The Good Life

by Marian Thurm

  Never mind that Stacy had so quickly forgiven him; he hadn’t been able to forgive himself and could not imagine that he ever would.

  S

  Every visitor they passed—on the escalators, in the lobby, waiting for the elevators, walking through the hallways on Clare’s floor—every last one of them was sick with worry over whatever patient he or she had come here to see, Roger was sure of it. The nurses and doctors went about their business nevertheless, chatting at the nurses’ station as if nothing were wrong, as if every patient in this hospital weren’t engaged, as Clare was, in the fight of his or her life.

  As Roger and Stacy prepared to go into Clare’s room now, a young guy dressed in blue scrubs was standing in the hallway talking to a woman whose scrubs were a deep purple. “So you know I’m a vegan, right?” he said.

  “Wait, you don’t even eat tuna fish?” the woman said.

  “I don’t eat anything that has a mother,” the guy explained, “and that includes tuna.”

  “Excuse me,” Roger said, and, with Stacy, made his way between them into his sister’s room. Last year, Clare had lost her hair to several rounds of chemo that started a month or so after her diagnosis; following her most recent round toward the end of the summer, she’d been sporting a microshort haircut and large gold hoop earrings. And today was in her own pajamas, rather than the hospital gown she hated. She was without a roommate (though this was subject to change at any moment), and one wall of the room had a small cork-board embellished with get-well cards and photographs of Marshall and Nathaniel that were attached with pushpins.

  Nathaniel, who was eighteen now, a senior in high school, was sitting in an armchair at Clare’s bedside.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” he said, and jumped up to offer Stacy his seat. Like Roger, he was an afficionado of cooking shows on TV; the one playing now on the television set next to Clare’s bed was, Roger recognized, Good Eats. He felt a pang of sympathy for the kid—all the high-priced tutors Clare and Marshall had hired for him apparently hadn’t done Nathaniel much good; his SAT scores had caused them no small degree of anguish, he knew. Nathaniel had recently dyed his spiked black hair white-blond, in homage to Guy Fieri from the Food Channel, whose show, Guy’s Big Bite, was one of his favorites.

  Roger kissed the top of his sister’s head. She was fifty-four years old, and every morning when he awoke, he prayed that she would hit fifty-five. And that twenty years from now, Clare and Marshall and he and Stacy would all be sitting around over dinner and complaining good-naturedly about how impossibly old they all were.

  “I’m sorry we came empty-handed today,” Stacy apologized, taking Nathaniel’s seat. Often when they’d visited Clare on the numerous occasions she’d been hospitalized over the past year, they brought with them expensive chocolates from a boutique in Grand Central, beautifully scented hand lotion, or paperbacks of novels and stories Stacy particularly loved.

  “Empty-handed? Are you kidding? You brought me blood!” Clare said.

  “Or at least Stacy did,” Roger said. He didn’t much care about the unknown patient who would be receiving his own B positive blood, but of course he would never say so out loud.

  Stacy drew her chair closer to her sister-in-law. “You’re looking good,” she said cheerfully. “And after you get my blood, you’ll be looking even better,” she teased. “Taller, considerably more beautiful, and, oh yeah, a lot more glamorous!”

  “Got anything to eat around here?” Roger went rummaging through the small cubby where Marshall stored all the treats that friends had brought for Clare. Despite the cookies and orange juice he and Stacy had been encouraged to sample in the snack room to which they were escorted after giving blood, Roger felt a little weak, a little drained, he announced.

  “No pun intended,” Stacy said.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, maybe I’ll feel like a vampire when they transfuse me,” Clare said. She smiled at Stacy, and at Nathaniel, who found a bag of gourmet white cheddar popcorn chips for Roger among her stash. “Tell them about your plans, honey,” she said to Nathaniel.

  “Can’t you tell them?” he said, and fooled with the snapshots on the corkboard, straightening and flattening their edges as Clare talked about his application to the Culinary Institute of America, where he hoped to get a bachelor’s degree in baking and pastry arts. To fulfill their application requirement of a half year of hands-on food prep, he’d been working after school in the kitchen of the Sugar Sweet Sunshine Bakery on the Lower East Side. During the seventeen months since Clare’s diagnosis, Roger knew, Nathaniel had prepared dinner for the family nearly every night; after each round of chemo, Clare told them, he’d brought her homemade miso soup with tofu and deep-fried bean curd on a tray, with Jell-O in fluted parfait glasses for dessert. He’d been sweetly solicitous of her, soothing her with the news that miso was a favorite of samurai warriors because it was so rich in protein, vitamins, and minerals, stuff Nathaniel knew to be just what Clare needed for her recovery.

