Authors: Francine Prose
“Can I hold one?” she says, sliding a cigarette out of the pack and rolling it between her fingers. “I know this story may be hard for you to believe,” she begins. Imagine Clarence Darrow convincing the jury with that one. “But it’s true.”
Somehow she expected telling it to be easy; she’s certainly had enough practice. But after a sentence or two, she stumbles. This is uncharted terrain. She’s talking about
their
house, their kids, their lives—it’s their story too, a dubious distinction no one else she’s told it to can claim. They’re all together in this: Martin and Stephanie. Megan and Joshua. Vera.
Finally she’s finished. Stephanie stubs out her cigarette; Vera counts three in the ashtray. Could so much time have elapsed, or did she smoke them all at once? Vera’s own unlit cigarette is broken in half. Martin’s giving her the kind of attention she imagines him giving a housefly he’s sneaking up on to swat. After a while he says, “You know, you’re wrong. I don’t find it hard to believe at all.”
“You don’t?” says Vera. “Oh, I’m so glad…”
“I find it fucking
impossible
.”
Vera’s cheeks flame the same red they turn when she’s just spent five minutes smiling at the subway flasher, chatting up the obscene phone caller, the same shade they must have turned the first time some playmate said, Guess what? and Vera said, What? and the kid said,
That’s
what. Meanwhile she’s casting wildly about for oaths to take. Is there a Bible in the house? The only lasting symbol she can see is that rubbed-out Stars and Stripes. Should she lay one hand on her heart and point to that?
“Listen,” she says. “You can’t imagine how often this happens when you write for an outfit like
This Week
.” Outfit? She’s never used that word in her life, except to mean clothes. “Write a story about anything—Bigfoot, say—the next week you get a letter from the cryptobiologists telling you it’s old history.”
“Cryptobiologists?” Stephanie goes for the bait. For years now, Vera’s been dining out on the cryptobiologists; she’s never known it to fail. So she’s more than a little discouraged now when Martin looks very obviously at his watch. Then, in case Vera’s missed that, he turns toward Stephanie and rolls his eyes.
“Now
you
listen,” he says. “Let me tell you about
my
day’s work. I go into the hospital to make my rounds, the nurses are so busy snickering I can’t get a dressing changed. I can’t get one of my patients a bedpan—the orderlies are in on it, too. You don’t know what a grapevine
is
till something like this happens. Then it’s
unbelievable
. The janitor knows, the chief of cardiology knows, the president of the A.M. fucking A. probably knows. Now I’ll tell you something else. There’s going to be some kind of inquiry. All very discreet and professional, no reason to get alarmed, just a procedural matter…so next month I get to go before the board and explain. And what am I supposed to tell them: some two-bit sleazo Lois Lane made me up?”
That’s what he calls her and this is what Vera says: “I’m sorry.” Can she leave now? She can’t understand why she’s come here. In light of the damage she’s done health care and the doctor’s career and medical science in general, she wouldn’t dream of being so small as to ask them not to sue.
Stephanie takes a long drag on her cigarette. “We have a neighbor,” she says. “Betty Anne.”
“Please,” says Martin. “Betty Anne stories. Spare me.”
“A horror story for every occasion,” says Stephanie. “You know the type. When we moved here, I was pregnant with Meggy; Betty Anne came over and introduced herself and got going about how her second cousin just gave birth to a kid with no arms and legs and its head growing out of its liver. Lately it’s mostly stories about kids who seem okay till they’re Josh’s age, then wake up one morning with forty-pound tumors in their stomachs.
“A couple of weeks ago, the doorbell rings and it’s Betty Anne, batting a newspaper in my face. When I saw what it was, I thought, Well, it’s just the kind of junk she’d read. Sorry.”
“That’s all right,” says Vera. “Go on.”
“‘Look!’ Betty Anne’s saying. ‘Look!’ And there’s a picture of the house. The kids. My heart just sank. ‘Betty Anne,’ I say. ‘Why would someone write this?’”
