Mrs. Everything (46 page)

These days, Bethie wore as much makeup as any of Jo’s acquaintances, and she shaved and plucked all the places that Jo’s friends shaved and plucked, and if she still thought bras and high-heeled shoes were tools of the patriarchy, she’d made peace with wearing them. “If you want to know the truth,” Bethie had said when Jo had called to offer her congratulations on the
New York Times
piece, “I tell all the reporters that I paid attention to entrepreneurs, but the one I really learned from was Dev.”

“Devon Brady?”

“He had a quality product. Distinctive packaging. He knew his customers. He couldn’t advertise, but he certainly used word-of-mouth effectively.”

“You should tell people,” Jo said. “Who knows how many ambitious young drug dealers you could inspire?”

Bethie smiled. Jo smiled back. At the exact same instant, the sisters said, “Hey, do you remember—” They broke off, laughing, and Jo was about to say,
No, you go first
, when Sarah came through the front door. In the sunlight, Jo could see that Sarah’s face was drawn, that her shoulders were hunched, and that, instead of keeping her usual brisk pace, she was walking slowly, like every step pained her. Worse, she hadn’t put on a full face of makeup the way she did every morning, even if all she was doing was going to the stoop to retrieve the
Free Press
. Her cheeks were pale, her eyes sunken and glassy. Jo felt an icy finger draw a line up her spine. She looked at her sister and saw that Bethie was seeing what she was seeing.

“Girls,” their mother began, “I have some news.”

Bethie

S
arah had left them a letter, in the top drawer of her dresser, in a business-sized envelope, with both of their names on the front. After the funeral, Bethie and Jo were going through their mother’s things. Jo was tackling the closet, and Bethie was in charge of the dresser, so she was the one who found it.

“Should we read it?” Bethie asked.

Jo bit her lip, thinking. “Tonight,” she said. “When shiva’s over.”

That afternoon, the house filled up the way it had for the two days before, with Sarah’s colleagues from Hudson’s, her friends from shul, Mrs. Johnson from across the street. Dozens of women, all of them saying the same thing:
Your mother loved you girls so much
. Bethie and Jo would give each other the same quizzical look, as Marge from Better Dresses or Carol from the synagogue told one or both girls how Sarah had bragged about Bethie’s business and Jo’s children.
She loved you so much. She talked about you all the time. She was so proud.

That night, after the rabbi led a minyan through the Kaddish prayer and the house finally emptied, Jo had found a bottle of
schnapps, possibly one left over from their father’s shiva. Dave and Harold took the girls back to the hotel for the night, and Jo and Bethie took the letter and the booze outside to the backyard, where Sarah had set up a wrought-iron table with four tiny, tippy chairs underneath the cherry tree. Jo and Bethie squeezed themselves into the chairs. Jo opened the letter, written in blue ink on lined notebook paper, in Sarah’s firm, back-slanted handwriting, with her usual abbreviations, capitalizations, and other uses of punctuation. They read and learned that, just as there were things they had never gotten to say to their mother, there were things that Sarah Kaufman had chosen not to say to them.

Drs found Mass in my belly six months ago.
That was how the letter began. No
Dear Josette and Elizabeth
, no
Jo and Bethie
, no
My darling daughters
or
These are my dying declarations.
“She sure knew how to get to the point,” Jo said.

Did one round of chemotherapy and got sick as a dog.

“She went through chemo? And didn’t tell us?” Bethie’s eyes were stinging. Whatever she’d felt about her mother, whatever resentments she’d held on to, the thought of Sarah going through treatment alone made her want to cry.

“That was Mom.” Jo’s voice was bleak. “Even if we had found out, somehow, she wouldn’t have wanted us there.”

Bethie kept reading.
I know you’ll be angry that I didn’t tell you, but I am a private person and did not want to burden you with my troubles. Jo, you have your husband and your girls, and Bethie, you have your “big business” to run.

Neither sister said anything about the way Sarah hadn’t mentioned Bethie’s spouse, although Bethie was sure that Jo had noticed. Sarah had gotten very quiet after Bethie told her that she and Harold had gotten married in a small ceremony at City Hall in Atlanta. “I’m glad you’ve finally settled down,” was all she’d said, but Bethie knew that having a daughter married to a non-Jew and black man had not been a part of Sarah’s vision for her good girl. Still, she’d sent a wedding gift, a set of crystal wineglasses from Hudson’s. She’d hosted Harold’s family for holidays,
and had visited them in Atlanta, and even if she’d never seemed entirely comfortable around Harold, Bethie recognized that her mother was trying.

