“I thought I was going with Dawn to the red carpet.”
“So did I, but apparently — ”
Her mother stood up. “I wanted to go,” she cried. “I know French. I could have been her interpreter — ”
“I know. She said you could go with her another time.” She’d better, Serena thought. “Soon.”
“What emergency? What was going on? I could have helped with the emergency — ”
“Mom! I don’t know. She said she had to leave. You can go with her soon! Next month, maybe! You can spend the weekend here — ”
Her mother sat down. She was breathing heavily. “I did something,” said her mother. She set her dark eyes on Serena, expectantly.
“No,” said Serena. “She had to work. I want to spend time with you. You can stay with me.”
At Saks, she may have been a thief, but now she was a horrible liar. Serena’s head hurt. Her mother was still wearing her sweater emblazoned with French words, and slowly she slipped it off, folded it, and placed it on the couch. Then Sophie sat, rubbing her hands against one another.
“Next month,” said her mother, softly. “I can go next month.” She sighed. “So I’m stuck here,” said her mother. “Homeless. I’m a homeless vagabond in — what, Georgia — ”
“This is North Carolina,” said Serena, suddenly wishing that she had not agreed to this. “You are not a vagabond, for god’s sake — ”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re an honored guest!”
Sophie got up and walked around the house, to the porch; she was checking. Serena folded her arms and waited.
Sophie rubbed her face with her hands. When she glanced up at Serena, her face was calm. “Thank you, honey,” she said. “I’m sorry. Maybe I would like some tea.”
She brought her mother some tea, and Sophie sipped it. They sat on the couch for a while in silence. There was the feeling that Sophie had been here for days already, that they had endured some injury together; there was, for a few minutes, only the call of an egret puncturing the air.
“What happened to your house?” Serena asked. “Why are you living with Dawn now?”
“My house,” said Sophie. “I couldn’t live in it alone. I kept hearing him.”
“Doing what?”
Her mother smoothed her hair and looked at her.
“Walking around. I woke up at night and heard knocking.”
Serena looked at her mother’s small hands folded precisely. “Maybe it was a dream,” she said.
“It was my home for forty years, and I couldn’t live there. It was where we lived. I kept waiting for him to walk out of the bathroom, to go into the garage, mucking around with his train sets, to leave his dishes in the sink. I couldn’t stay there alone.”
“I understand,” said Serena, softly.
“I didn’t know where I wanted to live. Dawn said come live in her place. I was in a daze. I could barely open a can. One day, I opened my eyes and I was living behind her house. It happened that fast.”
“And do you like it?” asked Serena.
“I don’t know. It’s about seven hundred square feet, and all my furniture is crammed into it. She thinks it’s cute, having me there. Look, we have two cats and a grandma in the backyard! I can barely move around. I never know when it’s the right time to ‘drop by.’” She lifted her hands in air quotes. “She had this romantic idea of Grandma, but now I always intrude. Or I come at the right time for chores. Mom, here’s a broom! Mom, can you scrub out this pan? Sometimes I think she just fries sausages to give me an activity. She thinks I want to spend all day watching the kids, as though that would be fun.”
“Isn’t it?” asked Serena.
Her mother leaned toward her. “All right. For a little while. After, say, an hour, it’s kind of a torture. I can do ten minutes of Polly Pocket. Then they should just have the kids play with the prisoners at Guantanamo. Now, that would make them speak.”
Serena wasn’t quite sure if her mother was kidding or not. She decided, for her own benefit, that perhaps she was. “Then why did you move?” asked Serena.
“She asked me. She convinced me. ‘You’ll get to know your grandchildren!’ I never know when to go over there or when she’ll shoo me back to my house.”
“That is hard,” said Serena, trying to sound gentle.
“Well. At least she was thinking of me.”
“I was thinking of you,” said Serena. “Live here.”
Sophie considered the house and laughed. “I can’t live here.”
“Why not?”
They looked around the small house; there was no need to answer this.
