by Maria Semple
Through the crowd, Bucky, with Mary Marge tucked in his elbow, offered the hint of a smile and returned to his conversation.
“I didn’t know how to tell you,” Ivy said. “We decided this should be family only.”
Eleanor fled across the street into an aggressively air-conditioned praline shop, minimalist and empty of customers. Her perspiration instantly froze, causing a violent shudder.
“Would you like a sample?” asked an angular woman with flat black hair.
“Sure,” Eleanor said, straining to seem like a normal patron. The woman handed her a frosted pecan. The tears began. Eleanor turned her back and stood too close to a red shelf filled with jars of praline sauce.
The door jingled. Ivy grabbed Eleanor’s arm and spun her around.
“You have no idea how hard it is for me to be caught between you and Bucky,” Ivy said, her face pleading.
“Between me and Bucky?” Eleanor said. “What did I do to him? Fly down here and miss my final animatic of the season? Drag my husband to a christening even though we’re both atheists?”
“It’s not what you’ve done to him,” Ivy said. “It’s what you’ve done to me. You didn’t come down for my birthday.”
Before Eleanor could process this, Ivy backpedaled. “I know, I know—I never expected you to. But it’s how Bucky thinks.” She gave a worried sigh, then in a rush, “He’s never gotten over you ruining our engagement party.”
“We’re still on Cachepotgate?” Eleanor said. The praline she’d been clutching had turned to goo in her hot palm.
“It started before,” Ivy said. “When you walked into the party. You saw how people were dressed and you asked where everyone was going.”
“I did not,” Eleanor said, remembering the moment clearly. “I certainly thought it because it looked like opening night at the opera. But I know for a fact I didn’t say anything.”
“Bucky heard you.”
With that, a line had been drawn. Eleanor drew lines for a living. She knew one when she saw one.
She walked to the register and forced a smile. “May I have a napkin, please?”
The woman reached under the counter and tore off a paper towel. Eleanor scrubbed the sticky sugar off her fingers. She placed the pecan in the towel and handed it back. “Thank you.”
“Oh no!” Ivy came around to see Eleanor’s face. “Are you mad?”
“This might get loud, and that wouldn’t be fair to the praline shop.” With that, Eleanor pushed past her sister and out the door.
“Okay, let’s do this,” Eleanor said to Ivy out on the sidewalk. “Where’s the scrapbook I made you? Where’s my goddamn wedding present?”
“As you know, we expected the derringers.”
“You do realize this isn’t you talking?” Eleanor said.
“They were Mom’s,” Ivy said. “They belong to me as much as they belong to you. They’re the only things left of hers. You just had them lying around your apartment.”
“What was I supposed to do? Ship them to you care of Mestre Mike’s yurt?”
“Bucky and I got married at John Tyler’s house so it should have been obvious,” Ivy said, unshaken.
“You got the derringers!” Eleanor said. “Last time I checked, they were mounted on your wall.”
“We should have gotten them before.” Ivy raised her face in defiance. It was a peculiar gesture for her, one Eleanor had never seen.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Eleanor said. “Where’s The Flood Girls?”
“Bucky and I were both offended by The Flood Girls.”
“Ivy, I’m warning you: don’t.”
“We don’t know what’s so charming about a bear crashing around a house while children are sleeping—”
“It’s our life, Ivy. It’s us.”
“—or waiting in a car while Ted Bundy is on the loose. And why on earth would you make me relive Parsley being hit by a car? You know how much I loved that dog.”
“I loved Parsley too!” Eleanor said. “Okay, I get it. Bucky feeds on insults and now he’s got you doing the same.”
“I finally found a man who treats me the way I deserve,” Ivy said. “You’re allowed to have that, but I’m not? And where was Joe during the christening?”
“Now Bucky has a problem with Joe?”
“Eleanor, everybody noticed Joe wouldn’t come inside.”
“Joe was tormented by nuns as a child and he’s not a fan of the Catholic Church. You know that!”
“You,” Ivy said. “Mocking the namesake of our son in front of tourists. Oh, Eleanor, even I couldn’t defend your sarcasm. I can see it in your eyes, when you’re going in for the kill. You delight in your nastiness and you always take it out on those weaker than you. I’m done with it and so is Bucky.”
