Authors: Beth Gutcheon
78
Five Fortunes / 79
“I’m going to trot on down to Saguaro, I want my coffee. See you there,” Amy said, and she went out, exhilarated, into the lambent morning.
Two marriages, Amy thought as she bounced along. God, what light, what delicious air, what a sweet smell of cut grass and eucalyptus. She felt like a child. She had slept like a baby. Her skin was glowing, she had the kind of energy you have when you’re eight, and the bell rings at recess, and you tear outside and run and run and run until they make you go back inside. She felt so good, she’d have liked to shout. Of course, she wouldn’t, there might be people sleeping.
Two marriages. Oh well. Noah worked too hard, and he knew it, and she suspected he still smoked cigars at the club. She’d told him that if he keeled over from a heart attack she’d never forgive him.
You couldn’t make men take care of themselves, especially doctors.
At least if he insisted on stuffing himself full of red meat and dying young she wouldn’t have to live forever as a lonely old widow.
Carter Bond, Carol Haines, and Laurie Lopez were sitting together in Saguaro with cups of steaming liquid in their hands. They watched Amy striding in.
“Hello, ladies! Are we ready?” Amy greeted them.
“We are ready,
mon général
,” said Carter.
“Shouldn’t it be
ma? Ma générale?
” Amy asked as she got herself a mug of coffee.
“I don’t think there’s any provision in the language for that.”
“Never mind. I’ve got it…it’s a pants role,” said Amy, and she and Carol laughed. “Opera jargon,” she explained to Carter. “There are men’s roles written for women to sing. The character is a man, but it’s always sung by a woman in a man’s costume.” Carter was looking at her with nostrils flared.
In bounced Fitness Professional Diane, in neon pink.
“Okay, ladies! Where are my mountain five-milers? Wow, big group! All right!” she cried as fifteen ladies followed her outside into the dawn to stretch.
Jill arrived at Saguaro as her mother and friends were striding off into the brush. There were more ladies stumbling into Saguaro.
Bunny
80 / Beth Gutcheon
Gibson and Rusty Haines were drinking herb tea and talking about Nantucket. Wilma Smythe and Rae Strouse were sitting in silence, trying to wake up. Jill met no one’s eyes, and poured herself a coffee into which she put three sugars. There were packs of sugar substitute there, but she ignored them.
She wandered outside with the others when Terri mustered them out to stretch. Halfheartedly she leaned or bent or pointed her toes while Terri, dressed in yellow, shouted and clapped. “Come on, ladies, let’s get those hamstrings warmed up! Let’s get that blood moving, get your heart started! It’s a
great
day!” With a shout of encouragement Terri strode off toward the foothills, hands pumping, and the group fell into line behind her. Jill joined in near the rear, behind two ladies she knew by sight but had never talked to. The ladies were talking about German cars.
Jill dragged her feet along the trail, as if they were two badly behaved toddlers. It took enormous will to keep them in line, when one wanted to kick and the other wanted to stumble and her whole body felt as if it weighed a ton. What a shuck it all was. She had gotten nowhere. She was a big fat sack of dirt and she always would be, and her mother had paid enough for this week to settle the national debt, and what was it? A week. One week. One week could change your life? Come on. In forty-eight hours she’d be back in New York. She had a history paper due, and she hadn’t even thought about it. She’d have mountains of e-mail because she was on all these mailing lists; for half of them she didn’t even remember why she’d signed up. She’d have 114 messages telling her there was a wrong clue in a double acrostic from last Saturday and she didn’t even do double acrostics anymore. Fuck.
She was hungry, too. She started thinking about what she would eat when she got home. Bagels. Ice cream. Peanut butter and jelly on fried toast.
Would any of these old bags ever see each other again? She bet not. She hoped not. So why were they yammering away at each other as if they were, like, friends? Why put all that effort into something with the life span of a fruit fly? What use was anything if it was going
Five Fortunes / 81
to die, sooner or later? Friendships? Marriages? Fruit flies? Anything?
Fuck it.
She cried a little. Not from self-pity, but from despair. The more the depression sank in, the more worthless she felt, the more angry and ashamed she felt that people kept trying to save her. Why couldn’t they just let her go to hell in her own way? What did they know about what it was like to be her?
