Three Women (13 page)

She became aware Beverly to her right was trying to speak, her face distorting with effort, her mouth drooling. Suzanne felt torn among those needing her attention: her daughters, both of whom usually soaked up her available energy, her assistant, a stranger here, Celeste who was sunk into a dangerous depression, and her mother. She was used to having Beverly command her attention by forceful statements. She was used to fending off her mother's attacks. She was used to pretending not to understand allusions to her bourgeois pretensions and her safe dull money-grubbing lifestyle. She was not accustomed to having to wipe her mother's face and lean close to try to figure out what Beverly was sputtering. She felt guilty because she was put off by Beverly's inability to control her body, her voice, her face. The same thing will happen to you when you're her age, she told herself, and you'll want people to be kind and understanding and accepting, won't you? So get it together, Suze, get it together and be a mensch. This is an opportunity too, to improve that first relationship of all. “You want something, Mother? More lamb? Tzimmes?”

Beverly was pointing. There were various bottles on the table, grape juice for the nondrinkers, Manischewitz for the traditional, like herself, and kosher Israeli dry wine for those who could not stomach alcoholic cough syrup. For Suzanne, the taste of sweet kosher wine was the taste of Karla's Shabbats, of holidays and all the times she had escaped her own mother and taken refuge with her aunt. She realized Beverly was wildly pointing at the dry red wine. She was not sure whether the social worker had said Beverly could have wine or not, but she was damned if she was going to forbid it if Beverly wanted it. Beverly very much did. Beverly sipped carefully and managed not to spill a drop. Then she waved her glass for more.

“Grandma, do you really want more?” Rachel asked, leaning across the table.

Beverly nodded wildly.

“The difference, according to Rabbi Moshe Poleyoff, between drink
ing wine for the sake of the mitzvah on the night of Pesach and drinking that leads to excess is that the second comes from being empty inside and making wine fill that emptiness. But if we are filled with joy and express that through wine, then the wine becomes the
simchah shel mitzvah
, the joy of the mitzvah….”

Beverly made a derisive noise and carefully drank down the glass. She managed a lopsided grin at Rachel and then at Suzanne. Dessert was never a big deal on Pesach—macaroons, fruit, and a matzoh-based custard cake. The huge meal left little room for sweets. After the food they raced through the tail end of the Haggadah. There was always singing then, which Suzanne had loved since childhood. “Grandma, you're singing,” Rachel said, and Elena too turned to stare. In fact, Beverly was singing. “
Eli-ahu ha-navi, eli-ahu, eli-ahu….
”

“Grandma,” Elena said, peering around Jim. “Have some more wine! It's a miracle.”

Beverly giggled and did have more wine. By the end of the dinner, she was lolling in her chair, breathing in gusts through her mouth, now and then snoring. Suzanne was happy for her. It was probably the first pleasure Beverly had enjoyed since her stroke. For Beverly at least, this evening was some kind of momentary liberation.

Twelve Years Earlier

Elena

Elena hated school. She hated all the girls who gossiped about her and called her a slut. She hated the boys who grabbed at her in the halls and begged her to suck their cocks. She hated the teachers who classified her as less than human. She hated the counselor who told her in a sickly sweet voice of pretend concern that she was not performing up to her potential—performing like a trained seal. She sat there, seeing herself leaping up, reaching across the desk, and strangling the woman. Feel my potential, bitch. Basically, Boston Latin was not a hand-holding type of school. If her grades sank too far or too quickly, she would be booted.
Nobody would be begging her to stay. Perform or perish. She kept playing Twisted Sister. She really was a sick motherfucker, according to her peers, and she sure was the odd one out in her family. She was no longer passing all those tests they threw at her. She played that record over and over again in her room, on her headphones.

She hated her little sister, Rachel, who was Mama's girl and always sucking up to Mother. Rachel was good, Rachel was perfect, Rachel was a complete nerd. She brought home her report cards like Moses coming down from Sinai. What Elena did as well as she could with great effort and sweat, Rachel just zipped through. She did all her homework in record time and did extra. She always had science projects going in the room they shared. She never asked for cool clothes or anything fun, but for books nobody else had ever heard of, and lately she wanted a computer. Who ever heard of a ten-year-old girl with a computer? Only nerdy boys had them. Rachel thought she was a little genius, and so did her teachers, and so did Sam, and so did their mother.

