Being Esther

by Miriam Karmel

On the basis of that, she supposed, she got the job.

  Marty was stretched out in his favorite chair working the daily crossword when she finally spoke up, announced her good news.

  “But what about the children?” he said, without glancing up.

  “What about them?” Esther absentmindedly flipped through a magazine, wishing she could find a way to tell her husband how she’d been rushing to get home before school let out when she spotted the help-wanted sign in the window. She might share with him that she changed her clothes three times before the interview, and still got it wrong. “But I got the job!” she could say.

  “Basil’s girlfriend,” Marty said, pressing a pencil to his lips. “Six letters.”

  She glared at him as she recalled an earlier conversation, one in which she’d proposed returning to school for a degree in library science. “Then what?” he’d said. “Then I’ll get a job at a library,” she replied. “At your age?” he asked. Esther was thirty-three. This time, Esther intended to stick to her guns. Marty wasn’t going to bully her out of a job.

  She set the magazine down and picked up Nine Stories, which she’d been displaying on the coffee table for weeks. “It’s only three mornings a week,” she said. “While the children are in school,” she added, her voice trailing off.

  Flipping to the last story in the book—the one in which that brilliant child was pushed into the deep end of an empty swimming pool—she settled on the passage she’d committed to memory. Esther had read and reread those lines as if she were rehearsing for a play. She recited them in front of the mirror and while clearing the breakfast dishes. “One of these days you’re going to have a tragic, tragic heart attack.” That’s what the woman in the story, the one with the unfortunate son, had said to her husband. Esther shouted those words while she ran the vacuum, while making the beds. Then, like that fictional woman, she threatened to wear red to her husband’s funeral and sit in the front row flirting with the organist.

  Esther was conjuring a way to work those lines into the conversation, the way to portend Marty’s death and his funeral, when he looked up from his puzzle and said, “I suppose if it’s only three mornings a week . . .”

  Esther closed the book, returned it to the coffee table, and nodded. “Brenda,” she said.

  “Brenda?”

  “Basil’s girl.” Softly, she added, “Nobody will ever know I was gone.”

  Every morning at 8:30 sharp, Esther and Lorraine speak by phone, though it would be easy enough to meet near the statue of Saint Francis, in the building’s courtyard.

  One morning Lorraine makes the call, the delicate expression the two employ for checking to see that the other has made it through the night. The next morning, Esther returns the favor. And so it will go, until the day one of them doesn’t answer, leaving the other to panic, wondering what to do. Dial 911? Call Milo, the building’s super?

  Today, while waiting for Lorraine to call, Esther peers through her living room window across the courtyard into the other apartments of the Devonshire Arms.

  Lorraine’s curtains are drawn, yet Esther can picture her friend seated at the kitchen table with the Sun-Times and her second cup of Sanka.

  When the phone finally rings, Esther picks up and without so much as a hello, says, “Ceely kidnapped me.”

  “Esther, listen to me. Your own daughter cannot kidnap you.”

  “Trust me. She did.” Esther pauses, waiting for her friend to deliver the verbal equivalent of a pat on the arm.

  Lorraine sighs. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t sleep so well.”

  “I just said that I was kidnapped, and you’re going on about a sleepless night!”

  Esther is about to hang up when Lorraine says, “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

  “Not now,” Esther whispers. “Later. I’ll tell you at lunch.” She has just finished reading the newspaper. The government is spying on ordinary citizens, listening in on phone conversations without a warrant. Though she doesn’t believe for a minute that anyone would bother eavesdropping on a couple of eighty-five-year-old women, she isn’t taking any chances. What happened to her is nobody’s business.

  She thinks about her grandson, Josh, who doesn’t care who knows what. Last Sunday, after dinner, he sat her down at his desk, punched some keys on his computer, and told her about something called a blog. “Here, Nonna. Check it out.” She read about Josh and his girlfriend, a sweet girl with a heart-shaped face and messy hair, about the things they did when he was away at college, about the smell of his sheets after sex. Esther, who could remember changing Josh’s diapers, stopped reading and said, “Very nice.”

  No, she is not about to broadcast the details of her life to strangers. No blogs. No revelations for government spies. “I’ll tell you everything. Later,” Esther says to Lorraine. “Now tell me what kept you up. Was it the music? I heard him playing again last night.”

