Falling

Falling

It was a slightly humid day, and Lena had been standing by the swings pushing her three-year-old child up and down for fifteen minutes. She looked at one of the four long grey apartment buildings, visible in the near distance, as she did so. She was searching for her own window. It gave her comfort to look up at it and know that it was hers.

The sky was a little overcast, but there was no wind. She crossed herself absent-mindedly and thanked God. God was not how she got through the night, but, like everybody, she thought an occasional prayer couldn’t hurt.

Still too young to pump her legs, Cathy kept saying, “More, higher,” as Lena whispered to herself, “Oh, thank you, God, that Mom passed just after I found the rat droppings on my Grandma’s tablecloth – just after I saw it, big as a cat. Oh, God, I know the HOA fee is nearly as high as the rent I was paying before, but you got us here to safety.”

A large heavy woman, with a pretty face, she continued to mutter, “So thank you, God in heaven, for a fast death and that she’s now with Dad, and for her deeding the place to me.”

She and Cathy had been living in a one-bedroom apartment on Western above Jesse’s Mexican Grill, when Bonnie, her mother’s friend, had rung to tell her.

“Lena, I have your number in her little book. I have some terrible news. You are an only child and your Mom had all those brothers in California, but only her lawyer has their number, so you’re going to hear it from me.”

“Yes, what is it. Is she ill? I know the cardiogram was something to worry about, she told me last Saturday.”

“Lena, child, your mother has passed. I am very sorry. Management saw to everything. She had all these directions. She was an organized lady. The door was open, like she was having the heart attack and thought to open it. I just walked in for the bridge club. Always thought of everything she did,” the friend had said. “And there was no pain, really, it just looked like she went to sleep on the sofa … Lena?”

“Yes, yes. Er … I guess I’ll be down to clear things out and, well, move in. It was deeded to me. I guess I’ll be there, the funeral, all of that,” Lena had said.

And so, about a month ago, she had moved in.

Six months before that, her divorce from Walter had been fast, just six weeks of process. This was because Walter’s father was a lawyer and able to get such things done quickly. Walter had found her the new place. It might seem strange that she shouldn’t have found her own apartment; but she had never worked, they had a joint bank account, and Walter had decided everything.

It was a cruddy place – that had only dawned on her gradually – but she hadn’t been able to afford anywhere better after Walter had paid the first month’s rent. He had been fairly decent, what with a sort-of payoff of $5,000 and alimony meant to come, and even selecting furniture from Ikea and paying for a workman to put it together. So when she and Cathy moved in, there was the cheap pine-smelling furniture seeming to welcome them.

Push – swing falls back – push. It was so soothing to push a child on a swing. Lena had loved to pump her legs and swing herself.

“Mommy, you’re not pushing,” the tiny girl called. She had been premature, only four pounds, and now she was unusually thin, although Lena was always feeding her.

There were a lot of people in the park: girls playing soccer, older children on the swings, and mothers in pretty dresses with their long dark hair, which might be wigs, and old couples sitting on the benches. It was a Jewish area, and as her father had been Jewish, the nearby apartment she now lived in, deeded to her on her mother’s death, had a shabbat elevator.

“That’s enough, pumpkin,” Lena said.

“You know we’re all out of bread. I have to go to the bakery again. Do you like Mondays, Mommy’s day off?” she continued conversationally.

On the way to the bakery she passed a neighbor of her mother’s, who lived opposite her, and her husband. “They’re Russian, but from the German-speaking part,” her mother had said; could it have been only six weeks ago? She didn’t especially like them, because they were old and their apartment smelled of something stale. Once, when the old man had been coughing and wheezing all night, she had brought them soup.

“I know your father was Jewish, but some Jews, the East Europeans and Russians, they’ve just crawled up from the bottom of the pile,” her mother had said.

“Well, how can they be living in Winston Towers?” Lena had asked.

“The daughter became a doctor. Their property tax is fixed at $886, mortgage paid off too, and the daughter pays the HOA fee. He’s devoted to her, he’ll always walk with her in the park until it’s really cold. Then they just spend an hour walking up and down near the front entrance.”

