All Is Vanity (8 page)

“Well, I don’t know if I should say anything yet, but there actually might be a bigger-house plan this year.”

“What? What are you talking about? Why didn’t you tell me?” I was a little ashamed that in our last few calls I’d not thought to ask about Letty’s life, since I expected it simply to jounce along in its established way.

“Well, I was about to, actually. I mean this all just happened yesterday. Michael got a call from the director of the Otis Museum.”

“The Otis! Would he be interested in something like that?” The Otis was known for its flamboyance. It had a gorgeous site, magnificent buildings, a colossal endowment, and a relentlessly second-rate collection. Letty’s husband, Michael, was a tweedy art historian with a specialty in nineteenth-century Lithuanian print-making who had just been tenured at Ramona University. They hardly seemed a match, and I had to admit that, though I’d phrased my question sincerely, I also wondered if the Otis could really be interested in Michael.

“I don’t know. I mean, we don’t even know what the job is yet, exactly. It’s really all just talk at this point.”

“It would mean a lot more money, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, you know,” she said dismissively, “we don’t really care about money that much.”

“Money’s not such a bad thing.” In fact, like Letty and many others in my comfortable class, I did think that work should be directed toward some more lofty goal than income. Ample money should be the happy, preferably unexpected, by-product of the passionate pursuit of a meaningful interest. However, if the big bucks were not forthcoming despite passion and obvious talent, what then?

“I’m sorry, Margaret, but I’ve …”

“I know. You’ve got to go.”

“But we didn’t talk about your book! Do you have a new idea?”

“Next time,” I said.

I did not have a new idea. I’d been sanding all day with the notebook open beside me ready to catch any drop of inspiration, but so far the pages had collected nothing but dust. It turned out that, despite my claim to Ted, I didn’t think better when I was busy. I did feel industrious, though, almost virtuous, sanding, listening to
Jude the Obscure
on audiotape turned up to maximum
volume so I could hear it over the scrape of the paper against the wood.

Applying the primer, while the reader rumbled on about how Jude’s misfortunes and ill-chosen associations drag him deeper and deeper into destitution, heartened me, though. The clean, white paint running like a milky river behind my brush renewed my confidence in my plan. Just as I was preparing the wood so that Codman Claret would cling to every grain, so I was preparing my mind for the right idea. But Ted was right, too, in a way. I’d been trying to force inspiration, grabbing like a drowning person at every twig. I would relax. I would float. I would let the ideas come to me.

Letty would approve of this. She’d always insisted that “wait and see” was not just a hopeful way of saying “lazy.” If I hadn’t filled out her college applications for her, she’d have missed all the deadlines. Of course, she wrote the essay herself, started and finished it in one short afternoon, something about how the values she’d learned as a Brownie had guided her behavior ever since. It had turned out quite well—clever, pithy, light—much better than the labored piece on California’s hypocritical attitude toward illegal immigrants modeled on
A Modest Proposal
that I produced after three weeks of erasing and rewriting in my locked room.

Back in elementary school, when I told my mother that Mrs. Larue had signed Letty up for Brownies, she’d scoffed. She’d said she’d wasted enough hours for the both of us striving for inconsequential badges. She’d said the Girl Scouts was an organization designed to keep girls in their place. She’d also declared her unwillingness to iron the uniform. I yearned a little for that ugly chocolate-milk-colored dress and felt beanie on Tuesdays, when the Brownies met after school, but I had to side with my mother after I saw the “telescope” Letty made with her troop out of a
paper towel tube. There were no mirrors, no lenses; they just decorated the cardboard with sequins and glitter. What good was that? And it was obvious from Letty’s creation that no one had taught them to apply glue with a toothpick.

Since the table was hemmed in by the shelves, which needed to stay away from the walls, and the kitchen counter was cluttered, Ted and I ate sitting on the bed, balancing a bottle of wine and our glasses within easy reach on pedestals of books. I may have enjoyed this picnic atmosphere and the sensation of inhabiting a work in progress more than he did.

“How much longer, do you think?” he said on the seventh night, picking a curl of sesame noodle off the pillow.

“Really just another day. I wanted to be sure the walls were dry before I put the masking tape around the windowsills.”

“You’re doing the windowsills, too?”

“They would look shabby, Ted, now that the walls are so nice. Believe me, you wouldn’t like it. And then a week for the hall and the bedroom, and then I’m done.”

“A week!”

“Well, I was thinking of doing something a little more interesting in here. Maybe a celadon with a light, springy green trim. And then the pale yellow base in the hallway, but with a subtle stencil about three inches above the molding, incorporating the green and the red of the bookshelves to draw the rooms together.”

“Are you insane?”

“What? It won’t be a Christmasy red and green.”

He let his face fall forward into his hands and then tipped his head back again, raking his fingers through his hair. Ted tended toward the histrionic. He thrust his arm toward me, index finger aloft. “Margaret, you have one year. One year to write a novel, not
to paint the apartment, not to read about writing, not to talk on the phone to Letty.” We’d received a phone bill that afternoon listing a number of calls of surprising length to California during peak hours. “Do you think I would’ve said, ‘Sure, go ahead, take the time,’ if I’d thought you were going to spend it tarting up a rented apartment?”

“Tarting up?”

He shook his head. “No, I didn’t mean that. It looks nice. But it’s completely unnecessary, and it’s taking you away from your work.”

