Pink Slip

by Rita Ciresi

  Auntie Beppina probably wouldn’t even get it. But why test her?

  For years Auntie Beppina had gotten on my nerves; she reminded me too much of my own mother. But I knew Dodie had a soft spot for her. Watching her sob in the cemetery, I had gotten a glimpse of how hard her life was. She was surrounded by men who dumped on her, and the only son who really loved her had taken himself far, far away.

  The doorman didn’t even know Dodie was dead. He lit another Virginia Slim and said, “Cute little man, fourth floor? No way.”

  I warned him about Auntie Beppina. I said my aunt was coming, she would arrive in a cab, she wouldn’t know what to pay the taxi driver, she would probably be all confused, could he help if she needed it? The doorman shrugged. I gave him a five. He said yes. Then I gave him another five and asked him if he’d help us bring a few bags downstairs later.

  “How I know you’re his cousin?” he asked, angling for another bill.

  “You’ve seen me before.”

  “No. Never.”

  “Yes, you have. I’ve been introduced to you. I know your name. Your name is Luis.”

  “Your name is what?”

  I pulled out my driver’s license, which proved I shared Dodie’s last name. For this, Luis let me up as far as Dodie’s door. I pulled out the keys, which were sent home to Auntie Beppina along with Dodie’s bagged body. “Look, here are the keys,” I told Luis, and when he started making noises about the super—“superno like this”—I described the entire interior of the apartment to Luis before I opened the door and let him peer inside to verify my account of the decor. Then I told him to please leave me alone, I was getting over bronchitis and his Virginia Slims were aggravating my lungs.

  He backed away. I shut the door. My description of Dodie’s apartment, of course, was accurate to the T. For years I had loved Dodie’s place and suffered from rental envy. I wanted the thin, sophisticated blinds—vertical, not horizontal—that hung on the big front window; the bed, covered in white matelassé, pushed against the back wall; the floor-to-ceiling mirror behind it; and the floor—to—ceiling bookcase with the ladder in front. Dodie always had an eye for where to place things: the spare pharmacy lamp on the big blond table, the terra—cotta candlesticks on the fake mantel, and the whimsical basket full of wooden green apples on the glass end table. The chaise longue in the corner came from Roche—Bobois, and the copper pots that hung above the counter where only two people could eat comfortably came from Williams-Sonoma. These last were a gift from George. What gifts George knew how to give to Dodie! But what gift had I offered? I would never know if it had been me who gave Dodie the pneumonia. I didn’t even know how you caught pneumonia. I had bronchitis. But forever I would feel guilty, as if I had handed him a grenade and then backed away. And forever I would love him and hate him for leaving me so abruptly, like the ghost-story boy named Reuben who stepped into the closet and disappeared without a trace.

  The Berber rug squished beneath my feet as I walked across the floor. I turned on the pharmacy lamp and sat next to its warm haze for a moment, sorry I had come early. I could have gone to church to say my prayers. I moved over to the window to open the blinds. As I reached for the cord, a cheerful voice said:

  Somebunny loves you!

  I jumped. My hand still on the cord, I practically pulled the whole sheet of vertical blinds down with me.

  I looked behind me, then down, sure I had located the infamous dildo. But the voice had come from a small stuffed bunny dressed in pale blue overalls who sat on the windowsill. He looked impishly at me, one ear bent toward his playful whiskers. When I reached for him, he repeated:

  Somebunny loves you!

  Oh God, I thought. How creepy. Then, in spite of myself, I laughed. I wondered who—besides George—might have given this loving creature to Dodie. Now I’d never know. No one Dodie had worked with—not a single friend—had attended his funeral. A huge bouquet—which my mother declared must have broke the bank—had come from his office; the card read only, Our deepest regrets. Cowards, I thought. Then I wondered how many of Dodie’s friends even knew—after all, Dodie hadn’t known about George until George’s mother had called.

  Dodie’s bed was made very neatly, with not a single wrinkle on the bedspread and the pillows all fluffed and arranged just right, as if he had made a conscious decision to tidy up before he took the pills. I wondered if he had washed the glass he had used to take his final drink of water.

