Three Women (20 page)

“Are you serious?”

“Sure as I’m standing here.”

“How can you be?”

“It’s one of those little miracles, isn’t it? Not so little. I’m three months along.”

Marta and Jim had tried to get pregnant after the loss of their baby girl. She had been pregnant twice and miscarried twice. Then they had given up, for it was too heartbreaking. “That’s wonderful,” Suzanne said. “Have you told Jim?”

“No! I won’t until my pregnancy is further along. I could still lose the baby, Suzanne. Remember what happened before.”

“I still think you should tell him.”

“Why?”

Suzanne could hardly say, so he won’t consider getting into an affair with Elena. “I think he has a right to know what’s going on with you. If you keep it from him, he’ll feel you don’t trust him, that you’re afraid to let him in.”

“I don’t believe he’ll take it that way. Wouldn’t he understand I just didn’t want him to endure weeks and weeks of uncertainty?”

“Besides,” Suzanne said, beginning to seriously consider Marta’s situation, “aren’t you at least a little scared? You’re forty-six. Your son was born twenty years ago. It’s not like you’re…I mean you’re not twenty-six now.”

“I’m healthy. My ob-gyn lady says I’m in good shape. She thinks I can do it. I’m sure going to try, Suzanne. Besides, my mother was forty-one when she had me. It runs in the family.”

Forty-one when she had you and dead now, Suzanne thought but did not say. “Please tell Jim. I think it would be good for both of you to share this, even the waiting.”

“I’ll think about it.” Marta grimaced. “You’re the first person I’ve told. And don’t you tell him! I’d kill you.”

“I promise. I wouldn’t steal your thunder.”

“And I promise I’ll consider telling him.”

“Please, do.”

“But Suzanne,” Jake said, drawing her name out the way he did when he was teasing or remonstrating with her, so that it had three syllables, “you don’t have anything to tell Marta. You don’t know one fact.”

“True. But I feel like a disloyal friend sitting on my suspicions.”

“And how would you like it if you told her and she miscarried?”

Suzanne felt a sharp pain in her gut. “Oh my god…If only I could figure out what’s happening, whether anything is happening.”

“But since you don’t know zip, you should keep your mouth shut and don’t let on even that you have suspicions.”

Sometimes she wondered if his advice was good, or just intended to avoid hassles and yet more complications in her life. “I did speak already with Elena.”

“Just chill for a while and let it go. You feel responsible for everything. I want you to fix the weather. It’s too humid.”

She buried her face in his chest. The hair tickled her cheek, but she did not mind. She wanted to crawl inside him and hide. “If you asked me to fix the weather, I’d probably try. Then I’d fail and feel guilty.” She sometimes felt as if the less time they had, the more energy they felt free to spend on each other when they were together. Was it real then? Did that matter? They presented only a certain side to each other, she was sure. She wavered between thinking he was genuinely passionate
about her or just an opportunist who wanted to recruit her to his cause and did not mind doing so in bed. Perhaps he was both. She did not even know if she wanted to reach a final conclusion about him. She needed what they had too badly to subject it to her usual level of scrutiny.

“Feel guilty for not spending more time with me.”

“Jake, I feel guilty for the time I do spend.” She sighed. “So what’s happening with your case in California? The one that goes back to that demonstration against logging old-growth redwoods. Will it be dismissed?”

“It doesn’t look that way. My lawyer is arguing for a change of venue. The logging of old redwoods is an important industry to most of the people in the town, and they passionately hate us for trying to stop them. The local prosecutor is going after me for everything they can think of: trespassing, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct. Conspiracy to commit an unlawful act and conspiracy to obstruct commerce. The last two are felonies. My lawyer is trying to get the felony indictments reduced to misdemeanors. He thinks I can finally plead guilty to trespassing and get off with a week or two in jail or a stiff fine. It’s a matter of them seeing me as the outside agitator who’s trying to steal their livelihood away and close them down. We got a lot of press coverage, making them furious.”

“It sounds inflated. Do you think they’ll bargain down?”

