Love and Miss Communication (10 page)

On the marriage front, Jack was far more definitive. When Evie would manifest signs of disappointment, he—the broken record—would say, “Evie, I love you. But I just don’t want to get married. I hope that’s enough for you.” Evie torpedoed everything a few days before last Christmas. Jack had announced he’d be flying to see his ailing mother and Evie was welcome to join if she “felt like it.” There was, apparently, no expectation on Jack’s part that they would behave like Siamese twins whenever family obligations were involved. They were not a de facto married couple, no more wedded together than a pair of teenagers who could break up over a text message. She pressed the point, emboldened by the low-cut dress she was wearing and the two glasses of wine she’d consumed at the bar of JAK, waiting for him to finish up for the evening. In fact, she didn’t let up even when they returned to his apartment and started to make love. She pulled apart from him, sat up with the covers gathered around her frame like a shield, and presented Jack with an ultimatum: get engaged in the new year, or they were done.

Somehow he’d managed to extricate himself from the conversation, assuring her that 2:00
A.M.
was not the time for such
a heavy discussion. But by morning, both of them knew something monumental had occurred—they had reached the point of no return. By the time Jack boarded his Virgin Atlantic flight, they were broken up. She never forgave herself for choosing that time as the do-or-die moment of their relationship. After all, he had just found out his mother had suffered a mild heart attack. His new restaurant was having trouble acquiring a liquor license because of its proximity to a school. Besides, Jack didn’t want to be coerced into a binding commitment, nor did she want to get him there with threats.

Caroline was right to hide her phone from Evie. Reading about Jack’s burgeoning success, so shortly after her own employment catastrophe no less, was like trying on bathing suits in fluorescent lighting: nothing good to see here.

# # #

With a
Wall Street Journal
spread on her lap, Evie scrunched her forehead and pondered what she had just read. The London-based firm of McQualin, Craft & Breslow was hoping to double its presence in New York, specifically its M&A department. She’d poached the newspaper from a neighbor she was
pretty sure
was out of town after the front-page headline caught her eye.

According to the article, the firm was looking to hire at least five partners and twenty associates with this type of corporate experience. Several New York-based firms had approached them about merging, but they resisted, hoping to grow internally. This could be the perfect opportunity for her to rejoin the workforce. So why wasn’t she on the phone with the HR department trying to arrange an interview? What was holding her back?

It looked like a perfect September day outside. If she really were to return to law firm life, her opportunities to explore the city would come to an end. Besides her park walks and a few matinees
at The Paris, she hadn’t done much to culturally engage with the city she loved so much. So before she called over to McQualin, Evie decided to do something as completely uncharacteristic as throwing her computer into the muddy waters of Central Park—go to a museum just for the hell of it. Not to tell an artsy guy that she saw the de Kooning exhibit. Not to prove to herself she was multifaceted. No, she would visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art because she had lived in New York for twelve years and had never stepped foot inside. And that, in her mind, suddenly seemed despicable. Without the shackles of Baker Smith and the lure of her laptop tethering her to the couch, she had no more excuses.

Dressed in dark leggings and a long-sleeved shirt with a paisley scarf tied on for whimsy, she set out for the Met, pleased to discover the ideal autumn weather she had anticipated was even crisper than she imagined. Over the course of her thirty-minute walk, she passed five different Starbucks. The aroma of the macchiatos and Americanos was the perfect complement to the smell of chestnuts roasting in the vendor carts. Though she was still full from breakfast, she hungrily took in the scent of New York. This was where she was meant to be—outside, absorbing sunlight and breathing fresh air instead of recirculated air-conditioning. The trail of the season’s first fallen foliage, each leaf more vibrant than the next, made a far better footpath than the dizzying geometric pattern of the Baker Smith carpet. Everything was sharper when her face wasn’t pressed up against a plastic screen.

Her mother called while she was walking but Evie just let it ring. She still hadn’t told her mother about Jack being married. Nor had she been very clear about just how little effort she’d put into finding new employment. A voicemail beeped as she reached the museum’s famed granite steps. Evie’s heart muscle tensed when she listened to the message.

