The Transformation of Things (12 page)

Now that we actually had started eating dinner together every night and having coffee together some mornings, there were questions: “How was your tennis match?”

“Oh, good,” I lied. “We won.” I invented a score in my
head, and a play-by-play of the action each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon, just in case he ever asked. I also didn’t mention that when I was supposedly playing tennis, I’d been jogging in Oak Glen.

And Will hadn’t noticed that the house was extra clean, his closet extra organized. He hadn’t noticed that I now cleaned the spotless oven weekly or shined the bamboo floors biweekly, or cleaned out the attic, or alphabetized some of his old jazz records in the basement. Or, if he had noticed, he filed it under “Things Jen Does That I’ve Never Been Around to Notice Before.”

I stared at Will for a minute now, handsome and sweet-looking in his formal wear, and I had to close my eyes and take a deep breath before I broke the news. “I guess I forgot to mention it.” I tried my best to sound breezy, casual. “Bethany is running the auction now.”

“What? Why would Bethany …” His voice trailed off as he understood why, and then his face turned a shade of white that made him look like a ghost, an apparition of his former self, so he began looking oddly out of sorts in his tuxedo. “Jen, why didn’t you tell me?”

“It’s no big deal.” I shrugged and pretended to go back to my coupon organizing, while blinking back tears. “It was a lot of work anyway.”

“But you loved it.” He sat down next to me and covered my hand with his to stop it, to stop me, from moving. “Jen.” I looked up. His eyes were a cool shade of blue in the slow evening glimmer of the kitchen. They were sad eyes, anxious eyes, and I had to look away. “You’re not even going to go?” he asked.

I swallowed hard. “We weren’t exactly invited,” I said.

He stood up and ran his fingers loosely through his hair. “That’s ridiculous. This is your auction.” He started pacing across the bamboo floor, the heels of his dress shoes clicking on each turn. “I’ll call someone. Who should I call?”

“Will, don’t.” I stood up.

“You’ll go without me.” He held his hands up in the air. “None of this has to do with you.”

“It’s okay, Will.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. He stopped pacing and looked at me, and I knew my own eyes were revealing more truth than anything that had come out of my mouth in the last month. “It’s not okay. Dammit, Jen. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What’s the point?” I whispered. I cleared my throat. “Besides, I’ve been busy. I have my freelance work, and …” I let my voice trail off because there was nothing else to add.

He sighed, reached out for me again, and pulled me to him, so my head was against his chest, so his heart was beating in my ear. Still loud and strong and steady, like the grandfather clock that had been in the hallway of my parents’ house and now sat in the front hallway of Kelly’s. He kissed the top of my head. “You’re still here,” he said, almost to himself, as if he couldn’t believe it, and he said it so softly that I had this strange feeling that he was somewhere very far away, despite still being able to feel his heartbeat.

“I am,” I said, feeling unbelievably sad about not being able to go to the auction, this deep, intense sadness. It worked its way from my stomach to my chest to my brain, until tears formed in my eyes again and threatened to spill over onto Will’s white tuxedo shirt.

“I’m going to go change,” he said. “And then I’m taking you out to dinner.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to,” he said.

I shook my head. “I’m really not up for dinner. How about a rain check?”

He sighed. “Jen, I wish you’d just—”

“Just what?”

“I don’t know.” He paused. “Throw something at me. Scream at me. Get angry, for God’s sake.”

I turned away from him. “I’m not angry,” I said, but even as I said it, I thought that maybe I was. I just wasn’t sure I was angry at him.

Will went upstairs to change, and I got myself a glass of Merlot and went out to sit on the back patio. It was a mild night, for November, and I was comfortable in only my sweater and jeans. As I sipped the wine by myself, I closed my eyes and thought about last year’s auction—about the red dress I’d worn, about the veal piccata I’d gotten the club to serve for only the price of chicken. The night had flowed, people milling about, bids being placed, everyone kissing my cheeks and telling me what a great job I’d done. And this was it right here, the one thing I’d really and truly liked—no, loved—about living in Deerfield. Being in charge of something great, something worthwhile.

When I looked up now, I caught a glimpse of Lisa, in her own red ball gown, standing in her kitchen, the little heads of Chance and Chester bobbing up and down. Even from far away, I could tell by the way she held herself that she was tired, that she didn’t even really want to go to the auction, and it didn’t seem fair, that she got to go and I didn’t.

I finished the glass of wine, and then I was too exhausted for dinner. I went upstairs, took my herbs, and got into bed.

I was walking down the plush red carpet in the entranceway of the club, holding on to Barry’s arm. I looked down to adjust my dress. Red wasn’t my favorite color, but Barry liked it.

Bethany was standing up ahead, by the door to the ballroom. She wore a black strapless gown that overemphasized her bust and her thin waist. I sucked my stomach in.

“Would you look at the tits on her,” Barry whispered.

“Oh Jesus, Barry.”

“What? I’m just saying. I wonder who did them for her. I bet it was Stevens. No, Markowitz.”

I frowned. I had a headache. I wasn’t in the mood for an auction, for a night of sucking in my stomach just to look half as thin as everyone else here, a night of listening to boring people talk about boring things. But I continued walking, one foot in front of the other, holding on to Barry’s arm.

We each picked up a bid book, found our table, and sat down. Bethany had put us at a table with other doctors, guys Barry knew with wives I did not. Barry started talking to them, while I folded and refolded my napkin in my lap. “I’m going to bid on the golf lesson with Chuck Jagger,” I heard Barry say to another guy, a high-risk ob-gyn named Killigan whom Barry had wanted me to consult with when I was pregnant with the twins.

