A Town of Empty Rooms (24 page)

Serena's heart tightened. Her mother had been gifted at languages — French, Spanish, German, Russian, a little girl growing up in the Central Valley of California, the floor fans sitting like airplane propellers in her living room to cut through the heat, Sophie's own mother stricken with vertigo when she was twelve, bedridden, and her father a constant card player, distant. They were second-generation from Russia but would have nothing to do with Judaism, except for Chanukah, when her father liked to gamble. Sophie began learning languages when she was a child, when her mother became ill. When she was supposed to be selling gum and soda and bread to the people of the town after school,
sitting by the register, she was instead teaching herself two languages, sending away for the Berlitz program, and she had mastered German and French by the time she graduated high school. Sophie's mother had not appreciated her linguistic abilities. “Don't sound smarter than the boys,” she said to her daughter.

Sophie stood along the wire fence of the playground, the children running on the hard gray cement. She was shy. She was not good at the games they played. That was how their mother described her childhood: “They did not know why I would want to speak languages they did not know. What was I saying? I was saying nothing.
I would like some milk. That ball is fast. Recess is almost over.”
Why did they not talk to her? Because she stood by the fence and muttered in French? Because Sophie's own mother was incapacitated and they could see that sorrow on her? Sophie told Serena how she remembered standing against the fence at school, her mother in bed. She said she didn't feel outcast but superior, knowing the languages no one else did. “I felt bigger than them,” she said. “
I
was going to fly over the ocean to Paris, I was going to sit in a café and converse with people in French, in German, in anything I wanted — ”

“You thought big even then,” Serena once said to her.

“I did until my mother died,” said Sophie. “Then I felt like nothing.”

Sophie had plans. She did not have a scholarship to pay for college, but she moved to the Fairfax area of Los Angeles when she was eighteen, lived with an aunt, started Cal State Northridge, tried to work at May Company and go to school, could not get to her classes in time after her shift, stopped working, ran out of money, dropped out, started again; then her mother died suddenly when Sophie was nineteen.

Serena had always wanted to hear this story — how Sophie tried to go to college on her own, that supreme effort. It was the time when her mother had tried to imagine herself as someone new. “I was the best in my class,” Sophie had told her. “I sat in the front row. My teachers loved me. I was on the way to becoming a diplomat. The French embassy. All my class presentations were about what I needed to know for that position. Champagne. I researched manners. Place settings. I asked to work at the perfume counter so I could learn about brands.
Chanel. I was preparing for the embassy dinners. My mother was dead. I did not think. I moved forward. It was the money, darling. I couldn't make enough. I fell asleep during class. One time the bus was late so I missed a final. I failed, and I knew everything! The professor wouldn't let me make it up.”

She told these stories to Serena growing up, and Serena was moved by this, her mother's living on the couch of her aunt Ruby in Fairfax, sitting in the front of the classroom, raising her hand, discoursing on champagne in French. It was as though her mother were her, then, or Dawn, but better; she was sitting in front of the room without any encouragement, spraying strangers' wrists with expensive perfume and picturing herself in another country; her optimism then sounded boundless, extravagant.

Now she was here. Their mother was slight, smaller than Serena. Serena sat beside her mother, feeling physically like a man. Her mother had always taken up a minute amount of space; after she had stopped going to college and met their father, she had spent her life stepping aside for him, and this need echoed in her very posture; she sat, knees together, hands folded, at one corner of the couch.

“Do you want anything to eat?” asked Serena.

“No,” said Sophie. She smoothed her hair down and looked around the room. “Where's your sister?”

Serena stood up and walked across the room. She felt like an executioner.

“Mom, she had to go,” she said.

Her mother looked up at her. “Left? Where?”

She took in a breath. “She went by herself to Paris. There was . . . a mix-up. A problem with the ticket. She wants you to stay here for the weekend. Which is great, which I would love — ”

“She went — by herself?”

“Well, yes.”

“That's not funny.”

“Mom. It 's not a joke — ”

She tried to take her mother's hand, but Sophie didn't let her.

“No. She had to go alone. Something — ” Now she would lie for Dawn, and how smoothly her voice slid into it. “There was an emergency — ”

“I thought I was going with Dawn to the red carpet.”

“So did I, but apparently — ”

Her mother stood up. “I wanted to
go,
” she cried. “I know French. I could have been her interpreter — ”

“I know. She said you could go with her another time.” She'd better, Serena thought. “Soon.”

“What emergency? What was going on? I could have helped with the emergency — ”

“Mom! I don't know. She said she had to leave. You can go with her soon! Next month, maybe! You can spend the weekend here — ”

Her mother sat down. She was breathing heavily. “I did something,” said her mother. She set her dark eyes on Serena, expectantly.

“No,” said Serena. “She had to work. I want to spend time with you. You can stay with me.”

At Saks, she may have been a thief, but now she was a horrible liar. Serena's head hurt. Her mother was still wearing her sweater emblazoned with French words, and slowly she slipped it off, folded it, and placed it on the couch. Then Sophie sat, rubbing her hands against one another.

“Next month,” said her mother, softly. “I can go next month.” She sighed. “So I'm stuck here,” said her mother. “Homeless. I'm a homeless vagabond in — what, Georgia — ”

“This is North Carolina,” said Serena, suddenly wishing that she had not agreed to this. “You are not a vagabond, for god's sake — ”

“Why not?”

“Because you're an honored guest!”

Sophie got up and walked around the house, to the porch; she was checking. Serena folded her arms and waited.

Sophie rubbed her face with her hands. When she glanced up at Serena, her face was calm. “Thank you, honey,” she said. “I'm sorry. Maybe I would like some tea.”

