Florence Gordon Page 16

  “Have you been getting any exercise?”

  “Very much so. I’m studying for the Olympics.”

  “What else have you been doing?” Florence said.

  “Nothing. What am I supposed to do? Watching TV.”

  “What have you been watching?”

  “My station—what’s it called?”

  “MSNBC?”

  “MSNBC. I like that one . . . what’s her name? The lesbian girl.”

  “Rachel Maddow?”

  “Rachel Maddow. I doubt she would be leaving her mother alone.”

  Yetta ticked off a list of complaints about her children: they didn’t visit enough, they didn’t call her enough, they didn’t include her in their vacation plans.

  “Yetta,” Florence finally said, “I’m here for a reason. I got a call from the social worker at the center.”

  “Who—Penny?”

  “Peggy.”

  “Penny, Peggy, Piggy. What did she have to say? Does she want to ban me?”

  “No. She doesn’t want to ban you, Yetta. But she does have concerns.”

  “She has concerns? She has concerns about me?”

  “Yes, she does.”

  “Well you can tell her that I have concerns about her. Tell her to put that in her pipe and smoke it.”

  “What are your concerns about her?”

  “She’s a yenta, and a wimp, and a bitch.”

  “She’s a wimp and a bitch?”

  “That’s right. She’s a bitch on wheels.”

  “That’s a combination you don’t see that often. A wimp and a bitch.”

  “Well, she breaks the mold.”

  Yetta was smiling now but she was still angry.

  “That must make her at least somewhat interesting,” Florence said.

  “There’s nothing interesting about her. She’s boring. She’s bored people to death. It’s been known to happen.”

  “Yetta, what she told me was—”

  “Don’t call me Yetta all the time!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s the third or fourth time you’ve Yettaed me. People only call people by their names like that when they’re treating them like a child. I’m not a child, so don’t treat me like one.”

  “All right. I’ll stop calling you Yetta, but I’m not going to stop treating you like a child until you stop behaving like one.”

  “How am I behaving like a child?”

  “The bitch on wheels told me that you’ve been refusing to wear adult undergarments.”

  “I have not been—what do you mean adult undergarments? What are adult undergarments?”

  “Diapers. It’s a polite term for diapers.”

  “That bitch thinks I should be wearing diapers?”

  “She says you’ve been soiling yourself, Yetta.”

  “If you call me Yetta one more time I’m going to jump out the window and then you’ll have a lawsuit on your hands. My son likes to go around suing people right and left.”

  “Calm down,” Florence said.

  “Soiling myself? She said I’ve been soiling myself? That’s ridiculous.”

  “How is it ridiculous? You’ve told me there are plenty of times when you can’t make it to the bathroom on time.”

  “That’s only when I’m coming home. I’ll put the key in the door and—”

  “So how is it ridiculous? That’s what she’s saying. That there are times when you’re not continent, and that you need to have something to protect you—”

  “It’s their fault. If they let Simon pick me up at the end of the day he could take me home in no time, and I wouldn’t have any trouble holding anything in. But instead they make me go on that bus, which takes about an hour to get me home. If you want to help me you can tell them to be nicer to Simon.”

  “I will tell them to be nicer to Simon. But—”

  “You say his name like you don’t think much of him.”

  “I think the world of Simon,” Florence said.

  “And you say that like you don’t think much of him.”

  Yetta’s bullshit detector was intact; her sense of humor was intact; her pride was intact. But gone was the faculty that makes you want to take care of yourself, and gone was the faculty that enables you to distinguish between what is real and what is not. It reminded Florence of the dreaming mind, which retains all the qualities that make you you, except for the capacity to know when you’re awake and when you’re dreaming.

  “Diapers?” Yetta said. “No siree. I’d sooner you just go to Plan B and lock me up.”

  “No one’s thinking about locking you up.”

  “The way you say that makes me sure that someone is thinking about it. Maybe you.”

  “Nobody wants to lock you up, and nobody wants to ‘ban’ you.”

  “If they don’t want me there, that’s fine. I’ll stay home. I’ll eat cat food for all I care. It’s better than the stupid meat loaf they’re so proud of.”

  “Yetta—”

  “Don’t—”

  “I’m going to. I’m going to Yetta you as long as you keep behaving like an idiot. It so happens I brought a couple. I’ll show you. They don’t look bad at all.”

  Florence had bought a sample pack of diapers at a drugstore in Grand Central before getting on the train. She took it out of her purse and broke the seal.

  “You’ve brought some, have you? How kind. How very kind.”

  Yetta snatched a diaper out of Florence’s hand.

  “How wonderful! How marvelous! You’ve completely changed my mind! Do you think I could get them in pink?”

  “I’m sure you could get them in any color you like.”

  “Do you think I can get them in red? To show the world I was a red-diaper baby?”

  “We can look into it,” Florence said.

  “Let me check it out. Let me figure out how to put one of these things on.”

  “You want me to help?”

  “I don’t think I need any help. I think I’ll be a natural. See? There!”

