She repeated my words with savage mockery. “‘I’m sure she was difficult to live with.’ Yes, she was fucking difficult to live with. I never could have girlfriends over to play, she was so suspicious of strangers coming into the house. No one ever invited me to their birthday parties or anything because she was creepy. The other moms felt uncomfortable around her. She always thought people were following her. In high school I finally started finding my own friends.”
She was panting, the anger exhausting her frail body. She leaned back in the wheelchair, her face pasty, like buttermilk, with red flecks floating on it. I let her rest, but when she opened her eyes, just a bit, little slits studying my reaction, I started again.
“Who was following her?”
“Don’t ask me. She’d say the FBI was monitoring her mail, or sometimes it was the CIA. Like one blue-collar refugee from Austria was important enough for J. Edgar Hoover to snoop on.”
“She never talked about an old crime, something that happened before you were born?”
Judy seemed to realize this was an important question. She took time to think about it but finally shook her head. “Not unless you mean the Dzornens robbing her of her inheritance, she talked about that plenty. It always upset my dad, he worked hard, he supported us, we lived as comfortably as anyone else around us: What did she want that guy’s money for, anyway? he used to say.”
Poor Leonard Binder. He sounded like a decent guy whose only crime had been marrying a woman badly scarred by life and war. At least he’d had those joyous moments with Martin, when they filled the garage with dry ice and set off the rockets.
“Your mother talked to you about the Painters. She also told you about the Dzornens, didn’t she? How they mistreated her? Did she think they were the people following her?”
“I told you I don’t know!” Judy tried to shout but she didn’t have enough strength in her abdomen; the words came out in a grating rasp.
“You knew a lot about her.” I kept my voice neutral, neither praise nor blame, merely a chance to open a curtain and see a new landscape. It actually got Judy to think: once again she cut herself off mid-curse.
“She wasn’t always angry. When I was little, sometimes we had fun, my dad and mom and I. My dad loved going to the park or the zoo, and he was good with tools, he could build things, mechanical things—Kitty always did the woodwork. They even made me a wagon with a motor. Kitty could sew anything. Once she made a wardrobe for my kitten. The girls at school were jealous when I brought Ginger with me to show-and-tell.”
“Do you remember what happened to change your mother?”
Judy looked at her knotted fingers, the fingers of a much older woman. “She wasn’t always happy, either, don’t go getting that idea! The first words I ever heard from her were how her birth mother didn’t like her, how she only cared about equations and atoms. Her mom liked Lotty better, Mom thought Lotty was a show-off.” She smiled slyly. “Of course that’s why I went to Lotty when I got pregnant; I knew it would piss off Kitty no end.”
I nodded. I didn’t like it, but I could understand it.
“And like you said, she lost everybody. I heard it so many times it stopped being about real people, it was like a bedtime story, the nasty kind that gives you nightmares.”
I nodded again: Judy’s drugs made a certain sense to me. If your life had been filled with horror stories from the day you were born, you would want something to blunt the images. That made me think of “duck and cover.” I asked Judy how that came into her history.
She gave an involuntary glance at the door. “If I tell, you have to promise not to say.”
“That’s okay: I promise.”
“And shut the door. I don’t want those nurses listening in.”
I shut the door and pulled the visitor’s chair over next to her.
She looked from me to the door several times, deciding whether she was really ready to jump off the high dive, but she finally made the leap.
“It was when I was seven, right after my birthday, when Mom had made these clothes for Ginger. I was playing with him. My mom came in shouting, ‘Put down the damned cat. You’re coming with me.’ She sounded so mad I was scared. I hugged Ginger tight to me and she grabbed him out of my arms and threw him onto the bed. I was screaming, I thought she’d killed him, it was terrifying.”
Tears began welling at the corners of her eyes. For the first time I felt real pity for her.
“We went in the car. I don’t know where, but it was a long way, out into the country. We went into this gas station, it was in the middle of nowhere, and this old lady was there. She and my mom, they spoke in German. My mom used to talk to me in German, and I could understand some, but I didn’t like it. The old lady asked about somebody and my mom said she was dead.
“Next the old lady wanted to know who followed us, and Mom said, no one, I was careful, and then the old lady knelt down next to me. She looked me in the face and asked was I a girl who liked nature and stars or a girl who liked dolls and sewing.