Текст книги "Woman on the Edge of Time"

Автор книги: Marge Piercy

Соавторы: Marge Piercy
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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Miss Moynihan sat outside the cubicle at the machine, whose ten pens scribbled away as the accordion piles of paper raced out from the face covered with dials. Miss Moynihan spoke in a carefully flat tone to her. “Close your eyes … . Open your mouth slightly … . Open your eyes … .” As the pens rushed on, she wrote obscure notations that always made Connie terribly suspicious.

She had her favorite fantasy as she lay there. Miss Moynihan would be called away. She would be called to the phone. A family emergency. Did she have a family? Yes, patient gossip had it that her mother was dead, her father worked for the subway, her older brother was a building inspector, and her younger brother was still in school … . “Try not to move your eyes so much or I’ll have to tape them. Relax. Open your mouth again slightly and keep it that way.”

Miss Moynihan would be called to the phone and she would sit up at once, pull the electrodes off, and quietly walk past the two desks in the outer room, where sometimes a woman sat and sometimes no one at all, turn right, and bolt down the stairway at the end of the hall. She could see herself doing that again and again … . “Try to relax, Mrs. Ramos. Just let yourself go. Relax.”

She would walk south to Harlem through the beautiful clean rain. Miss Moynihan’s father could not stand Acker, the patients said. Romeo and Juliet A doomed romance. Miss Moynihan had beautiful soft gray eyes, in which everything seemed to dissolve. She bustled about, efficient, hard, bouncy, but in her eyes chaos swirled. Connie decided Miss Moynihan was hoping to get pregnant. With so many beds in a hospital, it must be easy for them to make love … . Miss Moynihan tapped on the machine, hard taps, as if she could read her mind. They tapped that way sometimes. She never understood why. Did Miss Moynihan think she was falling asleep? Suppose she suddenly went over to Mattapoisett–what would Miss Moynihan’s machine show? Was Luciente dead? Why did she never feel her anymore?

It was the week before Thanksgiving. Captain Cream had had the final operation and sat about with a bandage on his head. He had to be dressed and he ate so slowly he drove Tony wild. He ate almost as much as Alice. Connie had the feeling, watching him, that he would go on eating all day at the same maddeningly slow rate as long as they stuck food in front of him. He would go on doing whatever he was started doing. If he was taken to the toilet, he would sit there until somebody remembered to fetch him off. Alice slumped in the lounge, withdrawn and creepy. Orville, with an implant, made jokes no one else found funny and giggled all day. Alvin called them the three stooges, but he did not seem to find that funny himself. Alvin was scheduled for surgery the next Monday, along with Miss Green. He would have been done already, but Dr. Redding had won his invitation to Dr. Argent’s hunting lodge, and took off a long weekend.

Connie worked at being a model patient. She did jigsaw puzzles, she watched television, she entered all conversations, she asked advice and agreed, she kept her wig straight on her itchy scalp and tended it like a prize poodle. She volunteered and volunteered. She was ward housewife. Next time she asked she got permission easily to call her brother.

The line was longer, everyone with the same problem, whining, begging, trying to charm. Only one thought fizzled through the whole spacy line. When she got to the phone, the damn number was busy. By the time she got back near the head again, it was lights out.

The next night, after an hour and ten minute wait, she got through. “Lewis, it’s me, Connie, again. I was just wondering about Thanksgiving?”

“Yeah, maybe Christmas. How’re you doing?”

“The doctor says I’m better–did you talk to him? What’s wrong with Thanksgiving? Christmas is so far away.” By Christmas she’d be operated on. “Remember, I was going to help Adele cook and clean and get ready for your party? Please. Lewis, please!”

“You’ve never proved much of a worker, Connie. There’s a lot of work to do. We’d probably do better having the cleaning woman put in an extra day.”

“I’ll work, Lu–Lewis, I’ll work! Ask them here if I don’t clean up the whole ward. If I don’t sweep and mop up and dust. I learned a lesson, please let me show you. I want so bad to get out for Thanksgiving!”

