Three Women (11 page)

“Beverly glares at me,” Karla said on the phone. “I feel as if she hates me now! Rosella came in with me and she hardly looked at us.”

“She doesn’t hate you, dear. She hates the situation she’s in. She hates her body and her brain that betrayed her. She hates the hospital and the staff who treat her as if she’s feebleminded.”

“She’s always resented me. Judged me. You know that.”

“Beverly hasn’t been satisfied with either of us…. That’s how she is. But right now, she needs our help. Try to encourage her to work with her therapists.”

“The last time I was there, she wouldn’t even write answers to us.”

She jumped into bed with Jake within ten minutes of meeting him
in the lobby, falling into him as if diving into oblivion. They made love much longer than the time before and far more powerfully. She wanted passionately not to think, not to be conscious: a powerful aphrodisiac. She knew she was surprising him, but he seemed rather pleased than overwhelmed. He was a man who liked sex with her, she was realizing with great satisfaction. It was a balm to her confusions. At least here in this rented hotel bed, she was at ease. Who would have guessed it? She did not really have the time to spare to do this, but she did not care. It was the most pleasurable event in her life for weeks.

Lying under him, over him, beside him in a half-destroyed bed, she realized she had never experienced sex the way she did with Jake. Perhaps it was him, perhaps it was simply her long abstinence, perhaps it was the time in her life. Sex with Victor had been potent but far more passive. He was something that was happening to her. He was the event. She was the object. With Sam, it had been mutual but low on their list of priorities after the first couple of months. They did it when they both could arrange the time and energy, and it became less and less frequent until perhaps once a month they got together. They were both so ambitious then and so overcommitted and so involved in whatever cases they were fighting in court that they barely observed each other. All her energy at home went into the baby and Elena, the children who always needed more than she could give, never mind Sam. Neither of them seemed to have the will to force intimacy and sustain it. It just hadn’t seemed important enough to work on, until it was gone.

She did not exactly consider Jake important to her, and she was surely just as overcommitted in time and energy now as she had been then with Sam—but she experienced him as her last chance at sex, perhaps in her life. They had created an artificial intimacy on-line that was blooming into a physical intimacy both jolting and sensual. She loved his mouth. She loved the way he entered her slowly, withdrawing and then thrusting in again. She loved the way his head snapped back when she was riding him and he was gone into sensations and she knew he would never, never suddenly open his eyes to ask if she had remembered to turn on the answering machine. Perhaps it was marriage that had deadened Sam and her. Perhaps it was being young and greedy for winning. Perhaps it was having a baby too soon after they married. But this late blooming was rich. Jake’s large hot hands on her breasts almost
brought her to orgasm again. Her breasts had never felt so sensitive and as able to give her pleasure.

Over supper she stared into his face, trying to understand the power of their coupling. She asked him questions about his life. His daughter had suddenly written to him, sending a photo of herself with a baby boy. His board had agreed that he could try to put together a Boston office if he had enough backing. He would be in charge of it, but he would need a local board of advisers and volunteers and money. Especially money.

“I’ve got this pesky case pending in California. From a protest about logging old growth redwoods. The local police came down on us hard. That was five months ago. I keep expecting it to be dismissed—after all, the violent ones were the police, not us. But it just drags on and on from motion to motion.”

“Who’s your lawyer?” She questioned him carefully about the case, but it sounded fairly trivial. At the most he could expect a suspended sentence and a fine, even if his lawyer lost. Nothing to worry about, she guessed.

His dark, intense eyes, close to almond-shaped, were beautiful in his sharp face. His face had something foxy about it: quizzical, feral, alert. He was one of those men who liked to put their backs against a wall and look out at the room. He gazed at her more intently than anyone had in more years than she could imagine. It was hard for her to take an interest in the Italian food, good as it was, for all she wanted to do was get back in bed with him and wipe out her life for another two hours. Yet the conversation was good. It was rare; it was years and years since she had sat talking intimately with a man, talking openly, honestly. She had male colleagues, she had male clients from time to time, she had male students and Jaime, her assistant. This was different. It was what had attracted her to him on-line: the quality of the discourse. The sense of ease.

