Part 17 (1/2)

We realize that no one we can in good faith call a friend is one of the poor. We know only one person who doesn't have health insurance. One who won't get social security. We both worry about these people and hope that if they're in need we'll have the wherewithal to help. By wherewithal we mean both money and goodwill.

My friend tells me about a woman whom she works with who has three children, a husband out of work, a mother with Alzheimer's in a nursing home, an alcoholic father in another nursing home. My friend says, ”I think that I should genuflect to her. But there's nothing I can do for her. Nothing at all.”

No one we know well doesn't have some sort of household help. A cleaning woman.

I tell my friend that when I was young no one I knew had household help, and that in the years when no one I knew had household help, I was left by men, or boys, over and over.

I suggest that it would be too simple to say this has to do with age and money.

But I don't know how else to explain it.

I confide that my closest male friend, J., had a cancer scare this summer. The day before he left for a month-long holiday, his doctor phoned and said the minute he came back, he had to schedule a biopsy. He was about to get on a boat to sail around the Caribbean. He did get on the boat, he went sailing, and he told the friend he was sailing with about his cancer scare. But he didn't tell me, although I'm the person he usually confides in, because he knew I was trying to finish a book and he didn't want to distract me.

When he finally told me after the book was finished, and the biopsy had come back negative, I was grateful that he hadn't told me before. Then I was appalled. I say to my friend, ”I often think I'm not really capable of love. Or capable of real love.”

I repeat to her for the thousandth time the story about my daughter and me when we were in a riptide. I didn't try to save her. I saved myself. Someone else saved my daughter.

My friend (the friend with whom I'm having the conversation) tells me that I panicked, that it doesn't mean anything about my character. And that I wouldn't have felt like that about our other friend's not telling me about his cancer scare if I hadn't been finis.h.i.+ng a book.

I don't believe her.

I know that one day it will be clear to everyone: I am incapable of love.

We stop for a cappuccino, and though we know it's overpriced, we don't for a minute consider not buying it. $2.75. Too much, but nothing, really, in our lives. On the tables there are bowls full of packets of sugar. I tell my friend that if I were one of the poor, I'd load my pockets with these packets of sugar; it would make a big difference. Perhaps I'd allow myself a coffee- not a cappuccino like this, but a plain coffee in a plain coffee shop- eighty-five cents- once a month. Each time I did this, I'd fill my pockets with sugar. I'd have to choose a different coffee shop each time because if I were one of the poor, I'd be noticed.

But, my friend says, if we lived in a really poor country, there wouldn't be packets of sugar on the tables.

Because of the conversation we are having, we pick up the movie The Story of Adele H. from the video store. We can hardly bear to watch it. The daughter of a famous man, Victor Hugo, Adele puts herself in the place of the desperate. For love. For unrequited love. She condemns herself to wandering. To starvation. Beneath our pity and our fascination, there is grat.i.tude. Because she has done it, we need not.

The next day, I copy a line from a book I'm reading, and mail it to my friend. It says, Ready to be someone else in order to be loved, she would abandon herself to ridicule and even to madness. Under the words I write, Today it is the fifth day of October. My friend meets me in front of my son's school. A little paradise, this school, where children can be happy as they learn. A private school, with a very high tuition. Leaning against the building is a woman wearing a white clown's wig, bell-bottomed jeans, a blue bra, and no s.h.i.+rt. I have neglected to mention that it's raining and she appears to be at least seventy. And that she's not wearing shoes. My friend and I don't say anything about her.

No one entering or leaving the building appears to look at her.

It is not possible that anyone entering or leaving the building will speak to her.

It is also impossible to invent anything that might approximate her history.

My friend and I don't say anything about her because we both know she's the woman we're afraid of becoming.

The one we fear becoming when we have lost our prosperity.

The one we really are.

The Healing.

Veronica loved to hear, and then go over in her mind, the story of how her uncle Johnny Nolan came to marry Nettie Bordereau. They had met when he was working as a lifeguard at a hotel in the Adirondacks. She was a chambermaid, and they'd been thrown together because they were the only two young people who went into town for Sunday Ma.s.s. Nettie confessed afterward- not to the priest, but to Johnny- that she'd made a point of being in the station wagon that brought people to Ma.s.s because she'd had her eye on him since Memorial Day and saw that he never missed a Sunday. He'd promised his mother, he'd told Nettie later on, and she'd liked that. She told him that not only was he good-looking, he was reliable.

