Emma's Table (12 page)

They finished serving without incident, and Emma took the tray from his hands, nodding with a slightly exaggerated courtesy. She went back to the kitchen for a large plate of biscotti, all dappled with icing and drizzled with jam.

She took her seat again.

It looked to Benjamin as if she'd recovered.

“I read a fascinating article in the
Times
this morning,” Emma said, addressing the table, rallying her troops.

Benjamin smiled in her direction and bit into a delicate cookie. It was soft and delicious, tasting of sweet almond paste and the crunchy pine nuts that dotted the top. He suspected that she'd made them herself.

“It was about this group called Doctors without Borders,” she said.

Benjamin nodded briskly, wanting to help her along.

“Did you see it?” she asked.

“I must have missed it,” he said, shaking his head.

No one else at the table had seen it either.

Benjamin rarely got much further with the Sunday paper than the crossword puzzle. He'd begun trying his hand at it—with Melora's help—several months before, after hearing the Sutton women comparing triumphant notes one night. They carried the puzzle around with them for most of the day, printed on an onionskinned page of the
New York Times Magazine
. Even so, they rarely got very far.

Benjamin squeezed Melora's hand beneath the table. They were nearly finished here, he meant to tell her; she smiled right back.

They could always find a few easy clues: the five-letter “Tatum” from
Paper Moon
, the obligatory African plains, beginning with a
v
; but there were always boxes and boxes that he couldn't begin to fill in, pristine and empty on that slightly crinkled page. He never had so much as an inkling of the special theme that tied those impossibly long answers together, stretching from one end of the tidy grid clear across to the other: that clever homophone whose discovery would unlock the whole thing, that cunning use of the letter
x
.

Benjamin knew that Emma finished those puzzles in a single go, her clever daughter just thirty-five seconds behind her.

Yes, he thought, they're quite a twosome.

“Doctors without Borders?” Cassy said, a little contemptuously. “You mean those goody-two-shoes volunteers?”

Emma nodded, but Benjamin could see that she didn't like her daughter's tone.

“The ones who go to third-world countries?” Melora asked.

Benjamin had heard of them too—leaving their cushy private practices at home, and ministering to the poor in far-off places. They'd always seemed so noble to him; he couldn't imagine what Cassy could have against them.

“The article was about this young woman,” Emma told them, “a plastic surgeon who spends half her time in Malawi. She's set up a clinic there to operate on kids with birth defects.”

“Where the hell is Malawi?” Bobby asked, a little drunkenly.

“In Africa,” Emma replied, waving him off. That wasn't her point.

“People come from hundreds of miles away to see her,” she continued, “some of them on foot. The clinic's gotten incredibly busy, but she's only got a few pieces of makeshift furniture. People are sitting on boxes.”

Melora passed Benjamin the cookie plate again. She didn't take any herself, of course; those cookies were loaded with white sugar. Benjamin felt grateful to her for leaving it at that, simply going without.

“Maybe we should donate some furniture?” Benjamin said. He was always calculating his boss's angle.

“That's just what I was thinking,” Emma replied. “What do you think, Cassy?” She turned to her daughter, the titular head of her charitable foundation.

Cassy didn't look impressed.

“In my experience,” she said—as hard-boiled as any pundit on a Sunday-morning news show—“those volunteers are much better at making themselves feel good than they are at actually helping people on the ground.”

Benjamin knew that Cassy was only resisting the idea because he'd suggested it. It had to be better than all those stupid “show houses” where they were always donating furniture—designers gussying up an apartment to hell and back, allegedly raising money for charity by charging admission at the door.

“I think you should check it out,” Emma told her.

“Go to Malawi?” Cassy asked.

“Or call the woman up, at least,” Benjamin suggested.

“Exactly,” Emma said.

Everyone at the table turned to Cassy then—her mother and father, Melora even. Benjamin watched their reflections, staring at the girl in the ancient mirrors. He wondered if they could see, as clearly as he did, that the topic was rubbing Cassy terribly wrong. Benjamin watched her hardening in her seat. She didn't have the softest face to begin with—all whippet-sharp features and steely gray eyes—but it was pure rock salt now, suitable for the iciest of winter roads.

