Fashionably Late

by Olivia Goldsmith

  Lies. Nothing but lies. Jeffrey, Lisa, Belle. Was there anyone in her family who hadn’t lied to her?

  It was twilight when Karen pulled up to the house. In the dusk, it looked even smaller and more ordinary than usual. Was it getting shabby? Arnold had never been interested in keeping it up, but Belle’s relentless nagging had at least ensured that the paint didn’t peel, or the shrubs get too long without it being taken care of. Karen strode up the cement walk and couldn’t be bothered to press the stupid chimes. Instead, she pounded on the door. She felt like pounding. Pounding was a very good idea right now. But despite her noises, there wasn’t any response.

  There also wasn’t a light visible from the street. What would she do if no one was there? She couldn’t imagine cooling her heels at the Dunkin’ Donut, or sitting on the stoop to wait for Belle to come home the way she had when she was a little girl in Brooklyn. Belle had to be there. Her mother had to be there.

  And she was. It took another minute of pounding, but then Belle, wearing a lavendar chenille robe, opened the door. ‘Karen,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here? Shh. You’ll wake your father. He’s sleeping in the den. Anyway, what are you doing here now?’

  Karen pushed passed her. It was a good question. What was she doing here? Was she going to scream? Smack Belle? Pound her until she was limp on the floor? Karen didn’t want blood, but then she’d never really believed Belle had any blood in her. Probably she was stuffed, like an expensive sofa. Yes, Karen would like to pound the stuffing out of Belle. For once, Karen felt good that she was taller, broader, bigger, and stronger than her mother. She’d like to grab the little woman and shake her until her teeth rattled. She stood in the center of the stupid mirrored living room, the room where lies had been told and reflected, where false lives had been lived for almost thirty years. Smashing all the mirrors might be a good place to start, Karen thought, and looked around the room wildly. Belle had followed her and crossed her arms, as she habitually did, across her chest. Sure. Typical. Belle always had protected herself, closed herself off, and refused the breast to Karen. For all Karen knew, Belle had spent her whole marriage refusing to let Arnold near her breasts.

  ‘Karen, what is it?’ Belle’s voice sounded more than curious. Did she actually sound concerned? Frightened?

  ‘You lied to me,’ Karen said. ‘You have lied to me for a very long time.’

  Belle looked at her and for once – maybe for the first time in their whole life together – Belle was silent. No justifications, no defensiveness, no nothing. Except, maybe, a gleam of fear in her eyes.

  ‘You heard about the stock already?’ Belle asked.

  ‘Stock? What stock?’ Karen asked, confused. But she wouldn’t let Belle distract her. ‘I’m not talking about that.’

  ‘About what then?’ Belle asked, but Karen could tell she knew.

  ‘You told me I was adopted. How could you? How could you deny me?’ Karen felt tears welling up into her eyes, but she wasn’t going to weep now. She had drenched two pillows on the flight back from Chicago and she doubted there was any moisture left in her. She felt as if she’d been turned from flesh to something much drier and harder. Not steel, but wood perhaps. Except does wood shake the way she was shaking? She knew that her trembling wasn’t from weakness; it was pure anger. She almost laughed bitterly at that thought. Anger was far too puny a word to describe this overwhelming rage.

  ‘Not here,’ Belle said. ‘Come into the bedroom.’

  Like a child, Karen followed her mother down the hall. Why was it always this way? Secrets. Don’t tell Lisa but … I’m doing this for you but don’t let your father know … If I tell you, promise you won’t tell your mother … Karen was sick of it all.

  They walked into the bedroom. The bed was covered with various articles of clothing, bits and pieces of Belle’s wardrobe that she was sorting and nursing with that obsessive care that she reserved for her garments – checking buttons, removing lint, pressing out creases. Karen ignored it all and turned to her mother. She wasn’t going to let Belle control her or sap her anger. ‘You lied to me,’ she repeated. ‘You told me I was adopted.’

