When She Was Good (9780545361910)

by Mazer, Norma Fox

  I walked downtown to the bus station and bought a ticket to Burlington, Vermont. I chose Burlington abstractly: it could have been anywhere, as long as it was somewhere else. And I chose it specifically, because in one of the places where I’d worked — the print shop, I think — I’d heard someone speak about Vermont as if it were a place apart. Another world: beautiful, green, special. “Oh, Vermont,” he’d said, and his voice was full of awe. “Vermont is magic!” I thought it must be a place where people had to do nothing to be happy, only live there.

  On the bus, traveling north on Route 22A, I sat on the left side of the aisle and stared in a daze at Lake Champlain and the mountains beyond. I touched the lump over my eye and wondered what I would do in Burlington. I had no plans, beyond finding some place to sleep. That turned out to be the Y. I went to bed and slept for ten hours. In the morning, I walked around the city, looking at the old houses with their big lawns. I bought bread in a market and sat by the lake, eating it with cheese and an apple. Before I went to sleep, I washed my clothes and hung them to dry at the foot of the bed.

  The next day I did all the same things: walked down to the water and then up the hills to the college. I ate bread and oranges. I was calm. I seemed to float in Vermont’s blue air. I had the sensation that there were two of me: moving together, yet separate, one hovering over the other.

  For a week I lived this way, thinking no farther than the next corner I would turn, the next street I would walk down, the next apple I would eat. There were still piles of snow melting at the corners, the sun was pale yellow, the sky blue as a crayon.

  One night, I called Pamela from an outdoor phone booth. “How are you doing on your own?” I had rehearsed saying this.

  “Em? Where the hell are you?”

  “Vermont.”

  “Ver-mont?” she said. “Ver-mont. I figured you for dead.”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “This dump is quiet without you. I suppose you want me to say I miss you? I don’t miss you one stinking bit, how about that? You like that? You left me, you little bitch, I had no food, I went shopping and all these stinking people wouldn’t leave me alone, they were cheating me.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “A lot of noise. Forget it. You coming back or not?”

  Not, I thought. And then, Say it. My stomach lurched. “You hit me again.”

  “What?”

  “You hit me.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t want you to do that.”

  “It’s not my damn fault. What am I supposed to do, you come home and say sorrr-y! Sorrry I lost the job. Sorry! And now you say it’s my fault? You got me going — you know you shouldn’t have done that, you know how I am, I can’t help it. And then you walk out on me. What a sister. You think that’s nice?”

  In the street, a truck ground by. I took in breath and let it out and tried to think of nothing. To think only of walking the streets, the sky like a shelf over my head.

  “Why don’t you just come home?” she said.

  I leaned against the wall, staring out the little window of the phone booth. “I don’t want you to hit me,” I said again.

  Then — as if that were a reasonable request, and I should certainly have mentioned it sooner — she said, Okay-okay-fine and if I had to know, she missed me, she really had missed me.

  * * *

  When I walked into the apartment, she was sitting in her chair, her legs spread out. She looked at me. So did the Monicas and Morties.

  “Hello, Pamela,” I said.

  She got up and came toward me. “So you came home,” she said. She reached out for me and kissed me. Then she held me away from her and looked at me again. “Well, damn!” she said. She took my face between her hands and squeezed. “Well, damn!” she said again, and squeezed my cheeks so hard I thought the bones would crack. “You little turd,” she said, squeezing harder and harder.

  The Morties and Monicas eye me from the back of the couch. That’s their job. To watch me every minute of every day. Like Pamela, their creator. Em Em, look at my darling new Mortie. Sitting in her chair, long yellow needles clicking. Look at his sticky wicky, his little micky: squeeze it, don’t be shy. Six Morties, six Monicas, leaning against each other, tongues sticking out, watching me with flat black eyes. I could strangle them, one by one. I want to. I want to kill them. I have wanted to kill them for a long time. My heart tightens with this desire.

