“Here in the twenty-first century? No,” said Lola. Ethan took his thumb out of his mouth and started to cry again. “Look, I have agave syrup, but it’s for him. No sugar. I’m running late. I have to go.” And yet another door briskly closed in Sugar’s face.
Still not put off, she descended the last flight of stairs and knocked politely, but for a good length of time, on the last apartment door, the dark gray one with five locks, each of which she eventually heard being slowly released.
The door was then opened by just about the thinnest girl Sugar had ever seen. She was wearing jeans that hung off her childlike hips, and two sweaters whose necklines revealed bones so close to the skin Sugar was amazed they hadn’t broken through. She had blond hair that was tied up in a knot on her head, and lovely pale green eyes fringed with dark lashes.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
“Why, I’m looking at you,” Sugar replied.
“Well, don’t,” the girl said, but she didn’t close the door.
“Please excuse my rudeness,” Sugar said, reaching out her hand. “I’m Sugar Wallace.”
“Sugar? What a stupid name,” said the girl, looking at her hand for a moment before her eyes rolled back in her head and she fainted, dropping like a silk scarf onto the floor.
7TH
Mr. McNally limped back to his favorite chair and sank into it. His hip was killing him, just not quickly enough for his liking. He settled back into the worn cushions and reached for the remote.
Television was all he lived for these days even though there was nothing decent to watch apart from the classic movie channels. He figured he must have seen every movie at least a dozen times and none of them was improving with age but at least they weren’t total shite to begin with like all the modern films.
His television was the only new item in an apartment otherwise untouched since the eighties. It was enormous, a flat screen, his pride and joy—or his pride, anyway.
Joy? He had forgotten how to feel that. He’d forgotten how to feel anything except anger: anger at making so many mistakes in his life and anger at not knowing how to fix even one of them. All his sixty-seven years had been a total waste of time except for a few years closer to the start than the finish where he’d found happiness and then thrown it away. And that made him even angrier: the fact that he had messed up his life himself. In fact, that made him so angry that he couldn’t think straight—he hadn’t thought straight in decades. He’d turned into the sort of grumpy old bastard he’d been terrified of as a boy.
Of course he had sugar. He had loads of the stuff, sitting in a faded striped canister in his empty kitchen. He didn’t eat much these days but he still liked a cup of tea so strong you could stand a spoon up in it and half a pound of sugar too, thank you very much.
She was a looker, the new tenant, and he didn’t know why he felt the way he did when he opened the door and saw her there; why he got angry before he got anything else. It was that poxy whore’s-melt downstairs who was to blame. It must be.
Below him Mrs. Keschl had shuffled back to her kitchen where she’d been in the middle of making something but couldn’t remember what. There was an onion on the kitchen counter, and a bay leaf, and a stick of butter and a ball of yarn.
She hadn’t knitted anything for twenty-four years and she didn’t have a kitten so she was hard-pressed to imagine what the ball of yarn was for. The kitchen was dark and put her in a bad mood, which wasn’t far to go. That old fink McNally! Not letting the new tenant have a cup of sugar when she knew the miserable toad practically lived on the stuff.
She shuffled back into the living room and over to her favorite spot in front of the dresser crammed full of her mother’s china, brought from Hungary decades before and never used, or admired, but in prime position anyway. Her ankles were swollen and her back hurt and she felt like reading a good book except that she didn’t have one and her glasses had broken during the Clinton administration and she hadn’t bothered to get them fixed.
“This is old age,” she said as she sat down. “I ask myself—what’s the point?” She asked herself a lot of things these days and couldn’t always remember the answers.
Her moods were worse, she knew that. She was not always a nice person to be around but that was just her way of avoiding the sadness that filtered its way into her like rainwater into a dry mountain creek.
There was still goodness in her, even though it might not be obvious to others. But she knew it for a fact and she clung to it. Then she heard the kid start caterwauling in the apartment below and wondered just how long she could keep hold.
