Women in Bed

by Jessica Keener

  When she awoke again, Ledger’s voice downstairs came up through the radiator like a bad tape, fading and skipping words. Sentences submerged in vitriolic sounds. Later, the feeling of losing something forced her out of bed. There was work, too, in a few hours. She tightened her robe around her waist and cracked open her door just enough to peek into the hall. It was empty. She needed to call Kevin. Where was her cell phone?

  In the hall, she found a cardboard box wrapped in kite string on the phone table. DO NOT USE had been marked on all four sides of the box, the phone cord disappearing into the wall like a rat’s tail scurrying out of sight.

  She stepped into the bathroom and locked it, dropping her robe on the toilet seat, then circling freely as the water filled the tub. At this time of day, sunlight knocked against the shiny tiles. The floor felt cool and forgiving under her feet.

  If Mr. Ledger yelled at her she would dive underwater to stop him. If he couldn’t get in and pounded on the door, and then said, “Open this door god damn it!” just like her father did, she would scream, “I’m not moving,” and stand back brave and dripping wet in the middle of the room.

  In the tub she flapped water over her skin. She rubbed away her father’s verbal slaps across her cheek and arms, then dunked her head to submerge Kevin’s growing disinterest.

  Clean and dressed, she took a pill before preparing to leave for work. Then she sat on the bed and waited. She waited with the patience of someone refusing to acknowledge what was falling apart around her. She’d lost her cell somewhere. What did it matter? She plucked random lint from her skirt until a feeling of reverie streamed into her blood from the pill and told herself that sometimes the world came together.

  Opening her door, she smelled a cigar, a sweet sedentary odor in the hall and followed it.

  “I’m on my way to work,” she said standing in the older boarder’s doorway. “I’m Jennifer. I live at the end.” Her head tilted in the direction of her room.

  “Joseph Rizzo,” he said in a lumbering Italian accent. “Glad you could stop by. Where do you work?”

  “I’m a server—a waitress.”

  He sat at a card table in front of the TV and shuffled his cards, nodding. “I was a chef once. You know the restaurant, Longines, in New York?”

  She shook her head. She knew zilch about restaurants except for the one she worked in, which was a steak-and-fries, salad-and-big-drinks-place that brought in huge tips.

  “I worked there twenty-three years. A very famous place. But that was a long time ago when I was young, like you. Yes, that’s right.” He nodded, pleased with the connection he had made between them.

  “Who’s the other boarder?” she asked.

  “War veteran. Vietnam. He has his troubles. Drinking. As for myself, Janie—”

  “Jennifer,” she corrected him.

  “Yes, Jennifer. Now I’m waiting for death. You see death is a hole in the ground. That’s what I say.” He swept his paw over the cards and reshuffled them. “That’s all it is. I’ve a warm place to sleep, a working TV; I enjoy the soaps and down the street they serve a nice lunch. Nice people there too. I go every day except Wednesdays. Wednesdays they’re closed.” He picked up his cigar and relit it.

  “You’re a pretty girl,” he added. “You should be happy.”

  “You think so?”

  She leaned into the threshold and smiled. “You’re a very nice man.”

  At the restaurant she forgot about herself and concentrated on customer orders. Rare or medium steak—free range, grain fed cows were the rave. Baked potato? Drinks? She pressed against shoulders, inched her way between perfumed blouses and ladies’ soft breasts. Middle-aged couples waiting to be seated grew boisterous as the night ticked on. The restaurant didn’t accept reservations so customers drank on empty stomachs. By the time they were ready to eat, the older men were drunk and talked to her as if she were their daughter or niece. Did she have a boyfriend? Many admirers? With her looks, they said, she could be a model, have her pick. The wives tolerated their husbands’ seductive indulgences. It reminded them of earlier, sexier times in their married lives.

  By midnight she was wide-eyed, hyper-awake, climbing imaginary rungs of hope. Afterward, she drank too many White Russians—vodka, Kahlua and cream—pooling and dividing her tips with the other servers, getting woozy again, waiting for fatigue.

