The New Order

by Karen E. Bender

I wanted her approval. This nervousness surprised me, and I tried not to show it to her.

  I opened the door and she stepped inside. I eyed my possessions critically, apprising what was there. A bamboo lamp stand, a porcelain lamp from my grandmother, a turquoise pillow with drawings my children had silk-screened on them, for an elementary school fund-raiser. Lori walked in, placing her feet guardedly on the floor, and her expression held the same authority as her younger self, but was now overlaid with something else, a gauze-like film of calm.

  “I like your house,” she said. “Look at this.”

  She walked around, brushing her fingers against items in the living room—the lamp, the coffee table, a blue glass vase.

  She talked. She talked a lot about nothing. It seemed to me that she was nervous, but the quality of her talking was not anxious, but simply had the purpose of filling the air. She liked admiring things, in that nervous way people have when they want to establish intimacy quickly. She sat on the couch and stretched out her legs. She admired the potted geraniums, the strawberries I put in a dish as a snack. There was a self-absorbed quality to the admiration, as if she wanted me to approve of her. She had been in contact with many people from our junior high school: a month ago, she ran into John Schubert, the best cellist, by the avocados at Ralph’s supermarket. John told her about his experience as a music major at UCLA, which ended abruptly when he broke his wrist during a softball game; he now managed an instrument store in West Covina.

  I remembered the low roar of that multipurpose room, all of us talking as we perched on our fold-out chairs. Mr. Handelman clapped and we picked up our instruments, and looked to him, waiting for him to begin conducting. That building no longer existed; it had been knocked down years ago to make room for a new basketball court.

  “What do you think Mr. Handelman is doing now?” I asked. “Is he still teaching?”

  Her face stilled.

  “Oh,” she said, looking at me. “Don’t you know? Mr. Handelman had a heart attack last year. He was teaching until the last minute, and then, boom, he died.”

  My heart jumped in the way it did when I heard bad news.

  “Oh,” I said.

  She wore the same expression she had when she was fourteen and knew information that I didn’t, as though her knowledge put her on a shelf above me. She had not lost this capacity.

  “I thought you knew,” she said.

  “I didn’t,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. “I’m sorry. Let me tell you some good news, then—remember the trumpet section? Gail and Harold? They got married. And they play for a band in a circus. In Austria! They have an exciting life—”

  I wished there was something I could tell her that she didn’t know. But she sat in my living room, glowing almost, with her expansive knowledge of what everyone else was doing.

  She kept talking. She was celebrating her twenty-sixth year of marriage with her husband, Fred, who was her best friend, and she was now an aficionado of French cooking and made excellent soufflés, and on her fiftieth birthday, her children threw a party for her at a restaurant on the Marina, just on their own, without her asking, and on and on. She did not sound like she was bragging, though of course she was, but I heard something else in her tone, what I knew of her from junior high school—the sense that she was asking permission, from me.

  I listened. I could see that she was glad I was listening. We had tea, and then I made pasta with broccoli and garlic and Parmesan for dinner. We sat, facing each other at the table, the way we used to in the cafeteria. I wondered if she thought I looked old, my hand placed carefully on my cheek to conceal any weary parts of my face. She thought that everything I prepared was delicious.

  “I could eat this forever,” she said. “I want the recipe.”

  She even got a little card out of her purse and wrote it down, right then. When she brushed her hair from her face, it was an adult gesture echoing the way she did this as a child.

  Her appreciation was nice, but I felt a kind of force behind her comments, a radiation, lifting off an explosion within. It made me want to duck under something. I kept peering at her, waiting for her to do something that would instantly reveal her adolescent self; I longed to see the authority she once had.

  My response was to keep feeding her. After the pasta, more strawberries. Then some mint chip ice cream, which had been sitting in the freezer for so long there was a sheen of ice on the top.

  Our conversation circled, floated around the room. But the discussion wasn’t answering some important questions. Did she ever play cello anymore? Did she remember playing in the orchestra? What else did she remember?

