The man’s face was expressionless. “Next time, try keeping your legs together,” he said. Bethie gasped, but he’d already turned away to grab the edge of the blood-stippled sheet and pull it off the bed. The woman took Bethie by the elbow and led her back down the hall, back into the elevator, back to the lobby, where her sister was sitting on the love seat, holding Saul Bellow’s Herzog, with her thumb marking her place. Jo got to her feet as soon as she saw Bethie, and hurried to take her sister’s arm.
“Are you okay?” she asked, and Bethie nodded, leaning against her.
“I’m fine.”
“I’ve got aspirin.” She settled Bethie on the couch, got her a glass of water and a glass of Coke from an unfriendly bartender, and gave her sister aspirin to swallow. Bethie said that she was fine to walk, but Jo made her wait inside while she pulled the car right up to the door.
The whole way home, Bethie was quiet. She pressed her purse against her stomach and leaned her head against the window. The radio played, the Beatles singing “Ticket to Ride” and the Beach Boys singing “Help Me Rhonda” and Bob Dylan singing “Mr. Tambourine Man.” As soon as Bethie heard his voice she reached down and clicked the radio off.
“Bethie?”
“I’m fine.” Bethie’s voice sounded like it was coming from a radio station whose signal they were losing. She felt that way, like she was fading in and out.
“Did you pick a major yet?” Jo’s voice was cheerful. “Last time we talked, you were leaning toward English.”
“I think I’m going to take some time off. At least a semester.” Bethie didn’t tell Jo that she wasn’t going back to the U of M, not after this semester, not ever. She couldn’t imagine walking the same paths she’d walked, strolling through the Diag, having a burger at the Union, sitting in the same classrooms in the Fishbowl where she’d sat as Devon Brady’s girlfriend, a girl who was pretty and admired, a girl who hadn’t been spoiled, raped, ruined.
“You’re dropping out?”
In Bethie’s head, the voice of the doctor—if that’s what he had been—was loud as a shout. Next time, try keeping your legs together. She knew she’d be hearing that voice, those words, on an endless loop in her brain, maybe for the rest of her life.
“I can take some business classes at Wayne State. There’s always a job for a girl who can type,” she said, repeating the mantra of Mrs. Sloan, who’d taught Business Typing at Bellwood High. “You should go back on your trip,” Bethie said.
Jo didn’t answer.
“I’ll pay you back,” said Bethie. Just like that, a plan was forming. “I’ll work at Hudson’s this semester. Mom can get me a job. I’ll earn enough money to give you back whatever it cost. You can go on your trip. You should go on your trip.” The image of Jo’s money in that awful woman’s hands, the idea of Jo missing out on her chance to escape, the chance she’d wanted so much and had worked so hard for, tore at Bethie’s heart. She could feel all her shame and sorrow gathering into a heavy knot at her center, an iron weight where her heart had once been.
“Don’t worry about it,” her sister said. “It turned out Shelley couldn’t come after all. So, you know, it wasn’t going to be what I’d thought.” She was staring at the road, not meeting Bethie’s eyes.
Bethie adjusted her grip on her purse, closing her eyes as her insides cramped. “Thank you,” she said when Jo had pulled into the driveway. “Thank you for everything.” She got out of the car, moving slowly, hunched over like Bubbe. It was the end of August, the air thick and humid and buzzing with the noises of lawn mowers and sprinklers and cicadas, those good, familiar summer sounds, beneath the wide, innocent Midwestern sky. Soon, school would begin. Kids would laugh and call in the early-morning light, mothers would pop their curlered heads out of front doors and yell at stragglers to hurry, or call kids back for homework and permission slips. Halloween would come, and costumed kids would knock on their door for candy. Then Thanksgiving, Chanukah, and Christmas. Snow would fall, snow would melt, grass would grow, be mowed, grow again. Mrs. Johnson across the street would bring over her squash and peppers and pumpkins, and Sarah would offer her roses and snapdragons and hydrangeas in return, and Bethie would always feel the way she was feeling, dirty and ashamed and unclean.
