Family Secrets (68 page)

“What month is this?” Hazel asked Mrs. Barkis one day.

“Why, October, dear. October first.”

“Richie was coming back in September.”

“Well, he’ll be back soon, dear. Here’s your happy pill now.”

“It makes me sad,” Hazel said.

“Don’t be silly. It makes you happy. Positive Thinking, dear. Drink it down.”

“I want to call the doctor.”

“Now, what would you say to him?”

“Tell him I feel sick.”

“Oh, you feel fine. Now why don’t you watch a little TV?” Mrs. Barkis switched on the set and settled herself down to watch her game shows. She loved game shows. She watched every one of them. She said it was “just like a college education.” Hazel didn’t understand the game shows and didn’t like them. She liked the prizes the people won and liked seeing how happy they were to get them. It was nice to see that people were so glad to get a present. There wasn’t any present Hazel could think of that she wanted any more, except maybe to see her grandson just once and hold him.

“C’n we go to the store?” Hazel asked.

Mrs. Barkis looked pleased. “The store? You want to go to the store?”

“I said that.”

“Well, we’ll go this afternoon after our naps, dear.”

“Why can’t we go now?”

“Well, what do you need that’s so important?”

“For Harrison. A present for Harrison.”

“Oh, all right,” Mrs. Barkis said. She hoisted herself out of her easy chair with great difficulty. “I need some stockings anyway. They just don’t last any more like they used to. I think it’s the air pollution. That smog just eats away the nylon. They say if you stand in front of the exhaust of a car your stockings just fall apart, and I believe it.” On and on, blah blah. Hazel didn’t mind this time. She had her secret.

At the store they went to the toy department and Hazel bought a big, cuddly baby doll, just the same size as Harrison was the last time she remembered him. It had on blue sleepers with feet, and it had reddish hair just like her grandson. Hazel let them wrap it. Back in the apartment she put the gift wrapped box into her own closet and shut the door. It was her closet and Mrs. Barkis wasn’t allowed in there. She was so excited she could hardly wait until after lunch when Mrs. Barkis lay down for her afternoon nap and soon was snoring. Then Hazel went into her closet and unwrapped the package, folding up the gift paper and ribbon neatly, and took the baby doll in her arms to the living room.

She sat on the chair and held the baby doll tenderly, rocking it. It felt good in her arms, not as heavy as she remembered Richie when he was that age, but soft like a baby. It had rubber baby skin and she put her cheek against the baby doll’s cheek and felt how nice it was.

“Sleep, baby,” she said. “Sleep.”

Mrs. Barkis found her that way when she woke up from her nap and came into the living room: sitting in the chair asleep with the baby doll cuddled in her arms. “Oh my,” Mrs. Barkis said, but then she didn’t say anything else.

Richie called on the phone. He was back! Hazel wanted him to come over right away, to let her go to see him, but he said no, they were very tired from their trip and he and Gilda both had stomach trouble from drinking all those different kinds of water in all those different countries, even though you ordered bottled water you couldn’t always trust them in the out-of-the-way places. But Harrison was fine. Richie said he would see her as soon as he felt better.

Hazel waited. She didn’t know how many days it was. It was a long time. Then one day Richie came to see her and brought her a new picture of him and Harrison and Gilda standing in front of a building he said was the Kremlin, in Moscow, Russia.

“Papa came from Russia,” Hazel said.

“You mean Grandpa.”

“Your grandpa. Papa. He came from Russia.”

“I know,” Richie said.

“Then why would you want to
go
there?” Hazel asked, bewildered.

“Why, it’s historical.” Richie said. “It’s broadening. Travel is educational.”

Hazel studied the photograph. “Harrison looks so big.”

“He is big,” Richie said proudly.

“When can I see him?”

“Soon. I’ll bring him over soon.”

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“You know where I live, Mother.”

“No. I forgot.”

“I live where we’ve always lived. Same house.”

“The little house?”

“Yes.”

“We should all be together in our old house,” Hazel said.

“I have to go to the office now,” Richie said.

“Office?”

“I have to take care of things. All our family business.” He reminded her of Herman. She smiled at him.

Richie left. “Oh,” Mrs. Barkis said, “you forgot to give him the present for your little grandson.”

