“It’s an interesting accusation,” Zabeth said. “I can see why you panicked.”
“You can?” The white breath of Kay’s voice disappeared into the mist. It was eight o’clock on Sunday morning and she was jogging after Zabeth through the woods. They had only been out five minutes and she was already winded. She pushed back a cuff on her baggy sweatshirt, felt it relapse bit by bit down her arm, wiped the sweat off her neck with her wrist. She was more out of shape now than she’d been two months ago, when they had started these weekly runs. She watched Zabeth’s narrow hips pump decisively up the path and groaned as she chose the steepest trail, the one leading through the laurel and scrub oak straight to the ridge. “So you don’t think I was an idiot to jump in the car and drive straight to the hospital?”
“No, I think you were an idiot not to put a pillow over her face when you got there and found out she was still alive.”
Kay panted and ducked under a spray of poison oak. The hospital room had looked different at night, eerier, like the cabin of a spaceship. A dim green lamp had lit Ida’s halved body, making her white skin and golden hair gleam above the crosshatch of empty shadows below. A cloud of L’Heure Bleue had hung about her along with another scent, sweetly chemical, maybe morphine, maybe those black roses, fragrant at last. But Ida herself had been sound asleep, the telephone crouched on her table, innocent as a sleeping cat. “I thought this physical therapist she’d fought with earlier might have come back for revenge. I totally forgot that she used to say ‘Stop killing me’ every time I asked for my allowance or needed a ride to a piano lesson. In that same insane voice. Sobbing.”
Zabeth laughed, a loud series of linked ha-ha-ha’s that sounded like slaps. “Exactly!” Zabeth said. “That’s what I love about old Ida. She’s so B-movie.”
Kay thought about this, Ida as Garbo coughing into a hankie, then discarded it. Ida’s pain was real. She had been ill or injured as long as Kay could remember. “You’re the one who looks B-movie today,” she said, to change the subject. Zabeth had dressed for their jog in lime green Nikes and black spandex tights topped by a leopard-skin print sports bra. A gold spangled chiffon scarf snaked around her throat, silver bracelets banged up and down on her arm. Despite the relentless pacing of her little feet, it was clear she had been out partying the night before. Huge rusty earrings still poked through the frizz of her perm. She hadn’t washed the thick lines of green kohl around her eyes, she reeked of musk and spermicide, and she had a large purple hickey on her neck.
“Blue movie,” Zabeth corrected. “But getting back to Ida—why do you let her pick on you?”
“Mom’s first fall was my fault,” Kay explained. “I left some toys at the top of the stairs and she tripped over them and broke her back. Dad had to give up a big commission in New York and come home and take care of her.”
“And you were how old then?”
“Ha-ha-ha! Do you still have the name of that shrink I told you about?”
Kay flushed. She knew, of course, that that first accident had not been her fault and she didn’t need anyone named Dr. Tanya Tamar to explain it to her. Still—she felt guilty. You did this to me. How often had Ida said that? You made me a cripple.
Zabeth looked over her shoulder and grinned. “I only met your mother once and I wanted to kill her. I bet your father thinks about it. If he were single he could have any woman he wanted.”
“He could?” Kay pictured Francis, slight, skinny, his hair parted low and combed over his bald spot, looking, despite his little British brush mustache, like a frail boy in the bow ties and striped shirts he always wore. She liked his looks, of course, but then he was her father, and she had no choice. “You think he’s attractive?”
“Yep. Plus all the extras: Famous. Smart. Funny.”
“Funny?” Kay grimaced. “He’s sarcastic. That’s different.” She shook her head. “He’s no fun to live with. Sits in his chair and does crosswords all day. Lectures when he talks and doesn’t listen when anyone else does. Says no before you finish asking a question. He’s a lot like Neal, actually.”
“Ha-ha-ha. They say we marry our fathers.”
“I hope not.”
Neal had slept on the couch last night. He’d never come to bed at all. Oh she didn’t want to think about Neal. She scrubbed her wet palms on her shorts, picked up her pace, and fixed her eyes straight ahead. Beethoven was good to jog to. “Ode to Joy.” Thump thump thump thump THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP. What was poor Beethoven’s idea of joy anyway? She tuned the beat to her footfalls, and tried to focus on becoming as thin and trim as Zabeth.
