“Aren’t you even going to mention the universe anymore?” she asked me one morning.
“What is this thing called the universe?” I said. “I don’t know what crazy concept you could be referring to.” And she came over and gave me a hug, which made my eyes fill up with tears. Again.
One day I hear my mother wading into the ongoing, ever-present Frippery discussion that should be called, “What Should We Think About Janelle.” Janelle is the friend of the Amazings, the young woman who is pregnant and regretting it. Unlike Ariana, who is refusing to go to college, Janelle has already gotten an early acceptance and scholarship to Boston University, and baby or no baby, she wants to go there. But how can she? She doesn’t have the money or childcare, or the time. It’s an ongoing situation, and everybody who comes into the Frippery gets drawn into this conversation, it seems.
“She’s steering that massive belly through the halls of the school,” says Ariana. “Trying to get all her work done. But you can see how upset she is. Water just kind of leaks from her eyes these days.”
“She’s crying because of that scumbag who got her pregnant and then didn’t stay with her,” says Charmaine, but Ariana doesn’t like that kind of talk. She starts waving her arms.
“No, no, no! Matt is not a scumbag. He’s a normal guy with a normal life, and neither one of them thought there was going to be a pregnancy, so it’s not like he went back on some promise he made. I get sick of people trashing him.”
“But he gets to go to college, and she doesn’t. That seems massively unfair,” says Charmaine. “She’s the one who has to suffer, while he gets off scot-free.”
“Also, I think he should be required to stick by her at least while she’s carrying his child, don’t you think?” says Dahlia. “He certainly shouldn’t be hooking up with Lulu.”
“Who’s to say he shouldn’t be hooking up with somebody else?” Ariana wants to know. “Janelle and Matt are not technically a couple and if they ever were, it lasted about twenty minutes. And boom! She got pregnant and wanted to keep the kid, and he didn’t have a say in it one way or the other—and now he’s met somebody he’s really into, and so what’s the big deal?”
“What do you mean, they’re not a couple? They’re the very definition of a couple,” points out my mother. “They are a couple that is actually, technically and physically, becoming a new person. Their DNA is mingling.”
“I know that,” says Ariana. “But it’s not like it used to be. Back when couples had to get married because there was a kid on the way, whether you liked the person or not. And who’s to say that Matt and Janelle and the new girlfriend might not all figure out a way to raise this kid? You know?” She flings her arms out, describing a threesome with her hands in the air, a series of circles and gestures. “Stranger things have happened, you know. Maybe they’ll all find an apartment near Boston University and Janelle can go to school, and the other two can, too, if they want, and everybody takes turns taking care of the baby. Big deal. That’s a decent life for everybody.”
I hear my mother get a bit louder, at full Millie MacGraw Force now. “That is patently ridiculous, and it’s a pipe dream, and not the way humans are built. What you need to tell Janelle, if you want to be a good friend to her, is that she should consider putting the child up for adoption. There’s no shame in that, none at all,” she says. “Some of the finest people I know were adopted, including my husband.”
I’m at the counter trimming flowers, and I keep my mouth shut, because I’m resigning from being the person who brings up seemingly impossible possibilities. I might not believe in those anymore. I also don’t tell people anymore what they should do.
And to be honest, for self-preservation, I have to shut down part of myself when Janelle herself comes in, bloomingly pregnant and unhappy about it. She’s a lovely, brown-haired girl-next-door type of girl, pale but shiny, with her gigantic winter coat and her Ugg boots, plodding through the winter waiting for a springtime baby she doesn’t want. She floats in like a moony celebrity guest star—and the Amazings, including Justin and Mookie if they’re around, give her hugs and kisses, and help her find a comfortable place to sit down. I hate it that I feel so acutely my own grief about the pregnancy I will probably never have. I look at her there, so morose and yet looking as though her body is on a brilliant mission, and I want to cry for both of us.
