Don't I Know You? Read online

  Until a few years ago, she’d kept the money in the mattress, like her mother. But she’d finally needed to replace the mattress—it was like sleeping in a hammock—and the office girl in her had won out and she’d gone to the Apple Bank on Seventy-Fourth and Broadway to open a passbook savings account. They were giving away toasters, and she thought the red apple on their sign was festive, a sign of luck. She earned 2.2% interest and put Michael’s name under hers on the account so he wouldn’t have to pay taxes on it when her time came.

  The mattress she’d replaced by calling 1–800-MATTRESS. One hundred dollars, removal included. The two guys looked too skinny to carry anything. She’d never seen skin as dark. Haitian, she guessed, or the Senegalese who sold African things that smelled strange on blankets up and down Broadway. They’d noticed the slit in the mattress.

  So money was not the problem. And even she knew that he could do fine on his own. Five years ago, when she’d been in the hospital for gallstones, he’d done fine without her. Maybe better. He hadn’t burned the building down. He hadn’t bothered the neighbors. He’d even vacuumed and cleaned the kitchen. He had said, though, that another day by himself and he’d go nuts.

  So, she’d say to herself, staring at the ceiling, What is the problem then?

  That’s when she wept, because her mind shut down at the understanding that dying meant leaving her son. Fine, she thought of saying to the cancer. Take me. What does that have to do with him?

  She’d weep for a minute and then wipe her eyes roughly. “For God’s sake,” she’d say, impatient. She’d pinch lightly at her cheeks and pull back the covers to start her day.

  She told her best friend, Muriel Yablonsky, from down the block. When their kids were young and they had a rare Saturday or Sunday off from the weekend piecework they did at home, they went to the park. Sometimes they only got as far as Louise’s stoop. “Play here,” they’d say to Michael and Muriel’s twin boys, handing them a piece of chalk and a rubber ball.

  Now the twins were grown and living in Jersey, married to blondes Louise couldn’t tell apart. Michael still had his toy wooden gun armed with rubber bands, set to discharge those square pieces of oilcloth. Now the old friends had time to sit at Muriel’s kitchen table, smoke cigarettes over cups of coffee slowly growing cold.

  Before the war, when Elia thought her girl time was up, he’d send Michael to stand in front of Muriel’s windows and yell for her. “Ma! Ma! Pop says come home or he’ll give you something to gab about.” But Elia was the neighborhood softie, walked to his barbershop on Amsterdam Avenue at quarter of eight every morning, came home at quarter past six every night, handing out candy from his coat both ways. He tipped his hat at neighborhood women and threw pitches for the boys playing in the street. He sighed and commiserated with Mr. Kashner who owned the dairy store on the corner. He was Jewish; people thought he was wise.

  When she thought about her life with him, she was astonished to realize how few years it actually covered: thirteen, 1931 to 1944, when the telegram had come. Thirteen out of seventy-three. No time at all, and space enough for a whole life. Her life with him was only part of other lives he’d had: the barbershop, the army, the woman with the Russian accent who’d shown up at the memorial service accompanied by a boy a few years younger than Michael. The boy looked like a miniature Elia. If Louise could see it, everyone else could. But no one had said a thing, then or later. Not when the boy, Nikolai, started showing up on the block, playing with the neighborhood kids, keeping his eye on her. Not when, in his twenties, money coming in from somewhere, dressed in gabardine pants and shirts with French cuffs, he started bringing them things: Prosciutt from Bleeker Street. Rolls from Ratner’s. A couple of bucks for Michael. A scarf for Louise. Once, for a few months, a car he said he needed them to watch.

  Being around Muriel always reminded Louise that marrying a Jew didn’t mean she was a Jew. And Italian Jew wasn’t real Jew. Muriel was a real Jew. Her parents had been Socialists, her father had built row houses in Philadelphia, her mother had written letters and filled out forms for the other Jews who didn’t speak English. In the seventies, Muriel had divorced her tailor husband and started dying her hair orange and wearing caftans and dangling wooden earrings. She volunteered as a reading teacher at a school in the Bronx, and invited the kids to her house and used them for her courses at Columbia. She was getting a degree in education. Louise had seen one of the experiments once. It had involved filling water glasses of different shapes to various levels and asking the kids questions about them. Muriel had seemed excited by the answers.

