Today Will Be Different

by Maria Semple

  Ivy found it hard to believe Joe would approve. “He can’t be much of a fan after what I did to him in Aspen.”

  “Joe is totally on board,” Eleanor said.

  Joe wasn’t on board. Joe was in Africa without phone or Internet.

  It was madness, the collision course Eleanor had set in motion. Her imagination became a battleground of incoming fire from Ivy and Joe.

  Ivy: But Eleanor, without a good lawyer I’ll lose custody of my son!

  Joe: Me bankrolling a custody battle between Ivy and Bucky, are you kidding?

  Ivy: Don’t you have your own money from Looper Wash?

  Joe: When I make money, it’s “our” money, but when you make money, it’s “your” money?

  Ivy: Joe has never understood what you and I are to each other.

  Joe: I have six siblings. And no drama. It’s called boundaries.

  Ivy: I promise to pay you back when I win my settlement.

  Joe: We both know Bucky will never give your sister a dime.

  Ivy: I can work it off by being your nanny.

  Joe: An insane child helping us with the baby? I don’t think so.

  Ivy: What matters is we beat this guy.

  Joe: Nobody beats the Troubled Troubadour.

  And then horns would honk and Eleanor would snap to. She’d been sitting at a green light.

  Ivy’s plane landed at noon. Eleanor bought a car seat and decorated the back of an envelope. Welcome to Seattle, Ivy and J.T.! She stood in the baggage claim among the limo drivers and watched.

  Ivy emerged wearing a sleeveless shift, her hair blond again.

  “Yay!” said Eleanor.

  John-Tyler wasn’t at her side. Eleanor’s eyes went to the next wedge of the revolving door. A little boy in a navy blazer emerged, holding hands with his father, Bucky.

  They stood there, facing Eleanor, the three of them.

  “This was my choice,” Ivy said. “It has nothing to do with Bucky. The IVF and the pills were making me overly emotional. I needed help, I see that now. And I’m getting it.”

  John-Tyler, in Gucci loafers you could fit in your palm, was his own little person. He held a plastic dinosaur and had Bucky’s chin. Eleanor wouldn’t have known Bucky had a chin until she saw it on Ivy’s son.

  Without a word, Bucky handed Eleanor a list of conditions. She scanned it numbly. If she wanted to visit Ivy, she could come to New Orleans and stay in a hotel. She wouldn’t be allowed in the house. She was never to be left alone with John-Tyler.

  Eleanor ransacked Ivy’s face for the slightest something: a held-back tear, a desperate flash in the eye saying I’ll call you later, a quivering lip. But nothing.

  Bucky held out a Neiman Marcus shopping bag. “We won’t be needing this.”

  In it a slab of leather. On its spine, THE FLOOD GIRLS. The shock of it, and of Ivy’s acquiescence, paralyzed Eleanor.

  Bucky, without lowering his hand, let go of the bag. It dropped to the floor with an unremarkable thud.

  “Let’s go find the departure level, shall we?” Bucky said, his arm now around Ivy’s waist. “Our plane leaves in an hour and I fear the powers that be will make us once again endure security.”

  “Yes, my love.”

  Bucky turned to Eleanor. “You blame me, of course. One day you will understand this is entirely your doing. You never gave me a chance. Yes, I do live a smallish life in New Orleans. And one might say I’m overinvested in Carnival. But I’m ferociously loyal to my family, you see. Any hardships I have with your sister are a function of me wanting the best for her and our son. I’m the first to admit that Ivy and I have had difficulties in our marriage. What couple hasn’t? But it’s basic emotional intelligence that when someone comes to you with their one-sided horror stories, you listen. You don’t plot their divorce. It’s true, Eleanor, you and I possess different styles. Last time I checked, the world allowed for such things. There’s a Buddhist proverb: ‘Just because a raft helps you cross the river, you need not carry that raft on your back for the rest of your life.’ In other words, Eleanor, you’re the raft, and Ivy has decided to put you down.”

  And then it was three backs walking away.

  It took several seconds for Eleanor to speak.

  “Where are the derringers?” she found herself screaming as she charged them. “I want my guns! I want my guns back!”

  Ten minutes later, Eleanor was in the back of a police car outside baggage claim. She explained to the young cop it had been a family argument and that the guns were darling antiques that didn’t fire, practically metaphors. Even if they did fire, they were mounted on a wall in another state.

  “You’ve got to calm down, ma’am.” It was the cop, through a crack in the window. “I don’t want to take you downtown. But you really gotta chill here.”

  Please God, don’t let all this toxic fear and rage hurt the baby. Please don’t let Joe get back from Kenya and find out I got arrested. I promise you, God, if you get me out of here with a healthy baby and without Joe knowing, Joe and the baby will be my family. I’ll never think about Bucky and Ivy again.

  “Get it together, ma’am. Count to three and put it behind you. Ready?”

  “One, two, three.”

  Right after Timby was born, that’s when it was toughest not to have a sister. Breast-feeding. Sleep schedules. Eleanor had found a baby class whose instructor believed high chairs, slings, and tummy time were bad, even bordered on child abuse, and of course Eleanor wanted to compare notes with her sister, a mother before her. Everyday life was booby-trapped with reminders. (Blueberries: the time Eleanor and Ivy had made cold blueberry soup from The Silver Palate Cookbook at their walk-up on Bank Street and it stained the guests’ teeth purple.) But as soon as a memory of Ivy was triggered, Eleanor snapped a rubber band around her wrist. If she didn’t have a rubber band, she scolded herself out loud: “No!”