We always give her flowers, Kat and I, because she is in need of comfort. We give her raspberry tea, and we prop her feet up on the beanbag chairs, and we tell her she’s beautiful and that she’ll be fine, and that life will take care of everything. But I can’t say I really believe any of that anymore, and sometimes when she’s here, I find myself going into the back room and letting my tears fall, quietly, on the ledger sheets.
My mother, as far as I know, never does tell her about the adoption thing.
Which is just as well. If I were Janelle, I’m not sure I’d be looking for more people’s opinions as to what I should do with my life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
PATRICK
The morning of the gallery opening, Patrick girds himself for the worst and tells Marnie that he doesn’t want her to come that evening. It’s for her own good, of course. Not that he thinks she would come, in her newfound fury, but he wants to make sure. When he tells her, she takes a long moment to look at him like he’s lost the last remaining bit of his mind. Then she goes back to clearing the table, dropping the silverware in the sink with a little more noisy force than he would have thought absolutely necessary.
“I’m just trying to be considerate of your feelings,” he says. Because damn it, he is.
“Right. Thank you very much.” She walks around him and gets the crumb-covered plates from the table, and he winces, thinking she’ll fling them in the sink as well—or possibly at him—but she places them more carefully. He’s grateful for that. She might be able to respond to reason.
He tries to appeal to that part of her. “I’m just thinking it might be awkward. Hell, I wish I didn’t have to go.”
“I wish you didn’t have to also,” she says without looking at him.
“Okay,” he says. “Well. So that’s it, then. You won’t come.”
She doesn’t even answer him. She walks out of the room.
“Look,” he calls after her. “I just don’t want to hurt you anymore. I want this all to be over.”
She comes back to the doorway. “Over?” she says. “Over? You want the gallery thing to be over, or you want our little domestic situation to be over, or you want all human life as we know it on this planet to be over? Which is it?”
“Um, all human life as we know it on this planet. Door number three,” he says. Dark humor. Maybe she’ll recognize that. We are all suffering here, no good guys and bad guys. Just us, bumbling along.
She stops now and looks at him, and he almost can’t take the heartbreak in her eyes.
It snowed last night, and the white light coming through the windows is reflected on her face. She looks beautiful there, with her hair still uncombed from sleep, all jumbled up and halfway curly. Her eyes have no makeup yet, and they are looking at him straight on, plain and real. She reminds him of a deer he once saw in the woods in the wintertime, the way he and the deer both stopped and looked at each other, unblinking.
“Patrick,” she says. “I’ll be the one who decides whether or not I’m coming to the gallery tonight. Your daughter wants to see your work, as you might imagine, and so does my mother, and some of the Amazings. It would create much more of a statement if I don’t go. So it’s not really up to you.”
“But I don’t want you to be uncomfortable . . .” he says.
This time she does leave. “Noted,” she calls back over her shoulder. “Do me a favor and don’t worry about me anymore. I’m in charge of myself from now on. You don’t even have to think about me, okay? In fact, don’t.”
He shouldn’t have said that about not wanting her to be uncomfortable. You’re
not allowed to say routine, condescending things about someone’s feelings when you’re in the process of hurting them. He knows this. Even if you’re scared shitless of the art opening you’re about to have. Maybe especially if you’re scared.
“I’m sorry,” he calls after her as she leaves.
Everything makes it worse, so he goes back into the studio and closes the door.
Hi, says Anneliese. You know, Patrick, none of this matters. We’re all just specks in the universe, floating out there in time and space, with only a limited time to live. You can fight and shake your fists and yell, but the truth is that you are going to be gone, too, Patrick. Poof! It’s over just like that.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
MARNIE
Patrick is a hit at the opening, despite everything. I can still feel all of his thoughts, so I can tell that he hates it, of course, hates that people are looking at him—hates hates hates that they see his scars. He’s imagining that they’re thinking with pity about the fire. But there he is, basking in his notoriety just the same—basking even in his disdain of it, being all artisty and wearing all black, and with his dark hair tousled and his big blue eyes cloudy and defensive.
