Three Women (31 page)

Beverly

Beverly had been exactly twenty-nine, yes, when Suzanne caught German measles. That was before kids were routinely vaccinated. Did they even have a vaccine that long ago? Suzanne had been seven, a skinny little girl, too skinny, with reddish hair, big green watery eyes. Was she wearing glasses yet? No, they sent her home from school with a note that she needed glasses that same year, afterward. Suzanne got dreadfully sick, and then she caught pneumonia and was taken to the hospital. The doctor was not encouraging. He asked to speak to the father. “There is no father,” Beverly said. She was furious that he was trying to go over her head. He thought her daughter was going to die.

She had held Suzanne’s superheated hand. Her daughter was burning up. Delirious. Tossing in the bed like a fish dying on a dock. Then Beverly had thought secretly to herself, guiltily, that perhaps she should not have had a daughter. It would be terrible if Suzanne died, terrible, but at the same time, it would be easier. She was always having to think about what to do with Suzanne when she went away. She had felt she would not be complete as a woman if she did not have a child, but now she wondered. A child seemed to eat money sometimes. There was always something that needed attention, that needed fixing, that had to be replaced or provided.

But when Suzanne was restored to her, thinner than ever, pale and slight as a sheet of paper, she had wept, holding her daughter and feeling that nothing could be as precious. How could she have imagined life
without her little one? Then the next day, she hauled off and swatted Suzanne when she spilled her soup all over the table. A clumsy child, there was no getting around it. A little ballet dancer she wasn’t. Two left feet and two left hands. There was something intractable in Suzanne from the moment she could sit up and say Mama, intractable and lumpy. Suzanne would sit glowering, making herself dense and immovable.

She had felt guilty about her temper, but Suzanne had a temper of her own. From the time Suzanne was eleven, they’d had screaming matches. They would both stand their ground and shriek at each other. “You will!” “I won’t!” Her daughter was as stubborn and willful as she was. They were a match, everyone said that. It used to infuriate her, how Karla could get Suzanne to do almost anything, how Suzanne would do the dishes without being asked at her aunt’s, how Suzanne would pick up after herself. At home, she was a little pig.

How had they got off on the wrong foot with each other so quickly, so unremittingly? Two strong wills striking metal against metal. Yet as an adult, Suzanne often seemed phlegmatic. Her daughter appeared to be encased in protocol, duty, busy-ness, the make-work of the law. It felt to her as if Suzanne had gone into the law in order to retreat from her, from their hectic and never affluent life together. The law was Suzanne’s shell she carried on her back.

Beverly stirred in the bed, trying vainly to find a comfortable position. Her body was sore all the time. She should try to get up, climb into her wheelchair, roll into the living room. She did not feel like it, so much effort for so little gain. There was nothing on television. It was hard for her to use the computer, for her vision was still blurred. Suzanne had bought her a big expensive monitor that she could read, but it took too much work for her to get to it. With the big monitor, she could no longer use the laptop in bed. Now it sat on the makeshift desk. She stared at it across the room and imagined sending E-mail messages to all the people she used to communicate with. Half of them probably thought she was dead. Wasn’t she?

She could see it clearly now, with so much empty time to contemplate her life: she should never have had a child. She was not cut out to be a mother. She had never really wanted to be responsible for another person, to have to explain her decisions and justify them, to have to drag that other through her life clunking behind. She had never wanted
to marry. She had understood from adolescence on that being the legal property of a man was a bad idea for her, that simply having another body always there, someone for whose meals, clothing, bills, and opinions she was responsible, would be death itself. She would hate him. He would be a large pole to which she would be tethered. Why hadn’t she applied that to children? When she had discovered herself pregnant, she had been delighted, as if it were some kind of accomplishment. She had felt very adult and competent and full of fantasies about her own child.

Her friends were shocked. Women did not just go and have babies by themselves in 1950. If they got pregnant and could not afford to fly to Puerto Rico for an abortion, then they went off to have the baby in a “home” like a women’s prison, and the baby was taken away and adopted.

She had been so proud. So confident. Was it only that she enjoyed shocking the people around her, even the most political men and women who thought of themselves as socially advanced and free thinking? Had she been acting in a little private play of her own, the bold heroine, the new woman in her cute maternity outfits Karla sewed for her? Karla had been behind her all the way. Beverly had entertained visions of herself with a miniature version by the hand, a little red-curled Beverly, a brave curly-headed little boy, a darling radical Shirley Temple marching along with her on parades and picket lines.

