“Sandy, if you call her now, she’ll come right here. You know Mona. Sandy, I couldn’t look at her. When my father died … Her face is like a broken heart. I couldn’t stand it,” and then he began to cry, in harsh broken sounds that I had never heard before.
“I won’t. I promise, I won’t. Jay, sweetheart, I promise.”
He grew quiet again and his hand slipped around my waist.
Then Martin and his parents came back into the room. They found me with my face against Jay’s throat, with his hand under my sweater, cooling the skin of my back.
“Uh-oh,” Martin’s father said. “Maybe we should have knocked.”
But his mother took it all in, the red eyes, the sorrow that hung in the room like something visible.
Poor Martin looked frightened. Had he ever seen his parents embrace, even in joy? “Love in bloom,” I said.
“They vant to be alone,” Martin’s father croaked. He helped Martin to climb back into bed.
Then we all talked, idle, drifting chatter, half listening to one another and to the other sounds around us, until the shadows grew long in the room, and it was time to go home again.
29
THE POSTCARD WAS PRINTED:
Dear Mrs. (and here my name had been typed in). It is now six months since your last gynecological checkup. An appointment has been arranged for you on Thursday, January 23rd, at 10 A.M. If for some reason you cannot keep this appointment, please notify this office at least 48 hours before the scheduled time.
The same postcards always came twice a year to my mother and me. We arrange to have our appointments on the same day and in the past we had gone shopping together and out for lunch. I called my mother and told her that I didn’t think I was up to it now, that I would go at some other time. (Thinking—never again, what difference does it make, who cares.) We hung up and a few minutes later she called back and gave me a long lecture about taking care of myself for the sake of the children, that I owed it to Jay to be both mother and father to them, that my body was a sacred temple, that she hated to go by herself—sometimes she felt a little dizzy afterwards, you read in the paper about not waiting too long, because God knows what’s going on inside you, God forbid, and I couldn’t stop living, even if I felt like it.
Finally I said, “All right, all right,” and she breathed a long whistling sigh. “Tootsie,” she said. “I know how you feel.”
We traveled together as we always did. I drove to the beauty shop and honked the horn two times.
My father came out with a hairbrush in his hand. Inscribed on his smock in an intricate scrolled script was Mr. B. He reached in the window to touch my cheek and I saw that his hand trembled slightly. “She’ll be out in a minute,” he said. “She’s just getting her coat.”
“Go inside, Daddy. It’s cold.”
“I’m all right,” he insisted. “I can take the cold.” But he backed away anyway, waving, and went into the store. Then in a few minutes they appeared together at the doorway and my father reached into his pocket for his wallet. He gestured briefly toward the car and then he gave her some money.
My mother ran in those funny choppy steps, as if her legs were tied together, and then she sat down beside me in the car. “We shouldn’t have had a Thursday,” she said. “It’s a busy day for us. They should have given us a Monday or a Tuesday.”
“Ma,” I said. “I was willing to change.”
“Tootsie, some things can’t be put off.” She lowered the visor mirror to look at herself, leaning close and squinting. She lifted her lips in a terrible leer and shook her head. “Don’t neglect your teeth,” she said.
At the clinic we went into adjoining curtained booths and undressed. We put on the paper gowns and slippers provided for us and then we opened the curtains and sat on the little stools and waited.
A nurse came by and said that they were a little delayed and that we would have to wait about fifteen minutes. “So just relax,” she advised.
“Ha!” my mother said. Then she reached behind her and brought her pocketbook onto her lap. “I want to give you something.”
“Ma,” I said. “We have medical insurance. The network has been very generous.”
“Take it for Daddy. He specifically said.”
The paper gowns rustled as I held out my hand. “Tell him thank you. Thank you both.”
“I always hate this,” she said, looking around.
“Waiting?”
“The whole business. I know they don’t even think about us, the doctors. Not as women. But it makes me nervous, anyway, to put my feet up like that.” She shuddered.
