She sat in that shower until James came and knocked on the door. “You okay in there?” he said.
“Just relaxing,” she said, and she realized she was still a liar. Me and Arnie, she thought, we sinners, we are just lying to ourselves, we are just alone.
THE SUN AND THE SOW
THE WAITRESSING WAS supposed to have lasted just the summer, but it had been a year and Paula was still at the nursing home. She was still being yelled at by the old lady who was a Holocaust survivor, and she was still being yelled at by her supervisor, for having been yelled at by a Holocaust survivor, since there were only three left at the Jewish Community Center, and since the center, whatever else it did, prided itself on keeping the survivors alive. “Everyone else knows to pour the boiling water over the tea bag,” Miriam snapped at her, “everyone else. You’re the only one who pours the water in first. The only one.”
“Pull your shit together,” Manny said to her, back in the kitchen. She knew she should have minded, but even when Manny yelled at her she didn’t really mind—he had such beautiful eyes, with eyelashes too heavy for his eyelids, like a doll.
The old Russian ladies who made the food laughed at her. “You should put some makeup on,” they said to her in the kitchen, pinching her cheek with a gloved hand. “You should do your hair. Then maybe he sees you staring at him.” But when she ironed the white collared shirt, or when her sisters did her hair in a fancy bun, they would laugh harder. “Look who thinks she’s so pretty now!”
The old men liked her, though. She was a natural blonde, straight to the roots. “You should be in a movie,” they would say. “Eh? Eh?” They winked. She would blush, and half the table would clap. But then they would realize she hadn’t put lemon in their water, and they’d send her off to the kitchen. Sometimes she just never came back with the lemon, because she knew they would forget. For her favorites, though, for Irene, for Otto, she always remembered, even if they forgot, even if Irene didn’t realize she always put ice in her milk, even if Otto was too tired to see she had put his dressing on the side. Otto never said she should be in movies; he only said, sometimes, slipping her a sweaty one-dollar bill, “You got hair like the sun.” She had hair like the sun but a face like a sow. Her grandmother had said it herself, maybe because it was, after all, her grandmother’s face.
But like her grandmother, she was strong. She wanted to cry sometimes, but she never did. She could tell other people thought she ought to be crying, because they would comfort her. After Miriam had yelled at her about the tea, Irene took her hand. Irene’s hand was the softest hand she had ever touched.
“Don’t worry, I’ll quit,” Paula said.
“Don’t quit on us,” Irene said. “What’ll I do? What’ll you do?”
“Move.”
“Where are you going to go?”
“Minnesota, maybe,” Paula said.
“Listen,” Irene said, “you have a family who loves you. Family is all that matters. I’ve lived in three countries and eighteen cities and I’ve got a collection of golf pencils to prove it and let me tell you, it’s never the place, it’s the people. Your family loves you?” Irene said.
Paula nodded.
“Of course they do,” Irene said, “of course they do.” She nodded her head. “Come here,” she said, and when Paula leaned in Irene said, not really whispering, “My daughter-in-law looks like a whore.”
“Oh,” Paula said.
“Don’t tell her,” Irene said. She let go of Paula’s hand.
“No, never,” Paula said.
“You going to go after that pretty boy, the pretty boy in the kitchen?” Irene asked. She was trying to say it quietly but she couldn’t say anything quietly anymore, and the whole table turned. It reminded Paula of her uncle’s farm, of the cows on the hill when the milk truck came by, like all the heads turned on the same neck.
At home it seemed to Paula as if the JCC did not exist. She had taken over her brothers’ old room, the Fortress of Solitude, and for the first time she was sleeping alone. She liked it, mostly. She had Tiina’s old laptop, which only worked when it was plugged in. She had a snowboard she should have sold. On the wall she had put up her pictures and at some point she had realized they were all of her family and that none of her school friends had made it up there, but she never did anything to change that. Maybe it was because she felt so bad about still living in her parents’ basement, taking the occasional community college class, soaking up her parents’ money when they had five more kids to send to school and they couldn’t take out any more loans. Maybe she just felt bad about being the ordinary one. She couldn’t even play the piano very well. At least she could sing, though. At least community college was cheap. “Cash is king,” her dad said. “Be useful,” her mom said.
She’d written her mom’s saying on a notecard and put it on her bulletin board. Next to the note was a card that read, “Friends are like stars. Even if you don’t see them, you know they’re always there.” It was from a friend she never saw. Surrounding the note were collections of wedding announcements and baby announcements from church. The brides were all too young, but she envied them anyway. She envied that they knew they were wanted, their hair in too-tight curls, their breasts both hidden and displayed by stiff white cloth. What was that like, she wondered, to know you were wanted, not because of everything you did, not because of everything you gave?
