Alternate Side

by Anna Quindlen

  “Is that my jacket?” Nora said.

  During high school Rachel had made criticizing her mother a hobby, especially in terms of appearance and apparel. Nora understood that what she wore fell into two categories as far as her daughter was concerned: things too lame to be allowed to pass without censure, and things that, in Rachel parlance, she could jack. Sometimes when Nora bought a blouse she could almost feel it slipping from her shopping bag directly into Rachel’s duffel. But it usually happened before the tags were even off the garment, before Nora had had a chance to actually wear it and, she had assumed, pollute it with her lameness.

  “Technically, yes.”

  “I’ve had that jacket forever,” Nora said. “Jenny picked that jacket out for me years ago.”

  “See, and you never wear it anymore.” Which was not really true, but Nora suspected she might never wear it again. It looked good on Rachel, which would not have escaped Rachel’s notice. She wondered if Rachel had passed into her retro phase, in which she would take Nora’s things if they had somehow been sanctified by the passage of time and the boomerang nature of fashion trends. She and Jenny had marveled over a magazine piece that said the leather bomber jacket was “back.” “As if it ever went away,” Jenny had said disdainfully.

  “So you’re really almost done with all your work?” Nora asked her daughter.

  “It’s amazing how little there is second semester senior year,” Rachel said.

  Nora remembered. It had given her endless hours to think about James and whether he would change his mind, which seemed pathetic to her now. Nora tucked her hair behind her ears.

  “I’m glad you’re not blond,” Rachel said.

  “What?”

  “All my friends’ mothers get blonder the older they get. Or at least all my friends in the city. It’s like a gateway to gray, I guess. I saw Elizabeth’s mom last night, and she is totally blond. It looks weird.”

  “Isn’t she Brazilian?”

  “She says she’s from Venezuela. Is there a big difference?”

  “In Brazil they speak Portuguese. In Venezuela I think they speak Spanish. I can’t imagine her blond, but she did have that unfortunate surgery when you were juniors.”

  “Her face has kind of relaxed now,” Rachel said. “That’s another thing I’m glad you haven’t done.”

  Bebe had once suggested that Nora’s forehead could use a little bit of a lift, and that the lines around her mouth might be made to vanish, but she’d ignored her. She figured it was like her professional ambition; she simply didn’t have that internal yearning for a smooth jawline or dewy skin that seemed to drive so many of the women she met. Part of it was Charlie. There were many uncertainties in her life, but Charlie’s carnal response to her continued unabated. When he was uninterested in sex, it was more about how he felt about himself than how he felt about Nora. If he was having a bad week he would watch her strip for a shower and say somewhat sadly, “Your butt still looks like a million bucks.”

  “So, Mommy,” Rachel said after a moment of silence. “This might be a good time to discuss my plans for after graduation.” Oliver was already set with a job working as an assistant in the same lab where he had worked as a student. Nora had assumed Rachel would return to the city of her birth to pursue the kind of job that liberal arts graduates pursued, the kind that required their parents to pay their exorbitant rent for at least a year or two, even though they were living in tiny apartments designed for one person with two roommates and a temporary wall down the center of the bedroom.

  “I’ve been offered a job by a great company in Seattle with excellent opportunities for advancement, and I’ve decided to take it,” Rachel said, so fast that the words blurred together, which, again, meant that there was more to this than her daughter was saying. Nora was silent for a minute or two. Then she stopped and looked at Rachel, and the fact that she had to look up at her, that her daughter was three inches taller than she was, combined with the strengthening wind, brought tears to her eyes.

  “Oh, my God, don’t cry,” Rachel said. “It’s not that far. There are nonstop flights every day.”

  Nora laughed. “It’s the wind,” she said. “And the fact that you’ve left out the most important part of this announcement, which is that you’re going to work for Christine, correct? And I just got off the phone with her and she didn’t say a word.”

  “I wanted to tell you myself. Daddy’s going to kill me, isn’t he? Those nice people who used to live down the block from us, he used to say they were in the rag trade as though they were street peddlers or something, even though they were majorly rich.”

