French Braid(61)

At a certain point Candle’s eyes drooped shut—she’d been up since crack of dawn—and when she woke they were traveling through New Jersey, where the stations stood close to the tracks and the passengers waited in clusters, sometimes whole families of them. Shortly afterward people in their car began stirring, assembling their belongings, rising to lift bags down from the luggage racks. The train entered a tunnel and the car grew dim. Candle’s heart was beating faster but her grandmother went on reading, even in the poor lighting.

“Penn Station!” the conductor announced, which was odd when you thought about it because Penn Station was where they had left from. But this one was totally different; there was no comparison. When Candle and Mercy arrived at the top of the escalator—Mercy having closed her book at the very last minute and risen unhurriedly from her seat—they entered an impossibly large, looming space that made Candle feel tiny, with a blur of people shoving past and uniformed men pushing luggage carts. “This way,” Mercy said, and she led Candle through the crowd and up another escalator, out onto a street that smelled like warm scrub water, and from there into a taxicab, only then bothering to slip her book back into her purse. “So,” she said, after telling the driver their destination. (Which was not a street address but the name of a restaurant, as if naturally he would recognize it, which, in fact, he seemed to.) “So, what do you think of New York?”

“Well…it’s tall, okay,” Candle said, peering out her side window. “But not any taller than parts of Baltimore. I was thinking I would maybe, like, have to look up and up and up till I accidentally fell over backwards, you know?”

“Oh, that could still happen,” her grandmother said, and then she smiled and gazed out her own window. There seemed to be a great many food carts on the sidewalks, Candle noticed. And a great many people stopping to buy hot dogs, but none were Nathan’s hot dogs.

In front of the restaurant—small, with an awning—Mercy handed the driver some bills and said, “No change required,” as if she did this every day of her life, and then she opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk and Candle followed.

Mercy’s friend was already waiting, seated at a small table. She was a bony, vivid woman—long straight black hair contrasting oddly with her old-looking face; slash of dark-red lipstick; glaringly bright geometric-print tunic hanging off her sharp shoulders. “Merce!” she cried, half standing, and she kissed Mercy on both cheeks and then sat back down.

“And this is my granddaughter Kendall,” Mercy said.

Candle smiled, tongue-tied, and slid into the chair to Magda’s left. “How nice to meet you, Kendall,” Magda said. “Your grandma tells me you’re a painter yourself; is that right?”

“Well, kind of,” Candle said. She looked around at the other diners—all seated at white-draped tables, all super–New Yorkish and glamorous. Mercy was wearing her cardigan now, and it was pretty obvious that she was only from Baltimore.

The two women ordered after barely glancing at their menus—an Asian salad for Magda, the roasted scallops for Mercy, with a glass of iced tea for each—but Candle had trouble making up her mind. Partly she wanted something new and exciting, but she hoped it wouldn’t be too exciting. She settled finally on a shrimp salad sandwich and a Diet Coke, and as the waiter wrote it down he said, “Excellent,” which she found reassuring.

Magda, meanwhile, was telling Mercy about her opening, which a lot of people had attended, including someone named Bruce whom they both apparently knew from long ago. “Naturally he bought one of your paintings,” Mercy said, in a tone that suggested that naturally he had not; and Magda said, “Wouldn’t that be the day, and of course he had to criticize the refreshments they were serving.”

“He didn’t!”

“?‘My dear young woman,’ he said to the waitress, ‘please don’t tell me there is no red wine on offer.’?”

“Oh, I just love it when people behave in character,” Mercy said.

“Me too, especially when it’s in bad character. And do you know what I really love?”

“What’s that?”

“I love it that for once it’s not me behaving badly.”

Then they both dissolved in giggles, putting their heads together like schoolgirls, while Candle watched, smiling shyly.

By the time their food arrived, the talk had moved on to Mercy’s own paintings. Was she still doing her house portraits? Was there much of a market for them? “Oh, no,” Mercy said dismissively. “Just, you know, a few commissions here and there, most of them fairly humdrum, although every now and then I’ll come across something intriguing, some place with real personality.”

To Candle, this sounded both modest and a little bit boastful, because it wasn’t really a few here and there; it was more like one or two, with months and months in between when Mercy’s paintings were only for herself. But she was glad her grandmom was putting on a good show. She didn’t want Magda to feel sorry for her.

Candle’s sandwich had potato chips alongside, but high-class ones, cut thicker than usual, with rims of brown peel left on. They could have used a little more salt, though. And there were weird dots of pickly things mixed in with the shrimp salad. But Mercy said her scallops were delicious. “I never order scallops back home,” she said. “They’re so often overcooked. Really you have to come to New York if you don’t want leathery scallops.” Then she gave Magda a playful nudge and said, “Robin claims the reason he hates to travel is, the food never tastes the same as it does in Baltimore. You just never can be sure what you might be getting, he says.”