But the women agree with Reuben. Turns out all three kids have called Connie and Helen. “I sympathized. Up to a point,” Helen told him. “Then I told them to pay the bills on this place for a year and see how long it’s all about feelings.”
If the kids can’t deal with the house, Reuben knows they definitely won’t be able to deal with the woman he’s begun seeing these last three months. First time anything has felt possible and right. Lovely. That’s the word that comes to him when he sees her standing barefoot in his hallway. Lovely. To turn onto his side and watch her waking up. But he can’t introduce her to the kids. Not yet. Anyway, it’s okay, even a little lovely, to be kind of secretive.
First things first. Let them get used to renting the house.
The renters will be in by September 1 with a negotiated rent-to-buy contract. He can only hope.
—
Recognize this? Layla’s tempted to call out to Helen as she bubble-wraps a piece of driftwood, a beach treasure from Anna and Helen’s summer on Nantucket. Layla remembers the exact morning—was it twenty years ago?—on a speed walk, early in their friendship, Anna with her disarming abruptness announced, “Before I had any of my children, when I was still in college, I got pregnant. Reuben and I were together. It was ours. I never told him. Ever. I actually told him that it was Helen who was pregnant and I was taking her to a clinic. And then, after the abortion, I fainted.” Anna described waking to Helen’s terrified face. “I’d fainted, and Helen had just run into my dad while getting cash at the bank. Later that day, after a car and a bus and God knows what else, we ate fried clams by the Nantucket ferry. Not strip clams but belly clams. With that gooeyness. We called them ‘ninth-month clams.’ Reuben’s never known, and he never will.”
Layla had been shocked that Anna was confiding this to her. She remembers the crisp, dry scent of pine on the walk, and she remembers the secret she then shared with Anna.
Now, instead of calling out to Helen, Layla nestles the wrapped piece into a half-filled plastic container labeled LIVING ROOM. She’d be so happy we’re all together, Layla thinks. Another party in her house.
She picks up a ceramic bowl. Before wrapping it she holds it to the light, the shell-pink porcelain so thin it’s almost see-through.
“Hey, I gave her that. Maybe for a birthday.” Caroline points.
“No, sweetheart. You gave it to me. For my thirty-fifth,” Molly calls from where she’s seated on the floor, boxing books. “She convinced me to give it to her.”
Caroline laughs. “That’s so typical.”
Suddenly everyone chimes in. Everyone has a story. A necklace. Those hand-painted dessert plates Connie’s packing belonged first to Ming.
“My best-fitting pair of jeans,” Connie says. “She basically stripped me out of them at a restaurant.”
—
“It was almost an accident.” It’s Layla’s voice Reuben hears. He pokes his head through the door to finds her across the open room, at the hutch wrapping plates in newspaper.
“One class. I’d planned to audit just the one. Now I’m in the Ph.D. program. Who could have guessed that one?”
Reuben nods to Layla across the room. He didn’t know anything about her starting a Ph.D. But why would he? Except this week’s call to tell her that the women were gathering to help him pack up the house for renting, Reuben hasn’t spoken or run into Layla in any of the Valley haunts in more than a year. After that week they accidentally wound up in bed together.
“This is all about Anna,” Layla announced that evening a year ago, though it sounded a little like a question. She and Reuben had gotten entirely flipped around, their heads propped against the bottom of the sleigh bed. “Knowing Anna, she orchestrated this and is up there watching.”
“Believe me, Layla, she was never that generous.” Reuben’s laugh more whisper than anything robust.
They agreed it probably wasn’t unusual, that there was probably even an official name for what happened. But, predictable or not, neither Layla nor Reuben had foreseen that after the afternoon and night they’d spent in Reuben’s bed or after he called the following evening—just to check in, to see if Layla was freaking out—he’d wind up over at her house, not even making it all the way upstairs before they were at each other. Again it was a frenzy. Fierce. Unquenchable. Fucking.
“This has got to be in some book about grief.”
“The hot-sex-and-grief chapter.”