“Evie, it’s Mom. Please call me.”

From the tone, Evie knew right away the message was ominous. Her mother wasn’t calling to share the Greenwich Town Thespians spring musical announcement or to invite Evie to the mother-daughter Columbus Day brunch at the club. No, her mother had news. Bad news.

Evie called back, her fingers shaking as she dialed the number. It took her three tries until she was able to type it correctly.

“It’s me. What’s going on?” Evie didn’t even try to disguise the worry in her voice.

“Honey, Grandma Bette is sick. She has cancer.”

Evie felt queasiness overtake her. Her knees buckled and she had to take a seat.

“What kind of cancer? Is she all right?” Evie demanded of her mother.

“It’s breast cancer.”

Evie felt some of her tension ease up.

“Well, that’s treatable, isn’t it? She’s going to be fine, right?” Evie asked, trying to convey how much she needed the answer to that question to be yes.

“Well . . .” Fran said, her voice trailing off, and immediately Evie knew there was more to the story.

Evie wasn’t a stranger to hearing bad news—not by a long shot, and she knew better than most that a single phone call could turn the world upside down. She was in her freshman year of college when her dad passed away, after suffering a heart attack at work. Evie remembered her dorm phone ringing while she was hanging out with her girlfriends, widening their waistlines with pizza and beer to celebrate the end of midterms. She had almost ignored the call but for some reason she was guided by an inexplicable impulse to answer it. Maybe she had some extrasensory perception for tragedy.

There were no warning signs with her father, no prior health conditions, no bouts of extreme stress. His work-life balance was one of the reasons Evie felt optimistic about law school, though she quickly learned that large-firm life in Manhattan bore no resemblance to her father’s career. Henry ate dinner with his family almost every evening, sleeves rolled up to reveal the cheap digital watch of which he was so fond, and cleaned his plate no matter what was served. He would ask Evie about her classes and lament that he should have been a history professor. Nightly, he’d retire to the couch to watch ESPN. Sometimes she would watch with him, despite her lack of interest in sports, just because his presence was a comfort. His surprising death would forever leave in Evie the belief that bad news prefers to lurk in unexpected places. Not that it ever stopped her from searching for it.

What Evie remembered most about that phone call in college was her utter feeling of helplessness. There was no ambulance to call, no doctors to interrogate, no miracles even to pray for. He was gone. It was the first time in Evie’s life where there wasn’t even a remote chance of turning things around. Death was, in fact, the only truly permanent thing she’d ever experienced. Everything else that had happened to her up until that point was child’s play.

This time had to be different. She would not, she could not, lose Grandma Bette.

“Well what?” Evie pressed. “Is Grandma going to be okay?”

“Well we just don’t know yet how serious this is.” Her mother’s voice, like a warm hand on the shoulder, filled the line after a long pause. “But, Evie, we’ll get through this. I’ll fill you in on everything when we see you. Bette’s up in Greenwich with us now. She’s being treated at Sloan Kettering and will be moving into an apartment in the city soon, near the hospital.”

The phone slipped out of Evie’s sweaty palms and she scrambled
to rescue it before it slid any closer to a pile of dog poop on the bottom step. A rambunctious school group alighted the stairs at the same time.

“You’ve been with Grandma in New York?” Evie shouted over the din of the children. Why hadn’t her mother told her she was in the city? Didn’t Fran need her help or at least want her to visit Bette? Her mother no doubt was overwhelmed with Bette’s care falling on her. And everyone knew Evie was just sitting home these days counting her beauty marks.

“Honey, Bette didn’t want to upset you. I think she was hoping this would turn out to be overblown. That the doctors up here would say it wasn’t a tumor, just calcification.”

“You should have called me right away!”

“What difference does it make? Bette was clear that she didn’t want you to worry until we had more information. We all know you’ve got a lot going on,” Fran said cautiously.

What did that mean? She had nothing going on. Literally nothing. It was as if the absence of having anything in her life made her this fragile person whose sanity everyone was afraid to dismantle. Was her nothingness so great that it was becoming a “something”?

