In Case We're Separated (20 page)

“I wouldn't change in
that
direction,” said Ruth.

Then I noticed Bernadette herself, standing next to the mailboxes near the front door. Bernie was a tall, grandly proportioned woman who weighed a lot but looked great. She was glancing at some papers with her coat on. “I have to hang up,” I said to Ruth. I put down the receiver and chased Bernie.

“Hey, Lilly,” she greeted me.

“You practicing medicine without a license?” I said.

“Cohen's daughter?”

“Cohen's
doctor
daughter.”

“Nobody knows more than I do about injections,” Bernie said. She got taller as we stood there.

We took the bus to Mrs. Cohen's apartment. Taking up most of the aisle, Bernie talked loudly about her kids. “I wasn't the best mother,” she said, “but I wasn't the worst. We had TV rules. We had sugar rules.”

When Mrs. Cohen came to the door, she looked better than some. She had white hair twisted on top of her head, more like my dead grandmother's than my mother's bleached blond waves. Mrs. Cohen's bun was not straight, but it was firmly hairpinned, and her eyes were dark and sharp. She wore a black sweatshirt with dandruff on it. Bernie beamed down at her. “I brought my boss,” she said.

“You don't look like a boss,” said Mrs. Cohen. “You look like my daughter.”

“I understand your daughter is a doctor,” I said loudly and slowly, but Mrs. Cohen could hear.

“A psychiatrist,” she said. Over the years I've had a few good encounters with psychiatrists, but enough bad ones that I'd have preferred her daughter to be a dermatologist. Then she asked, “Do you pay a decent wage?”

“An old leftie?” I said.

“I never joined the Party,” said Mrs. Cohen.

“She tells me about those times,” Bernie said. “She went to jail.”

The apartment was not too messy, except for a frying pan on the sofa. “So, honey, how's your sugar?” said Bernie.

Mrs. Cohen glanced at me, and I saw that she was prepared to lie about what they'd been up to, but Bernie was too proud. She showed me how she'd arranged the paraphernalia of diabetes—the little device to prick Mrs. Cohen's finger, the glucometer, the book in which to record blood sugar readings, then the insulin in its labeled jars in the refrigerator, and the syringes. “The used ones we put in here,” said Bernie, patting a coffee can. She'd been coming twice a day, every day, though she was paid to come only once and not on weekends. They showed me their routine. Bernie handed Mrs. Cohen each thing she needed. “We take it nice and slow,” she said.

Their intent faces—old and young, white and black—were as beautiful in an even better way than the pastries at the bus stop. I didn't know what to say. “How long have you lived here, Mrs. Cohen?” I asked.

“My daughter thinks I don't take baths,” she said. I had noticed a whiff of not-quite-enough-baths.

“We can do baths,” said Bernie.

On our way out of the building, I said to my employee, “You're not being paid for most of this. What do you get out of it?”

“You need to ask?” Bernie said, and in truth I didn't. “Mrs. Cohen says I'm
right,
” she said. “She says the government takes people's kids for no reason, and black people don't get a fair deal. She tells me that every day. That's what I get.”

“I see what you mean,” I said.

“She really was a Communist,” said Bernie. “She wouldn't tell you, because you're the boss.”

We separated outside. Probably Bernadette would walk around the block, go back inside, and have additional conspiracies with Mrs. Cohen, and I didn't care. It was a warm day and the office wasn't far, so I decided to walk, but first I went into a coffee shop and ordered a cappuccino, and while I drank it, an impulse made me call Brian at work, something I hardly ever did. I felt like talking about my life—about Ruth's exasperating behavior over the wedding dress, about Mrs. Cohen and her daughter and Bernie. But of course he was preoccupied at work, and I became self-conscious. After barely mentioning Bernie and Mrs. Cohen, and leaving Ruth out, I said what I suppose I had called to say: “Was there something else you wanted to say last night?”

He sighed. “No,” he said. Long pause. Then, “Not now. But maybe in a couple of weeks, yes.”

“I get it,” I said, and hung up. I thought,
But I love him!
By which I meant, I think, not just that I could talk to him as well as fuck him, and not, on the other hand, that I was prepared to nurse him through cancer or whatever his wife might have agreed to undertake as part of her marriage vows. I meant that for me, losing him would be a disaster. I wished I hadn't called, but what can you do? I finished my cappuccino and walked back to the office. On the way I came to a jewelry store, and I bought a ruby pendant on a thick silver chain. When you've had as much training in low times as I have, you know when to buy something quickly. I was wearing a black V-necked sweater and the pendant hung just above my breasts, looking lovely on my skin. The ruby was mounted in silver with an elaborate, old-fashioned design. I didn't wear the necklace out of the store. I clutched the silver-and-ruby pendant in my hand, and twisted the cord around my fingers. I needed something in my hand.