  I wasn’t sure what I wanted her to say, but I wanted the past to be simpler than I remembered.

  Her face flickered. “Oh, orchestra,” she said. “I stopped playing right after I dropped out. I just didn’t want to. I didn’t want to touch a cello after, everything.”

  She clasped her hands in front of her, firmly, as though she were being interviewed in some legal way.

  I felt a sadness settle in me, entwined with guilt.

  “But you were so good,” I said, wanting her to know this, “I remember your tone. It was better than anyone’s—”

  “I was okay,” she said, noticing my expression. “I didn’t want to play anymore. Maybe I should have. But I just didn’t. Something was there in me, I wanted to do something else. I had so much energy. You know? I tried running. I joined the track team. I ran with other girls for six miles until I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to run farther, until I hurt my knee. Then I went through a time when I was sleeping with a lot of different guys. Some I liked, some I didn’t, but I just wanted to feel how they made me feel, in every way possible. I learned a lot during that time. I still wanted things. After that, I started baking cakes. I wanted to make the best cakes, the sweetest. Then I gained forty pounds because I kept eating them. Each cake was more delicious than the other, and I had to finish them all. Then I started going to spin classes, and I dropped twenty pounds.”

  She sat back, exhausted.

  “In the last year or so,” she said, “I haven’t been well. I won’t go into the boring details, because I’m sick of talking about them, but, well. This stupid body. Now while I can still get around, I wanted to see everyone I knew.”

  I looked at Lori, a slight chill inside me. There was nothing that appeared different about her, except for the careful way she walked. I peered at her, trying to figure it out.

  “Oh,” I said, saying the things one said when confronted with vague medical information, “I didn’t know. I’m sorry—”

  She waved these words away. She closed her eyes.

  “Whatever.”

  “What—” I said. “Do you need anything? Are you—”

  “Let me show you pictures of the cakes,” she said.

  She held out her phone, showing me photos of cakes she had made when she inhabited that particular expression of longing. The cakes were round, decorated with various types of perfectly formed, bright flowers, and, even if the cakes were iced in yellows and pinks, had the odd feeling of fortresses.

  Finally, after talking for several hours, I told her I had to go to sleep; I showed her the room with her bed and her towels. Then I shut the door to my room and thought of her in the other room, and I had a sudden thought that she would open my door, march into the room, and stab me. I imagined the compliments about my pasta were all a front, that she had been waiting all these years, secretly, to do this. I could picture her standing over me, taking clear aim for my heart. I didn’t know why this idea came to me, but the more I thought it the more possible it seemed. I lay in the darkness for some time, listening for movement, but there was none. I locked the door.

  In the morning, I woke up and, for a moment, did not get out of bed. I listened to Lori, moving around the house. In the pale, morning light, I did not feel she would stab me, but was comforted by her presence. I want
ed her to stay another night, and I also wondered why she was here at all.

  When I came out of my room, she was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee.

  “Hi!” she said. She had to leave at around two—and was heading home.

  I brought out some rubbery croissants from Safeway and we sat together, the same way we sat at that cafeteria table forty years ago.

  I thought of us then, the way we leaned toward each other needing the fact of our own presence, then the feeling that we were made of fog. I thought of the sound of my voice when I told her she wouldn’t win, and the absolute steeliness of my whole self at that moment, the piercing of love between us, of our friendship. I took a bite of the horrible croissant.

  “Lori,” I said. “Have you heard anything about Sandra’s family? What happened to them?”

  It was not an honest question because I followed what had happened to them. The mother fell into depression, and they moved to Arizona. The older brother became a reporter on the local news in Phoenix. The father had a stroke a few years after the murder.

  She put down her croissant. Her hand was a little shaky.

  “I haven’t,” she said.

  Then she told me this.

