            THREE WOMEN

                  by
             Marge Piercy

BOOK JACKET INFORMATION

              First Edition

               a novel

  Suzanne Blume has survived two
marriages, had a successful career as a
lawyer, put two children through college, and is
enjoying her first sexual relationship in more than ten
years. Her teaching duties at a Boston
university allow her just enough time to take on
important cases, and most Saturdays she
manages a few hours with her closest friend.
Suzanne is not pleased when her older daughter,
Elena, loses yet another job and moves
back home, but, she has to admit, life at
forty-nine has yielded some unexpected
pleasures. Then one day a messenger appears in
court to announce that her mother, a woman of
legendary independence, whom Suzanne has never
felt truly accepted her, has been rushed to the
hospital.
  Intertwining the lives of three generations of
contemporary women, Marge Piercy brings
her exceptional talents to bear on some of the most
pressing questions facing us today: How do we nurture
children who cannot possibly live up to the dreams
we've created for them? How do we choose between our
own needs and those of the people we love? How do we
learn to become a family again after years of carving
out independent lives?
  Told with the rich prose of an internationally
acclaimed poet and the careful, detailed attention
of a master storyteller, Piercy's Three
Women is a novel as riveting as it is real.
It leads us to a place where some of our worst
fears meet fresh opportunity and a new chance
at real love.

  MARGE PIERCY is renowned as both a
poet and novelist. Her fiction includes
City of Darkness: City of Light; The
Longings of Women; He, She, and X;
Woman on the Edge of Time; and Gone
to Soldiers. She is the author of fifteen
books of poetry, including The Art of
Blessing the Day and Early Grrrl. She
lives on Cape Cod with her husband, Ira
Wood, the novelist and publisher of Leapfrog
Press.

  Visit the author at
www.capecod.net/~tmpiercy/

www.williammorrow.com

           ADVANCE PRAISE
         FOR THREE WOMEN

  "A lovely and unforgettable novel, filled
with wisdom and deep complexities of love between
three women in the same family. It will break
your heart. ... Fascinating, painful, rich in
texture and personality, and very exciting.
Piercy has written dozens of wonderful
books throughout a distinguished career, but this is
surely one of her very best."
    --JOHN NICHOLS, author of The
    Milagro Beanfield War and The
    Sterile Cuckoo

  "Like all of Piercy's work, Three Women
stretches ordinary thinking. ... Vividly
imagined and deeply satisfying."
    --MARILYN FRENCH, author of The
    Women's Room and Season in
    Hell: A Memoir

  "In her new novel, Three Women,
Piercy reveals the feel and grit of
contemporary family life with all the sweep,
intensity, and high drama that are her trademarks.
I expect that all three of these bold,
fascinating women will remain with me for a very long
time."
    --ALIX KATES SHULMAN, author of
    Good Enough Daughter: A Memoir

  "Three Women moved me profoundly. It
could be a mirror for many women today in all its
authenticity and compassion. Marge Piercy's work
is always wonderful, and this is Piercy at her very
best."
    --ELIZABETH MARSHALL THOMAS,
    author of The Hidden Life of Dogs




          Also by Marge Piercy

    POETRY
Early Grrrl
The Art of Blessing the Day
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
Mars and Her Children
Available Light
My Mother's Body
Stone, Paper, Knife
Circles on the Water
The Moon Is Always Female
The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing
Living in the Open
To Be of Use
4-Telling (with Bob Hershon, Emmett
  Jarrett, Dick Lourie)
Hard Loving
Breaking Camp

    FICTION
Storm Tide (with Ira Wood)
City of Darkness, City of Light
The Longings of Women
He, She and It
Summer People
Gone to Soldiers
Fly Away Home
Braided Lives
Vida
The High Cost of Living
Woman on the Edge of Time
Small Changes
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
Going Down Fast

    OTHER
The Last White Class: A Play (with
  Ira Wood)
Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt:
  Essays
Early Ripening: American Women's
  Poetry Now: An Anthology
The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of
  Days (with paintings by Nell Blaine)



 An excerpt from this novel appeared on the
netzine NERVE, nerve.com.


       For all those who are caught
        in the middle and pulled all
          ways I dedicate this
        novel with love and respect



            THREE WOMEN

                  
               Suzanne

  Suzanne Blume finished up her day's
lecture on the First Amendment in the cavernous
auditorium and shook off the students who immediately
surrounded her. She was the first woman ever to be
permitted to teach constitutional law at the
university, and she generally overprepared, as she
overprepared everything from occasional holiday
suppers with her daughters to every case she had ever
taken on. But today she had no time for the students,
as she had to get to her office and change from her
university outfit of trim slacks, silk
blouse, and blazer to her navy court suit,
same blouse. Like every woman litigator she
knew, she had a whole wardrobe of navy
suits, gray suits, one daring one in charcoal.
She took sheer panty hose from her middle
drawer where she kept makeup for court, scarves
for court, and dumped her dangling earrings. She
kicked off her high-heeled boots and put on
her pumps. At five foot three, she was too
small for her role in the world. In spite of the
backaches they gave her, she always wore heels
in public.
  Now she ran in them down the hall and to the parking
lot. She had given the keys to her Toyota
to her assistant, Jaime, and he had the car
waiting at the door. He drove. She sat in
the back reading her notes as he headed for
downtown Boston. She would get there a little early
for the afternoon session, but she would need time to run over
her presentation. It was important never to appear
to falter before the judges, but always to sound confident
and a little diffident at once--especially as a
woman.
  She loved appellate work, because it was nice and
tidy and controllable. It didn't offer the punch
and zing of regular trial work, but she had started
doing it when she still had the girls at home. It was
scholarly, it was somehow soothing, points of law
instead of Main Street at High Noon. It
had its advantages and its drawbacks, but it
wore less on her than trying cases. It
demanded enormous meticulous preparation, which she
customarily did in every case, but far less time in
court: say, one morning as opposed to a month
or several months. The power lines stood
out quite clearly: she usually faced several white
male judges from an upper-middle-class
background in their archaic robes, operating from a
view of the world she did not share but expected of
them. The defendant was seldom present. Unless
it was an exceptionally high-profile case, no
reporters bothered.
  "Can I come in to observe?" Jaime asked,
breaking into her concentration.
  "Park the car first." She thought for a moment.
"Why not? It's good for you to observe. Just keep
your mouth shut."
  "Thanks, Suzanne. I'll never say a
word."
  He was a blend of American Black and
Filipino, beautiful and wary, bright but overly
sensitive. He was far from his family and had
adopted Suzanne almost at once. She did not
mind. She had only been teaching for the last
twelve years, but in that time, she had acquired a
hundred honorary offspring. Some fell in love
with her, some were confrontational, some leaned, some
whined, some flattered, but they all stayed in touch,
and she remembered every one. Maybe she had done
better with her academic children than with her blood
children. Nowadays universities hired few
lawyers with courtroom experience, but when she had
been approached, she had already been involved with the
university clinic--and the university was eager
to hire a couple of women because of affirmative
action.
  She forgot Jaime as soon as she entered the
courtroom. It was always that way: a case closed
over her and she lived inside it. The appeal was
on a murder conviction of a woman who had shot
her ex-husband because she claimed he was abusing their
daughter, of whom he had custody. He was a
doctor. She was a laid-off librarian getting
by on temporary office work. The question of the appeal
of course was not whether she had shot her
ex-husband, whether he had abused their daughter
sexually, but rather if she had received adequate
representation from the court-appointed counsel.
Suzanne had amassed two good precedents and
argument from the transcript. The prosecutor was
the same one who had obtained the original
conviction. She knew him well from her years of
practicing: good but a little overaggressive. She
began to review her brief in the half hour
to forty-five minutes that would knock off the
cases on the agenda before hers. At one point
she noticed Jaime had slipped into a seat in the
last row. What she remembered as she talked was
the pale, drawn face of her client. She was
taking this on pro bono. The woman had no
money, and her family had exhausted its
resources. She remembered too the girl
Celia, terrified, placed in a foster home
for the last year.
  This was an appellate court and nowhere but in her
mind would the faces of the convicted woman and her
frightened daughter ever appear. Justice
to Suzanne was about people, but here it was all about
argument and precedent and the power of the judges. It was
the law, questions of the law: these judges being male,
like the lower court judge, should not be as much a
problem as it had been in the original trial. It
shouldn't bear so heavily upon the case that these
judges would never willingly believe that a good
professional man, a doctor of their own
class, would discard his wife into poverty and make
use of his own child sexually. No, she would only be
arguing points of the law, but in her mind always she
would know for whom she was fighting and why: the daughter,
Celia; the mother, Phoebe, whom she had
visited last Saturday at Framingham, the
women's prison outside Boston. She could not
make Phoebe understand that the judge would not hear
arguments about whether her ex-husband had sexually
abused her daughter, the act that had fractured
Phoebe's world. Phoebe didn't understand, but it
was not necessary that she should. Suzanne would win for her and
get her back Celia. Ultimately
Phoebe was right: that was the only thing that mattered.
Suzanne was in her proper element, a legal
fight, with the arguments marshaled in her memory like a
row of soldiers ready to go into battle. The
adrenaline sang in her muscles and in her mind.
She remembered once taking her younger daughter
Rachel to a presentation by a raptor
specialist, when Rachel was eleven and
impassioned by anything ecological. The woman
had with her a hawk, hooded. As soon as everyone
was settled, the lecturer removed the hood and the
hawk gleamed into life, eyes glittering, looking
for prey, eager for action. Fierce and utterly
focused: that was what Suzanne felt like in
court, that unhooded bird of prey. Finally it was
her turn to rise and, in ten minutes, to present
her case for appeal.

  Suzanne was a morning person. Except when
she was truly miserable, she snapped awake at
six and viewed her day with determination and zest.
She had a coffee maker on a timer, so that when
she crossed the hall into the kitchen area of the
enormous room on the east side of the house, she
could already smell her morning cup. She loved
things that took care of themselves automatically, like
reminders on her computer. She took her coffee
into the room that was now her study--it used to be her
older daughter Elena's bedroom. There she
turned on her computer, logged on to her
provider, and began reading her messages.
  She skimmed through them for a communication from
Rachel. She had been having trouble getting
Rachel on the phone. Her roommates in the
Philadelphia apartment were always vague, and
Rachel studied long hours with a group. It had
taken a few messages back and forth for
Suzanne to understand, for Rachel used Hebrew
words for almost everything connected with rabbinical
college. Thanks to Aunt Karla, Suzanne
had been bat-mitzvahed, but she had long ago
forgotten the Hebrew drummed into her. She wished
she could follow her daughter farther down that road,
wished she could understand half the time what Rachel was
talking about. Suzanne was proud, for women had not
been rabbis when she was a kid, but somehow becoming
a rabbi was the last thing she had expected.
Suzanne was modestly observant because her aunt
Karla had raised her that way, for her childhood
had been divided between her mother, Beverly, and
Aunt Karla. Still, being a professional
religious worker seemed to be overdoing it. At
twenty-two she herself had given birth to Elena and
nevertheless continued law school, so maybe Rachel
was taking the better path. She would be a good
rabbi, Suzanne was sure of it, understanding,
committed, passionate, learned.
  Rachel was as serious about rabbinical school as
she was about everything, from rescuing frogs from science
labs to protesting toxic waste dumping and being a
vegetarian. Better that than the other way,
Suzanne told herself, briefly thinking of her
older daughter Elena. As far as Suzanne could
figure out the message, Rachel was engaged in
some obscure argument about halachah, Jewish
law, having to do with caring for the bodies of the dead.
So who was dead? The father Suzanne had
never known had died out in California last year,
but she had not even been informed in time to attend the
funeral. She had received a letter from his widow two
weeks after the cremation. Would she have gone anyhow?
She had not even mourned for this man she could
remember seeing only once face-to-face,
awkwardly, when she was a skinny
twelve-year-old with an attitude, and a year
later on a platform giving a speech at a rally
where Beverly, her mother--briefly his lover--was
also speaking. It was perhaps the last Labor Day
celebration she had ever attended. Labor Day
belonged to her mother, Beverly. In her childhood it
had meant that Mama was giving a speech and she was
expected to march and sit and shut up, until
later there would be a union picnic and lots of
food, other kids, and maybe a swimming pool
or a lake.
  She wrote a vaguely encouraging note,
unsure whether she should press Rachel to explain
the debate or let it pass. She contented herself
with worrying on the screen about Rachel's long
hours studying. Was she sleeping enough? Was she
eating regularly? When would she come home next?
  An invitation to give a lecture on
International Women's Day in Albany. She
cited her fee and asked what they had in mind.
Her legal li/serv was full of discussion of a
recent Supreme Court ruling on evidence.
A university press requested she read a
manuscript submitted to them on the changing law
on domestic violence. She printed it out without
replying. Interesting, but did she have the time?
Maybe Marta would want to, as she had better
credentials on domestic abuse, having helped
write the current Massachusetts law.
  She read quickly through her other messages, her
friend Karen undergoing chemotherapy, her friend Alexa
fighting for tenure, Celeste enduring a terrible
divorce, Georgia just returned from Bali.
She made herself answer everyone else before she
opened Jake's morning message. They
communicated almost daily, although they had never
met. Jake lived in California, in the
Oakland hills, a situation similar to hers: a
house he co-owned with a couple, as Suzanne
owned hers with her colleague Marta who lived
upstairs with her husband, Jim.

                                   
  Suzanne, Earthworks is thinking of opening a
Boston office. We see a need to get
involved in issues of water, land policies, and
eroding protection of wetlands in the Northeast.
I expect to be out there as soon as I can set
up meetings with people who might work with us. Maybe
two, three weeks. If we decide to open up
an office in Massachusetts, I'd be running
it--a big IF. Anyhow, here's a chance to get
together finally and put faces on each other. I know
I want to meet you in reality, and I hope you
feel the same way. It could be fun.

  That message she could not reply to. She
felt as if she had started to sit down in a
comfortable chair but someone had moved it as a joke.
  She did not want to meet Jake in the flesh.
A romance on the computer screen was one thing; a
t@ete-@a-t@ete with a forty-nine-year-old
Suzanne was something else. She had not had an
affair in twelve years, not since Elena's
tragic mess. She had sworn off men then,
meaning it to be a temporary measure so she could
give all her personal attention to her
daughters, but it had become easier and easier
to stay uninvolved, until now it was terribly
simple. Who chased a middle-aged woman? Not
middle-aged men, certainly. So how had she
gotten into this electronic flirtation? Because it was
easy; because she liked the way he sounded; because it
felt safe and yet frisky. She had checked
him out when they first began electronic chatting, and
mutual acquaintances gave him social
clearance: not a weirdo, a sex offender, a
stalker. Shit, she had told him things about herself
she would never say to a real man, because Jake had
been a fantasy, a figment of her imagination and
her computer screen. Only a couple weeks
ago, she had told him about an erotic dream
involving her cat, Sherlock. Why had she done
that? Because he was fictitious and yet
self-animated. Not a man but a data stream.
  She found herself pacing around her study and then the
kitchen. From the counter where she fed them so she would not
step on their tails while they ate, her two
orange cats watched her, picking up her fear.
Tamar flattened her ears and backed farther under the
cabinet. Sherlock jumped down and rushed off
suddenly as if remembering an appointment on the
bay window ledge. She clutched herself
muttering. She must stop this, for she was acting like an
idiot!
  One thing she worried about now that she lived
alone was getting weird. One of the few
advantages she could recognize of being in a
relationship was that there was someone always there to act as a
check, a balance, a counterweight. If she was
paranoid or unobservant or projecting, the
other would knock her back on course. After
all, what law said she had to see Jake when he
came to Boston? If he did invade her
territory, she could say she was in Europe. In
Australia. Sick with the flu. In New York
visiting her mother, Beverly. She was not obligated
to begin an affair just because she had been flirting with
him for two years on the Internet. For all he
knew, she had flirtations going with seventeen other
men.
  It had felt so very safe. She had told him
things about her life and her feelings that she could not
imagine sharing with a man sitting in the same room.
She had male colleagues in the law school where
she taught, on committees, in court. She had
a decent relationship with Rachel's father, Sam,
as long as they weren't in the same place for too
long a time: they could handle about an hour safely.
But she would never, never have started this long friendly
flirtation if she had ever considered he might
appear in front of her. It had felt totally
disembodied, a meeting of two minds, an affair
made of words alone. She began to remember some
of those words. They had shared a fantasy that they were
in Paris together, walking streets familiar to both
of them. Climbing up among the strange stone
houses of the dead in P@ere Lachaise, kicking
up the autumn leaves. Eating cr@epes at a
pink restaurant way up on Montmartre with
Paris stretching to the horizon. Competing in their knowledge
and building up a map of their fantasy. He had
taken her on a hike high into the Sierra
Nevada. She had taken him into court with her,
sharing the excitement of confrontation and victory, the
desolation and guilt of loss. He had sent her
diary entries from a trip to Greenland, on the
ice field. She had watched condors take
clumsy flight off a cliff in northern
Arizona, released into new life in the wild.
  The house she shared in Brookline was a large
turn-of-the-century wooden structure painted
pale blue with cobalt trim on the
gingerbread and railings and window frames. She had
the downstairs with spacious rooms and deep
closets. Marta had the upstairs and the tiny
third floor, under the sloping roof. When they had
bought the house together twelve years before, it had
been lived in forever by two sisters and a brother,
strange wizened spinsters and bachelor who had
collected salt and pepper shakers, model
trains that ran all over the top floor,
matchboxes, postcards, and a great deal of junk.
She remembered Jim finding a box labeled
string too short to use. The last sister had
died and the heirs--distant cousins--put the house
on the market as it was, full of dust and old
clothes and worn rugs and battered furniture,
candle ends, and mismatched crockery. It reeked
of sad genteel survival. Marta, Jim, and
she had put a great deal of money into the house,
dividing it into two apartments with modern kitchens,
inviting bathrooms, air-conditioning, up-to-date
wiring, while keeping the fine old woodwork, the
fireplaces, the stained-glass windows, and the
encircling porch. Their house sat upon a high
hill, on the curve of Addington Road, a
street of occasional brick apartment houses, a
few Victorians, some modern houses, and many
frame structures about the same age as their own,
usually on lots too small for the houses--like their
own small backyard sloping downhill to the
garage. She had moved to Brookline from the South
End of Boston after Elena's disaster.
  Jim, Marta's husband, was off at a
therapists' convention. When Suzanne ran
upstairs to Marta, her friend was sitting at the table
in her old plaid flannel bathrobe reading an
article in the Yale Law Journal.
Marta waved her hand at the plate of muffins and the
pot of coffee. "I haven't had breakfast,"
she realized. "His E-mail has really
thrown me off course."
  "Look, so he told you he might be coming.
He may feel that's only polite. Maybe
he's just as nervous as you are."
  At night Marta always braided her gray
blond hair, now hanging in two long plaits
over the shoulders of her bathrobe. Suzanne
liked the way Marta looked before she was dressed
up for court, for meeting clients. Marta was far
more elegant than Suzanne, taller, with
prominent cheekbones. They had been friends
since law school. They had worked out of the same
Women's Law Commune in the late seventies
and then gone into practice with their friend Miles.
When they had bought the house together, Jim had still
been teaching at Simmons. Now their children were out of the
house--although Marta's son, Adam, and
Suzanne's younger daughter Rachel still came
home for school vacations.
  "You think maybe Jake doesn't really care
if we get together?"
  "He may have doubts too. Why wouldn't he?"
  "So maybe he won't press me."
  "So maybe he won't." Marta grinned.
"Will you be disappointed?" Marta was enjoying this
conversation. In their long friendship, Marta had always
been the volatile one; Suzanne was the more
practical, the one who smoothed things over, the
negotiator. Marta was deriving pleasure from
seeing Suzanne discombobulated over a man,
of all things. "Have you considered maybe you're just
an excuse to stay over Saturday night so he
can get a cheaper airfare?"
  As they lingered over muffins and coffee,
Suzanne regretted that she had not done her
morning exercise routine. She would feel a little
off her pace all day. Maybe if she got
home at a reasonable time, she could make it up
tonight. "I had one of those messages from Rachel that
she knows I can't relate to. It's like she's
rubbing my nose in it."
  "You thought she'd go to law school."
  "Well, why not?" Suzanne ran her fingers
through her thick short hair, setting it on end.
"She's bright, she has a good memory, and she's
picked up a certain amount just by osmosis.
Looks like we both failed to breed lawyers."
Adam was studying film at NYU.
  "Well, Suzanne honey, don't
despair. Studying to be a rabbi is not quite like
becoming a stripper. It's an honorable
profession."
  "Or a ma@itre do'." Suzanne shook her
head. "Don't get me started on Elena. In
and out of four different colleges and now she seats
people in a restaurant."
  "Kids do what they can," Marta said. "The
carpenter who's carrying out the renovations at
Rackham, Klein and Forbes has a degree from
Harvard. He was in computers. Now he makes
cabinets." That was Marta's firm: she
was the Klein.
  "Time to hit the road. Classes, and then I
meet my policewoman. Do you want to sit
in?"
  "Let me see how my day goes," Marta
said. "I looked over what you gave me, and I
think you can make a strong sexual harassment
case--provided you get a decent judge. You
don't know yet who you're going to pull?"
  "Not yet."
  "Knock 'em dead." Marta rose, and they
went their separate ways into their separate days.
Usually they touched base mornings and evenings.
They were part of each other's support system.
At times they had been the only support for each
other. When Suzanne thought of getting old, of
some dim future when she was emeritus at the
university, she did not assume her kids would be
around, but she always assumed Marta would be.
  She decided she would reply to Jake tonight.
She would just acknowledge his mention of a trip east and
go on at some length about how busy she was now. That
was a nice safe response and committed her
to absolutely nothing--which was what she supposed
she most desired.

                  
               Suzanne

  Suzanne had just got back from court
Thursday and was running a bath when Elena walked
in, yelling from the living room, "Mother? Mother!"
  "You startled me!" Suzanne cried, hastily
pulling on her terry robe. She shut off the
water. "Why didn't you call?"
  "You know you're never here, Mother."
  "Here I am right now. Besides, what are
answering machines for?"
  "I always thought it was so you could stand and listen and
decide if somebody was worth your attention, before
you'd pick up."
  Suzanne drew a deep breath. Be calm,
be calm. She felt rising in herself the particular
sharp anxiety tinged with fear she always felt when
she had not seen her elder daughter for a while.
"I'll be right with you." She rushed into her bedroom
to throw on slacks and a sweater. Suzanne was
systematic, orderly. She made a joke of
it. "I'm the only daughter of an organizer,
and wow, am I organized." She called
before going to a friend's house (except for Marta
upstairs), made appointments with everybody
including her daughters. She had a daily
calendar of activities, appointments, and
projects from the mundane (take suit
to cleaners; put recycled goods at curb) to the
important (work on speech for Harvard women's
law alumnae meeting). She reminded herself in
advance to buy presents for her children and her friends,
all of whose sizes were kept up-to-date on her
computer. Six months in advance, she made
appointments with the dentist to have her teeth cleaned, and
every November she arranged for Marta and herself to go
and have their annual mammograms in January.
Marta's mother had died of breast cancer, so Marta
could never bring herself to make the phone call.
  Suzanne realized this habit of
meticulously planned days must irritate her
older daughter, for Elena had certainly chosen
to go to the other extreme, exalting spontaneity.
Elena would never say, "I am coming to dinner next
Friday," but would always hedge her bets. "I
think I can make it, but I'll let you know." It
was the adolescent hope that something more exciting than
dinner with Mama would turn up, a belief that there
were always other possibilities that might unfold
before Friday. She understood, but nonetheless, it
hurt her feelings.
  Suzanne rushed into the living room. "You're
looking good. Is everything okay, sweetheart?"
It was impossible to tell from Elena's appearance
if she were doing well or poorly, for she always
looked lovely. Often it startled Suzanne that
she had given birth to such a beauty. Elena had
her father Victor's coloring, black hair and
instead of Suzanne's near-sighted green eyes,
she had large, large dark brown eyes, doe
eyes, dramatic and appealing. She was a good
five inches taller than Suzanne,
(victor, the Guatemalan politico, had
been six feet two). Her skin was olive like
her father's, and her mouth was full and sensual.
Nobody ever missed Elena in a crowd. She
had a dramatic voice too, in a lower
register; Suzanne herself was an alto rather than a
soprano. She had often been told her voice
led people to expect a bigger woman. Petite
Suzanne and her statuesque daughter stood in
the living room a bit squared off as always.
Suzanne could not help the nails of
worry that pounded into her.
  "So how's the good daughter?"
  "I assume you mean your sister."
  "Who else would I mean?"
  "She's working hard at school."
  "She's always working hard. Even when she's
asleep, she's working hard. That's how good
daughters are."
  "Elena, did you come all the way over here
to pick a fight with me about your sister? Please
tell me what's up. Please."
  Elena threw herself down on the couch. She was
wearing a tight short leather skirt that rode up.
Suzanne had to control herself not to point that out.
She had learned a few things over the years, one
of which was never, never to comment on Elena's clothing
or any new body piercings or tattoos she
noticed. Various earrings in both ears and her
nose stud, but she didn't observe any new
mutilations. She was relieved. Her daughter's
body was so beautiful, and she was always devising
what seemed to Suzanne new punishments for it.
  "Do you have a beer? Cold?"
  "Maybe, I'm not sure." Beer was not something
she regularly stocked in the winter. "Wouldn't you
like something to eat? I haven't eaten yet myself."
  "I'd rather have beer on an empty stomach. Then
I'll eat a big meal and go swimming."
  "Elena, is something wrong?"
  "Of course not. What could be wrong with me,
except for my existence? I'm sure you're going
to say I told you so." Elena grimaced and
turned away.
  "Told you so about what?"
  "That it wouldn't work out living with Jennifer. So
now she's moved out on me and I'm getting
evicted."
  "Evicted, why? Do you need money for rent?"
She was ready to write a check.
  "What use is that? It's too late.
They're throwing me out."
  "But why didn't you pay your rent?"
Suzanne had the familiar sense of being drawn
deeper and deeper into a bottomless bog.
"Don't you make enough at that restaurant?"
  "That bitch fired me, that's why."
  "Ah. Why?"
  "You think she does anything that makes sense?
She felt like it."
  "If you've been fired without cause,
I think you have a case." Suzanne had a
hopeful moment: she could be useful to her daughter.
She even imagined Elena's gratitude if she
won a case for her.
  "Oh, Mother, don't be such a lawyer prick.
I slapped a customer."
  "Oh ... I'm sure you had good reason."
  "So I'm going to be out on the street next
Friday."
  Suzanne was silent for a moment. Then she said
what she had to. "Of course you can move back
in. We can rearrange the rooms--"
  "Don't act so martyred. I promise I
won't stay long. I wouldn't move back here
if everything wasn't so fucked up right now."
Elena unfolded herself from the couch and paced to the
fireplace and back. "Could we have a fire?"
  "Let's have supper first. I'll check about the
beer." Her evening was coming to pieces. She thawed
a soup in the microwave. She would pull a
couple of baguettes from the freezer and stick them
in the oven. While the lamb barley soup heated,
she washed greens and put together a salad. With a
lot of work sketched out in her head, she had
looked forward to collapsing on her comfortable leather
couch, her feet in furry slippers up on the
padded armrest and her papers for Sherry, the
sexually harassed policewoman, on her lap.
  Far from suffering from the empty-nest syndrome
her friends had warned her about in tones usually
reserved for commiserating about a root canal,
Suzanne had flourished. She had expanded
deliberately and joyously to fill the apartment,
to fill her life. She even had a little time
to play now and then on the Internet, to read a
novel, to listen to music. She loved living
alone, absolutely loved it. She felt so
marvelously irresponsible in small details,
not judged, not tested, not pushed or resented. She
had become used to doing as she pleased with her own
space and her free time, such as it was. Now
Elena would expect to be taken care of and resent
every single thing her mother did for her.
  She had raised her daughters pretty much on
her own since Elena was twelve and Rachel was
seven, and before that, for Elena's first five years.
She had not been a particularly good mother, too
busy, too interested in her own work, too
demanding. She could hear Elena talking to Sherlock
in the living room. "Sherlock, you're so
sleepy. What a sleeping Sherlock. That's
right, blink. Roll on your back and I'll rub
your wonderful striped tiger tummy ..."
  Why couldn't Elena ever address her with half
that affection? Suzanne wondered--putting it on
the agenda to bring up with Marta--if she was not a
deeply irritating person, infuriating.
Suzanne had always had good tight women friends, but
she had also frequently annoyed many other women.
They seemed to find her hard, uppity, lacking in
the middle class kissy-face social
graces. She never made much small talk or
gave polite compliments. She was a good
litigator, a good hired or pro bono gun,
but a crappy hostess. Unfortunately, one of the
women she most annoyed was her own daughter.
Calm down, she said to herself, at least this time the
problem is just money and a job. No drugs, no
unsuitable men, Elena isn't pregnant or in
trouble with the law. She should be relieved, but her
anxiety remained. When Elena was fifteen,
Suzanne discovered how well her daughter could
lie to her, and she had never quite recovered from that
shock. The doubt always quivered there, was she being
fooled, was she fooling herself about Elena?
  Over supper, she thought aloud. "So you need
to move in probably over this weekend?"
  "I'm not working, so one day is like another."
  "Not to me," Suzanne said, then softened her
voice. "So we should get my gym equipment out
of the old playroom."
  "I am not going to sleep in that room off the
kitchen. You'd wake me every damned morning at
six. No thank you."
  "All right, you can use Rachel's room. She
isn't about to come home until spring break at the
earliest."
  "I don't want Rachel's room. I
want mine."
  Suzanne took a deep breath. "Elena,
that's fixed up as my office. It has been for
six years. I have no place else to put my
files, my computer--"
  "You have an office at school."
  "I don't keep my case work there. It
isn't secure and the university doesn't
approve of law school faculty conducting
private practice on the premises. I have
to work at home and I can't move six years of
accumulation out of my office."
  "It was supposed to be my room."
  "Elena, you moved out with great fanfare six
years ago. Did you want me to keep it as a
shrine?"
  Elena laughed. "With candles burning day and
night and incense and flowers."
  "Incense makes me sneeze," Suzanne
said reasonably. "I can go buy some flowers."
  "It's only for a month or so till I get
another job. Rachel can stay in that stupid room
off the kitchen. I'm sure she gets up at
six every morning and thanks God he didn't
make her me."
  "In some ways, your sister has always admired
you. Sometimes she envied you."
  Elena grimaced. "Because she has no idea
how to talk to men."
  Because Rachel looked like Suzanne except for
lighter hair. She remembered Rachel crying in
high school, My life would be so different if
I were beautiful like her, my life would be much
better. Suzanne had a brief impulse
to tell Elena about Jake and his plan to appear in
the flesh. Once she had almost told Rachel when
they were chatting about the Internet, but on
reflection, she had not considered it becoming to inform
her daughters that she had a long and intense
flirtation going with a man she had never met, and was
now terrified to meet: an environmental
activist dogged by the FBI who wrote her an
ecstatic two-page E-mail about
butterflies in Costa Rica. This man who had
lain down in front of bulldozers had sent her
a perfect little carved seal from the Inuit and another
time a salmon smoked till it resembled a
piece of wood. This man had taken a ship into a
nuclear test zone, and now was threatening to invade
her own territorial waters.
  Elena rose, stretched gracefully as a
panther, and sauntered to Rachel's room. She
stood in the doorway, shaking her head. "I'm
going to have to change things around. I can't sleep in
here, the way it is."
  There was no use in her arguing that the arrangement
was supposed to be temporary. If Elena
announced she could not sleep, she would not sleep.
Rachel was going to get a lot of practice being
forgiving. Elena was back, and maybe they could
learn to talk to each other instead of always fencing, and
heal some of their old scars. Maybe.
Suzanne the top-notch negotiator always
seemed to falter when she went head-to-head with her
older daughter; Suzanne the litigator always
lost her case when she was arguing points with
Elena. Somehow she had to find a mode of
communication between them that actually communicated.
Once, years and years ago when Elena was a child,
they had had intense intimacy. Elena had been
her precious miracle, with her father who had
disappeared into mythology leaving her a child beautiful
as an orchid and strong as a tiger cub.
Elena's childish paintings had been lush,
vivid, unlike the scrawls of other more ordinary
kindergarten finger-painters. Elena had danced as
early as she walked. How affectionate she had
been then, flinging herself into her mother's arms when
Suzanne walked into a room. And how radically
it all changed when Elena passed puberty.
  "Elena, if we try, maybe we can make this
work. Get along better with each other," she said
softly, trying not to put too much force into the words
lest they seem a demand.
  "It's just for a while, like a month, six
weeks," Elena said. "We don't have to get in
each other's way."
  "I want us to do better than that."
  "Whatever."

  Rather than intense preparation for her sexual
harassment case, most of Suzanne's weekend
was spent moving Rachel's things into temporary
storage along one wall of the room she was still using
as her gym and helping Elena move into Rachel's
room. A lot of Elena's possessions and
off-season clothes went into the basement, crowded
before Elena's stuff was shoved in.
  On Saturday they had the help of a gangling
orange-haired young man Elena knew from her
former restaurant job. He was a sous-chef there,
making salads and arranging food on plates.
He was clearly smitten, but Elena was
uninterested. "A big baby," she said. "Sex
appeal of a cooked shrimp."
  Sunday's help came in the form of a man perhaps
fifteen years older than Elena. He was of
distinctly less use than the boy had been,
puffing on the stairs. He complained of his back and
wanted to argue about where things should be put. Elena
and he disappeared into her room for an hour in the
middle of the afternoon. What could Suzanne
possibly say? It made her uncomfortable
to think of her daughter in bed with that oily creep,
but she knew she had to keep her reaction to herself.
Elena had been sexually active since
puberty, and there never had been anything Suzanne
could do about it. It did not help her mood that she
had not made love to anyone in twelve years.
She turned on the stereo and did her laundry in
the basement.
  "Is he your current ..." Suzanne
fumbled for the word. Boyfriend seemed absurd for a
forty-plus-year-old man, but she could think of
nothing else. "... your current boyfriend?"
  "I see him."
  I see him too, Suzanne thought, and I
don't much like what I see. "What does he
do?"
  "That's all you ever ask about someone, isn't it?
Peg them. The next question is, where did they go
to school?"
  Suzanne waited. She was better at silence
than her daughter. Finally Elena burst out,
"He sells swimming pools. As if that defined
who he is!"
  "Divorced?"
  "Twice. Satisfied?"
  Suzanne shrugged.
  Elena relented slightly. "Anyhow, he's
on his way out," she said. "Doesn't he complain
all the time, a drone like Muzak in elevators?
He's boring. Like most of your generation, he
whines." Elena shook out her hair, weighing it in
her hands. "Want a swimming pool? I can get
you a deal."
  "Swimming is not my exercise. Nor his,
I imagine."
  Elena snorted. "The only exercise he
likes requires a partner."
  Suzanne was grateful to the outgoing pool
salesman nonetheless, because when Elena was displeased
with somebody else, she was friendlier to her mother.
  They settled in gingerly. Elena was wooing the
cats. Sherlock had succumbed to her at once,
but Tamar belonged only to Suzanne and would not
let Elena touch her. She had found them on the
street, abandoned kittens of no more than seven
weeks, flea-bitten, with worms of three kinds
and a respiratory infection. Now they were huge and
beautiful, Sherlock lean and muscular, with
clearly Oriental head shape, a long
nose (like hers). She considered his profile
aristocratic. If she held him up extended
across the doorway, his body stretched from
doorjamb to doorjamb. Tamar was apricot rather
than reddish and fluffier. Her eyes were huge and
round, giving her a perennially astonished
expression. She was as big as her brother but
softer bodied. She had an enormous purr
only for Suzanne. She slept pressed against
Suzanne's side and would have liked to keep her
mistress on a leash. Both cats shared tiny
squeaky voices, a remnant of their starving
kittenhood and ludicrous in such large gorgeous
cats.
  Elena could not help being seductive with the
cats, as with half the world. It was her way of
wanting to be liked, Suzanne told herself.
Jake and she had been chatting again about everything in
their lives. She had told Jake all about
Elena--well, a little about Elena would be more
accurate.

  Elena got into a mess with two boys when
she was fifteen. Fortunately this whole tragedy
happened around the time that law schools were briefly
searching for "qualified" women to hire, to keep
their governmental funds. I had been serving as
adjunct faculty with the university law clinic.
So finally I was offered a full tenure-track
faculty position, and I took it so that I would
have more time home.
  Understand, being a law professor is kind of
cushy. The way the tenured faculty complain about
the students and facilities, you'd never know it, but
actually it's far more relaxing. You don't make
the huge bucks, but it's prestigious and you have
plenty of time to take cases you want to take on
the side, increasing your visibility, reputation,
and sometimes making lots of money if it's that kind
of case. Since I was absolutely riddled with
guilt about Elena, the offer no matter how
crassly motivated came at a time I needed
to regroup. And I've been teaching there ever since.
  I appreciate that you haven't asked me
exactly what happened to Elena. I think that
even today, I couldn't write it down. I've
never been able to come to terms with it, I know that.
Someday I will, and then I'll tell you the whole
story.
                                   
  I envy you knowing your daughter so well. I
lost custody years and years ago, and so I
rarely see Leaf, and never alone. She's
twenty-five and married already. She works in an
insurance office in Boise. My last photo of
her is from her wedding. I haven't lived with her
since she was five and my wife left me. I was
a quintessential hippie then. I worked in a
head shop, I was an orderly in a hospital,
I sold hot dogs at the beach, I was a
messenger. My wife just got sick of a life
on the edge of nothing in particular and went home
to her parents in Idaho. She got a divorce
with a judge who considered me a menace to society
because my hair was shoulder length and I smoked
dope. I think off the record he also considered
me a dirty Jew who had no business with a
blond and lovely daughter of Idaho. He
kept calling me a New Yorker, although I
grew up in Worcester.
  Even after I cleaned up and finished school,
she--my ex-wife Patsy--had no use for me.
She never believed I'd changed. Whatever I
said to her, she had this Oh Yeah look in her
eyes, sort of squinted, letting me talk but
never listening.
  Patsy was crazy about me when we were first
together, but after our daughter, Leaf, was born, she
began to judge me and our life. I should have
caught on but I was so comfortable doing whatever I
felt like when I felt like it, a perennial
adolescent all through my twenties, that I just
never saw what was happening. I was so used
to Patsy adoring me, so used to being adored, that
I never noticed how pissed off she was until
she took off and left me.

Suzanne read the message that night in her
office while Elena was moving stuff around in the
next room. Suzanne was exhausted and would
normally get into bed by ten-thirty on a Sunday
night and read for fifteen to twenty minutes,
something soothing like catalogs or a travel book
about the Greek Islands or New Zealand. It was
not that she intended to take an expensive or
extensive vacation anytime soon, but someday
surely she and Marta and Jim too would go off and
see some of these places together. She had abandoned
her earlier dreams of traveling with her daughters.
Elena would not willingly go down to the
corner deli with her, and Rachel was keeping kosher
now, which made cooking for her less than fun.
Kosher vegetarian: one of the world's lumpier
cuisines. Rachel never talked about going
anyplace abroad now except Israel.
  Tonight Suzanne was overexcited. She was yeasty
with hope she labeled irrational that perhaps she and
Elena could actually get along, could reach some
breakthrough in communication, in affection. It was a
new chance. She had never expected Elena
to live under her roof again. Yet now Elena's
sounds seeped through the wall. Moving furniture?
Pounding nails? The sound of salsa through the wall.
She had overcome her earlier stupid sense of
being invaded. Wouldn't Jake be jealous of her, not
only in contact with her daughter but once again
living with her? She should appreciate what she
had, instead of sulking about her privacy and her
routine. She was lucky to have her daughter with her,
and she should dedicate some of her energy to making things
better between them. Still she had her policewoman
to worry about, the sexual harassment case against the
Dedham Police Department. She wanted very
badly to win this case, for her client Sherry, and
because if she won, it would set a precedent in the
area, letting many other women who had been treated
just as badly come slowly out of their private
hells and begin to demand justice and reparation. The
Latino music came through the wall to her where she
lay wide awake in her bed, and she found herself
nodding to the beat.
  She suddenly thought of Victor, his lean
body, his olive face with the sculptured
cheekbones and the sensual mouth, and even after all the
troubles and all the years, something moved deep down
in her. How she had been mad for him. Besotted.
When he touched her, her bones liquefied. Her
brain turned off like a computer whose plug had been
pulled. They made love mostly in Spanish,
besides the universal language of their bodies.
How could she have loved him so strongly? But she
had. He was not her first lover, but he was the most
potent male force that had ever entered her life.
He had left her pregnant, shaken, and
mistrustful of the power and danger passion held for
her. He had taught her how easily she could be
rendered foolish, passive, all the things she
despised; how easily she could be hurt. That was
twenty-seven years ago, and still she shuddered. She
had learned after that adventure how
to protect herself from the possibility of
subjection, her defenselessness before her own
body's desire. If only Elena could learn
the same at a smaller cost. She had bequeathed
to her daughter her terrible vulnerability, but not the
lacquered shell she had grown to protect it.

                  
                Beverly

  Beverly climbed the steep stairway from the
103rd Street subway station. "May,
hello." She greeted the homeless woman who
always sat on the landing, where Beverly paused
to catch her breath. Stairs took her breath
away lately.
  "Hello, Beverly. Is the world treating you
all right today?"
  "Not bad. I just hope the snow holds off."
  "As do I, dear."
  She knew all the street people in her
neighborhood and made it a point to speak to them,
the ones who weren't too far gone. Half of them
were mental. Fucking budget cuts. Save the
state money and dump patients on the street.
The other half had just lost too much. Flo
Kennedy had said many years ago that every woman was just
one man away from welfare. Of course that hadn't
applied to her, since she had never relied on the
support of any man since her poor father.
Well, every old person was just one lost check
away from the streets. Who said that? Beverly
Blume.
  She had been out to Brooklyn to see her sister
Karla, as superstitious as ever. They had been
fighting about Rachel. Beverly simply could not
accept that such a bright able girl should do something so
useless as becoming a rabbi. Karla was thrilled and
defended her grandniece--as well she might,
since she was the one who had infected the whole
family. Beverly would never forgive her for that. It
was one of the worst mistakes she had ever made,
leaving her daughter, Suzanne, with her younger
sister while she was down south organizing
textile workers. Oh, she was as proud of being a
Jew as Karla was, but it was the cultural
heritage that meant something to her, not the religious
mumbo jumbo. Why seek out irrationality when it
leapt at you from the TV, from the tabloids?
  But at least she had to give Karla
credit for overcoming racism. After Suzanne
had gone off to law school at Harvard, Karla
had adopted first one mixed-race child and then
another. She often said she would have adopted ten more
if she'd had the money to support them. So after
helping Beverly raise Suzanne, Karla had
spent her middle years raising two more girls,
Suwanda--generally called Wanda--and Rosella,
with whom Karla had moved in when her health began
to fail. It was her weight that was doing her in, but
Karla had always loved to cook and eat. Karla
lived now with Rosella, her husband, Tyrone,
and the twins. Karla was very involved with Rosella's
children and Tyrone's family, the way she had always
been involved with any available kind of family.
Karla was in many ways a very traditional woman.
  "Miller, how's the leg?" She greeted him
at a table outside a Latino caf`e on
Broadway. It was cold to sit outside, but
Miller had always smoked, and like her, he wasn't
about to stop because people had got fussy about it. God,
to imagine how he had made her blood race.
Was it Dorothy Parker who compared love to a bus
accident? You were just going along the street minding
your business when bam, love fell on you and
flattened you. Or picked you up by the nape of the
neck like a huge eagle and bore you off, tore
your heart and liver out, and then let you fall half
a mile to earth. Certainly Miller had made
her feel as if every bone in her body had been
broken when he left her flat and took off with that
Greek girl, Marina--who later became a
follower of some guru and shaved her head like a
bowling ball. Beverly stood patiently while
he complained of his rheumatism and his heart before
she could turn the subject to the governor and the
mess he was making in Albany. He had
promised to repeal that stupid mandatory sentencing
law, and he had dropped it after election like a
lump of dung. There were women in there for half their
lives because of a purseful of marijuana, while
gangstas who slit open their girlfriend's belly
were out in eight years. Women were the mules, the
bottom of the heap. Suzanne would understand about that,
even if she didn't see much of the way the world
worked.
  Now here was Miller with his legs stuck out as if
they could no longer bend, his complexion pickled,
glasses thick enough to walk on like river ice.
She could give him a big smile and a
hello and not be able to imagine how once he had
burnt her eyes like the sun itself. He had been a
vigorous, charismatic man, full of stories
and a line thick enough to tether an ocean liner. "Oh,
Bev, you're the only woman who's ever understood
me. You have the mind of a man and the body of a
houri." For a year she had been crazy about him and
then he had bounced out the door, gone. And always,
always, even in bed she had called him by his last
name, for he would tell no one his given name. She
had seen it years later in the FBI records
when she had got her seven-foot stack under the
Freedom of Information Act. Hymie, his name
was, and he was ashamed of it as too Jewish, a
borscht belt joke.
  He had never been a good speaker, but he was a
solid man in a demonstration, and he had thrust
his tough big body between her and danger more than
once. How he had loved a good fight. He was
a natural brawler, quick and effective with his
fists. She had liked that. They had enough talkers.
She knew it was silly to respond to physical
strength and daring in a man, but she couldn't help
it. It was after such a demonstration they had first gone
home together and fallen into her bed. What an
explosion. She could remember it yet. At first,
one of the best lovers she had ever had, but he
cooled down in a matter of months. He was the
kind of man who was hot for novelty and tired
fast of what he had. She turned on 105th and
headed for Amsterdam.
  "Eh, Guti@errez, enc@omo vaen"
She always spoke Spanish to the dry cleaner, to the
fish peddler, to the super. She'd had to get her
good suit dry-cleaned after her old friend
Charlotte's funeral, it had been so muddy, and
she'd need it Sunday when the neighborhood
organization dedicated the pocket park she had
helped lobby for, where the kids could play safe out
of the streets. She wished she knew some Korean
to speak to the greengrocer. She loved languages
and had learned a bit of eight of them, just enough to get
along and have a friendly conversation. She had friends who
did crossword puzzles, but she had always learned
languages for fun. It was a game you could play
with people instead of alone--the best kind. You only had
to be willing to take a chance, to make a fool of
yourself and be a child in another language. Sometimes
she felt desolate when she realized that at her
age, she would never learn Chinese the way
she had always intended. It was like realizing you were never
going to meet that one person you wanted to spend the
rest of your life with, that it just wasn't going
to happen. Not that she truly minded living alone with
her cat. She had only herself to please, and she was
pleased with herself, as she always said when anybody
asked her if she didn't get lonely.
  People said New York was cold, but she had little
conversations with twenty people between the subway and the door
to her apartment. She knew hundreds of people in her
neighborhood, from the group trying to preserve
rent control, to the tenants union created to fight
the landlords, to the reform party meetings and all the people
she had known in fifty-five years of being
politically active. She had lived in this
apartment on 105th between Columbus and
Manhattan for thirty-one years. She had seen
the neighborhood change and change again. Friends
died and new friends came into her life. She felt
sorry for old people like Miller who could only
relate to people they'd known back when. She was
determined to remain curious and ready to learn new
things from new people until the day she dropped dead,
preferably on a picket line.
  She stopped at her favorite resale shop
on Columbus to scan the clothing racks. She
was still a size six, and she kept her hair a
warm light red. "Oh, Bev," Tina, the young
Jamaican woman behind the counter, called to her,
"I got a black number you would look great
in. Asymmetrical, very stylish."
  "Now where would I wear such a thing?" But she
took it, gave Tina her suit to hold, and went
behind the partition where a mirror stood. Umm, she
liked it. At her age, she couldn't wear
d@ecolletage any longer, and this dress covered
her pretty well. The tag said thirty
dollars, but Tina would usually bargain with her.
"Such a dress, what would an old lady like me
need with it?" But the tenants organizing group
always had a Valentine's Day party.
  She got the dress for twenty-two dollars.
No bottle of wine for the next few weeks, but
she would knock the old guys' eyes out at the
party. She still enjoyed that, she couldn't help it.
And maybe Hank would get a few ideas. She
saw one of the kids from her building, Bobby
Choi, hanging around outside P.s. 145 as
she passed and waved to him.
  The super greeted her warmly and gave
her a package. A friend in England had sent her
his new book on British miners. She
collected her mail and took the creaky
hesitant elevator up, muttering to itself as if
it were senile. It was a narrow old building the
landlord did not bother with. If you wanted the apartment
painted, you painted it yourself. The kids daubed
graffiti on the walls that stayed until other
kids spray painted over with new graffiti.
She opened both locks on her door, went in,
and shoved the dead bolt to.
  Her sleek black tomcat, Mao, came
to greet her, twisting about her legs and making that
Siamese cry of his. No man had ever
greeted her more ecstatically in her entire life
than her cat did whenever she went out, even if it
was just to the corner to pick up the Sunday Times.
She hated to admit it, but Karla's
neighborhood had better kosher deli now than
the Upper West Side. She had bought herself a
good supply of pastrami and kishkes and knishes.
What a supper she would have tonight, and she would share it
with Mao. She could get good smoked fish in her
neighborhood when she was willing to spend the money
and good strudel still, bagels, rugola, but proper
knishes and kishkes, no way.
  Karla had also given her a plastic container
full of chopped liver. Karla was a good cook,
but then, she had always liked fussing around the house,
the way Beverly could never be bothered. Most
nights, she just opened a can of tuna to share with
Mao or maybe a can of soup. Unlike most
women her age, she had not gone to fat and she had
not withered away. She was perhaps five pounds heavier
than she had been at forty, and that was it. Weight
was always visible on a small woman, but nobody
would ever call her fat like Karla. Suzanne
never gained weight either. That was one of the few ways
they were alike, mother and daughter. She hung up the
black dress on the rack over the tub to shake
out the wrinkles and get rid of the musty smell.
  Suzanne had bought her an answering machine
ten years before, and after letting it sit under the bed for
three years, finally she had given in and begun
to use it. She played her messages now.
  "This is Gordon from the Tenants for Rent
Control. We've got an important meeting
with our state rep tonight and I want everybody on
the steering committee to show up. Seven-thirty my
place. Beverly, are you listening?"
  About half the messages were political and
half were friends. Her poker group was meeting again
after a hiatus when Bianca had her heart
attack. Nat had called trying to get her to go
to a movie with him. He'd like to start up again, the
old reprobate, but once fooled is smart
afterward. She did not return his call. Let him
stew. He had been so taken with that widow with the condo
in Vero Beach. Now he thought he could just pick
up where they had left off two years ago. She
grinned. She was more interested in Hank, who was on
the steering committee with her. His wife had died
last year, and he was coming out of his mourning. He was
a retired academic who had written a couple
of books that had impressed her. She usually
wasn't that taken with writers, but he was
good-looking with abundant snowy white hair and
blue eyes the color of those weeds that grew in
vacant lots in Brooklyn, chicory. Kept
in shape. Yes, she would sit next to him tonight.
If she had time, she'd flirt with him, but she had
a proposal to push. It required research on
the landlords, but she knew how to do that, and she'd teach
the younger folks. It was important to pass on
skills.
  She sat down to her copyediting, putting on
her reading glasses. She hated them, forgot them
on every table and surface in the three-room
apartment. She had never worn glasses until
she'd turned fifty. But she could no longer do
copyediting without them, and that was her livelihood.
She freelanced for several journals and
magazines and the occasional small- to middle-size
publisher. She had a reputation for knowing many
languages and jargons and being fast and careful.
She operated mostly through messengers, because she had
been dropped by a couple of large publishers when
they realized how old she was. On the phone,
no one could tell, for she still had a fine clear
speaking voice. As if being seventy-two made
any difference to her accuracy. Snobby little
pipsqueaks out of Ivy League schools ran
publishing now, and their knowledge of the world was as narrow as a
shoelace.
  She lit a cigarette and drew heavily on
it as she began proofing the biography of a civil
war naval captain. Karla would not let her
smoke in Rosella's apartment. They acted as
if a puff of smoke would give the twins TB.
Beverly had to ration her cigarettes, no
more than half a pack a day, not because she gave a
damn what the scare mongers said, but because that was all
she could afford. She got by, she got by just fine
on Social Security and her copyediting and the
check Suzanne sent every month. That covered some
extras, like a pack of cigarettes every other day
and the deli from Brooklyn. An occasional
bottle of wine. Scrupulously she used the
check from Suzanne only for extras, so that no
one could say she was not supporting herself, as she had
since she was eighteen. It was absolutely
essential to stay independent.
  She had never gotten used to being old. When she
would walk down Broadway she would half
expect men to stare at her the way they always had,
something about her walk, the way she carried herself, the
sense of style she had been born with. She would
catch sight of herself in the mirror and think, who
is that old bat? Because inside
seventy-two-year-old Beverly Blume was
Beverly Blume, the same woman she had been
since eighteen, full of energy and opinions and
ready to laugh and ready to take a chance and
clear-eyed about what was going on in the world.
  She remembered the first time she had a
cigarette. She was eighteen, still living at home
with her parents, on Twelfth Street near
Second. They called it the East Village
now, but it had been simply the Lower East
Side then, the ghetto, and they lived all seven
of them in a four-room cold-water flat next
to an old-age home for the indigent. She had
taken a job in a box factory on Third
over near Avenue B. After she got her first
week's paycheck, she was walking out when that
gorgeous Irishman Jimmy fell into step beside
her. He asked her to supper. Now, she knew
if she didn't show up for Shabbat dinner, her
mother would kill her, so she only took a walk with
him and had a soda, a chocolate egg cream.
As they walked, he offered her a cigarette and
lit it for her like a gentleman. Then he kissed
her. She could still remember how sweet and sultry
that kiss was, tasting of the tobacco and chocolate
on both their breath. Nothing had ever come of it--she
had been a virgin and living at home--but she still
relished that first cigarette and that kiss in the
doorway of a dry cleaners. Ah, she had had
some fine times, no doubt about it. Life was mean
and hard, but it handed you something sweet now and
then, something really sweet.

       4 Thirteen Years Earlier
                Elena

  Elena was furious when Sam moved out. She
knew it was her mother's fault. If Suzanne
had been nicer to him, if she had played up
to him, he would not have left them. She knew he had
had an affair with a client. She had listened with a
glass at the wall to her parents' fighting. Not that
Sam was her father, but he was better than most
fathers. Suzanne should have fought for him, got
dressed up, had her hair done over, sat in his
lap and told him how wonderful he was. Instead
she stupidly blamed him for being unethical, as
if ethics had anything to do with sex. Even Elena
knew that was garbage, and she was still a stupid
virgin at fourteen.
  Even her cat Big Boy missed Sam, whose
lap he liked to sit in. Everything was falling
apart in her life. Her two best girlfriends,
Genette and Helen, were no longer hers. Ever
since they'd moved to the South End when she was just
entering the first grade, Helen had been her other
self. Helen was Black, but they had the same
name in different forms, and Helen's mama was a
lawyer too. Genette transferred in at the
beginning of third grade. Helen was closer
to Genette than Elena was, but they all hung
together, inseparable in and after school. She learned
all her jump rope chants from them. Then around the
time they were all going to take their exams to go
to Boston Latin School, Helen's family
moved to Lexington. Elena saw her a couple of
times after that, and they called and wrote, but their
closeness gradually died. Genette had gotten
interested in boys, and her grades were suffering.
She didn't make the cut. Elena went on
to Boston Latin alone, and Genette got into a
crowd in her middle school.
  Even though Elena was in seventh grade, at
Boston Latin she was called a sixie, and they
were the bottom of the heap. The school went through
twelfth grade, and the older kids were so
sophisticated and knowing, they were always picking on the
sixies. Elena had begun to grow tall, so she
wasn't towered over like most of her class, but that
didn't keep her from being a target. The first
year, she tried hanging with the Latina
girls, but she was studying for her bat mitzvah,
and that set her apart. She wasn't about to pretend
she wasn't Jewish.
  So far, she had done it all right, the way she
was supposed to. Her mother kept telling her that
Boston Latin was the place she had to be, like a
private school except it didn't cost
anything. That was a big help after the divorce,
since her mother had to buy Sam out of the row house
they lived in on Rutland Street. She had
gotten A's in everything but math. Like her
grandma, she liked languages. She was taking
Latin because she had to and Spanish because she wanted
to. She got through algebra only because the guy
sitting next to her let her cheat off his papers.
That was Evan, who lived in the South End too
on West Newton, although he'd gone to a
different grade school. Evan was almost as dark
as she was and Jewish too. He was great at math,
and in ninth grade, he took a science prize.
He was skinny and wore glasses and refused not
only to go out for sports but to take football or
basketball seriously. Boston Latin was big
on sports in spite of being an elite school:
their traditional rivalry was the Thanksgiving
football game with Boston English. Evan and
Elena decided not to attend. It was like going on
strike. They went to a slash movie instead and
sat there laughing, making bets on who would get
cut up next.
  The first time they had sex, they were stoned and kept
giggling. It didn't hurt, but it didn't feel
like much. They didn't date like the straight kids.
Both his parents worked, and her mother was always at the
law office or in court, so they just fucked whenever
they felt like it. When Rachel was home from grade
school, Elena and Evan just went in Elena's
room and shut the door. They played music
loud. She had Rachel cowed. She knew even
if Rachel suspected anything, she wouldn't
tell Suzanne: she'd be scared to. Evan
put on his father's overcoat and went into an adult
bookstore. He bought two books about sex and
several videos. After that, he spent an hour
looking for her clitoris till he found it.
  If other girls asked her about him, she said
he was like her brother. They were alike, intense and
dark and singular: more than her brother or her
lover, Evan was her twin. They liked the same
thrash bands that drove adults frothing
insane. They also liked some alternative
groups. They liked dark violent movies that
felt real. They liked taking their clothes off and
trying different things. They always did their homework
together and they always had sex, using a condom. They
went through a couple of packs every week. Neither of
them could drive a car, for they were both fourteen.
They had to use their bikes or the MBTA to go
anywhere. They bought their dope in the
neighborhood, at a spot outside a
drugstore where guys she knew from grade school
were selling. Evan lived in a brick row house
a story shorter than hers, but his family had the
whole place except for the basement apartment.
Both of them loved their neighborhood, with its
blocks that matched, each block a particular
type of row house, but every one of them individual
too, all red brick and some with funky little strip
gardens in the middle of the street.
  Evan and she didn't talk garbage like love
and families. They talked about peace and death and
hypocrisy and lies. They did his next science
project together, and then they let the mice go in the
basement of the school. She hoped they could make it
on their own.
  She listened to the other girls talking about their
boyfriends, and it wasn't like that with her. She
wasn't crazy about Evan. She didn't dote
on him. It was as if they were each other's shadow.
He called them E squared or E to the
second power. There was no hand holding, no
smooching, no rings or pins or flowers. They
fought sometimes and called each other names, but it never
lasted. They would start laughing, as if for them to be
anything but one being, one conspiracy, one gang of
two was a joke. She could not even have said if she
loved Evan. It was like loving her arm. They were a
unit. His parents and her mother asked questions, but they
had no idea how much time the two of them spent
together. Their grades stayed high. She thought
sometimes that if she robbed banks, it would be okay
with Suzanne, just so long as she maintained her
grade point average and stayed in Boston
Latin. Suzanne was always telling her how
lucky she was to be there, but she didn't fit in.
She was too weird for the other girls. She was
always an outsider, and if she stood with a group of
girls, conversation slowed down or even stopped.
She got her breasts and she was tall, so guys were
always trying to feel her up, poking at
her, making noises, but they were scared of her too
and never bugged her about dating.
  Evan and she could talk about everything. They
talked about being Jewish. He told her, "My
grandma made it something important, beautiful.
My parents, it's like something they stepped in and if
only they scrape hard enough, they can get rid of
it. Last year they had me get bar-mitzvahed,
but it was like this meaningless thing. My grandma had just
died and I felt shitty, and all they could think
about was how much the party was costing and who was the right
caterer and who to invite and who to leave out and who
gave the best presents. It was gross. They're
gross. Don't take it seriously if it
doesn't make money."
  "I'm not into the religion. I want to have both
my heritages. Sometimes I wish I knew more
about Sephardic Jews. My aunt Karla, she
told me that's what I look like, and she told
me something about them. They speak Ladino instead of
Yiddish. She's got this adopted daughter,
Rosella, who I think looks a little like me.
When people see us together when they're visiting or we
go to Brooklyn, they think we're sisters."
Sephardic Jews seemed to Elena much more
romantic than Ashkenazi like her family. She
read a historical novel about the Spanish
Inquisition and conversos, and it was cool and frightening
and epic. Elena did not bother to explain
to Evan that Rosella was really Puerto
Rican, because that was less interesting.
  The next year there was a new student who
transferred in from Kansas. They both had
history with him. He wasn't a jock, a club
kid, one of the super students who ran the school,
or a burnout who would be tossed, but like them, one
of the weird kids. He was between them in height and
had pale sleek blond hair he wore to his
shoulders. His eyes were a dark haunting blue.
He had a scar through one light brown eyebrow.
His cheekbones were high and sharp, and his profile
looked to her as if it should be carved on the prow of a
sailing vessel. He always had shadows of stubble
on his cheeks that made him seem older, more
experienced. Half the guys had just started shaving.
Evan had a darkish beard but not much of it. He
only had to shave every other day, and it took him about
a minute, although she did like to watch, 'cause it
was such a male thing to do. She was almost hairless on
her body and never even shaved her legs.
To each other, they called the new kid the
Decadent Viking. "I want him," Evan
said.
  "So do I," she said. "We'll share him."
  They made up stories of capturing him, tying
him up and doing things to him. His name was Chad. It
seemed a silly name for such a fascinating-looking
guy. He was broody. He sat at the back,
and even when he knew the answers, he sounded as
if he resented being right. She sat down next
to him in assembly one day. His wrists stuck out
below his shirt. There was a scar on each of them.
He caught her looking at his wrists. They stared
at each other. He did not hide his wrists.
Then he smiled.
  For two months they didn't do anything more than
make up stories about Chad the Decadent
Viking. Then Evan asked him one day, "Want
to study for finals in history with Elena and me?"
  "Is she your girl?"
  "I don't even know what that means. ..."
  They went over to Evan's house. He
didn't have a pesky kid sister, only an
older brother, at William and Mary. For the first
hour they studied together up in Evan's room,
smoking cigarettes and dope and studying really
hard, but she knew Evan was planning something. It
made her feel tense and high. She trusted
Evan and she didn't care what he did, as
long as Chad didn't laugh at them. She got
excited just sitting there, knowing that Evan was about
to make his move.
  He stood up suddenly and came over to her,
drawing her to her feet. He began unbuttoning
her blouse. "Get undressed, Elena, and lie
on the bed."
  Chad remained in his chair. "Hey. What's
going on?"
  "Watch," was all Evan said. He waited
till she had stripped and lay on the bed, feeling
exposed but also high from the way that Chad was staring
at her. She knew that she looked good and that he
couldn't turn his eyes away. In the meantime,
Evan quickly undressed and put on a condom.
Then he lay down on top of her. He could
tell she was excited already and simply pushed in and
began to fuck her. She glanced over at Chad.
He was staring at them, but he hadn't moved. She
loved the feeling of him watching them, as if he was
in their power and couldn't break away. She
came quickly. So did Evan.
  He stood up, not covering himself, and came to stand
in front of Chad. He motioned for Elena to come
over. Slowly, loose and wet after coming, she
obeyed. She almost felt sorry for Chad.
Instead of looking cool and in command the way he
always did, he looked lost, almost scared, but he
stood his ground. She had no idea what Evan
was about to do, and in a way she was scared too, but she
trusted him. It would be something wild. She thought
Evan was enjoying the upper hand and the power to shock
Chad.
  "Do you want us?"
  Chad was so startled he couldn't reply for a
moment. Then he repeated, "Us?"
  "We come as a set. We don't separate.
Or are you scared?"
  "I never did it with a guy."
  She knew Evan hadn't either, but he wasn't
going to say so, and she wouldn't betray him. "Have you
ever done it with a girl?"
  "Once ..." Chad said reluctantly. His
gaze returned to her body. His eyes excited
her. Evan never looked at her that way. They were
so used to each other's bodies, they took their
nakedness as a matter of course. Anyhow in the
year they had been fucking, her body had changed.
She had real breasts now, and her behind was curvier.
She liked Chad staring at her. Chad raised his
gaze to look into her eyes. "Don't you have a will
of your own?"
  "We're together," Elena said indignantly.
"He doesn't make me do what I don't
want to. We're honest with each other."
  "Do you love Evan?"
  Elena took a step backward away from
Chad, shaking back her hair. "I don't know
what that means."
  Chad grinned narrowly, as if she had given
him back a measure of initiative. "But I
do."
  "If you don't want to, nobody's making
you." Elena made as if to reach for her T-shirt
from a Twisted Sister concert.
  He caught her wrist. He gave her a push
so she sat down hard on the edge of the bed. Then
slowly and deliberately he undid his belt
buckle and then his shirt and then his jeans. Evan
watched him with his head cocked, smiling slightly.
Chad was erect, so he couldn't be that put
off. She stared at his cock, because it was only the
second one she had ever seen. He looked
different from Evan, sort of bigger and looser
around the top. "I'm not circumcised," he said.
"My father doesn't believe in it."
  Evan straddled his desk chair, keeping out of the
way. Elena waited until Chad had
undressed completely and sat on the bed's edge
next to her. Then without waiting for him to make a
move, she slid toward him and, taking his face in
her hands, gave him a sensuous tongue kiss.
She moved her thigh against his. She wanted him
so bad she ached. She did not think she had ever
wanted Evan this strongly, but she would never let
him know that. It would hurt his feelings, and he was
her own. Her flesh. Her more than brother.
  Chad's hand was on her breast now, a little
awkwardly, squeezing hard. With Evan she would
have instructed him, but she could not take a chance on
discouraging Chad. They had wanted him and now they
were going to have him, both of them. Now he was lying on
top of her, kissing her almost frantically. She
put her hand on his prick and guided him in.
Normally she would have liked fooling around with him
longer, but she did not want anything to go wrong.
He thrust hard and came almost at once, long
before she could. Then he lay spent on the bed,
while she eased out from under him.
  Evan let him lie like that for several minutes.
Then he motioned for her to get up. She took the
desk chair, which Evan had dragged to just beside the bed
to watch more closely. Evan lay down beside
Chad. At first he just caressed him from the back,
making spoons. Evan's chest and pubic hair
were dark, almost black, and Chad's body hair was
the palest brown. Chad was tanned over his arms and
chest. Evan was milky pale. Evan
patiently caressed Chad, reaching around to his
cock. Then he rolled Chad onto his stomach,
used the surgical jelly and slowly, caressing his
way, put himself into Chad's ass. Chad winced and
bit at the pillow, but once Evan was in, he
seemed to mind it far less. She liked watching.
She loved watching. She was possessing Chad through
Evan's cock. She was fucking him through Evan.
She wanted Evan to thrust harder, but he was
careful, gentle. She could almost feel his come.
Then he rested for a moment, turned Chad over and
began to suck his cock. She came just watching
them.
  Afterward Chad lay as if dazed. "Do you do this a
lot?" he asked finally, trying to recover himself.
  "We fuck all the time," Evan said. "We
study and we fuck. But it's the first time we've
ever taken anybody else with us. You should consider
it an honor." He was grinning widely.
  "Did you like being with us?" Elena asked almost
shyly. He was so beautiful, Chad with the blue
blue eyes and the carved face.
  "I've spent worse afternoons." He reached out
and pulled her down on the bed with him. He was staring
into her eyes. "I don't understand you."
  "Sometimes I don't understand myself."
  With a light caress now his hand moved over her
breast. "You're like something I made up lying in
bed at night."
  She jerked away. "I'm no fantasy."
  Evan said, "You know, we could all have a lot
of fun."
  Chad looked at him, his hand coming to rest on
Elena's bare thigh. "I think you're right."




                  
               Suzanne

  Rachel was silent for an entire week.
Suzanne tried to call her twice at the
apartment she shared with two other rabbinical
students. Suzanne left pleas on the answering
machine, but Rachel did not return her calls.
Finally a reply came in her E-mail.

Mother:
  I really can't imagine what you were thinking of,
to give my room to Elena. I just can't believe
you did that to me. I think it was incredibly
selfish of you not to give up your gym or your
office, but to make me the sacrificial lamb.
I am certainly not coming home until I have my
room back. You are always expecting me to put
up with anything to satisfy Elena, who can never be
satisfied anyhow!

  It seemed to Suzanne that Elena somehow
occupied seventy percent of the apartment. Her
jacket lay on the back of the couch. Her
CD'S were scattered about as if flung.
She left the television on and wandered away.
Her flame red brassieres and bikini panties
hung on the rod in the bathroom. She was on the
telephone as much as in high school, when
Suzanne had gotten Elena her own phone in
self-defense. Furthermore Suzanne had
to deal with Sam, who dropped in on his adopted
daughter a little too frequently for Suzanne's
comfort.
  Sam was ensconced on her couch at the moment.
"I pulled Judge Fogarty. That man must be
a hundred years old. Why don't they have
mandatory retirement for judges? It would help
if they had to leave the bench before senility
overcomes them."
  Sam was big--broad shoulders, big bones,
and curly sandy hair. He had been a
good-looking man when she had married him,
twenty-three years ago, but he had spread out
considerably since then. She had never been
madly in love with him the way she had with
Elena's father, Victor. She had not wanted
to be. She had seen herself going down the same
road as her mother, rendered idiotic by blind passion
for a series of ill-chosen men. Sam had been a
rational choice. She had made that choice as much
for Elena as for herself. She had loved him,
certainly, but with clarity, with her mind as well as
her body.
  Their careers had got in the way, so that in an
average week, most of the time they spent together was in
bed and almost all of that, asleep. They were both young
political lawyers very much on the make and far more
passionate about their cases than about each other.
Their marriage had disintegrated under the
pressure. But Sam had always been a good father,
to his three children with his current wife (who did not
work); to his own daughter Rachel and to Elena,
whom he had adopted shortly after the marriage.
She had chosen well in that regard, and as much
trouble as Elena had got into, it might have gone
far worse if Sam had not been there for her.
Elena's own father had disappeared before she was born.
Suzanne heard about him very occasionally. He was in
the mountains in Nicaragua. He had been shot
down on the streets of Guatemala City. He
turned up again in Chile. He was in jail in
Panama. She wondered. His family had
money, and she would not be surprised if he were
running one of their corporations instead.
He did Elena no good, except to excite her
imagination. Suzanne still remembered seeing a
composition Elena had written in her second
college: "I am a bastard out of Brookline,
Massachusetts. I am a bastard, the daughter
of a bastard. My father was a hero and a guerrilla
leader." Suzanne sighed. Sam was looking at
his watch.
  "Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn't have been more
truthful with Elena about her father. Then maybe she
wouldn't romanticize him so ridiculously."
  Sam shrugged. "Compared to us, he was a
romantic figure. You were crazy about him."
  "For a while. For a while. Until he took
to abusing me. I did not find that romantic."
  "I bet you didn't." Sam grinned.
"Besides, what harm does it do to give her a
sense of a colorful background? It isn't as
if she's about to go off to the jungle to look for him.
Or as if she's ever taken a serious interest in
anything political." Sam looked at his watch
for the third time.
  Sam was waiting for Elena. Doing anything with
Elena usually involved a great deal of waiting.
Elena had only begun to dress when Sam
arrived. They were going to a concert by a Chilean
group. If Elena did not appear soon, they
would be late. But Suzanne was determined not
to hurry Elena. She was constantly telling herself
to treat her daughter as if she were a houseguest rather
than a child of hers. Of course, she rarely
entertained houseguests. She was too busy.
Aunt Karla came to see her and the girls every
year, yes, sometimes with Rosella and the twins, and
Beverly visited maybe once every five years.
That was about it. But what she tried to keep in mind
was that a hostess was far more polite to a guest than
a mother to her daughter, and she needed to muster all
her tact and resources to handle having Elena
back home. She felt an intense usually
subliminal fear for Elena, always, that she would
get into some desperate trouble, that something violent
would happen to her. For Rachel, her fears had
always been more mundane. Don't catch cold.
Don't strain your eyes. Are you sure you can
handle six classes? But there was no limit to her
anxiety for Elena.

