by Gwen Cooper
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said dully. He struggled a bit until he was in a half-sitting position, his eyes refusing to meet mine. “I wanted to give you something.” His hand fumbled along the top of the dresser pressed flush against his cot. “I bought this for Honey, but I didn’t have a chance to give it to her.” He handed me a crumpled plastic bag. “Someone should have it.”
I accepted the bag and sat down on the bed next to him, trying to think how to begin. “I didn’t know you smoked,” I finally said. I hadn’t meant it to sound like an accusation, but somehow it did. It was the wrong way to begin.
“I don’t.” He seemed confused. “Ida made me quit thirty years ago. She’d kill me if she thought I was smoking again.”
I let it go. “We should talk about what you’re going to do now.” I tried to sound efficient and cheerful. Everything is fine, my voice insisted. It’s all just a question of logistics. “I’ve found a place for you to live through the Jewish Home for the Aged. It’ll cost a bit more than what you were paying, but I have a good job now. Laura and I can help with the rent. We want to.”
He continued to look at the wall. “I lost one home already,” he said. “I’m not starting over in a new neighborhood. Not at my age.”
“But you can’t stay here in this place.”
“What difference does it make where I die?”
“Mr. Mandelbaum …” I took his hand in mine. “Max,” I said gently. “There are still people who love you and need you. I do. Laura does, too. To her you’re like …” Like the father she should have had, I thought. “Like family.”
“Every time Laura looks at me, she’ll think of that day,” Mr. Mandelbaum said. “Better she shouldn’t remember. She’s still young enough to forget.”
Something sharp darted through my chest. If only she could! “You’re wrong. Laura needs you more than ever now. You need each other. Doesn’t she matter to you at all?” My voice became more urgent. “The world is the same place it was three months ago. There are still things in it worth living for.”
Finally, he turned to face me. “Oh, Sarah.” There were tears in his eyes, and a look of compassion. As if in this moment it were I and not he who needed understanding. “You know I haven’t wanted to live since Ida died.”
My throat closed in a hard, painful lump. There was nothing I could say.
The hand I held squeezed faintly against mine. I felt how it trembled, cold and papery and crisscrossed with thick veins. The skin slid loosely over the bones of his knuckles, as if there were nothing to connect them.
“As long as I had Honey and my memories, well …” He withdrew his hand to pass it over his eyes. “You and Laura will be fine without me,” he said. “When they buried my cat and everything that reminded me of my wife, they buried me, too.” He turned his face to the wall again. “It’s already like I never existed.”
Laura had always been a good student. But now all she did was study. She had this grim, determined air about her, like a prisoner trying to claw her way through solid earth. Although maybe that’s not as true as I think it is. Maybe Laura gossiped with friends and dated boys and thought about some of the other things pretty teenage girls are supposed to think about. It’s impossible for me to know. I worked a lot of late nights, earning as much as I could so I would have something to put away for Laura’s college. We didn’t see much of each other. We were like roommates, I remember telling Anise once, years later. Like roommates, rather than family. Two people who happened to share a living space because it was convenient and made financial sense for them to do so.
In a way, it was like living with my parents all over again. Our home was silent—no conversations, no music. I knew Laura resented my music, I knew she blamed me for loving it so much that I’d raised her the way I had. She screamed it at me once. It was a month after I’d gone to see Mr. Mandelbaum at the SRO, when I had to tell Laura that he’d died. I had gone to visit him every day after I’d found him, bringing food and soap and whatever comfort I could. I had succeeded so far as getting him to change into the clean clothes that I’d brought. But I couldn’t persuade him to leave that place altogether.
It wasn’t that Laura blamed me for his death exactly, but that she blamed me for everything—for our having lived in that building in that neighborhood in the first place. “Because of your music!” she’d yelled. “Because your music was more important to you than I was. You could have gotten a job, you could have asked your mother for help, you could have done anything when I was born that would have gotten me out of that place. But you didn’t!”
And what could I say? I had given up music for her. I’d stopped trying to be a DJ or a performer and went into the business side of it. It was only now, now when everything had ended, that I could see my mistakes. I wanted to say, I was only nineteen! Only four years older than you are now! Music was the only thing I knew anything about back then. I wanted to say, I didn’t want to be one of those single mothers who spends all day in an office and never sees her children. I wanted to spend every second I could with you. I didn’t just want us to live, I wanted us to have a life. I did the best I could, the very best I could at the time …
I wanted to say those things, but I couldn’t. The hardest thing in the world is to admit obvious past mistakes. Not because the admission of guilt is hard (I would have confessed to, would have apologized for, anything at all to win back Laura’s love). But because, in light of how stupid you turned out to have been, your defenses end up sounding like nothing more than excuses. Lame excuses, at that.
