“Ha! What’d you do?” I ask, pulling my knees up to my chest. “I probably would have chased him through the aisles until I had him cornered, then taken either the best or most embarrassing item out of his cart and held it hostage until he apologized.”
Isabelle laughs. “That’s what I should have done, but I just shrieked!” She shakes her head. “It was so very not cool of me, and it made getting back into the pose of cosmopolitan sophisticate downright impossible that afternoon.”
“So what did he do? ”
“Frank laughed at me and said, ‘Well, normally I don’t get that response from a girl until after I’ve asked her out!’ ”
I laugh again, thinking that sounds exactly like the Mr. Sands I know; a guy so cool and secure, he makes fun of himself with ease . . . not unlike Eric.
She smiles. “Though at first I was furious at this overly confident cart-bashing oaf, with that line, he charmed me. It made me realize that maybe, just maybe, some of my assumptions about this fellow had been wrong.”
I nod. “I make an ass of myself by making assumptions about things all the time.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Grace,” replies Isabelle. “I’ll bet your gut instincts are better than you’re giving yourself credit for. But you’re allowed to reassess and change your mind about things. Frank and I both learned that when I left him to go back to Washington.”
My head tilts to the side. “Wait a minute,” I break in, “you left him?”
“That’s right. I stayed in town through my father’s illness. But I had a life and a job I loved in DC. I’d been moving up the ranks at the Smithsonian Institution. American art and portraiture had been my specialty, and I’d been hoping to become head of the division, a rarity for a woman at that time. So I told Frank I was going and do you know what he said?”
“Was it something like, ‘The hell you are! ’” I say in my best imitation of the Frank Sands grumble.
Isabelle shakes her head. “He said to me, and I quote, ‘Well, I’ll miss you.’”
“That was it?” This does not sound like the Mr. Sands I know. The Mr. Sands I know wouldn’t have let the woman he loved get away. He always went after what he wanted—stuck to his guns, as he might say. “No, I don’t believe it.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Were you surprised?”
“Surprised? I was so mad, I almost spit at him,” Isabelle continues. “It’s funny, sometimes you don’t realize how much you want something until it’s taken away. That’s what happened when Frank said, ‘I’ll miss you.’I But he didn’t say, ‘No! You can’t go, Izzy, I won’t let you.’ He wasn’t even saying ‘please don’t go.’ Just, ‘I’ll miss you.’”
An interesting point: The person worth being with is the person who knows what you’re worth and who fights to keep you. “But you two did wind up together—I mean, you’re married now.” Isabelle nods her head. “So what happened?”
“Do you know it took that man a year and a half to realize he’d let the best thing that ever happened to him slip through his fingers?” She laughs, fanning herself in mock modesty. “A year and a half! We’d kept in touch somewhat during that time, but it wasn’t until I mentioned I’d gotten serious with a boy down in Washington that Frank Sands sprung into action. He hopped into his truck and didn’t stop driving until he got to my front door. He said, ‘Izzy, I felt more alive when we were together than I even knew possible. I want to feel that way again, and for the rest of my life.’ ”
I try to imagine how I’d respond to words like those. Try to picture the guy who would say something like that to me. “So, did you just jump into his arms at that point?”
“No,” Isabelle responds with a devious smile. “I made him suffer. I told him he needed to convince me why I should choose him. Plus it was a little bit of revenge for him taking that long to come to his senses.”
“I’m not sure I would have been able to pull that off. I probably would have thrown myself on him right then and there.”
“Grace”—Isabelle shakes her head—“if you don’t value yourself, no one else will either.”
“My dad left my mom for another woman.” This comes out of my mouth before I even think about what I’m saying.
“Oh, Grace, I’m sorry, I know how hard something like that can be.”
“Understatement,” I mumble.
“And there isn’t a thing in the world anyone else can say or do to make it better.”
“Most people seem to make it worse.” I pick at the threads in the knee of my jeans, wishing I hadn’t brought this up.
