Time's a Thief

by B. G. Firmani

  *

  The next day I was dispatched to get Kendra’s old Mercedes out of a garage way west in the fifties, over by the old McKim, Mead, and White power station, Clarice making sure to tell me how they wasted sixty fucking dollars a month on the parking space. It was strange to me how angry she was, and it wasn’t until Cornelia got home that I understood both her anger and the need for the car: old Isadore, cool old Zeyde, had had a lifelong hatred for his daughter-in-law and had forbidden her to ride in the family limousine to his final resting place.

  “I can ride in the limo, but she can’t,” Cornelia told me. “She’s so mad. God, she’s so mad!” It was clear that this pleased Cornelia no end, but in case I hadn’t got this, she danced a little jig around the room. I’d thought her crunchy Vermont school would have made her sweeter somehow, but now she seemed harder to me. Less gushy, more difficult. Angrier.

  “Aren’t you sad about Zeyde?” I asked her.

  “I am but I’m not. He was soooo old. Kendra was always his favorite anyway.”

  “I miss her,” I said. “I miss Jerry.” I hadn’t meant to say anything like this at all.

  Cornelia threw a look my way, not a kind one. Then she came over and interlaced her hands with mine, holding them up in the air.

  “Push,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Just push my hands,” she said. “It’s a game.”

  She was pushing, so my only option was to push back.

  “You’ve got to try harder than that,” she said.

  “I don’t like this game.”

  “You’ve got to really push, Francesca!” she said.

  “Why are you doing this?” I said.

  She arched herself forward and leaned into my face, her odd-colored eyes flashing.

  “You’re in love with my brother, aren’t you?”

  I tried to pull away.

  “Aren’t you?” she said.

  “I feel sad,” I told her.

  “You give up. You give up just like that. But you’ve got to fight.”

  I yanked my hands free from hers.

  “Cornelia, you don’t know a thing about me. I grew up fighting. I don’t like fighting.”

  “You’ve got to fight if you want him.”

  “Oh, come on, how corny is that!” I said.

  “You don’t understand. My mother has this thing about Jerry. She won’t let him go. She ruined him. She did something to him as a kid.”

  “Do you know how tired I am of people saying—”

  “I know Clarice is fucking that guy with the hair,” she said.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “I’m so sorry you know that.”

  I turned and caught sight of myself in Kendra’s mirror. It was as if I were vanishing. But when I turned back to Cornelia, she was the one gone slack, as if she’d lost the spirit of fight herself. There was no real hardness in her. There was only the inability to self-comfort, the family coldness. This orphaned quality they all had.

  Which somehow only made me want to save them all the more.

  “Not that I even care,” she said, leaving the room as her voice was breaking.

  The next morning a late-season frost hit. I remember thinking it would kill all the crocuses.

  It was left up to me to pilot Clarice in the old Mercedes out to the funeral parlor in Brooklyn. I was grateful that a couple from the neighborhood, the Horowitzes, had been pressed on us for the ride, because it meant that Clarice had to be on her best behavior. She sat on the passenger’s side upright as a schoolgirl, an enormous purse on her lap, while the Horowitzes sat in back. Mrs. Horowitz appeared to be turned out for a wedding in a satiny car coat and crazy lady’s single-flower hat, while Mr. Horowitz told all sorts of squirm-inducing jokes—“Oedipus shmedipus, as long as he loves his mother”—all the way out. Once we got to Ocean Parkway, he started a running commentary.

  “Jew, Jew, Italian. Jew. Italian, Italian, Jew,” he said, indicating the houses streaming past the window. No one else in the car paid him any mind.

  “I’m sorry, do you know these people?” I finally had to ask.

  “No, dear. You can tell because the Italians go in for the white wrought iron and the Jews like the black.”

  After the funeral the Horowitzes cabbed it back to Manhattan, meaning that it would be just Clarice and me on the long drive to the grave.

