Broken for You Page 2

  “I see.” Margaret smiled and nodded. She made another effort not to look at Nose Ring’s nose ring. “Well, that must be very interesting!”

  Nose Ring sighed. “Do you have everything you need?”

  “Yes! Thank you! It looks lovely.”

  Nose Ring resumed her place behind the counter.

  Margaret took a small, yellowed photograph out of her wallet; it was a school picture of Daniel, taken when he was eight. She stared at it.

  The whole thing was quite simple, really.

  According to Robert Leising, MD, and the various other neurology, oncology, and so-on-colleagues with whom he had consulted, Margaret had a very common type of malignant brain tumor: an “astrocytoma.” A slow-growing star. The traditional treatment was surgery followed by radiation.

  “What’s the prognosis?” she had asked.

  “Well,” and here Dr. Leising had pulled one of six sheets of film off the light board and scrutinized it, “your age is—?”

  As if he doesn’t know, Margaret thought. “Seventy-five.”

  “Seventy-five.” Dr. Leising nodded thoughtfully. He glanced at Margaret before resuming his study of the film. “Depending on the characteristics of the tumor—which we can’t clearly define without getting in there and removing as much of it as possible—with treatment you have a chance of living as long as several years or as little as two.”

  “How much of a chance?”

  Dr. Leising didn’t look up. “Twenty-five percent.”

  “That’s with treatment?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happens if we don’t do anything?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, if I only have a twenty-five percent chance of surviving this anyway, why don’t we just leave it alone?”

  “Maybe I haven’t made myself clear, Margaret,” Dr. Leising said, as if he were speaking to a nincompoop. That was when he resumed his discussion of Margaret’s slices in a way that clearly constituted the American Medical Association’s form of filibustering.

  So, this was her choice: She could either undergo a lot of treatment and die, sooner or later, or she could undergo no treatment at all and die, sooner or later.

  “Is something wrong?” Nose Ring had returned. “You haven’t tried anything.”

  Margaret swallowed hard. Now that all of this lovely food was in front of her, she found that she wasn’t hungry after all. She took a sip of tea, just to be polite.

  “Is that your grandson?” Nose Ring asked, leaning closer. “Cute.”

  She’s quite a young girl beneath all that makeup, Margaret realized. And much too thin. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

  Nose Ring shrugged. “What is it?”

  “Well, it’s a rather trite question, I suppose, but if you found out that you had only a short while to live, maybe a year or two, how would you spend your time?”

  The girl frowned. She picked absentmindedly at her fingernails, and showers of silver glitter flaked off and fell toward the floor. Margaret tried to follow the trajectory of the glitter, but it seemed to vanish into thin air.

  “I suppose I’d think about whatever it is that scares me the most—relationshipwise, I mean—and then do it. Do the opposite of what I’ve always done.”

  Margaret studied Nose Ring. She’d always assumed that people who embraced dramatic vogues in fashion were actually compensating for an innate dullness of character or chronic insecurity. She’d expected someone who looked like Nose Ring to offer a superficial answer to her rather trite question: “Take up hang-gliding! Sail around the world! Race hot-air balloons!” Something along those lines.

  “It would be a last chance, wouldn’t it?” the girl went on. “To break all your old bad habits?” She caught herself worrying her hands and promptly stopped. “Well anyway, here’s your bill. Pay whenever you’re ready.” She made her way back to the counter, looking pensive.

  Margaret contemplated her own habits. She stared at Daniel’s photo. He had been at that age when most children are self-conscious in front of a camera. But in this picture his expression was relaxed, serious, and sage. “You can see exactly what he’s going to look like when he’s twenty!” Margaret remembered saying to Stephen all those years ago, when the package they’d ordered came home from school: one 8×10, two 5×7s, four 3×5s, and many, many billfolds.

  But Daniel would never be twenty. The 8x10 remained unframed. The billfolds were never passed out to school friends and teachers. Margaret wondered if Stephen still kept a photograph of their son in his wallet, along with pictures he surely carried of the children he had with his second wife. His living children.

