Luscious Lemon

by Heather Swain

  “I told you to take better care of yourself!” Eddie yelps.

  Now I understand his question. He means, What did I do wrong? What did I do to cause this? I lie there, stunned, listening to his words, taking in his anger. I ask myself, What did I do wrong? The answer is very clear. Everything. I’ve done nothing right. From my smug self-assurance that being pregnant would be a snap for me because it’s the one thing every Manelli and Calabria woman before me has done with ease, to my begrudging acceptance of my family’s joy. My refusal to listen to Eddie and my stubborn certainty that I could have it all—restaurant, Eddie, this kid. I’ve been greedy. I’ve been selfish. Hardly the characteristics of a good mother. I’ve backed myself into a corner so that here, alone, in this bed with nothing left, I’ve gotten just what I deserved.

  I steel myself against Eddie’s harsh sobs. Against his words. If I let them in, I will shrivel. “I’m so sorry,” I say one last time and hang up the phone.

  I wake to the phone ringing. My eyes are gummy and thick. My hands clumsy. I fumble to find the phone somewhere, lost in the pillows beneath my head. I’m confused. Did I sleep? How long? The phone continues to ring urgently. I assume it’s Eddie, but I don’t want to talk to him again. I can’t take any more of his anger tonight. It stops, and I’m relieved, but then it starts again. If I don’t answer, he’ll call all night. I’ll never sleep. On the third round of rings, I pick up, ready to tell him not to call anymore.

  “Lemon! Oh, my God, honey.”

  It’s one of my aunts. I hear the others in the background, giving directions and planning my rescue. I have no idea which one is talking to me, but it doesn’t matter. Just the sound of that familiar voice cracks whatever thin protective coating I had armored myself with after Eddie’s words. If I thought I would lie here alone, I was wrong.

  “We’re coming!” my aunt says.

  “Please hurry,” I tell her.

  I have no idea how they know. It wouldn’t surprise me it they felt some cosmic rift pull each of them out of a deep sleep, yanking them toward me. I don’t care how they figured it out. They’re coming, and I am grateful. Not two minutes after I’ve hung up the phone, the buzzer rings. Rings and rings. I imagine them in a huddle on the stoop, leaning on the bell, ready to break down the door if I don’t answer promptly.

  I walk slowly through the dark hall to the foyer and buzz them in. Like a gaggle of wild geese, they flock up the stairs to me and explode through the door. I am embraced, patted, kissed, and cried on. Told to sit on the couch and not to move. They fill the apartment. Rush from room to room, turning on lights. They bring me water, tissues, soda crackers, and a blanket. I’m befuddled, bovine in my acceptance, and deeply appreciative. When I walk back toward the bedroom to find my shoes and some clothes, I see splotches of blood on the floorboards, on the bathroom tile. Joy and Adele usher me out of the hall.

  “Don’t worry,” Mary tells me. She holds a wet rag and a bucket of steaming water that smells like pine. “We’ll take care of everything.”

  Gladys hands Joy a bag of my clothes, my shoes are put on my feet, a coat is thrown around my shoulders. When they are ready, they shuffle me off, in the center of their foursome, moving steadily as one, leading me out the door, down the stairs and into the waiting car, idling by the curb. I see my Aunt Mary toss a bag of trash into the cans by the building, and I wail. That was her! I want to tell them, but I can’t. Adele pulls my head down into her lap.

  “It’s okay,” she whispers to me. “You’re with us now.”

  Chapter

  Twenty

  M y grandmother stands sentinel at the door with her arms outstretched, ready to enfold me. In her nightgown, she seems smaller than I remember. Older. Almost frail. This is a new one on her, I think, and feel badly for causing her any more grief and worry. My aunts walk me up the stairs. Grandma reaches out for me. “You’ll be just fine,” she says firmly into my ear.

  I’ve heard these words many times from her. When I was a child, it sounded like a command. And I listened as if I had no choice. I willed myself to be fine through every bump and scrape and emotional bruise. But this time I hear it differently. She needs me to be okay.

  My aunts hover behind me, but my grandmother shakes her head. “She needs to sleep. So do you. Go on home now,” she tells them. They shoo like stray dogs, and I’m relieved.

