Everyone had stayed over at Anne and Mitchell’s big house in Teaneck, with Kendra and me camping out on the floor in Zeyde’s old room; somehow it seemed wrong to both of us to sleep in the bed that he had just died in. She woke me up way too early the next morning, insisting that we go to the local pancake house and get waffles à la mode. She was in high spirits and it was as if yesterday hadn’t happened at all.
I’d forgotten about Kendra’s food enthusiasms, and of course this was really just an example of what a later friend of mine would term Junkie Replacement Syndrome—this friend feeling okay to say the word “junkie” with unique viciousness because she herself had been a needle addict for many years. That morning I surprised myself by realizing that I was glad to see Kendra, sloppy, confusing, histrionic behavior and all. There was something about her that made things feel special, like she was sharing something amazing with you and you were thrilled to be chosen.
Out at the pancake house, she told me that families sit shiva for seven days.
“Why seven?” I wanted to know.
“I have no idea—I really don’t know any of this crap. I’m just doing it to honor the spirit of Zeyde. I’m such a bad Jew. Like I feel like we probably should be tearing our clothes instead of eating waffles for whatever reason, except who cares? Actually Zeyde was totally secular, so he’d find this all hilarious.”
“I feel like Catholics like to make things divisible by three. So like a novena is nine days. But I mean, who does nine of anything? You’re more likely to do a week of something. It’s as if they have to make sure they corner the market on sacrifice.”
Kendra looked at me as she ate, and I found myself yammering on about all sorts of things, like the kick I was on then with Michel de Certeau’s The Possession at Loudon, Kateri Tekakwitha, female-specific religious manias, the cult of Bona Dea, women so often taking refuge in delusions because they are otherwise powerless, etc., as the ice cream waffle mess melted in front of me.
“I forgot what it’s like to talk to interesting people,” she said.
“You forgot just now?”
“Duh, I mean, no, I was with so many losers and doing all this shit and it was like no one was talking about ideas. It’s really not junk that makes junkies losers but all the planning around getting the cash to score. Like Burroughs said, the Job. He was fine, because he didn’t have to worry about that.”
“He had the cash.”
“The Burroughs adding machine, baby,” she said. She took a sip of her coffee. And then she looked away and back at me, as if to mark the importance of what she was about to disclose.
“I mean, I had the cash too,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“My parents fund everything.”
“They knew where you were?”
“Of course! Sidney and I are regular pals, we see each other all the time. All that flying to Europe to go to those gross mink farms. And Clarice basically pays me to stay away.”
“What?”
“Dude, where have you been? She buys me off. Although she’d like it better if I’d just OD and die. But die abroad, so it’s less embarrassing. Less of a chance of having it hit the New York papers: ‘Clarice Marr’s Troubled Daughter…,’ ‘Embraced Punk-Rock Lifestyle…’ So at some point I realized the biggest fuck-you would be to get clean and show up in her face. You know? And what a delight it was to see her just about pee herself at the cemetery yesterday. But what I forgot about was how quickly she always recovers. She really is the consummate actress.”
“My fucking head is spinning,” I said.
“Look, don’t give notice today,” she said. “That way you can still get paid while you’re here. ’Cause you have to stay with me for six more days now or I’ll lose my mind! Anyway, Sidney and I already worked it out. He sent Clarice back in a cab last night, and he’s probably on the phone with Ms. Bitch now telling her not to expect you. Kendra needs her friend. I’ve got heaps of clothes you can wear, and if everything’s too big you can just belt that shit. So you’re all sorted out.” With this, she gave me the corny, exaggerated wink that I remembered so well.
I couldn’t respond. What? So now she didn’t want me to resign? What if I wanted to? I played with the waffle in front of me, moving it around my plate.
“Are you mad at me?” she asked.
I sighed.
“It’s like at some point I realized being mad at you is like being mad at dust or the moon or the color yellow.”
