Rise and Shine Read online

  “Why didn’t you call me? I’m home now if you’re up. If you get this in the morning, call me at home. It doesn’t matter how early. Or call me as soon as you get off the air. I’ll be at the office. Or call me on my cell. I need a full report. Don’t panic.” I stopped, breathed, and hung up after the last. For me to tell my older sister not to panic, my sister who had done a stand-up as the president was being loaded into the helicopter after the stabbing by that wacko at the Caribbean summit, who had once interviewed the Russian president while he had his hand on her ass, who had piggybacked me over to the community hospital when I was eight and she twelve and told the desk clerk flatly, “She needs stitches in her leg right now!”—if I was telling Meghan not to panic, I knew it meant we were in terrible trouble here.

  When the phone rang, I jumped. “Hello, dear heart,” said a voice with a bit of a rusty hinge in it.

  “Oh, God, Aunt Maureen.”

  “Now, be still, Bridget. That’s why I’m calling so late. I know you’re sitting there worrying yourself to a sliver.”

  “Did you see the show?”

  “I did. And then I had bridge club. Can you imagine? Lucy Selliger said she’d never heard a thing like that in all her life. And I said, Well, Lucy, I assume your husband never hit himself with the hammer when he was hanging a picture.”

  “Oh, God bless you, is there anything Meghan could do that you wouldn’t stand up for?”

  “Of course there is. There have been times when I’ve given your sister the lash of my tongue, but this won’t be one of them.”

  “Of course not. That would be terrible for her. The worst.”

  “That’s not the only reason. Elaine Lee said this morning, Well, I thought that man was an asshole, too.”

  “My God! Mrs. Lee said that! Isn’t she a Mormon?”

  “Her husband was a Mormon. She’s Presbyterian. There was a big scandal about the marriage, apparently. But that’s neither here nor there. I’m sure there were plenty of Mormons out there thinking that Meghan was speaking the truth.”

  “I missed the whole thing.” The first Monday of the month was the only day I didn’t watch Rise and Shine before work. I always had a staff meeting, and all the day’s work backed up after it, all the weekend’s crises knocking at the door. The ancient furnace breaks in our women’s shelter on Mount Morris Avenue. One of the women in the transitional housing building down the street decides to try to scar up one of the others, maybe because she took her laundry out of the dryer in the basement or gave her boyfriend a blow job in the vacant lot. You never know what will set people off if they have no money, no home, and spend a lot of time watching television shows filled with people they’ll never look like living in places they’ll never be able to live. There had been the usual litany of need that morning, the usual litany of violence and poverty and want that would go on and on, more obscene than any words.

  It’s a different world up in the Bronx, where I work, the anti–East Side, rap and salsa from the doorways, squat buildings with metal grilles over the doors and windows, steep hills and layered graffiti and drive-by law enforcement of the “no one’s dead, let’s have coffee” variety. I know from experience that in a half hour on the train you can go from Lupe’s Brides Delux, which rents elaborate lace dresses at an hourly rate for hurry-up marriages, to Bergdorf’s, where the women stroll casually through the ground floor, putting out manicured fingers to touch a scarf, a bag, a sweater that may cost more than one of my women gets from welfare to support three kids for a month. I’ve watched those women sigh, frown, turn from one necklace to another, then with the dissatisfied not-quite-but-still look hand over a credit card for something they will scarcely use and barely remember enough to regret. If they went from their homes to Paris or Hong Kong, they would travel a shorter distance than if they were to take the Number 6 train to my part of the Bronx.

  “I missed it,” I repeated to my aunt. “I mean, I didn’t really miss it. You can’t miss it. They keep playing it over and over again. It’s like she just snapped.”

  “I talked to her this afternoon, dear. She will be fine. She needs a bit of space. She’s been in a brown study these last few months. I think it’s sending Leo off to college and being in the same job for a long time. She’s come up here after the show for lunch the last few weeks, and she hasn’t said much, but I can tell.”

