Being Esther Read online

  “You know.” Esther’s voice cracks. She pauses and starts over. “You know.”

  “Yes?” Ceely leans forward, cocks an eyebrow.

  Esther stares into her cup, as if it contained the words that elude her. She recalls telling Lorraine, just the other day, how Ceely and Sophie end their phone calls with, “Love you!” Ceely and Josh, too. “They say it, like I might say to you, ‘Tomorrow is your turn to call,’” she told Lorraine. “It’s so automatic, I wonder how much it can mean. But it’s nice the way they talk to each other. I realized I’d never said that to Ceely. Maybe she thinks I don’t love her.”

  “Maybe revelations of love are not your style,” Lorraine told Esther.

  “Ma!” A look of concern crosses Ceely’s face. “You were saying something?”

  Esther, startled into the present, says, “I was going to tell you about Lena. Milo’s wife. You’ve seen her. Long legs. Big red hair. She wears those tall leather boots and big gold earrings?”

  Ceely shakes her head. “Milo has a wife?”

  “I was sure you’d met her. Anyway, she’s moved back in. I saw her from the window. I was looking out and there she was, lugging a suitcase toward their apartment.”

  “That’s what you wanted to tell me?”

  Esther nods, but is unable to meet her daughter’s gaze. “She moved out about a month ago. Ella Tucker, in 3A, the one I avoid, got hold of me at the mailboxes. She’d heard that Lena had left Milo and moved in with the man who teaches English at the community center. Ella blamed it on Milo’s mother. She said, ‘That old woman drove Lena right into the arms of another man.’ I told Ella I wouldn’t know, that I thought I’d seen Lena earlier that day. Ella said, ‘No. You wouldn’t know.’” Esther looks up, gives her daughter a rueful smile. “Anyway, now you know why I listen for Ella to go down for her mail. Then, when she’s done, I go and get mine.”

  Esther catches Ceely checking her watch. “What’s wrong?”

  If she’d told this story to Mrs. Singh, the two women would be lost in conversation for the longest time.

  “Nothing.” Ceely rises and carries her cup to the sink.

  “I said something, didn’t I?”

  “No.” Ceely runs the water, then stops. “That’s just it, Ma,” she says, her voice bristling with frustration. “You didn’t say a thing.”

  “But I just told you a story. What do you want me to say?”

  Ceely shrugs. “Listen. I’m late.”

  Esther holds up a hand. “Wait. Don’t go. I have something to show you.” She rises and heads slowly to the living room. When she returns, she is clutching an awkward-looking object, which she sets on the table.

  “What’s that?” Ceely asks.

  Esther, surprised, says, “You don’t recognize it?”

  Ceely considers it through narrowed eyes and shakes her head. “Not really.”

  “You made it. You must remember.”

  For a moment they both stare at the mottled brown mug, as if it might suddenly perform a trick or start talking.

  Suddenly, Ceely cries out. “Where did you get this!” She reaches for it, turns it over in her hands, runs her fingers over the initials she’d carved into the bottom. “It’s pretty awful, isn’t it?” She smiles at Esther, then hugs the mug, as if it were the family cat that showed up on the doorstep weeks after everyone thought it had been eaten by coyotes.

  Ceely’s eyes shine with delight as she turns it over and again runs her fingers over her roughly hewn initials. “I don’t understand. How did you get this?”

  When Esther carried the mug into the kitchen, she remembered the heat it had given off when Jack handed it to her all those years ago. Jack. She hasn’t thought about the detective in ages. She looks at Ceely and understands there are things her daughter doesn’t know about her, either.

  “It’s from the time you ran away,” Esther says.

  “I told you, I did not run away!” Ceely glares at Esther, the glint in her eyes turning cold.

  “When you were away, I drank my tea from it. Every afternoon.” Esther holds her daughter’s stony gaze. “I’d think, ‘Ceely made this with her own two hands.’ Holding it was like holding a part of you.”

  Ceely’s face softens. “I can’t believe you saved this.” She lets out a short laugh, shakes her head. “This may be the ugliest mug I’ve ever seen.” She laughs harder. “I can’t believe you ever used it.”

