“Agreed.” Joey placed her hand over her best friend’s. They weren’t touchy-feely friends, but it felt important to convey her solidarity. Joey knew what they were both thinking, how unfair it was that Siya’s mom had recently lost dexterity in both her hands due to her MS diagnosis. Joey found it almost inconceivable to imagine Siya’s warm, giving mother doing something other than puttering around her kitchen.
Joey could feel Siya’s we-can-stop-holding-hands telepathy so Joey lifted her hand and checked her phone. She saw a text from an unknown number that was now wholly known to her, but that she hadn’t yet added to her contacts. Her stomach somersaulted. Can I see you again tomorrow, Jonesey? It was unfair of me to come to Florida before your wedding, I realize that now. I’m sorry. I’m also sorry for how many times I’m telling you I’m sorry. But now that you know everything, we really need to talk again, don’t you think?
“What?” asked Siya. Joey’s fingers hovered over the phone. It could all slip so easily out to Siya, but Joey wasn’t ready for Siya’s judgment, however well meaning.
“Nothing,” she said, maybe too brightly.
Joey shot off a quick text in reply. Tomorrow at 9am?
She couldn’t see Leo again before she told Grant. Which meant she had to tell Grant. Tonight.
Joey slid down her silver pouf and smoothed her olive-green silk midi skirt so she didn’t flash all her guests. She’d found it for a steal at a local boutique going out of business and paired it with a simple chunky cream sweater, which perhaps wasn’t weather-appropriate for August in Florida, but the air conditioner was on full blast. Joey adjusted her three gold coin necklaces so the coins all lined up uniformly in the center of her chest. She and Grant had discovered them at an antiques fair in Sarasota, from a dealer who’d told them an elaborate, questionably true, but nonetheless romantic story about each. Grant had surprised Joey for Valentine’s Day, both with his thoughtfulness and for knowing her taste, by having the coins strung on thin gold chains of varying lengths.
“Jo, why are you being so secretive? Who were you texting?” asked Siya, and Joey was quiet, at a loss for a response.
A welcomed distraction—somewhat—was Lily now striding across the mahogany wood, calling, “Siiiiiiiiya!” Joey’s sister wore her Power Lily jaw clench, a rose crushed-velvet jumpsuit, and mules with big, black, furry straps that resembled Chia Pets. She looked like some stern but sultry headmistress roused out of bed at an all-girls boarding school. Her hair ran in copper crimps to her waist. She had twenty necklaces draped in her cleavage, but they were all so delicate it was like gold and diamond webbing.
“Siya, I need your help.” Lily thrust a pile of bows from presents Joey had unwrapped earlier into Siya’s lap. “Can you make this into a hat?”
“Why, are you gonna stick it on your Insta, Lil?” asked Joey.
Lily’s microbladed eyebrows raised in a look of disdain that was so Rand, it nearly took Joey’s breath away. How was it even possible she’d never noticed? “No offense, Joey, but I have two million savvy followers. They aren’t captivated by some basic shower ribbon hat.”
Siya snorted. Joey pressed a hand over her chest, her heart pounding. “Then you can take Siya off ribbon hat duty, Lil. It’s not really my thing.”
Siya took the ribbons. “It’s fine. I like an art project.”
“Thanks!” Lily burst off, flagging a server.
“She’s something else, isn’t she?” Joey watched her little sister gesticulate to the poor server who’d apparently committed some sort of infraction. As ever, Joey was both amazed and appalled at the way Lily walked through the world, claiming everything and everyone she wanted. Maybe it was the Rand in her asserting itself, Joey thought with disloyal dread. An image flashed of her own father in his trademark sandals with socks, proudly walking into the kitchen to display an impressive tomato from his garden.
“Lily’s just trying—” Siya was interrupted by a shrill of the microphone.
“Sanjeep, where is Sanjeep?” Bea shouted amid violent taps to the microphone. Joey could barely look at her without seething. For a moment, Joey wondered why such a happy event felt a little like being tortured. Her mother wore her multicolored, embroidered artist’s cape, which she’d apparently retrieved from the bowels of her closet. Joey’s memories were rife with memories of her mother painting in that cape, especially on Corfu. Her mother now swept an edge of her cape in much exaggerated fashion so it came to rest over the same shoulder on which it had previously resided.