“Guess it’s lonely in the hospital, huh, Connie?” He was playing cat and mouse with her.

Her hand sweated on the greasy receiver. The gray butter of human anxiety. “Please, my brother, let me visit you. Let me help Adele. Let me see my nephew and my niece. I’ll clean and cook. I’ll do the dishes. I’ll make the house shine!”

“You never were much of a housekeeper, unless they taught you something. Besides, we’re fixing the house up with a tropical motif, going to put plants everywhere. You don’t like to work around the nursery, remember? You said the sprays gave you a headache.”

“That was years ago! I’ll work so hard you’d have to hire four men to do the work I’ll do for you. Just let me out of here for a couple of days. Just let me be with you a little!”

“I’ll take it under advisement. Don’t call again. I’ll let the hospital know if I decide to give it a try.” He hung up.

Shaking with anger, she left the pay phone. She despised herself for begging to be given the privilege of scrubbing Luis’s floors in Bound Brook. Claud would have stopped speaking to her if he’d heard that conversation; he’d have taken off like a shot. But it is war, she thought. I am conducting undercover operations. I am behind enemy lines and I must wear a smiling mask. It is all right for me to beg and crawl and wheedle because I am at war. They will see how I forgive. That made her feel stronger.

Sybil was waiting for her in the lounge. “What did he say?”

“Maybe, he said. He wouldn’t let me off the hook by letting me know one way or the other.”

Sybil touched her shoulder lightly. “Well, Thanksgiving together … I’ve had worse.”

Only Alice, Captain Cream, and Connie were let out on Thanksgiving furlough to relatives. Connie put on her old turquoise dress that fitted a little loose, and straightened the new wig on her head. Everybody was clucking and cooing over her except Sybil, who hung back, and Alice, who sat like a wrapped present in the hall, waiting. Sybil managed to catch Connie for a moment to whisper, “I hope you … fly away.”

“I’m going to try.”

Briefly, before the attendant could catch them (“No PC!”–physical contact–the slogan of the ward), they kissed. “I hope I never see you again,” Sybil whispered. “My dear friend, run!”

Luis’s house had an upstairs, a downstairs, and a level in between, most of it open space without doors or walls, like a big hospital ward. Rooms, rooms upon rooms. She was led up stairs covered with gold carpeting that must show dirt easily, to a room on the top floor. She had a bathroom all to herself, with a shower and a toilet and a wash basin and a mirror, a full‑length mirror on the back of the door. She had not seen herself entire in months. The basin was like a vanity table, everything white with gold trim.

The room had twin beds, and she felt dizzy at the thought of choosing one or the other. For a moment tears burned the inside of her eyes. She blinked. Why should a bed make her cry? For months she had not chosen anything. Luis dropped her little overnight bag on one bed, so she decided to sleep in the other. She felt relieved. So much space around her, it was almost frightening. It made her dizzy, it distracted her as if it were freedom instead of fancier imprisonment.

The room had one window, covered with filmy blue curtains and white and gold Venetian blinds. Quickly she pried two of the slats apart to look out. Ay, too bad! She stared down two stories onto a concrete paved area floodlit by a fixture high on the house. An outdoor fireplace was set into one side of the area, before the yard sloped away into shrubbery. No way out through this window.

The yard was elegantly planted, with borders swooping in and out in drifts of pine and juniper, but in the night and the cold, it looked only bleak. The ground was frozen and bare. Through the glare of light surrounding the house to protect it against burglars, she could not see whether the night was clear or cloudy. She hoped it would not snow. That would make it harder to get away. She wished that Luis had invited her out a few more times in the past so that she knew something of the area. Which way would she walk to get to public transportation? She must figure that out.

Without knocking, Adele opened the door. “If you want to set the table, we’re going to have pie and coffee before we turn in.”

