Sisterhood Everlasting

  Someday is now. (Or it is never.)

  Please come to the following address on the Second of April

  at 4 o’clock p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

  If you choose to come, bring yourself, all of yourself, and no one else.

  Consider it a journey that could last the rest of your life.

  If you choose not to come, that’s a different ending, but it’s a beginning too.

  Bridget waited until three nights before the move, while she was helping Brian pack up the books in the living room, to ask another question.

  “Did Tibby want to have a baby?” As payment went, this was a more expensive question, and she knew it.

  He didn’t answer at first. His book-boxing movements became robotic. “Yes. Of course.”

  “Did you?”

  “Of course.”

  She stopped and looked at him with some impatience. Tibby was gone. It didn’t seem so “of course” to her.

  He walked out of the room, up the stairs, and into his bedroom, and she thought they were back to her first day in this house.

  She waited for a door to bang shut, but a few seconds later she heard him walking down the stairs again. He was carrying something and he thrust it at her from several feet away. His face had changed to a completely different shape.

  She took it from him and looked at it. She drew in a breath and felt her whole body shifting in response to it.

  It was a photograph in a glass frame. It was black-and-white and must have been taken within a few days of Bailey’s birth, because her tiny face was puffy and crumpled.

  In the picture Tibby’s hand cupped the baby’s head and her cheek lay against her baby’s cheek. Tibby’s eyes were closed, her freckles were like dark snowflakes on her white skin, and her lovely pixie face showed something too ancient to name. It was her familiar Tibby, but also it was Tibby gone to a serious place where Bridget couldn’t follow.

  From the picture Bridget understood. She felt an uprising of tears, neither tranquil nor philosophical. The picture answered her question expensively.

  She handed it back to Brian and saw he was crying too. He sat down in a chair, his jaw in his hands and his shoulders shaking. She went to the other chair and curled up like a fetus.

  They stayed like that for a long time in their separate chairs. They didn’t exchange a word, but unlike the first time she’d pushed too hard, she realized that the air felt strangely companionable.

  She decided not to ask him any more questions for a while.

  Lena thought of canceling her weekly coffee with Eudoxia, but for what? So she could sit on her bed and stare at the wall and ruminate. Was that really something she needed more of?

  “My dear, what is it?” That was the first thing Eudoxia said. “Something is very wrong.”

  Lena looked at her coffee and looked at Eudoxia and looked back at her coffee. It seemed insane, on the face of it, to tell Eudoxia what was going on.

  But why?

  Because it wasn’t the kind of thing she did.

  But why?

  Because she was raw and uncertain, and she liked to keep all the messy parts of herself to herself.

  Lena realized she was kneading her hands in the manner of Valia if Valia had taken amphetamines. As much as Lena liked to hide the mess and display the finished product, by this point she was all mess and no product. She couldn’t hide from everyone for the rest of her life.… Well, she could. That was the direction things were going. But she knew from long-ago experience that when you were uncertain and if you were courageous enough to let her in, a real friend could do a world of good.

  “Tibby left a letter for me and one for Kostos. She gave a date and a time and meeting place, some place in Pennsylvania I’ve never heard of, and invited us both to show up.”

  Eudoxia looked purely puzzled. “To show up for what?”

  It was so outlandish, Lena found it hard to answer. “I guess it’s the chance to be together. To get together and stay together.”

  A dawning look was coming into Eudoxia’s eyes. “And if you don’t?”

  “Then just give up and move on.”

  “Tibby wants you to make a choice, not just wait around for him to come.”

  “I’m not waiting around for him to come.”

  “Lena.”

  “That supposes that I want to be with him. Maybe I don’t.”

  “I see your face when you say his name.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Eudoxia cocked her head to one side. “Let me put it this way: do you want to be without him?”

  Lena remembered the feeling of saying goodbye to Kostos at the ferry the last time. “But that doesn’t mean I want to be with him.” Why was everyone always trying to turn the world into binary choices, black or white, A or B, this or that?

  Eudoxia looked unimpressed.

  “We’ve caused each other more misery than anything else,” Lena said hotly. “It’s true. It’s all suffering with the two of us. If you were to ask Kostos: Has Lena caused you more pleasure or pain? If he was honest, he’d answer the same way I would about him.”

  Eudoxia sat there shaking her head. “That’s just silly.”

  Lena felt like Eudoxia had slapped her. “That’s silly? Thanks a lot.”

  Eudoxia looked unrepentant. “You’ve been unhappy because you haven’t been together. If you were together, you’d be happy.”

  Lena’s mind raced over their long, tragic history, all wrenching goodbyes and longing letters. Kostos being with people besides her.

  It couldn’t possibly be that simple, could it? There was no possible way. Their torments were real and important, fateful and psychologically complex.

  Weren’t they?

  Then the strangest thing happened. It was as though Lena’s consciousness shifted from her body into Eudoxia’s. Suddenly Lena’s mind existed at the top of Eudoxia’s big, generous body and looked out of her canny eyes.

