Best Friends (44 page)

I inspected the breasts. They looked like ordinary Los Angeles breasts to me, round and perky. “No.”

“The left nipple's a little higher than the right.”

“You're kidding.” I brought the photo right up to my nose. “If you say so.”

“She's heartbroken. She says she never would have gotten implants if she'd known. Says she can't go braless anymore.”

“Can't you not take the case?”

“I've got to take it.” She sighed. “It's one of my paralegals.”

We exchanged a glance. “I'm tired of the young,” she said. “I'll get her a couple thousand.” Sally ran her hand through her hair. “I can't believe the practice of women's law has come to this.”

I thought of Sally's first small office and her first client from the hairdresser downstairs, the breathless article about her practice in the
L.A. Times,
my fantasy of her suing her own father on behalf of a porn actress client. “You had such high hopes.”

“I did.”

“You still doing that consulting stuff for legal aid?”

“Oh, a little. But with the kids, I have only so much time, and this is the practice I created. And the legal aid stuff is thankless too, honestly. The last thing they called about was helping this woman with five children get back her kids. Well, I read the case report, and I don't want her to get her kids back.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them look, she doesn't deserve her kids. And the lawyer there said I was looking at it from a biased white Anglo middle-class perspective.”

“I don't know how you stand it.”

“No,” Sally answered to my surprise, “I don't either.”

 

 

 

“THE PLAY GROUP'S HERE today,” Sally announced one morning. “I should get home from the office by two, and the moms and kids start arriving at three. I told Kasey and Robin and Sara you'd be here in case I'm late.”

“Those are the mothers?”

“Uh-huh. Casey and Robin have four boys, and Sara has three girls. Clare, you should get Aurelia out here. Why don't you bring her next time? It's not a sin to miss a few days of preschool.”

“Aury hates to miss preschool.” This was true, but I wasn't really thinking about Aury. Sara was coming over, Sally had said, Sara and her three girls. “The Sara who's coming, is she by any chance Sara the Countess of Come?”

“Oh.” Sally waved her hand dismissively. “She's ordinary. You'll see.”

 

 

 

“SARA AND I ARE going to a sushi bar,” Kasey said, tossing her hair from her face, her one-year-old wiggling furiously under her arm. “You and Sally want to come? They have a baby-sitting room. It's great. The kids sit in there and watch videos.”

Sara arrived at the door beside Kasey, her brood lined up behind her. “The hostess keeps an eye on the kids,” Sara explained in her high, breathy voice. A porn queen and her daughters: it gave a whole new meaning to the term “play group.”

I imagined Sara's and Kasey's children quiet, inert, anesthetized by videos as grown-ups sushi'ed around them. “How nice,” I said, unsure what else to say.

“It's good business,” Sara said airily. “Keeps us yuppies happy.” By now, Sally had joined us. “Good-bye, Sally dear,” Sara said, kissing Sally on both cheeks. A flurry of perfume and thank-yous and the whole group was out the door.

“Sara called herself a yuppie,” I noted after the door closed. “That's the first time I've heard a porn star categorized as a yuppie.”

Sally conceded this. “But Sara's lifestyle is yuppie-ish. Her husband's an accountant. She's nice, don't you think?” And then, not waiting for my answer: “I like her.”

 

 

 

WHEN I GOT HOME, Aury had a new friend. My mother had been staying in our town house with Aury, as she always did when I went away, and during my five days in Los Angeles, a divorced woman and her daughter had moved into the town house next door. The mother's name was Sheila, and Aury's friend was Brittany.

I hated the mother. Vapid, stupid, big-haired. She subsequently turned up with a string of boyfriends, several of whom liked to hit her against the wall. Brittany was always with us at those times, playing My Little Pony or Twister with Aury on the living room floor, the thumps on the wall as much background noise as the ubiquitous Disney video. This is sordid, I'd think, this is terrible, and I'd take the girls to Dairy Queen.

