Ming scribbled down what the doctor said. She kept notes every time she spoke with the doctors. She had to. Hemispherectomy. Corpus callosum. Just the words terrified her. Now she grabbed Sebastian’s hand with her free hand. Maybe her daughter should stay right there, safely attended to in the hospital, playing birthday party with her lilac and turquoise My Little Ponies.
Sebastian clutched his wife’s hand but kept his eyes eagle-fixed on the man whose hands would cut out half his daughter’s brain.
1997, Bright Future
“Go to the movies.” The doctor stood. “I’m in with Lily twelve hours. Probably more.”
Sebastian put up his hands as if to physically push back the suggestion. He wasn’t budging until his little girl was in recovery.
The surgeon shrugged. “I’m a father, too.”
“Let’s follow doctor’s orders.” Anna took Ming’s hand and pulled her to her feet. “We’re out of here.”
Sebastian started to thank Anna for coming to the hospital, but she flashed a don’t-be-an-idiot look. This was planned. She’d shown up to keep them company till the surgery was over. Helen was on call to show up once Lily was out of recovery.
But once outside the hospital, the women seemed lost, the day too bright, too calm. And an odd part of the city, no reason to be there except for the hospital, and neither knew anything beyond the two blocks to the parking garage. Central Park was blocks and blocks away. There were no shops to browse. A no-man’s-land with a lot of people in scrubs. Ming insisted she wouldn’t go far from the hospital.
“I can’t eat,” Ming said.
“Let’s walk,” said Anna, but when the light changed, they seemed unable to move.
Finally, somehow, they drifted a few blocks. Took a left. When they passed a salon called Lily’s, they took it as an omen.
“Is this weird?” Ming said. “It actually seems like it might feel nice.”
“Lily loves pretty colors. You should have bright nails when she wakes in recovery.”
Starter Wife. Madison Ave. Kimono. They read through the names of enamel polishes. Ming decided on a red called Bright Future. Anna chose a hot pink called Hi Maintenance.
“Well, these two pretty much sum it up.” Ming laughed, and the women in the salon chuckled along as if they were in on the joke.
One woman ran hot water in the footbaths. “Are you going to a party? It’s good color for a party.”
Anna said, “Sure, a big party. The party of a lifetime.”
“Then you have extra scrub and massage?”
“We want extra everything,” Anna said. “We’ve got plenty of time.”
Ming pressed buttons on the side of her chair, and a rolling began from the base of the seat to her neck. Her body rippled as the chair heaved and surged. She leaned back and closed her eyes.
Anna laughed. “You look like you’re in agony.”
“It’s pretty much the most uncomfortable thing ever. But I hoped it might get better.”
They watched as the manicurists cut and filed, trimmed their cuticles and pumiced their soles. Then there was scrubbing and exfoliating. The women laced tissue over and under between their toes and smacked the bottles of polish against their open palms.
“You like this color?” The woman checked after she’d painted Ming’s big toe.
“She loves it,” Anna said.
Ming looked over at Anna with such gratefulness.
“While Lily was having half her brain removed, I was having my toenails polished. This will be part of the story. How weird is that?”
“Only a really small part of the story,” Anna said.
2003, Have Lovers
“Don’t marry again. Have lovers,” Ming commands in her instructional voice. She levers another log onto the fire. “Marrying is for having children. You did that. So onward.”
Ming, Caroline, Anna, and Helen lounge in front of the fireplace in Ming’s living room. A whole weekend visit of rain that won’t let up. The husbands have swept up the restless kids for bowling. All the husbands except for Helen’s, who after a year’s separation is now officially a not-husband. Even Ming, the traditionalist among them, believes that Helen’s marriage couldn’t have lasted through Helen’s ambition as an artist.
“Don’t all you creative people burn through marriages? Just don’t go for that again,” Ming says.
After a glass of wine, they have it all worked out for Helen. She’ll have a glamorous life, they insist. More shows, more galleries, more museums. Helen will become more and more famous. Have more and more lovers. Everything about Helen has a “more” in front of it.
