Remedies

by Kate Ledger

  “I didn’t realize you were still doing that,” Simon said. “Writing letters.” Really. He felt sorry for her, with all her pretend politeness. He felt sorry for her relationship with her husband, if it was true, as Emily had said, that Lucille couldn’t express her own opinion except in the letters she sent to strangers. “People don’t have time to read letters anymore. They don’t have time for anything that’s not right in front of their faces.”

  “Sure they do. People read plenty.”

  “People read e-mail. That’s the way to go. These days.”

  She began looking for something in her bag. “I don’t need all the technology. When I have something to say, I send a letter.”

  “Does anybody ever respond, ever?” he asked irritably.

  “Certainly,” she said, snapping her bag closed. “I got a letter back from the manager of our local supermarket that they’re going to fix the wheels on all their carts so that they’re easier for older people to push. Because that’s who shops there. I pointed that out to him. I got one back from a dentist I’d like to switch to saying that he’s intending to add several insurance carriers, and he’d be happy to look into ours. People care to hear how they can improve.”

  They approached the exit and he snapped the turn signal and moved into the right lane. “He’s in for it tomorrow, you know. Just watch. His whole system’s stunned. His body doesn’t know what to make of what happened, but he’ll be feeling it tomorrow.”

  “I hope it’s not too terrible,” she said, looking out the window.

  He could tell by her jaw that the lines of her face were arranged in worry. “What he’s experiencing is called stress-induced analgesia, I’m sure of it,” Simon continued. “It’s part of the fight-or-flight response. No pain because the brain is otherwise occupied. The effects can last hours after an injury, but it wears off. Even if they discharge him tomorrow, he’ll be hurting. You’ll see. It’s lucky I was able to come down, just to give you another pair of hands.” At a light, they sat in silence. “No, I don’t mind the couch. Not one bit.”

  They entered a stuffy apartment. Simon flicked on the light to find himself before the blond carpet that stretched like a windswept beach. “I suppose you want me to take my shoes off,” he said, standing a foot inside the doorway, as if to show her it was too late to avoid perturbations in the duff.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Otherwise I have to vacuum.”

  He sighed, bent over and undid his laces. “Why don’t you just hire somebody? We have somebody. She comes every week. She cooks, too.”

  “I’ve never liked the idea of other people cleaning up my mess,” she said crisply. “And you never know who you’re going to get. Some of them steal.”

  “I never even see ours,” Simon admitted. “I know she comes because I hear the vacuum sometimes, all the way down in my office. She could be robbing us blind, for all I know.”

  “Who needs that? I don’t need that.” There was the tinkling of metal hangers, like chimes, as Lucille reached into the closet to hang her sweater.

  Eager for air, Simon walked to the glass doors. “I’ll open up the door to the balcony. Get some fresh breeze through here. It’s cooled down outside.”

  “I’d rather have the air on.”

  He didn’t want air-conditioning. He wanted to feel the outdoors coming in, something penetrating the cocoon of the apartment. And he was as stubborn as a child who needed to have his own way. “It’ll be better once the door’s open.”

  He slid wide the glass door leading to the terrace and stepped outside. The balcony overlooked the condominium courtyard. Sunk in the center was a luminous kidney-shaped pool, limpid and holy-looking, glowing blue with submerged lights. The lightly wet night air touched his skin with tenderness. All he wanted from his mother was for her to acknowledge that he passed muster. That he’d turned out all right. That she was proud of him. Was that so much to ask? He was a good doctor whose patients were grateful. He wished he’d brought the file with their thank-you letters for her to read. He printed their e-mails. She believed in correspondence; let her read what he’d received. He considered calling Emily when she got home and having her FedEx the entire file to him. It was a thick file and would have to fit in a box. They’d arrive by the afternoon. Charles would be home by then, and he could see them also. Dear Dr. Bear, I just wanted to let you know how much you meant to my family through our cancer scare. You were the first person to suggest the problem might be something serious . . . And Dear Dr. Bear, Happy holidays to you and your family. Thank you so much for making Franny’s last Thanksgiving a peaceful one . . . And also Dear Dr. Bear, Thank you for checking up on me these last few months and making sure that I was taking my medication. Several of them he could recite by heart.

