“Dinnertime!” she called. “You want some, Ma?”
A whinny like a sick horse came from her room.
“Well, another new rule is only eating at the table. We’ll wait.”
A half hour of crawling, complaining, and expletives brought Esmerelda into position. She was swaddled in the festive serape her father had picked up on a Baja fishing vacation thirty years ago, all she’d been able to dress herself in. “Water,” she rasped.
“All you can drink,” Robespierre said, and went to fix her a tall glass at the tap. When she returned, the salad bowl was empty, the tablecloth was marred with lettuce and loose croutons, and her mother had a dab more color in her cheeks, overall appearing a smidge revived.
“Now, let’s get something straight,” Esmerelda burped. “I work. I’m the mom. I make the money. I’m like a million years older than you. Which means I’m in charge, the boss, el presidente, the goddamn big cheese. Got it? My word’s the law, whereas you’re a couple of underage ambushing Indians. Now hand over the key to the fridge and I’ll rustle up a round of hot-fudge sundaes.”
“You don’t get it, Ma!” Marat yelled. “Everything’s changing. Drastically. Your hot-fudge sundae days are over.”
“We’re helping you,” Robespierre said. “So you can earn more
money. And feel better. And live longer. So you can get ahead, and we can too.”
“Money’s no concern,” Esmerelda said, “I just inherited a house. I feel great.”
“Actually, the American Merchant Marine Veterans get the house once we move out or die,” Marat clarified. “Says so right here in the will. And Robespierre basically got the rest.”
“Bull-monkey. Give me that.” She scooped up the stack of papers, flipped and scanned. “She was a crazy old loon, and mostly drunk. This won’t stand up for a second.”
“Think of all your skills,” Robespierre said. “You’re smart. Fast. Ultraefficient. You keep that store afloat.”
“You need a raise,” Marat concluded. “
We
need a raise.”
“For your information, I ask for one just about every day. Slippy plays hardball, you know that.”
“Then go get more somewhere else.”
“I can’t do that. I can’t leave Slippy.”
“Sure you can.”
She shook her head. All the years of steady work when she was a Zoog-smoked soul-blitzed faker, no good to nobody, a huge boil on society’s shin. Slippy always spotting, with the steady hours and the paycheck and the health insurance, a fair retirement program, even good for short-distance emergency rides. “He’s done a lot for me, and for you guys too. You can’t even begin to know. One of the best friends I guess I’ve ever had.” One of her only friends, too, and the realization hit her square between the eyebrows, the emptiest moment in a day already overdone with lows.
“Well, you can make him scared you might leave,” Robespierre said. “That way he’ll pay you more.”
“We’ve got a plan,” Marat added. He went on to explain that they had mapped out a physical and financial regimen that integrated seamlessly with her hectic life, that she’d find various bits of her day slightly out of skew, but that was intentional, and with a little imagination and energy she’d figure it out in no time flat,
burning calories galore and firming up her earning potential, setting the stage for a major payday and whole-life reinvention, which in turn would pay for space and college camp and semesters abroad in ritzy European capitals.
“Whatever you say, Jenny Craig,” Esmerelda yawned. “I’m hitting the hay.” But without any help the undressing and bathing portion of her evening took a solid two hours, at which point she was far too pooped to dream of gulping down her typical bedtime serving of ice cream, much less trek to the kitchen to prepare the nightcap herself.
She awoke to a room glowing in light, the sun halfway across the sky, three hours late for work. Incredibly her walker had vanished from its parking spot beside her double-king bed, which meant that digging out clean clothes from her steamer trunk required an inefficient if vociferous search peppered with no fewer than fifteen rest breaks. Actually changing into her fresh muumuu was another hour-long production, with the side effect of whipping her stomach into side-shaking contractions. She limped over to the kitchen and applied tugs of increasing ferocity to the refrigerator door; when that failed to make headway, she wolfed down the assortment of apples and pears left on the counter and picked up the phone. “Slippy?”
“Ezzie! How’s the vacation going?”
“What vacation?”
“Robespierre called this morning and explained everything. Don’t worry, I get it. Frankly, I don’t know why you’ve never taken a vacation day before. You must have a world of stress inside.”
