Equal Affections (31 page)

“Oh, she's just an ambitious little singer,” Danny said. “April gets stuff like this all the time, don't you, April?”

April sat down at the table. “I didn't know what to say to her,” she said. “When she said she was sorry, I mean. I really wasn't sure what to say.”

“You should burn those songs,” Walter said. “The nerve of that girl.”

“Should I have said, ‘It's okay'? ‘Don't worry'? ‘It's not your fault'? I mean, what do you say when someone says, ‘I'm sorry your mother died'?”

“Don't worry about it, April,” Walter said. “Just put it out of your mind.”

“I'm not used to being at a loss for words,” April said. “Well, I guess I can look at her songs. It won't take me too long. And who knows, maybe she's great.”

Walter looked to Danny helplessly. “Am I hearing what I'm hearing? What's going on here?”

“Well, I really don't see how it can hurt,” Danny said. “Look, April, if you have time, do. If you don't, don't.”

“I feel like I'm missing something,” Walter said. “Your mother died yesterday, didn't she? Your mother died yesterday and this twitty girl is giving you deadlines to look at her stupid songs?”

Both Danny and April glanced up at him blankly and a little foolishly, like schoolchildren who have failed to understand a lesson.

___________

Later Clara was loading the dishes into the dishwasher when she suddenly stooped, bent over double, closed her eyes, and let out a low, sustained wail. Uncle Sy, who was sitting at the kitchen table, shuffling and reshuffling a deck of cards, stopped for a moment and looked at her. Then she pulled herself back up onto her feet, took a handkerchief from a pocket in her dress, blew her nose, and returned to loading the dishwasher. She continued to cry, softly yet unceasingly, as she loaded the dishes, and periodically stopped to wipe her eyes or blow her nose.

Nat, coming into the kitchen, found her this way. He approached her the way he had always approached Louise, from behind, putting his hands on her hot shoulders.

“You know, Clara,” he said, “you'll always have a job with me. Don't you worry about that.”

“Mrs. Cooper's with God,” Clara said, reaching back and putting her own hand over Nat's. “I know. She told me she saw the light, and now she's with God.”

“Yes,” Nat said. “Maybe she is,”

___________

At seven everyone who was still left loaded into three cars and headed off to Ming's, a big, fancy Chinese place by the freeway. That
afternoon the university's annual football reunion had kicked off, so the restaurant was full of huge men in rented tuxedos, drinking shots of brandy and recalling magnificent plays.

“Order anything you want,” Uncle Herb said. “It's on me.”

“Yup,” Uncle Sy said. “It's on me.”

No one was interested in ordering except Danny and April. They had always been rather aggressive at Chinese restaurants, and tonight, almost in tribute to their lost mother, they took the huge menu between them and fought it out, haggling and bargaining to orchestrate a perfect balance among all the particular tastes assembled tonight, not to mention Joanne's vegetarianism, Uncle Herb's low-salt diet, and the aversion of half the table to anything “too hot.” The only thing they did not argue over was sweet and sour shrimp, though both of them despised it. It had been their mother's favorite.

They ordered a vast quantity of food, so much that Uncle Herb looked a little blanched, even though he kept saying, “Anything, anything. It's on me.” Soon the dishes began to arrive. The sweet and sour shrimp glistened like neon in their thick red syrup. Platters filled up the lazy Susan at the center of the table and were taken away, only to be replaced by other platters. Across from Danny, Nat was nodding wearily at Aunt Eleanor, who was telling him about the terrible experience she'd just had with her home computer. “I'd just finished putting every recipe I have into that thing,” she was saying, “and then, the next day, I stick the disk into the slot—whammo, it's empty. Every recipe I ever had, gone.”

“Didn't you have a backup?” Nat asked.

“No, I didn't know I needed one.”

“Well, you must have the hard copy.”

“Hard copy?”

“Paper. You must still have the recipes on paper.”

“Oh, no. I'd burned them all the night before. Burned my bridges, you might say. I thought, This is the age of the computer, Eleanor, why keep your drawers stuffed with all those ratty notebooks?” She sighed. “There must have been about a thousand recipes, some dating back to my grandmother, and all of them now, just gone. When I think of the hours I spent!”

