Vintage Contemporaries, page 22
How was the food situation? The freezer still had a lasagna and a seven-layer dip ready to go. She took the lasagna out to thaw. Lucy’s friends were bringing casseroles, and Sarah’s best friend’s mom had paid to have Zabar’s salads delivered every week. Other than those, though, the fridge was pretty bare. Maybe Em could go shopping before Lucy woke up.
She was standing in the kitchen, staring into the refrigerator, making notes in her Emily notebook, when there came from the front door the sound of a key rattling into a lock. The handle turned. The door began to open. It’s Lucy, Em thought for one intensely happy moment. She’s been gone, but now she’s back, she’s home.
It was not Lucy. It was a woman, older than Lucy, her hair a newscaster’s helmet. She backed in, opening the door with her rear, carrying two big paper bags of groceries.
“Hello?” Em said. The woman let out a tiny shriek and whipped around. A single apple flew out of one of the grocery bags, sailed across the room, and landed perfectly on Lucy’s favorite armchair. Em said, “It’s okay! It’s okay! I’m a friend of Lucy’s!” Then thought, Wait a minute. “Who are you?”
The woman sat down, breathing heavily. “I’m Lucy’s sister,” she said. “Good Lord, you scared me to death. Are you . . . Em?”
“I am . . . Em.”
“Lucy told me about you. Sarah did, too.” She put the shopping bags down on the floor. “I’m Joanie. Pleased to meet you. Swear to God, I thought you were a murderer.”
“I’m sorry I scared you.”
“I’ve been in New York City one day and I’m already getting murdered.”
“Usually it takes longer,” Em said.
She stood up and smoothed her skirt. “I flew up from Charlotte. I’m here to help. I’m here as long as y’all need me to be here.” Her voice, Em realized, sounded just like Lucy’s, if she had never lost the Southern accent she must have grown up with. Em looked at this woman in her sensible shoes and began to cry.
“Oh honey,” Joanie said, and hurried around the half-wall into the kitchen to embrace her.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Em sobbed. She was wrecking this poor woman’s nice blouse, she just knew it. “Lucy’s so sick, and I’ve been the only one, and . . .” Joanie patted her back. She smelled like really good hair spray, just like Em’s mom, and that just made it worse.
“I’m sorry,” Em said, pulling away. She tore off a paper towel and wiped her face. “She’s your sister. I can’t even imagine how you’re feeling.”
Joanie waved her hand, an eloquent movement that contained within it an acknowledgment of her own sadness but also the recognition that sometimes things like that had to wait. For a moment, Em forgot how upset she was, so remarkable was this gesture. It was like one of those German words expressing a philosophical notion so complex Americans wrote dissertations on it.
“You sit,” Joanie said. “Do you drink coffee?”
Em sat. She looked out the window. From the kitchen came the sounds of coffee percolating, of groceries being put away. It was one of the first really warm days of the spring, the first day that felt like summer. Everyone was showing their arms.
Joanie brought her a coffee and sat down. Because Em had shoved all the furniture to the walls, they were all the way across the living room from each other, separated by a handwoven rug from Santa Fe. Em saw a red Lego she’d missed stuck in the rug.
“Is that really true?” Joanie asked softly. “Have you really been the only one?”
“No,” Em said, sniffing. She told her about the casseroles, the bagels, the frequent visitors after the diagnosis. “But Lucy’s started telling people not to visit anymore,” she said. “And there’s been no one else to just help, you know, with the day-to-day. Well, there’s the nurse. She comes three days a week. I try to come three days, too.” She took a deep breath. “We’ve been working on a book, but Lucy’s sort of lost interest in that. I think it makes us both too sad.”
“Is this the recipe book?” Joanie asked.
“Yeah. There’s enough, I guess. I just always want her to write a little bit more.”
“Can I read it?”
“Oh, gosh. I don’t know. You’d better ask Lucy.”
“I will,” she said. She reached down, dug the Lego out of the rug, and rolled it between her finger and thumb. Em realized in that silence that there were no chapters in the book about Joanie.