“I was trying to get to you — ” said Serena.
“Trying? How hard were you trying?”
“Didn’t you get my calls? Every day, almost, every other day? Then I stopped trying.”
“You should have sent a telegram,” said Sophie.
“No one answers phones at your house?” asked Serena.
“A telegram would have made me feel special.”
“Okay,” said Serena, confused. Her mother had never before asked for a telegram. She felt she had fallen short of expectations in a basic way. Her mother looked happier now, having gotten that off her chest. A telegram.
“Well, what do you have to do today?” her mother asked.
“The kids are out in about two hours. I have to go to the Temple, to do some — work.”
“I want to make money,” her mother said.
“What?”
“A lot of money. You girls — or Dawn, at least — made it. Your father made some money. I never did.”
“Good for you,” Serena said, clapping the couch pillow with her palm. “Good, Mom!”
“I don’t have enough,” her mother said.
“What do you mean?”
“Not for Los Angeles. It is ridiculous. What does Social Security buy you there? Your father never bought life insurance. He never thought he would die.”
Serena was quiet for a moment, absorbing that comment. “Mom, do you have enough money?”
“If I stop buying meat,” Sophie laughed.
She stared at her mother, ice in her throat. “You’re kidding.”
She was dizzy. How had her mother ended up crammed into the tiny apartment behind her sister’s house? She wanted to send her mother money, to buy her a house that would make her feel as large as she yearned to feel, but at the moment, they did not have even enough extra cash for an airline ticket to bring her here.
“So,” Serena said after a while, “what do you want to do?”
Her mother leaned forward, her face brightening. “Peer counseling,” she said. “At the senior center.”
“Oh,” said Serena. “ Who’s — ”
“I am doing the counseling. My specialty seems to be recent widows. The first month. One does not need a degree for this — ”
She looked at her mother, surprised. “Mom. You’re doing this? That’s great.”
“I just started. I am a font of wisdom, apparently. I say ‘one day at a time’ with great conviction. I don’t get ruffled when they are unable to get out of bed or eat, or when they decide they shouldn’t have married the man after all.” Sophie sat up, clasping her hands. “I go in wearing my navy suit from Macy’s and my bone pumps, and we sit in a little room in the senior center, and, you know, sometimes we have a little group, four or five of us, and I pass a rain stick and one person holds it and says what she feels and we all listen until then she passes it, and somehow I create an atmosphere so that they all want to hold the rain stick, and we hear about how Alfred was a good kisser and how Manny taught his wife to play golf and how Elton left for a year and then came back and how one woman wished Matthew would leave but he didn’t — ” She paused, a little breathless. “And then they thank me.”
Sophie was still, her gaze remote, as though she were trying to hear the echoes of her own wisdom — then her eyes settled on Serena. “Maybe there�
�s some sort of certificate I can get,” Sophie said.
“Mom, you should look into it,” said Serena. Her mother a peer counselor? Serena was more used to her mother’s describing herself as a duchess fleeing the Inquisition. But her mother had done this — it was as though she had opened a box she found in a closet and discovered a new talent. “ We can find out — ”
“I can find out,” her mother said, and touched her hair.
Chapter Thirteen
THE RABBI WAS SITTING IN his office, waiting for her. The idea of him there, with no one, made her restless. The phone rang again; Serena jumped to answer it.
“We need you.”
“Who is this?”
“Betty. Honey. Where are the spare keys?”
“The what?”
“They’re going to lock us out. Serena. We’re spreading the word. No more secrets. Everyone needs to know. I’ve been getting calls. The head of the religious school just resigned. She said, and I quote, ‘He is wonderful with the children. How dare you harass that great man?’ The head of ritual practices quit. She says it ’s a witch hunt. The people need to know, Serena. No one knows where the spare keys are. They ’re going to lock us out.”
“Betty,” said Serena, in the falsely authoritative voice she used to reassure her children, “no one’s locking anyone out.”