Beverly

Beverly hated the physical therapist pulling on her arm and her leg. It was humiliating to be handled like a sack of trash bundled for the dump. They made her stand up. They were talking at her, the nurse with the frizzy hair and the therapist, a woman half her age with damp pudgy hands and an inane grin. Oh, you think it’s funny I hang on to the bed afraid of falling.

“You have to learn to fall, Mrs. Blume. You are going to fall, and you have to learn how to do it correctly so you don’t injure yourself.”

Grin. Right, it’s funny for you, you bitch, to see me crashing to the floor, but it’s damned well not amusing to me.

“Take another step. That’s right. Now we have a walker for you.”

Beverly let herself drop abruptly on the bed’s edge. She was never going to use one of those disgusting contraptions. Decrepit old people used them, shuffling along. The nurse and therapist were talking at the same time. When two people talked to her, she couldn’t focus on either. They worked with stroke patients, you’d think they’d have learned that she could only hear one of them.

“If you ever want to go to the potty on your own, you’re going to have to get up on your two feet and put one foot in front of the other.”

Back and forth they made her march like Frankenstein’s monster, to the door and back to the bed, to the door and back to the bed. She had to urinate, but did they care? She tried to tell them, but she could only make a moan. She tried to reach for her pad, but they made her keep walking to the door and back, to the door and back. Finally she couldn’t hold it, and the warm seep of urine ran down her leg as she wept with her good eye.

The occupational therapist was trying to teach her to dress herself. Beverly kept trying to pull her panties on. She got her legs in the right holes this time, but the label was in front. It was so hard to coordinate
everything. Her bra she could not do one-handed at all. She could not go through life with her tits swinging in the breeze. Not that she was as big as Suzanne, who knows where she got that from. Actually Karla had the same oversize breasts. The occupational therapist Nona, a woman whose hair was as short as a man’s and whose grip was firm on her, who would never let her drop or think it was amusing if she fell on her face, showed her a bra with Velcro in front. It was the right size. Nona saw her looking at the size. “Same size as the bra you came in with,” she said with a slight smile.

Beverly nodded fervently, her head as it always did now, canting to the side. On the third try, she got the bra on. Better.

“We’ll skip the slip today, okay? Now I have here a dress you can close with Velcro. It’s kind of like a bathrobe, but it’s striped, anyhow. Kind of cheerful. I have to show all this to your daughter, if I’m around when she comes in. Do you think she could come in on a weekday?”

Beverly shook her head no.

“Oh, well. I’ll leave her a message.”

On Thursday she went to the bathroom by herself, got her pants down, even flushed, got her panties back up. She turned on the faucet one-handed and washed her good hand and patted at her useless hand. Then she hobbled back to the bed, step, slide, step, slide, like some stupid ballroom dance she was doing with the metal walker. By the time she got back to the bed, she was so exhausted she slept until the nurse woke her.

Eating was problematic. Food got stuck on the other side of her mouth. She imagined her body as split between her and what she called IT. The Jerk. The Jerk owned the right half of her body. On her half she chewed her food and swallowed it, but food that wandered over to the Jerk’s cheek could get stuck there and choke her unawares.

The doctors were thrilled Friday because she felt it when they pricked her thigh, but she couldn’t move it. It seemed the worst of all worlds. Her right thigh could hurt but remained as inert as a bag of wet sand.

They had given her special utensils to eat with. She could drink pretty well, although sometimes liquid dribbled out the right side. But it had taken a week before she could reliably get the spoon into her mouth instead of just somewhere near it. Everything she did turned into a mess. Everything she did was hard. Fatigue would drop on her suddenly and crush her to the bed. She thought of exhaustion as a boulder that sud
denly fell on her and pushed her flat. In any five-minute interval, she could use up her energy completely and deflate.

