“You can’t?”
“Honey, they’re all coming. They are like our extended family. I couldn’t think of not having Ari and George. And Lena? That’s not a question. I can’t exactly say everybody come but leave Effie home.”
“Why not?” Tibby said sourly.
“Tibby.”
“So would you mind disinviting me?”
More and more, Tibby spent her time watching TV. She’d given up on the computer and her “Script.” She watched all the murder shows. All the makeover shows. All the soap operas. All the cooking shows. Even the bug shows and the history shows. She blew most of her savings buying a TiVo on eBay. With the rest she bought a used PlayStation. Everything she needed was right there in that little TV. She watched for Maria Blanquette, but she never came on anymore.
There were quiet moments, though, maybe in the middle of the night or the very early morning, when the countless hours of TV sanded her brain down so that she could see life’s bigger patterns. And then Tibby had the sad thought that while she was staring at the screen, Brian, former Dragon Master, was being with a girl and living a life.
To:
[email protected];
[email protected];
[email protected] From:
[email protected] Subject: It
* * *
I truly cannot believe I’m writing a shotgun e-mail to tell you this, but I couldn’t tell one of you without telling the others.
I did it. It it. Or we did it, I should say. Me and Leo.
Bee, I think it was you (was it not) who bet a dozen crullers it wouldn’t happen before I was twenty-five. Ahem.
It’s not that I was in a hurry or anything. I really wasn’t. I would have forked over the donuts. I think I just realized that I was waiting for something that wasn’t even real.
I’ll have to give you the details in person when we are together. (Carmen??)
I’m suddenly picturing my dad seizing my computer and reading everything I write.
Love, love, love, love, love,
Your Loving Lena (Lover of Leo)
Originally, Bee’s return trip took her from Izmir to Istanbul to New York and ended with a short flight to Boston. Her plan at the time was to end up in Providence with a week and a half to get in shape for preseason soccer training camp.
But at the airport in Istanbul she switched the flight to Boston to a flight to Washington, D.C., instead.
And what made her happy, after a disorienting number of hours in transit, was seeing Tibby and Lena at the very front of the baggage area waiting for her. She ran at them, almost flattening them in her joy.
“I’m so glad you are here!” she shouted at them.
“We missed you,” Lena said as Bee hugged and hugged them.
“I missed you,” Bee avowed.
There was too much to say, so they didn’t bother quite yet. They drove to Angie’s downtown and stuffed their faces with pancakes and bacon even though it wasn’t breakfast time, and felt happy to be together. Bee realized they were good at trusting that the moment would come when all would be shared and all would be known. They would wait until Carmen was with them for the true unburdening.
Bridget was lucky, she really was. In the ways that counted.
“I’ve got to take care of some things at home,” Bee said as Tibby pulled her mom’s car up to Bee’s house. “But I’ll come by your parents’ party later, okay?”
“Good. It’ll be you, me, Len…Brian and Effie,” Tibby said darkly.
“Oh, no,” said Bee. “Really?”
“Yes.”
Bee looked at Lena, who shrugged. “Has Effie ever done what I wanted?”
“I’ll bring my riot gear,” Bee said.
Bee realized after she’d waved good-bye and watched them go that she did not have the key to her house. She didn’t feel like knocking. She left her bags in front of the door and went to the back of the house. She still knew the tricks of the kitchen door. She jimmied it patiently and it opened for her. She walked purposefully inside.
Her dad was still at work, she guessed, and Perry would be in his room. She got her bags from the front of her house. She marched them upstairs. Without stopping to think too much she unzipped her duffel bag and began putting her things in her old, emptied drawers.
She opened a window in her room. When she was done unpacking, she walked down to the kitchen and opened a window there, too. She made a quick circuit around the small and overgrown backyard, stopping briefly to pull a few hydrangea balls from the neighbors’ bush. She put the blue flowers in a glass in the middle of the kitchen table.
