Reba, who was vegetarian, wasn’t about to get into that argument again; and besides, she didn’t want to talk at all, she wanted to go on sitting in the dark. Unlike her mother, Reba loved being in the dark and delayed turning on the light in her little cabin till the last possible moment. In warm weather, she sat on her doorstep; all around her there was nothing but trees, with birds asleep inside them and the last little pool of daylight draining away in a gap between the branches.
Although her father was forever asking her to let him make her an allowance, Reba was entirely self-supporting. Several times a week she stripped people’s furniture or the walls of their houses to get them ready for painting. Her cabin was rent free, for though she may have lived there, as her mother always said, like a wild man in the woods, these woods were part of an estate owned by an investment banker and his friend. Reba was employed as the caretaker; she didn’t have to do much but had a list of phone numbers for plumbers and electricians, in case anything went wrong in the big house. She rarely saw the owners—they mostly left notes for her on their hall table—and their house was invisible from her cabin, so that she really appeared to be living in solitude.
On Saturday night she drove as usual to the station to meet her friend Lisette arriving on the last train. Lisette couldn’t come earlier because Saturday was a very busy day in the gourmet cheese store where she worked; and she was so exhausted from being on her feet all day that she was asleep before they got home to the cabin. Reba just picked her up and carried her to bed, tenderly lifting Lisette’s long pale limbs to get her clothes off without waking her. Reba always associated Lisette with something out of a fairy tale—especially when she was asleep, with her long ginger hair spread on the pillow around her pointed little face. She was Reba’s idea of the little Match Girl, or Cinderella before the Prince found her—someone pale and deprived who had to be taken care of.
Next day was a perfectly beautiful Sunday in early summer, and they had the whole place to themselves—the woods, meadows, ponds, and apple orchard—for the owners were away in the Bahamas where they had another estate. The leaves had that fresh look of translucent green that would grow heavy and dusty as the season matured; the lilac was out, so were pure white, sweetly fragrant clusters of bridal wreath. It had rained a lot in spring, so the grass was as moist and washed as the sky with its tufts of clouds. The swimming hole was full and the water uncluttered by the weeds that would infest it later; surrounded by trees and bushes, it was a completely private place, so they just stepped out of their clothes and dived in naked. It was cold inside, and Lisette—a pale shape flitting around in the dark green water—soon began to shiver; and Reba, though she herself didn’t feel cold at all, made her get out and wrapped her in the big white towel she had brought for her. They sat at the water’s edge, on stones embedded in moss, while Reba carefully dried each strand of Lisette’s hair and kissed her damp shoulder where it emerged from the towel. Then the mosquitoes came humming—Lisette was always their first victim, with her sweet blood, so Reba snatched up all their clothes and they ran as they were, two shimmering naked girls, to their cabin where they threw themselves on the bed and Reba went perfectly wild. They dropped into a deep sleep, in the middle of that warm afternoon, and when the phone rang, Reba—guessing it could only be Donna—didn’t answer, and when it kept on ringing, put her hands over Lisette’s ears so she wouldn’t be disturbed.
On that same Sunday afternoon Si had come by to see Donna; he usually made time to do this, not liking her to be alone the whole weekend. She at once spoke about Reba: “Why can’t she have a boy friend like everyone else.” Of course Si was the only person in the world she would say this to. She knew he felt the same, though he denied it. “It’s okay,” he said. “Leave her alone. It’s better than if she was with some jerk who wouldn’t know how to treat her decently.” Next moment he could have bitten his tongue off, for—“Plenty of those around,” she took the opportunity to say.
He engrossed himself in looking at his paintings on the walls. Along with everything else in the apartment, he had left them behind when he moved out. But he loved them very much—for themselves, and also for what they proved about him, that he had learned to appreciate and spend his money on them. Donna never had learned, and in front of him, she derided them: “Looks like some kid of five’s been messing around with a pot of paint.” What he didn’t know was that, before her friends, she boasted how he had bought them when no one else had known their worth. She became very indignant if any friend made the remark about the kid of five, and then she explained the paintings; it would have made him smile to hear her, as he used to smile about her in the past, in appreciation of her charming, childish ways.
Donna fussed around noisily emptying ashtrays, and at last she said, “Who’ve you come to see, me or those pictures? Well, sit down then, you’re making me nervous.”
He sat in one corner of a vast custom-made sofa; she sat opposite him on its twin. She stared at him and thought how unfair, my God. He looked so good with his suntan, artificial or not, his body kept in check at the spa, his stylish clothes: a man only just past his prime. She was two years younger than he was, but sometimes, catching herself unawares in a mirror, she thought with a shock: “It’s Gran.” Her grandmother had died of a stroke in her sixties; by that time all they would let her do was feed the chickens, and she walked around scattering grain for them and making clucking noises, her stockings fallen around her ankles.
“Oh don’t, please,” said Si, for big tears were rolling down his wife’s cheeks.
“It’s my health,” Donna said. “I feel bad all the time.”
