This was an amazing gift, TOTALLY amazing, and I am very appreciative of Blix’s kindness, but, sadly, I myself am not up to it. But . . . thank you.
Let the place go to a charity, and I’ll take the next flight home tomorrow, and later this week, I’ll tell my family the good news that I’m marrying Jeremy.
We’ll go to Cancun for our honeymoon like Natalie and Brian did. In a few years, we’ll have a kid, and then another, hopefully of the opposite sex, and I’ll decorate the house and garden and join the PTA and drive in carpools and keep a color-coded calendar hanging on the kitchen wall and get to say things like, “Honey, did you do your homework?”
I kind of love this idea. And in thirty or so years, I’ll be there to help my parents when they need to move to a nursing home. Jeremy will close his physical therapy practice, and maybe we’ll go back to Cancun for our fiftieth wedding anniversary when we’re eighty. And we’ll say, “Where did the time go?” like everybody else in the history of the planet. And then we’ll die fulfilled and people will say, “They were the luckiest ones.”
That’s a life, isn’t it? A person could do that. There will be so many, many good moments to that kind of life.
So why does it feel like right this minute I’m at a crossroads, trying to decide between the unknown and the known? Between the city and the suburbs? Between risk and safety? Didn’t I already make that choice? I told the guy I’d marry him! I kissed him right there in the diner, and I saw the happy look on his face, and how surprised he was—and now all I have to do is tell him that there’s a little piece of real estate that’s holding things up.
Blix, I am so sorry, but I already decided all this about my life. And now you’ve come to give me a gift that is going to muck up my whole life, and I’m sorry, but it’s just such a huge, huge mistake! I am not the person you thought. I don’t want a big, big life.
I know that if I called Natalie right this minute and told her everything that’s happening, she wouldn’t even have to think about it. She’d say I should run, not walk, back to Charles Sanford’s office this minute and insist that he rip up all the pages with my signature. Refuse to leave until every last shred of my signature is gone.
I’m about to punch in her number when I remember that I am carrying a letter from Blix right in my handbag. With my heart pounding, I take it out and open it, somehow knowing it will change everything.
TWENTY-FIVE
BLIX
Dear Marnie,
Sweetheart, an hour ago I got off the phone with you. You were asking me for a spell to bring Noah back to you, a request that pierced me to the core of myself. You love him. YOU LOVE HIM. At first I thought I’d go over to my book of spells—yes, I really do have one, but it’s more a joke than anything else because the best spells just sort of happen without any need of external stuff—but then I thought, what the hell, I’d try to find just the thing you could drink or eat that would make you a magnet for Noah once again. Maybe it would be only a placebo spell, but it would work because that’s how it all works. They work on BELIEF. And some directed energy. Here’s the truth, sweet pea: we are all vibrational beings in physical bodies, and thoughts actually become reality so you have to make sure you’re thinking about what you want and not about what you don’t want.
But then it hit me: there’s something else I can do instead, an immediate remedy—I could give you my house.
My funny, weird, crazy Brooklyn house. I should tell you: It has a plumbing issue. The floors slope in some of the rooms. It’s filled with tenants who don’t have perfect lives. The light switch on the first floor flickers sometimes, and once it shot a spark at me. I shot one right back. There’s a loose shingle on the roof. A tree branch batters the upstairs windows when storms come. What else? Oh, yes, one of the planters on the roof wobbles even though it’s supposedly cemented in place. The sun coming up in the morning can shine directly in your eyes, even with the bamboo shades pulled all the way down. The full moon will wake you up if you sleep in the front bedroom. Still, that’s the room I recommend. It’s the best because you will hear the sounds of the outside world, and that will keep you grounded and sane.
It’s a messy, forgiving, rambunctious house, filled with love and mischief. There have been so many good times here, and perhaps you already know the truth that good times beget other good times. And so there are plenty more to come. This house wants to be yours.