  Grandma carries my bag up the stairs and deposits me in my old room. “I put on fresh sheets,” she says as she pulls back the familiar yellow and green flower-basket quilt. This small act of love, the simplest thing, is what breaks me. She hangs on to me, holds me upright as I cry, and walks me to the bed. “It’s going to be okay,” she tells me. “We’ll get you through this.”

  As soon as I get beneath the clean, cool covers, I pass out and sleep heavily with no dreams.

  I wake late the next morning, confused for a moment to find myself in my old bedroom on the second floor of my grandmother’s house. Sun slips through the blinds, and the room is stifling hot. The distant sounds of kids playing at the small park a few blocks from my grandmother’s float through the screen. I inhale the heady fragrance of my childhood—a mixture of starchy noodles, pungent garlic, laundry detergent, mock orange, and must. When my head clears, I remember why I’m here and what I lost last night.

  I stare at an old water stain on the ceiling, trying to figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do. How I’ll get through a day. I hear the familiar sounds of my grandmother moving across creaking floors below, and I wonder how she did it. How she got up every day after my mother died. Why she didn’t lie down and die, too. Because she had me, I suppose.

  What do I have? Eddie? He’s gone. On the other side of the ocean. Blaming me for what’s happened. There’s Lemon. I can’t even begin to think about that. I want to burrow beneath the covers and stay here forever, where it’s warm and it smells nice and I don’t have to face anyone. I stay in bed for as long as I can. Hours maybe. I fall in and out of sleep. Turn my pillow over and over to find the cool side. I refuse to get up until I have to pee so badly it hurts. I try to ignore it. Will it away. But this is reality. I have to get up.

  Out of the cozy cocoon of my bed, I feel disgusting, dirty, and polluted. In the bathroom, I undress and look at myself in the mirror. My body looks the same as it did yesterday and the day before. My breasts are still heavy and swollen, my nipples darker and larger than normal. My belly protrudes a little more than usual, yet I’m not pregnant anymore. I was. Now I’m not. And I have no baby to show for it.

  Strange, how quickly I grew attached to that little primordial tadpole. The beginnings of my family. Lost now. Gone. Nature’s way of telling me it was no good. The earlier the better. A natural part of pregnancy. And all that crap my aunts said to me last night in the car, trying to console me, to console themselves. I listened, but nothing helped. What they don’t understand is, I wanted that baby, no matter what the problem.

  I climb into the shower, hoping to wash all the memories of last night away. As soon as the water hits my head, I start to cry. I let go of what I’ve been saving up since I first opened my eyes this morning. As I move through the motions of washing my hair, my face, scrubbing my body, I sob, letting the rush of water drown out my sounds as blood circles pink down the drain. All that potential gone.

  Once I’m clean and dressed and done crying, I feel better. I don’t want to get back in the bed. I want some normalcy, some simple thing to take my mind off what’s happened. I want to walk down the stairs and find my old life waiting for me, complete with my aunts driving me crazy, Eddie smiling, and the restaurant my only worry. Instead, I find my grandmother in the kitchen, working a crossword puzzle. In the center of the table is a huge bouquet of yellow roses. They fill the room with their seductive scent. I lift the small card and see Eddie’s name at the bottom. “All my love,” is the inscription. As if that were enough.

  “He called,” Grandma says. “Early this morning. You needed to sleep, so I di
dn’t wake you.”

  “Thanks,” I say. My grandmother’s complete practicality served me well in this situation.

  “He’s on a flight. He should be here tonight.”

  “Really?” I ask.

  “You sound surprised.”

  I shrug. “He didn’t have to rush back.” I say this, but it’s a lie. Of course I expected him to come home, but then again, after last night, I wasn’t sure that he’d ever come back.

  Grandma looks at me, her eyes large through her reading glasses. “You know he’s the one who called last night, don’t you? Called me, then Adele and Joy, Mary and Gladys. He wanted to make sure you were okay. That you had someone with you.”

  “No,” I say as I play with the soft silky petals of the roses. “He wanted to make sure someone was keeping an eye on me because he thinks I’m irresponsible.”

