The Original 1982 (23 page)
W
hile Maeve takes the kids to a matinee in Sag Harbor, Alan and I hang out on the porch with Lola the beagle and the paper. Maybe it's because of the rain, but I can smell fall coming. The hydrangea bush in the yard is still full of purple blossoms, and the lawn is lush and green, but soon it will be September and everything will start to change. A few Indian summer days, and the leaves turn yellow. Before you know it, it's winter again.
“You having a nice weekend,” Alan asks, “in spite of the crappy weather?”
“Totally,” I say. “I
like
the rainâespecially out here. I wish I didn't ever have to leave.” I'm feeling nervous about returning to sunny L.A. I know it's just a matter of time before I run into E and have to pretend to be over it. I feel the tears start to burn my eyes and the back of my throat.
“You
will
meet someone else, you know,” Alan says. “Your life isn't over.”
That's when I lose it. Kindness always does me in. I probably will meet someone, at some point. But I'll never be young again. I'll never have a child. That part is over.
“Heyyy,” he says, placing his arm across my shoulder. “Don't cry.” He's wearing a wool sweater that smells like wet dog. I think Lola's been rolling in it.
“You stink,” I say through tears.
“Oh, thank you. Thank you very much,” he says, and soon we're both laughing.
He hands me the Book Review and I pass him the Arts section. We go back to reading the paper. Lola is whining softly, dreaming. I think she's chasing squirrels in her sleep. Beyond her, I notice droplets of rain clinging to the tips of hydrangea petals.
By the time Maeve and the kids get back, the sky has cleared and the rain has stopped. “What are we doing for dinner, guys?” she calls, gently reprimanding us. We haven't done a thing about it yet.
“I'm getting the barbecue started right now,” Alan says, getting up, while I follow Maeve into the kitchen.
H
ours later, I'm hunched over the child's desk in my room when Samantha comes in to say good night. She shows me her freshly brushed teeth and leans into me.
“Very nice,” I say about her teeth.
She's wearing pajamas with ballerinas on them that are too small for her. She has such delicate wrists and ankles. “Are you still writing your story?” she asks.
“I am,” I tell her. The original black composition book has become two over the course of the summer. I'm rewriting my own memories.
The past can be anything you want
.
“I'm writing a story, too,” Samantha says. “It's about a girl detective. Maybe you can read it tomorrow.”
“I'd love to.”
“Will you read me yours?”
I look through the notebooks for something that might be appropriate to read to her and settle on the pages about fish and guinea pigs and cats. She listens with her chin in her hands.
“What do you think?” I ask when I've finished. I close the notebook.
“It's good,” she says with great authority.
W
hen we get back to town on Sunday night, I find JC waiting on the front steps of the brownstone. I'm not completely surprised to see him because of his text message:
what time u comin home?
“Hey, you,” he calls. His dark hair is falling into his eyes. He flips it away and reaches for me.
“Wait a sec,” I say. We watch as Alan and Maeve's car turns the corner. I don't want them to see him kiss me.
I open the door and hold it for him. He follows me up the three flights of stairs to the narrow floor-through. We kiss in the dark, in the foyer, under the archway. As we move toward the bedroom I'm trying not to worry about my fifty-two-year-old body. The last time JC saw me naked I was relatively perfect. Now, under my shirt and jeans, I have cellulite, fat on my belly, and sagging breasts. Of course, he isn't young anymore either.
One day you'll be sixty, I silently scold myself, and then seventy, and eighty, if you live that long. You're going to look back on this night and know what a silly thing it was to worry about.
“Relax,” he says.
Still, I don't let him take my clothes off until we're safely hidden beneath the covers.
A
couple of days later, I'm three thousand miles away, pulling into the driveway of my house, a 1920s bungalow at the top of a climbing street. There's a green shutter hanging off a window. The yard is dusty and overgrown. “You poor thing,” I say.
I bring my bag inside, turn on the sprinklers to give the garden a drink, and then head out to my studio, a small building behind the house that used to be a garage. There are cobwebs in the corners and the guitars are covered in dust, but it's a good room with an A-line roof and a couple of skylights. It always smells a little of sawdust. I know I'll miss it if and when the house is sold.
