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growing old with, spending the rest of his life with. And for Rose he'd walk the straight and narrow, he vowed, looking over the trio of chattering secretaries who'd entered the elevator beside him before taking one last whiff of their mingled perfume, swallowing hard, and looking away.
ELEVEN
"Why do we have to do this again?" asked Maggie as she flung herself into the passenger's seat. It was the same question she asked as they set out for every home football game. They'd been going once a year for almost twenty years, Rose thought, and the answer never changed. "Because our father is a very limited man," she said, and started driving toward the Vet. "Are you going to be warm enough? You remember we're playing Tampa, not going there." Maggie had dressed for the football game in a black catsuit, black boots with chunky heels, and a cropped leather jacket with a fake fur collar. Rose, on the other hand, had on jeans and a sweater, plus a hat, a scarf, mittens, and an oversized yellow down coat. Maggie peered at Rose's jacket. "You look like a mattress that someone peed on," she said. "Thanks for sharing," said Rose. "Fasten your seat belt." "Fine," Maggie replied, pulling a flask out of one of the jacket's minuscule pockets. She took a swig and tilted it toward her sister. "Apricot brandy," she said. "I'm driving," said Rose, her mouth set in a tight line. "And I'm drinking," said Maggie, and giggled. The sound of her sister's laughter reminded Rose of every other football game they'd
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attended since her father, in a slightly misguided act of involved parenting, had bought the first set of season tickets in 1981. "We hate football," Maggie had informed him with the absolute conviction of being ten years old and right about everything. Michael Feller's face had gotten pale. "We do not!" Rose had said, and she'd given her sister a fast upper-arm pinch. "Ow!" said Maggie. "Really?" asked their father. "Well, we don't like watching it on TV so much," said Rose, "but we'd love to see a real game!" She'd given her sister an insurance pinch to make sure she wouldn't say otherwise. And that was that. Every year, the three of them—eventually the four of them, once Sydelle appeared on the scene—would go to Eagles home games together. Maggie used to lay out her outfits days in advance, mittens trimmed with fake fur and hats with fluffy pompoms, and once, if Rose remembered right, a miniature pair of tasseled cheerleader's boots. Rose would make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and she'd put them in a lunch box, along with a thermos of hot chocolate. They'd bring blankets on the coldest days, and the three of them would huddle together, licking peanut butter off of their numb fingers, as their father would curse at every sack and fumble, then look guiltily at the girls and say, "Pardon my French." "Pardon my French," Rose murmured. Maggie looked at her curiously, then took another slip of her brandy and hunched herself lower into the seat. Their father and Sydelle were waiting for them by the ticket window. Michael Feller was dressed in jeans, an Eagles sweatshirt, and a down coat in the team colors of silver and green. Sydelle wore her customary look of icy discontent, a face full of makeup, and an ankle-length mink coat. "Maggie! Rose!" their father called out, handing them their tickets.
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"Girls," said Sydelle, kissing the air three inches to the right of their cheeks, then reapplying her lipstick. Rose followed her stepmother up toward their seats. Listening to the click of Sydelle's heels echo on the concrete, Rose wondered—and not for the first time why in the world this woman had ever married her father. Sydelle Levine had been a divorcee in her mid-forties whose stockbroker husband had had the bad manners to leave her for his secretary. Tres cliche, but Sydelle had survived the indignity, perhaps buoyed by the ample alimony payments her husband had eagerly agreed to (Rose imagined him thinking that even a million dollars a year was a small price to pay for years of Sydelle-free bliss). Michael Feller was eight years younger, a middle manager at a medium-sized bank. He'd be comfortable, but never rich. Plus, he had baggage—the dead wife, the daughters. What could the attraction have been? Rose had spent hours of her adolescence trying to puzzle it out in the years after Michael Feller and Sydelle Levine met in the Beth Shalom lobby (Sydelle had been on her way in for a five-hundred-dollar-a-plate fundraiser, and Michael had been on his way out of a Parents Without Partners meeting). "Sex!" Maggie had said, cackling. And it was true that, objectively speaking, their father was a handsome man. But Rose wasn't sure. She thought that Sydelle had seen her father not just as handsome, or a good catch, but as her true love, her second chance. Rose always believed that Sydelle had really roved him—at least at the beginning. And she'd bet that her father hadn't been looking for anything more than a traveling companion—and, of course, a surrogate mother for Maggie and Rose, given Sydelle's success with My Marcia. Michael Feller had already found the love of his life, and buried her back in Connecticut. And every week that went by, Sydelle grew a little more aware of that truth, and became a little more disappointed—and a little meaner to Michael Feller's daughters. It was sad, thought Rose, sitting down, pulling her hat over
