Three Women (6 page)

Beverly

Beverly got Elena when she called. “So how come the only beauty in the whole family is answering the phone? How come I'm so lucky?”

“Only you'd say so, Grandma. It's my good luck to get you. So how are you doing? Did you get it on with that writer guy you were interested in?”

“I'm bumping along, what else can I do? I haven't had any luck with him yet, but I haven't given him up for dead. So how's the restaurant?”

“I was fired.”

“Those kind of jobs, they'd just as soon get rid of you as exploit you. Hang around too long and they figure maybe you'll get something on them. The fish is rotten. The kitchen is full of roaches.”

“All of that!” Elena laughed. “I got evicted and so I moved home. I'm looking for work. You know, Mother doesn't really like having me around. I'm always in the way. I always was.”

“Elena, nobody can not love you! You and your mother, you just never understand each other. You're more like me, you're spontaneous and you get into trouble and you have a big mouth and men are always wanting things from you. She never does anything off-the-cuff. She'd have liked you to make a reservation six months ago. Mother, I plan to be fired next February and then I plan to be evicted, so you can expect me around the first of March.”

“Grandma, you have the wickedest tongue. So how come you called?”

“I'm raising money for some tenants fighting eviction—”

“Ah, you want to put the bite on Mother.”

“Well, she can afford it. She makes more money than the rest of the family combined. Look, I'll call back tomorrow evening. Where is she?”

“Taking some guy to the airport. I don't know where she met him, maybe at some conference?”

“Suzanne has got herself a boyfriend?”

“I been trying to figure that one. He didn't sleep here. Frankly I think he's just a friend of a friend, whatever. But she got decked out to see him.”

“Let me know. How about yourself, my beauty girl?”

“Nobody I give a shit about, frankly. Just guys.”

“Wait till you get to my age to be disillusioned. By now either I already did a thing with every old geezer I meet, or I might as well have, because I know his whole story from his ex-wives and ex-girlfriends. Or I had one just like him in 'fifty-five.”

“I want something more special, something purer, something more intense. Something that matters, Grandma. Not a guy like a Diet Coke, not a guy like a hamburger. I want to be moved. I want to be forced to care. I want to love, really love, again. Do you think I'm too burned out?”

“No, precious. You're full of fire. You just need someone strong and right for you.”

The next afternoon, Beverly went up to the Bronx to walk the picket line with her friends in the union. They were good kids. They worked so hard and they got so little. Her heart went out to them. She talked with dozens of them, some in Spanish, some in French as best she could, the Haitians, the brothers from Mozambique. It was a cold raw day with a wind that felt like it was peeling the skin off her face. They had bitter coffee in a plastic container, and one of the women went off for sandwiches and chips. After she had marched the line for a couple of hours, her knee began to give her trouble. After two guys from the American Nazi party had beat her up in Central Park years ago at an antiwar rally, her knee had never been the same. They liked to target the women, especially to gang up on women they guessed were Jewish.

She had to stand on the subway going home as it was already rush hour, and she just stayed on the express to Ninety-sixth. When she got
to the top of the steps, she felt dizzy. She dragged herself along the twelve long blocks to her apartment past the unisex beauty parlors, the theater that showed Spanish-language films, the shoe shops, the hardware store, the nail salons, the gym, the travel agencies. She was too tired even to stop and pick up something to eat. She thought about chicken from the take-out place but she didn't have the energy. Maybe she had something she could defrost. She was beat. If that Chino-Cuban place that had been on the corner still existed, they would have delivered. She was struck by how as she went through the streets of her neighborhood, she marked distances by landmarks that no longer existed. Oh, that's a block from where the New Yorker bookstore used to be. Yeah, she's upstairs from where Murray's Sturgeon was before he moved. Turn left at where the Thalia was. A map of ghosts.

