Home Safe

by Elizabeth Berg

  She will not call Tessa. One, she's a little mad at her, and two, she needs to learn to handle things herself. Three, this would be beyond Tessa, anyway, and actually, the truth is that's reason number one, two, three, four, et cetera. She will not call Midge, either, because she's a little mad at her as well.

  Whom to call, then? An emergency plumber, she supposes, but what plumber? She looks in the yellow pages, finds a long list. She'll pick one with a big ad; if they have a big ad, it must mean they have a lot of money. If they have a lot of money, it must mean a lot of people use them.

  There are a few plumbers with big ads, and one of them says, “Honest.” What does that mean? Are there rip-off artists who are plumbers? Well, of course; there are rip-off artists everywhere. She remembers her friend Alice telling her about two men who came over to fix her toilet and charged her a fortune for what turned out to be a really minor problem—Alice's husband came home from work, heard about what his wife had done in an effort to handle the problem herself, and told her that all the toilet had needed was a gasket, which he had intended to replace himself that weekend. Alice said, “And the worst part is, I knew it! I could hear them talking to each other in these low tones and all but giggling, and I knew they were going to rip me off, but I was too afraid to say anything. And they were just slobs—they had mud all over their boots; when they came in they just threw their smelly jackets on the floor and the dog tried to roll in them!” So much for using the yellow pages.

  She could ask her neighbors for a recommendation, but it's the middle of the night and anyway, since Dan died, she asks them for help too often. She gives them baked goods for recompense, but she can tell she has worn her welcome thin, and she understands completely. Last time she brought chocolate chip cookies to the Adamses, the wife said, “Oh, hon, we still have some from you.”

  No. She will handle this herself. She stares up at the ceiling, imagining it suddenly opening up with a terrible gush of water, of plaster. She sees huge chunks of ceiling hitting her head, water rising up to her ankles and beyond. She wonders if she can get electrocuted from standing in water that rises to the level of the baseboard outlets. She picks up the phone and dials the police.

  “Thank you so much,” Helen says. “I hope you'll understand if I say I hope I never see you again.”

  The plumber smiles in a kind of halfhearted way, and it occurs to Helen that he's heard that one before. “Seriously, though,” she says, “I appreciate your coming, and if I ever have another plumbing problem, I'll be sure you call you.” Whoever you are. The policeman who answered her call—after explaining in a not entirely unsympathetic way that the police were not handymen—redirected Helen to the yellow pages. She closed her eyes and put her finger down on an emergency plumber, who arrived two and a half hours after she called him.

  As the man is putting on his coat, Helen says, “Would you like a cookie?”

  He shrugs. “Sure!”

  She offers the bowl to him, and he bites into one. “Good!” he says. “Thanks! Okay, then, so I'll just be—”

  “Hold on,” Helen says. She dumps the rest of the cookies into a bag, hands them to the man.

  “You don't have to do this,” he says. “You paid me.”

  Helen's eyes fill, embarrassing her. Why is she crying? Maybe it's because she's tired. Maybe it's because in her own clumsy, distinctly roundabout way, she has handled a plumbing problem, and this, perhaps more than anything, has confirmed Dan's death. Maybe it's because she has felt for so long that she is walking a tightrope and now she has looked down to see that the ground is closer than she thought—all she has to do is step off. “Please take them,” she says, offering the cookies to the plumber again, and he does.

  After he leaves, Helen goes to look at the hole in the kitchen ceiling. Now she'll need to get that fixed. As well as the other hole he put in the upstairs wall, before he discovered that the problem was not a pipe at all but a gap in the grouting of her shower that was letting water trickle down. “Oh,” Helen said, standing by him. “Are you supposed to check that periodically? The grouting?”

  “Yup.” He pointed to a gap at the bottom of the shower stall. “See that?”

  She leaned in and looked. “Uh-huh.”

  “That's huge.”

  She nodded sagely. “Okay, so then obviously the thing to do is … I guess I just call …”

  “A tile guy?” the plumber said. He didn't seem at all surprised that he had to tell her that. When she had first called him, he'd told her to turn off the water to the house. When she hadn't responded, he'd said, “Do you know where the main water shut-off is?”