  From that perch Lena saw the whole thing differently, and it did seem silly. And dumb. It was another dumb thing Lena had been holding on to. Another part of her dreadful mythology that made her think even simple things were overwhelmingly complicated and worthy of dread.

  Feeling dumb, Lena crept back wretchedly to her own body. If she’d been aiming to keep her personal mess off the table, this might have been a good time to pay the bill and go home, but she realized she couldn’t anymore. She was all in.

  Lena stared at Eudoxia’s knowing face, and though she did feel silly, she did not feel appeased. There were other problems too. “In all the fourteen or something years we’ve known each other, we haven’t done much more than kiss a few times. How can we make some big blind commitment when we don’t even know how we are together?”

  Eudoxia cast that off with a flick of her wrist. “Anatole and I had barely kissed. Most couples in the history of the world had barely kissed. It’s when the world changed and people started doing everything else, that’s when everybody got divorced.”

  “You think.” Lena half intended to sound sassy and sarcastic, but it didn’t come out like that.

  “Of course. It’s better this way. You have more to look forward to.”

  Lena was floundering in messy doubt and Eudoxia was sitting there like the queen of certainty.

  “Oh, and another thing. I think he’s getting married.” Lena laid down the heavy card.

  Eudoxia shrugged philosophically. “Then he probably won’t come.”

  Lena shot up in her seat in protest. “He probably won’t come! And that seems okay to you? You think I should go and yet you think he won’t show up?”

  “I don’t think he won’t show up.”

  “But you think it’s possible.”

  “Of course it’s possible.”

  “How can I go if he doesn’t go? How terrible would it be to just wait there pathetically alone for him never to show up?”

  Eudoxia’s expression grew more serious. “That’s what you’r
e doing anyway, my dear.”

  Probably because she had no pride left, Lena called Eudoxia three hours after they’d said goodbye at the coffee shop.

  “Do you think he’ll come?”

  “I don’t know, dear one.”

  “You act so confident, like you know what’s going to happen.”

  “I don’t. I know what I want to happen.”

  “But what do you think will happen?” Lena recognized that she sounded like she was five.

  “I think you need to make this decision on your own. I think you need to know what you want and try to get it. That’s the only thing you can do. The other part is not in your control.”

  “Okay, okay, I know that.”

  “You get older and you learn there is one sentence, just four words long, and if you can say it to yourself it offers more comfort than almost any other. It goes like this.… Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “ ‘At least I tried.’ ”

  Lena sighed. “Okay. I get it. I do.” She was too pathetic for words. “But will he come? I just want to know what you think the odds are. Tell me what you really think.”

  “I think Tibby was a wise girl. I think she loved you.”

  When we argue for our limitations,

  we get to keep them.

  —Evelyn Waugh

  The afternoon she was getting on a plane to go to New Orleans, Carmen stopped in the Apple store downtown to switch her service from her old phone to the new one that Tibby had left for her.

  She had to wait in line, and then wait endlessly for the so-called genius salesperson to transfer all her contacts, so that by the time she got out of there she was running really late.

  She saw as she raced back to the loft that the black town car was already waiting to take her to the airport. She finished packing in a hurry. She went down to the car and then raced up to the loft again when she realized she’d forgotten her makeup bag. By the time the car pulled onto the FDR Drive she was half an hour later than she should have been.

  It ought to be fine, Carmen told herself. Travel departments always loaded on extra time. She immediately thought to pass the time checking her email and making calls, but the new phone was not booting up properly. She turned it off. Maybe AT&T needed a little time to switch the service. Her fingers itched.

  She grabbed a copy of People magazine from the seat pocket. She remembered how much she used to love these gossipy magazines. At Williams, between Dostoyevsky and Marx, she’d be gobbling up Us Weekly and OK! She’d believed they were faithfully recording the magical world of celebrity. But the more she knew the business, the less she enjoyed the magazines. Every page she turned, she saw the manipulations, the gears showing. She saw how much of the coverage was bartered and bought. She used to look at the red carpet pictures and be dazzled, but now she saw Botox and fake teeth, starvation and double-sided tape.

  Maybe they lost their thrill the day she had seen herself in one of the pictures. It was a red carpet photo of her at the Golden Globes, and it probably looked as glamorous as the next one to the outside eye. But when she saw it all she could think of was the sweat that had been dripping down her back, the gross taste in her mouth from not eating for three days, the tape holding up her dress, her confusion at photographers barking her name, the smile pasted on her face. There had been nothing magical about it.

  “What time is your flight?” the driver asked her.

  Carmen looked up. “Uh. Five forty-five, I think?” She looked at her dead phone. The flight time was on the phone. The airline and terminal information was on the phone. She wondered what time it was. Damn, that was on the phone too. The phone company might as well have switched off her brain while they were at it.

  “That might be tough,” he said.

  “What?” Now that he mentioned it, it did seem as though the car hadn’t moved in a while. She looked out the window. She scooted up to look through the front windshield. “What’s going on?”

  “There must be an accident. Nobody’s moving.”

  She could see the Triboro Bridge in the distance, but there were about a million other cars between them and it. She heard sirens behind them, trying to get through. The lanes of the FDR were so packed, no cars could get over to make way for them. A blast of honking began.

