Rise and Shine (23 page)

“For how long?”

Meghan shrugged, took a long pull on her beer and a long pull on the joint. She was staring up at the sky. “You know who I’ve been thinking about?”

“Who?”

“Mother. Do you remember the bedside table? There were magazines and paperbacks and aspirin and a silver insulated pitcher of tea and a carafe of water and some prescription vials—I’m still not sure what those were—and the telephone and that little date book she had, it had a pink cover and the word
Secretary
on the front in gold script, and God, so much other stuff, sometimes there was a bakery box with cookies, sometimes there was a box of chocolates. And Life Savers. There was always a roll of peppermint Life Savers.”

“I remember,” I said, and for a moment I did. Not the pitcher or the date book, but the smell, of warm skin, Chanel No. 5, and peppermints. It hovered there on the edge of my memory, then skittered away the way the shooting star had done. The bedroom with its floral spread and slipper chair, the striped walls and the landscape above the bureau, the soft, rather puffy woman saying, “That’s a sticky little face! Why is that little face so sticky?” For just an instant I had it. Somewhere it must live within me, but so deep that I would only ever glimpse the edges.

Meghan was talking, her voice slow and soft and changed somehow, the consonants not as sure of themselves as they’d once been. “She’d gotten her whole world down to one room and one trip,” she said. “She almost never left that bed until she got up to get dressed and go out, and when she went out she never went anyplace except the club. Even at the club she never went anyplace but the dining room. I used to think she was just lazy. Stupid, too, for the longest time I thought she was stupid. Maybe she was. Hell, I’ll never know now. But some nights I lie out here and think she had it all down. She knew where everything was in her room. She knew where everything was in her bathroom. She knew the menu at the club. She knew who would be there. Out the bedroom door, down the steps, into the car, up to the portico at the club, in the door, into the dining room. Then do the whole thing in reverse. There was no reason to do more. There was no reason to go anyplace else.” She sighed, and I heard the clink of the bottle against the side of the chaise. The sound made another memory, and another, and I said, “She drank.”

Meghan exploded with laughter and grabbed my arm. The smoke from her joint sent a slow coil into the air, and the bats moved off to the perimeter of the patio, down toward the big banana tree. “There’s a news flash! She drank! He drank! Everyone drank! Manhattans, martinis, vodka gimlets, whiskey sours. Remember that sweet old man Daddy worked with, Roger Highwater, how plastered he used to get? How he would sing?” I shook my head. “Jesus, Bridget, you have a lousy memory.”

“I just remember you. I just remember me and you.”

I looked over at Meghan, and tears were bright on her cheeks. The moon was coming up and laying down a silver stripe on the ocean in what seemed like the same place as the gold one had been in the late afternoon. The repetitive trill we were hearing was either a bird, a cricket, or a frog.

“There’s something so satisfying,” Meghan said, “about living a life like this. You get up and you run a couple of miles. You come home and you eat. You read, you swim. There are three bathing suits, and you put one on. There are three pairs of shorts, and you change into one of them. There are ten books, and you choose one. You read, you swim, you eat, you drink. You sleep. No one needs you to do more. Maybe that was her deal.”

“Except for one thing. She had children. Two daughters.”

“Maybe she thought we didn’t need her. Maybe she thought we had lives of our own and we didn’t need her.”

“Are you nuts? We were little kids. Of course we needed her.”

“Did we? We were at school. Nelly made our meals. What did we need her to do?”

“You don’t need a mother to do anything. A mother doesn’t prove anything by being there. She proves something by not being there!”

“Ah, so now we finally get down to it.” Meghan said the last four words slowly, with ellipses in her voice. Her face was dry now, and her mouth was drawn tight like a drawstring. I realized that she was drunk. Maybe it was only in that blurry netherworld that she’d finally made her peace with what she remembered of our childhood, or with herself.

“I didn’t come to fight with you,” I said. “I just miss you so much. And Leo does, too. He doesn’t say anything, but how would you feel? He comes home from Spain, his mother is plastered all over the papers and his father is living in some hotel in Japan and the apartment where he grew up is empty and it’s like he’s supposed to roll with it. He can’t talk to Evan about you because he thinks it’s disloyal, and he can’t talk to you because you’re out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“I’ve left him lots of messages. Once a week I go to Derek’s and I use their phone and call Leo. I even bought a phone card so I could do it. I’m embarrassed at how many messages I’ve left. When I was at the Cove, I worked out exactly where he’d be and called and called and got nothing but a machine.”

