Is This Tomorrow: A Novel (19 page)

They had been going out a year when Rita came down with a flu, the first time she had been sick since he had met her. She called him, her voice froggy and miserable. “I’ll see you as soon as I’m better,” she said, but Lewis came over with soup and orange juice, knocking on her door. He heard her fumbling with the lock, and then there she was, in her robe, her hair matted in damp coils, her eyes bleary with fever. “I can’t believe you’re here,” she said. She kept trying to fix her hair, and he pulled her hands down. “I like it mussy,” he said. She half smiled. “Come on, let’s get you to bed,” he said. Lewis changed her sweaty sheets and heated up the soup, helping her eat it, cupping his hand under the spoon with each bite. When she finished it, he put a cool cloth on her forehead.

“You’re so kind,” she said.

All that week, he took care of her, coming over in the morning and then after work, even taking her laundry to Suds and doing it for her. And then, as soon as she was well, he came down with it.

“My turn,” she said, showing up at his door with soup and crackers, but he wouldn’t let her in. “I don’t want you to get sick again,” he insisted, and she looked at him, perplexed. “I was already sick,” she said. “I’ve got immunity. You work in a hospital so you should know things like that.” She held up the bag. “I have chicken soup and those crackers you like.” She peered past his door. “Plus, your place is a mess. I can clean it up for you.”

“Rita, please, I just need to sleep,” he said. He thanked her, but kept the door half-closed. He sent her away that day, and the next day, too, and when she called to say she wanted to stop by, he said, “I’ll call you soon as I’m better.” By the end of the week, he had bounced back. He couldn’t wait to see her, but when she came over, she looked smaller somehow, and her face was pinched with hurt.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have sent you away,” Lewis said. “But honestly, I wasn’t doing anything but sleeping.”

“I missed you,” she said. She sat on the couch next to him, leaning her head against his shoulder. “When I was sick, one of my older customers actually left me a box of Miss Lydia’s Powders for Female Troubles outside the door. The landlady sent up cough medicine because she said she needed to get some sleep and I was hacking too loudly. And I had you to care for me. It made me feel so good. I wish you had let me take care of you.”

“I said I was sorry.”

Like an engine running down, she was suddenly quiet. She took her head off his shoulder and looked at him. “I’m bound to say something wrong, since I’m the one who has to do all the talking.”

“Okay by me. I like hearing what you have to say.”

“But what about what you have to say? Don’t you ever want to talk with me, share things?”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing now?”

She got up from the couch. “Why didn’t you let me help you when you had the flu?”

“Come on, it’s my job to take care of sick people, not yours.”

She shook her head. “But I wanted to take care of you, to feel needed, to get closer to you.”

“You’re making a big deal out of something that’s not a big deal at all.”

“Lewis, I feel lonely with you. You never talk about anything important with me. I never know what you’re thinking. I don’t even know that much about your past. I thought maybe things would change when you got to know me better, but now I think that maybe they won’t.”

He felt as if every cell of his body was exposed. She was inches away from him, but she looked so far away. “I’ll tell you what I’m thinking,” he said. “I’m thinking how lucky I am that I met you. I’m thinking that you make this town feel like home to me.”

“What did home feel like?” she asked. “Tell me about your parents, about what you were like as a kid. Anything.”

He felt as if a hood had been dropped over him. He couldn’t say a word, couldn’t look at her.

She stepped back, and looked at him sadly. “I don’t think we should see each other anymore,” she said. She grabbed her jacket, heading for the door. “It’s just not going to work out.”

“You’re leaving because of this?”

“This isn’t what I want for myself. I need someone who lets me in.” She was watching him, as if this was a test she knew he’d fail.

“Maybe I want someone who doesn’t leave the first time things get difficult,” he countered.

“The first time?” she said, astonished. “Are we in the same relationship?” She took her hand off the doorknob and studied him. “Okay,” she said quietly. “Let’s try this. Do you have anything to tell me?”

His mind fished for things to say. “My mother worked for a plumbing company that made plaid sinks and toilets. She was almost never home.” His words hung in the air.

He thought she’d be happy, but Rita frowned. “You told me she didn’t work,” she said curtly. “You told me she was always home.”

She put one hand on her hip, shaking her head, and he felt an itch of anger that she was blaming him, because this time, he had really tried. “Rita, what does it matter? Who cares what my mother did or how I grew up? What does it have to do with us today?”