“I have a message for that walking joke—”
“Eleanor,” Ivy said. “You’re talking about my husband. Bucky is my husband.”
“Tell him he’s won,” Eleanor said, reddening. “The two of you will have to find someone else to mine for grievances. Because this is the last time you see me. Watch how serious I am.”
Preservation Hall was thirty feet by thirty feet. The walls were water-stained and covered with pegboard; the thick wood planks had survived their share of floods. There was no stage. Only fifty listeners could pack in; those on mangy cushions in the front row tangled feet with the band. Joe was one of the fortunate who’d snagged a chair. He sat against the wall, his body moving like a bag of bones to the jaunty, brass-heavy Dixieland jazz. Eleanor appeared at his feet.
“Promise me,” her lips said through the trumpet solo. “Promise me we’ll never fight again.”
A month later, Katrina hit. Eleanor picked up the phone. Ivy answered. The fight outside Leah’s Pralines was never spoken of again.
The phone calls with Ivy grew more cordial and less frequent. Ivy had gotten a job as a docent at a local museum. After unsuccessful back surgery, Mary Marge was put down. John-Tyler had three birthdays. Eleanor dutifully sent what Ivy instructed.
Late one night, the phone rang, a 504 number. It was Lester, from a New Orleans hotel. He’d spent the day with Bucky and Ivy.
“That night of my party,” Lester said. “In New York. When Ivy went back to his hotel. I knew then it was all over for you.”
“Why are you saying this?” Eleanor asked. “What happened?”
“When was the last time you saw them?”
It had been three years.
“Why?” Eleanor said, panic seizing her chest. “What happened?”
“Don’t you see?” Lester said, drunk and not making sense. “He’s trying to plant your fingerprints on his crime scene.”
Eleanor called Ivy the next day and asked how she was. How she really was. Ivy gave an unexpected answer: on pills.
“Drugs?” Eleanor asked.
“Medication,” Ivy corrected. “Eleanor, it changes everything! In the past, something little would happen, like Taffy screwing the lid too tight on the raspberry jam. I’d try tapping it on the counter, running it under hot water and John-Tyler would be asking, ‘Why are you crying, Mama?’ And I’d think, I can’t even open a jar of jam without my misery rippling out into the world. But now that I’m on medication, it’s a jar of jam! I’ll eat my toast with cinnamon sugar! What a strange product of the modern age I’ve become. They should make a movie about it. A medicated woman going through her day with normal reactions to ordinary life and at her side is her former self who completely breaks down at the very same things.”
“Gwyneth Paltrow can play both parts,” Eleanor said flatly.
“See, there’s an example,” Ivy said. “The old me would have burst into tears because I’m an actress. I should play both parts. But the improved me? I think, yes, Gwyneth Paltrow would also be wonderful in the role.”
Matthew Flood died of liver failure at the age of sixty-six. He’d been sober for a decade. The lady from Dallas in whose guesthouse Matty and the gi
rls had lived couldn’t make it to the memorial service. But she’d arranged for a convoy of red Jeeps to meet the mourners at Wagner Park and four-wheel them to the top of Aspen Highlands. There, they’d scatter Matty’s ashes on his favorite run, the Moment of Truth.
A dozen of Matty’s AA friends, joined by Ivy, Eleanor, and Joe, zigzagged their way up the snowcat roads through the spring slush and arrived at the picnic bench that had been there forever. Welcoming them was an orange-and-blue Broncos wreath, barbecue from the Hickory House, and the Bobby Mason Band playing Matty’s favorite song, “Please Come to Boston.” The lady from Dallas had remained mysterious but loyal to the end.
There was champagne for fifty but Ivy was the only one drinking.
To Eleanor, these friends of Matty’s were graciously free of judgment toward the two daughters who never visited. Joe wept upon seeing the canister of ashes on the bed of white Aspen branches sprouting with lime-colored buds; Eleanor felt nothing.
It was the early death of her mother that had taught Eleanor to shut herself off. Deep down Eleanor knew she must have been born a warmer soul. She wasn’t meant to be so self-reliant. One day, Matty had forgotten to pick up the girls at day camp and they’d had to walk the five miles from the T-Lazy-7 Ranch. Matty came home after the bars closed and realized what he’d done. He crawled into Eleanor’s twin bed and cried. “I’m weak,” he said. “You’re so much better than I can ever be.” The snow from Matty’s hiking boots melted dirt on Eleanor’s Life Savers sheets.
