Sisterhood Everlasting (2 page)

“Hey, babe.”

“Hey, Jones.”

“In the chair still?”

“Yep.” Jones was in the business, so he knew how it went. Besides, he’d called her half an hour before.

“How late are you shooting tonight?”

“Till around seven, Steven said.”

“If you can, cut out a little early and come directly to the Mandarin, all right? It’s the pre-party before the big Haiti benefit. It’s important for you to at least show.”

“It won’t make a difference to Haiti if I don’t get there in time for the pre-party.” It was one of three benefits they had on the calendar that week.

“It’s not about Haiti,” Jones said, as though she were being dense. “It’s about the Shaws. They invited us, and I don’t want to stiff them. She’s probably going to be head of production by next year. We’ll be out of there by eight. Nobody’s going to stay for the whole thing.”

“Oh. Of course.” Cynical though she was, Carmen never remembered to be quite cynical enough. Why would she think the Haiti
benefit was about Haiti and not about the Shaws? Why would she think the gala was about the gala and not about the party before the gala? If not for Jones, she could have been one of the boobs who thought it was about Haiti and stayed for the whole thing.

It was endlessly tricky being in the know. It was a state Carmen had achieved with a certain bravado, but she found it difficult to maintain. Without Jones, she could easily slip out of the know, relapse into her natural eagerness, and probably never get hired for another part in her life.

“It’s a game and you play it,” he often told her when she felt discouraged or repulsed. “If you want to succeed in this business, it’s what you do. Otherwise, you gotta pick a different business.” He was thirty-nine years old to her twenty-nine. He’d been doing it for sixteen years, he always reminded her. But he didn’t need to tell her. Whether or not she liked it, she was perfectly good at playing the game when she chose to.

“I’ll try to be there before seven,” she said.

Carmen felt vaguely dissatisfied as she ended the call. It wasn’t that Jones didn’t care about charities. He did. Every month he put five percent of his earnings into a charitable fund. You couldn’t fault him for that.

“Was that your boyfriend again?” Rita asked.

Carmen nodded distractedly. Sometimes it was hard to know what you could fault him for.

“He’s an executive at ABC, isn’t he?”

She nodded again. Everybody in this business was looking for another contact.

“Lucky you,” Rita said.

“Yes,” she said. And not just because he was her boyfriend, but because he was her fiancé. If she was lucky, then she was extra lucky.

And what if she wasn’t lucky? Then what was she?

Lena put her feet up on her desk. The pink polish her sister, Effie, had applied to her toenails during her last visit had long since
started to chip. Lena balanced a sketchbook on her knees and began to flip through it.

She’d promised herself she’d clear out her apartment today. She was committed to filling a couple of trash bags with stuff—her place was too tiny to store anything extra—but of her twenty-seven sketchbooks, she hadn’t yet been able to throw away even one. This one, for instance, was an old one. On the first page was a pencil sketch of Mimi, Tibby’s old guinea pig, fat and asleep in her shavings. As long ago as it was, Lena vividly remembered the joyful chaos of pencil lines that had gone into sketching those shavings. There was a drawing of Bridget at sixteen, knees up on the couch, watching TV with a tipping sombrero on her head. It must have been a week or two after she’d gotten back from her soccer camp in Mexico. It was a loose pencil sketch, and Lena smiled at the hatching lines she’d used to represent the suntan on Bee’s cheeks. Every few pages was one of the inescapable drawings of Lena’s feet. There was a half-finished sketch of grumpy morning Effie at fifteen, too grumpy to let Lena finish it. There were three studies of Carmen’s hand from when she still wore a mood ring and bit her fingernails. How could you throw this away?

The later sketchbooks would be easier, Lena decided. They were mainly just feet and dated from about two years earlier, when Lena had mostly petered out on drawing. Instead, these last couple of years she had been putting her energies into her paintings, which were composed, formal, and largely abstract. You weren’t going to build a career out of making messy little sketches of your friends and family and your feet.

