Edgar and Lucy Read online

  “How are you, Nicky?” she said, falling easily into the name of his youth. “Menza menz,” he said, tilting his gray head; and then he said her name in the old way, too. “Florie.” The shock of hearing that, and the brief song of the old language rising into an air already rich with the smell of excellent cheese, must have been the reason she said yes when he asked her to join him the next week for a cup of coffee.

  But instead of coffee, he took her to a nice restaurant at which she felt embarrassingly underdressed (a beige sweater coat over a plain brown frock). All around them, handsome young men in blue suits and skinny women in silk chemises pointed tiny forks at silver towers of frutti di mare. It must be a special, Florence thought, amazed at the midday extravagance. Nicky ordered a bottle of wine, even though, when he’d suggested it, she’d said, “No. No wine.” When it came to the table, she had to say no again to the waiter; and then a third time when Nicky pointed out that it might go well with her soup. She shook her hand, but he poured it anyway, filling the glass to the rim like a peasant. Florence was so nervous by then, she allowed herself a few sips, with full knowledge that her face would turn beet red, which it always did when she drank. Pio used to call her Blushy Magee. And then she would titter, helplessly, in that high-pitched way of hers.

  The wine softened Florence, and soon she was beaming like a Christmas tree bulb as she listened to Nicky talk about the old days, the years with Pio in the tunnel. He was a good storyteller; he had a wonderful voice. And there were so many things she’d forgotten. The time the four of them, Nicky and Mary and she and Pio, had driven impulsively one Friday night to Seaside Heights. All the hotels were full and the two couples—both still newlyweds—had stayed on the beach practically the whole night, talking and eating and swimming in the dark water. They’d changed into their bathing suits under a towel. Impossible that such a thing could be true, but it was true. As Nicky spoke, Florence could see every detail again. How poor Mary had fallen asleep, and how the boys had covered her up to the neck in sand. What a lark it had been. Mary crying, “Get me out, get me out, I have to pee!” Florence remembered all of it—and before long she heard the laughter, the old sound of it. It was a few seconds before she realized that it was her own titter, flapping foolishly like a trapped bird in the brightly lit restaurant. She swallowed, coughed. Before she could raise her hand, a boy appeared to pour her more water. She drank it slowly, raveling herself back to reality. Here she was, a widow in a public place, giggling like an idiot and sharing a bottle of wine with a dapper loudmouth who was already a good deal more than tipsy. She coughed again, for effect, and touched her throat, somehow trying to let Nicky know that perhaps they had better lower their voices.

  Oh, but he wouldn’t shut up!—talking incessantly and with no discretion, even as the waiter brought a second bottle of wine, pouring it so slowly he was sure to overhear every word. Nicky leaned past the waiter’s hand and brayed at her. Did she remember how he and Pio had stolen some of the surplus tile from the tunnel; had come home one afternoon with the backseat of Pio’s car piled high with the shiny white squares? Didn’t you use them in your bathroom, Florie?

  Oh, for heaven’s sake! Florence looked around in distress. She always knew she’d be arrested eventually for the theft—because it was true: the downstairs bathroom, as well as the bathroom in her own bedroom, had been tiled with stolen property. Property of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. It was printed right on the back of the tiles. If anyone cared to pull them off the wall, the incriminating evidence would probably still be legible. For years, as a newlywed, Florence was terrified whenever she took a bath. Looking up at the white tiles that belonged in the tunnel, she would often imagine the bathroom as a place underwater, a makeshift limbo—the separation between air and liquid meekly provisional. As she smoothed the soap over her legs, she knew it was only a matter of time before the water burst through the walls and entombed her. The wrath of the Hudson.

  And there was Nicky, telling the whole world her husband had been a thief, and laughing about it with a piece of food trembling above his chin, stuck in that silly beard of his. At the cheese counter she’d thought the facial hair becoming, but now she realized it was nothing more than an old man’s laziness. Her mother had always said, never trust a bearded man. Wisdom from the grave. She made a distinct noise with her chair.

