The Widow Waltz (12 page)

I
push back the curtain in the ER and Luey shouts “Mommy!” in a voice of an eleven-year-old. I am relieved yet terrified. Mascara has run down my daughter’s cheeks; she resembles an exhausted mime. Her party clothes are heaped on a plastic chair, though the tulle skirt has fallen on the linoleum floor. As I cover her legs with a thin blanket, I see that the sheet below is stained with blood.

“Sweetie, what happened?” I am remembering my own hospital visits before we adopted Nicola.

Gulps and tears meet my question. “I . . . can’t talk.” An animal keening interrupts each word. I pull Luey’s shivering body toward me and pat her matted hair, the same way I had done less than two months ago, when she took the red-eye home the morning after Ben died, arriving in the colorless dawn. The preceding evening, Daniel had put me to bed with a fusty hot water bottle, which he magically produced along with a sleeping pill. At four-thirty in the morning, I woke up to take a second pill he’d left by my bedside, but in my blur I reached for Luey, who crawled under the covers fully dressed. We slept until past ten that morning. When Nicola tiptoed into the room and found us, we became three women joined in grief.

“When I got to the bathroom, there was all this . . . .” She points beneath her. Again, sobs.

A miscarriage is never a blessed event, but I see tonight’s drama as a merciful conclusion to the latest turn in the biopic of Luey, child-woman, feckless female, and, apparently, birth control abstainer. God, in his infinite wisdom, giveth and God taketh away. Maybe He hath recognized that Louisa Silver-Waltz is as ready to be someone’s mother as I am of giving another human being financial—and possibly equally misguided, marital—advice.

“Don’t talk, honey,” I say, and continue the rocking motion. I will be grateful if Luey doesn’t speak, because I won’t know what to say, but she whispers, “Mom, I’m scared.”

Me, too. “Hospitals are always scary.” I know this isn’t what she needs. “No one wants to be here. Try to sleep.” I attempt to quiet her moans with a
shush-shush
that emanates courtesy of some backup generator of maternal response.

“You’re wearing your good perfume,” Luey murmurs as she closes her eyes. “Where were you tonight?”

“Nowhere,” I say. “Not important. Sleep. Luey. Sleep.” After a few minutes her hand releases the blanket that she had clasped tightly. I gentle her onto the bed and speed-walk to the public area of the emergency room to find whoever is in charge.

I may as well be in a mosh pit. Every bed is filled. Hovering outside each one are boisterous groups that bump into one another. I stand as still as a hoary old beagle, trying to make myself invisible while I catch a scent, but if someone is directing this chaos, I detect nothing.

A woman in a smock silly with candy canes scurries by, clipboard in hand. “Excuse me,” I sputter, but she races to the end of the room, escaping into a tiny glass-walled office. I follow her, stand outside, and glare as she speaks on the phone. Am I being rude? So what? I’m a mother doing her job. When the woman gets off the phone, she catches my eye and leaves the enclosure.

“Yes?” she asks, as I rush toward her.

“Can you please tell me what’s going on with Louisa Silver-Waltz, the girl at the end?” I point toward her cubicle.

The woman, thickset with many small gold earrings and dark waves caught in a butterfly barrette, checks her clipboard. “And you are?”

“Her mother.”

She flips back a form and reads without looking up. “Your daughter is past twenty-one. I’m not allowed to reveal any information without her consent. You know, HIPAA laws.” She hesitates and meets my abject gaze. “If you wait by your daughter’s bed, a doctor will be by.” She has the grace to add, “I’m sorry.”

I sense that she is. Back by Luey’s side, I fold her ruined finery piled on the floor next to the plastic chair, where I sit, shifting my hips in a futile attempt to find comfort. While I wait I rest my eyes and evidently I doze, because I startle to Luey’s voice.

“Mother,” she’s whispering hoarsely. “Can I have some water, please?”

Spittle has run from the corner of her mouth. I lean toward her, wipe it away, and wince. An ogre has made a grab for my neck, but I manage to say, “Of course, honey,” and stand. “I’ll find some,” I add, because not only is there no pitcher of water next to the bed, there is no glass and no sink.

