The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  His story had been absolutely clear. They had been working together for two weeks. Sabine had asked before where he was from and Parsifal had told her Westport; but it was when they took a break from rehearsal one day so that they could get some lunch that she had asked him about his family. Parsifal, who had a great deal of youthful melodrama at the time, put down his sandwich, looked at her, and said, "I don't have any family."

  For Sabine, life without family, without parents, was inconceivable, a hole of sorrow that made her love him even more. The details of the story came slowly over the next year. The questions had to be asked delicately, at the right time. There could not be too many at once, there could not be follow-up questions. What worked best was soliciting the occasional feet: What was your sister's name? "Helen." To press the subject too hard made Parsifal despondent. She discovered that when he said he did not wish to speak about it, he wasn't secretly hoping she would try to coax him into conversation. There must be other family, uncles, cousins? "A few, but we were never close. They didn't try to help me after my parents' death. I'm not interested in them."

  Slowly the small stream of information dried up. The story had been told. It was over, leaving Sabine with only the vaguest details of sorrows best forgotten. Once, many years later, when they were playing in New York, she had suggested that they take the train out to Westport. She wanted to see where Parsifal grew up, maybe they could even go to the cemetery and put some flowers on the graves.

  Parsifal looked at her as if she had suggested they take the train to Westport and dig his parents out of the ground. "You can't mean that," he said.

  She did mean it, but she did not mention it again. There was a certain perverse benefit to the situation anyway: Sabine was his family. Hers was the framed picture at his bedside. She was always his past, his oldest friend, mother, sister, and finally wife. History began in a time after they had met. She did not complain.

  Sabine closed the ñle and tapped it on the table. She needed Parsifal. If he were here, there would be a sensible explanation to this. She ran through the facts until her head hurt. Then she called her parents.

  Of course they wanted to see her, to listen to her problem. They told her to meet them at Canter's. For Sabine, they would do anything, do it gladly.

  Sabine and her parents had had lunch at Canter's every Sunday that they lived together, and most Sundays after Sabine left home. They knew the menu like they knew each other, two sandwiches named for Danny Thomas and one for Eddie Cantor, the introduction of quesadillas and pasta in the middle eighties. Sometimes they went there for dinner during the week, if Sabine's mother had a math student who needed tutoring after school and there was no time to make dinner. But Sabine could not remember ever going there at three o'clock on a Tuesday. Once she was inside the restaurant, the smell of lox and lean corned beef overwhelmed her. She couldn't remember the last time she had eaten, and she put her hand on the overflowing pastry case and leaned towards the glass, suddenly mesmerized by kugel.

  "Wait until after lunch," her mother said, getting up from the booth where her parents were sitting. Sabine kissed her mother and allowed herself to be led back to the table.

  "Sabine," the waitress said, and took her hand. "I've heard about your sadness."

  Sabine nodded.

  "I'll get you something nice," she said. "Something special. Would you like that?"

  She said that she would. She would like nothing more than not to have to make a decision at that exact moment.

  As soon as the waitress was gone, Sabine told her parents there was news she needed to discuss with them and took the folder out of her purse. Her parents sat on the opposite side of the orange booth, watching, barely breathing.

  "Not your health," her mother said. She rested one finger on the edge of the file.

  "God, no," Sabine said. "Nothing like that." Although she desperately needed some advice, she hated to tell them. It had taken so long for them to come to accept Parsifal, to love him, that even after his death she felt cautious. She put the story out truthfully: Roger, the lawyer; Guy Fetters; Alliance, Nebraska; a mother and two sisters. Her father looked inside the file. He studied the information so hard she wondered if there were something she had missed.

  Her mother shook her head. "Poor Parsifal," she said. Her father sighed and put the folder down.

  "Why poor Parsifal?" Sabine asked, certain now that she had missed something.

  The restaurant was bigger than an ice-skating rink, but at three o'clock it was nearly empty, just a few old men in pairs who were drinking coffee, and they were all far away. They bent forward over their cups, their bald heads lacy with freckles. Still, Sabine's mother lowered her voice. "Don't you think something must have..." She paused and opened up her hands. They were empty. "Happened to him?"

  "What?"

  "Well, I wouldn't know," her mother said. "But he was a loving boy, always hungry for family. One would imagine that these people, these Fetter people, wanted nothing to do with him. They probably sent him away for being a homosexual. There isn't likely to be as much tolerance in Alliance, Nebraska."

  It had not occurred to Sabine. She sat back while the waitress brought her a bowl of mushroom barley soup and two knishes that looked very promising, flaky and golden in the soft light of the fake stained-glass ceiling. Sabine thanked her but was no longer interested in food.

  "Of course he wanted to forget the past," Sabine's mother said. "He made things up, okay, he shouldn't have done that, but I imagine these people did not do right by him, otherwise he never would have denied them. If you ask me, it's remarkable that he left them all that money, money that should rightfully be yours."

  "Stop that," Sabine said, and waved her hand. "There's more money than anyone could possibly spend."

  Sabine's father inhaled slowly, sadly. They waited. "Another possibility," he said. He had spent his life in America just down the street, working as a tape editor for CBS news. He was used to changing things around to alter their outcome. "Someone could have hurt him."

