Losing It (11 page)

“Sure, yeah,” said Elliot.

I looked at his left hand. He was wearing a ring.

“Nice area,” said Ed. “Looks like a great place to raise kids.”

How had I not noticed it? Elliot cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said,
a little louder, committing himself to the conversation. The finest strings of discomfort pulled in his face. “It is. It's got a great pool, and it's close to a lot of hiking trails.”

“Is Devon still out there at the Raleigh aquarium?” said Jeannette.

“She is,” said Elliot, glancing over at me again with a scattered expression. “She's still program director. They're keeping her busy.”

“I've been meaning to take you up on that free pass,” she said. “Take the grandkids. See that new, what is it—y'all got a new manatee over there?”

“Yeah, no, it's a hammerhead,” said Elliot. “They have a hammerhead shark now.”

“I wonder if those get depressed,” said Allison.

We all speculated on that for a little while, and then the group broke up into separate conversations. I tried to concentrate on my plate and arrange myself in a normal way. I spoke to Allison a little more about where she grew up, and me and her and Jeannette commented on the new sandwich place a few streets over, and whether we'd been there or not. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Elliot put his plate in the trash and check his watch and walk out of the room. I could feel him glance over at me as he did so, but I kept my head turned toward Allison.

People dispersed and I helped Jeannette clean up. I don't think anyone noticed that anything was wrong with me, except for Caroline, who was sitting there, and gumming her third piece of cake, and staring right at me, and I could swear the old bitch knew exactly what was going on.

—

“So how's it all going?”

It was later that day, after work. I was standing in a park and talking to Grace.

“Really, really good!” I said.

I hadn't felt like going back to Viv's yet, so I'd decided to go for a walk. In the middle of a wide, bright stretch of grass was a scratched-up metal sculpture, a dragon's tail coming out of the ground, about knee-high. I sat down on a bench close by.

“It's really hot here,” I said. “Sometimes I wish I could unbutton my skin and take it off.”

“It's hot here, too,” she said. “We get these heat-sick little kids and they're just over it.”

I missed Grace. I missed her faint Southern accent and her languorous manner. She was just bobbing along in her life in her fully formed way, and every time she had a problem or needed to talk something out, I wanted to tell her that she was going to be fine, because all she had to do was continue being the way she was and everyone would just naturally give her the benefit of the doubt.

I wanted to tell her about Elliot and how I'd felt when I heard he was married—the stomach-dropping disappointment of it. How I'd sat and methodically unbent all the paper clips in the drawer and then dragged the point of one along the underside of the desk, scratching as hard as I could.

“There's this guy at the place I work,” I said.

“Okay.”

“I have a crush on him.”

“Yeah?” she said hopefully.

She was with a guy named Chad, a nice guy who got stoned a lot and was studying to be a vet. I'd been at their apartment once and I'd studied them—their togetherness—like it was a rare organism. He was tossing a paperweight back and forth while talking to me. He put it down when Grace came up to him and he put his hand on her chest, kind of fit his fingers above her collarbone as if it was a ridge on a rock face and he was going to climb her. I'd thought about that for a long time.

“He has a ponytail.”

“Okay.”

“But he's handsome. I think so, anyway. He's kind of New Age–y.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, he has this poster in his office of a mystical Native American children's book. And, I don't know. I just get that sense.”

“Well, it's not the end of the world.”

“No, but, actually he's married.”

“Oh, man.” Her voice seesawed. I could feel how genuinely disappointed she was for me.

I got up and started walking along a path. It was humid and the sky had a shiny haze to it.

Grace cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, “stay away. There's a lot of drama here about that. The academic curator, she and the associate director of programming and education got involved, but he's married, and his wife is the community relations vice liaison, and she's the ex of our junior associate of senior outreach. You know what? Never mind.”

I laughed.

“I was actually looking at our New Age section the other day,” she said. “And guess what I found?”

“What?”

“Lucid Dreaming for Beginners.”

“No way. Was it the same?”

“Yup. Floating shoe and all.”

One of the earliest parallels about our lives Grace and I had discovered was that when we were roughly ten or eleven years old, we had both developed a voracious interest in lucid dreaming, and both went to a lot of trouble to furtively research it, her in her godfather's modern glass home office in Massachusetts, and me in the public library close to my parents' house, where I would spread out a bunch of books of Jaguars to deflect any suspicions. It turned out we had both read the same book, which inexplicably had, among other things, a woman's floating high-heel shoe on the cover.

