Bridge To Happiness (23 page)

I sat on the overstuffed sofa
in the media room where it was fairly dark and pretty much impossible to read the three grief books gathering dust on the floor next to me. Around me the walls were lined with framed posters of Mike’s favorite movies.
Jaws.
The Godfather
.
Apocalypse Now.
Star Trek.
Last of the Mohicans.

Last of the Mohicans.
For three and half decades I had loved a man who was never embarrassed about his romantic side. He’d played the sound track in his car for months after we saw the movie. I stuffed a handful of crackers in my mouth.

Barefooted, feet on an ottoman, a crushed box of Wheat Thins hugged to my chest, I sat there with the television on, wearing red sweats with the Cantrell campaign slogan from ten years ago, and the thought came to me that I might have slept in them. I sniffed my underarm. Baby powder. Maybe I had changed clothes today after all. The polish on my toenails was chipping off. I flexed my feet, toes splayed. One big toenail, once wearing a solid dark red coat of a color called
Not in Kansas Anymore
, was now polished in the shape of—I studied it for a minute—Idaho.

Once and always I was the daughter of a geography and math teacher. My father would have been proud that I could still, in my fifties, identify the states by shape alone.

I leaned my head back and stared at the green recessed ceiling. Idaho. The Gem State. Capital? Boise. Highest peak? Mount Borah. Lowest point? The Snake River. Home of the deepest gorge in North America: Hell’s Canyon.

I’m there now.

Chewing on another handful of wheat crackers made me feel better. Mindless eating was like mindless living, like mindless existence. The thin foil liner inside the box tore. When did they stop using waxed paper? I felt suddenly older than dirt.

On the TV screen a man was walking across a pristine, stainless steel factory. They panned to a close-up of a conveyor belt spilling peanuts into a dark vat of caramelized sugar, making me hungry again.

Five boxes of Wheat Thins in three days. Staring into the dark recesses of box number six, I swallowed, thinking some honey-nut peanut butter (lately I kept a spoon near the jar) would be good to dip them in, maybe chase it all with a shot of
Herradura
.

But then I would have get up, pull out the silver and blue tequila bottle from the bar cabinet across the room, get out the cutting board, find a lime, and the salt . . .

Way too much work. Besides, wasn’t drinking alone supposed to be dangerous?

So I lost myself in afternoon programming, living inside the big screen, rectangular, HDTV (the one that in full screen mode made everyone look like dwarves.) “
Sneezy
, Happy, Grumpy, Sleepy, Doc, Droopy,” I recited. “No . . . Droopy was a dog.”

Flashing across the screen was a line of bright red words:
Attention women between the ages of 18 and 65.

“Women over the age of fifty cannot remember the names of the Seven Dwarves,” I said to the empty room.

“Are you feeling sad?” A woman’s voice asked through the sound speakers in the kindest of tones.

“You bet I am,” I said.

“Fatigued?”

“Bingo.”

“Agitated? Experiencing a lack of confidence, a loss of interest in activities you once enjoyed? Are you having trouble sleeping?”

“Big Brother is watching me,” I muttered to the television, cramming another handful of crackers in my mouth and wistfully thinking of peanut butter.

“Qualified participants may receive study-related medical care, medications and lab work at no additional cost. Please call this number.”

I picked up the phone and had half the 800 number punched in when I heard the back door and a minute later Mickey came into the room, walking in his lanky style, slightly hunched over in that I’m-too-tall teenaged boy way. Cursed by their height, all my sons had walked that way for a few years, until manhood caught up with their long bones and their bodies filled out.

“I’m home.” He dropped his backpack in the doorway where I could trip over it, pocketed the car keys, and flopped down beside me, slapping his size
thirteens
on the suede ottoman. “
Whatcha
watching?”

“The history of Cracker Jacks.”

“The Food Channel again?”

I nodded. “How was your day?”

“Fine.” He took the collapsed cracker box off of my lap “Dinner?”

“No. I have
Froot
Loops.”

“You okay?”

“I’m fine. You?”

“Yeah.” He lifted the box to his lips and poured some into his mouth, chewed for a minute then said, “They put my name up for valedictorian.”

It took a minute to sink in. He had been suspiciously devoted to his school work, not that I had to ever worry much about him. He was the only one of our children who was like me, the one who never missed a homework assignment and voluntarily took extra credit. I used to have to get after the others, making them take extra credit to make up for the stupidity of not turning in their homework.

I think perhaps that was why Mike was often so frustrated with Mickey. To not study for a degree would have been a sheer waste for our youngest. “That’s wonderful.” I gave him a huge hug, then laughed because he was hanging his head and trying to hide his grin. I punched him in the arm.

“Ouch!” he said and laughed.

“Now all you have to do is pick a college,” I said to him, hoping in my heart he wouldn’t argue for a career as a professional boarder.

“I’m down to Southern Cal or Colorado.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Close to home or close to the mountains,” I said, aware of how he was thinking.