“At what number?”

“I don’t know. It’s Leo’s number. His dorm room, I guess.”

“He never uses the phone in his dorm room. None of them do. I don’t even think they have phones hooked up to the jacks. They all use their cell phones.”

“I called him at the apartment, too. I left so many messages at the apartment. Really long messages. Probably ridiculous messages.”

“But he never goes there. Don’t you have his cell phone number?”

“I do but it’s in my own cell phone, and the battery ran out so there’s no way for me to get it.”

“E-mail? I know I packed your BlackBerry.”

“Aah, the BlackBerry. You can’t get a signal here. But one day Derek was taking me into town and I turned it on. We were coming over that big mountain and all of a sudden, boom! I’m connected. My God, it was the scariest moment since I’ve been here. It was like my whole life was sitting in my lap. Two hundred and eighteen messages, and not one from anyone I wanted to hear from. Reporters, co-workers, people who would tell you at a cocktail party they’re my friends, only they’re not. I felt like the thing had claws.”

“So you just gave up on it.”

“I tossed it off the end of a pier in town. It’s at the bottom of the ocean. Where it belongs, in my opinion.”

“That’s mature,” I said.

My sister set her mouth and looked south over the sea. Finally she said, “Leo could have gotten on the plane with you and be here talking to me right now.”

“That’s not his job, Meghan. He gets to be the kid. You get to be the mother. He doesn’t take care of you. It’s the other way around.”

“Not always,” she said lazily, finishing the joint.

“Come home,” I said.

The trilling was loud and rhythmic, and while I waited for her to say something I found myself nearly lulled to sleep. But Meghan’s eyes were still open, staring at the stars. She ran her hand through her hair, which curled at the crown like the ringlets she’d had in her baby pictures.

“Home is not a place,” she said. “It’s a series of arrangements. There is your job, and all the people you know through your job, and all the things that happen because of your job. There are your friends, and all the things you do with your friends, and all the people you meet because of your friends. There are your children. Or, in my case, your child. There is your marriage. It’s the biggest arrangement of them all. You make me look smart and I make you look kind. You make me look rich and I make you look generous. You make me look interesting and I make you look credible. That’s why after a while it’s all one word. Kate-andsam. Motheranddaddy. It sounds like a corporation. It is not about whether people like each other or love each other or have sex with each other or want to be with each other. It is a deal. Does that sound harsh?”

“Yes.”

“You are such a baby. Do you remember how you used to sit in your walker and hold on to the back of my skirt and let me pull you around the house?”

“No.” If I had a memory, it was only one cobbled out of the hundreds of retellings throughout my life.

“You had this wooden walker with big colored wooden beads on a metal strip around the edge. I pulled you all over the house. You couldn’t move without me.”

“I know.”

“I married Evan. I loved him. He loved me. You wouldn’t believe how rare that is. I’ve met more people who didn’t even like each other when they got married than I can count. Whatever. But after a while you’ve heard the same stories and the same jokes over and over. Plus there’s all the small shit. Kate and I got drunk one night and we agreed that if you could get past listening to him chew you could get past anything. You could even deal with infidelity if you could deal with the chewing thing.” Meghan made very loud chewing noises. She didn’t sound like Evan, whose habit of taking very tiny bites has always driven me insane. She sounded exactly like Irving Lefkowitz. Maybe that was the point.

“Evan still insists that there’s no one else.”

Meghan waved her hand in the air. “Not the point. The point is after a while you understand that you’ve made a deal. Meghanandevan. Totally separate from either of you individually. I had this shrink on the show once who said the biggest single determinant of whether two people stay married is whether they’re determined to stay married. I remember Josh called me in because I told the shrink that sounded like a tautology, and Josh was worried that most of our viewers didn’t know what that meant. Probably because he didn’t know what it meant. Jesus. Josh.” Meghan stubbed out the end of her joint on the stone of the patio. “Now there’s something that seems so far away. Josh.” In the silence I could hear what sounded like laughter from the beach. “Anyhow, what? Oh, the shrink. That shrink was right. You made a deal, you keep to it. It’s like two trees. You can hang a hammock between two trees. You can’t hang a hammock with only one tree, or two trees that are too far apart.”

“Did you just make that up?”

“No, Christ, I must be drunker than I thought. It’s from some book I once had to interview the author of. God, it’s amazing the crap your mind retains. Do I know anything I didn’t learn through interviews with idiots?”

