Being Esther

by Miriam Karmel

  The carp had fascinated and delighted Sonia, who’d never known anyone who made gefilte fish from scratch. And though Esther knew such people existed (her family mocked and pitied them), she hadn’t known anyone who bought the fish in jars.

  Sonia will remember it all: Esther’s aversion to cats, the parrot, the fish, the names of those grinning young men.

  “Put her on,” she says to Buddy. “Put Sonia on.”

  “Oh, Esther,” he moans.

  A heavy silence engulfs the space between them. How could she have been so reckless? So presumptuous? Put Sonia on! As if they were in Mexico and she just dialed the Markels’ room (they always stayed in number 7).

  Yet she can still hear the squawking parrot, taste the papaya, smell the sweet panaderia breads. She has been so transported by memory that when Buddy says, “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Esther expects him to explain that Sonia has run out to the market for more limes.

  Ceely wants Esther to move to Cedar Shores. After Marty died, Ceely started placing glossy brochures on Esther’s coffee table, her nightstand, and even tucked between the pages of her latest book. The other day, she held one open and pointed to the pictures. “Look, Ma. You’ll have your own room. There’s even a small kitchen. But you won’t need to bother. There’s a dining room for all your meals.” The dining room tables were draped with white cloths. Mauve napkins bloomed from water goblets.

  Esther’s old friend, Helen Pearlman, who’d loved martinis, cooked with lemongrass, and played a mean game of tennis, is stashed away in a studio apartment at Cedar Shores, where they serve blush wine before dinner on Saturdays and hold nightly bingo games in the party room. Once a week a bus arrives for anyone wanting a ride to the supermarket.

  Not long ago, Esther visited Helen. The two women sat across from each other on matching mauve love seats in the “family room,” straining to talk above the din of the TV. Actually, Esther held up both ends of the conversation, while Helen’s attention drifted between Oprah and a group of card players at a table near the bay window. Esther asked Helen if she’d heard about Oprah’s great car giveaway? “Everyone in the audience got a brand-new Pontiac,” she said. When Helen’s eyes brightened, Esther thought she’d guided her friend safely back home through the fog. Then Helen said, “You know, Esther, I finally divorced Jimmy,” and Esther wondered whether there was any point in reminding her friend that Jimmy had been dead for eleven years. When Helen said, “He came home with powder on his shirt one too many times,” Esther rose, kissed her friend’s papery cheek and said goodbye.

  No. Esther is staying put. She has no intention of joining her friend in Bingoville. “Thank you, very much,” she told Ceely, as she handed back the brochure. “I’m happy just where I am.”

  She and Marty moved here not long after Ceely ran off to a commune in Vermont. Barry was in dental school. The move back to the city had been Marty’s idea. Gamely, Esther agreed, though not before spending a day in the basement crying into a pile of freshly laundered towels.

  She’d loved her old house, but the city proved to be a tonic. Esther and Marty felt freer, lighter, as if city living was like one of the miracle diets Esther was always trying. They enjoyed learning their way around the new neighborhood, though it was very near to the one they had left years ago when they joined the great migration north to the suburbs. They discovered the joy of walking—to restaurants, the hardware store, movies, the library.

  They rediscovered the joy of sex. Marty referred to that time as “our second honeymoon,” but to Esther, their couplings felt nothing like their early awkward intimacies. She and Marty became eager and playful, but also patient and considerate with one another. At the same time, their sex felt X-rated, illicit. Esther enjoyed pretending they were lovers sneaking off for an assignation in a borrowed room. In bed, she felt as if she were somebody else, somebody she would like to know. Suddenly she was that somebody! Nothing had prepared her for how good she would feel.

  Then one day, Marty said, “I can’t believe we wasted all those years living in the sticks.”