  Go on, Lise, I heard him say. Go on over and take a look at how clean I left the sink!

  “No,” I said aloud. The word echoed against the ceiling.

  Next to the bed a green light was blinking. Dodie had messages on his answering machine. I walked over. I wasn’t sure if I should play the tape. I stopped and thought about what he would have wanted me to do. I thought about how this differed from what he would have expected me to do. I reached for the switch, pressed REWIND, heard my own coughing on the machine—the hoarse sound of my voice calling Dodie’s name—and then stopped the tape.

  From the second kitchen drawer I pulled out a garbage bag. Into the bathroom first. My first impulse was to pocket the over-the-counter sleeping pills and the Baggie full of marijuana. Then I changed my mind. (I’m going to be a better person now, I kept thinking. I’m going to be better.) Down they went into the toilet, and with one push on the handle they were flushed away. Into the garbage bag went the massage oil and the condoms. The experimental medicine Dodie volunteered to take. Those suggestive—but not really lewd—erotic photography folios. I flipped through them—shamelessly inspecting the men—before I remembered where I was and what I was there for. I tossed them.

  I washed my hands. I kept on washing my hands. I looked in the mirrors. I kept expecting some vision—a picture of Dodie standing behind me. I kept expecting to turn around and see him lying on the bed. I thought I’d hear the tea kettle whistle from the kitchen, or a tray of ice cubes clattering into a bowl. Then he would say, Christ, that funeral was a good joke, wasn’t it? Like something out of The Twilight Zone. But there was nothing but the dull thud of the upstairs tenant’s feet shaking the ceiling. Nothing but my own congested breathing. And no note. He must not have planned it, I thought. But then I remembered him telling me, I would throw myself against the fence. I just want it to hit me like lightning. And he had cashed in his life insurance. He had left it all—all of it, and I was astounded (when his lawyer called the house in Connecticut to tell me) by how much there was of it, the stocks and the mutual funds and the municipal bonds and the treasury notes—half to Auntie Beppina, and half to me.

  After an hour I was pretty sure I’d put everything that would offend Auntie Beppina into one bag. I sealed it and propped it by the door.

  Auntie Beppina arrived around eleven o’clock, carrying a big black leather trunk that I feared dated back to the first and only big trip she’d ever taken in her life: from Trapani to Ellis Island.

  “You should have waited,” she said. “We could have come together.”

  “I told you, I had to meet someone.”

  “Who is this someone?”

  “Just a friend.”

  After years of listening to falsehoods from her own kids, Auntie Beppina had mellowed out and learned how to let things go. She did not pursue the identity of this friend. She put down the trunk and looked around dubiously. “So small,” she said. “How could he have lived in this tiny place?”

  “He had a doorman,” I said. “And no roaches or rats.”

  Auntie Beppina looked puzzled, and I explained that for a boy who came to Manhattan with a scholarship degree from Duke and six thousand dollars in student loans, this was not bad at all. For someone under thirty—not a Kennedy—this was even more than all right. By New York standards, Dodie had made it.

  She looked around the studio again and asked why anyone would want to live like an animal in such a tiny cage. “So many books,” she said. “You two, always with your head in books. Why was your head in
books all the time?”

  “Uncle Gianni couldn’t be bothered coming?” I asked.

  “He came.”

  My stomach felt sick. The last person I wanted to see there was Uncle Gianni. But Auntie Beppina told me he rode the train with her into New York, put her in a cab, then took the train back to New Haven. He would return to New York on the six o’clock train and pick her back up.

  This behavior was so utterly guinea I couldn’t stand it. “Why didn’t he just stay?” I asked.

  “He said, ‘What am I going to do in New York? It’s not baseball season.’ ”

  “He could have gone to Radio City and gawked at the Rockettes. He could have come to help.”

  “Cleaning out is woman’s work.”

  “And what is man’s work?”

