“Well, Sonny's sleeping. You'll have to come back later.”
“I can't,” Gretel said. “I'm here now.”
Laura came into the hall and closed the door behind her. “I wouldn't wake him up if I were you. He's already bent out of shape because I made him sleep in the living room so I could fix up the bedroom for Desmond.”
As far as Gretel was concerned, this girl was speaking another language.
“Hello?” Laura said when faced with Gretel's silence. She waved her hand in front of Gretel's face. “Are you there?”
That was when Gretel started to cry. “You can't have him,” she said, even though she had no idea how she would manage to fight a rival who was a grown woman with red nail polish and so much mascara.
“You think I'm here with Sonny! I'm waiting for Desmond.” Another blank look from Gretel. “Sonny's brother?”
Now that she understood, Gretel threw her arms around Laura as though she were a long-lost sister, and as soon as she did Laura started to cry right along with her.
“You don't know what it's been like,” Laura said as they both wept. Close up, Gretel could see Laura was older than she'd first thought. She might even be close to thirty. “It's been hell,” Laura confided. “I've had to live with my mother in New Hyde Park.”
They sneaked back into the apartment to have a cup of instant coffee together in the kitchen. That was when Gretel found out that Desmond Garnet had been in the Nassau County jail for the past eighteen months.
“I thought he was away on business,” Gretel said.
“He was,” Laura told her. “Amphetamines and crystal meth. That is his business.”
Because he was older, Desmond had taken the fall. Next time, it would be Sonny's turn.
“I'm so nervous now that he's coming back,” Laura admitted. “I want everything to be perfect when he gets here. Is my hair okay?”
“You look great,” Gretel told her. Just tired. Just worn out from all that waiting she'd been doing.
“I'm glad Sonny finally settled down with someone too.”
“We're not all that serious,” Gretel heard herself insist. Why would she say that? Why would she sip her coffee as though it were true? She turned the opal ring around on her finger, to ensure that the stone wouldn't show. All this time she'd been breathing for him, or so she'd believed. Now, she wasn't even certain she knew Sonny Garnet. Who was he really? Who could he be?
“Wild men.” Laura shook her head. “That's what they are. They'll do whatever they please. They'll never listen to us.”
“Nope,” Gretel said. The faucet in the kitchen sink was dripping. The heat was on too high. Traffic from the street echoed here, and she'd never even noticed. Gretel rinsed out her coffee cup. “I've got to go,” she said.
“You definitely don't want to be here when I start the vacuum and wake Sonny up.”
It was dark in the living room when Gretel walked through. All the shades were drawn and Sonny was asleep on the couch, his long legs stretched out, his face pale in the darkness. He'd set his boots right beside the couch, the way men who are used to making quick getaways always do. He looked beautiful in the dark, a creature from a distant planet. Gretel thought about the way he looked all the way home. She thought about it and thought about it, until the image shattered inside her mind into pure white light.
When she got to her house, her mother was out in the driveway, loading Margot's car with trays of green food.
“Hey, you,” Frances called. “Don't wait up tonight. We'll be back late.”
Margot had come out onto the front stoop with the tray of éclairs.
“Are you okay?” she asked when she saw Gretel's face.
“No.” Gretel was still seeing that white light in her mind, but that would soon fade.
“He dumped you.”
It was such a mild afternoon for this time of year. So hazy and so blue.
“Yes,” Gretel said. The white light was fading already, if she narrowed her eyes.
“Stinker.” Margot shook her head. She shifted the éclairs so she could put an arm around Gretel's shoulders. “You'll find someone better. I promise you will.”
By then Gretel had the opal ring in her pocket. It was a truly delicate piece of jewelry; she wouldn't even know it was gone until she had lost it, and then she could search under carpets and radiators as often as she liked, she'd never find it again. No matter how hard she tried.
“Count your lucky stars that it's over sooner rather than later,” Margot said.
Gretel shook her head so that the last remnants of white light flew up into the air and dissolved into what would soon be spring.
“All right,” she said. “I'll do that.”
The Rest of Your Life
One morning, when the air was misleading and mild with hope, I saw my mother standing beside the forsythia. The blossoms had just begun to open, and were now as much yellow as they were green. The branches tumbled into the yard, heavy with the weight of flowers and leaves, and there was my mother, all alone. She was smoking a cigarette, the first she'd had in years, since her cancer had first been diagnosed and treated. Her hair was dark and thick, and she hadn't bothered with a comb or a brush. She was crying out there, beside the forsythia, but even if she hadn't been, I would have known. Certain things need not be said, and there's nothing, not a whispered prayer, not a sacrifice, not a payment of any price, that will change what's about to happen.
We had dinner that night in the dark, not out of choice but because a storm had come up. The wind knocked down the power lines all over Franconia and left a dimmer world, a shadowy place where a working flashlight seemed worth its weight in gold. We stuck candles into wine bottles and waited for Margot to come over with a pizza.
“I got the last one before the oven went out.” Margot had picked up some antipasto and two bottles of wine as well, one of which my mother now grabbed and began to open.
“Let's get drunk,” my mother said.
Margot and I exchanged a look. My mother didn't drink.
“Okay,” we agreed, and we set about it as the wind rattled down our chimney.
We didn't stop drinking until the candles had burned down. By then, there was nothing left anyway, and we hadn't the heart for wine anymore. At ten o'clock my brother came home from work. He took bad news the way some people do, with silence and distance and even more distrust in the world than he usually had. He was working double shifts at the Food Star; he was worried about medical bills and mortgages, matters no one should be considering at the age of twenty. All of his free time was spent getting high; he did drugs with a vengeance, pursuing his own destruction the way he had once gone after good grades. He should have been in college; he should have been having the time of his life. Instead, he was standing in our dark kitchen, wolfing down the last piece of pizza and giving us grief for allowing my mother to drink.
