A Clean Slate (5 page)

I was seated on a chrome-and-leather chair, my bags piled high in a closet, while a stool was pulled up for Laney, and two more glasses of champagne were delivered to us.

“Feel free to lose your memory every Saturday so we can do this once a week,” Laney said.

I knew she meant it in a kidding way, but it reminded me of my horrible morning, of that sheer fear I'd felt when Beth Maninsky opened my door.

“You okay?” Laney looked a little chagrined at her comment.

I shook my head, shaking off the thoughts at the same time. “I'm great.”

I was leaning forward, my glass outstretched to toast with
Laney, when I heard a cry. I swung around to see a short, deeply tanned man with dark hair and at least two coats of mascara around his dark eyes.

“My God!” he said, before he rattled off a litany of what sounded like Italian words. “Melanie didn't tell me it was this bad.”

He spun my chair around so that I faced the mirror, and began pulling up strands of my hair, studying the split ends in the light.

“I take it you're Lino,” Laney said. She put her champagne glass down on his station with a clunk. She had that defensive tone in her voice, the one that said,
I'll break your legs if you mess with my friend,
and I loved her for it.

“Signorina,”
he said in a heavy Italian accent, “I mean no harm.” He squeezed my shoulders and I looked at him in the mirror. His long lashes batted a few times. “You're gorgeous,” he said to me. “
Bellisima.
Look at your body, your clothes. Beautiful! But this hair! I have no time for this.” He shuddered and turned to a boy who looked all of seventeen. “Get her shampooed. Now.”

After my head was scrubbed and then massaged until I was in a near dreamlike state by the underage minion, I was caped and back in front of Lino, who began furiously working away with his scissors.

“Shouldn't you ask her what she wants?” Laney said, the snippiness in her tone matching the sound of the scissors.

“No.” Lino gave my hair another decisive clip. “I have no time for talking. I decide. Clearly, she does not know what is right for her hair. We'll do a little cut,
molto bene,
and then you two ladies will be gone.”

“But that's ridiculous!” Laney said. “You have to take your time. This is her hair we're talking about! You need to find out what she wants. She's an adult, she should decide—”

“Lane,” I said, holding my hand out. I couldn't actually
see her, since Lino had my wet, wonderful-smelling hair hanging in front of my face like a curtain. “It's fine.”

“You don't care what he does?”

I considered her question for a second. Usually, I was concerned about what Ben would say if I did something nuts with my makeup or hair, of what they would say at work, but that didn't matter now, and I found myself pleasantly surprised. I was in for a change, and I told Laney as much.

“Mmm-hmm,” Lino said.

“So where are you from in Italy?” Laney asked. She sounded like she was trying to be nice, which I appreciated, since this guy had both my head and his sharp silver blades in his hands, but I sensed something mischievous in her voice. Although “Laney Pendleton” might not sound Italian, she was. Her mother's family came from Milan. Laney herself had been to Italy at least ten times.

“Napoli,” Lino said, the scissors flying furiously.

“Oh, so you've been to Ravello, right?” she said.

“Mmm-hmm.” This time there was no smugness to his tone.

“Have you been to that hotel—what's it called—Palazzo Mazzo?”

“Of course.”

Laney kept peppering him with questions about the Amalfi coast, about Positano and Capri and Sorrento. Lino grew more terse with each query, his scissor-snipping growing faster and faster until I felt I had to put a stop to it.

“What's going on here?” I said, ducking my head away from the approaching blades.

Laney had a sadistic-looking grin on her face. “He's not Italian.”

“Mon Dieu!”
Lino said, slapping his hands to his chest so that the scissors were pointed at his neck as if he might off himself. “That's not true!”

“Oh yes it is.” Laney's face was smug, almost triumphant.
“First of all,
mon Dieu
is French, not Italian. Second, there is no hotel named Palazzo Mazzo in Ravello, and Salerno is
not
right next to Capri. You're a fraud!”

Behind me, Lino froze, the scissors poised at his neck for a long moment. Then he leaned over my shoulder, toward Laney. “Keep your voice down, you little hussy,” he said in a clear Southern accent.

