Sisterhood Everlasting

  She thought of Tabitha the nurse. Now, this was a somber choice. It was the mother of somber choices, by which you could take care of all the smaller somber choices at once.

  Tabitha would be disappointed in her, and strangely, it was Nurse Tabitha’s disapprobation that got to her more than her father’s or Carmen’s or Lena’s or Eric’s.

  I wouldn’t do that to you, she thought, as she had thought before.

  The morning sun was burning a hole in the top of her head. So much for sun; why didn’t it ever rain here? For the first time in her life she wished for a crashing, brawling East Coast–style thunderstorm.

  She opened her pack and took out the envelope Tibby had left for her. She wasn’t supposed to open it for another two weeks, but that was bullshit. Tibby didn’t get to decide anything anymore. If she’d wanted the rights of friendship, she should have stuck around for them. Bridget considered tossing it in the water unread, but she couldn’t make herself do it.

  She tore it open. Inside was a letter and another sealed envelope marked with another later date. She unfolded the letter.

  Dearest Honey Bee,

  I’m trying to picture you reading this. Somewhere in the sunshine, at least a week or two before the date I wrote on the envelope.

  I know you feel abandoned by me, and I understand. You’ve probably gotten to the point of feeling mad at me, and if you haven’t, you will. Or you ought to. You trusted me to be around and I’m not. And God, I would give anything if I could be. Please believe that. The thought of missing out on the later life of my magnificent friend Bee is almost more than I can take. Everything feels like more than I can take right now.

  Of all of us, I suspect this is hardest on you, and I wish I could cushion it. I wish I could make you feel as strong and as loved as you are. You’ll find your way, because of that, and because you have the thing that so often wavered in me. You have faith. Not in God necessarily, but in the thing with feathers. You are brightness, Bee. You are hope. No matter how far down you get, you’ll always have it. That’s what makes you different from your mother and, I fear, different from me.

  I picture your spirit as a yellow, fluttering, buzzing, flying thing, and no matter how down you feel, it is in there. It is who you are.

  Bridget’s anger evaporated and the sadness came back. The anger was easier. She owned and controlled it, whereas the sadness owned her.

  It felt like a torrent so strong it could sweep her into the ocean, and not because she chose to go, but because she was powerless to resist it. Maybe that was what had happened to Tibby. Maybe she couldn’t help it.

  “Why do you keep making that face?” Effie asked, sitting cross-legged on Lena’s bed. It was not yet four o’clock and Lena was running out of deflecting conversation topics.

  “Why do you talk so loud?” Lena wondered if the close walls of her apartment felt as jarred and uncomfortable as she did being disrupted after so many weeks of solitary quiet.

  “I’m not talking loud. I’m just talking.”

  Lena didn’t argue. Effie thrived on arguments. Better to be flat boring than argue.

  Effie’s phone buzzed every few minutes, but she seemed to have made a commitment not to answer it. She glanced at it constantly, though. “How’s that guy?”

  Lena took a few extra seconds to answer. Words were like oxygen to Effie, and if Lena cut them off maybe she’d go home a little sooner. “What guy?”

  “The guy who looks like the pot-smoking Scooby-Doo character.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The guy with the scraggly beard. The guy who makes sandwiches.”

  Lena preferred to keep pretending she didn’t know, but the suspense could come to seem interesting if she wasn’t careful. “You mean Drew,” she said flatly.

  “Yes. Exactly. Drew. What happened to him?”

  “Nothing happened. He still works at the sandwich place. He’s still putting together work for a show.”

  Effie shook her head impatiently. “Do you still go out with him?”

  Lena sighed boringly. She pulled the laundry basket over and started folding. “I see him now and then.”

  The truth was she’d seen him once since she’d gotten back, and that was to tell him she needed to take a break for a while, as though the relationship were strenuous in some way. It was the classic it’s-not-you-it’s-me conversation, and he had acceded without a fight.

  “Do you hook up?”

  No fireworks. No arguing. Lena shrugged.

