And it really does scare her to walk back there. She doesn’t like the dark shade and the smell of the damp undergrowth. She doesn’t like the way people leave old dead flowers or, worse, ugly faded plastic ones junked up on the graves. She has had enough horror to deal with like that morning she kept yelling for her mother to get up only to finally give up and head on out to catch the school bus. When she got home and there were policemen there and everything, they asked didn’t she notice her mom wasn’t moving at all and she said that, yeah, she noticed, but it didn’t look any different from any other day for the past five or six or seven years.
Sometimes she tries to imagine her mom’s death, to walk through what happened that night with C.J. right there in the next room, painting her toenails and listening to Nirvana. Her high school art project was a sketch of Kurt Cobain and she played Lithium about a million times while she worked on getting his hands right. Sometimes she wants to give her mom the benefit of the doubt and call it accidental like that one really nice policewoman. That woman kept correcting anyone who said “suicide” like she was trailing behind with a broom, sweeping up the mess they were making. Not suicide. Accidental overdose.
“How about accident waiting to happen?” she had asked the woman, and stared until she looked away. C.J. was a master at the game of chicken and had been for years. She could stare into the worst face or situation and not flinch. The woman was being nice to her and she would have loved to have uncurled her fists and accepted that, but she couldn’t; it had been way too long. The woman wanted to open the exit door so C.J. wouldn’t be trapped and locked in with the great legacy of suicide as all the shrinks and educated cops like to call it. She has thought of that term legacy of suicide so often. Plenty of people outlive it and when they do, they get younger like instantly being given the extra years they might have lost, like passing go and getting two hundred bucks. The thought of Monopoly makes her think of that kid Abby who is always hanging out at Pine Haven. She told how her dog ate the race car, and when it came out the other end, her dad boiled it and put it back in the box. Her dad is that old friend of Joanna’s who once hit on C.J. and is married to a total bitch who C.J. is convinced tried to kill the kid’s dog. Sam Lowe told her all about it, this woman in a tight miniskirt dragging in a dog and demanding that he put it to sleep on the spot. She said she would pay what was owed plus a huge tip. “Bless her heart,” she said, and patted the dog’s head. “She went completely mad and they say will likely do it again.” He took the money and when she turned to leave—maybe she didn’t know she could have demanded to watch—he asked if she wanted her cremated for pickup, but she said that would be way too painful. “It’s better this way,” she said. “The sooner the better, okay?”
He assured her that he would do it as soon as she left and then he sat there and kept putting it off until the end of the day when the dog had fallen asleep with her little pointed nose wedged up beside his foot. “There was nothing wrong with her,” he said. “She’s a great little dog so I took her home. What’s one more?” He had already told her how he had grown up with many dogs—that his dad was known for taking in strays and naming them after pirates. “My dad is known as a dog-collecting weirdo who lived in a trailer in what became a pricey subdivision,” Sam said. “His other claim to fame is being the son of a man who blew his head off when he was only like forty years old or something. Nice, huh?”
It was that story that had gotten C.J.’s interest and they have been friends ever since. She told him all about her own mother and how all she heard at school and from the foster parents who stepped in her senior year of high school was about her goddamned legacy like she might have been in line for the fucking throne or something. Sam said that when his dad got beyond the age of the suicide, it was kind of like he was born again. “Not religious stuff,” he said. “I mean it was like he seemed younger and was willing to do things he hadn’t ever done. Took my mom on a trip out west, encouraged her to go back to school. Finally built a real house at the beach like he’d always dreamed of doing.”