Laney and I both gasped. “Where are you from? Mississippi?” I asked.

“Tennessee. And don't you say a word.”

“What's it worth to you?” Laney still wore that sadistic smile.

Lino glanced around, then leaned back into our little circle again. “I'll give her a free color, I'll pop for a makeup application and then you two get the hell out of here.”

“Done!” Laney said, and they shook hands over my cape.

Two hours later, I emerged from Trevé, my hair a gleaming, coppery-caramel color and styled in a chunky, layered bob that made me feel cutting edge (no pun intended) and gorgeous. My face had been cleansed and moisturized and powdered and plucked; my eyes were smoky with brown shadow; my lips glistened with gloss.

“Girl—” Laney looked me up and down as we stood trying to hail a cab “—we are going to have one hell of a night.”

W
e went to Laney's, since I had no desire to go back to the high-rise I couldn't remember, and I had enough clothes now to last me a month. Laney had a loft apartment in Old Town, with lots of exposed brick and artsy charm.

She cranked up a Rolling Stones CD and tossed me a beer. It was dark outside, but the apartment seemed to be glowing. Because of our afternoon champagne infusion, we were feeling a little goofy, and we danced around her kitchen for a while, singing into our beer bottles.

“All right,” Laney said after a few songs, “I need to redo my makeup and find an outfit that's going to make me look half as amazing as you. Come to my room and help me decide what to wear.”

“Sure.”

As I walked through the living room toward the bedroom, my eyes caught on the baskets of photos Laney kept
by her fireplace—one for childhood and family photos, one for high school and college, and two more for recent pictures.

“I think I'll flip through these for a second,” I said, sinking onto her couch and picking up the high school/college basket.

“No problem.”

I think she sensed what I wanted—to test my memory, to make sure it wasn't only the last five months that I couldn't remember.

She turned the music down a little, and soon I could hear the slide of hangers and the opening of drawers from the gaping door of her bedroom.

The few photos on top of the basket were of Laney's college friends, people I'd known vaguely from when I visited her during that time. Normally, I would have flipped through all of them, but I was more focused now. I was looking for pictures of myself.

The first one I came to was a shot of Laney and me in Tijuana, and I got a swoop of relief through my belly, because I could remember that time perfectly. I could even remember the hot Mexican guy who'd taken the picture. We'd been in San Diego for spring break, and we took a day trip into “TJ,” as all the San Diegans called it. We were giddy with the exchange rate and spent the day buying bright, coarse Mexican blankets and silver jewelry before we spent the rest of our money on tequila shots and margaritas. The photo in my hands was taken right before the last bus back across the border, and both Laney and I were rosy with drink, huge careless smiles playing on our faces.

As I dug deeper, I hit on smaller photos, rounded at the corners, taken when 3x5 was the usual photographic dimension. One of my favorites was there—Laney and I standing in front of a row of gray lockers, my Nikon on a strap around my neck, Laney clutching a clipboard to her chest.
It had been taken only three days after we'd met, and once again, I had a near perfect memory of that day. We'd been just outside the yearbook office when someone had said they needed a photo of us for the staff section. Both Laney and I wore too much makeup and tidal wave bangs—bangs that arched above our foreheads and came to rest below one eye. Right before the photo was taken, Laney leaned in and threw her arm around me, a gesture that made me nearly weak with relief. I'd hated being new in the school, but after that moment, I knew I was going to be okay.

I picked through the basket, looking for pictures of my old boyfriends, thinking that maybe the breakup with Ben had something to do with the memory loss, and maybe I wouldn't remember my exes. But I easily found and remembered a picture of my high school boyfriend, Ted, whom I'd lost my virginity to in the stockroom of the convenience store where he worked, and Steve, my college boyfriend, who looked stoned as he posed in front of one of the landscapes he'd painted.