Why all the drawings of her feet? They were not her best feature, probably her worst. They were size nine and a half, ten in some shoes, and prone to sweating when she was excited or nervous. Her toes were kind of long, especially the second and third—the Home and the Roast Beef, as Tibby’s mother would call them. The only advantages her feet had going for them as subjects was that they were attached to the bottoms of her legs and at enough distance that she could look at them from different angles. They were living and stayed still when she told them to, and they didn’t charge modeling
fees. She imagined the far future if anybody ever cared enough to look back at her drawings.
This girl really had a thing for her feet
, they would think. Maybe she would throw those last two sketchbooks away.

The phone on her desk rang. She plucked it from its cradle without moving her sketchbook. She didn’t have caller ID (it added $6.80 a month to her plan), but she knew it was almost certainly one of three people: her mother, her sister, or Carmen. Whichever one it was, she was on her cellphone, she was in a hurry, and she was calling to “check in.”

Lena cleared her throat before she hit the talk button. It wasn’t a teaching day, so she hadn’t spoken to anyone yet, and it was already three o’clock. She hated getting busted for that.

“Hey, Lenny, it’s me. Were you sleeping?”

Damn. “No. Just …” Lena heard an ambulance and a lot of honking through the phone. “Where are you?”

“On Greenwich Ave. I just got a facial. I look scary.”

It was either Carmen or Effie; still too noisy to tell which. Lena held the phone between her shoulder and her ear and went back to flipping pages. “What are you doing tonight?”

Three of many words were intelligible: “theater” and “benefit” and “Jones.” It was Carmen.

“Great.” Lena couldn’t pick which of those words summoned the worst thing.

“Jones bought a table.”

Yes, she could pick. The worst was “Jones.”

“I would have invited you, but you wouldn’t have come.”

“That’s true.”

“And you are … staying home and watching a movie with Drew.”

“Yes.” Sometimes Carmen made it easy for her.

“That’s just sad.”

But never that easy.

“No, it’s not sad. It’s what I like to do. Anyway, we can’t all be rich and glamorous.”

“Len, I’m not demanding glamour. You’re just not allowed to be that boring.”

Lena laughed. “Hey, did you do the kissing scene yet with the renegade cop?”

“No, that’s Friday. He has terrible breath.” Carmen’s voice was swallowed by what Lena guessed was a bus plowing by.

“Can you come to New York next weekend?” Carmen’s voice was asking when it came back.

“So you and Effie can take turns biting at my flesh until I’m dead?”

“Oh, please. Len. It wasn’t that bad last time.”

“How about the drunk DA who asked if he could give me a sponge bath?”

“Okay. I promise I won’t drag you to any dinner parties or introduce you to any men this time.”

“Anyway, I can’t. I’m teaching Saturday morning and I’ve got a painting to finish.” Lena was genuinely looking forward to a quiet weekend in the studio.

“You haven’t been here since Labor Day. You used to come all the time. What happened?”

What happened? That was a good question. And it wasn’t just the slobbering DA to blame. She’d gone all the time when Bee, Carmen, and Tibby all lived in a pile on Avenue C. She had gone every weekend. But that was a long time ago—more than three and a half years ago. Before they’d lost the lease, before Tibby had moved in with Brian and subsequently moved to the other side of the world, before Bee had moved to California, before Carmen had gotten semi-famous and taken up with the infernal Jones. Before her little sister, Effie, had moved to New York in a blur of open bars, pedicures, and sample sales, chewing up Manhattan from one end to the other. New York felt different now.

“I won’t make you do anything,” Carmen promised. “You don’t have to buy, wear, or say anything. I can’t speak for Effie, star journalist, but I will leave you to wander around the Met for two days if that’s what you want. Anyway, Jones is gonna be out of town.”

That made it slightly more tempting.

“You’ll let me know,” Carmen said, stealing the words from her mouth.

Lena thought of something. “Hey, Carma?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Did Tibby text you about something coming in the mail?”

Carmen must have ducked into a store or a lobby, because it was suddenly quiet. “Yes. Weird, huh. You didn’t get anything yet, did you?”

“No.” Lena hadn’t checked her mail slot yet today. She made a note to do that, with some combination of excitement and speculative concern. They heard from Tibby little enough that they circulated the news quickly when they did.

“Nothing good ever comes in the mail,” Carmen opined.