Johnny went back to New York after Labor Day, and she went back to Watertown. But every weekend he made the nine-hour trip to see her. He was starting a job with the telephone company, a linesman. The lifeguard job was just an interval between Korea and the job he thought would be his for life. It was a perfect time for him to get married, and the Nolans were pleased enough with Nettie. They admired her liveliness; they thought it would be good for Johnny, who, they were afraid, had a tendency to be lazy. But there was something about her quickness- which they attributed to her being French Canadian- that made them feel inadequate, apologetic, dull.

She and Johnny married in February. She wore a blue suit with a fur collar which made her look like an expectant little animal. The Nolans found the fur collar at once exciting and in bad taste. They were relieved when the couple announced they would live in Long Island City. Delia, Johnny's mother, Veronica's grandmother, had been a widow fifteen years; she liked to have her sons around her. She'd had seven, but had lost one in the war and one had moved to Baltimore. It never occurred to her that any of the three daughters would move away.

All the sons had married well, all six of them, but of the three daughters, only Veronica's mother had married. Aunt Noreen had become a Sister of the Good Shepherd. It was a cloistered order, so they never saw her. The other girl, Aunt Maddie, lived at home. She worked for the telephone company too. Or, she had worked there first, which was how Johnny had got the job. She was an operator. People said she had a good telephone voice on account of her having been musical. At family parties she played the piano while everyone sang. Veronica had never heard her sing.

Veronica knew her grandmother liked her best of all the grandchildren. It wasn't just that she was the youngest by three years; she was only nine, but she knew her having been singled out had nothing to do with her age. ”You're n.o.body's fool,” her grandmother had said to her once, when she'd heard about what Veronica had done when the butcher tried to shortchange her.

She was afraid of Moe Schultz with his b.l.o.o.d.y hands and his red cheeks that made you think there was blood too close under the surface, too much blood, and it would come spurting out at any minute, all over the place if someone crossed him, if he got too excited. And then he had a German accent. He had come from Germany. Veronica didn't know exactly when, but she knew that when you thought of Germany, you had to think of blood, of soldiers, of dead bodies, white, in piles. So she was standing up to all that when she looked at the coins, greasy, grown fattish themselves from the touch of Moe Schultz's fingers. She thought that there would be smears of blood on the coins if you put them under a microscope.

There should have been a quarter and two dimes in her hand, forty-five cents, and instead he had put only two dimes there. She felt in her flat palm, dry, warm, the absence of the quarter, which was of all coins the one that she liked best. Pennies were a children's coin, inconsequential. Nickels seemed coa.r.s.e to her and common, workaday, dependable, but without uses, capable of purchasing nothing that could bring excitement or real joy. You would have to think, think hard, about spending a nickel. ”He counts every last nickel,” was something she had heard people say. She could imagine a gray-faced man with begrudging eyes and tired felt hat and gloves with no fingers. She imagined him at night, when he came home from work to his ugly room in a boardinghouse, a room with no pictures, maybe even no window, or if there was one it brought no light. He would come home, take off his rodent-colored hat, hang his jacket, also rodent colored, on the coat tree (he would have no closet) and before he sat down at the table that, except for the bed and the dresser, was the only furniture in the room, he would reach into his pockets, lint covered perhaps because the linings of his pockets had begun to shred, and take out three or four nickels that he would add to others in a box that he took from the dresser, a flimsy box that would break one day from the weight of all those coins.

Dimes seemed to her deceitful; she would never have been surprised if, handing over a dime one day, a shopkeeper would say: ”But these won't do at all, you know, don't you know they're worth nothing.” Dimes in their lightness, their flimsiness, made her question the whole idea of worth. It seemed an impossible question to her- what was something worth- and she resented dimes for making her consider it.

Quarters, though, were the coins of the great world. She always imagined them with high, piled, s.h.i.+ning hair, in furs, trailing behind them a scent that was strong but not floral, making their way through anything, taking with ease and calm a.s.surance what they knew to be their rightful place. Sometimes she couldn't imagine anything a quarter wouldn't buy, so desirable, so complete in its attractions, did each seem in itself.