  The Morties’ ties dangle, the Monicas’ ponytails are like stiff brushes. Look at their eyes, look how they follow me around the room, how they glare. Pamela’s little sentries. I sweep my hand across the top of the couch, knock them this way and that, pitch them into each other. I make another sweep and topple them to the floor, where they lie in a heap.

  And now Pamela’s chair is glowering. The tattered arms are huge, menacing. “Say nothing,” I warn and shove it into a corner, fast, the way I threw down the Morties and Monicas. For a moment I feel brilliant, daring. I jump on the spot where the chair has always been, the place from which it could not be moved, not an inch, not a fraction of an inch — and if it happened, the penalty was severe. My ear throbs with memory, the ear she grabbed and tore. I jump again and land with a hard smack of feet. Crazy crazy loony nuts I always knew, Pamela yells, and I jump again and again and only stop when the old man downstairs, Mr. Foster, smacks the ceiling — BOOM-BOOM-BOOM — with his broom.

  After Mother died, the thought came to me (and I couldn’t imagine then that it wasn’t thought, but mute, passionate longing stuck to the chaos of feeling like dust to glue) that if I was good, if I paid attention, if I put up with, if I understood and overlooked and (later on) tended my bruises in silence, I believed — I can see now I needed to believe — that, in time, happiness would be given me. That I would find it. Or it would find me.

  It was this belief, like a small, steady breath in my heart, that kept alive Mother’s old command to me — Be good, Em — kept it alive long after I should have forgotten it. I mean, why? Why did I go on believing? Did it make sense? Why did I go on thinking, even when Pamela slammed me around, that if you are good enough, patient enough, for long enough, your reward will come?

  “I heard about your sister,” Mrs. Shotwell cries, swinging down the hall toward me on her crutch. “I’ve been trying to remember her name. Phyllis, was it?”

  “Pamela,” I say, holding open the door to the trash room.

  “Is that so?” she says disbelievingly.

  We’re both holding our garbage, hers such a neatly wrapped and tied package that it makes me ashamed of my old garbage. Mine doesn’t look nearly as good, just two lumpy paper bags. And from her glance, I’m afraid I’m not looking much better in my old jeans and torn sneakers.

  “It was plaguing me all morning,” she says. “Her name. I finally remembered. Phyllis.”

  “Pamela,” I repeat.

  She frowns as if I’ve got it wrong again. “I never saw her much. She kept to herself, didn’t she? How old are you, dear?”

  “Twenty-one,” I say. The lie comes automatically.

  Mrs. Shotwell clicks her tongue. “So young to be alone,” she says, giving me a sad face. She wears her hair the same old-fashioned way Mother did, wound around her head in a single thick braid.

  That hair was the reason I went to her apartment once in the middle of the night. The floor was quiet, the whole building was dead quiet. I knocked on her door for a long time. At last it opened a crack and she peered out. “What?” she said. “What is it?” I held out my bruised arms. She looked at them, then at me, then closed the door quietly, and again I heard the silence of the house. I stood there waiting, although for what I didn’t know. When I went back to the apartment, my feet were enormously cold, like two lumps of dead flesh.

  “At least it was quick for your sister,” she says. “Now my poor husband, poor Jack.” Her voice singsongs. “Poor Jack, he lingered. Oh, he lingered — I had such a time with him. I didn’t sle
ep for weeks.”

  I could tell her that I haven’t been sleeping well, either. I could say that the apartment is too quiet, that Pamela’s ranting voice — Why don’t you do something sitting there like a lump never going to move you’ll be as dead as me — is the only thing that breaks apart the silence.

  This morning, though, I did it. I broke the silence. I took a hammer to the lock on Pamela’s cupboard, smashing it open. I was eager to see what was inside. Money, I hoped, thinking of the way she had hidden Father’s money under the trailer. What I found, though, were all the things I’d “lost” through the years. A pair of garnet earrings that had been Mother’s, a china dog that Lois had given me, a bracelet I’d made out of yarn one summer, and Mother’s green sweater, the one that I’d “misplaced.” It was full of holes; moths had got into it. There were other things as well. Rags, crumpled balls of aluminum foil, toothless combs, pencil stubs, stained underpants, tubes of dried medicine.

