Today was Sunday. Spencer was coming over soon. Before the phone rang, Lily had been sprawled out on her bed, crucifixion-style. She thought that death might be a day like this, cool wind, the golden yellow light reflected off the bare oaks, the gray maples, soft sounds of Sunday cars, Sunday strollers, the cat sunning on a window across the yard, the old lady down below in her garden sitting in her coat having her coffee and reading the paper. There would be no pain after death, no bleeding, no vomiting, no weakness. Just happiness, and lightness of heart—
And that’s when the phone rang.
In heaven there would be no phone. No one would ever interrupt you. You’d never feel annoyed or frustrated. Death would be an eternal Sunday.
And now, I submit to you that no matter how bad you thought you were feeling on Sunday, it wasn’t as bad as you thought.
Maybe it was her father. There was always that possibility.
“Hello?” Lily said, expectantly.
“Finally! She picks up the phone!”
It wasn’t her father. Lily struggled with the next line. “Hi, Mom.”
“Well, that’s a fine hello. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. What’s the matter?”
Lily’s mother didn’t sound drunk, her speech wasn’t slurred, wasn’t slow, it was just a little sharp.
“So how
are
you?”
“I’m good, thanks,” said Lily. She thought of asking her mother how she was, but didn’t care and couldn’t fake it.
“Aren’t you going to ask me how I am?”
Big breath in. “How are you, Mother?”
“I’m fine
now.
Don’t worry. The tumor was benign.”
Lily closed her eyes. “What…tumor?”
“What, your father didn’t tell you? He’s too busy telling you lies about me, not actual information about my health. So what’s the matter with
you
? Are you still taking that
chemo
?”
“Yes. Still taking that
chemo.
Four more treatments.”
“And then you’re all better?”
“I don’t know.”
“So what’s wrong
now
? You sound like you swallowed a can of worms.”
“No, no, I’m fine.” Lily didn’t say anything else.
Allison said slowly, “I’ve been meaning to call you more often, but I’ve been really sick, Lil. Your father didn’t tell you…I had to go to the hospital. They took X-rays of my lungs. They think I might have a spot on one of them. God!”
“Surprising,” Lily said. “He didn’t tell me.”
“You know you could pick up the phone once in a while and call your mother. Your arm wouldn’t fall off.”
“I’ve been busy, Mom.”
“Doing what?”
“I’ve been very, very sick.”
“Oh, stop being
so
melodramatic. You’re just like your father. You should hear the stories he tells about Andrew to his former co-workers. He’s always on the phone with them. He’s got Andrew practically in the White House already, after that whole missing girl fiasco was cleared up. How
is
your brother?”
“I have no idea.” Lily had not spoken a private word to Andrew since May.
“Hmm. You don’t call him either. Well, that’s surprising. You know the doctor told me I was depressed. He said I was
clinically
depressed. He put me on Prozac, but it didn’t agree with me. I kept throwing it up.”
Lily, the phone slightly away from her ear, turned sideways on the bed so she could look out the window and smell the air. She breathed in and out to teach herself detachment. She was quiet. “Mom, I have to go.”
“Go? I just called you. We haven’t spoken for months! Why is that? Do I not call you? Do I not leave messages?”
“I don’t know, do you?” Did her mother think she had left messages with a machine? Lily said, “Sometimes when you call, I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
“I don’t know why, I’m speaking perfect English. Well, I’m calling you now. Tell me how you are.”
“I told you, I’m great.”
“Grandma says you’re hanging in there. Amanda, too. Annie is really concerned for you, she is being a very good sister.”
“Mom…do you know, I’ve been sick since August, and this is the first time you and I have spoken?”
“You never pick up your phone! No matter when I call, you don’t pick up. And when you do, you sound like this.”
“How do I sound?”
“You sound almost as depressed as I am, Lil.”
Lily made an exasperated sound. If she had any hair left on her body, it would have all stood on end. “Got. To. Go. Mom,” she said through a closed mouth. A perfectly good Sunday ruined. She couldn’t press the TALK button sharply enough. So dissatisfying. She threw the phone across the bedroom at the opening door and hit Spencer in the shin as he was walking in.