They were crazy, for they did just that: drank coffee from a blue and white electric percolator just before going to bed, along with a boughten apple pie. The pie tasted wonderful. She could have eaten the whole thing. A terrible desire to eat and eat and eat seized her throat. Food that had flavors. By shifting to the right in her chair she could see the refrigerator in the kitchen, huge and golden brown. It kept drawing her sleepy gaze, all that golden space crammed with food. She had seen it when she got out the nondairy creamer for their coffee. She had seen the turkey defrosting. The freezer was stacked with steaks and roasts and chops, with vegetables in bright cartons. She had seen gallons of milk, a pound of butter, vegetables in the crispers, salad dressings half used, real eggs, orange juice in cartons. She imagined herself rising slowly from her chair and with her Thorazine shuffle–she had been especially heavily doped that day in preparation for her furlough–stumbling into the kitchen to the refrigerator, sitting down on the floor, and pulling out one item at a time until she had eaten everything in the whole golden box. It all called to her in wonderful soprano siren voices: the jar of olives, the chunky peanut butter, the salami, the liverwurst in the opened package, the jar of maraschino cherries, the cheddar cheese, the packaged dip, the bacon, the eggs, the chocolate pudding from the dairy case, the soda, the big round bright pieces of fruit.

They seemed to eat very quickly. Luis talked nonstop about his day. He spoke quickly and he talked a lot and he didn’t like interruptions: in that he was like the brother she had had all her life. But this middle‑aged overweight businessman in the dark gray suit and the wide tie with its narrow dim stripe, the round moon face bulging into jowls, the forehead that ran well back to the middle of his scalp, the fat fingers with a lodge ring that remained braced on the table as he talked as though he feared if he let go of them they would fly up–did she know him from someplace?

“‘They all got brown spots on their leaves,’ he says to me. ‘They’re no good. I paid you six hundred to do the foyer and they all got brown spots.’ ‘That was a special price I gave you,’ I said ‘They’re worth twice that now.’ ‘All covered with brown spots,’ he said. ‘Listen,’ ‘I said, I could have done the job with plastic. We have a beautiful selection of plastic. You wanted live ones. Now look, the world is full of diseases and bugs. You could’ve signed up for my service. My boys come around every month regular as clockwork and they mop off the leaves and they exterminate and they put in the fertilizer. We keep it up. Something kicks off, we replace. It’s insurance. But you weren’t interested. Now you complain to me that some pest has got into your greens. Of course some pest got in. What did you think–you can put up a sign and say no insects allowed? You don’t keep up an investment, it’s money down the drain.’” Luis told the story with satisfaction. “Let that fool paint the leaves green. Trying to cut corners with me. When I do a job like that at a competitive price, I expect the service contract.”

Adele sat taking little nibbles of pie and nodding her head and making soft noises to accompany the loud fast rattle of his voice without interrupting it: um, Adele said, um hum, oh dear, mmm. She looked critically at her nails. Mostly she kept her eyes near his face, while her mind drifted high as a kite on some other wind. Once she smiled quickly, a loose bedroom face, and then smoothed her features over.

Adele blurred into Shirley, Luis’s second and Italian wife, responsible for getting him into her family’s nursery business. Somehow Luis had emerged from the marriage with a chunk of it. He was that way. Shirley had dark brown hair and a full pouting mouth and a full‑blown temper. She had lasted as long as she had because of the business. Yet she had sat there many years saying um hum, oh dear, uh huh, mmm. And Carmel before her. All Luis’s wives came to sound the same, nodding at him, but each one was fancier and had a higher polish. Each one was lighter. Each one spent more money. Carmel had been for hard times. Shirley was for getting set up in business. Adele was for making money in bushels and spending it.

When Adele noticed that Luis had run down for the moment, she said, “No gardenias this time. They have too strong a smell. It gives me a headache.”

“Okay, no gardenias. Yeah, they smell like cheap soap.” Luis nodded, looking pleased. He collected distinctions, judgments, he always had. At eleven years old he was saying seriously, “You know, a Cadillac is a better car than a Chrysler?” Their family’s ancient gray Ford had given way to an only slightly less ancient rust‑colored Hudson. Her father had driven maybe the world’s last Hudson. It was chocolate‑colored and the body was already rusting into shreds when they got it. It suggested a lump of dog shit on wheels.

