Best Friends (60 page)

“That's not true. They'll see you in the context of your family's absence,” I said, reasonably. But I knew instantly what a bad thing I'd said.

“I only see him twice a week now,” Sally sobbed. “I'm not a bad daughter, I just can't. I can't.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. I envisioned Sid carrying Ben on his shoulders, the little boy shouting, “Tuck! tuck!” Gone, gone, they were all gone. An orgy of loss. Sally loved her father; he would never abuse her.

“We were normal,” Sally said. “We were a normal family.” She set down her mug of tea with a thwack and looked at me. “I've got to stop grieving. I've got to keep myself together for my children. I have no choice.”

For the rest of my visit, she was fine.

 

 

 

“YOU'RE SCARED?” Ted had said sharply. “What in the world are you scared about?”

A gas station at a busy exit. It seemed to be our collusion, that we would meet to exchange Aury at progressively less welcoming places. The woman behind the counter was smoking, so we moved outside to stand by the tires.

“I don't know, I feel like I crossed some political line. I know the medical center's technically a nonprofit entity, but there's a lot of pressure on all the clinics to be cost-effective, and I'm not sure my clinic is. So a letter like this . . .” I shrugged. “It gives them an excuse.”

Ted frowned; it scared me that he didn't argue. “Medicine's becoming extremely money-driven,” he said.

“Nothing but a goddamn business,” I said bitterly. I was forty: Where would I work if my clinic closed?

Ted's eyes clouded; I thought he might be blinking back tears. A white car with dirty tires pulled in front of us, spattering our legs with mud. “You don't deserve to have your practice treated like a business,” Ted said thickly, and I thought of my clinic, its upholstered chairs with peeling arms, its big sample closet from which I filled recycled plastic bags with free pills, my scene in the waiting room earlier this week with the “user” who wanted an early script for more AZT, having sold his previous pills on the street as amphetamines. In what heroic landscape did Ted picture me working?

 

 

 

ANOTHER DAY DURING THAT trip to Idaho in June, we had a confrontation by the river. Two men, with big boots and lots of equipment, wanted to fish in the river from Sally's shore. Sally told them they weren't allowed.

“We've always fished here. We've fished here for forty years. My dad used to bring me here.”

“I understand that the river holds memories for you, and I respect memories, but I respect life too, and fishing is a way of taking life. One of many ways.”

The men eyed each other. It struck me that they suspected Sally was some kind of nature freak. “Fishing's natural,” the younger one said. He looked at Shoshana in the carrier on Sally's back. “The Indians used to fish.”

“It's a final decision. It's my property, and I'm unswayable.”

“That's too bad,” the older man said, “your little boys would like it.” Ezra was teaching the twins and Barbara his version of karate, which involved a lot of grunts and hopping, as Linnea the silent rocked herself in the grass.

“My girls might like it too,” Sally countered quickly. “And they'll grow up and decide for themselves, I'm sure. But it's not an experience they're getting under my auspices.”

“Your boy go to school?” the older man said, nodding at Ezra.

“No, I homeschool him.” Sally's answer startled me, because it was untrue. Later she said she'd told him that so he would think she was some hippydippy type not worth his efforts to pester.

“I don't think he'd pester you,” I objected. “He seemed nice.”

“They all seem nice. Listen, I'm a woman alone in the country with six kids,” she reminded me. “I've got to protect them.”

I hadn't thought of it like that.

FRIDAY NIGHT I DREADED, with all the hints Sally had made about their observing Shabbos, the Sabbath. But it was fine. A few mysterious prayers in Hebrew, some candles, and—considering six children were involved—a relatively peaceful dinner. Before dusk, Sally turned the lights off in the bedrooms, turned the lights on downstairs and in the bathrooms, and that's the way things stayed until Saturday night. Turning lights on and off counted as work, and observing Shabbos meant no working.

The next morning, Barbara wanted to go to Wal-Mart. “We can't go today, lambie,” Sally said. “It's Shabbos.” The twins wanted to help their mother bake cookies. “Not today,” she said, “it's Shabbos.”

“I can see some advantages to this Shabbos business,” I said. It was surprisingly warm, although there was snow on the mountains, and we sat on the front lawn in lawn chairs looking out over the valley. Shoshana was asleep on a blanket beside us, the other kids scampering in and out of a grove of trees.

“We Jews are practical,” Sally said with a wink, the gesture so unexpected I felt myself blush.

“How much is that house the mogul owns?” I asked, twisting around in the direction of the path.

Sally lifted her hands above her head and stretched out on the lawn chair. “Millions. It's advertised in
Town and Country.
”

She reminded me of Sid, stretching out like that, and suddenly I missed him. The old Sid, the Sid before Ben was dead, the Sid who asked if his business was worse than building the better bomb. A question I'd never wanted to answer. Maybe not. Probably not. Not.

He was big, that Sid. He was a force, a character, and I wondered fleetingly if Sally and I would ever seem as big to our offspring as Sid had seemed to us.

Ezra was running toward us. “Mommy, Mommy! We found a bunny nest! We found baby bunnies!”

Sally was on her feet instantly. “The little kids aren't touching them, are they?” She hurried off behind her oldest son.

I sat for a moment and looked out over the valley, the patches of green trees and snow, the rocky outcroppings, the long view to the mountains in the distance. “I love her,” Sid had said. “We've always had this special bond, Sally and me.” He was never, in essence, an evil man. For the first time I understood this. Even if he did just what he told me, when he did it, he was not in his best mind. I won't excuse him by saying he wasn't in his right mind, only that he wasn't in his best. He was losing control, he was panicked, he had made himself so adept at rationalization that he forgot that there were things a thinking human cannot, without consequences, do. But in the end he was a thinking human. On the altar of Sally's big future, he sacrificed not just Ben but himself.

