Hugh turned into their driveway, and Ruth eased a little. She loved their little craftsman bungalow. Some people moved in and out of houses as casually as they changed sweaters, but Ruth was a nester. Over the years she’d invested great care in acquiring and displaying her household things: a hand-blown witch’s ball in the garden, bird feeders in the shapes of Victorian houses, tastefully framed photos of Bethy at all ages; seasonal and holiday knickknacks that she felt warmed up a house, especially when there were children. One whole wall of the garage was lined with color-coded tubs for the various times of year. She stood in the middle of the living room now, drinking in the peach-colored walls and warm lighting. As Hugh brought her suitcase in from the car, she actually felt her heartbeat slow down. Coming home to Seattle was like stepping through a wormhole into a parallel universe, a place where Hollywood was just a figure of speech; where the foliage was lush, the air smelled sweet, and even the bad traffic was a better bad.
Hugh came up behind her and put his arms around her. “Good to be home?”
Ruth nodded.
“I told Mom we’d stop by later,” Hugh said. “I want to tell her in person.”
Ruth went into the kitchen to take inventory. Hugh had printed out several of Bethy’s latest headshots and attached them to the refrigerator door with magnets. Ruth thought she looked pretty up there, with her straightened hair cut in a bob and the slightest hint of lipstick and blush. Older. Is this what she’d look like when she was eighteen? Ruth had been right there in the photographer’s studio, helping Bethy in and out of different outfits and hairstyles and makeup, but in the photos it all looked spontaneous and effortless. You’d never know they’d been in a semi-abandoned building in downtown Los Angeles, where the photographer’s vast loft studio had been furnished with a boomerang-shaped thrift-shop coffee table and a couch held up by three wobbly legs and a brick. The shoot had lasted for two hours, and Ruth had been limp by the end, but not Bethy. Bethy had been in her element. “I bet this is what it feels like to be a movie star,” she’d whispered to Ruth as they changed her outfit behind a flimsy rice-paper screen. “I could just keep doing this. Maybe I could model, too, while I’m down here?” Ruth had made what she hoped was a neutral, let’s-wait-and-see noise, hoping Bethy would forget all about it. She didn’t want to pop the child’s bubble, but she was realistic enough to know that while Bethy could be made to look very appealing and fresh-faced, she didn’t have the bones for beauty. At the end of the photo shoot, when the child floated out of the building on wings, saying, “I can’t wait to see the pictures,” Ruth had merely said, “Oh, me, too,” and left it at that.
She opened the refrigerator and the cupboards and could see almost immediately that the household needed virtually everything—the refrigerator, in mute accusation, held only a half dozen eggs, some orange juice, and a couple of takeout containers from Wing Fong. The pantry was picked clean. There wasn’t much more than a box of saltines, several cans of soup, and some tomato paste. Poor Hugh. Maybe he didn’t have diabetes at all. Maybe he was simply suffering from malnutrition.
Ruth heard him on the phone in the third bedroom, which they used as a den. She went down there and poked her head in, whispering that she was going to the store. Hugh lifted his hand in acknowledgment. “No, let’s schedule it Wednesday. The day after tomorrow,” he was saying, which meant he was on the phone with Margaret. Even in the middle of a health crisis—was this a crisis?—he was a conscientious man.
Outside, the air was cold and weepy. Seattle in the late fall was Ruth’s favorite time of year, when you could hole up and make soup and bake and finally feel all right about the fact that you weren’t climbing a mountain or at least taking a hike along one of the area’s hundreds of trails. Not that she’d ever been the hiking type. She was more of the sitting-on-a-bench-watching-other-people-exert-themselves type.
She drove to their neighborhood Albertsons, at which she’d been shopping for groceries for eighteen years. There were still traces of pumpkin gore in the gutters and on lesser-used side streets. People had probably just figured what the hell, it was organic—it would decompose eventually and replenish the earth. Ruth thought affectionately that if someone had vandalized a display of Styrofoam takeout containers, the mess would have been cleaned up in an hour flat. Seattle was the home of militant recyclers, rabid reusers, and loathers of all things plastic.
