“What broke?”
Morrie pointed at the broken glass at my feet. “That. She’s a real klutz, this one.”
“I’m so sorry,” I stammered. “I’m very clumsy. Everyone says so. I should’ve looked with my eyes and not my hands.” I knew I should have brought Cat down with me; if she’d been there, I could have blamed her for the accident.
“Stand still while I get that cleaned up,” Mr. Goldman said, not unkindly, and I got my first good look at him while he was picking up the glass. He was a small, bespectacled man with strawberry-blond hair and a swarm of freckles that made me look positively freckle-free in comparison. He wore thick square glasses and a green knitted cardigan, but there was no sign of the little hat.
When Mr. Goldman disappeared back into his room, I asked Morrie about it.
“It’s not a hat, it’s a yarmulke. Jewish men wear them.”
“Why don’t you wear one?”
“I do sometimes, when we go to shul.”
Before I could ask what shul was, there was a knock at the door and Edith had returned less than an hour after she’d left. She was brusque. “Come on, let’s go. Bye, Morrie.”
I stomped back up the stairs behind her, bored and cranky. Unwilling to spend the rest of the afternoon cooped up in the apartment, I asked, “Can we go to the library? You said I could sign up for a new membership.”
“Not today, Robin. We’ll go another time, all right?”
“That’s what you said the last time I asked. Can we go get my bike then?”
She sighed. “Why don’t you amuse yourself playing with Elvis or if it’s books you want so desperately, here, read some of these.” Edith pulled a few of her travel books randomly from the shelf and tossed them on the couch before heading for Elvis’s cage and opening the door. Elvis squawked in pleasure. “Thank you, thank you very much!” He hopped out and immediately flew to his favorite perch on the corner of the top shelf.
Edith lifted the ice bucket from the liquor cabinet and took it to the kitchen. When she returned, the bucket heaped with cubes, she thumped it down and poured herself a scotch. She knocked it back in one go and grimaced before slamming the glass down. Edith then started viciously yanking at the clips in her hair and tossing them on the dining room table with the kind of fervor another person might reserve for throwing down gauntlets. She kicked off her heels and poured herself another drink, forgoing the ice tongs to use her fingers to fill the glass.
I looked away from her to the book resting open on my lap and pretended to study a few of its pages. The silence made me nervous. “Edith?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you know that Morrie’s been circumscribed?”
She didn’t reply.
“It means a rabbit cut his forefathers off, which means he has no willy. Do you think it will grow back again?”
“Hmm.”
I tried to engage her again, this time asking the question that I really wanted an answer to. “Who’s Michael?”
Edith plucked an ice cube from the glass and popped it into her mouth, crunching it into oblivion before replying. “No one. Michael is absolutely no one.” She picked the bottle of scotch up by its neck and went to her room, shutting the door behind her. She didn’t come out again that night.
Cat materialized from the shadows and curled herself around me.
“Robin?”
“Hmm?”
“I’m lonely.”
“Don’t be lonely. I’m here.”
“I miss Mommy and Daddy.”
“I know. Me too.”
“I miss Mabel too.”
I nodded as my throat constricted.
“Do you remember when—”
“Let’s not think about it. It will only make it worse. Here,” I said, “do you want to look at the books with me?”
We fell asleep on the couch, hours later, with travel books splayed around us and Elvis crooning to us from his perch.
• • •
In the week that followed, Edith had her first job interview. She ate a modest breakfast consisting of a large cup of coffee (no sugar and no milk) and a single boiled egg with an unbuttered slice of toast. Once she was finished eating, she headed to her bedroom to get ready.
“Make yourself useful, kiddo, and put a record on,” she called to me as she disappeared through the doorway.
I went to the shelf where all her albums were stored, and riffled through them for a few minutes before picking out one whose cover showed a man sitting cross-legged in what looked like a giant bubble. Pulling it from its sleeve, I held the record by the edges, as my father had taught me, so as not to get oily fingerprints on it, and then laid it down on the turntable. I gently lowered the needle to the vinyl, my father’s voice coming back to me as I did so: “Freckles, the worst thing you can ever do is scratch a record. You may as well throw it out after that.”
There were a few seconds of staticky noise before the needle caught the thread of the song, and then the opening strains filled the room. “Sugar man . . .”
Edith’s hand appeared seemingly out of nowhere, stretching over my shoulder and yanking the needle from the record, probably scratching it in the process. “Not that one, Robs. Rodriguez is more suitable for a mellow vibe, if you get my drift.” She brought her thumb and index fingers together, and then held their squashed tips to her mouth while pretending to be inhaling from them. “We need something a bit more upbeat today.” She plucked out an Elvis record, cranked up the volume, and then headed back to our room where she started excavating her closets.
Edith took great care to pick the perfect outfit, and then hunted down shoes and a bag to finish it off. After she laid each item out on the bed, including the underwear she’d chosen, she sat at her dressing table in her gown where she spent ages curling her hair, sweeping it up, painting her nails and “putting on her face.”
