of Modern Art and I would realize that the female figure most closely resembling Adelina was unnervingly sexual, with large hands, feet, genitalia. This was a rapacious creature to inspire awe in the merely human viewer.
I would see that there was erotic power greater than beauty. My father had paid homage to that, in my mother. Perhaps it was his loathing of her, that had allowed him to see her clearly.
Approaching us on the path was a striking young woman — walking with two elegant borzoi dogs — dark glasses masking half her face — in tight designer jeans crisscrossed with zippers like stitches — a tight sweater of some bright material like crinkled plastic. The girl’s hair was a shimmering chestnut-red ponytail that fell to her hips. Adelina stared with grudging admiration as the girl passed us without a glance.
“That’s a distinctive look.”
We walked on. I was becoming dazed, light-headed. Adelina mused: “On the catwalk, it isn’t beauty that matters. Anyone can be beautiful. Mere beauty is boring, an emptiness. Your father knew that, at least. With so much else he did not know, at least he knew that. It’s the walk — the authority. A great model announces ‘Here I am — there is only me.’”
Shyly I said, “‘There is only I.’”
“What?”
“‘There is only I.’ You said ‘me.’”
“What on earth are you talking about? Am I supposed to know?”
My mother laughed, perplexed. She seemed to be having difficulty keeping me in focus.
I’d meant to speak in a playful manner with Adelina, as I often did with adults who intimidated me and towered over me. It was a way of seeming younger than I was. But Adelina interpreted most remarks literally. Jokes fell flat with her, unless she made them herself, punctuated with her sharp barking laughter.
Adelina hailed a taxi, to take us to Tavern on the Green.
The driver, swarthy-skinned, with a short-trimmed goatee, was speaking on a cell phone in a lowered voice, in a language unknown to us. At the same time, the taxi’s radio was on, a barrage of noisy advertising. Adelina said, “Driver? Please turn off that deafening radio, will you?”
With measured slowness as if he hadn’t quite heard her, the driver turned off his radio. Into the cell phone he muttered an expletive in an indecipherable language.
Sharply Adelina said, “Driver? I’d prefer that you didn’t speak on the phone while you’re driving. If you don’t mind.”
In the rearview mirror the driver’s eyes fixed us with scarcely concealed contempt.
“Your cell phone, please. Will you turn it off. There’s a law against taxi drivers using their cell phones while they have fares, you must know that. It’s dangerous. I hate it. I wouldn’t want to report you to the taxi authority.”
The driver mumbled something indistinct. Adelina said, “It’s rude to mumble,
“Ma’am?”
“Don’t pretend to be stupider than you are,
The taxi braked to a stop. I was thrown forward against the scummy plastic partition that separated us from the furious driver. Pain like an electric shock, fleeting and bright, throbbed in my spine. Adelina and the swarthy- skinned driver exchanged curses as Adelina yanked me out of the taxi and slammed the door, and the taxi sped away.
“Yes, I will report him! Illegal immigrant — I wouldn’t be surprised.”
We were stranded inside the park, on one of the drives traversing the park from Fifth Avenue to Central Park West. We had some distance to walk to Tavern on the Green and I was feeling light-headed, concerned that I wasn’t going to make it. But when Adelina asked me if I was all right, quickly I told her that I was fine.
“Frankly, darling, you don’t look ‘fine.’ You look sick. What on earth is your father thinking, entrusting you with a
I wanted to protest, I loved Serena. A sudden panic came over me that Adelina might have the authority to fire her, and I would have no one.
“Darling, if you could walk straighter. This shoulder! —
Adelina shook her head in disgust. Her ash-blond hair stirred in the wind, stiffly. At the base of her throat was a delicate hollow I had not seen before. The bizarre thought came to me, I could insert my fingers into this hollow. I could push down, using all of my weight. My mother’s brittle skeleton would shatter.
“ — what? What are you saying, darling?”
I was trying to protest something. Trying to explain. As in a dream in which the right words won’t come. Not ten feet from us stood a disheveled man with a livid boiled-beet face. He too was muttering to himself — or maybe to us — grinning and showing an expanse of obscenely pink gum. Adelina was oblivious of him. He’d begun to follow us, lurching and flapping his arms as if in mockery of my gorgeous mother.
Adelina chided: “You shouldn’t have come out today, darling. If you’re not really mended. I could have come to see you, we could have planned that. We could have met at a restaurant on the West Side.”
Briskly Adelina was signaling for another taxi, standing in the street. She was wearing her dark-tinted glasses now. Her manner was urgent, dramatic. A taxi braked to a stop, the driver was an older man, darker- skinned than the other driver, more deferential. Adelina opened the rear door, pushed me inside, leaned into the window to instruct the driver: “Please take my daughter home. She’ll tell you the address. She’s just thirteen, she has had major surgery and needs to get home, right away. Make sure she gets to the actual door, will you? You can wait in the street and watch her. Here” — thrusting a bill at the driver, which must have been a large bill for the man took it from Adelina’s fingers with a terse smile of thanks.
Awkwardly Adelina stooped to kiss my cheek. She was juggling her designer handbag and a freshly lit cigarette, breathing her flamy-sweet breath into my face. “Darling, goodbye! Take a nap when you get home. You look ghastly. I’ll call you. I’m here until Thursday.
The taxi sprang forward. On the curb my mother stood blowing kisses after us. In the rearview mirror the driver’s narrowed eyes shifted to my face.
A jarring ride through the park! Now I was alone, unobserved. I wiped at my eyes. Through the smudged window beside me flowed a stream of strangers on the sidewalk — all that I knew in my life that would be permanent, and my own.
Bitch
It was a bitch. The summer was jinxed. Her father died on her birthday which was July 1. Then, things got worse. Though before that, things had not been exactly good. There were clouded memories. There had been a fear of entering the hospital. Her father had joked that hospitals are dangerous places, people die in hospitals. Her father had believed that hospitals are to be avoided at all costs. The air of hospitals is a petri dish of teeming microorganisms. Her father had rarely stepped into hospitals in his former life. Her father had had to be taken by ambulance to this hospital. Her father had not returned from the hospital. Her father had seemed to know he would not return from the hospital. Her father began to call her Poppy in the hospital. Each time she entered the hospital with dread. Each time she entered his room shivering with dread. Why are hospitals refrigerated? You don’t want to ask this question. Each time she entered his room, if he was awake, if he was awake and in his bed and able to see her, he would say Is that you, Poppy? He would squint and smile eagerly and say Is that you, Poppy? Her name was not Poppy. Poppy was not a name much like her actual name though it was rare, it had become rare, for anyone to call her by that name, either. She wondered if Poppy had been her baby name, and she’d forgotten. This thought frightened her so she tried not to think it. Nor could she ask her father Who is Poppy? Before the ambulance and the hospital and the elevator to the eighth floor which had become her life things had not been exactly good and yet not-good in a way of meaning not-bad, considering. You might have said not-good in the way of meaning pretty- good, considering. She wished now that that simple happy time would return but it wasn’t likely. She was visiting
