by Sarah Laing
‘Stop it,’ I say, pushing his forehead, suppressing a smile. When we first got together I made him watch A Room with a View. He reminded me slightly of George, and Toby’s hammed it up ever since.
‘So what do you say, Beck?’
‘Sure.’ I smile brightly. But I’m not sure at all. I’m agreeing provisionally because I don’t want Toby to screw up this interview.
He’s spitting on his shoes now, rubbing them with his fingertip. ‘Why don’t you pay two dollars to one of those shoe cleaners with the funny chairs. You could have them polished properly.’
‘Maybe I just will.’ He jumps up and kisses me full on the lips, pulling my body into his. He steps back and beams at me, looking so boyish and full of hope, it breaks my heart. ‘Wish me luck.’
‘Knock their socks off,’ I say.
It may be me needing the luck; I’m going to visit Great-aunt Esther today. She seemed wary on the phone, as if I was more likely a gold digger than her niece. She agreed to meet, but not before telling me how long it’s been since my dad’s been in touch. Over forty years.
I’m not due until eleven, and Wendy’s doing her free pastry and furniture collection round. I have some time to check my email and go to the laundromat. If Toby gets this job, we’re graduating to the Wash-Dry-Fold service. I gather the dirty socks and shirts into our drawstring bag and collect all the quarters lying around our room. I go to the computer, logging in, typing my username and password. There are a number of unsatisfying one-line responses to my last group email, my mother’s unpunctuated account of her social calendar and a message from Bruno.
I click, and the shock of it runs up my arm. He’s bought his tickets and will be here in two weeks’ time. He can’t wait to see me; we have so much to catch up on. I start whispering to myself, oh-my-God, oh-my-God, Jesus-Jesus, not now, what am I going to do, this-is-so-fucking-exciting, stop it Beck, you’re over him, London dealt to that — you’re through.
I can’t wait either, I type, xxx Beck.
I pull on my coat and gloves and throw the laundry sack over my shoulder. There was a blizzard a few days ago, all the shops and restaurants shut, and even now the snow is heaped two foot high on the verges, into diorama mountain ranges. The snow that isn’t heaped is dirty and I place my feet in Yeti-sized foot holes, careful not to slide on the black ice.
I walk past the psychic, her sign spelt in blue neon lights. Platinum blonde, she is not witchy but grandmotherly, her bulk spilling over the side of her orange plastic chair, knitting booties for babies as she waits for customers. Should I go in, ask her what to do? Or else there’s the Santeria shop, with its African saints and melted wax. Perhaps they could tell me who I should love the best. I worry that I’m being too hard on Toby; that the strain of travel, of two years of semi-regular sex, is wearing me down. Does he stand a chance against my first hormone-addled love, the one that I left before the novelty wore off? I’ve already proven myself to be inconstant. I don’t know what I’ll do in the face of temptation.
The laundromat is a playgroup today, filled with mothers drinking coffee from thermal sipper cups, their children running around and pushing buttons, stopping washing mid-cycle. The by-product of marriage. I wonder how soon Toby would want children. I’m not sure if I’ll have any. They seem more troublesome than charming, and their mothers alternately cajole and yell to bring them into line. The world is overpopulated already; it’s environmentally irresponsible to breed. I read a pamphlet about pregnancy in the diabetes clinic; it said it accelerated retinopathy and caused high blood pressure, sometimes heart problems. Diabetic mothers were more likely to have heffalumps with sugar-fat tummies, whipped off to the neonatal unit the moment they were born. That was if they didn’t spontaneously abort thanks to congenital abnormalities.
‘Stop that,’ I say to a little girl who has opened the door on my drying clothes. She pulls out her pacifier and wails, and her mother walks over, glaring at me as if I have subjected her to emotional cruelty. There are so many babies around in Park Slope, cocooned in sleeping bags, apple cheeks poking out, strapped to their parents’ fronts like the ultimate fashion accessory.
