by Jill Ciment
PART TWO
TILL KINGDOM COME
When a mid-October cold snap stopped the outbreaks, the New York Post ran the last of three infestation headlines—GIANT KILLER MUSHROOM ATTACKS BROOKLYN! GUESS WHO MUSHROOM MARY IS? SHROOM-AGEDDON V-DAY. Vida’s YouTube video now garnered less than a handful of hits daily and Jay Leno’s joke—How many Ziberax ladies does it take to screw in a light bulb? None, they already glow in the dark—was all but forgotten.
Maybe now she could finally get back to her work. The hardest part of acting was not acting.
She’d been living with Virginia in the maid’s room off the kitchen, vacated three months ago by Zachary’s Russian au pair. The second night after Vida moved in, Virginia regaled her with the whole Slav saga, reddening in capillary rage as she played Vida a poor-quality security video of a birdlike, black-haired girl feeding something tiny and white to Zachary. Had Virginia shown her the video before? The girl looked uncannily familiar. Virginia planned to install a new au pair in the narrow back room, a demure Midwestern girl this time instead of a Slavic sociopath, as soon as Vida found her own place. But instead of industriously seeking lodgings, Vida doggedly hunted for roles, calling everyone she knew in the business, without telling Virginia.
The third week of her stay, Zachary woke up with a fever and couldn’t go to day care. Virginia asked Vida to babysit, just this one time. One time turned into five straight days. Performing broad comedy to entertain a sick toddler wasn’t the role she was seeking. When the boxy, coarse-haired Zachary grew tired of her funny faces, he butted his head, like a kid goat, against the crib bars and screamed in anger or boredom, she couldn’t distinguish. She tried to soothe him and tell him his mommy was coming home not soon enough, but his eerily sentient black eyes didn’t believe her. He released a banshee war cry. Vida understood why the Russian had slipped him the occasional Ambien. Her friendship with Virginia had withstood the trespass and tussle of working together, agent and actress, but Vida doubted their friendship would survive one more day if she had to babysit Zachary any longer.
All her savings, which were never much, and all the money she made on the Ziberax ad, an indecent amount considering the effort, had been shoveled into the charred pit on Berry Street. The renovations had cost twice the estimate. Her credit cards were sodden with debt; they couldn’t absorb more. She had eight grand in the bank, the final payment before Pfizer pulled the commercial. Eight thousand would scarcely cover first, last, security deposit, and broker fee. She’d have to settle for a roommate. She limited her search to Brooklyn and found Jodie, a twentysomething aspiring actress with a twelve-hundred-a-month furnished share near the Williamsburg Bridge. To avoid spending evenings in the apartment while Jodie earnestly practiced for acting class, Vida worked out at her gym, fervently, as she nightly attempted to climb all the way to heaven on a StairMaster. To get to the gym from Jodie’s she had to pass through her disfigured neighborhood. Fatality and plain vanilla homesickness invariably drew her to her front door, now a gaping cavity in a black tooth. Abandoned for less than three months, her house was a ruin—one wall had crumbled, a couple of roof joists now hung diagonally; all the picture lacked were weeds and roosting pigeons. But nothing grew or nested in the ten square blocks of no-man’s-land. The few lucky intact houses that had survived the plague didn’t look so lucky now. Cars and taxis avoided the ash-heaped streets mined with broken glass and other tire-popping debris. Even parking-starved New Yorkers didn’t take advantage of the vacant spots.
One evening, a beige sedan pulled onto her block and stopped. Whoever was driving cut the engine and doused the headlights, but didn’t get out. The car’s interior light came on. Vida recognized the old Polish couple from down the street. Mr. Syzmanski was behind the wheel. Beside him, his short wife’s dread-filled eyes peeked over the dashboard. Vida waved to her former neighbors, but they didn’t appear to see her in the twilight, against a charcoal-black set. She was curious to see how others approached fate’s fist to the jaw and then managed the operations of normal life—opening a car door, marching up the stoop steps. But the old couple chose not to march up to the abyss’s edge. They remained in their sedan, doors locked, fearful and immobilized, staring through the windshield, as if waiting for a drive-in horror movie to end. Vida watched as Mr. Syzmanski reached over to cover his wife’s eyes.
