Solos

by Kitty Burns Florey

  When they hang up, Emily’s heart is knocking against her chest.

  She saw Susan just two days before, when she and Marcus were at the park with the dogs. Susan was sitting like a rock on her bench, and Emily had passed right by, turning her head as usual to avoid having to speak. Otto, she remembered, had made a move to go over to Susan—in Otto’s worldview, every human is worth a sniff—and Emily had pulled on his leash, roughly, so that he looked up at her in reproach. When she and Marcus walked home, Susan was still there, sitting alone in the gathering dark.

  Emily puts Izzy in his cage and goes to the window. The cool white light of morning is over. She will wait until the golden light of late afternoon. The hours in between are useless for her purposes. She puts on her red sweater and hoists her bag on her shoulder and walks up to Bedford Avenue. Maybe it’s her imagination, but the street seems more cheerful and alive, the mood not celebratory, exactly, but lighthearted, no longer haunted by the specter of a rapist. Emily stops at the florist for a bouquet of daisies, and then at the bakery for a pound of Polish butter cookies. Isa in the bakery is beaming. “Emily! You heerd?” Isa is a plump, middle-aged, white-aproned grandmother of seven, with an accent. “Somebody got dat fawking rapist,” she says with satisfaction.

  In front of Susan’s building, the only reminders of what happened are a stray strip of yellow crime-scene tape and a damp patch on the sidewalk where it was hosed down. Except for the customers in the laundromat across the street, no one is around. The Skolnicks’ front yard—dry birdbath, pachysandra border, bits of trash—is weedy and neglected, but the trellis still bears half a dozen late roses, brilliantly pink against the drab asphalt siding. Emily rings the bell and hears it rasp somewhere deep in the house.

  The front door is opened by Susan Skolnick. “I looked out the window to see who it was,” she says. “I’m expecting this woman from the Post, and I’m just not up for it. I saw you had flowers, so I couldn’t not let you in.”

  Emily holds them out with the box of cookies. “I’m so sorry about what happened, Susan. I won’t keep you. I just wanted to see how you’re doing.”

  Susan looks at her for a moment, then opens the door wider. “I was about to make tea. You want a cup?”

  “Sure, tea would be great, but—”

  “I’m all right. Come on in.”

  The Skolnick apartment is on the first floor, and it’s a mess. There are piles of dead newspapers, clothes thrown over chairs, take-out containers on the coffee table, a headless Barbie and her wardrobe scattered across the living room floor. They go to the kitchen in back—sink full of dirty dishes, wastebasket long unemptied—and Susan puts the kettle on. While it boils, she sits down at the table across from Emily. Susan looks terrible: The area around her left eye is blackened, with yellowish edges, and she has a bloody gash below it, across her cheek. Her black hair hangs around her face, uncombed. She is still in her nightgown, with a cardigan pulled around it, haphazardly buttoned.

  “Susan,” Emily says, hesitantly, “shouldn’t somebody look at that cut? Can I take you to the emergency room?”

  “I don’t want stitches. I want the scar, to remind me.” Susan speaks with surprising firmness, but in a flat, harsh voice. “It’s an odd feeling, to know that you killed someone.”

  This is not what Emily expected her to say, and she has no answer. But she doesn’t need one. Susan continues, “I’m not saying it’s a bad feeling. Just an odd one. Everything is different afterward. Nothing can ever, ever possibly be the same.”

  Susan’s face is closed, blank, uninviting, but Emily asks, “How? How do you mean, different?”

  “I’m different.” Susan says. “I was attacked. He didn’t rape me. I killed him before he could do it. He had the knife at my neck. I didn’t care what happened, he wasn’t going to do that to me. We struggled. I pushed him and he started to go over. I pushed him again. The last thing I saw was his horrible red prick, sticking up. And his pants down around his ankles, going over the side. His shoes. Big black shoes.”

  “My God, Susan.”

  “So you want to know how I’m different? The big difference is I’m leaving here. I’m gone.”

  “What? Gone?” Emily tries to remember other conversations she has had with Susan, back before Glenda was put down. She can’t remember much, a bit of chitchat at a meeting about the garbage dump, an exchange at the Greenmarket about the ripeness of peaches, a few doggy encounters in the park. She barely knows this woman. “Gone where?”

