“Fine,” says Vera. “An offer you couldn’t refuse.”
“Sweetheart,” Lowell says, putting his arms around her. “Please don’t get upset. Don’t think I just came out here because I thought you’d discovered the fountain of youth. And then when it turned out different…” Don’t think it? Vera wouldn’t if Lowell hadn’t suggested it. It’s not the first time he’s planted wild suspicions in her mind. It used to be that the only way she knew what he’d done was by listening to what he denied.
“It’s not like that,” he’s saying. “I needed to see you and Rosie, I love you…” Vera’s not listening; she’s too busy wondering if he was serious about that snake-oil scheme. A long shot, certainly, but after digging for lost Mayan treasure, hawking Flatbush wonder water is practically a sure thing. Vera shuts her eyes, counts silently to ten. When she opens them, she’ll ask him to stay one more time. Once and no more.
“Call Frankie up and explain,” she says. “He’s Italian, he’ll understand. We’re family.”
“It’s not Frankie,” says Lowell. “It’s me. Remember how every time I used to come back, I’d still be picking the thruway gravel from between my splayed, bleeding toes and you’d already be telling me not to get comfortable.”
“Did I say that?” mumbles Vera.
“Now I don’t want to get comfortable. I’m afraid I’ll relax, we’ll have a couple weeks of hillbilly ecstasy, then one night it’s, ‘Lowell, honey, could you run down to the market for a minute?’” Lowell detonates a three-stage explosion in his mouth. “Our red-hot love affair goes down the dumper all over again, and I’m out in the cold howling lonely Arky love songs at the moon.”
“I’ll go to the grocery,” says Vera. “I’ll send Rosie. We’re used to it.”
“Then you’ll find something else,” Lowell says.
“Like what?” Vera says.
“Like you’ve never cut me one goddamn inch of slack. Remember in Mexico? You were all ready to go and leave me to die in the jungle. We had thirty pesos left, and I bought you that sack of cashews—?”
“Twenty,” says Vera. “We had twenty pesos left.”
“Thirty. All right, twenty. That’s not the point. That is the point. Twenty pesos is nothing, we had nothing. Why hang on to nothing? I don’t even like cashews. I just thought they’d make you feel better. And you carried on like I’d traded you to some three-hundred-pound Federale for the worm in his mescal…”
“If you were dying of thirst…” Vera wishes she didn’t sound like the start of some high-school ethics problem, “…and the last Coca Cola on earth cost twenty pesos, twenty pesos would be better than nothing.”
“If there was just one can of soda between me and biting the big one, I’d pass on it,” says Lowell. “Get it over with. Put this poor boy out of his misery.”
“What are we fighting about?” says Vera. “Whether twenty pesos is better than or the same as nothing?”
Lowell laughs, but it’s not the kind of laugh that changes anything. “Sweet pea,” he says. “I meant what I said. I’m too old to keep going up to the Manson family farm to see if anyone needs a rider to share the driving cross-country.”
“What happened to Peter Pan?” says Vera.
“Peter Pan’s got crow’s feet and a bald spot,” he says. “And you don’t even notice. You don’t see me. All you see is some story you’ve been telling yourself about me since before we even met. It won’t change if I leave. You won’t hardly know I’m gone.”
This last is unfair. She’ll notice he’s gone, yes indeed. She’s less sure about the rest. But if she’s not seeing Lowell, who is she seeing? What story is she telling herself? It’s not the world-traveler-can’t-find-the-grocery story; she’s already given that up. The hillbilly-watching-the-river-flow story? If that were true, Lowell would stay with her, or at least in one place, would never have traveled this far to see her. Meanwhile she’s checking his eyes for crow’s feet. Wait, they’ll get crow’s feet together! But that’s not possible, and here’s one version of the story she can’t deny: sometimes two people who love each other can’t live together and get along.
Lowell hefts his bag, then sees the look on Vera’s face and drops it. “I’ll be back in no time,” he says. “Aren’t I always? I’m not saying it won’t happen for us. But there’s still a few things we need to work out. Everything’ll be different when I sell that screenplay, or even Frankie’s book, I won’t have to turn in receipts for every soggy cashew. We’ll get back together, Rosie’ll be a little older, we’ll spend all day in bed…”
Rosie! How can he claim to love her and speak so cavalierly about her getting older? If Vera missed a week of Rosie’s growing up, she’d regret those seven days all her life. “Right,” she says. “Two little gray heads on the pillow.”