“It will all be very discreet,” Caroline says, stretching out into her best languid sex-kitten pose. Caroline describes how, when Lucinda and Rusty are at the Ex’s, Helen will see her many lovers. How quickly they’ve all begun to call Paul the Ex instead of Paul.
“Clandestine is good, raunchy is much better.”
“And you’ll report in and tell us everything.”
“But we’re not interested in the downside. No singing any pity-me-I’m-lonely ballad. You should have thought of that when you were still married.” Ming sounds a little too excited by the whole prospect of Helen’s swinging-singles life.
“Someone needs to have lots of fun for all of us,” Anna says. “Let’s remember how late Helen was to any fun.”
“There’s a French lover. You met at a vernissage on the rue de Whatever.” Caroline rolls her r’s extravagantly.
“A Greek lover with a sailboat works for me.”
“Wait a second, Ming. You were the one with a Greek?” Helen asks. “Wasn’t that anthropologist Greek?”
“Ming was the romantic globe-trotter,” Anna says. “That was Alexi, her mad Greek. There was Belgian Maurice. And, of course, don’t forget she picked up Sebastian in a restaurant in Ecuador.”
Ming pours out another half glass. “And now, ladies, I’m a lawyer with a ranch house in the Berkshire boonies. Which is why I really need Helen to go crazy for all our sakes.”
2006, Dark
It was better that no one asked. Helen was convinced it was better for all of them. Let Ming think it was a life of romantic flings in faraway cities. Let them conjure interludes. There were men. They were right about that. But so little of it ever romantic. Maybe at first. Then it went dark fast. Whom did it help for Helen to describe the lost days, the high wire of night? The tinselly powdered lines of whatever the men brought with them. Soon the men hardly mattered. What good was it for her dearest friends to imagine her kneeling over a hotel desk desperate and licking the slick creases of unwrapped paper, tonguing for some last bitter coke crumble? Outside in some city, the sun rising. How had that even happened? And then it had. Before each gallery opening, she’d promise to keep it about the art. But there were afterparties, someone grabbing her arm, saying, “If you want your name remembered with the big boys, you have to party like the big boys.” Reviews lauded her with just her first name. Helen. Helen as the new name to follow, as the return to figurative painting that honored depth of subject and technique and a welcome end to post-anything irony. She liked being a single name. That was like the big boys. Picasso. Matisse. Basquiat. Helen. She didn’t bother questioning why she wasn’t known by a last name. “You must come with us, Helen,” and someone took her by the hand. Then there were rooms and rooftops, always a man saying something that first sounded like praise and, after that, the streaky dawn light and her wasted in a city she didn’t know. There were men. One left her in a closet. One doubled around her ankle the gray pearl choker he was bringing home to his wife.
Anna figured it out. Not because Helen offered. “What’s going on?” Anna said. “What are you doing? When are you getting back to pick up the children from Paul?”
Helen lied. At least at first. Then she stopped answering Anna’s calls. Anna
pushed and pushed. She didn’t stop. Then, finally, Helen called back. She was in a steep fall, in a sweaty, staticky jangle.
“Where are you, Heli?”
Helen looked around at the large television screen, the orange curtains drawn shut. Berlin. Maybe it was Munich.
“I’m in a fantastic hotel,” she said, as if that answered any worried question Anna asked. Then she turned nasty. “You think you’re me, Anna, having to collect you from another drunk high-school party?”
“Is there a writing pad next to the hotel phone? There’s an address, Heli.”
“I’m not an idiot.”
“You are. With idiot people flocked around you. Your kids are beyond worried. They’re calling me. Now I’ve got to get you home.”
Helen tried accusing. “Having fun feeling superior? I’m not you, Anna, with your perfect life. Perfect mom.”
She yelled into the phone. “I’m not the perfect anything you are!” She yelled and yelled. Everything. The drugs. The men. The hospital in Milan where her gallerist brought her. The attempted overdose.