Laney has always called me a serial monogamist, but it's not really an accurate term. While it's true that I've had almost as many boyfriends as I've had first dates, I don't go from one to another to another without a break. In fact, I've always tried to avoid that pattern, having seen my mother date a long string of guys, only to end up with heartbreak. Instead, I have serious boyfriends, and if we break up, then I'm alone—no blind dates, no pickups in bars—until I find someone I truly, truly want to go on a date with. Laney claims this trait has weeded out far too many candidates and leaves no room for flings. Her point is that flings are, by design, to be had with completely inappropriate men—the ones you find attractive, but would never date for one reason or another. And yet the whole fling thing has always seemed a waste of time to me, particularly given my goal of being married with one kid by the time I'm thirty-five.

I picked up a stack of pictures toward the bottom of the
basket and quickly discarded them one by one onto the coffee table like a blackjack dealer. With each slap of a picture, I mentally listed the who, where and when, building up a confidence that most of my memory was intact.
Senior prom with Ted, me in a hideous chartreuse gown that make me look jaundiced; Laney and me after a football game, clearly about to pass out; on the beach in Florida with Laney's sister, Sophia; Laney's kleptomaniac college roommate, Tara.
When I came to one of Laney, Dee and me, my hands froze. I'd been a senior in college, full of myself and how cool I was. Dee was still in high school and had used the trip as an excuse to “check out the campus,” when what she really wanted was to drink beer and hang out with me.

In the photo, Dee's light brown hair is short, and she's laughing—as she so often was—sandwiched between Laney and me, her head turned slightly toward mine. The pain of losing her rushed in like a hurricane.

According to Ellen Geiger, the psychiatrist I'd seen, everyone who suffers the loss of a loved one ruminates (her word) on the last time they spoke to or saw the person. I was not the patient to change that pattern. For months afterward, it was all I could think about—the last time I'd spoken to Dee and the last time I'd seen her, in January.

Dee had driven up from the University of Illinois to visit me, and we'd spent the weekend in our usual way—shopping during the day with Mom for clothes and boots and jewelry we didn't need, and at night going out with Ben and Laney, regaling them with stories of the astounding mix of freaks and psychopaths our mother used to date. Ben and Laney adored Dee as much as I did. It was hard not to. She had a little-girl way of holding her head down and drawing her eyes up that made you want to take care of her, and yet she could drink like a Russian soldier. And that laugh of hers was impossible not to love—a buoyant, soft-at-first chuckle that grew into a belly laugh.

On Monday morning, when Dee was supposed to leave, it was a silver-gray day, the sidewalks slick with ice, the city covered in a freezing fog. I had an early meeting, and so I was gone before she got up, leaving a note to help herself to breakfast and have a safe trip back. The usual banalities. She called me at work, though, wanting to chat, telling me about some dream she had about lobsters, relating a story she'd seen on the news that morning, and finally asking me where I kept the coffee filters.

“Third cabinet from the fridge.” I tried not to sound annoyed. Dee loved long, chatty phone conversations (I didn't) and she was always calling me at work during her study breaks, hoping for an hour-long talk.

“What about bagels?” Dee asked. “Do you have any bagels?”

“I don't know, Dee, look around.” I scrolled through my e-mails, anxious to get back to work. My meeting had been disastrous, and the market had just opened.

“Maybe I should visit Mom at work before I leave. What do you think?”

“Whatever you want.”

“I haven't even seen her office yet. Where's the building? It's somewhere on Michigan, right?”

“Michigan and Randolph.”

“Yeah, maybe I'll just stop in. Although I do have two papers to write.”

At that point, Ronald Han, my boss, who was known around the office as Attila the Han, stopped by my desk and stood over me with a frown, brandishing a stack of faxes. He drew a line across his neck with his finger.

“I've got to go, Dee.”

“Oh, all right. But what do you think? Should I pop in to see Mom?”

Attila slapped the faxes on his palm.

“I think you should just get on the road.” I deduced that
if she stopped in to see Mom, she might very well “pop in” to see me, too, and it was proving to be a much too hectic day for visitors.

“Yeah, you're probably right.”

“Okay, see you then,” I said, and hung up.

Two hours later, I got a call from the state police, and two hours after that I saw Dee for the last time when I identified her bloody body at Cook County Hospital.

