The Laws of Gravity (11 page)

Aunt Patti had never had a major breakthrough as an actress, no starring roles, never top billing, but she’d managed to capture the kind of small parts people remembered. She was the angry soup lady. She was the one
on the cat food commercial who tangoed with the cat. She was the woman in the bakery who had bought the last cream puff and ate it while the main character watched and cried. She had been on Broadway and off-off-Broadway; she had appeared in movies, television shows, and scores of commercials.

“I’m the queen of the bit part,” she used to brag. “If the Academy Awards ever handed out an award for Best Bit instead of those awards nobody gives a crap about, I’d have a gold statue over my fireplace.”

Nicole’s mother, Leslie, had been the brains of the family; Patti, Ari’s mother, had been the wild one. Aunt Patti was brash, even vulgar. She was a short, round, dramatic-looking character with a snub nose and high cheekbones. Almost Mongolian looking. Her hair, even now, in her eighties, was jet black, and she swore it wasn’t dyed. That meant nothing, of course. She swore to a lot of things that weren’t remotely true. Born Esther Morgenstein, she had changed her stage name to Patricia Morgan. She still lived well off the residuals of Aunt Patti reruns and the occasional commercial.

She had stayed on in the house in Little Neck where she raised Ari and his brother, Al. After her husband passed away, she moved into one of the two big rooms downstairs, and treated the Cape Cod as a ranch. There was a large backyard, filled with a tangle of thorny raspberry bushes, and a church next door, which is why they’d been able to buy it cheaply back in the 1960s. Patti didn’t start her acting career till she hit her forties; Nicole still remembered watching her aunt’s early roles in tiny basements of makeshift theaters all over Manhattan, and how her mother had scoffed at them. Nicole and Ari both had painful memories of being dragged onstage to dance with the actors, or of being showered with colored confetti and,
one memorable time, pelted with black feathers. Nicole still had one pasted into a photo album somewhere. She thought her aunt Esther brave, weird, and exotic, then and now.

So before she called Aunt Patti and told her what was going on, Nikki braced herself. Ari was the baby of her aunt’s family and her favorite son.

Nicole could only imagine what her aunt would say to all this, but she steeled herself with her new stubborn will.

Or maybe it wasn’t so new. Maybe she had just unearthed it, here in the last lap when she needed it most.

Nicole had been a rock-headed teenager, she knew that. She wondered uneasily if it had driven her father away, if it had led to her mother’s early death. Despite the softness of her face, the roundness of her curves, Nicole was someone who stood her ground. Once she had warded off a would-be rapist by planting her feet and refusing to get inside his car. Her resistance seemed to confuse him. He finally gave up and drove away. Her shapely calves were round but large, as if from having rooted herself firmly to the earth all these years.

As soon as the doorbell rang, Aunt Patti threw open her front door. The old lady still drove, though time had shrunken her so she could barely see over the top of the steering wheel. She was wearing a long black cape, dripping wet at the fringes, and she drew Nicole inside out of the wind and rain.

“You look awful,” Aunt Patti said, enfolding her niece in a hug. Her cape smelled heavily of musk perfume. “I just got in myself,” she added, stamping her feet to shake off water. “My neighbors cornered me. Right outside my own house, here in the downpour. I was just getting out of the car when they hobbled up to me. ‘Oh, Mrs. Leeds!
Mrs. Leeds!’ they cried—and that’s not even my real name, my name is Wiesenthal, same as my husband—‘We’ve got colored people moving into the neighborhood!’

“ ‘Colored people!’ I said. ‘Heavens, what colors
are
they?’

“ ‘Oh, you know what we mean,’ they said. ‘African-Americans.’—As if I didn’t know exactly what they meant. I know what they say behind my own back, too, the old cranks. ‘But what are you going to
do
about it?’ they wailed.”

Aunt Patti struck a pose on the carpet. Her mouth dropped open in mock amazement. “ ‘
Do
?’ I said. ‘What am I going to
do
about it?’ And I looked those old women right in the eye. ‘I shall treat them exactly the way I treat
all
of my neighbors,’ I told them.—‘I shall
ignore
them!’”

Nicole laughed, and Aunt Patti dragged her over to the sofa and made her sit down.

