Lottie Woodside and the Diamond Dust Cher by Marie-Helene Bertino
Lottie Woodside was learning it takes two fools to start a marriage and a team to end one. Lawyers, a notary clerk, Derek even brought the girlfriend: an overmatched but dear-looking thing who avoided Lottie’s eyes and sat on the bench in the notary’s hallway, reinforcing her bangs with a purse comb.
“I hope you promised her ice cream after,” Lottie said, and regretted it.
Since they had agreed to divorce, Derek preferred to keep their interactions brisk and professional, but the finality of paperwork and a state building seemed to stir old compassion. “Well, you know,” he said. Lottie knew this phrase, unfinished and delivered with chagrin, was meant to be conciliatory, a hand up into her new life.
The marriage was defunct. Thirty years folded into a drawer like holiday linens.
Lottie thought this earned her a cab ride.
She found one but upon opening the door saw that it was already occupied by a woman who, talking on her phone, blinked into the surprise of a new person. Lottie scanned the street for another cab but the woman waved come in, as if her departure would be more of a delay.
“I might not be on the way,” Lottie said.
“Everything is on the way,” the woman said. Then, into her phone: “Not you, Steve. The woman getting into this cab.” The cabdriver protested but the woman seemed to be in control of his cab and everyone in it.
The light turned green.
Lottie gave the cabdriver her Brooklyn address.
The woman caught her looking at the large, flat package wrapped in brown paper and propped against her knees. Her hand flew instinctively to protect it. Whoever was on the end of the line expressed dissatisfaction. “Relax,” the woman whispered. Lottie pretended not to notice the woman scanning her. “She’s no dealer. Sandals with socks.”
Lottie pressed her forehead against the cold window. She had taken a personal day from her nannying job and was looking forward to getting home. She planned to scrub Derek from their apartment with cleaning supplies that smelled like trees and by moving the couch from one side of the room to the other.
At a red light, the cabbie consulted the women in his rearview mirror. “We’re going nowhere fast.”
The woman leaned in to the partition separating them. “Can you try Tenth?” Elegant cuff links blinked on one sleeve.
The cab driver pulled out of traffic and performed a quick turn. The street was clear. He reached Tenth Avenue and made a sharp left, jostling the women against each other.
“Pardon me,” said Lottie.
Yards ahead, a streetlight turned yellow. The cabdriver accelerated.
Lottie pointed to a spot on the floor near the package. “You lost one of your cuff links.”
“Did I?” The woman clutched at her sleeve. “Hang on, Steve.” She bent over the package to feel around on the floor. “These things never stay where they’re supposed—”
Lottie didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. She was outside the cab, sitting on the curb, legs arranged uncomfortably beneath her. An expression of glass fell over her in waves. A gem shone on the pavement. It turned and signaled to someone. To her? Lottie leaned in; her eyes adjusted and the object resolved into focus. The woman’s cuff link. Lottie’s handbag slumped against a nearby hydrant. She stood, shook her arms and legs. Her backside ached. Where the curb stopped me, she reasoned.
A Subaru had collided into the cab on its left side, where the woman had been searching the floor. Its driver was out of his car holding his head, wondering at the wreck. The cab was pummeled into a crescent shape; the cabbie settled on one side of it, the woman on the other. Lottie saw where her door had flown open and ejected her. The cabdriver’s cheek rested against the steering wheel, smiling dimly in a good dream. Lottie had been in the presence of death only once and it was unmistakable.
In the back seat the woman clutched at her chest, as if trying to locate the pendant to a necklace. The cab steamed and bitched around her. “I’m okay,” she said.
People clambered out of the surrounding shops, wanting jobs. They asked who needed assistance and made phone calls. Lottie picked up her handbag and shook it. How lucky, she thought, everything that belongs to me is intact. In the distance, a siren yearned toward them. The woman in the back seat cried for help. Her door was stuck. Strangers took turns pulling. The ambulance arrived. Paramedics spilled out and tended to the drivers, the woman. A policeman established a divide with yellow tape, creating a temporary order that Lottie appreciated. No one not directly involved in the accident should be able to participate.