Ruth pulled into a parking space, disconcerted that everything felt at once deeply familiar, yet strange. She hadn’t noticed before how many people drove SUVs and pickups, had piercings and tattoos, wore strange leg-wear and everyday shoes that could be worn to cross a wilderness. No one in Hollywood would be caught dead in any of it. Ruth felt somehow more urbane, though she was wearing the same Seattle-wear herself that she wore, to her shame, in LA. Her eye was being trained, was the thing. She might not be a sophisticate herself—who had the money?—but she could tell the difference.
“Ruth Rabinowitz!” sang a woman’s voice. Ruth turned with dread. Speeding toward her was Bonnie Rowan, a perky, spandex-clad woman with the build of a boy and the leathery face of an elf. She always seemed to be coming from or going to an exercise class, athletic outing, or racing event. Over the years Ruth had been subjected to countless travelogues: sailing off of Greece, rock climbing in Utah, trekking in the Himalayas.
“Bonnie!” she nevertheless warbled back, matching the woman note for note. She hated that duplicitous side of herself, but it seemed to be the expected thing between women who had seen each other at school and neighborhood functions for years yet had absolutely nothing else in common.
“Where have you been keeping yourself?” Bonnie cried—as though they’d ever gotten together for so much as a cup of coffee. “It’s been forever! We heard you left town.”
“Bethy and I are down in LA,” Ruth said casually, loving the sound of what was coming next. “She’s acting professionally.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding.”
“Well, we’ve missed seeing you,” Bonnie said. A cell phone went off in the pocket of her Gore-Tex anorak, the ring tone set to the theme song from Rocky. She flipped the phone open with one hand, waggled her fingers good-bye to Ruth with the other, and set off down the aisle. Ruth watched her walk away. Who dressed in spandex to go shopping? She probably did it just to make dumpy people like Ruth feel bad about themselves. Ruth wouldn’t wear spandex to the Apocalypse.
For the umpteenth time she took out her own cell phone, double-checked that the ring volume was turned to high in case Bethy needed her, sped through the aisles, and hurried home. When she got there, Hugh said that his mother was expecting them. He’d called her, he said, and she had an hour before she was supposed to be at the Stroum Jewish Community Center for her monthly current events discussion group, which she hadn’t missed even once since 2002.
Helene Rabinowitz was a tough little bird. She had small, bright, judgmental eyes; coarse, wiry gray hair; a short, thick build; and a combative stance. And this was not merely, or even primarily, a reflection of her old age: Helene had looked exactly the same since the day she had first met Ruth twenty-three years ago and summarily judged her unworthy of Hugh. Apparently Ruth was what Helene termed a fluffnik—a person without serious intent. Evidently an artist, especially a ceramic artist, was a fluffnik of the first order. You want someone who plays with clay all day, you should make friends with a preschooler, Hugh said she’d told him. Find someone serious, a lawyer, a medical school student.
Still, Ruth had to give Helene her due: she had raised Hugh alone, a feat about which Ruth was newly respectful after single-parenting Bethany in LA. Hugh’s father, God rest his soul, had been killed in a freak collision with a bakery truck in 1963. “Well,” Helene often said, “at least he went surrounded by the things he loved,” these things evidently including rolls, Danishes, butter horns, and rugelach still warm from the oven. From his photographs Ruth could see that Jacob Rabinowitz had been a big man. Hu
gh had obviously gotten that from him. From Helene he’d inherited the tendency toward jowls and a shape like an apple.
When they arrived at her condominium complex that noon, Helene must have been watching for them because her door swung open before they’d even gotten to the top of the stairs. The buildings were sided with weathered gray clapboard and trimmed in crisp white. Each of the residents had a panic button in every room in the event of something dire.
