37
I
don’t know what to do for my birthday.” Lauren looked directly at Dr. Lewis, then over at his desk, where, to her great frustration, he had no pictures. It was beyond unfair that she had no idea what his wife looked like.
“What would you like to do?”
“That’s the thing, I don’t know.”
“Is there pressure to do something?”
“Well, yeah—it’s my birthday.”
She thought of birthdays in the past—two years ago, when her parents took her and three friends to
Mamma Mia!;
last year, when her mom paid for her and Amanda to go to a day spa. When she was younger, she’d loved studying magazines for party ideas, but there was really nothing to do that she hadn’t already done, and besides, she wasn’t in the mood.
His white coat was on a hanger on the back of the door, and she couldn’t remember whether it was usually there or not. She had gotten kind of confused about his job—doing therapy here, seeing kids at the hospital. It seemed he should do one or the other.
He laced his fingers together. “I guess another question would be, what do you like to do?”
“For my birthday?”
“For anything.”
Here he went again. Every so often he’d sneak this question in, like maybe he’d trick her into having an answer. She didn’t like to do anything. That was her problem; she had no interests.
She wished she’d brought a bottle of water. Once, she’d seen a yogurt carton in the garbage under the Kleenex table, and she’d been awestruck that someone would eat in front of him. It wasn’t his carton, she was sure—there was another garbage can under his desk.
“You mentioned once,” he said, “that you like to draw.”
She shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Do you like to look at art?”
“I’m not going to go to a museum for my birthday!”
He pooched out his lips, then sort of shrugged.
“That would be incredibly geeky,” she went on.
“Your friends aren’t interested?”
“I don’t
have
friends.”
He watched her for a long moment. “You’re feeling very empty,” he said at last. “It’s very painful.”
She sighed and looked out the window. Fuck you, she thought. The trees on his street were getting green, and she thought of how she used to try to draw leaves—like, really draw what they looked like. It was hard.
She turned back. “What do you mean ‘empty’?”
“No interests, no friends. No boyfriend.”
“You mean I’m a total loser.”
“I think that’s how you feel.”
“Because I am one.”
“I think there’s a difference,” he said, “between what you are and how you feel. And I don’t think how you feel now will last forever.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t, but I’m optimistic. You’re attacking yourself, but without as much passion or despair as a couple months ago. You’re not as focused on Jeff. And while you can’t decide about your birthday, you’d like to do
something,
which encourages me.”
The session was over, and she got to her feet and put on her jacket. He stood and opened the door. This moment, passing close by him to get out of his office, was always the same—crowded with things she suddenly wanted to say.
At home that evening she waited until everyone was occupied, then crept into the guest room. In a bookcase there her mom kept several books about art—a big art history book that she’d had since college, a book about the Italian Renaissance, several books on specific artists. There was one Lauren wanted to look at—Alex Katz. She pulled it from the shelf and kicked off her shoes, then sat on the guest room bed. This was a book her parents had bought on a trip to New York before she was born. From all the stuff they’d told her about that trip, you’d have thought they’d been there for months, but it was only a week.
Was it true that she wasn’t as focused on Jeff? She’d had some weird moments looking at him lately when she wasn’t even sure she liked him anymore. But she did—of course she did.
Somewhere in this book was a picture of a canoe on water, but she couldn’t find it. Instead, it was pretty much all paintings of people, and mostly of one person, a woman named Ada. The paintings had dates, and Lauren saw that over the years Alex Katz’s painting style had changed from sort of blurry or muddy to really sharp, almost like cutout paper. There was one of a woman—it was Ada again, though it didn’t say so—carrying an umbrella in the rain, and Lauren looked at it for a long time, focusing, finally, on the three white dots he’d put on each of her eyes. Those dots and the falling rain—it was as if she were crying, but she didn’t really look sad.