  ‘Well, you were adopted,’ Belle said. And Karen could hardly believe it. The trip down the hallway, or the comfort of being surrounded by her things, had given Belle enough time to regroup. The defensiveness had already crept back into her voice. But with her it sounded like authority, not defense. She’d already moved her hands from her elbows to her hips. Was she going to try to deny the whole thing, Karen’s whole reality? This time, no cigar. Even Belle didn’t have the stamina to pull that off. Belle looked away from Karen for a moment, into one of the three-way mirrors that reflected the two of them. ‘Arnold adopted you. I have the papers to prove it.’

  Karen’s jaw actually dropped. In the most important conversation between them, Belle was going to pull this kind of sophistry? What length would she go to to avoid the truth and avoid admitting how wrong she’d been? ‘We’re not talking about my father. You know that,’ Karen said.

  ‘Well, when I said you were adopted, it wasn’t a lie.’

  ‘So it was a sin of omission, not a sin of commission? That makes it okay?’

  ‘What is she talking about?’ Belle asked her closet. ‘Has she become some kind of Catholic?’

  ‘Cut the shit, Belle. You know what I’m talking about. Why didn’t you tell me you were my real mother? Why did you let me believe that you weren’t?’

  Belle snapped her head in an impatient jerk. ‘I always said you were my daughter. And I always treated you like my daughter. When did I ever say otherwise? Never. I never said otherwise. There was no difference between the way I treated you and your sister. If anything, you got more attention. You got everything you wanted. And from the beginning you were difficult. From the beginning you wanted your own way. And you got it. We moved out here for you, we sent you to good schools, you went to camp. When did you go hungry? When did …’

  ‘Stop it!’ Karen screamed. ‘If you keep this up I swear to God I’ll kill you. We are talking about a lie. You robbed me all this time. I thought that you had adopted me. I thought you loved me, and I thought there was some other woman who may or may not have loved me, but gave birth to me. Now I find out that there was no other woman. There was only you. And you didn’t love me or you never would have farmed me out in the first place, or denied your own child all this time.’

  ‘How dare you! How dare you judge me or raise your voice to me?’

  Karen rolled her eyes. ‘Belle, I am asking you to stop thinking about you for just ten minutes. Just for ten minutes, Belle, I want you to try to think about me. I want you to try and think about what it was like to grow up in this house and blame anything that wasn’t right on the adoption. I wasn’t pretty like Lisa because I was adopted. We didn’t get along because I was adopted. You weren’t affectionate because I was adopted. And if I, sometimes, felt that I didn’t love you, I had to be very careful, because I was adopted. I kept a space, a hole in me, that was reserved for my real mother’s love. I had to do it to survive. And there was another space, a hole in me, because my real mother had given me up. I didn’t need to waste all that space, Belle! I didn’t need to be so empty. You didn’t give me a bad life. You didn’t beat me. You didn’t starve me. A lot of kids had it a lot worse. But you gave me those spaces and you gave yourself this big burden, this wall between us. Why would you want to do that? Why would you want to lie?’

  Karen paused. She shook her head. ‘I can’t understand it,’ she said. ‘I’d never deny my child. How could you do it? Why would you do it?’

  ‘Oh, don’t get so high and mighty with me,’ Belle hissed. ‘You would do what you had to do. Things were different then. What do you know about it? Miss Career Woman. Miss Big Success. We sent you to school. We helped you. We denied you nothing.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t so easy for everyone else. Not like for you. I grew up in a dump. My mother was a piece worker. We moved at the end of
every month when the rent came due. I wore rags to school. Rags. I never once – not once – had a decent pair of shoes that fit me. I was smart, good in school, but what good did that do? I was smart enough to see just how trapped I was. There were no jobs for women. Was I going to go into the factory like my mother? I managed to graduate high school and I managed to get into night school for college and I studied to be a teacher. Nobody helped me. Nobody gave me anything. I had to choose between textbooks or dinner. You think my mother was so great? She just wanted me to take a job sewing and bring home a paycheck. You think I wanted to be a teacher? You think I wanted to deal with other women’s children all day long? But what else was there? Don’t think the world back then was a Joan Crawford movie. I never met any woman who had a job more important than secretary. So I went to night school and I worked days in a department store. Men’s haberdashery. And I met a man in each place. At night school I met Arnold, who was reliable but wasn’t romantic and wasn’t rich and wasn’t handsome. And at the day job, I met your father. He came from a good family. He came in and spent more money on ties in fifteen minutes than I earned in a week. He asked me out to dinner. So I went. He showed me a world I’d never seen before. We ate in restaurants with linen tablecloths. He drank wine. Not just at seders, but every night. And he gave me a ring. I thought we were engaged. I slept with him. There was no birth control then. None that nice girls knew about. We counted on the men. Well, I shouldn’t have counted on this one. And when I told him I was pregnant, he dropped me. I don’t think he ever meant to marry me.’

