Being Esther Read online

  The truth is Esther manages to arrange her activities sequentially and still have time to spare. Yet the irony is how quickly time is running out.

  The class was Lorraine’s idea. At first, Esther resisted, declaring, “I’m not a writer.”

  “You’ll learn,” Lorraine countered.

  Dubiously, Esther shook her head. She’s never kept a diary. She’s never even been surveyed to state her choice in a presidential race (unconditional Democrat), or to say whether or not she favors riverboat gambling (she does not), or whether she believes in global warming (as if that were a matter of faith). Until five years ago, Esther had been Marty’s wife. Now she is a widow.

  “I’m too old to learn,” Esther said.

  “It’s therapeutic,” Lorraine insisted.

  “Says who?” Esther asked with annoyance. “Dr. Phil?”

  Since Lorraine retired as a legal secretary she’s become an aficionado of daytime TV. Oprah. Judge Judy. She quotes them all. After Marty died, she gave Esther a notebook. “It’s to write down your feelings,” she said.

  Though Esther isn’t convinced of the remedial powers of writing, she agreed to the journaling class when Lorraine said, “If you don’t get out more, that daughter of yours is going to put you in assisted living. You’ll be playing bingo instead of writing stories.”

  Now Esther finds herself seated in a classroom that was last decorated by a teacher who’d taken Black History Month to heart. Fraying pictures of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks are taped to the cinder-block wall. A faded copy of the “Dream” speech is tacked to a crumbling bulletin board. The students are gathered around a large round table, with the teacher, a young thing Esther mistook for another student on the first day, democratically positioned in their midst. She is instructing them to close their eyes. “You’re six years old,” she says, her voice soft, hypnotic. “You’re in your mother’s kitchen. What do you see?” She wants details. Smells. Colors. Sounds. Every little knickknack.

  When Esther closes her eyes all she can see is the tattoo on the teacher’s wrist, the severe eyeglasses that mask a pretty face. She must be Sophie’s age, twenty-five, maybe twenty-eight. I dare you to try this when you’re eighty-five, Esther wants to say. Try conjuring a kitchen you haven’t thought about in decades.

  Then out of nowhere, a faded yellow linoleum floor appears, along with a round oak table and four mismatched chairs. Her mother is on hands and knees scrubbing the floor. The room smells of coffee and Spic and Span. Then Esther sees a pink cut-glass bowl filled with fruit. Her father is sitting at the kitchen table after dinner sipping hot tea from a tall glass and peeling the skin off an apple with a pearl-handled knife. The peel falls away in one long, continuous swirl.

  After class, Esther and Lorraine head to Wing Yee’s and settle into their favorite booth, the one that flanks the window but still affords a clear view of the fish tank at the far end of the room. After the waitress sets down two cups and a pot of tea, Lorraine glances around the room then back at Esther and says, “Why are we here?”

  “What are you talking about?” Esther’s voice wavers between irritation and concern. “We come here every week.”

  “I know, I know. But maybe we should have brought our lunch, like the others.” She asks if Esther noticed that the woman in the pink sweatshirt brought an apple, a sandwich, three Fig Newtons, and a bottle of water. “Even the anorexic next to me brought something,” Lorraine says.

  Esther, who had taken stock of all the lunches, shakes her head and asks Lorraine which she’d prefer, “Carrot sticks and a carton of yogurt, or chicken chow mein with fried rice?”

  “But people will think we’re standoffish,” Lorraine says.

  “Let them.” Esther shoots her friend a baleful look. “We’re both eighty-five years old. We can do as we please.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Lorraine sighs, as she slips her chopsticks out of their paper wrapper. “Still.”

  “Still, nothing. Now tell me what you wrote.”

  “Not much,” Lorraine confesses. “I could see my mother peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink. She was wearing a full apron over a housedress. There was a yellow clock above the stove that had stopped telling time at 7:25. My mother never fixed it. I don’t know why. It never even occurred to me that she could fix it. Or get a new one. Funny, what comes back. Seven twenty-five. After all these years.”

  The waitress brings their order and Lorraine fills their cups with jasmine tea. “How about you?”

