150 Pounds (26 page)

“What did I tell you about cussing in this house?” Greta asked. “That’ll be one dollar.” She held out her hand. Shoshana noticed how pink her palms were. Perhaps from her years of labor in this house, the meals she’d cooked, the clothes she’d washed, and the apples she’d picked. Shoshana didn’t think there’d been children. She wondered at the big house with no children in it, the loneliness of that. Joe, grumbling, reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled dollar bill.

“Thank you. This goes right to the needy children’s fund for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.”

“I told you, woman, I’ll donate a million dollars ta them. You just name yer price!”

She made a
tsk
sound between her teeth. “It’s much more fun to torture you.”

He turned to Shoshana. “Do you see this abuse I put up with? One of these days she is going to poison my soup.”

Shoshana giggled. “Seems to me she takes really good care of you.”

“Like a pet,” he said. “A dog she kicks.” He had an impish way of talking out of the corner of his mouth, and his accent was so thick she had to strain her ears to decipher his language.

“A dog, I wish! A dog would be much easier to look after than you. A dog doesn’t fall asleep in his armchair fully dressed with a lit pipe in his mouth.”

“Hmph,” Joe grumbled.

Shoshana realized Joe was getting somewhat cranky, and changed the subject. “So Mimi and you and your wife would harvest the apples?” she asked. “As a business?”

Joe smiled at her. “It was mainly your aunt Mimi, when she wasn’t on a set, and Georgina. And Greta here, too. The Three Amigas, I’d call them. Unfortunately, I was always traveling ta the Middle East fer work. I thought I had to work in oil, be a big success. But looking back on all those years spent on airplanes and in boardrooms and carrying my briefcase … the happiest times were when I was right ’ere, picking apples with Georgina. I miss that woman so damn much.”

A look of despair crossed his face, but it was gone almost instantly.

“One dollar, sir,” Greta said, stretching out her hand again. Her smile was feisty. Shoshana realized she was trying to cheer him up.

“Oh, here, wretched woman. Take it. And don’t dare hide my flask from me anymore.” He dug around his pockets until he found a crumpled dollar bill and grumpily set it down on Greta’s palm.

On the walk to the kitchen, they passed gold-edged mirrors that took up entire walls. She recognized a Lichtenstein, having taken Art History 101 at Princeton as a freshman. Was it real? She supposed it must be. Other smaller paintings were of rugged hillsides, bales of hay, and apple trees by the hundreds. They were all signed
BW
in a crooked script in the corners.

BW, BW. Bob Weiner?

“Did my father paint these?” she asked breathlessly, turning to Joe and Greta.

“Yes, dear, of course,” Greta said. “He was very talented. Mimi had a local artist come and give him lessons when he was a boy.”

“But he was a gardener,” she said, feeling immediately foolish. “I never knew he painted.” Tears filled her eyes unexpectedly.

“Oh, honey,” Greta said, putting a soft arm around her. “Everyone has dreams when they’re young. I’m sure providing a steady income for your family, supporting two beautiful girls, well, that was just more important to him.”

Shoshana ran her finger over the bumps her father’s brush had made. “He had some canvases and brushes up in the attic. I asked him about them once and he just said he tried painting but wasn’t any good at it. But that’s not true.” She waved her arm around, gesturing to the paintings. “He was talented.” A tear spilled onto her cheek and she brushed it away, willing the emotions of the day to stop washing over her.

“Can I bring Emily here to show her?” she asked, turning toward Joe. Greta squeezed her shoulder.

“Of course,” Joe said. “Better yet…” He strode over to her and began lifting the canvases off the wall. “’Ere.”

“Oh, no, that’s not—”

“Don’t be silly,” Greta said. “He owns half the art they have on display at the MoMA and hundreds more in a warehouse in Chelsea. He can afford it.”

“They all belong to you anyway, you should inherit ’em,” Joe said gruffly.

