Three Women (29 page)

Beverly

Beverly lay in the bed in the room she had been given in Suzanne’s house, rolling from side to side as she had been taught. She faithfully performed the range-of-motion exercises, but she no longer believed in them or anything except her own great fatigue with all of this futile fussing. The doctors had told her that her leg was healing nicely, as if that mattered. Her brain, that had always served her so well, would not heal. The neat sweet connection between mind and body she had always taken for granted was broken. Parts of her body obeyed her still; parts obeyed fitfully, like her voice; parts were dead to her, like her right hand. She had a distant lost foot at the end of the broken leg. Once it had belonged to her. No more.

She had to plot carefully how to get up. Moving herself from the bed
to her wheelchair required every bit of concentration she could muster. When she was finally in the wheelchair, she trembled with fatigue and had to rest before she could wheel herself to the bathroom. Then she must transfer again, to the toilet. Long after she had used it, she sat there resting. She had finally mastered transferring herself to the chair in the shower. The liquid soap hung on an old belt where she could reach it. Her greatest difficulty lay in getting the water just right. Elena had made marks with nail polish where she should turn the two dials for a good mix, but sometimes the water was hotter than other days. Then one morning she slipped, losing her balance. Suzanne heard her fall and acted terrified, then dragged her to the doctor to be tested all over again.

Every movement had to be planned like a military campaign. Every movement had to be calculated and performed with intense concentration. Otherwise she would fall. Otherwise she could break bones. Otherwise she might bang her head and have another seizure. It was boring to think hard about how to soap herself, how to rinse herself. Drying her body was a tricky undertaking. She was still trying to carry that out when she heard someone in the kitchen. The day had begun for the rest of them. Usually it was Suzanne, because Elena had an evening job and slept late. Now Beverly would have breakfast in bed, because by this time she was exhausted and had to rest. The effort of showering and drying wore her out. Suzanne brought food in on a tray.

After her oatmeal, toast, juice, and coffee, she promptly fell asleep. When she woke, the house was quiet. The phone’s ringing had awakened her. She did not move, although there was an extension within reach of her arm. Trying to answer the phone and make herself understood was an agony she would never go through again. It was humiliating. Besides, someone had answered it already, Elena or the answering machine.

She must get up and put clothes on. She rang her bell. Rang it again. It would be much faster if Elena helped her. The physical therapist was coming at ten-thirty, so she had to be out of bed and decent. Had she done the exercises she was supposed to do? She remembered doing them, but sometimes she got confused and thought she had done some task that she had really last done the day before. The days blurred into one another, melting into a featureless lump like melted wax. She slept so
much that half the day was gone into unconsciousness, and the rest was disjointed into uneven segments by her napping.

“Oh, it was just somebody from the restaurant, wanting a ride tonight.” Elena helped her dress. These days all Beverly ever wore were sweats that closed with Velcro. Anything else was too difficult to get on or off, except for two caftans Elena had bought her. She liked those best. She had always had contempt for people her age who slopped around in sweats, but now she was one of them. At least the caftans hinted that she had once been a woman. She especially liked the green one with glints of gold embroidery that Elena had bought from her first restaurant paycheck.

The physical therapist was about thirty. She had too much forehead, going up and up over her thick brows, making her eyes appear small. They were like round blue dots behind her glasses, like the eyes children drew. She smelled of mints and more lightly of sweat. Today they did a lot of arm and shoulder exercises, the therapist moving the arm for her, placing a hand on her elbow and taking her hand in the therapist’s own. Lifting the arm up over her head, then slowly down. Then the same slow dance out to the side. Moving the fingers of the dead hand. Moving the thumb. Before her second stroke, she had begun to have some feeling in that hand, but it was gone—like almost everything else she had cherished.

All but one. Elena. She missed Sylvia, their constant discussions of the news and society in general. She had asked if Sylvia could not come back at least sometimes, but Suzanne had learned she had another full-time job. If she were still a normal person, she could have called Sylvia and chatted. After the physical therapist left, not to be back till Thursday (she came twice a week), Beverly once again slipped down into the sleep of exhaustion. When Elena woke her for lunch, she had been dreaming. She had been a fugitive, running through abandoned buildings with the footsteps of the red squad behind her. They were after her. They were going to beat her. She was running for her life.