She let herself drop on the couch in her apartment. Mao came and lay on her chest. He felt heavy, but she was too tired to push him off. In a way it had been nice to have Marta and Jim here. She enjoyed the gossip about Suzanne, things Suzanne would never tell her. She enjoyed having an independent relationship with Suzanne's best friend, and she enjoyed having a good-looking man like Jim around. Still, the apartment was small. Although the couch opened into a double bed, there was only one bathroom. She was not much of a hostess, but she did run out for bagels and lox and cream cheese, and make them coffee. It turned out Jim was no longer drinking coffee. Beverly sighed. People increasingly seemed to define themselves by what they didn't do: didn't smoke, didn't eat fat, didn't eat meat or anything palatable. Didn't wear leather. Didn't drink. Didn't. If you ever said you loved something, they would say you were addicted to it. What a boring bunch of people the next generation had turned out to be. Jim was a handsome man, a little younger than Marta, but he kept himself up. Since he'd lost his teaching job and become a therapist, he spent a lot of time at the gym. She had never known anybody who worked out the way people did now. Guys were never hesitant in the old days to take off their shirts. Everybody felt as if showing some skin was a treat to the other sex. Women didn't feel they had to look like bone thin models to turn on a guy, and guys didn't think they had to be built like Charles Atlas. After all, a lot of them did heavy labor. In fact her friends used to laugh at the muscle guys. Oh, they liked some strength in a man, but not those carved mus
cles that were all the rage now, like pet snakes, she thought, exotic, useless, and time-consuming to keep up.

Two boys in the neighborhood had drowned last September, jumping into the river to swim in their clothes. Men did that more often these days, because they were getting to be as vain and ashamed of their bodies as women. They were embarrassed to strip to their underwear. They might not look like an underwear ad from the subway, Calvin Klein and his ghouls. So they went swimming in their clothes to cool off, and the waterlogged oversize pants dragged them to their deaths.

But Jim was proud of his body. He liked to show it off. For a while he had practiced distance running, but then he had taken up weights instead. She really liked him, but she didn't see the point in wasting all that time heaving and grunting around a gym, paying out good money to pretend to be a teenager. He was some kind of therapist, she had never gotten it straight. The truth was, she thought all therapists did was persuade people that problems were theirs, not the system's. Why blame General Motors or Coors or General Dynamic, if you could blame Mommy? Jim had been a college teacher, but in a budget crunch, he had been laid off. Like so many. She'd never had a profession beyond being an organizer, although she had worked at a great many jobs. But none of them had meant a thing besides a paycheck and a chance to do some political work. Sometimes, just a paycheck.

Beverly sighed. When she looked back over her life and thought about all the good changes she had hoped for, she could get into the dumps. But what the hell. You just had to keep slugging and have fun along the way. Mao was kneading her chest with his paws. She knew he was hungry, and she felt guilty. Finally she hoisted herself up. Felt dizzy again. Now what? High blood pressure? She rarely went to the doctor—just a waste of time and more money for the drug companies. Dr. Moss had given her those ghastly pills that had made her feel like her head was disconnected from her body. She had stopped taking them two months ago. She wasn't going to poison herself to profit some drug conglomerate. She undressed and put on her nightgown. She sure wasn't going back out, as wiped as she was.

She dragged herself into the kitchen, ashamed of her fatigue. She opened a can of salmon and split it with Mao, toasting a bagel left over from Marta and Jim's visit. Marta shouldn't have let herself go gray. She
made more money than Jim. That didn't shock Beverly the way it would have a lot of women. After all, her own mother, working as a button maker, had made more than their father. Papa got what work he could on the Lower East Side, but Mama had always been the real breadwinner.

Many political women had been able to get work when their husbands were blacklisted or worse, so it was no big deal to her that Marta earned twice what Jim did, but she could tell it was an issue to him. He had not expected to have to go back to school at thirty-six and begin a new career. Eight years later, he was always looking back over his shoulder at the life he should have been leading. She suspected him of getting it off sometimes with his women patients, but she had never said a word to Marta or certainly not to Suzanne, who'd make a federal case of it. She wouldn't just see that a little of that on the side probably kept him from seriously straying. After all, a guy in a position of authority and sympathy with a woman patient, why wouldn't they both be tempted? She just observed the signs and kept her mouth shut. Beverly had known Marta as long as she'd been tight friends with Suzanne. As husbands went, Jim wasn't half bad.