She could read for a while. The newspaper was hard, the print too small and the contrast poor. Large-print books were perfect. She felt as if she were reading children’s books, but they were normal novels and nonfiction books. She could read for up to half an hour before she wore out. When Karla came next, Beverly decided to be good to her sister this time and nod at her and write messages. She told her to bring some large-print books that were worth reading, something political with substance to it. A good biography of somebody who mattered. Karla seemed delighted to be asked to do something and promised she would return in two days with books. She did. Rosella came with her, carrying the big bag. WHERE TWINS? Beverly printed.

Rosella laughed. She was a small woman, no taller than Karla, and she had married a Black man not much bigger. But the twins were already up to their mama’s waist. “They won’t let us bring the little ones in here. Maybe they think stroke is contagious.”

SCARY? Beverly printed. SCARES ME.

Rosella had brought her a drawing Johnny made, of a stick woman in a bed with a big sun shining over her. Karla put it on her bedside table, propped against the lamp. It was the most cheerful thing in the depressing room.

The speech therapist was a bald man around fifty who wore loud plaid shirts that never went with his trousers. He must be color-blind, like a lot of men, and obviously his wife had left him. Today the shirt was a mauve, magenta, and teal madras worn with a pair of olive khakis. She stared into his eyes, half hidden behind his bifocals, and longed, longed for him to do something magical that would give her back her voice. She could remember her own voice, low-pitched, sexy, men had often told her. She longed to hear her own voice again more than she longed for anything else. She would gladly hobble around, she would wear Velcro clothes, she would eat with funny utensils, but give her back the power to speak and she swore she would be happy again. She stared into his face in silent supplication.

“Now I want you to make me a list of all the words you can think of that begin with
S
.”

Laboriously Beverly carved into the page
SHIT, SHE, SALMON,
SYLPH, SHOP, STORE, SAVE, SIGN, SIGNAL, SLAM, SORE, STYMIE
. She had only got that far when he stopped her.

“Ssssssssss,” he said. He put his hands on her face. “Sssssssssss.”

She tried. How she tried. What finally came out was “Shhhhhhhhh.”

“That’s good. That’s very good. Now try to breathe out a sound. Just breathe it. Ahhhhh. Ahhhhhhhh.”

No sound emerged, but the breath sounded a little like Ahhhhh. A nonvocalized Ahhh.

“Now try to put it together. Shaaaaaah.”

She made a nonvocalized sound that nonetheless was recognizably Shaaaa. Then she began to giggle, because
Sha!
in Yiddish meant shut up. A song of her childhood came to her and suddenly she was singing it rustily in Yiddish. “
Sha! Shtil! Mach nich kein gevalt! Der rebbe geyn sein tanzen, tanzen valt….
”

“It’s good you can sing. You should sing as much as you can. It’s practice for your vocal cords.” He had her sing “Some Enchanted Evening” as far as she could get. He had a deep baritone, nothing like Ezio Pinza, but still, it was fun. They sang some more show tunes together. She loved hearing her own voice. She felt almost human when the session ended. She was wheeled back to her bed and slept. When she woke, she said, “Shaaaa!” Almost a croak emerged. She managed a smile that was perhaps more grimace than smile, but which she totally meant. Dear, dear man. She must learn his name next time. He was her hero. Dr. Fish, that’s what the nurse called him. To her, he would be Ezio. She wanted to throw away all the other therapists and work with him all day with as much energy as she could force from herself. “Ahhhhhh.” She was croaking. “Shaaaah. Ahhhhhhh. Shhhhhh. Shaaaah. Shaaah! Shaaah.”

Suzanne

Suzanne borrowed Marta’s van to transport Beverly to Brookline for Pesach. After the holiday, Beverly was to enter a local rehabilitation center for stroke patients. Beverly was so excited about leaving the hospital, it was hard to make her understand that she could not go home. Suzanne had moved Beverly’s things to Brookline a month before with the help of Karla overseeing Rosella and Tyrone. The landlord was glad to have Beverly leave, so he could double the rent.

Suzanne had been paying Beverly’s bills. One of the many things her mother could not do was to sign a check. It felt distinctly uncomfortable to be operating behind Beverly’s back, making decisions for her mother, who had never lacked decisiveness, but discussing anything with Beverly took forever and she tired quickly of trying to communicate. She could form few words and no coherent sentences. She would not assess her prospects and options realistically. The easiest thing for Suzanne was to view her mother as a helpless client and make decisions for her—although she felt uneasy.

