A crazy sound escaped me.
“Don’t worry,” she said. She waved it away. “I thought it was funny.”
She sat down at her desk and stubbed out her cigarette as I stood blinking.
“Step it up, Francesca,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
It was as if we had a new understanding now, contemptible though it might be: she had seen me see too much, and this put us in some creepy way on the same side. We were the tough ones. Her children were a bunch of weaklings. They were the rococo phase, headed for extinction. Somehow, in the eternal ronde I was dancing with this family, Clarice now saw us as united, as if she thought the shifting allegiances would actually end with her.
Four hours later she was off to Le Cirque for lunch and I was leaning over Kendra, rolling and punching her like bread dough.
“Oh God, Kendra, come on, you’ve gotta get up,” I pleaded.
She turned over and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. I had brought in a plate of sandwiches and set it on the nightstand, and this immediately caught her attention.
“What’s on the plate?”
“Sandwiches. Caciocavallo from Balducci’s.”
“Would you hand me one?”
“Only if you promise me you’ll get up. Promise me—oh, please, promise me.”
“Fuck you, Reginald De Koven,” she said.
“Fuck you, Oblomov,” I said.
“Fuck you…Dionne Warwick. Burt fucking Bacharach,” she said.
“Fuck you, Alice James,” I said.
“Well, clearly you win that round,” she said.
She pulled herself up and I handed her a sandwich.
“Why’s it on whole wheat?” she wanted to know. “I hate whole wheat. It’s so healthy.”
We both sat eating. I knew by now that the best route with her was the roundabout one, so I waited for her to say something.
“God, I could totally smoke a doobie right now,” she finally said.
“Take the edge off,” I said in my Sarcastic Punk-Rock Voice. No way was I going to let her get near any kind of controlled substance. “Look, why don’t we find you an NA meeting?” I said.
“Because I don’t feel like sitting in a church basement eating windmill cookies with a bunch of judgmental ex-hopheads.”
“I’ll totally go with you if you want.”
“Shut up, Fifi,” she said in a silly voice.
“Shut up, Kiki,” I said, in the same silly voice.
But then she became somber again. We sat eating our sandwiches, neither of us speaking.
“I miss my Zeyde,” she said at last.
“I bet you do,” I said. “I bet you do.”
I looked at the curtains, which Kendra had pulled against the light days ago and not opened since. Maybe this was how she had to mourn. Maybe I had upset the order of things. Except all of this didn’t seem to be healing her…only weakening her, drowning her in sadness.
“So how do we get you out of bed?” I said at last.
“Usually I get the opposite question,” she said.
Kendra had eaten the middle of her sandwich and left the dark crusts, and these she began tossing around her room, raising her hand and slowly throwing them, like a priest sprinkling holy water. She wilted back into her bed and pulled the covers up to her throat.
“Why does she hate me so much?” she said.
“Shhh, she doesn’t hate you,” I said. “It’s just a game she’s playing.”
“Fucking hate this game.”
“So do I,” I said.
I leaned over and petted her head, trying to soothe her.
“That feels nice,” she said, letting her eyes close for a moment.
“Kendra, why don’t we just go?” I said.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Probably Williamsburg. Trina and Starr just moved again and they got something Northside off Roebling, six-fifty split two ways. And Southside is so cheap. I mean, it’s Williamsburg, so everyone will be making art out of their tampons, but the rent’ll be hard to beat.”
“What would we do for work?” she said.
“Oh, I can always get any old office job for a while. Something not so all-consuming. I should be doing my own work by now anyway.”
“But what would I do?”
“What do you mean? You had so many ideas,” I said.
“Yeah, I think I’d rather hook than strip.”
“Don’t be a dope. You’re smart and you could find something. You could work at a bookstore or whatever until you find something you want to do.”
“Until I find something I want to do. Oh, Chess, you really are a young soul.”
“What? What’s the deal?” I said.
“There’s nothing I want to do. There’s never been anything I wanted to do. I didn’t even want to dance, back when I was good even.”
“Look, you’re depressed. You’ve gotta get out of bed. Let’s go for a walk. We can get a slice at Two Boots! We can get a coffee and go to record stores on St. Mark’s. Come on, Kendra, please.”
