Today Will Be Different (17 page)

“You okay?” Joe took Eleanor’s hand as they settled into chairs to share memories of Matty.

“I’m crazy about you, Joe,” Eleanor whispered.

A woman with a weathered face and a Tyrolean sweater launched into a story. “Of course there was the time Matty brought that goat into the Jerome Bar!”

Amid the appreciative chuckles, Ivy muttered ominously, “He was a useless bastard.”

Eleanor had heard it, but the woman hadn’t. She continued. “I think he won it off Jim Salter.”

“Jim Salter had a pony, not a goat!” former mayor Bill Stirling said, laughing. “But I’ll tell you who did have a goat—”

“He was a drunk and a bookie,” Ivy growled. “He left us alone for weeks at a time to fend for ourselves.”

The attention now turned to Ivy, but her unfocused eyes rested on a tuft of grass a foot from the tin of ashes. She held a tippy champagne glass. On the dirt at her side, her own personal bottle.

Ivy raised her head and addressed the dumbfounded gray-haired woman. “We ate food off drugstore shelves.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“He didn’t know what grade I was in,” Ivy said, leaning forward. “My teeth were loose in my head from lack of nutrition. He let me become pen pals with prisoners from the back of
Rolling Stone
magazine. I’m sorry if I don’t see what’s so hilarious about bringing a goat into the Jerome Bar.”

Eleanor touched Ivy’s arm, but she kept going, now addressing the group.

“And because your beloved Matty paid no attention to me, I had to go marry a guy who controls my every move. Now look at me.” Ivy stood up, her chair flipping back into the fine dirt with a poof. “Know why I look like this?”

Eleanor and Joe had wondered. Ivy had arrived dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and an ankle-length silk skirt, her hip bones pointing through like headlights. Her hair was an unflattering red that picked up her rashy complexion.

“Hair dye has toxins that will hurt the fetus if I ever get pregnant again, so Bucky makes me use henna. He thinks I throw myself at every man I come across the way I did at him the night we met. And at you too, Joe, the day of my wedding. Now I can only go out if I’m covered from ankle to wrist like an Orthodox Jew!”

Even this group, desensitized to tales of shocking behavior, shifted in their chairs at the grace note of anti-Semitism.

“My whole life,” Ivy said, now beginning to cry, “no matter how gutter-bad things got, at least I was better off than Matty.”

Eleanor stood up. Ivy moved away. “But look at me!” Ivy yanked her arm back, even though no one had reached for it. “Like father, like daughter, second-class citizens, there at the whim of the people in the big house!”

“I know, Ivy.” Eleanor moved toward her sister, but Ivy ran off and shouted the rest from twenty feet away, like a hostage taker.

“If I leave, Bucky will get full custody of John-Tyler! Bucky’s drooling at the prospect of a court battle. His family owns every judge in New Orleans. He claims he was sold a bill of defective goods. He says you and Joe pulled a fast one by dumping your trash on his rich family, like I’m the crazy lady in the attic.”

Joe came up from behind and took Ivy by the upper arms. The strength of his grip made her go limp. He hustled her into a Jeep, borrowed the keys from the driver, and told Eleanor he’d meet her back at the hotel.

As Joe drove, Ivy kept her face turned away. Her only movement was to grip the roll bar tightly anytime the Jeep tipped down a steep switchback. When they got off the mountain and onto the pavement of Maroon Creek Road, Ivy finally spoke.

“I’m sure you’re wondering what’s happened to me,” she said without looking over. “I am too.”

Joe drove to the campus of the ritzy Aspen Institute with its Buckminster Fuller dome and sculptures by Herbert Bayer and Andy Goldsworthy. Joe parked the Jeep. He and Ivy walked along a path leading to the music tent. They passed manicured emerald mounds, some ten feet high. A woman in a down vest stood at the top of one, playing King of the Mountain with her Westie. At the edge of the lawn, cut through the sagebrush, a hidden path known only to locals. It led to an arc of benches tucked inside an aspen grove. This was where Eleanor and Ivy would go as children. This was their favorite spot.

Ivy sat down, home again.

“I’m validating everything you said,” Joe said. “We’ll figure this out the same way we’ve figured everything else out.”

“You were crying up there,” Ivy said.

“Mortality and nature,” Joe said. “It gets me every time. You try your best, or you don’t try your best. The mountains don’t care.”

“Gee,” Ivy said.

Joe laughed. “I’m sorry.”

Ivy snapped a sagebrush twig and rubbed the leaves into her fingertips. She held them up for Joe to smell.