“See?” Helen’s voice flattened. “I’m not perfect you.”
She’d done it. Calling Anna’s life perfect after the hell of diagnosis. How far up her ass could her own head fit? Now even Anna would leave her. And Anna should. She’d used Anna, too. Crying over Anna, a sob story she’d hoovered up her nose. Or wept into some man’s arms. She deserved to lose Anna. She’d basically lost Lucinda and Rusty. They stayed with their dad. “It’s just easier,” the kids said, at first blaming it on her schedule. When she pushed, Rusty shouted, “Mom, why is it about you? I just need a normal parent who takes care of normal stuff!” Then Lucinda stopped talking to her.
She was losing everything. But she was a painter. The art world referred to her by her first name. Helen. Up there with the big boys.
“I’m not whatever you think I am.”
“You’re not whatever you think you are,” Anna said into the silence.
2007, Noon
“What’s wrong with this picture?” Helen asked after she and Anna said their good-byes to the group that loitered smoking after the meeting. Anna had driven down, insisting she go with Helen to the noon meeting.
“Wasn’t I supposed to be dragging your skinny ass into recovery?” Helen fingered the ninety-day chip shoved into her coat pocket.
“There’s something to be said for getting the big-time drinking and drugging over with by eighteen, Heli. You had so many years of being the good girl to make up for.”
Anna slipped her arm through Helen’s. She steered them off Hudson, veering toward a shop on Bleecker Street where she’d spotted a perfect T-shirt in the window. They’d each buy one and give it as a gift to the other. An old tradition.
Anna took her time, then asked about the kids.
“Lucinda still isn’t talking to me. But she allowed me to come to her last volleyball game. And Rusty just looks terrified whenever I leave the room.”
“It will work out.”
Helen kissed Anna on the cheek. “Tell me that about a thousand more times before you drive home today.”
2006, Celebration
The invitation said, Come to Our Wedding and, in smaller type, the one we couldn’t have eighteen years ago. Molly joked that they might have also written, the party we definitely couldn’t have afforded. The inn was swanky, with a low-key, restored-chintz elegance. Everything about the inn—the airy rooms, the mowed lawns, the stone-path gardens—had that lovely low-key, effortless feeling.
Caroline and Danny arrived first, posted themselves on rocking chairs so that as the rest arrived—Helen alone, then Ming and Sebastian, who’d given Anna a lift—they gathered, bogarting all the other rockers on the inn’s front porch.
“It’s all a wonderful ballet,” Caroline said, watching the last of the tent being set up on the lawn.
“You really are too excited to be away from our kids,” Danny said. According to Caroline everything all day had been perfect—the lack of traffic, the cloud shapes, the lobster roll at a clam shack down the coast.
“You should have heard her ranting about the poetry of basil mayonnaise.”
“I’m sorry, but if I can’t think this is pretty much perfection, then I don’t know what is,” Caroline said.
One perfection they all admitted to was the kid-free weekend. Except, obviously, for Tessa and Shana, who were maids of honor, they’d agreed not to force the tribe’s attendance. At first Ming, brandishing her lawyerly authority, argued it was essential to have the kids. To witness Molly and Serena’s marriage. This was American history in the making. But she was promptly overruled. It was too complicated with high-school sports teams and proms and studying for college finals. Not to mention that Helen’s kids were barely talking to Helen.
Sitting on the porch, Bloody Mary in hand, Ming admitted, “Okay, kid-free is already a lot more fun.”
Down at the tent, Molly and Serena were in deep conversation with a woman holding an armful of magenta peonies. Dressed in scrubby T-shirts and sweatpants, they looked more like women heading out for a day hike than women who in five hours would be gussied up and standing with their daughters at a marriage celebration. The unsaid perfection, the one they’d promised would not upstage Serena and Molly, was that Anna was there. Right up on the porch. In the middle of the conversation. She had survived what they said she would probably not survive.