  “To pay for the funeral,” Auntie Beppina said, as if this was an admirable feat indeed, for a father to take care of the arrangements.

  Auntie Beppina’s face grew sorrowful again when I told her there was no note. “Nothing for me?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Nor me either. I mean neither. He just didn’t seem to leave anything.”

  Auntie Beppina’s expression brightened when I asked her if she would clean out the refrigerator. She could handle this. She also could scrub down the bathroom and leave the place nice for the next person.

  “Of course, it’s so small, it’ll be hard to rent,” she said. I didn’t tell her the doorman probably was downstairs at that very moment, buttonholing any and all folks who passed by to let them know there was an empty studio upstairs with a street view. By the end of the afternoon he probably could have collected thousands of dollars in bribes from prospective renters, some of whom might even consider killing someone (never mind waiting for someone to die) to muscle their way into such digs.

  I made some coffee and ran down to the corner grocery to get more plastic garbage bags. I sorted through the books to find the ones I wanted to keep and then decided I would keep all of them, although I had no idea how I’d get them out of Manhattan back to Ossining. I wrapped the dishes and bagged the linens—all these were going to the Salvation Army. The clothes were what killed me. I hid behind the closet door as I lifted one of Dodie’s shirts to my face.

  Big mistake.

  The collar was soft and marked with a single strand of his hair. I used the sleeve to wipe away my tears. I hoped my aunt didn’t see. But what if she did? Auntie Beppina was different from my mother. My mother never cried. At my father’s funeral she just stood there with a stubborn look on her face.

  Auntie Beppina caught me. Maybe I even wanted her to.

  “No use,” she said. “No use crying now.”

  I crunched the sleeve of Dodie’s shirt against my cheek. “But I loved him.”

  “No good,” she said. “It wasn’t right. You should never have been so close to him. He even said so.”

  “When?”

  “On the phone once. He said, I got in Lisa’s way. Must have been right after Christmas—”

  I blanched, remembering that gruesome Christmas scene with my family. In the end, I hadn’t left my mother’s house. I had run upstairs and packed my bags and then I let Carol talk me into going back downstairs for dinner. At the table everyone acted as if nothing had happened—and no one mentioned my mysterious man again.

  “There was somebody, wasn’t there?” Auntie Beppina asked. “This man you talked about. This New York man.”

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, what does it matter? We got into a fight.”

  “One fight! You get married, you have plenty of fights.”

  “I don’t want to fight with my husband.”

  “Then I guess you’d better stay a secretary for the rest of your life.”

  “I’m not a secretary!” I told her. “I’m an editor! I manage an entire department!”

  “Madonna,” Auntie Beppina said. “How come your mother never told me that?”

  I bit my lip. Just like Mama, Auntie Beppina seemed to think there were only two kinds of women—working girls (prostitutes, teachers, nurses, secretaries, and librarians) and married ladies (enough said). She seemed to think that because I worked, I wasn’t interested in getting married. For a while, maybe, that had been true. I had liked being on my own. My initial interest in marriage stemmed only from curiosity: I wanted to find out why people did it. I don’t remember when curiosity turned to loneliness and longing and I began entertaining thoughts about how nice it would be to come home and make dinner—together—with someone who would appreciate my smart mouth but also know how to silence it, every now and then, with a kiss.

  In college, the message had been clear: Educated women—Sarah Lawrence women—were supposed to find wifedom (or wife-dumb, as it was spelled back then) a dismal prospect. Also to be scorned was motherhood—which had brought Carol so low she had to down pills just to roll out of bed in the morning, but which also inspired her to tell me, After I squeezed that baby out, I felt like I could do anything. Women with college degrees’ were supposed to focus on creative expression and job satisfaction. Yet how could I buy into this party line when Stop It Some More was going nowhere and the day-to-day workings of Boorman Pharmaceuticals failed to interest or inspire me? I did not see where showing up at eight-thirty every morning in panty hose and pumps and saying yes, ma’am or no, sir to Peggy Schoenbarger or Hook Roberts or Eben Strauss empowered me. Why was being married to such a rule-ridden company any better than being married to someone as grim and repressive as my father?

