Alternate Side

by Anna Quindlen

  With a house as old as theirs in a city as fluid as New York, the idea that it belonged to you was relative. Maybe that was why some people ripped everything out: smooth, clean walls, steel banisters with bluestone treads, undeniably theirs in a way nicked wainscoting turned from butterscotch to caramel with age never could be. A curator who was an expert in city history had told Nora at a book party that while the house where the Lessmans lived was once a brothel and the Dicksons’ a small-time hat factory, the Nolans’ house had been owned for almost ninety years by a single family. The Taylor house, he called it, as though to emphasize the Nolans’ transience. The Taylors: a father, a mother, the mother’s mother, three daughters, a son. Apparently, you could find them memorialized in copperplate in some great leatherbound census book. The three daughters married and moved to what was then the country, now the suburbs. The parents died. The son stayed, single, and made his surroundings smaller and smaller, until finally he was living in what was now Oliver’s bedroom. He had had a hotplate, a cat, and six locks on the door. Only after they closed did Nora find out that he’d died there, information she had kept to herself and would never reveal to a living soul.

  “With houses this old, every single one has had someone die in it,” Alma Fenstermacher said when Nora first met her, unsolicited, as though to take the curse off, and Nora wondered whether Alma had actually known the last of the Taylors.

  Elizabeth II, the poodle, nuzzled Nora’s hand, in which she clutched a cocktail napkin spotted with a bit of mustard. “No,” said Alma, and Elizabeth backed off and sat down.

  “One more thing,” George said, coming up behind Nora and Alma, but Alma said, “Oh, George, I think Edward had something he wanted to ask you,” and she and Nora circled around to the dessert table.

  “Did you ever consider canceling?” Nora asked, choosing a cookie.

  “Edward and I discussed it,” Alma said. “I think we would have done so if it had been closer to the actual event. There’s been such an atmosphere, hasn’t there? But I thought canceling would make the atmosphere worse somehow.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Nora said.

  “I’m glad you agree. I think Linda was a bit disapproving, but then she’s so judgmental. Which, from a professional point of view, makes perfect sense for a judge. She and her husband are here somewhere.”

  “And the Fisks?”

  Alma sighed, her brooch rising and falling and catching the light from chandelier and candle. “I think I put a foot wrong there. I called Sherry to urge her to come. She looks so beaten down, poor thing. I said, Sherry, please, we want you there. She said, ‘What about Jack?’ And I paused.”

  “She can’t really have wanted to bring Jack here.”

  “I don’t think so—I think it was a kind of litmus test. I suppose I failed. In any event, they’re not here. Someone told me they’ve moved to their weekend place in Bedford for a while, or maybe he has and she goes out there from time to time.” Alma sighed again. “I hate it when things are unsettled on the block,” she said. “Let’s retire the subject. I’ve got some food in the freezer for your children. They’ve always been so appreciative of the party, and I know they’ll be home again before long.”

  “They’ve always loved this party,” Nora said, and she was not merely exhibiting Manhattan party politeness. She was still convinced that Rachel had dropped the determination to celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas after just one year because of the centrifugal force of the Fenstermacher party. Christmas was an oddly a-religious holiday in most of the city, although when she walked Homer on the evening of the twenty-fourth Nora was always faintly surprised and, if she was being honest, buoyed by the number of people she saw entering the Catholic church on the next block. The Fenstermachers actually had a crèche, but they kept it upstairs in the den, so few guests ever saw it. Her own children had played with it one year as though it were some sort of fancy toy village, and Alma, coming upon them, had insisted that they continue.

  “I always wondered what you did with all the leftovers,” Nora said.

  “Most of them go to the SRO. They have a party the day after this party. The decor is not the same, sadly, but they seem to enjoy the food.”

  “You’re too good to be true,” Nora said.

  “Well, we all have to do something,” Alma said, picking up a petit four. “I hope Sherry will be back next year. But not her husband. I draw the line there.”

  “I hate February,” Nora said to Charlie at breakfast.

  “There are places where we could live that are warm even in February,” Charlie said. Nora wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  “I hate February,” Nora said to her lunch group, and Elena rolled her eyes. “Everyone hates February,” she said, snapping a breadstick. “Have you ever heard anyone say they loved February? If you did, would you ever have anything to do with them again?”

  “God, you’re in a great mood,” Suzanne said.

  “I hate February,” Elena said, and winked at Nora.

  “The good news is that whoever was putting dog poop on my stoop has stopped,” Nora said.

  “Again with this?” Elena said. “How many times do I have to say, Not at lunch, babe. Not. At. Lunch.”

  “You sound like Charlie,” Nora said.

  “That’s just mean,” Elena said, and they all laughed.

  “The really good news,” Nora said, “is that my assistant quit.”

  “That’s the good news?” Jenny asked.

  “Oh, I hear you,” said Elena, who ran a PR firm. “I had one kid, when he aced his LSATs and decided to go to law school, I was happier than his parents. I was so glad to see the back of him.”

  Jean-Ann said, “One of my partners, I swear it’s his favorite part of the job, calling some young associate in, saying, ‘You may want to consider employment elsewhere.’ I’ve just never developed the knack. I’m always so relieved when they decide to quit and I don’t have to fire them. You’re so lucky, Nora.”