C.J. had never even thought of that before, how wonderful it would feel to get past the age her mother was—only thirty-six—and in a little over ten years, she would be there. Kurt would be in junior high and it would feel like a whole new life. It could be a whole brand-new life. When she said this to Sam, he turned and hugged her, squeezing so tight she could feel his heart beating, smell the detergent of his clean shirt. She knows that Sam really does like her and he likes Kurt, too, but he seems so young to her. That’s the difference in being a kid with a Mom and Dad who give a shit. It keeps a person younger. He went to college and always knew he would. Now he hopes to go to vet school in another year or so after he takes a few courses and gets his test scores up. He hopes all kinds of things and starts lots of sentences that way. I hope I’m right about this little dog. I hope Kurt will someday know how hard you work and how much you love him. I hope you’ll let me help you get that muffler fixed or at least go to a friend of mine to look at it. I hope we will always be good friends. She would like to tell him that she hopes all of that, too. She hopes for some part of herself to be everything he could ever hope to find in a woman. You deserve that, she wants to tell him. You deserve every good thing this life can give you.
And now, even though she worries about giving him the wrong idea, she has a flyer that she plans to take out to him tomorrow, maybe while she’s driving Rachel Silverman around. It’s a picture of Abby’s dog, Dollbaby, who without a doubt looks just like the one he rescued, and no doubt about it, the woman Sam described sounds a whole lot like Abby’s bitch of a mom.
This is the kind of thing C.J. keeps in her journal in the safe. She has written how she plans to resurrect Dollbaby and leave her right out there on the front porch of their house. Of course she also wrote about that time the weird magician dad came on to her after a party she worked, complimenting her tattoos and wanting her to get into his truck. He’s not bad-looking, really, for an old guy—when he’s not drunk that is—but because C.J. was used to seeing his kid come and go, it changed the whole picture so she couldn’t think of him as just another of those jerks who can’t keep it zipped. Instead he was somebody’s dad who couldn’t keep it zipped. But because of the way Joanna obviously feels about him, C.J. has decided to cut the guy some slack and give him a break; blame it on alcohol as so many people do. Blame it on being married to a bitch, as so many people do. He’s certainly not who Joanna thinks he is or that’s C.J.’s opinion and she thinks Joanna can do a whole lot better and hopes that she will. Occasionally, when she has allowed herself to dream and imagine a secure life with someone like Mr. Jump-Start the Heart, she has immediately thought about how she could maybe introduce Joanna to somebody really cool who is smart and deserving of her. She likes to imagine that her life will be secure and happy, and that she will be someone Kurt is proud of, that he will be a boy like Sadie’s son, happy and successful in his own life but never for a minute forgetting about her.
The phone rings and she picks up to a distant buzzing and finally, on her third hello, he says, Eight p.m. at Esther Cohen’s place. He says, And you better not be late this time, and hangs up. She dreads the walk, but there’s no other way. Kurt is in his bouncy chair and grins when she looks his way. Kurt has his father’s eyes and maybe that is why she has such a hard time saying no these days. She goes in the bathroom and jots a little note in her journal: Meeting at 8 p.m. It sounds like he’s mad, but a lot of nights have started out this way only to end with him being really sweet and offering something extra for Kurt. There’s so much she wants Kurt to have and maybe it’s time to ask, a savings account or something. Kurt will need a lot of things in this life. He will need an education and the right clothes, a good dog and summer camp. Someday he will need a car.
Even if he ever decides that he doesn’t want her anymore, he has to help Kurt. All of this is about Kurt, though there is a part of her that still wishes for something more. It’s hard
not to wish for just a little bit more.
Rachel
LUNCH IS NOT SOMETHING Rachel ever in her life really looked forward to or participated in. As a working woman, she almost always worked straight through or used the time in her office to catch a cat nap. There were early years when she used that lovely hour of time to stroll Charles Street, all alone, window shopping. House things. Baby things. Clothes she imagined wearing and art she imagined on the wall. And of course since everyone knew she wasn’t someone who invested huge amounts of time in lunch unless there was a meeting of some sort she had to attend, then she was missing in action. This made it especially easy after she had met Joe and began meeting him in the middle of the day.
