Being Esther (11 page)

Esther hoped Miss Smaller flickered across the bus driver's mind when he passed her stop. Perhaps her coworkers phoned, and perhaps somebody even suggested checking on her. But people get busy. It's possible Miss Smaller had talked at work about moving to Arizona, Florida, someplace warm, and everyone assumed she'd finally gone ahead and done it. No need to give notice. Not for a job like that, standing behind a counter selling lipstick and cheap perfume. For days, her body lay undiscovered.

At least Esther doesn't have to worry about that. She and Lorraine have their system. The day she doesn't answer, Lorraine will call for help. There will be no time for the foul stench of death to betray her. She will exit neatly, quietly. But what if Lorraine goes first? Had they ever considered the fate of the one who will be left behind? She slaps her forehead, laughing in disbelief.

Even after Miss Smaller's death, Esther and Lorraine hadn't considered the flaw in their plan. Instead, Lorraine had asked Esther, “What would you say about me?”

They were sitting in the courtyard, beside the statue of Saint Francis. “Say?” Esther looked quizzically at her friend.

“You know. After I'm gone.”

Esther glared at her friend. “What kind of question is that?”
She and Lorraine had known each other since high school. What was there to say? Since retiring, Lorraine had been studying Italian and serving meals to the homeless. She'd roped Esther into a writing class at the community center. She baked elaborate birthday cakes for her nieces, and hazelnut tortes for special occasions. “Well,” Esther hesitated. “I would say . . . I suppose I would say. I would say that you don't share your recipes.”

Lorraine's face collapsed. “This isn't the time for jokes.”

Later, Esther phoned her friend and apologized. “The truth is, you do so much, Lorraine, that I didn't know where to begin. But should anyone ask, I'd have to say, ‘She made the most spectacular hazelnut tortes.'”

Now, waiting for her friend to call, Esther looks up from the obituaries and sees, as if for the first time, the vitamins, the sugar bowl, the ruffled edging on the blue quilted placemat. Such homely objects. Yet each has a sense of purpose. The longer she stares at them, the more they mock her with their specificity. They know what they're about. They aren't sitting around, conjuring the few taglines that might explain the meaning of their existence.

E
sther looks forward to Tuesdays, the day she and Lorraine go to the community center for “Brown Bag Journaling.”

She supposes the class is scheduled at the noon hour to give busy people the opportunity to sandwich one more activity into their day. But the idea of eating and writing at the same time doesn't appeal to her. Multitasking, they call it; Esther calls it rude. It used to be you'd pay to see someone eating fire while walking a tightrope. Now people walk or drive or stand in the checkout line at the Jewel while talking on the phone, checking e-mail, or plugging music into their ears. They text messages while shifting lanes on the Edens Expressway. The other day, Sophie kept checking her cell phone while she and Esther were having tea.

The truth is Esther manages to arrange her activities sequentially and still have time to spare. Yet the irony is how quickly time is running out.

The class was Lorraine's idea. At first, Esther resisted, declaring, “I'm not a writer.”

“You'll learn,” Lorraine countered.

Dubiously, Esther shook her head. She's never kept a diary. She's never even been surveyed to state her choice in a presidential race (unconditional Democrat), or to say whether or not she favors riverboat gambling (she does not), or whether she believes in global warming (as if that were a matter of faith). Until five years ago, Esther had been Marty's wife. Now she is a widow.

“I'm too old to learn,” Esther said.

“It's therapeutic,” Lorraine insisted.

“Says who?” Esther asked with annoyance. “Dr. Phil?”

Since Lorraine retired as a legal secretary she's become an aficionado of daytime TV. Oprah. Judge Judy. She quotes them all. After Marty died, she gave Esther a notebook. “It's to write down your feelings,” she said.

Though Esther isn't convinced of the remedial powers of writing, she agreed to the journaling class when Lorraine said, “If you don't get out more, that daughter of yours is going to put you in assisted living. You'll be playing bingo instead of writing stories.”

