Rise and Shine (26 page)

I
GOT HOME
on a Saturday night, which is the official moment of the city of New York. When I return after even a week away, I am always struck by it again, the bulk of it against the sky, the dwindling perspective drawings of the streets, the way everything is available here, everything possible: Ethiopian food, gay group sex, designer clothes for dogs, druggy dance clubs, six-foot-long hero sandwiches, all-night dry cleaners. New York runs on its own digitalis. One moment your heart is thump-thumping in a normal fashion. The next it’s staccato, double time, leap-a-leap. “I love this girl!” someone screamed from the window of a taxi as I walked down Sixty-ninth Street in a light spring mist.

There was a note from Leo: “Went to Newport for the weekend. Love you a lot. Bought apples.” He had, two dozen of them. Young men do not understand the basic law of produce: Things rot. Even apples. He had cleaned the apartment in his fashion. The sofa bed was folded into place, although a long tail of top sheet trailed from one corner of the cushion onto the floor. The dishwasher had been unloaded, although everything that had been in it was huddled together on the counter like a motley collection of glass and china friends. In the center of my bed a black-and-white kitten was sleeping. My grown cat, Kitty Foyle, was hunched like an orange meat loaf in the chair in the corner, keeping watch. She looked baleful. When she saw me, she moaned.

“Life is a constant surprise with kids,” I remembered saying to Irving one evening after Leo had visited.

“Yeah, I got enough surprises in my life,” Irving said. “Surprises are one of the few things I got in spades.”

I was glad Leo was away, even though it meant the kitten would be a mystery for another day. The apartment felt quiet and peaceful. Nearly every drawer was open about an inch, and I went around the apartment closing them all. I await the research on why a person carrying a Y chromosome is unable to close a drawer entirely. “What?” Irving always said. “It is closed.”

Inside the all-night Duane Reade drugstore, a Muslim girl in a head scarf was working the register alone. In the back, a thin man in a windbreaker was reading
Car and Driver.
An elderly man who lives on my block patrolled the aisle with his wheeled walker. It has a little basket screwed to the front, like a bicycle, and each day he comes into Duane Reade to buy just one thing. That way he will have errands to fill each day of the week. “Antacids,” he was mumbling to himself. “Which aisle is antacids?” These are rhetorical questions. He doesn’t like it if you answer him.

On the street, it was a party. Four couples came tumbling out of the Greek restaurant, the women loudly shouting something at one another of the “I was right, wasn’t I?” variety. The men were unwrapping cigars and biting dramatically at the ends. Through the front window of one of the brownstones, trapped in a square of amber light, I could see a man and a woman in the foreground of some gathering, her head tipped toward him but turned down, his shoulder swiveled so it would touch her bare arm. He spoke and her chin floated north and she laughed, put out a hand to touch his arm, then drew back and lifted a glass to her lips. New York is full of pantomime. Once I watched an entire marriage proposal through the front window of a French restaurant from a coffee shop across the street. I could tell by the way the woman looked down at her ring that she found it a disappointment, and I wondered whether coincidence might be mischievous and allow me someday to see the night when she would throw it at him and break the engagement or, later still, demand a divorce.

On the stoop next to my building, a clutch of high school students were smoking cigarettes. One girl was wearing a frayed jacket that I’d seen in a magazine at the nail parlor; I remembered that it retailed at sixteen hundred dollars. “We do the same thing every weekend,” she was saying. Probably it was true. The celebrity pizzeria, the walk through the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, the smoke on the West Side stoop, the drinking at the apartment where the parents were in Paris and the son said pugnaciously that if anyone touched the sculpture, they would die. Even New York kids who are not spoiled are spoiled just by waking up every morning with the UN blocking the view of the river from their bathroom window. Once I’d realized that my mother was wrong when she behaved as though the city was the most exhausting of enterprises, I had been on the train from Connecticut and in the city at every opportunity. There was a time when I thought the most exotic words in the world were “sushi on St. Mark’s Place.” When I’d gone into hiding on City Island, it was not to find peace and quiet but to place myself in the purgatory I believed I deserved.

