Adverbs (7 page)

Gladys didn’t answer, or maybe we didn’t hear it, not over the beeper. It was working. It was beeping. “Oh my god,” Lila said quietly. “I have to call the hospital if this is real. I have to call in and see.”

“Phone around the corner,” Gladys pointed.

“I’ll go with you,” I said. She tottered up and leaned against me, staring at the old woman at our table, and I felt a warm rush those cocktails couldn’t touch. It was love, not that I didn’t know. We left the lounge and never saw Gladys again. It could be a malfunction, I knew, but that’s always the case. Lila tossed coins into the phone which sat near the slot machines because the world doesn’t care how exactly they get your money. I watched Lila talk to someone like she’d shown her scar to Gus, and loved her way up north. This is love, to sit with someone you’ve known forever in a place you’ve been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it’s time to go. You don’t care about yours. Why should it change, the love you feel, no matter how death goes? She smiled at me and stuck her thumb up and hung up on the guy at the other end of the line.

“They’re real mad at you,” she said with a grin. “It’s real, though. We can catch the last ferry and I can be in tremendous pain by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” I said.

“Do you think Gladys,” Lila said, “is some sort of—”

“She said she was here to serve as an example,” I said. “I promise I’ll do a thorough investigation while you’re under anesthetic, Lila, only please let’s go let’s go let’s go.”

“Listen to you,” she said, and led the way. “You’re too drunk to drive.” She clapped her hands like she used to do every birthday when the candles arrived in a halo of light, and her dwindling friends sang the same old song. “I haven’t been behind the wheel in forever. Hooray!”

Hooray. We were outside in the weird afternoon, damp and hard to breathe in. Some seagulls from someplace were eating fried chicken that the casino had thrown away, and up near the spiraling clouds I saw some other kind of bird flap against the wind only to go the opposite direction. Lila took the keys.

“Come on!” she cried. “Come with me!”

The same album was on, of course, from the giddy ride up, and I drummed my fingers against the window as Lila threw us into gear. “You don’t know what it’s like,” said the singer, who had probably done worse things than wrap Adam’s seeping wrists with towels left over from Lila’s mother. “You don’t know what it’s like to love somebody the way I love you.” The original artists were a bunch of grinning white men, but the version Lila and I listened to was by a woman who made the whole thing fierce and wise. I turned it up and let it speak. I’d spent my life driving around my city with Lila while the pop music told us what was happening and what it was like, and never wished I was doing anything else. We merged to the bigger road and flew south, the winter weather getting crankier around us as we sang
the song together. “You don’t know what it’s like to love somebody the way I love you,” and we retraced our woodsy steps down the only road back. We filled up the car without paying in Bainbridge, which is getting harder and harder to do, the gullible men hunted to extinction, or maybe hiding in difficult parts of the globe. Lila spun the wheel around each corner as the album ended again, but even this turned out to be a wrong dream. The girls don’t win on Super Bowl Sunday, no matter how the game goes.

The Jewish people are not islanders, except Manhattan and its many bridges of escape, its secret underground railroads and its taxis that must take you anywhere you want by law. We prefer the mainland, as we have never been able to leave someplace easily. We linger in the entryway at the end of my parents’ dinner parties, and we clutter up the aisles of the synagogue, and the bribes at the border don’t work, and we end up surrendering our shoes and boarding the train. No one has fixed this, this plague thrown down upon us, and when we turned the last corner Lila threw on the brakes for the mass of traffic stopped on the road to the ferry. All the red lights of automobiles stretched out like a holiday I didn’t celebrate. “What’s going on?” I called over to the guy in the rusty sedan.

He rolled his window down too. “There’s no way across,” he said. “The last ferry’s canceled, is what I heard anyway. I’m trying to hear on the radio. It’s an emergency, I guess, but nobody knows what to do.”

“There must be someone who knows,” I said. I got out of the car with bourbon bravado and gave Lila a thumbs-up.

“Come back,” she said.

“The ticket booth guy,” I said, pointing down the red light district. “He’ll know something. I’m going to walk there and see.”

“I mean,” Lila said, and wiped at her eyes without knowing it. “I mean, come back after that. Don’t fall in love with the ticket guy and leave me here in the car.” There was a noise above us like an airplane zoom, but it was getting too dark to see. People started laying on the horn, braying like bad geese in a panic. “I am here,” Lila said with a trembly smile. Our driver’s ed teacher had told us that’s what the horn should mean. Not
Move along, buddy
or
I am displeased
but
I am here. I am here, I am here, I am here!