“Yeah, so the hammock was for Leo. What about Leo?”

“Leo was supposed to be in Boston this summer working at the public library as an intern, although apparently he changed his mind. Last summer he was down south. He called me twice when he was down there. Not that I’m complaining, but that’s how it is. The summer before…Oh, damn, I’ll remember. London! University College. Leo has a life that doesn’t include me. Which is as it should be, I guess. Children stop needing their parents. Parents start needing their kids. Except for us orphans. No hammocks for us.” Meghan giggled. “We are hammockless.”

“Leo needs you. I need you. I miss you. Come home.”

“To what? To a life in which I would be the woman who used to be Meghan Fitzmaurice? To a life as the extra woman at dinner parties where everyone else is married? Have you ever seen an interview with one of those Yankees players who is fat and fifty and standing there listening to someone talk about something great he did twenty-five years ago? That’s what my life would be. I remember when Evan used to take me to those business dinners, before the men there were more interested in me than in him. There was this one really nice, smart woman who was always there. Julie. Julie something. And then she just disappeared. And finally I said to one of the other wives, I haven’t seen Julie. Where’s Julie been? And she said, Oh, her husband left her. Just like that. She’d been disappeared. It wasn’t that her husband was gone. Her life was gone.

“Sometimes if I get stoned enough, I look out there and I feel like I can see New York on the horizon,” she continued. “You know what it looks like? It looks like a mouthful of sharp silver teeth. It’s the scariest thing you’d ever want to see. It’s all right if you’re nobody, and it’s great if you’re on the way up. But man, it is a place that is cruel to used-to-bes. Divorced wives, has-been writers, rich guys who aren’t rich anymore. Actors who aren’t famous anymore. Rise and shine, my Irish ass.”

Meghan got up slowly from her chaise and stretched her arms over her head. “I’m going swimming,” she said.

“You’re crazy. You’re drunk.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“And it’s pitch black out there.”

“I know. But if you open your eyes there are glowy things down at the bottom, like lightning bugs in the ocean. Come see.”

When we were little, Meghan would put a jar of lightning bugs on the nightstand between our beds. I would go to sleep with the twinkle, first in front of my open eyes, then as an afterimage behind my closed ones. But in the morning the jar was always gone, the creatures freed, probably soon after I fell asleep. I never woke in the night, even when our parents came home late, stumbling up the steps.

This time I had to stay awake until Meghan returned from the endless expanse of black and silver water that lay before me. I was convinced if I didn’t she would drown, and then I wondered if perhaps that was the point, that one night she would get wasted enough to stroke stroke stroke toward the horizon and then drift off to sleep above the glowy things. I lay on the chaise and listened to a faint slapping sound and couldn’t tell whether it was her tireless arms or the ocean sliding toward and away from shore. There was another shooting star, and another. I closed my eyes for just a minute, and when I opened them again the sky was a clear violet-blue and there was a faint gold nimbus over the mountains as the sun struggled upward. I heard the slapping sound again, but this time it was Meghan’s running shoes as they hit the macadam of the main village road outside the gates. “Get up,” I think she said before she left, but maybe I just dreamed it.

I
F THE WORLD
were different than it is, if Meghan were different than she is, I would have understood her decision completely. Not only would I have understood, I would have envied her. The air was so light and clear, and it smelled so good, like the water, the flowers, occasionally like the smell of smoke when the stalks of sugarcane were being burned off farther down the island. None of the things that normally concerned us were of any importance. I found it telling that sometimes I would mention something that was utterly of New York, about some acquaintance having a droopy eye because the doctor put the Botox in the wrong place, of another offering Amherst a new dormitory if only the college would accept a C student with a nasty Ecstasy habit. And neither of us could get any traction on the conversation. The thing about New York is that while you are in it, of it, it seems unequivocally the center of the universe. Your metabolism rises to meet it, so that your heart seems to beat faster, your mind to jump more quickly from one thing to another. The earth seems made of concrete all the way down to its core. But far enough away, it seems not only improbable but impossible. As we lay on the dock by the sea or hiked into the hills to see where the coffee grew, the lizards bragging of their prowess with the thrum of the bright flaps of skin at their throats, the hummingbirds hanging with a loud hum over some fuchsia flower, it was not only that the concerns of that other life seemed beside the point. It was that it was impossible to believe that another island, choked with steel uprights, underground trains, endless moving lines of people, existed in the same universe with this one.