Business. Over lunch. She never liked mixing any kind of business with anything social. She is someone who likes firm boundaries. She has always wanted to be a voice in her community and someone actively participating, but what she never was able to tolerate was all the communication that went into it: who is doing what when. Where are you? What are you going to eat? What are you going to wear? Humans who get themselves all tangled up in that kind of thing must get something out of it, but she never did and so to get out on a city street all by herself where no one knew her felt wonderful. She feels the same way out in the cemetery talking to the dead. Just her and the long dead and the birds and the trees. And now C.J., of course, who scared the holy shit out of her, but she’s harmless, a good kid for sure. A sad good kid, all pierced and dyed and tattooed like somebody from the carnival, who will help her go where she needs to go.
Lately, Rachel finds herself looking forward to going to lunch. The food is pretty good and they serve the big meal in the middle of the day. Dinner—or supper as so many of them call it—is at five thirty. Who in the hell wants dinner at five thirty? You don’t have to be Einstein to figure out how a place like this works; a later dinner would require a later work shift for those in the kitchen and so on. It’s a business. Like anything else in the world, old age has become a booming business and—like any other endeavor—there are some who put their hearts in it and do a good job and there are those who need to be fired. Rachel is someone who came in reading the fine print on everything and asking enough questions and filing enough complaints that they would know she is someone not to cross—ever. So she has completely readjusted her schedule, eating her big meal in the middle of the day, which seems a small thing if you know your laundry is taken care of and the food prepared well and someone is keeping the place clean and scrubbed. At first she would come and get her food and take it with her, but now that she is used to being with Sadie and Toby, she just stays and eats right there with them.
The people at Pine Haven know that she is interested in a low-fat healthy diet—as they all should be!—and it has taken her weeks, if at all, to convince Sadie and Toby that frying a vegetable defeats the purpose of eating a vegetable. She orders unsweetened tea, but it almost always appears at her place as something that makes her body shake with the syrupy sweetness. There will be a whole new form of diabetes attributed to just that—gritty and grainy to the taste. Pure sugar. It’s a wonder that they don’t all weigh even more than they do especially with the lack of exercise.
When she asked what on earth the deal is, Sadie explained tea was just always sweet and then somebody, probably a doctor or somebody, said if people were tired of looking huge and dropping dead of heart attacks and strokes, they might think of laying off the sugar and all the lard intake. “Then people began to ask for unsweetened tea,” Sadie explained. “For as long as I can remember there was just tea and then unsweetened tea. If you asked for tea, it was sweet. I don’t know when all this fuss over sweet tea started. Now people say it all the time.”
“It’s quaint,” Marge Walker said. “People from the outside associate that with our homeland here in the South and I like it that way. Who here likes sweet tea?” she asked, and practically everyone raised a hand.
“I like a Long Island Iced Tea,” Stanley said. “That’s a northern drink. And, of course, tea is from China and I am part Chinese.”
“What part?” Marge asked, and everyone immediately looked away for fear of what might happen so she immediately added, “You’re about as Chinese as she is,” and she pointed over at Lottie who was working her tongue in and out of her mouth and shredding a paper towel.
“I am Chinese. I’m a terrible driver and I abused my children. I made them study all the time and called them bad names.”
“You’re a bigot,” Rachel said. It was one of those days when she could not put up with his ridiculous comments for one more second and didn’t even care what might come back to her. “You’re a racist idiot.”
“Speaking of bad names,” he said.
“Kindness,” Sadie said. “I believe in kindness. Be ye kind one to another,” and everyone got quiet as they usually do when Sadie speaks. The only one to continue was Stanley Stone who asked Rachel if she would like to come to his room for Saki and origami and she had to bite her tongue and sit on her hands so she wouldn’t try to break his neck.
