Beautiful Inez

by Bart Schneider

  “Can I help you?” he says, surprising her. She’d almost felt invisible, but there she is, leaning against a car.

  “No . . . no, I used to live here. Many years ago.”

  The man smiles at her, disbelieving.

  “Well, actually my husband lived here as a kid.”

  That the man can accept. “Care for a look around?”

  “No, thank you. I like it best in memory.”

  “I won’t take away your memory. Promise.” The man grins at her. He’d be happy to lead her through the house. Perhaps he is a gentleman and his intentions are pure. Or maybe he would ravage her. Maybe she could live like this. Meeting up with strange men in the middle of the day. Treating people as if they were interchangeable. Was this what Sylvia meant by a fugue state?

  “Thank you very much,” says Inez, smiling at the man in the tweed coat. “I have something I must tend to, otherwise . . .” She holds her hands open in apology, then turns and walks up the street.

  She continues to walk, leaving the fate of her car to the meter maids. At the corner of Bay and Fillmore, she can’t decide between Marina Green, the vast grassy expanse, with its dogs and kite fliers, jutting along the bay and marina, and the gentle beach at Aquatic Park with its long stone pier. Choosing the latter, she heads east. Across Van Ness, she smells the dark ferment from the Ghirardelli chocolate factory and realizes that she’s famished again. In the last week her appetite has turned into a feast-or-famine affair. She buys a Hershey bar in a small grocery and thinks of standing, as she did in childhood, nibbling chocolate beside the boccie ball courts.

  Aquatic Park was one of her father’s favorite spots on Sundays. Sometimes they’d have an afternoon meal in North Beach and then walk down Columbus. Her father would say, “How about we walk it off?” When she was seven or eight, she always wished they could take the trolley or cable car, but wanting to be a good sport like Bibi, she kept her eyes on the sidewalk and tried not to complain. It seemed like miles and miles they had to walk. When they finally got to the bandstand at Aquatic Park, her father would say, “How about we take a little rest? Unless you want to keep walking, Inez.” That made them all laugh. Her father winked at her and nodded. She felt proud to have walked so far without complaining.

  They often heard the municipal band at Aquatic Park. “Inez,” her father would say, “I hope this music doesn’t ruin your ears.” He was ashamed by how much he enjoyed “common music.” Inez happened to like the sound of the big horns. She remembers sitting on the concrete steps, how her vision would wander from the wide bay, to the mustached members of the band, to the steady stream of sailors in their immaculate uniforms, strolling by in twos or threes, or with their dates, willowy young women who, like Inez, had to be at least as smitten with the uniforms as with the men inside them. As she listened to the municipal band, she’d wonder whether the ruin to a person’s ears was ever visible. Did a form of rust set in like you saw on the fenders of old cars?

  Although her father pointed out the sailboats and fishing vessels with particular pleasure, she preferred the large ships, steaming out to sea or being tugged back in. “Someday you’ll sail the seas, Inez,” he’d say, and she believed him. She used to wonder why he said this to her, but not to Bibi.

  Their father often pulled a pair of plums from his coat pockets and wiped them off with a clean handkerchief before handing one to each daughter. Then he’d take the handkerchief and spread it across the lap of Inez’s dress or her coat so that the drippings from the plum had somewhere safe to spill. Inez could never understand how Bibi managed to eat her plum so much more carefully than she did. When she handed the handkerchief back to her father, it was always stained in purple blood.

  The boccie-ball courts were her father’s favorite. He never told them that, but they knew. A chicken-wire fence enclosed the courts. She and Bibi looked through the chicken wire at the old Italian men and their funny wooden balls, and their father looked over the fence.

  Her father handed them bars of chocolate, which they slowly unwrapped and nibbled as they stood watching the boccie-ball players. She used to wonder why her father enjoyed these funny men so much, the crazy gestures they made with their hands, their language one he didn’t understand any better than his daughters did.

  Once, she asked her sister why the Italians had so much to say about a silly game of wooden balls.