Not that a Sunday workout could do that. Zabeth was light years ahead of her. When Kay first met her, last spring, Zabeth had been dating a Colombian drug lord’s stepson. She sat in the back row at the one and only AA meeting Kay had ever attended, and the first thing Kay had noticed, as she sat down beside her, was that she was dressed entirely in black leather and creaked when she moved, like parts of a harness. The second thing she noticed was that she was sipping tequila from a Wonder Woman thermos. Kay took a few sips herself; they went straight to her head in delicious crescendo and when a melancholy woman stood up and said, “Hi, I’m PattiAnn, I’m an addict-alcoholic and I’m your treasurer,” she had giggled. Zabeth, looking at her with interest, had said, “Right. Let’s go.” They had gone to an Indian restaurant, where they ordered dal and daiquiris, and talked for hours about men, and music, and yes, even then, their mothers.
“It’s not just you,” Zabeth said now. They had come to the ridge top, to the grassy turnout where they always stopped to catch their breath. West Valley spread out beneath them, grey brown in the autumn mist. Sweat and mascara ran down Zabeth’s face as she turned to Kay. “Your mother puts everyone through changes. I’ll never forget that dinner last summer.”
Kay flushed. “That dinner last summer” had been the worst night of her life. One of the worst nights of her life. Zabeth didn’t even know how bad it had been. For two days, Kay had worked to prepare a gala going-away-to-Greece meal for her parents. The shish kebab, avgolemono, and dolma had been perfect. But the people! Stacy arrived fresh from a right-to-lifers march clutching a baby doll bloodied with catsup; Victor tried to sell everyone a used Taurus; Neal kept turning the TV on to check the game; Nicky had a fit when he was asked to help set the table; Francis and Ida had been drunk when they arrived; and Zabeth, in some Sheba, Queen of the Jungle outfit, had wanted to talk about the relevance of Greek myth to modern-day relationships. She had learned enough Greek in grad school to sprinkle her talk with slippery words full of x’s, and every time she opened her mouth, Ida’s eyebrows lifted, her red lips tightened, and her jeweled knuckles clenched on the rests of her wheelchair. Kay knew the signs. She watched Ida’s jealous mood darken and when she saw her hand hook out for something to throw—a knife, a fork, a wineglass—she covered the hand so hard with her own that Ida shrieked and spat out.
“She thought you were flirting with Dad,” Kay said now.
“I was flirting with him. So what? We were talking about Medea and suddenly your mother calls me a small-town slut and bursts into tears.”
Zabeth laughed her bracing ha-ha-ha and Kay turned aside. “That was the night she fell out of her wheelchair,” she reminded Zabeth as they started to jog back toward the trailhead. “She tried to go for a midnight swim when they got home and somehow she crashed onto the cement by the swimming pool. That’s what hurt her leg. That’s essentially why she had to have this last amputation.”
“Serves her right,” said Zabeth.
They ran in silence for a while. “So how have you been all week?” Kay asked. “While I’ve been commuting dutifully to the hospital. Where’d you get that hickey, for instance?”
Zabeth grinned over her shoulder. “Jealous?”
“Yes. You know what Neal’s like.”
“No, and promise you’ll never tell me.”
“Neal nibbles—”
“Stop!”
“—but he never nips.”
“Well, Garret nips.”
“Garret? The soccer player?”
“No, the pharmacist.”
“The one you said was ‘medium height, medium weight, medium everything’? I thought you hated him.”
“No, I hate the soccer player. Garret’s good. Medium good. Yesterday was our two-week anniversary and he gave me a briefcase made of Peruvian duck skin filled with red lace panties, a tab of LSD, and three love poems he wrote himself.”
“Poetry,” Kay repeated, jealous.
“I don’t know if it is poetry, exactly. It’s more like pornography. But it’s very effective. You know? I like that. I like to be wooed. Don’t you?”
Kay remembered Neal’s first gift to her—a boxed set of Brahms symphonies. “Nothing can match the music inside you,” he’d written on the note. And his last gift? A fly swatter. “Just don’t get married,” she said darkly.
They slowed as they came out of the jogging trail onto the road where they’d parked, Zabeth’s new Saab pulled close to Kay’s Lincoln Town Car with its peeling roof. Kay realized that Zabeth had probably had to roll out of a warm water bed filled with a hot lover to keep this jogging date today, and felt contrite. She was lucky to have any friends, let alone one as brave and spicy as Zabeth. “Thanks, Zab,” she said as they bent to stretch. “You’re good to come all this way just to help me get a heart attack. And the plant you sent Mom!” She flushed. She had completely forgotten the bleeding heart. Smashed upside down on the linoleum floor, it had been the only clue that anything at all had happened in Ida’s hospital room that night. It looked like Ida had thrown it straight against the wall. “It’s beautiful. She loves it. To bits.”
