Blessing in Disguise (12 page)

She thought of Irving Gill’s comparing his buildings to boulders that nature would chisel with storms and decorate with lichen and vines. This one would be like that—smooth to the eye, rough to the touch, but never static.

Not a lifeless monument to a glorified dead man—a Lincoln Memorial, a Widener Library—but the kind of place that would draw people in.

The way
he
would have wanted, she thought.

She felt a catch in her throat. Would she ever see it, ever stand in its shadow, or walk through its doors? Or would it end up just as more lines on paper, another “interesting” exercise, like design reviews at Cooper Union, when her projects had routinely been torn to shreds by her professors? Except this time, even if she could get her bosses to run with it, it would be the Eugene Truscott Memorial committee doing the judging.

But what if they do choose it? Are you prepared for what might come out if this thing actually does get built?

Anxiety stirred in the hollow space just above her solar plexus—a low dangerous thrumming like a hornet’s nest under an eave.

Hey,
Nola cautioned herself.
One step at a time. First Maguire. Get it past him, then you can worry about the rest.
She hoped that Maguire wouldn’t be annoyed that she’d scrapped his sketch. If he liked her design, there might even be a bonus in it for her, or, better yet, a raise. Damn, she could sure use one!

After all, it had been
she,
not Randy Craig, who had gotten them the Petrossian commission after Maguire nearly blew it with his overwrought design for the Easthampton beach house. Petrossian—
Andres
Petrossian, whose Carnegie Hall concerts were always sold out months in advance—almost walked,
would
have walked, if she hadn’t taken a chance, jumped in with her own two cents, pointing out how they could knock out a wall and pitch the roof, add skylights, making the living and dining rooms a single cathedral-ceilinged space with a wraparound deck overlooking the ocean. Just last summer, the violinist’s weekend getaway, with its soaring central space, had been featured in
The New York Times Magazine.

Remembering that article, Nola saw in her mind another, more recent headline:
DEAD SENATOR IMPLICATED IN DECADES-OLD KILLING
.

Damn you, Grace Truscott, for raking all this up.
Nola itched suddenly to pick up the phone. But she held herself back. What would she accomplish by telling the woman off?

Stowing her things on the shelf above her table, she grabbed her coat and purse and was out the door, waving to Leroy, who was busy emptying a wastebasket into a garbage bag. The old man merely grunted.

Waiting for the crosstown bus on Fourteenth Street, which after nine ran once in a millennium, Nola found herself longing for the luxury of a seat-sprung, smelly taxi. But she let the Yellow Cabs with lit-up for-hire signs just whiz on by. Every dollar she saved was money she could squirrel away for later, for the private school she wanted for Tasha and Dani.

By the time she’d transferred to a bus going up Eighth, and had walked the long block to her building—on Twenty-second just off Ninth—Nola was so tired she could hardly see straight. A blind man finds his way home by counting the number of steps, and that was how she’d felt, gliding from one circle of lamplit sidewalk to the next as if by memory alone, hardly noticing the Federal-style row houses and Italianate brownstones wedged together on either side of the street.

Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.

The thought jumped into her head, uninvited, all those cracks she’d jumped over when she was a child. Now, even dead and buried. Mama still wasn’t safe.

Can’t think about that right now. Just get home. ...

Florene greeted her at the door of her floor-through, wearing a wide, welcoming smile. “Lord, girl, you look like something got run over crossing the street. You okay or do I call the paramedics?”

“I’m just beat, is all,” she sighed. “Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t cure.” She dropped her bag by the wildly futuristic Pucci de Rossi hall table that she had splurged on back when she was married, when Marcus was raking it in at Salomon Brothers—before he lost his job and wound up knee-deep in debt.

“Or a good man,” Florene interjected with a laugh that rumbled through her massive body. “Honey, if you ask me, you could use both. There’s nothin’ like some lovin’ between the sheets to put the spring in a woman’s step.”

Florene ought to know, Nola thought with a surge of affection. She claimed to be fifty-eight, but Nola thought sixty-three or -four was more like it. And in her time, she’d had three husbands, not to mention several boyfriends who kept her plenty busy in between baby-sitting stints. Florene—who once told her that the day she retired from her clerking job at Macy’s was the day she’d cracked out the Reese’s Pieces and said to hell with being a size ten—was living proof that bigger was better.

