“Relieved?” Now this is a fine load of crap! “Are you kidding? She always wanted to go to Juilliard. She worked sooooooooo hard. It was her dream!”
Big studies my burning face, then says gently. “Whose dream, Len?” He positions his hands like he’s playing an invisible clarinet. “Because the only one I used to see working sooooooooo hard around here was you.”
God.
Marguerite’s trilling voice fills my head: Your playing is ravishing. You work on the nerves, Lennie, you go to Juilliard.
Instead, I quit.
Instead, I shoved and crammed myself into a jack-in-the box of my own making.
“C’mere.” Big opens his arm like a giant wing and – closes it over me as I snuggle in beside him and try not to think about how terrified I’d felt each time Marguerite mentioned Juilliard, each time I’d imagine myself—
“Dreams change,” Big says. “I think hers did.”
Dreams change, yes, that makes sense, but I didn’t know dreams could hide inside a person.
He wraps his other arm around me too and I sink into the bear of him, breathing in the thick scent of pot that infuses his clothes. He squeezes me tight, strokes my hair with his enormous hand. I’d forgotten how comforting Big is, a human furnace. I peek up at his face. A tear runs down his cheek.
After a few minutes, he says, “Bails might have had some ants in the pants, like most people do, but I think she was more like me, and you lately, for that matter – a slave to love.” He smiles at me like he’s inducting me into a secret society. “Maybe it’s those damn roses, and for the record, those I believe in: hook, line and sinker. They’re deadly on the heart – I swear, we’re like lab rats breathing in that aroma all season long…” He twirls his mustache, seems to have forgotten what he was saying. I wait, remembering that he’s stoned. The rose scent ribbons through the air between us. I breathe it in, thinking of Joe, knowing full well that it’s not the roses that have spurred this love in my heart, but the boy, such an amazing boy. How could I?
Far away, an owl calls – a hollow, lonesome sound that makes me feel the same.
Big continues talking as if no time has passed. “Nah, it wasn’t Bails who had it—”
“What do you mean?” I ask, straightening up.
He stops twirling. His face has grown serious. “Gram was different when we were growing up,” he says. “If anyone else had it, she did.”
“Gram hardly leaves the neighborhood,” I say, not following.
He chuckles. “I know. Guess that’s how much I don’t believe in the gene though. I always thought my mother had it. I thought she just bottled it up somehow, trapped herself in that art room for weeks on end, and threw it onto those canvases.”
“Well, if that’s the case, why didn’t my mother just bottle it up, then?” I try to keep my voice down but I feel suddenly infuriated. “Why’d she have to leave if Gram just had to make some paintings?”
“I don’t know, honey, maybe Paige had it worse.”
“Had what worse?”
“I don’t know!” And I can tell he doesn’t know, that he’s as frustrated and bewildered as I am. “Whatever makes a woman leave two little kids, her brother, and her mother, and not come back for sixteen years. That’s what! I mean, we call it wanderlust, other families might not be so kind.”
“What would other families call it?” I ask. He’s never intimated anything like this before about Mom. Is it all a cover story for crazy? Was she really and truly out of her tree?
“Doesn’t matter what anyone else would call it, Len,” he says. “This is our story to tell.”
This is our story to tell. He says it in his Ten Commandments way and it hits me that way: profoundly. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the storytelling aspect of life, of my life. I always felt like I was in a story, yes, but not like I was the author of it, or like I had any say in its telling whatsoever.
You can tell your story any way you damn well please.
It’s your solo.
This is the secret I kept from you, Bails,
from myself, too:
I think I liked that Mom was gone,
that she could be anybody,
anywhere,
doing anything.
I liked that she was our invention,
a woman living
on the last page of the story
with only what we imagined
spread out before her.
I liked that she was ours, alone.
(Found on a page ripped out of Wuthering Heights, spiked on a branch, in the woods)
Joelessness settles over the morning like a pall. Gram and I are slumped spineless over the kitchen table, staring off in opposite directions.
