Emma's Table (13 page)

Her great love, period, she supposed.

But it might have been any of them. All the boys preened for their bikinied attention—jumping wildly into the shallow end, the lifeguard's whistle and the boys' whoops their only warning of the dousing splash to come.

Gracie tugged on Tina's sleeve.

“Mommy,” she said, interrupting the ancient afternoon, “I think the changing rooms are over here”—as if Tina hadn't known for a thousand years already exactly where those changing rooms were.

“I think you're right,” she replied, smiling down at Gracie, and letting her lead the way.

Tina felt the moment pass: the wavy heat and the golden light. It gave way, in a flash, to the solid little girl in her puffy red coat. Tina watched her waddling down the hall,
over the creaky linoleum floor, and into the changing room at the very end.

Such a fool, she thought—her not-so-fond farewell to the beautiful girl on the prickly concrete.

But even as she turned away, Tina felt a whispering memory of her girlish optimism: so sure that she was only stopping at that Y for one last summer; that she'd be on her way again soon—to some place worth going. She'd been on her way to being someone.

Tina cringed at her youthful arrogance, nearly blushing for the girl in her pink two-piece—as if hope itself were some kind of vice. Not that it matters anymore, she thought, distancing herself from that hopeful girl, playing it all down. She was certain that she'd thrown all her chances away by then—just dumped, in big handfuls, like a bushel basket of dollar bills from a second-story window. She'd watched them flutter away already; she didn't expect to see any more.

Tina didn't blame anyone for the course her life had taken.

She'd made her peace with Tommy long before. She could no more blame him for her predicament than she could begrudge him his fine cheekbones, or the long white threads that ran down his strong thighs.

Tina reserved the blame for herself.

She felt overheated by the time she reached the locker room; the memory of her youthful missteps had her metabolism racing.

She pulled off her coat as fast as she could.

“There's no one here!” Gracie cried, galloping all around the changing room. Tina shushed her in case she was wrong, but she didn't seem to be. She hoped the girl wouldn't be too
disappointed. “I bet there'll be plenty of kids in the pool,” she said, trying to reassure her.

“Maybe not,” the girl replied—as if to reassure herself.

Tina hung her coat in a rusty old locker at the edge of the room. “Do you want to take your coat off, sweetie?”

“Can I have my own?” Gracie asked, pointing to another locker, just two or three down.

“Sure,” Tina said. There were hundreds of empty lockers there.

The two of them sat down, side by side, on a long wooden bench.

“What's that say?” Gracie asked, pointing to a rusty steel tag on the outside of the locker.

“It says, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell Pitt,'” Tina told her. She knew the name itself wouldn't answer her daughter's question. “They helped to pay for the lockers,” she explained.

“Am I allowed to use it?” Gracie asked.

Tina nodded.

“But what if Mrs. Pitt comes in?” she wondered.

Tina decided not to tell her that Mrs. Pitt was probably long dead by then. She took off her sweater instead, and watched as the little girl did the same. “We'll just ask her to use another one,” Tina said. “I'm sure she won't mind.”

She untied her shoelaces and slipped off her pants, watching Gracie in close pursuit, never much more than a beat or two behind. They stood in unison finally—two girls in clean white underpants and warm wool socks, looking each other up and down.

“I'm so pale,” Tina muttered, raising her arm to inspect her skin.

“Me too,” Gracie said, lifting her arm the very same way.

Tina handed her a swimsuit. They both grew a little more furtive then. They finished undressing quickly—their eyes averted—and pulled on their swimsuits fast.

Tina had to admit that Blackman was right about the Diet Club.

Gracie barely fit into her swimsuit from the summer before. There were big handfuls of flesh, like yeasty dough, popping out from the edges of her Lycra suit—a fleshy jack-in-the-box all around.

“Almost time for a new bathing suit,” she said, trying to sound upbeat.

“Do I have to have blue again?” Gracie asked.

“Not if you don't want,” Tina said. “What color would you like?”

“Guess!” the girl cried. She loved a guessing game.