Brittany was a thin, worried little girl who always had a cold. You would think, with her lousy family background, that she would have clung to my daughter, but Aury clung to her. I can't count the weekend mornings I read to Aury in bed until it was late enough for her to go next door and knock for Brittany. Every place we went, the grocery store, the gas station, the library, Aury wanted Brittany to go. It was maddening, because there was absolutely nothing remarkable about that child. Her hair was stringy, she didn't laugh, her favorite word was “gross.” Aury was a thousand times smarter.

“Why do you like Brittany so much?” I'd ask her. “Is there a reason?” She's my best friend, Aury would say.

“Does Brittany have to go with us everywhere?” I'd ask. “Can't we just go out on a little date, you and me?” Brittany would miss me, Aury answered. They both liked Cocoa Puffs with chocolate milk for breakfast; they both liked purple; they would end up at the same elementary school with the same teacher.

“Why are you so enmeshed with that girl?” I said once in exasperation. I liked the word “enmeshed.” It reminded me of Sally's adjectives.

“Mother!” Aury said.

 

 

 

SALLY HAD TO TAKE a deposition in, of all places, Cleveland, so after she was done, she drove her rental car to Akron to spend the night. It was the first time since she'd met Mark Petrello that I'd seen her on my turf, the first time since the birth of Ezra I'd seen her without a child, the first time since her wedding that she'd seen Aury. I was ridiculously excited. She'd be gone from Barbara less than thirty-six hours and, capping weeks of careful planning and pumping, had left twenty-six bags of breast milk in her refrigerator at home. She negotiated highways and parking lots and hospital tunnels to appear at the door to my office at exactly, as we'd planned, half past five.

“Wow,” I said, “you get around. How'd the depo go?” It was another botched implant case.

“I nailed him.” She'd interviewed the defendant's expert witness. “I'm sure it'll settle.”

I stood up and we hugged, and while I finished dictating my day's progress notes, Sally wandered out to the hall and struck up a conversation with one of my nurses.

“It was a great job,” the nurse was saying as I left my office. “I got to see everything. I got to see organs being harvested.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sally start.

“But that was okay because it was, you know, giving life.” The nurse, new the clinic, turned to include me in her audience. The clinic nurses liked to impress me; after all, I was their boss. “It was a kid, too. Auto accident, crushed chest. About two or three years old. Oh, and he was a gorgeous child. Thick blond hair, blue eyes.”

Sally left. I saw her walk down the hall into the restroom, shut the door.

“Excuse me,” I said to the nurse. “You can tell me about this later.” I nodded to the restroom. “She has small kids.”

I have a kid, I thought. But with me it was different.

I knocked on the restroom door. “It's safe, you can come out now.”

“Just a minute.”

“Are you okay?”

“I guess so.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It's not your fault. It's like noise pollution, all of a sudden you hear something and . . .”

“I know. It
is
noise pollution.” I thought then of Sid's magazine, sitting in the drawerful of dirty magazines. Vision pollution. “Like all those little things that hit you.”

“Man feeds son to pigs.”

“Eyactly.”

She came out, blinking her eyes. “Without my kids, I wouldn't survive.”

“Oh, you would.” My response was automatic.

“I wouldn't want to.”

Not that I could imagine losing Aury. But in my business, parents lost their children.

We went out to dinner. By the time we got home that night, my mother had fallen asleep in a chair, and Aury was in bed. Sally and I stayed up talking until two. She saw Aury the next morning briefly over breakfast, but she had a flight to catch, and before I left for work, she drove away.

 

 

 

WHEN SALLY SPOTTED ME at the airport, her eyes widened. “You look great.” she said. “You look like a different person.”

“I had a makeover by my patients. Jose, a hairdresser, and Frank, who owns a clothing store called Serendipity, and Kevin, a set designer. They all came to my house, and we ate cookies, and they went through my wardrobe and worked on me. It was great. It was the most fun I've ever had in one afternoon. Aury sat on Kevin's lap and supervised.”