“Pretty much perfection” became code for the afternoon, for the pre-wedding hike to a waterfall, for the service where Molly and Serena in taffeta gowns managed to weave their traditions so that Boston Irish Catholicism and New Orleans Black Methodism seemed an inevitable twining for even the most reluctant of the relatives.
And “pretty much perfection” was the surprise that Molly had cooked up for Serena when, after dinner and toasting and dancing to DJ SureShot, she directed everyone up to the log house behind the tent. There was a fire blazing in the great stone fireplace. And set up in the other corner was Vince Welnick—the actual ex and last keyboard player from the Grateful Dead—right there, in person, with his road band, playing “Truckin’.”
“I’m not sure how anyone actually dances to this, but please join us!” Molly shouted as she led her bride and partner of eighteen years onto the bluestone dance floor.
Serena was a self-confessed Deadhead. She loved the music, but she also loved that nothing about it fit with her image as a black lesbian orthopedic-surgeon mother. She liked to brag she was probably the only southern black girl in an Indian-print skirt swaying to “Sugar Magnolia” back in the day. Now Serena, shaking her head with equal parts joy and incredulity, had her arms wrapped around Molly. Tessa and Shana rushed close, and the women let their daughters slip inside the hug.
“I told Molly about Welnick!” Anna shouted as the friends danced in a loose circle. “When I learned he was out playing joints, like roadside dives, I knew he’d be game for a wedding.” Anna looked almost as thrilled as Serena.
The snare drums started whisking, and the band funked up for Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” The crowd lit up happy for a groove easier than the Grateful Dead.
“Who’s that?” Caroline pointed to a girl swaying alone in the corner. She looked eighteen. Tops. Even with her blond hair scraggly in front of her face, there was no mistaking how high the girl was. Wasted was more like it.
“She came with Welnick.” Molly slapped her hands over her face.
“His daughter?”
“I wish I could say yes. I’m trying hard not to think about her.”
“Shit, that’s just wrong.” Danny looked furious, like he should do something. Between all of them, there were a lot of daughters. “That hurts,” he said.
Caroline put her hand on his back to remind him it was Serena and Molly’s night. They deserved an undisturbed night of joy.
Late
r Vince Welnick scanned the dance floor. “Where’s Anna?”—as if he’d been looking for her all night.
“Anna,” he said formally when Molly lifted Anna’s arm. “Will you please join us?”
Without much convincing, Anna stepped through the crowd and hopped up onstage in her layered skirt and cowboy boots. The band hit the opening chords, and Anna shrugged her shoulders and blew a kiss to Molly and Serena. Then she slid her hands up the mike and started hitting perfect harmonies with Vince on “Friend of the Devil.”
“I was scared she’d refuse.” And the others knew that Molly meant because of the god-awful wig with its thick, blunt bangs.
Anna hadn’t played with her own band since the onset, but up onstage it was as if there had been no hiatus, no months in the hospital. She could hold her own. Deep in it. Snapping her fingers while the band segued into the Four Tops to sing backup on “Baby I Need Your Loving.”
Molly had arranged it with Vince. But, clearly, whatever Molly had assured him, it was obvious that Anna was a surprise. The songs kept rolling.
Then the guitarist handed Anna his other Gibson acoustic for Lowell George’s “Willin’.” She closed her eyes. She set the easy strum, and a harmonica joined. Anna took a sharp breath. I’ve been warped by the rain, driven by the snow, I’m drunk and dirty, don’t ya know, but I’m still . . . willin’. The band paced with her. She took her time. Let go and went down into the full lament and grudging hope of the lyric. When she shook her head, the wig was fixed in place like a thick helmet. She let pauses fill the room as she came up to the chorus, where Vince joined her.
When she’d finished the song, Anna walked over to Vince. She crouched beside his keyboard and started into an intense conversation. Like she was in mid-argument. Her hands gesticulated in blunt stabs. She stared across the room. And back at him. Then pointed to where the girl was sloppily propped against a wall. He listened, vigorously nodding his head. Then Vince took both of Anna’s hands, holding them tight to his chest as he bent into his microphone.
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