I Knew You'd Be Lovely (12 page)

“No,” I say. “I don't.”

She drags the boat down to the lake and stands at the water's edge, waiting for me. “This may be our last chance. Who knows if I'll even come back here after I go off to college.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you
wanted
to do better on the SAT. Last I checked, there was no guarantee you were even going to get into any colleges.”

Her face goes blank. Then she drops the boat and heads for the house.

“Lindz, listen—”

“No, you listen,” she says, stopping in her tracks. “Why do you always say no to everything? Why do you pretend you don't want anything, when we can all see how much you really do?”

“What are you even talking about?”

“What do you think I'm talking about? Your
life.
”

“See, that's the part you don't get,” I say, laughing a little. “I really
don't
want anything.”

“It's so transparent, it's pathetic.”

“And I certainly don't want anything from you,” I say, not laughing anymore. “You don't know the first thing about me, so let's both stop pretending you do. Go on, go sailing. Waste your life.”

Lindsay starts toward the house again, but then, in a single, fluid motion, she spins around, goes back to the water, gets in the boat, and sails.

I don't watch her. Instead I turn to the neighbors' house, the Beckers, and I remember the summer we lost her. That was the last summer James and Zack's family rented a cottage here; they bought a ski place in Vermont the following year and started going there for summers as well. But our mothers kept in touch, and Mom told me their father sent Zack away to military school when things got really bad, so now they're waiting to see if he makes it home in one piece. I guess active duty is still part of the military school bargain. It's hard to imagine Zack in combat, though; beneath all the bravado, there was such quiet fear.

And James, James who kissed me, apparently James fell in love while at college in the Midwest—Fran was her name, I think—and became engaged just after graduation. But six months later, in the middle of planning their wedding, one day Fran had trouble stepping off a curb. After a bunch of tests, they discovered she had Lou Gehrig's disease. She wanted to call off the wedding, but James insisted. So they got married, and a month before their first anniversary, with James by her side, she died. Fran died, and James became a twenty-three-year-old widower. Sometimes I can't help but wonder, if I were
ever to see him again, if there would be a way to ask him, without hurting him:
Does
everything happen the way it's supposed to, James? Do you still think so? This rotting house, my half-alive mother, your wife, my sister? My sister, who every time I look at her, I remember what she said when I first came back: “You left without saying good-bye.”

I turn to the lake just as the broad red and yellow stripes catch the bright wind. Lindsay's is the only boat out there, and it's perfect. I lied before, about “Smile of the Great Spirit.” I've been coming to this lake for nearly twenty years, and I never knew what the name meant. Where does she learn these things? Who ever taught her? I don't remember ever teaching her a single thing. All the while, hidden in the background, she must have listened and learned in the echoes and silences the rest of us didn't even know we made.

But she's not in the background anymore. That's what's changed; that's the difference between my sister and me. She's on the other side of the camera. And so unafraid. I watch the boat and, in spite of myself, I'm proud of her. Against the orange sun, her sail looks like wings.

I go to the end of the dock, sit down, and wait.
Come home
, I think, staring at the bright sail.
Come back
. The words are disorienting, and for a second I don't know who I'm talking to. I pull my legs against my chest and begin to rock back and forth.
Come back, come back
, my body is saying, until I'm not even looking at the boat anymore, but my eyes are pressed against my knees, and I realize I've begun to cry.

In her twenties, Katie was struggling to find a beautiful path. Having discovered what was false, she was waiting to encounter what was true. But thus far, the quest for something changeless and good had left her penniless and depressed. Every day she would eye the homeless man who hung around her block with a growing sense of kinship. She liked his signs.
WE'RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER
, or
WE ALL NEED A LITTLE HELP SOMETIMES
. Once he'd even had the wisdom to write
WE GROW RICH ONLY THROUGH WHAT WE GIVE
, which Katie felt should surely be the universal slogan of all panhandlers.

She'd lost two jobs in two weeks. First, a businessman had come into the Barnes & Noble near Lincoln Center where she was stacking the shelves and working the registers. As she totaled his pile of CliffsNotes, she'd said gently: “I realize these are convenient—God knows I've used them myself plenty of times—but you might go back
and read the books sometime. Maybe later, or in addition, or something.”

The slick head thought about this. “Yeah, I could do that,” he said. Then, casually handing her a hundred-dollar bill, he'd added: “But then again, look where that got you.” She didn't know what he must have said to her manager, but the next day, without warning, she was fired.

The following week she went to work in a midtown office besieged by phone calls. On her first morning, she'd had to say: “Thanks for holding, can I help you?” so many times in a row that she'd once said: “Thanks for helping, can I hold you?” An honest mistake, but apparently one that was not much appreciated by the client. Then, at the end of the day, she and her supervisor had entered the elevator together. As she pushed the button for the lobby, she'd said to him: “I assume we're both going to L,” which came out sounding like something that was not at all what she meant. She wasn't exactly surprised when, at the end of the week, she wasn't asked back.

Now she'd reached the stage where she was having difficulty mustering even enough energy to do laundry or open mail. Her friends weren't any help. She tried explaining her malaise to her best friend, Emily, but Emily's boyfriend, Roy, cut in.

“The point of life,” he said, “as I thought I'd taught you by now, is to try to suck as much pleasure out of each passing moment as you possibly can.” But Katie was convinced there had to be more to life than pleasure-sucking. Besides, she wasn't about to take the advice of Roy, someone whose life ambition was to have a furniture store
called The Sofa King, just so he could run ads that said: “Our prices are So-fa-King low.”

