“Good idea.” I sit at the table and watch as Joni finishes preparing the chicken breasts.
“Did you always like to cook?” I ask.
“Oh, yeah. Always. My mom was really great about letting me help. I think part of the reason is that she really didn’t like cooking; it was a relief for her to hand it off. So as soon as I was able, I began making dinner for the family. I loved it. I really did. I still remember the first meal I ever made: tomato soup and toasted cheese sandwiches.
“Every day, I would come home from school and put on my yellow apron and forget all about April Hastings and Beverly Whitman. They were awful. They made my my life hell all four years of high school. One day they sat behind me on the bus and put gum in my hair, and it took my mom forever to get it out.
“But anyway, I found cooking to be relaxing. I still do, at least when I cook here. The restaurant is another thing.” She looks up from unwrapping the cake of cream cheese. “Honestly? I’ve never said this out loud, but sometimes I wonder how much longer I can take it.”
“Maybe we should ask the cards.”
She smiles. “Maybe we should.”
AT DINNER, I ANNOUNCE that I’m going to take a road trip. To see Dennis Halsinger. And that I’m pretty nervous about it.
“How did you meet him, anyway?” Joni asks.
I laugh. “You know how I met him? I met him because of a loaf of bread.”
“That’s a pretty good first line for a how-I-met-him story,” Renie says.
“I guess it is.”
“So … what about the bread?” Lise asks.
“You want to hear the story?” I ask, and they all three nod.
“Well, I was nineteen and living in my first apartment. It was this tiny studio apartment at the back of a house near the university, and the act of buying a whole loaf of bread seemed like a minor miracle.”
“I remember that feeling,” Joni says. “I used to get excited that I could pick out whatever Kleenex box I wanted. And that I could eat the same thing three nights in a row if I wanted.”
“You cooked in your first apartment?” Renie asks.
“Of course. Didn’t you?”
“No. What was in my refrigerator in my first apartment was cheap beer. And I kept my underwear in there, when it was hot out.”
“But what about the bread?” Joni says.
“Okay, so I’d been to the little grocery store not far from me, and I was walking past Dennis’s house when he came out the door and smiled at me. I stopped dead in my tracks and said, ‘You want some bread?’ ”
“Why?” Lise says.
“Why did I ask him that?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll bet he was handsome,” Joni says.
“He was really handsome. He was tall and well built and he had long blond hair and these blue eyes with a kind of far calm like a lot of hippies did back then. He was wearing bell-bottom jeans and a white cable-knit sweater and he just … he just …”
“Oh my God, you jumped his bones, right?” Renie says. “You were all about free love in those days, right?”
“We were, but I was still a virgin. I didn’t really want to be. I think if he’d asked me that day, I would have gone right to bed with him.”
“Different times,” Lise says.
“Different times,” I agree. “But anyway, when I offered him the bread, he said sure and he invited me into his house and we sat at his table and ate it. And you’ll appreciate this, Joni: he had homemade apple butter that we put on it.”
“He made apple butter?”
“No, his mother did. And it had the prettiest handmade label, a trio of apple trees, done in watercolors. I told him how much I liked the apple butter and he went to the cupboard and got a full jar and put it in my grocery bag. And then he said he had to run some errands, did I want a ride home, and I told him no, that I lived really close by and I told him where. Then he went outside and he climbed into his powder-blue Chevy stepside, and I—”
“I love those trucks!” Renie says.
“Well, I do, too, and when I saw that he drove one—”
“But when did you sleep with him?” Joni asks.
“Oh. Well. That was later. But something else really wonderful happened first. The morning after I met him, I came outside, and Dennis was standing in my backyard. He asked if I wanted to go with him to the March on Washington. And I said no.”
“You said no?” Renie asks, incredulous. “To the March on Washington? The ’sixty-nine moratorium to end the war in Vietnam?”
“I said no.”
“Over two hundred and fifty thousand people went to that march!” Renie says. “It was the largest antiwar protest in history!”
“I know,” I say.
