Me for You Page 3

  “The café is fine, everything will be fine,” he reassured the young woman. “You’ll probably be its most polite customer.” He felt guilty for wishing that his daughter were as sweetly vulnerable as this girl. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been helpful to CeCe. She didn’t even need him to watch Keira very often, having a teenage neighbor who was more conveniently located.

  “Thank you.” The woman’s hand touched the shoulder of Rudy’s suit jacket. The thing was impenetrable. Still, he felt a human touch atop the stiff fabric. “Your playing is so lovely.” Finally, she had a good handle on the baby and diaper bag. Rudy handed her her shopping bag.

  “Shopping, with a baby,” the woman said, shaking her head at herself. “I’m a real genius.”

  “You are doing great,” Rudy told her.

  Rosemary Smith, the smooth, but robotic PA cooed over their heads. Rosemary Smith.

  “Who are those people calling?” he asked the woman, who artfully balanced baby, stroller strapped with shopping bags, and her diaper sack. “Do you ever wonder? If those are even real names?”

  The woman shrugged and laughed. “I know. Is it some kind of code? And is that even a human voice?” She was able to laugh the PA lady off, while Rudy couldn’t shake her. “Well, thank you again.” After sliding her baby back into the stroller, she gave Rudy a little wave.

  Rudy bowed his head regally, grateful for the first time for a customer encounter. He might go an entire day barely interacting with another person.

  And then mother and child disappeared among rounders of scarves and piles of purses, toward the elevators. Rudy felt a pang of missing them. Suddenly he wanted to tell Sasha, his best store-friend (okay, his only store-friend), about his visitors. About the breast pad! Was that too crass? Too intimate? Nah. Sasha had an easy sense of humor with a spark. He stood, smoothed over his jacket and hair, and headed toward Watches.

  3

  While Sasha’s second job was less glamorous, the time certainly passed more quickly cleaning the ladies’ locker room at the fancy gymnasium, which stood—like a giant peach stucco cake—at the edge of the town of Los Alnos. While she tidied and cleaned, she listened to the women chat as they changed in and out of their gym clothes. Sasha didn’t understand why American women bragged about their lack of sleep as though it were a badge of honor. They had a way of complaining that was sprinkled with an odd pride. For some reason, they wrestled to outdo each other. Especially when it came to their children. The children were such a burden! Apparently few of the women who lived in the town worked. They were stay-at-home moms, although their children seemed to mostly be in after-school programs until 5. (They had bitter conversations about having to pick them up on the hour sharp—they charged you if you didn’t!—and cook supper.) To Sasha, kids were a blessing, for she had lost a child of her own. Not a baby, a little girl. Stefania. Stefi: blond braids, orange popsicle–stained lips, forever singing in the back seat. This loss wasn’t something Sasha had shared with anyone in America because talking about it made her disintegrate. If that was even the correct English word. She called her girlfriends back in Hungary, but the time change, the expense . . . The truth was she wished she had an American friend to tell about Stefi. She almost told Renee from Chanel at the department store, but it’s not like Sasha could break down behind the Swiss Army Watches.

  Sasha figured the women complained because they were ashamed of their good fortune. They couldn’t say, Look at us, at the gym, at three in the afternoon! How lucky! Instead they seemed to feel they had to begrudge their lives—their husbands and children. Ugh, I’ve got to get Billy now. It was five o’clock. What did they think Billy was going to do, take a taxi to an after-school supper club?

  They didn’t marvel, as Sasha had when she first saw the enormous flower arrangements in the lobby and dressing room, towering with birds of paradise, anthuriums, red ginger, and tuberose—as though the gym were a Hawaiian resort. Sometimes the women lounged after their showers, with their hair and bodies wrapped in fluffy clean white towels—on the high-backed leather-cushioned benches before the big TV. They’d rest and watch cooking shows—aproned people cheerful about aioli-anything they were making: seared ahi tuna served on basmati rice, toasted on the bottom in a fry pan.

  “How do they get the fish not to stick?” Sasha asked the semicircle of lounging women, embarrassed by her phraseology. These California foods were mostly new to her—quite unlike Hungarian fare.

  “Lots of olive oil!” Two of the ladies laughed. “What do you eat at home?”

  “You know, paprika, goulash?” she asked, and they all laughed.

  These women undoubtedly went out for dinner many nights, probably only taking tiny bites of their food.

