Songs Without Words (10 page)

9

S
he had the dark look around the eyes that Liz didn’t like, the faintly hollowed cheeks. And she spoke a little too quickly, as she often did in times of difficulty. Trying to outrun herself was how Liz thought of it.

“I wonder how they’ll manage,” she kept saying. “I wonder if maybe they’re too old.”

They were at their usual Thai place south of Market, sitting at their usual table. The phone call that had brought this dinner into being had readied Liz for a Sarabeth in bad shape, but not this bad, or not this apparently bad: she looked a little as she had in the weeks after her breakup with Billy. She was very sensitive to loss—as how could she not be? Though what she was losing if Mark adopted a baby, Liz couldn’t quite see. Maybe just an idea. A wish. If you’d been through what she’d been through, that could be a lot.

“Do you think they’re too old?” Sarabeth said. “I mean, just from an energy standpoint?”

The answer, of course, was no, but what effect would that have? Put another way, would Sarabeth be better off hearing how hard it would be? Or how wonderful? This dilemma was as familiar to Liz as the restaurant, the food, the melancholy look on Sarabeth’s face. Liz felt it was important to be truthful, but she also felt there was generally more than one truth, and the choice of which to deliver could help or hinder.

“What an adventure,” she said, skirting the question altogether. “Imagine, you go on a trip and return home with someone you’re going to know for the rest of your life.”

The waitress arrived with their soup, and they leaned away from each other while she filled their bowls, the tangy, orangey milk of the broth and the little curled bits of chicken.

“Tom ka gai,”
Sarabeth said. “This should help.”

Liz raised her wineglass. Years ago, they’d been in the habit of going to a different restaurant every time they met—the latest hot spot or some out-of-the-way gem Sarabeth had discovered—but in the last few years they’d settled here, and it was more honest somehow: their dinners weren’t about going out, they were about getting together, and as if to prove it they ordered the same food every time.

“Hey, how’s Lauren?” Sarabeth said after they’d both had their first taste of soup. “I never heard how she liked
Howards End.
”

Liz thought of Lauren’s tearstained face last Friday, when she got her paper back. The way she’d allowed Liz to hold her, the way she’d allowed herself to be held. The next day, it had been as if none of it had ever happened.

“She didn’t,” she said. “She had a hard time with the paper.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Sarabeth said. “I should have suggested something else. I feel bad.”

“Don’t be silly. She has to have these experiences.”

“You really think that?”

Liz remembered resisting Brody’s saying about the same thing:
It’s good practice for life.
What did she think? Did she wish the kids had no challenges, no disappointments? What a pointless wish that would be, like wishing winter wouldn’t come, or illness, or death. But in a way she did wish it, because she hated the suffering.

She spooned up some broth and glanced around the restaurant. It was starting to fill, a SOMA crowd of thirtyish high-tech types. The women wore low-slung jeans and clingy featherweight sweaters, a far cry from the kind of thing Liz had worn when she was their age and working. Suits, it was then. Jackets with shoulder pads.

“Never mind,” she said. “Let’s talk about you. How’s
Anna Karenina
?”

Sarabeth smiled and leaned forward. “Last Thursday? Esther comes up to me afterward and says, ‘Dear Sarabeth, this is the highlight of my week.’ And she hands me three incredibly old Hershey’s kisses—like, with the little white tags practically gray.”

“That’s so sweet,” Liz said.

“Isn’t it? I always feel like she’s handing me a tiny piece of her life.”

“Maybe she is. So someone will have it when she’s gone.”

“Oh, that’s sad,” Sarabeth said, setting her spoon down and sinking back into her chair. “And beautiful. You always say things that are so true.”

“Please.”

“You do. Billy noticed it, did I…did I ever tell you that?” Sarabeth kept her eyes on Liz for a moment, then colored and looked away.