That night, a Help sign for a receptionist was posted on the gym door. Vida stopped by the empty front desk and called for Jimmy, the gym’s bull-necked, flirtatious owner. He and Vida had slept together a few times for sport. When she asked for the job, he thought she was kidding.
“I wish I were,” she said.
The fall from Queen Goneril to receptionist and towel girl had all the makings of a tragedy, but her other possible role, a middle-aged unemployed actress seeking work with no marketable skills unless crying-on-cue counts, had all the makings of a farce. Most of the gym’s clientele recognized her, if not as the infamous Mushroom Mary, aka Ziberax Lady, then as a fellow gym member, and when she fetched a towel or answered the phone, some kindly averted their eyes and pretended not to see, some attached themselves to her and tried to feed off her bad luck, some offered samplings of pop psychology, some offered condolences, some secretly gloated, but worst of all were the other gym members from no-man’s-land now sleeping on friends’ sofas or in cars, the rumpled glassy-eyed refugees who arrived first thing in the morning to shower before work. They recognized her as one of their own.
After the night she saw the Syzmanskis, she avoided her old street on the way home from work. But the couple remained on her mind. She couldn’t shake the image of Mr. Syzmanski reaching across the sedan’s front seat to cover his wife’s eyes. Vida had never felt more alone than in these past months, and not because she wasn’t involved with anyone. She’d never gone this long without a role to keep her company. She had gladly put off marriage and children for her acting, but until now, she hadn’t realized that she’d also put off the possibility of having someone’s loving hand cover her eyes when she was scared.
She walked by the high school where the last of the evacuees still remained, those without family or the means to move on. Outside the gymnasium door, under the glow of an exit light, two people kissed. Vida found it remarkable that love could survive under such conditions. She could tell the kiss wasn’t just carnal, although it was that, too. It was tender and romantic. The couple braided into a singular shape. When the kiss finally ended and the couple parted, she recognized Frank and Kat.
Nightly, Frank broke the shelter rule of separating single men after lights-out and slipped into Kat’s cot. They kissed and caressed a little under the covers, but they couldn’t really lose themselves. Inches away, Mrs. Syzmanski did needlepoint by flashlight.
Usually, they watched a movie on Frank’s phone, but tonight Kat needed to talk. “Tomorrow is Edith’s and my birthday. I think about her more and more, Frank, not less. I don’t know how to be without her. I’m still a twin—a twin-less twin. I’d bring her back if I could, but as ashamed as I am to say it, I also feel free in a way I never have before. I was born married, engaged for nine months before that. All my life, Edith was my other self, the choices I didn’t make, or maybe I was the choices she didn’t make, as if we were part of a double-blind medical study, only we didn’t know which one got the real medicine and which one the sugar pill. I feel horribly guilty taking any pleasure in her death.”
“She loved you. She always said Kat doesn’t see the glass as half full, she sees it as overflowing.”
“Remember that lawyer, Stanley, who was at the funeral? I think his wife may have been Edith’s lover. Edith tried to tell me a story once about a partner’s wife, the ‘most charming woman,’ she called her, and I cut her short, and said something like, ‘Edie, please, for your own good, get a life outside the office or you’ll have no life.’ Why didn’t I listen to her? Why didn’t she just tell me?”
“Edith knew you don’t got a judgmental b
one in your body. She was a grown-up lady living with her mother. She probably needed a secret.”
“She left me some money, Frank.”
“So how come you live at a shelter?”
“She set it up so that I couldn’t touch a penny until our sixty-fifth birthday. I don’t think there’s much, Frank, but I’ll find out tomorrow.”
His face knit together with hurt and bewilderment. “You knew about the money all along and you never told me?”
“I was embarrassed. My own sister didn’t trust me enough to manage my money, let alone hers. And maybe she was right.”
“I can’t believe she never told you how much.”
“She never even told me about Alice.”
