But then there are the days we can’t look away. “Man, the horizontal light was really strong today,” one of us will say, and the other two will say, “But you resisted,” and the first one will say, “Yeah, well, today I resisted. Who knows about tomorrow?” and we all say, “Who ever knows about tomorrow?” and we refresh our drinks.
Lady kicked off her flip-flops, stood on the chair. She looped one end of the rope around a ceiling pipe the way you’d loop an identification tag around your bag’s handle before a trip. She looped the other end around her neck. Her legs were shaking, but she was doing well. True, she was still crying, but she wasn’t sobbing; the only reason she knew she was crying was by the feel of her tears, silky yet itchy. No noose is good news would be her last pun, and this would be her final pleasurable experience: the warmth of big fat tears sliding down her cheeks, tippling off her chin.
Her feet were bare and sweating. She knew that by now they must be stuck to the chair’s metal seat and that it would require some effort to break the suction when she stepped forward. She would have to add this to her calculation when she made her move.
This must be the way an Olympic diver felt. Observing the conditions of board, of pool, of body. Perfectly poised, needing only to achieve the perfect mind-set, the Zen focus, the courage of one’s convictions. And then, the ability to say one-two-three-now.
She stood for what seemed like hours, sometimes getting to the one, sometimes getting to the two, but never getting to the three, never getting to the now. All she was getting was dizzy, so dizzy she began to worry she’d die of something else, something heart-related—a stroke or an aneurism. She didn’t want to die like that. She wanted her place on the chart.
It was that thought—fierce pride, family loyalty—that got her to the three, to the now, that got her to inch her feet off the chair, first just her right foot, then the left. When her toes felt nothing but air beneath them, her heel kicked the chair away.
This was when she remembered Beef.
She’d meant to return the framed photograph of the dog to the dentist’s office. She’d forgotten entirely. It was still in her purse, and her purse was upstairs in our foyer.
In the fascinating slowing of time that occurred as the chair skittered away, right before her second heel felt nothing beneath it, she realized she needed to stop what she was doing. She needed to deal with that photo, put it back on the shelf. Posthumous humiliation was not what she was after. The dentist going through life citing the purloined photo as incontrovertible proof that she’d died for want of him—this was not her goal.
She reached out, trying to grab hold of something to prevent her body from dropping any farther, but there was nothing to grab, no solid surface to stand on. There was nothing for her to do, no way out, no means of saving herself. She was going to die. And in that briefest, yet longest moment of her life, before she began to flail and kick, she understood she’d been wrong, that this wasn’t her time after all, but it was a realization that made no difference whatsoever. She dropped completely, the rope taut and intransigent.
She hadn’t counted on the building management’s years of neglect. She hadn’t realized that the pipe to which she tied the rope was hardly a pipe, was pretty much nothing but rust in the shape of a pipe. It snapped in two as soon as it felt her full weight. She fell hard, not to her death but to the concrete floor, where she landed awkwardly, heard the snap of a bone in her left calf, screamed from the shock and the physical pain. At the same time a downpour of cold water fell onto her from the broken ends of the so-called pipe, a continuous brutal waterfall.
To get to the elevator she had to drag herself through what was quickly becoming a shallow but numbingly icy lake populated not with fish but with clumps of multicolored dryer lint and sodden stray socks. In the elevator she had to reach up, grab the rail, and exert all of what little upper arm strength she possessed to pull herself to one foot and push the button to our floor.
When Delph, half asleep, responded to the pounding on the door, she found Lady prone on the old welcome mat, drenched, shivering, writhing, large flakes of rust in her sopping hair and a noose encircling her neck, its white tail running along the floor like some sort of soggy leash. Delph felt herself begin to shake. She was as unnerved as she’d ever been, though less unnerved than she would be in a few hours, five in the morning, when she took a taxi to Riverdale and, consulting the scrap of paper on which Lady had written an address and alarm code, broke into a dentist’s office to return a photograph of a dog. Delph trembled uncontrollably during the decommissioning of her sister’s crime, certain the dentist, wanting an early start to the day following his first-ever vacation, would suddenly show up. But he hadn’t, and she’d gotten away with it. She got back into the waiting cab, directed the driver to St. Luke’s Hospital.
“I did it,” she told Lady, who lay on a gurney in a hallway while waiting for a room to free up. Vee and Eddie sat on the floor by the gurney’s wheels, Vee’s head on Eddie’s shoulder, the two of them snoozing.
Woozy from painkillers, her neck chafed red, her leg in a cast, Lady looked up at Delph. She managed despite everything to speak.
“Someday this will be funny,” she said.
1878
It’s in Frau Geist’s dance class where the boy who will become our great-grandfather first places his hand on the waist of the girl who’ll become our great-grandmother. Naturally, they’re paired: nine-year-old Lenz Alter is the smallest boy in the class, seven-year-old Iris Emanuel is the smallest girl. Even so, when they converse, he has to look up. And conversing is mandatory. Conversing while dancing—preferably in French—is as important as knowing the steps. It’s part of doing it well.
Also, the boy must begin the conversation. Lenz has his opening line at the ready. “Bonjour,” he says. “I hate this stupid dance.”
The girls are encouraged to ask the boys questions. “Quelle danse do you prefer?” Iris asks.
“I hate them all.”
“Even the polka?”
“Maybe not the polka.”
“All the boys like the polka. And the mazurka.”
“En français,” Frau Geist sings out.
“It’s all boring,” Lenz says. He turns her, turns her again. “Ennui,” he says.
“I pretend we’re Earth,” Iris says. “I’m the Western Hemisphere, and you’re the east. We revolve in a circle as we rotate around the room.”
Lenz glances to the center of the circle. “That makes Frau Geist the sun,” he says. This is very funny if you’ve ever seen Frau Geist, and they snicker through a few more turns.
Before the dance ends, Lenz has made two requests: one, that the next time they’re partnered, he gets to be the Western Hemisphere, and two, that Iris marry him. All the other boys are doing it—proposing—although what one does after one becomes engaged, he’s not entirely sure.
Iris seems not to know this game at all. “I’m too young,” she says, frowning, perplexed.
He rolls his eyes, though he, too, is perplexed. Improvising, he says, “Not now. Later.”
“When?”
He does some calculations. “Eighteen eighty-six,” he says. He’ll be seventeen, done with gymnasium.
“But what about university?”