10. That’s Where You’re Going To Live If You Don’t Shape Up
The Year of Paying Attention
The other morning, stopped for coffee on my drive home to New York from the New England town of my youth, I rang my sister Marianne and promptly made her feel bad enough to start crying. I had spent the previous couple of days helping her move into her new one-bedroom apartment. She was recently returned there from Florida, after her husband of many years said he didn’t want to be married to her anymore. I have pictures from a few years back, a sunny Florida visit to introduce Sarah to Marianne and her husband. Since those two broke up, I think, did I give him the idea? Did my divorce make it easier for him to split from my sister?
Marianne hated Florida, she told me. Boring, and too many old people. Now she was back where we grew up, near her daughter, and her oldest friends. A few days earlier, her estranged husband had driven our dead father’s aging Lexus from their Florida condo, dropped off Marianne’s stuff, and left. Now I was up from New York to help, and offer support.
Marianne showed me around the nice little apartment, then we went to get something to eat. She’d thrown her back out. Periodically, as if being controlled by an unseen force, she’d freeze up. The sudden lurch, the little yelps of pain. After lunch we went and bought every kind of over-the-counter pain pill. Next, rug shopping.
Driving on a highway from the drugstore to the rug store, she pointed at some large brick buildings. “Do you remember Dad saying that’s where you’d be living?” she asked. “That was a reform school.” In a neighborhood, we drove by a tiny front-yard child’s playhouse, with a wreath on the mini-door. “Mum would say that’s where you’re going to live if you don’t shape up,” she said. I didn’t remember any of it.
In the next store we found a rug she said would look good in her new living room. “Oh, look — I love cows,” she said, pointing to a black-and-white framed print. I liked it, too. “It doesn’t go with the other stuff,” she said wistfully. She’d been hell-bent to set up her new, single life. She laughed telling me how a few days earlier how Ellen, her friend since childhood, had ordered her to keep moving after she froze and started crying in the supermarket. The tears weren’t from back pain.
Back in her apartment, Marianne eased her aching back onto a heating pad, while I re-assembled a wire shelf a friend had botched. “Poor bastard,” she said, explaining he was back drinking and smoking and waiting to go get some tests to see if he had cancer. “Caused by all the smoking,” she said. “Poor bastard.” She wasn’t interested in dinner. I told her I’d be back tomorrow, and went alone to Depot Pizza, next to the train station, because I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. I thought about my upcoming breakfast date in Cambridge with one of my oldest friends. I was in college when I met Carolyn. She was part of the jazz scene, promoting artists and concerts, and for a while dating my post-college roommate JC. Back then we lived in the same neighborhood, and shared all our friends. I hadn’t seen her since my roommate Jack’s funeral in Maine.“How early is not too early for me to pick you up tomorrow for breakfast?” I texted her, and she wrote back 8:30. “There might be traffic,” her message warned.
Queasy from pizza, I drove to the unfamiliar corporate park where I had a motel reservation. I didn’t know I was about to enter… the Twilight Zone. The lot was full, but everything was dark. Some people were smoking near the entrance. I carried my bag to the door, and a smoker said “You have to shove it open.” Where in hell was I? Was this a combination motel/halfway house? Three young women sat in the shadows by the entryway, staring at their phones and giggling. A large man and woman were drinking wine in the unlit reception/bar area, and a couple of other people were padding around in the half-light. One carried a flashlight.
The woman at reception said, “I’ll be right with you.” Two overhead lights barely illuminated the lobby. I saw a box of flashlights. After opening and pouring more wine for the couple, the receptionist finally turned and as if continuing a conversation, said, “I called about the power going out about ten minutes ago, and they said they’d send somebody.” Without power, there was no checking in. I nodded, then sat in the dark lobby and dialed around, finding a different motel with both an available room and functioning electricity. I drove over, checked in and went to bed.
