It rings five times, and she wonders if her grandmother lost the phone or doesn’t even know how it works, or if maybe it’s dead or turned off.
Then Grandma Rena is there on the other end, and Lucia is telling her that she needs her. Grandma Rena cries out of relief. Lucia doesn’t say exactly what’s happened, but she says there’s trouble.
“Are you safe where you are?” Grandma Rena asks.
“I think so,” Lucia says, and then she gives her the address.
“Stay put. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
“Okay.” Lucia ends the call, her head in her hands.
“Just fucking call Gilly,” Walt says. “I’ve got no feeling in my arm. I can’t believe you really stabbed me.”
“Give me a second to think.”
He moans again. “At least go down to the CVS on the corner and get me some gauze and peroxide and bandages.”
She could do that, but she won’t.
Walt moans. “I’m dying,” he says.
She goes to the TV and uses the clothespin to change the channel. She’s hoping for baseball. No such luck. She settles for a Mexican soap opera. A black line cycles up and down the screen, warping the picture. She turns up the volume.
“You’re just like your fucking mother,” Walt says.
It’ll be at least an hour before Grandma Rena arrives, probably longer. Lucia wants Walt to stop talking, but he won’t shut up. She goes over and picks up the knife, a little blot of blood on the tip. “I’ll stab you again if I need to,” she says to Walt.
“You’d do me like that?”
“Shut up.”
She goes back to the couch and sits down, holding the knife against her knee. She has the thought that she might actually have to stab him again. She’ll do it if she needs to, if he makes a move on her. But right now he’s pretty still, except for his big mouth. He groans and calls out the names of his friends. She watches what’s on TV, a woman in a black dress, holding flowers, wiping tears from her cheeks, giving a speech of some kind. It’s comforting. Lucia’s taken Spanish the last two years; she catches a word here and there.
“I wish your mother would’ve had an abortion,” Walt says. “Then I wouldn’t be dying of this stab wound.”
“Just shut up,” Lucia says. She hasn’t prayed in forever, but she prays now for the time to pass, for Grandma Rena to show up soon and take her away from this. She taps her foot against the floor. She sings Mariah Carey’s “It’s Like That” under her breath.
WOLFSTEIN
Wolfstein calls a car service in nearby Central Valley and tells the guy she needs a ride into the city. He’s reluctant at first, explaining he’s been burned on a few big fares recently, but then he caves when she puts on the heavy-duty charm.
Rena’s frantic, anxious. Lucia gave her almost nothing to go on. Just told her that she’s in trouble. But Rena’s also clearly excited. She keeps saying, “Lucia said she needs me.”
The car service picks them up in front of the motel fifteen minutes later. They get in the back seat of this scratched Lincoln Town Car that smells of apple cinnamon air freshener, Wolfstein holding her bag in her lap, Rena giving the driver the address Lucia gave her, fiddling with the phone, seeming to expect another call.
The driver has hairy ears and wears a battered blue baseball cap with the logo torn off. His name is Dennis. He’s got a city accent. He says he moved up to Tuxedo with his sister about ten years ago and then they moved to Monroe and then Central Valley. He complains about Kiryas Joel. He’s got on a green tank top from a charity golf tournament. Swirls of hair dot his shoulders like frosting. He beeps at a van that’s driving erratically as they get onto the Thruway headed south. He apologizes for losing his cool. He says he’s tired of this place, tired of everywhere, tired of his sister, tired of driving, tired of being tired.
Wolfstein puts her bag on the seat between her and Rena and then sits forward, reaching out and rubbing Dennis’s neck. “I’m Wolfstein, and this is Rena.”
He laughs. “Well, Wolfstein, I’ll fall asleep, you do that.”
But she continues. “I’ll keep you awake by talking. We want to get where we’re going in one piece.”
“I’ll get you where you’re going. You’ve got the magic touch, you know that? I’m already feeling looser.”
Wolfstein keeps at it.
Rena’s looking down at her lap. “Should I stop and get her something? As a peace offering, you know? She used to love stuffed bears.” She’s asking Wolfstein, but she’s really just saying what she’s thinking out loud.
