The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  The passengers were scraggy and exhausted-looking, like a committee assigned to the bus aeons earlier to puzzle out just this sort of thing—part of a rotating team whose members were picked up and dropped off at stations looping the planet. How different they were from the team of sleek girls at school, who already knew everything they needed to know. Which team was Francie on? Ha-ha. She glanced at the man across the aisle, who nodded commiseratingly between bites of the vile-smelling food he lifted from a plastic-foam container on his lap.

  All those hours during which her life (along with her mother) had gone from being one thing to being another, it had held its shape, like a car window Francie once saw hit by a rock. The rock hit, a web of tiny, glittering lines fanned out, and only a minute or so later had the window tinkled to the street in splinters.

  The dazzling, razor-edged splinters had tinkled around Francie yesterday afternoon in Mrs. Peck’s voice. “Your family.” “Have someone in your family come for you.” Well, fine, but where on earth had Mrs. Peck got the idea there was anyone in Francie’s family?

  From Francie’s mother, doubtless, the world’s leading expert in giving people ideas without having to say a single word. “A proud woman” was an observation people tended to make, vague and flustered after encountering her. But what did that mean, “proud”? Proud of her poverty. Proud of her poor education. Proud of her unfashionable size. Proud of bringing up her Difficult Daughter, Without an Iota of Help. So what was the difference, when you got right down to it, between pride and shame?

  Francie had a memory, one of her few from early childhood, that never altered or dimmed, however often it sprang out: herself in the building stairwell with Mrs. Dougherty, making Mrs. Dougherty laugh. She could still feel her feet fly up as her mother grabbed her and pulled her inside, still hear the door slam. She could still see (and yet this was something she could never have seen, really) skinny Mrs. Dougherty cackling alone in the hall. “How could you embarrass me like that?” her mother said. The wave of shock and outrage and humiliation engulfed Francie again with each remembering; she felt her mother’s fierce grip on her arm. Francie was an embarrassment. What on earth could she have been doing in the hall? An embarrassment. Well, so be it.

  On the day she had brought Francie all the way from Albany to be interviewed at school, Francie’s mother—wearing gloves!—had a private conversation with Mrs. Peck. Francie sat in the outer office and waited. Cynthia had been typing demurely, and occasionally other girls would come through—perfect girls, beautiful and beautifully behaved and sly. Francie could just picture their mothers. When she eventually did see some—Jessica’s tall, chestnut-haired mother among them—it turned out that her imagination had not exaggerated.

  Waiting in the outer office, Francie feared (Francie hoped) she was to be turned ignominiously away. Instead, she was confronted by Mrs. Peck’s withering smile of welcome; Mrs. Peck was gluttonous for Francie’s test scores. That Francie and her mother looked, each in her own way, so entirely unsuitable appeared to increase, rather than diminish, their desirability.

  When her mother and Mrs. Peck emerged from the office together that afternoon, a blaze of triumph and contempt crackled behind the veneer of patently suspect humility on her mother’s face. Mrs. Peck, on the other hand, looked as if she’d been bonked on the head with a plank.

  Surely it was during that conference that Francie’s family had been born. Her mother’s gift (the automatic nuancing of the unspoken) and Mrs. Peck’s mandate (to heap distinction upon herself) had intertwined to generate little tendrils of plausible realities. Which were now generating tendrils of their own: an imaginary church with imaginary relatives—suitable relatives—wavering behind viscous organ music and bearing with simple dignity their imaginary grief. Oh, her poor mother! Her poor mother! What possible business was it of Mrs. Peck’s when her mother had wanted to go to the toilet for the last time?

  Several companionable tears made their way down Francie’s face, turning from hot to cold. The sensation consoled her as long as it lasted. When she opened her eyes, she saw the frayed outskirts of town.

