Three Women (14 page)

But Elena knew she was just a burnout. There was nowhere to go and no one to turn to except her little family of Evan and Chad. The good kids didn't smoke. They stayed on the other side of the smoking line outside school. Passing beyond that line as Elena did every day was to brand yourself a slut. She knew what made her feel good, but everybody around her with any power over her told her that sex and heavy metal and whatever they could get their hands on to get them high, all were bad and dirty—and so was she.

Beverly

Beverly dreaded going into the rehab center because it sounded like a nursing home, someplace to park her. Someplace to stash her where she wouldn't be in Suzanne's way. However, by the time Suzanne drove her there, she was so exhausted she only wanted to be in a quiet room away from all of them. It was just too hard, too much. Everyone talked at once and they didn't understand she could not follow multiple threads. It was unbearably noisy. Music pounding. Everyone talking at her and each other, their voices a mad loud jumble in her ears. It was all so complicated, things in the way, furniture sticking out. The toilet wasn't within her reach. She could not hobble toward it with the walker she hated, for it caught on every piece of furniture, and there was too much furniture, stuff everyplace she tried to pass. Things kept falling down as she went by. They shouted at her, as if she were deaf. They thought if they yelled at her, she would understand them, when she only wanted them to speak slowly and pause while she caught up with them.

She could talk some now, she knew she could, but no one there gave her a chance to mouth the syllables she could manage. She could do all the vowels. That cute man with the mismatched clothes, Dr. Fish, back in New York had taught her she could make those sounds perfectly well. Shah, shay, she, sheh, shy, shih, show, shoi, shau, shew, shuh. Wonderful sounds. And “m.” She could say perfectly good things like “show me,” if they would only wait long enough and give her a chance. But Suzanne had always been impatient. She remembered she herself had been impatient, back when she had been a full and real person. Yes, she too had always been in a hurry, but now everything took time. Just getting dressed required at least half an hour, and another fifteen minutes getting to the toilet, getting up and back. Every little excursion and every little activity, like eating ice cream, wore her out till she needed to rest. But in Suzanne's house, there was little rest. All those people
milling around shouting at one another, doors slamming, water running, the phone burring, the fax beeping, people thundering up and down to the flat upstairs. All those faces she did not know or could not remember.

She would miss Mao. He had been overjoyed to see her. He was the one who loved her as she was. He got into bed with her and purred and purred. He kneaded his paws against her arm, and she felt as if she could almost feel him vibrating, as if the arm had a little sensation. The other cats, the orange ones, came to examine her, and they too were friendly, but Mao ran them off, hissing with his black fur on end. She was his. She wished she could take him with her to the rehab center. He still loved her, when nobody else could. Even her favorite, Elena, kept away from her. Spoke to her from a distance and fled. Everyone wanted to turn away from the ruin she had become.

Therefore, although she had not wanted to come and had tried to object to being parked here, as she lay in the hospital bed in the pale green room, she was relieved. It was manageable here. Ten steps to the bathroom and rails in place. A stool in the tub and railings. Railings on the walls. Wide doors her walker could pass smoothly through. Ramps. The remote for her TV was within reach. A tray swung over the bed on a balance spring so that she could easily swing it down or send it away. She could print notes on it, could prop up a large-print book. She was expected to make her way to meals, although she would much rather have had them in her quiet safe room.

Meals were depressing. Most of the patients or inmates, those stored here, did not try to communicate with one another. The right-brain-damaged ones could be talkative, but that didn't mean they made sense. The white-haired lady across from her, fragile and rosy as a porcelain shepherdess, sat there swearing, “Goddamned motherfucker son of a bitch bastard.” Some switch in her brain had frozen into curse mode. A middle-aged man with a twisted face was singing to himself as he stabbed at his food. Their food had a tendency to get away. Eating took every bit of concentration she could muster, a fierce battle not to get food into her lap or her hair or on her sweater, but carefully, avoiding choking, she spooned a little at a time into her mouth. Meals were very slow because they were difficult. None of them ate easily.