Thus Suzanne was carting Beverly off to Brookline, where Beverly had visited perhaps three times in the twelve years Suzanne had been living in the house with Marta and Jim. When Suzanne wanted to see Beverly, she went to New York. Her mother was portable in certain ways. When duty called, she went, but visiting her daughter in Brookline made her uncomfortable. It seemed to thrust right into her face everything about them that was different. They had more fights on Suzanne’s turf than on Beverly’s. Beverly was at home only in New York. She had been born there, grown up there, and never put down roots anyplace else. It had always offended or puzzled her, depending on her mood, that her only daughter preferred the Boston area. Probably she considered it a sign of weak character or a lack of style. She had always made clear that she thought Suzanne lacked style.

The minivan was harder to steer than an ordinary car but had room for the wheelchair. Suzanne had done her best with Elena’s help to fix up the room off the kitchen for Beverly. Suzanne’s gym equipment was now split between her bedroom and her office, and very much in the way. Every time she used the treadmill, she had to hang a quilt over the corner of her chest of drawers, so she would not hit herself on it. She hoped Beverly would be comfortable in that room for the next three days, until Suzanne could check her into the rehab unit.

It was definitely spring on the Wilbur Cross. The willows had leafed out along the streams. An occasional magnolia or cherry was in bloom. The day was sunny with the temperature in the upper fifties and the air softer than it had been in months. It was a drive she would normally have enjoyed, but she was monitoring her mother with one ear and Rachel and her boyfriend with the other. Suzanne felt sore with anxiety. Unlike most years, she was not looking forward to Pesach. The first-night seder was always with her daughters and whoever they brought, with Marta, Jim, and their son, Adam, and a friend or two. Beverly had never before come to her, although when Suzanne was growing up, Beverly had sometimes trekked out to Karla’s in Brooklyn, where Suzanne always went. This year her assistant, Jaime, wanted to come and also Celeste, shattered by divorce, and Georgia, just back from Bali.

She acknowledged to herself that she did not look forward to a seder with Beverly, whom she remembered at Karla’s in the old days as quarrelsome, alternately bored and combative. Beverly never felt comfortable with the ritual or pleased that her daughter enjoyed what Beverly considered a forlorn relic of the ghetto. Now Beverly would be quiet, necessarily, but it was no improvement. Suzanne sighed, making her way across the Connecticut River at Hartford. They were all who they were, and she must make the best of it. The hospital social worker had pressed upon her eight different pamphlets. If she did everything the woman urged, she would rebuild her entire apartment, reorganize her life, and hire ten different people to help.

It was still light when she pulled into her steep drive. There was her house on its hill, the little backyard sloping sharply downhill, three stories painted light blue with dark blue trim. Home in recent years had meant quiet and comfort. Now she could not read the meaning of her home. Her life felt at the moment without sanctuary—except for those
brief moments with Jake: because, she thought, I do not have to take care of him. I’m not responsible for him. Therefore I can be happy.

Suzanne realized in the next twenty-four hours that she had not really absorbed what the social worker had been trying to tell her. For Beverly to exist at all in the apartment, everything must be changed. In the small bathroom off the kitchen there was a shower, but it could only be used if the controls were lowered to where Beverly could reach them. That meant having a plumber in. They had nothing resembling a bath chair until Elena found a stool in the basement. It was not designed to get wet, but it would have to do. Beverly had to be helped onto the stool and off the stool again. The bathroom needed a railing for her to hold on to. They moved a single bed against the wall to protect on one side, but she could not sit up in the bed by herself and she was afraid she would fall out. If Beverly moved back here after the rehab center, Suzanne would have to buy or rent a hospital bed. Jim found a bookcase upstairs he could lend to the cause, with big square partitions where Beverly’s clothes could be stacked, as she could not open a drawer. They gave her a tambourine to summon them when she needed something, and the tambourine sounded every other minute.

