Sisterhood Everlasting (3 page)

“That’s my nightstand.”

“You can just pile the books on the floor, can’t you?”

Bridget was carefully laying clothes on top of the nightstand before she carried the whole setup from the front steps to the sidewalk.

“But I like having a nightstand.”

“I need to move the plants in from the kitchen, because they
aren’t getting near enough light in there. The leaves are turning yellow. Our bedroom has the best light. It’s like the plant ICU.”

“I can’t rest my coffee cup on a plant.”

“You can rest it on the floor,” Bridget said reasonably as she hobbled to the sidewalk with the nightstand. “It’s not like we have a real bed. The nightstand looks weird with just the mattress on the floor.”

Eric was shaking his head, but he didn’t look mad. Not really. “Bridget, I’ll be lucky if you don’t leave me on the sidewalk to be carried away.”

“You won’t be carried away,” she assured him.

The truth was she was always looking for things to put out on the curb. There was a large community of homeless people who convened in Dolores Park, and she’d gotten to be kind of friendly with them. She didn’t like to give handouts, but she was happy to leave things that might be useful, or things they could sell at the Mission flea market. Twice she’d actually bought her own possessions back by accident.

Eric jokingly accused her of wanting to be homeless herself, and she did frankly romanticize a life of sleeping under the stars. “I’d probably rather be a cowboy or an explorer,” she told him. Maybe she’d been born in the wrong era.

“What’s for dinner?” he asked her cheerfully, following her up the stairs to their second-floor apartment.

“I don’t know. What do you feel like? Maybe Pancho’s?” She could tell he was hoping she’d made something, or shopped for something to make. She should’ve. She hadn’t worked today. She was still temping and she hadn’t gotten called in a week.

What had she done? She’d spent the first part of the day searching the apartment for things to give away or throw away. She’d spent the middle part of the day waiting in the express mail line at the post office to send Lena and Carmen each a package of authentic corn tortillas she’d bought from a Mexican lady with a cart on Sixteenth Street, spending five times as much on the postage as she’d spent on the tortillas. (She’d gotten some for Tibby too, even knowing that she didn’t have Tibby’s current address and that Australia was too far to send something that would spoil.) She’d spent the last
part of the day realizing she’d been a bit too zealous in throwing stuff out and searching for her cellphone in the garbage cans out back. She’d called herself from her neighbor’s landline about ten times, listening for the trash to ring.

“We had Pancho’s last night.”

“We did? That was last night?”

“Yes, it was. Do we have any eggs? I could make an omelet,” he offered.

She checked the refrigerator. “We have five.”

“That’ll do.”

“And I got some handmade corn tortillas.”

“Perfect.”

“We could eat outside,” she suggested as she began assembling ingredients. They shared a tiny backyard with the two other tenants. It consisted of recycling bins, a plastic table, two chairs, and a gorgeous Meyer lemon tree.

He went into their tiny bedroom to change into jeans and a T-shirt.

“How was work?” she asked through the open door.

“Good. I got a new case.”

“Immigration?”

“Yes. Has to do with a second grader named Javier. A great kid.”

Eric always had a huge load of cases, and half the time he ended up doing it for almost no pay. His mother was from Mulegé, so Eric spoke Spanish like a proper Mexican. Half the cases came with stories that could break your heart, and Eric never turned down any of them. People from his graduating class at NYU Law worked at fancy firms making twice the money, pushing paper for big corporations, but Eric never wanted that. “My heart wouldn’t be in it,” he said.

She looked up as he came out of the bedroom in his oldest jeans and an Amnesty International T-shirt. It was the same thing almost every time Eric came home from someplace or even just walked back into the room where she was. She felt something, some little clap inside her head like a distant echo of the thunderous knock she had felt when she’d seen him the first time at soccer camp just before she turned sixteen. It wasn’t always entirely comfortable.
“What you two have, that’s called
chemistry
,” a nutty drunk in the park named Burnt Sienna had told her once.

“I tried to call you a bunch of times today,” Eric said. “Did you get any of my messages?”