Reuben sat at the raw maple table watching Layla sprint about her kitchen. He drained his glass of wine. They were both starving. Had he ever noticed the small arch in the back of her neck before? To sit in a kitchen and watch a woman move knowingly. A gift. Mincing garlic. Snapping leaves from potted herbs arranged in a window. She stopped to pull her hair from her face, twisting it into a practiced bun, tucking the ends so it stayed fixed without a clasp. She kept turning to look at him. She’d shake her head. Or laugh.
“Stop watching me,” she said. He couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful than a fifty-six-year-old woman in underwear and a T-shirt moving through her kitchen.
Holding up a fist of dry spaghetti, she pointed it at him—“Reuben, this is a bad idea”—then fanned the spaghetti into the pot.
“It’s not like it was exactly an idea.”
“I’m not telling anyone. Ever.”
“Then we can do this a few more times?” Reuben chortled.
He wasn’t actually certain that he wanted more, but Reuben felt so lighthearted. When was the last time he’d felt such scraped-out lightness? Why wouldn’t he want that? Pleasure. The pure endorphin relief? Of course his. But to feel hers. To give pleasure—rough and insistent—instead of that worried and delicate care.
“You’ve got to admit, Layla, we feel good. It’s healing.”
“Don’t go all Marvin Gaye on me. It’s what it was, and that’s all.”
She tossed the spaghetti and set the bowl on the table between them. She refilled his glass of wine. They ate hungrily from the same bowl, their forks going at the pasta until they were scraping up every last loose thread.
Then last week, after Reuben called Layla to tell her about packing up for the renters, he asked, “You’re good?” Layla said she was actually doing very well. And of course she’d already heard about packing from Connie. She’d be over to help.
“I’m looking forward to hanging out. I didn’t want to shut down our friendship, Reuben. I just thought a little distance between us was useful.”
“I’m good with time, Layla. It all takes time.”
“I’ve seen the pictures of your beautiful granddaughter. And I’ve heard some other very sweet rumors about you.”
“Trusting Valley talk is dangerous.” Reuben laughed, denying nothing.
“Well, believe me, I’m happy for all happiness. For your happiness. Any happiness.”
—
Ming rests on the blue love seat, Molly chatting beside her. They’ve figured out it’s the only way they can get Ming to take a break. She’s begun using a cane. Though she says it’s only for Sebastian’s peace of mind. But they know about the falls. She arrived looking exhausted. Still, it’s impossible to get her to slow down.
Molly leans her head back. “She loved that stupid chandelier,” she says. “I never got it.” The two women watch light from the cathedral windows flash against the hundreds of crystals. Dust sparkles through the air like glitter.
“She loved it all so much,” Molly says quietly. “And then she was ready to give this up.”
“I’m not ready to give up,” Ming says. “Just so you know.”
—
Someone is crying in the next room. It’s to be expected. But still. Get it under control. They’ll never get anything done if the day goes weepy. And it could. They calibrate how much to talk about, how much to acknowledge just how completely weird it is no
t having her here.
Especially when she’s everywhere. Each of them holding something of her.
Just look at that trestle table with its array of perfectly arranged things. The cobalt glass bowl filled with starfish. An inlaid bone box. Three pewter frames, in each a grinning child with missing front teeth.
Then there’s another sob from somewhere in the house. The mason jar gets wrapped in newspaper. Should the cardinal feathers be saved or put outside? There’s so much to be done.
—
Caroline and Helen pull pictures from the refrigerator. It’s slow going, less because the fridge is a dense collage—photographs, birthday cards, postcards layered over one another—than because the two women keep stopping each other. There’s so much to look at, to comment on. Every elementary class and soccer team. The three kids, their years of baby curls. Then mullets and shags, all the bad hairstyles. Mouths of braces. Horse jumping, swim meets. Anna and her brothers on top of Mount Washington. Cousins’ weddings. The wedding of Anna’s eldest son.
“Which summer was that?” And they bend in to look at Anna and Reuben with the three kids in tow parading lobsters.