Her heart was still pounding in her chest when Elena woke her, repeating, “Grandma, Grandma. Lunchtime.”

She insisted on getting out of bed (she was still dressed) to have her lunch. “Next week, you’ll get that cast off,” Elena said as she maneu
vered the wheelchair into the kitchen. “Won’t you be glad to see the last of that?”

“It…ches.”

“I broke my wrist once.”

Beverly nodded wildly, crookedly, holding up her good left arm. Meaning she had done so herself: had her wrist broken.

“I remember the itching under the cast. How was your therapy?”

Beverly shrugged on her left side. “Wha?” Pointing.

“Oh, the soup. Hot and sour Chinese. And mu shu pork. After all, neither Suzanne nor Rachel is here, right? So we can sneak us some pig meat.”

Beverly grinned.

“I figure if I roll the pancakes up for you, you can eat them one-handed.”

Beverly nodded. “Good to me.” It came out more like Goo tommy, but Elena understood and nodded back.

“I try, Grandma, I try. You know, Jim and I haven’t said one word to each other since that Monday.”

“Pig.”

“I don’t want to talk to him. He hangs around at odd moments waiting for me, but I don’t let him catch me. I have nothing to say to him that isn’t obscene.”

“Big pig.”

“You think talking about pork made me think of him?” Elena chuckled. “I’ll hide the trash away at the bottom of the bag, and Suzanne will never guess we were wicked. Okay, finish off your soup and I’ll start rolling pancakes.”

Beverly had been astonished when Marta had shown up with Suzanne to take her back in the van. She had assumed that Suzanne and Elena would have moved into an apartment somewhere. No, it was back to the same apartment in Brookline with Marta upstairs, and Marta and Suzanne apparently still best friends. If only she could speak well enough to ask, but two-word sentences were all she could manage. That didn’t make for an effective interrogation procedure, especially when she was prying for the delicate, the uncomfortable, the stuff Suzanne would rather leave unsaid. Elena too seemed to accept the situation. All the
women were still living here, and only the man was gone. Elena told her that Marta had thrown Jim out, and that he was furious about it. Beverly thought he ought to be grateful she hadn’t shot lower.

She no longer considered Jim worthy of Elena. He had shown himself to be a coward, throwing Elena aside to protect himself. Her good hand fluttered on the table. There was so much she wanted to say to Elena, so much she wanted to teach her, to share with her, and the effort of sputtering out two words exhausted her resources. She touched Elena’s hand. “Sweet,” she burst out. “You.”

“Yeah, sweet like a rattlesnake. I’ve learned something, believe me.”

Beverly shook her head.

“Yes, Grandma. I went after him.” Elena sighed. “Never mind. I’m doing fine. I don’t think I’m cut out to inspire a grand passion in some guy.”

Beverly disagreed with wild head shaking. Then she printed on a pad
J?

Elena looked at her blankly.

Beverly laboriously printed JAKE TRIAL?

Elena looked blank. “He’s still out in California. You’ll have to ask Suzanne. I didn’t know you’d gotten to be friends with him.”

They hadn’t, because she couldn’t talk with him. She understood his situation and how badly things might go for him in court. If the lumber interests owned the judge, as it seemed they did, then he could really be screwed. She didn’t think Suzanne had grasped how vulnerable he was to the conspiracy charge. He hadn’t taken his defense seriously because he thought it was a minor case, but she had seen organizers railroaded for twenty years just for doing what he had done. It was hopeless. Before her second stroke, she had thought about E-mailing him, but she had not gotten around to it before she could no longer use the computer. She liked him, his presence, his energy, his political strength. Suzanne had made a good choice this time, but he was in bigger trouble than he seemed to understand, unless the judicial system had changed more than she thought it had.

Elena had cleared the table and made them both espresso. “Now what would you like? Would you like me to cut up a pear?”