“I will come back,” I said to her, shut the door, and ran down the asphalt to the booth where they took your money. A woman in sweaty overalls was already arguing with the guy. His name tag said Thomas but he’d crossed out the H in ink. Behind him I could see what he brought to work: a cup of coffee and a tattered black sketchbook, and he smoked, and on a grimy counter was a TV with its back to me. I heard the dim sound of a crowd. He was watching the game.

“I’m telling you I can’t tell you, like I said,” he told Overalls.

“How can I get back to the city if there’s no ferry tonight?” she said. “I’m a florist. I have flowers in the back.”

There was a loud, loud horn blast, and we all turned around to see who was there. First in the line at the booth, its bumper growling at the roadblock, was a station wagon, but through the windows all I could see were stacks and stacks of newspapers, yellowing now and yellowing more with every passing moment.
Couldn’t anybody do anything right? “There must be a way,” I said.

“That’s what I keep saying,” said the other woman. “If the ferry’s broken there are other boats, like a charter.”

“Only if you have a lot of money,” the guy said, “and maybe not then. Look, I don’t know anything.” There was another roar above us and we looked up and waited. “They told me to let no one through and that there’d be more information on the radio. Will you
please
go back and sit in your car.”

“I have a friend,” I said, “who will have an operation tonight.”

Even the other woman looked at me funny. “I’ve heard every emergency,” the guy said. “Every single person in this traffic is urgent.”

The TV squawked and the guy looked. “These guys are really taking a beating!” an announcer said. He sounded more panicked than usual, maybe. “I’ve never seen this kind of thing from the Magpies!”

“Shit!” the guy said, and waved us back. “Please, ladies, it’s an emergency catastrophe. Go back and sit down and soon we’ll all know.”

“You could at least tell us something helpful,” said the overalls woman, and looked at me to see if I was on her team. I shook my head and walked back, the liquor fading with every step. Again there was the roar above me, but why notice the thunder when it only turns out to be rain? There wasn’t anything helpful to tell us. It was raining and it was going to rain. Everybody was honking so loudly I had to get back in the passenger seat to tell
Lila I didn’t know, but she’d ejected the album and was fiddling with my radio which was almost always not working much.

“Tell me something,” she said, and winced toward her belly. She undid the seat belt, took a deep breath, and faced me. “There’s no football team called the Magpies, is there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s the Eagles and some Orioles, I think. And the Anti-Semites. I don’t know.”

Lila winced again and then looked out the wet window. “Because the radio said something.”

“Holy motherfucking shit!” the radio said suddenly, and then disappeared into a depth of static.

“I think something is happening,” Lila said. She gave me a grim smile I hadn’t seen in months, a smile of trying to be brave. “I don’t think I’m going to make it. What did the guy say?”

“He didn’t know,” I said, “but he couldn’t spell his own name, either.”

“No one can spell my name,” Lila said, “and it’s a four-letter word. Don’t leave again. With all this traffic you’ll never find out. It’ll never stop and I don’t want to sit here without you.”

She opened her door briefly to the loud of the rain and the cars and she spat onto the ground, a white glob of her bite of cake. “It’s the end!” the radio shouted again, and I turned it off and reached across her to shut the door, so at least we could be quieter, a little. Emergency or football I wasn’t sure, and Lila didn’t seem up for either.

“They said this was my only chance,” Lila said quietly. In the lounge maybe it was worth it, to sit free at Point No Point rather than linger someplace to teach something to doctors, but now in
the traffic we couldn’t bear for anything to end here, not a single thing.

“You won’t die in this car,” I said. “It’s not like that anyway. We need to get you back, that’s all. There’s a way. We’ll find it. I’ll find it while you sit tight.”

“No,” she said. “The window’s only open a few hours, is what they said. If I don’t get there they can’t do the operation and that guy will be dead for nothing.”

“Listen to me,” I said, and I felt the fury in my throat. The weight of the world isn’t worth it, not even with the love which will die and go away, but each moment with Lila was worth everything, to talk to someone I’d known forever like an old song. Listen to it. Love was all we had left, all of us, as we sat beaten down with the knowledge that there wasn’t a boat for the rescue. “They don’t know anything,” I said, “those guys. They think a leather jacket looks good zippered up all the way. A few-hour window? If you hadn’t come to stairwell B I’d be crying there still, and if we hadn’t left our keys on top of the jukebox the ambulance would have pulled Adam out of the bathtub alive, but then I would have married him like an idiot, and lost touch because you hated him. I would have lost touch with you in a few-hour window, what were the odds? We can do this. That guy’s dead for nothing anyway, all the deaths are dead for nothing, but you’re not dead at all.”

