Fearless (19 page)

“Would you like breakfast? How about some cereal?”

“Manny called from work. He said you should go for a walk. How about it? Uncle Bill’ll come over. He was always your favorite. Remember, he’d carry you on his shoulders through the San Gennaro fair?”

She didn’t answer. Anyway, she didn’t remember. Her aunts had all these pretty memories that seemed to Carla had never occurred. She could recall only family quarrels and cooking and roomfuls of men slouched in easy chairs with their bellies distended, suppressing belches.

She couldn’t fight them anymore. All her life she had fought. Fought to dress the way she liked, fought to be friends with the kids she liked, fought to go out on dates, fought to move out of her mother’s house, fought to get married to a half-breed. Yes, in the beginning her relatives hadn’t wanted her to be in love with Manny, a bastard and almost a nigger, as one of the uncles that Carla supposedly doted on had said. Now Manny was simmering in their pot, mixed in with their spicy glop.

She said nothing. Her mouth was heavy. Even to sigh would require that she part her lips, and they were thick and stuck together.

“She’s not talking to us,” her mother commented to Aunt Mary by lunchtime. “Let’s put some food in front of her. She’ll eat it.”

Carla’s great-grandmother had killed herself by staying in bed and refusing to eat. Carla didn’t remember the passive suicide herself, except for a dim and fading snapshot of a memory: a dark room, dusty light streaming through wide blinds, and a tiny ancient woman lying still in a big bed. Carla knew the story as family legend. Mama Sofia had decided to die when she broke her hip. She refused to get up and use her walker. She refused to eat anything. She only sipped water from time to time. She wasted away for three weeks, caught pneumonia and died.

The story used to terrify Carla. Now she thought it was beautiful and comforting.

She lay in bed and said nothing. They put food in front of her and she watched it gel. She turned off the television and the air conditioner and returned to bed. She felt sweat grow out of her skin and drip down into the sheets. She hoped the heat would make germs breed faster in her lungs.

She looked at the mahogany dresser inherited from her grandmother, dark and sulking in the corner. Her eyes skied down the curling sweep of her green drapes, noticing dirt and stains she hadn’t before but that now seemed glaring. These were going to be the last things she would see in life. The television, the screen gray and hostile, stood at the foot of the bed like an overheated, sleepy dog. There was a scratch on its wood paneling, a gash caused by the yuppie who had thrown it out believing the set was broken. In fact, it required only an eighty-nine-cent fuse that Manny promptly bought and installed. He gloated about the ignorance of the rich college graduate. For months Manny dragged friends home to show them the set and tell the story. “He throws it into the garbage room. I tell him, ‘Don’t you want to have a repairman look at it? Maybe it can be fixed?’ He says, ‘No, I know about these things. Once they’re broken, costs as much to fix them as it does to buy a new one. And they’re never right again.’ ” Manny would then turn it on and gesture, laughing with his dark mouth, at the television’s perfect image.

Beyond the television, on the wall, there was a painting she had bought as a young unmarried working girl during a walk through the Washington Square Art Show years ago, before she had met Manny. A funny old man had a stall on the corner of Tenth and University Place jammed with pictures he had made of the neighborhood. The one Carla bought was a painting of the outside of the Grand Tichino restaurant on a lively summer evening, the street busy with tourists going by. What she liked about it was the old lady leaning on the windowsill in the tenement above the restaurant. The old woman didn’t look anything like her grandmother but it reminded Carla of her anyway. Since her grandma had died only a few months before, she bought the painting, although it cost fifty dollars, a huge sum to her then. She hadn’t looked closely at the painting for years. Since the crash, with the television always on, she had given it no more than a glance. She was interested in it now because of the association with her grandmother. Her mind wanted to go back to people who had died, people she was used to forgetting.

In the dark hot room she studied the painting. It was the only thing in the apartment that she had really bought and picked out all by herself. Everything else was handed down or salvaged by Manny.

She decided she didn’t like it anymore. The colors looked too bright; and the old woman was leaning out too far forward from the window. She seemed eager to see what was happening below. Carla’s grandma used to lean on the window ledge as if she never planned to move from that spot. She wasn’t curious about what was below, although she looked down. She had stopped there to rest, to be away from the complaints and duties inside, to be—Carla understood suddenly—alone. The ledge was as alone as she could be.

