Being Esther Page 7

  “Get going,” Esther says, nudging Ceely gently toward the group.

  “But we’ll miss the bus,” Ceely cries.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Again Esther taps her watch. “We have plenty of time.”

  “But you don’t even drink,” Ceely argues, holding up the bottle of scotch.

  “I like to have something on hand. You never know who will stop by. Maybe Mrs. Singh. Or that nice neighbor upstairs. Mr. Volz. Now do your old mother a favor,” Esther says, again pushing Ceely toward the departing group.

  Ceely is disappearing across the store when Esther cries, “Wait!”

  Ceely turns and stops, a look of concern crossing her face. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Esther says. She scurries as fast as she can to her daughter’s side and kisses her on the cheek, the way she had on Ceely’s very first day of school. Then she pats her arm and says, “Get going, or you’ll be late.”

  At dinner, over margaritas, the two women recount their day. Esther holds out her arm, admiring the watch, and Ceely agrees that it’s a good imitation. Then Esther says, “I almost forgot! The picture.” She pulls it out of her handbag and sets it on the table between them.

  “Look at me,” Ceely says. “I’m so stiff. Why can’t I ever take a good picture?” She pauses, searching her mother’s eyes for the truth. “Or maybe it’s my true visage?”

  “Nobody looks good on a donkey,” Esther insists. “Look at me. I’m not even facing the camera.”

  It’s true. Esther, who has always been a substantial presence, full-figured when women were admired for being zaftig, as Marty called her, appears shrunken in the photo, like a garment tossed in the wash on the wrong cycle. She’s looking away, off into the distance, as if something has caught her by surprise. Later, Ceely will study the picture, show it to Lorraine and wonder if she’d missed some early warning sign. “I don’t know what it is,” she will tell Lorraine.

  Perhaps, she will think, it’s the effect of the floppy-brimmed hat, or the fact that Esther had turned just as the shutter clicked, but her mother appears in shadow, as if she is not fully present, as if she has chosen to hop on that tired beast to begin her journey to the other side.

  Lately when Esther opens her eyes, she can’t remember if there is a reason to get out of bed. Sometimes, in the attenuated morning light, she mistakes the chest of drawers for Marty. She has seen her mother in the clothes she sets out on the rocker before bedtime. And then her eyes might wander to the crack in the ceiling, which in her dreamy, fugue state resembles a line snaking across a map. The Mississippi River, or the less commanding Chicago. When she discovered the crack, in the inconsolable days after Marty died, it had felt like a metaphor for her fractured life.

  She’s been meaning to tell Milo about it, see if it is something that he can fix. Then she forgets. Besides, the crack is useful, not unlike the grid on that chart Dr. Levenson gave her. His nurse taught Esther to stare at the dot in the grid’s center, first with one eye, then the other. “Call,” she said, “if the lines get wavy.”

  Some mornings, Esther recalls the old days when the radio jarred her awake. Marty kept it tuned to traffic updates; she listened for the weather, to know how to dress the children for school. The two of them would lie there taking in the headlines, before rushing headlong into the day. The news was as bad then as now. Vietnam. Protests. Race riots. Assassinations—one after the other. Once, rioters destroyed a three-mile stretch of Chicago’s West Side. Those were terrible times. These are bad times, too, maybe worse since it feels as if nobody cares. Certainly nobody protests, though there’s plenty of cause for that. At times, Esther imagines a collective shrug passing over the nation. A dull complacency has taken hold. Perhaps nations have life spans. Like birds. Dogs. People. “And ours is in the last throes,” she says, staring up at the ceiling. “Just like me.”

  The crack. She’s already decided that the day she can’t see it is the day she’ll call Ceely. “Come and get me,” she’ll say. “You can put me in that place now.” Today, though, even without her glasses, she can make out the wavering line. “It’s still here,” she whispers. “And so am I.”

  The fact of her existence, of waking and breathing and going through the motions of another day, of being Esther, does not so much surprise her as give her pause. Lately, though she is not a believer, she’s taken to murmuring a plea at bedtime to whatever merciful force might listen—Yahweh, Allah, God, Adonai. Let me die before I wake. Sometimes, she edits the prayer, attaching certain conditions to her entreaty. If tomorrow is the day I paint my eyebrows with lipstick, then please let me die.