“You’re drunk,” she said, crying very hard. “I wish I could get drunk with you again. But there’s no way across.”

“We can dream up a better time for you to die than stuck in traffic,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Not if I can’t get to sleep.”

“Then we’ll stay up all night,” I said. “You’ll stay up all night with me. We’ve done it before, lots of times. I love you so soundly and I will do anything to drag you forward. You’re mine, Lila. You’re my star quarterback.”

“I fucking hate football,” Lila sobbed. “Blow up the game for me when I’m gone.”

“I won’t do a thing,” I said. “Without you I’m not moving.” Through the front window was another cliché, rain raging while the women inside wept like girls. The traffic screamed its emergency around us, but we could do this thing on our own. She was all the world’s money, and I would spend it with her, my sharpest friend who changed the tide, my only comfort from the brutal gamble of the world and the wicked ways of men. I grabbed her hands and clasped them together over her scar into a position of strength, like a prayer we wouldn’t be caught dead saying.
Gather around us, heroic women of Haddam. Gather around us and put us under your silken wings. We are here, we are here, we are here, won’t someone take us across the sound together.

W
hat a bad day it was, the clouds low and cloudy, the rain no fun, the dark as it hit late afternoon thick like someone who stops by your place and just won’t leave. The day was canceled, almost, on account of the rain spilling itself all over everything. Everybody was eating at the diner where the food is lousy but you go there anyway. Everything was lousy about it. The chairs and tables stayed sticky, if you know what I mean. If you know what I mean there were five people inside the diner, plus a couple way off in the corner bickering together about something and the cook. Behind the counter was the guy who owned the place, with an apron on. He was let’s say polishing glasses with a white rag. Sitting on one of the stools was a woman who had been drinking. Near her lurked a young boy who didn’t belong to her. The boy was named Mike. Someone was supposed to meet him and hadn’t shown up and Mike, bored, just stayed around anyway, pressing the buttons of the jukebox without putting money in and slurping the leftover ice from a glass of soda the owner had given him out of pity. Mike didn’t mind it. Mike was ten years old, and already lots and lots of interesting things had happened to him in his life, so he could take a break this afternoon and punch nothing into the jukebox for a
few hours. Nobody was worried about him. Mike was worrying nobody sick.

Down the counter a ways were the two detectives, who automatically make a story get interesting, even though the only interesting thing they were doing was eating waffles, both of them, at five-thirty in the afternoon. They had taken off their hats and lined them up together on the counter like two very short additional customers. This was how it was, the five people, Andy and Mike and the woman who had been drinking, Andrea, and the two detectives, while the couple bickered in the back and the cook stared into space at the grill, thinking, Well, if I took my goddamn spatula and scraped at that piece of burnt cheese, if I scrape it right there it would look like the state of Nevada.

This was that day, if you know what I mean. Outside it was dark, and what with the rain you might not even know Andy’s was open. This was when there was a power shortage in California. It turned out to be corporate greed but at the time it seemed like there might be something to it, so everybody tried to be careful. All the neon signs were quiet and it was hard to see what was open and what wasn’t. The Andy’s sign was off. It definitely wasn’t Christmas and yet the snowman and the wreath were still painted on the windows. Outside garbage blew, running stop signs and red lights. We’ve all had days like this. If you know what I mean it felt reckless, the rain and whatnot, but only if your idea of reckless is sitting at a diner and having whatever you felt like. There were limits to the menu, of course, and on days like this that hurt. You wanted to go do something and nobody would help you. It was a bad day for love. Andrea in particular was taking it hard.

“I want an Angel’s Nipple,” she said to Andy. “It’s rum and heavy cream and an egg white with a floater of maraschino liqueur. I want a Louisiana Flip or a Neptune Fizz.”

“We don’t have those party drinks,” Andy said. “You know that, honey. I’ll bring you another half carafe of the house red if you want.”

“If I want,” Andrea sneered. She moved her hand down the counter like a spilled something, honey or milk. Mike watched her because it was a free country. “I want a Do Be Careful. I want a Pimm’s Cup. I want a Delmonico with a twist, served up.”

“I’ll serve you up a half carafe of white or red,” Andy said patiently. “Come on now, Andrea. They don’t have those things at a diner. It’s not the end of the world.”

“When they say it’s not the end of the world,” Andrea said, “it usually is.”

“The world can only end once,” said one of the detectives, and then he raised a paper napkin to his mouth and wiped himself a false, hearty smile. “I know!” he said. “Here’s something we can do! What is your name, Andrea? You want to do something? You want to look at a picture?” He turned to the other detective, who was already taking a photograph out of his jacket. It was not in an envelope. “Let’s show her the picture,” he said, and put the photograph down on the counter where it would probably stick. Andy frowned even before he saw it.

