Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn

by Alice Mattison

  “The police! Why the hell did you call the police? Half the time you don’t know where she is. You were hysterical.”

  “Howard called the police,” she said. “I phoned Howard when Joanna wasn’t there and wasn’t in school. I was afraid—did she tell you my bag was stolen?”

  Joanna had not quite understood or had not thought to say. Jerry didn’t know about the burglary, Con’s stolen purse. It was hard to understand that Jerry had no idea about something so important. This is what it would be like when they were separated. It seemed a waste of time to tell him. They could start the separation more efficiently if he never knew. But the credit card.

  “Haven’t you tried to use the credit card?”

  “I brought a bunch of cash,” he said. “What about it?”

  She told the story succinctly. He said, “But this burglar wasn’t going to go to Philadelphia and kill Joanna. Surely you didn’t think that.”

  “Nobody I talked to would dismiss the idea.”

  “This was a little overdone,” said Jerry.

  “But what you did would have been terrible even if nothing had happened.”

  “No. It was great. It is great. She’s excited.”

  “She spent the whole day in the motel.”

  “You don’t appreciate Joanna,” he said. “You have no idea what a great kid she can be.”

  Con didn’t answer. Now she was pacing from the kitchen to the living room and back, stretching the cord. Peggy had asked, “Were you marching?” Now she was marching. She had to march a long way to get where she had to be.

  The cat butted his head against Con’s leg. It was the first time she’d seen him in a long time; she’d forgotten him again. He jumped onto the table, then yowled at her. Con was silent, noticing the cat and watching herself get ready to speak. When she heard her own voice again, it sounded tentative, youthful, but that wasn’t because she was uncertain about what she wanted to say; she was only uncertain about how to say it. “Jerry, there’s something we need to talk about,” she said, and in answer—it was the one moment in the conversation when he reminded her of the young husband who amused and delighted her—he said, tentatively too, sounding finally a little scared, “What?”

  “This is not just because I’m upset at what you did,” she said. He was silent. Sandy paced on the table and socked her forearm with his orange head. With the phone tucked against her shoulder, Con washed his dish, took the can of cat food from the refrigerator, and forked some food into the dish, then added dry pellets from the box on the counter. She thought to herself in words, as if she said it to an interviewer, While my marriage was breaking up, I fed a cat.

  As she put the bowl on the counter, she heard herself make a sound—not a sob, not a sigh, something more primitive—a soft, low-pitched wail such as someone might emit before a battle in which people who were dear and well would scream and die. It was a sound for the last moment before the battle, when everyone was still all right and no skin was broken.

  “I can’t live with you,” she said.

  “I’ve been thinking—” said Jerry.

  “What?”

  “I know you’ve been thinking this way.”

  Yet she hadn’t known she’d been thinking this way. It wasn’t until she found Joanna that she had known what she’d been wanting to do. Somehow he had known before she did. He continued, “I know you want this. I don’t. I want us to stay the way we are. I thought maybe we should figure out what you could do that would be like these trips. These trips are why I can live with you—not just you, with anybody. I couldn’t live with anybody if I couldn’t do this.”

  Con hadn’t thought about whether she could live with anybody. She couldn’t live with Jerry, with his smooth surface that couldn’t be blemished or even grasped, with his solipsistic happiness.

  “You never let me come on the trips. You let Joanna.”

  “She’s a child.”

  “So what?” she said.

  “There are things you can share with a child and still keep to yourself.”

  Again, he sounded firm and confident. This was all he had to offer: the suggestion that Con take trips—or something—of her own. From here on, it would be up to her to end this marriage. Jerry would simply watch.

  “Of course I’ve thought of it, too,” he said now, surprising her.

  “Of what?”

  “Of breaking up. Of living apart. There are plenty of reasons. But I don’t want to. Well, I guess if I had wanted to I’d have said so. But if this is something that will help your life—well, you’ll have to do it, Con. I mean, if it’s like my trips are for me. If it’s the only way you can breathe.”

