Commuters (3 page)

“I sure do,” she said, matching his tone note for note, and startling herself. Jerry pulled back to get a better look at her, pleased. For a second, she basked in their sudden shared skepticism, a little secret exchanged in public, right there on the dance floor.

They were still marching in circles to “Strangers in the Night.” Rachel saw that most of the tables were beginning to be served their salad, and she hoped Jerry might allow them to sit down soon. She was starving, and of course the dinner would be excellent—
Winnie and she had pored over faxed menus and finally decided on the roast beef and a chicken Kiev, which was Waugatuck’s specialty.

“I’ve asked him plenty of questions about his head,” Jerry said, determined to continue. “And he seems all up to snuff.”

“Actually the doctors say—”

“I’m no medical expert, but seems to me he’s healthy enough, now. Dodged a bullet, is what I’d say.”

“Maybe,” Rachel said. “But he doesn’t remember much, in any case. The accident, the surgeries—nothing. It’s all a blank.”

“You mean he doesn’t know how he—”

“It’s just gone, is all,” Rachel said. “Or that’s what they tell me.” Listening to this old man, a near stranger, voice every one of her own doubts was unfolding a surprising, slow warmth inside her, the sense of…
finally!

“Let me get this straight,” Jerry said. Rachel noticed his breathing was a bit labored. “Your husband quit his job, for all intents and purposes…to write a whole book about a day he can’t even remember?”

Rachel stifled a smile.
Not bad,
she thought. There were two tiny medical bandages taped to the side of his head, near his ear. “It’s your wedding day,” she said. “Let’s just enjoy it.”

“One last. Thing,” huffed Jerry. They had slowed considerably, although the song was now a Motown classic, designed to get the floor jumping. “The house.”

“Hmm?” Surely the entrées would be out by now.

“Your mother won’t want to do anything substantial. She has a notion it will bother me. But I told her you’d help—you ladies can fix it up all you want. Encourage her. Good for her.”

“The house?” Rachel followed Jerry’s stiff gait off the dance floor. She waved back—
hi there! Just one second!
—distracted, to several friends who beckoned. “What are you talking about?”

“Scotch and soda,” Jerry said, and sat heavily. Not his table, but close enough. “Someone move my drink?”

“Jerry,” Rachel said, “What house?” Though a sharp little awareness now bloomed inside her. The time she’d teased her mother about having to clear out closet space, make room for a man’s things, in her tidy one-bedroom apartment. The way Winnie, hemming and hawing, avoided her eyes.

“Fifty Greenham, of course,” Jerry said. He squinted up at her, annoyed. “Closed yesterday. Is that the waiter?”

She couldn’t have.

Rachel stumbled through a conversation with Marilyn French, who’d played the piano during cocktail hour, and excused herself suddenly, rudely. Then she was caught by Sandy Hinton, who fretted lightly in the form of a joke that no one from Hand Me Down, the children’s clothes consignment store where Rachel worked, had called her back yet about a double stroller, hardly used. If they weren’t interested, surely she could find…Rachel promised to pick it up on Monday, and broke away. Her cheeks were burning.
No. She couldn’t have—Jerry had it all wrong.
Not that business-mogul Jerry could make a mistake about something this substantial. Not about
that
property—the one everyone in Hartfield talked about, a true 1920s Tudor right on Greenham Avenue, a stately oak-lined street that arched high above the center of town. Rachel shook her head, dumbfounded. A part of her had to admire the sheer craziness of this endeavor. He bought that place? For two eighty-year-olds to live in? It must be falling down, now nothing
but the shell of a once-grand property—a structure people slowed down to point out as one of Hartfield’s eccentric oddities.

“My God, Mom,” Rachel muttered to herself, in the hallway leading to the restrooms. She leaned back against the wall.
Well, we might need a little more room,
she remembered now, was what Winnie had said, that afternoon, turned away and fussing with some grocery bags. Rachel had assumed she meant a two-bedroom condo! So Winnie had known, even then. Why hadn’t she said anything?