I’m still embarrassed about not having gone. I had no good reason not to. If I’d gone, I would have earned an internal merit badge. I would have felt something, understood something, committed far earlier than I eventually did to my antiwar stance. I would have taken my part as a citizen of the world, I would have seen that I was a citizen of the world, a small part of an organic whole. But a vital part.
I might as well make a full confession. “Guess what else I said no to. Woodstock.”
“No!” Renie says.
“I would have said no to Woodstock, too,” Lise says.
“Not me,” Joni says. “I remember wanting to go, but I was too young. I asked my parents and they said no and then for a whole day I made plans with my friend Betsy Schuler to hitchhike there but we got too scared to do it. But why didn’t you go?”
I smile. “You know why? When some friends came to get me for a last-minute pilgrimage they were making, I said, ‘Isn’t it raining there?’ ”
The women laugh, but then it’s quiet, and I’d guess we’re all thinking about lost opportunities, great regrets.
“But Dennis …” Lise says.
“Oh. Right. So I said no to the march, where he was going the next day. But that evening, I came back from having seen a movie and I found a note on the table. Dennis had been there earlier; my roommate had let him in before she went off to spend the night with her boyfriend. The note said just three words: Cecilia. Tonight. Dennis.”
“Oh, I love it,” Joni says.
“Why?” Renie says, indignant. “It’s so presumptuous!”
“It’s romantic,” the rest of us say, in unison.
Lise’s cell rings and she holds up a hand. “Let me make sure it’s not the answering service—I’m on call.” She looks at the number, and her face hardens. “Not the service,” she says. “Go ahead.”
Her daughter? I think. But I go on with the story. “Okay. So … I read the note and I got ready. I bathed, put on clean clothes, brushed my hair. I waited a long time, and he didn’t come. Finally I gave up and went to bed, but fully clothed, just in case he did show up. I remember I put a record called ‘One Stormy Night’ on the stereo to fall asleep to, even though it was redundant; it was raining.
“I woke up to a knocking at the door. I answered and there was Dennis, and the night looked so big behind him. I had no idea what time it was. I opened the door for him to come in. But he gestured for me to come out, so I followed him around to the front of the house. He had a motorcycle with him; I was surprised I hadn’t heard it when he pulled up outside, but I hadn’t. I got on the back and we went riding. It had stopped raining, but the streets were still wet. Dennis dipped really low from side to side, and it wasn’t scary; it was like dancing. I rested my chin on his shoulder and looked at all the things we passed by and I watched his face in the side-view mirror and I kept thinking, He is so handsome.
“When he brought me home, I made us peppermint tea. We brought our mugs out to the back steps to watch the sun come up. The sky was all rose and apricot colors, and then it started turning blue, and the birds began to call. It felt like a privilege to be up at that hour. It was like church. We went inside and he lay in my bed next to me. Neither of us spoke. For a long time, we were stil
l, letting ourselves get warm. Then he rose up on his elbow and looked down at me, and he gently stroked the hair off my forehead, then back from my temples. He kissed me once, a long, deep, and perfect kiss. And that was all we did. He lay down beside me and we didn’t say another word until he had to go. That kept it like a dream. Joan Baez has a line in a song: Speaking strictly for me, we both could have died then and there. Whenever I hear it, I think of that time with Dennis.”
I stop talking, realize I’ve told this latter part of the story without really being here; I’ve been elsewhere, lost in the reverie.
I look around the table, a little embarrassed.
Joni practically whispers, “But you didn’t have sex that time?”
“You know, when I told my best friend, Penny, that story I just told you, she said, ‘That was your first time.’ And I said no, that came later. And she said, ‘No, that was your first time.’ And she was right. Dennis and I made an unalterable connection that night. It was the first time I’d met someone so fully in the middle. For me, it was a transcendent moment, something that superseded anything physical.”
Joni says, “Whew! It’s a good thing you decided to go and see him. Because otherwise I would have had to take you. And I don’t have time to take you.”
“He’s your one,” Lise says, quietly.