I check my watch. It’s past three a.m. The ER no longer resembles a balloon ready to burst. Before I go searching for water, I walk to the glass booth, where a thin young Indian or Pakistani man with wire-framed glasses has replaced the dark-haired woman. When he sees me approach, he slides open a panel. “May I help you?” he asks, leaning forward.

“My daughter is Louisa Silver-Waltz, in the bed at the end. I’d like some information, please. She was brought in earlier tonight. She lost her baby.”

“Let me check,” he says. He thumbs through a stack of papers. “Ah, yes,” he clucks. “She’ll be examined again first thing in the morning.”

And so we wait. I walk Luey to the bathroom. Her hair is sticking to her forehead, and I don’t need a mirror to know I can’t look much better. I would barter my watch for a breath mint and suddenly a headache is levitating my scalp. If I don’t have a cup of coffee, I will pass out.

“Lu,” I say. “Hungry?”

She groans, dramatically. “I suppose.”

“That settles it. Hold on—I’ll be back soon.” I leave the ER, weave through serpentine halls the chartreuse of a sinus infection, wait and wait for an elevator, push through a set of doors that appears to be designed to defend against nuclear waste, find the cafeteria, and buy two coffees along with a hermetically sealed cinnamon bun, most likely stale. I find my way back to the ER and enter just as a tall young man wearing a lab coat and a stethoscope is leaving Luey’s bedside. I nab him before he disappears behind the next curtain.

“Excuse me. Can you tell me what’s going on with my daughter?”

“Certainly,” he says. “I’m Dr. Pandit.” So young he has acne, he looks ready to shake my hand, were I not carrying a cardboard tray. “You have nothing to worry about. Your daughter is fine.”

My heart is a drumbeat. “Doctor, I am aware that my daughter was pregnant.”

“You can relax.” He draws a deep breath and smiles. “Your daughter hasn’t lost the baby . . . at least not yet.”

I stare at him, harebrained.

“I’ve recommended bed rest. The next forty-eight hours will be crucial, but there’s quite possibly good news ahead.”

He grasps my arm, as if shaking me awake. “Relax. Grandma,” he says. “I’m fairly sure the worst is over.” He pulls away. “Now, if you’ll excuse me . . . .”

I’d like to find a chapel and have a word with God, but not because Doogie Howser here has promoted me a generation. I feel a landslide of guilt for being dumbstruck by this news when another mother might rejoice. But there it is. I cannot even count the reasons, rational and not, why this pregnancy fills me with dread. I am paralyzed, and if when I leave this hospital, I should see a street lined with red-faced placard-carriers hissing my name, reviling me for my irreverence toward human life, so be it.

“Mother,
vamanos,”
Luey says, however, pushing back the curtain. Her tights are ripped but her face looks gloriously relieved, as the ill and injured are when discharged from a hospital. “You ready to roll? We’re outta here.”

But we aren’t. It takes more than an hour for paperwork to be executed. Only then do we leave, and after twenty minutes in the deserted streets finally manage to hail a taxi. Although its windows are cracked open to the cold, the vehicle reeks of last night’s vomit. I lean back, again aware of the literal pain in my neck, and close my eyes. I pray for strength and a sense of humor.

Luey and I have just enough money to cover the fare. When I open the door to the apartment, Sadie greets me with gusto while my daughter heads for the couch, kicks off her four-inch platform heels and collapses. “Shit,” she says. “It’s good to be home.”

“Go rest,” I say. It is a command, and I am grateful that Camille Waltz’s titanium tone has come to my defense.

Slowly, Luey pushes herself up from the couch and makes her way down the hall, leaving garments in her wake. After she disappears into her bedroom, I gather each piece of clothing, head for the back hall, and deposit the heap in the garbage. I give Sadie a serviceable walk and then, without even washing my face—for me, a stress sign as blatant as hives—strip off my clothes, throw on a T-shirt, and burrow under my covers.