  Esther describes the smell of detergent, the sight of her father peeling an apple. “That all came back. But honestly, Lorraine.” She pauses, not sure how to express an uneasy feeling that’s taken hold of her. “Honestly, I think it’s easier to predict the future than to remember the past.”

  Lorraine arches a perfectly plucked eyebrow, waiting for Esther to explain. This would be how she looked taking dictation, steno pad propped in her lap, pencil poised, waiting on Mr. Stein’s every word. Like now, her lipstick would have been perfect; every silver-blond hair would have known its place.

  “The problem,” Esther continues, “is that my future is too predictable.” She asks if Lorraine remembers the ads that promised no surprises at Holiday Inn. “Somehow, knowing exactly what to expect, before you arrived, was supposed to be comforting. What I’m trying to say is that I’d delight in a bit of surprise. Today, for example, I knew before we sat down that you would order the chicken chow mein with fried rice, and I would order the vegetable egg foo young, and that we would exclaim, when our plates arrived, that next time we’ll branch out and try something new.” She runs a fork through her food, as if it might present itself as something different. Then she sets her fork down and sinks back into the booth. “Even before we arrived, I could see us sitting here by the window, with you facing the fish tank because it was your turn for that, and we’d be bickering all the way to the arrival of the fortune cookies.”

  Lorraine grips a piece of chicken between the pincers of her chopsticks (which she can manage, unlike Esther, whose hands are too hobbled by arthritis). Slowly, she brings it to her mouth and chews. At last, she looks over at Esther and says, “When was the last time you stayed at a Holiday Inn?”

  Esther laughs, then, realizing that Lorraine isn’t joking, glares at her friend and asks, “How’s the chow mein?”

  Finally, Esther allows that she saw her mother on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor. And from there she’d conjured a kitchen in the Indiana Dunes. “The rich families drove to Wisconsin, to Lake Geneva, to the fancy resorts. But we spent two weeks every summer at Mrs. Zaretsky’s rooming house in the Dunes. Four or five families crowded into her home, one family to a room. The men stayed in the city during the week, leaving the women and children to enjoy the fresh air and the beach. I loved the commotion, the sound of the screen door slamming, the cries of the children playing tag. And then Mrs. Zaretsky would come tearing out and yell at us to pipe down and stay away from her flowers. At any time of day, you could find a couple of women in the kitchen. Someone was always complaining that somebody, she’s not naming names because that somebody knows who she is, took two eggs from her shelf in the refrigerator.” Esther pauses and stares out the window, as if those summer days were parading past the plate glass window.

  “Go on,” Lorraine urges.

  “Where was I?”

  “Someone had taken the eggs.”

  “Right! The eggs. But by the end of the day, when the cooking was done and the children had been fed, the women sat around the table gossiping, as if they hadn’t spent the afternoon trading insults and accusations. I loved crouching in a corner, listening to their stories. Sooner or later, though, someone would point a finger and say, ‘How long has she been there?’”

  Esther closes her eyes and smiles. When she opens them, she says, “They called those summer places kachaleyns. It means ‘cook alone.’ Funny, because nobody was ever alone in that kitchen.” She shrugs. “I suppose the
name was meant to be ironic.”

  The next day, while waiting for Lorraine’s call, Esther takes out her journal and reads the entry in which her mother is washing the floor. “You and your floors,” she says, smiling, as if her mother were sitting right beside her. If only she could have smiled when her mother was alive. Oh, how they fought. Was there anything that didn’t trigger a quarrel? Even her mother’s obsession with floors became grist for Esther’s anger.

  Esther can still hear the pride in her mother’s voice as she pronounced, about one woman or another, “Her floors are so clean, you can eat off them.” This bestowing of praise for cleanliness, as if it were really a virtue, drove Esther, whose housekeeping standards were rather lax, berserk. Once, after Esther’s mother had sung a song of praise for her daughter-in-law Clara’s floors, Esther set Barry in the middle of her mother’s kitchen with a can of PLAY-DOH and told the toddler, “Make Nonna a cake.” When Mrs. Glass protested that she’d just washed the floor, Esther reached into her bag and handed the toddler another can of clay. At this, Mrs. Glass collapsed onto the nearest chair, opened the top three buttons of her housedress, fanned herself with her hand and waited for her dizzy spell to pass.