And I want it to be yours. You and I are messy, forgiving, rambunctious people, just like the house. That is what we share, Marnie dear. I hope you will stay.
Because you see, I am dying. I have this cancerous, tumorous thing growing inside me—it’s been here with me for months, and I know the end is coming soon. I haven’t told so many people, because sometimes people think I should go get treatment, like treatment is something I want to waste my time with. I do not want to have parts of me cut off, and I don’t want to be burned and slashed and poisoned in the interest of “getting better.” I want the kind of treatment where the universe looks down and says, “Hey, Cassandra!” (Cassandra is the name I gave my tumor. I thought she deserved a name.) I think the universe should have said, “Cassandra, you know you don’t belong there. Get out of Blix’s belly, will you, and go evaporate back into the atmosphere. Go turn into part of a glacier, or a little nest for a squirrel, or go back to wherever you were before you came here. Sweet Cassandra, if you kill off our Blix, then you will die, too, because Blix has all the nutrients for you. So think about that.”
But the universe didn’t come through with any such thing, and Cassandra apparently did not think about the consequences, and she has grown bigger and stronger, and she nestles down next to my heart when we lie down together, and I know soon she will be the bigger part of me.
So I’m excited for what I know can happen. I am calling my attorney, and I’m drawing up a will that leaves you the whole mess of a house. My heart beats faster when I think of how that is going to be for you! I know that the house will set your life off on a new course, just the way it did that for me. I know that you and I are in many ways connected, and maybe you’ll feel that when you get here.
Think of me here, welcoming you. Will you do that? See me on the rooftop, or sitting at the beat-up kitchen table drinking tea, or out on the street talking to the people who come by. I’m the car horns, the bus that rounds the corner, the subs over at Paco’s across the street. I am all of it. And you are, too, although you may not know it yet.
I know, I know, this will come as a shock to you, getting a house from someone you think you don’t know. But I know you. I have always known you. And I see myself in you, believe it or not.
And here’s the main thing of what I know about you. I told you when we met that you are in line for a big, big life, and this, Marnie, is where you will find it. There will be love and surprises here in abundance, I promise you that. Be open to what doesn’t seem possible, and you will be amazed what can happen. Darling, this is your time.
Love over lifetimes,
Blix
P.S. Will you stay for at least the three months it’s going to take you to get over the shock of this? Please? Tallyho, my love!
TWENTY-SIX
MARNIE
I read the letter three or four or ten times, then I fold it up carefully, and put it back in my bag.
For fun, I do the little exercise Blix showed me at the engagement party—the one where you beam some energy over to somebody you don’t even know, and watch what happens.
I choose a baby in a high chair, banging his cup on the table in front of him. I picture him all bathed in white light and happiness—and then I wait to see the effect. And yep, he stops banging and looks around, and then his eyes meet mine and he laughs out loud.
I made a baby laugh! This is so cool.
After the rain stops, I go to H&M to buy a sweater to replace the wet one I’m wearing. My eye gets caught by a long, bulky white cardigan, a black knit tunic, three pairs of leggings, a s
hort black dress with red slashes on it, four pashminas, some heavy socks, two weeks’ worth of underwear (most of it sexy just because), and a blue knit cap. The clerk is ringing it all up while I’m looking at the jewelry display next to the counter, when a woman behind me in line—an older woman who has kind, crinkly eyes—says, “You need to buy that turquoise medallion there. Look at the shape of it. I think it’s your good luck charm.”
So of course I buy it, but I have that weird feeling again—the maple syrup sensation. A good luck charm. Just what I need. When I turn around to show her that I’ve bought it, she’s moved over to another cashier and doesn’t look back.
Outside, the weather has cleared up dramatically, and above the tall buildings, I can see wisps of white clouds scudding across the sky. The air feels clean and crisp. I put on the cardigan and go into the closest bank branch and start filling out the paperwork for an account.
Apparently I’m staying.