“Little Neck,” Aunt Patti said. “Little brains, little souls. I would have moved out long ago, but I love my yard and the church bells next door. They practically conduct their funerals in my driveway. It’s very baroque. Sometimes I sneak inside and take communion. They don’t know what to think.”

She bustled around, hanging Nicole’s coat on a brass coatrack in the shape of an elephant with many trunks. She shook out her own long black cape and hung it on another brass trunk. “How about I make some tea,” she said. It was not a question. She disappeared into the kitchen, a narrow galley-style room that was hardly used. Aunt Patti had never been a cook. Aunt Patti was the only woman Nicole knew who served her guests TV dinners and lasagnas still in their frozen-food foil trays.

She reappeared ten minutes later with a tea tray trembling in her arms. All of the dishes clattered together gently, and she set them down with
a look of relief. A deep red teapot, two dark red cups, and a pack of Fig Newton cookies. “I adore Fig Newtons,” she said. “These are my idea of health food.”

She poured the tea, and Nicole pretended to nibble at one of the cookies. She forced herself to eat something every morning—usually fruit with yogurt—then didn’t eat again till dinnertime, when Jay and Daisy watched her like hawks. She and her aunt sat in silence for a few minutes, drinking tea and eating the cookies. At least, Aunt Patti ate while Nicole hung on to hers. After a while Aunt Patti got up and turned on the NPR station on the radio. They were playing something with strings.

“So,” she said at last, when she had finished her tea. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“How much do you know?” Nicole asked, stalling. She had always been terrified of Aunt Patti, who seemed so much larger than life, plump and tiny as she was.

“I know Ari promised you something you need, something medical, and changed his mind.”

“That’s right,” Nicole said.

“What’s it called, again?”

“Cord blood,” Nicole said. “It’s Julian’s.”

“Cord blood.” Aunt Patti mused on it. “When I was born there was no such thing as a TV set. No computer. If you were a preemie, chances were you’d die. So Ari said yes, and then he backed out. Son of a bitch.”

She put up one short, pudgy hand. She always wore several large rings, including one enormous square aquamarine. “And do you know why?—Because he’s a frightened little man. Takes after his father. He clings to things. He was like that even as a little boy—a packrat. He collected
everything. All kinds of useless crap.” She turned the dark red teacup around and around on its little plate. “Baseball cards, shells, nails, paper clips, polished rocks. One time he decided to collect walnuts, hid them under his bed, and we ended up with white maggots all over his room. Maggots, in Little Neck.” She barked out a laugh.

“He could never let go of anything. When he outgrew his clothes, I’d try to donate them to Goodwill, but he wouldn’t let me give anything away. I might need them, he’d tell me.
When?
I asked. Probably it’s my fault. I’m not what you call the maternal type. So now he hangs on to everything.” She shook her head. “Like a dragon. Sits on a pile of crap and guards it. And that poor homely wife of his has to keep him company while he does. No wonder she tells jokes. I introduced those two, you know.”

This was not true. Nicole had introduced them in college, but it was one of Aunt Patti’s many myths. “Mimi is not homely,” is all Nicole said.

“Suit yourself,” Aunt Patti said. “A
meeskite
. Even on her wedding day. They say every bride is beautiful, but Mimi proved them wrong. She looked—what is it you say about an ugly baby? She looked
alert
.” She patted Nicole’s hand. “Now, now,” she said. “Don’t get upset. Everything you felt always showed in your face and it still does. Beauty isn’t everything.—But it doesn’t hurt, either. Right? I was a beauty. You were a beauty. Still are. But this.” She looked down again. Nicole had the funny feeling her aunt could read her future in the bottom of that red teacup. There had always been something witchy about Aunt Patti. “This is a mess.”

“What should I do?” Nicole asked.

Aunt Patti lifted her head. She’d had enough facelifts so that her features looked windblown; she always looked faintly surprised. One brown eye was wider than the other.

“Do?—You fight back. That’s what you do. And you have to act as if nothing’s wrong, as if you know everything is going to come out all right. You
have
to do it, for Daisy’s sake. You can’t just lie down on the carpet and die.”