  The kettle was whistling. Muriel let it. “Jesus Christ, Louise,” she said. “You gotta let the doctors do what they’re trained to do.”

  “The kettle,” Louise said. She poked through the bowl of hard candy on Muriel’s table, searching for butterscotch.

  Muriel poured hot water into the mugs. She was making Louise drink tea. Something herbal from that crazy health food place on Broadway. The tea strainer looked like it was filled with dirt.

  “You got coffee?” Louise asked again.

  “You’re not having coffee,” Muriel said.

  Louise didn’t argue. Both women were hard workers, their households smoothly running machines. But Muriel was better at getting what she wanted by way of announcement. Louise was better by way of endurance.

  “Coffee would be good,” Louise said.

  “Coffee’s not good for you,” Muriel said.

  Louise nodded and shrugged.

  Muriel sighed and started filling the percolator.

  “What about Michael?” Muriel asked.

  Louise admired that say-anything-to-anybody quality, but each time she was witness to it, it took her by surprise, as if one of her elderly aunts had reached over and shoved her.

  “He’ll be okay,” she said.

  Muriel was quiet.

  “There’s money,” Louise said. It felt funny to say out loud. It was like hearing her voice on tape. Once, she and Michael had squeezed into a booth in the music store on Amsterdam and made a record to send to Elia in the army. Michael had refused to talk. It was a recording of coaxing broken by long silences. The record had picked up his breathing.

  “Maybe Nikolai could help,” Muriel said quietly. They hadn’t talked about him much. Muriel would look at the new air conditioner in the bedroom window, the Mr. Coffee, the new TV, and neither of them would ever raise the obvious questions.

  Louise shrugged. “He doesn’t owe us,” she said. Nick had left the city a decade ago. Married a China girl and left. It had surprised Louise, but how well had she known him anyway? Sometimes he still sent money, no return address. After he left, Manuel and Tina had come back to the building. Louise didn’t know why they’d given up the fancy doorman job Nikolai had gotten them, but she was glad they were back.

  “Michael’ll be fine,” she went on, as if she were talking about being away for a couple of hours.

  “Money’s not what I meant,” Muriel said.

  Louise turned the butterscotch around inside her mouth. It was the taste of special treats and sickness all at once.

  “What’s he gonna do without you?” Muriel asked.

  The coffee was percolating in the top of the coffeemaker. Louise tried to concentrate on it. She waved away the smoke from her cigarette. “What he’s always done.”

  Muriel gave her her social worker look. “Can he do that without you?”

  Louise shrugged. She didn’t say anything. What did it matter what he could or couldn’t do? Whoever said anyone was getting a choice?

  Thursday, she took Michael to Coney Island.

  “The beach?” he said, looking to the ceiling as if checking the weather.

  “The beach,” she said. “We’ll take a walk.”

  “It’s a long ride,” he said.

  “Yes, it is,” she said.

  On the way to the subway station, she handed him the Baggie with the four tokens. “Take two out for now,” she said
. “Put the others in your pocket for coming home.”

  He did as he was told, then slipped his hand into hers.

  They had to change twice. By the last stop in Manhattan, the subway was empty except for a Puerto Rican teenager at the end of the car. She looped her handbag strap around her wrist.

  “No one’s going to the beach,” Michael said.

  “We’re going,” Louise answered. “Maybe he’s going,” she added.

  “I don’t like the beach,” her son said. He was still holding her hand.

  “I like it,” she said. “It’s where I met your father.”

  “I know,” he said.

  And then it was too loud to talk. She concentrated on where she was.

  She’d been lying on a blanket with her three girlfriends, getting as much warmth from each other as from the sun. Rosa, Allegrina, and Cookie. When one of them turned, they all turned.