It’s not that Brooklyn suddenly looks so beautiful, or that I miss my family any less, or that I’ve come to a momentous decision. It’s as though I can feel Blix’s presence all around me, that her words have landed in my soul somehow . . . and I want to bask in that for as long as possible.
Three months suddenly seems like nothing.
A little break from my life perhaps, before it goes rumbling off on its normal track—toward marriage and children and, yes, lawn mowers.
I have a chance to pause. I feel like that woman we sent energy to that time at the engagement party—and just the way she did, looking up to see who’s called her—that’s what I’m doing right now.
I text Patrick, for no reason at all: Just bought the heaviest sweater I’ve ever owned in my life. Question: Is life really possible for a kind of weird person from the South to make it here?
After a long time, he writes back: Sweater is a good start although December can be frosty. Hell, November can be frosty! Also Bklyn is welcoming to weirdos. It’s normal folks who have the most trouble. BUT: Do you say “y’all”? Might be harder to assimilate if you say “y’all.”
I don’t say “y’all.” My time in Northern California whipped that out of me. (BTW, nice punctuation! Colon AND quotation marks! )
Then I’d say you have a good chance. (I’ve been told I’m a punctuator extraordinaire.)
If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere, or so I’ve heard.
That’s Manhattan. Making it in Brooklyn guarantees nothing.
So I need a coat?
Most def. (That’s Brooklynese for “most definitely.”)
I figured.
I go over to Uniqlo and get one of those adorable little parachute-type coats. In dark purple. Because why not?
Then I walk home, trying out my part as a regular Brooklyn girl strolling through the hood.
I’m staying! I’m actually going to live here for three months. I feel like when you’re at the top of a roller coaster and are just about to start the whooshing ride you paid for, and you just hope you don’t freak out.
It’s a long walk back to Blix’s house, but I’m not up to figuring out the subway system just yet, and it’s too nice a day for a cab. And anyway, what else do I have to do but walk? I just want to look at everything, all the nail salons and brownstones and nondescript apartment buildings and restaurants, everything big and noisy and filled with ordinary life. For a while I try keeping track of how many people smile at me, which is not all that many, but who cares. It occurs to me that when it’s this crowded, you can’t afford to be smiling and chatting with everybody. You’d be exhausted within two blocks.
I see a woman sweeping her steps, and her brown arms in her floral-print housedress look majestic. A bird’s nest is perched in a gingko tree. A leaf on the sidewalk is shaped like a heart.
And all three of those things feel like Blix saying, “Welcome. You’re here now.”
My entire family, of course, loses their respective minds when I tell them the news that I’m staying for a bit. But I’m ready for them.
My mother calls it abhorrent and manipulative, and says Blix was probably certifiably crazy. My father says that I should come home and we can let our family attorney look over the papers.
“No one can keep you against your wishes,” he says. “Believe me, I’ll figure out how you can sell the property and still be at home.”
“It’s not like that!” I say, but they are not having any of that kind of talk.
When I get Natalie on the phone, I try a different tack. I start with the good news that I just walked through Brooklyn, and people smiled at me, and that even though it’s loud and dirty here, it’s also kind of amazing and full of stories—and that Blix was perhaps onto something when she said I needed to be here.
“What?” says my sister. “No, to all of this! What happened to our plan to have babies and hang out by the pool? You said you were happy here! Why are you letting this woman, who’s dead, by the way, change your whole life around!”
“It’s not changing my whole life,” I say. But the truth is, I’m not so sure. I finger the good luck charm I’m still wearing around my neck and listen to my sister’s diatribe, which is getting more shrill by the minute. The thing about sisters is they have your whole rotten history right at their fingertips.
She runs through the greatest hits of my misfit life: my admittedly checkered history of dropping the ball, changing the plan, not following through. How, sadly, it’s no wonder that things go badly in my life—I assume she means my marriage, my job—when I let myself be swept along by somebody else’s vision for me. Where is my backbone? What do I stand for?
