“Molly’s not one of them,” the troublemaker said. I guess he meant to be charming. “She’s got plenty of bones! She’s got great bones.” The table laughed with pleasure and relief.
I tried to, but a sob came out, and I swallowed it quickly before they heard. “I’d better clear,” I said, and stood, grabbing two pie plates before rushing out to the kitchen. It’s over, I thought with relief, glad to have a chore to distract me.
Naomi appeared with more plates. She leaned against the sink, studying me. “Did you understand what I was saying?”
I nodded, prayed she would stop.
“Don’t become one of those people who despises what they are and where they came from. You have nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it should make you even prouder. And—this is important—it should make you want to help others. Because you know, you of all people know that if given the chance, any of those kids could lead better lives. Understand?”
Naomi couldn’t have guessed what that meant to a nervous fifteen-year-old, a lonely girl who worried she didn’t belong at the school she attended, or with the adults who cared for her. It meant to me that I wasn’t special to Naomi—one in million she had chosen out of love and admiration—but merely a social experiment, a laboratory mouse. I lied, said I understood. She hugged me, said, “I love you,” and went back to her guests.
Why didn’t I ask her? Why didn’t I say, am I no different from the others? Could you have gone into the next driveway and found another Molly Gray just as good? Because I thought she would routinely reassure me, that she was too kindhearted to tell the truth except by accident.
I was uneasy in the kitchen. Their voices intruded and I worried there would be more lectures, more hammering on my heart. The house was stuffy with their talk, smart talk that I had flattered myself before dinner I was equal to, and I now hated, thinking it was what disconnected me from Naomi, what had made me feel so miserable and alone.
I stepped outside into the cool air. Naomi and Sam owned a long stretch of private beach on the bay, dark and still that night. Above, there was a bright cloudless sky, exploded with stars, not vast, but crowded with life, a Manhattan skyline of the cosmos, far away, yet beckoning, knowable.
Walking down to the shore, I fought my feelings, tried to swallow their bulk. I told myself—and this was the only time I considered going back—that I should return home. I could drive there myself in a Volvo not too different from the one that had taken me away.
Go now and in a few years you’ll forget all the nice things, I told myself. Be strong—go now or you’ll always feel this sad and unsure. I thought of all my so-called friends at school and admitted that though they were polite, they were not comfortable with me. Somewhat precociously, I knew that soon I would be too old, too different, too spoiled to go back. If I returned right away, the beautiful things, the marvelous ideas, the grand ambitions might become nothing more than a fantasy, something to hug at night while I slept next to my drunk and snoring husband, also dreaming of some other life.
Giving up the struggle to pull even with all the bright rich kids, dropping my oars to drift with the current in an aimless boat appealed to me. I wanted to be defeated, to lose, to be free of freedom. I’m weak, I decided, surprised, because I thought that’s why I had been chosen, for my strength.
“You made a mistake,” I said out loud to Naomi, staring back at the glassed-in porch where she and her guests lingered over coffee, free now to openly scare themselves with stories of the weird Boneless People. “I’m not strong enough,” I bawled, overflowing with self-pity.
The bay can amplify a voice and carry it for miles: mine seemed to echo among the pines. Ashamed that I might have been heard, I covered my mouth and panted through my fingers.
“Shut your trap, you stupid girl,” I said to myself, imitating how my father scolded when he came home tired. “I’m sick of your bawling.” My Maine accent had returned; I had flattered myself it was gone. “Don’t you put your ugly red face in my food. Shut up!” I snapped my head back as if I’d just been slapped. “Now go to your room and shut your ugly mouth!”
You’ve gone mad, I thought. I spooked myself. Scared, I ran to the freezing water, knelt on the rocks, ignoring the sharp biting circles of the barnacles, and put my hot face in the bay, hoping its ice cold would shock me out of lunacy.
When I returned to the house, after all the guests were gone, to face Naomi’s nosy, worried, even guilty questions, I had wrought a change. I was no longer a soft and willing clay for her gentle, and sometimes cruel hands. I had been fired, too hard for any more shaping.