  “I was lying awake all night after the police left, thinking about this. Murray and Vanna aren’t here, you know. They’re in Chicago for a long weekend. Visiting Murray’s parents.”

  “So you’re alone here?”

  “I wanted to be alone. They kept me at headquarters for hours until they decided not to charge me, and the whole time they’re saying I shouldn’t be left alone. I got back from the station at midnight, and then they were here half the night. The policewoman wanted to stay, my upstairs neighbor wanted to stay. They made me see a police psychiatrist. They brought a rabbi—can you imagine? They wanted me to get stitches, get some medication, call Murray, go stay with somebody. I said no, I just wanted to be alone. I was fine. I took a Valium. As soon as I get rid of this headache I’m out of here.”

  “But Susan—where are you going to go? Shouldn’t you—?”

  “Wait until I can think more clearly?” Susan rakes her fingers through her hair, then holds her skull between her hands like a basketball. The gash on her cheek has opened up, producing a few beads of blood. “That’s what my therapist said. I called her this morning at five-thirty. I figured she’d give me some support, and I ended up hanging up on her. I didn’t want to hear it. I already knew I was going. I’m leaving Murray. I’ve wanted to leave Murray for so long. Why haven’t I gone before this? I don’t know. It’s all I think about. I go to work, I think about leaving Murray. I walk around the neighborhood, I think about leaving Murray. I go to the grocery store, I cook dinner, I read the paper, and all I can think about is leaving Murray. And now I know I can do it. Why?” She lets go of her head, drops her hands to her lap. “Because I’m different. I want to be gone when he gets home. I want him to walk into this house and find the new Susan—the gone Susan.”

  Little Vanna seems a glaring omission, but Emily doesn’t ask. It’s none of her business. But, of course, none of this is her business. She has the odd feeling that she’s listening outside a door to Susan talking to herself. She asks, “Where will you go? What will you do?”

  The kettle boils. Susan sets down two mugs, a milk carton, a sugar bowl, a bottle of Tylenol. The whole time, she is talking. “The summer I was eight years old,” she says, “my family and I went to Maine for two weeks. We stayed at a fishing camp on a lake, and my father fished all day while my sister and my mother and I swam in the lake and walked down a dirt road to pick berries. We played Monopoly on the screened porch and read Nancy Drew books and drove into town to the general store where they sold homemade ice cream and fresh tomatoes and corn.” Susan takes two Tylenol, gulping them down with water from the sink. Then she sits across from Emily and continues.

  “At night we’d eat the fish my father caught. Then he and my mother and the people in the cabin next door stayed up late and played cards and drank beer while Linda and I lay awake on our cots upstairs and listened to them and fell asleep with the smell of the pine trees coming in the window. One morning I woke up early and saw a fox crossing the lawn. And there were turtles in one part of the lake, a little hidden cove where we played pirates. And every morning for breakfast we had blueberry pancakes. And sometimes at night we’d build a fire and toast marshmallows.” She stirs sugar into her tea. “And I’ve never forgotten it.”

  “That’s where you’re going?”

  Susan nods. “Lake Schoodic.”

  “Susan, shouldn’t you—?”

  Susan wears the stony face Emily recognizes. “Lake Schoodic.”

 
“But—”

  “Lake Schoodic, Emily. Lake fucking Schoodic. I’m out of here.”

  “Well,” Emily says. “Maine. I’ve been there a few times, to visit a college friend in Bangor. She lives on the Penobscot River. We saw some eagles, and once we drove to Bar Harbor for the day. I remember those tall, straight trees. And the big, rugged rocks along the coast. The days were warm, the nights were cool. It was wonderful.”

  Susan doesn’t smile or speak, just sits there with her gashed, naked, set face.

  Emily waits a moment. Then she says, “Well. Lake Schoodic?”

  “Lake Schoodic.”

  Emily shrugs, raises her mug and touches Susan’s. “Okay, then. Lake fucking Schoodic.”

  Susan laughs, finally, then winces, as if laughter hurts her bruised face. “Cheers.”

