She looked down at the Kleenex, and all at once she began pulling it apart, shredding it until her lap began to fill with bits of fluff. There had been times when she’d forgotten what a geek he was, but here it was again. She didn’t want to come here anymore. In the hospital she’d had this bizarre feeling that as long as she kept seeing him she’d be OK. Even this morning she had sort of wanted to see him. What was her problem? She was like some crazy person, always changing her mind. She had more than half an hour to go. Her mom would never let her quit coming, either. More than half an hour today, and hours and hours for however long it would take everyone to believe she wasn’t “at risk” anymore. She hated that: “at risk.” Like at any moment she’d do it again. She would never. Never. She hadn’t even really meant it! Dr. Lewis had said so: she knew her mom was coming home; she knew she’d be found in time.
“Where’d you go?” he said.
He was watching her. The Kleenex was all over the place, and her face warmed as she plucked bits of it from her pants and tried to gather them in her hand. He was always so calm—she didn’t think it was fair. She wondered if he’d ever had to do this. Maybe he was a therapist because he’d been “at risk” himself.
“I was wondering where you grew up.”
“You’re curious about me.”
Her face burned, but she kept looking at him.
“I grew up in Sacramento.”
“Oh.” She was surprised. “Were you depressed?”
He did the steeple thing again with his fingers. He sat there without responding, as if he were thinking about it.
Don’t you remember?
she wanted to say, but didn’t.
“What do you imagine?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s why I’m asking.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “when teenagers feel alone with painful feelings, they want to know how other people have dealt with the same thing.”
“So?”
“So maybe in asking if I was depressed, you were wondering if I’d gone through what you’re going through—if I felt as bad as you feel.”
She shook her head, but she was about to cry again, and then she was crying. Why had she done it—said
I’m Lauren
? Why, why, why? Everything was going along fine until then. Maybe that wasn’t entirely true, but with Jeff it was. And if it hadn’t been for her problems with Jeff, would she have been such a moper? Would she have been such a crier, such a loser? No. No, she wouldn’t. Dr. Lewis had it backward. He thought her crappy life, her “low self-esteem,” made it just
seem
like Jeff hated her. But she knew what she knew: Jeff hated her, and that made her life crappy.
30
A
ll that lying in bed in December, all those tears—Sarabeth wondered where they’d gone. She’d had trouble getting herself out of bed then, but in an odd way she felt worse now—she couldn’t get the bed out of her. Her legs, that had moved her through Tilden Park: they were full of sand, deadweights. Her head was full of sand, too, which made it hard to concentrate, hard to talk. She met Nina for coffee one evening and tried to explain what had happened, but she kept losing her train of thought or having trouble finding the right words.
“I’m worried about you,” Nina said, and Sarabeth knew she meant well, but it made her feel worse. “Will you make an appointment with a shrink?”
Sarabeth shook her head. She didn’t feel it was a bad idea, just that she couldn’t do it. Besides, she was too poor. Real estate was dead, and though she had lampshade orders to fill, she couldn’t make herself work.
Nina said, “Would you go if I made an appointment?”
“The lightbulb has to want to change,” Sarabeth joked, but her face felt weird, as if something were crawling on her cheeks, and she gave up and shrugged. “Anyway, it’s getting late—I should get going.”
At home she sat on her couch. She felt tired in one way but wide awake in another. There would come a moment when she would feel it was time to go to bed, and she would go, but meanwhile she waited. Time moved slowly. She thought of a freeway just past the point of a huge jam, how each emerging car would seem to have the road to itself, minutes passing, one by one.
In a while she realized that she needed to pee, and then that she needed to pee very badly: the pressure in her bladder surprised her. She got up and went into the bathroom, and it was the strangest thing—at the moment when she felt the urine against her skin, her eyes welled. It was like that trick kids played, putting someone’s hand in water to make him wet the bed.
Back in the living room it was very quiet—she could hear the tick of the clock in her workroom. She recalled a time when she almost always had music playing, but that was long ago. She hadn’t opened her stereo cabinet in months. What would it be like to have the kind of terrible, wasting disease where your mind was entirely intact but you couldn’t move or speak? She felt a little like that now, as if somewhere inside her there might be an urge to hear music, but that she lacked the means to bring that urge forward, to feel it.
She let Jim and Donald talk her into going to a cocktail party in Marin, at a stark hillside house in which just about everything was beige or white. The crowd was very upscale: she met a cardiologist, a landscape architect, a professor of sociology, a producer at KQED. She chirped her way through an explanation of her work, pretty sure they were all wondering how she supported herself.
Not very well,
she wanted to say.