  For starters, it earned me a paycheck. I liked supporting myself and not having to account for every penny I spent to someone else. But that didn’t stop me from fantasizing about bucking against the authority of Boorman. Why did I want like crazy to waltz into Peggy’s office and report, I’m quitting! I’m eloping with Mr. Strauss! I’m writing a novel—about sexual harassment!

  Pro or con, Ms. Diodetto?

  You don’t get it—it’s a story, not a political tract. It’s about everything we don’t understand in life: love and God and death and war and why people start to cry when they hear music.

  Hmm. Any hot fucking?

  Of course. I write only from personal experience. But I’m having trouble making the lesbian encounters sound authentic—

  Divest yourself of your miniskirt, Ms. Diodetto. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to introduce you to the raptures of Sapphic sex.

  Well—why not? Not for nothing was I the author of Face Crime! and Stop It Some More—I liked living in my head, where anything could happen at any minute. Working for Boorman had taught me I could easily live on a leash if I still had my imagination.

  But if I were married, who would be on the other side of the leash? A man named Ibby. A man who visited his parents twice a month and who flipped his lid if I wore high heels into the city. He would nag me about my all-terrain vehicle (No wife of mine will drive a Jeep!)—the shaky steering and the lack of heat and the lack of space to put in a car seat—until I agreed to give up my Jeep (although for a long time I had wanted to trash the inconvenient thing, having no idea why I ever bought it in the first place). He would take me to the car lot and haggle with the dealer until he got me a good price on a safe and sturdy car. Eat my dust, I’d say as I got behind the wheel and charged off the lot, and he was such a fast driver he would tail me like a cop and pull his Audi into the driveway behind me, blocking me in. Then we would go into the home where once Ibby thought there were too many rooms, and where I now would hurt his feelings by keeping the photo of Dodie and me singing “Bella Ciao” in my top desk drawer, although I would wrap it in purple cloth the way they shrouded the statues in church during Holy Week, because I would be frightened my cousin would step through the glass and show me a version of myself I both feared and longed to recover.…

  Oh Dodie! I thought. If Strauss asked me into his home, wouldn’t I be hiding? If you came back, would you know where
to find me? Would you even think to look in that house, where the doors would be left open on Passover for the coming of Elijah? Would it even occur to you to appear in the rearview mirror of a heavy, sturdy car that—when an eighteen-wheeler passed on the highest bridge in the world—didn’t even shiver in the wind?

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked Auntie Beppina.

  “Certo.”

  On the table at the foot of Dodie’s bed, there was a small black vase. I held it in my hand, rubbing the base back and forth in my palm as if it were a magic lantern. “Do you wish Dodie would come back to you?”

  “Gia è venuto. He’s already come. In my dreams. Dead children visit in dreams.”

  “Dodie wasn’t a child.”

  “He was mine.” Auntie Beppina sighed. “Parents, too, come in dreams. Don’t you dream about your father?”

  “No,” I said, because I couldn’t tell her that the few times I had, my father had his arms around me in a way no father should ever touch his daughter, and I woke up with a start, thinking, Oh God, I’m such a pervert, how can I be such a pervert? The only thing that made me rest easy was my sneaking suspicion that everyone else on the planet was one too.

  Cup of coffee in her hand, Auntie Beppina sat on the chaise longue. “I dream about my mother and my father all the time.”

  “Is it the same dream?” I asked.

  “Most of the time. It isn’t a dream like a story. It’s a dream—well, like a dream. More about a place than something happening. We’re always in the old town. My mother’s in the kitchen in her apron. My father comes home and gives me a kiss on the forehead. There’s dust on his boots. The skin’s split open on his hands. There’s the fountain—with the little trickle of water that dribbled over the stone—and the pink wall of the house, and the stone stairs that felt so warm when you sat on them. Sometimes I see the iron railing, the way it twisted—and the sunlight …” Her voice trailed off “Not like here. It’s always so dark here.”