Best Friends (13 page)

BAXTER CALLED ME. “I'm moving away on you, sis,” he said.

“Moving! But why? Where?” He was well established as a furniture-maker. He now owned half the shop; he and his partner got orders from as far off as Chicago.

“Sometimes you just have to move on,” Baxter said. “I'm going south.”

“Alabama? Florida?”

Baxter laughed. “Southern Ohio. Hocking County. Gonna build me a cabin in the woods.”

“But why, Baxter? Are you going to build furniture down there?”

“Sometimes you have to move on,” he repeated.

 

 

 

THAT WINTER HAD SOME serious ice. When I drove home from the medical school library, it was always dark. Some days I drove cautiously, thinking about family, sometimes Sally's, sometimes mine. What exactly had happened to Baxter? Why did my mother care more about the people who needed the Emergency Food Bank than about me? Was I really morally obliged, as my brother Frank suggested, to give my old car to Eric (whose wife had had three children in four years) when I bought a new one? Other nights I drove recklessly, thinking Los Angeles was nice, but wouldn't you miss icicles hanging on the stoplights like Santa's beards, or pine trees so stiffly encrusted with ice they looked like giant toilet brushes? And could you slide off the road in Los Angeles, your car spinning to face the direction you'd started? Could you say “Whoo,” check your mirrors, be sure no one had seen you, then, grinning, carry on in your new direction?

 

 

 

WHEN SALLY GRADUATED from law school that spring, I wasn't invited. Not that I could have gone—I was starting my third year of med school with clinical rotations, a daily grind with teams of interns and residents in the hospital, and I had no money. But still I believed that the invitation and the means to go would come, that one day I'd open my mailbox and there would be an airline ticket to Sacramento. It didn't happen. “Daddy wants just family,” Sally said. “He thinks that'll make it easier for Ben.”

Sally started work in July 1980 as an associate in a medium-size law firm in downtown Los Angeles, living at home with her parents and Ben until she could find the proper condo. We were both twenty-five. Sally had abandoned her early focus on estate planning—too much venality, she said—and signed on to her new law firm as a generalist. She was convinced her niche would reveal itself.

An older couple named Waluskey bought a double-wide trailer and moved it into a park near Palm Springs. When the trailer's roof developed a leak near the front door, the Waluskeys sued for the cost of a new trailer plus pain and suffering. Sally's firm, which did insurance defense work, represented the insurer of the trailer's manufacturer. Getting rid of the Waluskeys was Sally's first solo task.

Sally didn't want the case to settle; she wanted it to go to court. Because it would be fun, because the complaints were absurd, because she hated the Waluskeys and their stupid contending and alleging. She believed the Waluskeys had caused the trailer's leak themselves by adding a porch with a roof outside their front door. It was their own damn fault.

“Daddy says he'll come to the trial,” Sally said. “He says the Waluskeys won't know what hit them.”

 

 

 

ACCOMPANYING HER GARDENER LUIS to a nursery to choose some shrubs, Aunt Ruby, getting out of a pickup truck, toppled off a pair of high-heeled mules and sprained her ankle. It was a scene: Aunt Ruby's pastel jeans and sweater covered with mud, Luis struggling to pick her up, Aunt Ruby shrieking. Someone at the nursery thought an assault was going on and called the police, one of whom upset Aunt Ruby so much with an anti-Latino comment that she swatted him with her handbag and ended up booked for assault. Sally was just home from work when Uncle Freddie phoned.

“So here's F. Lee Baileyette,” someone cracked when Sally arrived at the jail.

Years later, when Sally had pruned Aunt Ruby and Daphne like limbs from her family tree, I used to think of her—brisk, efficient, a little peeved—arriving to bail out Aunt Ruby. “Here's my girl!” I imagined Aunt Ruby saying, or something similarly sweet. She had such faith. Ruby was disorganized, she wasn't the smartest woman in town, she was silly—but she did love Sally. I haven't seen Ruby for years. Or Daphne either, with her rolling eyes and perky breasts.

“She took him to the store with her,” my mother said, shaking her head. “As simple manual labor. As a pair of arms. As if he's not even a person.”

“Mom,” I said, “he's a gardener. Carting plants is his work. And Aunt Ruby hit the cop when he insulted him.”

“When, oh when, will people stop thinking they can find happiness on the backs of the indigent laborers of this world?”

This was a bit much even for my mother. I burst out laughing. “Are you crazy?” I asked.

“Crazy!” she raved. “Crazy! What is that family doing to you? What has happened to your conscience?”

SALLY'S MOTHER SWATTED imaginary bugs, her robe billowing around her. “Wicked Waluskeys,” Sally's mother said with a swat. “Wretched Waluskeys, pesky Waluskeys . . .”

It was early fall. Sally had sent me a plane ticket, bought with her new salary. She and I were beside the Rose pool in deck chairs. “Apparently Daddy's very good at what he does,” Sally said, ignoring her mother. Ben, wearing a funny tight pair of swim trunks, was emerging from the water. Whorls of pubic hair peeked out at the top of his thighs. “Very good. Or so they say. They! I mean so he says.” She snorted a puff of air out through her nose, like a dragon, and I blamed her displeasure on Ben's suit.