“It only takes a few minutes.” In my head I lie on the bed at home, my arms opened. Oh come into me. Your voice enters me. Come in. Jay parts my legs like brambles in a forest and goes through.
“Yeah, well …” my mother said.
“Think about something else. Pretend you’re in Paris and Doctor Miller is your lover.”
“Some lover.”
“Pretend you’re at the dentist’s. Open wide now, dear.”
“You!” She blushed. “Listen, do you know what I do? I shut my mind off completely.”
“I wish that I could do that.”
“I thought you didn’t mind the examination.”
“Not that,” I said. “I just wish that I didn’t have to think.”
“My poor girl,” she said, and she patted my hand. She looked down at her bare legs, embroidered with blue veins. “Older people should go first.”
“No,” I said. “Nobody should go, ever.”
“Don’t be crazy. It would be like the BMT in the rush hour. As you get older, you change, anyway.” She stood up and stepped back into her booth. She crooked her finger. “Come here for a second.”
I walked into her booth and she reached up and pulled the curtain. Then she parted the gown and lifted it. “I once had a beautiful figure,” she said. “Look at that.”
Her skin was mottled pink and white, as if she had just come from a hot bath. Her breasts were two pale tilting moons. There were sharp red marks where her girdle had held her and the thin line of an old scar ran across her belly, disappearing into the sparse, graying bush. She pointed to the trembling flesh of her thigh.
“Ma,” I said, “you still …”
“Feel that. Just feel that.”
I reached out and touched her skin briefly.
She smiled triumphantly. “That’s what happens!” She lowered the gown and opened the curtain again.
I went back to my own booth and sat down.
“It happens to everyone,” she said. “Things don’t work so well anymore.”
“Don’t you feel well? Is it Daddy?”
She shrugged. “Everybody slows down. You can’t do all the things you could always do.”
Suddenly I realized what she was talking about. I leaned over to look at her and she was staring down into the open pocketbook in her lap. I wanted to say something compassionate, as if she had just told me of the sudden death of a friend, but I found that I couldn’t speak.
“Some people think that they are going to live forever, that time is never going to get in their way.” Her mouth closed in a narrow furrow.
I wanted to say, “Forgive him then.” I felt terribly disloyal, knowing this news of my father. I thought of him looking at his own reflection above the head of a seated customer, combing his moustache, sucking in his belly and then letting it out again with a long hissing sigh. I imagined that she thought he had met a just punishment. I wanted to say, “Forgive him,” but my mother snapped her pocketbook shut with a final click that ended the conversation.
Then the nurse came down the hall, humming a tune. “Okay girls,” she said. “You’re on.”
30
I WAS NEVER REALLY afraid of the basement in our building. There are women who make their husbands or teen-age sons go with them when they use the laundry, or they travel in groups, like flocks of frightened birds. For me, nothing, no danger lurked in the shadow
s of those stippled gray walls.
We had less laundry now. It seemed a pitiable pile without Jay’s clothing among ours. I sat in the straight-backed peeling kitchen chair facing the dryers, with an open book in my lap. In front of me the clothes tossed and whirled as if swept by a fitful wind. Every few minutes I raised my eyes from the book, unable to concentrate, and saw bits of yellow, blue, or white: Paul’s baseball pajamas, my own nightgown. I could hear motors starting and then stopping, water screaming in the pipes overhead, and the whine of the elevator ascending. Somewhere in the distance doors slammed, and muted voices spoke.
Then the elevator descended again and there were footsteps in the corridor leading to the storage room. I stood up and looked through the doorway.
Estrella Caspar was there, her arms filled with bulging shopping bags. She seemed to be costumed for a starring role in a futuristic movie. Whatever she was wearing was made of a dazzling vinyl, reflecting the lights in the room. She wore large dark glasses, goggles actually. Her hair rose in a wild black cloud and an Indian headband was pulled across her forehead. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, and she rushed ahead toward the storage lockers.
I went back to my vigil at the dryers. There were ten minutes left on the timer. I could hear the metallic echoes of a locker being slammed shut, and then her footsteps again as she returned.
