Elena Undone

by Nicole Conn

  *

  Peyton and Wave sat with their wine, poolside, by the gazebo relaxing in the dusk. They had talked for hours, and the sun had just set and Peyton was only now beginning to feel a sense of release.

  “Do you think it’s worse because of all the extra stress you’ve been under?”

  “What extra stress?”

  “Oh…I don’t know, your mum’s memorial, Margaret’s continuing bullshit, this huge deadline you’ve been under, and you keep yammering about doing the project you want to do…but can never get to it. It’s all stress.”

  “Fuck, I hate this. You’d think I’d know how to beat it.” Peyton smirked. “Since I wrote the book on it and all.”

  “Physician heal thyself,” Wave mumbled. “Sweetie, I think it’s brilliant that you wrote your memoirs, but that’s just half the battle. Living, struggling with OCD doesn’t go away once you realize you have it. You said it yourself, it’s an ongoing condition—some days are better, some days are worse…and it’s your job now to find the best way to live with it. But I’ve known you forever, and even if you go into remission now and again...”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “No, really, Lombard. At your mum’s memorial you were like stone—I knew the minute I saw you—the unwavering Ms Granite—it was only a matter of time before you were going to crack. And in my book, even considering psycho chick who cheated on you with my girlfriend—well, even entertaining for a nanosecond having anything more to do with her is rid—”

  “Wave, look.” Peyton sighed, uncertain of how she felt herself about the reengagement with Margaret. “Nothing’s set in stone…and you know full well it wasn’t all her fault. I was completely MIA once my mom gondnce my ot sick.”

  “You’re far too forgiving.” Wave considered her good friend. “Don’t know why you were trying to procreate with her anyway. You have seen Rosemary’s Baby.”

  “Why do you think I’m adopting... Oh my God, you saw how crazy I got with the fertility shots.”

  “For the love of sweet chocolate please don’t make me go through that again.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. With my OCD I don’t dare get pregnant...and with Margaret—at least...well, we were compatible.”

  “Compatible... Right! Like Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes? Like Keith Olberman and Bill-O!” Wave was really disgusted. “Lombard, I’ve known you since high school. You were with her because she was safe. There was about as much passion between you and devil woman as a bloody rice cracker. Rice crackers are very nice, but I don’t want one in my vagina and I don’t think you do either—”

  Peyton couldn’t help herself, she laughed and pointed at Wave.

  “I know, I know… so I may run through them like socks in a drawer.” Wave took another sip of wine. “But at least I get to feel. High, low, schmucky, and all good and fucky. And someday, you are going to have to put your heart out there so you get to feel all those wonderful feelings too.”

  Peyton was not convinced.

  Peyton leaned into the crook of her dear friend’s arm. Felt safe for the first time that evening.

  “Blimey…what am I goin’ to do with you.”

  *

  Hi Peyton, I met you at the

  Elena considered, deleted and started over.

  Hi Peyton,

  I was the one you were so kind to at the adoption orientation. Thanks for helping out a perfect stranger. Hope you’re well.

  Elena Winters

  Elena took a moment, tried to think of a single good reason why she might want to reach out to this woman. She daydreamed a moment, thinking back to the woman who was so imposing, yet so kind in the same breath. Yes, it was that she was so engaging, Elena decided. But what was she thinking? Did her life even have enough room for a smid"jum for ageon of an acquaintanceship? The chances of her returning to that adoption organization were slim to none—she had already found another organization connected to their church closer to her home, and she—well, really there was no reason to send this e-mail whatsoever.

  Elena was a little curious, wondering why she felt so....well, strongly that she should send the e-mail. Maybe it was that the woman had been so sweet to her and she had meant to thank her that day for her warmth and kindness. But, what was the point—it was almost a month ago now, and this did seem pretty random to be thanking her this much later. The woman probably wouldn’t even remember her.

  She heard Nash and Tori coming in from the movies.

  She glanced back at her e-mail, was going to delete it but instead hit Send.

  *

  Peyton stood on the stepladder in the middle of her huge walk in closet digging through clothes, junk and tchotchkes as she searched and rummaged for the box she had specifically been hunting for the last hour. She had thought she had so clearly organized everything last year, glancing over the closed up cartons labeled Mom’s Photos, Mom’s Records, Salvation Army, Memorabilia, but now she realized she had been so grief stricken she had done all that cleaning on automatic pilot and only now was she beginning to remember where things actually lived. She also knew she hadn’t come to look before now, because she couldn’t have handled it.

  Peyton finally saw the box marked, WOMEN’S GLORY PROJECT, but before she pulled it down, she saw the special handmade pine crate that held her mom’s Biltmore Vanderbilt Teapot set. Now why had she put it away? She should really put it out in the dining room and actually use it. Even if it was a bit refined for Peyton’s taste, the cobalt blue and gold etchings were beautiful. Besides, her mother would have wanted that, not for it to be cooped up in the closet here along with the beautiful Grecian urn.