It was a practiced Bea move. Draw Attention to Thyself.
Sanjeep appeared from the kitchen, his round face steamy and bashful. He wore a long tunic made of thick yellow silk with navy embroidery adorning the neck. “Here I am, Madame Bee.”
At that, Bea executed a curtsy. She said into the microphone, in booming good humor, “Sanjeep, you’ve known me my whole life. How many times must I tell you? It’s Bay-uh.”
Joey said, “He’s younger than her. How is it possible he’s known her all her life?”
Siya shrugged, a purple ribbon clamped between her lips. Up front, by the windows onto Atlantic Avenue, Sanjeep dragged something cloaked in a sheet out of a closet.
“G.” Joey tapped her grandmother’s hand at her right. “Did you intend for Mom’s name to be pronounced Bay-uh?”
G smiled, and her aggressive swipes of blush smiled with her. “Your mother is a force, isn’t she? That’s what I always say, a force. A dynamo!”
“But seriously, G. Her name is pronounced Bee, right? Beeeeatrice. We’re Greek, not Spanish.”
But G was rifling in her cream leather purse. She drew out her phone, and a party of crumpled tissues flew out after it. “Joey, I need you to explain something to me.”
“G, you’re so beautiful,” said Joey in a spontaneous flood of love. Her grandmother might have been overzealous with the blusher, but her creamy skin was in far better shape than her advanced years would suggest, setting off her kind, aqua eyes.
“Oh please, Joey.” G scrolled through her phone. “Look closer. Even my wrinkles have wrinkles.” She frowned. “This! This is what you have to explain. What the heck is this?”
Joey saw a Facebook conversation with lengthy text. At the end was embedded a poop emoji. “You’re really doing the Facebook thing? Who are you messaging?”
G jerked back her phone. “What is that thing?”
“You mean the poop emoji?”
“The poop emoji,” repeated G with a doubtful curl of her lips. “But what…what does it do?”
Joey stifled a giggle. “It’s just meant to be funny.”
“Ah.” A smile took hold of G’s face. “I see. And what about all those different hearts?”
“What do you mean? Like, heart emojis?”
In her periphery, Joey could see Bea greeting a line of her friends, no doubt reveling in their praise over the lovely shower. Joey sighed. It was in fact a lovely shower. Just, it felt like a lifetime of love for and from her mom had gone in an instant, leaving a cold, gaping hole.
“Emojis?” asked G. “The faces? But there are a bunch of them with hearts.”
“Oh,” said Joey distractedly. “Well, if it’s just a big heart, it could mean love, especially if it’s coming from a romantic partner. And if there’s a face with a little heart that’s kind of winking, it’s a kissy—”
“Okay, darling. You can stop. Who knew a face could do so many things?”
“G, who are you talking to on Face—”
There was a tap on her shoulder. Joey swiveled to see the round, probing face of Doris, her grandmother’s best friend and personal trainer and the benefactor of Joey’s Jeep. Doris’s vision had become too impaired to drive, but not to personal train, so she now walked to houses in G’s little cul-de-sac to conduct sessions with seniors that consisted mostly of deep breathing and gossiping with an occasional grunting side stretch.
Joey hugged Doris and helped her into a chair. “Tell me, dear.” D
oris leaned in, and now Joey remembered this—Doris’s tendency toward close talking. “Tell me how you met your fellow.”
“Oh, yes, tell Dor the story.” G abandoned her phone and now looked rapturously upon Joey.
Joey smiled. She did love her love story. For a moment, a cloud drifted over, and she was somewhere else—telling Grant about Leo, and he was mad she hadn’t told him sooner, and worse, he was sad. And then, the cloud didn’t lift so much as assimilate, so Joey could recount things, but with an element of wistfulness.
She began with Grant’s gorgeous tan, omitting his man bun (the over-fifty set thought it was a variety of hamburger encasement), and she skated heavily over the surfing into him part (“But how dangerous!”). She was practiced at the climax—when Grant approached her on the beach.
