Stop That Girl (20 page)

That night a cool breeze blew in from the sea. We returned all the food and dishes to the kitchenette, and Jiao bought us a pizza to say thanks. The inspection was a success. Will and I could stay on. But something was bothering me, and in my bed I tossed and turned like a netted fish. Finally I gave up trying to sleep, rolled out of bed, and made myself a cup of cocoa. And I must have woken up my sister, because soon she materialized in her flannel pajamas in the hall.

“You all right?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “How about you?”

“I couldn’t sleep either,” she said.

“Want some?” I said.

“Might as well,” she said.

We padded back into the fake kitchen, and I put another mug of water into the microwave. I watched it going around and around. And then my sister said, “I know this is an intrusive thing to say, but I wish you wouldn’t always act like everything’s great, even when it’s not.”

“Me?” I said. “Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why would you?”

I licked the cocoa off my lips and said, “How am I acting like it’s great?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I feel like I can’t talk to you about your existence. You seem defensive about things.”

“By the way, why
isn’t
it great?” I said.

“God! Forgive me if I say this place seems a little less than ideal.”

“Less than ideal, sure, but no worse than where Mom and I lived before you were born.”

The microwave pinged. I brought out the mug and added the brown powder from the pouch, stirred and observed the granules dissolve, then presented it with a few clumps still floating on top to my sister. She slurped. “Ouch,” she said.

“Careful,” I said.

“How come you never told me about you and Jiao?” she said next.

“Me and Jiao?”

“That you guys went out together!”

“That,” I said. “Well, it wasn’t anything. How’d you dig that up?”

“Today when he was putting back the wall thing and you were out shopping, we all got to talking.”

“Oh. That’s kind of disturbing. What did he say?”

“Nothing specific, but I could tell.”

What was she getting at? “It was just a few dates and a few kisses,” I said. “No big deal.”

“Well, I got the feeling it was to him.”

“No, he’s just lonely and letting off steam.”

“But he seems so nice! And he has those nice kids, and he’s in the same situation you are. And he owns this house!”

“So?”

“Why did you leave Boston anyway? You loved working on that magazine.”

When I looked at my sister, standing in her pajamas in my pseudo-kitchen, her hair messed up like when she was little, I couldn’t help it that I still saw her as a kid. “What’s bothering you, anyway?”

“I wish you and Will would come live near us,” she said. “Now that I see you here, I just don’t understand.”

“You think my world here means nothing to me?”

“No, of course not. It just seems—” She couldn’t finish.

“What? It seems what?”

“I don’t think Mom would be very happy about it,” she said.

“What makes you so sure? Wouldn’t she be happy that I’m reasonably happy?”

“Yeah, but doesn’t it seem she’d be asking you the same questions I have been?” she said.

“So you’re just stepping in on her behalf?”

“Something like that,” my sister said.

After our mother’s stroke—which had been sudden, and complete, an aneurism the size of a rock, Roy at her side when she called out
Wait, something’s wrong, I don’t feel
right
—my sister and I took a trip to visit her then-boyfriend at Tulane University in New Orleans. It seemed like a good idea to go on a trip just then.

To save money we signed up for one of those driveaway cars packed full of someone else’s television, stereo, sewing machine, and boxes of books, and we drove there from New York in under two days. She didn’t like it that I drove so fast, and I didn’t like it that she complained, but mostly we were quiet or we cried all the way. About as grim as a 1,129-mile drive in a car full of someone else’s stuff could be. Relatively speaking, it was a relief to get to her boyfriend’s fraternity house and sack out on the rancid floor of the lounge.

I wasn’t happy being there, but I wasn’t happy anywhere. I didn’t know what I would do with myself next. I thought about Roy, traveling around the world to get his mind on straight. I thought of the sterile, doctorly way my grandmother took the news. There was a coil of anger in me, a sense of
all for nothing
over everything I’d ever accomplished.
For nothing at all.
And not a thing could convince me otherwise. Walking around that city alone, eyes stinging in the flinty air, I found myself one day caught up in a bellicose crowd. Mardi Gras had begun. A parade was thundering past. I ducked into a bar to wait it out. There were men in this bar with the seats of their pants cut out and no underwear on, as well as some others in taffeta party dresses with their blubbery chests pushed up into hairy cleavages. Everybody was drinking up a fit. It had been a few months to the day since Roy called from the emergency room and broke the news, and I ordered a Bloody Mary. A thin man who looked bland compared to the others sat next to me and tried to convince me to let him read my veins. The bartender said, He’s the real thing, little girl, and an older woman at the bar came straight over and said, I must watch this. He’s a legend around here. He won’t do this for just anyone, you know.

I said I didn’t have the money for such an honor and the woman said, I’ll pay. And she inserted a twenty into the pocket on his chest.

So the thin man chose my left arm, took my hand, rolled up the sleeve of my sweater (it was cold in New Orleans that February), and then began to trace the blue lines up and down my skin. It tickled. I tried to relax. Soon I felt warm all over. He began to tell me about my future. He said my destiny was unlike the destiny of anyone in my family history. He said I was someone with immense inner strength. He said I’d traveled many miles to get where I was now—metaphorically, of course—and that I would crawl on my knees, if I had to, to get to the place I was going. Nothing would get in my way. I laughed. He was totally full of it. He obviously didn’t know anything about me. Then suddenly the man grew concerned. The woman dragged intently on her cigarette, one of her ankles turned in, and she nearly toppled over. The man tried to roll my sweater farther up my arm. He pushed my sleeve into my armpit. He was looking at the high white part of my innermost arm. He pressed on my skin as if to see better. He said he was looking at something mysterious.

