Cures for Heartbreak (13 page)

“Sure. I'll go get him.” I went to his room and woke him up. He was alone; Sylvia was visiting her mother in New Jersey.

“Gigi Backus is on the phone.”

He blinked and nodded and picked up the receiver. I opened the curtains and stared out at the street while he told Gigi about Sylvia. “Great. We'll see you Sunday,” he said. “What can we bring? . . . Ha! Not that!”

“What?” I asked when he'd hung up.

“The kidney dish.”

That was the blue crescent-shaped tray they gave people to barf into at NYU Medical Center.

“Just a little hospital humor,” my father said, still chuckling.

The next Sunday I helped my sister pack to go back to school. “I hope you have a fun dinner with the cancer guy tonight,” she said as she crammed her clean laundry into her monster-sized backpack.

“I'll try.”

“Maybe while I'm away you can accidentally spill something on the purple putridescent fabric? Or run it through the paper shredder?”

“I'll see what I can do. I get the feeling Sylvia has access to an endless supply of it, though.”

I touched her backpack. I was suddenly feeling needy for her, wanting her to stay, not wanting to be left with our father and Sylvia. Our
stepmother,
almost—I couldn't get used to that word.
My father's girlfriend,
I called her.
My father's soon-to-be wife.
I kept telling myself to be mature about the whole thing. We'd moved my mother's clothes from her closet into mine and Alex's now-empty one. (“You're being very adult about this,” my dad had complimented me after the engagement. Which had made me feel guilty about the doodle I'd drawn on the inside back cover of my school-owned
Tale of Two Cities:
a green Sylvia with hairy warts.)

“He seems happier, though, right? I mean, you didn't see him when he was on the couch all the time, reading the
New York Times
all day long. It was depressing,” I said.

She shrugged. I knew she felt he was being disloyal to our mother, no matter what, that he was breaking an unwritten code by getting married again, and it was possible that she might never forgive him. It was weakness, she believed, to buckle to the need for a new marriage, to not be able to be alone. I could tell from her accusing gazes and glances at him, her unwavering annoyance—it all condemned his disloyalty.
I was glad she was so vehement; it took some of the pressure off me. She was our steadfast conscience.

“I'll miss you,” I said.

“Really?”

“Yup. You're lucky you don't have to stay here.” But even as I said it I wasn't sure I was ready to leave.

“You only have two and a half more years before you go to college.”

I shrugged, helped her pack the rest of her things, and then walked her to the subway. She was taking the 7 train to the Port Authority, since our father and Sylvia had driven to Briar Manor in Westchester that afternoon to meet with the wedding planner.

We walked quietly along the three blocks to the station together, past Cardially Yours Cards & Gifts, TemTee Foods, the Merry-Go-Round Gentlemen's Club, Tony's Meat Market, and Sunny Grocery, the storefronts we'd known all our lives.

At the subway station she adjusted her backpack on her shoulders. “I'll come down for the weekend soon. Good luck here. Keep on truckin'.” We hugged, and she left.

My father and Sylvia picked me up three hours later to drive to Gigi and Sasha's in Brooklyn. They were glowing from their visit to Briar Manor. My father wore a new corduroy blazer and jeans with suspenders; Sylvia was in a green tunic
and matching pants. I climbed into the backseat.

“You wouldn't believe this Briar Manor,” he told me. “It's a beauty-full property.”

“Beautiful,”
I corrected. “Not
beauty-full.
”

He ignored me. “They have a pond with ducks! We saw two ducks screwing.”

“Yes, they were fornicating,” Sylvia said.

Who were these people? I gazed out the window to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. They were going to mortify me at this dinner. I'd primped for it—I wore black knee-high boots and a maroon miniskirt, and had spent a half hour applying makeup. My fingers clenched on my pocketbook, then relaxed. The whole cancer guy crush had been an episode of girlish stupidity. I knew that. I'd grown beyond such things now. The next time I liked someone, it wouldn't be a crush, it would be real—and it would turn into an actual boyfriend-girlfriend thing. That's what I'd decided. Seeing the cancer guy tonight—so what? So what.

We got off at the Atlantic Avenue exit. Their neighborhood was five minutes away, two blocks from the projects.