“Sounds like you should give Benjamin my job,” Cassy said, glaring back at her mother.

“What are you talking about?” Emma replied.

He could hear that she was losing her patience with the girl.

Why hadn't she just stood up and helped her mother with that stupid coffee tray? he wondered.

“I wasn't complaining,” Emma said.

“And I've already got a job,” Benjamin added, smiling at Cassy, as if to defuse the situation. He saw right away that he hadn't.

“That's right,” Cassy said, the contempt dripping off her like a leaky faucet. “In an elementary school.”

“Come on,” Bobby said, as if to nip her offensive in the bud. “Be nice, Cassy.”

Benjamin appreciated the gesture, but he knew it was about as useful as asking an apple not to ripen on its leafy branch. It reminded him of those long-ago car trips he used to take with his family, sitting in the backseat, taunted by his older sister to the brink of tears. He refused to give in to them though; he was stoic to the end, but his sister was just as relentless, clamped on like a pit bull on the vinyl seat beside him.

“Be nice,” their father always told her.

Benjamin knew that “nice” was out of the question.

He decided to look straight past Cassy's insult. “Just training the furniture buyers of tomorrow,” he said, smiling still, as if to show he didn't hold a grudge. He thought it was rather charming of him, under the circumstances.

Benjamin finished his coffee and looked around the table.

He wanted to get the hell out of there. He knew from experience that it would be a fragile cease-fire. He began to calculate how long it would be before he could collect their coats from the front closet and leave this place.

“Maybe you should just write a check to Doctors without Borders,” Cassy said, turning back to Emma.

Benjamin felt safely off the hook.

“I could do that,” Emma replied. “If I wanted to.” She wasn't the type to run scared from her daughter, or anyone else, for that matter.

“I know you could,” Cassy said. “Although you're not exactly known for charity.”

“Is that so?” Emma replied calmly, nodding her head a little as she did. He could see that she was officially out of patience. “Would you care to tell me what I
am
known for?” she asked, throwing the gauntlet down.

Benjamin nearly jumped into the fray, interposing himself between the women warriors. “Why, you're the queen of interior design,” he might have said. “That's what you're known for, Emma.”

But it was too late by then. He could see from the set of Cassy's jaw that she was moving in for the kill.

Benjamin wrapped his arms loosely around himself, as if he were chilly in that temperate dining room. He felt like a passenger in a slow-moving vehicle, heading straight for a six-car pileup. He could see it all.

“‘Convicted felon' would probably top the list,” Cassy said, as lightly as if she were telling the time.

“That's enough of that,” Bobby barked at the girl.

Benjamin watched her shrug her father off, just like his sister always had.

He turned to Emma, who looked frozen in place. On closer inspection though, he could see that she was vibrating slightly—thrumming with rage like a red-tailed warbler, hovering in the air above its perch, wings aflutter.

Cassy had hit her mark.

Of course, it didn't take very long for Emma to recover her
self. She crouched forward in her seat like an angry predator, but he couldn't help seeing that she looked a little shrunken too—a couple of inches smaller in every dimension.

Benjamin had forgotten all about Cassy's cutting remark to him.

He only had eyes for Emma now, the gaping wound her daughter was so happy to inflict. He'd never seen his boss at human scale before—not even when she'd stood on those courthouse steps, announcing to the world, via fifty-seven camera crews, that she'd be going away for a little while.

It was a brand-new experience for him, seeing Emma cut down to size.

He wasn't sure he liked it.

 

TINA COULDN'T BELIEVE HER EYES.

Something
must have changed around here, she thought, standing inside the front door still, surveying the wide-open room before her, but she'd be damned if she could find the thing that had. Even the giant poster was there—straight ahead, on the tiled wall in front of her: a man with a prosthetic leg doing the long jump, or the broad jump, some kind of jump anyway, and landing roughly in a sandy pit, hardscrabble determination written all over his face.