What is it? I asked impatiently.

I get the feeling, he said, that when you get to this place it’s going to confuse you. You’re not going to understand why you’re there. It will feel all wrong. You’ll feel lost. But don’t give up. With great leaps of faith, you’ll find your way.

Great, I thought. A small crowd had gathered around. The woman who’d paid for this gave me a pat on the shoulder. Beer was a heavy vapor in the air, horns blasted out on the street, and I suddenly experienced a wave of claustrophobia. Thanking the vein reader I pushed my way out, and on a balcony across the street a woman was stripping, flinging her clothes down into the crowd. In moments she was topless. And the clog of people around me roared. I wanted to go back and find my sister. But while I was stuck between one person and the next, shoulder to shoulder, gazing up at the breasts, which were exposed like two pale eggs abandoned in a nest, I suddenly realized it was true I was at an important crossroads, and that my sister’s boyfriend was lucky to have such a forward-thinking, energetic person in his life, dealing with things much better than I ever would, and that this woman up on the balcony held the enviable place out of the fray because she was willing
in her own way
to move forward and share something of her real self, and that until I was able to do this, I would always be down here—metaphorically, of course—suffocating.

In one of those mysterious revelations that only last a moment but are utterly elaborate and complete, I thought I finally had a new understanding about my life. It had to do with the last conversation I’d had with my mother the night before she died, which had been a normal, everyday talk, but which had ended with her just happening to say, “I love you to pieces, you wonderful girl.” Wasn’t it lucky, to have that the last thing she ever said to me? And then there were her ashes, suspended now in the stratosphere, taken by Kathy and Roy and me to the edge of Cape Royal; as they fanned out on the updraft, I’d seen that place as if for the first time.

(So much of the near past had been a blur. The only positive thing I did during that time was take a night class at the Cambridge Adult Center. There I laughed peckishly at just about everything that poetry teacher of mine said, pathetic in my need to cheer up. Just the word
ham,
for example, because one night our class went out to eat, and with a glazed ham steak glistening on my plate, he had urged me to fling it into the center of the restaurant, and to prove my artistic spontaneity I’d done it. Everyone in the class roundly approved. But here I was supposed to be having some kind of life, and flinging a ham steak in a restaurant in Harvard Square was pretty much the most distinguished thing I’d managed to do.)

All the way back to the frat house, I barely registered the bodies I pushed against, the noise, the smells, that’s how buoyed I was by this nebulous good feeling and the fortune I’d been told. A shrill wind blew down the tunnels of the gray city streets off Lake Ponchartrain, but I barely felt it. I’m glad I was in such a positive frame of mind when I found Kathy, because she had just broken up with her high-school sweetheart, the very person we had driven all this way to see. My sister is a very careful person. She keeps all her receipts and parts her hair as if cutting a diamond. It’s hard to believe such a careful person would have gone so far out of her way just to break up with someone, but that shows how out-of-sorts we both were at the time.

We packed up, decided to leave that very afternoon, and found a driveaway car going north to Richmond, Virginia, from where we’d take a train. On and on we drove, well into the night, both of us drained. At some point I fully opened my eyes and said, “Are you all right?”

“Not really,” she replied.

I could see we were no longer on the interstate. It was a two-lane road alive with the sound of crickets and fresh with the smell of grass. “Are we lost?” I said.

“I’m tired and I’m looking for a place to stay,” my sister said, with an edge.

It was then that I considered what the vein reader had said to me and realized it might be all right if we were lost. Maybe the more lost the better. Finding our destiny, and so on. It was in that spirit that I looked ahead and saw the tall man wearing bell-bottoms standing near the stop sign. He was laughing and wearing a hat. And for some reason I was filled with a disproportionate feeling of pleasure at the sight of him in the headlights. A man standing by a stop sign! A laughing man. At nearly midnight! Not everyone is tucked in at this hour after all; I liked that. Not everyone retires to a comfortable bed. Would he stick out his thumb, ask us for a ride? What would my sister think? Would she step on the gas or stop and let him in? Who would he be, what was his story? Was he a civilized person or just a bum? I’d get her to stop; we’d get this man to talk. Who knows what stories he could tell. But as the car slowed down, I realized the man in the bell-bottoms was not a man but a defunct tree, all gnarled trunk, a few wild suckers sprouting from the base. Hard to believe, but tears stung my eyes.

“Maybe you’d better drive,” my sister said then. “I guess I really am too tired. I thought that was a man standing there.”

“Wearing bell-bottoms?”

“Now that you mention it, yes, it looked like he was wearing embroidered pants.”

“That’s funny, I thought it was a man too.”

“You did?” my sister said, pulling over. “Didn’t he look nice?” We both laughed.

I was thinking how amazing it was that we’d both been open to the possibility that a laughing man in bell-bottoms standing by a stop sign in the middle of the night might help us move on with our lives, and just then she held my hand.