I flipped through. There was nothing in the auction book that interested me: Dates and lessons. Yacht trips and dinners. I’d take friendship, real conversation, a challenge. How much for those?

I nudged Barry. “When are you going to have time for a golf lesson?” I said, thinking that I already never saw him.

He laughed and said, “Come on, Lisa,” as if my question wasn’t even a real one. As if he didn’t already work twelve-hour days, and worry more about other women’s breasts than mine.

Bethany walked to the front of the room; she was glowing. She was enjoying this, stepping in, stepping over everything Jen had done. She talked and talked. She got some bids, but she wasn’t aggressive, not persistent, not even kindly nagging us to remember what the money went to and how much breast cancer needed us, the way Jen always did.

Then the golf lesson. Barry stood up right away. “Five hundred,” he called out.

“Five-fifty,” Bethany’s husband, Kevin, said.

They went back and forth like this until Barry won the half-hour golf lesson for $1,025. When he sat down, I gave him a look. “What?” He shrugged. “It’s for a good cause.”

Fourteen

T
he next morning, Sunday, the details of the auction were splashed all over the front page of the
Deerfield Daily.
“Deerfield’s Finest Donate Time and Money to Cancer Research,” the headline read. They had raised $12,000 for the Helen Kemper Memorial Cancer Fund, which, really, wasn’t bad, but last year we’d raised $17,500. I couldn’t help but feel a little smug, and then a little sad. I shook my head.
Cancer research, for Christ’s sake.
And I’d been booted out of that, of wanting to, of knowing how to, do some good.

On page seven, the article continued with a collage of pictures: Bethany in a black ball gown, smiling at the mike. Lisa’s Barry standing up in a tux, bidding for an afternoon with golf pro Chuck Jagger. The article said he won it for $1,025, the highest bid of the night.

$1,025. It sounded familiar. Exact.

I went and got my reporter’s pad, and there it was, written in my own writing.
Barry bought the lesson with Chuck Jagger for $1,025. Lisa is annoyed. She’s already alone too much.

I sat down, the paper shaking in my hands. There must be some mistake. I couldn’t have really dreamed that, the exact amount of money, that golf pro. Was that the golf pro we’d booked last year? Had he sold for that much? I thought about Ethel, saying that my dreams were only my conscious discovering what my subconscious already knew, but how the hell did it already know this?

I grabbed my cell, found her number again, and called her, and even though it was Sunday morning, I left her a message to call me right away.

While I waited for her to call back, I paced the kitchen floor and tried to take deep breaths. There must be some logical explanation. There had to be.

I jumped when I heard my cell ring, and I ran to grab it.

“Ethel,” I said, my voice trembling.

“Jennifer, is everything okay?”

“No,” I said. “No. I don’t think it is.”

“What’s wrong? Are you still dreaming?”

“They aren’t dreams.” I paused. “They’re real things. Things that happened. To other people.”

She was quiet for a minute. “The transformation of things,” she said.

“What?”

“Have you ever heard of the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s what he called it. He once said he dreamed he was a butterfly, and then he woke up and he was a man. But then
he wasn’t sure if he really was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly only dreaming he was a man.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what she was getting at, and I wasn’t at all in the mood for some mumbo-jumbo Eastern medicine theory. There had to be an explanation, a rational one. Maybe the dream was just something I’d heard, something I’d guessed. Or it could be a coincidence. $1,025 felt like a nice round number, something I might dream up on my own.

But that’s not what Ethel had been saying at all—she’d said something about transforming, about not being sure if you were one thing or another. And what the hell was that supposed to mean? Was she saying I really was Lisa, and I was only dreaming now, dreaming as Jen? I knew that couldn’t be right—I could remember an entire long history of my life—Jen’s life—a funeral in the snow at the age of thirteen, a blind date in an Italian restaurant at age twenty-six.

“I don’t understand,” I finally said, feeling even more confused now than before she’d called.

“It is funny, the way our mind can play tricks on us,” she said. “Sometimes everything is not as it seems, Jennifer.” She paused. “A dream is only a dream. Even Freud never thought they were real.”

“A dream is only a dream,” I repeated back, trying to believe it the way she seemed to.

“Jennifer, try to relax. If the dreams keep bothering you, we can adjust at your next appointment. But it’s good that you’re sleeping so well.”

After we hung up I flipped back through my notepad, reviewing the dreams. Maybe Ethel was right, and a dream was a dream was a dream. But maybe she wasn’t. After all, she’d told me once that she was not a miracle worker at all, only a
healer. Maybe the dreams were real. And even Ethel didn’t have the knowledge or the understanding of how that could be possible, how a simple herb could transform your mind into something so oddly metamorphic.

And if they were real, then there was so much I knew now, oddly so much more than I’d known when I’d been close to Kat or Lisa. And Will—what had the broken dreams about Will even meant? That being a judge had made him literally sick? I ached for Will, for the way his job had made him feel, and for the way I’d pulled away from him because I’d thought it was the job that he really loved, not me.

This is ridiculous,
I told myself.
Listen to Ethel. Forget about the dreams.
Yet, no matter how many times I repeated this in my head, I still couldn’t bring myself to really believe it.

After a shower and some coffee, last night’s dream, the auction felt further away, felt like something that couldn’t have possibly happened at all. I went and cleaned up the paper, and then lying underneath, I saw a note on the table from Will.
MEETING DANNY TO WATCH THE GAME. HOME FOR DINNER. LOVE, WILL. Love, Will.
He was shouting it at me, in all caps again, and maybe that was the only way he knew how to express it, like this, a silent but authentic battle cry. Then I felt a little sad, thinking of the way he’d looked at me last night, stunned and broken, like a sick bird.