“My lawyer thinks they have to. He wants a change of venue because, as he says, in that town, they’d convict me of wife beating though I’m not married. It’s a strange thing, Suzanne, how much you get to care about those trees. The loggers call us tree huggers and think we’re weird and spacy. But those trees—they have character. They have a kind of power, a charisma to them it amazes me that anyone near them can’t feel. You look at one of them, big as a church spire, and it’s been there since the Dark Ages at least, and you can’t bear, you just can’t bear to think of it being killed and turned into planks. It’s like shooting the last great tiger to put its head up on your den wall. You just have to stop it. Once such a tree is gone, it’s not like it can be replaced. It’s a giant falling—for what? The profit of small men in big companies. I sympathize with the guys who just want to make a living where they live, but
tobacco farmers feel the same way—and so do crack dealers. Everybody wants to make it, but you have to look at the larger cost.”

“So when do you have to fly back?”

“I don’t have to be in court for some of these preliminary arguments. He’ll let me know next week.”

“It sounds as if it should get to plea bargaining fairly soon.” She rested her head on his chest and before she realized it, dozed off from exhaustion.

Beverly

Beverly often wished she could say all she wanted to, that she could speak aloud the way she could communicate on-line. It might take her half an hour to type out a paragraph of an E-mail letter, but then it was instantly transmitted and nobody knew she hadn’t written it in four minutes. If only she could talk that way too, everything would be so much pleasanter, if she could work out the communication and shape the sounds and gather them up in some cache in her head and then say it all correctly and with reasonable speed, then everyone would listen. Now only Sylvia and Elena were reliably patient. Even Karla just talked to Suzanne about her instead of talking with her. Karla wrote her a letter every week, full of the doings of the twins and Rosella and her husband and his family, news of Suwanda in San Diego, news of her synagogue, her neighborhood. It was humiliating to envy the sister she had always felt superior to.

Much of the time she simply gave up saying what she wanted to, because it was just taking too long to get it out. She could not think of the word she knew she knew. Her mind had mud slides, when everything was swept away in soft muck and buried. She had learned to stop and wait for her brain to clear itself. It was hard. She had always been glib and forceful, verbally. She had depended often enough on her ready
brain and tongue to get her out of a jam. Twice she had talked her way out of a rape situation. Several times she had talked a cop out of busting her when she was in a protest, a picket line, a demonstration. She had cajoled men into bed and out of bed. She had talked her way into jobs she wanted and out of tasks she dreaded. It had been her best weapon; as she got older, her only weapon.

She wished she could talk with Jake, Suzanne’s boyfriend. He seemed like a real organizer, the genuine thing, and she would have given anything to be able to question him closely about his work. She knew they would understand each other, if only she could speak to him. But he smiled at her when he came in, and then he went on as if she wasn’t in the room. He was one of the only people she saw around her who might understand her life and her choices, and she couldn’t have a decent conversation with him.

She looked into Elena’s face. Her granddaughter was lovely. She never grew tired of looking at her. Her hair was worn unfashionably long, silken, glossy, the rippling pelt of a panther. She had always moved well, since she was a little girl. Beverly did not think Elena had ever gone through an awkward stage. Her skin was like perfect fruit, never a blemish. It was tropical, smooth, inviting. Even that ridiculous stud in her nose had looked good on her, but lately it had disappeared. She pointed to her own nose and tapped it, then pointed to Elena’s nose. Elena was terrific at figuring out what she was asking.

“Jim didn’t want it there. He’s like, it’s distracting when we’re kissing. And he pointed out what it meant—it was my pact with Chad and Evan. He says it’s time to let go of that old trauma and walk on.”

Her eyes were commanding and melting at once. Beverly explained to Elena that Elena was the daughter of passion, while her sister Rachel was the daughter of rationality. Patiently Elena heard her out. “But, Grandma, I think Mother did love Sam, at first. She just forgot about him after a while. He wasn’t as interesting as a good case or a day in court. Then she let her pride take over when she learned he was bam bam with a client.”

“No passion. Fondness.”

“Whatever.” Elena shrugged. “I think Jim and I should get away from here. I know he’s used to it, but it’s time for him to leave. It’s too easy
for him. He needs a challenge. He needs a new world to conquer, you see?”

Beverly nodded crookedly.

