The History of Great Things (18 page)

S
o let's say we're sisters.

—We aren't sisters.

—Yeah, I know. Let me finish.

Let's say we're sisters, and I'm fourteen and you're seventeen and we live on a houseboat at the Seventy-Ninth Street Boat Basin and it's 1975. Our parents are dead.

—I don't see how this is an improvement, Betsy. Or a story about us, for that matter.

—Because I'll still be like me and you'll still be like you.

—Our parents are dead? That sounds grim. And don't you think we'd be completely different people if our parents were dead?

—Our parents
are
all dead. Did you or did you not want to live at the boat basin in 1975?

—I suppose I did.

—I'm making that happen for you.

We're sisters. I'm fourteen and I'm an aspiring writer, which right now means mostly that I read all the time and once in a
while I work on my novella about my half-sister/half-squirrel who lives under the dining room table, and you're seventeen and you're an aspiring—

—Wait. Let me be something different for a change. An interior decorator.

—Sure thing, Mom.

—you're an aspiring interior decorator, which means mostly that you redecorate our room all the time without ever consulting me about it first, and we live on a houseboat, and our parents are dead. They went to Zabar's to get us some black and white cookies and died on their way home through the park, murdered by drug-addicted muggers.

—Jesus, Betsy, that's a terrible story. That's a do-worse.

—The parks were rough back then.

—That doesn't mean you have to write about it. Who wants to read about that? Couldn't our parents die of something nice?

—That's not really a thing.

—Just try it for me.

Okay, we live on a houseboat and our parents are dead, they were much older parents who adopted us later in life, and they were wonderful, loving parents who encouraged us to do everything we wanted in life, and they died peacefully of old age in their sleep in their twin beds holding hands. Their last words were
Life has been perfect and we love you girls more than all the world and there's a key to our safe deposit box in the wall behind the life vests that has our will and plenty of money for you girls to get through high school and go to college.

—Well, that's nicer, I guess, but now it's just not believable.

—Yes, and it's also not terribly interesting.

—I've had plenty of interesting for one lifetime. I could spit interesting.

—Mom, seriously, just let me tell the story how I want to tell it right now.

—Fine.

The funeral is a bleak affair. This is not one of those sad-beautiful celebrations of life with occasional chuckles, this is a
let's get this over with as quickly as possible
in a small chapel in the basement of the Baptist church on Broadway and Seventy-Ninth. We're not even Baptist. We don't have a lot of relatives in New York, they're mostly all back in Iowa or in other parts of the country. A couple of them make excuses about coming because it's too far, too painful, too everything. So it's about six friends of our parents' from the boat basin and Nina, everyone sobbing, plus a minister who didn't know either of them and calls our mother Louisa instead of Lois.
Louisa and Fred were a remarkable couple
.

—Hold up there, sister daughter. Lois and Fred, really?

—Well, I could have gone with Edna and Walter, but it was harder to imagine them ever moving to New York for any reason whatsoever.

—What if Daddy got a job with the
New York Times
?

—That's a pretty liberal paper. Almost as unbelievable as you being your own mom.

—Good point.

The minister continues.
When their young daughter Lois suggested they live on a houseboat, the first thing Fred and Louisa said was “All hands on deck!” They saw an opportunity for the experience of a lifetime, and they went for it. Louisa and Fred had left their small-town
Iowa life behind for New York City as soon as they graduated college, but this was a whole new opportunity. Yes, it ended badly. Very badly.
He shakes his head and takes a long pause.

Jesus
, you lean over and say to me,
what the fuck is wrong with this guy?
I don't know
, I say,
but I feel like throwing a tomato at him, like they do in old movies about a bad play.
We both giggle. He glares at us. You glare back harder, with your neck extended in front of you. He doesn't notice.

But they raised two beautiful girls, Lois and—
he tries to glance down at his notes surreptitiously, fails
—Betsy, and gave them a foundation and community in this quirky little riverside neighborhood. We pray that their souls are at eternal rest.

—Betsy, this is some weird, dark shit.

—Have you read my stuff before?

—Not since about 1993. But I remember thinking what I did read was really cute.

—Cute.

—I'm giving you a compliment.

—No, you know what, it probably
was
cute. My concern here is that this, too, is leaning to the cute side.

—It has murder and orphans. What is cute here?

—Black and white cookies, houseboats. I don't know. It might be twee.

—I don't know what that means.