Meghan had refused to go with me to the airport. She said it was because if Negril was depressing, Montego Bay would be unbearable, that she hated long car rides and her head ached slightly. But I thought Negril had suggested that there was a life beyond the bedroom with its plantation furniture, the patio with its chaises, the spliff and the swim and the dock. She was putting her hands over her ears to blot out its siren song. The morning of my flight a fax had flown across the kitchen floor. The network was formally cutting off her salary.

“Good thing I have thirty million bucks in investments,” she said airily, waving it in front of her.

When she’d held my face in her hands the way she used to do sometimes when we were small, when she’d said, “You take care of yourself,” it would have been the perfect time to blurt out my suspicions. Of course I should have done that that first night or the third or even in the car home from Negril, when I’d had to ask Derek to pull over so I could throw up by the side of a pasture filled with goats. But I’d told myself I wasn’t certain, though the voice of running commentary in my brain—the voice that sometimes sounds suspiciously like Meghan’s TV voice—was telling me that I was full of it. There’s also a voice in my head that sounds remarkably like Tequila’s; add the occasional bromide from my aunt Maureen, and it’s impossible to imagine how I can hear myself think. As I’d stood at the counter of the drugstore and laid down a pint of rocky road ice cream, a Whitman’s Sampler jumbo collection of creams, and a home pregnancy test, the Tequila voice muttered sarcastically, “You got the candy, you got the ice cream, don’t need to be bothering with the E.P.T. test because you know the answer.”

The candy wasn’t mine anyhow. Sunday morning I got up early into the milky white light and the city streets, which are deserted then, and always dirty with the sordid debris of weekend parties. I bought some bagels and cream cheese and packed them into a bag with the Whitman’s Sampler, and took the train to Westchester. Our aunt Maureen lives in a faux Tudor building there, a place for older people, mainly women, that provides what are called support services, which means there’s a free van for shopping and lunch outings and organized trips a couple of times a month to the Manhattan museums or theaters.

“There’s my girl,” she said as she opened her door, throwing her arms around me and taking the tote from my hand. “Coffee’s on.” Meghan says Maureen is the only person outside of commercials who actually says that: Coffee’s on.

It’s impossible to visit the apartment and not go immediately to the window, which frames a slice of one of the broadest parts of the Hudson River. There’s a fringe of trees on the bank and, across the sweep of ruffled gray-green water, a steep embankment that looks as wild as it was when the Indians were the only people in New York, living a peaceful and uneventful life that would soon be marked by slaughter and betrayal. Maureen has a telescope on a stand, and an overstuffed chair that gives you mainly a view of treetops and sky. The light and the water are completely different, but in some ways it felt like the house where Meghan was living.

“You look wonderful,” my aunt said, handing me a mug that said
YOU ARE
#
1
! on it. “Did you have a wonderful time?”

“
Wonderful
is not the word I’d use. It was weird, because for all the time the two of us spend together, we both realized we never really have that much time to talk. Really talk, I mean. But we really really talked. Let’s just say that Meghan opened her mouth and everything came out.”

“Like Pandora’s box,” Maureen said evenly. “Our Meg has had a lot to think about.” Except for Evan, Maureen is the only one who is permitted to call Meghan by a diminutive. It is always preceded by the word
our,
and it occurred to me some time ago that it was to make the distinction between our Meg and their Meghan, the real woman and the public figure. Maybe there would no longer be the need for such a distinction.

“Did you have any idea of how unhappy she’s been?”

“Oh, Bridget. Meghan has never been happy, not really. She has a little motor inside her, and it drives her. The problem is that when you have that kind of motor, there isn’t really any destination. So then what do you do? You go as far as you can. But it’s never quite far enough. This used to be a problem only for men, but now you girls have managed to make it your own along with everything else.”

“Well, you know, this is all making me a little angry, because I thought things were pretty good. I mean, I knew her life was stressful. But I didn’t think it was truly terrible. And now it turns out everyone knew but me. And I should have known before anyone.”

