Life Sentences Read online

  “I know,” she said wearily. “I know.”

  “Well, there’s knowing and there’s knowing.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Keep in mind, everything was for you.”

  She choked back a laugh, faked it into a cough.

  “Oh, you can feel sorry for yourself, play the martyr in your mind. But don’t forget this one little thing, something I know, even if you were careful never to tell me.”

  She waited, let him have his moment.

  “You did it, Callie. I know you did it. I don’t know it in a way that would force me, as an officer of the court, to do anything about it. But you’re not fooling me.”

  “I got nothing more to say to you,” she said, and hung up. It was only then that she noticed she had been clasping a bag of frozen peas to her midsection the entire time, leaving the front of her shirt drenched and icy, her fingers stiff and immobile with cold.

  SIRENS

  THE WEEK BEFORE MY TENTH birthday party, my father suddenly became fixated on the idea that I must have a special cake. I had been trying to persuade my parents that this was an important birthday—two digits!—but hadn’t realized I was having any effect until my father decided that the cake was, in fact, a big deal.

  “What kind of cake do you envision, Cassandra?”

  “Yellow cake,” I said. “Chocolate’s not right for birthday cakes.”

  “No, I mean, what is the theme?”

  “The party has a mermaid theme,” I said, “so it should be a mermaid.”

  “Sirens,” he said, “Lorelei.”

  This worried me. “No, just regular mermaids, Daddy. Not the sirens. They were bad. Nice mermaids, like Hans Christian Andersen.”

  “She had a bum life, you know that, right? When she gave up her tail for legs, every step was like walking on glass splinters, and the prince didn’t marry her.”

  “That’s not the way it is in my storybook.”

  “They sanitize the books, dumpling. All the stories. Trust me. But, okay, sweet, happy mermaids, frolicking on a sea of icing. It will be yours. I’ll place the order tomorrow.” The next night, he came home unusually animated, full of stories about the wonderful cake and how breathtaking it would be. “The people there, they listened to me,” he said. “They didn’t thrust a book at me, say, “This is what we can do.’ They’ve never done a mermaid cake, but they’re going to create one for Cassandra.”

  “I don’t know why you couldn’t go to Bauhof’s, down in Woodlawn,” my mother said. But my father said this new bakery was much better. On Saturday, the day of my party, he made a great production of it: “I am Poseidon, gone to capture the mermaid and bring her back to do the princess’s bidding.”

  “She’s a happy mermaid,” I called after him. “She’s not going to be a slave or walk on splinters.”

  “She shall do whatever you desire,” he promised.

  Almost four hours later, as my mother’s carefully planned party began to wind down, my father still had not arrived home. When the first parents began showing up, my mother put out the ice cream, explaining the situation in a low, tight voice. We ate the ice cream, not wanting it to melt. Fatima complained loudly about not having her cake and ice cream together. “It’s the whole point of birthday parties,” she said, and some of the other girls agreed. “You get everything. The cake and the ice cream and the ice cream is all three flavors, pink and brown and white.”

  “Strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla,” I corrected, embarrassed by my father’s absence, aggrieved that Fatima would complain. My mother had always taken a dim view of Fatima’s manners. Perhaps she had a point.

  “You’re vanilla,” Fatima retorted. “And that’s the one everyone likes least.”

  “We should sing and figure out a way to have candles, even if there isn’t cake,” said Tisha, our peacemaker. They did, with me blowing out the candles in an old pair of candelabras festooned with grapes, one of my parents’ wedding gifts. Meant for romantic dinners, they hadn’t seen much use in recent years. They were matte gray with tarnish, but my mother said there wasn’t time to shine them. I blew out the candles—but there were only four, not the ten I had earned—and made a wish. I wished for a cake, with mermaids. I was angry and humiliated.

  It did not occur to me to be anxious, although I later learned that my mother spent that afternoon racked with fear for my father, that there had already been reports of small outbursts of violence. It was my birthday and I was ten, and all I knew was that I didn’t have a cake. It was a catastrophe of the highest order.

