Three Women (16 page)

Suzanne

Suzanne was sitting at Marta’s kitchen table, her head in her hands. “I don’t see what else I can do.”

“You haven’t considered a nursing home?” Marta was still dressed for court. She hadn’t yet changed, except for kicking off her pumps and removing her suit jacket.

“Marta! You know Beverly. She isn’t senile. She’d go mad in a nursing home. I can’t do that to her.”

“But neither can you stay home and take care of her.” Marta was sensuously caressing her own toes, freed from her court pumps.

“We’ll have to see how much taking care of she needs. I can hire someone. Marta, what else can I do? She can’t live alone. I let her apartment go months ago. I have to move her in. I have no other choice I can see, no other viable and reasonable choice.”

“Beverly and you under the same roof. You’ll move up here.”

“Maybe we can reach a rapprochement. She needs me. I always wanted her to give me her approval. I’m aware of how childish that is, but it’s been there forever. For her to say, Yes, you are a good lawyer, you did know what you were doing. You are truly a political person whose standards I can respect. And so on and on and on.”

“And you seriously think moving her into your flat is going to accomplish all that? There’ll be the wrong room, wrong furniture, wrong city, wrong food, and so on and on and on.”

“Realistically I know that. But my fantasies come into play. And I want to do right by her. She deserves being taken care of. She has been a good person, she has given her life to good causes. Now I should throw her in the garbage because she’s damaged?” Suzanne thought of a new line of argument. “How about your own mother? If she hadn’t died of breast cancer…suppose she’d had a stroke?”

“But, Suzanne, I was close to her. I never stopped being close. I could have lived with her. It isn’t the same thing. She was my bud.”

The carpenters came to put up railings and ramps. Her house was in utter chaos for days. Elena flirted with the younger carpenter. Suzanne would come home from work to find him still there, sitting at the kitchen table looking into Elena’s eyes while she practiced her Spanish on him.

“Are you interested in him?” Suzanne asked cautiously.

“If what you mean is, am I screwing him, no. He’s awfully young and naive, frankly.”

Then the plumber, the electrician. Then the carpenters came back. Then Elena and Suzanne repainted. “You think she’s going to give a damn if the paint is white or yellow?” Elena asked, her hair tucked under a red scarf.

Suzanne shrugged. “I don’t want her to feel that anything is shoddy or that we don’t care to make it right.”

“I will never let myself fall apart! It’s because she smoked all those years.” Elena shook her head. “Even I stopped smoking finally.”

“Well, she did cut down on her smoking. Beverly’s always been healthy. She had more energy than six other women put together.”

“It used to be so much fun to run around New York with her. She always knew bargain shops and cool places to have espresso or Chinese-Cuban food.”

“She never spent much money on herself, but she always looked good. She had dozens of friends.” Suzanne found herself on the verge of breaking into tears. They were talking about Beverly as if she had died. She sniffed hard and rubbed her eyes. “Anyhow, I think this pale, pale green will suit her. She’s always said her favorite color was green. To match her eyes.”

For three weeks, workmen had been in the house almost every day. She tripped over her treadmill when she ran to check a fax. In the middle of the night, when she woke up to pee, she ran into the exercise bike. Everything felt overcrowded. Constricted. She must endure it and not complain, not be martyred. Never let Beverly feel she was putting anyone out. The room next to the kitchen—which had housed a student
who had lived with them for the year after Elena’s disaster, which had once been her office, which had recently been her gym—was now fixed up into a sickroom. It had a hospital bed, railings. Everything was designed to be reachable from the bed or easily gotten to. The bathroom off the kitchen had been modified with a chair in the shower, a new higher toilet, faucets that turned on or off at a touch. The kitchen had been changed to make it more accessible. The front porch had a ramp, since Beverly could not climb stairs with her walker or her wheelchair. The ramps too had railings.

Suzanne’s house, her refuge, her aesthetic retreat, her comfort hole, was all changed around to meet the needs of her mother, with whom she had not lived since she had gone away to college. She could still remember those fights. They had been fighting since she was eleven, but the fierce arguments reached a crescendo her senior year of high school. “What’s wrong with City College?”

“I have a scholarship to Brown.” She could scarcely say that she had applied to thirty colleges to get away from home. Brown was the most prestigious place to take her and offer tuition as well. Suzanne had earned a four point average, was class valedictorian and coeditor of the high school paper, and was terrific at taking tests. Her SATs had been gorgeous. She was convinced to this day she had done all that not so much in order to succeed as to escape. Now they were about to become roommates.

