Vida (66 page)

She got Natalie and said the few words in code that would establish where and when their real call would occur. “Hey, how’s your weight? Did you lose ten pounds yet?”

“Nine! Off my hips” Natalie sounded choked with excitement.

“Off your hips, o-kay! And how are your first, second and third children?”

“My second is best. The first is okay. The third is … out”

Therefore she would call Natalie at 9 A
.M.
on one of the pay phones from their second list. The lawyer she set up an appointment with late in the afternoon of the next day. Again the lawyer insisted on meeting in Manhattan. She got Dr. Manolli’s answering service. Useless. She had to talk to him. She would have to call later.

Joel stood at the window of their motel room, staring at the parking lot gray with snow. “This time
I’ll
see the lawyer.”

“How come?” She was startled. Simultaneously she felt how much easier seeing Natalie would be if she didn’t have to run into Manhattan and what a poor basis for decision that was.

“How come not? The contact was made when we met Mrs. Richter. That bitch lawyer knows me. In fact, she seemed a lot more comfortable with me than she did with you.”

“She’s a woman who relates to men more easily than to other women. We should encourage this?”

“We should try to reform her while collecting our money in tens and twenties?” Joel snorted, pinching his nose. “The truth is, you don’t trust me not to botch it.”

The truth was, she hardly did. She was used to doing things herself. Joel was impulsive, moody, easily distracted; and she had to trust him in the long run. “Why do you want to do it?”

“Because, nook, it’s dangerous for you to go into Manhattan.”

“You too.”

“The Feds don’t sit around with my photo. I’m a face among a hundred thousand. When they put the collar on one of
us,
it don’t even make the evening news … I never lived in this city. Nobody in New York cares who I am.”

She hugged herself. “Why go alone? We could both go.”

“That’s just as dangerous for you as going alone. And yes, I want to go. You have to put it in my hands.”

“All right” She had a dreadful sense of letting go. If anything went wrong, it would be her fault before the Network.

Natalie was thinner and her color was poor, her face broken out for the first time since she had tried the pill. Vida took Natalie’s face between her hands, saying foolishly, “You went to prison for me.”

“Well, aren’t you worth forty days of idiocy and minor brutality?”

Startling herself, she giggled.

“You’re supposed to deny it was for me.”

“I beg your pardon. Let me take that again, sweetie. Oh, no, dear sister, it was not for thee. I did it for Goddess and country. The movement. Herstory. The glorious revolution.”

She held Natalie’s hand as they walked a path among towering firs. A few inches of grimy snow layover the hillside, but the sun glinted on the glassworks of tiny icicles on the dark branches. They were meeting, as so often, in the Botanical Garden in the Bronx, where Vida had come by train and Natalie by car. “But it does make me feel guilty.”

“I did it for me too. After all, I have to live with myself. I’m liking myself better these days.”

“Because you went inside? Because you took a stand?”

Natalie waved her arm. “Because of surviving it—the noise, the awful food, the lack of privacy.
Time!
I’ll swear I’ll never waste another day in my whole life dawdling around the house feeling depressed and unable to get out of my robe. Reading week-old newspapers and doing three tasks at once halfheartedly while the TV spills out talk shows”

“Don’t be ridiculous! You waste less time than anyone I know”

“You don’t know, sweetie. For years I’ve had down days. Days I just can’t cope. Can’t get on with anything. Can’t get up and out or at it or whatever.”

“Not enough to keep you from being invaluable politically.” Then she remembered herself years before denying other confidences Natalie had offered about how she felt boxed in, ignored, walked over as a wife and mother. “Do you feel guilty about … down days?”

“Sure. But I’m beginning to think they had something to do with Daniel. For years and years I’ve treated him like the weather, the climate. Something given. My husband.”

“Why didn’t you ever leave him, Natty? Why?”

“Why didn’t he ever leave me?”

