She Was Like That

by Kate Walbert

  “She overreacted,” he’s saying. “She clearly overreacted,” he says.

  It is hot inside the courtroom; somewhere “Thriller” plays, boys break dancing everywhere, whirling like tops all over Manhattan and Brooklyn and the Bronx, their knuckled spines spinning them so fast they’re a blur against the asphalt, the sidewalks, the streets.

  “She called the next day and rescinded her application,” Jonathan Fontaine says. “Apoplectic, she sounded, quoting some dead suffragist, Sappho, Margaret Sanger, all of them.” He turns to look at Beatrice Wells directly and raises a delicate finger. “You radical feminists need to get a sense of humor,” he says. “You need to lighten up.”

  She would like to say something but in this version she has no voice; in this version her mouth opens and shuts like a fish unhooked from its line and tossed to shore.

  “You don’t know when to let up,” he’s saying. “You don’t know when to let well enough alone. So I crossed the line a little bit. So I said it like it is, is that a crime?”

  And here it’s Frances Pearlman who steps in, her scratchy polyester pants announcing her. “It’s a crime!” she roars.

  “So sue me,” Jonathan Fontaine says.

  “She is!” Frances Pearlman roars. Beatrice recognizes the opened book Dr. Pearlman carries, its worn cover, its onionskin pages, the faint pencil marks of Pearlman’s collected coven.

  * * *

  “You can’t sue him,” Beatrice Wells’s mother says. They are on the telephone, Beatrice staring out to Grove Street, the wisteria twisting around the window, its vine arm thick, menacing as a snake. “If you sue him, it’s all over.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You won’t get any work. Ever. You’ll be blackballed. You’ll be labeled a troublemaker and you can just kiss everything else goodbye.”

  “It’s illegal. I mean, he said it himself.”

  “That’s a different thing.”

  “That’s not a different thing. That’s him admitting it; that’s him knowing full well what he was doing. That’s the thing. We make excuses; they come up with excuses. But they know full well and we let them get away with it. We make nice. Why isn’t everyone furious? Why aren’t we all just furious?”

  “Who’s we?” her mother says. “I’m not we. I’m me. And you’re not we. You’re you. Nobody’s we; there’s no we.”

  “Please, Mother.”

  “When I was your age it was a little more subtle: they asked our method,” her mother says. “I remember one of the secretarial positions. They said, ‘What method are you using?’ And I had to laugh because I had no idea—I mean, if you’d said rhythm I would have thought castanets. I told you I didn’t even sleep with your father until months after we were married.”

  Beatrice looks out the window at the brownstones across the way. “Yes,” she says. “You told me,” she says.

  “Terrified, I was terrified. I’d hide in the bathroom. I mean, in those days nobody ever said a thing. Not one thing.”

  Beatrice counts to ten, remembering how, when she moved in, her mother there to help her, she’d waked the next morning to her mother sweeping the street, the entire length of Grove Street.

  “So,” her mother says. “Are you?”

  “What?” Beatrice says.

  “You know,” her mother says. “Trying?”

  * * *

  In the other frequently played and truth be told unoriginal versions of their meeting, Beatrice Wells runs into Jonathan Fontaine in a restaurant (spits in his eye or maybe throws a drink), on a crowded bus (refuses his repeated requests to be acknowledged, stares him down cold), at a lecture celebrating the publication of a collection of her illustrations. (He waits in a long line to have her sign his book, attempting to apologize for the mistaken impression he must have given her—had he known she’d have such superhuman strength, such an extraordinary capacity for everything!) Now she wishes she had a bit more time, maybe a year or two more to get back on her feet. She would have liked to bump into Jonathan Fontaine at a gala or a museum, maybe at a busy restaurant while on a working lunch, someone else’s dime, a player who stands when Jonathan Fontaine approaches—they’ve brokered many deals—and introduces her.

  “Of course,” Jonathan Fontaine says, sizing her up—her tailored, dark blue suit; her expensive hair. “Ms. Wells and I go way back,” he says.