  My mother was loading the dishwasher when the telephone rang. Fatima, her mother late as always, was assessing my gifts, creating a hierarchy. (“Books!” she said with a snort. “Who wants books?”) Callie, who was going to Fatima’s for a sleepover because her mother was working, perched on a kitchen stool, mute as ever, drumming her legs to some tuneless song she was humming. I don’t remember my mother’s end of the conversation, which didn’t strike me as particularly noteworthy—a lot of monosyllables, no hint of high emotion. When she hung up, she was like an animal who had started to cross a road, only to be confused by oncoming traffic. She darted toward the front door, returned to the kitchen. She got her purse, put it down. She trotted around the dining room table a few times. She bit her fist.

  “Your father,” she said at last. “He’s been…hurt, he’s in the hospital. But they said I shouldn’t go tonight, because—well, it doesn’t matter. Besides, we have to wait for Fatima’s mother.”

  “She’s late a lot,” Fatima said complacently, continuing her inventory of the gifts.

  “A car accident?” I asked, not being able to imagine anything else.

  “He was hit by…something. He was driving and he got out of the car, I guess. I don’t know. They think he’s going to be okay. But we can’t go to him, not tonight.”

  “Was the cake in the car?” I couldn’t help it. The issue of the cake was huge in my mind.

  My mother cocked her head, studying me. Then, with extraordinary calm and purpose, she walked across the kitchen and slapped me hard, twice. Fatima’s eyes were huge, and I’m surprised she had the presence of mind not to catcall, as she might have at school. Callie didn’t even seem to notice.

  LOW COUNTRIES

  March 14–21

  CHAPTER

  19

  CASSANDRA LOOKED AT THE PAGE, astonished. There was Callie, waiting for her in her own book. Sitting on one of those wooden stools in her mother’s kitchen, swinging her legs, and humming. Cassandra had forgotten even mentioning Callie, but then, it was a fleeting reference. Callie was a name, paper-thin, a bystander, without any of the vividness that Cassandra had tried to bring to her portraits of Tisha, Fatima, and Donna. Was that Callie’s fault or hers?

  Cassandra seldom reread her own work, but she had been dipping in and out of My Father’s Daughter because Tisha’s criticism continued to rankle days after their lunch. Had Cassandra been unkind, unfair? Had she gotten things wrong? She honestly could not understand Tisha’s reaction. Here, in the birthday section alone, was yet another reference to Tisha as a leader and a peacemaker, the one who smoothed everything over.

  At any rate, she was glad now that she had reread the book, not only because she had found Callie, waiting quietly for her in her own pages, but because it reminded her of that private bond between Fatima and Callie. Perhaps they had stayed in touch? Tisha had mentioned Fatima was churchified now, no longer in contact with the others. Good—then they couldn’t prejudice Fatima against speaking with her. But how to find her? Cassandra picked up the Moleskine notebook in which she had, per her usual habits, been keeping notes, which she later transcribed to her computer. “Fatima/Spelman.” She had jotted that down from memory, after Tisha left her in the restaurant. It was a start.

  CASSANDRA ENTERED THE CHURCH THE way frail old women lower themselves into a pool—slowly, cautiously, self-aware. It wasn’t because she was white, although she was the only white
face here. Cassandra felt uncomfortable in any church. She had not been in a place of worship for years, not since her twenties, the era of first marriages in her crowd. The older marriages, the second and third marriages, had tended to be in restaurants or city halls or outdoor venues. Cassandra herself had never been married in a church. Her first wedding had been a giddy event in a field in upstate New York, neither parent in attendance. Her mother said she wouldn’t come if her father and Annie were there, and then her father reneged, as he often did. The second time, Cassandra and her husband had gone to city hall, then thrown a small party that evening, thinking to delight their friends with the announcement, yet it had cast a pall over the gathering. Ah well, most of the guests probably knew that her new husband, all but billed as her savior at the end of My Father’s Daughter, was already actively unfaithful.