So when Moe Schultz put into her hand only the two greasy dimes, she felt the absence of that quarter, strongly, as if she'd been deprived of a delicious meal that had been promised, that she had every right to expect, and had been presented instead with a plate of dry leaves. She felt the absence of the quarter in her mouth in just that way; the lack of it made her begin to salivate. And she saw the blood on Moe Schultz's hands, around the outlines of his nails, and she thought of the soldiers in their brown coats and the piles of corpses, and her body, too light to contain it, was filled with wave after wave of swelling anger. She had no choice but to speak.

”Excuse me, Mr. Schultz, I think you've given me the wrong change.” ”I've given you what is owing,” he said, staring her down with his brown eyes, also meat colored, also overfed by blood.

”I got one and three-quarters of a pound of hamburger, that's a dollar twenty-five, and a quarter pound of bologna, that's twenty cents, which makes a dollar forty-five.”

”You got two pounds of hamburger. Give it to me. I weigh.” She knew that he would put the meat on the scale and then put his fat thumb beside it and it would look like she was wrong.

”I think you made a mistake, Mr. Schultz. I think you forgot I only asked for a pound and three-quarters.”

He took the quarter from the cash register, whose keys he pushed with a violence Veronica knew was meant for her. He threw the quarter on the sawdust-covered floor, beside her shoes. She looked at the coin, s.h.i.+ning though defiled, beside her round-toed navy oxford. She tried to think of a way to get the coin without looking clumsy, without, as her aunts would say, ”giving him the satisfaction.” She would not give him the satisfaction. So she bent at the knees, keeping her spine straight, keeping her eyes on the butcher, although he had turned his back on her. But she knew he could see her in the mirror that covered the shop's wall. She reached for the coin without taking her eyes from the butcher's enormous back. Not looking at the floor, not once, she fingered the coin, scooped it up, and put it in her pocket, not saying goodbye as she pushed open the door and heard, upon her leaving, the falsely cheerful tinkle of the bell.

It must have been Mrs. Gallagher who told her grandmother about it. She was glad the news had come to her grandmother rather than her mother, because it was the kind of news that would have made her mother feel afraid. Her mother was not a strong person. Veronica sometimes felt that in the process of being born, she and her brothers had pushed out all their mother's strength and left it in a b.l.o.o.d.y heap on the hospital floor. And their mother had not recovered. Her mother wore gla.s.ses all the time; Veronica had no image of her mother without gla.s.ses, and they made her eyes look swimming, as if they were always on the verge of tears. She wore her hair in a bun at the nape of her neck, but little wisps of hair were always escaping, and she was always, nervously, ashamedly trying to put the stray hairs back into place. Her chest under the ap.r.o.n, limp and floral, that she always wore, seemed caved in, as though someone had given her a blow to the back where her waist was, and she had never again been quite able to straighten up.

She was afraid of so many things: things she had failed to do and things she could not possibly keep from happening. You could never leave the house without her running in once more to be sure she'd turned the oven off or not left the iron plugged in. When a high wind came you could see the look of terror on her flushed face. She didn't trust the house to keep them; when she asked Veronica's father to double-check the windows, he was cruel, and he said he would not, she must practice self-control.

Her father was afraid of nothing, but nothing pleased him either. He was never happy, and he resented others' happiness, particularly his wife's in those rare moments when she had some. If he came home from work and saw her and the children playing cards on the dining room table, he threw down his coat and accused her of indulging herself rather than seeing to his dinner. Soon he was in a rage. He responded to Veronica's excellent report cards as if they were a trick she'd pulled to show him up. Her mother would give her a nickel for an ice-cream cone as a reward; her father predicted her brains would bring her nothing but bad luck.

He might have been a bit afraid, Veronica sometimes thought, of her grandmother. Veronica's mother would deliver the good report cards to Delia and Delia would say, ”Isn't that great, then,” and her father would have to pretend to be pleased.