  And as soon as Clarice got back into the big old Mercedes it was as if all control fled her. She flopped herself down on the seat like a pile of laundry. The first thing I noticed was the smell: booze. She reached into her huge bag, pulled out a big bottle of Laphroaig, and took a belt right out of it.

  “Clarice, Jesus! Put that away.”

  “Francesca, Jesus! Shut up and drive,” she snapped.

  “At least get down so they can’t see you.” I reached over, but she slapped at my hand.

  “Propriety,” she shrieked, “oh, propriety!” She was already gone—drunk and not caring.

  A young guy in a yarmulke was waving us out of the parking lot, and I put my lights on and pulled out of the space, following a big Lincoln in front of me. Clarice lolled around on the seat and I barked at her to put on her seatbelt. I had no idea how to get to the cemetery in Queens, so it was one eye on the car in front of me, one eye on Clarice all the way there, in an unending processional.

  Clarice was dead quiet until suddenly she was not.

  “Old Izzy never liked me,” she announced.

  Don’t pick this up, I told myself.

  “Old Izzy thought I was a gold digger,” she said.

  “Let it go,” I heard myself saying, “please, Clarice.”

  “But I gave Sidney beautiful children. Beautiful children. Which is more than he would’ve got with Naomi. Blah blah blah, Naomi the psychologist. As if I care! You should’ve seen that broad’s nose. She was Barnard. I wouldn’t have gone there for all the tea in China. Too many Jews.”

  I swallowed. I weighed all possible responses, forward and backward and backward and forward again. She was so drunk that she’d never remember any of this.

  “Time to shut your Nazi mouth now,” I said, slowly and brightly.

  Amazingly, she did. She slid so far down in her seat it was as if she’d melted into a teenager. Her head flopped against the door, and in no time she was talking to herself in a quiet singsong.

  I drove on, twenty miles an hour, saying in my head, Jew, Jew, Italian, Jew.

  We passed through a blighted neighborhood somewhere on the Brooklyn-Queens border. A huge sigh came up out of me. This seemed to ignite something in Clarice.

  “You know, you really ran a racket on me,” she said.

  I pasted a benign smile on my face.

  “How’s that?” I said.

  “Oh you, false advertising. Coming into my house as you did.”

  I turned to see her attempting to glare at me. Her lipstick was comically smeared. She tried to lean toward me, but she was so sunken in her seat that the lap belt had her pinned across her chest, like a lunatic in a straitjacket.

  “You see,” she said, “I thought you were lesbian.”

  I turned back to the road just in time to screech to a stop at a red light. The Lincoln sailed away through the intersection.

  I thought you were lesbian.

  Just like that, with no article in front of it, as if it were a nationality. As if I hailed from the island of Lesbos.

  “So nothing with Jerry should have mattered,” she said.

  Far up ahead, the Lincoln pulled over to wait.

  Clarice sank to the side until her head rested against the door.

  “You were supposed to distract him, not make him fall in love with you. You’re a little snake. You’re all snakes. You can all go to hell.”

  And then she was out again.

  I drove on in silence, turning all of this over in my head.

  Oh, I had lots of time to think to myself on that drive. This was it. Yes, I would go now. I was surprised
by the mildness I felt over this decision. If Jerry was supposed to be in my life, he would find me. We would find each other. I had read enough Epictetus to believe in something like fate. All I knew was that I couldn’t stand one more minute in this woman’s company.

  I followed the Lincoln as it turned into the cemetery.

  It was such a strange place that now I feel like I must have dreamed it. It was crumbling and overgrown, and though it dated back to the nineteenth century, there was none of the pleasant greensward aspect of a grand Victorian cemetery. Through the windshield I could see tombstones with Magen Davids and Cohen hands and twinned lions and menorahs on them, tilting sideways out of the earth. Big pieces of them were broken off and you could see where nameplates had been pried free and stolen for the metal. Whole rows of headstones lay flat behind their pediments, as if they had been kicked to the ground, and brambles and winter-dead weeds covered everything. It hurt my heart, what had been done to this place.

