Emma's Table (8 page)

“I think I'll wear my yellow dress,” she added, sounding la-di-da, but her fear grew sharper with every additional lap she walked around her little room. “You know,” she said, “the one with the pretty flowers sewn right on.”

She only had the one dress.

Gracie looked all around, searching for something to light on. She was determined to pretend the whole thing never happened. She spotted a lumpy stuffed horse on top of her toy chest, all mismatched eyes and dingy white fur, the eldest of her toy companions, and the only one that could supply an ounce of comfort to her still, on those rare occasions when she thought to look to stuffed animals for comfort at all. She seized on it.

“Oatsy!” she cried, as if she were meeting a long-lost lover on a snowy train platform. She hugged the horsey close, and carried it with her to her perch on the bed.

But one stuffed horse was not going to do the trick.

She knew that as soon as she sat down.

So she frisked back to the toy chest and flung open its hinged top, surveying all her options. Gracie looked down deep, like a fireman to the bottom of a deep, deep well, searching for the little boy trapped at the bottom. She saw them in a jumble then, all the dolls and velvety animals that
had meant something to her once, if only for an afternoon. She pulled them out, one by one—three or four of them, and then some more; she arranged them carefully in a semicircle on the floor, a platoon of campfire girls sitting around half of a crackling bright flame: Gracie, herself, its center point, leaning back against the foot of her bed.

She smiled at the warmth of so much attention.

She felt the pleasure of her kindness too—liberating all those forgotten dollies, bringing them back into the light of day—like throwing another log on the campfire, so warm and crackling bright.

“I get to wear my shiny shoes,” she said, addressing the assembly. She was careful not to brag, but those shoes did go with her yellow party dress. Gracie saw them as her just deserts, and not merely for her kindness to half a dozen stuffed animals. She knew enough to know that a reward was in order—for soldiering on, marching straight past that photo album and the pretty little girl inside.

She imagined the pleasure of slipping into those shiny shoes—all stiff and black. She closed her eyes and lifted her chin, picturing the silky bows at their toes. Gracie ran to the shoe bin and touched the patent leather with just the tip of her finger. She didn't want to leave a smudge. Then she frisked to the closet and took the yellow party dress down from its place of honor on the far left side, the very first item on her closet rod.

It was the prettiest shade of yellow she could imagine. Like a stick of butter, she thought.

Gracie felt calm again as her fingers brushed against the yellow taffeta skirt—just a little stiff. She marveled at the tiny white flowers and bright green stems that were embroidered
all around the dress. She pressed her nose into the fabric, and smelled the sachet she'd made at school. Roses! she thought.

The pretty dress even smelled pretty.

She carried it back to the bed with her, and laid it down as carefully as she could, its neck up by her pillow and the bottom hem stretching down, as if the dress had agreed to a little nap. Her mother had told her they were going to a party that night—at a church, she'd said. And not their regular church either—some different one, for another religion—and even though she hadn't asked specifically, Gracie was pretty sure that a nighttime party at a brand-new church would have to be considered a Special Occasion.

And Special Occasions are what a dress-up dress is for. That's what her mother always said.

She couldn't wait to slip it over her head, waiting patiently while her mother did up all the tiny buttons that ran down the back. Not to mention the pleasure of walking in those shiny black shoes she wished she could wear every day.

“I know!” she said giddily, but natural too—child actress no more. “Who'd like a cookie?” she asked, addressing all the dollies that were laid out on the floor.

She paused a moment, as if to hear.

“Me too!” she said, skipping back to the closet one more time, digging out a brand-new box of gingersnaps that she'd hidden at the bottom of her special box. She'd stolen them from her grandfather's cupboard while he was in another room, stashing them in her pink backpack.

Gracie opened the box carefully, determined not to tear the cardboard tab that fit so neatly into the slit on the other side. She unfolded the waxy paper that lined the orange box and plucked a cookie out. She popped it into her mouth,
chewing just enough to make a doughy paste, which she fingered all over her teeth and gums, coating them in brownish black, then she ran her tongue over the sweetness, with its sharp hint of spice just beneath.