Someone identified Lottie as involved in the crash, and a paramedic slipped an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose. She sat on the curb breathing into it while the others worked on the cabbie. She was certain he was dead so when his eyelids rebooted, when he exited the cab unassisted, Lottie felt some cousin of duped. It felt stranger than anything else that had happened: man returned from the dead. The crowd watched him attempt tentative, directionless steps. He made it to the corner and threw up into a city trash can. The paramedics turned to the woman in the back seat who’d gone quiet.
It was the kind of overfamiliarity that Harolyn had hated, but Lottie liked that the doctor used we and us, as if they’d both been in a wreck.
“Are we married?” he said, placing against her breastbone a stethoscope he’d breathed onto twice to warm. There are two kinds of doctors: those who warm the stethoscope and those who don’t.
For the first time in thirty years, Lottie answered the question in the negative. We are not married.
“Is there anyone we should call?”
She pictured Harolyn the last time she saw her, laughing at a family of picnickers battling the wind on Higbee Beach. She felt the familiar, happy pain of missing her friend.
He shone a light into her eyes. “What is today’s date?”
“I never know the date,” Lottie said.
In a framed picture on the shelf behind him, the doctor was smiling the same way he was smiling now, his arm around a blond man holding a SOLD! sign.
“It’s Memorial Day,” he said. “The start of the summer. What’s the last thing we remember?”
Lottie told him she’d hailed a cab that had been hit by another car. The police had driven her there, to the Midtown hospital, over her insistence. Now she was talking to him. She wasn’t nauseated, had no neck or back pain, had no trouble breathing.
“You’ll be sore tomorrow,” he assured her, penciling a prescription for painkillers. “If you’re feeling signs of a concussion, come back. Sometimes these things hit us later. Confusion. Forlornness. Scattered thoughts. Mania. Euphoria. It signals swelling of the brain. You think you’re fine, then boom!”
“I’m seventy,” Lottie said. “What you’re describing is Wednesday.”
Something about nearness, fondness, something about significance acting out of proportion with time.
She asked how the driver made out and he told her fine.
“And the woman?”
The doctor blinked several times. “I’m sorry.”
So the one she thought would make it didn’t, and the one she thought wouldn’t did. “I didn’t know her.” Though appropriate, the sentiment fell short. Something about nearness, fondness, something about significance acting out of proportion with time. A nurse’s arrival seemed to signal to the doctor that their visit had concluded. “That’s a lot to process,” he said. “Stay if you need a minute.” When he was a child, he must have been every teacher’s favorite. His pinched, sincere expression reminded her of Pumpkin, the little boy she nannied. “Don’t forget your things.” He pointed to her purse and a package propped against the wall. Lottie recognized it as the one from the cab.
“That’s not mine,” Lottie said. But the doctor and nurse were gone.
It was hard to believe she and the package had emerged from the same car. Its wrapping was intact. Its pristine label indicated an office on the Upper East Side. Lottie carried it out of the hospital.
Lottie found a nearby coffee shop and ordered a sandwich and a cup of tea. At a free table she propped the package up on its own chair. She tugged at the tape and gently pulled down the wrapping to reveal a brightly colored portrait of Cher.
“Tuna salad!” the barista called.
Lottie left the painting to retrieve her order. At the condiment stand she shook pepper onto the bread, a habit Derek hated. She used more than she normally would, chewed, and studied the painting. Cher wore a sheer crocheted halter and sat elegantly slumped. She smiled with her mouth closed, lips outlined twice in black, eyes bright. Lottie returned the woman’s heavy-lidded smile, enjoying the feel of the sun through the window flattening against her collarbones. Someone had said it was the beginning of summer. It sure was. Ambulances seared past the coffee shop, no doubt heading for the scene of her accident. No, that would have been cleared already.
Lottie finished her sandwich and reclothed Cher. The address on the label was up twenty streets and over three avenues. She walked to the bus stop, pausing to wait out a surge of pain in her lower back.
An almost-empty bus arrived. Lottie and Cher had their own seat. Schools were letting out; at every stop, children charged onto the bus, yelling and draping themselves over her seat with no apology, until Lottie had to balance Cher on her lap. Lottie never minded children as Derek had. She liked that they made split-second judgments and that they looked her in the eye. Most of the time Lottie enjoyed the invisibility that came with being older, the fact that no one thought she was capable of anything criminal or notable, but she occasionally wanted to be seen.
At each stop children hurled themselves down the stairs, into the arms of parents and nannies and by the time they reached the Upper East Side, a neighborhood of art dealers and museums, the bus was empty again. Lottie and Cher disembarked and walked to the address, where Lottie repeated her name into the intercom.