“I’m thinking about tomorrow,” she told him. “About us down the line. I’m thinking about giving more and more of myself, but you’ve never even let me stay over the whole weekend,” she said. She leaned along the wall, waiting, and he knew that he was supposed to invite her, tell her how much he wanted to be with her. But he thought of a whole weekend of her questions, her wanting to know everything about him. And besides, she kept telling him how much she wanted to be with him, but look at how easily she was ready to leave. How would it be if he got used to having her around and then she left again? He thought of the way he had waited and waited for his father and all there had been were broken promises and then silence. His own mother had lied to him about his dad. Jimmy had vanished and Rose’s letters never came. “I have a really physical job,” he said quietly. “I get up early. I come home late. And right now, I just got over the flu.”

He saw how her face hardened, how she drew herself up. He wanted to grab her hands, but instead, he stayed planted to the floor, folding his arms across his chest.

“I had really fallen for you,” she said, and then, before he could open his mouth to stop her, she was gone.

T
HAT NIGHT, HE
roamed Madison, stunned at how much he missed Rita already. He walked to her apartment and rang her buzzer, but either she wasn’t home or she wasn’t answering. He stopped at a pay phone and called her, and then he began thinking about what she wanted from him, how he’d have to revisit his past and spread it out in front of her like a poisoned banquet. He had come here to reinvent himself, to start anew, and she wanted to take him back to what he had been.

Pained, he hung up the phone before she could answer.

H
E DIDN’T TELL
anyone he had broken up until the next week, after he had given up hope that she might call. Missing Rita was like an ache he couldn’t soothe. Lewis thought he saw her everywhere. Even the smell of the soup in the cafeteria, the watery canned tomato stuff, made him remember the way he had fed her when she was ill, how grateful she had been and how good it had all felt.

After two weeks, he admitted to the nurses and his friends that he and Rita were through. “You’re a young guy, you should be playing the field, anyway,” Mick told him, but it didn’t make him feel any better.

The nurses took him on as their pet project, inviting him to dinner, telling him there were more fish in the sea. It was as if going out with Rita had left a shine on him that other women were drawn to. He ended up dating one nurse for two weeks. He dated an aide’s best friend for over ten months. What Rita had said thrummed inside of him, and he tried his best to be different, to talk more, to open up, but no matter what he did, sooner or later, every relationship fell apart. His latest relationship, with a nurse named Dolly, didn’t last through August. “You have so many beautiful qualities,” Dolly said. “The way you look after me, the way you open doors. You never once forget to say God bless you when I sneeze. But I feel like I’m the only one in this relationship.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, and she shrugged. “I feel like I don’t really know you.”

“You know me.”

“Fine. Let’s try this then. Tell me one thing personal you’ve never told anyone else.”

Lewis felt the world clamp shut. He could talk about Jimmy, about Rose, about how his mother had so many boyfriends, but that old world seemed too large for him, as if it might swallow him whole and he’d never emerge again. “I have a rotten sense of direction,” he said, and Dolly sighed. “I rest my case,” she said, “and I knew that already.” After that she refused to go out with him anymore.

He still dated, but he began to read the signs that a relationship was going to end. The look in a woman’s face when he leaned in to kiss her, how her body angled away from his. A woman would tell him she wanted time to think their relationship over, and then a week later, Lewis would see her holding another man’s hand. They always said the same thing. I can’t get to know you.

A
NOTHER YEAR PASSED
and it was winter again, New Year’s Eve, and Lewis was working, walking the halls, ignoring the
HAPPY
1966
signs that were posted on the doorways. Already, he’d seen a patient with a broken leg who’d skidded on a patch of black ice. Two seventeen-year-old kids had been treated with Thorazine because they had taken too much LSD at a party, and their parents, mistaking Lewis for a doctor, had grabbed his arm. “We didn’t even know he smoked marijuana,” the mother cried. “That’s how it starts, isn’t it?” Lewis just nodded because they wouldn’t believe him if he said no. One of the aides had actually brought in hash brownies for the break room tonight, and the only reason Lewis hadn’t grabbed one was because he still had to work.

Maybe when he was done, if everything wasn’t all gone, he’d drop over there later and have one, along with some champagne. He looked in a room and saw that Sheila was here again. She never seemed to stay out the hospital for long, always back with heart or stomach pains, needing tests. She was sleeping, but he came in and sat beside her, just for a moment. He had looked up her chart after he had first met her and had asked the other nurses about her. She didn’t have any family. She was back in the hospital now because neighbors had noticed a smell coming from her apartment. They had knocked on the door repeatedly and then someone commented that he hadn’t seen Sheila in days, even though she usually went out every single day for a walk to the local church, her hair veiled, her hands clutching a white leather Bible. They knew she lived alone, without even a pet to keep her company. But this silence scared them. The landlord had broken in and found her on the floor, lying in a pool of urine.