  “Jimbo?” Nose Ring was on the telephone, speaking gently. “I’m sorry I yelled before. … Yeah, I know. … I love you, too. You want me to pick up some Häagen-Dazs on the way home? … No, I’m not kidding.”

  Maybe it was time for a change. A commuted sentence. Margaret had no difficulty knowing what was required. Daniel stared back at her, without forgiveness, but without condemnation, either, his eyes alight with the detached, loving wisdom of a little monk. Margaret tucked the photograph back into her pocketbook, sipped her tea, and waited until Nose Ring hung up the telephone.

  “Excuse me, dear,” she called across the room. “Have you a pen I might borrow?”

  “Sure. Are you a writer?”

  “Oh, no,” Margaret said automatically. “I’m …” I’m anything I want to be, she thought. Anything at all. “I’m the woman who invented the garlic press!”

  “Ah.” Nose Ring handed over her pen. “I’ll get more hot water for your tea.”

  “Thank you, dear. That’s very kind.”

  Margaret turned over the bill and began writing. “Room for rent in large Capitol Hill home. $250. All utilities included. Month-to-month. Private bath …” By the time she was satisfied with the ad, her appetite was back. She started with the crème brûlée.

  Magnifique! she thought, not minding that the café had begun to fill up with customers and she was no longer alone. C’est parfait.

  Before she actually placed the ad she would have to ask permission. Of course she would. She couldn’t just willy-nilly start taking in boarders without consulting her housemates. After all, they’d lived together practically forever. She’d tended their needs, kept them pristine and perfect, sheltered them. With the exception of those few intervening years when Stephen and Daniel had shared the house, they’d had her completely to themselves. Her devotion was unquestionable. Still, she knew they’d feel threatened. They’d never stand for a unilateral decision. It would take finesse, skill, and diplomacy to pull this off. What she intended would be a hard sell.

  Of course, they’d want to know what was in it for them. They’d have a point. She’d have to come up with something.

  Praise? Admiration? That might be an incentive. They’d be in contact with another set of human eyes. What could be the harm in that? They’d be ogled and applauded by someone besides her. That should be enough for the vast majority. Most of them were a bit shallow anyway. Fools for flattery. Yes, that could work. And she’d never take on anyone clumsy or bullish, that was certain. The more diffident among them could be reassured about that. They’d be in no danger.

  So there. That was settled.

  The next question was, how would she broach the subject? And who would she speak to first? Who would be the most receptive to change?

  Not the soup tureens; as a group, they were consistently unimaginative and stodgy. The game pie dishes at least had a sense of humor, but they were cowardly, and always took sides with anything lidded. Which eliminated the teapots and casseroles and so on. It was very tricky, as the lot of them were quite cliquish. All of the figurines were out; in spite of her best efforts, she could never manage to address them without sounding condescending, and they resented her for it. One or two of the teacups might be sympathetic. She also considered the gold-encrusted inkstands, who, for all their decorative exce
ss, had always struck her as fair-minded and sensible.

  But, no. The others would never be convinced by anything so diminutive as an inkstand. She’d need an ally that was at the very least physically impressive. Objects responded to things like size and blunt speech. Margaret roamed the rooms of the house in her mind’s eye: the Aviary Suite, Bonbon Dish Room, Smoke and Snuff Room …

  Aha! She had it. The pair of Qing Dynasty garden seats. They’d be perfect. Large and commanding, with their sea-green celadon glaze, they were not only elegant but wise and plain-speaking. The fact that they once sat in the open air had given them more free-thinking views. And if all that weren’t enough, there was the added prestige of their appraised value: eight thousand dollars each. The other garden seats were worth five thousand or less. If she could win over the Qing twins, Margaret knew, they’d get everyone to give her a fair hearing.

  Margaret reviewed her defense. She headed out to the sunny atrium (also known as the Chinese Garden Seat Room), cleaning flannel in hand. She’d surprise all of them with a thorough polishing first to get in their good graces. Then she would plead her case to the Qings.