  The redwood protest case has been
postponed again, this time by the prosecution, so
I am free to fly out. I have appointments with the people
I have to see Monday and Tuesday. It sounds as
if having an office there might happen, but I
won't know till I talk to supporters
face-to-face and see if I can be effective
in the Northeast. I'll be flying in Friday
night, hoping that we can spend Sunday together.
Let me know if that's possible. How are your
schedule and other commitments?

Suzanne hit "return" on her E-mail
program and sat there, trying to figure out what
to say. Panic told her to type that she was going
to be out of town, out of state, out of the country. She
was planning to drop dead on Friday night. The
memorial service had already been arranged.
Jake was not invited.
  What does it matter, she told herself, if
he's disappointed in me. So what? So we will or
will not continue corresponding. Maybe I'll be
disappointed in him. Of course I'll be
disappointed in him; how could I not be? What good
can come of this? She could not think what to say and she
ended up getting off the computer altogether, as if even
being on a potential link with Jake was too
dangerous to handle.
  Elena was still in bed. Suzanne ran upstairs
to Marta. "He does want to see me! He
wants to spend Sunday with me. What am I
going to do?"
  "I guess you're going to spend at least part of
Sunday with him." Marta smirked. "So what could
be so bad? Even if it's a disaster, you can eat out
for a month on the story. It's romantic,
Suzanne. Meeting a man on the Internet is
so trendy and fin de si@ecle. I'm rotten with
envy."
  "If you truly are, dearest one, you can meet
him in my place. He doesn't know what I
look like."
  "Hmm." Marta pretended to consider, head
cocked. "But Jim and I have to go to New York
this weekend." Her son, Adam, was at NYU.
"He's showing the film he made. I have to go see
it. I was thinking of asking Beverly if we could
sleep on her couch. I don't want to drop a
thousand for a stupid weekend. If we have a free
place to stay, we can fly instead of driving and
worrying myself sick about the car." Marta had a
new Jeep Cherokee she did not look
forward to parking in Manhattan.
  "Ask her. Beverly likes you. In fact I
think she likes you better than me."
  "Well, my mother always liked you better than
me. We should have traded mothers twenty-five years
ago and made everybody happy."
  "What a wonderful idea." Suzanne sat
up. "Elena could get into that. Suppose when you
went away to college, you exchanged parents.
Everybody by lot draws somebody else's. Or
a computer could make matches. So much less
angst. I think I'm onto a great piece of
social engineering."
  "You've changed the subject from Jake.
Jacob Kallen, eco-terrorist."
  "He is not, counsel. He is an
eco-activist."
  "Jacob, who wrestled an angel, or god,
or whatever." Marta played with her long braid
the color of weathered shingles. "Think he might
want to wrestle you?"
  "Don't be obscene, Marta. This is an
absurd t@ete-@a-t@ete I backed into. The
truth is, I never thought of him as a real man.
He was a figment of my computer. And I liked it
that way."
  Suzanne did nothing about Jake that day. The
next morning she did not even turn on the
computer but spent an extra fifteen minutes on
the treadmill, then took a long hot shower. By the
time she had breakfast and dried her hair, it was
time to rush off to the university.
  The gender equity committee of the law school
met every Thursday at seven-thirty, so she had
supper with Alexa, a friend from women's studies,
and then went to her committee meeting. When she got
home just after ten, Elena was watching a gangster
movie on TV. At the next commercial she
strolled into the kitchen, where Suzanne was setting
up her coffee for the next morning. "Oh, some
guy called. From California. He wanted the
address and directions."
  "Is he going to call back?"
  "He goes, "Well, is she going to be
around?"' Anyhow, I looked at your schedule and
I told him that Sunday looked clear all day.
Is he some kind of friend of yours?"
  "You told him I'm going to be around? On
Sunday?" She spilled ground coffee all over
the counter. "You said I was going to be here?"
  "Well, aren't you?"
  "I hadn't decided."
  "Whatever," Elena said, losing interest. She
strolled back into the living room, where her movie
had resumed.

                  
               Suzanne

  Suzanne spent an hour dressing for lunch.
Jake had called her from the Inn at Harvard
Square. She felt like a bloated adolescent
about to go on a date: ridiculous and pitiful.
To spend all this time worrying about her appearance was
humiliating. No matter what she did to herself,
she would still look forty-nine and she had never been
beautiful. She was simply pleasant-looking and
small, and that summed up the best she had to offer
to the gaze of any man.
  The truth was, most of her clothing that could be
called dressy was selected for class or for
court. She had a bunch of suits in gray or
navy and some silk dresses, conservative and
careful. She had two party dresses she wore
at holiday time. She had a couple of
caftans, comfortable and interesting-looking, in which she
entertained, on the occasions she had time and energy
to do that. She had exercise gear. Almost everything was
ordered out of catalogs, because she found shopping
tedious. It was always too hot in department
stores. It took hours to find anything, and then
they would be out of size eight. Finally she dressed
as if for class (rather than court): nice pants,
a chenille top, and a silk blazer. Earrings and
pendant. She avoided looking in the mirror and
marched out of her bedroom.
  "Where are you going?" Elena asked
suspiciously.
  "I might be back for supper, I might not."
She paused. "I almost certainly will be back.
But I'm not sure."
  "I'm going out with this guy, Roy, so I
won't be here for supper anyhow. But where are you
going?"
  "To meet a friend."
  "What kind of a friend? This is that guy who
called from California, isn't it, and you're
dressed up for him. Who is he?"
  Suzanne shrugged, a little flustered. "I
hardly know him." She yanked on her
coat and ran for the door.
  "So who is he," Elena called after her,
stimulated into curiosity by Suzanne's
reticence. "How do you know him?"
  All right, all right, she would meet Jake and
blow their silly thing out of the water and she would save
ten minutes every morning. Get it over with.
  The two elevators in the atrium of the Inn were
side by side. She was sitting, as she told him
on the house phone, on a couch facing them. Two
men got out, arguing. A woman and a child. Then the
doors opened and a small man emerged, looking
around. Of course he was not small compared to her, but
still he struck her as small. She realized that
both the fathers of her children had been a foot taller
than she was. She had never thought about that. Did
she have a preference for tall men? Had she had a
preference for tall men when she was younger? In
years, she had not exercised a preference for men of
any sort. He was perhaps five feet seven and
wiry, small boned. He had piercing brown
eyes in a sharp face. His brows were arched in
surprise (what had he expected?) and he was
smiling tentatively. He stuck out his hand.
"Suzanne, I presume?"
  "Jake?" They shook hands, rather shyly. She
asked, "How was your trip?" Then forgot to listen
to his answer. His handshake had been firm, his
hand warm, almost hot.
  Afterward she could not remember anything they said on
the way to the restaurant. When they sat down at
a table, he said, "You shouldn't be nervous with me.
I haven't bitten anyone in several years. And
I have been tested for rabies."
  That cut through her mental fog. She was beginning
to feel desperate. They had not had a real
conversation yet and she felt herself frozen
into mechanical jabber. She was an experienced and
competent litigator, seldom at a loss on
her feet. She had pulled more than one case out
of the fire with a brilliant closing, but here she was
unable to make coherent contact. She had somehow
expected him to be a vegetarian, but he said he
ate just about anything. "Except ham and
anchovies. I don't know why. A childhood
antipathy."
  She pulled herself together. "Have you ever spent time
in the Boston area?"
  "Is that like doing time? Sure, I went
to Brandeis as an undergraduate. I was
born on Long Island and then my family moved
to Worcester. But it's been close
to twenty-five years."
  "It's a big leap from the Bay Area.
Climate, culture, how people relate.
Different ocean, different orientation. You face
west, we face east."
  "I thought if you had time, you might take me
on a tour and let me look around. Not the tourist
things. But neighborhoods. The kind of places
I might live and shop and eat and hang out."
  "I'm free," she said, although she had planned
to work on her brief. "We'll improvise."
  The food was good, and he had an appetite.
As she began to relax, she began to eat. There was
something about his voice, deep and resonant and
quirky, that moved her. She liked hearing him
talk. She asked him about his recent trip
to Antarctica. He told her about acres of
penguins. The breath of a whale--fishy, warm, that
touched his face when she breached beside the small
boat. Sterile mountains beautiful and grim. It
was summer there in January, and the sun barely
set, glittering blindingly off the ice. But often
it was overcast and the wind cut through his clothes. He
kept getting windburn. His eyes had a
steadiness and intensity that made her keep catching
on his gaze as if it were barbed. His hands were large
for his size but finely shaped. He had presence.
Of course: he was an organizer, a macher, a
leader. Why should she be surprised that in the flesh,
he radiated strength, energy like radiant heat?
As they were leaving, he said, "Let's take a
walk around here, if you're willing."
  They walked along the Charles together. The sun
was out, the snow had melted the week before, and the
temperature was above freezing. It was not yet
spring, but it promised spring. The Charles was
free of ice. Families of mallards paddled
along. There was even a rower pushing the season.
  "It'll be a shock for you to go through winter again."
  "I lived up in the mountains for a couple of
years. We had fierce winters. We were snowed in
sometimes for a week." He made a gesture up
over his head. "That was my mountain man phase."
  "But for the last fifteen years, you've been
living in Oakland, and you haven't seen a
snowflake or an icicle or a sleet
storm."
  "Actually, in Antarctica," he said
mildly, "I saw quite a lot of ice. Besides,
even at home, I did go through a couple of
earthquakes and a fire that just missed my house
by three blocks. ... Are you trying to talk me
out of this move?" He sat down on a bench in the
sun and motioned her beside him. He turned to her
then, taking her by the shoulder. "What are you
afraid of?"
  "In general? Death, accidents, disease,
something happening to my daughters--"
  "All right, let's go at this another way.
What do you want, Suzanne?"
  "I want things to continue. I like my work. I
like my house. I like my friends."
  "Everything just the way it is. No changes."
  "Well, life is never like that, is it? I'd
like Elena to find her own place to live. I'd like
my mother to make an effort to see me as I am,
I'd like my dean to stop patronizing me--"
  "And what do you want from me? Anything?"
  "I don't know," she said in a much softer
voice, almost choked. "What do you want?"
  "I'll show you." He took her hand and stood.
He kept her hand as they walked. "For two
years we've been talking, we've been
flirting, we've been sharing our minds. I
don't want it to be less real now. I want
it to be more real."
  "I'm not ... perhaps who I've seemed to be
... I don't ... have affairs, go out with men, that
sort of thing." She was deeply, poignantly
confused. She knew him and she didn't know him
at all. He was a close friend, an intimate
confidant, a stranger.
  "Obviously you've been with men in the past.
Your daughters weren't the result of virgin
birth. You told me about their fathers."
  "I can't believe how much I told you."
  "Believe it. Why not? You have some idea who
I am." With her arm tucked securely in his,
he walked briskly back in the direction of the
Square.
  "It was easy in my office, alone there in the
mornings, typing messages on a screen. I'm
sure I came across as far more at ease, far more
... sophisticated, far more interesting than the
woman you see. I'm dynamite in a
courtroom but so awkward right now I feel like a
twelve-year-old."
  "You're out of practice. But I'm not
a set of skills to be mastered, not a brief
to be prepared. I'm just a man who's interested in
you."
  Heat slammed up her body. She could think of
absolutely nothing to say. Yes, she had
entertained fantasies about Jake, but the best thing
about them had been that they were fantasies. They cost
her nothing. They did not make her vulnerable, being
as easily put away as Rachel's paper
dolls had been, into a box covered with gold
foil that had held chocolates. But this fantasy
was out of its box.
  "When you listed the things you want, you never
mentioned love. Most people would. I would. Why not?"
  "I suppose because I'm a realist."
  "And you don't let yourself want what you don't
think you can have?"
  "Something like that. Or something I think might harm
me."
  "I won't harm you. Intentionally. We all
step on each other's toes now and then."
  The heat of his hand on her arm made her
imagine the heat of his body. He had remarked
at lunch that he had a high metabolism and
burned up food. His body felt like a little
furnace glowing in the chilly air.
  She felt giddy. This was all unreal. It was
intoxicating and flattering and outside of her real
life. He would go back to California and she would
go home and it would be sealed into itself, whatever
happened, whatever. For some reason, she felt
safe now. She relaxed. He put his arm around
her as they approached his hotel and she did not
draw away. She felt like laughing aloud.
Nobody would believe this was Suzanne the
Sensible being led along to his hotel room, which was
obviously where they were headed. This man had emerged
from her computer and he would vanish back into it.
Lately she had been having occasional hot
flashes and she had missed a couple of periods
last year, including one in December. Her
gynecologist told her it was the onset of
menopause. Change of life. Perhaps one
aspect of that change was hallucinating this man whose
arm was around her waist, whose hip occasionally bumped
hers as they walked, as they crossed Mass.
Ave., as they entered the lobby of the Inn.
  She felt ridiculously pleased and excited,
even aroused as they went up in the elevator and
walked along the corridor open on one
side to the central atrium, then around a corner
to his room. It was neat. He had his laptop
set up and several folders on the desk. No
clothes lay around, no wet towels.
  He put his hands on her hips. "We've
both been moving toward this for two years. Don't
be coy with me now, Suzanne. Don't you want
to know how we are together? Haven't you imagined this
time and again?"
  "Of course," she said honestly. She did not
add that imagining was all she had expected.
  He kissed her then, his mouth strange and
invasive and exciting. As she kissed him back,
as she loosened his shirt even as he undid her
blouse, this molten Suzanne was familiar. She
felt twenty again, back in late adolescence and
early adulthood when sex had been an
adventure, when she did not yet fear her own
body and the consequences of passion. Here, she thought,
there were none. It was all happening in cyberspace.
He was a visitor in every sense of the word. A
Suzanne she had thought dead, stirred,
blossomed, grabbed control. Things moved quickly.
She had always liked leisurely lovemaking, but
her hunger wanted satisfying now, fast. He was
slender but tight, the body of an active man,
not buff like a young athlete, for he had a soft
belly, but fit, stronger than his size would
indicate. Easily he picked her up and
spread her on the queen-size bed.
  It had been so many years since she had put
anything in her mouth besides food and a toothbrush,
she was surprised how quickly her old skill at
giving head came back to her. She ran her
tongue around the head of his prick, then took him
in her mouth. She still felt giddy. He was going
down on her before she suddenly thought of
contraception. She hadn't been on the pill in
over a decade. Lectures she had given her
daughters about unprotected sex came back
to her with a sudden rush. "Uh ... do you have a
condom?"
  He showed her the packet and she helped him
put it on. He hurt her a little, although he
entered slowly and she was wet. It was hard
to separate the pleasure from the pain, the sharpness from
the urgency. He settled into a steady rhythm and
she bounded up to meet him, thrust for thrust. He
was waiting for her and she concentrated. As excited
as she was, she did not think she could come.
She was too nervous with him. After several
minutes, she faked an orgasm, as she had
remembered doing with Sam. He moved then into a
harder rhythm, building toward his own climax, and
as he pounded into her, the almost forgotten rush of
warmth and power and pleasure began building in her
until she exploded just before he did. Afterward she
felt like laughing, because she had made much less
noise during her real orgasm than she had when
she mimicked pleasure.
  They lay for a while loosely holding each
other. Then they showered and she began his tour of
neighborhoods. It was clear they would make
love again later. Have sex, at any rate.
Although she felt close to him, she did not trust
the intimacy. Nor did she fear it. Some women
went on spa vacations to feel better. She was
having a one-day affair.

                  
                Beverly

  Beverly got Elena when she called. "So how
come the only beauty in the whole family is
answering the phone? How come I'm so lucky?"
  "Only you'd say so, Grandma. It's my good
luck to get you. So how are you doing? Did you
get it on with that writer guy you were interested in?"
  "I'm bumping along, what else can I do?
I haven't had any luck with him yet, but I
haven't given him up for dead. So how's the
restaurant?"
  "I was fired."
  "Those kind of jobs, they'd just as soon get
rid of you as exploit you. Hang around too long
and they figure maybe you'll get something on them.
The fish is rotten. The kitchen is full of
roaches."
  "All of that!" Elena laughed. "I got
evicted and so I moved home. I'm looking for
work. You know, Mother doesn't really like having me
around. I'm always in the way. I always was."
  "Elena, nobody can not love you! You and your
mother, you just never understand each other. You're more like
me, you're spontaneous and you get into trouble and you
have a big mouth and men are always wanting things from you.
She never does anything off-the-cuff. She'd have
liked you to make a reservation six months ago.
Mother, I plan to be fired next February and
then I plan to be evicted, so you can
expect me around the first of March."
  "Grandma, you have the wickedest tongue. So how
come you called?"
  "I'm raising money for some tenants fighting
eviction--"
  "Ah, you want to put the bite on Mother."
  "Well, she can afford it. She makes more
money than the rest of the family combined. Look,
I'll call back tomorrow evening. Where is she?"
  "Taking some guy to the airport. I don't
know where she met him, maybe at some conference?"
  "Suzanne has got herself a boyfriend?"
  "I been trying to figure that one. He
didn't sleep here. Frankly I think he's
just a friend of a friend, whatever. But she got decked out
to see him."
  "Let me know. How about yourself, my beauty
girl?"
  "Nobody I give a shit about, frankly.
Just guys."
  "Wait till you get to my age to be
disillusioned. By now either I already did a thing with every
old geezer I meet, or I might as well
have, because I know his whole story from his ex-wives and
ex-girlfriends. Or I had one just like him in
'fifty-five."
  "I want something more special, something purer,
something more intense. Something that matters, Grandma.
Not a guy like a Diet Coke, not a guy like a
hamburger. I want to be moved. I want
to be forced to care. I want to love, really
love, again. Do you think I'm too burned out?"
  "No, precious. You're full of fire. You
just need someone strong and right for you."
  The next afternoon, Beverly went up to the Bronx
to walk the picket line with her friends in the union.
They were good kids. They worked so hard and they got
so little. Her heart went out to them. She talked with
dozens of them, some in Spanish, some in French as
best she could, the Haitians, the brothers from
Mozambique. It was a cold raw day with a wind
that felt like it was peeling the skin off her face.
They had bitter coffee in a plastic container, and
one of the women went off for sandwiches and chips.
After she had marched the line for a couple of hours,
her knee began to give her trouble. After two
guys from the American Nazi party had beat her
up in Central Park years ago at an
antiwar rally, her knee had never been the same.
They liked to target the women, especially
to gang up on women they guessed were Jewish.
  She had to stand on the subway going home as it
was already rush hour, and she just stayed on the
express to Ninety-sixth. When she got to the
top of the steps, she felt dizzy. She dragged
herself along the twelve long blocks to her apartment
past the unisex beauty parlors, the theater that
showed Spanish-language films, the shoe
shops, the hardware store, the nail salons, the
gym, the travel agencies. She was too tired
even to stop and pick up something to eat. She thought
about chicken from the take-out place but she didn't
have the energy. Maybe she had something she could
defrost. She was beat. If that Chino-Cuban
place that had been on the corner still existed, they
would have delivered. She was struck by how as she went
through the streets of her neighborhood, she marked
distances by landmarks that no longer existed. Oh,
that's a block from where the New Yorker
bookstore used to be. Yeah, she's upstairs from
where Murray's Sturgeon was before he moved.
Turn left at where the Thalia was. A map
of ghosts.
  She let herself drop on the couch in her
apartment. Mao came and lay on her chest. He
felt heavy, but she was too tired to push him off.
In a way it had been nice to have Marta and Jim
here. She enjoyed the gossip about Suzanne,
things Suzanne would never tell her. She enjoyed
having an independent relationship with Suzanne's
best friend, and she enjoyed having a good-looking man
like Jim around. Still, the apartment was small. Although
the couch opened into a double bed, there was only one
bathroom. She was not much of a hostess, but she
did run out for bagels and lox and cream cheese,
and make them coffee. It turned out Jim was no
longer drinking coffee. Beverly sighed. People
increasingly seemed to define themselves by what they
didn't do: didn't smoke, didn't eat
fat, didn't eat meat or anything palatable.
Didn't wear leather. Didn't drink.
Didn't. If you ever said you loved something, they
would say you were addicted to it. What a boring bunch
of people the next generation had turned out to be. Jim
was a handsome man, a little younger than Marta, but he
kept himself up. Since he'd lost his teaching job
and become a therapist, he spent a lot of time
at the gym. She had never known anybody who
worked out the way people did now. Guys were never
hesitant in the old days to take off their
shirts. Everybody felt as if showing some skin was
a treat to the other sex. Women didn't feel
they had to look like bone thin models to turn on a
guy, and guys didn't think they had to be built
like Charles Atlas. After all, a lot of them
did heavy labor. In fact her friends used
to laugh at the muscle guys. Oh, they liked
some strength in a man, but not those carved muscles
that were all the rage now, like pet snakes, she
thought, exotic, useless, and time-consuming to keep
up.
  Two boys in the neighborhood had drowned
last September, jumping into the river to swim in
their clothes. Men did that more often these days, because
they were getting to be as vain and ashamed of their
bodies as women. They were embarrassed to strip
to their underwear. They might not look like an underwear
ad from the subway, Calvin Klein and his ghouls.
So they went swimming in their clothes to cool off,
and the waterlogged oversize pants dragged them to their
deaths.
  But Jim was proud of his body. He liked
to show it off. For a while he had practiced distance
running, but then he had taken up weights instead.
She really liked him, but she didn't see the
point in wasting all that time heaving and grunting around
a gym, paying out good money to pretend to be a
teenager. He was some kind of therapist, she had
never gotten it straight. The truth was, she
thought all therapists did was persuade people that
problems were theirs, not the system's. Why blame
General Motors or Coors or General
Dynamic, if you could blame Mommy? Jim
had been a college teacher, but in a budget
crunch, he had been laid off. Like so many.
She'd never had a profession beyond being an
organizer, although she had worked at a great many
jobs. But none of them had meant a thing besides a
paycheck and a chance to do some political work.
Sometimes, just a paycheck.
  Beverly sighed. When she looked back over
her life and thought about all the good changes she had
hoped for, she could get into the dumps. But what the
hell. You just had to keep slugging and have fun along
the way. Mao was kneading her chest with his paws.
She knew he was hungry, and she felt
guilty. Finally she hoisted herself up. Felt
dizzy again. Now what? High blood
pressure? She rarely went to the doctor--just a
waste of time and more money for the drug
companies. Dr. Moss had given her those
ghastly pills that had made her feel like her head
was disconnected from her body. She had stopped
taking them two months ago. She wasn't going
to poison herself to profit some drug conglomerate.
She undressed and put on her nightgown. She
sure wasn't going back out, as wiped as she
was.
  She dragged herself into the kitchen, ashamed of her
fatigue. She opened a can of salmon and split
it with Mao, toasting a bagel left-over from
Marta and Jim's visit. Marta shouldn't have
let herself go gray. She made more money than
Jim. That didn't shock Beverly the way it would
have a lot of women. After all, her own mother, working
as a button maker, had made more than their father.
Papa got what work he could on the Lower East
Side, but Mama had always been the real
breadwinner.
  Many political women had been able to get work
when their husbands were blacklisted or worse, so it
was no big deal to her that Marta earned twice
what Jim did, but she could tell it was an
issue to him. He had not expected to have to go back
to school at thirty-six and begin a new career.
Eight years later, he was always looking back
over his shoulder at the life he should have been
leading. She suspected him of getting it off
sometimes with his women patients, but she had never said
a word to Marta or certainly not to Suzanne,
who'd make a federal case of it. She wouldn't
just see that a little of that on the side probably
kept him from seriously straying. After all, a
guy in a position of authority and sympathy with a
woman patient, why wouldn't they both be
tempted? She just observed the signs and kept her
mouth shut. Beverly had known Marta as long as
she'd been tight friends with Suzanne. As
husbands went, Jim wasn't half bad.
  She had wondered how it would go with the three of them
sharing that big old rambling house, wondered if
Suzanne wouldn't be tempted by Jim, wondered
if she could bottle up her jealousy at living
with a couple. But Suzanne had always been
controlled, except for that early fling with the Latino
guy. Beverly had not liked Sam. His
politics were okay, but he was a cold fish,
superrational, the kind of guy who would rather argue
all night than have a good time. He had married
again, a woman who had a trust fund and
no ambition but to please him and keep him, and she
did. Too bad Victor wouldn't marry
Suzanne. She would have liked him for a
son-in-law, but Victor wasn't the marrying
kind. Apparently Suzanne could live in the
same house with Jim for years and never give him
the eye. Admirable, sure, but a little inhuman.
Suzanne had set out to make herself over into a
flawless woman, one without weaknesses. A
perfect professional who consumed herself in her
work. So much of what Suzanne did seemed a
silent reproach to herself about the way she lived her
life.
  Beverly lay on the couch watching her old
TV because her eyes were too tired to read. Before
she'd gone up to the picket line, she'd knocked
herself out, finishing that manuscript she was
copyediting. Now she couldn't see straight. Her
vision felt blurry. She turned on a PBS
program on cybernetics, but she just couldn't
focus.
  When she woke, the TV showed nothing but snow.
It must be the middle of the night. She couldn't see
the clock well, which was unusual. When her eyes
got tired, she couldn't read, but she could usually
see distant things just fine. She didn't feel
... right. She sat up slowly and her dizziness
increased. Her head hurt, sharply. She lurched
to her right and almost fell to the floor, realizing she
could not put weight on her right arm. Her right hand
would not close. She had a feeling of something in her
head, something pushing, something pressing. She grabbed
the phone clumsily in her left hand, the hand that still
worked, put down the receiver and poked at the
numbers. She was calling her friend Lucy, who
answered after four rings. Once again Beverly
clutched the phone in her functional left hand.
She was ready to cry with joy when she heard
Lucy's voice. Lucy would come over and help
her into bed and maybe call a doctor or
persuade her that nothing was really wrong. Maybe
she was just dizzy or had a virus. Some
middle-ear virus that made her dizzy. But why
couldn't she move her hand? It didn't feel like
pins and needles. It didn't feel like anything.
Why was her hand paralyzed?
  "Who the hell is this at four A.m.?"
  She meant to say, "Lucy, something's wrong with
me," but what came out sounded like slow and slurred
babble.
  "Some stupid drunk!" Lucy snorted, and
hung up.
  She stumbled across the floor, hanging on to the
sofa and then the bookcase and then the door. Her
right leg was dragging. Something was terribly,
terribly wrong. Was this what dying felt like? Her
life was not flashing before her, but her heart was pounding
fiercely and her head felt as if it were split
open. It was as if some dentist had injected
Novocain into half her body. Her right side was
not only numb but uncontrollable, as if she had
been cut in two.
  She put it together as she finally got the door
open. She was having a stroke. Utter panic
seized her. She leaned on the doorpost, frozen
with terror. Calm, calm, calm, she told
herself. You've had concussions. In antiwar
demonstrations, she had been clubbed. On
picket lines, she had been knocked down and
kicked. Stroke was just a word. She was still
alive. Her mind was functioning. If she could
recognize what was wrong with her, it could not be so
bad. Several of her acquaintances had suffered
strokes. One had never walked again. The other
recovered his abilities, but afterward moved more
slowly, more hesitantly. But at least he could
move. In the hall, her leg gave way under her
and she fell. Then she crawled forward until she
could knock on Madeline's door. They were not
friends, but they helped each other out. Madeline fed
Mao when Beverly went out of town--which seldom
happened nowadays. Beverly walked Madeline's
poodle when Madeline had the flu or visited
her son. They accepted packages for each other
and shared leftover goodies.
  She lay on the floor banging on
Madeline's door, but Madeline did not come.
However, the Korean woman across the hall looked
out. "Mrs. Blume, my God, what
happened?" She turned and shouted to her husband in
Korean.
  Now Madeline finally came to the door, opening
it an inch on its chain. "Beverly, what are you
doing on the floor? Did you hit her? What's
going on?"
  "She's been mugged in her apartment, I bet.
Look, she's in her nightgown. We have to call
the police. It's like that poor woman on
108th."
  Beverly tried to tell them that she was
having a stroke. Madeline bent close to her.
"Look at her face. It's all twisted."
  Mrs. Kim called 911. Mao came
creeping out, but Madeline saw him and shut him in
her own apartment. Madeline and Mrs. Kim
ventured into Beverly's apartment, Madeline
holding her cane and Mrs. Kim brandishing a
kitchen knife. "There's nobody in here. No
windows open."
  It was as if she were already dead and a ghost. She
could hear them, she could understand them, she could think
clearly what she wanted to say, but she could not
make her tongue speak the words. She had become
far more mute than Mao, who was pretty good at
making his needs known. She was a piece of
furniture, a sack of flesh lying on the
floor. She began to weep quietly with
frustration. The tears ran over her face and
onto the floor.
  The police figured out she was having a stroke
and called an ambulance. She was only half
conscious, but she was relieved when finally she was
carried into the rickety elevator to be taken
downstairs. She was terrified, but at last she was
off the floor. Doctors dealt with strokes all
the time. Lots of people her age had strokes. They
would fix her up at the hospital.

                  
               Suzanne

  Suzanne had been in court all day. Her
client's suit against the Dedham Police
Department was in its second week, while
colleagues were covering her classes. She was
planning to wind up today. When the secretary from the
law school appeared in the courtroom,
Suzanne was startled. The woman passed a
note to the court officer, who glanced at it and
passed it to Suzanne.

  Your mother has had a stroke and is in a
hospital in New York. This is the phone
number. The dr's name is Weinstein.

  She stared at the note. "Are you sure?" she
mouthed.
  The secretary nodded. Suzanne asked
to approach the bench. She showed the judge the
note. He frowned. "How old is your
mother?"
  "She's seventy ... two."
  "Can anyone take over for you?"
  "Yes, Your Honor." She motioned to the
defense table, where Marta was sitting. "I'm
finishing in perhaps half an hour. Let me do that and
then I can try to find out what's happened."
  "It sounds as if what has happened is
perfectly clear."
  "If we could adjourn until Monday, I
would be able to fly down and see my mother."
  The judge motioned the police department's
counsel forward. "I don't have any objection
to the delay. Do you, Counsel?"
  She called the hospital from her car phone.
"Mrs. Blume is in intensive care. Are you
a family member?"
  "I'm her daughter."
  "I thought her daughter was in today. ... No,
I see that was her granddaughter. She has had a
stroke, but she's conscious now."
  She packed in fifteen minutes, left
instructions with Elena, and ran upstairs. Jim
was sitting at his computer. He saw clients
three days a week and the rest of the time he worked on
his book Shafted and Beyond: A Manual for
Those Rendered Superfluous in Middle Age.
He had a book contract with a small publisher
of self-help books and had been working on the
manuscript for two years. She told him the
situation and asked him to keep an eye on things
downstairs. "But don't you think Elena will
manage?" He swung around in his swivel chair
and faced her, leaning back, every bit of his posture
indicating a willingness to be interrupted, to talk
about her situation.
  "Just in case." She did not take the seat he
beckoned her to. Her time was tight.
  Jim was a tall, rangy man with an intense
smile and the capacity to brood for weeks. His
hair was light brown and his eyes such a pale
blue they looked silver. She liked him, although
she considered him vain, but her real relationship was
with Marta. Jim was an appendage. They rarely
had a private conversation. They got on, but they
did not truly know each other in spite of having
lived in the same house for twelve years. It was
amazing, Suzanne thought, how much time you could
spend with someone and never actually get personal with
them. "You and Beverly have a rather fraught
relationship, as I recall."
  Recall? He had visited Beverly last
week. He was getting into therapist mode. She
began to feel a time panic. "Listen, Jim,
I really have to get out of here." She was never
comfortable when Jim switched into his therapist
role, and right now she could not deal with it.
  "I care about Beverly," he said, leaning forward
to indicate a change of focus. "She's a
strong, vibrant woman. Let us know how she
is, please. If you need help down there, I
could juggle my schedule and drive down."
  She thanked him and tore downstairs. Her
supper consisted of a yogurt eaten standing and a
tangerine she peeled while waiting for the shuttle.
Her stomach was clenched on itself, sore, knotted.
All those years of smoking. How many times had she
begged Beverly to quit? How many articles had
she sent her? Books on the tobacco
conspiracy, hoping that politics might succeed
where health facts failed. Beverly ate fatty
foods, fast foods, processed meats,
fruit, yes, but almost no vegetables.
  Yet Beverly was such a vital woman,
opinionated, energetic, stubborn, independent,
and feisty, an elegant woman, still
attractive. She caught colds every winter that
sometimes went into her lungs, but she had never had a
serious illness. Beverly always said, "I'm too
busy to get sick." Suzanne could not imagine
what she would find. Was her mother dying? She knew
nothing about strokes, imagining lightning striking the
brain. A charred smell. Fire and devastation
within.
  She went straight from La Guardia to the
hospital. At first they would not let her see
Beverly. She did find out that the stroke had
occurred the night before and that a neighbor had
called the ambulance. She sat in the small
lounge with its air of general tackiness and
anxiety soaked into the worn upholstery and the wan
carpeting, crowded with other individuals and
family groups waiting for word, for a little time with their
people in intensive care. It was as if each person
or little group was inside a glass box of their own
fear, unable to see each other or speak a word
across the room.
  Rachel walked in. They hugged each other
fiercely. Suzanne kept herself from crying
by making faces into Rachel's shoulder.
Rachel too was taller than Suzanne, but not as
tall as Elena, with a mane of curly light
brown hair. Rachel drew away to call her
attention to a young man. "Mother, this is Michael."
  Shifting gears abruptly, Suzanne looked
him over. A slight, almost wispy man, he had
a firm handshake. Probably worked on that. "Do
you know each other from school?"
  Rachel nodded. "We've been seeing each
other since late September."
  So why didn't you mention him? Usually
Rachel told her more details of her life than
Suzanne could absorb, so why had Rachel
held back? Michael seemed to be Jewish,
he seemed intact and functional, so what did
her silence mean? Suzanne filed away that
query for later. "You've seen Beverly?"
  Rachel nodded. "It's awful. She can't
talk. Her right side is partly paralyzed."
  Rachel knew exactly what had happened,
including the names of the two neighbors who had found
and helped Beverly. Finally the nurse told
Suzanne that she might go in to see her mother for
fifteen minutes. She felt like shouting a
protest that she had not come all the way from Boston
to see her mother for fifteen minutes.
  In the hospital bed, Beverly looked like a
broken doll. Her right arm lay on top of the
covers as if discarded there. Her face drooped.
Her mouth twitched but no words came out. Yet
Suzanne could tell that her mother recognized her.
Beverly attempted to speak but produced only
muddy gurgles. Suzanne felt her chest
tearing open with grief and pity. She took
Beverly's limp right hand. The left hand moved
over to stroke her arm. Suzanne fought back
tears, bit down on her cheeks to keep from losing
control. She was terrified for Beverly, who
looked half dead. were the doctors doing enough?
She was just lying there with tubes in her. She must
ask them if there wasn't some sort of operation,
something that could be done.
  Her mother was definitely there, conscious. She
could feel the intellect behind her mother's green
eyes. "Mother," Suzanne said. "If I could
only find out if there's anything you need me to do for
you."
  Her mother was stroking her arm. No, not stroking.
Suzanne looked at the finger. M. Beverly was
sketching an M. Suzanne scrabbled
in her bag for a pen and a bit of paper and put them
in her mother's still functioning left hand. However,
Beverly was right-handed. Still Beverly dug at the
piece of paper with the pen. M again.
  "M, Mother? What's M?"
  A jagged A. A crooked O. "Mao.
Your cat. You want me to find out what's
happened to your cat?"
  Beverly nodded.
  "Ah, you can move your head yes and no. That's
great." She felt an enormous flood of
relief. At least there was some communication
possible. "You can understand what I say?"
  There was familiar irritation in that vehement
nod.
  "When they kick me out, I'll go to your
apartment. How will I get in? Will the super let
me in?"
  Beverly traced a P on her arm.
  "P? Postman? Pills?"
  Beverly groaned. She traced a U, then
an R.
  "Purse? Your purse?" Suzanne felt
absurd. They were playing twenty questions, a children's
game she had played with Aunt Karla many times.
She could see from Beverly's furious expression
on the side of her face still expressive that her
mother was aware of the absurdity and hated it. Beverly
had always been a formidable presence to Suzanne,
judgmental, opinionated, and always in her own
way, elegant. A small woman like
Suzanne, but not a woman who felt small in
her manner, her impact, her bearing. Suzanne
had always felt she was a disappointment to her mother,
who combined militancy with style. Even at
seventy-two, Beverly remained a flirt, a
charmer. Nobody in their right mind would ever call
Suzanne flirtatious or charming. She was
capable. She was organized. Her intellect was
far more honed than her mother's. She was successful.
But in her mother's presence, she felt awkward,
lumpy, unadorned. Plain but serviceable. The
woman in the bed was a parody of her mother, but
Beverly was present, trapped behind that ghastly
grimace, that twisted face and limp body.
Suzanne felt guilty she had not returned
her mother's call. When Elena had told her that
Beverly needed a check for some tenants' strike,
Suzanne had been miffed. She had plenty of
expenses and causes without needing her mother
to put the bite on her. She should have called back
anyhow.
  She searched the room and the purse turned up.
Indeed, the keys to Beverly's apartment were inside.
"I'll stay in your apartment tonight."
  Beverly nodded.
  "Is there anything else you need?"
  Beverly threw up her left hand in a helpless
gesture. A tear rolled down her cheek from her
left eye. The nurse appeared. "Now, time for
our little patient to get some rest."
  Suzanne could not endure hearing Beverly
referred to in such a condescending way. "Please.
My mother is a very able, highly intelligent
woman. I want her to have the best care. I
want her to have intensive rehabilitation."
  "I'm sure Dr. Weinstein is doing everything
that can be done." The nurse ushered her firmly out.
  She had supper in the hospital cafeteria with
Rachel and Michael, who were returning
to Philadelphia that night. "But I'll come
back. It's easy. We can even study on the
train." Rachel fussed over Michael as he
ate. She did everything but cut his meat for him, and
she probably would have done that if he had eaten
any. They both seemed to subsist on salads and
juice. Of course, the food here wasn't
kosher. Michael seemed to take being fussed over
for granted. He liked it, obviously. She would
never approve of the way her daughters behaved with
men. Rachel had been involved with a few boyfriends
previously, but this seemed different. She could not
remember Rachel acting so possessive. In
some ways they behaved more like an old married
couple than like people who were just falling in love. She
wondered sharply if they were living together, for they had
a strikingly domestic air. Maybe that's why
she'd had so much trouble getting Rachel on the
phone in the last few months.
  "Rachel, I didn't mean to offend you with
Elena using your room. She's been evicted.
She won't use the room off the kitchen. But her
old room has been my law office for six
years now. I can't move my stuff out. It's
set up with the office equipment I need, my law
library, my files. You know she isn't going
to stay long. She doesn't like living with me one
bit."
  "It's just so like her to take my room. What's
wrong with the room off the kitchen? It even
has its own bathroom."
  "She says I make too much noise in the
mornings."
  "Ah, the princess Elena sleeps till
noon. ..." Rachel grinned suddenly. "It's
fine, Mother, really. I overreacted. Michael
said I was being a baby. It isn't as if it's
really my room any longer." Rachel had the
habit of suddenly breaking her own pouts and
snapping to with a luminous smile. She had done that
since she was eight or nine. It was a charming
habit that always melted Suzanne. It was an
enormous relief to focus on Rachel and her
boyfriend for a few moments, to block out the condition of
her mother's battered mind and body.
  "It's your room whenever you want it,
Rachel."
  "I mean, next year I won't even be in the
country." Rachel turned to beam at Michael.
  Suzanne clenched her hands in her lap. She
found the notion of her daughter in Israel a little
too dangerous to enjoy contemplating. "The
college is still planning to send you to Israel, in
the middle of this crisis?"
  "Mother, Israel is always in the middle of some
crisis."
  Both future rabbis laughed. Suzanne
did not.
  After Rachel had left with Michael,
Suzanne went back upstairs. She was
permitted another fifteen minutes with her mother.
It was even more frightening than before, for Beverly kept
sinking into unconsciousness.
  Then Suzanne took a taxi to the apartment where
she had spent a night on the couch maybe fifty
times over the past ten years. Mao greeted her
hysterically. She supposed he remembered her and
she also supposed he was frightened and lonely. The
apartment smelled musty. She threw her overnight
bag on the table and went to investigate. She
took the trash and garbage to the incinerator and
began to deal with dirty dishes in the sink. Someone
had been feeding Mao but had not bothered washing his
saucers.
  She fed him again, fussed him up, and then went
to talk to the neighbors. "You've got to do something
about that cat," Madeline, the neighbor who had
been feeding him, said. "I'll call Animal
Rescue for you."
  "Are you tired of feeding him?"
  "He cries all the time. And he can't stay in
that apartment alone. I'm not going to empty his shit,
believe me. Just call the Animal Rescue people
and they'll take care of him."
  "Execute him, you mean. I'll take him
until she gets out of the hospital."
  Madeline shook her head. "She had a
stroke, honey. Don't you get it? She'll
never be herself. She can't even talk. She can't
work anymore. How's she going to pay the rent?"
  "I'd better call the landlord. Give me his
name. I'll pay the rent for the time being. My mother
is a strong woman. People can make amazing
recoveries from strokes with good rehabilitation and the
will to work at it."
  She sat in her mother's small apartment, feeling
a weight as substantial as a ton of rock on
her head. It was all too much. What was going
to happen to Beverly? What was going to happen to all
of them? Her mother had gone in a few short
minutes the night before from being an independent working
woman to being perhaps an invalid, perhaps what? Her
responsibility? Or would Beverly recover?
Suzanne felt guilty even asking herself these
questions, but as she sat in the chair usually occupied
by her mother, some book on British labor
organizing in the mines still open where Beverly had
left off reading it, Mao in her lap with his
claws dug into her sleeve as if she too might
vanish, she could not turn off her mind. She could
not vanquish the fear and the questions. If Beverly
needed care, there was no one else to provide it.
Karla lived on her teacher's pension and with her
adopted daughter, Rosella, and family.
  Her laptop was in her briefcase. She set
it up on the coffee table, went on line, and
began to access the various websites on stroke.
She sat up until after midnight reading whatever
she could and getting more and more depressed and more and more
frightened. She could not believe what had happened
to Beverly, so quickly, so unjustly--although as soon
as she thought that, she mocked herself. What illness was
just? What calamity was earned?
  She wished she had possessed more energy to draw
Michael out. Obviously Rachel was far more
interested in him than she had been in any young man
before. Rachel was not as glib and seductive with men
as Elena--in fact, Rachel probably did
not have it in her to be truly seductive. She had
fallen in love before, but always she had
been more serious than the boy. Rachel had
recovered quickly from these small romances for her
gaze was fixed on academic achievement. For
several years she'd had a passion for tennis and
played in local tournaments. She had been
involved with ecological organizations since
ninth grade. Whatever Rachel did, she did
wholeheartedly, and now she seemed to have seriously
formed a couple.
  Thinking about Rachel gave her a little rest from
studying stroke, but she could not focus long on her
younger daughter. She kept feeling as if a wall
had fallen on her as well as on Beverly. She
had no idea how to proceed, but she could not endure
that feeling of total loss of control and total
helplessness. She would have to have an earnest conversation
with Dr. Weinstein about her mother's condition and the
options for treatment. She must make the doctors
and nurses understand that she was actively monitoring
what happened to Beverly. It would not do any harm
to let them know she was a litigator. Doctors
grew marvelously thorough when dealing with a lawyer.
She felt a thrill of protectiveness: she would
show her mother how useful she could be. She could
master the medical jargon. She had already picked
up a fair amount of the vocabulary on-line tonight.
Tomorrow she would attack. Whatever Beverly needed in
the way of therapy, medical intervention,
Suzanne would make them understand was to be provided
for her.

  Suzanne sat in the back of the shuttle with her
mother's cat in his carrier whimpering under her.
Occasionally he gave a sharp cry of despair just
for emphasis. It was Sunday evening, and she was
exhausted. It felt wrong to leave Beverly in the
hospital where Suzanne was not at all sure
she was getting the kind of attention she needed. But
obviously given Beverly's condition, the
hospital was the only place for her.
  There were elaborate instructions available for
introducing one cat to another in a household, but
all these rules involved much more time and energy than
she had. She hauled the carrier into the kitchen and
opened it. Mao bounded out, hissed at everything
around him, and ran out of the room before she could feed
him. She chased after him, but she had no idea where
he had gone. "Elena," she called. Half the
lights in the flat were on and in fact the TV was
turned to music videos, but Elena was
nowhere. How could she leave the house with the
television running? Suzanne tried to gain
control of herself. It had been a bad weekend, and
it was shaping up to be a bad year. No reason
to take that out on Elena. She sat on the couch
feeling flattened. The image of Beverly in the
hospital bed threaded by tubes, her face
twisted, unable to speak, haunted her. A fat
tear leaked from her eye. She rubbed both eyes
hard and sniffed her nose clear. No point
weeping now.
  Everything had happened so quickly, a big wind,
a storm out of nowhere. She turned on her
computer. Ninety-seven messages awaited her,
many from her law and feminist li/servs, but a
number were personal. Those she would read. Jake
had sent two messages:

  I hope you enjoyed the weekend as much as I
did. Meeting you at last was a delight. As I
told you when you were kind enough to give me a lift to the
airport, my meetings went well. I'll share
my notes with my staff and directors. We should
come to a decision soon about New England. I'm
hoping it will be positive. I felt very
positive about our time together.

  This morning another message:

  I haven't heard from you. I hope this means
you're busy catching up on the time you lost with me
last weekend, and not that you are having regrets?
Don't second-guess your emotions--what
happened was good.

  Jake felt distant to her, irrelevant.
She had no energy to spare. Second-guess?
He would be insulted if he knew that she had almost
forgotten about their time together in fretting about
Beverly. Suzanne sighed deeply, could think of
nothing to write, and went upstairs to check in with
Marta. She found Jim and Elena at the kitchen
table just finishing dessert while Marta cleared.
"Do you want some supper, Suzanne? There's
leftover chicken cacciatore. Jim made more
than enough."
  Suzanne cocked her head, considering. "I
guess I am hungry. I've been living on
hospital cafeteria sandwiches for three days.
I'd love some of Jim's chicken."
  Elena got up at once. "Thanks for
supper."
  "Hey," Jim said. "I never finished telling
you my lab rat story."
  "Later. I'll remind you."
  "Elena, there's a black cat in the apartment.
Remember your grandmother's cat?"
  "Chairman Mao? What's he doing here?"
  Suzanne explained briefly. "So don't
let him out. Maybe you should put some food
down."
  After Elena left, Suzanne said, "I
hope she didn't invite herself to supper. The
way I just did."
  Jim frowned. "She isn't an angry
teenager any longer. She's her own person
now."
  Marta asked, "So are you here for a while?
I'm not quite up to speed on your sexual harassment
case. If there's a chance I might have to take
over, I'd better master it."
  "I think I can confine my trips down there
to weekends, unless there's another crisis. I
paid the rent on her apartment, cleaned out the
refrigerator and brought her what she needs in the
hospital. ... As to what's going to become of
her, Marta, I have no damned idea. One day
you're healthy and making some money and living your
life. The next day you're in a hospital bed
with tubes sticking into you, unable to walk or talk
or stand or take yourself to the toilet. I can't
think of much that's scarier."
  "How's your blood pressure?" Jim
asked.
  "Right now, probably off the scale. That's
one of the reasons I exercise so passionately.
It keeps my blood pressure down."
  "I should get one of those handheld machines and
start taking mine regularly," Jim said. "My
father died of a heart attack when he was
sixty-two."
  "I don't know what my father died of. The
widow never told me."
  "Shouldn't you know?" Marta sat across the table,
sipping decaf while Suzanne ate.
"Suzanne, just because you never knew your father
doesn't mean his genes aren't active in you. You
didn't spring parthenogenetically from Beverly, no
matter how much it may have felt that way."
  "I don't even have his widow's
address. ... She didn't encourage contact.
This chicken is great." She smiled at Jim,
who looked pleased. He had taken up cooking in
the past few years. He was the best cook in the
house.
  "Suzanne, Jim and I have been talking.
Elena needs a job and Jim needs a
receptionist. Why not?"
  "Elena is not the world's most responsible
citizen, you know," Suzanne said slowly.
"I'd be really happy for her to go back to work, but
have the two of you thought this through?"
  Jim waved his hand airily. "You're too
down on her. It's not a demanding job. It's
three days a week. She might even like it. I
don't have an elaborate history with her, like
both of you, so she's more herself with me."
  "Did you ask her?"
  "Of course," Jim said. "Why wouldn't I
ask her? She's an adult and it's a quieter
environment than the restaurant. I don't
expect it to be permanent, but my office is
falling apart since my assistant got a
full-time job."
  "What do you think about it?" she asked Marta.
  "It sounds worth trying. Jim's been
complaining about getting behind in billing, his records
incomplete, double-booking appointments. ..."
  Suzanne understood. When Jim complained,
Marta felt obliged to solve his problems.
Probably the idea of hiring Elena had been
hers to begin with: since Marta had defended Elena
in court, she had always felt a little responsible
for her. Not that Elena usually appreciated that
any more than what she saw as Suzanne's
meddling.
  When she came downstairs, she was able
to locate Mao immediately by the sound of loud hissing
--a den of snakes--and a harsh yowling she could not
imagine issuing from her gentle Sherlock in
spite of seeing him with his back arched and his fur
on end. Tamar was up on the counter out of harm's
way, but her fur too was erected in an
attempt to look even bigger than she was.
Both cats were bigger than Mao, but he was standing
his ground. The confrontation had occurred over a
dish of cat food that Elena had put down on the
kitchen floor. She wished she could explain to her
cats that Mao was a visitor and needed
support, not hostility. She scooped
up Sherlock who made terrible threats but allowed
himself to be carried off to her bedroom, where she shut
the door and fussed over him. Then she unpacked
her carry-on bag and tried to figure out
exactly what overdue piece of work she should
tackle first. It promised to be a long night.
She would answer Jake in the morning. At the
moment, he felt like one more demand in an increasing
list of them. When she tried to call up his face,
she saw only Beverly, twisted and in despair.

  Elena was sprawled on the sofa with Mao on
her lap. "So I think I found a job."
  "In Jim's office?" Suzanne asked
cautiously.
  "It doesn't pay great, but it's not exactly
brain surgery."
  "Elena, if you go to work for friends, it doesn't
mean you don't have to work hard, get there on time, the
whole ball of wax. Because they're friends, you can't
just walk out."
  "Do you think I'm a total flake? I've
held all kinds of jobs, and it's no big deal
for me to work for Jim and handle his little office."
  "But, Elena, sitting up in a therapist's
office making appointments isn't anything like as
lively as working in the restaurant. The
proprietor may have been oppressive, but you
liked the scene. You told me you loved going
to after-hours bars and hanging out with the kitchen crew
and the waiters."
  "Yeah, it's a scene, but I've had it.
Nothing real comes of it, just surface excitement.
Some waiter goes, Look who just walked in.
The second-string sportscaster from Channel
Four, big deal! Enough. ..." Elena slowly
scratched Mao under his chin and he leaned into her
hand, safe in her lap from the big orange
monsters her gentle sweet cats had become.
"Mother, you're the one been telling me for years,
think about your future. Think about what you want
to do. Et cetera. Et cetera."
  "But surely the future you crave isn't being
a receptionist."
  "I want to see what a therapist does.
You're always making jokes about therapists, but when
people hurt, that's where they go. Remember when you thought
it was awfully important for me to spend months
and months in therapy!" One of Elena's rare
references to what had happened twelve
years before. "Besides, I took a bunch of
psychology courses."
  In the course of her four colleges during
years of on-and-off schooling, Elena had taken
courses in almost everything. "Do you really think you
might be interested in therapy? You could go back
to school."
  "How do I know if it's real? I need
to watch a therapist in action. Then I can
decide."
  She would beg Jim not to blame her if it
didn't work out, and urge him not to hesitate to end
the situation if Elena was getting in his way. But,
yes, it seemed to her a better situation than the
restaurant. From her pre-academic years in the
law collective, she had a pretty good idea
how much cocaine and speed and heroin passed through the
kitchens of restaurants. It would be much better
for Elena to be out of there. She was always at risk.
She thought that Elena had stayed clear of drugs
since she was fifteen, but she could never be sure.
Never. She supposed she just wanted to believe
that.


  I feel like a bad mother. I think on the
whole I have been barely adequate--like
Beverly, my own mother.
  I'm also feeling guilty that one of my first
reactions--silent, of course--to my mother's
stroke is to worry about what impact it's going
to have on me. What will happen to her? How much will
all this cost? Is she going to move back into her
apartment, ever?
  I know I've presented myself to you as
organized, capable, rational, in control. Most
of the time that's how I think of myself. Yet sometimes
I look at my life and I feel just the
opposite is true, that everything outside of the
law is a series of overreactions and careening
blunders.
  Like my mother, I got pregnant at
twenty-two. I had just entered law school. The
smart thing I did was not to drop out but to continue.
The other smart thing I did was not to marry
Elena's father, although I have to confess he didn't
ask me.

  Victor had been five years older than
Suzanne and dazzlingly handsome. When
he began to pay special attention to her, she could
not believe it. She met him in the clinic their
law school was running, where she as a first-year
student was involved in a work-study program.
He was in danger of being deported. She could still
remember the moment he had turned and suddenly
stared into her eyes, when she felt the floor
dissolve under her soles. His eyes were large and
luminous, a radiant dark brown: Elena's
eyes. Stories swirled about Victor, as they
always would, for he looked as if he should be a hero.
Perhaps he was. He was also a skillful liar, but
then that might go with being a hero in danger. She had
never understood him. She had only experienced
him.
  She knew she should not become involved with him,
and she was unable to resist. His desire simply
encompassed her and she burned. She still could not
imagine why he had selected her among all the
women who flirted with him, even after he and she were
involved, even right in her presence. But he found
in her exactly what he was looking for. She was not
a virgin, but she might as well have been, for his
touch consumed her. She was besotted with him. She
adored him, even as part of her studied him more
cautiously than he ever realized.
  One thing she was not too besotted to figure out was
that he was not, as the rumors said, a peasant who
had taken up arms. He was the son of a family
with considerable money. He had been educated in
private schools abroad, as was the custom in his
family. Yes, he had become a radical and
yes, he had fought the government. She did not
doubt he had put himself in danger. But he was
never short of money. What he lacked was comfort.
He had decided to move in with her almost immediately,
and he expected to be taken care of. In spite
of her feminism, she did not doubt for a moment that
she must cater to him. He was semidivine. His
skin was satin. His eyes were those of a proud
predator. His stance was that of a conqueror. She
capitulated; she collapsed. She brought him his
coffee with sweetened warm milk in the mornings
while he lay in state in bed. She picked up
his clothes where he tossed them and did his
laundry. She cooked only food he liked
or purchased it ready made. He was surprised
at first how poor she was, and that he had to give
her money for his accustomed luxuries of cigars and
wine and pastries. She saw all this
clearly andwitha wry grimace at the same time that
she was melting under him and fluttering to fulfill his
every whim. So it went until she was four months
pregnant.

  I married Sam because I already had Elena and
was overwhelmed with raising her alone. I had
Rachel because I felt I had to have a baby for
Sam too, since he seemed to want one. I
stayed with Sam long after everything between us was gone
except arguments, because of the girls. Some
personal life.
  I feel guilty that I loved living
alone. For the first time in years and years, I had
quiet at the center of my life. Ultimately
I think I am a failure at human
relations, except for friendship. I have been a
silly lover, a lackluster wife, a failure
as a mother, and inept as a daughter. I do well with
cats and friends. I should have married a tomcat.

  She felt guilty, that was the one absolutely
sure thing: guilty because of Beverly, guilty because
of Elena, guilty because she had fallen in bed with
Jake like a twenty-two-year-old. Actually
she didn't feel particularly guilty about that,
she just thought she ought to. She smiled at her
computer screen. Secretly she was rather pleased at
her adventure. The only person who knew was
Marta. After all, when most people go to bed with a new
lover, they have to tell SOMEONE. Her someone was
Marta. Only little girls and adolescents were
supposed to have best friends, but maybe unmarried
women could have them too. She was sorry that Jim and
Elena had been upstairs, because she wanted nothing
more than to sit down with Marta and tell her about
Beverly in great detail, to confess to Marta how
frightened she was and how confused about what to do next.
But since she could not tell Marta, once again she
collapsed into telling Jake--her late at
night and first thing in the morning confidant.

                  
                Beverly

  Beverly was talking to a worker at a machine in the
jeans factory in South Carolina. The machinery
was all going, the air was heavy with dust, and the boss
was threatening her. She had to get out. She would
meet the workers outside. But she could not
move. Her legs would not obey her. The thugs the
bosses had hired were coming after her with billy
clubs and wrenches, but she could not move. Her
legs were too heavy. She was falling.
  She was at Jones Beach lying on a blanket
with Ralph Caputo. He was rubbing suntan
oil into her back in sweet sensuous circles.
Now he was putting something wet on her back.
Maybe she was in the water. The water was warm as
a tub. But the water dripped along her sides
and then it was cold. "Please, Mrs. Blume,
am I hurting you?" Why was Ralph calling her
Mrs. Blume?
  Beverly came out of the haze slowly as the pain
in her head abated. She could remain conscious
longer at a time. She figured out she was in the
hospital and gradually she remembered the
stroke. She thought Suzanne had been there and
Rachel and Elena. She wasn't quite sure. Her
dreams were vivid, making it hard to tell what had
happened and what she had imagined as she kept
sliding under. They had her on intravenous, but at
least they had taken the disgusting tube out of her mouth
and throat. Some of the time, she just lay in the bed and
cried--cried on her good side. The left side
remained loyal, but her right side had betrayed
her. She finally got through to the nurse with the bushy
perm that she wanted her purse. She could look
at herself in her purse mirror. Her face was
drooping as she had thought, but not as badly as she
had feared.
  She could hear and see perfectly well. The
doctor who asked the same questions five times
kept inquiring if there were blurry spots in her
vision. No, no, no, she shook her head. On
the right side, her head had a tendency to flop on
her neck. She had become a rag doll. If
only she were ambidextrous the way her friend
Nell had been. Nell had had her arm broken
in a demonstration back in the Vietnam years,
but she had been able to write with her left hand.
Well, she would just learn to print with her left
hand.
  She was still intact inside. She could think, she
could understand what the patronizing nurses said to her
as they addressed her as if she were feebleminded or
a child of four. She wanted to scream. She tried
once, but nothing came out of her mouth but a weird
inchoate banshee moan. The effort made her
drool. She clamped her lips tight.
She would not drool. She would communicate,
somehow, somehow. She was still herself, but she was stuck
inside a body that no longer obeyed her. She
had never made a mindstbody split the way
Christians and Platonists did, but here she was
in a body that no longer seemed to fit. Her
body had gone on a sit-down strike against her
mind.
  That guy, Ralph Caputo, they had beat him
up when he was organizing women in a sweatshop in
Brooklyn. The thugs bashed his head in. He
was paralyzed afterward. He couldn't talk straight.
That's why she'd been thinking of him, for she was like
him now, broken, useless. Her friends would
gradually forget her. Everyone would say, poor
Beverly, she'll be missed; but not for long.
Nobody was missed long. A new person
filled the space. How often had she thought of
Ralph in the past twenty years? She had gone
to see him a few times out of remembrance of their
good times in the sack and in the field together, but then
she too had forgotten him--until she became
him.
  They lifted her on a gurney like a bag of
trash and wheeled her to a machine and stuffed her
into it. She felt as if she were about to be cooked.
Nobody explained anything. They just treated her
as if she were not conscious, alive, involved. She
lay in the machine wanting to scream again,
claustrophobia bringing her close to panic.
By the time they let her out, she was convinced they had
stored her in one of those sliding trays in a
morgue, except for the noises the machine made.
Her hearing was just fine.
  Three doctors came in and chatted with the
nurse around her bed, discussing her. They were
talking about her the way a vet might talk about a
dog's injury in his presence, without any sense that
she could comprehend. She felt that any moment one
of them would recommend she be put to sleep, which
wouldn't be a bad idea. If life was to go on like
this, death would be preferable. Of course that was a
fantasy. They'd rather stick more tubes in her and do
tests for the next ten years. They wouldn't suddenly
say, Okay, old lady, do you want a way
out? Yes, sir mister doctor, yes!
  Rachel appeared suddenly, her light hair
blown wild by the wind. "Bubeleh, can you understand
me? It's Rachel, your granddaughter."
  Beverly nodded wildly. At last
someone was talking to her and not about or at her.
  "But you can't speak yet? I was here last
week, remember?"
  Beverly nodded. She did sort of remember.
She made a talking motion, like a turkey
gobbler with her left hand and motioned toward herself.
Rachel understood. "Well, I'm here with
Michael, my boyfriend, but they won't let him
come in to see you."
  A boyfriend? If he came with her, he must be
interested. No guy just casually dating a girl
would go up to New York with her to hang around a
hospital where her grandmother was stored. She made
a gesture from charades at drawing Rachel out.
  "Oh, you want to know about Michael. He's
wonderful. We're going to get married, but that's
a secret, I haven't told Mother. I know
she'd carry on how I just met him. We have so
much in common, Grandma. We haven't decided
whether to get married before or after we go to Israel
for our rabbinical studies next year."
  Beverly pointed to the mirror and then made the
motion of drawing out.
  "What does he look like? He's tall and
thin and very serious. He has marvelous hazel
eyes. His family are Conservative, verging on
Orthodox. His grandfather was a rabbi in Germany before
the family escaped in the thirties, but his father was
in the garment business. His father still wants him to come
into the business."
  Beverly snorted. After spending most of her
life organizing in the garment business, she did
not have a high regard for garmentos, men who
subsisted off cheap labor here and now abroad.
Always somewhere women and girls were sitting in a dim
room full of dust sewing jeans and dresses,
hour after hour, year after year for pennies and the
profit of those men. Better he should be a rabbi.
  The nurse came in and made Rachel leave just
as things were getting interesting. She was dying to ask
Rachel where he was from, were they sleeping together,
everything. Rachel went back to Philadelphia,
Suzanne appeared, and the tests went on. They
prodded and poked every part of her body. They drew
enough blood to make her anemic. "Your blood
pressure is still dangerously high, Mrs.
Blume." What got into that young doctor? He
actually addressed her. Improperly trained.
He didn't understand she had become a rag
doll. She beamed at him as best she
could and nodded wildly.
  Finally they took her off the intravenous. Some
kind of therapist came to teach her to eat, as if
she had not been eating all her life. However,
after they had been at it together for half an hour,
she was willing to recognize that she had to learn
to eat all over again. She could not use a knife
properly with her left hand, and she had a tendency
to spill the food over herself. She was a
one-year-old, not even a toddler. She could not
talk, she could not walk, and she was just learning
to feed herself. Food had a tendency to accumulate
on the numb side, where she couldn't tell there was
anything tucked into her cheek and threatening to slide
down and choke her. All she was taking now were
liquids and very soft foods like Jell-O and
cream soup. She imagined eating roast chicken.
She imagined a steak, although she had never been a
big meat-and-potatoes woman.
  Suzanne appeared, talked, worried,
fussed. Disappeared again. The nurses gave her
pills, injections, more tests. The therapist who was
teaching her to eat now made her try to stand. She
promptly fell over like a toy horse with a
broken leg. Thump. They caught her, but she
banged her good arm. She did not look forward to the
times they hauled her out of the room, no longer on
a gurney but now in a wheelchair she was picked
up and placed in. She hated to see the other
stroke sufferers all waiting for X rays, for
CAT scans, for yet more tests. She knew that
she looked as bad as they did, and that made her
want to weep and bang her head. They were all
helpless, hauled about and pestered.
  She lay in the bed, too weary to lift her
hand. Her left hand. She was terrified when she
had the energy to think of what would become of her.
How could she do her work if she couldn't speak?
How could she even buy food? What would her friends
want with her? How could she do any political
work?
  Why me? Why me? She cried and then grew
angry with herself. Really, she was sounding like one of
those people who demanded the world make personal sense.
If something happened, it was part of the divine plan.
Accidents, catastrophes all had to mean
something. Yeah, they meant pain. The days flowed
into one another and the long gray nights. Suzanne
had gone back to Boston with Mao in a carrier.
  "That was two weeks ago, Mother,"
Suzanne said. "I took him to Brookline
two weeks ago."
  At least he would be all right. Poor boy.
He would not understand what had happened. The
janitor had found him in the rubbish starving and
injured, and now he would think he had been deserted
again. If she was to die, as they said she almost had that
first night, would that be so bad? It was living on in
a broken body, dumb and crippled, that
terrified her. It was surviving this catastrophe,
the betrayal of her mind and her body. It was
enduring in the prison of her mind, unable to speak,
unable to walk, like some poor animal run over in
the street and lying in the gutter mangled beyond
recognition, but still feeling, still in pain, caught
hideously between living and dying.

        10 Twelve Years Before
                Elena

  Elena was bored. She saw high school
stretching on forever. Each day was infinite. Each
class drained the blood from her. It was like eating
dust all day. She did not know which class she
hated more, algebra or biology. The only
classes she liked were Latin, Spanish,
English, and gym. She liked gym because they were
dancing. She loved to dance. Languages were always
fun, like playing dress up in words, and she was the
best. In English she got to write about her
feelings, and she had plenty of those to spare. Her
teacher liked her. She wanted to pat his bald
head and scratch behind his ears. He perked up so
when he looked at her. She had been growing again.
She was as tall as Chad now though still shorter than
Evan. When she walked down Washington or
Tremont, men were always calling to her out of cars,
making rude noises, as if she were a dog that would
come to a whistle.
  Sam said that she should be flattered, but if some
man twice his weight leaned out a car window
to call him a sweet ass, he wouldn't think it was
so cool. When she walked with Chad or Evan,
they left her alone. It was always better to be with
them. Her mother said to her, "I know these friendships
seem all-important to you now, but high school
friendships dissipate with time. You probably won't
go to the same college. You'll develop
different interests. You'll start going out with boys
and you'll make new friends." Her mother was
worrying that she was spending too much time with Evan
and Chad. Brat Rachel had told Mother that one
or both of them were always around, which simply wasn't
true. They were at Evan's more than anyplace
else, because nobody was ever home there.
  "What do you think will happen to us?" she asked
them. They were all lying on Evan's bed.
  "Nothing," Chad said. "What happens
to anybody? They get older and stupider."
  "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
Evan mocked in a fruity voice.
  "Dead," Chad said. "Stone dead."
  Chad had gradually filled them in on his
situation. When his parents divorced, his father had
won custody. He had persuaded the judge that
he was more responsible and better able to provide for
Chad and give him a strong male role model.
"I suppose," Chad said, lying with his head
propped on his arms, hands clasped on the back
of his neck, "that I'm supposed to develop that
strong role model from his rows of fancy shoes,
or perhaps his suits, because I sure do see his
clothes a lot more often than I see Dear Old
Dad. Not that I'm bitching, you know. If I
never saw him, so much the better."
  Chad missed his mother, but he wasn't permitted
to say so. He was in therapy with a guy he
despised. His father had interviewed him first.
Charles the elder--they had the same name, but Chad
refused to be Junior and had called himself Chad
since he was ten--worked as a financial
consultant. "He gets people to let him play with
their money. Things like rare coins and annuities and
investments. He gets the world's most boring
magazines. All he talks about are ways
to make money."
  Chad was only supposed to see his mother every other
Sunday and sometimes on vacations. She lived in a
tiny apartment in Medford with the dog he hadn't been
allowed to keep. They made appointments to talk
on the phone when Charles the elder was out. She was
a secretary again, as she had been when Charles the
elder married her. Chad insisted they come with him
one day instead of going to school. It was his mother's
birthday, and he wanted them to meet her. He said
he'd take them to lunch. When they cut school,
Evan wrote notes for them, because he could
imitate all the handwritings, Charles the elder,
Evan's mother, and Elena's mother, Suzanne.
Suzanne had this terrible sloppy
scrawl that Elena could never read, that Evan said
was the easiest to fake.
  They took the green line to Park Street and
then walked to a restaurant where they were meeting
Chad's mother. Elena picked her out at once,
at a corner table. She was tall for a woman and
fair, but she had a perennially worried look.
She rose to meet them, flustered, her hands
seeking each other on the table. "Chad, are you
sure it's all right to do this? I don't want you
to get in trouble with your father. I don't want the
judge to find out and your father to drag me into court
again and reduce our visitation. We have to be
careful."
  "He never knows where I am, Mom. And he
never remembered your birthday, so there's no way
he's going to know it's today and even ask."
  "But what about school. You're supposed to be
in school."
  "It's all right, Mom. It's taken care
of."
  It was funny, Elena thought. With his father, Chad
was a sullen little boy, just a kid. But with his mother,
he spoke in a lower voice, reassuring, in
command. He was the man. Elena wondered if she
would feel less incompetent if her mother weren't
so take-charge. He even ordered for his mother,
telling her what she wanted. It was cute.
  "Are you Chad's girlfriend?" she asked
Elena.
  "Just sort of," Elena said. "My mother thinks
I'm too young to date."
  "You look very mature for your age."
  "Thanks."
  "I'm so glad Chad has friends at his new
school. Even before the divorce, we were always
moving. Every time Chad and I would start to like a
place and I'd get to know the neighbors and we'd
make a few friends, Charlie would see someplace
he liked better or he would take a job with
another firm or he would get fired and we'd have
to move."
  Her hair was blond and very short. Elena thought
she dressed better than most mothers. She had a
nice blue wool dress, simple and long.
Tall women could wear slim long things like that.
She tried to imagine what she would look like in that
blue dress, for she almost never wore dresses.
She was surprised how attractive Chad's mother
seemed. She knew the woman had little
money, but she spent it well. Elena liked her
better than she had expected to. She understood
why Chad preferred her. She was soft and quiet
to be with. She didn't butt in. She wished her
own mother were more like that. Chad's mother was soothing and
flattered them. She thought she understood better
than Evan did why Chad was crazy about her.
Evan just saw a sad middle-aged woman who
couldn't even figure out what she wanted to eat for
lunch. No, Evan didn't get it. But she
did. The next day, she let Chad know, and he
was grateful, she could tell.
  Chad lived way over in Back Bay on
Beacon Street on the side toward the Charles
River. The buildings were taller there and they
didn't match. Chad's father had the top floor
of a six-story building that was supposed to look like
some of the older row houses, but didn't really.
Some days a housekeeper was there, Mrs.
Garcia. They never went near the place when she
was working. Besides, it was a longish walk. It was
furnished with chairs and sofas and tables that all
seemed too big, as if made for a giant, in
dark woods and with carving on the chairs.
  One Thursday Chad wanted them to come over.
First he showed them his room. It looked out on the
river. He had a Nintendo and his own TV and
stereo. He put on Ozzy Osbourne.
Suzanne would only have one TV in the whole
house, and she acted as if watching it would
produce instant brain rot in Elena and
Rachel. Elena perched on the window ledge,
admiring the view. It was early spring, but there were
sailboats already. He took them into his father's
bedroom and opened the top dresser drawer.
"Look at this."
  It was a revolver, with a black handle and a shiny
body.
  "Your father has a gun in his drawer?"
  "He has lots of guns. But this is my
favorite. It's a classic. Smith and
Wesson .357 Magnum." Chad sighted
along it and Elena ducked out of the way. "It's not
loaded," he said. "He doesn't keep
bullets in them." He rummaged in the drawer and
pulled out a heavy little box. "These are the
cartridges. Want me to show you?"
  "Put that down," Evan said. "This is
stupid. Who wants to get shot playing with a
gun?"
  "I wouldn't mind it," Chad said with a big
grin. "But I know what I'm doing."
  "Famous last words," Evan said.
  "Charles the not so great taught me how to shoot.
It's one of the few things we can stand doing together."
  "You mean he takes you hunting?" Evan
made a face. "Like bravely blowing holes in
bunny rabbits?"
  "I won't do that anymore. No, we just go
target shooting at a range."
  "My mother has a gun," Elena said.
  "How come you never showed it to us?" Chad asked.
  Elena had never thought of it as anything to show.
"She keeps it locked up. She's always been
terrified I'd play with it when I was little, or
Brat Rachel would get into it. She and this lawyer
friend of hers go target shooting, like your dad. I
don't even know where she keeps it. It goes out
of the house in a green bag when she and this woman
Marta go off, like on Saturday morning."
  "How come your mother has a gun?" Evan
asked. "I mean, I can't imagine my parents
having a thing like that in the house."
  "She and her friend at the firm they're in do a
lot of domestic violence cases, and sometimes the
husbands or the boyfriends come after them. Besides, they
enjoy it, her and her girlfriend, going shooting. Like
they're playing macho."
  "I like guns." Chad leveled the gun at the
wall. "When I'm shooting at targets or
skeet shooting, I pretend it's his head.
Pow!"
  "You really hate your father." Evan sat down
on the bed, caressing the black velvet spread.
Evan didn't care about guns any more than she
did. She knew the velvet bedspread made him
think about sex.
  "He's really hateful." Chad remained
standing.
  "I don't hate my parents. I'm not
close enough to them to have any strong emotions. They're
like, my landlords, you know. Nobody I feel much
about, but they take care of repairs and keep things
running."
  "Look at this." Chad pulled open a drawer
in the nightstand next to the bed and pulled out a
pistol. "This is just a .22 Ruger, but he's
had it for years and he's fond of it. He has a
warm feeling for his guns he never had for my mother
or for me." Chad put the Ruger back
in its drawer. He flourished the Smith and
Wesson and then put it away too.
  Evan had always been in control, of her, of
Chad. But today with the guns, Chad was taking
control. He was running things his way. He opened
the locked door of his father's study with a credit
card. "Do you have your own credit card?" Elena
asked, surprised.
  "Sure. But it has a really low limit. Just
eight hundred dollars. That's really a crock.
Anyhow, I saw this in a movie. Isn't it
cool? Come on. This is Charlie's office.
See, that's his shotgun from when he used to go
hunting. The last time he went was with a bunch of
other investment sharks, to a game farm where like they have
tame tigers you get to murder for fun. It's a
Remington 12 gauge. Aren't you surprised
how much I know about guns? That's his liquor
cabinet. Want anything?"
  "How about a scotch?" Evan said. "I'm
going to ask my parents for a Visa card too.
Great idea. I bet they'll give it to me."
  "He drinks only single malt. You'll like
it." Chad handed the bottle to Evan, who took
a swig and almost choked. Sometimes when they could get
it, they drank beer or wine, but they almost never
had hard liquor. Chad however could swig it without
blinking. He must have practiced, she thought. She
took a careful sip. It made her eyes
water. Chad then took a small sip. She was
watching his throat to see how much he swallowed.
Then he handed off the bottle to Evan. "You can
hold on to it," he said. Evan was drinking more
than both of them put together. After a while he
lay down on the leather couch. Chad pointed at his
father's big TV. "I'll show you what he
watches in here." He loaded it with a tape.
  "Is that pornography?" Elena asked. She
had never seen any.
  "What do you think it is, Roadrunner?"
Chad laughed. "Sit on my lap."
  Evan was out of it. It was as if they were alone.
They had never been alone together. Chad was different
with her this time, slower. He kissed every part of her
body. After the first ten minutes, the tape ran
on, but they didn't look at it. She was convinced
he had got Evan drunk intentionally. Afterward she
realized that afternoon, the afternoon of the guns, everything
changed. That was when Evan lost control of the three
of them, and Chad came out on top. That
was the first time that Chad had sex only with her and not
with Evan too. It was the first time she had sex
only with Chad. It felt almost as if she was being
unfaithful to Evan, doing it with him passed out on
the couch. That was when everything began to be different,
the way it was until the end.

