Being Esther

by Miriam Karmel

  Shortly after Helen Pearlman’s move to Cedar Shores, Esther decides to pay a visit. She has in mind taking Helen out to lunch, perhaps to that sushi place her friend enjoyed so much. But by the time Esther pulls into the Cedar Shores lot a heavy rain is threatening to put a crimp in her plans. One mishap on a rain-soaked road and Ceely will take away the keys quicker than Esther can say Bingoville.

  Helen’s door is ajar as if she were expecting a visitor, though Esther hasn’t called ahead. “She won’t remember that you’re coming,” warned Helen’s daughter, Fanny.

  Helen stands gazing out the window, where a pair of cardinals, oblivious to the rain, dance around a feeder. Her white hair sticks out in wispy tufts, sprouting haphazardly to expose patches of baby-pink scalp. Her faded muumuu has slipped off one shoulder, revealing a bone structure as delicate as a prepubescent girl’s. She isn’t wearing a bra.

  Esther, dressed in a navy-blue pants suit with a polka-dotted silk blouse, feels like an officious staff social worker or a volunteer delivering magazines and good cheer rather than a childhood friend who can show up wearing any old thing.

  “Yoo hoo!” Esther taps on the open door. “Anybody home?”

  Helen turns and regards her friend.

  Fanny told Esther that recently her mother painted her eyebrows with lipstick. Today, however, Helen’s pale face is a blank slate, static and impassive. Yet beneath the wreckage, Esther detects the outlines of a beautiful woman.

  “Helen?” Esther utters her friend’s name, as if she’s just run into someone she might have known, but isn’t sure.

  Helen turns back to face the window. Her spine is beautifully straight and as Esther lets herself into the room and crosses to the window she reminds herself that her friend’s mind, not her body, is giving out.

  Esther places a hand on her friend’s narrow back and kisses her papery cheek. Once Helen had returned from France smelling of lavender; she’d discovered a new perfume.

  “How are you feeling today?” Esther asks.

  Helen presses her nose to the glass and mutters something Esther can’t understand.

  Esther remembers her plans for lunch. What had she been thinking? Tentatively, she touches her friend’s arm. “So you’re feeling all right?”

  “Rude bird,” Helen says, as a jay dive-bombs the cardinals. “Dumb, too, out in the rain like that. Never did like them.”

  When Fanny reported the lipstick incident, she also mentioned that the Cedar Shores staff was threatening to move her mother to a more secure part of the building. Apparently Helen had been speaking in a French accent, and though Fanny didn’t understand why that was a problem, she was told that it was a sign of some sort of disorder affecting her brain—Fanny couldn’t remember the name—and that her mother’s behavior was becoming increasingly erratic. Recently, Helen had accused Consuela, a uniquely competent aide, of stealing one of her boxes of cherry Jell-O. Helen buys the Jell-O on outings to the supermarket and lines the boxes up on a bookshelf, as if she were assembling a set of encyclopedias, one volume at a time.

  The next day, when Consuela knocked to remind her about breakfast, Helen said, “I don’t want to go to ze dining room.”

  Now Helen turns to Esther and, sounding like the girl who’d shared a locker with Esther for four years at Von Steuben High, says, “I had a sneaking suspicion you’d show up. It’s good to see you, Esther.” She smiles and strokes Esther’s cheek, peering into her eyes with a knowing look. She points to an easy chair, gesturing for Esther to sit, then perches on the edge of the bed.

  “Wait!” Esther cries. “I’ll get you a chair.” Quickly, she sees that other than a straight-backed wooden chair tucked under a small dining table, she and Helen have exhausted all the options. Dejected, Esther settles back down. Helen’s cramped room looks nothing like the pictures Ceely has been pushing. The narrative set out in the glossy brochure invites Esther to imagine sipping coffee on her patio while watching golfers tee off on the third fairway. Esther is meant to believe that she will spend her days hitting golf balls on the Cedar Shores links, or riding the shuttle to the mall. In the evening, she’ll sip wine before dinner with a sleekly handsome, silver-haired man. There is a strong presumption of sex. Nothing in the brochure hints at the pungent aroma of beef broth and Lysol that assailed her when the sliding glass doors parted open to the lobby. The smell followed her all the way down the hall to Helen’s room, where it has worked its way into the curtains, the bedding, the walls. Helen’s home had smelled of lavender and fresh-cut flowers. Her living room was cluttered with books and magazines and there was always plenty of seating, even if some folks had to sit on the large, brocade pillows Helen stored under the piano. She was a generous hostess and didn’t mind experimenting with new dishes on her guests. Nobody ever left her home hungry.