Everybody here has surely read the story in Inside Outside, which Mr. Pierpont has thoughtfully blown up three copies of and posted on three walls in case anyone might have missed it. Everyone here knows what he’s been through, and they hover for a long time around the little sculptures. The beauty of her form, the sensuousness of her limbs and her expressions.
Still, like it or not, I know him enough to feel his pain here. He stays in the back of the room as much as possible, avoiding talking to the general crowd of people, just the ones who venture over. Let Philip Pierpont do all the hullabaloo, talk to the strangers. I can feel him thinking that. I remain near the front, surrounding myself with the Amazings. Ariana stays close in a protective way, and so does my mother.
People keep streaming in from the street, welcomed by the warm, twinkling lights, the tinkle of piano music, the plates of cheese, and little plastic goblets of champagne being passed around by people dressed in black. Philip Pierpont is a dapper man, buzzing around in between people, with his hands always seeming to be clasped together, as though in prayer. He is praying for Patrick’s success, and Patrick is bringing in a nice crowd, or at least what I think must be considered a nice crowd for a gallery opening. Good numbers.
I hear their enthusiasm. Muted, of course, because these are New York art people.
We leave early. I can only take so much. I see my mother watching my face curiously, wondering how I’m coping, probably ready to leap in and haul me out of there if the stress becomes too much. So after each of us has managed to have four pieces of cheese and a few crackers, and my mother and I each have a glass of champagne, we go. My mother is tired. The Amazings are drifty. There’s not much to do. The freezing cold wind is blowing off the river, and I’m glad to be out of the weather by the time we get down into the subway. A man is playing the trumpet down inside the tiled fortress, people are hurrying. The lights are bright. I hold Fritzie’s hand and she curls into me and starts sucking on a lock of her hair, a new habit. Lately she clings to me, which I kind of like.
“Do you miss your mom?” I asked her the other night as I was putting her to bed, and she was pouting and kicking at the blankets and telling me she was sick and tired of everything, and she didn’t want to go to sleep.
“No,” she said. “I miss my dad.”
When we finally come out from the subway into the Brooklyn night, my phone throbs in my pocket. I look down and see that it’s Natalie, so I press the button while we’re walking. Ahead of me, Fritzie is doing her usual heart-stopping balancing act along a low wall, dodging the iron spikes that are embedded in it. I’ve gotten better at standing this, but it still makes my teeth hurt.
“Hi, Nat,” I say tiredly. “You calling for Mom?”
There’s a bunch of noise in the background. “No,” she says. “I’m calling for you. Listen, Daddy’s had a heart attack, and he’s just gone to the hospital by ambulance. He’s stable, they said. But they just took him away. With the sirens on.”
“What? When did this happen?”
“It’s now. It’s happening right this minute, Marnie. I told you!”
“But what happened?” I don’t know what else to say. I feel like if I can get her to tell me the story, then I can explain to her why it’s all wrong. Our dad is healthy. In fact, he’s coming to Brooklyn soon.
“Look. I don’t know all of it, but he was alone in the house, and he started having chest pain and arm pain, and then he was out of breath, but he managed to call me. Why he didn’t call 911 I don’t know, but he didn’t. So I called the ambulance, and then I drove over there to meet them. They worked on him for a while, and they just took him away. I’m about to follow in my car when I can get someone to come stay here. I’ve been trying to get Mom, but she’s not answering her phone. So you tell her. I’ll call you later, when I know more about what’s going on.”
“Wait. Did you say he’s stable? You’re sure? Did the paramedics—”
“Yes,” she says. “He’s stable. I’ve got to hang up and call Brian and find someone to watch the kids so I can go to the hospital.”