I heard the sound of a sharp spank, then a wail. The whole group was coming back, Linnea trapped and writhing under Sally's arm. “Never never never touch a bunny,” Sally scolded. “I just hope that bunny-mommy comes back.”

In a moment Ezra was wailing too. “Mommy, I want the bunny-mommy to come back!”

“It will, honeybear. It will. We'll just leave the babies alone now.”

Ezra gave a long, quivering sob. “Can I go make sure the bunny-mommy comes back?”

“No, lovie, you need to stay here with me. If that bunny-mommy has any brains, she'll come back.”

“I don't think she has brains,” Barbara announced.

“What about the bunny-daddy?” Ezra sobbed. “If the bunny-mommy won't look after them, what about the bunny-daddy?”

“Oh, sweetie. Bunny-daddies aren't around much.”

“I hate Daddy,” Joshua annnounced suddenly.

“Oh, Joshua,” Sally said. “We all know that's not true.”

Barbara gave her mother a smirk. “I know a people-daddy who's not around much.”

“Linnea, ouch, honey, let go of my arm. I'm going to set you down, but you've got to stand here, okay? You can't go back by the bunnies.”

“How do you keep a people-daddy around if a bunny-daddy hops away?” Barbara was grinning.

I recognized the tilt of Sally's chin, the firmness in her voice. “Our people-daddy is never leaving. Understand, Bubbles? Never. Not if this people-mommy can help it.”

 

 

 

I GOT FIRED. My HIV clinic was closed, my patients' files transferred to the division of infectious diseases. “Idiots,” Sally said. “Unbelievable. You could move out here. You could practice regular medicine. You wouldn't even have to practice medicine. You could live here with me and the kids and care for us.”

Sally paying the way. Paying the way with her blue movie money.

No, that wasn't fair. Paying the way with her botched face-lift money, her lumpy liposuction money. Paying my way.

“It's beautiful here! You should see my roses. And we have plenty of room. Aury would love it. Even your mom! Your mom would love it. You could give her the whole annex.” The annex was the small cinder-block house beyond the vegetable garden, where Sally and Peter had first lived when they were building their house. There was nothing new with the divorces; the mogul had fired his financial adviser and was shopping for a new divorce lawyer, and Sally wouldn't make any move toward letting Peter go until she could guarantee he'd stay close.

“I'll visit. I'm staying here. We have this new house. And my mom's happy here, Aury's got her friends and her swim team, we're only a few hours from Ted, and I know it sounds hokey, but I couldn't leave my patients. I have contacts. I'll set up something in town.”

“Can you get by financially?”

“I'll be okay. I have some money saved up, actually. That accountant Cleve's been helping me.”

“I admire you.”

“Thanks. I kind of admire myself. I want to stay in the fray,” I said, closing my eyes. “Even if I don't stay at University, I want to keep up my practice with AIDS.”

“In the fray,” Sally echoed softly, respectfully. “I guess that's where we both belong.” I knew some people would say Sally had left it, but they were wrong.

There were days I admired myself, but other days I felt like a wisp, a nothing, a middle-aged woman who'd gone soft and useless, who couldn't even cook, an object of ridicule to Timothy Quiver and his infectious disease colleagues. On those days, I remembered Ben.

 

 

 

“STRANGE CALL FROM SALLY,” my mother said. “We talked more today than we have in the last fifteen years.”

“Sally called?” Aury and I had been swimming.

“She's moving.”

How could that be? “She told you that? Not back to Los Angeles—”

“She bought a house. It's around the mountain or somewhere. Where Peter and that girlfriend of his live now. Some computer millionaire owned it. Sally wanted to buy it for Peter so he'd be close to their children, but the only way the millionaire”—my mother sneered over this word—“would sell was if Sally signed a contract saying she'd live there herself.” I was surprised my mother had grasped this convoluted story; I was having a problem grasping it myself. “Peter's apparently thrilled,” my mother went on. “He and the girlfriend are going to move where Sally's living now. Sally says they're basically exchanging houses. She says in a way it's ideal because the houses are pretty close. There's a path. She says Peter designed the place she's leaving.”

“Sally told you this? Sally and the kids are moving to the house with the airstrip?”

“An airstrip! She didn't mention an airstrip. She did call the place a palace. You know what that millionaire did? He played with her by driving up the price.”

“I can't believe this. Sally hates that house.”

“She's doing it for the children! I told her she should be proud. It's never wrong to do things for your children.”

 

 

 

“SO YOU'RE GOING TO see possibles,” Ted said with a sly grin. We were at our Burger King eating lunch and exchanging Aury—a dangerous treat—and she and the girls were off in the play area.

“I don't want to see possibles,” I groused. Ted was leaning forward, as close as he would let himself get to me. “But I'm sure you're right, in private practice, I'll have to see the stupid possibles.”

Ted held his palm out and separated his third and fourth fingers like Spock giving the Vulcan salute. “A chink in the wall of your unacceptance of ambiguity.”

I scowled. “I don't know why I have to accept ambiguity.”

“Oh, Clare,” Ted said ruefully, sitting back in his chair. “When you're looking at me, what are you looking at except ambiguity? What am I? I'm a ball of ambiguities.”