  “This is a depressing conversation,” Jenny said.

  Nora’s assistant now was a temp named Richard. He was so thin that his clothes all looked as though they were still on hangers. When she had gotten in that morning, picking up the folder for a meeting with a vodka company that wanted to sponsor an exhibit of the Danish crown jewels, he held up a hand. “Your daughter is on the phone. She says it’s urgent,” he said, and then, seeing the look on Nora’s face, added, “in a girl way.”

  “Do you have a sister?” Nora asked him as she went into her own office.

  “I have six sisters,” Richard said.

  It seemed to Nora that it was always when she was late for a meeting that the phone rang and Rachel was on the other end with a crisis at once so profound and yet so fleeting that if Nora ignored it it would be added to the grievance bank, and if she took it seriously Rachel would say when she brought it up again that her mother exaggerated everything. “In a girl way,” she thought to herself. Richard had been working for her for only three weeks and she already liked him infinitely more than she ever had Madison.

  “I’m in so much pain,” Rachel wailed, as though Nora could do something about it, with Rachel four hours away in Williamstown.

  “Oh, buggy-boo,” Nora said, a relatively safe reply.

  “I was in this rugby scrimmage yesterday—”

  “A rugby scrimmage? Why were you in a rugby scrimmage? Aside from everything else, it’s not even rugby season.” Not a safe reply.

  “Mom, why do you always ask questions instead of just listening to me? I want you to listen to what I’m saying and instead you just grill me, like I’m a criminal or something. I don’t know why I bothered to call.”

  Nora was not sure, either. She supposed she should be glad that Rachel still called her when she was overwrought, when she got a B on a paper in her major, when she
and the current boyfriend had quarreled, when she’d strained something—it sounded like a hamstring, although Rachel was bound to think it was a compound fracture—in a rugby game. Sometimes Rachel called Christine about these things, which hurt Nora’s feelings, although she would never say this to either one. Oliver seldom called, and only with emergencies that he refused to characterize as emergencies. In a boy way, Nora supposed. “Mom, do you know where my passport is?” he’d asked the week before he was due to go to Oslo for a semester abroad. Luckily Nora was well acquainted with a place that could, for a price, provide a new passport in forty-eight hours, having used it twice before for Oliver, once for Rachel, and even once for Charlie, when he had to fly to Tokyo on an emergent business matter and discovered that he had somehow let his passport expire. In New York City you could find anything. There were women who would pick nits from a child’s hair if there was an outbreak of lice at school, as there so often was. Christine had thought she was kidding when she first told her. Nitpickers. Now they had them in Seattle, too.

  The last time Rachel had called Nora at work, Bebe had stood in the doorway of her office tapping a foot in a black slingback stiletto. There were people who were careful not to let judgment register on their faces, particularly where motherhood was concerned; Bebe was not one of them. Her whole body was a semaphore: get off the phone this is ridiculous what am I paying you for.

  “Kids,” Nora said, putting down the receiver and shrugging.

  “There were so many reasons I never had them,” Bebe said. “Or had any interest in doing so. Husbands don’t really care for them.”

  “And yet so many of them become fathers,” Nora said coldly.

  Bebe waved a hand. She was wearing a square-cut emerald so big no one would bother to steal it because it shouted “fake!” It had once belonged to some Indian royalty and had been Bebe’s engagement ring, and so “for sentimental reasons”—“the woman is as sentimental as a crocodile,” Nora had told her sister—she had decided not to give it to the museum. “Until I’m dead,” she’d added, unsentimentally.

  “They become fathers because their wives insist on becoming mothers. Although most of the ones I know had only one, just so they could say they had, you know: little Lindsay has changed my life, blah blah blah, night nurse, nanny.”

  Thank God Bebe was away now and couldn’t hear Nora talking to Rachel nor see Phil sitting in a spot cleared by their facilities guy with the snowblower. The last time Bebe had noticed him was just before the holidays, as she stopped in to the museum before she flew south.

  “Go away!” she’d yelled.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Pearl,” he said. “Nice morning.”

  “It’s fucking freezing,” Bebe said, pulling her mink coat tighter around her midsection.

  “Don’t you ever take a snow day?” Nora had said to Phil when she got to the office.

  “I’ve got all-wheel drive,” he said.

  “How did you wind up doing this in the first place?”

  “Ah, you know—like most things, it was a confluence of events,” he said.

  “A confluence of events?”

  “What, because you’re homeless you have to be stupid?”

  “But you’re not homeless. You have a home.”

  “Maybe I have a home because I do this.” He grinned. “You gotta love a country where there are rules for being poor, and rich people make them.”

  “I’m not a rich person,” Nora said.

  “I’m inclined to take your word for that,” he said. “You’re one of the only regulars who makes eye contact. Even a lot of the people who give me money won’t make eye contact.”

  “So what was the confluence?”

  “A divorce, the economic downturn. Some medical issues. A problem with alcohol. I got it together, but it took a couple of years. When I first started, I was more, you know…like you think I ought to be.”