As soon as she was home from the hospital with a squalling baby, she had intimations she had made a terrible error. Everyone said she was so brave, but here she was in a little apartment in Brooklyn down the block from Karla, and stuck, penned up with a voracious creature with a voice like a steam whistle and one demand after another. She never finished having to fix something for or around the baby. The creature never seemed to sleep more than a couple of hours at a stretch. Karla had endured two miscarriages and was glad to take the baby when Beverly could not stand being stuck with her another hour. It had seemed to her even then that the tiny red-faced Suzanne glared at her balefully, reproaching her for her secret regrets.

She finally dragged herself into the wheelchair and rolled over to the computer. Then she sat there idle in front of it. Elena had made the screen background dark red for her. It was cheerful. But who did she really want to talk to, and what did she really have to say? Labor orga
nizing was useful but sometimes so depressing. You just got people a wage they could live on and raise their families in decency, and then the fucking owners moved the factories where they could get kids to work for fifty cents an hour. Your people were all out of work and back in poverty, stuck in dead-end jobs they could not live on. The more you liked the people, the more you respected and admired them, the worse it was for you. She had tried to affect the economic and political life of her country for half a century, and sometimes she had succeeded and sometimes she had failed, but it was over. She could not push anymore.

It seemed to her she could always smell her own body like decay, like something old and rotten left too long in the garbage pail in the kitchen. If she were really as strong as she had always thought herself to be, she would just swallow her own tongue. She would find some way to kill herself. Drag a radio into the bathroom and prop it in the shower stall, but she could not bring herself to do that. Suppose she did something wrong and ended up alive but paralyzed?

After her first stroke, she had tried hard, she had tried and tried. She had fought to get her strength back, to speak clearly, to move, to walk, to care for herself, believing she could recover. She had expected she would be herself, her own person again. She no longer believed any of that. What had been Beverly Blume was gone forever. Less than half herself was left, and that was dwindling. The caretakers provided by the service spoke to her as if she were feebleminded, a large floppy retarded child. None were like Sylvia, and she could not succeed in creating relationships with any of them. It was not the same women who came, and the way they spoke at her was like a performance on automatic pilot. They did not engage. They did their job.

Suzanne was walking her to and fro tonight. It was so boring. Suzanne was doing a good job walking her along, but Beverly could tell her mind was elsewhere. Suzanne had always been able to do that since she was a little girl, to be sitting one place but be mentally miles away. It had always annoyed Beverly. She would be talking to her daughter and then realize it was like talking to the radio: Suzanne hadn’t heard one word she had uttered.

“What…think about?” Beverly demanded.

“What? Oh, Maxine’s case. I was going over the arguments I’ll use before the Supreme Judicial Court.”

“What arguments?”

Unintentionally, Suzanne speeded up her pace, hauling Beverly along as she talked. Beverly forgot to listen after a while. It was all legal stuff. At least she had Suzanne’s attention. She asked, “Marry him, you?”

“Who?” Suzanne stopped cold.

Beverly laughed. “More…one?”

“Jake, you mean? No. Why should I?”

Beverly shrugged. “Did…Sam.”

“Marrying Sam was a big mistake, you know that. It’s not that tight a relationship. It’s fine the way it is. I can barely manage that.”

“Leave you…set up.”

“Marriage wouldn’t set me up. You didn’t think it would set you up, did you? Why foist it on me? Besides, I haven’t the time for it.”

Beverly jabbed her thumb at her chest. “Burden!”

“No, you aren’t.”

Beverly made a derisive noise.

“You’re my mother.”

Suzanne was such a wimp, unable to admit what a nuisance Beverly had made of herself by having two strokes and landing on her. Beverly could feel the money burning up. She noticed how they were trying to economize. They thought she couldn’t see how her care was costing more and more. Beverly shook her head. Denial, the young ones called it. Beverly called it willful blindness. Of course she was a burden to her daughter. She was a burden to herself. What a mess life was at the end, never resolved, never cleanly finished, never coming to a proper satisfying conclusion, a final resonant chord of completion.