She lit up into her million-dollar smile.
“Oh, Chess—I knew you’d understand!” she said.
*
Okay, so who knew what to truly make of this family, these machinations, this constantly roiling collection of relationships at all? Somehow I was still a sucker for Kendra’s peculiar charm. And if she told me I understood her, it was as if with those words she made it true—and thus she made me necessary.
We had the old Mercedes, and Kendra and I tooled all over the Jersey hinterlands in it, smoking a million cigarettes, breezing through wooded byways, stopping at every diner we saw and drinking coffee until our hands shook. At first all she wanted to do was tell me stories about Zeyde, what a street kid he’d been, such a tough ass, how he had complained that her dad was a sissy—it was the old F. Scott Fitzgerald thing, he thought the rich were soft but he wanted his children to be like them—and how she’d always been Zeyde’s favorite. Always, always his favorite. He was like a spotlight on her when she was a child, the person who taught her she was special: he was the glow she basked in.
In a way he ruined me, she said, because I thought all my life would be like that.
From there we would talk about everything, but we always seemed to turn eventually toward religion, or faith, which we could jaw about till the cows came home. The pretense of our sitting shiva was dropped: she said Zeyde was free already, and she pictured him piloting himself toward heaven in a contraption like a balsa-wood gilder—just big enough to hold his essence, since the things of the body had no meaning anymore. Not that she was sure that Jews believed in souls or heaven or anything. As for the seven days of shiva, Anne, Mitchell, and Shoshanna seemed to be the only constant attendees. I was fascinated by Judaism and was forever asking young Shoshanna all sorts of questions, which was probably everything you’re not supposed to do, but the practice of religion in that house seemed like a complicated, multiform affair. I was used to Catholic “universality,” there being only one acceptable version, and that there were all kinds of Judaism I found, in a word, pretty cool. It seemed to adhere to the reverse prejudice I had about Jewish people in those days: they were, as a group, so much smarter than the average goy and thus could more readily embrace complexity. Anyway, shy young Shoshanna was flattered to be asked anything at all and, at every meal we had together, blinked at Kendra and me as if we were movie stars.
The week flew by, and even before the end of it Kendra was throwing out all sorts of ideas about us getting a place together in the East Village. We could get jobs as waitresses or strippers or canvassers for that Ralph Nader activist group, or any old thing! She knew a girl who got paid to roller-skate around a dance club with big Lene Lovitch streamers in her hair shouting Yi-yi-yi-yi! while serving shots of tequila—maybe we could get a gig like that? I just had to give notice to Clarice and we’d be free.
All this time, despite my love for Kendra, always in my mind was Jerry. Kendra was in so many ways the opposite of him that somehow she ended up recalling him at every turn. Where she was voluble he was reticent. She wanted to be liked, and he refused to pander. He hid his wounds, while she flaunted hers. She did, but he stood back. They both had the family theatricality, but while hers was needy, his was disdainful: How dare you think you will watch me…although watch me you must.
It occurred to me that I didn’t know him at all, really.
One night toward the end of our time out there, we were driving up the Palisades Parkway and I was seized by the desire to st
op and look at Manhattan. Kendra pulled over to a lookout, and we climbed up on the back of the car and lit cigarettes. I gazed across the water at nighttime Manhattan dressed in all her lights, and as I looked, I felt that alluring champagne fizz of the city. Excitement about the future was like something tingling through my limbs.
And yet it seemed like Kendra’s mood was beginning to sink.
“Big city of dreams,” she said dismissively.
She put her hands up, framing the cluster of lights around Midtown between them.
“One look and you hear Rhapsody in Blue, right?” she said.
“I think of Berenice Abbott. Lewis Hine. Those paintings by Joseph Stella.”
“So you think of an image even though here you are looking at the real thing?” she said.
“It’s already an abstraction. Or maybe you see a representation first and it’s taught you how to look at the real thing.”
