Iron Shoes Read online

  The kitchen phone rang and she picked it up, nuzzling the receiver under her chin as she tore the card in half. A deep voice said, “Sis?” Oh-oh, she thought, Victor. Victor never phoned unless he wanted something. She pulled the stool over and perched on it. It was best to sit when Victor spoke.

  “Yes?” she said. “What can I do for you?”

  His salesman’s laugh, not yet perfected, rippled out and ended a note too short. “I just wanted to say hello and give you some good news. Mom’s coming home from the hospital Sunday.”

  “So soon?” Kay scanned the calendar on the wall. Two days away. Ida would need lots of care—she always did when she first came home—and now, legless, she would need even more. Greta was a housekeeper, not a nurse. Had Dad hired a nurse? He always said he was going to, just like he always said he was going to fire Greta, but he never did. Usually, Kay had to come up and help.

  “That really seems soon.”

  “Doesn’t it? Just great. So here’s the thing. Stacy and I were thinking we should all get together and give her a welcome home dinner. Like if we all go up to their house Sunday night and have a real gourmet meal.”

  “And who’s going to cook this ‘real gourmet meal’?”

  Victor hummed a scrap of hymn and said nothing.

  “Stacy?” Kay suggested.

  That salesman’s laugh again. “Stacy’s got Bible class all morning and, frankly, between you and I, she just doesn’t get it, about food. And I’d like to, you know that, but it’s hard on Sundays with church in the morning and the lot until six.”

  “All tied up, huh. So what were you thinking?”

  “Cassoulet.”

  “Right. With the goose confit and the boned rabbit? The one that takes four days to make and costs a hundred dollars and still tastes like baked beans?”

  “That beef bourguignon you do is always good too. Or plain old coq au vin. There was too much salt pork in it, remember, last time I think I told you, but I really liked what you did with the little pearl onions.”

  Kay pulled the phone pad toward her, poked through a kitchen drawer until she found a pencil stub, doodled a second, and finally wrote “pearl onions.” What was the use. She’d been feeding Victor ever since he’d been born; she’d given him his first bottle of formula and his first spoonful of mashed banana. She’d learned to bake before she was six because he liked her egg custards, and by the time she was ten she was frosting the six-layer coconut birthday cakes he requested. So what was one more meal? One more time? She cooked for her parents practically every Sunday anyway. And at least, unlike her husband, they ate what she served. “Have you talked to Mom at all?” she asked.

  “I did.” He paused. “She sounded a little strange.”

  “I’ll say. I think she’s hallucinating on the morphine. Did she talk about a horse?”

  “The thing about Mom is, she needs Jesus. I keep telling her and telling her. She really needs Jesus.” Victor’s voice dropped, then boomed loud and false again. “So we’re all set for Sunday. Terrific. And oh hey I meant to tell you, there’s a sale of late summer peaches at Gladstop’s.”

  “No pie. Forget it. You bring dessert.”

  “Nothing is better than your warm peach pie.”

  “You … bring … dessert.”

  “Hey! No need to bite my head off.”

  Kay swallowed the last drop of wine in her glass and tried to remember if Victor had been this awful before he turned Christian. He had been a frightened child with fastidious habits who hoarded money. He’d been slow in school and poor at sports and almost invisible at home. Neither Francis nor Ida seemed to expect much from him. He’d been free to eat and watch TV all day. Kay had read to him, helped with his homework, taught him to drive. After she left home, he had a breakdown she still felt guilty about, but what could she have done? She was with Biff and having a breakdown herself. He’d done a lot of drugs, gone in and out of rehab, and then he’d met Stacy and the two of them had gone to a Bible meeting and found Jesus and now he was a militant Christian who believed everyone who wasn’t should be shot.

  “I’ll see what I can do about a pie, Vic,” she said now, and he, relieved, said, “I knew you’d come through.”

  She hung up the phone, dumped the rest of the wine into her glass, and went into Nicky’s room. “Ready for your story?” She could hear her voice, how thick it sounded. Last week she had started to hiccup in the middle of reading; the week before that she had passed out and he’d had to wake her up. She steadied herself on the back of a chair.