He raised his hands in surrender. She turned away to the window.
They watched
LA Story
because Lily was convinced the answer to life’s riddle was there.
She didn’t find it there.
So they watched
Parenthood.
Maybe it was there.
Spencer said, “Tell the truth, are you watching it for the answer to life’s riddle, or are you watching it for Keanu?”
“Am I that transparent?” said Lily.
The movie was about fathers and sons, but Lily couldn’t help thinking about mothers and daughters. When Spencer asked why she was not laughing, she PAUSED the movie and turned to him. “Do you know what the problem with my mother is?”
He turned to her. “Well, you’ve told me. She’s got some issues.”
“She is too beautiful,” said Lily. “And worse—she’s always thought so. Not just beautiful, but more beautiful than anyone else. You’ve seen pictures of my mother in Maui.”
“Yes,” said Spencer noncommittally.
“What? She’s still beautiful. Older now.”
“That’s not it.”
Lily knew it wasn’t. “I know she’s not looking as well as she used to. But I’m telling you, something happens to beautiful people. They think that something extra is owed to them by life, by God, by all the people around them. They think their life has to be better, more dramatic, happier—in color, not black and white.”
“Everyone wishes their life were happier.”
Lily shook her head. “No. Not like beautiful people. They walk this earth, their chin up to the rest of us, and think that great happiness, great love, great joy is their right and their prerogative. Passion as the entitlement of the beautiful, the way power is the entitlement of the rich.” Lily paused. “Especially when it comes to love. Beauty and love become somehow synonymous. How can plain people have great love? They can’t, that’s how. They can have average love, mediocre love, but their hearts can’t soar. Only beautiful hearts can soar.”
“I think you’ve hit on the nail right there,” said Spencer. “Beautiful people don’t necessarily have beautiful hearts.”
“But it doesn’t matter, don’t you see? You don’t fall in love with a heart. You fall in love with a woman’s face, with her body, with her hair, with her smell. That’s first, everything else is secondary. My mother’s beauty when she was young was so extreme that she didn’t understand how every man who met her didn’t love her
in extremis.
”
“Did your father?”
Lily nodded. “He did. Another problem—after nearly forty-three years of marriage, she still wants him to.”
Spencer didn’t say anything for a while, and Lily thought he was thinking about what she just told him, but the next thing that came out of Spencer’s mouth was, “Was Amy beautiful?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Spencer!” Lily turned to the TV and pressed PLAY on the remote, cranking up the volume. Leaning over, he took the remote out of her hands and pressed PAUSE.
“Why do you always do that?” Lily said, not looking at him. “Why do you always,
always
turn the conversation back to that?”
“Because that is what I do, and you’re not answering me.”
“Yes, she was beautiful, yes, yes, yes, but I don’t want to talk about her right now, I don’t want to talk about her or him, or about them. I don’t want to think about them, can’t you understand?”
She fell quiet, he fell quiet. The movie remained on PAUSE. Finally Spencer said, “Tell me, was your father handsome?”
Lily sighed. “Very. He was very popular with the girls, my grandmother tells me. But he didn’t think much of his face except as a way to get girls. He thought much more of his brain. He was too smart to give much credence to his external features.”
“But your mother…”
“She was also smart, but she didn’t care a whit about that.
When she looked in the mirror she saw Botticelli. And all the men around her saw it, too. So when she fell in love—with someone before my father—she thought it was going to be forever, because her beauty seemed eternal. So when he ended it after only a few months, she was shocked, she couldn’t believe it.”
“Why did he end it?”
“I don’t know. She never said. I don’t think she’s ever told anyone why, even my father. But we know one thing—she burned two cigarette butts into her wrists by way of dealing with this unfathomable rejection.”
Spencer raised his eyebrows. Lily smiled. “Told you. Cuckoo as a bird.”
“So tell me, who is Andrew like?”
“Spencer!”
“All right, all right.” He took a breath. “You know, you’ve turned out surprisingly well.”
“Hmm, no, I don’t think so.”