“‘People will do anything for a buck,’ she tells me. ‘I got you an extra copy.’ She’s waiting to be asked in. But I say, ‘Excuse me,’ and practically shut the door in her face and go inside and call Martin…who needless to say is in surgery. So I make myself a glass of iced tea, a Swiss cheese sandwich on French bread with fresh tomatoes from the garden…”
Vera trusts people with that kind of memory for food. Like Carmen. It makes her forgive Stephanie her kitchen equipment and think once more how in another lifetime she might have been friends with Stephanie, who’s saying:
“By now I’m talking to myself like I’d talk to the kids: ‘There, there, don’t worry, nothing will come of this, no one will read it…’ Just then the doorbell rings. It’s Mrs. DiPaolo from down the block, a real sweetheart, Martin takes care of her for free. She’s always bringing presents, afghans, dolls with crocheted dresses for Meggy, those hard little anise cookies—”
“I tell Steffie, ‘Watch out, they’re Mr. DiPaolo’s gallstones,’” says Martin.
Vera forces a smile. Does that count as another apology? It’s an effort not even Stephanie makes, but she does say, “Mrs. DiPaolo worships the ground Martin walks on. Now Mrs. DiPaolo’s got some kind of crocheted square. A doll blanket? A potholder? It’s tiny, the stitches are crooked. You’d burn your hand off.
“I thought, Oh, God, Mrs. DiPaolo’s going downhill. Still I invite her in, sit down. She sits down and faints dead away at the table. Mrs. DiPaolo, wake up! After a minute or so she comes to. I ask, can I get you anything, brandy, a glass of water? Yes, she says, a glass of water. There’s something peculiar about how she says it. Plus she’s being very careful not to look at the newspaper on the table. Still I don’t get it, not till she’s gulped down three glasses, all the time looking at me
very
weirdly, and finally it hits me. The dolly blanket was an excuse. She’s come for the water! And then, to make things even clearer, she takes a handkerchief out of her bra, dips it in the water, stands up straight, says thanks for the water, and splits.
“And still I’m not absolutely positive. I mean, it would’ve been too embarrassing to say, ‘Mrs. DiPaolo, are you here for the
water
?’ Immediately I wish I had, because then I could’ve said, ‘Mrs. DiPaolo, there’s nothing
in
the water.’ Which is just what I tell Mrs. Grossman from across the street when
she
rings the bell a few minutes later.
“Poor Mrs. Grossman’s apologizing a mile a minute, but she’s talked to Mrs. DiPaolo; she doesn’t even believe in these things, holy water’s for the
goyim
, but maybe she could have a drop, see what all the fuss’s about, maybe take some home to her husband, anything’s worth a try. Mrs. Grossman’s husband has cancer. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Grossman,’ I say.” And now Stephanie’s looking hard at Vera, who’s thinking that “anything’s worth a try” is what the voice on the phone said.
“But
you
try telling Mrs. Grossman she can’t have a glass of water for her husband. So you give her some, as if you think it might work, too. And that’s when it really begins.
“The doorbell keeps buzzing. You didn’t know you knew so many people on the block. By the time Martin and the kids get home, the phone’s rung forty times. Just to eat you have to take the phone off the hook and stuff it under a pillow, and you can still hear that computer voice scolding you…”
“Next morning, the kids leave, Martin leaves. By nine you’ve got thirty people on your lawn staring at your window as if the pope’s going to appear at it any second. And the worst part is, when you go out and look in their faces, you can’t even tell them to get lost.”
“
I
could’ve told them to get lost,” says Martin, but Stephanie ignores him:
“You feel like you need an
excuse
to make them leave. So you say, ‘Sorry, I have to water the lawn.’ That’s the worst thing you could’ve said. The minute you bring out the hose they’re holding out jars, bowls, five-gallon trash cans. ‘Just give us some,’ they say. ‘Then we’ll go away. Please.’ And you give in. You have to. It’s just water. It’s free. It’ll make them go away.”
Vera imagines Stephanie in her T-shirt and designer jeans and long perfect fingernails, turning on the garden spigot as if it were the fountain of youth, each drop a potential miracle. In her fantasy, Stephanie moves solemnly from one to the other like a priest dispensing communion.
“What did it feel like?” Vera has to clear her throat and repeat herself, but still she can’t ask what she most wants to know. Is false hope better or worse than no hope at all, and is it wrong to write those stories—New arthritis cure! Elvis alive!—to make promises no one can keep? She thinks she could ask Stephanie Green these questions she’s never been able to ask anyone. After what’s happened, Stephanie must be asking them, too. Perhaps
this
is the common bond Vera’s sensed all along.
“Like shit,” says Stephanie. “It made me feel like shit.”