Emily was more understanding. “Something good's going to come your way, I just know it,” she said. “All you need is for one little thing to go right, and everything else could fall into place from there.”

Katie was doubtful. She looked everywhere, even though she didn't know what she was looking for. She was becoming an insomniac, so she found herself watching a lot of late-night TV. Plenty of people were doling out advice; it's just that no one ever said anything useful. She clicked through infomercials selling things everybody knew nobody needed, and an old movie whose emotional climax she'd just missed. “What are you running from?” Clark Gable asked as he clutched the trench-coated arm of a perfectly coiffed blonde. “What is it you're so afraid of?” Most disheartening were the reruns of a daytime talk-show host who seemed to think that tough love was the answer to everything. Diabetes? Tough love! This was what her species had to show for itself?

She went to the Museum of Natural History, figuring if she couldn't find a sense of connectedness among her own kind, maybe seeing the full wingspan of life would console her somehow. But it was no use. Like everything else, the museum left her with more questions than answers. The mollusks in particular irritated her. What was so great about shellfish that they deserved their own wing?

Even the dodo bird,
Raphus cucullatus
as he was formally called, was a mystery. It was speculated he had become complacent because of a lack of predators. In the
absence of enemies, he grew unwary, got fat, and forgot how to fly. His ancestors must have known how to fly, the little metal plaque said, in order to reach the small island of Mauritius in the middle of the Indian Ocean, where Dodo lived. But Dodo himself was just a flightless pigeon. He became extinct around 1700, killed by, among other things, semiwild pigs liberated by the Europeans. His original Latin name, from Linnaeus, was
Didus ineptus—
an appellation given post-extinction, in what Katie concluded was perhaps the greatest ever example of adding insult to injury.

She looked at Ineptus tenderly, wanting to touch him, but he was in his Plexiglas case. “What is it you're running from?” she whispered, aware of the competent strangers all around her. “What are you so afraid of?” Lately she would lie awake for hours, wondering whether she should look for a place with cheaper rent? Move to a cheaper city? Apply to graduate school? Learn how to waitress? Maybe she should have studied French wines in college instead of French literature. She shielded her face with the collar of her Windbreaker so the young mothers juggling strollers and BlackBerrys wouldn't hear her addressing the bird. “Tell me what to do,” she said.

Things continued to deteriorate. The fact that she had recently fallen into the habit of masturbating to thoughts of George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron, was not a good sign. Although generally speaking, she was an advocate of masturbation. “Sleep with a person, and you please him for a night. Teach him to masturbate, and you please him for a lifetime,” she would occasionally joke to her closest friends. Katie was not ashamed of Lord
Byron. You had to be resourceful in life; she'd learned that early on. Now even her resourcefulness was coming to an end.

One snowy afternoon in early February, she ducked into Fliks Video, hoping for a miracle. Emily had once given her a quote that Katie liked so much, she carried it around on a scrap of paper in her wallet.
A miracle is nothing more than justice postponed, arriving to compensate those it had cruelly abandoned
.

“I'm looking for a movie where justice is served,” she said to the greasy-haired teenager behind the counter.

He stared at her blankly. “You mean, like, Schwarzenegger?”

“Not exactly,” Katie sighed. “It's all right. I'll look for myself.” But as she ambled along, scanning the shelves, nothing promised to be the hope-giving, wisdom-packed wallop she was searching for. Only then, as she stared at the rows of box covers, at the pictures of people laughing or embracing or crying, all caught in the heroic struggles of their lives, did a small thought occur to her with such simplicity she almost said it aloud:
I am afraid to try
.

Emily and Roy attempted to cheer her up. They cooked her Middle Eastern food, poured her wine. “You're talented! You're gorgeous!” they said. “Tell it to my landlord,” said Katie. She stared at her couscous, not eating. Couscous always reminded her of cooked sand—that was probably its proper translation. Where did people muster the energy to harvest the desert and cook it? Where did everyone find the will to do all the work in the world? We're all allowed a kind of grace period, she decided, when we can coast along, before we really need to choose
a life and summon the determination to live it. Her grace period had just run out.

The following Tuesday, Valentine's Day, her phone was disconnected and her car was towed. Katie tried to remain cheerful in the face of disaster.
Well, at least I'm not Ineptus
, she thought. Maybe that would be her slogan for the day. She practiced saying: “Look, I am not Ineptus,” and “This is not an Ineptus you're dealing with here, folks.”

On top of that, it was cold cold cold. It was one of those days she wished her blow-dryer were battery-operated so she could stick it in her pants before she left the apartment.

She went to the municipal building where you pay penalties and back-tickets. It quickly became clear that her strategy of avoidance had not been the best way to deal with parking violations. To get her car back would cost four more dollars than she had in her checking account. She asked the stout, thin-lipped woman behind the counter if she could borrow four dollars.

“No,” the woman said.

Her eyes came to rest on the string of tissue-paper hearts hanging above the woman's head. “Where's the love?” said Katie. The woman did not smile. The people in line behind her grumbled. Then she remembered her emergency cash. She opened her wallet and unfolded a weather-beaten five-dollar bill. Emily had always teased her about it anyway. “Yeah, that'll get you out of any emergency whose solution is a chai latte,” she said. After her account was settled, the woman gave her a slip of paper on which was written the address of the tow lot:
770 Zerega Avenue, the Unlimited Tow Company, the Bronx.