  She had finally spread her mother’s ashes back east, near her childhood home in Maine, at the coast, her favorite summering vacation spot where she used to take Peyton every August. Peyton had been especially fond of the lovely little cabin with its rustic interior, homey and lived in. It always smelled of the sea and a bit of must, but that was what was so wonderful about it. It felt lived in and it was the only time her mother did not feel uptight to her.

  The only other times Peyton could recall her mother seemingly able to relax were during the times they drank tea together. The only time that Peyton would see the pinched edges at her mother’s mouth begin to relax. As if tea, or perhaps the ceremony of drinking it, created a calm for her mother.

  Peyton pulled down the wooden crate and removed and unwrapped the beautiful bone china teapot and remembered that day so long ago when they were playing with Peyton’s miniature tea service.

  Why do people drink tea?

  Peyton’s mother stoppul mother ed a moment to consider. Well, it’s been around forever and it’s a very nice and civilized way of people sharing time.

  Young Peyton pretended to be very civilized as she sipped the tea out of the half-inch teacup.

  But I drink tea, Peyton, because there isn’t anything a good cup of tea can’t make better.

  Peyton thought that was a life lesson her mother had been right about. A cup of tea certainly always made things better.

  *

  Elena finished the church calendar at the dining room table. She sensed her laptop behind her. She turned. Checked her e-mails. Again. So many of them—always more requests from the church, but her eye scanned to see if there were any return e-mails.

  Nothing.

  *

  Peyton rubbed her forehead, trying to erase the constant memories of her mother.

  She was certain her relationship with her mother was no less neurotic than most, but because her father had died so early in her life, and she had literally no memory of him, her mother had become everything to her, even when she disapproved of pretty much everything Peyton undertook: Ladies don’t ‘do’ sports. Young lady, get out of those jeans right now and into a dress! Peyton, get your head out of that book—you don’t live life by reading about it…you live it by doing it. Do something useful!

  Peyton’s mother didn’t speak to her for nearly a year when
she heard of her decision to become a writer: What kind of nonsense is that when you have gotten a four point average all through college, to throw it away on this silly dream when you could be a big success in business? Theoretically to follow in her mother’s footsteps, as she had herself become the President of International Commerce for the high-end cosmetics corporation to which she had devoted her entire life, finding all her affirmation from the praise of colleagues as opposed to the love of another human.

  And when Peyton came out to her mother, Carolyn simply spat: I cannot bear to look at you. It’s evil—what you do…what you…what you crave is evil, Peyton. You need to get it fixed.

  Getting it fixed was two years of therapy and her mother’s gradual if reluctant acceptance. For some reason, Carolyn could handle that Wave was, All right, one of those kind of women—she’s different, she’s crazy—but you! And it was Wave’s endless patience and nurturing that helped Peyton and her mother find a way back to one another—even if it was a voiceless narrative of grudging acquiescence. Finally it was simply never mentioned again. It was tolerated. Carolyn barely got to know Margaret and Margaret was as uninterested in Peyton’s mother as Peyton’s mother was in Margaret. Within their mutual indifference toward one another lay peace.

  After Peyton’s father passed away, which she could barely even recall, the only person she could remember her mother even semi-dating was Dennis, an account executive at the company. At best it was sporadic and occasionally Peyton remembered watching her mother dress up and would feel giddy when Carolyn would ask her opinion: Which dress do you think, Pey? This red one that goes with my new lipstick? Or this one that’s more flattering to my hips? And, of course, Peyton had no idea what she was talking about but jumped up saying “The red one, the red one” because it made her mother’s face happier, shinier than she had ever seen it. And in those moments she saw her mother as beautiful, like a starlet out of a black-and-white movie. The rest of the times she simply appeared tight and bitter.

  But soon Dennis’s visits became fewer and fewer and eventually he left the scene altogether, except for the occasional popping over during the holidays—usually very late at night and sometimes on Sunday mornings. Peyton was mystified that he would always schlep his golf clubs along for the visit when her mother rarely golfed. It was only much later that Peyton realized that Dennis had been married and that their visits were explained to his wife as “golf dates” and that her mother’s need for some companionship but no involvement was well served by having an affair with a married man.

  She brought the beautiful teapot into the kitchen, washed it carefully, then retrieved the WOMEN’S GLORY PROJECT box and carried it to her desk. She spread all the papers, research and photos about her desk in the living room—another thing she knew her mother would have objected to. Peyton practically lived in the cavernous vaulted beamed living room, had transformed her mother’s huge dining room table to be her enormous desk so that she could have all her projects out and at her fingertips in a moment’s notice. But more than that, so that Peyton could feel safe in her womb. She often made a makeshift bed out of the chaise that cut the living room in half separating the couch and living area from her office space and she could hole up for days in that single room, making stops into the kitchen for coffee, tea and her meals, which she would also eat in the living room. Wave always teased her, “You know you have another two thousand square feet here you could be enjoying...other rooms might be feeling rejected.”

  Peyton spread the photos, articles, clippings before her, feeling a sense of calm wash over her. Her work had become her salvation. Since her mother’s death and Margaret’s betrayal, and with her OCD lurking around every corner, the few moments she felt some release and a sense of losing herself were when she buried herself in her work. And now, now that she was considering adopting, she felt renewed faith that life held promise, like that poor woman said at the adoption orientation.