Downstairs, Lola was gluing butterflies on to a bright pink lampshade that spun and sang “Send in the Clowns” when she turned it on. It was one of the few things that stopped Ethan’s crying. Her son was her most prized possession but his crying exhausted her so life was being boiled down to a string of things that shut him up. All she wanted was to be a good mother but it was harder than anything else she had ever done.
When she wasn’t painting the walls to give him more color, adding a sapphire blue sofa there, a scarlet toy box here, a cobalt throw there, she was trying to make a living, but sometimes she struggled to see how she would ever have fun again.
There was never enough money, enough time, enough customers, enough vodka, enough good-looking men who had even half a clue what to do with an amenable female—that’s if she could ever get a sitter.
There was a way forward, that was becoming clear, but she didn’t want to taint the life of her perfect, pure, sweet-smelling son the way she had once tainted her own.
She looked at her boy on the rug, his sad little face crumpled, tears collecting in the corners of his eyes like dewdrops. Then he lifted his fat little arms up to her, hands opening and closing, and she scooped him from the floor and hugged him close.
He was still crying, but the way he burrowed into her she knew he felt better.
8TH
At the touch of Sugar’s soft hand on her cold brow, Ruby’s eyes flickered open and she stared up, trying to work out what had happened.
Sugar just let her stare, then gently helped her back to her feet.
Whether people tended to need more helping to their feet when Sugar was around or whether she just noticed them being on the ground more than others in the first place, she could never quite say. But either way she seemed to help people to their feet a lot. They were the people who still wrote her letters.
Most of them took more out of her than Ruby. She weighed next to nothing; it was like herding a cloud.
“The name my mother gave me is Cherie-Lynn,” Sugar said, as the fragile girl wobbled on her spindly legs like a newborn foal. “But I’m not sure it’s any less stupid.”
“It isn’t,” said Ruby. “I’m Ruby.” She was seeing stars. She loved seeing stars, although it meant that the hospital was not far away and she did not love the hospital.
“You know I could really use a glass of water,” Sugar said. “Would it be OK if I came in?”
Without waiting for an answer, she stepped forward and shut the door behind her, then took Ruby by one bony elbow and navigated her to a big red wingback armchair over by the window.
The apartment was roughly twice as big as Sugar’s and furnished expensively, but not in a way she thought a young woman like Ruby would go for. The colors were dark and a wall of books, mostly fairly weighty reading from what she could see, lent it an aristocratic library feel. With the drapes pulled all but closed, the apartment had a sour, stale feeling to it, as though the windows were never opened.
“I’ll just sit you down here and if it’s all right with you I’ll get us each a drink.”
Ruby’s gaze followed her into the kitchen. She was kind, this Sugar woman, but Ruby knew where such kindness usually led: to food.
Ruby was down to sixteen one-eighths of a cracker, three wedges of orange, a whole stick of celery, which she did not even like, a small jar of baby food for vitam
ins and minerals, and half a diet soda each day and she felt good at that level although she thought that perhaps she could cut back to two wedges of orange. Of course, if the hospital was just around the corner, she should probably consider raising her quota to four wedges of orange and even maybe add a carrot but it was just that she felt so good the way things were at the moment with three and just the celery.
“Now is there anyone I should call for you?” Sugar called from the kitchen, a beautifully equipped gourmet setup of which she doubted Ruby used even a fraction. “I could do that if you need me to; otherwise I’m quite happy to sit with you until you get your equilibrium back.” She took in the neatly displayed boxes of cereal, the array of artisan pastas, the selection of oils, the preserves, the shelves heaving with cookbooks. “Equilibrium is very important,” she continued, checking out the refrigerator, packed with unopened cheeses, meats, a cooked chicken, a box of whoopie pies—none of it touched. “Nobody tells you that when you’re young. Always yakking on about the birds and the bees and vocational guidance but let me tell you, equilibrium is right up there with breathing.”
