Yes, she could pick. The worst was “Jones.”
“I would have invited you, but you wouldn’t have come.”
“That’s true.”
“And you are … staying home and watching a movie with Drew.”
“Yes.” Sometimes Carmen made it easy for her.
“That’s just sad.”
But never that easy.
“No, it’s not sad. It’s what I like to do. Anyway, we can’t all be rich and glamorous.”
“Len, I’m not demanding glamour. You’re just not allowed to be that boring.”
Lena laughed. “Hey, did you do the kissing scene yet with the renegade cop?”
“No, that’s Friday. He has terrible breath.” Carmen’s voice was swallowed by what Lena guessed was a bus plowing by.
“Can you come to New York next weekend?” Carmen’s voice was asking when it came back.
“So you and Effie can take turns biting at my flesh until I’m dead?”
“Oh, please. Len. It wasn’t that bad last time.”
“How about the drunk DA who asked if he could give me a sponge bath?”
“Okay. I promise I won’t drag you to any dinner parties or introduce you to any men this time.”
“Anyway, I can’t. I’m teaching Saturday morning and I’ve got a painting to finish.” Lena was genuinely looking forward to a quiet weekend in the studio.
“You haven’t been here since Labor Day. You used to come all the time. What happened?”
What happened? That was a good question. And it wasn’t just the slobbering DA to blame. She’d gone all the time when Bee, Carmen, and Tibby all lived in a pile on Avenue C. She had gone every weekend. But that was a long time ago—more than three and a half years ago. Before they’d lost the lease, before Tibby had moved in with Brian and subsequently moved to the other side of the world, before Bee had moved to California, before Carmen had gotten semi-famous and taken up with the infernal Jones. Before her little sister, Effie, had moved to New York in a blur of open bars, pedicures, and sample sales, chewing up Manhattan from one end to the other. New York felt different now.
“I won’t make you do anything,” Carmen promised. “You don’t have to buy, wear, or say anything. I can’t speak for Effie, star journalist, but I will leave you to wander around the Met for two days if that’s what you want. Anyway, Jones is gonna be out of town.”
That made it slightly more tempting.
“You’ll let me know,” Carmen said, stealing the words from her mouth.
Lena thought of something. “Hey, Carma?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Did Tibby text you about something coming in the mail?”
Carmen must have ducked into a store or a lobby, because it was suddenly quiet. “Yes. Weird, huh. You didn’t get anything yet, did you?”
“No.” Lena hadn’t checked her mail slot yet today. She made a note to do that, with some combination of excitement and speculative concern. They heard from Tibby little enough that they circulated the news quickly when they did.
“Nothing good ever comes in the mail,” Carmen opined.
Carmen was so attached to her iPhone she might have had it sewn into her skin if iSurgery were offered at the Apple store. She didn’t trust information that came any other way. But Lena liked the mail. She was talented at waiting.
Carmen’s phone started beeping. It always did that eventually. “My manager,” Carmen said. Her voice was once again immersed in street noise. “Talk to you. Love you.”
“Bye.”
Lena had less than ten minutes of peace before her phone rang again. This time it was her mother from the car. She could always tell that particular connection.
“Hi, sweet. Just checking in.”
“Okay.” At least her voice was broken in now.
“How are things?” Her mom sounded relaxed, which meant she probably hadn’t talked to Effie yet. She usually called her two daughters in a row, and Lena and Effie agreed, it was always better to get the first call. Her mom was a worrier. After she talked to Effie, she was tight with concern about all the parties and the credit card debt and the crazy goings-on. After she talked to Lena, she was tight with concern about the absence of parties and credit card debt and crazy goings-on. Lena insisted that her mom worried about Effie more, but Effie insisted that no, it was definitely Lena.
“She’ll die in her bed alone or with cats” was Effie’s cheerful summary when anyone asked about Lena. But then, Effie’s idea of a quiet night was getting home from the clubs at three instead of five.
“How’d you sleep?”
Her mom always asked that, however near or far from sleep Lena might have been. “Fine.” That was how she always answered, however well or unwell she’d slept.
“Did you have lunch?”
Lena glanced up at the clock. Should she have? “Yes.”
“What did you eat?”
“Mom. Why do you need to know that?” It was as though her mother believed if she stopped asking, Lena would stop eating. If she stopped calling, Lena would stop talking. If she stopped bothering her, Lena would cease to be. It wasn’t enough she had given Lena life at the beginning. Her mom seemed to feel the need to do it every day.
“I don’t. I was just asking.”
She loved her mother and depended on her mother, and yet every single word her mother said annoyed her.
“A turkey sandwich. How’s Dad?”
“Fine. I talked to Ariadne about the painting. She says forty by forty-eight would work, but do you have anything with more blue?”
“With more blue?”
“She’s redecorating. She bought a new couch.”
“Seriously, Mom. More blue?”
“I’m just passing along what she said.”
“I don’t have any other landscapes that size. I have figures, but they aren’t blue.”
“Lena, don’t sound mad. She wants to support you.”