  My grandmother frowns at me, but she lets my comment go. “His mother called here this morning, too.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “No, I hung up on her. Of course I talked to her.”

  “What’d she want?”

  My grandmother takes off her glasses and gazes at me like I’m slightly demented. “She wanted to make sure that you’re okay.”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  She sighs and shakes her head. “I told her that you were asleep.”

  “I wonder what Eddie told her,” I mutter as I slide into a chair across from Grandma.

  She’s clearly had enough of my cynicism. She pushes back from the table. “How about some breakfast?”

  “I’ll just have tea.”

  “You need to get your strength up. I’ll make you some bacon and eggs.”

  I stay at the table, obediently, as she lays strips of bacon in a skillet and whips up eggs with milk.

  “Scrambled eggs were the first thing you taught me to cook,” I tell her.

  “They’re easy. Hard to ruin.” Then she smiles. “You loved cooking. Loved being in the kitchen since you were little.”

  “Especially at Little Great-Aunt Poppy’s house.” Poppy had a special stool to allow her to reach the stove. It was the perfect size for me when I was a kid. Every time Grandma and I went to Staten Island to visit Poppy and Livinia, I’d beg to stand on the stool and learn something new. She taught me to make my first meatballs, ravioli, and black raspberry pie.

  “When did Poppy move in with Livinia?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” Grandma says as she flips the bacon. ’Fifty-two, ’fifty-three. Somewhere thereabouts.”

  “Livinia told me that Uncle Tony ran away with his boss’s wife, and that she was pregnant.”

  “Who was pregnant?” Grandma slips two pieces of wheat bread into the toaster slots.

  “His mistress.”

  “Hmm,” snorts my grandmother.

  “Do you think that’s true?”

  She shrugs. Removes each piece of crispy bacon to a paper towel, then pours the hot grease into an empty coffee can.

  “What happened to Livinia?” I ask. “Why’d she fall apart so badly?”

  “She was always fragile.” Grandma pours the egg batter over the remaining grease and stirs. “Everything hit her hardest. When our mother died, she didn’t get out of bed for a month. Everyone else had to make all the arrangements. Figure out how to take care of Papa. I think Tony couldn’t take it. Not that I blame him.”

  “You’re so harsh,” I tell her.

  The eggs firm up. The toast pops. My grandmother puts everything on a chipped blue plate. “Everyone’s got problems,” she says as she sets the food in front of me. I’ve heard this refrain many times before. “Take Poppy. Crippled when she was a baby. Never married. Had to live with my parents, then take care of Livinia.”

  “She was the happiest person I knew,” I say.

  Grandma pours steaming water from the teakettle into the egg pan. “I don’t know if she was all that happy, but she got by without complaining.”

  “I never heard a negative thing come out of her mouth.” I nibble at the toast, then take a bite of the eggs and realize that I’m ravenous.

  “Yeah, well, you were her favorite. She was always happy to see you.”

  As if in tribute to Poppy, Grandma sets a jar of black raspberry jam, Poppy’s specialty, beside me.

  “You know what’s weird?” I ask as I cover my toast with the sticky black jam. “I remember being so much more sad at Poppy’s funeral than at my parents’.”

  “You were too young to understand what was happening at your parents’ funeral.”

  She’s right, of course. Up until that point, funerals had been fun for my cousins and me. The only people who died were old distant relatives. We took great disgusted pleasure in daring each other to touch the dead’s clammy wrinkled skin. They felt like crayons to me, cold and waxy. I got a secret thrill from coloring in those days, imagining I was gripping the finger of some poor lost soul.

  My parents’ funeral was different. I knew I was supposed to be sad, but mostly I was confused. The only clear memory I have is asking Grandmother Manelli if my mother would go to heaven, since there was no body for the priest to bless.

  “That’s for our Lord Jesus Christ to decide,” she told me in a vaguely threatening way.

  I liked the idea of Jesus diving down in the water to talk to my mother. She’d be sitting on a rock in her favorite red dress, smoking a skinny cigarette, with fish swimming through her hair. “Norma,” he’d say in his nice voice. “Would you like to come up to Heaven?” And she’d say, “No, thanks, Jesus. I’m happy here. I always did like the water.”

