Don't I Know You? (23 page)

Sybil turned back to Meryl, who was still sitting with her hands extended.

“Okay,” said Sybil, “let's have a look-see.”

She gazed at the palm of Meryl's left hand for a long minute, as if reading a page in a book.

“Huh,” she said again. Her voice was slightly nasal. Afterward, Meryl would do a killer impression of it.

“What?” said Meryl avidly. “Is it bad?”

“You have a simian line, which I'll get to, but look here,” she said, pointing to a crease inside the deeper line that curved around the base of Meryl's thumb. “Your line of Mars is very pronounced. It's almost an extra life line.”

“But isn't that good? Two life lines?”

“It means that although you're easy to get along with, you can be fierce about standing up for things. A fighter.”

“Well, my husband would not disagree,” said Meryl, blushing again. Sybil tapped the plump bulge at the base of her thumb.

“And look at that Mount of Venus—so much energy.” She peered at a chain of tiny islands that braided the lifeline.

“But you do have to watch your lungs.”

“That's right! I caught some sort of bug when we shot
Osage County
and it took me
weeks
to get over it.”

Sybil chuckled and put a finger on the fleshy pad under Meryl's third finger. “You also have quite the appetite for sensual excess.” The actress gave Rose a sidelong tell-me-something-new look.

Sybil traced the single horizontal crease on Meryl's left palm.

“This simian line … textbook case.”

“Simian, as in gorilla?”

“Yes. It's when the head line and the heart line run together. Only ten percent of the population have it, but it's fairly common among artists—and criminals. Nothing to worry about, though. It just means that you take a slightly maverick, intuitive approach to things.”

“Okay,” said Meryl tentatively.

“But sometimes it clouds your judgment. When you've got your sights on something, you can be opportunistic.”

“Really?” said Meryl in a little-girl voice.

Rose sat forward.

“More tea?” said Sybil.

“Yes, please.” Meryl held out her black cup. “What else?”

Now she took Meryl's right hand in her own. “You feel things deeply—sometimes too deeply.”

At this Meryl looked as if she might cry.

“I hope you've cultivated a few ways to protect yourself.”

Meryl snorted. “Well, I do hot yoga, if that counts,” Meryl said. “Although I think it's wrecking my back.”

“Just be careful about what you throw your heart into. Because once you commit, there is no turning back. And then the people closest to you can suffer too.”

Meryl turned to Rose with one hand on her heart.

“I wish my daughters could hear this.”

But Rose was thinking about Eric, his single-minded focus on work. How it had shaped their life.

“And don't confuse a commitment to acting with self-immolation.”

“But how do you know this—have you been an actor?”

Sybil's sly smile returned, along with that flirtatious cock of her head.

“Not really. But I do write a little. And writers tend to be obsessive.”

“Do you write poetry?”

Sybil now poured herself some tea.

“Yes. But these days it's mostly novels, or stories.”

Rose could read the names on the spines of the books piled beside her. Valerie Martin, Edna O'Brien, Alice Munro.
Cat's Eye
, by Margaret Atwood. Several copies of
Cat's Eye
.

“How's your sleep?” Sybil asked Meryl.

“Not so good.”

“That does not surprise me. Do you meditate?”

“I've tried it, but my schedule is so crazy…”

“You know what Flaubert said: If you want to be a revolutionary in your art, lead a boring bourgeois life. Or words to that effect. Let's have a look at those feet.”

Meryl took off her Sorel boots and socks—Rose's socks, actually. She had the beginnings of a bunion on one foot and a recent pedicure. Nude polish with a pearly sheen. Sybil poked at her boot.

“These are great in the snow but they have zero support. You're going to pay for that eventually.” She pushed down on the top of Meryl's foot.

“Ouch.”

“Nerve supply seems okay. Have you tried toe-spreaders?

“Toe-spreaders?”

