Being Esther Read Online Free PDF Page B

She wears the same coral lipstick and her hair, swept up and secured into place with a thick coating of spray, is still a silvery blond. Esther always feels as if she has a poppyseed stuck in her teeth when she’s with Lorraine.
    â€œYou don’t remember, do you?” Esther says. “It’s the movie where Charles Boyer convinces his wife that things that happen are figments of her imagination. He isolates her and in the endhe drives her mad.” She pauses. “Lorraine, I am here to tell you that my daughter is gaslighting me. She insisted that we had a date. But we did not.”
    Lorraine nudges a teacup toward Esther.
    Esther pushes it away. “You don’t believe me.”
    â€œI believe you.” Lorraine refills her own cup. “But she didn’t exactly kidnap you. She’s your daughter. Besides,” she says, reaching across the table for Esther’s hand.
    â€œStop!” Esther recoils. “I know what you’re going to say—that I don’t have to move. But one day . . . one day, just like Helen, I’ll paint my eyebrows with lipstick, or serve a raw roast to dinner guests. I’ll burn myself with the teakettle, or trip on the bath mat and break my wrist. We have to be so careful, Lorraine. It’s exhausting being this careful.”

M rs. Singh was mugged early on a Sunday morning, while heading for a bus to visit Mr. Singh in the hospital. She’d hoped to arrive in time to feed him his breakfast.
    â€œNext thing I knew, I was on the ground,” she tells Esther, who already knows the details, compliments of Milo. The two women have run into each other in the foyer, collecting their mail. Mrs. Singh’s arm, the one she ordinarily uses to hike up her sari when she climbs the stairs, is in a sling. As she struggles with the key to her mailbox she tells Esther that she never heard her assailant. “One minute, I’m heading for the bus; the next, boom, I’m on the ground!” All she remembers is a burning sensation piercing the shoulder where her purse strap had been. Her sari was ripped, her eyeglasses broken, and so was her right arm, which had taken the brunt of the fall. “I never saw it coming,” she says.
    Esther considers telling her neighbor about the mugging that precipitated her father’s move to America, and how he often reminded the family that if he hadn’t been attacked at the train station in Warsaw by a group of hooligans who taunted him for being a Jew, he would have gone to the death camps with the rest of his family. Her father spoke of that attack as “the straw that broke the camel.” Sometimes, he called it “the silver lining in the clouds.”
    Instead, Esther offers to help Mrs. Singh in any way she can and warns her neighbor not to trip on the hem of her sari as she makes her way up the stairs.
    Safely back in her own apartment, Esther bolts the door and fastens the chain, and thinks that if Ceely ever gets wind of the mugging she’ll put her in that place where Helen Pearlman is stashed away. Esther can’t find the silver lining in what happened to Mrs. Singh.
    Shortly after Mrs. Singh was mugged, a sign went up near the mailboxes in the foyer announcing a meeting in the courtyard near the statue of Saint Francis, on Wednesday at five. A police officer will be on hand to answer questions and address concerns about neighborhood safety. The sign says: “Bring your own chair.”
    Esther plans to bring one of the lawn chairs that she and Marty had found on sale at Walgreens alongside a jumble of rubber flip-flops and tanning oils. When Marty suggested that they buy two, she’d pictured the patch of dirt between the sidewalk and the curb that Milo rakes and waters to no avail. “What will we do with lawn chairs?” she asked. Marty paused, jingled the change in his pockets, and said, “You never know.” Then Esther pointed to a spot where the