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There had been a break, a rupture in the seam of her identity, and it happened sometime after that. She wasn’t the same person she used to be. She looked at the faces in the picture, from Tibby to Bee to Carmen and back to Tibby.
Those were the people who made her something, and without them she was different. She’d held on to them and to that old self tenaciously, though. She clung to it, celebrated it, worshipped it even, instead of constructing a new grown-up life for herself. For years she’d been eating the cold crumbs left over from a great feast, living on them as though they could last her forever.
But what was that great feast? It was the idea of their friendship, their shared strength, their unconditional love for one another, their support, their security, their honesty and the freedom it seemed to promise. It was an idea big enough to sustain her through years of poverty.
Now it was unquestionably gone. And deeper questions gnawed at her. Had it really been such a feast? Had it ever been real? How could this have happened if it had been? How could Tibby have kept so much from them? If the strength and support had been real, how could Tibby have given up? How could they have let her? How could they have let her get so far away from them?
There was a clear and dreaded answer to all these questions: If it had been real, they couldn’t have. She couldn’t have. It hadn’t been real.
Lena hadn’t been eating leftovers from a feast; she hadn’t been eating at all. She’d been starving, and so devoted to her delusions she’d become incapable of feeding herself in the most basic way.
She eyed the letter Tibby had left for her. It stood perched on her desk, day after day. She studied Tibby’s writing, just Lena’s name on the front, and a note to open it after December 15 on the back, but it had no more secrets to tell her. She’d looked at it too often, too long, too fearfully for it to say any more. I could open it now, she told herself, and instantly recoiled at the thought, as she always did. Later was the time she would open it, never now. Tibby wanted her to open it after December 15. She didn’t specify how long after.
The phone rang and jolted her from her thoughts. She stared at it without even considering the idea of sticking out her hand and picking it up. After a few seconds, she poked the button and the message began playing. She hadn’t realized it was Christmas Eve until her robot-voiced message machine told her the date.
“Len, it’s me. I’m on the train right now, because you are not allowed to spend Christmas alone. I’m passing through … I don’t know, New Haven? I think that was the last stop. I said in the last message I’d be at your place by one, but it looks more like one thirty. Call me back and let me know you got this.”
Lena felt as if she were choking on her tongue. Effie was on her way. She was coming here to keep her company for Christmas, and that was about the last thing Lena wanted.
She should have known she couldn’t get away without acknowledging Christmas. Her parents had finally let the matter drop after badgering her endlessly about coming home to Bethesda, but she should have known she hadn’t heard the last of it.
Why hadn’t she listened to her messages? If she had she could have caught Effie while she was still safely in New York, not racing past New Haven. She could have somehow talked her into staying there or doing something else. Now Effie was coming here, and what was Lena supposed to do?
She knew Effie all too well. Effie was going to pester her with questions and confidences and take her out to dinner and make a big fuss about exchanging presents and sleep in her bed with her. Effie wouldn’t leave her alone. She would crawl into Lena’s precious quiet like a tapeworm.
Lena put her face in her hands. Should she call Effie right away? Before she entered the state of Rhode Island? Lena racked her brain for excuses to make Effie turn around and go back home. Leprosy? Bedbugs? No heat or hot water?
No, Effie was on the move. She couldn’t be turned away. Lena suspected that her parents were a big part of the impetus for this visit and probably the ones financing it. If Lena wasn’t careful, Effie would book them a hotel room with massages and manicures all around.
There was only one thing Lena could do. She could be so arduously, painfully boring that Effie would leave the next day. And that, at least, came naturally.
Jones decided, somewhat impulsively, that they should spend Christmas in Fresno, California. Christmas needed to be celebrated, and his parents needed to meet his fiancée before the wedding, so that was what they did.
Which was how Carmen found herself sitting at a dining room table in a modest ranch house in suburban Fresno on Christmas Eve, between the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Jones.
There was an artificial tree in the living room, a fruitcake on the kitchen counter, but as they sat down to dinner, Carmen was surprised by how little ceremony there was. There were no prayers or toasts, they just started eating. They didn’t even remember to turn the TV off.
“I can’t hear what he’s saying,” Mr. Jones said with some irritation after he’d eaten most of his ham.
Carmen wasn’t sure Jones was saying much of anything, but she jumped out of her chair to turn the volume down on the television so they could all hear it in case he did.
“No. The other way,” Mr. Jones directed her, and she realized the person Mr. Jones couldn’t hear was the man on the TV.
“Oh. Okay. Sorry.” Carmen remembered how, as a child, she’d longed to be able to watch TV during dinner and her mother had never let her do it one time, not even when she was sick.
“Delicious,” Carmen said to Mrs. Jones, pointing at the ham.
“Thank you. I use a maple glaze.”
“Right. It’s very good.”
“I can give you the recipe if you’d like.”
“Okay. Yes. I don’t cook much these days, but I’d like to learn.” She wondered if she should have said that. She glanced over at Jones, but he was staring at the TV.
“Do you enjoy cooking?” Carmen asked, and then she felt doubly stupid at the blank look Mrs. Jones gave her. She knew how alien and spoiled she probably sounded, as if cooking were a hobby you chose or didn’t.
“Is that a lemon tree?” Carmen asked, pointing out the window.
“Yes.”
“That’s the great thing about living in California, isn’t it?” Carmen knew she was talking too fast. She suffered the
length of the pause and felt herself grow a pair of antennae in the meantime.
“I suppose it is.”
After a while Carmen shut up and let the TV take over. No wonder Jones had gone into the business.
As Carmen spread the noodle casserole around on her plate she let her mind turn to Bridget. She’d calculated the distance from Fresno to San Francisco on a map online. She imagined she might call, she’d thought about it a lot, but now that she was here she knew she wouldn’t. If she could have thought of the first sentence to say, she might have, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t ask Bee how she was. She couldn’t mention what she was up to. Every casual opening seemed intolerably phony, and the deeper conversation was impossible.
“We can spend tomorrow at the movie theater,” Jones mentioned to her later, after they’d said goodnight to his parents.
On their way upstairs to the bedrooms Carmen noticed there was a picture in the stairwell that must have been of Jones with his older brother. It was the only picture of the deceased brother she had seen so far in the house. The two boys were sitting at a picnic table, with big slices of watermelon on their plates. Jones looked about seven. Carmen paused to look at it, but Jones didn’t wait for her. He kept going up the stairs. She stared at his back and wondered if he or his parents ever talked about his brother anymore. She tried to picture such a conversation at the dinner table, with the TV going.
Carmen had often wondered how it turned out, the Jones style of mourning. Maybe now she knew.
Bridget woke on Stinson Beach sometime after the sun rose. She sat up and looked at the waves. She imagined each one coming at her, like the bar of a swinging trapeze, toward her and away, toward her and away, inviting her to come in and take hold. She could do that. She could walk right in and keep going, swinging from one wave to the next. Tibby had done it. Why not her?
