The Believers (21 page)

"Jason--"

"No offense," Jason said quickly. "If you don't want to talk about it, that's cool." He waited a moment. "I've never really been into religion myself. I mean, I'm not against religion, per se, I'm just not into organized religion, you know? I was raised Catholic, and
man
, that is the worst, most hypocritical shit. If I was going to get religious, it'd be something a little freer."

Rosa stared grimly into the spaghetti water.

"Have you ever been to Stonehenge?" Jason asked.

She shook her head.

"Aw, man, you got to go. It's like this circle of humongous stones that these guys built in England thousands of years ago--"

"I know what it is, Jason."

"They used to dance around these stones in the nude, or whatever, drinking potions and praising their gods. I could totally get into a religion like that, you know what I'm saying?"

She turned around from the stove. "I know what you're saying, Jason, I'm just not that interested."

Jason raised his hands in surrender. "Fair enough, fair enough."

Fifteen minutes later, when Lenny and Jane returned from the liquor store, Rosa served up the spaghetti.

"This is raw, Rosa," Lenny complained, prodding sulkily at his serving with a fork.

"Dude," Jason said, "this is al dente."

"Whatever, it tastes like sticks, man."

Rosa, who had inherited her mother's contempt for the domestic arts, was unabashed. "Don't eat it if you don't like it."

"I could make some grilled cheese if you're still hungry," Jane suggested.

"Nah, it's okay." Lenny pushed his plate to one side and took out his rolling papers.

Rosa cast him a minatory look. Lenny always claimed--and perhaps, at some level, genuinely believed--that smoking dope and drinking alcohol did not contravene his sobriety. It was a fantasy that his five recoveries and relapses had failed to puncture. "Is it cool with you if we have a spliff, Jane?" he asked.

"Sure," Jane said, with careful insouciance. "No problem."

"You smoke?"

Jane smiled shyly. "I did a bit of the wacky baccy at college."

Lenny and Jason exchanged sidelong glances of amusement.

"Hey, Jason," Lenny said, "did you know Jane works at Tiffany?"

"Yeah? Cool. Do you get, like, a discount on the jewelry and stuff?"

"Oh, totally!" Jane replied. "Thirty-five percent. But I don't actually work in the store. I'm in the PR department."

Lenny lit his joint. "Jane's like an executive," he croaked as he inhaled. "She hangs out with all the celebrity customers."

"Awesome,"
Jason said. "Who have you met?"

Jane began to list the various famous people she had encountered--detailing their quirks and preferences with an unsettling combination of groveling reverence and impudent familiarity. "JLo can be kind of a diva. But you know who's really a doll? Eve. The rapper? Yeah, she's like, the sweetest, most down-to-earth person..."

Lenny passed the joint to her. "You gonna have some?"

Jane gave an exaggerated shrug. "Whatever."

"That's good stuff," Lenny said, watching her put the joint tentatively to her lips. "Lebanese. It's going to give you a good buzz."

Jane spluttered and flapped her hands as she exhaled. "Whoa, that's strong!" She held the joint out to Jason.

"Have a bit more," Lenny urged. "Try to keep it in your lungs for a while."

Rosa made a murmuring sound of disapproval. As a teenager, she had watched Lenny presiding over his girlfriends' drug-taking in much the same way as this--teaching them how to construct joints, how to snort coke, how to conduct themselves when stoned. There was something terribly sad about seeing him, fifteen years on, still playing the wise old druggie--still delivering his know-it-all lectures on the provenance and quality of his gear. "I'd go slow with that, Jane, if I were you," she said.

Lenny waved the comment away. "Don't listen to her, Jane. She's a party pooper."

For the next hour, Rosa sat and watched them get stoned. It took Lenny longer than the other two to start displaying any real sign of intoxication, but by the time he began rolling the third joint, even he had begun to laugh at jokes several minutes longer than was strictly warranted. Jane was now coming to the end of a lengthy anecdote about the time she had met Seal's personal assistant in a bar and he had told her she looked like Samantha from
Sex in the City
. "I was like, Get out! And he was like, No! For real! And I was like, Oh, my God!"

The boys gazed at her, bleary-eyed.

"Yeah, it was crazy. He actually really wanted to introduce me to Seal, because evi
dently
, that show is like, one of Seal's super-favorites."

"Wow," Jason said solemnly. He and Lenny began to snort with laughter.

Sensing mockery, but eager to be a good sport, Jane looked back and forth between the two men. "What's so funny, you guys? Tell me!
What?
"

"I'm baked," Lenny announced when at last their guffaws had died away. "You," he added, pointing at Jane, "are
really
baked."

Rosa could take no more. "Well," she said, rising suddenly from her chair. "It's late."

The three of them looked up at her with naughty smirks.

"Off to bed then, Ro?" Lenny inquired.