                 
               Suzanne

  Suzanne and Elena were eating an early
supper of Chinese takeout, before Suzanne
took the shuttle to see Beverly in the
hospital. "Why don't you come to New York
with me? You've always been your grandmother's
favorite. All you'd have to do is throw underwear in
a backpack and we'll fly down together."
  "She wouldn't want me to see her like that."
  "I think she's glad for any company. She's
bored to tears."
  Elena threw down her chopsticks. "I can't
do it!" she shrieked. "You know I can't stand to see
death and dying!"
  Suzanne cringed. "I'm sorry. I thought
maybe you'd gotten over it--"
  "I'll never get over it." Elena rose and
stalked from the table.
  Suzanne found the routine of taking the shuttle
to La Guardia every weekend and back again Sunday
night grueling and depressing, but her presence
helped ensure a decent level of medical
attention for Beverly. She hoped it cheered
Beverly up, although it was difficult to tell. This
weekend Beverly was furious. Suzanne could
feel the waves of anger coming off her mother, making
her feel like an inadequate ten-year-old.
  "Mrs. Blume can use her vocal cords,"
said the speech therapist. "They are not paralyzed.
Her stroke has affected her speech center. But
she can relearn to speak, if she would only try."
  "I'll have a conversation with her about trying,"
Suzanne promised. Beverly used to get
angry when anyone called her "Mrs."
Blume, for she was proud that she had never married,
but here she could not protest.
  At least the room was a little less grim.
Beverly was installed with two other stroke
patients. One was much older than Beverly, a
white-haired woman whose skull had been partly
shaven for some procedure. The other was a
woman in her forties, who wept constantly. She
talked and talked. Suzanne heard the nurse
call her Tammy. Tammy rattled off an
occasional coherent sentence in the middle of babble
and obscenities. She could not seem to stop
talking, but she also could not seem to understand a word
anyone spoke. The tears seemed to have no
connection with what came out of her mouth. "Lazy
fucking son of a bitch eat shit!" she would say.
"Rover wants a cracker. Done the dirty
laundry. Wrong dishes."
  Suzanne sat on an uncomfortable chair beside
the bed and talked earnestly at Beverly. She
tried to decide the best approach. Sympathy?
I know how you're suffering, Mother. ... Beverly
hated pity. At least her mother's face had
straightened out. The nurses combed her hair
occasionally. Suzanne had brushed it for her an
hour ago, but it was standing straight up as if
indignant. She decided to be blunt and
straight-forward. Attack and insist. "Mother, you have
to try. You must do what the therapists ask you to."
  Beverly printed in that awkward crooked left
hand, BAD DOG.
  She stared at Beverly, clutched with fear. Was
Beverly going crazy like the woman in the next
bed. No. Her eyes were lucid. "You mean,
they're trying to train you like a dog. Obedience
training."
  Beverly nodded wildly.
  "But, Mother, if they don't get you
to cooperate, you'll never speak again."
  WANT DIE
  "Mother, you aren't going to die. That isn't an
option. You'll live for years and years, so you have
to learn how to communicate again. You have to get
better. You must take seriously what they're
trying to teach you."
  POTTY TRAINING
  "Well, do you want to dirty yourself? You're
practically an infant in what your body will let
you do. Don't you want to take back control?"
  Now Beverly was weeping, only from the left
eye. The other just stared.
  It felt so odd. Instead of feeling ten now,
she was her mother's mother giving her childhood
instructions: learn to dress yourself, learn to speak
so that others can understand you, learn to feed yourself, learn
to tie your shoes and wipe your behind. No wonder
Beverly was humiliated and furious. It
was unjust that a mature and intelligent woman
should have to go through this forced childhood; it was not right that
Suzanne should have to play this hectoring role.
Sometimes when Beverly glared at her, she wanted
to tell her mother, all right, don't learn a thing.
Rot in your bed!
  She pulled herself closer. "Look, you're in
great shape compared to What's her name, Tammy
over there. At least you aren't blathering."
  Beverly actually made a noise that could have
been a laugh. She printed, GET ME OUT
  "I can't." Suzanne felt desperate.
"You have to do what all the therapists show you. You have
to cooperate, Mother. Or you'll end up in a
nursing home. The occupational therapist, the
physical therapist, the speech therapist ..."
  WANT GO HOME. The conversation was
extremely slow because Beverly had to laboriously
print the words with her left hand.
  "You'd starve to death. You wouldn't be able to feed
yourself, to dress yourself, to get food in. Mother, you
have to learn to do these things. You have to. If you really
mean to get out of here, you have to work at all the
stupid things they try to make you do. You can't get
into college until you finish grade school."
  NEVER WENT COLLEGE
  "Actually you went for two years, remember?"
She was a little frightened that Beverly didn't seem
to remember that.
  NO COUNT NO DEGREE
  Suddenly Beverly sat up in the bed and began
to sing, "We Shall Overcome."
  Suzanne ran for the nurse. "She can talk
now! She can talk!"
  The nurse stuck her head into the room and shook
her head. "That's just singing. A lot of them can sing
when they can't talk."
  "But if she can form the words to the song-- Listen
to her!"
  "Don't ask me why, but often the ones who
can't talk can sing songs they used to know. It's just
that way." The nurse turned and swished off.
  Whenever she tried to question anyone on the staff, from
the chief doctor down to the therapists and nurses,
she always came upon a blank wall closing off
her march into answers. She began to realize it was
not because they were withholding knowledge, but because they didn't
possess it. The brain held secrets in its
wrinkled gray convolutions, a mysterious organ
as stroke was still a mysterious disease.
  "Mother, I understand all this is humiliating, but
there's no going back. You have to obey these
therapists and nurses, no matter how condescending
they are. You have to try to walk. You have to try
to speak. You have to try to hold the spoon. Things will
only improve if you stubbornly try to do things,
instead of stubbornly refusing."
  NEVER THIS MEAN TO YOU
  "Oh, yes, you were." Suzanne snorted.
"But, Mother, the only one who can get you out of this
damned place is yourself. Don't fight me.
Don't fight them. Fight your illness!"
  Sunday afternoon, Rachel was there, praying at
Beverly's bedside. Beverly must love that, but it
sounded pretty, anyhow. At least it was company
for Beverly, and soothing to herself. She could be quiet
and bask in a moment of peacefulness. Rachel was
blooming. She said she had been hiking with
Michael. She tanned better than Suzanne,
who freckled. Rachel freckled too, but not as
extensively. How glad Suzanne had been
when the fashion for a mahogany tan had faded in
the epidemic of skin cancer and the destruction of the
ozone layer. All through adolescence and early
adulthood, she had spent a small fortune on
tanning oils trying to look the way Elena
looked naturally. All she got was blotchy.
Her freckles got freckles.
  Suzanne watched Michael, trying
to collect a sense of him. He could pray just
fine, loud and sure of himself with the Hebrew. His
Hebrew was more fluent than Rachel's. He
wasn't bad-looking, thin, fine-boned, a little
awkward in his movements as if his body had grown
too fast for him to be used to yet. Beverly was
eyeing him too. At one point she caught her
mother winking with her good left eye at him. He
seemed startled and then forced a smile at
Beverly. He was a good boy, to come here from
Philadelphia every Sunday with Rachel. She
noticed that they seemed to communicate by telepathy
like a flock of birds, wheeling at once,
turning in the same direction, a unit. She
began to suspect this was serious. That kind of
communication meant they were sleeping together, perhaps even
living together. She never got anything but the answering
machine or the roommates at Rachel's
apartment. She was disturbed that Rachel had not
confided in her, as she always had.
  In the hall outside Beverly's
room, Suzanne proceeded to try to find out.
"I assume you're coming home for Pesach,
sweetheart. You can sleep in my room. Would you
like Michael to come with you?"
  "We thought we'd do first-night seder with you and then
second-night with his parents."
  "Ah. The in-laws," Suzanne said,
watching Rachel's face carefully.
  Rachel blushed. She didn't speak.
Whoops! As if by remote control, Michael
appeared immediately. "I think Rachel and I
better get going, Mrs. Blume." That Mrs.
Blume was her, not Beverly. "We have a meeting
of our Torah study group tonight. We're starting
Exodus."
  Suzanne was about to make her own exodus
to La Guardia, when one of the hospital social
workers buttonholed her. "It's time to think of
what sort of preparations you need to make for your
mother."
  "Preparations?" It sounded like a euphemism for
burial.
  "You have to understand, even if she improves at a
significantly faster rate than she has been
able to do so far, she will never be able to live alone.
Have you considered a nursing home?"
  "No! But she has an apartment. ..."
  "She can't return to it. Mrs. Blume, so
far your mother cannot feed or dress or toilet
herself. She needs a safe environment, she needs
continuing therapy long after she leaves us, and she
needs care."
  Suzanne sat on the shuttle, wanting so
passionately to be home already she had the feeling
she could rise and rocket home at a greater
velocity on her own, without the help of the plane.
What was she going to do? She could not put Beverly
in a nursing home. Would she have to take her back
to Brookline? Even when Beverly was healthy, her
mother and she had not willingly cohabited since she
was seventeen. How could they possibly manage
to live together now?
  Suzanne had left home to go to college and
returned only for an occasional holiday. Every
summer, she had gone to summer school. She had
zipped through in three years and then gone to law
school. Never had she wanted to live with Beverly
after she had gotten away from her. The happier
parts of her childhood had been when Beverly was
off organizing and she was living with her
Aunt Karla. Aunt Karla loved having her
there. Aunt Karla thought she was wonderful.
Aunt Karla cooked succulent meals,
cholents, pot roasts, chickens roasted with
vegetables, goulashes--for her husband had been a
Hungarian Jew who had died slowly at
forty-two after being hit by a fuel truck while
unloading boxes on Flatbush Avenue. He
had lain in a coma for three months, exhausting
Karla's savings. Her soups filled the house with
steam that could make Suzanne drunk. Suzanne
felt cherished with her aunt, as if her presence were
a gift. She was the daughter Karla dreamed of.
When she had gone off to law school, Karla had
set about finding a little girl to adopt.
  Her mother was apt to open a can of chili or
chicken soup and call that supper. Her mother did not
think Suzanne was wonderful. Her mother was always
telling her how to act with boys, how to dress, how
to carry herself. Then Suzanne would purposely
slump and pick up a book and pretend to drown
out her mother's voice with the words on the page until
in fact she became so involved that she could not hear
Beverly telling her what was wrong with her and how
to make it right. Beverly was always trying to fix her,
to improve her, to organize her. The way
Beverly did things was right, and the way that Suzanne
wanted them was wrong--morally, aesthetically,
politically wrong!
  Her mother scoffed at lawyers and said the first thing
to do after a revolution was to shoot them all. Her
mother considered she had long ago sold out. Her mother
thought teaching jurisprudence was a con, something
highfalutin and silly. Her mother thought feminist
theory was bad politics. Beverly had tried
to make her feel guilty first for marrying Sam and
then for divorcing him. How could she bring her mother
back to Brookline, to a neighborhood Beverly
hated to visit because she called it bourgeois?
  There was a message from Jake: he would be in
town Tuesday. Could she see him? She taught
until three. Her sexual harassment case had
gone to the jury, who had only taken two days
to give her--or rather her client Sherry--a
victory. She was still awaiting a decision on the
appeal of the murder conviction of Phoebe, who had
tried to protect her daughter. She had
preparations to make for Pesach, for her classes.
She could steal the time from around four-thirty to bedtime,
a block of time she communicated about at
once.
  She was not nervous this time. She longed to fall
into him and be replenished. She was exhausted, she was
overcommitted, and he was her vacation. She would
never say that to him--she doubted there was a man
living who would like to feel he was essentially a kind
of recreation program for a woman--but she just
wanted to snuff herself out in him for a few hours.
She had consulted her gynecologist and put herself
on the pill. She was entering menopause, but it
seemed a gradual entry, and she could, her
gynecologist warned her, still get a nasty
surprise and find herself pregnant. She endured
occasional hot flashes, but as far as she could
tell, she had been too damned busy to actually
experience her own menopause. It was creeping
past her. When she had a hot flash, she was still
astonished and often did not realize till a
couple of months had passed that a period had
been missed. Her body seemed off on its own
adventure, without her mind accompanying it. She
felt as if she were being cheated of something other women
had begun to study: a colleague in women's
studies was writing a book about the change. With
her weekends gone, she was behind in everything she
did. Her article languished in her computer.
Fortunately, she had overprepared her
lectures on constitutional law during the last
summer, so she managed to stay afloat.
  She had not enjoyed a full night's sleep in
weeks. Her fatigue reminded her of just after
Elena was born. After Rachel's birth, it had
been less totally draining, because she had known what
to expect, because she had Marta and some help from
Sam. With Elena, she had had only herself and a
couple of weeks of Aunt Karla's presence,
a miracle in the middle of chaos. But Karla
had to go back to teaching school and she was waiting for
her own little girl to become available. That was
Suwanda, tall, lean, now an acupuncturist
in San Diego. Karla had adopted
Rosella two years later, as a newborn.
For a woman who had never given birth, Karla
knew a lot about raising kids.
  "Beverly glares at me," Karla said on the
phone. "I feel as if she hates me now!
Rosella came in with me and she hardly looked
at us."
  "She doesn't hate you, dear. She hates
the situation she's in. She hates her
body and her brain that betrayed her. She hates
the hospital and the staff who treat her as if
she's feebleminded."
  "She's always resented me. Judged me. You
know that."
  "Beverly hasn't been satisfied with either of
us. ... That's how she is. But right now, she
needs our help. Try to encourage her to work with
her therapists."
  "The last time I was there, she wouldn't even
write answers to us."
  She jumped into bed with Jake within ten minutes
of meeting him in the lobby, falling into him as if
diving into oblivion. They made love much longer
than the time before and far more powerfully. She wanted
passionately not to think, not to be conscious: a
powerful aphrodisiac. She knew she was
surprising him, but he seemed rather pleased than
overwhelmed. He was a man who liked sex with
her, she was realizing with great satisfaction. It was
a balm to her confusions. At least here in this rented
hotel bed, she was at ease. Who would have
guessed it? She did not really have the time to spare
to do this, but she did not care. It was the most
pleasurable event in her life for weeks.
  Lying under him, over him, beside him in a
half-destroyed bed, she realized she had never
experienced sex the way she did with Jake.
Perhaps it was him, perhaps it was simply her long
abstinence, perhaps it was the time in her life. Sex with
Victor had been potent but far more passive.
He was something that was happening to her. He was the
event. She was the object. With Sam, it had
been mutual but low on their list of priorities
after the first couple of months. They did it when they
both could arrange the time and energy, and it became
less and less frequent until perhaps once a
month they got together. They were both so ambitious
then and so overcommitted and so involved in whatever
cases they were fighting in court that they barely
observed each other. All her energy at home
went into the baby and Elena, the children who always needed
more than she could give, never mind Sam. Neither of
them seemed to have the will to force intimacy and sustain
it. It just hadn't seemed important enough to work
on, until it was gone.
  She did not exactly consider Jake
important to her, and she was surely just as
overcommitted in time and energy now as she had been
then with Sam--but she experienced him as
her last chance at sex, perhaps in her life. They
had created an artificial intimacy on-line that
was blooming into a physical intimacy both
jolting and sensual. She loved his mouth. She
loved the way he entered her slowly, withdrawing and
then thrusting in again. She loved the way his head
snapped back when she was riding him and he was gone
into sensations and she knew he would never, never
suddenly open his eyes to ask if she had
remembered to turn on the answering machine. Perhaps
it was marriage that had deadened Sam and her. Perhaps
it was being young and greedy for winning. Perhaps it was
having a baby too soon after they married. But this
late blooming was rich. Jake's large hot
hands on her breasts almost brought her to orgasm
again. Her breasts had never felt so sensitive and
as able to give her pleasure.
  Over supper she stared into his face, trying
to understand the power of their coupling. She asked him
questions about his life. His daughter had suddenly
written to him, sending a photo of herself with a baby
boy. His board had agreed that he could try to put
together a Boston office if he had enough backing.
He would be in charge of it, but he would need a
local board of advisers and volunteers and
money. Especially money.
  "I've got this pesky case pending in
California. From a protest about logging old
growth redwoods. The local police came down
on us hard. That was five months ago. I keep
expecting it to be dismissed--after all, the violent
ones were the police, not us. But it just drags on and
on from motion to motion."
  "Who's your lawyer?" She questioned him carefully
about the case, but it sounded fairly trivial.
At the most he could expect a suspended sentence
and a fine, even if his lawyer lost. Nothing
to worry about, she guessed.
  His dark, intense eyes, close
to almond-shaped, were beautiful in his sharp face.
His face had something foxy about it: quizzical,
feral, alert. He was one of those men who liked
to put their backs against a wall and look out at the
room. He gazed at her more intently than
anyone had in more years than she could imagine. It
was hard for her to take an interest in the Italian
food, good as it was, for all she wanted to do was
get back in bed with him and wipe out her life for
another two hours. Yet the conversation was good. It
was rare; it was years and years since she
had sat talking intimately with a man, talking
openly, honestly. She had male colleagues,
she had male clients from time to time, she had male
students and Jaime, her assistant. This was
different. It was what had attracted her to him
on-line: the quality of the discourse. The sense of
ease.

                 
                Beverly

  Beverly hated the physical therapist pulling
on her arm and her leg. It was humiliating to be
handled like a sack of trash bundled for the dump.
They made her stand up. They were talking at her,
the nurse with the frizzy hair and the therapist, a
woman half her age with damp pudgy hands and
an inane grin. Oh, you think it's funny I
hang on to the bed afraid of falling.
  "You have to learn to fall, Mrs. Blume. You
are going to fall, and you have to learn how to do it
correctly so you don't injure yourself."
  Grin. Right, it's funny for you, you bitch,
to see me crashing to the floor, but it's damned
well not amusing to me.
  "Take another step. That's right. Now we have
a walker for you."
  Beverly let herself drop abruptly on the
bed's edge. She was never going to use one of those
disgusting contraptions. Decrepit old people used
them, shuffling along. The nurse and therapist were
talking at the same time. When two people talked
to her, she couldn't focus on either. They worked with
stroke patients, you'd think they'd have learned that
she could only hear one of them.
  "If you ever want to go to the potty on your own,
you're going to have to get up on your two feet and
put one foot in front of the other."
  Back and forth they made her march like
Frankenstein's monster, to the door and back to the
bed, to the door and back to the bed. She had
to urinate, but did they care? She tried to tell
them, but she could only make a moan. She tried
to reach for her pad, but they made her keep walking
to the door and back, to the door and back. Finally
she couldn't hold it, and the warm seep of urine
ran down her leg as she wept with her good eye.
  The occupational therapist was trying to teach her
to dress herself. Beverly kept trying to pull her
panties on. She got her legs in the
right holes this time, but the label was in front. It
was so hard to coordinate everything. Her bra she
could not do one-handed at all. She could not go through
life with her tits swinging in the breeze. Not that
she was as big as Suzanne, who knows where she
got that from. Actually Karla had the same
oversize breasts. The occupational therapist
Nona, a woman whose hair was as short as a
man's and whose grip was firm on her, who would
never let her drop or think it was amusing if she
fell on her face, showed her a bra with
Velcro in front. It was the right size. Nona
saw her looking at the size. "Same size as
the bra you came in with," she said with a slight
smile.
  Beverly nodded fervently, her head as it always
did now, canting to the side. On the third try,
she got the bra on. Better.
  "We'll skip the slip today, okay? Now I
have here a dress you can close with Velcro. It's
kind of like a bathrobe, but it's striped, anyhow.
Kind of cheerful. I have to show all this to your
daughter, if I'm around when she comes in. Do you
think she could come in on a weekday?"
  Beverly shook her head no.
  "Oh, well. I'll leave her a
message."
  On Thursday she went to the bathroom by herself,
got her pants down, even flushed, got her
panties back up. She turned on the faucet
one-handed and washed her good hand and patted at her
useless hand. Then she hobbled back to the bed,
step, slide, step, slide, like some stupid
ballroom dance she was doing with the metal walker.
By the time she got back to the bed, she was so
exhausted she slept until the nurse woke
her.
  Eating was problematic. Food got stuck on
the other side of her mouth. She imagined her
body as split between her and what she called X.
The Jerk. The Jerk owned the right half of her
body. On her half she chewed her food and
swallowed it, but food that wandered over to the Jerk's
cheek could get stuck there and choke her unawares.
  The doctors were thrilled Friday because she
felt it when they pricked her thigh, but she couldn't
move it. It seemed the worst of all worlds. Her
right thigh could hurt but remained as inert as a bag
of wet sand.
  They had given her special
utensils to eat with. She could drink pretty
well, although sometimes liquid dribbled out the right
side. But it had taken a week before she could
reliably get the spoon into her mouth instead of just
somewhere near it. Everything she did turned into a
mess. Everything she did was hard. Fatigue would
drop on her suddenly and crush her to the bed. She
thought of exhaustion as a boulder that suddenly fell
on her and pushed her flat. In any
five-minute interval, she could use up her
energy completely and deflate.
  She could read for a while. The newspaper was
hard, the print too small and the contrast poor.
Large-print books were perfect. She felt as
if she were reading children's books, but they were normal
novels and nonfiction books. She could read for
up to half an hour before she wore out. When
Karla came next, Beverly decided to be good
to her sister this time and nod at her and write
messages. She told her to bring some
large-print books that were worth reading, something
political with substance to it. A good biography
of somebody who mattered. Karla seemed
delighted to be asked to do something and promised she
would return in two days with books. She did.
Rosella came with her, carrying the big bag.
WHERE TWINS? Beverly printed.
  Rosella laughed. She was a small woman,
no taller than Karla, and she had married a
Black man not much bigger. But the twins were already
up to their mama's waist. "They won't let us
bring the little ones in here. Maybe they think stroke
is contagious."
  SCARY? Beverly printed. SCARES ME.
  Rosella had brought her a drawing Johnny
made, of a stick woman in a bed with a big sun
shining over her. Karla put it on her bedside
table, propped against the lamp. It was the most
cheerful thing in the depressing room.
  The speech therapist was a bald man around
fifty who wore loud plaid shirts that never
went with his trousers. He must be color-blind, like a
lot of men, and obviously his wife had left
him. Today the shirt was a mauve, magenta, and
teal madras worn with a pair of olive
khakis. She stared into his eyes, half hidden
behind his bifocals, and longed, longed for him to do
something magical that would give her back her
voice. She could remember her own voice,
low-pitched, sexy, men had often told
her. She longed to hear her own voice again more than
she longed for anything else. She would gladly
hobble around, she would wear Velcro clothes, she
would eat with funny utensils, but give her back
the power to speak and she swore she would be happy
again. She stared into his face in silent
supplication.
  "Now I want you to make me a list of all
the words you can think of that begin with S."
  Laboriously Beverly carved into the page
SHIT, SHE, SALMON, SYLPH,
SHOP, STORE, SAVE, SIGN,
SIGNAL, SLAM, SORE, STYMIE.
She had only got that far when he stopped her.
  "Ssssssssss," he said. He put his hands
on her face. "Sssssssssss."
  She tried. How she tried. What finally
came out was "Shhhhhhhhh."
  "That's good. That's very good. Now try to breathe out
a sound. Just breathe it. Ahhhhh.
Ahhhhhhhh."
  No sound emerged, but the breath sounded a little like
Ahhhhh. A nonvocalized Ahhh.
  "Now try to put it together. Shaaaaaah."
  She made a nonvocalized sound that nonetheless
was recognizably Shaaaa. Then she began
to giggle, because Sha! in Yiddish meant shut
up. A song of her childhood came to her and
suddenly she was singing it rustily in Yiddish.
"Sha! Shtil! Mach nich kein
gevalt! Der rebbe geyn sein tanzen,
tanzen valt. ..."
  "It's good you can sing. You should sing as much as you
can. It's practice for your vocal cords."
He had her sing "Some Enchanted Evening" as far
as she could get. He had a deep baritone,
nothing like Ezio Pinza, but still, it was fun. They
sang some more show tunes together. She loved hearing
her own voice. She felt almost human when the
session ended. She was wheeled back to her bed and
slept. When she woke, she said, "Shaaaa!"
Almost a croak emerged. She managed a smile
that was perhaps more grimace than smile, but which she
totally meant. Dear, dear man. She must learn
his name next time. He was her hero. Dr. Fish,
that's what the nurse called him. To her, he would
be Ezio. She wanted to throw away all the other
therapists and work with him all day with as much energy as
she could force from herself. "Ahhhhhh." She was
croaking. "Shaaaah. Ahhhhhhh.
Shhhhhh. Shaaaah. Shaaah! Shaaah."

                 
               Suzanne

  Suzanne borrowed Marta's van
to transport Beverly to Brookline for Pesach.
After the holiday, Beverly was to enter a local
rehabilitation center for stroke patients.
Beverly was so excited about leaving the hospital,
it was hard to make her understand that she could not go
home. Suzanne had moved Beverly's things
to Brookline a month before with the help of Karla
overseeing Rosella and Tyrone. The landlord was
glad to have Beverly leave, so he could double the
rent.
  Suzanne had been paying Beverly's bills.
One of the many things her mother could not do was to sign a
check. It felt distinctly uncomfortable to be
operating behind Beverly's back, making decisions
for her mother, who had never lacked decisiveness, but
discussing anything with Beverly took forever and she
tired quickly of trying to communicate. She could form
few words and no coherent sentences. She would not
assess her prospects and options realistically.
The easiest thing for Suzanne was to view her mother
as a helpless client and make decisions for her--
although she felt uneasy.
  Thus Suzanne was carting Beverly off
to Brookline, where Beverly had visited perhaps
three times in the twelve years Suzanne had
been living in the house with Marta and Jim. When
Suzanne wanted to see Beverly, she went
to New York. Her mother was portable in certain
ways. When duty called, she went, but visiting
her daughter in Brookline made her
uncomfortable. It seemed to thrust right into her face
everything about them that was different. They had more fights
on Suzanne's turf than on Beverly's.
Beverly was at home only in New York.
She had been born there, grown up there, and never
put down roots anyplace else. It had always
offended or puzzled her, depending on her mood,
that her only daughter preferred the Boston area.
Probably she considered it a sign of weak character
or a lack of style. She had always made clear
that she thought Suzanne lacked style.
  The minivan was harder to steer than an ordinary
car but had room for the wheelchair. Suzanne had
done her best with Elena's help to fix
up the room off the kitchen for Beverly.
Suzanne's gym equipment was now split between
her bedroom and her office, and very much in the way.
Every time she used the treadmill, she had to hang a
quilt over the corner of her chest of drawers, so
she would not hit herself on it. She hoped Beverly
would be comfortable in that room for the next three days,
until Suzanne could check her into the rehab
unit.
  It was definitely spring on the Wilbur
Cross. The willows had leafed out along the
streams. An occasional magnolia or cherry was
in bloom. The day was sunny with the temperature in
the upper fifties and the air softer than it had
been in months. It was a drive she would normally
have enjoyed, but she was monitoring her mother with one ear
and Rachel and her boyfriend with the other. Suzanne
felt sore with anxiety. Unlike most years,
she was not looking forward to Pesach. The first-night
seder was always with her daughters and whoever they brought,
with Marta, Jim, and their son, Adam, and a friend
or two. Beverly had never before come to her, although
when Suzanne was growing up, Beverly had sometimes
trekked out to Karla's in Brooklyn, where
Suzanne always went. This year her assistant,
Jaime, wanted to come and also Celeste, shattered
by divorce, and Georgia, just back from Bali.
  She acknowledged to herself that she did not look
forward to a seder with Beverly, whom she remembered
at Karla's in the old days as quarrelsome,
alternately bored and combative. Beverly never
felt comfortable with the ritual or pleased that her
daughter enjoyed what Beverly considered a forlorn
relic of the ghetto. Now Beverly would be quiet,
necessarily, but it was no improvement.
Suzanne sighed, making her way across the
Connecticut River at Hartford. They were all
who they were, and she must make the best of it. The
hospital social worker had pressed upon her
eight different pamphlets. If she did
everything the woman urged, she would rebuild her
entire apartment, reorganize her life, and
hire ten different people to help.
  It was still light when she pulled into her steep
drive. There was her house on its hill, the little
backyard sloping sharply downhill, three
stories painted light blue with dark blue
trim. Home in recent years had meant quiet
and comfort. Now she could not read the meaning of her
home. Her life felt at the moment
without sanctuary--except for those brief moments
with Jake: because, she thought, I do not have to take
care of him. I'm not responsible for him. Therefore
I can be happy.
  Suzanne realized in the next twenty-four
hours that she had not really absorbed what the
social worker had been trying to tell her. For
Beverly to exist at all in the apartment, everything
must be changed. In the small bathroom off the
kitchen there was a shower, but it could only be used if
the controls were lowered to where Beverly could reach them.
That meant having a plumber in. They had nothing
resembling a bath chair until Elena found a
stool in the basement. It was not designed to get
wet, but it would have to do. Beverly had to be helped
onto the stool and off the stool again. The bathroom
needed a railing for her to hold on to. They
moved a single bed against the wall to protect on
one side, but she could not sit up in the bed by herself
and she was afraid she would fall out. If Beverly
moved back here after the rehab center, Suzanne
would have to buy or rent a hospital bed. Jim
found a bookcase upstairs he could lend to the
cause, with big square partitions where Beverly's
clothes could be stacked, as she could not open a
drawer. They gave her a tambourine to summon
them when she needed something, and the tambourine sounded every
other minute.
  It took such effort for Beverly to haul herself in
or out of bed that most things she might need had to be
within reach of her good hand. Once they understood that,
they had to turn the bed around so that her left hand would
be on the outside, able to reach the table they placed
there.
  She never seated people at the seder but always let them
find their own places. She was amused to note that
Elena put herself in between Marta and Jim, as if
she were their child, leaving Adam to sit beside Rachel--
which he probably preferred anyhow. Elena had
suddenly adopted Marta and Jim as preferable
parents, obviously. Long ago, when they had
moved into this house, Elena had resented them,
imagining they were spying on her, keeping watch on
her for Suzanne. Elena had lived in this house
for two years until she went away to college,
only returning for vacations. Now Suzanne was
pleased to see that Elena was establishing her own
relationship with them, finally. Suzanne drew a
deep breath and tried to relax her shoulders. She
so wanted everyone to be happy, to have a
good seder, to be together in kindness and joy and maybe
even a little bit of something spiritual and enlightening, just
a little. She wanted joy in the house, a guest like
Elijah, who had his cup set out for him. There
had not been enough joy lately.
  She had not let Rachel have her way with the
food. There was plenty for vegetarians, but
Suzanne still made chicken soup with matzoh
balls and roast lamb. The tzimmes was
vegetarian: carrots, apples, raisins,
onions cooked long and slow together, Karla's
recipe from her own mother. An heirloom. So were
the soup and the matzoh balls. Suzanne enjoyed
the sense of being one in a line of women making a
particular recipe for a particular holiday, women
appearing one inside the other receding ever smaller
like the cows on the tin of evaporated milk from her
childhood. Beverly used to buy evaporated
milk for some stupid reason. It didn't
spoil. It was one of those weird tastes from
childhood that brought back not nostalgia or
pleasant memories but an archaic sense of
discomfort, like woolen leggings and rubber galoshes,
the smell of the cloakroom in grade school. The
sweetish overcooked taste of evaporated
milk.
  Her mother had always improvised meals, for
Beverly suspected there was something bourgeois or
overly fussy or perhaps dangerously fattening
involved in thinking seriously about food. It was from
Karla that Suzanne had learned to cook, not that
she ever had time to do it. It was a pleasure for
vacations, for holidays, for the rare times she had the
energy and the leisure to entertain. Basically, the
only time she ever cooked a big meal was at
Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, Thanksgiving, or
somebody's birthday. Yet Suzanne was proud
that she could create a sumptuous spread on the
appropriate occasion.
  Suzanne relinquished leading the service
to Rachel, who had brought a new Haggadah,
photocopied in her office. There was a lot of
turning of pages back and forth and people asking, Where
are we? Too much Hebrew for Suzanne's
taste, who considered it like pepper, nice as a
condiment, but avoid heavy use. Rachel was
running quite long. Suzanne began to fidget about
her meal in the kitchen sitting in the turned off
oven. Rachel was good, though, with a charm in
delivery that Suzanne had never before
seen in her daughter, already a performer, as rabbis
had to be. Suzanne suddenly remembered
Rachel in a play in middle school, wanting
to be the heroine but being given the part of the heroine's
mother instead. She had been valedictorian of her
class, but she had not been asked to the senior
prom. She had been president of the Social
Issues Club and the French Club, but
Saturday nights she went out with her girlfriends
or stayed home. She had always been her mother's
daughter. Elena had been and still was tighter with
Sam than his own daughter. Sam loved
Rachel, but Elena knew how to play him.
Rachel was too straightforward to charm her father as
much as Elena could.
  If Sam had married a Jewish woman, it
would have been awkward for Rachel this Pesach, because
she would have had to decide whether to spend the
second-night seder at her father's or
Michael's family. Sam's tall slender
blond wife did not make a seder, so Rachel
was spared the choice. Sam's wife played
tennis and golf, gave elaborate dinners and
parties for his clients, kept the large house in
Weston immaculate with help from a string of au
pairs and maids, and raised his second batch of
children with every kind of lesson that money could buy, from
ballet and gymnastics to soccer and violin. They
were precocious edgy children with streaks of violence and
anxiety that she could sense like the seep of gas
whenever she found herself forced to spend time with Sam's
family. That did not happen as much since
Rachel had learned to drive. Sam had given
her a series of old cars, each good for two or
three years before it disintegrated.
  When at last she could serve the meal, she
watched Rachel with Michael. "Here. Try the
tzimmes." She fed him as if he could not take
for himself. There was something passive in him, as if
he simply waited to be served, to be fussed
over, knowing that it would come to him. For Rachel he was
the prize of her life, Suzanne began
to observe. He was pleasant enough looking, teeth a
little too big for his mouth but all right. Beverly
kept smiling at him as nearly as she could, with her
face only partly under control. Her favorites
at the table were Elena, Michael, and Jim.
Beverly had seldom met Adam and paid little
attention to him. Poor Adam was used
to Rachel's full attention. She had
always played the role of doting older sister,
since she had been ten and Adam, eight. Today
her attention was fixed on Michael. Adam had
always been prone to whine, and he was overflowing with
complaints tonight. The wine was harsh, the tzimmes not
sweet enough, the service too long, his
favorite song had been left out: but what he
really minded was Rachel turned not to him but
to Michael.
  Unlike Rachel, Michael was not taking a
large part in the seder. He was more an observer,
looking a little amused, as if perhaps this was not what
he considered a real seder, not traditional enough.
"Who leads the seder in your house?" she asked
him.
  He seemed surprised at the question. "My father,
of course."
  Of course? Why not his mother? She suspected that
he was judging them in some quiet way. Was he
finding not merely the seder but the family too
outr`e? This was a house of women, and she doubted
if the boy was used to that. He probably believed
the way he was used to was the only right way.
  Elena had always liked Celeste, enjoying her
gamy humor, but her divorce had left her
shattered, and Elena instinctively shrank from her
ravages. Celeste was quiet and morose. When
she read a passage, her voice was an octave
higher than usual, a child's tremulous voice.
Once or twice Suzanne was afraid
Celeste would begin to cry, and immediately set her some
task. Normally she thought during the seder about her
own personal liberation and political issues in
which she was involved, but she found herself too wedged
between her roles as mother and as daughter tonight to give
much thought to anything spiritual. She did not see much
liberation coming her way this year.
  Jaime followed along with the exotic reading and the
exotic food, seated on her left as she had
Beverly on her right. Perhaps she was attempting
to protect both of them from casual buffeting.
Georgia, who was an interior decorator with
exquisite taste, had brought her a beautiful
scarf from Bali, sea colors, that Elena was
wearing. She had immediately claimed it, and
Suzanne could not refuse her for she looked
stunning in it, worn casually around her shoulders
over a sea-green camisole and tight black
pants. Jaime eyed her curiously, a parrot
perched at a table of sparrows. She paid
little attention to him, focused on Beverly and
Jim. After all, although Jaime was as beautiful
and as splendid as herself, he was two years younger
than Elena--and at their ages, that could seem a
generation. However, Jaime was observing her.
  Georgia was beginning to age, she realized with a
pang, her black glossy hair streaked with
white. The sun had turned her fair skin
leathery. Suzanne had never noticed all those
wrinkles around her eyes. She was as thin as ever but
had begun to look more gaunt than chic. They were
all getting older. People kept telling her tonight how
good she looked. She was accustomed to her looks
being taken for granted, like the walls and the ceiling,
nothing to comment on. She felt like telling
Georgia and Marta and Celeste that it was only
that she was getting laid for the first time in more than a
decade. This glow was her body's delight. It
would be short-lived, only a little generator of
joy parked out there away from the rest of her
roiled-up life.
  She became aware Beverly to her right was trying
to speak, her face distorting with effort, her mouth
drooling. Suzanne felt torn among those
needing her attention: her daughters, both of whom
usually soaked up her available energy, her
assistant, a stranger here, Celeste who was
sunk into a dangerous depression, and her mother.
She was used to having Beverly command her attention
by forceful statements. She was used to fending off her
mother's attacks. She was used to pretending not
to understand allusions to her bourgeois pretensions and
her safe dull money-grubbing lifestyle. She
was not accustomed to having to wipe her mother's face and
lean close to try to figure out what Beverly was
sputtering. She felt guilty because she was put
off by Beverly's inability to control her body,
her voice, her face. The same thing will happen
to you when you're her age, she told herself, and you'll
want people to be kind and understanding and accepting, won't
you? So get it together, Suze, get it together and be
a mensch. This is an opportunity too,
to improve that first relationship of all. "You want
something, Mother? More lamb? Tzimmes?"
  Beverly was pointing. There were various bottles
on the table, grape juice for the nondrinkers,
Manischewitz for the traditional, like herself, and
kosher Israeli dry wine for those who could not
stomach alcoholic cough syrup. For
Suzanne, the taste of sweet kosher
wine was the taste of Karla's Shabbats, of
holidays and all the times she had escaped her own
mother and taken refuge with her aunt. She realized
Beverly was wildly pointing at the dry red wine.
She was not sure whether the social worker had said
Beverly could have wine or not, but she was damned if
she was going to forbid it if Beverly wanted it.
Beverly very much did. Beverly sipped carefully
and managed not to spill a drop. Then she waved
her glass for more.
  "Grandma, do you really want more?" Rachel
asked, leaning across the table.
  Beverly nodded wildly.
  "The difference, according to Rabbi Moshe
Poleyoff, between drinking wine for the sake of the
mitzvah on the night of Pesach and drinking that
leads to excess is that the second comes from being
empty inside and making wine fill that emptiness.
But if we are filled with joy and express that through
wine, then the wine becomes the simchah shel
mitzvah, the joy of the mitzvah. ..."
  Beverly made a derisive noise and
carefully drank down the glass. She managed
a lopsided grin at Rachel and then at
Suzanne. Dessert was never a big deal on
Pesach--macaroons, fruit, and a
matzoh-based custard cake. The huge meal
left little room for sweets. After the food they
raced through the tail end of the Haggadah. There was
always singing then, which Suzanne had loved since
childhood. "Grandma, you're singing," Rachel
said, and Elena too turned to stare. In fact,
Beverly was singing. "Eli-ahu ha-navi,
eli-ahu, eli-ahu. ..."
  "Grandma," Elena said, peering around Jim.
"Have some more wine! It's a miracle."
  Beverly giggled and did have more wine. By the end
of the dinner, she was lolling in her chair, breathing in
gusts through her mouth, now and then snoring.
Suzanne was happy for her. It was probably the
first pleasure Beverly had enjoyed since her
stroke. For Beverly at least, this evening was some
kind of momentary liberatioN.

       14 Twelve Years Earlier
                Elena

  Elena hated school. She hated all the
girls who gossiped about her and called her a
slut. She hated the boys who grabbed at her in
the halls and begged her to suck their cocks. She
hated the teachers who classified her as less
than human. She hated the counselor who told
her in a sickly sweet voice of pretend
concern that she was not performing up to her potential--
performing like a trained seal. She sat there, seeing
herself leaping up, reaching across the desk, and
strangling the woman. Feel my potential,
bitch. Basically, Boston Latin was not a
hand-holding type of school. If her grades
sank too far or too quickly, she would be
booted. Nobody would be begging her to stay.
Perform or perish. She kept playing Twisted
Sister. She really was a sick motherfucker, according
to her peers, and she sure was the odd one out in her
family. She was no longer passing all those
tests they threw at her. She played that record
over and over again in her room, on her
headphones.
  She hated her little sister, Rachel, who was
Mama's girl and always sucking up to Mother.
Rachel was good, Rachel was perfect, Rachel was
a complete nerd. She brought home her report
cards like Moses coming down from Sinai. What
Elena did as well as she could with great effort and
sweat, Rachel just zipped through. She did all
her homework in record time and did extra. She
always had science projects going in the room they
shared. She never asked for cool clothes or
anything fun, but for books nobody else had ever
heard of, and lately she wanted a computer. Who
ever heard of a ten-year-old girl with a computer?
Only nerdy boys had them. Rachel thought she was
a little genius, and so did her teachers, and so did
Sam, and so did their mother.
  Most of all she hated her mother, who kept
going on about college, college. Elena was
never going to college. As soon as she was old enough
to get a license, she wanted a car. Like
Judas Priest sang, "Headin Out to the
Highway." She had a learner's permit already.
Chad got his license the week he turned
sixteen. He was after his father to buy him a
car. When Elena had a car, she was going to get in
it with Evan and Chad and take off. They would go
down to Mexico. They would drive up
to Alaska. They would go anyplace but here. Key
West. The Mojave desert. She did not care
where. Chad would care and Evan would care but she just
wanted to take off and never look back. She would
be with both of them and there would be nobody to pester them
and hector them, and what they were to each other and what
they did together. Only with them did she feel
alive. When she was alone in her room, she
wondered if she even existed. She felt
empty, empty. She didn't know who she was and
she wished she was dead. Life stretched before her like
a hall at her high school when she was cutting
classes and every room had a boring class in
session and going down the hall, she could hear the
stupid smug bored voices of the teachers in each
one. It was a puce-colored hallway reeking of
years of sweat and grease and chalk dust. That was the
rest of her life. A dull dim hallway going
between one place she didn't want to be to another
place she dreaded going. It was all shit. It was
all shit forever.
  Every other day, there was her mother going at her, how
she dressed, how she was acting, what was she
learning, what did she want to be? Deaf, Mother,
for starters. Going on about how she could be anything
she wanted to be. Okay, I want to be a
rock star, she yelled, playing air guitar. I
mean something real, Suzanne went. Nothing about
her satisfied Suzanne. Well, she didn't
like Suzanne either. What do you want to be? An
orphan.
  Sometimes when she was high, it felt okay.
Sometimes when she was making out or fucking, she
felt real, she felt there. When Chad or
Evan looked at her, she felt as if she
really existed and she was something each of them wanted.
Sometimes lost in the pounding roar of the music,
carried on its tornado of sound and whirled through the
night, she felt alive. She felt for a moment
as if it mattered, and then she wanted to die right
then while it was fierce and good. Once they had
gone off on a day trip with Evan's parents
to Mount Monadnock, and the three of them had
managed to get away. It was fall and the ground was
red as blood with maple leaves and golden under
them. They got high sitting on rocks way off
the trail where the cliff tumbled down before
them. The colors seemed to sing in her eyes. They
had taken off their clothes and they were all lying on
a rock that the sun had heated and it felt as if
they were melting together. She could not tell where she
ended and they began. She felt as if her heart was
bursting in her, swelling through her whole body and
pulsating like the colors of the red, red leaves.
  Her mother was always on her back about grades, as
if they meant a fucking thing. It was so boring, so
mundane. Her mother never had any fun, she just
worked all the time and fussed. Always running out with
her briefcase under the arm and rushing, rushing,
wearing stupid gray suits and running on high
heels down to the car or even the T. It was a
joke. Her mother's idea of a great evening was
to make supper, which Elena was entirely indifferent
to, lie in a hot bath for half an hour and
read a book with her feet up, wearing her old
bathrobe. Her mother had been born boring. Some
people were, like Rachel. Her mother was the most
impatient woman alive. Suzanne was always
asking if she hadn't done something yet. Elena
would be doing the dishes, like she was fucking supposed
to, when everybody else in the world had a
dishwasher, and her mother would come zooming in saying,
Aren't you done yet? Did you wash your sweater?
Did you make your bed? Do your homework? When
are you planning to get it done? Didn't you do that
yet? Did you forget to take out the garbage again?
How could you lose your shoes? I don't understand.
I don't understand. She sure didn't, that was for
absolute real.
  Elena felt at war with everyone. Her mother was
trying to keep her in. She simply agreed and
then did what she pleased. Rachel told on her
twice. The second time, she took a knife from
the kitchen and laid it against Rachel's throat,
holding her down on her bed. "If you rat on
me again, I'm going to slit your throat. Don't
think I'm bluffing. Don't ever think I'm
bluffing. It'd be a pleasure. I wouldn't mind
knowing what it feels like to cut my little pesky
sister's throat."
  That scared Rachel. She stopped carrying
tales to Mother. Elena looked at herself in the
mirror, posing squint-eyed and nasty. She could
look pretty bad. She liked the way she
looked. She was tall now, and she liked being
taller than a number of the boys. She was lean and
mean and tough. The three of them were their own
family. They were together whenever they could be. It was
what they all wanted. It was what she wanted more
than life itself. When she was with Evan and Chad,
she felt surrounded, protected, enclosed,
loved. They got wasted a lot, but it didn't
matter because they didn't care about anybody
else, anybody outside their tight circle.
They were everything to one another. If one of them even
thought about anybody else for five minutes, the
other two set them straight. They were a unit.
As soon as they were old enough, as soon as they had
wheels of their own, as soon as they had enough money
to run away, they were going to live together. They would
sleep as long as they wanted to and stay up until
they wanted to go to bed. They would eat when they felt
like it, pizza or nothing or greasy hamburgers
instead of the tofu and broiled chicken and smelly
fish her mother tried to get down her. They would
play their music as loud as they felt like and they
would fuck whenever they chose to and never worry again
about getting caught. They would be happy. They would
be in pig heaven.
  In their first day's class (they tried to take
all their classes together, although they couldn't
manage it by half), Chad came in late. He
passed her a note as soon as he could. "Old
man found my stash. Shit! He says he's
going to send me to military school."
  At lunch he explained. "He found out somehow
I see Mom when I'm not supposed to. I
don't know how he found out. I don't think it's
past him to hire some seedy private eye. Who
knows? Anyhow, after he found that out, he went through
my room. He ransacked it. He found my
stash of dope and downers."
  "So you tell him you're holding it for a friend,"
Evan said.
  "Ha. You think he's that stupid? He called
his lawyer and he's trying to get my mom in trouble
for seeing me."
  "What kind of trouble can your mom get in?"
Elena asked. She wasn't eating. She hated
to eat at the school. She wasn't about to walk in
with a tacky brown-bag lunch and she wasn't about
to eat that shit either. Food was overrated. She'd
rather just have a cigarette and a Coke.
  "He can get his lawyer after her, like he did
before. He can get the judge to rule I can't see
her even as much as I do." Chad slammed his fist
on the table. "I hate him. I never
wanted to get her in trouble. I just wanted to see
her." Waves of intense emotion beat off him.
  It was exciting to feel all that raw emotion
discharging. It was like an electrical storm at the
table. Elena had always loved thunder and lightning.
Rachel would stop up her ears, but Elena would
run to the window, almost hoping the lightning would
strike near, would electrify her. It was so
beautiful. Chad felt like that. She wanted
to feel that emotion consuming her. She put her hand
over his on the table, but he didn't notice.
He pounded the table again. He looked as if his
face would break open and molten tears pour out, but
of course he could not cry here. He could only
beat on the table.
  A monitor came over. "Don't pound on
the table, weirdo."
  Elena said, "Let him be. He's got
problems today."
  "He's my problem right now. Lay off the table
or I'll send you to the principal."
  "Get lost, dick-face," Evan said.
"Or you'll have a problem."
  But Chad stopped. They got through the rest of the
day. After school, they went to Elena's. Chad
didn't want to go home. Rachel was at
swimming class. Another mother took her, and then
their mother picked her up at six. They shut themselves
in Elena's bedroom. She opened the windows before
they lit up. Saved airing it out later. Chad
wasn't about to be chilled by dope or anything
else.
  "She explained it all to me before she left,
how he was just too cruel to live with. How he was
always putting her down, just the way he does with
me. He likes to stick pins in you just to see you
flinch."
  Elena frowned, focusing with difficulty.
"Why didn't she take you with her?"
  "She didn't have any money. She didn't
even have a place to stay. Then she wanted me
to come, but he got the court to give him custody.
He had like four lawyers and she had this cheap jerk
who hardly bothered." He scrubbed at his eyes,
dry and bloodshot. "She should've taken me with
her anyhow. She should have!"
  That woke Evan up. "You don't know that your
father and his lawyers would have let her take you," he
said gently. Evan hated it when people blamed others
too much.
  "He's killing me. He won't let me
see my mother. He doesn't give a fuck about
me. I'm just a piece of property. I'm just a
club to beat her over the head. I'm nothing to him.
He doesn't care how much I hurt. He
doesn't care what I feel. All he wants
to do is win."
  "Maybe we could run away," Elena said
tentatively. Both guys stared at her. "We
could go away together."
  "Where would we go?" Evan asked.
  Chad stood. "What does that matter, so long
as it's away from here? I hate him. I hate
my life. He's going to send me to military
school."
  "He's just threatening you," Evan said, trying
to cool everybody down.
  "No. He had his secretary send for all these
applications and brochures. He's threatened before,
but this time he's been on the phone to some place in
Virginia. He's going to send me to some damned
military prison school. I'd rather die."
  "How could we get a car?" Elena poked him,
to get his attention back.
  "I can take one of my father's cars. He has
three. I know where he keeps the keys."
  "Just don't take the Porsche," Evan said.
"That's too conspicuous and too small for three
of us." He was in. He could not resist the idea.
  Suddenly Chad was up again, ready for anything.
"California. I love that place. Northern
California--north of San Francisco. I
have friends there who have a house where it's like you're
walking in a pasture with their two horses and
suddenly the world drops away and you see you're on
top of this cliff. Bam, down below there's these
breakers crashing in on the rocks. You just want
to step off. Step off into that blue air."
  "I want to go for real," Elena said, putting
her hands on both their shoulders. "Not just bullshit
around, like talking about robbing a Brinks truck.
I want to do this."
  "For real," Chad said.
  "We're always real," Evan said. "That's
what we are together. Brute reality. Let's go
to bed."
  The next day, Chad took his father's BMW,
to show them how easy it was. They went off
to Rhode Island and each got tattooed--it was
illegal in Massachusetts. Chad
got a winged skull, Evan an eagle, and she
chose a red rose with a thorn dripping blood.
The guys put theirs on their arms, but she chose
to have hers on her hip. They were not big tattoos
--Chad was charging them on his credit card--but they
were perfect. She wouldn't say a thing
to Suzanne, but at some point, her mother would see
it--probably the first time she wore a bathing
suit. Suzanne would go ballistic. Elena
loved her tattoo. That night she kept looking
at it with a flashlight under the covers, the way she
used to read comic books when she was a kid.
  Suzanne had had it easy. She had gone
to high school when things were upside down and the kids
felt powerful. Kids seemed like this great force,
all of a piece, what they called youth culture
and hippies and yippies. They were so sure they were
right that they scared the shit out of teachers,
principals, parents, bosses. They just took
over the streets and the parks. Suzanne had a
lot of practice feeling right and justified by the
time she was going off to college.
  But Elena knew she was just a burnout. There was
nowhere to go and no one to turn to except her little
family of Evan and Chad. The good kids
didn't smoke. They stayed on the other side
of the smoking line outside school. Passing beyond that
line as Elena did every day was to brand yourself a
slut. She knew what made her feel good, but
everybody around her with any power over her told
her that sex and heavy metal and whatever they could
get their hands on to get them high, all were bad and
dirty--and so was she.

                 
                Beverly

  Beverly dreaded going into the rehab center because it
sounded like a nursing home, someplace to park her.
Someplace to stash her where she wouldn't be in
Suzanne's way. However, by the time Suzanne
drove her there, she was so exhausted she only
wanted to be in a quiet room away from all of
them. It was just too hard, too much. Everyone
talked at once and they didn't understand she could not
follow multiple threads. It was unbearably
noisy. Music pounding. Everyone talking at her
and each other, their voices a mad loud jumble in
her ears. It was all so complicated, things in the
way, furniture sticking out. The
toilet wasn't within her reach. She could not hobble
toward it with the walker she hated, for it caught on
every piece of furniture, and there was too much
furniture, stuff everyplace she tried
to pass. Things kept falling down as she went
by. They shouted at her, as if she were deaf. They
thought if they yelled at her, she would understand them,
when she only wanted them to speak slowly and
pause while she caught up with them.
  She could talk some now, she knew she could, but
no one there gave her a chance to mouth the syllables
she could manage. She could do all the vowels. That
cute man with the mismatched clothes, Dr. Fish,
back in New York had taught her she could
make those sounds perfectly well. Shah, shay,
she, sheh, shy, shih, show, shoi, shau, shew,
shuh. Wonderful sounds. And m. She could
say perfectly good things like "show me," if they
would only wait long enough and give her a chance. But
Suzanne had always been impatient. She
remembered she herself had been impatient, back
when she had been a full and real person. Yes,
she too had always been in a hurry, but now
everything took time. Just getting dressed required
at least half an hour, and another fifteen
minutes getting to the toilet, getting up and
back. Every little excursion and every little activity, like
eating ice cream, wore her out till she needed
to rest. But in Suzanne's house, there was little
rest. All those people milling around shouting at one
another, doors slamming, water running, the
phone burring, the fax beeping, people thundering up and
down to the flat upstairs. All those faces she
did not know or could not remember.
  She would miss Mao. He had been overjoyed
to see her. He was the one who loved her as she
was. He got into bed with her and purred and
purred. He kneaded his paws against her arm, and
she felt as if she could almost feel him
vibrating, as if the arm had a little sensation. The
other cats, the orange ones, came to examine
her, and they too were friendly, but Mao ran them off,
hissing with his black fur on end. She was his.
She wished she could take him with her to the rehab
center. He still loved her, when nobody else
could. Even her favorite, Elena, kept away
from her. Spoke to her from a distance and fled.
Everyone wanted to turn away from the ruin she had
become.
  Therefore, although she had not wanted to come
and had tried to object to being parked here, as she
lay in the hospital bed in the pale green
room, she was relieved. It was manageable here.
Ten steps to the bathroom and rails in place.
A stool in the tub and railings. Railings on the
walls. Wide doors her walker could pass
smoothly through. Ramps. The remote for her
TV was within reach. A tray swung over the bed
on a balance spring so that she could easily swing it
down or send it away. She could print notes
on it, could prop up a large-print book. She
was expected to make her way to meals, although she
would much rather have had them in her quiet safe room.
  Meals were depressing. Most of the patients or
inmates, those stored here, did not try
to communicate with one another. The
right-brain-damaged ones could be talkative, but that
didn't mean they made sense. The white-haired
lady across from her, fragile and rosy as a
porcelain shepherdess, sat there swearing,
"Goddamned motherfucker son of a bitch bastard."
Some switch in her brain had frozen into curse
mode. A middle-aged man with a twisted face was
singing to himself as he stabbed at his food. Their food
had a tendency to get away. Eating took every
bit of concentration she could muster, a fierce
battle not to get food into her lap or her hair
or on her sweater, but carefully, avoiding
choking, she spooned a little at a time into her mouth.
Meals were very slow because they were difficult. None of
them ate easily.
  The rhythms of the day were different here than they
had been in the New York hospital but just as
repetitive and marked. Bathe and get dressed,
rest. Eat breakfast, rest, go to physical
therapy, rest, go to speech therapy, rest, lunch,
rest, go to occupational therapy, rest, be parked by the
TV, rest, supper, be parked by the TV, go
to bed, and start again. Yet she did not mind the
routine, because the chaos at Suzanne's had tired
her to desperation.
  All around her were people with various degrees of
stroke, various stages of recovery. When she
thought "recovery" she put mental quotes around
it. She heard from her various therapists about people who
had regained use of their legs, their arms, their
hands, their speech apparatus, their ability
to live a normal life, but all around her, she
saw the broken and the blasted. Like herself. If they
did not often reach out to one another, it was
partly because it was so much work to make contact with
another person who was not a therapist assigned
to you, and partly because looking at another person with a
similar problem was depressing. She began
to notice, to realize, that often a stroke was only
a first stroke, and that others minor or major
might readily follow.
  She no longer fought her therapists but tried,
stolidly, in a daily routine of attempts and
frequent failure. The one therapist she
approached with passion was her speech therapist. This
one was a woman, Nancy Wright. I WANT
TO WRITE, NANCY WRIGHT, she printed
painstakingly on a piece of paper. Suzanne
brought her steno pads and marking pens. "First
we'll work on your speech, Mrs. Blume."
  A speech pathologist had examined her for a
good part of an afternoon until she wept with frustration
and fatigue. The verdict was that there was no injury
to her vocal cords or her pharynx. It was all
in the brain, that gray globular organ she
increasingly resented. She imagined a hole in it
where the speech machine had once effortlessly worked,
spitting out words, sewing together sentences. She had
been such a talker. Her mother had called her The
Mouth when she was angry with Beverly.
  "A bayzeh tsung iz erger fun a
schlechter hant." A wicked tongue does
more harm than a wicked hand. That was her mother
talking. Suddenly she was at the table in their Lower
East Side apartment on Twelfth Street
next to the Jewish old folks' home. They
lived on the third floor back. The table was
actually two tables stuck together when the whole
family was home for a meal. She had three older
brothers and of course her sister, Karla. Al
went down in the Pacific on a destroyer.
Davey died of pneumonia in the hospital after
he was mugged outside his record store. Gene
perished of a heart attack just five years ago,
playing golf outside Las Vegas. They had
never had much to do with one another, except Gene,
who had been her favorite. They had little in
common. Different paths. But she could see them
around the two tables stuck together along with her
Aunt Hannah, who was some obscure cousin
brought over to save her life, and also their
Zeydeh, who seemed to her even then ancient and
weird, who spoke almost no English. They were
all crammed around those two shoved-together
tables singing the blessings and then digging into the good and
plentiful food of Shabbat. She could smell the
soup her mother made with eggs from inside the chicken,
the eggs without shells.
  Then she was even younger and helping Mama pluck
the chicken from the kosher butcher's. They were plucking
the feathers, and what did they do with them? They saved
them till Mama and Aunt Hannah made
feather dusters they sold at the Sunday market.
Nothing went to waste in that house, not a scrap of
vegetable peeling, not a bone, not a bit of fat.
Everything was used. Not like the piles of trash that
went out of Suzanne's every day, mountains of
garbage, things tossed out. No, they used every tiny
scrap.
  Then they did not throw away people, not her weird
Grandpa who had a head injury from a pogrom in
Lithuania and could only do rote tasks. Not
Aunt Hannah who woke everyone in the house with
her screaming at least one night a week,
nightmares from the Nazis. Sometimes a hungry
neighbor or a cousin passing through or someone in
some kind of trouble joined the meal. She could smell
that soup. She had not remembered it in years. It
was a soup that belonged to the days a chicken had
feathers and feet instead of parts wrapped in
plastic film. Kids like Rachel were turning
into vegetarians because it came as a shock to them that
all those objects that came so neatly from the
supermarket were not Disney creatures marching with a
dance step into their pots, but real animals who had
died to feed them. She had never been kept in the
dark about that, you ate to live, so she accepted it.
People overprotected kids nowadays, so they grew
up inept and unable to deal with adversity. That was a
subject she felt strongly about, and she opened
her mouth to speak to the old guy snoozing beside her as
the TV played some stupid sitcom about
twenty-year-olds with no politics and no sense
trying to decide who to fall into bed with. Then she
realized she could no more make the speech about child
raising than he could understand it.
  The scent of that soup tickled her nostrils.
She could smell it more clearly than she had
smelled anything since her stroke. It was a rich
smell, luscious. Perhaps she had never eaten
anything so good since. She could taste it. Her
mouth was filling with saliva. She could feel the
hard wooden seat with its center ridge pressing
into her buttocks and she could feel the
rough cotton of the white Shabbat cloth under her
elbows. Yes, Zeydeh was bent over his bowl of
soup, nose almost in it, and Davey was imitating
him and poking her in the ribs. She could smell the
fragrance of the challah fresh from the oven. Broken
open, its yellow softness revealed itself under the
glaze of the surface. It was almost more cake than
bread. It melted in her mouth. Why hadn't she
bought herself challah in recent years? A bakery
in the next block to her apartment made perfectly
good challah. Mama roasted two chickens so
everybody could have two pieces. She always got a
wing and a back. The boys got the legs. Mama,
Papa, and Zeydeh split the breasts, and
Papa got the other leg. Aunt Hannah,
Karla, and she divided up the rest. She
remembered how when she had left home and was
making money as an organizer for the ILGWU, she
ordered half a chicken in a restaurant and she
ate the whole thing, every bit of it. She could taste
that too. It wasn't like Mama's, which was a kind
of chicken pot roast with celery and carrots and
onions and garlic. Karla knew how to make it.
No, this restaurant chicken was roasted like the
goyim made but very good. She ate it all down
to the last bit of skin and sucked on the bones,
picking up the bones in her hands, not like a lady.
She could taste her mother's chicken in her mouth and
at the same time she could taste that roast chicken in
the restaurant, from her first union paycheck.
  Tears trickled from her left eye, her good
eye down her cheek, leaving trails of salt.
How could she ever have imagined she would be reduced
to sitting in a dimly lit room in front of the
TV no one was watching with a bunch of old people
nobody cared about--including each other--and crying
about vanished chickens? I've had my life,
damn it, she thought, I've had my life. It was
a damned good life, even when I was scared, even
when I was in danger, even when I was crying my
heart out. Why can't it just be over? I don't
regret it, but for this empty epilogue. I had
as much living as anybody could ask for, so let me
out of here. Let my body go!

                 
               Suzanne

  "Are you sure you're not rushing into marriage because
you're nervous about going to Israel
by yourself? You've never been out of the country alone.
You've always been with me or with your father."
  "Really, Mother, I'm looking forward
to Israel, I'm tremendously excited about
going. I've traveled by myself." Rachel was using
the ultra-reasonable tone of voice Suzanne
had often heard her use with Elena. "When I was
thinking of going to school in California, I went
out there alone. I went to Santa Fe with a friend.
You're just upset because I want to get married
during my year there."
  "But how long have you known him? Michael." She
made herself say his name. She did not like the way
they doted. She did not trust doting. She did
not like his vaguely superior air, the sense she
had of him judging them.
  "I've known him since my first year in
rabbinical college. We were in Hebrew
Ulam together. We started studying together that first
year." Rachel put down the underwear she was
sorting--what was to be taken with her, what was to be
put away. "Really, Mother, what have you got against
him? What more suitable husband am I ever
likely to meet?"
  "I like him," she said defensively. "I like
him fine. I just think marriage is something you should
wait till you're done with school before you rush
into."
  "Who's rushing, Mother? We've been talking
about it for months and months."
  But not to me, Suzanne thought sourly. When
did you stop telling me?

  Suzanne was putting away the woolens
Rachel had brought home. It always moved
Suzanne to handle her daughter's clothing. She
was sorting the things that needed to go to the cleaners from those
that could go into old suitcases in the basement at
once. A few smelled of the simple light
floral perfumes Rachel liked. Others
simply smelled of her daughter, a particular
scent she could not have named but would have recognized
anyplace. She buried her face in a blue
woolen turtleneck, and for a moment she felt like
crying. Menopause, Marta would say. Marta
blamed all moods on menopause, as if the world
wasn't knobby with problems and irritants.
Rachel's body scent was a clean gingery bready
smell. Flesh of her flesh. This morning she had
heard Jim and Marta fighting
upstairs. Marta had a low flash point, a
temper that sometimes caused her to break things she had
no desire to break. Jim was slower to anger but
far, far slower to forgive; and he never forgot.
  She remembered when the girls had been
small, how much their little clothes had pleased her,
like the clothes made for dolls. Rachel had been
a plump baby, good-natured, easily moved
to giggles or tears. When she was older, she
liked to color. She used to get so excited when
she saw the ducks in the Public Gardens, the
swans. She loved the swan boats. Elena had
never been interested in them. She liked rides
better.
  Rachel had loved stories about animals,
heroic dogs, wise or foolish cats,
mistreated horses, mischievous goats.
Elena had been more musical. She had
responded to music from the time she was a baby.
At one time, Suzanne had imagined that Elena
would be a musician. Or a dancer. Even in
financially difficult days, Suzanne had
managed ballet lessons for Elena. She could
remember her flickering across the stage like a dark
flame. She had always been lovely. She was one
of the only women Suzanne had ever known who
woke up pretty. Sleep seemed to lie on
her lightly and never to rumple her
excessively. Yet she slept profoundly.
When Elena was an infant and then a toddler,
sometimes her stillness in sleep frightened
Suzanne. Elena would sink into sleep and lie in
it as if on the bottom of a pool. More than
once, Suzanne had wakened her out of fear that
something was wrong, fear that her baby had died.
  She had been a far more anxious mother with Elena
than with Rachel. By the time Rachel was born, she
had Sam and Marta to help. She had some
experience. But when Elena was born, she realized
she had never held a baby in her life. She
ran out and bought Dr. Spock and every other book
she could see that might serve as manuals. The more
she read, the more things seemed able to go wrong.
Sudden infant death syndrome. Colic.
Meningitis. Choking. Smothering. Being dropped on
the head. Some nights she had sat and wept,
overwhelmed with the responsibility, overwhelmed with
fear. Sometimes she felt as if Elena were not a
baby but huge, bigger than she. Then she would
feel guilty. Motherhood had not been
joyous the first time. She had felt inadequate.
She was finishing law school, she was on the Law
Review, she was studying hours every night while
holding the crying Elena on one arm. She
wondered why she had not gone mad. Perhaps she had.
No, she had survived and so had Elena, but when
Elena got into trouble, Suzanne had been sure
it was her fault, her failure as a mother.

  "I think it would be good for you to be on the
board," Jake said, dipping bread into sauce from
the pot roast. "I know it would be good for the board."
  "But I'm overextended as it is. I'm
teaching, I'm practicing law, I'm still involved
in the clinic, I'm mentoring several students,
I'm trying to finish an article on appeals in
battered women syndrome cases ..."
  "The board will meet only once or twice a
month. You could manage that. An evening now and
then."
  "But you don't want me just as a warm body
at meetings. Do you?" She wished she did not have
a tiny suspicion that one of the reasons he was
attracted to her was because he wanted to recruit her
legal talent for his organization. Gratis, of
course, legitimate pro bono work, if she
had the time. But she had that little suspicion, and she
did not enjoy it.
  "You're a crack litigator, Suzanne.
We could use any help you could give us.
We're always in court. We're always suing some
lumber company or power megalith, or they're
suing us, or both."
  "Just when did you think of asking me? How long
have you had that in mind?"
  They looked at each other in a heavy silence.
Between them lay the half-eaten meal and the question she
did not quite ask, but which he understood.
  "It's an obvious idea, Suzanne. I'm
not at all sure it was my idea originally. I
imagine when I mentioned meeting you, one of my
directors made the suggestion."
  She decided to ignore the messier
possibilities for the moment. "I have no idea
how much time and effort my mother is going to take.
For the moment, she's in a good rehab center. But
that's temporary. She's going to need lots of
help. I don't understand what's involved,
frankly, except that I suspect it's a lot
more than I can imagine."
  "Well, how about you go on the board and we put
off asking you for anything more until you have your mother
settled?"
  "How about you give me some time to see what
having my mother in my home entails?" It was always
easier to maintain a relationship in two busy
lives when at least part of those working lives
intersected. However, she felt too overextended
to agree to anything. "Right now I wouldn't
baby-sit a friend's goldfish for a weekend.
I'm pulled out of shape."
  "It would be good for you to get involved. I know
you'd find it more interesting than you can guess."
  "I just need some time without any more new
demands."
  "I can wait." He grinned at her.
  Why did that make her so uncomfortable?