  Louise looked like their kid sister. Short and thin, her chest flat, her hair frizzy and wild. Worse on the beach.

  Each neighborhood had its own bay, a stretch about two blocks wide. Bay 10 was Italian. The Jewish kids walked over from the other side of Ocean Parkway to Bay 7. Bays 8 and 9 were empty. Two bays completely empty.

  Elia had crossed the empty strip of beach and stood in front of their blanket, his shadow across their legs. His black hair was slicked back. His eyes were olive green. He was completely dry but looked as if he’d just stepped from the water. She’d almost expected him to stretch and sigh.

  He’d smiled at all of them with good teeth. “Ladies,” he’d said.

  Cookie had sat up and struck her pinup pose. “Gentleman,” she’d said.

  “Come take a walk with me,” he’d said to Louise, holding out a hand with thin fingers tapering to well-kept nails.

  So they’d walked down the beach, Louise careful to keep their arms from touching. He bought himself a hot dog, French fries, and a large ear of roasted corn. He offered her whatever she wanted, but she said no. It didn’t seem right to have a stranger spend twenty-five cents on her. He’d wiped his fingers on his thighs. Now she remembered almost nothing about their conversation. Had she talked at all? But at the end of the boardwalk, he’d buried his nose in her hair. She remembered that. She’d wished for Allegrina’s silky straight hair, and she had to keep herself from pulling away.

  “You smell like something,” he said.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  He took her hand and cupped it, upside down, in his.

  She resisted the unlikely impulse to snap the waistband of his bathing trunks.

  Later, his reputation as a solid, reliable, decent man would be so convincing that she’d be surprised when she remembered that their life had begun that way. Maybe that’s why the Russian woman at the service hadn’t stopped her short. Maybe there’d been women like that one all along. Maybe he hadn’t kept secrets from her. Maybe she’d done that to herself.

  A stop away from Ocean Parkway, she felt a disturbance in the air, as if someone had opened the doors while the train was still moving. She checked. Michael was there. He was looking at the teenager, whose chin was against his chest. The boy seemed to be asleep.

  “You see that?” Michael said.

  Louise had that feeling that she sometimes got with her son, that she was being addressed by a stranger.

  “No,” she said. She didn’t know if she had the energy for this.

  He sat up a little straighter and rested his hands on his knees. “That guy’s looking at me.”

  She weighed her options. “Looks like he’s sleeping,” she said.

  Michael snorted. She was being thick. It was his cross to bear. “He’s not sleeping,” he said. “He’s got his eye on me.” He shifted his weight from side to side, gripped the edge of the plastic seat, and called the boy a name under his breath.

  Cursing was never a good sign.

  She put a hand on his wide shoulder and rubbed slow circles. “Our stop next,” she said, but it was like she wasn’t there.

  “Hey,” he called out. “Hey, fella.” He said “fella” like the two guys in the building who had moved in last year. Roommates, they said.

  It took the teenager a minute to realize Michael was talking to him.

  “I see you,” Michael said.

  “Michael Ermanno,” Louise said. Sometimes that worked.

  The teenager was still slumped in his chair, but now he was awake, watching Michael. He tucked his hand in the waistband of his jeans and left it there. “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “No,” Michael said, rising. “You can’t.”

  For Louise, it was like trying to stand in open water too far from shore. Michael’s episodes were like waves lifting her off her feet. The effect was cumulative. Enough waves and you felt like your whole life was open water.

  This episode went the way they all did. Maybe better than some. Michael did his stamping and snorting. The boy did his. Louise made her usual attempts to calm things down. Michael had his reactions. She landed almost softly on one of the seats, a railing nearby to hold on to. The boy watched her fall and stepped back. The doors opened at Ocean Parkway, and he left.

  They watched him disappear down the stairs, and then the doors closed.

  She patted the seat next to her and told Michael to sit down, and he did, his shoulder rocking against hers as the train started to move back the way they had come.

