Bank Robbers (2 page)

The pain of being so close to her own mortality, that was what frightened her about Nathan's death.

No matter what she told people about facing death, the fact was that deep down she felt she was going to be the exception to the rule and live forever. And watching him die had been like being hit in the face with cold water.

Here she was, alone, with nothing! Nothing! Where the hell had all the years gone? Where was her life?

It was especially bad when she was alone in the hospital with all those foreigners sticking things into her, taking things out of her, rolling her here and rolling her there. She'd count every day waiting for the end.

And now she was on her steady diet of pills, and she spent her days waiting for the next round of broken bones.

It didn't matter anyway. No one was concerned with Dottie O'Malley Weist.

She looked back up at the clock.

Quarter to three. She just wanted to get this over with.

She had begun to feel as if she didn't exist anymore. She had lived alone for four years now.

After Nathan died she'd made an effort to get out, get involved with something. She'd signed up for a senior citizen's group which met every Thursday night in the basement of St. Anthony's Church.

Jesus! Had that been depressing!

A roomful of ancient women who spent each evening recounting the deaths of their husbands in, it seemed to Dottie, unnecessarily graphic detail. And when they had exhausted that topic, they would move on to the disgusting operations and ghastly deaths of friends and family.

Dottie soon stopped going to these meetings.

Slowly, a kind of eerie anonymity began to creep over her life. It was almost like being in solitary confinement, even though she lived in a city of eight million people.

For instance, she could recall one whole month going by without actually being addressed by another human being. Dottie felt her eyes begin to get itchy. She had to change the subject in her head …

And not to be touched by another human being—that she could count in years. Just to have someone hold her hand, or give her a pat on the shoulder, even … she began to hunger for that, and so for a while she would deliberately walk slowly and let busy people brush against her …

She finished making up the couch, and glanced up at the clock. Three on the nose. She moved over to the phone and dialed Fred and Teresa's number.

The television was still blaring as usual behind her. She'd gotten into the habit of turning on the set whenever she entered the apartment. She couldn't stand the silence of the place. She was thinking she should have turned it off before she dialed the number, but it was too late now, the line was ringing. She waited for the phone to pick up, and she sat, tapping a pencil.

“Hello?” A voice came on after the ninth ring.

“Is this Teresa Newhouse?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Dottie Weist, Teresa,” she said as calmly as she could.

“Dottie? Weist?” the voice croaked back to her.

“I'm Nathan's wife? I saw you last at Agnes's wake, er, several years ago. Teresa, do you know who this is?”

There was a silence.

“Yeah. What you think, I'm stupid? What you want?” she demanded.

That was Teresa. Rude, with an edge in her voice that could cut through walls.

“I want to speak to Fred.”

“He's dead.”

Dottie exhaled. “When?”

“Five weeks ago.”

“I'm sorry, Teresa. Is there anything I can do?” Dottie's voice softened.

She detected just the tiniest sob, and then there was a long silence; it sounded as if Teresa had put the phone down. Dottie waited patiently for Teresa to pull herself together.

“Dottie? You there?”

“I'm here.”

“I gotta go.”

“Sure thing. Look, you need some company maybe?” she asked. There was a silence.

“I ain't got nothin' in the house,” the gruff voice came back.

“Well, I'd just like to pay my respects.”

There was another silence, and she waited for Teresa to make some sort of decision.

“When you wanna come over?”

“I could come over now, this afternoon.”

“All right. I'll be here,” she said, as if it was a major concession for her to have to socialize with Dottie.

“Fine. I'll see you around four.”

She waited and finally heard the click.

She prayed Teresa would be able to give her the number of a fence.

*   *   *

T
ERESA
D
E
N
UNZIO
N
EWHOUSE
sat at the kitchen table and stared at the phone.

What the hell did
she
want to come up bothering her for? She took a deep drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke hard, so it shot out in a stream at an angle.

Miss High-and-Mighty.

And all the men, they would swoon over her like she was some kind of delicate flower or goddamn queen.

Well, Dottie O'Malley Weist was no queen.

Oh yeah, she knew her. She always had these airs, as if she were better than the world, but Teresa knew it was all an act. For instance, she wouldn't read the
Star
or the
National Enquirer,
like the rest of the world. Oh, no. She read “literature.”

All those books she was always reading. The real thick kind, with the plastic library covers on 'em. She'd bury her nose in them and not talk to anyone else.

But Teresa knew what the truth was about those.

She wasn't really readin 'em.

She was just pretending. No one really reads those things. Says so right in all the newspapers all the time. Not with a kid and a husband to look after. It was just that she did it so
good.
Her eyes would actually move across the page as if she knew what all them words were, but Teresa had proof Dottie wasn't really reading.

Her lips didn't move.

And no one reads without moving the lips, this was a fact.

Dottie fooled everybody, except for her, Teresa.

She was a goddamned chorus girl, like the rest of 'em. Out there showing off her legs.

And Nathan, when he first brought her around … she'd gotten Teresa's best friend Margie kicked off the line, and Margie'd been with Nathan plenty. Poor little victim Margie hadn't even seen her coming.

And, wham, suddenly Dottie and Nathan are married?

No. Teresa shook her head.

And then she'd made Nathan miserable. “Get rid of her, Nat,” Fred had always told him. “What you do for a living ain't good enough for her? Get rid of her. Have Teres' set you up with someone
nice.
”

But Nathan, who was basically an okay guy, stuck it out with her. Jeez, Nathan Weist not good enough? If Teresa hadn't already been married to Fred, she'd have gone for Nathan herself. She'd have been as proud of him as if he'd been president.

Not that she hadn't loved Fred. Oh no, she had, and she'd have never given him up for nobody. Her eyes began to dribble tears again the way they had for five solid weeks, and Teresa wiped them with the back of her hand and then squashed out her cigarette in the tray.

