She toyed with the idea of a note. The fact that none of our family suicides had left one had always struck her as a dereliction of duty, or, if that was too strong, at least a missed opportunity.
She had always imagined that when the time came, she would leave an explanation behind. Just a few years before, an actor had killed himself (pills) and left a courteous note she’d admired: “Dear World,” he’d written, “I am leaving because I’m bored.” Ever since, Lady’d imagined leaving behind an equally pithy and frank declaration, a sentence unassailable and plucky and concise enough to fit inside a Hallmark card. But now, as she thought about it, she realized that if she were being honest, her note would have to say, “Dear World, I am leaving because Shine’s Hardware at B’Way and 242nd refused to honor its returns policy,” and so by the time she passed out, banging her head on the side of the tub in the process, doing more visible damage to herself than she’d done to that sad entrepreneur in Riverdale, she’d already ditched the note concept.
She woke up several hours later, headachy and parched. She chewed a handful of aspirins and drank the taste away with several glasses of fuzzy tap water. She washed her face.
In the tradition of Jews in the hours before the Cossacks arrive, she spent the rest of the day cleaning her apartment and packing her things. She filled a cardboard box with volumes of literature from her truncated college career, Reader, I married him crammed next to I can’t go on; I’ll go on. She put the box out by the staircase. Her hope was that one of the building’s families, immigrants all of them, would take the books for their children and perhaps think well of her.
The day latened, and she stopped to take in the sunset, that purple, magenta, and orange offspring of innocent nature and despoiling industry. It was beautiful, the sunset, in the way poisons sometimes are — the berries of the belladonna plant, shiny black as patent leather; the apple of the wicked stepmother, blood red and irresistible. An unnatural natural phenomenon, those dangerous and gorgeous colors, and she looked at them longer than she meant to. She had to shake her head, turn away from the window, before she could continue with her chores: fetching, bending, placing material things in boxes. It was as active as she’d been in weeks. The muscles along her spine, shocked at what was suddenly asked of them, twinged and chided.
She dragged a second box out into the hall, this one filled with cartons of Irish oatmeal and bags of brown rice and a dozen or so dented mini cans of soup. FREE TO A GOOD HOME, she’d printed on its side.
Her dented Campbell’s Soup for One Chicken with Stars. Her dented Campbell’s Soup for One Split Pea with Ham. “I would rather dump a gallon of soup gone bad,” Vee had said only a few weeks before, holding up one of those little cans, she and Delph laughing at Lady’s expense, “than buy something that 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.