In the Drink (28 page)

I looked down at my hamburger, a thin gray patty on a splayed-open bun with a soggy lettuce leaf and an anemic tomato slice. “I guess not,” I said. “I’m not as hungry as I thought I was.”

“No wonder,” she said. “I wouldn’t eat that if you paid me fifty bucks. Send it back, liebchen, get the meat loaf, please.”

“Ma,” I said swiftly and menacingly, “remember when I was little and I wanted to know what the superego looked like and you yelled at me?”

She gestured to the waiter, shaking her head at me. “Listen,” she said to the man when he arrived within earshot, “my daughter made a mistake, she meant to order the meat loaf. Could we get a plate of that, with beet salad and a potato pancake, instead of this hamburger?”

Without a word, he lifted my plate and stalked into the kitchen. I watched my food go back whence it came. “You sent me to my room,” I said.

She chewed in silence for a moment.

I said impatiently, “I can’t believe you don’t remember. It was the time I cheated on a test. My teacher called you that night.”

She leaned back with a decisive nod. “Oh, yes, I remember now. I told you the superego was inwisible but the mind can see inwisible things, but you wouldn’t listen, you wanted to see it.”

“You were furious at me. Your face turned red and you were shaking.”

“I would never get mad over such a thing.”

“Well, you did.”

“But I wouldn’t.”

We looked at each other. I tried to reconstruct the incident
exactly as it had happened so I could accuse her point by point and force her to admit that she’d been a cruel and terrible mother, but I found that her denial had clouded the entire thing.

“Well, I thought you seemed pretty mad,” I said after a moment.

“That reminds me, there’s a matter I must discuss with you,” she said. “About the figurines. Do you think you might have a place for them sometime soon? All those old family figurines from Germany?”

“No,” I said, “I absolutely do not want those figurines. You can donate them to the Salvation Army.”

“They’re your heirlooms. Your inheritance. They were your great-grandmother’s, and they’re supposed to go to your daughter when you have one. You are sure you can’t find room for them?”

I was visited then by the darkest and direst of fears. All my anger evaporated, or rather, it alchemized into the opposite of anger. “What is it, Ma?”

“What is what?”

“Why are you giving them to me now?”

“I thought you wanted them; I thought maybe you would think it was an honor, a privilege, but if you don’t like them—”

“Are you sick?” Cancer, I thought. Breast cancer. Or ovarian, one of those mother-killers. She was sixty-six. What would I do without her?

“Sick?” she said.

“How’s your health?”

“My health,” she said, puzzled. “I got a bit of arthritis, but—”

“But you’re all right?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said vaguely, thinking about something else. “But, Claudia, if you won’t take them, then there’s your
cousin Charlotte in Freiburg. You don’t mind if I send them to her?”

“Not at all,” I said, “but why don’t you keep them until—I mean, why not keep them?”

“Because,” she said, “I’m moving to a tiny little place next month and I won’t have room for them, and so I thought, well maybe I pass them along to you. But if you don’t like them, there’s no reason why you have to take them. I never knew you didn’t want them.”

“You’re moving? Why?”

“I got a little place with a microwave and balcony about as big as a window box, and I sold my house to a big family, three kids.”

“You didn’t tell me you were selling it.”

“I forgot,” she said. “We always got so much else to talk about.”

“What were you going to tell me about my father before, in the cab?” I asked in a rush of courage.

“Ach, him.”

“William said something about him. That he was a jerk, essentially. How does William know that? Is it true?”

“William Snow was a very troubled little boy,” she said, shaking her head. “His father was such a big fat nincompoop, did you know he cheated at poker?”

“William is a lawyer now, remember? He’s successful and happy and well adjusted and pretty soon he’ll be rich. What did he mean, about my father?”

“There was a lot of gossip always in that place,” she said. “Small-minded people with nothing better to think about than me, well, I feel sorry for them, they can’t find anything else to do. Ja, your father.” She chewed and swallowed; I imagined a host of possibilities in the split second before she answered me. He’d left me an inheritance; he’d had other children besides
me; he was actually still alive. “What do you want to know about him?”

“Did he have any other kids?”

“Only you.”

“What happened between you?”

“Happened? Between us?” She looked apprehensive. “He had to go back to England.”

“Would he have married you if he hadn’t been killed?”

“I wouldn’t have married him for anything,” she said, “and anyway, he was already married to someone else.”

“I guess that would have been a bit of a problem.”

“It was no problem.” She put a whole pierogi into her mouth and chewed, her eyelids fluttering with pleasure.

“But there must have been something about him or you wouldn’t have—you know, slept with him.”

“Sure, he was good-looking. But he was so silly, such a silly man, Claudia. So vain, so selfish and unkind. What was he doing with me? He had a wife. And if he chose me it was only because he wanted a recommendation from me. I didn’t understand at first. I was very naive, he must have been laughing at me.”

“A recommendation?”

“For a chob.”

“Oh, my God,” I said, “what an asshole.”

She gave a surprisingly genuine laugh. “Yes, what an asshole.” I got a glimpse, in the lightening of her face and eyes, of a younger, happier Gerda who probably hadn’t existed since before I was born, pecking away at her typewriter in a foreign city, poor and alone but determined to succeed.

“Ma,” I said, “Jackie fired me.”

She recoiled from this news as if I’d shot a pistol into the air. “Fired you!”

“I deserved it,” I said, obscurely gratified by her disbelief.

She reached over and patted my arm. “She is a paranoid, neurotic woman. She is reacting to things that are real only in her head.”

“No, really, she had good reason. I screwed up all the time; the other day I finally went too far. There was nothing else for her to do.”

“Well,” she said dubiously.

“Really,” I insisted, glad in spite of myself that she was so hard to convince.

