Three Women Read online

  People said New York was cold, but she had little conversations with twenty people between the subway and the door to her apartment. She knew hundreds of people in her neighborhood, from the group trying to preserve rent control, to the tenants union created to fight the landlords, to the reform party meetings and all the people she had known in fifty-five years of being politically active. She had lived in this apartment on 105th between Columbus and Manhattan for thirty-one years. She had seen the neighborhood change and change again. Friends died and new friends came into her life. She felt sorry for old people like Miller who could only relate to people they’d known back when. She was determined to remain curious and ready to learn new things from new people until the day she dropped dead, preferably on a picket line.

  She stopped at her favorite resale shop on Columbus to scan the clothing racks. She was still a size six, and she kept her hair a warm light red. “Oh, Bev,” Tina, the young Jamaican woman behind the counter, called to her, “I got a black number you would look great in. Asymmetrical, very stylish.”

  “Now where would I wear such a thing?” But she took it, gave Tina her suit to hold, and went behind the partition where a mirror stood. Umm, she liked it. At her age, she couldn’t wear décolletage any longer, and this dress covered her pretty well. The tag said thirty dollars, but Tina would usually bargain with her. “Such a dress, what would an old lady like me need with it?” But the tenants organizing group always had a Valentine’s Day party.

  She got the dress for twenty-two dollars. No bottle of wine for the next few weeks, but she would knock the old guys’ eyes out at the party. She still enjoyed that, she couldn’t help it. And maybe Hank would get a few ideas. She saw one of the kids from her building, Bobby Choi, hanging around outside P.S. 145 as she passed and waved to him.

  The super greeted her warmly and gave her a package. A friend in England had sent her his new book on British miners. She collected her mail and took the creaky hesitant elevator up, muttering to itself as if it were senile. It was a narrow old building the landlord did not bother with. If you wanted the apartment painted, you painted it yourself. The kids daubed graffiti on the walls that stayed until other kids spray painted over with new graffiti. She opened both locks on her door, went in, and shoved the dead bolt to.

  Her sleek black tomcat, Mao, came to greet her, twisting about her legs and making that Siamese cry of his. No man had ever greeted her more ecstatically in her entire life than her cat did whenever she went out, even if it was just to the corner to pick up the Sunday Times. She hated to admit it, but Karla’s neighborhood had better kosher deli now than the Upper West Side. She had bought herself a good supply of pastrami and kishkes and knishes. What a supper she would have tonight, and she would share it with Mao. She could get good smoked fish in her neighborhood when she was willing to spend the money and good strudel still, bagels, rugola, but proper knishes and kishkes, no way.

  Karla had also given her a plastic container full of chopped liver. Karla was a good cook, but then, she had always liked fussing around the house, the way Beverly could never be bothered. Most nights, she just opened a can of tuna to share with Mao or maybe a can of soup. Unlike most women her age, she had not gone to fat and she had not withered away. She was perhaps five pounds heavier than she had been at forty, and that was it. Weight was always visible on a small woman, but nobody would ever call her fat like Karla. Suzanne never gained weight either. That was one of the few ways they were alike, mother and daughter. She hung up the black dress on the rack over the tub to shake out the wrinkles and get rid of the musty smell.

  Suzanne had bought her an answering machine ten years before, and after letting it sit under the bed for three years, finally she had given in and begun to use it. She played her messages now.

  “This is Gordon from the Tenants for Rent Control. We’ve got an important meeting with our state rep tonight and I want everybody on the steering committee to show up. Seven-thirty my place. Beverly, are you listening?”