  “He’ll be fine with it. It’s a great opportunity. I know you know this, but I thought the business was ridiculous when my sister first told me about it, which shows how bad I am at putting my finger on the future. Little did I know that someday people would be wearing yoga pants to work. Which, by the way, I still think is a terrible idea.”

  “It’s just, I don’t know, all my friends from high school, most of my friends from college, they’re all coming to the city. Which, by the way, is kind of obnoxious, isn’t it, that we call it the city? There was a girl in my seminar from Paris, she said to me one day, ‘You know, Rachel, there are other cities in the world.’ ”

  “I suppose.”

  Rachel laughed. “I think that’s exactly what I said. But anyhow, I realized everyone would wind up here, and we’d all go to the same bars, and the same parties, and it would be like a continuation of my childhood. And I don’t want that. You didn’t have that. When you came here it was a brand-new life for you.”

  “I’m not arguing, Bug. This is a really smart and mature decision. I’m gobsmacked and awestruck.”

  “SAT words,” said Rachel.

  “Right,” said Nora.

  “Are you mad at Christine?”

  “Why? Because she treated you like a grown-up? Wow, you really underestimate me. When do you start?”

  “Two weeks after commencement. I’m staying with her until I get an apartment. I’m hoping for an August first move-in.”

  Oliver’s and Rachel’s commencements were a week apart. “Oh, Jesus, talk about crazy,” Charlie had said. “Two days of events with one, two days of events with the other. Like a triathlon for the parents.”

  “Three days of events,” Nora had said. “But I talked to a woman once who had twins at different colleges whose commencements were on the same day. I’m just relieved we don’t have to deal with that.”

  Nora and Rachel turned onto the museum block shoulder to shoulder, in the companionable silence of two people, one of whom had had something momentous to say, one of whom knew she was going to hear it, and both of whom had gotten it over with. Phil had thrown off his blanket and turned his face, with its stubbled chin, to the thin April sunshine.

  “Beautiful day,” he said to Nora.

  “Phil, this is my daughter, Rachel. Rachel, this is Phil.”

  “Hi, Phil,” said Rachel, shaking his hand, which made Nora proud.

  “That’s so you,” Rachel said, when they’d moved down the block. “To know a homeless guy.”

  “He’s not really homeless.”

  “That’s even more you, to know a faux-homeless guy.”

  “Stop picking on me,” Nora said.

  “I’m not picking on you. I’ve decided not to pick on you anymore.” Rachel put her arms around Nora. “My little Mommy,” she said, standing on tiptoes so she could put her chin on the crown of Nora’s head.

  “Want to come up and meet my new assistant?”

  “Richard?” Rachel said. “Love him. Love. We’re phone friends. That girl you had before was just the worst. Tell Richard I’ll meet him in person the next time. I’m late for brunch. I might go shopping after.”

  “Nice girl!” Phil shouted down the block when Ra
chel had disappeared.

  “Yep,” Nora said, and went inside, where one of their curators, a young woman they’d just poached from Tiffany’s, was waiting. “We have a major problem,” she said before Nora was even halfway across the lobby.

  “We’ve got a major problem,” Nora said when she finally got through to Bebe, who refused to carry a cellphone. “I didn’t come this far to answer my own phone,” she’d said when Nora asked why.

  “Which is?” Bebe said. Nora could hear the clank of dishes and realized her assistant had probably tracked Bebe down at The Breakers in Palm Beach. She had told Nora the hotel had the best niçoise in the world, although Nora suspected there was probably someplace in the country of France that would argue with that.

  “The star of Kashmir,” Nora said. “Annabelle says she thought that it was sitting a little oddly on its stand when she looked this morning. She took it to the gemologist, who looked at it carefully, and says it’s a copy. A very good copy, but a copy.”

  There was a long silence. Nora thought Bebe was thinking, then realized she was chewing.

  “So?” Bebe said.

  “So? Bebe, that necklace is one of the most valuable pieces in our collection. The insurance estimate was eight million dollars, and that was four years ago. Even then they thought it was low.”