  After they have sipped their tea, Emily says, “Susan, I want to apologize …”

  Susan holds up a hand. “Don’t bother. It doesn’t matter. I’m leaving here. All the crap that’s happened here is nothing to me. I have been utterly, cosmically, crazily unhappy in Williamsburg. All I want is to get out, and I don’t want to take anything with me. Not even your apologies. I want as few memories as possible. I’m starting over. My therapist says my anger should be directed at the guy who attacked me, not at Murray. She went on and on about it. I told her I don’t even know this guy—Elliot Cobb? I killed some guy named Elliot Cobb. Some creep who pulled a knife on me, who called me a bitch and stuck his hand in my crotch, who slashed me across the face to give himself a hard-on, who made me push him off the side of the building. Who the hell was he? I don’t know, and I don’t care. It’s Murray Skolnick that I know.”

  Susan winds down abruptly and lapses into silence again.

  Murray Skolnick, as far as Emily can remember him, is a short, brisk, balding guy who works in Manhattan in … what? Insurance or something? Surely Susan’s therapist is right, Emily thinks, it can’t be healthy to suffer a trauma like this and then walk out on your family. To just hop in the car with a black eye and a livid welt on your face, to drive to a lake in Maine and hope to recapture the impossible innocence of being eight years old? And yet, for some reason, Emily trusts Susan’s decision. She wonders why this is so. Maybe it’s because Susan has fought Elliot Cobb and beaten him. Elliot C., whom Emily instinctively saw as bad. Or maybe because it’s what she should have done herself, left Hart before he left her. Or maybe it’s just that she has seen Susan, too many times, walking the streets of Williamsburg like a ghost.

  Maybe anything is better than that.

  Susan doesn’t move; she stares in the general direction of the overflowing wastebasket. Emily watches her for a full minute, during which Susan doesn’t blink once. There is dirt under her nails, and her naked wedding ring finger bears a white, ring-shaped indentation. On the floor in a corner is Barbie’s decapitated head, her blonde hair splayed out as if she’s been the victim of some terrible crime. Emily finishes her tea, sets down her cup, and pushes back in her chair.

  Susan doesn’t seem to notice. She sits with her elbows on the table, her chin on her clasped hands, staring, as if in the mess of cereal boxes and soda cans she is having a vision of Lake Schoodic, and a little house on its shore. Binoculars by the window for watching the birds, a glider out on the porch, strips of fly paper, a pick-up truck, and a job at the general store or the tackle shop. Maybe, eventually, a dog. Maybe, someday, a man who isn’t Murray.

  Finally, Emily stands up and says, “I should probably get going, Susan. If you don’t need anything.” She leans down and puts an arm around Susan’s shoulders. “Good luck. Take the cookies with you to Maine. They’re really good.”

  “Thanks,” Susan says without acknowledging the embrace. “I will. Do you mind letting yourself out?”

  In front of the house, a little white car with the New York Post logo pulls up to the curb. Two women get out, one with a notebook, one with a camera. “If you’re looking for Susan Skolnick,” Emily says, “she’s gone.”

  She takes Otto for his noontime walk, thinking about Maine.

  Maine is nice in the summer, when New York—as Lamont once put it—is like being panted on by a huge dog with bad breath. But she was there once in winter, and the snow was deep, pure, and shiny where the sun melted the top of it and it froze. It was aloof and frightening, and Emily, from Berkeley, California, had never lived with that kind of snow. She cannot imagine settling in such a place: nature so big, people so small. Maine is moose, she thinks, and blizzards, and lakes iced over so thick you can dig holes in them and fish; Brooklyn is tiny humans putting their umbrellas up as they hurry out of the subways.

  Still, she has never been forced to a rooftop at knifepoint. She has never shoved a man off a four-story building. It would change you, as Susan said, forever.