  "Hurt him how?" Sabine asked.

  "It's possible," her father said reluctantly, "when he was a boy." He rubbed the back of his neck.

  How Parsifal would howl at this, Sabine told herself. You and your parents sitting in Canter's talking about whether or not anybody put his hand in my pants when I was a kid. Sabine looked again at the pages she had memorized. Mrs. Albert and Albertine, but no Albert.

  "A terrible thought," her mother said.

  Sabine was ashamed of herself for not rushing to Parsifal's defense. Her parents had assumed that there was a perfectly good, if perfectly horrible, reason for his lie, but she had not. She believed their answer was somewhere in the neighborhood of correct, if not the exact facts, then the general tenor. Someone in Nebraska had wronged Parsifal enough to leave him unable to speak of what had happened.

  "So do you think I should call them?" Sabine asked.

  "That's what you pay the lawyer for," her mother said. "You don't need to waste your time talking to people like that. Parsifal clearly didn't want you to know them, so respect his wishes. Don't know them."

  Sabine's father nodded in agreement and picked up a potato knish that was growing cold on his daughter's plate.

  Sabine was grateful to her parents. Time after time she had asked them to understand things she didn't have much of a hold on herself. They had wanted her to be an architect, but instead she built miniature versions of suburban developments for architectural firms. They thought that with her beauty she would have married well, but she had devoted her life to a man who loved men. The years they had fought and wept and not spoken and made up were so far behind them now that the things that had been said were both forgiven and forgotten. Parsifal had come to their house for many Shabbat dinners and for every Passover and Thanksgiving. He had his own place at the table and there were always plenty of macaroons because he had once said how much he liked them. Parsifal had helped Sabine's mother wallpaper the
kitchen. He had taught Sabine's father a particularly difficult card trick that mystified her father's friends. At the wedding her parents stood with them beneath the chupah and cried, if not from happiness exactly, then from love. They had disliked the circumstances, her mother would say, but they had always loved the man.

  "We can't leave here until you eat something," her mother said to Sabine. "If you keep going like this you're going to vanish."

  The waitresses skated by with coffeepots. They kept the old men happy. The manager brought Sabine a slice of chocolate cake she hadn't asked for and made it clear that she was welcome to stay in that booth for the rest of her life.

  On the phone that evening, Roger said of course, no problem. He thought it was just as well that he contact the family. "But if they want to get in touch with you?"

  "They're not going to want to talk to me," Sabine said. "No one likes to open up old wounds."

  "But I need to know, if they ask me."

  Sabine was drawing a picture of a small black top hat on the back of the phone book. After a moment's hesitation, she put Rabbit inside. "If they ask, then"—she bit the end of her pen—"then you tell them yes. They won't ask."

  "If you're sure," Roger said.

  Sabine said she was sure.

  When Sabine was nineteen and had bothered to think about these things at all, she'd pictured Parsifal's mother as being extremely beautiful. That was when his mother was still the tragic heroine of the story. Her hair was thick and dark and she wore it pulled back carelessly in a barrette. She had long legs and tasteful gold jewelry and a good strong laugh. Her eyes tilted up at the corners like her son's. They were his eyes, pale blue like a husky dog's and rimmed in spiky black lashes. She kept one leg tucked beneath her on the front seat of the car as the family drove up to Dartmouth to see their son. They worked the crossword puzzle together aloud. A five-letter word for African horse.

  Had Parsifal gone to Dartmouth?

  The father was behind the wheel, getting the answers to all the difficult questions (five letters, Gulf of Riga tributary). Sabine was never told what he did for a living, and so she imagined him a scientist, spending his days in a white lab coat, checking on beakers and Bunsen burners. He was handsome, quiet, hopelessly in love with Parsifal's mother.

  In the backseat was Helen, who tilted her head out the window because she liked to feel the full force of the wind coming down on her. She was still in high school, all legs and arms. She read magazines in the car. She answered all puzzle questions concerning movie stars.

  Sabine made them out of bits of Parsifal's personality, characteristics of his face. She made their skin from the pale color of his skin. She put them together in her spare time, and when she had them all exactly right, she arranged them in the car and sent them speeding towards their death.

  Dorothy, Albertine, and Kitty, quite alive in Nebraska, eluded her entirely. In fact, the entire state of Nebraska defied imagination. Who actually lived there? Every day that Parsifal lived in Los Angeles, he denied them, scraped them from the landscape again and again until they were hardly outlines. What had they done? Who had cut off whom? Parsifal at four, ten, fifteen—what could a boy have done that was so wrong? Sabine got the Rand McNally road atlas out of the trunk of her car and thumbed through to Nebraska, a page kept perfectly clean and uncreased from lack of use. Other pages showed green for hills, darker green for mountains, blue for rivers and the deep thumbprints of lakes, but Nebraska was white, a page as still as fallen snow. It was not crosshatched with roads, overrun with the hard lines of interstate systems. It was a state on which you could make lists, jot down phone numbers, draw pictures. And there, in the beating heart of nowhere, Sabine found Alliance. Alliance, Nebraska. How could he not have mentioned that? It didn't look like something you would simply forget.