  Francie climbed the stairs cautiously, lest creakings draw the still gregarious Mrs. Dougherty to her peephole. She paused with her key in the lock before contaminating irreversibly the silence, her mother’s special silence, which, she thought, a person had to shout to be heard over. Francie leaned her head against the door’s cool plane, listening, then turned the key. The lock’s tumbling sounded like a gunshot.

  A little colorless sunlight had forced its way around the neighboring buildings and lay, exhausted, across the floor. A fine coating of city grime sealed the sills in front of the closed windows like insulation. Her mother’s bed was tightly made; the bedspread was as mute as the surface of a lake into which a clue had been dropped long before.

  The only disorder in the kitchen was a cup Francie had left in the sink when she’d come to see her mother in the hospital three weeks earlier, still full of dark liquid in which velvety spots had begun to blossom. Francie sat down at the table. The night she’d finally dared to ask her mother what had happened to her father they’d been in here, just finishing the dishes. Francie remembered: her mother was holding a white dish towel; she started to speak.

  Too late, then, for Francie to retract the question—a question that had been clogging her mouth ever since the day, years before, when Corkie Patterson had pummeled into her the concept that every single person on earth had a father. As Francie clutched the wet counter her mother spoke of the sound—the terrible fused sound of brakes and the impact—the crowds out the window, which at first hid everything, the siren circling down on their block like a hawk. She did not use the word “blood,” but when she finished her story and left the room without so much as a glance for Francie, Francie lifted her dripping fingers and stared at them.

  After that, Francie’s mother was even more unyielding, as though she were ashamed of her husband’s death, or ashamed to have spoken of it. And Francie’s father evaporated without a trace. Francie had only cryptic fragments from before that night in the kitchen with which to assemble the story: her parents married at eighteen, she’d figured out. Had they loved each other? The undiminishing vigor of her mother’s resentment toward absolutely everything was warming, in its way—there must have been love to produce all that hatred.

  The bathroom, too, was clean—spotless, actually, except for a tiny smudge on the mirror. A fingerprint. Hers? Her mother’s? She peered past it, into her own face. Had he even known there was to be a baby? Just think—things that you did went on and on, turning into situations, for example. Into people…

  As little as Francie knew about him, it would be infinitely more than he could have known about her. There were no pictures, but if she were to subtract her mother’s eyes…In just a few years, she would see changes in her face that her father had not lived to see in his.

  “In a few years!” Bad enough she had to deal with “in a few minutes.” When you return, Mrs. Peck had said. Well, sure, a person couldn’t just stay at school, probably, when her mother died. But what on earth was she supposed to do here?

  Her mother would have told her. Francie snatched open a drawer and out flew the fact of her mother’s slippery, pinkish heap of underwear. Her mother’s toothbrush sat next to the mirror in a glass. In the mirror, past the fingerprint, her mother’s eyes lay across her own reflection like a mask.

  The hospital floated in the middle of a vast ocean of construction, or maybe it was demolition; a nation in itself, of which all humans were, at every moment, potential citizens. The inevitable false move, and it was wham, onto the gurney, with workers grabbing smocks and gloves to plunge into the cavity of you, and the lights that burned all night. Outside this building you lived as though nothing were happening to you that you didn’t know about. But here, there was simply no pretending.

  Cynthia had come up the hill, Mrs. Peck had sent Francie home, and now here she was—completely lost
; she’d come in the wrong entrance. People passed, in small groups, not touching or speaking. The proliferating corridors and rotundas bloomed with soft noises—chiming, and disembodied announcements, and the muted tapping of canes and rubber shoes and walkers. The ceilings and floors were the same color and had the same brightness; metal winked, signaling between wheelchairs and bedrails. Francie tried to suppress the notion, which had popped up from somewhere like a groundhog, that her mother was still alive, lost here somewhere herself.

  Two unfamiliar nurses sat at a desk at the mouth of the wing where Section E, Room 418, was. In their crisp little white hats they appeared to be exempt from error. They looked up as Francie approached, and their faces were blank and tired, as if they knew Francie through and through—as if they knew everything there was to know about this girl in the short, filmy dress and motorcycle jacket and electric-green socks, who was coming toward them with so much difficulty, as if the air were filled with invisible restraints.