  “Samurai worriers,” Roger said absently. “Who knew they had a thing for miso soup?”

  He didn’t understand why Stacy and Clare were laughing at him now, the two of them screaming with laughter, their heads thrown back, tears leaking from their eyes in his sister’s hospital room as they shrieked “samurai worriers!” He didn’t like being laughed at, but what a pleasure it was just to see the two of them enjoying themselves like that, in Sloan Kettering of all places, a place you’d never, ever want to find yourself.

  S

  As she’s cleaning up the mess in the kitchen after Roger’s little barbecue on the terrace—she should have been smart enough to stock up on paper plates, Stacy realizes, annoyed at herself—her sister calls back.

  “I’ve been thinking about it, and look, just let me pick you up at the airport tomorrow,” Lauren says. “Just let me do this for you, all right? The plane gets in around five? After the twins’ gymnastics practice, the three of us will drive to Kennedy in the SUV, pick you up and bring you into the city, and we can all go out for an early dinner. Nothing fancy, maybe that coffee shop sort of place in your neighborhood, okay?”

  Bemused by Lauren’s persistence, but touched, too, Stacy realizes they haven’t seen each other in a couple of months; hey, why turn down the opportunity to spend some time with her sister? And her nieces, fourteen years old and probably none too keen on being in the company of relatives . . . Lauren doesn’t know much of anything about their financial crisis, though she must have assumed something was up when Stacy told her she and Roger were moving to a smaller apartment, one that was several blocks east of Park. She has never offered Lauren any details; their relationship just isn’t the sort where either of them shares with the other the particulars of their bad news. (Only Jefrie knows; when Stacy told her, the night after they went to hear Dave/Professor Sarno’s band, Jefrie said, “Wait, Roger put up the Atlanta mall as collateral? But why would he do something so risky and, well, so just plain stupid?” Then she’d apologized to Stacy, who had no answer to her question. Or no intelligent answer anyway.)

  She remembers something her grandmother is fond of saying: What was, was, what is, is.

  And what was the point, Stacy asked Roger, of torturing himself with the heavy weight of blame and guilt that he insisted on shouldering and which served no purpose except to grind him down, little by little, day after day.

  “Well, if you’re absolutely, 1,000 percent sure it’s not too much trouble,” she says now to Lauren, and shakes some Ajax vigorously into her mother-in-law’s scratched and stained sink.

  “See ya tomorrow,” her sister says.

  ~ 27 ~

  In the laundry room of her new building, Stacy soon discovered, the housekeepers who worked for her neighbors were from all over the world—Russia, Poland, the Philippines, Korea, but mostly the Caribbean. They had plenty to say, most of it uncomplimentary, about their employers. As she transferred armloads of wet clothing from the washing machine to
the dryer in this big brightly lit room that opened onto a brick patio and smelled mostly of the too-sweet scent of a variety of fabric softeners, she heard a litany of complaints: about dogs who did their business on Wee-Wee pads in kitchens, foyers, and hallways; spoiled children who, disgracefully, threw tantrums in the neighborhood branch of the New York Public Library; and employers with crumbling marriages who used the F word right there in front of their children.

  Stacy listened now, over the continuous whirring of spinning washers and dryers, as one of the housekeepers, who was named Louise, stood with her hand on her hip and announced that the woman she worked for had been arrested for trying to run someone down in the building’s underground parking garage.

  “Whoa!” a woman named Josie said, pulling a long stream of plaid boxer shorts from a washing machine. “What the fuck wrong with her?”

  “She got a whacked-out problem, that girl!” someone else added. She was a middle-aged housekeeper in jeans, and a pink-and-white T-shirt that said “100% KOSHER— ALYSSA’S BAT MITZVAH SEPT 8, 2007.”

  “Well I hope she end up in Rikers where she belong!”