Si said, “I’m going to speak to Dr. Abramson first thing in the morning.” At the same time he was thinking of his grandmother. Not that she had looked in the least like Donna—Si’s grandmother had been thin, with ghetto eyes and a scarf on her head: but that was the way she had cried, just letting the tears roll down her face. He had assumed that she had wept like that, without words, because she couldn’t express herself much in English (for instance, on the subject of Donna, dance hostess from Michigan, daughter of Italian truck-farmers). But now he thought that maybe it was the way old women cried—silently, having no language left for all they had to say.
Slapping his thighs in a determined way, he got up. “You should get out more, Don, see your friends—”
“I have no friends.”
“See Reba—go to her place, get a car and go there, see what she’s up to.”
“She doesn’t want me . . . No she doesn’t. She has that girl there.”
Donna sighed—differently from how she had sighed for herself; and in spite of his determined good cheer, Si’s mood also clouded over, and when their eyes met for a moment, it was with the same expression. Si mumbled, “As long as she’s happy,” but it didn’t seem to convince him any more than it did her.
The day after Lisette returned from visiting Reba, Donna went to see, or look at her in the cheese store where she worked. It was easy to see Lisette, all one had to do was buy a piece of cheese. That was how Reba had first met her—Donna cursed the day but it had been her own fault, she herself had sent Reba there to pick up a quiche for lunch. It was Donna’s best cheese place in the whole world, and just around the corner from her, on Madison. Although in the past Lisette had not been Donna’s favorite assistant, now she always hoped that she would get to be served by her. On this particular day, Donna’s lot fell to the manageress, an older woman. Most of the customers, including Donna, had been coming there so regularly that they acted like family friends; and they were all expected to know the manageress’s personal history—“How’s Trudy?” Donna inquired obsequiously, as soon as she had given her order. She didn’t listen too carefully to the answer, for her eyes were on Lisette—on Lisette’s hands cutting cheese for another customer; these hands were too large for the rest of her and also reddened as though they had washed a lot of dishes. A kitchen maid, that’s all she is, thought Don
na, unaware how imperious she looked at that moment, a real grande dame, which of course she was no more than was Lisette; but she had had money for a long time now and by constantly buying quality goods had taken on some of their aura.
“I told her from the start,” the manageress was saying, while her hands worked independently packing Donna’s purchases, “‘Trudy, mark my words, that guy’s bad news.’ But who listens to me, I’m only the mother, right? So who am I to give good advice to my own daughter.”
“It’s true what they say,” Donna said. “‘When they’re small, they break your arms, when they’re grown, they break your heart.’ The brie looks nice and moist, maybe I’ll take a piece. Sometimes it’s like they do it on purpose, taking up with people that they know it’ll hurt the parents. Really low company,” she said, the last three words dead slow; and she watched Lisette’s hand tremble as the knife she was holding sank into a wheel of cheese. She’ll cut her finger off, Donna thought, watching expectantly, but Lisette was too professional to let emotion undermine her skill. The knife made it to the end, the piece was weighed and packed, and Donna said, “Oh Lisette, I didn’t see you, how are you, dear? You look well—have you been in the country? That’s right, make the most of it, the good weather won’t last forever.” She swept out, and on the same momentum went down the Avenue, proud of herself and the way she looked. There weren’t many people on this ordinary weekday morning dressed up like she was—in her silk suit cut amply to accommodate her figure, shoes and purse matching, and a little summer hat swaying on the topmost mast of her bouffant of burnished gold.
But later that day she was defending herself to Reba: “What did I say? I was talking to what’s her name about Trudy. Well, why shouldn’t I go there? My heaven, I’ve been going there long before she ever—and how do you know I was there? Does she call you every five minutes to report on all that’s going on in the store?”
Reba hung up on her—because she was mad at her and also because she wanted to get back on the phone to Lisette and calm her down. Donna was unrepentant—“What did I do?” she muttered defiantly at her own reflection in the mirror, but quickly altered her expression to a nicer, softer one.
When Si next came to see her, she complained to him—“Now she won’t even let me go in my own cheese place.”
Si said, “It’s because she knows you don’t like her friend.”
“Her friend! You should see her—she’s just this starved little rat. But I guess you would like her. You’d like anyone as long as they’re under twenty-five. Making yourself ridiculous,” she ended on a change of subject.
Instead of answering, Si went off to look at his pictures again. In a way her accusation that he came not to see her but his pictures was true, though not entirely. These paintings and his feelings for her—what used to be his feelings for her—were mixed up together. He stood in front of one of his earliest acquisitions—River By Day: II. He couldn’t have explained the subject—it didn’t look like a river—but he knew he had to have it the moment he had seen it in a gallery many years ago. He had already at that time made a lot of money—in the window-shade business—and he was going to make a lot more. He was in big business and reveled in it, but at the same time there was something in him that kept aloof, untouched by everything he did—strange feelings that possessed him when he saw, for instance, the sun blazing on the ocean; and most of all, and the essence of it all, his feelings for the vital young wife he had married, in spite of all his family and his ancestry, because he had desired her more fiercely than anything else in the world.
