The Cost of Lunch, Etc. (19 page)

She had few nice things, but one of them was a jade necklace my father had given her when they eloped. It had an oblong pendant intricately cut and hung on a fine gold chain with smaller globes of green jade set into the links—surprisingly delicate. I seldom saw her wear it. I think she felt few of her clothes were good enough to set it off. But frequently she would take it out, show it to me and hold it, finger it, admire it.

In a nostalgic mood, she would call me into her bedroom. She would drag from the closet a small pink piece of furniture about two and a half feet high with little drawers. It was small enough to be something made for a child. She kept it as far back in the closet as she could where it was hidden by my father’s and her own hanging clothes. In its drawers were scraps of velvet, satin and silk, pieces of flowered cotton and rayon. They were not for quilting or patching but rather as visible mementoes of her earlier life when she still could entertain hope.

She fingered a scrap of orange silk, worn almost translucent. “I wore this gown to a party. It was for St. Patrick’s Day and they all yelled at me for wearing orange. How did I know about their saints?”

She tossed her head, calling up the ghost of long spent flirtations. “But he asked me to marry him anyhow.”

“Why did you turn him down?”

“He drank too much … Like your father.”

She pulled out a bit of brown lace backed with green shiny satin. “This was one of Rose’s costumes in George White’s Scandals.”

My aunts Rose and Evelyn had both danced in Ziegfeld Follies, other shows and revues, and Rose performed in the movies. My Halloween costumes were glamorous hand-me-downs from Rose’s acts.

“Do you remember when I used to wear this?” A bit of turquoise cotton with white and yellow daisies. I remembered. She had still been beautiful then, her face like a flower: before her only pleasure was eating, especially cake and cookies and pies she baked.

But the session always ended with the jade necklace. She would take it from her jewelry box in which it was the only real piece, clasp it around her neck and finger it, her eyes going blank and blind as she revisited a more promising past than anything the present offered. She would rise abruptly, order me to shove the miniature chest of drawers into the back of the closet. Then as she returned the necklace to its place, she always said, “Someday this will be yours.”

The last time we spoke on the phone, she reminded me that I was to have it. After they moved to Florida against my mother’s wishes, we spoke every Monday when my father went out to play bridge at the senior center. She seemed afraid that my brother’s fourth wife would take the necklace. As she was not ill, I couldn’t understand why she brought that up. But then she had demanded we drive down the previous winter because she had something important to give me that could not be brought back on a plane. Again, when my father was out of the house, she collected dollar bills from every conceivable hiding place.

She pulled three dollars from behind a picture frame, dollars from her shoes, dollar bills under the lining of drawers, dollars rolled up in nylon stockings (she never wore tights), tucked into cookbooks and novels. She stood on a stool to reach dollars she had hidden on a high kitchen shelf (where all the whole grain and health foods I had sent her to control her blood pressure were stowed collecting dust),
dollars hidden in a box of sweaters she would never wear in Florida. That night we counted slightly over $1,200 in single dollar bills she had saved from grocery shopping and hidden away from my father. That was what she felt that we needed a whole car to carry back to Massachusetts.

A few days after our last Monday phone call, she suffered a stroke. She lay on the floor while my father picked up all the pieces of a fluorescent bulb she had broken. Finally he called the rescue squad. My husband Ira and I flew down on standby the first night of Chanukah, but my father took her off life support while we were in the air. When we landed, she was already dead. She was perhaps eighty-seven. I never knew her real age as she had no birth certificate and made a habit of lying about her age, since she was considerably older than my father. She had had me when she was in her forties, about the age I was when she died.

While we were gone to Florida, I let my assistant Jean stay in our house, since she was going through an acrimonious divorce and seemed afraid of her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Earlier that year, Jean had complained of pains and gone to her gynecologist, who told her nothing was wrong with her except nerves. From her symptoms I did not believe he was correct. I suspect she had an ectopic pregnancy. I made an appointment with her at a women’s clinic in Boston. Her pains got worse. When she arrived and was examined, they discovered that her situation was critical and the tube was about to burst. They rushed her into an operating room and saved her life. I had always treated Jean as if she were family. At my wedding, she was a member of the party. She was small, like me, but with light silver-grey eyes and a cowl of very short blond hair, a little pug nose, a laugh that always sounded as if it were forced out. Every workday, we had lunch together and gossiped and chatted. I was glad to have Jean in the house to keep the heat on and the pipes from freezing, to feed the cats, to collect the mail while I was in Florida.