Mom wasn’t here anymore, she reminded herself, although she heard her voice often. Mom could have put me up after everything went wrong and I moved to that horrible place on Western, she thought. Or she could have at least let me use her washing machine. She didn’t, oh, she just thought she knew everything. Strange, really, to trawl around the apartment now, with all of her mother’s things in it, but so much better than living above Jesse’s Mexican Grill.

Lena bought some rolls and added some Jewish rye for the old couple. She remembered his too-close garlic breath breathing on her last week as he had said, “Your mother was a real lady. We miss her.”

“I’m sure I will too,” Lena said, “though at the moment I just don’t believe it.” She had hoped what she said was true. Mostly she felt gratitude, even victory, at having gained her childhood home back.

What had really proved to Walter that something was wrong with her was when she left Cathy to go to Gene’s Sausage Shop. Cathy was watching “Superheroes”; Walter was popping back to work for lunch and she needed something. Next door to their apartment, in the boiler room, was the testiest furnace she had ever lived with. It gurgled and creaked and hissed all night. Intermittently the same Bosnian workman came to tune it up or find excessively expensive repairs to do. And she was out and the line was terribly long, past the length of a “Superheroes” episode, and Cathy got into the furnace room when the workman was in there and hid.

She remembered coming back, hearing Cathy’s little voice behind the locked door of the boiler room, and getting the superintendent; and the embarrassment of having left her child, and how as she talked his head swayed and the ground swayed and Walter came back and talked to him for a long while, too.

Walter was a theater director and she had met him while doing costumes. Marnie, his lead actress, was a lovely bright young thing with red nails. Every two weeks now she had to hear Cathy talk about Dad and Marnie and her red nails. Walter told his father about the boiler incident, and he had taken a statement from the superintendent and carefully filed it away, like Monica Lewinsky’s mother stashing the valuable stained dress. So when Walter didn’t pay alimony, they threatened to bring her to trial for child endangerment, which Walter’s lawyers would certainly win. They knew she would lose Cathy if that happened.

Walter can’t have been so disturbed about her leaving Cathy and about the boiler room, because he and Marnie didn’t even want full custody. They knew Cathy was all she had, and of course she would not complain about the lack of alimony if they could hold that incident over her.

Walter had actually thrown her out of the apartment. It felt that way, when the surprise of the new furniture had faded and been overtaken by the breathy sound of rats grinding their jaws in the walls. Or did he quickly remove her to somewhere cheap and toss her $5,000 so she wouldn’t complain? He had grown tired of her because she was a klutz, because she kept forgetting things. Forgetting to pick the laundry up is one thing, but forgetting about your child is another.

Her mother was cold about it. “Poor executive functioning isn’t an excuse for everything. So that means you leave a three-year-old child alone for forty-five minutes?”

“The doctor says it was depression,” Lena had said.

“Depression! You young people just don’t accept personal responsibility!”

Her father had died eight years before and there would have been room for all three of them in the apartment, but the implosion of the marriage and the fallout distressed her mother and she said Lena was undisciplined. Her mother had been a very disciplined woman, except that she hadn’t counted on having a heart attack at sixty.

Get that bread. Walk back, swing Cathy some more. Go to Monday story hour at the library. On every weekday except Monday she worked from the matinee hour onwards selling tickets at the Goodman Theater. It paid the HOA fees, which were very high, and left some money over for essentials.

She passed the old man and his wife, forgetting that she had bought them Jewish rye. She nodded at the couple. People are herd animals. The young skirt around the old and the old distress them. The old sit on the shore, watching the young, their beautiful bodies bared to the sun, zoom out on fast boats on the green-tossing waves. After passing them, Lena remembered the bread, but then decided it would go nicely with her lunchtime soup.

A horrible heaviness engulfed her. The pills for depression didn’t do anything except make her feel nothing, and she had stopped taking them, for she would rather feel the heaviness. She had no friends. She had even pretended she was widowed and gone to the widows’ club to make friends, but it didn’t work, for she didn’t grieve Walter. She did grieve a lot of things, such as money still being tight and how she had to cancel her membership to both the Adler Planetarium and the Arts Institute, and how she couldn’t go out for a $30 lunch any more. She had grown from chubby to fat and thought she might join a dating club if she could ever get her weight down.