SINCE I AM TELLING THE STORY OF THE PEOPLE I’VE LOST or fought hard to keep, then our next stop is New York. I am a brand-new associate in the law firm where I eventually made partner. After two years in the city—as was the case in boarding school, college, and graduate school—I had few friends, although I had many acquaintances, dated a lot, and went to my favorite kind of social gathering, namely large, loud, anonymous parties. I had no close friend, no best friend, until I met Wendy Sonnenfeld.
That happened in SoHo, in a dark loft, blaring with music and quaking with dancers. Our dates knew each other and introduced us. Later we went out to breakfast at an all-night diner on Canal Street. Over pancakes, Wendy told me she had gone to Hunter Elementary, a school for bright children. It ruined me, she said. She claimed she suffered from a self-imposed pressure; that unless she was busy with an extraordinary endeavor, she felt she was squandering her time. That was her story. She presented it, a calling card, to the people we knew in those days, a gang of writers, actors, and painters every generation seems to see when they’re young and then lose touch with by middle age. Maybe the gang are all Peter Pans and can be known only by the young. Wendy had reason to expect a lot of herself. She was talented. She played the flute so well I was amazed she hadn’t pursued music professionally. On her walls she had preserved two paintings from that phase of her artistic wanderings, each stunning and quite different. Often people mistook them for the work of an established artist. There were several etchings, a sculpture, a notebook of poems, and soon, a restless dissatisfied trail, the tracks of a search party. It’s not that she didn’t have an identity—she had no conviction her talent was worth the effort.
“I’m not a genius,” she’d say.
“So what?”
“I’m not even that good.”
“So what?” I was pushing Zen those days. Process, not results.
“I don’t have a vision.”
“So…?” I wavered. Even I thought a vision might be essential.
“Artists have vision,” Wendy assured me.
I got wise to her eventually. She secretly thought she was an ordinary person, a quiet stream accidentally diverted into this babbling brook of so-called artists. Ashamed to be a regular person, she was creative out of obligation.
In time, I told her my story. Not the dinner table version, but the details of Maine’s cold grubby poverty, my unhappy parents, and the sediment of gritty humiliation that must be swallowed at the bottom of even the clearest broth of charity. I took the risk she would think I was ungrateful to Naomi.
She didn’t. She understood. From then on she was my best friend because I knew I could be myself with her. But I didn’t think the reverse was true, no matter how frank she was with me, because it seemed that everyone was her closest friend. Wendy was totally open in those days, expressing her feelings with reckless ease—a bird singing in the public park, unconcerned by who might overhear, laugh, or be moved. In fact, she did have an unusually appealing voice, warm and melodic and inviting. She worked the phones at the real-estate office of a friend when she needed extra cash, and men often asked her out without having seen her, excited and in love, just with her conversation. You see why I liked her so, she was everything I’m not: emotional, friendly, trusting, charming, comfortable with humanity.
I don’t know why she liked me. I really don’t. I do know when I realized my
primacy among her one million friends. She appeared at my door one Saturday morning, holding up a bag of take-out coffee and artery-stopping jelly doughnuts. “Are you alone?” she asked.
I don’t wake up quickly, but I forced myself to fight against grumpiness. “Yeah, sure, come in. I can make you good coffee.”
“I don’t want good coffee. I’ve made a life choice, and I can only drink Greek-coffee-shop coffee on momentous occasions.” She glanced at my bed—I lived in a studio apartment and the dining table was within view—and said, “Looks too messy to have been just one person sleeping.”
“I kicked him out in the middle of the night.”
She laughed. “Did you really?”
“He was moving around too much.”
“Wonder Woman,” she commented, a nickname she used for me. I had objected the first time, protesting that it was derisive. No, she had answered, I mean it admiringly. But from then on she called me Wonder Woman only when we were alone, presumably so that I couldn’t claim strangers might misinterpret. Wendy took out a doughnut, a snowball of sugar, and bit down hard, with exaggerated appetite. There was a puff of white smoke, a confectionary explosion, flakes falling on her jeans. A dot stuck, clownish, on the tip of her nose; jelly oozed at the corners of her mouth. “Hmmm,” she hummed, orgasmically.