“I believe in change,” I said to Bernie the next day. “I above all people believe in change. I'm different from the way I was, you're different from the way you were. I'm not sure Mrs. Cohen can become different. Can become better.”

“You white folks,” Bernie said. “You lock away your grandmas. I wouldn't lock my grandma away.”

“The assisted living place is not a prison,” I said.

“What's the worst that can happen?” said Bernie. “She'll die? She's
gonna
die.”

“I know.”

Ruth called me late that night. “I had a fight with Mom on the phone,” she said. “She wants me to go back and buy the dress again. Could you tell her there was something wrong with it?”

“You're sixty years old,” I said. “What do you care what Mom thinks?”

“Fifty-nine,” she said. “I'm going to wear woolen pants and a silk jacket. Silk is dressy. I forgot I had it.”

“What color?” I asked.

“Black.”

“Well, you didn't want to be appropriate. Just don't ask me to explain it to Mom.”

“Are you okay?” she said then. I'd been crying just before she called.

“Brian's getting ready to dump me,” I said.

“Oh, Lilly,” she said. “Oh, Lilly, honey.”

“Well, right,” I said. Then I brought her up-to-date on Mrs. Cohen.

“What will you do?” she said. “You'll have to fire Bernie. At least reassign her.”

“I would never fire Bernie!” I said. “I thought you didn't believe in appropriate. I thought you didn't believe in respectable.”

“Lilly, you don't need this daughter as your enemy.”

“You think it's okay to be outrageous,” I said, “but only if nobody's heart gets broken.”

I didn't fire Bernie, or reassign her. I told her to visit Mrs. Cohen only when she was being paid for it and to stay away from the diabetes equipment.

“But she'll make a mistake,” said Bernie.

“I thought you taught her so well she won't make a mistake.”

“She's an old lady!” Bernie shouted. We were standing near the mailboxes, and people were listening. I didn't argue. Two weeks after Ruth's wedding, Mrs. Cohen's daughter found Bernie injecting her mother, and eventually she did close us down—or, something closed us down—but it took a long time. Possibly we kept going longer than we would have, because the bad publicity attracted some donations. And at around the same time, Brian did regretfully hint at some difficulties his wife was going through, which required his more scrupulous presence.

The night before the wedding, I took my parents out to dinner. They were tired from the flight, a little trembly. They seemed smaller than when I'd seen them last. My mother said I definitely should have gotten a haircut for the wedding, while my father said he hoped I wasn't going to wear high heels, in which I could tear a ligament and be laid up for weeks if not months. I couldn't tell them about Brian, but I told the story of Mrs. Cohen and Bernie. My father, to my surprise, thought I did right not to reassign Bernie. My mother said my father and I were both crazy.

When I dressed for Ruth's wedding the next day—in a tight pink silk dress with matching heels, and with the ruby around my neck—I could predict some of my future pretty accurately, but I was excited about the party, and the people I'd see. The wedding was in a private room in a restaurant, with thick gray carpet and blue drapes and chairs. It was just as well that Ruth had returned the dress—she'd have matched the decor. Ruthie's hair was pinned up like Mrs. Cohen's and she looked not exactly inappropriate but terribly serious in her black silk jacket—shy and cute. She'd told me to come early, and when I arrived we hugged. “You look like the bride,” she said.

“Somebody had to.”

When I was young, I attempted suicide thirteen times. Now I don't see my life in contrast to the lives of other women my age, with their marriages, their children. My life contrasts with my death, and at times everything seems to have sharp edges, as if the people I know—work people, family, friends and lovers—were cutouts, not paper dolls but dolls made of metal. They are so real they seem not quite alive, for a moment, and when I touch their edges electricity sparks. They are so real it is a painful joy to be near them, no matter what they are like as people. The room began to fill. Ruth's daughter came in, weepy. Then her son, David, arrived grinning, bringing our parents. Ruth put her hands on our father's ears when she saw him, and pretended to pull them. His ears stuck out in a funny way, and Ruth always teased him. Bob, the groom, came—a kind, strong-looking man in an ill-fitting suit—moving that day with a look of slow surprise. He came with a brother who looked like him, and a daughter, a tall midwife named Binnie, who once dated—maybe even lived with—Ruth's son. My cousin Joan, a psychologist, came over and demanded to know what I'm up to—apparently surprised to see me alive—and reintroduced me to her son, whom I'd last seen as a little kid. Now he had an impressive-looking Asian wife or girlfriend. But before Joan and I could speak, there was a stir, and it was Joan's mother, Aunt Sylvia, arriving, brought by her son, my cousin Richard. Richard was
old,
I noticed, the first of the cousins to be old, but Aunt Sylvia, who was truly old, just looked like Aunt Sylvia. My aunt had short white hair, a hooked Jewish nose, and a loud, clear voice. She and my mother were the last alive of six siblings. I don't know how long it had been since they'd seen each other. Richard steered Aunt Sylvia into the room carefully, because she was blind. My mother turned at the commotion and stepped forward, blond and wrinkled, her arms lifted unsteadily.