  It’s the dementia that she fears the most. Recently, she broached the matter with Lenny, her son-in-law, the expert on aging. She’d tried sounding curious and bright, as if she might be preparing to write a dissertation on the topic; not doing research on her own behalf. “Is there a point,” she asked, “when you know you are about to cross over?” Then she told Lenny about Helen painting her eyebrows with lipstick. “One day she’s applying color to her lips, the next, boom!” She paused. “My question is, do you know?”

  “Know?” He raked a hand through his wiry hair and considered her through enormous Coke-bottle lenses, as if she were speaking a language he did not understand.

  She nodded. “Do you know when you’re about to do something like that, like putting lipstick on your forehead? There must be a, what do they call it, you know, a tipping point?”

  “The beginning of the end?” He gazed at her intently.

  “Yes,” she muttered, quickly looking down, afraid that he could read her mind, that he had surmised she was, after all, making inquiries on her own behalf.

  “Well, I don’t know, Esther. I think it’s more gradual than that. Incremental. But you know, dementia isn’t my area of expertise.”

  She should have known that was coming. Everybody’s a specialist. Even Dr. Levenson. Recently, when he finished checking her eyes, she mentioned that her feet appeared more swollen than usual. He shrugged and said he was sorry to hear that, but he didn’t know anything about feet. But you’re a doctor, she’d wanted to say. At some point, you studied the body, head to toe.

  And Lenny, the noted expert on aging, couldn’t tell her if she’ll wake up one morning as someone other than the woman who’d set her head on the pillow the night before. So Esther resorts to a higher power, to some force that might see to it that she exits this life without disgracing herself.

  She has spent a lifetime striking bargains with God. As a young woman, on the chance that some higher power might be listening, Esther, a hypochondriac prone to thinking that she had one fatal disease or another, would close her eyes and pray. Please let me live to Barry’s bar mitzvah. Then you can kill me. She sought numerous reprieves. Let me live until Ceely graduates from high school. Then she wanted to dance at her daughter’s wedding, hold her first grandchild, pass the Torah at her grandson’s bar mitzvah.

  Esther’s deathday became a moving target.

  Now Barry, the hotshot dentist with the fancy North Shore practice, is in financial trouble, and Ceely and Lenny are in couple’s therapy. All Esther ever wanted was to shepherd her children into self-sufficiency. She never wanted to live to see them fall apart. And she certainly doesn’t want to lose her marbles before taking her last breath.

  And so she’s begun to beseech a higher power. Yahweh, Allah, God, Adonai. Let me die before I wake. Or at least let me collapse on an Oriental carpet like Jimmy Pearlman.

  One minute, Helen’s husband was paying bills at his desk, the next he was keeled over on a silk prayer rug. There are worse ways to exit. She could die like Marty, with a young doctor waving his fingers in her face. Or she could take her last breath in that place where Ceely wants to put her.

  Suddenly, Esther hears Mr. Volz padding around upstairs, starting his day. On occasion she sees young men trailing after him up the stairs. She listens now for an extra set of footsteps, but today it is o
nly Timothy Volz. Odd, how familiar she’s become with his habits, yet how little she really knows about him. Like a husband. How well had she known Marty after fifty years, after all those mornings in bed listening to the radio?

  In a few minutes, water will whoosh through Mr. Volz’s pipes. In twenty, his door will close and he’ll make his way down the stairs past Esther’s apartment. Then she’ll hear the vestibule door bang shut, the slam of a taxi door, the crush of gravel on asphalt as his cab pulls away.

  “A regular Rockefeller,” her sister-in-law called him, after Esther reported that her neighbor rode taxis everywhere. Clara, who never learned to drive, was too nervous in taxis, always watching the meter, suspecting the driver of taking the longest route. If Harry couldn’t drive her, Clara took a bus. Lately, that loopy Fanny Pearlman, Helen’s daughter, had been carting Clara around to doctors’ appointments, the hairdresser, even all the way to Highland Park to visit her son and his uptight wife.