The thought of that much sugar turned my stomach. I winced and looked away.
“I’m gibbon ub bart,” she mumbled.
“What!”
Wendy opened one of the coffees, raised it greedily to her mouth, the steam arching in ahead of the liquid. “I’ve given up art!” she said after a swallow. “Fuck it,” she said. “Fuck creativity. It’s time to do something useful, something that works. So you’ll be my only friend from now on.” She opened the other coffee and brought it to me. “I’m going to become a teacher.”
“A teacher?”
“‘Those who can, do,’” she said. “I’m gonna teach retarded children.”
“Yeech,” I said, not about the coffee, although the taste reminded me of burned wood.
She stared at me for a moment, surprised. “Aren’t you impressed with my compassion, my self-sacrifice, my worthiness?”
“No,” I said. “What a depressing job.”
From the way she beamed at me you would have thought I had been supportive. “They can really be helped,” Wendy insisted. “The earlier, the better. A lot can be done, they can function. Really.”
“I believe you. But why am I going to be your only friend?”
“Oh. Well, you are already. Everybody else I know is only interested in people who are artists, actors, writers—something pretentious. You’ll see. Besides, I won’t be able to stay up late. I’ll be in school getting my degree. Working hard.”
I didn’t believe her, although we spent the day filling out her application to a graduate program in special education. Even when she did begin her training, I expected her to quit any day. And I was absolutely sure she was wrong about her circle of friends. But they did recede gradually, a steady, barely perceptible evaporation. She replaced them with an equally large number of new friends and acquaintances. I was, however, the only survivor of the past, the bridge from one Wendy to another.
Perhaps our intimacy was intensified because we had no real families. Wendy was orphaned while in high school; her parents were killed in a head-on crash with a drunk driver on New Year’s Eve. Her only close relative was an uncle who lived in Florida and she disliked him, although he had performed his duty to her: seen her through college and administered the insurance money wisely so that there was a slight income, enough for her to be bohemian, enough for her to pursue the teaching degree with the help of a loan or two and some part-time work.
As for me, after Sam’s death, Naomi lost interest in everything except for her endowment of Stanford to collect feminist literature. She moved out there, and I rarely saw her. Besides, she disapproved of my choice to enter corporate law, wishing me to be a legal aid lawyer or something in the public interest. Naomi never said so, but I suspect she hoped I would return to Maine, to defend battered women or other worthy causes. I have to confess I believed she was right, that it was my duty to return something—and I took more than my share of pro bono cases to salve my conscience. Yet any attempt to force myself to go back was as hopeless as coaxing a child to eat spinach. My muscles fought it, my throat closed up, I was revolted.
Wendy and I became each other’s family. We made Thanksgiving meals for ourselves, and later for friends who were apart or without homes to visit. I bought her a dreidel and lit candles on Hanukkah; she helped me drag the Christmas tree from Sixth Avenue to my apartment.
While I worked seventy hours a week in order to impress to make partner, Wendy’s load of studies, clinic work, and her part-time job left her equally drained. She’d bring pizza, Chinese, deli, terrifying desserts on her way home (her apartment was only two blocks from mine), and the hour or two we spent consuming and debriefing was my only joy. We were so different in our backgrounds—the hard and sad yellow-haired lobster girl, the lively and nervous Jewish girl—the oneness surprised me, sometimes even bothered me. I couldn’t imagine being so at ease with any man. I don’t know how to describe those thousands of hours: intimacy and comfort, knowledge and forgiveness.
Twelve years ago Wendy got her degree. She was very proud. With the certificate of completion in her hand, she felt she could shake off the worrisome self-imposed label of dilettante that had dogged her since college. She already had a job in a children’s city program that would begin in the fall, and she had worked three evenings a week in a halfway house for retarded adults.