  “Not a story, Mom,” he reminded her. “This.” He raised the stuffed animal he called Pokey and pointed to the same thick green book, Dinosaur Facts and Figures, that she had been reading to him for months. She made a face but settled down beside him, the book propped open on her knees. She had just read the dimensions for the tail span of the tyrannosaur for the umpteenth time, trying not to slur, when the phone rang. “That will be your uncle again,” she said, sliding off the bed. “Asking us to bring homemade ice cream with the pie.” She picked the phone up.

  But it was Ida. Her voice was small and clear. “I want you to stop it right now,” she said.

  Kay laughed. “Stop what?”

  “Killing me.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to stop killing me.”

  Kay leaned into the receiver. “Mother?”

  “I mean it,” Ida said. “I am not kidding about this. I have had it up to here with you two.” There was a sudden clatter, the sound of something falling. “Goddamn you to hell,” Ida screamed. The phone dropped and went dead.

  · · ·

  That was a mistake. She would surely pay for that one. Sometimes the penalty was worth it though. Ida waited until the horse finished laughing. His tongue was wet and fat and his teeth were small, stained, and oddly human. Everything about him was wrong, off kilter, like one of her own paintings. She had probably made him up from parts of old enemies. That smug abortionist in Oakland. The art teacher. The redhead at Ransohoff’s. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again the horse was gone but Kay was there.

  I know I owe you an apology, Ida thought. And you’ll get it. A big one. But—she closed her eyes again and feigned a deep sleep—not right now, it’s too complicated, I can’t even start. She felt Kay bend over, stole comfort from her smell of soap, red wine, and sweat, the brush of her hesitant lips, her rabbit breath—she must have driven like the wind to have made it over here so quickly—and then fell into a real sleep at last. The dream, if that’s what it had been, did not follow. Kay and Francis did not tumble naked onto her bed, mocking her while she lay beside them helpless, pinned beneath the horse’s sharp hoof.

  Three

  “It’s an interesting accusation,” Zabeth said. “I can see why you panicked.”

  “You can?” The white breath of Kay’s voice disappeared into the mist. It was eight o’clock on Sunday morning and she was jogging after Zabeth through the woods. They had only been out five minutes and she was already winded. She pushed back a cuff on her baggy sweatshirt, felt it relapse bit by bit down her arm, wiped the sweat off her neck with her wrist. She was more out of shape now than she’d been two months ago, when they had started these weekly runs. She watched Zabeth’s narrow hips pump decisively up the path and groaned as she chose the steepest trail, the one leading through the laurel and scrub oak straight to the ridge. “So you don’t think I was an idiot to jump in the car and drive straight to the hospital?”

  “No, I think you were an idiot not to put a pillow over her face when you got there and found out she was still alive.”

  Kay panted and ducked under a spray of poison oak. The hospital room had looked different at night, eerier, like the cabin of a spaceship. A dim green lamp had lit Ida’s halved body, making her white skin and golden hair gleam above the crosshatch of empty shadows below. A cloud of L’Heure Bleue had hung about her along with another scent, sweetly chemical, maybe morphine, maybe
those black roses, fragrant at last. But Ida herself had been sound asleep, the telephone crouched on her table, innocent as a sleeping cat. “I thought this physical therapist she’d fought with earlier might have come back for revenge. I totally forgot that she used to say ‘Stop killing me’ every time I asked for my allowance or needed a ride to a piano lesson. In that same insane voice. Sobbing.”

  Zabeth laughed, a loud series of linked ha-ha-ha’s that sounded like slaps. “Exactly!” Zabeth said. “That’s what I love about old Ida. She’s so B-movie.”

  Kay thought about this, Ida as Garbo coughing into a hankie, then discarded it. Ida’s pain was real. She had been ill or injured as long as Kay could remember. “You’re the one who looks B-movie today,” she said, to change the subject. Zabeth had dressed for their jog in lime green Nikes and black spandex tights topped by a leopard-skin print sports bra. A gold spangled chiffon scarf snaked around her throat, silver bracelets banged up and down on her arm. Despite the relentless pacing of her little feet, it was clear she had been out partying the night before. Huge rusty earrings still poked through the frizz of her perm. She hadn’t washed the thick lines of green kohl around her eyes, she reeked of musk and spermicide, and she had a large purple hickey on her neck.