Beverly shook her head no.

“Maybe later. Those Bosc pears I got are pretty good. I pick out fruit better than Suzanne does.”

Beverly nodded.

“But what would you like, Grandma?”

Beverly decided to risk telling the truth. “To die.” She held Elena’s gaze with her own, never wavering. “To die!”

Suzanne

Suzanne came abruptly awake. It was 2:00
A.M.
and the phone was ringing. She did not pick it up. She had endured middle-of-the-night phone calls from clients before, and it was best to answer them the next day, unless they had just been busted. Those kinds of phone calls had mostly ceased when she became an academic instead of a full-time lawyer. She sat up in bed, listening while her heart pounded from the sudden jolt into consciousness and the adrenaline slowly receded in her veins. She was especially annoyed because she was getting so little sleep these days. Only after Beverly fell asleep in the evening, did she get to her briefs, her classes, her own work.

“Mother! Mother!” It was Rachel, although it did not sound like her.

“Rachel?” She grabbed at the receiver on the combination answering machine and phone that sat beside her bed. “Are you hurt?” Bombing was the first thing she thought of.

“I’m so humiliated!” Rachel began to sob bitterly.

“What’s wrong?” She turned on the bedside light and sat up, mounding the pillows behind her and disturbing the two orange cats, who had been sleeping, one pressed against her right thigh and one against her left.

Rachel was sobbing, and at first Suzanne could not make out what she was saying. It had to do with her marriage, she could tell that much. Patiently she waited for coherence.

“We started it a month ago. That was when your ketubah finally arrived and the letters from our rabbis. So we got our court date.”

“Court date? Who’s your lawyer?”

“A rabbinical court, Mother, the Beit Hadin. We were supposed to be proving we’re Jewish and single. There’s an enormous amount of paperwork, but we had everything, we thought. We had two witnesses from school to testify we each were Jewish and single. One of them was my friend Zipporah, and they wouldn’t accept her because she was female. I didn’t even bother telling you about that. So we got another court date. Another three weeks.”

“Women aren’t witnesses?”

“Apparently it’s a matter of luck. Remember, this is an Orthodox court. Things are so weird here, they assume everybody who practices the religion is Orthodox. Like there’s only one flavor and it’s walnut. It’s pure luck which rabbis you get. How much fuss they decide to make. But this time was worse. When they got to me and I explained I was studying to be a rabbi, Mother, it was as if I said I was a prostitute. They were furious. It was awful, Mother, awful! They were so nasty you wouldn’t believe it, what they said to me. So I walked out.”

“You can get married at home, sweetheart. Really, it’d be better for all of us.”

“Well, we’re not getting married at all, so you don’t have to worry about it!” Rachel began to sob all over again.

“But, Rachel, you can get married here. So it was a nice gesture to marry in Israel, but you’ll be just as married if you do it in Brookline or Philadelphia. And you’ll have your choice of a dozen rabbis.”

“Michael was furious at me for walking out. He didn’t understand why I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and put up with it. Well, he’s a man, and Orthodoxy is made for him. I just got furious that he couldn’t understand how insulted I was and how ashamed. So we had a huge fight. It started in Koresh Street, and went on all the way home on the bus, although we shut up then because other people started to butt in. We went at it when we got back, and we broke up and that’s all there is to it!”

“Rachel, it was a devastating experience for you. But you love each other. You’ll come back from this.”

“Never! I saw a side of Michael I’d never seen. A side that thinks
that a woman is less of a Jew than a man, no matter what he says, no matter what he pretends. I cannot be married to that. I can’t!”

“Rachel, don’t make up your mind about him yet. Give yourself a little cooling off time. Give him some space and take some yourself.”

“Not likely,” Rachel said, far more soberly. “I don’t think I can forget that he didn’t back me up and he just wanted me to shut up and let those old men pour shame on my head.”

“Then don’t forget. But maybe you can forgive. Or maybe at least you can begin communicating again.” Why am I arguing so hard on his behalf? Suzanne wondered. I scarcely know him and I wasn’t crazy about him in the first place. But Rachel really seemed to love him and to want to be with him.

