Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) (8 page)

So I am in North Carolina, following the disembodied GPS voice to a random destination. I pass an open field. There is the tree. A bit scragglier than I had written it, but unmistakable nonetheless.

I screamed.

I was with my niece, whom I scared to death. She was driving. “Pull over.” I might have shouted it.

I got out of the car, and, as I stood by the side of the road, shocked and staring, a pickup truck passed by and stopped. The driver asked if everything was okay. “Yes,” I said. “I’m looking at the tree.”

“That’s my friend’s tree,” he said. “It’s an oak tree,” which is what I had written. And, in my novel, Marcel doesn’t know what to do with the tree when he first meets it, so he simply rubs himself against it.

The man said to me, “The bark is rubbed off because all the goats over there come over and rub themselves against the tree.”

When I spoke at the book festivals, I always told this story. I always said, “Isn’t this strange?” Or, “Isn’t this mystical?” Or, “Isn’t this remarkable?” As if I were a teenager recounting some woo-woo moment at a slumber party. Sometimes I likened it to an ESP experience, equivalent to thinking,
I really miss my friend
, and a minute later the phone rings and it’s she. Only one woman questioned me further, asking if I thought I’d had a spiritual experience. I said quickly, laughing, “No.”

Of course it wasn’t some ESP thing or a coincidence. And, as I understand synchronicity (not well), it doesn’t appear to be that, either, but something startlingly different, as my friend Joy pointed out one day when I had finished touring.

We are in a café, having cappuccinos and eating
pains au chocolat
. Because we haven’t seen each other in a while and are close friends, we are analyzing, pondering, and laughing about absolutely everything. I bring
this up. Joy, who is a reporter, Jewish, and more religious than I (but who isn’t?), forces the question and points out that I’ve been avoiding it.

In the dream and in what I wrote as a result, did I invent a higher power, a lion that could solve the problems of not only my heroines’ lives but my own, and provide me with comfort and peace? Joy mentions Jacob (in the Old Testament), who dreams of a ladder to heaven. Of course I know nothing of this and don’t really see the parallel after a quick Google on my iPhone of the Internet bible, Wikipedia. Nevertheless, how did I write a tree that exists in a place I had never been? How and why did I find it?

“The miracle of Marcel’s tree,” I say, laughing. No question I am more comfortable with the miracle of surviving a water bug, whose purpose is clear—to provide laughter at the dinner table. My mother’s commandments, which I live by, are concrete, pithy. They do not address the mysterious, the intangible, the unknowable. They do not allow for miracles like Marcel’s tree.

Have I had some proof, at sixty-six and facing loss, that I am not as alone as I feel? Am I so resistant to this idea that “Marcel” even provided a stranger in a pickup truck to stop, verify it, and offer additional proof?

Joy and I sip our cappuccinos, and the question sits there unanswered. There it will stay.

There is no way I can wrap my brain around this. It requires a leap of faith. A leap of faith conflicts with my religion. It’s not that I am “not Jewish enough,” but I am too Ephron to ever acknowledge it.

I
don’t care about the weather. I care only what the weather is going to do to my hair. Filling this gap in coverage—surprising, given how much weather reporting there is—I tweet #TheHairReport. I wish it had pictures. The useless weather report on cell phones has pictures. In my hair reports, I imagine round circles (heads) with, depending on the weather that day, straight hair, curly hair, frizzy hair, hair blowing sidewise, flat hair (hat head), long hair flowing in curves (hair with hairography, which, if you’re keeping up with hair lingo, you know is the dance in your hair).

Treacherous out. Walk slowly to blow-dry.

Moist. Tendrils expected.

Blizzard coming. Buy shampoo.

Hurricane coming. Sandbag ears.

Hurricane coming. Evacuate extensions.

Prepare for hurricane hair. Make minestrone.

Stay home. Cancel everything.

Bad hair day becomes good one. Sometimes life gets better.

Extreme hair happiness. Take it to the streets.

Good hair night. Or good night, hair.

Sunny and mild. Rush to blow-dry. Have important photos taken.

Sweat head.

Sweat head continues.

Cold. Sacrifice hair for ears. Wear hat.

Hat head trumps bed head. Root lifter recommended.

Tropical. Wash with piña colada.

Bad hair day gets worse. Cover mirrors.

Atlanta. Nice trees, bad hair. Wear leaves.

Charleston. Fried. Like everything else here.

Boston. Fritzy, a notch worse than frizzy.

Rome. Seems like a good place for hair to retire to.

Sicily. Hair good. Cappuccino better.

San Francisco. Due to hills, am more worried about legs than hair.

Pouring. Take boat to blow-dry.

Put a bow in it. Maybe some tinsel.

Doing the hair tango.

A very good day for hair of all sorts.

Spring. Take your hair for a walk. It doesn’t get better than this.

Fall. Wear a fall. Don’t fall.

Windy. Spray advisory in effect.

Major frizz alert.

Thanksgiving. Outside fine. Inside, beware of critical relatives.

Beautiful. A Beyoncé day.

M
any months ago, Julia Gregson and I, best friends and writers, sold an idea for a travel piece to
More
magazine. We had hatched it while having breakfast in my local Pain Quotidien.

