The Sixteenth of June Read online

  “So,” she said. “Get you anything? Soda? Coffee?” She pronounced coffee as if it had a w. Cawfee.

  “No, thank you, Mrs. Reed. I just—”

  “Iris. Please.” She gestured for him to sit on the couch while she took the recliner. “An easy visitor. My favorite kind.” She tossed him a smile.

  Stephen glanced around the room. The television set, an old model with wood paneling, sat beside a glass-tower stereo system with a record player, trinkets displayed on top: framed pictures, snow globes, souvenirs. If only June could see.

  “So you’re here to get the report, huh?” Iris nodded from the chair. Her robe was secured over flannel pajamas. She wore big, fluffy slippers in the shape of cats.

  “Nora’s worried about you. She can’t help it. Leo says one day we’ll be able to do phone calls with video feed—” Stephen stopped himself. He was babbling. Nora’s mom seemed to be taking him in, watching how this Yale kid, this alleged best friend, was doing. He took a breath, steadied himself. “It’s hard for her, being away. I think it makes her feel better to have a friend come see you.”

  “To make sure I’m not croaking and not telling her about it. Which, let’s face it, I would do.” Iris reached over to the side table and drew forth a glass filled with breadsticks. “It helps,” she said, encouraging him.

  With what? he thought, mystified, taking one. The nausea? Or did she mean that it helped in such moments to have a prop? Something to point with, something to munch on? Something to break the awful silence?

  “What’s there to say?” She shrugged and snapped her breadstick in half. “The radiation is like punching in at a job. You go, you sit, you leave. There’s nothing to tell, really.”

  “They weren’t supposed to do radiation,” Nora had said on the phone. “I’m worried it means she’s worse.”

  “Scars, sure. Different machines, different side effects. But otherwise it’s the same. I tried telling Nora, it’s just to shrink the tumor. Then they’ll go back to the chemo again. I’ll tell you, though, the change is refreshing. Just to be doing something different.”

  Iris munched on her breadstick and nodded as though discussing current events. “They’re the generals, you know. The docs give you the plan. Your job is to show up. You try not to complain too much. If you complain, it affects things. They think you can’t take it. The radiation is just a different weapon. Same war, different weapon.”

  Stephen had the sensation of having wandered into a stranger’s house, of having to kill time until someone would fetch him. As though he were a boy, and at any minute the sound of his mother’s heels would signal that he could leave.

  He sat up straighter. He had to do better than this for Nora. “I imagine it does feel like battle. Your body’s waging a war against an invader. How strange that when the doctors look at you, you’re the patient but also the enemy.”

  Iris regarded him. She inclined the breadstick toward him, a pointer. “I see why she raves about you. And, you know, those damn doctors, they do exactly that.”

  He ended up staying for two hours. Some thin line of comfort established itself, then grew. Iris had things she wanted to say. Not so much for Nora’s sake, but perhaps for her own. She was like a stand-up comic with months’ worth of saved material. “There’s this one nurse,” she said, squinting, “with these damn fingernails. They curl! I’m not kidding. The nails curl on themselves! How can that be legal?”

  It wasn’t that she wanted a laugh. She just wanted someone who would listen without pitying her, without bringing the burden of their nerves into her living room. The breadsticks, he realized, had helped.

  By the second hour, she let him get up to make coffee. “I think you mean coffee,” he teased. “Oh ho, Mr. Classy over here,” she said. When he poked his head out of the kitchen, she was smiling.

  International Suisse Mocha, read the rectangular tin. The fragrance of cinnamon wafted up to his nose. Maybe she had bought it imagining Nora in Milan. Maybe that was as close to Europe as she could get.

  Iris was the sort of woman who bought her pantyhose at the drugstore, the same place she probably picked up the coffee and the breadsticks. Her handbag, on the kitchen table, was old and faded, a patchwork of leather, and it probably held everything from an umbrella to Band-Aids, anything a person might need. Iris was grounded, no-nonsense. She was the opposite of his mother. She was, in short, a real mother.

  When Stephen brought out the coffee, Iris had nodded off in her chair, her head turned to the side. He set the mugs down and walked over to the pictures on top of the stereo. There were no family shots of the three of them. No professional portraits in black and white that looked staged, even the dog regal.

