Gladys sipped her drink. “And what happened to your boy who wanted money?” she asked me. “Did he change you, too?”
“He was a mistake,” Lila said quickly.
“He was,” I said, but this didn’t help, or the drink I finished. It’s one thing to forgive yourself a mistake. But if you knew it was a mistake at the time, how do you forgive yourself then? That boy Adam had left a spiral scar as he tripped through my life, but you’d expect a clumsy passage from someone who showed up carrying his shoes. I looked at Lila, who couldn’t drink what was in front of her. I thought we wouldn’t have times like this, me drunk and her sober, until she was pregnant and a boy was gone from my life. But instead she was sick and he was gone from my life. “He’s dead,” I said.
“He’s nothing,” Lila corrected me. “He’s less than nothing.”
“You can’t be less than nothing,” I said. “Thank God. He killed himself without caring about me. He shed me like skin.” I heard the talk. You can be talking, just talk, and you wish you were conveying something at the same time, but you’re not. How could you be? “He said he felt happy whenever he looked into my eyes,” I said, “but he scarcely ever did. I said I’d hold him all night and make sure nothing happened to him, and sure enough nothing did. I thought I’d keep him because everybody should have a true love you can’t be with, but he lay in the bathtub and got gone, all guilty over something I didn’t even know about. Six years. I thought I’d be doing this with Lila when she was pregnant, not sick. Point No Point, we always said. Point No Point or bust someday.” I stood up and rested my hand on the wrecked TV just for peace and quiet. The ceilings were mirrored, with cameras behind them probably to keep all the money safe, and still I didn’t have any. “How dare he admit there’s no point?” I said, and sat down again to drink Lila’s Old Pal. “There’s no point to drinking, either, but look—I’m doing it.”
Gladys didn’t look surprised. She finished her drink too, and gave me an otherworldly sigh. “And you’ll die too?” she said to Lila. “When is that, dear?”
Lila gave her the smile again, the gorgeous one. “You’re not supposed to ask me that,” she said. “A month maybe, unless this beeper goes off, and then there’ll be another operation and one more month. And then Allison will go to grad school without me and study poetry. She has her loans, she’s all set to go, we just have to wait me out.”
“Poetry?” Gladys said. “You’re wasting money quicker than blackjack.”
“In high school it was Wallace Stevens instead of Sidney Poitier,” Lila said. “You know that poem about the different ways to look at a bird? She knew them all by heart. How many was it, Allison?”
“Thirteen,” I said. “O thin men of Haddam, why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird walks around the feet of the women about you?”
Lila took my hand and squeezed the thumbnail until it showed a white blob. A ghost, she taught me the day we met on stairwell B. A ghost in your fingernail.
“Are you ladies hungry?” Gladys said.
“I can’t eat,” Lila said.
“Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?” Gladys said, a song from prep school days. “If you could eat, dear, what would you, for a wish?”
“Cake,” we both said. It was her favorite forever.
“You don’t say,” she said, chuckling. She reached under her shawl and brought cake to the Point No Point Casino Lounge Number Six. It was a small piece on a paper plate, covered in clear plastic like a birthday leftover. This woman was a prophetess. “A bite won’t kill you,” she said to Lila, “no quicker, anyway.”
Lila tore the plastic off and licked a bit of icing from her finger. “What other wishes can you grant, Gladys?” she asked.
Gladys reached down to Lila’s waist and pointed to the beeper. “You won’t believe me,” she said, “but I can make this go off and extend your life if the operation works.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
“I made the cake,” Gladys said. “I made you a drink, as you well know. That’s no less a miracle. You want to live longer, Lila? It won’t be fun, but it seems like you girls could use the time.”
“You’re crazy and I wish you would stop,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” Gladys said. “I don’t think you’re ready for it to stop.”