  “You can believe it,” Esther says. Then she checks her watch. “It’s getting late. Lenny will be home soon. And Josh. Now get going. You’ve got things to do.”

  Over coffee one morning, Esther runs across the obituary of a woman writer who, at the age of seventy-seven, left behind a simple note: I’ve lived long enough.

  Esther, who has already lived eight years longer than the writer, tries the idea out for size. “Enough is enough,” she says. But who is there to listen, to argue, to talk her down from the ledge? Certainly not the sugar bowl or the vitamins—what an unlikely pair!—standing mute, like Marty all those years, her words washing over him while he read the paper. The bird isn’t much better. Mickey. Dumb bird. Though she is grateful for his chatter. She named him for the parrot that lived in the courtyard of that old hotel in San Miguel. Saint Michael.

  Esther wonders if that writer ever sat alone at her table waiting for a sign, for a bird to cry, No!, or for the vitamins to say, Don’t be ridiculous! Enough is never enough! And would the sugar bowl nod in agreement?

  She laughs at the thought. Sometimes that’s all it takes. One laugh and she’s down off the ledge. Or Sophie calls to shoot the breeze. Or Lorraine reminds her that they have matinee tickets for a new production at Steppenwolf. And then Esther wants to stick around and see how things turn out.

  Yet she can easily imagine the alternative, a day when nobody calls, or she can’t laugh at her own jokes, and even the sound of the bird’s incessant chatter isn’t enough to fill the void.

  In the obituary, a friend reports that in recent years the writer had pared down her life. She stopped hosting dinner parties, going to movies, attending the theater, traveling. She stopped fussing over clothes. She tossed out her lipstick; cut her own hair. “Taken all together,” the friend observed, “she lived in a room that was too empty.”

  Esther surveys her kitchen, crammed with stuff: tea tins, an old portable radio, a flashlight, matches, digestive biscuits, cutting board, electric can opener, and a wooden block holding knives she once wielded with a familiar fluency. Potted plants jockey for space on the divider that separates the living room from the kitchen. The room isn’t empty at all, but Esther knows that’s not what the writer’s friend was suggesting. “Maybe it’s good to have to go to the grocery store,” the friend remarked. Suddenly, Esther remembers the All-Bran that Ceely brought over the other day, though she’d distinctly requested Lucky Charms.

  Esther checks her teeth in the rearview mirror, running a finger over them to erase any lipstick smudges. Slowly she pulls away from the curb.

  At the first intersection, she turns right to avoid crossing against oncoming traffic. At the next light, she turns right again, and suddenly recalls the year Marty gave her a tennis racket for her birthday, along with a short white dress and socks with pink pom-poms at the heel. She took lessons. She practiced hitting against a backboard. She drove balls into the net, over the baseline, into the next court. “Home run!” she’d cry. “Out of the ballpark!” When Marty accused her of running around her backhand, she said, “Tennis just isn’t my game.” And for once, he didn’t put up a fight.

  The Jewel is up ahead on the right. Esther slows down, signals, pulls into the lot, and after cutting the engine, she lets out a sigh. “I made it,” she whispers, then sinks back and rests her head on the seat. When she closes her eyes she sees Ceely’s importuning hand, waiting for the keys. She sees Dr. Levenson, glowing with sunshine, shaking his head. They want to take away the keys, but she did just fine.

  She opens her eyes, s
its up straight, but still can’t shake a growing sense of unease. What is she doing here among all these cars, all these people dashing into the store, then rushing back to their cars, their carts brimming with groceries, their days just as jammed with plans and obligations? She feels haunted by a failure of imagination. She could have gone to the Art Institute to admire the impressionists, or to Marshall Field’s to linger at the perfume bar, spritz her wrists with the latest scent. She could have walked to the park and sat on a bench.

  Esther is about to drive off, when there’s a tap on the window. A woman, about Ceely’s age, is peering in, her hand shading her eyes as if she were scouting intruders on the horizon. She’s wearing a severe black suit and pearls. Her haircut, like Ceely’s, is expensive. Tentatively, Esther rolls down the window, letting in a rush of perfume.

  “Are you all right?” The woman crouches, bringing herself eye level with Esther.