I told my Drs. “no more.” They gave me medicine for the pain. It didn’t hurt much. I am sorry.

Here, there was a space, as if Sarah had paused to gather her thoughts, to figure out what it was that she was sorry for, and what else she needed to say.

. . . for any way I might have failed you. There is a Will in the safe-deposit box (key in drawer in bedside table). Freddie Barash is Lawyer. Left $ to Grandkids, Jewelry and Keepsakes to Bethie, except a few things marked for friends.

“Well,” Jo murmured, “that’s pretty cut-and-dried.” She looked sideways at her sister.

Be good to each other
, was the last thing Sarah had written, before
Love, Mother
.

Jo folded up the pages and slipped them into the envelope. For a moment, neither of them spoke, and when they did, they both said “I’m sorry” at precisely the same instant. Bethie started laughing, then the laughter turned into a sob. She sniffled, wiping her eyes, and looked at her sister. “What are you sorry for?”

“For not being around when you needed me,” Jo said. “For not being there when you were in trouble.”

Bethie wiped dust off the bottle of schnapps, uncapped it, raised it to her lips, and took a swallow. Nine years ago, when they’d had their fight, she would have given anything for Jo to say those words, for Jo to take some responsibility for what had happened to Bethie. Now, between the therapy she’d gone through and Harold’s perspective, she could see it differently.
You were kids
, Harold would tell her, in the deep, resonant voice that made even an observation that they were out of paper towels sound as portentous as a reading from the Bible.
Not even kids: teenagers. Of course Jo was all up in her own head. That’s the nature of the beast. And your mom was probably just trying to keep the boat from sinking.
Bethie’s therapist, whose name was Allison
Shoemaker and whose voice was fluty and sweet, had urged her to consider the most benign interpretation.
Maybe she genuinely didn’t notice
, Dr. Shoemaker had suggested.
When she found out, she behaved appropriately, right? She tried to protect you. She let you know that she cared.

“It’s fine,” Bethie said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I could have done more.”

“Maybe,” Bethie allowed. “But, for that to happen, you would have needed to know what was going on. And you didn’t.”

“If I’d been around more, I would have noticed.” Lynnette Bobeck, Jo’s teenage distraction, had come to the shiva. She’d put on forty pounds since high school and dyed her hair an unbecomingly brassy shade of blond. Her oldest son was in college, a sophomore at the U of M, as hard as that was to believe. Bethie took another swallow of schnapps, wincing at the burn. “Ugh, what is this supposed to taste like? Mouthwash in hell?”

“Cinnamon.” Jo extended her hand, wiggling her fingers, and Bethie passed her the bottle. Jo drank, winced, gasped, and said, “Ow.”

“I know.” Bethie looked out into the darkness, the velvety sky, the faint glow of the stars visible through the layer of pollution. “Do you think you’ll miss Mom? She was so hard on you.”

Jo drank again, coughed, passed Bethie the bottle, and said, “She was hard on both of us.” Bethie nodded. Every December, she’d gotten a chance to see a different kind of mother/daughter relationship at Harold’s house, just a mile to the south of Alhambra Street, a significantly bigger and more impressive house than the one she’d grown up in. She and Harold would visit every Christmas. The Jefferson house was always full of music, raised voices, the smell of something being braised or fried or simmered. Harold’s mother, Irene, doted on her daughters and her grandchildren. She was liberal with her hugs and kisses, and happiest when she had her newest grandbaby in her arms. Every year, someone would be having some kind of crisis, either romantic or financial. Harold’s mother would invite the suffering son or daughter up
into her bedroom, where, Bethie knew, she’d dispense commands in the form of advice from her seat at her vanity. So far, Bethie hadn’t set foot in the sanctum. Harold’s mother was polite to Bethie, and she treated Harold like a conquering king whenever he came home. There’d be a party, and Luther Jefferson’s famous barbecued brisket, cooked for twelve hours in a smoker out back, and games of dominoes and Spades, which Bethie had given up trying to learn. She always felt like an outsider there, no matter how polite Harold’s mother was to her, so she ate her brisket, played with her nieces and nephews, helped with the dishes, and tried to stay out of the way.

“I wasn’t the easiest kid.” Jo had another sip. “Some days, with Lila, I know how Mom must have felt. It’s like, I love her to death, but I also want to throw her out a window.”

Bethie snorted.

“I feel like she’s made it her life’s mission to get under my skin. I bet Mom felt the same way about me.”

