by Renée Rosen
“Yes. I mean no. I do not want to marry you.”
“You’re kidding, right? I surrender, okay? You won. You got me.” He laughed in a sick defeated sort of way. “You’re a woman. You’re supposed to want to get married. That’s what you all want.” There was a long pause before he looked at me, his dark eyes hooded and confused. “Just tell me why. Why won’t you marry me?”
I reached for his hands and said, as gently as I could, “Because I don’t love you.”
Erik looked at me with disbelief. I felt cold and heartless just sitting there, but other than offering him a glass of warm gin, because I’d forgotten to refill the ice tray, I had nothing for him.
* * *
• • •
Everyone was operating at half capacity that last week in June. Even Helen. She arrived one morning at an unprecedented half past nine, which was like showing up at noon for anyone else.
“Mr. Berlin called for you,” I said when she walked in, handing her a pile of pink message slips. “I’ll get your coffee. And your newspapers.”
She nodded, unlocked her office door and flipped on the overhead light.
When I came back with her coffee she was just hanging up from a telephone call with Berlin. Reaching for her pocketbook, she said, “Alice, I need to step out for a bit but could you gather up the staff and have them meet me in the conference room at one o’clock? I have an announcement.”
“Is everything okay?”
She said everything was fine, but there was a funny tickle in her voice and an even funnier look in her eyes. I tried but couldn’t read her. She was dazed as she left her office.
All morning long, my worst fears were festering. So were everyone else’s. I don’t think anyone went to lunch that day, too nervous to eat. And at one o’clock everyone, including the secretaries, had crowded into the conference room. There was no sign of Helen. I hadn’t seen or heard from her since she’d left the office.
People were chain-smoking, worried looks etched into their faces. No one was talking above a whisper. I sat at the conference room table with my colleagues for ten agonizing minutes before the door burst open and Helen walked in, her hands clasped behind her back. One look at her face and I knew something was up. I nervously tapped my foot, waiting along with everyone else for her to say something. Anything.
“I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve asked you in here. Well . . .” She paused, and everyone in the room inhaled. “I just got our sales numbers and”—she brought her hands to the front, revealing a bottle of champagne—“I’m pleased to tell you that July has already sold more than 200,000 copies over the June issue.”
The room took off when she said that. It came alive, erupting with applause and cheers, even a few misty eyes and tears.
“We did it,” Helen said, her voice peaking above the celebration, while she wrestled with the cork, her thumb easing it out of the bottle. “We’re on our way, pussycats!” The cork popped on cue and the roar of applause grew even louder.
While Helen made her way through the room, hugging everyone, I took over as bartender, finding a cart in the hallway filled with glasses and more bottles of Dom Pérignon. I’d never seen Helen splurge like this—on calories or the expense—but she was beaming, proud and, more than anything, relieved. I thought about that deceptively frail-looking woman I’d met three months ago who didn’t even know what a flatplan was. Since then I’d watched her grow. And struggle. With herself, her staff and the good ole boys club at Hearst. I’d never witnessed, let alone been part of a fight like that. There were lessons learned along the way that I’d never forget. And I was rejoicing that in the end she’d won. We’d won. Beaten the odds.
I felt light and grounded at the same time. A few sips of champagne and my head was swimming with sparkling bubbles. I loved everyone in that room and was actually embracing George Walsh of all people when the receptionist came into the conference room and interrupted me.
“Alice,” she said, tapping me on the shoulder, “I have a call for you. On line two.”
“Will you take a message?” I said, sipping the last bit of my champagne.
“She said it’s important.”
Margot leaned over and refilled my glass. It was too noisy in the conference room so I took my champagne, went back to my desk and pressed the flashing button on my phone.
“Alice? Alice? Is that you?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Faye.”
A rush of panic hit me. I set my glass down, spilling my champagne, my legs turning to rubber. There was only one reason Faye would ever call me.
“Alice, I’m sorry. It’s your father—”
“What happened?” I stared helplessly at the champagne running over the papers on my desk. “Is he okay?”
She went silent for a moment. I heard a burst of laughter coming from the conference room down the hall.
“I’m sorry. He had a heart attack. It happened this morning.” Her voice began to crack. “The doctors did everything they could but—”
“He’s gone?”
“I’m so sorry.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
After I hung up with Faye, I didn’t remember telling Helen that my father had died, but what I did recall was that she insisted on buying me a round-trip ticket on TWA.
I hadn’t shed a tear since Faye told me the news, but the hole in my heart was ever growing. After my mother died, it had been just the two of us, and my father—not knowing what to do with a thirteen-year-old daughter—took me to Derby Downs to watch the go-cart races, fishing on Lake Erie and to Cleveland Indians games. Together we learned to cook, eating fried eggs and oatmeal for dinner until we had graduated to grilled cheese sandwiches. When we couldn’t stand the sight of those anymore, we experimented with my mother’s meatloaf recipe. We ate dinner side by side on the sofa, plates on our laps, while we watched Perry Mason and The Red Skelton Show. But really, it didn’t matter what we did, I was just relieved to be near him, grateful that he hadn’t left me, too. Now he was gone and I’d never be able to talk to him again. About anything. Especially not about the reasons he and my mother got married.