  But then, she herself had cheated as well, two nights before, and the man was among their guests. That very night, as readers of her second book knew, he had insisted on accompanying her to buy more champagne, then pulled her into an alley where they kissed passionately. No, the surprise wasn’t that the marriage broke up but that it managed to last almost three years. Luckily, her lover was a lawyer, and he had persuaded her to get a prenup, not that he was around when the marriage finally crashed under the weight of so much infidelity—mainly her husband’s, her little fliers aside—that she felt almost wistful for the days of almost fucking someone else on her wedding night.

  That was ten years ago, on the eve of her fortieth birthday. Cassandra had learned her lesson. She was good now. Apart from the married lover. But she was going to end that soon, and then she would be truly good.

  Like Fatima, who was a member of this church, a fact that Cassandra had sussed out with surprising ease via Spelman’s impressive alumnae association. Cassandra had found that contact on Spelman’s home page, where she was briefly distracted by the information on the college’s white dress tradition. (The “don’ts,” in particular, held her attention, along with the prim guidelines for proper undergarments.) True, the college had no intention of giving away the whole score—address, phone—but it did provide Fatima’s married name when Cassandra explained they were childhood friends.

  A quick search through the Beacon-Light’s newspaper archives had kicked up Fatima’s new surname in connection with a piece about this church, a famous one apparently, old and venerated. But the congregation had grown so huge that the church was moving to a new “superchurch” in the suburbs, a plan that had excited quite a lot of coverage. Fatima was quoted as wondering how anyone could object to the Lord’s presence, even if it did mean more traffic. For now, there were two Sunday services, one at eight and one at eleven, to handle the overflow crowds. If she were truly prudent, Cassandra knew, she should attend the first, to be on the safe side, and then return for the second one if Fatima didn’t show.

  But she couldn’t believe that Fatima the party girl had changed to the extent that she would attend an 8 A.M. service. Cassandra chose to arrive fifteen minutes before the later one, taking a seat in the back. However, the church was vast, with a balcony for overflow seating; she wasn’t sure she would be able to spot anyone here. True, Tisha had been instantly recognizable, but Cassandra hadn’t been trying to pick her out of a crowd. It also seemed rude to peer too intently at the women around her, as it only called more attention to the outsider in their midst. Also—but there she was.

  Bigger. Okay, enormous, a ship of a woman, steaming down the center aisle like an ocean liner. Yet that confident energy convinced Cassandra it was her old classmate; Fatima may have weighed more than two hundred pounds, but she clearly thought she looked good. She did. She wore a fuchsia suit and a matching hat, the kind of hat that few women could carry, with a curling feather and netting. The hat matched her bag, her bag matched her shoes. If it weren’t for the setting—and Tisha’s warning—Cassandra would have assumed this vivid peacock of a woman was the same fun-loving borderline bad girl she had known years ago.

  Fatima, she thought, her mind wandering as soon as the service began, had been one of those girls mothers such as Lenore didn’t want their daughters to befriend. Loud, a little tacky. Of course, what it all came down to was the preternatural sexuality, evident to grown-ups when Fatima wasn’t even ten years old. She had been the first to get her period, in sixth grade, announcing this fact with great flair to the girls in their set—and not minding in the least when the boys overheard. By then, she already had a head start in the breast department, one of those girls who sprouted overnight, developing so quickly that even she seemed surprised anew, every day, by these massive things on her chest. Fatima started dating in fifth grade. By the time Cassandra was reunited with her old friends in ninth grade, there were rumors that she wasn’t a virgin. But Cassandra had always believed the gossip was generated by the more racist girls in the class, those pinch-faced Catholic school refugees who didn’t get Fatima or understand why Cassandra was friends with her.

  Now here was Fatima at midlife, in church, with a husband in tow and what must be their three sons, all teenagers. Should Cassandra even try to speak to her here? In front of her family? Suddenly, the whole adventure seemed inappropriate. Perhaps she could follow them from the church, take down their license plate, even tail them. No, that was sillier still.