“That's terrible, Eleanor. I'm sorry.”

“Eh, you live and learn. So here's my question: What do you think I can get in court?”

“In court?”

“From the company. You know, for loss of income, loss of documents crucial to my career, emotional distress.”

Nat put a hand on his forehead. “Eleanor,” he said, “if you didn't make a backup copy—”

“So what? I still bet I'd have a case.”

Nat buried his face in his hands, then unburied it and tried to explain to Eleanor why it would be unfair and unethical for her to bring the computer company to court when she hadn't made a backup, and everyone knows—it was the first rule of computers—that you should always make a backup.

“Backup, shmackup, how was it my fault? To this day I don't know how it happened. I put the disk in, I took the disk out, I put the disk in again and it's ‘unreadable.' How is that my fault, I'd like to know?”

“I'm not saying it's your fault. The disk got dusty, or something glitched. These things happen sometimes. Who knows? The point is, you should have made a backup, so even if you do get money out of the computer company or the disk company, it won't be fair.”

“Well,” Eleanor said. “From now on, I guess I always will make a backup. Listen, if it comes to trial, can I call you as an expert witness?”

Nat looked grimly at the table.

“That was a joke, Natty,” Eleanor said. “Ha-ha.”

“Ha,” Nat said.

“Anyway, I'm not really serious about suing. Ah, look!” A waiter was arriving with yet another platter. “Good old shrimp with lobster sauce. Remember that place in Boston we used to go, Natty? You and me and Louisy and Sid? With the shrimp with black beans. We were so young. I tell you, it really makes you feel old to lose a sister. All my life I know I'll have certain things, but never again in my life will I have a sister.”

She took the napkin from her lap, touched it to her eyes. Nat didn't say anything.

“Look, let's be honest for once,” Eleanor said. “I know Louisy didn't like me too much all the time. I don't blame her, I was a pain in the neck. But I loved her. I really did. You think she knew that?”

“Yes,” Nat said. “Oh, Eleanor, of course she knew that.”

“I felt sorry for her all these years. Being sick like that. I really did feel for her. It just seemed every time I tried to show it she pushed me away—”

Nat wriggled uncomfortably. “Eleanor, Louise really loved you too. You just irritated each other. That's common with sisters. Anyway, she pushed a lot of people away. She wasn't very good at accepting sympathy, she always assumed it was pity.”

“We used to sit together on that little twin toilet,” Eleanor said, and took a deep breath. “Well, enough of this. I'll just pull myself back together here.” She sat up straight.

“Danny,” she said, “would you please pass the beef?”

“I think it's pork, Aunt Eleanor.”

“It doesn't matter,” Eleanor said. “Pass it anyway.”

___________

It was on his way from the bathroom, which was full of vomiting football players, that Danny once again had the vision of his mother: She was looking hungrily down as usual, an angel on each side, only this time—he saw it distinctly—there was a bandage over her mouth. A single square of white gauze. Why a bandage? He tried to hear her voice in his head, and suddenly it was gone. Sentences she had often used spoke out of his mind, but in vague, uncharacterized intonations. Her voice, which Danny had heard a thousand, a hundred thousand times, which was as inescapably her own as a set of fingerprints, or handwriting—how could memory lose something so precious as that? He tried to recall if there was anywhere a tape recording, or a super-eight movie—something on which there might be preserved the minutest reminding fraction of how his mother spoke—but from heaven, Louise, her mouth a square of light, looked down at him and shook her head: no.

Across the room some of the football players had cleared away the tables, linked arms, and formed a chorus line. “We're gonna beat the fuck out of those Oregon ducks,” they were singing as they kicked out their legs in haphazard synchrony. Danny sat down. Fortune cookies
went round. There was a cracking sound as all around the table the little crescents of stale dough were broken open, the slips of paper extracted and read. “I got two,” Uncle Sy announced. “What does that mean?”

“Double good luck, Uncle Sy,” Cousin Joanne said.