An hour after they had all gone to bed, she got up. Then she discovered that Luis had locked her in. She pushed and pushed on the door and then she tried to stick a comb in between the door and the jamb to push the catch back. It would not slide in. She turned back and slowly undressed. This was only Wednesday night. She had Thursday and Friday. He might forget to lock the door. She might find a key that fit it. He might get careless. A knife might work. Weary, heavy with drug, she let herself fall into the strange soft bed and dissolve into sleep.

“You’re dreadfully slow,” Adele complained. “My cleaning lady gets that done in forty‑five minutes.”

“It’s the drug. It slows me down. They gave me a real heavy shot so I can hardly move.”

“It seems to me you move fast enough when it’s time to eat.” Adele was consulting a list. Everywhere she had lists–of groceries, of dry‑cleaning, of jobs to be done, of people to be called. All morning, while Connie was cleaning and making desserts from the recipe books Adele shoved at her, not trusting her to cook on her own as she knew perfectly how to do, Adele was writing lists at a desk she had at the end of the kitchen. Every list made more work. Connie gripped the handle of the vacuum till her hand ached and took a deep breath and did not allow herself a word. She swept the yellow carpeting while before her the tropical fish Luis always kept swam to and fro in their glass prison in the living room, under the murmur of the bubbler.

Breakfast had been bacon and eggs and toast with strawberry jam and lots of real coffee from the blue and white percolator. All morning whenever she could sneak a chance to do it, she made and drank coffee. How wonderful she felt. Lunch was the next high point. Adele was talking on the phone and told her to help herself to leftovers. First she had a cheese and salami sandwich with a big mug of coffee, sweet and light the way she loved it. She heated the milk first. Then she ate a lot more cheese and salami without bread, so it wouldn’t fill her up too fast.

Each time she opened the door to that paradise of golden possibilities, she felt buffeted by choice. Deciding was so difficult she could hardly move her hand. Too much. She felt like weeping with joy. She went back and forth from the dinette to the refrigerator, carrying each time one new treasure–a piece of leftover apple pie, more cheese, this kind white and blue like the coffeepot and strong‑smelling, a golden delicious apple, chicken salad in a bowl. Finally Adele marched over, five phone calls later, and said, “You can’t still be eating lunch? Really! Lew said you were here to help me, and I have to watch you every minute, just as if you were the hired cleaning lady!”

Connie put on the turkey according to a recipe Adele had clipped from a slick women’s magazine, having filled it with a mix of nuts, cornmeal, mushrooms, green peppers, and raisins. Adele had her cover the poor bird with aluminum foil, although Connie knew that would spoil the bird and steam the skin. She obeyed. She felt chunk with food. Her time sense was altered by all the coffee. The world seemed to have slowed down as she speeded up. On the ward, hours passed and she never knew where they had gone. Now she felt as if she were running and when she looked at the clock an hour later, only fifteen minutes were used up. The drug and the caffeine battled in her, and she felt high and fast.

Candied sweet potatoes made from a can! As if she didn’t know real ways to cook sweet potatoes. Eddie had loved yams. She remembered the time she had told Luciente that with some money and a decent kitchen, she was a good cook! How many ways she had learned to cook in her life: Mexican, Puerto Rican, soul food, and what Professor Silvester called continental. All good food. She wished she could be cooking a feast for Luciente and Bee. She pretended she was making a Thanksgiving dinner for Luciente’s whole family, and for Sybil and Tina Ortiz too. They would all meet and sit down to feast together and they would drink wine and make jokes and maybe she would even, only politely for the season but with feeling, kiss Bee one last time. Then she would be the one cautioning Luciente to remember that the food was not nourishing, was not real, out of your own time!

