by Gwen Cooper
Laura liked to watch Prudence looking out the window. At such moments, she wanted to stroke Prudence’s fur, to breathe in the cinnamon-and-milk smell of her neck and hear the low rumble of her purring. It had been a long time since she’d sat with a cat and listened to it purr, or felt the kind of peace that comes when a small animal trusts you enough to fall asleep in your lap.
But whenever she reached out to Prudence, she saw—no matter how hard she tried not to—an old man in tears, kneeling on a cracked sidewalk and crying out, She’s all I got! There was a terrible danger in loving small, fragile things. Laura had learned this almost before she’d learned anything else.
Laura knew her face must have taken on a faraway expression, because now Perry was repeating, “You should go home for the night.” And then, with a look of concern that was almost harder for Laura to bear than a direct reprimand would have been, “I wish you’d taken some time off when your mother died.”
“It wasn’t the right time,” Laura said. “I’d just taken off three weeks.” In fact, it was Perry, claiming that the directive came straight from Clay (who sometimes tried to mitigate his own capriciousness with equally random acts of generosity), who’d insisted that she take a full three weeks for her honeymoon. “And, anyway”—she paused to smile in a way she hoped would be convincing—“I’m fine. I really am.”
It had been a Tuesday in March, the first legitimately gorgeous spring day of the year—and an illusion of sorts, because the following week would be as cold and rainy as the depths of February—when Laura had gotten the call from her mother’s office. Even though Sarah had worked as a typist for the small real estate law firm in the East Thirties for over fifteen years, Laura had never met any of her mother’s co-workers. So when she’d heard a voice other than Sarah’s on the other end of the line, she’d known instantly that something was wrong, known it even before the woman’s hesitant voice had said, “Is this Laura? I worked, work I mean, with your mother …” She’d known before the woman went on to say things like heart attack and didn’t suffer.
Laura must have told a co-worker, must have told somebody what happened and where she was going, although afterward she could never remember. The next thing she knew, she was squinting in too-bright sunshine. I should have worn sunglasses today, she thought, and then wondered if she ought to be thinking about sunglasses now. Women in unbuttoned winter coats and men in suits with their ties loosened, people whose mothers hadn’t just died, walked at a more leisurely pace than they had in the brisker weather of the day before. They strolled past small cafés where people whose mothers hadn’t just died sat outside for the first time in months, and past the Mister Softee trucks that always seemed to spring up like fresh grass the instant the thermometer climbed above sixty-five. Laura had a sudden flash of memory, of Sarah bringing armfuls of fresh fruit on breathless summer nights to the hookers who walked Second Avenue, Laura hiding behind Sarah’s legs as the hookers thanked her and bent down to tell Laura, Ainchou a pretty girl.
By now Laura was aware that her scattered thoughts were a way of distracting herself, of avoiding the knowledge of her new reality (I have no parents) even as she hailed a cab and directed it to the morgue at 32nd and First, deep beneath the ground mere blocks from the desk where Sarah had died, high in a glass tower not unlike the building Laura had just left.
It was on a day much like this—when Laura had been, what, six? seven?—that Sarah had picked her up outside of her elementary school one Friday afternoon and announced, with a kind of happy mystery, “I got Noel to cover the store. We’re going someplace else today.” And Laura, still wearing her red backpack with the Menudo pin she’d begged Sarah for at the Menuditis store, had clasped Sarah’s hand and followed her to Eldridge Street and Adam Purple’s Garden of Eden.
There were dozens of community gardens on the Lower East Side in those days, but the Garden of Eden was far and away the grandest of them all. Adam Purple, a squatter and neighborhood eccentric, had spent a decade reclaiming what had been five lots of burned-out tenement buildings with plant clippings and compost he made himself by filling wheelbarrows and grocery carts with manure he collected from the horse-drawn carriages of Central Park. The result was a fifteen-thousand-square-foot formal garden bursting with roses, pear trees, climbing ivy, flowering bushes, and hundreds of other plants Laura couldn’t begin to name. At its precise center was an enormous foliage yin–yang circle.