The washing is dry anyway, crackling and shrunken when I pull it out. I pair Toby’s socks, and think of my mother and her constant housework lament. ‘I work too,’ she’d say to my father. ‘Why is it I’m left with all the laundry?’ Could I fold Toby’s stretched cotton boxers for the rest of my life? Or would that just make me angry and bored? And what about the sex? If we’ve tailed off so much, a half-life from where we first started, what are we going to be like in two years’ time? I look around the laundromat; it’s always so hot in the advertisements. I wonder where the cowboy is, the one who’s going to drop his Levis and swan around in his cotton Y-fronts. There’s a quiffed woman in the corner who looks alluring in an androgynous James Dean way.
I drop my washing off and head to the Q train, stopping to buy a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts for Great-aunt Esther. I transfer at 42nd Street, taking the labyrinthine passage across to catch the A, getting off at 72nd Street, next to the Dakota and the entrance of Strawberry Fields. Yoko Ono still lives here, and this was where John Lennon was shot. If this meeting is a disaster, at least I can tick a sight off my list.
I remember the day the shooting happened. I’d just started school, my hot pink bag slung over my shoulder, my lunch inside a turquoise box with compartments for sandwiches, fruit and raisins. I had an orange drink bottle and no friends; I didn’t much like my teacher because she didn’t believe that I could read. The principal announced the news at school assembly and Mr Lawrence, the standard two teacher, got out his guitar and sang ‘Imagine’ to us all. The words to the song were on the overhead projector, but I knew them already; John was my mother’s favourite.
We put on the Mind Games album when we got home from school, sliding the twelve-inch out of its surrealist cover, a woman’s face like a hill in the distance, two suns burning through a gloomy sky. As my mother poured herself an early glass of wine, my sister and I danced, unfurling from seeds to sprouts to trees, swaying around the living room.
I wonder if I would recognise Yoko Ono if she came out the door. I know I should like her; she is avant-garde and ground-breaking, everything I would like to be. I don’t want to be a Yoko-basher; I’m sure it’s fuelled by racist, moralist Beatles fans, upset that John ditched a nice English girl for someone Japanese. But there’s something about her voice, the high whiny part of her register, that turns me off.
Esther is twenty blocks north and a couple west, which gives me time to think of what I might say. I wonder what she will look like. I have a photograph of her, one from Owen and Klara’s wedding that my father reluctantly dispensed from his treasure chest. It was taken on the steps of City Hall, and Klara and Owen stand halfway up, Klara in a sharp suit, Owen tall and handsome, not the broken-capillaried, droopy eye-lidded man I knew. He was a looker; maybe that’s why Klara followed him to the end of the world. It would have been a shock after all this. Flanking her are two bridesmaids, a middle-aged woman and an old man, his beard long and white, leaning on crutches. One of the bridesmaids has the same intent look and straight-across eyebrows as Klara (and me) except she is taller, more angular.
I walk past the Natural History Museum, wondering whether I will ever get round to seeing the squid and the whale tussling. I still haven’t made it to MOMA in Queens; there are so many places to visit that I feel overwhelmed. I look into the dense greenness of the park, wondering whether it is still dangerous, or whether all of New York has been sanitised, and the version I exist in is not the authentic one. At music school I told Lily I wanted to live here, and she said, ‘Don’t go, you’ll be eaten up, it’s too dangerous by far.’ She’d lived here in the late eighties while her mother conducted a brief, disastrous affair, before Giuliani sent all the homeless people to Atlantic City on a bus. Someone flashed Lily in the subway, and her mother decided it was time to go back to Ohio, even though Lily
was about to start at the ‘Fame’ performing arts high school in Lincoln Square.
I’ve located Esther’s building; it’s more of a red than a brownstone. The railing is wrought iron, and in front of the basement apartment are the kind of trash cans that Oscar the Grouch shacks up in.
I look at all the names, yellowing and hardly discernible behind the scratched plastic. But there is E.M. Kirschen, the script curly and Germanic. Number seven. She was older than Klara when she left Berlin; born in 1926, which makes her seventy-eight.
I push the buzzer, feeling the drill beneath my fingers. I wait.
I push the buzzer again. If she doesn’t answer, I’ll be free to go.
Then, a crackle, that same voice from the telephone. ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s Rebecca Quinn, your great-niece.’