  The path we drove in on must have ended abruptly, because all of a sudden the Lincoln in front of us just stopped. I hit the brakes of the big old Mercedes and we lurched sickly forward, almost kissing its bumper. Clarice jolted suddenly awake.

  She thrust her enormous handbag at me.

  “Here—fix my face,” she said. All traces of drunkenness were gone, poof! She unbuckled herself, stuck out her huge face at me, and closed her eyes. I had one confused second when it seemed as if she wanted me to kiss her. In a moment I pulled out a bunch of tissues and began to clean up the face of this woman I had come to hate.

  Out of the car, in the frozen air, Clarice became the dutifully grieving daughter-in-law once again. I’d never met anyone who could turn it on and off so quickly. She was like an actress pinching her own hand to bring tears to her eyes. She was the least human person I’d ever known.

  I watched her walk ahead of me to the graveside, and let myself fall back into the crowd.

  And then, out of nowhere, I felt a familiar hand on my arm.

  “Come back with us and sit shiva,” Kendra said.

  18

  Good luck getting a straight answer out of this girl.

  She had dyed her hair a dark, ruddy pink, and she lay on a rose-pink coverlet in Zeyde’s old room, a clutch purse in deepest pink thrown down as a pillow for her cheek. Her terminal red lipstick was gone, and the new color, an orangey red, clashed with her hair. There was a luxuriousness about her, and the sensation of the delight she took in feeling herself watched—but there was also her old familiar indolence, her sense of being tragically stuck on this earth: Is that all there is? I’d forgotten about Kendra’s particular style of self-made drama. You miss a person, and then you see that person and you miss her in a different way.

  “Ain’t it great to be in Joisey?” she said. “We’ve got that TGI Friday’s right down the way. And the craft store, where you can buy everything you need to make a birdhouse. Plenty of culture.”

  “Last I heard you were in Spain. And before that Morocco, hanging out with Paul Bowles.”

  “Ha! That made it over?”

  “What’s he like?”

  “It’s complicated,” she said. She let this go into a big yawn, and lazily flew her hand to her mouth. She had carried in a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke and set it on the floor in front of her: she told me she was sober now.

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know—five months?” She was weaving her hand in the air.

  “That’s great,” I said, though I didn’t know enough not to feel confused when anyone I knew gave up drinking—although drinking was maybe the least of Kendra’s addictions. “You in AA?”

  “ ‘Easy does it,’ ” she said.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “I’m actually in NA. Narcotics Anonymous.”

  “Oh,” I said. I felt out of my league.

  She was weaving her hand in the air, moving it in arabesques.

  “When did you come back?” I asked her.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I was in Paris for a while. I was in, like, Belgium, and then Amsterdam. I mean, it’s complicated. I did that courier thing on a ship, like carpets? Eventually it was enough.”

  “But what finally brought you home?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Everything felt baffling, borrowed. Unreal. Zeyde’s room was a time capsule from another era, with an old Telechron clock, a tombstone-back chair against the wall, a deco bedroom set with exaggeratedly curved edges and a big round mirror gone silver around the frame. On the dresser was a massive lamp made up of a crystal globe with a prowling panther staring at it, a red nightlight in his mouth. All this time I was standing at the dresser clicking the switch of the lamp, which lit the globe and then the panther, then both, then neither, then the globe, then the panther, then both, then…

  “You don’t know?” I said.

  “I guess I got bored,” she said, as if all this were just another extension of that boredom.

  I let my hand drop from the lamp.

  “Kendra. I mean. The last time I see you is what, three years ago? At a train station in like Passyunck or whatever. And then you disappear. And then you’re back and it’s too complicated for you to say anything about it? Or, I don’t know, maybe you might wonder how I’m doing?”

  She smiled, her cheek against her handbag.