  “No.”

  “Okay,” the plumber had said. “It should be right by the meter.”

  “And the meter …?” Helen had said.

  “It's … round? With a bunch of numbers on it?”

  Helen had been exuberant; she knew that one! But where, she had asked him. Where was it? Not in the kitchen, right?

  Helen goes to the closet and gets her coat. She'll walk to the bookstore, she will find a book on home maintenance. Damnit. And then she will take herself out to dinner and order macaroni and cheese. And then she will come home and go to bed early. Tomorrow night, she is going to have dinner with Claudia. She called early, while the plumber was there, and Helen accepted her invitation. Claudia said she wants to talk to Helen about something; she wondered if they could do it over dinner, at her place. “I'd be delighted,” she told Claudia, then told the plumber. “That was one of my students. I teach writing.” He said nothing, and she added, “I'm a writer. I've published quite a few books.”

  “Yeah, my wife reads, sometimes,” the plumber said. “Helps her fall asleep. Me, I'd rather take a pill.”

  twenty-one

  CLAUDIA LIVES IN A MODEST HIGH-RISE DOWNTOWN, NOT FAR from the lake. Helen takes the elevator to the fourteenth floor, thinking of how, if she lived here, she wouldn't be able to fit her weekly haul of groceries into this tiny elevator. Never mind that she now shops for one: she has a hard time passing up any bargain. Or anything that isn't a bargain that looks good. Or anything in a food store period; those people are geniuses at making you want. The right arrangement of papayas makes Helen desperate to have some. The yellow color on a box of cereal conjures up an image of her at the breakfast table full of cheer, and she'll buy it as though it were a prescription that will make her exactly that. And when they put out samples? Oh, then Helen is a dead duck.

  She exits the elevator and walks down the hallway, looking for Claudia's apartment. There is the smell of something in the air … curry? She checks the numbers, realizes she's walking the wrong way, and starts back in the opposite direction. A door opens, and Claudia sticks her head out. “Hi,” she says. “I heard the elevator. I thought it might be you.”

  She's nervous; her voice trembles. She's wearing a blue skirt and a white blouse beneath a yellow ruffled apron. Low heels, nylon stockings. There's something touchingly anachronistic about the scene; it borders on the ironic, but Helen feels sure that Claudia doesn't mean it that way. Helen wishes she herself had dressed up a bit; she's wearing old brown slacks and a pilling beige turtleneck. She holds up the bottle of wine she's brought, a few flowers wrapped around the neck with blue velvet ribbon. When Claudia sees it, she smiles so sweetly Helen wishes she'd brought better wine, more flowers.

  The apartment is small, sparsely furnished, but with a great deal of art on the walls. While Claudia goes into the kitchen to stir the pot—they're having chicken and dumplings, she said—Helen moves from image to image. There is a grouping of botanical prints, a watercolor of nasturtiums in a jelly jar, a primitive piece featuring a farm in the middle of rolling green fields. Most imposing is an oil that Helen finds fascinating. It is a panorama of New York City; she recognizes the Chrysler Building, a subway stop, Radio City, and, sadly, the Twin Towers. But nothing is where it should be—the buildings are all mixed up. There is traffic on a freeway in the middle of the painting,
but the cars are all stopped and people have gotten out of their vehicles, leaving their doors open, to mingle with each other. They are dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, jeans and T-shirts, a few faded and ill-fitting dresses. Many touch each other: embrace, shake hands; a child and an old woman press foreheads together. Three little black girls play jump rope. A large patchwork quilt lies open on the road, and there is food spread out on it like a picnic: platters of chicken, bowls of salads and beans, bags of opened potato chips, cakes and cookies. All around the quilt, like a living border, are gigantic ants wearing telephone headsets.

  The painting also shows many men in black pants and white shirts, but they are very small, perhaps one eighth the size of the other people; and whereas the full-size people are smiling, laughing, the little men are all grim-faced and isolated, seemingly wandering around without purpose. Each man leaves red footprints behind him—blood? It is an obvious political or social statement, but there is something else about the painting that is angrier than that, darker.