“The foamy things they put between your toes at the nail salon, only sturdier. When you walk with your toes separated, you distribute your weight properly, which means that you'll keep your balance much longer as you age. And get your husband to massage them when you watch the news. Look at mine,” Sybil said, kicking off her slippers and flexing her slim feet. “I'm seventy-four, but I've got the balance of Nadia Comaneci.”

Rose surreptitiously checked her phone. “Sorry, Meryl, but if we want to—”

“I think we're done here,” said Sybil.

“Thank you
so
much!” said Meryl, standing up. “You've given me such a lot to think about. And I'd love to read something you've written. Could I persuade you to sell me one of your books? A novel, if you have one.”

Sybil smiled her cat smile. “I have a few.”

She retreated behind the curtain and returned wiping the cover of a book with her sleeve.

“You have daughters—yes?—so you might like this one.”

“
Cat's Eye
,” said Meryl, reading the cover.

And now it all fell into place for Rose: the voice, the knowing smile, the nimbus of curls.

“I'll sign it for you.” Sybil took the book and opened to the title page.

“The thing is, once your balance goes, you're more likely to fall and break a hip, and then it's game over. Most people die within a year of fracturing a hip, did you know that? So we have to stay grounded. Especially given everything. Given the world right now.”

She pointed to Rose's brogueish shoes. “Rose has the right idea.”

Sybil scribbled some words across one corner and returned the book to Meryl. Then she put a hand on the actress's arm.

“And now I have to say something, something you might not want to hear.”

Meryl looked at Rose. “No, what, say it.”

“You've embarked on a new project recently…”

“That's right,” said Meryl.

“It involves you playing a certain character, and you like to do a great deal of research for these roles. The way a person speaks, and moves.”

“Yes.”

“This new role of the woman, the failed writer who murders someone—I'm not sure this is going to work out well for you.”

Rose felt the room recede, as if her hearing had shut down. She can't mean me, she thought. But it was done, the arrow had entered her. In the armchair beside her, Minky's claws flexed open and then dug into the fabric. Meryl's face reddened.

“But that's not how I see her, as a failed writer,” said Meryl almost in a whisper. “To me she's a character I love.”

Rose's thoughts ran backward, all the way to the spa, and to their first dinner. Meryl's penetrating questions. The talk about advances and broken contracts.

“It's not the role that's the problem so much as your approach to it,” Sybil said. “You'll do what you do, which will serve the work well. But don't be surprised if certain relationships suffer in the process.”

“It's always a little hard on my family,” said Meryl quietly. She was gazing down at her hand and would not look at Rose.

“Besides them,” said Sybil.

Rose's original plan had been to go to the movie, and then after for drinks at the star-worthy Shangri-la, where the fireplace ran the full length of the bar. They would talk about the movie, and how Darlene Love's amazing voice had been stolen without credit for the hit record “She's a Rebel.” They'd marvel at how arbitrary it could be, success or failure. A writer and an actress, talking.

It's too late to just walk out, Rose thought.

A passerby on Ossington peered into the storefront window without seeing the three women. Sybil began to clear away the tea.

“Remember what happened when you played that Australian woman accused of killing her baby,” she asked. “The dingo movie?”

Meryl put her face in her hands. “She said I made her look coarse, and she hated the clothes they made me wear. But it's a movie, I kept telling her. It's fiction.”

“Well, there's no such thing as pure invention,” said Sybil mildly. “I'll be right back, I have a little something I want to give you.”

They were left alone in bruised silence. Meryl came over to Rose and took her hand, made her meet her eyes.

“That's not how I see you, Rose. Please believe me. This has nothing to do with my work.”

“How do you know? It's all fair game. I've done it too.”

Rose remembered a newspaper story she had written in her twenties, about a woman who lived with thirty-six rescue cats, and was fighting an eviction. She had shared tea and home-made butter tarts with Rose, who then made ruthless fun of her (and her zodiac coffee mugs) in print. Months later they found themselves in the same lineup at No Frills. The woman glared at Rose, left her groceries behind, and stalked out of the store. Rose went home, reread her story, and saw what she had done. Felt deeply chastened, and never forgot the lesson.