“I can’t understand. You weren’t happy with him since, oh, maybe six months after Sam was born”

“Funny we both pinpoint it there … I don’t know why, it makes me feel good that you remember it the way I do.”

She stopped. “I haven’t given you enough. Ever. I moved into your home. I moved into your life. Same way in New York, I arrived raw and bleeding. I’ve never given you enough.”

“Well, I’m the one always feeling guilty and having to be nice. That puts me at a disadvantage. But don’t change the subject. I’ve been realizing things about how I acted with Daniel. I took responsibility for a lot of my life, but I always treated him as a given. I think I felt as long as I had him, I was all right—respectable, married, secure. You know, I think my mother dying scared me a whole lot.”

Something. A cold finger touched her. “Natalie, what do you have to tell me? Natalie!” She grasped her by the arms.

Natalie looked away and then into her eyes, almost embarrassed. “A week ago, baby—six days. Last Tuesday. I flew out there for the funeral” She put her arms around Vida.

“Why didn’t you … “ But how could anyone reach her, tell her? “Mama’s dead? Ruby’s dead?”

Natalie nodded, holding her tight. She felt squashed. Angrily she thrust Natalie away and walked off the path into deeper snow, kicking it up with her boots. Boots Natalie had bought her in the fall at Filene’s, she remembered aimlessly. Her head hurt. She ran into a fir as if it had suddenly leaped in front of her. The pain helped. She kicked the tree, kicked it again and again till her toes were bruised. She banged her head on the bark till Natalie seized her from behind. Then she turned, struck Natalie’s shoulder and collapsed against her. She could scarcely tell what she felt. She was buffeted; she lurched and turned. It seemed to her she felt nothing but long shuddering tremors, the cracks in things.

They stumbled on, holding each other. Tears dripped down Natalie’s round cheeks. When Vida hugged Natalie, Natalie’s curly hair got in her eyes. They walked on through the firs till they emerged on one side of the conservatory. The sun striking the icy crust of a hedge hurt her eyes—broken glass it seemed. “How could she forgive me? I wasn’t with her.”

“It happened in the night. She had her third attack in the middle of the night.” Natalie tugged at her arm. “It’s cold. Let’s go inside.”

She let herself be towed. “Paul will say I killed her”

“He won’t say anything of the sort” Natalie nudged her along toward the winter entrance of the conservatory, fumbling for her purse to pay for both of them. “She rallied after she saw you. They were talking about letting her go home in a week or two.”

“Did Sharon catch on to what was happening that night?”

“You bet your boots. And the funeral was swarming with FBI and red squad. All those guys in suits standing at the back making notes, while the rabbi did one of those She was a real Yiddishe Mama routines.”

“Ruby? That would have made her spitting mad.”

“I felt like she was poking me in the ribs. I used to get mad when she did that. Sticking her sharp elbow in our ribs … Did you ever feel embarrassed by her when we were kids?”

“By Ruby?” She was startled, following Natalie into the Orangery, where the scent of orange blossoms perfumed the air, lush after the outdoors. She did not want to breathe the perfumed air. “No. She was so vivid. I’d just get pissed with her for being hardheaded.”

“I mean, we’d bring her to school for some event and she’d listen to the Principal and poke us in the ribs and hiss, Baloney! Other mothers didn’t do that. In the hospital all the nurses and orderlies were telling her their love lives. She knew who was sleeping with who on every floor”

“Did she ever find out you were in the jug?”

Natalie blew her nose. “Come on, the john’s just ahead. I can wash my face. Paul! After swearing everybody to secrecy, he let it out himself”

“But you never got to see her again?”

Natalie shook her head no. “I was going to fly this weekend with the kids. Sandy had sent me money for plane fare. I used it up for the funeral. I’m just glad I got out in time.”

They were framed in the mirror side by side: Natalie’s face red and moist; hers, dry and stiff.

“It’s dirty, how they get us! She dies and we can’t be there. That’s how they hurt us. I let her down. I saw her when I could, but I should have tried harder. It was risky. She couldn’t learn to take care. She always thought I was just playing some kind of silly game”

“But sweetie, she had a good life.”