Liz thought of her one and only encounter with Billy. She had always feared, especially as they grew older, that Sarabeth would find her way to a married man, but she’d never imagined someone as dangerous as Billy, as adept at hiding his treachery behind a veil of compassion and intelligence. She’d also never imagined how distressing it would be for
her,
nor how reluctant she’d be to meet him. Sarabeth had begged for months, and finally, when Liz could make excuses no longer, she drove to Berkeley and had the most awkward and stilted lunch with the two of them, Sarabeth trying so hard to be at ease, Billy as full of himself as she had expected, and the idea of his family hovering everywhere. Leaving afterward, she had shaken his hand and said, “It was so nice meeting you,” when what she was thinking was: You monster.

“I’m sorry,” Sarabeth said now.

“For?”

“Bringing it up. Actually, making you do it in the first place.”

Liz shook her head. Looking at Sarabeth’s tiny white face, her unruly hair, the curve of her narrow shoulders—she had a renewed awareness of how much Billy had meant to Sarabeth, saw how much Sarabeth was still in anguish. She wished she had some way to lift it—lift the misery off Sarabeth the way you could lift a mesh dome off a bowl of potato chips, straight up, without jostling the sides of the bowl.

In a few minutes the waitress arrived with their red curry beef, and they waited while she cleared away the soup. From a stamped tin tureen she spooned rice onto clean plates, then ladled the
panang
over it.

“I’ve been thinking,” Sarabeth said once she was gone, “maybe I should invite her to tea. Esther, I mean. Like I could take her to a place with scones and real china, and we’d sit there and talk about life. But I’m not so sure I should. It’s like, do I want to change the relationship?”

“That’s a good question,” Liz said. “It’s like my mother and Mrs. Nudelman.”

“Your mother and Mrs. Nudelman what?”

“When she got sick. My mother took her lunch every day. You didn’t know that?”

“I don’t think so,” Sarabeth said. And then, “God, Mrs. Nudelman. I haven’t thought of her in years.”

She had lived across the street from Liz’s family, right next to Sarabeth’s: an old lady in a small Spanish-style house fronted by the most beautiful garden. Long before Mrs. Nudelman fell ill, Liz’s mother had been friendly with her, asking her for advice on growing tulips in California, bringing home jars of her kumquat preserves. Then the roles changed.

“What did she have?” Sarabeth said.

“Cancer.”

“Did we know that?”

“I don’t think so. Or if we did, we didn’t know what it meant.” Liz pinched up some rice in her chopsticks and dabbed it in the sauce. It was strange: in childhood the idea of cancer had been so terrible it had been almost without meaning. And that somehow made it not terrible—made it nearly nothing. She thought of how knowledge accumulated in layers rather than linearly, how you learned the same things over and over, but differently each time, more deeply. This made her think of rain, sprinkling lightly, dampening the earth; and then sprinkling again and pouring down, and the earth taking it in and getting wet with it, drenched with it. And then, over time, gradually drying out again, as in old age the mind sometimes cleared itself, and memories—and knowledge—were lost.

“Do you ever dream about Cowper Street?” she asked Sarabeth.

“Not that I remember. Do you?”

“I dream about our backyard. The orange trees. I don’t exactly dream about them, but I kind of dream their smell.”

“That smell!”

“Our own little madeleine moment.”

“But in reverse.”

Liz leaned back and felt herself relax. She was always glad when she and Sarabeth talked about the past; she thought of it as good therapy for Sarabeth. Liz sometimes even brought up Lorelei:
Remember the time your mother played Monopoly with us for six hours? Remember when your mother taught us how to make popovers?
She had to be careful, though, because so many moments that for her had been harmless, even fun, for Sarabeth had been—or had, in retrospect, become—very fraught.
Remember the time your mother modeled that silky gray dress for us? And we thought she looked so beautiful?
In response to which Sarabeth might say, bitterly:
You mean the one she ripped to shreds because she thought my father didn’t like it?

Sometimes Liz felt it was best to pretend Lorelei had never existed.

After dinner they stood together outside the restaurant, clutching their coats close. They were almost directly under the freeway, and the sound of cars on wet road was everywhere.