Kat sat across from Stanley in his vast spotless office, a view of Madison Square framing his domed head. Janice had brought in a tray of coffee with real cream and old-fashioned sugar cubes. A check lay shockingly white on his black leather desk pad, too far away for her to see the amount.
“Today must be a difficult birthday for you without her,” he said kindly. “This shouldn’t take long.”
After signing the stack of legal documents he set before her, she waited for him to stand ceremoniously and shake her hand before giving her the check, fifty-eight hundred dollars. She put it in her purse. Why did she feel like she was stealing it?
“Well, Kat, you’ll be able to get your own place now. Janice will help you set up a bank account. The trust can do direct deposits, unless you prefer that the checks be mailed to your new place?”
“There are more?”
“Yes. The first of every month.”
While the bank teller counted out her money—fifty twenties, twenty fifties, and thirty-eight hundred-dollar bills—Kat’s emotions ran from elation to disbelief to gratitude to hurt. Why had Edith thought it necessary to hide the fact that she was rich?
One more secret.
Outside the bank, on the bustling avenue, Kat couldn’t help but feel exuberant with the weight of those bills in her purse. She hailed a taxi. The whole drive back to Brooklyn, she planned a surprise for Frank. She’d take him to an expensive dinner and then book them into a nice hotel, maybe someplace on Central Park. Or maybe instead of a restaurant, they should order room service with iced Champagne? A honeymoon.
As the taxi crossed over the Williamsburg Bridge, she got her first bird’s-eye view of her old neighborhood. From this vantage point, the devastation didn’t look as large as she had imagined. Yes, the burnt-out row houses were a travesty, but it was only ten square blocks in an otherwise thriving borough. A subway car rattled past the stalled bridge traffic. No one inside bothered to look out the window.
She considered asking the cabbie to wait outside while she ran in and got Frank, but as they approached the school, she had him drive past and drop her off a block away. She hadn’t realized until now how difficult it would be to tell Gladys and Mrs. Syzmanski, practically family at this point, that she and Frank were moving on. She knew they would be happy for them, but in the end, how could they not feel forgotten? No matter how she couched it, all that they would hear was Good-bye and good luck.
When she opened the gym’s double doors, she heard a commotion coming from her quadrant of cots. Mr. Syzmanski, an ox-stout, dome-bellied man who usually sat mutely all day, was stomping and kicking his cot, as if he were trying to kill it.
“You’ll break your foot, you crazy old man,” yelled Mrs. Syzmanski.
The shelter’s security guard hurried over, but Frank got to the old man first. She couldn’t hear what Frank whispered to him, but she watched as the rage deflated in Mr. Syzmanski’s domed belly until he looked almost concave. Mrs. Syzmanski clutched the big gold cross yoking her double chin and watched with grave, anxious eyes as Frank led her husband outside for fresh air.
“The shelter is closing next week,” she told Kat. “We’re getting vouchers to a motel in Yonkers, but he said he’d rather live in our car. We’re going to freeze to death in our car.”
“The motel doesn’t take pets. I can’t move to another place that won’t take my babies,” said Gladys.
“As soon as that fuckball insurance company pays what’s owed me, I’m rebuilding. ‘Act of god’ my fucking asshole!” yelled Marty.
“How are we supposed to rebuild from Yonkers?” a gruff voice on the far side of the gym shouted.
“Can’t we get FEMA trailers like they had in New Orleans and park them next to our houses?” asked a single mother with two hyperactive boys.
“You want we should live in a FEMA trailer?” a raspy older voice answered. “Those trailers were toxic. The formaldehyde made the people of New Orleans sicker than the debris.”
Mrs. Syzmanski searched Kat’s face. “I used to go to Edith for advice when he acted crazy like this. Your sister was such a wise lady. I called her Dr. Edie after your mother, everyone did.” She graced her lips with her cross. “Maybe you can help me now? He says to me, ‘I’m going to kill myself.’ He wants us to go to sleep in our car and never wake up. He says, ‘Freezing to death is supposed to be a good way to die.’ Should I tell one of the social workers? I’m worried they’ll take him away and commit him. Then where I will go?”