  “That makes me sound terrible.”

  “Nah, you’re okay. Like I said, eye contact. Plus, like, right now, you’re having normal conversation.”

  “Don’t you ever consider…”

  “What? I sit on the sidewalk with a sign. Maybe you think it’s humiliating, but it’s only humiliating if I feel humiliated, and I don’t. What did Eleanor Roosevelt say? ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.’ And, by the way, everything on the sign is true.”

  “ ‘Need something to eat?’ ”

  “Hey, everybody needs something to eat. What about you? Don’t you need something to eat? You walk all the way downtown in this cold?”

  Nora had. The garbage in the gutters was frozen into agonized attitudes as though the Cheez-It bags and drinking straws had died of hypothermia. Even George’s pugs stayed indoors in this weather, allowed to relieve themselves in the backyard because George insisted that they suffered terribly from the road salt that got into the tender creases of their paws. But still Nora walked, waiting for the cold to weaken and wane. When the weather warmed she would resent the bicyclists who suddenly reappeared, the runners who had been inside on treadmills while her earlobes were anesthetized by cold. But she always noticed that when the temperature warmed, she lived in the world more surely, looking at the buildings and the people around her. As soon as the winter wind began to blow up the Hudson corridor, her head went down and her shoulders up. It was not something she noticed, really, until she felt her body unclench sometime in March, although, this being New York City, people had even begun to pathologize the phenomenon. “He suffers from terrible seasonal affective disorder,” a woman had said about her husband, who was a poet and thus assumed to have enhanced sensitivities. (“He’s a pain in the ass even in June,” said Jenny when Nora mentioned the exchange.)

  In the meantime she bought one pair of gloves after another, slapping her hands together as she came down the block to restore feelings to her fingers, seeing Linda at the corner in a gray coat waiting for a cab, wondering where Sherry was and whether she was away or simply avoiding the rest of them. There was an odd disconnect between their professional selves, in dress shoes and tailored jackets, and their everyday selves on the block. Those selves were the great equalizers, just men and women in sweatshirts wondering why the recycling guys always spilled half the plastics on the street, who it was who persistently refused to properly bag their garbage. (George had once said he would mount a spy camera, but either he hadn’t done it, it hadn’t worked, or he hadn’t caught the culprit.) They could have been anything: German professors, nephrologists, sculptors. Nora had discovered that Linda was a judge not during conversation at the holiday party or on the street while walking their dogs, but by reading a story about a sentencing in one of the tabloids. She was certain she had once had a conversation with Linda about getting out of jury duty, but Linda had in no way suggested at the time that there was anything wrong with that. It was as though each of them was two people, at a minimum. Once Nora had hypothesized jokingly that Alma Fenstermacher was a CIA operative. “If so, it’s the best cover I’ve seen yet,” said Sherry Fisk.

  “Yet?” Nora had yelped.

  All that was quite different from her own parents, who each was only ever a single person, as far as she could tell. Her mother was always a Connecticut housewife, partial to bridge parties and celery with cream cheese filling to serve at them, and her father, when at home, was not a different man from his work self but simply waiting to be that self again, like a windup doll whose key had been removed from its back. When his appendix had burst, he was confined to his bedroom for a week after he left the hospital, and Nora and Christine hurried by the half-closed door as though, if they raised their heads, they would see something shameful: Douglas Benson in pajamas on a Tuesday afternoon.

  Their mother had always seemed to think of being a mother as a kind of pastime, like bridge or tennis. Most nights at dinner she asked them to d
escribe the best thing about their day, and most mornings at breakfast she paged through their copybooks, although it was not clear what she was looking for except for conspicuous misspellings, which had to be erased and corrected on the spot. But sometimes when she was reading a magazine in the living room in the afternoon and they appeared, she would look up with a faintly puzzled expression on her face, as though they were neighbors she’d invited for coffee and then forgotten about.

  Nora had felt sometimes that she should be grateful for her mother’s vague and cordial disengagement. Jenny had shocked her by offhandedly telling stories of how her mother was always slapping her face, putting her on punishing diets, flirting with her boyfriends, how she had looked at one college rejection letter and said, “I never understood why you thought you’d get in there in the first place.” Nora had come around to thinking that it was better to bear no marks at all than claw marks. The most resonant memory she had, for some strange reason, was of her mother leaning toward the bathroom mirror, patting her face lightly with a pink chamois powder puff over and over again as though she were somehow comforting herself.

  While many of her friends had agonized about hiring help for their children, nailing themselves to the cross of motherhood and learning to resent their kids in the bargain, Nora had not thought twice about engaging a nanny—because of her own childhood, and Mary. For cookies after school there was Mary, and for help with sharpening pencils, and for soup on winter vacation days and ice pops on summer ones. Mary made cinnamon toast when they were sick, sewed the badges onto their Girl Scout sashes, and stacked the cotton underpants in their top drawers. For cuddling under the covers and talking about this and that, the two sisters had each other. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” Nora had said one evening to Rachel, when they were huddled under the lavender duvet talking about how mean the new girl in the fourth grade was. “I don’t think my mother ever got into bed with me or my sister.”