Being Esther (2 page)

While the Markels' phone rings, Esther glances at her leather book, the blur of lines running through the names. What if Sonia isn't there?

Gently, she sets the receiver back in its cradle. The last number she dialed had been reassigned, though Esther still wasn't ready to draw a line through Charlene Fink's name. And when she phoned Sadie Sherman, Emily answered, all grown-up and pleasant enough, though Esther still recalled the colicky baby who had grown into a churlish child and then an insubordinate teen. Emily informed Esther that she and her sisters were sorting through their mother's belongings. “Mom moved to assisted living last month.” Windy Shores or Cedar Hollow—the name sounds like the overnight camps the children once attended. Esther tries picturing Sadie, who'd run a successful travel agency for twenty-nine years, making lanyards or pot holders or clay pinch pots.

Esther takes a deep breath as she prepares to redial the Markels. She hopes that Sonia will be the one to pick up, though at this point it will be a relief to get anyone on the other end, even prickly old Buddy. BM, they'd called him behind his back.

The phone rings twice. Three times. Four. She is about to hang up, when someone answers. A man. “Hello!” she blurts. “This is Esther Lustig calling.” When the man doesn't reply, she repeats her name, and then, always quick on his feet (Buddy and Sonia were remarkable dancers—tango, cha-cha, rumba, you name it), Buddy cries, “Esther! Esther Lustig! Is that really you?”

Giddy with excitement, she practically bursts from her seat, as if they were rushing headlong to embrace. “I suppose it is!” she exclaims, her hand flying to her head as if to affirm her identity. Oddly, she feels reassured by the soft nimbus of hair, which is as familiar as the sound of her own voice. Then she catches her reflection in the old gilt-framed mirror. There she is, the same basic model: green eyes, coppery-blond hair, broad forehead, and the full mouth, which she has been painting the same shade of red since college. With her free hand, she adjusts her silver glasses and recalls Marty saying that when she removed them she looked like Judy Holliday. After Marty got sick she let the blond go, but the steely gray reminded her of cloistered nuns, and soon she was coloring it again.

She's held on to her figure, more or less, carefully selecting her garments to compensate for the less. Other than the loss of an inch or two—she stands just a bit over five feet—everything is the same. Yet nothing is. She has become a caricature of herself.

“Yes, it's me,” she sighs, sinking back into her chair. “It's Esther. Esther Lustig.”

Then Marty is back, accusing her, in a high-pitched falsetto, of behaving like a schoolgirl. I suppose it is. Esther. Esther Lustig.

Placing her hand over the receiver, she tells him to shut up. “Am-scray! Get out of my hair!”

“What was that, Esther?” Buddy says.

“The cat,” she lies. “He was clawing the sofa.”

Animated by her anger and pleased with the convincing riposte (Buddy wouldn't know, but Sonia would, that Esther loathes cats, that she once drove the family tabby, who'd been clawing the furniture, to a secluded ravine off Sheridan Road, where she released it into the wild), Esther launches into her spiel, the one she's been honing since the first few awkward calls. She no longer lets on that she is going through her address book,
checking to see who is here and who has gone to the other side. After that rather indelicate attempt at gallows humor fell flat, she started telling people that she's been sorting through boxes of old photos. “And you'll never guess what I came across,” she says.

The picture she describes to Buddy was taken at a college dance. “Sonia's in it,” she tells him. “Along with me and Ruthie and Helen. We were the Starrlites. With a double
r,
like Brenda Starr! And that silly play on
light.
” They'd adored Brenda, she tells Buddy. “She was so thoroughly modern, and she had that boyfriend with the mysterious eye patch and the dashing name. Basil. Basil St. John.” Esther repeats Basil's name, as if she were under a spell induced to unleash ancient memories. She studies the picture. There they are, the four Starrlites—and their dates. Was it on a dare that they'd all hopped up on the bandstand during the musicians' break and mugged for the camera, pretending to play the instruments? She's forgotten the names of the young men, except for her date—Jackson Pflug. Who can forget a name like that? Sonia will remember the others, though she probably won't recall any better than Esther how they'd managed to round up four men in those days. Esther probably encouraged Jackson to dance with the girls who came alone because she remembers dancing with Sonia, wishing she were with Marty, who had been shipped off to Holland shortly after they'd met. Sonia smelled faintly of lily of the valley, and when Esther rested her head on Sonia's shoulder and felt Sonia's sweet, warm breath on her neck while the band played “I'll Be Seeing You,” she was glad Jackson was dancing with some other girl. Poor Jack. In two months, he would be killed in the Siege of Bastogne.