She went into the bedroom, pulled the shades to blot out the daylight, crawled into bed, and pulled her pillow over her head. She slept for an interval that could have been an hour, or eight hours, or a day. She woke, shuffled to the table, ate food she didn’t taste, slept again. One morning, Sarah appeared in the doorway. “Bethie, you have to get up. You’ve got an interview in Housewares at eleven.”
Bethie pulled herself out of bed, into the shower, and into the only dress she had that still fit, an old one of Jo’s, green polyester with long sleeves. She couldn’t fix her pasty complexion or the circles under her eyes, but she washed and set her hair, and put on lipstick and blush, and rode downtown with her mother, and promised the manager, one Mr. Breedlove, that she would work hard, and that she’d be grateful for the opportunity. When Mr. Breedlove smiled at her with yellowed teeth and said, “Happy to have you on the team,” she felt a great weariness. Time for another ride on the carousel, she thought. Round and round again.
At lunch, Bethie ate cheeseburgers or fried chicken or the meatloaf special, while Terri and Marcy and Liz, the other girls on the floor, had salads or cottage cheese with pineapple. What was the point of watching her weight now? Once, she’d thought beauty was power, but now she could see that it was just trouble. A pretty face, a cute figure, a smile, all of those were weak spots. They were ways in, and Bethie wanted to be armored, defended, unbreakable. At home, she would poke and pick at her dinner, and when her mother and Jo were asleep, she’d pull ice cream out of the freezer, or a box of Bisquick from the pantry, add eggs and milk, and make pancakes, which she’d smear with margarine and douse with syrup and eat in big gobbling bites. The ice cream left her with headaches that made her feel like someone was driving an ice pick into her forehead, and the pancakes burned her tongue, and she knew that none of it was good for her, but she couldn’t stop. Food filled her and soothed her, and even feeling stuffed to the point of sickness, even getting sick, was better than feeling the shame, remembering the abortionist’s sneer as he told her to keep her legs together next time.
Another four bottles of Metrecal appeared in the pantry. Sarah began serving chef’s salads for dinner and Jo, who’d gotten a job teaching history at a middle school in Detroit, would try to get Bethie to go on walks with her, or on bike rides, or to hit tennis balls at the park. One morning at Hudson’s, Bethie’s old high school friend Laura Ochs walked right past her, on her way to the semi-annual White Sale, and didn’t even recognize her, and Bethie, her face burning with shame, locked herself in the break room for the twenty minutes she figured it would take Laura to buy discounted sheets or towels. She studied herself in the mirror. Her face was round and pale as the moon; her hair hung in lank strands against her cheeks. There were circles under her eyes, and her expression was exhausted, the look of a girl who knew that things were bad and that they would never get better.
My fault, she thought. My fault for dropping acid, my fault for being stoned. My fault for being with Dev in the first place, and believing that he wanted to be with me. That night, she joined Liz and Marcy for drinks at Tangier, a bar down the street from Hudson’s, where the floors were sticky and the barstools’ vinyl seats were torn, and the only nod to anything foreign or exotic was a single faded paper lantern that hung above the far corner of the bar. Bethie ordered a gin and tonic that came in a squat, smeared glass, and drank it as she listened to Liz chatter about her upcoming wedding, and Marcy complain about her husband.
“Uh-oh,” Liz said, her voice low. “Gals, we’ve got company.” Bethie looked up to see Mr. Breedlove, the long strands of his sparse black hair combed across the brown-spotted dome of his skull.
“May I join you ladies?” he asked, squeezing his bulk into t
heir booth. “Bartender, another round!” Another gin and tonic with an anemic wedge of lime arrived. Bethie sipped, breathing through her mouth to avoid Mr. Breedlove’s stale coffee breath. He was telling them about his last trip to Miami, leaning so close that Bethie could see the blackheads that dotted his nose. “The gals there, whew, let me tell you,” he said, and made a fanning gesture, to indicate their sexiness. “Talk about itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny bikinis!” Liz, who needed all the overtime he could pay her, giggled, and Marcy glanced at her watch, and Bethie excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, where she spent another long spell studying her reflection. An idea was starting to come to her. Her face was still pale, but her eyes, instead of looking blank and exhausted, sparkled with mischief and bad intentions. She felt alive again, like a struck match fizzing into flame, the same way she’d felt slipping Uncle Mel’s glass paperweight into her pocket, on the way out of his door. For the first time since she’d laid back on the hotel-room bed, Bethie could imagine possibilities. Doors were opening, and maybe she could walk through.