At last she found the canoe. She couldn’t remember the first time she’d seen it, but it was long ago, when she was a kid. It kind of freaked her out, actually, the canoe nearly filling the picture, blue all around it so you didn’t know where it was: near a house and people, or out in the middle of a cold lake. There had been a time when Lauren had taken this book from its shelf quite frequently, had sat on the guest room rug and stared at this picture. The page was even a little smudged. When had that been?
The blue was as dark as the ocean. The canoe was pale yellow, with markings that suggested it was made of bark. It sat on its own reflection, its pale water-self black at one end, as if that end would pull the entire reflected canoe down into the depths, leaving the other one to try to go on by itself. Lauren closed the book and lay back on the bed. The house was quiet: her parents were downstairs somewhere; Joe was in his room doing homework. She had homework, too, a page of math problems she could never finish by tomorrow, which made her feel it was pointless even to start them. She pulled the book close, rolled onto her side, and rested her forearm on its cool, smooth surface. Maybe she would sleep here tonight, for a change.
38
A
s weekends approached, Sarabeth thought of making plans, but she was never sure she’d feel like following through, and she hated, above all, to cancel on people. It seemed so wishy-washy. It was.
One Friday evening, after opening a container of leftover pasta puttanesca and discovering that it was sprigged with mold, she simply left the house and got in her car and drove. Other people did this—just headed out—why not her? Something interesting would occur to her, and if not there was always Intermezzo.
She hadn’t seen a movie in a while, and she headed for the likely theaters, but nothing appealed, at least not at the first few. She headed back to Solano, thinking there might be something interesting at the Albany Twin, and amazingly enough there was an open parking space right in front. She thought it might not even matter what the movies were, given how well everything else was working.
But it did matter. She didn’t want to see Catherine Zeta-Jones as a woman with a dying child, nor Jude Law as a football coach. From her car she watched as people spilled down the sidewalk in twos and threes, chatting, laughing, ready for the weekend. She was within a stone’s throw of great Indian food, but she didn’t move. She couldn’t get out of the car, couldn’t join the strolling crowd, not by herself. She felt weak and useless for a moment, but then she summoned a positive thought and reached for her phone. She called Nina: no answer. Jim and Donald: no answer. Miranda: no answer. She had cell phone numbers for all of them, and a year ago she might have used them, interrupted them midevening for salvation. Not now.
She started the engine again and looked over her shoulder. Someone was already waiting for the spot, and she reversed with the sense that she could never keep anything, not even a parking place, for quite long enough. All the drive home she thought this, but without the kind of feeling by which such thoughts used to be accompanied. It was neutral, divested of freight. Maybe it was the truth.
The Heidts’ house was bright with lights, and she didn’t even slow down; she kept going right past it and on to the corner. The clock on her dashboard said 7:42. She reached the freeway quickly, the traffic fairly light for a weekend evening. What to do? She looked at the bridge, saw the way the lights traced the way to the city. Should she? Her last trip across the bay had been the night she saw Liz.
She merged into the bridge traffic. The approach to the toll plaza was a sea of brake lights, and as she neared the stalled cars she felt a sense of misgiving.
Across the bridge, the San Francisco exits offered themselves, but she let each one go by. Passing Cesar Chavez, she realized she was not going to stop, not going to find a little taqueria where she could have a bite to eat and then go home. Coming up was the exit for the Cow Palace, where she had gone with her parents to see Barnum and Bailey; all she remembered was the enrapturing smell of cotton candy and the serious tones with which her parents discussed whether or not to buy her a cone. Did they in the end? She couldn’t recall. She drove on, hungry now, the bay on her left and the dark hills of Brisbane up ahead on her right.
In a while, she passed the airport. The network of skyways was still new to her, unnerving. A bit later she passed the exit for Liz’s, and she imagined showing up and ringing the doorbell.
Surprise!
She was not about to do that. She was going to Palo Alto then, and she was now hungry enough to wonder what restaurant she could find there. When had she last been to Palo Alto? It had been years, and the restaurants changed all the time. What did she want to eat? Wondering made her ravenous, and it seemed nothing could be large enough, no amount of food huge enough, to satisfy her. She wanted a greasy, dripping cheeseburger was what she wanted.