“I don't know what got into us,” she tells Buddy. “You should see Helen, perched on the piano, legs crossed, open-toed shoes peeking out from under a long, flowing skirt. Remember Ruthie? She's blowing a sax. I'm at the drums. And Sonia. Sonia is
hugging the bass, beaming. Her hair is swept up to one side, with a flower pinned in it.”

“A flower!” Buddy exclaims, as if he's never heard anything so extraordinary. “What kind?”

“Why, I don't know,” Esther stammers, irritated that he'd ask about a flower, rather than the name of Sonia's date or even what Sonia was wearing, until she remembers that Buddy is a landscape architect and might reasonably wonder about such things. Then it occurs to her that Buddy is retired, in which case it might be more accurate to say, “He was a landscape architect.” Is. Was. She wishes there were better road maps for growing old.

Lately, Esther has been preoccupied with such thoughts, though she keeps them to herself. If Ceely knew, she'd have her in assisted living faster than you can say “Bingo!” Esther plans to die first.

Buddy is still going on about the flower. Should she make something up? Gardenia? Orchid? Esther's earliest (and unhappy) exposure to flowers occurred during the two weeks each summer when her parents rented a room in the Dunes from Mrs. Zaretsky, a sharp-tongued woman who used to come tearing out of her kitchen, apron flapping, to scold the children in Russian if they got anywhere near her dusty flower bed. Later, when Esther and Marty started to travel, she expanded her understanding of flora, but it was mostly limited to the names of plants that grew abundantly in sultry places—bird-of-paradise, calla lily, jacaranda.

Hastening to change the subject, she reports that Sonia is wearing an embroidered blouse with flounce sleeves. “It's the kind you might bring back from a foreign market,” she tells Buddy. “Then one day, you see it hanging in your closet and wonder, ‘What on earth was I thinking?' But Sonia had flair. On her, it doesn't look like a costume.”

“Sonia's uncle lived in Mexico City,” Buddy says. “Her folks drove down there once a year. They'd return with a carload of silver pins and bracelets, straw chairs for the children, wool shawls, and embroidered blouses. Lou had dreams of starting an import-export business.”

“I remember,” Esther lies. Then she reminds Buddy of the winters their group spent in San Miguel. Every January, once all the kids were in college, the Starrlites and their husbands took rooms at the old Aristos Hotel. They set up house for a month, with their toasters and coffee pots and electric fry pans. In the evenings, they gathered for cocktails.

“Sonia made the best margaritas,” Esther says.

“It was the limes,” Buddy remarks, and suddenly Esther remembers how stingy he'd been with praise. It wasn't the limes, she wants to say. Instead, she asks if he remembers the parrot that lived in the Aristos courtyard, and when he says, “Can't say that I do,” she decides she's had about all she can take of Buddy Markel.

It was time to put Sonia on. She'll remember. What's more, if Esther were to say, “Parrot,” Sonia will mock the bird and cry, “Hola!” And Esther will feel as if she's come home, that at long last she's returned to the place where you don't need reminding that the front door sticks or the toilet handle needs jiggling or the third runner on the staircase is loose. Sonia will recall how the parrot squawked until Lolita, the hotel's duenna, fed it breakfast.

Then Esther will say, “Papaya and banana.”

“Yes,” Sonia will exclaim. “The same fruits she left in baskets outside our doors each morning.”