Now, Lena could not get out of her feeling of strong disassociation with everything. It crippled her, like how she had barely talked to anyone the second year of college when Dad had died.

She went back to Cathy, who actually preferred the company of the other children, and won her company back with promises of the swing. As she again started pushing her, the old woman stood up and then fell.

Lena wanted to grab the chains of the swing to stop it, and then to pick Cathy up and run over; but the child screamed, “More, higher.” Now, slowly, the man was lifting her with his old heavy bones, so slowly. Minutes later, Lena gained the resolve to stop, and walked over to the couple, wincing at the red stain on the tissue he was staunching the woman’s forehead wound with.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

He turned to look at her slowly.

It was summer, and Cathy would learn to pump her legs by the end of it, and the little boy hitting a softball nearby would grow half an inch. The swimming pool water would warm and the sand on the beaches would become dry and crumble and the July sky would be spread with music rising from the silver curve of the Pritzker Pavilion toward the tall towers. The music would ascend toward the proud skyline, bursting and flamboyant and American. It would rise over the wide shoreline and above the lake over which the incoming planes fly, past all the individual stories of the people on the beaches, toward a greater knowledge that is wordless. Yet past the singing and dancing that is summer, the old man’s voice vibrated with a different knowledge, holding only the pathos of a few fallen leaves on yellowing grass, seen from the height of an apartment window.

“No, it’s all right. We’ll be all right,” he said in his deeply-accented autumnal German voice.

She was late for story hour. She had misjudged the distance. Cathy was asleep when she got back. She muddled around the apartment a little, dusting a flower pot, because she heard her mother’s voice telling her to do so. Then she noticed that the cactus was dead, the pink flower on the top turning grey, and she put it by the garbage pail

But then she heard her mother tell her, “Just keep it, dear, give it a little more time, won’t you?” So she put it back.

After a little while she heard a tentative knock at the door. She did nothing. Then she heard it again. It was the old man, holding some pastries on a plate.

“Our daughter brought them,” he said, “but she brought so many! Irmgard asks me to bring the rest to you.”

“Oh. Thank you. How is she?”

“Sleeping now. Akzeptiere Beschwerde als Weg zum Friede,” he muttered.

“I’m sorry?” she asked.

“Reinhold Niebuhr. Accept hardships as a pathway to peace,” he said.

“Ah,” she said.

“Irmgard said she is looking forward to finding out what the next stage is like.” he said gently.

“Well, thank you, Danke schön,” Lena said, inclining in a respectful bow toward him. Maybe she would visit the old couple. Maybe the man would be her first friend since everything had gone wrong.

As he walked slowly down the hall, she noticed how, unlike when he had supported his wife, all his weight was now on his stick.

“Are you looking forward to the next stage?” she asked.

He turned slowly, with a smile in his eyes that now held the light of the sun, mottled by clouds as it sinks below the horizon, when a few stars have already come out. Somehow it reminded her of when it was finally time for her mother to pack up the picnic things and put them in the car, while her father sat there, still playing the guitar into the falling night.

“Oh yes,” he said, and very softly he added, “and so should you, mein Kind.”

After he had gone she ate one of the pastries and tasted the butter in the outer shell, the plum jam in the middle. Then she found her face was wet. Was she crying for her mother, for the man and his wife, or just for the pity of it all? She looked at the picture of herself and her mother, taken in 1992, when she was three. She was pulling away from her hand and her mother was big with the brother that was lost before birth. She thought of how her mother would make her soup and tea during the bitter winter months. On the days when the tips of her fingers froze as she walked back from West Ridge Elementary, her mother was always there. She would look up at the lit windows of the building and find her own window.

And then, when she found her square of light and thought of her mother waiting with soup and tea and the warm air flowing through the air ducts in the walls, she had known she was coming home.