But Rachel knew why, and she closed her eyes. It was cooler downstairs, quiet. Her heels sank into the thick, salmon-colored carpet, and she could feel the grainy pattern of the metallic toile wallpaper against her bare shoulders. On the one hand, she had sympathy for her mother’s position. Rachel’s own move, last year, certainly made it hard, if not impossibly awkward, for anyone to raise the subject of Hartfield real estate in her presence.

Melissa called it “the switcheroo,” and Winnie had been one of its biggest supporters.

“
Please
.” She’d scowled when Rachel once ventured fears about, well, what people would think.

And there certainly hadn’t been anything on the market, anything close to what they would need or could afford, without changing the girls’ school midyear. Neither Lila nor Mel had protested once the plan was explained to them—though probably this wasn’t healthy—and Bob was just relieved, happy to find a solution, a way of accepting that leave of absence…and so that left Rachel. She had signed on, full of misgiving, and so they had moved. If you could call it that, when their address, 144 Locust Drive, didn’t even change.

Their house’s attached two-bedroom rental unit had intimidated Bob when they were first shown the property, that summer before
Lila was born. He hadn’t liked the idea of being a landlord, hadn’t liked the word itself, and had visions of endless tenant disputes, late-night phone calls about plumbing problems. But both Rachel and their Realtor, Billie, had convinced him otherwise, Rachel so deeply in love with the square-sided painted-white brick house on Locust that she felt she would happily plunge any stopped-up toilet herself, even seven months pregnant. And even Bob would admit that everything had gone smoothly. Billie always took care of finding the right people, and the renters had been a series of quiet young couples on the first leg of their exodus from Manhattan, a lot like Rachel and Bob had been. Mostly, they got pregnant and then moved out. Meanwhile, Rachel and Bob—and later Lila and Melissa—paid hardly any attention to that part of the house, or the round pale stones paving a discreet path around to the separate side entrance.

Then, last year, several factors aligned all at once, like tumblers in a lock clicking into place. Once it became clear that Bob was struggling to keep up, the partners at his firm offered a year’s leave at half pay—or demanded one. (It was never made clear to Rachel which.) The Copenhavers, who had rented for almost three years, decided to move to Boston and open a health-food store, and gave only one month’s notice. And Billie, when Rachel called in a panic, said that she might have one prospect, a single banker who traveled a lot…but that he wanted something bigger than their unit. Something much bigger.

So the plan was hatched: keep the house, lease the main part, live in the smaller unit. For a while, until Bob got back on his feet. It wasn’t
unheard of
, Billie assured them, but this didn’t really hold true for Rachel. In a matter of weeks, the Brighams went from four bedrooms to two, from three full baths to one and a half, from the
center of their home to its shoved-off-to-the-side appendage. Or at least that’s how Rachel felt, especially on the nights where she would lie awake and listen to Vikram Desai, a perfectly pleasant man, a total stranger, move around her kitchen. She’d follow his footsteps across the cream-colored tiles she’d chosen six years ago, up the stairs where the girls posed for Christmas photos, and into what used to be her bedroom. Hers and Bob’s, that is.

Here in the Waugatuck hallway, little by little Rachel became aware of a sound—not the music and voices at the reception upstairs, but from behind her. Behind the wall, inside the ladies’ room. A high-pitched wail that came and went. Gasps, then a pause. Without thinking, she went to the door and pulled it open.

Annette, slumped on a low overstuffed stool in front of the dressing table mirror, raised her head. Another woman stood nearby, hovering anxiously. She shot a distressed look at Rachel.

“Oh, perfect,” Annette said loudly, waving an arm. Her makeup was smeared and her eyes raw. “Un-fucking-believable.”

“Excuse me,” Rachel said, taken aback by the slap of anger. She turned to leave.

“Don’t you run away now! You came to find me, well—here I am. You want to drag me back upstairs to that whole—Can you believe this?” Annette turned to her friend, a shorter woman in a gray silk suit, who was trying to hush her.

