In Case We're Separated

by Alice Mattison

“I know,” I said. The dress looked good.

  “Can I walk in it?” she asked.

  “You don’t need to walk in it.”

  “I walk in everything.” It had a slit up one side, so she could walk in it, she demonstrated, squashing me against the mirror as she took an exaggerated long stride across the dressing room. I put my arms around her and held tight, wondering if it would be harder to see her alone once she was married, though she and Bob already lived together and I seemed to be seeing her now. I’d never been married, and she’d been divorced for years and years.

  Ruth paid for the dress and said she was going back to her office—she was a magazine editor—though it was past six. As we were standing in the street outside the store, about to go in separate directions, she started to cry. I put my hands on her shoulders. “What?” I said.

  “I don’t like the dress,” said Ruth.

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “No.” Then she said, “Let’s rent a car and drive to California.”

  “You’d want to take Bob along.”

  “I don’t need him,” said Ruth. She was joking but tears were sliding down her face. I patted her arms and let her go.

  “And I don’t need Mom and Dad showing up,” she said. In their late eighties, our parents still lived independently and could fly up from Florida for a wedding. For years in my difficult twenties and thirties I didn’t talk to them, as I made my way in and out of emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, and day programs. When I let them call me again I had had a long enough vacation, and their peculiarities bothered me less than they bothered Ruth, who’d been dealing with them all along. Our parents seemed sweet and frail to me, passive-aggressive and exhaustingly anxious to her.

  “I’m late,” I said. The man I loved was named Brian, and we were meeting downtown. Though Brian and I ate dinner and performed ordinary sex as well, we called our evenings oral-sex dates because I loved to be licked. Some guys will, some won’t, but he loved it, too, and his wife didn’t. All I could think of was my mouth by the time I saw him, my mouth and his mouth. We met at a little restaurant on Second Avenue, ate paella with mussels and clams—which seemed like a rehearsal—then took a taxi to my place on the Lower East Side. I told people I lived in the building where my grandparents lived when they came to America, though I had no idea where they lived.

  It was fall, cold out, and Brian and I were chilled. We hurried into bed, dislodging my cat, and pressed our hands together, then ran them up and down each other’s legs and arms and buttocks and back, swiftly and roughly, to get warm. Brian not only liked licking, he liked fat women, and I was one; his wife had been fat but had lost weight. Once we were warm and laughing we got to the business of mouths.

  “My sister’s getting married on Sunday,” I said sometime later.

  “And you’re upset that you can’t invite me,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m looking forward to seeing family. It’ll be easier, not having to look after a date.”

  “That’s healthy of you.”

  “I’m healthy.” I thought for a while and said, “But ordinarily you’d be right.”

  “About what?”

  “Women who date married men hate it that they can’t take them places,” I said. “You knew right away because you’ve had quite a bit of experience with single women.”

  “Is that a disqualification?” he said.

  “No,” I said. We’d been dating for a year and I had a pretty good idea of his history. I thought for a long time, and something kept me from just moving on to another topic. It was something about the way he’d said, “Is that a disqualification?” What it meant was fine, but not the way he said it. It was weary, as if he’d known something for a while that I resisted knowing. I said, “But if you’ve done it so many times, why did you stop? What happened to them? Why aren’t you in bed with one of them right this minute?”

  “Sometimes they ended it, sometimes I did,” he said. “Isn’t that how it’s been for you?” He was quiet for a moment. “Sometimes it’s time to behave for a while.”

  I thought about what behaving might mean for him. “I see,” I said, and touched him again, and he responded.

  Next morning when I arrived at the office, a former Chinese take-out place that always smelled of cooking oil, Georgiana—a light-skinned black woman with formidable multitudes of braids—was listening to one of the employees, Jerry, a Vietnam vet. “So I says to him,” Jerry was saying, “because he can’t seem to hear me, Pete, you wearing your hearing aids? And he says, What? And I go, Your hearing aids, and he goes, What? and I go HEARING AIDS and he still doesn’t get it, so I say, The things . . . you use . . . to help . . . you hear. And he says, Oh, my hearing aids, sure, I’m wearing ’em.”