When I got back to The Sanctum last night, I put Bailey’s notebook into the carton with the others and closed up the box. Then I returned St Anthony to the mantel in front of The Half Mom. I’m not sure how I’m going to find our mother, but I know it isn’t going to be on the Internet. All night, I thought about what Big said. It’s possible no one in this family is quite who I believed, especially me. I’m pretty sure he hit the jackpot with me.
And maybe with Bailey too. Maybe he’s right and she didn’t have it – whatever it is. Maybe what my sister wanted was to stay here and get married and have a family.
Maybe that was her color of extraordinary.
“Bailey had all these secrets,” I say to Gram.
“Seems to run in the family,” she replies with a tired sigh.
I want to ask her what she means, remembering what Big said about her too last night, but can’t because he’s just stomped in, dressed for work after all, a dead ringer for Paul Bunyan. He takes one look at us and says, “Who died?” Then stops midstep, shakes his head. “I cannot believe I just said that.” He knocks on his head nobody-home-style. Then he looks around. “Hey, where’s Joe this morning?”
Gram and I both look down.
“What?” he asks.
“I don’t think he’ll be around anymore,” I say.
“Really?” Big shrinks from Gulliver to Lilliputian before my eyes. “Why, honey?”
I feel tears brimming. “I don’t know.”
Thankfully, he lets it drop and leaves the kitchen to check on the bugs.
The whole way to the deli I think of the crazy French violinist Genevieve with whom Joe was in love and how he never spoke to her again. I think of his assessment of horn players as all-or-nothing types. I think how I had all of him and now I’m going to have none of him unless I can somehow make him understand what happened last night and all the other nights with Toby. But how? I already left two messages on his cell this morning and even called the Fontaine house once. It went like this:
Lennie (shaking in her flip-flops): Is Joe home?
Marcus: Wow, Lennie, shocker … brave girl.
Lennie (looks down to see scarlet letter emblazoned on her T-shirt): Is he around?
Marcus: Nope, left early.
Marcus and Lennie: Awkward Silence
Marcus: He’s taking it pretty hard. I’ve never seen him so upset about a girl before, about anything, actually…
Lennie (close to tears): Will you tell him I called?
Marcus: Will do.
Marcus and Lennie: Awkward Silence
Marcus (tentative): Lennie, if you like him, well, don’t give up.
Dial tone.
And that’s the problem, I madly like him. I make an SOS call to Sarah to come down to the deli during my shift.
Normally, I am The Zen Lasagna Maker. After three and a half summers, four shifts a week, eight lasagnas a shift: 896 lasagnas to date – done the math – I have it down. It’s my meditation.
I separate noodle after noodle from the glutinous lump that comes out of the refrigerator with the patience and precision of a surgeon. I plunge my hands into the ricotta and spices an
d fold the mixture until fluffy as a cloud. I slice the cheese into cuts as thin as paper. I spice the sauce until it sings. And then I layer it all together into a mountain of perfection. My lasagnas are sublime. Today, however, my lasagnas are not singing. After nearly chopping off a finger on the slicer, dropping the glutinous lump of noodles onto the floor, overcooking the new batch of pasta, dumping a truck-load of salt into the tomato sauce, Maria has me on moron-duty stuffing cannolis with a blunt object while she makes the lasagnas by my side. I’m cornered. It’s too early for customers, so it’s just us trapped inside the National Enquirer – Maria’s the town crier, chatters nonstop about the lewd and lascivious goings-on in Clover, including, of course, the arboreal escapades of the town Romeo: my uncle Big.
“How’s he doing?”
“You know.”
“Everyone’s been asking about him. He used to stop at The Saloon every night after he returned to earth from the treetops.” Maria’s stirring a vat of sauce beside me, a witch at her cauldron, as I try to cover the fact that I’ve broken yet another pastry shell. I’m a lovesick mess with a dead sister. “The place isn’t the same without him. He holding up?” Maria turns to me, brushes a dark curl of hair from her perspiring brow, notes with irritation the growing pile of broken cannoli shells.