Gracie dealt out cookies to every dolly in the circle.

Then she ate another one herself.

She loved feeling so generous and good, including them all—a tasty cookie for every last one of them—even though she knew how this game ended, every single time.

A (Secret) Turkey Sandwich

IN A BUILDING ALMOST DIRECTLY ACROSS THE
park from Emma's, Bobby Sutton wrestled a key into a tight Yale lock. He pulled the door toward him, then lifted it up; he knew that only when he'd reached the perfect longitude of lifting and latitude of pulling would he be able to turn his key in that miserable lock.

It always took him several tries.

He was interrupted by the groaning machinery of the elevator, its metal doors opening at the end of the long corridor. He looked up fast, a little squirrelly; he was afraid it might be Emma.

Of course it's not, he thought—once he'd seen for himself that it wasn't.

Bobby was relieved, but every bit as guilty, peering down the beige hallway. It was just the girl from across the hall, with the beautiful figure and the homely face.

Bobby went back to his lock.

It was only his comings and goings from this secret place that gave him pause. He felt happy and relaxed when he was safely inside. He smiled at the girl as she approached, nodded—the way he did with their neighbors on Park Avenue. Friendly, he thought, but not too much.

“Howdy,” the girl twanged, in a southern-sounding drawl, breezing right past him down the center of the corridor. She was moving fast—like a plane that had just touched down to land, bumpy and barely under control.

Her voice was a little loud for the narrow hallway.

“Well, hello, hello,” Bobby replied, all hearty exuberance then, as if he'd always meant to speak to her—trying to mask his unfamiliarity with the local customs. He was such a pleasant man, the last thing he wanted was to give offense. He made a mental note for next time: a smile and a nod won't do over here.

Bobby went back to his lock—to all his useless lifting and pulling.

He heard the girl's keys jangling on the other side of the corridor. He heard her key turn quickly in its lock. He'd forgotten all about her since the last time he'd seen her there—just coming in as he was leaving, or vice versa maybe. She looked fearless in that short red coat that hugged her breasts, those shiny black boots with their pointy heels. There was a wide swath of naked skin where the coat left off and the boots had yet to begin—a sexy white line down the center of a road.

She doesn't let that face slow her down, he thought, not for a second. It was a sound calculation on her part too. There was nothing to be done for it, after all, with her nose so large and her mouth all slack, those beady little eyes set close.

Bobby admired bravery of every stripe. It was one of the things he liked best about Emma.

He went fumbling back to his keys.

“It's a bitch of a lock,” she said, “isn't it?”—her southern accent gone with the wind. She crossed the hall and stood right beside him, in front of his metal door. “The guy before you used to leave it unlocked,” she told him.

Bobby felt the chill of the outdoors on her tight red coat. He smelled it on her mousy brown hair. “Well, I
thought
I had it figured out,” he said, looking down at his useless arms, all encased in navy cashmere. “But I'm having a terrible time with it today,” he said, pulling the key back out of the lock and letting his arms fall down to his sides.

The girl plucked the key right out of his hands.

Bobby was less startled than he would have thought.

“Trick is,” she said, “you've got to push it as hard as you can.”

“The key?” he asked.

“No,” she replied, rolling her eyes, as if she were bowled over by his massive stupidity. “The door,” she sang, pushing her shoulder hard against it. He watched the fluttering musculature of her thighs as she pressed her weight against the door. He heard his key turning in the lock.

“See?” she said.

“Well done,” he told her.

Bobby didn't remember anything about pushing. In fact, he was fairly certain that his pulling-and-lifting method worked here too. He wasn't quite willing to abandon it yet, but it was hard to disagree with success.

He thanked her.

“
De rien
,” she said, lifting her voice up high at the end and
batting her beady eyes—the southern belle gone straight to France. She went to such lengths, he thought, to make herself larger than life, which put him in mind of Emma all over again. She dropped the keys into the palm of his hand—from a height—so they gathered velocity as they fell, landing hard against his soft skin.

“There you go,” she said, with a lilt in her voice.