  Meanwhile, Sasha had to tamp down her enthusiasm for how luxurious this gymnasium was. She treated the locker room with the same nonchalance she would have for a bus station. Still! The endless pile of bright white, sweet-smelling warm towels, fresh from the dryer. The chair masseuse in the hall. The clean smells of lotion and deodorant and hairspray. Women with rosy cheeks from exercise and a hot shower.

  Rudolph, the gentleman who played the piano across the way from Sasha at the department store, called the fitness club the Peach Fortress. From the outside, the facility loomed like a giant, peach-colored stucco citadel. Why the architecture in California was so ugly, Sasha didn’t understand. There was no lack of money, yet everything looked cobbled together in conflicting styles: Spanish arches, Roman pillars, stucco here, aluminum there. The cars in the parking lot were so fancy that the club continually had trouble with break-ins. Really, Sasha hadn’t seen so many expensive cars in one place—like they belonged to the attendees for a ball at a palace. She parked with the other employees in a lot across the street. Finally walking into the locker room was pleasant. She’d grown to like the clean smells of chlorine and baby powder and shampoo, in contrast to the perfumed department store.

  Rudy’s wife, who had died of a heart attack, used to come to the gym to walk on the treadmill and to swim laps in the pool. He obviously missed his Bethany so much! He commented that, while his wife was among the sweetest persons he knew, she could be bitingly funny. Sasha liked the idea of humor being something that could bite. It made her smile. Rudy said that the club demonstrated Bethany’s ass-to-ring ratio theory about the town of Los Alnos. Rudolph’s Bethany said that the smaller the women’s bottoms were, the larger their diamond rings, the sleeker their cellular phones, and the bigger their sport vehicles. Sasha laughed, because it was true; they were all quite tiny and fit, with rings that you couldn’t help but notice.

  Given the fancy cars and giant diamonds and amount of leisure time these well-clad ladies had, Sasha assumed they’d never give her the time of day. So she was surprised to find that most of the women were actually quite nice; looking at her nametag and calling her by name—meeting her gaze to say hello. Hi, Sasha, and how are you? They looked her in the eye—Americans did this; they were outgoing and friendly. Most of the gym attendees picked up their towels and carried them to the hampers, and a few even wiped the counters with a paper towel when they were done fixing their hair and doing their makeup, and they often thanked Sasha. She wore her employee uniform of black slacks of any type other than denim, any type of white shirt with a collar, and her nametag.

  When Stefania had been alive, Sasha would make her dinner as soon as she got home from work. Gabor, on disability, clearly wasn’t too disabled to get the meal started for her, yet he never did. He could have put on the big pot of water for red potatoes. His injuries were relatively minor. They’d both taken a terrible fall together, yet Sasha continued to work despite having broken two vertebrae, while Gabor put off having a recommended hip replacement. Sasha suspected that drinking and inactivity contributed to his ailments. Still, in a way, Sasha was glad she did not have to nurse Gabor. She felt guilty about this, but it was true. She couldn’t imagine working two jobs, caring for Stefi, taking care of the hous
e and meals, and having a post-surgery husband.

  Gabor was one of those people who took others down with him. He was not only impossible to help but also had a way of enmeshing you in his problems and making them yours, too. Always perceiving himself as a victim—the world ganging up on him in a conspiratorial way. Perhaps this paranoia was fueled by alcohol, but he really believed this in his skewed worldview. Even to the point of blaming those trying to help him. Gabor could ruin everything from a nice moment to an entire party, all the while convinced he’d been wronged in some way.

  In fact, he had been the one to injure Sasha—to literally take her down with him. They’d been walking home from a neighbor’s Christmas party back in Hungary, their young Stefi at home with a babysitter. Gabor had had way too much vodka and glug to drink. You were supposed to have one or the other. As they teetered, he clung to Sasha’s arm, even though he was twice her weight. They slid dangerously along the icy sidewalks. “Please,” Sasha pleaded. “Slide your feet, don’t lift them.” She tried to steer them, slipping along with care. She pushed her shoulder into Gabor, as though he were a heavy wind that could tip her over. He lifted his right arm to begin a rant, a continued conversation from the party, a conversation of which Sasha hadn’t even been a part. His thick-gloved hand shot into the air.