“Look closer, you’ll remember. Come on. It’s that Cape rental. The summer the twins both broke their arms.”
It’s also all the other children, their tribe. Rusty and Lily costumed as Fred and Ginger. Pirate getups from the Halloween-in-July party. A holiday greeting of Caroline’s trio equipped in helmets, life jackets, and paddles looking terrified beside a river raft. Tessa and Shana in matching Little Mermaid outfits. Postcard after postcard announcing Helen’s openings.
“She was my archivist.” Helen laughs.
“You were lucky,” Caroline says.
They peel off the photographs. Snip the bits of extra tape. They’re careful not to let anything tear. Slip them into a brown envelope.
An archaeology of all their lives. Curated by Anna.
Under a full family picture from a cousin’s wedding, there’s a Polaroid, that old familiar square shape.
“Look, it’s from Fox Road,” Caroline says. The bit of the slate path and the first of three cement steps up to the front door of Anna’s family’s house, the Tudor on Fox Road—it’s instantly recognizable.
It’s all of them in the small square photograph—Caroline, Molly, Ming, Helen, and Anna—they’re out on Anna’s front lawn. A sprinkler in the foreground, the arc of water. The girls are upside down, having kicked up into handstands. They’re all wearing bathing-suit tops and cutoff jean shorts, like they’ve planned the outfits.
“Of course we planned.” Helen bends close; her finger traces the photograph’s white border. “I remember cutting those shorts.”
It’s the summer of sixth grade. The last days of August before school starts. There’s a lot to worry about. Whose homeroom? There’s the worry of seventh-grade algebra and the teacher who’s a hundred years old and reportedly hasn’t given an A in eighty years.
The girls have spent days perfecting handstands. The Old Friends. That’s the summer they took on the name.
It’s Anna who comes up with handstands. They need to record the moment. All of them need to be able to do it. Anna and Helen take gymnastics, and Ming is on a dive team and does handstands and backflips. Only Molly and Caroline need to learn, and, Anna says, that will be a cinch. The first plan is to scissor open their legs. They’ll balance touching toe to toe like upside-down paper dolls. The cutoffs and bathing-suit tops, their hair cleanly parted and bunched in pigtails, that’s also part of the choreography.
By the end of the first afternoon, they’ve revised the plan and just want everyone upside down holding long enough for Anna’s brother to take a picture.
“I’m the most pathetic,” Caroline says.
“No, look at—”
Upside down, none of the faces are visible, but Caroline and Helen recognize each of them, their young-girl bodies. There’s a wobble to Caroline, all legs and knobby knees. Next to her, Molly’s kicked up, cockeyed, the weight unequal between her hands. She can’t quite get vertical, her body having begun its curvy changing. Ming’s a straight boyish arrow, determined, like she might hold her handstand for hours. There’s the deep gymnastic sway of Anna’s back, her sharply pointed toes, one foot angled to touch Helen’s foot. Helen’s foot meets Anna’s, the other leg bent in a declared fancy pose.
Helen remembers that she and Anna planned to have their feet touch just as the sprinkler water hit. And they did.
“Anna and I still had the fantasy that we were heading to the Olympics.”
“This took two days of solid practice.” Caroline leans against Helen. “I felt like a total klutz.”
“You were.” Helen nuzzles her face against Caroline’s. “But look, you did it.”
“I did do it.” Funny how all these years later, Caroline finally feels proud. Of her young-girl effort, however awkward. But also of all of them. All the things they each might now say to the children they were. The great unworrying spell they might cast backward. Caroline’s gawky body no more a betrayal than Molly’s abruptly changing one. Same shorts, bathing-suit tops, even their hair braided in matching French braids, and still each girl upside down is her own complete and changing self. And just outside the Polaroid’s thick border are the streets of their town and Caroline’s sister, Elise, still a happy and eager tenth-grade girl practicing for fall cheerleading.
“We all did.”
“Ming. Molly. Get over here.”