Nicole felt relief and dread. There were days when lying down and dying seemed easier than this endless struggle. And what if in the end she lost the battle anyway? She had read the statistics. They were not good, not for cases like hers. She sat up straighter against the lemon-yellow sofa. A Van Gogh painting of a woman’s sharp face, also yellow, sat across the room from her, above the piano. The woman looked sickly. Nicole remembered the print from her childhood.

“Once upon a time,” Aunt Patti said, “your mother and I were together, driving through the Catskills. We were only teenagers. I had just gotten my license. I took her out for a ride, and on one of those mountains around Ellenville the brakes just went kaput. I felt them go. The car kept rolling downhill faster and faster, picking up speed, zooming around curves. Your mother was terrified. She started screaming.

“What could I do? She was my little sister. It was my job to take care of her. So I just pretended it was on purpose, like an amusement park ride. ‘Wheeeee!’ I yelled. ‘Isn’t this
fun
?’—And I hung on like death till the road finally started to go uphill and I could pull over to the side.

“Sometimes you go through the motions. You bluff your way through. Act like you know it’s all going to come out hunky-dory.” She laughed and crammed another Fig Newton in her mouth, then dabbed daintily at her mouth with a paper napkin, orange, decorated for Halloween. “I understand there was something in writing. May I see it?”

Nicole unzipped her big pocketbook now and handed the letter over, still in its envelope. Her aunt examined the envelope first, front and back,
then opened it. She wore her reading glasses around her neck on a beaded chain. She read slowly, moving her head from side to side. Despite all the plastic surgery, she had jowls, and age spots on the back of her hands. She looked young and old at the same time, angry and sugary. Nicole wanted to grab hold of her and hug her, the way you would an old tree that has survived a hundred storms. But you didn’t do that sort of thing with Aunt Patti. Finally she frowned over the tops of her glasses at Nicole.

“Well, it looks legal to me. Signed by a lawyer. You have to shame him into this, my darling. That’s the only way.”

“How?” asked Nicole.

“He refuses to listen to reason, right? Drag him into the public eye. He’ll hate that. Ari has always had an excessive sense of pride. When he was six years old he wet his bed. Not for the first time, mind you. And I drew myself up to my full height”—here Aunt Patti did a demonstration, and without rising from the chair, she appeared to grow several inches—“and I said, ‘Oh, Ari!
Shame
on you. Such a big boy!’—That’s all I had to say. It offended his dignity. He never had another accident again.”

She folded the paper back into thirds, slid it into the envelope, and handed it back. “There’s your weapon. Shame him. Take out an ad in the
New York Times
. Haul him into court if you have to. The public will lap it up, and Ari will hate that. He’ll back down in a red-hot minute.”

Nicole looked at her aunt. “Why are you taking my side?” she said.

“I’m not taking sides,” Aunt Patti said. “This is a matter of life and death. If they invented this cord thing now, they’ll invent something else next year, or two years from now. I’m not worried about the distant future. I’m talking about what’s happening right now. Without this, the doctors say you are going to die. Leukemia and lymphoma. Correct?”

Nicole nodded. Without intending to, she touched the side of her neck.

“The purpose of family is to preserve life,” Aunt Patti said. “We treat family members the way we’re supposed to treat everyone else on the planet. Listen, Nikki—if you died, Ari would never forgive himself. I know my son—he has a good heart. I’m protecting both of you, I’m not taking sides.”

“Jay says I can’t give up,” Nicole said.

Aunt Patti dismissed this with the wave of one hand. “Well, but Jay adores you. He’s gaga over you. He would say or do anything. I’m telling you what you
have
to do.”

Nicole shook her head. “It doesn’t feel—natural.”

“There’s nothing natural about this,” Aunt Patti said. “Maybe chewing each other to bloody stumps would be natural, I don’t know. Your brakes have gone out,” she said. “May as well pretend to enjoy the ride. All I can say is, it worked for me.—And now,” she added, “I have to take a nap. I hate to admit that.”

“I won’t tell a soul,” Nicole said. She got to her feet.

“Good,” said Aunt Patti. “And you can tell Ari I’m on your side. He won’t like that, either, but it may motivate him. That’s all my boy needs—a little motivation.”

Then, as if to demonstrate, she propelled her sick niece into her coat and out the door, into the fall sunlight.