  “Oh, people think—” His disdain was cut off curtly by their fall. As his gloved hand scooped and clawed frantically at the air, he lost his bearings. Sasha realized in retrospect that she should have let go of him. But his grip was strong. And he made the verboten mistake on ice—he lifted his foot and then they were both cartwheeling backward, his heel high in the air as though he’d just kicked a football. All of this was in slow motion, Sasha trying again to uncurl her arm from his grip, and then they were down, on their backs, neither of them using hands to break the fall because by then Gabor had their hands entwined in a mess, and Sasha’s left hand was burrowed in her pocket for warmth. She felt and heard the sudden, sharp crack that was like a long icicle snapping in half inside her. A pain shot through her abdomen. She turned her head in time to vomit into the snow, the surge of adrenaline and pain passing through her throat, burning her esophagus on the way, all their lovely Christmas dinner coming up and up and up.

  Gabor, his coat thick, his drunken body loose enough to somehow rubberize in the fall, began to laugh. He had smacked the back of his head, but only after his coat and hat and hood absorbed most of the fall, so it was a light smack. (A goose egg revealed itself later, along with the hip injury.) For the moment, he just sat there, removing his woolen cap, rubbing the back of his hair vigorously, and laughing, laughing, and trying to pull Sasha up, not realizing that something inside her was very broken.

  “Too much of the spirits, eh?” he asked. (She’d only had two small cups of punch.)

  “I’m hurt,” she sobbed, her entire body wracked with pain, the pain of the broken vertebrae—later in the hospital the X-ray showed that they were broken—but also from the awkward twist she’d quickly made so as not to throw up on herself, which seemed like the only thing that could make the situation any worse.

  “Oh, now,” Gabor said tenderly, realizing that she was, indeed, hurt. “Let’s get you inside and put your feet by the fire.”

  “I can’t move,” Sasha said in a whisper so serious that Gabor sobered up a notch. He took off his coat and laid it over Sasha, and rushed into their house to call the ambulance as Stefi wailed in the background.

  In his retelling of the tale, they’d both drunk too much, were laughing and singing, and fell together on their way home. Gabor, the sturdier one, was fine, but Sasha, his dear, delicate Sasha, broke her back. In his mind, he had truly rescued her, quickly covering her with his coat and running inside to call the ambulance, patiently waiting by her bedside as the X-rays were developed, confirming the breaks. Sasha shuddered whenever she recalled lying under her husband’s coat, for the first time appreciating the cold—how the sidewalk numbed the pain a bit—wishing she had drunk more. Before the ambulance arrived, Sasha knew that she must, somehow, at some time, get a divorce if at all possible. For her husband would forever be doing this, taking her down with him. Down, down, down, until she was buried under the frozen earth.

  Just last week, Sasha received a phone call from Gabor (drunk, at 8 a.m.!) to report that he and his young, pregnant girlfriend had moved out of their house. “Their” meaning Sasha and Gabor’s tiny place two houses in from the highway, the one they’d finally bought after renting for ten years in California. In the divorce agreement Gabor had yet to sign, Gabor was to buy Sasha out, but she said she’d wait until he could, figuring it was good to at least hold on to the property. Property! A house! But then Gabor had gotten laid off from yet another job and could no longer make the mortgage payments. He had asked Sasha if she would move in and take over the payments so he and his girlfriend, about whom Sasha was surprisingly complacent, could find a cheap rental. Sasha agreed.

  But when she’d gotten back to their house, Sasha found the power was out, the property taxes were due, and the mortgage was two months in arrears. The bank that had cheerily refinanced the home just three years prior, even encouraging Sasha to take a bigger line of equity than she wanted, was no longer the lender. The new bank was about as sympathetic as the Mafia. Sasha had taken an entire day off from both jobs to make progressively humiliating phone calls, but wound up making no progress, except for smoking again for the first time in twelve years, after which she was sick. The sick made her cry, and the crying made her want to lie down, and the lying down made her hate herself. Why had she left Gabor in the house in the first place? Why didn’t she stay and take care of the only home she’d ever owned?

  Now, as she refilled the little cotton ball and Q-tip canisters in the club locker room, she worried about the long list of paperwork required by the mortgage remodification company. This company was legitimate, her friend Freda, a nurse at the dermatologist’s she once visited, assured her. Still, Sasha was overwhelmed by the fact that the first thing she had to do was write the officer at the remod company a check, and a cover letter she was certain would show her limited English abilities. Then there was the pile of paperwork to collect. She had begun the search and assembly and it was overwhelming.