“We can’t wait! I’m afraid that there will be members taking sides. Honey. Do you know where they are?”
“In a box on the top shelf of the filing cabinet — ”
“Can you find them and bring them home? For safekeeping? I may sound paranoid, but things are going out of control,” said Betty. “Counting on you.” She hung up.
Serena stared at the phone.
“What?” Serena’s mother asked, looking up.
She glanced at her mother.
“We’re going to work,” she said.
She was apprehensive of bringing her mother to the Temple, but now she had two reasons to go there: to help out the apparently paralyzed spiritual leader of the synagogue, and to find the keys to prevent people — Who? Him? Other congregants? — from locking each other out. How had she landed in the middle of this chaos? She stared at her mother, wondering how she could explain any of these situations to her. Her mother got into her car. The day was brighter now, the clouds breaking apart across the silver-blue sky.
“Where are we going?”
“ The rabbi needs his coffee.”
“Can’t he get it himself?”
She paused. “He’s a little distracted right now. I’m the only one who knows where it is.”
Somehow, this had the effect of impressing her mother. They drove. Her mother delicately ate some of the peanuts out of the packets she had swiped from the airplane. The air had a peculiarly swampy texture, being both cool and thick.
Serena drove to the Temple. She wondered if Dawn remembered the fear in the house the morning she became ill. She heard everyone wake up, early, around five, Dawn had a temperature, and at first it was nothing. Then it began to rise — 102, 103, 104. Her father decided they had to take her in.
It was eight in the morning, and they hit traffic on the 405. Dawn’s temperature went up: 105. When they got to the emergency room, there were two heart attacks in process, and it took twenty minutes to get Dawn into a room. Serena remembered her father banging on the doors, yelling at the staff to hurry. He was sure he knew what was wrong with her and the doctors didn’t; they had to get her fever down.
For two days after the fever broke, they thought she was fine.
She didn’t realize that Dawn’s leg was paralyzed until two days later; her father did not believe that either. She remembered him standing in his nurse’s outfit beside her bed. “It’s temporary,” he said to the doctor, standing, arms crossed. “Weakness. I’ve seen this, Doctor.” She remembered the casual way he made this statement, and she noticed the doctor’s face flinch, as though her father had taken some liberty that she did not then understand.
The doctor’s tone had been sharp. “No,” he said. “You don’t know. You’re wrong.”
Her father had stiffened and assumed the same posture as the doctor, trying to absorb his authority. The doctor began to talk about rehab and strengthening her sister’s other leg, and her father could not listen; he paced around, running his hand through his hair. “How did this happen?” he yelled at the doctor. “You didn’t work fast enough. This is your fault! Yours!”
He sat beside her sister and held her hand; he could not look directly at the leg. “You can do anything,” he said to her; she lay in the bed, sipping milkshakes. “You know that? You are Dawn Hirsch, the great Dawn Hirsch, and this isn’t going to stop you. I promise that.”
He had driven to the hospital fast enough to cool her down, to keep her from seizures, to keep her from further harm. But her father was ashamed, deeply, that he could not have brought her back intact, perfect; he could not bear to look when Dawn came home with a walker, for she was one person he had not been able to save. When she returned home, he sat down with her and with the walker; he tried once to teach her how to use it.
“Let’s try it,” he said. “Grab the edge and stand up.”
Dawn grabbed the silver handle and slowly raised herself up.
“Okay,” he said. “Take a step. One. Two.”
Dawn started; he stood beside her. His large hands gripped the bar beside hers. Dawn’s knuckles flushed white; she took a step. Another. Her father nodded; it was taking all of his energy to keep his expression engaged and neutral. He lasted about three minutes. Then Serena felt his hand on her shoulder.
“Serena,” he said, and he looked bereft; his eyelid twitched. “Show your sister how to use this.”
“Me?” she asked.
“I know you can do it. I’ll pay you fifty cents.” He vanished into the garage.