She was looking at me with a sad smile on her face.
“You’re neat as a pin, Chess. You’ll always be fine.”
“What do you mean? Why are you talking like this?”
“My mother loves you. You’re the perfect fit.”
“Are you kidding? She hates me and she thinks I’m a sham and a fool and totally wet behind the ears. She loves to laugh richly at my moronic ways and she hates that I don’t even speak French. She thinks I’m a total bumpkin and that I’ve got my fare back to the hill village sewn into my underpants. She doesn’t even trust me.”
“Listen to me,” she said. “I know her a teensy bit better.”
“Kendra, you’re driving me crazy.”
For some reason she smiled at this. Then she reached out and touched my arm.
“Hey,” she said, “I looked at Wisconsin Death Trip.”
Inside that book was where I had put Jerry’s letter.
“It’s the real deal,” she said. “You should go with him. He’s better than I am.”
“Don’t say that. There’s no ‘better.’ What the fuck number did your mother do on you all?”
“Oh, Bert’s fine, and Cornelia will be fine too. I think in the long run even Jerry will be okay. I never will. I’m just not made that way.”
“Man, I’m totally sick of your melodrama,” I said.
“I know, right? I’m totally sick of it too. Sick, sick, sick! I wish it would go away.” She yawned a huge yawn, slid herself down in her pillows. “Look, I promise I’ll get out of this bed tomorrow. See? Promise. I just need to think for a while, okay? I’ll see you tomorrow.” She snuggled herself under the blankets, then took out her hand and pointed to her own cheek.
“Plant one,” she said. And I leaned over, and kissed her.
*
I was up early the next morning, almost with the sun. I was so relieved. Finally we’d be getting on with our lives. I knocked lightly on Kendra’s door and then went in with my little tray of coffee and buttered muffins. It was no surprise that Kendra didn’t stir at all, and I put the things down on her nightstand and sat gently on her bed.
“Kendra,” I said, and I touched her shoulder.
She was so still.
“Kendra?” The girl really could sleep, was a champion narcoleptic.
And then I realized. She was too still.
KENDRA, I screamed, and I grabbed her and she was loose in my arms, slack as a ragdoll, and I shook her and shook her. I was shaking and then I was slapping her awake, trying to slap her awake, and then I pulled her out of bed and we were both on the floor and a hollow prescription bottle rolled to the floor and I was screaming and screaming for help, screaming her name, screaming her name and she was so still as I cradled her and rocked her in my arms, but her flesh was warm, her flesh was still warm.
19
She did not die.
A young doctor with a ponytail
was telling us that benzodiazepine overdoses are rarely lethal unless you mix the pills with something else—alcohol, other depressants, opiates, et cetera, et cetera. She told us they had given Kendra something called Narcan, a charcoal that would stop the absorption, and she told us something else about an antagonist, but I didn’t understand what that meant. I was trying to listen but not really taking it in, and I could guess that she was an intern because she was peppy and talked in a way that suggested she was more proud of her knowledge than she was concerned about her patient. It was all the same to her. She might as well have been telling us about a new recycling program. She really did say et cetera, et cetera, which struck me in a doctor as imprecise, and she pronounced it like “eck cetera.” When she said it again I turned to Clarice, but she was already fixing me with a look: This girl might be a doctor, but she’s obviously not very bright. The young doctor was wearing a butterfly necklace, which seemed to me needlessly infantile. I wanted to take her by her face and push her to the floor.
I got myself over to the wall and was leaning on it. I felt like I could bend it back, put my hand through it as if through soft marshmallow.
Somehow knowing Kendra was in the clear was when it all really hit me, and suddenly I felt myself shaking all over. I felt my teeth chattering, and I put my hands to my jaw to hold my face together. It was like I was falling. Someone put me in a chair and that was when I guess I was given something. I remembered that feeling like when they’re putting you out under gas and you’re told to count down and it’s like, Wow, this feels stupid, but then suddenly you’re gone.
I woke up and someone had put a coat over me. It was a puffy down coat and I was trying to remember where I’d seen it. Whose was it? I was groggy and felt so cold even with the coat. There were no windows where I was but it felt like it was dark outside, the middle of the night.