My brother and his wife were already there when Ira and I arrived. I asked my father what we should do with her things.

“Throw them out. Get rid of them.”

“You don’t mind if we take some things?”

“Why would you want that stuff? Just get rid of it all.”

Along with my brother’s wife, I went through her things quickly. What I took were photographs, my own books signed to her—my father had never read any of them—some shawls I had given her wrapped in plastic and obviously never worn, the rings cut off her fingers by the undertaker and that jade necklace. She had so little to leave me and I knew how she had cherished that necklace, proof my father had once cared for her. (When I was thirteen, she made a fuss about wanting a present from him for her birthday. He bought her a kitchen garbage can.)

I carried it into the living room, where he was watching a football game. “Do you mind if I take this? I know you gave it to her as an engagement present.”

“What?” He scowled at it before returning his gaze to the screen. “Never saw it before in my life.” He banged his beer can on the arm of his easy chair for emphasis.

A year and a half after my mother’s death, I was invited to a party on the Saturday night of Labor Day weekend and decided it would go perfectly with a linen tank dress in a color the store called celery. I always kept the jade necklace in my jewelry box in a little padded drawer by itself, a place of honor as my mother had always stowed it. I opened the drawer. It was empty. I felt true fear. How could I have misplaced or lost it? How? Certainly since my mother’s death, I seemed to have been permanently scatterbrained, absent-minded. I had lost more items in the intervening year and a half than I had lost in my entire life beforehand. But the jade necklace? I tried to remember the last time I had worn it, perhaps seven weeks before. But I was sure I had seen it
more recently than that. But could I trust my memory? I had misplaced so many things recently.

I took everything out of the jewelry box. I crawled all over the bedroom floor. A flashlight revealed nothing but dust bunnies under the bed and in the bottom of the closet. I suffered with a stomachache all day. I must have looked in that drawer six more times, somehow expecting it to appear where it always was stored. Obviously I had done something stupid with it. Ever since my mother died, I had been misplacing things. I saw it as a metaphor, that since I had lost her, I kept losing other things, especially clothing and jewelry.

Monday afternoon of Labor Day, the phone rang. It was from Jean’s roommate, Roxanne. Jean had been working for me for seven years at that point and had moved twice since her divorce. She had moved in with Roxanne the year before and told me what a pill she was, but Jean liked the apartment. She said Roxanne was a cow and jealous of her. On the phone Roxanne sounded very nervous,

“I don’t know if I should tell you this. I really don’t know …” Her voice kept rising into almost hysteria.

“Tell me what?”

“Jean has been stealing from you. At least for a couple of years. At first it was things she said you gave her. A sweater, a couple of blouses, a skirt, earrings, that kind of thing …”

“Stealing?” I couldn’t imagine it. Jean had warned me that Roxanne was jealous of her.

“Food. A steak from the freezer. A bottle of wine. But lately she’s been bringing home stuff I know you wouldn’t give her. Fancy stuff. A gold Jewish star. A watch. A silver bracelet with turquoise set in it. A cashmere cardigan—”

“A jade necklace!”

“Yeah. Did you give it to her?”

“No! Never. It’s the one thing my mother could leave me.”

“Please don’t call the police. I don’t want to get into
trouble. Maybe I should’ve let you know sooner … It’s making me nervous, all this stolen stuff in the apartment.”

I was silent for a moment. My instinct was to handle it myself. “Is she there?”

“No. She’s with her new boyfriend. She picked him up in a bar two weeks ago and she’s been spending every night with him.”

“Give me directions. I’m coming over to get my stuff.”

Now she was silent. “I don’t want to get in any trouble.”