  Now she apologizes for not having anything to offer Esther. “Not even tea or coffee.” She smiles ruefully. “Or a drink. Wouldn’t that be fun!” She claps her hands in delight. “Remember Sonia’s margaritas?” Her eyes light up, as if their old friend has just handed them a long-stemmed blue glass with a salted rim. “But I’m out of tequila.” Helen holds up her empty hands and frowns with regret. Then her face lights up; her blue eyes sparkle. “Maybe we’ll run out and get some. The good stuff.”

  Esther nods and wonders if lunch is a possibility after all, though perhaps a Mexican restaurant would be more fitting.

  “Remember the time Marty ate the worm from the tequila bottle?” Helen throws her head back and laughs. “How many drinks had he had by then?”

  “I didn’t speak to him for three days,” Esther confesses.

  Helen’s eyebrows shoot up. “Because he ate the worm?”

  That was so many years ago. Esther can’t remember why she punished her husband with silence. Certainly not because he ate the worm. Or had she? If only she could do it over. She’d be less quarrelsome, more agreeable. She shakes her head. “I honestly don’t recall.”

  “Well, you must have had your reasons,” Helen says, as if discerning Esther’s need for forgiveness.

  Suddenly, shouting erupts from down the hall. A look of alarm crosses Esther’s face as she glances at the open door and then back to Helen, who appears as unruffled as she’d been gazing out at the birds. A man, presumably not the silver fox depicted in the brochure, is ranting, and several aides go rushing past Helen’s room, apparently to quell the disturbance.

  “Oh, that’s just Mr. Kelner,” Helen says, dismissing him with a wave of her hand. “He’s a shouter. Every day, around this time, he shouts for his keys. His wife died last year, but he still thinks he has to pick her up. She was standing in front of the beauty parlor waiting for him, when something, I can’t remember what you call it, fell off the building and hit her. It was one of those freak accidents.”

  Esther nods. “Cornice,” she says, as if she were helping Marty with one of his crosswords. “I remember reading about that in the paper.”

  “Cornice?” Helen leans forward and squints at Esther, who hopes she hasn’t triggered a lapse into French or some other fog. But Helen continues with her story. “By the time Mr. Kelner arrived, there were ambulances and rescue squads all over the place.” She pauses. “I guess his mind stopped that afternoon.”

  When the commotion next door finally subsides, Helen asks about Ceely and Sophie. “And that hotshot dentist son of yours.” She leans forward, as if they are already at lunch, sharing secrets across the table. “Tell me everything,” she says, and Esther thinks the sushi place might work after all.

  Esther glosses over Barry’s financial troubles and mentions that her granddaughter has a new boyfriend. “Sophie’s found another loser, I’m afraid. She’s bringing him to dinner soon. I’ll know more after that.” She is beginning to feel like a foreign correspondent, reporting from a distant shore. Or is this how it feels to visit someone in prison? How much do you tell a person whose life is so constrained, without stirring feelings of resentment or despair
? She hesitates before deciding to tell Helen that she’s been thinking of taking a trip somewhere. “Maybe to Mexico.” Esther doesn’t say that Ceely has been trying to get her to move to Cedar Shores and that she suspects the trip could be her last hurrah.

  “Mexico!” Helen claps her hands again and smiles. “You can pick up a bottle of tequila. But without the worm.”

  “One bottle, without worm,” Esther says, relaxing into her chair. Their exchange is so effortless, so light and easy, like old times. Then before she knows it, she hears herself saying, “I understand you’ve been speaking with a French accent.”

  “French?”

  “Oui!” Esther replies, still in a playful mood.

  Helen blanches; her mouth tightens. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Fanny,” Esther mumbles, fearing she’s said too much.

