Any Day Now (18 page)

As promised, she'd driven them in the big silver SUV, a Nissan Pathfinder, to Friendly's, where she'd surprised them all by ordering two ice cream sundaes — hold the shrimp in a basket — and announcing that she'd just become a car saleswoman at Hal Houston's Nissan dealership.

“Or car salesperson,” she said. “We've got to be PC, right? We
are
in the early zeroes.” She'd sat in her usual spot in their usual corner booth, beaming under her haircut, and meeting every one of their concerns and considerations with cheerful logic. Why should she sit around and wait for another man? Why shouldn't she work if she was able? And why the hell not sell cars?

“Because you've never sold anything before?” Georgette asked.

“Because you're sixty-nine?” Odile asked.

“Because you don't know one thing about cars?” Clément asked as gently as he could.

As was his long habit, he kept a close watch on all three: referee, buffer, interpreter. Georgette did her usual hammering, with Odile throwing up her hands early on, saying, “Well, darling, it's your life.”

There was a logic to it. The Nissan dealership was trying to get a bigger market share of their particular demographic. And what better person to appeal to senior drivers than a senior herself, especially one cruising around town in a silver Pathfinder, especially one with a nice wardrobe, expensive haircut and winning personality?

“How many older people do you actually see driving SUVs?” asked Georgette.

“See, that's just it, the market's wide open. It's all opportunity out there!” said Maddy, and by then the others were too exhausted to remind her about all the opportunity she'd claimed in the past year and what it had done to her.

How had Maddy ended up so wide open, as she put it? Or so unstable, as Georgette put it? It depended on who you listened to. Odile said Maddy had lost her anchor when Alain died of congestive heart failure three years ago. She was one of those women who needed a man to keep her focused. And with two husbands dead and buried, who could blame her for being a bit scattered now? Georgette, though, said Maddy had always been up and down, a drama queen since age two and a glutton for attention. Not to mention, made of porcelain.

They'd just passed Exit 8, which meant the next one was hers. Clément began to edge the car a fraction to the right. But the snow was now so thick between lanes, the resistance under the tires so great, that he was forced back into the tracks he'd been following so doggedly. Changing lanes was going to take an aggressive turn of the wheel and flooring the accelerator. He checked the rear-view mirror — both women were looking out their windows, quiet for once. Clément sent up a prayer and then sent them, he hoped, into the next lane. For a moment it felt as if the car was in someone else's hands. The women screamed as the slush from the highway, the snow from the sky, flew at them. But then, in a movement that felt more like a landing than a lane change, they were in the right lane, surprisingly steady, and still going forty miles an hour.

“Hey, You, what are you trying to prove?” said Odile.

“I think he wants to kill us and keep the insurance,” Georgette said. But they both sounded wonderfully relieved.

No one saw exactly what happened next as, signal clicking and flashing, they turned onto the off-ramp. But they all felt it. Clément sensed everything going out from under them…tires, road, earth. Georgette felt herself as light as a fleck of seafoam, heard Odile singing Clément's name. Odile felt an arm thrust in front of her and thought, “This is what a whirlpool feels like.” In the front, Clément thought suddenly of Sister Joan's Rose of Sharon bush, how purple the blossoms turned in July. A certain silver SUV popped into Georgette's mind, and Odile cried, “Maman!” And still they moved through space, Clément's head bouncing off the steering wheel, Odile pressing like a piece of paper to the right back door, Georgette looking up at the sunroof to see falling snow.

One of the paramedics punched in Maddy's number on his cell — the number clear as a headline in Clément's head. “Darling,” Clément said. “We can't come today. We've had an accident. We can't come. Do you understand?” And then Georgette had insisted on speaking, too. She was lying on the next stretcher after telling everyone, “
Mon beau-frère est vraiment un bon
chauffeur
.” She kept on in French to Maddy, telling her she'd put out her arm to keep Odile from hitting the front seat. “Maman taught us to do that, remember?”

Odile wasn't saying anything from her stretcher. “A bit of shock,” a young paramedic told Clément, who kept craning over to see how she was doing. His back hurt, his neck, too, but already they'd been told how incredibly lucky they were.

When the second ambulance failed to show up — “This is going to be a helluva day!” one paramedic said to another — they wheeled all three stretchers onto one ambulance. “Your own private tour bus,” one said.

“No more touring for me,” Georgette said. “Hey, You,” she called to Clément. “That's it. No more Sunday drives out to Maddy's. From now on, she wants to see us, she comes to us. What do you say to that, Odile?”