  Esther, who couldn’t believe she’d ever cried into the towels, hated to think that she’d frittered away her life. “Wasted?” she frowned. “Let’s just say it was nice while it lasted.” She reminded Marty of the trees that formed a canopy over the quiet roads; the expanses of green; the tranquil village where the children could ride their bikes to the playground or the ice cream parlor and she never had to worry. And hadn’t they made interesting friends? She was forever entertaining, and like-minded people reciprocated. “It felt right at the time,” she told Marty.

  “I hated every minute of it,” he declared, at which point Esther retreated to the kitchen and started chopping onions for a pot roast.

  Esther refused to let Marty ruin her joy. She had few regrets about the past, and she took pleasure in the present. She’d loved everything about their new life, even the building’s name. The Devonshire Arms was a typical Chicago-style building—three wings, four stories, dusty yellow brick. Yet she appreciated the fact that there were no lingering cooking smells in the hallway as there were in her sister-in-law Clara’s building, where garlic, fried meat, and scorched oil seeped into the hallway carpets, the wooden lintels, the paint on the wall. Not once has Esther smelled the curries from the Singhs’ apartment across the hall.

  And what a surprise and a pleasure it was to encounter Lorraine after all these years, in an apartment across the courtyard. Next door to Lorraine lives a young boy who practices piano every morning and sometimes at night. In the summer, with the windows open, Esther feels as if she is being serenaded.

  And if she asks Milo, the super, to fix a leaky faucet or change a bulb in the hallway, he responds as if he’s been waiting all day for her call. No. Esther isn’t moving. What’s more, she’ll have no part in her daughter’s get-out-and-do-more campaign. Ceely wants Esther to join the mall walkers, take up water aerobics or yoga. Just the other day, while unloading a bag of groceries in Esther’s kitchen, Ceely remarked that a friend’s eighty-four-year-old mother had taken up tai chi and still mowed her own lawn.

  Ceely has always tried to improve Esther. When she was ten years old she hounded Esther to play mah-jongg with the other mothers. And why didn’t Esther wear eyeshadow and get her hair done once a week like Susie Gordon’s mom? And did she have to wear a sweatshirt and corduroy slippers around the house? Ceely had a way of making Esther feel like the old love seat they’d moved to the basement rec room after the stuffing started to show.

  All these years later, Esther is still on the defensive. “You wouldn’t believe how much exercise I get just walking around the house,” she said, as Ceely finished unpacking the groceries. “Besides, I don’t have a lawn to mow.” She reminded her daughter that she walked to the library and the drugstore and that she and Lorraine walked to Wing Yee’s on a regular basis. She walked to the market on Devon a few times a week. Though she doesn’t need much, Esther enjoys steering a cart up and down the aisles, examining all the products that weren’t available when she was a young woman running a busy household. The year she took up Chinese cooking, she drove halfway across Chicago for gingerroot and five-spice powder. Now, when she has little appetite and nobody to cook for, she can load her basket with five kinds of goat cheese, purple peppers, yellow tomatoes.

  “The supermarket doesn’t count,” Ceely said, as she stuffed the empty bag under the kitchen sink. She called grocery shopping an “add on,” something Esther would do no matter what. “You need to do more,” she declared.

  And if I don’t? How can Esther tell her daughter that sometimes she is content sitting by the window, looking out at her neighbors coming and going, or staring across the courtyard and watching Lorraine’s cat sunning itself on the windowsill? She can sit without her knitting or a book. She is content doing nothing, and she can’t explain why.

  Esther is an avid reader, though she rarely purchases a book. She prefers checking books out of the l
ibrary, where she can exchange pleasantries with the librarians and hear them say, “These will be due in two weeks.”

  Sometimes, though, as she leaves the library, Esther’s delight turns to fear as she imagines her father trailing after her, wagging an accusing finger and issuing a stern admonishment: “Don’t you forget, Esther. No lunch is for free.”

  How long has her father been gone? Yet still, his voice wins out. She has even imagined arguing with him, trying to explain that the books are in fact free, if only for a few weeks. “It’s a lending library, Pa.”