  Georgiana shook her head and we laughed, and then Mrs. Cohen’s daughter phoned, just as I was thinking what a fine, friendly little project we ran. As we spoke I looked at a map of downtown Manhattan over Georgiana’s desk. We put pushpins where we had clients. Each worker was supposed to have a different color pushpin, but there were more employees than colors, and Georgiana didn’t bother to keep the map up-to-date. Still, it looked impressive, and I liked staring at it while I talked on the phone. At first I didn’t mind talking to this daughter, who seemed to find her mother dear if exasperating. We laughed together; then she got more specific. Mrs. Cohen had injected herself with insulin for years, until her daughter had found a syringe on the floor and called in visiting nurses. But for some reason, Medicare had stopped paying for the nurses, and the daughter was glad, because she wanted her mother to move into assisted living. Once the nurses were canceled, the mother agreed to go, but Bernadette was spoiling the plan by reeducating Mrs. Cohen about injections—or doing the injecting herself.

  “We’re talking about needles,” said the daughter, sounding like my sister. “We’re talking about practicing medicine without a license.”

  “Well . . .” I said.

  “I am a physician,” said the daughter. She’d chosen the right moment to say that, like a pilot choosing the right moment to push a button and bomb a picturesque village out of existence.

  “I’ll talk to Bernadette,” I said.

  “Do more than talk,” she said. “I’m sorry. I know this Bernadette person means well.”

  I was about to try to reach Bernie when the phone rang again, and it was Ruth. “I took back the dress,” she said.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “It was too appropriate,” she said. “If I have to get married with a rabbi and all my relatives, at least I want to look inappropriate.”

  I wrote “Bernadette” on a pad in front of me, and underlined it twice. I said, “It wasn’t white with a veil.”

  “Still. But you’re right—Bob says I’m crazy.”

  “And didn’t you tell me this is an extremely casual rabbi?” I said.

  “Yes. A woman.” Ruth and I are Jewish—and so is Bob—but you’d never know it from anything we do, although I suppose you’d know it from what we think. Ruth’s daughter had found this rabbi. “I don’t dress up,” said Ruth. “I don’t stand up before clergy.”

  “You could change,” I said, becoming annoyed. I needed to call Bernie. “You’ve never been a complete mess, so you’ve never had to change. It would do you good to change, for once. I’ve changed so many times.”

  “I wouldn’t change in that direction,” said Ruth.

  Then I noticed Bernadette herself, standing next to the mailboxes near the front door. Bernie was a tall, grandly proportioned woman who weighed a lot but looked great. She was glancing at some papers with her coat on. “I have to hang up,” I said to Ruth. I put down the receiver and chased Bernie.

  “Hey, Lilly,” she greeted me.

  “You practicing medicine without a license?” I said.

  “Cohen’s daughter?”

  “Cohen’s doctor daughter.”

  “Nobody knows more than I do about injections,” Berni
e said. She got taller as we stood there.

  We took the bus to Mrs. Cohen’s apartment. Taking up most of the aisle, Bernie talked loudly about her kids. “I wasn’t the best mother,” she said, “but I wasn’t the worst. We had TV rules. We had sugar rules.”

  When Mrs. Cohen came to the door, she looked better than some. She had white hair twisted on top of her head, more like my dead grandmother’s than my mother’s bleached blond waves. Mrs. Cohen’s bun was not straight, but it was firmly hairpinned, and her eyes were dark and sharp. She wore a black sweatshirt with dandruff on it. Bernie beamed down at her. “I brought my boss,” she said.

  “You don’t look like a boss,” said Mrs. Cohen. “You look like my daughter.”

  “I understand your daughter is a doctor,” I said loudly and slowly, but Mrs. Cohen could hear.

  “A psychiatrist,” she said. Over the years I’ve had a few good encounters with psychiatrists, but enough bad ones that I’d have preferred her daughter to be a dermatologist. Then she asked, “Do you pay a decent wage?”

  “An old leftie?” I said.

  “I never joined the Party,” said Mrs. Cohen.

  “She tells me about those times,” Bernie said. “She went to jail.”

  The apartment was not too messy, except for a frying pan on the sofa. “So, honey, how’s your sugar?” said Bernie.