Slippy’s description brought it to life, the planet of wind and fire lodged in her abdomen that blocked every smile and drained flavor from food and tinted the world with grays and blacks. “Never mind that,” she said, sad as week-old gravy.
“Well, allow me to give you some day-off pointers. Number one, don’t call the office. The rest mostly involve alcohol.”
“Right. OK. Just making sure you got the message.”
“Course I got the message. Your kids are more reliable than you are, and that’s saying something. Now hit the tiki bar and don’t bug me until tomorrow.”
She threw the phone across the room and looked longingly at the refrigerator, her mother’s fridge, the stubby rounded-corners kind from the mid-1970s. Fanny had stocked it with fairly priced vegetables, bulk packages of meat, pitchers of homemade iced tea, bowls of fresh guacamole, usually a chocolate cake or two, a peeled box of baking soda in the back that she replaced faithfully every New Year’s Day. Fanny took care of the vacuuming, the dishes, clothes washing and dry cleaning, semimonthly dusting; she handled the personal valet services and Esmerelda’s morning wakeup call, bathing assistance and spa treatments, mortgage payments and property taxes and year after year of all the insurance bills imaginable. Three badly cooked but edible squares a day, with packaged cakes and cinnamon buns left out for midnight snacks. A universe of responsibility and diligent execution fueled by something close to love but vividly different. Pride. Filial piety. Guilt. The absence of a better thing to do. All of it and none of it and everything in between.
Esmerelda could never cry for her mother’s death. But she wound up weeping anyway, for something less definable, a vague sense of her life heading in a new and harder direction like all the rest of the fish. It was her first good bawl since Jasper’s wretched face popped into her hospital room, way back on the day the kids were born. She cried silently, her hands in her lap, her shoulders hopping like a girl skipping rope.
Ten minutes later she was done. She placed a call to the local taqueria for lunch delivery and used the travel time to reposition herself in the foyer and undo the locks so she could open the front door mere minutes after the delivery guy rang the bell.
“I’ll get my purse in a sec,” she said, grabbing the delivery guy’s bag and peeling the foil off the business end of a carne asada super burrito, which she polished off, with the accompanying
handful of chips, in under a minute. “Want to make some extra money?”
She led the guy back to the kitchen. “You want me to cut the lock?” he asked.
“No point,” she responded. “They’ll just put in another one. What I could use, however, is my own stash.” The sentiment required significant further discussion to translate effectively, but a combination of pantomime, napkin diagrams, and busboy Spanish got the point across: she wanted a battery-powered minifridge that fit in her closet, was camouflaged as a shoe rack, made as little noise as possible, and could store a side of ham in a pinch.
“OK,” he agreed. “I need some money.”
“Fair enough,” she said, “let me check my purse.” Unfortunately, poking around her room for fifteen minutes didn’t uncover her great wool bag, and by the time she figured out the kids were probably holding the thing hostage upstairs the delivery guy was gone. She used the rest of the day to fold her clothes, set her alarm clock to an energetic-but-not-disorienting radio station, and work out a system involving preselected clothing and strategically placed rest stations to get dressed and out the door in under an hour. She was reviewing an Emily Post book left on her bedside table when the front door jangled, the kids filed in, and the house warmed with the smell of a supermarket roast chicken.
“Hey, Ma,” Robespierre called. “How you feeling?”
“Hungry!” she croaked, though in truth she was unusually satiated and comfortable, her soul somewhat at rest.
“Well, we’ve got dinner. Come on, and we’ll eat.”
“Have a good day off?” Marat asked.
“Wise asses!” she shouted, shoving herself out of bed. “You know perfectly well what kind of day I had.”
“It’ll get harder before it gets easier,” Marat warned.
