Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn (26 page)

“Anyway—” she put her other hand on Joanna's shoulder and patted it. Joanna shook her off, but Marlene persisted, and Joanna allowed it. Now they walked again. They had reached Brighton Beach Avenue, the Russian neighborhood under the el train, and Marlene was briefly distracted by the Russian signs advertising all kinds of businesses. Everything was in the shadow of the elevated train—the one they'd come on, the usual grimy el, not Marcus Ogilvy's vision of light and lightness, but more than acceptable if elevated trains please you. Peggy pointed out Russian delis, Russian insurance companies and gift shops, a drug store, a travel agency, a Russian psychic.

“Well,” Marlene said, “wouldn't you know, my boyfriend and I are strolling on the boardwalk, just enjoying the sun and the day, and what should happen but he runs into a man who owes him money—and they talk, and he says something, and the
other guy says something. And the next thing I know my boyfriend slips away from me, and the
next
thing I know there's a scream, and people running and shouting. Well, the upshot was he'd stabbed the guy. Or somebody stabbed the guy, and later the man identified my boyfriend and me. He'd seen me too, of course. I thought my goose was cooked. But Gert and Abe—you never knew this about your grandparents, my dear,” she said, patting Joanna's shoulder again as they made their way up the avenue. “I hope this isn't going to shock you. They told the cops I was on the blanket with them the whole afternoon—they said we both were. We got off. The guy who was stabbed was not a great witness, and the cops didn't think they had enough of a case—they forgot about it. You can't imagine how relieved I was. Well, that's the kind of life we led in those days—but you should have heard Abe. I had to promise over and over I'd never have anything further to do with the guy. That was an easy promise to keep!”

“But you didn't keep it, did you?” Joanna said in a low voice.

“Oh, sure I did,” said Marlene. “Look, here's a restaurant.” She stopped. “My father would have liked this one.” They were led through the warm, dark room to a table, and as soon as they'd settled themselves, Marlene declared that they should order the lunch special, several courses. “This is the way it's done,” she said. “We won't need dinner. Later, we'll have coffee and cake.”

The place was quiet, with Russian ornaments and cloth hangings they could scarcely see in the dimness, and Con felt inordinately grateful for the warmth, for chairs, for the change
of scene, which said one part of the day was over and a different one had begun. It would be a good thing if, here at the restaurant, they talked about nothing but food. When the waiter came, Marlene said firmly, “I want Ukrainian borscht, stuffed veal, and potatoes,” and he was charmed. Maybe American old ladies didn't usually order so much food. Peggy asked for soup and chicken, but instructed the man to leave out potatoes or rice. “Carbs?” she said, and he nodded. Con ordered a full meal, carbs and all. Joanna just asked for coffee. “I'll pick something later,” she said. But the coffee seemed to cheer her, and she talked about the parachute jump and the Ferris wheel. “How often do you see something that big with a
shape
?” she asked. “With
lines
?”

“But the phone call…?” Con said.

“Did you hear I got arrested?” her daughter said, looking at Peggy, who nodded. Joanna told her the story anyway in a low voice, leaning toward her as if to exclude Marlene, but of course it was just the sort of story Marlene liked. She proposed flying to North Carolina immediately to picket the police station and the bar. Then she praised Joanna for criticizing the war in Iraq. “Weapons of mass destruction!” Marlene said, her voice liquid with sarcasm.

“Was the call about what happened at the bar?” Peggy asked then.

“No—Well, maybe. Maybe he's decided my life is too interesting. He likes women just active enough to haul things around his studio.”

“Barney,” said Con. “The sculptor Joanna works for.”

“I went to art school, you know,” said Marlene. “I was an artist.”

“I've heard,” said Joanna. Her voice was flat. She looked at Marlene as if it hurt her neck to turn her head in that direction. Con realized with a mixture of dread, weariness, and excitement that something was going to happen. It had seemed odd all along that Joanna had joined them. Something made her want to be with them—to return to New York in the first place—and it wasn't pleasure in Marlene's company. But for the moment, Joanna ignored Marlene and explained to Peggy who Barnaby Willis was. “One of his former interns needs a job,” she said tensely. “He doesn't need two of us.”