Bobby wondered if it was some other apartment door that he was meant to lift and pull. There'd been any number of doors like these over the years. He placed the keys, deliberately, in a small compartment of his briefcase. He was careful to zip it shut. He was adamant about avoiding mix-ups, especially now that he'd moved in with Emma. He didn't want these keys turning up in a trouser pocket, in a jumble of American Express receipts, landing on the foyer table along with the mail.

And they won't, he thought, not as long as I'm careful about it.

“Going out?” the girl asked.

“Yes,” he said, “I've got some errands to run.”

He was heading back to Emma's place. He'd been gone for a couple of hours already. He didn't want to push his luck.

“It's freezing out there,” she said, lifting her shoulders up around her ears, as if an arctic gust had just blown through, making her red coat even shorter at her thighs.

Bobby wondered if the girl thought he lived there. He only came around a couple of times a week, but she wouldn't know that.

He wondered if she had any notion of a “secret apartment.”

 

As a young man, practically a newlywed still, Bobby had rented a small apartment—not so different from this one, he thought—in an ordinary building on the Upper West Side: Sixty-sixth Street, he remembered, just off Broadway. He kept it a secret from Emma, of course. He needed to have a place apart, safe from all her meddling, where he wasn't under glass.

Bobby could see that young man still, with a slimmer waist and a jowl-free jaw, not so different from the man who stood in that hallway then: kindly and good-natured, a little weak. He was no match for Emma at all. So he rented a small apartment, which he set up like a newlywed of one—his bride gone missing. He remembered pondering the arrangement of the living room so carefully. Maybe he should try the couch over there?

Emma wouldn't dream of consulting him on such questions.

It hardly matters now, he thought, which was true enough, of course, but he still felt a pang, wondering what life might have been like with a woman who actually listened to his opinion every once in a while.

Eventually, the apartment on Sixty-sixth Street gave way to another, somewhere nearby—the next in a long line of secret apartments. He'd rarely been without one for as long as he'd been married to Emma. He lived in one of them even, after the two of them separated, all those years before. They were always in this neighborhood, and always fairly nondescript, but Bobby took tremendous care in arranging them. They were a comfort to him.

More like home, he thought, than any of the places he'd lived with Emma.

He'd taken this last one just a week or two after moving back in with her. He'd forgotten the level of scrutiny she put him under, after all those years of living out from under her watchful eye.

He'd come over that afternoon for just an hour or two, to stretch out on the sofa and read the Sunday paper. He was leaving in fine fettle—nicely restored, as from a long winter's nap—with a crisp glass of wine under his belt and a roast turkey sandwich from the deli on the corner.

“I haven't seen you around lately,” the girl said.

He'd told Emma he was going to the office.

“I've been traveling,” he replied. Bobby wondered whether he'd ever known the girl's name. He suspected not.

“For pleasure?” she asked, smiling at him.

He watched her place the toe of her boot a little farther out in front of her. She began to wriggle it as if she were crushing out a cigarette.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “all for work.”

Bobby hadn't been out of town since Christmas.

“Well, I've missed seeing you,” she told him, a little kittenish.

He recognized, finally, that the girl was flirting with him. He smiled to himself, having assumed—in all his guilt—that she was trying to pin down some inconsistency in his story, or trick an admission out of him, the way that Emma might have. He felt relieved, but not interested at all. He couldn't imagine why such a young girl would be flirting with him in the first place.

She was barely Cassy's age, practically half his own.

The girl kept smiling at him, her eyes locked onto his.

Then again, he thought—a little emboldened by her in
terest—why shouldn't she flirt? He was a good-looking man, nearly six feet two and solidly built, with the smooth, clear skin of a much younger man, and a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. I'm not so bad, he thought—and he had some money too, which might compensate for a few extra years.

But the girl didn't seem like that to him, not at all. She was just high-spirited.

Bobby had never had much trouble finding women. He found them too easily, in fact, and his spate of secret apartments had come in handy for trysts as well. But at sixty-four, he was old enough to be this girl's father, and he'd never gone in for that sort of thing. What's more, he'd curtailed his romantic high jinks lately. He was after a more mature companionship nowadays—some mutual pampering, not too much heat.

