52 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
grace of God go I”; “Hindsight is twenty-
twenty”; and “Better than canned beer.”
“Ma’am?” he says. She’s been drift-
ing, apparently. Sabbatical haze.
“Yes?”
“Done,” he says, and she resists cor-
recting his grammar as she’s inclined
to do. A turkey is done, she might say
to him. You are finished.
“Really? Wow. I mean, I wasn’t ex-
actly watching but that was fast.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“I’m glad you left your stickers all
over the place.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
The Ma’am was irritating but the
rest of him she liked. She remembers
the story of her friend from college,
who invited the UPS guy in—this was
exciting back then, a man wearing a
brown-and-yellow uniform on your
doorstep, ringing your doorbell, good-
ies packed in large cardboard boxes.
“How about a drink?” she asks Phil.
“Would you like a drink? A nightcap?
I was just going up and, boy, you really
saved my ass. No one answered the
buzzer. The whole world is out. I mean,
I have a cat and my son. Well, he’s with
his father tonight, but he would have
totally freaked if I couldn’t get in to
feed the cat. It’s his cat.”
“Sure.”
“What?”
“Sure. I’ll have a drink,” Phil says.
“I’ve got coverage.”
“Coverage. Great!”
Phil holds the vestibule door open
for her and then follows Constance
into the elevator and out onto the
brightly lit floor, lines of doors on either
side of the long hallway, strangers
within. It’s Chicago real estate of a cer-
tain kind—thin walls, thin-glassed win-
dows that leak heat in winter, the ra-
diators blasting like nobody’s business.
Here the Little Match Girl looks en-
tirely out of place—Constance has kept
the print through college and gradu-
ate school, its twin, Hansel and Gre-
tel, lost to a moldy basement in Oak-
land, unrecoverable.
It is very late when Constance finds
herself naked from the waist up,
attempting to balance spoons on her
nipples—something we used to do at
football parties, she lies—for the en-
tertainment of the locksmith Phil, a
man to whom she has already recited
her mother’s to-do list, hoping for a
better reaction than the silence of Sto-
rytelling Wednesday. Phil had come
through; he applauded heartily.
“You get it?” she’d said. “You get it!”
They have finished the bottle she
found in the refrigerator, their sex vig-
orous, inspired, or what she remembers
of it, the couch wide enough for both
of them though she preferred the floor.
Now he watches the spoons, which
she has, after several attempts—mus-
cle memory, she explains—finally mas-
tered. They balance from her nipples
like silver icicles.
“Neat trick,” Phil says, buttoning up.
“I’ll teach my wife.”- Constance could eat Macy Levitt for
lunch; she could pummel her with aces,
lunge the net, drive the ball down her
throat. She pictures it clearly. Think
like a winner, her coach is saying, her
coach a woman whose name has been
engraved countless times on the tro-
phies in glass outside the ladies’ lounge:
Baby Rollins, 1st Place, Ladies’ Singles;
Baby Rollins, 1st Place, Club Cham-
pionship; Baby Rollins & Fran White,
1st Place; et cetera, et cetera.
She beats Macy Levitt in straight
sets; she makes Macy Levitt cry; she
makes Macy Levitt throw off her glasses
and stomp them with her Tretorns, los-
ing the needlepoint band in the crab-
grass next to the court, its fine handi-
work sucked up and shredded by the
power mower a few days later, the driver
entirely oblivious; she makes Macy Lev-
itt quit the junior-varsity team and years
later, when she learns that Macy Lev-
itt has been hospitalized for anorexia,
she wonders if she also made Macy
Levitt do that.
Constance reheats the coffee. She
shuffles the stack of business cards Phil
has left behind—what’s with this guy?
Outside a bright moon and far below
the scurry of late-night students, home
from the library, the clubs, other dorm
rooms: the university is taking over this
neighborhood, once a place of revolu-
tionaries and poets, men and women
who labored in the slaughterhouses,whose fathers and mothers escaped
lives so unspeakable they never spoke
of them, their languages, their ety-
mologies, submerged in the rising tide
of English, their customs obliterated,
or at least that’s what the public said
when the public weighed in, person
after person waiting for her chance at
the microphone.
But no one listened.
And here’s another mother story, the
part Constance doesn’t like to tell: the
reason for all this mother business. Why
her mother is here again, as she will al-
ways be here again: Vassar girl, Katie
Gibbs girl, a ghost perched on the nar-
row, faux-brass railing of the balcony
good only for the cat litter and the trash
Constance is too lazy to take down, a
ghost stepping out of Hansel and Gretel,
shaking the dead leaves from her
sweater, still confused as to what path
she was meant to follow, or maybe
haunting the corner with her last match.
“What’d I miss?” her mother says,
after complimenting Constance on her
presentation—Constance has folded a
linen napkin, one of her mother’s fa-
vorite floral ones, next to the plate, and
sliced some bananas into a bowl. She
has poured a glass of milk and picked
a daylily from the long drive, put the
flower in a silver bud vase. She wants
everything nice.
But, as she watches her mother’s
hand shake holding the toast, a feeling
of pity or, rather, revulsion reaches up
to tighten its hold, to grip her throat.
It’s a feeling Constance knows from
catching her mother alone in padded
bra and girdle, her mother’s blue-white
skin, the frayed straps of her compli-
cated undergarments Constance has
seen drying in the master bathroom,
slung over the metal shower rod. So
Constance does not say “Nothing,” as
she sometimes remembers, cruel, cruel
child that she was, that she continued
to be; instead she waits, fingering the
grass stain on her tennis skirt, a smudge
of dirt on her wrist, her animal smell
rank, furious.
“Everything” is what she says, look-
ing back at her mother, whose green
eyes, rimmed in red, stare out so hungrily.
“You missed it all,” she says. THE WRITER’S VOICE PODCAST
Kate Walbert reads “To Do.”