I pull the cover off the piano and sit down to change the strings on my Martin. It's my favorite songwriting guitar and has been for as long as I can remember. Ever since Jules lent me the money to buy it. Its rosewood body has a worn patina only love and time could give it.
It's already dusk when I lock up the studio and come back inside. I turn on the TV and all the lights, but the house feels too quiet. There's no food in the kitchen except for some stale cereal. I stand at the counter and eat it straight from the box. From my window, I can see the downtown skyline glittering in the distance.
When I call Jules, she screams, “You're back!” She launches right into her news, excited to tell me about a new collector. He's interested in one of her larger mixed-media pieces. Its sale will pay the bills for months.
“You hungry?” I ask her.
“Not very,” she says. “But come get me.”
She's waiting out front when I pull up in my beat-up Land Rover. Her place isn't much more than a concrete box, but it looks good. She's filled the front yard with wild lilacs, hollyhocks, and black-eyed Susan.
She climbs into the seat beside me and we drive over to the health food restaurant on the Third Street Promenade, where we always go. I get the same thing every time: a veggie burger with sweet potato fries. She takes pride in her healthy diet of tofu and kale and anything with flaxseed oil. Meanwhile, she's ducking outside every fifteen minutes for a smoke.
We talk and talk, dissect every feeling and thought. It's good to get her perspective on things. She's able to place our failures and regrets in the context of archetypes and mythological tales. By the end of the night, she's convinced me that what I really need is a dog.
T
he next morning, I begin my search, scrolling through pictures on Petmatch.com the way some look for love on a dating site. When I see her profile, I know she's the one. A border collie mix, supposedly part Eskimo dog, she's white with light brown patches. There's something tender yet intelligent in her expression. Excited, I forward the link to Jules.
Check out her name,
I write.
Like the Van Morrison songâis it kismet?
she writes back.
She has a lovely face.
We take a ride to the Valley to pick her up. I've already faxed my paperwork. I've got four hundred in cash in my pocket. Jules brings Madeline along, one of her own dogs, a half-blind Chihuahua mix who's going on twenty. “Madeline's a good judge of character,” she says.
My dog has been rescued from a kill shelter and is being fostered by a couple in Reseda. They think she looks to be about a year old.
We get on the 101. It's a long drive up through the Cahuenga Pass. “Remember when Bighead called me, thinking he had called you?” Jules never tires of talking about the man who brought us together. We've had a version of this conversation more times than I can count.
“Of course I remember,” I say.
“He was incredulous! âYou've got a roommate
and a dog
in that place?' I didn't know what he was talking about.” Her laugh is still a girlish bell.
“I think my apartment must have once been someone's sewing room,” I say. “It was teeny-tiny.”
“You couldn't turn around in there! You used to bathe with your dishes in the bathtub.”
“There was no kitchen sink. There was no
kitchen
!”
“I lived with Katherine. At the Normandy. Remember? We called it the Dorm-andy. And George, of course, that handsome boy. He was still a puppy.”
Cigarette smoke curls up over our heads. I ask her to crack the window. Nobody smokes anymore. “When are you going to quit those?” I ask, not bothering to hide my annoyance. “You look like Popeye the Sailor!”
She laughs at that. “You know, nicotine is actually very good for cognitive function.”
I roll my eyes at her. “I really do want you to quit!” I say. “I'm not kidding.”
“All right,
all right,
” she says, taking a final drag before dropping the cigarette out the window. “Take it easy.” She gives my shoulder a pat.
When we get to Reseda, we circle around awhile before finding the street. Some of the houses in the neighborhood have forlorn guard dogs behind chain-link fences and broken-down cars in the yard.
“There it is,” Jules says. We pull up to a small ranch near the corner and lock up the car.
When my dog appears at the door, she looks like a princess in the wrong part of town. The woman fostering her holds her by the collar. “Do you still like her?” she asks.
Is she kidding? Does she think I could look at that face and change my mind? “I certainly do,” I say, kneeling down to scratch her head. I haven't had a dog since I was a kid. She pants a little and raises her ears. She has dark markings across her nose, like freckles. Her eyes are soulful and bright. “What a good girl you are,” I say, stroking her back. I dig into my pocket for the wad of cash and hand it to the foster woman. She counts it and grins. She has a gold crown in the place of an eyetooth.