“Who are you here to see?” The receptionist sounded doubtful. “We’re booked.”
“Steve?” Lottie tried.
The door buzzed and Lottie opened it. She climbed four flights to a gallery space where a young woman sitting at a small, gleaming desk greeted her.
“Is this about the Basquiat?”
“I was in a car accident,” Lottie began, but then a man yelling from an office on the other side of the space startled the receptionist. The girl gestured to a folding chair next to a stack of magazines, crossed the room, and disappeared behind the door.
“Is it her?” the man said. “It’s been hours.”
“It’s an old lady,” Lottie heard her say.
Lottie gave Cher the chair and looked at the art. On an overlarge canvas the word RAPE stood against a field of crudely sketched penises.
“Isn’t it amazing?” The girl stood behind her. “The artist is a public defender of rapists.” She gestured across the space. “Over there will be our Warhol exhibit. All the diamond dusts arrive today. That’s why it’s a zoo.”
Lottie let out a low whistle. “Diamond dust,” she said.
From the office Lottie heard the sound of something large being thrown against metal. The man yelled for the girl, who jogged to rejoin him. They did not keep their voices low. “It’s only been a few hours. You know her, she’s probably talking. There’s a woman here to see you.”
“What does she want?”
“I haven’t asked yet.”
“If it’s not your job to ask her, whose is it?”
Lottie remembered what it was like to work in an office like this. She remembered refreshing her makeup after crying in the bathroom. Bonding with people her age. She’d met Harolyn when they worked on the same floor of a Midtown building. They ate their sandwiches out of wax paper, sitting on the same park bench every day. Lottie thought she’d spend the rest of her life meeting Harolyn at twelve forty-five. But Derek disrupted her schedule, slightly, then more. She couldn’t remember when or why she’d left that job. She couldn’t even remember the building’s address. And she spent so many years there.
A phone rang in the back office. The man said, “It’s me.”
The receptionist emerged. “It’s not a good day,” she said. “He won’t be seeing clients.”
“I’m not a client,” Lottie reminded her.
“Oh my god,” the man yelled. “Anna!”
“That’s me,” the girl said.
Lottie nodded. She had made a decision. “Good luck with the diamond dusts.”
“Diamonds aren’t even rare. Everyone thinks they are but they’re not.” Her voice was sorrowful. “Did you want to leave a message? I can take down your name.” But the girl was already turning to the back office where he was calling her again. “No need.” Lottie picked up the painting and started toward the door. She stepped into the vestibule and pressed the button for the elevator, which came at once. As the door closed, she heard the man’s hot voice and the receptionist’s salving replies.
“She wasn’t a client. In a car accident. Sandals and socks.”
“Well, bring her in!”
“Well, she’s gone!”
In the lobby, men argued over a pallet of boxes. Lottie maneuvered past, through the door to the street. She was relieved to hear an enormous lock activate behind her.
Lottie wasn’t certain what she was doing was stealing, but she wasn’t certain it wasn’t. She’d bring the painting back after she had time to think. The bus was nearing Midtown when her cell phone rang.
It was her employer, Alice Blakeman, who about the birth of her son, Pumpkin, once said: “I would have been just as happy had we adopted a cocker spaniel.”
“I know it’s your day off,” Alice said. “But just for an hour?”
Lottie wanted to go home, take off her shoes, and scrub the walls. But she needed hours. Though guilt had made Derek financially considerate, the divorce had been expensive. She and Cher disembarked at the next stop.
Lottie and Cher crossing Fifty-Sixth Street.
She thought of Cher’s certain gaze and straightened herself.
Lottie pulling Cher away from a delivery cart’s path.
Lottie and Cher waiting for a walk sign next to a pharmacy window that seemed to reflect all the light in the world. Amidst the blurred, bright people crossing and waiting, Lottie was a hunched figure in a light jacket. She thought of Cher’s certain gaze and straightened herself.
Lottie and Cher weaving through commuters belching up through the Fifty-Ninth Street subway exit.
In the Blakeman office, Pumpkin jumped on the couch while Alice stood on a chair in the center of the room, spraying him with water.
“Thank god,” Alice said when Lottie entered. She motioned to Pumpkin with her shoe. “Ice cream, or whatever?”
