Fashionably Late (68 page)

Karen paused. She shook her head. “I can’t understand it,” she said.

“I’d never deny my child. How could you do it? Why would you do it?”

“Oh, don’t get so high and mighty with me,” Belle hissed. “You would do what you had to do. Things were different then. What do you know about it? Miss Career Woman. Miss Big Success. We sent you to school. We helped you. We denied you nothing.

“Well, it wasn’t so easy for everyone else. Not like for you. I grew up in a dump. My mother was a piece worker. We moved at the end of every month when the rent came due. I wore rags to school. Rags. I never onceţnot onceţhad a decent pair of shoes that fit me. I was smart, good in school, but what good did that do? I was smart enough to see just how trapped I was. There were no jobs for women. Was I going to go into the factory like my mother? I managed to graduate high school and I managed to get into night school for college and I studied to be a teacher.

Nobody helped me. Nobody gave me anything. I had to choose between textbooks or dinner. You think my mother was so great? She just wanted me to take a job sewing and bring home a paycheck. You think I wanted to be a teacher? You think I wanted to deal with other women’s children all day long? But what else was there? Don’t think the world back then was a Joan Crawford movie. I never met any woman who had a job more important than secretary. So I went to night school and I worked days in a department store. Men’s haberdashery. And I met a man in each place. At night school I met Arnold, who was reliable but wasn’t romantic and wasn’t rich and wasn’t handsome. And at the day job, I met your father. He came from a good family. He came in and spent more money on ties in fifteen minutes than I earned in a week.

He asked me out to dinner. So I went. He showed me a world I’d never seen before. We ate in restaurants with linen tablecloths. He drank wine. Not just at seders, but every night. And he gave me a ring. I thought we were engaged. I slept with him. There was no birth control then. None that nice girls knew about. We counted on the men. Well, I shouldn’t have counted on this one. And when I told him I was pregnant, he dropped me. I don’t think he ever meant to marry me.”

Belle laughed, but the laugh was brittle. “He took me sailing once, on Lake Michigan. He knew how to do all those rich boy things. You know, tennis and sailing. When he left me, I thought of taking a boat and drowning myself in the lake. I couldn’t do it and I couldn’t tell anyone.”

Belle’s eyes blazed. “What do you think? You think there were abortions on every street corner like there are today? You think there was counseling for girls in trouble? You think the university would let an unwed mother finish school? You think a school system would hire an unwed mother?” Belle laughed again. “You don’t know what it was like, and women my age don’t want to remember. Believe me, we don’t want to remember. My own mother threw me out. So I moved into a boarding house.

It was the lowest of the low, not for a Jewish girl, and I hid the pregnancy and worked as long as I could, and then had you and I planned to put you up for adoption. But once I saw you, once I held you, I couldn’t do it. You think I’m made of stone? I kept you with me until my money ran out, but then I had to put you in foster care. What choice did I have? There was no day care back then and my mother wouldn’t speak to me, and anyway she had her own kids and had to work.

But I never forgave her for it. I never spoke to her or any of them again.

“So what could I do with you? And what life would I have with you? I had to give you to the state. Can you imagine? And I went back to work and I finished school and I got a job. And then, I was surrounded by women. Women and children. There was no way I was going to meet a man, not anyone decent. Not anyone who could make a living. So I looked up Arnold, and I made sure that we just accidentally bumped into each other, and we started dating again, and this time I couldn’t wait until he proposed.”

“So he didn’t know? He didn’t know about me?”

“He didn’t know about me. He thought I was a nice girl, and I let him think that. He was willing to give me anything I wanted, and I wanted to move away, get away from Chicago, and to quit my job. I wanted a house and I wanted nice clothes and I wanted to get you back. When I told him I couldn’t conceive, he didn’t ask any questions. When I told him we should adopt, he agreed. And when I told him I’d seen an older baby that I just had to have, he was willing. I don’t know what he knew or what he suspected. He never asked me a question, so I never had to lie. And I didn’t lie to you either.”

Belle looked at Karen, her lips thin, her mouth tight. “So don’t play high and mighty with me, because you don’t know what it was like. You don’t know what you would have done. I did the best I could.”