The nurses all thought Sheila was a lot of trouble. She would get up and wander off by herself. She wanted to know what every pill and every procedure was for. She would listen to the news on a little transistor radio and then, five minutes after she had heard it, she’d want to talk to the nurses about it. In November, when there had been a march on Washington to protest the war, she insisted she wanted to go. When there were race riots in Los Angeles, she clucked her tongue, and when Bob Dylan came on, her favorite, she sang along to “Blowin’ in the Wind.
”
“She’s just lonely,” Lewis would say, but the other nurses sniffed. No one came to visit her in the hospital and she received no cards.

Lewis sat looking at her now in her bed. He had learned that sometimes sleep was like a kind of hypnosis, that sometimes even comatose patients would know there was a presence beside them. “I’m here,” he told her and took her hand. St. Merciful was a good hospital. He knew that. But he knew, too, that good doctors and good medicine weren’t always enough. He had seen it himself in the hospital. It was something all the nurses knew. Patients with family, with people who loved and needed them, just got better faster.

Chapter Fifteen

Ava, bundled in her winter coat, came home thinking about the new year—imagine,
1966
!—and Lewis again. He came to see her every six months, and a month ago, she had taken the train and visited him, letting him show her around Madison. She hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him, her big, tall son. He was a man now, twenty-two, and orbiting away from her even more. Their visits never seemed long enough, and when she went to hug him good-bye, she could feel his body pulling away, which made her want to tug him closer.

Most of the other boys in the neighborhood Lewis’s age had joined the armed forces, which terrified Ava, but at least more and more people were protesting Vietnam. Even Ava had gone to Boston Common to march. She had come home exhilarated, with a little flag she had been waving and an
END THE WAR
button pinned to her lapel. Spotting her, Ted Corcoran, whose son Stanley had just joined the marines, came over to scold. “You’re making a big mistake, Ava,” he told her. But she didn’t think so. Lewis was against the war, which made her proud and happy, and she had heard through the grapevine that Bob Gallagher’s son Eddy, now living in Canada, his brush cut now grown down to his shoulders, had actually burned his draft card, something Bob refused to discuss. It could be just wishful thinking on her part, but even Lyndon Johnson’s Texas-twanged speeches seemed a little less gung-ho these days, and he looked increasingly lined and tired. Ava saw a few of Lewis’s former classmates when they were pumping her gas at the local station. Some, when they spotted her, would blush furiously as if embarrassed, while others would preen, as if now that they had a job, everyone had to take them seriously.

The girls were changing, too. The younger ones looked like beautiful English sheepdogs, with all that long pin-straight hair and bangs that hid their eyes, dressed in short little miniskirts or long flowy dresses. Of course, not everyone was like that. She still saw many a girl with teased-up hair and spit curls, hanging on to a boy with a wiffle cut. Even worse, she saw girls with wedding dresses over their arms, or with bellies swollen like little beach balls.

The neighborhood, too, was changing. The Hula-Hoops, the trikes on the lawn, the occasional Beatles bubble-gum card, all belonged to a whole new sea of kids Ava only vaguely knew. The Browns, who had bought Dot’s house, had sturdy twin boys now. How had that happened so fast?

It hadn’t taken long for word about Lewis being gone to spread. After he had left home, Ava got the feeling that everyone in the neighborhood expected her to leave, too. When the Bokma family two blocks away moved because Cindy, the wife, wanted to live in California, Cindy made a point of coming over so she could give Ava the name of her realtor. “Why would I want that?” Ava asked her.

“You never know,” Cindy said. “And even a small house is a lot for just one person, isn’t it?”

“Not really,” Ava said.

“Maybe you’d like to rent something smaller,” Cindy said. “This guy knows all the good places. Or maybe you could move closer to your son.” Ava turned away so Cindy wouldn’t see Ava’s confused pain. “Thank you, but I’m staying here,” Ava said.

She kept thinking about the day Lewis had left. She had found the white envelope on the kitchen table, and she had known what it was before she opened it. She had read his letter three times, standing in the middle of the living room, but she hadn’t cried. She always had known he’d leave eventually. You didn’t raise your kids to keep them. You wanted them to be independent and strong and the last thing she wanted was to have a relationship like the one Charmaine had with her mother, the two of them more like equals than mother and daughter. She had expected that when Lewis left she’d feel lonely, but she had also thought that maybe she’d feel good, too. She’d know that she had raised him right, that she was sending him off happy. Maybe, too, she had thought that as an adult he’d still be in her life.