  Yetta had put the diaper on her head. It fit snugly, like a cap.

  “Perfect. Now I never have to worry about blowing my top, if that bitch on wheels annoys me again.”

  “I’m glad,” Florence said. She stood up. “I’m glad we had this little chat.”

  “Me too. Come again soon!”

  Florence decided to walk to the train station rather than calling a cab, but although her ankle was feeling better, she felt stiff and sore from Wednesday’s exploits, and she finally had to sit on someone’s stoop and call a cab. As she waited, she thought of Yetta with something like admiration. Florence had to admire the spirit that made her refuse to do anything in any way other than her own.

  She couldn’t admire it unreservedly, though, because Yetta stank and her house was appalling. Florence thought that after an hour there, she probably stank too. She made a mental note to wash her clothes as soon as she got home, but the stench in Yetta’s house had been so thick that Florence wasn’t at all sure that her clothes were salvageable.

  68

  As wretched as Yetta was, she’d probably live long enough to get much worse. Medical science was working tirelessly to extend the life span, but it would be more humane to find new ways to shorten it.

  On the train Florence remembered a piece of research that Emily had evidently failed to do. It concerned a meeting held in the early days of the Redstockings. It was only a little piece of the puzzle, but it was the piece that Florence needed now.

  She called Emily and got her voice mail.

  “Have you done the research on the meeting? Please call me back.”

  By the time she got to Grand Central, Emily still hadn’t called back.

  Florence left another message, and then another.

  It was incredibly rude of the girl to be out of reach. She said she’d be my “trusty assistant.” She wasn’t looking so trusty now.

  She tried her son, and got no answer
there either. She tried her daughter-in-law. No answer.

  My son and his family have all been wiped out in a car crash, she thought idly.

  How could they be so rude? That Daniel and Janine were snubbing her was bad enough, but it irked her no end that the girl, who was supposed to be working for her, was snubbing her too.

  What had become of responsibility? What had become of loyalty? What had become of simple human courtesy?

  She was so angry that she dialed the wrong number, not once but twice, and ended up quarreling with the person at the other end of the line.

  When she got home, she heard workmen in the apartment next to hers. She needed to escape the banging, and although she hated to write in public, after showering and changing her clothes, she took her laptop and went down to a quiet café she knew on West Sixty-seventh.

  In the café she scrolled through her memoir, what there was of it, and began to type. What with everything else that had been going on recently, she’d sometimes found it hard to concentrate on her project, but now she worked on it in a fury. She’d learned over the years that her writing went best when she could find material to match her mood. Now she decided to write about men and women who’d betrayed their ideals over the years. In the span of an hour she wrote a chapter about the different forms that failure of nerve had taken among people she’d known, and she felt sure it was the best thing she’d written in a long time.

  A dapper little man in his eighties approached her table, with a coffee in one hand and a plate of little muffins in the other.

  “Are you a writer?”

  “Get away from me,” Florence said.

  69

  Daniel thought he’d have the apartment to himself for a few hours, but when he got in, Emily was at the kitchen table, reading a book. It was some enormous tome. He couldn’t see the title.

  “Wanna fight?” he said as he passed her, which was one of their usual greetings. She didn’t look up—thank God, because he could only imagine what he must’ve looked like.

  He went straight to the bedroom he shared with Janine, and closed the door. The bedroom had acquired a new personality since he’d been there last. He felt as if he were visiting the room of someone who’d died.

  I don’t know her anymore, he thought, but he wasn’t even sure if that was true. In one moment, what she’d done seemed inconceivable; in the next, it felt like something he’d expected all along.

  But that might be the way it always is when you learn something surprising. If a friend dies unexpectedly, much too young, at first it’s impossible to believe, but in time you come to feel as if you knew he was going to die young the first time you met him.

  He couldn’t even feel very angry anymore. Maybe it was the right move for her to have an affair. If she’d told her friends about it, maybe the ones who truly loved her and truly understood what she needed—maybe those friends had told her she was doing the right thing.

  He pulled off his clothes and got in the shower and made it as hot as it could go, and stayed in for a long time.

  70

  Emily had been back for two or three hours when her father came in.

  “Wanna fight?” he said, and then he vanished into his bedroom, and then she heard the shower.

  She hadn’t been able to look at him. She was vibrating with guilt. She had done everything she knew she would do, but more so. She’d spent the weekend having sex—which had turned into unprotected sex—and doing drugs. Not just Ecstasy. Drugs she’d never planned to take. Major drugs. Weird drugs. Drugs that hadn’t even been invented yet.

  She’d come back a different person from the person who’d left, but she didn’t know exactly how. It would take a while, she thought, to understand how.

  She was sitting in the kitchen reading Little Women. She reread it sometimes, parts of it, when she was feeling low.

  After half an hour he emerged from the bedroom. She didn’t look up at him; she kept reading, or at least she kept her head down. If she looked at him, she might cry.

  Her parents had always trusted her completely. Not completely, but they’d always trusted her. And now she was brain-damaged from all the drugs she’d taken in the last two days, and she was pregnant, and she had AIDS, and the baby had AIDS too.

