All You Need Is Love (18 page)

“Good luck with your new girlfriend,” I say.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” he says.

“Fine. Good luck with your non-girlfriend. And do me a favor. If I ever come to London and am tempted to look you up or we see each other at Arabella’s wedding in ten years, leave me alone.”

“Love, I…”

Click. Power returned to me at least momentarily by hanging up. Another transatlantic transmission call that has left me a couple dollars poorer and a whole lot more angsty.

I don’t know exactly what I wanted from that phone call but the details of his infidelity were not on the list of possibilities. The only plus side is that is makes me miss him less and makes it a tiny bit easier to cut ties. Won’t be wearing the white turtleneck that I was wearing when I met him any time soon. I wonder how I’ll feel when it’s winter and I’m a senior and go to pull that shirt out — will I remember meeting him in the topiary garden and feel sad or will I put it on without thinking about it? Maybe distance helps placate the wounds but the tangible things still remain — the shirts, the mixes, the little presents acquired. No wonder my dad boxed up all of Gala’s stuff when he realized she wasn’t coming back — who could live in the constant debris of memories and missing?

As quietly as I can I get dressed, slip (not literally, though I wouldn’t put it past my non-graceful self) down the stairs, and after leaving a note for Dad and Bels saying I went to see her, I get into the car and drive to see Mable.

Of course, it’s after hours and you can’t just expect to visit the hospital just because it’s now four-forty-five in the morning and you’re awake. However, when I get to the front desk they let me in and when I reach the nurses’ station, they tell me Mable’s been asking for me.

Wordlessly, I kiss Mable’s cheek. Her skin is papery thin now like she’s been flattened, which maybe she has been. Mable’s eyes flutter and she stirs.

“They told me I could come in, sorry,” I whisper.

“No, no, don’t be sorry, I wanted you here,” she says. She turns to look out the window. “Hello, world.”

“Want me to help you over there?”

Mable nods. “Yeah, but I don’t think I can. It’s been a tough couple of days.”

I gulp and feel that familiar worry swirling in my body but I know that’s not what she needs right now. “I could wheel you over there,” I suggest.

“Yeah — just put up the rail here and unclick that thingy,” she points to the wheels on her bed.

I roll the bed closer to the window not caring if I’ll get in trouble with the doctors. The process takes a few minutes since we have to roll the iv stand, too, and the pulse monitor comes off which sends a nurse in. She’s about to object when I plead with her using my eyes which probably look very sad right about now. The nurse nods and says she’ll be back in a minute to help move the bed back.

I sit next to Mable on her bed, both of us looking out the window at the earliest morning light. Below, the skyline of Boston shines.

I point to the glowing Citgo sign. “That reminds me of my first time at Fenway with you. You let me have three hot dogs.”

“I knew you’d either love me for it or feel sick and learn your lesson.”

“Both,” I say.

She points to another place. “Remember the pedicures on Newbury Street?”

“And the mean girls you told me to ignore — you were right — it’s not really worth it to buy into the girl cat fighting fiasco.”

“Glad to be of service. Hey, look, you can kind of — suspend your disbelief with me here — see the corner where Slave to the Grind is.”

I sigh. “God I had so many nights there — Chinese food with you, bemoaning my lack of lovelife or latteing myself into a frenzy over work — stopping there after I did those voice overs…”

Mable pokes my leg. “You should do those again — you liked that.”

I shrug. “I don’t know.” Then I remember something. “I did get an offer from Martin Eisenstein to look him up if I’m ever in LA…”

“Holy crap — really? Well, you get your butt out there and see what he has to offer you — oh, but if it’s skeezy and involves dating him or something come right back.”

“I don’t think I’m heading to California any time soon,” I say. “I might not go anywhere.”

Mable turns to me and stops looking at the bright lights outside. “We had a lot of great days together.”

“You’re speaking in the past tense and it’s scaring me.”

Mable doesn’t comfort me or shake off my observation. “And you have to remember great days, you have to catalogue them — in your mind or in your journal. Because it’s the shitty days that seem to cluster and accumulate and the great ones only stand out for a moment.”

I nod, letting the tears fall, with the line
days glowing like a firefly and then fading out
from a song I once wrote in my journal floating in my mind.