You love once and then maybe not again. Not on a day like this. The rain, the rain, the rain. You can’t even hear it outside the window but still it’s a sad thing. Rain, the grade school teachers say, makes the trees and flowers grow, but we’re not trees and flowers, and so many grade school teachers are single. Even
Mike’s teacher got lonesome brokenhearted like this. Her husband left and took all the red wine and even the salt, on the grounds that it was his. No, if you loved once and then kaput, then it looks like rain in your life. At least an Angel’s Nipple would make it taste better, if you know what I mean. If you know what I mean the picture showed an old woman looking steadily at the camera in black-and-white, almost a formal portrait. Andy put a half carafe of red in front of Andrea.

“Who are you guys?” Andrea said. “I think I’ll have a half carafe of red, Andy.”

“We’re detectives,” the detective said. Mike looked up from the jukebox because it was interesting now. He looked at the picture.
Murderer?

“I thought you weren’t supposed to say ‘We’re detectives.’” She said “We’re detectives” in the tone of voice someone might use to say “Making you happy isn’t making me happy.”

“You’re thinking of spies,” the detective said.

“I’m thinking of leaving, is what I’m thinking of,” Andrea said.

“Don’t leave, lady,” the detective said. “We’re just showing you a picture. We flew all the way out to San Fran and came to this diner.”

“I hate when people call it San Fran,” Andrea said.

“San Fran is what everyone calls it,” said the detective. “Like the song says, I guess when it rains it pours.”

Andrea poured more from the carafe into the glass and then, less successfully, back again. “Why don’t you leave her alone?”

“It’s Gladys,” Andy said, turning his head so he wouldn’t have to look at the picture upside down anymore.

“Gladys, the man says.” The detective turned to the other detective, as if they were partners. “She’s calling herself Gladys now.” The partner took out a pen and then looked around. Their two hats were sitting in front of a paper place mat the diner used. He slid it on over and wrote Gladys, G-L-A-D-Y-S, in big pen letters.

“You asshole,” Andrea said to the owner of the place. “You asshole jerk Andy.”

Andy raised his hands very mildly and Mike blushed back by the jukebox. “She comes in here all the time,” he said to the detectives, and poured them more coffee.

“Much obliged,” the detective said about the coffee, and then turned to his partner. “Man says she comes here all the time.” The other detective nodded and wrote “comes here all the time” below “Gladys” on the place mat.

“Why’d you tell them that?” Andrea said. “God, I want a drink.” She slugged her wine down which didn’t take long. “I want a Hong Kong Cobbler. I want a Gypsy Rose. I want a Mother’s Ruin or a Singapore Sling, either one. They’re both gin-based although I forget which one has ginger beer.”

“We don’t have those party drinks here,” Andy said patiently. “This is a diner. I thought about opening a bar but that was a long time ago.”

“Seems like even a bar wouldn’t have drinks like that, more’s the pity,” the detective said. “Times have unfortunately changed.”

Andrea stumbled up off her stool and went and sat closer to the detectives. She tried to pick up the picture but it stuck to the counter like I told you. “I’ve never seen this woman before in my life,” she said. “I come in here all the time.”

“Usually drunk and sad,” Andy said.

“When Andy said she comes in here all the time he meant me,” she said, tapping the place mat with a nail she broke on a man’s door. “I come here all the time and I’ve never seen Gladys in all my life.”

“Don’t get like that,” the detective said. “This other guy and me, we’re detectives. Our client wants us to find the woman in the picture. There’s only one of them. We flew out here, we ask around, and she’s calling herself Gladys now and she comes here. We wait, she comes in, we got her and it’s kaput, kaput, kaput. Cake.”

“Cake,” the partner said, also.

“She
always
calls herself Gladys,” Andrea said, slouching back to her place.

“Cake?” Andy said. A very bad covered cake was nearby, and some lonely doughnuts.

“It’s an expression detectives use,” the detective said, “like easy as cake.”

“Pie,” Mike said. At school he’d just had a test on expressions like “easy as pie” but he said it so quietly, only the jukebox heard.

“Another one is ‘southside,’” the detective said. “It’s a detective expression if someone is, what’s-it-called, fleeing. If they’re fleeing, a detective will say ‘southside,’ because where do birds go?”

“Southside,” Andy tried, and Mike murmured it to himself. “I wish all my troubles’d go
southside
.”