  “She’s been coming up there?” My sister’s schedule usually looked like the schematic for a nuclear power plant. Lunch with my aunt Maureen in Westchester seemed pretty far off the grid.

  “The last month or so. She can’t stay long, but I make her a grilled cheese sandwich.”

  “The patented Maureen Dougherty cure for anything that ails you. I still think I ought to make one anytime I get the flu.”

  “Everyone feels a little better after a grilled cheese sandwich. A real grilled cheese sandwich, none of that low-fat nonsense. Especially for your sister. She looks like a roof shingle in a high wind these days.” Our aunt Maureen is the official queen of china closet aphorisms. I suspect she makes most of them up on the spot.

  “She’s in a high wind right now. She’s going to blow right over.”

  “She will be fine.”

  “I can’t get her on the phone. I can’t get Evan, either. I’m going a little nuts here.”

  “Oh, I think she’s under the porch, dear,” Maureen said.

  On Valentine’s Day the year after we moved in with Aunt Maureen and Uncle Jack, our uncle had brought us home an Angora kitten. I’d like to say that I won the right to name her, but the fact is Meghan simply wasn’t interested. I suppose it seemed too much like we were staying if she christened a cat. I named her Puff Ball. “That’s the stupidest name I’ve ever heard,” Meghan whispered that night as we lay in bed.

  Despite her name, and her appearance, Puff turned out to be one of those cats who never met another animal that didn’t look like dinner. With a grating, high-pitched yowl, she set slain moles, birds, mice, chipmunks, even frogs, on the kitchen floor. But sometimes she took on a possum, a raccoon, a neighbor’s boxer, and the result was a deep puncture wound or a gash from ear to ear. We discovered what had happened only after the fact, too late for the vet, because when Puff was wounded, Puff went under the porch and nursed her injuries until the bleeding stopped and the healing began.

  Whether it was when her best friend ran off with another group of girls in eighth grade, when she was unfairly denied the English prize at her high school graduation, when she was passed over for the weekend anchor spot, or when the doctors told her she would never carry another pregnancy to term, Meghan did precisely the same. She licked her wounds alone and in isolation, until only the sharpest eyes could see the scars. And then she went on as if nothing had happened. Once I had cried to my aunt, “Why can’t she talk to me about it when she’s really upset?”

  “It’s not in her nature,” Maureen had replied.

  Like Puff, who died quietly at age nineteen while lying on a pile of old sheets in the upstairs linen closet, Meghan always managed to recover. So maybe this, too, would pass. I should know better than to underestimate my sister. She’d taught me to ride a bike when she’d just learned herself, pulled me out of the Long Island Sound surf one afternoon when I was caught in a bad rip current, gotten both of us scholarships to Smith, had a baby when they told her she never would, pushed aside the occupant of the morning show spot without even seeming to do so, and kept the woman as a friend, or what passes as a friend in her circles in New York City, to boot. Maybe it would not matter that the viewers of Rise and Shine had heard the same two words that had killed off Tandy Bannister’s radio show and landed him in Detroit doing syndicated car news, the same two words that had cost a gubernatorial candidate in Nebraska a sure primary victory.

  At 7:00 the next morning I awoke, put on the TV, and it was as though nothing had happened. There was the intro music and there was the logo and there was the cheesy-looking semicircular desk. Except that
instead of the usual opening—“Good morning. Rise and shine. I’m Meghan Fitzmaurice, and I’ll be with you for the next two hours”—the program opened with Tom McGregor, a jovial guy who looked ten years older than my sister and who was actually ten years younger. Viewers loved Tom because he looked like an average guy who lived in the burbs, had three cute little kids, and played golf with his brother-in-law on Sundays; in fact, Tom lived in the burbs, had a fourth cute kid on the way, and played golf all weekend long. The makeup crew complained bitterly about trying to bring down his sunburn to manageable levels on summer Mondays. They’d wound up using the kind of foundation you use to cover serious scars and he still looked like an Irish guy in the third hour of the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Meghan said he was smarter than he looked, certainly smarter than Bill Messereau, his opposite number, the single member of the team, who always wound up on those lists of the ten most eligible bachelors in New York.

