The Parallel Apartments (63 page)

“Please go right at the light.”

Rose turned. The fairly steep hill was something of a project for the old Chrysler, which began to shimmy and decelerate.

“Please step on the gas pedal as hard as you can.”

Rose did. The old yellow Chrysler stalled, just a couple of blocks from the estate sale.

“Here is your chance to test the emergency brake,” said Charlotte.

Rose turned and stupefied Charlotte with the gentlest, most beatific smile the desolate woman had ever seen.

As the pair walked from Victorian birthing chairs to jars of wolverine urine, from rhinestone-peppered snoods to high-thread-count but unevenly yellowed Egyptian cotton sheets, from commemorative beer steins (Columbia Exposition) to glass-front displays of worthless bijouterie, from a miniature, operational guillotine (up near the cash register) to a charmless teddy bear featuring humanoid fingers, a hinged mouth, and a construction flaw to the crotch that left that area disfigured with a hideous camel toe, Charlotte grew disappointed with the estate sale at the same rate she grew interested in Rose's story of Justine.

“And she had an awful boyfriend who was in jail for five years,” said Rose. “His nose hair grew a quarter inch a day. What's that?”

Charlotte held in both arms a long, semi-cylindrical object whose form suggested a taxidermied peccary, but was not.

“This is a sofa bolster,” said Charlotte. “But it has lost its original weenie shape.”

“Put that down,” said Rose, pausing in her review of a chrome golfing panda. “You'll get bedbugs or bird mites. Or you'll upset the baby. They know when terrible things are afoot, you know, or when awful objects are nearby. Like that thing.”

As if Rose had actually heard Charlotte say to herself,
Well, I won't be pregnant much longer, anyway,
Rose added: “By the way—what's your date?”

Charlotte held on to the bolster. “January 14.”

Rose looked up and smiled. Except for tiny downturns at the corners, the smile was just as before: grand, arresting, divine. Charlotte could summon no mental rhetoric sufficient to describe its beauty, but she knew that Justine would always be safe if within the scope of it. Charlotte herself felt a rare comfort that a shadowed interior part of her wanted to call love.

Rose ran up to Charlotte and hugged her, the martyrized bolster between them. Rose's embrace was gentle and firm. This Rose hugs much like she drives. What else does she do like that? Maybe everything.

“This,” Rose said, “makes my plan nearly perfect.”

“This? Why?”

“No, not this,
this:
guess who else is pregnant. Guess who else is due on
the same day
?”

Charlotte squeezed her bolster companion. “Who?”

“Guess.”

“Not…”

“Yes.”

“I need to see her.”

“I'm trying to convince her of that.”

Charlotte sat down on a zebra-skin director's chair. Rose sat on the concrete floor next to her.

“Justine needs you,” said Rose. “She loves you and has always felt horrible about sending you that note. She told me she tried to get it back before they delivered it.”

“I wish she had,” said Charlotte. She had not kept it. Charlotte remembered buying the felt pens and stationery for her in Sears. She'd never forget
the vanilla light and smell of Clorox in the aisle. Charlotte never returned to that department store again.

“But she needs her mother, too. She can't have both unless you and Livia make up. Do you understand that?”

“I don't know if I can.”

XXVI

October 2004

Livia stared at her computer in the Collections Department of Braunschweiger's S&L, waiting for the auto-dialer to put her in touch with a debtor between three and six weeks late on an unsecured loan payment. Ah, there. Loan information and a name popped up on the screen.

“Yes, Mr. William Stone, please.”

“This is.”

“This is Mrs. Moppett, at Braunschweiger's, calling about the late payment on your loan. Have you been able to send in that $123.20 yet?”

“No, I, uh, don't have it.”

“When do you think you will?”

“About two months?”

“Then you'll be behind three payments,” said Livia, who recognized the timbre of the conversation as one where no silver would ever cross palms.

“Can you make a partial now? I can take a check over the phone.”

“I don't have anything at all right now. I got fired. And I owe my dad a thousand bucks. When I get a new job, I'll need to pay him back first.”

“Can you give me a promise of one payment, say, within two weeks?”

“I won't have it.”

“If you get more than three months behind I'll have to send your account to a more vigorous collections department.”

“Mrs. Moppett, I understand your position, but you must have better things to do.”

She studied Mr. Stone's account. He was sixty-six. And forced to borrow money from his dad.

“I guess I do, Mr. Stone.”

Livia hung up and called Charlotte. No answer.

She gathered up her purse and sweater and stopped by her boss's office.

“Art, I need a few hours off.”

“Whuffuh?”

“None of your business.”

Livia knocked. Livia had not been to her mother's since early summer, when they'd had a brief conversation through the closed door. Livia had hollered,
“Let me in, please!”
and Charlotte had said, almost merrily,
“Not now, busy!”
And it had been this way ever since they first separated, back in May, while stuck behind a construction project on Forty-Fifth on the way home from Dr. Gonzales's, where Charlotte, judging from her cuckoo behavior before and after, had obviously received an interesting medical opinion. Charlotte had bailed Livia's Nissan, walked home, and locked Livia out of her life. It was about the diaries, of course. And Charlotte's medical secret.

Livia knocked again.

“Who is it?” said Charlotte through the door.

“It's me, Mother.” Livia took a step back. She thought of Mr. Stone. “Open up.”