Think of Amelia! Think of Jeremy! Don’t I care that people here need me? Our parents!
I sit and listen, looking around the bright kitchen, at my shopping bags on the floor, my new coat, my beautiful white sweater that she won’t see. The sun is coming through the kitchen window. Blix’s plants on the windowsills are still in glorious bloom.
Finally I rouse myself enough to tell her I have a pot boiling over on the stove and have to hang up.
I try a new tactic with Jeremy, simply stating the facts. Not coming right home. Three-month residency required for the inheritance. Staying here. All is well. We’ll be fine.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he says. “Back up. I’ve never heard of anything like this.”
“Yep,” I say. “Me neither. But there we have it. It is what it is. It doesn’t have to be a problem. It just delays things a bit for us, is all.”
“But wait. It does seem like an odd situation, doesn’t it? Having something unusual like that written into a will? Why do you think she did it?”
“Well, she was unusual.”
“It just doesn’t sound like a very nice thing to do to somebody. You know? No offense because I know you liked her, but a gift with such strings seems really . . . well, suspect.”
“I can see that way of looking at things,” I tell him slowly, but what I am thinking is that it’s extraordinary how the late afternoon light slants in the kitchen window and hits the scarred top of the brown table. I love this table. The heft and solidity of it. And the turquoise refrigerator. I love that this whole place seems to hold Blix’s personality—and how does something like that happen?
“Can you come home for a visit, do you think? Or should I maybe come up there and see you?”
“Okay,” I say. I shake myself back into the conversation.
“Okay to you coming home for a visit, or okay for me to come and see you?”
“Either one,” I say, and yawn.
He’s quiet for a moment. Then he says, “Look. I’m sorry I’m not such a good phone guy, but I just want you to know that this makes me a little bit sad. And in case you didn’t know, I really loved having you working with me right in the next room, just knowing you were there, and my mom will miss having you to talk to because you know just how to make people feel good, you know? We all need you here. My patients, my mom, me.”
“Well,�
� I say. “Thank you.”
“And this is really temporary,” he says. “Right?”
“Oh my God! So temporary! Very temporary!”
“Because I love you, you know. I’m going to be so lonely without you!”
“I love you, too,” I say. “We’ll talk every day. I miss you.” And then I add, “It’ll be lonely here without you, too.”
And then, wouldn’t you know that when I hang up and turn around, Noah is standing there next to the refrigerator. Shit, I didn’t even hear him come back in the room. He gets out two beers and holds one out to me, cocking his head and looking way too amused.
“Wow. That was so sweet,” he says sarcastically. “Really. You’ll have to tell me who the lucky guy is.”
“Actually, it was my fiancé,” I say.
“Excuse me? Your fiancé? Soooo . . . how long have we been divorced—and you’ve already got somebody else lined up?” He’s smiling. “What? Did you have a guy waiting in the wings or something?”
“Oh, Noah, stop it. It’s not like that at all. He’s my old boyfriend, and we’ve gotten back together and we have a lot in common, so . . . we recently decided to get married.”
“Your old boyfriend. Who might that be? Let me see if I remember the pantheon of guys.” He puts his finger on his chin, a pantomime of someone thinking. His eyes are bright with laughter. “Wait. I hope to God it’s not the one that ditched you before the senior prom!”
“No. Please. Stop. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
“Oh my God! Is it the guy you ditched to go out with the hot guy? It is, isn’t it? You got back together with him?”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I’m curious. Because I care about you. I did this terrible thing to you, and I’ve felt horribly guilty over it, so I’m glad to see you’re fine. That’s all. Also . . . I’m a little jealous, maybe. You got over things kind of . . . rápidamente, if you ask me.”
“I suppose you think I should still be pining for you.”
“It would have been nice to have at least a six-month pining period. I think for a two-year relationship a person should get six months of pining.”
Matchmaking for Beginners Page 19