Free Jeremy Thrane by Kate Christensen Page B

with pre-shift cigarettes and demitasses, and seemed mildly put out by our arrival. No one else was there except a couple of old fruits sipping wine at the bar. I felt their eyes rake over me; I didn’t return their glances, but it perked me up to be viewed as a morsel, my rose having long ago given up the ghost of its first bloom. Actually, now that I thought about it, “first” implied a second.
    We faced off in a booth, Amanda and me against Emma and Irene. Amanda lit a cigarette while I scanned the wine menu to see whether they’d added anything that sounded better than the old standby.
    “I wish you’d quit smoking, Amanda,” said Emma. Lucy, her mother, had died two years before of lung cancer and emphysema.
    “I’ll stop in two years,” said Amanda. “You were thirty-five when you quit.”
    “Isn’t it ironic,” my mother said to Irene, “how our children emulate us only in the things we most dislike about ourselves?”
    “Beatrice has just decided to cut off all her hair,” said Irene, peering through her reading glasses at the wine menu. “My own greatest mistake at her age.”
    “At least don’t smoke in front of Mom,” I said to Amanda. “Her mother died of lung cancer, for God’s sake.”
    Amanda didn’t look at me or acknowledge what I’d said except to send a wave of dislike my way, from which I gathered that I had been sent to a penalty box in her head, but I was tired of her disdainful silences, and now made it a policy to ignore them. If she had something to say to me, she could say it aloud.
    “Where is Leonard tonight?” I asked my mother, although the thought of spending an hour or two or, God forbid, three with mybrooding, intimidating stepfather, with his lashing out and unpredictable querulousness, was not a pleasant one; I wanted to change the subject before Amanda and I started bashing each other over the head with our plates. It was appalling the way we turned into overgrown kids whenever we were with our mother.
    “Leonard,” she said. “That’s what I—”
    “We’ll have the Beaujolais,” Irene was saying to the waiter with a shuddering little moue. He nodded and disappeared before I could protest. I noticed cruelly that her jowls had softened and drooped even more since the last time I’d seen her, sometime last spring. Mentally, I liposuctioned her neck and lifted her face, stapling the flaps to her ears, causing her to grimace in a permanent deranged smile.
    The wine arrived, was pronounced drinkable by Irene, who had no idea what she was talking about, and was poured all around.
    “To Emma,” said Irene. “A wonderful, wonderful reading.”
    Our glasses met over the breadbasket and clinked gently. We drank.
    I sighed and set down my glass. “What were you going to say about Leonard?” I asked Emma.
    My mother looked bleakly at me.
    She and Leonard lived up on West Eighty-seventh near Riverside, a world away from Gramercy Park. I’d been sitting at their kitchen table recently, doing the crossword puzzle and drinking coffee, when Leonard came in, rifled through the cupboard as if he were looking for something, and then slammed the door shut and banged the counter with his fist.
    “What’s going on out here?” my mother said, coming into the kitchen.
    “Where is the cheese?” said Leonard. “Why didn’t you buy some more or at least put cheese on the shopping list! I just went out and came back and there is no cheese for my lunch!”
    She stared at him. “Leonard,” she said, “it’s only eleven o’clock. There’s plenty of cheese. What’s wrong with you?”
    “With me? Me? I have to go out to the store again, Emma!”
    “I just bought a cheddar and a Muenster yesterday.”
    “At least put them where I can find them!”
    Emma opened the door of the refrigerator, reached into the cheese compartment, and took out two blocks of unopened cheese. “Here you are,” she said briskly, setting them on the counter.
    They looked at each other; I