Julia and I have been friends for thirty-five years. Our husbands were friends first. Jerry met me and Richard met Julia about the same time, and we all fell in love with one another. They lived in Los Angeles then and moved back to England shortly thereafter, eventually settling in Wales, and we have continued our friendship with extended visits in each other’s homes and meeting for vacations. Together we are great travelers. I don’t mean to exotic places. To, like, places in Europe. We like
to do the same things—walk, talk, and eat. We can spend hours at a café yakking way into the night, wake up the next morning, and fall into another endless conversation at breakfast.

I have recited a poem in French to them (Verlaine). No one can mangle French like me. It may be what I do best. Once we all created a water ballet. In other words, we behave like idiots together. We are always, always, always laughing. Except when we’re not, in which case we’re always extremely sympathetic.

Julia and I are nothing alike and a perfect match. She is tall. Very tall. About five ten, with auburn hair. Briefly, in her twenties, she was a model, and can still, if pushed, do the model walk with the bored model face. I am shortish—five four—with dark brown hair. My complexion is olive-ish. Hers is whatever goes with redheads, which means she can wear yellow and orange, earth tones, as they say. I am strictly black, navy, and an occasional raspberry (when I can find it, which I never can; it’s ridiculous to have mentioned it). Whatever looks good on Julia looks terrible on me. That’s how I know what to buy her for her birthday: if it looks bad on me.

Richard and Julia live in a farmhouse (that began as a cowshed in 1330, aka the Middle Ages) on the River Wye with a horse, sheep in the meadow, cavorting lambs
in the spring. Their dog got punished recently for eating a farmer’s prized chicken (really, it was some sort of valuable chicken beyond, like, being organic). My dog—who walks on a leash on New York City sidewalks and occasionally scarfs a crust of pizza—is terrified of ants. (This is true.)

Julia’s e-mails are sometimes about fields of bluebells or horseback rides on frosty hills. Once she rode all the way across Wales on horseback, camping out at night. I occasionally play Ping-Pong. I bowled 154, but when I was thirteen. One day when Julia telephoned (or “rang,” as she would say), her husband was out shooting pheasant and mine was playing Word Whomp. When we visit Wales, I miss the subways. Driving where they live is hair-raising, what with the needle-narrow roads and tall hedges and insane roundabouts, not to mention driving in England, where left is right and right is left (and I don’t know my left from my right). How incredible that they do it every day.

Julia is also game. She has traveled alone through India and Turkey. She trained wild horses in Australia. She is the person I wish I were.

About four years ago, after a career as a journalist and one novel published, Julia wrote an international bestseller,
East of the Sun
. It’s fabulous. I highly
recommend it and all of her novels (
Band of Angels
and
Jasmine Nights
). As they say on Facebook, thumbs up. And by the way, isn’t “thumbs up” the biggest cop-out as well as the genius of Facebook? Telling someone you’re happy for her in a click. Oh man, does that let you off the hook. I always call Julia and she calls me not only when we need advice and sympathy, but when we have news to celebrate. We are the best kind of friends, truly happy for the good stuff.

So we’re sitting in Pain Q having lattes and croissants—one other great thing about Julia, she’s never ordering spelt—lamenting the fact that at this time in our lives, we know what we like and repeat it. We live in a comfort zone. Her comfort zone is considerably larger than mine, nevertheless, we should both break out. Shake ourselves up. Grow.

We decide to take a trip together in which we each force/encourage the other to do things we wouldn’t normally do, and then write it up in side-by-side diaries. We had to behave, in other words, counterintuitively. Or, as all
Seinfeld
lovers understand, do what George did: order the chicken salad instead of the tuna. Julia suggests we travel to Kenya and work in a rural village. Her daughter Poppy did this on “gap year.” In England that’s the year between high school and university. One other young
woman in Poppy’s group was eaten by a crocodile, but Julia assures me it’s very beautiful there. I nix that. I realize I am in over my head. There is nothing Julia is scared of. I am so not in her league.

We forget about it—life happens, as they say—and one day I am having a meeting with some editors at
More
 (a magazine for women over, say, thirty-five). They are looking for some travel pieces to assign. I mention this idea. They say, “Great.”

We settled on Spain (no crocs). Julia thinks I need to go horseback riding. I had ridden on horseback as a kid at camp in Arizona, but exclusively western saddle, with its large saddle horn to grab on to in case of emergencies. The only time I had tried the sleek, hornless English saddle favored in Spain and by all well-bred equestrians was fifteen years earlier with Julia in Wales. Julia swore that Maggie, my horse, was menopausal. She bolted, taking off into the woods in a wild gallop you get rescued from in a movie by a man you fall in love with. I managed not to fall off, but the trauma remained fresh. Julia thought I needed to face the fear. That was the point of the trip, wasn’t it?

I thought we should learn flamenco dancing. It seemed both absurd and sexy, a jolt to our systems. I had some castanets when I was five. My parents brought
them back from Mexico, and I was always click-clacking around the house. We agreed we would order strange items off menus, things we had never tasted and were not inclined to. Like salt cod.