Joe leaned in. Ivy touched his face. He pulled away.

“I don’t think I drank enough water when I got here,” Ivy said.

“We’re at eight thousand feet,” Joe said. “Eleven on the mountain.”

“Would you mind getting me some?” Ivy asked.

“When I get back, we can talk about everything. I want to listen.”

Joe walked the fifty yards to the music tent. It was May; the place was desolate. In an unlocked concession stand he dug out a stack of paper cups. He pulled off four, found a men’s room, and filled them with chilly tap water.

Joe made his way back to the secret spot, careful not to spill a drop of his offering.

He arrived at the circle. The benches were bare.

Joe emerged from the aspen grove. He saw no sign of Ivy. The woman and her dog were gone. Joe sensed another absence. The patch of red. The Jeep. He’d left the keys on the floor.

Joe stomped down Highway 82 toward town. It had begun to rain. The tops of the mountains were sugar-dusted with snow.

The jolly convoy of Jeeps cruised by on their way back from the memorial. One skidded to a stop. It was Eleanor.

“That was the last time,” Joe said. “Do you hear me? I’m done with her.”

They returned to the Limelight Hotel. Ivy’s room was empty, her bags gone. Eleanor received a call. The missing Jeep had turned up at the Aspen airport, parked in a fire lane, engine running.

A few months before the memorial, Eleanor and Joe had decided it was time for Eleanor to go off the pill. The morning of the service, on the way to Wagner Park, sudden nausea had her retching into a wine barrel spilling with the twisted brown of last year’s petunias. She wrote it off as the thin air.

The next day, on her way back to Seattle, in the women’s room at the Denver airport, Eleanor coughed up bile.

“Are you all right?” Joe asked when she emerged.

“Fine,” Eleanor said. “Just a long line.”

Joe wasn’t continuing to Seattle with his wife but flying from Denver to Nairobi. He was already a day late to meet two other doctors for pro bono surgeries. He’d been raising money and making arrangements for the past year.

If Joe thought Eleanor might be pregnant, she knew he’d cancel his trip. She kissed him good-bye at his gate and hoped to have good news to spring on him when he returned.

Back in Seattle, the good news came in the form of a fierce underwater heartbeat and an ultrasound printed on delicate thermal paper. The baby would arrive around Thanksgiving. But, as Dr. Koo had said, Eleanor was forty and just eight weeks into her first pregnancy. “Best not get ahead of ourselves.”

On her way out of the doctor’s office, Eleanor received a call from Ivy.

“It’s over,” Ivy said. “I’m leaving him.”

For the next week, whenever Ivy could break free from Bucky—at the market, at the playground, in her parked car while she pretended to be at the gym—she’d share stories of his tempestuous jealousy and histrionics.

It wasn’t the end of Bucky that had Eleanor living in Technicolor. It was being a sister again. There was no relief deeper than being loved by the person who’d known you the longest. Eleanor’s heart giggled with mad abundance: so much to share, so much goodwill, so many notes to compare, so many ways to help and be helped. She went out into the world, everything a performance for her coconspirator, Ivy. It was Eleanor at her vibrant best.

“Oh, Eleanor,” Ivy sighed while Bucky was off getting takeout. “I lost myself and threw you out in the confusion. How can you not hate me?”

“All that matters is we’re back.”

They both recognized that Bucky would never let Ivy just walk away. So the sisters hatched a plan. While Bucky was receiving an honor from the city for hiring good-behavior prisoners to pull the Khaos float, Ivy would whisk John-Tyler to the airport. Eleanor had two plane tickets paid for and waiting. She’d found a divorce lawyer. She’d put down first and last month’s rent on a town house in West Seattle. Ivy could work in Joe’s office.

Ivy found it hard to believe Joe would approve. “He can’t be much of a fan after what I did to him in Aspen.”

“Joe is totally on board,” Eleanor said.

Joe wasn’t on board. Joe was in Africa without phone or Internet.

It was madness, the collision course Eleanor had set in motion. Her imagination became a battleground of incoming fire from Ivy and Joe.

Ivy: But Eleanor, without a good lawyer I’ll lose custody of my son!

Joe: Me bankrolling a custody battle between Ivy and Bucky, are you kidding?

Ivy: Don’t you have your own money from
Looper Wash
?

Joe: When I make money, it’s “our” money, but when you make money, it’s “your” money?

Ivy: Joe has never understood what you and I are to each other.

Joe: I have six siblings. And no drama. It’s called boundaries.

Ivy: I promise to pay you back when I win my settlement.

Joe: We both know Bucky will never give your sister a dime.

