“Now that I am leaving the hospital, I would like us to start dating. Officially.”
Sasha laughed, her pale pink cheeks blushing a deeper rose color. She waved a hand in dismissal. “I have husband. At large.” She winced a little, took a bite of salmon, and looked up and above Rudy’s head thoughtfully. “A husband with a girlfriend and baby who is nowhere to be found. Whose name is on my mortgage, who occasionally finds a way into my bank account but who will not come home. His cell phone number is same and I call and I call and leave message and I am so aggravated I don’t call anymore. I don’t want him to think I am heartbroken and want him to come home. His girlfriend can have him. I want to sell my house, which is on the verge of selling itself via the bank if Gabor doesn’t show up and sell it with me and allow us to divide our property. Limbo.” Sasha set down her fork.
Rudy wished he hadn’t interrupted her from eating her dinner.
“That’s exactly what I talked about with my doctor today: limbo. Hercules’s hydra. A quagmire of snakes. As soon as you cut off one, another rears its head. Which is why you have to stop attacking the snakes one at a time and cut the whole thing off at the neck.”
“And what about missing snake? Missing alcoholic ne’er-do-well husband?”
Rudy cleared the dishes from Sasha’s tray to the radiator. He flipped the paper place mat on her plastic tray and gave it a wipe with a napkin. He lay out a fresh napkin and fork. Then he opened his nightstand drawer and produced a tiny gourmet grocery store cake that CeCe had brought for him.
Sasha’s eyes filled with tears when he placed the little cake between them, facing her. It was chocolate with thick fudge chocolate frosting and a cream layer within, with two pink roses adorning it. Chocolate was her favorite. Rudy had learned this when the word cocoa came up in their crossword puzzle, which he always pulled from one of the morning newspapers and saved to do with her. The word cocoa had led to a dream discussion of desserts they loved, the good news being that they both had a sweet tooth.
“This is very nice,” Sasha stammered.
Rudy could see she was working to regain her composure. Like CeCe, she clearly did not like to weep in front of others. Her tale of Stefi had been an anomaly she seemed a little embarrassed by. Maybe he shouldn’t have pushed her into a serious conversation now.
“Sasha, I do not want to push you into anything. And I don’t want you to pity-date me.”
“What is this ‘pity-date,’ Rudy?”
“I mean, don’t feel like you have to say yes because I have a crush on you and I’m in a mental hospital.”
Sasha’s look became grave. “Rudy, there is nothing I want more than to be ‘official.’ It is just . . . I am married woman with many complications.”
“A full set of luggage with carry-on and steamer trunks?”
Sasha nodded and giggled.
“Me too. The cure for that?”
Sasha shook her head. “Ah, if only we knew.”
“Cake.” Rudy cut a slice, placed it on her plate.
She made sure to get all the frosting as she ate. Licking her fingers, she agreed to come over and cook him dinner when he got home from the hospital. “That is a start,” she declared.
“When I was a young man,” Rudy told Sasha, “I wanted to get married, but had no idea, no plan, for what to do after that. I let Bee make all of our plans. Now I’m figuring out what I want—and the first thing that I want is a dinner, at my home, with you.
“I made you this.” Rudy opened his nightstand drawer and produced the small, decoupage box that he had made in the occupational therapy room on the unit. “It’s not fancy or expensive, but it’s heartfelt and it’s all the colors that you like. It reminds me of you, and I feel cheerful whenever I see it.”
Sasha gasped. Her face flushed pink again.
“Beautiful, you made?”
“Occupational therapy. Decoupage!”
Sasha held the box in two hands and looked up at the ceiling. “You know,” she said. “You’ve already given me so many gifts.” She raised one hand, counting out with her fingers in the air: “Music, laughs at dull job, confidence, happy stories of happy marriage, dogwood tree name!” Her hand was splayed out with five items. She giggled. “This is beautiful. I love it.” She pulled the box to her chest.
