Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (37 page)

And then it was over. I’d burned my plea to the elements to relieve me of my unquenchable desire for sugar, so crazed by managing four guests and my dog, the inclement night, the lighter, the need to feed the greyhounds, that what looked like my solemnity was distraction. I was anywhere and everywhere but in my own heart as my piece of paper caught fire and threatened to travel up my sleeve.

“Should we pray?” Patty asked.

There was a confounded silence until Lindsay said, “How about the Spiritualist Prayer of Healing?”

Patty’s face lit up in interest. “What is it?” she asked eagerly.

Lindsay cleared her throat. “Repeat after me: ‘I ask the Great Unseen Healing Force to remove all obstructions from my mind and body and to restore me to perfect health. I ask this in all sincerity and honesty, and I will do my part. I ask this Great Unseen Healing Force to help both present and absent ones who are in need of help and to restore them to perfect health. I put my trust in the power and love of God.’”

Only the wind and the rain spoke when we finished. I thought of Katie, probably getting around to weighing and measuring her lunch as we stood on the Promenade, of the readers of our blogs, of Lindsay’s uncle gimping around on his new prosthesis, of all the people I’d seen come and go or come and stay in the Rooms. I knew each of us was thinking along the same lines. I wanted to cry but the Zoloft/Wellbutrin barrier made it hard, and I had so much to do before bed.

We woke, in our separate domiciles, to snow. As the day warmed slightly, the snow turned to rain. The airports were a mess. Lindsay was frantic about her flight early the next morning, and her airline wasn’t reassuring her when she called every half hour. She was aching for Jalen and wanted a good night’s sleep and an anonymous departure. She also wanted a good shower. My bathtub had decided that draining was too much work for its antique pipes. I’d caught Lindsay and Mimi with a bottle of Liquid-Plumr, imploring the water to move. They were chagrined that I walked in on them, but I was horrified at one of my shames being exposed.

Late that afternoon I put Lindsay in a town car bound for a Wall Street hotel she’d found online at a bargain price. It pulled away from the curb and kicked a nice spray of slush onto my pants. It was getting colder. The rain was turning to sleet. By the time I returned from feeding the greyhounds, we were in the middle of an ice storm.

“Do you think Lindsay’s going to make it out tomorrow?” I asked Mimi as I hung up my coat.

“Lindsay will find a way. She’ll get out and kick the plane into the air if she needs to.”

We laughed. Because she was the thinnest and youngest of us, we had naturally deferred to Lindsay, and as an oldest child and wife of a passive, somewhat lost man, she accepted her leadership without noticing.

Mimi’s cell phone rang. She said hello, followed by a very long silence as she listened intently. “Oh, my God,” she said. “You’ve gotta talk to Frances.”

Wendy had gone down to the Promenade to take pictures of the ice on all the black wrought iron. She slipped and knew as she fell that something had gone terribly wrong with her right knee. People rushed over to help her but she shushed them away, pulled out her cell phone, and dialed 911. A man ran back to his car and brought a blanket for her. Two women stood by and waited until the ambulance came, trying to reassure her that everything would be okay. Wendy looked dolefully at her swelling pant leg and tried to thank them for their time and concern.

“Hey,” she said gaily, “at least I’ll be able to say I’ve seen the inside of a New York City ER. There’re some real characters here.”

It was Saturday night, the eve of St. Patrick’s Day. I shuddered to think what kind of characters were drifting in.

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “He cut my jeans up the side. My favorite Gap size twenty jeans. I’m more pissed off about that than I am at falling.”

“What did he say?”

“He took an X-ray. He doesn’t think anything’s broken, but I’m waiting for him to come back. He says I can’t walk on it.”

There was no way I was skating to Long Island Hospital on nine blocks of black ice. I called the car service through which I’d dispatched Lindsay to Manhattan and was told that because of the road conditions, it would be a thirty-dollar trip and an additional five dollars for every ten minutes they had to wait for me to retrieve Wendy. Lindsay had crossed the Brooklyn Bridge for less than fifteen dollars. I was dismayed at the price until we started our skittering progress toward Amity Street.