  “Good morning,” Tom said with his serious look. “The Federal Communications Commission announced late yesterday that it would begin an investigation of the use of a profanity on this program during a broadcast interview. The FCC acted after several complaints from viewers, including the wife of the vice president. Network officials said they were confident that after looking into the incident, the chairman of the FCC would conclude that it had been an unfortunate production accident and that it was in no way deliberate.”

  It’s funny how the way you deliver a line can make all the difference in the world. Tom was neither attractive nor authoritative, but he had sincerity that politicians must have wanted to tap and bottle. He was the Vermont maple tree of sincere, dripping with the sweet stuff, a little sappy but pure nonetheless. Having him do the story was the perfect solution. If network executives were intelligent, Tom would have finished there and the program would have gone on as if nothing had happened. But if more network executives were intelligent, television would be completely different than it is.

  “Meghan?” said Tom.

  My sister was wearing a pale pink blouse. It is the color they make her wear when they want her to look feminine, vulnerable, soft, sweet—in other words, when they want her to appear other than what she is. She wore that practiced look that people in her business have perfected, not quite a smile but friendly nonetheless.

  “I want to take this opportunity to apologize to viewers who were offended by what I assumed were off-the-air remarks at the end of a particularly contentious interview. I lost my temper in front of a live camera and a live microphone. It’s happened to others more distinguished than I am—presidents, prime ministers, and in one memorable case, the Prince of Wales.” You could almost hear the chuckles. I could almost hear the computer keys. Meghan had written this herself. I knew the sound of her voice.

  I knew the sound of the lawyers’ voices as well. Occasionally I’d heard her mouth them when the network itself had been in the news, when they’d been sued by the family at the center of a made-for-television movie, when their weekend anchor had been arrested for drunk driving.

  “It was not my intention nor the intention of the network to permit such language or to countenance its use,” Meghan continued, and in case you weren’t clear on the fact that she was reading a prepared statement, she was looking down at the papers on the desk, papers that even the most cursory TV-watching American knows are used just for show, so that anchorpeople have something to do with their hands. “The network is mounting a full investigation of the circumstances and will respond completely and appropriately to the FCC investigation.”

  Meghan looked up and smiled softly. This time the smile was in the mouth but not the eyes. Or perhaps I was the only one who noticed.

  “At least that’s what it says here,” she added with the signature head tilt. “I’m Meghan Fitzmaurice. Rise and shine.”

  I’d heard her say it lots of different ways over the years, but I’d never imagined she could make it sound like that, make “Rise and shine” sound exactly like “And you can all go to hell.”

  “WOO-HEE,” SAID TEQUILA when I walked into my office.

  “I know.”

  “Things are happening fast,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Her husband’s here.”

  “What?”

  I’ve known Evan Grater longer than I knew my own parents, or my aunt and uncle, or Irving Lefkowitz. The only person I’ve known longer than Evan is Meghan, but sometimes the two merge in my mind, and I really do believe I knew that tidy little boy who had to be pulled, gasping and affronted, from the Bensons’ pool, humbled by his future wife.

  But I don’t think he’d ever been to my office. And why would he have? Evan has one of those Wall Street jobs that no one understands but that seem to consist of some mysterious ability to turn money into more money, a little like what Christ did with the loaves and fishes. He works near the Staten Island Ferry terminal in an office that seems to float over New York harbor; viewed from the right angle, the Statue of Liberty appears to be a paperweight on his Hepplewhite desk. From his office we watch the fireworks over the harbor on the Fourth of July. It’s like being in the center of the starbursts. “Open these windows, Daddy!” Leo said once when he was small, and we all laughed, except Meghan, who shuddered slightly and buttoned her cardigan against the air-conditioning. Incredibly enough, my sister is afraid of heights.