It took such effort for Beverly to haul herself in or out of bed that most things she might need had to be within reach of her good hand. Once they understood that, they had to turn the bed around so that her left hand would be on the outside, able to reach the table they placed there.

She never seated people at the seder but always let them find their own places. She was amused to note that Elena put herself in between Marta and Jim, as if she were their child, leaving Adam to sit beside Rachel—which he probably preferred anyhow. Elena had suddenly adopted Marta and Jim as preferable parents, obviously. Long ago, when they had moved into this house, Elena had resented them, imagining they were spying on her, keeping watch on her for Suzanne. Elena had lived in this house for two years until she went away to college, only returning for vacations. Now Suzanne was pleased to see that Elena was establishing her own relationship with them, finally. Suzanne drew a deep breath and tried to relax her shoulders. She so wanted everyone to be happy, to have a good seder, to be together in kindness and joy and maybe even a little bit of something spiritual and enlightening, just
a little. She wanted joy in the house, a guest like Elijah, who had his cup set out for him. There had not been enough joy lately.

She had not let Rachel have her way with the food. There was plenty for vegetarians, but Suzanne still made chicken soup with matzoh balls and roast lamb. The tzimmes was vegetarian: carrots, apples, raisins, onions cooked long and slow together, Karla’s recipe from her own mother. An heirloom. So were the soup and the matzoh balls. Suzanne enjoyed the sense of being one in a line of women making a particular recipe for a particular holiday, women appearing one inside the other receding ever smaller like the cows on the tin of evaporated milk from her childhood. Beverly used to buy evaporated milk for some stupid reason. It didn’t spoil. It was one of those weird tastes from childhood that brought back not nostalgia or pleasant memories but an archaic sense of discomfort, like woolen leggings and rubber galoshes, the smell of the cloakroom in grade school. The sweetish overcooked taste of evaporated milk.

Her mother had always improvised meals, for Beverly suspected there was something bourgeois or overly fussy or perhaps dangerously fattening involved in thinking seriously about food. It was from Karla that Suzanne had learned to cook, not that she ever had time to do it. It was a pleasure for vacations, for holidays, for the rare times she had the energy and the leisure to entertain. Basically, the only time she ever cooked a big meal was at Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, Thanksgiving, or somebody’s birthday. Yet Suzanne was proud that she could create a sumptuous spread on the appropriate occasion.

Suzanne relinquished leading the service to Rachel, who had brought a new Haggadah, photocopied in her office. There was a lot of turning of pages back and forth and people asking, Where are we? Too much Hebrew for Suzanne’s taste, who considered it like pepper, nice as a condiment, but avoid heavy use. Rachel was running quite long. Suzanne began to fidget about her meal in the kitchen sitting in the turned off oven. Rachel was good, though, with a charm in delivery that Suzanne had never before seen in her daughter, already a performer, as rabbis had to be. Suzanne suddenly remembered Rachel in a play in middle school, wanting to be the heroine but being given the part of the heroine’s mother instead. She had been valedictorian of her class, but she had not been asked to the senior prom. She had been president
of the Social Issues Club and the French Club, but Saturday nights she went out with her girlfriends or stayed home. She had always been her mother’s daughter. Elena had been and still was tighter with Sam than his own daughter. Sam loved Rachel, but Elena knew how to play him. Rachel was too straightforward to charm her father as much as Elena could.

If Sam had married a Jewish woman, it would have been awkward for Rachel this Pesach, because she would have had to decide whether to spend the second-night seder at her father’s or Michael’s family. Sam’s tall slender blond wife did not make a seder, so Rachel was spared the choice. Sam’s wife played tennis and golf, gave elaborate dinners and parties for his clients, kept the large house in Weston immaculate with help from a string of au pairs and maids, and raised his second batch of children with every kind of lesson that money could buy, from ballet and gymnastics to soccer and violin. They were precocious edgy children with streaks of violence and anxiety that she could sense like the seep of gas whenever she found herself forced to spend time with Sam’s family. That did not happen as much since Rachel had learned to drive. Sam had given her a series of old cars, each good for two or three years before it disintegrated.