  About half the messages were political and half were friends. Her poker group was meeting again after a hiatus when Bianca had her heart attack. Nat had called trying to get her to go to a movie with him. He’d like to start up again, the old reprobate, but once fooled is smart afterward. She did not return his call. Let him stew. He had been so taken with that widow with the condo in Vero Beach. Now he thought he could just pick up where they had left off two years ago. She grinned. She was more interested in Hank, who was on the steering committee with her. His wife had died last year, and he was coming out of his mourning. He was a retired academic who had written a couple of books that had impressed her. She usually wasn’t that taken with writers, but he was good-looking with abundant snowy white hair and blue eyes the color of those weeds that grew in vacant lots in Brooklyn, chicory. Kept in shape. Yes, she would sit next to him tonight. If she had time, she’d flirt with him, but she had a proposal to push. It required research on the landlords, but she knew how to do that, and she’d teach the younger folks. It was important to pass on skills.

  She sat down to her copyediting, putting on her reading glasses. She hated them, forgot them on every table and surface in the three-room apartment. She had never worn glasses until she’d turned fifty. But she could no longer do copyediting without them, and that was her livelihood. She freelanced for several journals and magazines and the occasional small-to middle-size publisher. She had a reputation for knowing many languages and jargons and being fast and careful. She operated mostly through messengers, because she had been dropped by a couple of large publishers when they realized how old she was. On the phone, no one could tell, for she still had a fine clear speaking voice. As if being seventy-two made any difference to her accuracy. Snobby little pipsqueaks out of Ivy League schools ran publishing now, and their knowledge of the world was as narrow as a shoelace.

  She lit a cigarette and drew heavily on it as she began proofing the biography of a civil war naval captain. Karla would not let her smoke in Rosella’s apartment. They acted as if a puff of smoke would give the twins TB. Beverly had to ration her cigarettes, no more than half a pack a day, not because she gave a damn what the scare mongers said, but because that was all she could afford. She got by, she got by just fine on Social Security and her copyediting and the check Suzanne sent every month. That covered some extras, like a pack of cigarettes every other day and the deli from Brooklyn. An occasional bottle of wine. Scrupulously she used the check from Suzanne only for extras, so that no one could say she was not supporting herself, as she had since she was eighteen. It was absolutely essential to stay independent.

  She had never gotten used to being old. When she would walk down Broadway she would half expect men to stare at her the way they always had, something about her walk, the way she carried herself, the sense of style she had been born with. She would catch sight of herself in the mirror and think, who is that old bat? Because inside seventy-two-year-old Beverly Blume was Beverly Blume, the same woman she had been since eighteen, full of energy and opinions and ready to laugh and ready to take a chance and clear-eyed about what was going on in the world.

  She remembered the first time she had a cigarette. She was eighteen, still living at home with her parents, on Twelfth Street near Second. They called it the East Village now, but it had been simply the Lower East Side then, the ghetto, and they lived all seven of them in a four-room cold-water flat next to an old-age home for the indigent. She had taken a job in a box factory on Third over near Avenue B. After she got her first week’s paycheck, she was walking out when that gorgeous Irishman Jimmy fell into step beside her. He asked her to supper. Now, she knew if she didn’t show up for Shabbat dinner, her mother would kill her, so she only took a walk with him and had a soda, a chocolate egg cream. As they walked, he offered her a cigarette and lit it for her like a gentleman. Then he kissed her. She could still remember how sweet and sultry that kiss was, tasting of the tobacco and chocolate on both their breath. Nothing h
ad ever come of it—she had been a virgin and living at home—but she still relished that first cigarette and that kiss in the doorway of a dry cleaners. Ah, she had had some fine times, no doubt about it. Life was mean and hard, but it handed you something sweet now and then, something really sweet.

  4

  Thirteen Years Earlier

  Elena

  Elena was furious when Sam moved out. She knew it was her mother’s fault. If Suzanne had been nicer to him, if she had played up to him, he would not have left them. She knew he had had an affair with a client. She had listened with a glass at the wall to her parents’ fighting. Not that Sam was her father, but he was better than most fathers. Suzanne should have fought for him, got dressed up, had her hair done over, sat in his lap and told him how wonderful he was. Instead she stupidly blamed him for being unethical, as if ethics had anything to do with sex. Even Elena knew that was garbage, and she was still a stupid virgin at fourteen.