She had fallen behind the two ladies with the Audis. She was alone, and feeling rebellious enough to sit down and weep, and maybe stay there for hours until she succeeded in scaring the whole place to death, when she became aware of a slim figure in black sweats, wearing mittens and an orange knit hat. The figure came up behind her and stopped. Jill turned and looked. It was Solange.
“What are you doing here?” Jill demanded.
“I am your shepherd.”
Jill thought angrily of saying out loud, Wouldn’t you rather be someplace doing parlor tricks? Thank God, Jesus and Mary I didn’t tell anybody I thought you had told me something important.
Everyone had such a good laugh at my mother, the General. And Carter, Mother of the Year. Imagine the roar if they knew what you told me.
Aloud, she said, “My own
personal
shepherd?”
“There is always a shepherd at the back of the group. I like being up early.”
Jill grunted and started walking again. No skeleton found under a bush picked clean by coyotes in her future. Don’t want to scare away the customers. She stumped along the path, feeling worthless.
Man in the desert knows there is no sea.
Jill felt a hand on her shoulder and stopped walking. She turned to face Solange, who looked into her eyes, squinting with curiosity.
Solange’s face was sleek and unlined; she wore black kohl or something around her smokey yellow eyes.
“I see,” said Solange, looking away from Jill’s face.
I bet, thought Jill. They walked on in silence, Jill in the lead.
82 / Beth Gutcheon
When at last they joined the group, Jill took the section of orange she was offered and sat down on a rock. She ate the piece of orange in one bite, pits and all. Solange crossed the circle and stood at the other side of the group with her arms crossed over her chest and her back to everyone, looking out over the valley.
Jill was marching along on the downward slope in front of the Audi ladies when it began to occur to her what had happened. First, she had learned that one of the ladies had had a Saab, but the window on the driver’s-side door had exploded the week she took delivery, then a string of other annoying things had occurred, and then the brake system had failed when the car had 23,000 miles on it.
Next, Jill lost a few seconds of the conversation, and when she tried to bring her mind back to it, she couldn’t. She couldn’t do a thing with it; it was careening around the heavens like a bumper car. There was an enormous balloon in her chest, as if she’d been pumped full of helium, and she had a terrible sense that she was about to laugh out loud. She was full of mirth. The sky was bright blue and gold.
She took off her hat and mittens, warmed to her fingertips by some radiant, tingling sense of lightness. Brilliance. Light. She began to focus…it was light. It was light! Her chest was full of light, oh, God, Jesus and Mary, it was like a hallucination…the pain was gone, the weight was gone, and her chest was full of light.
At that point, she did begin to laugh, and to run. Then she slowed herself down to a racewalk, because it was important to think.
This was not some minor vagary of mood. This was a freaking class B miracle—Jill knew what it was like when that bleak horror set in. It stayed for weeks. There was nothing in the magic chest of pharmacology that could accomplish what had just happened to her. Her shrink and her mother had tried everything on her—Prozac, Zoloft, Xanax. They worked for other people but not for her. And even if they worked, you had to take them for weeks before they kicked in. This was unbelievable. And it wasn’t going away.
Can I trust it, can I trust it, she kept trying to ask as she strode down the mountain. But she couldn’t even keep her mind on the ques-Five Fortunes / 83
tion. She was too filled with relief and joy. And hilarity. That meant everything she had learned was real. The hope…she could trust it.
The work of ceasing to be a house for demons…it had begun, she could go on…
Oh, the danger. The danger of asking for miracles, the danger of wanting proof once a day. Oh, it was awful to be so addictive, she’d have to get rid of that. How much proof do you need? How much does anyone get? She had just had 1,000 percent more than most people. Never forget it, never forget this. Store this joy, these colors, this light, like juice in a battery, soak it in, keep it. Her feet made a beat as she walked, and she made a mantra to go with it. She felt that her senses had been intensified—sight, sound, and smell; she was able to experience things so acutely that this half hour could be unzipped later and stretched out to last a year.
Oh, the pulsating, throbbing, joy-filled absence of despair!
She waited at the bottom of the mountain. She waited by the path, feeling the sun, unable to stand still. She decided to try to remember how to skip.
