27

My real life

My real life is what I thought about, standing at the stove watching Miss Bertha’s dinner heat up.

My mother had cooked a lot of food (having no faith in Mrs. Eikleburger) and put it in the freezer, clearly marked. She had left oven temperatures and cooking times for me, too. Tonight it was to be meat loaf with mushroom gravy. I had told her Miss Bertha’s favorite, or one of them, was meat loaf, which it wasn’t. Mrs. Fulbright liked it a lot. As for the mushroom gravy, Miss Bertha really hated it because she was sure all mushrooms were dangerous and called them toadstools. She was certain she’d get a poisonous one, which she probably would if I knew where they were. Since she wouldn’t eat the mushroom gravy, I cut her square of meat loaf open, scooped out some, and stuffed the sauteed mushrooms inside. I sealed it back up. You really couldn’t tell.

Now I stood before the stove, watching the peas warming in one pot and the mashed potatoes in the other, thinking about my real life. Was it now, waiting for the food to heat up? It made me uncomfortable to think my real life was watching over Miss Bertha’s dinner.

I walked over to the tin-lined counter at the end of the draining board, where Walter was washing dishes, and set down some dirty utensils and the frying pan in which I’d re-sauteed the mushrooms. I asked, “Walter, do you ever wonder what your real life is?”

“Uh-uh.” He shook his head.

He could be so annoying. “Well, wonder now. Wonder what your real life is.”

“Okay.” He went around and around a glass platter with a dishrag.

There was this exasperating silence. I didn’t know whether he was wondering or not. Probably not. I was scraping bits of blackened onion grit from the frying pan, waiting.

“Well?”

“I guess it’s washin’ this here dish.”

Deesh, he said. Walter was so practical about life.

“Not just your life. Your real life. What you’re meant to do.”

He was silent for a moment, then he said, “Washin’ these here pots and pans, looks like. Looks like the same thing to me.”

I heard Miss Bertha’s cane smarting the wood floor of the dining room and picked up their basket of rolls from the serving counter. I took them in with the water pitcher.

As she looped her cane around a third chair at the table, Miss Bertha complained again that the “two of them” had no business going off both at the same time, and what was for dinner?

Meat loaf with mushroom gravy.

There came a sound of satisfaction from Mrs. Fulbright and a big grunt from Miss Bertha. She complained that my mother wasn’t there to cook her something else, and wasn’t that part-time German cook here?

No, not tonight.

I let Walter dish up the food, as he really enjoyed doing that and was very neat about it. After taking in their plates, the steam rising from the potatoes, I went back to the kitchen and waited.

There came a yell and a chair overturning and I started for the back door, asking Walter to go see what was wrong.

Then I ran across the grass to the other back door and up the stairs to my room.

As I changed my skirt for my jeans, I wondered again what my real life was. Or what it should be. I stared in the mirror, pressing my fingers into my cheeks, and watched as the skin whitened and the color returned when I took my fingers away. Then I pressed my fingertips against my forehead. I was seeing how solid I was. I felt ghostly, as if the inside of me had been scooped out and replaced with nothing, not even mushrooms

 

I was told to keep Aurora happy and that meant Cold Comforts. And that meant getting another bottle of Southern Comfort out of the storage room. I knew Mrs. Davidow kept the key way back in a cubbyhole in the rolltop desk in the back office (which would have been the first place I’d look if I’d been a thief). After I knuckled it out, I stuck my head into the dumbwaiter opening in the wall beside the desk to listen to what might be going on. Aurora could make more noise for her single self than any human being I have ever encountered. It often sounded like she had a party going on.

I went up to the third floor and got the bottle, stopping among the clothes and blankets to admire some of Ree-Jane’s clothes. I always had a secret hankering after one of her evening dresses (she had several): it was the one my mother had made for her for her Sweet Sixteen party. It was white tulle and chiffon, the skirt spangled all over with sequins, very small ones that seemed to show not themselves but their reflected light. It was white and silver. I took the dress down and put it over my arm and carried it, along with the Southern Comfort, to the kitchen.

After I poured the Southern Comfort and brandy, I mixed in the usual ingredients of fruit juice, some gin, and my secret ingredient, which changed every time I made it. I took the glass back to the office and called up the dumbwaiter shaft: “Aurora Paradise, I’m sending up your Cold Comfort!”

Then came a scuffling and a creaking and her voice bellowing down the shaft: “ ’Bout time you did!” She gave two knocks with her cane, the all-clear signal, though why it wouldn’t be clear was more than I could say. I set the glass—which reminded me of Lola’s drink at Trader Bob’s—in the box and pulled on the cord. Up it went.

“You got it?” I called, half of me in the shaft, looking up at semidarkness. She yelled back that she had. “I’ll have Walter bring up your dinner.” Silence. I guess now that she had her Cold Comfort she saw no need to put herself out by answering. “I have to go out,” I called up.

Then I heard her whine: “Go out? You? Wherever would you have to go to? It’s evening.”

“I do have a life of my own.”

“No, you don’t.”

That really irritated me. But the irritation only masked something else. A cold center gathered inside me. I was afraid she might be right.