  “Nah, the husband posted bail and she’s back home. And here’s her brassieres, right here,” Louise said. She pointed to the three leopard-print bras she’d draped over the crook of her arm.

  It was hard for Stacy to ignore the fact that she herself was the only woman of the dozen or so in the room who wasn’t a housekeeper; she observed, as well, that there was merely one male here among them, and, inexplicably, he happened to be wearing a pleated black knee-length skirt that showed off his thick, hairy legs as he bent over into one of the large plastic recycling bins neatly lined up opposite the door. He was fishing for treasure, apparently, and walked off with a pile of magazines, his tennis sneakers squeaking against the shiny linoleum floor. Watching him leave, Stacy tried, and failed, to imagine who he might have been and what possessed him to dress up in a skirt merely to scavenge some recycling bins for his neighbors’ abandoned magazines. She listened to the housekeepers as they continued their eager, spirited talk about the woman who’d turned violent behind the wheel of her car—if she didn’t belong in the slammer, then certainly she belonged in the loony bin, they decided. Stacy stood among them, ignored, and felt a flicker of something resembling loneliness at one o’clock on a week-day afternoon as her load of towels and child-size socks and pj’s spun noisily. At her feet, littering the floor, were needles from discarded Christmas trees, the trees themselves shoved against the wall near the entrance. On a long plastic table where tenants in the building customarily displayed, as if in a thrift shop, things they no longer wanted, there were Christmas ornaments, best-selling paperbacks with shiny gold or silver covers, a computer monitor, its screen cloudy with dust, an array of dolls with uncombed hair and dingy-looking clothing. And one Dora the Explorer doll positioned slightly apart from the rest, a pristine Dance & Sparkle Ballerina Dora, her plastic hand grasping a violet-colored plastic barre, her feet in pink toe shoes. After a moment’s hesitation—because despite her gently worn wedding dress, she’d never given her children secondhand anything—Stacy scooped up Dora and her barre, and slipped out of the laundry room. Feeling as if she’d gotten away with something illicit.

  She would never tell Roger that Olivia’s new doll was a gift from the laundry room; despite their failing finances, he would, she knew, be mortified by what she’d done.

  S

  The public school where Olivia was now a student was only four blocks from their new home. This was one of those schools for the “gifted and talented”; it had a low acceptance rate, and Stacy knew the principal’s long friendship with Clare and her willingness to pull a string or two on Olivia’s behalf was another stroke of good luck, something to be grateful for if you were keeping score of these things, which Stacy was. As she stood and waited in the cold for Olivia this afternoon, she couldn’t help but take note, as she had every day since Olivia had enrolled here last week, that the mostly middle-class students who were streaming forth from the front doors were sloppily dressed, the laces of their sneakers untied, their backpacks food-stained, their hair not quite as clean as one might have hoped. And then there were the mothers, some of them sneaking cigarettes while they waited for their kids, the mothers looking—in their baggy sweat suits—as if they were part of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd instead of from right here in the city. But one of them, Stacy knew, was the wife of a former star who’d played for the Knicks years ago; another was a frizzy-haired philosophy professor at Columbia. An interesting mix of families, and a far cry from the crew who waited outside the Griffin School, just a few blocks west of where Stacy stood now. This was the school Olivia had transferred from, a school whose tuition was a cool $32,000 per year. In truth, Stacy had never felt the least bit comfortable among the crowd of chicly attired mothers and high-priced housekeepers who assembled at the front of the school every afternoon at dismissal time; she’d developed not a single friendship among the mothers of Olivia’s classmates—classmates who came to school dressed in miniature Burberry trench coats and cashmere sweaters, their infant siblings arriving in their strollers wearing black patent leather Gucci baby shoes on their teensy feet. This was a world Stacy had little interest in making her own; it was Roger who’d insisted that this was where their children belonged and where they would get the best education their money could buy. She’d often thought of her former life, of the homeless people she’d lavished such attention on, and reflected ruefully that she probably shouldn’t have allowed Roger to have his way when it came to decisions about their children’s education. But all that was moot now: she and her family would not be dipping their toes in that world of privilege again, certainly not in the foreseeable future, she imagined.

  “Sweetie pie!” she said now, greeting Olivia, as she always did, as if it had been weeks since they’d seen each other rather than hours. Will, who attended preschool in another part of the building, had been dismissed earlier and was off on a playdate with one of his new friends, who happened to be a neighbor and lived several floors beneath them.