She had taken his letter and gone to his room. He must have slunk out early in the morning, before she had even thought to struggle out of bed. Had he planned this or was it spur of the moment? She had looked around as if she might find clues, trailing her hands along his desk, his dresser. She felt relieved that almost nothing there was gone, that there was so much he had left behind. His bed was made. She opened his closet, his drawers, and some of his clothes were still there. His books.

She sat on his bed. He had the right to do this. He was eighteen. You couldn’t stop anyone who really wanted to leave, and he was so angry at her. His rage was like a hot little heart and all she could do was listen to it beat.

A
VA BEGAN STAYING
later and later at the office, marking off the days on her calendar. She didn’t really have that much work to do. Now that Richard had bought them all brand-new Selectrics with a little typeball and roller, work was faster and easier, but that meant she had even more time when she had to pretend to be busy. She barely looked up when the other women left, their arms linked, hats bobbing on their heads as they gossiped. When Richard strode out, he nodded at her, that tight, pleased grin on his face because he thought she was still working, and she waved and kept typing the same words over and over again, killing time:
Ava. Ava Lark.

She liked the way the office felt when it was empty. None of the men were asking her to make coffee or copies when they were steps away from both the coffee machine and the copier. She wasn’t summoned over to deliver papers to yet another associate in another office, whose gaze would linger on her body as he made some lame joke that she was expected to laugh at.
Hey Ava, you could be a train conductor because you’re sure stopping me in my tracks!
The phones were silent so she didn’t have to deal with customers wanting to talk to Richard because they were angry that the pink Satin Glide vanity case looked wrong in their bathroom, that the antique-looking faucets on their new sink didn’t really look all that antique. If, every day, she could have done her job without anyone else around her, she would have been done by noon.

She wandered the empty rooms, passing the other women’s desks, looking at their decorations. Charmaine had a sad little picture of her and her mother, two grown women both dressed up like witches for Halloween and a
WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS
button, which Betty, who supported the war, kept pointedly taking down. “Vietnam falls and it’s dominoes, all the way to us,” Betty insisted, flipping her hands. “You want to live under Communism? I don’t.” Only Cathy was gone, two months now. Tired of pining after Richard, she had grown out and straightened her hair with Curl Free, coming into the office flashing fishnet tights and miniskirts, and in six months, she had snagged a husband from accounting. When Cathy left, triumphant, Richard threw her a party and immediately replaced her with an older woman in her fifties, a widow who wasn’t likely to marry again and leave the company.

Ava walked into Richard’s office. It was decorated with all sorts of knickknacks that he thought were funny. A fake brass statue of a grinning man in a suit holding a trophy that said
WORLD’S BEST BOSS
.
Two windup toys, a walking tub and a clacking toilet. He had his diploma from the University of Massachusetts framed so it was the first thing you saw, and there was a photo of his wife perched on his desk. She was a little blonde with a toothy smile and big round sunglasses and her arm was thrown carelessly around his shoulders. The two of them were beaming over their little girl, who thankfully didn’t have their mother’s grin.

The typing pool had straight-back wood chairs that they sometimes padded with a cushion to support their backs. You had to get up to stretch every few hours or you’d really regret it. But Richard’s chair was deep brown leather and so plush it looked as if you could sink down into it and never want to get up. Ava sat, half shutting her eyes. The leather cushioned her whole body and there was an extra ridge of support right where she needed it at her back. The chair was tall enough so she could rest her head and neck, too. So this is what it felt like to be king of the castle. If she had a chair like this, she could type for hours and never feel the aches. For a moment she saw what he saw, the grand sweep of his office, the line of desks in the other room, the elevator at the end of the room so he could note who had arrived and who had snuck out early. He had a fine view of the typing pool, with Ava’s desk right in front, framed by his doorway.

She had felt his stares before, but only for a moment, because she had ten invoices to get out before noon, because she had calls she had to field, and because she didn’t like looking at him. Now, though, sitting in his chair, she felt how exposed she was. Anytime he wanted to take a gander at her, he could. Her desk was open in front so he could watch her legs. If she bent over, he could look right down her blouse.

She flushed, anger rising up her throat. Tomorrow she’d start wearing scarves tucked around her neck. She’d make sure her legs were covered in dark nylons. If she caught him staring, she’d stare right back.

She leaned back in his chair, resting her head. God, but this chair was comfortable. She could fall asleep right here, right now. She had no idea what he did all day, no real clues what his family life might really be like. Look how happy he was in this photo, but didn’t she know how photographs could lie? For all she knew, his wife could be a harridan, his daughter a tantrum machine. “I have everything,” she had heard Richard say to one of the other salesmen, but did he? You could look at the last picture she had taken with Brian, at the beach, the two of them posed awkwardly in the sand, her hair in a white puckered bathing cap, the strap fastened under her chin. Everyone had thought they were a golden couple and maybe Ava had thought that, too.