Rachel sighed heavily, and for a moment the lines between them were silent, both of them hearing only each other’s breathing and the echoey metallic sound of the connection. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Mother.”

“Rachel? If you could call before two
A.M.
our time? It would really help, sweetheart. And try not to be so upset. I’m sure everything is going to turn out all right, somehow.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t think about the time, Mama.”

“Don’t worry, dear. And try to call Aunt Karla too. She will want to know what’s happening. I know she was planning to go over for your wedding. She already bought tickets.”

Suzanne found the task of helping Beverly shower and dress uncomfortable. She had a deep feeling she should not see her mother’s naked body, more a sense of impropriety than squeamishness, for the actual sight of Beverly’s withered flesh produced mostly compassion. Beverly had always been vain and careful about who saw her in various states. Suzanne knew she had seen her mother naked when she had been a little girl, but she doubted she had seen her that way since she was twelve—and Beverly, around thirty-five and stunning. It was humiliating to Beverly, who kept her head averted and would not meet her gaze. She was almost pouting. “Water…not…hot.” It actually sounded like wa-ah naw haw, but in the context was clear.

“I’ll make it hotter. The last time, it was too hot for you. Maybe I should get one of those bath thermometers?”

“Silly.”

“I want to get the shower right for you. You enjoy it if I get it right.” Suzanne knew there wasn’t much Beverly did enjoy these days.

Beverly nodded. She pointed at the shower gel that smelled of a combination of rose and lavender. “Nice.”

Suzanne was glad she had done something right. Elena and she had to make up for the lack of help—for the bills simply mounted higher and higher. Suzanne did not think that Beverly complained as much with Elena, but she was hard put to please her mother—as it always had been and apparently always would be. “Mother, I want to do everything right for you, but it seems I never please you.”

Beverly actually smiled. “Wash back. Gently.”

Carefully, slowly, Suzanne ran the washcloth over Beverly’s back. Every knob of her spine stood out like wooden beads on a child’s necklace. She had owned such a necklace herself, of orange wooden beads. Beverly had brought it back from Copenhagen, when she had gone to a conference with European union officials. She had been angry with her mother for not taking her. They were so often angry with each other. What a waste of time and energy.

Rachel called next in the morning. She was calmer, more elegiac. “I was so in love with Jerusalem. Now I want to run home. Now this isn’t home any longer, but a foreign country.”

“Ah, dearest, as with most infatuations and disillusionment, the truth is somewhere in between.”

“I know, Mother. I’m not about to run away. I just have to digest all this…. I’ve been so good. When I go into Mea Shearim or the Old City, no matter how warm it is, I wear long skirts and blouses with sleeves. I go bundled up the way I used to in New York when I was going to visit Grandma or Aunt Karla, the way you put on layers in spite of the heat because of men in the street. Here it’s because they throw things at you.” Rachel sniffled, but her voice was clear and resonant. “I was so respectful of their weird ideas. So meek and obedient to rules I not only don’t believe in, but intensely despise.”

“But Michael didn’t make the culture of the Orthodox.”

“Michael can go fuck himself!”

Suzanne shook her head. It was extraordinary for Rachel to use profane language. “You’re still angry with him,” she said mildly.

“I’ve never in my life been so conscious of being a feminist. I feel like a one-woman parade through Jerusalem. It’s schizophrenic here. I meet such strong wonderful capable women, and in the eyes of their religion, they don’t count. I don’t count.”

“I support you whatever you decide,” Suzanne intoned, realizing how often in the more recent years of her daughters’ lives, she had used that phrase. “You have to sit down with Michael and try to reach an understanding, even if it’s that you aren’t suited to each other.”

Rachel blew out her breath, sounding for a moment like Elena. “You can say that again.”

When Suzanne did grab a moment to call Karla from her office while she ate a yogurt and thumbed through a speech Jaime had updated for her, Karla already knew. “It’s so sad for her, it’s heartbreaking. She’s such a good girl, and never deserved such shame and trouble. If I could fly over there, I would.”