Lena knew that. And she could have used the sale. If she didn’t want her mom pimping her paintings to suburban friends with blue sofas, she’d have to submit to showing her paintings in the normal way. Two times she’d been given spots in group shows, once in Providence and once in Boston. Both times she’d sold her paintings and gotten unambiguously positive write-ups in the local press, and both times she’d gotten an outbreak of cold sores so bad she could barely eat for days. When the dealer called to read her the review in the Herald, her feet sweated straight through her socks. Even good things could be traumas to her.
“Well, who knows. Maybe the muse will come.” Her mom wanted to wrap it up without an argument. Lena heard her turn off the car.
“The muse doesn’t get to pick the color.”
“I’ve got to go, darling. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Lena hung up and glared at her feet. The next time the phone rang, she wouldn’t answer. She would let it ring itself out. She would be like Bee and lose her phone, maybe even stop paying the bills until the phone company turned off her service. Then she could enjoy a little quiet and not have to invent turkey sandwiches or defend her way of being.
But the phone began to ring less than an hour later and she didn’t let it go. What if it’s Tibby? She knew it wasn’t, but she couldn’t suppress the thought. When was the last time Tibby had called her? When was the last time Tibby had even responded to an email? But she thought of Tibby’s recent text and she couldn’t let the phone go past the second ring, even though it was obviously not Tibby, but rather Effie, or possibly Carmen telling her what movie she should rent tonight.
In some way she didn’t like to admit, Lena was always waiting for a call. Not from the people who were always calling, but from the ones who never did.
“Bridget, what are you doing?”
Bridget looked up. Eric was mostly blotted out by the setting sun as he strode up the walk, pulling his tie loose and his collar apart as he always did in the final stretch of his way home from work.
S
he stood and kissed him on the lips. “We don’t really need this anymore.”
“That’s my nightstand.”
“You can just pile the books on the floor, can’t you?”
Bridget was carefully laying clothes on top of the nightstand before she carried the whole setup from the front steps to the sidewalk.
“But I like having a nightstand.”
“I need to move the plants in from the kitchen, because they aren’t getting near enough light in there. The leaves are turning yellow. Our bedroom has the best light. It’s like the plant ICU.”
“I can’t rest my coffee cup on a plant.”
“You can rest it on the floor,” Bridget said reasonably as she hobbled to the sidewalk with the nightstand. “It’s not like we have a real bed. The nightstand looks weird with just the mattress on the floor.”
Eric was shaking his head, but he didn’t look mad. Not really. “Bridget, I’ll be lucky if you don’t leave me on the sidewalk to be carried away.”
“You won’t be carried away,” she assured him.
The truth was she was always looking for things to put out on the curb. There was a large community of homeless people who convened in Dolores Park, and she’d gotten to be kind of friendly with them. She didn’t like to give handouts, but she was happy to leave things that might be useful, or things they could sell at the Mission flea market. Twice she’d actually bought her own possessions back by accident.
Eric jokingly accused her of wanting to be homeless herself, and she did frankly romanticize a life of sleeping under the stars. “I’d probably rather be a cowboy or an explorer,” she told him. Maybe she’d been born in the wrong era.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked her cheerfully, following her up the stairs to their second-floor apartment.
“I don’t know. What do you feel like? Maybe Pancho’s?” She could tell he was hoping she’d made something, or shopped for something to make. She should’ve. She hadn’t worked today. She was still temping and she hadn’t gotten called in a week.
What had she done? She’d spent the first part of the day searching the apartment for things to give away or throw away. She’d spent the middle part of the day waiting in the express mail line at the post office to send Lena and Carmen each a package of authentic corn tortillas she’d bought from a Mexican lady with a cart on Sixteenth Street, spending five times as much on the postage as she’d spent on the tortillas. (She’d gotten some for Tibby too, even knowing that she didn’t have Tibby’s current address and that Australia was too far to send something that would spoil.) She’d spent the last part of the day realizing she’d been a bit too zealous in throwing stuff out and searching for her cellphone in the garbage cans out back. She’d called herself from her neighbor’s landline about ten times, listening for the trash to ring.
“We had Pancho’s last night.”
“We did? That was last night?”
“Yes, it was. Do we have any eggs? I could make an omelet,” he offered.
She checked the refrigerator. “We have five.”
“That’ll do.”
“And I got some handmade corn tortillas.”
“Perfect.”
“We could eat outside,” she suggested as she began assembling ingredients. They shared a tiny backyard with the two other tenants. It consisted of recycling bins, a plastic table, two chairs, and a gorgeous Meyer lemon tree.
He went into their tiny bedroom to change into jeans and a T-shirt.
“How was work?” she asked through the open door.
“Good. I got a new case.”
“Immigration?”
“Yes. Has to do with a second grader named Javier. A great kid.”
Eric always had a huge load of cases, and half the time he ended up doing it for almost no pay. His mother was from Mulegé, so Eric spoke Spanish like a proper Mexican. Half the cases came with stories that could break your heart, and Eric never turned down any of them. People from his graduating class at NYU Law worked at fancy firms making twice the money, pushing paper for big corporations, but Eric never wanted that. “My heart wouldn’t be in it,” he said.