  Now Esther makes a fresh entry in her journal. “I’m sorry,” she writes, then studies the words. Is this what the teacher had in mind when she instructed the class to write something every day? “Even one line,” she’d said, explaining how one sentence often leads to another. Esther ponders the entry, wondering whether two words constitute a sentence. And suddenly she is writing more, her thoughts tumbling faster than she can transfer them onto the page. You were right, Ma. About so many things. Not about the floors. You and I will never agree on that, though you’ll be pleased to know that my standards, though nothing like Clara’s, have improved. Yet I think I understand. When you got down on your hands and knees and ran that sudsy rag across the linoleum, you were in command. You ruled from that homely room with the noisy refrigerator and the dripping faucet. You were safe there in a way you never were in the world outside the home. When you stepped outside you might get lost, and when you spoke, the only words you uttered in frustration might be in Yiddish. Then who would understand you, help you find your way back home? Even after you’d been here for more years than you’d lived there, in that place you had to flee, you felt safer in your kitchen, scrubbing the floor until it sparkled. You were safe, and by extension, so were we. This was your way of making us feel protected.

  Esther sets down her pen and wonders if Ceely will ever sit like this and wish things had been otherwise. Perhaps she should warn her daughter. “Let’s talk. Now. Before it’s too late.” But Ceely is too busy, even for a cup of coffee.

  Esther runs her hand over the page, over the image of her mother on hands and knees, vigorously shaping her world. Then she picks up her pen and absentmindedly starts listing all of the other kitchens she’s inhabited, stopping when she reaches the room in the house where she and Marty had started their days over ever so many cups of coffee.

  On one such morning Esther recalls setting a plate of rye toast beside Marty’s orange juice before trying to tell him about a dream. Though most of her dreams got away quicker than those thousand-legged bugs that scurry down the bathtub drain before she could catch them, she couldn’t shake this one.

  Marty, who had been reading the morning paper, looked up and regarded her as if he might be considering the implications of her dream. Esther, meanwhile, bustled about the kitchen, waiting for her husband’s reply. She waited while he ate a slice of toast, wiped his mouth, and carefully set the napkin back on his lap. She waited while he buttered a second toast triangle. As he reached for the jam, she could no longer contain herself. “It was the strangest dream,” she confessed.

  He set down the knife, picked up his cup, took a sip of coffee, and nodded, as if pondering his reply. With great deliberation, he returned the cup to its saucer. Finally, he said, “Do I look like Dr. Freud?”

  Marty looked nothing like the distinguished headshrinker. Dr. Freud was a regular mensch, with that lean, intelligent face and neatly cropped beard. Marty’s face was round as the beets Esther boiled for borscht, and when he was angry, it turned just as red.

  At last, satisfied that he needed nothing else, Esther sat down. She considered the toast, which had turned stone cold. She straightened her place mat. She picked up her juice glass and set it down again, as she struggled to speak to her husband, who was skimming the sports page. When she could no longer hold her tongue, she said, “What’s the matter with you, Marty? Why are you always so angry?”

  He turned the page and without looking up, muttered, “What do you want from me, Esther?”

  “Nothing,” she sighed, as she plucked a slice of cold toast from the basket.

  But it wasn’t nothing. In her dream, Ceely was a child again, sitting at the kitchen table cutting hearts out of red paper and doilies while Esther put the finishing touches on dinner. Glitter, which Ceely sprinkled on the valentines, the way Esther dusted sugar on the tops of poppyseed cookies, had caught like fairy dust in the dimples of her rosy cheeks and in the folds of her thick, auburn braids. Ceely was wearing a yellow cardigan with a starched white Peter Pan collar peeking out at the neckline. Esther, overcome by this angelic vision, wiped her hands on her apron, floated across the table and wrapped her arms around the child. She pressed her face into Ceely’s braids, which smelled of Breck shampoo and Elmer’s glue. She nuzzled deeper, inhaling huge gulps of the child’s sweetness. Suddenly, she was sailing through the air and when she landed, her head hit the stove. Esther opened her eyes and saw Ceely standing over her, all in black, from the tips of her dyed hair to the toes of her steel-tipped boots. “I told you to stay away!” Ceely shrieked. Then she stormed out of the kitchen, leaving a trail of scuff marks on the freshly waxed floor. A few minutes later she returned, her arms piled with garments that Esther had sewn over the years: party dresses with smocking across the bodice; plaid schoolgirl jumpers; pleated skirts; seersucker rompers. She dropped the pile at Esther’s feet, then stomped on it and hissed, “Return to sender.”