“Fanny!” shouted Sylvia, blind though she was, and Mom called, “Sylvia darling!” Sylvia had a cane, but she took long steps, leaving Richard behind. She and my mother embraced in the center of the room, while everyone clapped.

A chuppah was set up in a corner. Chairs were brought for the old people, and the rest of us gathered. The rabbi performed the ceremony. Everyone said “Mazel tov” and wept a little. Waiters brought food. I was moving toward the bar when a man I hadn't recognized called, “Lilly, Lilly!” and it was my cousin Bradley, now a writer in Boston, a gay man already in his fifties, though I used to consider him a baby. “We have to talk,” said Bradley—Brad, he's called now—who was my favorite when he was six, with more hair, and I was nine. We walked to the bar and he asked for a glass of white wine. On antidepressants you have to be careful, so I postponed my single drink. “I'll just have a glass of water,” I said to the bartender.

“Ice?”

“Mmm.”

Brad and I clinked glasses, and I sipped. In an hour I'd get my Chardonnay. “Are you happy?” I asked my cousin.

He smiled. “Are you?”

“I know,” I said. “What a question.”

The Odds It Would Be You

I
n 1976, when Bradley Kaplowitz was twenty-eight, he took lessons and learned to drive. A New Yorker with a pocket full of subway tokens costing fifty cents each, he rented a Dodge Dart so he could take his bald mother, Bobbie, on vacation. Bradley worked at a downtown bookstore, where a regular customer had mentioned an old-fashioned resort in the Adirondacks, at which he'd spent a week or two each summer since childhood. “Loons!” said the man. Though Bradley was hoping to be a writer, he didn't know what kind of birds loons were. The man described cabins at the edge of a lake. The dining room served three meals a day, he said, but the place wasn't fancy. “Nothing dressy,” Bobbie had said.

With many miles still to drive on Route 28, Bradley and his mother turned off the Northway, which they had never seen before, at Warrensburg. Bobbie remembered long-ago trips on Route 9 to Lake George—the Burma Shave signs, the motor courts with their tiny separate houses. When Bradley was a baby, he and Bobbie—his father had already departed—were brought along on a vacation by Bobbie's sister Sylvia and her husband, Lou.

“Are you tired? Do you want to stop?” Bradley asked as they drove into Warrensburg. His mother sat trustingly beside him in her orange-pink turban, a color too harsh for her skin. He wanted to stop. As soon as he had a license, she was sure they could drive anywhere.

“I should take my pills,” she said. He found a little lunch counter. They'd had lunch outside of Albany, but now they ordered pie and coffee. The waitress brought water. “In New York these days, you have to ask for water,” Bobbie said.

Bradley hated watching her take the array of pills. She did it with abandon, like a starlet in a movie tossing down barbiturates after being left by her lover. Bobbie tipped her head back to gulp the water, but ate little of her lemon meringue pie.

They traveled west. They were going to a big lake, the site of the crime in the real story behind
An American Tragedy
. Bradley had read it at City College. He barely remembered it, yet it was still vivid for Bobbie, who said she'd read it in high school. “He rows her out onto the lake—” she said. “You know he's going to do it, but you're begging him, ‘Don't!' ”

After a while she slept, her lipsticked mouth open, her head tilted back. The turban was askew when Bradley glanced at her. When she awoke she resettled it, telling him, her voice a little groggy, “Want to hear something funny? When I first bought it and put it on, I thought, This isn't going to stay. Then I thought, I know what I need, a hat pin! Picture it, honey, picture it.”

Bradley didn't want to picture it, but couldn't help it: as he steered around curves, his hands tight on the wheel, he imagined the fake pearl at one end, the sharp point at the other, not sliding harmlessly through tangled hair but straight into his mother's skull. “Horrible,” he said. “Hush.”