“Expectations will always take the piss out of reality.”
“I don’t actually feel that way,” I said.
“Yet,” she said. “You don’t feel that way yet.”
“You really feel like that?”
She shrugged. Even she sometimes couldn’t tell when she was posing. Across the water, something hovered in the distance. A light was turned off or on again and somehow the picture changed. But the source was untraceable, just one moment lost among millions.
“Do you miss him?” she asked me at last.
“Do I miss who?” I asked her.
She spoke, still looking at the city, not turning.
“Jerry.”
I swallowed.
“Yes,” I said.
A huge sigh escaped her, and she sank down into herself. I felt this keenly, felt the disappointment my words gave her, but now I knew I’d finally ask the question I’d wanted to ask all along but had not—because it was too much like looking past her, beyond her.
“Where is he?”
She violently flicked her half-smoked cigarette into the road.
“How the fuck should I know?” she said.
“I only thought—”
“You only didn’t think at all,” she said.
“Oh, come on, Kendra! Don’t be like this. All I do is think.” I flicked away my own cigarette and slid off the car. I watched her gathering her powers into herself, summoning up a great chill to blast at me, there from her perch on the big Mercedes. But it was pretty late in the game for her to pull her freeze-out routine. Suddenly I was giving her goofy little smacks all over her knees and boots and saying, “Oh, come on, don’t be mad, come on!”
She slid from the car and maybe I put my hands up—because all at once we were on each other, grappling and grunting and shoving and then she got her hands around my neck. I was choking and she almost had me flat but I dropped my weight and twisted free. We spun out from each other. Then we were facing off again. I couldn’t catch my breath and I stuck my hand out in front of me like a catcher’s mitt.
“Punch my hand,” I said.
“What?”
“Punch my fucking hand!”
“What the fuck?”
“Come on, punch it!” I yelled at her.
She flapped her own hand at me in dismissal. But then she changed her mind and wound up. And she punched so hard that my whole arm flipped back.
“Wa-oww-oh!” came out of me as my arm lit up like Christmas. I grabbed my shoulder and hugged it. I saw the ground shimmer in front of me, and it was all I could do not to whimper.
“I think I hurt you,” she said at last.
She said it in a tiny voice, apologetic. But she couldn’t hide the fact that she was smiling.
*
We drove into the city late the next afternoon and pulled up in front of the house on Eleventh Street. Sidney had flown out the day before, on a buying trip to Latvia.
Clarice was outside to greet us.
She was coatless in the cold air, dressed in her most elegant black Chanel and a pair of ice-pick high heels. As soon as we stepped up to the curb she spread her arms wide and wordlessly pulled us into her embrace.
She’d never done such a thing before, and I stood stiffly as she gave a yank and pinned me, smashing my face to her clavicle. I twitched and squirmed and fought to turn my head to Kendra.
But then the sight of her…
Kendra was swooning against her mother, eyes closed, as needy and desirous as a little baby. Even as Clarice fought to keep me clamped to her bosom—nothing kind or warm in any of this—she was pulling Kendra off her with her other arm. This was all happening in seconds and I yanked myself free. The stickiness I felt all over my body was repulsive.
But worse by far was Kendra’s helplessness as she clung to her mother.
Just then Clarice opened her eyes at me, and it was as if she had turned into robot Maria from Metropolis, startling in her inhumanness.
In a moment she did get Kendra off her, thrusting her away like a sack of potatoes. I watched as Kendra staggered back, wobbling on her feet. The fizzle of humiliation in the air was so strong it was almost sexual. We both watched as Clarice pulled on a pair of new leather gloves and stepped out into the street with her arm raised. A cab sailed magically into view.
“I’m off to Chanterelle,” she said. She turned to Kendra and fixed her with a look as if to dispel any notion that she’d been there to welcome her daughter home.
And with a slam of the cab door she was gone.
*
So it will be hard to explain what happened in the days that followed.