The friend nodded to Rachel, as if they shared an understanding, and then toward the door. “She’s just a little upset,” she said. “Probably it would be better if—”

“What
is
it with you people? Don’t you have a single ounce of dignity? Do you really think I’m going to let my father get suckered into losing
everything
at the end of his life? He’s worked damn
hard for what he’s made, and if you think I’m going to just stand around while you and your mother take what you—”

“Annette,” the friend groaned. “Don’t.”

“—please…Do you
know
what my lawyer says? You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

“Well, I’m sorry you feel this way,” Rachel said. “And to tell you the truth—”

She stopped, confused. Though she’d only spoken with Annette briefly, once or twice before, Rachel could tell that Jerry’s daughter was none too pleased about this marriage. But she’d had no idea that Annette was this furious. And all along, Rachel had somehow assumed that Annette’s objections to the marriage were her own—that everything about this gaudy spectacle, this wedding, was unseemly and unnecessary, a bit tacky and more than a little embarrassing. But now, underneath Annette’s wine-soaked vehemence, Rachel heard something else: fear. The kind of sharp, blinding fear that springs from loss.

“It must be hard,” she said. “With his moving here. But I think—”

“This all makes me sick,” Annette moaned, and she really did look ill—white in the corners of her mouth, and trembling. “Sitting up there, smiling while you all wink at each other and count your lucky stars that my father has decided to act like a fool. Like an
idiot
. I won’t let you do this to him. His reputation—what this would have done to my mother—” She choked on a sob.

“Annette,” Rachel began. She might have taken a step closer.

“Don’t touch me!” Annette shrieked. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry,” she said to the friend, suddenly conciliatory. “I’ll get it together in a minute. I just won’t be
pitied
. Not by her.”

Rachel went quickly past them into the next room. As she expected, there was a stack of small plastic cups on a shelf above the sinks. She filled one, hands shaking.

Back in the dressing room, Rachel set the water down in front of Annette and pulled up a stool, close enough to see the dots of mascara beaded along the other woman’s lower eyelashes.

“Now you listen to me. That is
my mother
up there, and it’s her wedding day, and I won’t have you making a drunken scene to ruin even
one minute
of it for her. Do you hear me?” Despite the heat of the moment, Rachel recognized her own tone immediately: it was the one she used when one of the girls had really crossed the line.

“For the record—not that it matters—I had no idea Jerry had bought a house. That house.” Annette started to interrupt, but Rachel barreled ahead. The friend was observing this with a small, impressed smile. “Do I think it’s insane, at their age? Yes. Will I try to talk her out of it? You bet. But that’s not for tonight. Tonight we are
celebrating
. You are going to fix your face and we are going to get upstairs and smile and clap and pose for the photographer and do nothing but talk about how
wonderful
it all is, the fact that it’s possible for two people to find each other this late in life. We’re going to say all of the things everyone wants to hear. And we’re going to toast my mother and your father—no, not you. You’ve had enough to drink.” Rachel stood and tugged her dress back into place. “But the rest of us are going to raise a glass and I’m finally going to eat some roast beef—and Annette? You are going to
adore
the cake, so perhaps this lovely friend of yours will make sure you sit down to a nice fat slice.”

She put a hand on the ladies’-room doorknob and paused, struggling for kinder words. “It’s strawberry,” she informed the other two women, both silent and staring at her. “With a fondant icing.”

The food had been so fucking bad he thought it might have been a joke. Seriously. It was hard to comprehend the piece of chicken that had shown up on his plate—poor, poor chicken—stretched out and pounded flat and curled up halfway around a still-frozen shard of butter that had a small piece of red paper stuck to it. As if to compensate for the moisture-less meat, its accompanying puddle of mashed…what was it?…cauliflower had come ringed with a thin, grayish water—sauce? Dish soap? Sweat from a line cook’s greasy forehead? Avery dragged a fork slowly through the mess, amazed. Strange, though, how all these people were chewing and smiling and chatting in ordinary tones over these plates of misery. An urge to burst out laughing bubbled up in him, but Avery contented himself instead with minute examinations of the bleached-out celery salad—what was this herb, for example, tiny flakes of which clung to the wilted vegetable with admirable tenacity even as he tried to scrape some off with a fingernail. Rosemary? No smell whatsoever. An ashy taste, kind of like licking a match head.