After a half hour of hanging around her bed, I dismissed the driver after forking over another hunk of savings. As I came back into the emergency room, we were treated to a raging drunk tied to his gurney, threatening to sue the EMS workers who brought him in. I was pleased to have been behind the procession of gurneys and EMS people when he arrived—I could give Wendy the delicious story of one of the women walking over to look at the guy and then coming back to tell her partner she’d brought him in a couple of months ago in the same condition.

“What’s tomorrow going to be like?” I asked the EMS woman.

“Alcohol poisoning, busted noses, green puke everywhere,” she said. “The only time it’s worse is New Year’s Eve.”

Wendy listened to the story intently, then said, “I’m in love with my doctor. I told him, ‘It’s worth having a knee so swollen that it has its own zip code to be treated by you!’”

The exclamation points she was talking in were a sure clue to how scared she was and how much pain she was in. She was being cheerful, dammit! I wondered when she’d crack.

“I wish your doctor would hurry.” I brushed through the curtain of her cubicle and looked around for someone who might speed this up. The X-ray, he had informed us, had confirmed her knee wasn’t broken, but she’d have to have an MRI when she got back home. Then he disappeared in search of a brace and a pair of crutches. That was fifteen minutes ago.

“The woman next to me is really nice!” Wendy chatted on. “She’s here with her daughter, and we commiserated about how long it all takes. I gave her my blanket because she was so cold, and they offered me cookies but I turned them down. I told them, ‘I think this might be the end of my tennis career!’ and we all laughed and laughed!”

It was nine thirty. I wanted to go to bed.

Oh, shit
, I realized. My friends whom Wendy had stayed with were expecting company. She would have to sleep in Mimi’s bed because she wouldn’t be able to get up from the futon on the floor. What about Mimi? Her knees were almost as bad as Wendy’s.

Her doctor, cute as a button and younger than springtime, showed up with a strappy brace and crutches. Wendy rolled up the leg of the sweatpants I’d brought, and he asked her to lift her leg. Tears sprang from her eyes as soon as she did. I excused myself and said I’d wait outside the cubicle. I saw she was grateful that I was leaving.

After some grunting from both of them, the doctor pulled the curtain back and hurried off. Wendy was sitting up, the brace lying flat under her knee.

“It doesn’t fit,” she sobbed. “It’s one size fits all and it doesn’t fit.”

“Oh, honey,” I said. “Remember how swollen your knee is.”

“He said it was supposed to fit. He’s gone off to get duct tape or something.” She leaned forward as much as she could and whispered, “I gotta lose this weight, Frances. Don’t ever tell anyone I said this, but I
can’t
end up like Mimi! I
can’t
.”

I didn’t tell Mimi this, of course. The next day she and I picked our way to CVS to pick up Wendy’s codeine prescription and more Diet Coke. Our eyes were on every step we took, our concentration on our feet and the frozen tire grooves in the streets. It was hovering at thirty-two degrees, and we were sweating from fear and care.

Mimi came to an abrupt halt halfway down Love Lane. “This had to happen.”

I looked at her to see if she was being sarcastic. She wasn’t.

“Wendy needed to have this happen. I spent a lot of time talking with her last night and this morning. Every day her blog and inventory are about three things. Exercise, food, men. She needs to stop. All those things are really one thing, and she needs to step back and take stock until she understands that. She needs to learn to ask for help. This
had
to happen!”

What is truth and what is fact? Two weeks later, after blogging every day about how much she hated her knee and how big and discolored it was, Wendy learned she had arthritis and joint mice in both knees. That was a fact. The truth was harder to discern. Mimi was probably right that Wendy needed to get off her merry-go-round, but I wasn’t sure Wendy understood how much she had to take the carousel’s place. If she could stay in that ineffable place that is reserved for the biased observer, Wendy might pull all the bits of her—the books, Queen Victoria, the
New Yorker
s, what was on her iPod, et altogether into the confidence she had when telling a story. How we’d laughed at Teresa’s on Thursday morning!

Wendy was snarking about students trickling into the bursar’s office to get their incomplete forms. They’d left campus in mid-January for the debutante season.