I will not let it bother me, she thought, if he is trying to recruit me in bed. She promised herself she would not take it seriously. If he did not want her skills, she would never have come alive again sexually, would never even have guessed it was possible for her. After all, everybody had motives, everybody had his or her own agenda. Still, it felt a little tarnished. It made her wonder if she could possibly continue to carve out time for him if he did move east. Whenever he brought up her joining the board, she took an emotional step backward.

She was not convinced, but she was mollified.

Basically, Beverly had to be taken from the rehab center because Medicare and the insurance covering rehabilitation had run out, and with Rachel still in college and Elena at home, Suzanne could not pay for a continued stay. Plus every time she visited, Beverly whispered in that strange cracked voice, painfully forming the words or something like the words, “When go home?”

She was not sure that Beverly understood that home, meaning the old apartment, was gone forever, but surely a room of her own in Brookline would be a lot better than this dreary room with a partially deranged roommate who kept babbling about events in her distant past and sometimes calling her dog for an hour at a time. Suzanne had saved her mother’s things—some pieces of furniture, lamps, bric-a-brac, books, clothing—and they were waiting for her in Brookline. Perhaps those familiar objects would help make Beverly feel at home.

The day arrived when the move could no longer be put off. It was a Saturday in late May, a cool overcast day when colors, instead of fading
in the mist, seemed to glow as if lit from within. The pink dogwoods on the lawn of the rehab center looked as if they might explode. Suzanne was wheeling Beverly to the curb. She had borrowed Marta’s van to transport the wheelchair and the walker and the other paraphernalia. “Look, Mother,” she said, pointing at the pink dogwoods.

“Suburbs,” Beverly said and shrugged her good shoulder.

Suzanne did not speak again as she got Beverly to the van, helped her from the chair to the seat, protecting her head as she had been taught and collapsed the wheelchair before adding it to the heap in the back. Then she paused, feeling an insane desire to flee, to run off into the misty morning and vanish, perhaps turn up in California on Jake’s doorstep. It’s your fucking duty, she thought. Beverly is your mother.

A little voice said, some mother she was. But sometimes she was a good mother and loving and always Suzanne was proud of her. When she came to school, it was an occasion. Here comes the charming Mrs. Blume. Her mother was always special, dressed up a little Bohemian but always attractive, her hair glowing, just enough makeup and never too much. The male teachers lit up. The principal would see her at once. She had that rich throaty voice that made everyone want to stop and listen—unless Beverly had a political bone to pick, like her objection to school prayer long before it was a cause everybody had heard of. Her mother might not be a practicing Jew, like Aunt Karla, but she was well aware of how the dominant culture tried to assimilate her daughter forcibly with Easter songs in school assembly. Then her mother’s visits raised hell, but a kind of hell that Suzanne was not embarrassed by. She had always agreed with her mother then, politically. It was not until Suzanne became a feminist that their fighting spread to the political arena. “I have no common cause with suburban housewives,” Beverly proclaimed. “Ladies in pearls are not my constituency.”

“I have no common cause with macho politicos who use women like toilet paper,” Suzanne had yelled back, just as strident, just as angry.

Suzanne’s becoming politically active had not brought them closer but given them one more thing to argue about. But after age seventeen, she had always been able to walk out the door, to escape. Gritting her teeth, she went around to the driver’s side of Marta’s van and climbed in. This time there was no escape.

Beverly

Beverly had been invisible for months. She spoke and no one heard her, for none had the patience to listen while she carefully, deliberately sculpted the words out of pain and air. She made gestures and faces no one noticed. She had no opinions or ideas, since no person listened to them, argued with them, was swayed by them. She was without purpose or effect.

She hated the physical therapy but she went through the motions. The speech therapy she gave herself to wholeheartedly. The occupational therapy she worked at. It was humiliating to be learning like a retarded toddler to dress and undress herself, take herself to the toilet, clean herself, feed herself, get in and out of her walker and her wheelchair. She could use the walker on even ground, but she tired quickly. The wheelchair appeared in some ways more dignified and certainly more comfortable, but it was too wide to pass through many doorways.

Her anger was feeble and throttled. She was often angry, but it was hard to express except by throwing things on the floor, again like a toddler in a high chair. She remembered King Lear, so angry, so foolish, so weak. She thought of herself as Queen Lear. She had lost everything and would gladly die on the moor.

Her speech therapist was a fat woman to whom she had taken an instant dislike the first day, but at the end of a week, she had to admit that Nancy was better than that Dr. Fish she had thought so wonderful in New York. Nancy pushed her hard. She began to get out not only almost every sound she needed to truly speak, but to form complete sentences, even if it took her five minutes. She came to respect Nancy, even to feel warmly toward her. She wished she could go on seeing her even after she left the facility, but it was too far away from Suzanne’s house. She’d be seeing a speech therapist whose office was a few blocks away.