At the hors d’oeuvres table she ate a handful of salty cashews, then a couple of mouth-puckering cornichons. She picked up a little plate and helped herself to a few sections of California roll, then added several leaves of pickled ginger and a knob of wasabi. She rolled a piece in the seasonings and put it in her mouth whole, and instantly the wasabi assaulted her sinuses, burning her nostrils and making her eyes water. She chewed quickly and immediately had another.
In the window over the table she saw her reflection, her pale face with its shadowed eyes, her mouth moving mechanically. Behind her, the party guests talked animatedly of art and Hawaii and feeling more grounded these days. She didn’t know them, but she knew she wasn’t them.
Is this it?
It was. She was where she’d been heading all along, though without knowing it. Liz hadn’t put her there; she’d just turned on the light. There was a fluttering in Sarabeth, like wings, and she thought her task was to quiet that feeling, to soothe the bird inside her, reassure it that all was OK. She looked at the window again, but this time she tried to look through it. She believed she was looking into the backyard, but it was too dark and rainy to tell if there were dense trees out there, or lawn, or a neighbor’s imposing house.
In the days after the party she began to think of her bedroom on Cowper Street, of how, because of an unfortunately placed streetlight, it had been very light at night, and of how when she couldn’t sleep she sometimes pretended that the illuminated shapes she saw were other than what she knew them to be. Her fan-backed chair was a peacock, her coat-rack was an antelope, and down the hall her mother’s voice was just the cry of a monkey, a shriek that should be, or the soft, rhythmic cawing of an exotic bird.
The bird in Sarabeth grew more and more still. Without the beating of its wings it began to seem like something quieter than a bird, a small warm roundish thing in the middle of her chest, like an auxiliary heart. This thought pleased her for a very short time and then repelled her with its reach toward poetry. If not a heart, then a stone? But that was poetic, too.
So there was nothing inside her—she said goodbye to the bird and missed it only briefly. She was shedding what she could, though the pile of stuff on her floor remained.
31
I
n the second half of January an acquisition deal of Brody’s did an eleventh-hour stall, and though he could have dealt with it by videoconference he booked a flight to Boston instead, telling Liz it was the only way.
Bruce Sellers came along. They took a cab from Logan, arriving at their hotel a little before 11:00 p.m. Once Brody’d dropped his bag in his room and phoned Liz, he went down to the empty business center and spent an hour on e-mail, calling room service to bring him a burger while he worked.
He’d taken a midday flight because of a morning meeting he couldn’t miss, so he’d been home at breakfast—unusual for a day when he had to travel. “Where are you going?” Joe said, and when Brody told him, Joe found the weather page of the newspaper and reported that snow was expected in the Northeast.
“Better take your galoshes,” Liz teased.
“Oh, no—I don’t
have
galoshes!”
“Maybe you could buy some at the airport.” Joe looked serious, pleased to have this idea for Brody. “You know those stores that have everything, like suitcases and toothbrushes and stuff? I’ll bet they’d have galoshes. Especially in January.”
Lauren was watching Joe. “They were kidding,” she said in a mean voice, and from across the table Liz met Brody’s eyes and then quickly looked away.
Finished with his burger, he opened a new e-mail and addressed it to Joe. It was a little after nine in California; he might be online. Brody typed:
It’s the middle of the night here and twenty-three degrees out. It was a real shock when I walked out of the terminal. What’s up there?
He went to the
Times
site and read an early edition of tomorrow’s paper, giving Joe five minutes, ten, fifteen. At last, when he was close to giving up, a reply came.
Not much—I have a ton of homework. Mom ordered Round Table for dinner.
Brody wrote back:
She’s slipping! I’ll have to talk to her about that. (Just kidding.) I’m alone in a sterile “business center” in my hotel—a weird place to be in the middle of the night.
And Joe wrote:
That would be a good opening scene for a movie. Businessman in the middle of the night in a strange hotel, no one else around.
Brody smiled.
Stop, you’re scaring me!
Tracking shot up the hotel corridor, scary music. Sorry, I’ve gotta get back to my math now.
No need to be sorry, Joejy. You don’t ever need to be sorry you’ve got other stuff to do, OK?
Brody thought for a moment, the cursor hovering over the
SEND
button. He moved it to the line he’d just written and backspaced until it was gone.
“Go get ’em, kiddo” he typed instead, and he sent it, though he knew Joe might not see it before tomorrow sometime. He did a few more work e-mails and then logged out and wandered around the mezzanine level of the hotel, passing an empty conference room and then the closed door to the fitness center. A sign said it was available twenty-four hours a day, and he opened the door: empty, though the lights were on, the machines lined up against a black window. There’d been so much rain at home lately, he and David hadn’t played tennis in weeks, and he’d all but stopped his nighttime trips to the high school. He imagined himself working out, and the pain this would bring to his shoulder was almost a draw—as if hurting it were a job he’d been neglecting.
Round Table. They delivered, was the main attraction. Their pizza wasn’t very good. Hound Table, the kids used to call it. Woof, woof.
