Alternate Side(19)
“I need to be cleansed in the waters, Mommy,” Rachel had said. “In the River Jordan.”
When Nora confronted Charity about this, she seemed not the least contrite. “Children be needing the Lord in their lives,” Charity said.
“I know you believe that,” Nora said. “But Charlie and I have different ideas about religion.”
“Some things are just believing,” Charity had said, lifting her chin. “Some things just the truth.”
“Guess that shut you right up,” Christine had said on the phone.
Charity was the source of most intelligence about the block, which she got from the other housekeepers and nannies. As they walked the dogs and swept the sidewalks, they gossiped about movie stars, popular singers, and the people they worked for. Three months before the Levinsons put their house on the market—two months before Dori Levinson had given her husband’s clothes, tennis rackets, and chess set to a charity shop and had the locks changed while he was at work—Charity had said, “Mr. and Mrs. Levinson, no good.” Nora had been able to call Alma Fenstermacher and bring over a tin of cookies in a timely fashion because Charity said, “Mr. Fenstermacher, no more bladder.” It was Edward Fenstermacher’s gallbladder, of course, not his bladder, but Nora had still been glad of the intelligence. It was important not to cross Charity unnecessarily. Early on Nora had said jocularly, having heard an exchange on the playground between two nannies, “Do all Caribbean women yell at each other all the time?”
“What?” Charity had shouted, and Nora just shut up.
She had had to clear Ricky with Charity before he started working in the house. “Puerto Rico,” Charity had said, adding a sound like air going out of a tire under pressure. It had taken two years of his meticulous service for her to acknowledge that Ricky was not lazy and to stop checking Nora’s jewelry box for theft after he left, although how he could possibly steal anything when Charity hung over his shoulder like a shawl Nora could not imagine. Charity eventually acknowledged that he was hardworking and trustworthy, but said this was because he was actually from South America, which was not true, although he was not Puerto Rican, either. She had also let Nora know when Ricky and his wife had had first one child, then another. Nora had passed clothes and sports equipment that had once belonged to the twins along to Ricky’s boys, who were now eight and ten and whose photographs, posed in front of a spectacularly phony mountain backdrop, were taped to the dash of the van.
There was a shadow government on the block, a shadow government that knew where all the bodies were buried, a system of mutual dependence, one group needing services, the other employment. Nora was never certain where the balance of power fell. Charity knew when Nora bought new underpants, when Rachel was menstruating. She changed the sheets, so she knew when Nora and Charlie had had sex, which was not so often now. She picked up their prescriptions. She knew their secrets.
Nora would never forget the two of them sitting side by side on the couch in the den of their old apartment staring at the television screen the September morning of the terrorist attacks downtown, the sound the two of them made together as the first of the World Trade Center towers distintegrated in slow motion. That day was the first time she had ever seen Charity sit down while at work. It was the first time Charity had stayed overnight when Nora and Charlie were there as well. At dawn Nora had found her in the kitchen, listening to the radio, making sandwiches for the firefighters at the fire station nearby, Charity wiping the tears from her face with the back of the hand that held the bread knife. Wordlessly Nora had joined her.
The only other time Nora had seen Charity weep was at the twins’ high school graduation. She had worn a pink hat with silk flowers and a pink suit. Oliver had gone out and gotten Charity an orchid corsage. Nora would bet anything that that corsage was pressed somewhere, perhaps in the pages of Charity’s Bible.
When Nora passed Ricky Monday morning she called, “Good morning, Enrique,” in as cheery a voice as possible, given the atmosphere around the parking lot.
“You need me, Mrs. Nolan?” Ricky said.
“Charity says the dryer isn’t working properly.”
“That vent,” Ricky said, shaking his head. “I’ll take care of it. We don’t want to get on Charity’s bad side.”
“No, we do not,” Nora said.
Linda Lessman was waiting for a cab on the corner to go to work at the criminal courts building. Her fair hair was always damp in the mornings since, having been the captain of her college swimming team, with the square shoulders and narrow hips to prove it, she tried to do laps each day before work. Nora had been a little afraid of her when the Nolans first arrived on the block—of Linda’s blunt, declarative sentences and direct gaze—but over time she had come to like her.
Legend had it that residents of the block had once caught up with one another in the supermarket and the drugstore, but the supermarket had been replaced by a twenty-story condo building, the drugstore by a bank branch, and everything was delivered now: the groceries, the dry cleaning, the takeout. When the twins were home they had breakfast delivered, coffee in go-cups and pancakes in foam containers. At 2 A.M. they would often order tikka masala and cheese fries, sushi and baklava.
“You ladies seen Ricky?” George called from halfway down the block. Linda and Nora both stared at him as he approached. He was wearing what appeared to be a baby carrier, the kind of front pack in which Nora and Charlie had once carried the twins, switching their respective burdens back and forth because carrying Oliver was like carrying a sack of flour and carrying Rachel like carrying a bag of ferrets.