Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn (18 page)

In the wallet's zipper pocket were two quarters and a handful of pennies. The plastic slides had in them a Visa card, an ATM card, a driver's license with a startled young face and her address in Philadelphia, a photograph of Joanna looking plump and impatient, a photograph of Barbara waving from the steps of a red London bus—and then she remembered taking it, and how the bus took off with Barbara and without her, and how she'd chased it, laughing. A photograph of Jerry, looking like a boy.

A red address book. For months, back then, she hadn't had people's addresses or phone numbers. After her mother died she had spent a few days each week in the apartment, trying to deal with everything. Barbara had been little help, but she had put together a memorial service and had somehow found relatives to attend it. They'd had a fight about something of her mother's, which Barbara, in the end, had taken. Con had wept as if it were her mother that Barbara wanted and had managed to secure, but now she couldn't remember what the object had
been, or whether she'd taken it when Barbara died, whether she'd even thought of it.

A bottle of aspirin, 325 milligrams each. Now her headaches often didn't subside even if she took extra-strength aspirin. A lipstick. She looked at the keys again. One was the key to her mother's apartment, one to their car. Now she didn't have a car, and Jerry had a different one. She didn't recognize some of the keys, though they all looked familiar, looked as if her fingers might have identified each one in the dark.

Jerry stood in the doorway. “What are you doing?”

“You forgot to give me my package.”

“What was it?”

She stared at him. He was naked, his forearms long and tapered, like a young man's, his legs thicker—middle-aged—but held lightly, as if he might spring away. He'd grown hairier—on his arms, his shoulders—as he grew older. His belly was still almost flat. He worked out at a gym. His hands had always looked too wide for the rest of him, and they still did; he had the hands of a wide, squat, muscle-bound man, but he was a long, narrow man. He had a way of turning his palms so he looked as if he wore something on his hands; they were small mitts. His hair was graying but still mostly dark; it had the texture of a black man's hair.

“It's my purse,” she said.

“What purse?”

“It was stolen. Years and years ago. The week my mother died. From her apartment.”

“Are you
kidding
me?” said Jerry. “Is the money in it?”

“Just some coins,” she said, “but lots of other things.” Then she said, “Aren't you cold?”

“Not particularly.”

She found herself standing, anyway, as if to warm him with her body. She took him in her arms and wept a little.

“What is it?”

“I don't know. It's beautiful, but sad, somehow. Look.” She showed him the keys, the wallet.

“Come to bed,” he said.

“I don't know what to do about Joanna.”

“It's the middle of the night. Don't you have to go to work in the morning?”

So she followed him back to bed and pulled herself next to him, leaving what she'd found on the table. She wouldn't let him sleep in her bed when anyone else was in the apartment. She slept, then awoke once more and went to look at the bag. She couldn't thank Pete, who'd found it and mailed it, who'd spent several dollars on postage, mailing what he'd found to someone who might be dead or might never receive it. She couldn't let him know it had reached her. She was sure Pete wasn't the burglar. Someone who didn't bother to take the coins from the wallet would not bother to return the bag, even if he'd had a change of heart.

She looked at the old crossword puzzle. She'd filled in half the blanks. She remembered that she used to work crossword puzzles, but she didn't remember doing one before her bag was stolen. It was called “Name Game.” For one across the clue was “salami purveyor” and she'd written “deli” in ink. Five across was “provoked.” She had not written anything there. She
didn't let herself find a pen and finish it. Jerry was right. It was the middle of the night. But before she returned to bed, she turned some of the pages, starting at the back of the magazine. The recipes were for shrimp and vegetables with champagne, salmon fillets braised in red wine, asparagus and mushrooms with fresh coriander. Fancy food. Con strained to remember reading the food page—probably on the train from Philadelphia. She couldn't. In the Style section an article said, “Now, at the end of the 1980s it is the height of high style to wear almost everything a man does, in versions scaled to a woman's physique.” The sentence seemed innocent—old-fashioned and simple-minded. She couldn't imagine a time—only fourteen and a half years earlier—when this sentence might have seemed like something to write and read. She left the magazine and returned to bed. She didn't know she slept, but she must have, because what awoke her next was not a nightmare—it had no story—but perhaps the residue of a nightmare. Con felt herself falling, falling into emptiness that was featureless and unending. In a moment, if she didn't stop herself, she would be no one, not there, not anywhere. Nothing held her, nothing kept her from falling into featureless space or timeless time except the thought of Joanna, and she screamed and in her mind reached to hold onto someone. She reached for Jerry and held his arm, and when she sensed that she'd touched someone, she clung harder.