“Edwin didn't want to hear about it either.” Edwin Friend was his mother's boyfriend. If they'd married, Bradley considered, would Edwin have been braver? He and Bobbie were the same age, but now he looked older than she did, old from fear, though he was well. Edwin drove Bobbie to doctors' appointments, waiting in his big car outside. “I don't like it when they call me Mr. Kaplowitz,” he told Bradley. If his mother had become Bobbie Friend—such a lighthearted name—would she have gotten well, gotten her hair back: a tentative fuzz, then a soft crew cut, then thickening curls?

They reached the resort after five. When Bradley opened the car door, the air was pungent with the smell of the woods. His legs trembled as he walked to the office to check in, while Bobbie waited in the car. He put from his mind the knowledge that he'd have to drive as far again in only a week.

“The wood boy will come to your cabin every morning at six thirty,” the woman in the office told him placidly.

“The what?” It sounded like an animal. Bradley looked past her as she sat in front of a window. The lake glittered in the late afternoon sun. He heard the whir of a motorboat, then saw it pulling a water-skier, who fell. The boat circled around for her.

“The wood boy. He's quiet.” Water in the cabin, she said, was heated by the fireplace. The wood boy would start a fire each morning, so Bradley and his mother could take hot showers.

He got back into the car and described this arrangement to his mother, afraid she'd scold or grow petulant, feeling guilty for luring her here. The man in the bookstore hadn't mentioned the wood boy. But Bobbie laughed. “I wonder if the water really gets hot,” she said. “Well, we can bathe in the lake.” Bradley turned the key in the ignition one last time, and followed the instructions the woman had given him, driving slowly along a rutted road behind several widely separated log cabins, and at last parking the car. He turned off the engine and now let himself take in the silence, which was broken only by the light sound of the lake and the hum of the motorboat that pulled the water-skiers. He didn't bother with the suitcases, but helped his mother out, and they walked up some rough steps cut into the hill. His pants clung to his legs, but a breeze was already drying the sweat and making him cool.

The cabin had two bedrooms and a living room. In the bathroom, a tank for hot water felt cold to Bradley's touch. His mother hadn't followed him inside. She sank into an Adirondack chair on the porch, facing the lake. “Oh, honey,
look,
” she called. He knew what she meant: it was what they had imagined: birch trees, evergreens, the lake, and dense woods beyond it. He was giddy with relief, carrying in their suitcases. Then he took her arm, and they walked on the lakeside path to dinner. That night they heard the reckless laughter of a loon.

Next day it rained. Sure enough, the wood boy was quiet, but Bradley awoke and listened. He waited in bed until he heard the boy leave, listening to the thump of logs being lowered to the floor and the sound of rain right above his head. Then he went into the living room, where a fire blazed from tinder.

After breakfast, Bobbie sat in her Adirondack chair on the porch, knitting a little sweater of fine yellow wool. One of Bradley's cousins was pregnant. Bradley sat in the other chair, looking at the gray lake and misty woods, digesting the unaccustomed breakfast—he'd had eggs and toast and potatoes. He was sleepy and bored, but content. It seemed that all he needed to do was keep Bobbie where she was, sitting back with her elbows close to her body, as the silvery blue knitting needles, with sixes on their bottoms, made their way, forward and back, through the looped and twisted yarn. She came to the end of a ball, which had slowly unraveled at her feet. She took another skein from her old pink quilted knitting bag, which Bradley had known most of his life. Now Bradley hitched his chair closer to his mother's so he could hold the skein on his outstretched wrists. As Bobbie wound her ball, Bradley tried to be even more helpful, tilting the skein this way and that by raising one arm slightly, then the other, his palms up. Without the yarn, he would have looked like someone
beseeching
. His mother's face looked young and enterprising as she worked, biting her lip slightly, concentrating. Finally the new ball—perfectly round, like something from a photograph on a calendar, including a kitten—was done.

“You're a good son,” she said. “A better son than a mother.”

“No,” said Bradley. “A wonderful mother.”

She was silent. With the ball in her lap, she tied its end to the short end of yarn coming off the yellow scrap that hung from the needles. Beginning to knit again, she said, “I'm sorry, honey.”

“For what, what's wrong?” he said.

“Oh, nothing's wrong
here,
it's lovely,” she said, as if he'd been the one who'd apologized. She glanced toward the lake, where mist rose in curls and streaks. “I mean—”

He knew now what she meant. “Hush,” he said.

She was apologizing for what was going to happen. A good mother does not leave her son.