“My bet is she’s a little past that stuffed-bear phase,” Wolfstein says. “I say let’s just get there. This is a rescue mission, right?”
Rena’s fidgeting, lacing her fingers together in her lap. “Yeah, of course. You’re right. What the hell was I thinking?”
“It’s okay,” Wolfstein says. “Don’t beat yourself up.”
“You’re a good egg,” Dennis says to Wolfstein from the front. “You’re good at making people feel better, huh? That’s a rare talent. I’ve known you fifteen minutes, I already feel like a million bucks. You hitched?”
“I’m not, Dennis,” Wolfstein says.
“You enjoy single life too much; I get it. Me too. I go to the bar when I want. I come home when I want. I drink what I want, eat what I want, watch the shows I want to watch. Guys I know who’re married, their wives watch the Hallmark Channel nonstop. Give me some cop shows. The Shield, you ever hear of that one? My favorite show right there.”
Wolfstein moves to Dennis’s hairy shoulder blades. When she’s done, he thanks her again. She claps her hands together and says it was her pleasure.
They’re on the Tappan Zee Bridge. Wolfstein looks out at the light hitting the Hudson River. This bridge makes her nervous. It reminds her of going to and from Nyack with Aunt Karen. She was maybe nine or ten when it opened in 1955. She remembers seeing the river as full of possibilities, how it seemed so everlastingly big at this spot, so hopeful and beautiful. She remembers how she thought she could see history—actually see it—when she looked down at the water and the shore and the trees. Ghosts moving. Boats that weren’t there. Smoke from fires. She also remembers worrying, more than she ever had on any other bridge she’d ever crossed, that this one would collapse with her on it and that she’d be in the river in a car, banging on the window, gasping for breath, and that her world would end that way, that her pain would disappear into the deep darkness.
“I hate this bridge,” Dennis says, seemingly just to say something. “What a piece of shit. It’s gonna fall apart one day soon. Mark my words.”
“I believe you,” Wolfstein says.
Dennis drums the steering wheel. He turns on the radio. “You ladies mind a little music?”
“Fine with us.”
He scans the stations, settles on oldies. Bobby Vinton’s “Roses Are Red” is on. Dennis sings along. “My mother loved this song. My mother and all her sisters. She had six sisters. They’re all dead. My mother’s dead. Girl I dated in high school, Sophie, she loved this one, too.” A beat. He slams one hand against the side of his head, his palm flat against his ear. “I’m sorry. Here I go again.”
Wolfstein’s hand is on his shoulder again. “What’s wrong with remembering a thing like that? Loosen up a little. You’re fine.”
“I just don’t want to burden you with my bullshit. I hear a song, I start blubbering about my old lady. You’re gonna think my backbone’s made of matzo, that’s what. Crumbles like poof.” Another beat. “Who am I even? I’m the driver. ‘Drive, dummy,’ that’s what you gotta say to me. ‘We don’t want to hear about what your mother had for breakfast in 1958 or who you went to the dances at Cardinal Hayes with.’”
“You went to Cardinal Hayes?” Wolfstein asks
He nods. “Big time. You’re not from the Bronx, are you?”
“Riverdale.”
“No shit.”
“It’s true. You’re f
rom Concourse?”
“Mott Haven.”
“Tell me”—Wolfstein nudges forward in her seat again—“you don’t happen to smoke, Dennis sweetie, do you? I lost my pack somewhere along the way.”
Dennis gives her a big smile in the rearview mirror. “Do I smoke? I was born smoking.” He punches open the glove compartment and takes out a pack of Marlboro Reds and passes it back to Wolfstein. He pushes in the car lighter and waits for it. “I need one, too. How about your pal? She’s quiet. She needs a smoke, maybe?”
Wolfstein holds up a cigarette. “Rena?”
Rena shakes her head. “Maybe I should get her a necklace. Just a little something.”
Wolfstein hands Dennis a cigarette and pops one between her lips, keeping it there until Dennis gives her the stubby lighter. She lights hers, the cherry sticking to the coils, and then reaches into the front and lights Dennis’s for him. He’s grinning as he draws in on the cigarette, like this is the sexiest thing he’s ever experienced. Soon, the car is full of smoke.