What was Kat supposed to say? Who was she to give advice?
She opened her purse’s jaws wide, and showed the astonished Mrs. Syzmanski and the weepy Gladys the brick of cash.
“Edith wanted us all to share this.”
Mrs. Syzmanski shook her head in wonder. “How much is there?” she whispered.
“Enough so that no one has to move to Yonkers.”
Gladys kissed her hand. “Thank you, Edith.”
Tomorrow, she and Frank would look for a place to rent, big enough for all, or three smaller apartments near one another, but tonight she was taking him to a hotel. She could no longer splurge on a park view if she was to make good on her promise, but she found them a nice two-star near the river.
Alone in a room at last, they had their first unabashed kiss. She remembered what a good kisser he’d been, but she didn’t kiss him wildly back, as she had forty years ago. She felt inexplicably bashful. Their circumstances had created a courtship and she had never been courted before. She’d always been too eager for adventure to delay sex. Was that the source of her shyness? Or was it because Frank hadn’t seen her naked in forty years? As he undressed her, reaching under her sweater to touch her breasts, her shyness became exquisitely painful. Here she was, sixty-five years old and gray—she hadn’t dyed her hair in months—and in love for the first time. She’d always believed she’d been in love before, countless times. She’d certainly known zealous passion and fanatical lust, but she’d never known shyness, not like this.
Afterward, Frank looked at her as if she might not be real. “I always thought you were the prettier sister.”
Ashley felt the cold snap as Siberian teeth. Though she marveled to see her arctic-white skin burnished to bronze, her time at the beach had hardly been a holiday. She’d been forced to eat half-finished hamburgers left for the gulls, ketchup packets stolen from Coney Island hot dog stands. She filched anything left unguarded on a beach towel, and sometimes she stole the towel, too.
There were mornings when hunger was her only company, days when anguish choked her like a fish bone. Hearing Russian being spoken on the boardwalk only made the bone prick sharper. Some evenings, just as twilight leeched every color from the world and the phantasmagoric gyrating lights of Coney Island’s colossal Wonder Wheel blinked on, Ashley considered swimming out into black infinity. Maybe home was on the other side? To be alone and unloved in such a beautiful alien land.
Once the temperature dropped, she knew she needed sounder shelter than an encampment under the boardwalk. She migrated back to the old neighborhood by the river and moved into a parked car with a busted door lock and a theft-proof gadget on the steering wheel. Once she got the hang of alternate-side-of-the-street parking, she knew exactly when to move her encampment in a
nd out—a beach blanket, four iPods, three watches, two wallets, and a purse with all sorts of makeup. Aside from moving the car for the street sweeper twice a week, the scruffy, unshaven owner of the car never drove anywhere. If she had the keys, she’d light out for California, or maybe Florida. She could learn to drive on the fly. She’d fire up her four iPods with the cigarette lighter, and let them serenade her all the way to Hollywood, or maybe South Beach. For food, she’d rob gas station concession stands. She had a getaway car. When she got sick of pretzels and cola, she’d eat at diners, steaks and potatoes and hot dogs and ice cream, and then sneak out a bathroom window. She almost tasted the meat as she lay curled on the hatchback’s rear seat, the beach blanket pulled up to her chin for warmth.
Just as she dozed off, a fist commenced pounding on the window. The car owner’s unshaven face, lit by a streetlight, contorted and snarled behind the glass. “What the fuck!” When she sat up and he saw that she was female, and tiny, and very pretty, his expression switched from belligerent to disbelieving.
“I scream rape if you call police,” Ashley threatened as he opened the door with his key.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, holding his hands wide and taking a giant step back. “But you can’t sleep here.”
“So? I be car’s guard. Lock broken. You go nowhere anyway.”
He looked over the front seat headrest to her encampment below—the watches and purse and iPods.
“How long have you been here?”
“Why? You have weekly rate?”
“I need to use the car. You need to leave. Now.”
“Where going? Maybe I come.”
“I’m going to my girlfriend’s house upstate. It’s her car.”