  As her mind raced, she was going through the motions of an earnest congregant, rising and sitting and singing as instructed. Eventually, the service broke down her defenses, forced her to relax, listen to the actual words being said. Cassandra began to see, dimly, the appeal of it all. Not this particular God, who seemed a little harsh to her, but the enforced time-out, the necessity of stopping and taking stock once a week. Besides, the music was sublime. She wished she could lose herself in it as those around her did—heads bobbing dreamily, arms rising with sinuous languor—but she would have looked ridiculous.

  The service over, her mind still wracked with indecision, Cassandra was waiting at her pew to file out when Fatima seemed to catch sight of her. She examined Cassandra intently, it seemed, before her gaze moved on. Had she recognized her? Outside, as the crowd milled along the sidewalks, enjoying the relative mildness of the first weekend of March, Fatima approached her.

  “Are you—?”

  “Cassandra Fallows, Fatima. We went to school together.”

  The name didn’t seem to register.

  “Back at Dickey Hill?” Cassandra persisted. “With Tisha Barr and Donna Howard? Remember, we all started in third grade together, when it first opened—”

  “I remember them, but that was a long time ago.” Said stiffly, a little grudgingly. Had Fatima jettisoned her entire past when she reinvented herself as a churchwoman? Was that required? Couldn’t this God, Baptist though he might be, forgive a girl for enjoying the effect that her precocious breasts had on the boys around her? Because wasn’t that what it was all about, even the inept blow jobs she had allegedly given? Fatima’s only sin was being the first of her crowd to discover the thrill of finding out that she was desired, wanted. It was a forgivable offense at any age.

  “You came to my house.” Almost pleading now, and not just because she needed Fatima’s help for the book. She couldn’t bear to be forgotten by this girl who loomed so large in her memories. “The place near the school, at the end of Hillhouse Road, the dead-end road?”

  “Oh, Cassandra. The rich girl.”

  She laughed, relieved and defensive. “I wasn’t rich. In fact, after my father left, my mother and I had a tough time of it. Don’t you remember how you made fun of my lunches, how I once ate peanut butter every day straight for a month?”

  “There was a swimming pool—”

  “Never filled.”

  “Still—you weren’t poor. I didn’t even think of my mother and me as poor, and we had a lot less than you. No one in that school was poor.”

  “Not even Calliope?”

  The name seemed to spark something in Fatima—a tiny, almost impercept
ible flinch. Yet all she said was, “People didn’t generally think of themselves as poor back then. Not where we lived. Our neighborhood was proof that you weren’t poor. The poor people lived where we used to live.”

  “But Callie didn’t live up northwest, near you. She was one of the girls from over Edmondson Avenue way. Right? Isn’t that where you first knew her?”

  “Look—what do you want?”

  That was the Fatima that Cassandra remembered—blunt, to the point, yet still charming somehow. Fatima told you when she was mad at you, made fun of your lunch and your clothes. But she never stayed mad, and she didn’t mean to hurt anyone.

  “I’m writing a book. About all of us.”

  “What kind of book?”

  “A memoir, something like my other books—” Cassandra could tell from Fatima’s expression that, unlike Tisha, she had no idea that Cassandra was a writer. “About how we were then and how we are now.”

  “Who would want to read such a thing?”

  Cassandra could see no polite way to point out that thousands of people would like to read what she wrote. As long as it was a memoir, not a novel. She was inured to the reality that most people didn’t read, that the majority of people she met couldn’t even fake familiarity with her name or work. But how had Fatima, who appeared in both books, mentioned by name, managed to miss this? Hadn’t someone, in the last ten years or so, asked, “Hey, are you the Fatima in that book?”

  Cassandra said, “Well, I’m going to write about all of us, but I’m going to use Callie’s story—”

  Again, there was that flinch, a slight flaring of the nostrils, a tic left over from childhood.

  “The thing that happened to her?” Fatima asked.

  “Yes, and—”

  “I wouldn’t have anything to say about that. I really don’t have anything to say about any of that. You leave me out of it.” A demand, not a question. “That was a long time ago. I can’t be associated with such things.”