Maureen went back into the kitchen to refill her own cup, and I went over to look at the photographs covering the wall of the dining nook. It ought to be the Meghan Fitzmaurice wall, of course. There is a photograph of Meghan with a small wizened man who, upon close examination, turns out to be the chief justice of the Supreme Court. There is Meghan at the Oscars, surrounded by movie actors and looking like just one of the crowd.

But there is me, too, at my graduation from Smith, standing on a beach in the Hamptons one summer, pretending to give Leo a good sock in the jaw while he holds his palms up and out, his eyes wide in play-horror. If you count the photographs on Aunt Maureen’s wall, the number will always be equal. There will never be more space given to one niece than to the other. I know because I’ve counted. Maureen and our mother had been two sisters, too, and although she never said so, it was clear to me in hindsight that our aunt was bound and determined to see that in our case neither felt less favored.

“Do you know you don’t have a picture up here of the two of us together?” I said.

My aunt Maureen nodded sharply. “I have one. It’s that sweet one of the two of you with your arms around each other standing on the porch when you were young. It’s on my bedside table. But here, no. Here the two of you are separate.”

“Why? It seems so counterintuitive.”

“Because you are separate, Bridget.”

“Well, there’s no denying we’re different.”

“Of course you are. I read a book or two when you first came to live with us, mainly to learn how to cope with Meghan. She was so angry, and it was difficult to think she wasn’t angry at me.”

“I know the feeling.”

“She wasn’t, you know. She was just angry at the way things turned out. And even then there was that motor. I think she was angry at how it drove her. In any event, one of the books I read said that the second child occupies the territory not already claimed by the first.”

I laughed. “Ah. That’s how I got penniless obscurity.”

Maureen shook her head. “I would hope that one of the lessons of your trip was that that is not how things have turned out in the least.”

“Do you think that accounts for my job? That being a social worker is being the anti-Meghan?”

“Now, it’s funny that you should see it that way. I always assumed that your job was by way of imitating me. Maybe I was flattering myself.”

“You could never flatter yourself as much as you deserve,” I said, and I hugged her. “But here’s something that worries me: If the second child gets the stuff the first doesn’t want, what does that say about an only child? Where does that leave Leo?”

“I suspect an only child can either be everything or anything he pleases. Leo’s taken the second tack. I wouldn’t worry about that boy.”

“I’ve never really been worried about Meghan before,” I said, staring out into the tree branches.

“I don’t believe that for a moment,” Maureen said.

“She’s really thin,” I said.

“That’s not new.”

“Really thin. Thinner than she’s been before.”

Maureen got up from the table and went into the other room, came back with one of the supermarket tabloids. I looked at the front page. An aging movie star had found out her husband was gay. The lead singer of a band was sleeping with his ex-wife’s sister. At the bottom was a small grainy photograph and a headline: “Meghan in Rehab?” The photo showed a redheaded woman in a hospital gown attached to an IV walking down a hospital corridor. The picture was shot from the back. At least the woman, whoever she was, had not had the humiliation of having her gown gape in back as hospital gowns are so wont to do.

“She’s at some place in Colorado. The one they said that young actress went to last year.”

“Or not. Because since we know Meghan isn’t there, maybe that girl wasn’t there, either. Maybe no one has ever been there. Maybe the place in Colorado doesn’t even exist. Maybe Colorado doesn’t exist. When did this come out?”

“I’ve been getting sympathetic looks at bridge for three or four days, so probably then. I was just worried that Leo might have seen it, or heard about it. I spoke to him Tuesday night. He seems to be enjoying his job. He said he had a surprise for you when you got back. I hope it’s a good surprise. I’ve noticed that children’s surprises sometimes tend to be a little miscalculated, if you get my drift.”

I laughed; I was remembering a lifetime of unfortunate surprises. Aunt Maureen doesn’t really care for surprises, perhaps because there were so many enormous ones: the fact that she never had children herself, that she was left almost overnight with her sister’s instead of her own. That’s why she likes the Whitman’s Sampler instead of fancier chocolates. They still print a chart on the inside lid so you know exactly what you’re getting.