Tina knew, of course; all roads led to pink, but she took the long way there. “Purple?” she asked. Gracie shook her head. “How about yellow?” She shook some more. “Green?” Tina asked. The girl began shaking her head vehemently; she didn't stop either, not even between colors.

“Brown?” Tina asked.

“Eww,” Gracie cried, hopping from one foot to the other.

Tina heard a dull thud every time she landed.

“I give up,” she said finally, having named every color she could think of, some of them several times. “What color would you like?” she asked.

“Pink, silly!”

“Good choice!” Tina said, smiling down at the girl. “I had a pink swimsuit once.”

“I know,” Gracie said. “I saw it.”

Tina couldn't imagine that she had, but she let it pass.

She closed their lockers firmly and led them to a large communal shower. It was a huge white cube—fifteen feet in every dimension—with old porcelain tiles on all the walls, and slightly larger ones on the ceiling and floor. They were beautiful too, like glassy white eggshells, all sparkling clean, but if you looked close, you could see a million cracks. Every tile was a shadowy network of them—the most delicate road maps in history.

Tina turned on the tap, one of a handful of shiny silver handles protruding from the wall. She waited for the water to warm up.

“Why are we taking a shower now?” Gracie asked.

“So we'll be clean when we get into the pool,” Tina said, looking straight into the tangle of confusion on her daughter's face. “It's a rule,” she said, trying again, “so that
everybody's
clean when they get into the pool.”

“But we'll be clean as soon as we jump in,” Gracie said. “Won't we?”

Tina let the matter drop. Better that, she decided, than getting too specific about other people's filth. “Let's have a quick rinse anyway,” she said. She hopped under the warm spray—like a rain shower almost, that old showerhead so high above her head, three or four feet at least. The water gathered some heft on the way down, pinging hard against her pale skin.

She saw Gracie on the sidelines still, giving herself a big bear hug.

“Brrr,” she shivered.

Tina coaxed her under the showerhead.

Gracie looked up skeptically.

Tina thought of Tommy for the second time that after
noon. She watched the water rolling down her legs, trailing off to the silver drain. They used to do it right here, she remembered—she and Tommy, in this little place—sneaking off to make love on the shower-room floor. Late in the day, after the little girls had gone home, but before the women came in from their offices.

She marveled at their never getting caught. It seemed so risky to her now.

They were short on pleasure, those shower-room trysts—more about boredom than sexual heat. Gracie was conceived right here, she thought, staring down at the tiles in front of her toes, the very ones she'd pronounced sparkling clean a moment before.

Tina felt ashamed of herself.

She turned to the wall, so Gracie couldn't see.

“Such a fool!” she hissed, growing angry at the memory of it—at turning up pregnant by the end of August, all hope of college dashed, and her parents so hurt and disappointed. Even junior college went by the boards, with a baby coming and all the extra expense.

She was no better than dirty water herself.

She watched it trailing down the silver drain.

They went as far as marrying—she and Tommy—in the autumn of that year. They found a small apartment in Wood-side, but no one was very optimistic. Tommy was just a kid, she thought, only too happy to let him off the hook. He was no more ready for marriage than the man in the moon.

Tina didn't spare a kind thought for herself though. Somehow she couldn't, not even all these years later.

The marriage only lasted a couple of years. Tina cut him loose as soon as she could support herself. Her parents had
helped her—straight through her mother's cancer and death—and Tina moved up quickly at the plant, rising from secretary to bookkeeper much faster than anyone would have thought.

She gave Tommy permission to leave as soon as she could afford the rent on her own. “Really,” she told him, “it's all right.”

He took her up on it too, running off like a boy on the last day of school, hurtling toward the summer days to come.

“I'll be back,” he'd told her. “Wait for me.”

But Tommy ran and ran and never looked back.

She'd heard he'd moved to California a couple of years before; they hadn't heard from him in ages. It was hard for her to say, just then, whether she was waiting for him still, or merely stuck in a rut.

Tina didn't blame him though.

I might have done the same thing myself, she thought—if she'd been in his place anyway, if she hadn't fallen in love with Gracie already. But she had, of course, so she wasn't going anywhere.