Isabelle looks down at her hands, and seems to consider whether she should say more. “You’re entitled to feel angry, you know. None of this was your doing and yet here you are in the middle of it.”
I nod. “It’s not fair.”
“No, it’s not. But I think when you’re ready, letting the anger go will help a great deal.”
“I don’t think I’m there yet.” Part of me doubts I’ll ever be there.
“No rush.” Isabelle shakes her head. “People act selfishly, Lord knows I have. Frank has too. No one—no one—is perfect.”
Though this isn’t exactly a newsflash, hearing the words now, it almost sounds like a revelation. “I’m afraid that doesn’t change much even as we get older,” she adds.
“So mentally we all just stay teenagers for the rest of our lives? Please do not tell me life is high school.”
“More like middle school,” Isabelle says with a laugh. “And you’re wonderful, Grace, you really are. I thank you for coming here today, it means a lot.”
“I don’t think I’ve cheered you up too much.”
“You’ve done better than that,” she replies. “Because you and I, we haven’t been pretending here, have we? Neither one of us is speaking to the other like she’s a child. We’ve just been talking things through, the both of us understanding that life’s messy and hard and constantly requires reexamination.”
I nod and smile at Isabelle. I like her even though I don’t want to. Liking her complicates things. Liking her means I’ll probably wind up thinking about her . . . and worrying about her . . . which is the last thing I need. And because I know I shouldn’t invest, because I know liking her will only make life more difficult, it makes her friendship that much more interesting to me.
When I leave the cottage, determined to “embrace the suck” and deal, I head for Mr. Sands’s room in the main building. His door is open, so I walk in. “Mr. Sands,” I say, barreling forward and approaching his bed. “Have I got a story for you!” I want to keep things as breezy as possible this afternoon and get back to our usual banter.
“Grace,” he says in a low, croaking voice. He doesn’t look good; his skin is dry and yellowy-gray, and a pungent smell comes from his mouth.
“Are you okay?”
I look at Mr. Sands lying there and take him in. I’ve never really looked at his body before because he’s usually dressed in some sort of flannel shirt and chino pants. But today he’s wearing a pajama top that’s open enough at the neck that I can see the loose skin on his sternum that’s threaded with blue veins. I watch his chest rise and fall, trying to get air. But instead of deep, rhythmic breaths in and out, its shallow, up and down movement makes it look like he’s attempting to catch up to something, but he’s falling helplessly behind. I wonder how Isabelle can stand to see him—the man who’d once rammed her supermarket cart, the man who’d pursued her to Washington—like this. I wonder if he asked her to “help” him too. Or if he asked me because people would suspect her involvement.
No one would ever think to question me . . . I’m just a kid with an after-school job in a nursing home.
“Do you want to play cards or checkers or something?” I finally say. “You know I might even let you win.”
“No,” he replies, “not just now.”
“That’s okay, I was just kidding. I wasn’t going to let you win.”
To
my relief, this makes Mr. Sands laugh. “Oh, Grace,” he softly slurs.
“I’m sorry,” I reply, breaking eye contact and looking down at my shoes. “My stupid jokes probably aren’t helping.”
Slowly and with great effort, Mr. Sands says, “Your stupid jokes mean the world to me.”
Whether it’s from the tone or the sentiment, I’m suddenly overcome, and I try to smile as I feel hot tears sting the corners of my eyes. “Well then,” I reply, “you’re in luck, because stupid jokes, I’ve got a million of them.”
“That’s my girl,” he says. “That’s my Gracie.”
And that’s when “his girl,” his “Gracie,” has to look away, and my eyes fall on his nightstand. In my ear I can almost hear the words of his wife: “You’re allowed to reassess and change your mind about things.” Sometimes we make assumptions. Sometimes we make decisions. And sometimes they’re wrong. Isabelle had said life requires reexamination, and I think she’s right about that.