I was already dressed and sat on the bed watching her in the mirror with the fanciful thought that if I reenacted those last moments with my mother—our reflections communing with one another—Edith’s face might magically rearrange itself into my mother’s features. When Edith got to the moment where she applied her mascara, I waited, holding my breath to see if she’d open her mouth like my mother did; my own mouth ready to copy the O. She didn’t and I felt cheated.
Once Edith was dressed and made-up, she went to the cupboard where she reached into the back of one of the top shelves, pulling out a large ornately carved and painted box. She brought it back to her dressing table, where she set it down gently and opened the lid. A tune escaped like a genie from a bottle and, with it, the smell of Chanel No. 5, Edith’s signature scent.
“What song is that?”
“It’s ‘Greensleeves.’ Pretty, even if it’s a touch maudlin.”
The box had dozens of drawers with tiny gold handles, and as she pulled each one out, I could see they were lined in pink suede and filled with sparkly trinkets. It was a treasure trove of jewels, and without thinking, I reached a hand out. The smooth lacquer of the box, the velvety softness of the lining and the cool sparkle of gemstones was a hypnotic combination and my fingers itched to touch every one of the mesmerizing textures.
Before they connected with anything, Edith uttered a stern, “No!”
I snatched my hand back as though scalded. “I’m sorry.”
“This is the one thing that is off bounds to you. You can play with my makeup and clothes and anything else you like, but you must never, ever touch my jewelry. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Some of these pieces have huge sentimental value and are irreplaceable. One day when you’re grown up and I’m no longer around, they’ll be yours, but until then, you must promise me that you’ll never touch this box or anything in it.”
“I promise.”
“Okay then.
Good girl.” Edith extracted a string of pearls with a matching bracelet, which she put on with expert fingers. After she’d closed the box and returned it to its place, she said, “Let’s go.”
We were preparing to leave when the phone rang. Edith checked her watch and, with a sigh, snatched up the receiver.
“Hello, Edith speaking.” She listened for a moment and then a twitch of impatience tugged at her eyebrow. “Wilhelmina, I’m afraid this isn’t a good time for me, I was just on my way out.”
Wilhelmina? My stomach twisted into a knot.
“You want to set up an appointment to visit?”
My thumb automatically went to my mouth, and I started to chew on the nail as I listened in on the one-sided conversation. Cat was doing the same on Edith’s other side.
“I see. Well, you’ll just have to call back another time, I’m afraid. If I miss this job interview, it will be your fault, and I’m assuming you agree that gainful employment would be nice if I was to be Robin’s legal guardian. Ta-ta.”
Edith slammed the phone down with relish. “Good riddance to bad rubbish. Come, Robin. Let’s go.”
We headed out in Edith’s yellow Beetle without Cat who’d once again been told to stay at home, and I promised to behave once we got to the office. I took a book along (one of Edith’s travel ones as we still hadn’t gotten to the library), and I was hoping to use it as a prop so I could eavesdrop from wherever I was seated. The job was an admin position and Edith was being interviewed by a senior secretary who came out to the reception area to meet us.
“Good morning. You must be Edith; it’s lovely to meet you. I’m Harriet.” The woman was much older than Edith, and if not exactly frumpy or overweight, then definitely dowdy in appearance. She wore her graying, uncolored hair up in a severe bun and wore very little makeup. Her nails were cut short and left unpolished. She smiled brightly when she greeted Edith and politely gestured her ahead, but when Edith started to walk in the direction she indicated, Harriet’s friendly mask slipped and I could see something akin to contempt cross her face. I’d been well trained by my mother to be sensitive to nonverbal cues, and I could see that this woman had made up her mind within seconds of meeting Edith. She would not be hiring someone who was dressed better than she was, and certainly not a younger woman who looked so glamorous.
Edith didn’t seem to pick up on the woman’s jealousy and chattered excitedly all the way home. “That went very well, hey? Harriet seems nice and I think I made a good impression. Did you hear how impressed she was about my experience with the airline? I thought it would work against me, but she seemed to get what I was saying about service industries being pretty much the same. How difficult do you think it will be to pick up shorthand?”
Edith was surprised, hurt even, when she never heard back, and I didn’t know how to tell her that, like my mother, she was an exotic orchid in a garden of daisies and would often be punished for it. The next few interviews were very much along the same lines, and after her first dozen rejections, Edith replaced Elvis with Dean Martin and took less care with her appearance. Contrary to helping her chances, it only made things worse. The women interviewing her seemed to instinctively know that all Edith needed was to be given a chance before she would rise like a phoenix from the ashes.
The closest Edith came to being hired was by the only man who interviewed her. He asked her few questions and barely looked at her résumé before announcing she had the job. Edith was ecstatic until he casually suggested she meet him at the President Hotel in Eloff Street that night to celebrate. I was listening in on the interview with my back turned, so all I heard was an almighty thwack. When I spun around, Edith was marching out of his office while the man clutched his cheek.