“Mommy,” Gracie said, touching her lightly on the wrist.

Tina looked down at the girl, bursting out of her navy swimsuit—her face as wide as a movie screen, a picture of confusion pushing through the flab.

“What is it, sweetie?” Tina said.

“Are we clean yet?”

Milky Cereal
and Cookie Crumbs

IT'S YOUR OWN DAMNED FAULT, EMMA THOUGHT,
addressing herself like a critic that morning, a finger wagging in her voice. She wouldn't be in this mess right now if she weren't such an eagle eye.

It was a strange kind of criticism though—like a cube of sugar hiding in the salt cellar, just a compliment in disguise. Emma could be as backhanded with herself as everyone else in the world was with her. She was almost used to it by then. People always made their compliments sound suspiciously critical to her.

“Oh, Emma!” she'd heard, more swooning times than she could count. “I wish I could be half as cutthroat as you!”

She didn't have time to dwell on hit-and-run drivers that morning though.

Emma had more pressing business.

“Don't you ever miss a trick?” she mumbled, picking up the
phone and dialing it briskly, striking the numbers as roughly as typewriter keys: 4-1-1.

“Hello, operator,” she said.

She'd waited until ten of nine to call—until Bobby had left for his office. She wanted the place to herself, and she had to wait for someone to be there, of course—for someone to pick up at the other end of the line.

 

Emma had woken up at five that morning, a full half hour later than she normally did. She didn't feel any better rested though—more like a dime-store thief with those few extra minutes slipped into her pocket. She put it down to the wine she'd drunk the night before, two or three glasses, at least—twice as much as she usually did.

At least
that
was tasty, she thought, berating herself once again for the overcooked pork and those awful vegetables that had turned out nearly raw.

“Hard as rocks,” she grumbled—as if anyone ever cut rocks into neat little cubes and doused them with too much olive oil. She'd hardly been able to drop off to sleep the night before, what with her frustration at the terrible meal.

She didn't let herself so much as think of her daughter.

Emma was an expert at ignoring the elephant in the room. She focused on the terrible meal instead of Cassy's cruelty—first to Benjamin, like a warm-up pitch, then a fastball hurled straight at her own head.

“Convicted felon,” Cassy had snarled—scarcely able to suppress her pleasure.

Emma pretended it had never happened.

She marched back over her dinner preparations instead—task by task—hunting in vain for the terrible error, the mis
step that had cost her success. Failure tasted a lot like pork, she thought—as dry as dust.

Everyone ate, of course, just as if nothing were wrong. Benjamin took seconds even, but Emma couldn't forgive herself. She saw the way they heaped that chutney on.

But all that had to wait for now—her dinner and her daughter, her work even. “May I have the number for Forty-four West Realty Corp.?” she asked, the silver receiver pressed up against her ear, her rich brown hair falling all around it.

Emma was meant to be working up a clever variation on a guest room that morning—one that could double as a home office. She was taping a segment for
Oprah
that afternoon. But she had some personal business to work out first.

She was sitting in Bobby's study, at his handsome mahogany desk, swiveling a little in that ugly ergonomic chair of his, her lower back and lumbar spine allegedly protected at every turn.

But Emma didn't feel safe at all.

“You've got no one to blame but yourself, Emmy”—that's what her father always said, once she'd crashed hard to earth after aiming too high: losing her bid for student body president, only a runner-up as homecoming queen.

“Damned eagle eyes,” she muttered, scratching a spot of tarnish from the brass trim on Bobby's desk blotter.

Emma knew she wasn't entirely to blame for her difficulties that morning. She wouldn't have found anything, of course, if there'd been nothing there to find. But she didn't want to be angry with Bobby either.

She hated problems she couldn't solve on her own—especially so early in the morning.

She was growing annoyed with the operator too.

“No,” she said, huffing out a little breath, “I don't have an address.” If I had an address, she thought, I wouldn't be calling you.