  “Shall we have dessert?” Dominic said, and Florence fluttered a hand in the general direction of her lower regions. “I think I may be sick.”

  “Have a seltzer. Do you want a seltzer?” The old man signaled for the waiter.

  No, she did not want a seltzer. She wanted to go home, she wanted to lie down on her bed and sleep, and not dream, and be done with it. “Wipe your mouth,” she said. “You have a clam on your chin.”

  Dominic dabbed at his face. “On the other side,” Florence said. He attempted to clear the deck two more times, with no success, and finally Florence reached over and wiped the old man’s chin.

  “Thank you, Florie.” He said it quietly, and he held her eye in such a way that Florence suspected the man harbored some vague hope that she might be wiping other clams off his chin in the future. Her hands suddenly felt swollen and hot; her heartbeat pulsed in her fingertips like a series of tiny clocks. “I really do feel sick,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  After he signed the check, they stood. Florence allowed him the courtesy of pulling out her chair and helping with her coat. But when they were outside and he touched her shoulder, she flinched. “I have a grandson,” she said sharply.

  He drove her home unevenly, slurring through stop signs. After a blessed spell of silence that lasted six blocks, he suggested they go out to a movie some night. He wasn’t doing anything on Friday. Was she?

  What an idiotic question; what would she be doing on Friday? Painting her nails, she should have said, for heaven’s sake. He was talking to her like she was some kind of teeny-bopper. In reply to his question, Florence only said that she was very sorry about Mary. Such a nice woman, Dominic, so devoted. A pity she was always so frail. That shut the man up for the rest of the drive, and then, at last, they were back in Ferryfield, pulling into her driveway.

  “That grandson of yours. That’s Frank’s son, right?”

  It couldn’t have been a real question. He knew exactly who the child was. Why bring up Frank now, just as she was about to step out of the car?

  “He doing okay? The kid. Adjusting and everything? After what happened to him, my God. Does he remember any of that?”

  Florence was abashed, and wondered if such rude questions were a weak effort at retaliation in the face of rejection. Or perhaps it was simply a drunken man’s unthinking blather.

  “I take good care of him. He wants for nothing.”

  “Light of my life,” she added. And then she was sorry she’d said it, remembering that Dominic and Mary had produced no children; though surely they must have tried.

  “You’re very lucky,” he said, and Florence replied, “We all have our burdens.” She patted the man’s knee as lightly as she could. She didn’t want to end the afternoon at odds with him. The poor man, so desperate he had wanted her. A fat old woman. An Italian widow with a crucifix around her neck. He should have known better than anyone that he was barking up the wrong tree. A mail-order bride from Russia is what he needed; or perhaps he should join a bowling league. Old men had to do terrible things. It had nothing to do with her.

  She told him to take good care of himself. Kind words, but laced with a prick of finality. Yes, she thought, getting out of the car, she had handled that just right.

  After Dominic pulled away, she went behind the house, into the garden, and picked a tomato. She carried it to her bedroom, and she was crying before she reached the bed. She held the tomato carefully so as not to break the delicate skin and stain the pillowcase. Frail Mary, the poor childless woman. Florence held the fruit to her nose and smelled the greeny place where the stem had been. She felt a weig
ht on her shoulder. Dominic’s hand still pressing there. She changed position, rolling onto her back.

  But then came the thought of the boy from the grocery store. Just the week before, he’d dashed outside to find her in the parking lot and touched her arm. “Ma’am.” The way his hand had lingered there on her bare skin. “You forgot your purse,” he said blandly—and there it was, her patent leather clutch, in his other hand. He held it out, but Florence didn’t take it immediately. Let the boy think she was dotty. She’d wanted to be near him a moment longer. As she lay in bed, she could still feel the warmth of their closeness, the way something had bloomed in her chest, hopeful—but frightening, too, like blood unfurling in water.

  But why? Why should she want this boy to touch her, while she had refused the affection of the old man? Somehow (and here Florence’s finger gently punctured the skin of the tomato) it was as if the boy had the power to make life start again—or as if the life whose end she was now approaching was not her real existence, but something badly imagined. The boy seemed to possess some ingenious secret concerning time. There had been an error, but the boy could correct it. She turned her head on the pillow, moaning.