  At last she spotted an old-fashioned clock on the dashboard. It was almost five. “Can you get off this?” she asked.

  The driver looked over his shoulder at her. He couldn’t get anywhere. It was too stupid a question to answer.

  She tried to turn her phone on again, but it turned itself off. Was it the battery? Where could she charge it?

  Another twenty minutes passed, and no one moved except two police cars and an ambulance that finally broke the sclerosis. “Shit,” Carmen said, as she did every couple of minutes. She stared at the phone in rising panic. What could she do? She couldn’t call the airline, she couldn’t call her manager, she couldn’t call the travel contact. What had anybody ever done before they had iPhones?

  She read every page of People, including the weird ads in the back. At five forty-five she paused and raised her head to acknowledge officially missing her flight.

  “What do you want to do?” the driver asked.

  “I guess go to the airport,” she said. She felt like half a person without a phone to wield. “I’ll have to catch a later flight.”

  The only saving grace was the fact that the official meeting wasn’t until Tuesday. She’d simply have to absorb the local culture at a slightly faster rate.

  She read The New York Times and even the Financial Times, God help her. She didn’t get out of the car and into the airport until seven twenty. She went to the Delta counter and put herself at their mercy.

  “Please just get me on the next flight to New Orleans,” she said.

  The Delta woman seemed to push every button on her keyboard at least a hundred times. “The next flight I can get you on is Tuesday afternoon.”

  “What?”

  “I’m afraid so.” She pushed a few more buttons.

  “It’s only Saturday. How can that be?”

  She shrugged. “Can’t say.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She looked down at her screen again. Her name was Daisy and she had a very cheap dye job. Carmen could not afford to start hating her yet. “Sorry. Most of these are overbooked.”

  “Can you check another airline for me?”

  “Well, I can’t really.…”

  “Please?” Carmen felt like she might vault over the desk and hijack the computer herself. She ached for some digital interaction.

  “All right, let me look,” Daisy said. She looked, shook her head, looked, shook her head. Carmen hated the sound of her fingernails clacking on the keys. Why did somebody who typed on a keyboard for a living grow such farcically long nails?

  “What?” Carmen finally exploded bossily.

  Daisy picked up her phone. She mumbled a few things and nodded a few more times. Finally she looked at Carmen. “There’s some big music festival in New Orleans this weekend into next week. That seems to be what’s going on. Nobody’s got any seats until Tuesday.”

  “Nobody?”

  “Nobody.”

  “What should I do?” Carmen wished she had somebody better than Daisy to throw her lot to.

  Daisy seemed to wish she had somebody better than Carmen to assist. “Wait till Tuesday?”

  “I can’t wait until Tuesday!” Carmen exploded. “I have a meeting on Tuesday! It is the biggest meeting of my entire career.”

  Even Daisy was a human being. “You could drive.”

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “You could rent one.”

  “I can’t drive for a million hours by myself!” She wasn’t even so sure she had a valid license. She drove about twice a year, when she went home to see her mom and David and Ryan.

  Daisy gave her a look of maternal sympathy. Carmen realized you could turn almost anyone into a mo
ther if you acted like enough of a baby. “Could you get a train?” Daisy asked.

  “Is there a train to New Orleans?” Carmen had effectively forgotten the existence of trains. She used to like trains. She once took the sleeping train to see her father in South Carolina, and she’d found it pretty thrilling.

  “Sure. There must be. It would take a while.”

  “Can you look for me?”

  “Can I?”

  “Sure. On your computer.”

  “You’d probably do better to call Amtrak.”

  Would it help or hurt if Carmen started crying? “I don’t have a phone. It’s not working.”

  Daisy looked around to see if there was danger of someone catching her engaging in a non-plane-related travel search. Carmen suddenly loved Daisy.

  Daisy opened up the Internet browser on her computer and tapped a few things in. She raised her eyebrows. “Well, believe it or not, there’s a train leaving Penn Station at nine fifty-nine tonight that gets you into New Orleans at … five fifteen in the morning.”

  “Tomorrow morning?”

  “Monday morning.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “No.” Daisy made an understanding face. “You’d make your meeting.”

  Carmen considered. She’d do her local absorption at warp speed. What choice did she have?

  “It’s almost eight now. You probably ought to get going,” Daisy counseled.

  “Okay. You’re right. Well, thanks.”

  “Good luck to you,” Daisy said sincerely.

  Carmen looked over her shoulder several times as she left the terminal. She found it strangely difficult to say goodbye to Daisy, and she wondered if maybe this meant she was lonely.

  Lena walked along the river. Over the last few days, she’d taken many walks along the river. It was freezing, but she didn’t feel it. It might have been hailing. The river might have leapt out of its banks and taken her under and she might not have noticed it.

  What would she do? What would he do? No, no, no. What would she do? (What would he do?)

  Stop! That wasn’t what she got to decide. She only got to decide what she did. This was a version of the prisoner’s dilemma: a lover’s dilemma. She had to do what she was going to do regardless of what he was going to do. She had to do the right thing.