She and Adele put all the boards into the dining room table, making it very long, and then covered it with snowy linen and set it with china and real silver plates and silver‑plated salvers for breads and rolls and crystal goblets, except for the little children, who got ruby‑tinted glasses for their milk. Luis came in to open the wine himself with a fuss, a sparkling rosй.

Now Luis sat at the table’s head in a chair with arms, carving the huge turkey with an electric knife he flourished wildly. The strange stuffing he had already piled in a big bowl. On his right and left were Mark and Bob, his sons by his second marriage. Next to Bob, Dolly was dressed up in a jade green pants suit with a ruffled copper chiffon blouse, looking gorgeous and wound tight enough for her head suddenly to fly off. Nervousness ticked in her throat like a bomb. Delicately she ate green olives from a glass dish. Neither Shirley nor Carmel was there, of course, left to their own devices. Luis liked to command the attendance of all his children at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, having the money to back up his commands. But Nita was missing. Carmel had insisted she was too sick to go. Then came Celeste, Adele’s eight‑year‑old from her first marriage, Connie herself, and then baby Susan in her high chair on one side of Adele and the toddler Mike on the other side.

Luis, big with pleasure, lorded it now over his full plate and the dinners of everyone else. “Mark, you take more potatoes. That’s how come you’re so skinny. Makes you weak. That’s why you didn’t make the football team. Now, you try out for wrestling, listen to me–you can be skinny in wrestling. You wrestle in your own weight class, see?”

Mark grew red in the face and his fork slumped in his hand.

“Now take Dolly. She doesn’t need to eat to get fat. She just looks at the potatoes and she gains weight, right?”

“I’m not fat, Daddy. I’ve lost all the weight I need to.”

“It won’t last. It’s heredity. Look at your mother. If I didn’t work as hard as I do, I’d be as fat as she is.”

Luis was fat. He’d been fat for twenty years, but he refused to admit it. He talked about weight all the time. He wanted his women to be thin for him, she thought, wondering if she could ask for more turkey yet or if she should wait till it was offered. Dolly sat nervously poised for further attack from Luis. She had grown up thinking her parents married; then had come the period when Luis was proving legally he had never married and she was a bastard. Shirley’s parents would never let her marry a divorced man. But then Dolly had become the child of his first marriage, and since she was eighteen she had been supposed to call him Daddy. Adele was Anglo and they didn’t care how many times you got married, just so it was legal. So Dolly had slid into being his legal up‑front daughter again. If only he could have divorced Connie, his sister, or made her illegitimate, how happy Luis would be!

“Look at your aunt pack it away now. Eats like there’s no tomorrow. If you ate like her, Mark, you’d make the football team for sure. Bob, why aren’t you eating your sweet potatoes? Those are the best part of the meal.”

“They are not I don’t like them, Dad. They taste funny.”

“There’s nothing funny about the way they taste. At your age you don’t know what’s good … . Celeste, what are you doing?”

Celeste jumped. She was happily swishing her candied sweet potatoes, cranberry relish, and broccoli into a multicolored mush, pressing it all together and sculpting it into castles with her fork. “Nothing.”

“Adele, she’s playing with her food again. That’s a disgusting habit. You ought to have that put on your head to wear.”

Adele blinked from her serene, faintly smiling cocoon. Connie watched her sideways, sure she was on something. No wonder Adele got on so well with Luis. She was hardly ever in the same room with him, no more than his fancy guppies swimming behind glass. She tended her two youngest with a casual smiling absentminded air, all the time off somewhere screwing seven‑foot bronze angels on sunset clouds. She could not help speculating what Adele was on. Adele might just be incredibly stoned, but Connie didn’t think so: she was too far off. Downers, most likely.

“Susan?” Adele focused on her baby in the high chair. “Why, she’s a little darling. She ate her pudding all up!”

“It’s Celeste again. Making mud pies with her food!”

“Oh, Celeste,” Adele said with a sweet smile. “You can play afterward. You know that upsets your daddy.” Her long thin hand laden with rings floated like a scarf through the air and sank to rest beside her scarcely touched plate.

