“Chewing gum for a nickel.”
“Peanuts! I bet you didn’t get peanuts on the airplane. Food allergies,” Esther says and rolls her eyes. “I’ll tell you what else has gone by the wayside. People making their fortunes off things. Widgets. You know, stuff we can use.” She tells Buddy about a cousin who invented fitted sheets. Another cousin made a fortune selling gloves. “And someone had to invent paper clips. Or paper cups. Recently, I read the obituary of the man who made millions off Toni permanents. How often do you stop to think that someone had to invent the most ordinary things, things that make bigger things run, or like fitted sheets, make life easier? Things that, in a nutshell, do something. Now it’s all junk bonds and hedge funds and things we can’t even understand, let alone hold in our hands.”
Buddy, who has been making another attempt at his sandwich, sets it down and with a confused look says, “Food allergies?”
“Did I say that?” She certainly has gone off on a tangent. “Oh, yes. From the peanuts. They’ve stopped serving them on airplanes. What I want to know is why the allergic people can’t say, ‘No, thank you?’”
Buddy nods, though not convincingly, and then not be outdone he says, “Phone booths . . . with doors that shut.”
She smiles. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I hadn’t either, until I was looking for one. And then I wondered, ‘What would Clark Kent do?’”
“I suppose he’d find some other changing room,” Esther says. “Or not. In which case.” She frowns. “Who would save us from ourselves?”
Certainly not the man seated across from her, who is now reaching for his drink. She holds her breath while he brings the glass to his mouth and then, with surprising aplomb, sets the long-stemmed glass firmly back on the table. Still, Buddy Markel will not be our savior. For that matter, neither will she. We’ve had our chance, she thinks. Somebody else will have to figure out how to save a world without widgets or spotted owls.
Buddy looks at her intently, and after a long pause he says, “Sonia. Sonia’s gone.” He reaches for his wallet and after much fumbling slaps a picture on the table as if it were the winning card in a hand of gin rummy. He taps it gently, then strokes the image of a woman with cropped gray hair who is seated on a park bench. “That’s Sonia.”
“I know,” Esther murmurs.
“You do?”
Esther nods, but as she draws the picture closer she wonders if she spoke too soon. The woman in the picture is leaning into a cane. And her stiff, short hair is wrong. The last time they’d met, Sonia had the kind of thick, silver hair that you see on models chosen to make aging look glamorous and fun, like the woman in the Cedar Shores brochure. This woman is wearing a long black skirt, a peasant blouse, and fat amber beads. She is a woman who might be impersonating Sonia. Would Esther recognize her if they were to pass in the supermarket? For that matter, would Sonia know Esther?
“She’s beautiful,” Esther says, sliding the photo back across the table.
Buddy nods. Then, suddenly, with all the enthusiasm of their initial greeting, he says, “Esther! Esther Lustig! It’s so good to see you. How long has it been?”
Oh, what difference does it make? She can tell him, but if they were to sit here long enough, he’d ask her again. She wishes Sonia was here. Sonia wouldn’t go all stupid on her.
Postscript
Two weeks before Esther was scheduled to move into Cedar Shores: A Retirement Community, Ceely received a call from Milo. “Your mother,” he said gravely. “She is on bed.”
Ceely rushed right over, not knowing whether “she is on bed” meant that Esther had fallen and was on the bed resting, or whether she was on the bed with a fever, or whether she was on the bed unwilling to get up and that Ceely had better come over and talk some sense into her, as she’d done the previous week. Ceely refused to entertain any other possibility.
Soon after Ceely arrived, Sophie showed up with Lenny, who spent most of the time on the couch, his head in his hands. Barry, the last to arrive, was talking on his cell as he strode into the living room.
“She’s on the bed,” Ceely said to her brother, and then they all traipsed after him into the bedroom, even Lorraine, who had alerted Milo when Esther didn’t answer the phone at the appointed time.
Later, Lorraine would tell Ceely, “Now here’s the part I can’t remember. Whenever we separated, one or the other of us would say, ‘I’ll call you in the morning.’ It was your mother’s turn to call, but I don’t think she said that.”
Lorraine dabbed at her eyes with a crumpled tissue. “We’d been to our class at the community center, the one where we write in journals. Then we went to Wing Yee’s, and after, we sat on the courtyard bench,” she said, indicating with her head the approximate spot, two flights down, where they’d rested after lunch. “The air was nippy, but the sun felt good.”
“Then what happened?” Ceely asked.
“Your mother said, ‘I feel sad,’ and I said, ‘About what?’ And she said, ‘Everything.’ And I said, ‘Esther. Be specific. Please.’ Then she got a little prickly. You know your mother. ‘You want specific?’ she said. Then she held up her hand.” Lorraine demonstrated how Esther had traced the outline of one crooked index finger with the other. “I was shocked to see how bent her finger was,” she told Ceely. “I remember thinking, How could I have overlooked a thing like that? ‘The doctor calls it a swan’s neck deformity,’ your mother said, and I remembered that of course she’d mentioned it, which made me wonder how I could have forgotten. Anyway, she said, ‘Swan’s neck. Sounds better than it looks. You live long enough, Lorraine, you get the booby prize.’ Your mother paused for a while, but she wasn’t finished. She said, ‘My TV is on the fritz. And I’m having trouble reading the paper. And now Ceely has signed me up for that place. Bingoville.’”
Lorraine’s hand flew to her mouth. “I’m sorry.” Then she reached for Ceely’s hand and patted it. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“Go on.” Ceely edged closer to Lorraine. They were sitting on Esther’s love seat, which Sophie and her boyfriend would soon be coming to pick up. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”
Lorraine wiped her eyes again with the shredded tissue.
“Please, Lorraine,” Ceely urged. “Tell me what happened next.”