Now Esther finds herself seated in a classroom that was last decorated by a teacher who'd taken Black History Month to heart. Fraying pictures of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks are taped to the cinder-block wall. A faded copy of the “Dream” speech is tacked to a crumbling bulletin board. The students are gathered around a large round table, with the teacher, a young thing Esther mistook for another student on the first day, democratically positioned in their midst. She is instructing them to close their eyes. “You're six years old,” she says, her voice soft, hypnotic. “You're in your mother's kitchen. What do you see?” She wants details. Smells. Colors. Sounds. Every little knickknack.

When Esther closes her eyes all she can see is the tattoo on the teacher's wrist, the severe eyeglasses that mask a pretty face. She must be Sophie's age, twenty-five, maybe twenty-eight. I dare you to try this when you're eighty-five, Esther wants to say. Try conjuring a kitchen you haven't thought about in decades.

Then out of nowhere, a faded yellow linoleum floor appears, along with a round oak table and four mismatched chairs. Her mother is on hands and knees scrubbing the floor. The room
smells of coffee and Spic and Span. Then Esther sees a pink cut-glass bowl filled with fruit. Her father is sitting at the kitchen table after dinner sipping hot tea from a tall glass and peeling the skin off an apple with a pearl-handled knife. The peel falls away in one long, continuous swirl.

After class, Esther and Lorraine head to Wing Yee's and settle into their favorite booth, the one that flanks the window but still affords a clear view of the fish tank at the far end of the room. After the waitress sets down two cups and a pot of tea, Lorraine glances around the room then back at Esther and says, “Why are we here?”

“What are you talking about?” Esther's voice wavers between irritation and concern. “We come here every week.”

“I know, I know. But maybe we should have brought our lunch, like the others.” She asks if Esther noticed that the woman in the pink sweatshirt brought an apple, a sandwich, three Fig Newtons, and a bottle of water. “Even the anorexic next to me brought something,” Lorraine says.

Esther, who had taken stock of all the lunches, shakes her head and asks Lorraine which she'd prefer, “Carrot sticks and a carton of yogurt, or chicken chow mein with fried rice?”

“But people will think we're standoffish,” Lorraine says.

“Let them.” Esther shoots her friend a baleful look. “We're both eighty-five years old. We can do as we please.”

“I suppose you're right,” Lorraine sighs, as she slips her chopsticks out of their paper wrapper. “Still.”

“Still, nothing. Now tell me what you wrote.”

“Not much,” Lorraine confesses. “I could see my mother peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink. She was wearing a full apron over a housedress. There was a yellow clock above the stove that
had stopped telling time at 7:25. My mother never fixed it. I don't know why. It never even occurred to me that she could fix it. Or get a new one. Funny, what comes back. Seven twenty-five. After all these years.”

The waitress brings their order and Lorraine fills their cups with jasmine tea. “How about you?”

Esther describes the smell of detergent, the sight of her father peeling an apple. “That all came back. But honestly, Lorraine.” She pauses, not sure how to express an uneasy feeling that's taken hold of her. “Honestly, I think it's easier to predict the future than to remember the past.”

Lorraine arches a perfectly plucked eyebrow, waiting for Esther to explain. This would be how she looked taking dictation, steno pad propped in her lap, pencil poised, waiting on Mr. Stein's every word. Like now, her lipstick would have been perfect; every silver-blond hair would have known its place.

“The problem,” Esther continues, “is that my future is too predictable.” She asks if Lorraine remembers the ads that promised no surprises at Holiday Inn. “Somehow, knowing exactly what to expect, before you arrived, was supposed to be comforting. What I'm trying to say is that I'd delight in a bit of surprise. Today, for example, I knew before we sat down that you would order the chicken chow mein with fried rice, and I would order the vegetable egg foo young, and that we would exclaim, when our plates arrived, that next time we'll branch out and try something new.” She runs a fork through her food, as if it might present itself as something different. Then she sets her fork down and sinks back into the booth. “Even before we arrived, I could see us sitting here by the window, with you facing the fish tank because it was your turn for that, and we'd be bickering all the way to the arrival of the fortune cookies.”

