The Fixer Upper

by Judith Arnold

  “Libby? It’s Gilda.”

  Shit. Just what Libby needed: her ex-mother-in-law. “Gilda, I can’t talk right now. I—”

  “What’s all this about you dating an Irish person?”

  “Gilda, I—”

  “Vivienne called me after synagogue today. She said you told her you’re dating an Irish person.”

  “I’m not dating him.” Even if last night had been a date, he probably never wanted to see her again, after her brusqueness on the phone. She didn’t know if she wanted to see him again, either, if he could mock her in the midst of this disaster.

  “Not that I want to interfere,” Gilda said, although Libby understood that interfering was exactly what Gilda wanted to do, “but it’s easier when everyone is of the same faith. I know you don’t go to shul that often. Let’s face it, neither do I. Once a month, I try. It’s good to go at least once a month, just to keep your hand in. You should go once a month, Libby. Vivienne will take you.”

  “I’m sure she will.” What if Reva was attempting to phone her again? What if she’d moved from a bathroom to a bus kiosk? What if her friends were all planning to drag her off to Brooklyn, and she needed directions from Libby on how to get home? “Gilda, I can’t talk now. I’m expecting an important call.”

  “You should get Call Waiting. Vivienne has Call Waiting. She says it’s worth its weight in gold.”

  How much did Call Waiting weigh? Libby shook her head to rid herself of that inane thought. “I’ll phone you tomorrow, Gilda, okay?”

  “Okay. I want to hear all about this Irish person. Is he Catholic?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “It’s important. You should find out before this thing goes too far.”

  “All right. I’ll find out.” Libby would have promised to vet his baptism records if such a promise would get Gilda to hang up. “I’ll talk to you later,” she said before pressing the off button to disconnect the call.

  I am a bitch, she thought.

  She was still holding the cordless handset when the phone rang again. It vibrated against her palm and she flinched, then jammed her thumb against the connect button. “Hello?” Please, let it be Reva, she prayed—although God probably wasn’t listening because she didn’t go to shul once a month to keep her hand in.

  “Libby?” A familiar man’s voice, but not Ned’s. As if he’d ever want to talk to her again, after she’d treated him so rudely.

  “Harry?” she guessed.

  Correctly, as it turned out. He sounded pissed off when he said, “Reva is here.”

  Libby’s scalp relaxed and her hair felt dark brown again. Who cared if Harry was pissed off? He spent a significant portion of his life pissed off. Libby, on the other hand, was ecstatic. “She’s there? At your apartment?”

  “She showed up with a group of kids, Libby. What the hell is she doing here?”

  Testing the limits. Spreading her wings. Being an obnoxious brat. “Perhaps you ought to ask her,” Libby suggested.

  “Bonnie and I have plans for tonight. I’m supposed to see Reva tomorrow. I always see her on Sundays. But suddenly, she shows up with four kids and says, ‘We were in the neighborhood, sort of.’ How can someone be in a neighborhood sort of?”

  “Ask her,” Libby said. As her anxiety drained away, it created a vacuum inside her, and given nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum, rage was rushing in to fill the empty space. She took slow, deep breaths to keep her anger from erupting. Right now, all that mattered was getting Reva home. “Do you know who the other kids are?” she asked, as if Harry kept up with Reva’s social circle. If Reva had introduced him to her friends, though, he might remember a name or two.

  “No idea. There’s another girl and three boys.”

  “Three boys?” Libby felt her hair turning gray again.

  “They seem like nice kids. Clean-cut. No pierced noses. Listen, Libby, I don’t want these kids here. Bonnie has tickets to a concert at the Japan Society for tonight,” Harry said. “We’re supposed to hear some woman play bass koto and shakuhachi.”

  Now, there was something Libby could be grateful for—that she was not going to spend the evening listening to someone play bass koto and shakuhachi. “If you don’t want them there, send them home.”

  “Reva asked me to drive them home. I can’t fit them all in my car. I’ve got only five seat belts.”

  “Then put them in a cab.”