“Oh, you just don’t like to see a woman cry, you big sap,” Greta said, jabbing him in the ribs with her elbow.

“Clam it, old broad. Now, where the hell’s dinner?”

“Joe Murphy, that’ll be another dollar. Anyway, you’re older than me by ten years. I’ll be burying you with these two hands under the tree out back, so you’d better be nice to me.”

Did everyone who died around here get buried in the backyard?

Shoshana counted three more living rooms with fireplaces by the time they entered the bright white kitchen that Shoshana remembered. A farmer’s sink was stained a dark copper, and the ceiling was tin. Pots and pans hung from hooks, and the last sip of the day’s light poured in from two large spotlessly clean windows. A ruffle of white curtain brushed the bottom of the window. “You babysat us!” she exclaimed to Greta, who was setting out an array of meats and cheeses on a wooden platter with silver handles. She had a simmering pot of soup on the stove, and she used a long-handled ladle to spoon out the broth into small blue bowls. “I remember this kitchen, we used to bake cookies.”

“You betcha,” Greta said. “You two girls were cute as pie.” She slapped Joe’s hand as he reached for his flask.

Shoshana set the paintings down carefully on the counter. “After we eat I think I’ll get started cleaning Mimi’s house,” she said. She corrected herself, the words feeling strange on her tongue. “I mean, my house. Greta, do you have paper towels and a mop?”

“Honey, I got everything. We’ll do it as a team. Joe will probably take a nap—”

“I’m sitting right ’ere, woman, don’t talk about me like I’m a child—”

“—so we can just head over there and get to work,” she finished.

The food was delicious, and fresh. They sat in the dining room, along a table that was as long as a football field. Six giant candelabras lined the middle, along with baskets of wildflowers in brilliant blues and purples picked from the nearby fields. Joe Murphy sat at the head of the table in a red velvet armchair, mainly smoking and drinking from his flask and reluctantly sipping the delicious chicken soup with dill picked from the backyard.

And then it was time to leave. Shoshana longed to see the rest of the mansion but was eager to get the farmhouse in decent shape for her mother and Emily to visit tomorrow. The days were getting longer but it was still dark out by six, perhaps even more so here in the country.

After leaning over to give a sleeping Joe Murphy a kiss on the cheek (he had indeed fallen asleep in his armchair), Shoshana bade good-bye to P-Hen and Patrick O’Leary, and walked back over the hills with Greta and Sinatra. She turned around at one point and saw Patrick O’Leary watching them from the front window, his breath fogging up the glass.

Darkness fell over the rolling hills, like bluffs in an ocean of green, and she took in the rich smell of soil as the moon’s light shone off a nearby field of wheat, the sounds of the crickets buzzing … she breathed deeply and Greta smiled at her, as if to say she understood the wonder of it all, and was glad someone else was there to appreciate it as well. Greta walked quietly at her side, observing the landscape as if seeing it for the first time. Shoshana had so many questions for her—this woman had watched Mimi raise her father, after all—but she wanted to get inside and put down the paintings first, as they were heavy.

“Your trees still produce apples, you know,” Greta told her, her face open and friendly in the smudged navy blue dark.

“No, I didn’t know.” She felt a little out of breath from all the walking she’d done today. It was strange—in Hoboken with all its flat concrete she never tired in her walks with Nancy. It must be the fresh air out here. Her lungs were used to the pollution drifting over into Hoboken from all the factories and power plants near Newark Airport.

“You see?” Greta asked, pointing as they came over a hill and saw the lights Shoshana had left on spilling onto the orchard. “Right now there are apple buds on the trees the size of marbles. They are sleeping. Like a caterpillar, snug in its cocoon. Safe. Come summer, these trees are going to wake up. Depending on the variety, you’ll start to have thousands of apples. I used to help Mimi pick them, so I remember. The McIntoshes will be ready in September, the Winesaps and Red Delicious making their debut in October.”

Shoshana smiled. “It sounds like it’s their debutante ball.”

