Best Friends (62 page)

THE MOGUL HAD SENT a minion to do his closing, and two moving vans to remove every scrap of furniture from the house he had once, in a burst of expansive optimism, built for himself and his bride. There were nail holes in the walls where his valuable paintings had hung; furniture impressions lingered in the carpets. The living room was fronted with windows that towered to maybe fifteen feet, and from the gallery edging the living room, the state highway was barely visible through the trees. Weeds were sprouting through cracks in the landing strip. Sally had managed to put something in each room: a pool table in the dining room, a chair covered with an afghan in the library, a computer on a table in the computer room, a bed the kids could bounce on in the former exercise room. It wasn't the way I would have done it—I would have fully furnished one or two rooms and left the rest empty—but that was Sally's choice. She wanted, she said, to “inhabit” the house. There was an entire wing of bedrooms, enough for each child to have a separate room, but so far, the kids had dragged their blankets and pillows down the hall each night and slept on the floor outside Sally's room.

When you left the house in the evening, a light came on automatically over the front door, and as you walked down the sidewalk to the circular driveway, more lights came on, a sequence of beams that followed you as you moved, that made you feel like some movie star being stalked by photographers' flashes. “Ridiculous,” Sally said, but the lights were wired into the security system, and she couldn't figure out how to shut them off. There were lights triggered by motion at the back of the house too, and when the kids came down the path from Peter and Laurie's, their homecoming was sequentially lit up. Sally would stand and watch for them from the kitchen, and I thought how Peter had once used that path, how Laurie must have waited for the lights as eagerly as Sally did. The driveway, Sally said, was heated: Laurie had never had to call someone to shovel. Presumably this still worked; Sally would find out this winter.

“And to heat this place!” she raved. “He could have put in solar panels. It really is an immoral house.”

“How can you afford it?” I asked. The upkeep on my new house in Ohio was bad enough.

“It's a stretch. Maybe I'll sell it. But who would buy it? There's not a market here for houses this size. People who would spend the money want to build.”

I imagined what Sally's living situation would sound like to an outsider: a retired lawyer, now divorced, living alone in a huge house with her six children. But that would be inaccurate, it would leave out the isolation, the bitterness, the headiness, the wasted extravagance of a driveway lighting up like Christmas (sorry, Sally) when someone walked outside to see the stars. One day I walked into the living room at dusk and saw a shadow flit behind the couch, the only piece of furniture. For a moment I thought it was a ghost, haunting this glassed and vacant room, but it was only silent Linnea, staring at me with her unreadable eyes. Autism is a diagnosis that comes to mind, but what do I know about children? Sally doesn't buy it. She thinks Linnea is biding her time, that one day she'll look at the piece of toast on her breakfast plate and say, “Mommy, I much prefer eggs.” The pediatrician did suggest a specialist in Boise. Someday. Maybe. “And what if she is autistic?” I asked, desperation welling inside me, an inchoate fear that Sally, like her father, could simply throw a child away.

“Then we'll deal with it,” Sally answered. “But I won't start dealing with it unless I'm sure it's there.” She walked away, as she often did, grumbling happily. “Damned mogul,” she might say. “Stick me with with this house.” Or: “And he enjoyed it, he enjoyed it! I was never even allowed to talk to him, but every lackey I talked to let me know that he enjoyed it.”

 

 

 

I GOT CLEVE HIS PILLS. I actually got lots of patients pills, because the drug company needed a doctor who didn't want a blinded study, who would agree to give each patient the real thing and not a placebo. Timothy Quiver and his ID consorts, bless their fuzzy little heads, took months to convince themselves an unblinded study would “fit” their academic setting. So any patient in town who wanted something new came running to me.

Cleve's libido was returning, he told me; he'd gotten out his video collection.

“Bathhouse Fantasy
?”

Cleve bunched his fingers together and kissed the tips. “Your friend's father was an artist.”

THAT SUMMER WHEN AURY went to Colorado, my mother and I drove to the Smokies so she could see bears.

“Do you think I did something wrong with Baxter?” she asked. “I don't care about his lifestyle, but why can't he find love? Frank and Eric did.”

“Oh, Mom,” I said. “That's just his nature. He's a hermit.”

She shook her head. “At least you have Sally.”

 

 

 

“HE WAS A FUNNY GUY. He never did anything without thinking. He always said”—Sally tapped the side of her head—“ ‘ You need a plan.' ”

The kids around the kitchen table grinned. They'd heard these stories before. “My grandpa had a huge business,” Ezra announced to Aury. “He sold things. But he didn't give people what they needed, he sold them what they wanted.”

“Ezra's going to sell people things they need,” Sally explained. “That's more in keeping with Torah.”

“Grandpa didn't keep kosher,” Barbara's voice rang out. “Grandpa ate
lobster
!”

“He was a wonderful man to his family,” Sally said, summing up, “but he wasn't much of a Jew.”

“I can see where it's nice to have Torah,” I said. “Cuts out all the ambiguity.”

“That's not true. The whole Talmud is nothing but arguments over the interpretation of Torah.”

I sighed. “You think you'll be this religious ten years from now?”

Sally grinned. “Maybe more.”

“How can you be more? Will you blowtorch your stove? I can see the point of religion, but I can't see the point of all these rules.”

Aury's eyes were wide; we'd had a long talk on the plane about what to expect.

“What's the point, kids?” Sally asked. “We all need meaning in our lives. This gives us meaning.”

I was startled by her putting it this baldly, but Sally was always direct. “Even if it's”—I cast about for the word—“goofy meaning?”

