Best Friends (24 page)

“Oops, four o'clock,” she said, glancing at her wrist. “I'm off at four.”

I stood there. “Excuse me?”

“I have a life, you know,” Lillian stood up and stuffed her magazine into her handbag.

Down the hall, Selina Gilbert's head popped out of the exam room. “You got a bathroom for me?”

I pointed her toward the restroom. As she walked away, I noticed, below the sleeve of her examining gown, a healed gash on the back of her arm. An oblong, symmetrical gash that looked almost as if it had been placed there.

I turned back toward Lillian. “Can't you see she's a victim?” I whispered. “And you're just victimizing her more.”

“I wouldn't call her a victim.” Lillian was looking beyond me to the hall and the receptionist's desk. It was clear that she was dying to leave.

“I'll do the pelvic myself,” I said. I started to walk away, but it didn't seem I'd said enough. I went back to Lillian's door, blocking her exit. “You think she's any less a person than you are? You think she's some kind of animal because she's had a lousy life? You think she should just suffer with her discharge, serves her right? God, I don't want to know what you think.” My voice was as disgusted as I'd ever heard it; it almost frightened me. “You remember one thing, okay? If you read about her in the paper and they've found her body somewhere”—I was shaking my finger—“or if she has some kid who dies a horrible death, or if you open some porn magazine someday and see her bound up and being beaten, well, well—you can say you did your part.” I was feeling shaky toward the end of that sentence but recovered my stride to repeat, “You did your part.”

The door to Ms. Gilbert's exam room slammed. Lillian rolled her eyes; I heard her mumbling as I walked away. As I pushed open the door to the exam room, I saw, against the late-afternoon light slamming through a window, the silhouette of Lillian, fleeing. “Let's do it,” I said to Ms. Gilbert. “Legs up.”

She did have a horrible discharge, so thick I could hardly locate her cervix, and when I palpated her uterus and tubes, her brown eyes, staring straight at the ceiling, welled with tears.

 

 

 

IT WAS AT THIS time that I had the revelation about my father, that he'd been an embezzler, for me. I didn't tell Ted. I couldn't. He was too happy.

I called Sally. I could tell her about Selina Gilbert, about my dad. We could discuss those things, at least. She could make me feel better about those things.

“Oh, Clare,” Sally said once I had finished. “What a nightmare. You must be exhausted.”

Exhausted? No, that wasn't right. “I'm beat. I feel like I'm seeing all sorts of things clearly for the first time, and I hate what I'm seeing.”

“All sorts of things?” Sally asked, the sliver of hesitation in her voice filling me with unease.

“Everything,” I said. Could she sense, somehow, that I knew about Sid? Did that mean she knew about him? I wanted to close my ears. No, I wanted to close my mind. I clutched the phone tighter to my ear. “I feel like, I feel like—”

“Wait a minute,” Sally said. There was silence, then several whomping sounds. “I'm on the portable phone on the patio with the paper, and I just saw a hornet.”

Did she really believe her father distributed magazines? Could someone who attacked hornets with a rolled-up newspaper be that naïve? “Did you get it?” I asked.

“I think I only enraged it. Hold on, I'm going inside. Now, what were you saying? Something about how you felt?”

I took a big breath. “I can't explain it.”

“You're disillusioned,” Sally announced firmly.

Her sureness was somehow offensive. I stood, with tears running down my cheeks. “I suppose so,” I managed after a moment.

“Have you thought about that word? Dis-illusioned? In a way, losing illusions can't be bad.”

“If you say so.”

“No, really. Dis-
illusioned.
Do you get it? Do you see my point?”

“You don't have to argue at me,” I said. “I'm not sitting on one of your juries.”

“It's a useful way of looking at it,” she persisted. “Dis—”

“Sally!”

There was a long silence. I was not going to be the one to break it.

“I thought I might make things easier for you, give you a different way of looking at things,” she said at last.

She did know.

 

 

 

A FOOL. I'D BEEN a simpering fool, worse yet, an uninteresting fool, seduced by the most predictable of blandishments: money, ease, power.
“Hemos guardado un silencio bastante parecido a la estupidez,”
quoted Margaret, my Guatemala-raised friend, newly free of her abusive spouse, the Vietnam Vet from Hell. Loosely translated, the Spanish means: Jeez, we kept so quiet you'd think we were stupid.

“Damn straight,” I told Margaret on the phone. I was saying “damn” a lot, a tough word to confront a tougher world.

The quote, Margaret explained, was a snippet of liberation theology, a Jesuit thing. “God,” she said, sighing, “I love Jesuits. They're serious. They're sexy.”

Characteristic of Margaret, that mixture of politics and giggly lust. There weren't a lot of Jesuits in Kansas. There Margaret collected and ordered, for her museum, stories of pioneer women, their diaries and letters, matter-of-fact accounts of snakebite and hunger and death. “It's amazing,” Margaret said, “you realize how privileged we are. Even the Guatemalans I grew up with seem privileged compared to the pioneers.”

“You couldn't touch a pioneer woman with a branding iron,” I muttered.

“What?” Margaret said.

I almost told her, but even now there was that silliness in her. I thought of the old days, when she was surprised by Sally eating ham. Now she was excited by Jesuits.

“I'm not right,” I said. “I'm tired.” I'd lost my intellect, my sharp edge. I wanted my old self back, the fearless self I'd been so proud of in high school. The self who knew it knew everything, that there was nothing it couldn't handle. “I'm going out to see Sally this month,” I told Margaret. “That should help.”