  Two

  The First Respondent

  “I came to him like a pilgrim,” the young woman said, and held out her hands, palms up, like she was waiting to be given something: a stack of books, a platter of sweet potatoes, an armful of clean, folded linens. She was telling Margaret why it was she had no furniture, hardly any possessions at all, really, except for her clothes and her French press coffeemaker; that was why this was the perfect arrangement for her. They’d met maybe fifteen minutes ago, and Margaret was about to give her a tour of the house. They were still on the first floor. In fact, they hadn’t moved since they’d met.

  Her name was Wanda. That was how she’d introduced herself on the phone, and how she’d introduced herself when she showed up—two hours before she said she would—at the front door. “Hello, Mrs. Hughes. I’m Wanda. I’m here about the newspaper ad. We just spoke on the phone.”

  Margaret had trouble seeing Wanda clearly. The sun was setting, and the accumulating shadows slanted across her face in a way which gave it an odd, fragmented look. She was quite small, though, and her eyes were very large and dark.

  “I’ve been doing affirmations about this, and I hope it’s not inconvenient for you that I’m here now—I decided to splurge and take a taxi instead of the bus—but it just sounded like the answer to my prayers, and I really believe in following your impulses. I think it’s so crucial.”

  Affirmations. Margaret knew that this word had a new and different meaning nowadays, but she didn’t know what that meaning was.

  “Is it all right for me to be here now?”

  “Yes. It’s fine. Come in.”

  But Wanda stayed outside, and right away started telling Margaret about her life: how she was deeply in love with a man named Peter; how Peter was troubled but brilliant, a furniture restorer by trade, an artist by passion who sculpted bigger-than-life-sized angels playing tenor saxophones; how he and Wanda had lived together in a New York loft they’d renovated themselves.

  Margaret was very uncomfortable—less so with what Wanda was saying than with the fact that she was saying it while standing on the front steps. It was as if the paperboy had come to collect and then suddenly started describing the intimate details of his personal life.

  “We built bookcases together, I tell you,” Wanda went on. “We re-finished an entire Victorian bedroom set. We had dishes. Coffee mugs. Wineglasses. We bought major home appliances. On credit!”

  Margaret nodded sympathetically. She came from a generation of people for whom these events—the sharing of environments, worldly goods, and beds—automatically meant “marriage,” but she understood that times had changed. She was pleased with herself for not feeling shocked at the fact that Wanda was a person who had been “living in sin,” as the nuns would have said, with mouths as shriveled and briny as gherkins.

  Then, Wanda went on, out of the blue Peter told her that he needed to simplify his life. His life was becoming too complicated, too cluttered, too full. “How can a life be too full?” Wanda appealed to Margaret, but she rushed on before Margaret had a chance to respond. Peter wanted to quit his job and get out of Manhattan. He wanted to travel, see open spaces, move west. He wanted, Wanda said bitterly, to be free. Find himself. Use Laundromats.

  Wanda said, “I thought, Okay. I’ll give it all up. My New York connections, my career, all of it. I love him that much. I can do this.”

  So, one weekend when Peter went on a camping trip to the Adirondacks, Wanda sold everything. Not just the things she and Peter had together, either, but everything. Things she’d bought with her own money. Things she’d acquired long before she met Peter and which had stories he never knew about or guessed at. Whatever she couldn’t sell she gave away, threw away, or burned in secret ceremonies. And then when Peter got back and she told him about this extraordinary thing she’d done and said, “I’m ready,” he stared at her with a blank look on his face and said, “I’m sorry. I thought you understood. I want to be alone.”

  How awful for her, Margaret thought. She was feeling less uncomfortable; as Wanda went on with her story, Margaret had moved one of the foyer chairs away from the wall and into the center of the hallway. She was sitting there now. Wanda didn’t seem to mind; Margaret wasn’t even sure she’d noticed. How awful—after this young woman came to him with her empty hands, having divested herself of everything.

  That was when Wanda said, “I came to him like a pilgrim,” and did that peculiar gesture.