“We’re busy,” Molly snarls. She can’t quite believe the others have already forgotten that they’ve sworn to Sebastian not to let Ming overexert. Do they remember it’s not just her difficulty walking? Ming’s losing vision—a tapered, narrow hallway is the way she describes it.
“No, you both need to see what we found,” Helen says.
“What?” Ming’s already pushing off the couch, her cane positioned to steady and bear her spastic gait. Molly puts out her hand, not touching, just spotting at the elbow in case Ming stumbles or falls back.
Ming and Molly pick their way, a slow, zigzagged path through the maze of taped-up boxes in Anna’s sun-flooded living room toward the open kitchen.
Helen squeezes Caroline’s hand, and Caroline squeezes back—Yes, yes, I see. Right now this seems good—bifocaled and progressive-lensed—to be one another’s compassionate eyes, one another’s witness, it seems very good. Wait long enough and The Old Friends actually become old, Anna could tell them—though that moment, too, has come and gone. But it’s not just witnessing the ineluctable decline. Or the aftermath. And who’s to say it is not actually Anna just now nudging Helen—Heli, now here’s a painting. A house’s undone clutter. The summer light stippling the faces of intimate friends clustered and packing. Ming walking regally through the dismantled house with Molly in attendance, the two of them clucking slyly at some joke. The private joke, isn’t that the most interesting part? Or how the others straining to hear are lifted, connected by a curl of laughter. Always it was this, the layers of lived life and, still, the unanticipated pleasures. And the afternoon sun dusting gold light over the scuffed floor prevails—if only momentarily—over sadness or worry at watching Ming manage her cane.
“What’s so important?” And here’s Ming, her free hand out to hold the photograph Helen passes to her.
“It’s us. Before everything.”
Acknowledgments
First and always, Nancy Rockland-Miller—who hounded me to write a book celebrating friendship—I hope in some measure this novel lives up to what she believed might be achieved.
This book could not have been imagined without the abundant gifts of friendship that have sustained and shaped so much of my world vision—to that beautiful, motley, sprawling tribe I owe a debt beyond words.
All gratitude and love to Bill Clegg for being a dear friend, sublime reader, and agent extr
aordinaire over many years. A deep bow to Carole DeSanti for her editorial rigor, generosity, and brilliance. Raucous shouts of thanks to the teams at the Clegg Agency and at Viking Penguin for all efforts on behalf of this novel. I am beholden to my supersmart and precise copy editor, Maureen Sugden, and to Chris Russell, who each saved me from numerous infelicities.
I am all thanks to Fran Antell, Tracey Rogers, Sonya del Peral, Martine Vermeulen, Maria Basescu, Marie Howe, Honor Moore, Dani Shapiro, Melinda Lockman-Fine, and Emma Herdman, who offered attention, wisdom, and enthusiasm to the novel in various incarnations. Dr. Bob Weitzman, Robert Chodo Campbell, and the Zen Center for Contemplative Care helped me more fully understand aspects of medicine and end-of-life care. A shout-out to Suzanne Gardiner, whose cards led me through dark to greater dark and to song. And to the Rocklands and Rockland-Millers, thank you for my place in your family all these years. I am every day blessed by a life as a reader; I thank the poets and writers whose work is both a solace and a beckoning to go further and truer. Always thanks to my family—my father, Claudia, and Jessica—for unwavering belief and true north; my appreciation always and again to the insights (literary and otherwise) of my sons—Jonah and Gabriel—and for the ways they continue to open my heart and shape my attentions. And thanks too to the new brood—Zane, Wynn, and Dara—who, without genetic obligation, put up with me.
Oh, Bruce Van Dusen. Every day. Every single day I am astonished. And beyond lucky.
I am deeply grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation, Hedgebrook, the Borg, Camp Otterbrook, and Sarah Lawrence College for valuable support, sustenance, and time.
This novel is, finally, a work of imagination, which, of course, has been liberally influenced by a lifetime of places, people, and events. I am grateful for the leniency of everyone who believes they recognize an angle of chin or the echo of something once uttered.
Before Everything Page 22