“You look like you belong here. You look L.A.” Sally seemed surprised at this notion. We hurried down the concourse to the baggage claim. “What exactly did you do to your hair?”

“Well, it's cut, obviously, but then Jose dyed it darker and then streaked it. Extreme, huh? But it was getting mousy.”

“You look L.A.,” Sally repeated in wonderment.

“Amaying,” I said, hurt. I thought I'd looked L.A. for years.

“Eyactly!” Sally cried.

I knew she was soft-soaping me, trying to make up for my obvious disappointment at seeing her pregnant again.

I couldn't believe it. It was almost more than I could stand, that she and Peter had thrust themselves together again. “Talk about amaying,” I said, waving a hand at her belly, “how do you get pregnant that fast when you're nursing? You're not supposed to ovulate when you're nursing. Nursing is supposed to be natural birth control.”

“I know. That's what my OB says too. He can't figure it out.”

I shivered at the thought of Peter having super-vigorous sperm.

“I think it's pure will,” Sally said. “I want children so badly I will them into conception.”

Had she forgotten? I thought about how desperate Ted and I had been to have children, how our marriage foundered on the lack of them. I thought of reminding Sally, but then I hesitated. After all, I did have Aury.

 

 

 

BY LATE 1991, Sid was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Sally was thirty-six with four children—Ezra, Barbara, and the twins, Joshua and Gabriel—under three years old. She kept up a full-time law practice but managed to do much of her paperwork at home, late at night after the kids were in bed. She cooked, she entertained, she drove Ezra to Gymboree.

“What else can I do,” she said. “What bigger act of faith is there than bringing a new child into the world? And motherhood is an amazing job because you can use everything—your intelligence, compassion, imagination, endurance, strength—everything, every resource you have. It's incredibly challenging.”

“Gosh,” I said, “and all I do is drive Aury to swim class.” I reminded myself that Sally was a lawyer. Persuasion was her stock in trade. “But you can use those things in any intense relationship,” I said. I thought, fleetingly, how I had no intense relationships. “I use them with my patients.”

“Well, work,” Sally conceded, making a slight face. She was nursing with both breasts, one baby tucked like a football under her right arm, the other laid across her belly. “But with your children, you discover talents you didn't know you had. You can make such a difference: point their way in the world, give them memories that'll inform their lives years later”—she was caught up in her argument, leaning forward—“like my dad did.”

I'd had poison ivy climbing up the back wall in my backyard, and a neighbor told me—so logical! why hadn't I thought of it!—to simply cut off its stem at the root. Sure enough, the vine withered away. Like Ben, I'd thought, cut off at the root. What took Sid so long to think of it?

“Whatever my father's faults,” Sally said, “you can't say he's not a wonderful father.”

I didn't say anything.

Sally looked at me with a frown, then, sighing, rearranged the babies.

 

 

 

THERE WERE SOME SIGNS: Sally went to pick him up for a dinner to celebrate her and Peter's anniversary, and Sid was on his patio in his swim trunks, puzzled by her presence. At his birthday, Sid tore into his gifts and seemed perfectly happy, but after the party, Sally found him puzzling over the boxes, unable to fit the tops onto the bottoms. Later, the attendant in Sid's gym told Sally that some days her father came in two or three times a day, while other days he didn't come in at all; but Sid told Sally he exercised every morning like clockwork. One night Sid said his mother was a good woman, and Sally had the distinct impression that her father believed his mother—who had died before Sally was born—was alive.

“I know it's Alzheimer's.” Sally's voice curled through the receiver and into my ear. “You can't know someone for thirty-six years without knowing something's wrong.”

Maybe what he did is driving him crazy, I thought. Interesting that his mind was going. Justice.

Sally, who refused to wallow, was sounding wallowy. “I hate to see him like that. And he knows, I know he knows, that's the worst part, he was looking at those boxes like what's wrong with me?”