“I know that as long as he’s around here, he could backslide. All his friends are going to be just shocked out of their chairs when he leaves Marta. Their teeth will drop out. Like I vandalized a public statue, you know? ’Cause their marriage is an institution. This house is like a stupid public crossroads for the legal profession. They’re always ‘entertaining.’ It’s gross, really gross.”

Beverly nodded again. “Bourgeois. Way it’s done.”

“Exactly. I could puke. I feel so bad when I see him going through the motions, doing the right thing. It’s so sick. He doesn’t even like any of those people. It’s all for her. Because she wants to be a judge by and by.”

“Judge? Hangman.”

“Right. It’s so phony, it reeks. He isn’t like that. He’s more like me, emotional, more physical, sort of wanting to plow straight ahead, zoom, at what he wants. He doesn’t crush his feelings and pretend they don’t exist.”

Rachel had said something funny to Beverly, maybe a year ago when she was trying hard to talk Rachel out of studying to be a rabbi. Rachel said, “You don’t believe in the Eternal One, but you believe in passion, in Eros. Don’t you think that’s just as irrational? Why not pick a major deity, anyhow?” Beverly had been startled. Since she was five Rachel had been coming out with statements or questions you just never expected. Her mind worked differently.

Beverly had answered, “I’ve experienced passionate love. I’ve never experienced your god. I prefer to stick to what I can feel, what I can know.”

Beverly realized that Elena was sitting there expectantly. Beverly had dropped right out of the conversation as if through a trapdoor, into her memories. It was rude and disconcerting, but she could not help it. Her mind would cough up a memory like a fish landed suddenly out of a river onto a bank. To cover up her inattention, she nodded wildly.

“I knew you’d agree.”

With what, she wondered. But she probably would agree, whatever
it was. She had fallen in love with her granddaughter when Elena was only three. “No! Not right,” Elena would say, not shouting but with a totally convinced intensity that Beverly recognized as her own.

“Like it’s a second chance for me, finally.” Elena leaned forward, her hands twisting on her jeans. One knee stuck through the torn fabric, shiny, pale against the denim. “I never thought I’d really give a shit about a guy again. I mean, yeah, for fun, to pass the time, to buy you dinner, to take you out. But to really feel like you’re both in one skin. Like you know where he is at because you’re really both in the same place at the same time? I knew you’d get it.”

Elena was the center of her life now. Her granddaughter had always been important to her, but now Beverly poured all her love into Elena. She longed to see her as fervently as she had ever waited for a lover. She gazed into her face with as much joy and passion and the underlying pain of anticipated loss. Elena would go off with Jim to California, and she would never see her. It would be a loss as great as the loss of her right hand and her ability to speak clearly. She needed to see Elena daily, she must see her. It was necessary for her survival as well as for her happiness. Elena was life itself, vitality. As Elena felt about Jim, she felt about Elena. She breathed her. She drank her in.

Suzanne was sitting in the same chair after supper as Elena had occupied that afternoon. Suzanne had actually cooked tonight. Beverly had always thought of her daughter as being far more domestic than she was. She had not realized that Suzanne was often not home at suppertime, and when she was, half the time she just picked up takeout. Suzanne suddenly stared at her. “You look different. Your hair.”

“Elena.” Her granddaughter had gone out and gotten her old hair dye and now her hair was red again. She felt almost human. Elena had used conditioner and brushed it out: now she had her own hair back.

“Mother, I know we haven’t been communicating very well.”

Beverly turned her face away. Did Suzanne think Beverly was “communicating” terrifically with anybody? Even her speech therapist couldn’t always decipher what she was trying to spit out.

“You probably feel I’m not here often enough for you.”

Beverly didn’t bother answering that one. She just shrugged. As if
Suzanne sitting on her like a mother hen on a recalcitrant egg would help her.

“I wish I could say it’s going to improve, but when school starts in the fall, it’ll be worse than it is now. But I’m hoping we can work out a way that we do spend time together regularly and we can do better.”

“Better…than what?”

Suzanne was losing the patient manner she assumed like an apron. “Better than we usually do. Better than we’ve done since I can remember.”

Beverly waved her left hand.