"Yes. You should be going soon, too."

Lenny made a comically chastened face. "You're right." He turned to Jason and Jane. "She's right, you guys. We should all go to bed
very
,
very
soon."

Rosa looked at Lenny. "Well, come on, then."

"In a bit. Me and Jase are just finishing our wine. You don't have to escort us out, you know."

"Fine." Rosa went over to the door. "Please try not to make too much noise when you're letting yourself out."

As she left, they erupted in giggles. It was, she reflected, the second time that day that she had exited to the sound of derisive laughter.

On her way to the bathroom the next morning, Rosa met Jane in the hall, looking gratifyingly hungover.

"Well!" Rosa said with slightly sadistic good cheer. "I guess you made quite a party of it last night."

Jane nodded uneasily.

"What time did they finally go?"

"Actually--" Jane's response was interrupted by the sound of someone coughing and hawking behind her bedroom door.

Rosa froze. "Is that...?"

She turned around to see Lenny emerging from Jane's room in nothing but a pair of grubby boxer shorts. Behind him, she caught a glimpse of scattered clothes and rumpled sheets and five burned-out cigarette butts standing in a row on Jane's night table.

"Hey," Lenny said. He gave a sleepy, childlike wave and walked into the bathroom.

"Hey," Rosa repeated mechanically. It was years since she had had occasion to witness her brother's near nakedness. The revelation of his bony, yellow chest and emaciated pin legs was almost but not quite as distressing to her as the apparent fact that he had spent the night with her roommate.

"So,"
she said, looking at Jane.

Jane cringed. "I hope you don't mind, Rosa, it was just--"

"Please! You don't need to justify yourself to
me
." Rosa turned and walked briskly back to her bedroom. At the door, she glanced around at Jane, who was standing where she had left her, staring abjectly at the floor.

"Jane?"

"Yes?"

Rosa leaned, smiling, against the doorjamb. "I don't want to alarm you or anything, but you might want to get yourself checked out by a doctor. My brother does have quite a history of venereal disease." With that she disappeared into her room and closed the door.

CHAPTER
13

Karla lay on her bed, sucking messily at a nectarine and scribbling on a yellow legal pad. In a couple of hours, she and Mike were due at Perry Street for a family celebration in honor of Audrey's fifty-ninth birthday, but Mike had not yet returned from the gym and she was taking the opportunity to do some work on a letter she was writing for her neighbor, Mrs. Mee. The boss of the nail salon where Mrs. Mee worked had recently introduced a new tipping policy, and customers were now being asked to leave their gratuities with the cashier at the front desk instead of giving them to the manicurists directly. In theory, the tips were pooled at the end of the day and distributed equally among the workers, but the women strongly suspected that they were being scammed. Karla's letter, which was to be presented to the boss by the entire staff, demanded that the old system be reinstated and threatened recourse to the Labor Department if it were not. She paused now to read over the paragraph she had just written. "We the undersigned believe that we have a right to receive our tips from the patrons. This is the standard procedure in other nail and beauty salons throughout New York City. It ensures, among other things, that each employee is rewarded for the level of service that she provides."

She sighed. She had performed countless favors of this sort for Mrs. Mee over the years: written character recommendations, made referrals, located medical specialists, organized therapy sessions, researched clinical trials. She had yet to see evidence that any of it had really helped. Somehow, Mrs. Mee always found something to object to in the services that Karla rendered. The sought-after asthma doctor with whom she had arranged a rare consultation was accused of having a "disrespectful" manner. The marriage counselor who agreed to see Mrs. Mee and her husband for no charge was judged to be inconveniently located. The training program that Karla found for her at a high-paying Upper East Side beauty salon was dismissed as "too boring." Karla was not unaccustomed to dealing with people who were hard to help: she spent a good deal of her working life assisting those for whom the most elementary acts of self-preservation were a challenge. Yet even by these standards, Mrs. Mee was a tough case. There was something willful, something
defiant
, in her perpetual, low-level unhappiness. It was as if suffering had become so integral to her identity that the prospect of any real, material improvement in her life would pose a threat to her deepest sense of self: she had invested her entire personhood on a horse called Put-Upon, and she was damned if she was going to change her bet now.

Karla looked up at the sound of the front door opening. A moment later, Mike came into the bedroom. He was wearing track pants and a muscle tee with a large Rorschach blot of sweat on its front.

"Hi," Karla said. "Good workout?"

"Fine." He gestured at Karla's writing pad. "Is that your essay?"

"Yes." She drew the pad to her bosom.