She lights another cigarette. “All the time I was filling those poor, cracked Tupperware bowls, I kept thinking, Stephanie, you’re going to pay for this. And I didn’t have to wait long. By the weekend we no longer had a lawn. Not that it mattered, I didn’t want to go out. Me and the kids stayed holed up all day. Meggy and Josh stopped day camp, the kids were teasing them so bad. Then the neighbor kids started in. It took Josh days to tell me, but what was happening was, the parents were sending them to snitch water from our house. My
friends
! Sensible people! I sat my kids down and tried to explain, but that only made it worse. I guess because it was their lemonade, they figured it was their fault. So every day I watched Meggy and Josh’s world get scarier and smaller until they were just laying around picking on each other and fighting…”
“I know what’s it like,” Vera says. “I’ve got a daughter. Rosie. She’s ten.” Searching her memory for some story to prove she
does
know what it’s like, she considers escalating Rosie’s humiliation at the ballet recital into something even worse than it was. But it’s too long a story, and nothing else comes to mind. Stephanie studies her coolly. There’s a flicker of interest in Stephanie’s eyes that goes out almost instantly, and she says:
“Really, getting away this weekend was more for them than for us. We figured their little cousins could at least be trusted to be decent. Anyhow, we get on the thruway and hit the first rest stop; you have to stop every five minutes or they’ll drive you batty. We go into the snack bar, and the woman behind the counter says, ‘Haven’t I seen you kids before, you sure do look familiar, these aren’t those kids in that mashed-potato commercial on TV…?’ And the kids start shrieking and run out of the snack bar and on the way are almost hit by a car in the parking lot, and that’s when I start screaming, too. Poor Martin.”
“Wait a minute,” says Vera. “That woman couldn’t have recognized them from
This Week
, the picture’s not that clear. I’ve been looking at the photo for the last forty-eight hours, and I couldn’t have—”
“
We
know that,” says Martin. “You tell it to the kids.” Then all three fall silent, listening to the children fighting upstairs. This, too, makes Vera miserable. There’s no way she can make it up to these people. And though it’s not the worst that could happen—it’s not as if she’s got in a car and killed them—the fact remains: Vera, who spends half her waking life fearing her own child may come to harm, has ruined these kids’ whole summer.
“I’m sorry,” she says, one last time, thinking now of that Babel story, “The Sin of Jesus,” and how it ends with the servant girl saying, “There’s no forgiveness for you, Jesus Christ. No forgiveness and never will be.” If some Odessa servant can say that to Jesus, what will these Greens say to her?
“Sorry’s not good enough,” says Martin.
L
EAVING THE GREENS, VERA
hears something hiss. She thinks of escaped pet boa constrictors, alligators in the sewers, all manner of deceptively domesticated animals seeking their lost jungle home in these manicured back yards.
BOROUGH BOA BINDS BROOKLYN BABY.
This is just the sort of neighborhood where such things happen. Then she sees the witch from Hansel and Gretel standing on the porch next door, crooking her finger and hissing.
There’s a second or two when Vera could still pretend not to notice; by the time she’s turned slightly and looked the old woman full in the face, it’s too late. She checks to make sure the Greens aren’t watching, then heads up their neighbor’s walk.
Up close, the woman’s younger than Vera first thought. She’s probably sixty or so, but dresses and carries herself to look older. It’s as if she can’t wait to be ancient, with all hagdom’s gruesome authority. Above her black brogues, ochre jersey knit pants—gathered over her belly and inches too short at the cuff—expose dry, bluish-white ankles. She’s wearing a faded, pebbled cardigan over what the discount stores call a ladies’ polyester shell. Her face defines the word pinched, her mouth puckered around what might be a desire to spit out uncomfortable dentures; Vera can almost picture her lying to the dentist so her teeth will fit badly on purpose. She tries to imagine a
This Week
story about middle-aged women whitening their hair, having their teeth pulled, doctoring their birth certificates in a scam to collect early Social Security. Who would believe it? This woman would.
Vera’s almost to the front porch when the old lady calls out, “Did you get any?”
Isn’t that what high-school buddies ask after heavy dates? Vera’s a little giddy as she sings out, “Get any what?”
“Water. Did they give you any?”
Vera shakes her head no, then for some reason changes her mind and says, “Yes.” Now she wishes she
had
asked the Greens for a taste. She wonders what they’d have done, if that would have made things worse.
“I’m surprised,” says the woman. “Mostly those folks wouldn’t give you the steam off their shit. Pardon me. But
imagine
having something like that and hogging it for yourself. What’s it for?”