“What present?”

“The doll.”

“Harrison’s too big,” Hazel said angrily. “I know that. You think I’m dumb. That doll is
my
doll.”

She waited and waited for Richie to come back. He had promised her he’d come back. Richie wouldn’t break a promise. Sometimes he called on the phone to ask the nurse if she was all right. If she knew it was him Hazel would make Mrs. Barkis let her talk to him. She always asked Richie when he would come to see her and he always said he would come soon, but he didn’t come. Hazel thought maybe he couldn’t stand to look at her. She looked at herself in the mirror over the bathroom sink and she knew she looked awful. She was so old and skinny and her face didn’t go together right. Her mouth seemed to go one way and her chin another, and she trembled. She looked ugly. It must make Richie sad to see her look so ugly. She wished she looked better. She had stopped wearing her bridge because it hurt her gums, and now when she talked nobody could understand her at all, not that there was anybody to talk to. But Mrs. Barkis couldn’t seem to understand her and that made Hazel feel so alone it was scary.

She didn’t have anything any more. She felt sadder and lonelier every day. She was so lonesome it hurt her chest to breathe. She felt like crying all the time, but she wouldn’t give Mrs. Barkis the satisfaction. Time went by so slowly. Sometimes she remembered lots of things and other times she would look around the apartment and wonder what she was doing there. She should be in her own house, doing all the things she had to do, picking out which dress to wear when she went out tonight with Herman, seeing that Richie was all right; what was this place? Who was that woman? Then she would remember. Everything was gone. She would be better off dead.

At night Hazel took her baby doll to bed with her. She put it to sleep under the covers, with its head on the pillow, and then she lay very quietly beside it until they both fell asleep. She wished it would make her be young again. When she was a girl she’d had a doll. When she looked back she thought she had been happy then. She used to think she was lonesome but she didn’t know what it was to be lonesome until now. Richie was never going to come to see her. He was too busy. Even if he did see her, it wouldn’t make things the same as they were before. It wouldn’t bring back her husband and her little boy and her happy life with all their friends in the winters and then the happy summers with the family in the country. That was all gone. There wasn’t anything left.

Hazel knew where Mrs. Barkis hid all the pills. The pink ones were the dangerous ones, the ones that could kill you if you took too many. They were her heart pills. She could take them all and she would go to sleep and when she woke up everything would be all right again. If she could just go to sleep for a long, long time, years and years, it would be all right afterward. If she died, Hazel knew, everyone would be sorry, and then they would be nicer to her. She knew she wouldn’t ever wake up if she died, but somehow it didn’t seem real. Dying meant not having to be here, always so sad and lonely and waiting for something good to happen that never did. She couldn’t imagine herself not being anywhere. But she could imagine this great lump of loneliness rising off her chest, and being peaceful.

She waited until one afternoon when Mrs. Barkis was having her afternoon nap. Mrs. Barkis was so tired from having to get up all night that she slept very hard in the afternoon and nothing bothered her. Hazel waited until the snores were even and deep and then she went into Mrs. Barkis’ bathroom, the one she wasn’t allowed to use, and looked into the medicine chest. There was a plastic bag with a zipper on top, like a makeup bag, only she knew Mrs. Barkis had a great big box for her makeup, and sure enough, inside that little plastic bag were all Hazel’s pills. The white ones were the happy pills. The blue ones were something else, she wasn’t sure. There were some other white ones she took whenever her ankles swelled. And there were the pink ones!

There was a whole bottle of pink pills because Mrs. Barkis had just had the prescription refilled. Oh, Hazel wasn’t so dumb. She had heard Mrs. Barkis on the phone the other day calling the drugstore. A whole bottle of those pink pills would be enough to make her die. Hazel took the bottle into her own bathroom, tiptoeing, and drank them all down with a big glass of water.