The next morning was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Over eggs in a Cambridge breakfast spot, Carolyn asked me whatever happened to that job prospect I’d been talking about, the one working for Doug. Oh, that? It went away, I said. What are you doing after this, I asked. She was going to see her mother at a nursing home. I said I’d give her a ride. “Do you want to come in and meet Mary?” she asked. In four decades I’d never met Carolyn’s mother. On the drive there, Carolyn told me, “I had to finally put away that picture of you and me when I was working on the ABC yacht. My mother was always saying, ‘Look how good you two look! Why didn’t you two get married? You should lose forty pounds!’ I couldn’t take it after awhile.”
Decades earlier she’d agreed to come to New York from Cambridge for the summer, because the radio station where I worked needed a grownup to manage a big party powerboat on which TV ad sales people entertained clients. She sublet an apartment, which turned out to belong to Mr. Apology. Allen Bridge was a conceptual artist who set up a phone answering machine for people to call and apologize for things they’d done. Some admitted to murder, for which they felt bad. All that summer Carolyn listened as messages were left on the machine. After a jet skier ran over Mr. Apology while he was scuba diving, then fled the scene, his widow said, “I’m sure whoever they are, they are sorry.”
I parked outside the nursing home, and Carolyn and I rode the elevator up a flight to meet Mary, along with her kind Brazilian nurse. Mary was sharper than I imagined she’d be. Walking me back to the car, Carolyn said, “She’ll be talking about this for weeks.”
Driving back to North Andover, I called Marianne to propose we set up her bedroom and living room, then go get lunch. We went to “The 99,” where I hadn’t been since our mother was alive. Sitting opposite me in the booth, Marianne turned into our mother for brief flashes, lovingly mocking herself and the people she cared about, mixing rueful judgment with affectionate compassion, defaulting back to “what the hell, whatevah!” Small, trim, a pixie haircut, she was my little sister, smiling and laughing as we recalled stories of our parents. Her back was a little better. “Want to go to a movie?” I asked, and her face lit up. We went to Patriot’s Day, the story of the Boston Marathon bombers. It was hard to watch. I leaned over and whispered, “Ellen has run two Boston marathons since this happened.” We drove back to her new apartment, and I did a couple more things, and said, “I guess that’s it.” “Are you leaving first thing tomorrow?” she asked. I told her I was, and walking down the stairs to the parking lot, I said I’d call her later. Before the hall door swung shut, she said, “Wow — I’m not crying.”
It was snowing. I had to change to a third motel, because the one with power didn’t have an available second night. When I texted Marianne my new location, she texted back, “My place — ” I was in the motel where she’d waited for movers to deliver her Florida furniture to her new apartment. She texted, “Lil dumpy — but not bad. Free breakfast. Take the cereal bars in the bowl at the front desk. Did Joe check you in?”
I woke up and headed back to New York, stopping after a couple of hours for coffee and to call her. She said her back was “bettah.” I wished my own Massachusetts accent would come back. “Okay, so text me when you get home,” she instructed. “Why?” I asked. I told her I’d get home fine, and she shouldn’t worry. Waiting for me to let her know I’m okay was a bad habit, I said. I thought I’d spotted a teaching moment for my sister, to help her embrace her new, single life. I thought she could use some of the wisdom I’d gathered in my latest 12-step program, the one for families and friends of problem drinkers. God knows what else I said, but I went on for a bit, about how important it was to change mental habits if she wanted to stop worrying all the time.
“I don’t think it’s asking very much,” she said, and I could hear she was crying. Oh, Christ, what had I been yammering on about? “I’m feeling a little fragile,” she explained. I wanted to shoot myself. We talked a while longer, and I told her of course I’d call her when I got home.
By the time I made it to Roosevelt Island, I could explain my behavior to myself. I desperately wanted us both to breeze past the pain she was going through, to avoid any suffering Marianne was experiencing because the marriage she assumed she could rely on had crumbled. Back in my apartment I put my small suitcase down and called to let her know I was safely home, the same call I’d make to my mother after visiting her when she was alive in that same New England town.“Now get right into bed,” my mother would joke, as if I were eleven.
Next week: Angela Davis, Katy Perry & Me