  My office is in the back bedroom of a narrow row house on Carolina Street just off Mount Morris Avenue. From my window, which is accented with a security grate locked into place with a padlock so junkies will be dissuaded from stealing my computer, I can see a backyard that we’ve asphalted over so we can keep our two vans there. We use the vans to take clients to and from the endless appointments that are the price of poverty in big cities. Welfare, immigration, the methadone clinic, the school. A couple of years ago, just after I arrived, Tequila had some buttons made up for one of our fund-raising events that said “Being Poor Isn’t for Sissies.” Actually, they’d originally said “Being Poor Ain’t for Sissies,” and we’d insisted on changing them, setting off a pitched battle about white grammar versus black street language or, in Tequila’s words, “tight ass instead of talking true.” We won because white folks rule the world and because Tequila’s daughter, Princess Margaret, told her mother the original was trashy.

  I’ve always got one of the buttons on my bulletin board, although people are always stealing it and I have to go back to Tequila for a replacement. It’s next to my list of phone numbers: city agencies, hospital emergency rooms, shelters, the precinct. I’ve also got a pile of regulations held in place with one pushpin: eligibility for public housing, rules for visits by biological parents to children in foster care, all the things you’re not supposed to do if you’re on parole. In a corner there’s a basket filled with ratty toys, since lots of the women I have to talk to come in dragging tired, sometimes hungry children. There are granola bars in a jar on my desk. I’ve got everything at my fingertips, which means that my office looks like one of those apartments occupied by an old person who won’t throw anything out.

  So I felt a combination of shock and shame, seeing Evan amid my junk when I got to the office. He was turning a page on the circular sent out by the precinct with the new rules for complainants in domestic violence cases, a fingertip away from making a move that would send all the papers on my desk crashing to the floor. “Ev, don’t,” I said as he put the one he’d been reading back.

  For many years Evan was the closest thing I had to a dependable man in my life. If there was a mouse in my kitchen, I barricaded myself in the bedroom until Evan arrived with a trap and a rind of Jarlsberg. If I needed a mirror hung, I would ask for his help, although he was not much better with a hammer than I was. He bought me a locket when I graduated from high school and perfume on my birthdays and cashmere at Christmas. He is a good listener, a quality rare in the circles in which he travels. I know that he is shy, although most people do not; Meghan’s aura of sociabili
ty has rubbed off on him. I suppose he was a hybrid, the brother-father I’d never had.

  My sister and I are orphans. People like that. I know it sounds harsh, but I could see it even when I was young, the round-eyed looks, the lowered voices. Everyone around us went limp at the sound of the word. I see it at work now, too. It’s so much easier for us to find a placement for three siblings if the parents are gone for good, dad shanked in Attica, mom frozen to death in an abandoned building after an alcoholic blackout. That’s a real case; those kids are living in a split-level house on a half-acre lot in Jersey now, although the littlest one still hoards food under his bed from the years when he was starving. I helped place them myself. Their mom was one of our clients, and on a good day she was a pleasant churchgoing woman with scars all around her eyes. On her bad days she was, in the words of her middle kid, the devil.

  Meghan and I weren’t orphans the way those kids were orphans, but no matter what facts surround the word, it still has a certain punch to it, a Dickensian shorthand that means lost, sad, needy. There’s one photo of us that I think of as the orphan photo. It was taken at Easter; our parents had died in December, on their way home from a holiday party in their black Lincoln. In the picture we’re wearing the kinds of clothes working people think the upper-class wears on special occasions. And we’re dressed identically, turned into twins by tragedy. Navy coats with small rounded collars and pearl buttons, white straw hats, white gloves, and patent leather shoes. Elastic under our chins to keep the hats on. There are two versions of the picture. In one we are both looking at the camera, Meghan, tiny and almost translucent, as though she’s a vision halfway through a disappearing act, and me dopey, mouth a little open, square and short, going through a chubbette phase. The second picture was probably taken accidentally, my aunt’s finger coming down on the button of her old Brownie a moment later. We are still in place, but Meghan is staring off to the side and I am hitching up the socks that have crept down into the heels of my shoes. My nephew, Leo, has these two pictures in one of those hinged stand-up frames on his bureau for reasons best known to him.