“Keep your door locked,” Sylvia said as my father searched for a parking spot. We had no trouble finding one. “Simon, use the Club,” she warned him.

I got out of the car and stared up at their long brownstone stoop. It was nothing like I'd imagined. I'd pictured them living in a house just like the boxy brick ones we had in
Queens, with white cement trim or plastic awnings. Instead I peered up at their stately brownstone, its intricate moldings, its imposing front door. We rang the bell, and Gigi bounded downstairs to greet us.

“Don't you look gorgeous!” She hugged me. “My God! And Simon! And you must be Sylvia! I'm so glad you could come. What a wonderful thing. I'm so happy for you.” She hugged them too and led us upstairs; their apartment was on the top two stories. It had pine plank floors, a fireplace, and huge long skinny windows. There were rainbow decals on the windows, rainbow switchplates on the walls, and a rainbow wind chime by the door. A gray cat was sprawled on the couch, asleep. Sylvia sneezed.

Hovering by a tall wooden bookcase was Sasha.

I hardly recognized him. His hair had grown black and long, to his cheekbones. He was tanned and still thin, not tall, but stronger-looking. Healthy.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

“Sasha, you remember Mia and Simon, of course, and this is Sylvia!” Gigi crooned.

“Nice to meet you.” He shook Sylvia's hand.

“Here, don't be shy,” Gigi said, offering us a plate of cheese and crackers.

My father beamed. “Cheese!”

“Oh, no.” Sylvia backed away as if cheese spores might be
floating through the air and infecting her veins.

“Simon called and told me you were healthy eaters.” Gigi smiled and waved her hand. “One bite won't kill you.”

Sasha spread a cracker with cheese and offered it to me. I thanked him. Then he made one for my father.

“None for me, thanks.” Sylvia positioned herself as far away from the offending hors d'oeuvre as possible.

Gigi brought out wineglasses for everyone, including me. She paused the bottle above my glass with a glance at my father.

“Sure!” he said, and she poured away.

“You look very healthy,” Sylvia told Sasha. “Really.” She sounded surprised and unconvinced.

“You look good too, Simon, very robust,” Gigi told my dad.

“Thank you. I feel very robust.” My dad helped himself to another cheese and cracker. “Sasha, I hear you're a world traveler.”

Gigi touched Sasha's arm. “Sweetie, can you get the pictures?”

“Sure.” Sasha disappeared into another room and brought out a huge cloth-covered album. “The first half is Europe and the second half is Nepal. We have slides too, but I think we'll spare you those.” His voice was deep but gentle. Soft.

“Nepal.” My dad shook his head in awe.

“He wasn't supposed to go to Nepal. No, that wasn't in the original plan. We agreed he was going to keep traveling an
extra two weeks, and then he calls me up. ‘Ma, guess where I am?' he says. ‘
Kathmandu,
' he says. Kathmandu? Aaah!” She pretended to choke him and then kissed his head.

I sipped the wine; it tasted sour, but I pretended to like it. I'd had wine before but preferred it in the form of wine coolers.

“Nepal. That is very daring of you to go there,” Sylvia said. “Very, very daring.”

We flipped through the album, past Montmartre and Provence and Amsterdam, to pictures of yaks, monkeys, snow-covered glaciers, and tiny villages. Gigi had put the album together; it was her bubbly handwriting and exclamation points beneath the pictures, her
i
's dotted with circles.

“Weren't you worried?” Sylvia asked.

“Was I worried? I almost died of worry,” Gigi said. She turned to Sasha. “Remember, I kept trying to call you in Patan? I asked for Sasha and the manager of the hotel said, ‘Dead! Dead!' I practically had a heart attack.”

Sylvia gasped. “What did you do?”

“Turned out the guy meant the phone line was going dead—he couldn't hear me.”

A timer in the kitchen rang. “That's the lasagna. Why don't we move to the table? I want to hear all about your wedding plans,” Gigi said.

Sasha refilled my father's wineglass, then his own.

“I want to do it right this time, I really do,” Sylvia said.
“That's why we're going to have the whole big shebang.”

“I just love weddings. I hope Sasha has a big wedding someday.”

“Mom.”

“I know, I know, you probably want to get married in Kathmandu on top of a yak. Just let me help pick out the flowers, okay? Or at least the color of the yak.”