  Hours later, she finished mulling over and rereading all the research papers she had gathered for this project during the several years after she had written her best-selling memoir. She had pitched the idea, relentlessly, this great coffee-table book she had coined the Women’s Glory Project which was devoted to really exploring in depth all the things that made women so wonderful. Emily, who Wave always described as, “One part performer, one part angel and eight parts killer shark,” had been Peyton’s agent since the start of her career. Though she lived in LA, she was still all Brooklyn and at times her bedside manner left Peyton feeling bruised. “You mean shredded!” Wave corrected. pth correcIt had been touchy with this project as Emily had barked at her: “What’s the hook?”

  “Hook? It’s not like selling a Toyota, Emily,” Peyton had remarked.

  “It’s gotta have some kind of angle.”

  “How about women are amazing and we never take enough time to see who they really are—their flaws, their strengths, everything that makes them so—”

  Emily yawned with feigned exaggeration. “Whatever. It’s so Seventies—no one cares anymore about what makes a woman. We’ve gained our independence, our freedom. We fuck who we want. Give me a hook…celebrity women, or a cause—breast cancer—something. I can’t sell it on just ‘women.’ No one gives a shit.”

  So while Peyton made her money on freelance articles and ghostwriting, she kept gathering all the materials to do this coffee-table book which would be not only a verbal ode to women, but a visual one as well. She could never really find the time to work on it, and as her mother became more ill, she only spent moments daydreaming about the structure, whether it should be about women of all ages, women of fame, women who worked, and then decided it should be about all of them. All women. That’s what made the project so wonderful. She had oodles of ideas and research sucked away in her brain for fodder, and was always meaning to get to it, and after her mother died, she didn’t have any extra energy for anything other than what she had to get done. Now she felt it was time. Time to really pursue this—

  PING—an e-mail popped up from an ewintersholylight@mail.com. Who the hell was that? Some religious nut? Peyton dumped it into her spam file and went back to work.

  *

  Elena brought in the groceries and set them down. She wandered over to her laptop, checked her inbox, then shook her head, and headed straight back into the kitchen. She put everything away and began to pull out the hamburger meat for the burgers she had promised Nash earlier. She meticulously put together the special ingredients she and Nash had concocted for “the best burger on a bun” as Nash had nicknamed it and then remembered she had to send an e-mail to Millie.

  Back to her computer. She sent the e-mail to Millie and sat there a moment. She checked her Send box. Yes, the e-mail had gone out.

  *

  Peyton’s phone rang. It was her agent asking her to look at the e-mail they had just gotten from the women’s magazine, MORE, offering her a recurring op-ed position. Emily was hugely excited and Peyton knew this was a great opportunity so she sat down, opened up the e-mail and had to agree that the offer was generous, wouldn’t take too much time from this project she was committed to working on, and sent off her CV and clippings.

  As she sat and read other incoming mail, something nagged at her. Nagged and nagged twn,and naghat she’d missed something. She looked through all her e-mail trying to decipher what was niggling at her and finally checked her spam folder. She opened the one from ewintersholylight@mail.com

  Hi Peyton,

  I was the one you were so kind to at the adoption orientation. Thanks for helping out a perfect stranger. Hope you’re well.

  Elena Winters

  Peyton read the e-mail a couple more times and then smiled. That’s right, the poor woman with the lost keys. She began an e-mail back:

  Hi Elena, glad you wrote

  Now what? She had no idea what to say to this person. What was the point? But she didn’t want to be rude. She started again. Backspaced. Wrote something truly innocu
ous. Backspaced again. She started a third time, and tried to figure out what it was she was trying to say. When she finally finished she read it aloud, then shook her head. “Yeah…some brilliant writer, Peyton.”

  She was giving it one last go, when the doorbell rang. She wondered if it was Wave, but Wave would just walk right in.

  Peyton made her way to the door, opened it and there stood Margaret.

  *

  “…and then Tyler said it would be cool if I did my Amazing Person paper on him so I’ve actually been getting into all this soul mate research, which at first you know I thought was just so much hokum.” Tori was helping Elena clean up the dishes after dinner as she charmingly went on with one of her informational riffs. “You know, cuz, I’m all about the facts and the data, but, ya know, now that I’ve done a bit more digging on the whole thing, it’s pretty amazing how some of these soul mates have met—like with the kind of randomness no mathematical algorithm can explain, and ya know what else is sort of whack, is how enduringly it’s existed within our consciousness.”

  “Hmmm.” Elena half listened as she always did because she always had a million things on her mind and she simply couldn’t take in all the information that Tori offered up, even when Tori was at her most absolutely charming. The huge databanks in Tori’s brain were truly a feat. She never provided information in a show-offey manner, nor was she even remotely annoying about it. It was all delivered as off-handed matter-of-fact knowledge, but also with a sweet conviction that what she was telling you was very much meant for your own well being. And, everyone agreed, it was often quite fascinating.