Laura, with the limited perspective of childhood, had thought she’d known everything there was to know about New York City, especially her small corner of it. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, there was this! She felt staggered by the realization of how much beauty, unsuspected by her, had lived hidden within the bleak, shabby cityscapes she saw daily.
The afternoon sun had played mischievous tricks in Sarah’s hair that day, crowning her in a red-gold blaze. To Laura’s dazzled eyes, her mother had never seemed more beautiful. She looked like a fairy queen from one of Laura’s much-loved picture books. What magic was this that her mother had conjured? One moment they’d been walking down a glass-and-rubble-strewn urban street, picking their way carefully over crack vials and crumpled soda cans, and then suddenly they were overwhelmed by the spicy-sweet scent of roses and crocuses. Feral cats lazily opened and closed their eyes in the sun-dappled shadows beneath fruit trees, too serene to bother with the birds chattering in branches overhead. Laura thought of The Secret Garden, a book she had just begun to struggle through. Surely, she told herself, this very spot must be the most enchanted place in the entire world.
“Most people, people who live in other places, only think about dirt and noise when they think about New York and where we live,” Sarah had said as the two of them strolled, still hand in hand, through the alternating coolness and warmth of the garden. “They don’t know it like you and I do. They don’t know that we live in the most wonderful place in the world.” In an echo of Laura’s earlier thoughts, Sarah had winked and added in a stage whisper, “It’s our secret.”
They were standing beneath a cherry tree that had not yet begun to blossom, and Laura stopped Sarah to pull a sheet of paper from her backpack. Her teacher had made everyone in the class write a poem about springtime that day, and Laura was suddenly moved to read hers aloud to her mother. Blushing, because Laura hadn’t been a child who “performed” for adults, she read:
Winter is over
Gone is the snow
Everything’s bright
And all aglow
Birds are singing
With greatest cheer
Expressing their joy
That spring is here
Animals awaken
From their long winter sleep
Spring is like a treasure
We all wish to keep
Sarah had been charmed. “That is the most beautiful poem I’ve ever heard,” she’d said. “Did you know that some of the best poems are songs?” And Laura, who hadn’t known that but did know that her mother knew everything about music and songs, had nodded with what she hoped passed for the solemn wisdom of somebody much older, perhaps ten or eleven. “I think your poem is a song,” Sarah had told her. Then she and Laura had practically run all the way back to Sarah’s record store, where Sarah had selected a few albums from her enormous personal collection and made a phone call to a friend. Then they’d walked over to Avenue A and entered what looked like a perfectly ordinary twenty-story apartment building.
But it turned out there was a recording studio in the basement. Funny-looking block letters etched into the glass-door entrance proclaimed it Alphaville Studios, and Sarah said it was a famous place. A man Laura had never seen before, with a scraggly long beard and deep dimples, appeared from some hidden back office and greeted Sarah with a hug and a warm rubbing of cheeks. “It’s been a long time since we’ve seen the likes of you around here, girl.” He sneaked them into an unoccupied recording studio where Sarah put her records on a kind of machine that let her filter out the
vocals until all they could hear was the music. Laura had been deeply impressed with Sarah’s knowledge of this complicated-looking equipment. Clearly, she’d spent a lot of time here once. With this realization came the insight, always shocking for a small child, that Sarah must have had an entire life all her own before Laura was born.
Sarah played around with various knobs and buttons until the percussion was a heavy, insistent thump thump-thump thump. That was when she had started to sing Laura’s poem. She’d made Laura sing along with her. And even though, in Laura’s opinion, it wasn’t a very good song, there was little in the world more delightful to her in those years than the sound of her mother’s singing.
Sarah had made a tape recording of the two of them singing together in the studio, which they’d listened to again at home that night before Sarah ceremoniously placed the cassette in a small metal box she’d shown Laura once, claiming it held her most treasured personal belongings.