  Instead, there was Nora. Nora with her high school friends. Nora at prom. Nora onstage, a playbill from one of her shows.

  You didn’t marry for you, Stephen thought to himself. You didn’t marry for money or romance. You married because it was what you were supposed to do. Then Nora came along and made it worthwhile.

  When he leaned down to turn off the light by her chair before leaving, her hand flew up and trapped his wrist. He couldn’t see her expression. It was evening by then, the room dim. “Tell her I looked good,” she said. “Tell her I made the coffee.”

  “Of course,” Stephen said uncertainly. “Of course, Iris. I will.”

  Stephen had done exactly that. He called Nora in Milan the next morning and assured her that her mom seemed well. “Two hours!” Nora mused. “She must have really liked you. Did she give you the fancy coffee?”

  Stephen steps out of the shower onto the white bath mat, its velvety surface plush. He has often thought since then that maybe Nora was enamored not with Leo but with Delancey, the fairy tale of the place. There were no ripped screen doors or loose brick steps. “I can’t believe you live here,” she’d murmured when she first visited. When Leo came down the stairs that day, maybe he carried some of Delancey’s glow with him. Maybe in the light from the skylight above, the frog appeared to be a prince.

  Then there was Leo himself. Unassuming Leo, with his blueprints for a settled, suburban life, felt perhaps like a remedy to Nora. Maybe he answered her hope, her restless hope, for normalcy. Be careful what you wish for, he should tell her. It gets granted in middle age.

  Nora didn’t see the GUTS of the place. She didn’t see all that got swept aside by the Portmans—all they ignored and avoided. But maybe she didn’t need to. Maybe our choices are too complicated to dissect. We choose without knowing why. We choose because, we choose despite. The heart does not make it easy.

  “I regret nothing,” Grandma Portman had told him. “Not a thing! Because of you, bubeleh.”

  When he confronted Nora that day on the sidewalk, some part of him knew it was a losing battle. What was he expecting? He couldn’t convince her to dump Leo. He couldn’t sink his hooks into her and drag her back to their old friendship. Life didn’t work that way. He could be the best friend in the world, driving out to New Jersey to sit with her sick mom, but it was Leo she would lean on. She made her choice.

  And so Stephen receded. His grandmother became a substitute for his best friend. Because—and it strikes him now as so naïve—he had thought she was the one person who wasn’t going anywhere.

  After all this time—he’ll be thirty soon, Grandma Portman had reminded him—life and death still come as a shock.

  Nora doesn’t want to know the truth about her fairy tale. And maybe she’ll find happiness. Who is he to say? Maybe contentment will be waiting for her at the end. Stephen has been convinced that Leo is trying to trap her, but isn’t he doing the same? Fantasizing about escaping with her to the city when she has plans of her own?

  The lines of an old nursery rhyme come to him. Peter, Peter pumpkin eater, / Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.

  He tries to recall the rest of it. He pauses before the mirror,
white with steam. “The chandelier makes all the difference,” he will tell his mother. “The heated towels are superb.”

  He remembers the lines as he reaches for the door. He put her in a pumpkin shell, / And there he kept her very well.

  Ten

  Nora waits for the elevator, pressing the button with one hand while checking her phone with the other. She knows the phone will tell her nothing new when she flips it open. Welcome, the Sony Ericsson starts to scroll. Nora shuts it when she sees no envelope blinking for new voice mail.

  She once read something about the importance of control, even if it is an illusion. People waiting for an elevator need a button to push. There could be no voice mail—the phone would have sounded in her palm—but checking gives her something to do. She glances at the elevator button, a harvest moon, and remembers how her mother used to jab for extra morphine in her sleep, requiring comfort even in her dreams.

  The elevator chimes a bright, shrill D. Nora wonders how people would react if it were suddenly switched for a lower octave, a butler with reproachful eyes. The steel doors part.

  A man with side-swept hair holds open a copy of the Times. “Kerry Takes Lead in Ohio,” the front page announces above the fold. John Kerry flashes his horsey smile beside an article about E. coli outbreaks. He is trying to look casual in a denim button-­down, the sky vast and blue behind him. A beer in his hand, still in the bottle. Bet he turned down the burgers, though.