Most of all she hated her mother, who kept going on about college, college. Elena was never going to college. As soon as she was old enough to get a license, she wanted a car. Like Judas Priest sang, “Headin Out to the Highway.” She had a learner's permit already. Chad got his license the week he turned sixteen. He was after his father to buy him a car. When Elena had a car, she was going to get in it with Evan and Chad and take off. They would go down to Mexico. They would drive up to Alaska. They would go anyplace but here. Key West. The Mojave desert. She did not care where. Chad would care and Evan would care but she just wanted to take off and never look back. She would be with both of them and there would be nobody to pester them and hector them, and what they were to each other and what they did together. Only with them did she feel alive. When she was alone in her room, she wondered if she even existed. She felt empty, empty. She didn't know who she was and she wished she was dead. Life stretched before her like a hall at her high school when she was cutting classes and every room had a boring class in session and going down the hall, she could hear the stupid smug bored voices of the teachers in each one. It was a puce-colored hallway reeking of years of sweat and grease and chalk dust. That was the rest of her life. A dull dim hallway going between one place she
didn't want to be to another place she dreaded going. It was all shit. It was all shit forever.

Every other day, there was her mother going at her, how she dressed, how she was acting, what was she learning, what did she want to be? Deaf, Mother, for starters. Going on about how she could be anything she wanted to be. Okay, I want to be a rock star, she yelled, playing air guitar. I mean something real, Suzanne went. Nothing about her satisfied Suzanne. Well, she didn't like Suzanne either. What do you want to be? An orphan.

Sometimes when she was high, it felt okay. Sometimes when she was making out or fucking, she felt real, she felt there. When Chad or Evan looked at her, she felt as if she really existed and she was something each of them wanted. Sometimes lost in the pounding roar of the music, carried on its tornado of sound and whirled through the night, she felt alive. She felt for a moment as if it mattered, and then she wanted to die right then while it was fierce and good. Once they had gone off on a day trip with Evan's parents to Mount Monadnock, and the three of them had managed to get away. It was fall and the ground was red as blood with maple leaves and golden under them. They got high sitting on rocks way off the trail where the cliff tumbled down before them. The colors seemed to sing in her eyes. They had taken off their clothes and they were all lying on a rock that the sun had heated and it felt as if they were melting together. She could not tell where she ended and they began. She felt as if her heart was bursting in her, swelling through her whole body and pulsating like the colors of the red, red leaves.

Her mother was always on her back about grades, as if they meant a fucking thing. It was so boring, so mundane. Her mother never had any fun, she just worked all the time and fussed. Always running out with her briefcase under the arm and rushing, rushing, wearing stupid gray suits and running on high heels down to the car or even the T. It was a joke. Her mother's idea of a great evening was to make supper, which Elena was entirely indifferent to, lie in a hot bath for half an hour and read a book with her feet up, wearing her old bathrobe. Her mother had been born boring. Some people were, like Rachel. Her mother was the most impatient woman alive. Suzanne was always asking if she hadn't done something yet. Elena would be doing the dishes, like she was fuck
ing supposed to, when everybody else in the world had a dishwasher, and her mother would come zooming in saying, Aren't you done yet? Did you wash your sweater? Did you make your bed? Do your homework? When are you planning to get it done? Didn't you do that yet? Did you forget to take out the garbage again? How could you lose your shoes? I don't understand. I don't understand. She sure didn't, that was for absolute real.

Elena felt at war with everyone. Her mother was trying to keep her in. She simply agreed and then did what she pleased. Rachel told on her twice. The second time, she took a knife from the kitchen and laid it against Rachel's throat, holding her down on her bed. “If you rat on me again, I'm going to slit your throat. Don't think I'm bluffing. Don't ever think I'm bluffing. It'd be a pleasure. I wouldn't mind knowing what it feels like to cut my little pesky sister's throat.”

That scared Rachel. She stopped carrying tales to Mother. Elena looked at herself in the mirror, posing squint-eyed and nasty. She could look pretty bad. She liked the way she looked. She was tall now, and she liked being taller than a number of the boys. She was lean and mean and tough. The three of them were their own family. They were together whenever they could be. It was what they all wanted. It was what she wanted more than life itself. When she was with Evan and Chad, she felt surrounded, protected, enclosed, loved. They got wasted a lot, but it didn't matter because they didn't care about anybody else, anybody outside their tight circle. They were everything to one another. If one of them even thought about anybody else for five minutes, the other two set them straight. They were a unit. As soon as they were old enough, as soon as they had wheels of their own, as soon as they had enough money to run away, they were going to live together. They would sleep as long as they wanted to and stay up until they wanted to go to bed. They would eat when they felt like it, pizza or nothing or greasy hamburgers instead of the tofu and broiled chicken and smelly fish her mother tried to get down her. They would play their music as loud as they felt like and they would fuck whenever they chose to and never worry again about getting caught. They would be happy. They would be in pig heaven.

In their first day's class (they tried to take all their classes together,
although they couldn't manage it by half), Chad came in late. He passed her a note as soon as he could. “Old man found my stash. Shit! He says he's going to send me to military school.”

At lunch he explained. “He found out somehow I see Mom when I'm not supposed to. I don't know how he found out. I don't think it's past him to hire some seedy private eye. Who knows? Anyhow, after he found that out, he went through my room. He ransacked it. He found my stash of dope and downers.”

“So you tell him you're holding it for a friend,” Evan said.