  Mrs. Cohen glanced at me, and I saw that she was prepared to lie about what they’d been up to, but Bernie was too proud. She showed me how she’d arranged the paraphernalia of diabetes—the little device to prick Mrs. Cohen’s finger, the glucometer, the book in which to record blood sugar readings, then the insulin in its labeled jars in the refrigerator, and the syringes. “The used ones we put in here,” said Bernie, patting a coffee can. She’d been coming twice a day, every day, though she was paid to come only once and not on weekends. They showed me their routine. Bernie handed Mrs. Cohen each thing she needed. “We take it nice and slow,” she said.

  Their intent faces—old and young, white and black—were as beautiful in an even better way than the pastries at the bus stop. I didn’t know what to say. “How long have you lived here, Mrs. Cohen?” I asked.

  “My daughter thinks I don’t take baths,” she said. I had noticed a whiff of not-quite-enough-baths.

  “We can do baths,” said Bernie.

  On our way out of the building, I said to my employee, “You’re not being paid for most of this. What do you get out of it?”

  “You need to ask?” Bernie said, and in truth I didn’t. “Mrs. Cohen says I’m right,” she said. “She says the government takes people’s kids for no reason, and black people don’t get a fair deal. She tells me that every day. That’s what I get.”

  “I see what you mean,” I said.

  “She really was a Communist,” said Bernie. “She wouldn’t tell you, because you’re the boss.”

  We separated outside. Probably Bernadette would walk around the block, go back inside, and have additional conspiracies with Mrs. Cohen, and I didn’t care. It was a warm day and the office wasn’t far, so I decided to walk, but first I went into a coffee shop and ordered a cappuccino, and while I drank it, an impulse made me call Brian at work, something I hardly ever did. I felt like talking about my life—about Ruth’s exasperating behavior over the wedding dress, about Mrs. Cohen and her daughter and Bernie. But of course he was preoccupied at work, and I became self-conscious. After barely mentioning Bernie and Mrs. Cohen, and leaving Ruth out, I said what I suppose I had called to say: “Was there something else you wanted to say last night?”

  He sighed. “No,” he said. Long pause. Then, “Not now. But maybe in a couple of weeks, yes.”

  “I get it,” I said, and hung up. I thought, But I love him! By which I meant, I think, not just that I could talk to him as well as fuck him, and not, on the other hand, that I was prepared to nurse him through cancer or whatever his wife might have agreed to undertake as part of her marriage vows. I meant that for me, losing him would be a disaster. I wished I hadn’t called, but what can you do? I finished my cappuccino and walked back to the office. On the way I came to a jewelry store, and I bought a ruby pendant on a thick silver chain. When you’ve had as much training in low times as I have, you know when to buy something quickly. I was wearing a black V-necked sweater and the pendant hung just above my breasts, looking lovely on my skin. The ruby was mounted in silver with an elaborate, old-fashioned design. I didn’t wear the necklace out of the store. I clutched the silver-and-ruby pendant in my hand, and twisted the cord around my fingers. I needed something in my hand.

  “I believe in change,” I said to Bernie the next day. “I above all people believe in change. I’m different from the way I was, you’re different from the way you were. I’m not sure Mrs. Cohen can become different. Can become better.”

  “You white folks,” Bernie said. “You lock away your grandmas. I wouldn’t lock my grandma away.”

  “The assisted living place is not a prison,” I said.

  “What’s the worst that can happen?” said Bernie. “She’ll die? She’s gonna die.”

  “I know.”

  Ruth called me late that night. “I had a fight with Mom on the phone,” she said. “She wants me to go back and buy the dress again. Could you tell her there was something wrong with it?”

  “You’re sixty years old,” I said. “What do you care what Mom thinks?”

  “Fifty-nine,” she said. “I’m going to wear woolen pants and a silk jacket. Silk is dressy. I forgot I had it.”

  “What color?” I asked.

  “Black.”

  “Well, you didn’t want to be appropriate. Just don’t ask me to explain it to Mom.”

  “Are you okay?” she said then. I’d been crying just before she called.

  “Brian’s getting ready to dump me,” I said.

