Working with Difficult People
As Nora Eunice Magliano sat down slowly in the bathtub, she couldn’t help but think of the boy. In high school in Madison there had been a boy with matted sandy hair and more freckles than most redheads, a small strange boy who taunted her mercilessly about her weight. For some reason he had been obsessed with the idea of Nora Eunice getting stuck in a bathtub. Something was wrong with that boy, at least that’s what her mother had told her.
“He has worse problems than you do,” her mother had said. “Ignore him and eventually he’ll stop.”
That’s what Nora Eunice had tried to do, and in the end it had worked. Eventually. After a year or so, the freckly blond boy found himself a different target, and left Nora Eunice free, for a time, from verbal taunting. During that year, however, she stopped taking sit-down baths. For the next twelve years, she took only showers, or washed herself with a cloth. Until today. And now it turned out that she fit just fine, here in this tub, the old one in the upstairs bathroom, this tub with lion’s feet and porcelain so worn that rusty streaks showed through. She looked down at her body, under the water. Immersed. There was plenty of room.
Earlier that morning, Nora Eunice Magliano had begun to feel ill. Her aunt had just arrived at the offices of Burke & Benedict Books, the aunt who now preferred to be called Sister Eunice, the aunt known to the publishing house as their best-selling author Sr. Martin de Porres. Whatever her name, she had certainly managed to make an impression. Sister Eunice had received with warm gratitude the condolences of the staff and their kind memories of her mother, and she had accepted, with modesty demurrals, their admiration for her literary skills—and on top of it all she had taken the time to learn the names of every single person in the room. When she was done charming everyone, she smiled and winked at Nora Eunice, then followed the publisher into his office for a private conversation.
Ten minutes later, ten long minutes after Father Bresnahan had closed the door, Nora Eunice stood up, put on her coat, and told her co-workers that she needed to go home. Everyone was very understanding. The stress of the funeral. She shouldn’t have even come into work today.
When she arrived at her grandmother’s house, the house where she had lived for the past five years and which would no doubt soon be sold, she found her mother in the living room, wrapping an old crystal sherry glass in newspaper.
“Should we keep the set together?” her mother asked. “Or give one glass to each sister? Originally it was a full dozen, but now only nine are left, so one apiece would work out perfectly. But who wants a single sherry glass? What do you think?”
Nora Eunice told her mother that she felt sick, and needed to go upstairs.
Now, listening from the upstairs tub, she heard someone at the front door. Her mother was telling whoever it was that she didn’t need to knock, that she could come right in whenever she wanted to. Of course it was one of her aunts, but which one? Then Nora Eunice heard her mother fixing tea for the visitor and coffee for herself, and her mother’s manner left no doubt: the guest was Sister Eunice. Then the two Larkin sisters were sitting down together. For a mid-morning chat! They had to be at the kitchen table—right underneath Nora Eunice—yakking away like old friends!
What on earth did they have in common? Sister Eunice was almost twenty years older than Nora Eunice’s mother! The oldest of nine and the youngest. Eunice Larkin had left this house to join the convent before her baby sister could even talk. She was Sr. Martin de Porres, a family legend, not a regular person.
Nora Eunice listened intently. Sister Eunice was asking her mother about her job, about the registrar’s office at Edgewood College in Madison, the most boring place in the world! And now they were laughing. Nora realized that her mother, of whom she was eternally embarrassed, and her aunt, whom she feared and admired, were both working women. Or at least Sister Eunice had found that connection. They were laughing about their professional lives, about the bureaucracy of small colleges, about working with difficult people. It was too much. Nora Eunice wished she could change the station, listen to something else.
She turned and looked at the little table next to the bathtub, where a few minutes before she had carefully placed two objects. One was a trapezoidal blade from the hardware store, a replacement razor for a utility knife, still wrapped in protective cardboard. The other was a bronze mask, encrusted with verdigris, the ancient green face of a strong-jawed woman, a face with stylized curls and large blank eyes.
Next episode: Looking for the BierWagen
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