She took University and headed toward downtown. Driving past one enormous house after another, she remembered a burger place farther south. Could she find it from here? She drove by feel, taking turns that seemed right and then were. She could almost taste the cheeseburger with its charred edges and delicious, soft bun. It had been around forever, this place; it had been a Castleberry tradition, Saturday lunch: Robert would grab a kid or two for the drive, load up on food and milk shakes, and head back home to Cowper Street for the actual eating. When Sarabeth and Liz went with him, they sat in one of the red leather booths while he waited in line, gradually approaching the crank-operated grill, where a woman in a smock stood with a spatula, pulling slips of thin white paper from slices of cheese and then laying them on the blackening rounds of meat.
But the place was closed. Not just closed: gone. Sarabeth gaped from her car. She was over an hour from home, and starving, and she had lost something she’d had at the beginning of this adventure, something vital. She went into a supermarket and bought the last rotisserie chicken in the place, and she devoured it in her car, tearing at the breast meat, gnawing on the legs until the bones were clean. She felt like an animal.
There was a kind of muscle memory to driving these streets, a knowingness activated in a not entirely conscious way. Heading for the freeway, she might not have turned on Cowper at all had she been prepared to see it. But no, it was a complete surprise:
COWPER STREET
on a sign, in advance enough of the actual corner so that there was time to get into the left lane. As she turned, she slowed down and cracked the window, and cold air came in, along with a tree smell from her childhood.
She parked in front of what had been the Castleberrys’ house. Across the street, the streetlight that used to keep her awake was gone.
Her parents’ bedroom window was dark. She got out of the car and jaywalked, then stood still on the sidewalk. It was a stucco house with shutters and a turret with a conical roof that her mother had despised. “My Hansel and Gretel house,” she used to say. Standing in the cold night air, Sarabeth wondered at the sheer energy it must have taken for her mother to be dissatisfied by so much. Her psyche was like a huge grid of mousetraps, set to spring at the lightest touch. There were traps for Sarabeth’s father, traps for Sarabeth. The biggest trap, though, was the grid itself, the trap of being Lorelei.
Sarabeth thought of her own miserable time around the holidays, how at certain moments she had feared that she might decide she couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t stand it anymore, feeling as she felt. Was that what Lorelei had lived with? Feeling horrible, and feeling that her stamina for feeling horrible might run out? They had been so awful, those feelings: the tiny bit of them that Sarabeth tasted. Did they go away for Lorelei, the morning she took the pills? Was there a period when she felt better, relieved? Sarabeth thought of Anna, tumbling toward the wheels of the train and hating what she’d done. She so hoped Lorelei had been calm as she went.
She looked at the house again, took herself back thirty-five, forty years. She imagined following the brick walkway to the front door, stepping into the entryway, and having in her possession the thing that would lift Lorelei’s spirits forever. She imagined this Lorelei, her spirits forever lifted, greeting her and asking:
How was your day?
She let this image stretch out, expand: herself in school clothes, carrying a metal lunch box; Lorelei calm and combed and cheerful.
How was your day?
She imagined a Lorelei with room inside herself for the response.
She remembered the damp air in Tilden Park, the mud. The things inside her that she had wanted help in carrying—would they have been so poisonous if that help had been available when she was younger? Maybe a mother
was
a cauldron, or something simpler: a plain round bowl.
And if so, what was a friend? She looked at the Castleberrys’ old house. Love, she thought. Kindness.
In fact, she’d had both from her mother, in bits and pieces. She could remember Lorelei sitting at her bedside when she was sick, bringing her toast and ice water, playing cards with her if she felt well enough. And Lorelei’s excited applause when she learned to ride a bike, watching from the sidewalk as Sarabeth’s father trotted along holding the handlebars and then, at just the right moment, let go.
Do you miss her?
Maybe so—despite the dark corners, despite the cold winds. Maybe she missed not only the Lorelei who was but also the Lorelei who wasn’t: the one who might have been. Maybe that Lorelei even more.