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her ears, and wrapping her scarf tightly around her neck. Sad, and unlikely to change. Sydelle and her father were in it for the long haul. "Want some?" Startled, Rose jumped a little in her seat, and turned to face her sister, who'd flung her legs over the seat in front of her and was waggling her little flask of apricot brandy. "No thanks," said Rose, and turned to her father. "How have you been?" she asked. "Oh, you know," he said. "Work's keeping me busy. My Vanguard 500 fund had a terrible quarter. I—RUN YOU BASTARD!" Rose leaned past her sister to talk to Sydelle. "And what's new with you?" she asked, making her regular game-day effort to be nice to her stepmother. Sydelle fluffed her mink. "My Marcia's redecorating." "That's exciting," said Rose, trying to sound enthusiastic. Sydelle nodded. "We're going to a spa," she continued. "In February," she said, and cast a meaningful glance toward Rose's midriff. "You know that when she got married, My Marcia bought a size six Vera Wang, and ..." "... had it taken in," Rose recited silently to herself, just as Maggie said the same words, only out loud. Sydelle narrowed her eyes. "I don't know why you feel compelled to be so rude." Maggie ignored her and held out her hand for her father's binoculars as the cheerleaders took the field. "Fat, fat, old, fat," she recited, making her way down the line. "Bad dye job; ooh! bad boob job, old, fat, old. . . ." Michael Feller waved at the beer vendor. Sydelle grabbed his hand, and put it back in his lap. "Ornish!" she hissed. "Pardon me?" said Rose. "Ornish," said Sydelle. "We're doing the Dean Ornish diet. Plant-based." She gave another sideways glance, this time at Rose's thighs. "You might want to try it." I'm in hell, thought Rose bleakly. Hell is an Eagles game, where the
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bleachers are always freezing, and the team is always losing, and my family is insane. Her father patted her shoulder and flipped open his wallet. "Want to get us hot chocolate?" he asked. Maggie leaned over. "Can I have money, too?" she asked. Then she squinted at the wallet. "Who's that?" "Oh," their father said, looking embarrassed, "it's just this article I cut out. I was meaning to give it to Rose ..." "Dad," said Rose. "That's Lou Dobbs." "Right," said her father. "You're carrying a picture of Lou Dobbs around in your wallet?" "Not his picture," Michael Feller said. "This article. About preparing for retirement. It's very good." "Do you have pictures of us in there?" Maggie demanded, grabbing for the wallet. "Or just Lou Whoever?" She flipped through the pictures. Rose looked, too. There were school pictures of her and Maggie that dated from sixth and fourth grade, respectively. A picture of Michael and Caroline, on their wedding day—a candid shot, with Caroline puffing out her lower lip to blow her veil off her forehead, and with Michael gazing at her. There was not, Rose noted, a shot of Michael and Sydelle. She wondered if Sydelle had noticed. Judging from her icy expression, the way her tiny eyes were fixed straight ahead, Rose guessed that the answer was yes. "Go Birds!" the guy in the row behind them blatted into Rose's ear, and then belched as a finale. Rose got to her feet and headed into the echoing, windswept concourse, where she bought herself a cup of watery hot chocolate and a hot dog in a squishy white bun, which she devoured in four gigantic bites. Then she leaned against the railing, picking bits of relish off of her scarf, counting the minutes until eight o'clock when she was going to meet Jim for dinner. Hold on, she told herself. She bought three more cups of hot chocolate and carried them carefully back to the seats.
TWELVE
"Mrs. Lefkowitz?" Ella rapped hard on the aluminum door, balancing a lunch tray on her hip. "Hello?" "Go to hell!" came the slurred voice from inside. Ella sighed and kept knocking. "Lunchtime!" she called out, as cheerfully as she could. "Fuck off!" yelled Mrs. Lefkowitz. Mrs. Lefkowitz had suffered a stroke, and her recuperation had unfortunately coincided with the week that Golden Acres had been getting free HBO. The free HBO had included a Margaret Cho stand-up special. Mrs. Lefkowitz had been calling Ella "Ass Master" ever since, and laughing uproariously each time she said it. "I've got soup," Ella called. There was a pause from the other side of the door. "Cream of mushroom?" Mrs. Lefkowitz asked hopefully. "Split pea," Ella confessed. Another pause, and then the door was flung open, and there was Mrs. Lefkowitz, four feet eleven inches, white hair rumpled and wild. She wore a pink sweatshirt and matching sweatpants and knitted pink-and-white booties—the kind of outfit you'd give a newborn, Ella thought, and tried not to smile, as her final Meals on Wheels client for the day glared at her furiously.