Beverly plopped herself down in a kitchen chair and pointed at the other. Enough of this pointless staggering back and forth from the bedroom to the living room and back like a gerbil on a treadmill. For this she should struggle on? She dragged a pad over and began to print. NOTHING LIVE FOR. USING UP RESOURCES. PAIN. CAN’T DO ANYTHING MATTERS. TIRED. TIRED. TIRED.

“Mother, what do you want?”

HELP ME DIE. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE.

“Murder you.”

PEACE! HELP ME.

Suzanne looked into her eyes, staring and staring. It was the longest
and most intense stare they had ever exchanged, at least since Suzanne was twelve or thirteen. Mostly they had avoided this kind of piercing scrutiny of each other, avoided offering themselves to it out of dread, a need for privacy, even out of delicacy. Now they stared and stared at each other.

“How long have you been thinking about…wanting to die?”

3 MONTHS, Beverly wrote. EVERY DAY. EVERY NIGHT.

“You’ve been talking to Elena about this.”

Beverly nodded. She printed carefully, NEED BOTH HELP. SOON. VERY SOON.

Suzanne was frowning. She did not look convinced. Inside Beverly’s mind, arguments chased themselves, tumbling over one another like puppies but trapped, mute. To get them out, that was the difficulty. She could only beg. Stare. Plead with her eyes. Help me. A last favor. Give me peace.

Elena

“Now he’s back on the talk show circuit with this father-right thing,” Marta said. “How can anyone take him seriously? Warmed-over Bly.”

Pudgy Miles was frowning. “He got in some licks. And judges, mostly men, mostly fathers, are going to like his line. The world is full of men who screwed up their marriages and imagine they want their kids.” He turned to Elena, sitting scrunched up in a chair, trying to make herself small and preferably invisible. “Now I need to be sure I can trust you as a witness.”

Elena blinked, insulted as if he had slapped her. “I know I was wrong and I want to try to make up some of it to Marta. We were worms.”

“You’re going to have to do better than that if you want to convince a judge that Marta is the injured party. He’s contesting the divorce, so we’re at war.”

Miles was the beige man, she thought: beige hair, beige skin, beige
mind. No one had ever caught his eye across a room and clicked. However, she could hardly say her capacity for instant ignition had won her a lot of prizes. Maybe it was better to be beige or gray. His mind was nasty and sharp-edged enough.

“One thing we want to show is that you’re easily influenced by a man you’re involved with. That he was the active party.”

“Easily influenced. You’re not talking about Chad and Evan. You’re not going to bring that up!”

“Those records are sealed, since you were a juvenile, but I can have you mention it if I ask the right question. I need your cooperation. I’m telling you how I want to play it.”

“I’m the weak little slut who can be pushed around by any man. But Chad and Evan didn’t push me around. I was happy with them. Death just seemed like another bigger orgasm or the biggest high of them all. And I wanted Jim at least as much as he wanted me. I thought I wanted him anyhow.” She looked briefly at Marta. “I thought I knew who he was. I made him up.”

“He’s plausible,” Marta said. “I believed everything he said for years.”

“We need to establish Jim’s guilt, so we need to establish your relative innocence,” Miles said patiently. “I need your cooperation or I won’t use you.”

“I’ve been down this road before….” She sighed. “It’s always a story, isn’t it? Never the truth.”

Miles gave her a steady stare that said he did think it was the truth: that she was an impressionable idiot. Marta was waiting patiently.

“I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll say whatever I have to,” she said.

“I appreciate what you’re trying to do,” Marta said. “Understand that I want to forgive you. It’s healthier for both of us.”

Elena stood at the window looking out while they worked on their line of argument together. Boston was locked in the grip of a glacier. It had snowed and frozen over and snowed and frozen over. Sidewalks were lined with cliffs of dirty ice. On every street battles were waged over parking places. If someone had chipped out a place, it was theirs, by the unwritten law of the city. They might place a trash can or an old chair in it to mark possession, but if anyone moved that trash can or chair and took the place, it was often more than a war of words that would follow. She wondered if anyone had ever been killed in
one of these battles. She asked Miles. He frowned and went silent for a few minutes. Then he said, “Almost. Dorchester District Court, 1994. William Procton parked in the place cleared by the defendant Edmund Little. Edmund Little shot William Procton in the thigh. The jury would not convict him of anything more than simple assault. I don’t know if he actually served time. Basically, the jury thought Little was justified.”