Suddenly, a woman from the cleaning staff appeared in the doorway. She was middle-aged, with a frowsy mop of fake black hair, dressed in a blue uniform and a kerchief, a white name tag perched on her chest. Jane. The other women in the office always complained about Jane. She broke knickknacks and then just put the pieces in the trash. She ate any remaining candy on a desk. The other typists looked down their noses at her, and once Charmaine had even put a big sign on her typewriter that said:
CLEANING PERSON, DO NOT TOUCH THIS AREA!

Ava knew what a thin line there was between one job and another and Ava never complained, not even when her ashtrays weren’t emptied and she had to clean them herself. She knew it was just her speedy typing that kept her from a job like Jane’s.

Jane cleared her throat, regarding Ava.

“Jane,” Ava said, because unlike her boss, she believed you should be kind to everyone, you should recognize them, no matter their job. “Don’t worry,” Jane said. “I do it, too. Sometimes I even catnap in that chair.” She winked at Ava. “Sleep,” she said. “I can work around you. And I won’t tell. I’ll wake you up before I go, if you like.”

Ava grinned at Jane. She didn’t stay in the chair very long after that. Instead, she got up and went to the break room and made herself and Jane some coffee, pouring it into Richard’s fancy cup and then her own. She brought both cups over to Jane, who was polishing the desk of an account executive. Jane blinked when Ava handed one cup to her. “Go ahead,” Ava said.

“Why, aren’t you nice,” Jane said, taking Richard’s cup. Jane breathed in the coffee, sighing. “This will get me through the next floor,” Jane said. “You should see what pigs the accountants are. Condoms in their wastebaskets. Once vomit on a desk. I think they do it deliberately.”

“I know what we need,” Ava said. “Come on with me.” She walked Jane back to Richard’s office, to the row of liquor bottles, the special gold-rimmed glasses he kept on the ledge. She had seen him pouring alcohol for clients, the toilet-and-tub guys who sauntered into his office in their fancy suits, wanting him to buy the novelty items, the toilets made out of fake gold. Richard’s voice would grow more boisterous, the other men would guffaw, and then Richard would carefully close his door. She tried to find the bottle that was the most expensive, scanning the labels. There it was, Chivas Regal Royal Salute. Brian had ordered it for their honeymoon and when she had made a face at the taste, how strong it was, he had laughed. “You’re drinking money,” he had told her.

She picked up the bottle. “Scotch okay?” she said.

Jane hesitated.

“Come on, let’s drink some money,” Ava said. She liked the way that sounded.

“We won’t get in trouble?”

“I take full responsibility,” Ava said. “If we get caught or anyone notices, you can blame it all on me.” She poured a little of the scotch, warm and golden into their coffee mugs. “Really, it’s fine,” she said. “He doesn’t notice anything but himself.” She lifted her cup, waiting for Jane to do the same. “To us,” she said, clinking cups with Jane, and she drank it down, and she didn’t know if she felt giddy from the alcohol or from the fact that they had dared to drink it.

When they were finished, Ava took the cups and washed them and put them back. She hoped that Richard wasn’t the type to notice the level of his scotch.

Ava hung around until Jane headed to the next floor. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow,” Jane said, and Ava waved and thought what that would be like, staying here every night just so she could have the cleaning woman for company. It made her think of all those days with Jimmy, when she was so lost and lonely that she was grateful to see him showing up at her door, a little boy who made her feel better. How she had depended on his company!

She got up and put on her coat and then walked down the five flights instead of taking the elevator because it spooked her being the only person in it late at night. She had heard that last year the elevator had gotten stuck, and one of the cleaning staff had been cooped up by herself for six hours before someone came to rescue her.

When she got home, the neighborhood streets were dark, but the houses were lit up from within. There were all these signs of life still and though it should have made her feel better, instead, she felt her skin tensing, like it was stretched too tightly over her bones. A small headache was already forming, as the fizzy lift of the drink plummeted. She went into her house and flicked on the living room lights. She turned on the radio, and there was that song, “Strangers in the Night.” Sinatra’s voice grated against her so much, she felt like hitting him. When was the last time someone brought her roses? And his tone was so sweet. That godawful word
sweet.
Wasn’t that just another word men used to turn women into children? They might as well call you
docile.
Like sheep. She thought of how Jake used to call her
kitty,
which she didn’t mind, and then, out of the blue, it was
jungle cat,
and when she raised her eyebrows at him, he said, “You’re no house kitty. You’re a wild thing. You don’t like it?”