“So a week from tomorrow,” Liz said. “Are you sure you don’t mind bringing your same salad?”

“Of course I don’t mind. Anyway, the kids love it.”

“That’s not a good reason—would you rather bring something different?”

“Liz,” Sarabeth said. “Are you sure you don’t mind making your same turkey?”

“OK, you got me.”

They hugged and parted, and Liz started the long walk to the garage where she always parked. It unnerved her a little, being alone in the city at night, and she kept a brisk pace, her purse tight at her side. The buildings she passed were dark and warehouselike, though a few had lights on upper floors and company names etched on the narrow glass sidewalk-level doors. Stopped at a crosswalk, she was joined by a big guy in a leather jacket, and her heartbeat hammered until the light changed and he took off ahead of her. She passed a seedy-looking doughnut shop with a single old man sitting hunched over a cup of coffee, and then an empty lot in which she could just make out the forms of several homeless people lying in sleeping bags. She was ashamed of herself, being afraid of such unfortunate people.

In the van she felt better. As she made her way to the garage exit she thought, for some reason, of those orange trees on Cowper Street, with their hard, shiny leaves. There’d been lemon trees, too, that produced lemons with incredibly thick skins. You’d cut one open, and there’d be half an inch of white pith surrounding the tart fruit. Her mother had made lemonade with them. Liz remembered the summer when she and Sarabeth were thirteen, how day after day they sat under the big tree in the backyard and read aloud the advice column from
Seventeen
magazine, all the while sipping from tall glasses of homemade lemonade. If John had a friend over they’d read in loud voices, trying to attract the boys’ attention. If Steve had a friend over Liz would tell them not to come out back, and Steve would pout and tell their mother, but in the end Liz and Sarabeth would be left alone, the yard theirs. How long ago that was, when you could be at once so dramatic and so innocent.

She paid the garage attendant, and soon she was on the freeway, doing sixty, heading home. Already, there were Christmas billboards up: Gap scarves, De Beers diamonds clipped to the branches of a fir tree. “How do they get those signs up there?” Joe had asked at age five or six. “With an airplane?”

She switched to 280, drove past the neon of the Serramonte Center, along the rim of the vast, light-dotted bowl that was South San Francisco. The airport became visible, then the wide, irradiated mouth of the Valley. And then the freeway twisted to the west, and soon there was little to see from the road but the darker dark of the hills, the lighter dark of the sky.

No one knew where she was right now—not precisely, not with complete certainty. She approached the turnoff for 92, the road to Half Moon Bay, and she imagined a piece of herself splitting off, taking the turn in an alternate van, the two of them heading up the mountain, other-Liz and other-van, the twists and turns of the narrow road. She followed them to the top, then stopped at the first point on the downward stretch where the ocean became visible. From there she leaped to the distant beach, soaring downward with her arms spread, and she remembered a moment in college, in a class on twentieth-century poetry that Sarabeth, from across the bay, had urged her to take because the professor was a famous poet herself, visiting just for the quarter. There was a long poem that the professor had read aloud, and at the end it was something or other about birds going “downward toward darkness, on extended wings,” the words themselves dark and majestic as they filled the Stanford classroom. “They’re on extended wings,” the professor said when she was finished reading, “but they do go down.” All these years later Liz remembered the moment vividly, the professor with her little voice, speaking of the biggest things there were. The chill she felt as she listened.

November was always rainy, but Lauren thought this year was worse than usual. Rain and rain and rain, cold air on her neck, damp seeping through her shoes to her feet.

She was in math, and a steady stream of water leaked down the windows, blurring the view. She had math last period every day, and as if math itself weren’t bad enough, Aimee Berman sat across the aisle from her. Today she had a huge hickey on her neck, and she was pretending to be embarrassed by it. At lunch Lauren had seen her covering it with her hand and laughing with her girls. They were huddled under the overhang in their idiotically matching outfits: skirts over bare legs, despite the weather. Aimee’s was this ugly plaid thing, but on her it looked good. Her legs were so perfect, it was like they weren’t even real.