“Con, wake up, it's all right.”

She had thought she was awake. She
was
awake, but it didn't help, because she still felt that letting go of this human arm might release her to fall over an edge, into a cessation of
everything. She held Jerry's arm and he turned and surrounded her with his body, and soothed her like a baby. Any decent human being would have been enough to keep her from falling, but what if nobody had been in her bed? Usually, nobody was. Usually she was alone in the apartment. She sobbed with her whole body.

In the morning she slept through the alarm clock. “Con?” Jerry said, finally. He was standing in the doorway.

“I'm staying home,” she said and slept again. When she awoke, sunshine told her that hours had passed. She heard the shower. She went into the kitchen. Jerry had moved the objects from the bag closer together, so as to make room for a cereal bowl and a coffee mug (which sat near them, with a little milk in the bottom of the bowl, and some coffee in the mug), but he had kept Con's things in the same relation to one another: the bottom left corner of the green notebook, with the twisted spiral of metal, rested just below and to the right of the wallet, and so on. The wooden box was off to the side. She tried to open it again. She'd have to pick the lock. It was a simple lock and probably she could open the box without trouble, but she wanted to wait and be careful, so as not to mar the wood.

She phoned the office and said she was sick. It was almost true. Her head felt wrong. She would not finish the task she'd set this week; it would have to wait. She poured herself a cup of coffee, took the notebook, and went back to bed. When Jerry emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel—he still hadn't unpacked, and indeed there was no place to store his clothes—she said, “I'm looking at something” and waved him away. He padded into the living room and didn't come back.

The first page of the notebook was dated March 3, 1987. She'd been carrying it around for two years when it was stolen. Now she didn't carry notebooks like that.

“Jo to doctor 4/6 4:00” was written on the first page. Under it she'd skipped a few spaces and had written “Office meeting Wed. 3” Then came a list of jobs she'd planned to do, maybe over a weekend: laundry, buy shoes Jo, call mother.

She turned the pages. Nothing was funny. She'd been an earnest, hardworking mother. After a bit came notes from the visit to the doctor. Joanna's height was five feet, four inches: she'd already been taller than her mother. Under that was “Plaintiff's lawyer—Bernstein” and a phone number. She'd been so sure, at the time, that she'd know which plaintiff was meant that she had not written it down. And then she suddenly remembered Bernstein. She'd liked him. They'd settled that case.

Con read reminders of errands, notes about work. Sometimes she had copied a few sentences from a newspaper article or a book. Sometimes she argued with herself on paper. “If due process violation, then—” she'd written. Then nothing, but two pages along came the working out of the argument. “It's a due process violation,” she'd written. “Plaintiff should have offered notice and a hearing. As in Hendrix. But Hendrix had to do with firing. But still.”

Next came a few pages of what looked like a letter, but then she realized it was a journal. She had rarely kept journals or diaries, only when she was upset. “Another day, no phone call,” the diary began. Maybe Jerry had been on a trip. But he never called from his trips.

She'd gone on, “She wouldn't give up on me, never has in all
these years, yet always the sense that it's because she knows I'll never do such-and-such, never say such-and-such. But I don't know what such-and-such is, so I might have finally said or done it. Last time—more disdain? When M. bragged about the ribbon?”

Could she have meant Marlene? Or was M “mother” and “she” was Marlene? Surely Con had never felt that embarrassing sort of need for Marlene.