“You won’t. She can hardly complain that I stole my own things back. But if I were you, I’d kick her out or move before she does something worse.” I could not remember being angrier in years, maybe since my father had turned off my mother’s life support while we were flying down to Florida. Betrayal—that’s what I felt. I felt angry and I felt betrayed.

Ira remembered strange things that had puzzled him at the time. Once he had walked into her office downstairs and saw bags of groceries. Why would she bring them to work? Another time when I was out of town, he saw her wearing a dark gold sweater and said, “I gave my wife one like that for her birthday.”

She answered, “I liked it so much, I bought one too.”

Several times when I was traveling, she had acted seductively but he had just ignored it. He didn’t say anything because he wasn’t sure and he didn’t want to get her into trouble if he was wrong.

Ira drove and we found the house without difficulty. The apartment was accessed by a back stairway in a white clapboard house. The second floor had two apartments. The one Roxanne and Jean shared was in the back of the house, a living room with a corner kitchenette, two bedrooms. Roxanne greeted us nervously. “I don’t know what she’ll do.” She was a tall boxy woman with a long bark brown ponytail wearing old jeans and a new Red Sox tee-shirt.

“She’s the thief.” Nothing was going to stop me now. “Which is her room?” I waved the bags I had brought.

Roxanne pointed. Then she shut herself up in the bathroom. I had paid so little attention to her, I doubt if I would have recognized her in the street. I was focused. I was on a mission.

Jean’s bedroom was a mess, the bed sort-of made, cosmetics scattered all over her vanity, along with a bottle of Femme perfume I recognized and plopped into the first shopping bag. I began going through her drawers. I didn’t care if she arrived or not. I didn’t care if what I was doing was legal or not. I found the necklace quickly and in fear that somehow it would disappear, I put it on. I found other jewelry, including a gold Mogen David on a chain that my husband had given me. Jean was not Jewish. I also found the clothes, the watch, the jewelry, the other items I thought I had lost. I collected them all—sweaters, blouses, scarves, a patterned half-slip, the silver and turquoise bracelet a friend had given me in Arizona. A half-open bottle of wine I was sure was stolen too was on her dresser, but that I left. I had the urge to pour it on her bed but resisted. I took nothing that I did not know for sure was mine.

I felt hurt that Jean would do this to me but also relieved that I had not lost my mind, had not become dangerously careless or absentminded. Roxanne told me as she ushered us out, almost pushing us through the door, that she did not expect Jean to return but thought she would go straight to work with me the next morning.

When she arrived Tuesday morning, I was wearing the jade necklace. I confronted her. I had placed all the items I had recovered from her bedroom in a pile on the table.

She kept not looking at me and I kept saying, “Look at me! What am I wearing?”

She kept saying her mother had given her the jade necklace and her boyfriend had given her the Mogen David. She wept.

I had a great desire to hit her, but I kept myself under tight control. I spoke quietly throughout, an edge on my voice but speaking softly so as not about to allow the scene to degenerate into a shouting match. I just wanted her out of my life. I wanted never to see her again, never again to have anything to do with her.

“You’re fired,” I said. “Now get out.”

“Are you going to call the police?” She had stopped crying and was squinting at me.

“Not if you get the hell out and never bother me again.”

She looked once more at the pile as if hoping to reclaim something from it. Then she picked up her purse and started out. She turned. “Does that mean you won’t give me a letter of recommendation?”

I never heard from Jean again, but I did hear about her. I didn’t ask, but people who knew the story told me tales. Nothing good. Cocaine and man trouble. I will never understand how I had failed to suspect her but, as I said, she had been with me for seven years and I considered her almost family: but family can turn on you as easily as a stranger. Now I remembered signs, walking in on her looking into the refrigerator, her constant sniffling that had begun after her divorce—but I knew little about cocaine. How every time I came back from a trip, I would miss something. I felt like a fool, but mostly I felt relief. I still have my mother’s jade necklace, and every time I touch it and every time I put it on, I think of Mother and I still miss her. I don’t think missing a mother ever stops.