  Then he thought how annoyed Emily would be to be suddenly burdened with the task of FedExing files to Florida. “You’re not going to win them over,” she’d say. And he didn’t want her trooping through the basement, encountering the wine casks when he wasn’t there to present them to her. The truth was, though, if she ever came to the office, she typically insisted on walking around the house, refusing to enter the basement where she would have to walk past the storage bin marked simply “Baby” that held photos of Caleb and a few tiny, stray stuffed things that had once sat in his crib. The woman had hardly been all the way downstairs in her own house in sixteen years. Then, in lieu of having his file of letters, the hanging folder he’d entitled “Kind Words,” a treasury of cards and commendations, he told his mother about his plans to make wine.

  “I got a kit. It’s a surprise for Emily.”

  He might as well have told her he had plans to send messages into space to coordinate the date and time for his own extraterrestrial abduction.

  “Why wouldn’t you just buy her a nice bottle and be done with it?” she asked.

  But he didn’t care for his mother to understand. She was not a woman with imagination. On the plane to Fort Lauderdale, in a confidential conversation as they’d hunkered down in the last row near the toilets, he’d managed to enlist Jamie’s help, convincing her to participate in the first fermentation. Jamie was sullen, earphones in her ears, the cords trickling like a wiretap down the front of her sweatshirt to a CD player tucked in the front double-handed pocket. She wore the hood up, looking like an angry elf. The engines whirred, and a middle-aged stewardess performed the seat-belt demonstration, double-pointing toward the exits and jiggling an oxygen mask in a mime of what it would look like dangling during a moment of crisis. Simon felt strangely energized by this impromptu trip, purposeful. He’d gifted Emily with the seat in first class, though he was certain he’d seen her grimace when she learned their seats were near the bathroom.

  “Guess what,” he’d said, nudging his daughter in the side.

  “What.” She twisted out of range of his elbow.

  “You know what a vintner is?”

  She rolled her eyes, plucked the earphones from her ears. “Are you going to quiz me the whole flight? ’Cause I’m not in the mood.”

  He started over. “How would you like to try making our own family wine? I’ve got this kit—”

  “Is this going to be like the other kits? Like the car?” she said when he looked like he didn’t remember. “Remember? I told all my friends we were going to build our own antique car from scratch. I told everyone. Nobody believed me, and I said yes, it’s true, and then it didn’t happen. They called me Scorch Shorts for an entire year.”

  “Scorch Shorts?”

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

  “It turned out to be much harder to get the parts than I’d anticipated. One of the companies had even gone out of business. Anyway, this is different. I’ve got all the components. We’re all ready.”

  “So?”

  “You want in?” He waggled his eyebrows at her, pretending to sell the idea.

  “Why me?”

  Because, he wanted to say. Because of your mother. Because it’s not
too late to change the way things are. Instead, unable to hide a note of irritation, he demanded, “You wanna help or not?”

  “Am I going to have to crush grapes with my feet? That’s just gross.”

  “No, I’ve got a machine for that. Much more civilized.”

  “Do I get to drink whatever we make?”

  He considered this. “You get to taste. Sure. The way you’d get sips of wine at Passover, or something like that. You can’t kick back with a glass, but you can taste.”

  “Can I have my friends over for a wine tasting?” She was a wheeler and dealer. It delighted him to negotiate with her.

  “One, maybe, yeah. For sips. It’s a surprise for your mother. She doesn’t know anything about it. Don’t tell her. I want to present her with a wine we’ve made in our own house. She’ll be amazed.”