“Okay,” Joanie said authoritatively, and it was as if a machine had just been turned on. “I’m here and I can help with all this. You tell me all the things you’ve been doing and we can divvy them up. You might need to do the really New Yorky stuff. This city scares the bejesus out of me.”
Em still came uptown three days a week, but it made a huge difference having Joanie around, her smoking in the house notwithstanding. Aghast that her eight-year-old niece walked to school alone in Manhattan, Joanie started going with Sarah in the morning and picking her up in the afternoon. Though all Sarah’s classmates also walked alone, she didn’t seem to mind. She adored her aunt and was just sorry that her teenage cousins had not also traveled from North Carolina.
Joanie’s arrival also encouraged Lucy to make more of an effort to get out of bed and be in the rest of the apartment. Em could tell this was partly due to the activation of her good-host instincts—she was forever asking Joanie if she needed something to drink—but also partly out of a desire to put on as good a face as she could for her sister. One afternoon they were all sitting in the living room, and Lucy, haltingly, told a story about how her older sister had liked to dress little Lucy up like a doll.
“Oh yes,” Joanie said, laughing. “That just made you miserable. But I was so happy to have someone to take care of!”
Lucy looked at Em with a raised eyebrow. “I did not want to be taken care of,” she said.
But it was Joanie, now, who would sometimes bring a bedpan in to Lucy’s room and then carry it out when Lucy wasn’t able to get out of bed. Em had been terrified of that eventuality, and the fact that someone else was doing it—that she could concentrate on calling cabs and dealing with the telephone company—made her feel simultaneously relieved and ashamed.
But what Em could do was go out with Sarah. They went to the library, or got a snack at the diner, or visited the Museum of Natural History, which Em had obviously never seen but to which Lucy had a family membership. Sarah liked the halls of gems and minerals, dark and quiet compared to the bustle of the rest of the museum, the jewels laid out on black cloth.
On one visit, an older woman told them that the Star of India had been stolen from the museum once, in the 1960s, because no one at the museum had changed the battery on the enormous sapphire’s alarm. Eventually it was found in a locker in a bus station in Miami. “So the lesson is, never forget to change your batteries!” the woman said, which Sarah and Em later agreed was a completely inane lesson to take from that story. The lesson was, you never knew who wasn’t doing their job.
* * *
As far as Em could tell, Edith’s preferred situation with her assistants was to have the assistant quit or get fired right before Memorial Day, so she didn’t have to pay them while she was gone. Em refused to quit and was too valuable to be fired, so for the second summer in a row, she would work alone in Manhattan while Edith repaired to her house in Montauk.
Last summer had been gloriously stultifying—three months of slush and answering the phone. Edith seemed to start drinking around lunchtime and never once called in after two. On afternoons when Emily didn’t have a shift at Kim’s, she would come to the office and play movies on the VCR by the couch.
This summer was turning out different. There was Lucy, for starters, and the greater and greater responsibilities Em had at Sunrise Squat. And Emily was less available: picking up more hours, spending more time at Rob’s, working furiously, she said, on her Open Heart script. She came in to the office about once a week, whenever she needed a printer.
Today she’d brought in My Own Private Idaho, a movie they’d watched together many times after Emily duped a copy on Kim’s dual-deck VHS. They sat together on the couch, each reading, half watching a movie they knew by heart. But when River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves sat by the campfire, they both put down their reading and gave the men their full attention.
“When I left home, the maid asked me where I was off to,” Keanu said, reclining, gorgeous. Here Em and Emily joined in joyously: “‘Wherever, whatever, have a nice day.’”
On the screen, River curled tighter and tighter into himself, lit by firelight. “I could love someone, even if I, you know, wasn’t paid for it,” he said. “I love you, and you don’t pay me.”
“Mike,” warned Keanu.
“I really wanna kiss you, man,” River said, and as they always did, they gasped at the beauty of it.
“Talk about an open heart,” Em said.