  Sometimes at night Esther listens for the music from across the courtyard. The autistic boy who lives next to Lorraine can play for hours. It’s always the same, a haunting melody that stirs forgotten feelings of longing. This she won’t tell a soul, not even Lorraine, but last night the music started when she was in bed reading. She set down her book, closed her eyes, and listened. When the music stopped, she opened her eyes and he was there, standing at the foot of her bed. “So it’s you,” she said, smiling up at him. Marty’s hair appeared as thick and wiry as the first time they’d met. He needed to lose the same ten pounds he’d carried before his illness. And he wore the same fat, sloppy grin. Even the gap between his front teeth, the one she’d loved exploring with her tongue, was still there.

  “Yes,” he said, jingling the change in his pockets. “It’s me.”

  “The music,” she said. “It touched me.”

  “Where?” He drew closer. “Show me.”

  She placed her hand on her breast, and he placed his hand over hers, and then he began moving it slowly up and down the front of her body, playing her with the assurance of a virtuoso. She closed her eyes again and tried guessing what song he was playing.

  When she opened her eyes he was gone and she wept at the loss, which felt as strong as the first time. Then, her hand touching the spot where his hand had been, she whispered, “If that’s what you get to do after, if you get to learn to play such music, then maybe it’s not such a bad place after all. Better than that joint Ceely’s been pushing.”

  Now Lorraine is saying, “It wasn’t the music. I just couldn’t stop thinking about poor Mrs. Singh.” She pauses. “Or maybe it was the cake I ate at dinner. Maybe that’s all it was.”

  “No,” Esther says. “What happened to that woman is enough to keep anybody up.”

  Esther has never had a neighbor like Mrs. Singh, who lands, unbidden, at Esther’s door, a bird-of-paradise in her brilliant saris bearing samosas, lentils with curry, chapatis, and dal.

  Esther knows that cooking is her refuge from the loneliness of being shut in with a sick husband. Yet lonely as she is, Mrs. Singh has never accepted Esther’s invitations for tea. “Kumar,” she’ll say, looking over her shoulder at the door she always leaves slightly ajar. “Well, next time,” Esther will say. Graciously, she accepts her neighbor’s offerings, always returning the empty plates with something of her own creation: poppyseed cookies; chicken soup; a wedge of her famous kugel, the fat, buttery egg noodles studded with plump golden raisins.

  Now she confesses to Lorraine that until the other day, her biggest fear for her neighbor was that she would trip on the hem of her sari and fall down the stairs. “There must be some way to hike it up,” she tells Lorraine. “Even in winter, she lets those beautiful silk skirts drag through the snow.”

  “The Singhs owned a shop on Kedzie,” Lorraine offers. “Before Mr. Singh got sick. It was one of those shops that sell saris and gold.”

  “That’s no excuse,” insists Esther, who knows that about the Singhs. “Dresses aren’t like tissues, no matter how many you h
ave.”

  Over lunch at Wing Yee’s, Esther tells Lorraine that the other day she’d gone down for the mail and found Ceely in the lobby with Milo. “They stopped talking when I showed up, and gave each other a look. I was sure he’d been telling her about Mrs. Singh. That’s the last thing I want Ceely to know. I felt like chasing her out the door with Milo’s broom. Then Milo started whistling and sweeping the stairs, and Ceely asked if I was ready. I didn’t know what she was talking about.” Esther pauses. “Remember Gaslight?” She searches Lorraine’s face for some sign of comprehension. Amazingly, Lorraine’s looks haven’t deviated since high school. She wears the same coral lipstick and her hair, swept up and secured into place with a thick coating of spray, is still a silvery blond. Esther always feels as if she has a poppyseed stuck in her teeth when she’s with Lorraine.

  “You don’t remember, do you?” Esther says. “It’s the movie where Charles Boyer convinces his wife that things that happen are figments of her imagination. He isolates her and in the end he drives her mad.” She pauses. “Lorraine, I am here to tell you that my daughter is gaslighting me. She insisted that we had a date. But we did not.”

  Lorraine nudges a teacup toward Esther.