And there she stood behind him now and said, “What’s she like?”
For a moment his eyes, still full of River By Day, rested on her: but then he lowered them and walked away from her and on to his next picture, hanging there pristine and unchanged. She followed him and said again: “What’s she like?”
It was a question she had asked him before and he had answered it, as he did now, with a vague and vaguely helpless gesture. Then he flung himself on one of the sofas, and she came and sat not opposite now but right next to him, and asked it for the third time. But he said, “Did you go to Dr. Abramson like I told you?”
“Yeah. I went. Same old story: ‘Donna, I’m warning you, the one thing you’re not to do is get upset. Take it easy. Be happy. Sing. Laugh.’” She threw back her head to laugh, and next moment she said, “How old is she anyway?”
“Twenty-three,” he answered, as if he hoped not to be heard.
But she heard, and “Twenty-three,” she repeated, in a soft, nostalgic way. Then she said, “Reba’s getting on for twenty-five.”
“I know,” he said. “I know that.” They spoke in low and gentle voices to each other—maybe because they were sitting in such close proximity on the sofa. She moved her knee a little closer to his, just touching it, and he made himself not move away. Clearing his throat a couple of times, he said in a different tone now, more conversational: “I wanted to talk to you about Reba’s birthday.”
“It’s not till September.”
“I know it’s not till September: you don’t have to tell me. But I want to start moving on setting up a trust fund for her. So she’ll have some money, for God’s sake. Let her go on working as a cleaning woman, okay, it’s her choice, but that money’s got to be there for her, if she wants it or not.”
“Oh. Yeah. Wonderful.” Donna moved her knee away from him. “That’s all we need: so she can pack up any day she feels like it and go off to Mexico or wherever with whoever. No thank you.”
“That’s her business.”
“No it’s not; it’s mine.” Donna left him and went to sit on the opposite sofa. “I have my one daughter, after all the miscarriages that’s all I have, and I’m keeping her. As close by me as I can.” She hit her fist against her breast, to show how close. But the heart under her resolute fist was jumping violently and there was the familiar pounding in her veins.
Si had always recognized every tremor passing through her and he still did, though they were different tremors now. Dr. Abramson had told him, “Don’t get her excited, Si, see she takes it easy, or I can’t be responsible.” The way things were, Si knew that to spare her meant to leave her, relieve her of his presence. He no longer asked her as he used to—not only out of courtesy but from real concern for her—how she would spend her day, what she would eat. He had learned that this upset her more than anything, so now he went away without asking, feeling bad she was alone and wishing she had plans for the evening, as he had.
Si didn’t call Reba as often as her mother did, and for such an energetic, successful man of the world, he was very shy with his daughter: “I’m not interrupting anything? You’ve eaten dinner?” Unlike Donna, he didn’t ask what she had had for dinner and then quarrel with her for not eating meat. Instead there was a hesitant silence, and then he asked her to lunch with him on any day she chose; he knew she knew it had to be lunch and had to be a weekday because evenings and weekends belonged to his girl friend. Reba said she would meet him on Friday, at one o’clock—no, wait, one-fifteen.
She drove in early that day to take Lisette out for her lunch break at twelve. She left her car in a parking lot and went to the store, but she had to wait, for Lisette was still busy with customers. Reba liked watching her at work. It was how she had first seen her, and though Lisette had appeared quite homely in the white coveralls she had to wear and her ginger hair tied into a thin pony-tail, even then, before she even knew her, Reba had recognized the real Lisette beneath this disguise.
Now, as soon as Lisette was free from her last customer, the two girls walked down the street to a little walled garden, which had been scooped out of the surrounding buildings. Lisette took possession of a couple of wire-mesh chairs, while Reba lined up at the refreshment booth to buy jello and cream cheese sandwiches for herself and Lisette, who had also become a vegetarian. Reba was going to have lunch with her father, but she liked to eat together with her friend; besides, she had
a big appetite and was always ready for something.
“But why does she hate me?” Lisette was saying, for she was still rankling from Donna’s visit, though it was an almost weekly event.
“She doesn’t,” Reba answered, as usual. She began to explain Donna’s psychology and then Lisette sighed and talked about her mother, who had started drinking again. They couldn’t hear each other too well because of the loud rushing sound from the waterfall, which had been made to cascade over ridges built into a stone wall. Also, the little stone garden had filled up with office workers enjoying the fine day during their lunch hour and old ladies come out of their apartments to stretch their veined legs to the sun. All the same, Reba felt very private with Lisette. She kept taking glimpses down her friend’s back, exposed by the dress she was wearing. It was a sundress, held up by two thin straps and as ill-fitting as most of Lisette’s clothes (she usually bought them on sale); but inside it her back was lightly freckled down to the top of her tiny flowered panties, which was as far as Reba could see.
“If she doesn’t watch out,” Lisette was saying, “she’ll have to go back to that place where they dry them out. She hates it but she’s sliding right back in there and he’s helping her: Uncle Jack. I blame him really. You’re not listening.”
East Into Upper East Page 33