  Jamie fitted the earphones back in her ears. Then she asked, “Where are the grapes?”

  “Being shipped. An enormous amount of them,” he bragged. “And they’re fantastic quality. It takes about fifty pounds of grapes to make just five gallons of wine, and I thought we’d start big. I thought we’d start with fifty gallons.”

  A passenger angled by their row, heading for the bathroom. Simon looked up, but he’d lost Jamie’s interest already. She’d tuned out.

  “Hey,” he said, nudging her again. Scatological humor had once greatly amused her. They’d rolled off the chairs in the living room giggling over jokes about diarrhea and poop and turds. Once upon a time, they’d sung rousing rounds, Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts, mutilated monkey meat, little dirty birdie feet. They’d sung it until Emily, who was naturally squeamish, stomped her feet, told them to quit it, she’d had enough. “Know what the hole in a barrel is called?” Jamie looked at him, unblinking. “A bung hole.”

  She looked at him as though she were regarding slime. “Ugh,” she said, turning toward the window and turning up the volume on her music. But she hadn’t said no to the project, to being his ally, and this was enough to consider a victory. All he wanted was a project they could do together. No, that wasn’t exactly true. He wanted a project they could do together whose end result would impress his wife; he wanted Emily to look at him again with the faintest hint of desire in her eyes. It didn’t matter that his mother couldn’t fathom the worth of the endeavor or that Jamie would participate only grudgingly.

  On the far side of the kitchen galley, Lucille filled a tea kettle at the sink. Her wrist wobbled under the weight of the kettle.

  “Let me get that for you,” he said. “Are you sure you want tea? It’s so hot out. And you should turn off the air since we have the door open. It’s very inefficient.”

  “My house,” she insisted brightly. “I make the tea.”

  He said nothing, leaning over the galley, and then decided, in the uncommon absence of his father, to take aim at her least favorite topic. “So, Mom, don’t you think it’s time I know?”

  “What’s that?”

  “About my father? My real father?”

  She looked at him with bald disappointment and sighed. “This again?”

  “Again? I know nothing.”

  “There’s nothing to know.”

  “Jamie’s going to be asking any one of these days. What am I supposed to say?”

  She took a deep breath through her nose. “We’ve been over it. You’ve heard it all.”

  “I don’t know the first thing about the guy. And you know, biology’s key. Certain types of colon cancers are more prevalent in Ashkenazi Jews. Also some birth defects she might be worried about when she’s ready to have kids. She should know something, don’t you think?”

  Lucille placed two cups on the counter. They were actual teacups, like a dainty china set. “I don’t know anything about his genes,” she said.

  “That’s all the tea you’re having? I could finish that cup in one swallow. I’ll take a mug instead,” he insisted. She turned to find him a mug. “Well, for starters, his name was Lawrence Blumberg?” The name was on his birth certificate. A guy who sounded like an accountant. But who was he?

  Lucille sighed. A moment later, almost in echo, the kettle let out a petulant hoot, and she busied herself pouring.

  “I was very lucky to have met Charles,” she began. He slumped. It was the same rehearsed version he’d heard long ago. She aimed the hot water over the tea bags, pouring with tediously slow motion, he thought, and replacing the kettle just as slowly. When she returned to the galley, she settled her teacup on a saucer and pushed the mug across the counter in his direction. Not quite in front of him, he noticed. She said, “You and I were lucky beyond our stars that he was willing to adopt a child that wasn’t his.”

  “So you’ve said.” He could practically mouth the story along with her. It began with the dance.

  “We met at a dance. It was the summer, and he was about to leave for duty. I’d made mistakes, that’s for sure. I was walking around several weeks pregnant, my whole life upside down, and I hadn’t told a soul. In fact, I was determined to ignore it for as long as I could—”

  “But what had happened? Who was he? The guy, I mean. Was he your boyfriend?”

  Her eyes fluttered as though she had caught something in them. “Just an older boy from the neighborhood. He lived nearby. All the kids, we all knew each other.”