  Esther pushes it away. “You don’t believe me.”

  “I believe you.” Lorraine refills her own cup. “But she didn’t exactly kidnap you. She’s your daughter. Besides,” she says, reaching across the table for Esther’s hand.

  “Stop!” Esther recoils. “I know what you’re going to say—that I don’t have to move. But one day . . . one day, just like Helen, I’ll paint my eyebrows with lipstick, or serve a raw roast to dinner guests. I’ll burn myself with the teakettle, or trip on the bath mat and break my wrist. We have to be so careful, Lorraine. It’s exhausting being this careful.”

  Mrs. Singh was mugged early on a Sunday morning, while heading for a bus to visit Mr. Singh in the hospital. She’d hoped to arrive in time to feed him his breakfast.

  “Next thing I knew, I was on the ground,” she tells Esther, who already knows the details, compliments of Milo. The two women have run into each other in the foyer, collecting their mail. Mrs. Singh’s arm, the one she ordinarily uses to hike up her sari when she climbs the stairs, is in a sling. As she struggles with the key to her mailbox she tells Esther that she never heard her assailant. “One minute, I’m heading for the bus; the next, boom, I’m on the ground!” All she remembers is a burning sensation piercing the shoulder where her purse strap had been. Her sari was ripped, her eyeglasses broken, and so was her right arm, which had taken the brunt of the fall. “I never saw it coming,” she says.

  Esther considers telling her neighbor about the mugging that precipitated her father’s move to America, and how he often reminded the family that if he hadn’t been attacked at the train station in Warsaw by a group of hooligans who taunted him for being a Jew, he would have gone to the death camps with the rest of his family. Her father spoke of that attack as “the straw that broke the camel.” Sometimes, he called it “the silver lining in the clouds.”

  Instead, Esther offers to help Mrs. Singh in any way she can and warns her neighbor not to trip on the hem of her sari as she makes her way up the stairs.

  Safely back in her own apartment, Esther bolts the door and fastens the chain, and thinks that if Ceely ever gets wind of the mugging she’ll put her in that place where Helen Pearlman is stashed away. Esther can’t find the silver lining in what happened to Mrs. Singh.

  Shortly after Mrs. Singh was mugged, a sign went up near the mailboxes in the foyer announcing a meeting in the courtyard near the statue of Saint Francis, on Wednesday at five. A police officer will be on hand to answer questions and address concerns about neighborhood safety. The sign says: “Bring your own chair.”

  Esther plans to bring one of the lawn chairs that she and Marty had found on sale at Walgreens alongside a jumble of rubber flip-flops and tanning oils. When Marty suggested that they buy two, she’d pictured the patch of dirt between the sidewalk and the curb that Milo rakes and waters to no avail. “What will we do with lawn chairs?” she asked. Marty paused, jingled the change in his pockets, and said, “You never know.” Then Esther pointed to a spot where the plastic webbing was starting to fray and said, “They won’t last a season.” Now five summers have come and gone. The chairs have lasted longer than Marty, who’d hung them from a hook on the wall in the basement storage room.

  When Esther goes downstairs to retrieve her chair she wonders whether Mr. Volz, who lives in the apartment one flight up from hers, can use the other one. She isn’t sure why she thinks of Mr. Volz, except that he doesn’t own a car, and while that doesn’t preclude him from owning a lawn chair, she regards him as a man with deliberately few possessions. It also occurs to her that this is an opportunity to get to know her neighbor better. She already knows, from the sounds he makes padding around in the rooms above hers, that he is an early riser with regular habits. She knows, from Milo, that he does something at the university involving rare books, though she can’t imagine what. Perhaps he has girlfriends? Or not. There is something in the way he tosses his scarf as he slides into a taxi each morning that suggests she might want to tread lightly where that is concerned.

  Milo carries the chairs upstairs, setting one in Esther’s foyer and leaving the other propped outside Mr. Volz’s door. Then Esther phones her neighbor to explain. The answering machine picks up and she realizes she’s never heard his voice, for whenever they pass in the hall Mr. Volz simply nods.