I see my mother’s head swing around, her eyes wide. The words stable and paramedics have a way of floating across the night air and bringing one’s attention to what matters. She grabs for my phone, but Natalie has hung up. I stand there in the freezing night air, and I get very, very calm as I’m telling her the news. Fritzie manages to balance all the way to the end of the low little wall, and she only slips off when my mom lets out a cry and starts running down the sidewalk.
“Wait, Mom!” I say. “Millie, wait!”
I take Fritzie by the arm and run with her, but my mom is already so far ahead, running and running the blocks of Brooklyn.
She is brave and has always been fabulous whenever there’s a crisis, unless it’s something small like running out of potatoes when she wants some to mash this very minute, and then she panics. But as I run, I scroll back through tragedies I’ve known, and what I mostly can come up with is that when her mother was dying, she was cool and calm and orchestrated everything, only falling apart once the burial had taken place, and even then she discreetly took to her bed for two days and did her weeping in an organized, orderly way that anyone could understand.
She reaches Paco’s and runs past, all the way to our stoop, where she stops and leans against the railing. Fritzie and I arrive there seconds later.
“I have to go to him,” she says, and her voice is cold steel. “And I need you to come, too.”
“Okay,” I say. It’s my father there in that ambulance, going fast to some hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, the sirens probably blaring, and him on a stretcher being tended by paramedics. People are trying to keep him calm. They’ve hooked him up to monitors and machines and fluids. Are his eyes open or closed? Is he in pain? Does he think he’s going to die? I send him some energy. Some white light.
Hang on, I say to the air, and hope my words get to him.
“What about me?” says Fritzie. “You can’t leave me. Marnie, I need you to be with me.” And she starts to cry.
It’s quite a night. My mother is on the phone to my sister four times, and she talks twice to the doctor on call in the emergency room and finally finds out they’re admitting my father. Then she talks to the nurse in the Cardiac Care Unit. She talks to my father’s brother, Joe, who lives in Cincinnati. She talks to Natalie’s husband, Brian, who is home with the kids but who wants to reach out to my mom and see if there’s anything he can do.
And then, at one in the morning, she talks to my dad, whose voice is fuzzy and sedated. He tells her he loves her. She tells him she’s coming soon. He calls her Lumpkin, which is apparently a nickname from their honeymoon, something she never told me about.
I fall asleep thinking something I’ve never thought about
before: my teenage mother and father off together on a honeymoon, children romping in the surf at Fort Lauderdale and making up silly nicknames. She was Lumpkin, and when I ask her, she smiles and says he was The Farteur.
For the first time in forever, I laugh. Perhaps I didn’t need to know that.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
MARNIE
“How old is your father?”
“Um, he turns sixty in the spring.”
“Sixty is old, right?” Fritzie is leaning against my arm, so close to me that I can barely type on the laptop. I’m trying to make airline reservations for my mother and me. I don’t want to ask her to move, exactly, because it’s Saturday morning and we are fighting a hefty layer of impending doom. There is packing to do and arrangements to make. My mother has been on the phone nearly all morning with all her relatives and friends and my father’s golf acquaintances. The doctors have said that my father is out of danger for the most part; the heart attack wasn’t very severe, and he’s responding well to medication. But still, we need to go to him.
Fritzie smells like peanut butter and sleep and a skinned knee and last night’s cheese and, also, deep down somewhere, no-more-tangles shampoo.
“Well,” I say, “it’s not old old, but it’s getting up there in years.”
“A person could die at sixty.”
“Well, people die at all ages.”
“But when they’re sixty, nobody would be really surprised. Is that right?” She moves in even closer, if such a thing is possible.
“I think they would be surprised. They would say that person died too young.”
“Huh. I wouldn’t say that. I would say it’s too bad, but I would say it was too young only if they were . . . twenty-eight.”
“Okay, noted.”
She scratches at her knee, which still has dried blood on it from last night’s fall. “Did you know your dad your whole life?”
“Did I what?” I want to say that of course I did, but then I remember that for Fritzie, that’s not something to take for granted. “Oh. Yes. I did.”
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