The City bulldozed the Garden of Eden a few years later, and the metal box disappeared in 1995, the day Laura and Sarah lost their apartment. And now, Laura thought, there was nobody left except her to remember what Sarah had sounded like when she sang, nobody left alive who even remembered (because Laura realized that she didn’t) what Laura’s own voice had sounded like when she was a child.
Where did tapes go when they died? Did they go to a Tape Heaven? Laura felt herself on the verge of a giggling fit as this idea weaved through her thoughts, but she quelled it because by now she was standing in the lobby of the Morgue. Above her head was a motto inscribed in Latin. Laura drew on the Latin she’d picked up in her law studies to translate.
Let conversation cease, let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights in helping the living.
Perry wasn’t the only one who thought Laura hadn’t taken enough time to grieve. She was starting to feel like one of those dolls, the kind with a string in its back that, if you pulled it, forced the doll to repeat the same litany of phrases. I’m fine, she’d said when she’d returned to work the next day. I’m fine, she’d said after coming back from the half day she took for her mother’s funeral. I’m fine, she’d been repeating to everybody, to Perry, to her fellow fifth-years, to the hard-faced blond woman who answered her phone and filed her papers. I’m fine. I’m okay. You don’t have to look at me that way because I really am fine.
She remembered when she was younger and had started noticing that seemingly every pay phone in New York—not just the ones on the Lower East Side, but all the way up to Grand Central and beyond—had the words WORSHIP GOD etched into its metal base. Laura had wondered about the person who’d poured so many hours and days—months, even—into seeking out each and every pay phone in Manhattan. Had it been religious zeal? A sincere, if skewed, belief that repeating those two words so many times would actually induce others to worship God? Or had it been that the whole weight of this person’s soul had come to rest on those two words, endlessly repeated, and the act of inscribing them was the only way to exorcise the thought?
Laura was inclined to think it was the latter, because if she’d been able to take one of the dozens of paper clips she systematically unfurled over the course of a workday and use it to scratch the words I’M FINE on every desk, phone, and wall in the office, she would have done so. She appreciated everybody’s concern. But the burden of appearing to be fine, so as to keep others from worrying about her, was almost worse than simply allowing herself to feel bad would have been.
She was especially glad now that she hadn’t told anybody when, unexpectedly (and despite taking the appropriate precautions), she’d found herself pregnant only two months into her marriage. Of course, it wasn’t strictly necessary to tell anybody right away—in fact, it was accepted that you weren’t supposed to tell anybody until your first trimester was safely behind you.
Josh had been overjoyed at the news; he’d actually had tears in his eyes. But Laura had to spend a few hours composing herself before she could even get the words out, because her own first reaction had been panic. The best time for her to have gotten pregnant would have been four years ago, when she was a first-year associate and therefore more expendable to the firm—or it would be seven years from now, when she would (hopefully) have made partner. The fifth year was the worst possible time to take maternity leave. Now was the time to put in the hours, to take on the caseload, to wine and dine clients after hours and cultivate the relationships among partners that would—after a grueling, decade-plus slog—lift her to the heights of success she’d always striven toward. She’d seen other female attorneys who’d gone on reduced schedules once they had children. The idea was something of a grim joke among women in the firm, because what a “reduced schedule” meant in reality was that you ended up doing the same amount of work for less money. Most of them never regained their pre-pregnancy standing in the firm. Laura realized, too late, that questions like when they’d have children, and how many children they’d have, were among a million things she and Josh hadn’t discussed before rushing into marriage.
And she’d had deeper fears even than that. There were an infinite number of ways to be unhappy. Laura had learned from Sarah that marriage and children were no guarantee of avoiding any of them.
Still, it was impossible to ignore Josh’s happiness or remain untouched by it. One Sunday afternoon they’d painted the walls of their spare bedroom a soft, sunny yellow—perfect, as Josh had noted, for a boy or a girl. She thought about this peanut-sized thing—something made of her and Josh—traveling with her wherever she went, a secret sharer who sat in with her on meetings and rode with her on the subway and inhaled the same smoky-sweet smell of early winter that she did. She felt a kind of tender pity for it sometimes, so small and defenseless. Poor thing! she would think, and then wonder why she pitied it so much.
