This was exactly the kind of complicated mess Lydia had always been so good at straightening out, the kind of legal and emotional minefield she had always been so good at negotiating. Now she seemed to sit over the pages for hour after hour without being able to pay attention to them at all. Hannah Graham wanted to make a fuss to stop her father from selling her mother’s things? Well, so what? What did it matter if Cavender Marsh got to sell those things or not? Tasheba Kent wanted to make sure that her black feather boa went to some kind of show business museum, and not to a fan collector, because fan collectors sometimes did really disgusting sexual things with mementos of their favorite stars? Why, in the name of God, should that be Lydia Acken’s problem?
What Lydia’s mind kept going back to, over and over again, was the sight of a storefront window on a side street in the East Village, a window she had passed by accident the first time, when her cab had been stuck in traffic and made a wrong turn. “LEGAL SERVICES,” the sign in the window had said, first in English, then in Spanish, then in some sort of Asian characters, then (Lydia hadn’t been sure about this) in the Cyrillic alphabet. Her cabdriver swore heavily in Spanish and speeded up. Turning the corner onto Third Avenue, Lydia was just able to catch the one sign on the one corner that hadn’t been torn down and hauled away: East Sixth Street.
She had come back on a Saturday afternoon, walking down the avenue from St. Mark’s Place with increasing uneasiness, knowing that her plain denim skirt and white cotton blouse and blue canvas espadrilles were all wrong. The clothes she wore were all made of natural fibers, for one thing. They were also much too clean. The people around her looked not only worn, but grungy. They had dirt ground into the pores of their skin, so deep it looked as if it might never come out. Their clothes were almost invariably not only polyester and rayon, but the cheapest versions of these, the kinds that crackled like paper and chafed the skin. The children wore pants that were too big for them or too small for them or that just didn’t sit right on their hips—but there weren’t many children. The ones Lydia saw were either Spanish or Asian. They chattered away in languages she didn’t understand.
When she got to the storefront with the sign about legal services in its window, she went in through the plate-glass door and sat down on a worn couch with green plastic cushions. All around her she saw women in sagging dresses and too-tight jeans, tired women and bruised women and women who looked as if they’d rather be dead. There were also a couple of men, but they kept to themselves, in a corner, as if they had stumbled into an old-fashioned hen party. The men looked as if they’d rather be dead, too.
A very young woman with what Lydia now knew was called an “Isro” was sitting at a desk near the back, answering the phone and calling out the names of women who were then allowed to pass through the door behind her desk. The very young woman looked harried and annoyed. At the front of her desk there was a listing stack of brochures, printed in plain black and white, nothing fancy. “EAST VILLAGE LEGAL SERVICES,” the brochures announced on their covers. Lydia got up and went to the desk to take one.
“Do you want to sign up to talk to one of the lawyers?” the young woman with the Isro asked her.
“No, no,” Lydia said, retreating.
The young woman lost interest in her. Lydia sat back down on the couch and looked through the brochure. Like the sign out front, it was printed in four different languages. Lydia stuck to the English and found out that East Village Legal Services was made up of lawyers who devoted all or part of their time to providing members of the East Village community with the legal help they needed to “negotiate the system,” specializing in welfare law and “disputes with social services professionals” and battering and wife-abuse cases. At the very bottom of the English section, thick black letters spelled out IF YOU ARE A LAWYER. Underneath there was a short paragraph that said simply, “If you are a lawyer and would like to donate your time at EVLS, please contact Sherri at 212-555-2876.”
I could devote all my time to something like East Village Legal Services, Lydia found herself thinking, at the oddest times, for days afterward. If I scaled down the way I lived, I wouldn’t have to work at all anymore. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting paid.
It was a crazy idea, and it didn’t help her any with working out the details of the Tasheba Kent auction or getting ready to go to Maine. Lydia was even having a hard time packing. When she put her black wool dinner dress into her suit bag, she asked herself why anybody ever bothered to go to the trouble of dressing for dinner. When she zipped her mid-heeled dress pumps into the shoe pockets of her suitcase, she wondered how she could ever have decided to buy such silly shoes. Everything she did in her life was wrong, everything was silly, and nothing she tried helped her to settle down. Even her tranquilizers didn’t work. Her tranquilizers had gotten her through her divorce without so much as a headache.