  She had been annoyed at Sandra that morning. Sandra came into the orchestra room wearing a yellow tube top, and Lori felt a wilting inside because Sandra looked radiant in it, as though she had, through great will or knowledge, changed a deep force within herself. Sandra walked differently, more lightly when she wore it as well, as if she were balancing on a piece of sky. It was how some girls moved through the world now, with that precise assurance. But we were not those girls. Some were, but we were not. Lori told me that one reason she liked orchestra was not just because she enjoyed playing music but because she felt safe with that cello in front of her. It was like a large and kindly guard.

  And here was Sandra in the tube top, her shoulders gleaming, Sandra walking and invisibly throwing glitter into the air. And then Lori felt certain that Sandra was going to crush her in some way she could not explain.

  Lori wanted to get rid of her.

  “Go,” she told Sandra. “It’s fish and chips day. Don’t you want to be the first in line?”

  Fish and chips were Sandra’s favorite lunch. Everyone knew. Lori said that she remembered how Sandra looked at her, trying to figure out if leaving early was a good idea.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” Lori had said. “It’ll be a long line.”

  She was doing her a favor, Lori told herself, telling her to go first in line. In fact, she was being generous to Sandra, helpful even, ignoring the fact that she was happy when Sandra ran off. Lori was glad, just then, that she didn’t have to look at her. That clear feeling of relief. She didn’t have to watch Sandra walk through the orchestra room and feel that she, herself, was somehow flawed. Lori thought she would follow her to the cafeteria, in ten minutes, but then Sandra would have disappeared into the crowd and Lori then believed that she would not feel diminished.

  She remembered, later, how clear her mind was the ten minutes after Sandra left. The worry that had rushed through her was gone.

  And then there was the slow unfurling of catastrophe, the shouting and the sound of alarms, and the fact that no one could go to lunch at all. Mr. Handelman shutting the doors and locking them, the news that something was happening in the cafeteria, not just lunch, and that some people had been injured. No, not just injured: killed.

  We didn’t hear that Sandra was dead until the next day, and this at first seemed a lie, a rumor, a joke, nothing that could be real.

  Lori said that when she found out, she laughed—not because she thought it was funny, but because she had no idea what reaction to have. There was no sense to the statement that Sandra had been killed; nothing felt real at all. In fact, it seemed that her brain had shut down: she could not think. She could not believe this.

  Lori spoke quickly and did not look at me as she told me all of this, the words surging with an intensity that made me wonder if this was the first time she was telling this story. And then she put her hand on mine and said,

  “I want to thank you.”

  Her hand felt too cool, like a ghoul’s.

  “For what?”

  “You understood,” she said. “You said I wouldn’t win.”

  She looked at me with an assumption of my innocence that was so utterly incorrect it felt as though the world was constructed of nothing. I had not understood anything; she was wrong. The absolute wrongness of this made me concerned and suddenly I wanted to eat everything in the world. I took a bite of croissant and chewed it, slowly. I wondered if I should just allow her this misunderstanding of me, for I came out in such a good light.

  “I did say that,” I said.

  “I felt like my terrible nature was finally seen,” she said. “And you were right. I shouldn’t have been First Chair.”

  I picked up our plates and put them in the sink so I wouldn’t have to look at her. Lori’s face shone with certainty about the misguided fact of my goodness.

  “You didn’t shoot her,” I said, carefully. “You just told her to get lunch. You didn’t know—”

  “So?” she said. Her eyes were bright and troubled. “I somehow helped. If she had not gone to the cafeteria, she would be here.”

  “Shut up,” I said, trying to sound a little light, but she jumped. “What are you talking about?” I continued. “It was him. He did it. Not you.”

  “But I gave her the idea to go.”

  I stared at her. I had to tell her—that she was wrong about me, that the actual reason I told her she would not win was because I wanted to win, I wanted to play in the circle of light.

