When in doubt, tell stories.
There they were, round and puffed up in their winter coats, standing in her doorway around the corner from Barney Greengrass, her mother and father. She often spent Sunday mornings in Barney's lox and bagel establishment, doing the puzzle, reading the wedding notices with a rich mixture of envy and contempt. Delaying the time when she'd have to return to the empty apartment. She fought tooth and nail for this, this barely furnished, drafty studio, four blocks from the slipcovers and cushy carpeting of the family home. Now, she was stuck with it, its provisional feel, the high ceiling echo of its loneliness. Backpedaling was not an option.
The shaming and blaming went on for weeks. They weren't a screaming family. Too decorous. They were more of a sulking family. When things got really bad, her mother would take to her bed with a Victorian lack of amusement. Her father made it clear he didn't think she could manage living alone, paying the rent, that he couldn't understand why she wanted to live three blocks north and one block east when she had a perfectly good room with a matching maple headboard, dresser and desk at home. In the end, she hung in and moved out, her greatest adult accomplishment to date.
When she was small, she liked to bury her face in her mother's fur coat, an unexpected encounter between otherwise unacquainted mammals. She'd seen seals, sleek and dripping, sunning themselves on the rocks overlooking their pool at the Central Park zoo. But the coat, though dead, was more approachable. In the doorway, however, her mother was not wearing the Alaskan seal and this was noteworthy given the bone-shattering cold of the February day. Her mother was more modestly dressed in a gray cloth coat with no color at the neck. Funereal, Randy thought, bordering on churchy. Her father wore his signature fedora, but that didn't mean anything since he never left home without it. She'd been dusting the New York soot off her bookshelves and wasn't expecting them. Damn, it looked serious. Grandma was already dead so it wasn't that kind of emergency. But it was clearly something.
What do you say when you're twenty-two and your parents appear unannounced at your door? Surely not "can I get you something," since Randy didn't have a thing to offer. Her fridge was stocked with the remains of last night's mushroom pizza, an ancient, shriveled grapefruit and a jar of stuffed olives. She looked at the two of them and they looked at her, not even taking off their coats. They had something to say and, apparently, they were going to say it.
Randy's mother and father sat down on the couch, a slab of foam rubber covered in some muddy brown synthetic material and settled their swollen feet on the orange-lollipop colored rug she bought at Macy's. Her friend, Joanne, wondered why she'd bought a rug when she wasn't even married.
"We got a call," her mother launched in with a blank expression on her face. "From someone named Leila Weiss. We don't know her. We had no idea who she was. She said she was getting divorced," and here her father chimed in so that the words came out in stereo. "She's naming you as the co-respondent in her divorce case."
Randy didn't know what a co-respondent was. It sounded like something you were responsible for learning about in high school, in algebra class or English, maybe a part of speech. Randy didn't know Leila Weiss either, had never met her. But the name registered, rang a carillon of bells. It was clear that the call had come from Mark's wife. Mark was her boyfriend.
She met him in the elevator of the office building downtown where she was working as the intake person for civil cases at the Legal Aid Society, the next best thing to finishing law school. She had high hopes for law school, how she'd eventually be sitting behind an enormous desk with a great many telephones. But law school was a fucking nightmare. Four women in an advancing battalion of male faces, the professor calling on them randomly to analyze cases. Property. Contracts. She tried to make herself even smaller than she was, willing herself invisible and it must have worked because in the six sleepless weeks she was there at BU she never got called on. Not once. She didn't exist.
At Legal Aid, she had an alcove at the front with a desk, not enormous, but all hers. Clients would come in and sit opposite her and she got to ask them all sorts of personal questions about their income, their domestic arrangements, the installments remaining on their kitchen appliances. Mostly, it was landlord-tenant or slip and fall. People were either being evicted for being in arrears on their rent or they were trying to sue the city for failing to repair the sidewalk outside the building where they weren't paying their rent, so that they could get enough money together to pay their rent. She was six months out of college and it was her first real job. She loved it. For some reason, it was a slow season for family law so she wasn't up on the pertinent legal jargon. Had never run across a client who was being named as a co-respondent. This was virgin territory although that ship had sailed a number of years back.
Mark was a forty year old married accountant, but kind of good looking. Jeez. They were both standing in the elevator holding cups of scalding, undistinguished coffee. He caught her eye and gave Randy a sheepish smile that felt empowering. She was needing that bad after she had to drag her father up to Boston to bail her out of BU back in October. The two of them were ushered into an office wallpapered with framed diplomas for an expensive and mortifying negotiation. The dean noted that women weren't really cut out for the law. He and her father didn't seem at all surprised that she was packing up and going home. Expectations fulfilled.
Her parents had only met Mark once. It was New Year's Eve. The two of them had planned a big night, dinner out then maybe some music. But on the thirtieth, Randy woke up with a toothache so over-the-top that it dwarfed everything else in the world. There was only the toothache. It turned out to be an impacted wisdom tooth that had to come out immediately. If the dentist hadn't been her father's cousin, a grizzled person with medieval dental equipment, she never would have gotten an appointment right before the holiday. She probably would have been forced to kill herself. As it was, she had the thing extracted and crawled back to her parent's apartment, crushed, defeated and stoned on Percocet.
Mark came by at around eight with a dozen purple roses. Her mother was extremely impressed. He had taken off his wedding ring and just looked like an attractive Columbia graduate, which he was. A tad old, true, but charming and solicitous. Randy was lying on the couch, a slab of foam rubber covered in gold brocade. She was close to suffocating under a pile of blankets. Through the narcotic fog, she saw the two of them, Mark falling in age precisely between her and her mother. The scent of the roses mixed with the smell of her own unwashed body nauseated her. She mumbled a weak thank you and turned away.
Now, her father was looking at the orange rug. Randy could see that he was trying to make eye contact with her, but couldn't quite pull it off. "Just tell him you can't see him anymore," he suggested, sighing with weariness and resignation.
"Of course, we know it isn't true," her mother added, tight-lipped. "What this awful woman said. It's unthinkable that this Leila Weiss would lay this in our lap. Call us and say you were involved with her husband. Involved in that way," she added with emphasis. "Your father and I know you'd never do anything like that."
And Randy thought, I can't get credit for anything. Not even being a half-way decent bad girl.
Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com