Rena zooms down her window.
“You were in Monroe; you know what the hubbub was there?” Dennis asks. “I heard a lot of sirens, caught snippets on my radio. Something about a bus.”
“No idea,” Wolfstein says.
“Well, what’s in Brooklyn, you don’t mind me asking?”
“Rena’s from there.”
“One’s from the Bronx, one’s from Brooklyn, so what’re you doing up in the sticks?”
“We’re having an affair, me and Rena here. Running around behind her husband’s back. Had to get an out-of-the-way motel.” Wolfstein’s straight-faced.
Dennis’s eyes are slits in the rearview mirror. He draws in deep on his cigarette. His body language changes, shoulders slumped, hands tighter on the wheel. “You’re having fun with me.”
Wolfstein reaches out and takes Rena’s hand. It’s cold. What she’s said hasn’t even registered on Rena’s face. “Nope, sweetie,” she says. “We’re lovers, and we just rampaged that shitty little motel room.”
“You two are ‘lovers,’ huh?” Dennis says, his eyes darting between them in the mirror, studying their expressions for proof it’s a joke. “What a word.”
“We sure are. Right, Rena?”
Rena’s lost in thought, not even paying attention. “What? Sure. Right.”
Dennis blows a line of smoke at the mirror. “Describe it to me. What happened back in that room.”
“You want a play-by-play?” Wolfstein asks, smiling. She exhales her own cloud of smoke over Dennis’s shoulder, and it dissipates in a puff against the windshield.
Rena coughs, shoos smoke away from her face, seems to shake into awareness. “What are we talking about? Where are we?”
“We’re still on the Thruway south,” Wolfstein explains. “Good old Dennis here wants us to talk about our time at the James Motel.” She winks.
Dennis’s face gets flush. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean no disrespect. I just got the feeling you were having fun with me.”
“I don’t understand,” Rena says, obviously oblivious, her mind full of Lucia. “What’s going on?”
“You two are having a little love affair, huh?”
“What?” Rena seems confused, as if Dennis is talking in a language she doesn’t quite understand.
Wolfstein reaches over the bag and elbows her in the arm. “We’re in love. Really in the thick of it. Don’t tell her husband, okay?”
“It’s true,” Rena says.
“Hot and heavy, that’s what I told him.”
“Good for you,” Dennis says. “God bless. To each his own. I’m happy for anybody who has passion in their lives, cheating or no. Woman like you, I bet your old man’s good for nothing. Chased you away.”
“Something like that,” Rena says. And, after a pause, her eyes drift to Wolfstein and she continues: “When she touches me, I feel alive in a way I haven’t in a long time.”
Wolfstein looks at Rena and can’t tell if what she’s saying is genuine or if she’s suddenly playing along, too. She realizes, she guesses, that sometimes people say something they don’t think they really mean but realize they actually do mean while in the act of saying it. Maybe her hands on Rena mattered. Rena, after all, hadn’t been touched by loving hands in a long-ass time.
“That’s lovely,” Dennis says, tearing up. “Just lovely. I wish someone felt that way about me. You know, I can attest to the power of her touch. That little massage she gave me—wow. I felt electric. You were okay with that, right? I’m sorry if I was out of line.”
“You were fine,” Wolfstein says. “Rena’s not the jealous type.”
“I wish someone felt that way about me,” he says again, and now he’s crying harder, choking on it, trying to hold back but finally letting it come. He jerks the car over to the shoulder, jolting Wolfstein and Rena around in the back. He stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray and tries to compose himself. “Fucking stupidhead, that’s all I am.”
Wolfstein’s cigarette had almost been knocked from her hand, but she’s still holding onto it, and somehow the tip is two inches of trembling ash. “Don’t take it so hard, sweetie.”
“Matzo, that’s what my backbone’s made of.”
Rena’s sitting up straight, looking at the phone in her palm. “Can we get moving, please? I need to get to Lucia.”
Dennis settles down a little, paws at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Who’s this Lucia?”
“Her granddaughter,” Wolfstein explains.
“You should keep a kid out of whatever mess you’re making.” A beat. “Forget it. Who am I to talk? I’m the king of messes. I’m sorry. Forgive me. You don’t need this out of a driver.”