  “I’m fine,” Esther says, without conviction.

  “Oh.” The woman frowns as if to convince Esther that she might not be fine. “You were sitting there for such a long time, I just wondered.” She cocks her head to one side, the way one might express sympathy to a child who has just scraped her knee.

  “I appreciate your concern,” Esther says. “But I’m okay. Really. Thank you.” She pulls the keys from the ignition and when the woman shows no signs of leaving, Esther says, “I was just making a shopping list.”

  At that, the woman presses closer and peers inside the car.

  “A mental list,” Esther says, defensively.

  “Oh.” The woman, her good intentions thwarted by this obstinate woman, sounds disappointed. “Well, do you need any help?”

  “With a list?” Esther smiles ruefully at the stranger. For years, she scoured the newspaper ads, clipped coupons, made lists of all the specials. Even when she no longer needed to economize, she went from store to store for the door busters. It was a game and she was good at it. The ball always went over the net. She never had to run around her backhand or plot a route that avoided left-hand turns. It’s what she did. “I should say not,” she declares.

  “I thought,” the woman stammers. “I thought you looked a bit lost.”

  “Well, I’m not.” Then, with as much dignity as she can muster, Esther drops her keys into her purse and snaps it shut.

  Esther grabs a shopping cart and makes a beeline for the cereal aisle where she sets two cartons of Lucky Charms in her basket. But when she envisions Ceely bustling about her kitchen after the funeral, dumping the Lucky Charms into a garbage bag, she sets one back. Dr. Levenson, with his vacation plans, can stock up on cereal, she thinks, as she proceeds down the aisle.

  Briefly, she stops to inspect a display of roasted chickens that are warming under heat lamps. They remind her of the man on the radio who said, “Cooking is over.” When she heard him, she thought she’d mistakenly tuned in to one of those wild talk shows where conspiracy theories abound. But then the familiar velvety voice of her favorite radio host interrupted with some smart rejoinder before asking listeners to phone in. Esther considered calling in to describe Mrs. Singh’s curries and chapatis, and her sister-in-law Clara’s kugels. Cooking is over. What a theory! Now, looking at those chickens, lined up like premature babies asleep under grow lights, she acknowledges the man’s point.

  Esther and her mother used to walk to the poultry market on Kedzie Avenue. Esther pushed Ceely in the stroller while her mother warned her to slow down, watch the uneven sidewalks, go gently over the curbs, look both ways before crossing. “Next week, you can go alone,” threatened Esther, who couldn’t afford a kosher chicken and was there to escort her mother the eight blocks from home. Mrs. Glass, who grew flustered and agitated when English failed her, never left home alone.

  The poultry market reeked of singed feathers and warm blood. It rang with the shrieks of chickens stacked floor to ceiling in wooden cages. The birds clucked and cried and flapped their wings, raining feathers down on the sawdust-covered floor.

  Recently, Esther described the scene to Sophie, who was as religious in her devotion to fresh food as Esther’s parents had been to Jewish dietary law. Sophie only eats birds that have run free and been fed nothing but grub worms, nuts, and the seeds from native plants. She further restricts her diet to food grown within a fifty-mile radius.

  “Those were the days,” Esther said, when she told her granddaughter about their excursions down Kedzie Avenue. “Three generations. All together,” she sighed, glossing over Mrs. Glass’s annoying instructions. “It was nice,” she told Sophie, as she poured their tea. After slicing two pieces of apple cake, Esther paused, as though stopping to admire a painting that has caught her eye.

  Sophie urged her on. “What happened to the store, Nonna?”

  “Who knows?” Esther shrugged. “We moved. Like everybody in those days. We left the city. The Koreans moved in. Then the Indians. And now the young people, like you, flocking back to the place their parents and grandparents couldn’t wait to flee.”

  “And you, Nonna. You came back.”

  Esther smiled. “I suppose I did.” She paused. “But it isn’t the same.”

  Nothing’s the same, Esther thinks, as she passes the roasted chickens. Cooking is over.