       17 Twelve Years Earlier
                Elena

  Elena was annoyed the guys were hogging the
driving. Ever since Chad had taught her, she
loved to drive. Her mother saw no reason for her
to start driving at what she called below the age of
reason, but Chad had brought her in for her
learner's permit. The guys would tire eventually
and let her take over. They had borrowed
Chad's father's BMW, which was hardly
inconspicuous but made good time on the night
interstate west. They had left in the morning at
the time they were all supposed to be going to school,
to give them a full day's head start before any of
them were missed. Now it was 1:30 A.m., and they
were just crossing from Ohio into Indiana with Judas
Priest shouting that song they kept playing over and
over, "Rock Hard, Ride Free."
  She wakened curled in the backseat to find that
Chad was checking them into a motel. They all
fell into the bed and more or less slept until it
got noisy in the morning. Then they all took
turns in the shower and Chad shaved.
  "How come you aren't shaving?" she asked Evan.
  "I'm going to grow a beard. Great disguise.
I look older with five o'clock shadow."
  She made a disgusted grimace. "Just don't
expect me to kiss you!"
  He grabbed her and rubbed his cheek against hers.
"Kiss, kiss, kiss."
  They were both giggling as they fell on
the bed. Chad came in whistling. "Leave you guys
alone for five minutes, and you're at it. In
permanent heat, that's what you are."
  Elena said, "I think we should all do something
to change our appearance."
  Chad shrugged. "Who's looking for three
kids? Runaways are a dime a dozen."
  "Your father's going to want his car back."
  Chad waved that away with an airy gesture.
"We'll have to ditch it at some point and get
another."
  "Oh, sure. We can trade," Evan said.
"Hi, want to trade your old Ford Escort
for a nice BMW, no questions asked?"
  "For the time being, let's get as far as we can in
it."
  "I've never been to California," Elena
said, curled up again in the backseat with a bag of
potato chips that would do for breakfast.
  "I have," Chad repeated. "We lived in
Sacramento for two years when my parents were still
together. Mom and I used to go for picnics on the
American River. My mom taught me how
to paddle a canoe. We would pretend to be
Indians."
  "Your mother used to, like, play with you?" Evan
asked in surprise.
  "Yeah. She had a wild imagination. We
always played together. Now I'll never see her
again, ever."
  "That's silly," Elena said. "She wouldn't
tell your dad where you are. She wouldn't rat on
you."
  Chad didn't answer. Elena tried
to imagine her mother playing with her. Actually she
remembered Suzanne crawling around the floor with
her when she was little. They were bears under the
dining-room table. She could hardly believe
Suzanne had done that. Growled and eaten
berries. Yes, they had eaten blueberries out
of their hands under the table, her mother's face stained with
purple. In the memory, Suzanne was young and
almost radiant. She remembered the same table as
a tent and her mother and herself under it--were they
Indians? Bedouins? That was fun. They ate under
the table from a can of tuna fish. The cat Big
Boy had come and eaten some of it too and made
Elena giggle. Big Boy was a huge brown
tabby from the street who slept with Elena, always,
his big grizzled head on her thigh.
She wondered if he was missing her. He was an
old cat now and set in his ways. Would he start
sleeping in Rachel's bed? Would he cry for her,
looking around the house and in the closets? She
felt almost angry at these long buried
memories of childhood. How could Suzanne have
been that way and now be the way she was? Now she
never understood a thing but kept pushing Elena to be
somebody else, an older version of the perfect
Rachel. Her mother just did not love her. She was
trying to train her like a recalcitrant dog.
  After weeks of making idle plans for running
away together, Elena herself precipitated their
leaving. She received a midsemester grade of D
in physics, which she had taken just to avoid
chemistry and its bad smells. Physics
seemed cleaner. But she hated it. Everything had
to be so diddly-shit precise. She had
expected it to be exciting, like time and space and
warp engines and stars exploding. But it was all
boring. It was measuring things nobody needed
to measure, displacements, specific
gravities. All this crap was because her mother
insisted Elena go to college, which was pointless. It
was pointless like school and adulthood and every
meaningless thing people filled their time with: 6:45 watch
the news; 7:30 get married; 8:05 talk
to investment broker; 9:00 watch TV. They would
all be dead soon, like some terrorist would set off
the big one and they would combust or else die
hideously with awful sores and their hair falling
out. Or some other terrorist would drop a plague
virus in the reservoir. There was nothing to look
forward to anyhow except growing up and getting a
boring job and paying taxes and having babies you
could force to act the way you wanted them to, so they
too would grow up doing what they found just as boring
as you had. As Chad was always saying, it was better
to give them the slip. Head out. Get off the
bus. If you followed their plan, all you got every
day was older.
  But she knew her mother was just going to kill her for
getting the D. As if it mattered. She could
hear it already, the speeches about living up to her
potential, the speeches about how important it
was for a girl to do as well as she possibly could--
like she was some kind of super Girl Scout leading
a charge of females up a hill against a guard
of macho men. Her best friends were boys. Her mother
didn't understand guys. She was always going
on about discrimination and quotas and affirmative
action and self-esteem. Elena's self-esteem
was just fine. She didn't need some stupid grade
in a class she hated to prop it up. Her mother
didn't care about her anyhow, only about
performance. Suzanne just couldn't endure to wait
until Elena grew up. She wanted her to act
a certain way, to dress a certain way. The first
time Suzanne saw her new bathing suit, she was
ripshit. "You have to shave your pubic hair to wear
that."
  So what? Like did her mother think she was going
to slip with the razor and perform a
clitoridectomy? When Suzanne saw her
tattoo--her gorgeous rose with the thorn and the
drop of blood--she just went ballistic. She
spent a whole evening investigating law governing
tattoos on minors in Rhode Island before
Elena persuaded her to cool it. Then Elena
heard her on the phone to her friend Marta asking about
how one got tattoos removed. Elena just
couldn't stand the fuss that was going to happen when her
mother saw her report card. All that guilt,
all that screaming and moaning. So she said to the
guys, "If we're ever hitting the road, it
better be now. Chad's facing military school
and I'm facing the electric chair."
  Now here they were, driving across endless
expanses of nothing in particular. They could
hardly find a place to pee, it was so vacant.
It felt like high school in the form of a landscape.
Nothing at all for a hundred miles and then a
fucking Hardee or a Kentucky Fried
Chicken and a gas station. They didn't even have
Burger Kings. They were playing M`otley
Cr@ue's Shout at the Devil. Every time they
sang "Bastard," she felt they were singing to her.
When Chad changed the music to Iron Maiden,
they all shouted with the tape on "Runnin Free."
They were running free. The other song the guys
kept playing was Scorpions, which was not her
favorite group, "Bad Boys Running
Wild." She was just as wild as them.
  They were past Iowa and into Nebraska at a
service plaza. They always tried to sit by the
window because it was more interesting, and they could keep an
eye on the car and stuff. They saw the state
troopers stop and one of them walking all around the
car. He looked at something and he was reading the
license plate.
  "Come on," Evan said. "The Greyhound is
loading. We can get on and pay for our tickets
on board. Just get on. We can say we were
hitchhiking and got stranded. The driver won't
throw us off in the middle of nowhere."
  They boarded the bus with the other passengers. They
couldn't sit together, but they got it straightened out and
went as far as Denver, where the bus was going. Chad
paid for all their tickets. He had cleaned out a
money stash at his house. The main things she
missed were her clothes and the tape player. She still
had her Walkman and most of her tapes that were in
her backpack, but a lot of the tapes had been in
the BMW, including the Iron Maiden tape with
"Wrathchild" on it.
  Denver was kind of cool. They could see the
mountains the next morning, after they walked around
during what remained of the night. Soon it was too
smoggy to see, but they knew the mountains were there.
They had no luggage, because when they had left the
car, they had left everything. She had only the
clothes she was standing in, jeans and a T-shirt and
her leather jacket and sneakers, plus the few
things in her backpack.
  "What are we going to do?" They were sitting in a
caf`e that had opened for breakfast. They were eating
a big breakfast because they hadn't eaten much the day
before. They had been scared in Nebraska and they were
still nervous. Before they left the caf`e, Elena
washed her hair in the basin in the women's room,
with the weird liquid soap. She patted it with
paper towels. It would dry as they walked around.
  "We should cut your hair off and pretend you're
a boy," Chad said.
  "Nobody's going to think I'm a boy and
keep your hands off my hair."
  "What are we going to do now? Keep taking
buses?"
  "That is distinctly not cool," Chad said.
"We need wheels."
  "Do you know how to hot-wire a car?" Evan
asked. "I don't."
  Reluctantly after a couple of minutes,
Chad admitted, "No. I don't either."
  "I don't see charities ringing their bells
on street corners to give away used cars,"
Evan continued. Maybe he felt the other two
had dragged him into this mess. Evan had swiped his
old man's American Express card, but
soon his old man would put a halt on
it. Plus if they used it, it would be like a big
sign to the cops as to exactly where they were. They
had already gone close to the limit on Chad's
Visa, and that too would leave a paper trail.
They had to buy a few clothes, and all three
got matching nose studs. It was like a wedding ring,
but cooler. It said they were one another's people, a
family. This was all the family she would ever
want or need.
  "There's worse places to be," Elena said in
a conciliatory tone. "It's nothing like Boston
or New York or Washington. I like the
Spanish I hear in the streets." That was the
only class she missed from high school,
except English. She wanted to be smooth in
Spanish so that if she ever met her father, she could
impress him. "Maybe we could like go up into the
mountains. They're so fucking awesome. Why not?
There's a lot of ghost towns here. We could just
find some old deserted cabin and move in."
  "We could go to Mexico," Evan said. "I was
there once with my parents in Acapulco, but I
barely remember it. I think I got sick and
threw up."
  "Well, then, we don't want to be going
there," Chad said sarcastically. "Poor little
Evan. Besides, if we don't get wheels, we
aren't going anyplace."
  "I just said, I don't see why we can't stay
here for a while. ... I think it's cool."
  "We said we were going to California. I have
friends in California. They can help us."
  "Oh sure, they can give us their allowance.
Loan us ten bucks. I can hardly wait,"
Evan said.
  "Guys, we're getting cross. I think we
all need sleep. We got to find a place
to crash," she said. It was real important to her
that they all get along, not carp like married people.
Mostly they all did get along, because they loved
one another, but when things were hard, then the two
guys would start sniping.
  They walked around for a couple more hours, getting
crankier and more and more silent together, until finally
they found a cheap hotel that did not give a damn
that there were three of them sharing a room. In
motels, it was easier, because just one of them checked
in. It all came down to Chad's being right: they
had to have a car.
  Around eight that night they woke up and
went out to eat. Elena got them to try a
Mexican place. She hardly ever had
Mexican food. Her grandma had taken her out
for it a couple of times in New York, but
Suzanne didn't like hot food. But at least,
thanks to Beverly, she could pretend to having eaten
it all her life. It was greasy but good and
definitely cheap, which helped a lot because none of
them had much cash.
  They walked around and looked at people and stared
into store windows. They bought a couple of
T-shirts and some underwear and socks and the Rising
Force tape. Chad tried to buy beer, but they
wouldn't sell it to him. Evan said, "When my
beard grows out, I'll look much older, and they
won't ask for ID."
  Chad said, "We can always pimp for Elena. That
should support us."
  "Fuck you, Chad. I don't think that's
funny. I won't do that. You go sell your
ass."
  "Nah," Evan said. "Nobody'd pay for
her. We'd have to pay them."
  They were both grinning now, bonded over teasing
her. She pretended to be upset, but she was glad
they stopped being cranky.
  Back in the hotel room it was stuffy and dim.
Chad stood in the middle of the floor looking at
both of them where they sprawled on the bed,
Evan's head on her breasts. "I have the
solution to our problems right here. Never pays
to doubt the Chad."

  "Your credit card." Evan threw up his
hands. "We can use it maybe twice more and then
they'll be down on us."
  "No. Th." Chad reached into his jacket and
pulled out a gun.
  She remembered it. It was from his father's
bedroom. The Smith and Wesson .357
Magnum, he had called it. It lay there in his
hand, large and deadly.
  "What's that for?" she asked, not wanting to hear.
  "Freedom. If they corner us, I'm not
going back." He raised the pistol to his
temple and mimicked firing. "Fast death, sure
and sweet."
  Evan hefted it dubiously. "Exit?
Bang bang, an emergency measure? Is that
why you brought the damned thing?"
  "No, man, it gives us a chance.
That's our ticket to California."
  Elena hated guns, but she didn't speak.
She would sound like a wimp.

  Elena and the boys spent a week in Denver,
arguing about what they should do. The money was going.
"We could always rob a gas station or a convenience
store," Chad said. "People do that all the time."
  "That doesn't make it right!" Elena said with a
fierce conviction that surprised even her. "You
can't go sticking a gun into the face of some guy
who's just pumping gas. Just an ordinary working
guy. That's not right!" It could have been Suzanne
talking, she knew it, but she couldn't help her
upbringing. Or Grandma Beverly, who was as cool
a grandma as anybody ever had. Elena couldn't
condone casual crime committed against ordinary people
just for money.
  "I never thought there was any use having a gun
along," Evan said.
  "It's a way out," Chad said. "I won't go
back. I'll never go back."
  Evan shrugged. "Don't be so dramatic.
If we're ever going on to California, it should be
before all our money runs out. Maybe we should just
take a frigging bus as far as we can go."
  Chad grimaced. "I hate buses. They
stink."
  "Well, do you just want to stay here until our
money's all gone?" Evan demanded.
  Sometimes she hated Chad. They were out here because of
him. Okay, she was scared for Suzanne to find out
she was flunking physics, but Suzanne wasn't
about to do anything more than guilt-trip her and make
up some stupid punishment, like doing the dishes for
two weeks straight. But Chad had all these
complications, like his mother he wasn't supposed
to see and his father who wanted to send him to military
school and he suffered all the time at the top of his
lungs. He'd bullied them into coming. They had just
been daydreaming about it like kids would talk about
setting fire to the school or robbing a bank or
a beer truck. It was like imagining you were Batman
or something. It was like getting high. When it was
over, you were still home and everything was the same. But
here they were a couple of thousand miles from home and a
mile high in a city that felt terribly dry and
made her heart pound when she ran up the stairs
at the hotel. They were dirty and had no nice
clothes. The beds were awful and the
mattresses were lumpy and smelled of stale
urine. Her face was breaking out, which just never
happened to her. It was all the greasy food, her
mother was right. Too many french fries did ruin your
skin. There was a special shampoo she used at
home she didn't even see in the drugstore
here. It made her hair shine. Now her hair
hung there dull and limp. She didn't even have
a hair dryer to blow it out the way she wore it.
No wonder when she saw herself in a mirror or
a shop window, she just didn't want to look.
She worried about Big Boy, that Rachel and
Suzanne wouldn't give him his medicine twice
a day and would forget to get the special food he
needed from the vet.
  Evan was getting grumpy, her Evan who was
always above the fray. The situation was out of his
control. He knew it, she knew it, and neither of
them liked it. She liked it better when Evan
ran things, when it was his ideas they followed--although
it was Evan's stupid desire to fuck Chad that
had got them into this mess to begin with. When they all
had sex now, she didn't come. She was too
angry. She lay there bored and a little sore.
Mostly Evan wanted to fuck Chad and Chad
wanted to fuck her, and they both wanted it too
often to suit her. Chad was always wanting to try
new positions with his feet in her face or her
straddling a chair that was uncomfortable anyhow.
Lately whenever she peed, it burned. The guys
were so noisy together they gave her a headache. If
she could only be alone sometimes, quiet,
peaceful.
  She wished they would just lay off her until they
got to California. She saw the golden state in
her mind, beaches, orange groves, cable cars,
movie stars, waves rolling in. If they could
only finally get to California, everything would be
better. Chad had friends there who'd help them.
They would be okay. They would all live in a little
shack on the ocean and get brown and happy together.
In the meantime, she felt like they insisted on sex
all the time because they were bored shitless, the same as
her.
  "Pack up. We're going," Chad announced
suddenly, clapping his hands together. "Let's move
on out."
  Everything they had, what little it was, fitted
into the backpack Elena always wore, only now
Evan kept it on his back. They
sneaked out, because they owed the desk for the last night.
Elena had been sent down to give him a story
about how they were waiting for money to come. He'd
leered at her but said he'd give them until the
next day at noon. It was evening. They took a
bus to a mall where they ate burgers and ice
cream.
  Elena didn't know what Chad had in mind and
she was sure Evan didn't either, but both of them
were scared to ask. Maybe if she knew, she'd have
to try to stop him, and then what would they do? They were
running out of options. It had seemed to her before they
left that they had so much money. She had taken
three hundred dollars out of the savings account set
up for college. The check had to be cosigned
by Suzanne and her, but Evan was expert at forging
Suzanne's signature. He had been doing it
on absence excuses for two years.
  Food used up money fast. Gas, when they
had had the car. It had needed a lot of gas.
"If we do get a car," Elena said, "it
shouldn't be so gaudy, so conspicuous. And it
shouldn't use so much gas."
  "I better check the consumer's guide ratings
on gasoline consumption before I lift us some
wheels. And don't you care about emissions
standards? We shouldn't like drive a car that
pollutes," Chad said, slapping her butt.
She hated when he did that, and he knew it.
  They walked around the mall until the traffic
thinned out. Finally Chad saw what he was waiting
for. A guy pulled up in a dark blue Ford
Taurus. His girlfriend was waiting in the
passenger's seat while he ran into the liquor
store. He left the engine running.
  Chad yanked open the door on the passenger's
side. "Ou." He shoved the gun into her neck.
  "Don't hurt me!"
  "Don't scream, or I'll shoot. I
don't want you, just the car." He pulled her out.
"Evan, drive." Evan flung the backpack
behind him and fumbled for the parking brake.
  Chad motioned Elena into the backseat, and they
lurched off. "Okay. Elena. Where do we go?"
  "Turn right at the light." She turned on the
overhead and looked at the map Evan had bought.
"Okay, just keep going. We're heading for the
interstate."
  They drove all night. Before they climbed
into the mountains, they had to buy gas. "That
jerk had less than a quarter of a tank. I
used to know this guy who never put more than a quarter
tank in his wreck at once, because he always thought
it was going to die on him." Chad sounded almost
cheerful. The tapes in the car were country western
crap, and Elena threw them out the window as they
roared upward. The one tape she kept was
Kiss, who were okay. It was an old tape but it
had "Partners in Crime."
  She finally got her turn at the wheel.
Evan tried to stay awake to talk to her but he
dozed off, his head against the passenger seat window.
She drove just five miles over the speed
limit, the way Suzanne always did. They
didn't want to be stopped by police. She had
a brief fantasy that they would be, and then she could
go home and take a real bubble bath and change
her clothes and sleep in her own clean bed with
Big Boy. But she didn't want them to get
caught while she was driving. The guys had
waited all this time to finally let her drive, so
she wasn't about to fuck up.
  She drove on through the dark shapes of the
mountains, the engine straining sometimes. She had
to turn on the heater, it got so cold in the car.
She could see patches of snow and then more snow to either
side of the car. Then white banks of snow hemmed
them in. In the headlights of oncoming trucks,
she saw a whole winter of snow around them. Then
finally they were coming down and down. The snow disappeared
and the sky began to lighten over the mountains behind them.
She was tired now but she wouldn't admit it. She
gripped the wheel hard. Chad was snoring in
back. Evan lay against the windows, his head at
an awkward angle as if his neck were broken.
What was going to become of them all? Suppose
they did get to California? So what? Kiss was
singing "Nowhere to Run," which matched her mood.
  Still, she had flown through the dark. She had
driven all night and her exhaustion was like a
drug singing in her veins. There was no going back
now. They were across the first high mountains and she would
never be the same again. She had come into a new
country of the damned. She was not who she had been,
but new and dangerous and desperate. They had
stolen this car, they had stolen their new life. They
were real criminals now, outside the law,
outside the prefabricated flat lives she
scorned. She loved them both passionately,
Evan, who was a part of her, and Chad
whom they both adored and who ruled them like the sun,
as they turned about his fire and ice. Her desire
for him slowly returned as she drove on into the
pasty predawn, the air like congealed grease around
them. He had been right to yank them out of their boring
lives and turn them loose. On to California,
where they would live together and there would be no one else
they would have to please--only themselves, only each
other. They would be free--together.

       18 Twelve Years Earlier
                Elena

  Elena said, "So what's going to happen in
California, when we get there?"
  They were camping in the desert under a sky that had
more stars than she had ever seen. They were partway
across Nevada. They had got gas in Elko and
got back on 80. In Battle Mountain, they
bought Cokes from a machine. The last time they ate
was in Utah. They were scared to get out of the car in a
town, scared to go into a fast-food place or a
restaurant. They were trying to make the money last
and trying to avoid being seen, because they were sure they
were wanted now. The night was cold. She had her
jacket but she was still chilled through, pressed against
Evan's bony side. He had been increasingly
silent all day. Now he spoke up. "Yeah,
Chad, what's in California?" There was an
undertone of confrontation in his voice.
  "Nothing," Chad said. "But wouldn't you like some
real honest nothing?"
  "What does that mean?" Elena asked.
  "What do you think of your life so far?"
  She laughed harshly. "Shit. Pure endless
shit."
  "What do you think the rest of your life will be?"
  "Shit. Pure boring shit."
  "So?" Evan huddled farther into his clothes.
"What do you propose?"
  Chad was quiet for perhaps five minutes. The
stars were huge over them, like animals in the indigo
sky. Not all of them were white. As she lay
back staring at them, she could see blue and yellow
and red. It was as if they were in outer space looking
around. It did not feel like earth. She felt as
if they had left behind everybody else, and there was
no one alive, really alive, except the three
of them who were one unit, one self. She touched the
stud in her nose, a sign of their
union, that their bodies belonged to each other as their
souls did. It felt as if they were on the moon,
or some asteroid private to them.
  "I think we should go as far as we can, because it's
fun and we're together, and it's the best game I
ever played. But if they're going to catch us, or
the money runs out and we're at the end of our
game, then we should end it." He clapped his hands
together, a sharp report like a small explosion.
  "You think we should kill ourselves," Evan said.
  "Some combination of that," Chad said calmly.
"I'm not going back to my old man. I'm not
going to let him destroy my mother and put me in
military school. I'd rather die. It's that
simple."
  Evan was silent, tense. She could feel his
body drawn into itself, coiled. She did not want
to speak until he did. She felt calm about the
idea of killing herself. It sounded curiously neat
and soothing. She could imagine how sorry
Suzanne and Rachel would be for the way they had
treated her.
  "Of course, if you're scared ..." Chad
said. "It takes nerve."
  She could imagine how impressed all her
classmates would be. She would go from slut
to heroine. She would be a story no one would forget.
That's how it was, if you really did it.
  "I've thought about it," Evan said. "Ever
since I can remember, I've thought about it. But
then I used to think all the time about flying."
  "You couldn't fly," Chad said softly. "But you
can walk out that door."
  "There's always that," Evan said.
  She tried to imagine it. Like a huge
orgasm. A crashing into sleep. She thought of
what Suzanne would say, and how her sister would
cry and cry. Everyone would think how mean they had
been to her, and they would feel guilty. Suzanne
would think how she had yelled at Elena about the
dishes and her room and smoking and grades and
clothes and her tattoo. Suzanne would really be
sorry, but it would be way, way too late. After
the assembly in school, counselors would come in
to tell the kids it was all right, but nobody would
think so, not the adults, not the kids. A month
later, some other kids would kill themselves in
homage. A copycat suicide. But theirs would
be unique. "We can't let them catch us and put
us in jail," she said aloud.
  Evan said, "We're underage."
  "I'm not," Chad said. "I'm sixteen.
I'd go to jail. But I won't."
  At dawn, he showed them all how to load and
fire the gun. It hurt Elena's ears. It
really hurt. But she learned to hold the gun.
  "It isn't like you have to be a good shot," Chad
said. "It isn't like you're trying to hit a target
forty feet away." He held the gun to his
temple, and Elena thought for a moment he was going
to do it right then.
  "I'm hungry," Evan said. They had
hardly slept all night. "Do we have anything
left to eat?"
  "We'll stop in the next town. We need
gas anyhow," Elena said and began walking toward
the car. She did not want to die, not
particularly. Not right then, anyhow. Later. Now
the wind was fresh and cold as a fish's belly and the
east behind them was a lemon stripe at the
horizon. It was strange how in the desert, she
thought of the sea. The mountains she was staring at
looked near, but they had driven until well after
dark across the desert surrounded by ridges of
mountains they climbed and then descended and back
onto the desert again. She felt like an ant
crawling over a bedspread. But she did not care.
She walked in the middle, with her arms around each
of them.
  "If they catch us," Evan said, "they'll
separate us."
  "Of course," Chad said. "But we belong
together."
  "We're a set," Elena said happily.
"A family. A unit."
  "Don't call us by nasty names like family,"
Chad said, slapping her butt. "We're loving
to one another. My father never loved anyone but himself
and expensive whores and expensive cars. Never.
We're not a family, we're a little tribe.
A tribe of three."
  "I don't think I ever loved anyone but a
spaniel I had named Audrey, my grandmother,
who died when I was twelve, and you guys,"
Evan said. "My grandmother was so warm I always
wanted to be with her, but my parents could barely stand
her. She had an accent. They called her
ignorant, when she spoke five languages."
  "Whatever we are," Chad said, "we stay
together. If we need to, we die
together."

  They had driven for maybe half an hour. A
police car had passed them going the other way right
after they pulled out onto the highway, but it
didn't seem to pay them any mind. It wasn't
really light yet, just gray dawn with the sun not
yet up over the last mountain range behind them and the
sky still dark ahead, westward where they were going.
Elena was curled up in the backseat, using the
blanket that they had found in the trunk. Chad was
driving and Evan was sitting beside him. Then they
saw a police car coming behind them with its lights
rotating. They couldn't hear the siren. No cars
were in sight before them, just a couple of trucks on
the other side of the highway. Chad stepped on it,
but the police car was gaining on them, still far behind but
getting bigger as she knelt on the seat facing
backward. "I wish we had the fucking BMW,"
he muttered.
  Suddenly Chad swerved off the highway. The
car spun around, rocked as if it would go over but
then finally came to a halt facing back toward the
police car still getting bigger. Chad pulled the
gun out of his jacket. "This is it," he said.
"I'll go first. Then, Evan, take the gun, do
Elena and then yourself."
  Evan made a noise that sounded like a yeah, but
he was probably as scared as she was. She
felt a weird elation and total panic at
once. This was it, like Chad said. The end. The
finish. The final scene in the movie. She
imagined music and she wished they had the tape
deck on.
  Chad was facing away from her toward the police
car. She saw him lift the gun and put it to his
temple. There was a noise so loud she bit her
tongue. Her head rang and her eyes dripped
tears. Then she felt something wet and slimy on
herself. She looked down. It was his blood, and some
gray matter like snot. "His brains," she
screamed. "His brains are all over me!"
  Chad slumped forward over the wheel with part of his
head gone and blood and brains all over her and the
seat and the window. It was horrible, not at all the
way she had imagined. He had turned
into garbage. She pawed at herself, but she could not
bear to touch the stuff. She realized that Evan was
screaming. He had blood all over him. Chad
had fallen on him and he was frantically
pushing him away.
  She opened the door and stumbled out, vomiting.
It was a dry vomit because they hadn't eaten for
twelve hours. But she kept heaving, bent over
and then rising to her feet and staggering onward. She
was coughing and crying and trying to vomit but on her
feet because she had to get away from that thing in the car,
she had to escape it.
  The police car had slowed down and was pulling
off about thirty feet away from them. Two state
patrolmen got out, one from each side, and started
toward them. She stared at them as she lurched forward
and it seemed to her as if she were traveling toward
them and gazing at them for minute after minute. One
was taller and wore sideburns like Elvis. The
other was stockier and had light curly hair that
reminded her of Rachel. It felt as if she was
moving ever so slowly toward them and they were staring at
her as if she was something fierce and wild, like a
bear. Then they both looked past her. Evan
got out of the front passenger's seat. He had
taken the gun but it hung loosely in his hand.
  "What are you doing with that?" she screamed at
him. "Are you really going to shoot me?"
  Evan didn't say anything. His mouth was
hanging open and he looked as if he might throw
up too. Chad had fallen half out of the open
door, blood all over him. The cops were coming
toward them. "Drop the gun," one of them shouted.
"Put the gun down. Put your weapon down on
the ground now! Then raise your hands. Put your
weapon on the ground." They had their guns trained
on Evan. One cop had dropped to a knee and
held his gun in front of him in both hands. The
other was still coming forward, also holding his gun out with
both hands. Evan just kept staggering toward them.
Then he made some kind of gesture. She was
sure he was raising his hands to surrender, but he still
had the gun and the cop in front shot, then the other
trooper. The gun in Evan's hand went off as
he was hit, but the shot just went into the earth. Shot
after shot. She could not tell who was shooting, but she
saw Evan jerk and spin. Then he went down.
She ran to him. The cop was on her and grabbed her
and pushed her against the car. She was screaming. She
did not even feel herself slam into the metal.
  She heard the cop who had shot Evan say,
"He's dead." At first she thought he meant
Chad. But she kept screaming. She couldn't
stop. She didn't think she would ever
stop. They had shot Evan, who hadn't wanted
to die, who hadn't had any intention of shooting her
or them or anybody, anybody at all. Who
was just so freaked-out at what Chad had done, for
real, that he wasn't even aware he was holding the
gun. They had shot him dead. She waited for them
to shoot her too. Why should she care?

                 
               Suzanne

  Suzanne was sitting at Marta's kitchen
table, her head in her hands. "I don't see
what else I can do."
  "You haven't considered a nursing home?"
Marta was still dressed for court. She hadn't yet
changed, except for kicking off her pumps and
removing her suit jacket.
  "Marta! You know Beverly. She isn't
senile. She'd go mad in a nursing home. I
can't do that to her."
  "But neither can you stay home and take care of
her." Marta was sensuously caressing her own
toes, freed from her court pumps.
  "We'll have to see how much taking care of she
needs. I can hire someone. Marta, what else
can I do? She can't live alone. I let her
apartment go months ago. I have to move her in.
I have no other choice I can see, no other
viable and reasonable choice."
  "Beverly and you under the same roof. You'll
move up here."
  "Maybe we can reach a rapprochement. She
needs me. I always wanted her to give me her
approval. I'm aware of how childish that is,
but it's been there forever. For her to say, Yes, you
are a good lawyer, you did know what you were doing.
You are truly a political person whose standards
I can respect. And so on and on and on."
  "And you seriously think moving her into your flat
is going to accomplish all that? There'll be the
wrong room, wrong furniture, wrong city,
wrong food, and so on and on and on."
  "Realistically I know that. But my fantasies
come into play. And I want to do right by her. She
deserves being taken care of. She has been a
good person, she has given her life to good
causes. Now I should throw her in the garbage because
she's damaged?" Suzanne thought of a new line
of argument. "How about your own mother? If
she hadn't died of breast cancer ... suppose
she'd had a stroke?"
  "But, Suzanne, I was close to her. I
never stopped being close. I could have lived with her.
It isn't the same thing. She was my bud."
  The carpenters came to put up railings and
ramps. Her house was in utter chaos for days.
Elena flirted with the younger carpenter. Suzanne
would come home from work to find him still there, sitting at
the kitchen table looking into Elena's eyes while
she practiced her Spanish on him.
  "Are you interested in him?" Suzanne asked
cautiously.
  "If what you mean is, am I screwing him,
no. He's awfully young and naive, frankly."
  Then the plumber, the electrician. Then the
carpenters came back. Then Elena and
Suzanne repainted. "You think she's going
to give a damn if the paint is white or
yellow?" Elena asked, her hair tucked under a
red scarf.
  Suzanne shrugged. "I don't want her
to feel that anything is shoddy or that we don't
care to make it right."
  "I will never let myself fall apart! It's because
she smoked all those years." Elena shook her
head. "Even I stopped smoking finally."
  "Well, she did cut down on her smoking.
Beverly's always been healthy. She had more energy
than six other women put together."
  "It used to be so much fun to run around New
York with her. She always knew bargain shops and
cool places to have espresso or
Chinese-Cuban food."
  "She never spent much money on herself, but she
always looked good. She had dozens of friends."
Suzanne found herself on the verge of breaking
into tears. They were talking about Beverly as if she
had died. She sniffed hard and rubbed her eyes.
"Anyhow, I think this pale, pale green will
suit her. She's always said her favorite
color was green. To match her eyes."

  For three weeks, workmen had been in the house
almost every day. She tripped over her treadmill
when she ran to check a fax. In the middle of the
night, when she woke up to pee, she ran into the
exercise bike. Everything felt overcrowded.
Constricted. She must endure it and not complain, not
be martyred. Never let Beverly feel
she was putting anyone out. The room next to the
kitchen--which had housed a student who had lived with
them for the year after Elena's disaster, which had once
been her office, which had recently been her gym
--was now fixed up into a sickroom. It had a
hospital bed, railings. Everything was designed
to be reachable from the bed or easily gotten to.
The bathroom off the kitchen had been modified
with a chair in the shower, a new higher toilet,
faucets that turned on or off at a touch. The
kitchen had been changed to make it more accessible.
The front porch had a ramp, since Beverly
could not climb stairs with her walker or her
wheelchair. The ramps too had railings.
  Suzanne's house, her refuge, her
aesthetic retreat, her comfort hole, was all
changed around to meet the needs of her mother, with whom
she had not lived since she had gone away
to college. She could still remember those fights.
They had been fighting since she was eleven, but the
fierce arguments reached a crescendo her senior
year of high school. "What's wrong with City
College?"
  "I have a scholarship to Brown." She could
scarcely say that she had applied to thirty
colleges to get away from home. Brown was the
most prestigious place to take her and offer
tuition as well. Suzanne had earned a four
point average, was class valedictorian and
coeditor of the high school paper, and was terrific
at taking tests. Her SAT'S had been
gorgeous. She was convinced to this day she had done
all that not so much in order to succeed as to escape.
Now they were about to become roommates.

  Mud slides and more mud slides. I was
supposed to go to a conference in Big Sur, but
Route 1 is closed again. The meeting got
moved to a hotel in San Jose.
  My friends are buying me out of my half of the
house. The wife's pregnant again and they think
they can fill it just fine. It isn't divided
into apartments, like your house. We just all shared the
kitchen and the family rooms. I'm glad we
don't have to put it on the market. It should make
clearing out of here easier.
  Have you thought about joining the board? There's a
lot of enthusiasm here for the idea.

                                  
  I haven't had two minutes to think about your
board. My apartment is full of carpenters,
plumbers, plasterers, electricians, all because
my mother is coming to live with me in approximately
two weeks. I am considering taking on one of the
trickiest appeals I've ever faced. I
wonder when you first had the idea of my joining the
board?

  I will not let it bother me, she thought, if he
is trying to recruit me in bed. She promised
herself she would not take it seriously. If he did
not want her skills, she would never have come alive
again sexually, would never even have guessed it was
possible for her. After all, everybody had
motives, everybody had his or her own agenda.
Still, it felt a little tarnished. It made her
wonder if she could possibly continue to carve out
time for him if he did move east. Whenever he
brought up her joining the board, she took an
emotional step backward.

  When I came back from Boston and mentioned
I'd met you, immediately my boss got excited.
He suggested I ask you at once. I still think
it's a great match of talents and need.

She was not convinced, but she was mollified.
  Basically, Beverly had to be taken from the
rehab center because Medicare and the insurance covering
rehabilitation had run out, and with Rachel still in
college and Elena at home, Suzanne could not
pay for a continued stay. Plus every time she
visited, Beverly whispered in that strange
cracked voice, painfully forming the words or
something like the words, "When go home?"
  She was not sure that Beverly understood that home,
meaning the old apartment, was gone forever, but surely
a room of her own in Brookline would be a lot
better than this dreary room with a partially
deranged roommate who kept babbling about
events in her distant past and sometimes calling her
dog for an hour at a time. Suzanne had saved
her mother's things--some pieces of furniture,
lamps, bric-a-brac, books, clothing--and they
were waiting for her in Brookline. Perhaps those
familiar objects would help make Beverly
feel at home.
  The day arrived when the move could no longer be
put off. It was a Saturday in late
May, a cool overcast day when colors, instead
of fading in the mist, seemed to glow as if lit from
within. The pink dogwoods on the lawn of the rehab
center looked as if they might explode.
Suzanne was wheeling Beverly to the curb. She
had borrowed Marta's van to transport the
wheelchair and the walker and the other paraphernalia.
"Look, Mother," she said, pointing at the pink
dogwoods.
  "Suburbs," Beverly said and shrugged her good
shoulder.
  Suzanne did not speak again as she got
Beverly to the van, helped her from the chair to the
seat, protecting her head as she had been taught
and collapsed the wheelchair before adding it to the heap
in the back. Then she paused, feeling an insane
desire to flee, to run off into the misty morning and
vanish, perhaps turn up in California on
Jake's doorstep. It's your fucking duty,
she thought. Beverly is your mother.
  A little voice said, some mother she was. But
sometimes she was a good mother and loving and always
Suzanne was proud of her. When she came
to school, it was an occasion. Here comes the charming
Mrs. Blume. Her mother was always special,
dressed up a little Bohemian but always
attractive, her hair glowing, just enough makeup and
never too much. The male teachers lit up. The
principal would see her at once. She had that
rich throaty voice that made everyone want
to stop and listen--unless Beverly had a
political bone to pick, like her objection
to school prayer long before it was a cause
everybody had heard of. Her mother might not be a
practicing Jew, like Aunt Karla, but she was
well aware of how the dominant culture tried
to assimilate her daughter forcibly with Easter
songs in school assembly. Then her mother's
visits raised hell, but a kind of hell that
Suzanne was not embarrassed by. She had always
agreed with her mother then, politically. It was not
until Suzanne became a feminist that their
fighting spread to the political arena. "I have no
common cause with suburban housewives,"
Beverly proclaimed. "Ladies in pearls are
not my constituency."
  "I have no common cause with macho politicos
who use women like toilet paper," Suzanne
had yelled back, just as strident, just as angry.
  Suzanne's becoming politically
active had not brought them closer but given them one
more thing to argue about. But after age seventeen, she
had always been able to walk out the door, to escape.
Gritting her teeth, she went around to the driver's
side of Marta's van and climbed in. This time
there was no escape.

                 
                Beverly

  Beverly had been invisible for months. She
spoke and no one heard her, for none had the
patience to listen while she carefully,
deliberately sculpted the words out of pain and
air. She made gestures and faces no one
noticed. She had no opinions or ideas,
since no person listened to them, argued with them, was
swayed by them. She was without purpose or effect.
  She hated the physical therapy but she went
through the motions. The speech therapy she gave herself
to wholeheartedly. The occupational therapy she worked
at. It was humiliating to be learning like a
retarded toddler to dress and undress herself,
take herself to the toilet, clean herself, feed herself,
get in and out of her walker and her wheelchair.
She could use the walker on even ground, but she
tired quickly. The wheelchair appeared in some
ways more dignified and certainly more comfortable, but it
was too wide to pass through many doorways.
  Her anger was feeble and throttled. She was often
angry, but it was hard to express except by throwing
things on the floor, again like a toddler in a high
chair. She remembered King Lear, so angry,
so foolish, so weak. She thought of herself as Queen
Lear. She had lost everything and would gladly die
on the moor.
  Her speech therapist was a fat woman to whom
she had taken an instant dislike the first day, but
at the end of a week, she had to admit that Nancy
was better than that Dr. Fish she had thought so
wonderful in New York. Nancy pushed her
hard. She began to get out not only almost every sound
she needed to truly speak, but to form complete
sentences, even if it took her five minutes.
She came to respect Nancy, even to feel
warmly toward her. She wished she could go on
seeing her even after she left the facility, but it
was too far away from Suzanne's house. She'd
be seeing a speech therapist whose office was a few
blocks away.
  Now Suzanne had finally come to get her out of
this pastel prison. But Suzanne had lied
to her, had never told her she had let go of
Beverly's home, the apartment where she had lived
for the last thirty-one years, in the neighborhood
where she knew everybody and everybody knew her.
Here she was nobody, just an old lady in a
wheelchair who drooled sometimes and couldn't talk
right. There she had been a character with politics, with a
history, with a circle of friends--friends she would never
see again. People she cared about. When Suzanne had
blithely let go of that apartment, she had killed
Beverly's identity, her selfhood, her past.
She was furious whenever she thought of that act of
cheapness. Suzanne had no right to do that to her.
  Now she was going to have Suzanne's choices
thrust down her gullet. Even the house was
wrong, a big wooden object with trees and dark
ominous rhododendrons and yews all around it, a
huge waste of space. It was depressing, a
turn-of-the-century monster upper-middle-class
people had lived in with servants when her mother had come
to this country. It was as if Suzanne had some
nutty nostalgia for what Beverly's mother had
never enjoyed: the good life circa 1910 on a
street occupied by professionals, yuppies, their
precocious children, their computers, their pedigreed
dogs and cats. Even their hamsters had
pedigrees back twenty generations, all the way
to 1994. They drove BMW'S, Volvos,
Jeep Cherokees, the higher range of
Toyotas with an occasional Land Rover and
Lexus. Someone else, usually Black or
Latina, cleaned their houses. Sometimes another
service person, usually white, walked their
dogs for them. Beverly did not belong here. Even
if she could speak fluently and forcefully, she would
have nothing to say to people who lived like this. They had
built a ramp so she could wheel herself into the maw
of the dark enveloping house. The thought of actually
living here was so depressing her eyes burned.
  "You should be grateful," the social worker said,
"that you have such a good daughter. She's taking you
in. She's remodeling her house so you can get
around." They kept telling her she should be
grateful, as if to be forced into a corner of someone
else's life when she had always had her own, was
something to grovel and mumble thanks about.
  "Why ... move out ... good apartment ...
South End," Beverly spoke slowly.
It took her three false starts to get out the
question.
  "Mother, I haven't lived there in twelve
years! You know why I left."
  "Why?"
  "I had to get Elena out of that
neighborhood."
  "Should've ... sent her ... live with me."
  Suzanne said nothing, her mouth thinning as it
did when she was angry.
  "Marta ... kept her ... from jail,"
Beverly said.
  "She did, yes," Suzanne agreed.
"I'm glad you remember."
  "I remember ... all," Beverly said. "You
think I lost ... brain?" She wanted to say
another word, but she could not recall it. She was
always having to substitute one word for another. She
knew Suzanne was trying to listen, trying to be
patient, but sometimes while she was putting a
sentence together like building a wall one brick at
a time and then attempting to force those words out through her
reluctant apparatus, Suzanne went off
to another task, answered the phone, began another
conversation.
  She was put in a little room off the kitchen.
She supposed it had been the maid's room when
this house was built. She imagined an
immigrant Irish maid huddling there in tears
after a sixteen-hour day of work. It had its own
bathroom, whose door had been widened. There were
railings everyplace. At least it would be far
easier than when she had stayed here at
Passover. She slept in a hospital bed, which
she would never share with any man as long as she
lived. She would never have another lover. No one
would ever stroke her breasts again or touch her there
or talk silliness to her late at night or in
the morning. She would never be held in strong or
wiry arms, never press her breasts against a
broad hairy chest or feel an erection hard
against her belly or thigh.
  But her cat was waiting for her. Mao was thinner.
His coat felt coarse. They weren't feeding him
right. Probably those two huge orange
tabbies took his food away. She would fix that.
He was ecstatic to see her, kneading her side,
vibrating as if he were all purr-engine. She
moved him to her good side where she could hug him.
A little feeling had come back on her
numb side, but she still could not move that hand. The
leg she could move crudely, roughly, dragging it
more than walking normally, but at least it
supported her.
  She was exhausted from the move and she napped,
Mao pressed to her side. Whenever she woke,
he was there purring. He was the only friend she had
left now, the only remnant of her own real
life that had been stolen from her. Grateful, they
wanted her to be grateful, for what? Grateful
that Suzanne hadn't thrown her out on the street?
She had known bag ladies in her old
neighborhood, and she was not convinced their life was
any worse than hers right now. At least if she
were a bag lady, she'd be in her own
neighborhood. Her friends would help her out. They
always had.
  Karla, her silly sister, had always said she
believed in an afterlife. What a word, after
life. Well, that was what she was enduring: this was
her after life.




                 
               Suzanne

  Alexa appeared at Suzanne's office.
"Suze, we better have lunch together--somewhere with a
bit of privacy."
  "Sorry, I can't today. I just moved my mother
in, and I have to interview some possible caretakers
from an agency. How about we talk for a couple of
minutes here?"
  Alexa shut the door, looking around in the
hall first. Suzanne assumed this was about
Alexa's battle to get tenure in the
political science department, but Alexa looked
at her accusingly. "Is it true you're taking the
Rodriguez appeal? Tell me it isn't
true."
  "News travels fast. I only decided
last week to consider it. I've only begun
to review the transcripts." Suzanne sat
down, trying to glance surreptitiously at her
watch.
  Alexa was a stocky blond woman who wore
voluminous clothing, as if she were fifty pounds
heavier than her real weight. She had
a pretty face, round and motherly, and had
recently married a chiropractor. "Suze, you
can't do it. It's dirt. Dragging those children and their
families through that trauma again. Let some
cold-blooded shyster have it."
  "Alexa, I don't think she's guilty."
  "How can you believe her instead of twenty children?"
  "I'll be able to answer that question better, after
I've read through the records. I haven't
committed myself yet. I need to know if there are
genuine grounds for appeal."
  "That woman abused little children left in her care.
If you get her off on some technicality, how
could you live with yourself?"
  "I can't really discuss the case until I
know the facts and the context. I'm not convinced she
abused anyone. Have you read the transcripts?"
  "I've read the papers. I think she should be
hanged. The sexual abuse of children is one of the
worst crimes an adult can commit, girlfriend, and
you know that in your conscience."
  "But sending a woman to prison for thirty
years for a crime she didn't commit is also a
terrible abuse, Alexa. Suppose somebody
heard you calling a student Girlfriend and decided
you were having an affair with her?" Suzanne
stood. "I really have to keep that appointment at the
agency. I can't leave my mother home alone.
Elena's with her today, but most days she works as a
receptionist."
  Striding down the hall with Alexa bobbing beside
her, she was annoyed. Everybody assumed
Maxine Rodriguez was guilty. Perhaps she had
even assumed that herself before she had met the woman
out at Framingham last week. Maxine came
across as a dedicated woman whose life had been
destroyed. She was gaunt and distraught,
desperate, but Suzanne felt that pull, something
that often made her take a chance on a client whose
case felt reasonably hopeless. Suzanne
had not decided to take on the case. The court of
appeals had refused to review the previous
appeal. She would need new grounds. However, in
the advances of appellate court opinions she
had been scanning just the week before, she had read
an opinion overturning a similar case on the
grounds that the children's testimony had been
rehearsed, prepared, essentially scripted for
them. Alexa's using guilt on her for considering
the case made her even more determined
to examine the record with care. Alexa was her
friend, but she was also prejudging. Children were the
sentimental heroes of this story, but Maxine also
had rights and feelings and a life cut off at the
roots.

  Suzanne stood in the doorway of Rachel's
old room, where Elena was staying. Elena was being
difficult about sharing the room with Rachel, who was
home between returning from school and going off
to Israel. Elena kept demanding Suzanne
move out of her office and let Rachel stay there.
"Look. I'm a lawyer. This is my law
office. It is not anyone's bedroom. You've
been staying in Rachel's room, and now Grandma
is in the room downstairs. The two of you will just have
to share a bedroom until Rachel leaves. It's
only ten days, Elena. Try to be reasonable
about this."
  "I do not share a bedroom. I do not share a
bed with a woman, even if she is my sister. I
am not a child, and I need privacy."
  "Well, there isn't any to be had."
  "Why don't you sleep in here with her?"
  "Elena, I'm glad to have you here, but you moved
back simply to have a place to live. I also have
Beverly now. I am not moving out of my office and
I am not moving out of my room. I just
rearranged and rebuilt half the house. I'm not
about to rearrange the other half."
  "Fine! I'll find someplace nice and
private to stay. You'll see!"
  "Elena, if you want to stay with a friend for the next
ten days, that's fine with me. But we all have
to make allowances for each other."
  "You make me feel like I don't matter!"
  "Elena, of course you matter very much to me. But
you know that I have classes to teach, people depending on
me to get them out of prison or to win appeals,
your grandmother helpless downstairs. I have to live
my life. I can't just sacrifice it to you."
  Rachel was far more accepting of the situation. They
were packing up some of her things for storage and others
to go with her to Israel, or to follow her.
  "I'm so sorry it doesn't even look like
your room any longer," Suzanne said. "Nothing
seems to be working out to anybody's
satisfaction."
  "It doesn't matter. I'll never live in
this room again."
  "Rachel, why do you say that?"
  "We're getting married, you know that. You
don't expect Michael to move in here."
  "In Israel."
  "We want to be married in Jerusalem.
What could be more special? You'll fly over with
Grandma. Elena if she wants to come. Daddy for
sure and maybe his family."
  On one hand, Suzanne was glad that Rachel
was not marrying right away. They had time
to reconsider. More selfishly, if she had
to manage a wedding right now, she would explode.
She could not imagine where the time and energy would come
from. On the other hand she wished Rachel were not going
anyplace, particularly into danger. The
logistics of a wedding that far away (all those
expensive plane fares and hotels) made her
taste anxiety in her throat like acid.
  "Wouldn't you rather put off worrying about marriage
until after you get done with your year in Israel
and get married when you come back home? You have a
lot to learn this year and a whole new culture
to get used to, without having to learn how to be
married to each other."
  "We know we want to marry, Mother." Rachel
gave her a sweet smile. "We won't
change our minds. We've been talking about
marriage for months."
  Suzanne found herself quietly weeping as she
packed Rachel's clothing for a year's storage.
They had never been separated by such distances,
thousands of miles. When Rachel had gone
to Europe, it had been with Suzanne, who loved
traveling with her younger daughter. Rachel was a
patient traveler. Unlike Suzanne herself,
she did not mind when a plane or train was late
or when they had to wait to get into a hotel room.
She liked almost everything except men bothering her
in the street. She liked strange foods (she
had not been eating kosher yet); she liked
museums; she liked city streets and markets and
churches and shuls; she liked mountains and seas and
rivers and forests. Rachel didn't complain about the
blistering heat in Arles or the early snow in
Bergen. She didn't mind the traffic jam on
M-1 outside Heathrow so that they almost missed
their plane trying to return a rental car
to someplace with ambiguous signs. She liked
traveling by plane, she liked traveling by train,
she liked taking the underground or the
metro or whatever. She was a perfect equable
traveling companion. They would never travel together
again, she thought, wiping her streaming eyes.
  They were both in an elegiac mood. Do you
remember, was the theme of their chatter. Suzanne
was glad she had some time to spend with Rachel in between
the end of school and the beginning of summer quarter.
She had not planned to teach this summer, but after
Beverly had her stroke, she volunteered,
convinced she would need the money. She had not
guessed the half of it. She would need to put a
lot of work into Maxine's case, which she had almost
decided to take. It was a political hot
potato, and although Suzanne's appeal would be
strictly on procedural grounds, she did not
doubt that the ambitions of the state attorney
general and the lieutenant governor were as
relevant to the case as any of the children's
well-rehearsed testimony.
  "Do you remember how you used to cry when moths
got into the apartment on Rutland Street and died
there?"
  "Oh, Mother, I'm sure I didn't go around
weeping about moths. But I do remember when Big
Boy got sick and died, how terrible that was."
  Then a little later, "Mother. Do you remember how
we rented a little house with Daddy up in Maine?
It was out on a rocky peninsula. Once with a friend
I tried to find it, but I discovered that Maine
has maybe two hundred rocky peninsulas, and
I couldn't remember where it was."
  "It was on a peninsula near Bath. Called
something like Five Towns. You were almost six. ..."
  "You and Daddy seemed so together. When I
remember it, everybody is always laughing.
Everybody is glowing and happy."
  "It was just a week. You can be happy with anyone
for a week, I guess. I just wish I could make
Beverly happier."
  "I think she needs more and brighter lights in there.
It's hard enough for her to read without sitting in
twilight."
  "More light." Suzanne was pitifully eager
for any ideas that might help. Rachel had
concrete suggestions about improving Beverly's
situation: get her a computer with an extra large
screen. One with big keys. Then she can
communicate more easily when she's tired and she can
find stimulation on-line.
  To Suzanne's surprise, Beverly
did not reject the idea. "Can learn!" She
hit her chest with her left hand. "Learn!"

  Then suddenly the preparations were all made, the
time was used up and Rachel left for New
York, where she was meeting Michael to fly
to Israel together. It had been hanging over
Suzanne for months, for weeks, for days. All
at once the day, the hour arrived and she saw off
her daughter. Rachel looked so small and
vulnerable heading for the plane. She appeared very
serious, with a briefcase in one hand, pulling a
carry-on with the other. Rachel had worn that same
expression since she was a toddler making mud
pies and sand castles in the park. Suzanne could
see Rachel with her sturdy little legs stuck before
her in a V looking at a doll in her lap with
that full measuring stare. Rachel had been born
good-natured and serious, in equal measures. That
night, Suzanne wept again, intermittently.
Beverly held her hand in her good hand. "Will ...
do ... fine."
  "She may. I don't know if I will. I'm
closer to Rachel than to Elena. Rachel always
preferred to be with me rather than her father. We never
had the same kinds of bitter gouging fights I'd
still have with Elena if I let it happen."
  "You love, both ... diff ... rent
ways."
  They had a rare moment of communication, even if
the content was simple reassurance. Rachel was
too young to marry. Why couldn't she wait? Why
did she want to join her life to that rather innocuous
stiff young man?

  Suzanne often found her own house
uncomfortable lately. Elena's music,
Beverly's needs. She hired a woman to come in
for Beverly eight hours a day Monday through
Friday, to take her out for a walk when weather
permitted, make her lunch, whatever. One of
Beverly's main problems was boredom. She was not
about to park herself in front of the TV and watch
soap operas all day. She would watch the news
and CNN for a while, even a cooking show
occasionally. Suzanne found that ridiculous, as
Beverly had never cooked anything more complicated
than a hot dog. Her usual style was to open a
can of soup. Spaghetti was pasta boiled too
long with a can of tomato sauce or
tomato soup dumped over it. Maybe cooking
shows were like sitcoms to Beverly, a series of
jokes.
  Suzanne was helping Jake find an apartment.
The move was happening. He would be here most of the
time for the next few years. He was fully capable
of finding his own housing, but it distracted her from her
continuing funk over Rachel. It was mildly
amusing to look at places to live, and
probably she would be spending some evenings and
weekend afternoons there, so she might as well help
in the search. Both of them put in such long hours,
and had so many meetings to attend, that working on the
apartment problem was a convenient excuse to spend time
together out of bed.
  "All right, I'll be on the board. But it
may be pretty nominal, Jake. I haven't
got days or even hours to give."
  "You might find it more interesting than you
suppose."
  It was Jake she found interesting, and if the
price of peace between them was to go on his board, she
did not like it, but she acquiesced. The sex was
strong. She enjoyed surprising herself and sometimes
surprising him. It was Tuesday and she had an
appointment at three, but she was free until
then. They had looked at two places, one
ridiculously overpriced and the other, possible but
small, cramped. "But I don't need much
space," he said. "I travel light and I
live lightly. Some books, a bed, a computer
on a good desk, music and a little kitchen and I'm
set. I'd rather live in a smaller place I can
afford." He was tight in surprising ways, she
noticed. He hated to waste money. Maybe that
came from running a political organization on
erratic contributions. He had the recycling
habit. When he wasn't using the computer and
actually had to write on paper with a pen, he used
the backs of circulars and form letters. When something
broke, her impulse was to discard it and his was
to tinker with it. The too small apartment was in
Brookline ten blocks from her house. "You
want to stop by my house? I think we can grab a
little privacy."
  It was eleven-forty-five when they arrived. "I
think it would be nice to take Beverly out for lunch
today," Suzanne said to the West Indian aide,
Sylvia. Sylvia was just a few inches taller
than Beverly but had eighty pounds on
her. She was a broadly built woman with light
brown skin and hair cut really short. She was
skilled at getting Beverly to do what was needed.
Suzanne handed Sylvia two twenties and
Sylvia set about to bundle Beverly out to the
Greek place, the diner, or the Jewish deli,
as Beverly chose. It would take them at least an
hour and a half, including the time to toddle down the
block.
  They had just got into bed in the otherwise empty
house when Suzanne heard voices and
footsteps. After they made love, when they got
up to shower, she looked out and saw Jim's car in
the yard. Marta seldom came back during the
week. Monday through Wednesday were booked-solid
days, so she usually didn't get in till seven
or eight. Suzanne opened the back door and
softly climbed the steps partway to listen. Yes,
it was Elena's voice. What were they doing back
at Marta's in the middle of the day?
  He could have forgotten something (then why was Elena
with him?). They could be having lunch (why wouldn't
they eat someplace nearer his office?). They could
be having a personal conversation about some problem at
the office (with all that laughter and then long
silences?).
  She motioned Jake to silence as they crept out
to his rented car, parked at the curb. "I have the
most awful sinking feeling that Elena is doing a
number with my best friend's husband."
  "Don't jump to conclusions," Jake said,
"She'll never forgive you if you're wrong."
  "I'll never forgive her if I'm right."
  "Of course you will. Down the pike. The thing to do
is try to figure out what's really happening.
All lawyers are part detective, or want
to be."
  She sighed. "I was happy a few minutes
ago. I really was."

                 
                Elena

  Elena noticed it the third week she was working
there, the way Jim looked at her, how often he
looked. She was surprised and not surprised.
She was used to men looking at her with that kind of
interest, but she had never paid much attention to him
before. He was the old guy upstairs in the house
where she hadn't wanted to move. Marta
was always giving her little hints about life and education
and the future that were really depressing. Their son,
Adam, was a pain in the ass, covering everything she
had been supposed to do and never did. Now he was
at NYU studying film, like all the grind-hard
kids from high school who thought they were the next
Quentin Tarantino. Adam was seven years younger
than she was, but he always acted as if he knew
everything better.
  Jim had been like an uncle, someone you could
borrow twenty bucks from or get a ride
someplace, the guy who wouldn't tell on you if
he caught you smoking on the porch. She doubted
she had ever looked at him carefully. He had
pale gray-blue eyes like glacial runoff,
eyes of tremendous intensity. He was in great
shape. He ran every day. He worked out. He
kept himself lean.
  What she first liked about him was that Jim was no
workaholic like her mother, like Rachel, like their nerdy
son Adam, like Marta. Jim was a goof-off like
her. She had never realized that. He had
patients, sure, five on a busy day,
sometimes just a couple, but he didn't really give
a fuck. Once she grasped that, she loved the
job, in spite of the disappointing grungy office
over a tropical fish store and next to a bowling
alley in Brighton. When she had first seen the
office with its beaten-up furniture, two tiny
rooms that hadn't been painted since World War
II, she had wanted to turn around and flee.
Now she understood: he didn't care if the
office turned some patients off. He didn't
really give a damn. Some days he played on
the Internet. They shared cool sites. She
began to look at him with deliberate interest, a
kind of itch, like who was he really and what was going
on with him? He let himself have fun. He liked
to take it easy and chill out, even in the office.
He had an eye for women, she could tell. She
was sure he had girls on the side. Vaguely
she remembered something from years before: Rachel had
told her about Jim and a student. She could hardly
write Rachel in Israel and ask her, but there
had been something, she knew it.
  She was tired of the gonzos she had met at the
restaurant, that she met at the gym. They were either
lawyers like her mother or just as bad, buzz saws with
penises. Or they were losers like the swimming pool
salesman, nothing much going on, just
boring. Or kids who had no clue. Jim did
not seem to be dying to get his hands on her. What
he seemed to want when she came into his office
between appointments was to talk with her. To really
talk. He talked about how he lost his teaching
job. It had been a student and they had been in
love, but it hadn't worked out. Her parents pulled
her out of school and he got fired. Sure he
had kept it from Marta. It was easy. She was so
wrapped up in herself and her law practice, she
barely noticed what was going on with him.
  She told him what really happened at the
restaurant, how that guy had grabbed her and she
had belted him. She told him about her friend
Courtney getting AIDS from a bad needle.
She told him about Kevin walking off a cliff
when he was stoned, and her swearing off drugs,
finally.
  His eyes were beautiful, icy, intense.
Wintry with all the blaze of winter sun.
Sometimes she found her gaze dropping from his, just
because of his intensity. She liked it. That intensity
felt familiar, felt right. It wasn't until
the first time he embraced her, as they were about to leave
the office one evening after she had been working there for
two months. He slid his arms around her and
held her to him. That was all he did for about three
minutes, just held her. She could feel his
erection, but he did not make a move on her.
Finally she pulled his head down and kissed him.
  It was as she was kissing him that she understood the
power, the compulsion of it: it was how he felt, his
body against hers. He was tall like Evan, he was
lean like Evan, and the way he held her made her
think of Evan, freshly, blindingly. There was that
same intensity, the way they talked with each other.
Never had she thought she would find it again, a twin
soul, her other, her brother. Love struck her
like lightning during that first kiss, the way it should, the
way it must. She was shocked with love, smoldering.
  For two weeks after that all they did when they
could snatch a moment was kiss and talk, make out
and talk. She was melting. She was dissolving. At
night she could not sleep for imagining sex with him.
Instead of feeling like a jaded sophisticate,
burned out and bored, she felt as if she had
become fifteen again. She told him about Evan
and Chad, the whole thing. He knew the general
story, but from Marta's point of view, the story
she had been made to tell in court, how
she was just a poor innocent drag-along. How the
bad boys had done her in. She told him the
way it really was and then the year afterward, when all she
could do was lie there for two months and then get up
and go through the motions. How Suzanne had ripped
her out of her old life, old school, old
friends. She was waiting all the time to die. She had
collaborated in Chad's death and she had been
supposed to die next, but she had chickened out and
Evan had been shot because of her, because of her
cowardice, getting out of the car and running. That was
why the state trooper shot Evan.
  Marta had defended her. It was sickening, but
her mother and Marta kept telling her she had
to keep her mouth shut. She could not tell the
truth. The big lie was that she was a weak-willed
girl under the influence of two guys who had made
her run off with them. They had fed her drugs and
forced her into sex with them. They were evil and she was a
poor misguided lamb led astray. Chad was the
ringleader, Evan was the follower, and she was the
victim, blah blah blah. She had hated
Marta as she sat in that courtroom. She was
underage anyhow. In the eyes of the law she was a
child. In her own eyes, she was a guilty old
woman who had lived too long and was too scared
to die.
  Now she was given a second chance, after all
these stupid wasted useless empty years. She
talked to Jim about wanting to die. He listened,
really listened, and then he took the story and made
it change. He made her a heroine who had
tried to save Evan and Chad. He made her a
faithful friend who, when she could not save them, was
willing to go with them into the land of shadows, but the
police arrived too soon. Chad and Evan
died of their own weaknesses, their inner demons.
She was only the pretext for their immolation. Now
she must find her own way. She was not to blame for the
weakness of others, but she needed to believe in her
own inner strength.
  Jim told her about the death of his daughter,
only two months after they got her home from the
hospital. His second child. He knew Marta
was not to blame but could not help blaming her. Something
had obviously gone wrong during the pregnancy,
when she had insisted on working until the day her
water burst. The girl, Annette, had been
fragile, born prematurely. Then she was
dead in her crib, sudden infant death
syndrome, it was called, as if that explained
anything. It just said, your baby died and we don't
know why.
  Elena and Jim held each other. He seemed
afraid to go much further than kissing and stroking
her hair and holding her face between his hands. He
kept saying he was too old for her. The more he
protested, the more fiercely she argued.
  She was half wild with desire for him. She
told herself it was like poison ivy of the brain. She
could think of nothing else. She waited until a
Monday afternoon when everybody was out of the house
except Beverly and Sylvia. Then Sylvia
took Beverly to the speech therapist. Jim was
upstairs working on his book. She just went
quietly up and put her arms around him as he
sat at the computer. She was not wearing a bra or
panties, just a loose rayon dress, cut low
and slit up one side. When he stood and began
to kiss her, she put his hand on her breast. Her
breast was burning to be touched. She kneaded his
back, pulling his shirt loose from his pants, then
slid her grasp down to his firm buttocks.
He felt good, lean and sleek and hot under her
hands. He was breathing hard now. Yes, she would have
him. When they were undressed, she knelt and
kissed his penis. "Put it in me. Just do it now.
I can't wait any longer."
  They made love on the couch in the living
room. She groaned and thrust up her hips,
feeling him enter her. This was love they were making,
something different and new again, something special,
something holy. He kept saying, "I love you,
I love you, I love you."
  She kept saying the same thing. Then she added,
"I want to belong to you. I want to be yours."
  "I want you to be mine." But when they were showered
and dressed, he said, "We must be very careful.
If we pay too much attention to each other, one
of them will guess. ... You're on the pill,
right?"
  He was too cautious, but she could wait.
  "I feel out of control with you," she said. "I
haven't felt that way in years. Always I've
been the one driving the car. I couldn't trust any
of them enough to let go."
  "I understand," he said, "and your trust honors
me. We have to cut through all these roles of control
and the fear of it and be vulnerable and open to each other.
To be naked."
  The next time, she got him to make love on
the bed he slept in with Marta. It was obscene
to think of them together. Marta had no right to him, for
she did not love him. They were always fighting,
Elena could hear them in the evenings if she shut off
her music and listened. They argued about money, about
their son, Adam, about accountants and doctors,
about the dishwasher and roof repairs. If they had
ever loved each other, it was long, long over. They
were just used to living together. They were each other's bad
habit. But Jim wanted her as strongly as she
wanted him, because they were really one. They were one will,
one life, one body. She saw that, even if he
didn't; and sometimes, already, he did.

                 
                Beverly

  Beverly liked her new computer. She had
resisted using one for years, for she could not see
incurring the expense for no good reason. At first
she had thought they were a fad, and then she thought she was
past learning about them, since technical stuff had
never been her strong suit. Now just to learn something
new was a reassurance her life was not completely
over, that she was still alive upstairs. It was hard.
She forgot more easily than she ever had, and
concentration was difficult and strenuous. At least the
computer opened up rather than closed down her world,
shrinking since the night of her stroke.
  Even with the large keys to type with, she was slow.
The mouse was easier. Suzanne set her up on
E-mail and showed her the Internet. She
didn't think any of her old friends did
E-mail except Lucy, who had taught at
CUNY for twenty-five years and had a computer
before any of them. She carefully typed out a note
on the computer to Lucy at Eighty-fifth
Street, asking her if she was on E-mail.
Sylvia would mail it for her. Beverly wanted
to E-mail somebody. She asked Suzanne at
breakfast the next morning. Suzanne printed out
a list of the E-mail addresses of
politicians.
  Later that morning, Beverly composed an
E-mail to the President about the problems of
Medicare coverage. She wrote about all the people
she had seen in the hospital and in the rehab
center and what happened to them and how awful it was that
people couldn't be covered at home, where they
were much better off than in a nursing home-dump,
and it was less wasteful of money and resources.
She wrote the letter for forty-five minutes. Then
she hit "send" and went to bed. She was exhausted.
But she was happy.
  Now she could send the same letter to the senators from
New York and the two from Massachusetts. She
would find out the name of the representative for
Brookline and send him one too. She was no
longer helpless. She would collect useful
E-mail addresses and harangue them all. It
seemed much more intimate than writing a letter. She
felt as if she was going right through their defenses,
past their secretaries and assistants, straight
into their faces. Tomorrow she would compose a letter on
immigration policies. Then welfare. Then
minimum wage. Suzanne showed her a site where
she could monitor proposed legislation. She would
have plenty to tell them all.
  She actually had some appetite for supper.
Suzanne brought home Chinese takeout.
Beverly remembered how she used to eat
proficiently with chopsticks. Back in '68,
she had a Chinese boyfriend, a Maoist and
nutty, but she liked him anyhow. He had
beautiful eyes, great bones, and an erection that
never died. She sighed, remembering. He had
married a Chinese woman who managed a
television repair shop. For months, he
continued to visit Beverly, but she wasn't comfortable
with that. Soon he had a baby boy and they moved
to Atlanta, where his wife's family sent him
to graduate school.
  Now she had to eat with a special fork that could be
managed easily. She got so weary sometimes of
all the things she could no longer handle, ordinary
silverware and cups, ordinary clothes she could no
longer fasten. Ordinary stairs. Ordinary
public transportation she had used all her
life.
  But tonight she would not dwell on that. "Letter ...
Rachel?"
  She had seen it in the hall when Sylvia was
helping her go for her walk. When they had finished
supper, Suzanne read it to her. It was full of
tourist stuff, this road, that shuk, going
to Sarah's Tomb. She and Michael were living in
a dormitory near Hebrew University.
"We each have a roommate. Mine is from
Cincinnati. She is two years older
than I am and much prettier, with blond hair
halfway down her back. Michael is rooming
with a Brit from Coventry. Every day we walk and
walk and walk. When we don't walk, we
take buses. We are memorizing all the bus
routes. You have to know before you get on, because it's
push and shove and chaos. I always expect the
walls to buckle." Beverly wanted to know what
Rachel thought about Israel politically, if she
had met any Palestinians yet, how she was
getting on with her boyfriend: the real stuff.
"Yesterday we visited the Old City again. When
we went out the Damascus Gate where there's a
row of some kind of palms (i can't tell the
different kinds yet) that look like upright feather
dusters, we saw this fountain, nothing fancy, and in
the basin, already kids were splashing around. It made
me feel like joining them, but we're on our best
behavior--although nobody else is! I'll have
E-mail by the time you get this. Here's my
address."
  Suzanne gave her Rachel's E-mail
address. Now she could ask her all the questions she
wanted to. Beverly felt as if she went around
grinning now, maybe crookedly, but with honest
joy.
  A couple of nights a week when Suzanne
was actually home all evening, after supper,
Suzanne would clear and load the dishwasher while
Beverly lay down to nap. Then Beverly would
wake in an hour or so, and they would go together to her
computer. Suzanne logged her into the New
York Times on-line. Then AP. Then
ABC news. Then the Washington Post.
Beverly's heart was beating hard. She would keep
up with news after all. There must be liberal and
radical sites. She would find them. Now every
morning and noon and night she would dip into some
news site and pick up the breaking news. She
also discovered there was a huge amount of stroke
information on-line. A couple of days later, she
stumbled onto a li/serv of old radicals, and
Suzanne showed her how to subscribe. Now every
day she got messages from people all around the country
who were politically savvy and experienced. She
could get into wonderful arguments and discussions. There
was also a stroke support group she joined, although
it was sometimes depressing.
  She wished she did not tire so quickly. But
on-line communication was easy compared
to writing a real letter. The phone was her bugaboo.
She hated the rare times when she had to answer.
She had been hung up on numerous times, because
she could not force out a reply quickly enough. But with
E-mail, she could take her time reading and
comprehending what people wrote and composing and
laboriously typing an answer with one hand.
Nobody got impatient except her server,
who dumped her occasionally, and then she had
to reconnect.
  She began doing her hand and arm exercises with the
same fervent concentration she brought to her speech
exercises. Her clumsy left hand was her link
to the world. However dimly, she was reconnected.
Her old friend Lucy wrote back. Almost every day
they E-mailed short or longer notes about their
lives. Lucy had broken her hip when she was
knocked down by a Rollerblader and had trouble
getting around. She had undergone a hip
replacement, but it was painful, and she would never
walk easily again. Then she heard from her friend
Rose, who had written five books on
labor history. Lucy had given Rose
Beverly's E-mail address. Now she had
two friends as well as her correspondence with all
the politicians she felt like advising, berating,
occasionally praising, and all the old lefties on
the li/serv with their monikers. Hers was West
Side Rosa, for she had always identified with
Rosa Luxemburg, and the West Side was her
spiritual home.
  She was sorry when her eyes got tired or
when her back hurt too much for her to continue.
She would have loved to get on-line when she woke
up and to stay connected all day. It was exciting.
It felt right. She was no longer alone in this
pale green room when Sylvia went home but was
still vitally in the world. She kept finding new
subjects to explore: UFO'S, archaeology,
specific writers.
  Her hand and her eyes betrayed her,
particularly her hand. She had to stop after around an
hour, although she had got much better at making
full use of that hour of connection. She lay
resting then, sometimes dozing, sometimes just listening to the
house around her. She had identified the steps and
voices of Elena and Jim. Two or three
times a week, Elena sneaked upstairs or they
came back from work together. They were going to bed, of
course. She smiled slightly. Elena
was still her favorite. Beverly liked Jim. He
was an attractive man, and Marta didn't
pay enough attention to him. Besides, they had only one
kid, in college. Lots of men went off on
their own then, found someone new. It was human
nature. Often enough in her life, what they had
found had been her. She could not judge Elena.
  Elena knew she knew. Elena came in and
sat down one afternoon. "I love him," she said
without preamble. "I can't help it."
  Beverly nodded. She understood.
  "I knew you'd see it my way," Elena
said. "Now I have to go back to work. It's a
pretty easy job. I'll look in on you
tonight."
  From then on, Elena took some time each day
to sit with her. Beverly had felt bad that Elena
did not want to be with her. Now she understood. It
wasn't because of her stroke or her distorted
face, no, it was just that Elena was having an
affair and had to cover it up. Now that Elena
knew that Beverly was not going to make a fuss or
be judgmental, they were close again. Beverly thought,
I am slowly, slowly coming back to life. It
isn't the life I had, but it's a great
improvement on last month and infinitely
superior to the month before that.
  Besides, Beverly rather enjoyed knowing something that
Suzanne didn't. Suzanne was worrying about
something, Beverly could feel it, probably a
case. Suzanne might know a lot about the law,
but she was no observer of people. Beverly smiled
inwardly. She had Elena's confidence, and
Suzanne didn't.