“What do we do to celebrate?” I asked.
“We don’t have to celebrate,” she said.
“It’s not fair. There’s no cap and gown, no graduation picture with ten thousand people in it.” Her eyes were shimmering with feeling. I wanted to make a fuss, to show her I was proud too. I didn’t know how.
“Would you do me a favor?” she asked. She looked shy, which wasn’t like her. “Would you take me to the cemetery where my parents are?”
“They were buried in New Jersey, about a forty-minute drive from Manhattan. Wendy had gotten directions from her uncle in Florida. She hadn’t been to the grave in years; in fact, she had never mentioned its existence to me. We went right away, that afternoon, in the beat-up red VW bug I drove in those days. I decided it was time to get a real car after listening to it struggle to keep up on the turnpike. The skies were threatening rain. With uncharacteristic caution, I had brought an umbrella, but when we arrived at the gate and stopped to ask directions to block 6, the sun came out.
I drove slowly on the narrow road between the dead. They were all Jewish. We had passed a temple for ceremonies near the entrance. “It’s weird,” I whispered, “to look at their names.”
Wendy nodded. “My mother’s family bought their lot here forty years ago. Uncle Manny was really glad I was gonna visit. You know what he said? That there’s room for me and my husband and children.”
“Brrrrr!” I shook off the creepiness.
We had driven on a suburban road to get to the cemetery, passing the usual houses, supermarkets, gas stations. When we found block 6 and got out, I looked around and all that was gone. Nothing to see but headstones, gray and silent. Off at the perimeter, to be sure, I could find the edges of the commercial world; and among the graves moved the living world, a few crews digging new holes, cutting grass. A block away a ceremony was in progress: someone was sobbing.
“Here,” Wendy said. She had dressed up for this, I realized. Nothing dramatic, which is why I hadn’t noticed earlier. She was in a gray skirt and white blouse, not formal but neat, a schoolgirl’s uniform. Perhaps the way she dressed when they died.
There was a large rectangular granite slab in the middle of block 6, near the edge of a footpath that intersected it. KLEIN was carved along the top. Then six names beneath, along with dates of birth and death. Klei
n, Wendy explained, was her mother’s maiden name, and those names were her grandparents and great-grandparents.
“Here’s Mom and Dad.” Wendy moved to a stone buried flush with the ground, below the upright slab, placed at the edge of the path, SONNENFELD was crammed onto it, with her mother’s and father’s first names below. Of course, the dates of their deaths were identical, a clue to their accident, BELOVED DAUGHTER & SON, it read on one line, and then beneath that, the oblique reference to Wendy: CHERISHED MOTHER & FATHER.
I started to cry. Embarrassed, I squeezed my eyes together and put my arm around Wendy’s shoulder to remind myself that she was the one who needed comforting.
Her head was bowed, studying the carved symbols, the letters that represented her parents. Her cheeks were flushed, but her eyes were clear, not teary. She didn’t move or speak for quite a while.
The burial in the other block ended. The doors of the limousines and cars opened and slammed together, a chorus of departure.
“You know why the rocks are there?” she asked me, pointing to other headstones. I noticed for the first time there were small rocks placed on the top rim. “You do that to show you’ve come and visited,” she explained.
Out of guilt? Wanting credit? Or better things: wishing the love and grief could be as obvious and as permanent as death?
“Do you believe in God?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
Another long silence. She closed her eyes for a while, but still no tears. When she opened them, I said, “Do you?”
“Yes,” she answered. “Will you put a rock there?”
I bent down, searched in the grass, and found a small brown rock, half-covered with moss. I put it next to her mother’s name.
“I’m ready to go,” Wendy said, “but I need you to hold my hand while I say something.”
I took her right hand in my left. She brought her feet together in a dutiful pose and looked down at the stone. “Ma,” she said, and her voice broke on the word. “Dad,” she struggled on, and at last there were tears in her eyes. “This is my sister, Molly. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m not lonely because I know her.”
The Murderer Next Door Page 2