Mr. Breedlove was waiting for her, right by the telephone booth outside the restroom door. He crowded her into a corner, maneuvering his bulk to trap her against the wall, extending one arm and putting his hand by her head. “Want to grab a bite?” he was asking. Some part of Bethie’s brain must have noticed one of his suit jacket pockets hanging lower than the other, and while her mouth was smiling and saying, “Of course, let me just freshen up,” her hand was easing forward, dipping into his pocket, extracting the wallet and tucking it quickly into her purse.
Mr. Breedlove smiled at her, and gave her fanny a little pat as she disappeared back into the bathroom to powder her nose. Bethie locked herself into the stall and flipped open the worn black leather wallet, where she found sixty dollars and a Diners Club credit card, behind a plastic folder full of photographs of a woman who had to be Mrs. Breedlove, several small Breedloves, and a chocolate lab, by far the best-looking of the bunch.
She tucked forty dollars into her pocket, and put lipstick on her lips without meeting her own eyes in the mirror. On her way back to the table, she dropped the wallet on the floor and kicked it toward the bar, confident that one of the other patrons, or Tangier’s single weary waitress would discover it and give it back. “I’m so sorry,” she said, picking up her jacket, which she’d draped over the back of her chair, “but I forgot I need to pick my mother up at the synagogue tonight. It’s the anniversary of my father’s death,” she said, to sympathetic murmurs from Marcy and Liz, and a disappointed frown from Mr. Breedlove.
Outside, it was sleeting sideways, a wicked wind blowing off Lake St. Clair. Bethie shivered, pulling her coat closed, tugging her hat down over her ears. Forty dollars wasn’t enough to pay Jo back, or even pay for a plane ticket back to London. But it would be enough for a one-way bus ticket to San Francisco. Dev had talked about California like the promised land, where it was always sunny, where it never snowed, where the Man wouldn’t hassle you for burning a little rope. The next morning, she went to work as usual, but she left early, claiming debilitating cramps. She took the bus back home, and in the empty house, she found her sister’s rucksack, gathering dust in the rear of their closet. Her blue-and-white dress still hung there, the pretty dress she’d brought on her visit to campus, the one she’d been wearing the night she’d met Dev. She left it hanging there, filling Jo’s rucksack with the clothes that still fit her, underwear and bras and socks, a few books, a toothbrush and a comb, and walked out the door toward the bus station, and California, and whatever new life awaited her there.
Jo
L’chaim!” roared three hundred wedding guests, as Denny Ziskin’s heel came smashing down to shatter a napkin-wrapped glass.
Denny raised his arms in triumph, flushed with pleasure at the feat of breaking the glass, and of marrying Shelley Finkelbein. The crowd stomped and clapped and began to sing “Siman Tov U’Mazel Tov,” and Denny grabbed Shelley’s hand and danced her down the aisle, toward the reception hall doors, behind which, Jo knew, four thousand dollars’ worth of delicacies awaited, including an ice sculpture of a Star of David, grapefruits topped with maraschino cherries to be served with a flaming brandy sauce, prime ribs of beef, twice-baked potatoes, a three-foot-long challah, and a reproduction of the Temple Mount constructed from chopped liver, olives, and carrot and celery sticks.
Jo was under the chuppah, wearing a bridesmaid’s gown of apricot-colored satin with a white satin sash, white Mary Jane platform shoes, and a white headband in her curled and sprayed hair. She was holding Shelley’s bouquet, in addition to her own. Shelley had given her a small, sad smile when she’d handed it over, before turning to the rabbi and taking Denny’s hand. The bouquet was made of orchids and delphiniums and hydrangeas, all winter-white, and Jo had wanted to throw it, hard, preferably at Shelley’s face, but she’d promised to behave herself. Her presence was the price that Shelley had exacted for giving Jo the name of a doctor who could help Bethie. “I’ll tell you,” Shelley had said when Jo had called, “but you have to be my bridesmaid.”
Jo felt like she’d swallowed a stone. “No,” she blurted. “Why?”