  “They’re not talking about boccie ball, Nez, they’re talking about politics and business. They’re talking about smart things to do with your money. Maybe they’re talking about somebody’s wife who got really fat. Or somebody else who used to do magic tricks and just dropped dead on the streetcar.”

  This was a shocking thought; she didn’t believe Bibi at first. How did Bibi know what they thought? She didn’t understand Italian. Anyway, it seemed to her that all those men knew were wooden balls, how close the big one was to the little. They held their hands apart, scratched lines in the sand with the toes of their shoes, invented new methods of measurement as they went along.

  The chicken wire is gone now, replaced by a short wooden fence, but the boccie-ball courts are still here. Inez leans against the fence as she nibbles on her Hershey bar. When she closes her eyes, the chatter of Italian, the rise and fall in pitch, sounds like chamber music. The agitated voices evoke a string section worrying itself into a dissonant corner before easing toward a resolution. She opens her eyes and watches the men play. Had her father wished he were one of them rather than an old Swede who had nobody to talk with about his life?

  After she finishes her chocolate, she instinctively reaches into her pocket for something more to eat. And there’s the plum. She wipes it off on her coat. She hadn’t thought any of the men had noticed her, but just as she takes a bite out of her fat Santa Rosa plum, and feels the juice of it spilling down her chin, a short man from the other side of the fence holds out a clean white handkerchief.

  “Prego,” he says.

  “No, no.”

  “Prego.”

  She looks into his small, animated face, an oval of light under his gray felt hat.

  He wants to hand the handkerchief to Inez, but because she’s so surprised by the gesture, he bends toward her with the white cloth and dabs at the juice spilling from her chin. “Grazie,” she says, and turns away.

  human

  INEZ hadn’t expected it to go this way. The closer she gets to ending her life, the more human she feels. For better or for worse, the relationship with Sylvia has humanized her. Just a couple of hours after dropping Sylvia off, even after Sylvia’s punishing diatribe, Inez aches for her.

  On the way home, Inez stops at the Larabaru Bakery on Sixth Avenue for French bread and at Shenson’s, on Geary, for a pound of lox—something special for the kids when they get home from school.

  Her father-in-law is alone in the house when she gets there. The very sight of him calls her humanity into question. She thinks how nice it would be to slap his face and, perhaps, add a twist to his gimpy bow arm. She lets the impulse pass. “Hello, Isaac,” she says. “How are you?” She doesn’t hear a word he says in reply. Inez finds a cucumber in the fridge, peels it, and cuts it into thin coins. After slicing a half loaf of French bread and spreading the slices with cream cheese, she adds the cucumbers and fillets of smoked salmon. Once she’s assembled a plateful of open-faced sandwiches, Inez opens the front door—her usual sign to the kids that she’s home.

  She hears Joey tromp in the front door first. “Hi, Mom,” he shouts. Inez knows that Anna’s not far behind—Joey, anxious for home, always runs ahead the last couple of blocks.

  Inez meets Joey in the front hall, gives him a hug, runs a hand through his cowlick. She’ll give him a bath tonight, shampoo his hair. As her eyes grow moist, Inez turns to the side.

  “How was your trip, Mom?” asks Joey, dropping a math workbook and his Weekly Reader on the hall table.

  “It was fine.”

  That seems to satisfy Joey’s curiosity. “Is
there a snack?” he asks, heading for the kitchen.

  “Go and see.”

  Anna pushes her way through the open front door, blancing her binder and a stack of schoolbooks, covered in white butcher paper. “Hi, Mom,” Anna says in a flat voice, without looking at her mother.

  “God, Mom,” Joey shouts from the kitchen. “Did we strike it rich?!” This in response to the lox, a delicacy that Jake refers to as “gold” whenever Inez brings home a pound of it.

  “There’s something in there you might like,” Inez says to her daughter.

  “No thanks, I’m not hungry,” says Anna, climbing the stairs to her room.

  Finally a little fallout. Inez watches Anna disappear up the stairs, resisting the instinct to follow her.

  AS soon as he gets home, Jake goes off to mix drinks. He seems happy to see her. Relieved, may be more like it. Perhaps she put a scare in him. Given Jake’s public life as a political agitator, an “agent of change,” as one newspaper columnist described him, Inez has always been surprised by how much he favors the status quo in his home life. There’s no way to prepare the poor man for what’s coming next.

