Each night I roam the neighborhood and then lie in bed listening to what’s left of the waiting family breathe. My mother and father in their bed; Aunt Bernadette in my old room, smelling of new car upholstery and the cigarillos she smokes since she quit smoking cigarettes; cousin George and his new girlfriend whom no one likes, on the foldout couch in the living room. Carl, Lanie’s second husband, and Kevin, his boyfriend, in the guest room. As a group, we possess the qualities of a freshman college hall mixed with those of the only remaining survivors of a made-for-TV-movie nuclear holocaust — we eat whatever’s in the house and stay indoors, paralyzed by catastrophe but secretly happy for an excuse not to do our homework.
“We’re staying,” Carl declared when it became clear that Jack wasn’t showing up for the ceremony. Over the years Carl has remained one of Lanie’s closest friends. He called someone at the community college where he works to substitute for the English comp classes he hates teaching anyway. “I’m not going anywhere,” Aunt Bernadette said, taking a long drag of her cigarillo. She would manage her real estate business from here, no problem. “We won’t leave you in your time of need,” George’s girlfriend, Lizzie, said. No one had figured out precisely what it was that Lizzie did for a living, and even now, three days later, all we know is that it has to do with marketing something to someone. Lanie looked at me and mouthed, “Who is she?”
“Please, everyone stay,” my mother said, pushing my father and his scowl aside. My parents have recently reconciled after a six-month separation during which my father lived next door. She turns and looks at my father. “Lanie needs us.” Kevin was already on the phone to the airline, agreeing to pay a seventy-five-dollar service charge in order to change his and Carl’s return flight. “I’ll call the rental car place,” George assured Lizzie, who whispered her concerns in his ear. George’s business partner would handle the bulk of their web design business from New York. “It’s the internet,” George assured Lanie when she protested. “The internet is everywhere.”
Lanie shifts, resting her cheek on my shoulder. She flings an arm around my waist, demanding my attention in her sleep. “That’s ridiculous,” she says to someone in the mysterious land of her dream mind.
Suddenly, I want to wake her up and tell her everything I haven’t told her over the past several years — how my arrangement with Elliot, which at first had seemed like an ideal substitute for a boyfriend or a religion, has become bizarre and slightly frightening; how I suspect I’ve become a full-fledged atheist, unable to believe in the god of marriage or the god of career, never mind the regular god; how there are nights I lie awake in my apartment, staring out the window at the lonely night sky so big and vast and me so small and afraid; how I wonder how to feel less separate from the world around me, then wonder how it’s possible that I’ve wondered the exact same thing year after year lying in different beds looking at different patches of sky. But instead I look at Lanie’s hand draped over my hip, filled with energetic purpose even in sleep.
I miss her already. We will all have to return to our lives at some point, which leads me, as most things do in the middle of the night, to death. I convince myself that I can stand the thought of my own death more than I can bear Lanie’s death someday, her bones crumbling to dust. I begin to weep — at first from the inside out and then it’s just my body going through the motions, practicing, working out for death as if one could be in shape for it, ready to run its marathon when it finally arrives.
Community
“Harriet,” Aunt Bernadette says to me, pausing to light a cigarillo at the breakfast table where we’re all drinking mimosas meant for the wedding brunch. Lanie has cut the heads off of the flowers in her wedding bouquet — roses, delphiniums, hollyhocks, dahlias — and floated them in a bowl of water at the center of the table. They bob brilliant red and yellow and blue. It’s just like Lanie to make something extraordinary out of disaster, orchestrating her own abandonment like a party.
“It’s ten o’clock in the morning, Bernadette,” my mother says to her sister, waving her hand through the exhaled smoke.
“Lay off. You have Sam, I have these.” Bernadette pats the pack in the pocket of her bathrobe. “Anyway, look who’s talking, Ms. I’m-working-on-my-third-mimosa. Don’t pretend to be a priss. It doesn’t suit you.”
“Sam is not a pack of cigarettes,” my mother says. Her voice is shrill with the twenty years of tension that run like currents of electricity underneath the surface of this exchange.
“I’ll get the banana bread.” My father heads for the kitchen.
“Perfect,” Lanie says, her voice pure and resonant as the oboe she played in the high school band. She speaks without lifting her head from the table as Carl massages her neck and shoulders.
“That doesn’t bother you?” Lizzie, George’s girlfriend, says to Kevin, Carl’s boyfriend, sitting next to her.
“No, does it bother you?” Kevin has no patience with Lizzie since the night of the ceremony that didn’t happen. After polishing off a bottle of wine by herself, Lizzie started telling drinking stories from her sorority days. When it became clear that no one wanted to hear about the time she took a shit on a sorority sister’s bed that she mistook for a toilet, she cornered Kevin and began asking him questions about his sex life. Doesn’t it hurt? Is Carl’s penis bigger or smaller than yours? Don’t you ever miss girls? Not even a little? At which point George peeled her off of Kevin and led her upstairs to the bathroom. “Just so long as she doesn’t take a dump on my bed,” Lanie whispered to me.
“It would bother me,” Lizzie says now.
“Guess what, Lizzie? Kevin isn’t you,” George says. He’s lost patience with her too.
“I was just asking.”
“Harriet,” Bernadette says again. Again, she pauses, lighting a new cigarillo.
“For Christ’s sake, what?” I was hoping she’d been distracted. I can feel her urge to ally herself with me from across the table — just a couple of single girls holding out for a love that will transform us. The trouble is I’m not holding out, and I don’t want to be on her team. My mother doesn’t want me on Bernadette’s team either.
For the most part, my mother chooses to see my life as faraway, something she can’t quite make out in the distance, but then she panics and sends me negligees and hair combs, the bait with which to lure a man. She imagines that if I stand at my bedroom window with my hair pulled back and my negligee arranged just so, men will swarm to me like worker bees to a queen. “Don’t end up like Bernadette,” my mother told me over the phone last week. “Finding love and staying in love are acts of will. Look at me and your father. Sheer will and determination.” For her, love is like exercise — something you endure in order to feel virtuous.
“Nice mouth for a girl who studies monks,” Carl says to me now, working a knot under Lanie’s right shoulder blade.
“Is that what you’re doing in Illinois?” Bernadette says. “Working with monks?”
“Yes,” I say. “I fuck them too.”
“Jesus, Harriet,” Lanie says. She gives me a look that tells me not to contribute to the chaos.
“You’d think you two actually had a personal relationship with the man given the number of times you’ve called on Jesus in the past minute,” Bernadette says. She blows smoke in my mother’s direction.