Dolly refused seconds, which Luis seductively tried to press on her, pretending he was only teasing. Mark was still toying with his first serving. The twelve‑year‑old Bob ate dark meat and more dark meat, steadily ignoring everybody. He was chubby and darker than anyone else except her, with small chin and black eyes, the Indian nose. Once when he cast a quick survey down the table, she flashed him a private smile; his eyes widening with surprise, he smiled back. Mainly he seemed to be pretending nothing was real except him and the turkey. He raised a screen of strong protection between his father on his right and himself. You will not hurt me! You won’t get through! the screen said. Indeed, Luis seemed to sense the barrier and he pretty much left Bob alone. He tried once. “That Cesar Chavez guy–I see they got him in jail again. Huh? You still got his picture on your bedroom wall?”

But under repeated prodding, Bob would say only, “I like him. He’s got a nice face.”

Connie smiled again at her tough nephew, who went to an Italian parochial school and had a picture of Chavez on his wall. At the table were those wrestling with Luis and those like Bob, Adele, herself, who were noncombatants. Bob and she rivaled Luis in how much they ate and their pleasure in eating. Adele picked politely. She was patting the baby’s face with a napkin and cooing, while she floated in a sky‑high hammock behind her eyes.

After the pumpkin pie, the maple nut ice cream, and the coffee, Luis herded them into the living room she had decorated under his supervision with pots of pink and yellow chrysanthemums, big spidery blooms as big as baby Susan’s head. Mark, Bob, Celeste, and Mike galloped off to the family room one level down to watch TV, but Luis was serving drinks to the adults in the living room. Connie was excused to begin cleaning up. Dolly offered to help. Connie knew what kind of help she’d be, but looked forward to the company.

“No,” Luis said. “Connie can clean up just fine. You stay with us. I don’t see my big girl that often, do I?”

Dolly glanced at her little jeweled watch, then at the numberless blob of clock on the wall that Connie could never read. Vic was to come and pick Dolly up to take her back to the city, once he got done having Thanksgiving dinner with his mother in a restaurant near Leisure World retirement community.

Connie had run the glasses and dishes through the dishwasher and was just starting on the second sinkload of pots, when Dolly burst into the kitchen, weeping. Luis had been teasing her about how she had been talking about marrying Geraldo and nothing had happened.

After Dolly had wept on Connie’s shoulder as so many, so countless many times before, blown her nose, and put her makeup back on layer by delicate layer in the small bathroom off the kitchen, she settled in a chair. “Why did you want so bad to spend Thanksgiving here?” Dolly asked her. “I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to.”

“How come you have to? At least if you go to Carmel she doesn’t make you cry.”

“Yeah, Carmel keeps after me, she just makes me mad.”

“How come you didn’t bring Nita? Is she for real sick?”

“Carmel’s pretending. She doesn’t want to be alone on Thanksgiving. Nita has a little cold, a drippy nose, is all. Carmel says she has her the rest of the time, she gets to keep her holidays. She only did it to spite him. I get caught in the middle. I have to get back to work. He always wants to collect everybody together like some crazy sideshow!” A moment later she was sniveling again. “How can he say I’m fat? How can he? … You know Adele’s only nine years older than me? Just the difference between me and Mark!”

After Adele had put the little ones to bed, she wandered into the kitchen, where Connie and Dolly were putting the dishes away out of the dishwasher here and there, by chance.

“You put the good crystal in the dishwasher!” She was morose now, tense. “You could have broken it all! You don’t do that with crystal. You wash it by hand, of course. Are you so lazy? Or I suppose you’ve never seen a good piece of crystal before.” She was talking to herself. She puttered around the kitchen in low‑pitched sulky anger. Dolly giggled softly; Adele appeared not to hear. We are not three women, Connie thought. We are ups and downs and heavy tranks meeting in the all‑electric kitchen and bouncing off each other’s opaque sides like shiny pills colliding.