Karen stood there, silent. Belle moved from the center of the room to the side of the bed and sat down as if she was exhausted. Karen shook her head. As always, Belle had managed to justify herself, but it didn’t mean that she was right. Maybe she had done the best she could do, but it wasn’t good enough.

“You shouldn’t have lied,” Karen said. “It was still a lie, and it made our lives into a lie. Don’t you see how it put a wall between you and daddy? Don’t you see what it did to me? And look what it did to you!

You’ve always been distant. I can’t remember that you ever hugged me or cuddled me. Not ever.”

“That was you. You weren’t affectionate. I felt as if you always knew.

That when I got you back from the state, that you looked at me with eyes that knew. You blamed me. You didn’t want my hugs.”

“You’re talking crazy!” Karen cried. “I was four years old. I was taken from the only home I remembered. I wasn’t blarning you. I was probably scared. I was traumatized.” She put her hands to her head.

She felt as if it might explode. For a crazy moment she imagined Belle with her trusty Dustbuster, vacuuming brains up off the carpet.

“Well, easy for you to talk. You don’t have a child. If you did, I’d ike to see if you’d do any better. Lisa certainly hasn’t. One of hers is always puking and the other one is going to wind up in prison. You got Stephie on drugs, and Tiff was so jealous that she started stealing.

Your father says the haul she was caught with was over a thousand dollars worth of clothes. That’s grand larceny.”

“What? What are you talking about? What has Tiff done?”

“See? Do you know what goes on in your family? No. Too busy with work.

Selfish! You’ve always been selfish. You think you would have been a good mother! Ha! You’d be as bad as Lisa.”

“Maybe Lisa hasn’t done such a good job because she never saw anyone be a good mother.”

Belle glared at her. “Right. Blame it all on me. I’m the bad one.

Tiff is my fault. Lisa is my fault. Your father is my fault.

Stephanie is my fault. Everything is my fault.”

Karen knew Belle was overdramatizing to make her look ridiculous, but this time it wouldn’t work. “It is all your fault,” she said.

“Because you lied to us all. And you never showed that you loved us.”

“What? So you two never did anything of your own free will? It’s my fault your sister slept with your husband? I made that happen?”

Karen felt the body blow, but for once she saw everything, each manipulation, each knife thrust, each distracting wave of the red cape, for what it was. Belle would sacrifice anyone’s feelings for her own.

It was the only way she knew to survive. “Yes,” Karen whispered. “You did make that happen. If you hadn’t always been forcing us to compete, if you hadn’t always praised me to her and her to me but never praised us to our faces, then maybe she wouldn’t have been so consumed by jealousy.

She slept with Jeffrey to hurt me and it was because she’s never felt like she could win.”

“And what’s Jeffrey’s excuse, Dr. Freud?”

Karen stood still, absorbing the pain. She could say, “Ask my father why a man cheats on his wife,” but she had the grace not to. Instead, she just shook her head. “You shouldn’t have said that,” she told her mother. “My marriage is none of your business. I just wanted to know if you had an apology in you.” She paused. “I want you to understand that what you did has ruined a part of me that won’t be fixed. I’ll go on, but I won’t go on with you.”

She turned and started to walk out of the room. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Belle asked. Karen didn’t answer. She kept on walking.

“You’re turning your back on your family and you’ve lost your husband.

You could lose more. We’ll see how you like being alone. It’s just a good thing that you never had any children,” Belle spat at her.

“Because however bad a mother you think I was, I know you’d be worse.”

Karen kept walking down the hallway. She passed the open door of her old bedroom and the den, where Arnold still lay sleeping, the television blaring a rerun of “In the Heat of the Night.” She continued through the living room, out the front door, and to the corner. Outside, in the darkness, she realized that she had nowhere to go and no way to get there. She kept walking from streetlight to streetlight until, at last, she reached Long Beach Road and the gas station at the corner. She got into the phone booth, but couldn’t find any change. So she lifted the receiver and dialed a collect call. By the time Carl answered and accepted the charges, the mouthpiece was shaking against her face and her teeth were chattering despite the warm night. He could barely understand her when she tried to talk to him.

“Just tell me where you are, Karen,” he said. “I’ll come and get you.”