The rhythms of the day were different here than they had been in
the New York hospital but just as repetitive and marked. Bathe and get dressed, rest. Eat breakfast, rest, go to physical therapy, rest, go to speech therapy, rest, lunch, rest, go to occupational therapy, rest, be parked by the TV, rest, supper, be parked by the TV, go to bed, and start again. Yet she did not mind the routine, because the chaos at Suzanne's had tired her to desperation.

All around her were people with various degrees of stroke, various stages of recovery. When she thought “recovery” she put mental quotes around it. She heard from her various therapists about people who had regained use of their legs, their arms, their hands, their speech apparatus, their ability to live a normal life, but all around her, she saw the broken and the blasted. Like herself. If they did not often reach out to one another, it was partly because it was so much work to make contact with another person who was not a therapist assigned to you, and partly because looking at another person with a similar problem was depressing. She began to notice, to realize, that often a stroke was only a first stroke, and that others minor or major might readily follow.

She no longer fought her therapists but tried, stolidly, in a daily routine of attempts and frequent failure. The one therapist she approached with passion was her speech therapist. This one was a woman, Nancy Wright. I WANT TO WRITE, NANCY WRIGHT, she printed painstakingly on a piece of paper. Suzanne brought her steno pads and marking pens. “First we'll work on your speech, Mrs. Blume.”

A speech pathologist had examined her for a good part of an afternoon until she wept with frustration and fatigue. The verdict was that there was no injury to her vocal cords or her pharynx. It was all in the brain, that gray globular organ she increasingly resented. She imagined a hole in it where the speech machine had once effortlessly worked, spitting out words, sewing together sentences. She had been such a talker. Her mother had called her The Mouth when she was angry with Beverly.

“
A bayzeh tsung iz erger fun a schlechter hant
.” A wicked tongue does more harm than a wicked hand. That was her mother talking. Suddenly she was at the table in their Lower East Side apartment on Twelfth Street next to the Jewish old folks' home. They lived on the third floor back. The table was actually two tables stuck together when the whole family was home for a meal. She had three older brothers and of course
her sister, Karla. Al went down in the Pacific on a destroyer. Davey died of pneumonia in the hospital after he was mugged outside his record store. Gene perished of a heart attack just five years ago, playing golf outside Las Vegas. They had never had much to do with one another, except Gene, who had been her favorite. They had little in common. Different paths. But she could see them around the two tables stuck together along with her Aunt Hannah, who was some obscure cousin brought over to save her life, and also their Zeydeh, who seemed to her even then ancient and weird, who spoke almost no English. They were all crammed around those two shoved-together tables singing the blessings and then digging into the good and plentiful food of Shabbat. She could smell the soup her mother made with eggs from inside the chicken, the eggs without shells.

Then she was even younger and helping Mama pluck the chicken from the kosher butcher's. They were plucking the feathers, and what did they do with them? They saved them till Mama and Aunt Hannah made feather dusters they sold at the Sunday market. Nothing went to waste in that house, not a scrap of vegetable peeling, not a bone, not a bit of fat. Everything was used. Not like the piles of trash that went out of Suzanne's every day, mountains of garbage, things tossed out. No, they used every tiny scrap.

Then they did not throw away people, not her weird Grandpa who had a head injury from a pogrom in Lithuania and could only do rote tasks. Not Aunt Hannah who woke everyone in the house with her screaming at least one night a week, nightmares from the Nazis. Sometimes a hungry neighbor or a cousin passing through or someone in some kind of trouble joined the meal. She could smell that soup. She had not remembered it in years. It was a soup that belonged to the days a chicken had feathers and feet instead of parts wrapped in plastic film. Kids like Rachel were turning into vegetarians because it came as a shock to them that all those objects that came so neatly from the supermarket were not Disney creatures marching with a dance step into their pots, but real animals who had died to feed them. She had never been kept in the dark about that, you ate to live, so she accepted it. People over-protected kids nowadays, so they grew up inept and unable to deal with adversity. That was a subject she felt strongly about, and she opened her mouth to speak to the old guy snoozing beside her as the TV played
some stupid sitcom about twenty-year-olds with no politics and no sense trying to decide who to fall into bed with. Then she realized she could no more make the speech about child raising than he could understand it.