“Not the first two thirds … She was happy with Sandy, wasn’t she?”

They drifted arm in arm through a room of monstrous topiary shapes. Puerto Rican men were playing cards, men in their fifties and sixties, while a row of women chatted under a tree that grew up to the high white metal-and-glass dome. “I think so.” Natalie scratched her head. “They fought a lot. It used to startle me. He never fought with my mother that way, screaming in the kitchen. She got to him—that was it. She fascinated him the way my own mother never did. He was excited by her, she got under his skin, and he learned how to shout and rave … I used to do that with Suki. We’d shout at each other.”

“You and I have always been able to lose our tempers.”

“When we’re close. Not when we were fighting about politics all the time, remember? But I never could do it with Daniel.”

“Oh, come on, you fought all the time. I remember.”

“Not like you scream and hurt and kiss and make up. It’s like a battle under the surface, where you’re always fighting about the telephone bills and when will we get the furnace cleaned, but you’re really fighting about how come you don’t make love with me anymore and how can you make such a fuss about that little creep?”

Her legs buckled. She did not know how it happened, but she was sinking. Natalie pressed her back onto a park bench under an African tree with a punched metal label hung on it. They were in a long room shaped like a big quonset hut, all white metal and glass, with large aggressive plants around them like philodendron run amok. She felt drunk. Her eyes ran. She felt out of control, out of equilibrium, dizzy, attacked in all her senses, her head about to break open and spill. Silently she wept, while Natalie plied her with tissue after tissue.

“Hold on,” Natalie was saying. “Poor baby.”

“Natty, she never got to meet Joel! She wanted to so bad. She would have flirted with him. He likes being flirted with. It puts him at ease”

“Sometimes I used to wish I was Ruby’s daughter” Natalie was daubing at Vida’s face. “It seemed to me if I’d been born Ruby’s daughter, I’d be beautiful like you and slender like you and know how to wrap men around my finger”“

“Oh, Natty, I always get wrapped. I know how to attract, but I never keep my head. Once I’m involved, it’s all the way—plunge, splash, drown. You only thought that because I wasn’t real attracted to the boys we went to high school with. I think it was a class thing. They were too bland. I wanted a bit of electricity. A taint of danger”

Natalie smiled wryly. “Well, you got what you wanted, in aces.”

As two young men entered the room, automatically she signaled Natalie that they should move. They strolled onward. The air was cooler, moister in the next room. Ferns. “Inside, I got a funny message from Lohania. Then they told me I had a visitor one day and it was her. They let her see me. I was pretty suspicious,” Natalie said.

“What did she want, Natty? Is she connected to Randy? How did she look?”

“She’s maintained on methadone by him. It’s all quite legal and it binds her like a leash … She looked not so good. She was nervous, tense.”

“But she’s working for Randy. You didn’t say anything to her?”

“Now you think I’m stupid all of a sudden?” Natalie squeezed her arm. The next room was unpleasantly moist, so they kept moving. “Oh, look” Natty pointed ahead. “There’s a bench in the desert.”

“I like the desert,” Vida said, since Eva wasn’t around to draw hope from that statement. The sun was almost down in a blaze of red that seeped through the glass to fire the cactus, gnarled, knobby, menacing. “What did Lohania want?”

“She asked about you. I maintained I hadn’t seen you in years. She didn’t believe me. She said Kevin still feels ripped off by the Network and that they haven’t done shit since he was booted out. Then she said to me, In the middle of all this mess, he’s still real, you know that? He’s got his politics still. She said I’d see I was wrong about him. Now, what does that mean?”

Vida shrugged angrily. “I don’t suppose it means a thing except that Kevin’s buying light time by shooting off his mouth. Randy and Kevin always did get along” Briefly her eyes began to run again. She took another paper handkerchief from Natalie. “I hope you have a lot of these?”