  “It was low. Norman said it was worth at least ten, and that was when the market was depressed.”

  “So what I’m telling you is that it’s gone, and there’s a copy in its place, which is a major crime as well as a major disaster for the museum. We should call the police and the head of the security firm immediately. We also need to figure out how to handle this so the PR fallout won’t be terrible. My understanding was that we had a fail-safe system here.”

  The greatest hazard of running a museum of jewelry, she had learned early on, was security. Unlike a significant Vermeer, say, or the skeleton of a T. rex, an important necklace was both portable and fungible. A thief might not be able to dispose of it as configured, but it could be turned into a handful of stones and still be valuable.

  Nora had been happy that they had gotten publicity nearly everywhere for their innovative display cases, which were designed to deliver voltage sufficient to disable a two-hundred-pound man if they were broken or opened without a complicated computer authorization. One of the local TV reporters had even volunteered to be zapped by one of the cases, but the museum’s insurance firm thought that was unwise. “You accidentally kill somebody on camera, it would be bad,” the security chief said. “But trust me, we tested it on one of our guys, and it worked.”

  “It definitely worked,” said a broad-shouldered man who Nora thought looked as though he’d played college football, and the way he said it made her think he was the person they’d tested it on.

  Bebe had negotiated hard, demanding a clause that if anyone was electrocuted, the manufacturer would be responsible for damages. She was a shrewd negotiator, in part because she acted a little dim at the beginning of any discussion. The men on the other side of the table were always lulled into a false sense of supremacy until she pulled her real personality out of her pocket and laid it on the table. “I don’t want some thief whose brain is fried suing me for a million bucks,” she said of the liability clause, which the manufacturer had eventually agreed upon.

  “They swore those cases were fail-safe,” Nora said, tapping a pen on her desk and staring at a list of who had the computer codes.

  “Hold on,” Bebe said, and Nora heard her put the receiver down. “I want the berries, but no whipped cream. And no blackberries. Just the strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries. But no whipped cream. Last time I had to send it back.” Nora heard her lift the phone again. The maître d’ must have brought her the restaurant phone, the way they did in old Hollywood movies. “You there?” Bebe said. “Don’t get your panties in a twist. That necklace is sitting in my home safe.”

  “What?”

  “It has sentimental value. It’s the last piece Norman ever gave me. I was going to that black-tie thing at The Pierre, and just for one night I wanted to wear the real thing. Not that any of those people would know. There was a woman there with a diamond as big as a Ping-Pong ball on her one hand, and I can tell you that it was no more a diamond than I’m Marilyn Monroe.”

  “That was months ago. All that time we’ve had a paste copy in that display case?”

  “I told you years ago, no one uses paste anymore. And my copies are the best copies. I’m surprised anyone even noticed. When I’m home from Palm Beach I’ll put the real one back.”

  “Bebe, we’ve been telling visitors that what they’re seeing is the star of Kashmir.”

  “And they never even noticed the difference, right? So who cares? If nobody can tell the difference between real and fake, who cares if fake is what you’re showing?”

  PR NEWSWIRE: Attention Local Outlets

  MUSEUM BEGINS SEARCH FOR PRESIDENT

  The Museum of Jewelry will be searching for a new president with the resignation of its current leader.

  Nora Nolan, who has overseen the museum since its opening five years ago, will leave at the end of the year, according to Bebe Pearl, the chair of the board.

  “Nora has been the heart and soul of my fabulous brainchild,” Mrs. Pearl said from her home in Palm Beach. “She’s also become one of my closest friends. She will never stop being part of the Museum of Jewelry.”

  Mrs. Pearl endowed the museum and donated nearly all of her extensive collection of fine jewelry to it after the death of her husband, Norman, a real estate developer whose personal wealth was estimated by Forbes at slightly over $3 billion. There was skepticism in the museum community about what was often seen as a vanity project, but the museum has been unexpectedly successful under Ms. Nolan’s leadership. No reason was given for her resignation.

