Young Wives. Olivia Goldsmith

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СКАЧАТЬ Why don’t you sit here?”

      “Take a look at these while you’re waiting for your mom,” Laura had suggested, pleasant and cool and oblivious to Angie’s total emotional collapse. Angie did, and once she’d begun to read through the first fat file she forgot about her surroundings.

      Angie wiped the tears out of her eyes with the back of her hand. But, for the first time in days, they weren’t tears of self-pity. They were tears of pity for others, as well as something else … something frightening that she couldn’t exactly define. It seemed as if the hour or so she’d been in this messy room had stretched into days—or as if she’d been in the room long enough to experience other people’s lifetimes. Angie had looked at file after file. Every one had shocked her; the stories were horrible. They weren’t all betrayals by husbands, though there was a lot of that. There were other betrayals, but almost all of them were betrayals of women by men—men who held power because the women loved them, or men who held power because they were a woman’s boss, or because the court had given them power.

      The files raised a lot of questions that Angie couldn’t answer. Except perhaps for one—why she was there. So many of the cases had shocked her with the disservice the legal system had done and the horrors that the women clients were going through: a woman with restraining orders but being stalked by her violent ex-husband nonetheless, another who had lost her house and was living with her children in a shelter while her husband had taken all of their assets and was living in Canada. Deadbeat dads. Several older women bilked by “investment advisors.” Oh, the lists went on and on. Every one of these women couldn’t have had a shoddy lawyer—although there were certainly enough of them to go around.

      The women who came here needed help, and Angie realized she could help them. But she’d been avoiding the knowledge for a long, long time. In law school, after graduation, while she looked for a job, when she got engaged to Reid. She’d always known about her mother’s grim work. She just hadn’t wanted to cope with this kind of unfairness. She wanted to have her perfect selfish life, preferably with Reid.

      So, now that she wasn’t going to have Needham and Reid, why didn’t she want this? She did feel the injustice, and feel it deeply. But there was something in the way. Difficult as it was, Angie sat with the feeling. And then she recognized that under her pity and compassion, it was a kind of nausea, and she knew it for fear. These grim files, these grim lives, could have been her own. She could wind up as alone and unloved as these women seemed to be. The fear that had been building in her stomach almost rose to her throat. For days and days she had been fighting off the impulse to call Reid again.

      She’d tried to think of a million reasons why the Soprano would answer the phone: he could have hired a maid, he could be staying at his parents and a neighbor could be checking on the plants, he could have found a sister who had been missing for thirty years, he could have taken a eunuch as a roommate. More realistically, Angie admitted to herself she could be in denial. Because however far-fetched the reasons, she actually wanted to believe one of them. So far she had resisted the phone and refused the two other deliveries that Reid had sent—another bouquet and something from a bookstore. So far she’d held out.

      But now, here, surrounded by lives encased in manila folders, lives that seemed as empty and loveless as hers did, Angie reached for the phone. She dialed her husband’s office number. As the phone rang at the other end she knew she should hang up. She should call Lisa and get talked down, like from a bad acid trip. But the feeling, the compulsion, was so strong she couldn’t control herself.

      “Andover Putnam,” the switchboard operator said.

      “Reid Wakefield,” Angie requested, and just saying his name aloud sent a shiver all the way down the back of her neck.

      Just then the door to the overcrowded little office swung open and her mother walked in. Angie put the phone down quickly, as if she’d been caught with a vibrator instead of a receiver in her hand. She felt her face flush and hoped her mother didn’t notice.

      “Having fun?” Natalie asked.

      “Fun? I’m so upset I can’t see straight,” Angie admitted. She didn’t have to admit all the reasons she was upset. She took a breath or two and looked down at a couple of the folders. “I mean this Carolyn Stoyers custody case, and the things immigration did to that Vietnamese woman …”

      “That’s nothin’,” Natalie said and threw a fat file down on the desk in front of Angie. “Take a look at this one. You want injustice, see what they tried to do to JoAnn Bloom. Too bad Karen got sick,” Natalie said. “But she’s a tough bird. She’ll be back. At least until she’s through chemotherapy.” Angie sat and looked at the folder.

      “What happens in the meantime?” Angie asked, finally looking at her mother’s blank face. She knew that her mother was holding out the hook and hoping that it stuck, and she was afraid that maybe it might.

      “You know,” Angie said, before her mother could answer, “ever since you and Daddy divorced, I thought you were, well, a little adamant. I know he tried to give you a raw deal, but I just didn’t believe that all women were being given raw deals. I thought that maybe you were … paranoid.”

      “You know what William Burroughs used to say, don’t you?” Angie shook her head. ‘“Paranoia is having all the facts.’” Natalie’s gaze swept the room. “Nice office space, huh?” she asked.

      Angie looked up at her. “What are you asking?”

      “Whether you want to give a few hours of your time to help out.”

      “A few hours?” Angie laughed. “It would take my whole life time to fix this.”

      “Oh, a lot more than that,” Natalie said. “But you could take a small bite. Just something to chew on while you find your feet.”

      Angie knew her mother, knew her strategy, but nodded anyway. She wouldn’t get sucked in forever. Still, she could do this now. She couldn’t go back to Needham.

      “Okay,” she said. “But it’s just temporary. It’s just for right now.”

13

       In which Michelle cleans up the debris with a little help from her friend

      Michelle was on her hands and knees trying to pick the bigger pieces of broken glass out of the carpet. She’d stopped crying a long time ago—sometime after she’d quit looking for Pookie out in the dark, and before she’d tried to put some order into the wreckage of her children’s rooms upstairs. She’d had to settle for eliminating, filling six big garbage bags with all of the torn pillows, smashed toys, broken knickknacks, shredded posters, and other mangled bits and pieces of her two children’s material lives. Frank had helped her put their son’s bunk beds upright but, battered himself and with at least one rib broken, he had at last gone to lay down. Neither she nor Frank wanted the children to see their father’s face tonight, and maybe not tomorrow. It even frightened Michelle. She had put ice on it, but it was really too late for that. He would look frightening for the next week at least.

      Michelle knelt there. She thought of the joke Jada always made. She was like Cinderella now, but there was no fairy godmother. She was about to get up from her knees when she saw yet more glass, these shards glinting from under the ottoman. As she reached to extract them she realized she’d used the exact same motion only twenty-four hours ago, though her house had been perfect then and she was only СКАЧАТЬ