Rise and Shine

by Anna Quindlen

  “Who cares what the world thinks?”

  “Oh, honey, it’s a little late for that attitude now.”

  “I feel as though you hid everything from me.”

  “Of course I did. You got all the best parts of my life, Bridge. And you loved it. How could I tell you how I really felt? I used to watch your eyes, at the dinner parties, at the screenings, when someone would talk to me on the street. You loved it. You loved the movie stars and the VIP entrance and the greenroom and the First Class lounge. You were hypnotized just like all the rest.”

  “Is that why you didn’t tell me? Or did you want me to be just like everyone else, thinking you had the perfect husband and the perfect kid and the perfect life? You didn’t have to be a martyr. I’m your sister. I’m not some groupie standing outside the studio with a hand-knitted afghan and a sign that says RISE AND SHINE.”

  “Oh, and you really wanted to know the truth, didn’t you? Grow up. You’re the one who gets to have illusions. I’m the one who has to deal with reality. That’s our deal. Someone has to be the bitch so someone else gets to be the nice one. Someone has to be the one who pushes so someone else gets to be the one who takes it easy. Someone has to be the driven one so someone else can take their time and figure things out and follow their bliss.” She was singsonging, mocking me, leaning forward with her eyes narrowed, the words tumbling from her slack mouth. The notch at her hairline glowed red. There was no doubt that she’d have a scar. “Someone has to be in charge so someone else can relax. Someone has to be willing to do everything so someone else can do nothing.”

  I felt sick to my stomach, and my voice was unsteady. “Jesus, Meghan. You sound like you hate me.”

  She fell back heavily onto the lounge and closed her eyes. There were no birds calling, no sounds from the beach or the boats. Finally there was just the sound of deep breathing, and I thought she had either fallen asleep or passed out from the sheer power of everything she’d said. I began to cry.

  “I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about everybody. Everybody in the world. I don’t hate you,” she finally whispered. “I love you. You and Leo. You’re the best things I ever did. But sometimes at night I’d sit in the kitchen of that apartment and I’d be so lonely and I’d think, What happened? It’s not that it’s a bad life; it’s just so not real. The apartment, the cars, the speeches, the lunches, the show—none of it’s real. Three real things: Evan. Leo. You. Evan’s gone. Leo’s going.”

  “Leo will always be around. Me, too.”

  “You know what the opposite of ‘rise and shine’ is, Bridge? ‘Good night, and good luck.’ But look what I have to show for it. A son who went to the annual mother-son school breakfast with his aunt, and a whole roomful of plaques and plates and crystal good-for-nothing things with my name on them. I don’t hate you. I hate me.” And then she was asleep, snoring faintly, her mouth open.

  In the middle of the night, a bird cried loudly and woke me, and I looked over and she was gone. I looked into her room, but the bed was still made as Derek’s wife had left it that morning, a white square floating in the black of the unlit interior. I was afraid that she had tried to go swimming again and I started down to the dock, but after only a few steps I was stopped by the shadows, the black spaces beneath the enormous canopy of rhododendron leaves, monochrome in the darkness, and the sharp profiles of bamboo and banana trees. The dock was partially in light, and I could see that there were two people on it, naked and entwined. I could not see their faces. I stepped back quickly and fell over an uneven step, then went inside but scarcely slept until morning, when I dozed off until I heard the sound of running shoes hitting the macadam out front.

  At breakfast we had papaya with lime wedges and some kind of gingerbread. The coffee was strong, and the steam veiled our faces as we bent over it. “Whoa, honey, was I drunk last night!” Meghan said with a laugh as though nothing had happened. And somehow, with that one sentence, the sort of thing that is tossed off in every office in New York nearly every morning, to excuse everything from public urination to adultery, I knew that she would return. I didn’t know when or how. But perhaps because our day trip had taken her a little too close to the world she’d left behind, or simply because she had finally revealed so much, she had recovered the muscle memory of how to lie, how to lie fluently, easily, as a matter of course. Who could blame her? Lying is always easier than telling the truth.