“Yes, you can!” the caption blared.

Tina knew that poster as well as she knew her own name—and for almost as long, it seemed. The photograph made her just as squeamish as it always had. She felt a fluttering in her stomach and the jitters in her legs. She fixed on the spot where the man's fake shin met up with his stump of leg, a spiderweb of shiny metal somehow holding the thing in place.

She looked away from his awful landing, just as she always had—that jarring mash of metal and plastic and skin—but not before she wondered at the perfect uselessness of the man's left sneaker, its bright white laces done up tight, protecting a fake foot from whatever it needed protection from.

Gracie pulled her mother into the massive room.

And that smell, Tina marveled—like a roundhouse punch of chlorine bleach. She'd know it anywhere.

She showed her membership card to their local Y to the woman who sat at the entry desk. It was probably the same woman she'd spoken with earlier. Tina smiled at her when she asked Gracie her name. She'd called the branch closer to home, first, wanting to confirm the pool hours there, but found it closed for renovations. So she pulled out the phone book and located a replacement pool—the one near her parents' house in Forest Hills.

“You said we were going swimming,” Gracie whined when they climbed up out of the subway, “not to Poppy's house.” She must have recognized the landscape, Tina supposed—the Korean deli on the corner maybe, or the video store across the street.

“We
are
going swimming,” Tina replied, pulling her winter coat tight.

She felt a little whiny herself, not exactly thrilled at the prospect of a chilly swim on a winter's evening, but she was the one who'd dreamed it up, after all—making amends to Gracie for a phony party at the Baptist church, a weight-loss meeting in drag.

“Good,” Gracie said, looking up at her a little bashfully. She rarely whined.

They walked hand in hand, just five or six blocks more,
to the YMCA where Tina had gone as a child. It was her first visit back in what felt like ten thousand years.

On reflection, she supposed it was more like ten.

The woman at the front desk waved them past; they walked deeper into the building. Tina saw the skinny pools straight ahead: two of them, in fact, just ten feet wide and twenty-five yards long. They were laid out neatly, side by side, the indoor version beneath a cage of foggy glass, and the outdoor one right beside it, emptied out in the dead of winter, surrounded by patches of mangy snow.

“There are
two
pools here?” Gracie asked, barely containing herself.

She pulled her hand away from Tina's and scampered down the hall to take a better look—her flame red coat, all puffy with down, bouncing up and down with every step. Tina had wanted to buy her a cloth coat—navy and fitted, she thought, as slimming as possible—but Gracie wouldn't hear of it. The girls at school wore puffy coats.

Her daughter looked like a beefsteak tomato as she bobbed down the hall.

Tina tried to shake it off.

It wasn't so hard really. She felt a little excited to be there herself. When she recognized the sunbathing area—that tiny patch of concrete just beyond the outdoor pool—she nearly laughed out loud.

Was it really that small? she wondered.

An image of her eighteen-year-old self flashed before her eyes. And not like looking backward, not like turning around on a mountain path and gazing back down the hill you'd climbed to the pretty glade a mile or two back. No—for that moment, Tina
was
eighteen again, all oiled and shining at
the water's edge, lazing a summer afternoon away. She was sprawled out on the tanning deck, as pretty as a floral centerpiece—a spray of white roses maybe, in a long, slim vase—nothing but her two-piece and a thin beach towel between her own soft skin and the rough concrete floor, its texture as prickly as a bed of thorns.

Tina could feel the sun bearing down on her—its hot, rough fingers grabbing tight. She closed her eyes lightly and lifted her face to the searing heat. How she loved that burning stillness, the wavy sizzle on soft eyelids.

It never lasted long, of course.

There was always some commotion there, a rush of testosterone from the boys in the pool. Tommy, probably, she thought—shaking her head at the memory of him, her great love in those silly years—the hair on his arms and legs bleached to blond, his frayed cutoffs riding low.