But by now at least someone had cleared everything supposedly edible off the table, including the piece of cake that had appeared in front of Avery with one clear thumbprint deeply imprinted on its thick icing. White icing, of course. He realized that the entire meal, from the glass of champagne that sat in front of him, untouched, until its golden showers of bubbles dimmed to a dull stillness, to that entire chicken/dishwater plate to the dessert finale, had been white, or beige, or somewhere in between.

Actually, Avery was glad. Far better for him to encounter all the glorious misery of a truly bad meal, in which he could lose himself, than to suffer through a decent dinner where he would be forced to eat boring bites of unmemorable, unexceptionable food with nothing then to distract him from the country-club chatter that swirled all around his grandfather’s big night. And the food, its excellent awfulness, kept him parked in this same seat all evening, fascinated—kept him, that is, from walking by the bar. Which wasn’t a bar at all, of course, but two long rectangular folding tables set up in a side room just off the dance floor. Earlier, he’d been by just once, just to look—quickly, sidelong—at the rows of square-sided bottles, each slippery now from the harried bartenders’ wet hands, lined up casually next to fanned-out stacks of little cocktail napkins and bowls of pimento olives and those snotty little onions that came three on a stick when you asked for it that way. But this wasn’t a martini crowd—no, the big draw here was white wine, dozens of bottles bobbing in plastic tubs on the floor behind the long table swathed in starchy cream-and-green polyester cloths. Cheap, thick glasses were set out upside down, the way they never should be, gathering condensation inside their bowls and a musty smell. A few men were asking for rocks drinks,
in lowballs that had a nice pebbly bottom. In the first hour of the reception, Avery had allowed himself to skate a thumb across one, furtively. Then he’d snatched his hand back.

He’d agreed to go dry, completely, even though drinking had never been the problem—not the main problem, anyway. But here was the truth: he wasn’t sure how long he’d be staying that way. He just hadn’t decided that, yet.

Avery loosened his tie one more centimeter, put a foot up on the abandoned chair next to him, and grinned back at his stepfather, Rich, making his way toward him. Across the empty dance floor, Rich pretended to do a little soft-shoe shuffle. At least he seemed to be enjoying himself, although he usually did, even when Annette was nowhere to be found, as had been the case for much of the reception, now that Avery thought about it. It was a running family joke that Avery took after Rich in that way: easygoing, handy with a joke, as opposed to Annette’s tightly wound energy, or whatever his long-gone “real” father must be like. So this had created a surprising ally for Avery, in the past year and a half, all through Rehab Stint One and then College Take Two and then Live at Home/Look for a Job and then Rehab Redux: This Time We Mean Business. Rich was cool. He’d never tried to bully Avery, or guilt-trip him, or label himself an enabler, or all those other modes Annette cycled through. In fact, it had been Rich who had finally convinced Annette to allow Avery to make this move, last week, from Chicago to New York.

Actually, maybe he should thank Grandad. Without the old man’s crazy, random decision to move here, of all places, Avery knew Rich and Annette would never have considered letting him come to Manhattan.

“Time to blow this joint,” Rich said now, emphasizing his own dorkiness. “You need money for the train?”

“No, I’m good.” Avery actually could have used some cash for the train, but at the moment he was just so thankful that Rich wasn’t bugging him to go back to whatever hotel he and Annette were at, that this alone was worth it. They both paused to watch the band’s drummer, his face flat and tired, lug a beaten black case across the empty dance floor, and whack it against a chair nearby. Rich neatly caught the chair before it toppled over, and the drummer banged his way out a side door, not looking back. Although the bride and groom had left at least an hour ago, more than a few of their geezer friends were still lingering at the tables—out later than you’d expect, Avery thought. What was it now, 8 pm?

“Mom in the car or something?”

“Ah. Well, your mom cut out a little early. She’s over at the hotel now. She wanted me to see if you’ve changed your mind about staying the night…there’s that brunch thing—and we don’t fly out until three.”