  The bedroom window vibrates as a garbage truck rumbles by. The day has begun; people have places to go, things to do. Even the autistic boy who lives across the courtyard next to Lorraine has started to practice. Esther can hear the music. Every morning he plays a haunting medley. It segues from something by Erik Satie, to “Eleanor Rigby,” and finally to the theme song from Cheers. Whenever he gets to that last part, a feeling, something like longing, comes over Esther, though she can’t say for what. Her life, she supposes. Not that she’d care to repeat it all, though she certainly isn’t greedy enough to cherry-pick only the good parts. She longs for just an ordinary morning with Marty at her side, listening to the news, the weather, the traffic updates, a morning when she doesn’t wake and wonder if today is the day when her body finally succumbs, overtakes her, the day when she falls and breaks a hip, has a stroke, or worse, loses her marbles before her heart stops beating.

  She reaches for her glasses on the nightstand but stays in bed, politely waiting for the music to end. The boy plays the medley three times without stopping. Every day, the same routine. Now he’s starting at the top. These kids get in a rut. Can’t help it. Esther is in a rut, too. Every day, the same. Look for the crack. Strike bargains with God. But then she’ll find herself listening to the footsteps, the rush of water, the taxi pulling away. And she’ll find herself waiting for the music.

  When the music ends, a brilliant chirping erupts from the living room, as if the bird, too, has been waiting politely to start its day.

  It is time to get up, go into the living room, lift the pillowcase off the cage, change the water, fill the seed dish, line the cage with yesterday’s newspaper. Then Esther will wait for Lorraine’s call and make up the rest of the day as she goes along.

  Esther is at the kitchen table, nursing a mug of tea and going through the newspaper while waiting for Lorraine to call. Always, she starts with the obituaries, then works her way through the rest of the bad news—war, famine, the endless terror of the human condition. She ends on a lighter note with Ann Landers and the funnies. On the really bad news days, she’ll turn to the sports, especially when the Cubs are playing. Then she can commiserate with Milo, an avid fan, over something other than the weather.

  She didn’t always start with the obituaries, and can even recall a time when she scanned them with a kind of detachment, as if the subject at hand did not apply to her. Not that she ever assumed she would be the one to get a free pass. Yet reading the notices as she once did, Marty seated across from her at the kitchen table, the sugar bowl and vitamins on a doily between them, her coffee mug set squarely on a blue quilted placemat, death was something remote, something that happened to other people.

  Then Marty died.

  Esther recalls the week after his funeral when she opened the morning paper and, in her grief, had mistaken it for that day’s edition. As was her habit, she turned first to the obituaries. Her trained eye scanned the names, barely reading them, for in a city as large as Chicago, Esther could go weeks without knowing any of the deceased. Most days her eye fixed only on the number beside the name, where upon a quick actuarial accounting she understood that she had, by almost any measure, already beaten the odds.

  But that morning after Marty’s funeral her eye tripped and stumbled on a bold block of type. Then came the shock of recognition. Lustig, Martin.

  L-u-s-t-i-g. M-a-r-t-i-n. She decoded the letters, stringing them together, like a child learning to read. Then her name jumped out and her mouth went dry. What was she doing there, her name nestled among the dead? It felt like a sneak preview, a coming attraction for the day when she would boldly appear, and the names of her children, grandchildren, the husband who had predeceased her, would traipse faintly behind. Perhaps someone would think to add a personal touch, though nobody had thought of doing that for Marty.

  The woman whose name appeared below Marty’s was remembered for the stuffed mushrooms and the laughter she brought to family gatherings. Her name was Lenore. Esther wondered about Lenore’s laugh. Esther’s friend Helen, a smoker, laughed until the phlegm rattled in her chest. Her mother had snorted when she laughed. Her son doesn’t know how to laugh. Whenever Esther says something funny, Barry smiles, and even then, only one side of his mouth turns up. Even his smile is crooked. She imagined Lenore’s laughter sounded like wind chimes in a gentle breeze.

  Sharing the page with Lenore and Marty was a man who had organized family reunions every July for twenty-three years. And there was a woman who’d worn fanciful hats. Esther’s hats were on hooks in the front hall closet, but were any of them fanciful? Had she ever organized a reunion? For a few years, when the children were younger, she sang in the temple choir. She couldn’t remember why she ever quit.