An elevator took him to the main lobby, and he strolled past the concierge. At the registration desk the lone clerk said, “Anything we can help you with, Mr. Mackay?” and Brody did a double take, wondering if this was the same guy who’d checked him in two hours ago. He didn’t think so. Another ominous touch for a movie: everyone knowing your name.
In the bar there were several clusters of low, upholstered chairs, only one of which was occupied, by a couple sitting as close together as the furniture allowed. Brody took a stool and ordered a Scotch. The bartender was a young woman with long hair and a tastefully revealing blouse, and he imagined saying,
I’ll bet you get a lot of lonely businessmen trying to talk to you
, but then he’d be one.
The first taste of his drink gave his throat a satisfying burn. He went to bars only when he traveled, drank Scotch only when he went to bars. It tasted good, better than he remembered. He sometimes thought that the main difference between life now and life in his parents’ heyday was the decline of alcohol. He and Liz had talked about this: how, growing up, they’d lived with their parents’ drinking the way farmers lived with the seasons. Spring, summer, fall, winter. Sober, tipsy, drunk, hungover. And none of the four of them—Robert and Marguerite, his mother and father—had ever had anything like a drinking problem. It was just how people lived then.
Liz, at breakfast this morning. That mischievous look when she made the galoshes comment. An idea had flashed through his mind in that instant: Don’t go. Don’t go to Boston. Then Lauren made her nasty remark to Joe.
He thought of an evening at Tahoe, over Christmas, when Joe switched his vote from the DVD his cousins preferred to the one Lauren wanted. “That’s not fair,” Austin said, but Joe wouldn’t budge, and the only adult willing to intervene was Steve, who forced a coin toss and was thereby the agent of his boys’ defeat. “I changed my mind,” Brody overheard Joe saying later. “What’s the big deal?” He didn’t want to be caught protecting his sister’s interests.
Brody took a long draw on his drink. In the mirror over the bar he saw the couple nuzzling, the man’s hand so far up the woman’s leg that he couldn’t have had more than an inch to go. They were having an affair, of course. In Brody’s experience this happened when someone wasn’t moving fast enough, when someone couldn’t get the hungry look out of his eye. An affair or a garage band, those seemed to be the options. Or a sports car. Russ had bought a Ferrari just months before his separation was announced.
“What’s up?”
He turned and there was Bruce, looking a lot better than Brody felt: showered, maybe even shaved.
“There he is,” Brody said. “I figured you weren’t asleep. What can I get you?”
Bruce asked for a Scotch, and they sat and drank for a while, talking about tomorrow, their strategy for jump-starting negotiations again. It was one-forty when Brody got to his room. He brushed his teeth in the spotless bathroom, pulled down the sheets on the pristine bed, and climbed in.
He’d had a second drink, and he was a little woozy. Heat blew from the vents under the window, and he felt how dry the air was, could almost feel how dry he’d be by morning, his nasal passages, his throat. He got up and went back to the bathroom for a glass of water.
He blinked in the sudden light, then looked at his reflection. His face was changing: softening, falling. He was getting jowls, and his chest hair was almost white. He imagined Liz climbing into bed, three thousand miles away; Joe up in his bed; Lauren in hers. Thinking about Joe and Lauren when he was away: this always made him ache a little.
He turned off the light. Getting back into the hotel bed, he thought again of Lauren’s nasty tone at breakfast:
They were kidding.
He understood that his not saying anything had made it worse than it was. It had been like telling her:
I’m afraid of you, I can’t control you, I can’t—I
still
can’t help you.
He had failed to help her. Her life had brought her to its own edge, and he had failed to step in and help her. He didn’t want this to be true, but it was.
When Brody was away, Liz felt returned to a much earlier time, a time when he’d traveled less but worked much more. His years at start-ups—she’d often felt that he was much farther away than Mountain View or San Jose: hundreds of miles, thousands of aeons. Winter afternoons like this one, she made blanket forts with the kids: crawled inside with them and staged tea parties, Playmobil rodeos, Thumbkin sleepovers. Sometimes in those years he didn’t get home till two or three in the morning, and he’d climb into bed next to her and seem for a moment like someone she didn’t know. And then:
I’m finished,
he said, three or four years ago, and she knew right away what he meant. No more craziness. No more seventy-hour workweeks, no more Valley rules. They opened a bottle of champagne that night to celebrate.
But had he done it? Truly? She wasn’t sure.
She let things go a little when he was away. Round Table last night, Chinese tonight—though tonight there was a good reason. She cleaned up quickly, dropped Joe at his science partner’s, and drove with Lauren back to the high school.