“That’s okay.”

“Well, consider my duty discharged,” Rich said, with a little salute. Avery was so grateful for this, his stepfather’s implicit trust. For not pushing it, or grilling him on—
who? where? what next?
—the exact circumstances of his patched-together New York life, which would be one week old tomorrow. It must be a guy thing, Avery thought. Or maybe Rich just knew the truth: that Avery himself didn’t know much yet about how it all would go down, this move. Apartment, job, all that.

“So what’s the deal with the husband? Cancer, or something?” Avery nodded at Bob Brigham, over by the foyer, talking loudly
to a few of those older guys whose wives stood by, holding coats over their arms. Bob had his back to where he and Rich were sitting, and his cue-ball-smooth bald head was almost as wild as that twisting helix of a scar, pink and raised and lumpy, that ran down the back of his head and disappeared under his collar.

“Nope—took a bad fall, is what I heard. Guy’s lucky, that’s for sure.” Rich jingled coins in his pocket but made no move to leave. Avery wondered if he was, in fact, in for a speech about safety and the bottom line.

“Jesus.”

“That one daughter he has is a looker, huh?”

“Really?” Avery wrinkled his face. That irritating kid who’d latched on to him earlier, bugging him with questions about the tattoo on the back of his hand?
What was it of?
(Chinese dragon.)
Did it hurt? Did they use a big needle? Was his mom mad?
(No, yes, who knows?)

“You don’t think? Well, I don’t envy him. Going to be tough once all those boys start coming around.”

Then Avery saw who Rich was talking about. Not the younger girl, her older sister. Avery saw both of them, trailing their mom, each with an armful of flower baskets culled from the tabletops. And yes, that taller one—with her waterfall of blonde hair and that skin, golden-tan and smooth as anything. He could see what Rich meant. How old was she? Sixteen? His new—what? Cousin. Step-cousin? Thinking along these lines made Avery feel perverted.

“So, listen. I don’t want you to worry about her.”

“Who?”

“Your
mother
. She’ll get used to this—” Here Rich waved his hand vaguely at the dance floor, the Brigham family, the few re
maining white-haired guests. “Stranger things have happened, in families.”

“She’s flipping out, huh?”

“Well. She has worked up quite a lather, but…let’s all give it time. Settle into things. There were quite a few folks unhappy when
I
burst on the scene, if you recall.”

“Nah,” Avery said.

“In any case, I wanted to give you a heads-up about something.”
Here it comes,
Avery thought. “This deal you made with your mom in order to move here, all the talks we’ve had—”

“I
know
, Rich.” AA or NA, weekly calls to old shrink, careful transfer to new shrink, constant contact with home. One screwup and it was back to Chicago. Or worse.

“Yeah. So, about your grandfather—”

Avery got real quiet and stayed that way when Rich paused for his response.

“Now that you’re both here in New York—I know, I know, it’s the suburbs—and you’re in the city, fine.” Rich hustled to cut off Avery’s first objection. “We think it’s best if you train out for regular visits with Jerry. Check in on him—you know. And it’ll be quality time for you guys. He won’t be getting any younger.”

“I already said I would. Every once in a while.”

Rich shook his head pleasantly. “Regular visits. Meaning once a week.”

“Once a
week
?” Avery almost fell off his chair. “So what happens if I can’t?”
If I don’t,
is what he thought, but he already knew the answer. They had him. He was out of that house, finally, but they still had him—and they knew it.

“Let me put it this way,” Rich said, with a wry smile. “It would
behoove
you to follow through on this, for your sake. And your mom’s. She’ll talk to you more about it.”

“Uh-huh.” Avery couldn’t help it: his inward, unreasonable reaction was a fierce, childish disappointment. Here he was, at last on his own, in New York City, and he was being forced to punch a time card with his
grandfather
.

“Oh, come on. That’s not so much, is it? Bud?”

“Grandad’s not going to know if I’m using, you know,” Avery said flatly. “I mean, I doubt he’d even be able to tell if I was high. So if this is the grand plan to keep tabs on me—well, then you’re fucked. And so is Mom.”