“So,” she greeted Ruth with a quick, hard cuff on the forearm as Ruth stepped past her in the foyer, “if it isn’t the prodigal daughter-in-law.” Helene often delivered short bursts of pain, though Hugh dismissed this when Ruth pointed it out: a pat on the cheek felt more like a slap, a pinch on the arm turned purple by morning. And she continued to hang the disclaimer daughter-in-law around Ruth’s neck like an albatross years after her friends’ in-laws had dropped the qualifier.
“Bubbala.” Helene gave Hugh a strong hug, then held him out at arm’s length for a good look.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Nu? You look terrible. Look at your color, it’s like putty, and is that sweat? Why are you sweating? It’s like Siberia outside.”
“Look, why don’t we go sit down?” Hugh said.
The three of them moved into Helene’s living room, which was a masterpiece of rigidly enforced order: the sofa’s feet sat on protective disks; contrasting throw pillows were arrayed with mathematical precision. Ruth estimated there hadn’t been a speck of dust on the coffee and end tables since Hugh was in high school. Reverently framed family photographs occupied every free surface, mostly of Bethy and Hugh. Two included Ruth.
Hugh sat in his usual place, a soft, deep club chair that had evidently been Jacob’s, and which Hugh had inherited upon his father’s death. Helene laid her palm tenderly on his cheek. “Are you hungry? I’ve got some nice babka. What about cake and a fresh cup of coffee?”
“Coffee would be nice, Mom.”
“No cake? It’s from Goldberg’s.”
“Just coffee.”
“You?” Helene said to Ruth.
“No, thank you, Mom. Can I help?”
Helene waved her hand dismissively, already halfway to the kitchen. Ruth sighed. Hugh glanced at her and made a downward motion with his hand: Let it go. This is going to be bad enough. It was with just such hand signals that they had navigated the minefields of twenty-three years of holidays, birthdays, school plays, and Easter—which, unaccountably, Helene loved best of all the holidays, both Judaic and Christian, probably because it meant that Bethy would come and hunt for the plastic eggs Helene liberally filled from her massive coin jar.
Helene returned from the kitchen with cups of coffee, setting them in front of Hugh and Ruth.
“Look, Mom, there’s something we want to tell you,” Hugh said. “Some news. It turns out I’m diabetic. I just found out.”
Helene discounted this with a wave. “We’re a heart family.”
“Even so. We have an appointment to go over everything with Manny Kalman. But the good news is, it’s manageable.”
“Of course it’s manageable.” Helene sat down in the chair beside Hugh’s and stirred a spoonful of sugar into his coffee. “Herb Rosen had it forever, and he lived to eighty-five. Then again, he’d never been much of an eater. His wife was a terrible cook. Always too much salt.” Helene took a sip of coffee.
Hugh sighed and pushed his cup away. Ruth crossed the room and switched her black coffee for his sweet cup. Helene pretended not to notice. “Yes, and that’s exactly what we’ll concentrate on—how to manage it,” Hugh said.
“And for this you left my granddaughter alone in that terrible place?” Helene asked Ruth.
“It’s not a cold, Mom,” Hugh said. “Diabetes is a potentially life-threatening disease.”
“He’s rattled,” Ruth said. “It came as such a shock.”
Helene fixed her small, bright eyes on Ruth. “I don’t know why. You know what he’s been living on since you left him? He’s been living on macaroni and cheese—the kind that comes in a box and gives you a heart attack.”
“I didn’t leave him,” said Ruth.
“I eat other things,” said Hugh.
“What? That spaghetti you fix, with the sauce that you don’t drain the grease off of? That’s good for you?”
“Eggs,” Hugh said. “I scramble eggs.”
“Well, you could eat an apple.”
“I’ve eaten an apple.”
Ruth thought she might scream.
“Anyway, that’s not the point,” said Hugh.
“I didn’t leave him,” said Ruth.
“I’ll make you some soup,” Helene said. “When she leaves again, I’ll make you some chicken soup with spaetzle. You like that.” She held up her hand imperiously. “White meat only. Who couldn’t lose a pound or two?”
“All right, Mom,” Hugh said.
“So you tell that to Manny Kalman. Tell him from now on, your mother who loves you will feed you.”