 

 

 

TOO NEAT, TOO CLEAN. As if the force of her appearance could scrub things away. She was wearing a navy top and a white skirt, the gold chain of her handbag biting into her shoulder. “Clare!” She threw her arms around me.

My face was briefly smushed against her shoulder. When we separated, I looked at her again. Amazing—after Timbo, after Flavio, after her brother and Flavio, after her father—how untouched she looked. The radiant cheeks, the starry eyes, the curls lying flat on her cheeks. Maybe it was stupidity. Maybe it was obliviousness bought at some incalculable price.

“You look tired, Clare,” Sally observed, giving me a rueful smile. “Are things okay with Ted?”

“Fine.” I bit off the word.

“I bet you're glad to be done with residency. The things they put you through! How was your flight?”

She took my carry-on, she moved us down the concourse. At the baggage claim, she spotted my suitcase before I did. She had the rest of the day off, she told me, but first thing tomorrow, she had to take a deposition. “What is it?” I asked.

“It's a guy suing my client. She hit him from behind, so she's liable, and he had some injuries, but he wasn't wearing his seat belt, and in California that automatically cuts down the award. It should be fun.” She hummed a little. “You can see me in action.”

 

 

 

THE AWKWARD THING, I found, was not knowing how to bring it up.

“Do you feel like splitting an onion brick?” Sally asked. “Or that hot spinach dip is good.”

I didn't want to eat. What we were doing in a restaurant? I wanted to talk about the evil in the world.

“I don't know, Sally, it overwhelms me. And not simply evil—carelessness and lack of caring. That Lillian I told you about didn't care at all about my patient's infection. She didn't care! And she's a nurse.”

Sally frowned. “But you took care of your patient, right? It all worked out.”

“Yes, but nurses are supposed to care! Why would someone become a nurse if she didn't care?”

“You seem very unhappy,” Sally said cautiously after a moment.

I cast my eyes around the restaurant, the customers looking as sleek and self-satisfied as honking seals. “How can I not be unhappy? After what I've seen?”

“Is it your father?” Sally said gently. “Clare, he wasn't a murderer. I know what he did was wrong, but he did it for you.”

“It's not my father,” I said bitterly.

She didn't seem to hear me. “And sooner or later,” she went on, “you have to separate what you're responsible for from what you're not. He was the embezzler, not you. Why should the guilt be yours?”

I looked at her.
Ask me,
her eyes seemed to be saying.
I need you to know that I know.
I gripped the edge of the table, steadying myself for what I had to say. “Sally, do you know what your father really does?”

“Yes,” Sally answered, so quickly I was speechless. She took her napkin off the table and smoothed it in her lap. When she looked up, the tilt of her chin was challenging, even angry. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

 

 

 

“THIS IS DR. MANN,” Sally said. “Okay with you if she sits in?”

Everyone nodded. The plaintiff looked at me and smiled. Twenties, long hair, a soft face and a cheap shirt and tie—he looked like a nice guy. Sally took a thick folder of papers out of her exquisite briefcase.

Sally smiled apologetically at the plaintiff. For the record, would he state his name? Age? Address? Place of his birth? Parents' names? Places of their birth? Oh boy, I thought, settling in my chair, thinking of Sally's deliberate ways, this is going to be a long one.

“IT'S FINE,” I SAID. “The flight was good, and Sally was right there to meet me, and we had lunch at a new place, and then we came back here to unpack, and tonight we go to Sid and Esther's for dinner. Esther's cooking.” Did any of this matter? But it was the sort of thing Ted liked to hear.

“Good. It sounds like you're having a relaxing time.” I was to be away a week, the longest we'd been separated. Since I'd given up on getting pregnant, being away from Ted didn't matter. I couldn't imagine missing him. “I want you to rest, Clare,” he was saying. “Three weeks from now, you're going to be starting your new practice. You won't get to sleep in late then! I know you're exhausted. When I saw you drop that coffee mug—” I had dropped it while talking about Sally.

“I just dropped it, okay?” I said tersely. “It wasn't a statement.”

“You could have scalded me!” Ted said. “That coffee was coming at me like hot lava!”

“People can have emotions, Ted. People are allowed to have emotions.”

Sally set the teapot on the burner and looked at me from across the kitchen.

 

 

 

SHE THOUGHT AUNT RUBY said photographer.

Five years before. Sally had known for five years. Aunt Ruby, after Sally-the-fledgling-lawyer got her out of jail, had invited her back to her house. “You know,” Aunt Ruby said at the door, reaching for Sally's hand, “you turned out pretty good for a pornographer's daughter.”

“What? Did Daddy get a camera too? I knew Ben was taking pictures, but—”

“Ben's taking pictures?” Aunt Ruby raised her eyebrows. “You're kidding, I never thought your father would let either of you near the business. I don't even know where the offices are, somewhere in the Valley I think, but your dad's like some Mafia guy that way: keep my family out of it. Which you have to give him credit for. Even Freddie gives him credit for that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The way I look at it, Sally, and I've told Sid this, it's not savory, it's not ideal, but there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it. It's the old American bugaboo about sex. There probably wouldn't be a market if Americans weren't such Puritans. It's like Vegas. You go to Vegas, and there's some showgirl with her boobs hanging out and wooo, hot stuff. I ask you, what's the big deal about breasts? Why in the world should breasts be kept under wraps?”

“Market for what? Aunt Ruby, what are you talking about?”

“Of course, I don't want boob shots on my coffee table. Freddie's good about that, if he looks at the stuff he never brings it home. And Sid, well, after what he's seen, I'm sure he'd have no interest. What's that saying about the cobbler's children? They go barefoot. Is that right? I'm not sure it fits, but you see my point.”