“Okay,” she says, handing the leash to me. “You go with your new mommy now, Brown-Eyed Girl.”
T
hough I put the bungalow on the market only weeks after returning to Los Angeles, 2010 was not a good year to sell a house in need of repair, so I continue to live in Silver Lake. This morning, like most days, I carry my coffee out to the studio, Girl at my heels. I turn on my gear and stare at the first line of a song I've been stuck on all week.
If love isn't love/What do I do now?
Late in the day, Alan calls. “How's it going?” he asks. “We were just thinking about you.”
It's evening there. I can hear the commotion of dishes being cleared away, Maeve asking the kids about homework. Girl is sitting at my feet, looking straight up into my eyes. I cup her head with the palm of my hand. “It's going well,” I tell him.
“Glad to hear it,” Alan says. “Hang on a minute. Someone wants to say hello.”
When he puts Samantha on the phone, she asks me, “Did you finish your story yet?”
“Yes,” I tell her. “I finished it. Do you know what some people call it when you finish a story, Samantha?”
“What?”
“They say you've put it to bed.”
G
ood night, Little Fish.
Once I carried you in my belly and held you wrapped in a blanket in our garden, under a star. You were a ten-year-old girl with snow on her eyelashes and had a guinea pig named Z, whose fur was soft as a bunny's. You sang a harmony to your father's melody one miraculous night and were your grandfather's chess partner, a girl who loved prime numbers, asked questions, and fell in love.
Your heart was broken the way every heart breaks, when a pet falls sick and dies, when someone you love doesn't love you back, when you have a dream that, for whatever reason, never comes true.
But your heart became full, the way every heart becomes full, of wonder and appreciation for life's beauty. Every spring, summer, fall, and winter, a surprise. Years of sunrises, stars and sandy beaches, books and music, skies with clouds that pass over, friendships that grow deep, laughter, and love, that most amazing gift, fleeting and miraculous as a comet.
In the original 1982, Minnow, you were a soul hovering, wherever it is that souls hover, and one day your soul passed over mine. We touched briefly, the way souls do, and though it didn't last long, it changed me, and I never forgot you.
There's no going back, but one day someone will read these words and won't know what was true from what was invented. That's what all memories are like, in time. When I'm gone, and Gabriel is gone, and everyone who knew us is gone, you will be still be in the world.
Dulce sueños,
Minnow. Sweet dreams, my love.
Ya te extraño,
already I miss you.
T
o my friends and family, my early readers: your support and feedback helped immeasurably. Janet Rienstra, Paul Pimsler, Leslie Shipman, Ken and Cindy Carson, Meryl Kramer, Gregory Henry, Jacquie Leader, Kim Greist, Leon Ichaso, Gary Baker, Judith Ehrman-Shapiro, Dawn Dover, Edith Carson, Sherri Fischer, David Wecal, thank you, and especially Lisa Walker, for your generous encouragement, for reading every version, and for sharing your experiences of pregnancy and motherhood in the eighties.
Thank you to all the beautiful children I've had the privilege to know: Alex and Michael Carson; Matthew and Brayden Fischer; Max and Adam Ehrman-Shapiro; Ben Ehrman; Elizabeth, Bibi, and Madeline French; Aiden, Beatrice, and Will from East Ninety-fourth Street; Leo at five; and most especially, the delightful and lovely Chloe Carson.
Thank you to my fellow writers at the Writing S. group. Your wisdom never fails to inspire me. Thank you, Elisabeth Robinson, for our conversations about writing and the writing life, and especially for sending Sheila Gaffney my way. Sheila, I don't know what I would have done without your insights. I'm very grateful for the afternoons we spent at my table, taking the book apart and putting it back together.
Dan Kirschen, thank you for your kind help in the day-to-day, and to all at ICM and William Morrow/HarperCollins, thank you for all you do.
To Lisa Bankoff, my amazing, smart, fun, kind agent. When I am asked how I found you, I always say it was a miracleâa cold query letter sent by e-mail, late one night, and answered thirty minutes later. Lisa, thank you for changing everything.
Last but not least, thank you, Kate Nintzel. You are a mind reader and brilliant editor. I don't know how you do that. Thank you for carving away the excess and asking the right questions, for helping to bring the heart of my story into focus and Minnow into the world. I'm forever grateful.