“Can you get your money back on the tickets?”

“The travel agent says they’re refundable, minus a service fee. So what can I do?”

Over long-distance, they sighed and commiserated.

Rachel was back to E-mail, which signaled to Suzanne that her daughter was slowly recovering. Rachel told her more details of the battle in rabbinical court. She reported comments of her fellow students and teachers.

The cast was finally off, but Beverly had regained little mobility. Without Sylvia or anyone filling in as primary caretaker, it was up to Elena and Suzanne to do most of what needed to be done for Beverly. One or another of the agency employees came in three mornings a week, but otherwise they were on their own with her. Elena took the whole day shift on Monday and Tuesday, when the restaurant was closed. Otherwise she took over at one and stayed with Beverly until four, when she had to leave for work. Suzanne got home as quickly as she could, but there were days when Beverly had to remain alone from four until seven. None of them liked that, but there was nothing Suzanne could do. Weekends she took over.

Suzanne was back to making supper or bringing home takeout Wednesday through Sunday, as Elena ate at the restaurant with the staff from four-thirty to five-fifteen. Home meals had to be something easy for Beverly to eat, as she hated needing help with her food. If Suzanne cut the fish into bite-size pieces before she brought it to the table, Beverly found that acceptable, but not if Suzanne tried to cut the food on her plate. Tonight it was a fish and potato stew she had cooked from scratch—a fast scratch. She was learning entrées that took no more than twenty minutes to cook, or she just couldn’t manage. Beverly seemed to find the soup satisfactory, although Suzanne knew it probably tasted bland to her. Then they hobbled together back into the bedroom.

“Mother, this is what I want. We’ve wasted so much of our lives arguing, disagreeing, trying to make the other more like ourselves. It’s hard to break old habits, but maybe we could begin to be gentler and more loving with each other?”

“Loving…” Beverly repeated. She lay back on the propped-up pillows, exhausted from the bath but relaxed. There was a scent of the shower gel about her, instead of the musty smell that often clung to her crippled body. “Love me?”

“Yes, I love you. In spite of how badly we’ve gotten along. In spite of never feeling I please you. You’re my origin, my source, my first family.
You were the earliest image of beauty I had. Your face. Of course I love you.”

“Then…help me…die.” It took Beverly almost two minutes to get the phrase out, her face knotted with the effort.

Suzanne stared at her mother. “Help you to die?”

“Tired…Useless…Ready.”

“Mother, you’re not close to death. You could live for years. I don’t think you’re in great pain. Haven’t we made you feel welcome?”

“Can’t do…any…thing.”

“You’re bored.”

Beverly slowly nodded, her head lolling to one side. “Never…before use…less.”

“You’ve worked so hard all your life, why do you have to be working? What do you think you have to be accomplishing?”

Beverly shook her finger at Suzanne, pointing.

“You mean I’m the same way.”

Beverly nodded. “Tired.”

Suzanne looked at her mother, trying to understand. “Everything is difficult for you. Eating. Going to the toilet. Dressing. Bathing. Speaking.”

“Tired.”

“So you really wish you could die?”

“Now. Soon. Help me.”

Suzanne did not reply as she went off to her room, warm tears sliding down her cheeks. Elena stayed that night with her new boyfriend, Sean. Suzanne did not get to speak to her privately until Saturday morning, when she motioned Elena into her office and shut the door.

“Beverly said something really disturbing to me the night before last. She said she wanted to die. She was serious, Elena. She said she wanted help to die.”

Elena nodded, slinging herself sideways across a chair with arms. “She’s been saying that to me for about a month, Mom. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I don’t know what to do. But it’s mean, it’s cruel to ignore her.”

They met each other’s gaze. “You know, it would be considered murder,” Suzanne said. “Mostly people don’t get convicted, but sometimes
they do. Prosecutors always try to get a conviction. I’m not convinced we need another criminal case in this family. And I’m not convinced she has a right to ask this of us. She’s not in enormous pain. She could live for years.”