“Who needs meaning when we’ve got this life?” he says. He flings his hand out, taking in all of it—the apartment building, the chips of electric-blue sky between the rooftops, the park across the street where the children shriek with happiness in the swings, and miles away, the sea, that he claims he can hear.
But he doesn’t know. I’m at the point where I’m all meaning. I’m not going to have a body much longer, but I am certainly going to have scads of meaning.
At night, curled up next to me, he whispers, “Blixie, I don’t want you to die.”
And there is nothing really to say to that. So I just reach across the vast expanse of blanket and touch him.
His hands are like big warm mitts, but somehow their shape is as delicate as stars. Houndy is made from stardust, that’s for sure.
NINE
MARNIE
“How are you doing?” Sylvie asks me on the phone two days later.
I’m jobless and unloved and I’m currently lying under the covers, reading old issues of People magazine and eating granules of instant pudding out of the box, is how I’m doing.
I’m also having a little bit of a fascination with dust motes. I know, I know. They’re fantastic. But they’re really more than fantastic. They have a lot to tell us about ourselves, these dust motes. If you stay still for a long time, they stop falling, but when you move again, wave your arm in the air or shake your foot in the covers, then they come swirling around again, like little stars. Like whole universes. It makes you think—what if our world and the whole solar system are just contained on somebody’s dust mote? What if we’re that meaningless?
I throw tissues at the wall; I pace around the apartment and dance to wild music until the neighbors downstairs bang on my ceiling with their broom handles.
Maybe I could stay like this forever, suspended between worlds.
But what I say is, “Oh, well, actually I’m having all the feelings.”
“Are you looking for another job yet?” she asks.
When I don’t say anything, she says, “I’ll make some calls for you, if you want. When you’re ready. You really are a very good teacher, you know. This has nothing to do with that.”
Later I call Natalie and tell her the whole story, and she puts me on speakerphone so she and Brian can both work on cheering me up.
They say all the right things—things I know I would say to a friend who’d called with this story: wow, what a tough year you’re having; of course you’re not crazy; you’ll find something else; we love you; you could move back home. I chew on my knuckles while they talk to me so they won’t hear me crying.
I have to figure everything out, but right now I have a headache, and I need a nap. Besides that, I need to watch the dust motes lit up by the setting sun before it gets too dark to see them any longer.
So one day, without any warning, my parents show up.
My parents live three thousand miles away; when they show up, it means that airplanes and rental cars have been involved. And this doesn’t happen without about a million conversations ahead of time. But here they are, banging on the door, calling my name like they’re expecting to wake me from a coma. For a long moment, I think maybe I’m hallucinating their voices. Has it come to this? But then I realize. Ah, of course. I should have known. Natalie and Brian have told them what’s happened.
I open the door tentatively, aware suddenly that I’m covered with flour and chocolate and wearing a too-small Japanese kimono that my father brought back from Japan for me when I was thirteen years old. I have on one bunny slipper and one sock, and my hair is a tangled mess because I have let the braid from four days ago turn feral, like a bramble you’d step around in the woods.
I have been baking. Cupcakes with messages in them, if you want to know. Like fortune cookies, but cupcakes.
When against all odds Noah comes back to me, he will be so surprised to bite into a chocolate cupcake and see the message: YOU ARE NOW WITH THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE.
Maybe this could be a business. Cupcakes with Messages. I’ll have to come up with a better name, of course, but first I have to figure out how you can tuck pieces of paper into cupcake batter without getting them all wet. I’ve been puzzling over this for days, and so far nothing seems to be working.
My mother puts her hand over her mouth. Her eyes fill with tears as she and I both take in the full horror of my situation. My father pulls me into his arms and hugs me. I start to cry.
“We’ve been trying and trying to reach you,” he says in a muffled voice. “Why don’t you answer your phone? We’ve been calling you for days and days. We were out of our minds. Your mother finally said we should book a flight and rent a car and see for ourselves what’s going on.”
“I wanted to call the police,” my mother says. “How could you do this to us?”
“I am so, so sorry,” I say. But really—has it actually been that long? I might have lost some track of time.
They come into the apartment warily, like they might be entering a crime scene. Suddenly everything looks awful: the sun shining on the countertop where I spilled eggs and cream and flour. And the little slips of paper everywhere, with their simplistic sayings on them, look stupid and childish. Out of the corner of my eye I see that my mother has picked up one off the floor that reads: WHO CARES WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK? BE YOU!
She hands it to my father and stares at me with round, tragic eyes. “Marnie? Honey? What is going on?”
“It’s . . . an idea . . . a business idea . . .”
“A business idea?” My father is all over business ideas. He looks at the slip of paper and then at me and then back at the slip of paper. It has chocolate smeared all over it.
“Throw that away, Millie,” he says in a low voice.
The trash can is overflowing, and the window has streaks of dust. The sink is filled with soup cans and spoons and a cardboard coffee cup that has something green floating in it. I was studying it earlier, that green mold. Mold is life, after all. And now that I look around, seeing the place through their eyes, I also notice that there’s a red high heel in the middle of the floor and the picture of Noah and me at Lake Tahoe smashed on the floor by the heater. (Yes, I smashed the picture with the high heel, so what? It was a satisfying symbolic moment.)