  The next morning she stood on the drive with the sun behind her as I got into the car to go to the airport, and she put her hands on my shoulders and smiled a pure and simple smile. There were so many things I wanted to tell her and talk to her about, but during the course of the week there had not been the right time, the right place, the right opening. “You know what’s so great about this place?” she said. “You can see everything so clearly here. You’re on your own, kid. Take care of yourself.” She started to walk into the house, then turned at the door. “Tell Leo to listen to those messages. Tell him I poured out my heart. Tell him he needs to come and see me. Tell him we’ll talk.”

  I GOT HOME on a Saturday night, which is the official moment of the city of New York. When I return after even a week away, I am always struck by it again, the bulk of it against the sky, the dwindling perspective drawings of the streets, the way everything is available here, everything possible: Ethiopian food, gay group sex, designer clothes for dogs, druggy dance clubs, six-foot-long hero sandwiches, all-night dry cleaners. New York runs on its own digitalis. One moment your heart is thump-thumping in a normal fashion. The next it’s staccato, double time, leap-a-leap. “I love this girl!” someone screamed from the window of a taxi as I walked down Sixty-ninth Street in a light spring mist.

  There was a note from Leo: “Went to Newport for the weekend. Love you a lot. Bought apples.” He had, two dozen of them. Young men do not understand the basic law of produce: Things rot. Even apples. He had cleaned the apartment in his fashion. The sofa bed was folded into place, although a long tail of top sheet trailed from one corner of the cushion onto the floor. The dishwasher had been unloaded, although everything that had been in it was huddled together on the counter like a motley collection of glass and china friends. In the center of my bed a black-and-white kitten was sleeping. My grown cat, Kitty Foyle, was hunched like an orange meat loaf in the chair in the corner, keeping watch. She looked baleful. When she saw me, she moaned.

  “Life is a constant surprise with kids,” I remembered saying to Irving one evening after Leo had visited.

  “Yeah, I got enough surprises in my life,” Irving said. “Surprises are one of the few things I got in spades.”

  I was glad Leo was away, even though it meant the kitten would be a mystery for another day. The apartment felt quiet and peaceful. Nearly every drawer was open about an inch, and I went around the apartment closing them all. I await the research on why a person carrying a Y chromosome is unable to close a drawer entirely. “What?” Irving always said. “It is closed.”

  Inside the all-night Duane Reade drugstore, a Muslim girl in a head scarf was working the register alone. In the back, a thin man in a windbreaker was reading Car and Driver. An elderly man who lives on my block patrolled the aisle with his wheeled walker. It has a little basket screwed to the front, like a bicycle, and each day he comes into Duane Reade to buy just one thing. That way he will have errands to fill each day of the week. “Antacids,” he was mumbling to himself. “Which aisle is antacids?” These are rhetorical questions. He doesn’t like it if you answer him.

  On the street, it was a party. Four couples came tumbling out of the Greek restaurant, the women loudly shouting something at one another of the “I was right, wasn’t I?” variety. The men were unwrapping cigars and biting dramatically at the ends. Through the front window of one of the brownstones, trapped in a square of amber light, I could see a man and a woman in the foreground of some gathering, her head tipped toward him but turned down, his shoulder swiveled so it would touch her bare arm. H
e spoke and her chin floated north and she laughed, put out a hand to touch his arm, then drew back and lifted a glass to her lips. New York is full of pantomime. Once I watched an entire marriage proposal through the front window of a French restaurant from a coffee shop across the street. I could tell by the way the woman looked down at her ring that she found it a disappointment, and I wondered whether coincidence might be mischievous and allow me someday to see the night when she would throw it at him and break the engagement or, later still, demand a divorce.