After that, Edith refused to take any calls from her friends, not even Victor, and took the phone off the hook when I complained about having to lie to him about her whereabouts. I was relieved that the phone was out of commission; it meant that Wilhelmina wouldn’t be able to reach us to set up a time to do her visit. Cat also relaxed once the phone stopped ringing.
One morning, Edith breezed up to the liquor cabinet and measured out a tot of brandy, topping it up with ice and ginger ale. An hour later, she was back to pour another. After two more drinks, the tot measure was abandoned, as were the ice and mixer, and the tumbler was half filled with pure liquor. By the sixth drink, she’d hauled her travel books down from the shelves, spread them around her on the floor and started talking to them like long-lost friends.
Edith was saying her reluctant good-byes to all the exotic destinations she’d been to and become a part of; the places whose rhythms flowed through her veins. She was mourning not only my mother’s life but her own life too, the life she had envisioned but would not get to live. Her sorrow permeated everything.
She began to roam about the apartment at night and sleep during the day, and she wouldn’t change out of her nighties or make our bed. “There really isn’t any point, is there? Not if I’m not going anywhere.”
“Maybe you’ll have another interview,” I suggested tentatively.
“There’ll be no more interviews! There are only so many times a woman can be told she isn’t wanted. It’s important to know when to call it quits.”
I was secretly relieved. I couldn’t keep being a spectator to Edith’s constant disappointments; I knew she would come to resent me for being the chief witness to her downfall.
A few days after Edith’s drinking began, I looked up from picking my cuticles to find Cat doing the same. Our nails had already been bitten down to the quick and pinpricks of blood dotted our inflamed fingertips. It looked like a colony of rats had been nibbling on our hands while we slept. Cat kept shooting Edith nervous, fearful looks, adding up the drinks on her fingers until the day’s count exceeded the number of digits on both of her hands. After that, I’d take over, though I was less obvious with my calculations.
No matter how much I tried to assure Cat that everything would be fine, she insisted on obsessing over all the things that could go wrong in our perilous new reality.
“If she carries on like this, we’re going to be taken away. It’s only a matter of time,” Cat said.
“No, we won’t,” I replied, trying to sound both exasperated and bored with the discussion. There were certain things that were better off not being said out loud and I wished Cat would learn when to keep her mouth shut.
“Yes, we will. If she keeps drinking all day and doesn’t get a job, we won’t have any money. And if we don’t have money, that will mean we’re poor, and if we’re poor, we won’t be able to pay to live here. If they throw us out, we’ll be living on the street because that’s what homeless people do, and they’ll take us away from her and send us to a foster home. That’s if that social worker doesn’t show up here again first. If she sees Edith like this, she won’t even wait for us to be homeless, she’ll take us then and there.”
I wished Cat would just shut up. All of her chatter, the constant outpouring of her insecurities and deepest, darkest fears was getting harder and harder to ignore. “All we need is to come up with a plan,” I said, faking confidence.
“The plan is to not have Edith give us away or have Wilhelmina take us.”
“That isn’t a plan! That’s just what we want to happen. The plan tells us how we’re going to do it.”
“So then, what’s the plan?”
“Could you just keep quiet for a minute and let me think?”
In the blissful silence that followed, I went to get a pencil and some paper. I’d watched my mother draft out her own plans in this way: our family budgets, what we needed to pack and prepare for our holidays, and instructions for how to put together a dinner party. I was pretty sure I could do it, too, because she’d explained each step to me as she went along, emphasizing how important it was to always be in control of things.
“Okay,” I said, sucking
on the pink eraser at the tip of the pencil. “What could stop us from living here?”
“Edith, obviously,” Cat said darkly. “And Wilhelmina.”
“She’s easy,” I lied. “If she shows up at the door again, we just pretend we aren’t home. She can’t take us away if she can’t get inside, so stop worrying about her. What would make Edith give us away?”
“I don’t think she wants us,” Cat said with a tremor in her voice. “I think she’s only taking us because we have no other family.”
“So then it’s easy. We just have to do stuff to make her want us.”
“Okay.” Cat brightened. “She’s always telling you to make yourself useful so we can do that.”
“Yes, but how?”
“Maybe we can pour her drinks.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “We don’t want her drinking so much, remember?”
“Yes, but what if we pour the drinks for her but we make them a lot weaker?”
“Good thinking!” I’d seen my mother do that with my father a few times at mine functions and it had worked. “What else?”
“We can make her breakfast for her. And paint her nails.”
“Yes, and we can make up bubble baths . . .”
“. . . so she has to get out of bed.”
“Exactly.” My hand was getting sore from scribbling all our ideas down.
“We can also tell her she’s pretty.”
“That will make her happy.”
“And we must be quiet and behave so we don’t irritate her.”
“You’re the one that irritates her.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to.”
“We need to try and cheer her up.”
“How?”
“Well, she likes pictures,” I said, gesturing to all the stuff on the walls. “We could draw her funny ones.”
“And we can tell her jokes.”
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