“So there I was, every bone in my body hurt. Lolak, my instructor, had gone. He’d told me he could get anyone to surf, but after I rammed into Grant, I think he gave up on me. There’s something about the sea though. I was spent and content. I found this stick, and I drew my name into the sand. I was admiring it, when this guy came over.”
“Grant,” said G triumphantly.
“Grant.” Joey smiled. “His calf was wrapped in a T-shirt, and I recognized him immediately. I said, Did I do that?, and he nodded, and I felt so terrible. It was really embarrassing. And so I said, It’s my first time. And he said, No? I wouldn’t have guessed. But he was laughing, and he held out a beer for me and had one for himself, and then I understood. He’d sought me out.
“I said, Are you going to be okay?, and he said, I think I’ll live. And then he looked at what I’d written, and he said, So Joey?, and I said, And you are?, and he gave me this gorgeous grin, you know Grant—”
“Very handsome,” said Doris, with a knowing look.
“Very,” agreed Joey. “So Grant didn’t answer when I asked him his name. He just wrote with his finger in the sand next to my name one of those ampersands and then followed it with his name. So it read—”
“Joey and Grant,” said G and Doris in one united swoon.
Joey felt the cloud lift entirely now so she could pretend to herself a little longer that this sweet Bali love was all in the world there was. “So we had a romance, but only for a couple of days, until his flight out. And I knew he lived in Florida, of course, but I didn’t know I’d be coming back here.”
“But then not too long after I had my surgery,” cut in G, as her starring part arose. “You remember, Dor, on my aorta?”
“Of course.”
G nodded importantly. “Well, Joey came back from Bali for my surgery and was visiting me in the hospital. And she walked right into Grant!”
“Literally right into him.” Joey laughed.
“He’s a doctor,” confided G to Doris. “A dermatologist.”
“Oh, my.” A knowing glance passed between them.
Joey stifled a laugh as her mother rapped on the microphone again. “Attention, attention, please.”
“What now?” said Joey, since she’d already opened presents, and Bea had already delivered a lengthy and meandering speech that Joey had endured with her fists clenched at her sides. Siya shrugged, not looking up from her bloated ribbon thing.
When the room had quieted, Bea said, “I just have one final gift to present.” Joey saw a stand had appeared, along with that thing Sanjeep had lugged out of a closet. It looked like a canvas. With a flourish, Bea unveiled it.
Oh shit. Joey froze.
“Is it…a flower?” Doris squinted.
“Is it a mountain?” asked G. “That’s quite a beautiful mountain.” G leaned forward so far that her chair tipped, and Joey somehow grasped her faculties fast enough to right the chair.
Oh no. Oh no.
“It’s a vagina,” explained Bea, but Joey had already put together the pink and red and oh, she couldn’t look. She wished for sunglasses. She wished to disappear.
All Joey could do was whisper, “You painted me a vagina?”
“Your vagina,” said Bea, as the restaurant filled with nervous laughter. “Well, of course it’s not your wedding gift. That’s the wedding, from your father and me. This is just sentimental, sweetheart. I know your vagina, of course. I gave birth to you.”
“Ah!” said Sanjeep, and Joey gave an involuntary glug as she saw him try to absorb it all. “Brilliant! Bea, how about that, you are very talented, I did not know—”
“I thought you could present it to Grant.” Bea paced the room now. “You aren’t giving your vagina to him, of course. That belongs only to you. Remember that, Joey. You own your vagina. But if you have a fight, or you’re out of town. Or if you have babies. It will never look this fresh. See the depth I was able to create.” Bea appraised her work with a look of satisfaction. “It took a long time to shade the labia…”
“It’s…lovely, darling,” said G with a loving but dubious look to her.
Bea said in that tight tone she reserved only for G, “Lovely is a little…condescending for this piece, Mother.”
Bea smiled at Joey, as if she actually believed Joey would accept the vagina thing as a peace offering. Joey felt the silence in the room get louder, awaiting her reaction.
“Thanks, Mom. It’s…fab.”
“Mic drop,” said Siya, and plopped something atop Joey’s head. A ribbon flopped into her mouth.
Joey spit out the ribbon and pressed her fingers into her temples. “Total mic drop.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Joey
Florida
2019
They found themselves in a sea of blenders and mixers and one extremely odd vagina painting.