  Still, whenever she approaches the exit, she expects one of the librarians to come running after her, shouting, “Hey! Where do you think you’re going with those?” But she keeps walking, never looking back, until she is safely at home. After bolting the door, she collapses onto the sofa and waits for her breathing to return to normal, for her better self to prevail, and for the earlier frisson of fear to be replaced by an overwhelming sense of pleasure. Her father was wrong.

  Esther was a young married woman when she bought her first book. Nine Stories was on the best-seller list, and she couldn’t wait to be in on the excitement. When Betty Pink, the librarian, informed Esther that fifteen people were ahead of her on the waiting list, she headed to Kroch’s and Brentano’s to purchase a copy. The fact that the surly clerk had never heard of J. D. Salinger and ignored Esther’s attempts at conversation didn’t diminish her pleasure at the thought of owning her own copy. Then, while handing her money to the clerk, Esther started at the sound of her father’s voice. “Aha!” he said, as if he were standing there beside her. “I told you, ‘No lunch is for free.’ Now maybe you’ll believe me.”

  Esther felt unsettled after reading the stories, not unlike the way she’d felt after smoking her first cigarette or drinking her first cocktail. It was as if she’d reached some defining moment, some point of no return, after which she’d never be the same. Yet when she looked in the mirror, the same open, candid face stared back at her. And when she spoke, a familiar, soft voice filled the air. The metamorphosis, if that’s what had occurred, left neither visible nor audible traces. Yet somehow, she felt transformed.

  Those nine stories were like a road map to another world, one populated with precocious children and confused adults. There was even a character with the surname of Glass, though he bore no resemblance to any of the Glasses in Esther’s family.

  Connecticut, practically a character in one story, seemed as alien and distant to Esther as the Polish shtetl from which her parents had fled. After reading the story about two women from Connecticut who spent an afternoon drinking, Esther couldn’t stop thinking of her mother scrubbing the kitchen floor, polishing the Shabbes candlesticks, chopping onions for soup. She had no frame of reference for this newly delineated map of the world.

  Esther hated the way Eloise from Connecticut treated her maid, as if she were nothing more than a stick of furniture. And it broke Esther’s heart, the way Eloise ignored that darling child of hers, with the imaginary playmate, Jimmy Jimmereeno.

  Jimmy Jimmereeno!

  The story haunted Esther. While peeling potatoes for dinner, she saw those two women sipping highballs in Eloise’s well-appointed Connecticut living room. As she washed the lettuce, she heard the sound of clinking ice cubes and slurred female voices. By the time she set the table, she was feeling like one of the old dresses in her closet, something outmoded that she’d hung onto for too long. After putting the children to bed, Esther soaked in the tub longer than usual. She wondered if she knew anyone to invite for drinks in the afternoon.

  The next day Helen Pearlman stopped by.

  Esther, who had just popped a roast in the oven, hugged her friend and said, “How about a drink?”

  “Coffee would be great,” Helen replied. “But only if you’ve got some made.”

  Esther, annoyed with her friend, wondered how Eloise broached the matter of drinks, since a first round had been poured offstage, so to speak, sometime after Mary Jane’s arrival and before the clinking of ice cubes in empty glasses. Of course, Esther would know just what to say once she and Helen had finished their first round. “Gimme your glass.” That’s what Eloise had said to Mary Jane.

  Esther told Helen that she had something different in mind. “A highball, perhaps?”

  “A highball?” Helen consulted her watch. “At two thirty?” She laughed so hard she cried. “Oh, Esther. You’re such a card. That’s what I love about you.” Wiping tears from her eyes, she said, “If you have any cream, I’ll take just a splash.”

  Later, as Esther cleared away the coffee cups, she told herself that nothing good could come of drinking in the afternoon. After all, look at how Eloise had treated that precious child, and how she’d disregarded the feelings of the maid, and how she and Mary Jane had slurred their words. Still, her hand trembled as she wiped cake crumbs from the table. While rinsing the dishes, Esther wondered if she was missing out on something. Yet she was busy raising Barry and Ceely; she helped Marty with the pharmacy books. What more could she want?

