Today Will Be Different (21 page)

Insight!

Violet once told me, “Change is the goal. Insight is the booby prize.” She was right, of course.

I don’t want insight. I want my sister back.

I’m sorry, Eleanor,
Ivy says to me when she drifts in for her three a.m. hauntings, Joe slumbering peacefully by my side.
It was a sickening choice I had to make. Always know I do see you for who you are. You are my family. I miss you too
.

Then I wake up in a sweat, ditched, a monster gutted of both softness and strength, of every good quality I ever possessed. The next morning I return to my daily life, which is just a mock-up of daily life because of my secret shame: I’ve been reduced to a thing that misses Ivy.

I touched the empty bench at my side, something I find myself doing when I ache for my sister.

The comfort, the thrill to have her sitting beside me. To again have a sister who “always came by,” as Spencer had put it. Just imagining Ivy’s flesh and her limbs, something within me rose up, the Flood girls one again, ready to conquer the world.

“Excuse me?” It was Timby. He’d cracked the door and poked his head through. “Can you name three countries in Europe?”

“Spain, France, and Luxembourg.”

Timby gave me the thumbs-up and closed the door.

I started with a new shrink this week. I told him the tale of the Troubled Troubadour, the one I’d been perfecting all those sleepless nights. In it, Bucky was the villain, I the victim, Ivy the pawn. It was so dispassionate it might have been told by a third party. (The Trick strikes again!) The shrink suggested that the worst thing a person can experience is being on the receiving end of “hatred and misunderstanding.”

“What if there were something even worse?” I asked him. “Hatred and
understanding
?”

Everything Bucky had said about me at the airport that day. None of it was wrong.

Would you like to sample a nutty Gouda?
Sorry, Joyce Primm, you’re selling cheese because you wanted the real story of my life but I’d already drawn an
X
through it.

I raised my face.

The colors of the dusty light were the colors of autumn, the colors of the ’70s: orange, mustard, brown, olive. The stained glass looked more inspired by Peter Max or Milton Glaser than Christianity. A hand holding a dove. The word
joy
in sock-it-to-me font. The one depiction of Jesus had him with ropy rainbow hair like the Bob Dylan album cover. Mom came home one Sunday beaming with optimism because the choir had sung “Day by Day” from
Godspell
and the priest had announced that from then on, women would be allowed to wear pants to church. She would be dead within the year.

Daddy used to call the three of us “my girls.” Mom called the two of us “my girls.” What a dishonor to them both, the shameful estrangement of the Flood girls now.

Building a wall around Ivy, Bucky, and the shambles of the past: it seemed like the only solution at the time. And for years, it had worked. Kinda! But today the wall buckled.

I stood up. My heart was as heavy as an asteroid.

I’d turn fifty in May. My accomplishments? To most people, they’d be the stuff of pipe dreams. Everything I’d set out to achieve in this lifetime, I’d done, with grace to spare. Except loving well the people I loved the most.

It was time to try something else. What, though?

Alonzo and Timby were on their feet, an intense playful energy bouncing between them.

“Where did it go?” Alonzo said. “Wait, there it is!”

“Where?”
Timby jumped up and down.

Alonzo reached behind Timby’s ear and pulled out a quarter. “There it is! It ain’t right!”

Timby grabbed the coin from his hand.

“It ain’t right!” Alonzo said, and turned to me. “Any luck?”

“No luck at all,” I said.

Together the three of us squinted into the afternoon sun. We headed back down the path toward the car.

The Twelve Step meeting had broken up. Several addicts hung around drinking coffee and smoking. I approached.

“Hi,” I said. “I want to apologize again for interrupting.”

“Pobody’s nerfect,” the vested man said.

The fragile woman watched me warily and sipped her coffee. She drank out of a Color Me Mine special. There was no mistaking the mug’s thickness and sloppy glaze job.

I thought I was hallucinating.

“Can I see the other side of your mug?” I asked.

She turned it: a childish rendering of a walking stick and the word
Daddy
.

With Timby’s backward
Y
.

“Joe,” I said. “He was here.”

All eyes quickly looked away.

I cried out in frustration. “Is there anyone in the vicinity who is
not
addicted to something? I have one basic question.”

“They all left early and took a bus down to the Key,” offered a woman leaning over to scratch a cat.