Lila looked at Gladys and me and then the cake. It felt like waiting for Adam to say it back, those quiet times when all of a sudden nothing’s a joke. We’d had these moments before, usually in bars. This was like all of them. “Yes,” Lila said finally, “but can you really?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Gladys said, and stood up. “No, what am I talking about? There are lots of ways. It’s a gamble.”
“It was a gamble to come here,” Lila said. “What are the odds?”
Gladys didn’t answer, or maybe we didn’t hear it, not over the beeper. It was working. It was beeping. “Oh my god,” Lila said quietly. “I have to call the hospital if this is real. I have to call in and see.”
“Phone around the corner,” Gladys pointed.
“I’ll go with you,” I said. She tottered up and leaned against me, staring at the old woman at our table, and I felt a warm rush those cocktails couldn’t touch. It was love, not that I didn’t know. We left the lounge and never saw Gladys again. It could be a malfunction, I knew, but that’s always the case. Lila tossed coins into the phone which sat near the slot machines because the world doesn’t care how exactly they get your money. I watched Lila talk to someone like she’d shown her scar to Gus, and loved her way up north. This is love, to sit with someone you’ve known forever in a place you’ve been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it’s time to go. You don’t care about yours. Why should it change, the love you feel, no matter how death goes? She smiled at me and stuck her thumb up and hung up on the guy at the other end of the line.
“They’re real mad at you,” she said with a grin. “It’s real, though. We can catch the last ferry and I can be in tremendous pain by tomorrow afternoon.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” I said.
“Do you think Gladys,” Lila said, “is some sort of—”
“She said she was here to serve as an example,” I said. “I promise I’ll do a thorough investigation while you’re under anesthetic, Lila, only please let’s go let’s go let’s go.”
“Listen to you,” she said, and led the way. “You’re too drunk to drive.” She clapped her hands like she used to do every birthday when the candles arrived in a halo of light, and her dwindling friends sang the same old song. “I haven’t been behind the wheel in forever. Hooray!”
Hooray. We were outside in the weird afternoon, damp and hard to breathe in. Some seagulls from someplace were eating fried chicken that the casino had thrown away, and up near the spiraling clouds I saw some other kind of bird flap against the wind only to go the opposite direction. Lila took the keys.
“Come on!” she cried. “Come with me!”
The same album was on, of course, from the giddy ride up, and I drummed my fingers against the window as Lila threw us into gear. “You don’t know what it’s like,” said the singer, who had probably done worse things than wrap Adam’s seeping wrists with towels left over from Lila’s mother. “You don’t know what it’s like to love somebody the way I love you.” The original artists were a bunch of grinning white men, but the version Lila and I listened to was by a woman who made the whole thing fierce and wise. I turned it up and let it speak. I’d spent my life driving around my city with Lila while the pop music told us what was happening and what it was like, and never wished I was doing anything else. We merged to the bigger road and flew south, the winter weather getting crankier around us as we sang the song together. “You don’t know what it’s like to love somebody the way I love you,” and we retraced our woodsy steps down the only road back. We filled up the car without paying in Bainbridge, which is gett
ing harder and harder to do, the gullible men hunted to extinction, or maybe hiding in difficult parts of the globe. Lila spun the wheel around each corner as the album ended again, but even this turned out to be a wrong dream. The girls don’t win on Super Bowl Sunday, no matter how the game goes.
The Jewish people are not islanders, except Manhattan and its many bridges of escape, its secret underground railroads and its taxis that must take you anywhere you want by law. We prefer the mainland, as we have never been able to leave someplace easily. We linger in the entryway at the end of my parents’ dinner parties, and we clutter up the aisles of the synagogue, and the bribes at the border don’t work, and we end up surrendering our shoes and boarding the train. No one has fixed this, this plague thrown down upon us, and when we turned the last corner Lila threw on the brakes for the mass of traffic stopped on the road to the ferry. All the red lights of automobiles stretched out like a holiday I didn’t celebrate. “What’s going on?” I called over to the guy in the rusty sedan.