  On the stoop next to my building, a clutch of high school students were smoking cigarettes. One girl was wearing a frayed jacket that I’d seen in a magazine at the nail parlor; I remembered that it retailed at sixteen hundred dollars. “We do the same thing every weekend,” she was saying. Probably it was true. The celebrity pizzeria, the walk through the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, the smoke on the West Side stoop, the drinking at the apartment where the parents were in Paris and the son said pugnaciously that if anyone touched the sculpture, they would die. Even New York kids who are not spoiled are spoiled just by waking up every morning with the UN blocking the view of the river from their bathroom window. Once I’d realized that my mother was wrong when she behaved as though the city was the most exhausting of enterprises, I had been on the train from Connecticut and in the city at every opportunity. There was a time when I thought the most exotic words in the world were “sushi on St. Mark’s Place.” When I’d gone into hiding on City Island, it was not to find peace and quiet but to place myself in the purgatory I believed I deserved.

  Meghan had refused to go with me to the airport. She said it was because if Negril was depressing, Montego Bay would be unbearable, that she hated long car rides and her head ached slightly. But I thought Negril had suggested that there was a life beyond the bedroom with its plantation furniture, the patio with its chaises, the spliff and the swim and the dock. She was putting her hands over her ears to blot out its siren song. The morning of my flight a fax had flown across the kitchen floor. The network was formally cutting off her salary.

  “Good thing I have thirty million bucks in investments,” she said airily, waving it in front of her.

  When she’d held my face in her hands the way she used to do sometimes when we were small, when she’d said, “You take care of yourself,” it would have been the perfect time to blurt out my suspicions. Of course I should have done that that first night or the third or even in the car home from Negril, when I’d had to ask Derek to pull over so I could throw up by the side of a pasture filled with goats. But I’d told myself I wasn’t certain, though the voice of running commentary in my brain—the voice that sometimes sounds suspiciously like Meghan’s TV voice—was telling me that I was full of it. There’s also a voice in my head that sounds remarkably like Tequila’s; add the occasional bromide from my aunt Maureen, and it’s impossible to imagine how I can hear myself think. As I’d stood at the counter of the drugstore and laid down a pint of rocky road ice cream, a Whitman’s Sampler jumbo collection of creams, and a home pregnancy test, the Tequila voice muttered sarcastically, “You got the candy, you got the ice cream, don’t need to be bothering with the E.P.T. test because you know the answer.”

  The candy wasn’t mine anyhow. Sunday morning I got up early into the milky white light and the city streets, which are deserted then, and always dirty with the sordid debris of weekend parties. I bought some bagels and cream cheese and packed them into a bag with the Whitman’s Sampler, and took the train to Westchester. Our aunt Maureen lives in a faux Tudor building there, a place for older people, mainly women, that provides what are called support services, which means there’s a free van for shopping and lunch outings and organized trips a couple of times a month to the Manhattan museums or theaters.

  “There’s my girl,” she said as she opened her door, throwing her arms around me and taking the tote from my hand. “Coffee’s on.” Meghan says Maureen is the only person outside of commercials who actually says that: Coffee’s on.

  It’s impossible to visit the apartment and not go immediately to the window, which frames a slice of one of the broadest parts of the Hudson River. There’s a fringe of trees on the bank and, across the sweep of ruffled gray-green water, a steep embankment that looks as wild as it was when the Indians were the only people in New York, living a peaceful and uneventful life that would soon be marked by slaughter and betrayal. Maureen has a telescope on a stand, and an overstuffed chair that gives you mainly a view of treetops and sky. The light and the water are completely different, but in some ways it felt like the house where Meghan was living.

  “You look wonderful,” my aunt said, handing me a mug that said YOU ARE #1! on it. “Did you have a wonderful time?”

  “Wonderful is not the word I’d use. It was weird, because for all the time the two of us spend together, we both realized we never really have that much time to talk. Really talk, I mean. But we really really talked. Let’s just say that Meghan opened her mouth and everything came out.”