The click of a door released. My stomach roiling, I climb the stairs.
There are three apartments on each floor, and Esther is on the third. I can tell which one by the dogs. They scuff and clatter at the door, bark and pant.
The door opens. The woman peers out from behind her chain, a dog’s black nose squeezed into the gap. I squat, extending my hand towards it. It stretches out a tongue and licks my palm. The chain rattles back along its track. Esther Kirschen is tall and slightly stooped, in tweed trousers and a tailored white shirt. She has an air of austerity. Her hair is silver, pulled back to a low bun, the pins securing it invisible. Her glasses are horn-rimmed and thick, but her gaze penetrates the lens. I recognise the cut of the eyebrows from my photograph, although they have turned silver.
‘You don’t look much like Klara,’ she says.
I hand her the box of doughnuts. The dogs are at my ankles, scratching their claws along my boots, snagging my tights. ‘I’m musical like her, but mostly I look like my mother.’
‘At least they gave you a good Jewish name. Is your mother Jewish?’
‘No.’ My mother was a fan of Daphne du Maurier.
‘I didn’t think so.’ Esther opens the box, then screws up her nose. I think about grabbing them back and running down the stairs. This has all been a mistake.
‘What are your dogs called?’
‘This one’s Calypso, and this one is Terence.’ They are distinguishable through their accessories; Calypso has a pink bow that clips back her Yorkshire terrier locks, and Terence has a tartan collar. ‘They keep me on my toes. I take them for walks twice a day.’ Esther’s accent is mostly old school New York, the one without the Rs, but there’s a hint of German in the vowels, a friction in the Ws. My father says that Klara almost had a New Zealand accent by the time she died. ‘Come inside, take your coat off.’
I step over the threshold, remembering vampires, how they can only come inside if invited. Then they’re free to enter as many times as they like. The apartment has a dark entry hall. There is a small bedroom to one side, filled with books and piles of fabric. Every wall is lined with shelves, and on those shelves are bolts of fabric, beads and novels. More novels are stacked in towers on the floor. There are no provisions for earthquakes, but New York isn’t on the faultline like Wellington. Here, you get woken up by fire engines, not by the earth jolting. The living room is light and airy in contrast, floors polished, sparsely furnished with a roll-armed chair and a salon-style sofa. A table for two is placed in the bay windows and a lamp hangs over it, promising intimate dining. There are no paintings, but a Japanese kimono and an Elizabethan gown are displayed on one wall; the other is covered with framed photographs. So far I haven’t seen a cello. I peer into the windowless kitchen; copper pots hang from the ceiling.
‘It’s so strange for me to meet a blood relation after all these years. I’ve never once met your father.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I don’t know why my father hasn’t tried to seek out his roots; the only holiday he and my mother have taken is to Fiji. He’s even eligible for a European passport as a child of one of Germany’s dispossessed nationals, but he hasn’t applied.
‘I used to send him presents, you know, and Klara would send me photographs, but he stopped writing me when she died and after two years of silence I gave up.’ She looks hurt at the memory and I almost defend my father. He was only fourteen. He was at a boarding school he hated, bullied by the prefects, fighting over food. Grandad was probably too drunk, too grief-stricken to forward the mail. Grandad almost forgot he had a son. But these excuses might seem inadequate to someone who lost her parents in concentration camps.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say again.
‘It’s no use apologising. It wasn’t you who was rude.’ Esther sounds imperious, and I bridle; my father does deserve more compassion. ‘He’s started writing again now. People hit their middle age and suddenly realise that history is important. Young folks don’t have any appreciation for it.’
‘I do. I want to know about my history,’ I say. Or at least my father’s history, steeped in epic drama that he denies. My mother’s family, shopkeepers and bank managers from the Waikato, National Party voters, sixth-generation New Zealanders from England and Wales, don’t interest me much at all. But perhaps they will when I’m fifty.
‘Not that I can tell you much about your grandmother — she was always a mystery to me. She spent far more time with Heinrich Weiss than she did with Tante Dagmar and me. Now, would you like coffee or tea?’
‘Tea please. With milk, no sugar.’
