FORTY'SEVEN
Ella walked up to the fence surrounding the swimming pool and pressed her face against it. "There," she said, giving the single word all of the sadness and disappointment she felt. "There she is." Lewis stepped next to her, and Mrs. Lefkowitz zipped up in her new scooter. Together, the three of them stood at the fence, looking through the diamond-shaped holes. Looking at Maggie. Her granddaughter lay on a chaise lounge beside the deep end, resplendent in a brand-new pink bikini, with a silver chain, thin as a filament of hair, clinging to her belly. Her skin shone with suntan lotion. Her hair was arranged in a soft pile of loose curls on top of her head, and her eyes were hidden behind small round sunglasses. And around her were four people—an old woman in a faded pink rubber bathing cap, and three old men in shorts. As Ella watched, one of the old men leaned forward, toward Maggie, as if he was asking her a question. Her granddaughter propped herself up on one elbow, looking thoughtful. When her lips moved, her audience burst into laughter. "Oh," said Lewis. "It looks like she's made some new friends." Ella felt her heart give a painful twist, as Maggie continued to amuse her new acquaintances, looking more relaxed and at ease than Ella had ever seen her, as the Water Babies aerobics class
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splashed energetically to a wavery tape recording of "Runaround Sue." Every day for the past week—every day since Ella had tried to tell Maggie about her mother—this had been her granddaughter's routine. Maggie would come home from work, dash into the back bedroom, swap her Bagel Bay uniform for her bathing suit and shorts, and come here. "I'm going swimming," she'd say. Ella was never invited. And Ella could see where this was going. Maggie would move out—into an apartment of her own, or maybe in with one of her new friends, some pleasant old woman who'd offer all of the benefits of being a grandmother with none of the messy complications or painful history. Oh, she thought, it wasn't fair! She'd waited for so long, she'd hoped for so much, and now, to see Maggie slipping away from her like this! "What should I do?" she whispered. Mrs. Lefkowitz backed up her scooter and drove it, full speed ahead, toward the entrance to the pool. "Wait!" Ella cried. "Where are you going?" Mrs. Lefkowitz didn't turn, didn't stop, and didn't answer. Ella shot a helpless glance at Lewis. "I'll go ..." he began. "We better ..." she said. Ella's pulse beat in her throat as she hurried after Mrs. Lefkowitz, who was speeding through the gates, straight toward Maggie, and didn't show any signs of slowing down. "Hey!" one of the old guys called as Mrs. Lefkowitz zipped past him, bumping into the table on which he'd spread a hand of cards. She ignored him and pulled her scooter up to Maggie's lounge chair. Maggie lowered her sunglasses and stared. Breathing hard, Ella and Lewis hurried after Mrs. Lefkowitz, and for one bizarre moment Ella was reminded of a dozen spaghetti westerns and the scene each one of them had, where the good guys made their stand against the enemy on a conveniently deserted street or in the middle -of an empty corral. All the scene needed, she thought, was for some tumbleweed to blow past Mrs. Lefkowitz's scooter. Even the
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Water Babies had ceased their splashing and stood quietly in the shallow end, water dripping from their tanned, wrinkled arms, watching to see what would happen next. Maggie stared at Mrs. Lefkowitz, and Maggie's new friends eye balled Ella and Lewis, and Ella made a careful study of the cracked concrete beneath her feet, wishing for a cowboby hat and, even more desperately, for a script. Was she the good guy or the bad guy here? Was she the hero, come to rescue the damsel in distress, or the villain, come to lash her to the train tracks? Hero, she decided, just as Mrs. Lefkowitz rolled the scooter forward another six inches, nudging the edge of Maggie's lounge. Ella was reminded of a puppy pushing its nose against a closed door. "Maggie, dear," Mrs. Lefkowitz said, "there's something that maybe you can help me with." Maggie raised her eyebrows as one of the old men glared at Mrs. Lefkowitz. "She's tired," he said belligerently, gripping his cane with two hands. "She had a very long day. And she was just getting ready to tell us about how she almost got a job at MTV." Mrs. Lefkowitz wasn't moving. "So go ahead. Tell." Maggie looked over Mrs. Lefkowitz's head and addressed herself to Ella. "What do you want?" The words rose up, unbidden, to Ella's mouth and threatened to spill over. I want you to love me. I want you to like me. I want you to stop running away. "I . . ." she man aged. "She's busy," the short, round, barrel-shaped man said, stepping in front of Maggie's lounge chair protectively. "Are you Maggie's grandmother?" asked the woman in the pink bathing cap. "Oh, you must be so proud of her! Such a beautiful girl, and so accomplished . . ." Maggie bit her lip, and the old man with the cane made an unpleasant noise as Lewis quietly pulled two chairs over to Maggie's circle and motioned for Ella to sit. "MTV?" Mrs. Lefkowitz asked, nodding knowledgeably, as if
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she'd invented the station. "Were you going to be a contestant on one of their game shows?" "On-air talent," Maggie muttered. "Like the Carson Daly," said Mrs. Lefkowitz, crossing her hands over her lumpy waist and tilting her square sunglasses toward the sun. "So handsome, that one." The two groups arranged themselves in an uneasy half-circle around Maggie's lounge chair. Ella and Lewis and Mrs. Lefkowitz were on one side, Maggie's new friends on the other. Maggie stared at one group, then the other. Then she gave an almost invisible shrug, reached into her backpack, and pulled out a notebook. Ella felt herself relax the tiniest bit. It wasn't progress, exactly, but at least Maggie hadn't bolted, or asked them to leave. "It's Jack, isn't it?" Lewis asked the man who'd been gripping the cane. The man—Jack—gave an affirmative grunt. Lewis offered him his hand. The talkative woman began quizzing Mrs. Lefkowitz about her scooter. The two other men went back to their game of cards. Ella closed her eyes, and breathed quietly, and hoped.