“With the bread.”

“From the
panaderia
down the road!”

Sonia will remember it all. She'll vouch for Esther's memories; she will validate Esther's existence.

The first time Sonia followed Esther home after school, a carp, which Esther's mother had bought at the kosher market on Kedzie Avenue, was swimming in the bathtub. Esther hadn't wanted Sonia to see the fish flopping around in the rusty tub. She'd already been to her friend's home where Sonia's mother had been seated at a desk writing letters on pale blue stationery, a cardigan with pearl buttons draped across her shoulders. Esther told her new friend that until the fateful day when her mother knocked the fish out with a wooden mallet, chopped it up, ground it and shaped it into fish patties, she loved perching on the toilet seat and reaching into the tub to feed it bits of lettuce and crusts of bread. “It was the closest thing we ever had to a family pet,” she confessed.

The carp had fascinated and delighted Sonia, who'd never known anyone who made gefilte fish from scratch. And though Esther knew such people existed (her family mocked and pitied them), she hadn't known anyone who bought the fish in jars.

Sonia will remember it all: Esther's aversion to cats, the parrot, the fish, the names of those grinning young men.

“Put her on,” she says to Buddy. “Put Sonia on.”

“Oh, Esther,” he moans.

A heavy silence engulfs the space between them. How could she have been so reckless? So presumptuous? Put Sonia on! As if they were in Mexico and she just dialed the Markels' room (they always stayed in number 7).

Yet she can still hear the squawking parrot, taste the papaya, smell the sweet
panaderia
breads. She has been so transported by memory that when Buddy says, “I'm afraid that won't be possible,” Esther expects him to explain that Sonia has run out to the market for more limes.

C
eely wants Esther to move to Cedar Shores. After Marty died, Ceely started placing glossy brochures on Esther's coffee table, her nightstand, and even tucked between the pages of her latest book. The other day, she held one open and pointed to the pictures. “Look, Ma. You'll have your own room. There's even a small kitchen. But you won't need to bother. There's a dining room for all your meals.” The dining room tables were draped with white cloths. Mauve napkins bloomed from water goblets.

Esther's old friend, Helen Pearlman, who'd loved martinis, cooked with lemongrass, and played a mean game of tennis, is stashed away in a studio apartment at Cedar Shores, where they serve blush wine before dinner on Saturdays and hold nightly bingo games in the party room. Once a week a bus arrives for anyone wanting a ride to the supermarket.

Not long ago, Esther visited Helen. The two women sat across from each other on matching mauve love seats in the “family room,” straining to talk above the din of the TV. Actually, Esther held up both ends of the conversation, while Helen's attention drifted between Oprah and a group of card players at a table near the bay window. Esther asked Helen if she'd heard about Oprah's great car giveaway? “Everyone in the audience got a brand-new Pontiac,” she said. When Helen's eyes brightened, Esther thought she'd guided her friend safely back home through the fog. Then Helen said, “You know, Esther, I finally divorced Jimmy,” and Esther wondered whether there was any
point in reminding her friend that Jimmy had been dead for eleven years. When Helen said, “He came home with powder on his shirt one too many times,” Esther rose, kissed her friend's papery cheek and said goodbye.

No. Esther is staying put. She has no intention of joining her friend in Bingoville. “Thank you, very much,” she told Ceely, as she handed back the brochure. “I'm happy just where I am.”

She and Marty moved here not long after Ceely ran off to a commune in Vermont. Barry was in dental school. The move back to the city had been Marty's idea. Gamely, Esther agreed, though not before spending a day in the basement crying into a pile of freshly laundered towels.

She'd loved her old house, but the city proved to be a tonic. Esther and Marty felt freer, lighter, as if city living was like one of the miracle diets Esther was always trying. They enjoyed learning their way around the new neighborhood, though it was very near to the one they had left years ago when they joined the great migration north to the suburbs. They discovered the joy of walking—to restaurants, the hardware store, movies, the library.