“I … um … no. I didn’t have my phone with me.” She didn’t want to say her phone was likely in one of the garbage cans out back.

Eric got a certain look, somewhere between impatience and amusement, when she misplaced her phone again, or gave away large portions of their belongings, or spent the afternoon fishing in the bay with a homeless man named Nemo, as she had done the day before. “Nobody could accuse you of being boring” was what he often said when he got that look. And frankly, having somebody like Bridget around was what Eric needed, because he was prone to habits and ruts and he knew it. Who else got him out to street festivals, free concerts, bike-a-thons, and community gardening projects? Who else got him to try surfing and jujitsu and the leggy, oily creatures they served at the restaurants in deepest Chinatown?

“You didn’t lose your phone again, did you?”

“Uh. I don’t think so.” She started flipping through the free newspaper she’d picked up at the BART station.

He gave her that look. “Bridget, if you don’t want the phone, it would be cheaper just to cancel the service. That way Carmen and Greta and Perry and your dad and I and whoever else wouldn’t have to leave all those messages for you that you never pick up. You’d save us the trouble.”

“That’s true. Hey, look,” she said, pointing to an ad in the paper. “There’s a one-bedroom on Guerrero for $1,850 a month. That’s pretty good.”

“I like this place. I don’t want to move again. We’ve moved four times in the last year and a half.”

“I like Guerrero. I bet it’s a fifth-floor walk-up, but I don’t really mind that if it’s high enough to get a lot of sun. I wonder what cross street.”

She spent her life following the sun, seeking the brightest apartment in San Francisco. She didn’t really care about any other feature. There was always a sunnier place than the one she had, a
better spot for the plants, which accounted for a lot of the moving. When she’d found this place, she’d actually pounced on it while Eric was at work, and he’d come home to an empty apartment because she’d forgotten to tell him they’d moved. “We don’t live here anymore,” she’d told him when she’d finally discovered him, bewildered, in the bare bedroom.

She’d thought this place would be the answer. But it turned out the kitchen wasn’t really very sunny at all.

Eric started cracking eggs. He got egg white on his jeans.
He is very handsome
, Bridget thought. He loved her in spite of herself, and that seemed like a lucky thing.

“I was calling you because I had an hour free at lunch and I wanted to take you to that little shop behind Union Square to get you a dress for Anna’s wedding.”

“Oh, right.” His cousin Anna was getting married in Petaluma the following weekend, and he was excited about it. Eric thought weddings were romantic, and they gave him the opportunity to bring up the topic of marriage. Bridget got a certain look, somewhere between anticipation and fear, when Eric started talking about getting engaged. “I don’t need a new dress. I can get Carmen to send me one of her leftovers.”

“Carmen is four inches shorter than you are and her clothes are totally wrong for you. Remember that weird black stretchy thing with the feathers?”

Bridget laughed. “That didn’t look great on me. I admit.”

He came over and put his arms around her and kissed the side of her neck. “You are going to be the most beautiful woman at that thing. I want you to wear your hair down. I want to show you off. Let me be shallow once in a while, will you?”

Bridget wasn’t so sure she wanted to be the most beautiful woman at that thing. There was the bride to consider, first of all. And besides, she didn’t have much to prove in that way. She knew she was put together well. She had always known that. She had the attributes that people thought they wanted: blue eyes, long legs, a graceful neck, genuine yellow hair. She’d thought her hair would fade a bit as she got older, but it hadn’t. It was her mother’s hair, her
grandmother’s hair, her bittersweet birthright; she wouldn’t get rid of it that easily.

Bridget didn’t suffer from those ailments that picked at you over a lifetime, like allergies or acne, dandruff or a sore back, floaters in your eyes or lust for food that made you fat. She went straight to the hard-core stuff, the rough waves in the gene pool, like the depression so severe it had taken her mother’s life. Sometimes she felt that the outside of her gave a very incomplete account of the inside of her.