To give her a moment, Rudy stepped out to the kitchen to make her fresh tea with milk and sugar, the way she liked it. The hospital hall smelled of warm chicken and lemon-lime cleaner. It smelled of comfort and institutional walls at the same time. Rudy was excited by the notion of learning all the other things she liked—more of the small things such as Chopin waltzes and desserts with marzipan. The list would grow. A list of all the things he could do to add to her happiness. In this way, Sasha was like Bethany—simple things brought her pleasure. And when it came to these small joys, she was demonstrative, irrepressible. This song! Those trees! Yet both women were quick to gently tease Rudy—to not let him get away with buffoonery or bluster. Was it all right to draw these similarities between Bee and Sasha? He decided it was probably okay. Because awakening one Wednesday morning to find your wife dead beside you under the duvet proved one, and perhaps only one, adage: Life is short. This was perhaps the one tired maxim that rang true through the thick layers of dark, depressive dreams and murky, choking days of grief. And when it came to how you would possibly live out the rest of your days without driving off a cliff, some things became clear: Finding love isn’t about finding someone at the right time. It’s about finding the right person, regardless of the time. Once we’re a certain age, we know these things, don’t we? There are no checklist test drives, rebound relationship rules, or appropriate periods of mourning. We aren’t meant to be punished with scratchy black Victorian garb buttoned up to our chins. Even CeCe didn’t have the energy or heart to lecture her father—who loved her mother as much as she could ever love anyone—about the possible pitfalls of dating Sasha.
Rudy returned to the hospital room with a fresh cup of hot tea for Sasha. She had taken her hair out of its ponytail and brushed it. Her tresses lay fluffy and bright around her face. She cradled the cup in her hands.
“Does Cecilia know?” she asked Rudy shyly. “That we are becoming ‘official.’ ”
Rudy nodded. “She can’t wait to meet you.”
22
At work, Sasha rested her hip bones against the warmth of the watch case. She didn’t want sleepiness to envelop her during the late-morning slow period, so she opened the glass and rearranged the watches, moving the more expensive pieces toward the front. The first of October was close enough to holiday season to do so, their manager had said. He implored them: “Make your case burst with treasures shoppers would love to find under the tree!” Silicon Valley certainly relished status symbols. The store’s decorator would dress everything in holly and gold, silver, and ruby-red glass balls to complement the felt. “We want them to spend, spend, spend!” the manager chirped at Sasha.
Sasha was a conservative shopper, but this year her discount would prove useful for holiday gifts. Sasha was so happy to have significant others to shop for this year: Rudy, CeCe, and CeCe’s little daughter, who Rudolph had said was delighted by just about everything from pigeons to cardboard boxes.
Now Judy, Sasha’s sometimes lunch partner, wandered over from Clinique. Their special had just ended. “Silicon Valley now has enough mini mascaras to fill a landfill,” Judy had said the day prior. By today they’d cleaned up the aftermath of the rush. Now came the lull.
“Hey,” Judy told Sasha, “there are a couple of cute men over in the Suits Department. Well, one guy’s in Suits and the other guy is in Shoes, I think. Want to take a walk around to meet them?”
Judy was bold. The last time they’d made such rounds, she had done Sasha’s makeup first.
“Land you a guy, help you sell more watches. Can’t hurt!”
Sasha didn’t wear a wedding ring, and no one at work other than Rudy knew about Gabor.
Judy was kind and funny, but her topics of conversation didn’t extend to Chopin. Sasha had been worried about the makeup makeover, given that Judy’s routine included a thick layer of foundation—a mask Sasha couldn’t imagine using. She begged off that layer, and as she watched in the mirror she was pleased by the pale peach and very light bronze blush and shadow Judy applied, followed by light brown eyeliner she smudged in such a way Sasha would never be able to replicate. Last, she made Sasha open her mouth as she applied a nude pink lipstick, which had required lip smacking, followed by a sheer gloss. Sasha even purchased a few of the products later with her discount—a luxury for her.
“C’mon—let’s go for a stroll.”
Sasha politely declined. “I’m so tired,” she explained. “I’ve been visiting a friend in the hospital most nights.” She paused. “And, I am dating.” She didn’t mention that the dates had all been at the hospital.