  “But then I heard you play in the auditions,” she said, “and I thought, she will be First Chair, I knew it before he said it, and then you were, and I felt somehow freed. I can’t explain why. But I was glad that you had won, not me.”

  Just as I had felt forty years ago, sitting across from one another in that cafeteria, it seemed we were sitting on different continents. I waited for myself to correct her. I waited.

  I did not.

  On the continent across the table, she put her hands over her face and sighed. “So,” she said. There was a silence between us that felt a thousand years old. She got up and stood, a little lost, in the kitchen. She went into the room where she had slept and wheeled out her suitcase. I followed her, and I felt needy; I wanted to talk to her more. I didn’t want her to leave.

  “Do you have a cello?” she asked.

  I kept my old cello stored in the back of my closet with other items I didn’t use. I brought it out and unzipped its vinyl bag. I had not played in many years; it made no sense to keep it, but I carried it everywhere I had lived. The strings were limp with disuse. They were soundless when you plucked them. She rubbed her palms on the curved top of the cello, the rounded edges of it.

  “Do you ever play?” Lori asked.

  “No,” I said. “Never.”

  “But you still have it,” she said.

  I did. I refused to give it away.

  “When was the last time you played?” I asked.

  She thought. “I don’t know. Thirty years ago?”

  “I remember how you played,” I said. I wanted to convince her of something, of the beauty of her sound. “I remember it.”

  She looked at the cello and rubbed her palm across the edges.

  “May I try?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She tuned the old instrument so that it had some approximation of a cello, and then sat down in the living room and leaned its neck against her shoulder. She settled herself behind the instrument, turned the tuning pegs, plucked the strings and listened to them. I had forgotten what it was to play an instrument, to feel myself creating the clear notes, to feel the fluttering and hum of music against my chest, that gorgeousness rising from my arms, my breath.

  I wait
ed to tell her why I had said what I said to her. I waited.

  She tightened the bow and drew it across the strings of the cello.

  “How do I sound?” she asked.

  I felt we had been talking since the beginning of the world. Outside, it was just after noon; soon the sun would start dying. A sparrow called. Somehow I knew that this was the last time I would see her. We sat across from each other, our chairs balanced on the flat, grubby carpet, sitting up, politely, our backs straight, trying to hold down this room with only our own weight. A million years ago, we sat in the cello section of Garfield Junior High’s Advanced Orchestra; a million years ago, we sat on the cafeteria’s cold steel benches, as, around us, our classmates roared. Lori’s thin fingers touched the neck of the cello. She plucked the strings, A, D, G, C. They echoed in the small room. She set the bow on the strings and slowly drew it across them, and the two of us listened, waiting to hear the sound she made.

  The Good Mothers in the Parking Lot

  They have not arrived. The parking lot is dark, and it is November and you are waiting for them and your arms feel hard as glass in the cold. You are at the elementary school and you are waiting for the other mothers; you are going to send your children off on a field trip. The bus is going to drive hours and hours through the night, bringing the children to a national park. Some of the parents are nervous; it is their first time sending their children away on a trip. The children are ten years old. It is three days after the election. The night is cold and the sky is black and starless and feels lower; the sky is weighted in a different way now, with grief. But this feels like a new, startling form of grief. The cars rumble into the dark parking lot one by one, making a crunching sound as they roll across the asphalt. The cars are big enough to kill a dozen people with one false turn. The clear pale brightness from the headlights swings across the dark emptiness of the parking lot, everyone standing here made brilliant for a moment, then their faces imperceptible, dim.

  You have not seen these mothers since the election. You wait for the other mothers to get out of their cars, which roll in, one after another, no one unlocking their doors at first, peering out. Perhaps they are afraid too, or just cold, because it is November and now you can see your breath in the air. You wait. You wonder what each mother will look like now. You wonder if their faces will blind you, or if you will crumble when they step off the bus, or if they will even be able to look you in the eyes because they are suddenly surprised and ashamed. The asphalt in the parking lot may crumble into ash.