The BabyLove adoption agency required prospective parents to compose autobiographical essays as part of their application. Mike had completed his paean to the sun-dappled days of his Bronx childhood some weeks ago, but Karla, despite persistent nagging, had yet to get beyond her first paragraph. The other day, she had called the agency to see if they had any sample autobiographical statements, but the woman on the other end had only laughed. "We don't give out samples," she had said. "It wouldn't be appropriate. The autobiographical statement is a personal document. There isn't any right or wrong way to do it."

"Is it nearly done?" Mike asked.

"Nearly."

"Let me see what you've written so far."

"No," Karla said, recoiling from his outstretched hand, "let me finish it first."

Mike sighed irritably. "I don't know why you're making such a meal of this. Are you using the guidelines?"

Karla nodded. "Yes, of course."

The essay guidelines provided by the agency recommended, among other things, that applicants attempt to answer the following questions:

What was your parents' style of childrearing?

What were your past relationships with your parents and siblings?

What are your current relationships with your parents and siblings?

What level of education have you reached? Are you satisfied with this?

What is your job? Do you find it fulfilling?

What are some of the significant failures and successes you have experienced in life?

Whenever Karla considered this list, she became overwhelmed and depressed. It seemed to her that to supply all the required information accurately and honestly would take months of labor and at least 10,000 words.

"Why're you eating?" Mike said suddenly, pointing at the nectarine in her hand. "You're going to have dinner in a bit."

Karla wiped at her mouth guiltily and set the nectarine down on the bedside table. "It was just a snack," she said. "It'll help me not eat so much when I get there."

"What's she giving us for dinner, anyway?" Mike asked suspiciously.

He had not yet recovered from a recent Perry Street dinner at which Audrey had upended a can of spaghetti and meatballs onto a serving plate and carved the congealed cylinder into slices.

"I think she's doing take-out," Karla said.

"Oof, that's a relief." He began to undress. "I was thinking that we could make an announcement tonight about the adoption."

Karla grimaced. "Oh, I don't know, honey. It's Mom's night..."

"So? She'll be thrilled. What nicer present could we give her?"

Karla tried to picture her mother being thrilled by the present of grandmotherhood. "Well...if you want to," she said.

Mike went into the bathroom to take a shower.

"Honey," she called after him, "if Mom starts going on about the endorsement tonight, don't get into it, okay?"

"Well, if she asks me, I'm going to say what I think," he called back.

"Oh, Mike, please don't. She
knows
what you think."

Mike returned now, wearing a towel around his waist. "I'm not going to let her lecture me on union politics."

"But it'll get into an argument, and it's her birthday..."

Mike shrugged. "If she doesn't want an argument, she shouldn't bring it up."

Audrey opened the front door at Perry Street, looking very much as if she had just gotten out of bed.

"Happy birthday!" Mike cried.

"Nothing happy about turning fifty-nine," Audrey said bleakly, running her fingers through her unbrushed hair.

Mike let his mouth fall open in playful disbelief. "Fifty-nine? Get out! You don't look a day over thirty!"

"All right, Omar Sharif." Audrey said. "Simmer down."

On entering the living room, Karla could not help giving a small gasp. Since her last visit to the house a few weeks earlier, the standard Perry Street disarray had degenerated into full-scale squalor. Pieces of clothing and full ashtrays and old newspapers were strewn over the floor. A half-eaten baked potato was sitting on top of the television. The whole place smelled of something sweet and rotten. "Has Sylvia been here lately?" she asked.

Audrey looked around her, as if noticing the disorder for the first time. "Yeah, she came on Monday, but I had to send her away. I wasn't feeling well."

There was an uncomfortable pause.

"We brought you a present, Ma!" Mike said, handing over a bottle of wine and a large wrapped package.

"Oh! Isn't that nice," Audrey took the offerings and set them down on a chair.

"I'll go and get some glasses for the wine," Karla volunteered.

"You don't want to open it now, do you?" Audrey said. "Why don't you wait until people get here? I've got beer in the fridge."

As Karla left the room, she glanced at Mike. She did not mind failing to qualify as Audrey's idea of "people," but he surely would.

The nasty smell was even stronger in the kitchen. And the mess was epic. A sinister brown substance was oozing from one of the three gaping trash bags on the floor. The filthy linoleum sucked at Karla's shoes. In a pot that was sitting on the stove, she discovered the source of the smell: putrefying chicken soup. "Mom," she called out, hastily replacing the lid. "How long has this soup been sitting here?"

"What?" her mother called back.

"How long have you had this chicken soup?"

"The soup?" her mother shouted. "Oh, no, don't have any of that. Jean made it for me last week. It's probably gone off by now."

Karla shook her head. She took three beers out of the fridge and began searching for glasses. The cupboard where they were normally kept was empty. She went through all the other cupboards and then checked the sink, but after digging around in the festering dishes for a while, she was able to locate only one cloudy tumbler with the dessicated dregs of red wine coating its bottom.

She went back into the living room. Mike and her mother were sitting on the love seat, arguing about the union endorsement.