“This is terrible,” said Con.

“He gets
me
for free—the foundation pays,” Joanna said. “And he'd
still
rather have her. I suppose he likes the way she sucks his cock. He told me I could do what I wanted and get the rest of the money for doing nothing—he won't tell.”

“Does she suck his cock literally or figuratively?” said Peggy.

“Both, I assume,” Joanna said.

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” Con said, but Joanna shrugged. “I asked too many questions, even about his work. Maybe he does this when the intern figures out he's not God. I don't care.”

“Does that mean you're going back to North Carolina?” Con said. “What will you do?”

“There's not much for me there,” said Joanna, “but I'll still be a sculptor. That's what I'll do.” She shrugged with one shoulder, as Jerry often did. “And make money somehow.” She shook her head as if to shake that topic out of it. “I hate borscht. Do they have any other kind of soup?”

She ordered a large bowl of chicken soup with meat dump
lings. The other soups arrived, and soon the main courses. The food was good, but Con was sorry she'd ordered so much. Now she was hot. Marlene chewed steadily beside her. When Con raised her eyes, Peggy smiled. Still, the meal was tense, and the tension came from Joanna. It continued to seem anticipatory, and as they ate, with desultory talk about the food, Con felt like turning to see if Barnaby Willis, dragging one of his outsize steel sculptures, was about to stomp into the Russian restaurant so as to discard her daughter more publicly. Or would Tim do it? “Are men ever worth it?” she said. That seemed like a safe topic. The male waiter was out of earshot.

“They have lovely equipment attached to their fronts,” said Peggy.

“Oh, if only that was all there was to them!” said Con. Jerry's lovely equipment had made her happy only two days before.

“Loving women is just as hard,” Joanna said. “Loving people who don't love back. It doesn't matter if they're men or not. It doesn't matter about equipment.”

She said it firmly enough that nobody could disagree.

Marlene stopped chewing. “Loving women,” she said. “Are you referring to homosexual love or friendship?”

“Any kind of love,” said Joanna promptly.

“Gert never loved me as much as I loved her,” Marlene said casually, while sawing through meat. She had eaten almost all her lunch.

“You're kidding me,” said Con. “She adored you. She never felt sure of you—I guess she knew you were smarter.”

“That may have been the way it looked to you,” said Marlene, “but it wasn't how it was.”

“But you were so powerful.”

“But she had children.”

“But you'd call, and she'd go nuts.” Now that Con knew she missed her mother, she remembered perfectly those long-ago moments when Gert turned from her and Barbara to lose herself in friendship.

“No,
you'd
go nuts, and she'd be off the phone. Gert didn't know how lucky she was to have me.”

Joanna's spoon clattered to the side of her bowl and everyone looked at her, but she said nothing. Then she said, “Tooth.”

“You have a toothache?” Peggy said.

“No, I banged the spoon on my tooth.” Then she said with a catch in her voice, “It wasn't
always
money you wanted, was it?” She said it to Marlene. Marlene was still chewing, looking at her plate. Everyone else was done—Con had been looking around for the waiter. She didn't know what Joanna meant, whether it was a strange joke or a real question. Peggy looked confused, but didn't say anything. Con wanted to go to the museum. Now Marlene had definitely stopped eating. Con didn't remember seeing the waiter again, but noticed that the check was on the corner of the table. They split it up—not fairly, but everyone contributed. Con didn't know whether Joanna's remark about money had come before or after the check had been put down. A joke about money might make sense with the check on the table.

They left the restaurant. When Con stepped from the darkly carpeted, darkly upholstered interior onto Brighton Beach Avenue, Marlene and Joanna had preceded her, and they stood waiting, apart, each momentarily abstracted. The
Q train's supports and track bed dimmed the street and sidewalk, and then a train passed above them, and as Con looked it seemed that what deepened and filled the complicated shadows was not its shape but its noise. When it passed, in relative silence Brooklyn's interrupted light again speckled and striped the old woman and the young one. Joanna's face was shadowed; Marlene squinted, as a squib of sunlight found her white hair and hooded eyes, and the sidewalk under her shoes.