She was proud at first that he had asked her to teach her sister how to walk. She told Dawn to sit on the couch and demonstrated the walker, zooming across the living room. Then she hovered by Dawn, watching her sister grip the walker. Her sister’s right leg hung beside her, motionless. Serena did not know what to do other than direct her like a traffic cop. To the right. More to the left. She was afraid Dawn would pitch forward, and of course, Dawn did, and Serena grabbed her arms and slid her hands back on the aluminum bar again. Dawn, to her surprise, listened to her. Her sister already had a core of determination; she gripped the walker and stepped forward and turned right or left or wherever Serena suggested. “Good,” Serena said, in a teacherly, high-pitched voice; it was a pleasure to use this voice, to assume knowledge of this thing, walking, to hold knowledge of anything at all. After a week, Dawn could move along with the walker, and then, a few months later, with a cane. She watched Dawn tilt across the lawn, not the way she used to, but with a strange lightness, and then a speed that relieved Serena and frightened her.
And later, when she tried to advise Dawn of the best way to hold her cane, the best way to put her foot down, Dawn looked at her with her clear golden eyes and said, regally, “I know.”
THE CAR STOPPED IN FRONT of the Temple. Her mother got out and gazed at the building. The gold doors were bright in the midday sun. Her mother looked disappointed, perhaps, that this was not the Eiffel Tower. But she said nothing as they headed in. Serena heard a rustle in the back, and the rabbi stepped out.
“You’re here,” he said, hurrying forward. “Serena Hirsch.”
Both she and her mother stopped at the sound of her name. He said it hoarsely, rather beautifully, like a plea. Serena was startled by the silence, which seemed to affirm the fact of chaos, not peace, as usually there was the swish of the Xerox machine or the clatter of a Hadassah member’s heels; now there was nothing.
“Who is this?” he said. His eyes glinted. “New member?”
“This is my mother, Sophie,” said Serena, suddenly wary. “Mom, this is Rabbi Golden.”
The rabbi reddened as though embarrassed by a s
udden thought. “Your mother,” he said. He reached out and firmly grasped Sophie’s hand.
The phone rang, piercingly. Once. Twice. Three, four times. It stopped.
“Pay no mind,” said the rabbi. “I don’t know if it’s a supporter or . . . well.” He looked at Serena. “So. Tell me. Where is it?”
He seemed childish standing there. She led him to the kitchen and opened a cabinet over the stove. There were several red packets of French roast coffee. He stood, rubbing his hands, while she took one down and handed it to him. “There you go,” she said. “Remember. It’s over the stove. Here.”
He clutched the bag of coffee tenderly, as though it were a baby. “Okay,” he said. His hands trembled. He walked over and absently placed the bag of coffee on the counter. He seemed to have no intention of brewing it into actual coffee. She understood that he had merely wanted someone to drop by.
His office had the sharp odor of an animal. His desk was neat, organized in a way she had never seen before. Papers were stacked. Serena’s mother had wandered over. She looked into his office, the vast gallery of photos of him, shaking hands like a diplomat.
“Why don’t you know where anything is?” Sophie asked. “Aren’t you the rabbi?”
He blinked. He turned his gaze toward her, alert.
“I know where God is,” he said.
“And where is that?” asked her mother, crisply.
The rabbi opened his mouth and shut it. Serena was surprised; she had never seen him appear shy.
“You’ll have to come to my service and listen,” he said, in acquisition mode. “Friday night, seven-thirty — ”
“I don’t go,” said Sophie, waving her hand away.
“That ’s what people say,” he said, “until they hear me — ”
“Well, it’s all — I don’t know. Somewhat ridiculous, anyway,” said Sophie, her voice heavy with a combination of bitterness and woe. “No offense. I don’t know why.”
The rabbi stepped back, as though stung by something in the air. His face was pale. His eyes darted past them, longingly, to see if anyone else was coming through the doors.
A Town of Empty Rooms Page 18