“She does? Well, good. I wanted to send something, just to let her know I was thinking of her. I mean the thing about Ida is, she’s a total witch but you’ve got to admire her.” Zabeth grinned up at Kay. “Feel better?”
“Yes. Still no runner’s high but I always feel better after I see you. Would you do me a favor though? Don’t tell.”
It was a mistake, and Kay flushed, steadying herself for Zabeth’s astonished “Don’t tell who?”
“My parents. About me going back to the hospital at night. I mean, you probably won’t even see them again, but if you do—Mom isn’t going to remember calling me, I’m sure, and Dad doesn’t know, and I’d just like, I don’t know … I don’t want to give them the satisfaction.”
“Of knowing they can jerk you around whenever they want?”
“Something like that.”
Kay waited for the ha-ha-ha but Zabeth was silent. “I am going to see Francis, actually,” she said at last. “We’re having lunch on Thursday.”
“You’re having lunch with …?”
“Your father.”
“Why? I mean,” Kay caught herself, “where?”
“Calm down. It’s no big deal. He phoned and ordered this prescription from Garret while I was there and I just thought it would be more fun to deliver it in person. He’s not that easy to talk to on the phone, is he?”
“Where?” Kay repeated, bending to tighten her laces. “What restaurant?”
“I don’t know. Where do you two go?”
“We don’t.”
“His office is only how close to the library and you don’t go to lunch with him? Kay! I had lunch with my father every week when I lived back East, and once a month we went to the movies.”
“He liked you,” Kay said. “My dad doesn’t like me.”
“You ought to get to know him, Kay.”
“There’s nothing to know,” Kay said. “And anyway, every time I try …” Her voice trailed away. Had she ever had a real talk with Francis? She couldn’t remember one. In fact, she couldn’t remember a single pleasant exchange. Had he ever even touched her? Well yes—Indian wrist burns, Dutch rubs, knuckle raps. He used to flick her with a tea towel when she did the dishes. When she kissed him he squinched his lips up. When she told him she loved him, he said, “Ditto.”
“You ought to get to know him,” Zabeth repeated. “Before your mother dies.”
“My mother is not going to die.”
Zabeth touched her shoulder and looked her in the eye. What bloodshot little eyes she had, inside all that kohl. “Are you all right with this, Kay? It’s just a lunch.”
“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?” But Zabeth didn’t answer this very good question, nor did she invite Kay to join them on Thursday. Instead, she squeezed her shoulder again, hard, waved goodbye, and drove away. Alone in her own car, Kay groped through the glove compartment for the emergency aspirin; when she couldn’t find it, she emptied the entire contents of the glove compartment onto the floor. That felt good. As she sat up, her elbow grazed the stack of Chopin tapes and she knocked them off the seat with a swift smack. That felt good too. Then she shoved the library books onto the tapes. Then all the empty cardboard and Styrofoam fast food containers. Then she pounded the steering wheel with her fists and that felt good too. But not good enough. Her head was throbbing and crazy words were going through her head, like He’s my father. Mine. You can’t have him!—and what sense did those make? She punched the leather seat beside her three times, four times, felt the car flood with yellow light as the sun finally broke through the morning mist, then almost immediately darken as a shadow fell over her hand. She glared and looked up.
Charles Lichtman, leaning on his bike, smiled in at her. She gasped in horror. All she could focus on was the bandanna tied around his dark curly hair; it was the same rosy pink as his full lower lip. “You all right?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” she mouthed. “Fine. Just. You know. Throwing a fit.”
His eyes, brown as syrup, poured over the mess inside the car and returned to her hot face. “Good luck,” he said. He waved and rode away.
She could not stop shaking all the way to the Frederickses’ house. The image of Charles Lichtman bicycling away trembled before her eyes. How long had he watched her tearing the car apart? Had he noticed that the library books she had tried to karate chop were the same books he had just returned? Was he wondering, even now, what interest she had in Van Gogh’s letters, John Wesley Powell’s trip down the Colorado River, or Japanese joinery? Did he know she had only taken those books hoping to find some note or message from him tucked between the pages? Did he think she was insane? Was she insane? She eyed a bar sitting sunny and silent on Main Street: the White Oak. Not open. Too bad. Not that she would go to a bar on a Sunday morning, alone, when she was supposed to be at rehearsal—it was just an idea. For a minute, imagining what it might be like: the boozy secret dark, the long mirror, the candy-colored lights of the jukebox in the corner, a good idea, yes. But not one she would ever pursue. She had never gone to a bar alone. She wasn’t like Zabeth.