                 
                Elena

  Monday morning, Elena lay in bed in the
room she finally had to herself again, listening to the sounds
from upstairs. That was his tread crossing. Then
Marta slogged across the floor. It should be herself
up there, not that woman who did not adore him, who
did not even know him any longer. Elena had
intended to move out and had gone as far as answering
ads, before changing her mind. It was too convenient
to be living in the same house. She could keep an
eye on Marta's van and know when she had left.
It made arrangements pitifully simple.
  She would move when he moved with her,
not before. They would leave together. Neither of them belonged
here. Nobody really loved her except him, and of
course Beverly. The first time Elena had seen her
after her stroke, she had to turn away from what
looked like the Halloween mask of a witch. Now
Beverly just looked a little lopsided, like a candle
that had begun to soften before it ran down in wax.
Beverly could talk, if a person had patience.
Elena had patience, unlike her mother, who was
really being a bitch, half the time finishing
Beverly's sentences for her. Elena didn't
feel she was so damned important she couldn't
wait for Beverly to say what she wanted to.
Grandma was on her side. She had had plenty of
affairs, and sometimes told her stories about men
she had known over the years. That was more interesting
than when she got into talking about old strikes and
bygone demonstrations. It took Beverly about
three times longer than normal to tell a story,
but often it was a pretty good story when she spat
it out. Elena truly enjoyed hearing Beverly's
adventures. Too bad those guys were dead and
gone or doddering, because some of them sounded cool.
Beverly had been way ahead of her time, having a
baby by herself without bothering to get married or lie
about it; she just wasn't into marriage and never
bothered to marry anybody.
  Finally she heard Marta leaving at eight.
Now Elena waited for Suzanne to clear out.
She was teaching, and then she would be off to Framingham
to talk to the woman who'd fooled around with the kids.
At eight-thirty, Sylvia came up the walk
and Suzanne met her at the door for
last-minute instructions. Then she was gone.
  Elena gave herself another ten minutes, in
case Suzanne had forgotten something--although
Suzanne never forgot anything unless her hard
disk crashed. Her mother kept all her little
memos about the world on her computer, so she never
forgot a birthday or an anniversary or a
holiday. Elena surreptitiously checked her
mother's schedule on her computer regularly, so she
wouldn't be surprised. Sometimes having a mother who
was so well organized had its advantages.
There wasn't a spontaneous moment in
Suzanne's day.
  Then Elena put on her bathrobe and passed
quietly through the kitchen. Sylvia was helping
Beverly shower. Elena ran up the stairway to the
second floor. He had left the
kitchen door unlocked and was waiting in the
kitchen. She let her robe fall. He pulled
her into his arms wordlessly, caressing her through the thin
cotton of the brief gown. Then he picked her
up and carried her into the bedroom. She fell with a
gasp on top of the bedspread and he threw himself
on top of her. They were both excited and barely
kissed before he thrust into her. He was driving
hard. It almost hurt. She liked it. Nothing
existed but his weight on her, his hard slender
body under her hands, his prick inside her banging
and knocking on her womb. She could not stand it.
She could not stand for it to end. She could not stand for it
to continue. It was too much, too much. When she
came, it was as if she'd broken open and molten
blood spilled out.
  He cried out, almost a scream, when he came.
After they had recovered, they lay and talked. She
knew much more about him now, about how his father had died
of a heart attack when he was way too young, about
how his mother had married again to a man he couldn't
stand, and moved to Tucson. She knew he was
exactly forty-four--two years younger than
Marta. Of course he was younger. She should have known
that.
  She hated weekends now. Suzanne and
Marta had been around all day Saturday and
Sunday. At least some Saturdays, the two
women went shooting at a range, keeping them out
of the house for a couple of hours. When Marta went
out Saturday night, Jim had to go with her, to some
judge's house. They were starved for each other.
She had to figure out some way they could meet on
weekends. Maybe in the car in the garage?
Nothing sounded feasible. She told him he should
start having Saturday morning office hours.
They had sex at the office sometimes, but it
wasn't comfortable. The damned bowling alley made
rumbling noises and booms, and they could hear people
talking and the drill going in the dentist's office
next door. She wondered why anyone would go
to such a cheap dingy place. It was a low-rent
building with paper-thin walls and an odd smell
to it, half musty, half chemical. He deserved
a better office. She was sure that potential
patients took one look, caught the odor, and
fled.
  "I know it," he said, "but it's all I can
afford. If Marta would only stake me to a
better rental, I know I could get more
patients."
  They showered together and then had a leisurely
breakfast. "I don't feel like you're older
than me," she was saying over her coffee. "I
know you are, but it just doesn't feel that way."
  "I don't belong to my wife's generation. I
don't have those baby boomer goals," he said,
eating cereal with sliced peaches. "I think
feminists like my wife are actually a couple of
generations behind. They're acting like men did in the
fifties. They believe in the corporate
dream. They believe in the gray flannel
suit. They think happiness lies in
achievement."
  "I'm not interested in success," she said. "I
don't want to be a success, I don't need
to be with a success."
  "You've come to the right place." He laughed
shortly, his mouth twisting. He had such a
mobile mouth, long, full, and dangerous. When
she stared at his lips, she felt herself growing wet
again. She could look at his mouth and feel it on
her. He was saying, "She's defending a murderer
now, this guy who shot his parents. It's very
Oedipal. No wonder she's become hard through
and through. She's turning into a suit of armor with no
one inside."
  "You think my mother's that way?"
  "I think they're both so success oriented,
they have no inner life. No spiritual values.
No sense of their energy or their larger direction.
But teaching is different from being a full-time
litigator. Suzanne isn't on the
battlefield so much, but she's used to a level
of adoration from her students no man can ever give
her."
  "What do you think of her boyfriend?"
  "Same type. Ram it through. Get it done.
Move on. Search and destroy."
  "They never just sit like this talking."
  "We're wasting time. That's what they'd say.
I'd say we're spending it--spending it very
well. Actually I don't like to think of time as
something I waste or spend. I think of it as
something I experience."
  He took off her nightgown again as they sat
on the couch in his study. He put his prick
into her but they didn't fuck. They just sat there
joined. He sucked her nipples. "This feels
so real," she said. "I haven't been this
alive since ... you know."
  "Say it."
  "I haven't been so alive since Chad and
Evan died."
  "Did they ever fuck you at the same time?"
  "No. One did or the other. But once
Evan was fucking Chad while he was fucking me.
It was awkward. They were way heavy. I didn't
like it." She had felt smothered, squashed. It was not
a good memory and she shook her head.
  "Marta has a gun. I'm not a violent
man, Elena. I've found the gentleness in
myself."
  "I hate guns." She shuddered.
  "Poor baby. My baby." Reaching down,
he began to play with her clit.
  "I never really understood how my mother
justifies shooting for pleasure. It seems like
something she'd object to in somebody else."
  "Marta represents battered women and sometimes
she gets threatened. But it's part of her macho
image. She says shooting's her sport." He
was rubbing her harder now. The energy was gathering in
her, upwelling. It felt so strong, him inside
her and his hand pushing against her hard. She came with a
little shriek. He liked her to make noise. He
said it was liberating. This time he had her get on
her knees on the floor and he entered from behind.
  They dressed for work around ten-thirty, since his
first client of the day was due at eleven. She
drove in first and he arrived five minutes
later. At twelve they had lunch down the
block in a place that had light
California-type food, big gorgeous
salads and sandwiches with avocado and lots of
sprouts. "You should go back to school and train as
a therapist. It wouldn't take you long. You have a
lot of psych credits."
  "I have a lot of everything credits. Why get
another degree?"
  "So we can practice together," he said
patiently. "It would be better for both of us.
You'd be good at it, I know you would."
  She liked the idea of them both being therapists.
It felt like a good way to live. To be together at
home and together in the office. They could get off a
quick one in between clients. Last Thursday, they'd
had sex on his couch. It sagged and hurt her
back. When they were both therapists, they'd have a
nice big clean office, tastefully
furnished with a new couch. "Maybe in the fall.
I could go back to school part-time and still work for you."
She didn't want another woman in her place
in the office.
  "Unless we throw it all up and run off together
..." He grinned.
  She wished he would not treat it as a joke.
Making a change would be difficult for him, but it
was what he needed. He was suffocating in his
life, he had said that, and she absolutely
agreed. She began to think about California again.
Once, years ago with Chad and Evan, she had
set out for California. Now she was in love again,
once again joined utterly with someone she cared for
passionately, someone with whom she formed an intense
private world of two. Maybe this time they would
really go. In a sense, she was still stuck way
back there in the middle of the Nevada desert at
dawn, where half of her body and soul had been
gunned down to lie bleeding in the gray light.
Now perhaps after all these years, she could leave that
broken body on the ground and move on toward the
West and finally cross the last wall of mountains.
  "I want to be with you," she said, putting her
hands on either side of his face and looking into his
pale pale eyes. "I want to be with you today and
tomorrow and next week and next year."
  "You're my girl," he said. "We belong
together. We work."
  Nobody else had ever cared so much about her
feelings, ever. She could explain how she felt
about things, and he'd actually listen and try to help
her sort it out, instead of telling her she didn't
really feel that way, or shouldn't.
  When she came home on Wednesday,
Suzanne was waiting for her. Now what?
Suzanne got right to the point. She crossed her
arms and stood, somehow impressive in spite of the
fact that she was five inches shorter than Elena.
"Are you having an affair with Jim?"
  "No, I'm working for him. What are you talking
about?"
  "I had to come back during the day. You two were
upstairs."
  "Is this your best courtroom cross-examination
manner?"
  "I take it not answering my question is a yes."
  Elena shrugged. "I don't know what you're
driving at. We came back here to have lunch and
to look at some files of his. He
wants me to go back to school to become a
therapist. He thinks I'd be good at it. I
don't know. What do you think?" Distract her.
Usually the idea of Elena going back to school
could excite her mother for up to a week.
  Suzanne frowned, silent for several
minutes. "Much as I would like to believe you, I'm
not sure I can. If you haven't yet begun an
affair with him, don't. It would be so unfair
to Marta. Marta is my best friend. She saved
your hide."
  "By lying about me. By making me lie about myself and
about Evan."
  "Was it so much a lie? Did you want to go
to a youth detention center for three years? Chad was
the one who wanted to kill himself. You had no
reason."
  "No reason except that my life sucked.
Except that you were always trying to make me do what
I didn't want to. You were always trying to turn
me into somebody I wasn't and then making me
feel guilty and shitty if I didn't
fulfill your fantasies." She always had that
anger within ready to be loosed, but she was also aware
that she had thrown a switch and sent her mother along
a track other than the one she had been bearing
down on. They could always fight to exacerbated raw
nerves over Chad's and Evan's deaths.
  "Are you really thinking of going back to school?"
Suzanne asked.
  "Yes. I'd go on working for Jim part-time.
He thinks I'd make a good therapist. Wouldn't
you like that better than me working in a restaurant?"
  "Of course." Suzanne was frowning again.
"Elena, I'd be absolutely delighted if you
returned to school. If therapy appeals to you,
I'd be glad to help. But please, please,
don't get involved with my best friend's husband.
It won't work out for you. He isn't about to leave
Marta. He's more dependent on her than you may
realize. Everyone will get hurt and nobody will
get what they want, Elena, not even you.
Especially not you."

                 
               Suzanne

  Alexa came to see her with Celeste for
backup. They went to lunch, but Suzanne ended
up barely picking at her food while
she defended herself.
  Alexa presided, as she always did. She had
tremendous presence for a woman scarcely taller
than Suzanne, although solid, stocky. Her
shoulders were broad for a woman. "It's a terrible
throwback, Suzanne, to how it was when I was in
school. Freud laid down the law that when women
reported sexual abuse, it was their fantasies
about Daddy. It took ten years of the women's
movement before we had the stuff to prove that sexual
abuse of children is shockingly common, not a matter
of kiddies making it up out of Oedipal
urges."
  "I think inventing abuse in the family is
rare, and I believe that multiple abuse in an
unbearable situation does lead to repression of
memories for years." Suzanne gave up and
put down her fork. She was not going to get any
lunch. "But I think the child care cases are a
kind of witch-hunting of our time. Mothers and fathers
and the larger society feel guilty about someone
else's caretaking. This guilt is turning
into persecution."
  "You didn't think that woman you represented
who murdered her husband was making up the stories
about him molesting their daughter," Celeste said.
She was looking a little better than she had even a
month ago. She had abandoned hope of
reconciliation and all her emotion was going
into trying to get a good settlement. A little color
had come back into her gaunt face. She had
touched up her hair to a rich auburn.
  "No, I didn't. I have to look at everything
on a case-by-case basis. If you could meet
Maxine, you'd see a woman I don't think
is a liar or an abuser, but a sympathetic
caring woman who has been through hell. I've
read all the transcripts by now, and I think she
was railroaded. I've seen the videotapes, the
unedited videotapes--not those snatches the jury
saw--and I think I can prove the manipulation that
went on between the psychologists, the DA, and those
children. Look, with parents and a strong prosecutor
and a team of experts all coaching children, I'm
convinced a child will produce testimony about almost
anything to please. You have to understand that every child began
by denying the abuse and continued to do so until
persuaded or coerced into a different story."
  Alexa was biting her lip, her large hands
spread on the table in supplication.
"You've gone over to the side of those associations
of men who claim feminists made up all
repressed memory and sexual abuse in
families."
  "I have not gone over to the other side. I'm
handling the appeal of one specific woman royally
abused herself by the justice system. Child abuse is
so unsavory that even to be accused of it is a
crime in itself. No matter if I win her
appeal, understand, Maxine will never, never be free
of this. She will never be restored to her previous
life and her good name, in spite of what I do!"
  Suzanne wished she could show her friends the
videotapes she had studied. The psychologists
told the children that other children had all testified a
certain way and what was wrong with them? You could see
the children wavering. Some began to weep. Others
produced stories on demand, but fantastic ones
of flying witches and the torture and dismemberment of
squirrels and kittens and bunnies. It was
indeed like the trials of the witches, in which
neighbors, lovers, friends, and family testified
to seeing the accused turn into a big black dog
or fly through the air or dance with the devil. As far
as she could tell, it was the prosecution that was
dancing with the devil in this case. But her friends would
never see those videotapes of the sessions with the children.
  Suzanne felt alone as she walked back
to her office. She could not make Alexa understand,
and now Celeste too was estranged from her. She
had only half an hour before her next class,
and several phone calls to make. She had won
Phoebe's appeal and Phoebe was out of prison
and reunited with her daughter--but two years had
been lost and their relationship would never be the same.
She was trying to help Phoebe find a job,
pulling in favors. Libraries did not seem
eager to hire someone who had spent two years in
prison, even if she had finally won her case
on appeal. Phoebe needed a job and soon.
  What was sitting on her mind like a big green
bullfrog was her suspicion about Elena. Was
Elena having an affair with Jim? She did not
want to believe it but neither could she lose that fear.
Would Elena, who usually scorned middle-aged
men, men who were less than physically perfect
(but Jim worked out all the time), really choose
someone she had known since childhood for an
affair? Her mind was working over Elena's
statement as she would that of any other
witness. She was weighing the evidence and the
background of the defendant. For Elena,
flirtation was a standard way she dealt with men. She
probably flirted without even deciding to.
Certainly she flirted with Jake whenever she saw
him. He just ignored it. "I understand it's nothing
personal," he said with a grin. Perhaps if Elena
did not flirt with Jim, it was more meaningful. All
Suzanne could do was watch. Her mind worked over
the grounds of appeal for Maxine, Phoebe's
problems, the lecture she was about to give, and her
scrutiny of Elena, all separate but all in
process.
  Justice was her mistress, and sometimes a
cruel one, sometimes capricious. The law was an
immense skyscraper built out of medieval
timbers, the stones of cathedrals, plywood,
masking tape, skulls, dried vines, mud
bricks, and library paste. It was far from
perfect and she did not have the love of the law many of
her colleagues claimed to enjoy. She saw its
imperfections and its loopholes and its
sinkholes. For her, justice wore a female
face, a face of mercy as well as of judgment.
The rickety edifice of the law had been built
by men, for men, and she was a woman forcing her way in
and trying to make it proper housing for women and children.
Last year someone from the governor's office had
approached her in a preliminary sortie
to discover if she had a desire to become a
judge in the state system. She had been
flattered, tempted, but her answer had been, not
yet. She had work to do as a lawyer still.
  She had often wished for a wife, and never more than
now. Someone to take care of the nurturing,
caretaking side of the house, of the lives piled
around and against hers. She had never been great at
that, and she wasn't doing much of a job of it now.
She had envied Marta having Jim home as much
as he was at the office, presumably taking care
of things at least minimally. For years he had done
their grocery shopping and took in and picked up
dry cleaning and laundry. He had been
available for chauffeur service, back when the
kids needed to be taken to lessons, practice,
events. Jim and Marta had always seemed
to Suzanne to have a fine marriage. Why did she
think he was fucking around? Because she knew from a
colleague that he had an affair with a student just
before he was fired by Simmons. She was
inclined to believe that if a man had one affair
he'd probably had others.
  She sat in her office at home that evening
quietly toting up arguments on a legal pad.
She would observe. There was absolutely no
point saying anything to Marta when she had nothing
to report except suspicions that she fervently
hoped would prove groundless. She could do
irreparable damage. She stood up and walked
back to Beverly's room. She had been tempted
to ask Sylvia, but she understood at once it was
inappropriate. She could not intrude on
Sylvia's personal space with such a question. It
was not Sylvia's business to monitor the sex
lives of the household.
  Beverly sat as straight as she could in the
armchair. Her good hand fluffed her hair. She
had not been able to dye it since her stroke, and it
was mostly gray, making Beverly look much older
than she had last winter.
  "Mother, I'm worried about Elena."
  Beverly said nothing. It seemed to Suzanne that
she watched more warily. She made no sound,
volunteered nothing.
  "I'm worried she may be about to get into an
affair with Jim. I know that sounds ludicrous, but
they're together a great deal. It would be a disaster."
  Beverly still did not answer. She seemed to be
looking past Suzanne out the window to the street.
  "Mother, are you listening? I'm scared Elena
may be using the house and her job to launch an
affair with Jim, Marta's husband. Do you know
about this?"
  First Beverly shrugged on one side. Then
seeing that would not get her off the hook, she
croaked, "Know ... nothing. Elena ... good
girl."
  Suzanne began to wonder if she were suffering from
lawyer's paranoia, that state in which if someone
near and dear said that it was raining, you wondered if
they were lying. You analyzed their motivations. She
seemed to be disbelieving everyone around her. It was
ridiculous to imagine that Beverly was conscious of the
world beyond her bed and the narrow circle of things she could
reach, that she would be observing anything clandestine.
"Never mind, Mother, it's all right. I'm just being
silly." She felt a slippage of guilt for
pestering Beverly. She was becoming a petty
tyrant, cross-examining everyone.
  Beverly hauled herself to her feet and
went thudding around her room, pushing herself along in
the walker.
  Back in her office, Suzanne pressed her
face into her hands. Was she becoming a total
cynic, as happened to trial lawyers often enough
to make it an occupational hazard? She intensely
disliked the idea of mounting surveillance over her
daughter, of watching her every interaction with Jim, of
monitoring her comings and goings. If Elena
realized what she was doing, it would further
alienate her daughter. But whatever she did, she
would not pester Beverly again with her suspicions: it
simply was not fair to her mother.
  On Friday, she suggested they all have
Shabbat dinner together, something that only happened when
she was home enough that day to prepare it. She tried
to observe Jim and Elena's interactions, but there
weren't many to ponder. Jim sat at the big round
table in her dining room between Marta and Beverly.
Then came Elena. Then herself. Then Jake.
Suzanne had decided it was time to include him in
family events. Then Marta. She observed no
long glances, no meaningful meeting of gazes.
They neither avoided each other nor sought each
other. She began to wonder if she had been
completely mistaken. Everybody ate, drank,
and sang, reasonably jolly. Marta seemed in
an unusually ebullient mood. Suzanne thought
she looked glowing. Marta was a woman who could
look incandescently beautiful one day and plain the
next. When she was happy, her pink-pale skin
lit up from within. Her gray-blond hair was
loose tonight on her shoulders.
  Elena seemed more contained, eating steadily but not
saying much. She was especially solicitous of
Beverly. Suzanne was pleased that Elena had
gotten over her first reaction to her grandmother and was
close to her again, protective. She reminded
herself to say something to Elena about appreciating the
hours she spent amusing Beverly. When Elena was
not occupying herself with Beverly, she was obliquely
watching Suzanne and Jake together. If
Suzanne was trying to figure out her daughter's
relationship to Jim, her daughter was observing hers
with Jake. There was not a lot to observe, as
Suzanne was occupied with the meal, and Jake was being
friendly to all. They were not likely to act
physical in public. Each was too conscious of
position and audience. Yet she was intensely
aware of him beside her. It seemed to her his
arm below his T-shirt glowed with sexual heat just
inches from her own. His sharp foxy face was
relaxed tonight. He seemed to be genuinely enjoying
the food and the company.
  Beverly flirted a little with Jake, but mainly
listened to Elena. Elena did seem interested in
this job. Several times during the week,
Suzanne had heard Beverly laugh with
Sylvia, in the evenings with Elena. Beverly did
not laugh with her. Her relationship with her mother had not
warmed or softened. She knew it was her fault,
because she wasn't around most of the time. She was
supporting Beverly financially and physically, but
she wasn't giving much personally. Yet she was
always exhausted. Their times together drained her.
Perhaps they drained her mother also. She just could not
seem to work out a way they could communicate
easily, that they could be together smoothly, warmly.
When she was apart from Beverly, she could imagine
affectionate interaction; but when they were
face-to-face, old habits ruled. It was
bumpy. She felt as if Beverly was always
angry with her.
  She would love a real Shabbat--a period of
rest, of contemplation--she thought as she stared at the
flames atop the beeswax candles dancing in the
breeze from the open windows. A scent of roses
entered from the garden behind the house, old-fashioned
sturdy pink climbing roses that bloomed only in
the early summer. A time without tasks,
responsibilities, worries. To fix her
mind on a rose and sit. She did not know if
she had ever experienced that kind of peace and
probably never would. She imagined going away
someplace with Jake. Then she realized how hard
it would be for either of them to snatch that time.
  She swore to herself she would put effort into trying
to improve her relationship with Beverly but knew the
week would go by in a rush of depositions,
motions, searching of precedents, teaching and seeing
students, faculty meetings, and finishing a law
review article she had started months before. She
would put Jaime to work on running down the
citations and then she would knock the rest of it off
... sometime. Sometime this week.

  She decided even though she knew nothing, it
would not be right to keep her suspicions from Marta,
who, after all, was the principal victim if
something underhanded was going on. She went
upstairs at breakfast time for two days running,
but Jim was there both times. It was Thursday before
she got some time alone with Marta.
  Marta immediately seized her hands, squeezing.
"I have news. You're never going to guess."
  Marta was a partner already, had been for seven
years. A better offer? But she was satisfied
where she was. She liked a small office and she
liked her partners, especially Miles. Something
to do with Adam? If Suzanne was wrong, did
she have a right to upset Marta? Possibly
injure her marriage?
  "I went to the gynecologist last week. I
haven't been having my periods. ..."
  "I guess menopause could be considered good
news, although it usually isn't."
  "That's what I thought. But, Suzanne, you're
not going to believe this any more than I did. I'm
pregnant!"
  "Are you serious?"
  "Sure as I'm standing here."
  "How can you be?"
  "It's one of those little miracles, isn't it?
Not so little. I'm three months along."
  Marta and Jim had tried to get pregnant
after the loss of their baby girl. She had been
pregnant twice and miscarried twice. Then
they had given up, for it was too heartbreaking.
"That's wonderful," Suzanne said. "Have you
told Jim?"
  "No! I won't until my pregnancy is
further along. I could still lose the baby,
Suzanne. Remember what happened before."
  "I still think you should tell him."
  "Why?"
  Suzanne could hardly say, so he won't
consider getting into an affair with Elena. "I
think he has a right to know what's going on with you.
If you keep it from him, he'll feel you don't
trust him, that you're afraid to let him in."
  "I don't believe he'll take it that way.
Wouldn't he understand I just didn't want him
to endure weeks and weeks of uncertainty?"
  "Besides," Suzanne said, beginning to seriously
consider Marta's situation, "aren't you at least a
little scared? You're forty-six. Your son was born
twenty years ago. It's not like you're ... I
mean you're not twenty-six now."
  "I'm healthy. My ob-gyn lady says
I'm in good shape. She thinks I can do
it. I'm sure going to try, Suzanne. Besides,
my mother was forty-one when she had me. It runs in
the family."
  Forty-one when she had you and dead now,
Suzanne thought but did not say. "Please tell
Jim. I think it would be good for both of you to share
this, even the waiting."
  "I'll think about it." Marta grimaced.
"You're the first person I've told. And don't
you tell him! I'd kill you."
  "I promise. I wouldn't steal your thunder."
  "And I promise I'll consider telling
him."
  "Please, do."

  "But Suzanne," Jake said, drawing her name
out the way he did when he was teasing or
remonstrating with her, so that it had three
syllables, "you don't have anything to tell Marta.
You don't know one fact."
  "True. But I feel like a disloyal friend
sitting on my suspicions."
  "And how would you like it if you told her and she
miscarried?"
  Suzanne felt a sharp pain in her gut.
"Oh my god ... If only I could figure
out what's happening, whether anything is happening."
  "But since you don't know zip, you should keep
your mouth shut and don't let on even that you have
suspicions."
  Sometimes she wondered if his advice was good,
or just intended to avoid hassles and yet more
complications in her life. "I did speak already with
Elena."
  "Just chill for a while and let it go. You feel
responsible for everything. I want you to fix the
weather. It's too humid."
  She buried her face in his chest. The hair
tickled her cheek, but she did not mind. She
wanted to crawl inside him and hide. "If you
asked me to fix the weather, I'd probably
try. Then I'd fail and feel guilty." She
sometimes felt as if the less time they had, the more
energy they felt free to spend on each other when
they were together. Was it real then? Did that matter?
They presented only a certain side to each
other, she was sure. She wavered between thinking he was
genuinely passionate about her or just an
opportunist who wanted to recruit her to his
cause and did not mind doing so in bed.
Perhaps he was both. She did not even know if she
wanted to reach a final conclusion about him. She
needed what they had too badly to subject it
to her usual level of scrutiny.
  "Feel guilty for not spending more time with me."
  "Jake, I feel guilty for the time I do
spend." She sighed. "So what's happening with your
case in California? The one that goes back to that
demonstration against logging old-growth redwoods.
Will it be dismissed?"
  "It doesn't look that way. My lawyer is
arguing for a change of venue. The logging of old
redwoods is an important industry to most of the
people in the town, and they passionately hate us for
trying to stop them. The local prosecutor is
going after me for everything they can think of:
trespassing, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct.
Conspiracy to commit an unlawful act and
conspiracy to obstruct commerce. The last two are
felonies. My lawyer is trying to get the
felony indictments reduced to misdemeanors.
He thinks I can finally plead guilty
to trespassing and get off with a week or two in
jail or a stiff fine. It's a matter of them
seeing me as the outside agitator who's trying
to steal their livelihood away and close them
down. We got a lot of press coverage,
making them furious."
  "It sounds inflated. Do you think they'll
bargain down?"
  "My lawyer thinks they have to. He wants a
change of venue because, as he says, in that town,
they'd convict me of wife beating though I'm not
married. It's a strange thing, Suzanne, how
much you get to care about those trees. The loggers
call us tree huggers and think we're weird and
spacy. But those trees--they have character. They have a
kind of power, a charisma to them it amazes me that
anyone near them can't feel. You look at one of
them, big as a church spire, and it's been there
since the Dark Ages at least, and you can't bear,
you just can't bear to think of it being killed and turned
into planks. It's like shooting the last great tiger
to put its head up on your den wall. You just have
to stop it. Once such a tree is gone, it's not

like it can be replaced. It's a giant falling--for
what? The profit of small men in big
companies. I sympathize with the guys who just
want to make a living where they live, but tobacco
farmers feel the same way--and so do
crack dealers. Everybody wants to make it, but
you have to look at the larger cost."
  "So when do you have to fly back?"
  "I don't have to be in court for some of these
preliminary arguments. He'll let me know
next week."
  "It sounds as if it should get to plea bargaining
fairly soon." She rested her head on his chest
and before she realized it, dozed off from exhaustion.

                 
                Beverly

  Beverly often wished she could say all she
wanted to, that she could speak aloud the way she
could communicate on-line. It might take her
half an hour to type out a paragraph of an
E-mail letter, but then it was instantly
transmitted and nobody knew she hadn't
written it in four minutes. If only she could
talk that way too, everything would be so much
pleasanter, if she could work out the communication and
shape the sounds and gather them up in some cache in
her head and then say it all correctly and with
reasonable speed, then everyone would listen. Now
only Sylvia and Elena were reliably
patient. Even Karla just talked to Suzanne
about her instead of talking with her. Karla wrote
her a letter every week, full of the doings of the twins and
Rosella and her husband and his family, news of
Suwanda in San Diego, news of her
synagogue, her neighborhood. It was
humiliating to envy the sister she had always felt
superior to.
  Much of the time she simply gave up saying what
she wanted to, because it was just taking too long
to get it out. She could not think of the word she knew
she knew. Her mind had mud slides, when
everything was swept away in soft muck and buried.
She had learned to stop and wait for her brain
to clear itself. It was hard. She had always been
glib and forceful, verbally. She had depended often
enough on her ready brain and tongue to get her out of a
jam. Twice she had talked her way out of a
rape situation. Several times she had talked a
cop out of busting her when she was in a protest, a
picket line, a demonstration. She had cajoled
men into bed and out of bed. She had talked her way
into jobs she wanted and out of tasks she dreaded.
It had been her best weapon; as she
got older, her only weapon.
  She wished she could talk with Jake,
Suzanne's boyfriend. He seemed like a real
organizer, the genuine thing, and she would have given
anything to be able to question him closely about his work.
She knew they would understand each other, if only
she could speak to him. But he smiled at her when
he came in, and then he went on as if she
wasn't in the room. He was one of the only people she
saw around her who might understand her life and her
choices, and she couldn't have a decent conversation with
him.
  She looked into Elena's face. Her
granddaughter was lovely. She never grew tired
of looking at her. Her hair was worn
unfashionably long, silken, glossy, the
rippling pelt of a panther. She had always moved
well, since she was a little girl. Beverly did
not think Elena had ever gone through an awkward
stage. Her skin was like perfect fruit, never a
blemish. It was tropical, smooth, inviting.
Even that ridiculous stud in her nose had
looked good on her, but lately it had disappeared.
She pointed to her own nose and tapped it, then
pointed to Elena's nose. Elena was terrific
at figuring out what she was asking.
  "Jim didn't want it there. He's like, it's
distracting when we're kissing. And he pointed out
what it meant--it was my pact with Chad and
Evan. He says it's time to let go of that old
trauma and walk on."
  Her eyes were commanding and melting at once.
Beverly explained to Elena that Elena was the
daughter of passion, while her sister Rachel was
the daughter of rationality. Patiently Elena
heard her out. "But, Grandma, I think Mother did
love Sam, at first. She just forgot about him after
a while. He wasn't as interesting as a good
case or a day in court. Then she let her
pride take over when she learned he was bam
bam with a client."
  "No passion. Fondness."
  "Whatever." Elena shrugged. "I think Jim
and I should get away from here. I know he's used
to it, but it's time for him to leave. It's too easy
for him. He needs a challenge. He needs a
new world to conquer, you see?"
  Beverly nodded crookedly.
  "I know that as long as he's around here, he could
backslide. All his friends are going
to be just shocked out of their chairs when he leaves
Marta. Their teeth will drop out. Like I
vandalized a public statue, you know? 'Cause
their marriage is an institution. This house is like
a stupid public crossroads for the legal
profession. They're always "entertaining." It's
gross, really gross."
  Beverly nodded again. "Bourgeois. Way it's
done."
  "Exactly. I could puke. I feel so bad
when I see him going through the motions, doing the right
thing. It's so sick. He doesn't even like any
of those people. It's all for her. Because she wants
to be a judge by and by."
  "Judge? Hangman."
  "Right. It's so phony, it reeks. He
isn't like that. He's more like me, emotional, more
physical, sort of wanting to plow straight
ahead, zoom, at what he wants. He
doesn't crush his feelings and pretend they
don't exist."
  Rachel had said something funny to Beverly,
maybe a year ago when she was trying hard to talk
Rachel out of studying to be a rabbi. Rachel
said, "You don't believe in the Eternal One,
but you believe in passion, in Eros. Don't you
think that's just as irrational? Why not pick a
major deity, anyhow?" Beverly had been
startled. Since she was five Rachel had been
coming out with statements or questions you just never expected.
Her mind worked differently.
  Beverly had answered, "I've experienced
passionate love. I've never experienced your
god. I prefer to stick to what I can feel,
what I can know."
  Beverly realized that Elena was sitting there
expectantly. Beverly had dropped right out of the
conversation as if through a trapdoor, into her
memories. It was rude and disconcerting, but she
could not help it. Her mind would cough up a
memory like a fish landed suddenly out of a river
onto a bank. To cover up her inattention, she
nodded wildly.
  "I knew you'd agree."
  With what, she wondered. But she probably would
agree, whatever it was. She had fallen in
love with her granddaughter when Elena was only
three. "No! Not right," Elena would say, not
shouting but with a totally convinced intensity that Beverly
recognized as her own.
  "Like it's a second chance for me, finally."
Elena leaned forward, her hands twisting on her
jeans. One knee stuck through the torn fabric,
shiny, pale against the denim. "I never thought I'd
really give a shit about a guy again. I mean,
yeah, for fun, to pass the time, to buy you dinner,
to take you out. But to really feel like you're both in
one skin. Like you know where he is at because you're
really both in the same place at the same time?
I knew you'd get it."
  Elena was the center of her life now. Her
granddaughter had always been important to her, but
now Beverly poured all her love into Elena.
She longed to see her as fervently as she had ever
waited for a lover. She gazed into her face with as
much joy and passion and the underlying pain of
anticipated loss. Elena would go off with Jim
to California, and she would never see her. It would
be a loss as great as the loss of her right hand and
her ability to speak clearly. She needed to see
Elena daily, she must see her. It was necessary for
her survival as well as for her happiness.
Elena was life itself, vitality. As Elena
felt about Jim, she felt about Elena. She
breathed her. She drank her in.

  Suzanne was sitting in the same chair after
supper as Elena had occupied that afternoon.
Suzanne had actually cooked tonight. Beverly had
always thought of her daughter as being far more domestic
than she was. She had not realized that Suzanne
was often not home at suppertime, and when she was,
half the time she just picked up takeout.
Suzanne suddenly stared at her. "You look
different. Your hair."
  "Elena." Her granddaughter had gone out and
gotten her old hair dye and now her hair was
red again. She felt almost human. Elena had
used conditioner and brushed it out: now she had her own
hair back.
  "Mother, I know we haven't been communicating
very well."
  Beverly turned her face away. Did
Suzanne think Beverly was "communicating"
terrifically with anybody? Even her speech
therapist couldn't always decipher what she was trying
to spit out.
  "You probably feel I'm not here often enough for
you."
  Beverly didn't bother answering that
one. She just shrugged. As if Suzanne sitting
on her like a mother hen on a recalcitrant egg
would help her.
  "I wish I could say it's going to improve,
but when school starts in the fall, it'll be worse
than it is now. But I'm hoping we can work out a
way that we do spend time together regularly and we can
do better."
  "Better ... than what?"
  Suzanne was losing the patient manner she
assumed like an apron. "Better than we
usually do. Better than we've done since I
can remember."
  Beverly waved her left hand.
  "Mother, you have to believe me when I say I
want us to be closer. I have the feeling you're
mad at me all the time. What are you angry
about? Or am I projecting? Am I
completely wrong?"
  Beverly shrugged. When Suzanne went on
staring at her, she finally said, "My apart ...
ment."
  "Your apartment?" Suzanne looked at her
blankly. "We had to let that go five months
ago."
  "Mine." Beverly sought as so often for a simple
way to say what she meant. "Friends. You took
away."
  "I took away your friends?" Suzanne
looked baffled. "Mother, you had a stroke. You
couldn't live alone in New York. You couldn't
shop or cook or take care of yourself."
  "Sylvia ... there."
  Suzanne frowned, mulling it over. "You
mean, you wanted help to stay there? But it couldn't
have worked. I couldn't go on running back and forth
all the time. You couldn't pay the rent there, and if
I paid your rent, I couldn't pay Sylvia."
  Beverly closed her eyes to signify that the
conversation was over. There had to have been a way, there
had to be a way; but Suzanne had let her
apartment go, and now there was no place to return
to. She asked her friends on-line and checked
rental Web sites about places in New
York that she could afford. There seemed to be none.
She was stuck here in Suzanne's house where she
had no business, no use, no group of friends
to sustain her. All her life she had lived
involved with others, with causes, with actions, with
work, with friends and lovers, enemies and
cohorts. She was useless, silent as a phone
yanked from its connection. The only connections she
had that meant anything were to Sylvia, to Elena,
to Mao, who lived mostly in her room, and to her
computer and through it and only through it, to the world beyond.
  From a large family in Trinidad, Sylvia
had sacrificed her own prospects to her younger
siblings. She had been bringing them to the States
one at a time, setting them up, until sure they
could make it here. Now they all sent money back
to the parents and grandparents. It seemed archaic
to Beverly, although Sylvia was twenty-three years
younger than herself: to live in a big
multigenerational family and owe your life to them,
the way Victorian daughters had been
expected to be spinsters and take care of their aged
father, giving up their possibilities of marriage
and family to him. Sylvia was quite contemporary in
other ways. She had a fairly sophisticated
analysis of colonialism and, of course, of
racism. She seemed unimpressed by U.s.
electoral politics, although she had taken out
citizenship years before and did conscientiously
vote. Her irrationality was the lottery. She
played it religiously, full of tales of people
who had played a number they had seen in a dream
or that had some fateful significance, and then,
suddenly, they were rich. A lady she had cleaned
for when she first came to the States had just three
years ago won a million dollars: Sylvia
had seen it in the papers. "And she didn't even
need it," Sylvia said, throwing up her hands.
"She had a nice house already, her son a
doctor, her daughter working for Bell
Atlantic. What did she need that for?"
  Sylvia kept trying to get her to play the
lottery and would not listen when Beverly tried
to explain to her how it was a way to milk the poor.
"That lady, she had plenty of money, she had
two fur coats, and she still played the lottery.
And she won. Why not me?"
  Sylvia had the patience to wait for her to finish
a sentence, even if it took her three or four
minutes to get it out. "If I had a will, I'd
remember you in it, for being so kind with me. But
I'm piss poor. I have a few books and old
clothes. I don't even have anything to pawn, if
I need cash." That was what she said, although it
took her a while, many jerky pauses, and some
wrong words before she managed to say it.
She wanted Sylvia to know how much she
appreciated her care and her attention. She
knew from what had happened to some of her older
friends, how callous and even cruel some caregivers
from agencies could be. She remembered the
bruises on her friend Moira's arms and legs
before she was put in the nursing home to rot away.
  "Your daughter pays for me. Don't worry
about it. She's a good child, Beverly. She works
real hard. I know you're crazy about your
granddaughter, but I don't see her working so
hard. She takes care of herself and she likes
to get others to take care of her."
  Beverly only smiled. She did not expect
Sylvia to appreciate Elena's passion and
beauty, but Elena was the brightest spot in her
life. She loved being Elena's confidante. It
was a drama she followed from day to day,
anticipating each new episode of Elena's
romance. It was like being young and having a girlfriend who
confided. She touched her refurbished hair. Now
she looked more like herself. She looked more like the
woman she had been. Beverly, she said to the
woman in the hand mirror, Beverly: Elena
made you reappear. You're almost visible again.

                 
                Elena

  Elena had never felt such a sense of
fullness, not even with Evan and Chad. Then she
had been a kid, not in control of anything, doomed
to serve out her educational sentence of boredom and
humiliation. Now her feelings were even more intense,
as if during those years of meaningless sex, inside
she had been growing stronger and waiting, always
waiting.
  Missing him when they were not together was an ache she
carried with her like a bad tooth. He was a fluid
environment that surrounded her, in which she lived, in
which she floated, in which she swam. Her feelings were
not inside her, but she was inside them. They were so
large they must carry everything before them. It did not
matter what Suzanne suspected or what
Marta might do, their love was too big and too
strong and too intense to be contained by anyone.
  They saw each other every day of the week, except
weekends. He told Marta he needed Elena
to come upstairs afternoons Monday and Thursday,
to act as his secretary on the book
project. Marta was actually happy that he
wanted a secretary. She thought it was just great they
were getting along so well. Elena felt
Suzanne watching her when they were together, but
Suzanne was in court, Suzanne was at
school, Suzanne was even sometimes with that weird
little boyfriend of hers. When they were all collected
at some meal or event, she and Jim were utterly
cool, only watching each other from the corners of
their eyes, nothing steamy, no meaningful glances.
They cooperated, fitting together without even having
to chew it over. It was part of their seamless unity.
  Weekends were chancy. Sometimes Marta and
Suzanne went shooting. Sometimes Suzanne
took Beverly off someplace. Suzanne was
making an effort to spend time with Beverly on
weekends. Elena knew Beverly found that a
dubious blessing but could not say so. Everyone was always
telling Beverly what a good daughter Suzanne
was to take her in, as if she really had a
choice: she could hardly dump her mother in the
street. Every day Elena blessed her luck that she
had not moved out. She had meant to, but she did
not have close friends in Boston where she could crash.
Her best friends were in Chicago or New York,
places she had lived between college and the
present. The people she knew here were kids she had
gone to high school with--people she had zero desire
to see--and guys from the restaurant. Beverly had
turned out to be her best supporter, the only
person besides Jim she could confide in--and she could
hardly discuss Jim with Jim. Her grandmother had
been a slut in her own time and knew a lot about
guys. And she was, clearly, totally on
Elena's side.
  "Sometimes I wonder if I should get
pregnant," she said to Beverly. "I mean he
has a kid with Marta. Adam, a weasel. I
could do better than that without trying."
  "Not sure ... thing."
  "You mean, that I could do better?"
  "That he ... like baby."
  "Yeah, maybe you're right. That I should wait
till he leaves her and we go out to California."
  Beverly nodded crookedly but fervently.
"Wait."
  "But I was thinking it could nudge him along.
It's going to take something to get him to move out."
  "Better ... free ... choice."
  "Of course he'd choose me. He
loves me. He's crazy for me, Grandma. But
he's entrenched. It'll take a little dynamite
to blow him loose, don't you see."
  "Big bang ... can hurt ... you too."

  She went out Saturday night with a guy she
knew from the restaurant, the red-haired sous-chef
who had a crush on her. She had run into him at
Chestnut Hill when she was shopping for a new
bathing suit at the late summer sales. Jim
liked to swim, and last Tuesday, when he
didn't have any appointments, they had sneaked off
to Walden Pond. They had fucked in the woods
on a beach towel. It was exciting. He told
her she made him feel twenty years younger.
  Jim didn't like her going out with Stan, but she
told him it was a good cover. She enjoyed seeing
him smoke with jealousy. Stan was just a guy,
gangly and adolescent, on Prozac and moody
in a totally uninteresting way. He was about as
sexy as one of his salads, but he was perfect for
going out with on a night she couldn't see Jim.
Evenings were generally off-limits for them. Soon
they would be living together and this dodging around would end.
  It would take them a little while to get on their
feet in California, but who cared? She was used
to living on the margin, and she'd teach him tricks
for getting by on little cash. Soon he would be set
up there as a therapist and patients would come to him.
She'd get a job in a restaurant or an
office, easy. She didn't need much, and he
had told her time and again that owning things meant nothing
to him. He was living Marta's life, he said.
All he needed, he could fit in a backpack
and a briefcase, besides her. She was what he
really needed. They'd go out to bars to hear music and
to movies, and it wouldn't matter who saw them.
They would make love whenever they pleased. They would
sleep in the same sweet bed. They would wake
together and shower together and eat together every morning. They'd
live together in a way that would be cool and loose and
pretty. She was totally amused that Jim could
manage to work up jealousy over Stan, but if he
wanted to suffer, good. He should realize that she was
attractive to other men, that if he didn't
grab her, someone else would. Slinking around and
acting like secret agents was amusing at times, but
enough! Maybe they would rent a house in
California where he could use part of it for his
office, much nicer than that hole he had
now.
  It was easy to be cool and sensible when she
wasn't with him, but when he was there and touching her,
her brains boiled dry. She couldn't think, she
could only feel at top decibels. That was
love, and she had known it once, and never since.
She was consumed by it as if she were set on fire from
toes to hair. She wondered that people did not turn
on the street and stare at her, astonished.
Sometimes she felt like a goddess, glowing from within,
burning white-hot with a passion that must be palpable
to those who came near her. This was hyperreality, this
was what was meant to be.
  She liked to keep him on edge. When they
rode to work together in the mornings, on days when they
did not take separate cars, she would put her
head in his lap and sometimes she would suck him.
Twice he fucked her on the couch between
appointments, with her hand thrust into her mouth to bite
so she wouldn't cry out. Once, the next client
sat in the waiting room just outside. Sometimes she
came when they did these odd quickies in random
places, but often she didn't. She did not
care. It was the excitement she craved, the sense
that they were out of control, that they were so besotted with
each other that they had to take wild chances. If
she was going to pry him loose from his boring
marriage and his ill-fitting staid life, she had
to draw him over the edge, teach him to relish taking
chances, give him back his recklessness and daring.
  "I'm good for you," she said, as they lay on his
bed upstairs--the bed he shared at night with his
fat wife. Marta used to be thin, but lately
she had been gaining weight, especially around the
middle. She had a belly. Elena, who
observed her carefully, noticed her middle-age
spread. She was letting herself go. "You don't
think so, but I give you back what you've lost
over the years."
  "You're certainly good for john henry." He
put her hand on his prick, flaccid after their
recent fuck.
  "I'm good for all of you, Jimmy."
  "No one's called me that in years. Not since
high school."
  "What were you like then?"
  He laughed shortly. "I was class
president. That meant a lot to me. I'd have
killed for it, but I only had to charm everyone. I
was on the track team. I was the
second-best pitcher. I played in a stupid
garage band, the Lords of Chaos. My girlfriend was
voted the prettiest in our class."
  "I don't think I would have liked you then."
  "I don't think I liked myself. I was
putting on an act all the time."
  "Same as you were doing when I met you,
Jimmy. You'd gone to sleep. Now you're
fully awake."
  "Not at the moment." He yawned. "I'd
love to take a nap. If only we dared take
a snooze ..."
  "Some afternoon we will. But I'm not sleepy
yet." She rolled over onto him, feeling him
harden beneath her. "And neither are you, baby boy."

                 
               Suzanne

  Suzanne had her checkbook and returned
checks spread out on her desk. What she had
feared but dismissed from possibility was true: she
was living far beyond her means. She was spending more
than she was making, and she had to transfer money from
her investment accounts to cover household
expenses.
  It was expensive for Rachel to spend this year in
Israel, and electricity and food costs had
risen to more than double what they had been now that
Elena and Beverly were living in the apartment. But it
was the cost of Beverly's illness that was bleeding the
money away. Sylvia came in five days a
week. Medicaid no longer covered the
therapists. The medication and the rental on items from
the hospital bed to the wheelchair were expensive.
In the few months Beverly had been with her,
Suzanne's cushion for the year had gone. She
had already used up money saved in the last five
years. Modifications to the house had cost well
over twelve thousand dollars, wiping out an
IRA on which she had to pay a stiff penalty.
She could see the situation clearly, and it scared
her. She would have a modest pension from the university
if she hung on until retirement, but the
expenditures she was looking at were
catastrophic.
  She rose from her desk to stand at the bay
window, staring. What could she do? Rachel had
another year of rabbinical school when she
returned. She was going to have to urge
Rachel to have a small wedding, which she suspected
would disappoint her. She would have to approach
Rachel again about waiting till she was back in the
States to marry Michael. The airfare
to Israel and the hotels would be a major expense
in a good year; now, she did not see how she could
manage it. Was Elena serious about going back
to school? If so, where was that money coming from? Could
she cut back Sylvia to four days? Could she
get Elena to spend one or two days a week with
Beverly? She was going to have to do less pro bono
work and more law for money. Her life was crumbling
before her, and she did not know how to stop the
hemorrhage of money and time. She had a man
seriously interested in her for the first time in a
decade and a half and she barely had time to fall
into bed with him once a week. She would lose him.
She would lose herself. What options did she have?
  The next night as she clung to Jake, the
words burst out of her. "It's not fair, it's not
fair!" At once a panic seized her. He
would see how selfish she was; he would be turned
off by her callousness and cruelty, in even thinking
that.
  "Of course, nothing is, so whatever you're
talking about has to be true. I met today with people from
Pittsfield, where GE has been dumping
PCB'S for years and years. ..."
  But she had to talk to him. She felt choked with
unspoken words. Who else could she trust? "My
mother. We've never gotten along. We aren't
close. And here she is like a great stone that's landed
on me. I feel like the ancient mariner, with the dead
huge bird, the albatross around his neck. But
I didn't shoot my mother. She shot herself."
  He drew back to look levelly at her.
"You really are upset. How about a drink? Would
a nice cognac somebody gave me soothe you a
little?"
  "I don't want a drink, I want a
solution. She went on smoking for years after it was
clear how dangerous it was. Well, she wanted
to smoke. She's never eaten in a healthy way.
She had her energy and she did whatever the hell
she pleased. Now I'm stuck with the consequences."
  Jake stood looking at her. He grimaced,
"So is she, baby. So is she."
  Suzanne sighed, deflating. "I know that.
It's just that I can't afford all the help she
needs. Illness is so unbelievably
expensive, it just breaks you. There's no help
to be had. It breaks you financially and it breaks
you emotionally and it breaks you into exhaustion."
  "Would it cost less to put her in a nursing
home?"
  "It would cost even more. And I can't do it.
It's not an option. She's been a strong
political woman who spent most of her life
trying to make the world more decent. She doesn't
deserve terminal storage."
  He was pacing. She wished he wouldn't. It
distracted her and made her a little edgy. It was part
of his superabundant energy. He stopped in
front of her and said, "This Pittsfield
business, we're going to need your help."
  "My help."
  "I think it's going to require going to court."
  She groaned and turned away. One more thing she
was supposed to do, and it would be gratis, of
course. A year ago, six months ago, she
would not have hesitated in a good cause: now she was
stymied. She could end up representing a client
like GE because she needed the money to support her
mother.
  He was frowning. "What bugs me is how long
this minor case in California is taking. It
keeps getting postponed. Both sides keep
making motions and it goes on and on. I have a
chance to go to Greenland and I'm going to have to pass it
up. They let me come to Boston because it would be a
hardship and the court trusts me that far, but I'm not
allowed out of the country."
  She stared at him. "Why would you want to go
to Greenland?"
  "I like extreme places," he said. "I like
wilderness. Although it isn't quite. The last time I
was there, we used an old army installation, from the
days of the early warning system. At some point, the
place had been evacuated, and they'd never
returned. It was like a crime scene--everything
abandoned and left as it was. A frying pan on
the stove with old grease in it. A girlie
magazine open on the john floor. ... One
of the things that drove my last girlfriend crazy was that
I'll pick up and go anyplace, Suzanne.
I can't resist it."
  "What is it you can't resist?" She noticed
that his desire for travel did not frighten her.
Better adventure with polar bears than with other
women.
  He turned at last to face her. "My
childhood was dull. Dreary. I think my
parents never talked to each other except when they
were traveling. Maybe I still think traveling is
the answer to boredom. Perhaps I'm just not a very
imaginative person and I need a change of
scene to keep my blood flowing. But I can't stand
the idea of places I've never been. And if
I've had a good time in a place, I want to go
back. It's a permanent itch."
  "Maybe a trip with a purpose is for you what
an interesting case is for me." It was a relief
to think about Jake, even briefly, instead of herself
and her life.

  Rachel was back to communicating on
E-mail. She sent short messages every
couple of days, although sometimes she got long-winded
and lyrical with endless descriptions of
Jerusalem, like a woman with whom Rachel had
fallen in love and who also angered her constantly,
as faithless lovers will. Jerusalem belonged to too
many. You could never have an illusion you had discovered
her or even that she was special for you. She was
special for everyone. She touched them all into rich
madness. For three thousand years poets and
prophets and priests and nuts had sung her
praises, and they still fought to the death for her.
  Rachel seemed so distant, she had an
impulse to pick up and go to her. She missed
Rachel's positive, level mind and
temperament. Of course she could not. Suzanne
had a brief interval between summer school and the
beginning of classes in the fall. They used to go out
on Cape Cod. Then they went up to Maine.
Now she was lucky if she got as far as the
corner deli. She could not barge off and leave
Beverly alone in the house, with Elena working.
Elena had been better with her grandmother than
Suzanne had ever expected, and she was
grateful. Elena spent hours with her grandmother,
who seemed more responsive to her than
to Suzanne or anyone else, except
Sylvia.
  "I really, really appreciate your kindness
to Beverly," Suzanne said to her daughter. They
were both in the kitchen having a quick breakfast.
Elena was bound for Jim's office and Suzanne
was headed for court.
  "It isn't kindness. You don't
understand. Nobody does, except maybe
Sylvia. Grandma's all there. She's still all
there inside."
  "Of course I understand--"
  "Then why are you always in a hurry with her?"
  "I don't think I am. ..."
  Elena laughed sharply. "You can't ever wait for
her to finish a sentence."
  "I just try to anticipate what she's trying
so hard to say."
  "She hates that."
  "I think you're projecting."
  "She told me she hates it."
  Suzanne was embarrassed. "Why didn't she
tell me?"
  Elena shook back her black mane. "You'd
finish that sentence too. Some other way."
  Suzanne felt as if they had conspired to put
her in the wrong. She was trying so hard to make it
all work and to carry the load of the house. She had
a moment of blind furious exasperation. Her hand
clenched on her coffee mug. She had a brief
desire to throw it at her daughter, an urge she
was ashamed of as soon as she became aware of it.
"It's hard for all of us," she said softly.
  "How hard is it really for you? You're out of the
house most of the time. Sylvia does nine tenths
of the work."
  "Fine. I'll quit everything and stay home with
my mother. Will you get a job that pays enough
to support this entire household?"
  "I couldn't support a pet dog, and you know
it. It always comes down to money with you. Beverly's
right!"
  "It all comes down to money with everybody,
Elena. Food on the table, shelter overhead,
Sylvia, her medicine ..."
  "Just don't ever talk that way to Grandma or
I'll never, never forgive you."
  "Elena, I brought her here. From the time she had
her stroke, I flew down to see her every
weekend. Obviously I care about her and I'm
perfectly willing to sacrifice to make her
comfortable. It requires effort from all of us."
  Suzanne went off to the bathroom and shut herself
in, trembling with frustration and irritation. I'm
perfectly willing to sacrifice, huh? What
choice do I have? Who asked me what I want,
anyhow? I'm sick and tired of being good, but
there's no escape from duty, is there?
And no use fuming about it. Elena will leave when
she wants to, and I'll still be here with Beverly,
now and tomorrow and next year. It could go on for twenty
years.
  She had an acute sense of being in a trap.
She stood in the bathroom, not the most spacious
room, painted a pale blue, and stared at the
white ceiling. She sank onto the cover of the
toilet, clutching herself, feeling pecked to death,
pulled and stretched to dangerous thinness. Her
nerves were hot as overloaded wires. Her brain
was a neglected radiator. She did not know
what to do with her frustration, her anger, her
weariness. There was no one she could hand it off to.
She had started out feeling gratitude toward
Elena for spending time with Beverly, and she had ended
up wanting to break something over her daughter's
head.
  She ran upstairs to Marta, who was standing in
her slip putting on makeup in the bathroom.
"Target practice, target practice this
Saturday, please, please. If I don't
get to shoot something, my head is going
to explode. We haven't been going often enough."
  Marta looked at her over her shoulder as she
carefully darkened her brows and eyelashes, giving
her face more definition. "Are we in a
crisis?"
  Suzanne nodded. "I'm overextended and
crazy. I need it. Promise me."
  Marta stood finishing her makeup and running
over her schedule in her head. "We could steal
away for an hour and a half Saturday morning,
if we get going early. Ten minutes to get
there, ten to get back. We should have a full hour
to shoot once we set up."

  "There's no way I can pay more of Rachel's
expenses," Sam said bluntly. "So you have your
mother? I have Stephanie, Jonah, and Emma.
An old lady lying in bed doesn't touch what
one active kid burns up in piles of cash--
a kid who wears out clothes every day and takes
fourteen kinds of lessons with all that gear and
private school and doctors and dentists up the
wazoo. Therapists. Orthodontists. Their
clothes cost as much as my suits."
  She recognized that voice of Sam's. It was
not his negotiating voice. It was his, This is
my final offer voice. "I'm getting
further in debt with every day. Rachel's year in
Israel is not cheap, as you may have noticed.
..."
  "It wasn't my idea she become a rabbi."
  "Right. She could always get a restaurant
job."
  "At least Elena doesn't send me tuition
bills every time I turn around."

  Saturday morning as Marta and Suzanne
stood in front of the shooting table at the rod and
gun club they had joined years before, she thought,
there's something satisfying about handling the gun,
aiming, and then that moment of percussion and destruction
--harmless, appeasing to the tension within, punishing
only the target and releasing the week's frustration
and rage. They had used to go every Saturday,
enjoying the incongruity of two feminists shooting
together. Gradually they had let the game lapse
until they went only once a month or so.
  "Why did we stop doing this? It's fun.
It's a tremendous release."
  "Why?" Marta grinned, taking careful aim.
Since they were wearing ear protectors, they
talked loudly to hear each other. They were early,
and the range was half empty. "Why did we stop
going to movies? Why did we stop going for
walks in the country? Why did I never get
another dog after Archie died?" She got every shot
into the target. Marta was a better shot than
Suzanne, but Suzanne's clusters were more
consistent.
  It was Suzanne's turn. "Because we don't
have time, only projects and duties and
relationships." Soon Marta would have a baby and
her time would be even more limited. An elderly
invalid downstairs and a new baby upstairs:
they would be one crazy overextended household.
Suzanne got most of her bullets in the
target, missing only twice on that round. "Have
you told Jim yet about the baby?"
  "Soon. Very soon."
  "What are you waiting for? The onset of
labor?"
  "My doctor's coming back from the Cape and I
have an appointment to see her the first Monday after
Labor Day. If everything's on schedule,
I'll tell him that day." Marta was missing most
of her shots.
  "The longer you wait, the more he's going
to feel out of the loop." She wanted to urge
Marta to tell him now, before it was too late, because
she had an increasing sense of trouble coming.

  Suzanne loved fall. It meant going back
to school, as it had in her childhood, and she
enjoyed teaching. She looked forward to the new
classes, to the new students, and to her research
assistant, Jaime, back from the Philippines
where he had been visiting relatives. She
wanted to get on with the law review article that
had been languishing in her computer since
February. She was tired of heat and
air-conditioning equally, of soft asphalt
underfoot, of fading cottons and browning grass and
weary leaves on the maples along the street.
She was beyond irritation at the kids next door
screaming under her window when she was trying to work.
She was sick of trying to figure out what to feed
her family that wasn't hideously expensive and
wouldn't heat up the kitchen.
  The first crispness in the air the week after
Labor Day perked up her spirits. She began her
classes with energy, went shopping with Marta and
bought a gray pinstripe suit in the newer cut
they were showing, everything longer again. Fortunately, it
came in petite, so skirt and jacket would not have
to be altered. Marta bought a new gabardine
dress, cut loosely. "Think ahead," she said
happily. "Four months and counting."
  "What did Jim say when you told him?"
  "I haven't. ..."
  "Marta, you have to."
  "I'm scared." Marta turned away from the
mirror of the fitting room.
  "What are you scared of?"
  "That if I say it to him, I'll lose the
baby."
  Suzanne's stomach clenched on itself.
"Please tell him."
  "I will. As soon as my ob lady checks me
over."
  "I thought that was last Monday?"
  "She kicked me over to next Monday."
  "Are you sure Jim hasn't noticed
something?"
  "We haven't been at it much this summer.
He's a little depressed about work and his book. I
haven't pushed things, since I discovered I'm
pregnant. I figure the less that
goes on, the calmer it will stay for the little one."
  "Marta, you're forty-six. This is going
to make an enormous change in both your lives.
I really think you better tell Jim, and
soon."
  Marta shrugged, smoothing down the fabric.
"Isn't it funny how we just can't bear to look
at woolen things until the weather turns, even
though we know damned well it's going to be fall
and then winter, just like every other year?"
  "Marta, listen to me. You have to promise me
you'll tell him. I'm afraid for you. You can't
go on keeping this from him. He'll be furious if
you don't share the news with him while it's still
early enough to do something about it if you both decide you
don't want the child."
  "Of course we want the child, Suzanne.
Didn't we try for three years nonstop?"
  "That was ten years ago."
  "The years go by so fast, don't they?" Marta
took both her hands and squeezed them. "I
promise, I'll tell him. I'm seeing the
doctor next Monday. Right afterward, if
everything's okay and the amniocentesis comes out
well, I'll tell him. Okay?"
  "Promise me you will. Promise! If you
don't, Marta, then I will."
  "All right! Don't get brutal about it.
Next Monday."

  Next Saturday morning Marta and she put
in close to an hour target shooting, again getting
up early to be there when the range opened. Today the
canopy that protected the firearms from rain was
flapping briskly like a sail over their heads.
The wind carried a slight salt tang, coming in from
the ocean and carrying a promise of rain that would
wash the city air clean.
  "We have to do things like this more often. Do you realize
we did two things this week that weren't demanded of
us? We went shopping and here we are off to target
shoot," Marta said, eyeing the target. "We're
becoming frivolous. Next we'll turn
into ladies who lunch."
  "Lunch? What's that? That apple I eat at
my desk? The yogurt I gulp down in the car
on my way to court?"
  "Sometime this fall, we'll do it! We'll
meet for lunch, like real ladies do. We'll have
a salad apiece and then dessert.
We'll dress up and carry shopping bags, even
if there's nothing in them but briefs. We'll
flirt with the waiter and complain about our husbands and
our children. You can complain about Jake."
  "We'll never do it," Suzanne said
bleakly.
  "Oh, but we will, before I'm the size of a
cruise ship."
  "If you tell Jim."
  "I'm telling him Monday, if the news is
good. I see the doctor at one."
  "Good luck."
  "More than that. I want magic."

  When she got home, Suzanne spent some time
with Beverly, while running up and downstairs to do
her laundry. She felt she was annoying
Beverly by zipping in, sitting for half an hour,
then running off to move the wet laundry to the
dryer and load the next pile of dirty clothes,
but this was the time she had. Her time was almost all
double-booked. Sheets from three beds, all those
towels were a nuisance, but she could not add one more
expense. She was going under financially. She had
to do the laundry herself now.
  "Makes me ... nervous." Beverly shook
her head. "Always in hurry."
  "Mother, how does that make us different? You were
always in a hurry too. We're both impatient
people. I get it from you."
  Beverly grinned crookedly. If Suzanne
could amuse her, things were always better. That was one
way that her mother remained accessible. "Mother, I'd
like us to use this time to get closer."
  "Laundry time."
  "I mean these months. I'd like us to ... do
better with each other. Communicate better."
She could see the skepticism in Beverly's
eyes. She went on. "Why do you doubt me?
Or do you think we just can't do it?"
  "Always ... want each ... other ...
different."
  Suzanne was trying not to guess, not to rush
to finish Beverly's sentences for her. Elena's
accusation stung. She sat nodding, leaning forward,
settling back in the straight chair. "Maybe
we can stop doing that and accept each other after
fifty years."
  "Fifty years!" Beverly repeated, as if
appalled or astonished. "So long. You
fifty?"
  "I will be next spring."
  "Goes fast."
  "Doesn't it."
  "Okay." Beverly lurched forward and patted
Suzanne's arm. "Will try."

  "No, she hasn't told her husband."
Suzanne felt guilty, as if she had
betrayed Marta by sharing her secret with Jake.
"I keep begging her to." He had been showing
her photos of the Fraser River in British
Columbia where he had been last year at this
time, with whom, she wondered. "It looks like
Chinese landscape paintings--steep mountains like
monoliths."
  "It's a beautiful gorge. Where we were going,
the only way across was a sort of hanging cage
way above the waters."
  Who had he been traveling with? He always said
"I," but sometimes she observed another man or a
woman in the photos: and in any case, someone was
operating the camera. She suffered a throb of envy
for the someone who had the freedom and time to pick up
and wander off with him.
  He lay propped on his elbow. The sun
poured in through the slats of the blinds in his new
apartment, igniting a stray white hair among the
curls on his chest. "Marta had better tell
him. Not something she should spring on him. By the way,
dear, I'm actually not fat, I'm having
contractions, so could you rush me to the hospital?"
  "She's superstitious about it. They tried for
years to get pregnant after they lost a baby
daughter. She kept miscarrying. Then they gave
up." She was still wondering who his "we" was.
  "How does she know he wants a baby still?"
  "I almost think it doesn't matter. She
wants it."
  "It's his, right?"
  "Of course! Marta wouldn't have five minutes
a week for an affair. It's Jim I was
suspicious of."
  "No longer?"
  "I've been watching. I still don't understand
what was going on upstairs that afternoon, but I
haven't seen or heard anything since. A
lawyer gets to be suspicious, and maybe my
dirty imagination was running away with me."
  "Did you ask your mother?"
  "She said nothing's going on."
  "Well, she's there a lot more than you are.
Speaking of time, I need you to meet with the other
lawyer who's going to help us on the PCB
case. Would you like me to set up an appointment,
or do you want to talk to him yourself?"
  No, she did not want to play telephone
tag with Sid Braun. "I can make it Friday
at three or the following Wednesday for a
breakfast meeting." She could not say No
to Jake. It was a good cause, and she wanted him
too badly. These times with him were a fix of
pleasure, something that sustained her through the rest of the
week. A hit of warmth.
  "I'll see what we can put together."
  She didn't have this Sunday afternoon to spend lying
here making love and chatting, and she didn't have
Friday at three to waste either, but she had
to sacrifice them to Jake. Could she afford him?
How could she possibly not try to? At her
age and in her situation, having a lover was a
luxury whose price had to come out of her flesh, but
as long as she could have him, she suspected she would
somehow manage. She only wished that he had
less of an agenda. But if he were not the
activist he was, rushing from court case
to bargaining table to meeting to lobbying session, he would
want far more than she could give him. If that time
came, she did not know what she would do.
  "I'd love to take you to British
Columbia. A lot is still wilderness. It's
gorgeous. We could backpack into some of my
favorite places. We wouldn't see another
soul for a week. Wouldn't that be paradise?"
  Suzanne could not imagine herself backpacking
into the wilderness, even the beautiful mountains and
waterfalls he had photographed, but it was all
moot. He wasn't going there anytime soon, and
neither was she.