Delia told Veronica she must study hard, that if she studied hard the world was her oyster. Her grandmother used phrases that pleased Veronica but which she in no way understood. She had never seen an oyster, but she knew it was a kind of fish, something like a clam, and she knew that it was gray. What that had to do with the world, or something good about it, was nothing she could imagine. Another time Delia had said, ”I wouldn't be too quick about marrying. Marriage isn't all beer and skittles.” She had no idea what skittles were and she hated the taste and smell of beer. She a.s.sociated it with her father and her father's anger when he drank, so maybe the angry behavior of men was what her grandmother was talking about. But she was saying marriage wasn't beer and that other thing, so what could she possibly have meant?

Her puzzlement about the things her grandmother said added to her unease about Delia's favor. Delia liked her for things like standing up to Moe Schultz and preferring what she called ”sums” to dolls and dress-up. Veronica was pretty sure that Delia a.s.sumed it was because she was ”practical” rather than ”dreamy” that she liked adding numbers. What she would never know, because Veronica would die before she let her know, were the dreams that went on in her head when she was adding numbers. That she wanted the quarter, not only because she was angry at being cheated, but because she wanted who the quarter was. That she liked writing numbers in a column because each of them was a person: two was a prince, five a jaunty boy, and eight a tender mother. Seven was a card-sharp and a cowboy, six was a fool who deserved nothing but to be deceived. And somehow the new number that could be born by adding the others up brought to her a world of couplings, connections she would dwell on endlessly. If her grandmother knew all that she would never take Veronica with her on errands.

So between feeling bad that her grandmother had chosen her on false grounds and sad about how the way her coming into life had sapped her mother's strength and hopeless that everything she did seemed to her father a theft from his account, she often wished she could be somewhere else, brought up among some other people. She was mostly alone, watching things, making up stories. The only sense of Tightness came from being with her grandmother, when Delia called her ”partner.” And even then, when she heard those words, she felt that she had stolen grace.

Her aunts and uncles didn't like her except for Johnny, who did like her, because she was happy to listen when he spoke about Korea. And she liked the slippers he'd brought back, and the paper parasols and the tops and the toys made out of paper that no American children could figure out. She thought they were meant to be looked at rather than played with. The word ”toy,” she thought, must be a mistranslation. She was sure Johnny had misunderstood. She never told him that; she always asked him to take out his things from Korea and show them to her. This made everyone think she was showing off; she could tell they wanted to say something about it to her, but they were too afraid of Delia to let their dislike of Veronica show. But the Bordereaus, Nettie and her brother Phil (his real name was Philippe), didn't see any need to change anything they did because of something about Delia. They said, right out, and no one stopped them, ”That kid gives me the creeps,” and ”What the h.e.l.l's she staring at like that?”

There were a lot of Bordereaus around after a while, because within a year of Nettie's marrying Johnny her whole family had moved to Queens from Watertown. There was Phil, an electrician, and an older widowed sister, Adele, who was a nurse. A practical nurse. ”An L.P.N.,” Nettie had said, quickly, casually, pretending it was something she wasn't really proud of. For a long time, Veronica thought Nettie was saying ”elpienne,” that it was one of her French words, and Veronica thought it had something to do with the Alps, that Adele was some kind of mountain climber, although this was hard to understand because she was very fat and always complained about her sore feet. But by not asking, by listening- although the way it happened was a mystery to her- Veronica learned that L.P.N. were initials standing for licensed practical nurse. She didn't know either when or how she found out that an L.P.N. wasn't a real nurse, they didn't get paid as much, they couldn't give injections, and they almost never worked beside the doctors.

Phil and Adele and Mrs. Bordereau moved into the top floor of a house two blocks from Delia's. It was a house built on a slab of concrete; there was no gra.s.s at all, only one slab in the front and another one in the back, which Phil said was a relief because if there was anything he didn't need it was mowing. The house was very dark on account of something called blackout shades, which weren't really black, but dark green, and Veronica knew they had something to do with the war, but she didn't know what.

Mrs. Bordereau almost never left the house. She wore a white net over her hair and her gla.s.ses had no rims. Light bounced off them more than ordinary gla.s.ses. She made up special medicines and gave people ”treatments” but no one ever went to her except Veronica and her family. Nettie said it would take a while for her to build things up, but then you wait and see, there'd be lines up the block, like in Watertown. Veronica did not believe her.