  Could he give it up so easily?

  Maybe it was the way she could breathe.

  “I think I’ll talk to someone I know who does separations and divorces,” she said.

  “A lawyer friend.”

  “A lawyer friend.”

  “We won’t fight,” he said.

  “We’ll talk.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t have to happen,” he said. “Con, I’m sorry your bag got stolen. I’m sorry I picked the wrong time to have an adventure with Joanna.”

  He’d never apologized before. She was slightly awestruck. They hung up and she went to bed and lay rigidly under her mother’s blanket, looking down at her still, separated body, nearly an unmarried woman. She was in the middle of leaving her husband, and in the middle (past the middle) of a week looking after her mother’s cat. She hadn’t told Jerry her mother might be losing her mind, or that Marlene wanted power of attorney.

  Lying in bed, she realized her period had started, a week early. This happened lately, and she had a box of Tampax in her suitcase, but it was almost empty. Peggy would lend her tampons, she thought, slightly consoled. Or money.

  In the morning she got up and went about her business, not exactly grieving, almost convalescent: each act—showering, dressing—was noticeable, even startling. She watched the news on television. There was always something about the Exxon Valdez. They kept trying to figure out what had caused the ship to run aground. In China, ten thousand people had now taken over the central square in Beijing, demanding increased democracy. And an enormous asteroid had passed within half a million miles of the Earth. Barbara called.

  “Are you at work?” Con tried to figure out what time it would be in London.

  “I don’t have that job anymore. But it’s all right. Have you heard from Joanna?”

  Con was appalled at herself. She hadn’t let her sister know Joanna was all right. She told the story. “I’m leaving Jerry.”

  “Just over this?”

  “No, of course not.” It was hard to explain. “It’s because this was so clearly Jerry. It’s his defining act, taking Joanna and not telling me.”

  “What’s my defining act?” said Barbara. “Does everyone have a defining act?”

  “I don’t know but Jerry does.”

  “Quitting that job,” said Barbara, “was my defining act. Anybody wants to know anything about me, they could see a two-minute clip of me walking out of that office.”

  “Well, I guess so.” Con couldn’t recall when they’d begun discussing Barbara’s personality instead of Con’s marriage.

  “I really called to ask you about Mom,” said Barbara. “I talked to her yesterday. What’s this stuff about a doctor? Was this your idea?”

  “Of course not.”

  “It seemed like your kind of thing.”

  “My defining act?”

  “Maybe. Worrying.”

  “Mom sounded strange on the phone the other day,” said Con. “She didn’t remember what I’d told her. She’d forgotten about the burglary. Marlene’s worried. She wants power of attorney.”

  “Marlene’s overreacting,” said Barbara. “Be careful of Marlene.”

  “Oh, I’m used to her,” Con said. “She’s bossy, but you have to admit she’s helpful. I don’t let her bother me.”

  “You di
dn’t tell her she could have Mom’s power of attorney, did you?” Barbara said. She spoke differently—maybe more slowly—as if Con were a child or someone who might not understand.

  “No, of course not,” said Con. “I’m a lawyer. But she’d probably handle it all right if she did it.”

  “Maybe,” said Barbara, “but don’t.”

  “What?”

  In London, Barbara sighed. “You idealize Marlene,” she said, “but Connie, you have to see…well, Marlene’s risky.”

  Con found a reason to hang up. Too much was going on; she had no time for Barbara’s theories.

  On Monday evening Con left the office with a sheaf of papers stuffed into her tote bag to read at home, because she’d had no time for them during the day. A meeting that should have lasted an hour had been twice that long, slowed by quarrels between one lawyer so abstract she dismissed practical difficulties and another so practical that the first lawyer drove her wild. Con had said little. She’d intended to stop on the way home for groceries—would she actually have all three visitors at once?—but she left the office late, having accomplished little, and went straight home. The warm November weather was starting to annoy her. At home she e-mailed Peggy, suggesting dinner on Wednesday. The bathroom door was still leaning on the wall. Con looked at it with some nervousness, then went for her tools. Finishing the project was easier than she had expected.