When at last she could serve the meal, she watched Rachel with Michael. “Here. Try the tzimmes.” She fed him as if he could not take for himself. There was something passive in him, as if he simply waited to be served, to be fussed over, knowing that it would come to him. For Rachel he was the prize of her life, Suzanne began to observe. He was pleasant enough looking, teeth a little too big for his mouth but all right. Beverly kept smiling at him as nearly as she could, with her face only partly under control. Her favorites at the table were Elena, Michael, and Jim. Beverly had seldom met Adam and paid little attention to him. Poor Adam was used to Rachel’s full attention. She had always played the role of doting older sister, since she had been ten and Adam, eight. Today her attention was fixed on Michael. Adam had always been prone to whine, and he was overflowing with complaints tonight. The wine was harsh, the tzimmes not sweet enough, the service too long, his favorite song had been left out: but what he really minded was Rachel turned not to him but to Michael.

Unlike Rachel, Michael was not taking a large part in the seder. He
was more an observer, looking a little amused, as if perhaps this was not what he considered a real seder, not traditional enough. “Who leads the seder in your house?” she asked him.

He seemed surprised at the question. “My father, of course.”

Of course? Why not his mother? She suspected that he was judging them in some quiet way. Was he finding not merely the seder but the family too outré? This was a house of women, and she doubted if the boy was used to that. He probably believed the way he was used to was the only right way.

Elena had always liked Celeste, enjoying her gamy humor, but her divorce had left her shattered, and Elena instinctively shrank from her ravages. Celeste was quiet and morose. When she read a passage, her voice was an octave higher than usual, a child’s tremulous voice. Once or twice Suzanne was afraid Celeste would begin to cry, and immediately set her some task. Normally she thought during the seder about her own personal liberation and political issues in which she was involved, but she found herself too wedged between her roles as mother and as daughter tonight to give much thought to anything spiritual. She did not see much liberation coming her way this year.

Jaime followed along with the exotic reading and the exotic food, seated on her left as she had Beverly on her right. Perhaps she was attempting to protect both of them from casual buffeting. Georgia, who was an interior decorator with exquisite taste, had brought her a beautiful scarf from Bali, sea colors, that Elena was wearing. She had immediately claimed it, and Suzanne could not refuse her for she looked stunning in it, worn casually around her shoulders over a sea-green camisole and tight black pants. Jaime eyed her curiously, a parrot perched at a table of sparrows. She paid little attention to him, focused on Beverly and Jim. After all, although Jaime was as beautiful and as splendid as herself, he was two years younger than Elena—and at their ages, that could seem a generation. However, Jaime was observing her.

Georgia was beginning to age, she realized with a pang, her black glossy hair streaked with white. The sun had turned her fair skin leathery. Suzanne had never noticed all those wrinkles around her eyes. She was as thin as ever but had begun to look more gaunt than chic. They were all getting older. People kept telling her tonight how good she looked. She was accustomed to her looks being taken for granted, like
the walls and the ceiling, nothing to comment on. She felt like telling Georgia and Marta and Celeste that it was only that she was getting laid for the first time in more than a decade. This glow was her body’s delight. It would be short-lived, only a little generator of joy parked out there away from the rest of her roiled-up life.

She became aware Beverly to her right was trying to speak, her face distorting with effort, her mouth drooling. Suzanne felt torn among those needing her attention: her daughters, both of whom usually soaked up her available energy, her assistant, a stranger here, Celeste who was sunk into a dangerous depression, and her mother. She was used to having Beverly command her attention by forceful statements. She was used to fending off her mother’s attacks. She was used to pretending not to understand allusions to her bourgeois pretensions and her safe dull money-grubbing lifestyle. She was not accustomed to having to wipe her mother’s face and lean close to try to figure out what Beverly was sputtering. She felt guilty because she was put off by Beverly’s inability to control her body, her voice, her face. The same thing will happen to you when you’re her age, she told herself, and you’ll want people to be kind and understanding and accepting, won’t you? So get it together, Suze, get it together and be a mensch. This is an opportunity too, to improve that first relationship of all. “You want something, Mother? More lamb? Tzimmes?”