“He’s just okay, like the rest of us,” I say. “He’s been coming home after work.” I don’t add, and smoking three bowls of weed to numb the pain. I keep looking up at the door, imagining Joe sailing through it.
“I did hear he had a treetop visitor the other day,” Maria singsongs, back to everyone else’s business.
“No way,” I say, knowing full well that this is most likely the case.
“Yup. Dorothy Rodriguez, you know her, right? She teaches second grade. Last night at the bar, I heard that she rode up with him in the barrel high into the canopy, and you know…”
She winks at me. “They picnicked.”
I groan. “Maria, it’s my uncle, please.”
She laughs, then blathers on about a dozen more Clover trysts until at last Sarah floats in dressed like a fabric shop specializing in paisley. She stands in the doorway, puts her arms up, and makes peace signs with both hands.
“Sarah! If you don’t look like the spitting image of me twenty years – sheesh, almost thirty years ago,” Maria says, heading into the walk-in refridgerator. I hear the door thump behind her.
“Why the SOS?” Sarah says to me. The summer day has followed her in. Her hair is still wet from swimming. When I called earlier she and Luke were at Flying Man’s “working” on some song. I can smell the river on her as she hugs me over the counter.
“Are you wearing toe rings?” I ask to postpone my confession a little longer.
“Of course.” She lifts her kaleidoscopic pantalooned leg into the air to show me.
“Impressive.”
She hops on the stool across the counter from where I’m working, throws down her book. It’s by a Hélène Cixous. “Lennie, these French feminists are so much cooler than those stupid existentialists. I’m so into this concept of jouissance, it means transcendent rapture, which I’m sure you and Joe know all about—” She plays the air with invisible sticks.
“Knew.” I take a deep breath. Prepare for the I told you so of the century.
Her face is stuck somewhere between disbelief and shock. “What do you mean, knew?”
“I mean, knew.”
“But yesterday…” She’s shaking her head, trying to catch up to the news. “You guys frolicked off from practice making the rest of us sick on account of the indisputable, irrefutable, unmistakable true love that was seeping out of every pore of your attached-at-the-hip bodies. Rachel nearly exploded. It was so beautiful.” And then it dawns on her. “You didn’t.”
“Please don’t have a cow or a horse or an aardvark or any other animal about it. No morality police, okay?”
“Okay, promise. Now tell me you didn’t. I told you I had a bad feeling.”
“I did.” I cover my face with my hands. “Joe saw us kissing last night.”
“You’ve got to be kidding?”
I shake my head.
As if on cue, a gang of miniature Toby skate rats whiz by on their boards, tearing apart the sidewalk, quiet as a 747.
“But why, Len? Why would you do that?” Her voice is surprisingly without judgment. She really wants to know. “You don’t love Toby.”
“No.”
“And you’re dementoid over Joe.”
“Totally.”
“Then why?” This is the million-dollar question.
I stuff two cannolis, deciding how to phrase it. “I think it has to do with how much we both love Bailey, as crazy as that sounds.”
Sarah stares at me. “You’re right, that does sound crazy. Bailey would kill you.”
My heart races wild in my chest. “I know. But Bailey is dead, Sarah. And Toby and I don’t know how to deal with it. And that’s what happened. Okay?” I’ve never yelled at Sarah in my life and that was definitely approaching a yell. But I’m furious at her for saying what I know is true. Bailey would kill me, and it just makes me want to yell at Sarah more, which I do. “What should I do? Penance? Should I mortify the flesh, soak my hands in lye, rub pepper into my face like St Rose? Wear a hair shirt?”
Her eyes bug out. “Yes, that’s exactly what I think you should do!” she cries, but then her mouth twitches a little. “That’s right, wear a hair shirt! A hair hat! A whole hair ensemble!” Her face is scrunching up. She bleats out, “St Lennie,” and then folds in half in hysterics. Followed by me, all our anger morphing into uncontrollable spectacular laughter – we’re both bent over trying to breathe and it feels so great even though I might die from lack of oxygen.