  “How you doin’?” she said in a Bronx accent.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “Jesus Christ is our lord and savior!” she said merrily.

  “What is the matter with all of you?”

  She slowly lifted herself up, slid her feet to the floor. She stretched, slow and slack, uncurling her fists in the air, and then she let her hands drop.

  “I just want to know what you’re doing sleeping in my bedroom,” she said.

  “What?” I said.

  “You heard me, Chess. Why are you sleeping in my bedroom?”

  “Kendra, please! Your mother asked me to sleep there.”

  “What are you doing in that house at all?” she said.

  I cast around Zeyde’s room.

  “I called your mom when she put out that ad for an assistant last year because I wanted to ask about you, and it was weird, but I somehow ended up taking that job.”

  “You ‘somehow ended up’ taking the job?”

  “Is it so unlikely?”

  Now she wasn’t languid at all. She was incensed. She picked up her heavy purse by the corner and slapped it back down on the bed.

  “I just don’t know how you could ever think it was okay to work for my fucking mother.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I threw my hands in the air. What could I say? “It’s complicated.”

  “Now there’s a phrase that doesn’t suit you.”

  I kicked off across the floor. I looked around the room and fell into the chair against the wall.

  She sat staring at me until all I could do was look down.

  “I’m sorry,” I said at last.

  “You betrayed me,” she said.

  “I never meant it to be like that,” I said miserably.

  “Everyone betrays me. Everyone. It starts out good and then the whole thing falls to shit.”

  “Kendra, you know I didn’t mean to do that,” I said.

  “I don’t know anything,” she said.

  “Please. You’re my friend, but you’ve been away so long. I don’t hear from you at all. How am I supposed to guess your feelings about something? This is a friendship, like this?”

  “But we have a bond,” she said.

  “Of course we do,” I said. “Of course.”

  At this she dropped her gaze and shook her head at the floor.

  “Well, if it means anything at all to you, I was planning to quit soon anyway,” I said.

  She looked up at me.

  “You were?”

  “I think I came to the end of the line with Clarice.” I didn’t know how much to say to her
, what to explain. “It’s time for me to go,” I said.

  “That’s great,” she said. Suddenly she leapt up to the mirror. She snapped open her purse, whipped out her lipstick, drew an orange-red circle on her mouth. She dabbed the curves of her cupid’s bow, rubbed her lips together. She drew an envelope from her purse and blotted a kiss on it.

  “Thoroughly Carnelian,” she declared, turning to me. “Do you like it?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  She dropped the lipstick into her bag and snapped it closed. “Let’s go tell her,” she said.

  “Tell who what?” I said.

  “Duh, stoop! Let’s go tell Clarice that you quit.”

  “What? Now?”

  “No time like the present.”

  “But wait, how tactless would it be to announce my resignation at Zeyde’s shiva?”

  “Not tactless at all,” she said.

  “It’s completely tactless,” I said.

  She stopped entirely, looked in the mirror, and then turned back to me.

  “You’re not sincere!” she shouted. “You’re not sincere about any of this, about my feelings or how you’ve hurt me or anything!”

  “Jesus, Kendra, please.”

  “You’re lying and you lie like all the others.”

  “Kendra—”

  Suddenly she swung her heavy purse and slapped it to my chest.

  “Fucker,” she said. “Motherfucker.” I caught her purse in my hands as she turned away and clutched the dresser. I watched as she slithered down the front of it until she was sprawled on the floor, a mass of sobs.

  Oh, I realized, Oh.

  She is crazy.

  Not quirky-crazy. Just crazy.

  They are all crazy.

  “Look, I’ll do it,” I said. “I promise I’ll do it tomorrow.”

  “Good,” she said between sobs. “Good.”

  *

  Of course I was overlooking the fact that grief does strange things to people.

  This was much clearer to me the next day, after I’d slept off the strangeness of the funeral, Clarice’s uncensored spewing at me, and Kendra’s suddenly materializing out of nowhere.