It could be noon or it could be four when a voice sings out, “Anybody home?” I am mid-dream, screeching at Ben for winding up in an Iraqi jail because he neglected to pay taxes throughout our whole marriage. This reminds me that, for the first time, I will need to complete my returns single-handedly, which sends me straight to the thought that tomorrow is a workday. Wally should be back and hot on the trail of my worldly assets, leading to an ice cream sundae of money with a ring on top.

“Happy New Year!” Nicola trills as she knocks on my door.

“Nicola . . . c’mon in,” I say.

Her gleaming black hair is smoothly braided, hanging down her back. She is dressed in a narrow rose satin tunic, her legs in tight jeans tucked into narrow leather boots that reach her knees. My older daughter resembles an elegant branch of quince.

“Napping?” she asks.

“Long story.” I stifle a groan. “How was Boston?” I pat the bed next to me. “Tell me everything.”

I need a dose of normal, a daughter reporting prosaic details—who she saw and kissed, what she ate and wore, where she danced and slept, and why she’s very glad to be home. Which is exactly what I hear for a good ten minutes. If anyone demanded that I repeat the particulars, I would fail, but having Cola next to me is like listening to a mixed tape of beloved show tunes.

“Where’s Luey?” she asks when she’s finished with her headlines.

“Sleeping.”

“Not anymore,” Luey says, joining us. She is wearing one of my robes. Her hair is freshly washed, hanging in tousles. She smells like citrus and almonds. “Happy New Year, sister.” Luey grabs Nicola in a tight embrace that I see less often than I wish.

“Back at you, “Nicola says. “How was your night?”

“Big and ugly.”

“Do tell.”

“Not now.”

“How about you?” Nicola pivots toward me.

“You’d have been proud. I went to the party given by the broker and his friend.”

“The smokin’ broker,” Luey says in a droll voice that she didn’t bring to the hospital. “And his boyfriend.”

“Stepbrother, as it turns out.”

“Did you mingle with the beautiful and the damned?” Nicola asks.

I present Harriet Ross and the bald slut as exhibits A and B.

“Did you know anyone?” Luey asks.

“Not a soul except the hosts”—whom I know barely.

“I love a party when I know no one,” Luey says.

I hope she knows the father of her child.

“I’m starving,” Nicola says. “How does pizza sound?”

Like a beautiful Band-Aid for our problems. “If you’re cooking, I’m helping. Luey?” Again, an order.

The three of us improvise, grating cheese, rolling dough, slicing, dicing, and perfecting. We do pizza well. Thirty minutes later I’ve busted out the Wedgewood that’s mid-auction on eBay, courtesy of Luey, getting bid up by hopeful brides. I light some half burnt candles and we sit. If I were a more traditionally religious woman, I would repeat the prayer in my mind:
Thank you, God, for keeping my daughters safe and healthy. Grant us a new year of peace.

Nicola produces a bottle of Chianti. She pours one glass, then a second, and is onto the third when Luey intercepts. “Nothing for me,” she says.

“Hung over?” Nicola asks.

Luey places her hand on her stomach. “No, Cola. Pregnant.”

Cola groans. “Jesus, who put you in charge of bad jokes?”

“Point taken,” Luey says. My daughters simply stare at each other for a moment too long, in a silence—not a good silence—I am desperate to shatter.

“Say, do either of you know a Clementine DeAngelo?” I ask.

Now I have their attention.

“W
hat’s up with Clementine?” Nicola asked. She could picture Clementine, with cheekbones jutting like parentheses while her own appeared to be merely embossed. If the girl got a decent haircut, she could model, she’d thought.

“She sent her condolences. I ran into her in the country,” her mother said.

At one of the bonfires, where Clem—Nicola had heard her called that—was with the farm-stand guy, Nicola had tried to talk to her. As the conversation choked, Nicola couldn’t believe she was the same person she’d seen her father goofing with the previous day when Clementine had checked their car’s sticker at the beach parking lot.

Her dad could talk—or flirt, if she was being technical—with anyone, another of his gifts, like being able to recite the states in alphabetical order. While most daughters might have been embarrassed by this behavior, Nicola felt proud, as if Ben Silver had his own gravitational force that no woman could resist, even if she was Nicola’s camp counselor. Nana was particularly susceptible, though half the time she started it. Her father flirted better than any man her own age.