“OK,” said Odile. And the sound of that voice, his wife's voice, made tears run from Clément's eyes. They were speeding through the blizzard now, the road somehow solid beneath them.

“I mean really, she's got her big SUV wheels now, right?” Georgette said. “She's one; we're three, right? I mean, how come we never saw that before? No more saving her soul, You. From now on, we're watching our own asses.”

The paramedic closest to Clément looked down at him and smiled. “Happens to some people, the adrenalin. Can't stop talking. I think she's happy to be alive.”

His cellphone rang. “Your sister,” the paramedic said, putting the receiver next to Clément's ear. “She must have done star-69.”

Clément listened for a long minute. “Me too, sweetie. Yes. Of course, I'll tell them.” He handed the phone up to the paramedic.

“Well?” said Georgette.

“She was crying,” he said. “‘I love you all so much. Tell my sisters. Tell my sisters.' She just kept saying that.”

By the end of the first day everyone had a no-caffeine headache, even Joe, who'd tried to convince us he was an herbal-tea guy.

“Sure,” said Mary Anne, who seemed particularly strung out that first night, “if you don't count his two cups of espresso every morning.” Mary Anne would know, since she used to live with Joe.

We let Joe have it, didn't let up with the digs all evening. Gabriella and Allison even wrote a limerick — “There was a cute shmo named Joe, who pretended to no-no 'spresso. He only drank tea, oh, deary me, which meant that our Joe had no go.” Joe rewarded us with his goofy laugh and that made us just get worse. This was while we were
supposed
to be doing our Evening Papers, a new idea of Sondra's to help us collect ourselves at the end of the day. “A literary vespers,” she said.

Short on caffeine and gassy from garbanzos and raw broccoli, I'd almost forgotten why we were sitting knee to knee in Sondra's orange-and-avocado room. “Welcome back to the fabulous seventies!” Mary Anne had already said twice. It was more spacious than the room I was sharing with Candace. Of course, Candace herself took up a lot of room.

The truth was that between the personalities — far larger in this desert resort than they'd ever seemed in Sondra's Santa Monica bungalow — and my pounding head, there was barely the psychic space to write. I'd tried the usual warm-up that afternoon: a list of verbs tumbling fast from the subconscious. Take three and start writing. This always kick-started me in the city.

But here it just looked like a list of verbs:
gyrate, pump, explode, run, gambol, quake,
hypnotize, bury
. And then for some reason:
pranam
. A leftover maybe from my meditating, Hindu-guru days, when I would lie face down, full body to the floor, at the feet of the master.
Pranam
. Oookay. Then in free-association free fall:
pester, land, infiltrate, stun.
Usually I enjoyed spying on my inner self this way, was entertained by the hairpin turns of my mind as I jumped from verb to verb. But that afternoon at Casa Polarity, I just thought: mixed-up girl.

“Do we know who runs this place?” Joe asked as we staked out our places on the floor. Most of us had arrived by noon, in time for the Casa's vigorous lunch of organic produce. “I mean, do we
know
?” The lack of caffeine was making him paranoid.

“Not Starbucks,” said Mary Anne.

“Did you see the women?”Allison asked. “They look like the Stepford Wives. Those shining eyes, as if they've seen the light.”

“Did you read the brochure, for chrissake?” said Candace. “‘We would appreciate no sexual relations being conducted on our premises outside of marriage.' Where do they get off? And who says ‘relations' anymore?”

“Who has relations anymore?” asked Joe.

“Hey, guy, speak for yourself,” said Curtis, the newest guy in the group.

“And these buildings, like relics from some Hollywood set,” I offered.

“Let's take the plunge, shall we?” said Sondra.

Usually we start out, not exactly meditating, but sitting in a circle together. Grounding, Sondra calls it. Candace — who often puts herself in the position of translating Sondra to the rest of us, with no objection from Sondra, who doesn't mind being seen as a bit inscrutable — calls it Centering. I call it breathing. I follow the breath of the people, friends all, around me.

It was the chance to be with these folks for three days and really write, plus getting out of the smog and not having to think about what Coleman was doing right then and with whom in New York, that finally convinced me I could afford $500, all-inclusive, plus (apparently) the opportunity to kick caffeine if that was something one was concerned about. I'd taken a cash advance on my Visa.
Last time,
I'd told myself at the ATM earlier in the week. How it would actually be the last time, and how real, regular, actual money was going to start coming in, I didn't know. But a few days in the desert might clear the way. Both Sondra and Candace had said so to me separately.