"Mom," Karla said, "where are your glasses?"

Audrey turned to her. "Mike says you're actually going to
campaign
for the governor. Is that true?"

Karla looked at Mike. They had not discussed this matter. She had always done canvassing work for union-endorsed candidates in the past, but this time, she had been hoping that she might quietly recuse herself.

"Oh, Karla!" her mother cried.

"Well--," Karla began.

"She has nothing to be ashamed about," Mike said. "The Democrats always talk about how much they love us, but they never do anything to help us. I'd rather have the help without the love, quite frankly, than the love without the help."

"My God," Audrey said. "I never thought I'd live to see the day--"

"About the glasses, Mom," Karla said.

"Hmm?"

"Your glasses. I can't find them."

"Really?" Audrey made a mystified face. "Well, not to worry. It's only beer. We can drink from the bottles."

"They can't all have disappeared. I'll keep looking."

"Don't be such a fusspot," Audrey said sharply. "Mike won't mind drinking from a bottle, will you Mike?"

Out in the hall, the front door banged shut. "I'm here!" Lenny shouted. He came into the living room and threw his leather jacket on a chair. "Hey, guys." He had an ugly sore on his forehead, and the skin around his eyes was a sickly purple color. "Hello, love," Audrey said. "You look tired--" She broke off at the sight of Tanya in the doorway, wearing a cowboy hat and a "Jesus Is My Homeboy" T-shirt. "I didn't know Tanya was coming."

"Really?" Lenny scratched his head. "I thought I told you, Mom."

"No." Audrey's tone was firm. "You didn't."

Tanya glanced about the room with stagy diffidence. She seemed to be enjoying the awkwardness that her presence had caused.

"I could have sworn I did," Lenny said.

Audrey sighed in resignation. "Well, she's here now."

"Listen, if it's a problem--" Tanya said in her reedy, little girl's voice.

"No, dear," Audrey said. "It's not a problem. Sit down."

"Seriously," Tanya went on, reluctant to relinquish the idea of her unwantedness. "I don't mind going."

"Oh, do shut up, Tanya," Audrey said.

Lenny laughed and leaned over to kiss the top of his mother's head. "Happy birthday, Mom. Sorry we're late."

"It doesn't matter. Rosa's not here yet anyway."

"Is she at one of her Jewish classes tonight?" Tanya asked.

Audrey looked up at Lenny sharply. "What classes?"

"Huh?"

Audrey smiled. "You heard. What classes is Tanya talking about?"

Lenny shrugged. "I dunno. I think she's studying the Talmud or something."

"Jesus." Audrey flopped back in her seat. "I've got these two"--she pointed at Karla and Mike--"voting Republican. And now Rosa's training to be a fucking rabbi. What is
going on
with this family?"

Karla picked up the package that Audrey had left on the chair. "Hey, Mom, why don't you open your present?"

"Yeah, go on, Ma," Mike said. He took the package from Karla and placed it in Audrey's lap.

Still shaking her head, Audrey tore away the paper. Mike and Karla's gift was a hardcover book with the title,
Schmatte: A Photographic History of Garment Workers in London's East End
.

"Oh, very nice," she said.

"Ooh, it's beautiful," Tanya cooed. "I
love
old black-and-white photography."

Karla nodded, pleased. "Yes, so do I."

Tanya, who liked to think of even her most unremarkable enthusiasms as her patented idiosyncrasies, looked irritated. "No, but I'm like
obsessed
," she said possessively.

Mike knelt down next to Audrey. "We thought you'd find it interesting," he said, "with your dad being a tailor and everything."

"I was the one who found it on the Internet," Karla added quickly.

"Mmm..." Audrey flicked quickly through the pages.

"I wrote something in the front," Karla said.

Audrey turned to the page on which Karla had put her inscription.
For Mom
,
with love and admiration, from Karla and Mike.

"Very nice," Audrey repeated. "What a thoughtful present. Thank you."

She closed the book and laid it on the floor by her feet. "Now, what about that beer? Or would you like some wine, Lenny?"

"Wine, please."

"Right you are. Go on, you open it."

"Maybe Mike should do that," Karla suggested. She knew that her husband would resent Lenny's opening the wine that he had brought.

"Whatever," Lenny said.

"Get some mugs, Karla," her mother commanded, "and the Chinese menu. It's in the drawer next to the fridge."

When Rosa arrived an hour later, the food was sitting in the oven, and Karla was on her hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor.

"Shalom!" Karla heard Audrey drawl as Rosa entered the living room. There followed a brief exchange, most of which Karla was unable to make out. Then Rosa came into the kitchen. "What on
earth
are you doing?" she demanded. Karla, her round face pink from her exertions, looked up apologetically. "It was so filthy in here. I just thought..."