Alternate Side(73)
The bell rang again. A man with black hair, brown skin, and khaki clothes stood at the door. Two other men, similar enough that no one on the block would ever be able to tell them all apart, stood behind him. All three were wearing backpacks. “Hello, missus?” the man who was obviously in charge said, uptalking like a private-school girl in eighth grade. “My name is Joe? I do home repairs. My men will clean the sidewalks and shovel snow. Good prices for you.”
“What’s your real name, Joe?”
“Joe.” He smiled, nodded. Nora noticed that he had no index finger on one hand, and as he saw her noticing, he curled his fingers into fists. “I work for Mr. George across the street? Also Mrs. Wooden?” Nora hadn’t met the Woodens yet, and supposed now she never would. They had just acquired a house near the corner. As far as Nora could tell, they had no dogs.
“Do you have a card, Joe?” Nora said. “This isn’t really my house but I’ll pass it along.”
That afternoon she had given the card to the couple at the closing. They’d paid five times what she and Charlie had. “You’ll need a handyman,” Nora said, as she signed paper after paper, first with her own name, then with Charlie’s because he had not wanted to be there and had given her power of attorney. Nora didn’t need a handyman, not anymore. She had a super instead. She lived now on the fifteenth floor of a new building, a white box with partial views of the river, along with an endless vista of wooden water towers and tarred roofs, that all-you-can-eat buffet of Manhattan aloft. Nora loved the light and the air. She loved not being known. She loved that there was no wainscoting, no molding, no charm, no history. She liked the nothingness of it, the blank slate. Wasn’t this what living in New York was supposed to be like, the skyline, the anonymity, coexistence without intimacy?
“How did you sleep?” Nora asked when Rachel came to town and stayed in the guest room.
“Good,” her daughter said. “It’s like staying in a really nice hotel.”
“Ouch,” Nora said, making coffee in the tiny kitchen, which was just the right size for what she needed a kitchen for now.
Rachel stood next to her, hip to hip. The night before they had watched trash TV with their legs entwined on the couch. Now Nora leaned into her daughter, feeling small and sad. “I like nice hotels,” Rachel said. She opened the refrigerator. “No plain yogurt?” she said as she took a banana from the bowl.
“First-world problem,” Nora said.
“Mommy, I love you, but no one says that anymore,” Rachel said. She hoisted herself until she was sitting on the counter, her legs dangling, the way she’d liked to do when she was in middle school. “So how are you, really?” Rachel said. “And that’s not a rhetorical question.”
“I take a lot of pleasure in having children who know what a rhetorical question is,” Nora said, carrying coffee mugs to the dining table as her daughter followed. The table was new. The cups had been around for a long time. Charlie hadn’t wanted much of the kitchen stuff. He actually hadn’t wanted much at all.
She sat down and looked at Rachel and worked to keep her voice flat. “It depends on the day,” Nora said. “Sometimes I’m sad and sometimes I’m okay and sometimes I’m even a little happy and sometimes I think we made the wrong decision but mostly I think we made the right one. I spend a lot of time worrying about you and your brother.”
“And we both spend a lot of time worrying about you.”
“And how are you? Also not a rhetorical question.”
“Nice deflection, though,” Rachel said, hugging her mug, biting her lower lip, shifting in her chair the way she did, all those little mannerisms that Nora knew so well. “I’m all right, in spite of everything. A year ago, not so much. I started feeling as though in my whole life I’d never really made a decision. Everything in my life just sort of happened. The guys I wound up with, my friends, they were just there. Like, even college, it was sort of, Okay, I’ve been here for reunions, it’s beautiful, it’s a great school, that’s fine. But making the decision to leave New York, to do something so different from what anyone else I knew was doing—it just felt so good, to decide something all by myself. I know you think what I do is kind of lame and random—”
“I do not!”
“But I made a big decision and now I make small decisions every single day, and they may only be decisions about whether a onesie should have snaps or a zipper but I’m the one making them.”
“I can say from experience that whether a onesie has snaps or a zipper is an important decision. I vote zipper, babe.”
“So did I,” Rachel said, and looked at her watch. “Oh, no, I’m going to be late for the Cotton Council meeting! And no judgment, please.”
“You’re talking to a woman who once sucked up to the Gemological Institute of America. No judgment.”
At the door, as she was leaving in her grown-up suit, Rachel hugged her hard and said, “I’m glad you’re here. It might be even harder if you were at the house without Daddy, or he was there without you. This is nice. It’s a nice place.”
“It’s a nice place,” Jenny had said, too, following the long hallway to the bedrooms, opening the glass-fronted kitchen cabinets, looking down on the buildings below. “Did Rachel approve?”