  Esther’s favorite was the woman who didn’t take “no” for an answer. When Esther was mad at Marty, she’d purse her lips and sometimes leave the room to cry into a stack of towels. Then she’d come round to whatever point of view he wished her to adopt. She’d never stood up to Lustig, Martin. Not that she hadn’t tried, but when Marty said, “No,” Esther eventually caved in.

  Ordinary. Perhaps that’s how they’d describe Esther, which was how Miss Smaller in 3G had been remembered in her obituary. Poor Miss Smaller. If a body didn’t decompose, give off a stench worse than rotten potatoes, how long until anyone would have missed her? Milo discovered her body. A heart attack. She was young for that. Midfifties. But a heart attack, all the same. For days, nobody claimed the body. Finally, a phone number on a slip of paper led to a niece, the one who posted the obituary. “Miss Smaller was an ordinary woman,” it said. There was mention of a brief marriage; a son, killed by a drunk driver. For eighteen years she’d managed the makeup counter at a pharmacy on Diversey. Milo told Esther that Miss Smaller rode the bus to work every day at the same time. Esther regretted never talking to the woman, but if they passed on the sidewalk, Miss Smaller always looked away.

  Esther hoped Miss Smaller flickered across the bus driver’s mind when he passed her stop. Perhaps her coworkers phoned, and perhaps somebody even suggested checking on her. But people get busy. It’s possible Miss Smaller had talked at work about moving to Arizona, Florida, someplace warm, and everyone assumed she’d finally gone ahead and done it. No need to give notice. Not for a job like that, standing behind a counter selling lipstick and cheap perfume. For days, her body lay undiscovered.

  At least Esther doesn’t have to worry about that. She and Lorraine have their system. The day she doesn’t answer, Lorraine will call for help. There will be no time for the foul stench of death to betray her. She will exit neatly, quietly. But what if Lorraine goes first? Had they ever considered the fate of the one who will be left behind? She slaps her forehead, laughing in disbelief.

  Even after Miss Smaller’s death, Esther and Lorraine hadn’t considered the flaw in their plan. Instead, Lorraine had asked Esther, “What would you say about me?”

  They were sitting in the courtyard, beside the statue of Saint Francis. “Say?” Esther looked quizzically
at her friend.

  “You know. After I’m gone.”

  Esther glared at her friend. “What kind of question is that?” She and Lorraine had known each other since high school. What was there to say? Since retiring, Lorraine had been studying Italian and serving meals to the homeless. She’d roped Esther into a writing class at the community center. She baked elaborate birthday cakes for her nieces, and hazelnut tortes for special occasions. “Well,” Esther hesitated. “I would say . . . I suppose I would say. I would say that you don’t share your recipes.”

  Lorraine’s face collapsed. “This isn’t the time for jokes.”

  Later, Esther phoned her friend and apologized. “The truth is, you do so much, Lorraine, that I didn’t know where to begin. But should anyone ask, I’d have to say, ‘She made the most spectacular hazelnut tortes.’”

  Now, waiting for her friend to call, Esther looks up from the obituaries and sees, as if for the first time, the vitamins, the sugar bowl, the ruffled edging on the blue quilted placemat. Such homely objects. Yet each has a sense of purpose. The longer she stares at them, the more they mock her with their specificity. They know what they’re about. They aren’t sitting around, conjuring the few taglines that might explain the meaning of their existence.

  Esther looks forward to Tuesdays, the day she and Lorraine go to the community center for “Brown Bag Journaling.”

  She supposes the class is scheduled at the noon hour to give busy people the opportunity to sandwich one more activity into their day. But the idea of eating and writing at the same time doesn’t appeal to her. Multitasking, they call it; Esther calls it rude. It used to be you’d pay to see someone eating fire while walking a tightrope. Now people walk or drive or stand in the checkout line at the Jewel while talking on the phone, checking e-mail, or plugging music into their ears. They text messages while shifting lanes on the Edens Expressway. The other day, Sophie kept checking her cell phone while she and Esther were having tea.