“Next? I think that’s when she batted her hand in the air and said, ‘Enough about me.’ And she started talking about a bomb going off in a market in Iraq. ‘A father and son had gone to buy a bird. And then. Kaboom! Gone. Just like that.’ She told me she’d tried figuring out what she’d been doing when the bomb went off. She’d calculated the time difference. She said it was nine hours ahead in Baghdad. ‘So when it’s three in the afternoon, I’m just waking up. Or maybe I’m still asleep. Yes. I was probably asleep when that bomb went off,’ she said.” Lorraine paused. “Then your mother gave me one of her looks and said, ‘How’s that for specific?’ She got teary and looked away, started rubbing her finger, as if she was trying to straighten it out. She said something I couldn’t hear. If she isn’t looking right at me, I can’t hear so good. So I said, ‘What did you say?’ That’s when she looked up, raised her voice so loud I was afraid the neighbors would come running. ‘And I’m still here!’”
Lorraine continued. “Then I had to get going. I wanted to bake a cake for my niece’s daughter’s baby shower. A hazelnut torte. Your mother loved my tortes.” She smiled. “Then we parted. But I don’t remember hearing her say, ‘I’ll call you in the morning.’”
Esther never called. So Lorraine called her, and then she called Milo, and then they were all gathered around Esther’s bed, shouting, “Mom!” “Nonna!” “Esther!” “Ma!” Even Milo, who had been a paramedic in Belgrade before fleeing to Chicago, who knew that all the shouting in the world wouldn’t rouse the tiny figure lying faceup on the white chenille spread, even he joined in. “Mrs. Esther!”
Sophie leaned over to kiss her Nonna’s cheek. “She
looks so peaceful,” she sighed. “Like Sleeping Beauty.”
As a child, Sophie had loved taking naps with Esther, snuggling under the comforter, kissing her grandmother’s soft cheek, inhaling the lingering sweetness of the Pond’s that she lathered on her face every night at bedtime. Esther would lie there, serene, eyes closed, and just as Sophie decided she was sound asleep, her grandmother would pounce and, like an affectionate retriever, lick her face. So when Sophie leaned over Esther’s eerily composed body, inhaling a last whiff of the familiar Pond’s, she half-expected her Nonna to spring up, plant one of her sloppy kisses and cry, Fooled you!
But the figure in the blue dress was a study in repose. “Still life on chenille,” Sophie whispered, eerily echoing a remark Esther had made not that long ago. Then she wondered aloud why Esther was wearing the dress. Softly, she said, “Perhaps Nonna had a premonition.”
After all, how many times had Esther cried, “Get out my blue dress and shoes?” And how many times had one or the other of them shot back, “Get it yourself!” All that time, Esther was trying to tell them that she was old; that she wouldn’t go on forever. Despite her son-in-law’s efforts to extend life, she might have told them that she didn’t want to go on forever. But they dismissed her with jokes. “So in the end,” Sophie said, “she got the dress for herself.” The girl started to weep.
Esther looked as if she might have been heading out for the evening. She’d put on her pearls with the matching earrings, and the Lady Bulova, a birthday gift from Marty. She had on nylon stockings and a fresh coat of lipstick. Her glasses were on the nightstand, and her shoes—the dyed-to-match silk high heels—stood beside the bed, pointy toes facing out.
“She looks perfect,” Sophie said, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.
“Too perfect,” Ceely replied.
“We don’t even know that she’s really, you know,” Barry mumbled. “Maybe she’s just in a deep sleep. I mean, don’t you think we should call someone. To confirm?”
“Feel her hand. It’s ice,” Sophie said, but her uncle recoiled and backed away. “Besides, Milo used to be a paramedic.”
Barry looked at the super, as if for the first time. “What’s he doing here?”
“Shut up, Barry,” Ceely said. Then, “Go ahead. You call. Put that phone of yours to good use.”
It was Milo who made the call.
Esther died of natural causes, though for the longest time, Ceely couldn’t shake the feeling that her mother had taken matters into her own hands, that if only she hadn’t pushed her mother to move none of this would have happened. Lenny, who hoped one day to find the switch to extend human life, would put his arm around his wife and say, “She wore out, Ceel. That’s what happens.”
“But the scene was too perfect,” she’d say, to Lenny, to Sophie, to anyone willing to listen. “It was so artfully arranged. Like a still life. Sophie was right.”
Certainly, Esther had outdone herself in every way. If only her mother could have seen what the others observed. The magazines on the coffee table were fanned out like early morning in a doctor’s waiting room. The bathroom sparkled; the towels were freshly stacked. The dishes were put away, except for a single mug, turned upside down in the drying rack. Esther had looped a clean dish towel over the oven handle. With the exception of the spices and odds and ends of rice and grains, she’d consumed all the food in the cabinets and wiped the refrigerator clean. Even the place mats—Esther always set out two, as if Marty might stroll in for dinner at any moment—had been put away.
For years to come, they would all remember Esther’s shoes pointing out, as if awaiting their marching orders, and the fact that when her body was lifted and taken away, the chenille spread appeared as taut as a freshly made bed in a five-star hotel. It appeared as if Esther had been levitating, as if she’d willed herself to be lighter than air so as not to disturb the bedding.
I would like to thank the following individuals for their advice, encouragement, and efforts on my behalf: Faith Sullivan, Doug Stewart, Ann Woodbeck, Janet Hanafin, Jean Housh, Sherry Roberts, Don Pastor, Carol Dines, and Daniel Slager.
I owe a special thanks to the Ragdale Foundation for the gift of time and space. Much of this book was written there.
Above all, I am grateful to Bill Price for his insights and comments, but most especially for being there.
Being Esther is Miriam Karmel’s first novel. Her short stories have appeared in numerous publications. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Sandisfield, Massachusetts.
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