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 not to prevent people from learning the discouraging facts of her life, but to prevent them from laughing at all she’d left out.
She reflected, too — how could she not? — on our mother’s leap into this river the year before. Vee had called her. Lady was answering phones then.
“Mom’s not here,” Vee said. “She hasn’t left the house in weeks, and now suddenly she’s not here.”
“Enjoy the time off,” Lady said.
“We thought she might be with you.”
“With me? When has she ever walked the four blocks to see me?”
Later in the day Vee called her again.
It was not Lady’s choice to die the same way our mother had. The method Lady preferred had come to her almost immediately. She would hang herself in the basement laundry room of the Riverside Drive building. She might have done it in her own building, where there was no chance that her sisters would be the ones to discover her, but she was being a little selfish: she didn’t want to die among roaches and rats. The basement in our building was cleaner.
But although she debated over which building to die in, she never wavered when it came to the method. She was actually good with ropes and knots; she’d made a number of intricate wall hangings and plant hangers from rope over the years: the macramé craze.
Walking away from the river, she saw few people. The professional pyrotechnics of the holiday were over and done with. All she heard now were the occasional explosions of cherry bombs in nearby Spanish Harlem. Tomorrow, the last day of the long weekend, the last day of this wretched vacation, there would be newspaper articles about the accidental mutilations of reckless boys by reckless boys, about the deliberate mutilations of cats. She was glad she wouldn’t have to read any of it.
It was already tomorrow — the early hours of Monday — when she reached our building. She let herself in with the key she’d had since always, and boarded the waiting elevator. Without thinking — a muscle memory — she pressed the button to our floor. It was only when the doors opened and she heard music seeping out from under our apartment door — Buffy Sainte-Marie, all that vibrato, and the volume much too loud considering the hour — that she realized she’d gone up when she’d meant to go down.
For a brief moment she stood in the elevator, annoyed and uncertain. When the doors started to close, though, instead of letting them, instead of pressing B as she should have done in the first place, she extended her hand, and the doors reopened.
She stepped into the hallway and stood on the welcome mat, a little rag rug that had lain before the door for three generations, the fibers frayed, the colors rubbed away. She was unsure what to do next. Then she made a decision: she reached into her purse, retrieved her keys again, and let herself in. Leaving the door ajar, she stood inside the foyer, just stood there, as if she had no idea how she’d come to be where she was.
Vee and Delph, on the other hand, reacted as if they’d been expecting her. They were both awake despite the hour, and in the kitchen, Vee in a ruby-red Gap T-shirt and cutoffs, Delph in a calico granny dress, both in bare feet.
“Hey,” Vee said. “There you are.”
Delph was leaning against the fridge, eating a peanut-butter-on-pumpernickel sandwich. “Want some?” she said, advancing toward Lady, holding the sandwich out. “I’m eating it, but I’m not even hungry.”
“No thanks, and don’t get peanut butter in my hair.”
That this is what came out of her mouth surprised Lady as much as any of the other surprising things she’d done that weekend. Concern for her hair, her terrible wiry hair. Although the truth was that Lady had made a bit of an effort with her hair that night. She was hoping to look halfway decent when she was discovered. There’d be the broken neck, the Basenji-blue tongue, the bulging eyeballs, maybe (she was sorry to say) a horrid mess on the floor beneath her, but at least she’d be wearing a nice dress and her hair would look attended to, restrained with one of her leather barrettes, her turquoise earrings gently undulating back and forth.