  She took a cab to Ledger’s and climbed the stairs to her second floor, forgetting yesterday’s egregious confrontation with the cardboard box, until she saw it again: the phone tied and quartered in string. This incensed her. She would not let him do this to her. Turning, she snuck down to the first floor and used the phone in a nook under the stairs. She had given up finding her cell, convinced she lost it in Michele’s backyard.

  “Kevin?” she whispered when he picked up. “Ledger strung up the phone. I can’t talk long. I’m sorry I left.”

  “I called your cell earlier. It wasn’t working. What’s going on Jen?”

  “I was at work. If you’d come over, you’d see. Are you alone?”

  “What are you doing,” Ledger said. He stood midway down the staircase, a vulturous shadow in the dark.

  She hung up.

  “I’m coming from work.”

  “That phone is not for public use.”

  Hovering beneath the stairs, she waited for him to move. His rules were absurd. He turned and wavered upwards, around the second landing to the attic where he slept.

  She stood against the wall for a long time. Her legs ached. She heard steam heat crawling up through the walls and the dead silence of sleepers. Finally, she went up to her room for another pill. It didn’t take long to feel the pill’s sumptuous, full-bodied embrace.

  Early the next morning, she woke to the sound of furniture toppling and Ledger’s voice shouting through the wall behind her headboard. When she opened her eyes again the sun flashed. She turned on her side and saw a white envelope under the door crack.

  You’ve used two utilities at once, Ledger wrote in a script that rubbed against her fingertips like Braille. The phone and the bathroom. Phone privileges have been taken away.

  She shredded the note, but saw shadows of feet passing her door. The unknown boarder’s doorknob rattled down the hall. Someone with uneven legs stomped down the stairs. She dressed, put on her winter coat and hurried outside to walk off the absurdity of Ledger’s logic, the impending disaster of her love life. But Ledger’s voice nipped at her heels like her father’s, until the two disciplinarians galloped in tandem, chasing her. You’ve used two utilities at once. You think you have special privileges? She circled her block imagining Kevin’s apartment, walking in when he didn’t answer; finding an unmade bed; the smell of recently smoked cigarettes; empty beer cans; a flute across his sheets. She wanted to call him but she knew he was at a rehearsal. She circled the block four more times and went back to the boarding house.

  “A boy came by,” Ledger called to her from his wing chair.

  “Kevin?”

  “No, his name was Alan.”

  She blocked the doorway.

  “Mr. Ledger. If I need to make an emergency phone call, what should I do?” He took off his reading glasses.

  “An emergency phone call is fine; otherwise, you may use the pay phone down the street.” He slid his glasses on, jiggling them to give them a snug fit, and returned to his newspaper. The piano top gleamed in the sun. She went out again to the center of town.

  Outside, the hour was slow. She was happy once wasn’t she? She scanned the store fronts: the card stop where she collected trolls as a child, their bright-colored hair soft as milkweed; coke and muffins at the ice cream store. Under a cold, flat sun, she passed the town field where her mother took her and her older sister, Ruth, to play. Her sister lived in Florida now.

  “Jennifer!”

  She heard a loud honk and
saw Alan coming toward her in a garbage cart. In the short time she had known him, he had left a job driving a bread truck and now he picked up garbage for the town—not this town, he had driven out of his territory—because the money was good.

  “Kevin took off to his aunt’s beach house. He knows something’s up.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Can you get in?” Alan leaned over to open the small door. “Did the old man tell you I came by? That place is weird.”

  “Did you talk to Kevin?”

  “Jay did. What do you want to do Jen? Kevin’s not going for this one.” He reached over to cup her breast but she waved him away.

  “Stop. Okay? I need to think.”

  She crossed the street and went into a luncheonette, the one she guessed Mr. Rizzo frequented but it was too early for lunch. Inside, construction workers were fork lifting scrambled eggs and toast. She had to find her cell, but she didn’t have his aunt’s number. Maybe Alan had it.