She carried the two glasses of water into the living room and handed one to Ruby. “I learned that myself some years ago but I learned it the hard way. It comes naturally to some but I’m sorry to say I wasn’t one of them.”
“I’m fine,” Ruby said.
“I’ll just sit here and finish my glass of water and then I’ll be on my way. I have a lot to get done today. What about you?”
Ruby had thought about walking up to the Whole Foods at Columbus Circle because they most likely had the biggest selection of quinoa, but now she wasn’t so sure. She tried to remember how long it had been last time between the stars and the hospital. She had a horrible feeling it had been not that long. Maybe she should just think about going to the smaller Tribeca Whole Foods. Or the Chelsea one.
Actually, now she came to think about it, she was pretty sure that it was a couple of weeks between the stars and the hospital. Possibly even a month. It had been OK until the nurses had called her mother. Then there’d been a scene that she didn’t care to revisit. She should have the extra bit of orange and the carrot. And some quinoa.
She couldn’t remember how her daily intake had been whittled down to so little. She was sure she had been trying harder, had been doing better. Where had she gone wrong?
“I don’t need you to call anyone,” she said. “You can go now if you want. I’m fine.”
“All right then,” said Sugar, not moving. “You know I always wanted to be named after a jewel. In fact, I wanted to be called Jewel but the best I could get away with was Sugar, which is what my granddaddy called me, or Sugar Honey to be exact, which sounded OK the way he said it but otherwise I guess it is a bit much.”
“Your water is finished,” Ruby said.
“So it is,” Sugar agreed. “But I still have a terrible thirst so would you mind if I help myself to another glass before I go? It’s hot up there on the rooftop—I live up there, did I mention that? And a person can get dehydrated climbing all those stairs. Or just walking on the flat for that matter. I’ll get you another glass while I’m at it.”
Ruby was too exhausted to object. She would wait until she felt better, perhaps do a few more sit-ups. Then she would walk down to Tribeca and maybe get a diet soda and take it to Battery Park if it was such a nice day that people were getting dehydrated everywhere. They had one of those fountains that spurted up from the ground down there and if you found the right seat, you could watch the children play in it and see past them to the Statue of Liberty in the distance. Ruby liked that. She felt the farthest away from the Upper East Side at the very bottom tip of Manhattan.
“Oh, you keep a scrapbook,” Sugar said, noticing the leatherbound book sitting on the coffee table near Ruby’s chair when she came back with two more full glasses.
Ruby picked up the book, and held it to her chest, blushing. “It’s private,” she said.
“I kept a scrapbook when I was younger,” Sugar told her. “For years, I put all sorts of things in it. I wanted to keep a diary but I knew my mama would read it so I just collected bits and pieces to remind me of things instead of writing it all down.”
“Mine isn’t that sort of a scrapbook,” Ruby said. “It isn’t about me.”
“So who’s it about?”
“Other people.”
“Other people you know or other people you don’t?”
It occurred to Ruby that it had been quite a long time since she had talked to anyone. It felt foreign, like Dutch. She couldn’t now work out how Sugar had gotten in to her apartment and started a conversation. Had Ruby invited her? Had Sugar invited herself? It all seemed hazy somehow, but familiar too, in a good way, like she was always talking with people, which she wasn’t unless they were people her mother paid to tell her she should eat and she didn’t do that anymore. Talk to the people that is.
Sugar hadn’t mentioned eating. Not once.
“I remember my scrapbook had a birthday card from my oldest brother Troy,” she was saying, “who told me I was the sweetest sixteen the whole city had ever seen, and it had a dried red rose from my prom date, Charlie Harrison, who turned out to have thirty-three warts on one hand and eleven on the other. And I had a photo of Grampa Boone—on my mother’s side, the one who called me Sugar Honey—getting married to my grandmother and I even had a tiny little piece of lace from her wedding veil.”
Ruby looked down at the leather-bound folder. “Oh,” she said. “Mine is a little bit like that.”