In her lounge chair, Maggie also had her eyes closed, thinking about what to do and how to make things right, even when part of her protested that it wasn't her job to fix things. Except nobody in Florida knew what was her job and what wasn't. Nobody here knew what a mess she'd made of her life. Nobody here knew Rose, and how she was the one who took care of things, the same way they didn't know that Maggie was always the one who needed saving, or fixing, or help. She had a job, a place to live, people who cared about her. Now it was time for her to start repairing the damage, starting with the one she'd hurt the worst—starting with Rose. She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling afraid, part of her wanting to jump to her feet, hurry through the gate, jump behind the wheel of Lewis's long car, and drive off someplace where nobody knew her, where nobody knew who she was, or what she'd done, or where
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she'd come from. But she'd already run to Princeton, and then she'd run here. She didn't want to run anymore. In the shallow end, the Water Babies began their cool-down. In the chair beside her, her grandmother cleared her throat. "I bet you miss people your age," Ella said. "It must be hard for you, being the only young person here." "I'm okay," said Maggie. "She's fine," growled Jack. Maggie opened her eyes, then opened her notebook. "Dear Rose," she wrote. Ella looked at the page, then very quickly looked away. Dora, the woman in the pink bathing cap, had no such compunctions. "Who's Rose?" she asked. "My sister," said Maggie. "You've got a sister? What's she like?" Jack put down his cards, and Herman set aside his Mother Jones. "She's got a sister!" "She's a lawyer in Philadelphia," said Ella, and then closed her mouth and looked at Maggie for help. Maggie ignored her, closing her notebook, getting up and walking through the gauntlet of senior citizens to the edge of the pool, where she dangled her legs in the water. "Is she married?" asked Dora. "What kind of law?" asked Jack. "Does she do wills, by any chance?" "Is she coming to visit?" demanded Merman. "Does she look like you? Does she have any tattoos?" "She's not married," said Maggie. "She has a boyfriend . . ." Or at least, she used to have a boyfriend, until I fucked that up that for her. Maggie stared unhappily into the chlorinated depths of the deep end. "Tell us more!" urged Dora. "Does she have anything pierced?" asked Herman. Maggie smiled and shook her head. "She doesn't look like me. Well, a little bit, maybe. We have the same color eyes and hair, but
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she's bigger than I am. And no tattoos, either. She's very conservative. She wears her hair twisted up all the time." "Like you!" Ella said. Maggie started to protest, then touched her ponytail and realized that it was true. She hopped into the water, flipped onto her back, and floated. "Rose can be funny," she said. Ella hurried to the edge of the pool to listen. The rest of Maggie's pool friends followed after her, jostling for prime position along the deep end's ledge. "And mean, sometimes. When we were girls, we had to share a room. We had twin beds, and there was a space in between them, and she'd lie there, reading, and I used to jump over her." Maggie started to smile as she remembered. "She'd be lying there, and I'd jump back and forth, from one bed to the other, and I'd say, 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog!'" "So you were the quick brown fox," said Ella. Maggie gave her a "duh" look that was quickly repeated by Jack, Dora, and Herman. "I'd do it until she hit me," she said. "She hit you?" asked Ella. "I'd jump back and forth, and I could see that she was getting really irritated, but I'd keep doing it until she'd stick her arm up in the air and bat me down when I was jumping." Maggie nodded and pulled herself out of the water, looking strangely pleased with the memory of being hit by her sister, mid-leap. "Tell us more about Rose," Dora said, as Jack handed her a towel and her tube of Bain de Soleil. "She doesn't care that much about looks. And stuff," said Maggie, resuming her sprawling position on her lounge chair, remembering Rose squinting at herself in the mirror, or Rose clumping mascara onto her lids, then heading out the door with half-moons of black on her cheeks. "Oh, I'd like to meet her," said Dora. "Invite her for a visit," said Jack, cutting his eyes toward Ella. "I'm sure your grandmother would love to have both of you."