The first thing you do after the funeral is raid the liquor cabinet.
It's time for cocktails!
you say.
I don't want to drink, Lois. The kids who drink at my school are a bunch of assholes. That's what drinking is! I like being in control of myself. Well, that's not one of your choices today, Betsy.
Pick your poison
, you say, opening the door to the li
quor cabinet. I say
I'm not sure I want anything that's in there. Unless you see something that tastes like a milkshake.
You push some bottles around, say
You might like this
, hold up a bottle of something that says “coconut” on the label.
I hate coconut, Lois, you know that. Oh, wah, I forgot something about you. Relax. I know!
I say.
I want a Martini and Rossi on the rocks, like Angie Dickinson. I don't think we have that, Betsy. How about this?
You hold up a bottle of Boone's Farm apple wine.
Oh, that looks good!
I imagine it will taste like apple juice, take a big swig, almost spit it out.
It tastes like if apple juice was made of gasoline. It tastes like what apple juice would taste like if it were made of gasoline. Oh, whatever, Lois. Do you want to be a writer or not? Yes. All right, then, straighten up that grammar and let's get drinking. You have to start slow. Booze is an acquired taste. I don't know what that means. It means you have to learn to like it. No, I mean, I understand the idea, I'm just saying it makes no sense to me. If you don't like something, can't you just not like it? Sure, Betsy. But there are some tastes that you realize are good once you get used to them. Like anchovies. Anchovies are the best! Right, but some people think they're disgusting. Okay, but they don't have to eat them. It's just about trying new things more than once before you go saying you don't like them. The reason it applies so well to booze versus other things is that booze gets you drunk. So it's totally worth it. Sip it. You'll see.

I take a small sip, let it slide down, nod. Better than the first big gulp, yes. Take another, another, another.
Yeah, okay
, I say.
Okay. Yeah, okay.
Another another. I slide down into the built-in bench sofa and everything slips away, my algebra test, the shaggy-haired boy who hasn't noticed me, my bossy older sister, our dead parents.
Kind of the greatest thing ever, am I right?
So far it's up there. But I haven't been alive that long. I didn't know you were a drinker, Lois. There's a lot you don't know.
If I weren't half-drunk I might comment on that, but the urn with Mom and
Dad's ashes has caught my eye and I'm distracted. I open the lid and look inside. It's a little unsteady in my hands as I take it off the kitchen table.
Christ, Betsy, be careful! I just want to see what it looks like. They. It. They.
I have an urge to plunge my hand into it. I open the twist tie on the plastic bag inside to get a better look. My vision is blurry, and it's dark in there, but it looks like sand. When you get up to go to the bathroom, I sink my hand in halfway up to my elbow. It seems like the exact right thing to do. It feels cool and satisfying. It feels like if Mom and Dad were the beach. Nothing about this seems weird to me.

You come back into the cabin and see me with my hand in the urn and my eyes closed.
Oh my god, Betsy, are you fucking nuts? What the fuck is wrong with you? Give me that!
I hold the urn to my body more closely, push you away with the other hand.
We should scatter those in the river
, you say.
It's morbid to keep an old urn around. No!
I say.
We're keeping them. We're keeping them. Okay, we'll talk about this later. We're keeping them! We'll talk about it later. WE'RE KEEPING THEM.
You roll your eyes, I'm clearly out of my mind with grief or with drink or possibly both, so you try to shift gears.
I think we should take this thing for a ride.
Oh my god, Lois, that's an amazing idea. Where should we go?
The beach
, I say.
I want to go live at the beach. I like the mountains
, you say.

We try to think of places with beaches and mountains and settle on Seattle.
For Christ's sake, please take your hand out of the urn now.

—Betsy, there are so many things wrong with this. This isn't better, it's just different.

—It's sisters on a sailing adventure! I moved you to the mountains!

—A houseboat is not a sailing boat.

—It can be if we want it to be.

—Also, I feel like this is pretty obviously you blaming me for your drinking problem.

—It's not. I was thinking about how I wish I'd started drinking a little sooner so that maybe I could have quit a little sooner.

—You don't wish you'd just never drank at all?

—Nope.

—Huh.

So we set out for Seattle. It takes almost two years. We're almost there when we run into some trouble in Mexico, because I studied French and your Spanish is—

—For shit, I know, Betsy.

—I was just going to say you struggled with it.

—It's fine, my Spanish
is
for shit.

So when I get arrested for prostitution (really just drunk and disorderly, but I'd gotten my tube skirt and my tube top mixed up, so basically I had made an extremely short dress out of my shirt), and I'm sure that I'm facing life in a Rosarito Beach prison, it takes a while before you're able to understand that I understood wrong and that all they want is about six thousand pesos for their trouble.
Should have just left you there. Very funny. You owe me six thousand pesos. I have no idea how much that is. Neither do I.