 

Con eating breakfast at her mother's table might have been turning into her dead mother—slouching as her mother did, picking with a fingernail at a three-dimensional stain on the tablecloth—but Joanna was not turning into Con; she was a good reminder of Con's present life as she awoke, sat up, and began talking, shaking her big teenaged head from side to side as if her ears needed air. “Who was that on the phone?”

“Aunt Barbara.”

“I thought so. Who was it last night?”

“Someone from my office,” Con said. She paused. “Aunt Barbara is at a motel near Kennedy Airport. She's on her way here.”

“Okay,” said Joanna. She scratched her breasts under her pajama top and went barefoot to the bathroom, then came to the table and sat there, but when Con said, “Toast? Cereal?” she said, “I'm not hungry yet.”

Con left her at the table and tried making a list of all they had to do before they could leave. Of course they didn't have to empty the apartment yet, but they certainly had to empty the
refrigerator. Yet what were they to do with everything in it? She said, “I've gotten to know one of the neighbors,” and left Joanna to ring Peggy's doorbell. She didn't have her phone number.

Con didn't ask—yet—about the cat, but she asked if Peggy would take some food. “You have to be willing to throw away good food,” Peggy said. “People die in my family every week. You have to be merciless. I'll come up later.”

Upstairs again, Con made up her mind to be merciless. She found a suitcase and began putting into it things of her mother's she wanted. Joanna insisted on adding Gert's knitted afghans and shawls and blankets, and even a bag of half-knitted sweaters for babies who'd grown up while Gert searched for more yarn from the correct dye lot.

“It's the most Grandma thing in the place,” said Joanna. “Except for the answering machine.”

“The answering machine?”

“I'm taking that. I want her voice.”

Con didn't think she wanted to own her mother's hesitant voice, sounding baffled about this disturbing invention as she recited her phone number twice. Today Con felt grimly reconciled to her mother's death. She could do without her mother. Yet when she opened the drawer with the photographs, she dropped to her knees and spread her hands on them as if she touched something alive. Her mother had amassed these objects so deliberately: how was Con to discard them?

“Where's her body?” said Joanna, coming along behind her.

“It's being cremated.”

“Did it already happen?”

“I don't know.”

“Mom, don't you care?” But then she left the room and Con didn't see her for a while.

Barbara and Peggy met on the staircase. Con came out to greet her sister and there was Peggy as well. It seemed amazing that her sister in London could turn so quickly into her sister here in her arms. Barbara felt soft and indefinite. Her hair was waved and streaked, and she looked more professional than Con did. After she and Barbara embraced, Con tried to introduce both Barbara and Joanna to Peggy, but Barbara was exclaiming over her niece, whom
she
then introduced to Peggy. The moment when the sisters would have looked at each other and allowed themselves full consciousness of what they had lost—whom they had lost—was postponed, and felt staged when it happened. Barbara wanted coffee. She had questions. Con felt accused, once more, when she said that Gert was being cremated.

“It makes her so
gone
,” said Barbara.

“But you told me to do it.”

“You should have said no,” said Barbara.

Con said, “And if we had a body, we'd have to have a burial. And a real funeral.”

“Well, what
shall
we do about a funeral?”

“Memorial service.”

Barbara exhaled noisily and settled herself. “All right, memorial service. But shall we sit shivah?”

“I've been sitting shivah since I got here,” Con said. “I sat shivah before she died.”

Barbara ignored that. “I'll stay around for a while,” she said. “There are relatives we need to invite…. Are they all upset?”

Con had not phoned anyone else. She had intended to make
a list, but had not done it. Barbara now listed their father's two sisters and some cousins of their mother's. She carried her coffee to the sofa and took off her shoes. “Shall we plan it today?” she said. “We can check with people….”