“Oh, honey, harvest season is so exciting. But this is trimming time. I did it for Mimi for years, until these hands got too arthritic.” She held them up to Shoshana to observe, but Shoshana thought they looked just fine, with a few brown spots on them darker than her natural tawny skin color. They’d stopped walking and a butterfly flitted around their heads, its purple and black wings moving against the dark, expansive sky. She realized she never looked up in Hoboken; there was always a building blocking the moon, or the clouds.

“You mean trimming the trees? Like with pruners?”

“Exactly. You need to use shears for the little branches, I call ’em suckers. Then a small saw for the thicker ones. Mimi’s trees are over fifteen feet high right now. You want to grow good apples, you got to space out the branches so they get an equal amount of sun. Around ten feet tall is perfect. Dwarf trees are the wave of the future, or so I hear when I go into town. You want a bright red Red Delicious? You got to give those babies some
sun
.”

Shoshana felt overwhelmed. First the house would need cleaning, the leaves swept off the floor, cobwebs wiped from the windows and doorway frames, and the moth-eaten couch replaced. The idea of clearing the tangled
Where the Wild Things Are
forest in the back of the house was a whole different ball game, as her father used to say.

Back at her house, Shoshana struggled with the heavy brass key once more. When they entered, she was struck by how low the ceilings were, compared to Joe’s mansion. What year was the farmhouse built? She made a mental note to look it up. A time when people were shorter than now. Certainly Mimi had been only about five feet, if that. The floor sloped, too.

“I’ll tackle the second floor, you okay working down here?” Greta asked.

“Sure,” Shoshana said. She swept her long, thick hair back into a ponytail; the brown rubber band she used had been around her wrist and left a red mark. She kicked off her shoes and found a bucket and a bottle of Murphy Oil Soap under the sink in the kitchen.

For the next two hours, Shoshana and Greta scrubbed, polished, swept, and wiped down the house. It was too late to make a train back to Hoboken. Her arms ached.

At last, Greta came into the kitchen, where Shoshana was just throwing out the last of the many sponges she’d used along the counters and cupboards. “Come, honey, let’s have us a glass of wine,” she said. So the two women walked back over the black ink hills to Joe’s house, polished off a bottle of wine before the fireplace, watched the two dogs wrestle and bark at P-Hen, and chatted about the past.

Later, Shoshana walked back from the mansion and her eyes widened when she saw the farmhouse. It glowed, the full yellow moon behind it lighting it as if with a thousand bulbs. She breathed in the sweet air, watched the apple trees sway as the wind picked up. She let herself into the house (the key turned easily this time!), and climbed into her father’s old bed fully dressed. Tomorrow she would wake, check
Fat and Fabulous,
then finish cleaning when her mother and sister arrived. After that she’d come up with a plan to tackle the vines and weeds that grew among the apple trees.

Just before sleep’s tide pulled her in, Shoshana lay there, looking at the peaked ceiling and listening to Sinatra’s soft snores, thinking this might just be it, this home, the fate she always knew she was searching for, that craving for a special destiny that had never subsided deep within her. Yes, this house, these hills, these beautiful trees … might just be part of a little something called fate.

Suddenly, without preamble or fuss, Alexis and Noah were inseparable. How strange it felt, to glide so effortlessly from being a single entity on this planet to existing as one half of a couple. From food shopping for what Billy called her “single girl salad” to planning meals with another person in mind, Alexis felt she was going through a metamorphosis. She’d existed solely inside her own head, walking around Manhattan, answering her own thoughts. Her days used to revolve around her six tiny meals, her workouts, her blog. Now Noah took up so much space inside her it was like wearing a second skin.

It was Billy who changed her, of course. It wasn’t falling in love with Noah, though the ways he made her feel certainly were the reasons behind pushing her daily workouts to afternoons so she could help him set up his resturant across the street in the old fur store they’d danced in months ago. She’d also stopped weighing both herself and her food at his insistence.