Spencer was quiet. “Do
you
think love belongs only to the beautiful?”
Lily pondered.
There are things about you I could never love.
“Yes,” she said reluctantly. “I don’t want to admit it, but I do. I don’t want to believe that Joshua would have left me anyway, but I can’t help feeling he would not have left had I been more beautiful.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” said Spencer. “And didn’t that boy leave your mother
despite
her beauty?”
“Yes, but that just confirmed to my mother that inside her was a black hole that her beauty hid from the rest of the world but not so well from her lovers.” Lily fell silent. Did Spencer just say,
I don’t see how that’s possible
? She stared at him from across the couch but he had turned back to the TV. “Andrew is nothing like my mother,” Lily said, pressing PLAY. “To answer your stupid question.”
Spencer smiled. “Liliput,” he said, “stop denying your rightful place in the universe. You don’t want your mother’s extreme
beauty, nor her black hole. Look where it leads.”
The doorbell rang. Not the downstairs bell. The apartment door bell. Lily pressed PAUSE. It was six in the evening.
“Are you expecting someone?” Spencer got up.
“No,” she said. “Maybe it’s Rachel. Go see.”
Spencer went to the door to go see. Slowly he turned to Lily. “I don’t know how to say this. It’s your family.”
Lily put her hand over her face. “Oh, no! Which ones?”
“Um—all of them.”
“Oh, no! Oh, no!” The doorbell rang again, but Lily’s confusion was so great, she couldn’t even get up from the couch.
“I have to open the door, Lily.”
“Spencer, they’re going—” He let them in.
To have a cow
, Lily thought, seeing even before she saw, the looks on their faces when they walked in, Amanda, Anne, Grandma, holding trays of pasta, of brownies, pitchers of Kool-Aid, bags of potato chips and found Spencer, extremely casual, comfortable, worn-in jeans, a sweatshirt, his off-duty weapon on the coffee table, his boots by the door, letting them into a tiny, darkened apartment where there was only him and Lily.
No one, not even Spencer, had any idea what to say.
It was Lily who spoke first. “Grandma, Annie, Mand, you remember Detective O’Malley.”
They said
nothing
, still holding the food out.
He took his gun, his jacket, put his boots on. “I’ll see you, Lily.”
“Yeah, see ya.”
After he closed the door behind him, they whirled on her, and she fell back on the couch. They stared at her so accusingly demanding an answer, an explanation, but she didn’t know what to say. Did he come on police business, harassing a girl in her tenth week of chemo? Or did he come to sit with her awhile?
And which was worse?
“I don’t know what you want me to say. He gives Joy Sundays off.”
“Of all the people in New York City, you let
that
man into your house?”
It was a short, stifled visit. Twenty minutes later they were all out the door and Lily was alone.
Lily’s family stopped speaking to her, except for Anne, who was remarkably still calling and asking Lily if she needed anything, and Lily tiredly would say, “I need nothing. Do
you
need anything?” Amanda had stopped calling. Grandma regressed back into her house, citing Joy and her returned agoraphobia as the reasons she no longer
had
to come and see Lily. Her father didn’t call.
But it was her mother who made things clear for her—oh, why does Lily
ever
pick up that damn phone! Her mother who said to her one fine cold day, “Everyone’s furious with you, you know, for taking up with that scalawag.”
“What scalawag?”
“You know very well who I’m talking about. Aside from the fact that he’s old enough to be your father, have you got absolutely no shame? He wants to put your brother behind bars for something he didn’t do. Your brother!”
“I haven’t taken up with him, what are you talking about?”
“Oh, come now! Stop playing games. Yes, there’s a generation between you two, but you’re a twenty-five-year-old woman, not a child. He has set out to destroy your family and you’re letting him in your house? He is sent by the devil. He is the enemy. There is something wrong with you, Lily, if you can’t see that. Really, you simply have no soul and no conscience.”
“Mom, what are you talking about? I have cancer. He brings me food…”
“Oh, cancer shmancer. Don’t use your cancer as an excuse, Lil, as a weapon against the rest of us. You still have to make good decisions, smart decisions. Why can’t you tell him your brother is innocent?”