“What are you doing now, for work?”

I shrugged, about to trot out a reassuringly bright and hopeful and wholly imaginary future, but I heard myself saying, “I’m not doing anything. I’m still trying to figure it all out.” With a pang of hope and self-loathing, I thought of the meeting with Gil on Monday.

“Ach,” she said; I thought I could see the words “grad school” and “floundering” and “decide” form on her tongue and dissipate like clouds massing and boiling and blowing away. “You need some money, then.”

“I do,” I said. “But I can’t borrow any more from you, Ma, you’re right.”

“Not borrow,” she said. “I’m giving it to you. I just sold my house. I just didn’t know how bad things were for you when you asked me the other day.”

“Oh, Ma,” I said in a clutch of anxiety. “No, I don’t feel right taking your money—” What was I saying? Why couldn’t I take my mother’s money, offered freely, when I could steal from Jackie with only the slightest twinge? “And some day I’ll pay you back what you loaned me.”

“Forget it, forget the money, it’s not important,” she said, and I could tell she was as bewildered as I was; she was also asking herself what on earth she was saying, hearing herself
saying it while intending to say something else entirely. “You got more important stuff to figure out.”

“I know I do,” I said, “but I got myself into this.”

“Oh, piffle,” said my mother.

Then, as if on cue, my new, improved dinner descended from the waiter’s hands to rest on the table before me. I leaned forward and bathed my face in the steam rising from the meat loaf, breathed the savory emanations.

I rang William’s doorbell just before ten o’clock with two bottles of good champagne. I wanted to laugh aloud with nervousness. I’d drunk a couple of beers very fast on the walk over from the subway to gird my loins; this was the night, I had decided, when I would finally say everything I had to say to William as bluntly and directly as I could. What did I have to lose?

But suddenly I wasn’t sure any more that he’d really meant for me to come—maybe it had been a momentary whim, maybe he’d called someone else when I said I couldn’t come right away and by now she was curled on his couch with her feet tucked under her, laughing with her head thrown back.

When William came to the door I saw that the couch was empty.

“Finally,” he said. “What did you girls talk about all
night?” He took the bottles, felt them to see if they were cold, and finding that they were, enveloped me in a one-armed bear hug, pressing me to his chest so that my nose would have nestled in his neck if I’d had the presence of mind to let it, but for some reason I held myself stiffly away from him, perhaps because several beery little burps were working their way out of me right then.

Then just as suddenly I was following him to his kitchenette in a happy daze, listening to him jabber about something while he put one bottle in the fridge, twisted the foil off the other, aimed it at the sink, and eased the cork from the neck of the bottle. He seemed uncommonly animated.

“I had no idea what to expect,” he said, and sucked the thick white foam that came boiling up after a wisp of cold smoke. “Never before in four years at Cromwell Wharton Dunne had a partner asked me to lunch. But it turned out to be a sort of picnic in his office, paper plates on either side of his desk, just informal conversation, you know, about this case, that case, when he says, ‘So, have you thought at all about your future here?’ and I said yes, I’d thought about it and I was looking forward very much to a long and fruitful career, that kind of bullshit—”

“You got made partner?” I said with a pang of envy.

He laughed. “No, unfortunately they don’t just tell you casually over calzones, it’s a formal process.” He handed me a glass. “But I think he’s decided to take me under his wing. You don’t get mentored by a partner if they don’t take you seriously. I feel like I’m in, I could be wrong, but I got a very good feeling, overall.”

“Is that why we’re celebrating?”

“We’ll get to why we’re celebrating in a minute. How’s your mom?”

“She’s moving to a smaller house. She wanted me to have those awful figurines but I told her to send them to my cousin in Germany. She took it surprisingly well.”

“Why don’t you want them?”

I gave him a look. “Oh, I just remembered, speaking of fussy little breakable items, I still have your crystal tumbler. It insisted on coming home with me after your party.”

“Well, bring it back.”

“I will, next time I come over.”

“If there is a next time,” he said. “I’m counting everything after you leave.”

I sat at one end of his big leather sofa and tucked my legs up under me with what I intended to be a seductive little slithery motion in imitation of the girl I’d pictured sitting here in my place. William sat at the other end and set his glass on a coaster on the end table.

“Make some chitchat,” he said.

“I got fired,” I said.

“Did you now.”

“It took her long enough. I deserved it.”

“You mean because you were the worst secretary in the history of the profession?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, good for you, I guess.”

“I took the book with me, William. I took it off the hard drive and erased it. I also stole that bogus agreement I signed. I have a meeting with her editor on Monday afternoon.”

His eyebrows shot up; he looked amazed. “Really?”

I nodded.

“You’re going to ask for money?”

“Is that really as insane as I think it is?”

He shook his head, admiringly, I hoped. “Well,” he said, “you’re not taking it lying down.”

“Well, I may get laughed out of there. Or thrown out.”

“There’s always Ian,” he reminded me. “You would be my private revenge on him for being such a—whatever he is.”

“I have a better idea,” I said. “Why don’t you give him Elissa? Kill two birds with one stone.”

“What do you have against Elissa?”

“It’s the way she treats me. Like I’m a crazy person, like I’m bothering you.”

“You’re so paranoid.”

“I’d pay you to fire her. I meant it when I said I’d do your laundry for a year. It would be worth it to bring her down.”

“I usually drop it off at the corner place,” he said, and smiled. “It comes back all nice and folded. But I’ll think about it.”

I smiled back at him. This is just William, I told myself; I’d known him all my life. The boy next door, so to speak. “I have another confession to make,” I said swiftly. There. I couldn’t take it back; I had to go forward, it had to come out now or we’d just sit in silence until Old Scratch came in with his pushcart to truck us off to hell.