  And Justin, at the end, had been so strange. Just before she left, he’d taken both of her hands in his and said, “This is forever, you know. This is forever.”

  And then he’d asked her to say it with him, and she hadn’t known what to do. She’d tried to make a joke of it, but that didn’t go well, and when she escaped from his dorm room, her head felt like a malfunctioning music box.

  Her father opened the refrigerator. He still hadn’t spoken to her, which was weird.

  Or maybe not so weird. Obviously he sensed that something was going on with her, and he was being tactful.

  She heard him taking things out of the fridge, and then she heard the rattling of pots and pans. He was making so much noise that it was almost as if he wanted to get her attention. But that was so unlike him that she instantly dismissed the idea.

  She heard a knife slicing through things; she caught the scent of onions frying.

  Although he claimed to be baffled by her veganism, and liked to make dumb Dad jokes about slipping bacon bits into her meals, he in fact had always treated her choice respectfully, to the point of learning how to cook for her. When she was in high school, he used to make tofu scrambles for her on the weekends, and he was making one now.

  She wished he weren’t so attentive. Even if he was silent, you felt like you could never be alone with your thoughts when he was near. She wished she could make him realize—without actually telling him—that if he ever lost her, it would be because of this. Some parents lose their children because they don’t pay enough attention, some because they pay too much.

  She wasn’t sure she knew what she was talking about, but it sounded right.

  The tofu scramble was ready in a few minutes. He put a plate in front of her, and another plate with two pieces of whole wheat toast, and a glass of orange juice, and a napkin.

  “Take it away, Angelo,” he said, which was what he always did when he served anybody. She didn’t know what it meant.

  She nodded, vaguely, in his general direction, still unable to meet his eyes.

  She had no idea why he was doing this: cooking for her, not making her speak. It was uncanny. How could he understand what she was going through? Of course he didn’t know the details of it, but somehow he understood—he understood something—and somehow, she was beginning to think, he forgave her.

  71

  His daughter couldn’t look at him. It was as if she were embarrassed for him. Could it possibly be that she knew about the affair? Could it possibly be that she knew that he’d been humiliated, and felt that he deserved it?

  He forced himself to concentrate on the scramble thing so as not to think about anything else. But he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about the possible scenarios. Maybe Emily too had come upon Janine nuzzling up to the Great Man, and had been shocked at first, but had come to sympathize once Janine explained her motives.

  “I still love your father, but he doesn’t . . . he isn’t . . .”

  I don’t what? I’m not what?

  It was obvious what he didn’t; it was obvious what he wasn’t. He wasn’t the man she thought she’d married; he hadn’t given her the life she’d hoped for. He had trapped her in the Great Northwest, and she’d put up with it for the sake of the children, but she’d always been a big-city girl at heart, and these months of intellectual excitement in New York had made her finally realize that she just couldn’t bear the smallness of her life with him anymore.

  But did she really have to tell Emily? Before she told him?

  But maybe she hadn’t told Emily.

  But if she hadn’t told Emily, why was Emily averting her eyes?

  Maybe Emily was averting her eyes not because she knew, but because she knew some
thing, even if she didn’t know what. Maybe he was giving off a smell that animals give off when they’ve been defeated. A smell that animals give off when they’ve been—what was the word? There was some word for when your wife is sleeping with somebody else, but he couldn’t remember what it was. He remembered first hearing it in a Shakespeare class he took in college—all those stupid jokes about men wearing horns. Shakespeare thought that getting cuckolded—that’s the word—was the funniest thing in the world.

  Shakespeare was a fucking idiot.

  What did Emily know, and when did she know it?

  He made the scramble and put it in front of her, with toast and orange juice. All she could do was nod at him. He thought the chances were slim that she actually knew about the affair, and yet she couldn’t look him in the eye. She was ashamed of him, even if she didn’t know why.

  72

  Daniel had planned to be out when Janine came home that night, but she got back earlier than expected.

  “It was great,” she said, in answer to his question. “I don’t know. It was and it wasn’t.”

  She was pulling things out of her pockets—pens, coins, ticket stubs—and dropping them on the kitchen counter. Slob.

  Receipts, tissues, condom wrappers.

  No, she wasn’t pulling condom wrappers out of her pockets. But he expected her to.

  He had been thinking of little else than what he wanted to do, but he still had no idea.

  He was standing in the kitchen with a spatula, in the middle of making dinner. All he did, in the family’s new dispensation, was stand around and cook. He should have been wearing a fucking apron.

  It enraged him that he was fucking cooking at the moment she walked in the door.

  “So what have you guys been talking about?” Janine said. “What did I miss?”

  “Not very much,” Emily said, from the living room.

  “What? Your dad hasn’t been his usual chatty self?”

  “Dad’s been Calvin Coolidge.”

  “I like a girl who makes Calvin Coolidge jokes,” Daniel said. “Too few teenagers have the moxie to do that these days.”