Three Women (30 page)

“If she wants our help, we have to give it to her, Mother,” Elena said. “Can’t you see that? We’re the people who love her most in the world.”

“I keep thinking, maybe I haven’t done enough to make her feel welcome. To make her comfortable.”

“Mother, I’ve spent much more time with her than you have. She can’t be comfortable. She hasn’t got a life. I understand. Can’t you?”

“I’m trying, dear. But no, I can’t understand, really. All she has to do is stay with us and let us take care of her.”

“All she can be is a good vegetable.”

Suzanne stared at her daughter, wondering how Elena could talk so calmly about what was after all murder or being an accomplice to self-murder of someone she loved. How could Elena sit there so placidly staring back at her?

She felt guilty refusing Jake, but she could not stretch herself any thinner; more than that, she felt as if she was already failing her mother and her daughters and her clients. She could not go out to California to help Jake, no matter how much she might want to. There just wasn’t
enough of her. What she could do was find him a really good California lawyer to join in the case, right away.

She saw her doctor the next day, her annual checkup twice postponed. Dr. Rose frowned at her. “Your blood pressure is one sixty-five over ninety. Sky high.”

“I’ve always had low blood pressure,” she said reproachfully. “Could you take it again?”

“I’ve taken it twice. I want you to buy a little monitor and record it yourself six times a day or whenever you think of it, and keep a log for me.”

“Dr. Rose, this must be an aberration.”

“Take it seriously. Some women’s blood pressure does shoot up around menopause. Your mother has had two strokes. If you don’t want to have one yourself, you’re going to have to bring that blood pressure down. Frankly, you’re exhausted. You’re undergoing more stress than your body can handle. Something has to go.”

Jake called. “The trial is going badly. I can tell. Come out. Please.”

“I can’t, Jake. Things with my mother are in crisis. I’ve leaned on my colleagues to cover for me so many times this school year, I can’t ask more favors, and my mother requires intensive caretaking right now. Her deterioration is increasing rapidly.”

“Suzanne, I’m facing the possibility of prison.”

“Surely they can’t give you more than a short sentence, and you can appeal immediately. You should be able to stay out while the appeal is going on.”

“I don’t think it’s going to work out that way.”

She wanted to weep with frustration. She felt like a rope in a tug-of-war. She was fraying and everybody else was falling down.

Elena

Elena started going out with Sean, she suspected, because she wanted to put some guy between herself and Jim, and Sean was the biggest body she could find. Six feet four and beefy, he had boxed for a time but given it up to become a cook. He went to school and worked his way up through lesser restaurants. Now he was the dessert and pastry chef at Natalie’s. He had a bit of a drinking problem, she thought, but he was neither violent nor abusive. He just got quieter. He touched her as if she were the most delicate pastry. Sex with him was occasional and low key, all she felt she could handle at the moment. He was, like her friend Cindy, someone to pass time with, someone caring and never dangerous to her.

The restaurant was a scene she understood, but it too was only passing time. She got on with most of the crowd who worked at Natalie’s. One of the cooks disliked her and never passed up a chance to call her a slut. One waitress, slumming from Bennington, was snotty, but otherwise, they were all types she was comfortable with. Her gentle romance with Sean was common knowledge and gave her a little status. Time slid forward. The weather crispened, then grew permanently chilly. One Friday night, it snowed, briefly, more a promise than an event. By the next morning, no trace remained on the streets or on the lawns of her mother’s neighborhood, that would never feel truly hers.

She considered moving in with Sean but decided that was more than their fragile link could endure. By spring, she would find an apartment, a roommate, somewhere she wanted to live. She would still see Grandma regularly. Her California dreams had evaporated with her feelings for Jim. Here she belonged, by the cold gray North Atlantic of winter. Often in the mornings now, ice skimmed the puddles. It snowed again and this time it stayed, thatching the grass, turning everything ghostly. That night, after they hung out in a late-night bar, she walked on the Com
mon with Robby, the headwaiter, his current lover Tom, Sean, and Cassie, one of the waitresses. They crunched the new snow. Then Tom, Cassie, and she lay down and made angels. It felt blissful lying in the clean snow that gleamed in the darkness with the fresh flakes falling on her face like little kisses. Robby stood grinning at them. “My, what sweet children. The only snow I like I get from my dealer.”

“Ah, but this is free,” Tom said, but he got up and dusted himself off. Robby had a gift for making people feel silly when he chose. He was the connection in the restaurant, the man who could get what anyone wanted. Elena, who had not touched drugs in five years, avoided that side of him. She kept herself on a strict two-beer limit. Everyone teased her, but she was Robby’s age and had a couple of years on them—except Sean and the kitchen staff.