  4

  Best in NJ

  At Celestial Styles, the sole salon in Ferryfield, Lucy was cutting Audrey Fenning’s hair—though her greater attention was on herself, in the mirror. Under her work smock (purposely left untied), she was still wearing the pretty silk wraparound she’d put on for the butcher. A little thrill ran through her. The thrill of seeing herself in yesterday’s dress. There was no shame; in fact, she felt quite the opposite. As Lucy reflected on her outrageous behavior of the night before, the memory only served to draw her upward, like a flower toward the sun. It was one of Lucy’s gifts, to recognize the intelligence of her body and the utter impossibility of denying it. No matter how many times her father had said it would ruin her, she’d always known that her carnal appetite was the one thing capable of saving her. If she believed in God, it was here. Surely, He’d given us such appetites so that we’d stay—for a while at least—on our side of the fence. Without the force of the body, its compulsions, what would prevent a person from sprouting wings before his time and demanding entrance to paradise?

  Yes, her cleavage looked excellent. Customers and co-workers were no doubt wondering about Lucy’s attire—the glam-slut dress wildly inappropriate in the grim salon, a grooming station for a dying breed of wash-and-set dowagers and second-marriage dye-jobs. The worst were the golden-anniversary types, women with the cachet of having been married to the same man for more than half a century, and whose thin speckled fingers were burdened with an excess of diamonds—the wreckage, Lucy suspected, of years without sex. It was a horror show—a friggin’ wax museum. Well, at least one’s vanity never suffered here. Lucy pushed out her chest and noted the success of the gesture in the large mirror.

  “Ow!” Mrs. Fenning said. “Watch what you’re doing.”

  “Oh my God,” Lucy muttered, looking down and seeing a dot of blood on the old woman’s ear.

  “What?” Mrs. Fenning asked in alarm. “Did you cut me?”

  “No, no,” Lucy said, quickly wiping the woman’s ear with a towel.

  “You jabbed me.”

  “I am so sorry. It’s a tricky spot.”

  “It’s an ear.” Mrs. Fenning reached up her hand. “What’s dripping there?”

  “It’s just water,” Lucy said, blocking the woman’s arm. “Here, let me…” She pressed the towel against the earlobe. “All dry.” It was only the tiniest of scratches, thank God, and the blood seemed to have stopped. “What do you think of the bangs?” Lucy said brightly, in an effort to change the subject. She could not afford to lose this job.

  “Maybe a little shorter,” Mrs. Fenning said, pursing her lips.

  Lucy turned the chair a bit, to impede the woman’s view of her left ear, and then concentrated with an exaggerated studiousness on her work. The attention cajoled the old woman back into place. She sighed, and then closed her eyes regally, as if meditating.

  It was so much easier to cut people’s hair when they didn’t talk to you. But Lucy knew it wouldn’t last. It was physically impossible for Audrey Fenning to keep her mouth shut.

  “Did I tell you Lou and I went to Florida?”

  Lucy smiled tightly, suppressing a yawn.

  “That’s why you didn’t see me for two months. Our daughter lives down there. Karen. She works for the space people.”

  “For who?” Lucy thought of the small set of rubber aliens—green, with bendable limbs—that she’d purchased for Edgar recently at the dollar store.

  “For the government,” Mrs. Fenning said irritably, as if it taxed her to have to explain herself. “Satellites, outer space, that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, wow.” Lucy glanced at the ear; it was still a touch red.

  “Very smart girl, let me tell you. “

  “So, what is she, an astronaut?”

  “Karen? Oh God, no. Can you imagine that? That’s just suicide, if you ask me. No, she does numbers and stuff for them. Calculations for the orbits. They hired her right out of college and she’s been there twenty years now.”

  Lucy wondered if Karen was overweight. Perhaps, after a day of numbers, she liked to come home and eat a box of chocolate donuts in front of the television.