  “I’m not going to pay their cab fare,” Harry retorted. “I don’t even know who these kids are. And they wouldn’t all fit into one cab, either. Do they have enough money to pay for their own cabs?”

  “I have no idea.” Let Harry be a father, Libby thought churlishly. She’d spent so much time fretting over Reva today; now it was Harry’s turn to fret. “I don’t want them taking the subway at this hour,” she added.

  “It’s not that late. If I send them off now—”

  “Can they take a bus? There are fewer nutcases on the bus.”

  “They’re all gathered around the flat-screen TV. Bonnie?” he said away from the phone. “Hide the remote.” Back into the phone, he said, “Why did you let Reva travel down here by herself? She isn’t even fourteen yet.”

  “I didn’t let her. She told me she was going to Central Park,” Libby informed him.

  “Maybe you need to keep her on a shorter leash.”

  Oh, great. Harry was going to turn this into a criticism of Libby’s parenting skills. As if she’d done anything wrong, other than to trust her daughter. As if he ever did anything of significance when it came to raising Reva. He’d walked out on them, hadn’t he? He’d fled from fatherhood. Sure, he saw Reva on Sundays—and he could dazzle her friends with his fancy-schmancy flat-screen TV—but who the hell was he to tell Libby how short a leash she should keep Reva on? As if Reva were a poodle.

  If he thought her parenting skills were lacking, would he demand custody? And if he did that, would he decide not to help her buy her apartment, because she wouldn’t need such a big apartment if Reva weren’t living with her? Was her entire life about to crumble because her daughter had pulled this meshuggeneh stunt?

  “I don’t want you to miss your koto and shackalacka concert, Harry—”

  “Shakuhachi,” he corrected her. “I’m not exactly sure what that is. Bonnie would know.”

  “I’m sure she would. Why don’t you usher the kids to the nearest bus stop and stay with them until they board a bus uptown. I’ll take it from there.”

  “The bus is a schleppy way to get home. They can catch the IRT. The one, two, three and nine all stop down here. They won’t even have to change trains.”

  He wanted to send Reva into the subway after dark, and he thought Libby needed to put their daughter on a shorter leash?

  But there were five kids, three of them boys. And although it was dark, it wasn’t that late yet. People would be heading out for dinner now, or uptown for bass koto concerts. The sane-to-crazy ratio of subway passengers wouldn’t be that awful.

  “All right,” she snapped. “Just send them home.”

  She hung up the phone and groaned. She’d managed to be nasty to Harry, Gilda and Ned, all within fifteen minutes. Once Reva got home, Libby was sure she’d be nasty to her, too. She was a lousy mother, an impatient daughter-in-law, a shrewish ex-wife…and to Ned she was what? A former friend? A reject sweetheart?

  A bitch.

  As long as Reva got home safely, Libby swore to herself that she didn’t care.

  Fourteen

  Reva had more important things on her mind than whether her mother was upset. Like, where was Darryl J?

  Okay, so autumn was beginning to grow cold. Maybe he’d found a place to perform indoors so his fingers wouldn’t freeze. Or maybe he’d left the city and headed south. Maybe he was right this minute standing on a street corner in Washington, D.C. because it was ten degrees warmer down there, and the president might be strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue, and he’d stop all the secret service guys and s
ay, “Listen to that dude! Isn’t he incredible?” And Darryl J would mention to the president that while it was warmer in D.C., he sure did miss Reva, his biggest fan in New York City.

  Maybe Dee-Dee would hear him, too—except she rarely went into the city, even though Bethesda was about as close as you could get to Washington without being in Washington. Dee-Dee wouldn’t like Darryl J’s music much, anyway. She listened to Tony Bennett and that kind of thing.

  Maybe Darryl J had gone even farther south. Maybe he was hanging out in the Florida Keys with that guy who sang about margaritas.

  Or—it pained Reva to consider this possibility—maybe Darryl J had quit. Maybe he’d given up. Maybe he couldn’t survive on the spare change folks tossed into his guitar case, and his parents said, “Come on home, Darryl J, go back to school, get a degree. Become an accountant.”

  God. Darryl J as an accountant. The mere idea nauseated her.