Lottie and Pumpkin walked to the ice creamery on Fifth. Pumpkin ordered three scoops of mint julep. Lottie ordered one scoop of vanilla.
“Why would you order one scoop when you could have three?” Pumpkin said.
They sat on a low stone wall that bordered a park. Families dotted the lawn. Pumpkin stabbed at his ice cream with his small, pink tongue. Lottie had once attended Derek’s company picnic in this park. They had crossed this lawn holding eggs balanced on spoons. Teams. On the subway home, Derek had said he was proud of his “jock wife.” He balanced a platter of macaroni salad sheathed in plastic wrap on his thighs.
The sun retreated behind a cloud and threw shadows onto the field. The boy sitting next to her dragged his tongue across his ice cream while turning the cone for advantageous angles. He was attached to her, this was clear by how close he sat, how relaxed he was in her presence. Who was he?
“Do you like your ice cream?” she said.
He nodded. “It’s delightful.”
It was Pumpkin, she realized. The wealthy boy she cared for, who every so often opened into a moment of startling tenderness. Lottie worried these moments would become rarer as he aged. What did Harolyn always say about life? It’s like a piece of pottery. A kite? A bike. “Was I here yesterday?” Lottie said. “Did I watch you?”
Pumpkin nodded. “We made turkey casserole for Alice.”
“You’re a good boy,” Lottie said.
“What is that?” He pointed to the package.
Lottie unwrapped the top half of the painting, revealing Cher from the chin up.
“Ugly,” Pumpkin said.
Lottie felt a stab of loyalty. “It’s modern art.”
Pumpkin produced a marker from his pocket and, before Lottie could stop him, drew a pert mustache on the canvas. She slapped his hand, sending the marker through the air to clack against the concrete.
“Ouch,” he said, more loudly than the slap warranted. Receiving no response, he said it again.
“I want to know,” Lottie said, “what made you think you could do that.”
He retreated, flashed, hardened into a plan. “I’m telling Mother.”
She licked her fingers and tried to erase the smudge. It blurred and spread. She pulled Pumpkin off the bench, to the curb, across the street, toward his mother’s office.
Lottie and Cher sitting on the bus.
“No, thank you,” Lottie said, when a man offered his hand.
Lottie and Cher leaping to the sidewalk.
Shop owners hosed off hot concrete. It was the beginning of summer. Or summer was almost over. In any case, the sun was to be enjoyed, because it had been absent for so long or because it would soon be going away. It was dusk when Lottie and Cher walked home through the park. The lamps were lit. Baseball games were concluding in the fields. Winners and weepers. Reluctant families trudged toward the subway.
Her apartment had three rooms: bedroom, kitchen, and family. Pale yellow walls and a partial view of the park, if you hung out the window upside down like a bat, clenching the railing with your toes. This was her joke with Pumpkin, and it never failed to elicit his throaty, adult laugh.
Lottie sat on the couch, removed her shoes, and spent a long time rubbing each foot. Her ancient answering machine flashed with a message. The gallery, she assumed, but it was Alice Blakeman.
“I don’t know what to say. Pumpkin tells me—it’s hard to even believe—he says, well, Lottie, did you slap him?”
This would be the most thought Alice would ever give her and it would come in the form of bewilderment that someone on her payroll would do anything to confuse her. Lottie knew that over the course of the night the confusion would calcify into self-righteousness, then insult. Lottie would have to apologize.
“Or else what?” she said aloud, rubbing and making a difference to a firm knot in her heel.
The apartment was neat but not clean. A painting of an Italian café hung over the dusty television. “A conversation starter,” Derek had called it. He bought it during his traveling phase when he read about other countries and went nowhere.
It was meant to be their starter apartment, but they had lived in it for thirty years until a few weeks before, when Derek came home from his job at a medical supply firm and told her he would be moving into his girlfriend’s apartment that very night. She was a coworker and had attended the park party, watching the couple cross the lawn holding eggs on spoons. She’d even expressed regret that no one had eaten Lottie’s macaroni salad. “A waste of good noodles.”