Sugar smiled and pointed at the scrapbook. “Go on then, honey. Let’s take a look.”
To her own surprise, Ruby found herself opening it, smoothing the pages with her small bony fingers as she slowly started to turn them.
“Goodness,” Sugar said. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
Far from being the record of a single city girl’s misspent youth or a collection of aspirational skeletons as she had suspected, each page bore a neatly glued New York Times clipping of a newly married couple beaming into each other’s eyes, or at the camera, or twirling on a dance floor.
“Weddings,” said Ruby. “Every weekend they have all these lame stories about people getting married. It’s such a crock. I mean they just come out with all this ridiculous stuff about falling in love and all that. And they talk about how they met and what they first thought and how it all went wrong but then they met again and realized it was meant to be and so they got married.”
“They do?”
“Yeah, no one just says, ‘We met in a bar and didn’t hate each other and my ovaries were about to shrivel up and die so we hooked up.’ There’s always some big story.”
“Is that so?”
“I just started putting some of the really weird ones together and then it kind of turned into a scrapbook. The world’s most stupid scrapbook.”
“So, are you in college?” Sugar asked.
“Look at this one,” Ruby said. “Katie Sheehan and Adam O’Neill met in some dorks’ online support group for Jeopardy! fans. Can you believe that?”
“People sure do meet in the strangest places these days,” said Sugar. “You don’t even have to be anywhere.”
Ruby flicked over the page. “And Trey Tenforde and Genevieve Ford? A bird shat on his ice cream on their first date and that made her fall in love with him. Bird shit! Can you believe it? And these two—look, two men—lived together for twenty years but then one got cancer so they went to Iowa and got married. That’s before they changed the law here so the same sexes could get married at home.”
“Well, looks like you’re quite the romantic, Ruby.”
“No, I’m not.” Ruby bristled. “I’m just someone who likes stories with bird shit in them.” She slapped the book shut. “That’s why it’s private. That’s why I never show it to anyone. It’s not about me. It’s about all the losers out there and their stupid lame stories.”
“They’re definitely
better to collect than stories about murder and mayhem,” Sugar said.
“Or stamps,” Ruby added. “I hate stamps.”
A pale pink hue had snuck into her cheeks. Sugar didn’t know what had done it, looking at all that marital bliss or having someone to talk to about it. One thing she was sure of was that this girl was starved of more than just food. She was lonely.
And Sugar was good with lonely.
9TH
Theo was at Gramercy Park Hotel on a second date with Anita, a sophisticated blond advertising executive with whom his former brother-in-law had set him up.
She was halfway through a story about a photo shoot she’d just been on with a celebrity whose famous rock-star husband had terrible body odor issues when Theo thought he saw Sugar walk past outside.
“I’m so sorry; can you excuse me a moment?” he interrupted, not waiting for a reply as he jumped up and raced out onto the street, on the trail of the shiny swinging ponytail. But then the ponytail turned the corner and he saw its owner was of Asian heritage—and pregnant.
It was not Sugar at all.
He breathed out, long and slow, the crushing ache of disappointment sitting on his chest like a Glaswegian smog as he walked back to the bar to apologize to Anita. She was very pretty. Smart, and good company too.
“Do you want to try that new Spanish place around the corner?” she asked when he sat down again. “It just got three stars.”
Usually Theo would have said yes, even though he knew he did not feel anywhere near enough for Anita to take it much further (and he thought tapas were bad value for the money). Usually, he would go on a third date before letting her down gently, saying he just wasn’t ready for anything serious and did not want to pretend otherwise. Usually that would be the truth. But suddenly he had the feeling he was ready for something serious. Just not with Anita.
And what his wreck of a marriage, subsequent divorce and years of therapy had reminded him was that honesty was always the best policy. His mother had taught him that too, but somewhere along the line he had forgotten. Never again.
The Wedding Bees Page 4