  Wherever he was, Reva, Luke, the Stavers and Micah hadn’t found him. They’d taken the IND downtown, disembarking at the Times Square station and again at 34th Street and wandering around the platforms to see if he might be playing there. The last station they’d checked was West 4th Street, and then they’d climbed back into the afternoon sunshine. Reva was kind of glad they didn’t find him in a subway station, because the platforms were gloomy and smelled like petroleum. She wasn’t sure why, since the trains were powered by electricity, but the atmosphere in subway stations seemed oily to her.

  She’d actually had a pretty good time in the Village, even though Luke had hardly paid attention to her. Katie Staver and Reva had found plenty enough to talk about, so they’d ignored the guys and the guys had ignored them. Boys their own age were such dorks.

  That was just one of the many reasons Reva liked Darryl J: he was way too mature to be a dork. He would never laugh through his nose so hard he wound up snorting like a pig the way Micah did. He would never shout, “Lance Armstrong! Lance Armstrong!” at a bike courier pedaling down the street the way Matt did. He would never go nuts over some weird hubcaps the way Luke did.

  Reva supposed even guys in their twenties might go nuts over weird hubcaps, but only if they’d stopped maturing somewhere around their fourteenth birthdays.

  “I think Luke likes you,” Katie had confided to Reva at one point.

  “Who cares?” Reva had said with a shrug. Not that she wasn’t flattered—assuming Katie was right about Luke, which was highly doubtful, given how little he acknowledged Reva’s existence—but he’d continued to talk about those stupid hubcaps three blocks after they’d passed them. Who needed that?

  Well, she was never going to see Luke Rodelle again outside of school, because she was never going to see anyone again. The way her mother was acting, Reva would be lucky if she was allowed to walk around the block to buy a bottle of milk before she died. Everyone—even Bony—was shitting bricks just because Reva had gone to the Village. God, you’d think she’d killed someone or something.

  Her mother kept walking in circles—through the living room to the den, out to the hall and into the entry and then into the living room again. Occasionally, she’d pace a minicircle without leaving the living room. Just watching her walking around and around made Reva dizzy.

  Reva sat on the sofa with her feet tucked under her and her arms folded. She felt no obligation to look sorry or rueful. Even if she apologized, her mother wasn’t going to forgive her, so why knock herself out pretending she regretted what she’d done?

  “I can’t believe you’d do something like this,” her mother said for about the hundredth time since Reva had gotten home. She was saying it more softly now, at least. The first few times, she’d screamed it—well, as close to screaming as possible without disturbing the neighbors. Early in the discussion—which had really been more of a monologue because her mother had done all the talking—Reva could practically see fiery little exclamation points shooting out of her mouth. But her mom was finally calming down, pacing more slowly, speaking with commas instead of exclamation points.

  “You act like the Village is on the other side of the world,” Reva grumbled. “It’s just a few subway stations away.”

  “The problem isn’t the Village,” her mother explained. “The problem is that you went there without telling me, without asking permission—”

  “I’m supposed to stop everything, in front of everyone, and call you and ask for permission?”

  “Yes.”

  “No one else had to call their mothers.”

  “Maybe because their mothers don’t care where they are. I care.”

  Right. Her mother was just so wonderful because she expected Reva to check in with her every hour on the hour. Reva ought to nominate her for the Nobel Prize in Motherhood.

  “I didn’t know who you were with—”

  “I told you! Katie Staver and her brother Matt, and Micah Schlutt and Luke Rodelle.”

  “Yes, you told me now. You didn’t tell me when you left the house this morning. Is that mascara on your eyelashes?” Her mother leaned toward her and squinted.

  “No,” Reva lied. She was already screwed. One little fib wouldn’t blacken her soul any further at this point. “Anyway, you can look up Luke and Micah and the Stavers at work on Monday. They’re all Hudson students. They’d meet your seal of approval.”

  Her mother must have heard her sarcastic undertone. She pursed her lips and paced another circuit. “What were you doing in the Village, anyway?”

  “Nothing.”

  Unlike the lie about the mascara, her mother wasn’t going to swallow this one. She glowered at Reva. “You traveled all the way downtown to do nothing?”