“God, he’d be perfect,” said Emily. The lead role of her show was a young surgeon who gives himself up to the ghosts who haunt his hospital. “A guy I knew said he knew his brother—Leaf?—and I gave him a script, but who knows if he ever saw it. I bet he’s dying to do theater, though.”
“Probably. He’s a serious actor.”
“He only looks like a god.”
* * *
Sarah and Em made the cake. Sarah was an excellent young baker, though she tended to overdo it with the rainbow sprinkles.
Joanie handed Lucy a birthday hat, which she refused to wear. Joanie wore it instead. It perched precariously atop her hairdo.
Em turned out the lights and brought in the cake. The three of them sang—the adults hesitantly on the first line, but then, inspired by Sarah’s enthusiasm, finishing strong. It was very difficult to dampen an eight-year-old’s spirits on a birthday. “Can I blow out the candles?” she asked her mom, and Lucy said, “Go for it.”
“Make a wish!” Sarah said to her mother, then blew.
Em thought, Fuck it, and cut the entire cake into four enormous pieces, cake slices from a cartoon, the size she’d always wanted when she was little. She remembered protesting bitterly against her mother’s thin slices, her declarations that there would be more tomorrow. (In fact, she often threw leftover birthday cake away while Em was asleep.) Sarah’s eyes widened when she saw her piece, and she said, “Yes!”
The cake was delicious. Sarah, giggling, fed forkfuls to Lucy. Joanie ate exactly one bite, praised it extravagantly, and set her plate aside. Em finished her whole goddamn piece.
While Joanie cleaned up, Sarah and Em sat on the floor in the living room watching television. A kid named Doug got in trouble with the principal because of his cartoon making fun of the cafeteria’s mystery meat. “This show is really good,” Sarah said to Em. Em had to admit it wasn’t bad, but mostly it just felt amazing to lie on a rug and watch cartoons while grown-ups did the dishes.
About halfway through the episode, it became impossible to ignore the fact that Lucy and Joanie were having an argument.
“He flew here from California,” Joanie said. “How can you say he doesn’t care?” Lucy’s ex, Duncan, had come back to town, leaving behind his second wife and a new baby, and was staying in a hotel nearby. He stopped by sometimes to take Sarah to piano lessons or the library.
The rhythm of the fight was odd, because Lucy talked so much more slowly than Joanie did. “He flew from California to get Sarah,” she said. “Not because of me.”
“He’s not stealing her. He’s trying to help! And you said you wanted—”
“Well, he can just stay away from me.”
Last summer, when Lucy had invited Em to come upstate for a week, they had been sitting on the dock reading while Sarah played in the water, and Em read Lucy a line she loved, about the dissolution of a character’s marriage: “There had been no intrigue, just a gradual wearing down of the mechanism for concern.” “Oh yeah,” Lucy had said. “That’s exactly what it’s like.”
“He told me he wants to see you,” Joanie said now. “He was married to you for ten years!”
“Yeah, he left just in time.”
Sarah moved closer to the TV. Em tried and failed to catch Joanie’s eye. “You cannot shut him out,” Joanie said. “For Sarah’s sake, you need to let him—”
“I can die any way I want to!” Lucy snapped. Sarah stood up and, without a word, walked out the front door.
“I’ll get her,” Em said to the sisters, who weren’t looking at each other but had the good grace to appear embarrassed at least. She grabbed her shoes and ran out the front door of the brownstone. “Sarah!” she called to the child, who was already halfway down the block. She hopped down the sidewalk, trying to pull on her shoes, then followed her.
She caught up at Columbus, where Sarah, a rule follower, was waiting impatiently for the walk light. When the sign changed Sarah set off across the street, and Em walked alongside her. Neither of them spoke. The city was alive with city sounds: cabs zooming past them, a police siren a few blocks away, the bodega guy commiserating with a customer about the Yankees. An old lady with a pinched face walked her pinched-face little rat dog toward them. Em nudged Sarah’s arm, pointed the dog out. Sarah nodded and kept walking. As they crossed Central Park West, Sarah took Em’s hand, then dropped it when they got to the park.