“You okay?” Joe took Eleanor’s hand as they settled into chairs to share memories of Matty.
“I’m crazy about you, Joe,” Eleanor whispered.
A woman with a weathered face and a Tyrolean sweater launched into a story. “Of course there was the time Matty brought that goat into the Jerome Bar!”
Amid the appreciative chuckles, Ivy muttered ominously, “He was a useless bastard.”
Eleanor had heard it, but the woman hadn’t. She continued. “I think he won it off Jim Salter.”
“Jim Salter had a pony, not a goat!” former mayor Bill Stirling said, laughing. “But I’ll tell you who did have a goat—”
“He was a drunk and a bookie,” Ivy growled. “He left us alone for weeks at a time to fend for ourselves.”
The attention now turned to Ivy, but her unfocused eyes rested on a tuft of grass a foot from the tin of ashes. She held a tippy champagne glass. On the dirt at her side, her own personal bottle.
Ivy raised her head and addressed the dumbfounded gray-haired woman. “We ate food off drugstore shelves.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“He didn’t know what grade I was in,” Ivy said, leaning forward. “My teeth were loose in my head from lack of nutrition. He let me become pen pals with prisoners from the back of Rolling Stone magazine. I’m sorry if I don’t see what’s so hilarious about bringing a goat into the Jerome Bar.”
Eleanor touched Ivy’s arm, but she kept going, now addressing the group.
“And because your beloved Matty paid no attention to me, I had to go marry a guy who controls my every move. Now look at me.” Ivy stood up, her chair flipping back into the fine dirt with a poof. “Know why I look like this?”
Eleanor and Joe had wondered. Ivy had arrived dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and an ankle-length silk skirt, her hip bones pointing through like headlights. Her hair was an unflattering red that picked up her rashy complexion.
“Hair dye has toxins that will hurt the fetus if I ever get pregnant again, so Bucky makes me use henna. He thinks I throw myself at every man I come across the way I did at him the night we met. And at you too, Joe, the day of my wedding. Now I can only go out if I’m covered from ankle to wrist like an Orthodox Jew!”
Even this group, desensitized to tales of shocking behavior, shifted in their chairs at the grace note of anti-Semitism.
“My whole life,” Ivy said, now beginning to cry, “no matter how gutter-bad things got, at least I was better off than Matty.”
Eleanor stood up. Ivy moved away. “But look at me!” Ivy yanked her arm back, even though no one had reached for it. “Like father, like daughter, second-class citizens, there at the whim of the people in the big house!”
“I know, Ivy.” Eleanor moved toward her sister, but Ivy ran off and shouted the rest from twenty feet away, like a hostage taker.
“If I leave, Bucky will get full custody of John-Tyler! Bucky’s drooling at the prospect of a court battle. His family owns every judge in New Orleans. He claims he was sold a bill of defective goods. He says you and Joe pulled a fast one by dumping your trash on his rich family, like I’m the crazy lady in the attic.”
Joe came up from behind and took Ivy by the upper arms. The strength of his grip made her go limp. He hustled her into a Jeep, borrowed the keys from the driver, and told Eleanor he’d meet her back at the hotel.
As Joe drove, Ivy kept her face turned away. Her only movement was to grip the roll bar tightly anytime the Jeep tipped down a steep switchback. When they got off the mountain and onto the pavement of Maroon Creek Road, Ivy finally spoke.
“I’m sure you’re wondering what’s happened to me,” she said without looking over. “I am too.”
Joe drove to the campus of the ritzy Aspen Institute with its Buckminster Fuller dome and sculptures by Herbert Bayer and Andy Goldsworthy. Joe parked the Jeep. He and Ivy walked along a path leading to the music tent. They passed manicured emerald mounds, some ten feet high. A woman in a down vest stood at the top of one, playing King of the Mountain with her Westie. At the edge of the lawn, cut through the sagebrush, a hidden path known only to locals. It led to an arc of benches tucked inside an aspen grove. This was where Eleanor and Ivy would go as children. This was their favorite spot.
