We sat in less than comfortable silence.
“It’s a personal question,” Rochelle Steiner said.
“Yes, and I appreciate your answering it. Why did you, by the way? Answer it. If I may ask another personal question.”
Rochelle went silent again. It was interesting, I thought. I resolved to be more like this, myself: not to speak until I was ready. Obviously, people waited for you.
“My mother died,” Rochelle said. “About four months ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“You asked why. I think that’s why. I’m not at my usual strength. I’m wobbling a bit.”
“You were close to your mother?”
“Very close. But she wasn’t a well woman. She needed a lot of care.” She shook her head. “Now we’re really off the tracks.”
I nodded. “It’s okay. I mean, it’s okay with me. Did she have … cancer? Or something like that?”
“No. Well, yes, at the end, but she’d been ill for many years. Since I was a child. And I was responsible for her. Now I’m not, so it should all feel easier, but somehow it doesn’t. Also, I’m her executor, which ought to be very straightforward since there’s not much money involved, but I can’t seem to close out the estate. My mother filled up her house with absolute junk, for years. Just packed it in. And every time I go out there, to make a start on it, I end up opening the front door and just looking at it, for hours, and then closing the door and leaving. Okay!” she said brightly. “That’s enough. Let’s get back to your problem.”
“But you solved my problem. At least, you gave me something to try. Actually, I’d like to return the favor. Help you solve yours.”
“Well, thanks,” Rochelle said, getting to her feet. “But I prefer the usual formal invoice for services rendered, which comes to zero in your case, since we’re calling this a pre-hire consultation. Besides, as I said, my mother’s gone. And her illness, unfortunately, couldn’t be fixed with declarations of love. I can attest to that.”
I got to my feet, too.
“I wasn’t thinking of that part,” I told Rochelle Steiner. “I was thinking about the house. I mean, if it’s all right with you, I know a person who could help with that.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Excavation
In which Sally Oppenheimer describes the refraction of pain, and Phoebe Oppenheimer gets hired On the Monday of Thanksgiving week, Sally’s employee Drew backed the Greene House Services truck into Lorelei Circle in the Hamlet of Ellesmere, Long Island, where I waited with her former roommate, Rochelle Steiner, each of us with a large Dunkin Donuts cup in one hand and a chocolate cruller in the other. Neighbors in the cul-de-sac, forewarned about the coming of the truck, had offered no resistance to this inconvenience, relieved that the injured house was finally being dealt with. A few of them had even turned up to help, which I thought was nice but which only seemed to cause Rochelle additional discomfort. She was very discomforted, this much was obvious, even to me, and I’d only met her once in person and spoken to her on the phone a few more times. Now, with the truck easing backward and the neighbors watching, I think I finally understood the magnitude of what Rochelle was dealing with. The professional, accomplished, and clearly brilliant woman beside me was quietly losing her shit.
It wasn’t the reunion that I’d imagined. When Sally emerged, she hugged me but shook hands with Rochelle from as far away as she seemed able to stand and still execute the gesture. Then she said something respectful about Rochelle’s mother, and how sorry she was to have been called under such circumstances.
“I haven’t even started,” Rochelle told her. “And it’s been months.”
“That’s completely normal,” said Sally. “And you have started. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
I started to think it might be all right after all.
My sister and Rochelle went inside, and I helped the man named Drew to set up a tent just off the porch, and a line of tables under that. He didn’t say much. When I asked if he’d been working with Sally for a long time, he only grunted, though not unkindly. But when one of the neighbors offered him a coffee I saw him hesitate, then accept. He took a donut, too.
When they emerged, Sally brought Drew inside, and Rochelle came and stood beside me. “Apparently this isn’t the worst she’s seen,” said Rochelle. “That’s pretty sobering. But maybe she’s just being polite.”
“Oh no, I’m sure not,” I said.
“It’s nice of you to come out for this. Don’t you have school?”
I did have school. I also had school tomorrow, and a half day on Wednesday, but I’d decided to miss all three. I was a senior, after all, and I had college applications to work on, or at least that was what I’d told my homeroom teacher, who signed the formal excuse for my absence. It wasn’t true. I had already completed the only application I intended to submit. And I’d also submitted it.
“I wanted to be here,” I told Rochelle. “Not just to help out. The thing is, I’ve never seen Sally work. I know she’s good at what she does, but I’ve never had an opportunity to watch her. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not,” Rochelle said. “That’s really nice. It must be nice to have a sister.”
I smiled. “It is. And brothers. I love my brothers, too.”
Rochelle nodded. We weren’t going there, apparently. Yet.
Lewyn had wanted to come out. He had asked me more than once, and even called Sally to talk it over. Both of us told him no, but for different reasons. Sally was nervous enough about seeing Rochelle again, and didn’t need the additional stress of Lewyn’s obvious emotions, so I sat him down and laid it out for him. It isn’t your time. This is about Sally.
He understood, or said he did. That morning he had seen me off to the Barclays Center where I’d caught a train to Ellesmere. Probably, now, he was working at the warehouse and pretending he didn’t care that both his sisters and the only woman he had ever loved were all together, and up to their elbows in trash.
It was that bad and worse, I discovered, when Sally allowed me inside. By then I had on a disposable white suit over my clothes, rubber gloves, and a dust mask over my nose and mouth, but I still couldn’t escape the feeling that I was wading in bioactive muck. The house was dense with broken-down matter, papers and plastics, abandoned food and piles of clothing, much of it still on store hangers. Little could be salvaged, but Sally was a maniac for recycling, and bin after bin filled up under the tent. Rochelle seemed to hold it together fairly well, until, at around noon, she unearthed the first relic: a debating trophy, behind piles of crumbling newspapers in a downstairs cupboard. “Let’s go out for a bit,” I heard my sister say.
I kept on with what I was doing. I was feeling the rhythm of it, the weird mindlessness of reaching and picking and sorting and, above all, expelling matter. Space began to open in the rooms, and filthy air to expand around the objects. It was glorious to see the floor, or at least the destroyed carpet (once … brown?) that covered the floor, and then to see that small, open area widen and grow. It was thrilling to find some article that might conceivably be personal. When I did—a pocketbook, a silver chain, a photograph—I carried it reverently outside and placed it on the designated table.
“You’re hired,” Sally told me when I came out carrying a recipe card file.
“You already hired me. Remember?”
“Yes, but I was just being nice. Now I’m serious. You’re a good worker.”
“It’s very … satisfying, isn’t it?”