  She sat at the counter for one of the makeup and hair dryer stations. As she wiped a counter that was sticky with hairspray, she paused to examine herself in the giant mirror. If she had one marked characteristic, it was her pale blue-gray eyes. Yet she’d never liked them. She’d always wished they were a more glamorous blue. Blue topaz. Her blond hair was well below her shoulders now. Upon close examination, the ends were brittle and the roots could use color. Darker roots made her feel cheap. She found her skin to be too thin, sometimes showing bluish veins in her forehead. She wished her eyes weren’t the blue of something faded; something that once was, or could be, better. Gabor’s new young wife had those bright topaz-blue eyes. Sasha’s were more like stones underwater, made larger by her glasses, which she hated, too.

  She remembered when Rudy first came by her station at Nordstrom. “We both wear glasses,” he’d remarked. “But I like yours better.” Today, he’d come by to tell her a story about a woman who had been breast-feeding by the piano. “And then her renegade nursing pad shot clear across the floor!” he’d exclaimed, blushing furiously. Sasha had never been close friends with a man before, but Rudy was such a gentleman, unlike any other men she knew. His story was funny, and they had laughed, but not unkindly, at this poor woman, who was as overwhelmed as they were. Sasha knew that Rudy had probably shown this woman a kindness that mattered, and made her feel better. Just as he made Sasha feel good about herself, even optimistic about life, for the first time in she didn’t know how long.

  One day he offered to help Sasha find new health insurance! He had offered up this idea as he saw her in the break room eating a box of plain Cheerios with her tea because she said her stomach was on fire. He asked why she didn’t go to the do
ctor.

  “Co-pay too much with my insurance,” Sasha had explained, sitting up straighter so that perhaps it would appear that her stomach did not burn with pain. Both her stomach and her back. The two of them screaming to outdo each other. She had spread out the company’s open-enrollment insurance papers on a table in the break room, unsure what to choose.

  “Please, may I help you look over the options?” Rudy asked. “I’ll stop by Watches later.” His face reddened a bit, and he bustled out of the break room, sloshing a bit of coffee on his way.

  “He wants to take care of you,” Renee from the Chanel counter teased. “ ‘Stop by Watches.’ ”

  They both giggled.

  Later, Rudy visited her counter and surprised Sasha by politely apologizing, while making eye contact with the Swiss Army Watches. He insisted he didn’t want to intrude, but did want to help.

  “Oh, but I could use the help.” Sasha lowered her head to meet Rudy’s kind gaze.

  They agreed to have coffee.

  As Sasha put out new Kleenex boxes and fresh clean towels at the gym, she felt a little thrill at being single—that Rudy and she would have coffee and he might be able to help her with the bureaucratic paperwork she’d been consumed by lately.

  When Gabor left Sasha for a younger woman, Sasha was surprised by the fact that she felt relief. There were times when she could not face all the personalities Gabor transformed into with alcohol. She lived with the four people that she supposed many who live with a poorly functioning alcoholic knew well. After the first two drinks there was the chatty, garrulous, sometimes amorous drunk. Bristly kisses smelling of cigarettes and vodka. It was beyond her how vodka could be so odorless in the bottle yet reek on a man’s breath. Then the third and fourth drink brought the argumentative drunk. The circular arguments never worth having. Once, over how long to microwave a hot dog! Even when she didn’t reply, Gabor managed to keep the argument alive himself, directing angry proclamations at her. It was an oppressive combativeness because it was directed at whatever she was doing. Cleaning the kitchen: Why that way? Why? She would retreat to different parts of their small house, to read, to pretend to be able to concentrate on a book. He would declare “Eh, sulking!” and then turn on the television and ask her what she would watch with him, and she would say she didn’t care or would name something. Either way there was a combative answer. Then there was the passed out Gabor. You’d think it would be a relief, but he was always fully clothed, facedown, head tipped to one side, glasses on but askew, shoes on, hanging off the end of the bed, large and heavy and immovable so that Sasha could barely peel back the covers to get into bed herself, as he was usually stretched diagonally across the center. She would put on her pajamas and curl back what covers she could, then roll up earplugs and stuff them in her ears, because Gabor’s drunken snoring kept her awake. (The doctor diagnosed his snoring as apnea, worsened by drinking.) The next morning’s light always exposed the fourth personality: the cranky, hungover alcoholic. The crankiness was certainly worsened by the apnea, which the doctor explained interrupts the sleep pattern as many as sixty or seventy times a night. Combined with the booze, it made Gabor succumb to gurgling choking bursts of louder snorting snores every few minutes that frightened and woke Sasha even through the earplugs.