  “Your sister —” Mrs. Shotwell hesitates, like someone stepping on a wet floor and trying not to leave footprints. “She was an, ah, interesting person.”

  I shift the soggy trash bags. “You mean crazy,” I say. “A liar, a hitter, a crazy person.”

  No. I don’t say it. The words press against my throat like solid objects, but rise no further.

  “Mr. Bielic says it was a stroke.” Mrs. Shotwell makes a prim mouth. “He told me when he came up to fix my showerhead. So young to have a stroke!” She makes that mouth again, as if Pamela’s dying is proof of some disgusting secret.

  Suddenly, perversely, I wish for Pamela. For my sister. Who else can I tell about Mrs. Shotwell’s disapproving little mouth? Who else can I amuse with my stories? Who else is going to shout in her most affectionate tone when I make her laugh, “Oh, you bad, bad little girl!”

  Mrs. Shotwell drops her garbage into one of the silver cans and sighs. “You think someone is going to be with you forever, and then they’re gone. Life is mysterious.”

  I grip my two bags of garbage in both arms, as if they’re something to hang on to forever. “Death, even more so,” I blurt.

  One day you are alive: you blow your nose, you take a walk, you eat, you sleep, and day passes day, and maybe you’re a good person and maybe you’re not, but it doesn’t matter, because after a while, good or bad, there comes another day, and you are dead. Mother died. Pamela died. I will die. Everyone dies. Everyone, without exception, lives and then dies. A stubborn, unrelenting pattern; commonplace, mysterious.

  I will never truly understand — not why we have to die, or how it happens from one second to another. How Mother was alive and then she was dead. How Pamela lay on the rug, her furious eye fastened on me. And time passed, and I thought she might lie there forever, never letting me go. Then in the blink of a second, the light of her eye was gone. She was gone.

  It happened. It had to happen. But of course, it is not as dear as all that, either. There is the phone call I could have made sooner, and the “time factor.” Isn’t that what they always say in mystery shows, the time factor?

  Something is dripping on the floor, a tiny rain of liquid. Just as I notice this, Pamela shrieks in my ear Serves you right smelly prying bitch and at the same moment the garbage bags stretch and sigh, and then, like Pamela’s revenge, they both give way. Coffee grounds, eggshells, the Morties and Monicas, and all the foul-smelling rags from Pamela’s cupboard spill on me and the floor and spatter Mrs. Shotwell’s gleaming, laced up shoes.

  She stamps her foot. “Get that cleaned up,” she orders, as if it’s her own pristine floor that’s been debased, and hobbles to the door.

  She didn’t have to say it. I’m already down on my knees.

  In the middle of the night, Pamela’s litany yanks me out of my sleep. What happened where were you you’re late what did you do where’s the money I’m hungry make supper get a move on do you have something to tell me I’m dying for a laugh when the hell are you going to do the laundry wash the dishes give me a haircut clean this place you don’t know how good you have it —

  Her voice is in my head, in the air, in the room. I fall out of bed and run through the apartment: but her voice follows me, a jackhammer blasting my brain with words. When it finally stops, I creep back into bed and lie there, my heart shaking my whole body. Suddenly I leap out again, cross the space between our beds and run my hand over the covers, feeling for her heat in the mattress — and even when nothing moves under my touch, looking to make sure she’s not there, humped in a corner, big bulging eyes open and watching me.

  The only time I escaped those eyes was at night. She slept hard and deep, as if sleep were a passion. Solid, dead-and-gone sleep, that was her sleep. Baby sleep. The sleep of the innocent, she told me once: nothing on my conscience, she said. And she hit herself on the head, overcome with laughter, because I never slept that way.

  A dream: I’m standing in front of a long narrow mirror. Someone is telling a story, maybe the one about Snow White. There seems to be a glass coffin here. I search the room. “I’ve mislaid a sister,” I say. Pamela is behind me. She’s coming for me. Breath pumps in my throat, my heart runs me into the ground, propels me like a fist as hard as iron. I’m not fat and strong like her. No, don’t! I shout, but it’s done. I’m darkness, I’m dead.