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Maggie knew that he was right. Ella would love to meet Rose. What grandmother wouldn't? A smart, successful granddaughter with a law degree. But Maggie wasn't sure whether she was ready to see Rose again, even if Rose was willing to forgive her. Things were going better for her than they ever had, ever since she'd left Philadelphia that terrible night. For once in her life, she wasn't in Rose's shadow, she wasn't the second sister, the one who wasn't as smart, wasn't as successful, the one who was just pretty in a time when pretty felt as if it mattered less and less. Corinne and Charles hadn't known about her history, her struggles, the remedial classes, all the jobs she'd quit or been fired from, all the girls who used to be her friends. Dora and Jack and Herman didn't think she was stupid or a slut. They liked her. They admired her. They listened to what she had to say. And Rose would show up and ruin everything. "A bagel shop?" she'd ask, in a tone suggesting that a bagel shop was the best Maggie could hope for—a bagel shop, a spare bedroom, a borrowed car, the kindness of strangers. Maggie opened her notebook again. "Dear Rose," she wrote once more, and then stopped. She couldn't think of how to do this, of what she was going to say next. "This is Maggie, in case you can't tell from the handwriting," she wrote. "I am in Florida with our grandmother. Her name is Ella Hirsch, and she was ..." Agh. This was so hard. There was a word for what she wanted to say here. Maggie could almost catch it, could practically taste it on her tongue, and the feeling caused her heart to quicken, the way it had during the classes at Princeton, when she'd sat in the back with the right answers waiting to burst from her mouth. "What's the word that means that someone wants to be with someone else, but they're not, because of a fight or something?" she called. "The Yiddish word?" asked Jack. "Who's she gonna write to in Yiddish?" asked Herman, returning his attention to Mother Jones. "Not Yiddish," said Maggie. "The word for where there's two
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relatives, or something, but other people in the family are angry at each other about stuff, so the relatives never meet." "Estranged," said Lewis. Jack glared at him. Maggie appeared not to notice. "Thanks," she said. "Glad to be of use in my golden years," said Lewis. "Her name is Ella Hirsch, and she was estranged from us," Maggie wrote, and stared at the page. This was the hard part . . . but she'd had practice at Princeton, working with words, picking out the best ones the way a careful cook chooses the best apples from the basket, the plumpest chicken from the butcher's case. "I'm sorry for what happened last winter," she wrote, deciding that this was probably the best way to handle it—flat out, in the open. "I am sorry I hurt you. I want ..." And she paused again, aware that everyone was staring at her, as if she were some rare aquatic creature recently brought into captivity, some animal at the 200 who'd just learned an amusing new trick. "What's the word for when you want to make something right?" "Reconciliation," Ella said quietly, and spelled it, and Maggie wrote it twice, just to be sure she got it right.
FORTY EIGHT
"Okay," said Rose, as she got into the passenger's seat of her car, "okay, so you swear and affirm under penalty of perjury as defined by the Pennsylvania Code that there will be absolutely nobody else from Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick at this wedding?" This was important information. Of all the things she'd covered with Simon—dead mother, vanished sister, unspeakable stepmother— they'd never gotten around to the topic of Mr. Jim Danvers. And Rose was determined not to have to do it at the nuptials of two of Simon's law-school classmates mere months before their own wedding. "As far as I know," said Simon, straightening his tie and starting the car. "As far as you know," Rose repeated. She flipped down the mirror, glanced at her makeup, and began swiping at an unblended patch of concealer beneath her right eye. "So I'll just have to keep my eyes open for skateboards." "I didn't tell you?" Simon asked innocently. "Don Dommel fell off his board and hit his head on a railing and saw God. No more extreme anything. He's into meditation now. There's yoga every afternoon at lunchtime. The whole place smells like incense, and the secretaries have to say Namaste when they answer the phone.'"
