Читать книгу The Girl in Times Square - Paullina Simons - Страница 26

On Thursday, August 5, Claudia sat Lily down and said, “I’m not going to beat around the bush. The family is worried about you.”

Lily squeezed her hands together, realizing they were numb, released them and said, “Don’t worry, Grandma, I’m just tired, that’s all.”

“That’s not it,” said Claudia. “You’re not too tired to find a job, are you?”

“Oh, that.” Yes, too tired for that, too.

“Yes, that. The family wants to know if you’re looking for work. For meaningful work.”

“Tell them all, from me—no.”

“Stop wringing your hands. You’re not helpless. You’re a college graduate.”

“Not quite.”

“Well, that’s deliberate, you know it is. What, you didn’t know you needed one more class to graduate? One more! Three hours a week, three credits. You didn’t know that?”

I didn’t know that. Did she have enough energy to say it? “I didn’t know that.” Good, Lil.

“Puhlease.”

“Grandma, I was already taking eighteen credits last semester, the maximum you can take.”

“You could’ve gotten permission.”

“In case you don’t know, I work to pay my rent.”

“Your mother sends you half your rent. Your boyfriend, and Amy—they pay the rest.”

“Perhaps you didn’t hear me speaking to you these last three months, but Joshua’s been gone since April. And believe it or not but Amy has not paid her rent since she went missing in May.”

Claudia continued as if Lily hadn’t spoken. “I think you kept three credits, consciously or subconsciously, so that you could hang on to something, hang on and not move forward. I think you want to feel that you’re still unfinished.”

She wanted to tell her grandmother that she was still unfinished. Unfinished, unanswered, unformed. “I can’t have this conversation again. Here are the magazines.” She stood up from the couch and swayed.

“You’re not getting any younger, you know. Only you think your time is infinite. But you’re twenty-five next month. And soon your youth is gone. Ask your mother how she feels about her youth being gone.”

“I know how she feels. She’s told me enough times. And you know what, my mother has bigger problems than her youth being gone.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Never mind.”

“By the time I was twenty-four, do you know what I’d done?”

“Yes, I know, Grandma. You’ve told me—”

“I’d been in one concentration camp, Ravensbruck, and one death camp, Sobibor. I walked two hundred kilometers carrying your mother on my back. I lived in DP camps near Hamburg, sleeping on the ground for three months, and then in typhoid barracks. All this by the time I was twenty-four.”

“—A thousand times,” Lily finished quietly.

Claudia remained sitting. “What are you waiting for? You want to turn out like that young woman in Iowa?” She said nothing more, as if Lily should have intuited, or perhaps known the rest.

“What woman in Iowa?” Lily finally said in a flat drone.

“The woman, thirty-four years old, was riding in the passenger seat of her car and a landscaping block fell from an overpass and crashed through the windshield. It hit her in the face. A two-foot-square concrete block struck this woman in the face. What does this tell you?”

“She shouldn’t have been riding shotgun?” offered Lily.

“Exactly. Lily, don’t be caught in a passenger seat with a concrete block in your face.”

Lily wanted to tell her grandmother to stop, to desist for a moment, to remember Lily, to remember Lily’s life, that Amy was missing, that her mother was missing, that Joshua, yet another supposed constant, was missing. That even she, Lily, was missing. But no way to talk about that when her hands, her thighs were going numb, numb! No way to talk about anything. She left.

Friday night, August 6, Paul asked her to come watch him perform his music at Fez on Lafayette. Lily was happy to be asked, so she went but found it nearly impossible to remain upright. The noise, the smoking was debilitating to her in ways she could not explain. She left as soon as Paul’s set was over. At home the machine was chockfull. Rachel asked her to go to the movies. Amanda called to invite her for Sunday dinner. Anne called just to find out how she was doing. Her mother called, spoke in some sort of code. “Your father will be the death of me,” was all Lily could decipher. The coke-addled cutie-patootie called asking her for a drink but in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “I don’t do Manhattan, baby,” he said, “but boy do I do Bed-Stuy. Come out, I’ll show you a good time … like before.” She smiled. He had been such a good kisser.

But Lily didn’t do good time in Bed-Stuy anymore, not with the bruises that appeared on her legs, on her lower arms, on her shoulders. Bruises on her thighs, on her shins. She refused to notice them a week ago, thinking they would go away, not recalling when she had banged herself, but over the last weekend, she hadn’t banged herself at all, yet they appeared and stayed. The older ones weren’t turning yellow either. They remained black and blue, and new ones came, and grew while Lily slept. Did she fall and not know it? Did she bump into futons, furniture, flowerpots and not know it? Was she sleepwalking? Indeed, indeed she felt as if she were sleepwalking.