  Belle laughed, but the laugh was brittle. ‘He took me sailing once, on Lake Michigan. He knew how to do all those rich boy things. You know, tennis and sailing. When he left me, I thought of taking a boat and drowning myself in the lake. I couldn’t do it and I couldn’t tell anyone.’

  Belle’s eyes blazed. ‘What do you think? You think there were abortions on every street corner like there are today? You think there was counseling for girls in trouble? You think the university would let an unwed mother finish school? You think a school system would hire an unwed mother?’ Belle laughed again. ‘You don’t know what it was like, and women my age don’t want to remember. Believe me, we don’t want to remember. My own mother threw me out. So I moved into a boarding house. It was the lowest of the low, not for a Jewish girl, and I hid the pregnancy and worked as long as I could, and then had you and I planned to put you up for adoption. But once I saw you, once I held you, I couldn’t do it. You think I’m made of stone? I kept you with me until my money ran out, but then I had to put you in foster care. What choice did I have? There was no day care back then and my mother wouldn’t speak to me, and anyway she had her own kids and had to work. But I never forgave her for it. I never spoke to her or any of them again.

  ‘So what could I do with you? And what life would I have with you? I had to give you to the state. Can you imagine? And I went back to my work and I finished school and I got a job. And then, I was surrounded by women. Women and children. There was no way I was going to meet a man, not anyone decent. Not anyone who could make a living. So I looked up Arnold, and I made sure that we just accidentally bumped into each other, and we started dating again, and this time I couldn’t wait until he proposed.’

  ‘So he didn’t know? He didn’t know about me?’

  ‘He didn’t know about me. He thought I was a nice girl, and I let him think that. He was willing to give me anything I wanted, and I wanted to move away, get away from Chicago, and to quit my job. I wanted a house and I wanted nice clothes and I wanted to get you back. When I told him I couldn’t conceive, he didn’t ask any questions. When I told him we should adopt, he agreed. And when I told him I’d seen an older baby that I just had to have, he was willing. I don’t know what he knew or what he suspected. He never asked me a question, so I never had to lie. And I didn’t lie to you either.’

  Belle looked at Karen, her lips thin, her mouth tight. ‘So don’t play high and mighty with me, because you don’t know what it was like. You don’t know what you would have done. I did the best I could.’

  Karen stood there, silent. Belle moved from the center of the room to the side of the bed and sat down as if she was exhausted. Karen shook her head. As always, Belle had managed to justify herself, but it didn’t mean that she was right. Maybe she had done the best she could do, but it wasn’t good enough.

  ‘You shouldn’t have lied,’ Karen said. ‘It was still a lie, and it made our lives into a lie. Don’t you see how it put a wall between you and Daddy? Don’t you see what it did to me? And look what it did to you! You’ve always been distant. I can’t remember that you ever hugged me or cuddled me. Not ever.’

  ‘That was you. You weren’t affectionate. I felt as if you always knew. That when I got you back from the state, that you looked at me with eyes that knew. You blamed me. You didn’t want my hugs.’

  ‘You’re talking crazy!’ Karen cried. ‘I was four years old. I was taken from the only home I remembered. I wasn’t blaming you. I was probably scared. I was traumatized.’ She put her hands to her head. She felt as if it might explode. For a crazy moment she imagined Belle with her trusty Dustbuster, vacuuming brains up off the carpet.

  ‘Well, easy for you to talk. You don’t have a child. If you did, I’d like to see if you’d do any better. Lisa certainly hasn’t. One of hers is always puking and the other one is going to wind up in prison. You got Stephie on drugs, and Tiff was so jealous that she started stealing. Your father says the haul she was caught with was over a thousand dollars’ worth of clothes. That’s grand larceny.’