  * * *

  But fate has dealt her a different hand and here she is, quite suddenly, wandering among the outdoor holiday kiosks making small talk with Jonathan Fontaine, aged skates looped and hanging over her shoulder, hair crammed under a woolly winter hat. Yes, he’s saying, he still lives in the East Seventies, and yes, he’s saying, he’s still at the office most mornings by 6:00 A.M. though no, he’s saying, he no longer runs marathons, bad knees, creeping age, too much travel, the world smaller, compact, a summit every few weeks in farther-flung locations, a debilitating plane ride. This one will take him close to fifteen hours.

  “And who will be there?” she asks, she can’t help herself. “Who will be at the Future of Our World?”

  “Oh, the usual suspects,” Jonathan Fontaine says. His blue eyes water as he considers the scented candle she thought could make a nice presentation—its neutral beige matching any color scheme. “Fred and Ted. Bill and Will. Javier. Han and Dao. Andre. Oskar with a k,” he says. “Do you know them?”

  “I haven’t met them,” she says.

  Jonathan Fontaine shrugs. “Well, they’ll be there,” he says. “They’re always there,” he says.

  “And women?” she asks. “Any mothers?”

  She knows she’s a total bore, transparent as glass, but somehow she can’t help herself. She will ruin the party every time she opens her mouth but increasingly she can’t help herself, remembering how she did not when she had the chance, sitting there, across from Jonathan Fontaine’s wide desk in her small chair, remembering how she had said, No, how she had nodded and smiled, how she had walked to HR directly afterward to withdraw her application, how she had never called or read him any names from her Assembly book, how she had never invoked the wrath of Gloria, or Margaret, or Eleanor. At the very least, she might have quoted Eleanor. It seemed a shame to have never quoted Eleanor. On paper, this a small offense, perhaps—she wouldn’t argue that—and yet water dripped for generations will drill a tunnel through solid rock. She knew in other places she might be wrapped in a tarp and sold for a dowry, held prisoner for the sins of her uncles, kept hidden under the draped folds of a heavy black blanket, traded into slavery, beaten regularly, drowned like a kitten at birth, and still, and still.

  Jonathan Fontaine holds the scented, beige candle in his elegant fingers. He appears to be truly thinking, his hair blowing around; he appears to be racking his brain. “I don’t know,” he finally says, putting the candle back in its place. “Maybe Mary. Mary might be there, I think. Mary is sometimes there,” he says.

  * * *

  The jury has reached its decision. The foreman in her smart pink jacket and gold brooch stands to read the verdict. First, though, she’d like to say a little something. If it please the court, she says, and the judge turns to her and Jonathan Fontaine stares at her and Beatrice Wells, in her place somewhere outside the imagining waits for her, and the lawyer, uncharacteristically, pauses for her; even the stenographer stops typing. The semibarren Anne Boleyn has returned, her head balanced on her shoulders; she leads Gloria Steinem in bunny ears and fishnet stockings, the lovely, ugly Eleanor, and the aged Girton girl, who carries a plate loaded with roast beef and roasted potatoes, creamed spinach. Frances Pearlman stumps down the aisle to a front seat, the scritch-scratch of her polyester pants unnerving.

  “It all sucks,” the foreman says.

  “What?” says the judge.

  “We’re screwed,” says the foreman. “Totally screwed.”

  “Twenty percent,” says one of the women on the jury, the quiet one who has been embroidering throughout and seemed to barely g
ive a damn. “Maybe thirty percent, thirty if we’re lucky.”

  “Rarely thirty,” another woman says; she is dark-skinned, older. “And what about women of color?”

  “Sometimes thirty. In certain subjects, fifty, sixty, seventy—teaching, nursing,” says a woman with large glasses.

  “Ninety-three percent in prostitution,” says the embroidering woman, biting off the thread.

  “Tooth and nail, we get there. Crawling over hot coals,” says the foreman. “There are sacrifices.”

  “There are always sacrifices,” says the woman in the glasses.

  “Sacrifices, hah!” says the judge. “I’m making less than this guy,” she says, gesturing to the snoring man, who grunts and snaps his suspenders. “And my daughter? Jesus! She’s in Hollywood!”

  “It’s not like none of us don’t know,” says the embroidering woman. “We all know.”

  “Not necessarily,” says the youngest woman, a pretty filly in her early twenties; she looks up from her handheld device and beams out at them. “To me you’re speaking Greek.”