I couldn’t think about it, so instead I harnessed all my attention on taking my first airplane flight. Wearing my best summer shift for the event, I was nervous, zeroing in on real and imagined engine noises, turbulence and the clouds outside my window. I must have smoked half a pack of cigarettes from the time I boarded the plane until we touched down. My head felt full, my ears refusing to pop even after I’d landed at Cleveland Hopkins.
Faye was there to pick me up. The last time I’d seen her had been the day I left home. It was drizzling that morning, and as I boarded the Greyhound, I had turned to see my father’s new wife holding her clutch over her head, shielding her hair from the rain while tugging on his arm, coaxing him back to the car. My father and I had shared a final finger wave before the bus driver closed the door and I moved down the narrow aisle to my seat. I remember hearing the engine rev as we eased away from the curb. My father was still standing next to his Buick, rain collecting in his hair, turning the sleeves and shoulders of his coat a shade darker. The driver’s side door was open and I remember seeing Faye’s hand summoning him inside.
Now she was in his Buick, waiting for me by the curb at the airport. She wore a floral scarf, tied at the nape of her neck. Her skin was pale, her eyes rimmed red and deeply sad.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. And this burned me because it was as if she’d invited me and I didn’t need her request to be there. He was my father. I was still his daughter. And then I realized, with a gaping hole spreading through my chest, that Faye was the only family I had left. If you could have even called her that.
As we drove through Cleveland, I noticed how living in Manhattan, even for a short while, had changed my perceptions. Cleveland, just an hour outsi
de of Youngstown, had always been the big city for us, but compared to New York, it was tiny, slow moving, provincial.
We went straight to the funeral home—a rite of passage I’d been spared when my mother died due to my youth. It was quiet like a synagogue or a library, the floor amplifying our footsteps. We were led toward the back, into a showroom of caskets, a grotesque display of commerce. Little gold placards with catchy model names like Serenity, Transitions and Parliament listed each one’s features—quilted satin lining, reinforced seal—and of course, the price. I couldn’t have told you which model Faye and I decided on. I was in a fog, with a hazy memory of a woman with a complexion like a potato sprouting eyes, taking down information for the obituary. After that, in an equally dazed exchange, we met with the rabbi.
On the drive back to the house, Faye went the long way, deliberately avoiding—or maybe I was giving her too much credit—the very intersection where my mother had been killed. The silence in the car hung between us like a cloud. Faye and I had never been alone together, and the awkwardness mounted with each passing mile. I supposed I could have made small talk, but it was too much work.
I assumed she felt the same.
It was hard walking into the house, which bore little to no resemblance to the home I was raised in. Faye had covered up that life with new spring green wallpaper in the foyer and hallway, little floating teapots on the kitchen walls. She’d buried my mother’s beautiful hardwood floors under wall-to-wall shag carpeting. The blue drapes I used to play hide and seek in were now lemon yellow with golden ties. The furniture was all different, except for my father’s chair, a recliner, stationed before the TV in the family room. The seat cushions had taken on the contours of his backside and shoulders, and his scent—a combination of Old Spice and beef jerky—was woven into its nappy fabric.
I told Faye I had a headache and went upstairs to my old room at the end of the hall, which was now a sitting room with a Singer sewing machine set up in the corner and a daybed trying hard to be a sofa. It was depressing in there. Depressing everywhere. I didn’t want to be in Youngstown and everything that mattered to me felt more than just a plane ride away. There was a princess phone on the side table and I thought about calling Helen to make sure she found her schedule for next week and to see if there was anything she needed. I thought about calling Trudy, too. And despite my best efforts not to even think about him, I considered calling Christopher. I wondered what he was doing at that very moment. Who he was with. Had he thought about me since that day in his darkroom?
I lay down on the daybed, trying to clear my mind, but it was no use. I knew when I caught myself thinking about Erik that I wasn’t ready to deal with my father yet. Yes, I was there to lay him to rest, but as I closed my eyes, it was my mother who was everywhere. I swore I smelled the faint scent of her perfume, heard the soft murmur of her voice, like she was in the next room, talking with my father or maybe on the telephone. I remembered how she’d read to me at night, both of us squished together in my bed, under the covers, our toes touching, our heads sharing the pillow. I heard a dog barking outside and remembered the time she took in a stray, a beagle with a hurt paw. She cared for that dog, even named him Charlie, and cried three weeks later when his rightful owner came to claim him. There was a flood of other memories, too, like the times my friends weren’t available so she’d grab a piece of chalk and draw a hopscotch board on the driveway or when she would abandon whatever she was making for dinner to sit on the kitchen floor and play jacks with me.
I heard a faint sound coming up through the floor vent—an agonized whimpering. Faye must have been down in the kitchen. She was crying.
* * *
• • •
During the funeral, I kept thinking, This is where a sibling or a cousin would come in handy. Despite familiar faces—my father’s golfing buddies, his clients and his coworkers at the foundry, and even some of my high school friends like Esther, whom I hadn’t spoken to in over a year—I’d never felt more alone. All eyes were on me. I was on display, the poor little orphan child.