  “Oh, Lilly,” she said. “Oh, Lilly, honey.”

  “Well, right,” I said. Then I brought her up-to-date on Mrs. Cohen.

  “What will you do?” she said. “You’ll have to fire Bernie. At least reassign her.”

  “I would never fire Bernie!” I said. “I thought you didn’t believe in appropriate. I thought you didn’t believe in respectable.”

  “Lilly, you don’t need this daughter as your enemy.”

  “You think it’s okay to be outrageous,” I said, “but only if nobody’s heart gets broken.”

  I didn’t fire Bernie, or reassign her. I told her to visit Mrs. Cohen only when she was being paid for it and to stay away from the diabetes equipment.

  “But she’ll make a mistake,” said Bernie.

  “I thought you taught her so well she won’t make a mistake.”

  “She’s an old lady!” Bernie shouted. We were standing near the mailboxes, and people were listening. I didn’t argue. Two weeks after Ruth’s wedding, Mrs. Cohen’s daughter found Bernie injecting her mother, and eventually she did close us down—or, something closed us down—but it took a long time. Possibly we kept going longer than we would have, because the bad publicity attracted some donations. And at around the same time, Brian did regretfully hint at some difficulties his wife was going through, which required his more scrupulous presence.

  The night before the wedding, I took my parents out to dinner. They were tired from the flight, a little trembly. They seemed smaller than when I’d seen them last. My mother said I definitely should have gotten a haircut for the wedding, while my father said he hoped I wasn’t going to wear high heels, in which I could tear a ligament and be laid up for weeks if not months. I couldn’t tell them about Brian, but I told the story of Mrs. Cohen and Bernie. My father, to my surprise, thought I did right not to reassign Bernie. My mother said my father and I were both crazy.

  When I dressed for Ruth’s wedding the next day—in a tight pink silk dress with matching heels, and with the ruby around my neck—I could predict some of my future pretty accurately, but I was excited about the party, and the people I’d see. The
wedding was in a private room in a restaurant, with thick gray carpet and blue drapes and chairs. It was just as well that Ruth had returned the dress—she’d have matched the decor. Ruthie’s hair was pinned up like Mrs. Cohen’s and she looked not exactly inappropriate but terribly serious in her black silk jacket—shy and cute. She’d told me to come early, and when I arrived we hugged. “You look like the bride,” she said.

  “Somebody had to.”

  When I was young, I attempted suicide thirteen times. Now I don’t see my life in contrast to the lives of other women my age, with their marriages, their children. My life contrasts with my death, and at times everything seems to have sharp edges, as if the people I know—work people, family, friends and lovers—were cutouts, not paper dolls but dolls made of metal. They are so real they seem not quite alive, for a moment, and when I touch their edges electricity sparks. They are so real it is a painful joy to be near them, no matter what they are like as people. The room began to fill. Ruth’s daughter came in, weepy. Then her son, David, arrived grinning, bringing our parents. Ruth put her hands on our father’s ears when she saw him, and pretended to pull them. His ears stuck out in a funny way, and Ruth always teased him. Bob, the groom, came—a kind, strong-looking man in an ill-fitting suit—moving that day with a look of slow surprise. He came with a brother who looked like him, and a daughter, a tall midwife named Binnie, who once dated—maybe even lived with—Ruth’s son. My cousin Joan, a psychologist, came over and demanded to know what I’m up to—apparently surprised to see me alive—and reintroduced me to her son, whom I’d last seen as a little kid. Now he had an impressive-looking Asian wife or girlfriend. But before Joan and I could speak, there was a stir, and it was Joan’s mother, Aunt Sylvia, arriving, brought by her son, my cousin Richard. Richard was old, I noticed, the first of the cousins to be old, but Aunt Sylvia, who was truly old, just looked like Aunt Sylvia. My aunt had short white hair, a hooked Jewish nose, and a loud, clear voice. She and my mother were the last alive of six siblings. I don’t know how long it had been since they’d seen each other. Richard steered Aunt Sylvia into the room carefully, because she was blind. My mother turned at the commotion and stepped forward, blond and wrinkled, her arms lifted unsteadily.