I could hear voices, women’s voices.
I got up to follow the voices, pulling back a curtain, which made an abrupt metal-on-metal slt! An orderly sat at an almost-empty nurses’ station, his face lit by a computer screen. He flicked his eyes to me, not unkindly, and then looked away again. St. Vincent’s felt like a dark wilderness of night and machine beeps and fitful sleep.
I followed the voices down the hall. There were two women. One I recognized as Clarice. I realized the other woman was Anne. It was Anne’s coat that I held in my hands.
They were arguing.
I stood at the dark end of the hall, watching them.
“…just doesn’t make sense—she’s in your house all that time and you don’t go see her? And it’s been how long, how many years? How’s such a thing possible? You don’t go to her once in—”
“You have no idea of the commitments I have.”
“You think you’re impressing me? You’re not impressing me. You’re not—”
“Anne, you flatter yourself if you think I’m interested in impressing you.”
Anne caught her breath at the sharpness of this.
“If that had been my daughter, my child, and her reaction to her zeyde’s death was like that, you can bet I’d make some time to—”
“I’m sure little Shulamith is very lucky.”
“Shoshanna! My daughter’s name is Shoshanna!” Anne yelled. “My daughter, your niece.”
I watched as Clarice stepped back, as if to warm up, and then stepped forward again.
“And what a lovely name to saddle that child with,” she said.
Anne did not speak for a moment.
“You don’t like us,” she said quietly. “You don’t like any of us.”
“ ‘Us’ meaning whom, Anne? ‘Us’ meaning whom?”
“They’re your own flesh and blood and you’re no kind of mother to them. You’re no kind of mother to your children.”
“My children! Poor little Kendrick, my twenty-three-year-old child!”
“She needs you and you turn away from her—”
“She turned away from me a long time ago.”
“Who is the mother here? Just who is the mother, Clarice? Are you competing with your own daughter? Is that why you do the things you do? Don’t think I don’t know. We all know. You’re a disgrace. You’re a disgusting woman—yes, disgusting for all your fancy B.S. and your airs and your—your shit manners! Your lousy, shit manners!” It was as if it were physically hurting Anne to curse. “You think you’re such a lady, but you’ve got no kind of class. You hear me? No kind of class! You should clear out and leave my brother alone. He’d be a lot better off without you. You’re going to bring him home the AIDS with this, you hear me? You loose, disgusting woman!”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” Clarice growled.
But, strangely, she didn’t make a move.
How long did those two women square off in that corridor, burning at each other?
And I realized something then. Clarice wanted to leave Sidney. She wanted to leave them all. She wanted to start over. She wanted to be young again, and have every possibility open before her.
Her family meant nothing to her.
A squeaky sound came from the far end of the hall. They both turned. A nurse came out of the shadows in a gaily colored smock top and white clogs. She had skinny braids and a kind way about her, and she must have just started her shift, because she smiled at the two women. Both Clarice and Anne hung their heads in shame.
With this, I melted back around the corner.
*
Sidney had come in from Latvia at the news, and the moment Kendra was well enough to leave the hospital, she was bundled into the car and driven up to the rehab at Old Briar. It all happened so quickly that I wasn’t even given a chance to say good-bye.
Clarice was not invited on the trip.
She was in a foul mood and made a point of telling me that Kendra had been back up at Old Briar half a dozen times since that episode freshman year. “The girl treats it like sleep-away camp,” she said as I sat dully before her, in theory taking dictation but in reality staring into my cup of coffee. All I felt was blank, unresponsive, even as endless complaint came out of Clarice’s mouth. Kendra would have to stay for a three-month minimum this time, Clarice told me, and you can’t even imagine the price of such a thing. She went on and on about the expense of her daughter, the absurdity of her daughter, her lack of imagination—and the appropriateness of the DSM definition of insanity, which should really be called stupidity.
She treated the whole thing like it was some meaningless piece of theater. She didn’t seem to care about Kendra’s heart, mind, flesh, anything, just the expense of her. I responded by saying nothing. That was my new tack: let her run her mouth all she wanted, and say nothing in response.