I looked down at the torn black ribbon pinned to my dress. I was seated next to Faye, and as the rabbi was speaking, I saw her tears hit her prayer book, landing on the Hebrew letters, rippling the page. I reached over and squeezed her hand. I told myself to go ahead and cry. Cry for my father, for my mother, too. But I couldn’t bring myself to show even a fraction of the heartbreak wracking through my body. I was sure the onlookers found me strong and brave, or maybe callous as a stone, but even for the sake of putting on a good show, I couldn’t give in to my sorrow. It ran too deep and I feared I would drown in it.
Faye wanted us to sit shiva, so the house was filled with people, there to pay their last respects. There was a woman I’d never seen before standing in the kitchen, wearing an apron with apples on the front pocket. She and the other women from the synagogue’s Sisterhood—presumably Faye’s friends—were milling about, preparing the food, slicing tomatoes, cucumbers and onions, carving turkey breast, corned beef and brisket. The woman in the apron spooned globs of creamed herring into a glass bowl while another woman with lipstick on her front teeth took a head count of bagels, touching each one, as if making sure they were all really there.
“Hope you’re hungry,” she said with a red-toothed smile.
Hungry? I couldn’t have forced down a bite.
I went out to the living room and stopped, my feet unable to take another step. I felt a punch to the gut as Michael and his wife came through the front door. I hadn’t expected to see him, let alone his wife, but such were the perils of a small town where everyone knew each other and felt obligated to pay shiva calls. I froze, wishing the floor would open up and swallow me whole.
Michael looked uncomfortable, even before our eyes met. The placing of his hand on my shoulder while trying to half hug, half kiss me would go down in history as one of life’s most awkward moments. His wife’s squeezing of my wrist—while holding her very pregnant belly—didn’t go over much better.
“We’re so sorry, Ali. Really, we are,” Michael said.
The wife nodded emphatically, her honey-colored ringlets, like corkscrew noodles, bouncing on her shoulders. I don’t remember what I said in response. All the blood was rushing through my ears. Little white stars were dancing about in my peripheral vision like right before you faint. That belly was right there—I had to say something. Had to acknowledge it.
“I see congratulations are in order. When are you due?”
“Oh, not for another five weeks.” The way she said that oh, like she was trying to downplay it. No big deal, for fear I’d go to pieces in a fit of jealousy.
“So, New York City, huh?” Michael stuffed his hands in his pockets and did that nodding thing he sometimes did when he was nervous and didn’t know what to say.
“Yeah, New York.”
He looked around, still nodding, eventually asking how Faye was holding up. There was more small talk. He told me about his job at the accounting firm and that they’d bought the Mendelsohns’ old house. He still got together with Aaron and the guys for poker on Friday nights.
The more he talked, the more I noticed that the angst I’d felt when I saw him and his wife was now leaving me. After we’d broken up, I’d thought about Michael often, too often. Memories, good and bad, tore so at my heart, that sometimes I could hardly breathe. Now I looked into his soft brown eyes and realized how very young and innocent we both were. How it never would have worked with us anyway. I couldn’t have imagined myself married to him, still living in Youngstown.
Michael was talking now about his mother needing bunion surgery and soon it was obvious that we had nothing more to say. The pregnant wife hugged me and so did Michael.
“Again,” he said, “I’m really sorry, Ali.”
That was a loaded statement and I knew the I’m sorry was not just about my father’s passing. It was also an
apology for breaking my heart, but in truth, it hadn’t been his fault. I’d given Michael too much power, and in the end, I think I broke my own heart, all by myself. As hard as it was getting over him, that pain and grief had forced me to start again. I’d seen and experienced more in the past few months than I had in all my years before that. Since my breakup with Michael and my leaving Youngstown, I’d had my own apartment, my first real job. I’d moved to a city where I knew no one and was making my way among the best of the best. There was a bigger world out there, and now I was part of that and I’d done it on my own. With that came confidence that no one could take from me. I hadn’t realized how much I’d grown until that very moment. And it also occurred to me that it was no longer possible to deny something else that I’d been trying to push away. Since I’d been in New York, I’d discovered what it meant to really have a connection with a man. And it wasn’t with Erik. It was with Christopher.
* * *
• • •
Later that night, after the floor had been swept, the dishes had been dried and put away, the garbage taken out to the street, and the ladies from the Sisterhood were gone, it was just Faye and me. We were both exhausted and had changed out of our black dresses and into bathrobes. Actually, I had forgotten to pack one, so Faye loaned me one of hers, a soft white terry cloth that felt luxurious against my tired body. She’d made us tea with cinnamon sticks and set out a plate of schnecken that neither one of us would touch.
We sat at the dining room table with a box of my father’s mementos, things she thought I might want to have: his Navy and Marine Corps ribbons, a sapphire pinky ring that I was surprised she hadn’t wanted to keep, his diploma from Youngstown High and a wedding photo of my parents that he’d held on to, one I’d never seen before. The two of them were standing outside City Hall, arm in arm, cheeks pressed together.
A lump rose up in my throat and my voice cracked when I blurted out, “Did you know my parents had to get married?”