  Jake returns with a whiskey sour for himself and a gimlet for her. He seems intent on pleasing her. He hands her a drink and a cocktail napkin, then drapes his arm around her shoulder. Inez suddenly becomes conscious of the whereabouts of everybody in the house. Anna, as far as she knows, is in her room doing homework, Joey is hacking away at the Dvořák. And the old man . . . she’s not even going to worry about the old man. At the moment, she and Jake are alone in the living room, Jake in a black polo shirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts, the pale green hue of a breath mint. Inez glances at his tan legs and smiles.

  “You seem happy, Inez. You must have found what you were looking for.”

  “I wasn’t exactly on a pilgrimage.”

  “Did you see Bibi?” asks Jake, taking so hearty a gulp of his drink that a little spills over his lower lip.

  “Yes, I saw her.” Inez sips at her drink. “You make a fine gimlet, Jake.”

  “Thank you.” Jake pats at his mouth with his napkin.

  “Anyway, I found the whole thing a bit exhausting, which is why I spent the night in Napa.”

  “Did she look bad?”

  “No, she looked okay. About as good as a forty-five-year-old woman in a nuthouse can look. She wanted to be remembered to you. She wonders if you’re still performing your egg-balancing trick.”

  “Ha. She remembers.”

  Inez studies her husband as he leans back cross-legged on the sofa. She used to envy the ease with which Jake resided in his body. Now she thinks that he may have gone a little slack. Has a little too much self-satisfaction set in? At least that’s not a problem that plagues Inez. “There’s something else,” she says, “that might shock you, Jake.”

  He sighs like a spent athlete, then pulls himself up straight on the sofa. “What?”

  Inez takes a long sip of her drink. “I’m going to bring Bibi home next week.”

  “What do you mean?” Jake shakes a cigarette out of his pack but can’t find a light for it.

  “They’re willing to let her out.” Inez tosses Jake a book of matches from the coffee table.

  “For a day?” he says, lighting his cigarette.

  “No, for good. She’s harmless, Jake. I know the house will be a little tight, but I think Bibi will get along very well with your father. Maybe she can teach him how to sew.”

  Jake’s face freezes. He sits with three fingers pinned across his lips. It appears that she has a talent for petty sadism. If she’d discovered this fact a little earlier, her life might have taken another shape.

  “You’re not serious,” he says, his brow still furrowed, smoke pouring out of his great nostrils.

  She sips her drink and smiles at Jake. “Of course not.”

  Jake lets out a gasp of relief.

  “Bibi’s perfectly happy where she is. She’s more content than the rest of us. When I was visiting, it occurred to me that people really do become who they’re supposed to. It’s like growing into your face. And Bibi is perfectly at home with being crazy. You could say it becomes her.”

  “And what becomes you, Inez?”

  “To be unhappy, I suppose.”

  “You’re not so unhappy.”

  “I’m sure it’s all relative.”

  “You seem relatively happy.”

  “If you say so.”

  “It’s not what I say.”

  Inez looks at her husband with a degree of pity, the way you might consider a child who you discover, while he stands beside you at the piano, is tone-deaf. “How about you, Jake? What do you think your natural state is, happy-go-lucky?” She can’t quite disguise her contempt as she says the phrase.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say happy-go-lucky. I do have some depth, after all.”

  “It is all relative, isn’t it,” says Inez, again, cruelly. She sighs. “I think Bibi’s where she belongs. What’s the phrase? Let sleeping babies lie.”

  “I think it’s dogs that you let lie, Inez, not babies.” Jake stands and stretches out his arms extravagantly. “I remember when we brought Joey home. He never seemed to sleep, did he?”

  “No,” she says.

  “Drove you crazy.”

  It’s clear that Jake is aiming for a little tit for tat.

  “I had to take him down to the basement to sleep. How long did that go on? Weeks? Months?”

  Jake is standing in front of her now, shifted into attorney mode. “That wasn’t a very good time for you.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Did you ever figure out what it was?”