  Even her cat Big Boy missed Sam, whose lap he liked to sit in. Everything was falling apart in her life. Her two best girlfriends, Genette and Helen, were no longer hers. Ever since they’d moved to the South End when she was just entering the first grade, Helen had been her other self. Helen was Black, but they had the same name in different forms, and Helen’s mama was a lawyer too. Genette transferred in at the beginning of third grade. Helen was closer to Genette than Elena was, but they all hung together, inseparable in and after school. She learned all her jump rope chants from them. Then around the time they were all going to take their exams to go to Boston Latin School, Helen’s family moved to Lexington. Elena saw her a couple of times after that, and they called and wrote, but their closeness gradually died. Genette had gotten interested in boys, and her grades were suffering. She didn’t make the cut. Elena went on to Boston Latin alone, and Genette got into a crowd in her middle school.

  Even though Elena was in seventh grade, at Boston Latin she was called a sixie, and they were the bottom of the heap. The school went through twelfth grade, and the older kids were so sophisticated and knowing, they were always picking on the sixies. Elena had begun to grow tall, so she wasn’t towered over like most of her class, but that didn’t keep her from being a target. The first year, she tried hanging with the Latina girls, but she was studying for her bat mitzvah, and that set her apart. She wasn’t about to pretend she wasn’t Jewish.

  So far, she had done it all right, the way she was supposed to. Her mother kept telling her that Boston Latin was the place she had to be, like a private school except it didn’t cost anything. That was a big help after the divorce, since her mother had to buy Sam out of the row house they lived in on Rutland Street. She had gotten As in everything but math. Like her grandma, she liked languages. She was taking Latin because she had to and Spanish because she wanted to. She got through algebra only because the guy sitting next to her let her cheat off his papers. That was Evan, who lived in the South End too on West Newton, although he’d gone to a different grade school. Evan was almost as dark as she was and Jewish too. He was great at math, and in ninth grade, he took a science prize. He was skinny and wore glasses and refused not only to go out for sports but to take football or basketball seriously. Boston Latin was big on sports in spite of being an elite school: their traditional rivalry was the Thanksgiving football game with Boston English. Evan and Elena decided not to attend. It was like going on strike. They went to a slash movie instead and sat there laughing, making bets on who would get cut up next.

  The first time they had sex, they were stoned and kept giggling. It didn’t hurt, but it didn’t feel like much. They didn’t date like the straight kids. Both his parents worked, and her mother was always at the law office or in court, so they just fucked whenever they felt like it. When Rachel was home from grade school, Elena and Evan just went in Elena’s room and shut the door. They played music loud. She had Rachel cowed. She knew even if Rachel suspected anything, she wouldn’t tell Suzanne: she’d be scared to. Evan put on his father’s overcoat and went into an adult bookstore. He bought two books about sex and several videos. After that, he spent an hour looking for her clitoris till he found it.

  If other girls asked her about him, she said he was like her brother. They were alike, intense and dark and singular: more than her brother or her lover, Evan was her twin. They liked the same thrash bands that drove adults frothing insane. They also liked some alternative groups. They liked dark violent movies that felt real. They liked taking their clothes off and trying different things. They always did their homework together and they always had sex, using a condom. They went through a couple of packs every week. Neither of them could drive a car, for they were both fourteen. They had to use their bikes or the MBTA to go anywhere. They bought their dope in the neighborhood, at a spot outside a drugstore where guys she knew from grade school were selling. Evan lived in a brick row house a story shorter than hers, but his family had the whole place except for the basement apartment. Both of them loved their neighborhood, with its blocks that matched, each block a particular type of row house, but every one of them individual too, all red brick and some with funky little strip gardens in the middle of the street.

  Evan and she didn’t talk garbage like love and families. They talked about peace and death and hypocrisy and lies. They did his next science project together, and then they let the mice go in the basement of the school. She hoped they could make it on their own.