The talk show she ended up going on with Jim was local, since this case was purely a Massachusetts scandal. She wasn’t sure why she’d decided to do it, except maybe as some kind of revenge. She wanted the world to see what kind of a jerk he’d really been. She had never heard of the loudmouth who ran it, but apparently he had been a columnist in the
Herald
for centuries. The audience was gross, whooped up and out to witness bloodletting, but she kept her cool. Jim’s line was all about how Marta had written the domestic violence bill that they were all living under, and yet she had not hesitated to grab a gun and try to shoot him.

“First of all, she didn’t try to shoot us. She goes to the range regularly and my mother, who’s her best friend, says she’s a good shot. She shot way over our heads. It was a statement, like, she was really”—she paused for a usable word, for the first several that came to her had
shit
in them—“angry with us. It was like this theatrical gesture.”

“Didn’t you feel in danger?” Joe, the talk show guy, asked, leaning forward. She could tell he thought she was cute.

“Never. She was aiming way over our heads. That’s why the police laughed this off. He’s here because the police wouldn’t do anything. It was like setting off firecrackers, if you see what I mean?” She gave him a melting look.

“She could have killed us,” Jim said. “She shot off a whole round.”

“You’d have to stand on a stepladder to get in the way,” Elena said and was rewarded by a laugh from the audience.

“Isn’t it unusual, don’t you think, for a girlfriend to be defending the wife?”

“I was a…a fool. An idiot. A bitch, to get involved with him. He told me their marriage was over. He said he hadn’t touched her in two years. And meanwhile, she was pregnant. I’m so ashamed.”

“She kept it from me!” Jim said. “She never told me.”

“That she got herself pregnant?” Elena waved her hand. “She must have, since you never touched her, right?”

“How do I know it’s mine? I don’t remember dragging you off to bed, screaming and protesting. If I remember right, you came on to me.”

“So we’re both stupid and unfaithful creeps? As for the baby, try a DNA test if you aren’t sure,” Elena said. “But you’re sure. You don’t even have a candidate because she was too busy supporting you to see anyone else. I’ve always admired Marta, and I think I was trying to be her.” That was total bullshit, but she figured it would go over, being the kind of mushy psychologizing she could see the host eating up. She was scared of Jim, in a way, scared of how he had fooled her. Scared she could be sucked back in. Scared she wanted passionate consuming love so badly she made it up out of pasteboard.

It was ugly. Jim accused her of being brainwashed and out to get him because he had stopped seeing her. Everything got twisted around, but she kept her cool. She could tell the host was disappointed that she couldn’t be shaken. Soon he let them go and called in the next set of fools, two sisters who were fucking each other’s husbands.

She confided in Beverly. “I’ve been thinking about this summer, thinking about it a lot. And the one thing I’ve come up with is that I liked working in his office. I like therapy.”

Beverly printed on the pad, WORK THERAPIST OFC?

“No. I want to be a therapist.”

“Why?” Beverly said in that strangled voice that sounded as if it were ripped from her throat.

Elena shrugged. “I think I’d be better at it than he is, for one thing. I’d be better than the shrinks I was sent to after, you know, Evan and Chad. I know a lot about the dark side of people, how you get into things, how you get obsessed. I think I could help, partly because I’ve
been so fucked up myself. And if I did something that was right for other people, I’d hate myself less.”

Beverly printed, WHY HATE SELF? WONDERFUL. GOOD TO ME.

“Then you’re the only one I’m any good for. Or who thinks I’m good for anything at all.”

YR. MOTHER LOVES. NO GOOD SHOWING.

“Yeah, I feel like she does, maybe for the first time since I was a little girl.”

“Lots ways…do good,” Beverly laboriously mouthed. She pointed to her chest. “Did good…for people.”

“Grandma, I’m not about to become a union organizer.”

Beverly shrugged.

“I guess I want a profession. When I meet people, they always say, And what do you do? What I should answer is, I fuck around and I fuck up.”

Beverly shook her head and then winced.

“Come on, lazy. It’s time for you to walk.”

With the cast off, Beverly was supposed to walk every day, but she was always putting it off because it hurt and it exhausted her. Elena took it on herself to make sure that Beverly took at least a short walk. With the pavement icy, they walked to and fro in the house, or else Elena would take Beverly to a mall. “You want to go to the Chestnut Hill Mall today?”

Beverly shook her head no. “Crowded.”