Though it had been Derek’s decision to divorce, they’d both participated in the relationship’s dimming. His dalliances, her aloofness. There were no children or money to divvy. There had been a baby who hadn’t lived long. When Lottie pictured her, which she’d been doing more often, she lay in the hospital’s bassinet on one of her only days, too delicate for the world to hold. The only time she’d been in the presence of death before that morning’s accident. Weeks of damaging silence followed. Derek couldn’t meet Lottie’s gaze. He never blamed her but did not contradict her when she blamed herself.
Lottie poured a glass of wine and waited for remorse to split her in two. Garden-variety doubt, at least. No feeling arrived. Even after a second glass. She liked that the dishes in the sink were hers. Her work dresses, pressed and zipped, hung in the front closet. A headache bloomed at the base of her neck. She thought of Derek in this space as she throated two aspirin. He’d always looked too big in it, clumsy fingers pulling a pot from a high shelf.
Lottie removed Cher from her wrapping and leaned her against the wall. Except for Pumpkin’s smudge, Cher was flawless, making everything in the room seem dull. Her patient, beaming face. The bold lavender and fuchsia. They smiled at one another.
Lottie propped Cher on one of the kitchen chairs, turned on the radio, and pulled a pork cutlet from the refrigerator. She liked noise while she made dinner. On the news, a man was being interviewed about something that had nothing to do with Lottie or anyone she knew. She chopped chives as the water boiled, tossed a pad of butter into a warming pan.
Lottie and Cher eating dinner at the kitchen table.
Lottie had never felt young, not even in youth. She disliked only one thing about time: the accrual of loss. At fifty, Harolyn said, people start to leave the room. Sometimes Lottie would shop to take her mind off all the good people gone. Harolyn, her baby, several dear friends, Derek too, in a way. She’d miss parts of him. The evil you know, Harolyn would say. Harolyn had been the most person with a capital P Lottie had ever known. No one made her do anything. How had death managed it? One moment you’re a person and the next you’re not.
After dinner, Lottie surveyed the family room. A knobby couch, an easy chair, two bookcases. She removed the café picture and replaced it with Cher. She stepped back and studied the woman.
“This must seem so shabby to you.”
Lottie ran the vacuum over the living room and hallway carpets. The couch was lighter than she had anticipated. Or she was stronger. She dragged it to the opposite wall. The easy chair to where the couch had been. The television to the other wall. This rearrangement would create an enclave for Cher, she thought as she yanked the plug from the socket, a sacred space. She walked to the kitchen and retrieved a pint of ice cream from the freezer.
It occurred to her that the enclave should be on the smaller wall. The far wall did not offer the type of intimacy an enclave required. Lottie dragged the chair back across the room to the smaller wall, but there it was too close to the couch. The room creaked to one side, Cher in the middle, a steady rudder. Lottie pushed the couch to the far wall. Now the television was next to the couch instead of across from it. Then the bookshelves: two five-tiered towers of unfinished wood that Derek had put together with nails and a high heel. He wasn’t all bad. It’s impossible to hate a person you truly know.
Lottie decided to move the couch to the bookshelf wall and the bookshelves to the green wall, creating the enclave she desired. She had to progress inch by inch. First one bookshelf, then the next, then she ran to the couch and moved it a few inches. The system worked but Lottie realized too late that the couch wouldn’t fit past the bookshelves. She should have done one bookshelf then the other. She tried to move the chair to make way for the bookshelves. It lodged between the couch and the wall and refused to budge.
Lottie’s strength was gone, her hands chapped and red. She attempted to lift the television over the couch to free up some space, but it was too stubborn to move. Lottie had positioned each piece of furniture so it could move neither forward nor back. A miracle of geometry.
Her headache was not responding to the aspirin, and an hour had passed. Or, three. Why the headache? It had been a regular day. She’d looked after Pumpkin and picked up a sleeve of veal on the way home for dinner. No, that was the year before. It had been Derek who knew what to do with veal. He’d surprised her with dinner and a fistful of wildflowers. They’d eaten at the kitchen table as the room filled with afternoon sunlight. If that was the previous year, what was today? Lottie remembered the accident, the painting. The lamp on the table next to her was off. She must have done it in her sleep. Her heart thumped. Had it been a dream, the cab, the Cher? There she was on the wall, every part of her glimmering in errant light. Two women in a room. Both recently survived a wreck.
“We’ve experienced quite a shock,” Lottie told her. It was the right sentiment: honest, simple. A kiln, Lottie remembered. Is what Harolyn said life is like. It turns up the heat until your true colors show.
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