  In the evening she read fitfully, feeling herself slide into gloom, trying to remember any single case she’d worked on in her entire career about which she was sure she was right. She was good at what she did—reading and thinking, then persuading others to see things as she did—but at times what she could do felt like no skill at all; anyone could do it. Fixing the bathroom door had pleased, then depressed her. Why couldn’t her real work have such clear results? The cases she worked on lingered and lingered. Nothing was obvious. Newspaper stories made justice and injustice more distinct than they were in Con’s mind, though she’d been a lawyer for so long. From the first paragraph of a newspaper story she could tell which side she was on. Working on a case, Con was never as sure as she had to sound.

  She kept the cell phone on in case Joanna called but it was silent. Finally, to cheer herself, she made a list of tasks for the rest of the week. That night she slept poorly, unable to make the parts of her mind—the parts of her life—make sense to one another. Instead of thinking about work, she thought of Joanna, of Barbara, even of Jerry. She thought about the war in Iraq, slept, then awoke recalling mistakes she’d made in jobs over the decades. She’d worked most of her life on the problems of those without money and power, and those people seemed to have less money and power now than when Con and others like her had begun. And she’d failed them more than once.

  But it was morning, and she stepped through her apartment, which got sun only in the afternoon, when she wasn’t usually home. Con associated sun with weekends. She assembled what she needed, watering a few dark plants with thick leaves, plants that didn’t need much sun. Joanna’s hairy sculptures looked ungainly but compelling in the morning dimness. Con liked this apartment, though it was elongated and dark. Marching back and forth, gathering notes, checking e-mail, preparing breakfast, she seemed to make the rudiments of a trail.

  She checked the Times site: Iraqis in Fallujah hated Americans even more than in the other cities. She postponed reading the story. Once she’d trekked through the apartment and was ready to emerge into the light—her body clothed, down to those annoying but pleasantly smooth tubes of nylon on her legs, her stomach soothed by granola and banana and yogurt, her bowels emptied—she could perhaps do a measure of work worth doing. And so, although she was inadequate and the world was full of sorrow, she got herself to the door of the building, along the speckled gray sidewalk, and down the gray steps into the subway. From there on, other people made some contribution. Nobody expected Con to drive the train.

  At work that day Con walked in on one of Aaron’s interviews. She’d seen the client go into his cubicle, and could hear their low voices. She herself was reading cases, searching for lines of reasoning that one court or another had adopted. She stood and stretched at the window, and then walked down the hall toward the voices. The client was a young, muscular woman who looked older close up, her face strained. Aaron—a possibly gay black man of indeterminate age and impenetrable reserve—looked baffled, his forehead creased. He often whispered.

  Con introduced herself and asked if she could listen in, saying she wanted to get a better sense of the clients. Aaron looked annoyed but said he didn’t mind. “So this was the second time you worked in that office, or the first?” he said, staring at his questions.

  “I don’t remember—he never liked it when I worked.”

  “And that was why you quit, the first time?”

  “There were so many reasons to quit,” said the woman.

  “So when was that?” said Aaron.

  “Wait a second,” said Con. “Did you quit because your husband hit you?”

  “It’s hard to say,” said the woman, turning to look at her.

  It was intolerable to have to question people about subjects so intimate. Let Aaron do it. Probably he did it better. But she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “If you didn’t quit, he’d have hit you?”

  “Well, he hit me anyway,” said the woman, with a little laugh. “But yeah.”

  Later that day came an e-mail from Joanna. “I just told Tim we’re finished. I’m going to a motel. Love, Jo.”