  Sabine took the adas back to Parsifal's study, a small room with a corner fireplace that looked out over the swimming pool. A favorite black-and-white picture of Phan holding Mouse on the flat of his palm was on the desk. Parsifal had conducted much of his rug business from home in the last two years. In drawer after drawer she found invoices, a sheaf of receipts, notes about particular Kashan and Kerman rugs he was looking for, names of buyers in Azerbaijan, a folded-up sheet of notepaper that said, in his own writing, "Poor wool was cheaper than good wool, and various processes of chemical washing temporarily concealed the deficiencies and imparted an enticing sheen to the carpet, which the unsophisticated thought charming." There were meticulous records of purchase dates and rates of exchange, employee 1040s that she thought she probably should send to someone. In other drawers she found notes on magic, mostly descriptions of other magicians, tricks he'd liked and wanted to figure out later: "From his mouth he expelled eleven yellow finches, one at a time, his arms straight out to either side." One note mentioned her: "His assistant balanced everything he needed on top of her head. Rather doubt I could talk Sabine into this." She put her face down in the notebook and smelled the pages.

  In a folder marked "Phan—1993" was a copy of every lab report, every T cell count, every pill swallowed, with no editorializing other than the occasional "Color is bad today," or "No sleep—night sweats." Behind it, a considerably thinner folder that just said "Parsifal," in which he had tried to keep a similar record for himself and then quickly given up. He should have told her he wanted to keep track, or she should have known.

  There were some letters in a box in the closet. There were letters she had written to him when she was much younger. She knew what they said and didn't open them. He had saved some birthday cards she had given him, a postcard she had sent from Carmel, though she couldn't remember going to Carmel by herself. There were some letters from Phan. Sabine sat on the floor and held them in her lap. The envelopes had been opened carefully, so as not to rip the paper. She slipped her fingers inside one and took the letter out. Most Beloved, it began, and for some reason this was the thing that started Sabine crying, so that she folded it up right away and put it back. There were a few letters from other men that she didn't bother with, and then, at the very back, a postcard from Nebraska addressed to Guy Fetters / NBRF / Lowell, Nebraska.

  Dear Guy,

  Just to say you have a beautiful baby sister waiting for you at home, very healthy, as am I. Kitty says come home soon.

  Sent with Love from your Mother.

  Sabine turned the card over and over again. The picture on the other side was of a grassy field with some snow-tipped mountains in the background that said "Beautiful Wyoming." This made it all true, truer than anything Roger could have told her. All she could read of the postmark was "MAR 1966," which meant that this new sister, who must be Albertine, was fifteen years younger than her brother. What was Parsifal doing away from home in February? And what was NBRF? Sabine flipped through the box again. One lousy postcard from an entire life? This was all that was sent? Sabine wanted to know where the pictures were, report cards, wedding announcements and obituaries clipped from the paper. Where, exactly, was the proof?

  Those were long and quiet days for Sabine, every one sunnier and more relentlessly beautiful than the last. A week passed and then another one started right behind it. In the backyard, limes and avocados fell to the ground, rolled under the low palms and rotted. Hot pink azalea blossoms clotted the pool skimmer. She went back to work on the strip mall in her studio. She made shrubbery for hours at a time while Rabbit slept on her feet. When it was finished she went back and covered the bushes in bright red inedible berries. The work was good because she knew what to do, how to mix the glue into a thin wash, how to cut the steel. She studied the floor plans. She made a rare interior, a boardroom for an office building with deep blue chairs that swiveled beneath her fingertip, a cherrywood conference table whose tiny planks she sanded and stained. She did not decide what to do about the rug stores, although they told her there needed to be a buying trip. She did not look over the papers that Roger sent, and she did not call the Fetters of Alliance, Nebraska,
to ask them what the hell had gone on during childhood. What stopped her was her mother's voice in Canter's saying that, clearly, Parsifal had not wanted her to know. If she had found a way to respect his wishes at nineteen, surely she could do it at forty-one; but she kept the postcard on her desk, the words face-out.

  Parsifal did not believe in magic. Everything was a trick and some tricks were better than others. He was openly hostile to any magician who claimed to have powers above and beyond good acting and good carpentry. He couldn't even speak of Uri Geller's spoons. But Sabine was a little more sentimental. She knew that there was no such thing as a true Indian rope trick, but she thought that maybe death was not always so final, that sometimes it was possible for someone to come back.

  "Dead is dead," Parsifal had told her. "Period."

  She said she believed in telepathy, in a few rare cases. She believed that she had it with Parsifal.

  "No such animal," he said.

  But then how did she always know what he needed? How did she always know it would be him when she picked up the phone? How was it she so often knew what card was on the top of the deck when he held it out to her?

  So on the ninth day alone in the house, when the phone rang in the middle of the afternoon Sabine was so sure it was Parsifal that she tripped over the rabbit while lunging for the phone. On the second ring she remembered he was dead. On the third ring she knew it was his mother. On the fifth ring she got up off the floor and answered the phone.

  "Mrs. Fetters?" the voice asked, not stating a name, but requesting one.