For years I thought I resented Laura for the guilt she made me carry. (As if I wasn’t carrying enough already.) Guilt for things that were beyond my control, for decisions I’d made so long ago (and for such good reasons!) that it didn’t seem fair to punish me for them now. For the first time in my life, I craved the silence I’d grown up with. I came to understand my mother better, how a woman could decide that she didn’t want to talk to her own child. There were times when I’d catch a look on Laura’s face, as if she were about to say something of more substance than Going to the library. I’ll be back later. Perhaps if I’d encouraged her … but I don’t know. I never did encourage her. I didn’t want to hear her repeat the accusations I made against myself daily. Sometimes I thought there was nothing left inside me but tears, and that if Laura said the wrong thing I’d put my head down and cry all those tears out until there was nothing left of me at all.
Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Laura needed to be angry at someone. Who could she be angry at if not at me? The City? The developers greedy for more land they could overprice? Those were anonymous entities, nothing more than a thousand worst-case scenarios Laura blamed me for not having thought enough about. And then one day the anger and silence become a habit. One day it’s been so long since you’ve talked to someone that it’s impossible to say the things you should have said years ago.
Maybe that’s why I blather so relentlessly at Laura when she comes to visit me now. Too late I realized how insidious silence is. I think sometimes that maybe—by sheer accident—I’ll find the one right thing to say, the one thing that will make Laura look at me again the way she used to.
After Laura graduated from college and moved away, she was no longer my legal dependent, and I had to move out of the Mitchell-Lama building. Not that it mattered much to me. That apartment had never felt like a real home, anyway.
I moved back to the Lower East Side. I had to go all the way out to Avenue B—once an unthinkable place to live, certainly for a woman alone—to find an apartment I could afford. It wasn’t exactly the same when I moved back (you can never go home again, as they say)—not even remotely the same, really. But it was the only place where I could find traces of what had been, and what might have been if not for one rainy day and a few fallen bricks.
I still couldn’t bring myself to listen to my music. But I could no longer stand the silence, either. I started watching a lot of TV. And
I went out for long, roaming walks. I felt like a ghost haunting the neighborhood. It was odd to see how much things had changed in eight years. The building where Anise and I used to live was now a luxury high-rise where a one-bedroom apartment started at four thousand dollars a month for only five hundred square feet. A tall silver box divided into dozens of smaller silver boxes, none with any more personality than the other. Lofts the size of the one Anise and I shared now sold for three million dollars, which struck me as something beyond madness. The SRO where Mr. Mandelbaum died was now a high-end boutique hotel. Its lobby bar was thronged at night with young girls who were beautiful and looked very expensive.
But there are still traces of the place I once knew. The DIE YUPPIE SCUM! graffiti on the occasional brick wall. Chico’s Loisaida mural on Avenue C. Walking through these streets I used to know so well is like running into a girl you once knew at your twentieth high school reunion, some girl who’s had a lot of plastic surgery. She looks older and yet she also looks younger. Like herself and also like a different person from the one you remember.
One day I found myself walking down Stanton Street, where Laura and I used to live. It was raining, and maybe that was what drew my feet in that direction. Where our building had been was now a construction site littered with cement blocks, stacks of lumber and steel beams, and a silent crane. Gaily striped banners proclaimed that luxury lofts were being erected.
I stood there in the rain and looked at it for a while, the way I’d stood in the rain that night, watching our old building come down. I couldn’t remember the name of Mr. Mandelbaum’s cat anymore, that cat Laura had loved so much she’d been willing to risk her life for her. I tell myself all the time that I’m too young to be so forgetful, even though I have a grown daughter. I’m not even fifty yet. But my memory has become full of holes.
This day wasn’t rainy as that other day had been. After one intense, tropical burst, the clouds cleared and the sun was beating down again. Just as I was preparing to leave, I saw something move near one of the cement blocks scattered on the ground.
It was a kitten. A tiny little thing. Probably no more than a few weeks old, cowering behind something solid. The creature looked soaked through. She was trying hard to remain unseen, and for a second I did consider leaving her to her privacy. And yet—surely this was some kind of miracle, wasn’t it? That I should find a kitten—one who looked so much like how I remembered the Mandelbaums’ cat—on this spot, in this place? She had the same green eyes, the same black tiger stripes and little white socks on her paws. Surely I was being offered a second chance, to save now what I hadn’t been able to save for Laura all those years ago.
And didn’t I also need saving? Didn’t I also need someone to love? It was meant to be, a voice in my head whispered.
I crouched down, holding out my hand. “Hey, kitty,” I whispered. “Are you lost?” The kitten shrank back, afraid. Poor thing! I thought, and something in my chest that had been hard and frozen for years began to loosen. I reached out to her again, and she seemed to draw herself inward until she was a tight ball of watchful fluff, just beyond the reach of my fingers. It was probably prudent, I told myself, for such a young kitten to be wary of a strange human. As this thought crossed my mind, I remembered Anise’s cats, all named for Beatles songs, and I smiled. “Prudence?” I said. “Is that your name?”
The kitten looked at me with enormous, fearful emerald eyes. And then, without thinking about it, I began to sing. For the first time in fourteen years, I found my voice. “Dear Prudence,” I sang softly. “Won’t you come out to play?”