“I do, and I don’t want to talk about this. I have to go.”
“Amanda tells me your quality of life is terrible. She says you’re not doing anything to help yourself, you’re not going out, you’re not exercising, or reading, or painting. No wonder you’ve taken up with him. You’re bored, Lil, but you need to get yourself together.”
“I’m together, Mom. Are
you
together?”
“Why do you think your brother doesn’t want to speak with you anymore—”
Lily slammed down the phone.
How could she say this, how could she say this, how—could—she—say—this.
Groaning, Lily lay on her bed, trying to drown out the words that were pounding like drums in her entrails. Mothers…so much power, so many knives…so many ways to stick it to you.
Oh, why in the name of all that was holy did Lily pick up the damned phone…
Dare she think it? She would prefer her mother bitterly drunk and unavailable than her mother like this and blind sober.
The cumulative effects of four months of chemo were destroying her. There was no joy in knowing it would soon be over, because every single day felt as if it would
all
be over. As in, oh, would that it all be over.
Just two more treatments. One was right before Christmas.
For Christmas, Lily reluctantly went with Spencer—who would not take no for an answer—to his mother’s house in Farmingville. She didn’t want to go and said she was going to
Andrew’s, but Spencer said, “You told me that lie at Thanksgiving and then I found out you were here by yourself. You are not going to be by yourself on Christmas, Lily, that’s all there is to it.”
So she went.
In the car Lily said, “How are you going to explain me?”
“I’m a big boy. Why do I have to explain anything?”
Spencer’s family was an army division without the discipline. He introduced her as “Lily.” As in, “This is Lily.” And that was all. Two of the sisters—she couldn’t remember anyone’s name—did a slow double take, from him to her and back to him for a lingering look—and that was all. The family shouted, they drank, the music was loud, the children were louder, the adults tried to out-shout both. Lily’s bald head, unprotected by an acoustic curtain of hair had every sound emission echo and bounce off it until the head became a large red ball of viral nerve endings, one more whisper and she would be spun into a spectacular neural overload. Still, the kids didn’t care about her head, they all wanted to touch it, despite the shouts from the adults, including “Uncle Spence,” to “leave the girl alone!”
“Uncle Spence already has a girlfriend,” said Sam, Spencer’s eight-year old nephew who was turning forty-seven next month. “She is in Chicago with her family. Mommy says he only brought you because you have cancer.”
“Sammy!” The mother was redder than Lily’s overloaded head.
Lily smiled. She didn’t glance at Spencer, next to her at the dinner table.
“Lily, I didn’t say that, please forgive him,” said the mother, throwing livid looks toward a son she had apparently once loved.
“Don’t worry.” Lily was amused. “Really. And Sammy, your mommy is right, your uncle did only bring me because I have cancer.”
A terrible silence followed before everyone laid in to the turkey and yams. Spencer stayed quiet. Lily ate cheerfully, and asked for seconds, and thirds, and then threw up everything in
Spencer’s seventy-seven-year-old mother’s white and clean bathroom.
“He’s just a child,” Spencer finally said to her after they’d been on mute in the car, driving home. “And it’s not true.”
“Oh, like I care about that.”
“What then?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, it’s Christmas.”
“Yes, you’ve told me. Thank you for your Christmas charity, Detective O’Malley.”
“Ah. So you do care about that.”
“Not even remotely. But it
is
true.”
“Lil, what’s the matter?
Something
is the matter, what?”
She didn’t reply.
“What?”
“You know, I would’ve gone to Andrew’s today, where my whole family is. You know why I didn’t? Because they didn’t invite me. In fact, what Amanda said, was, ‘Lil, in light of the circumstances it’s really best that you not come. You understand. Have this all die down a bit.’”
“I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”
Yes, Lily wanted to say. It
is
your fault. And my fault. When Spencer didn’t speak, she said, “They’re
so
upset with me.”
“I know.”
“You
don’t
know. You don’t understand
anything.
”
“No?”
“Of course not! They think I’m selling them out.”