It was getting close to Christmas. Grandma was right. “Okay. We’ll take a stroll in lovely
casa nuestra
. Sounds like
cosa nostra
, doesn’t it?” Elena ran into the living room and put on one of her favorite disks lately, Juan Luis Guerra. Then she bopped back into Beverly’s bedroom and offered her arm. Helped her grandma out of bed. They began walking in time to the music, which she turned up superloud. Beverly liked the music, loosely nodding her head in time as they made their difficult deliberate way out of the bedroom, across the kitchen, and into the living room and then around the living room and back. They turned into a parade, because all three cats followed them as they promenaded. Going half time to the music, stepping along. It made Elena feel good.

While Grandma was napping, Elena did her laundry and got out the yellow pages to start calling colleges and universities in the area about graduate training in becoming a therapist. She felt very competent and focused as she asked questions about the programs and requested their catalogs and registration forms. Was she trying to show Jim that she wasn’t just a bimbo? Was she trying to impress her mother? Was she trying to work off guilt? It didn’t matter, she could see nowhere else to go.

She did not know if she believed she would do this thing, go back to college where she had often felt ill at ease, get a graduate degree—she who had taken five and a half years to get a B.A. She had majored in psychology finally because it was the easiest for her, except for Spanish. She had begun taking Spanish at Boston Latin as soon as she could, continued in Brookline, continued in every college. She had always pushed herself to learn it so well that she hoped eventually to be mistaken for a native Spanish speaker.

Now she had a new fantasy. She could see herself in a comfortable office warm and welcoming, not like Jim’s at all. She would have her own assistant, taking calls and booking appointments and billing insurance companies. She would wear glasses on the job, just clear glasses to make herself look serious. Large important-looking glasses. She would wear her hair caught back and dress in suits, like Suzanne. Suits said that the wearer shouldn’t be trifled with. Her mother went to court in suits. Jim dressed too casually. She would not. She would let the clients know she was on the job and serious about it, and she would advertise that she offered therapy in Spanish.

She was lying on the couch in the living room with MTV on just for the company, eating taco chips and drinking diet soda. She could see herself in her office. She could see the office, the desk with a slate top. She would not space out the way Jim confessed he did when a client bored him. She would sit perfectly still except for taking notes. Everything about her would convey intense unwavering attention, what a person wanted who came to see a therapist.

Beverly’s bell rang. Elena sighed but got up at once. She had been enjoying her vision. She felt almost as if standing up might let it slip out of her. It was a fantasy she felt good about, and she did not want it to escape. But Beverly was calling. She helped her up and Beverly went
to the bathroom while Elena ran downstairs and moved her wash to the dryer. Then she got Beverly settled in bed again.

She could see that her grandmother was working herself up to say something. Sometimes it took Beverly several minutes to get a sentence all lined up before she tried to spit it out. Elena passed the time thinking about Sean. He was good to her. Why couldn’t she be in love with him? No, better that she wasn’t, for whenever she truly fell in love, she fell off the edge. It was a disaster. Better to feel affectionate toward him and enjoy the occasional sex. Normally she wanted more and hotter, but she was still a casualty of the sex wars, and gentle and occasional was just fine for now. She saw him standing at the window of his North End apartment, doing his morning exercises, a combination of aerobics and tai chi. She had begun learning to do the tai chi with him. For serious exercise, she preferred to go to the gym.

Beverly was speaking now. “Need your help.”

“Sure, Grandma. Anything.”

“Mean it?”

“Don’t you know me yet? What do you want me to do for you?”

“Want die!”

“Grandma, things are better now. You’re home. You’re getting some benefits from the therapy.”

“No use. No point. Want die.”

“What exactly do you mean, you want to die?” Elena asked slowly.

“Want pills. Kill me.”

“You want to kill yourself? No way. I’ve been down this road before. Grandma, when you kill yourself, you’re really dead. Meat.”

“Not child. Know. Want…die.”

“Grandma, it’s not that bad. Are you in a lot of pain?”

Beverly glared at her. Her lips thinned. “Want die.”

“Are you asking me to help?”

Beverly nodded again, again.

“Grandma, I love you. But I can’t do that. I know what a mess it is. Believe me, I know. I’d miss you too much. Mother would miss you.”

“No use.”

“You mean, it’s no use my arguing with you, or your life is no use?”

“Both.”

“Your life is plenty of use. You listen to me. We talk. We spend time
together. It means something to me. It must mean something to you.” Elena took Beverly’s hand. Her own felt cold to her, as if the warmth had drained out of her body when her grandma started talking about death and dying. Yes, she was scared. She did not want to hear this. She had to make Beverly stop.

“Love you. Want die. Now.”