The Believers by Zoë Heller Page B

embarrassment of having an elderly Latina scrub her toilets, she usually made sure to be elaborately, importantly busy whenever Sylvia was in the house.
    "I'll get up," she said. "Just give me a minute."
    "Okay." Sylvia wagged her finger. "Don't be too long!"
    Audrey watched her as she left the room. Maintaining the fiction of chummy equality with your help could be very wearing at times. Privately, she thought her socialist conscience could have survived a tiny bit more deference from Sylvia. She closed her eyes and tried to recollect the dream she had just been having. But the few stray images that had survived Sylvia's intrusion were already escaping--slipping away from her grasp, like the prizes in a fairground machine falling from the clumsy mechanical claw. After a while, she gave up and opened her eyes again. She looked at her watch. She was supposed to be meeting Rosa in Brooklyn in an hour to take Joel's mother, Hannah, to see Joel. She hadn't even put gas in the car. She got up and began hunting in her pocketbook for her keys.
    Audrey hated napping in the daytime. It was demoralizing. It made her feel like an old lady. She wasn't getting enough nighttime sleep, that was the problem; she wasn't scheduling things efficiently. By day, she sat at Joel's bedside in a narcoleptic stupor; by night she rattled around the Perry Street house, a lone pea in an oversize pod. Her domestic life, which for forty years had been framed by Joel's clamorous, demanding presence, had become a shambolic, unpunctuated affair. She frittered her evenings away, gazing listlessly at the television, smoking joints, wandering in and out of the kitchen to open and close the fridge--always putting off the moment when she would have to clomp up the stairs to bed. The procrastination had nothing to do with fear of the dark, or of the bogeyman: it was simply that without Joel, she didn't have the gumption, the discipline, to call a halt to the day by herself.
    The keys were not in her bag. She went into the kitchen and began searching through the piles of newspaper and mail on the kitchen table.
    She felt a sort of guilty nostalgia now for the early, hectic days of Joel's illness. In the first week after the stroke, the crisis had formed a cocoon into which nothing resembling normalcy had been allowed to intrude. Joel had had two emergency surgeries to stop bleeding in his brain. His heart had stopped beating twice. She had set up camp in the ICU--sleeping in the chair next to Joel's bed at night and showering in the maternity ward in the morning. Rosa and Karla had taken compassionate leave from their jobs. And every day, a procession of Joel's friends and colleagues and former clients had passed through the Family and Friends Lounge. Sometimes, there had been as many as twenty people gathered in the little room, telling sentimental stories about Joel and ordering in bagels and lox from the deli across the street. One night, Judy Collins had come by, and they'd all sung "We Shall Overcome."
    Six weeks on, that first, exhilarating spike of catastrophe had subsided. Joel, still languishing in the no-man's-land of coma, had been demoted to "sub-acute" status and moved to a rehab center at NYU. His law office had been closed, and his small staff--with what seemed to Audrey rather heartless efficiency--had found themselves new jobs. Rosa and Karla were back at work. Audrey had come home.
    Everyone had assured her that coming home was the sensible thing to do. Joel would likely be in the rehab place for months to come, and it would be silly, they said, to wear herself out at this stage in hysterical displays of saintliness. She needed to conserve her energy for the long haul. The nurses had been instructed to phone her immediately if Joel's condition changed in her absence, and in the case of an emergency she could get from the house to the hospital in under half an hour.
    Still, there was a part of Audrey that was appalled by her decision. Six weeks Joel