A Reunion of Ghosts. Judith Mitchell Claire
informs the whole world, or even just the checkout girl, of my desperately lonely existence.”
Lady hadn’t minded the teasing, and it still made her smile to recall that evening. Eddie Glod was at his night job, mopping floors at Union Theological, so it had been just the three of us on Lady’s futon, wooden plates balanced on knees. She and Joe Hopper had bought the plates at Azuma, figuring that, wood being unbreakable, the set would last them forever. And certainly none of the plates had broken or chipped. Still, there was something about eating off wood that was like nails on a chalkboard, and there was a slightly rancid smell due to the vegetable oil Lady used to keep up their color, and eventually you had to watch out for splinters.
Lady hadn’t made soup that evening. Vee had come across the soup-for-one cans while searching Lady’s cabinets for the vodka. (“In the bathroom,” Lady had been required to say.) Lady’d made only spaghetti, pouring Kraft blue cheese dressing over it, a favorite meal of ours, one she’d been preparing for Vee and Delph since our childhoods.
“I don’t care what supermarket checkout girls think about me,” Lady told Vee, although this wasn’t true; she cared what everyone in the world thought about her, including impotent college boys and irritable hardware store owners. “But,” she added, “you know what those cans of soup make me think of? Men. All the men I meet, all the men I know. Not Eddie. We all love Eddie. I’m talking about Joe and his friends and the men who come into the office, all flirting and puffed up with themselves as if I don’t know about their tartar and bad breath and gangrenous wisdom teeth. Even the guy I work for. There’s something wrong with all of them, I swear it. An entire gender of dented soup cans, all damaged and marked down, and you have to wonder, is the dent just because it fell on the floor and you’re getting a bargain, or is it caused by something like botulism and it’s going to kill you? My feeling is, Why take the risk? What’s the best that can happen? A bowl of cheap soup? Better to go soupless, that’s what I think.”
“You’re twenty-six,” Vee said. “It’s too soon to give up on soup.”
Delph disagreed. “Who says? I’m only nineteen, and I have no interest in soup whatsoever.”
“Yes, honey,” Vee said, “and no offense, but that’s not normal. I’m not saying you have to run out and lap up the first bowl of soup you stumble across. You should wait for a variety you like. But you should at least be wanting soup. In fact, you should be craving soup. You should be dreaming about slurping it from bowls and drinking it from mugs and ladling it from the pot straight into your mouth.”
“I’ll have the salad,” Delph said.
It took Lady the rest of Saturday evening and all of Sunday, the actual Fourth of July, to finish packing. She owned so little; she was surprised it took as long as it did. But it was all the trips to the liquor store to mooch cardboard boxes. It was her sudden compulsion to fold the clothes she normally just stuffed into drawers, every black T-shirt, every black sweater, every pair of black jeans folded as if by a saleswoman in a luxury boutique. It was her decision, after she’d filled those boxes, to pile them neatly, geometrically, a waist-high room divider that was somehow both sturdy and flimsy.
When she was done, she took off her black T-shirt and jeans and changed into a black sundress she’d laid out on the sofa. She stepped into flip-flops and went to the kitchen and took her will from the otherwise empty junk drawer, where she’d kept it with the take-out menus and magnets from banks and broccoli rubber bands. A will at her age: it was a perk of having a paralegal for a sister. All the estate planning you could ever want. Who cared that you had no property to speak of? “Yes, but what if you get hit by a bus?” Vee had argued when Lady and Joe were newly separated, “and your executor sues the city for millions and wins? Don’t you want a say in who those millions go to? Or who they don’t go to?”
“You don’t have a will, though,” Lady pointed out.
“Because if you die intestate without kids, the law gives everything to your spouse,” Vee said, “which I don’t mind. But you should.”
The truth was that Lady didn’t care one way or the other. Let Joe inherit her rabbit-eared TV. Hell, let him inherit the fortune reaped by her estate after her imaginary collision with a bus. But Vee wasn’t having it. “Over my dead body,” she said, and she came by the next night with the document, ten legal-size pages although only two sentences in the entire thing mattered. The first of these sentences said, “I give and bequeath the rest, residue, and remainder of my property in equal shares to my surviving sisters.” The second one said, “It is my intention that this will shall not be revoked by my forthcoming divorce from Joseph Hopper.” All the rest was archaic gobbledygook.
Lady hadn’t looked at the document since she’d signed it. But now, given that it was soon to take effect—to mature, as Vee would have said—now, before folding it into thirds and slipping it inside her purse, Lady stopped to skim it. She wished she could blot out the reference to Joe. The divorce was no longer forthcoming. It was done, it was history. Why did he still have to be a part of her story?
She wished, too, she could cross out “the rest, residue, and remainder,” and replace it with a phrase that sounded like something she’d actually say. Something like “I give all my shit to Vee and Delph, although why they’d want any of it, I have no idea.”
“The rest, residue, and remainder,” she’d said the evening Vee had presented her with the document, Vee proud of herself the way a kid is when bestowing a handmade Mother’s Day card upon the kind of mom who gets off on such things. “Doesn’t that sound like what’s left after you kick? Ash residue? Skeletal remains? Eternal rest?”
Vee had been annoyed. “It’s just legalese.” She’d expected gratitude and admiration, not a bad review.
“Why can’t it just be English?” Lady asked.
“Jesus, Lady,” Vee said. “None of our clients who actually pay an arm and a leg for these things stop to read them. Why do you have to? Just sign whatever your name is these days.”
Her name then, as now, was Lily Alter. No longer Frankl, our father’s name. No longer Hopper, her husband’s name. The new name was such a recent acquisition it still felt like an alias. As she wrote it, she felt as though she were committing fraud.
“Okay, you can die now,” Vee said when Lady put down her pen.
The witnesses, a Korean mother and her adult daughters who lived in the apartment next door, had scowled. They understood more English than they spoke. They didn’t like Vee’s sense of humor. Smiling comfortingly at Lady, they sang out a Korean word that sounded like “muenster,” as in the cheese.
“Man-se,” the mother said, enunciating. “Means may you live ten thousand more year.”
The final thing Lady did before leaving the apartment that Sunday was gather the diaries she’d kept on and off through the years. She took those small spiral notebooks filled with her dull day-to-day and threw them into a black trash bag.
She knew that the most recent of the notebooks contained a recap of the soup conversation, and she considered stopping what she was doing to find it and read it over, see if she was remembering it correctly, but she forced herself to resist succumbing to nostalgia and fondness or anything else that might interfere with what she was planning to do later that night. Instead she slung the trash bag over one shoulder and left the apartment.
It was a little past midnight. She trudged west, pushing through the thick heat of the night, the black plastic sack sticking to her back. Standing on the broken concrete and exposed rebar that was the bank of the Hudson, she hurled the bag as far as she could. Not very far, but far enough. She watched as slowly it sank.
It was a relief to be rid of the weight of the journals. The literal weight, she meant. The contents of the notebooks weren’t weighty at all; she never wrote anything revealing. She rarely wrote anything that was true. She didn’t lie, per se. She just committed literary sins of omission. Sleeping with a married dentist? Who’s sleeping with a married dentist? She was drowning those notebooks