Rich didn’t answer for a minute. “Avery,” he said, finally, and shook his head. Then his stepfather stood to go, and briefly rested a hand on the top of Avery’s head. “Give a call soon.”

New York so far had proved an immense disappointment, if Avery was willing to admit that to anyone. Or himself. He’d spent the past six days riding the subway, all the way up and down the 6 and 2 lines. If a stop looked appealing—Astor Place, for example, with its funky mosaic sign and the packs of skater-punk kids exiting en masse, plugged into iPods and jittering with energy—Avery would get off too, ready to roam. But then up from underground the first thing that he’d see would be some huge Starbucks. Or a Barnes and Noble. Or a Kmart—no shit! Astor Place had all three on one corner, and it all proved too much for Avery, skater kids notwithstanding. He’d turned right around and glumly re-descended. He hadn’t come to New York-fucking-City for Kmart.

Central Park was okay. Loaded with hot moms pushing double strollers that were bigger than the crappy Honda he’d sold before coming out here. But the hot moms were too busy with the
stroller occupants to pay any attention to Avery, wandering here and there, checking it all out, the passing scene. One afternoon some loud-talking woman stopped dead in her stilettos to size him up, and then went on to ask a series of questions he’d heard before and wasn’t particularly interested in. She’d handed him a card—VIP TalentBooking something something—and strode away. Avery flipped the card around for a while and then stuck it, with a handful of change, into a raggedy coffee cup loosely held by the nodded-off bum sitting next to him on the bench. (Last time this happened he’d been waiting on line outside Schuba’s Tavern, on Southport, and his friends’ reactions had been ferocious and unremitting. They’d howled and yanked away the business card, everyone calling the agent’s cell again and again, in between shots of whiskey, over the course of a long night. Poor guy.
Yeah, hi, this is Avery Trevis? I’d like to model your smallest nut huggers? And I’d like to shave my
—Give it back, Smitty! It’s still my turn!)

Museums were another way to go, but after an hour or so in the new MoMA, Avery was still thinking about the twenty bucks it had cost to get in.

One afternoon he had joined the long lines to view where the World Trade Center had stood. People stood on a platform and shuffled respectfully past that canyon. There were long lists of names, boards with reprinted photos, flowers and notes twisted through the wire fence. There were vendors with makeshift carts full of merchandise—pins and baseball caps that said, 9/11, always in our hearts, under logos of flags or eagles. So many men were wearing official-looking NYPD or Fire Department T-shirts that at first Avery was moved, thinking they had all come to mourn lost comrades. But then he realized that these shirts, hats, were also
for sale. He hadn’t known it was—what?—legitimate to dress like a police officer if you weren’t one.

He avoided the indie culture. He stayed clear of Tompkins Square Park, Avenues A through D, Orchard Street—anywhere he’d heard was DIY, was punk, was cool. He couldn’t afford cool. He couldn’t afford to start longing for that scene, the loners and artists and hackers and freaks that he’d torn himself away from in Wicker Park. He was exiled from cool, an alt-dot fugitive, at twenty years old. Avery knew it was a rehab cliché, and he wasn’t even sure how entirely he bought it, that whole “change your friends” rule. But as of now, he was staying clear of the whole scene, just in case.

Only once had he broken this self-imposed restriction, and it had been yesterday afternoon. The memory goosed a shot of pure adrenaline through Avery now, still sitting alone at a table in the Waugatuck Tennis Club.

Thompson Street, below Houston. The screeching music drew his attention first, speakers blaring that Japanese girl group who covered “Freebird” in wild, broken English and thundering bass lines. silkworm, read the sign, set askew over the open door in a tiny storefront. Boutique shoe store, was Avery’s first guess. But then he saw the Ramones poster, and the retro-style barber chairs, three of them, jammed tight in one line. Three or four pale, skinny dudes clustered inside, talking loudly over the music, ignoring Avery, who was now just inside the door. They all had Mohawks of varying lengths and color, and tattoos up and down each arm. One was sweeping clumps of hair in slow circles around the floor.