  “Blue movie,” Zabeth corrected. “But getting back to Ida—why do you let her pick on you?”

  “Mom’s first fall was my fault,” Kay explained. “I left some toys at the top of the stairs and she tripped over them and broke her back. Dad had to give up a big commission in New York and come home and take care of her.”

  “And you were how old then?”

  “I don’t know. Three.”

  “Ha-ha-ha! Do you still have the name of that shrink I told you about?”

  Kay flushed. She knew, of course, that that first accident had not been her fault and she didn’t need anyone named Dr. Tanya Tamar to explain it to her. Still—she felt guilty. You did this to me. How often had Ida said that? You made me a cripple.

  Zabeth looked over her shoulder and grinned. “I only met your mother once and I wanted to kill her. I bet your father thinks about it. If he were single he could have any woman he wanted.”

  “He could?” Kay pictured Francis, slight, skinny, his hair parted low and combed over his bald spot, looking, despite his little British brush mustache, like a frail boy in the bow ties and striped shirts he always wore. She liked his looks, of course, but then he was her father, and she had no choice. “You think he’s attractive?”

  “Yep. Plus all the extras: Famous. Smart. Funny.”

  “Funny?” Kay grimaced. “He’s sarcastic. That’s different.” She shook her head. “He’s no fun to live with. Sits in his chair and does crosswords all day. Lectures when he talks and doesn’t listen when anyone else does. Says no before you finish asking a question. He’s a lot like Neal, actually.”

  “Ha-ha-ha. They say we marry our fathers.”

  “I hope not.”

  Neal had slept on the couch last night. He’d never come to bed at all. Oh she didn’t want to think about Neal. She scrubbed her wet palms on her shorts, picked up her pace, and fixed her eyes straight ahead. Beethoven was good to jog to. “Ode to Joy.” Thump thump thump thump THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP. What was poor Beethoven’s idea of joy anyway? She tuned the beat to her footfalls, and tried to focus on becoming as thin and trim as Zabeth.

  Not that a Sunday workout could do that. Zabeth was light years ahead of her. When Kay first met her, last spring, Zabeth had been dating a Colombian drug lord’s stepson. She sat in the back row at the one and only AA meeting Kay had ever attended, and the first thing Kay had noticed, as she sat down beside her, was that she was dressed entirely in black leather and creaked when she moved, like parts of a harness. The second thing she noticed was that she was sipping tequila from a Wonder Woman thermos. Kay took a few sips herself; they went straight to her head in delicious crescendo and when a melancholy woman stood up and said, “Hi, I’m PattiAnn, I’m an addict-alcoholic and I’m your treasurer,” she had giggled. Zabeth, looking at her with interest, had said, “Right. Let’s go.” They had gone to an Indian restaurant, where they ordered dal and daiquiris, and talked for hours about men, and music, and yes, even then, their mothers.

  “It’s not just you,” Zabeth said now. They had come to the ridge top, to the grassy turnout where they always stopped to catch their breath. West Valley spread out beneath them, grey brown in the autumn mist. Sweat and mascara ran down Zabeth’s face as she turned to Kay. “Your mother puts everyone through changes. I’ll never forget that dinner last summer.”

  Kay flushed. “That dinner last summer” had been the worst night of her life. One of the worst nights of her life. Zabeth didn’t even know how bad it had been. For two days, Kay had worked to prepare a gala going-away-to-Greece meal for her parents. The shish kebab, avgolemono, and dolma had been perfect. But the people! Stacy arrived fresh from a right-to-lifers march clutching a baby doll bloodied with catsup; Victor tried to sell everyone a used Taurus; Neal kept turning the TV on to check the game; Nicky had a fit when he was asked to help set the table; Francis and Ida had been drunk when they arrived; and Zabeth, in some Sheba, Queen of the Jungle outfit, had wanted to talk about the relevance of Greek myth to modern-day relationships. She had learned enough Greek in grad school to sprinkle her talk with slippery words full of x’s, and every time she opened her mouth, Ida’s eyebrows lifted, her red lips tightened, and her jeweled knuckles clenched on the rests of her wheelchair. Kay knew the signs. She watched Ida’s jealous mood darken and when she saw her hand hook out for something to throw—a knife, a fork, a wineglass—she covered the hand so hard with her own that Ida shrieked and spat out.