  But, as it turned out, when Francie tried to explain herself, using (presumably) key, she thought, words, like “Kathryn McIntyre,” and “Room 418,” and “dead,” even then neither of the nurses seemed to understand. “Did you want to speak to a doctor?” one of them said.

  A tiny, hot beading of sweat sprang out all over Francie. From the moment she was born people had been happy to tell her what to do, down to the most minute detail; Eds. Clarke & Melton knew just what was happening; there were admonitions and exhortations plastered all over the walls—this is how to behave, this is what to think, this is how to think it, that’s then, this is now, this is where to put your sock—but no one had ever said one little thing that would get her through any five given minutes of her life!

  She stared at the nurse who had spoken: Say it, Francie willed her, but the nurse instead turned her attention to a form attached to a clipboard. “Is Miss Healy around?” Francie asked after a minute.

  The fact was, Francie would not have recognized Miss Healy; she’d hardly noticed the broad-faced, slightly clumsy-looking girl who’d been changing the water in a vase of flowers as Francie had listened to her mother describe, with somber gloating, the damage to her body, the shock of finding herself on the ice with her pork chop and canned peaches and so forth strewn around her, the pitiable little trickle of milk she had watched flow from the ruined carton into the filthy slush before she understood that she couldn’t move.

  “She never complained,” Miss Healy was saying, in a melancholy, slightly adenoidal voice. “She was such a pleasant person. You could tell the terrible pain she was in, but she never said a word.” Miss Healy directed her mournful recital toward Francie’s elbow, as if she were in danger of being derailed by Francie’s face. “And when the people from her office brought candy and flowers? She was just so polite. Even though you could see those things were not what she wanted.”

  Oh, great. Who but her mother could get someone to say that her pain was obvious but that she never complained? Who but her mother could get someone to say she was polite even though everyone could tell she didn’t want their gifts? No doubt about it, the body they’d carted off almost a day and a half ago from Room 418 had been her mother’s—Miss Healy had just laid waste, in her squelchy voice, to that last wisp of hope.

  “The thing is,” Francie said, “what am I supposed to do?”

  “To do?” Miss Healy said. Her look of suffering was momentarily whisked away. “I mean, unfortunately, your mother’s dead.”

  “No, I know,” Francie said. “I get that part. I just don’t know what to do.”

  Miss Healy looked at her. Clearly Francie was turning out to be, unlike her mother, not a pleasant person. “Well, you’ll want to grieve, of course,” Miss Healy said, as if she were remembering a point from a legal document. “Everyone needs closure.” She frowned, then unexpectedly addressed, after all, Francie’s problem. “I’ll call downstairs so you can see her.”

  Fading smells of bodies clung to the air like plaintive ghosts, their last friendly overtures vanquished by the stronger smells of disinfectants. An indecipherable muttering came from other ghosts, sequestered in a TV suspended from the ceiling. Outside the window huge, predatory machines prowled among mounds of trash.

  Miss Healy returned. “Mrs. McIntyre isn’t downstairs. I’m really sorry—I guess they’ve sent her on.”

  They? On? If only there were someone around to take over. Anyone. Jessica, even. At least Jessica would be able to ask some sensible question. “On…” Francie began uncertainly, and Jessica gave her a little shove. “On where?”

  “Oh,” Miss Healy said. “Well, I mean, does your family use any in particular?”

  Francie stared: Where would Jessica even begin with that one?

  “Does your family have a particular one they like,” Miss Healy explained. “Mortuary.”

  “It’s just me and mother,” Francie said.

  Miss Healy nodded, as if this confirmed her point. “Uh-huh. So they’d have sent her on to whatever place was specified by the next of kin.”

  Francie felt Jessica start to giggle. “It’s just me and mother,” Francie said again.