Lorraine grips a piece of chicken between the pincers of her chopsticks (which she can manage, unlike Esther, whose hands are too hobbled by arthritis). Slowly, she brings it to her mouth and chews. At last, she looks over at Esther and says, “When was the last time you stayed at a Holiday Inn?”

Esther laughs, then, realizing that Lorraine isn't joking, glares at her friend and asks, “How's the chow mein?”

Finally, Esther allows that she saw her mother on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor. And from there she'd conjured a kitchen in the Indiana Dunes. “The rich families drove to Wisconsin, to Lake Geneva, to the fancy resorts. But we spent two weeks every summer at Mrs. Zaretsky's rooming house in the Dunes. Four or five families crowded into her home, one family to a room. The men stayed in the city during the week, leaving the women and children to enjoy the fresh air and the beach. I loved the commotion, the sound of the screen door slamming, the cries of the children playing tag. And then Mrs. Zaretsky would come tearing out and yell at us to pipe down and stay away from her flowers. At any time of day, you could find a couple of women in the kitchen. Someone was always complaining that somebody, she's not naming names because that somebody knows who she is, took two eggs from her shelf in the refrigerator.” Esther pauses and stares out the window, as if those summer days were parading past the plate glass window.

“Go on,” Lorraine urges.

“Where was I?”

“Someone had taken the eggs.”

“Right! The eggs. But by the end of the day, when the cooking was done and the children had been fed, the women sat around the table gossiping, as if they hadn't spent the afternoon trading insults and accusations. I loved crouching in a corner, listening
to their stories. Sooner or later, though, someone would point a finger and say, ‘How long has she been there?'”

Esther closes her eyes and smiles. When she opens them, she says, “They called those summer places
kachaleyns.
It means ‘cook alone.' Funny, because nobody was ever alone in that kitchen.” She shrugs. “I suppose the name was meant to be ironic.”

T
he next day, while waiting for Lorraine's call, Esther takes out her journal and reads the entry in which her mother is washing the floor. “You and your floors,” she says, smiling, as if her mother were sitting right beside her. If only she could have smiled when her mother was alive. Oh, how they fought. Was there anything that didn't trigger a quarrel? Even her mother's obsession with floors became grist for Esther's anger.

Esther can still hear the pride in her mother's voice as she pronounced, about one woman or another, “Her floors are so clean, you can eat off them.” This bestowing of praise for cleanliness, as if it were really a virtue, drove Esther, whose housekeeping standards were rather lax, berserk. Once, after Esther's mother had sung a song of praise for her daughter-in-law Clara's floors, Esther set Barry in the middle of her mother's kitchen with a can of PLAY-DOH and told the toddler, “Make Nonna a cake.” When Mrs. Glass protested that she'd just washed the floor, Esther reached into her bag and handed the toddler another can of clay. At this, Mrs. Glass collapsed onto the nearest chair, opened the top three buttons of her housedress, fanned herself with her hand and waited for her dizzy spell to pass.

Now Esther makes a fresh entry in her journal. “I'm sorry,” she writes, then studies the words. Is this what the teacher had in mind when she instructed the class to write something every day? “Even one line,” she'd said, explaining how one sentence often leads to another. Esther ponders the entry, wondering whether two
words constitute a sentence. And suddenly she is writing more, her thoughts tumbling faster than she can transfer them onto the page. You were right, Ma. About so many things. Not about the floors. You and I will never agree on that, though you'll be pleased to know that my standards, though nothing like Clara's, have improved. Yet I think I understand. When you got down on your hands and knees and ran that sudsy rag across the linoleum, you were in command. You ruled from that homely room with the noisy refrigerator and the dripping faucet. You were safe there in a way you never were in the world outside the home. When you stepped outside you might get lost, and when you spoke, the only words you uttered in frustration might be in Yiddish. Then who would understand you, help you find your way back home? Even after you'd been here for more years than you'd lived there, in that place you had to flee, you felt safer in your kitchen, scrubbing the floor until it sparkled. You were safe, and by extension, so were we. This was your way of making us feel protected.