And I nod, thinking I know exactly what she means. What I felt for Dennis right from the start was a pull like gravitation, a feeling that I already knew him in my bones, and that thus far in my life I had only been piddling around, waiting to find him. I know how this sounds. But it’s true as blue, as Dennis himself might say. Or would have, in those days.
“Your first,” Lise says. “There’s something so evocative about those words: the first.” She sits there for a minute, thinking, and then she says, “Where are you going, again?”
“Well, Dennis is in Cleveland, so I’m going there. But it’s a road trip, so I’m perfectly willing to roam around and go almost anywhere else, too.”
“Des Moines?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Well, I might come, then. I just might.”
“Who are you going to see?” Joni asks.
“If I go, I’ll tell you,” Lise says. Then, “So, Renie. What came in at work today?” Clearly she wants to change the subject.
Renie thinks for a moment, then says, “One from a woman whose son doesn’t like her boyfriend. One from yet another Bridezilla … Oh, and one from someone whining that the person who gives her massages keeps doing it wrong.”
Joni frowns. “Are you kidding?”
“I wish I were.”
“So what are you going to tell her?”
“I haven’t decided yet. But it will probably have something to do with suggesting she try hard manual labor rather than get massages.”
“What will you tell the woman whose son doesn’t like the boyfriend?”
“That’s a hard one. The boyfriend is why she got divorced. So how can she expect the kid to like him?”
“The mother has a right to her life,” Lise says.
“The kid has rights, too,” Renie fires back.
Joni has left the table, but now she comes in carrying the birthday cake, candles ablaze. “Guess what, Renie?”
“Oh, is it my birthday today?”
Joni starts singing the birthday song, and the rest of us join in.
“I want a huge piece of cake,” Renie says. “Do we have ice cream?”
“Frozen yogurt,” Joni says. “I’ll get it as soon as you open your gift.”
Renie rolls her eyes and accepts the large, gaily wrapped present. She opens it and says, “Oh thank God, it’s just what I needed.” She holds up a makeup kit, something obviously designed for little girls, all pink rhinestoned pots and brushes and tiny lipstick tubes. “ ‘Just Like Mommy,’ ” she reads. She stares at it, then drops it. She puts her elbows on the table, her face in her hands, and begins to cry.
“Renie?” Joni says, and Lise, seated next to her, puts her arm around her.
“What’s wrong?” Lise asks, gently, and Renie waves her hand: not now. After a moment, she puts her hands into her lap and says, “I have a daughter. Somewhere. When I was nineteen years old, I gave up a newborn baby. She’s twenty now. She was born in Winona on May first at four-nineteen in the morning. Seven pounds, twelve ounces. Twenty and one-half inches. Very dark, thick hair that already was over the tops of her ears. Mouth like a tiny little rosebud. One dimple in the left cheek, just one.
“When I was in labor, I refused painkillers because I wanted to feel everything. That was all I could give her, was to be fully present at the time of her birth. It hurt a lot. I held her for seven minutes after they stitched me up and then I never saw her again. I named her Camille. It was a secret—I knew her adoptive parents had named her Haley, but I named her Camille. That’s who I’d like to see. So. Let’s have that cake.”
THAT NIGHT, I TAKE RILEY out for a walk. He sniffs at the base of every tree trunk we pass and at various spots on the ground here and there for what seem to me to be unreasonable lengths of time, one paw held up high against his chest as though to lessen any possible contamination of the site with his own smell. Or perhaps it’s the dog equivalent of a person reflexively putting her hand to her chest, which often happens when people see something particularly interesting: witness visitors at museums, leaning forward to look at a thousand-year-old artifact in a glass case.
We walk three blocks, then four. It’s a nice temperature, the stars are out, and I want a little time to think. I wonder why I haven’t felt any regret about stopping work. Did it mean so little to me?
There is a lot of satisfaction, a lot of joy, that can come from doing something you love and that you’re good at, and I was good at my job. And yet it was nothing I ever expected to do.