  “She’s my daughter.”

  “I know.” Esther flashes a nervous grin.

  “What do you know?” Abruptly, Helen rises and makes her way back to the window.

  Esther remembers when Helen took a crash course at Berlitz. Then, after returning from Paris, she bought a stovetop espresso pot at a shop in Old Town and sweet-smelling cigarettes from the stand in Evanston that sold out-of-town newspapers and the racing gazette. After her French phase, Helen did nothing but knit mohair shawls. For a while, she was consumed by baking yeast breads, and then she planted a perennial garden.

  In all those years, Helen had never turned on Esther, who is staring down at her hands as if they might hold the answer to what just transpired. Her hands flutter in her lap like the birds outside the window. She seizes one with the other, hoping to steady them. Then, looking up at her friend, she says, “I see there’s a party here on Saturday night.” Her voice sounds shrill, too bright. “There was a sign in the lobby.”

  Helen taps on the glass until the birds fly off. “I used to throw a party,” she says. “Shrimp de jonghe. I served shrimp de jonghe. They cried for more. Remember?”

  Esther remembers the year everyone served the fussy shrimp dish. Francois Pope demonstrated the recipe on TV and the next day there was a run on seashell ramekins at cookware shops across the city. She made it once and loved how the house smelled of garlic and herbs, until the image of her mother’s pursed lips and her father’s wagging finger intruded and broke the spell. Her father’s voice followed her around the kitchen, then into the dining room as she presented the dish to admiring guests. Trayf! Trayf! he cried, chanting the word for the forbidden food. Once, Esther confessed to Helen that she couldn’t get his voice out of her head. “He sounded like a barking dog. Trayf! Trayf!” Helen threw back her head and laughed. “That’s such hocus-pocus, Esther. Nobody keeps kosher anymore.”

  Esther had envied the ease with which Helen could turn her back on tradition, the same ease with which she wore long, blowsy dresses, garments with a decidedly ethnic flair—muumuus the year Hawaii was granted statehood; dashikis when black power was in the ascendancy; gauzy skirts in the manner of hippie flower children. When the group began wintering in Mexico, Helen started a fad with brightly embroidered shifts, though she alone managed to look like something other than an overstuffed chintz sofa.

  Now, in a faded muumuu, her nose pressed to the glass, Helen is nattering about a dish that Esther has long forgotten. “Shrimp de jonghe,” she says, as she taps on the window. “Shrimp de jonghe. Shrimp de jonghe.”

  Esther is wondering whether Helen is slipping into her French fixation, when Mr. Kelner starts up again. “Keys! Keys! Where the hell are my goddamn keys?”

  Suddenly, Helen turns from the window, her face wild with fear. “The keys,” she cries, crossing the room to the closet. “They’re in my purse.” And before Esther knows what is happening, Helen is at the door, her muumuu sliding off one shoulder, a worn leather handbag dangling from her wrist.

  “Where are you going?” There is panic in Esther’s voice. She remembers her plans for lunch, how she’d imagined Helen slipping into her coat, the two of them making their way down the corridor, then sailing through the parting glass doors to Esther’s car. Helen would slide into the passenger seat, Esther would pull out of the parking space, and off they’d go to Edo Sushi, where Helen would order a bento box and Esther would pick at anything on the menu that wasn’t raw.

  “Are you coming, or not?” Helen stomps her foot. She is wearing pink slippers, the kind that might have been crocheted by one of the denizens of Cedar Shores.

  “Oh, Helen.” Esther doesn’t know what else to say. Then Mr. Kelner resumes his shouting, and again an aide comes racing past Helen’s door.

  Helen, her face flushed with impatience, ignores the commotion and continues stomping her pink foot. “Let’s go!”

  Esther considers calling the aide who is rushing toward Mr. Kelner’s room, then above the din she hears a jay’s scratchy cry. “All right,” she says, and without considering where she’ll get the seed, she suggests going outside to fill the feeder.

  “Greedy jays.” Helen sounds frantic. “I feed people. We’ll get shrimp. At the Jewel. Write that down, Esther. Shrimp. What else? What else do we need? Did you write that down?”