She looked up as he came out of the bedroom in his oldest jeans and an Amnesty International T-shirt. It was the same thing almost every time Eric came home from someplace or even just walked back into the room where she was. She felt something, some little clap inside her head like a distant echo of the thunderous knock she had felt when she’d seen him the first time at soccer camp just before she turned sixteen. It wasn’t always entirely comfortable. “What you two have, that’s called chemistry,” a nutty drunk in the park named Burnt Sienna had told her once.
“I tried to call you a bunch of times today,” Eric said. “Did you get any of my messages?”
“I … um … no. I didn’t have my phone with me.” She didn’t want to say her phone was likely in one of the garbage cans out back.
Eric got a certain look, somewhere between impatience and amusement, when she misplaced her phone again, or gave away large portions of their belongings, or spent the afternoon fishing in the bay with a homeless man named Nemo, as she had done the day before. “Nobody could accuse you of being boring” was what he often said when he got that look. And frankly, having somebody like Bridget around was what Eric needed, because he was prone to habits and ruts and he knew it. Who else got him out to street festivals, free concerts, bike-a-thons, and community gardening projects? Who else got him to try surfing and jujitsu and the leggy, oily creatures they served at the restaurants in deepest Chinatown?
“You didn’t lose your phone again, did you?”
“Uh. I don’t think so.” She started flipping through the free newspaper she’d picked up at the BART station.
He gave her that look. “Bridget, if you don’t want the phone, it would be cheaper just to cancel the service. That way Carmen and Greta and Perry and your dad and I and whoever else wouldn’t have to leave all those messages for you that you never pick up. You’d save us the trouble.”
“That’s true. Hey, look,” she said, pointing to an ad in the paper. “There’s a one-bedroom on Guerrero for $1,850 a month. That’s pretty good.”
“I like this place. I don’t want to move again. We’ve moved four times in the last year and a half.”
“I like Guerrero. I bet it’s a fifth-floor walk-up, but I don’t really mind that if it’s high enough to get a lot of sun. I wonder what cross street.”
She spent her life following the sun, seeking the brightest apartment in San Francisco. She didn’t really care about any other feature. There was always a sunnier place than the one she had, a better spot for the plants, which accounted for a lot of the moving. When she’d found this place, she’d actually pounced on it while Eric was at work, and he’d come home to an empty apartment because she’d forgotten to tell him they’d moved. “We don’t live here anymore,” she’d told him when she’d finally discovered him, bewildered, in the bare bedroom.
She’d thought this place would be the answer. But it turned out the kitchen wasn’t really very sunny at all.
Eric started cracking eggs. He got egg white on his jeans. He is very handsome, Bridget thought. He loved her in spite of herself, and that seemed like a lucky thing.
“I was calling you because I had an hour free at lunch and I wanted to take you to that little shop behind Union Square to get you a dress for Anna’s wedding.”
“Oh, right.” His cousin Anna was getting married in Petaluma the following weekend, and he was excited about it. Eric thought weddings were romantic, and they gave him the opportunity to bring up the topic of marriage. Bridget got a certain look, somewhere between anticipation and fear, when Eric started talking about getting engaged. “I don’t need a new dress. I can get Carmen to send me one of her leftovers.”
“Carmen is four inches shorter than you are and her clothes are totally wrong for you. Remember that weird black stretchy thing with the feathers?”
Bridget la
ughed. “That didn’t look great on me. I admit.”
He came over and put his arms around her and kissed the side of her neck. “You are going to be the most beautiful woman at that thing. I want you to wear your hair down. I want to show you off. Let me be shallow once in a while, will you?”
Bridget wasn’t so sure she wanted to be the most beautiful woman at that thing. There was the bride to consider, first of all. And besides, she didn’t have much to prove in that way. She knew she was put together well. She had always known that. She had the attributes that people thought they wanted: blue eyes, long legs, a graceful neck, genuine yellow hair. She’d thought her hair would fade a bit as she got older, but it hadn’t. It was her mother’s hair, her grandmother’s hair, her bittersweet birthright; she wouldn’t get rid of it that easily.
Bridget didn’t suffer from those ailments that picked at you over a lifetime, like allergies or acne, dandruff or a sore back, floaters in your eyes or lust for food that made you fat. She went straight to the hard-core stuff, the rough waves in the gene pool, like the depression so severe it had taken her mother’s life. Sometimes she felt that the outside of her gave a very incomplete account of the inside of her.
She knew she should do a better job of strutting her stuff once in a while for Eric’s sake. She certainly did take pleasure in the way he looked. But she hadn’t accumulated much in the way of clothes and makeup. She couldn’t really afford it. Eric thought her disinterest resulted from a puzzling lack of confidence, but it wasn’t that. She knew how she was.
Eric cocked his head and walked to the back window. “Do you hear that?”
“No. What?” Eric had weirdly good ears.
“It sounds like a phone ringing. It sounds like your ring.”
Bridget went over and craned her neck out the window. It sounded like her phone, all right. “I had a feeling it might be down there,” she said.
With his weirdly good ears, Eric followed the sound down the stairs and out the back door to the large square plastic trash bin. She heard his laughter rising to the back window. “God, Bee, have I been calling the garbage all day?”