  She’d known about the cancer for close to three weeks. Fall had arrived for good. Children were resigned to their school-year routine and didn’t argue with their parents on the way up the block in the morning. They came running down the hill in the afternoon, backpacks dangling by a strap and hitting the sidewalk like the cans and shoes behind a newlyweds’ car. “Stay where I can see you,” the mothers called out. “Stop at the corner.” The fancy new mothers in the neighborhood sent their children to progressive private schools and donated to all the right things, but the longtime residents made them nervous. Ashamed, they smiled at the black teenage fathers sitting on their stoops with their toddlers and the loud, unintelligible music coming from their boom boxes. They nodded to the Dominican handymen playing dominos on card tables at the top of the basement stairs. But they were ready to throw themselves on their children in an instant. They were Secret Service agents, one hand on the hood of the president’s car.

  Louise saw all this from her window. She sat sidesaddle on the radiator cover, her back against the lower sash. Though the air was chilly, the window was open wide enough for her hand and the cigarette in it, the smoke moving in the air like breath.

  The Daily News and the Post were on the kitchen table. Page one of the Post said NABBED! over a photo of a man getting into a car. She didn’t read the story. On page three of the News, there was a small article with no byline. EX-HUSBAND NABBED AFTER TWELVE YEARS.

  When Louise got her second cup of coffee and sat to read, she almost didn’t make it to page three, but she forced herself for the sake of routine. He had lied. He’d been in New York that day. His second ex-wife said that he and Gina had been “negotiating a new financial arrangement.” There had been some disagreement. He was going to New York to work it out. Someone had seen him sitting in a car around the corner from the building. Someone else had seen him on the stairs. There were flight records. The defense said it was nothing but circumstantial evidence. The DA said the evidence might be circumstantial, but it was strong circumstantial evidence. Evidence was evidence.

  Louise’s old suspicions came spilling out inside of her. The old arguments surfaced. It was crazy. Whatever Michael was, he wasn’t a murderer. Was it crazy? He’d been down Gina and Steven’s that night, but he was always down Gina and Steven’s on Tuesday nights. They watched the nature shows together. He hadn’t come home covered in blood. But still, for two days he’d been someone she hadn’t recognized. For two days, someone she didn’t know.

  She’d thought about telling someone then. The police had interviewed both of them lat
e that night, and again a few days later. Michael hadn’t seemed suspicious to them. He’d said he’d gone down for his usual Tuesday night thing, but no one had been home, so he’d gone to the store instead. He’d hung out there, and then he’d come home.

  What was she going to tell the police? That he hadn’t turned on the TV or the radio in two days? That he’d skipped his daily dominoes game in the park? That he ate standing up? Avoided his favorite chair? Took a shower three times in one day? These were things that meant he was a murderer? She’d been stabbed and there wasn’t a spot of blood on his clothes. But he’d come home in his undershirt, without his top shirt. It wasn’t the first time he’d come home missing something, no idea where it had gone, but still.

  He’d avoided his bed. For two nights, she’d found him in the living room, lying on his back between the couch and the wall. He’d pulled the couch away from the wall to make space for himself. She’d sat in the armchair across the room from him both nights, neither of them saying a word about it the following mornings.

  But even that was just that: strange boys did strange things. It wasn’t anything like proof.

  The police were more interested in Louise, anyway. They told her that Gina’s phone records had indicated a call to her right around the time of death.

  Louise’s skin had tingled. She’d almost laughed. Yes, she’d said, she’d gotten a call, but she hadn’t known who it was. The sounds had been incoherent. A crank, she’d thought. And they’d believed her.

  She hadn’t recognized the voice, but she’d recognized that somebody was in horrible pain, and she hadn’t done anything.

  So she hadn’t told anyone about Michael, not even Muriel. Instead, she’d played cop. She checked her knife drawer. She poked around Michael’s room when he was out. She asked him questions she felt ridiculous asking, checking the story he’d told the police. She asked the Puerto Ricans if Michael had been any trouble that night in the store. He had been there and he hadn’t been any trouble, but they couldn’t remember exactly when or for how long.