At lunch, Bradley ate onion soup for the first time. As he ate, he felt something alien in his mouth, and before he could decide not to, he'd swallowed it. It stuck, neither up nor down. Bobbie was talking about Edwin. “We could have married,” she said. “We always
meant
to.” Edwin had had a wife, a secret wife whom Bobbie somehow knew about. Then Edwin had divorced his wife. In the days when he'd claimed to be a bachelor, he said he couldn't marry because of his old, frail mother, and maybe that had been the truth all along, wife or no. His mother was still alive, managing alone in a smelly apartment in Red Hook, in her nineties. “But I'm not sorry!” Bobbie now said brightly.

Bradley didn't want to frighten her. He cleared his throat. Then, feeling self-conscious, he used his finger, but of course he couldn't reach whatever it was. At last he said, “I've got something caught in my throat,” and his mother stiffened with alarm, her eyes wide open.

“I can talk, it's all right,” Bradley said, but he couldn't endure the sensation, the sense of something caught. “Excuse me.” He left the dining room. It was still raining lightly. Outside the building, he leaned over, panicky now, pressing his hands on his knees. He didn't care if he vomited, even if everyone in the dining room saw. He coughed and retched, but nothing came. Had the object moved? Was it blocking his windpipe? At last, as his eyes teared, he strained and brought up saliva, and something. He drew it out: a woody brown piece of the skin of an onion. His throat was swollen from his straining. He dropped the onion skin, wiped his eyes on his sleeve, and returned to the dining room. All the children in the room looked up as he entered. The waitress, a college girl, approached him. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine,” Bradley said. “I had a piece of onion skin lodged in my throat, but I coughed it up.”

Outside, the rain seemed to be stopping, and blue areas appeared in the sky. Bradley gingerly ate a little more soup. “You're sure you're okay, honey?” Bobbie said.

“I'm sure.”

While they ate dessert, the chef came out of the kitchen and walked over to their table. He was a skinny man in an apron and a chef's hat. “I just want to apologize,” he said.

“Oh, it's nothing,” Bradley said, wishing the incident would end.

“I saw the onion skin fall into the pot, but I just couldn't find it,” he said. “I was afraid somebody would get it. Now, what were the odds it would be you?”

Puzzled, Bradley calculated the odds—one in about forty, except that not everyone had had soup. The chef's question seemed like one only Bradley could ask, but it pleased him.

Afterward, the weather cleared, but it was too cool to swim. Bradley had been adding logs to the fire all day, and for the first time since their arrival, the water tank was hot, so they both took showers. Then he proposed that they take out a canoe.

“I won't be much help,” his mother said.

He had been to Boy Scout camp. “I think I can do it,” he said.

The placid woman in the office was on the phone, so while he waited Bradley looked at a map of the lake that hung near her desk. Then she helped him carry a wooden canoe out of a shed and along the dock, dropping two life jackets into the bottom. No one was on the dock. The water-skiers, who had appeared as soon as the rain stopped, were gone. Bradley and the woman lowered the canoe into the water, while Bobbie stood by, her hand on the turban. There was a breeze. Then the woman held the rim of the canoe, kneeling on the dock in her blue jeans and leaning forward, while Bradley helped his mother into the bow, and settled himself in the stern with his paddle. The woman gave a brief underhand wave and turned back to the office.

Bradley remembered the stroke. Soon he found a rhythm, and in a short time he'd brought them a little distance from the dock, with the shore on his right. He struck out for deeper water, afraid of running aground.

As if continuing the conversation that had been interrupted at lunch, his mother said, “It's not always a bad thing, not to marry. At least I was married long enough to have you!”

“Yes,” Bradley said to her back, not sure where this was going.

“Something I think about,” she said. “You know, honey. The way you are. Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with it, you know. But not to marry, have children . . .”

“Yes,” Bradley said, stroking hard. He steered past an inlet that looked narrow and shallow. The shore beyond it curved out, then in. He saw only a few houses in the dense evergreen woods.

“I think—if your father had stayed, if I'd been different, a different sort of mother. Maybe it wouldn't have happened.”

Bradley was silent, considering what to say. He felt angry, and paddled hard but didn't speak until the feeling passed. “I can't imagine being different,” he said then. “I was meant to be gay.”

“Then it's all right?” she said, her back in a white sweater in front of him, her head looking ahead of her in its foolish turban.

“It's all right,” he said.

They kept on, moving swiftly. Bobbie studied the lakeshore. “Maybe we'll see a deer coming to drink,” she said. But a short time later she said, “Shall we go back, honey?”

He'd tired her. He turned the canoe. Now the shore was on his left. The resort was a long way off, past a peninsula he'd need to steer around. In front of him, his mother had folded her arms against the wind, which was now in their faces. It was hard to paddle, and he was tired. They'd gone too far.