  Effie punched a couple of buttons on her phone and put it down again. “Honestly, I’m not sure which answer I’m hoping for. I hate for you to waste your time on such a loser, but it would be comforting to think you were actually having contact with another human being. Mom and Dad would be comforted by that, I know. Even Dad. I’m not kidding.”

  No fireworks. Lena clamped her teeth together. Effie was the human equivalent of gasoline sprayed all over the kitchen. It was hard to avoid not only fireworks but complete conflagration.

  “You don’t need to worry, Ef. I’m fine. I have human contact. You all should calm down,” she said calmly, boringly. “I teach two afternoons, one morning, and one evening a week. I spend time in the studio. I see other instructors and professors all the time.” Effie looked bored, so she went on. “I go to a demo or a lecture pretty much every week. I helped Susan, um, Murphy do this PowerPoint slide show.…” Lena was running out of material and she wished she had more. Effie’s eyes had drifted to her phone but she hadn’t picked it up yet. “I have lots of human contact.”

  “Do you have any friends?”

  It was so like Effie to cut her to the quick, to push aside her feeble maneuverings, to destroy her complacency, however lame. Lena swallowed and hoped her eyes didn’t show anything. “Sure.”

  “I don’t mean old friends, but friends here. That you see.”

  This was why Lena wished she had checked her messages and somehow derailed this visit. She wished her sister would go home. She wished she had never come.

  “Sure,” Lena said again, bending down to pick up the laundry basket. She carried it over to her bureau and set it down again. Slowly, laboriously, sock by sock, she went about putting her clothes away.

  When she’d organized her face again, she turned to Effie. She cleared her throat. It took a lot for her to voluntarily bring up the subject of Effie’s job at OK! magazine, because Effie’s tales of low-ranking celebrity and the absurdly vain girls she worked with made Lena want to pull her own hair out. And furthermore, Effie would find it stimulating.

  But here, under two and a half hours into Effie’s visit, Lena had come to that. She sighed again and sat down on the floor. “So how’s work?”

  We are masters of the unsaid words,

  but

  slaves of those we let slip out.

  —Winston Churchill

  Lena submitted to dinner at a restaurant. She picked a place that was bustling, cramped, and loud, the kind of place that didn’t take reservations, so as the evening wore on you found yourself sitting and eating among standing-up people who were hungry and wanted your table. She knew it would be hard on her nerves, but she also knew it could potentially spare her the devastation of Effie’s laser beams and gasoline fires.

  First Effie ordered a martini and smoked salmon and then a shell steak and two glasses of expensive red wine. She was at least as poor as Lena, but she dressed a lot better and she had a real knack for taking advantage of free food. Lena wondered if her parents knew what kind of meal they were underwriting.

  Lena had one glass of red wine, and halfway through it she felt red-faced and slightly woozy. She was beginning to find the Christmas decorations infinitely depressing. When had she last had a drink? She thought back to Kostos and the couch in her grandparents’ house. She put her hand on her red cheek.

  The lights got dimmer and the music got slower. It was Ella Fitzgerald singing Christmas carols. Effie ordered a molten chocolate ca
ke with vanilla ice cream for them to share.

  “I’m happy to be with you, Len. You need your family at times like this.”

  Lena looked around the room. Effie was getting sappy and serious just when the restaurant was clearing out. Just when Lena had imagined and hoped for noisy hordes demanding their table, the place had turned perfectly intimate.

  “Like with Valia, you know. You were a big help to me. I really took her for granted. I really didn’t know how much she meant to me, how much she taught me.” Effie closed her eyes for several dramatic seconds and heaved a sigh. If Effie was talking about Valia, Lena knew that the dangerous subjects and God-knew-what-else couldn’t be too far behind.

  Lena looked desperately at the door, wishing for the place to fill up. Where was everybody? What was wrong with this place? You couldn’t count on Providence for anything ever.

  Effie looked like she was going to cry. She reached out her hand to Lena’s. “First Valia and then Tibby,” she said. “It’s really hard to believe.”