He rolled his window down too. “There’s no way across,” he said. “The last ferry’s canceled, is what I heard anyway. I’m trying to hear on the radio. It’s an emergency, I guess, but nobody knows what to do.”
“There must be someone who knows,” I said. I got out of the car with bourbon bravado and gave Lila a thumbs-up.
“Come back,” she said.
“The ticket booth guy,” I said, pointing down the red light district. “He’ll know something. I’m going to walk there and see.”
“I mean,” Lila said, and wiped at her eyes without knowing it. “I mean, come back after that. Don’t fall in love with the ticket guy and leave me here in the car.” There was a noise above us like an airplane zoom, but it was getting too dark to see. People started laying on the horn, braying like bad geese in a panic. “I am here,” Lila said with a trembly smile. Our driver’s ed teacher had told us that’s what the horn should mean. Not Move along, buddy or I am displeased but I am here. I am here, I am here, I am here!
“I will come back,” I said to her, shut the door, and ran down the asphalt to the booth where they took your money. A woman in sweaty overalls was already arguing with the guy. His name tag said Thomas but he’d crossed out the H in ink. Behind him I could see what he brought to work: a cup of coffee and a tattered black sketchbook, and he smoked, and on a grimy counter was a TV with its back to me. I heard the dim sound of a crowd. He was watching the game.
“I’m telling you I can’t tell you, like I said,” he told Overalls.
“How can I get back to the city if there’s no ferry tonight?” she said. “I’m a florist. I have flowers in the back.”
There was a loud, loud horn blast, and we all turned around to see who was there. First in the line at the booth, its bumper growling at the roadblock, was a station wagon, but through the windows all I could see were stacks and stacks of newspapers, yellowing now and yellowing more with every passing moment. Couldn’t anybody do anything right? “There must be a way,” I said.
“That’s what I keep saying,” said the other woman. “If the ferry’s broken there are other boats, like a charter.”
“Only if you have a lot of money,” the guy said, “and maybe not then. Look, I don’t know anything.” There was another roar above us and we looked up and waited. “They told me to let no one through and that there’d be more information on the radio. Will you please go back and sit in your car.”
“I have a friend,” I said, “who will have an operation tonight.”
Even the other woman looked at me funny. “I’ve heard every emergency,” the guy said. “Every single person in this traffic is urgent.”
The TV squawked and the guy looked. “These guys are really taking a beating!” an announcer said. He sounded more panicked than usual, maybe. “I’ve never seen this kind of thing from the Magpies!”
“Shit!” the guy said, and waved us back. “Please, ladies, it’s an emergency catastrophe. Go back and sit down and soon we’ll all know.”
“You could at least tell us something helpful,” said the overalls woman, and looked at me to see if I was on her team. I shook my head and walked back, the liquor fading with every step. Again there was the roar above me, but why notice the thunder when it only turns out to be rain? There wasn’t anything helpful to tell us. It was raining and it was going to rain. Everybody was honking so loudly I had to get back in the passenger seat to tell Lila I didn’t know, but she’d ejected the album and was fiddling with my radio which was almost always not working much.
“Tell me something,” she said, and winced toward her belly. She undid the seat belt, took a deep breath, and faced me. “There’s no football team called the Magpies, is there?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s the Eagles and some Orioles, I think. And the Anti-Semites. I don’t know.”
Lila winced again and then looked out the wet window. “Because the radio said something.”
“Holy motherfucking shit!” the radio said suddenly, and then disappeared into a depth of static.
“I think something is happening,” Lila said. She gave me a grim smile I hadn’t seen in months, a smile of trying to be brave. “I don’t think I’m going to make it. What did the guy say?”
“He didn’t know,” I said, “but he couldn’t spell his own name, either.”
“No one can spell my name,” Lila said, “and it’s a four-letter word. Don’t leave again. With all this traffic you’ll never find out. It’ll never stop and I don’t want to sit here without you.”