She stuffed a bread knife into the hem of her dress and walked carefully upstairs, aware of its swinging and bumping. Again that night Luis locked her in. Lying stiffly on the bed, this time she heard him turn the key in the lock. She went through the empty drawers of the dresser, she went through the shelves of the medicine cabinet, finding aspirin, toothpaste, antiperspirant, shampoo, a room deodorizer. The bedroom window was closed with an air conditioner. The bathroom window opened a foot and a half after she worked on it with the knife for half an hour. Then she leaned out into that drop, two stories to concrete. No vines, no convenient fire escape, no porch or garage roof to drop to. She was still trapped. She worked on the doorjamb till she was drenched with sweat, but could not get the hall door open.

Friday was a big workday and also her last full day outside the hospital. Saturday she was to clean in the morning and then be carried back to Manhattan well before the party. Friday morning she spent cooking dishes for Saturday’s buffet–three large cakes and two mousses for dessert. At two o’clock Luis came home to fetch her, taking her off to his nursery and greenhouses. The other places were just retail outlets. Here she had worked three months for Luis, transplanting, spraying.

Luis drove her over in his white Eldorado, which felt as big as the patient lounge. He had the radio on but after a while he shut it off to launch at her. She sighed and tried to dampen herself to endure.

“You seem pretty quiet this time. Not like the old Connie. Did they finally teach you a lesson in keeping your mouth shut?”

“I been helpful to Adele. Haven’t I been working hard?”

“A lot harder than you’re used to working. If you can call that work. You liked the food yesterday, didn’t you?” He chuckled.

“I cooked it. Didn’t I do a good job?”

“With Adele standing over you, sure. And careful to hide the chili powder. Yeah, you’ve been toned down a bit, taken down a peg or two. I bet you’d be glad for a job in the greenhouse now.”

“Sure I would, Lewis. If you’d sign me out, I’d go to work tomorrow.” She was craning her neck, trying to figure out where they were and how near public transportation. Maybe at the nursery she could get away. She knew exactly how to get back to Manhattan from there; she’d done it every day for three months. She had slipped the money out of her purse, in case he took that from her, and secreted it in her bra, feeling like a spy, a secret agent. It wasn’t too comfortable. The stiff paper rubbed her breast. The nursery looked as it had when she’d worked there, except it was winter now and much less stock stood outside in rows, only what they grew themselves. Most of the stock was shipped to them in spring from the South, from Ohio, even from Texas, brought in by truck.

The greenhouses were full. Luis’s top man, Richie, and his secretary came running after him as soon as he stepped through the door. Luis turned her over to Gino, the sixty‑year‑old grizzled Italian who ran the greenhouses, saying, “Keep an eye on her. She’s crazy as a bedbug and she’s likely to try to bolt. I don’t want to be responsible to that hospital for her escape. So keep one eye on the door. I’m taking her coat to lock up, so she wouldn’t get far … . Now, I want you both to pick out good plants for my house, for the party. We’re having a tropical motif. No gardenias. And I want perfect specimens. No curled leaves, no bug damage, nothing. You go over them and you look and look hard. I want about thirty good ones. No rubber plants. Take a big Norfolk pine. No coleus, no begonias. Take some Dutch amaryllis. Everything’s labeled on the end, Connie, if you don’t remember. Take a big pineapple and a few of the other fancy bromeliads. Take a careful look at the flowering maples and see if any are good enough. No cactus! Some jackass always backs into them. Gino, you pick out orchids yourself. Collect everything by the loading dock and I’ll have the truck deliver it. One of the larger figs might be good. You look at them and pick out whatever’s blooming best or got fruit on. There’s some miniature citrus. Take a look, see if the butterfly lilies are out. Maybe a coffee tree. No Venus flytraps, none of the gruesome ones. Some fool always sticks a cigarette in. Now get moving. And use your eyes. You may be doped up, Connie, so you move like you’ve got lead in your britches, but I want you to use your eyes. Nothing but the best, you hear me?”