Chapter Nine
I figure it’s worth a shot. Answers can come to you from strange places. And none would be stranger than my sister. “Hey, Lolly,” I say when I get home and find her on the living room floor doing her homework in front of the TV. “How do you decide if you should do something if you’re not sure if it’s right or not?”
“Huh?” she says, without bothering to look at me.
“Okay,” I reply, trying to figure out how to rephrase without giving away too much. “Have you ever been in a situation where somebody wants you to do something, but you’re not sure that it’s, like, moral?”
“Why?” she asks, her head suddenly jerking up. “What’d you hear?”
“Nothing, guilty conscience.” I shake my head, taking a peanut M&M from the bag in my pocket and throwing it in her direction.
She snags it out of the air with her right hand and pops it into her mouth.
“So do you mean have I ever been in a position where I’m not sure if I should listen to my conscience or not?” she asks, then sits up crossing her legs, happy for the excuse to close her textbook. “Sure, of course I have.”
“Really?” I take my coat off and plop down on the couch, slipping off my shoes and pulling my knees to my chin. “So how did you ultimately decide what to do or not do?”
But instead of answering that question, Lolly leans in close to me and grabs my pinky with hers. “Promise you won’t tell Mom?”
I nod and we unlock our pinkies.
“Okay, well, Jake has been wanting me to have sex with him, right?”
“Uh—” I say, unprepared for the hard left turn my brain has to make to participate in this topic of conversation.
“But this is my virginity we’re talking about, and I didn’t want to give it up to just anybody because some guy’s putting pressure on me. This is the kind of thing that has to be my decision. I have to be the one calling the shots on this, you know? That’s the kind of thing that once it’s gone, it’s gone.”
I nod and bite my bottom lip. I’m hearing Lolly’s words but haven’t gotten Mr. Sands out of my head yet.
“And I don’t care what some of the girls at school say, you can’t re-virginize if you don’t sleep with anyone again for like a year.”
“Re-virginize?” I ask, my eyes finally focusing on my sister.
“Yeah, like when you pick a cherry off a tree, another one grows back in a year. Same idea.”
Though I’d tried to block out most of what we’d learned in sex ed, I definitely remembered the day our wrestling coach/health class teacher did the “breaking of the hymen” unit. Mr. Z. read the description directly from our text book: “It occurs when the male genitalia breaks the thin membrane that covers the opening of the vagina.” Mr. Z. then looked up, smiled, and said, “And boys, best remember that old Pottery Barn slogan, ‘You break it, you bought it.’” Most of the guys laughed uncomfortably, the girls’ reactions seemed split between embarrassment and horror. I felt embarrassed, horrified, and nauseous.
“The girls at school think they can become born-again virgins? That’s bird-brained. Why would they even say that?” I ask.
“Um, because they’re sluts?” Lolly replies. “They’re trying to pretend like they didn’t do all that stuff. But once you make that decision it’s obviously a done deal—no second chance to make a first ‘impression.’” Lolly laughs.
“So you didn’t have sex with Jake?” I feel a rush of relief, like a deep exhale.
“No.” Lolly chews on the tip of her pen cap for a moment until the left side of her mouth curls into a smile. “Not yet.”
Not exactly the answer I was hoping for, but close enough for now. And maybe this is Lolly’s way of admitting she isn’t as sure about Jake as she’s been pretending. “You haven’t had sex with him because you think, I don’t know, he might be fooling around with other girls?”
“What?! No, that’s not what I meant at all.”
“Oh.” I try to make it sound casual. “Then what? Something stopped you. What was it?”
“Well, I thought about it, but I want it to be special, and I realized that by making Jake wait a little while longer, he would respect me more.” Lolly nods. “And it’s working, because he understands what it means. He’s not so in my face about it all the time anymore, so that tells me that he really gets it, you know?”
I nod. I did know. I knew he was “getting it” from another girl, and when the phone rings a moment later, I have a sick sense who’s calling before I pick up.