 

Emma had left Bobby in bed that morning, sleeping as soundly as he always did, the rise and fall of his slumbering chest in perfect time with the little puffs of air he spat—
puh, puh, puh
—all night long, like a speech therapist demonstrating the most perfect
p
imaginable.

It didn't annoy her either.

She liked having her husband in bed beside her. She wasn't much of a sleeper still, but she slept much better since he'd come back home. No question about that. She didn't even mind it when he flung a sleeping arm over her chest, like a protective mother driving toward an amber light. It startled her awake every time, but it was something like a comfort to her too.

She'd slipped out of bed as gently as she could and walked straight to the dining room. She wanted to see how the new housekeeper had made out—her inspection like a consolation prize, a gift-wrapped package with a silky white bow. She might not be able to lie in bed with her husband, like every other woman in the world, but she could do this, at least: she could see if the new girl had returned the place to any semblance of order.

She hadn't, of course—not at all.

There were water marks on the sideboard, and a brand-new chip in the Limoges. She saw cookie crumbs on the carpet as big as her fist, and a cell phone beneath the chair where Benjamin sat.

“Perfect!” she growled. “The only blind housekeeper in America.”

She felt herself spinning out of control.

Emma scoured the room for something—
anything—
the girl might have done right, but there was nothing. She climbed down onto her hands and knees, fingering up a bushel of cookie crumbs and a gargantuan piece of roasted carrot.

She'd have to vacuum later.

Then she picked up the cell phone from beneath Benjamin's chair, lying dark as an iguana, blending into the faded pattern of the old Persian rug. It didn't blend near well enough to elude Emma though. That phone called out to her as loudly as if it were ringing.

Benjamin was in such a rush to get out of here, she remembered—wanting to flee the dustup that Cassy caused—that she wouldn't be surprised to find his hat and coat in the hall closet. He would have left his shoes, she thought, if it would have gotten him out of here any faster.

Emma walked back to Bobby's office with the cell phone in her hands. She'd have her husband messenger it to him later—at the elementary school, she thought, nearly rolling her eyes at the thought of the place.

Cassy might have had a point—about that, at least.

Emma wouldn't be seeing Benjamin again until Friday afternoon. He'd need his phone by then. She laid it down on Bobby's desk, at the center of the green leather blotter, then turned to leave, walking as far as the doorway before she changed her mind.

He'll just leave it there, she thought—Bobby would—if it's just sitting out like that. Emma didn't know
how
such a
thing could happen—with the phone sitting there as plain as day—but she had more than enough experience with her husband to know that he would. So she walked back to the desk and slipped the phone into Bobby's briefcase, which was standing open on the desk chair in front of her.

A silky lining caught her eye, its bright red fabric gnashed between zipper teeth, as painful to her as a bloody wound. Emma opened the zipper, naturally, and pushed the lining back down inside. She found two silver keys there, on a steely ring. She pulled them out like a fairy-tale princess, as if they were the keys to the kingdom maybe, or to the handsome prince, locked away in some stony tower.

She turned them slowly in her hands, studying them from every angle. They weren't the keys to her apartment, she knew that much; or to the place in the country either. They didn't unlock the storage bins in the basement or the wine cellar either. They didn't look familiar at all. She kept gazing at the long silver prongs—the pattern of raised dots that ran down their shafts—like keys for the blind almost, written out neatly in Braille.

Emma had never seen them before.

She felt a queasy fluttering in her stomach and chest. They weren't the keys to Bobby's office. He had one of those electronic card keys that you pressed up against a glassy box. Maybe for his old apartment, the one he lived in before moving back in with her? But she didn't think so: he'd sold that place months ago. Wouldn't he have straightened out that lining after all this time?

Of course he would have, she thought.

From there, it was a rather quick jump—for Emma anyway—to Bobby's checkbook inside his briefcase, and her dis
covery of the regular monthly checks. They'd begun as soon as he moved back in with her, and they continued straight through to the first of February, just ten days before: checks like Swiss clockwork, written to “44 West Realty Corp.” in the amount of $3,253.

Emma knew.