“To who?” Spencer looked at her so sharply he nearly drove off the road. “To me? You’ve
got
to be kidding me. Have you told them that you are the most reluctant sell-out, you are a failure as a sell-out, you are the worst witness, you have the worst memory, you remember
nothing
, and what you do remember you keep from me anyway. You tell me nothing, have you told them that?”
“They don’t care and they don’t believe me.”
“How is that your fault?”
“Oh, Spencer. It’s not about them.” Lily fell quiet. It’s about
you.
She thought they were right. Her mother was right. On Christmas Day, Lily felt unholy for being in the company of an Irish Catholic who wanted to put her brother away. How did this happen? How did her brother turn the family upside down and it was Lily who was on the guilt rack?
“I don’t know why they’re getting their panties in a twist,” said Spencer. “I haven’t talked to him in a month. I have not called. I’ve done nothing. I’m wrapped up in a dozen other things. Christmas is the worst time for the missing. Too many of them, and their families want them back.” He paused. “Most families want their loved ones with them on Christmas.”
“Oh, stop it. Stop judging my family. Look, you want me to tell you something about my brother? Is that what you want?”
“No! What I want is for you to make peace with your family. Make peace with yourself.”
“You want to hear it or not? It won’t help you, but here it is.” Lily’s voice was shaking and low. “Years ago when he was in college, every other weekend, he would come home from Cornell and on the Sunday before he went back he would take me to New York City. He was twenty and I was three. He took me to the Museum of Natural History and to the Met and to the Guggenheim. He took me to the movies, for ice cream sodas at Serendipity’s, to the Cloisters, to Battery Park, to the Empire State Building, and to the Twin Towers. I learned to love New York City because he showed it to me for four years of Sundays, holding my hand on the subway and on the way back home to our apartment he carried me. He was in law school and I was seven the last time we went out and he carried me. Then he got married, and got busy, and I saw him less frequently, but still he took me to lunch, to the movies, to dinner. He called me; we spoke. It’s never been like this—this complete shutout of me.”
Lily saw Spencer’s hands tense around the wheel. He was staring grimly at the road.
“Can’t you understand that I worshipped him? Amy being involved with him, it’s like incest. She may as well have been my sister having an affair with my father. And Andrew knows it’s a brutal betrayal. He can’t face me.
That
is why he hasn’t been to see me, and not because of the vicious things my mother says, and not because of your stupid and completely wrong suppositions!” Lily’s whole body was trembling. Her nose started bleeding.
Spencer raised the palm of his hand at her. “Okay, Lily.”
“Okay, what?” she yelled.
His palm was still up. “You are sick, you are sick with cancer, and I am not, simply not going to have this out with you. It’s impossible. That’s what I mean by okay, Lily. So calm down.”
And what did Lily say to him when she calmed down and cleaned herself up? “Oh, cancer, shmancer,” said Lily.
They drove the rest of the way in silence, and when Spencer tried to help her up the stairs, she said she was going to be fine and didn’t need his help anymore.
He took her by the shoulders. “You know what—after I get you upstairs you might be fine, but there is no way you’re getting up there without me, so just stop the nonsense.”
She stopped the nonsense. She couldn’t get up to her fifth floor walk-up without him. She let him help. Spencer had to carry her the last flight of stairs.
When they were inside the apartment, he asked if she wanted him to stay.
“No!”
“Merry Christmas,” said Spencer and walked out.
A penultimate chemo five days before New Year. Joy had time off for the millennium. A relenting Grandma invited Lily to come to Brooklyn and stay over, but Lily declined: she was too sick, her nose was constantly bleeding, and besides, she couldn’t stand
one more word about Spencer, who himself was not available on the Saturday the millennium ended. Lily didn’t know where he was. He didn’t offer, and she didn’t ask. On New Year’s Eve, Rachel and Paul came over with champagne, begging her to come with them to a blowout party at the Palladium, but she couldn’t get up off her made bed. They stayed for an hour and at ten went without her, leaving her with a glass of champagne by the bedside.
Lily slept through midnight 2000, though she left her windows open to hear through black dreams the cork-popping joy from other windows, other rooms.