“It'll come,” Candace had said in that dead-sure, positive way of hers that really does see me through a lot.

“Balance and opportunity, Jennifer,” Sondra had said. I decoded that to mean: If you come on this retreat, everything will work out. The money, the man, the screenplay. All in their time and all in perfect balance, and all before I turned forty, six months away. As she reminded me not so cryptically, “The place
is
called Polarity.”

Sondra's head was rolling left to right, right to left, the way it does sometimes when we centre ourselves. I closed my eyes, the better to feel my own sensations. My neck was stiff, my head like a pincushion. I imagined a mug of coffee before me; it steamed; my temple thumped. I opened my eyes and saw Joe and Mary Anne leaning into each other, whispering. Mary Anne smiled. She saw me looking, and smiled more. I pointed to my head, winced. Mary Anne put a trigger to hers.

“Empty the day, empty the past,” Sondra was saying. And I knew she knew we were being our unfocused selves.

“You're so talented and so unfocused,” Sondra had told Mary Anne in front of the whole group a few months before.

Afterward — Mary Anne and Joe and I live in the neighbourhood and usually walk home together after writing group — Mary Anne had said, “Gifted but lacks focus. Story of my life.”

“Mary Anne could have been an astro…what was it, M.A.? An astrophysicist?” Joe asked. The three of us had linked our arms; Joe was in the middle. It was nearly 1:30. Sondra liked to wear us down, let fatigue open all the valves. Usually we were still writing at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. “She had a scholarship to MIT when she was a pup,” Joe said.

I'd looked over at Mary Anne, all ninety-four pounds of her. Her blonde bangs had gotten long, dipped into her eyes.

“Class valedictorian. Honours physics. Prez of the science club,” Joe said.

Mary Anne shrugged. “But noooo, I thought I'd write comedy.”

“You're
funny
,” said Joe. “Your stuff is really, really funny.” But Mary Anne pushed off from us, and Joe and I had walked the rest of the way home behind her.

Sondra was now invoking the spirits of the desert. “Watch over us this weekend,” she said. “Guide our pens. Guide our hearts.” Then she split us into groups for our first writing exercise. We were seven — Candace, me, Joe, Mary Anne, Curtis, plus Gabriella and Allison — so that meant one group would have three. Sondra always tried to split up Mary Anne and Joe, because although they weren't a couple, they were best friends and former roommates. And Sondra, though she didn't exactly have it in for Mary Anne, didn't like to make it too easy for her either.

After closing her eyes for a full minute, she divided us: Mary Anne and Curtis, Joe and Candace (Candace immediately going into, “There was a cool guy named Joe, who…”), and me with Gabriella and Allison, though those two
were
a couple and Sondra seemed to have no problem with their working together.

I was happy. My teammates were solid, funny, good folks. “How's Coleman making out?” Allison asked when we got into groups, even though we were supposed to be getting right into High Dive, the first exercise. “How's the Rotten Apple treating him? Are they past previews yet?”

No idea, I told her. “We talked a few times the first week he was there and then he moved and now I don't have a number for him and…” I had to stop. High dive right into a vat of tears. I'd been crying a lot in the last month. It wasn't just Coleman, though he didn't help.

“Things have always been pretty loose between us,” I said. “Now they're baggy.”

“Don't worry, honeybunch, he'll call,” said Allison. “He's just getting acclimated. New York takes a lot out of people.”

“She's giving us the eye,” Gabriella said.

We took the plunge.

Griffin found he couldn't swim all that well.
(So literal — high dive, water. Jeez.)
And now, of course, it was too late, with the azure light pouring through and Nippy's goggles filling up with water.
(Who's Nippy?)
A failure of preparation, as usual. A failure to look ahead and realize that there could be bogs and snags, treacherous sand. Nippy, thought Griffin, as he dropped and eddied near a high wall of coral, was someone who always could see weeks in front of him. Years even. Life never surprised him, whereas it was only surprises for Griffin.
(Who's Griffin?)

Joe and Mary Anne, though they weren't in the same group, had managed to stretch out next to each other. Joe wasn't writing, was watching Mary Anne who was writing furiously as usual. He read along, nodding.