  “Did you hear that?” says the judge. “There’s no we here. Only me. And I’m the judge. And I say, adjourned.” She raises her gavel and is about to strike when from Frances Pearlman’s chair comes what sounds like a steady mumbling, or humming, a noise that gets louder and louder as if, from the opened book in her lap, Frances Pearlman has let out a swarm of angry bees, though the rumble comes from Frances Pearlman herself, from the deep place within her, the diaphragm, where she has been taught to breathe in and breathe out, to emote, Frances Pearlman reading aloud, her glasses low on the bridge of her nose, her yellowy eyes fixed to the brittle pages, pausing only to lick her finger to turn the page, to continue.

  The foreman watches for a moment then sits back down. The old man wakes, the jury listens, the judge pauses. An eerie quiet blankets all of them, the only sound the rising notes of Pearlman’s recitation, the clicking consonants and vowels, the combinations of letters in a life lived, a woman born, the names pronounced then drifting down, lilting down, like snow, muffled by their own inconsequential accumulation, melting in the courtroom heat to be taken up as water, again, by the clouds.

  It is the judge, from her high bench, who abruptly breaks the silence.

  “Could somebody turn her off?” she says, banging her gavel hard.

  * * *

  In a kiosk called Shangri-la, amid wind chimes and handbags made from gum and candy wrappers, Beatrice Wells spots a cat-shaped trivet of molten glass, a functional art piece with a little tag attached telling the story of the trivet’s creator and its proper washing instructions. “This is perfect,” Jonathan Fontaine says. “You’re a lifesaver,” he says.

  “Guilty,” Beatrice Wells says. “They found you guilty.”

  “What?” Jonathan Fontaine says.

  “What you said to me. About getting pregnant. That was against the law. It was none of your fucking business,” she says. “You had no right to ask me. It didn’t have a thing to do with anything. It had nothing to do with you.”

  “I don’t remember,” Jonathan Fontaine says.

  “Oh yes you do,” Beatrice says, as if she’s reprimanding her boys. The sun has set behind the mecca of Times Square and now the streetlamps in Bryant Park switch on—magical. In front of her, Jonathan Fontaine smacks his hands together for warmth and reaches for the trivet. “This is perfect,” he says. “You’re a lifesaver,” he says.

  “Oh,” Beatrice Wells says. “I’m happy to help.” He smiles at her then, his blue eyes softer, smooth as Ella’s deep voice, beautiful as the exhausted girls with their American Girl dolls, sleeping in their mothers’ laps in their taxis to their hotels, beautiful as her beautiful boys, suddenly huge, whooping and hollering in the dusky outline of the park, smacking someone’s jacket against one of the sycamore limbs, a wedged Ping-Pong ball, a particularly forceful serve. “How old?” Jonathan Fontaine says.

  “Charlie’s fifteen,” she says. “Sam’s ten.”

  “A handful,” he says.

  “You can say that again,” she says.

  She watches as Jonathan Fontaine grips his trivet, his raw hands rough, the scratch from her skate blade almost completely disappeared, a thin white line. “This is perfect,” he says. “You’re a lifesaver.”

  “It was the principle of the thing,” she says. “Sure, I could have lied. I could have not given a damn. But it wasn’t fair. It isn’t fair.”

  “Well,” Jonathan Fontaine says. “Best of luck with them. Best of luck with everything.”

  “Great to see you,” Beatrice Wells says. “It was really great to see you,” she says. They have walked away from the kiosks and stand on one of the steps leading back down to Forty-second Street, Beatrice shivering a bit, thinking she might suggest to the boys that they get their hot chocolates before skating, that they maybe bag the whole thing given how the day’s turned cold, how the boys have worked up such a froth on the Ping-Pong table—they weren’t even into it, anyway. She had cajoled them here, she knew, saying how it had been forever since they’d had an outing like this, telling them how she’d recently found her old skates. She hadn’t worn them since high school, she’d said. Come on, come on, she’d said. Please? “This is perfect,” Jonathan Fontaine says. “You’re a lifesaver.”

  “And you’re a son of a bitch,” Beatrice Wells says. “Charlie! Sam!”