“Ahhh!” Mable lets out an angry roar. “I wish I could just rearrange the atoms in my body.”

“So you’d be well?” I ask.

“No I meant like so I could slip out the window and float around,” she swings her hand outtowards the window. “So I could revisit all the places from my great memories.” She puts her head back on the pillow. “But I can’t.”

“You look really tired,” I say.

“I am,” she nods. “Listen, Love….tell me something you’ve never told me before.”

“Why?”

“So this day — this moment can be a good memory, not a terrible one — so you can think about it afterward and feel more than just sorrow.”

I think but can’t find any untold information that feels worthy of right now. ‘you go first, Aunt Mable.”

“So…Mable isn’t my real name,” she says. Again, I have that tiny flick of wonder if she’ll announce her real name is Galadriel.

“So what is it?” I ask and hold both of her hands in mine.

“My name is really “Maybelline”.”

I laugh. “I can’t believe you’re named after a mascara.”

Mable laughs back, her trademark cackle. “No, not the mascara, the song, “Maybelline”.

“I don’t know it,” I say.

“Come on — you, collector of classics, maker of mixes?” I shake my head and Mable says, “I’ll put it on a disk for you.”

“Deal,” I say. “Then I can sing it for you.”

“Don’t think you’re getting out of telling me something I don’t know about you…fair is fair.”

“This isn’t fair,” I say and start sobbing. I feel certain I won’t see her again and I know she’s thnking the same thing.

“I know it’s not. And there’s nothing I can do to make it fair except to tell you I love you and that living means keeping going.”

“Like Dylan said?”

Mable nods. “Yeah, keep on keeping on. But — tell me your thing.”

Squeezing her hands but not looking at her because it just hurts too much I say, “The thing you don’t know is that…is that it doesn’t matter that Galadriel gave birth to me. Because the truth is, you’re my mom anyway, right? You’re the one who told me about love and boys and how to respect myself. You’re the one who made me write down the songs in my head.”

Mable cries and cries and I lie on her chest, ignoring the tubes and awkward position my back is in and that it might be painful for her to bear the weight of me. “When they ask me on these college essays and interviews
who’s the person who influenced you most,
I’ll say you.”

It takes every ounce of strength I have or have ever had, to get up from the bed, kiss and hug her, and leave. But she asks me to leave her there, and when I go to the nurses’ station to get them to move the bed back, I don’t return to the room. I do as Mable asked and go home to my father to tell him to come see her. I drive and cry and wonder at the speed of years and days, how fast the preset happens and how quickly what you’re going through changes from the right now into a memory.

What no one tells you about funerals, about people really dying, is that nothing really changes. You still have to get dressed and brush your hair and sleep and eat and pee but all the while knowing that there’s this loss out there, this unchangeable thing lurking beneath every action, every thought.

I sit with my dad at the front of the Hadley Hall chapel and pat his hand — he gave a good speech and seems to be doing — considering the circumstances — okay. We’re both “okay”. Louisa has been the one to help organize the food and flowers, the one who helped make the phone calls bearing bad news.

At the back of the chapel, my friends are sitting showing their support. Not tons, but the close ones — even Lila Lawrence came up from Newport, Arabella, Harriet Walters, Chili Pomroy, and Chris. Faculty members like Mr. Chaucer and Lana Gabovitch keep to themselves but nod hello. Miles, Mable’s ex-fiance said hello to me and started to say something else but we didn’t have time to talk before the service started with its heavy chords and organ music, which Mable would have hated.

Back at our house, the downstairs is a mass of mourning, platters of crackers and cheese, deli meats for those of us who feel the need to stifle our sadness with salty snacks and tepid lemonade. Dad is in his study, momentarily escaping the crowd of coffee people, Mable’s old friends from her past jobs and school, and I’m on the spiral staircase, sitting in my all-black attire.

“Mable would hate that I’m so typically funereal,” I say and pluck the dark linen of my trousers up then let it fall.

“But she’d like what you said,” Chris points out.

“It was just stuff from my journal,” I say and shrug. I’m all cried out right now, more stunned and tired. I give a quick visual sweep of the room to see if Miles is here, but he’s not. He must have left.