                 
                Elena

  Elena was always super hot on Mondays, because
usually Jim and she did not get a chance to be
alone the whole weekend. This Saturday, they had
from eight to nine-thirty in the morning: that was it.
They almost got caught, because they had expected
Marta to be at the range longer. Elena knew
they simply could not continue like this. Yes,
it made things hot, but it would be ever so much nicer
to sleep and wake together, the ultimate couple
thing: sleeping twined in the same sweet bed. She
had never had that with anyone she loved, just guys who
were convenient, whose main virtue was that they were there: not
since traveling with Chad and Evan, and then they
had slept in sleazy motels or crummy
hotels, in the car, beside the car. So many meaningless
guys since then, sometimes she couldn't remember
what they looked like. She was not sure she would
recognize some of them in the street. Far from
wanting to spend the entire night with them, she was
bored shitless having to deal with them the next morning
when all she wanted was strong coffee and to get her
blood moving with some aerobics.
  That was one thing she had gotten from her mother--that she
liked to move, she liked to work out. She had to say
that Suzanne kept herself in shape for a woman her
age. She had real muscles, unlike cow
Marta, who had been gaining weight steadily,
visible to Elena's watchful eye. There's someone
who needed a workout and wasn't bothering. Elena
had only to look at Jim, tight, taut,
buff, and then at Marta with her belly pushing on
her pants to know they were no longer suited, if ever
they had been.
  He needed her, he did, or he would die
inside. Electric Elena he called her, my
soul. Even in her dreams, she was with him. Last
night she had dreamed they were making love in a
large warm pool, floating together. She had come in
her sleep, then wakened alone in the bed, deeply
resenting their separation. It had to end. If she
contemplated life without him, it was a return
to dust and ashes. It was worse than meaningless, it
was total nothingness. Love centered her. Love
impaled her and held her upright. Loving him
made her thrum with energy. She felt as if her
touch could heal. When she massaged Beverly's
shoulders, Beverly told her it felt wonderful.
She knew it was the magic from her love that was
giving her holy energy that coursed out from her like
light.
  She went into Beverly's room to give her
breakfast, as she did every Monday. Suzanne
had cut back one day on Sylvia this fall.
Beverly skipped bathing those mornings, for she did
not want Elena's help in the shower. Elena
understood her grandma's embarrassment, although
truly she would not have minded. Sylvia
told her she could have been a nurse. She knew
Sylvia meant it kindly, but that was no life.
Helping her grandma a couple of times a week was
nothing. Spending forty to fifty hours a week
doing the same with strangers would drive her up the
wall.
  She made Beverly scrambled eggs with peppers
and hot sauce, one of her specialties.
Beverly loved it. "Tired ... bland food."
  "Every Monday, you get my special eggs.
Maybe we'll run off to Mexico together, you and
me. Hey, Grandma, ever been there?"
  Beverly nodded and held up three fingers.
Three times.
  Elena brushed out Beverly's hair. It
looked much better red again, bringing out the green in
Beverly's eyes. She loved to fix up
Beverly, who totally appreciated the attention.
It gave Grandma a lift to know she looked
better--more like herself. It was funny the things that
gave you that sense of identity. When she was still in
high school, she had this tough black studded leather
jacket she had got Sam to buy for her
birthday. She had worn it winter and summer, when
it was far too cold or too hot for the jacket.
It had gone west with her into trouble and the death of her
friends. When it had been stolen at a party her
senior year, she was devastated. Suzanne bought
her another, but it was never the same. Years
later, she would have the impulse to put on that
jacket, her real jacket of which all others were
imitations, and feel the loss all over again.
  She could hear Jim walking around upstairs.
He trotted out for his run, down the front
stairs. She would not go upstairs till later.
He liked the mornings to himself. He ran, he
lifted weights. He caught up on his
E-mail and made phone calls and puttered
around the Internet. That was fine with her. She was a
night person and woke slowly to full alertness.
She never put her fine lingerie in with the regular
wash. Monday mornings she did her hand
laundry, enjoying the spectacle of her
salmon, grass green, blue, scarlet, and
black bras and panties, camisoles and
slips hung on the line. This time she put them
outside instead of down the basement. It was a
gorgeous day. Summer had come back, warm enough
to wear a sundress, her favorite, a dark
honey color that set off her skin and
eyes. The light was the same color today. She
stood outside with her eyes closed, feeling the
sun hot and red on her lids. She liked the
way her underthings looked, like pennants, flags of
pleasure and delight, silk and satin and nylon
banners moving languidly in the faint breeze
that was like a sigh. After the rain of yesterday, the
weather had warmed, humidity and sweet sun from the
South.
  "Did you like fancy underwear, Grandma?"
  "Liked ... my body."
  She helped Beverly into the living room and put
on CNN for her. Neither of them had ever been able
to get into watching the soaps, although Sylvia had
her favorite, General Hospital, she
watched every day. Elena thought that neither her grandma
nor she could enjoy other people's pretend lives, for
they both liked real action too much. Soaps were
for women who imagined taking lovers but didn't
dare, women stuck in fading lives, who knew
now they would never be loved the way they dreamed of,
the way she was loved. She held herself gently by the
elbows as if she might fly apart. Never had she
believed, since she was fifteen and her life had
cracked like an egg, that she would know love again and
be totally, vehemently loved. She walked with that
love shining around her.
  She was making a simple red dress for herself,
a tank top A-line that would come to midthigh and
move well. It would be perfect for dancing. She
kept trying to get Jim to go dancing with her, but
he was afraid to go out in public. "Like, do you
think one of her judges is going to be boogying
at a club?"
  Beverly pointed, grinning. "Only you sew."
  "You mean I'm the only one in the family who
can."
  Beverly nodded. "Never patient." Pointing
to herself. "Nor Suzanne."
  "I find it relaxing. I don't do anything
I don't want to, Grandma. It's sensual
sometimes, the feeling of the material, seeing something
take shape under my hands."
  Jim crossed over them, back from his run, and
both women looked up. Beverly smiled at her.
"You ... love him."
  "Like crazy."
  "Powerful." Beverly shook her head. "Big
wind."
  Elena wasn't quite sure what her
grandmother meant, but she smiled and nodded back.
Whatever Beverly meant, Beverly was on her
side and wished her well, so it didn't matter
if she couldn't exactly understand what the words
intended. Big wind, she mulled over, something that
tears the roof off. "You mean like a hurricane that
blows everything inside out and tears the leaves from the
trees and roofs off houses."
  Beverly nodded fervently. "All changed."
  She made lunch for them, hot dogs she found
in the freezer. They were turkey hot dogs but that
was better than tofu, anyhow. Didn't people eat
real hot dogs any longer? She also found whole
wheat buns. Beverly had no trouble managing a
hot dog in a bun, since it was essentially
one-handed food. They drank diet soda that
Elena went down to the corner to buy, since
Suzanne simply wouldn't get it. Elena
decided she would get real buns and hot dogs with
her own money. If you were going to eat a hot
dog, you wanted a real hot dog, not a health
food imitation.
  After a leisurely lunch, Elena loaded the
dishwasher and turned it on. Then she kissed
Beverly on the forehead and went upstairs. As she
climbed the stairs, already her heart was beating
loudly, quickly. She began to feel that warmth
building in her groin, liquid heat pooling between
her thighs. She liked the way it made her
feel. She liked the leisurely morning with
Beverly, getting ready, slowly moving toward
him. By the time she pushed in the kitchen door, she
could have fucked him right away. They kissed with her
sitting in his lap feeling his erection against her
stomach as she faced him, her thighs on either side
of his narrow hips. They used to have lunch together on
Mondays. Now they didn't, but it was cool.
They had lunch together Tuesday through Friday, and
they had the whole afternoon to themselves on Mondays, a
treat after the wasteland of the weekend.
  His hair was all tousled, the way it got when
he was trying to work on his book. She liked
to muss his hair, hair almond brown, close
to blond, with small patches of gray over both
ears, fine and silky. She loved to tangle her
hands in it. He wore it too close to his
head. He looked much younger when it was messed.
He was letting it grow lately, over his collar.
His features were so chiseled. She kissed his
nose, his forehead, his chin, his cheeks, his
eyelids. "I adore you, I adore you."
  "I like being adored. Adore me some more." He
led her into the bedroom. With a practiced hand, he
shucked her clothes, spreading her on the towel he
always carefully placed over the wedding ring quilt
on his bed. She hated that towel. It represented
stealth and secrecy. She needed to be with him all
the time, in light as well as in shadow, but she
wanted him too badly to argue about it now. He
was in a hurry, thrusting into her. The weekend
drought stoked up his desire too. He told her
he was no longer having sex with Marta, that it had
been more than a year, and she believed him. Why
would he want to? Getting thick in the waist and with
her belly sticking out, obviously she didn't
care. He rode hard on her, his balls
slapping against her. She tongued his nipple as he
rode, making it hard. Then she nipped him
lightly. Riding her at a gallop, pounding.
Lately she liked it that way. Hard, fast.
Harder, their bodies thumping one on one, so that
she felt as if they were rising and being pounded down
at one and the same time, a complicated motion like those
carnival rides she had loved as a child. And then
at last she burst.
  They showered together. Then they split a beer,
both naked in the heat of the afternoon. She wished they
could make love on a blanket in the yard. It
must be eighty in the full sun and heat of
midafternoon. She told him her wish as they lay on
the bed again, just chilling. Relaxed together.
  He grinned. "That would give the neighbors a
thrill."
  "It would give me a thrill."
  "I can arrange that, without needing to trot
downstairs." Languidly he reached for her, and
they began slow, easy, sensuous lovemaking. The
towel had fallen to the floor. She noticed that but
didn't think he had. Good-bye, towel like a
condom, towel like a no trespassing sign. They
kissed and kissed, touching each other all over their
sleek backs, his chest and her breasts, their
bellies and thighs. She plucked a hair from his
thigh, causing him to cry out. He bit her neck.
  "Vampire!" she moaned.
  "I am ze Count Drac-yu-lah ... I do
not drink ... wine."
  Finally he spread her legs and began to eat
her, his head buried in her thighs, doing her
leisurely, feeling her, tasting her,
flicking his tongue. She lay with her eyes
closed, concentrating, when she heard something.
Someone walking. She froze, but he did not
notice. His ears were buried in her flesh. A
woman's voice called something. Marta. Elena
controlled her reaction. She did not blink or
move a muscle. Let Marta find them. Let
the secrecy be over. Let the farce end. He was
making those funny noises he made when he was
eating her, as if she tasted like ice cream, and he
heard nothing. Elena controlled her breathing,
controlled her desire to bolt. She lay there,
waiting.
  Marta appeared in the doorway, stopping
abruptly as if flash frozen. She stood
staring, Elena saw through her lashes. Elena had
her lids lowered, her head flung back, as if
she were in a trance and could see nothing. Marta
made an awful choking sound. Elena was cold through
but determined. Let the pretense end. Let the
lying stop. Marta was still standing just inside the
bedroom staring, transfixed. Elena was beginning
to get nervous. She was trying to decide if it was
time for her to see Marta and scream. She felt
stone cold. How long could Marta just stand there?
  Then Marta began to scream herself. "No!"
She cried out, "No!" moving now, toward the
dresser just inside the door, the chest of drawers
with a green bag on top and a pile of books.
Jim froze and then leapt from between Elena's legs
and knelt on the bed babbling. "Marta, I'm
sorry! It doesn't mean anything!" he cried
out.
  Elena was naked and exposed to Marta. She had
to explain quickly. "We love each other. We have
to be together. We're going to live together. I
wanted him to tell you, but he wasn't ready.
..." It did not feel victorious but bad.
Sickening. Wrong all through.
  Jim was mumbling, "Oh my god, oh my
god, shit, shit ..." He hopped off the bed and
took a step toward Marta. "Marta, never mind
the kid--"
  She tried to calm him. "Jim, it's okay.
It had to happen. We have to make her understand how
we feel about each other."
  Marta was fumbling with the green gym bag on the
top of the dresser. The books cascaded to the
floor. "You bastards! I'm pregnant, you
bastards." She was holding something now in
both her hands, letting the bag drop with the books.
She was clicking something into place. Elena
scrambled off the bed in Jim's direction, the bed
now between them and Marta, who was holding something out.
Elena looked around the room for her clothes. She
was not sure where they had fallen. She grabbed the
bedspread off the bed and wrapped it around herself.
Jim was stepping into his briefs, yanking them on
as if it mattered. Then she saw what Marta had
in her hand. She stared, disbelieving.
  "No," Jim was saying to Marta. He took
a step toward her and then backed rapidly away.
"Baby, this doesn't mean what you think. It's
a mistake! You don't want to do this, Marta.
Put down the gun." He climbed back onto
the bed, crouching there.
  "While I'm working and in court, this is what you
do, you bastards." She raised the gun in both
hands and shot. Elena threw herself in front of
Jim. Marta fired shot after shot. Elena
waited for the bullets to tear through her flesh. She
had been meant to die in the desert and she had
failed then. Now it would be complete. At least
she would save her lover.
  Jim was shouting over and over, "It didn't
mean anything, baby, it didn't mean anything.
It was just this once. It was an accident!"
  As what he was saying sank in, she drew
away from him and sat on the bed, stunned. She
felt very cold. Everything seemed too brightly
lit in the room and outlined in light. She saw that
Marta was aiming way over both their heads.
Marta had drilled a neat line of bullet
holes in the wall high over the bed. Elena almost
smiled, but her face was frozen. Her heart was
frozen. She did not think it was beating. "Jim,
you don't have to pretend. You don't have to lie about
us," she said, but he paid no attention. "Don't
be scared. She isn't shooting at us." He would
not even look at her. It was as if she had not
spoken.
  The gun fell and Marta ran from the room,
sobbing wildly, crying out something Elena could not
understand. Jim was talking now very fast, "It
doesn't matter, it doesn't mean anything!"
he was shouting and chasing after Marta, leaving Elena
on the bed. She got up and grabbed her clothes from
the floor, dressing quickly. Jim in his underwear was
pleading with Marta in the living room. Carrying her
shoes, Elena headed for the kitchen and the
back stairs.
  It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter if
he says it doesn't. Maybe nothing at all
mattered in her life. She wished Marta had
shot both of them dead. Marta said she was
pregnant, she was sure Marta had said that, which
meant Jim had been lying and lying to her. She
put her hand on the kitchen door and paused. In
her head his words repeated themselves over and over again.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't mean
anything. So it didn't.

                 
                Beverly

  After Elena made them lunch, her granddaughter
went upstairs, and Beverly, back to bed. Waking
from her postlunch nap, Beverly rolled over to her
computer and started composing an E-mail to the
New York Times, complaining about their
coverage of an airline strike. She was trying
to think of a word that was escaping her, the way they so
often did--like trying to grab a minnow in a
bucket--when she heard loud noises from
upstairs. Screaming. More screaming. Then the sharp
report of shots.
  Beverly had heard shots often enough in her life
to recognize them. Heard them in the South.
Heard them in the streets of her neighborhood.
Guns meant trouble. Trouble and blood and
somebody hurt. Then she heard even more loud
yelling. She called out, "Elena! Elena?"
  Beverly struggled out of her chair into her walker
and began her slow progress toward the back
stairs. Finally she arrived at the bottom and
called out again. No one answered, although she could
hear someone crying upstairs. It must be Elena.
She had to get to her. Marta had a gun
upstairs. It was a stupid thing to have around. She
hated firearms. Little kids were always getting
killed playing with them. They should be banned. She
could understand some clerk in a 7-Eleven keeping one
under the counter, but in somebody's house? She had
fought with Suzanne many times about owning a gun, but
Suzanne at least kept hers under lock and
key. Nobody else ever saw or handled it,
stored in a small safe in her office.
  Beverly began laboring up the stairs. It was
hard. In fact, it was almost impossible. The
walker just wouldn't balance on the narrow
back stairs. She was dragging herself up by the
railing, pulling the walker after her, thumping. She
had to get upstairs to see what had happened.
Oh, she could imagine terrible things. She heard
yelling but no one answered her calling for Elena.
  She had climbed halfway up when she lost
her balance. The walker skidded on the edge of the
narrow step. She grabbed at the railing and held
herself by her good left hand. The walker clattered
down. She was lying on the steps holding on by one
hand. Her arm ached. She tried to form words more
clearly, but she could only shriek in incoherent
blurts of sound. Slowly her grip began
to slide off the railing. She tried to get her
knee up onto the step, but she couldn't. Her
leg wasn't strong enough.
  She heard steps coming, the door opening.
"Help ... me," she called. Elena appeared
at the head of the steps. She was crying and her
sundress was on inside out. Beverly tried
to speak but she was slipping down the steps and then
thumping, banging, step after step hitting her
brutally as she went down. Elena came after her,
flinging herself down the stairs, grabbing for her.
"Grandma! Hold on! I'm coming!"
  Their hands touched. Elena tried to grip her but
could not get a purchase on her hand. Beverly was
hurled from step to step to the bottom where she lay in
a heap. Elena ran down and knelt over her.
"Grandma. Are you okay?" Elena was gently
examining her. "Grandma, where does it hurt?"
  Now Marta appeared at the top of the stairs.
Her face was swollen and wet. She spoke in a
strange numb voice, "What happened?" She
came slowly down the steps and leaned over
Beverly, touching her carefully. She did not
look at Elena. Jim was standing above in his
underwear, wringing his hands and calling to Marta, who
ignored him.
  Marta was gingerly exploring her leg.
"Beverly, can you hear me? I think your leg is
broken. We mustn't move you." Gently Marta
ran her hands over Beverly's back. "I
don't think you have a spinal injury, but I'm not
a doctor. Listen, don't be afraid,
Beverly. I'll call an ambulance." She
carefully disengaged herself, never touching Elena or
looking at her, and ran back upstairs.
  "Grandma, Grandma. Don't die on me!
Grandma! I couldn't stand it. Please!
Please don't die. It's all my fault.
Please!"
  She wanted to speak but she couldn't. Elena was
cradling her. Beverly could not form words. Her head
was roaring. Her back hurt horribly, her
legs hurt. One of them was twisted under her. It
must be broken, as Marta said. But the worst pain
was the one in her head. She recognized it. She
remembered it. It was lightning in the brain, the
nightmare come again. She was having another stroke.

                 
               Suzanne

  Suzanne canceled her litigation class. Her
hands were shaking so badly she had to dictate the
note Jaime taped to her office door canceling
her hours till further notice. Then he got
her car to take her to the hospital, for she did not
trust herself to drive. Her mouth kept twisting
into a weird crooked smile, a nervous
grimace of appeasement, the way a frightened dog
will wag his tail. Beverly had been doing so
well. She had been walking daily, no matter
how awkwardly. She had been involved with
acquaintances and causes on the Internet. There
had been no warning signs. Beverly seemed to have
been steadily improving, pleasing her therapists with
her progress. Suzanne had just talked to the
agency about cutting back Sylvia to four
mornings, since Beverly thought she could manage
by herself in the afternoons.
  Suzanne went up to the front desk of the
hospital, to ask for her mother. Beverly was in
surgery. In addition to the stroke, she had broken
bones. Suzanne was directed to a lounge, where
she found Elena huddled in a chair. "What
happened?"
  Elena looked at her momentarily, but her
eyes immediately slipped away from Suzanne's
gaze. "It's all my fault."
  "Just tell me what happened."
  Elena was silent for several minutes, while
Suzanne reminded herself of her vows of patience.
Finally Elena in a flat almost inaudible voice
told her the story. Halfway through she began
to weep uncontrollably. Suzanne was
startled, almost frightened. Elena never cried.
Elena had stopped crying when she was twelve, and
Suzanne had not seen her in tears
since. Elena seemed reduced to childhood by her
tears, convulsed, out of control. She spat the
story out in gulps. Tentatively, Suzanne
embraced her, held her as her shoulders shook.
  "Marta started screaming, I was screaming,
Jim was going on and on to her how she should forgive
him and I meant nothing, nothing to him."
  "He was scared. And guilty."
  "She said she was pregnant. Then she took
her gun out of the gym bag on the dresser--"
  "Did she shoot Jim?"
  "She didn't shoot anyone. She just drilled
a row of holes over our heads to scare us."
Elena sighed. "She had every right to shoot us, and I
wish she had!"
  "I'm devoutly glad she didn't." Marta
was volatile, but under it, she was a rock. Besides,
it was hard for a defense attorney to ignore the
consequences of murder. This was a disaster. "It was
my fault too. I should have gone to her with my
suspicions." She should have confronted Elena more
forcefully. She should have backed Jim into a
corner. He had always been a little afraid of
her. She could have used that on him.
  "It's not your fault, Mother. You tried to tell
me. You said I'd get hurt. I deserve
to get hurt, but Grandma didn't." Quickly,
brokenly Elena told her what had happened.
"I've killed her. And I love her so much!"
  "She's not dead." Suzanne hugged her
daughter. "She's not dead and you're alive. I
couldn't lose you, and Marta knows that." Marta had
been there for her for years and years, before she had
married Sam, when Rachel was little, after Sam and
she broke up. Marta had helped raise
Rachel, certainly. She had been more than an
aunt. If she had been raised by her Aunt
Karla as much as by Beverly, so Rachel at least
had been raised partly by Marta, and Marta had
always helped with Elena, when Elena would permit
any help.
  Suzanne sighed. "It is a mess, that's for
sure. Now I'm going to try to find someone I can
ask about Beverly. She can't still be in the operating
room."
  She found a nurse at last who had an
answer. "Mrs. Blume's in the recovery
room. I can't tell you anything else. You'll
have to speak to the doctor, and he's operating. No,
you can't see her yet. Come back in an
hour. She should be out of recovery by then."
  At least Beverly had survived the operation.
Suzanne had never felt more helpless. She was not
accustomed to total uselessness. She ought to tell
Rachel. Not till there was something more definite
to report. It was four-thirty here, so it was the
middle of the night in Israel. They had been
communicating exclusively through E-mail. No
reason to worry Rachel until the situation was
clear. Clear. What a bland word. Like a shard of
glass.
  Marta had left a message to call her.
She must, although she felt guilty before Marta.
Had Marta miscarried? That was the critical
question. Instead of going back into the lounge immediately,
she sat down in the corridor, in a plastic
chair holding her head in her hands as the tears
began to seep out.
  Why wasn't Jim the one lying in the recovery
room? That would have been justice. He was
seventeen years older than her daughter, which should
have given him some discretion, some pass at
wisdom. Suzanne found a quiet corner and
called Marta on her cell phone. "Are you
all right? I mean as all right as you can be. ..."
  "I didn't lose the baby, if that's what you
mean."
  "That's what I mean."
  "I can't talk long now. Jim and I are
having a huge fight. I just want him to get out
and leave me alone."
  "I'll be there as soon as I can. Beverly's
out of the operating room, but she hasn't regained
consciousness."
  "When you get here, come upstairs--but don't
bring Elena, please. I can't deal with her
yet."
  Is our friendship over? That was what Suzanne
most wanted to ask, but how could she bother Marta
at a time like this? She would have to move out. She would
have to take Elena and move out. She felt
desolated. She felt painfully alone. She
began to bargain with fate: all right, just let my
mother live, let Beverly survive and I will
gladly move to any miserable place and not
complain, I promise, I promise! And I
won't complain about expenses, never again. I will
make her happy somehow, I promise. I will
make it better!
  At five-thirty, Beverly was out of
recovery and moved to the intensive care unit.
She was not yet conscious. Suzanne was allowed
to see her briefly, to speak to her inert body with the
tubes threaded through her arm and nose. Beverly
looked tiny in the bed, among the apparatus that
kept her alive. Her skin was blue-gray.
Then Suzanne had to leave, and Elena was allowed
to go into the room briefly.
  When the nurse told them that they must leave, they
went downstairs. The doctor would see them in an
hour or so. They were silent, both exhausted with
emotion. They decided to go to the cafeteria and
sat, both with a cup of bitter coffee on the
table, facing each other. Elena would not meet her
gaze but pressed her face into her hands.
  "I must sound callous, but I half wish she
had plugged Jim. I know"--she started to say "you
think you love him" and realized how patronizing that
sounded--"I know you love him--"
  "I did! I can't now. I made him up.
He was just a middle-aged married man fucking an
employee who was shoved in his face. It was my
fault--"
  "Don't keep saying that, Elena. He's
supposed to know what he's doing. He's a
therapist, for pity's sake."
  "Mama, you don't even know how to swear, do
you?" Elena briefly, bleakly laughed.
"Grandma's the last person I ever wanted
to hurt. All I can hear in my head is Marta
shouting that she's pregnant, and Jim being a
complete worm and telling her I didn't mean a
thing to him--"
  "He was scared, Elena. He didn't
necessarily mean what he said."
  "But he did. Long after she threw down the
gun and ran out of the room, all he could think of was
denying what happened, trying to make it go away!
He didn't think for one second of how I
felt."
  "You have to understand, Elena, he's really
dependent on Marta--emotionally, economically,
socially, every way. He wasn't about to leave her.
I tried to tell you that. I've known them for so many
years, I know how their marriage works."
  "I thought their marriage was over. I didn't
think they cared about each other."
  "It's hard to judge other people's marriages from
the outside--"
  "Mother, don't be so rational. I've
fucked everything up! Everything!" Elena was
clutching herself by the shoulders. "Grandma looks
terrible. I've been such a fool, but why does
she have to pay for it?"
  "It's my fault for agreeing that you take that
job. I knew he had a history with young women.
I just didn't think he'd come after you."
  "Maybe I went after him, Mother. You
pretended I was an innocent when I was fifteen.
Don't do it now. How could you have prevented me from
taking the job? How could you have prevented me from
taking him?"
  "So we'll all have to share responsibility for
what's happened." Suzanne stood. She must go
back upstairs to wait for the doctor, who was
supposed to make an appearance to talk with them.
"The consequences will be with us for a while."

                Elena

  Elena felt deeply ashamed, not because she had
been with Jim, although being walked in on that way was
totally tacky. She felt ashamed that she had
believed passionately in a frail lie. She
had believed he did not care about his wife, that their
marriage was over and dusty, and that he loved her as
strongly, as purely, as devoutly as she loved
him. She had made herself believe all those
foolish lies, she had been willing to hurt
everyone around her, all for a piece of
self-hypnosis. She'd been a blind idiot.
  When she had thrown herself in front of Jim,
she had expected to die. Now it seemed like
silly melodrama, but she could not shake that sense
of once again having brushed against violent death.
When Chad had blown his head open and Evan had
been shot, most of her old classmates made
it clear they thought she should have died with them. Someone
left a note on her locker, IF AT
FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED ... and a drawing
of a gun with a balloon message BANG!
  Elena was impressed with Marta. She knew
how to put real fear into them, but she hadn't lost
control. Marta had sure scared the shit out of
Jim. Elena would never forget the sound of his
quavering voice begging for his life, begging for
forgiveness. Even when she and Marta were bending over
Beverly crumpled at the bottom of the steep
back stairs, he was going, "I was depressed.
It was a stupid midlife thing. I never meant
to hurt you, Marta. She's a kid! That's
all." He ignored Beverly. He ignored
her.
  She had seen herself in a great romance. Now she
was just a fool and Beverly was paying the price.
She could not stand it if her grandmother died because of her.
Chad and Evan had died in the desert and she had
not gone with them. If she caused Beverly to die,
she did not think she could continue. She had made
a mess of her life. She had to go out having done
something she could feel good about. She was not used
to feeling so small, so mean. Love had been a
roaring inside her that drowned out everything else.
She had wanted that old intensity so hungrily
she had pretended to herself, lied to herself to get it.
She had ruined everything for the people around her,
out of her need for a lie.
  They came back to the house together and Elena
shut herself in her room.
  "Stay out of Marta's way for now,"
Suzanne said.
  No fucking problem, Elena thought. That was her
intention.
  "Although you're going to have to have a real conversation with
her. But wait until she's ready. I'm going
upstairs now."
  Elena did not want to lie and listen for Jim
passing over her head. She did not put on her
usual salsa. Instead she found her old
tapes, Judas Priest, that song that she had
played again and again after Chad and Evan, "Night
Comes Down." She put her Walkman over her
ears and spaced out. That music filled with pain and
energy and lightning had once felt like reality
turned into sound. M`otley Cr@ue's
"Bastard." She kept playing the two songs
over and over from fourteen, thirteen years ago.
What a loser she was still. If she was not going
to die, she needed to change herself. Into what? A
pumpkin? She had no idea.
  Still she had actually dozed off with the music still
thundering in her head when she felt rather than heard the
door open, and Suzanne came in. She shut
off her music at once and sat up,
embarrassed because she had fallen asleep,
embarrassed because she had been able to sleep.
  Suzanne sat down on the chair in front
of the desk, turning it to face her. "She's thrown
Jim out."
  "For real, or just because she's pissed?"
  "I don't know if she knows. He doesn't
believe it yet either."
  "I better find another place to live,
fast."
  "Elena, you just lost your job. It wasn't much
of a job anyhow. Just hold on. We have to work this
out, all three of us, and running away won't
fix things."
  Marta could have killed her. Easily. She
kept thinking about that. No more Elena. Zero. When
she was younger, she had brooded about death. It
seemed like this cool thing, the place where all
troubles vanished and everything was quiet. It was the
place that gave you peace and made everybody
else sorry for you. It was the dark place at the
center of the best music, at the center of
orgasm when she thought she would die of pleasure.
It was the most real of all realities, the
ultimate rush, the fire at the core.
  After she had been brought back to her mother and
school, she had wished many times she had died with
Chad and Evan. They were heroes. She was a
failure. A coward. But she had not tried
to kill herself. At first she felt she wasn't good
enough to deserve it, because she had not done it when she had
the chance. Other times she remembered Chad's head
blown open. She could not want that. Then slowly
her life recommenced, the boredom and the tiny
pleasures and the minor troubles and anxieties and
occasional victories.
  She said to her mother, "I have to figure it all
out. Why I'm alive."
  "Why shouldn't you be alive? Marta didn't
really want to hurt you."
  "But my life has to have a purpose. Twice
now I've faced gunfire and survived." She
could not explain to Suzanne the shame she felt.
She knew Beverly would understand, but her grandmother was
still unconscious.
  "Just being you, Elena, is purpose enough."
  "Not any longer. You of all people must see it,
Mother. I need a reason. I need to find it."
  Suzanne would understand by and by. But first she had
to understand it herself. She was not sure what she was
looking for. She didn't intend to go off and join
Mother Teresa's order or start licking lepers.
Jim had fooled her, in part because she had wanted
so badly to believe in passion, in absolute
love. That had been her religion. Now she
needed a new one. She needed something real to do with the
rest of her twice broken life.

                 
               Suzanne

  Suzanne had to go to Framingham to see
Maxine, whose case was approaching the court date
to hear her appeal. She needed some points of
testimony clarified. She also knew her visit
was necessary to keep hope alive for Maxine, for whom
prison was an unending nightmare.
  Maxine looked gaunt, seemingly thinner each
time Suzanne saw her, as if she were wasting
away, burning up from some internal fever of
despair. She had always been a sharp-featured
woman, but now she was frighteningly
angular. In the two years since her conviction,
she had aged ten years. Suzanne felt if she
could not work a judicial miracle for Maxine,
then she would simply turn her face to the wall and
die inside.
  At least sitting in the visitors' room with
Maxine was some kind of pretense that her life
might return to normal, although the assortment of
families scattered around the room and the vending
machines trying to squeeze intimacy out of a
limited time slot was hardly typical family
life. Little kids ran around overexcited and the
women tried to read hope from the faces of their
boyfriends and husbands, mothers and others.
  "What happened to your arm?"
  Maxine shrugged and looked over her shoulder
to make sure no one was listening. "I got shoved
and kicked."
  "By a guard?"
  "Another inmate. They hate me. They think
I did it." Maxine's head drooped on her
shoulders. "They can't stand people who abuse children. A
lot of these women have children outside, and they worry
about them. I understand. But they don't believe
I'm innocent any more than that jury did."
  "We'll win on appeal. Either this time or the
next level. You were railroaded. I know that, and
sooner or later, a court will recognize it
too."

  When Suzanne returned, Elena was reading the
help-wanted columns with a Magic Marker in
her teeth. The house smelled spicy. "Did you
make yourself supper?"
  "I made supper for both of us. If you're
willing to eat it."
  "I'll eat anything," Suzanne said.
"Thank you."
  "I've been keeping it warm. Beef
burritos. That okay?"
  "Wonderful." Suzanne never ate
Mexican food, so she wasn't completely
sure what a burrito was, some kind of chip?
It sounded as if it should be a small donkey, but
not having to cook was a blessing. She had planned
to graze on anything she could find in the
refrigerator, probably cold and standing up.
She heard voices from upstairs. It sounded like
Jim yelling.
  "I wonder if she took him
back," she mused, listening. She couldn't make
out any words, only loud voices.
  "No," Elena said. "She's not that stupid.
I am, but even I won't take him back.
He knocked on the door down here, but I
wouldn't let him in."
  "No good can come from him," Suzanne said
fervently, shoveling the food in. "I want
to get to the hospital to check up on Beverly."
  "I was there," Elena said. "No change."
Elena had been going to the hospital every afternoon,
while Suzanne took the evening shift.
  They both heard Jim when he left, thumping
down the stairs cursing. Then he slammed the outer
door. Suzanne decided she had to catch
Marta before going to the hospital.
  Marta answered the door, but she was on the
phone. Even across the room, Suzanne could hear
Adam yelling through the receiver. "That is the
shittiest stupidest thing I ever heard in my
life! Is he crazy? Is she crazy?"
  "Your father has had affairs before. I forgave
him, but I can't this time."
  She could not hear Adam's reply.
Apparently his voice had dropped to normal
decibels.
  "No, I can't continue with him this time. I
won't!" Marta said firmly.
  Suzanne knew that Adam had his caring side.
He was wonderful with small children and animals.
He was also a master whiner. Adam was superb at
sulking and accomplished at getting his way. He
took this situation as a personal affront, but he
would get over it. He had always been close
to his mother, and he would support her no matter
what, Suzanne was sure.
  "Adam, you're at school. You're twenty and
you can surely survive a divorce now. You can
see both of us separately when you come home--"
  Another long pause. She could hear Adam
yelling but not what he was saying.
  "Oh, by the way, I'm pregnant."
  Marta put down the phone with a deep,
prolonged sigh. She rested her hands on her
slightly swollen abdomen. "It's good to see
you. How's Beverly?"
  Suzanne told her and then added, "Have you
really thrown Jim out?"
  "Really. And he's furious about it."
  "How can he be? You caught him in
bed."
  "Somehow he makes it my fault that I
walked in. He keeps talking about me shooting
at them."
  "Elena says you didn't shoot at them. She
says you carefully aimed over their heads. But
what were you thinking of?"
  "I just wanted to do something. I wanted
to express how much at that moment I wanted to see
them both dead and bleeding. I wasn't going to do
it. Having a baby in prison is not my idea
of the way to start a new life."
  Suzanne came over to the chair where Marta was
sitting and put her arms around her. "Thank you for
your forbearance. Elena's a real pisser in some
ways, but she's my daughter, and I love her.
I couldn't stand to lose her, Marta."
  "I know that." Marta put her hand over
Suzanne's, where it rested on her arm. "Jim
is going to make trouble. He's trying to fight the
divorce."
  "But you walked in on them."
  "He's got Harvey Saunders. Harvey's
a tiger."
  "Have you reached the point of thinking of a lawyer?"
  "I talked to Miles the first night."
  They had all known each other for twenty-odd
years, since they had worked in the same law
collective over a furniture store in an
old Cambridge building. Miles was of
medium height, medium build, with sandy hair and
light brown eyes. He was the sort of man
easily overlooked in a crowd, a class, a
party. In fact he had married later than any
of them, to an ambitious lawyer who went
into politics and was now a state representative
from the western suburbs. In court no one ever
overlooked him twice. He had a deep
persuasive voice, polished when he wanted it
to be, full of emotion or dry and trenchant.
He was actually a fine singer who loved choral
music, but in court, he sang solo, and the jury
often listened and was moved. While he usually did
criminal law, he had handled difficult
divorces before. He would push hard for Marta.
  "What were you fighting about earlier?"
  "He appeared without any notice and started
berating me about threatening him. He's all worked
up about the shooting. He seems to have fixated on
it as something he can hold over me."
  "Marta, it was an easily misunderstood
gesture. Harvey can use it."
  Marta shook her head slowly. "It wasn't
as violent as I wanted to be. I'm too sane
to do more than the gesture. But I don't want
to see Jim outside court and I'm not ready
to see Elena yet. ..."

  At the hospital, she sat by Beverly's bed
with her briefcase beside her, working, preparing for
tomorrow. As if anybody ever could prepare for tomorrow,
because the troubles that were pelting, bruising them all in
a rain of bloody earth were nothing she had ever
anticipated or for which she had in any way
prepared. Every few minutes, she put down her
paperwork and took Beverly's limp hand in hers.
How cold she felt. That worried her. She
chafed the hand, held it to her cheek. Every so often
she would address Beverly, in case she could hear.
  Jake had called her twice. She had not
returned his calls. If she dialed his apartment
now, she would surely get his answering machine and
be able to leave a message that would alert him to her
situation. She could not speak with him. She had not
an ounce of emotional energy left for him or
anyone else. It was absurd. She had finally
met a man who was truly interested in her, and she
simply did not have time to see him. Her family
had closed over her head, and it was all she could do
to teach her classes, meet her students, and try
to hold on to her cases that were proceeding
inevitably to court.
  As it happened, she was there at the right moment.
Her mother's eyelids fluttered several times as
had happened before. Now, however, her eyes opened
a slit and she moaned. "Mother," Suzanne said
loudly, unsure if Beverly could hear her.
"Mother! I'm here."
  Beverly moaned again and Suzanne ran into the
hall to tell the nurse. Suzanne could not tell
if Beverly knew where she was. Suzanne
stood by the side of the bed while the nurse checked
her mother over, checking pulse and pressure. Then
they made her leave. She thought that unfair,
since she desperately wanted to find out what
kind of shape Beverly was in.
  Still, she and Elena mildly celebrated
Beverly's return to the living with a couple of big
cookies Elena picked up at the local
bakery. Suzanne said, "It makes
me nervous, him trying to see you."
  "Don't worry. It was stupid. I was
stupid. Marta and you were stupid to throw us together.
He's a sleaze, Mother."
  "Did Beverly know what was going on?"
  "Well, of course. She was home all day.
She liked to know what was going on. It made her
feel more ... real. Connected. In touch."
  "She should have told me."
  "And betrayed my confidences? Come on.
Grandma's always been on my side."
  "Someone truly on your side would've advised
you to clear out, and fast."
  "Grandma's like me. She likes intense
emotions and drama. But I'm going to change.
I'm going to be calm and mature. I'm going
to be like a rock. That's what I'm going to be when
I finally grow up: a boulder."
  "Elena, precious, you don't have to go from
extreme to extreme."
  "Maybe I do, Mother. Then someday I'll end
up in the golden happy middle. But maybe I
can only get there by banging from one side to the
other."
  She noticed suddenly that all three cats were
lying in a heap on the plush chair, clutching one
another in sleep. Some peace accord had been
reached. Perhaps they understood that chaos had come and
things would never be the same. Mao lay between the two
larger orange cats, sleeping soundly. At
least someone was benefiting from the troubles that had beset
her family.

                 
                Beverly

  Beverly woke to blurred grayness, her head
throbbing. Her right leg was in a cast. She touched
it tentatively, her bad leg. That at least was
better than if it were her left leg. She kept
blinking but she could not see well, and then she was
too exhausted to cling to the narrow rock shelf of
consciousness. She slid off and dark waters
closed over her.
  Suzanne had been there, she remembered that.
A strange nurse, Black but not Sylvia.
She could not speak. Again, again. She groaned when
she thought of how hard she had worked to regain some
speech, and now it was gone. She had slid all the
way down the glass mountain and lay in a
heap at the bottom, worse than before, because her
vision was blurred, so how would she read or see the
computer screen?
  She desperately needed to know what had
happened upstairs, when she had tried to climb the
stairs. She must find out if Elena was all right.
No one had thought to offer her pen and paper and she
could not speak. She felt entirely helpless,
imprisoned in isolation. They would not let anyone
be with her long. Suzanne came and went,
nurses and aides and orderlies. Finally Elena
came. Elena's face was blurred but her voice
was clear and low pitched. "Grandma. Can you make
out what I'm saying?" Elena peered at her,
bringing her face close to Beverly's. "Okay,
if you can understand me, press your finger into my
palm."
  She pressed her finger into Elena's warm soft
palm. Then she traced a question mark again and again.
  "Oh, you want to know what happened, right?"
Her Elena, bright and sensitive as always, sat
beside the bed and told her everything. Beverly was
immensely grateful. Nobody had thought to bring
her up-to-date. Elena came every day, as did
Suzanne. Beverly slept a great deal, if
she could call that dark heavy place "sleep,"
full of fragments that brushed her mind, perhaps
fragments of her mind partly exploded, debris
floating loose in her.
  Beverly could tell that the nurse had an
attitude about Elena, who was always being judged
by other women. Beverly fiercely wanted to comfort
her, to protect her, to show that nurse her
solidarity with Elena, but she could not. She
supposed everyone in the hospital knew the
story. It was easy to pass judgment on women
who took chances: bad women they were labeled for
being adventurous. Elena's crime had been
falling in love with a man who was leading her on.
Married men could be dangerous, because they knew
women better than bachelors and they had a lot
of practice at manipulating a woman. They
knew what to say and how to make you feel sorry
for them. She had been in that bed several times herself.
A married man had a lot of practice in lying
successfully to a woman, in making excuses, in
making promises that sounded convincing.
  They made her get up and hobble to the
bathroom. They had to hold her because of her broken
leg. If that leg wasn't stupid, she
would never have broken it. Strong bones ran in her
family. She had never before broken a bone
except when her wrist was snapped in a
demonstration, but that was intentional. She had healed
fast then. A textile mill strike in South
Carolina.
  All those flowers. People had really cared then.
She had been a heroine to the women of the mill. That
had felt stronger than the pain of her wrist. She
couldn't even remember the pain, but she could
recall vividly the cookies. She had been so
young then that eating all those cookies had made her
face break out. She could still taste the coconut
orange cookies one middle-aged woman had
brought her with a big red bow left over from
Valentine's Day on top.
  She had been strong then for such a small
woman. She astonished the male organizers, the
way she could hold up in a march or a picket
line, the way she could work all day and still have the
energy for a good rousing speech at night. She had
looked far more delicate than she was, but that
too had often been to her advantage. She had
been roughed up a few times, beaten, especially
in the South. The civil rights days had been
dangerous. She had felt real fear days and
nights and days and nights.
  Lying in the narrow hospital bed, she
remembered another narrow bed, upstairs in the
house of a Black family in Alabama. There
was only one loft room and she had been put in
it, while the rest of the Lucases doubled up
downstairs. Those nights were hot and still and the air was
thick, almost wooly in that loft. The sound of a car
pausing outside the house choked conversation at
once, could wake her from what passed with them all
for sleep.
  She could see Leander's face vividly, and his
sister Marcella, both with slightly uptilted
eyes, a tint of red in their hair and skin, the
high cheekbones of southern Blacks with an
Indian ancestor. She could hear their voices.
Marcella had been jailed for two months after a
march and then went on a hunger strike for better
conditions, losing a third of her body weight.
She turned ashen, her skin lifeless. Their mother was
fired from her maid's job and had to start taking in
laundry. Yet they shared what they had with her.
Mrs. Lucas was always claiming she wasn't
hungry when there wasn't enough food to go
around. She herself lost seven pounds while she was
staying with them. She was closest to Marcella, who
was twenty. They lived warily, all of them, doing
what they had to but always on edge.
  Sure enough, one night the Ku Klux Klan
threw a fire bomb. It crashed through the window
into the kitchen. They managed to put out the fire,
although it cost them one of their only blankets.
They had to. The fire department stood around and
watched the flames, making jokes about niggers and
nigger lovers. Leander had been burned, but not
badly. They had treated it with ice and grease.
She remembered the dog, but she could not think of his
name, barking hysterically at the fire. She
remembered the taste of greens with a bit of pig
fat in them. Yes, she had eaten pig down
South. If they had any meat, that was what they
had. She never said a word. She could taste those
greens with fatback and onions. Mrs. Lucas
made a kind of fry bread when there wasn't much
else. She could not have refused to eat what they
shared with her, for they honored her with their sharing. It
was all they had to give, besides their trust and their
friendship.
  When Beverly woke next, she did not know where
she was, and she thought she was in her room
upstairs in their little house, Leander and Marcella
and their parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lucas, and
Leander's girlfriend, Ella with the corn rows. The
brown dog with his tail that would slam on the floor
like a metronome. The smell of the laundry
cooking on the stove and the scorched smell of the
iron. She was convinced she was there in that loft room
until she tried to move and her leg would not obey
her and everything turned gray. Then she remembered
it was thirty-five years since she had seen them.
Yet their shotgun house with the ladder going up to the
loft where she slept felt far more real to her than
anything in the hospital. She felt as if she
could extend her hand to touch Marcella or Leander,
hug Mama Lucas and be engulfed by her warmth,
sit on the rough wooden steps patting their big
waggy dog, Sugar. She was still that thirty-something
New Yorker with the strawberry hair and her big
green eyes and her false air of fragility and
her daily inexhaustible strength. She had been
closer in age to Mama Lucas than
to Marcella, but she felt much younger than Mrs.
Lucas, and everybody seemed to think she was younger
too. The hard life and poor nutrition
aged them early and fast. Somewhere in the wreck of
her stroke-wracked body that woman with the reddish
hair and the peach complexion still abided. Her real
life was not here in this sterile place where she had
no identity, but out there, somewhere, where things counted and
lives were changed, out there where if she could only
summon the strength and the willpower, surely she
could break through and once again live--live touching
others truly and being touched by them, a woman other
people might love, might hate, might admire, but
never could ignore. Here she was as invisible as dust
on the windowsill, and as unimportant.

                 
                Elena

  Elena was glad when Grandma was transferred from
the hospital to the rehab center, where it was a lot
less depressing and easier to park.
  "Yeah, I'm looking for work," she told her
grandma, who was propped up awkwardly in a
chair, dumped there like a bag of laundry. "My
car needed a brake job, so Suzanne had
to pay for it, which made me feel totally shitty.
But I'm back to my own wheels again. I'm going
to get a fucking job somewhere, somehow."
  "Hurt?" Grandma was talking but very slowly,
laboriously. Her voice sounded as if it had
been squashed. It was much worse than before.
  "Sometimes. I get depressed when I think
how stupid I was. How I could believe so
passionately in such a nasty wimp."
  "Want ... home."
  "I'll bet you want to get out of here. But the
therapy is helping, isn't it?"
  Grandma shrugged. She printed on her pad,
2nd TIME, THEY DON'T TRY.
  "But you're trying hard."
  Grandma shrugged again. She spoke, "Point?"
  "You mean, what's the point? So you can get
around again. So you can speak to me."
  Grandma printed, ONLY YOU UNDERSTAND.
  "That's because, you and me, we love each other
better than anybody else loves us,
Grandma."
  Grandma tapped her hand and tried to smile.
Her face was twisted and her smile, a
grimace, but Elena understood. It was such a
rotten thing that the old woman had to go through all this
again. Some of the therapists were good, they worked
hard, but Elena could see that the orderlies treated
her grandma like a sack of flour. They picked her
up and put her here or there, they spoke around her,
they touched her roughly and unfeelingly, as if she
were a piece of furniture. They did not have the
patience to wait while she got together the word or
two she meant to speak. Elena made a great
point of her own presence, to try to protect
Grandma if she could, but she knew the effect was
short-lived.
  "I can't figure out what I want to do."
  "Live," Grandma said.
  "Yeah, that's cool and everything--like, neither of us
is dead. But I have to figure out what I want
to do. I can't go on the way I have been." She
waited for Beverly's nod. She could explain
to her grandma exactly how she felt, as she never
could to anyone else. "So now I have to grow up.
Mother's a lawyer. Rachel's going to be a
rabbi. But I'm nothing. I was thinking for a while
maybe I'd go to law school. ..."
  Grandma managed to shake her head
vigorously.
  "I know, I know. Big mistake. I could
never stand it. Too boring. Too in the head. I
know."
  Grandma nodded. Made a lunge and patted
her hand.
  "Well, I'm not going to be a doctor or a
nurse. I can't stand these places." Elena
waved her hand at the Maalox-green walls,
mint-flavored antacids. "I can use a
computer, but I don't love them, the way Mother
does. I just don't love words that much."
  "Colors," Grandma said.
  "Yeah, I love color. My eyes sink
in. But I'm not cut out to be an artist,
Grandma. I don't believe in those framed things
on the wall, like they mean that much. I hate
museums. I feel trapped and coerced. Like
someone is yelling in my ear, Appreciate,
Appreciate you shithead, you turkey!"
  Grandma giggled. Elena loved her even more
then. She could not imagine her mother giggling at that.
Rachel certainly wouldn't. They would both want
her to appreciate! Where did those voices come from
anyhow? Grandma was never her conscience.
"Grandma, if you were my age, we'd be
girlfriends. We are anyhow."
  Grandma brought Elena's hand to her
lips and tried to kiss it. She could not control her
mouth very well and drooled a little. Elena did not
mind, although Grandma looked embarrassed and dabbed
at the hand, grimacing again. "Don't be
embarrassed. Dogs do the same thing, and I like
dogs."
  That made Grandma giggle again. "Me, dog?"
  "No way. Just nice like one."
  "Friends." Grandma waved between them.
  "To the end."

  How Elena hated the Sunday want ads. It
gave her a headache just to weigh the Globe
help-wanted section in her hands and look at
all that fine print. There had to be something she could
do. Oh, she could probably get a job as a
receptionist for a while. Boring, boring. But her
looks would get her that, and she would be
ultrapolite. She would kiss ass down to the
bone for a job. She just could not stand being stone
broke. She could feel the wheels grinding in the
house. Her mother had never spoken to her of money in
her life. Whatever Elena had asked for, she had
gotten unless her mother did not think it was good for
her. It was strangely human for her mother to admit
to money troubles. Suzanne had never told them
they could not afford a school or a trip or some
coat, probably because Suzanne always felt
guilty, as if she wasn't a good enough mother.
Well, she wasn't a great one for sure, although
Elena wondered if she would do any better. With
Jim, that loser, she had assumed they'd have children.
Life was so fucking weird and malignant. She
knew for sure that Suzanne had to be really hard
up to mention money to her, so she was determined
to carry a bit of the load.
  Monday morning as she was doing her laundry,
she saw Jim hanging around in the backyard by the
oak tree, as if to catch her. Yellow leaves
all over the ground like fallen light. He
didn't go to his office Monday, of course.
He looked like a forlorn kid, like a kid who ought
to be in school and didn't know what to do with himself.
For a moment, watching from behind the curtain in
Beverly's room, she felt sorry for him. She
felt a moment's tug of pity. She made herself
turn away. It didn't mean anything. He
tried to get into the house and pounded on the door, but
she lay low. Marta had changed the locks,
giving them new keys to the front door
and the grade door in back. She stayed in her
room till he finally drove off.
  Two police detectives showed up at the
house just as she was about to go to a job interview.
Jim was trying to cause trouble for Marta about
shooting into the wall that day.
  "She didn't shoot at us. Understand, she was
standing at the foot of the bed and we were in it. Naked.
She'd come in to tell her husband she was
pregnant, and there he was all over me. But she
didn't shoot at us. She raised the gun and
shot way over our heads. It was like a symbolic
act, understand, but she hadn't lost it, and she
actually was very careful not to hurt us. Personally
I would have drilled both of us if I'd been her.
We both deserved it. It wasn't assault.
If anything, we assaulted her."
  "You don't want to lodge a complaint against
her?"
  "I'm guilty. She isn't guilty of
anything except trusting two people she had every reason
to trust--except we weren't worth it." She would
come through for Marta: it was the honorable thing to do. It
would serve Jim right. What was he trying to pull
off anyhow? "We were never in danger and she
wasn't even threatening us. It was like setting off
firecrackers. No, I wasn't scared. I was
just ashamed."
  Because she wanted money, wanted it badly, she
took the first job she was offered, a receptionist's
job at a group of financial analysts and
investment counselors who shared a suite of
offices off Route 128 in Needham. It was
about twenty minutes from the house, and she would be
going against traffic coming and going. The pay was
ridiculous, but she wouldn't hesitate to quit
if she found something better.
  "Elena, you didn't have to take a low-level
job like that. I can find you something with friends of ours,"
Suzanne said, dutifully eating the chicken
Elena had fried.
  "I have to take it. I need to be working. Your
friends would be terrified to hire me, for fear I'd
fuck their husbands. You know that."
  "Maybe around the university I can find
something."
  "Whatever. I'll quit if something better
comes up. Mother, I'm not trained to do a thing.
I'm useless. I have classes toward four
different majors besides psychology, and
I don't know how to do anything a boss with a brain
would pay me for."
  "Do you want to go back to school?" Suzanne
asked helplessly.
  "If I do, I'll go in the evening. If you can
get me a deal. Not otherwise. And I haven't
the faintest goddamn idea what I'd study,
anyhow. I seem to have no interest in life beyond
fucking everything up."
  "Elena, you've been very good since the ...
disaster. I know you don't want to hurt Marta
more. I know she doesn't want to hurt you.
You've shown real strength. I believe in you now
more than I ever did. I want you to know that."
  Elena shrugged, not knowing how to respond. It was
a compliment for sure, but she had always been poor
at receiving compliments on anything besides her looks.
That's what she had always been admired for--by men.
She was used to her mother trying to guilt trip her,
run her life, give her moldy advice, warn
her about dire consequences. She was not used
to praise. It embarrassed her, and it also made
her feel squishy, as if she might snivel.
"So how's your boyfriend these days? I haven't
seen him around. He didn't bail out, did
he?"

  Elena was going over her wardrobe, sewing on
buttons, catching up an unraveled hem.
Monday she started her new job, and she found
dealing with her clothes soothing. Then she heard the
key in the lock and went into the living room,
startled. It was 9:20. It was that young guy,
Jaime, who worked as her mother's assistant. "You
have a key?" Yeah, he'd been at Passover.
  "Sure, for when she needs me to fetch. She
needs her other glasses. Appeals court starts
at ten-forty today, so I have to hustle."
  "You're her errand boy?" Elena gave him a
smile with her dig. She had never really spent
time with him. He was almost beautiful.
  "I'm whatever it takes." He sauntered
into Suzanne's office and found her glasses beside
her computer. "She hardly ever forgets anything.
This is a first." He looked sideways at
Elena. "Have you ever watched your mother in action?"
  "Mother? No. Why?"
  "Aren't you curious? She's good. She told
me you're starting your new ... career ...
Monday, so why not come along with me
today?"
  "Wouldn't she be pissed if I barged in?"
  "She won't even notice. She's focused,
Elena, very focused. Why don't you come and
watch?"
  She was suddenly ashamed that she had so little
interest in what her mother did for a living, plus she
was also a little intrigued by Jaime. He reeked
confidence for a kid two years younger than herself.
He had her mother's car and he drove it with
assurance. Her mother didn't lend her the car without
a big fuss, while here he was acting as if he
owned it. For a moment she had a pang of jealousy.
Who was this kid that her mother trusted him so much?
  "You keep looking at me. Interested in what
you see?"
  "Mildly," she said with a grin. "I thought you were
gay."
  "I don't rule anybody out because of age,
sex, or race. I'm an equal opportunity
fuck. ... Actually I'm straight.
Interested?"
  She just smiled. He really was cute. She had
never been involved with anyone younger. She would be in
control: maybe she would like that for a change.
Maybe after she moved out of her mother's house, she
would look him up. Men did not tend to forget her,
and she doubted if she would forget Jaime.
  The building was located on a narrower plaza
off the bleak windswept wasteland of City Hall
Plaza. The crescent-shaped building that
divided this plaza from the street was new, but the
courthouse was not. The lobby was shabby, and after they
passed through the metal detector and into the old
elevator, it only got worse. Cops all
around, people shuffling along, suits rushing past. It
was a dreary building badly kept up, full of
dirty corridors and crowded offices that hadn't
been painted for thirty years. It smelled of
old smoke and damp boots and decaying paper,
seedy upholstery, the stench of anxiety and fear.
  However, the courtroom where the appeals were being
heard was a different world. This room was clean and
well lit. The ceiling was high; blue velvet
curtains hung behind the dais, where three big
empty black leather chairs faced
microphones. Behind the chairs was a bookcase of
shiny law books, resplendent on display. The
same blue velvet curtains hung on three
high narrow windows. The room was wood
paneled, with portraits of old guys in black
robes hung on both walls. Jaime went up
to her mother, who was sitting in the front row of
benches outside the dividing waist-high wall.
Suzanne took the glasses and shoved them on
her nose. She did not even notice Elena.
She could spy on her mother without having to explain,
for it did not seem that Jaime was going to tip her
mother to her presence.
  Jaime handed Suzanne a brief, a trial
transcript (all things she had often seen around
the house since she was a baby), and a yellow pad
covered with Suzanne's scrawl. Then he took
his seat in the back row with Elena. They sat around
for twenty minutes, while Jaime entertained her
with commentary on what would happen and pointed out the
reporters to her. Then the judges, three old
guys wearing black robes just like on TV,
came in, and everybody bounced to their feet. A
woman intoned, "Hear ye, hear ye" and gave
this archaic-sounding announcement of the court being in
session for citizens to present their pleas. But she
didn't see any ordinary citizens, only
defense lawyers and prosecutors, officers of the
court and judges. Marta was sitting in the front
row of the benches. Some reporters were taking
notes, yawning, taking more notes. Jaime
told her they weren't usually present, but they had
come in because of Maxine's notoriety.
  She supposed she expected Perry Mason,
but Suzanne stood almost on tiptoe in front
of the podium facing the judges and most of what she
said Elena could not follow. "Point three in my
brief." "On page one hundred and twelve
of the transcript." "On the top of page one
hundred and eighty-nine." "Point four of my
brief." Cases. One of the judges rose at
one point and consulted one of the shiny-looking law
books in the bookcase that stood between the blue
velvet ceiling-to-floor draperies behind the
dais. There was no jury. Nobody talked about
guilt or innocence. It was weird. One judge
looked half asleep. The other was leaning way
back in his chair, although he nodded or grunted
occasionally. The other was talkative, addressing
her mother as Suzanne and quoting case citings.
Her mother spoke for fifteen minutes and was
interrupted seven or eight times. Suzanne
looked so little and cute up there talking fast,
taking what they could hand her, that Elena
thought for the first time that what her mother did was actually
hard, it was a constant battle.
  Then she sat down and a woman prosecutor in
a gray suit stood at the podium. The
judges were very nice to her. Elena took a
particular dislike to the one in the middle, who had
asked her mother only one question but who seemed to coo
over the young prosecutor. The prosecutor
might have been his tall thin blond daughter,
slightly horsey faced with an accent Elena had
heard in the restaurant, that she supposed they
learned in prep school--because she doubted
anybody naturally spoke that way. The
prosecutor was maybe fifteen years younger than
her mother. They were being so sweet to her, all of them
awake now. They did not ask her the same kind
of tough questions they stuck Suzanne with. Elena
wanted to kick the judges. Who would ever guess
this was supposed to be a hot case? She was
convinced, still, that Suzanne had won, because she had
been so together, so fierce, so positive. She had
answered every hard one they had thrown at her.
  "There won't be an opinion for months,"
Jaime hissed as the prosecutor sat down and the
next lawyer came to the podium.
  "How do you think it went?"
  "Not so good. I know Suzanne's
disappointed."
  Elena stood. "I'll take the MBTA
home."
  "Don't you want a ride?"
  "Not really. See you." She would tell her mother
later that she had sat in, but she felt she had
intruded enough. If she could not say that she
understood any better what Suzanne did, at
least she knew now where it happened. That was something.
It gave her a picture in her head.

                 
               Suzanne

  The Friday before Suzanne was finally to argue
Maxine's appeal, Miles wanted to see her in
his office.
  Miles, who was acting as Marta's lawyer,
repeated patiently, "He was trying to invoke the
domestic abuse statute."
  "Bastard!" Suzanne said. "We both worked
for that. There's even some language in the statute
that Marta wrote. How can he call
walking in on your husband humping a younger woman
in your bed and reacting, domestic abuse."
  "Assault with a dangerous weapon with the aim of
doing malicious harm, as between two partners in a
domestic arrangement. But Elena saved
Marta's ass. She insisted that Marta never
intended more than a symbolic act. The row of
bullet holes far up the wall proves that, so
the prosecutor told Jim he doesn't have a
case."
  "It's a miracle she didn't lose the
baby."
  "It looks as if we're out of the woods, at
least until he starts bringing it up in the
divorce proceedings." Miles rose from behind his
desk and went around to the other side, resting his behind
on the edge just in front of her. "So, when's your
court date on the day care case appeal?"
  "Next Thursday. I've been at the rehab
center so much, everything else is going to hell. I
have to get my act together."
  "Marta too. Your lives have been a bad
soap opera, Suzanne. Now Jim's
determined to make trouble. I want you to keep that
in mind and make that daughter of yours understand too.
It hasn't to do with custody of Adam, because after
all he's twenty, but the unborn girl. ...
Now I have to know from you, Jim doesn't want a
divorce. Does Marta, really? What's your
take on this. Is she reacting out of spite? Will
she regret it after the baby's born?"
  "I have to sit down and talk to her."
  "No kidding. Well, get on it and tell
me. I don't want her to divorce him while
she's pregnant with his child unless she's damned
sure that's the path she wants to take--not for right
now, but for next year and the next two decades."
  Driving to school, she thought about the question Miles
had posed her. She had not been able to forgive
Sam for his infidelity, but their marriage had
dried up by then. She had not felt she required
a husband strongly enough to have one who preferred
another woman. She had been stung, betrayed,
with an almost physical sense of despisal. But
Marta might still love Jim; she was, after
all, bearing his child. If she herself could forgive
Elena, perhaps Marta could forgive Jim. She had
been with Beverly so much, she had neglected the
support she should be offering Marta. They were
supposed to be together in court Thursday
for Maxine's appeal.
  Suzanne gave over the visiting of Beverly
to Elena for the weekend to review her brief and
once again go over the videotapes of the children's
testimony and the records of the two therapists and
assistant prosecutor with the children. This was a case
she found herself caring about intensely. The more her friends
argued with her and colleagues and acquaintances
attacked her for taking it on, the more she studied the
records, the more determined she was to secure
justice for Maxine and get her out of
Framingham. Marta told her she'd be
present. Marta knew how much Suzanne cared
about this case and how controversial it was, so she
would lend her moral support.
  When they walked into the courtroom Thursday,
there was a stir among the court personnel. Marta
sighed. "Here I come, the one woman parade. I
should have worn red. I think everybody in Boston
has heard what happened."
  In the car, she had discovered she'd forgotten the
glasses that did not slide down her nose and
sent Jaime back for them. "Lawyers are
terrible gossips."
  "Sex and violence. Pregnancy and
betrayal. I hate feeling like such a patsy."
  The three judges entered and they rose. She
began to focus. She ran over the basic
arguments in her head. The children's testimony had
been rehearsed, coerced, and heavily edited. The
defendant had never been permitted to confront her
accusers. There was no cross-examination, no chance
to test the coherence of the stories. Maxine had not
been granted her full rights by law. Further,
evidence of the child witnesses had been tainted by the
process by which it had been obtained--repeated
questioning, which amounted to coaching and suborning of their
testimony.
  If the conviction was overturned, the state would
appeal; if the conviction was not overturned, she would
appeal. Either way, it was going to be a long
process. She would be living with this uncomfortable
case for the next year or two. Well, Maxine
had been living with it a lot longer, ever since she
had first been accused by the parents of one of the children in
her day care center, of sexual abuse of their
son.
  As the oldest judge Laplaine had a
private conversation with the clerk of the court, she
mustered her concentration. She owed Maxine
that. Distraction was the antithesis of the focus
required to win. She had drawn a judge who was
new to the district court of appeals, a man in his
early sixties from the North Shore who had been
a prosecutor before being elevated to the bench. Then
there was Judge Corrigan, just turned seventy.
Suzanne had pleaded before him several times. He
had the reputation of being fair and learned, but with the
disconcerting habit of pulling cases from nowhere.
Suzanne had never been caught unprepared, but
she knew Marta had once been slapped with a
defeat because Judge Corrigan cited a case
Marta had never heard of and could not argue. The
oldest and chief justice was Laplaine, a little
deaf, fair if he followed you but known to space
out. Sometimes he dozed with his eyes open. Other
times he was sharp, the most conservative of the three,
although she did not know how that would affect this case.
He was strict in his interpretations. He had
given her a hard time with Phoebe, but in the end
she had won.
  At her cue, Suzanne rose. She had her
fifteen minutes. "Good morning. May it
please the court, I am Suzanne Blume
representing Maxine Rodriguez. I'd like
to reserve three minutes for rebuttal. ..."

  Suzanne and Marta sat at a corner table
in a seafood restaurant in Fanueil Hall.
They both ordered broiled salmon, a salad,
and a glass of Evian water.
  "So, how do you think it went?" she asked
Marta.
  "I thought Corrigan was with you. I saw him
nod once. He didn't hit you with one of his
obscure case citations. He seemed
interested." Marta frowned, considering.
  "I wasn't sure about Laplaine. I
couldn't tell if he was even listening until he
asked that question about my interpretation of the rules of
evidence. I felt he was iffy. What did you
think about the new guy, Beamer?"
  "I can't read him yet. I've never argued
before him. He was a tough prosecutor and I thought
he might be leaning to their side." Marta rubbed
her eyes. "It always takes a while to figure
out a new judge. Yes, he was a
prosecutor, but some judges with that background
are harder on prosecutors who haven't done a
sterling job. Until Beamer has a
track record, how can we read him?"
  "Well, we'll find out in a few months.
They're considering the appeal, but they're not letting
Maxine out in the meantime. I was hoping she could
recover her health." Suzanne sighed. "Do you
think I did a decent job for her?"
  "I thought you were superb. It's partly
political, you know. The AG put his weight
behind this case."
  She considered Marta's answer and her stomach
clenched. Marta did not think she had won. What
could she have done differently? Had she not been
prepared enough? She did not know how much more
prison time Maxine could endure. Had her life
gotten in the way of her case?
  Marta was saying, "I was surprised to see
Elena in court."
  "Elena? Are you sure?"
  "You didn't notice? She was sitting with
Jaime in back."
  "How strange. I'll have to ask her tonight.
Marta, we have to talk about what happened."
Suzanne propped her chin into her cupped hand.
"I don't know where to start. You're my best friend.
Elena I love dearly as you know, but she has this
talent for creating dangerous messy dramas."
  Marta groaned. She pulled at her
gray-blond hair that was always elegant, like the
color of furniture in Beverly's apartment in the
fifties--Hollywood oak, she thought it had
been called. Bleached oak, just that silvery ash
blond. "Jim is older and is supposed to know
better."
  "Marta, don't you really think I should take
Elena and clear out?"
  "I don't want Jim to fuck up my life
more than he has. And I don't want anybody
downstairs but you. While I'm not ready to forgive
and forget, I feel less angry with Elena because
of how she dealt with the police. That saved me a
lot of grief, and I appreciate it."
  "Elena's not seeing him, you know. She's not
even talking with him. She's bitterly
disillusioned."
  "Good. Let's hope it stays that way."
  "The worst thing is, Marta, I suspected this
maybe two months ago and I confronted
Elena. She persuaded me I was crazy. I
kept watching them together and I couldn't see any
sign that something might be going on."
  "I never caught on myself. But it's nice
to know I wasn't abnormally dense."
  They both picked at their food. Then they
walked together, slowly. It was a clear sunny
day, one of those cool glassy days of October
in Boston. The sky seemed infinite over them.
The air was fresh and almost squeaked in the lungs.
Only her life, she thought, was full of disorder
and murky with the odor of unsolved problems.
Suzanne took Marta's arm. "So how are you
feeling about being pregnant?"
  "Am I still cool with it? Well, I admit
I had second thoughts right afterward--"
  "It's late but not impossible to do something about
it. It still seems to be a pretty risky
business, having a baby at our age."
  "No! She's my baby. I've always wanted
a daughter. I still do."
  Suzanne nodded, tightening her grip on
Marta's arm. The baby who had died had been a
girl. Then came the miscarriages. "But do you
really want to raise this baby alone?"
  "Oh, he'll insist on visitation. Besides,
I won't be alone. I have you. Don't I?"
  "Of course. But you don't feel the baby
needs two parents?"
  "Yes. You and me. Plus Adam. He'll
shape up and come through. He's just dazed and pouting
for the minute. Jim will make demands. It isn't
as if I'm trying to keep him away from the baby.
But I don't want to go through my life having a
husband who prefers other women to me. The
business of making love in our bed was more than I
can stomach. I could forgive him once, but this was
too close to home."
  "Forgive him once?"
  "Do you imagine I never knew why he was
fired? I just thought it was better for everybody if
I pretended I didn't. I thought he'd
learned a lesson. I thought it was a onetime
aberration. Now I wonder how many more there were I
never knew about. I wonder about the receptionist
before Elena. I wonder about his patients, but I
don't lie awake wondering, and if I stay
married to him, I will."
  "I know. When I discovered Sam was having that
affair, I just couldn't recover from it. I kept
thinking, well, if he would rather be with her, why are
we together? I kept being haunted by images of them
in bed together. I kept listening to everything
he said and wanting to cross-examine him. Oh, so
you say you went to the dentist. Exactly what time
was your appointment? Well, a filling shouldn't
take more than half an hour. ..."
  "We're going to be on short rations.
Babies are expensive. Adam will be in school
for years yet. Maybe we should take in
roomers. Oh, Adam's coming home this
weekend."
  "He sounded martyred on the phone."
  "Well, he's going to have to put his bony
shoulder to the family wheel. We're all in
deep shit, and he's going to have to help rather than
suffer at the top of his lungs." Marta sounded
cheerful, in spite of her words. "I hope you win
this case."
  "I have to. If they don't overturn the
conviction, I think it'll kill Maxine. That
really scares me."
  "You did the best you could for her under frankly
impossible circumstances."
  "You don't think we have a prayer, do you? I
have to start preparing for the SJC." The Supreme
Judicial Court: the highest court in the
state. But would Maxine hold out that long?

                 
                Beverly

  Beverly's words beat around in her head like
birds trapped in a house, banging themselves on the
windows, able to perceive where they wanted to go but
trapped by an invisible barrier. She could not think
of a damned thing to look forward to. She would be
lucky if she could drag herself around in a walker
again. She knew how slow and painful and partial was
the recovery from a stroke like hers. She had
enjoyed certain things after her first stroke: being with
Elena, E-mail, playing around on the
Internet, and chatting to the degree she had been
able to with Sylvia. Those had been her pleasures.
She did not think she would be talking again soon.
Sylvia had gone off to another job. Elena would
probably leave now, to get away from Marta's
hostility. Her vision was too blurry to read a
computer screen, although she could more or less see
faces. She could distinguish between the bored nurses
and orderlies and the truly nasty ones, and the couple
of nice young women who tried to make contact.
  She was worried about her darling.
Elena was unnaturally quiet and broody. Every
day she came to the rehab center to sit with her.
Elena felt guilty about the fall, and Beverly
had not managed to persuade her that to take
responsibility for an accident was silly,
unnecessary. It was like coming around a corner and bumping
into an oncoming truck.
  She did not believe in sulking, so she tried,
to the degree she was able, to convey good spirits. But when
she was alone, she wept. Sometimes she thought she
would choke to death from her tears and the way they made
her nose and sinuses block up. It would have been
perfect if she had never wakened from that coma, just
slid from sleep into death and vanished.
  Her friend Dave had died in a coma. He had
been struck by a scab's truck on a picket
line and never regained consciousness. He had left
a living will, and for once, the doctors respected
it--probably because there was no money in his
family. The union was picking up the tab, but
there were times it paid to be poor. She knew he would
have wanted to go out the way he did, a light
turned off, not to be kept like a big turnip in
a hospital bed.
  Dave and she had gone out for Chinese-Cuban.
He loved black beans. When he was younger, his
hair was black like those beans, like Elena's.
Glossy hair, his complexion ruddy, always a
little weathered, and those gray eyes: they went right through
her. Was it after the garbage strike? No, it had
been a demonstration. Something about welfare.
He'd had a scar on his right hand, crossing the
back of it, dark red and slightly raised. For
some reason, she had never asked him how he got
it. She remembered the feel of that scar when she was
touching his hand, when he was caressing her. They had
never really had an affair, just gone to bed a
couple of times. He was no great shakes in bed.
Too much in a hurry. It was one item on a
list. Too bad. He had been gorgeous
to look at. She had gone to bed with him twice,
no, three times, each time hoping it would be
better, that he would be more involved, more sensual,
less abrupt. Then she had decided it was
pointless, and that they would just stay friends, which they had,
until the end. She was glad he could not see her
as she was now. She refused to look at herself in the
hand mirror they gave her. That was not her face.
Her hair was growing out gray again.
  When she thought of her face, she thought
of herself when she had been at her peak. For her that
had come on the late side, say thirty to forty.
Everyone had thought she was younger than she was, but
when she had truly been younger, she had not had the
confidence, the knowledge of men, to do much with her looks.
No, her glory days had been in her thirties
and early forties. She had worn a red rinse in
her hair. Red hair, green eyes. Suzanne
should tint her hair red. She would look much more
interesting, but Suzanne had never listened to her when
she tried to tell her how to capitalize on her
features, how to present herself, how to dress and
walk and smile. She had done her best to pass
on tips to her daughter, although her hard-won
know-how had been rejected every time. It was sad.
Suzanne just refused to learn from Beverly, when
if she had taken a little advice, she could have had
so much more fun. A man like Victor would have gone
off anyhow, but she could have kept Sam on the
hook far longer if she had known how to play him.
Suzanne just shut down whenever Beverly tried
to pass on a few good words. If Beverly knew
anything, it was men.
  Whatever she tried to give her child, Suzanne
never seemed to want. Instead she felt as if
Suzanne wished she was more like her sister Karla,
a homebody, a lump, a balebusteh, a
grade school teacher with sentimental left
politics, rife with superstition. It was her own
fault for leaving Suzanne so often with Karla, but
it had been out of the question to take her little girl into some
of the dangerous situations where she was working as an
organizer, particularly in the South. Those
Klansmen didn't care if they shot or burned
a child instead of an adult. Perhaps they liked it
better. She could not understand them, those men so driven
by hate and malice and pride, so ready to maim and
kill in the name of their skin. More than once she
had thought she would die there, in the South. She had
one of the lawyers with the civil rights movement draw
up a will for her. She had little to leave, but she
wanted it clear that Karla was to be Suzanne's
guardian. Once during a march, she had looked
up and realized she was in the bead of a man with a
rifle standing on an overpass. Then for some
reason he laughed instead and did not shoot her.
Later she heard he had shot someone else, a
young man from Chicago. They never caught him.
They usually didn't.
  How could she have lived her life so
near the edge, so fully, so passionately, and be
stuck now in a bed with no more ability
to communicate than a worm or a cauliflower?
Her voice had been her weapon, her tool.
She had been valued by others for her ability
to marshal the right words and say them passionately in
a ringing voice. Her voice had never been
called shrill, a full womanly voice that
carried into a crowd. Without her voice, she was
indeed crippled. Soon she would not remember
what her own voice had sounded like, low pitched and
rich in quality that men had compared to honey.
  When the doctors or the nurses discussed her,
they emphasized it was her second stroke, as if
that proved she was careless, in a category of those
easily dismissed. Maybe they tried hard with the
first-stroke victims, but if it happened again, it
was no longer worth their trouble. There was something
dismissive in the label. Second-time loser.
Second time around. Secondhand. They used
to call imperfect merchandise seconds. She was
certainly imperfect merchandise.
  She wanted out of the rehab center, but going
back to Suzanne's was not hugely
attractive. Her own life had been
demolished, like an old tenement where people had lived
for generations and raised their families and faced their
troubles. Now it was a parking lot. Now she was
parked in this bed. She could taste her despair.
It was bitter tea in her mouth.

                 
               Suzanne

  Suzanne read Rachel's E-mail with an
increasing sense of separation, physical and
mental. Suzanne had been told about a certain
kind of rapture, a form of temporary
infatuation, that came over people in Jerusalem. She
was accustomed to a high level of intimacy with
Rachel, and she missed it. They were inhabiting
different universes at the moment. Each of them
regarded the other's preoccupations as intrusions.
Worse than tangential. Irrelevant.