She opened her door briefly to the loud of the rain and the cars and she spat onto the ground, a white glob of her bite of cake. “It’s the end!” the radio shouted again, and I turned it off and reached across her to shut the door, so at least we could be quieter, a little. Emergency or football I wasn’t sure, and Lila didn’t seem up for either.
“They said this was my only chance,” Lila said quietly. In the lounge maybe it was worth it, to sit free at Point No Point rather than linger someplace to teach something to doctors, but now in the traffic we couldn’t bear for anything to end here, not a single thing.
“You won’t die in this car,” I said. “It’s not like that anyway. We need to get you back, that’s all. There’s a way. We’ll find it. I’ll find it while you sit tight.”
“No,” she said. “The window’s only open a few hours, is what they said. If I don’t get there they can’t do the operation and that guy will be dead for nothing.”
“Listen to me,” I said, and I felt the fury in my throat. The weight of the world isn’t worth it, not even with the love which will die and go away, but each moment with Lila was worth everything, to talk to someone I’d known forever like an old song. Listen to it. Love was all we had left, all of us, as we sat beaten down with the knowledge that there wasn’t a boat for the rescue. “They don’t know anything,” I said, “those guys. They think a leather jacket looks good zippered up all the way. A few-hour window? If you hadn’t come to stairwell B I’d be crying there still, and if we hadn’t left our keys on top of the jukebox the ambulance would have pulled Adam out of the bathtub alive, but then I would have married him like an idiot, and lost touch because you hated him. I would have lost touch with you in a few-hour window, what were the odds? We can do this. That guy’s dead for nothing anyway, all the deaths are dead for nothing, but you’re not dead at all.”
“You’re drunk,” she said, crying very hard. “I wish I could get drunk with you again. But there’s no way across.”
“We can dream up a better time for you to die than stuck in traffic,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Not if I can’t get to sleep.”
“Then we’ll stay up all night,” I said. “You’ll stay up all night with me. We’ve done it before, lots of times. I love you so soundly and I will do anything to drag you forward. You’re mine, Lila. You’re my star quarterback.”
“I fucking hate football,” Lila sobbed. “Blow u
p the game for me when I’m gone.”
“I won’t do a thing,” I said. “Without you I’m not moving.” Through the front window was another cliché, rain raging while the women inside wept like girls. The traffic screamed its emergency around us, but we could do this thing on our own. She was all the world’s money, and I would spend it with her, my sharpest friend who changed the tide, my only comfort from the brutal gamble of the world and the wicked ways of men. I grabbed her hands and clasped them together over her scar into a position of strength, like a prayer we wouldn’t be caught dead saying. Gather around us, heroic women of Haddam. Gather around us and put us under your silken wings. We are here, we are here, we are here, won’t someone take us across the sound together.
frigidly
What a bad day it was, the clouds low and cloudy, the rain no fun, the dark as it hit late afternoon thick like someone who stops by your place and just won’t leave. The day was canceled, almost, on account of the rain spilling itself all over everything. Everybody was eating at the diner where the food is lousy but you go there anyway. Everything was lousy about it. The chairs and tables stayed sticky, if you know what I mean. If you know what I mean there were five people inside the diner, plus a couple way off in the corner bickering together about something and the cook. Behind the counter was the guy who owned the place, with an apron on. He was let’s say polishing glasses with a white rag. Sitting on one of the stools was a woman who had been drinking. Near her lurked a young boy who didn’t belong to her. The boy was named Mike. Someone was supposed to meet him and hadn’t shown up and Mike, bored, just stayed around anyway, pressing the buttons of the jukebox without putting money in and slurping the leftover ice from a glass of soda the owner had given him out of pity. Mike didn’t mind it. Mike was ten years old, and already lots and lots of interesting things had happened to him in his life, so he could take a break this afternoon and punch nothing into the jukebox for a few hours. Nobody was worried about him. Mike was worrying nobody sick.
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