Ivy: I can work it off by being your nanny.

Joe: An insane child helping us with the baby? I don’t think so.

Ivy: What matters is we beat this guy.

Joe: Nobody beats the Troubled Troubadour.

And then horns would honk and Eleanor would snap to. She’d been sitting at a green light.

Ivy’s plane landed at noon. Eleanor bought a car seat and decorated the back of an envelope.
Welcome to Seattle, Ivy and J.T.!
She stood in the baggage claim among the limo drivers and watched.

Ivy emerged wearing a sleeveless shift, her hair blond again.

“Yay!” said Eleanor.

John-Tyler wasn’t at her side. Eleanor’s eyes went to the next wedge of the revolving door. A little boy in a navy blazer emerged, holding hands with his father, Bucky.

They stood there, facing Eleanor, the three of them.

“This was my choice,” Ivy said. “It has nothing to do with Bucky. The IVF and the pills were making me overly emotional. I needed help, I see that now. And I’m getting it.”

John-Tyler, in Gucci loafers you could fit in your palm, was his own little person. He held a plastic dinosaur and had Bucky’s chin. Eleanor wouldn’t have known Bucky had a chin until she saw it on Ivy’s son.

Without a word, Bucky handed Eleanor a list of conditions. She scanned it numbly. If she wanted to visit Ivy, she could come to New Orleans and stay in a hotel. She wouldn’t be allowed in the house. She was never to be left alone with John-Tyler.

Eleanor ransacked Ivy’s face for the slightest something: a held-back tear, a desperate flash in the eye saying
I’ll call you later,
a quivering lip. But nothing.

Bucky held out a Neiman Marcus shopping bag. “We won’t be needing this.”

In it a slab of leather. On its spine,
THE FLOOD GIRLS
. The shock of it, and of Ivy’s acquiescence, paralyzed Eleanor.

Bucky, without lowering his hand, let go of the bag. It dropped to the floor with an unremarkable thud.

“Let’s go find the departure level, shall we?” Bucky said, his arm now around Ivy’s waist. “Our plane leaves in an hour and I fear the powers that be will make us once again endure security.”

“Yes, my love.”

Bucky turned to Eleanor. “You blame me, of course. One day you will understand this is entirely your doing. You never gave me a chance. Yes, I do live a smallish life in New Orleans. And one might say I’m overinvested in Carnival. But I’m ferociously loyal to my family, you see. Any hardships I have with your sister are a function of me wanting the best for her and our son. I’m the first to admit that Ivy and I have had difficulties in our marriage. What couple hasn’t? But it’s basic emotional intelligence that when someone comes to you with their one-sided horror stories, you listen. You don’t plot their divorce. It’s true, Eleanor, you and I possess different styles. Last time I checked, the world allowed for such things. There’s a Buddhist proverb: ‘Just because a raft helps you cross the river, you need not carry that raft on your back for the rest of your life.’ In other words, Eleanor, you’re the raft, and Ivy has decided to put you down.”

And then it was three backs walking away.

It took several seconds for Eleanor to speak.

“Where are the derringers?”
she found herself screaming as she charged them. “I want my guns! I want my guns back!”

Ten minutes later, Eleanor was in the back of a police car outside baggage claim. She explained to the young cop it had been a family argument and that the guns were darling antiques that didn’t fire, practically metaphors. Even if they did fire, they were mounted on a wall in another state.

“You’ve got to calm down, ma’am.” It was the cop, through a crack in the window. “I don’t want to take you downtown. But you really gotta chill here.”

Please God, don’t let all this toxic fear and rage hurt the baby. Please don’t let Joe get back from Kenya and find out I got arrested. I promise you, God, if you get me out of here with a healthy baby and without Joe knowing, Joe and the baby will be my family. I’ll never think about Bucky and Ivy again.

“Get it together, ma’am. Count to three and put it behind you. Ready?”

“One, two, three.”

Right after Timby was born, that’s when it was toughest not to have a sister. Breast-feeding. Sleep schedules. Eleanor had found a baby class whose instructor believed high chairs, slings, and tummy time were bad, even bordered on child abuse, and of course Eleanor wanted to compare notes with her sister, a mother before her. Everyday life was booby-trapped with reminders. (Blueberries: the time Eleanor and Ivy had made cold blueberry soup from
The Silver Palate Cookbook
at their walk-up on Bank Street and it stained the guests’ teeth purple.) But as soon as a memory of Ivy was triggered, Eleanor snapped a rubber band around her wrist. If she didn’t have a rubber band, she scolded herself out loud: “No!”