After Sidney took Kendra to the rehab, there was one night of yelling and then he went back to Europe. Yes, he was punishing her. This left only Clarice and me in the house, in the enormous, empty, but increasingly claustrophobic house. As if waking up from a dream, I realized I had no idea what was happening with my friends. Where was Trina? Where was Fang? It seemed like ages since I’d seen either of them.
And Trina had gone rushing forward without me.
She’d always been beset by legions of groover boys looking to chat her up, but suddenly, all out of the blue, something changed and she actually started going out with a guy. It would be hard to express the amount of dismay this caused me. I mean, I wanted to be happy for her, but it was all I could do not to beat around the room in a tantrum. He could have been a saint, the nicest guy in the world, but I was filled with criticism—my friend was being taken away from me. Simon was a photographer and a musician and he had a cool old Chevy, and they went out to Coney to take Holga photos, down through Jersey to the Princeton Record Exchange, out to Montauk to capture the waning light. Trina began inviting me to go on all sorts of trips with them, but I begged off—they didn’t need me tagging along. She’d been sympathetic but appalled at what Kendra had tried to do, and thought the whole Marr-Löwenstein family was a
n infection I kept willfully ignoring. She’d been telling me for ages that I needed to get away from them, and I’d just kept on ignoring her and making excuses, so it was no wonder that she stopped saying it now. What surprised me was that I missed it. I missed the lectures, I missed the reminding.
One awful evening Fang called, and I was so relieved to hear her voice that I immediately let out a stream of woe. What was I doing with my life? Why was I so stuck, how could I get anywhere, why was I so stalled out? I went on and on like this before I became aware that she was completely silent, saying nothing at all—simmering and about to boil.
“What is it?” I finally said to her.
“I broke up with Clark,” she said.
“That’s great!” I said.
“Fuck you, Chess,” she said. “Why are you such an asshole?”
And then she started to cry.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m just…I’m happy you got away from him.”
“Do you understand a thing? God, Chess. Now I have no place to live and I have all my stuff in a fucking garbage bag. I schlepped it to work this morning and stowed it in the supply room at, like, six a.m. so no one would see me and here it is eight at night and I’m too embarrassed to leave until everyone’s—”
“Look, Fang, I’ll come help you—”
“Trina and Simon are coming,” she said icily.
“Oh,” I said. I stared at the yellow kitchen wall. Oh. Everything was going on without me.
“I wish you’d told me,” I said at last.
“Well, I’m telling you now, aren’t I? And how much would you care anyway, because you’re all taken care of and you don’t have to worry about a place to live or the Con Ed bill or buying your own food or subway tokens or anything and you’re so obsessed with that scene I never see you anyway so why should you care about me?”
“Oh, Fang, you know I care about you!”
“I just never see it. I never fucking see it.”
“I am so sorry,” I said.
“Yeah, just keep saying that,” she said.
I realized just how much I had underestimated her.
I’d never really updated my sense of her since we met as freshmen. In some way I’d seen Fang as a funny novelty, reading her Jürgen Habermas in the original German but becoming mad hostile if you asked her what the literal translation for “chow fun” was: How the fuck should I know? You know how many dialects there are in China? I was thinking of something Trina had clued me in on, the way I always seemed quick to harsh on Fang…I hadn’t even seen this, but it made me remember certain things. I thought of one time in college when we were making some typically lazy dinner, soup from a can and grilled cheese, and I’d said, Hey, I’ve got some Parmesan, that might be good, and I’d taken it out and handed it to Fang and she put it on her grilled cheese. And I’d said, What the heck are you doing? She’d given a terrible start at this, as if she’d been zapped by an electrical shock. I hadn’t even known how much I’d embarrassed her. Later I would realize so much: she had the shame of the immigrant, and there was the deepest insecurity in her—fear of missteps, fear of exposure, fear of criticism about her class background. To cover this she put on a tough face, sought to be uncriticizable, the smartest girl in the room. And in my own lack of worldliness, my own insecurity over my own missteps, I became the one directing criticism her way: the friend who should have been supporting her was instead poking around to find the gaps in her armor.
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