She brought her mother some tea, and Sophie sipped it. They sat on the couch for a while in silence. There was the feeling that Sophie had been here for days already, that they had endured some injury together; there was, for a few minutes, only the call of an egret puncturing the air.

“What happened to your house?” Serena asked. “Why are you living with Dawn now?”

“My house,” said Sophie. “I couldn't live in it alone. I kept hearing him.”

“Doing what?”

Her mother smoothed her hair and looked at her.

“Walking around. I woke up at night and heard knocking.”

Serena looked at her mother's small hands folded precisely. “Maybe it was a dream,” she said.

“It was my home for forty years, and I couldn't live there. It was where
we
lived. I kept waiting for him to walk out of the bathroom, to go into the garage, mucking around with his train sets, to leave his dishes in the sink. I couldn't stay there alone.”

“I understand,” said Serena, softly.

“I didn't know where I wanted to live. Dawn said come live in her place. I was in a daze. I could barely open a can. One day, I opened my eyes and I was living behind her house. It happened that fast.”

“And do you like it?” asked Serena.

“I don't know. It's about seven hundred square feet, and all my furniture is crammed into it. She thinks it's cute, having me there. Look, we have two cats and a grandma in the backyard! I can barely move around. I never know when it's the right time to ‘drop by.'” She lifted her hands in air quotes. “She had this romantic idea of Grandma, but now I always intrude. Or I come at the right time for chores. Mom, here's a broom! Mom, can you scrub out this pan? Sometimes I think she just fries sausages to give me an activity. She thinks I want to spend all day watching the kids, as though that would be fun.”

“Isn't it?” asked Serena.

Her mother leaned toward her. “All right. For a little while. After, say, an hour, it's kind of a torture. I can do ten minutes of Polly Pocket. Then they should just have the kids play with the prisoners at Guantanamo. Now, that would make them speak.”

Serena wasn't quite sure if her mother was kidding or not. She decided, for her own benefit, that perhaps she was. “Then why did you move?” asked Serena.

“She asked me. She convinced me. ‘You'll get to know your grandchildren!' I never know when to go over there or when she'll shoo me back to my house.”

“That is hard,” said Serena, trying to sound gentle.

“Well. At least she was thinking of me.”

“I was thinking of you,” said Serena. “Live here.”

Sophie considered the house and laughed. “I can't live here.”

“Why not?”

They looked around the small house; there was no need to answer this.

“I was trying to get to you — ” said Serena.

“Trying? How hard were you trying?”

“Didn't you get my calls? Every day, almost, every other day? Then I stopped trying.”

“You should have sent a telegram,” said Sophie.

“No one answers phones at your house?” asked Serena.

“A telegram would have made me feel special.”

“Okay,” said Serena, confused. Her mother had never before asked for a telegram. She felt she had fallen short of expectations in a basic way. Her mother looked happier now, having gotten that off her chest. A telegram.

“Well, what do you have to do today?” her mother asked.

“The kids are out in about two hours. I have to go to the Temple, to do some — work.”

“I want to make money,” her mother said.

“What?”

“A lot of money. You girls — or Dawn, at least — made it. Your father made some money. I never did.”

“Good for you,” Serena said, clapping the couch pillow with her palm. “Good, Mom!”

“I don't have enough,” her mother said.

“What do you mean?”

“Not for Los Angeles. It is ridiculous. What does Social Security buy you there? Your father never bought life insurance. He never thought he would die.”

Serena was quiet for a moment, absorbing that comment. “Mom, do you have enough money?”

“If I stop buying meat,” Sophie laughed.

She stared at her mother, ice in her throat. “You're kidding.”

She was dizzy. How had her mother ended up crammed into the tiny apartment behind her sister's house? She wanted to send her mother money, to buy her a house that would make her feel as large as she yearned to feel, but at the moment, they did not have even enough extra cash for an airline ticket to bring her here.

“So,” Serena said after a while, “what do you want to do?”

Her mother leaned forward, her face brightening. “Peer counseling,” she said. “At the senior center.”

“Oh,” said Serena. “ Who's — ”

“
I
am doing the counseling. My specialty seems to be recent widows. The first month. One does not need a degree for this — ”

She looked at her mother, surprised. “Mom. You're doing this? That's great.”

“I just started. I am a font of wisdom, apparently. I say ‘one day at a time' with great conviction. I don't get ruffled when they are unable to get out of bed or eat, or when they decide they shouldn't have married the man after all.” Sophie sat up, clasping her hands. “I go in wearing my navy suit from Macy's and my bone pumps, and we sit in a little room in the senior center, and, you know, sometimes we have a little group, four or five of us, and I pass a rain stick and one person holds it and says what she feels and we all listen until then she passes it, and somehow I create an atmosphere so that they all want to hold the rain stick, and we hear about how Alfred was a good kisser and how Manny taught his wife to play golf and how Elton left for a year and then came back and how one woman wished Matthew would leave but he didn't — ” She paused, a little breathless. “And then they thank me.”

Sophie was still, her gaze remote, as though she were trying to hear the echoes of her own wisdom — then her eyes settled on Serena. “Maybe there's some sort of certificate I can get,” Sophie said.

“Mom, you should look into it,” said Serena. Her mother a peer counselor? Serena was more used to her mother's describing herself as a duchess fleeing the Inquisition. But her mother had done this — it was as though she had opened a box she found in a closet and discovered a new talent. “ We can find out — ”

“
I
can find out,” her mother said, and touched her hair.

Chapter Thirteen

THE RABBI WAS SITTING IN his office, waiting for her. The idea of him there, with no one, made her restless. The phone rang again; Serena jumped to answer it.

“We need you.”

“Who is this?”