Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn
Page 25
The ladies’ room outside the auditorium had no line. Peggy gestured, and they all nodded. There was no line inside either. There were four stalls. Marlene, Peggy, Joanna, and Con went into the stalls.
Con was alone for the first time in many hours. She hung her bag on a hook and, again, put her hands to her face and held them there for a long time, feeling her own features, almost as if she had thought her face might have been replaced with a different face. Then she opened her jacket, unzipped her pants, and pulled them down. She sat. To her left and right was silence, and she knew that all four of them were sitting on toilets, waiting for their bladders to calm down and remember what to do. The pause was long.
For a while Con just sat, grateful for solitude. Then—toilets are conducive to thought—she began to think. People don’t have moments of lucid, significant new thought often, but I’m almost at the end of the story, and part of the reason for the story is that Con, at this moment, did. She didn’t know yet if she believed Joanna. She didn’t know if she’d fallen in love, again, with Jerry. But she knew she missed her mother, that was something. And she knew something else. Truths are often false. Marlene might have loved Gert and killed her anyway. And Con should live differently. She should live with more tolerance for forgivable flaws, and less tolerance for unforgivable ones. She heard the sound of urine splashing into a bowl.
All these years, her daughter had kept silent. As they walked, a few minutes later, toward the auditorium, Con put her hand on Joanna’s arm and when all four hesitated at the doorway, she handed Peggy two tickets for seats next to each other. Peggy put her hand under Marlene’s arm. They received programs. Con and Joanna were sitting to the left of the aisle and Marlene and Peggy to the right, several rows away.
They shrugged out of their jackets and sat down. “Joanna,” said Con.
“Are you mad at me?” said Joanna.
“Why would I be mad at you?”
“You’d rather not know. You don’t think it’s true. You want to go on thinking good thoughts about Marlene.”
“How long have you been planning this?”
“Oh, years. But I didn’t know for sure that I’d do it. I liked thinking about it—but maybe it was just a fantasy, you know? When you said she was coming, I thought, Maybe it’s time. But I still wasn’t sure. Even when I found the clipping I wasn’t sure I’d say anything. I kept watching myself to see if I’d do it.”
“I’m not mad at you. But what do you want?”
“What do I want? I want my grandmother.”
“You might have had an easier time,” Con said.
“Do you think I’m right?”
Con considered. “I think you are.”
“If Grandma had lived you’d have stayed with Dad. You needed to break up with Dad because you weren’t going to break up with Marlene.”
“Well, I don’t know about that!” said Con.
“I’m not asking you to call the cops,” said Joanna. “I don’t look forward to testifying at the murder trial of Marlene Silverman.”
“No.”
“But there is something I want from you,” Joanna continued.
Behind them, two women had come down the aisle and seated themselves, an older woman with white hair and a younger one. “Have an obsession!” the older one seemed to remark. “Carrots!”
“Carrots?” said the younger one, or that is what Con heard. Maybe the old woman meant “carats.” As in diamonds.
“I want you to listen to me,” said Joanna. “What happened to me in North Carolina. Do something about it.”
Con had just decided to live differently. “I should,” she said. “I should quit my job and spend all my time trying to make people see what is happening in this country.” She flipped through her program without looking at it. “All I care about,” she said—and as she spoke it sounded familiar—“is you and the Bill of Rights.”
“This once,” said Joanna.
“Okay,” Con said. “Okay.” She thought for a moment. “I’ll look at the police report.” Then she reached across the armrest and pressed Joanna to her body, and Joanna pushed her big head with its wonderful curls into her mother’s face and neck. They stayed that way until they were embarrassed, until the armrest began to hurt Con’s side.
The orchestra walked in, in twos and threes, and began warming up their instruments. They each played a note, another note, a run of notes. Con took out her cell phone. She wanted to call Jerry, but she remembered where she was and turned it off. “Turn off your cell phone,” she said to Joanna, and Joanna took her phone from her pocket and stabbed the little oval button with her long lovely finger. The phone played its valedictory tones and subsided. Joanna put it away. The theater darkened, and the opera—which, Con reminded herself, would have a doubtful ending—began.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank The MacDowell Colony and The Corporation of Yaddo for residencies during which some of this book was written. For generous help with this novel, I thank April Bernard, Susan Bingham, Donald Hall, Susan Holahan, Andrew Mattison, Edward Mattison, and Sandi Kahn Shelton. I’m endlessly grateful to my loyal and resourceful agent, Zoë Pagnamenta, and my brilliant editor, Claire Wachtel. Thanks as well to everyone in the Bennington Writing Seminars—colleagues, students, alumni, and our late director, the incomparable Liam Rector—for your companionship in the writing life.
About the Author
ALICE MATTISON is the acclaimed author of four story collections and five novels. Her collections In Case We’re Separated and Men Giving Money, Women Yelling, as well as her novel The Book Borrower, were named New York Times Notable Books. Raised in Brooklyn, she teaches fiction in the graduate writing program at Bennington College in Vermont and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
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ALSO BY ALICE MATTISON
NOVELS
The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman
The Book Borrower
Hilda and Pearl
Field of Stars
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
In Case We’re Separated
Men Giving Money, Women Yelling
The Flight of Andy Burns
Great Wits
POETRY COLLECTION
Animals
Credits
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph by George Marks/Getty Images
Copyright
NOTHING IS QUITE FORGOTTEN IN BROOKLYN. Copyright © 2008 by Alice Mattison. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition AUGUST 2008 ISBN: 9780061982453
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