The scent of that soup tickled her nostrils. She could smell it more clearly than she had smelled anything since her stroke. It was a rich smell, luscious. Perhaps she had never eaten anything so good since. She could taste it. Her mouth was filling with saliva. She could feel the hard wooden seat with its center ridge pressing into her buttocks and she could feel the rough cotton of the white Shabbat cloth under her elbows. Yes, Zeydeh was bent over his bowl of soup, nose almost in it, and Davey was imitating him and poking her in the ribs. She could smell the fragrance of the challah fresh from the oven. Broken open, its yellow softness revealed itself under the glaze of the surface. It was almost more cake than bread. It melted in her mouth. Why hadn't she bought herself challah in recent years? A bakery in the next block to her apartment made perfectly good challah. Mama roasted two chickens so everybody could have two pieces. She always got a wing and a back. The boys got the legs. Mama, Papa, and Zeydeh split the breasts, and Papa got the other leg. Aunt Hannah, Karla, and she divided up the rest. She remembered how when she had left home and was making money as an organizer for the ILGWU, she ordered half a chicken in a restaurant and she ate the whole thing, every bit of it. She could taste that too. It wasn't like Mama's, which was a kind of chicken pot roast with celery and carrots and onions and garlic. Karla knew how to make it. No, this restaurant chicken was roasted like the goyim made but very good. She ate it all down to the last bit of skin and sucked on the bones, picking up the bones in her hands, not like a lady. She could taste her mother's chicken in her mouth and at the same time she could taste that roast chicken in the restaurant, from her first union paycheck.

Tears trickled from her left eye, her good eye down her cheek, leaving trails of salt. How could she ever have imagined she would be reduced to sitting in a dimly lit room in front of the TV no one was watching with a bunch of old people nobody cared about—including each other—and crying about vanished chickens? I've had my life, damn it, she thought, I've had my life. It was a damned good life, even when I was
scared, even when I was in danger, even when I was crying my heart out. Why can't it just be over? I don't regret it, but for this empty epilogue. I had as much living as anybody could ask for, so let me out of here. Let my body go!

Suzanne

“Are you sure you're not rushing into marriage because you're nervous about going to Israel by yourself? You've never been out of the country alone. You've always been with me or with your father.”

“Really, Mother, I'm looking forward to Israel, I'm tremendously excited about going. I've traveled by myself.” Rachel was using the ultra-reasonable tone of voice Suzanne had often heard her use with Elena. “When I was thinking of going to school in California, I went out there alone. I went to Santa Fe with a friend. You're just upset because I want to get married during my year there.”

“But how long have you known him? Michael.” She made herself say his name. She did not like the way they doted. She did not trust doting. She did not like his vaguely superior air, the sense she had of him judging them.

“I've known him since my first year in rabbinical college. We were in Hebrew Ulam together. We started studying together that first year.” Rachel put down the underwear she was sorting—what was to be taken with her, what was to be put away. “Really, Mother, what have you got against him? What more suitable husband am I ever likely to meet?”

“I like him,” she said defensively. “I like him fine. I just think marriage is something you should wait till you're done with school before you rush into.”

“Who's rushing, Mother? We've been talking about it for months and months.”

But not to me, Suzanne thought sourly. When did you stop telling me?

 

Suzanne was putting away the woolens Rachel had brought home. It always moved Suzanne to handle her daughter's clothing. She was sorting the things that needed to go to the cleaners from those that could go into old suitcases in the basement at once. A few smelled of the simple light floral perfumes Rachel liked. Others simply smelled of her daughter, a particular scent she could not have named but would have recognized anyplace. She buried her face in a blue woolen turtleneck, and for a moment she felt like crying. Menopause, Marta would say. Marta blamed all moods on menopause, as if the world wasn't knobby with problems and irritants. Rachel's body scent was a clean gingery bready smell. Flesh of her flesh. This morning she had heard Jim and Marta fighting upstairs. Marta had a low flash point, a temper that sometimes caused her to break things she had no desire to break. Jim was slower to anger but far, far slower to forgive; and he never forgot.