  Aunt Poppy’s funeral, though, I remember clearly. I was thirteen, awkward, angry, and I felt her death acutely. No one else seemed all that sad. She had outlived everyone’s expectation by dying in her fifties. But for me, Poppy’s death highlighted the sum total of my abandonment. She was the one adult in my life who I didn’t have to share with any other children. Although my grandmother and my aunts were always around when I needed them, I never had their full attention. Poppy, though, lavished care on me. Listened to me. Talked to me about the world. Once she was gone, I felt I had no one who loved just me.

  “So.” My grandmother interrupts my memories. “What are you going to do today?”

  I finish my toast and push my plate away. “First, I have to call Franny and check on the restaurant.”

  “Don’t rush yourself,” she says as she collects my dirty dishes.

  “You sound like Eddie.”

  “It’s true,” she says. “You don’t have to be in a hurry now.”

  “That’s fine advice from the woman who hasn’t slowed down in eighty years.”

  She shrugs and dunks my dishes in the sink. “Suit yourself,” she says. “You always do.”

  From the living room, I call Franny’s apartment. I get her voice mail. “Not home. Leave a message.” I hang up and call the restaurant.

  Melanie answers and asks me to hold. I suppose that’s a good sign. She must be taking reservations on another line. I listen to the canned Coltrane loop and try to remember what was going on at the restaurant when I left. It seems like days ago, although it was just last night. What did we have in the walk-in that needs to be cooked tonight? How many tables are booked? What did I plan for specials? I have no idea. It’s as if all memory of Lemon has faded and been replaced by this giant black blob in my head.

  “Hey, Lem,” Mel says when she comes back on. “You coming in soon?” she asks brightly. Clueless.

  “No,” I say, and then I pause. What should I tell her? How could I explain? I can’t even bring myself to say it. “I’m not feeling well.”

  “You sick?”

  “Yeah,” I say, uncertainly. “Is Franny there?”

  “Hang on. I’ll find her. Feel better,” she tells me cheerily.

  “Lemon,” Franny whispers anxiously.

  “Hey, Franny,” I say, but my voice falters.

  I hear a door close and a chair
squeak. I imagine that she’s in the office. “I heard what happened. Eddie called this morning.”

  “Eddie called you, too?” I ask. I’m befuddled by this. Who else did he call while I slept? Who else knows what happened?

  “Where are you?” she asks.

  “I’m at my grandmother’s. What’s going on there?”

  “Everything’s under control.”

  “I won’t be gone too long.”

  “Oh, Christ, Lemon,” Franny says. I hear the squeak of the door and someone saying her name. Franny puts her hand over the mouthpiece. I can’t make out what she’s saying.

  “What are you telling people?” I ask.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Just tell them I’m sick.”

  “Okay,” she says. I hear the office door squeak open again and a muddled voice in the background, then Franny asks me, “Did you order skate wings for tonight?”

  “Skate wings?” I repeat. Skate wings? I can’t even remember what a skate wing is. “I don’t know.”

  “Okay, whatever. Don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of it. You feel better. I gotta go.”

  Franny hangs up, and I listen to the dial tone, infuriated. That’s all she has to say to me right now? She hopes I’ll feel better? Why didn’t she call me if Eddie called her? And skate wings? Who gives a flying fuck about skate wings?

  I spend my day lying on the couch, watching confessional TV, game shows, and reruns of sitcoms. I’m perfectly content to wallow in the ordinary pleasures of American life. In fact, I think I’ve been missing out. All these years, busting my ass to prove that I wouldn’t be like everyone else in my family. I’d be the successful one. The one who got out of Brooklyn and made something of herself. But now I’m perfectly content to plant myself in front of the television and lap up canned laughter and ads for processed food.

  Between shows I drop into a drugged sleep filled with blurry dreams of me on the floor beneath the moon, Eddie standing over me, my aunts with buckets of cleaning fluid. Sometimes I dream of the restaurant. I see meat, raw and bloody, and know that I can’t cook it. I panic because there is a full house out front, and I have nothing to serve them. I see Franny, angry at me, wielding a knife.