Zabeth! Those little red eyes! He could have any woman he wanted. And what about that LSD? What kind of present was that? Dad ought to know better, Kay thought, her lips pressed together. He ought to be ashamed. What does he think he’s doing? The old fool. And Mom. Poor helpless Mom. Oh where was that card with Dr. Tamar’s number on it? Who would trust anyone named Dr. Tamar?
The Frederickses lived in a large tract house at the edge of town, near the freeway, and the other musicians had already arrived by the time Kay drove up. She could hear Walt’s voice as she hurried up the walkway; he was well into his weekly pep talk.
“You know what a genius is?” Kay let herself in the front door and glanced around at the others, ducking her head in apology at being late. Walt sat on his yellow velvet pillow in the center of the living room floor in lotus position, warming his tiny fat hands around a teapot. “A genius is someone who dares. Haydn dared to compose great music and we dare to play it. So what does that make us?”
He twinkled at Lois Hayes, who said, “Excuse me, Walt, but I have to be back in an hour.”
“Of course. Of course. We all have places to go and people to meet and things to do. And why is that? Barry?”
Barry Morris, a volunteer fireman who played the cello, looked at his diver’s watch and said, “I don’t even have an hour.”
“No of course not, you’re busy, we’re all busy, we’re involved with life and we’re involved with life because we dare to be. Isn’t that right? Zipper?”
Walt’s son Zipper ran his hand over his shaved head and said, “Sure. I guess.” Zipper was seventeen and the most balanced of the group—Lois looked wild-eyed already, bouncing her viola case against her knee, and Barbara Billings, who clerked at the shoe store, was making little cluck-cluck sounds to herself, bird calls maybe. “Remember what Haydn said,” Walt continued. He closed his eyes. His face was cheeky as a toddler’s. His tongue flicked between his plump lips. “‘God will forgive me,’” he quoted, “‘for having a cheerful heart.’” His wife came to the doorway; she wiped her hands on her apron and peered around the room, making sure everyone was paying attention to Walt, then she stepped forward, knelt as before an altar, whisked his teapot away, and left.
“Geniuses,” Walt breathed, opening his eyes and clapping his hands, “have cheerful hearts. So let us commence.”
Everyone reached for their instruments with relief. Kay, shaking her wrists out, walked across the room toward the piano. Walt, still on the floor, feinted for her ankles but she sidestepped him, smiling thinly. Every week he made the same pun about her jogging shoes, called them ReBachs instead of Reboks; today he sang a bar of “O Sole Mio” as she tugged them out of his grasp. She pulled out the piano bench, sat down, and opened her music.
She had not practiced regularly this week and she could hear the rushes, fakes, and sloppy phrasing as she began the first movement of the Haydn. She wondered if Walt could hear them too. She glanced up from the keyboard, expecting censure, but he was bent over his violin, intent, eyes closed. She refocused on the music, trying to force a cheerful heart. The Haydn bored her, though, so vigorous and busy; it just made her more tired than she already was. She enjoyed the second movement more, but still could not concentrate. She finished playing and looked up. “I need a lot of work,” she said. No one contradicted her.
The third movement was a nightmare. Lois hissed to herself over her viola, Barbara’s timing was off, Barry flubbed bar after bar, and Walt had to stop playing to rub his wrists, which were swelling with bursitis. Only Zipper, eyes open, fixed on nothing, played well, and he stopped when he saw them all watching and dropped the flute from his lips, a smile becalmed on his face. Walt called, somewhat mechanically, “Bravo, bravo! Now on to the Chopin.”
Kay sat still on the piano bench as the others disbanded. Don’t be nervous, she told herself. Don’t think about your mother, your father, your friend, or your husband. Don’t think about Charles Lichtman. Don’t think about anything but the music. She hit the first notes and was startled when Walt’s “Lovely, lovely” brought her back to the present. She had played the whole piece the way she so often drove, in a dream, head down, flying through blackout. Now as she lifted her hands off the keyboard Walt planted a wet kiss on her forehead. “I don’t deserve it,” she warned him.
“You can tell she’s not used to praise,” Walt said to the others. And that at least was true. She was not used to praise.