  Friends,

  Andrew, Josh, and I are having a small private funeral for Jack. But we would welcome some time with all of you at our home, and will be receiving visitors from 6 to 9 P.M. this Tuesday. Please come by and share some stories about their father with the boys.

  Fondly,

  Sherry

  Rumor had it that Jack Fisk had hanged himself. The funeral director had made the mistake of using the word suddenly in the paid obituary, which was technically accurate but in recent years had become a kind of covert shorthand for suicide. There was speculation that the remorse over what he’d done to Ricky, or anxiety over the outcome of the case against him, had broken him. But Nora knew that Jack had as little of remorse in what Sherry called his emotional tool kit as any man alive, and Linda Lessman had heard through the courthouse grapevine that there had been some deal made, that Jack would not be criminally prosecuted, that he could even continue practicing law. Ricky’s account of what had happened now apparently dovetailed roughly with his.

  “I wonder how much that cost?” Linda had said.

  “I never even knew the guy had a bad heart,” Charlie said.

  “I didn’t think he actually had a heart,” said Nora.

  “Enough,” Charlie said.

  Charlie believed that Jack had died of sorrow. Nora thought he died of bile. Maybe it was a chemical reaction of the two, like the baking-soda-and-vinegar volcanoes the kids had made in school. In any event, it was certainly natural causes. Whenever Nora imagined disaster, it was always dramatic: the plane on which they were flying to Bermuda plummeting into the cerulean sea, a cab rocketing around the corner and sending her flying while her children watched in horror. When the twins were small and she was carrying them she would always imagine stumbling; she endlessly rehearsed spinning, falling, cushioning them so that her own body took the full weight. But the crises were never what you thought, always more pedestrian: Ollie sliding down the banister and breaking his collarbone, Charlie complaining that she’d served bad shrimp and
then having to have his appendix removed. Jack had apparently told Sherry he didn’t feel well, took three Advil, lay down in the den, and died sometime between the evening news and the end of the Yankees game, with The Wall Street Journal open on his chest.

  “I don’t know that I’ll ever make my peace with the idea that I was downstairs in the living room reading for all that time, and he was either dying or dead,” Sherry said the next morning while Brutus pulled mulishly at his leash, his black eyes glittering as Homer sat patiently next to Nora.

  Everyone on the block had salved themselves with the idea of Jack’s as a good death, falling asleep in his recliner chair, without months of chemo or a long hospitalization or, what none of them said, the perpetual disgrace of being the guy who’d done that terrible thing to the poor handyman. But Sherry was not part of that hallelujah chorus. She had not seen her husband for hours, perhaps because it had become second nature to avoid him, and she tortured herself with the notion that he might have called for help and she not heard him, a classical station playing loudly while she read a British mystery novel down below. Her eyes darted up and down the block when she talked to Nora, ever suspicious that one of the tabloids might be casing her home. GOLF CLUB EXEC BEATEN BY BUM HEART. It hadn’t happened. Jack might have once again become a page-five story, but the mayor’s wife had recently left him for a woman—“who I know personally, and, believe me, she is a million times nicer and smarter than he is,” Jenny had told Nora on the phone—and a photogenic twenty-five-year-old divinity student had been assaulted while she biked to class. Bebe had once told Nora that that was the best you could hope for when there was bad publicity—that something worse would come along. And she had been right.

  Sherry had even decided against a memorial service. The memorial service had become the new funeral in New York City. No coffin, no body. The deceased was already long gone to the crematorium by the time some public venue hosted what was called a “remembrance” or a “celebration of life.” Nora and Charlie knew the drill by now: slightly more than an hour of anecdotes, favorite readings, a little poetry, perhaps one of the more literary psalms. Slideshows were considered tacky, but classical music was de rigueur even if the person had hated the Philharmonic, WQXR, and Mozart. Sometimes Gershwin or very modern jazz was acceptable, and several people they knew had had “New York, New York” as the recessional. Occasionally a memorial would run close to two hours, and then you would see people sliding into the aisles and out the door early, grumbling in the sunlight about how important it was to be respectful of the time commitments of the living.