“I told her about my past in broad strokes. It was only a quick overview today. But do you think you could…”
Yes.I didn’t even have to know what she was going to ask to know that the answer was yes. But of course I had to let her speak.
“Do you think you could come with me to some of the sessions where I tell her about…”
“… the lemon tree?” I supplied when she trailed off, knowing it stood for all this junk we were talking about.
“Yes. The lemon tree.”
“Name the time, and I’ll be there.” I’d fly in from anywhere. Except Wild Arts. “After August, though. I can’t leave Wild Arts in the lurch.” Apparently, even though I’d started off phoning in my artist-in-residence duties, I was now committed.
She raised an eyebrow. “You can’t leave Wild Arts, or you can’t leave your ‘friend’ you’re hooking up with there? The dancer with the pink hair, right?”
I made a face at her. “I can’t leave Wild Arts. Gretchen isn’t even there for the second session.”
“Gretchen,” Auden said quizzically. “And can I assumeGretchenis also the one who gave you all this sage advice about Mother Dearest?”
“She is,” I said warily. “Was.” I kept having to remind myself that Gretchen was in my past. She’d specifically said we weren’t going to keep in touch, but I still hadn’t absorbed the fact that I would literally never see her again.
“You like her!” Auden said in a singsong voice, teasing me in a juvenile way she never had when we were actual juveniles.I took that as a kind of progress—for both of us. Life had been dead serious, for the most part, when we were kids.
“I do like Gretchen. Did.” I was doing it again. “But not in that way. She was… fun.” That was understating it entirely.
“Fun and wise. Maybe you shouldn’t have let her go.”
“Maybe it wasn’t up to me.” That was as close as I would come to admitting that if more had been on offer, I might have been down with it. Auden was still looking at me with that damned raised eyebrow. “Anyway, I can’t get into something now. Isn’t the standard advice after a breakup—and I’ve essentially had two, if you count Scott, which I kind of think I have to—to take some time for yourself? Be alone for a while?”
“Oh, screw the standard advice.”
“Well, I don’t have Gretchen’s phone number. I don’t know how to get ahold of her,” I said, like this was my only, or main, obstacle.
“OK,” Auden said, backing off in a way I found both uncharacteristic and destabilizing. “I see how it is.”
I suddenly thought about how Karlie had said my next band should be named Overdue Reckoning.
I thought about it on the flight back to camp, too. I was having my overdue emotional reckoning, right? I’d played “Lemon Tree.” Not only alone in my cabin, but in front of Gretchen. We’d sung it together. And I’d grappled with what it meant for my life, what it stood for in terms of acknowledging how much damage my mother had done. I’d decided to let Scott go. I’d written some new songs. Auden had confided in me about her troubles, and we were making a plan to tackle them. I’d made peace with Karlie. When I came back to New York in a month, my apartment would be waiting for me.
That was a hell of a lot of reckoning for a month. I should be happy. Or if not happy, exactly, satisfied. Content with a job well done.
Then why the hell was I so sad?
Sad was a new one for me.
I wondered if that was because sad was subtle. Maybe sad could hide beneath other, bulkier emotions like fear and anger. Emotions that could make a person smash a TV in a Hilton Garden Inn. Maybe I’d finally excavated the sadness that had been under the surface all along?
That didn’t feel quite right, but what the hell did I know? I was a beginner at this emotional shit.
16
REARVIEW MIRROR
Gretchen
The thing about coming back to reality was there was a lot of reality to deal with.
When you abandon your life for a month, especially when the main item on your life to-do list is “Expand empire,” a lot of stuff piles up. Admin for the existing studio. Getting ready for the fall sessions, which were more numerous and better attended than the summer sessions. Writing job descriptions because I was going to have to hire a receptionist/studio manager for the new place. Historically, I’d done that role myself with some help from some older students who covered the front desk when I was teaching my own classes in exchange for free lessons, but I wasn’t going to be able to scale up that informal approach to things. I’d only ever hired teachers, who were independent contractors who invoiced me, so this was a whole new ball game involving payroll taxes and all kinds of stuff that hurt my head.
I had stuff to do on the home front, too, most urgently making nice with my cats, who were mad that I’d left them with my sister for a month—Ingrid had moved into my place while Iwas gone, so it wasn’t like they’d been uprooted. But still. They were prickly. I understood.