Elena did not know if she were pleased or depressed that Rachel wasn’t getting married after all. She had hoped they would all go to Israel, which sounded like a great trip, especially in the winter. She was shocked when Rachel called her. A first. “How could I have been so mistaken about Michael?”

“How could I have been so mistaken about Jim? I made a much worse botch of things. At least you didn’t get married. If the rabbinical court hadn’t insulted you, you’d be marrying him and then you’d be stuck. Then you’d find out what he’s really like.”

A long silence while the satellite connection burbled and clanked to itself. “You’re right.” Rachel couldn’t help sounding surprised that Elena had been able to offer her some insight. “I’m trying to be satisfied with that.”

“I’m just sorry we didn’t all get to go and visit you,” Elena said.

Rachel said. “Mother’s been poor-mouthing me for months. Are you really eating cat food and sprouted potatoes?”

“Every night,” Elena said. “But I eat at the restaurant.”

“I thought you were fired?”

“Different restaurant.”

Rachel didn’t ask anything more about her job: who but another restaurant worker would? “It’s so beautiful here. It actually snowed in Jerusalem yesterday. It was like crystal and gold. Glittering.”

“I’m going back to school. But don’t tell Mother yet. Please.”

“Why? What could you be studying that she would object to? Let’s see, theological school. Studying to be an Episcopal priest….”

“You can do all the religion for the family. No, I just don’t want her getting excited and telling me what a great idea it is, so that I get contrary and don’t do it. I want it to be my idea, and I don’t want to tell her until I’m taking classes.”

“You know, she really wants to be supportive. You think she’s trying to butt in, when she’s just wanting to make it easier for you.”

“It’s better if I do it myself, at least till I’m launched and I know it’s working. Believe me, it’ll be better that way.” Elena switched gears. “Anyhow, don’t you think you might get back with Michael?”

“Are you going to get back with Jim?”

“But that was stupidity. Just gross. Marta’s pregnant! I wouldn’t be in the same room, believe me. He tries to corner me, but I won’t let him. With Michael, I met him. He isn’t married to someone else. He’s just young.”

“Well, I’m the same age he is, and I’m not going to take his insensitivity. I don’t even think he’ll be a good rabbi.”

“What do I know. He seemed, you know, like he cared about you.”

“Well, it was an act. I should think you’d understand that.”

Elena shrugged, realizing Rachel could not see her. “I’m an expert on being fooled. Being fooled and fucking up. I can just pretend a man is the way I want him to be and ignore anything that shows me how wrong I am.”

“Me too, apparently. Must be genetic.”

She did not tell Rachel about Sean. Her sister would be shocked that she had taken up with another man so quickly, never understanding how Sean protected her. She had loved Jim, and she knew that weakness lay inside her like a virus in abeyance, ready to swarm into her blood again if she gave it a chance. She suspected Jim knew that too, and that was why he had not stopped stalking her, waiting for her. Not lately, for he had seen her twice with Sean. Sean’s bulk made him impossible to ignore. She also neglected to mention Sean because her relationship with him, while pleasant, did not occupy much of her mind or emotions. Sean was damaged and could give a limited amount. He had wounds she did not push to explore. She simply made do with him and the time passed and took her out of danger.

He drank two or three beers to every one of hers, getting quieter and more withdrawn. She did not try to monitor his drinking after the first couple of times. He did not want her to take care of him. He was on his own lonesome road. She spent more time trying to figure out Robby, because he ran the waiting staff and she had to suit him to keep the job.
She could hostess and go to school, that was her plan. He was quirky, mercurial, sometimes kind and sometimes sarcastic, demanding. She stepped around him carefully, learning to tell when she came into work what kind of mood he was in and pace herself accordingly. He gave her more leeway because they were the same age born on adjacent days. He also liked her style, as he remarked. He told her she moved well. Sometimes when they went to a different bar, they danced. He was fun to dance with. Sean would not dance, saying he’d feel like a performing bear. Going out with the kids passed the time. Sometimes when she thought back to the summer, she imagined she had succumbed to a high dangerous fever that had burned her up and left her debilitated, and that she was still slowly recovering.