  “Did he—force you?” It was the first time in his life the idea had occurred to him, and he felt horrified for a moment until he thought he saw her coloring change slightly—was she blushing?

  “Oh no. Not like that,” she said quickly.

  “So you knew him from the neighborhood,” he prodded. When she didn’t say more, he scolded with exasperation, “Didn’t you think I’d have to know someday?”

  “It wasn’t like it is today,” she protested. “It was still the Fifties. People cared if you were pregnant and not married. I was lucky to meet a man who could see past all that. When I met your father—Charles, that is—I didn’t think I had a chance. With anyone.” The skin around her eyes was so fragile-looking, so complex, that for a moment, he was stunned by it. For a moment, he forgot to be annoyed by having heard the story so many times before, and he thought about the vessels pulsing beneath the surface of her skin, feeding the fascia, and the groupings of those tissues that created all the expressions her face was capable of. “I believed I was doomed to spend my life alone. I couldn’t see how I could possibly keep a baby—not by myself, that’s for sure—and who would want me after all the mess I’d made?”

  He pushed his tea away and sat back in the chair. “Did this Lawrence know?”

  “I was going to tell him, sure. The weekend I was prepared to, though, he died with his cousin in an accident.” She took a sip of tea. Again he had the feeling that the story, the one she’d told so many times, was suspect. All the details came up short. Something heartfelt was missing at their core.

  “On a motorcycle, right? Racing around.” He’d heard that much before. That his father had died in an accident. He’d always imagined the guy on the motorcycle, he realized, but never imagined the young Lucille, finding out. “That must have been awful,” he ventured.

  “Oh, sure.”

  Oddly, he felt pleased to hear it. He’d never imagined his mother distraught. The way she told it, he’d presumed that the circumstances of his own origin involved a convoluted series of transactions, as if she’d negotiated a raw deal with the Blumberg guy and then managed to wrangle a better one with Charles.

  “Were you in love?” he asked, feeling cautious.

  “What did I know about love?” she scoffed. “We hardly knew each other. Two kids, you know? We didn’t know what we were doing.”

  “Well, did you go to his family? Did anybody know?”

  “I didn’t think anyone would believe me. And I couldn’t prove anything. They had money, and I figured they’d think I was just some kind of gold digger. And then I met Charles at a dance,” she said, smiling at the memory, and Simon rolle
d his eyes as she started in on the story of the dance again. “My friend Shelly made me go. I didn’t want to, but she insisted. He was tall and so strong-looking, like a sports star. He liked my hair. I used to wash it in egg to make it shine. When he left on duty, I really believed I’d never see him again. But he kept in touch. He couldn’t get me out of his mind, that’s what he said. Me. I could hardly believe it. We corresponded the whole time he was at sea. And when he was injured in the service, I was able to be there for him when he came back. I was the one who took him home from the hospital. I had to tell him that I wasn’t the person he thought I was, but he didn’t care. I got the chance of having my life steered right. Charles saved us. He really did. Saved us and provided for us. Made us a family. We should always be grateful to him for that,” she added pointedly, “in case you’re inclined to forget.”

  He was astounded that this Lawrence Blumberg could be so efficiently erased. “Did he tell you not to talk about, you know, before?”

  “He didn’t have to,” she sniffed. “It’s ancient history.”

  “My history,” Simon said.

  Her eyes fluttered indignantly. “That man’s gone,” she argued. “Almost fifty years now.”

  He sat staring at her face, the lines, the ginkgo-leaf skin. He had come to Florida because he imagined that he would help. He imagined becoming useful to them. But he realized that Emily had been right. His motives hadn’t been pure. He’d wanted more from them. Whatever caring was going to take place, he wanted to be there for it for some reason. And right now, he wanted the story of his origin, perhaps even an inkling of life before Charles entered the scene, but he couldn’t get it from her.