Dear Mom,
  Now I know where the old legend of the streets
of gold comes from: here. In the late afternoon, the
streets near the Old City seem to be made of
old gold. Sometimes they seem almost
edible to me, like peanut brittle. It seems a
pity to walk on them, yet people have for thousands of
years.
  Sometimes I feel drunk with breathing (and
sometimes just plain sick because of the smog from the cars and
trucks that gathers in the bowl of the city). But when
the exhaust doesn't get to me, the scents make
me giddy.
  Jerusalem smells of pine, or maybe
it's cedar, and of rosemary. When I think how you and
Marta used to try to keep one pitiful pot of
rosemary going all winter in the kitchen window, it
makes me giggle. Here it grows like a weed.
They use it for ground covers on hills. They
use it for hedges, the way we use privet.
Also their gardens are full of lavender. What we
cherish as prize little specimens grow everywhere here
fiercely as poison ivy in Massachusetts.
  We were sitting on a hill near the kibbutz
where Michael's friend lives, and I realized we
were sitting on thyme. It was all over the ground
there. I don't know if they planted it or if it
grows wild, but truly, here even the weeds are
holy and wonderful. I really do have a desire
to kiss the ground sometimes, like some people do when they get
off the plane. Wherever we go, I feel the past
walking with us, shining through the present, so that at
times, everything seems lit from within.
  As for us, I think we will be married in late
November or early December. We have
to decide with the rebbe next week what would be
convenient for him, and then I can give you the date.
You should make reservations at once, then. It will
be early enough in December so you won't run
into all the Christians coming for their holidays.

  How was she going to make Rachel understand she could
not afford flying to Israel herself, let alone with
anybody else in the family? She would have
to disappoint her daughter, who was never demanding,
never surly. She felt rotten, but she also
felt trapped. She was plunging headfirst
into debt, and there were more expenses coming. She would have
to sit down and figure out her situation exactly.
Maybe it wasn't as bad as she thought.
  Rachel's next E-mail was less
ecstatic.

  I am really shocked at both Elena and
Marta. I can understand Marta better.
After all, pregnancy makes some women's
tempers short. How is she now? Is she really
going to divorce Jim? I am writing her
separately. Marta has always been like a really
close aunt to me, and I can't even remember a
time she was not there, even before we lived together. I
know she will be a good mother to her baby, but I also
remember how hard you told me it was for you
to raise Elena alone. I am worried for
Marta and she is always in my thoughts and prayers.
  Elena will never cease to amaze me, what she
decides to give herself to, what she pursues,
and what she flees from. She is my own sister, but
I think there is something perverse in her which leads
her on dangerous paths and into darkness of her own
making. I understand that she didn't know that Marta was
expecting, but she certainly knew Jim was
married. What did she hope would happen? How
did she justify it to herself? I try to imagine,
and I can't.
  I am less surprised at him. He has
always had a wandering eye, and he used to put his arms
around me more than I was comfortable with. He always
seemed like an old man to me. I mean, he was
my "uncle." Everyone has uncles who are just
a little too familiar, so I didn't see it as
a big problem. Like relatives who insist on
kissing you on the mouth when you don't know them that
well. Michael's family are big kissers.
It's hard for me to get used to, but I resist
showing discomfort. It's my fault for being too
stiff and formal with people.
  This is a great place to work on being overly
formal and distant, because everybody talks to you as if
they were family and had the right to yell at you and
criticize you to your face and give you advice.
Everyone from the guy behind the counter in the coffee bar
to the cab driver who took us from the airport the very
first day to the woman who cuts my hair, off of
Ben Yehuda near Cat's Corner where all the
kids hang out. She is planning my wedding for
me, without my desire or input. At least she
thinks she is. She has cut my hair all
differently. I will have a picture taken to send
you. We don't have a new camera yet, since
Michael's was stolen. I wonder if we should
ask for a camera as an early wedding present, as
we could sure use one here, hint, hint. Maybe
I should ask Dad, what do you think?
                                  
  Suzanne sat at her desk going over
bills. Money was still hemorrhaging. She had
to find a way to cut costs; she had to find a way
to make more money. Of course the simplest
solution would be to leave the university and go back
into private practice full-time, but if she
did that, she would have no time at all for her
daughters, her mother, Jake, her life. Herself.
She had lived that way when she was younger. About
to turn fifty, she found it unappealing. Stick
your head in the buzz saw. The total
unreflective life.
  Still, she would have to cut back on pro bono
work. What a choice. Be good to your mother or be
useful to the people who really need your help with the
courts and the law. It should not be a choice anyone
had to make. It was unfair. People got old. People
had strokes, heart attacks, developed
cancers. It should not come as such a financial shock
to a family. Something was wrong with the whole system
of health delivery when taking care of a family
member could bankrupt you in a few years. She
did not know what to do. Everything she was earning, she
was spending, and her savings were eroding at a frightening
rate. When her savings were gone and her investments
cashed in, she would have no cushion for disaster and
trouble; and where would the money come from then for
Beverly's care? She could complain to no one
except to Jake, when he was around, since she
hardly felt she could dump on Marta, and it
seemed tactless to complain to Karla. Would
Rosella step in if something went wrong with
Karla? When something went wrong. Rosella's
family's financial resources were meager, but
Karla was already living with her.
  Costs. Okay, drop the rod and gun club.
She wasn't going to be shooting with Marta. Cut
back to basic cable. She never had time to watch
movies anyhow. Less takeout? But who would do
the cooking? If she was to litigate more
lucrative cases, she would not have time to make
even the few meals she did. Elena was going to have
to pick up some of the slack. Less dry cleaning,
somehow, but she had to be absolutely neat and
polished for court.
  It was clear that she could not fly to Israel for
Rachel's wedding. Maybe Rachel and Michael
could wait till they got home. Rachel would be
incredibly disappointed, but to fly over would cost
several thousand just for herself. She did not
know when Beverly would be back home. She did not
know what kind of care Beverly would need.
Suzanne plunged her face into her hands and
sighed. She felt run over. She got up and
went into the living room.
  "Elena," she said, standing over the couch. Then
she thought better of their positions and took a seat
in the armchair.
  Elena opened her eyes. "I'm trying to learn
to meditate."
  "Really?" Suzanne tried not to sound
skeptical. "Does it help?"
  "Sometimes. I should take a class. Marta
should learn to meditate."
  "I think we should stay off the subject of
Marta."
  Elena stretched with feral grace, arching her
back. Elena had never gone through an awkward
age, as Rachel and she herself had--sometimes she
wondered if she had ever grown out of it.
  "Elena, we have money problems. We're
spending much faster than we're earning. We have
to cut costs. Beverly's condition is bankrupting
me."
  "Just don't let Grandma catch on to that."
  "I have no intention of speaking to her about the
situation. You and I have to solve it."
  Elena seemed fascinated by the idea of
cooking. "I used to see the cooks whip up
dishes at the restaurant. I used to think like I
could be a chef, except it's so sweaty and they
all have mad dog tempers and throw knives around
the kitchen. Besides, I don't want to go back
to working in a restaurant. Too many drugs around.
Too much nightlife."
  "Well, cooking for you, me, and Beverly
won't take chef's school."
  "You have to let me cook the way I like it. No
tofu. No turkey burgers. And at least
sometimes I get to make things hot."
  "If you cook, you choose what we eat.
Agreed."
  "I can do it." Elena looked pleased with herself.
"I'll take over the grocery shopping too."
  "That would truly help." Suzanne had
expected a fraught conversation, that Elena would
feel martyred and coerced. Finally she said that.
  "No." Elena propped her head on her
knuckles. "It's kind of sweet that you need
me. You've always been so
supercompetent, I never felt useful. That's
why I didn't mind taking care of Grandma on
Mondays. Besides, I love her. I like the way
we have to manage together. I'm talented at living
on shit and air. I've had a lot of
practice. I never did like taking money from you
once I was out of college, so a lot of time I
was getting by on hope. I can cut our food
bills in half. Now that I'm working, I can
kick in something toward the electric and phone
bills."

  It proved much harder to talk to Rachel. The
phone call had to be set up by E-mail in
advance, because of the time difference.
  "Mother, I'm not going to be married three or
four times, so if you miss the first, you can't catch
the next showing."
  "Couldn't you wait till you get back to the
States? It's only till May."
  "You're just trying to get me to put my wedding
off. You tried that when I was home."
  "Rachel, my back is to the wall
financially. I'm spending more than I'm making.
If I borrow money to go to Israel for your
wedding, I don't see how I can ever pay it
back--and Beverly is going to be living here
soon, more dependent on me than ever."
  "It won't feel like I'm really married if
you aren't there, Mother. It won't feel right."
  "Then please wait till you come home, because
I don't have the money to go there."
  "I'm not going to put off the marriage. It's
time for us to get married. I'll never in my life
meet anyone else I want to marry. Michael
and I, we're two of a kind. We're soul
mates. He's my chassen, my intended, my
bashert. I won't take a chance on losing
him, on things coming apart."
  "Couldn't you put it off for a few months?"
  "It's complicated enough. We have to go before the
rabbinical court and prove we're Jews and
single and so on. It's a formality, but we have to do
it to get a marriage license. We're trying
to get an appointment soon. It's like a dream,
to be married here. Whenever I think of my wedding,
which is going to be so beautiful, I want to share it
with you. There'll be dancing, Mother, and local wine
and great food and friends we've made here that I
want you to meet. We're writing vows
in Hebrew."
  "Rachel, I want to be there. I want
desperately to be there. But I can't see my
way out of this hole. All I see are the walls
of increasing debt around me."
  "You'll be in our prayers, Mother. You,
Grandma, Marta, ... and Elena."
  Oh, great, Suzanne thought, but she rebuked
herself. Religious attention was what Rachel had
to offer. "Thank you. We'll get through all this
somehow." Her words felt like sawdust in her mouth.

  She was lecturing her Feminist Legal
Theory class. "As a woman, empathy is one
of your strengths. As a lawyer, it can destroy you.
Empathize with the victim, and you've lost your
momentum as a defense attorney, whose role is
defined as speaking for the client and giving him the best
defense possible.
  "As a lawyer, you're trained at arguing,
you're practiced at making points, you're good
at turning an argument back on a person,
picking holes in stories, cross-examining.
  "As a mother or a lover or a wife, these
skills and habits are dangerous and
undesirable. They can and will destroy personal
relationships. Don't think being a lawyer won't
change you. It already has. You don't think the
same way, you don't talk the same way. You
will not act the same way."
  As she spoke, she flashed back to the last
year with Sam. All her lawyerly observational
skills had gone into cracking the facade of their
marriage until she proved that he was having an
affair, until she knew almost as much about that
affair as Sam did. Smart? Maybe.
Painful? Absolutely.

  Out to California for another damned
postponement of this stupid trial. It just goes on
and on and on. My lawyer will die of old age
before they drop the charges or we finally go
to trial. I expected to be flying to Ethiopia,
but the court won't allow me out of the country. This
is killing me by inches. I'm one of those
travelers who are very moved by Africa, and
I've never been to Ethiopia. I'm supposed
to be useful around water issues, but will I ever
get there? I know it's the lumber interests that are
screwing me, but what good does it do
to know that? Anyhow, at least I'll see you in a
couple of weeks. Change of venue refused.
Preliminary motions go on. Both sides
jockeying for some arcane advantage.

  A 10:00 P.m. phone call. "It's not
so bad," he said, "this occasionality. Is it so
bad? After all, do you want a husband demanding you
do the laundry, pay the bills, rub his neck,
have supper on the table?"
  "No." She didn't even have to think about it.
"Like you, I was married once. It was a mess.
I don't have time." She loved the sound of his
voice in her ear. She closed her eyes when she
spoke to him on the phone, lying in bed. "My
marriage to Sam died of neglect, like a
forgotten goldfish."
  "I suppose I have time for a wife who'd stay
home, but she'd tire of me fast. I had a
live-in girlfriend in Berkeley. While I was
in China, she took up with her tae kwon do
teacher. She saw me about as often as you do,
except for sleeping time. Women who have children want
a father for them. Women who don't, want to have them.
Everybody wants a person who's there--and as you
have observed, I'm with you only now and then. But
you're the same way."
  "Things are a little easier with Elena helping.
I'm getting the advantage of her guilt.
She's working now. She's trying. She cooks
four nights a week, which is all I'm generally
able to eat with her."
  "Is she a good cook?"
  "I wouldn't go that far. But I'm not about
to complain. Food made for me is good. Food
I have to prepare is bad."
  His dry chuckle in her ear. "The strange thing
is, you really are good in the kitchen."
  "In another life."
  He was silent for a moment, and then his voice was
ironically dreamy. "Maybe we'll both
retire at sixty-five or seventy and sit and
stare at each other and the TV. ... I'll be
honest with you. There are times that sounds like
paradise."
  "I understand. But my fantasy is listening
to music. My music, not Elena's.
Symphonies, not rock."
  "You can sit with your Beethoven and I'll watch
my Forty-Niners and we'll nod at
each other in bliss."
  "Do you really think so?" She opened her eyes,
cocking her head.
  "Naw, I'll die of a heart attack in some
Norwegian airport, like Trondheim. And
you'll get shot by the husband of one of your
clients."
  "Or maybe we'll both just spontaneously
combust."
  "Soon, I hope. In the meantime, I'm
stuck out here with this stupid petty trial."

  Suzanne poured coffee for Marta, who was
drumming her hands on Suzanne's kitchen table.
When Marta came downstairs for the first time since
that damned Monday, Elena got up from the table
at once. "Stay," Marta said
authoritatively, and Elena sat.
  Now all three of them sat there glumly. "It

was a courtesy call I suppose," Marta
said. "To let me know he's going on what's his
name's talk show. To try to get me to show up and
make a worse fool of myself."
  "Why is he doing this?" Suzanne asked.
"You're the wronged party."
  "His line is that I'm the author of the
domestic violence bill--as if a couple of
sentences I contributed make me the author.
Miles's wife must be really pissed. It was her
bill. But never mind, the idea is that I wrote
the domestic violence bill and then I got a
gun and tried to kill my husband and his girlfriend."
  "I repeat my question, why is he doing this?"
  "He's furious I threw him out. He's
furious at having to be on his own. In his mind,
I really did wrong him by walking in. It's
revenge."
  "What does Miles say?" Suzanne
glanced over at Elena, who was sitting very small
in her chair and saying absolutely nothing.
  "He says I should start wearing maternity
clothes on all occasions."
  "He has a point."
  "Bullshit. I hate maternity clothes."
  "They're supposed to be better than they were
twenty years ago."
  Marta giggled, sounding twenty years younger.
"That's called spacing your children, right? One in
college and one in the oven."
  Suzanne spent a moment trying
to decide how she would feel if she were pregnant
instead of experiencing irregularity in her periods
and an occasional hot flash. Would she be glad?
No, terrified. She had daughters, and two were
quite enough. Often it felt like two more than she could
manage. She had been at most a passable mother,
mostly defined in negatives. Not abusive.
Not violent. Not hostile. Not crazy. Just too
busy to give everything they needed. With a checkbook
instead of a jar of cookies and an open kitchen
door. She was of the generation who had children because they
felt they had to but didn't always know what to do with
them once they had them; who were guilty before their children
because they dared to have lives and careers and goals of
their own. A transitional generation going forward
while looking backward. She was vehemently
glad she was passing the age when getting
pregnant was a possibility. She had done her
bit for the population explosion, and loving and trying
to give her best to her daughters was hard enough,
sometimes impossible.
  Elena finally spoke. "What do you want me
to do? I'd go on the show and say how ashamed I
am and contradict what he says. Would that
help?"
  "I'll ask Miles. It might."

  Suzanne was lecturing. "You may find
increasingly as you practice litigation, that you find
in yourself a conflict between your own sense of right and
wrong, and your role as a litigator. Now the
usual way of dealing with this conflict is to say,
I am a hired gun. If the gun thinks too
much about how it's being used, it will not be a useful
gun. But many lawyers find that they can't make that
neat and clean a distinction between their morality and their
practice. The exercise I am going to give you
today is not a test. There is no right answer, no
correct citation. It is an exercise that if it
works, will cause you to think about the interplay between your
values and your role as a lawyer. You are going
to have to think about what you really believe justice
to be. It will be a case out of domestic law. Not
all of you will receive the same case. It's a
matter of chance which of four cases you'll draw.
Count yourself off one to four aloud starting in the last
row on the right-hand side and working toward me. When
you get up to leave, you will find that my assistant
has placed four piles at the back of the room.
Take a case from your number. You have the
weekend to consider how you would argue your case.
Two out of the four cases I've chosen are
custody cases, among the most hairy in the
practice of a lawyer who specializes in
domestic law. One is the case of a woman who
went after her rapist and shot him. The fourth is a
case of environmental law, which pits community
safety against jobs. You will write up your
argument and what you will be trying to accomplish."

  Suzanne met the new client at her office
at the university. The dean let her use her
university office that way from time to time, as long as
she didn't do it too often. Bud Hiller was
close to sixty, thin and rigid as a
broomstick, large bland features that gave
nothing away. He would be a terrific poker
player. His voice was pitched a little too loud.
Fortunately, her office was reasonably
soundproofed by the rows of law books on the
walls. He had been through three lawyers on this
case, suits and countersuits between the heirs to a
chain of outlet stores. The sons and daughters were
suing one another for control. They all claimed
fraud and even that this one or that one had abused their
senile father before his death. It was a busy heap of
maggots, reeking of money. Three lawyers had
made good fees off this case; it looked as if
she would be the fourth.
  It was not a case she wanted. She contained
herself, listening, questioning him, taking careful notes with
Jaime backing her up. Bud Hiller had
inquired coldly who Jaime was upon entering her
office, but now it was as if Jaime were a cat on
a chair. Jaime was a good note taker; he
brought the same careful intelligence to all
aspects of being a student he would bring to his
law career. His beauty was deceptive. He
looked languid, graceful, decorative. His
mind was spun steel. Meticulous. Wary.
Capable of great speed and ruthlessness. She had
met his parents, his African-American father and
his Filipina mother. By the time Jaime was her age,
he would be fat, bald, and far more powerful than she
ever would be. She had great faith in him.
  Hiller orated on, his injuries, the stinginess
of his dead father, the perfidy of his siblings and their
spouses, how his previous lawyers had failed
him and his just cause. She listened, she took
notes, and she thought how she would love
to show him the door, but this case leaked money through
all its flimsy seams. She had come to a
financial crossroads where she must take
cases that would pay her bills instead of cases that
excited her legally or ethically. She was still the
litigator she had always been. She could find a
new angle to use. She began to plot her
strategy in getting Bud his money and doing his
siblings out of theirs.

  Jake was still stuck out on the West Coast.
She had begun to miss him. Communicating
by E-mail and phone worked to a degree, but she
missed his presence, his warmth. She did not
realize how thoroughly she missed him until she
woke Friday night from a dream of his body,
found herself wet and steaming with menopausal heat and
simple outrageous desire. It was startling to her
that she could want him so strongly. She sat at
her computer late Saturday night trying
to explain why she was feeling especially down and
even a little guilty about decisions being forced upon
her.


  When I went into the law collective after
clerking for Judge Fairweather for a year, I had
all sorts of notions of defending the unjustly
accused, the poor, the marginalized. But we always
made a certain amount of our money on drug
dealers, fences, bookies--sleaze. We
defended the poor and the persecuted, but we also
successfully defended the greedy, the dangerous,
and the depraved. That's how it goes when you're in
criminal practice. You defend criminals,
at least part of the time. ... So when I joined the
faculty, one great source of relief and joy was
that I took only cases I wanted to take.
Cases that were interesting, challenging, and cases where
the defendant had right but no money. Now here I
am doing what I consider sleaze cases again--because
once again I need the money. It depresses
me. I wake up in the middle of the night and I
feel the stink of it.

  Sunday morning, she had a reply.

  Look, sometimes I'm required to make
jolly with people who are giving us money. For some of
them, it's conscience money. For others,
it's almost in the nature of a bribe. Give us enough
money and we'll look the other way. With seventy
major polluters to choose from, we won't go after
them. And we don't. It's never spoken about, but
it's the way the world runs. On grease. We
all make a certain number of compromises for the
sake of survival, for the sake of
effectiveness.

  In academia, I've been faced with few
such problems. Guys on football scholarships
don't take law. I've had students try
to get me to change grades through threats and
promises and histrionics, but I've never
seriously been tempted to do so. I hear it's
worse when you teach undergraduates--they have a
consumer mentality. I paid for this class, so I'm
entitled to an A. In law school, we have them
more properly intimidated.
  This guy and his family are all sharks. The
only good thing I can see in the case is that the
others are at least as bad as Buddy Boy. You
have the feeling if any of them could push a button
and cause the others to cease to exist, there'd be no
hesitation. But at least he hired me and not a
hit man.

  As she read his messages, typed on his
laptop from motels, she felt a twinge of
guilt because it was her nature when involved with a
man to try to take care of him: in this case,
to make sure that Jake dealt with his stress,
made the changes the doctors demanded, ate more
sensibly, got enough sleep. But when she only
saw a man three or four times a month, she
could scarcely monitor his food and exercise and
sleep habits. She tried to push it out of her
mind, and shortly she succeeded. She had enough
to worry about.

                 
                Elena

  Elena could not say she liked her job, but she
liked having a job. It felt normal to get
into her aging Honda and drive off at the same
time most people were heading for work, feeling like a real
person instead of a character in a soap opera. She had
lunch alone in the building cafeteria or in a
restaurant nearby. This was a
neighborhood where there were more places to eat at
noon than in the evening, for it was ringed with high-tech
firms and places like hers that handled money or
practiced law for corporations or consulted with
them.
  It was boring sitting there out front on display
saying the same thing over and over again, Good day,
Black, Lincoln and Worthington, how may I
help you? Mr. Laslau is in a meeting at the
moment. May I take your number? Mr. Rowe
is out of the office at the moment. May I take
your number? Mr. Lincoln's line is busy.
Will you hold? Receiving packages from UPS,
FedEx, Airborne, the post office. Handing
over outgoing mail and parcels. Telling people where
to sit and serving them coffee. She was a
waitress, but one who never got a tip.
  She observed that the different analysts and
advisers liked to keep their clients waiting
different periods of time. There were the five-minute
guys, the ten-minute guys (most common), and the
fifteen-to-twenty-minute masters like Mr.
Lincoln. Naked power, she thought. She wondered
how much of her own life had been spent waiting for
those who saw no reason to deal with her promptly.
  Sometimes one of the guys asked her to photocopy
something. Making coffee was also part of her pitiful
job. Mostly she sat on display behind the teak
counter, answered the phone, and greeted whoever
came through the double doors. Already two of the
analysts were hitting on her, but she sloughed them
off. She just smiled and passed everything off as a
joke. "Oh, Mr. Laslau, you know I can't
do that! What a sense of humor." She sounded like
an idiot, but she must not let herself care. She
must smile and smile and smile until she thought
her face must be sprayed with that strange hair
lacquer reminiscent of bug spray one of the
secretaries was always using in the women's room.
Elena never did more to her hair than get it
trimmed to even it up when it started to look ragged,
wash it every other day, and once a week use a
conditioner. She loved her hair and took comfort in
it. She had always resisted cutting it short the
way all her friends wore theirs, for she liked
retreating behind that sleek black curtain. She
liked the weight and heft.
  She saw friends from the restaurant more often than
she had since she'd been fired, but she could not
spend much time with them. They worked late;
she had to get up early. The women at Black,
Lincoln and Worthington didn't attract her.
They seemed slight and vacuous. She had made
friends with one of the technicians at the rehab
clinic, Cindy, recently divorced. They
took to going out together Saturdays to the movies,
to a club, to a rock concert. Cindy was a year
older, chunky but cute, blond, curvy, and
savvy with a great capacity for remembering jokes.
Elena never remembered anything but punch lines.
She envied people who could hold a crowd with a story.
  She spent a lot of time going over the affair
with Jim. She was sure she had seduced Jim.
She was convinced she had thought of him sexually first,
then put out some musk he could not resist. He had
not loved her; she had loved him. That was her
crime. She had made him come to her. Perhaps she
had never forgiven Marta for making her lie in
court about Evan and Chad, but she knew Marta
had done all that to protect her. Why had she
held a grudge so long for something done to keep
her out of worse trouble? Because she pushed her own
guilt off on Marta, that was why.
  She tried to talk to Cindy. Cindy thought she
was being mushy and mystical. "So you got involved
with a married man? Most men are married. I did
that back in college. Everybody does it
once. It's only fatal if you keep doing
it."
  "I think I just bring terrible trouble down."
  "On yourself mostly, sounds like."
  "Not exactly ... So are you in the mood for
Mexican? Or Thai?"

  She had been working at Black, Lincoln and
Worthington for exactly three weeks. Her
probationary period would end next Friday.
Monday as she came into work, she was told
to report to Mr. Lincoln. "Miss Blume,
I'm afraid we're going to have to let you go."
  "But I've always been on time. I come back
from my breaks early. I've greeted everyone the
way I was told--"
  "Miss Blume, it's nothing personal. But
you're at the front door of our company."
  She saw Sunday's Globe lying on his
desk. In the Metro section, there was a column
about the so-called scandal around Marta, Jim, and
domestic violence. Photos of all three of
them, including a really stupid one of her
with her eyes half shut, were printed with the column.
  "Is there anything wrong with my work?" she
asked.
  "We just feel you haven't really fit in ..."
  She was still on probation. No severance pay, no
notice needed. She came in at five to nine
on Monday, and by nine-twenty she was back in the
parking lot. So much for Black, Lincoln and
Worthington. She was unemployed again. And
notorious.

  Suzanne sat at the table, frowning. "I'm
just trying to see if we have a case."
  "Mother, enough with law and courts. I'm not going
to sue them. It's a crappy job." Elena was
waiting to see if her mother liked the Creole
chicken.
  "You don't want them to take you back?"
  "No. They'd resent it and me. I don't have
any friends there."
  Suzanne frowned, eating absentmindedly,
glass of water at the ready. "Maybe they could
use you at Earthworks."
  "Mother! Haven't you learned anything?"
  Suzanne looked blank for a moment. "Oh,
Jake is hardly ever there. And if he wanted a
young girlfriend, the place is crawling with interns in
their twenties. Besides, I think you learned something
--I'd like to think so."
  "So would I. Do you like the chicken?"
  More water. "It's delightful."
  "It's too hot for you."
  "No, it's fine. ... I should learn to eat
hotter food. It's supposed to be good for you."
  Nothing further was said about Elena's going to work
for Earthworks. She wished she had saved the
Sunday paper. She should have asked Mr.
Lincoln for his, since obviously he had
finished reading it. She found a couple of
possibilities in the daily paper and spent the
next morning finding out that each of them had heard of
her also. Her picture in the paper hadn't
helped her job prospects.
  One of the guys at the old restaurant told
her Natalie's was looking for a hostess. She
wished she could stay out of the late-night
restaurant workers' scene, but maybe
Natalie's wouldn't mind if she was momentarily
notorious. She called up and got an
interview. There really was a Natalie,
who would be meeting her at 3:00 P.m.
Friday in her restaurant at the base of
Beacon Hill.
  Natalie was about fifty, as short as
Suzanne but much heavier, crammed into a pants
suit. She had cropped blond hair and smoked
constantly. "Yeah, I saw your picture in the
paper. What happened, you get canned for that?"
  Elena was truthful, figuring she had nothing
to lose. Natalie hired her on the spot.
"Report for work starting tomorrow. In fact, if you
could start tonight?"
  "I could be back by five, dressed for work."
  "Do it." Natalie dismissed her, going back
to her accounts.
  Well, at least she didn't have to take money
from her mother, and she had a job that paid better than
Black, Lincoln and Worthington. Almost
anything would, short of baby-sitting. It was a
familiar scene, and she fit right in even if
half the waiters were younger than she was. Robby,
the headwaiter, was the person she had most
to please, as Natalie did not pay much attention
to the waiting staff unless something went wrong. She
spent her time on the menus, on lining up
specialty events, on advertising and
publicity. Robby was exactly Elena's age
and quickly figured out they were the same sign,
Aries. Robby was thin, good-looking in an edgy,
slightly overpolished way, gay, with ambitions
to be an actor. Two of the other waiting staff were
would-be filmmakers. They had one poet and one
photographer and an ex-model, whose career had
lasted six months. It was a typical
restaurant scene, and after work, most of them went
out together to the bars frequented by other
late-nighters. Yes, it was comfortable, it was a
scene she slipped into like an old pair of
pants. Nonetheless, if she didn't want
to spend the rest of her life doing restaurant
work, she had to scramble. But in which direction?
Up? Sideways? Just not in the same tired
circles.
  Whenever she was sitting still for a moment, whenever she
was in the tub, she no longer fantasized about
Jim or any other guy. She tried to imagine
herself in various lives. It was a mental
trying-on, the way she might try on dresses
in a boutique--except with an undercurrent of
desperation. She had to choose one of these;
she had to try on the right one and plunk down money
and time to possess it. She needed to become something
real. She had the feeling that then she would be
protected from herself, from the wild flight
into obsession, from the stupid risk that brought down the
roof. But only if the choice she made was the right
one. In middle school, they had had a book of
short stories. One of them, "The Lady or the
Tiger," she remembered. Two doors, with
something behind them, happiness or death. Well, she
had already loosed the tiger. Lady Luck had
to be behind the next door she opened. Had to be.

                 
                Beverly

  Beverly lay in the bed in the room she had been
given in Suzanne's house, rolling from side
to side as she had been taught. She faithfully
performed the range-of-motion exercises, but she no
longer believed in them or anything except her own
great fatigue with all of this futile fussing. The
doctors had told her that her leg was healing
nicely, as if that mattered. Her brain, that had
always served her so well, would not heal. The neat
sweet connection between mind and body she had always
taken for granted was broken. Parts of her body
obeyed her still; parts obeyed fitfully, like her
voice; parts were dead to her, like her right hand. She
had a distant lost foot at the end of the broken
leg. Once it had belonged to her. No more.
  She had to plot carefully how to get up.
Moving herself from the bed to her wheelchair required
every bit of concentration she could muster. When she was
finally in the wheelchair, she trembled with fatigue
and had to rest before she could wheel herself to the
bathroom. Then she must transfer again, to the
toilet. Long after she had used it, she sat there
resting. She had finally mastered transferring herself
to the chair in the shower. The liquid soap hung
on an old belt where she could reach it. Her
greatest difficulty lay in getting the water just
right. Elena had made marks with nail polish where
she should turn the two dials for a good mix, but
sometimes the water was hotter than other days. Then
one morning she slipped, losing her balance.
Suzanne heard her fall and acted terrified,
then dragged her to the doctor to be tested all over
again.
  Every movement had to be planned like a
military campaign. Every movement had to be
calculated and performed with intense concentration.
Otherwise she would fall. Otherwise she could
break bones. Otherwise she might bang her
head and have another seizure. It was boring to think
hard about how to soap herself, how to rinse herself.
Drying her body was a tricky undertaking. She was
still trying to carry that out when she heard someone in the
kitchen. The day had begun for the rest of them.
Usually it was Suzanne, because Elena had an
evening job and slept late. Now Beverly would have
breakfast in bed, because by this time she was exhausted and
had to rest. The effort of showering and drying wore her
out. Suzanne brought food in on a tray.
  After her oatmeal, toast, juice, and coffee,
she promptly fell asleep. When she woke,
the house was quiet. The phone's ringing had
awakened her. She did not move, although there was an
extension within reach of her arm. Trying to answer the
phone and make herself understood was an agony she
would never go through again. It was humiliating. Besides,
someone had answered it already, Elena or the
answering machine.
  She must get up and put clothes on. She
rang her bell. Rang it again. It would be much
faster if Elena helped her. The physical
therapist was coming at ten-thirty, so she had to be out
of bed and decent. Had she done the exercises she
was supposed to do? She remembered doing them, but
sometimes she got confused and thought she had done some
task that she had really last done the day before. The
days blurred into one another, melting into a
featureless lump like melted wax. She slept so
much that half the day was gone into unconsciousness,
and the rest was disjointed into uneven segments by her
napping.
  "Oh, it was just somebody from the restaurant,
wanting a ride tonight." Elena helped her
dress. These days all Beverly ever wore were
sweats that closed with Velcro. Anything else was
too difficult to get on or off, except for
two caftans Elena had bought her. She liked
those best. She had always had contempt for people her
age who slopped around in sweats, but now she was
one of them. At least the caftans hinted that she
had once been a woman. She especially liked
the green one with glints of gold embroidery that
Elena had bought from her first restaurant
paycheck.
  The physical therapist was about
thirty. She had too much forehead, going up and
up over her thick brows, making her eyes
appear small. They were like round blue dots behind
her glasses, like the eyes children drew. She
smelled of mints and more lightly of sweat. Today
they did a lot of arm and shoulder exercises, the
therapist moving the arm for her, placing a hand on
her elbow and taking her hand in the therapist's own.
Lifting the arm up over her head, then slowly
down. Then the same slow dance out to the side.
Moving the fingers of the dead hand. Moving the thumb.
Before her second stroke, she had begun to have some
feeling in that hand, but it was gone--like almost everything
else she had cherished.
  All but one. Elena. She missed Sylvia,
their constant discussions of the news and society in
general. She had asked if Sylvia could not come
back at least sometimes, but Suzanne had learned
she had another full-time job. If she were still a
normal person, she could have called Sylvia and
chatted. After the physical therapist left, not
to be back till Thursday (she came twice a
week), Beverly once again slipped down into the
sleep of exhaustion. When Elena woke her for
lunch, she had been dreaming. She had been a
fugitive, running through abandoned buildings with the
footsteps of the red squad behind her. They were after
her. They were going to beat her. She was running for
her life.
  Her heart was still pounding in her chest when Elena
woke her, repeating, "Grandma, Grandma.
Lunchtime."
  She insisted on getting out of bed (she was still
dressed) to have her lunch. "Next week, you'll
get that cast off," Elena said as she maneuvered
the wheelchair into the kitchen. "Won't you be glad
to see the last of that?"
  "It ... ches."
  "I broke my wrist once."
  Beverly nodded wildly, crookedly, holding
up her good left arm. Meaning she had done so
herself: had her wrist broken.
  "I remember the itching under the cast. How was
your therapy?"
  Beverly shrugged on her left side. "Wha?"
Pointing.
  "Oh, the soup. Hot and sour Chinese. And
mu shu pork. After all, neither Suzanne nor
Rachel is here, right? So we can sneak us some
pig meat."
  Beverly grinned.
  "I figure if I roll the pancakes up
for you, you can eat them one-handed."
  Beverly nodded. "Good to me." It came out more
like Coo tommy, but Elena understood and nodded
back.
  "I try, Grandma, I try. You know, Jim
and I haven't said one word to each other since that
Monday."
  "Pig."
  "I don't want to talk to him. He hangs
around at odd moments waiting for me, but I
don't let him catch me. I have nothing to say
to him that isn't obscene."
  "Big pig."
  "You think talking about pork made me think of
him?" Elena chuckled. "I'll hide the trash
away at the bottom of the bag, and Suzanne will
never guess we were wicked. Okay, finish off
your soup and I'll start rolling pancakes."
  Beverly had been astonished when Marta had
shown up with Suzanne to take her back in the
van. She had assumed that Suzanne and Elena
would have moved into an apartment somewhere. No, it was
back to the same apartment in Brookline with Marta
upstairs, and Marta and Suzanne apparently still
best friends. If only she could speak well enough
to ask, but two-word sentences were all she could
manage. That didn't make for an effective
interrogation procedure, especially when she was
prying for the delicate, the uncomfortable, the stuff
Suzanne would rather leave unsaid. Elena too
seemed to accept the situation. All the women were still
living here, and only the man was gone. Elena
told her that Marta had thrown Jim out, and that he
was furious about it. Beverly thought he ought to be
grateful she hadn't shot lower.
  She no longer considered Jim worthy of
Elena. He had shown himself to be a coward, throwing
Elena aside to protect himself. Her good hand
fluttered on the table. There was so much she wanted
to say to Elena, so much she wanted to teach her,
to share with her, and the effort of sputtering out two words
exhausted her resources. She touched Elena's
hand. "Sweet," she burst out. "Y."
  "Yeah, sweet like a rattlesnake. I've
learned something, believe me."
  Beverly shook her head.
  "Yes, Grandma. I went after him." Elena
sighed. "Never mind. I'm doing fine.
I don't think I'm cut out to inspire a grand
passion in some guy."
  Beverly disagreed with wild head shaking. Then
she printed on a pad J?
  Elena looked at her blankly.
  Beverly laboriously printed JAKE
TRIAL?
  Elena looked blank. "He's still out in
California. You'll have to ask Suzanne. I
didn't know you'd gotten to be friends with him."
  They hadn't, because she couldn't talk with him.
She understood his situation and how badly things
might go for him in court. If the lumber interests
owned the judge, as it seemed they did, then he
could really be screwed. She didn't think
Suzanne had grasped how vulnerable he was to the
conspiracy charge. He hadn't taken his defense
seriously because he thought it was a minor case, but
she had seen organizers railroaded for twenty
years just for doing what he had done. It was
hopeless. Before her second stroke, she had thought
about E-mailing him, but she had not gotten around
to it before she could no longer use the computer. She
liked him, his presence, his energy, his political
strength. Suzanne had made a good choice this
time, but he was in bigger trouble than he seemed
to understand, unless the judicial system had changed
more than she thought it had.
  Elena had cleared the table and made them both
espresso. "Now what would you like? Would you like me
to cut up a pear?"
  Beverly shook her head no.
  "Maybe later. Those Bosc pears I got
are pretty good. I pick out fruit better
than Suzanne does."
  Beverly nodded.
  "But what would you like, Grandma?"
  Beverly decided to risk telling the truth.
"To die." She held Elena's gaze with her
own, never wavering. "To die!"

                 
               Suzanne

  Suzanne came abruptly awake. It was
2:00 A.m. and the phone was ringing. She did not
pick it up. She had endured middle-of-the-night
phone calls from clients before, and it was best
to answer them the next day, unless they had just been
busted. Those kinds of phone calls had
mostly ceased when she became an academic
instead of a full-time lawyer. She sat up in
bed, listening while her heart pounded from the sudden
jolt into consciousness and the adrenaline slowly
receded in her veins. She was especially annoyed
because she was getting so little sleep these days. Only
after Beverly fell asleep in the evening, did she
get to her briefs, her classes, her own work.
  "Mother! Mother!" It was Rachel, although it did not
sound like her.
  "Rachel?" She grabbed at the receiver on the
combination answering machine and phone that sat beside her
bed. "Are you hurt?" Bombing was the first thing she
thought of.
  "I'm so humiliated!" Rachel began to sob
bitterly.
  "What's wrong?" She turned on the bedside
light and sat up, mounding the pillows behind her and
disturbing the two orange cats, who had been
sleeping, one pressed against her right thigh and one
against her left.
  Rachel was sobbing, and at first Suzanne could not
make out what she was saying. It had to do with her
marriage, she could tell that much. Patiently she
waited for coherence.
  "We started it a month ago. That was when your
ketubah finally arrived and the letters from our rabbis.
So we got our court date."
  "Court date? Who's your lawyer?"
  "A rabbinical court, Mother, the Beit
Hadin. We were supposed to be proving we're
Jewish and single. There's an enormous amount of
paperwork, but we had everything, we thought. We had
two witnesses from school to testify we each were
Jewish and single. One of them was my friend
Zipporah, and they wouldn't accept her because she was
female. I didn't even bother telling you about
that. So we got another court date. Another
three weeks."
  "Women aren't witnesses?"
  "Apparently it's a matter of luck.
Remember, this is an Orthodox court. Things
are so weird here, they assume everybody who
practices the religion is Orthodox. Like
there's only one flavor and it's walnut. It's
pure luck which rabbis you get. How much fuss
they decide to make. But this time was worse. When
they got to me and I explained I was studying to be
a rabbi, Mother, it was as if I said I was a
prostitute. They were furious. It was
awful, Mother, awful! They were so nasty you wouldn't
believe it, what they said to me. So I walked
out."
  "You can get married at home, sweetheart.
Really, it'd be better for all of us."
  "Well, we're not getting married at all,
so you don't have to worry about it!" Rachel began
to sob all over again.
  "But, Rachel, you can get married here. So it
was a nice gesture to marry in Israel, but
you'll be just as married if you do it in Brookline
or Philadelphia. And you'll have your choice
of a dozen rabbis."
  "Michael was furious at me for walking out.
He didn't understand why I couldn't keep my
mouth shut and put up with it. Well, he's a
man, and Orthodoxy is made for him. I just
got furious that he couldn't understand how insulted
I was and how ashamed. So we had a huge fight.
It started in Koresh Street, and went on all
the way home on the bus, although we shut up then
because other people started to butt in. We went at it
when we got back, and we broke up and that's
all there is to it!"
  "Rachel, it was a devastating experience for you.
But you love each other. You'll come back from this."
  "Never! I saw a side of Michael I'd
never seen. A side that thinks that a woman is
less of a Jew than a man, no matter what
he says, no matter what he pretends. I
cannot be married to that. I can't!"
  "Rachel, don't make up your mind about him
yet. Give yourself a little cooling off time. Give
him some space and take some yourself."
  "Not likely," Rachel said, far more soberly.
"I don't think I can forget that he didn't
back me up and he just wanted me to shut up and
let those old men pour shame on my head."
  "Then don't forget. But maybe you can forgive.
Or maybe at least you can begin communicating
again." Why am I arguing so hard on his behalf?
Suzanne wondered. I scarcely know him and I
wasn't crazy about him in the first place. But
Rachel really seemed to love him and to want to be
with him.
  Rachel sighed heavily, and for a moment the lines
between them were silent, both of them hearing only each
other's breathing and the echoey metallic sound of the
connection. "I'll talk to you tomorrow, Mother."
  "Rachel? If you could call before two
A.m. our time? It would really help,
sweetheart. And try not to be so upset. I'm
sure everything is going to turn out all right,
somehow."
  "I'm sorry, I didn't think about the time,
Mama."
  "Don't worry, dear. And try to call
Aunt Karla too. She will want to know what's
happening. I know she was planning to go over for your
wedding. She already bought tickets."

  Suzanne found the task of helping Beverly
shower and dress uncomfortable. She had a deep
feeling she should not see her mother's naked body, more
a sense of impropriety than squeamishness, for the
actual sight of Beverly's withered flesh
produced mostly compassion. Beverly had always
been vain and careful about who saw her in various
states. Suzanne knew she had seen her mother
naked when she had been a little girl, but she
doubted she had seen her that way since she was
twelve--and Beverly, around thirty-five and
stunning. It was humiliating to Beverly, who kept
her head averted and would not meet her gaze. She
was almost pouting. "Water ... not ... hot." It
actually sounded like wa-ah naw haw, but in the
context was clear.
  "I'll make it hotter. The last time, it was
too hot for you. Maybe I should get one of those
bath thermometers?"
  "Silly."
  "I want to get the shower right for you. You enjoy
it if I get it right." Suzanne knew there
wasn't much Beverly did enjoy these days.
  Beverly nodded. She pointed at the shower gel
that smelled of a combination of rose and lavender.
"Nice."
  Suzanne was glad she had done something right.
Elena and she had to make up for the lack of help
--for the bills simply mounted higher and higher.
Suzanne did not think that Beverly complained as
much with Elena, but she was hard put to please her
mother--as it always had been and apparently always would
be. "Mother, I want to do everything right for you, but it
seems I never please you."
  Beverly actually smiled. "Wash back.
Gently."
  Carefully, slowly, Suzanne ran the
washcloth over Beverly's back. Every knob of
her spine stood out like wooden beads on
a child's necklace. She had owned such a
necklace herself, of orange wooden beads.
Beverly had brought it back from Copenhagen, when
she had gone to a conference with European union
officials. She had been angry with her mother for not
taking her. They were so often angry with each other.
What a waste of time and energy.

  Rachel called next in the morning. She was
calmer, more elegiac. "I was so in love with
Jerusalem. Now I want to run home. Now
this isn't home any longer, but a foreign
country."
  "Ah, dearest, as with most infatuations and
disillusionment, the truth is somewhere in between."
  "I know, Mother. I'm not about to run away. I
just have to digest all this. ... I've been so good.
When I go into Mea Shearim or the Old City,
no matter how warm it is, I wear long
skirts and blouses with sleeves. I go bundled
up the way I used to in New York when I was
going to visit Grandma or Aunt Karla, the
way you put on layers in spite of the heat because of
men in the street. Here it's because they throw things at
you." Rachel sniffled, but her voice was clear and
resonant. "I was so respectful of their weird
ideas. So meek and obedient to rules I not
only don't believe in, but intensely
despise."
  "But Michael didn't make the culture of the
Orthodox."
  "Michael can go fuck himself!"
  Suzanne shook her head. It was
extraordinary for Rachel to use profane
language. "You're still angry with him," she said
mildly.
  "I've never in my life been so conscious of
being a feminist. I feel like a one-woman
parade through Jerusalem. It's schizophrenic
here. I meet such strong wonderful capable
women, and in the eyes of their religion, they
don't count. I don't count."
  "I support you whatever you decide,"
Suzanne intoned, realizing how often in the more
recent years of her daughters' lives, she had
used that phrase. "You have to sit down with Michael
and try to reach an understanding, even if it's that you
aren't suited to each other."
  Rachel blew out her breath, sounding for a moment
like Elena. "You can say that again."
  When Suzanne did grab a moment to call
Karla from her office while she ate a yogurt
and thumbed through a speech Jaime had updated for
her, Karla already knew. "It's so sad for her,
it's heartbreaking. She's such a good girl, and
never deserved such shame and trouble. If I could
fly over there, I would."
  "Can you get your money back on the
tickets?"
  "The travel agent says they're refundable,
minus a service fee. So what can I do?"
  Over long-distance, they sighed and commiserated.
  Rachel was back to E-mail, which signaled
to Suzanne that her daughter was slowly recovering.
Rachel told her more details of the battle in
rabbinical court. She reported comments of her
fellow students and teachers.

  I had coffee with Michael in a caf`e this
afternoon, but we could not agree. I think I never
understood how strong a grip traditional
Judaism has on him, as opposed to newer
ways. I think he only got
into Reconstructionist rabbinical school because he
was turned down by the Conservatives in New
York and his parents didn't want him to go
to LA. I don't hate him any longer, but I
know he is not my bashert. Both Elena and
I seem to have mistaken something small for something
grand. I feel diminished, if you know what I
mean. I am calmer, but I feel I am
less. I think, Mother, you saw that tightness and
rigidity in Michael even the few times you were with
him, but I was blinded. I wanted too much for him
to be the way I wished he was, and so I did not
let myself know Michael as he is. That was an
injustice to him too. I cry a lot still, but I
am getting clearer. Today I managed to thank the
Eternal One for showing me the real Michael before
it was too late.

  The cast was finally off, but Beverly had regained
little mobility. Without Sylvia or anyone
filling in as primary caretaker, it was up
to Elena and Suzanne to do most of what needed
to be done for Beverly. One or another of the
agency employees came in three mornings a
week, but otherwise they were on their own with her.
Elena took the whole day shift on Monday and
Tuesday, when the restaurant was
closed. Otherwise she took over at one and
stayed with Beverly until four, when she had
to leave for work. Suzanne got home as quickly as
she could, but there were days when Beverly had to remain
alone from four until seven. None of them liked
that, but there was nothing Suzanne could do. Weekends
she took over.
  Suzanne was back to making supper or bringing
home takeout Wednesday through Sunday, as
Elena ate at the restaurant with the staff from
four-thirty to five-fifteen. Home meals had
to be something easy for Beverly to eat, as she hated
needing help with her food. If Suzanne cut
the fish into bite-size pieces before she brought it
to the table, Beverly found that acceptable, but not if
Suzanne tried to cut the food on her plate.
Tonight it was a fish and potato stew she had cooked
from scratch--a fast scratch. She was learning
entr`ees that took no more than twenty minutes
to cook, or she just couldn't manage. Beverly
seemed to find the soup satisfactory, although
Suzanne knew it probably tasted bland to her.
Then they hobbled together back into the bedroom.
  "Mother, this is what I want. We've wasted
so much of our lives arguing, disagreeing, trying
to make the other more like ourselves. It's hard to break
old habits, but maybe we could begin to be
gentler and more loving with each other?"
  "Loving ..." Beverly repeated. She lay
back on the propped-up pillows, exhausted from
the bath but relaxed. There was a scent of the shower
gel about her, instead of the musty smell that often
clung to her crippled body. "Love me?"
  "Yes, I love you. In spite of how
badly we've gotten along. In spite of never
feeling I please you. You're my origin, my
source, my first family. You were the earliest
image of beauty I had. Your face. Of
course I love you."
  "Then ... help me ... die." It took
Beverly almost two minutes to get the phrase out,
her face knotted with the effort.
  Suzanne stared at her mother. "Help you
to die?"
  "Tired ... Useless ... Ready."
  "Mother, you're not close to death. You could live
for years. I don't think you're in great pain.
Haven't we made you feel welcome?"
  "Can't do ... any ... thing."
  "You're bored."
  Beverly slowly nodded, her head lolling to one
side. "Never ... before use ... less."
  "You've worked so hard all your life, why do you
have to be working? What do you think you have to be
accomplishing?"
  Beverly shook her finger at Suzanne,
pointing.
  "You mean I'm the same way."
  Beverly nodded. "Tired."
  Suzanne looked at her mother, trying to understand.
"Everything is difficult for you. Eating. Going
to the toilet. Dressing. Bathing. Speaking."
  "Tired."
  "So you really wish you could die?"
  "Now. Soon. Help me."
  Suzanne did not reply as she went off to her
room, warm tears sliding down her cheeks.
Elena stayed that night with her new boyfriend,
Sean. Suzanne did not get to speak to her
privately until Saturday morning, when she
motioned Elena into her office and shut the door.
  "Beverly said something really disturbing to me the
night before last. She said she wanted to die. She
was serious, Elena. She said she wanted help
to die."
  Elena nodded, slinging herself sideways across a
chair with arms. "She's been saying that to me for about
a month, Mom. I've been thinking about it a
lot. I don't know what to do. But it's mean,
it's cruel to ignore her."
  They met each other's gaze. "You know, it would
be considered murder," Suzanne said. "Mostly
people don't get convicted, but sometimes they do.
Prosecutors always try to get a conviction.
I'm not convinced we need another criminal case
in this family. And I'm not convinced she has a
right to ask this of us. She's not in enormous pain.
She could live for years."
  "If she wants our help, we have to give it
to her, Mother," Elena said. "Can't you see that?
We're the people who love her most in the world."
  "I keep thinking, maybe I haven't done enough
to make her feel welcome. To make her
comfortable."
  "Mother, I've spent much more time with her than you
have. She can't be comfortable. She hasn't got a
life. I understand. Can't you?"
  "I'm trying, dear. But no, I can't understand,
really. All she has to do is stay with us and let
us take care of her."
  "All she can be is a good vegetable."
  Suzanne stared at her daughter, wondering how
Elena could talk so calmly about what was after all
murder or being an accomplice to self-murder of
someone she loved. How could Elena sit there so
placidly staring back at her?

  I need you out here. I know it's a terrible
time for you but things are going badly. I've called
twice, but keep getting your answering machine.
I am being tried, crudely and unfairly. My
lawyer can't believe what's happening. I think
you could help. The organization would be glad to pay
your way out here, and I think we can raise your
fee. But things are going to hell. It's a hanging
judge, George Epson, who represents the
lumber interests. He'd like to send all of us up,
but particularly me. He denies every motion by my
counsel and agrees to every objection of the
prosecutor.

  I can't come out right now. My mother is much
worse. I don't know what to do. I can't get
away right now. But I know some really good lawyers
out there and I will get on trying to find out who can
join your case. I hate to let you down, but things
are very very hairy here.

  She felt guilty refusing Jake, but she
could not stretch herself any thinner; more than that, she
felt as if she was already failing her mother and her
daughters and her clients. She could not go out
to California to help Jake, no matter how much
she might want to. There just wasn't enough of her.
What she could do was find him a really good
California lawyer to join in the case, right
away.

  She saw her doctor the next day, her
annual checkup twice postponed. Dr.
Rose frowned at her. "Your blood pressure
is one sixty-five over ninety. Sky high."
  "I've always had low blood pressure," she
said reproachfully. "Could you take it again?"
  "I've taken it twice. I want you to buy
a little monitor and record it yourself six times a
day or whenever you think of it, and keep a log for
me."
  "Dr. Rose, this must be an aberration."
  "Take it seriously. Some women's
blood pressure does shoot up around
menopause. Your mother has had two strokes.
If you don't want to have one yourself, you're going
to have to bring that blood pressure down.
Frankly, you're exhausted. You're undergoing more
stress than your body can handle. Something has
to go."

  Jake called. "The trial is going badly.
I can tell. Come out. Please."
  "I can't, Jake. Things with my mother are in
crisis. I've leaned on my colleagues
to cover for me so many times this school year, I
can't ask more favors, and my mother requires
intensive caretaking right now. Her deterioration
is increasing rapidly."
  "Suzanne, I'm facing the possibility of
prison."
  "Surely they can't give you more than a short
sentence, and you can appeal immediately. You should be able
to stay out while the appeal is going on."
  "I don't think it's going to work out that way."
  She wanted to weep with frustration. She felt
like a rope in a tug-of-war. She was fraying and
everybody else was falling down.

                 
                Elena

  Elena started going out with Sean, she
suspected, because she wanted to put some guy between
herself and Jim, and Sean was the biggest body she
could find. Six feet four and beefy, he had
boxed for a time but given it up to become a cook.
He went to school and worked his way up through lesser
restaurants. Now he was the dessert and pastry
chef at Natalie's. He had a bit of a
drinking problem, she thought, but he was neither violent
nor abusive. He just got quieter. He
touched her as if she were the most delicate
pastry. Sex with him was occasional and low key,
all she felt she could handle at the moment. He
was, like her friend Cindy, someone to pass time with,
someone caring and never dangerous to her.
  The restaurant was a scene she understood, but it
too was only passing time. She got on with most
of the crowd who worked at Natalie's. One of the
cooks disliked her and never passed up a chance
to call her a slut. One waitress, slumming
from Bennington, was snotty, but
otherwise, they were all types she was comfortable with.
Her gentle romance with Sean was common knowledge and gave
her a little status. Time slid forward. The weather
crispened, then grew permanently chilly. One
Friday night, it snowed, briefly, more a
promise than an event. By the next morning,
no trace remained on the streets or on the
lawns of her mother's neighborhood, that would never
feel truly hers.
  She considered moving in with Sean but decided that
was more than their fragile link could endure.
By spring, she would find an apartment, a
roommate, somewhere she wanted to live. She would
still see Grandma regularly. Her California
dreams had evaporated with her feelings for Jim.
Here she belonged, by the cold gray North
Atlantic of winter. Often in the mornings now,
ice skimmed the puddles. It snowed again and this time
it stayed, thatching the grass, turning everything
ghostly. That night, after they hung out in a
late-night bar, she walked on the Common with
Robby, the headwaiter, his current lover Tom,
Sean, and Cassie, one of the waitresses. They
crunched the new snow. Then Tom, Cassie, and
she lay down and made angels. It felt
blissful lying in the clean snow that gleamed in the
darkness with the fresh flakes falling on her face
like little kisses. Robby stood grinning at them.
"My, what sweet children. The only snow I like
I get from my dealer."
  "Ah, but this is free," Tom said, but he
got up and dusted himself off. Robby had a gift
for making people feel silly when he chose. He was
the connection in the restaurant, the man who could
get what anyone wanted. Elena, who had not
touched drugs in five years, avoided that side
of him. She kept herself on a strict two-beer
limit. Everyone teased her, but she was Robby's
age and had a couple of years on them--except
Sean and the kitchen staff.

  The talk show she ended up going on with Jim was
local, since this case was purely a
Massachusetts scandal. She wasn't sure
why she'd decided to do it, except maybe as some
kind of revenge. She wanted the world to see what
kind of a jerk he'd really been. She had never
heard of the loudmouth who ran it, but apparently he
had been a columnist in the Herald for
centuries. The audience was gross,
whooped up and out to witness bloodletting, but she
kept her cool. Jim's line was all about how
Marta had written the domestic violence bill
that they were all living under, and yet she had not
hesitated to grab a gun and try to shoot him.
  "First of all, she didn't try to shoot us.
She goes to the range regularly and my mother,
who's her best friend, says she's a good shot.
She shot way over our heads. It was a
statement, like, she was really"--she paused for a
usable word, for the first several that came to her had
shit in them--"angry with us. It was like this
theatrical gesture."
  "Didn't you feel in danger?" Joe, the
talk show guy, asked, leaning forward. She could
tell he thought she was cute.
  "Never. She was aiming way over our heads.
That's why the police laughed this off. He's here
because the police wouldn't do anything. It was like
setting off firecrackers, if you see what I
mean?" She gave him a melting look.
  "She could have killed us," Jim said. "She
shot off a whole round."
  "You'd have to stand on a stepladder to get in the
way," Elena said and was rewarded by a laugh from the
audience.
  "Isn't it unusual, don't you think, for a
girlfriend to be defending the wife?"
  "I was a ... a fool. An idiot. A
bitch, to get involved with him. He told me their
marriage was over. He said he hadn't touched her
in two years. And meanwhile, she was pregnant.
I'm so ashamed."
  "She kept it from me!" Jim said. "She never
told me."
  "That she got herself pregnant?" Elena waved
her hand. "She must have, since you never touched her,
right?"
  "How do I know it's mine? I don't
remember dragging you off to bed, screaming and
protesting. If I remember right, you came on
to me."
  "So we're both stupid and unfaithful
creeps? As for the baby, try a DNA test if
you aren't sure," Elena said. "But you're sure.
You don't even have a candidate because she was too
busy supporting you to see anyone else. I've
always admired Marta, and I think I was trying
to be her." That was total bullshit, but she
figured it would go over, being the kind of
mushy psychologizing she could see the host eating
up. She was scared of Jim, in a way, scared of
how he had fooled her. Scared she could be sucked
back in. Scared she wanted passionate consuming
love so badly she made it up out of
pasteboard.
  It was ugly. Jim accused her of being
brainwashed and out to get him because he had stopped
seeing her. Everything got twisted around, but she
kept her cool. She could tell the host was
disappointed that she couldn't be shaken. Soon he
let them go and called in the next set of fools,
two sisters who were fucking each other's husbands.

  She confided in Beverly. "I've been thinking
about this summer, thinking about it a lot. And the one thing
I've come up with is that I liked working in his
office. I like therapy."
  Beverly printed on the pad, WORK THERAPIST
OFC?
  "No. I want to be a therapist."
  "Why?" Beverly said in that strangled voice that
sounded as if it were ripped from her throat.
  Elena shrugged. "I think I'd be better at
it than he is, for one thing. I'd be better than
the shrinks I was sent to after, you know, Evan and
Chad. I know a lot about the dark side of people,
how you get into things, how you get obsessed. I
think I could help, partly because I've been so
fucked up myself. And if I did something that was right
for other people, I'd hate myself less."
  Beverly printed, WHY HATE SELF?
WONDERFUL. GOOD TO ME.
  "Then you're the only one I'm any good for.
Or who thinks I'm good for anything at all."
  YOUR. MOTHER LOVES. NO GOOD
SHOWING.
  "Yeah, I feel like she does, maybe for the
first time since I was a little girl."
  "Lots ways ... do good," Beverly
laboriously mouthed. She pointed to her chest.
"Did good ... for people."
  "Grandma, I'm not about to become a union
organizer."
  Beverly shrugged.
  "I guess I want a profession. When I
meet people, they always say, And what do you do? What
I should answer is, I fuck around and I fuck
up."
  Beverly shook her head and then winced.
  "Come on, lazy. It's time for you to walk."
  With the cast off, Beverly was supposed to walk every
day, but she was always putting it off because it hurt and
it exhausted her. Elena took it on herself
to make sure that Beverly took at least a short
walk. With the pavement icy, they walked to and fro
in the house, or else Elena would take Beverly
to a mall. "You want to go to the Chestnut Hill
Mall today?"
  Beverly shook her head no. "Crowded."
  It was getting close to Christmas. Grandma was
right. "Okay. We'll take a stroll in
lovely casa nuestra. Sounds like cosa
nostra, doesn't it?" Elena ran into the
living room and put on one of her favorite
disks lately, Juan Luis Guerra. Then
she bopped back into Beverly's bedroom and offered
her arm. Helped her grandma out of bed. They
began walking in time to the music, which she turned
up superloud. Beverly liked the music,
loosely nodding her head in time as they made their
difficult deliberate way out of the bedroom,
across the kitchen, and into the living room and then around
the living room and back. They turned into a
parade, because all three cats followed them as they
promenaded. Going half time to the music, stepping
along. It made Elena feel good.
  While Grandma was napping, Elena did her
laundry and got out the yellow pages to start
calling colleges and universities in the area
about graduate training in becoming a therapist.
She felt very competent and focused as she asked
questions about the programs and requested their
catalogs and registration forms. Was she trying
to show Jim that she wasn't just a bimbo? Was she
trying to impress her mother? Was she trying to work off
guilt? It didn't matter, she could see nowhere
else to go.
  She did not know if she believed she would do this
thing, go back to college where she had often felt
ill at ease, get a graduate degree--she
who had taken five and a half years to get a
B.a. She had majored in psychology finally
because it was the easiest for her, except for
Spanish. She had begun taking Spanish at
Boston Latin as soon as she could, continued in
Brookline, continued in every college. She had
always pushed herself to learn it so well that she hoped
eventually to be mistaken for a native Spanish
speaker.
  Now she had a new fantasy. She could see
herself in a comfortable office warm and welcoming, not like
Jim's at all. She would have her own
assistant, taking calls and booking appointments
and billing insurance companies. She would wear
glasses on the job, just clear glasses to make
herself look serious. Large important-looking
glasses. She would wear her hair caught back
and dress in suits, like Suzanne. Suits said
that the wearer shouldn't be trifled with. Her mother went
to court in suits. Jim dressed too casually.
She would not. She would let the clients know she was
on the job and serious about it, and she would
advertise that she offered therapy in Spanish.
  She was lying on the couch in the living room with
MTV on just for the company, eating taco chips and
drinking diet soda. She could see herself in her
office. She could see the office, the desk with a
slate top. She would not space out the way Jim
confessed he did when a client bored him. She
would sit perfectly still except for taking notes.
Everything about her would convey intense unwavering
attention, what a person wanted who came to see
a therapist.
  Beverly's bell rang. Elena sighed but got
up at once. She had been enjoying her vision.
She felt almost as if standing up might let it
slip out of her. It was a fantasy she felt good
about, and she did not want it to escape. But
Beverly was calling. She helped her up and
Beverly went to the bathroom while Elena ran
downstairs and moved her wash to the dryer. Then she
got Beverly settled in bed again.
  She could see that her grandmother was working herself up
to say something. Sometimes it took Beverly several
minutes to get a sentence all lined up before she
tried to spit it out. Elena passed the time thinking
about Sean. He was good to her. Why couldn't she be
in love with him? No, better that she wasn't, for
whenever she truly fell in love, she fell off
the edge. It was a disaster. Better to feel
affectionate toward him and enjoy the occasional
sex. Normally she wanted more and hotter, but she
was still a casualty of the sex wars, and gentle and
occasional was just fine for now. She saw him standing
at the window of his North End apartment, doing his
morning exercises, a combination of aerobics and
tai chi. She had begun learning to do the tai chi
with him. For serious exercise, she preferred to go
to the gym.
  Beverly was speaking now. "Need your help."
  "Sure, Grandma. Anything."
  "Mean it?"
  "Don't you know me yet? What do you want
me to do for you?"
  "Want die!"
  "Grandma, things are better now. You're
home. You're getting some benefits from the
therapy."
  "No use. No point. Want die."
  "What exactly do you mean, you want to die?"
Elena asked slowly.
  "Want pills. Kill me."
  "You want to kill yourself? No way. I've
been down this road before. Grandma, when you kill
yourself, you're really dead. Meat."
  "Not child. Know. Want ... die."
  "Grandma, it's not that bad. Are you in a lot
of pain?"
  Beverly glared at her. Her lips thinned.
"Want die."
  "Are you asking me to help?"
  Beverly nodded again, again.
  "Grandma, I love you. But I can't do that.
I know what a mess it is. Believe me, I
know. I'd miss you too much. Mother would miss
you."
  "No use."
  "You mean, it's no use my arguing with you, or
your life is no use?"
  "Both."
  "Your life is plenty of use. You listen
to me. We talk. We spend time together. It
means something to me. It must mean something to you."
Elena took Beverly's hand. Her own felt
cold to her, as if the warmth had drained out of her
body when her grandma started talking about death and
dying. Yes, she was scared. She did not want
to hear this. She had to make Beverly stop.
  "Love you. Want die. Now."

                 
                Beverly

  Beverly had been exactly twenty-nine,
yes, when Suzanne caught German measles.
That was before kids were routinely vaccinated. Did
they even have a vaccine that long ago? Suzanne
had been seven, a skinny little girl, too
skinny, with reddish hair, big green
watery eyes. Was she wearing glasses yet?
No, they sent her home from school with a note that
she needed glasses that same year, afterward.
Suzanne got dreadfully sick, and then she
caught pneumonia and was taken to the hospital.
The doctor was not encouraging. He asked to speak
to the father. "There is no father," Beverly said. She
was furious that he was trying to go over her head.
He thought her daughter was going to die.
  She had held Suzanne's superheated hand.
Her daughter was burning up. Delirious.
Tossing in the bed like a fish dying on a dock.
Then Beverly had thought secretly to herself,
guiltily, that perhaps she should not have had a daughter.
It would be terrible if Suzanne died, terrible,
but at the same time, it would be easier. She was
always having to think about what to do with Suzanne when
she went away. She had felt she would not be
complete as a woman if she did not have a child, but
now she wondered. A child seemed to eat money
sometimes. There was always something that needed attention, that
needed fixing, that had to be replaced or
provided.
  But when Suzanne was restored to her, thinner
than ever, pale and slight as a sheet of paper,
she had wept, holding her daughter and feeling that
nothing could be as precious. How could she have
imagined life without her little one? Then the next
day, she hauled off and swatted Suzanne when
she spilled her soup all over the table. A
clumsy child, there was no getting around it. A little
ballet dancer she wasn't. Two left feet
and two left hands. There was something intractable in
Suzanne from the moment she could sit up and say
Mama, intractable and lumpy. Suzanne would
sit glowering, making herself dense and immovable.
  She had felt guilty about her temper, but
Suzanne had a temper of her own. From the time
Suzanne was eleven, they'd had screaming
matches. They would both stand their ground and shriek
at each other. "You will!" "I won't!" Her
daughter was as stubborn and willful as she was.
They were a match, everyone said that. It used
to infuriate her, how Karla could get Suzanne
to do almost anything, how Suzanne would do the dishes
without being asked at her aunt's, how Suzanne
would pick up after herself. At home, she was a little
pig.
  How had they got off on the wrong foot with
each other so quickly, so unremittingly?
Two strong wills striking metal against metal.
Yet as an adult, Suzanne often seemed
phlegmatic. Her daughter appeared to be
encased in protocol, duty, busy-ness, the
make-work of the law. It felt to her as if
Suzanne had gone into the law in order to retreat
from her, from their hectic and never affluent life
together. The law was Suzanne's shell she carried
on her back.
  Beverly stirred in the bed, trying vainly to find
a comfortable position. Her body was sore all the
time. She should try to get up, climb into her
wheelchair, roll into the living room. She did
not feel like it, so much effort for so little gain. There
was nothing on television. It was hard for her to use
the computer, for her vision was still blurred.
Suzanne had bought her a big expensive
monitor that she could read, but it took too much
work for her to get to it. With the big monitor, she
could no longer use the laptop in bed. Now it
sat on the makeshift desk. She stared at it
across the room and imagined sending E-mail
messages to all the people she used to communicate with.
Half of them probably thought she was dead.
Wasn't she?
  She could see it clearly now, with so much empty
time to contemplate her life: she should never have had
a child. She was not cut out to be a mother. She had
never really wanted to be responsible for another
person, to have to explain her decisions and justify
them, to have to drag that other through her life clunking
behind. She had never wanted to marry. She had
understood from adolescence on that being the legal
property of a man was a bad idea for her, that
simply having another body always there, someone for
whose meals, clothing, bills, and opinions she was
responsible, would be death itself. She would hate
him. He would be a large pole to which she would be
tethered. Why hadn't she applied that to children? When
she had discovered herself pregnant, she had been
delighted, as if it were some kind of accomplishment.
She had felt very adult and competent and full of
fantasies about her own child.
  Her friends were shocked. Women did not just go and have
babies by themselves in 1950. If they got
pregnant and could not afford to fly to Puerto
Rico for an abortion, then they went off to have the
baby in a "home" like a women's prison, and the
baby was taken away and adopted.
  She had been so proud. So confident.
Was it only that she enjoyed shocking the people around her,
even the most political men and women who thought of
themselves as socially advanced and free thinking? Had
she been acting in a little private play of her
own, the bold heroine, the new woman in her
cute maternity outfits Karla sewed for her?
Karla had been behind her all the way. Beverly
had entertained visions of herself with a miniature
version by the hand, a little red-curled Beverly, a
brave curly-headed little boy, a darling
radical Shirley Temple marching along with her
on parades and picket lines.
  As soon as she was home from the hospital with a
squalling baby, she had intimations she had made
a terrible error. Everyone said she was so brave,
but here she was in a little apartment in Brooklyn down
the block from Karla, and stuck, penned up with a
voracious creature with a voice like a steam
whistle and one demand after another. She never
finished having to fix something for or around the baby.
The creature never seemed to sleep more than a
couple of hours at a stretch. Karla had
endured two miscarriages and was glad to take the
baby when Beverly could not stand being stuck with her
another hour. It had seemed to her even then that the
tiny red-faced Suzanne glared at her
balefully, reproaching her for her secret
regrets.
  She finally dragged herself into the wheelchair and
rolled over to the computer. Then she sat there idle
in front of it. Elena had made the screen
background dark red for her. It was cheerful. But
who did she really want to talk to, and what
did she really have to say? Labor organizing was
useful but sometimes so depressing. You just got people a
wage they could live on and raise their families
in decency, and then the fucking owners moved the
factories where they could get kids to work for
fifty cents an hour. Your people were all out of work
and back in poverty, stuck in dead-end jobs they
could not live on. The more you liked the people, the more you
respected and admired them, the worse it was for you.
She had tried to affect the economic and
political life of her country for half a
century, and sometimes she had succeeded and sometimes
she had failed, but it was over. She could not push
anymore.
  It seemed to her she could always smell her own
body like decay, like something old and rotten left
too long in the garbage pail in the
kitchen. If she were really as strong as she had
always thought herself to be, she would just swallow her own
tongue. She would find some way to kill herself.
Drag a radio into the bathroom and prop it in the
shower stall, but she could not bring herself to do that.
Suppose she did something wrong and ended up
alive but paralyzed?
  After her first stroke, she had tried hard, she
had tried and tried. She had fought to get her
strength back, to speak clearly, to move,
to walk, to care for herself, believing she could
recover. She had expected she would be herself, her
own person again. She no longer believed any of
that. What had been Beverly Blume was gone
forever. Less than half herself was left, and that was
dwindling. The caretakers provided by the service
spoke to her as if she were feebleminded, a large
floppy retarded child. None were like Sylvia, and
she could not succeed in creating relationships with any
of them. It was not the same women who came, and the
way they spoke at her was like a performance on
automatic pilot. They did not engage. They
did their job.
  Suzanne was walking her to and fro tonight. It was
so boring. Suzanne was doing a good job walking
her along, but Beverly could tell her mind was
elsewhere. Suzanne had always been able to do that
since she was a little girl, to be sitting one
place but be mentally miles away. It had always
annoyed Beverly. She would be talking to her
daughter and then realize it was like talking to the
radio: Suzanne hadn't heard one word she had
uttered.
  "What ... think about?" Beverly demanded.
  "What? Oh, Maxine's case. I was going
over the arguments I'll use before the Supreme
Judicial Court."
  "What arguments?"
  Unintentionally, Suzanne speeded up her
pace, hauling Beverly along as she talked.
Beverly forgot to listen after a while. It was all
legal stuff. At least she had Suzanne's
attention. She asked, "Marry him, you?"
  "Who?" Suzanne stopped cold.
  Beverly laughed. "More ... one?"
  "Jake, you mean? No. Why should I?"
  Beverly shrugged. "Did ... Sam."
  "Marrying Sam was a big mistake, you know
that. It's not that tight a relationship. It's fine
the way it is. I can barely manage
that."
  "Leave you ... set up."
  "Marriage wouldn't set me up. You didn't
think it would set you up, did you? Why foist it
on me? Besides, I haven't the time for it."
  Beverly jabbed her thumb at her chest.
"Burden!"
  "No, you aren't."
  Beverly made a derisive noise.
  "You're my mother."
  Suzanne was such a wimp, unable to admit
what a nuisance Beverly had made of herself
by having two strokes and landing on her. Beverly
could feel the money burning up. She noticed how
they were trying to economize. They thought she couldn't
see how her care was costing more and more. Beverly
shook her head. Denial, the young ones called it.
Beverly called it willful blindness. Of course
she was a burden to her daughter. She was a burden
to herself. What a mess life was at the end, never
resolved, never cleanly finished, never coming to a
proper satisfying conclusion, a final resonant
chord of completion.
  Beverly plopped herself down in a kitchen chair
and pointed at the other. Enough of this pointless staggering
back and forth from the bedroom to the living room and
back like a gerbil on a treadmill. For this she
should struggle on? She dragged a pad over and
began to print. NOTHING LIVE FOR. USING
UP RESOURCES. PAIN. CAN'T DO
ANYTHING MATTERS. TIRED. TIRED.
TIRED.
  "Mother, what do you want?"
  HELP ME DIE. PLEASE PLEASE
PLEASE.
  "Murder you."
  PEACE! HELP ME.
  Suzanne looked into her eyes, staring and staring.
It was the longest and most intense stare they had ever
exchanged, at least since Suzanne was twelve
or thirteen. Mostly they had avoided this kind of
piercing scrutiny of each other, avoided offering
themselves to it out of dread, a need for privacy, even
out of delicacy. Now they stared and stared at each
other.
  "How long have you been thinking about ... wanting
to die?"
  3 MONTHS, Beverly wrote. EVERY DAY.
EVERY NIGHT.
  "You've been talking to Elena about
this."
  Beverly nodded. She printed carefully,
NEED BOTH HELP. SOON. VERY
SOON.
  Suzanne was frowning. She did not look
convinced. Inside Beverly's mind, arguments
chased themselves, tumbling over one another like
puppies but trapped, mute. To get them out, that
was the difficulty. She could only beg. Stare.
Plead with her eyes. Help me. A last
favor. Give me peace.