  In the ladies rest room, she leaned into the mirror. The muscle over her eye ached again, pulsing. Maybe her brain was eroding from her grandfather’s pills, or desperation and insecurity. She had fucked up. She didn’t know what to do.

  “Jen?” Alan tapped on the door. “You okay in there?”

  She opened the door.

  “I made a mistake. We made a mistake.”

  He stood in front of her breathing hard. She could still smell gin.

  “You’re just scared.”

  “Kevin’s your friend.”

  “Hey, babe. Don’t’ moralize with me. He’s your ex-lover because it’s not happening between you two. You should call Michele.”

  “Stop this,” she said shaking her hands.

  He looked at his watch. “I’ll leave it up to you then.”

  She didn’t stop him from getting back into his trash truck and pulling away. He was right and he was wrong. Across the street, a dog lifted its leg to a tree. The sky was fading behind brittle clouds. She started walking toward home.

  When she opened the door to the kitchen she smelled breakfast, roasted coffee beans and toast and saw them at the kitchen table, distant as her childhood had become.

  “Jennie!”

  Her mother rose and came over to her, her dark eyebrows squirreling with worry.

  Check me out, Jennifer wanted to say. Take a look at your jittery pill-popping daughter.

  “You’ve lost weight.”

  “She must be hungry. That’s why she came home,” he said, swiping his mouth with a napkin, smoothing a crease on his suit jacket. “You don’t have the decency to call and give us your address?”

  “Let me get you something to eat,” her mother said. Her mother wore black slacks and a beige blouse, her stay at home clothes when she wasn’t volunteering at the church or hospital.

  Jennifer saw the coffee pot on the countertop full of fresh, perfumed brew. She was tempted to pour some for herself.

  “She wants money. Why do you think she came home?” Her father started to get up and the movement scared her. His silver hair glinted like a knife.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said easing away from her mother’s weakened look, her impotent plea. Her mother donated time at the cancer gift shop but when it came to rescuing her from her father’s violent impulses, she stood in a corner, bullied by her husband for too many years. And now here it was again, like so many times in her life; Jennie sought her mother’s help, but her mother was no safer than quicksand.

  She couldn’t go there anymore.

  She ran outside while their voices called through the rooms of her brain. “Where’s she going now? I don’t know. Why didn’t you tell her to stay and eat? Did you see how she looked?” Street sign after street sign she ran until she reached the boarding house once more. Ledger was standing near the banister folding bed sheets in the upstairs hall.

  “I’ve had trouble with him before,” he said as she walked around him on the way to her room. “He lost a leg in the war but that’s no excuse. He drinks. I don’t allow drinking!”

  The door to the unknown boarder’s room had been thrust wide open, the mattress stripped to gray stripes, she saw, before she closed her own flimsy door.

  Directly, she penciled a note to Ledger and dropped it on the bed.

  “I used to live here,” it said. And although she knew it made more sense to wait for Sunday’s paper to look for a brand new place, she scooped some change from the drawer with the pills—red bullets, which she pushed away in disgust—and bought a newspaper from the machine down the street.

  Next she waited for the bus on the corner. When it arrived it swept her up in the cold empty morning. The second time would be easier she decided as she moved to the back. Hadn’t she already developed an aptitude for the classifieds? All those lists in black and white neatly spread across her knees. As for Kevin, he had already unlatched the gate and was diminishing. The bus surged forward and she felt her spine burning without love. Alan, she was convinced, got his kicks from the chase. So she fled as any animal would, out of instinct, toward the scent of nurturing waters and the promise of a sweet tasting hand.

  Woman with Birds in Her Chest

  On Thursday, ten minutes to four, Cynthia walked into her director’s office at St. Agnes Hospital and submitted her resignation. She didn’t want another job. She was lucky she didn’t need one. Money wasn’t her issue. But fifteen and a half years with the elderly had taken its toll. Old people have incurable ailments. What could she say to them about the inevitable? That aging and its related problems will go away?