  “She thought you were flirting with Dad,” Kay said now.

  “I was flirting with him. So what? We were talking about Medea and suddenly your mother calls me a small-town slut and bursts into tears.”

  Zabeth laughed her bracing ha-ha-ha and Kay turned aside. “That was the night she fell out of her wheelchair,” she reminded Zabeth as they started to jog back toward the trailhead. “She tried to go for a midnight swim when they got home and somehow she crashed onto the cement by the swimming pool. That’s what hurt her leg. That’s essentially why she had to have this last amputation.”

  “Serves her right,” said Zabeth.

  They ran in silence for a while. “So how have you been all week?” Kay asked. “While I’ve been commuting dutifully to the hospital. Where’d you get that hickey, for instance?”

  Zabeth grinned over her shoulder. “Jealous?”

  “Yes. You know what Neal’s like.”

  “No, and promise you’ll never tell me.”

  “Neal nibbles—”

  “Stop!”

  “—but he never nips.”

  “Well, Garret nips.”

  “Garret? The soccer player?”

  “No, the pharmacist.”

  “The one you said was ‘medium height, medium weight, medium everything’? I thought you hated him.”

  “No, I hate the soccer player. Garret’s good. Medium good. Yesterday was our two-week anniversary and he gave me a briefcase made of Peruvian duck skin filled with red lace panties, a tab of LSD, and three love poems he wrote himself.”

  “Poetry,” Kay repeated, jealous.

  “I don’t know if it is poetry, exactly. It’s more like pornography. But it’s very effective. You know? I like that. I like to be wooed. Don’t you?”

  Kay remembered Neal’s first gift to her—a boxed set of Brahms symphonies. “Nothing can match the music inside you,” he’d written on the note. And his last gift? A fly swatter. “Just don’t get married,” she said darkly.

  They slowed as they came out of the jogging trail onto the road where they’d parked, Zabeth’s new Saab pulled close to Kay’s Lincoln Town Car with its peeling roof. Kay realized that Zabeth had probably had to roll out of a warm water bed filled with a hot lover to keep this jogging date today, an
d felt contrite. She was lucky to have any friends, let alone one as brave and spicy as Zabeth. “Thanks, Zab,” she said as they bent to stretch. “You’re good to come all this way just to help me get a heart attack. And the plant you sent Mom!” She flushed. She had completely forgotten the bleeding heart. Smashed upside down on the linoleum floor, it had been the only clue that anything at all had happened in Ida’s hospital room that night. It looked like Ida had thrown it straight against the wall. “It’s beautiful. She loves it. To bits.”

  “She does? Well, good. I wanted to send something, just to let her know I was thinking of her. I mean the thing about Ida is, she’s a total witch but you’ve got to admire her.” Zabeth grinned up at Kay. “Feel better?”

  “Yes. Still no runner’s high but I always feel better after I see you. Would you do me a favor though? Don’t tell.”

  It was a mistake, and Kay flushed, steadying herself for Zabeth’s astonished “Don’t tell who?”

  “My parents. About me going back to the hospital at night. I mean, you probably won’t even see them again, but if you do—Mom isn’t going to remember calling me, I’m sure, and Dad doesn’t know, and I’d just like, I don’t know … I don’t want to give them the satisfaction.”

  “Of knowing they can jerk you around whenever they want?”

  “Something like that.”

  Kay waited for the ha-ha-ha but Zabeth was silent. “I am going to see Francis, actually,” she said at last. “We’re having lunch on Thursday.”

  “You’re having lunch with …?”

  “Your father.”

  “Why? I mean,” Kay caught herself, “where?”

  “Calm down. It’s no big deal. He phoned and ordered this prescription from Garret while I was there and I just thought it would be more fun to deliver it in person. He’s not that easy to talk to on the phone, is he?”