“I’m sorry,” I say between gasps.
She manages, “No, me. I promised I wouldn’t get like that. Felt good though to let you have it.”
“Likewise,” I squeal.
Maria sweeps back in, apron loaded with tomatoes, peppers, and onions, takes one look at us, and says, “You and your crazy cohort get out of here. Take a break.”
Sarah and I drop onto our bench in front of the deli. The street’s coming to life with sunburned couples from San Francisco stumbling out of B&Bs, swaddled in black, looking for pancakes or river rafts or weed.
Sarah shakes her head as she lights up. I’ve confounded her. A hard thing to do. I know she’d still like to holler: What in flying foxes were you thinking, Lennie? but she doesn’t.
“Okay, the matter at hand is getting that Fontaine boy back,” she says calmly.
“Exactly.”
“Clearly making him jealous is out of the question.”
“Clearly.” I sink my chin into my palms, look up at the thousand-year-old redwood across the street – it’s peering down at me in consternation. It wants to kick my sorry newbie-to-the-earth ass.
“I know!” Sarah exclaims. “You’ll seduce him.” She lowers her eyelids, puckers her lips into a pout around her cigarette, inhales deeply, and then exhales a perfect smoke blob. “Seduction always works. I can’t even think of one movie where it doesn’t work, can you?”
“You can’t be serious. He’s so hurt and pissed. He’s not even speaking to me, I called three times today … and it’s me, not you, remember? I don’t know how to seduce anyone.” I’m miserable – I keep seeing Joe’s face, stony and lifeless, like it was last night. If ever there was a face impervious to seduction, it’s that one.
Sarah twirls her scarf with one hand, smokes with the other. “You don’t have to do anything, Len, just show up to band practice tomorrow looking F-I-N-E, looking irresistible.” She says irresistible like it has ten syllables. “His raging hormones and wild passion for you will do the rest.”
“Isn’t that incredibly superficial, Ms French Feminist?”
“Au contraire, ma petite. These feminists are all about celebrating the body, its langage.” She whips the scarf in the air. “Like I said,
they’re all after jouissance. As a means, of course, of subverting the dominant patriarchal paradigm and the white male literary canon, but we can get into that another time.” She flicks her cigarette into the street. “Anyway, it can’t hurt, Len. And it’ll be fun. For me, that is…” A cloud of sadness crosses her face.
We exchange a glance that holds weeks of unsaid words.
“I just didn’t think you could understand me anymore,” I blurt out. I’d felt like a different person and Sarah had felt like the same old one, and I bet Bailey had felt similarly about me, and she was right to. Sometimes you just have to soldier through in your own private messy way.
“I couldn’t understand,” Sarah exclaims. “Not really. Felt—feel so useless, Lennie. And man, those grief books suck, so formulaic, total hundred percent garbage.”
“Thanks,” I say. “For reading them.”
She looks down at her feet. “I miss her too.” Until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to me she might’ve read those books for herself also. But of course. She revered Bailey. I’ve left her to grieve all on her own. I don’t know what to say, so I reach across the bench and hug her. Hard.
A car honks with a bunch of hooting doofuses from Clover High in it. Way to ruin the moment. We disengage, Sarah waving her feminist book at them like a religious zealot – it makes me laugh.
When they pass, she takes another cigarette out of her pack, then gently touches my knee with it. “This Toby thing, I just don’t get it.” She lights the smoke, keeps shaking the match after it’s out, like a metronome. “Were you competitive with Bailey? You guys never seemed like those King Lear type of sisters. I never thought so anyway.”
“No we weren’t. No … but … I don’t know, I ask myself the same thing—”
I’ve crashed head-on into that something Big said last night, that awfully huge something.
“Remember that time we watched the Kentucky Derby?” I ask Sarah, not sure if this will make sense to anyone but me.
She looks at me like I’m crazy. “Yeah, uh, why?”