  When Margaret heard that word—and it was so startling; she hadn’t heard it for years—her first thought was not automatically of the kind of pilgrim Wanda meant. When Margaret heard the word “pilgrim,” all she could think of were those cardboard cutouts that elementary school teachers used to put up around Thanksgiving. Maybe they still do, Margaret thought. Maybe times haven’t changed all that much. In November—after the black cats, benign ghosts, and witches on broomsticks, and before the Christmas trees and mangers and Wise Men and Santas and reindeer and holly and mistletoe and Dickensian carolers—teachers would explain for the thousandth time the meaning of the word “maize” and dutifully staple up a few pilgrims in those severe-looking black-and-white outfits. They might also put up some Indians. Turkeys. A horn of plenty or two.

  Margaret learned early on in life that Thanksgiving was the time of year when even the best-mannered people ate and drank too much, and men—especially men: men you thought you knew, men you used to think loved you and would protect you—abandoned their higher selves and the postmeal society of womenfolk for baser pursuits; men like her father and his European colleagues went off to smoke various forms of malodorous tobacco and tell disreputable jokes behind closed doors, and, much later, men like Stephen and his friends not only thought nothing of leaving their wives to clean up the kitchen, but ended up falling asleep in undignified poses in front of the television set, while on the screen younger men—boys, really, who should have been home eating candied yams and chestnut stuffing and pumpkin pie—were hurtling against each other like senseless bulls. As far as Margaret was concerned, whatever dim hope had remained for the Thanksgiving holiday had vanished completely with the advent of televised football.

  She couldn’t for the life of her imagine why Wanda had chosen to come to her Peter like a “pilgrim”—unless she meant that, as some form of penance or self-denial, she’d adopted the colorless style of dress that made pilgrims resemble Cubist penguins. She was dressed rather plainly.

  “You have beautiful things,” Wanda said, sounding a little congested. Margaret was startled by this abrupt segue into normal conversational tone and content. Maybe the girl was less distraught than she appeared.

  Margaret got up. Her legs felt stiff. “Why don’t you come in.”

  Apparently Wanda was through talking about Peter; she showed all the symptoms of a down-winding music box. She pl
odded across the threshold, around the chair, and into the hallway. She sighed. She sniffled. She no longer looked like a person who believed that her affirmations—whatever they were—had been affirmed. Margaret found her sudden silence disconcerting.

  “I’ll show you the main floor first—unless you’d like to see the room right away?” Margaret waited, but Wanda made no reply. “It’s on the second floor,” Margaret continued. Her voice sounded strange, unfamiliar, hollow. She tried to remember the last time she had spoken this many words to anyone inside the house.

  Wanda pressed her lips together, looked down at her feet, and sighed again.

  To Margaret’s left was a large, walnut-inlaid, glass-fronted cabinet crammed with eighteenth-century Bow figurines. She could feel them squinting at her through their excessive vegetal surroundings, their pouty little doll-like mouths wary. Nonetheless, they were intrigued.

  “All right then!” Margaret proclaimed. “To the kitchen!”

  She closed the front door but decided to leave the chair where it was; she didn’t want to draw any more attention to the fact that she’d been sitting down while Wanda had been languishing on the front steps.

  They moved toward the kitchen: through the foyer, down the hallway, past the grand staircase, the living room, the library, the powder room, and the first-floor guest suite.

  “Yes, your things are really beautiful,” Wanda repeated, almost as if she too was aware of them staring at her. If Margaret hadn’t known better, she’d have thought Wanda was buttering them up.

  When they arrived in the kitchen, Margaret began explaining how whoever took the room would have full use of the appliances, pots and pans, everyday dishes, cutlery, and so forth, but not the china, crystal, or silver from the dining room étagère.

  This policy had seemed reasonable enough to Margaret when she’d first designed it, but she suddenly felt self-conscious and miserly repeating it to her first potential boarder. Besides that, she could not get used to the feeling of directing her voice to another living entity within these walls. It wasn’t that her vocal cords went unexercised: For years she’d sung along with television commercials (those for Charmin bathroom tissue and Sominex were her favorites); occasionally she put on old recordings of her favorite musicals (Gigi, My Fair Lady, South Pacific, The King and I) and crooned along while she cleaned; she often practiced her French aloud; and of course she conversed with her things and their ghosts. But when there was a need to speak with real people—postmen, electricians, roofers, and so on—Margaret used her voice as little as possible. It had been years since she’d allowed herself unrestricted conversation with another living person.