“If you find one, be sure and give him my number,” Nola joked. “Seems like the only men who get close to me are the ones on the street looking for a handout.” She smoothed a peeling edge of wallpaper on her way into the kitchen. “How’d everything go tonight?”

“Fine, ’cept the TV’s on the fritz again. Left me high and dry, right smack in the middle of
L.A. Law.”
Florene bent over with a whoosh of exhaled breath to retrieve a balled-up candy wrapper that had rolled under the kitchen table. “That woman called again, too, didn’t leave her name, but I recognized her voice—same one been callin’ you all week. Oh, yeah, and Tasha said she was sick, but I figured it musta been all those cookies she ate. Let me tell you, that girl can out-Peak Frean me any day of the week.”

Ignoring the fresh reminder of Grace’s persistence, Nola said, “Tasha’s sick?”

“Nothin’ to get all riled up about. Tummyache is all. If I had a nickel for each time one of my kids’d had a bellyache, right now I’d have my butt parked like Ivana Trump up at the Plaza Hotel, all kind of gorgeous men just beggin’ to make my acquaintance.”

“They don’t seem to be having any trouble finding you right where you are.” Nola couldn’t help laughing as she poured herself a glass of orange juice, looking about the tiny, cluttered kitchen and thinking that, if Florene watched less TV and put in some more time cleaning up after herself and the kids, there wouldn’t be this mess to come home to every night. But that was nothing compared with how much the girls adored her. Florene was Big Bird with an attitude.

“Do like me, and put some miles on that tired ass of yours.” Florene shot her a wicked grin as she gathered up a bulging satchel from which Nola could see, poking up over the top, a ball of unraveling yarn, a half-eaten bag of Doritos, a dog-eared Harlequin paperback, and one of Dani’s vivid drawings. “You’ll feel better and live longer. Beats Geritol every time.”

Yeah, sure, maybe I’ll get real lucky and wind up with another guy like Marcus.

“No thanks, Florene,” she said. “After what I went through the last time, I’m keeping my ass up on blocks until I find a man who knows what else I’m good for.”

“You do that, girl ... but don’t wait
too
long, or all the good ones’ll be taken. Skinny thing like you don’t have the pick of the litter the way us big gals do.”

Florene let loose one of her rumbling belly laughs, and Nola laughed with her, deeply and fully, feeling better than she had all day. All
week,
for that matter. Florene was good medicine ... even if she gave lousy advice.

She reminded herself, for the umpteenth time, how lucky she was to have Florene, not only as a babysitter, but as her landlady as well. And Florene thought
she
was the lucky one, not only that Nola’s rent money enabled her to keep up the mortgage payments and repairs on this ever so slightly rundown place she’d inherited from her first husband, but that she got to play grandma to boot. Not to mention Ann Landers.

Nola told Florene good night and hurried down the hall to the bedroom Tasha and Dani shared.

She found Dani asleep on her stomach, with her little butt making a mound under her Winnie the Pooh comforter, and her thumb propped against her half-open mouth. Nola felt tenderness well up in her.

“Mommy?” Tasha called over to her from the other bed. She sounded stuffed up, as if she had a cold ... or had been crying.

She was sitting bolt upright, not even leaning back against the wicker headboard. Her face, polished by the yellow glow of the nightlight, looked small and pinched. An old woman’s face on an eleven-year-old’s body. Only her hair, a softly waving brown, looked unruffled. Tasha had been waiting up for her all this time.

“Hey, sugarpie ... what’s happening?” Nola sat on the edge of Tasha’s bed, and without thinking put a hand to her forehead to see if she was running a fever. It felt cool as marble.

“Dani makes bougary noises when she sleeps. Just listen to her.” Tasha wrinkled her nose primly at the soft, snuffly snores coming from Dani’s side of the room.

“Is that what’s keeping you awake?” Nola scooted over to wrap an arm about Tasha’s thin shoulders, which were pinched tight as a clothespin.

“No.”

“Something at school?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Not Jamal again?”

“He
always
sucks.” Her voice dropped to a pained whisper. “My teacher doesn’t like me.”