He was hopeful of his reconciliation with Emma.

Bobby looked down at his expensive shoes, willfully breaking contact with the girl's insistent gaze. He transferred his briefcase heavily from one hand to the other.

“Well, don't be a stranger,” she said, the arc of flirtation on its downward trajectory.

He was glad to watch her turn away, back to her own door then. Bobby walked down the long hallway, all covered in wall-to-wall carpeting—a mauve ground with a small, insistent pattern printed on it, like a swarm of busy ants. He passed a succession of metal doors, all painted beige, just like his own. Ten of them, he'd bet, every five paces or so, and every one of them exactly the same.

That's twenty apartments a floor, he thought.

They had the landing to themselves at home.

Bobby called for the elevator, its doors opening the very
second he pushed the shiny gold button. It must have been waiting since the girl decamped. He stood inside the elevator cab, waiting for the doors to close again. He heard the fluorescence of the tiny lights that were set into the hallway ceiling, ticking away like impotent time bombs. He'd heard them from the first moment he'd walked into the place—just ticking and ticking—but no explosion yet.

 

“
DAMN BLACKMAN
,”
TINA MUTTERED, ANNOYED
with Benjamin and mildly attracted to him both. Even as recently as their meeting on Friday—the two of them gazing at each other through veils of mistrust—Tina had felt strangely drawn to him. She'd gone to special pains to dress that morning, for a meeting with Benjamin at the very end of the day. She might be crazy, but she suspected, from time to time, that he returned her interest. They were like lame tulip bulbs in April—fighting
not
to push their heads above ground.

But why, she wondered? Tina supposed she'd never work it out.

And she couldn't blame Benjamin for her current problem. It was her fault—not his—that Gracie thought they were going to a party that night. Benjamin may have recommended the Diet Club to her, and he was definitely the one who told her that the group that met at the Baptist church on Sunday nights specialized in families and children, but Tina was the one who'd upgraded a support group for fat kids into some kind of party.

Much as she'd like to, she couldn't blame him.

It wouldn't hurt, she thought, if she met a decent guy every once in a while.

Tina steeled herself as she walked down the hall to Gracie's room. Better to get it over with, she decided—moving slower with every step, as if she were crossing the Mojave Desert. The corridor was only ten feet long.

“Sweetie?” she said, from outside the door.

There was no reply. Tina didn't hear the girl inside either.

“Gracie?” she called, opening the door.

The first thing she saw was a yellow dress laid out on the bed, its lacy neckline beneath the pillow. It looked like a body in a coffin.

That's my doing, she thought, wanting to crucify herself on a cross of cheap yellow taffeta.

“What the hell?” she mumbled, taking in the balance of the scene.

She saw Gracie on the floor, leaning up against her bed, half a dozen stuffed animals arranged all around her—a cookie in front of every one of them, and the orange box in Gracie's hands.

Tina walked into the room.

She saw a trail of crumbs running down the front of Gracie's shirt.

“What's going on in here?” she asked, failing to keep her voice as neutral as she'd intended. “Sweetie,” she added—in recognition. She watched her daughter stash the box of cookies behind her back, her head hanging down as she salted the evidence away.

“Sweetie?” she said, but much kinder this time. She hated to see her feeling ashamed.

“I'm supposed to say, ‘Come in,'” Gracie told her, “before you open the door, Mommy.”

“That's true,” Tina replied.

No defense like a good offense either, she thought, admiring the girl's pluck. “Next time I will,” she told her. She decided not to say anything about the cookies for the moment.

Where the hell did she get them? Tina wondered.

She'd never bought a box of gingersnaps in her life. Every once in a while, Tina caught Gracie with a small stash of secret food—cookies, usually, or those awful little snack cakes. She suspected her father of breaking down, giving in to the girl—when he picked her up from school maybe, or when she visited him at his apartment. He swore he didn't give her junk though, or not much of it anyway, and Tina believed him. What's more, she knew it would take a lot more than an occasional gingersnap or Hostess Twinkie to have gotten the girl to the state she was in—twenty pounds overweight at the age of nine.