She had wondered how it would go with the three of them sharing that big old rambling house, wondered if Suzanne wouldn't be tempted by Jim, wondered if she could bottle up her jealousy at living with a couple. But Suzanne had always been controlled, except for that early fling with the Latino guy. Beverly had not liked Sam. His politics were okay, but he was a cold fish, superrational, the kind of guy who would rather argue all night than have a good time. He had married again, a woman who had a trust fund and no ambition but to please him and keep him, and she did. Too bad Victor wouldn't marry Suzanne. She would have liked him for a son-in-law, but Victor wasn't the marrying kind. Apparently Suzanne could live in the same house with Jim for years and never give him the eye. Admirable, sure, but a little inhuman. Suzanne had set out to make herself over into a flawless woman, one without weaknesses. A perfect professional who consumed herself in her work. So much of what Suzanne did seemed a silent reproach to herself about the way she lived her life.

Beverly lay on the couch watching her old TV because her eyes were too tired to read. Before she'd gone up to the picket line, she'd knocked
herself out, finishing that manuscript she was copyediting. Now she couldn't see straight. Her vision felt blurry. She turned on a PBS program on cybernetics, but she just couldn't focus.

When she woke, the TV showed nothing but snow. It must be the middle of the night. She couldn't see the clock well, which was unusual. When her eyes got tired, she couldn't read, but she could usually see distant things just fine. She didn't feel…right. She sat up slowly and her dizziness increased. Her head hurt, sharply. She lurched to her right and almost fell to the floor, realizing she could not put weight on her right arm. Her right hand would not close. She had a feeling of something in her head, something pushing, something pressing. She grabbed the phone clumsily in her left hand, the hand that still worked, put down the receiver and poked at the numbers. She was calling her friend Lucy, who answered after four rings. Once again Beverly clutched the phone in her functional left hand. She was ready to cry with joy when she heard Lucy's voice. Lucy would come over and help her into bed and maybe call a doctor or persuade her that nothing was really wrong. Maybe she was just dizzy or had a virus. Some middle-ear virus that made her dizzy. But why couldn't she move her hand? It didn't feel like pins and needles. It didn't feel like anything. Why was her hand paralyzed?

“Who the hell is this at four
A.M
.?”

She meant to say, “Lucy, something's wrong with me,” but what came out sounded like slow and slurred babble.

“Some stupid drunk!” Lucy snorted, and hung up.

She stumbled across the floor, hanging on to the sofa and then the bookcase and then the door. Her right leg was dragging. Something was terribly, terribly wrong. Was this what dying felt like? Her life was not flashing before her, but her heart was pounding fiercely and her head felt as if it were split open. It was as if some dentist had injected No-vocain into half her body. Her right side was not only numb but uncontrollable, as if she had been cut in two.

She put it together as she finally got the door open. She was having a stroke. Utter panic seized her. She leaned on the doorpost, frozen with terror. Calm, calm, calm, she told herself. You've had concussions. In antiwar demonstrations, she had been clubbed. On picket lines, she had
been knocked down and kicked.
Stroke
was just a word. She was still alive. Her mind was functioning. If she could recognize what was wrong with her, it could not be so bad. Several of her acquaintances had suffered strokes. One had never walked again. The other recovered his abilities, but afterward moved more slowly, more hesitantly. But at least he could move. In the hall, her leg gave way under her and she fell. Then she crawled forward until she could knock on Madeline's door. They were not friends, but they helped each other out. Madeline fed Mao when Beverly went out of town—which seldom happened nowadays. Beverly walked Madeline's poodle when Madeline had the flu or visited her son. They accepted packages for each other and shared leftover goodies.

She lay on the floor banging on Madeline's door, but Madeline did not come. However, the Korean woman across the hall looked out. “Mrs. Blume, my God, what happened?” She turned and shouted to her husband in Korean.