She knew she should do a better job of strutting her stuff once in a while for Eric’s sake. She certainly did take pleasure in the way he looked. But she hadn’t accumulated much in the way of clothes and makeup. She couldn’t really afford it. Eric thought her disinterest resulted from a puzzling lack of confidence, but it wasn’t that. She knew how she was.

Eric cocked his head and walked to the back window. “Do you hear that?”

“No. What?” Eric had weirdly good ears.

“It sounds like a phone ringing. It sounds like your ring.”

Bridget went over and craned her neck out the window. It sounded like her phone, all right. “I had a feeling it might be down there,” she said.

With his weirdly good ears, Eric followed the sound down the stairs and out the back door to the large square plastic trash bin. She heard his laughter rising to the back window. “God, Bee, have I been calling the garbage all day?”

A whole stack of memories

       never equals

              one little hope.

—Charles M. Schulz

“Big surprise,” Jones told Carmen when she walked into their
loft two nights later. “I got your dad a room—a nice room, an upgrade—at the SoHo Grand for this weekend.”

Jones still had his jacket and tie on, which indicated to her he’d made a reservation at either a good or a trendy restaurant, where she would be able to eat barely anything, because she’d eaten a sandwich for lunch and hadn’t had time to go to the gym. You didn’t stay a size 0 by eating lunch
and
dinner, not if you had an ass like hers.

Carmen hung up her jacket and checked the mail. Jones was talking to her from his seat in front of the giant glow of their living room computer.

“But I told him he could stay here,” she said.

“Of course he can stay here. But you gotta admit it’s a lot cooler to stay there.”

Her dad came to visit her in New York from his home in Charleston every few months since his wife, Lydia, had died, whereas Jones’s parents tended to stay put in Fresno, where he liked them. Her and Jones’s loft wasn’t the SoHo Grand, maybe, but it was pretty nice. A lot nicer than any of her friends had.

“I’ll ask him,” she said.

“I already asked him. He’s into it.”

“You talked to him?”

“Yeah, he called here about an hour ago.”

Carmen sighed. Would her father never learn to call her on her cellphone? “All right.”

“You gotta love that bar. Maybe he’ll meet a girl.”

“Jones.”

He smiled and she couldn’t help smiling back. His conciliatory smile was always pretty winning.

She watched him clickety-clacking on the keyboard. She considered how the light gathered on his bald head, which he shaved as assiduously as she followed any of her beauty regimens. He said it was the only way he liked it. Jones was all about choosing, but she also knew that certain patches of his scalp were going to stay bald whether he liked them to or not. It was amazing, really, the effort that went into the absence of things.

“Is this all the mail?” she asked.

“I think so. Why?”

“Tibby said she was sending something.”

“Tibby?”

“Tibby.”

“You hardly ever talk about Tibby anymore.”

“That’s not true. I talk about her. I just don’t talk
to
her.” That was why Carmen had been ecstatic to see a text come in under Tibby’s name and why she was impatient to get home to the mail.

Jones finished whatever he was doing at the computer and came over to her and kissed her shoulder. “Put on something gorgeous, gorgeous. I’m taking you out.”

“Where?”

“Minetta Tavern.”

“No way.” She loved that place. Damn. How could she not eat?

She started thinking her way through her large closet. The new Gucci? The pink Stella McCartney from last year? She wouldn’t need to spend much time on her hair and makeup, having already spent most of the day on it. Maybe the little Catherine Malandrino dress that Jones loved? She’d definitely end up having sex tonight if she wore that one. “What’s the occasion?” she asked.

He kissed her ear. “I’ve got a gorgeous woman, who’s going to be my bride.”

She laughed. “You have that every night.”

“That’s why I want to celebrate.”

“I guess turkey would be good.”

Lena leaned her elbows on the counter and watched Drew’s back as he sliced the turkey, slowly transforming the edge of poultry-blob into a fringed and delicate pile. He kept going until the pile was absurdly tall and then flipped it onto a piece of whole wheat bread. One of the good things you could say about his job was that he got free sandwiches.

“Lettuce, tomato, peppers, mustard, no mayo,” he recited, turning his head to check with her.