  Lena was frozen. She felt an upheaval taking place somewhere down deep, and she hoped that if she stayed very, very still it could be contained. She thought of the time she’d gotten food poisoning from kung pao shrimp, how she lay completely still in her bed, suffering the nausea, hoping if she didn’t move it wouldn’t all have to come up.

  Valia had been ninety-two. Tibby had been twenty-nine. Valia had had children and grandchildren, a restaurant to run, and a long happy marriage. Tibby, with her talent, her wit, her love, had been denied everything. Valia had lived a full life, while Tibby had suffered a secret hole in hers so devastating she couldn’t go on. Don’t move. Don’t move. It was going to come up.

  “I’m really sorry about Tibby. I really am.” It was the martini and all the wine talking. Lena hoped her wine wouldn’t answer.

  “I know how much you miss her, Len. I miss her too.”

  “What. Are you. Talking about.” Lena’s words came through her clenched jaw. It couldn’t be contained. It was coming up.

  “I am. I do. Tibby and I might have had a few conflicts, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love her.”

  Oh, God. Here it came. Lena was effectively leaning over the toilet at this point. Her mouth was filled with saliva. Her stomach was heaving. You just had to get it out and pray you would feel better when it was over.

  “You didn’t love her,” Lena erupted, all bile and nastiness. “How can you even say that? You know you didn’t.”

  Effie looked injured. It was a look she was good at. Lena didn’t let herself consider the idea that it was real.

  “You were angry about the stupid thing with Brian.” Another wave. Lena couldn’t hold it back. “He loved Tibby and he didn’t love you, and you never let go of it. You still blamed her for that. I know you did.” It was nasty, finally, when it came up.

  Effie’s eyes were shiny. “How small do you think I am?”

  “You stole our pants because of that! And you lost them!” As this bilious memory came up and out, Lena recognized the strange, childlike belief that was nesting right inside it. If they’d still had the Traveling Pants, this couldn’t have happened. The pants wouldn’t have let this happen to Tibby or to any of them. The pants would have protected them.

  “You still haven’t forgiven me for that! You said you did, but you never did and you obviously never will.”

  Lena pressed her mouth together. She wiped the tears off her cheeks with her fingers. She and Effie were shouting and both of them were crying, Lena realized, and it was probably a good thing the place was mostly empty. Ella Fitzgerald sang on about Frosty the Snowman and Lena trembled in her chair.

  “That’s not true,” Lena said, more quietly.

  “Anyway, I wasn’t mad at Tibby,” Effie spat out. “I wasn’t mad at Brian. I was mad at you.”

  Lena felt her chin wobbling, her shoulders shaking.

  “I was mad at you for choosing her over me. I was mad at you for choosing your friends over me every time. I am your sister! That never meant anything to you, did it?”

  Lena watched helplessly as Effie stood. “Yes, it did,” Lena said.

  “No, it didn’t!”

  “Effie.”

  “I came here because I wanted to help you, Lena, but I can’t. I don’t matter enough to you to be able to help.”

  Lena was crying hard. She put her face in her hands. “That’s not true,” she tried to say.

  Effie rooted around her bag and pressed five twenties onto the table. Her eyes were still streaming as she hitched her bag over her shoulder and walked out.

  Lena watched her sister’s back, and after Effie was gone she stared at the door of the restaurant with the diminishing hope that Effie might come back through it.

  Bridget walked slowly back to Bolinas and into the Sea Star Inn. She was starving, and it was the first place she came to. She ordered eggs and sausages and buttered toast and more toast.

  She didn’t realize until she saw the tinsel strewn around the place and heard the well-wishers on the radio that it was Christmas.

  “Do you know if there are any rooms available tonight?” she asked the waitress, who also appeared to be the innkeeper. The place was ramshackle enough that Bee hoped it was in her price range.

  She got a tiny room and use of a bathroom in the hall for forty dollars a night. That evening she got into the creaky bed as the sun was setting. When she woke up in the middle of the night she could hear rain beating against the window.

