She gave him a stern look. “I’m trying to knock off about eight things before I go meet Emmy.”
He came in, shut the door, sat down and leaned in a bit toward her. “Aves, everybody’s worried about you,” he said.
She paused. She gave a helpless, bitterly amused laugh. She laid her palms flat and open on the table before her. “Blum, I can’t win this one, can I? Every bit of passion or oomph I ever show from now on will be judged through the lens of last year, won’t it? If I’m not tamped down with so much lithium I can barely think straight, I’m just a ticking time bomb around here, right?”
He laughed. Thank God somebody could still laugh at her in the way she wanted! “No, sweetheart,” he said. “No one’s been doing that. It’s the past week or so. You’ve been different.”
“Blum—” Her voice broke. “Blum, I’ve been feeling good.” She started crying; she could do that around Blum. “I’ve had energy, I’ve had ideas. Don’t take it away from me.”
“But, Aves.” He leaned forward more. “Look at yourself. You’re crying. Do you really feel good right now?”
“I’m feeling. I’m feeling. Okay?”
He sighed, shook his head. “Would you just call Vikram and talk about the lithium? You want me to do it with you now?”
“I told you I have a million things to do before I go meet Emmy.”
“You’re meeting Emmy soon?”
“We meet every Wednesday at three at Serendipity.”
“Why don’t you take a Valium now, then?”
“I will consider taking one,” she said. But Blum just sat there. “You are not doing directly observed therapy with me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Blum stood up, all six feet two inches of him. He was a boy from Midwood; they understood each other. “I know you hate that you have this thing,” he said. “But you have to think about keeping yourself and your family safe.”
“Safe!” she snorted.
“We all get crap to deal with, and this is yours, Aves,” he said in a suddenly sharper voice. “Be a grown woman.”
Blum left, closing the door behind him. She cried. She knew the good times were coming to an end. She should be heading uptown, she thought. But she kept tweaking the damn outline she’d made so she could fully implement it in the morning. There they were, the tears and the anxiety wrestling right alongside the exhilaration about all her plans, that lust for life, that rush. Good-bye to all that. She stuffed her yellow pad into her workbag, slung the black garbage bag of Hello Kittys back over her shoulder.
On the 6 train uptown, she gave withering looks to people whose body touched hers. Finally, to a man who bumped into her, she said, “You could be more careful.”
“Fuck you, bitch,” he said, before getting off the train.
Her head was racing. She should take a Valium before meeting Emmy. But in the pit of her stomach, she could remember the dead Valium haze from last year, the hell getting off those things, how proud she was she hadn’t needed one in three months. Being with Emmy would calm her — it always did. She never took her illness out on her child. They were going to have fun today!
She stepped into Serendipity. There was Emmy, sitting on a white chair, alone at a white table, waiting for her, her dark, curly hair pulled back in barrettes that were woven with pink and blue ribbons. Her Trapper Keeper was in front of her, with the big pink sticker letters on the front spelling out MILLY (Emmy short for M., M. short for Milly.) She smiled when she saw her mother, showing a mouthful of braces. Then, when she noticed her mother was hauling a black plastic garbage bag, the smile disappeared. Her eyes hazed over with fear.
But Ava didn’t see that. She barreled into the restaurant, knocking down a chair with the black plastic bag. “You can’t leave a chair out in the middle of the room,” she huffed at the waitress who hurried over to pick it up. “Emmy!” Suddenly, she was leaning over, kissing Milly, who cringed — she had schoolfriends just a few tables away; she knew they were already looking over, giggling. “I come from Chinatown bearing gifts!” exclaimed Ava. One by one, she pulled the Hello Kitty dolls from the plastic bag, arranged them in an arc on the tabletop. “Aren’t they cute?”
Her mother was cuddling up next to her, asking about her day at school, and, mmm, were they sharing a frozen hot chocolate like they usually did?
“Yes,” said Milly, “but I have to go to the bathroom first; I’d been waiting for you to get here.”
Walking toward the back, Milly could hear how loudly her mother was talking to the waitress, as though she wanted the whole restaurant to hear. In the back, at the payphone, Milly called her dad’s office, waited for his secretary to put him on the line. Somewhere deep down, she’d broken in two again, just as she had last year. But for now, she put herself above the shock and the humiliation and the knowledge of what the next few days (weeks? months?) would be like. (Well, actually, she thought about Francelle, and how grateful she was that Francelle was not only loving but the same person every day.)
“You need to come to Serendipity,” she said when her father came on the line. “Mom’s breaking down again.”
Four. Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1992)
There it was on the plate, in a pool of syrup, a final fat blueberry that had escaped the finished pancake. Milly speared it with her fork and raised it to Jared’s lips.
“You have it,” she said.
“No, Millipede, you have it.”
Milly held the blueberry between her lips, leaned forward, and shared it with Jared — the two of them laughing as they each bit the berry to pull away their half, kissing all the while. The entire transaction took just seconds; they were certainly not the kind of people to engage in ostentatious and drawn-out public displays of affection. But the whole affair had caught the eye of the mid-fortysomething woman sitting across from them in the restaurant, who turned to her companion, another fortysomething woman.
The first woman said, “I don’t think I can do any more Sunday brunches at this place.”
Her friend looked moderately alarmed. “Why? We love this place.”
“I can’t watch another beautiful, bedheaded Gen-X couple come in here with their whole drowsy Sunday vibe of we-just-had-amazing-sex-and-now-we’re-going-to-drowsily-walk-around-the-Chelsea-Flea-holding-hands-before-we-go-home-and-have-more-sex.”
To which her friend laughed. “Oh, them,” she said. “Yes, I’d noticed them.”
“You just missed the blueberry make-out trick, unfortunately.”
Her friend glanced the way of Milly and Jared. “I don’t think they’ll make it to marriage,” she said.
Friend #1’s eyes narrowed. Now they were playing one of their favorite single-friends games: Prognosticate the Fate of the Happy Couple before You. “Why not?”
“Look at him!” Friend #2, the harder-bitten of the duo, exclaimed. “Have you watched him run his hands through his lush head of hair? He’s so full of himself. He’ll get tired of her. She’s too needy. You can tell.”
“Oh, nooo,” said Friend #1. “You have not been sitting from my vantage point. He’s crazy about her. I saw the doggy eyes.”
And on and on they went, and how amusing and perhaps disconcerting it might have been for Jared and Milly if they could have heard the prognostications made about them by two lonely strangers in a crowded Sunday brunch spot. But this wasn’t the case, and Milly and Jared sailed out of the Chelsea nouveau diner as bedheadedly as they’d arrived, back out into the garbage-scented steam of their first postcollegiate New York summer. They were on this side of town, and not in the East Village, because they were meeting friends from school at a new park along the Hudson for some sort of Frisbee/picnic thing, hastily arranged the day before via a batch of messages left on answering machines. This was their life now, Jared having achieved his goal of Milly and hence free to pursue his myriad other goals, and Milly forever glancing over her shoulder, trying to identify the shape-shifting unease that cast a shadow over their happiness.