Carmen was so attached to her iPhone she might have had it sewn into her skin if iSurgery were offered at the Apple store. She didn’t trust information that came any other way. But Lena liked the mail. She was talented at waiting.

Carmen’s phone started beeping. It always did that eventually. “My manager,” Carmen said. Her voice was once again immersed in street noise. “Talk to you. Love you.”

“Bye.”

Lena had less than ten minutes of peace before her phone rang again. This time it was her mother from the car. She could always tell that particular connection.

“Hi, sweet. Just checking in.”

“Okay.” At least her voice was broken in now.

“How are things?” Her mom sounded relaxed, which meant she probably hadn’t talked to Effie yet. She usually called her two daughters in a row, and Lena and Effie agreed, it was always better to get the first call. Her mom was a worrier. After she talked to Effie, she was tight with concern about all the parties and the credit card debt and the crazy goings-on. After she talked to Lena, she was tight with concern about the absence of parties and credit card debt and crazy goings-on. Lena insisted that her mom worried about Effie more, but Effie insisted that no, it was definitely Lena.

“She’ll die in her bed alone or with cats” was Effie’s cheerful summary when anyone asked about Lena. But then, Effie’s idea of a quiet night was getting home from the clubs at three instead of five.

“How’d you sleep?”

Her mom always asked that, however near or far from sleep Lena might have been. “Fine.” That was how she always answered, however well or unwell she’d slept.

“Did you have lunch?”

Lena glanced up at the clock. Should she have? “Yes.”

“What did you eat?”

“Mom. Why do you need to know that?” It was as though her mother believed if she stopped asking, Lena would stop eating. If she stopped calling, Lena would stop talking. If she stopped bothering her, Lena would cease to be. It wasn’t enough she had given Lena life at the beginning. Her mom seemed to feel the need to do it every day.

“I don’t. I was just asking.”

She loved her mother and depended on her mother, and yet every single word her mother said annoyed her.

“A turkey sandwich. How’s Dad?”

“Fine. I talked to Ariadne about the painting. She says forty by forty-eight would work, but do you have anything with more blue?”

“With more blue?”

“She’s redecorating. She bought a new couch.”

“Seriously, Mom. More blue?”

“I’m just passing along what she said.”

“I don’t have any other landscapes that size. I have figures, but they aren’t blue.”

“Lena, don’t sound mad. She wants to support you.”

Lena knew that. And she could have used the sale. If she didn’t want her mom pimping her paintings to suburban friends with blue sofas, she’d have to submit to showing her paintings in the normal way. Two times she’d been given spots in group shows, once in Providence and once in Boston. Both times she’d sold her paintings and gotten unambiguously positive write-ups in the local press, and both times she’d gotten an outbreak of cold sores so bad she could barely eat for days. When the dealer called to read her the review in the
Herald
, her feet sweated straight through her socks. Even good things could be traumas to her.

“Well, who knows. Maybe the muse will come.” Her mom wanted to wrap it up without an argument. Lena heard her turn off the car.

“The muse doesn’t get to pick the color.”

“I’ve got to go, darling. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Lena hung up and glared at her feet. The next time the phone rang, she wouldn’t answer. She would let it ring itself out. She would be like Bee and lose her phone, maybe even stop paying the bills until the phone company turned off her service. Then she could enjoy a little quiet and not have to invent turkey sandwiches or defend her way of being.

But the phone began to ring less than an hour later and she didn’t let it go.
What if it’s Tibby?
She knew it wasn’t, but she couldn’t suppress the thought. When was the last time Tibby had called her? When was the last time Tibby had even responded to an email? But she thought of Tibby’s recent text and she couldn’t let the phone go past the second ring, even though it was obviously not Tibby, but rather Effie, or possibly Carmen telling her what movie she should rent tonight.

In some way she didn’t like to admit, Lena was always waiting for a call. Not from the people who were always calling, but from the ones who never did.

“Bridget, what are you doing?”

Bridget looked up. Eric was mostly blotted out by the setting sun as he strode up the walk, pulling his tie loose and his collar apart as he always did in the final stretch of his way home from work.

She stood and kissed him on the lips. “We don’t really need this anymore.”