LITMIR.BIZ

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it wasn’t just that. She couldn’t blame Arnold. Lisa had always been able to play hard to get and she had never had attention from their father either. Was it genetic, or just her good looks? Even now, with Lisa’s fine skin beginning to show those tiny wrinkles at the eyes and the slightest beginnings of puckering around the mouth, Lisa was still attractive enough to turn any man’s head. Even so, it was Lisa’s elder daughter – who had not just her face but also Arnold’s tall, lanky body – who was going to be the real beauty of the family.

      As if she was reading Karen’s mind, Lisa looked up and smiled. ‘I can’t tell you how thrilled Stephanie is about her intern job.’ Stephie – who wasn’t doing well in high school – had opted for a study program. She was to work part-time at Karen’s.

      ‘Isn’t it dangerous, her going into the city like that alone every day?’ Belle asked. Still rooted in Long Island, Lisa and her family lived in Inwood.

      ‘Oh, Ma. She’s almost seventeen. She’ll be a senior in high school next year. All the kids in her class have jobs. But they’re stuck at Burger Kings and J.C. Penney’s. I think she can negotiate the four blocks from Penn Station to Karen’s showroom.’

      ‘Oh, don’t tell me. A schvartzer could grab her at any minute.’

      ‘Mother! Not “schvartzer.” “Black.” You can’t call black people “schvartzers” anymore.’

      ‘Why not?’ asked Belle. ‘It means the same thing.’

      Karen shook her head. How had Arnold put up with Belle for all those years? Karen knew there was no sense talking to her mother. She may as well talk to her own ovaries. Nothing would change. And technically Belle was right, schvartzer did mean ‘black’ in Yiddish, but the connotation was all wrong and completely different. Belle was an expert in the letter-of-the-law arguments: as a kid, Karen nearly had apoplexy trying to get Belle to admit to hypocrisy or unfairness in her positions. Belle couldn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge them. She spoke, for instance, about how the family had left Brooklyn because of ‘the element.’ Belle would have been shocked and disgusted by anyone who said ‘nigger,’ but wasn’t her code just an epithet by another name? Belle never specified exactly what ‘the element’ was, just that ‘the element’ had changed. When Karen had studied high school chemistry and gotten to the periodic table, she had asked her mother which of the elements on it they had been escaping from. Belle hadn’t seen the humor. Humor was never Belle’s strong suit.

      Karen looked over at the woman and suddenly wondered if her real mother was so … so Belle-ish. It wasn’t that Karen didn’t love and appreciate Belle. She was grateful. After all, Belle had taken her in and cared for her and educated her and taught her so many things. Despite Belle’s prejudices and her third-person disembodiment, Belle was a careful, involved mother. Sometimes too involved. Karen felt guilty for being critical of Belle in any way. But wasn’t that the unnatural inheritance of an adopted child: we couldn’t afford to reject a mother when we had already been rejected by one.

      Now Belle picked up the salad plates and compulsively wiped up a minuscule spot of salad dressing beside Karen’s place. It was a silent rebuke. Then Belle went out to the kitchen for the next equally small course.

      Lisa looked across the table at Karen and shrugged. They understood that there was no changing Belle. Lisa lowered her voice. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. Karen shook her head. ‘What?’ Lisa’s face tightened with concern. ‘The doctor?’

      ‘Not now,’ Karen told her, and jerked her chin toward Belle in the kitchen. ‘Talk about something else.’

      Lisa nodded and raised her voice to a normal level. ‘I really mean it about the job for Stephanie. She needs something like this and I won’t lie. The money will come in handy.’

      Lisa was always short of money. It confused Karen. Leonard had to be doing very well, but somehow it seemed that Lisa was always in some sort of trouble with her Bendel’s account or her Bloomingdale’s card or her other bills. Still, she kept on spending. Karen knew that long ago Lisa had begun smuggling in any new clothing purchases and hiding them around the house. She’d told Karen that since she had no money of her own, she had to beg Leonard for cash. Karen almost visibly shuddered when she thought of living like that, but Lisa seemed to prefer to have too little money and too much time on her hands than to go out and get a job. Since closing her little boutique – more a hobby than a business – she had not worked. The idea of working seemed to fill her with horror. Karen had to smile. My sister Lisa: a Jewish, female, Maynard G. Krebbs.

      Belle returned with the inevitable plates of desiccated chicken. Beside the flat, white breast there was some punished broccoli. Belle believed that nothing should be cooked al dente except perhaps her Jell-O, which was frighteningly chewable. To this day Karen didn’t know her mother’s secret for creating that leathery skin on a gelatin cup.

      ‘I’m looking forward to spending more time with Stephanie,’ Karen said aloud. Actually, she had some reservations about hiring her niece as an intern. And Jeffrey was furious about it. ‘The girls in the showroom are competitive and jealous already,’ he had said to her. ‘We don’t need this.’ He was probably right, but Jeffrey had never really liked Lisa or Leonard. He considered them both too provincial and too materialistic, and he thought their kids were spoiled. ‘Plus, it certainly won’t help Tiffany’s self-image,’ he had added as an afterthought, referring to Lisa’s other daughter. Karen had to agree with that.

      ‘How’s Tiff?’ Karen asked now. Tiffany was Lisa’s younger daughter, her fat one. Built kind of like Karen, the girl was already at thirteen almost as tall as her sister, Stephanie, and had to be double Stephanie’s weight. There was no doubt that Tiff was bright, and she did well academically, but there was no denying she was troubled. Except, of course, by Belle, who insisted Tiff’s weight was simply a question of lack of willpower and spite.

      ‘She’s fine,’ Lisa said, but her voice tightened.

      ‘She’s fat is what she is,’ Belle said, and stabbed at the dried-out piece of chicken on her plate. ‘Fat and cranky.’

      For a moment, Karen felt dizzy – almost as if she might faint. She’d heard this, just this and just like this, before. This is déjà vu, she thought. Or perhaps it had actually happened. Then it came to her. She had sat there so many evenings when she herself had been a teenager and Belle had called her fat and cranky in exactly that same dismissive tone of voice.

      When Lisa had been no more than a toddler and Karen had started the rocky preteen years, she and Belle had begun to disagree for the first time. Most kids had fights over clothes with their parents but with Belle and Karen fights took on epic proportions. Arnold, predictably, refused to participate. A labor lawyer and negotiator, he refused to negotiate at home. His abstention meant, for all intents and purposes, that Belle had the field all to herself. The battles were all about appearances and control. Belle had threatened, cajoled, ridiculed and then gone back to threatening, all to get Karen to ‘dress properly,’ to diet. And to give up the idea of Pratt and go for one of the Seven Sisters colleges. But, along with some of her baby fat and her status as an only child, in her teen years Karen had lost her eagerness to please. She was a rock, and when she started wearing thrift shop looks, Belle went ballistic. Remembering it now, Karen shook her head. There had been so much animosity over what had only amounted to a normal passing phase.

      Mrs Watson had saved Karen. A WASP, one of the few left in the suburban town, Ann Watson had lived in the only old house on the street – a white-pillar Georgian that was as disheveled as its owner – a bird-like older woman who drank most of her days away. Once the land the Lipskys’ house sat on had been part of the Watson estate. Now Mrs Watson’s lawn was weedy and smaller in size than the other plots, sold off one by one. But Mrs Watson had taught Karen to play bridge, taught her about couture, about why the tatty Aubusson rugs on her floors were better than Belle’s spotless wall-to-wall, and she had given Karen her cast-off Chanel jackets (the skirts were too small), which Karen had worn with work shirts and jeans. Mrs Watson had approved. ‘You,’ she’d said,

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