  Olivia was lugging a castle she’d made in art class with shoeboxes and aluminum foil fashioned into turrets. A doll’s head, the size of an adult fingertip, poked through one of the castle’s windows forlornly.

  “That’s some gorgeous castle,” Stacy said. When it came to her children’s artwork, the lies flowed easily, and were always accompanied by what she hoped passed for a genuine smile.

  “This is Jazzmin,” Olivia said, pointing to the pretty girl standing next to her, who also held a castle in her arms and had a backpack slung over her shoulder. “We’re having a playdate today, okay?”

  It was okay, but only if Jazzmin’s mother agreed, Stacy explained to the girls. “Where’s your mom, sweetie?” she asked.

  Jazzmin, whose skin was the color of iced tea, pointed to a tall white guy around Stacy’s age, dressed in jeans and a thin corduroy jacket that couldn’t possibly have kept him warm on this cold day in January. His eyes were remarkably bloodshot, his long hair was in an oily ponytail, and most disconcertingly, his feet were in flip-flops. He would not have been out of place among her homeless clients, Stacy suspected, and when she approached him, the stink of a freshly smoked joint was all over him. This is how you come to pick up your little girl from kindergarten? she wanted to say. The guy was completely wasted, and she wondered how he’d managed to get here on time to collect his child.

  Introducing herself, Stacy presented the idea of a playdate as something he had no right to refuse.

  “Hey, you’ll get no argument from me,” Jazzmin’s father said, and laughed. “Keep her as long as you’d like. Just gimme your address and I’ll come get her later.”

  Stacy tore out a piece of paper from the small notebook she always kept in her purse just in case she had an idea she wanted to include in her still-unfinished novel.

  “Love you, Daddy,” Jazzmin said after he took the paper from Stacy,
but he’d already turned his back and started to walk off.

  They stopped at a candy store on the way home, where Stacy, who was seething over her brief encounter with the poorest excuse for a father she’d met in a long while, bought the girls Kit Kat bars. It was the social worker in her, and the mother in her, that made her loop her arm around Jazzmin and pull her close. And that was when she noticed the aroma, which wasn’t a pleasant one, of a young child’s body, one that hadn’t been washed in a long while. When they arrived home, just a few minutes later, she told the girls that before they could play, they’d have to take a bath.

  “You’re silly,” Olivia said. “We don’t take baths in the afternoon.”

  “Well, we do today.”

  Stacy ran the water for the bath, and stood by as the girls undressed and tossed their clothing on the floor. She nearly gagged at the odor, but was relieved to see there were no bruises on Jazzmin’s body, something she’d been worried she might find. Just because Jazzmin’s father was a stoner and wore flip-flops in the winter didn’t necessarily mean he was an abusive parent, she realized. Or at least not physically abusive.

  “So . . . where’s your mom today?” Stacy said casually.

  “In South Carolina with her boyfriend,” Jazzmin said. #x201C;We don’t see her,” she added, and said yes, Stacy could wash her hair for her.

  “That’s silly!” Olivia said. “Moms don’t have boyfriends.”

  “Some do,” said Stacy, but went no further than that. She thought, for the first time in a long while, of her ex, Rocco Bassani, who she’d heard—via Jefrie—was recently divorced and the father of a toddler named Dylan, whom his then-wife had given birth to after Rocco had his vasectomy reversed. Some of the best sex of her young life had probably been with Rocco, she recalled now, as she put bubble gum-scented Tame Your Mane Lazy Lion conditioner through Jazzmin’s hair and then Olivia’s. One summer night, when he was in med school and the two of them were living together, she and Rocco had sex in his parents’ pool at their house in East Hampton. She’d worried that his mother or father might wake up and decide to go into the kitchen for something to drink and look out beyond the door that led to the patio and the pool. Yeah, and then what? Rocco had said, making fun of her. Like they can possibly see what’s going on out here? She knew they couldn’t, but the fear stayed with her as Rocco pulled off her bikini bottom there in the shallow end of the pool where they could smell the ocean just beyond them. It embarrassed her slightly now to realize that the fear of being discovered had heightened the experience. And also that she still thought of Rocco with affection.