“Damn that Benjamin!” she muttered, as if to pin this mess on him, for dropping his phone the night before, but she knew in a blink that it would never stick. Benjamin didn't have a cruel bone in his body; he didn't want to hurt her.

“Lazy maid!” she grumbled then, trying another tack—like a slipper that fit a little bit better. If she'd straightened up the dining room like I asked her to, she thought, I wouldn't have found that phone at all.

The maid was toast, but Emma didn't feel much better.

If only I wasn't so damned observant, she thought with a sad shake of her sleepy head. She brought the chickens home to roost, just like her father had always taught her: no one to blame but herself.

It was six fifteen on Monday morning.

Emma plucked Benjamin's phone from out of Bobby's bag. She took the silver keys too, and walked to the kitchen—where the maid had somehow done an even worse job cleaning up.

“Thank God,” she said. It gave her something to do, at least.

She set about cleaning the place as it ought to have been done, starting with the roasting pan and the silvery wire rack. The girl had left them—only halfheartedly clean—on the draining board beside the sink.

“Just filthy,” she whispered, with a song in her heart.

Emma's mind wandered as she scrubbed. She'd be the first to acknowledge that her keen powers of observation had never served her quite as well as she would have imagined. Little details, she thought—that's all she ever managed to see. The big picture always eluded her somehow. She hadn't had so much as an inkling, for instance, that Bobby was going to walk out on her all those years before, much less that he'd come strolling back so many years later. She'd never seen it coming. Or that foolish business with her daughter last night—Emma had no idea she'd raised such a cruel child.

Of course, those were just the hors d'oeuvres, leading Emma straight to the main course, her tried-and-true entrée: an entire nation turning against her in such lockstep that they'd throw her into prison for an entire year—for something that happened in accountants' offices every day. Just a measly tax return, she thought, and no one in the world to save her. Emma shook her head, marveling at just how clueless an observant woman could be.

She scrubbed that roasting rack until it shone like new—better than new, in fact—grunting out her muscular exertions as she worked.

Is it me, she wondered, staring at the sparkling pan, or am I feeling a little better?

She moved directly to the salad bowl, which looked clean enough, but Emma washed it again for good measure, and all the serving platters too—even the ones she hadn't used the night before.

Bobby came in for coffee at seven.

“Morning, dear,” he said, hugging her sleepily from behind—his stale breath ruffling the hair at the nape of her neck.

It didn't interrupt her scrubbing for a second.

“Sleep well?” he asked, giving her shoulders a gentle rub.

Emma flexed her body tight, humming out that she had, “thank you very much.” She was glad he couldn't see her face.

“Bastard,” she mumbled, the moment he left.

She opened the dishwasher door, moaning aloud as she looked inside, as if she were gazing into a bloody wound, straight through the red and the muck and the dirt.

“Look at this mess,” she whispered, a real agony in her voice.

The disarray was breathtaking: plates and cups and saucers strewn in every direction—sizes and shapes in a riot of clutter, not to mention the jumble of cutlery. It looked to Emma as if a madwoman had loaded the thing.

She took out every single item.

Could the girl possibly think these things were clean? She reloaded the machine properly, the way it ought to have been done in the first place. There was loads of room to spare.

She has to learn, she thought, seething.

Bobby left for the office at eight thirty. “Have a nice day,” he called.

Probably too late for that, she thought.

She wiped down every surface twice.

 

At five of nine, she dialed the number—44 West Realty Corp.—sitting at the phone in her husband's study. “Hello?” she said, when a man's voice answered. The super, she supposed, or the doorman maybe. “I'm calling from Bobby Sutton's office,” she said. “One of your tenants,” she added, bluffing.

Emma paused for a second. There were any number of
paths she could take. “He's asked me to messenger a package over,” she said—choosing her route. “Can you give me the address, please?”

She scribbled it down: 44 West Seventy-eighth Street.

“And the apartment number?” she asked.

She waited while the man looked it up, turning the contraband keys in her hand. “Sutton,” she repeated. “Robert Sutton.” She wrote the apartment number down and hung up the phone.