  At the deli, she is cheered by the array of prepared salads, wedges of cheese, slabs of processed meats. Behind the counter, a baby-faced young man with pink cheeks is holding up a slice of Swiss cheese. “Like this?” he mouths to a woman who is talking on her mobile phone. She nods and keeps talking. “Then I go out on the porch and there’s all these potted plants,” she is saying. “It looks like a frigging greenhouse. There’s a note with my name on an envelope. In Brad’s writing.”

  The woman pauses long enough to consider a slice of ham the clerk is holding up. She shakes her head and indicates with her fingers the desired thickness, before returning to her call.

  Esther is torn between finding out what was in Brad’s note and telling the woman to pipe down, that everybody can hear her business. Her mother used to move through the house, shutting windows at the first sign of an argument. “The neighbors will hear,” she would hiss.

  But the clerk smiles cheerfully as he hands the ham to the woman. When she walks off, the phone still pressed to her ear, Esther has an urge to follow, tell her to get back and thank the young man. She feels a tap on her shoulder. “You’re next,” someone says.

  “Me?” Esther looks up at the smiling clerk and is seized by a sudden and overwhelming panic. Who is this young man with the baby face? Once she knew all the clerks, joked with them, called them by name. Tony used to run to the back for the best strawberries. The butcher saved the choicest cuts of meat for her. Then he retired, and Tony had a heart attack, collapsed right into a pyramid of Georgia peaches.

  I’m living among strangers, she thinks as she studies the clerk’s pink face. “Ma’am?” A look of concern clouds his features. “Are you all right?”

  Why does everyone keep asking that? She still can’t shake the encounter in the parking lot with that woman peering into the car. She feels tired. Well, who wouldn’t, when some total stranger comes up and asks if you’re all right, as if you were crossing a busy intersection with a white cane or standing in the middle of a sidewalk reading a map? The thought that she looked as helpless as a blind woman or a disoriented tourist fills her with shame. And now this clerk, who is no older than her grandson, is questioning her state of being.

  Esther manages a joke, tells the young man she’d been so engrossed in the woman’s phone call that she forgot what she wanted. “By the way,” Esther says. “She should have thanked you.”

  The young man leans across the deli case, and though he isn’t quite shouting, he articulates every word, the way Esther does when speaking to Milo. “Have you decided what you want?”

  If she were to tell him, would he believe her? She wants one more morning with Marty beside her in bed. She wants to wake up each morning with a sense of pur
pose. She wants her daughter to stop pushing brochures on her. She wants her son to straighten up and fly right. She wants to be something other than the object of concerned looks and condescension.

  The clerk is waiting for her to speak. She should say something. She feels in her coat pocket, as if she might discover a list, but all she finds is an old tissue. And a button. She still hasn’t sewn it back on. If she had remembered to do that, or if she’d dressed up a bit, perhaps she might not arouse such concern. Her mother wore a Persian lamb coat when she left home. She was a short woman who stood tall. She carried herself with dignity.

  “Ma’am?” The clerk is growing impatient.

  Esther points to the display case. “I’ll have some of that. The smoked salmon,” she says. “One slice, please.” Then she pauses. Should she explain that she can afford more, but since Marty died she has little reason to cook? In the evening, she scrambles an egg or spreads peanut butter or goat cheese on toast. “Okay. Two slices,” she says. “If you don’t mind.”

  “Why would I mind?” His face clouds with confusion. “You can have whatever you want.”

  Whatever she wants. When was the last time she did that? For years, she did what Marty wanted, or the children. Even today, when she could have visited the Art Institute, a park, or even Marshall Field’s, she came here as if she still had a household to feed, as if her destiny was to spend a lifetime pushing a cart up and down the aisles of a supermarket. She hates to think of all the hours she’s logged here. Walk away. Now. Go to the park. Look at some paintings. But the young man is waiting, more patiently than Marty ever did. “Stop,” she’d tell Marty, as they neared the store. “We’re out of milk. I’ll just be a minute.” He’d pull into the lot, leave the motor running as she hopped out of the car. By the time she returned, he was pounding the steering wheel, fuming and shouting. “What took you so long?”

  She looks up at the young clerk. His baby-pink face is open to her, waiting, as if he had all the time in the world. “Some of that, too,” she says, her bent finger pointing to the rice pudding.