Now Suzanne had finally come to get her out of this pastel prison. But Suzanne had lied to her, had never told her she had let go of Beverly’s home, the apartment where she had lived for the last thirty-one years, in the neighborhood where she knew everybody and everybody knew her. Here she was nobody, just an old lady in a wheelchair who drooled sometimes and couldn’t talk right. There she had been a character with politics, with a history, with a circle of friends—friends she would never see again. People she cared about. When Suzanne had blithely let go of that apartment, she had killed Beverly’s identity, her selfhood, her past. She was furious whenever she thought of that act of cheapness. Suzanne had no right to do that to her.

Now she was going to have Suzanne’s choices thrust down her gullet. Even the house was wrong, a big wooden object with trees and dark ominous rhododendrons and yews all around it, a huge waste of space. It was depressing, a turn-of-the-century monster upper-middle-class people had lived in with servants when her mother had come to this country. It was as if Suzanne had some nutty nostalgia for what Beverly’s mother had never enjoyed: the good life circa 1910 on a street occupied by professionals, yuppies, their precocious children, their computers, their pedigreed dogs and cats. Even their hamsters had pedigrees back twenty generations, all the way to 1994. They drove BMWs, Volvos, Jeep Cherokees, the higher range of Toyotas with an occasional Land Rover and Lexus. Someone else, usually Black or Latina, cleaned their houses. Sometimes another service person, usually white, walked their dogs for them. Beverly did not belong here. Even if she could speak fluently and forcefully, she would have nothing to say to people who lived like this. They had built a ramp so she could wheel herself into the maw of the dark enveloping house. The thought of actually living here was so depressing her eyes burned.

“You should be grateful,” the social worker said, “that you have such a good daughter. She’s taking you in. She’s remodeling her house so you can get around.” They kept telling her she should be grateful, as if to be forced into a corner of someone else’s life when she had always had her own, was something to grovel and mumble thanks about.

“Why…move out…good apartment…South End,” Beverly spoke slowly. It took her three false starts to get out the question.

“Mother, I haven’t lived there in twelve years! You know why I left.”

“Why?”

“I had to get Elena out of that neighborhood.”

“Should’ve…sent her…live with me.”

Suzanne said nothing, her mouth thinning as it did when she was angry.

“Marta…kept her…from jail,” Beverly said.

“She did, yes,” Suzanne agreed. “I’m glad you remember.”

“I remember…all,” Beverly said. “You think I lost…brain?” She wanted to say another word, but she could not recall it. She was always having to substitute one word for another. She knew Suzanne was trying to listen, trying to be patient, but sometimes while she was putting a sentence together like building a wall one brick at a time and then attempting to force those words out through her reluctant apparatus, Suzanne went off to another task, answered the phone, began another conversation.

She was put in a little room off the kitchen. She supposed it had been the maid’s room when this house was built. She imagined an immigrant Irish maid huddling there in tears after a sixteen-hour day of work. It had its own bathroom, whose door had been widened. There were railings everyplace. At least it would be far easier than when she had stayed here at Passover. She slept in a hospital bed, which she would never share with any man as long as she lived. She would never have another lover. No one would ever stroke her breasts again or touch her there or talk silliness to her late at night or in the morning. She would never be held in strong or wiry arms, never press her breasts against a broad hairy chest or feel an erection hard against her belly or thigh.

But her cat was waiting for her. Mao was thinner. His coat felt coarse. They weren’t feeding him right. Probably those two huge orange tabbies took his food away. She would fix that. He was ecstatic to see her, kneading her side, vibrating as if he were all purr-engine. She moved him to her good side where she could hug him. A little feeling had come back on her numb side, but she still could not move that hand. The leg she could move crudely, roughly, dragging it more than walking normally, but at least it supported her.

She was exhausted from the move and she napped, Mao pressed to her side. Whenever she woke, he was there purring. He was the only friend she had left now, the only remnant of her own real life that had
been stolen from her. Grateful, they wanted her to be grateful, for what? Grateful that Suzanne hadn’t thrown her out on the street? She had known bag ladies in her old neighborhood, and she was not convinced their life was any worse than hers right now. At least if she were a bag lady, she’d be in her own neighborhood. Her friends would help her out. They always had.

Karla, her silly sister, had always said she believed in an afterlife. What a word, after life. Well, that was what she was enduring: this was her
after
life.