“I’m impressed that Clementine spoke to you,” Nicola said to her mother. “I’ve never heard her get out a full sentence. Maybe you caught her when she’d taken a Xanax.” Nicola regretted that she’d aimed for humor and landed on malice, sounding small.

“I’ve never had a problem,” Luey said. “She’s just shy.”

Is there anything you can’t do?
Nicola was tempted to say, but the look on her mother’s face—sad and perplexed—stopped her. Nicola switched to the top item on her mind.

“I ran into Michael T. Kim in Boston.” Chased after? Slept with? No matter.

“The boy who took you to the prom, that Michael?” Her mother’s face is flushed with curiosity.

“The big brain who dumped you?” Luey asked.

“I dumped him.” That was how Nicola remembered it.

“What was he doing in Boston?” her mother and sister asked in nosy harmony.

“Harvard med school—”

“You could have called that one ten years ago,” Luey said.

“—and throwing a party.”

“Kegger?” Luey asked.

“Catered. With enough profiteroles for a hundred more guests.” Already, she was feeling defensive on Michael T’s behalf.

“Did you have fun?” Her mother’s dependable investigative opener.

Exposing herself in front of Luey was generally an act of masochism, but after a moment’s debate, she decided to live on the edge. “I did,” she admitted.

“Do you think you’ll see him again?” The second question her mother tended to ask, early and often.

I hope so,
she thought, while she aimed for insouciance. “I doubt it. He’s there and I’m not and med students get no time off.”

“Which is why you’re blushing,” Luey pointed out, though her usual bite wasn’t on display. “You like him.”

“He’s a friend, and after a few even Harvard guys act like horny Boy Scouts,” though this didn’t apply to Michael T. He was old school, and Nicola’s only disappointment was that she’d blown things years ago. When she left—one of his friends drove her back to New York—he promised he’d call. But now Michael T. remained in Cambridge, where more than half of the med students appeared to be not-entirely-unfortunate-looking women eager to compare notes on rotations and matches. Nicola didn’t want to push too hard, fearing that he’d see her as a gold digger—as if in this century, marrying a doctor other than a heart surgeon, sports medicine physician, cosmetic dermatologist, or concierge internist was a fast track to anything but debt.

“Your New Year’s, how was it?” she asked, looking at Luey. “As eventful as Mother’s?”

Her sister took longer than necessary to offer up, “I was . . .” and nothing more until, a bit too eager to change the subject, she added, “That’s sweet about Clementine and the condolences.”

“Clementine has blond hair down to her butt, right?” Luey says.

“Not anymore,” I say, picturing the androgynous sylph I met in my kitchen.

“She parked cars at the beach and worked at the tennis club. I like her.”

Luey sucks the tip of a curly tendril of hair and then wanders off. How unhinged have I become to want to ask, Did your father know Clementine, too? Were they ever together—together-together?

Did I imagine the look of shock and upset on Clementine’s face when I mentioned Ben’s death? No, something that day in the kitchen was off. I am sure of it. Could Ben have seduced this sheltered girl? What was worse, to think of my husband betraying me, or to imagine that he took advantage of a woman who is really a child?

I force myself back on autopilot, as I start cleaning up after our dinner, loading the dishwasher and vigorously wiping the counters, determined to put the same effort into scraping away the foul image I’ve conjured of Clementine and Ben. I try to see Ben not as a philanderer—or more hideous, a pedophile—his arm around a girl as young as his daughters, but as an ordinary father and husband, watching football until bedtime, Nicola and Luey feigning interest beside him. But today the television is switched off, as is the benign quadrant of my imagination.

“Mother, I’d like an answer.” Nicola’s voice is shrill.

“Excuse me?” I ask.

“It’s time for resolutions,” she says. “I asked twice.”