All the ladies she had passed on her way down passed her now, going back to their rooms for breakfast. Rae gave her a little hug as she went by. Everyone smiled. The Audi ladies went by, and both looked at her and beamed. At last Solange came along. She was a little behind the last of her charges, so they were out of earshot when she reached Jill.
“You sent me a ball of light!” Jill said, and danced a little jig.
Solange said, “You can do it yourself, you know. You can ask for it yourself, and you can send it to other people.”
“How?” Jill was glowing. Oh, what an idea! To be able to do that for someone else!
“You know how,” said Solange.
“I don’t! Solange, tell me!”
But Solange laughed, and walked on.
C
arter Bond proceeded to the Saturday morning final weigh-in with a sense of anticipation such as she hadn’t experienced since she was thirteen and checked every morning to see if it was still true that she had grown boobs. In underpants and a towel she danced back to her locker after her turn on the scale. She found Jill ahead of her, pulling on her sweatpants.
“How’d you do?”
“Ten pounds! Ten pounds in one week!” Carter crowed. Jill gave her a high five. “How about you?”
“Thirt-teen. Thirteen pounds and fifteen inches,” said Jill.
“Yesss!” Carter yelled. Jill was doing a jig.
“See, it all worked, it’s all real,” Jill said. “So come to T’ai Chi today.”
Carter didn’t say no as fast as she had other mornings.
“Good, I’ll pick you up after breakfast,” said Jill.
“No, I can’t. I’m afraid we’ll have to do that kelp thing.”
“At eight twenty-five. Do I look positively waiflike?”
“Positively.”
“I live for the day when people start saying ‘Now, don’t lose
too
much…’”
“I can’t believe you’re making me do this,” said Carter as Jill herded her along toward T’ai Chi.
“Shut up, you’ll love it.”
84
Five Fortunes / 85
“You know, I’ve really gotten into these sand designs,” Carter said, stopping suddenly. They were standing on a redwood walkway, crossing a sunken garden that consisted entirely of three rocks in a bed of powder-fine sand. A wooden rake stood against the walkway.
“It’s different every day, have you noticed?” Carter said. “Who does it? The guards?”
“It’s supposed to be very Zen,” said Jill. “If you contemplate it.”
“What I contemplate is, how do they do it without leaving foot-prints?”
“You really
are
a detective, aren’t you?”
T’ai Chi seemed to have some special charge this morning, Jill thought. There was giant Carter, solemnly striving to experience the morning as if she were a tree. There were Laurie Lopez, and Carol Haines and her sweet, goofy little mother, Rusty, and dear Rae Strouse, who must have gotten interested in something else while she was doing her makeup, since she had gummy aquamarine eye shadow on only one eyelid. This week had been like a peculiar boot camp, in which they had all shed their external differences and become a troop of comrades, cheering each other on. Even The Movie Star’s sidekick had come out to join them.
Jill continued to turn, and now her circle of women was behind her, and before her was a stand of evergreens, and—well—the driveway, but it was serene and silent, and nature was beautiful, and the women and the trees were all part of one thing…
Jill had tears running down her cheeks when she had turned full circle, and she was smiling. The funny thing was, she noticed without surprise, that about three other people were weeping too.
“I see
no
reason,” said Glenna Leisure, “for life ever to be more complicated than this.”
“Laurie,” said Carter at lunch, “when you’re President, could I be head of the FBI?”
“I was thinking of Justice for you,” said Laurie.
“I’ll take it, since it’s you asking, but I’d rather the FBI.”
86 / Beth Gutcheon
“Well, we’ll take it under advisement.”
“What about me?” Amy asked eagerly. “I can type and speak French and do CPR.”
“Chief of staff, of course,
mon général
,” said Laurie.
“How about Rae for press secretary?”
“Don’t be silly, Rae is a dancer. I will put her in charge of the National Endowment for the Arts.”
“And Wilma Smythe—Surgeon General, don’t you think?”
“Surgeon General. Are you taking notes,
mon général?
”
“I don’t need to,” said Amy. “When you’ve given a dinner for three hundred for the Brearley school auction, staffing the cabinet is child’s play.”