He shrugged, looking somewhat distant.

“You can talk to me about your choices, you know.”

“I need to tell you something. Ron Wilson called me.”

“Our graphics manager?”

“Yeah. I was at the office with Phillip one weekend and he had a bunch of work to do, so I was playing with the Macs in the design department and just kind of came up with the logo.”

“What?”

“It was me who did the images you liked. Ron wanted me to tell you. I heard everyone talking about the new line and I just was bored and did some art for fun.”

I burst out laughing and didn’t know if I should hug him or kick myself. “Those designs were spot-on.”

“I guess I take after you,” he said, grinning, and I smiled. IT felt so good. Mickey… He was better than I was at his age. “That’s why I’m thinking of picking UCLA,” he explained.

“The graphic arts program,” I said.

“Yeah.”

I was so thankful he wasn’t running off to become a professional snowboarder. Not with the potential I saw in those designs. Without any of us even knowing it, my youngest son was already primed to join the company and someday, with some time and experience and a degree, he would step into my job. I felt something I could only name happy pain, a cross between joy and anguish, because Mike would have loved this. He wouldn’t have had to buy another sports division for his last son, just to make everything fair and equal between them.

“Well, dear.” I ruffled his hair. “I’ll tell you what. This summer you’re working in graphics, not in the warehouses or having your talent wasted doing gofer work for your brothers.”

“Really? You mean it?”

“Yes, I mean it. But you’ll be doing things besides designing. You’ll need to start at the bottom.”

“That’s great, Mom.”

“And you can pick your school without any influence from me. You’re right that your dad would have wanted it that way.”

The look we exchanged said everything, good feelings, pride, some bit of confidence in my son doing what he thought he should, which wasn’t a bad thing; he was almost eighteen—until enough time elapsed and the moment grew empty because we were alone, Mike didn’t live in this wonderful moment. I lived it alone, and then I was left with another reality. My last child was leaving home.

“Get up, you lazy bitch.”

“Ellie! Don’t talk to March that way.”

“How am I supposed to talk to her? Look at her. She hasn’t moved.”
Bariella
Crocker
Hutcheonson
stood at the foot of my bed, hands on her socialite-slim hips, as bossy as she was back in 1964, and living up to the audaciousness of her name.

“See there. She’s opened her eyes. Hello, March. We came to save you.”
Mariclare
Davis flanked Ellie looking the opposite: anxious and sweet and worried.

I pulled the covers over my head. Two of my best friends were standing in my bedroom and interrupting my morning nap.
Harrie
, Dr. Harriet Fortis, was MIA.

Though at this very minute I regretted our first meeting, we had, years back, all found each other at the start of our freshman year of high school and stayed friends in spite of boys, college, careers and family, divorce and now death. That first year, Sierra High School had been brand new, and public, and each of us had come from somewhere else: private school, catholic school, out of state, from another district. The four of us didn’t have friends we had known since our days in a sandbox, and couldn’t walk onto the center of campus that first day in an estrogen pack of box-pleat skirted teens, gathering like everyone else around the flagpole for the pledge of allegiance.

The truth was we found each other because of shoes. We all had on the same ones: black patent-leather
Capezio
Baby Dolls, which had only been stocked in and sold out of every small boutique or ballet store in the Bay Area. So we bonded over our shoes and our loneliness, at an empty lunch table, and because of some kind of kindred serendipity that brings friends together.

We were
Bariella
,
Mariclare
, Harriet and March. But minutes into our first sleepover that next weekend, we realized three of us would be called Bari, Mari and
Harrie
, which sounded like female versions of Donald Duck’s nephews. After giggling ourselves silly and talking in duck voices for five minutes, we came up with new nicknames, something less like characters from Walt Disney.

Almost forty years later Ellie, MC,
Harrie
and I were still the same, older and maybe not always wiser, but with an enviable history of friendship together. Our last names changed over the years as men had come in and out of some of our lives, Ellie’s three times and counting, but our nicknames hadn’t ever changed.

“How did you two get in?” I lay on my back in bed, still sluggish.

“The back door was unlocked,” MC told me. “You really should be more careful. They never did catch the Zodiac killer.”

MC had been the sweet Catholic girl, who came to that first day of school so excited because she wouldn’t have to wear uniform plaid and Peter Pan collars ever again. Except that later that fall, box-pleated skirts and Peter Pan collars became popular.

We had laughed about it just a few years ago, because in high school, most of us wore the same thing anyway: sleeveless sheath dresses with low cut flats, double-breasted hounds tooth-checked coat dresses and squat heels, fuzzy white car coats and hip-hugger cords with thick belts and boots. For those four years, we all made our own uniforms.

“It’s like a morgue in here.” Ellie snapped open each of the shades on the French doors and front windows. “
You
didn’t die, March. Mike did. Now get dressed. We’re taking you out to lunch.”