Ivy sat down, home again.
“I’m validating everything you said,” Joe said. “We’ll figure this out the same way we’ve figured everything else out.”
“You were crying up there,” Ivy said.
“Mortality and nature,” Joe said. “It gets me every time. You try your best, or you don’t try your best. The mountains don’t care.”
“Gee,” Ivy said.
Joe laughed. “I’m sorry.”
Ivy snapped a sagebrush twig and rubbed the leaves into her fingertips. She held them up for Joe to smell.
Joe leaned in. Ivy touched his face. He pulled away.
“I don’t think I drank enough water when I got here,” Ivy said.
“We’re at eight thousand feet,” Joe said. “Eleven on the mountain.”
“Would you mind getting me some?” Ivy asked.
“When I get back, we can talk about everything. I want to listen.”
Joe walked the fifty yards to the music tent. It was May; the place was desolate. In an unlocked concession stand he dug out a stack of paper cups. He pulled off four, found a men’s room, and filled them with chilly tap water.
Joe made his way back to the secret spot, careful not to spill a drop of his offering.
He arrived at the circle. The benches were bare.
Joe emerged from the aspen grove. He saw no sign of Ivy. The woman and her dog were gone. Joe sensed another absence. The patch of red. The Jeep. He’d left the keys on the floor.
Joe stomped down Highway 82 toward town. It had begun to rain. The tops of the mountains were sugar-dusted with snow.
The jolly convoy of Jeeps cruised by on their way back from the memorial. One skidded to a stop. It was Eleanor.
“That was the last time,” Joe said. “Do you hear me? I’m done with her.”
They returned to the Limelight Hotel. Ivy’s room was empty, her bags gone. Eleanor received a call. The missing Jeep had turned up at the Aspen airport, parked in a fire lane, engine running.
A few months before the memorial, Eleanor and Joe had decided it was time for Eleanor to go off the pill. The morning of the service, on the way to Wagner Park, sudden nausea had her retching into a wine barrel spilling with
the twisted brown of last year’s petunias. She wrote it off as the thin air.
The next day, on her way back to Seattle, in the women’s room at the Denver airport, Eleanor coughed up bile.
“Are you all right?” Joe asked when she emerged.
“Fine,” Eleanor said. “Just a long line.”
Joe wasn’t continuing to Seattle with his wife but flying from Denver to Nairobi. He was already a day late to meet two other doctors for pro bono surgeries. He’d been raising money and making arrangements for the past year.
If Joe thought Eleanor might be pregnant, she knew he’d cancel his trip. She kissed him good-bye at his gate and hoped to have good news to spring on him when he returned.
Back in Seattle, the good news came in the form of a fierce underwater heartbeat and an ultrasound printed on delicate thermal paper. The baby would arrive around Thanksgiving. But, as Dr. Koo had said, Eleanor was forty and just eight weeks into her first pregnancy. “Best not get ahead of ourselves.”
On her way out of the doctor’s office, Eleanor received a call from Ivy.
“It’s over,” Ivy said. “I’m leaving him.”
For the next week, whenever Ivy could break free from Bucky—at the market, at the playground, in her parked car while she pretended to be at the gym—she’d share stories of his tempestuous jealousy and histrionics.
It wasn’t the end of Bucky that had Eleanor living in Technicolor. It was being a sister again. There was no relief deeper than being loved by the person who’d known you the longest. Eleanor’s heart giggled with mad abundance: so much to share, so much goodwill, so many notes to compare, so many ways to help and be helped. She went out into the world, everything a performance for her coconspirator, Ivy. It was Eleanor at her vibrant best.
“Oh, Eleanor,” Ivy sighed while Bucky was off getting takeout. “I lost myself and threw you out in the confusion. How can you not hate me?”
“All that matters is we’re back.”
They both recognized that Bucky would never let Ivy just walk away. So the sisters hatched a plan. While Bucky was receiving an honor from the city for hiring good-behavior prisoners to pull the Khaos float, Ivy would whisk John-Tyler to the airport. Eleanor had two plane tickets paid for and waiting. She’d found a divorce lawyer. She’d put down first and last month’s rent on a town house in West Seattle. Ivy could work in Joe’s office.