This time she paused in the doorway. “It’s snowing again,” she said. “I’m going to wear my brown patent leather boots …”
“Is it sticking?” I asked.
But she was bending over now, peering into the window of the spinning dryer. She turned her head in a circular motion, in playful imitation of the tossing clothes. “Hey, this is even better than the late show!” she said, and her birdcall laugh reverberated everywhere. Then she stooped to look at me, lifting the dark glasses to her forehead. Her eyes were like something seen through a microscope, so terrible were they in detail. Her false lashes were thick and black like the enlarged legs of insects. “You could do something,” she said. “You should change your lipstick.”
Automatically, my hand came up to my mouth. If I had been wearing any lipstick, I had already eaten it off.
“Blond hair and fair skin, you should use something in the coral family.” She pulled a huge leather fringed pouch from her shoulder, opened it, and leaned her head inside. “Here, wait a minute, I’ll show you.” She pulled things out impatiently, scattering them on top of the dryers. Out came a thick pink wallet, a pair of blue satin slippers with furry pompons on the toes, keys, scented crumpled tissues, a round, framed mirror, and makeup: tubes, compacts, boxes rolling this way and that, powder spilling in a fine pale snow. “It’s in here. God, I’ll be late. They’ll kill me.”
“Then don’t,” I said. “It’s all right.”
“No no no, it’s right here. It’s perfect. Ah,” she said finally and she withdrew a tube of lipstick, pulled off its cover with a flourish, and rolled it open. “Here,” forcing it under my eyes. “Coral Dreams,” she said, and I could feel her breath and smell it, a stale lavender scent. Or was it the lipstick? Only a stub of a lipstick, actually. “You can have it,” she said. “Here, here,” pushing it into my hand.
The book had fallen to the floor. “Thank you,” I whispered.
“It can change your outlook,” she said. She winked, and pushed the goggles down, hiding her eyes. “Use Lemon Ice underneath for a base. You could be good-looking yourself.”
“Thank you,” I said again.
She began to spill the makeup and slippers and keys back into the pouch. I picked things up that had rolled onto the floor and handed them to her. She hummed, with her lips pursed, and examined herself in the mirror.
The dryer turned more slowly now and then came to a stop, the last garment floating weightlessly to the bottom of the basket. “Done!” I said brightly, but she had turned her back and I could hear her shoes clicking on the tiled floor as she made her way back to the elevator.
I looked down at the lipstick in the palm of my hand. I thought I might write something on the wall near the dryer with it. Something in keeping with what was already scribbled there: names, dates, curses, threats. What? Fuck the world? Jay and Sandy forever? In this catacomb, poor Christians died … I dropped the lipstick into the lint-filled darkness behind the dryer and then I began to empty it of my laundry.
I went upstairs and found Harry sobbing into the sofa cushion and Paul sucking his thumb on the opposite end of the sofa. Joseph was on his hands and knees with his head under the skirt of the upholstered chair. His voice came out muffled and strained. “I’m looking for it, Harry. We’ll find it, Harry.” But this only seemed to be a cue for Harry to howl with more passion.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, and Joseph backed up from under the chair, banging his head. “Oh, I didn’t even hear you come in. It’s that stupid turtle.”
I sat down and Harry rushed me, pushing his wet face into my lap. “My t-turtle,” he sobbed, gasping and spilling a new flood of tears and saliva.
“What happened?”
“It’s g-gone.”
“It can’t be gone. Turtles can’t open doors.”
“That’s what I told him,” Joseph said. “Turtles can’t open doors.”
“Where’s the bowl?”
Joseph brought me the bowl with the plastic palm tree on its center island. Only one turtle, and that one withdrawing from the environment, was there.
“Which one is missing?” I asked. Harry had never even named them, although Paul made up new and endearing terms for them all the time. Honey, Lulu, Bingo, Poppy, Moony.
“The one with the soft shell,” Joseph said.
“The best one,” Harry wailed.