  Too many lies was not a good strategy. One or two Reva could pull off, but pile on a bunch and her mother might suspect everything she said, even the truthful stuff. She decided to try a little sincerity. “We were searching for this guy who sings and plays the guitar,” she said, opening her eyes wide in the hope that she’d seem even more honest. At the moment, she was being honest.

  “A musician?” That brought her mother to a dead halt.

  “Yeah. He always sings in Central Park, so we went over there to hear him, but he was gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “Well, he wasn’t in the park today. So we thought maybe he’d set up downtown. Sometimes musicians set up in Washington Square, so we decided to look for him there.”

  “I see.” Her mother dropped onto one of the chairs and studied Reva. Reva sensed no exclamation points spewing from her, not even any serious heat. Either she’d exhausted herself by marching laps around the apartment or else the whole idea of Reva searching for a musician appealed to her. “What kind of music does he play?”

  “Guitar, and he sings. He writes his own songs, too. He’s real good.”

  “And you wanted to see him because…?”

  “Luke and the Stavers are on the winter dance committee, and they thought instead of a deejay we should have a live musician. And they thought maybe a street musician would be fun. And affordable,” Reva added.

  “A street musician at a Hudson School dance?”

  “Why not? Tracy Chapman started out as a street musician,” Reva reminded her.

  “I doubt Tracy Chapman performed at private-school functions.” She wiggled her fingers a bit, a gesture not too far from wringing her hands. “Does this fellow play dance music?”

  As if people went to dances to dance. But the mood in the living room had definitely improved; her mother hadn’t yelled “I can’t believe you did this!” in the past ten minutes. “We were going to ask him,” Reva said. “And Katie wants me to be on the dance committee, too.”

  She’d hoped her mother would be impressed that people wanted her on their committees. But unfortunately, her mother stayed on topic. “So you went to the Village in search of this street musician.”

  “It was Luke’s idea to go there. He goes down to the Village all the time to hear musicians.” His mother
treats him like a grown-up, she wanted to add, although he sure had seemed pretty immature when it came to those stupid hubcaps.

  She braced herself for her mother’s expected comment—something along the lines of how she didn’t care where other kids were allowed to go and how if other kids were allowed to jump off the Empire State Building, did Reva think her mother should give her permission to jump off the Empire State Building, too? But her mother surprised her by asking, “So…what kind of music does this person play?”

  “Good music. Kind of like Paul Simon when he’s doing ethnic stuff, like ‘Me and Julio’ or that Rhythm of the Saints album.” Demonstrating knowledge of and respect for her mother’s musical tastes ought to earn her a few points. And she desperately needed some points.

  Her mother rose, wandered in another uneven circle around the living room that ended in front of the fireplace, stared at it for a long minute and then turned back to Reva. “If this musician—what’s his name?”

  “Darryl J.”

  “Darryl J? Is Jay his last name?”

  “No, it’s just a letter. Like an initial or something.”

  “Darryl J,” her mother said awkwardly, as if trying to wrap her tongue around some long, foreign-sounding word. “Well, if you couldn’t find him, I don’t suppose he’s going to be able to play at your school dance.”

  “We aren’t done looking for him yet,” Reva said, then bit her lip and wondered if her mother would say something like, You bet you’re done looking for him, young lady. You’re banned from leaving the apartment ever again, except for school.

  “What are you planning to do? Comb all five boroughs in search of him? Do you realize how impossible that would be?”

  “We could still look a little more. He might be somewhere.”

  “Sure. And while you’re at it, maybe you can find Jimmy Hoffa,” her mother muttered. Reva didn’t know who Jimmy Hoffa was, but she didn’t care enough to ask. “None of this would be a big deal if you’d had the courtesy to phone me first. Why bother to take the cell phone if you’re just going to turn the damn thing off?”

  Reva had taken it because her mother had forced her to, but she didn’t mention that. Nor did she mention the humiliation of having to call and check in with your mother in front of a group of friends. She doubted her mom would understand that being grounded for the rest of the century was preferable to acting like a baby in front of witnesses.