He puts the car in drive, and they roll back into the flow of traffic. Wolfstein smokes out the window, squishing the filter against the glass when she’s done and letting it drop to the whooshing blacktop, a smudge of ashes left behind.
In the city, they hit congestion. Dennis has clammed up. It’s just the radio, the heavy sound of the brakes, the Town Car’s chassis squeaking occasionally, horns and sirens outside. They cross the Willis Avenue Bridge and get on the FDR. After that, it’s the Brooklyn Bridge, where an ambulance missing its back doors almost stalls out in front of them. The bridge feels like a cage.
Truth is, it’s been a long time, a very long time, since Wolfstein’s gone into Brooklyn, let alone driven into it. Could be it’s been more than thirty years. And, even then, was by subway. She had a friend, Nellie, who lived in Greenpoint back then. And she briefly dated a guy, Benny O’Quinn, who bartended in Red Hook and had tattoos on the backs of his hands that read red meat and cold beer. That was a brief fling. Two weeks of tequila nights and late breakfasts at greasy spoons.
It sometimes hurts to think of herself as young, as flitting around with so much dark, beautiful energy, like a bird hitting windows. Her hands were young, her eyes, her legs (this pain’s getting worse), her nails, her hair, everything younger. In the place those memories live, she sometimes sees flashes of faces she no longer has names for. She often wonders what’s real and if there are places where dreams have mixed with memories, or even overtaken memories, to make something that never happened seem like it did. Like Hector Cruz from her third movie. He doesn’t even seem like he could’ve been. They’d balled on a Greyhound bus, as in a dream.
Where they’re going, Wolfstein’s never been. Dyker Heights. They’re on the BQE and then the Gowanus and then the Belt Parkway, the traffic moving tidily now. She’s looking out at billboards and brick buildings, covered in graffiti. She’s looking into open windows. She’s looking out at the water, the Narrows, the Statue of Liberty. She thinks of that Lou Reed song, “Dirty Blvd”: “Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I’ll piss on ’em. That’s what the Statue of Bigotry says.” She’d met Lou once. He was wearing sunglasses and had a mullet. He was detached, not very friendly. He said he’d seen her movies. He called her the Actress, real sn
ide, like she wasn’t an actress at all.
They get off the Belt at Thirteenth Avenue.
Rena’s bopping around in her seat now, checking the phone. Wolfstein’s still hung up on what Rena said about feeling alive at her touch. Dennis has flung one arm over the back of the passenger seat. He’s singing under his breath.
Wolfstein reaches into her bag on the sly and plucks out three hundred bucks. She reaches into the front seat, the bills folded in her hand, and she places them gently on top of the ashtray, hoping Dennis won’t comment.
But he does. “What’s that? It’s too much.”
“You went above and beyond,” she says.
“I don’t need no charity.”
“It’s not charity.”
Dennis lets out a sigh.
“Plus, it could be I’m interested in buying more of your time,” Wolfstein explains.
“Interested how?” Dennis asks.
“We run into the place we’re going, you keep the car running.”
They’re driving up Thirteenth Avenue, Dennis constantly braking behind a city bus, groaning, double-parked cars everywhere, pedestrians dashing from sidewalk to sidewalk between cars. Rena’s saying the address from Lucia out loud over and over, as if she’ll lose it if she doesn’t.
“I’ll wait for you, sure,” Dennis responds after a lag.
“Thanks. You’re a pal.” Wolfstein puts her hands on his shoulders again, but he bristles at her touch this time.
A couple of blocks later, Dennis pulls to a stop at the curb in front of a Laundromat with blinds lowered in the window to keep out the sun and a weathered, hand-painted blue sign that reads WASH DRY FOLD. He’s parked at a hydrant with his blinkers on.
Rena says the address one last time.
“This is the place,” Dennis announces.
No way Wolfstein’s leaving her bag in the car. It was a mistake to leave it with Rena back there in the room even for a few minutes, testing fate. She’s not a hundred percent on Dennis sticking around. She gets out, hauling the bag with her, the door screeching open, and Rena follows fast on her heels.
A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself Page 28