 

 

 

BY SEPTEMBER, I was feeling like a real doctor. During my internal medicine rotation, I met an elderly black woman, Mrs. Sidebottham, who was dying of ovarian cancer. She was my patient. I was the only one at the hospital who talked to her and her family, who wrote notes on her, who gave one damn about her belly pain and constipation. I was proud that I, a lowly third-year med student, should have my own patient, even if she was a patient no one else wanted. Mrs. Sidebottham was a medical failure, dying of a disease no one could cure or even palliate, refusing to leave the hospital for a nursing home or hospice. According to certain people, she was a drain on the system.

“Sit down and read to me, girl,” she'd say, gesturing to her Bible. “I like the way you talk.” She told me what chapters to read, and when I was done, she'd harrumph and cross her hands over her belly and close her eyes, as if she were cradling a secret.

Mrs. Sidebottham's belly got bigger and bigger, her skin thinner and thinner. Her veins stuck out like road maps. One day she stopped asking me to read. Two days later she stopped talking. When her arm scraped the bedrail, a piece of skin the size and shape of a credit card peeled off.

“You gives us hope,” one of the daughters told me. “None of the other doctors ever gives us hope.”

I pointed out I was only a student doctor. But really, I thought, could a little hope hurt? My father lived three months longer than predicted.

“That's all right! You don't have to be a complete doctor. You're the only one comes by here, anyway.”

Eventually it became clear, even to me, that Mrs. Sidebottham was dying. She went to hospice three days later. “You got the family to agree to that?” the attending said, looking over his spectacles with new respect. “Good job.” He shuffled through his stack of file cards for the one stamped with Mrs. Sidebottham's name, then scrawled a black “X” across the front.

 

 

 

“ I CAN'T BELIEVE IT!” Sally said. “I'm so upset I can't see straight. You remember the Waluskeys and their allegedly defective trailer? The insurance company ordered me to settle with them. Five thousand dollars to get the Waluskeys off their back! Just pay them off, they said. Isn't that criminal? Can you believe the greed? Is that all there is in the world? Greed and lies?”

“You really can't blame them for suing, Sally. It's their home. They bought it new and they were disappointed. That patient I was following died,” I went on. “Remember I told you about her? Mrs. Sidebottham. She went to hospice and she died there. I saw the obituary in the paper.”

“I don't know if I can stand it,” Sally said.

“Stand what? Death?”

“No! The greed and the lies.”

“Aren't you going a little crazy over this one case?” I asked.

“Didn't you tell me she had cancer everywhere? Aren't you going a little crazy over this one case?”

“Sally,” I reproached her. We both fell silent. Neither of us apologized. We said our quick good-byes and hung up.

I walked into the kitchen, heels (I always wore heels to work now, not wanting to look sloppy) echoing on the linoleum floor. I poured myself a glass of water and sat at my kitchen table in front of a framed photograph, left by the previous tenant, of a beech forest in winter. If I didn't have Sally, I had no one. Frank and Eric thought I was standoffish and weird, I thought Baxter was weird, my mother believed I'd abandoned my principles, and my old anatomy partner, who'd had a two-year crush on me, had written me a letter telling me I should get therapy to overcome my “fear of intimacy.” And now Mrs. Sidebottham was dead. Suddenly I saw my whole career in front in me, years of work and fatigue and encouragement, and the patients dying just the same. All dying, every one. No matter what I'd do, I couldn't save them.

Well, that's life, I thought. It ends. And that's friendship: every friendship has its wobbly moments. Live with it, I told myself. Get used to it. I remembered Sally years before in the car driving west, swirling her hand in that chaotic gesture, saying from now on the deaths would be easier. And I had a true friend, right? Yes, one true friend. A friend of immeasurable value. Because who else but Sally could ever love my prickly nugget of a soul?

 

 

 

SALLY ME THE RHUSBAND FIRST. She met him that autumn in a disco. His name was Flavio, age twenty-nine, born in Spain and raised in Israel, South America, and Hong Kong. His father was an importer; Flavio worked in the family business.

“A disco? You were at a disco?” In 1980 there were still discos.

She went there in the evening sometimes, with people from work. She even danced, did I believe that?

“Wow,” I said. So Sally was friendly with people from work. I felt a stab of jealousy. “Does this Flavio look like that guy I danced with that time we drove to Tijuana?”

Sally laughed, almost giddily. “He's not disreputable, he's handsome!” I could almost feel the heat of her flushing cheeks through the receiver.

“I'm eager to meet him,” I said. “Flavio. I can't imagine.”

“You can't imagine,” Sally eagerly agreed.

I flew out. He was better and worse than I expected. He was obscenely good-looking, like some TV star almost too perfect to make it to the big screen. He looked as though he had been worked on: nose fixed, hair coiffed, an exercise trainer coaxing the shape of his rear. He had an accent, and a sidelong stare well aware of its effect. Dark hair, olive skin, blue eyes. This was before colored contacts. I told Sally that if he were a dog, he'd be Best of Show.

“Even in Los Angeles they stare,” Sally confided. “People come right up to him: Are you an actor? Should I know you? I've never been around someone physically beautiful, and it's fascinating. The beautiful do have an effect.”

“Doesn't it make you, like”—I hesitated, not wanting to be unkind—“jealous?”

“Last week a woman asked me if I was his publicist.”