I thought of those quiet, absorbed hours. “Man,” I said, “I miss whiling away the day like that.”

“You're telling me,” she said. “I've never been so in the moment.”

A tired woman pushing a stroller walked by. I passed an old-fashioned-looking water fountain, its base a cascade of concrete flowers.

“I bet she scream-whispers at him,” I said. “Elliot's wife. Her name is Devon.”

“Devon. Huh.”

“I bet they'll be at a cocktail party and she'll get mad and scream-whisper right in his ear.”

“It's certainly possible.”

“I bet she's always violently applying hand lotion.”

“That book did not work,” said Grace. “Remember how we'd try to dream of flying or breathing underwater but then we'd end up just dreaming of being random adults?”

“Yeah. We talked about that. Having a superpower. Me and Elliot. Sort of. We talked about what it would be like to stop time. I was just in his office and we got into this conversation and it was really easy and we were just in it.”

“I would always dream about being in an airport lounge . . .” Grace trailed off.

I stared at another metal sculpture. It was a hump with spikes on it. Then I realized it was related to the dragon's tail. The whole thing was supposed to be a large sea creature, its body coming out of the surface of the grass in different places.

I looked around. I started walking again.

“Wait, what were you saying?” I said. I wanted to find the head.

“Never mind.”

Grace was quiet for a few moments. The sound of cicadas swelled in the air.

“Can I ask you something,” she said, “aside from all of this?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What are
you
going to do?” I said. “What is anyone going to do?”

“I'm asking—where did you see yourself? At this age?”

“Remember that guidance counselor at Arizona?” I said. “With all the stacked-up pudding cups?”

She waited.

“Okay, the way I saw myself at this age? I'm wearing a black leather jacket. I've got a searing expression on my face and my long hair is flowing in the breeze. There's obviously a lot on my mind. Maybe I'm holding a sacred key. Then the camera pulls back, turns out I'm standing in the middle of Stonehenge. It's like, ‘Who's that girl? What's she thinking? What is her life?'”

“Okay, well, in case that exact scenario doesn't play out.”

“I also saw myself wading through a beautiful lake with purple mountains in the distance.”

“You know what I
mean
.”

I sighed. “I don't know. I have to get some job, I guess.”

I came up to a large marble statue surrounded by shrubs. I stared at the copper plaque without reading it. I wheeled around.

“I have to tell you something,” I said.

“What?”

“You're not going to believe it.” I laughed a little too hard.

“What is it?”

“Aunt Viv? Who I'm staying with? She's a virgin.”

Grace cleared her throat. The pause was complicated and I could feel her choosing her words. She knew, of course she knew, about my situation, and she also knew that whatever she said now would reflect on it.

“Well, that's— How do you know?”

“She told me.”

“How? What did she say?”

“She just said it. We were in the kitchen.”

“So you guys are getting along?” She was stalling.

“Yeah,” I said. “More or less. I think.”

Grace was quiet.

“But I mean, how could this happen?” I said. “There must be something wrong with her.”

“Not necessarily.”

“But it's so strange. Don't you think it's so strange?”

“No,” said Grace. “What's strange? I mean, really, in this life? Remember that book? Remember the testimonials? That one lady said she dreamt about crawling through a giant baby's hair. There was that guy with the mustache who said all he wanted to do was not worry and be carried along in a toucan's pouch.”

“Yeah.” I'd come up to the sea creature's head. It was sticking out of the ground, its neck a long metal trunk. It stared straight ahead with a kind of grimace. Someone had stuck gum in one of its eyes. I felt grateful for Grace. For a moment, I felt like everything was okay. “You're right,” I said. “It's a weird
world.”

Seven

I stood outside the door of Viv's studio with a heavy copper key in my hand. She'd just left for work, her car crunching the gravel as it ambled down the drive. The day before, while taking a phone message, I'd shaken out a ceramic jar to find a pen. A key fell out, and as soon as it bounced onto the counter I knew what it would unlock.

This was where she holed up often after work, taking a plate of leftovers in, and staying sometimes until late into the night.

I turned the key in the lock and it clicked. I pushed the door open. The first thing I noticed was the cluttered feel and the smell—sweet tea and wood. There was a purplish glow coming from a window that looked out over the side of the house.