“Busy!”

“Open up or swear to god I'll break in through a window in the middle of the night and scare you into a coma.”

The door opened.

Her mother did not look the same. Her hair had thinned, her cheeks flushed when she spoke, she wore atypically loose clothes, she had gained—

“Mother, you're larger. But you look skinnier.”

“That, of course, doesn't make any sense. Any other insults to deliver before I send you away?”

Livia walked past her mother and sat on the old divan. Her mother remained standing by the open door, as if ready to flee. Or slam it so hard it set off car alarms.

“I want to know what's been going on.”

“I just don't know what you mean,” said Charlotte.

“Did you read something in those diaries?”

“What dia—”

“Stop. Something about me.”

Charlotte shut the front door; the action was not too far from a slam. She went into the kitchen. Livia had plenty of time to glance around the room for the diaries—there were none to be seen—before her mother arrived with a glass bottle of Coke in one hand and a roll of zinc tablets in the other. By the slow, stiff, deliberate way she moved, Livia realized two things: (1) the diaries were no longer here—Charlotte would've been far more brisk in pace if she had been guarding them, and (2) there was something up—medically up—with her mother.

Charlotte sat down in the middle of the staircase, leaning back against the stairs.

“Mother, are you sick?”

“No.”

“What is it, then?”

She sipped her Coke.

Livia realized that the house didn't smell like cigarettes.

“You quit smoking? And quit beer? Have you got cancer?”

“No.”

Livia stood up.”

“Tell me what the hell is going
on
!”

Charlotte stood up, too, turned to the side, and lifted the hem of her top.

“Oh my god,” said Livia. “What who when wh—”

“Do not spread this around.”

“Mother, this is—”

“There's little chance that it will live. I might not either. It will all be over in the next few months.”

Livia and her mother both sat back down, Livia literally falling back on the divan, Charlotte lowering herself to the stair step as if she were a barrel of dynamite being lowered by a tower crane onto a piano.

“Who—”

“Not your business. The pregnancy discussion is over.”

“But—”

“And to answer your other question, the diaries are gone.”

Livia lay stomach-down on the couch and put her face in her hands.

“Did you read them?”

“I did,” said Charlotte.

“And?”

“I noticed an entry in which it was reported that you had had relations with Lou.”

Dizziness now, static in her head. Her hands smelled of the bank, of money.

“I—”

“You deceived and fucked your own father.”

The disgusted accusation Livia expected, but the curled-lip sear with which her mother delivered its uglier verb, she had not. Livia looked up. Charlotte ate two zinc tablets. She stared at her daughter, and stood up as if to leave.

“I don't feel good,” said Livia.

“I'll bet.”

Livia took a step toward the door.

“Don't you dare leave now, Livia.”

“It was an accident.”

“Neither sex nor deception are accidents.”

“I didn't know it was him.”

“You had some free time between funerals so you thought you'd fuck your father.”

The second use of the word shocked Livia less than it made her angry. She took a step toward her mother.

“
You
never never ever showed me a picture of him! I didn't know who he was—he was just a kind person on a night I needed one. One thing led to another.”

“The new widow needed to fuck an older stranger.”

“You ought not judge me when it comes to sexual caprice.
Mother.
”

Charlotte stood, took three long strides, wound up like a sidearm relief pitcher, and struck Livia in the face, hard, with the heel of her open hand. Livia went down, hitting her head on a side table. She began to bleed from a gash in her hairline.

“Neither of us knew,” she said, searching her head for the wound, now bleeding plentifully. “But here's something you don't know. Better wind up first, so you'll be ready to hit me again.”

Charlotte did so.

“Burt,” said Livia, “couldn't perform. Justine is Lou's daughter.”

Charlotte let her raised hand fall to her side. She walked up the stairs and disappeared into the bathroom.

Livia wiped blood out of her eye, and left.

“Oh, what in the world has happened?” said Archibold as Livia came inside. Against her wound she held a folded paper floor mat of the sort auto mechanics put in a car to keep their work boots from soiling the carpet. “Let me see.”

Archibold took her in for stitches. On the way there she told him the truth about everything, which she'd kept from him for a decade and more. “Oh, my poor Livie,” he said, touching her wrist. “Oh, poor everybody.” Livia took an indefinite leave from work. Archibold checked Livia into the psychiatric floor of St. David's. For three weeks she sat in a rough wooden chair large enough to accommodate her whole body if she brought her feet up and tucked them under her rear. No one bothered her. After the first week she was assigned a psychiatrist, Dr. Mazie Sloane, who insisted Livia try Lexapro and Trazodone as a course of treatment for what the doctor told her was major depression. Livia told her it was grief and sadness and shame, not depression, but the doctor insisted. Archibold visited every day. He urged Livia to try the meds, and she did, but instead of improving, she simply slept twice as much and suffered headaches that felt like a tiny strongman throwing safes against the inside walls of her skull. At the end of three weeks, Livia signed herself out, quit the meds, and went to bed. She promised Archibold she wouldn't hurt herself. She refused to see anyone except Archibold. Not many people wanted to see her.

On Christmas morning Livie got up and sat in front of the little Christmas tree Archibold had fashioned with a glue gun and a bunch of pecans. He had a spread of presents for her, but she had nothing for him. She began to tremble with the shame of not spending thirty minutes to go shopping.