“All right,” I said, my voice tightening as I got up from the bed in a self-righteous huff. My foot tumbled a stack of books, instigating a domino-like cascade of several more stacks. “I’ll get back to work, right away, sir.” I grabbed my notebook and flounced down the narrow path between the books that lined the hall. I tried to make enough noise with my bare heels to communicate my displeasure, but not so much that it would wake our downstairs neighbors.

Ted followed, a takeout box in each hand. He liked his environment to be orderly, even in the midst of internal turmoil. “Margaret, you’re deliberately misunderstanding me.”

I’d thrown myself into the corner of the skewed and sheet-covered couch and opened my notebook on my drawn-up knees. This was the closest I could get to demonstrating work, since I’d neglected to pick up any sort of writing implement. “ ‘Go ahead, take the time,’ you said. As if I were your employee!”

“Listen, it was your plan. I liked the plan. I agreed to the plan. Now you have to do the plan! Not whatever you want.”

“I’m not—”

“No! Let me finish. It’s as if we agreed I could use my time, which is basically the same as our money—not your money, not my
money, our money—so that I could build a boat, and instead I used it to reorganize my books. When the time was gone and there was no boat, you would feel cheated.”

“If it were important to you to reorganize your books, I would want you to do that.”

“No, you wouldn’t! Not if you knew I really wanted to build a boat!”

“But Ted, it’s not like type, type, type, type, done! You make it sound like if only I applied myself I’d be sliding into the denouement around now.”

“
You
made it sound like you only needed to apply yourself.”

“Well, I am applying myself. It’s hard, that’s all. It’s art, not boatbuilding. I’m figuring it out as I go along.”

“Margaret, I know it’s hard. I couldn’t do it.” He sat down on the couch next to me. I pulled my nearly empty notebook against my chest. “But I believe you can, and I just don’t want you to look back and see this as an opportunity wasted. I want you to give it your best shot.”

How could I argue with that? Ted was right. The only reason I’d not made more progress was that I hadn’t been giving it my best effort. I needed to buckle down. “You know what?” I said. “I think I’ll just do a quick base coat to cover up the mess and be done with it. Save the celadon for when we buy a place.”

“After you sell your book.”

I got off to an excellent start the next day. Like Sally Sternforth, I ignored the growing ruin of dishes and I turned off the
Today
show before it was over. The shelves were dry, so I shimmied them back
into position and reshelved the books. To discipline inspiration, I forced myself to write one thing in my notebook after every tenth trip to the bedroom to collect books. It didn’t matter what I was writing, I told myself. As long as I got material down, I’d have something to work with later. Then I painted the windowsills.

Really, I got an enormous amount of both writing and apartment work done, so it was unfortunate that when Ted came in the door unexpectedly at three-fifteen, I was sprawled on the couch laughing at something Letty was saying. Our door was weighted so that it swung shut automatically, which it did with a wallop, as Ted stomped back down the stairs.

“This isn’t good,” I said into the phone.

“What? Did you paint the windows shut? I did that once.”

“No, no, it’s Ted.” I explained the wrath of Ted, perhaps putting a bit more stress than was strictly accurate on his patronizing tone and unreasonable expectations and neglecting to mention the elaborate stencil work I’d proposed.

Letty was gratifyingly outraged. “It’s not like you’re making widgets! I mean, sometimes you’ll produce pages, sometimes you won’t. Just because there’s no evidence doesn’t mean you’re not working. It’s a process. Look at me; I must pick up twelve times a day, and the house is still a mess.”

Though I appreciated Letty’s attempt to empathize, I did not, I admit, relish her equating her work with mine.

“I think Ted has a point,” I said. “Maybe I’m not doing as much as I could be. I’m working, but maybe I’m not working in the right way.”

“What is the right way?”

“Well, for one thing, I should do more writing, generally. What about, instead of calling each other, we send e-mail. Writing might become a real habit for me then.”

“And when Ted hears you pounding away at a letter to me, he’ll think you’re working.”

“Letty, I’m not suggesting this to avoid work—it’s to make myself work more!”

“I know.”

“Well, I think it would be an excellent exercise for me. I could even imagine that in the course of writing to you about an idea, I might really develop it. I might end up writing my novel to you.”

“Ooh, that would be neat,” she said. “It would be like reading Dickens in the original serial form.”

That was my first mistake. If only we’d stuck with the phone and kept Letty’s words off the page, I don’t believe I would have done what I did.

Margaret always had to be different. Some people, my mother, for instance, thought she was showing off. “Why can’t she just do like the rest of you girls?” she said the year we were nine and Margaret refused to remove the Socialist Workers Party button from her collar, even for the Christmas concert, and then again the next year when Margaret insisted on trying out for the football team. She wasn’t showing off, though, when she did those things. She was just being Margaret.

The story is that Margaret and I met before we could understand what it meant to know someone else, and I suppose this is true.
I can’t remember the single occasion when I first became aware of her, because she was always there, like my own hand. She was more vivid, though, than other children, at least to me. My memories of nursery school are a jumble of unconnected details—penny loafers with a confusing dime in the penny slot, a dress in a Mondrian pattern of red, white, and blue rectangles, swinging around white tights, a boy’s bristly brush cut, and the teacher with a bindi—although then I thought of it as a dot—guiding my fingers to form a papier-mâché bracelet for Mother’s Day. I remember Margaret clearly, though. That morning Margaret made her mother something she said was the bust of Nefertiti, which made some boy, Buddy something, giggle. It looked like a ball with a blue cylinder on top. Miss Betty, the teacher’s aide, frowned. “Wouldn’t your mother like a nice bracelet,” she asked, “like everyone else is making?” But Margaret shook her head, her gaze intent upon her sculpture.