They walked down the bridle path, the reservoir invisible to their left. “Where are we going?” Em finally asked.
“The playground,” Sarah said, to Em’s surprise. Sarah, old beyond her years, was not much of a playground kid.
On this beautiful June day the playground was filled with insane children, most of them younger than Sarah. Instead of going in, she sat on a bench outside the fence. Em sat next to her. Sarah was looking straight ahead. In profile her chin looked exactly like her mother’s.
A bird trilled in a tree nearby; fat, stupid bees bumped drunkenly into soda cans in the trash can at the playground’s entrance. Behind the fence a boy was chasing a group of girls across a wooden bridge, all of them shrieking happily.
“This used to be my favorite playground when I was little,” Sarah said.
Em held back a smile. “When you were little, huh.”
Sarah cast a glance her way, alert for mockery. “Yes,” she said. “When I was little.” She pointed at the bridge. “That was there, but all this stuff here”—the blue-and-red playground apparatus—“That’s all new. It was fine before. I don’t know why they changed it.”
“You sound like a real New Yorker,” Em said. “Complaining about how the city’s different now.”
“Before, there were more things to climb, and—OW!” She smacked her arm and a smashed bee tumbled to the pavement. “SHIT!” She leapt to her feet and stomped away, holding her arm. Em hurried after her. She remembered crying piteously when stung by a bee as a child, but Sarah seemed absolutely furious, stalking around and cursing under her breath. She really was a New Yorker.
Em got some ice and a plastic bag from a nearby hot dog stand. Sarah’s cheeks were bright red and her eyes gleamed, but her face was set as they sat in the grass. Still the children played.
“What’s California like?” Sarah asked. Lucy had not let her visit him there.
“I don’t know,” Em admitted. “I’ve never been west of Missouri.”
“I guess it’s all sunny and beachy, like Baywatch.”
“How do you know Baywatch?!”
Sarah gave her an incredulous look. Who doesn’t know Baywatch?
“There’s Disneyland,” Em said. “That seems awesome.”
Sarah snorted. “We have Central Park,” she said.
When the ice melted, Sarah got up and walked around the playground, touching the apparatus. Who was this child, who was courting nostalgia at the age of eight? At one point another kid directed a jet of water toward her and she screamed delightedly, dancing out of the way. Then she collected herself and walked on, dignified as a cat.
They walked back to the apartment, Sarah’s sweaty hand in Em’s sweaty hand. At the bodega, Sarah deigned to allow Em to buy her a Bomb Pop. A few days later, at Lucy’s insistence, Duncan took Sarah back with him to California. Em wasn’t there when she left, but Joanie told her it was the worst thing she’d ever seen in her life.
* * *
The city was auctioning off five community gardens on the Lower East Side, vacant lots that locals had made beautiful over decades. Em sat in the back of the room with Louis, their backpacks on their laps. The city employee running the auction introduced her favorite garden—“Twenty-five hundred square feet, undeveloped, at 237 East Seventh Street.” This was the garden where she had scrounged cinder blocks for her bookshelves, where she had ducked in to cry one afternoon on the way home from work, only to have a woman in overalls pat her shoulder and hand her a pot of cilantro. Its winding paths, its butterflies. She remembered walking past at night and hearing the sound of crickets, as if a tiny bit of the country had been transplanted between tenements.
Several developers had sent bored representatives to make a play for the properties, but for this garden the auction was joined by several new bidders in suits. The long strawberry blond hair should have been a tip-off, but none of the city officials who regularly did battle with Michael were at the auction. Soon the bids reached a million, then two million. The developers dropped out. Michael and Joe were bidding against each other, scowling across the room through the incongruous monocles they both wore. Em felt the thrill of disobedience, the delight of seeing everyone else in the room realize something was going on, the pride of knowing she helped make it happen. The monocles had been her idea.
When Michael said “Two-point-five million dollars!” Em and Louis and others scattered around the room opened their backpacks, and ten thousand crickets filled the air.