“But I would never decapitate anyone,” Rose said. “I think.” Meryl laughed and then teared up with relief.

“I agree. I can just Google that part.”

Outside, some snow had begun to fall, absentmindedly, like drifting thoughts. Sybil slipped back into the room and handed them two Ziploc bags. Rose opened hers: a pair of blue foam toe-spreaders. Meryl's were glittery. The actress thanked her effusively and Sybil went over to the chair with the sleeping cat.

“Minky, down you get, it's time for bed.” She blew out the tea lights and turned to the two women with the cat in her arms.

“Don't forget what I said about the feet. And if you go right now, you'll still make your movie.”

 

Mister Softee

Rose's mother was ninety-four, so it was expected—but still. Your only mother, poof, gone. Eric called from Philadelphia and sent flowers. Her stepson, Ryan, was on holiday in Thailand, and her daughter had just started a new job in Hong Kong. Ceri offered to fly home for the funeral, but Rose forbade her.

“It'll just be the caregivers and me anyway,” she said, holding her phone flat on her hand like a canapé and talking into it, to avoid the keyboard. “Nobody else is left.”

This came at the end of a year of dogged self-improvement for Rose—Spanish lessons, Zumba at the gym, the meditation app. She'd cut back on the wine, lost a little weight. And every day she did some research for her next novel, even though her publisher had declared bankruptcy. The Flo-Q copy-writing contracts she could do handily on the side and was grateful for. It felt good to finish something and get paid.

Her mother's death should have been another ending, and in certain ways it was, of course. But it also felt like the beginning of a new unmothered self, someone she didn't yet recognize.

It was September. The air felt cooler, like a silk lining, and the traffic had a new self-important urgency as everyone retreated indoors to school and jobs. Two days after her mother died she took her laptop to Starbucks, dropping into the safety of the screen. The pale guy with the thin head and his devices spread widely around him was there as usual. A number of her friends had sent condolences on Facebook. Should one “like” a death, though? In the afternoon, she drove down to Cherry Beach, a miraculously condo-free stretch of the waterfront that still resembled the shoreline of a lake. She felt a little truant doing this, but the funeral wasn't for another four days and all the arrangements had been made. The visitation room at Oak Ridges Manor, her mother's last home, was booked. The casket had been chosen.

The man at the funeral home who dealt with her was the owner's son. As he sat across from her in his ill-fitting suit, she had had an urge to shock him. To kiss him on the mouth. In the lee of her mother's death she kept being ambushed by strange impulses like this.

The parking lot at Cherry Beach was empty except for the usual chip truck, and something new, a Mr. Softee. On the side of the white van was a cartoon of a waffle-patterned man with a curl of soft ice cream on his head, like a plump white turd. And instead of the usual clown-calliope tunes, this Mr. Softee was broadcasting slow, lugubrious music. Something classical. Behind the counter was an older man with close-cropped silvery hair, wearing a black apron and a gray fedora. Familiar-looking.

As Rose walked past the truck on her way to the water's edge, Mr. Softee caught her eye, smiled, and gave a little ceremonial bow. She pretended not to have seen.

A few die-hard sunbathers lay on the beach. Cyclists rode along the already leaf-strewn bike path. Across the channel, where the sailboats slipped in and out of the harbor, were the islands, Toronto's peaceful archipelago. Cherry Beach reminded Rose of her childhood home, a brick house on a cul-de-sac with a view of the billowing and sometimes fiery smokestacks of the steel plants across the bay. Going down to the lake still made her curious about the world on the opposite shore, and whatever she was missing.

In the parking lot stood a Plexiglas-enclosed sign describing the city's plans for developing Cherry Beach. She wanted to vandalize the sign, because the place worked perfectly as it was. On weekends families came down to Cherry Beach with their coolers and lit fires in the rusted BBQ grills set back under the trees. This well-used place, tattooed with footpaths, would soon be ruined by streetlights, chain-link fences, and a glass Visitor Centre.

The sun had a low glare so Rose went back to the car to fetch her hat.