—I should have probably mentioned something sooner, Betsy. I never really thought through the houseboat thing, I just wanted something that was as different as I could think of from Muscatine, Iowa.

—That's okay, I never really think through anything.

— . . .

—I'm kidding! Sort of.

F
ive years pass. You have still not made a recording. You gave up a lot of things—and you should have been rewarded, but you weren't. You're not ready to give up, not yet; you've been making a respectable living for years now; few singers get to this level, ever. It could still happen, your voice is still glorious, but you're growing tired of the effort. You like paperback novels and doing needlepoint and you don't at all mind having a few weeks off between jobs. You've spent parts of summers in New Hampshire since I was in high school, have often considered taking the entire summer off to go up there and sit on the deck, look at the mountains, read, sew. But let's not kid ourselves. Relaxation is not an area in which you excel, and doing anything with less than excellence is not for you. You're all for a good long bubble bath or a half glass of wine now and again, but sitting around for a week with nothing to show for yourself in the end is for lazy asses. In late May you head up for the summer—Victor will take some long weekends and part of August—and it's about four days into sitting on the deck reading and looking at the mountains when the black flies start to bite, and for whatever reason, you taste really good to the black flies, and the bug zapper doesn't help, the coils don't
help, and no amount of Off! helps prevent the black flies from chomping on you and covering you with golf ball–sized welts. This black fly-biting coincides, though, with your growing a bit itchy in another way, which is to say that sitting on the deck for four days reading and looking at the mountains turns out to be the maximum sitting-still period for you, though you don't realize it in that way; what you do realize is that you should build a screened porch on the other side of the house, which will obviously and once and for all solve the black fly problem. So you run to town, buy a book on building stuff, find a design for a porch, run to the lumberyard, ask where people rent bigger tools and supplies. The people at the hardware store laugh when you tell them what you're planning, that no, you're not picking this up for your husband. But you're not insulted. This is no different from reupholstering a chair, you tell them; you simply follow directions.

It doesn't occur to you to be insulted. You're not a feminist. Or, more accurately, you think you're not a feminist. You spend next to no time thinking about feminism. When you think of what a feminist is, you think of unattractive women with hairy armpits holding signs in the streets and feeling sorry for themselves. Your response to life is, in essence, a response to the word “no.” It doesn't occur to you that this is in any way feminist—that your desire for a career, for something other than the domestic life that 1957 thought you were supposed to have, has anything to do with this—or even that you're doing something for your daughter (much less her generation) in this way, not even in an I'm-just-trying-to-feed-her way (because you still think that's the father's job). You want what you want, that's all. And right now you want a screen porch. So you build a screen porch. There's some building and taking apart, because
there are parts that aren't perfect; some nails go in angled a tiny bit wide and the floorboards are off by a fraction of a centimeter that even a top-notch carpenter would be happy with, and it's to be expected that that's part of the process, same as everything else. You'll do it and undo it until it's right. Two weeks later, you have a marvelous screen porch; you get some lounge chairs, a table, it's adorable. But your body is killing you, so you decide to splurge on a massage. It's forty-five dollars for an hour and a half, way cheaper than in New York, still a huge splurge, but just this once you spring for a massage, and it's transcendent, and you can see now that this should be a legitimate business expense for you, given the amount of stress you have to endure. What's more, you make a connection with the masseuse. She asks a number of questions pre-massage: she's a firm believer in the mind-body connection, wants to know not only what hurts but where you “hold things” in your body, a mind-blowing idea for you, but one that rings as true as anything you've ever heard. So you tell her. You say you hold them in your neck and shoulders and in your fingers and in your chest and sometimes your back and in your skull.
My calves are fabulous
, you say.
Utterly empty of things
.
Ha!

Afterward, she makes suggestions. There's a bookshop in town that specializes in spiritual books; she recommends some titles. She mentions that she's learning Reiki, explains what that is, and if you're interested in being a guinea pig, she needs practice. The spiritual bookshop might be the loveliest place you've ever been. The gray-haired woman behind the counter is positively lit up, and the room smells divine with handmade candles and scented oils and lotions. You sample scents and browse books and by the time you head to the counter you've racked up a hundred and nineteen dollars' worth of merchan
dise. A shitload of money, but that's all right. It's an investment in yourself.