“Anyway, why don’t you hop a train and come up to see us today if you can? Grandma would love to see you.”

“Of course, I’ll leave for Grand Central now,” she said. She jumped into a taxi, inappropriately thinking how circumstances were conspiring to keep her from ever visiting a museum.

# # #

The train wasn’t crowded, thankfully, so Evie was able to have an entire row to herself. She was in no mood to put up with sweaty commuters dripping meatball sub juice or slurping Big Gulps. Without the distraction of a neighbor, she was able to process
what she’d just found out. The image of Bette’s ring finger waving in her face flashed through her mind. How she never expected that one day she’d look back on that with nostalgia? She would love to burst through the doors of Fran and Winston’s house and say, “Surprise, Grandma, I’m engaged! You may have cancer but look at my rock!” Bette vould probably say, “Evie-le, if I had known my getting cancer vould get you get married, I vould have gotten sick a long time ago.” And she would have meant it.

Bette and Evie were always a tight pair, so much so that Fran would accuse her daughter of being all Rosen and no Applebaum. But Lola Applebaum of Great Neck, Fran’s mother, never took the time to get to know Evie. She was too busy keeping up with the Joneses (in her case, the Kleins and the Cantors) to pay much mind to anything other than when she’d be able to lease a new Mercedes to park in her circular drive. Bette was totally different. She would often take her to school when Fran was working, and she sat front row at every one of Evie’s dance and piano recitals (despite her obvious lack of talent). In grade school Bette showered Evie with lollipops (usually given on the walk to school before 8:00
A.M.
) and Barbies, then twenty-dollar bills in high school, and then pearls of wisdom like “no one buys ze cow if zey get ze milk for free” in college. When Evie was dumped by her high school boyfriend the day before the homecoming dance, Bette stroked her back and watched
Family Ties
reruns with her until she fell asleep. When her first SAT score came back about 100 points light, Bette coaxed her into the car and drove all the way to New York to distract her with a favorite activity, pretending to shop for a very important customer at the Decoration & Design Building on Third Avenue.

They hatched a story during the four-hour drive that they were the
two principals of the formidable design team Rosen & Rosen, based in Baltimore, and were tasked with finding imported damask silk woven with real gemstones for an “A-list” celebrity client. After delivering their spiel a few times with straight faces, they collapsed in laughter at Scalamandré, a purveyor of wall coverings so luxurious they made Evie’s knees weak, and suddenly her poor showing on the math section of the SAT seemed to matter quite a bit less.

But after Henry died, their bond really climaxed. They—the generational bookends—seized on to each other like life preservers, and the thought of losing her grandmother now made Evie feel like she was drowning. She shivered on the over-air-conditioned train, wrapping her scarf more tightly around her.

At the New Rochelle stop, two ladies shuffled up the train steps. Out of an empty car, they selected the row right behind Evie. The women appeared to be about Bette’s age. They announced their arrival on the train with the heavy scent of Chanel No. 5 and the clanging of gold bracelets.

“I’m worried about her, Gladys,” one of the women said. “She’s no spring chicken.”

“Edith, relax. What is she again? Thirty-two?”

Evie felt her shoulders tense. She knew she should get up right now and switch seats, but some masochistic tendency forced her to stay put.

“She’s almost thirty-three. And not a single boyfriend in the last year. Imagine my Gayle, as pretty as she is, an old maid. Look at this picture.”

Evie heard Edith fishing around in her oversize purse. She was curious to see the photo, curious if Gayle was more or less attractive than she was.

“She’s a beauty, all right. Lovely skin,” Gladys said, after
Edith must have produced the picture. “And she’s not going to end up an old maid. No one would dream of calling her that until she’s at least forty.”

“You’re crazy. People probably already call her that. Or they will soon enough,” Edith said. “Her standards are too high. Of course, you think she listens to me? Of course not. I’m just an old-fashioned bubbe with too much to say.”

Evie was tempted to turn around and invite these women for lunch in Greenwich. They could have a nice chat with Bette over rugelach and iced tea.

“None of them do. They’re too busy on those Blueberry things to listen to anyone,” Gladys said.