  “He’s too soft,” Leo had complained last Sunday at brunch. “Soft?” Michael had repeated pleasantly, his eyes narrowing. Leo shrugged, not wanting to pursue it. “This election has everyone’s panties in a twist,” he muttered that night, squeezing toothpaste onto his brush. He never bothered capping the tube, so a dried blob formed at its mouth. The toothpaste came out reluctantly, after a great exertion of pressure.

  “People get too heated about politics,” he continued. “All this talk of moving to Canada if Bush wins.” He shook his head and turned to Nora. “You don’t think Stephen’s serious, do you?”

  “I think you should’ve told your dad what you think.” Leo had a point, after all; Kerry looked like a strong wind might knock him over. Michael, however, was too filled with policy to notice. “Kerry has to win,” he said grimly, shaking his head at the television. “He has to.” Nora smiled sadly at his conviction. “Why?” she wanted to ask. “Because you and your friends think he should?”

  It’s terrible, the first shrink had noted, his long academic fingers steepled, when the narrative doesn’t unfold as we expect. This was his way of alluding to her mother’s death, through language tidy and convenient. She had looked away angrily.

  The doors open to the lobby. Miguel mans his post at the front desk and his face lights up upon seeing her. “You have the big party tonight,” he says warmly. The side-swept Times reader hurries past, too important to say hi to the doorman.

  “I do,” she affirms, touched that he has remembered. Miguel attends night school at Drexel, an MBA program; his wife is studying to be a nurse. He sets down a picture of her and their newborn son at the start of his shift, clearing space for them on the cluttered desk.

  “You want me to call a cab for you? Bad weather today.”

  “No, that’s okay. It’s a short walk.” She holds up a foot to show him her practical shoe choice and thinks of the joke that Leo would make: “Flip-flops! Of course!” He was disappointed in Bush but could not abide Kerry.

  “Take an umbrella, at least.” Miguel gestures to the stand.

  A gem, Miguel, not that anyone in the building would notice. The complex is filled with obnoxious twentysomethings, their laughter echoing through the hallways at 2:00 a.m. on weekends. The place had felt so grown-up when she and Leo moved in. Nora had been impressed by its industrial feel, the exposed pipes and soaring windows suggesting a life pulled from a magazine. But she has started to feel exhausted by the girls in elevators wearing too much perfume, the guys, behind them, scoping out their legs. No cute elderly couples loiter the halls; no families return from the store with groceries.

  Nora thinks of Miguel’s wife in her nursing scrubs in their apartment, the baby playing on a quilt. She thinks of Miguel hurrying to make it home before bedtime. She imagines him putting the key in the door, eager to see his family.

  Leo, apparently, is in no such rush—Leo, who was supposed to call after his trip to the printer’s and pick her up to avoid precisely the concerns Miguel has so gallantly mentioned. 2400 Locust to 2035 Delancey. It is nothing, a nondistance. Around the corner, really. Unless the skies are darkening and you’re wearing a white dress. Unless you had hoped to arrive at the party looking perfect.

  It’s fine. Really, it’s fine. This is what Nora will say to Leo in a breezy, high voice, because that will have more of an effect on him than a hundred angry voice mails (“Where are you? You were supposed to call!”), which he would find a way to dismiss.

  Instead she will stroll through Delancey’s double doors and switch into her heels, leaning against the wainscoting. “No big deal,” she will say, an uncomplaining trouper like Miguel.

  The building’s automated doors swing open. The air outside is a strange, humid mix, cool but thick. Nora’s nose reacts to the mugginess, her sinuses contracting.

  Locust has a small hill, which Nora ascends toward Center City. She spots the bright blue mailbox on the corner and cringes, remembering the undeposited check sitting on the kitchen counter. The lawyer’s accompanying letter informed her that it would be the last one.

  She hasn’t looked at the amounts closely or tabulated if the sum matches the number that had been read from the will. Surely, she should verify it. Her mom would be scandalized that she hasn’t. But Nora can’t bring herself to do it. The checks have appeared over the months in absurdly varying amounts: $12.87; $26,423.29. She imagines a group of lawyers standing guard, pulling a lever and letting the pennies pour forth. Life insurance, she thinks. An awful term, because what does it insure?