So the pregnancy had remained their secret, hers and Josh’s, which made things infinitely easier when, one Friday night in mid-February and just before the official end of her first trimester, the pain had started in her lower back and blood began to flow.
She’d returned to work on Monday, a bit pale and tired but otherwise not noteworthy in any way to her co-workers. Because she hadn’t told anyone she was pregnant, she didn’t have to go through the ordeal of telling everyone she no longer was. Not even Josh’s parents had been told. (“Let’s give Abe and Zelda a couple of months before they drown us in parenting advice,” he’d said.) The only exception they’d made—or, at least, that Josh had thought they’d made—had been telling Sarah. “Of course you’ll want your mother to know right away,” he’d said. Laura hadn’t bothered to correct him, because what could be more expected, more perfectly normal, than a young woman, pregnant for the first time, sharing the experience with her mother and leaning on her for advice and support?
But Laura hadn’t said anything to Sarah. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because when you told your mother you were pregnant with your first child, she was supposed to tell you how you don’t even know what love is until you hold your baby for the first time, or how you’ll never love anything in life the way you’ll love your child. Except that Laura already knew this hadn’t been true in Sarah’s case, and Sarah knew that Laura knew. So what could Sarah have said? You’ll love your baby, but only as much as you love some things and less than you love others?
Perhaps if Laura had told Sarah about her pregnancy, Sarah would have told Laura about the bottle of nitroglycerin pills Laura had found when she’d cleaned out Sarah’s bathroom. Sarah had been keeping her own secrets. And even though Laura was angry now, angrier than she allowed herself to realize, she could guess that Sarah’s reasons for saying nothing to Laura about her heart condition had been similar to Laura’s reasons for saying nothing about her pregnancy to Sarah. Because when your mother told you she was sick, you were supposed to tear up and hug her and beg her to do everything the doctor said because you absolutely couldn’t bear to lose her.
Sarah must have known th
at Laura couldn’t and wouldn’t have said any of those things. Not because they weren’t true. But because she and Sarah had already lost each other years ago.
Josh never tried to get her to talk about the miscarriage. But he did keep trying to get her to talk about Sarah, to remember things. When they’d driven down to the Lower East Side to clean out Sarah’s apartment, he’d insisted on a “nostalgia tour” like his parents had always given him and his sister when they used to drive through Brooklyn as a family. “Come on,” he’d urged. “Tell a sheltered boy from Parsippany what it was like growing up in Manhattan. How often are we down here?”
And Laura had tried. She tried to re-create for him the open-air drug markets that had flourished on Avenue B and 2nd Street, ignored by the authorities for far too long because what could be done in the face of such large-scale—and lucrative—dedication to vice? When they drove past Tompkins Square Park, with its cheerful playgrounds, flowered pathways, and pristine basketball courts, it was impossible to make Josh visualize the Tompkins Square Park she’d grown up with, taken over almost entirely by tent cities erected by junkies and the homeless, and frequented by punked-out teenagers in dog collars and Sex Pistols T-shirts. Million-dollar condos and trendy restaurants had once been burned-out tenements where squatting artists lived, or SRO hotels that, for all their seediness, were still preferable to the violent squalor of the city’s official homeless shelters. “And—oh!—right there.” Laura pointed to a spot on the pavement. “That’s where my friend Maria Elena and I used to play Skelzie with bottle caps. Whenever we went out to play together, her mother would yell after us, Cuidado en la calle!”
The whole time she was talking, Laura found herself wondering why Sarah all those years later, had moved back to the Lower East Side. Had she thought she could rewrite the past? Play out the same scenarios but tack on a different ending? Hadn’t she realized that the Lower East Side she’d haunted these past few years had borne only the most passing resemblance to the place she’d landed in as a teenager, armed with nothing more than her high school diploma and a determination to see the world the way she wanted to?