She remembered when the girls had been small, how much their little clothes had pleased her, like the clothes made for dolls. Rachel had been a plump baby, good-natured, easily moved to giggles or tears. When she was older, she liked to color. She used to get so excited when she saw the ducks in the Public Gardens, the swans. She loved the swan boats. Elena had never been interested in them. She liked rides better.

Rachel had loved stories about animals, heroic dogs, wise or foolish cats, mistreated horses, mischievous goats. Elena had been more musical. She had responded to music from the time she was a baby. At one time, Suzanne had imagined that Elena would be a musician. Or a dancer. Even in financially difficult days, Suzanne had managed ballet lessons for Elena. She could remember her flickering across the stage like a dark flame. She had always been lovely. She was one of the only women Suzanne had ever known who woke up pretty. Sleep seemed to lie on her lightly and never to rumple her excessively. Yet she slept profoundly. When Elena was an infant and then a toddler, sometimes her stillness in sleep frightened Suzanne. Elena would sink into sleep and lie in it as if on the bottom of a pool. More than once, Suzanne had wakened her out of fear that something was wrong, fear that her baby had died.

She had been a far more anxious mother with Elena than with Rachel. By the time Rachel was born, she had Sam and Marta to help. She had some experience. But when Elena was born, she realized she had
never held a baby in her life. She ran out and bought Dr. Spock and every other book she could see that might serve as manuals. The more she read, the more things seemed able to go wrong. Sudden infant death syndrome. Colic. Meningitis. Choking. Smothering. Being dropped on the head. Some nights she had sat and wept, overwhelmed with the responsibility, overwhelmed with fear. Sometimes she felt as if Elena were not a baby but huge, bigger than she. Then she would feel guilty. Motherhood had not been joyous the first time. She had felt inadequate. She was finishing law school, she was on the
Law Review
, she was studying hours every night while holding the crying Elena on one arm. She wondered why she had not gone mad. Perhaps she had. No, she had survived and so had Elena, but when Elena got into trouble, Suzanne had been sure it was her fault, her failure as a mother.

 

“I think it would be good for you to be on the board,” Jake said, dipping bread into sauce from the pot roast. “I know it would be good for the board.”

“But I'm overextended as it is. I'm teaching, I'm practicing law, I'm still involved in the clinic, I'm mentoring several students, I'm trying to finish an article on appeals in battered women syndrome cases…”

“The board will meet only once or twice a month. You could manage that. An evening now and then.”

“But you don't want me just as a warm body at meetings. Do you?” She wished she did not have a tiny suspicion that one of the reasons he was attracted to her was because he wanted to recruit her legal talent for his organization. Gratis, of course, legitimate pro bono work, if she had the time. But she had that little suspicion, and she did not enjoy it.

“You're a crack litigator, Suzanne. We could use any help you could give us. We're always in court. We're always suing some lumber company or power megalith, or they're suing us, or both.”

“Just when did you think of asking me? How long have you had that in mind?”

They looked at each other in a heavy silence. Between them lay the half-eaten meal and the question she did not quite ask, but which he understood.

“It's an obvious idea, Suzanne. I'm not at all sure it was my idea
originally. I imagine when I mentioned meeting you, one of my directors made the suggestion.”

She decided to ignore the messier possibilities for the moment. “I have no idea how much time and effort my mother is going to take. For the moment, she's in a good rehab center. But that's temporary. She's going to need lots of help. I don't understand what's involved, frankly, except that I suspect it's a lot more than I can imagine.”

“Well, how about you go on the board and we put off asking you for anything more until you have your mother settled?”

“How about you give me some time to see what having my mother in my home entails?” It was always easier to maintain a relationship in two busy lives when at least part of those working lives intersected. However, she felt too overextended to agree to anything. “Right now I wouldn't baby-sit a friend's goldfish for a weekend. I'm pulled out of shape.”

“It would be good for you to get involved. I know you'd find it more interesting than you can guess.”

“I just need some time without any more new demands.”

“I can wait.” He grinned at her.

Why did that make her so uncomfortable?