She looked in the refrigerator. There wasn’t much there. A bottle of ginger ale. A half-full carton of milk. Some takeout boxes. A wilting bunch of celery in the bottom drawer.
In the cabinet were various cans, who knew how old. Then she remembered the cereal. She opened the pantry door and saw the impressive lineup of boxes. Both her father and her brother were big on cereal.
She found a bowl and a teaspoon. She poured herself a short layer of cornflakes and added some milk, pleased that it had not yet expired. She sat herself down at the little kitchen table. She wasn’t hungry and it didn’t taste particularly good, but she ate it.
She left her bowl and spoon in the sink. She left her purse dangling on the chair.
For better and worse, this was her home, and she would remember how to live in it.
The magic had worn off. The loveliness had vanished absolutely. She was back to sweatshirt Carmen, though it was too hot to actually wear one.
She stayed in her bed, trying to sleep through rehearsal. She felt the old Destructo-Carmen impulse, and she tried to work it.
Julia was sympathetic. She brought her cookies and tea from the canteen. She brought her bags of salty Fritos and let her borrow her iPod. She promised they would never talk about meter again if Carmen felt like it was making it worse.
“Thanks,” Carmen said tearfully.
She would have stayed in bed all day, but opening night was now four days away, and Carmen knew if she missed the afternoon part, Andrew would maim, mangle, dismember, and also kill her.
She dragged herself miserably to the theater. She was slowly turning invisible again. Jonathan wasn’t even bothering to flirt with her anymore.
She was unfortunately still visible to Judy, who was waiting stage left to pounce on her.
“Carmen, c’mere,” she said, walking briskly out back.
Carmen felt herself suffocating, even apart from the ninety-five-degree heat and one-hundred-percent humidity.
“I don’t like to think I have made a mistake.”
“Me either,” Carmen said dolefully.
“I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with you.”
“Where to start,” Carmen said.
Judy looked at her sharply. “You’re wallowing.”
“I know.”
“It’s too late to get someone else to do this.”
Carmen felt the thud of her pulse in her head.
“And yes, I have thought about it.”
Carmen was done with being smart. She had nothing to say.
“You know, Carmen, the great majority of people achieve real quality in acting by work and study. There are a few people who have very strong natural instincts, and for them it sometimes makes sense to just get out of the way and let it happen. Do you know what I’m saying?”
Carmen nodded, though she didn’t fully know what Judy was saying.
“So you go home and figure out what the trouble is and come back tomorrow for dress rehearsal and do your job.”
Carmen gazed at Judy without confidence.
“One last thing.”
“Yes.”
“Trust yourself. Don’t listen to anybody else.”
Carmen tried not to roll her eyes, but it seemed to her a laughable command at this point.
Judy shrugged. “That’s all I’m going to say.”
“So look what I bought,?
?? Bee said to her father when he got home from work.
He was surprised to see her, first off, let alone the array of vegetables, fresh fruit, and pasta she’d bought at the new Whole Foods and left on the counter. “I’m only home for a couple of nights, so I thought we could make dinner together.”
Once upon a time her father had enjoyed cooking. He used to listen to Beatles songs in the kitchen, and he played them loud, so the words made their way onto Bridget’s sheets of homework.
She pushed him gently and amicably on the shoulder. “What do you think? You know how to make pesto, don’t you?”
He nodded. He looked strained, shell-shocked, slightly frightened.
“Good. I’ll get Perry. He can make the fruit salad.”
This was an absurd notion, but Bee was ambitious tonight.
She dragged Perry downstairs, blinking like a mole pulled from the dirt. “You can go back to your game after dinner,” she told him. She set him up at the counter next to her with a paring knife, a pile of fruit, and a blue bowl. “Cut off the peels and cut everything more or less into squares,” she explained.
He was so startled he just did what she said.
She started chopping garlic for the pesto. “Like this?” she asked her dad. He looked up from washing basil.