  Con didn’t know whether this was good news or bad, or whether it meant Jo would come home or not. “Are you all right?” she replied. “Now what?” She went back to the New York Times site and read the story about Fallujah. Sunni Muslims who lived there still favored Saddam Hussein and resented the American presence. When American soldiers threw candy at children, the children didn’t pick it up because they thought it was poisoned. When American soldiers hung their feet out of the back of helicopters, Iraqis were insulted, because in their country it is disrespectful to show the bottoms of one’s shoes. Reading the story, Con put her feet down. They’d been curled around each other, so anyone passing might have seen the bottoms of her shoes.

  She worked until evening. On the way home, she bought a free-range chicken. She didn’t hear from Joanna again, but there was an e-mail from Marlene: “There’s an El Greco show at the Metropolitan Museum. And did you buy the opera tickets?” Jerry wrote that he was coming Thursday evening. That meant he’d be in New York for a day before Marlene arrived. But who was Marcus Ogilvy?

  Con still didn’t have any money and her marriage was over, but she forced herself to spend some of Thursday working. She had to learn what was on the missing papers. She talked to Mabel, who still didn’t have them, but admitted it was true that two of the women had been soliciting in the neighborhood. “I told them not to,” she said. “Nobody looking for a whore is going there.”

  “Were they trying to get you closed down?” If Con had her lost notebook, she felt obscurely, she’d know what to do. There was a short paragraph in blue ink, written on the train, and a longer one, in black, that she’d written in her mother’s apartment. When she’d visited the house, one resident had said, “If I weren’t here I’d be in jail. Or dead.” The women did not bake cookies and sew quilts—nothing that wholesome was going on—but they had ordinary conversations about shopping and laundry. Con had been happy there, despite the irritating TV in the background and the smell of cigarettes.

  “Some people have a hard time with rules,” Mabel said now. “Did your daughter ever call?”

  “I found her. Thank you,” said Con.

  “She was missing?”

  “She was with her father. She was fine.”

  Twice Thursday morning her mother called. Now Gert kept fretting about the burglary. She couldn’t be persuaded that Peggy hadn’t paid for the new locks. Marlene had gone to work. “She told me a million things not to do,” said Gert. “Why would I l
eave the stove on? She made coffee and put it in a jar but I can’t open it.”

  “You’ll be home soon,” said Con.

  “Saturday. Will you be gone?”

  “No, of course not. I’ll make dinner. I’ll sleep on the sofa and go home Sunday.”

  “I miss you,” said Gert.

  “I miss you, too,” said Con, and found that it was so. She pictured her mother slightly dazed in Marlene’s house. Then she said, “I think Jerry and I may separate for a while.”

  “You’re separated now,” said her mother. “You’re in my house.”

  “That’s right.” It was all Con could say on the subject.

  “My husband and I were separated during the war,” said Gert, as if she’d forgotten to whom she was talking.

  “Yes, Daddy was in the army.”

  Something terrible was happening to Gert. Marlene was right.

  “I was thinking about Papa,” Gert continued, “because I was looking out the window here and all the time I see birds. My friend lives in an apartment, but there’s grass outside.”

  “I know. A condo.”

  “A condo. I keep seeing the kind of birds my father had. During the Depression, my father kept birds.”

  “Pigeons?” said Con. She thought she’d heard that her grandfather had kept homing pigeons. Con’s father and Gert’s father had become the same person.

  “Pigeons. It was on the tip of my tongue. Four pigeons. He would take them to Coney Island and let them go and they would fly home. He loved to watch them come down to their house. One day during the Depression my mother said to him, ‘We have nothing to eat. Tomorrow we eat the birds.’ The next day my father sold them.”

  “That’s sad,” said Con, but she was hungry and impatient to get back to work. Marlene was right, but what could she do now? She got off the phone, ate toast standing up, and made some more phone calls. She wasn’t sure, after all, if an appeal would make sense, if the zoning commission decided against Mabel Turner’s house. Finally she called Sarah, who said, “Of course. We’ll argue that these woman have a disability. Aren’t they addicts?”