  Emily stops back at the bakery for a cherry Danish, and then she stands in front of the video store eating it, staring into the face of Julia Roberts, displayed on a poster in the window. Her talk with Susan, it occurs to her, has made her feel distinctly unsettled. She has not been happy since Luther told her about Marcus’s house in Honesdale. But she knows it’s not just the prospect of losing Marcus. Honesdale isn’t that far away, she tells herself. She has looked at it on the map, measured out distances. She tries to spare her sickly car any trips farther than Long Island, but once she gets a tune-up, she thinks she could make it to Honesdale for a visit. And she can write letters. He might even write back. And there’s always the phone; she and Marcus have always talked on the phone; and there’s no reason that should stop, except for the problem of fitting long-distance calls into her budget. But it can be done, she is sure. If her life were a film starring Julia Roberts, Julia would slip gamely into her outsize grin, find a way to stay in touch, and probably end up marrying Marcus in the end—a scene that would be neither ridiculous nor improbable but truly, magically heartwarming.

  Her life is very far from cinematic, however, unless some eccentric filmmaker decided to do a documentary called Broken Dreams; even then, the audience would have walked out long ago.

  And the problem is not just Marcus.

  It’s her ailing car, her phone bill, the coming holiday dilemma, and the fact that she just spent the ten dollars that was supposed to get her through the weekend on bakery stuff and flowers. It’s the garden of gray hair growing near her left ear. It’s her failure to do what she came to New York so many years ago to do: make a career for herself as a photographer. She replays in her mind the uncomfortable fact that she has made exactly four thousand dollars this year from her photographs. Last year she made five. Next year … next year she may very well not make anything. Dr. Demand, her best customer, seems to have enough BREADS and TIMES, and he’s run out of friends and relatives to give them to. The gallery that was supposed to call her back hasn’t. As for her new idea, it will probably be a dead end, too. “Disappearing Brooklyn” indeed. Who cares? Good riddance. And what if Sophie should move to Mexico, lay her off, get hit by a bus?

  She is in a mood, she knows: By tomorrow this mopey Emily will have faded away, and her usual optimistic self will be back. Which just proves what a sap I am, Emily thinks, but she can feel herself cheering up already. She struggles to remember some lines from W. H. Auden that she used to know, something about the baffle of being, and about how, even when there’s not much joy to be had, a laugh is less heartless than tears. And her father’s old joke: Q. Why are cats like radio announcers? A: Wee paws for station identification. And gray whales like to have their bellies tickled. And gorillas, she read, run out and dance in the rain. And then there is Otto, who is looking up at her with a look that is half adoration, half impatience, thinking, What is she doing? I am so sick of waiting fuh huh. She always imagines Otto, who was born in the neighborhood, with a thick Brooklyn accent.

  She bids good-bye to Julia Roberts, and she and Otto turn up North Third to Havemeyer, then go back along North Sixth, a route Otto particularly likes because it
takes him past Reba’s house. Sometimes Reba is sitting in the window watching the world go by, her little long-nosed face darting back and forth between the curtains. Sometimes she is even in the front yard, tied to the fence, barking. Today she is nowhere in sight, but Otto sniffs around the fence anyway. “Come on, Otto. You’ll see her at the park in the morning,” Emily says, and, after she gives him the last bite of her Danish, Otto lets himself be dragged away.

  Emily likes the route too, because they walk by Marcus’s building. When Marcus moves away, she thinks, she’ll walk by here with Otto every day. A pilgrimage. Like when the Mona Lisa was stolen and people lined up at the Louvre to look at the bare wall—or like tourists at Ground Zero gazing into empty space—she will walk by 222 North Sixth and think her thoughts.

  She resolves to do what she’s been avoiding: call Marcus and ask him if what Luther told her is true. If Susan Skolnick can pull herself up out of a violent assault ending in death and desert her family and relocate to the Maine wilderness, Emily Lime can make a simple phone call to ask Marcus about his plans.

  As she is thinking these things, Otto begins straining at the leash, whining, and there is Marcus just coming out of his front door. She lets Otto go, and he bounds up to Marcus, who squats down and says, “Hey boy, hey boy, what’s up, boy, hey Otto, how’s my doggie, how’s my boy? Hey hey hey hey hey,” and lets Otto lick his face. Emily stands beaming at them—her two great loves—until Marcus straightens up and says, “You’re just the person I wanted to see, Emily. I tried to call you last night, but I kept getting your voice mail.”

  “Sophie and I finished up for the season, and she took me out to dinner to celebrate. We got slightly looped on Mojitos at a Caribbean place in Brooklyn Heights. I didn’t get home until after midnight.”