“They’re
all
of them,” she said, her accent making gullies and hills as she rolled across their egos, “male or female, interchangeable, ’cause they’re all blonde and their names all sound like law firms. Trouble is, you call ’em by name and they have no idea who you’re talkin’ to. Denson Preston Nowlin maht really be a Binky, and she maht be Binkster among the Lock Jaw Set down at the Kappa Sigma house, but in the registrar’s office they were all known as Tossers.” Her voice dropped, and she barely moved her lips even as she lengthened the words. “As in, ‘the
roo-les
are
jus’
diff’rent up here in the Big House, dahlin’. Ah’m sure you undah-
stand
’ and ‘Why
cain’t
Ah take mah aht hist’ry exam in April?’”

“More, more,” I begged. I adore the South, and Wendy knows the South from Margaret Mitchell to Bobbie Ann Mason.

“Mah favrut name of all tahm,” Wendy slurred, deep in the scornful heart of Appalachia, “is Candy Crystal Kane. Ah mean, did they expect her to dedicate huhself to the Daughters of the Confed’racy or become a porn stah?”

“You’re kidding,” Lindsay said.

“Am not. Mimi, am I kidding?”

“Unfortunately, no. And they all speak in code. ‘You in on Honey Horn this year?’ and counted cross stitch: ‘In C-of-C Love,’ thirteen stars in a St. Andrew’s cross.”

Mimi had seen enough homes of the good ladies—Mrs. Husband’s-birth-name Husband’s-family-name Roman numeral (“as in Mrs. Morton Cable III,” Wendy translated)—of St. Alban’s to be Wendy’s confed’rate.

“I don’t miss it at all,” Mimi said as she speared another piece of French toast.

“Ah hate ’em, but ah love that they’re there.” Wendy shrugged.

But Wendy didn’t see these things as more than facts to retell, let alone see them as her treasures. Our treasures are part of our truths.

Lindsay took two showers in her hotel room, spent the night arguing with her airline, and made it to Cincinnati and Jalen’s arms as though the last couple of days had been weeks spent in the windless blue skies of the doldrums. That, too, was a fact. What was the truth? That she stood between him and a slow death from overexercise and undereating, what the rest of us call anorexia—and he stood between her and the nicks and dings of being alone? He was her biggest project, although the married-people things they did together gave it a veneer of normalness. I wondered how disposable the rest of us were compared to that? I suspect more than we were to Wendy.

Mimi found a condo in Govanstown, Maryland, on a golf course. She was due to start her new job at Welch Library in mid-July, the Holly month, according to the Celtic calendar. The holly tree was her favorite tree—hardy, prickly, beautiful all year round. She thought it portentous that there were two hollies shading the entrance to her home-to-be. Their presence prompted her to throw away more stuff than she’d originally estimated, including all of her waxes and candle molds. She had an opportunity to start over and wanted to invigorate her Wiccan work with materials bought locally. Sleight would be behind her, and she could present some of herself as she wanted to be. Not thin, alas—or the way things were going, not thinner. But less haunted, a solitary Wicca by choice rather than command. There was an infinity to explore in her devotions. She put out feelers to the covens in the area. Jolene would be her closest friend forever, but there was more to offer back than herbs and candles.

Mimi’s truth lay within her hopes and her devotion. How can you fractionate magic into facts? Any item could become holy and useful in ways the rest of us couldn’t imagine.

My sweet, sad Katie kept her eyes on the pavement, sticking to facts because her truth was too tender to use. Ounces, cups, days, pounds, sales, sizes, Diet Coke, and skim milk lattes; OA meetings and OA service, making sales and contributing to the rest of the company she worked for, blogging, her cats, and her searches for the funniest YouTube postings: these were what would make her strong.

It was warming up again when I escorted Wendy to Penn Station, where a redcap took over. I was going home to a Bat Cave that would echo in its sudden emptiness. There were a thousand things to do: laundry, put dishes away, take out garbage, catch up on bills and mail, put blankets into storage, arrange my own books by my own bed, make notes. Daisy was waiting for me, napping on the couch that faces the door. She was waiting and wanting and loving ever so conditionally, but the nice thing about a dog’s conditions for love is that they are mostly about being outside, playing, food, and affection. Dogs are easy to bribe into love.

The truth of my day was already written: I believed I had a thousand recoveries waiting for me. I’d used up about half of them, and I’d use up another one by the time I took Daisy out for her last pee of the night.