I go over and try to scoop up as much as possible of the detritus of my life, to hide it from them. But I can’t hide it at all, and now that Natalie has told them that I’ve lost my job, they also can see that I haven’t gone out and replaced it. Soon they’ll point out to me that when MacGraws lose jobs, that’s when they double down; they start making calls, sending out flurries of résumés and curricula vitae. That’s when a MacGraw gets into gear.
“So what happened to your phone?” my mother wants to know.
I look around. Where is my phone, anyway? How could I have neglected it? Oh, yes. The phone. Well, the truth is I must have forgotten the charger at work the day I left, and I honestly have never thought of it again until this moment. No wonder nobody has called me. I talked to Sylvie and Natalie last week, and then never bothered to recharge it. I have been so—so lame. Maybe I am having what they used to call a nervous breakdown. I don’t really know what one of those is, but that does not mean that I’m not having one.
“Oh, honey,” my mother says. I expect her to say the things she wouldn’t have been able to avoid saying back when I was in junior high: stand up straight, comb your hair, and why didn’t you do these dishes? It’s even scarier that she says none of that. Instead, she tightens the purse strings of her lips and sets herself to work making things conform to the standards set by civilization.
My father, clearly the designated hugger, comes over once again and holds on to me, and says, “You need some care.” They must be really worried if he’s not going to ask why I didn’t get another job yet, or why I was so awful as to get myself fired, or what I think I’m going to do next.
Nobody says anything that would be upsetting.
I close my e
yes in gratitude. My parents are here, and I can stop running from whatever has me, because they are going to take care of me now so I don’t have to adult myself anymore.
They pack up my things, donate the furniture, clean the apartment, make the necessary phone calls, sell my old car to a guy down the street.
And just like that, it’s over.
They are going to take me back home, back to the mother ship, for repairs.
TEN
MARNIE
When you fall apart and move back home, nursing a big heartbreak, everyone tiptoes around you, until one day they bombard you with all the opinions they’ve been keeping to themselves.
But here’s the thing I didn’t expect: I actually don’t mind their opinions. I am back in suburban Jacksonville where I belong, back in the 1960s pastel-yellow ranch house on the cul-de-sac where I grew up, two blocks from a black-water creek in one direction and the low-slung pink brick elementary school in the other. Old oak trees, dripping with Spanish moss, stand guard among the palm trees, the same as they always did. Nothing truly bad could ever happen to you here—that is, if you have the good sense to come in during the daily thunderstorm that arrives around 5:00 p.m.
My father is sure that I need to find another job, but he is patient and willing to help me. He says I need something with security! Health benefits! A pension! He talks to Rand Carson, my old boss at the Crab & Clam House when I was a teenager (I was chief clam girl, I’ll have you know)—and when I make a face and tell my dad, “Not the fried clams again!” he says I am in line for a much more senior position: dining room manager. I can boss the clam kids around while somebody else pays my health insurance premiums.
My mother has another life in mind for me altogether, as her sidekick. She declares happily that we are “joined at the hip” as we make the rounds of her social life and errands: to the pool, to the store, to the library, to the gym, to lunch with her friends, and then we do the whole circuit all over again the next day. I am the prodigal daughter, welcomed back into the neighborhood, complimented for how I’ve grown up, for my nice smile. And it’s true; I smile brightly at all the people my mother knows, which is nearly everyone in town. The neighbors who are outside watering their lawns need to run over just to get a look at me, as does Rita, the cashier at the Winn-Dixie, and Drena, who has styled my mother’s hair since forever at the Do or Dye Salon on Hyde Park Avenue. They all look at me with slightly pitying expressions on their faces. So they know the whole story. Of course they do, but they understand.
And then there’s my sister, who lives only a half mile from my parents, in a new subdivision that features the kind of dream house that two full-time professional incomes can provide. She is just about to begin her maternity leave when I arrive, and she is the perfect example of how a perfect person can make a perfect life. I know, I know: I am using the word perfect too many times, and no life is perfect, but when I am with Brian and Natalie in their cozy house, with her cozy big belly, and the furniture all overstuffed and comfortable, and the walls painted muted shades of gray and beige with white trim, and the windows all clean and everything looking peaceful and restful, I think that this—this!—is what everybody had been hoping would magically fall into my lap, too. I, myself, did not see it, frankly; given a house like this, I’d be painting the walls real colors, colors from the red family or the turquoise family, and hanging modern art on the walls.
One morning I’m having breakfast with my father out on the patio, just us, when he asks me what I see myself doing in my life, so I tell him the truth.
“Well, I have a lot of plans actually. I’m really into that idea of baking cupcakes with little sayings in them—like fortune cookies, you know, but with cupcakes. And also I’d like to write love letters for people who can’t think of the right words. Oh! And I also would love to make costumes. Maybe do a stop-action film with figurines in costumes. I could write the scripts. Or, say, I could be happy, um, working in a bookstore because I could help people find the novels they need to read for whatever is bothering them.”