“The Key?” I said.

“The Key Arena.”

The Key Arena was part of the Seattle Center, seventy acres in the middle of the city, home of the ’62 World’s Fair. The pristine campus now boasted five museums, seven theaters, a dozen restaurants, and zero places to park. I bit the bullet and used the valet.

My eye was pulled up the Space Needle towering fantastically overhead, its hot white spotlights beginning to win out over the bruising sky.

“Can I pee?” Timby said.

“Quickly.”

“I’ll take him,” Alonzo offered and they headed into the children’s theater.

I went to a deck, leaned against the rail, and looked out across the expanse.

Summer was over: the cheery red popcorn wagon was locked and on its side by a concrete wall. Soft salmon the color on the weeping Japanese maples. Armies arrived each dawn to erase any sign of autumn on the ground; it was only on the trees. The lawn was freshly mowed and striped like vacuumed carpet. Bearded, topknotted men in their twenties walked their bicycles through, tech lanyards swaying. The enormous fountain in the center blasted water up and out, fifty nozzles pointed skyward, all synchronized to music, violent classical, it sounded like from my faraway perch. Kids in various stages of dress dashed up and down the fountain’s embankment trying to outrun the unpredictable blasts. Many shivered violently from having failed: it was the eve of winter.

The Key Arena loomed.

Ugly, squat, concrete. It was hard to imagine the thing was ever considered beautiful, even back in ’62. The Beatles played there. So did Elvis. It’s where the Sonics won the championship. But time had passed it by. The Sonics left for Oklahoma. No NBA team wanted any part of the place. Bands resisted playing there. The logical thing would be to tear it down. But there was always an outcry. Even its defenders couldn’t find anything to recommend it other than dogged sentimentality.

Alonzo joined me at the rail.

“I want to go home,” I said, feeling a sudden gust of fear. “I don’t want to know where Joe’s been going.”

“I do!” Alonzo said with a laugh.

“Timby, let’s go.”

But Timby was gone, running down the hill toward a nondescript group of people strolling along, swinging Starbucks.

“Dada!” he cried.

And one of them was Joe.

My mother was represented by the young theatrical agent Sam Cohn before he became the legendary Sam Cohn. She threw him a surprise birthday in our rambling, rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment. Her twist: Each guest had to bring one friend Sam had never met. While all Sam’s real friends hid in the back staircase, Sam entered to a roomful of strangers yelling, “Surprise!”

Now it was me, scanning the unknown faces, wanting to be relieved to see these people who called up nothing.

They smiled and chatted animatedly as if still trying to make good impressions. The silence of familiarity hadn’t yet descended.

Joe spotted Timby. His face lit up. He handed his coffee to one of the strangers just in time for Timby to leap into his arms. Timby’s legs were so long it looked like Joe was holding a grown person.

Joe looked around and spotted me at the rail.

I gave him a wave.

Joe shook his head, but not in surprise or remorse. It was almost as if… dare I say… he welcomed the wonder of it all.

The Plan

From where Joe was standing Eleanor was thirty again, in cutoffs and a button-down covered with red roses, her bare feet crusted in sand.

Joe had been two years into his residency then, pulling a graveyard ER shift at Southside Hospital on Long Island. Friday night always delivered revelers with alcohol-related injuries, but never anyone as captivating as the Flood girls.

Ivy was the one your eyes went to, six feet tall, milky skin, ethereal and lissome, her flowing yellow dress blackened at the hem from dragging on the ground. Something about her made you want to reach out and confirm she was real. Eleanor was the hurt one, though, her right arm in a sling made from a bedsheet.

“So tell me what happened,” Joe said.

Eleanor had green eyes and a dusting of freckles. Pretty, but not the pretty one.

“You know how you’re walking along the beach,” she said, and paused to burp. “Excuse me. And you see those share houses with rickety decks and you think, What idiot would be stupid enough to stand on one of those, let alone throw a keg party and pack it with thirty people?”

“The answer is…” Ivy pointed at Eleanor.

“Let’s see the damage.” Joe rested her arm on a rolling table. He gingerly untied the bedsheet.

Eleanor looked around, as if pillaging the exam room for details. Joe watched her watching. He caught himself and lowered his eyes. They landed on the curve of her waist peeking through a gap between her shirt buttons. He quickly looked away.