  Death money. They should call a thing what it is. Nora turns right on to Twenty-third. She knows that even if the amounts don’t match, she wouldn’t do anything about it. It could be short by hundreds, even thousands, and she would let it go.

  At the lawyer’s office, her father had been cowed, for once. He cleared his throat, convinced an error had been made. “She listed me as her beneficiary,” he said. “Didn’t she?” Nora had almost felt sorry for him. But he wouldn’t learn his lesson or think about his wife’s final rebuke. The money only made him resent Nora more. The lawyer shifted and answered stiffly, a long-winded explanation to avoid having to say, “No. No, she didn’t.”

  If she hadn’t died, proceedings of a different nature might have occurred at that law office. “Based on what?” Leo would ask skeptically. Divorce is a dirty word to him. But he doesn’t understand that miserable parents who stay together could be more toxic than parents who separate. “You only think that because yours never did,” he would point out.

  Leo idealizes her suburban upbringing. “Look at this place!” he whistled when she first brought him over, trudging down to the basement. He surveyed the old Ping-Pong table and shag carpeting, the beat-up couch and outdated decor. “Just so we’re clear, you actually like all this?” she asked. “Like?” he repeated. “Nora, I love it! This is exactly how a house should be!”

  He threw himself onto the couch, and a cloud of dust arose from its cushions, showering him like confetti at a parade. “We never had anything like this. Even when we moved.” She pictured him at fifteen, excited to leave Manhattan, imagining a house (finally, a house!), only to be greeted with austere Delancey. “There was never a place where you could put your feet up and relax, you know?” “Yeah, but, Leo,” she wanted to tell him. “That’s just furniture.” How nice to have problems that could be solved by an ottoman.

  A pregnant woman approaches, pushing a stroller, her head t
ucked into her phone. A child born every minute somewhere. And how casually it is all treated! How nonchalant, the sci-fi act of pregnancy. The woman’s belly balloons out from an orange maternity shirt, the fabric snug, the outline of her navel just visible, circular and deep as a hot tub. Leo would ogle the woman if he were here and nudge Nora unsubtly. Look, look! As though other people’s babies might be theirs. As though they are already a family.

  A blinking red hand alerts her to stop. Nora pauses at the corner of Twenty-second and Spruce, not wanting to rush through the intersection. June would never show up sweaty or be seen in flip-flops.

  But then, June was one of those women whose feet seemed to have permanently adjusted to the shape of a heel. She traversed the city in them, strolling with Dedalus through Rittenhouse Square, his leather leash swinging jauntily. When someone stopped to admire how well trained he was on the leash, June didn’t explain that he had just been jogged along Museum Mile by the dog-walker. Dedalus swayed his golden tail, too tired to even lift his leg.

  “It’s the quality of the heel,” June would say, dubiously eyeing the Payless espadrilles Nora had purchased for the party. BOGO, the signs advertised. What’s the difference? Nora thought, lifting one from the shelf while women swarmed around her with their shopping bags. Could anyone even tell?

  June wears Manolos and Louboutins, Stuart Weitzmans and Jimmy Choos, rows of them in tasteful colors arranged on open shelves, an array of calfskin, crocodile, satin, suede. When June and Michael were away, Nora slipped them on. Teetering across the plush carpet, she felt the same pinches and aches.

  The light flickers, a blinking man. Go go go.

  There is no secret. Nora knows this now. For so long, she’d believed she simply had to master a set of rules. Invest in good footwear. Sit straight in chairs. Reapply lipstick throughout the day. But testing out those constricting slingbacks and riffling through June’s vanity, Nora saw that no magic was behind it all, no sleight of hand or trick. June’s perfumed deodorant didn’t cause Nora to sweat any less. Slipping on a Chanel blouse, she didn’t feel transformed. No, she thought, carefully putting the items back on their hangers and in their compartmentalized drawers. It wasn’t like in the movies, where the downtrodden Jersey girl just needs access to wardrobe and makeup to become Cinderella. Princesses don’t come from Paramus. They are born, not made.