  She listened to the other girls talking about their boyfriends, and it wasn’t like that with her. She wasn’t crazy about Evan. She didn’t dote on him. It was as if they were each other’s shadow. He called them E squared or E to the second power. There was no hand holding, no smooching, no rings or pins or flowers. They fought sometimes and called each other names, but it never lasted. They would start laughing, as if for them to be anything but one being, one conspiracy, one gang of two was a joke. She could not even have said if she loved Evan. It was like loving her arm. They were a unit. His parents and her mother asked questions, but they had no idea how much time the two of them spent together. Their grades stayed high. She thought sometimes that if she robbed banks, it would be okay with Suzanne, just so long as she maintained her grade point average and stayed in Boston Latin. Suzanne was always telling her how lucky she was to be there, but she didn’t fit in. She was too weird for the other girls. She was always an outsider, and if she stood with a group of girls, conversation slowed down or even stopped. She got her breasts and she was tall, so guys were always trying to feel her up, poking at her, making noises, but they were scared of her too and never bugged her about dating.

  Evan and she could talk about everything. They talked about being Jewish. He told her, “My grandma made it something important, beautiful. My parents, it’s like something they stepped in and if only they scrape hard enough, they can get rid of it. Last year they had me get bar-mitzvahed, but it was like this meaningless thing. My grandma had just died and I felt shitty, and all they could think about was how much the party was costing and who was the right caterer and who to invite and who to leave out and who gave the best presents. It was gross. They’re gross. Don’t take it seriously if it doesn’t make money.”

  “I’m not into the religion. I want to have both my heritages. Sometimes I wish I knew more about Sephardic Jews. My aunt Karla, she told me that’s what I look like, and she told me something about them. They speak Ladino instead of Yiddish. She’s got this adopted daughter, Rosella, who I think looks a little like me. When people see us together when they’re visiting or we go to Brooklyn, they think we’re sisters.” Sephardic Jews seemed to Elena much more romantic than Ashkenazi like her family. She read a historical novel about the Spanish Inquisition and conversos, and it was cool and frightening and epic. Elena did not bother to explain to Evan that Rosella was really Puerto Rican, because that was less interesting.

  The next year there was a new student who transferred in from Kansas. They both had history with him. He wasn’t a jock, a
club kid, one of the super students who ran the school, or a burnout who would be tossed, but like them, one of the weird kids. He was between them in height and had pale sleek blond hair he wore to his shoulders. His eyes were a dark haunting blue. He had a scar through one light brown eyebrow. His cheekbones were high and sharp, and his profile looked to her as if it should be carved on the prow of a sailing vessel. He always had shadows of stubble on his cheeks that made him seem older, more experienced. Half the guys had just started shaving. Evan had a darkish beard but not much of it. He only had to shave every other day, and it took him about a minute, although she did like to watch, ’cause it was such a male thing to do. She was almost hairless on her body and never even shaved her legs. To each other, they called the new kid the Decadent Viking. “I want him,” Evan said.

  “So do I,” she said. “We’ll share him.”

  They made up stories of capturing him, tying him up and doing things to him. His name was Chad. It seemed a silly name for such a fascinating-looking guy. He was broody. He sat at the back, and even when he knew the answers, he sounded as if he resented being right. She sat down next to him in assembly one day. His wrists stuck out below his shirt. There was a scar on each of them. He caught her looking at his wrists. They stared at each other. He did not hide his wrists. Then he smiled.

  For two months they didn’t do anything more than make up stories about Chad the Decadent Viking. Then Evan asked him one day, “Want to study for finals in history with Elena and me?”

  “Is she your girl?”

  “I don’t even know what that means….”

  They went over to Evan’s house. He didn’t have a pesky kid sister, only an older brother, at William and Mary. For the first hour they studied together up in Evan’s room, smoking cigarettes and dope and studying really hard, but she knew Evan was planning something. It made her feel tense and high. She trusted Evan and she didn’t care what he did, as long as Chad didn’t laugh at them. She got excited just sitting there, knowing that Evan was about to make his move.