The waiter wipes their table with his dirty rag. He was Simone’s favorite, Marie remembers: the son, Milo, with his bitten nails and his moods: he had a story to tell, Simone would say.
On the walls the Aegean coast in plastic frames and rows of photographs of models and politicians and actors in black and white, standing with Milo’s uncle, John, or Milo’s father, Demetrios, elegant, illegible signatures scrawled across their faces. Milo’s father works in the kitchen. John’s wife rings the register. The plate-glass walls look out to the corner of Ninth and Twenty-Third and the women watch as other women, other men, cross the avenue or wait to cross the avenue, the younger women in shorter skirts, Barbara’s read, spring fashion. Umbrellas unfurled against the rain though they are useless, umbrellas; the enemy now the weather, someone says.
The skirts have always been above the knee, Franny says.
So, so above? Barbara says. There’s a dot of mayonnaise on her lower lip no one bothers to point out. Her neck sags and a thousand years ago, Marie remembers, Barbara gave Simone quite a run for her money. Oh well. Simone’s dead and now Barbara’s neck sags like a turkey’s and here they are, sleepless and still not exhausted: everyone raring to go when the party is almost over.I
Four hours, Franny is saying. Four hours’ sleep is the most I get. I don’t know when it starts to happen. Sixty? Sixty-five? It sneaks up, Franny says. She spears a fry with her fork, cuts her meat patty, and jabs the whole in catsup. “It sneaks up.”
“I’ve read melatonin,” Barbara says, because she’s always reading. “Melatonin regulates.”
“What was that old commercial?” this Jane, the listener. “Regulate, regulate, Metamucil helps you regulate,” she sings, her voice an embarrassment.
Milo appears from nowhere to clear their plates, his black vest stained but otherwise impressive, his white shirt starched. Marie took him for forties but Simone said younger: this kind of work and so forth.
“Ladies,” Milo says.
“And gentlemen,” Barbara says.
“Dessert?” Milo says.
“Rice pudding?” They crane to see the revolving dessert case near the front door, its trays of cakes and pies, shellacked, fly-flecked, as if perhaps something new is in the mix.
“It’s Wednesday,” Milo says.
“I wanted the rice pudding,” Franny says. “I had a craving.”
Milo winks. “I’ll check,” he says. He gathers the menus, huge in their old hands, then disappears again as the busboy descends to refill their waters.
“I’m going to float out to sea,” Franny says, watching him.
“Milo’s looking haggard,” Barbara says, though no one’s paying much attention. They stare out the plate-glass windows thinking of this and that—someone has painted a sprig of holly on the glass for Christmas but it’s spring, already. In the community garden folks are planting peas and uptown, Donna says, in Central Park, the daffodils have started blooming in those great glorious waves, hundreds of them, thousands, and those trees they have the children shouldn’t climb. She’d been there with her grandson, Atlas—who thinks of these names?—and the security had come and said don’t climb and Atlas’s mother, you remember Jenny, no shrinking violet, had said she’d climbed those trees when she was a little girl and what the fuck?
She said that?
To the guy’s face.
“Not since 9/11 do they let you climb trees,” Barbara says. She read it.
No.
Atlas.
Atlas.
So Atlas was grounded.
Donna takes a sip. “Atlas was pissed,” she says.
Outside a siren then a fire truck and then another and then another; a line of police cars follow.
“Someone’s climbing trees,” Barbara says.
“It’s a Surge,” Marie says. She watches the long line of police cars and fire trucks and motorcycles framed in sprigs of flaking holly or possibly mistletoe through the glass, all the vehicle lights going but no sound at all; the sound nothing, quiet as the quiet before All Clear.II
“All thanks to Mr. Kelly,” Franny says.
“Gene?”
“Hah! I wish!” she says.
“I can still remember my first Surge,” Barbara says. “New York. Nineteen sixty-seven.”
“That wasn’t a Surge that was a Police Action. I was there. The gays, right?”
“Felt Surge-ish.”
“Here I am like a chicken with my head cut off. Thought something had happened,” this Donna.
“Nineteen sixty-seven,” Franny says.
“Two thousand two,” Donna says. “My first.”
“That was anthrax,” Franny says.
“And what about anthrax?” Barbara says. “Whatever happened to anthrax?”
But no one seems to know, the Surge endless, police car after police car after police car after fire truck after motorcycle after police car after police car after police car after police car, like a parade with no candy, no spectators, no high school beauties, cheerleaders, or flag twirlers. No one on the sidewalks paying much attention either except the tourists, who have no idea what could possibly be going on below—New York! They stand on the High Line looking down.
Should they run for their lives?
“Where to?” says the guy shaving gourmet shaved ice, kimchi or boysenberry, take your pick.
And back at the Galaxy, among the regulars, Milo appears with a tray of rice pudding. Five cool bowls of white in frosted glass, intended for Friday’s rush, he says, but for certain customers like his favorite Chelsea ladies, Wednesday’s the new Friday.
I. Sometimes, before, it had felt like they were in a boat, Marie and Simone, Barbara, Donna, Franny, and all the others. More and more friends disappeared. The illness turned Bev Garfield’s face to stone. Ida Pierce lost her mind, first forgetting the word for sugar. Sugar, they had said to her, waving the little white packets. Sugar. Trudy, whom they had loved, could no longer walk, and so they had pushed her through the streets of Chelsea, down the pitted, filthy sidewalks, struggling to smooth her way up over the frozen curb and then steady again. They did what they had sworn they would never do: they spoke of their health, they complained of aches and pains. They couldn’t go anywhere fast enough. “Come on,” Trudy would say. “For the love of God, push!”