You gobble up the books like you're eating M&Ms, highlighting passages in different colors. With a ruler. Is there another way to do it? You consume books by Leo Buscaglia, Shakti Gawain, John Bradshaw, Wayne Dyer, M. Scott Peck, Shirley MacLaine. You call Audrey to talk about it. She's read a few of the same books; some of them have helped her, too.
Shirley was a little too out there for me
, Audrey says, with some hesitation. You laugh, you know it's true, but you can't help think that some trauma from a horrible past life could explain a lot about this one, because you still haven't come up with anything conclusive, trauma-wise.
What did you think of the Louise Hay? That kind of blew my mind. I mean, under “high blood pressure” it says, “Longstanding emotional problems unresolved!” That is totally Victor! And under “arthritis” it says it relates to feeling unloved!
Audrey's a nurse. She has a spiritual life, but she believes in modern medicine.
I don't think you gave yourself arthritis, Lois. But what if I did?
You'd never given any thought to a mind-body connection prior to this, but now all your aches and pains make sense. No wonder you bruise so easily. You haven't just been bruised literally, you've been bruised figuratively too. Your world is now cracking open with possibility. Finally. There are affirmations for this. You have found something here.

Celeste, the masseuse/Reiki student, is thoughtful in explaining her practice and gentle in her touch, often not even touching but simply hovering her hands over parts of your body that she
feels drawn to
. You can feel the energy and heat from her hands going directly into you; you are sure that evil cells are breaking up and dissipating with each passing second. Never having done anything less than full-bore, you tell Celeste after
one Reiki session that you feel better already and ask where you can take the training yourself. It feels like this is something you could do that would be useful to people, something that could help mitigate the worldwide conspiracy against you. Of course, you could never give up music, but you do feel you're on to something here. A year later you're a Reiki master. Even your skeptical daughter has to admit she feels better after you treat her minor aches and pains. You take on a few clients, referrals from the center where you took the training, an overworked waitress, an elderly woman, a couple of AIDS patients. They, like everyone, adore you. You're moving in the right direction, you're sure now, though you're still depressed, and you haven't—won't—give up singing, although you're somewhat choosier about accepting dates now. You won't go back to Memphis to work with that cocksucker J
,
won't go back to Stuttgart if they put you up in that shit hotel where they sassed you about using your coil to boil water after you spent good money on an adapter, won't go back to Houston unless you get an apology from the conductor about the way he let that no-name whore muscle you out of an aria that should have been yours, you won't you won't you won't. Victor is disappointed that you're turning down jobs, especially in pursuit of this hippy-dippy voodoo stuff; when he sees you wearing crystals around your neck or smudging the house with sage, he puts on a baby voice to ask
how your widdle magic is coming along
, and you're disappointed that he doesn't get it, though you're not surprised. He's never really gotten you. He loves you and takes care of you, and you thought that would be enough.

One day you wake up and you almost, almost wish you hadn't. You don't exactly know where this came from, it's a new feeling, and it's frightening. Best to stay in bed. You tell
Victor you're tired, you're just going to take it easy today; he doesn't think anything of it. You don't call Audrey, and you let the dog pee on wee-wee pads in the house—nothing new—but you almost forget to feed him until he comes up to you whining, nearly an hour after feeding time. This is somewhat alarming, so after you feed the dog, you set the clock to wake you for his dinnertime and go back to bed. You can't read, can't even focus on the TV, though you leave it on; the shades are still drawn from the night before. Victor is concerned when he comes home, but for now he's still buying the story you're selling about not feeling well, even though the description of your symptoms is vague.
I don't know, just ecch-y
, you say, he cracks up at your made-up word. He giggles and asks if you want him to call the doctor about your ecchi-ness.
No
, you tell him,
I'll be fine. I just need some rest.

This goes on for the better part of a week. You're frankly baffled by it, because you haven't been crying; you know what crying means, at least. Right now, what you are is vacant. That's not technically a feeling, but it seems like all the parts of you that care about anything have turned in their keys and checked out. You have no energy for or interest in anything, and no matter how shitty you've felt in the past, you've always been motivated to whip up a new concert gown or screen porch as needed. Right now, zero. Victor finally insists on taking you to the doctor, so you make an appointment, but the doctor can't find anything wrong with you; he prescribes Valium, but that only makes you feel worse; still, you put it in the big plastic bag with the rest of the stash of pills you keep on hand—and you call the doctor back and tell him you didn't respond well to the Valium and he prescribes something else and that something else perks you right up. You'd be more than happy if there were
a pill for what you have, and there might be, and it's not for lack of trying; two of your shrinks have prescribed things that don't work and sometimes made things worse. You've been saving all these pills in your Ziploc for years now—Xanax, Percocet, and so on—some make you drowsy, some make you feel nothing at all, which you're discovering is no improvement—but who knows when something might come in handy, whether it's a pill or a set of pearl buttons from a blouse that's out of style. Betsy might need it sometime. Waste not, want not. Bonus, you lose five pounds, that's always good, so by the end of the week, you're not so much good as new as you've just
gotten through
whatever that was and now it's over.