THE CREEPY THING ABOUT HIS LIFE NOW WAS THAT HUGH was navigating a grotesque and never-ending obstacle course. Test himself too infrequently or fail to keep his numbers in the acceptable range and he would find himself bucketing down the road toward maiming, organ failure, and death. Keep it under control—if he could keep it under control, which Manny had told him could be extremely challenging—and he got to stick around. What kind of purgatory was that?
Not that he had any intention of revealing these musings to Ruth. After they’d left Helene’s condo they’d gone to see Manny together and had had nearly an hour’s orientation about Hugh’s new diet and exercise regimen, as well as a practicum for Hugh on how to test himself with a meter and what to make of the results. The finger-stick hurt, the meter was unnerving, and its results were tyrannical: bad numbers, bad man.
Ruth insisted on buying an expensive digital bathroom scale at the Sharper Image, and then loaded the cupboards with entire product lines of sugar-free foods, all of which tasted like crap. She was worried about him, he knew, but she was also fretting about Bethany down in LA. He was horrified that Ruth had left her down there with Mimi Roberts, but on the ride home from the airport she’d made it very clear that the decision was not up for discussion. “I’m not going to talk about it,” she’d said. “Bethy has some important auditions coming up, and she needs to be there for them. So leave it and let’s deal with this.” This, of course, being his diabetes, which, she implied, he had obviously brought upon himself.
He missed his wife. This woman was no one he knew, and certainly no one he would have married if he’d met her today for the first time.
Chapter Thirteen
AS SOON AS HUGH AND RUTH HAD GONE TO BED, THE PHONE rang. Ruth, who never slept well when Bethany was out of the house, sat up and grabbed the receiver before the second ring.
“Mom?” Bethy’s voice was high and shrill.
“What’s the matter, honey?” She could hear Bethy breathing shallowly. “Bethy? What’s the matter? Honey, slow yourself down—you’re going to hyperventilate.”
“We just heard like a really loud bang out by the garage and we’re scared,” Bethy said. In the background, Ruth could hear Allison say, “I think it’s moving! I think it’s coming around the front!”
Bethany gave a little shriek. “We’re really really scared. We think there might be a burglar or something, or an Armenian. Allison says that sometimes Armenians sneak around and look in your window to decide if they’re going to rob you or something.”
“Where’s Mimi?” Ruth said, peering at the clock on her nightstand. “Isn’t Mimi there? It’s almost ten thirty.”
“We don’t know where she is.” Ruth could hear Allison saying something, but she couldn’t make out the words. Bethy began to moan, and Ruth could hear her teeth chattering. The child had never had a level head when it came to a crisis.
“Honey, let me talk to Allison. Okay? Bethy? Put Allison on the phone.”
Ruth could h
ear Bethy saying, “No, she wants to talk to you.”
“Hello?” Allison said casually.
“What on earth is going on there? What do you mean it might be an Armenian?”
“We heard a noise,” Allison said. “This, like, thump. It was right outside the front door.”
“And?”
“Well, I mean, I’m okay, but Bethy’s kind of freaking out.”
“Do you know where Mimi is?”
“Work, probably. She went back after she dropped us off.”
“Have you tried calling her?”
“Nah,” Allison said. “She left her cell phone here, and she never answers the office phone at night. She says that’s why she stays late in the first place.”
“But, honey, she’s got young girls home alone.”
“Yeah. We could always call 911, though.”
“But you haven’t? Why haven’t you?”
“It’s not really that big of a deal.” Allison was beginning to sound annoyed.
“Are you hearing anything now?”
Ruth could hear Allison put her hand over the receiver and say, “Are we hearing anything? I mean, I’m just hearing your mom.”
Bethy said something Ruth couldn’t make out and then Allison got back on and said, “We don’t hear anything.” Then she could hear Allison put her hand over the receiver again and say, “But what if they’re just waiting out there for us to get off the phone?”
Ruth heard Bethany give another little shriek. She sounded far away.
“Allison?”
Seeing Stars Page 21