Lots of books, framed sheet music on the walls, a flimsy computer desk on one side with knotted nylons underneath next to stacked dusty magazines.

In the middle of the room was a large wooden table. Spread out on top were paint-stained newspapers and mason jars with murky water and brushes inside. I walked around it, studying the plates she was working on. She was creating a meticulous lace-like gold trim
around one of them. Another one showed layers of green, with a faint sketch on top, probably meant to be filled in, of a figure on a horse. I paged through a sketchbook where she was trying out ideas and stared at a drawing of a few polar bears swaying to the earth in parachutes.

I went over and sat in the chair across from her computer and laid my hands on the keyboard. A screensaver of a bouncing cube blinked on. I wanted to poke around online—I had a feeling she didn't have the technological prowess to cover her Internet tracks. It was all ordinary, a few gardening websites, some moderate political blogs, her e-mail account. It looked like she was contemplating bidding on old maps at an online antiques auction. I was hoping she had all her passwords set, so that you didn't have to log in, and my fingers were jittery with the possibility of reading her e-mail. But I couldn't; it was closed.

There was a set of drawers next to a sofa and I rummaged through them. They were messy, no rhyme or reason—a few seashells, a cobblestone, fancy stationery on which she'd been practicing her signature, one loopy and casual, another formal and long. There was a tiny Rubik's Cube on a key chain, some leftover antibiotics.

I got up and then sat down on the couch next to a wicker basket holding pincushions—how was it possible for people to acquire so much random stuff? I picked up a box of blank cards with birds on them that was lying there and started to feel a roving, prickly irritation.

The backs of my feet hit something below. I reached down to find a stack of photo albums. From staring at the pictures you
would think Aunt Viv's upbringing had been a series of listless county fairs and picnics next to rickety old houses. Generally-dissatisfied-looking people tromped through the albums. But there were some happy photos, too—kids crowded around a sparkler, their faces lit with delight; a group holding hands around a tree, all of them covered in mud.

One photo showed Aunt Viv at probably around eighteen or twenty years old, standing in front of the Alamo. It had been taken in an off moment—she's looking off to the side, her face is troubled as if something had just occurred to her, something deeply worrisome. The hem of her dress is caught in the wind. The background is bright in the sun. I stared at it for a long time, trying to interpret her dark expression. I wanted to ask her about that photograph. What was she thinking about? What had she remembered? What was
wrong
that day?

—

“It's a blue jay,” said Aunt Viv, squinting into the distance. “Bluebirds don't have that crested head, they're songbirds and we don't get them here that often.”

We were sitting at a white plastic table on the wraparound porch in the front of the house, eating dinner together for the first time in days. You would think that her admission that night—it had been about a week since then—would have made us closer, but it somehow had the opposite effect. Aunt Viv had started avoiding me. She stayed late at work, e-mailing me to say that she was tied up at the office. When she did come home, she would mostly eat in her study with the door closed. The one Saturday that had intervened she
spent gardening, squinting up at me in a distracted way when I walked down the front steps to go somewhere in my car. I didn't mind—I was a little embarrassed, too, but it was getting ridiculous.

So when it happened that we were home at the same time that night, she seemed to embrace it, to want to reset and start over. And that's how we ended up sitting on the porch, at a plastic table she'd dragged out of the garage for something different, eating Chinese food takeout.

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, stared at a shiny pond of brown sauce on my plate.

“It's pretty,” I said. “It's such a bright blue.”

“Yes. You can see hummingbirds, too, sometimes, around the honeysuckle at the front door.”

I nodded.

“I used to think I would become a bird-watcher,” she said. “I got a field guide and everything, but”—a gale of laughter went through her; she brought a napkin up to her mouth to stifle it—“it didn't work out.”

Aunt Viv was in a good mood. There was something going on with her. “I got some great news today,” she said, confirming my suspicion, glancing at me and then pushing her napkin deep into her lap.

“You did?”

“A man named Pete Wexler called me at work. He said he was from Southern Imports?” She looked at me expectantly.

“The home-goods store?” I said.

“Yes, exactly,” she said, nodding.

She went on: “At first I thought it was some kind of mistake. I
was in the middle of an admission report and I almost hung up on him. But then he told me he'd seen my website, and that he was going to be at the McCormick show. That that was something he did—he goes to antique shops and art shows and things like that to get ideas. He said he was only going to be in town for the one night, but he was planning to stop by the show, to see if the plates would be appropriate for the store.”