‘And you must have some of your doughnuts, I can’t eat them myself.’
‘Oh. Okay.’ But I’m not sure whether I can eat them either, not without doing a blood test and an injection. I normally rely on other people’s sweet tooth to hide the fact that I have only taken a sliver. As Esther goes into the kitchen to put the kettle on, I rummage around in my bag to find my blood-testing machine, then place it in my armpit to defrost it a little.
Esther brings out the tray as I’m pricking my finger.
‘What are you doing?’
‘A blood test. I’m diabetic.’
‘Well I never. Another diabetic in the family. They do say it’s genetic.’
‘Who else had diabetes?’
‘I do. Here, shall we give these doughnuts to the dogs? I’ve got some cheese and crackers and apple slices.’
Esther is a stickler. Esther is old-school. I wonder if she’s type one or type two, how long she’s had it for. ‘I’m going to have a little taste,’ I say.
‘I certainly wouldn’t myself — I couldn’t stop myself eating the whole thing.’ Esther passes me the knife and I excise a wedge from the glazed cinnamon doughnut, watching as Esther breaks the pink sprinkle one in half for Calypso and Terence. ‘Do you record as you go?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Your results. I always write mine down as soon as I’ve tested because otherwise I forget.’
‘The machine remembers,’ I say, pushing a few buttons, scrolling through my day’s results.
‘I know it does, but you don’t see the pattern unless you plot the results. Let me show you my books.’ She goes into her bedroom and returns with a couple of folders. ‘Now look at this one.’ The folder smells musty and the notes are difficult to decipher. The test results don’t resemble anything familiar, they say ‘Low’, ‘Medium’ or ‘High.’ The insulin doses are enormous, Esther injecting herself with hundreds of units. Maybe she’s insulin resistant. And on the page beneath, Esther has recorded everything that she eats, including the weight of the bread slices and carbohydrate totals. It doesn’t look like a notebook; it looks like a laboratory write-up.
‘When’s this from?’ I ask.
‘This must be from 1950, the year after I was diagnosed at twenty-three. I was rather advanced in years to develop type one, but I suppose I was lucky. It would have been far more difficult for me as a child. There was a Jewish woman, Eva Saxl from Prague, who fled to China during the war, and she had to harvest insulin from water buffalo pancreases, pig insulin was so hard to find on the black market, let alone the pharmacy. Her husband fi
gured out a way to extract it and it was brown and mucky. The doctors here couldn’t believe it when they saw it. But it worked.’
‘Did you meet her?’
‘No, she lived here for a while, but it’s a big place. Now she’s in Chile. I saw her on PBS.’ Esther flicks forward, pulls out another folder. ‘And this one is from the eighties, when they brought in home blood testing. My, how much easier my life became when that happened. No more test tubes with bubbling chemicals that ate the paint off my cabinets. Although I do miss the bright colours the test tubes would turn. That orange was almost radioactive.’
But just because things are easier, doesn’t mean that Esther is any less diligent. I flick through, not a day missed. No big blanks, no diabetes holidays like the one I took in London.
‘I know it seems a bit crazy, but my doctors tell me it’s always the obsessive types who have the best control. Ruby used to say it was my perfectionist streak coming out. I didn’t see her complaining when I stitched her into the nicest gowns in the chorus line. Look at my legs!’ Esther pulls up her trousers to reveal pale calves, long stray hairs curling out of them. ‘No ulceration, no amputation, not like that Ella Fitzgerald. Oh, and that Mary Tyler Moore, she oughta lay off the turps. Only a little nerve damage. My kidneys are working too.’
‘That’s great,’ I say, wondering who Ruby is, thinking of all those notebooks my specialists have given me, and how they make me feel rebellious, trapped. I don’t want to fill in those small squares; they make me feel as though my life should be groundhog day, eating the same food and repeating the same activities. They don’t allow for late nights at gigs, for birthday parties or midnight movies or dinners out.
‘I have had some laser surgery on my eyes. It’s hard to avoid that one. But they’re so clever these days. They didn’t have that when I was diagnosed. How have you fared so far, dear?’