  “This is Esther Lustig. From downstairs,” she tells the machine. She considers describing herself so that Mr. Volz won’t confuse her with Mrs. Singh or with that boorish Ella Tucker in 3A. But what could she say? I’m short and appear to be getting shorter. I have blond hair, though I’ve noticed that in a certain light, it looks pink. I wear eyeglasses with silver frames. My husband used to say that I look like Judy Holliday. If we were at a party, he’d wrap an arm around my shoulder, smile, and say to anyone within earshot, “She’s a dead ringer for that broad, don’t you think?” People would nod and look down at their feet. Once, to relieve the tension, I joked, “He’s only saying that because I beat him so badly at gin.” But that merely added to the discomfort, so I described the scene in Born Yesterday, where Judy Holliday beat Broderick Crawford in gin. People coughed and studied their feet again. Later, I told Marty that if he ever pulled that stunt again, I’d leave him.

  Finally, Esther finds her voice. “I live downstairs in 2B. I left the chair for you. In case you’re going to the meeting tomorrow evening.” The machine cuts her off before she can say that she’ll understand if he doesn’t use it. She dials again, but as soon as she hangs up, she realizes that she’s forgotten to leave her phone number. Then she writes a note.

  Dear Mr. Volz,

  Perhaps you can use this chair for the meeting tomorrow. It’s been in storage for too long. I’m glad to share it.

  Sincerely,

  Esther Lustig, 2B

  She rereads the note, puts it in an envelope, seals it, and on the outside, in her best Palmer script, writes: Mr. Volz. Then she trudges up the stairs, holding tight to the railing. After pausing for breath at the landing, she tapes the note over a part of the webbing, which, as she’d predicted, has come undone.

  The next morning, Esther discovers the chair propped outside her door. Taped to it is an envelope with MRS. LUSTIG printed in neat block letters.

  When Esther makes the call to Lorraine that morning, she describes how her hand shook as she opened the envelope. “I felt like one of those stars at the Academy Awards. The paper is thick,” she says. “Real quality.”

  “Esther! Please, just read the note,” Lorraine insists.

  “Hold your horses.” Esther presses the paper to her bosom. “I’m getting there. You know,” she says. “You weren’t always so impatient.”

  “And how would you know?”

  Esther is silenced by this truth. She and Lorraine had gone the
ir separate ways after high school. All those years Esther was busy raising a family in the suburbs, Lorraine was here, sharing an apartment with her mother. For thirty-five years, Lorraine rode the el to an office on LaSalle, where she worked as a legal secretary. Mrs. Garafalo kept house. Lorraine has told Esther that every Saturday morning she had her hair done at a salon on Montrose, after which she and her mother went to Marshall Field’s for lunch. On Sundays, they went to church. And in the evenings? But Esther has learned not to press Lorraine about life with her mother. She has never found a way to ask, Didn’t you want to strike out on your own? Instead, the two women picked up where they left off, on graduation day at Von Steuben High, all those Junes ago. Recently, Lorraine said, “When I’m with you, Esther, I forget that we’re no longer in high school. It’s as if all those years in between never happened.” The confession, so unexpected, so out of character, stopped Esther from turning the moment into a joke, from suggesting that a mirror would help bring back all those years.

  “Okay,” Esther sighs. “So you were impatient. I didn’t know. Now, do you want to hear the note?”

  “Go ahead,” Lorraine says.

  Esther clears her throat, holds the letter out at arms length, and reads:

  Dear Mrs. Lustig,

  Thank you for the kind offer of your chair. Alas, I have a prior engagement and am unable to attend the meeting.

  Yours truly,

  Timothy Volz

  “Timothy,” Esther says. “You don’t hear that very often.”

  “Well, you don’t see him very often, either. Odd man,” Lorraine replies.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m not going to spell it out for you, Esther. And do you really think he has a prior engagement? Prior engagement! Who says things like that? ‘Busy.’ He might have said, ‘I’m busy.’”

  “People get busy,” Esther snaps.

  She hangs up and thinks about Timothy Volz and his prior engagement. When was the last time she had to decline an invitation because she was busy? She is beginning to feel like an old Eskimo drifting away on an ice floe, passively observing all the busy people back on shore. There are so many ways that people keep occupied. Perhaps Mr. Volz is traveling. Then she wonders if she is too old to travel and if not, where would she go?