Now Rachel stops by Sadie’s room, but Sadie is napping. Rachel almost wakes her but then changes her mind. For several days now, Sadie has been skipping lunch, taking long naps after a busy morning so that she is able to rally again late in the afternoon. The last time she came to the table, she was wearing her pajamas under a big sweater, which was not like her at all. She has also begun to talk to people who aren’t there, pausing to answer the invisible switchboard off to the side of her bed that she works to plug and unplug saying, Hello? Hello? Toby has seen this, too, but neither of them mentioned it for a while. It doesn’t happen very often and when it does, it doesn’t last more than a few minutes. Sadie will shake her head, laugh, and then be back as clear as a bell. Toby said she saw no reason to tell anyone about it, that she herself was very open to all the ways a person might communicate spiritually. “Who am I to say that Sadie doesn’t really have somebody on the line?” Toby asked, and Rachel nodded her agreement. Now she stands and watches Sadie asleep with what looks like an old grocery list in her hand and Harley purring at her feet. He stares at Rachel with big green eyes, ready to bolt if she raises her hand the way most do when they see him so she just eases back out with a whispered promise to come back a little later.
“DO YOU THINK anyone here likes potatoes?” Rachel asks when seated, and looks at her little daily menu, picks up the pencil to mark what she wants. “I see potato salad and baked potato and French fries. I see sweet potato pie.”
“Must you always be so critical?” Marge asks. She says that she is offended by the way Rachel criticizes the food and therefore the whole South and all the southerners in it and that she bets there are plenty of Jewish Yankee foods that they could all make fun of.
“Maybe,” Rachel says. “In fact, I am sure you could. However, here’s the difference. You don’t hear me sitting around and talking about it all the time or plastering it on the front of every local-yokel rag and filling up the menu with one choice. Gefilte fish, gefilte fish. Gefilte fish salad and gefilte fish fried. My my, wouldn’t I sho love me some gefilte fish.” She knows she is being mean even as she does it and yet she can’t help herself. Sadie’s absence almost always affects her this way, taking away her reason and desire to strike a more moderate tone.
“Let’s be prejudiced against unkind people,” Sadie had said when the conversation turned to stereotypes and got Toby so upset. “Let’s be prejudiced against those who act ugly.”
“The gefilte, now there’s a monster of a fish,” Stanley said. “I caught me a gefilte one time. Big-ass fish long as my leg, fought it for hours there on the coast of Israel.”
Even Rachel has to laugh at that and it helps to swallow back the discomfort she has felt since leaving the cemetery. The two of them hold eye contact for a second before he continues with his little rant. It’s not often you encounter such brazen and boisterous stupidity. And of course she has learned that anytime she
makes eye contact with him and seems to have a moment of understanding, it flips him out into the most absurd place, like a kid determined to shock and steal the show. The behavior is unacceptable as hell. She watches him, waiting to see what will come next.
“At the state fair,” he tells, “they had fried sweet tea and fried Coca-Cola and fried beer, which required a current ID.”
“In case no one knew you were legal, right?” Toby asks, and the whole table laughs. Toby can almost always make that happen. What a gift. Just yesterday she told how that child from next door said her poor puppy once ate a monopoly piece and her Daddy boiled it clean once it came out the other end. Toby said it had a get out of tail free card. “Get it? Do you get it?” Toby asked, and laughed so hard she had to excuse herself to go to the ladies room. It made Rachel think of that movie, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which she hadn’t thought of in years, the part where the Danny DeVito character keeps putting a hotel in his mouth. Nineteen seventy-five. That was one of their movies there at a little theater in Arlington. Godfather, Exorcist, Jaws, Taxi Driver. Not a very romantic backdrop but lots of moments that made her jump and lean in to hide her face against Joe’s shoulder, his big warm hand on the back of her head pulling her close.
“Hey, cat got your tongue? Dreaming of gefilte fish?” Stanley is tapping his fork against her plate. He stares at her in a way that makes her uncomfortable, like he can read her thoughts. The T-shirt under his rumpled half-unbuttoned dress shirt says ROYAL RUMBLE and has a picture of one of those ugly wrestlers.
“Hey, I’ve got a question for you, Stanley,” Toby says. “Did you ever know somebody named Art Silverman?” Toby looks at Rachel and shrugs a what have you got to lose look.
Life After Life Page 22