At first the kitten looked bewildered. I wasn’t surprised. My voice sounded scratchy, and it was deeper than it used to be. I didn’t even sound like me anymore. But as I sang, my voice gained strength and I started to recognize it again. “The sun is up, the sky is blue … it’s beautiful, and so are you …”
Timidly, cautiously, the kitten crept out from the shadow of the cinder block. She sniffed my fingers, inching forward, and allowed me to lift her. She was soaking wet, and I bundled her under my jacket, against the warmth of my chest. She pressed one paw, tentatively, softly, to my cheek. I noted what looked like a funny little extra toe.
“Let’s go home, Prudence,” I whispered. The kitten responded with a series of cheeping mews, as if she were trying to sing back to me.
One day Laura came to my apartment with the news that she was engaged. I was happy for her, of course I was happy for her, and yet I also thought, My only daughter is engaged to a man I’ve never even met. Laura tells me so little about her life. But there was a happiness, a sweetness that seemed to exist despite itself in her blue, blue eyes, so much like her father’s. I know my daughter well enough to know when she’s happy. And when she invited me to have lunch with her and her fiancé and I met him for the first time, I could see why.
I actually ran into Josh once after that, completely unexpectedly. It was at night, maybe around eleven o’clock or so, during one of my endless walks. One small club I passed had live music playing, and, impulsively, I drifted inside. It was a three-piece acoustic band, performing a cover of Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home.”
There are moments when a song hits you in a certain way. You know it’s soupy and self-indulgent, but even knowing that doesn’t stop the tears from rising. And suddenly I was so tired, a bone-deep exhaustion I’d been feeling more and more lately. I sat down at the bar, needing a moment to pull myself together.
And then, out of nowhere, Josh was beside me. “What a surprise!” he exclaimed, kissing me on the cheek. “I’m here with some of the writers from my magazine, checking out this band. Come over and I’ll introduce you. I’m sure the three of you could talk music for hours.”
Josh was only nine or ten years younger than I was. Still, he looked like he belonged in this place. Looking around at all the young faces, I was suddenly aware of my age, how far-too-old I was for Lower East Side dives where young artists played in the hope of being discovered. One day you look around and realize everyone in New York is younger than you are. “Oh,” I said to Josh. “That’s okay. I was just going to have a quick drink and head home.”
“I’ll have a drink with you, then.” He sat on the bar stool next to mine and ordered a Maker’s Mark rocks from the bartender.
“How’s your family?” I asked, at a loss for anything else to say. “I’m looking forward to meeting them.”
“They’re good,” he said. “My parents still live out in Parsipanny in the house I grew up in. My dad’s getting ready to retire soon. My sister has a house near them, but she’s looking for a place in the City, closer to where she works.” His face hardened subtly. “She and her husband split up and he … doesn’t do a lot for their kids. She’s basically raising them on her own.” Then he sighed. “Oh well. It’ll probably make her and the kids closer with each other as they grow up.”
“Yes,” I said faintly. “It happens that way, sometimes.”
There was a mirror behind the bar. The Josh sitting next to me on the bar stool was looking into it. But the Josh reflected in the mirror was looking at me. I turned my eyes down and twirled the straw in my drink a few times.
“Hey,” he said. “Did you ever hear how Laura and I met?”
“No.” I tried to smile. Tried not to think of all the little ways I’d long ago stopped being a part of Laura’s inner life. “I don’t think I have.”
“She came to my office one day. Her firm represents my company and they had a meeting of some kind. Anyway, I was on my way to see somebody when I saw this beautiful woman near the elevator. She has those eyes, you know? And she was struggling with these two enormous briefcases.” He laughed. “I mean, they looked heavy. Heavier than her, maybe. So, naturally, I went over to help, but she didn’t want me to. She didn’t just say, No, that’s okay, I can manage. She really didn’t want me to carry those briefcases for her. I could tell she was embarrassed. She cared about managing those two heavy brief
cases on her own.
“For days, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Why would somebody care so much about such a simple thing? It wasn’t stubbornness, I could tell that, but it was something. I thought about it all the time, trying to figure it out. Finally, I called her office and asked her out.” He paused, took a sip of his drink.
“Later she told me it was her first client meeting. Apparently, it’s a customary thing for an associate to carry a partner’s briefcases when they go to meetings. I said to her, But that guy you were with was all the way back in the conference room. It’s not like he would have seen me helping you. And she kept saying, But an associate is supposed to carry the briefcases. That’s part of the job. It’s what you’re supposed to do. And I thought that I’d probably never met anybody who cared so much about doing the right thing, doing what you’re supposed to do, all the way down to the little things.
“I couldn’t have known it that first time I saw her. But I did know it somehow, you know? How sometimes you look at someone’s face, and you don’t know what exactly it is you’re seeing, but you know it’s important. Laura thinks she has such a poker face.” He laughed again. “I know how hard she works to convince herself she’s in control of things all the time. But you can tell when she really cares about something. It’s written all over her face.” His eyes in the mirror found mine. “I saw it when she looked at you at lunch,” he said. “I don’t know, maybe you think the two of you aren’t as close as you’d like to be. Laura doesn’t talk about it much. I have an older sister. I know it can be rough between mothers and daughters sometimes. My sister loves my mother, and the two of them talk all the time. But I never see in her face what I saw in Laura’s when she looked at you.”