“Still,” said Bethie.

Jo raised her shoulders, shrugging.

“I’m sorry, too,” said Bethie. “Your marriage was none of my business. I shouldn’t have dragged you down to Atlanta and lectured you about how you weren’t happy.”

Bethie saw her sister’s shoulders draw together, saw her pull her knees up to her chest and wrap her arms around them. After a moment, Jo said, “Marriage is hard.”

“It is,” Bethie agreed, even though her marriage, while of much shorter duration than her sister’s, had been largely trouble-free. Harold was a good man, and she knew what he’d sacrificed to be with her. She knew it when his brothers went on trips to Vegas and didn’t invite him; she knew it when, once, he’d called her from Mervyn’s, where he’d taken Kim and Missy. His voice had been tight when he’d put Bethie on the phone with the security guard who hadn’t believed that the girls were his nieces, and who’d needed a white woman’s assurance that Harold hadn’t kidnapped them. If he could endure that for her, if he could live with
a wife who out-earned him, if he could sit and applaud while she collected an award from the Chamber of Commerce, Bethie could deal with his snoring, or the way he’d leave the sports section unfolded on the kitchen table, or the card games that lasted until two in the morning and left the living room smelling like an ashtray. She held out her hand for the bottle and waited to hear if Jo had anything else to say. When Jo didn’t speak, Bethie said, “I have an offer for you.”

Jo looked at her. “Oh?”

“Your trip. The one you never got to take. Now that the business is doing well . . .”

Jo made a face. “Nice understatement.”

“I want you to take a trip. Anywhere you want to go, for as long as you want to stay. You have to go by yourself, though. Or with a friend. No husband, no kids. That’s my only condition.”

For a long moment, Jo didn’t say anything. When she finally spoke, Bethie wasn’t surprised at her response. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s . . .” She turned her face away from Bethie. “It’s not a good time right now.”

“You don’t have to leave right this minute. I’m just making the offer.”

“It’s not your job to take care of me.” Jo’s voice sounded waspish. Bethie wasn’t surprised. With Dr. Shoemaker, and on her own, she’d spent a lot of time thinking about the ways that money can complicate relationships.
If you give someone a gift they can’t hope to reciprocate, they can end up feeling resentful
, Dr. Shoemaker had said.
You have to give without expectation, without needing anything more than a thank-you.

“It’s not about taking care of you,” Bethie said. “You missed your trip because of me. I owe you. All I want to do is give you what you should have had.” When Jo didn’t answer, Bethie said, “Actually, that’s not the only thing I want. I want to be in your life, and I want you to be a part of mine.” Her voice sounded rougher as she said, “I missed you, you know. Not that I don’t enjoy
spending time with my nieces . . .”

“They adore you,” said Jo.

“And I love them. But you’re my sister, and you’re the only family I’ve got, and I miss you.” She saw Jo’s shoulders rising, heard her sister’s inhalation, and Jo’s voice, quiet but perfectly audible, when she said, “I missed you, too.”

Jo

O
ne afternoon in early March, Jo was running on the town’s fitness trail when she heard someone call, “Hey, wait up!” She turned, and there was Nonie Scotto, in brand-new sneakers and a pink nylon track suit that whistled as Nonie approached.

“Fancy meeting you here,” said Jo, jogging in place.

Nonie’s face was pink and sweaty, and she looked miserable. “You have to help me,” she said. “It’s my twenty-fifth high school reunion coming up, and I can’t go there like this.” She made a stab at jogging in place, then gave up and stood still.

Jo studied her friend. It was true that Nonie had put on weight in the years that Jo had known her, years that Nonie had spent in a state that ranged from annoyance to anguished despair over what she never failed to refer to as her “figure.” Every year, in January, and sometimes in May, right before swimsuit season, Nonie would sign up for Weight Watchers or TOPS or Overeaters Anonymous. She’d come back from the initial meeting with her purse full of literature and her eyes full of fire, convinced that the reason
none of her previous attempts had resulted in permanent lifelong weight loss was because she’d failed the program, not because the diet she’d gone on was unsustainable. “This time, I’m going to see it through,” she’d say, and she’d drop ten or fifteen pounds in the first three or four weeks. At that point, after squeezing into her size-ten designer jeans and collecting a round of compliments, she’d get bored, and hungry. A slice of pizza would turn into three slices, a cheat meal would turn into a cheat long weekend, and then Nonie would show up on a friend’s doorstep, announcing, “I’m off the wagon. Want to get a banana split?”