Nola’s heart lurched. What could have happened to make Tasha think that? Something in particular ... or the same old don’t-give-a-shit attitude her teacher had been coasting by on since the beginning of the year? Mrs. Millner struck her as a real burn-out case. Probably been at it too long, though she didn’t look much older than Nola’s own thirty-seven. She remembered that stupid and probably dangerous tinfoil business—assigning a bunch of eleven-year-olds the at-home science experiment of melting tinfoil. You bet she’d raised hell. So would any other mother with her head screwed on.

“She on your case about those times tables you were having trouble with?”

Tasha shook her head, her shoulders corkscrewing violently within the crook of Nola’s arm; finally, she blurted tearfully, “Sh-she’s making me be in the puh-play!”

The play? It must have been announced in one of those mimeographed sheets the school was always sending home with the girls—PTA meetings, and field trips, and what to do about head lice. Oh, right. Something about it being Black Pride Week, and the fifth-graders putting on a play about the civil-rights movement.

“She give you one of those crummy parts where you don’t get to say anything?” Nola spoke lightly, hoping that was all it was.

Tasha broke into a fresh torrent of sobs.

“I huh-have to be the b-bad lady who yells at Rosa Parks for sitting duh-down on the b-bus!”

Nola felt something heave over inside her, slowly, like a large flat rock. Feelings tumbled through her that she’d thought she had buried with her mother ... of not fitting in, of not being black enough ... or white enough.

She felt a bolt of anger. She wanted to strangle Tasha’s teacher.

“Did she tell you why she picked you?” Nola asked gently, working to hold back her rage. She patted Tasha’s shoulders until they stopped hitching and her sobbing subsided.

“She didn’t say, but
I
know,” Tasha lashed out. “Jamal says it’s ’cause I’m a honky!”

A honky? Nola felt a bubble of hysteria rising in her, and had to clamp her teeth over her tongue to stop it from erupting. Oh, that was rich. How Mama would have appreciated that joke. Mama, who’d been turned away from three different motels once on a trip to Mobile. And Mama had been light-skinned, Nola herself nearly white enough to “pass,” if that antiquated notion still applied. Even though Marcus’s complexion had been somewhat darker than hers, both girls were on the fair side. She should hardly be shocked that Tasha and Dani stood out among even their Hispanic classmates.

“Oh, sugar.” She sighed, suddenly too weary to move, except to rest her cheek against the top of Tasha’s head, which felt soft and silky as new grass. “I’ll talk to her. Tomorrow.”

Nola felt her relax a bit, and saw Tasha bring her thumb to her mouth before the child realized what she was doing. Catching herself, she ran her thumb back and forth over her lower lip.

“You won’t say it was me who told?” she asked.

“I’ll say I heard it from one of the other mothers.”

“Then Mrs. Millner won’t be mad at me?”

She sounded, just then, like little Dani, asking for assurances where there were none to be had—as if Nola could somehow keep a skinned knee from hurting when the Band-Aid was pulled off, or make Marcus show up when he’d forgotten it was his weekend with the girls.

Nola pulled Tasha close, squeezing her tightly. She’d sent away for the applications, and had stored them in the top drawer of her desk—Grace Church, St. Luke’s, Little Red School House, Friends. Next year maybe ... oh, but it
had
to be next year. For Tasha, especially. Bright and sensitive, but too high-strung for those damned IQ tests that would have gotten her into one of the “special” public schools, like Hunter.

But private-school tuitions were so high—ten thousand a year,
double
if she were to send Dani, too (and how could she not?). Though they weren’t exactly
poor,
unless she got herself bumped up to associate or project manager, private school was not going to be an option.

“I’m going to sleep now.” Tasha yawned, and slithered from under Nola’s arm, curling up under the covers with a corner of her pillow tucked tight against her cheek, her thumb playing across her lower lip. In that instant, she and Dani could have been twins. “ ’Night, Mommy.”

“ ’Night, Tash.” Nola bent to kiss her daughter’s cool forehead. Her own face felt flushed and achy, and a pulse in her temple leaped close to the surface.

Back in the kitchen, Nola thought about eating something, but the idea of going to the trouble of fixing even a sandwich was more than she could manage. Instead, she poured herself what was left of the coffee, and helped herself to a stale-looking Danish from the Entenmann’s box Florene had left on the counter. Dinner
chez
Nola, she laughed to herself as she made her way down the hall to her bedroom, behind the stairs.