  “But I thought you liked them!” Esther cried.

  Esther didn’t need Marty, sitting there with the newspaper, or Dr. Freud, to tell her that the clothes in her dream represented the many letters that Ceely had been returning unopened. Esther would never forget the first one—a red envelope stuck between the junk and the bills—and her excitement at being the recipient of such an intriguing piece of mail. Then she saw that the letter was addressed to Ceely, and next to the address, scrawled in Ceely’s loopy script: Return to Sender. Thinking there must be some mistake, Esther stuck the valentine into a fresh envelope, along with a ten-dollar bill and a note to buy something special.

  When that envelope came back, too, Esther marched to the phone and in the middle of the day dialed long distance, as if she were the president of AT&T. A cheerful voice on the other end announced that Ceely wasn’t in. “But I’ll tell her you called.” It was always a different cheery voice. Ceely is at work. Ceely went to a movie. Ceely just ran out for a carton of milk. They all promised to inform Ceely that Esther had called.

  In the beginning, Marty refused to get involved. “Leave her alone. She’s busy.”

  But Esther stood her ground. “Too busy to return a call? Too busy to talk for five minutes? I even told the girl . . . listen to me, I don’t even know the girl’s name. We don’t know who Ceely is living with. I told the girl, ‘Have Ceely call collect.’” Esther paused to catch her breath, then pleading, said, “What’s the matter with you, Marty? She’s eighteen years old. She can pick up a phone.”

  Six months later, Ceely wrote and told them to stop trying to make contact. There was no return address on the envelope, only a faded postmark from Vermont.

  It was Marty’s idea to search for Ceely.

  Esther, who had been chopping onions for a mushroom barley soup when he announced his plan, put down the knife and turned to
face her husband. “Vermont’s a big place,” she said.

  “We’ll hire someone. He’ll find out what’s what.”

  “Who, Marty? Who are we going to hire?”

  “A detective.”

  “This isn’t like the movies,” she said, turning back to her work.

  A few minutes later Marty plunked a phone book on the kitchen table. “Take a look,” he said.

  Esther wiped her hands on her apron as she shuffled to the table. “What is it, Marty?” she sighed. “I don’t have time for games.”

  “Look,” he said, jabbing a yellow page with his stubby finger. “It says here, ‘Private Investigators.’ There’s an entire page of them. See for yourself. We’re not alone, Esther. There must be lots of people like us. People looking for somebody.”

  Silently, she returned to the chopping board. As she set to work on a carrot, which, through her tears, resembled her husband’s thick finger, she wondered what kind of heartbreak all those other homebodies might have caused.

  Three weeks later, Esther and Marty were seated on hard wooden chairs, staring across a cluttered desk at Jack Kolner, the detective they’d picked from the Yellow Pages because Esther liked the sound of his name.

  When Jack reported that he’d found Ceely and she’d threatened him with a knife, Marty’s face turned so red that Esther thought her husband was having a stroke. She reached over and stroked his hand, but Marty, ignoring her touch, leaped from his chair and shook his fists at the ceiling. Then Jack was on his feet waving him back down and speaking in reassuring tones. “That sort of thing happens in this line of work,” he said. But Jack didn’t strike Esther as the sort who was accustomed to having knives pulled on him. He wasn’t much younger than Marty; a little old to be running around spying on people.

  After Marty calmed down, Jack tried to assure them. “It was one of those Swiss Army knives. And it wasn’t open.” He paused. “I suppose I should have been clearer about that.” Then he informed them that Ceely was living on a commune outside of Burlington.