  “Makes a good living, let me tell you. Bought a new house, couple of years ago. Orange trees, swimming pool, the whole shebang. Two hops and you’re on the beach.”

  “You look like you got a tan.”

  “That’s just the bronzer. It rained practically the whole time we were down there. Weather was crap. We saw a lot of movies. We saw the one about the dog. Did you see that?”

  “No,” replied Lucy, losing steam. She wasn’t good at these kinds of conversations. Privy to the dullness of others’ lives, she often worried about her own. Were we all like this? Tape recorders that had run out of available space long ago? After a certain age, it was all replay—an endless loop. This wasn’t the first time Audrey had told her about Karen’s new house in Florida. Florence did this, too, repeating the same old stories until you wanted to scream, or knock over a lamp. And the worst part of it was, the dullness of others rubbed off on you; it was contagious. Lucy glanced at herself in the mirror and noted with dismay that the dress was losing its power. A lock of Fenning’s hair was clinging to the skirt. She brushed it off as if it were feces.

  “Oh, and did I tell you about the salon I went to down there? I needed a trim because with all the humidity my hair grows like a spider plant—it gets very big, you know, very puffbally. So Karen says, ‘Go where I go, Mom.’ Place was amazing. Spotless, everybody in white. I said, what do they do, surgery here? But I mean it was gorgeous. Big vases of flowers everywhere. You want fresh fruit, they got fresh fruit. Hispanic girl in the back making cappuccino. And they give you a massage before they cut your hair.”

  Lucy wished she were still in bed with the butcher. She wanted those hairy arms around her again, that big body on hers, blocking out the sun. The salon suddenly seemed too bright.

  “And not bing bang boom. The girl rubbed me for a good ten minutes.”

  “Maybe you should move to Florida,” suggested Lucy.

  The woman’s quick eyes darted upward, gauging the girl’s level of flippancy.

  “I’d move there in a second,” Lucy said, with as much innocence as she could muster.

  I’d move anywhere, she thought. She glanced impatiently toward the front of the salon, as if she were waiting for someone who was very late. She could see the street beyond the windows, the buildings across the way, the small municipal trees in their individual metal corrals—each component of the scene so familiar it seemed to return her gaze. Lucy had grown up not far from Ferryfield—just two towns over, in West Mill, across the river. Seventeen years in a dark house with dreary furniture and too many clocks, a conspiracy of clocks that had slowed down time in an effort to forestall the future.
She couldn’t wait to be free of that house, of her father—to live as far away as possible. Frank had wanted the same thing, and the two of them had often spent hours over a six-pack or a bottle of wine, discussing the options. Frenzied, youthful conversations that had left them breathless—the idea of escape so potent it sucked the oxygen from the room. Once, the plan had been to live nowhere at all. They would simply drive all day and then spend every night at a different roadside hotel—dirty sex and clean sheets, tiny soaps wrapped in paper. She’d never met a boy with so many ideas—and the laughter, she’d never laughed harder with anyone. They could be happy anywhere, even in a car going nowhere. Maybe they’d head south, toward Mexico. Frank had managed to make her believe in such things. His fantasies were inspiring, life-giving. Until they weren’t. Until they somehow became the exact opposite. A line of thought that carried her husband straight out of the world.

  Lucy resented Mrs. Fenning’s mobility, even if it was nothing more than a geriatric gambol in Boca Raton—or wherever it was the space people conducted their business. Why should this old woman with canary-yellow hair and the beginning of a goatee have more freedom than she did? Lucy was suddenly furious. She took a deep breath. A molecule of perfume rose from her breasts, offering a brief comfort. “It might be nice,” she said dutifully. “Florida.”

  “I don’t know.” Mrs. Fenning scrunched up her nose. “You can’t really do Christmas down there. The lights just look stupid.”

  Lucy plugged in the blow-dryer.

  “Wait.” The old woman held up her hand and wiggled her fingers. “Let me see the back before you dry it.”

  Lucy passed her a small mirror and turned the chair. Mrs. Fenning made a thorough inspection. It seemed she was satisfied when suddenly she brought the glass closer to the left side of her face.