  “That big painting is really interesting,” Helen says, coming into the kitchen, where Claudia is tossing a salad. “Who did it?”

  “A guy I used to know.” Claudia speaks quickly, then bows her head to her task, her mouth tight.

  Okay, Helen thinks. We'll leave that one alone.

  It is after dinner that Claudia brings up the reason she invited Helen over. “I have something I'd like to give you,” she says. “But before I do, I need to ask you a few things.”

  “Of course,” Helen says, and thinks, A manuscript.

  “I've written a book,” Claudia says, and Helen smiles.

  “You don't have to read it,” she says quickly. “I'm sorry, I just—”

  “I would be glad to read it,” Helen says. “I'm smiling because I was hoping that's what you would tell me. I would love to read it.”

  “I want you to know that much of it is … Much of it might be hard to read.”

  “Is this nonfiction?”

  “Yes, it's a memoir. A kind of fractured memoir. And I'm a little worried that if it ever got published …”

  “Your family?” Helen asks.

  “No, they're all gone. Long gone. It's just me. I have no living relatives that I know of. Isn't that funny? I'm the end of the line. But I'm worried about …

  “Well, I'll just say it. If you publish something like this, if you say some things that … If you write a deeply personal book and it gets published …” She looks up, frustrated.

  “Why don't you let me read it first,” Helen says, gently. “And then we'll take it from there.”

  Claudia covers her face with her hands—they are large hands, the knuckles reddened—and makes sounds that are either laughing or crying, Helen can't tell, and she doesn't know what to do. Should she gently touch Claudia's shoulder? Look away until she collects herself? But then Claudia pulls her hands down and Helen sees that she was laughing. “I guess I'm more nervous about this than I thought! I feel so confused. I'm scared that it might be publishable, and scared that it won't be, that someone will read it and not care.

  “Oh, I hope this isn't an imposition, asking you to take a look at it. I just feel you're … I trust you. I hope it isn't an imposition. I had to tell you in private, I couldn't bring the thing to class. I can hardly talk about it, as you can see. I'll go and get it.”

  She returns from her bedroom with a brown paper bag. The manuscript isn't very thick; Helen doubts that it's much over one hundred pages. She regrets the smallness of heart that makes her grateful for that. The truth is, she suspects this could be a very fine work. But she has been fooled before: the first few chapters of a bound galley or a book about which she raved to everyone, but then ultimately was disappointed by.

  They talk more over a dessert of apple crisp, but it is idle conversation, anemic and superficial. Helen would like to know more about Claudia, but the woman is clearly unused to sharing intimacies, to letting people in. And why must she? Are people not entitled to keep their own counsel, to live lives of relative isolation, if that is their choice?

  And yet. Looking at Claudia, almost anyone would sense a longing on her part, a wish for someone to reach a deep place in her. It is in her eyes. But the someone to reach Claudia is not Helen: she can see that, now that Claudia has turned her manuscript over, she would like her teacher to go.

  And so she thanks Claudia for the meal, and says she'll see her in class. Claudia closes the door quietly, seemingly with great care, and Helen imagines her next clearing the table, rinsing the dishes with a kind of single-mindedness almost monastic in nature. She sees again the sparseness of the apartment, the single chair by the curtainless window, turned to look out on a world far below.

  As Helen waits for the elevator, she reads the first page. It is the same thing Claudia read in class the first day. A good start, Helen thinks. She flips to another page, and reads, I drew mustaches on the male clothespin dolls, thin black lines of authority, of destiny. She flips again and reads, He is a senior, and he occasionally backs me up to my locker to tell me about his weekend conquests, the girls he nailed in the backseat, their garters and underpants. I don't know why he does this; I don't know why I don't walk away. Near the end, Helen reads, She wears the blue nightgown, still. A little box in the corner has been added to the room, stationed beneath the dying plants. A humidifier? I ask the nurse. Deodorizer, she whispers. It is not working, though. The room carries the smell of death, which has been described as sweet. It is not sweet. The elevator comes and Helen closes the manuscript. It feels suddenly like a live thing.

  twenty-two

  “OKAY, EVERYBODY,” HELEN TELLS HER CLASS. “LET'S SEE IF WHAT you've done will let us not only hear your characters, but see them. Who wants to go first?”