The memory of that morning reverberated in my brain now until I had a hard time breathing, wondering if maybe I was going under again, if I would soon forget this moment, too. But after a second, the air was a little clearer, and I was still there, still holding her picture, still missing her like crazy. At least, I consoled myself, I remembered. I seemed to recall everything about myself and my history except the very recent past.

With that thought, I picked up Laney's latest basket of pictures, the ones taken during the last few years, and sure enough, I seemed to recognize all those as well. Actually all but one—a photo of Laney and me leaning together at a lunch table. I recognized the restaurant, a brunch place where we frequently met on Sunday mornings to dissect our weekends. Based on our clothes, the photo had probably been taken in summer…but I couldn't remember having this picture taken at all. My earlier confidence evaporated, leaving a hollow feeling in my stomach.

I noticed how odd I looked in the photo. It wasn't my hair, which was pulled back the way I used to often wear it, or my outfit of khaki shorts and a T-shirt. It was my face, and the utter lack of a genuine expression on it. My head was next to Laney's, and she was smiling widely, but my face was frozen. Sure, I was smiling, but it was forced and tight, the grin failing to reach my eyes.

Laney slid into the room then, holding her hands away from her body for an outfit inspection.

“Adorable,” I said. She wore a shorter black skirt, a sweater in a deep wine color and matching lipstick.

“Thanks.” She dropped her hands. “What's that?” She came around the couch and stood behind me, looking over my shoulder.

I lifted the photo so she could see. “It doesn't even look like me.”

A second went by. “It really wasn't you,” she said. “You hadn't been you for a long time.”

I looked at my grim image one more time before I tucked it, facedown, into the bottom of the basket.

 

“Where are we going?” I'd been so distracted by my haunted face in that picture that it hadn't dawned on me to ask the question until we were already in a cab, flying down Lincoln Avenue, past lit-up bars and restaurants and outcroppings of brick town houses much like the one I used to own.

“Tarringtons,” Laney said.

Tarringtons was one of our old haunts, a place where we used to know each and every bartender. I couldn't say when I'd last been there, but I was sure it had been over a year. Ben and I had fallen into that relationship stage where we didn't go out that often, happy to stay home, tucked away in the town house, making linguini and watching movies (weird little independent films if it was my night to pick,
The Godfather
or some other mobster flick if it was his). The problem with that stage, of course, is that when you come out of the relationship, as I apparently had, you feel odd going back into the old stage, the go-out-every-night-and-make-witty-small-talk stage. I hoped I was up to it.

The smoke hung like nimbus clouds from the ceiling as Laney and I walked in. Tarringtons was a long, thin, oak-lined place with a wooden bar to the left, the rest of the place scattered with stools and tall round tables. At the front, a shaggy guy played acoustic Van Morrison tunes.

We made our way to the bar and snagged the last two empty stools. Laney ordered margaritas, our cocktail of choice. I started to ask her for more details about Gear, but we were soon interrupted by a shout and a round of hugs from Jess and Steve, two friends of ours from Laney's days at an advertising agency. Jess and Steve both still worked there (at least as far as I knew), and they both still did everything together, but for different reasons now. For years, while they were “just friends,” we were constantly telling Jess that they should have sex and get it over with, but she swore they weren't like that. Then one day, a year and a half ago, they'd announced that they were, in fact, like that. They were in love, they'd discovered, and a few months later they were engaged. We'd been hearing about the wedding plans all year and in fact, if I remembered correctly, it was coming up soon.

“Oh my God,” Jess said. “Is it Kelly McGraw, blast from the past, or is it a vision?”

“It's me,” I said, letting myself be pulled into another one of Jess's surprisingly strong hugs. Everything about Jess was tiny—her miniature frame, her rosebud mouth, her hands and feet—and although she hated being called “cute,” she was probably going to be stuck with the term her whole life. Steve was just the opposite. Tall and gangly, with an unfortunate resemblance to Ichabod Crane.

“You look unbelievable,” Jess said. “Where have you been and what have you done to yourself?”