She lay down on the living room couch with her doll because she didn’t want to go into that bedroom. She didn’t feel like it was her own bedroom because Mrs. Barkis slept there at night in the other bed. The other bedroom was Mrs. Barkis’ bedroom, where she kept all her clothes and had her afternoon nap, so that wasn’t Hazel’s either. Nothing in that apartment was really hers. She just lived there. The living room couch was a good place for a visitor. She was a visitor. She wouldn’t be there long. She was glad. The afternoon sun was streaming in through the windows and she could hear cars going by down below in the street. It was hard to hear them because of the air conditioning. The room was too cold. Hazel’s fingers were all numb and she dropped the doll, but she didn’t know it till she heard it thump because she couldn’t feel it. She felt funny, but she wasn’t scared, she was happy. Her heart was pounding like she was getting ready to go on a big adventure.

Everyone said it was terrible about Hazel accidentally taking an overdose of her medicine. She must have been feeling unwell and had stumbled into the bathroom and taken more pills than she should have. She had dropped some on the sink and on the floor because her hands were shaking, so it never occurred to anyone that it was anything but an accident. Mrs. Barkis said she felt so guilty, but you couldn’t watch her twenty-four hours a day. They should have had a relief nurse. The family regretfully agreed. Poor Hazel always tried to be so independent, didn’t want to be a bother to anybody, must have thought she’d just take a pill and forgot and took more.

Richie insisted on a very Orthodox funeral. The family didn’t object because they knew that when she was alive Hazel had always agreed with anything her son had wanted to do, and whatever he had wanted she had wanted.

FOUR

When Buffy was in her senior year of high school she wrote to the New York chapter of the Amateur Athletic Union for her AAU card and entered her first track meet. After some thought she had decided to be a long-distance runner, because girls could continue in long-distance running much longer than sprinting, until they were even thirty years old. She wanted a long career. Besides, she liked the idea of distance. Distance meant escape.

All her classmates were applying to colleges, and Buffy had already decided to go to Bakersfield, because they had track meets there and it was one of the colleges where runners went. This first meet which she had entered would qualify her to get into Bakersfield if she met the standard. She knew she could.

“Bakersfield?” her parents said. “What kind of college is that?”

“It’s the University of Southern California.”

“Oh, California,” her father said. “You want to be a hippie.”

Buffy just shrugged. Let him think she wanted to be a flower child, at least he would think it was better than being a runner.

At the last minute before the meet began she was a little nervous. Maybe these girls were better than she had thought. So much depended on winning. It was all she had wanted, all she had thought about, for all these years, her first step on her life plan. But when she started to run everything became familiar and she wasn’t afraid at all. Buffy and her body were friends; she had taught it and forced it and developed it until it responded exactly the way she wanted it to. If she didn’t keep after it, it might fail her. But it respected her will, and she respected its will, and she had made it give in to her terms. She was leaving all the other girls behind her, but that didn’t mean anything if they were too slow. But at the end of the race she found that she was not only first, but had bettered the standard.

The girls were socializing now, being friendly, but Buffy wasn’t interested. She walked away, drying her wet face with a towel, and then she went home.

Her mother wanted to buy her a new wardrobe for college. Skirts, sweaters, even pants if she insisted, and nice clothes for dating.

“People don’t date any more, Mother,” Buffy said.

“What do you mean they don’t date? They sit home?”

“No, I mean a boy doesn’t call you up and ask you out for next Saturday night, and you don’t put on a black dress and go dancing. Boys and girls are more like friends today. You just go out when you feel like it, and you don’t dress up. You wear jeans, you go to the movies or something.”

“Well, I certainly didn’t expect you to do more, at your age,” her mother said. “I expect you to be friends. We were always friends, when I was your age. I don’t expect you to fall in love and get married at eighteen, you know. But you need some nice dresses. I never heard of a girl going off to college without some nice dresses.”

She let her mother buy her whatever she wanted. As long as it was her mother’s money who cared? She then shortened the “nice dresses” until her mother screamed that she could see Buffy’s underpants, which was fine with Buffy because she knew her long, well-shaped legs were her best feature. She’d had her frizzy beige hair straightened, and now it was sort of reddish and the ends looked as if she’d been electrocuted. She wanted to grow it long and her mother wanted her to go to the hairdresser and get it trimmed, and finally Buffy gave in and said she would let him trim the frayed ends. The bastard nearly gave her a crew cut. Now she really looked like those dikey runners her father was always making fun of. Everybody in the family said it was a big improvement and looked cute. Thank God for eye makeup. At least people knew she was a girl.