She cried for her grandmother. Only a few tears. No sobs. Slow-moving sad drops of regret. She had ignored that old woman. She had waved her grandmother away morning and night on her way out of the apartment, annoyed by the old lady’s nagging warnings about her revealing clothes, the boys she was seeing, drugs, sex, whatever was the latest horror that television told the old lady to guard against.

Carla fell asleep.

Her baby returned to her arms. Hot, sweating, feeding from her.

Manny’s stern voice yanked her out of her shallow grave of dreams: “Carla! Is the air conditioner broken?”

She could have been swimming: her T-shirt was stuck to her belly; a translucent oval revealed her deep navel. She remembered the sight of Bubble’s thick trunk bursting out of his stomach, wiring him to her insides.

“You want an innie or an outie?” the doctor had asked.

“It’s working!” Manny complained, standing by the air conditioner. He switched it on. The overhead light dimmed for a moment.

“Leave me alone,” she said. Her mouth was dry and her lips thick, numbed. The words sounded like a trumpet player clearing his mouthpiece.

“Somebody’s here.” Manny opened the glowering dresser. He tossed out a yellow-and-black-striped polo shirt. “You’d better change.”

“I don’t want to see anybody,” she tooted. She was on her back. Twisting to get on her side, away from Manny, her head throbbed. The first wave of cooled air skimmed over her soaked shirt and its temperature clung, a freezing sheet tossed onto her skin.

Manny’s feet thumped, walking around to her side of the bed. His round face and charred eyes popped in front of her. “The lawyer’s here. I had a lot of trouble convincing him to come to see you. I know you ain’t up to leaving the apartment. I been patient, but it’s over a month now and we have to do something. They call me every day and I have to make a decision. You got to help me, understand?” Manny lifted her, one hand on her elbow, the other on her shoulder. He had no trouble doing it. She couldn’t lift herself; Manny got her up with no effort at all. She was a helpless child.

“Let me die,” she said into her husband’s mouth as he pulled at her drenched T-shirt. She no longer tooted: she growled.

“Don’t be crazy. You’re in mourning. You’re not dying.”

What did he say before? It’s been a month? You’ve been feeling sorry for yourself for a month?

He pulled the T-shirt off her. Sweat collected in the hollows, dripping down her breastbone, her armpits, the back of her neck. Manny took his callused hand and smoothed the perspiration all over her exposed ribs and breasts, small and empty of milk. He hummed with appreciation and looked at her nipples.

She was appalled:
He wants to have sex with the lawyer waiting in the hall?

“You look good to me,” he mumbled. “I miss you,” he said and kissed between her breasts with a loud smacking noise. He spread the sweat on her hollow stomach. A pool filled her big belly button. “This is no good. You’d better take a shower. I’ll get your mother to help you.”

He left her halfway up out of bed. She could still feel his sandy palms sweeping across her chest and belly, squashing and squeezing her. She was warm and small while he handled her: a baby being bathed.

“Come back, Manny,” she whimpered and sagged back onto the bed. The air conditioner vibrated and struggled.

“You’re a mess,” her mother said casually and lovingly, the way mothers say it, the way Carla used to say it to a food-smeared Bubble or a dirt-encrusted Bubble or a red-eyed, temper-tantrum Bubble. “You don’t want to take a shower. We’ll go in the bathroom and sponge off.”

Carla allowed her mother to wipe her with the washcloth, although she was capable.

“You’re too skinny,” her mother commented, running the cool towel over her ribs.

“I’m always too skinny for you,” Carla said.

“That’s right. Something sick about those models. It’s not real men who want that. They’re selling you a bill of goods.”

“Nobody’s selling me anything,” Carla said sadly.

Her mother was done. Carla sat on the toilet, staring at the blackening edges of her cast. Her mother brought in a clean white long-sleeved blouse—too formal and too hot to wear with her shorts. Carla didn’t argue about it although she wanted the yellow and black polo shirt that Manny had picked out. If it pleased her husband then she should wear it. What did she have left to do but to please him? But she had no energy to fight her mother’s choice.