  ‘What? What are you talking about? What has Tiff done?’

  ‘See? Do you know what goes on in your family? No. Too busy with work. Selfish! You’ve always been selfish. You think you would have been a good mother! Ha! You’d be as bad as Lisa.’

  ‘Maybe Lisa hasn’t done such a good job because she never saw anyone be a good mother.’

  Belle glared at her. ‘Right. Blame it all on me. I’m the bad one. Tiff is my fault. Lisa is my fault. Your father is my fault. Stephanie is my fault. Everything is my fault.’

  Karen knew Belle was overdramatizing to make her look ridiculous, but this time it wouldn’t work. ‘It is all your fault,’ she said. ‘Because you lied to us all. And you never showed that you loved us.’

  ‘What? So you two never did anything of your own free will? It’s my fault your sister slept with your husband? I made that happen?’

  Karen felt the body blow, but for once she saw everything, each manipulation, each knife thrust, each distracting wave of the red cape, for what it was. Belle would sacrifice anyone’s feelings for her own. It was the only way she knew to survive. ‘Yes,’ Karen whispered. ‘You did make that happen. If you hadn’t always been forcing us to compete, if you hadn’t always praised me to her and her to me but never praised us to our faces, then maybe she wouldn’t have been so consumed by jealousy. She slept with Jeffrey to hurt me and it was because she’s never felt like she could win.’

  ‘And what’s Jeffrey’s excuse, Dr Freud?’

  Karen stood still, absorbing the pain. She could say, ‘Ask my father why a man cheats on his wife,’ but she had the grace not to. Instead, she just shook her head. ‘You shouldn’t have said that,’ she told her mother. ‘My marriage is none of your business. I just wanted to know if you had an apology in you.’ She paused. ‘I want you to understand that what you did has ruined a part of me that won’t be fixed. I’ll go on, but I won’t go on with you.’

  She turned and started to walk out of the room. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Belle asked. Karen didn’t answer. She kept on walking.

  ‘You’re turning your back on your family and you’ve lost your husband. You could lose more. We’ll see how you like being alone. It’s just a good thing that you never had any children,’ Belle spat at her. ‘Because however bad a mother you think I was, I know you’d be worse.’

  Karen kept walking down the
hallway. She passed the open door of her old bedroom and the den, where Arnold still lay sleeping, the television blaring a rerun of ‘In the Heat of the Night.’ She continued through the living room, out the front door, and to the corner. Outside, in the darkness, she realized that she had nowhere to go and no way to get there. She kept walking from streetlight to streetlight until, at last, she reached Long Beach Road and the gas station at the corner. She got into the phone booth, but couldn’t find any change. So she lifted the receiver and dialed a collect call. By the time Carl answered and accepted the charges, the mouthpiece was shaking against her face and her teeth were chattering despite the warm night. He could barely understand her when she tried to talk to him.

  ‘Just tell me where you are, Karen,’ he said. ‘I’ll come and get you.’

  ‘I’m in hell, Carl,’ she told him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  What’s in a Name

  Carl had tucked Karen into his own bed, and with the help of a blue Valium and half a glass of red wine that Carl made her drink, Karen slept for nine and a half hours. She woke up and stared at the unfamiliar ceiling over her. For at least a minute she couldn’t remember where she was. A lot of her recent past seemed to have disappeared as well. Karen had to back track from Paris to New York to the Marianas to SoHo to Chicago to Rockville Center, and finally to here, Brooklyn Heights. She groaned, then, and turned over to her side, pulling the blanket up and blocking out the sunshine that shone in through the bay window and onto the ceiling. Like an accident victim, she lay as still as she could, trying to figure out where it hurt and what was irreparably damaged.

  Carl tip-toed in. ‘Ah, Sleeping Beauty has awakened.’

  For some reason that made Karen think of Tony de Freise and the night of the Oakley Awards. She and Jeffrey had thought Tony was the Bad Fairy, but it was Jeffrey who was an evil spirit, not a prince. Karen moaned.