Robert Tanenbaum - Falsely Accused

“Well, that was fun,” said Karp after Stupenagel had trotted down the stairs.

“Yes, delightful. You never have to worry about whether Stupe will wear out her welcome because she always does. Yes, I know, she’s my friend. As so she is, for my sins. Let’s clean up-no, you clean up. I’m going to walk the dog, lounge in the bath, and then lose myself in a trashy romantic novel.”

Later, the two of them lying in bed, Karp was aware of a dense psychic cloud, oily smoke and troubled lightning, emanating from Marlene’s side of the bed. Her jaw grinding, her brow furrowed, she was rapidly snapping the pages of her paperback at a pace too quick for reading. At last she tossed the book aside and drew a deep sighing breath.

“What?” he ventured.

“Oh, nothing, just the usual pathetic dissatisfactions of the bourgeois matron.”

“She really got to you this time, didn’t she?”

“Yeah, but I was ready to be got to.” She shifted in bed and gazed into his eyes. Out of long habit, and love, he no longer registered that one of her eyes was not real, but imagined expression in both of them. “Look,” she said, “I’m not saying this hasn’t been sweet, this last year and a half. I like cooking. I even like ironing. It’s sort of calm and dreamy and sensuous, when you have plenty of time, and I like having kids in the house and being the place where the kids come, and Lucy loves it too. And I think I needed it, after what went down in D.C. I deserved it. But now … I don’t know. Something’s stirring. Dragons.” She paused, then laughed briefly. “My vocation.”

Hesitantly Karp asked, “You’re saying you want to get back on some kind of career track, right?”

“Yeah, ‘career track.’ That’s just what I don’t want. I want my blood stirred. I want to feel the way I felt when I was with the rape bureau and I had some scumbag in my sights and I was going to send him away for eight to fifteen, and he knew it and I could see it in his eyes. Or even chasing down that stuff in D.C.”

“You could land a D.A. job in a second. As you never fail to remind me, there are four other boroughs.”

“Yes, but I already explained why that won’t work,” replied Marlene impatiently. She flung herself back on the pillows and let out a puff of air. Suddenly she rolled closer to him, flicked her fingers over his lower belly, and nuzzled into his chest. “Ah, shit, we might as well start another baby. Close your mouth, Butch; flies will fly in.”

Marlene shook her daughter into grumpy wakefulness, and then tripped lightly to the toilet and puked again. It was a glorious Monday, the fourth week of first grade and Marlene was pregnant.

“How are you feeling?” asked Karp solicitously across the Times and was rewarded with a wordless snarl and a poisonous look. He shut up and raised the wide sheet of newsprint like a drawbridge. Marlene dragged on an ensemble made up of scruffy, striped OshKosh B’Gosh overalls, a T-shirt, and basketball shoes and had her usual fight with Lucy about appropriate school clothes. Lucy refused to wear skirts, and Marlene would not let her wear jeans to school. After a brief contest of wills, they compromised on corduroy slacks and a heavy red turtleneck with embroidered birdies, too hot for the season, but let the little rat sweat her butt off. Lucy brushed her own hair and shrieked when Marlene attempted to correct the snarls. By this time Karp had wisely departed the loft. Breakfast, a war between Froot Loops and a proper breakfast, with the basic food groups, was unpleasant, as was the argument about what would go into the purple Barbie lunch box.

Marlene took a deep breath, fought to control her liquefying gut, and held her hands up in a referee’s T. “Okay, time-out. I don’t want to fight with you anymore. I’m feeling sick and short-tempered and you’re probably picking it up, and it’s making you all crazy. I tell you what: Mommy’s going to wash her face and brush her hair, and while she’s doing that, you can pack your own lunch box with anything in the house.”

“Anything?”

“Hey, go for it! As long as it fits.”

After that, it went more smoothly. Marlene finished her toilette, including another little spew, and fed the mastiff a quart of kibble. Lucy, for a wonder, remembered her homework, still something of a prized novelty in first grade. It was a large collage of pictures clipped from magazines and pasted on red construction paper, which bore the legend MY NEIGHBORHOOD in careful block letters. Lucy’s neighborhood comprised a large midtown bank building, a car, a pizza, a sliver of Chinese writing, a fire engine, and a cat, all of which, except the bank, were undeniably to be found in the environs of Crosby Street. She had done it entirely by herself, including the doily-work border, making very little mess with the rubber cement, and so was inordinately proud of the thing.

The door was thrown open, and the huge dog leaped out and clattered down the stairs, followed by Lucy at a trot and Marlene at a more dignified pace. Lucy went to P.S. 1, the City’s oldest school and one of its best, rather than a somewhat closer, but undistinguished, institution. Marlene had contrived this irregular arrangement not only to provide her darling a better start up life’s slippery slope but also to partially block the outrage of the child’s maternal grandmother, to whom all schools not conducted under the auspices of the Church were nests of vice and crime. (Ma, it’s a great school; all the Chinese kids go there.) As a result, Marlene had taken upon herself not only the additional burden of fighting each morning over school clothes (surrendering the great and ever underestimated advantage of school uniforms) but also the responsibility for transport.

Marlene had a car for this purpose, a beaten-up VW hatch-back, yellow in color, that she had bought in D.C. The vehicle was parked illegally in an alley at the foot of Crosby Street, which Marlene rented at the cost of about ten traffic tickets per year. Marlene knew the beat cops, and took care of them, and only got a ticket when a substitute came on duty, or when there was a ticketing drive on. There was no paper under the wiper this morning, which improved her mood. The dog defecated promptly by the storm drain, which improved it even more.

Then Marlene, the dog, and the child piled in and drove off with a rattle, enveloped in blue stink. Though relatively rich now, she kept the beater, as she maintained that anyone who ran a decent car in the City was a moron. Which she was not.

Eight minutes-east on Canal and south on the Bowery-brought them to the school, to which, in fact, all the Chinese did send their kids. P.S. 1 was about eighty-five percent Asian, the remainder made up of the children of striving Lower Manhattan moms like Marlene, who had worked a scam to get their kids into this font of Confucian order, discipline, and achievement.

A few of these aliens stood out-blond and auburn accents-among the sable tide of little heads that bobbed above the noisy throng milling along the gate and arched entranceway of the venerable building.

“There’s Miranda Lanin!” cried Lucy, pointing at one of these, a blondie. She was out of the car in a flash, clutching her homework project but leaving her lunch box on the seat. Sighing, Marlene switched off the car and trotted after her with lunch.

There were Chinese moms at the entrance too, of course, all of them, Marlene noted with shame, better turned out than she was, although nearly all of them worked a job or two, or three, in addition to running a household. She saw Janice Chen and Mrs. Chen and waved. Janice exchanged a rapid trill of Cantonese with her departing mother and then joined Lucy and Miranda on the steps, switching effortlessly to idiomatic American English, a feat that always knocked Marlene out. As the three girls stood chattering and comparing their neighborhood-view projects, Marlene spotted another familiar face.