When the blouse was on and she was ready to go out to meet the lawyer, her mother said, “If you really want me to go back to California before you’re back on your feet, able to do for yourself, I’ll go. I didn’t want to while you were yelling because you yell things you don’t mean and then the next day you’re sorry but you’re too proud to take them back. You’re my baby,” and her mother was crying suddenly. Although she had sounded annoyed right up until she said “baby,” she was quickly a wreck. Tears rolled down her cheeks, her wide mouth trembled, and her old hands came together in a prayerful gesture. “I’m trying to help you,” she said.

“Okay, Mama,” Carla said and they hugged awkwardly, Carla still on the toilet, her mother arching past the rigid leg to embrace her. “I love you,” Carla said.
You mean, if you still could love anybody
. Later, as they hobbled together out of the bathroom, she added, “Stay until the cast is off.”

“Now I’m a mess,” her mother said, brushing away a tear. She smeared mascara across her cheek toward her temple.

“Fix yourself up. I can make it.” Carla took her crutches and faced the hallway. She made sure not to look at the jeweled doorknob to Bubble’s room. From the sound of it Manny had taken the lawyer into the living room. The hall smelled dusty and was only half-cooled. She listened to their conversation as she maneuvered in the narrow passage.

The lawyer was a fast talker: “—these new seats, they’re called sixteen-Gs, were ordered on all new planes by the FAA. They’ve been proven to be much safer in the kind of crash your wife was in.”

“No kidding.” Manny was grim.

“They don’t break loose. Passengers aren’t turned into human missiles—”

“And they knew about them?”

“Knew about them? They’re using them. All new planes have them. About fifteen percent of the old planes have had them installed. The FAA is going—”

Carla had reached the living room entryway. It had no doors and she faced the two windows at the far end. The sun was bright, irradiating the red drapes Manny had been given by the son of one of the old women in his building when she died. The glow rouged Manny’s and the lawyer’s faces as they turned toward her.

The lawyer was a little man, very nervous, or at least jumpy. When he moved at Carla, he seemed to leap out of his body, his motion was so sudden and quick. “Hi, I’m Steven Brillstein,” he said. His small hand was flat; he kept the fingers together and the thumb close. He noticed she was occupied by the crutches and removed his offered hand abruptly. “Stupid of me. Last thing you need now is to shake hands. Here,” he stepped aside and offered her the couch. “Sit.”

“They didn’t have these seats in the jet my wife was in?” Manny asked, preoccupied. He made no move to help Carla as she tried to get herself around the glass coffee table onto the couch. The living room looked weird. She hadn’t ventured there since coming home. She checked all the furniture, trying to understand what was odd about it.

No bottle lying on its side.

No abandoned toys.

No sleeping baby nestled in the yellow-and-white-print couch. She dropped onto it heavily. One crutch kicked up and banged the coffee table. It vibrated. The lawyer put a soothing hand on the glass and said, “No harm done.”

Across from her, on the credenza, in a silver frame, was the portrait of Bubble taken by the same man who had photographed her wedding. It was one of a series of photos that Manny had mailed off to modeling agencies. Carla hadn’t objected to the cost and the fuss because she agreed with Manny: Bubble was such a beautiful boy, probably companies would want him to sell their products.

“Did you hear that?” Manny demanded of her. “They had seats that would have made a difference. Do you believe that? They can’t get away with this. It’s wrong. You know?” Manny was serious. He paced in front of the glowing red drapes. “I don’t care about the money. You understand?” Manny was talking to the lawyer. He had a grim expression on his face. His eyes were intense. Carla assumed Manny was saying that he didn’t care about money to improve his chances of getting the lawyer to ask for a lot. She knew that he cared about the money, that he had been poor his entire life, that he blamed everything on his lack of money, probably even the crash. It was ridiculous hearing him say he didn’t care. Manny persisted in his theme: “If they aren’t made to pay for this, then they won’t do anything about fixing it so other babies won’t die.”

“That’s the way the world is.” The lawyer cocked his head at Carla and twisted his small lips back and forth. “Corporations don’t volunteer to do the right thing. They have to be persuaded by the economics. Look at what the car companies tried to do to Ralph Nader.”