In their boat the sea turned blue and black and gray; rocked and jostled and crowded in, they were bored though sometimes not bored at all, sometimes someone would tell a story and they would laugh until they had tears in their eyes. They knew the story by heart, and still they would laugh and wipe their eyes with their hands, strangers’ hands, the skin there, the bruises from their too-thin blood, the liver spots, the freckles, their hands mosaics though that made them something else—art—and they were flesh and blood, too. They still were flesh and blood. They stared at their hands. They breathed. They slept. They stood from time to time and stretched. It was eternal, the trip, though they were moving so slowly they might have been going nowhere. Where were they now? Where had they been? More and more Marie saw her family, her other one, far, far away. She could see them but she could not reach them and besides if she breathed, if she said one word, they would disappear. More and more she smelled the apricot smell that sickened her: squashed black fruit, and more and more she heard the loud buzz of bees—there were still bees, impossible; fruit; her mother, her father, her sisters, her brother.
She climbs down, her body stiff from hiding. In other houses lights are bright in the bluing dark. She smells the fresh dirt smell not so far from here where other families live; she smells the sick sweet of apricots, feels the soft, rotten fruit on her bare feet. She smells her cold hands, her stink: onions, horseshit, fear. Someone pulls aside the draperies of St. Claire’s Rectory, second floor, and stares out unseen. The Garmands’ weather vane, a brass pig, looks a shadow in the blue light: late spring and the days longer though still cold, the smell fire, ash.
Her mother’s black shawl hangs on the nail behind the door, her sisters’ work boots, mud-caked, beneath it, as if a body might get warm, dry. The fire is out. She sees her brother has left his spectacles on the kitchen table beside her father’s books. Her brother might have been reading. Or he might have been roughhousing, her mother shushing him to quiet. At least remove your spectacles, she would say, spectacles a word she liked to speak out loud, the poetry of it, she said, the word as round as the thing, no? If you listen close everything’s a poem, she had said.
But just last month Paula Feist had enough. She could no longer hear and she could no longer taste. The chemo sizzled her buds, she said; everything for shit. For a while she seasoned her eggs, her Ensure, with green chili powder, a gift from her oldest hotshot daughter in Santa Fe, a daughter who cast small goats with long horns out of bronze. A daughter in the newspapers. It all meant something Paula Feist had long ago forgotten, something vaguely religious, or pagan, or animistic. Paula Feist’s hotshot daughter sold the goats in a gallery on a road of galleries run by other hotshot daughters, women in brightly patterned outfits with turquoise jewelry. The last time Paula Feist went to visit she had thought that perhaps she might live there, too. She liked the other women; she liked their smells, their clothing, the way they had of calling one another sweetheart. She liked the look of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, blood-red at sunset, or sunrise. She liked the whole thing, she told her daughter. The whole package.
Her daughter had smiled, wanly, Paula Feist said, and said, “No, Mom. I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to live with me. Sorry.”
They knew it all already and besides, it is not a story to be told again, not one of the stories that will make them laugh until they have tears in their eyes. Those stories they can hear a million times but this story they would rather not hear again. Paula Feist understands this by the way the other women shift in their seats, looking out to the frothy waves, white-capped, ominous. The sky darkens, the sun filters through in brilliant shafts of copper and pink. They remember it well, the sun, remember how Paula Feist chose this day to climb out, the way her old legs seemed young, again, the way her arms pumped to push her forward.
Or maybe the boat has always been empty.
II. Thirteen and a stale bun in her hand, cold cup of tea—they believed her seventeen and she let them, she at her desk filing or mimeographing—would it have been mimeographing? Always a quick study. Purple ink on her fingertips, her raggedy nails she bit when she couldn’t find a cigarette. The machines they used. Bulky monsters. The sounds of the tick-ticking, or the thunk, or the whiz. You listened for the sounds and it would always be her luck to get in line behind Bramwell, greasy-haired married man she had tried to avoid: him with his wife and children in Cheshire waiting it all out.
If there weren’t no war he would’ve made one to send the wife away, Shirley said. Shirley of Camberley-Frimley—like a bad limerick, Abe said—and the London flat they shared with its broken heat box and wet walls and blackened windows and the little potted plant Shirley called Alice and the poor goldfish with no name she called No Name that swam around and around in the hazy water of its glass bowl. She told Abe once about it; she told Abe once about everything and then she did not ever again: Shirley with her black-inked eyes and shorn hair and tiny, elfin hands. She had had some sort of childhood illness that kept her small. She knitted socks and listened to the wireless with the rest of them, never hurrying, reluctant to go to the public shelter and then going as if only agreeing to dance with the last man because he was the last man. If I must, Shirley said, up from her chair and tucking her knitting into the wicker basket with the leather strap meant for fish. My father’s, she told Marie: dead in the First. They went down the steps to the darkened room, the air dank, stuffy, listening to Jerry’s offerings, praying someone had lit one of the oil drums nearby, praying for a night dark from burning oil but the nights were never dark; they were bright with fires, the stench as sharp in the morning as the blaring all clear. Shirley at Balham Station when the bomb ruptured the water main; Marie may have been there, too, but in the country that day with Alice. Take Alice, Shirley had said. She needs a little cheering up.