  “It’s just time,” she said to Nan, who looked up from her desk and nodded in her mild, non-confrontational way. Only Nan’s double chin gave away her habit of eating too many chocolates and sweets to relieve the ongoing stress of her position. So, without trying to dissuade her, Nan asked if Cynthia would stay another month until she found someone to replace her. Of course Cynthia, who prided herself on doing everything right and correct, said she would.

  During the next few weeks, Cynthia withdrew from her associates, except for Moira, who was extroverted, and a hard person to escape. Moira went after things. To the others Cynthia in her usual gracious and measured way, pulled away. In the corridors people said, “You’re leaving!” and squeezed her arm as if in condolence, as if checking her blood pressure and pulse. Cynthia resented this but smiled to reassure them. No tragedy had occurred here. She was fine. Leaving was her choice.

  As expected, they planned a party. On her last day, Nan gathered scores of staff who intersected with social services, a department that functioned as a catchall for every division, a medical way station for patients no matter what their disease.

  Cynthia analyzed her sendoff as fulfilling a mandatory rite of closure. Administrative heads from Radiology, Cardiology, Respiratory Diseases all the way down the line of command, the pyramid of control, assistants and nursing aids wandered in and out of the conference room. Even Mrs. Jackson, Cynthia’s client, was there: small and emaciated, twisting her beads, looking sad next to the oversized cake.

  Public displays were distasteful to Cynthia. She attributed this to her Presbyterian upbringing and to her elderly parents who had limited energy for their only child. Don’t bother. Don’t fuss, her mother liked to say. Cynthia performed as best as she could at her afternoon sayonara; opening gifts, forcing a happy face—what is that face, someone please tell—she kept thinking as she held up two candlestick holders, a gold chain, an appointment book, and a tiny emerald pin. This was her finale, a measure of her achievement she reminded herself. Tying it all up.

  Landmark. Demarcation. Crossing. What?

  Fifteen years on the job. Fifteen years of fill-in-the-blank behind her.

  Her replacement, a young woman named Roxanne Morgan whom Cynthia hired fresh out of graduate school, stood near the back and looked on. Go
od for Roxanne for knowing not to impede.

  After the party, Cynthia checked her desk one last time. She didn’t want Roxanne inheriting used erasers, bent paper clips. She didn’t want to leave fingerprints of herself behind. Roxanne had a Master’s degree, like Cynthia, but Cynthia had the immeasurable experience. Roxanne would have to make her own way.

  After the party, Moira was called to another floor on an emergency admission. Nan lingered and watched Cynthia walk out of St. Agnes’ for good. It was cold outside in this Northeastern city, a streak of pink zigzagging across the darkening sky as she stood on the icy pavement in her low heels until someone honked, another well wisher, waving bye. Startled, Cynthia hurried to her car.

  The first weeks at home she slept late and read magazines in bed. Her husband, Miles, didn’t say anything. He said she deserved the rest. “You do what you want,” he said.

  But she didn’t need his permission.

  “I don’t mean it that way,” he said apologetically.

  She spent a week indulging herself at the malls, succumbing to a buying spree. She bought practical navy pumps, slacks lined with slippery black taffeta. A jewelry store caught her eye. So much hope in those glittering stones, those ancient histories of light. She bought a diamond pendant and hid it in her jewelry box. From whom was she hiding? She wondered. Miles would not have protested her expensive purchase.

  She considered taking a Spanish class but stopped herself. Once she visited Miles in his office. What a silly idea. Her husband was an internist with a subspecialty in renal disorders. His patients were elderly too. His beeper went off continually. Complaints; worried faces. Oh, hadn’t she just escaped this? Dumb, dumb, dumb. Miles looked kindly at her. There was nothing he could do to stop the flow of others’ needs.

  “See you at home,” he said.

  In April she struggled in her sleep. Her dreams became shadows of fingers, and the night, a troubling piece of lint in her throat. Beside her Miles slept with his arm heavy on her thigh. She wanted to wake him. Something wrong? Everything okay? he would have asked. But she didn’t.