“Women’s History Project,” the notice had said. “An evening of discussion and taking stock.” Lauren’s social studies teacher had organized this end-of-semester event as a kind of conference or colloquium, complete with focus groups, talks, and miniseminars. The participants were supposed to be the class’s students and their parents and grandparents, but as Liz followed Lauren to the auditorium, she saw several other mother-daughter pairs and not a single boy or man.
Lauren’s middle-school friend Jessica and Jessica’s mother, Linda, were standing in the lobby. “Look,” Liz said, “there are the Youngs. Shall we join them?” She’d always liked Linda, hadn’t seen her in a long time.
Lauren stood still, not speaking, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Lauren?” Liz said.
“You can.”
“Oh, that’s OK. I just thought you might want to.”
Liz tried to remember if this was a class Amanda was in. Would there be anyone here Lauren could comfortably approach? Getting in the car after school today, she’d seemed dull, listless. She’d been quiet through the afternoon, quiet through dinner.
“We can go in,” Lauren said now, but she didn’t move, and after a moment Liz herself led the way to the double doors.
The stage was set up with a microphone on a stand, and there were circles of folding chairs on the auditorium floor, six to eight per group. A woman Liz took to be the teacher stood on the steps up to the stage, talking to a couple of girls.
“Wow,” Liz said, “very professional.”
“Liz!”
She turned, and there was Pam Silk, another mother from the middle-school days—someone Liz hadn’t always liked. She was one of those people who seemed to regard busyness as a contest you could win. “Three kids,” she was always saying. “You can’t imagine how big a difference that third one makes.”
Now she approached, saying, “Long time no see! And Lauren—your hair looks
so cute.
”
“Thanks,” Lauren said, and then, “I’m just going to go down there,” and before Liz could follow, or ask her to wait, she took off for the front of the auditorium.
Pam moved closer and lowered her voice. “I’ve been thinking of you constantly. How are you? Are you OK?”
“I am,” Liz said. “Thank you, yes.”
“Alexis was really upset,” Pam said, shaking her head. “Really upset.”
This was not a conversation Liz could have. She craned her head back and forth as if she were trying to make out what was happening at the front of the auditorium. “It looks like things are getting started,” she said. “I guess I’ll—I think I’ll head down there.”
Pam colored slightly. “Oh, absolutely,” she said. “Isn’t this fun? I told Alexis, there’s no way anything like this would’ve happened when we were in high school.”
Liz made her way to the front, smiling when she saw an acquaintance but keeping a purposeful look on her face. She stopped at a folding chair and feigned interest in the contents of her purse.
Terri Mayfield arrived at her side.
“Terri, thank God.”
“You OK?”
“Yeah, yeah. I wasn’t sure Amanda was in this class.” Liz glanced around, but Amanda was far from Lauren, standing with a group of girls Liz didn’t recognize. She turned back to Terri. She’d been an angel during Lauren’s hospitalization, dropping off dinners in disposable dishes, leaving messages of love and concern that insisted Liz not call her back unless she really wanted to. “I’m glad to see you,” Liz said.
The teacher moved across the stage to the microphone. She welcomed the visitors and explained the format: first small groups, with the students asking questions and making notes; then a few short papers, to be delivered by individual students; and finally several concurrent discussions on a variety of subjects. “We’re here,” she concluded, “to explore the question ‘Where are we now?’” She looked out at the group in the auditorium, perhaps forty girls and women ranging from adolescent to quite elderly. “Though another question might be: ‘Where are they?’”
Everyone laughed, and Terri leaned toward Liz and muttered, “I know where mine is.”
“Wouldn’t you think some of the boys would have come, though?” Liz whispered back.
“If only for the extra credit.”
Liz chuckled, but she felt a little disappointed; she hadn’t known Lauren was getting extra credit for attending.
Mom,
she’d said.
Do you want to go to this thing with me?
Lauren was standing outside a circle of chairs, and when the crowd broke Liz joined her and took a seat.
The girls had typed up questions. “Do you work outside the home?” “Who does the housework at your house?” “Respond to the following with a score of 1 to 10, with 1 being ‘strongly agree’ and 10 being ‘strongly disagree’: I am where I want to be in life. I felt free to make choices when I was 20. 30. 40. My daughter/granddaughter is likely to have a career. My daughter/ granddaughter is likely to have a family.”
The mothers’ answers were recorded on yellow paper, the grandmothers’ on green. Lauren wrote with her head bent, then doodled on an extra piece of paper when another girl was up. Liz stole a look at the doodles: curlicues, parallel lines, nothing of real substance. She wondered if Lauren was drawing for real these days. She remembered a Saturday evening in October or early November when Sarabeth found a sketch of Lauren’s on the kitchen counter. A sketch of a leaf. Later, Liz had taken it to a folder where she kept drawings of Lauren’s that seemed in danger of disappearing, and when she opened the folder to put it inside, she noticed that the previous one she’d put there had been from months before.