* * *
The next day was one of the good days and someone nearly died and the EMTs from the hospital across the road had to come. It was smart, she realized, to have built the senior center across from the hospital. She would never have thought of that. And when the EMTs arrived it was better still because they had to give oxygen, and everything was in chaos. “I think he needs oxygen,” she said, and the EMT looked up and said, “You’re right,” surprised. The EMT was cute, even if his hair was too short and too gelled, as if saving lives was like surfing.
Best was that Manny got all out of sorts. His rule over the center was threatened and he tried to give directions—“You can take him into the visiting area,” he said, but the EMTs just ignored him. “Uh-uh,” they said, “it’s best in these situations not to move people.”
“Paula, I’m counting on you for room trays,” he said then, to restore his order. She walked away smiling, even though room trays were the worst duty, which was why he had to count on her. It sounded like such a basic task but pushing the carts was never easy, the gravy always tipped, and it was depressing; the food never masked the other smells. And there was the resident who stared straight ahead and didn’t acknowledge that you were alive.
The ones with Alzheimer’s were worst, of course. It always reminded her of Grandma. Grandma had had Alzheimer’s, and Aunt Marijo probably did, too. Aunt Marijo always tried to feed them three and four lunches when they came to visit now. She would look at all the cleaned-off dishes in the sink and say, “My word, and I thought I did dishes last night.”
But Grandma stole things. Once, Paula’s doll. It was the only doll she cared about—the American Girl doll you got when you turned eight because the catalog recommended it for girls ages eight and up. Her sisters still had theirs. Paula’s had been Samantha, because Samantha had the nicest clothes—red velvets, plaids, lace collars, Mary Janes. In the magazines Samantha had tea sets, and her wardrobe was lined with velour, and the wicker of the outdoor patio set curved and bent more beautifully than anything Paula had ever seen in real life. “That’s so Samantha of you,” Tiina would say when Paula touched a particularly smooth silk dress at the mall.
It’s just nice, she wanted to say.
But she was a server at the JCC’s Senior Living Center, and her job was to wear white on top and black on the bottom, and black tennis shoes that would not scuff the floor. And to keep her hair out of her face and out of the food, since, as Manny pointed out, she was the only blonde in the place and they would know who’d done it.
That night, before she fell asleep, she let her
self pretend. She would be in the kitchen, chopping something. Carrots. She would be using the dairy knife since it was a dairy day, she would not be making that mistake. And Manny would need something—he would need the knife. “Can I borrow that,” he would say, leaning over. When he leaned over she would smell his cologne. And when she handed him the knife he would clasp his hand over hers. “Say,” he would ask, “have you always worked here?” But the joke would be friendly. And he would take his hand and brush a fallen strand of hair back behind her ear.
* * *
It was Otto who almost talked her into asking Manny out. “Listen, sunshine,” Otto said, “someday someone’s going to realize what you got. You just keep doing what you’re doing,” he said. “Someone’s going to appreciate you.”
Then he had started to choke on the soup, and the matzoh balls fell into his lap like something from inside his lungs. When she was helping him clean up, he said, “Life is too short to eat bad matzoh ball soup.”
Okay, she’d thought, in the kitchen. Life is too short to eat bad matzoh ball soup. She wished there was a magnet for that. Afterward she had stood in the kitchen and studied Manny’s back. He was magnetic, that was the word. He was the kind of person who walked down the street and you didn’t want to like him but you had to. You wanted to be close to him, for the same reason you went to museums or sat on beaches, simply to be done staring at the ugly things, to put them from your mind for an afternoon or an evening. It was why no one had crushes on her. She was the reminder of how hard the world was; it was in her face, the unfairness of life.
But still, Otto had said that someday someone would appreciate her. She thought maybe it was true. Maybe there was another Otto out there. Probably the Otto wasn’t Manny, though, she thought, and turned away, back to stacking the room trays, hot and dry now from the washer.
At her parents’ house she told Julia and Leena and Anni and Uppu about Manny. The girls would come down to her room and sit on the couch she had rescued from the side of the road. The Fortress was always freezing, because of the air vent, and they pulled blankets up to their necks and drank Diet Coke she kept on the basement windowsill to keep it cool.
“He always washes his car,” Paula told them. “He got a tattoo,” she told them.
“Tiina’s always talking about getting a tattoo,” Julia said. “She’s so impulsive like that. It’s kind of immature.”
“She better not,” Anni said. “Mom will lock herself in the bedroom and not come out again.”
“I would get one,” Leena said. “You know, if I left.”
“Really?” Julia said.
“Manny’s is a bulldog,” Paula said, almost proudly. She didn’t tell them about how when he got it done it was covered in cellophane and the cellophane was stuck on with masking tape and she kept hoping it would fall off and she would have to help him press it back on.
But the next week his ex-girlfriend showed up. She looked like Irene’s daughter-in-law: they both wore tight pants and stilettos, as if the nursing home was a shopping mall and they had to look hot, hot, hot. They did look hot, hot, hot. Manny’s ex-girlfriend’s hair was black and glossed and she straightened it between her fingers, constantly. Manny disappeared out in the parking lot with her and it was an hour before he came back in. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Paula,” he said, “never tell someone you love them too soon. Take it from me.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Promise me.”