“Because I don’t have any girl friends,” Shelley had snapped, with a flash of her old spirit. “If you’ll remember, I wasn’t spending a lot of time senior year with my old sorority sisters.”
Jo, who remembered exactly where Shelley had been spending her time, hadn’t answered. “Denny was a Sammy. He’s got eight fraternity brothers he wants to be his groomsmen. Plus his real brothers, plus his cousins,” Shelley said. “I’ve got to come up with some more gals.” Her voice had softened. “And I miss you.”
I miss you, too, Jo wanted to say. I miss you, I love you, I’ll love you forever, I never stopped. Instead, she swallowed and said in a stiff voice, “If that’s what you want, I’ll do it.”
On the Thursday before the wedding, she’d left her house on Alhambra Street and driven to Shelley’s house, where for three days straight she had been with Shelley, and if some evil demon had devised a perfect way to torture her, it could not have hurt worse. She’d accompanied Shelley to the beauty salon, where the girls in the wedding party had gotten manicures and had their hair styled. She’d sat next to Shelley at a bridal luncheon on Friday afternoon, and at Shabbat dinner with her family Friday night. They were always together, but never alone, and every minute, Shelley was right there, close enough to touch; lovely Shelley with her shining hair arranged in a graceful twist, amplified by lengths of fake hair the hairdresser had clipped in; Shelley with her pale skin and her sooty lashes, Shelley with her shining gray eyes and tobacco-scented breath, hugging Jo good night on Friday after dinner before dispatching her to the same blue guest room where Jo had slept during her visit the previous spring. That time, Shelley had snuck into Jo’s bed at two in the morning. The night before the wedding, Jo lay awake, past midnight, past one o’clock, past two, waiting, hoping against hope that Shelley would come to her, that Shelley would say I can’t do this, that Shelley would say Let’s run away together; let’s just go. Jo was ready. She’d filled her mother’s car with gas before leaving home, she had her bag packed, the car keys on the bedside table. But Shelley never came.
On Friday afternoon, it had started to snow. Leo Finkelbein had stood by the living-room window, fretting about the guests who hadn’t yet arrived and the foolishness of a January wedding in Michigan. By dinnertime, the snow turned into rain, which made Leo’s mood darker. “Vurse,” he had muttered. “It’ll freeze!” The rain had frozen, but plows had cleared the roads and, on the morning of the wedding, the Finkelbein household arose to find the landscape transformed. Everything, from the ground to the trees to the rooftops, had been coated in a sparkling crust of ice. The whole world, especially the grounds of the West Bloomfield Hills Country Club, glittered as if sprinkled with diamond dust. The club sat on top of a hill above the golf course, with wide windows that offered a view of the sparkling slopes and the pine tr
ees, with their boughs frosted with snow.
Jo told herself that she felt nothing as the happy couple came skipping down the aisle, Shelley, adorably gamine, and Dennis, gawky as a schoolboy in his heavy glasses and his white dinner jacket, with their guests clapping and stomping and singing, their hands clasped, arms raised triumphantly, as if they were boxers who’d just won a fight. She watched them and thought, I want to die. I do not want to exist in a world where this has happened.
“Jo? You okay?” That was Denny’s sister Julie, pregnant beneath her apricot satin. Jo nodded, forced her lips into a smile, and followed Julie into the ballroom, where it looked like the inside of an ice castle. The tables were laid with pure white tablecloths, glittering crystal, and towering arrangements of white orchids and white ranunculus, creamy lily-of-the-valley and white gardenias, peonies and hydrangeas, all mixed with gracefully curving branches that had been sprayed with white paint and glitter. Mr. Finkelbein, short and stout as a teapot in white tails, stood at the front of the room, in front of the nine-piece orchestra, patting his hands together, smiling in delight as Dennis and Shelley made their way onto the floor for their first dance to “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” which was followed by an exuberant hora. The guests formed circles, one inside of the other. Shelley and Denny were ushered to the center, seated on chairs, and hoisted to shoulder height by shouting, perspiring men, who hefted them up and down in time to the music. Dennis was beaming, and Shelley was smiling, clutching one end of a white handkerchief while Denny held the other end, looking as if this was all she’d ever wanted in her life.
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