“What are we going to do with all this stuff?” asked Grant.
“You’re going to use it to cook me ten-course dinners, of course.” Joey slipped her hands under his T-shirt at the base of his spine.
“And what are you going to do?”
“Eat,” she said into his chest. “I’m going to eat all of your masterpieces.”
“How generous.” He cracked his neck back and forth.
Her mouth opened. The words to tell him about Leo in town hung in the back. They hid behind her tonsils.
She and Grant had such a simple relationship. Her first simple relationship.
Grant knelt beside the boxes, sifting. He held up a white ceramic mezuzah. “I’ll hang this up, yeah?”
“Sure.” Joey went to the kitchen for a glass of water. The refrigerator was leaking murky purple again. She put down a towel to sop it up—a stiff white towel covered in yellow smudges, a towel of suspicious origins. From Grant’s bachelor life, probably.
“Mezuzah is up,” he called. “I even Googled the prayer to say.”
When she returned to the foyer, Grant was holding up the painting. “Now where should I hang my gift?” He smirked. “It deserves a place of prominence, don’t you think? In our marital home.”
“Only if you want me to paint a picture of your dick to go beside it. Then we’ll be those people. The strange genitalia people.”
“Well, what kind of studying is going to have to occur to render that painting?” He pulled her into him with one hand and set down the painting with the other.
“Don’t you wish.” The moon outside hooked over Grant’s head.
Grant kissed her forehead.
“I have to tell you something,” she said.
* * *
Joey hadn’t known that her last day as a lawyer would be her last day. In fact, she’d just reached the pinnacle. Partnership. Her father had shown up from Florida with champagne. They’d alerted him first—the King of Estate Planning. Scott toasted her. “My big-deal daughter. You’ve worked so hard for this.” It was eleven A.M. The champagne fizzed down Joey’s tubes the wrong way.
She got flowers from her biggest client. Not flowers so much as a garden. It took up her whole desk. Two mailroom guys had to carry it in.
“They’ll fit into your new office,” said Mark Delisio, the man
aging partner who’d come down to slap her shoulders. He slapped them twice before halting, presumably coming to the realization that she was a woman with shoulders as delicate as tissue paper.
He smiled with his mouthful of veneers. No woman had made partner in her group in twenty-eight years.
Joey’s new, partner-size office with an actual city view was being prepped down the hall. (The view was of another office building in Battery Park. But sunlight peeked between the office buildings at certain times, she’d heard.) Office fairies had installed her new nameplate as her partnership was being announced.
“Now I wish I could say take the day off.” Wish wasn’t a word you wanted to hear out of Mark Delisio’s lips. What followed was a string of semi-platitudes like last minute and it’s out of my hands.
At four the next morning, as Joey sat on the floor of her office, double-, triple-, quadruple-checking the myriad org charts and agreements that had to be reviewed and signed at eight A.M. by a client launching his new hedge fund, her chest arrested.
I’m having a heart attack, she thought. Her second thought was, I hate my life.
That she hated her life came as a surprise to Joey. When I make partner, I will love my life, she’d told herself all along. I’ll be able to save for a West Village walk-up. I’ll take more vacations. I’ll go to Bali. I’ll have more sex. Better sex. More discriminate sex.
That she’d made partner and still didn’t feel happy was surprising.
Joey glanced at the blue sheets of paper they used to fasten the agreements. She stapled four sheets together. Then she thrust an agreement across the room. The pages fell in a disappointing heap on the carpet, only one paper poking out, not even out of order. Joey grabbed a permanent marker from her table, sending pens flying across the cherrywood. She wrangled the floral arrangement to the floor. It smelled like summer. Like the outdoors.
What were those things?
Joey sprawled on the floor and began to sketch. After some time, she filled all four stapled sheets so she added new ones. Eventually, there wasn’t enough floor space. She moved chairs to the hallway. She wedged her bookcase between her desk and a file cabinet. Her hand flew across the sheets. When Mark walked into her office the next morning, she knew he was there because his $1,500 John Lobbs approached her blue canvas. She didn’t look up.
When We Were Young Page 16