Sally made a face for her children, as if I'd just said something even the baby would know was ridiculous. Her voice dropped. “It's not goofy. It's old. It's time-honored. It's the way my father's father lived, and his parents before him. Judaism is three thousand years old! How can you not respect something that's lasted that long? There I was out there, I had my kids; they're forward, but I had nothing behind me. Nothing. When your personal history is gone, you have to start looking for something else. So I looked to tradition.”

“Do you flush the toilet on Shabbos?”

“Only dirty. We don't flush if it's pee. But we do that all week long, it's environmentally responsible. Right, kids?”

“If it's brown, flush it down!” Gabriel shouted with zest. Aury winced.

“Flushing a toilet wastes water,” Barbara said solemnly.

I guffawed. “Washing your hands wastes water.”

Barbara cast an inquiring glance at her mother.

“That's sanitation,” Sally said. “Washing your hands helps stop the spread of germs. In a family this size, we can't afford germs. You need to wash your hands, honey.”

She's going to have a bunch of weird kids, I thought. No TV, no videos, limited toilet flushing, kosher. All this and Idaho too.

“Ezra,” Sally said firmly, “save some cacciatore for Aunt Clare.” It was a new sort of cacciatore, mushroom and tofu. Still, Sally made it especially for me.

“Mommy,” Joshua said, “can Jews eat pizza?”

“You can eat cheese pizza, honey. If Laurie offers you pizza, tell her you only eat the plain cheesy ones, okay?”

“I hate Laurie,” Joshua said; Sally didn't correct him.

Where was Peter in this? I thought. What did Peter think? But I'd never know.

“Oh, I don't know,” Sally said, refilling my plate. “Maybe this is just a phase. Maybe ten years from now, I'll be using the meat-dish shelves to store canned hams or something.”

We couldn't stop giggling.

 

 

 

PERHAPS SID ROSE DID, as he said that morning at the Beverly Hills Hilton, buy Sally her future. Although that is unthinkable.

I don't want to be an optimist. An optimist believes things always turn out okay; that, as my Sister Mary Klein said, all things work together for the greater good. Aunt Ruby was an optimist. If she fed Freddie, she'd make him well; if Sally knew about Sid's business, she'd be a better person; Sid had loved his kids so much he'd never, ever hurt them. I don't have that kind of faith. Things happen that should never happen. I think of Roger at his end, picking at his hospital bedsheets, his brave grin when the woman at his door was only me and not his mother. Or Ben walking up that hill in Mexico, huffing a bit, not looking back; Sid following, the gun in his pocket thunking on his leg. How could I say these things work for the greater good? Even considering it mocks their useless tragedy. And that's the essence of tragedy: it's useless. In 1993, my worst year, I lost thirty-three patients.

On the other hand, an optimist can go on.

“You know, we have to live with it,” Sally said. “In many ways, it's a great house.” Her cheeks were shiny, red; her new and cheaper health insurance didn't cover prescriptions, and a medication for her rosacea would be, in her current circumstances, a ridiculous extravagance. “It's bracing to not have money for every whim. Like I tell the kids, it's not the end of the world.”

But I can't forget that memorial, that tooth. I've brought it out to Idaho. I've moved it from the pillbox to the pocket of my jeans. Someday, maybe, now that Sid is truly gone, there'll be a time and place to tell her.

 

 

 

“DID YOU PLAY THAT new Maccabees game on the computer, Barbara?”

“Yup.”

“Was it fun?”

“It was great, Mommy. I killed Ezra, I killed him.”

“Bubbles. Say something else. Say you beat the pants off him or something.”

“Yeah, right,” Barbara scoffed. She looked at me and rolled her eyes. I smiled at her gently, trying to show her she should be grateful. I was grateful.

Later, Sally was picking up children's clothes from the floor and talking. “And then we can't go outside on Shabbos after dark, because we set off those stupid lights.”

“Good grief. Sal, you're not turning them on. They're automatic.”

She nodded, but not miserably. “They still go on because of us.”

“Have you talked to the Web Reb about this?”

“I've talked to several Web Rebs. Opinions vary. If you view going outside as being the agent of turning the lights on, then of course going outside is forbidden. But if you consider the lights simply the response to a movement in the air independent of you, then you can go outside. I kind of prefer the stricter interpretation.”

I stopped in my tracks, gave her a warning look. “Sally, you're a maniac! Do you realize you're becoming a maniac?”

“Opinions vary. Do you have anything you need washed? I'll do a load of darks.”

We clambered downstairs to the basement laundry, under the bedroom wing, our arms filled with clothes. “You're not asking me, but if you want to know one of the things I treasure most about Judaism, it's the prayers, and my favorite prayer is the shehecheyanu.”

“The sh-what-ee-ah-noo?”

“Shaw-heck-ee-ah-noo.”

“Oh. Well, why? What's remarkable about it?”

“In English, it's ‘Thanks be to God for giving us life and sustaining us and enabling us to reach this season, amen.' It's a prayer of thanks for being alive and staying alive. You say it on special occasions. We just said it during the High Holy days.” They had gone to Salt Lake City for Yom Kippur and stayed in two hotel rooms with all the lights on.

“That's interesting.”

“It's a lovely prayer. People have said it for thousands of years on their most important days. I've gotten to a point where, when something really special happens, I call it a shehecheyanu moment.”

“That is nice. I like that.”

Sally was going through pockets. I remembered her on the dorm hallway phone, moaning in Spanish to Patricia about how difficult it was to separate darks from lights. Now she was forty and a laundry expert.