Her wrist was badly swollen.

Joe held out his hand. “Can you shake it?”

Eleanor winced, unable to move her fingers.

“I’m right-handed!” she said. “It’s how I make a living. If I can’t hold a pencil, my life is over.”

“Or at least inconvenienced,” Ivy put in. To Joe, as if Eleanor weren’t in the room: “She tends to exaggerate.”

“A life-changing job falls into my lap and what do I do before I even sign the contract?” Eleanor said. “Rent a house on Fire Island and throw a party.”

“I wanted it to be a theme party,” Ivy said, pouting. “It’s midsummer, June twenty-first.”

“You dress like Titania every day as it is,” Eleanor shot back, then turned to Joe. “What kind of hillbilly move is that? Spending money I don’t have on a keg party!”

“Let’s get you X-rayed,” he said.

“Oh. My. God,” Eleanor said. “What’s that T-shirt?”

Joe opened his lab coat to check. The one he’d put on in the dark that morning was daffodil yellow with a cheery blue clown and the words
Meyer Mania
.

Ivy came around. Now both sisters had him in their crosshairs.

“Meyer Mania?” said Ivy.

“Yeah,” he said, not sharing the excitement. “I’ve had it forever.”

“But what
is
it?” Eleanor asked.

“My theory is a family of Meyers had these T-shirts made for a reunion, and you could get a free image, so they picked a happy clown.”

“How did
you
end up with it, though?” Eleanor asked.

“I found it in the dryer at college.”

Eleanor grabbed Ivy with her good hand. Ivy grabbed her back.

“What?” Joe asked.

“We may love you,” Ivy said.

The X-ray came back showing a significant Colles’ fracture. Joe returned to the examination room to find the sisters yammering about the party.

“I’m surprised you’re not in more pain,” he told Eleanor.

“Oh, I’m in pain,” Eleanor said. “Pain I’m good with. It’s discomfort I can’t handle.”

“You win!” Ivy said, poking Eleanor.

Eleanor yipped; for a moment the laughing sisters were lost in each other.

Ivy explained it to Joe. “We have a contest. We each try to prove we have a weaker character than the other.”

Joe tried to do the math on that.

“You get twenty bonus points,” Eleanor said to Ivy. “My life is over and you’re staring at yourself.”

Ivy was on tiptoes, looking over her shoulder at her reflection in a clerestory.

“Someone give Narcissus a hand mirror before she climbs onto the counter,” Eleanor said.

“Her career isn’t over, right?” Ivy asked.

“Nah,” Joe said. “I’ll put her in a short cast and she’ll be holding a pencil in two weeks.”

“A cast?” Eleanor cried. “‘Hello, Violet Parry? I was on a deck that collapsed and I broke my wrist so you’ll have to find another animation director.’” Her voice jumped an octave. “Why now? Why my right hand? Things were finally starting to go well—”

“Stop talking,” Joe said, surprised at the forcefulness of his tone. More surprising, Eleanor did stop talking.

“Oh, my,” Ivy whispered.

“The world isn’t your friend,” Joe told Eleanor. “It’s not designed to go your way. All you can do is make the decision to muscle through and fight the trend.”

Eleanor’s face spread into a smile. “And call you on Monday.”

“And call me on Monday.”

“Oh, my.” This time, Ivy said it out loud.

Twenty years and Timby later, apartments bought and sold, belongings packed and unpacked, a move across the country, funerals of parents, career triumphs and washouts: how could Joe tell Eleanor his path had been leading somewhere that didn’t involve her?

That for fifty years there’d been a hidden architecture to his life, like the aisle lights in the floor of an airplane. They’re always there, embedded in the ordinariness of the plane; no need to notice them until there’s an emergency and they blink on to lead you to safety.

It came with no warning. A month ago. On a breezy Sunday, the day of the Seahawks home opener. As usual, Joe had arrived at the Clink two hours early to take care of the players.

First up, Vonte Daggatt, a star safety who’d sustained a severe distal radius fracture at the end of last season. Joe had operated immediately, inserting a titanium plate. The bone had healed nicely over the summer. There’d been minor swelling on Wednesday; Joe hoped the cortisone shot would have eased it enough to clear Vonte to play.