“Lol?” Jake says when I answer.
“No, it’s Grace,” you asshole.
“Oh, hey,” he replies casually. I wonder if he’ll come up with some excuse about why he was kissing Natalie in the pharmacy the other day, some long-winded explanation of how he thought his tonsils were inflamed and Natalie said she’d be happy to examine them for him. “You know, I’d really like to see some of your art stuff next time I’m over at your house, okay?”
It is not okay.
“Hang on,” I answer. “Lolly, it’s Ja—” Before I even have the chance to finish his name, she springs to her feet and reaches for the receiver, wrestling it from my hand.
“Hey!” she says, sounding way too excited to hear from him. “Wait, I’m going to take this upstairs where I can get some privacy,” Lolly says. After I hear her door close upstairs, the key turns in the lock of the front door. Mom pushes through and enters a moment later, a droopy-dog expression on her face.
“Hope you and your sister want hamburgers for dinner.” She holds up two grease-stained white paper bags with the red You Say Potato . . . logo on the front.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” I respond. Whenever Mom brings food home from the restaurant, it usually means something unpleasant happened during her shift. I don’t know whether they give it to her as compensation, or whether she takes it to compensate herself, and I don’t ask. I do know, however, that if I’m still hanging around in another ten seconds, I’ll be forced to hear all about it.
It’s not so much that I mind listening to her stories. Everyone likes to have an audience—that’s why most people have kids, isn’t it? Sometimes her stories are even funny. (Like the time she told us about the busboy who wiped out while he was carrying the Caution! Slippery Floor sign across the dining room. Or when one of the managers introduced the four-appetizer combo he named the “Four Play.” Trouble started when waitresses started asking customers if they wanted “some Four Play” before their entrée.) But most of the time when Mom talks about work, it’s usually about how she “got into it” with someone else, and she wants me to tell her she was 100 percent right and the other person was totally wrong. The problem is, after she explains the situation and her response, I almost always think she was the one who screwed up.
“Can you believe when I told the chief operating officer that I needed more budgeted for advertising this quarter, he had the nerve to suggest my media plan was wrong?” she asked me last time. “So I told him, Jim, you th
ink you can come up with a better plan, you can do it yourself!” She looked at me for confirmation but all I could do was bite my lip to stop myself from telling her she was probably lucky he didn’t fire her then and there.
“Is your sister home?” Mom asks.
“On the phone.”
She nods. “Hey, how was your day?”
I stop at the top of the landing and turn around to face her. The overhead light shines on the crown of Mom’s head and illuminates her face. Most of her makeup has worn off, so the purple half-moons under her eyes are no longer concealed and her exhaustion is visible.
“My day? It was okay. It was fine.”
“Good,” she says. “Good,” she repeats as she takes off her overcoat and walks toward the kitchen.
Dinner is eaten in silence as Mom, Lolly, and I seem equally content to marinate in our own thoughts. Lolly picks at her burger and the bottom half of the bun, which is all she allows herself to eat, and when she finishes her few bites of dinner, she pushes her chair out and scrapes her plate in the trash.
“I’m going out,” she says.
“Okay,” Mom replies, not bothering to ask where she’s going or with whom.
I follow Lolly’s lead, clean my plate, and run upstairs after her. “Where are you going?” I ask, finding her in the bathroom reapplying mascara.
“Out with Jake,” she replies. “We’ll probably watch a movie at his house.” She looks at me out of the corner of her eye. “Or something,” she adds with a mischievous grin.
I wonder what Mom would do if she knew what I did about Jake. And then I do the gut check Mr. Sands suggests: What’s the right thing to do in this situation? By not telling Lolly that her boyfriend’s a cheater, do I ultimately hurt her more than if I come clean about what I know?
The gut tells me to go for it: “You know, Lolly,” I finally say, “I think you can do better than Jake.”
She brings her right hand down and away from her face. “What?”
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