“We’ll find it, baby,” I told him. “Turtles walk so slowly.” I moved my arms, turtle fashion, swimming through a dense atmosphere.
Joseph cupped the side of his mouth. “I looked everywhere,” he whispered.
“Now, stop it, Harry,” I insisted. “We have to think. Did you take it downstairs with you when you went to the park?”
He shook his head.
“Did you take it out of the bowl today at all? Did you, Paul?”
Paul withdrew his thumb with a popping sound, looked at its wet puckered flesh, and shook his head.
“Okay, so it climbed out of the bowl and it jumped off the table. It’s somewhere in the house and we’ll find it.”
Joseph whispered in another aside. “If it doesn’t starve to death, if it doesn’t get stepped on first.”
Harry resumed his weeping.
“We’ll put food out for it,” I said, inspired. “Like they did for the elves in the story. Go get the turtle food.”
“I don’t want to step on it,” Harry said, without moving.
“Take off your shoes. Then you can’t hurt it. You won’t step on it anyway. It’s hiding someplace.”
“When we lived in the Bronx, in the old place,” Joseph said, “I had a hamster? Well, it got loose from the cage and we couldn’t find it. Boy, we searched for that hamster for two weeks. Well, P.S. we found it all right. It climbed into this hole in the hall closet and it starved to death. Did that stink! Even the people next door could smell it in their closet. They went yelling to the super. It was all stiff, with its eyes open …”
“Ixnay, ixnay,” I said.
“Huh? Oh yeah. Well, a hamster isn’t like a turtle. Hamsters are known for getting into walls like that.”
Harry came back with the little box of turtle food. He began to shake it out in the corner of the room.
“No, wait a minute,” I said. “We have to put the food in water. Remember what it says on the box?” I went into the kitchen and gathered four jar lids and filled them with water. We sprinkled a fine shower of turtle food into each of them, and then set them out in the dark places under furniture.
“Well, that’s that,” I said.
“He’ll be back tomorrow, you’ll see, Harry,” Joseph said, as he was leavi
ng.
Then I bathed the children together, letting them play roughly and splash, secretly watching their bodies, the small dangling bells of their sex.
Later, when I lay sleepless in the very center of the bed, Paul cried out.
I went into their room and bent over him. “What’s the matter, honey?”
“I’m afraid of the turtle,” he said.
“What? Afraid of that little turtle? He can’t hurt you.”
“I don’t want him to come into my bed.”
“Paulie,” I said. “Turtles can’t climb up on a big high bed. They don’t even know how to climb.”
He was still whimpering and I said, “Do you want me to come into bed with you for a while?” I lay down beside him and he locked himself against my side as if he had been pulled there by suction. A small fire at which to warm myself. In the middle of the night, I awoke from a dream, instantly forgotten, and tiptoed back to my own bed, looking for the turtle in my path.
We didn’t find it the next day or the next, and Harry continued to grieve for it.
“Harry,” I said. “You didn’t even really like that turtle.”
“I did.”
“Sometimes you wouldn’t look at it for days. Sometimes the bowl was dry. You forgot to give them food and water.”
“I did,” he said, growing sullen. “I loved it.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll buy you another turtle.”
“I want that one,” he said. “I don’t want another one.”
“Harry.” I touched his face, making him look at me. “Do you think about Daddy?”
“I want that turtle!” he said, almost without moving his lips.
“Listen, sweetheart. Daddy wants to be here. But he can’t help it. He’s so sick. It’s not his fault. He still loves us. Do you remember he sent you that nice kangaroo from the hospital?” My God.
“I want my turtle!” he shrieked, shutting his eyes and forcing blood into his head until his face was a violent red.
I wanted to shake him then, to rattle his teeth and bones the way I had when he wouldn’t eat. Enough anger and despair grew in me to smash furniture, to fell trees. But then he looked directly at me and I saw his rage and his sorrow and he saw mine. My arms fluttered open like wings. He moved into them and I embraced him, holding on for dear life.
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