“Two sets of false teeth in the glass,” says Lowell. Then he pulls her gently into the kitchen, where Rosie is drinking her two-thousand-calorie Baby-Ruth health drink and patting the overstuffed backpack beside her like one of those nervous passengers in bus stations and airport lounges who fear losing contact with their luggage.
Keep calm, Vera thinks. “What’s going on?” she says.
“We thought Rosie could come to L.A. with me for the rest of her vacation and be back in time for school,” says Lowell.
“We?” Vera says.
“Me and Dad,” Rosie says.
“That’s three weeks!” Vera screams.
“Two,” says Rosie. “Two and a half.”
“I suppose your Mafioso’s paying for this, too.”
“No,” says Lowell. “Sergio the Mystic.”
“She’s not going,” says Vera.
“Mom, why?”
“Because I said so!” says Vera.
“Mom, be reasonable,” Rosie’s saying. But how reasonable can you be with your hands over your ears? Vera’s chained to the mast as they sing their California siren song. She knows better than to listen. She can’t believe or trust them. Why should Rosie come back? It’s warm out there, and Rosie hates the cold. It’s a state full of vegetarians. Lowell won’t make her go to school. They’ll camp out on C.D.’s floor, making retro-hippie Smalltalk with Mafiosi and mystics and all his Big Youth friends…
Vera’s stomach hasn’t lurched this way since her last trip down with Hazel. If only she’d apologized to Hazel, kept her vow, maybe none of this would be happening. Once again the unlikeliest explanation is the most comforting. The harsher truth is that this is what Vera’s been fearing all along, because this—unlike those nightmare visions of Rosie pitched before speeding trains—is waking reality and inevitable. This is the natural order. She’d always known Rosie would grow up and leave her someday; she’d thought she was resigned. But not now, not so soon.
“I’m warning you,” says Rosie. “I’ll run away and go anyway.”
“Try it,” says Vera.
“Two weeks,” says Lowell. “It’ll give you a break.”
“Thanks,” says Vera.
“I won’t stay forever, if that’s what you’re scared of,” says Rosie. “I’d miss my room and my Dungeons and Dragons and ballet and Kirsty…”
“Terrific,” says Vera. “What about me?”
“Of course you, Mom.”
“Girls,” says Lowell. “Girls. Please. Rosie, hon, leave us alone a second. I need to talk to your Mom.” When Rosie leaves, he says, “Look, Rosie and I were talking. I know you two’ve been having difficulties, bashing horns or whatever the does do when the buck’s not around to get pissed at. One day away, she’ll start missing you like crazy. That’s why she loves me so—I’m not here. You think I don’t know that? Two weeks apart will set you guys up for a year.”
Vera’s already given in. The thought of Rosie and Lowell discussing their difficulties wounds her like the notion of Shaefer cueing Esposito to intervene if she spent too long in his office. She remembers how, when Rosie was little, women in line at the supermarket would say, Oh, if they could onl
y stay that age. She thinks of all the ordinary moments she’d be cuddling Rosie or just watching TV with her and would be overcome with longing to stay in that moment forever. Now she understands that keeping Rosie from going with Lowell is as impossible as that.
“All right,” she says. “If you swear—I mean swear—you’ll send Rosie back before school.”
“Cross my heart,” says Lowell, then reaches for Vera and presses her against the place he’s just crossed. Lowell and Vera stand in the doorway, rocking like dancing bears. It’s easy to hug like that when your suitcase is packed: no danger of getting too comfortable. Then it’s Rosie’s turn, and as she rains tiny kisses on Vera’s face, Vera sees that her eyes are wide open. Is she scared that Vera may yet change her mind, or is she—as Vera suspects—just scared? Perhaps she was hoping that Vera would continue to say no. For once Vera controls herself. “Call me when you get there,” she says. “Collect.” Then they’re gone.
