The Year of Pleasures (23 page)

“I was, wasn’t I, darling?”

“No, but you really were!”

She shrugged. “The truth? It was too hard.”

“Being a lawyer can’t be easy.”

She laughed. “Compared to acting, it is! But who ends up doing what they thought they’d do anyway? I wonder about that all the time. Although I have to tell you, once I was getting a manicure and I was watching this woman do my nails, she was about forty-five, and I was feeling so bad for her, her crappy polyester blouse. And I said, ‘Hey, Denise? What did you want to be when you were a little girl?’ And she looked up from sort of dreamily filing my nails and said, ‘I wanted to do nails. My aunt Chichi used to come over every Friday to babysit us, and she’d bring this little overnight bag just
full
of nail polish and she’d let me do her nails. Red, pink, sparkly silver. I just always loved doing nails. Did my little friends in elementary school, did my high school friends. It’s peaceful; you make people happy—I’m telling you, I volunteer one day a month at a women’s shelter and one day a month at a nursing home, and I am Miss Popularity! And this job, you go home at the end of the day and you’re
done,
you know? You can just enjoy your family, read a good book, watch TV.’ Then she said, ‘Why do you ask?’ and I said something like, ‘Oh, just wondering,’ because I wasn’t going to tell her I’m the elitist asshole that I am, thinking nobody wanted to do work like hers. So then she said to me, ‘What did
you
want to be?’ and I said, ‘An actress,’ and she got this really sad look on her face and very quietly and sincerely said, ‘I’m sorry.’ I said, ‘That’s okay,’ and then I spent the rest of the time just looking at the little picture of her family that she keeps on her station, looking at how happy they looked and feeling like an idiot. I thought, This woman is one everyone famous does everything
for.
You know?”

“I wanted to be a priest,” Lorraine said, and quietly, nearly respectfully, belched.

“What?”
Susanna said, and Maddy said, “You did not; you weren’t even Catholic.”

“I know, but I wanted to be a priest.”

“Why?” asked Maddy.

“Because they were the only ones who could touch the host. Remember when only priests could touch the host? I wanted to touch it, too.”

“What did you want to be, Maddy?” I asked.

“I’m being it,” she said.

“Even when you were little, you wanted to be a nurse?”

“Yeah. I went around the neighborhood, saving things. Baby birds fallen from the nest, a kid who scraped his knee. I still like being a nurse, too.”

I yawned hugely, and Lorraine said, “Betta wants to sleep. But what did you used to want to do?”

“Be married,” I said.

Lorraine snorted.

“Really,” I said. “And have a bedroom where all it was, was bed. Like, you’d open the door and it would be wall-to-wall mattress. And a refrigerator built into the wall.” I thought for a moment, then said, “I didn’t think I’d end up
here.
”

Later, after we had all gone to bed, I heard my bedroom door open. Softly, Maddy called my name.

“I’m awake,” I told her, and she crossed the room and climbed into bed with me. She shook the bed settling in, making exaggerated movements. It made me laugh.

“Hi,” she said, her nose right up to mine.

I smiled at her in the moonlight.

“Are you okay, honey? You were crying pretty hard during the movie.”

“Not as hard as Susanna!” I said.

“Well, for God’s sake. What did you expect? Forever the drama queen. I love being around her because she gives you permission to let it all out. No matter what you do, it won’t be as much as she. Everything she does has to be a big production. Remember when she used to bring her boyfriends home? Remember how
loud
?” She began making rhythmic grunting sounds.

“I remember.” We giggled together quietly.

“Lorraine was crying, too,” I said. “I was pretty surprised.”

“She’s having a lot of trouble,” Maddy said. “She hardly gets work anymore, and she’s slipping in other ways that . . . well. She’ll tell you about it, I’m sure. She probably hasn’t yet because your plate is pretty full. How are you doing, Betta? Really.”

I sighed. “I don’t know. It depends on the day. Depends on the hour of the day. I feel like I’m walking around carrying a really full—overly full—bowl of water. When I don’t look at it, nothing spills.”

She reached over and turned on the bedside lamp. “Is this okay? The light?”

I nodded.

She lay on her side again, her face close to mine. “I just want to tell you . . . I think it’s bad for you to have too much free time.”

“I need time, Maddy. This is a big deal, what’s happened. I need time to understand all that it means.”

“Yes, but you need some structure, don’t you think? Your store idea is good. We’re all willing to be partners. Why don’t you go ahead and—”

“Oh, I don’t know if I really want to do that. I think I do and then I think I don’t. It makes me really nervous to think about really doing it. Sometimes things feel so . . . unreal right now. Flighty. I think I just need to grieve. I’m entitled to a year of grief, according to the etiquette.”

“How about a year of pleasures, instead?”

“Right,” I said.

“I mean it. So many people who lose someone think that they need to behave in a prescribed way. Of course you’re hurting! But what if you determined to find one thing every day that you—”

“I know. Count your blessings. Remind yourself every night of every good thing that happened to you that day.”

“No. I’m not talking about things that happen to you. I’m talking about things you make happen. I’m talking about purposefully doing one thing that brings you happiness every single day, in a very conscious way. It builds up the arsenal, Betta. It tips the balance.”

“A whole
year,
” I said. “When I can hardly commit to eating lunch tomorrow!”

“You’re taking it too literally,” Maddy said. “Don’t think of it as calendar days to cross off, or as an assignment with a beginning and an end. Think of it more fluidly—as a philosophy that you exercise daily. And the days turn into years. And the years turn into a lifetime.”

I nodded. “I think what you’re saying is what John was trying to tell me, too. But you don’t know what a confusing time this is!”

“I do know. I lost someone, too.”

“Who?” I asked.

“My eleven-year-old daughter.”