“A little smaller,” he said.
She plugged in the long-unused kitchen radio, an artifact of sorts, and tuned it to an oldies station. She bounced around a little as she grated the cheese.
“Penne or linguine?” she asked Perry, making the boxes dance in front of him. “You get to choose.”
“Uh.” Perry looked from one to the other. He seemed to take his job seriously. “Penne?”
“Perfect,” she declared.
They worked in silence but for a dumb Carpenters song on the radio.
“Did you get pine nuts?” her father asked her.
She was so pleased that she had. “Here,” she said, plucking them from behind a loaf of bread.
“Some people use walnuts,” her father told them, “but I prefer pine nuts.”
“Me too,” said Bridget earnestly.
Perry nodded.
After she’d set the little kitchen table and lit a candle and helped Perry transfer his burgeoning salad to a bigger bowl, she heard “Hey Jude” come on the radio. She felt a sad and strange sort of exultation. She turned her face away from them for a moment and closed her eyes, caught in the grip of remembering how it used to be in this house, in this kitchen.
To her right, over the sound of water running in the sink, she heard her father sing along to two words of the song. Just the two, and yet it brought her a joy she could hardly contain.
Tibby’s parents’ twentieth-anniversary party was for her, in a way, like a traffic accident taking place in slow motion over a long period of time. Sometimes she was in the accident and sometimes she was watching it.
It also had the feature, for Tibby, of having been foretold. And as with an accident, Tibby didn’t dare look, but she couldn’t not look either. Her better angels told her to look away. And she told those better angels to take a hike.
Lena brought her the Traveling Pants to wear. Lena and Bee hovered so close to her she felt like she’d grown two more heads. She finally told them they had to go away.
Tibby talked to various family friends. She acted like she was writing a real script, being a real film student, and not just playing one while watching TV.
The first time she saw Brian he was eating hummus. The next time he was eating shrimp dumplings. The third time he was eating stuffed grape leaves. How could he eat so much?
The fourth time, he was with Effie. It had to happen eventually. Tibby watched while Effie, in a fit of lurid effrontery, touched Brian on the back. In front of everybody. Tibby felt sick. Both Lena and Bee magically reappeared, each at one of Tibby’s elbows.
Effie looked beautiful. She really did. Her cheeks were pink and her legs were tan and her breasts looked like they were ready to take over the room. To be fair, Effie wasn’t overdressed. She wasn’t overly made up. Effie was happy. That was the thing.
And by that standard of beauty, Tibby was a pure fright. A Boo Radley spooking around her parents’ happy party.
Tibby spent some of the time in her room. At one point she went into the backyard and found Bee teaching soccer moves to Nicky and Katherine. Tibby tried to be zany and get up a game of spitting watermelon seeds, but who was she kidding?
“Can this just be over?” she asked Bee before the cake was even presented.
At last, in a blur of warm tidings and well wishes and drunken neighbors, it really was over. She ended up saying good-bye to Effie and Brian in order. She could tell it wasn’t what they’d intended. Everyone looked embarrassed at the way it had fallen out.
Tibby kept her face on. And yes, there was Effie, close enough to smell. Tibby moved her mouth and formed words in the generally appropriate category. “Thanks. Great. Yeah. Blah, blah blah.” Effie moved on.
Now it was Brian’s turn. Tibby said the same robotic and stupid things, but Brian didn’t say anything stupid or robotic back. He just looked at her. Tibby’s spirits were fried, but even so, her brain carried on. It continued to perceive things and have thoughts.
Yes, Effie was glowing. Effie was a goddess. But when Tibby looked with honest eyes she could see that Brian, all handsomeness notwithstanding, didn’t look so happy. He was a second Boo Radley, but with a fuller stomach.
Tibby stopped whatever stupid thing she was saying in the middle of a sentence. Enough already. Brian held her hand. He held it and he looked at her straight on, eye to eye. She didn’t look away. It was the first brave thing she’d done in three months.