“Ha. You think he's that stupid? He called his lawyer and he's trying to get my mom in trouble for seeing me.”

“What kind of trouble can your mom get in?” Elena asked. She wasn't eating. She hated to eat at the school. She wasn't about to walk in with a tacky brown-bag lunch and she wasn't about to eat that shit either. Food was overrated. She'd rather just have a cigarette and a Coke.

“He can get his lawyer after her, like he did before. He can get the judge to rule I can't see her even as much as I do.” Chad slammed his fist on the table. “I hate him. I never wanted to get her in trouble. I just wanted to see her.” Waves of intense emotion beat off him.

It was exciting to feel all that raw emotion discharging. It was like an electrical storm at the table. Elena had always loved thunder and lightning. Rachel would stop up her ears, but Elena would run to the window, almost hoping the lightning would strike near, would electrify her. It was so beautiful. Chad felt like that. She wanted to feel that emotion consuming her. She put her hand over his on the table, but he didn't notice. He pounded the table again. He looked as if his face would break open and molten tears pour out, but of course he could not cry here. He could only beat on the table.

A monitor came over. “Don't pound on the table, weirdo.”

Elena said, “Let him be. He's got problems today.”

“He's my problem right now. Lay off the table or I'll send you to the principal.”

“Get lost, dick-face,” Evan said. “Or you'll have a problem.”

But Chad stopped. They got through the rest of the day. After school, they went to Elena's. Chad didn't want to go home. Rachel was at swimming class. Another mother took her, and then their mother
picked her up at six. They shut themselves in Elena's bedroom. She opened the windows before they lit up. Saved airing it out later. Chad wasn't about to be chilled by dope or anything else.

“She explained it all to me before she left, how he was just too cruel to live with. How he was always putting her down, just the way he does with me. He likes to stick pins in you just to see you flinch.”

Elena frowned, focusing with difficulty. “Why didn't she take you with her?”

“She didn't have any money. She didn't even have a place to stay. Then she wanted me to come, but he got the court to give him custody. He had like four lawyers and she had this cheap jerk who hardly bothered.” He scrubbed at his eyes, dry and bloodshot. “She should've taken me with her anyhow. She should have!”

That woke Evan up. “You don't know that your father and his lawyers would have let her take you,” he said gently. Evan hated it when people blamed others too much.

“He's killing me. He won't let me see my mother. He doesn't give a fuck about me. I'm just a piece of property. I'm just a club to beat her over the head. I'm nothing to him. He doesn't care how much I hurt. He doesn't care what I feel. All he wants to do is win.”

“Maybe we could run away,” Elena said tentatively. Both guys stared at her. “We could go away together.”

“Where would we go?” Evan asked.

Chad stood. “What does that matter, so long as it's away from here? I hate him. I hate my life. He's going to send me to military school.”

“He's just threatening you,” Evan said, trying to cool everybody down.

“No. He had his secretary send for all these applications and brochures. He's threatened before, but this time he's been on the phone to some place in Virginia. He's going to send me to some damned military prison school. I'd rather die.”

“How could we get a car?” Elena poked him, to get his attention back.

“I can take one of my father's cars. He has three. I know where he keeps the keys.”

“Just don't take the Porsche,” Evan said. “That's too conspicuous and too small for three of us.” He was in. He could not resist the idea.

Suddenly Chad was up again, ready for anything. “California. I love
that place. Northern California—north of San Francisco. I have friends there who have a house where it's like you're walking in a pasture with their two horses and suddenly the world drops away and you see you're on top of this cliff. Bam, down below there's these breakers crashing in on the rocks. You just want to step off. Step off into that blue air.”

“I want to go for real,” Elena said, putting her hands on both their shoulders. “Not just bullshit around, like talking about robbing a Brinks truck. I want to do this.”

“For real,” Chad said.

“We're always real,” Evan said. “That's what we are together. Brute reality. Let's go to bed.”

The next day, Chad took his father's BMW, to show them how easy it was. They went off to Rhode Island and each got tattooed—it was illegal in Massachusetts. Chad got a winged skull, Evan an eagle, and she chose a red rose with a thorn dripping blood. The guys put theirs on their arms, but she chose to have hers on her hip. They were not big tattoos—Chad was charging them on his credit card—but they were perfect. She wouldn't say a thing to Suzanne, but at some point, her mother would see it—probably the first time she wore a bathing suit. Suzanne would go ballistic. Elena loved her tattoo. That night she kept looking at it with a flashlight under the covers, the way she used to read comic books when she was a kid.

Suzanne had had it easy. She had gone to high school when things were upside down and the kids felt powerful. Kids seemed like this great force, all of a piece, what they called youth culture and hippies and yippies. They were so sure they were right that they scared the shit out of teachers, principals, parents, bosses. They just took over the streets and the parks. Suzanne had a lot of practice feeling right and justified by the time she was going off to college.