  * * *

  Another dream: Pamela’s big hand. A hand like meat. No, I say, no. But she’s laughing at a joke I made, so I know it’s going to be okay this time. I wake up dazed.

  * * *

  A third dream: Rotting bodies of giant mice heaped in a room. The smell is disgusting. I want to get out of this room! The door is far away, but in the distance, I see flowers like heaps of gold across the top of a train, and someone is saying that I should get on board. Hurry — hurry up, you’ll miss it!

  * * *

  From the last dream, I wake up knowing that there’s something I need to do, though I can’t think what it is. Later, in the market, the first thing I see is a revolving rack of flower seed packets. Marigold, lemon balm, calendula. The same flowers that Mother planted all around her vegetable garden. Alyssum, sweet william, lupine. I look at the pictures on the packets and say each beautiful beautiful name to myself.

  I’m waiting for the elevator when a woman comes in through the front door. Nothing exceptional about that: people go in and out that door all day, every day. Old men shuffling their feet; boys who’ve parked motorcycles outside, and mothers with kids hanging off them like clothespins.

  I see tinted glasses, a green shirt, a hand pulling a scarf off dark hair.

  The shirt’s the same green as Mother’s cat-button sweater. That’s what I notice first. Then her face: cheekbones, little lines around her mouth, an I-don’t-see-you gaze. And her hair — dark, thick, almost wild.

  I stare at her in the first moment as if I know her better than anyone in the world, although I’ve never seen her before. In the second moment, I know this is wrong: I have seen her and in exactly this way — me waiting for the elevator with my handful of junk mail, she making a high-shouldered beeline for the stairs. I can’t understand how I could have forgotten her even for an instant. But in the reign of Pamela, I lived as in another dimension of time, the world passing in a blur before my eyes. Who I saw, I barely saw. What I felt, I hardly grasped.

  * * *

  Lobby, elevator, mailboxes, door, stairs, door. This has been my round for the past half hour. I’m looking for the woman with the dark hair and green shirt. Walk through the lobby, look out the front door, check the elevator, check the mailboxes, go to the stairwell, start all over again.

  William gazes at me with his mouth open.

  “You’re drooling,” I say.

  “What?” He’s sitting on the bench against the wall.

  I take a tissue from my pocket, wipe his mouth.

  “Thanks, Em!” He giggles and cranes his neck.

  I want to talk to her. I don’t know how I’ll do it, what I’ll say. Start with hello, I guess. />
  Hello. Hello, my name is Em. Hello. What’s your name?

  Baby talk. William talk. Don’t I know how to do it any other way? I think so, but I’m out of practice. If I could only grab her mind and pull it into mine, then she’d see who I am and how she’s been walking around in there for days, shoving everything else aside.

  Outside, little girls are playing jump rope; there’s a knot of guys bent over the open hood of a car. I cross the parking lot, walk: to the sidewalk, look both ways.

  In again. Lobby, elevator, mailboxes, door.

  Hello, please don’t think I’m rude. Hello. I just want to know your name. Hello, I’m Em. Maybe we can be friends. Please.

  No, not please. Not humble. Her face wouldn’t like that.

  Maybe she’ll be the one to start. Hello there! I noticed you by the elevator the other day. Aren’t you the girl with the sister who died? And now you’re all alone….

  She’ll link arms with me, we’ll go somewhere, a coffee shop. I’ll tell her that once I worked in a place like this. But not for too long. I fumbled a pitcher of juice, spilled it all over a customer. She’ll laugh. I’ll tell her about the different places I worked. Just funny stories to make her laugh again.

  Another time, maybe the next time, I could tell her about Vermont, and some things about Pamela. How I hardly worked after I came back. My sister’s disability checks provided for us, I’ll say. It wasn’t much, but after Vermont she hated to have me go out. She didn’t want me to be away from her. She was suspicious even when I went to the library for her. At the end, she wouldn’t let me out even for food; we called in our grocery orders. I didn’t leave the apartment for weeks, months.