He folds his newspaper and smiles at me. “We should try to narrow this down and see how any of it could be monetized,” he says. “When you’re thinking of what to do with your life, whatever your occupation is, it would help to think money.”
“Also, you’re going to think this sounds crazy,” I tell him, “but it’s possible that I could turn out to be a matchmaker. I mean, I’ve had a few successes at it, so it’s something maybe I could pursue.”
He gets up and ruffles my hair on his way to leave for work. “Ducky, I’m gonna say it again. You’re a fascinating human, but that’s not what life’s about. You gotta make some money.”
It is not lost on me that this—Natalie and Brian’s dream house—this is the reward for going to school and really applying yourself to a skill that people want and will pay for. You get to meet a nice person, and so what that he is maybe not the most zany, creative, handsome person you ever met, a guy who wants to play guitar all night long and write you love songs, and then cook omelets at three in the morning, like the guy I married by mistake—but he is instead that other kind of man: a provider, an ethical, strong, good man with an eye to the future. Your future.
Ah, you see how it is with me. You see how Noah creeps in. He has set up shop in my head with his goofy love songs and his Ray-Ban sunglasses and a storehouse of memories, like the way he’d claim he had a special delivery for me of one thousand smooches and then he’d kiss my whole body, up and down, every inch of me. Both of us laughing until—well, until we couldn’t anymore.
There is no point in thinking about this, however. I’m in my real life now. Back where I started from, and where I will pick up the pieces.
My room, still painted pink, smells like being a kid again. The light still slants in through the pink cotton curtains just the same as it always did, a slant that is so familiar it may actually be installed in my DNA—along with the sound of the hinges of my bedroom door, chiming like a musical note, and the flat-yellow hall light shining up into the attic.
Late at night, after my parents have gone to bed, I find my way to the family room, the lived-in, comfortable space, where you don’t have to pretend about anything. There’s the same worn-out rag rug, the chipped bookshelves, and an old brown corduroy couch that hugs you when you sit down, like it’s so very glad to see you.
Welcome home, Marnie, the couch says to me, and I sink farther into its soft cushions and let myself fall under its spell of safety and familiarity.
“It’s so good that you finally came to your senses and came back home,” says my friend Ellen one night when she and Sophronia and I meet for drinks and dinner. I’ve been home only three days, but my mom says I need to get out, and she’s probably right.
Ellen and Sophronia are both working for an insurance company in downtown Jacksonville and are dating multiple men from the corporate world. They tell me they have a social life that keeps them on the go: Margarita Mondays and Wacky Wild Wednesdays and Thirsty Thursdays. And then there are the weekends—parties at the beach, with plenty of beer and dancing. Dating intrigue, that sort of thing.
I can hardly remember that world. Maybe I wasn’t ever really part of it, come to think of it.
“Oh, you should totally come with us,” Ellen says. “It’ll be good to get back out there, get that guy out of your system.”
Sophronia gives her a meaningful look, and then they both look sad for me.
“So. Are you really over him, do you think?” Ellen asks.
“Yes. Oh, yes. Totally. Over him, over him, over him,” I say. I’m glad they can’t see the lump that has formed in my throat.
They both reach across the table and hug me at the same time, and I remember how I used to like them in middle school, before we went to separate high schools and I lost my way and they became the part of the popular crowd at their school. The Cool Kids.
They’re still the cool kids, and maybe hanging out with them
would be a good idea, now that I’m back here.
We drink a bunch of beers, flirt with some guys, and then I get tired and sad and tell them I’ve got someplace I need to be.
The corduroy couch is calling my name.
Natalie and Brian come over for dinner my first weekend at home.
I discover that they are now best friends with my parents. I am shocked—shocked!—to realize that the four of them have rituals together. There is Sunday dinner, and then most Saturday afternoons my father and Brian play golf while my mother and sister go shopping or go to a matinee. Also, my sister cooks extra for my parents on Mondays and Wednesdays, and my mother sends over some Thursday meatloaf each week.
Even more startling to me is the fact that they get together at least every other week and play quadruple solitaire. There’s a complicated scoring system that no one can quite explain to me, not without laughing so hard they give up. I stand there, amazed, while my mother and sister try to tell me all about it, with my father and Brian tucking in little helpful remarks here and there.
“. . . and if you have more than a certain number of cards . . .”
“Red cards!”
“No, not just red cards, any cards . . . just more points for red cards.”
“Well, yes, unless your opponents have an odd number of black cards.”
“Solitaire?” I say. “But isn’t that . . . played . . . alone?”
They fall over laughing at that quaint idea. I feel a flash of irritation mixed with envy knowing that I can never catch up to them, will never truly be a part of their cozy little group.
Natalie takes my arm and says, “Never mind. It’s a silly game.”
My sister looks like an advertisement for pregnancy and happy marriage, like it’s the least tiring thing ever. Her formerly long blonde hair is now chin length and cut at a sharp angle that makes her blue eyes jump right out at you. And although she’s definitely wearing a huge round thing on her front, the rest of her looks perfectly slim and regular, like somebody came along and randomly glued a basketball underneath her shirt.
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