  Inez glares at Jake. “Why are we talking about this now?”

  “Was the doctor any help at all? What did the doctor say?”

  “He mentioned hormones,” Inez says, closing her eyes on Jake, on the conversation.

  “Hormones. They blame everything on hormones, nowadays. Your pimples, your breath, your personality, the way you behave in public. You’d think that hormones were a disease. Polio, for Chrissakes. Might as well get Dr. Salk working on a vaccine for hormones. Next thing you know, hormones will be a leading legal defense.”

  Inez tells herself that it won’t be long and begins to hum her Schubert lied. Everything in this life is precious. . . .

  “Speak of the devil,” Jake says.

  When she opens her eyes, Joey’s standing beside his father. “Are we going to have dinner tonight, or something?”

  “Are you hungry?” Jake asks.

  “Yeah, I’m really hungry,” Joey says.

  “How about we call Chicken Delight?”

  Inez hears their advertising ditty in her head—Don’t cook tonight, call Chicken Delight—and imagines the truck pulling up in front of their house, the teenager with a flattop and a Chicken Delight jacket walking up their front stairs with a large white Chicken Delight sack. The neighbors peering out from behind their venetian blinds. Can’t she even cook a chicken dinner?

  “How about we go to the Feed Bag?” says Inez.

  “Sounds great,” Jake says.

  “That’d be neat,” Joey says, bounding out of the room. “Cheeseburger in a basket!”

  “Do you think we can go with the kids,” Inez asks, “and leave the old man here?”

  Jake grins at her. He likes the idea and seems pleased that Inez has adopted his moniker for his father. “I think we can manage that. We can heat up the leftover spaghetti for him.”

  THREE bites into his cheeseburger, Joey drops his bombshell: “I want a dog.”

  “Jews don’t have dogs,” Jake says, winking, between bites of his cheeseburger.

  “I’m only a half Jew,” Joey says.

  “And the wrong half, at that,” Inez says.

  “Why the wrong half, Mom?” Joey asks.

  “Yes, please explain,” Anna says, a hard grin breaking over her face.

  “We’re getting a little off the subject,” Inez sa
ys.

  “Hey, Dad,” Anna says, sticking out her tongue, “Jews don’t eat cheeseburgers.”

  Jake holds his cheeseburger at arm’s length as if it’s contaminated. They all have a hearty laugh. For a moment, you’d think they were the happiest family in America, and Inez, the most normal of moms. Maybe that’s how it is . . . for a moment.

  Inez looks across the booth at Joey. “Since when have you wanted a dog?”

  “Since always.”

  “I’ve never heard you mention it.”

  “I wasn’t ready.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought I better wait until I got responsible.”

  “You think you’re responsible now?”

  “Enough for a dog,” he says, dragging a french fry through a puddle of ketchup.

  “What kind of dog do you want, Joey?”

  “Let’s not get started,” Jake says.

  Joey keeps his eyes focused on her. “I don’t know, any kind.”

  “We can’t get a dog,” Jake says.

  “Why?” Joey and Anna ask in unison.

  “We’ve already got your grandfather to look after.”

  “Maybe Isaac will like having a dog around,” Inez says.

  “Don’t kid yourself.”

  “It can keep him company while the kids are at school.”

  “I’d be worried about the poor dog having to be alone with the old man.”

  “Quit making excuses,” Inez says, turning to face Jake, who’s disappointed that his last comment produced no laughter. “You should get the boy a dog.”

  Jake looks at her, surprised. “Me? Why me? Why should I do it?” His eyes hold the same old question: Why are you doing this to me? Although it’s become less frequent in recent years, she enjoys watching the look of the persecuted seep into Jake’s eyes. Jake wants her to say something to undo the trouble she’s started. Inez smiles back at Joey. “The truth is,” she says, “I think this family could use a dog.”

  Joey sings an arpeggiated trumpet charge, and his sister obliges him by calling out: Charge!

  “But let’s let Dad get used to the idea.”

  “It’s going to take a lot of getting used to,” Jake says, frowning in mock anger.