Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [81]
Henry waved his hands and feet in the air. “Oh!” Button cried. “Look at those feet! Don’t you just want to eat them?”
“All the time,” Mary said. She leaned over and smiled at Henry. “Look who it is,” she cooed at him. “Look who came to see you! Grandma Button is here.”
“I think he needs to be changed,” Button said. “It’s the kind of thing you should do right away.”
Mary picked up the baby and brought him to the changing table. She started to wipe him, but Button came over and edged her out.
“No,” Button said, grabbing the wipe from Mary’s hand. “You want to do it like this. Here, let me show you. Go like this.”
Jesus is coming.”
And then: “Jesus is coming, folks, you should be ready.”
Isabella looked down the subway platform to see if she could find the man who was trying to tell her about Jesus. She couldn’t see anyone, which made her nervous. His voice boomed around her: “Are you ready? Jesus will know if you aren’t ready.” It was Friday night and Isabella just wanted to get home. Lately, she’d had the feeling that someone was going to push her onto the track while she waited for the subway, and just because this man was talking about Jesus didn’t mean he wouldn’t be the one to do it.
“Will you be ready when he comes? Will you be ready?” the voice echoed down to her. Isabella shivered and hoped that the train would come soon.
The whole week, things had been off for Isabella. New York, it seemed, was out to get her. It started on Sunday, when a crazy bearded man spit at her on the street and called her a cunt. Monday, while she was watching TV, a giant roach the size of a small dog crawled out from behind the bookshelf and died in the middle of the room. It shook and gyrated and then finally stopped moving. Isabella thought it might have had a seizure.
Tuesday, there was the situation with her underwear. Her laundry was delivered to her door that night. Usually this made her feel wonderfully organized and put together—for only a dollar a pound, she could drop off all of her dirty laundry and have it delivered clean and folded the same day—but this time, as she unpacked the bag, she found a pair of underwear that didn’t belong to her. It was a large, flesh-colored, silky pair of underwear with a rose on the waistband. She held it between her thumb and pointer finger like it was dirty, although she realized it must have been cleaned and washed with her things. Her dog, Winston, sat and stared at the underwear, his head cocked to one side, trying to figure out why Isabella was holding it in the air.
In the end, she threw it out. She thought of returning it but figured the cleaners wouldn’t know who the owner was anyway. It was such a small thing, but it made Isabella feel sick, like someone had broken in and touched all of her underwear. It didn’t make sense, she knew. After all, she paid these people to wash her underwear. She did it on purpose. But it still left her uneasy, the thought that people’s personals could get mixed up so easily—that someone else’s underwear could find its way into her drawers.
On Wednesday, Isabella found a whisker on her chin. She hadn’t noticed anything strange that morning, but when she touched her face that night, there it was: a coarse black whisker. When had it had time to grow? “This is not right,” Isabella said to the mirror as she plucked the whisker out. “This is not right!”
“What?” Harrison asked from the other side of the door.
“Nothing,” Isabella said.
Thursday, Isabella found out that Beth White was getting a divorce. She couldn’t believe it. It left her unsettled. Beth and Kyle had gotten married five years ago, in a perfectly bland New Jersey wedding where they’d had a DJ instead of a band and served chicken instead of steak. They weren’t the kind of couple you looked at and thought, “Now, that’s what love looks like” or “That’s what I want to have someday.” But they were a couple that was compatible in a very ordinary way, and Isabella had always thought they were