“You always talk about it like it’s drivel,” Jacob says from his place to my left. I look at him through the slats of the banister. “But as far as I can tell, your journal is pretty incredible.”

Chris gives me just the tiniest nudge, subtle enough so I get that he heard what Jacob said but not enough so that everyone gets Chris’s point.

“Love — I’m really sorry,” Lila says. She’s still a walking Golden Globe, all legs and streaks of blonde and already toasty tan on her way out to “Cali for vacay” as she phrased it. “I have to go — my flight’s tomorrow and I haven’t even packed.”

Arabella is on the other side of the room, helping serve food, clear drinks and though it goes unsaid, staying away from Lila Lawrence. The fact that they both slept with the same guy draws an invisible line between them that neither one wants to acknowledge.

Later, when the house has emptied and Arabella and I have finished the dishes, I go into the living room to help put the furniture back in place. Dad hefts the couch a few feet back and I take a side table over to where it belongs near the big floral chair.

“It’s so weird, Dad, I feel like calling someone to talk about this whole day, you know describe the event and everything…”

“But let me guess, the person you’d call is Mable?” Dad sits on the couch and surveys the clean room.

“Yeah,” I sigh and sit next to him. On my way I move a vase of flowers over to the table and as I do, I notice that there’s an arrangement that doesn’t match the others.

“I’m turning in,” he says. “Louisa’s staying the night if that’s okay with you.”

I turn to him. “You don’t have to clear it with me.”

“You live here, I live here, I just want you to have a voice,” he says. “I’m beat — and I have my graduation introductions to write.”

Graduation. Parents traipsing all over campus. End of the year. “Do you need me to stick around? I mean, Arabella’s going to the Vineyard…”

Dad stops in his tracks. “Well, not that this is the most appropriate time to discuss this — But…we have a couple of things to sort out.”

“Are you canceling it?”

Dad shakes his head. “No, Mable made me promise to let you and Arabella go, she’s already got Ula and Doug set and the property’s paid up for a year, and if it winds up being successful, she has a potential buyer.”

“Who?”

“Whom. Trip Randall. The man who owns it.”

Henry’s dad. Mr. Uptight Blazer and Cocktails at noon himself. “He wants to buy Slave to the Grind?”

Dad swallows and flaps his hand — his gesture for let’s drop this. “This doesn’t really concern you — it’s just business, part of Mable’s estate planning.”

“Okay — I mean, I’d like to be involved, I know I’m a minor but only until this fall, so you can tell me things, I’m competent…” I say. I go back to the little flower arrangement and study it. The outside is all green and the flowers are all Lily of the Valley. “These are out of season,” I say.

“I didn’t get them — I wouldn’t know the first thing about flowers,” Dad says.

“These are Mable’s favorite.” Were, I think. They were her favorite. “Did Miles send them?” Mable’s ex-fiance is the only one I can think of who would have known and found her favorite flowers. They must have been imported and expensive to find at this time of year. Then, stuck to the bottom of the circular glass vase, I see a small notecard. It reads “
from your old friend, G. Together in spirit
.” Without showing my shock to my father, it clicks that they are from Galadriel. Gala. She’s out there in this world, somewhere, which I guess I knew but it is stunningly odd to feel it hit home.

“You can go to the Vineyard after your work is completed,” Dad says. “After you have final approval from your overseas professors and after…”

“After what?” I ask. The school stuff makes sense so there’s not much point in arguing for shoving off tomorrow, like Arabella is.

Dad reconsiders something. “You know what? Nothing. We can talk more this weekend, okay?”

“Okay,” I say and we hug for a while in the quiet early summer night.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” I ask Arabella for the hundredth time.

“You’re not really expecting me to answer you again, are you? Listen, I’ve got it all sorted.” She flaunts her bus ticket to Wood’s Hole and says, “Bus then ferry then Ula and Doug will fetch me and bring me to the world of coffee. Hey — what about that for a name?”

“World of Coffee?” I ask and wrinkle my nose. “I don’t think so — it sounds like a department store. It’s not what Mable had in mind.” I’ve been wrapped up in thinking about what Mable would have wanted — or did want — for her café, and for me, and I’ve come to the conclusion in the past twenty-four hours that she just wanted me to keep going. Like she said, keep on keeping on. But it’s not easy.