“Okay,” she said. She thought, I love you, Manny.
When she went home, Brita and her boys were all visiting and she told Brita the story. Brita had four boys and she wanted her siblings to get married and have kids too, even Tiina, and she thought it was a little immature of Paula to go moping after some guy she couldn’t date. “How come Nels is the only other one to get married?” Brita said. “How come you can’t just date one of those Finn boys in town?”
But Paula knew Brita was wrong about the Finn boys. They were never going to date her. And she knew Brita was wrong about Manny. For instance, Brita thought it was the girlfriend who had talked about love too soon but the way Manny had looked, as if there was something he was trying to forget, made Paula think it was Manny. She understood him. It was why he said things to her, things like not to go downstairs because they were hot-boxing the janitor’s closet, things like how his brother was paralyzed from diving off a cliff and now Manny noticed every building that didn’t have ramps.
“Listen,” Julia said, “he’s just using you because you’re too nice. Just quit already and go to school full-time. Do social work like you always say you want to do. Get your own place.” Julia always talked to her like that, like she was older than Paula. All of these things were true, but Paula had never even liked school. And she liked the Fortress of Solitude. She liked not paying rent. She liked living where there was always the sound of people walking above her head. And there was Manny. There was Irene, and Otto.
* * *
Sometimes she wondered about Otto. Some of the residents said he wasn’t a real Holocaust survivor. He didn’t have numbers on his arm. He said he’d been in the camps, though, he swore it. Each time, though, he named a different camp.
Miriam muttered under her breath about him. One day she spat on the floor. Paula skipped the lemon for her water. After all, who knew what was true anymore? Who knew who had been where? But then she felt guilty. She hadn’t been in the Holocaust, and she wasn’t even Jewish. She brought Miriam her lemon and apologized for the delay.
“What?” Miriam said.
“Just your lemon,” Paula said. She set it carefully atop the glass.
Miriam reminded her of her grandma more than anyone else. She was unexpectedly mean, like Grandma had been. Like Grandma, she told good stories, but hers were sadder.
“When they came for us,” Miriam had said, “the last thing I had eaten was a piece of cake.”
Friday night she drove to her parents’ house after Shabbat, as usual, and she saw Brita’s van, as usual, but inside everyone was sitting on the couches, silent. No one looked at her when she came in.
“What?” she said. Maybe because she worked in a place of death, she thought someone was dead. She thought of everyone who wasn’t sitting there right now: Tiina in New York, Nels in Minneapolis, Simon in Boston. She almost began to cry. No one said anything. “What?” she said.
Her mother looked at Leena, pointedly. Leena was eighteen and normally looked sixteen, and right now she looked even younger, with her eyes all baggy from crying.
“I’m pregnant,” Leena said. The way she was sitting, her knees pulled into her chest, Paula could not even look at her belly, to see if she had missed something.
“With who?” Paula said, and realized the question did not make sense. She felt a shock so severe—she felt like she had been a fool. The world was never what she had thought it was. She was naive; here she had thought Leena was like her, one of the quiet ones, one of the good ones. We were in this together, she wanted to say.
Leena did not look up.
“She isn’t telling,” her mom said, sighing. “Apparently she thinks it’s okay to just run off with whomever, like it doesn’t matter—”
“That’s enough,” her dad said.
“The Wisuri girl is pregnant,” Uppu said.
“I said that’s enough,” her dad interrupted.
They were all quiet.
It was a silent night. They ate in silence. Her parents took Leena upstairs into their bedroom, and from the basement vent Paula could hear them trying to talk to Leena but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. Julia and Anni and Uppu sat with her and they went through the options endlessly but none of them even knew she had been sleeping with somebody.
“She should have used protection,” Julia said, and Anni and Uppu blushed. “I feel like she did it just because she was so relieved to have someone like her.”
“Just because boys always chase you,” Paula said.
“Leena,” she said, “you can tell me.”
“It’s not anyone’s business,” Leena said. And she began to cry. “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s all fine. I’m stupid.”
“Who was it?” Paula said. “Just tell me. I’m your sister. You can tell me.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Leena said. “He doesn’t live here. He’ll never live here. It was all—everything was an accident. I was stupid and wrong. There’s nothing else to say.”
Paula reached out to hug Leena, but Leena moved away.
“Please,” Paula said.
“Why does it matter anyway?” Leena said. “I’m not going to marry him and he’s not going to marry me and this baby is just going to have one lonely, pathetic mother.”
“Don’t say that,” Paula said, but she couldn’t have agreed more.
* * *
Because Paula could not tell anyone at church—the news would spread, she was sure, in a day, but in the meantime they would all behave like it was not happening—she told Irene. “My sister is a teenager and pregnant,” Paula said.
We Sinners Page 10