  “Just whoever your mother put down on the AN37-53,” Miss Healy said. “Not literally the next of kin necessarily—she couldn’t have used you, for instance, because you’re a minor. But just, if there’s no spouse, people might put down someone at their office, say. Or she might have used that nice friend of hers who came to visit once, Mrs. Dougherty.”

  Yargh. It wasn’t enough that her mother had died—no, they had to toss her out, into that huge, melted mob, the dead, who couldn’t speak for themselves, who were too indistinguishable to be remembered, who could be used to prove anything, who could be represented any way at all! “My mother hates everyone at her office,” Francie said. “My mother hates Mrs. Dougherty. Mother calls Mrs. Dougherty that buggy Irish slut.”

  Miss Healy drew back. “Well, I guess your mom wasn’t expecting to die, exactly, when she filled out that form,” she said, and then recovered herself. “There, now. I’ll call down again. Even this crazy morgue has files, I guess.”

  Out the window a wrecking ball swung toward a solitary wall. Miss Healy hesitated. She seemed to be waiting for something. “I called that lady at the school,” she said. She stood looking at Francie, and Francie realized that she and Miss Healy must be almost the same age. “I just didn’t figure there’d be some other way you’d know.”

  “How did mother get all the way out here?” Francie asked the man who greeted her.

  The man’s little smile intensified the ruefulness of his expression. “We get a lot of folks out this way,” he said. “You might be surprised.”

  “That’s what I meant,” Francie said. “I meant I was surprised.”

  The man jumped slightly, as if Francie had gummed him on the ankle, and then smiled ruefully again. “Serving all faiths,” he explained, gesturing at a sign on the wall. “Serving all faiths,” Francie read. “Owned and operated by Luther and Theodore T. Ade. When you’re in need, call for Ade.” “Also,” the man added, “competitive pricing. But mainly, first in the phone book.”

  He disappeared behind a door, and Francie jogged from foot to foot to warm herself—it had been a long walk from the last stop on the bus line. She looked around. Not much to see: a counter holding some file folders, a calendar and a mirror on the wall, several chairs, and a round table on which lay a dog-eared copy of Consumer Reports. So this was where her mother had got to—nowhere at all.

  “Won’t be another minute.” The man was back in the room. “Teddy T.’s just doing the finishing touches.”

  Finishing touches? Francie blanched—she’d almost forgotten what this place was. “You’re not using lipstick, are you?” she managed to say. “Mother hated it.”

  The man glanced rapidly at the mirror and then back at Francie.

  “Lipstick,” Francie said. “On her.”

  “‘On her…’” the man said. As he stared
at Francie, the room lost its color and flattened; swarming black dots began to absorb the table and the counter and the mirror. “I’m very sorry if that’s what you had in mind, Miss, ah…” dots streamed out of the dot man to say. The riffling of file folders amplified into a deafening splash of dots, and then Francie heard, “I’m very, very sorry, because those were definitely not the instructions. I’ve got the fax right here—from your dad, right? Yup, Mr. McIntyre.”

  Francie’s vision and hearing cleared before her muscles got a grip on themselves. She was on the floor, splayed out, confusingly, as her mother must have been on the ice, and the man was kneeling next to her, holding a glass of water, although, also confusingly, her hair and clothing were drenched—sweat, she noted, amazed.

  “O.K. now?” the man asked. Next to him was a cardboard box, about two feet square, tied up with twine.

  Francie nodded.

  “Happens,” the man said, sympathetically.

  Francie finished the water slowly and carefully while the man fetched a little wooden handle and affixed it to the twine around the box. Things had gone far beyond misrepresentation now.

  “And here’s the irony,” the man said. “We deliver.”

  All night long, Francie fell, plummeting through the air. When she finally managed to pry herself awake with the help of the pale wands of light along the blinds, she found herself sprawled forcefully back on her mattress, aching, as if she’d been hurled from a great height. On the kitchen floor was the cardboard box. Francie hefted it experimentally—yesterday it had been intolerably heavy; this morning it was intolerably light.