New Year’s resolutions, a Ben-spawned tradition. Do anything twice and my daughter, ripped from her native land, calls it a family custom, which she will adhere to as strongly as if she were raised in a fascist state. Cola is the child who insists on red velvet cupcakes for her birthday breakfast, decided to hide Valentines like Easter eggs, and wears white lace underwear on first dates. At eleven, when she read that Korean grannies believed you’d grow tall if you cut your hair, she gave herself a Joan of Arc cut. She flatlined at the height of five foot five, and now her hair, as lustrous as enamel, swings below her shoulders.

“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll pass on the resolutions.” I cock my head toward the cupboards. “Chores.”

“I’ll help you later. This is what we do. Don’t be a buzz kill.”

“It’s my party and I’ll be a buzz kill if I want to,” I bitch loud enough to be annoying, especially to myself. Nicola tosses the sponge in the sink and leads me by the elbow to the living room couch, where she’s arranged pads of paper and three freshly sharpened pencils.

“Luey!” she shouts. “Resolutions!”

Her sister skids into the room more like a sports fan than a person who fourteen hours ago was moaning on a hospital bed. I hold my breath as she seats herself on the couch and leans back, her bare feet propped on the coffee table. They are my mother’s feet—impossibly narrow, irritatingly elegant, and impeccably pedicured by her own hand. My own polish-free, peasant-sturdy pair is hidden in cotton socks.

“Who wants to start?” Nicola asks.

“Me, me, me.” Luey scribbles quickly. She looks up and recites, “I, Louisa Silver-Waltz, resolve not to watch more than three hours of television a day.” With elaborate indifference she lays her paper on the table.

“Unacceptable,” Nicola says, since family shtick allows for resolution veto. “You try that every year and it lasts a week.” She tears the resolution in half. It’s a playful rip, but a rip just the same.

Ben and I weren’t the kind of parents who required our daughters to memorize
Maus
or even
Horton Hears a Who
. Luey was devoted to television—
Muppet Babies, Pee-wee’s Playhouse
reruns, Civil War documentaries, and police procedurals, all given equal time. That she earned higher grades than her older sister despite rushing through homework during the commercials brought on dependable filial distress. Who could blame Nicola? I would argue with Ben against the girls having TVs in their bedrooms. He’d laugh and offer Luey’s grades as a defense. Advantage, Ben.

“Luey, you think,” Nicola commands, then turns toward me. “Mother, you start.”

The Georgia strategy is to make resolutions too small to fail—doing fifty crunches before bedtime, eating my Omega-3’s, learning to make an orchid bloom again and again. These I have mastered. It was Ben who loved his resolutions in high-def. Once, he stopped smoking—cold turkey after two packs a day—and another year, learned Italian well enough to charm waitresses in Venice seven months later. Six years ago he resolved to run a marathon. Given how that turned out, you’d think my daughters would give us all a pass.

“I will go gray,” I say. Oh, the money I’ll save, and it will be easier than phoning the twenty-four-hour L’Oreal haircolor hotline while I scour stains off my white bathroom tile.

“You will not!” Luey shrieks. “Do better.”

“In that case, I will learn a new word every day,” I snap back.

“That was two years ago.”

She’s right. Into daily conversation, I wove
internecine
,
dyspeptic
,
c
oncupiscent,
and the word that won the last game of Scrabble that Ben and I played:
mingy
. If only I’d recognized foreshadowing when it met me over a card table.

“Get personal, Mother,” Nicola says.

Personal is I will figure out what happened to our family’s finances and at least uncover the fate of that storied ring. More personal: I am determined to learn if my husband truly loved me. Most personal: I resolve to discover if there was another woman, a young mother half my age named Clementine, and how Ben could let his feelings for her muck up my and our daughters’ lives, and if he’s the father of her baby. I’m not sure I can accomplish any of those, so I dial back to, “I resolve to grow up” and wait for the inevitable override. But instead I hear Nicola asking, “How so?”

Indeed. “Every day I’ll do at least one thing out of my reach,” I say. As I try to reboot, is there a choice?