There was the natural rhythm of things you knew without knowing. The natural rhythm dictated that Brian let her hand go now, but he didn’t. He kept on and so did she. Before he got shoved along by a paralegal in her father’s firm, Brian squeezed her hand. But so quickly and subtly she wasn’t completely sure it was on purpose or actually that it had even happened.
She watched him go with a sad, slow feeling, as though she saw close things from miles away. She went up to her room without saying good-bye to anyone else.
She climbed into her bed and looked at the place by the window where Mimi’s cage used to sit, where Mimi had lived her soft, simple guinea-pig days among her wood shavings and her pellets. Tibby wished she could go back to when Mimi was still alive. To when Bailey was still alive.
She thought about the first time she met Brian. It was Bailey, of course, who thought of it, who put them together. Bailey was uncanny in that way. Before Bailey died, she basically set Tibby up with everything and everyone she would need for a happy life. And Tibby mostly lost or forgot them.
It was so hard to live the right kind of life, even if you knew what it was.
Tibby wished she could at least go back to the night in June when she’d lost the idea of love. She didn’t wish she could take back the sex. She used to wish that, but not anymore. She and Brian loved each other. They were old enough to know what they were doing. She wanted to be with him in every way, and that was one of them.
As she thought about it, she realized she wouldn’t even change the condom breaking or her fears about pregnancy. If she really got a wish, she wouldn’t want to be greedy or impractical. You couldn’t turn back time or bring the dead to life. If she got a wish, she would hope to be more modest with it.
She remembered when she was around four or five asking Carmen if she believed the wish Tibby had made over her birthday candles would come true. “Yeah, if you wish for something that could actually happen,” Carmen had said philosophically.
Tibby’s wish would be to hold on to the idea of love even in the face of darkest doubt. Because that was the way in which she failed. Not once, but again and again.
That night, Carmen tried to figure out what the trouble was. She walked around the campus. She sat on the hillside where she’d first met
Judy. She called Tibby, and then she remembered about the Rollinses’ anniversary party and she cried because she wasn’t there with them.
Why are we always apart? she wondered. A voice on the phone wasn’t enough sometimes. Why have I kept away all this time?
Because we have the Pants, she thought quickly. The Pants make it okay to do that.
She went back to her dorm room, and without bothering to take off her clothes or brush her teeth or turn out the lights, she crawled into bed.
She was lying there, eyes open, a while later when Julia came in.
“Look what I have for you,” Julia announced gaily. She was in her Florence Nightingale persona.
“What?” said Carmen weakly.
“Those buttermilk scones you love. They make them at night. Did you know that? I have three in the bag and they are ho-o-ot!” She drew out the O, trilling it in song.
Carmen sat up. Scones were, in fact, the most comforting food in the solar system.
But as she looked up at Julia’s face, something occurred to her. Julia looked happy. Not just cheering-up-a-friend happy, but genuinely happy. Carmen, on the other hand, felt—and undoubtedly looked—genuinely sad.
In the next moment another thing occurred to Carmen. She remembered the time, just a few weeks ago, when Julia was the one who looked unhappy. And it happened to be at the same time that Carmen was feeling, and undoubtedly looking, happy.
Was this a coincidence? She thought not.
Julia was happy when Carmen was unhappy. In fact, Carmen’s unhappiness was the very thing that seemed to make Julia happy. And, alternately, Carmen’s happiness caused Julia displeasure.
There was a notable misalignment there. A serious one. What kind of friend thrived on your unhappiness?
She knew the answer. No kind of friend.
She lay back down, her mind whirring.
She thought of her pathetic resolution to be a more worthy friend to Julia, deciding that if she lost weight and pulled herself together, Julia would like her better. How wrong she had been! Julia liked her precisely for her unworthiness. All the ways Carmen failed made Julia feel better about herself. What few ways Carmen succeeded made Julia despise her. Even sabotage her.