Oh, God, Fred, she thought and then shook her head. She lit another cigarette to calm herself down. She sniffed and then tried to think of the things that had annoyed her about Fred. It made her feel better. If she thought about all the goodness in the man she'd go crazy from grief, so she'd surrounded herself with all the things he'd done that drove her nuts.

Teresa took a sip on her coffee and grimaced. It was cold.

Fred had been good to her, yes, but he had a lazy streak in him Nathan never had. Nathan would be at that club, cookin' in the back room with Ben Zimmerman at all hours of the day and night. But Fred, well, every day on the dot of two-thirty, she'd have to throw him out of the house. Two-thirty was her cutoff, because the kids would be in from parochial school and they had agreed that he should always be gone when they got in.

She'd brought her kids up right; it wasn't good for children to see their father lying around the house like a bum all day, that was the way Teresa had always felt.

And periodically she'd have to put Fred straight and she'd say, “I don't care what it takes, we got a three-hundred-dollar grocery bill. You bring it home tonight so I don't gotta go to Murphy's on a Hun'-two, where the produce looks like crap.”

And out Fred would go, maybe do a little hustlin' or hijackin' or crack a safe, but he'd be back into the house at six the next the morning with the money.

Now there was a right guy, just like Nathan.

But did Dottie ever appreciate him? Naw.

This was not a right woman.

And now she was coming all the way up here to gloat over her widowhood.

That was just low.

Teresa felt her eyes fill again with tears.

*   *   *

T
ERESA
still lived on 106th Street. Although it had been over twenty years since Dottie'd been to Teresa's, for some reason she remembered exactly which train to take.

The neighborhood that met Dottie's eyes when she left the station was frightening. Groups of dangerous-looking teenagers hung out along First Avenue, blasting music and screaming at one another with foul mouths. And the filth of the avenue, and the burned-out buildings—it looked like a war zone. Dottie couldn't think of anyone Teresa's age having to make her way through this destruction, and for a second Dottie felt that maybe she didn't have it that bad on Sullivan Street.

She kept glancing over her shoulder as she stood in the small hallway waiting for Teresa to let her inside. The buzzer rang and Dottie quickly opened the inside door and shut it, making sure it was locked behind her.

Dottie slowly climbed up the first flight of stairs in the tenement building. She stopped and took in a deep breath, resting on the second-floor landing.

She still couldn't believe she was fifty-eight. Deep down, Dottie was still twenty-four, that was the way she felt. When she looked in the mirror, it was like looking at herself with a mask on.

It amazed her that climbing stairs had begun to tire her quickly. Not only stairs, any physical activity at all. Dottie stared up at the next set of white stone stairs. Even the exercises they'd given her to do for her bones didn't help with some things, although she felt a lot better and was a lot more agile now than when she'd first begun them.

Dottie took another deep breath and started walking again.

Lord, not only was the outside terrible, she thought, but who could walk up all these flights each day? Especially someone of Teresa's weight. It must take her hours, she thought, as she continued up the steep steps.

“Dottie?” she heard Teresa's screechy voice echo down to her. “Dottie, you get in okay?”

“Yeah.” Dottie exhaled as loudly as she could.

“It's the top floor,” Teresa called down to her.

Dottie leaned on the banister breathing hard.

“What floor,” she panted, “is that?”

“Sixth.”

“Aw, God Almighty,” Dottie muttered under what little breath she could catch.

By the time she reached the top floor, her throat was dry and she was gasping. Her hip was aching slightly. She slammed against the door and pushed it open with the entire weight of her body.

“What'd you do? Run up here?” Teresa asked, apparently stunned to see her so soon.

Dottie shook her head, just trying to get some breath to stay in her lungs. She shook her head, tried to speak, and staggered over to a chair and looked at Teresa, motioning for some water.

Teresa turned to the sink, took a glass out of the drainer and filled it with water. She handed it to Dottie.

She drank slowly, finally getting her breathing back to normal.

“How do you do that each day?”

“I don't. My daughter and her husband bring me up groceries twice a week. Way the neighborhood is now, I don't go out unless I gotta,” she said. “You want some coffee or something?”

“Sure.” Dottie said, and watched Teresa turn around. She heard herself gasp, as she really looked at the woman for the first time.

Teresa had lost an entire person of weight.

They were the same height, and now Teresa seemed to be almost exactly Dottie's size. Teresa turned back, looking at her suspiciously.

“Teresa, you're skinny.”

“Yeah. I lost a lotta weight this past year, what with Fred being so sick and everything.”

“Well, here we are, both skinny again. Like when we first met.”

“Yeah,” Teresa muttered softly and they both silently thought to themselves, ‘and nobody's here to see it.'

Teresa moved over to the stove and lit a fire under a dented old teapot. She took out a small jar, and two cups.

“All I got in the house is instant,” she said.

“That's fine.”

“So, Roberta called from California and said you was in the hospital. You better now?”

“As well as I can expect.”

“What do you have again?”

“Osteoporosis.” Dottie watched Teresa shrug, unknowing. “It's a debilitating bone disease. Your bones get so weak they break easily.”

She watched Teresa shudder.

“But you're okay now,” she said, her back to her.

“No. It's wiped me out financially, and Medicaid won't pay for this new procedure that would slow it down.”

Teresa let out a bitter cackle.

“Those bastards, they don't pay for nothin'. Jeez, I had to go in there beggin' for chemo for my Fred.”

“Yes, and I'm tired of it. And I'm going to do something about it. Do you know they actually escorted me out of their offices, like I was some kind of common criminal? Well, from now on, the government is going to pay for everything.”

“Yeah?” Teresa chortled.

“I have a plan, and I need your help.”