  No hands.

  “Oh, come on. Must I choose one of you?”

  Now two hands shoot up, Billy and Donetta. Helen is about to call on Donetta when she smiles shyly and says, “He can go first.”

  Billy runs his hand over the top of his severe crew cut, pulls his pages from his back pocket, and unfolds them. “A'ight, this is between a grandmother and her grandson Anthony, okay? I heard a guy on the el telling this story about his grandmother. A lot of this is direct quotes. The rest I made up.” He clears his throat. “Okay, so two characters, Anthony and Grandmother.”

  Anthony says, “Oh, man, you got to knock so loud? You gotta stop coming around here all the time! My neighbors are complaining.”

  Grandmother says, “Let me by, I smack you face. I got lasagna. Heat it up a little, we eat, then I want you to pluck my chin hairs.”

  Anthony says, “Shit, man.”

  Grandmother says, “I got salad too.”

  Anthony says, “You got to start calling, yo. I could be sleeping, you knock on the door like that. I could have somebody over. I could be fucking somebody, I got a girlfriend now says I look like James Dean.”

  Grandmother says, “You look like Dean Martin, Anthony. I tell you that since you five years old. You look like Dean Martin.”

  Anthony says, “You look like Dean Martin! You really do, man, that long face. And don't call me Anthony. I'm James now.”

  Grandmother starts blabbing away real fast in Italian.

  Anthony says, “English, English!”

  Grandmother says, “Madonna! It's Anthony, Anthony, Anthony! First Anthony, my husband, second, my son, third, my grandson, you don't take from me what don't belong you! You not so big I can't still hit. I can reach you face, and smack, Big Mr. Six Feet Tall.”

  Anthony says, “Fine, you can call me Anthony. You never listen to nothing.”

  Grandmother says, “Good boy. Now listen, Anthony, I need you to steal me some night creams. My skin is so dry. Look here, I touch and it fall like snow.”

  Anthony says, “Use Vaseline, why don't you? I'm tired of stealing shit for you.”

  Grandmother says, “Maybe you like to change shirts.”

  Anthony says, “Why?�
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  Grandmother says, “Maybe I kill you and I no mess up you nice shirt. We bury you in that one.”

  Anthony says, “What the fuck kind you want?”

  Grandmother says, “Estée Lauder. Get the big size, save money.”

  Anthony says, “I'm stealing it.”

  Grandmother says, “We eat and then you pluck my hairs. You got Kleenex to put them in?”

  Anthony says, “Why you gotta wrap them up? Why you gotta carry chin hairs home in your purse?”

  Grandmother says, “Look at me, nice blue suit, nice leather shoes. Always my hair in a bun, my face washed, I got nice bones in my face. Sophia Loren. You think I look like chin hairs? Anyway, I don't leave them here, you give to a gypsy to put a maledizione on me. Or you show your friends, make fun.”

  Anthony says, “Who the fuck would want to see your chin hairs? If anybody wants to see chin hairs, they look at me. I got me a fine soul patch.”

  Grandmother says, “After dinner, you shave it off. Disgustoso.”

  Anthony says, “Over my dead body.”

  Grandmother says, “Okay. Set the table; we eat, then I kill you and then I shave you.”

  Billy folds his papers and leans back in his chair. “That's all I got so far. I'm going to make it into a short story and submit it maybe to The New Yorker, I might give it to them.”

  Helen crosses her arms and leans back in her chair. She doesn't have to say a word. The class has eagerly jumped in to critique, and they are so complimentary and excited that Billy smiles. A few teeth missing near the back on one side, but a nice smile, she finally sees it. Nancy told her recently that she had once been in Billy's apartment, and it was neat as a pin. “And you know what was on his kitchen wall?” she said. “A puppy calendar!”