  “Like Pandora’s box,” Maureen said evenly. “Our Meg has had a lot to think about.” Except for Evan, Maureen is the only one who is permitted to call Meghan by a diminutive. It is always preceded by the word our, and it occurred to me some time ago that it was to make the distinction between our Meg and their Meghan, the real woman and the public figure. Maybe there would no longer be the need for such a distinction.

  “Did you have any idea of how unhappy she’s been?”

  “Oh, Bridget. Meghan has never been happy, not really. She has a little motor inside her, and it drives her. The problem is that when you have that kind of motor, there isn’t really any destination. So then what do you do? You go as far as you can. But it’s never quite far enough. This used to be a problem only for men, but now you girls have managed to make it your own along with everything else.”

  “Well, you know, this is all making me a little angry, because I thought things were pretty good. I mean, I knew her life was stressful. But I didn’t think it was truly terrible. And now it turns out everyone knew but me. And I should have known before anyone.”

  Maureen went back into the kitchen to refill her own cup, and I went over to look at the photographs covering the wall of the dining nook. It ought to be the Meghan Fitzmaurice wall, of course. There is a photograph of Meghan with a small wizened man who, upon close examination, turns out to be the chief justice of the Supreme Court. There is Meghan at the Oscars, surrounded by movie actors and looking like just one of the crowd.

  But there is me, too, at my graduation from Smith, standing on a beach in the Hamptons one summer, pretending to give Leo a good sock in the jaw while he holds his palms up and out, his eyes wide in play-horror. If you count the photographs on Aunt Maureen’s wall, the number will always be equal. There will never be more space given to one niece than to the other. I know because I’ve counted. Maureen and our mother had been two sisters, too, and although she never said so, it was clear to me in hindsight that our aunt was bound and determined to see that in our case neither felt less favored.

  “Do you know you don’t have a picture up here of the two of us together?” I said.

  My aunt Maureen nodded sharply. “I have one. It’s that sweet one of the two of you with your arms around each other standing on the porch when you were young. It’s on my bedside table. But here, no. Here the two of you are separate.”

  “Why? It seems so counterintuitive.”

  “Because you are separate, Bridget.”

  “Well, there’s no denying we’re different.”

  “Of course you are. I read a book or two when you first came to live with us, mainly to learn how to cope with Meghan. She was so angry, and it was difficult to think she wasn’t angry at me.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “She wasn’t, you know. She was just angry at the way things turned out. And even then there was that motor. I think she was angry at how it drove her. In any event, one of the books I read said
that the second child occupies the territory not already claimed by the first.”

  I laughed. “Ah. That’s how I got penniless obscurity.”

  Maureen shook her head. “I would hope that one of the lessons of your trip was that that is not how things have turned out in the least.”

  “Do you think that accounts for my job? That being a social worker is being the anti-Meghan?”

  “Now, it’s funny that you should see it that way. I always assumed that your job was by way of imitating me. Maybe I was flattering myself.”

  “You could never flatter yourself as much as you deserve,” I said, and I hugged her. “But here’s something that worries me: If the second child gets the stuff the first doesn’t want, what does that say about an only child? Where does that leave Leo?”

  “I suspect an only child can either be everything or anything he pleases. Leo’s taken the second tack. I wouldn’t worry about that boy.”

  “I’ve never really been worried about Meghan before,” I said, staring out into the tree branches.

  “I don’t believe that for a moment,” Maureen said.

  “She’s really thin,” I said.

  “That’s not new.”

  “Really thin. Thinner than she’s been before.”

  Maureen got up from the table and went into the other room, came back with one of the supermarket tabloids. I looked at the front page. An aging movie star had found out her husband was gay. The lead singer of a band was sleeping with his ex-wife’s sister. At the bottom was a small grainy photograph and a headline: “Meghan in Rehab?” The photo showed a redheaded woman in a hospital gown attached to an IV walking down a hospital corridor. The picture was shot from the back. At least the woman, whoever she was, had not had the humiliation of having her gown gape in back as hospital gowns are so wont to do.

  “She’s at some place in Colorado. The one they said that young actress went to last year.”