“Southside,” the detective said. “All the birds end up in South America, not a lot of people know. Every bird in the world.
They say in Peru you can scarcely walk in winter without stepping on a bird of some kind. Of course some birds are evergreen but the rest are in South America.”

“Is that so?” Andy said. He’d heard a lot of bullshit as part of owning and operating a diner but speaking of cake this took it.

“No,” Mike whispered, and then turned around and said it. “No. Birds migrate according to a variety of patterns. I learned about it, and we saw some magpies on a field trip two and a half days ago, or we were supposed to but didn’t because of the rain. The yellow-billed magpie can be found exclusively in the coastal valleys south of San Francisco Bay, and there are three common words beginning with the letter A that describe it. The first is ‘attractive.’”

“Don’t you have someplace to go?” the detective said.

“No,” Mike said, and Andrea finished her wine and raised her fist in a salute. “It’s a free country.”

“If you’re gonna tell my customers to leave,” Andy said, “I’ll have to ask you gentlemen to go southside.” But then Andy ruined it and winked at the boy, telling Mike there wasn’t anybody on his side after all.

“We’re
detectives
,” the partner said.

“What do
detectives
,” Andrea said, using the word
detectives
like she had used the word
your wife Helena
not so long ago, “want with Gladys anyway? She’s a nice old lady and she doesn’t have any money probably. She used to be an actress.”

“She works I think at a store someplace,” Andy volunteered. “I heard her say ‘the store’ once, or ‘back at the store.’ She’s not bothering anyone, or you.”

“What business do you have?” Andrea asked.

The detectives looked at one another like this was their least favorite part of the job. “Our client,” said the one who keeps talking, “says this woman Gladys is the Snow Queen.”

“The Snow Queen?” Andy said. “Who the fuck is the Snow Queen? Excuse my language, kid.”

“It’s okay,” Mike said. “I’ve heard people say fuck a bunch of times.”

“Don’t say fuck,” Andrea said. “Once you say fuck it’s all over and your life has changed. Andy, how come you don’t say excuse me to me? I’m a lady, with your language.”

“How’bout you give me another soda,” said bold bold Mike, to Andy, “for swearing.” Andy set him up, of the opinion that sugar didn’t hurt kids one bit. That was a rare commodity and Mike was learning to appreciate such people.

“The Snow Queen, if anybody cares,” said the detective, “is an agent of the netherworld of Kata. In human form, she takes the human form of a woman. As her name implies, she can control all types of weather especially snow.”

“Gladys is making it rain,” Andy said, thinking, And I didn’t even open a bar to hear this kind of crazy talk.

“That’s what the man says,” said the detective.

“And what man is that?” Andy said.

“My client,” the detective said. “Our client, my partner and me.”

“And what does your client,” Andy said, “want with the Snow Queen?” and cleared the waffles.

“He’s in love with her,” the detective said. “We get paid by the hour.”

Love is hourly, too. There are stories about people who have loved someone forever after laying eyes on them for a few minutes and then nevermore, but these stories have not happened to anyone we know. No, when you love someone you spend hours and hours with them, and even the mightiest forces in the netherworld could not say whether the hours you spend increase your love or if you simply spend more hours with someone as your love increases. And when the love is over, when the diner of love seems closed from the outside, you want all those hours back, along with anything you left at the lover’s house and maybe a couple of things which aren’t technically yours on the grounds that you wasted a portion of your life and those hours have all gone southside. Nobody can make this better, it seems, nothing on the menu. It’s like what the stewardess offers, even in first class. They come with towels, with drinks, mints, but they never say, “Here’s the five hours we took from you when you flew across the country to New York to live with your boyfriend and then one day he got in a taxicab and he never came back, and also you flew back, another five hours, to San Francisco, just in time for a catastrophe.” And so you sit like a spilled drink, those missing hours in you like an ache, and you hear stories that aren’t true and won’t bring anyone back. Things happen and you never get over them, and through the door came Gladys, the woman in the picture, and this is something none of the five people would ever get over. She was older than you might think but she looked good, and she did not look around, but went straight to the counter and sat down and put an arm around Andrea.

“It’s good to see you, Andrea,” she said. “I thought I might
not see you. This place doesn’t even look open, what with the sign dark.”

“Hello,
Nancy
,” Andrea said, and Andy poured half a cup of coffee.

“You’re drinking more than usual if I’m Nancy,” Gladys said. “Well, never you mind, dear. I know you’re sad. What you need is a Gene Ahern Gloom Chaser. It’s two kinds of rum, and cognac, Cointreau, lemon juice, and a bit of sugar, all stirred up and served in a highball glass with cola.”