  “Goodbye,” Jonathan Fontaine says. “Thank you, again.” He moves in to kiss Beatrice and she, somewhat startled, tilts her face toward his, closing her eyes, smelling the cold of his scarf, his face, lingering. “My pleasure,” she says into the soft wool. “Goodbye,” she says, holding on though he’s already gone, disappearing as quickly into the crowd as he’d suddenly appeared out of it—a random encounter, an accident of timing.

  “Are we going?” Charlie says. He’s run over, panting. “Sam’s toast.”

  “He cheated,” Sam says, catching up. “He like totally cheated.”

  “Loser,” Charlie says.

  “He totally cheated, Mom. I’m telling you the truth,” Sam says.

  Her boys’ flushed faces look as ravenous to her as they did when they were little, smaller boys, when sometimes, after a particularly exuberant snowfall, on a snow day, they would all three take the subway to Columbus Circle and walk into Central Park, their sleds the cafeteria trays she insisted were just as good as anything you could buy. Then the boys wouldn’t let her out of their sight; then they’d make a train and slide down, the ice and the snow and the wind stinging her cheeks as she shut her eyes and felt the world drop away.

  “Come on,” she says to them now. “I want to show you something.”

  * * *

  Beatrice Wells has been skating with her boys for what feels like hours, long after most of the tourists have gone to their various preshow dinners, long after children are in bed, businessmen and businesswomen at home, offices shuttered, stores closed, restaurants filled, the subway rumbling underground, relentlessly crisscrossing the city, east to west, north to south. In Queens, in the yellow, sickly light of a JFK terminal, Jonathan Fontaine will soon board a direct flight for Beijing and, despite two Ambien and several glasses of good wine, have trouble sleeping, the flesh wound throbbing, worsening throughout the long trip until, in Beijing, he will seek out Mary at the first gathering. She will say, in no uncertain terms, that he needs medical attention. Pronto, she will say. But for now, he remains unaware. For now, he sits in the JFK executive lounge, in the seat that he has always liked best, near the big plate-glass windows where he can watch the planes taking off, landing, the drama of their lights in the dusk, the blinking red warnings, the blurry yellows, the stark whites.

  He thinks of Beatrice Wells every now and again, or rather his mind drifts that way, to her face, still pretty underneath that ridiculous hat, to her strapping boys. Boys who now hold hands, their mother’s hand linked back to them, the last in line or maybe, from a different angle, the first. This
is exactly what she wants, she has told them: she wants them to go fast, as fast as they can, and they promise they will, and they do, and when they are not quite enough they enlist all the others—the guy in the fur vest, a few lingering instructors, a couple from Australia, young backpackers staying at the YMCA—the all of them forming the whip, circling around and around and around on the thin ice of the artificial pond, building a mounting speed as Beatrice holds tight, almost ready to let go. At any moment, she thinks, eyes pressed shut, she will let go; at any moment, she thinks. Any moment.

  Acknowledgments

  My great thanks to the editors of the publications that first published many of these stories, as well as to Sarah Gorham, who took a chance on Where She Went, and Nan Graham, who continues to take chances on everything.

  Enormous gratitude to Rafael, Delia, and Iris, for every moment, and to my mother, for her love of a good story.

  A Scribner Reading Group Guide

  She Was Like That

  Kate Walbert

  This reading group guide for She Was Like That includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  In these deft, gorgeously wrought stories, Kate Walbert explores the hearts and minds of women, the joys and anxieties of mothering in the modern age, and the drive for human connection in an increasingly disconnected world. Walbert is as skilled as ever at capturing female interiority. In the brilliant opening story “M&M World,” a woman is plunged into panic when she briefly loses one of her daughters at the Times Square store. In “Slow the Heart,” a single mother wanting to enliven the dinner table conversation suggests to her family that they play Roses and Thorns, the game the Obamas played during meals in the White House. And in the story, “A Mother is Someone Who Tells Jokes,” a woman reflects on the nursery school project that preceded her son’s autism diagnosis. She Was Like That is a deeply resonant, career-spanning collection from a writer “rightly celebrated for her ability to capture the variety and vulnerability of women’s lives with a combination of lyricism and brawn” (NPR).