“I’m in hell, Carl,” she told him.

39

WHAT”S IN A NAME Carl had tucked Karen into his own bed, and with the help of a blue Valium and half a glass of red wine that Carl made her drink, Karen slept for nine and a half hours. She woke up and stared at the unfamiliar ceiling over her. For at least a minute she couldn’t remember where she was. A lot of her recent past seemed to have disappeared as well. Karen had to back track from Paris to New York to the Mananas to SoHo to Chicago to Rockville Centre and finally to here, Brooklyn Heights. She groaned, then, and turned over to her side, pulling the blanket up and blocking out the sunshine that shone in through the bay window and onto the ceiling. Like an accident victim, she lay as still as she could, trying to figure out where it hurt and what was irreparably datnaged.

Carl tip-toed in. “Ah, Sleeping Beauty has awakened.”

For some reason that made Karen think of Tony de Freise and the night of the Oakley Awards. She and Jeffrey had thought Tony was the Bad Fairy but it was Jeffrey who was an evil spirit, not a prince. Karen moaned.

“You don’t have to get up now,” Carl told her. “It’s still very early.”

Awkwardly, he took her hand. She had told him everything, and his round face drooped with sympathyţor at least it drooped as much as his round face could. “I’m so sorry, Karen,” he said. “Nothing about Belle surprises me, but I’m shocked by Jeffrey’s behavior.” He shook his head.

“You just can’t trust heterosexual men,” he told her. “But you’ll recover. Think of Rose Kennedy and how she had to deal with Gloria Swanson. It was an inspiration.”

Karen closed her eyes.

Carl cleared his throat. “Try and think of betrayals as just a part of life.”

“Yeah. So are genital warts. That doesn’t mean I have to like them when they happen to me. Oh, Carl, what should I do?”

“I hate to advocate catatonia to anyone, but it’s always worked for me.”

“I think I will try a little more sleep,” Karen said. Carl tip-toed out of the room.

She couldn’t bear to get up yet. Even with Carl’s help she wasn’t ready to face this day, or any of the others that would follow it. She lay there under the blankets and wept with selfpity. And why not, she asked herself? Who else would feel sorry for her? She wiped her eyes on the corner of Carl’s fat duvet and pulled it over her head. After a little while she drifted off into a light sleep.

She was on the white duvet, but the ceiling had turned black around her. The duvet was rolling, and she realized she was on a sea. A white sea. She was in some kind of basket or boat and rolling with the waves.

As far as she could see around her, there was nothing but the darkness of the sky and the shining, milky white sea. She began to weep again with loneliness, and her tears fell into the basket. She realized that if she kept crying she would sink, go down and down endlessly into the dark, cold water, but she couldn’t stop crying. And then she heard someone else’s weeping. It was high-pitched and came from the pool at the bottom of the little boat. She bent over and plunged her hands into the warm bath and pulled out a baby. It looked at her with slanted black eyes. It knew her, and she knew it. Karen held it close to her breast and both of them stopped weeping.

When Karen woke, she was still cradling the pillow to her side.

Karen was back at home packing when she heard the noise in the living room. Ernest had left, so Karen stiffened with fear. But then Jeffrey called out. Funny that the fear lessened when she heard his voice. I guess that means he’s not as bad as a burglar or a rapist, she thought, and turned to the doorway and walked down the hall to the living room.

He was sitting in one of the chairs at the refectory table, a pile of papers stacked neatly in front of him. The papers, the chair upholstery, and his face were about the same shade of white. “What is it?” she said, because she had nothing else to say to him. “What do you want?”

“The company,” he said. He didn’t move, and though he looked so pale, he sounded firm.

“Fat chance,” she told him. She didn’t feel safe turning her back on him, but she wheeled around and started back toward the bedroom.

“This isn’t a choice you’re being offered,” Jeffrey told her. “It’s fait accompli.”

She turned. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

“You won’t listen to reason,” he said. “So this is the only way. I met with some staff, some family. We’ve all agreed. With my share and theirs combined, we out vote you. We’re selling to NormCo without you.”

She was drained of all words for a minute, but then the ridiculousness, the nerve of it, became so obvious that she felt a surge of energy.