There were more names and phone numbers, plans for work, shopping lists, lists of people to phone: her mother; Barbara. A flurry of facts, names, and numbers, in the last used pages. Addresses. Directions. This must have had to do with the case she'd been working on when the bag was stolen, the last case she'd worked on for that job. Everything had ended at once: her marriage, her job, her life as a daughter. This notebook.

The next-to-the-last entry said “Mountain View Motel” with a phone number. The last was a note to herself in blue ink, followed by another one, in black. The first said, “Mabel Turner and her gang not terrific clients. Possible to dump them? Find different but comparable client? Ethical to dump them?” Then came a space. The second note was in larger handwriting, as if Con had been excited. “NO,” she'd written. “NO. Nobody's consistently terrific. Nobody's terrific. The point is how we describe them. Orange stripe on white can be honestly described as white stripe on orange.” She stared at the sentence. It seemed like something she had always known—something everybody had always known—but also something she still didn't know: that there was more than one truth, more than one way of telling the truth.

Her mother had had a striped tablecloth, and that was what
Barbara had taken. Losing her mother had made loss the theme of Con's days; losing Barbara was only part of the life of loss. She looked back over fifteen years and saw nothing but loss, nothing but sorrow. As with the stripe on the tablecloth, this was one way to see it. She took a shower and washed her thinning, graying hair, feeling kind toward it for once.

 

When Con awoke in her mother's bed on Saturday morning, she thought the problem was that she'd lost the cat. Then she remembered. She'd forgotten to offer the cat to Peggy the night before. But why would Peggy want him? For a long time Con couldn't bring herself to get out of bed. For once, the phone did not ring. She made up her mind to go running. Then she'd figure out how to go home. She still didn't have keys to her house, and Jerry and Joanna were still away from home. Now it seemed cumbersome to imagine the burglar going to Philadelphia and finding his way to University City so as to hurt Joanna. Now she knew he just wouldn't have the energy, as she herself, the day after her mother died, did not have the energy to get out of bed.

She wanted things. She'd known the dark red glass ashtray all her life. Now she knew that Marlene had taken it from a hotel—cheating on one alarming lover with another—and given it to her mother. Barbara must not have it; Con must have it. What if Marlene had lied, and her mother came home from Rochester to find Con packing her belongings or giving things away? Maybe her mother was fine and Marlene was demented.

Con put on her sweatpants and running shoes and took her mother's new key, which she first stuck into her sock—where its sharp edges nicked her skin—and then into the pocket of her T-shirt. She remembered the man at the funeral home, someone besides Marlene who believed that Gert was dead. She made her way down to the street. The fresh new morning was kind; she stretched against an iron railing and took off slowly. A man passing said, “Way to go, girl.” But she was soon breathless. She gave up and walked. Now she wanted to be back in the apartment, where she could cry.

On her way to the shower, she considered her mother's enormous collection of towels. Her mother had acquired objects with abandon; apparently she thought she'd never die. Instead of taking a shower, Con moved piles of towels to the sofa, then began taking clothes from the closet and laying them on the bed. She found dresses her mother had made years ago. How could Con dispose of them? She had never properly appreciated her mother.

When she was finally bathed and dressed, she called Marlene. “It's hard,” Con said, when Marlene said hello in her ordinary voice.

“Oh, Connie, my old friend,” said Marlene, and at that Con began to cry loudly and openly. She had no tissue, and walked with the phone—it was the kitchen phone—as far as she could, looking for one.

“It's for the best,” Marlene said again.

“No, it isn't!” Marlene never talked like that. She never made the remarks people habitually make to keep from noticing how bad they feel.

“She was terrified,” said Marlene. “She'd say something that didn't make sense, and then she'd point out what she'd said.”

“There are medicines.”

“Which
might
slow it down.”

“It still isn't better that she's dead.” Con remembered something her mother used to do. When a decision had been reached, she'd pat the furniture—a table, the top of a bookcase. A little tap, as if to say, “So.”