“What? You didn’t tell me.” Judy reached across the watch counter, the sleeve of her white Clinique lab-coat uniform making little static pings on the glass. She squeezed Sasha’s arm. “You have a boyfriend.” Judy clapped and did a little jump. There were streaks of tester lipstick on the top of one of her hands.
Sasha nodded and smiled shyly at the watches. Judy giggled, waned, and winked conspiratorially as she sidled back to her station, bubbling with happiness for her friend.
It was true: Sasha was a girlfriend. A welcome status, given that she was no longer a mother, and hardly a daughter, given her parents were gone. She was hardly a wife. Her one brother, who lived in England, had a new family, and it was too far and expensive for either him or Sasha to travel all the way between the west coast of America and their little village. Besides, the new wife wasn’t that welcoming.
Yet being happy worried Sasha. Even on the sunny warm days of September in Palo Alto, she imagined the ice that had taken her and Gabor down, broken her back, broken her spirit. Something about that incident might rise up, invisible and dangerous, to hurt her again. To take something else away. Stefi had been torn from her. Gabor was gone. Maybe Rudy would be next. Come home from the hospital, mix up medications, and die in his sleep, as his poor wife had. She returned to focusing on the watches, moving her favorite Swiss Army Watch front and center. For now, she was a girlfriend, she told herself. A girlfriend who was happy just to play gin rummy.
“Dad, don’t make her your project.” CeCe was getting over a cold, and her nose looked pinched and raw. The dry hospital air probably didn’t help.
“I don’t intend to! She is my friend.” Rudy straightened his covers and pillow. He couldn’t wait to get home and sit in a chair, instead of this bed, and sleep in a bed that didn’t move. “Lady friend,” he added softly, immediately regretting these stodgy words.
CeCe blew her nose. Her weeping during hospital visits—a great relief to Rudy that brought them closer—had given way to the seasonal cold, and now she seemed plain run-down and distressed. To Rudy, it seemed like the first time she had truly succumbed to the pain of her mother’s absence.
“Whatever.” Cecilia sighed with resignation. “Lady friend. Oh my god.”
“Well, I don’t know!” Rudy raised his voice, startling CeCe. She sat up straighter in her chair, ballerina neck posture. “I haven’t dated since I met your mother in college. And I would like to point out—as you rush to judge my social life—that most of my dates have been in a hospital! Other than one dinner I made for her at home, and a food court lunch we shared. And these have all been with a woman whom I am genuinely interested in, whom I was already friendly with at work. Your mother knows about her! Knew about her. I told her about her. My friend from Hungary in Watches. Our mornings in the crazy circus of the first floor of the department store. Sasha has been nothing but kind to me, and now, as her friend, I want to help her get rid of her good-for-nothing husband so that she can get on with her life, too. You think life in a new country is easy? When you’ve got a mortgage and the family court system to navigate? You, more than anyone, know that age comes with complications.”
Rudy raised a finger as he made this point. Suddenly he felt verbose, as if he were badgering his drained daughter with a lecture. He folded his hands in his lap.
It was early—the time between occupational therapy and dinner and visiting hours—but the nurses had become lax with Rudy, allowing his quiet, low-maintenance visitors lots of leeway.
CeCe slumped back in her chair, sipped cranberry juice from a hospital carton. “I’m sorry. Spencer keeps pointing out how judgmental I am. And the weird thing is, I see it now. But I don’t mean to be. I’m oblivious, I suppose.” She folded her arms across her chest, burying her hands under her arms. Usually this was to keep herself from ripping at her nearly bleeding cuticles.
“Don’t apologize,” Rudy told her. “You have every right to express your opinion. You lost your mother.”
“I’m an adult, Dad,” CeCe reminded him. “With a family. At least for now.”
The nurse came in to give Rudy his four o’clock medication and take his vitals. The antidepressants no longer had side effects. The mild antianxiety medication made his dreams steady, instead of turning into repetitive nightmares of that unthinkable morning. Plus, the daily goals on his whiteboard had escalated from “SHOWER” (on that first day in the hospital) to proactive tasks, such as “RESCHEDULE DENTIST APPOINTMENT.”