“Oh, my God. Oh, Maddy. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I had no idea. Lorraine didn’t say anything!”

“No, nor would she. She lets me decide who to tell.”

“How?”

“A diving accident, ten years ago. She was at a neighbor’s pool and went headfirst into the shallow end. We’d had a fight that morning. The last words I said to her as she went out the door were ‘And don’t think I’m making your goddamn bed again!’ ” She shook her head, remembering. “I thought I would lose my mind, at first. Seriously. I felt like I’d just realized the world was made of glass, you know? Thin as a lightbulb, and every step you took was at your own peril. And then, only a couple of weeks after Molly died, I signed up to take tap-dancing lessons. I’d always wanted to, but I’d never had the courage.”

“Did it help?”

“Well, it was a place to go where there was never any sorrow. Nobody there knew. Nobody there ever said, ‘Well, you still have your sons.’ It was just nice people who were all terrible dancers—we all goofed up together. I think the instructor must have felt like shooting herself, but she was remarkably patient. On the day that class ended, I went home and asked for a sign for what I should do next. I opened a novel and pointed to a word, and it was
Greece.
So Dan and I went there.”

“Huh! So you just . . . blocked it out.”

“Oh, God, no. No. Of course not. You can’t do that, even if you want to. But what I’m talking about is . . . well, I think that deep sorrow can make for a kind of . . . unloosening. You can get reoriented in a really important way. Losing Molly reminded me of how beautiful life is. I know it’s counterintuitive, but it’s true. The horrible stuff? I think it’s all a necessary part of the great pageantry.”

“That’s one way to look at it.” I heard the bitterness in my voice. I tasted it, too, pooled at the back of my tongue.

“Think about it, Betta. My pain over Molly ended up making me easier with the world and with myself. Don’t worry about backsliding—it’s all part of the process. But don’t worry about feeling good, either. You don’t dishonor the one you loved by being happy.”

She turned onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. “You know, in Greece, Dan and I took a walk one night down this twisty little street. It was so quiet, and the stars were so clear. And all of a sudden, both of us could feel her there with us. I remember we stopped walking and just looked at each other, and then we embraced. Later, when we talked about it, we agreed that we had felt her . . . beneficence, you know? We had felt her telling us that it was all right, whatever we did, it was all right—that
she
was all right. We really did feel that. She was telling us . . . well, anyway, her death changed our lives for the better, because it brought a kind of awareness, a specific sense of purpose and appreciation we hadn’t had before. Would I trade that in order to have her back? In a fraction of a millisecond. But I won’t ever have her back. So I have taken this, as her great gift to us.” She looked at me. “But. Do I block her out? Never. Do I think of her? Always. In some part of my brain, I think of her every single moment of every single day.”

“Yes. That lit place.”

“Right. It is like a lit place.” She reached over and took my hand. “Now listen to me. I want to tell you one more story, okay? Can you listen to one more story?”

“Yes.”

“When Molly was eight years old, she was an avowed atheist. She told her father and me at breakfast one day that she’d thought hard about it, and she just couldn’t believe in God. But then about a year later there was a fire in a house a few doors down from us, some electrical wiring problem. There was a big family living there, five kids, and everybody died—the whole family, they didn’t get out. It bothered Molly a lot, especially at nighttime—she’d been friends with the little girl her age. She would think about all those people she’d never see again, how they went to bed that night, you know, and then . . . After about a week, she told us she had renounced her atheism. She said she now believed in God and in heaven. And she said that in heaven, there were cards on which were printed the names of every person on earth. The cards were in God’s hands. I’m sure this came from Molly’s having heard someone say that very thing, but she added something. She said that written on each card, in real big print, were three words: I LOVE YOU. She found comfort in this, and so did I. I still do.”

“Maddy?”

“Yes, sweetheart.”

“I saw John. I saw him in that chair right over there.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“I believe you, Betta.”

I started snuffling, and she reached over for a tissue and gave it to me. “Blow,” she said, and after I did, she got another tissue and wiped under my nose. “Slob,” she said tenderly.

“I don’t understand anything.”

“Oh, nobody understands anything. We’re all just here, blinking in the light like kittens. The older I get, the more I see that nothing makes sense but to try to learn true compassion.”

“I’m so glad I found you all again,” I said.

“You’ll never get rid of us now. You’ll have to come on all our expeditions and wait in the waiting room if any of us needs surgery.” She yawned and pulled the covers up higher. “Can I sleep with you?”

“No. You kick, if I recall. Do you still kick?”

“So says Dan.”

“Right. So get the hell out of here. Tomorrow, do you want a Dutch apple pancake for breakfast or hash browns and eggs and bacon? Or French toast?”

“Yes,” she said, and then, kissing my forehead, “Good night.”

On a cold afternoon, made bearable by a bright sun, I drove over to Lydia Samuels’s retirement home. In addition to the box of letters and the radio, I was bringing a picture I’d cut out of the local weekly the day before. It was of an older couple who lived in the home, dancing. The chairs and tables in the cafeteria had been pushed back. Balloons and streamers were everywhere; one table covered by a sheet held a large plastic punch bowl and a tray of cookies. A couple of aides stood off to the side, beaming. Oftentimes such shots are condescending, patronizing, but that was not the case here: The couple was caught in a graceful turn, and on each of their faces was intelligence and enviable pleasure. I’d thought Lydia might like to have it, or perhaps pass it on to the people featured there, he in his well-cut suit, she in her blue dress, her thick white hair held back by combs studded with pearls.

When I asked for Lydia at the desk, the nurse told me she was in her room and directed me down the hallway to the last door on the right. I knocked softly, then, when I heard nothing in response, more loudly. “Come in!” she said, and I poked my head in, introducing myself.