“Mother, you have to believe me when I say I want us to be closer. I have the feeling you’re mad at me all the time. What are you angry about? Or am I projecting? Am I completely wrong?”

Beverly shrugged. When Suzanne went on staring at her, she finally said, “My apart…ment.”

“Your apartment?” Suzanne looked at her blankly. “We had to let that go five months ago.”

“Mine.” Beverly sought as so often for a simple way to say what she meant. “Friends. You took away.”

“I took away your friends?” Suzanne looked baffled. “Mother, you had a stroke. You couldn’t live alone in New York. You couldn’t shop or cook or take care of yourself.”

“Sylvia…there.”

Suzanne frowned, mulling it over. “You mean, you wanted help to stay there? But it couldn’t have worked. I couldn’t go on running back and forth all the time. You couldn’t pay the rent there, and if I paid your rent, I couldn’t pay Sylvia.”

Beverly closed her eyes to signify that the conversation was over. There had to have been a way, there had to be a way; but Suzanne had let her apartment go, and now there was no place to return to. She asked her friends on-line and checked rental Web sites about places in New York that she could afford. There seemed to be none. She was stuck here in Suzanne’s house where she had no business, no use, no group of friends to sustain her. All her life she had lived involved with others, with causes, with actions, with work, with friends and lovers, enemies and cohorts. She was useless, silent as a phone yanked from its connec
tion. The only connections she had that meant anything were to Sylvia, to Elena, to Mao, who lived mostly in her room, and to her computer and through it and only through it, to the world beyond.

From a large family in Trinidad, Sylvia had sacrificed her own prospects to her younger siblings. She had been bringing them to the States one at a time, setting them up, until sure they could make it here. Now they all sent money back to the parents and grandparents. It seemed archaic to Beverly, although Sylvia was twenty-three years younger than herself: to live in a big multigenerational family and owe your life to them, the way Victorian daughters had been expected to be spinsters and take care of their aged father, giving up their possibilities of marriage and family to him. Sylvia was quite contemporary in other ways. She had a fairly sophisticated analysis of colonialism and, of course, of racism. She seemed unimpressed by U.S. electoral politics, although she had taken out citizenship years before and did conscientiously vote. Her irrationality was the lottery. She played it religiously, full of tales of people who had played a number they had seen in a dream or that had some fateful significance, and then, suddenly, they were rich. A lady she had cleaned for when she first came to the States had just three years ago won a million dollars: Sylvia had seen it in the papers. “And she didn’t even need it,” Sylvia said, throwing up her hands. “She had a nice house already, her son a doctor, her daughter working for Bell Atlantic. What did she need that for?”

Sylvia kept trying to get her to play the lottery and would not listen when Beverly tried to explain to her how it was a way to milk the poor. “That lady, she had plenty of money, she had two fur coats, and she still played the lottery. And she won. Why not me?”

Sylvia had the patience to wait for her to finish a sentence, even if it took her three or four minutes to get it out. “If I had a will, I’d remember you in it, for being so kind with me. But I’m piss poor. I have a few books and old clothes. I don’t even have anything to pawn, if I need cash.” That was what she said, although it took her a while, many jerky pauses, and some wrong words before she managed to say it. She wanted Sylvia to know how much she appreciated her care and her attention. She knew from what had happened to some of her older friends, how callous and even cruel some caregivers from agencies could
be. She remembered the bruises on her friend Moira’s arms and legs before she was put in the nursing home to rot away.

“Your daughter pays for me. Don’t worry about it. She’s a good child, Beverly. She works real hard. I know you’re crazy about your granddaughter, but I don’t see her working so hard. She takes care of herself and she likes to get others to take care of her.”

Beverly only smiled. She did not expect Sylvia to appreciate Elena’s passion and beauty, but Elena was the brightest spot in her life. She loved being Elena’s confidante. It was a drama she followed from day to day, anticipating each new episode of Elena’s romance. It was like being young and having a girlfriend who confided. She touched her refurbished hair. Now she looked more like herself. She looked more like the woman she had been. Beverly, she said to the woman in the hand mirror, Beverly: Elena made you reappear. You’re almost visible again.