In my late twenties, I took a job helping to care for a dying woman who was married to an extremely rich and powerful insurance magnate named Clement Burke. Every evening, he used to come and sit by his wife, and after she fell asleep for the night, he would talk to me until eleven o’clock, when it was time for me to go home. I was between jobs, casting about and beginning to feel a little desperate, looking for something that would stick. He was a man who had built his fortune on believing in things like Positive Mental Attitude, a man who, even in the face of his wife’s incurable illness, would tell her every night, Every day, in every way, you are getting better and better. At first I thought it was cruel, but it seemed to comfort her; and finally I decided that getting better didn’t necessarily mean getting cured, at least not to them. There was something that happened between the two of them when they said those words together, she lying pale in her blue nightie and holding on to his freckled hands, he with his face so close to hers and so full of love. There was something that happened that was beyond me, but that I understood anyway. It’s like the way you can read scientific principles that may be beyond you intellectually, but that your poet’s soul embraces.
After his wife died, Clem (as he asked me to call him) told me that he had very much appreciated the way I’d been able to rally his wife where others had failed. I got her to eat a bit, to get out of bed and sit by the window and look at the view, to allow a brief visit from this grandchild or that. Whenever she smiled, I felt a quick uptick inside myself: it felt good to provide her with whatever small pleasures I could.
Clem suggested that I become a motivational speaker, and that in fact he would be willing to hire me himself to do inspirational retreats with his sales force. At first it seemed a bizarre suggestion, but then the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea—why not try to help others be their best selves, why not turn what seemed to be a natural proclivity into a good-paying profession? I’d get to travel a lot, too, which I’d never been able to do before; those retreats were held in beautiful and interesting places. One time it might be a secluded abbey surrounded by layers of lush green, where you could hear the Divine Offic
e chanted at specified hours throughout the day. The next time might be at the Arizona Biltmore or in some pink towering structure in Miami so close to the beach the ocean seemed to be in your room with you. The job took me to Alaska and Hawaii, and more than once to luxury hotels abroad: London, Paris, Rome, Madrid. After I had worked for Clem for ten years, he died, and I didn’t care to work for his son, who lacked the qualities that made me so admire his father. Using all I had learned about the tenderness and fragility and vagaries of the human spirit, the needs and frustrations that we all share, I started writing self-help books. Then I began doing speaking gigs as well, based on those books.
I worked because I needed to, of course, but I also worked because it was the way I communicated best. I had always had a shy love of people; they broke my heart a million times a day. But from the time I was a little kid, I was a loner. I never liked recess. My favorite teacher in elementary school let me stay in from it; I always wanted to stay in. It’s not that I’m antisocial; it’s that I care too much, and so I have a lot of fears. It takes a lot for me to really get close to someone in an honest and undefended way.
A couple of years ago, there was a day when I had a lot of work to do. But I ignored it and took the whole day off. I loved that day, the ease and deliberateness of it, the way it put me in touch with my species in a way that was not virtual. Instead of talking to an imaginary reader, I talked over the fence with my next-door neighbor about gardening. Later, I sat in the backyard and listened to the birds, watched the movement of the clouds and the progression of the line of shade that moved across the back deck. I put a CD on the stereo and listened to it the way I used to listen to music: eyes closed, attentive to the nuances in a song, the way that a tiny shift in volume or diction or timing or chord structure could enlarge the feeling, the meaning.
I went to a bookstore and browsed. I ended up buying Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, because I’d never read it. I went to a coffee shop and sat at a little table with my latte and read for an hour and then I closed the book and engaged in conversation with anyone who wanted to talk: a young woman with hair to her waist and wide brown eyes who had just moved here; a man in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank who made you forget his disability in the space of one minute; a four-year-old boy who climbed up in the chair opposite me and told me all about his toy truck while his grateful mother talked to her girlfriend. Stepping away from my routine for just that one day made me feel as if I’d taken a vacation to some idyllic place. But that “place” was in me: a kind of rare peace and a deepened appreciation for other people; the small kindnesses I witnessed, the way I remembered—because we do forget—that we’re all in this together.