  Not long after Helen refused to drink a highball in the afternoon, Ronnie Kaufman, the accountant who lived two doors down, ran out for a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Ronnie’s defection was the most exciting thing that ever happened in their neighborhood, inspiring all sorts of speculation ranging from another woman to sudden amnesia to kidnapping. But Ronnie was no kid. Looking back, it was easy to see that when a thirty-nine-year-old man with a wife and three children fails to return home from the minimart after running out for a pack of Lucky’s, he was a victim of nothing but his own lack of imagination, his inability to envision a better way of breaking free from the monotonous, suffocating, mind-numbing tedium of his world, which was bounded by the greenest, most neatly manicured, chemically enhanced lawn in the entire post-war suburban development known as Timber Ridge.

  As if Ronnie’s disappearing act wasn’t enough, Marty came home one evening, poured a scotch without ice, then polished it off before telling Esther that his assistant’s wife had been fooling around with her tennis instructor. Everyone was getting in on the act, even that shiksa, Effie Greenberg.

  Esther, who had been planning to tell Marty that she’d just accepted a part-time job at Kroch’s and Brentano’s, decided to wait until after dinner before breaking the news.

  She’d been peeling potatoes that afternoon and quizzing Barry on his spelling words when the phone rang. She was annoyed with Barry, who’d failed his last test. And the potatoes had sprouted. She wiped her hands on her apron before picking up the phone. “Yes?” she said, with the abrupt impatience of a person ill-suited to dealing with the public.

  Yet she got the job. “Monday. Of course,” she stuttered. “Thank you.”

  Esther had convinced herself that the interview hadn’t gone well. She’d worn—in the end—the suit she wore last year to her nephew’s bar mitzvah, with brown pumps and a matching leather handbag. At the last minute, thankfully, she’d stuffed the gloves in her purse.

  Penny (even her name was playful and blithe) had on a soft pink sweater and a slim gray skirt. Her shoes, skimming her feet like ballet slippers, were the color of doves.

  They’d sat on either side of Penny’s desk, in an alcove near the back of the store. The space was barely large enough for a desk, a small bookshelf, and the chair under which Esther hid her matronly handbag from view. Esther, who’d worked summers at her father’s dress shop, had never interviewed for a job. She folded her hands in her lap and attempted a smile.

  Helen had coached Esther, said she’d be asked about her goals. “My goals?” Esther eyed her friend with suspicion. “You know,” Helen shrugged. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Esther let out a nervous laugh. Her goal that day was to pick up Marty’s suits at the cleaners; make sure they hadn’t run out of milk; drive Ceely to her piano lesson. “What am I thinking?” Esther said to her friend.

  Penny didn’t ask about goals. She skimmed the applicat
ion Esther had spent hours preparing, pushed it aside, and said, “I need someone three mornings a week.”

  Was that a conversational gambit, an opening through which Esther was expected to reveal something of herself? She eyed Penny’s casual, blond hair, the way it stayed within the confines of a thin plastic headband. Eloise would have hair like that. You remind me of Eloise, she might say. And then they could discuss the story about Connecticut. The other stories, too, if there was time. Penny would see that Esther loved to read, was up on the latest books. So what if she couldn’t imagine a life beyond the one she was living?

  “And I need someone who’s punctual.” Penny tilted her head to the side, as if she were assessing Esther’s ability to read a clock. “Is there any reason you can’t show up on time?”

  Esther shook her head. Ceely and Barry would be in school by then, Marty long gone to the pharmacy, leaving her to rattle around, holding down an empty fort. She wanted to tell Penny that she’d fly to the store; walk the two miles, if the car broke down. Nervously, she nattered about working in her father’s store. She neglected any mention of dusting the mannequins, polishing the mirrors, filling the cut-glass dish with lemon drops, and chose instead to inflate her duties in the office, where, in a pinch, she opened the mail, sorted the accounts payable, answered the phone.