I thought I needed to couch surf to get rid of princess tendencies. Couch surfing, if you don’t know, is staying in people’s homes on their couches or in spare bedrooms. Generally speaking, I prefer vacations where the sheets have a high thread count, the bathroom is full of mini lotions, and a manicure is an elevator floor away. Once Richard and Julia talked us into a walking tour in Cinque Terre. This is such an English thing, walking tours, only it isn’t walking, it’s hiking. Cinque Terre consists of five little villages nestled together in the mountains on the northwest coast of Italy. If you take a train from one town to the next, it takes five minutes. Maybe three. Through a tunnel. If you walk from one to the next, it takes eight hours up the world’s steepest hills and, even worse I discovered, down them. My hips were crying. After the first day, Jerry, Richard, and Julia hiked and I took the train. On the fourth day, in a wisp of a town called Riomaggiore, Jerry and I found ourselves in a hotel room so small, I tripped over myself. Some bugs, too. Outside the window was a stucco wall. I reached out and touched it.

As only a girl raised in Beverly Hills can, I freaked
out. I was so freaked, I figured out how to make a call on an Italian pay phone (I don’t speak Italian), got an Italian operator (who didn’t speak English) to find a hotel in the next town, called the hotel, and booked a reservation and a taxi to take us there. When I knocked on Richard and Julia’s door to tell them we were moving on to Porto Venere and would meet them there, they were in their tiny room, happy as can be, lounging on the bed, drinking Chablis. Admittedly their window did have a view, but still.

To recap the trip: horseback riding, flamenco dancing, couch surfing. And we were going to stay at a monastery for some serious silence (what could be harder?) and spiritual rebooting—or I should say
booting
, as
rebooting
implies that I was at some point spiritual in my past.

No sooner had we settled on this journey, which would take us from Madrid to Seville to Barcelona, than I began to have fantasies of the nightmare variety. I slip on a castanet and end up in traction. I fall off a horse and end up in a coma. My plane will crash and I’ll end up dead.

A note about this. Last week I had lunch with a friend who told me that worrying is a depletion of your power. Then someone else told me that worrying is negative
goal-setting. Then someone else told me worrying is about having negative expectations. I’m planning to give up worrying. I want to, but I’m worried I won’t be able to.

Furthermore, about this trip, I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I had never flown across the Atlantic alone. Everyone I know takes off for parts unknown at the drop of a hat, but travel is not easy for me and never has been. I’m always ambivalent. And by the way, I really have to mention here that the other week I got on a plane for Tulsa, and, just before takeoff—the doors were closed, as they say—the pilot got on the loudspeaker and this is what he said: Something has fallen off the plane. I forget what because it took me by surprise, but the thing that fell off began with an
F
—not a fuselage but like a fin or a flipper. “That’s not a problem,” the pilot said. “There’s a small hole in the plane as a result.” I am not quoting exactly, but nearly. “That’s not a problem, either,” he said. “We just have to fly slowly.”

As far as I could tell, no passenger even blinked except me. I said to my husband, “Should we get off?” He shrugged. We went to Tulsa. It took forever to get there, but we did, which, as we all know, is the important thing. I am not a fan of flying.

Nevertheless, I was going to Spain.

Then, a couple of weeks before we were supposed to
leave, my editor announced something that should have been obvious from the start. The magazine was planning to send a photographer with us.

Suddenly I wasn’t getting on a horse. I was getting on a horse and being photographed doing it. For all I knew, I might need a stepladder to get on a horse. I had even learned a useful sentence: I want a short horse.
Yo quiero un caballo corto
. I had learned another phrase—
una copa de vino, por favor
—so that I could order a glass of wine to recover from my day or perhaps imbibe in the hospital where I was in traction or a coma. Where I would undoubtedly also be photographed.

Being photographed raised all sorts of concerns. Where to get a decent blow-dry in Barcelona, Seville, Madrid, and a monastery. I have short curly hair. Without a blow-dry, I look like a tulip. Hair anxiety. I could not be photographed with bad hair. And what about makeup? I couldn’t stop by a department store every morning to see if the Bobbi Brown counter would make me up, which I sometimes do if a photograph is going to end up somewhere public. They don’t have makeup counters in monasteries. When I vacation, I never think about makeup or hair. That’s the definition of a vacation. Would a photo of me flamenco dancing with bad hair and no makeup end up circling the Web for eternity?

When you get older, and I am older, it is harder to take a good picture. Sometimes I open my iPad and by accident tap Photo Booth and about pass out. I am not a fan of the candid shot.

I called Julia in a panic. I tried to work her into a frenzy, mentioning the horror of being photographed flamenco dancing. That didn’t upset her too much. I carried on about candid shots without blow-dries, which didn’t upset her too much, either. Of course her hair isn’t half as curly as mine. Also she was once a model. She might not think of the camera as a weapon of destruction. Besides, she has the adventure gene. The adventure gene rules. I pine for it.

Still, being the most loyal, most understanding friend a girl could ask for, she understood. Too much stress.

We canceled.

To this day, I don’t really know why I needed to cancel. Was it fear of flying, fear of riding, fear of dancing, or fear of photos? Does vanity trump all?