Everyone laughed. “Colored yaks! That's what we need for our wedding,” my father said. “Of course they have to be iridescent lilac.”

“Lilacs—is that the flower you picked for your bouquet?” Gigi asked as we sat down at the dining room table.

“Fresh ones for the centerpieces, but silk ones for my bouquet because I'm allergic.”

“I made this with whole-wheat noodles. Simon told me you're allergic to white flour. And I used low-fat ricotta.”

“Yes, thank you, smells wonderful,” Sylvia trilled.

Gigi served the lasagna and salad. She stared at my father and Sasha as we passed dishes down the table. “Seems like ages ago that we met you. Sasha took his turn for the better after that—his second remission, and his counts are great!” She plopped a gargantuan lettuce leaf onto a plate. “We are so lucky.”

“We're all lucky,” Sylvia said. “I don't know if Simon told you, but I'm a lung cancer survivor myself.” She launched into the details of her treatments, how the cancer had spread to
her lymph nodes but she was doing just fine, just great, how she was participating in a clinical trial of a new drug that seemed incredibly promising. I knew all this, and if I'd been a better person it would have given me great sympathy for her and an enlarged capacity for kindness. But it irritated me. It annoyed me that she should live for so many years with this advanced cancer when my mother had died in twelve days. It bothered me that her own mother was still alive. If Sylvia had not been so diametrically different a person from my mother, with her herbal tinctures and tarot cards and Zingy-Dell figurines, if she'd been normal, then I would've liked her. Or so I told myself.

Sasha shoveled in his lasagna. I was sitting next to him and kept glancing at him as Sylvia recounted her litany of health woes. He had dark brown hairs on his forearms; his hands were strong and wide as he gripped his water glass.

His eyes were a color I couldn't quite name. Seafoam. Aquamarine. Topaz. These were the colors from the Forever Yours wedding supplies catalog, which had implanted themselves in my brain. There was something mischievous about his face, its angles and long dimples—had those dimples been there before? His smile was alarming. Warm and direct, it caught me off guard; I almost felt he could see what I was thinking.

I wanted to touch him. I found myself almost involuntarily edging my thigh closer until it brushed his jeans.

“Sasha's going to start at Columbia this fall,” Gigi said.

“Really? What's your major going to be?” Sylvia pushed the ricotta filling to the side of her plate.

“I'm not sure yet. Philosophy, maybe.”

“He's always reading that stuff. Kant, Kierkegaard, Heidegger . . . What's that thing you were talking about the other day, honey—
Dasein
?”

“Casein? The milk protein?” Sylvia asked.

“
Dasein.
It's a concept of being,” Sasha said.

Sylvia stuffed a huge piece of lettuce into her mouth. “Philosophy. Not a lot of jobs in that!”

“True.” He grinned politely. He caught me staring at him; I looked away.

The conversation returned to the wedding again, the challenge of finding iridescent lilac everything, the vegetarian menu, the fat-free cake, my dad and Sylvia's plans to honeymoon in Florida.

“We might drive all the way to Key West. Though I hear it's very gay,” Sylvia said.

“I'm going to wrestle alligators,” my dad said matter-of-factly.

Everyone had finished eating; I got up to help Gigi and Sasha clear the plates.

“Sweetie, why don't you show Mia the view from the roof?” Gigi asked him.

“Sure.”

I followed him to the other side of the apartment and up
two flights. The dark sky opened around us. From above, the connected brownstones looked so much smaller, so insignificant. We looked out over the brownstone rows and treetops to the glittery Manhattan buildings. “It looks so close from here,” I said. “Same in our neighborhood. We can see the Empire State Building from Skillman Avenue, and it looks like it's right there. Or down the tracks of the number seven train—the skyline seems so close you could touch it. I wish we lived there.” In my school, being asked
Are you from Manhattan?
was the highest compliment. If someone guessed you were from Queens it meant you had applied too much eyeliner, or styled your hair too big, or bought your clothes at ABC Discount Variety on Queens Boulevard instead of at a chic secondhand shop in the Village.

“I love Queens. Alley Pond Park, Breezy Point, the Rockaways—my mom used to take me there.” He smiled. “It's funny, being in another country—people are impressed sometimes when you say you're from New York. They think it's this amazing, exciting place, like in the movies.”