Rudy had spent some time planning how to help Sasha extricate herself from her marriage. But now he wondered: Was his plan to help Sasha a patronizing project? He’d started a list of tasks he thought he could help her with, which included: cook hearty dinners, find divorce attorney, help her sell her house. Then Sasha could quit one job. Was this intrusive? Was he attacking Sasha’s “Hercules’s hydra,” instead of his own? Yet he didn’t want to date Sasha while watching her work two jobs to the point of exhaustion, deal with a deadbeat husband, America’s legal system, and the sale of a home. As a white, male American, who didn’t even need to work at this point, he had a leg up. And, after all, it was he who had gotten the rest at the hospital. It couldn’t possibly have been a reprieve for Sasha to visit him so generously.
Besides, his own list was fairly short—just grief, really. And cleaning out his wife’s things. Being there for his daughter.
At the hospital, some patients befriended and tried to help others solve their problems. “Remember,” a group leader told them, “it was always easy to give advice. Meanwhile, we become unavailable for our own challenges.”
But then in another group, they discussed having a plan in place when it came time to leave the hospital. You were supposed to line up a doctor, therapist, and day hospitalization program—a nine to three weekday routine of group therapy, lunch, and activities. Crazy School, Rudy thought. A young social worker handed out sheets of resources.
“The hardest part is asking for help,” he gently told the group, pushing his slightly bent wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose.
Rudy didn’t subscribe to this platitude. Having landed in bed like an injured rhino just before his in-patient hospitalization, he believed that for those living alone the hardest part was getting help. Getting toast. Rudy had spent an entire day in bed trying to will himself into the kitchen to make a stack of toast.
Until recently he’d felt alone in the world without Bee. But he hadn’t been left behind. He’d punished himself. Isolated himself.
Now Rudy was free to leave the hospital and try to start fresh. CeCe had to attend a school event for her daughter the next afternoon, and Sasha had volunteered to pick up Rudy.
The next day Rudy’s pulse began drumming in his chest and throat in the afternoon. Later his limbs trembled and one foot tapped the floor, as he stood talking to Sasha, not feeling still enough to sit down. It wasn’t Sasha that made him nervous or the ride arrangement. Something—everything it seemed—in Rudy’s body was pointing toward a fear of leaving the hospital.
CeCe called as he was packing up with Sasha, and
asked to speak to her. From Rudy’s perspective, she didn’t seem to let Sasha get a word in edgewise. A few seconds later, Sasha handed the phone back to Rudy, and he apologized for what he imagined were minute-by-minute orders issued by his daughter.
“Like police a little.” Rudy could tell that Sasha was suppressing the giggles. He laughed, letting out a big cleansing breath that seemed to slow his heart rate. “But nice, not mean. And, you know,” Sasha mused, “CeCe is very easy English-speaking person to understand, because she is so direct.”
Rudy agreed. There were certainly no vague requests or instructions from CeCe. No nuances to decipher.
“She is the most literal-minded person I know. My daughter. Bethany and I used to say we couldn’t imagine where her funny little personality came from.” Rudy chided himself for bringing up Bee. But he and Sasha had discussed her quite a bit, along with Stefi, and Gabor. Still, he worried that now Sasha might feel excluded from his family. His family history. Oh, who was he kidding? He was a bachelor with a grand piano and too-big house who was fifty-four going on seventy-five.
“Ah, but this is a good thing, you know,” Sasha observed, apparently unfazed by the mention of Bethany. “Do you know the hardest thing about learning English? Those sayings: ‘That’s the way the cookie crumbles.’ ”
“Aphorisms?”
“Yes, aphorisms. A rolling stone gathers no moss.”
“A penny saved is a penny earned,” Rudy shot back.
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?” Sasha flipped a piece of her hair up over her lips, thinking. “Crazy, this. Means what?”
“Well—”
“Everything happens for a reason,” Sasha added.
“That’s a platitude!” Rudy corrected excitedly. “They’re the bane of clichés. Especially if you’re grieving.”
Sasha tilted back her head, her gray eyes gazing up at the ceiling as she thought for a moment. She looked at Rudy.
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