“Or else they cancel each other out,” Eleanor added. “No one knows the answer to this mystery.”

“Well, I hope Joanne's right,” Sy said. “Because they're both goodies.”

He looked hopefully round the table, but no one asked him to read his fortunes aloud.

___________

“What a stupid dinner,” Nat said in the car, on the way home. “And by the way, who can I thank for sitting me down next to Eleanor? That woman is the biggest pain in the ass I have ever known in my life, and I can tell you now, I didn't appreciate it. Boring me to death all evening with her ridiculous lawsuits and recipes and computer problems.”

“I don't know how it happened,” Danny said.

“Why do you have to imply that everything is someone's fault?” said April. “Jesus, there weren't place cards, Daddy; people sat where they sat.”

“Yeah, well, someone could have done me the favor of taking the place next to Eleanor instead of just leaving the space open for whoever happened to be stupid enough at that moment to go to the bathroom. Tonight, of all nights, someone could have been thoughtful enough to consider in advance what might be nice to do for me.” He shook his head. “Whoever had this idea of going to a restaurant in the first place was an idiot. No one wanted to be in a stupid restaurant. And all that food! It was gross, positively gross. People in mourning shouldn't eat like pigs.”

Danny looked in shame at the floor of the car.

“I think,” Walter said cautiously, “that Herb and Sy just needed to do something—you know, to give something.”

“Sure,” Nat said. “They meant well. But, Jesus, after what I've just been through—what we've just been through—it was the last thing I needed. All of this, this whole day—it was all too much. I wanted something quiet, something respectful. Other people had to make it a fucking bar mitzvah.”

“You know, Dad,” April said, “if you want to accuse me of something, I wish you'd just come out and do it. I wish you'd just say what you're thinking: You just wanted a nice little party, but uh-oh, here comes your crass, vulgar daughter, who bakes a zillion cakes and insists everyone go out for dinner and doesn't even sit down next to Aunt Eleanor for Daddy's sake, like a good little girl would.”

“April—”

“Fuck the truth. Fuck the fact that she was my mother, not just your wife, and you didn't lift a goddamned finger all day. Who cares if Eleanor made ten times as much food as I did, or that Uncle Sy had the idea for the dinner? If it's convenient, just yell at me, blame me—”

“April, would you just stop it? A fight is the last thing I need right now.”

“No, I won't! You act like you're the only person in the world who's ever felt anything, like no one loved Mom but you. Everything has to be your way, no speeches, Mom wouldn't have liked it, no songs, Mom wouldn't have liked it, nothing too fancy, Mom wouldn't have approved, and now, no fight, I'm not up to it, I have to be protected. Well, that's bullshit, Dad. You're not the only one who gets to make decisions, or vent their feelings, or—or anything—”

“Will you be quiet?” Nat shouted. “Will you just please stop yelling, April?”

“We're all a little overexcited here,” Walter said. “Why don't we try to calm down?”

They were pulling into the driveway. Almost immediately Nat switched off the ignition, moved to open his door.

“You act like you loved her so much,” April said. “That's what I can't believe. That's what absolutely kills me.”

“And just what do you mean by that?” Nat said, turning to face her. “Are you saying I didn't love your mother? Then I would like to ask
you, April, what the hell gives you the right to judge whether or not I loved your mother?”

“Because if you loved her, you wouldn't have been fucking someone else,” April said.

There was a sudden silence.

“Don't act so surprised,” April said. “It didn't take a genius to figure it out.”

Slowly Nat removed his hand from the door latch and leaned his head against the steering wheel. “Oh, God,” he said quietly. “Oh, Jesus.” And he started to cry.

“Yeah, you cry,” April said. “You cry.” She got out of the car and, running into the driveway, started spinning herself in a mad circle, her arms in the air, the way she often had as a little girl, whirling and whirling until it seemed to be the world that was whirling. In the midst of it all she jumped up once, heaved her arm into the sky, as if the moon were a ball she wanted to catch, and, flailing suddenly, landed hard on her behind.

“Shit!” she said. Walter jumped out of the car after her, shouting her name.