I watched as Kendra caved in. It was as if in that orbit, with the pull of her mother and the things of her childhood, all the refusenik notions that she held in her mind disappeared.
Once inside the house, Kendra walked through the rooms picking up things and examining them, caressing bookcases and patting pillows and running her hand over the backs of chairs.
“I’ve been gone so long,” she kept saying. She had a look on her face I’d never seen before, something regretful, almost contrite.
“May I see my room?” she asked me.
“Why are you asking?” I said.
We went upstairs to her room, but she halted at her door. She took a long look inside. I’d barely changed a thing, and immediately I began gathering up my stuff while she walked the room, stopping at anything foreign: a stack of books, a sweater thrown over a chair. She looked at these things as if they were exotic mushrooms that had sprouted in a familiar wood.
“I’ll stay in Cornelia’s room until we’re ready to go,” I said, my arms full. She nodded. She was looking at a dress that I had for whatever reason hung on the closet door: it was the dress she’d been wearing when I first saw her. She took it by the shoulder, ran her hand down its arm until she held it by the cuff, and flounced it back and forth, like someone coaxing a partner to dance.
She turned and looked at me. Tears were in her eyes.
“How is it I got so old?” she said.
She was twenty-three.
“You just need some sleep,” I said. “Why don’t you take a nap before dinner?”
She went and flopped down on the bed.
“I’m so tired,” she said.
I spilled the stuff in my arms to the floor and went and yanked her boots off. I rolled her under the covers and tucked her in, folding the sheet over so that the scratchy blanket wouldn’t touch her neck. Then I took my sleeve and wiped her face, and the whitest foundation smeared itself on the black of my sweatshirt. All through this she was inert, blinking at me, dazed and almost paralyzed.
“Thank you.” She rolled over and put her face to the wall.
She slept through dinner, slept the night, then slept the next day through—I’d gone back to work with Clarice, not sure what the plan was yet—and then, after sitting up for some soup, she went right back to bed. When she still hadn’t come down the next morning, I took her some coffee and a slice of challah and sat down gently on the edge of the bed.
She rolled over and opened her eyes.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Did she ask about me?” she said.
“Of course. She keeps asking. She’s just surprised that you’re still in bed.”
What Clarice had actually said was, That cow isn’t up yet?
“She doesn’t want to see me,” she said. It was as if the light had gone out of her face.
“I’m sure she does,” I said. “I can go get her.”
“Look at you,” she said. I had on an “outfit,” proper work clothes, and she was used to seeing me in jeans and combats. “You look so pretty,” she said, touching my skirt. “You’re slender and you have good posture.”
“Oh boy, you definitely need to get up,” I said.
She rolled onto her back and looked up at the ceiling, and in a moment she was sobbing.
“Oh, Kendra,” I said. “Here, drink this coffee. It’s good. It’s, um, fair trade.” I suddenly felt self-conscious, but I got her to sit up and I handed her the coffee. She took a sip.
“Good, right?” I said.
She nodded at me like a little girl.
She ate in silence, and when she was finished she handed me her plate. She had crumbs on her mouth, and I touched my own in a mirror to hers; but instead of wiping them away herself, she offered her face to me. I gently wiped her mouth with the napkin.
“Thank you,” she said. She turned over and almost immediately fell back asleep.
When I got myself downstairs again, Clarice was at the window, smoking a cigarette.
“Is she up?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Boredom will get her up eventually,” she said.
“I think she’s depressed,” I said.
“Story of her life.”
“Clarice, her grandfather just died. Why don’t you go talk to her?”
“Because I don’t care to,” she said. She blew smoke into the air. “Please save your do-gooder speeches, Francesca.”
“I really think she’s very sick!” I said.
“So sad,” she said. “So very sad. Poor little rich girl, ate too many sugarplums.”
“Clarice—”
“Will you be telling me to shut my Nazi mouth now?”
Time's a Thief Page 24