Vera picks up the blender jar with what’s left of Rosie’s breakfast glop in it. How good it would feel to throw it against the wall. But how would it console her to spend the next half hour sponging molasses and granola crumbs off the plaster? It’s what would come after the crash: a silence so profound it might for one moment seem to stop time, might edge out the silence that’s come with Rosie and Lowell’s leaving. Vera’s footsteps echo as if in an empty apartment. You’d think they’d taken everything, furniture and all.
First things first. Vera concentrates on not running after them. There’s still time to catch them, persuade them they’re picking the worst time to leave. Now that Vera doesn’t have work they can play, take trips like when Rosie was small. Or better yet: she’ll go with them! She’s getting those three weeks of severance pay, she’s got money saved up…She can’t even convince herself. If they’d wanted her, they’d have asked. She imagines overtaking them by the community garden, pleading her case while Lowell and Rosie read the nametags on the chewed-looking Cut-and-Come-Again zinnias, the stunted Silver Queen corn. She sits down and grips the arms of her chair till she’s sure she can’t possibly catch them and then wishes with all her heart that she had.
Or does she? Vera no longer trusts herself to know what will help. Dinner with Solomon, Rosie’s recital, even seeing Karen Karl—she’d thought those things would make her feel better; they’d only made her feel worse. If she’d run after Rosie and Lowell, she’d probably have been struck by a falling blender jar some other distraught person aimed at the wall and missed.
She knows Rosie’s coming back and, eventually, Lowell. So that’s not it, not really. It’s what they seem to have taken with them: the comfortable myth that their return would ever be anything but temporary, that they’d ever be hers to keep. Their leaving today is just practice. Vera thinks of those women in the supermarkets, wishing their babies had stayed babies—oh, they meant more than that sweet, milky smell, more even than unconditional love. She’s imagining a This Week story about some scientists—Russian, of course—who’ve found a way to stop time. That’s the story she wants to hear! She’s no different from and no better than the folks who read This Week. She needs those stories, too! She envies them their hopes: centenarian moms, eternal Elvis. All hers seems to be disappearing. The myth of a harmonious, unconventional, and never-boring family life with Rosie and Lowell. The myth of her true career revealing itself the minute she stopped working at This Week. Soon she’ll have no stories left to get her through days like today.
If she goes on this way, she’ll panic. First things first. She pours herself a cup of coffee and tries to remember all the things she used to wish she could do if not for Rosie and her job. Simple things, she seems to recall, places it would be nice to go midweek instead of on weekends when everyone else is going there, too. Today she can’t think of one. She opens the paper and reads the listings. She’d have her pick of the new movies without waiting in line, but can’t in her present state see spending hours in the dark watching giant faces talk about their problems. Uncrowded museums? The Met has a new exhibit of eighteenth-century French landscape painting—a period she hates. Who’s showing at the Whitney? That guy who paints and erases.
Reading is out of the question. So is thinking, eating, getting out of her chair. Light filters in through the half-shut blinds, casting shadows on the floor; and as one skims past, Vera hallucinates a small, furry, black creature. If she doesn’t get out of here soon, the place will be crawling with furry black creatures. Leave, says a voice in her head. Go anywhere. A voice? From where? Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish the sound of her own survival instinct from the first harbinger of psychosis.
What to do? If she had a therapist she could ask, the therapist would answer, “What do you want to do?” They’d volley that back and forth for a while. She’d settle for an astrologer, for Karen Karl. No, she doesn’t need a horoscope; she needs a friend. Maybe she should call Lynda and ask her what to do, say: “Lynda, you’re right, they’re all El Creepos.” What would Lynda say? Buy a new outfit. Get your hair done. Let him go. You’re better off. I told you so. That’s life. Vera knows that herself. Louise! She needs to talk to Louise. She dials Louise’s number, but no one answers, and that, too, seems like an omen as Vera sits there, listening to the phone ring and considering her limited options.
One: She could stay home and clean the apartment, which, after thirty-six hours of Lowell, sorely needs it. But the obvious danger is that she’ll wind up grooming the furry black creatures. Two: She could go up to This Week and begin the Herculean task of dismantling her office. In terms of morale, it’s probably the worst move she could make. On the other hand, it’s the only thing that promises that illusory sense of accomplishment she so desires.