  By the second day of sleeping in a bed and eating cooked food, she’d run out of money. The waitress/innkeeper, Sheila, saw Bridget in the lobby with her pack on her shoulders.

  “You going already? I’m sorry to see it.”

  “I’d like to stay,” Bridget said. “But I ran out of money.”

  She saw the look on the woman’s face. “I mean,” Bridget said quickly, “I can pay my bill.” She took out her wallet. “I’ve got enough here. I just don’t have any more to spend.”

  Sheila nodded. She wore a bandana tied over her hair just the way Bridget’s grandmother Greta sometimes did. “I’ve got some odd jobs around here,” she said. “I could spot you a few days’ room and board if you’re prepared to work.”

  For some reason, the way it came out of Sheila’s mouth, the word “work” sparkled like a new pair of cleats, a banana milk shake.

  “I’d love to work,” Bridget said.

  “All right, then.” Sheila nodded. “Go put your stuff in your room and we’ll get started in the kitchen.”

  That night Bridget used the ancient pay phone in the lobby to call Eric. She called him at work, knowing he wouldn’t be there. She left him a message wishing him a merry Christmas and telling him she loved him. She thought she might say something else, but she couldn’t. Her heart was pounding as she hung up the phone.

  The next morning she used it again to call Nurse Tabitha.

  “Did you talk to your boyfriend?” Tabitha asked.

  “Not yet. No.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “I don’t know.” Bridget poked her finger in the swinging hatch of the change slot. “How long do I have?”

  “How long do you have?”

  “To make the decision. To, you know, end it.”

  “Bridget, you are probably about nine weeks pregnant. That’s early. According to California law, you can terminate the pregnancy at up to twenty-four weeks. But once you’ve thought it through and made up your mind, I do not recommend waiting. Based on my experience, if you go past fourteen weeks, it’s a whole lot worse for you.”

  “Worse for your body?” Bridget asked.

  “Worse for your heart.”

  Back in the quiet crypt of her room, Lena carefully packed Effie’s things in a cardboard box. Although they were spread around the place, each of Effie’s possessions stood out. The bottles of magenta and turquoise nail polish, the chartreuse tights, two Christmas stockings, the high-heeled gold boots, the lacy pink tho
ng still in its package, the three different kinds of hair product in neon green plastic, a tub of makeup. It was as though Lena’s drab apartment was incapable of digesting objects so colorful, fragrant, and festive.

  Lena gazed wretchedly at the cheerful array in the box. Effie had come armed to celebrate Christmas with manicures, pedicures, facials, and makeovers. She was going to remake Lena’s underwear drawer. She was going to give Lena a new hairstyle. She’d threatened to download new songs onto Lena’s iPod. She had come because she wanted to make Lena feel better. These were the things Effie knew how to do.

  “You just have to let people love you in the way they can,” Tibby had said to Lena once.

  Lena carefully taped the seams of the box and left it by the door to take to the post office. Effie had come bearing intimacy and joy and Lena could tolerate none of it. Effie was far above anything Lena deserved.

  It’s not that you don’t matter; it’s that you do, Lena told her sister silently.

  Now Lena’s drab silence was fully regained, her misery preserved. She perched on the edge of her bed, sitting on her hands. This was just what she had wished for, wasn’t it? Effie was gone, without even spending a night. Lena’s fingers and toes were unpainted. A holiday was uncelebrated. Her hair was as plain as before. Lena was all alone, dismal and withdrawn once again. She’d done what it had taken to scare Effie away, maybe for good.

  Lena tipped over and lay with her cheek pressed into the itchy top blanket. She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy.

  Lena woke with a jolt in the middle of the night. She stared at the ceiling for a time, her eyes as wide and clear as if it were the middle of the day. She got up and walked the four steps to her desk and sat down in the chair.

  Her apartment featured one large window, which faced the air shaft. For about an hour during the day and an hour at night, the sun and then the moon, respectively, found their way into her room. Now the moonlight brushed in through the dirty chicken-wire panes and illuminated the letter that stood there unopened day after day, night after night.