“That should be her biggest problem,” Margot said.
At that point, my mother was curled up on the couchâfor a nap, she had told us, but it was clear she was out for the night. If you looked at the way she was sleeping, with her knees crunched together and her back so twisted, you couldn't help but think that the world was a crueler place than anyone had ever dared to suggest. You might even find yourself believing that fair itself was a meaningless concept, one which would only deceive you, in the end.
Margot started to cry then, and once she did, I did too.
My brother groaned. “A lot of good that will do.”
“Nothing will do any good,” Margot said.
In the past few months, since my mother had found a new lump under her arm, things had moved much too fast. Maybe that's why Margot looked as if she'd aged a whole year in a matter of days. Time wasn't the same anymore. Doors were slamming shut before we even knew they'd been opened. Good fortune can take forever to get to you, but as it turns out, sorrow is as quick as a shot.
We all had hangovers the next morning, but by the time Margot had come over and I had dragged myself out of bed, my mother was already at the kitchen table, looking up cemeteries in the phone book.
“You're kidding, right?” Margot said.
My mother smiled the way she always did when she was convinced she was right. “If you don't want to go with me, fine. I'll drive myself.”
“Are you going to drive yourself to your own funeral too?” Margot asked.
“I'll take a taxi.” My mother reached for one of Margot's Salems. “Don't even think of telling me not to smoke,” she informed her cousin. “I have a perfect right to do as I please. Considering it doesn't make a difference.”
I poured myself a glass of orange juice and started to cry.
“Look what you did now, Franny,” Margot said to my mother. “You made Gretel cry. Do you see what you're doing by starting to smoke again? You're sending your only daughter around the bend.”
“Gretel's very sensitive,” my mother said. “She always cries.”
The truth was, I hadn't even realized that my mother was sick again until she began sleeping more. It wasn't just naps; she would be sitting there with you having tea one minute, and the next she'd have her head on the table, eyes closed. After that, she started losing weight, even though she ordered a chocolate milk shake and a double cheese-burger every time we went out for lunch. When she started coughing, I knew I should worry; it was the sort of cough you hear all night long, that reverberates through your dreams. My mother swore she would see a doctor, but she waited a few weeks, and then a month, and by that time she'd started to have backaches. Although we hadn't recognized it as such, that had been the sign that her cancer had not only reappeared but had already spread to her lungs.
“If Gretel is so sensitive, how come she didn't apply to college?” Margot asked. “She knows that's what you want for her. She's got two more months until high school graduation and then what's she going to do? Work at the Food Star like Jason? Deliver newspapers?”
“Can we talk about this another time?” I said.
“When?” Margot demanded to know. “When it's too late?”
“Let's not fight,” I suggested, nodding at my mother, who was still looking through the listing of cemeteries.
“You call this a fight?” Margot shook her head. “Baby, you've never seen a fight if you think this is one.”
“Pinelawn,” my mother said, closing the phone book at last.
I started crying all over again.
“If you're going to do that, you can't come,” my mother warned.
“Absolutely not,” Margot agreed.
I blew my nose, and put on a pair of sunglasses.
“Now you're talking,” my mother said to me, and I really did have to laugh, since I wasn't saying a word.
I sat like that, in silence, shielded by dark glasses, all the way out to Pinelawn. When we turned off the expressway, there were miles and miles of graves. It was mind-boggling to think that so many people had already died, but here they were, all in a row.
“My God,” Margot said. She was driving, but she was paying more attention to the cemetery than to the road. “This goes on forever.”
My mother insisted that Margot and I wait in the car while she went in to buy the plot. We smoked cigarettes and listened to the radio. We had made a vow not to cry, for my mother's sake, so instead we played a game Margot had taught me when I was little and she was my baby-sitter.
“I'm going to my grandmother's house and I'm bringing an ax,” I said.
“I'm going to my grandmother's house and I'm bringing an ax and a vial of barbiturates,” Margot fired back.
“That counts as
V.
For vial. If you want it to be B it will have to be a bunch of barbiturates.”
“Fine,” Margot said. “Give me a bunch. Give me a bazillion.”
It was my turn now. “I'm going to my grandmother's house and I'm bringing an ax, a bunch of barbiturates, and a cure for cancer.”
“Gretel.” Margot sighed.
She thought I was impossible, but she loved me anyway, which is the best sort of love there is. When my mother came out of the office she looked giddy and flushed. She smelled like roses as she got into the car. She had a map of Pinelawn, a complicated document of twisted lanes and roads, which she waved under our noses.
“Vista Drive,” she said. “Plot number two-two-five.”
That's when she saw the cigarette in my hand.
“Are you crazy?” my mother cried. “Why would you do this to yourself?”
I had already opened the window, but before I could toss out the cigarette, my mother grabbed it away. She practically had electricity shooting out of her fingertips, and her hair stood on end.
“Don't you ever do that again! Ever!”
My mother turned to face the windshield. Her shoulders were shaking.
“Okay,” I said. I might have been crying. “I won't smoke.”
“Franny, it was my fault,” Margot said. “I figured what the hell.”
“Well, figure it differently.” My mother's voice sounded small and tight. “Let's go. Vista Drive.”
Margot started driving, but the cemetery was confusing and my mother had to keep directing her, and when that still didn't work, she had Margot stop the car and got behind the wheel herself. It had begun to rain by the time we finally found plot 225, the light, pale rain of spring which smells so good. We didn't have raincoats or umbrellas, but we got out anyway.
“I don't like it.” Margot pursed her lips. There was a tremor around her mouth which seemed to make speaking more difficult than usual. “Not one damn bit.”