So she hangs up the phone, dresses, and on her way out almost stops at Firbank Florists to tell Dick and Kenny the news. Kenny will understand, but Dick will purse his lips and turn Lowell’s leaving into one of life’s wry, bittersweet little jokes. Which it’s not—it’s her life. What’s really inhibiting her is the fear that halfway through her story Kenny and Dick, needing reassurance that something similar won’t happen to them, will reach for one another’s hands and unhinge her completely.
She doesn’t stop till she gets to the newspaper stand by the station, where she gives the blind man a dollar and asks for a pack of Camels. She waits for her change, he waits for more money; nothing transpires till he says, “Dollar twenty,” and she counts out four nickels. When she smoked, she was always shocked by how quickly the price went up. Now it seems like a bargain. Consider heroin. Cocaine.
She rips open the pack, leans against the railing, and lights up. The first one feels like she’s filing her lungs with a rasp, the second’s down to fine-grained sandpaper, the third smells like burning flesh, the fourth tastes just fine, so she lights up a fifth. By now the two winos loitering nearby are watching her with awe. “Got a smoke?” one says. “Sure,” Vera says. “Take two.” Then she hurries into the subway and down to the far end of the platform so she won’t have an audience when she throws up. Even in this she’s a model of delicacy and discretion, leaning gracefully over the tracks to spare the platform maintenance crew any nasty surprises. There’s not much in her stomach—smoke, coffee, bile. Mostly what she’s disgorging is the kind of self-pity that makes her wish she were Rosie’s age, with Mommy and Daddy there to hold her forehead and bring her ginger ale.
By the time the train comes, she’s feeling somewhat steadier. When she stumbles on, she finds she must have wandered back up the platform; she’s in one of the middle cars. Maybe it’s all to the good. If she ran into a screamer today, she’d probably outscream him. At this hour, even the middle’s half-empty; plenty of room for Vera to study her fellow passengers. The trouble is, she can’t see them, can’t hear the train noise, can’t feel anything but a vague nausea and pain in her lungs. Perhaps what’s numbing her is a massive dose of endorphins: the brain’s homegrown. If she were sitting across from Lowell’s double or some
retarded kid in a hippo sweatshirt, she’d be better off not knowing.
Likewise, in the elevator: she’d rather not know why Hazel’s whistling “Stormy Weather” all the way up. Vera’s sure it’s because she’s been fired, but some lurking curiosity about the bounds of her own paranoia makes her ask, “Why so cheery?” Then Hazel tells her how Monday the doctor removed a growth from her breast. “This mornin’,” says Hazel, “his seckatary calls up, she says, ‘Hazel, girl, you home free!’” A shiver crawls up Vera’s spine. She’s moved by Hazel’s reprieve, which she sees as a sign sent by God to remind her that one can do worse than lose one’s job and send one’s daughter off for two weeks in California. Immediately she feels guilty for appropriating this major chapter in Hazel’s life as an exemplary detail in her own, and then, in some misguided gesture of penance, finds herself thinking that now she can start worrying about lung cancer all over again.
“Who knew he got Labor Day off?” is how Carmen greets her. “Not me, not till last night he lets it slip he’s going to Norfolk with his buddies…”
Vera doesn’t ask why Carmen can’t give Frankie some space. She knows being in love makes you want your lover to want to be with you. Even so, Vera’s finding it hard to work up her usual sympathy for the continuing saga. Frankie and Carmen were lovers, Oh, Lordy, how they could love. She wants to tell Carmen that Norfolk is much closer than L.A., that Carmen will be seeing Frankie long before Vera sees Lowell. Carmen, be thankful he’s going with his buddies and not your only child. Mostly what Vera wants to say is, Forget him. Hold out for someone who’d rather be with you. Sure, Vera thinks. Look who’s talking.
Maybe what’s irking her is the THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING sign behind Carmen. Vera reaches into her purse. The crumpled pack is still there, dusting keys and sunglasses with delicious tobacco crumbs. “He’ll come around,” says Vera, knowing how banal she sounds. Carmen does, too. She looks, if anything, more disconsolate than when Vera walked in.
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