  With trembling hands, Esther fishes a slip of paper from her purse and writes shrimp in shaky block letters. She is holding the note out to Helen when the aide, who’d earlier rushed toward Mr. Kelner’s room, pops his head in the door. “Everything okay?” He’s a short muscular young man with a shaved head. “You all right, Helen?”

  “No!” Helen cries, stomping her foot again.

  The aide enters. With his gaze fixed on Helen, he tilts his head toward Esther. “Is she bothering you, Helen?”

  Helen stares blankly into space and when she shrugs her muumuu slips farther down her shoulder. Esther has an urge to set it back, cover her friend’s exposed flesh. But the young man has insinuated himself between the two women, creating a gulf that Esther could never breach.

  He turns to Esther. “We can’t have you disturbing the residents.” He shouts, as if he’s determined that Esther is hard of hearing.

  “Excuse me?” Esther, whose hearing is just fine, is both startled and annoyed by this officious young man’s cheek. Next, he’ll be advising her to remain silent, tell her she has the right to an attorney.

  “We can’t have you disturbing the residents.” He crosses his arms over his chest, narrows his eyes at her.

  “But we’re old friends,” she insists. “We’ve known each other since we were young girls. Children.” Her voice brightens as she seizes on what might be a winning argument. “We were children together!” She wishes she possessed a document attesting to her history with Helen. There must be something—like a passport or driver’s license—something to legitimize her right to be here, some proof she could press on this overbearing man with the glinting gold ring in his left ear.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am.” He lowers his voice, but she can tell that he is not sorry at all. And then he says, “You have to leave.”

  “Leave?” She avoids his gaze, looks over his shoulder toward the window. “But we were just on our way out. To feed the birds.”

  “I’m sorry, but we can’t have you disturbing the residents,” he says, as he ushers her toward the door.

  She pulls away from him, loses her balance, but steadies herself against the doorframe. She fingers the buttons on her blouse and smoothes her skirt, before turning to face him. She has put up with enough from this man with the muscles and the shaved head. “You’re not sorry at all,” she says. “And Helen, my friend Helen, is not a residents.” She hisses the final s. “Helen is a resident. Singular. One person. Unique. But how would you know? You look at her and all you see is an old woman in a faded, loose dress. But that dress, which is far older than you, happens to be a muumuu. Helen brought it back from Hawaii. Before Hawaii was even a state.”

  Esther stops. Her heart feels like it will pop the polka dots off her blouse. She clutches her purse to her chest and turns to Helen,
expecting to see mirth glinting in her eyes, dancing around the corners of her beautiful mouth. Helen will defend her from this interloper. “Brava!” she will say. “Brava, Esther.” But Helen has assumed her gone-to-the-moon look; she is lost from the inside out.

  Esther blows a farewell kiss to her friend and, holding her head high, brushes past the aide and out the door.

  Perhaps she only imagines it, but as she makes her way down the hot, fusty corridor, she hears Helen call out, “Au revoir, Esther!”

  Esther was delighted when Marty’s mother gave her a cookbook as a wedding shower gift. It was not just any cookbook, but the best-seller by the famous Popes, Antoinette and Francois, who by then had influenced a generation of Chicago housewives.

  Esther, who was not a suspicious woman by nature, regarded her mother-in-law’s gift as an obvious choice for a young bride. But in time, Toots Lustig (her real name was Mildred), a fancy cook herself, revealed her true intentions. She expected her new daughter-in-law to provide her son with the kind of meals to which he was accustomed.

  Toots was known for her fancy butter cookies, as well as for her chopped-liver swan, a sleight-of-hand extravaganza involving tinfoil, sprigs of parsley, and sliced pimento olives, strategically placed to resemble eyes. Toots once invented a casserole—a mélange of pasta, canned tomatoes, green pepper, and gobs of Velveeta cheese—which she dubbed “Jewish spaghetti,” though it was neither inherently Semitic nor Italian.

  One afternoon, Toots invited her new daughter-in-law to watch while she baked butter cookies for a bridge party she was throwing with her two sisters. (Esther, under her breath, referred to the women as “The Gabors.” Not that they were glamorous, but Toots and her sisters shared a kind of haughty fake grandeur affected by that Hungarian trio.)