“I’m sure it’ll pay off in beach vacations and miniskirts and hunky boyfriends who wash my car in their undies. Now pass
me some damn dinner and let me feast in peace.” They sat back as Esmerelda ripped the bird apart, draining meat off each drumstick and wing, scooping handfuls of flesh from the breasts, gobbling glazed skin scraps, sucking on bones. For the first time in a while she noticed the grease coagulating on her throat, the chemical taste paving the roof of her mouth, the low-grade quality of the meat, the pizzazz of a truck-stop restroom. The familiar ritual of chewing and swallowing imparted some small joy, but overall she felt burned and nasty and hardheaded and dumb. To complete the Pyrrhic victory, she finished off the chicken by herself, then sat back and absorbed a surfing frenzy in her stomach—cutbacks and hard snaps and whistling tube shoots—while the kids mouthed off about taxes and accounting and other tedious financial terms that shut down every last functional cell in her brain. She just barely made it to the sofa before she was out hard as nightfall, sitting upright in a pose not unlike the nightly position she’d taken on Stillwell Road, nesting on the couch with the kids on her lap. She stayed down through after-dinner dishes and homework, Marat’s bedtime toke and Robespierre’s nightly self-assessment, clear on through the night until she awoke early to the upbeat tunes of classic soul squawking on her clock radio. With a thumping fearful focus, she raced into fresh clothes and saw to her personal toilet, then munched on the apple lying on the kitchen counter and read her Emily Post book by the front door until she heard the familiar double-honk of the special services van.
“Coming!” she called, and pushed out into the day. Without her walker she proceeded in a series of miniature shuffles, her hands held out like a sleepwalker for balance, her eyes firmly affixed to the six inches in front of her feet. By the time she made it to the street she was cooking, her head a puffy old tomato, her pits sopped with sweat, her toes crammed in painful bunches against the tips of her specialty-fit plastic shoes. She looked up to find her way onto the van’s electric lift only to discover the street empty as the dark side of the moon.
Sobs contracted her lungs, and she was seriously considering plopping down on the spot for the rest of the day when another double-honk got her attention. The van was idling on the corner, four houses down. “Back up!” Esmerelda called weakly, flapping an arm. “Reverse!” But all she heard was the crank of the parking brake.
Hell if she was going to burn another vacation day for this bullshit.
She pushed into her shuffling routine but quickly lost patience with the careful steps and geared up into aggressive half-steps, even catching a glimpse of air between her soles and the ground. Not so bad when you get the hang of it, she thought, and loaded herself onto the electric lift in such good spirits that she let the driver off with a couple jibes about his clip-on tie and preference for glam pop rather than the red-carpet aerial assault she’d planned in response to his dastardly parking job.
She conked out for the ride downtown, but when the driver shook her awake she felt oddly refreshed, her legs burning comfortably, a small but righteous hunger in her belly. After descending on the lift, she strode out across the sidewalk at her new rambling gait, enjoying the feel of flexing more muscles, the slight decrease in nauseated stares she received without the use of her walker, a significant influx of pride. When Lakshmi arrived with the Gargantuan, she started to wave it off, until her knees started twisting inward and her vision blanked for a second and she realized that was enough freelancing for day one.
“You OK?” Lakshmi asked.
“Pushing it a little,” she grunted.
“I could tell. I’ve never seen you walk around on your own power before.”
And even kooky with a light-headed wonder-tipped sensation that bordered on happiness, Esmerelda remembered that Lakshmi’s stint on the job was at least as long as she’d been there herself, seventeen years and counting. Enough time for her kids to grow up without ever seeing Esmerelda at a reasonable
weight, or able to support herself without assistance, or being an independent person by any conceivable metric.
“Get used to it,” she retorted. “The kids have me on some kind of plan.”
“Oh, I know about the plan.”
“You do?” Esmerelda pulled her head sideways and took another look at Lakshmi, her simple scrunched face, pellet eyes behind pint-sized wire-framed glasses, a forehead long enough to land planes on. Faint hairs on her upper lip. The long gray switching ponytail, the brown cotton skirt and cheese-colored blouse. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to conjure up an image of vermin.
“Nothing,” Lakshmi said, and Esmerelda could’ve sworn she saw her nose twitch.
She motored the Gargantuan to the cash register and turned to her prework snack. While she wasn’t any hungrier than usual her muscles were on tape delay, her thoughts took two or three pings to process, her body temperature was sinking fast. Sugar withdrawal, she suspected, and plotted a course for packaged strudels, a liter of orange juice, maybe a fro-yo for dessert. She kind of expected that her usual store of treats under the desk would be missing and the staff room fridge cleaned out; far more impressive was how her great wool bag had been messed with, her emergency stores of hard candy, leftover pasta, ham, cheese strips, and breath mints replaced with a ten-pound bag of Valencia oranges.