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"Split pea sucks," said Mrs. Lefkowitz. The left corner of her mouth drooped slightly, and she held her left arm bent at an odd angle tightly against her side. She looked at Ella hopefully. "Maybe you could make cream of mushroom?" "Do you have any?" asked Ella. "Sure, sure," said Mrs. Lefkowitz, shuffling toward the kitchen, her tiny form swimming in all that pink yarn. Ella followed along, setting the tray down on the kitchen table. "Sorry I yelled at you. I thought you were someone else." Who? Ella wanted to ask. As far as she could tell, she was the only one who ever saw Mrs. Lefkowitz, outside of her doctors and the home-care health aide who came three times a week. "My son," Mrs. Lefkowitz supplied. She turned toward Ella with a can of Campbell's in her right hand. "You tell your son to"— Ella couldn't bring herself to repeat it—"effoff?" "Kids today," said Mrs. Lefkowitz complacently. "Well, it's nice that he's visiting," said Ella, dumping the congealed grayish mass into a saucepan. "I told him not to come," said Mrs. Lefkowitz. "But he said, 'Ma, you were on the verge of death.' I said, I'm eighty-seven years of age. What did you think I was on the verge of? Club Med?'" "Well, that's lovely that he's visiting." "Bullshit," said Mrs. Lefkowitz. "He just wants to get some sun. I'm convenient," she said, her drooping lip quivering. "Guess where he is right now. On the beach. Probably staring at the girls in the bikinis, and drinking a beer. Hah. He couldn't wait to get out of here." "The beach sounds nice," Ella said as she stirred. Mrs. Lefkowitz pulled a chair away from the table, carefully seated herself upon it, and waited until Ella pushed her chair close to the table's edge. "I guess," she said. Ella set the bowl in front of her. Mrs. Lefkowitz dipped her spoon and raised it toward her lips. Her wrist trembled, and half the soup wound up on the front of her
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sweatshirt. "Shit," she said, and her voice was small and wavering and defeated. "Do you have plans for dinner?" asked Ella, handing Mrs. Lefkowitz a napkin and tipping the soup into a coffee mug. "I told him I'd cook," she said. "Turkey. He likes turkey." "I could help you," said Ella. "Maybe we could make a platter of different deli sandwiches. Easy to eat." She stood up, looking for a pen and a pad of paper so she could make a list. "We can go buy some brisket, and turkey and corned beef. . . cole slaw and potato salad, if he likes that ..." Mrs. Lefkowitz smiled with half of her mouth. "I used to buy it with caraway seeds, and at the end of dinner I'd find a little pile of caraway seeds on the side of his plate. He'd never complain . . . he'd just pick them all out and leave them there." "My daughter was like that with raisins. She'd pick them out of anything," said Ella. Mrs. Lefkowitz looked at her sharply. Ella let her voice trail off. Mrs. Lefkowitz maneuvered a spoonful of soup to her mouth and appeared not to notice Ella's silence. "So we'll go shopping?" she said. "Sure," said Ella, bending to put the dishes in the dishwasher, turning her back to Mrs. Lefkowitz. Lewis was coming to pick her up tonight. They were going to a movie. And how soon before his questions came? Do you have children? Do you have grandkids? Where are they? What happened? You don't see them? Well, why not? "Sure."
THIRTEEN
"You're home!" said Maggie. Rose entered the apartment warily. It had been a terrible day. She'd been at work for thirteen hours, and Jim's office door had been closed for all of them, and she was in no mood for Maggie's nonsense. In the apartment's small living room, all the lights were blazing, something smelled like it was burning in the kitchen, and Maggie, dressed in ruffled red pajama shorts and a red T-shirt that read "SEX KITTEN" in silver letters, was perched on the couch, channel surfing. A bowl of singed-looking microwaved popcorn sat in the center of the table next to a bowl of reheated frozen corn, two celery sticks, and a jar of peanut butter. This, in Maggie's world, passed for a balanced meal. "How's the job search going?" asked Rose, hanging up her coat and heading into the bedroom, where her bed was strewn with what appeared to be the entire contents of her closet. "What's this? What happened?" Maggie plopped herself on top of the heap. "I decided to sort out your clothes." Rose stared at the tangle of blouses and jackets and pants, now just as much a mess as Maggie's baggage out in the living room. "Why are you doing this?" she said. "Don't touch my things!"