“Good one,” says Nicola, who avoids her sister’s eyes and announces, “And I’ll do the same.” After a dramatic pause she adds, “I resolve to get serious about work.” Let it not involve the unaffordable luxury of acquiring another degree she will use no more than the L.L.Bean wardrobe that she abandoned in Iowa a few years ago. I knew those black patent leather clogs would get kicked to the curb.

“Uncle Stephan wants to teach me the business. His assistant is returning, but he says I can stay as long as I want.” She looks pleased.

I have learned that my brother’s generosity may arrive with hidden tariffs, but I say, “Cola, I’m proud of you” and lean forward to give her a tight, lingering hug.

“Excellent,” Luey adds. “Both of you.”

“Okay then. We’re done. Your turn.” Nicola’s subtext is,
Top this.

“I resolve to be an excellent mother.”

Nicola laughs, not kindly. “To what?”

“I told you twenty minutes ago. You’re going to be an aunt.” She raps the wood table three times in Ben’s gesture. “In about seven months I’ll be big as a yurt.”

Nicola rolls her eyes as she did at fourteen and, for that matter, at four. “Go on. Get serious.”

“I am.” Her words surf on a whitecap of emotion. “Deal with it.”

Nicola stares at Luey as if she’s blinking green. “Are you certifiable?” she says, but I recognize curiosity embedded in the question.

“Maybe. But don’t worry, I might lose the baby. Would that make you happy-clappy?”

“Hey!” I find the voice that has forever defanged arguments between my honey-and-sardines daughters. “Have a little respect. We’re talking about a
child
,” who for the first time I am picturing, barely, as a bud on my family tree. I won’t suffer sarcasm or bitterness in earshot of this speck of life.

Silence rings like an icy bell and I realize that I, Georgia, have performed my first grown-up act of the year. My daughters’ faces show remorse, which triggers a boundless love in me for both of them, for the possibility of a baby, and—before it dissolves like sugar into batter—for Ben, poor man, who is missing all of this.
Ben, I need you to be my partner in parenthood, to help both our daughters finish the job of growing up, to meet our grandchild. Ben, you’ve been cheated and so have all of us.

“I’m sorry.” Nicola’s whisper floats in my direction as she clutches Luey’s hand. “Tell me everything,” she says. “Is the father—”

Luey wriggles away, puts her finger to her own lips and nods.

More than anything, Nicola wants to be closer to Luey than her younger sister will ever allow, not that Cola has any idea of how to make that happen. And certainly, every part of me needs to know more, wants to know more.

I’d like to say that biology counts for little, something I was sure I believed the moment Nicola was placed in my arms. But I’d be lying if I pretended I haven’t been praying that the man who blessed my first grandchild with his DNA was at least a sweet, guileless junior high school biology teacher, not a drifter whom Luey met online or picked up at a NASCAR rally. I can’t say I don’t hope the father of her baby loves her, and I want him to present himself—the sooner the better—bearing gifts and ardor. I’m afraid, however, to trespass further into Luey’s clandestine inner terrain. For now.

“This calls for a toast,” to a decision that Luey may still have to make, to a new year, and to the snake dance that is my family’s life.

“No alcohol for Luey,” Nicola says.

“Now you’re the superintendent of pregnancy?” her sister asks.

“Just saying.”

I fill three tall glasses of pomegranate juice, two spiked with yesterday’s flat champagne, call it a cocktail, and set them down on a tray in front of my daughters.

“To Luey!” I say.

“To you, Ma, and all of us,” she answers, clicking her glass to mine and Nicola’s.

“To all of us,” Cola echoes. “Mother, Luey, baby.”

We sip, soundlessly, as my phone rings. I lift it up and squint at the name it flashes. Chip Sharkey. Real estate can wait; I don’t answer. But the mute phone taunts me. Calling Wally has been on my radar. I’ve waited for him to reach out and when he hasn’t, I’ve thought about him every fifteen minutes and sent him daily emails. Painting a kitchen by myself—the job I’ve told myself I will start tomorrow—or, say, scaling Kilimanjaro has struck me as infinitely easier than continuing to find the path that might or might not lead us out of Ben’s quagmire, and might or might not start with what Wally can discover.