                 
                Elena

  "Now he's back on the talk show circuit
with this father-right thing," Marta said. "How can anyone
take him seriously? Warmed-over Bly."
  Pudgy Miles was frowning. "He got in some
licks. And judges, mostly men, mostly fathers,
are going to like his line. The world is full of men who
screwed up their marriages and imagine they want
their kids." He turned to Elena, sitting
scrunched up in a chair, trying to make herself
small and preferably invisible. "Now I need
to be sure I can trust you as a witness."
  Elena blinked, insulted as if he had
slapped her. "I know I was wrong and I want
to try to make up some of it to Marta. We were
worms."
  "You're going to have to do better than that if you
want to convince a judge that Marta is the injured
party. He's contesting the divorce, so we're at
war."
  Miles was the beige man, she thought: beige
hair, beige skin, beige mind. No one had
ever caught his eye across a room and clicked.
However, she could hardly say her capacity for
instant ignition had won her a lot of prizes.
Maybe it was better to be beige or gray. His
mind was nasty and sharp-edged enough.
  "One thing we want to show is that you're easily
influenced by a man you're involved with. That he was
the active party."
  "Easily influenced. You're not talking about
Chad and Evan. You're not going to bring that up!"
  "Those records are sealed, since you were a
juvenile, but I can have you mention it if I ask the
right question. I need your cooperation. I'm telling you
how I want to play it."
  "I'm the weak little slut who can be pushed around
by any man. But Chad and Evan didn't push
me around. I was happy with them. Death just seemed
like another bigger orgasm or the biggest high of
them all. And I wanted Jim at least as much as
he wanted me. I thought I wanted him
anyhow." She looked briefly at Marta.
"I thought I knew who he was. I made him
up."
  "He's plausible," Marta said. "I
believed everything he said for years."
  "We need to establish Jim's guilt, so we
need to establish your relative innocence,"
Miles said patiently. "I need your cooperation
or I won't use you."
  "I've been down this road before. ..." She
sighed. "It's always a story, isn't it? Never
the truth."
  Miles gave her a steady stare that said he
did think it was the truth: that she was an
impressionable idiot. Marta was waiting
patiently.
  "I'll do whatever it takes. I'll say
whatever I have to," she said.
  "I appreciate what you're trying to do,"
Marta said. "Understand that I want to forgive you.
It's healthier for both of us."
  Elena stood at the window looking out while they
worked on their line of argument together. Boston was
locked in the grip of a glacier. It had snowed and
frozen over and snowed and frozen over.
Sidewalks were lined with cliffs of dirty ice.
On every street battles were waged over parking
places. If someone had chipped out a place, it
was theirs, by the unwritten law of the city. They
might place a trash can or an old chair in it
to mark possession, but if anyone moved that trash
can or chair and took the place, it was often more
than a war of words that would follow. She wondered
if anyone had ever been killed in one of these
battles. She asked Miles. He frowned and
went silent for a few minutes. Then he said,
"Almost. Dorchester District Court, 1994.
William Procton parked in the place cleared
by the defendant Edmund Little. Edmund Little shot
William Procton in the thigh. The jury would
not convict him of anything more than simple
assault. I don't know if he actually served
time. Basically, the jury thought Little was
justified."

  Elena did not know if she were pleased or
depressed that Rachel wasn't getting married
after all. She had hoped they would all go
to Israel, which sounded like a great trip,
especially in the winter. She was shocked when
Rachel called her. A first. "How could I have
been so mistaken about Michael?"
  "How could I have been so mistaken about Jim?
I made a much worse botch of things. At least
you didn't get married. If the rabbinical
court hadn't insulted you, you'd be marrying him and
then you'd be stuck. Then you'd find out what he's
really like."
  A long silence while the satellite connection
burbled and clanked to itself. "You're right." Rachel
couldn't help sounding surprised that Elena had
been able to offer her some insight. "I'm trying
to be satisfied with that."
  "I'm just sorry we didn't all get to go and
visit you," Elena said.
  Rachel said, "Mother's been poor-mouthing me for
months. Are you really eating cat food and
sprouted potatoes?"
  "Every night," Elena said. "But I eat at the
restaurant."
  "I thought you were fired?"
  "Different restaurant."
  Rachel didn't ask anything more about her job:
who but another restaurant worker would? "It's so
beautiful here. It actually snowed in Jerusalem
yesterday. It was like crystal and gold.
Glittering."
  "I'm going back to school. But don't tell
Mother yet. Please."
  "Why? What could you be studying that she would
object to? Let's see, theological
school. Studying to be an Episcopal priest.
..."
  "You can do all the religion for the family.
No, I just don't want her getting excited and
telling me what a great idea it is, so that I
get contrary and don't do it. I want it to be
my idea, and I don't want to tell her
until I'm taking classes."
  "You know, she really wants to be
supportive. You think she's trying to butt in,
when she's just wanting to make it easier for you."
  "It's better if I do it myself, at least
till I'm launched and I know it's
working. Believe me, it'll be better that way."
Elena switched gears. "Anyhow, don't you
think you might get back with Michael?"
  "Are you going to get back with Jim?"
  "But that was stupidity. Just gross. Marta's
pregnant! I wouldn't be in the same room,
believe me. He tries to corner me, but I
won't let him. With Michael, I met him.
He isn't married to someone else. He's just
young."
  "Well, I'm the same age he is, and
I'm not going to take his insensitivity. I
don't even think he'll be a good rabbi."
  "What do I know. He seemed, you know, like he
cared about you."
  "Well, it was an act. I should think you'd
understand that."
  Elena shrugged, realizing Rachel could not see
her. "I'm an expert on being fooled. Being
fooled and fucking up. I can just pretend a man
is the way I want him to be and ignore anything
that shows me how wrong I am."
  "Me too, apparently. Must be genetic."
  She did not tell Rachel about Sean. Her
sister would be shocked that she had taken up with
another man so quickly, never understanding how Sean
protected her. She had loved Jim, and she
knew that weakness lay inside her like a virus in
abeyance, ready to swarm into her blood again if she
gave it a chance. She suspected Jim knew that
too, and that was why he had not stopped stalking her,
waiting for her. Not lately, for he had seen her
twice with Sean. Sean's bulk made him
impossible to ignore. She also neglected
to mention Sean because her relationship with him, while
pleasant, did not occupy much of her mind or
emotions. Sean was damaged and could give a
limited amount. He had wounds she did not push
to explore. She simply made do with him and the time
passed and took her out of danger.

  He drank two or three beers to every one of
hers, getting quieter and more withdrawn. She did
not try to monitor his drinking after the first couple of
times. He did not want her to take care of him.
He was on his own lonesome road. She spent more
time trying to figure out Robby, because he ran the
waiting staff and she had to suit him to keep the
job. She could hostess and go to school, that was her
plan. He was quirky, mercurial,
sometimes kind and sometimes sarcastic, demanding. She
stepped around him carefully, learning to tell when
she came into work what kind of mood he was in and
pace herself accordingly. He gave her more leeway because
they were the same age born on adjacent days.
He also liked her style, as he remarked. He
told her she moved well. Sometimes when they went
to a different bar, they danced. He was fun to dance
with. Sean would not dance, saying he'd feel like a
performing bear. Going out with the kids passed the time.
Sometimes when she thought back to the summer, she
imagined she had succumbed to a high dangerous
fever that had burned her up and left her
debilitated, and that she was still slowly recovering.

                 
          Suzanne and Beverly

  Suzanne thought Rachel, in trying to act
cheerful, sounded so miserable, she ended up urging
her to get back together with Michael. She could
tell that rejecting that suggestion made Rachel
feel better. Rachel had made a Mizrachi
friend, Nava, a young woman with Moroccan
parents. She was invited to the older sister's henna
party. Suzanne worried that the wedding preparations
would upset Rachel. Perhaps it was too exotic
to make her jealous. The henna party was all
women, with hours of eating and giggling and dancing.
Rachel wrote that she was sending photos. If
Rachel was depressed by the wedding, her E-mail
did not reflect it. Karla kept insisting they
would get back together, but Suzanne was doubtful.
If Rachel felt that Michael was in essential
disagreement with her about something as important as her
religion and her role as a rabbi, they would not
reconcile. The rift had hurt Rachel and
shaken her confidence.
  Suzanne understood how the quarrel could cause
Rachel to doubt her ability to command love. She
had been down that betrayal road herself. She had
been slow to suspect Sam, because even Victor,
whom everyone had expected to be constantly running
around, had seemed satisfied with her until she
got pregnant. She had begun to suspect
Sam when stories and schedules did not jibe.
She had been shocked at the deceit as much as at
the infidelity. She had been told a hundred
times that she just didn't understand temptation. It was
her nature to fall in love rarely,
to put her practice and her daughters before any
man, and to have too much trouble trusting the love of
one man ever to consider another on the side. She
had no time for complications. She could still find
buried in the bottom of her brain a hot core
of anger, a seed she had never let grow but had
never rooted out. It was there, radioactive but
unacted upon--that old painful sense of betrayal
she called upon in defending many of her women
clients.
  Sam had phoned her the week before, wanting
to discuss Marta's divorce and the situation with
Elena. She had referred him to Miles, who
surely could handle Sam and deal with his
curiosity. Marta and Sam had never gotten
along. She wasn't about to say one word to him that
might come back to haunt Marta or give him
satisfaction. Sometimes she was fond of Sam, but
she did not entirely trust him where Marta was
concerned. They had old grudges they hadn't
aired or relinquished. Years ago, she had
resolved never to be caught between them.

  Suzanne had to muster all her patience, never
considerable, to have a real conversation with Beverly.
Beverly was sitting up in bed, while Suzanne
sat in a desk chair dragged up beside the bed.
  Beverly wrote, BETTER GAVE YOU
KARLA FULL TIME.
  Instead of denying the suggestion to avoid a
fight, Suzanne pondered what Beverly had
written. "Maybe so," she said. "It was hard
going back and forth. You had such different ideas about
everything. With Karla, I went to shul. With
Karla, I was supposed to be interested in food
and to like to learn to cook. Eating was good. With you,
any mention of religion set you off. You
didn't want to observe Jewish holidays, so
if I didn't spend them with Karla, I
didn't get any holidays. You were bored with
food. Grab some takeout. Have a snack. You
never ate much and you hated to cook."
  Beverly shook back her hair, struggling
to speak. "Karla ... fat."
  "I didn't think that was so bad. Her house
smelled like cinnamon and garlic and onions and
rendering chicken fat. Her chairs were easy to sit
in. She spoiled me, you said, and certainly she
made me feel like something precious. But I
couldn't want to be her. She was a third
grade teacher. I already knew that wasn't enough
to be."
  Beverly carefully printed, I MADE YOU
SNOB?
  "Let's just say you had higher ambitions for
me. Security wasn't your goal, and you
didn't want it to be mine."
  "So not ... all bad."
  "Of course not. But you two sure were a
contrast. You were glamorous. You were a flirt--"
  Beverly laughed, waving her hand as if to bat
at a fly.
  "You were always coming and going. You had boyfriends.
If you entered a room, everyone knew it. You had
politics. You took chances. But Karla was
kinder. Gentler. And she was more ...
affectionate."
  SHOULD NOT HAD KID.
  Suzanne knew she should disagree politely,
but she could not, for she had often thought the same thing.
When she was little, how often she had wished that Karla
were her mother and Beverly her aunt. She had felt
guilty for that wish, but she had not been able to keep
herself from confiding it to Karla--who had been very, very
pleased. She would have said that the two sisters were at
war over her, except that her mother seemed rather
satisfied to leave her to Karla at least half the
time. "Well, I suppose I had two mothers.
That must be twice as good as one. Basically, you
know, you were flat out, the way I live now. I
barely have time for anybody, and you were the same
way. We're alike in that. You gave first
place to your work, because it was important to you--"
  "Im ... portant ... others."
  "Likewise for me. Besides, she let me down
too. When I came back from college, I'd
been replaced. She was crazy about Suwanda--
she'd just adopted her--and suddenly I was no
longer the golden girl. But you and I are more
alike than you realize in how we deal with things.
You had Karla take care of me, and I get
Elena to help and the agency."
  Beverly nodded. She let her head loll
back on the pillow. "Tired."
  Suzanne started to rise. "I'll let you
rest then."
  Beverly stopped her with a hand on her arm. "Must
talk."
  Suzanne took her seat again. "Sure.
What's on your mind?"
  "You know. Want die."
  "Yeah. You want to die." She looked hard
at her mother. "You're asking me to commit murder,
you understand that, Mother."
  Beverly shrugged. "Do ... careful."
  "I teach the law. I am an officer of the
court. We've already had one notorious case
touching this family."
  Tears rolled out of Beverly's eyes. "No
... go on. No."
  "What am I supposed to do?" Suzanne
asked out loud.
  "Pills."
  "What kind of pills?"
  Beverly gestured toward the bookcase she had
been using as a dresser. "Top ... shelf."
  Suzanne went to the bookcase. She saw
only socks and stockings and mittens. A jar of
oversize safety pins. "What am I looking
for?"
  "Print ... out."
  She found a sheaf of papers under the socks,
downloaded from the Internet, from last July before
Beverly's second stroke. It consisted of
descriptions of various ways for terminally ill people
to end their lives. "But you're not terminally ill."
  Beverly had been writing on her pad. NO
END. WORSE THAN TERMINAL. On a
second sheet she continued printing, LITTLE ME
LEFT. ALL I VALUE GONE.
BURDEN. THIS NOT LIFE!

  Beverly felt exhausted and frustrated.
To say something simple, almost simpleminded,
took all her strength. Why couldn't she make
Suzanne understand? There had to be a way to get
through to her. Her thoughts raced in her head, although
sometimes a word or a phrase eluded her and she
had to make do with some equivalent, but what came
out of her mouth was crude and jerky. It was not what
she wanted to say, but a brief headline version.
Everything became a summary, a synopsis, a
piece torn from her meaning. It wasn't enough
to sustain her interest just to eat, shit, and sleep.
She was trapped in this broken mind and partly
paralyzed body. She was tired of it, tired
to death. If only she could make them feel what
she felt. But how? "Why you ... make ... me
stay?"
  "Is it that bad here?"
  Beverly nodded fervently. She longed to tell
Suzanne it wasn't anything wrong she was doing.
This was not Beverly's life, rather Suzanne's she
was squatting in the middle of, out of place, unable
to communicate, unable to act.
  "Would you be happier in some kind of facility?"
  "No! No!" That was living death: to be stored
with the other dysfunctional to be minimally tended
by underpd staff who had no idea who she had been
and did not care. "On steps ... disappointed."
  Suzanne pondered for a moment. "Are you
talking about this summer?"
  Beverly nodded. "Bad day."
  "It sure was."
  "Marta free. Elena okay." She hated
to hear herself talk. It was humiliating to sound like a
two-year-old or someone who had only begun
to learn English. Every time she opened her mouth, she
cringed. She printed, NOW TIME HELP
ME!
  "We're trying to help you. Elena and I and the
aides who come in make sure you walk every day.
We try to give you what you need, Mother, even if
you don't think we succeed."
  She glared. How could Suzanne so stubbornly
refuse to understand? She felt taken advantage
of. Because she could barely argue her case,
Suzanne could pretend she did not know what
Beverly wanted. "Help ... die. Only
help ... want."
  Suzanne was silent for a long time. Beverly
waited her out, staring. Did her daughter really
think she would forget what she wanted so
passionately, that she would change her mind, that she
would drop the subject? Fat chance. She would not
let Suzanne forget what had to be done. She
would hound her daughter until she got her way.
She had to communicate her desperation, even though
she felt like a toddler in a high chair banging a
spoon. "Only ... thing ... want." She
hit her good hand against her chest. God, she was
skinny and flabby. Her own body disgusted her.
It was not the body she had nourished and cared for, the
vehicle of her will and her pleasure. "Die!"
  Suzanne began to weep. Beverly wished she
could hit her. How dare her daughter sit and
weep because of what she wanted and desperately
needed? As if the whole family wouldn't be much
better off with her out of the house. How dare
Suzanne assume she was not aware how
much her illness was costing--she'd asked the aides
what they were paid and multiplied that by two--and for
what? Boredom and pain and disgust. She glared
at her daughter, who looked up, saw her, and
began to cry harder. This is a big help,
Beverly thought, a great big help, as if crying
made anything different. She was never a weeper.
Karla was. Since they'd been little girls, she
had wept at anything: you only had to tell her a
dog had been run over or a bird had hit a
window, and she was off. In the movies, she was always
blubbering. Sometimes Beverly had refused to sit with
her. In fact, Suzanne had been the same
way, but Beverly had shamed it out of her, making
her more stoical, stronger. It was undignified
to be constantly spouting tears. Women who relied
on crying to get their way should be ashamed. Never
had she used tears as a weapon, and she was
immune to them. Suzanne could blubber all
night, but Beverly would not alter one jot of her
intent.

  Suzanne felt despair like a cold rock
in her abdomen. Beverly was not going to relent.
She was not going to stop sitting there like a furious
owl glaring and repeating in that low cracked voice that
she wanted to die. She could just see explaining
to Beverly's doctors that her mother was bent on
suicide, except that Beverly was far too
helpless to commit suicide. Suzanne would be
responsible for killing her.
  Suzanne had fought legal battles for
twenty-five years, but never had she killed
anything larger than an earwig. She had lived
her life non-violently. She could not even
imagine helping her mother die. She still had in her
lap the sheaf of papers Beverly had insisted she
take from the shelf. Obviously Beverly had been
contemplating suicide even before her second
stroke. Obviously she was not about to change her
mind, no matter what Suzanne argued. She
felt trapped. Whatever she did would bring an
avalanche of guilt down on her. She would be
buried in guilt whether she refused to help her
mother die, or whether she was coerced into killing her.
How could she live with either choice?
  She waved the papers. "I'll read this and get
back to you." How ridiculous that sounded, as if it
were a brief on which she was offering an opinion.
  "Help ... me."
  "I'll do what I can, Mother. I'll do what
I can."
  Beverly reached out with her good hand and grasped
Suzanne's wrist, hard. Suzanne was
surprised how much strength Beverly could muster.
Her mother's gaze never wavered from hers. She
seemed determined not to blink. "Must, Suze,
must."
  Suze: what her mother had called her when she was
a little girl, and Beverly was actually pleased with
her. She was not so much touched as briefly amused.
"You're a crafty old manipulator,
Beverly. You won't give up, will you?"
  "No."
  "I'll read the material and consider very
seriously what I can do. Now, let go of my
arm, Mother." She then bent down and kissed her on
the forehead.
  Beverly held on for another minute and then
let go. "Tomorrow."
  "Yes, tomorrow we'll talk again. That's a
promise."
  Suzanne turned out the lights and went into her
office. What her mother had given her did not
exactly seem like bedroom reading. She sat
down at her desk to read the directions for ending
her mother's life. She wished that she drank
whisky, but the strongest thing she ever consumed was
sherry, at the dean's socials. She didn't
even have any of that handy. There were times it was a real
pity she was not a drinking woman.
  As she was reading, she got a call from a
California lawyer who owed her a favor. She
had talked him into helping on Jake's case.
"It's bad. The judge has just given
instructions to the jury that practically preclude
anything but a guilty verdict including the
conspiracy charge, which is the real killer. I
think there're plenty of grounds for appeal, but
since I came in late, I won't know till
I see the complete court transcripts."
  "There's really a chance Jake could go
to prison?"
  "I'd say the odds are on it."

                 
                Elena

  Elena listened to her mother going on about this case
in Florida where the guy got a
suspended sentence for helping his wife die and this
case where a guy got fifteen years house
arrest. Then there was a case in North Carolina
where a son was convicted of first-degree murder, in
spite of the fact that his father was dying and begging him
to end his suffering. Now she was talking about something
called Cruzan.
  "It's a crap game," Suzanne said,
putting down her notes. "There is no state in
which the law recognizes the right of a family
member to help someone die, even when they have begged
for it and are in terrible pain." Suzanne rose and
began pacing, not frantically but almost to Elena's
eyes with a mechanical precision, turning each
time on her heel. "For exactly the same act,
juries have repeatedly let the defendant go
free while other juries have sent people to prison for
life. The standard defense is the kind of
temporary insanity plea. Everybody knows it's
patently untrue, but the juries will often seize
on it to justify what happened. And in
Washington very. Glucksberg, the Supreme
Court opinion, written by Rehnquist, made
a strong distinction between withholding medical treatment
and affirmatively giving someone medication that could
kill, thus overturning the decisions maintaining the
right to die from the Second and Ninth Circuit
Courts."
  "So a lot of these guys took a gun and
snuffed the one they loved. But we're talking about
pills," Elena said. "If we do it right, there's
no murder investigation. Come on, Mother, we should
be able to help her."
  Suzanne sat down again to the pages of notes
she had brought with her to this little meeting in her home
office with the door shut. "You're convinced we should
do this?"
  "Mother, she's been begging me for two months
before she ever asked you. I can't refuse her, just
to protect my own neck. I love Grandma."
  "I love her too--"
  "But you have a lot of history. She was always there
for me. She never judged me. I owe her this."
  "The fact that I have history with her makes it
even more complicated. How do we know we haven't
made her feel guilty for being dependent on
us?"
  "She does feel guilty for being dependent.
Wouldn't you?"
  "Then we're failing. How do we know
we're not subtly encouraging this for our own
convenience?"
  "I suppose because, according to you, we could both go
to prison for life."
  "But don't you sometimes feel imprisoned now?
Don't you wish you didn't have to rush back here
to sit with her? To help her to the bathroom.
To change bedpans or sheets when she doesn't
make it to the bathroom in time. To help her bathe.
To help her eat. To take her to the doctors and the
therapists. Doesn't that get to you?"
  "Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes not. I have more
patience than you do."
  "The cats have more patience than I do. But
don't you see, Elena, we have motive. How can
we be sure it's not our own convenience we're
acting on?"
  "Because she's been asking and asking again. She's
in despair. She hates her life now, Mother.
Can't you understand that, can't you try to see this from her
point of view, just this once?"
  Suzanne sighed. "I hate suicide. I
can't help it. When I think you almost killed yourself
when you were fifteen--"
  "Come on, Mother, that's ancient. It was never
my idea. It's one thing Marta was right about.
Chad wanted to die, he was so bullshit at his
father. He was just ripped. He didn't want the
life his father was making him live. He felt
he'd rather die than go to military school. I was
just fucking bored."
  "I know you don't like my starting with the legal
aspects, but that's how I come at it. I can
divide our research into several parts--"
  "Research?" Elena heard her voice rise
in a spiral.
  Suzanne looked at her in surprise.
"Yes, research. First, the law. Second,
available methods, pros and cons, and of those
methods, determine which are actually practical
for Beverly and for us. Then, once we have chosen a
method, if we both decide it is advisable
to proceed, how to do it."
  Elena laughed dryly. "Here we are, working
together, Mother. For perhaps the first time."
  "Is it really? I guess it is."
Suzanne lay back in her desk chair and
closed her eyes for a moment. "I wish it was
less grim."
  "Why should it be grim? We're working
to release her. It's the best present we could
give her. We have to do it for her, Mother. We both
promised."
  "Yes, we did, Elena, we must be out of our
minds." Suzanne raised her hand wearily
to forestall a reaction. "One of the thorniest
points is that she is not dying, she is not in
unbearable pain. She simply feels helpless and
hopeless and she wants to be done with a struggle
she's losing. Okay. Now the practical."
Her mother brought out the sheaf of papers Elena
recognized as Grandma's printout.
  Elena stood. "I'll take over this part.
I'll do the ... research."
  Her mother looked at her with raised eyebrows.
"Are you sure you want to? It's rather dull
library stuff."
  "You think I can't do it because it's too
intellectual for me?"
  "Never. Of course you can. I'm a little
surprised you're volunteering."
  She knew very well her mother did not believe in
her ability to dig up information on suicide
methods but could not say so. She smiled. Mother was
sometimes ridiculously easy to manipulate.
Elena wanted to figure it out. She was pretty
good at scouting out drugs, and she had connections for
getting them without leaving a paper trail. "It's
a job I'm more than willing to take on." She
trusted herself more than Suzanne's scruples in
the situation.
  Suddenly Suzanne crumpled. She sat at
her desk with her head in her hands, weeping.
Sobs wracked her. Elena was terrified for a
moment. Suzanne never cried. She moved
slowly toward her mother, hoping it would end as
spontaneously as it had begun. Then
awkwardly, tentatively, she put her arm around
Suzanne and patted her back, feeling somewhat
like a person afraid of horses attempting
to quiet one.
  Suzanne got herself back under control. When
she could speak, she said softly, "It's hard
to explain. But all this means giving up. Giving
up the fantasy that someday she and I would understand
each other, would ... have a better way of being
together. ... Don't be upset, Elena, it's just
an old daydream of mine."
  "At least the two of us are doing better,
Mother, don't you think? That's something neither
of us expected, right? At least we have that."

  There were lots of nice ways of saying what they
were talking about, ways people had invented to discuss a
person offing themselves with words like tongs. One of
Elena's favorites was "self-deliverance," which
sounded like having a baby on your own. If she was
amused by the language that went around death on
tiptoe, she was matter-of-fact about gathering
information. Chad had been sloppy in planning his
own death. He had taken Evan with him, without
Evan's desire, simply because Chad had been
out of control. If he had truly wanted to kill
himself and only himself, the solution would have been
to take the gun, lock himself in his room at home
and use it, or walk into the desert alone and put
the gun to his head. But he had not wanted to die
alone. He had wanted company in his dying, for them
to be with him and for them to die with him. For so many
years, she had felt guilty that she had not shot
herself or been shot. She had not been able
to protect Evan. She had failed him. But she
did not feel guilty toward Chad. Finally after
all these years, she found in the core of herself a
certain amount of anger and a certain amount of pity.
Sometimes anger dominated and sometimes pity, but the
guilt for not dying with them was utterly wiped.
Evan had died because of Chad's gun, not because of
her.
  She went off to the public library and began
to look for books on suicide, which proved
irrelevant--endless statistics and stupid
generalizations. Psychological profiles.
Pontificating. Then she tried poison. That was
more useful, although most ways sounded too painful.
  In a big bookstore, she found a couple of
books that were actually about helping people to die, or people
offing themselves. She stood by the shelf reading them for a
while before she decided the one to buy. She bought a
couple of random books so that the bookstore
employee would be less likely to remember her:
an Italian cookbook and a book about all the
various current psychological therapies. That
she might actually read. The clerk was maybe
twenty-two and paid no attention. She gave him
cash.
  She carried home her three books and sat
down to read case histories of suicides,
Let Me Die Before I Wake. Most of the
people seemed to have cancer, but Grandma had the
same right to decide she didn't want to live.
Grandma wanted to do it neatly. She hadn't
asked about Mother's gun, which was a blessing. Elena
could still see Chad with his head blasted open and the
brains and blood spilling out. Shooting a person
turned them into garbage.
  She sat up on her bed with the pillows piled
up behind her and read the book with a yellow
transparent marking pen, just as if she were back in
college and studying for her finals. She was
methodical. It was very important to her to do this
right, to learn what was needed to help Grandma and
prove herself to her mother and, most importantly,
to herself. It mattered a lot that she not fuck up.
Her new image of herself as the competent therapist
went with the careful note taking, the figuring of the
exact amounts of whatever drugs she could buy that
were necessary for a sure lethal dose.
  After the restaurant closed Friday night,
she went out to the late-hours bar with the gang and
took a seat next to Robby, watching for a good
opportunity to talk when no one else was
listening. Robby mostly dealt cocaine, crack,
heroin, and marijuana, but he boasted he could
provide anything. Finally her chance came.
"Robby, I need some stuff."
  "I'm listening."
  She did not dare ask him to get it all at
once. It would be too weird. She would ask for
part of it and then in a week or so, request more.
"I'd love to have some Nembutals or
Amytals or ..." She went down her list.
"And maybe some Darvon or Demerol or
codeine?"
  "Either/or, or both."
  "Like I'd want both, but I'll take what
I can get."
  "It's going to cost you." What he never would
ask was why she wanted it. Presumably to get
high, to get low, to get out of it.
  "If you want to fly, you got to pay. When can
you have it?"
  "Next Friday."
  "Give me a ballpark figure and I'll have
the bills."

  When Elena reported back to her mother, she was
pleased to tell her not only that she had figured out
what to use--drugs and dosage--but that she had
lined up the first delivery for the next
night. What she needed was cash in fifties.
Robby liked fifties. "Neither too big nor
too small," he had said in his deep liquid
voice. "Just right."
  Friday night she gave Robby the money and
she got the pills in two vitamin bottles.
"The vitamin C is the Nembural. The B
complex is the codeine."
  Instead of putting them in her purse, she put
them in the pocket of her black silk pants.
The bulge would not show under her mandarin-collared
tunic of deep red and gold. It felt safer
to keep them with her than to leave them in her purse
in Natalie's office. Every time she felt them
bump against her, she felt proud of herself.
Grandma's deliverance. How happy she would be.
It wasn't enough, but it was a start.
  She waited till she was at Sean's, to count
them in the bathroom. She needed thirty
Nembutal. Robby had sold her ten. He'd
been more generous with the codeine.
  Her mother was waiting for her Saturday morning.
"Beverly's asleep. Did you get it?"
  Elena produced first one bottle with a flourish
and then the other. She felt like a magician.
"It's part of what she needs."
  Her mother looked at the bottles but did not
touch them. "That's it?"
  "What did you expect, a guillotine?"
  Suzanne ran her fingers through her short thick
hair. "I don't know, I don't know!"
  "It's not like you to be so indecisive."
  "I never murdered my mother before."
  "Come on, don't be melodramatic.
Don't you believe she has a right to decide when
to give up her life? When to die with dignity,
while she still can?"
  "I believe it--in the abstract."
  "Well, I'm exhausted. We'll talk it
over with Grandma tomorrow in the morning when she's got
it together. Now I'm going to bed." Elena was a little
miffed that her mother did not appreciate what she
had done, but Grandma would.
  "Can you get the rest?" Suzanne asked,
wringing her hands. "This much won't do it, if I
understand you correctly."
  "Next week I'll get more. And the week after
I'll get the last installment. I can't ask for
it all at once. The guy I'm dealing with would be
too suspicious."
  When it came to the third time she asked, he was
leery. "You've been doing a lot of those. Got
a habit? Or are you dealing them?"
  "I'm doing them with two friends who are in town
for a while. I'm not addicted. We've just been
into it lately. I don't do it when I have to work.
Have I seemed off to you?"
  "Guess not." But she noticed him watching
her, and she was extra careful with everyone that night
and the rest of the week. The price went up. He was
testing her. Well, after this batch, she would tell
him her friends had left and she was no longer
interested. She'd buy some weed just to fool him.
  On Saturday he finally sold her the last of
what they needed. She did not spend that night at
Sean's. She just told him she was feeling a little
queasy, something she'd eaten. Sean hadn't seen
the transactions in the cloakroom. Robby never
talked about his customers. She drove home
cautiously, not even running a yellow. When she
had actually shut the front door behind her and
entered the house with the pills still in her pants
pocket, she felt an immense relief. It was
all there, everything Grandma needed. She had done
it.

                 
                Beverly

  Beverly wanted to keep the two bottles on
top of her chest of drawers, where she could gaze
on them, eyes no matter how blurry fixed on
her deliverance. Suzanne objected. "The
aides can see them there. It's important that they
not be aware you have the pills. Elena could get
into trouble."
  Beverly had a project. She was an
actress playing her last role. She was
persuading the caretakers that she was weaker than she
was. She faked apparent sleep even oftener
than she lapsed into that druggy stupefaction that
overwhelmed her frequently. She saw no
reason to perform exercises that were unpleasant and
pretended she could no longer do them. Two of the
aides told Suzanne Beverly was getting
worse and should see her doctor. Suzanne
made an appointment for the last week in
February. They would do tests to determine if she
had undergone another small stroke or if she were
suffering from some other complication. Beverly
was determined not to endure more tests. That was the
deadline, three weeks away.
  She felt weirdly expectant and cheerful.
Knowing that it would all end soon made everything more
bearable, like the pain in her leg that had no feeling.
It was impossible the leg should hurt, but it did.
The doctor called it phantom pain. Well,
he should feel it, then he'd know what a phantom
it wasn't. The pain in her head that came and went
and came back again. The pain in her back from lying
in bed too much, from sitting up in bed, from lying in
awkward positions because half her body was dead
wood. The pain in her bowels from the severe
constipation she supposed came from lack of
exercise. The pain in her kidneys from the
medications they had her on. The pain when she did
attempt mild exercise. The fearful effort of
doing anything whatsoever, from putting on a
Velcro-fastened sweater to going to the bathroom.
The shock when she saw herself, that scrawny
twisted-face hag in the mirror. The heroic
effort it took to speak a coherent fragment. The
total boredom of getting through each empty day
and long night. The humiliation when she could not get
to the toilet in time, as happened increasingly. The
smell of her own body, the smell of the bed she was
condemned to. All about to finish.
  She felt young inside, knowing that her exit was
under her own control. This was the first power she had
enjoyed after months of being helpless and at the
complete mercy of others. She would not wait too
long. She did not want more tests, more invasion, more
time in the hospital. She hated the doctors who
treated her like an idiot. She would escape them
all. She saw herself as the woman she had been,
slender yes but shapely, with her red hair and
green eyes, with her laugh and her wit and her
husky voice, with her ability not only to speak
like a human being but to move rooms and crowds.
She saw that woman rising up from this ruined body
and escaping. It did not matter that she did not
believe in an afterlife. She believed that at the
moment of death she would be restored to her full
ability. She would die as herself.
  She would do it all correctly. She would not
waver. She wanted silence, she wanted peace,
she wanted out. Each time Elena brought an
installment of the pills, she kissed her
granddaughter's hands. Every day when she wakened in the
morning, instead of despair and a return
of pain, she opened her eyes to hope. It would not
hurt, what she read promised her. She would
pass away quietly. There would be no more
awakenings to a burnt-down life. She would
slide into a sleep of real peace and never waken
again.
  Every day she asked herself if it should be today. It
had to be the weekend, when the aides were gone. She
could not take the chance of one of them finding her in a
coma, her secret fear. She had seen a woman
who had tried to kill herself but had not taken enough
pills. She was brain damaged, kept alive
on machines--as punishment, Beverly supposed.
She would do it right. She had been bold and
efficient all her life, and she would seize the
opportunity the pills gave her and make an
exit under her own control.
  Elena came in to sit with her. It was morning.
"What day?"
  "Monday, Grandma."
  She felt a stab of panic. Somehow the
weekend had slipped past. With her new confidence
in the pills, she was letting the days slide by under
her. Nothing seemed as terrible now that she knew
she could call a halt. But next week was the
doctor's appointment. She would have to go into the
hospital for tests. She had pretended
deterioration too convincingly, and now she must act.
  She made a simple chart on her pad of
paper. 11111. She would cross out each, starting
with the first one for Monday, so she did not forget again
what day it was. She must do it Friday night
or Saturday night. "El ..."
  "Yes, Grandma. Do you need something?"
  "Fri ... Sat ... Time."
  She thought Elena could not possibly understand what
she meant. To make it clearer, she jerked her
head toward the shelf where the pills were hidden
inside a nightgown. "This coming Friday or
Saturday night?" Elena asked. "Or just some
Friday or Saturday night?"
  "Coming."
  "Are you sure you want to?"
  "Sure."
  "I'll have to go to work anyhow, Grandma. It would
look too suspicious if I didn't."
  "Suzanne ... be here."
  "We'll have to make sure with Mother that she will
be."
  She would rather have Elena on hand.
Maybe she could do it before Elena left for work or
wait till she came home. So many
practical arrangements to be made. "Give
... book."
  Elena of course knew exactly which book she
was talking about. "Oh, you want the Bible."
  Beverly did not think that was funny. "Not
religious."
  Elena grinned, handing her Let Me Die
Before I Wake. Beverly loved to read about those
peaceful deaths. They kept the book hidden with the
pills. Now she waved Elena away so she could
read her favorite account again. Everything had to be
done right. She had made Suzanne and Elena
both read several chapters. This was her final
piece of work as an organizer, organizing her
own death--with dignity. Under her own power.
  "Grandma, I'll miss you so much. And so will
Mother. I love you, Grandma."
  "Miss ... both." Of course she wouldn't.
Silence and peace. The great comforting nothing. She
would allow them to be a little sentimental, as long as
they didn't try to stop her and as long as they
didn't insist too much that she go along with the
mushiness. She had always been hard-headed and
wasn't about to change at the end. She had heard
of deathbed conversions, but she had contempt for them.
The values someone lived by should be sufficient
to sustain them in dying. She had the same contempt
for rational people who suddenly called for a priest or
a rabbi as she did for those old fellow
travelers or party members who went leaping to the
other side and became as fanatical right-wingers as
they had been fanatical on the left. Nobody
seemed to undergo a conversion to tolerance and the understanding
they didn't have every last penny of truth in their
particular piggy bank. Religion had never
interested her, and it didn't now. Politics and the
economy as they impacted on ordinary people,
justice and equality, those had been her passions,
but she was past being able to have an effect. Time to let
go, of everything.
  "Grandma ... are you asleep?"
  "Thinking."
  "About what?"
  "What believe? Y."
  Elena was puzzled for a minute. "Do you mean you
believe in me? Or are you asking what I
believe in?"
  "Both." She had actually meant the
second possibility, but she did have faith in
Elena.
  Elena scrunched up her face. "You ask
hard questions, don't you? Not much. I guess there's
some power behind everything, but I can't imagine getting
into a personal relationship with whatever it is.
Sort of like thinking whether electricity likes you
or not."
  Beverly nodded, pleased.
  "I guess I believe in trying to be good--a
recent thing for me." Elena laughed
self-consciously. "I mean, I haven't got
much of a track record, do I?"
  "Good to me."
  "Well, maybe you've had an influence on
me. I mean, I think it's cool how you were
trying to help people all your life." Elena rose
and paced. Beverly thought she looked as beautiful
and swift as a panther. "You were cool and you had a
good time anyhow. I want to do something right. I
guess I really have to, to like myself. I've done
so much damage. I've broken a lot of people's
dishes."
  Beverly motioned Elena near and squeezed her
hand. She stared into her face. That face was one of the
few things she would miss, her beautiful bold
granddaughter. "Don't ... lose ... bold.
... Dare." Glossy black hair worn
unstylishly long. Long large eyes almost as
dark as her hair. Full sensuous mouth and
cheekbones like her own. A face that could be a
tragic mask or a seductress, except it
was too animated, too alive from within.
  "Grandma, I don't think that's my problem.
It's not thinking things through. Not being clear what
I'm doing. Not guessing consequences but just driving
over the cliff to see what happens."
  She wanted so much to tell Elena how
precious she was, and how she must value herself.
How even if she made messes and even the
occasional catastrophe, she was vital and
glorious. She must not be tamed. She must not
give up and become mediocre and gray. Beverly
had never in her life loved anyone more than she
loved Elena. "Love you ... as ... you are."
  "I know, Grandma," Elena said, her voice
breaking, "but I don't."
  In that moment, Beverly decided: it would be
Saturday night. It would be more convenient for
Elena if she did it then. A last little
gift of timing for her beloved, not to cause her
any more trouble than she had to. Then, then, she
would finish. She would have her own death and be done.

                 
               Suzanne

  "Getting divorced is such a lot of work. I
don't wonder I never went into that kind of law."
Marta lay on her couch, her belly rising
majestically above her.
  "Everybody's wrong and nobody's right. But
can't this stop while you have your baby? Can't you
call a time-out?"
  "Three weeks. She says it'll have to be a
C-section."
  "They do a lot more of those now. Did you get a
second opinion?"
  Marta sighed heavily. "Could you give me a
back rub if I lie on my side? If I
can still lie on my side."
  "Sure. Where's the oil you like?"
  "In the bedroom, on the dresser."
  The green gym bag was no longer there. The
room looked different with Jim's things gone.
Marta had Adam move the bed against one wall,
to make more room for the baby's crib and bassinet
until she could make over Jim's office into the
baby's room. Marta wanted to make the house
over completely, but the divorce was impoverishing
her, as Beverly's illness was doing to Suzanne.
Neither of them had money to waste on new curtains
or rugs. Suzanne found the almond massage
oil and brought it back to the couch.
  "Now that it's coming close to time, do you miss
Jim?"
  Marta shook her head. "Honestly, no. I
realize how much time I spent stepping carefully
around his ego. I want this baby. It may be
self-indulgence, it may be middle-age folly,
it may be the fastest way to total exhaustion
known to woman, but I want her."

  Jake's lawyer called at eight that evening.
"The jury's back."
  "What were their findings?"
  "Guilty on all counts."
  "No!" she said. "I can't believe it."
  "I told you, with the judge's instructions, there
was no other possible outcome." He
sounded irritated.
  "Can Jake call me?"
  "I think he's disappointed in you. He hoped
you would come out."
  "My mother's in terrible condition. I can't leave
her now. She's been deteriorating rapidly
since her second stroke. My daughter and I
are doing most of the caretaking, and I can't get
away. I just can't! Try to make him understand. I
don't know how much longer she can hang on." In
one sense, she was telling the truth. In another,
she was lying. She was gradually sinking in a mud
hole of guilt, sinking like the creatures whose
remains she had seen in the museum by the La
Brea tar pits in LA. She had no idea
why she should think of that--a place she had visited
with Sam when Rachel was just four and Elena, nine.
She felt guilty she was not in California for
Jake; she felt guilty about her mother in all
aspects, in all scenarios, at all times.
  "I'll tell him, but you know, he's facing
prison. They got him on all the misdemeanor
charges, then on conspiracy to disrupt commerce.
That's the big one. The lumber companies are the
big employers up here and the big contributors and
they get most of what they want--and they wanted
Jake's hide."
  "I understand. I'll be available for the appeal,
I promise. That's what I do best."
  "He's still going to be serving time, even if you
start the appeal tomorrow--which I understand you can't do."
  "Just get me the transcripts as soon as
they're available. ..."

  Suzanne had all the instructions in front of
her. The two types of pills were to be ground up
together and put into a small amount of liquid.
Beverly requested fresh orange juice.
Elena did the grinding before she left for work, but it
would be up to Suzanne to prepare the "cocktail"
just before Beverly consumed it. "Saturday!
Saturday!" Beverly had been saying all
week: beaming as if she were looking forward to a
date or a party. Suzanne kept going into her
own room and weeping. Her stomach was lead. How
could she really go through with it? It seemed
to Suzanne that her mother and she had finally been
communicating at least semi-well for the first time in
decades. Why couldn't they continue? She had
always wanted her mother's respect, and
lately, she seemed to be getting at least a little
of it. She felt the finality of death as a sentence
on her as well as Beverly.
  "I won't put the plastic bag on,"
Suzanne said to Elena. "I can't smother her.
If she takes the pills and they stay down and
work, that's her choice. But I won't put a
plastic bag over her head."
  Elena was dressed for work, all in black but
for a red scarf. "If the pills don't work
by early morning, I'll put the bag on."
  "I'm going along with this because she wants it and
that's her right. But I can't smother her and you shouldn't.
If she wakes up, that's how it is."
  "I'll be home by one at the latest."
  "I'm going to sit up with her."
  "So will I."
  Suzanne had not felt as close to her older
daughter since Elena had been a little girl.
She could place their first bad fights around the time
Elena was twelve--around the time of the divorce from
Sam. Her home life had become a
battleground, and she had responded by throwing herself
into work. She needed the money, but more, she was
happiest in court and most miserable while fighting
with Elena. Oh, there had been a few nasty
scenes with Sam, but only a few. Their
divorce was probably as amicable as it was
possible for such a cleavage in four lives to be.
But life with her daughter had become hard fought,
an unending screaming match and duel. She knew
Elena had begun to lie to her constantly,
unwaveringly, with an air of triumph. What could
she do about it? Only throw herself further into work
until the catastrophe arrived. Her beautiful
daughter had become a hostile stranger who
hated her and to whom nothing she said or pleaded or
threatened had any meaning. Much of the time, she did
not even know where Elena was, and if she asked,
Elena boldly lied.
  Now after the summer's mess, they had made a
rapprochement. Suzanne did not understand why but
she was too glad to question it. Elena had been more
affectionate toward her than since she was a little
girl, permitting Suzanne more expressions of
her love. She even let herself be touched on
occasion, hugged.
  Suzanne sat beside Beverly's bed, holding
her mother's withered hand. How much she had aged in the
past year, as the strokes pinched and
twisted her. Elena had been dyeing Beverly's
hair, but the red coiffure looked incongruous
around her wizened face. She had lost weight in
spite of their best efforts to stuff her. Her
muscles had slackened and shrunk. The biggest
change was the fire gone from her eyes. Her eyes
looked out but could not see much. The doctor had
told Suzanne that Beverly had cataracts in
both eyes, in addition to the blurring of her vision
caused by the second stroke, but that he could not
recommend an operation. Suzanne hoped they would
be able to put this death over on the doctor,
to persuade him it was natural. She prayed he
would not probe, just simply sign the death
certificate and let everything slide by. The hand
in hers felt cold. Since Beverly's second
stroke, medical interest in her condition had
waned. Suzanne had tried to prepare the way
by telling the doctor and aides how weak Beverly
had become. She looked into her mother's eyes,
eyes that had always seemed a clearer, harder green
than her own. She must have inherited her myopia from
her father, since Beverly had not worn glasses
till she needed them for reading after she turned
fifty. She had always loved Beverly's clear
passionate gaze.
  "How are you feeling?"
  Beverly smiled. "Hopeful."
  "What do you hope for?"
  "De ... liv ... rance."
  "Do you still want to go through with this tonight? There's
plenty of time to change your mind." Suzanne could
not keep the pleading from her voice.
  "No!" Beverly shook her head from side
to side three times. "Do ... it."
  What would it feel like to lie there in the bed
Beverly was so weary of, and know that she would die in
a matter of hours? Like a condemned prisoner, but
Beverly was self-condemned. She did not see
death as punishment or something to be feared, but as a
release. Suzanne wished she could look out through
her mother's eyes for just an hour to know if this was
really what Beverly must have. Last night
Suzanne had lain awake going through agonies of
guilt, wondering if she had somehow let Beverly
know indirectly how much it was taking out of all of
them to care for her, what an enervating financial
burden her support was, how overstretched
Suzanne had been feeling. She had done her
best to keep these feelings to herself, but she
could never be sure she had succeeded. She was so
tired all the time, exhausted beyond any hope of
repair in the brief hours of sleep she could
steal. Perhaps she had not concealed her fatigue as
well as she had imagined. She could not bear to think
that.
  "Want ... first act ... Mam ...
Butter ..."
  Suzanne rose and put on the CD. In the
summer, she had put a speaker into this room so that
Beverly could listen to music. That, and a little TV
that could be operated from the bed. She had tried
to make Beverly comfortable, she had tried. As she
returned to sit by the bed in the flood of Puccini,
she thought how weird it was that her mother's favorite
opera should be about a submissive woman who
killed herself for the love of a jerk. Suzanne did
not care for opera: too rich, full-blown,
overwrought for her tastes. She would rather listen
to jazz or baroque music or Mozart. She
had always found it out of character that Beverly should love
opera. Beverly used to go to the City Opera or
get cheap seats at the Met with a friend of hers who
taught at City College. They would talk about
tenors the way some women talked about movie stars
or basketball players. Now the flood of
passion seemed appropriate.
  Beverly was lying back against her pillow with her
eyes closed, waving her good hand languidly to the
music. Mao lay curled on her belly.
  "Isn't he heavy?"
  "Keeps ... warm."
  When the first act had finished, Beverly motioned
for her to get moving. Suzanne brought a tray with
toast and broth. A light meal was supposed
to prevent the stomach from rejecting the pills.
  "Now we're supposed to wait half an
hour."
  "Play ... second."
  Suzanne put on the second act of the
opera. She decided she would bury it with her mother,
but then remembered that Beverly had already set up
her cremation, making all her arrangements over the
past two months, during the time she had been
talking about wanting to die. "Want ... tidy,"
she had said repeatedly. Beverly had little to leave.
Her meager savings were long gone. The clothes she
could no longer wear had been donated to Good Will
months ago. She had given Elena her
jewelry, mostly out-of-date costume
jewelry except for an opal pendant and an
onyx cat pin with tiny chips of emerald for
eyes. To Suzanne, she left Mao.
To Rachel, she bequeathed her own mother's wedding
ring. She confided to Suzanne that she had worn it
only when she was checking into hotels with various
men. It was a wide lustrous gold band with a
Hebrew inscription Suzanne could not read--but
Rachel would be able to.
  Laboriously Beverly printed on the pad,
TELL R SORRY NOT WAIT.
  "I know she'd want to say good-bye to you."
  Beverly only gave her a crooked smile.
"Time ... now."
  "Are you sure?"
  "Sure." Beverly glared imperiously.
"Bring ... drink."
  Suzanne dragged herself into the kitchen and mixed
the ground-up pills into a mug of orange
juice. She used a mug so that she could better
mix the grainy white stuff into the juice. Finally
she had it in suspension and experienced the strong
impulse to wash it down the sink. Her hands were
trembling. If she accidentally dropped it, that
would be that. Finally she carried the mug in
to Beverly, walking as slowly as she was able. She
began to cry and stopped to snuffle back her
tears, as she knew crying would anger Beverly.
If this was going to be their very last time together, she
did not want to taint it.
  Beverly reached out. Suzanne slowly handed it
to her. Beverly tasted it and made a face.
"Ecch." However, she smiled wanly and drank
it a gulp at a time. She reminded Suzanne
of someone trying to cure hiccups by taking small
sips of water. She took only sips but she
kept at it, gagging once, pausing then for a
minute. Finally she consumed the whole mug of
drugged juice.
  "There." She sighed. "Help me lie down."
  "Do you want the music on?" Suzanne
watched her mother carefully. Beverly could still throw
up, and then it would be over. They could not go through
getting all those drugs a second time. Her
body might well reject the poison she was
feeding it, and then Beverly would have to give this up.
  "Let it ..."
  She took her mother's hand and held it. Their
hands were exactly the same size, the same
shape. She might never see or touch
her mother's hand again. For a while, it seemed as if
the pills would have no effect, and Suzanne had
half an hour of hope that it was not going to happen.
Perhaps Elena had mistaken the chemicals or the
dosages. Beverly hummed occasionally along with the
opera. She nodded to Suzanne and then freed her
hand and petted Mao, who had moved to a position
against her side. Her eyes fluttered shut,
opened again, looked around once and again, then slowly
the lids slid down. Her breathing grew more
regular and deeper. Suzanne stared, wondering
how she could tell the difference between normal
sleep, for she often saw Beverly dozing
open-mouthed in the daytime, and a mortal sleep.
Suzanne would have liked to turn off the opera, but
she did not want to wake Beverly by moving around the
room. It felt as if it continued for an hour, but
it was only twenty minutes. Then the conclusion
came and silence arrived. She took Beverly's
slack hand in her own. It felt a little cooler
than normal and she chafed it gently. A
shapely hand, still. Beverly had always been vain about
her hands but never had a manicure in her life,
never wore polish.
  More or less silence. It was Saturday night
and cars were careening up the hill and down again,
local kids. A dog was barking hysterically.
Someone was walking along the street calling a
cat. "Max! Max!" Mournful appeal. She
imagined calling after her mother, "Beverly!
Beverly! Come back." It did not seem
possible, what was happening, that she should be sitting
here holding her mother's hand as her mother was leaving her,
steadily, gradually, moving beyond the sound of her
voice and the touch of her hand. She gazed at
Beverly's gaunt face and felt she had never
loved her as much. It could not end like this. The slight
curve in her mother's nose, the way one eyebrow
was more arched than the other, the softness of her
unpierced earlobes, her high, fine cheekbones
--all to be lost? She could not bear it. She had
not spent enough time looking at Beverly, not enough time.
  Beverly was breathing more deeply. She began
to snore. Suzanne rose and paced into the living
room and back, into the kitchen and back. She had
eaten nothing for supper except the same toast and
broth Beverly had consumed. She was not hungry,
just anxious and exhausted. Coffee was what she
wanted, but she was too wired already and could not make
herself stand at the stove and make it. She
kept wanting to shake Beverly by the shoulder and bring
her back to consciousness, to demand a response.
How could she let her mother slip away like this,
further and further from her?
  She decided she could run upstairs briefly
to check on Marta, see if she needed anything.
Marta did not know what they were doing; it was better
if she didn't. Why implicate her, if
anything went wrong? But Marta would think it
strange if she did not appear. She was sitting
at the kitchen table with her feet propped up.
Suzanne remarked, "Your ankles look
swollen."
  "They are. All of me feels swollen."
She patted her belly. "I keep thinking at
least it's almost over, it's almost time. I'd
forgotten how long the last month is--twice the
normal length. Obviously I'm not having any
more children after this. I just want to deliver her
safely. I trust Helen. She's been my
gynecologist for twenty-two years."
  "I should get back. I just wanted to check in
with you. Beverly's having a bad night."
  "Don't leave. Stay. Let's just hang for a
while."
  "Not too long. Beverly isn't well. She
has an appointment this week, Tuesday. The
doctor wants to check if she had another
ministroke, perhaps without us realizing it." She
felt awkward and miserable lying to Marta, but she
had to protect Marta and herself--and Elena. The
fiction must be built up. "I have to get back
down there. I don't like her being alone when she's
so weak."
  When she returned downstairs, Beverly was still
snoring. Her breathing seemed slower. Mao
raised his head to look at her. She imagined he
was reproaching her. She very gently touched her
mother's cool, slightly moist hand. Her mother's
hands had always been dry and comfortingly warm--like
Jake's, she thought suddenly--but since
Beverly's stroke, they were often cold. She
resumed her seat beside the bed. She was exhausted but
did not want to take her gaze off Beverly's
face. She still somehow hoped that Beverly would open
her eyes, no matter how angry and disappointed
she would be if the pills did not work. It was just after
eleven. Suzanne wondered again if there were
anything she could have said or promised or offered that
would have kept Beverly with her.
  Beverly's breathing grew shallower and less
frequent. Her mouth had fallen open.
Suzanne no longer hesitated to get up and
move around the room, for she doubted anything she
did was likely to wake her mother now. The only
question was whether Beverly would slip into a coma, which in
itself would simply send her to the hospital where they
would discover the residue of the pills in her, or
whether she would, as she had begged them, die at
last. She hoped Elena had gotten the amounts
and the drug mixture right. She should have checked it.
Sitting there beside the unconscious Beverly, she
could not believe that she had not checked out Elena's
results. She had simply, blindly accepted
them, because the act they were committing was too painful for
her to deal with in the detail required to confirm
Elena's conclusions. She was ashamed. Again she
sat beside the bed and held Beverly's inert hand in
her own, hoping that on some level her mother could
feel her presence and be comforted by it. She spoke
now and then, "Mother, it's me. I'm here with you.
It's Suzanne." She spoke just in case
Beverly could sense her presence or the affection
she was trying to project. She sat holding the
limp hand and weeping, slow tears flowing down
until her face was swollen and her blouse, wet
on the bodice, more tears than she thought her body
could hold. The tears seeped out and out.
  When Elena arrived, just after twelve-thirty,
Beverly's breathing was slower, shallower, but
ongoing. "I'll take over," Elena said. "Just
let me change out of my work clothes and I'll
sit with her."
  "I think I should stay."
  "You look exhausted. At least get
undressed and lie down for half an hour.
I'll wake you if anything seems to be
happening. I'd like to be alone with her for a while."
  Reluctantly and eagerly at the same time,
Suzanne backed out of the room and went
to undress and lie down. She did not intend
to sleep. But she did.

                 
                Elena

  Elena looked in on her mother. Suzanne had
put on the flannel nightgown with little red
posies Rachel had given her and was lying on her
bed with a law journal open under her
loosened hand. She had, as Elena hoped, dozed
off.
  It was a quarter after one. Now or never, she
thought. She took her promise to her grandmother
seriously, perhaps religiously. She doubted if
Rachel would understand her use of the word, but it felt
sacred to her. To untether Grandma and set her
free. Elena did not exactly believe in an
afterlife, but she thought something of everyone remained in
the room, in the wind, in the minds of those who had
loved them. She loved Beverly. No one else
in her life had ever cared for her as wholly, as
sweetly, as nonjudgmentally as her grandmother did.
There was a price for such love, and she was about
to pay it.
  She took a plastic freezer bag into the
sickroom where Beverly had been lying since
May. It always smelled of stale body odors,
but she was not squeamish. Gently she lifted
Beverly's head. How light she was now. Beverly
was breathing hoarsely and did not wake. Elena
doubted if she ever would, unless her stomach was
pumped now, but she might remain like this. Dr.
Kevorkian would know if Beverly was really dying,
but not Suzanne and not herself. She kissed her
grandma on the forehead, and then on her cheeks.
She wanted to kiss her lips, but Beverly's
mouth was open and slack. Then Elena fitted the
plastic bag over Beverly's face and tied it
under the chin, tightly. She had read that sometimes
unconscious patients would instinctively paw
at the bag, trying to remove it. Beverly did
not. Elena hoped she had it tight enough. It
moved with Beverly's breath. Elena was unsure
whether she had done it correctly. If only
she could ask someone, but the world was asleep, and there
was no one to ask. Elena watched. It was her
duty to go the last steps her mother could not take.
She took her grandmother's limp hand and kissed it.
Mao got up, stretched, and went to her to be
petted.
  "Even though she left you to Mother, I'd take
you with me, if I knew where I was going, understand?"
She rubbed under his chin, the way he liked best.
"Roommates are always iffy, but it's time for me
to move on. If I get a good place to live,
I'll come get you. That's a promise."
  She had thought Beverly might jerk or kick
or give some sign she was suffocating, but she
did not. Instead, the breathing stopped,
started again with a gasp and then once again stopped.
  "Grandma, go in peace. Let yourself go," she
said softly, again and again, stroking the limp hand that
hung out from the blanket.
  The breathing stopped, started again, stopped. She
touched Beverly's neck. There was no pulse.
She waited, holding the limp cold hand. The
breathing did not resume. She smelled urine.
In the morning, she would clean up. Carefully she
lifted Beverly's head again and took off the
plastic bag and put it in the garbage. Then she
thought better about that and instead burned it in a
flame from the gas stove, holding the corner with
kitchen tongs. That residue she flushed down the
toilet. She did the same with the printout from the
summer. Let Me Die Before I Wake
she carried down into the basement and stuffed way into a
box containing her summer clothes. She would dispose
of it tomorrow. Then she washed her hands, not of the act,
but out of caution.

  When she came out of the bathroom, Suzanne was
awake and waiting to use it. She noticed neither of
them used Beverly's bathroom. "Mother, I think
she died about fifteen minutes ago."
  "Why didn't you get me up? I should have
stayed awake."
  "It happened so gradually, I was sitting beside
her, and I didn't even see it. Her breathing just
got shallower and shallower and slower and slower and then
I realized it had stopped. I never saw it
happen. I just looked at her and realized she
wasn't breathing any longer."
  "It was peaceful like that?"
  "I didn't even see it happen."
  Suzanne went into Beverly's room and bent
over her. She touched Beverly's face. "She's
getting cold already." She picked up Mao and
carried him off to her room. "We must go to bed, so
we can discover the body in the morning. We have
to get rid of those bottles."
  "I took them away with me when I left. I
left them in a Dumpster on Beacon Hill."
  "Thank you." Suzanne turned, still holding
Mao, and kissed her on the cheek. "Thank you,
sweetheart. I love you."
  Elena wondered for a moment if her mother had
guessed what she had done; she doubted it. No
one would ever know. Except if she loved someone
intensely and she trusted them, maybe she
would tell them. But she knew and was proud of herself.
She had come through for Beverly, she had come through.
She was a better person than she had been, even
if most of society would never think so. She was
ready to leave home again and plunge back into her
life. She had kept her most important
promise. She had dared to keep her word to her
grandmother. Two small tears ran down her
face, and she brushed them away. She gazed
back at Grandma lying there, the empty body, and
she thought she could feel Beverly thanking her for
release, for silence, for the end.

                 
       Suzanne: A Year Later

  Suzanne placed the yahrzeit candle for her
mother in the bathtub, for fear of fire. Besides, as
she admitted to herself, she found it beautiful
to wake in the night and go into the bathroom lit by the
small flickering of the candle in its glass. She
woke several times that night and lay awake from
five on. Today Karla was coming with her daughter
Rosella and the twins. Rosella's husband,
Tyrone, couldn't take off work. They were to arrive
from Brooklyn by noon, so that they could all go to the
cemetery for the unveiling and be done before sundown,
as it was Friday. Elena was going to meet them at
the cemetery. Rachel had already arrived and was
sleeping in her old room--sleeping far better
than her mother, as Suzanne could tell when she
checked on her. It was ridiculous to look in on
Rachel as if she were a baby, but having her in the
house was a precious treat, making it impossible
for Suzanne to resist a glimpse of her
sleeping daughter lying on her side clutching the
pillow to her, as once she had clutched a stuffed
rabbit.

  Marta drove the van, with Rachel and
Karla's entire family onboard. Suzanne
held the squirming Emily on her lap. She was
blond like Marta, chubby, avid, curious, and
had just begun to talk, more or less. She was still
crawling everywhere and in bursts she struggled to get
down. She was used to being held by Suzanne, so that
was no problem, but all the people excited her.
Rachel began making faces at her till she was
wildly giggling. "Cool it a little, if you can,"
Marta said over her shoulder.
  Karla, sitting up front with Marta, turned
to beam at the baby. "Such a darling girl! How
lucky you are. I was forty when I adopted my
first little girl. I wish she could be here today."
  "You know Suwanda can't be coming east all the time,
Mama," Rosella said, leaning on the back of
Suzanne's seat. "She's paying off her condo,
and San Diego is plenty expensive. She
thought the world of Aunt Beverly, so she'd come if
she could."
  Suzanne began to wish she had driven her own
car, but then she would have had half the relatives in
it anyhow. She just wanted to be quiet and find
her core, not to lose this odd ritual connection with
Beverly. Rachel was looking at her and understood.
  "People, I think we should start to get into the mood.
We should be thinking about Grandma. This is a
memorial for her. To show respect for the dead and
to remember her and thus keep her alive in our
lives." It was Rachel's rabbi voice,
fuller, more commanding than her normal speaking
voice. Suzanne was just getting used to the change
that would come over Rachel when she was being official,
when she was on duty. Suzanne was grateful
to lapse into silence. "Rosella," Rachel
turned around. "Would you like to hold Emily for a
while and give my mother a rest?"
  Suzanne thanked Rachel with her eyes and
handed Emily to Rosella. The twins set up a
clamor, but Suzanne was able to close her eyes
and concentrate. A year and a day since Beverly
had left them. The pain of that night had never
healed. It was still raw within her, but she could not
believe Elena and she had done the wrong thing.
Beverly would never have acquiesced in continuing. It
would have been a long quarrel, not good for any of
them. But the raw wound persisted and the guilt. It
would never leave her.
  A year ago, she had buried her mother. At
least the cemetery was not far. She had been back
twenty times to the grave. Now came the unveiling
of the monument. As they drove in under the metal
archway, Suzanne stirred herself to give
directions. A car was already there--Elena's.
Suzanne admitted to herself she had expected
Elena to be late, but she understood when she saw
Jaime and Elena together at the grave site.
Jaime was never late. Under his charge, Elena
made appointments even with her mother and kept them.
  Suzanne had found it hard to take
when Elena had moved in with him, but she had
gradually got used to it. At least she liked and
trusted Jaime, which was more than she could say for
most of Elena's past choices. He was wearing a
suit, a dark suit in which he was radiant.
Elena was also in a suit. She had several
styles now: her former flash at the restaurant,
drab student outfits for her classes, and
lately a new conservative wardrobe Jaime
must have picked out. She suspected those outfits
had to do with Elena's image of herself as a therapist
--and the need to accompany Jaime to various
functions.
  Elena was standing over the grave talking
to Beverly about Mao, when Suzanne came up.
Elena had her grandmother's cat. As always
Suzanne was a little dazzled by her own daughter.
She and Jaime were a striking and gorgeous
couple. Suzanne sighed. Jaime had his law
degree and was clerking for a justice of the Supreme
Judicial Court. That was a year's gig, and
then what? She could not tell if Elena was
seriously interested in him, nor could she ask her,
nor could she guess from Elena's attitude.
She opened her hands mentally and let the matter
drop. Elena and she had a warmer relationship these
days, but she could never presume on their new
cordiality to pry.
  As they all shuffled up to the site where a bit
of canvas still hung over the stone she had ordered,
Rachel took charge. Suzanne remembered
meeting her when she returned from Israel
deeply, darkly tanned, leaner and more defined.
Her eyes looked bigger and greener against her dark
skin. Her hair was cropped short to a halo of
curls. That assurance, that hardening Suzanne had
noticed from the moment Rachel got off the plane
was still with her. The daughter Suzanne had sent off
was not the daughter she got back, but one who was at
once less and more than she had been.
  "Judaism gives us great leeway in what
we think happens after death. We are not required
to believe in an afterlife or reincarnation or
heaven or hell or anything in between. We are
required to respect and remember the dead. We
are here to share our loss of Beverly, our grandmother,
our mother, our sister, our aunt, our friend. When I
look at this family, I see a legacy she
left us. We are a multicultural,
multiracial family, and a monument
to the risks she took and the bravery she
demonstrated in her civil rights work and in her
organizing for those who needed her. She sought
justice, and to go on seeking justice is her
bequest to all of us. Justice in the courts,
justice in our religion, justice on the job,
justice in the streets and in the legislatures of
our land. Justice for everyone, not just the
privileged or the fortunate. That is Beverly's
legacy to us. We have lost someone dear and
precious. Ha-makom yenahem otcha
v'otach. May the Eternal One comfort you and
may being in this place together today bring comfort to all of
us." She pulled the cloth from the stone, black
marble engraved with Peh Nun, Here Lies,
Beverly's Hebrew name, Batsheva bat
Shimone v'Ranit, her English name, Beverly
Blume, and her dates in both calendars.
  Rachel was reciting the Twenty-third Psalm
in Hebrew, printed phonetically on the sheets
she had handed out. Then she launched into the El
Malay Rachamim, while they more or less
joined in. Suzanne still remembered it from the
funeral. Compassion. They--she and Elena--had
tried to demonstrate compassion to Beverly. She
would never rest quite easy in her mind that they had done
the right thing, but at least they had done what Beverly
had asked of them, however difficult.
Rachamim was such a beautiful word, but so hard
sometimes to act upon. Compassion, pity. It seemed
larger than those English words. There had been no
inquest. Beverly's primary stroke doctor had
signed the death certificate after a few
perfunctory questions, as Elena and she stood
holding hands in the rigor of fear. They had
buried Beverly the next day.
  Now together they recited the Mourners' Kaddish,
which Suzanne had memorized during the last year.
She had managed to get to the nearest acceptable
synagogue once a week to say it as it was
supposed to be recited, in a minyan, but all
other days, she had said it in her bedroom upon
rising, and that was the best she could do. Respect and
remembrance. That she had given, freely. Her
eyes flooded briefly with tears and she snuffled
them back.
  Rachel had brought a bag of stones so that those
who had not thought of it could each have a stone to place
on Beverly's grave. "Here at the bet
ha-olam, the permanent place, we
place a remembrance on the matz-evah to show
we have come and paid our respect." Flowers were never
used. A stone lasted. Besides, Beverly had not
been a flower sort of person. She had never
planted a garden or tended one in her life, and
she was not the sort of woman to whom men brought
flowers or who would ever buy them for herself. Men had
taken her out to dinner and on an occasional trip;
had brought her bottles of wine and schnapps; had
given her scarves and costume jewelry. And one
child. But never flowers.
  She only wished, looking over to Jaime and
Elena standing with less than an inch between them, that she
had Jake with her. She had argued his appeal and
he was out while it was decided. Still, he had not
completely forgiven her for failing him, as he saw
it. He had come out of prison wan and haggard.
She had told him the truth about Beverly's death,
and perhaps that made some difference. He was still dealing with
what had happened to him. On spring break she would
fly out to see him, and then they would resume being
lovers or they would not. She tried to avoid thinking
about it but did not succeed. She needed him now, but
she had not been with him when he needed her. They would
begin tentatively and then they would see what had
survived between them. She put the stone she had
brought with her on the top of the black marble marker.
"Good-bye," she said softly. "Good-bye,
Mother."
  She waited until Rachel stood alone again
and then she went up to her younger daughter and kissed
her on the mouth. "Thank you."
  Rachel looked mildly surprised. "You
liked the little service? I wanted to keep it
simple."
  "I want to thank you for putting it together for me,
what I never saw before. That I'm actually doing
the same thing my mother was, in a different context.
Justice. Thank you, Rachel. That was healing."
  Rachel took her hand. "That's good to hear. This
year, I do more and more services, but sometimes I
feel like a fraud. I'm pretending to be a
rabbi, 'cause I'm still a student and I know how
much I don't know yet. But you make me feel
as if I'm real."
  "Oh, you're real, sweetheart." Suzanne
looked at her family straggling toward the van
and the car. "We're all real and we try."
  "A sixteenth-century rabbi said that keeping the
precepts of our parents is more
important than saying Kaddish for them."
  Suzanne smiled for the first time that day. "I
don't care what some sixteenth-century rabbi
said, Rachel. I care what you say. And you've
given me some meaning in this. A sense of continuity
with her. I can promise her, we will remember."
She took Rachel's hand and pulled her along
to catch up with Elena, whose arm she took, so that
they left together, her between her daughters as Karla
walked with her own little family. Away they went
slowly from the place where she had left what
remained of her mother, except for memories and the
quest for justice. Maxine's appeal was going
forward even as she wasted away in Framingham
Prison, and Jake was free at last.
Suzanne would win that appeal. The trial
transcript revealed that the judge had been
wildly biased. She would go on teaching and seeking
justice, no matter how flawed and partial.
Justice in the world, but for each other in intimacy,
mercy and as much kindness as she could muster.

               THE END