Talk about baggy relationships. Joe was straight as far as I knew. There was love there and knowledge and no bullshit. “Romance
means
bullshit,” Mary Anne said when I'd tried to delicately inquire once. “He wants to sometimes, but no, we know each other way too well.” Mary Anne looked up now at Joe and made a dramatic move with her arm so he was shut out. Mary Anne did this exercise better than anybody, as if she packed all the force of her small body and huge mind into the spring-off, hit bottom immediately, then fluttered her way up to air. We would be gasping for breath sometimes, the writing was that brilliant. “Boy, does that resonate!” Candace would say when Mary Anne read a page to us afterward. And Sondra would just nod and ask, “Anyone else?”

But Nippy had done this one too many times. Gone off and left Griffin with just enough instructions to nearly kill himself. Like the time he'd typed up the directions to the Ski-Doo. Typed! Lots of detail on how long to idle, which lever was for what
(are there levers on snowmobiles? Veracity, veracity)
and anal points about wiping the thing down afterward and how to store it. No opportunity, though, for questions. Of course, Nippy was a law unto himself. A golden-eyed fish was coming directly at him. Griffin saw a flash of white and wondered, Do fish have teeth?

I was treading water. Maybe if I started over, went with just dialogue. Or did a quick verb to verb. Anything that didn't stick me with loser characters in a situation I knew zip about, like deep-sea diving. Although the goggles filling up with water sounded like maybe he was only scuba diving. What did I know? But Sondra was strict about a few things, one being that you rode things out, that you wrote and waited and trusted.

“Fuck trust,” Mary Anne said one night on the way home. “What does she think we are, idiots? If something's dying on the page, get out and cook something else.”

Griffin breathed in and watched the bubbles swirl over his head. It was another world down here, just like Nippy said. The colours so intense, the silence so loud. It was enough to make him forget. Almost.
(Time for revelation: They're a gay couple. No, they're boarding school enemies. No, they're just jerks.)

Candace was weeping silently. This happened to her sometimes, actually pretty often, when she wrote. She couldn't help it, she said. Ever since Sondra had strongly suggested that Candace go back and look at her precognition images and leave the writing of fiction “for later,” Candace had been undergoing a rebirthing of sorts. She wiped her eyes with the wrists of her sweatshirt, the one I'd given her for her birthday the year before and which she wore nearly every time we were together. I looked at her long enough and hard enough for her to raise her head and smile at me through the downfall. She was right about our connection being strong. It was just that I didn't feel
that
way about her.

Choke, float, decry, imitate, infiltrate, boggle, tease
. Verbs galore. I didn't care. I already hated Griffin and Sabine or whatever his name was. Wait. I turned back the page and saw that
infiltrate
was on my earlier verb list. Did this mean something? Sondra said there was significance in every little thing.

Griffin: I don't know why you just don't go down with me. I mean you're the one with the experience.

Nippy: The first time should always be solo.

Griffin: Says who, ol' buddy ? I'm scared shitless.

Nippy: But being scared is the best part. I wish I was still scared. I'd give anything to still be scared.

I'd been telling Sondra for a year that I should be writing screenplays, not short stories, but she said that if I couldn't tell a story in actual story form, in traditional, dead white novelists' narrative, then I'd never be able to do it as a script. “And besides, do you want to be like every other person in this city, pounding out the Great American Screenplay?” she asked. (Joe, Mary Anne and I dubbed it The GAS.) “Do something original! Do something not L.A.!”

Of course, that's not what she'd been telling Curtis, who'd arrived six months before with a novel half done. “Put it away,” she told him. Now he was finishing the pilot script for a TV melodrama because she said the dialogue in his novel was “inauthentic.” Now he was writing nothing but dialogue.

Sondra put people in the washer, added a whole lot of bleach, and hit “spin.” What makes me different from other writing teachers, she said to new people coming in, is that I don't meet you where you are. You think you're the next Raymond Carver? I'll have you write song lyrics for a while. You've spent the last year working on a screenplay? Time to write personal essays. Or the libretto for an opera. Or maybe just a year's worth of journal entries. The idea was that every form fed every other form. A new one freed you from the one you were committed to, and, Sondra said, were more often throttled by. Her other idea was that we all thought too much, that we had to reconnect to our deeper source. (Everyone has one, she assured us in the New Age-guru tone she alternated with haute-literary critic and showbiz been-around. Sondra, as Griffin might say, was a law unto herself.) The point of High Dive and Evening Papers and Verb to Verb, even all our synchronized breathing, was to meet up with that source. “Unbridle yourselves!” she entreated us. (Every time Sondra said this, Mary Anne gave a soft whinny, just loud enough for Joe and me to hear.) Of course, all that unbridling and genre-swapping made for a certain level of weirdness every Tuesday night.