“Like to sell them there?” I said, chewing on some noodles.

Viv pushed her lips together in a perplexed, happy way and nodded.

“Wow, that's fantastic, Viv!” I said.

She looked down at her plate, pleased. A bumblebee hovered just above the porch railing.

“So, what would that mean?” I said.

“Well, if I could get them sold there, that would be a real step. A really good step in terms of visibility and distribution. Well, and financially. They sell name-brand things there. It would mean everything. I would have to make it more of a priority.” I could tell she had already thought this through a number of times that day. Dreamed about it. “I would have to change my whole way of doing things.” She dabbed her lips. “I suppose a long-term goal, and this is something, you know, it's probably too soon to start thinking this way, but that maybe one day I could quit my job.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Maybe it doesn't seem like a big deal to you.”

“Are you kidding?” I said, determined to straighten out any misunderstanding. “Of course it's a big deal. It's a really big deal. It's wonderful!”

I could tell what it meant to her, and I was happy she had this good news, and happy to be happy for her. It was like some internal screw in her had loosened, and all her parts had settled a little with relief and excitement.

“I almost knocked over my cup of coffee at work,” she said. “I just couldn't believe it.”

“Oh, no!” I said, laughing.

She sighed happily, and looked into the distance, where the sun was just beginning to set, making everything look golden.

She had a kind of domestic finesse that allowed her to do little, old-fashioned things well—make preserves and then label the jars with pleasing cursive, tie perfect bows, bake rustic-looking scones without consulting a recipe. She often had lipstick on her teeth and had a habit of shaking her wrist to get her watch to sit right. These were some of the things I noticed about Aunt Viv.

She hummed beautifully when lost in thought, when gardening or absentmindedly putting things away. She pressed firmly into paper when she wrote and had a disarmingly legible signature. She was plump but not slovenly, and had a way of seeming clean and slapped fresh all the time, as if she'd always just stepped out of the shower. It might have had something to do with her complexion, which blushed easily. Sometimes when entering a room she would cast a cool, queenly gaze around it, and if you didn't know better you could be forgiven for thinking she had an edge of
snobbishness to her. I would remember that day at Alice's party, and how she was holding court with her friends, like the popular one at a girls' school, and how imperious she looked.

She read with all the sensuality and absorption of a preteen girl, stocking-footed, sliding down the sofa, completely immersed, her hand foraging on the plate of cheese and crackers next to her like something with a life of its own.

She liked gardening and yanking and patting things down, and you could tell she had grit—like the kind of person who would not freak out on a ship in some survival situation; the kind of person who would sit and watch quietly, taking stock, and only show the chain mail beneath her veneer when an emergency required it. She was a survivor, Aunt Viv. That, I felt, was true, even if sometimes when she laughed it was like the tinkling of simple, pretty light.

She looked more exhausted than a World War One soldier when she got home from work. I watched her once from the top of the stairs when she couldn't see me. She dropped her bag in place and stared at herself in the hallway mirror. She yanked the little scarf off her neck and hung it on a brass hook; shrugged off her linen blazer and hung that up, too, so she was just wearing a white shirt, a circle at the collar revealing her red chest; pulled her earrings off. Things she liked doing included letting her face go all soft when listening to music, clapping her hands to rid them of flour, abruptly changing the radio station, ending a conversation with a quick look away from you, dismissing you, always in the process of dismissal—the hair tie she yanked off her head, the rings she hurriedly swiveled off her fingers, shaking her head to banish an unwanted thought,
cleaning out the dirt from under her fingernails with efficient scrapes, shucking away layers to be free; all part of some fastidious, ongoing process—shucking, stripping, cleaning, in preparation for some never-reached point. And then sometimes she would stare into the distance with a bewildered expression and my heart would break a little and I wouldn't know why.

She read everything and knew a lot. It would shoot up now and then like a spit of lava and you would get a sense of the craggy knowledge beneath. “Old Dick Crookback,” she said, one afternoon when she got home from work and encountered me on the front porch, reading a book I'd found about Richard the Third. “What?” I said. “That's what they call him,” she said, “because of his scoliosis.” She looked sad. “He was misunderstood. Such responsibility for an eleven-year-old.” She walked into the house.