  When Eleanor had gotten back from the airport, after the nice cop let her drive herself home, she stripped the apartment of all things Ivy. (Kidney beans: when they lived in New York, they decided to throw a chili party, and because the kitchen was so tiny, they’d cooked the beans the night before but left them out, causing them to ferment, and they’d ended up having to order takeout from Empire Szechuan.) Eleanor cleansed her closet of all clothes reminding her of Ivy. A Fiorucci T-shirt washed a thousand times and soft as silk went to Goodwill. The Conran apron, it would have been bought on Astor Place during the Bank Street days. That went too.

  Books. Jane Eyre went. The Drama of the Gifted Child with Ivy’s underlining. Lonesome Dove, torn in half on a camping trip so they could read it at the same time, then duct-taped back together. A Vanity Fair with Daryl Hannah on the cover and Ivy’s Dior ad inside. Shoe boxes of photos, ones Eleanor had been meaning to put into albums: any with Ivy went in the trash, and the trash went down the chute.

  The Flood Girls kept looking back at her.

  Years before, Joyce Primm, a young book editor, had expressed interest in Eleanor’s expanding the illustrations into a graphic memoir. Eleanor had demurred.

  But what if she did get them published…?

  What if she did flesh out the story of their childhood? The tale of losing her beloved mother and becoming a mother to Ivy at age nine. There were a thousand moments that called to her! The time she and Ivy told Matty they were going to explore the Midnight Mine and he’d barely looked up from the paper to say, “Nice knowing you.” Or when Tess, after her diagnosis, could be found sitting in her parked car, listening over and over to “Frank Mills” from the Hair eight-track.

  Eleanor’s imagination lit up the sky with scenarios of Bucky wandering into a Garden District bookstore and seeing The Flood Girls as a graphic memoir. The injury! The humiliation! The panicked buying-up of all copies in New Orleans so nobody would see it! She could finally outflank him! People telling Ivy, “I had no idea what a terrible childhood you had. Thank God you and your sister have each other.” And Ivy would have to lie or a
dmit that she’d thrown Eleanor away like trash. Either way, sweet vengeance!

  Yes, Eleanor had drawn those twelve illustrations out of love. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t weaponize them.

  Charming Joyce Primm into a book deal over drinks at the W Hotel made Eleanor feel both unhinged and exhilarated, like a woman throwing all her boyfriend’s clothes onto the front lawn.

  But when it came time to sit down and write the memoir, the vindictive energy was gone. Eleanor tried to recapture it for art’s sake but couldn’t. She shoved The Flood Girls in the back of a closet to be dealt with later.

  Eight years passed.

  The reminders of Ivy would always be there. Depending on the day, they made Eleanor feel angry, wistful, devastated, or nothing at all. Eleanor couldn’t not be reminded of Ivy. But she could control the recovery time. After so many years of practice, it now took Eleanor no more than five minutes to bounce back.

  Just last weekend, Eleanor, Joe, and Timby had gone to an inn on Lummi Island. It had a cool dark library with a treasure box of tea bags, and newspapers on wooden rods. Perfect for an early October afternoon while Timby and Joe kayaked. Eleanor would read the New York Times the way it was meant to be read, leisurely, from first page to last. She wouldn’t even skip the obituaries.

  There was a woman who’d made one fortune importing bananas from the Caribbean and a second fortune growing cotton. It sounded vaguely familiar. Eleanor revisited the headline.

  ARMANITO TRUMBO CHARBONNEAU

  PILLAR OF NEW ORLEANS SOCIETY

  DEAD AT 92

  Before Eleanor could stop them, her eyes dropped to the last line.

  “She is survived by grandson Barnaby Fanning, the historian, and his two children, John-Tyler and Delphine.”

  Blur

  “Put something under her head,” someone was saying.

  I opened my eyes to a halo of concern. Spencer, Timby, a museum guard, and a stylish older woman knelt over me, the woman unspooling a long floral scarf from her neck. She folded the scarf in half and in half again and again until it was the size of a head. My head, it turned out. I dutifully raised it and she placed her scarf underneath. A downside of extremely fine cashmere? Despite how many times it’s folded, it has the cushioning capacity of typing paper.

  From a secondary arc of standing people: “I called an ambulance.”

  “For me?” I said. “I don’t need an ambulance.” Although I did feel a bit foggy…

  “Just relax and breathe,” said the lady in charge… the museum director? She must have been eighty, with her pinched skin, density of crags, and white hair, curly and flying. Giant black-rimmed glasses dwarfed her small face, defiantly free of makeup.

  “Do you see her pupils?” someone whispered.

  “Mama!” Timby threw himself across me.

  “Please!” I patted his back. “I’m fine.”

  A person off to the side excitedly recounted the incident. “I’m just checking my stocks and I see this woman running, and wham, next thing I know, she’s on the ground.”

  “Get up,” Timby said.

  “Yeah,” someone said. “She’s not getting up.”

  “If you’re talking about me,” I said to them around Timby’s head, “it’s because I’m choosing not to get up.”

  “Do you need some water?” an installer asked.

  “Nah.”

  He turned to Timby. “Do you need some water?”

  “Is it VitaminWater?”

  “Someone should call a loved one,” said an excited woman. “Little boy, do you have a father?”

  “Of course he has a father,” I said. “What do you think this is?”

  “Do we know how to reach him?”

  “The number’s on her phone,” Timby said.

  “Eleanor?” Spencer came in. “May we borrow your phone?”

  “I dropped it in a bait bucket.”

  A collective “Hunh?”

  “It had stopped serving me.”

  “Wow,” said Spencer, and “Wow!” again, the second time spread across three syllables.

  “Wow what?” the museum director asked Spencer, for which I was grateful, because it meant I didn’t have to.

  “Sometimes she says things,” he clarified… kind of.

  “Is she always like this?” asked someone who was met by a round of shrugs. This crowd was sure easy to stump.

  “Remind me never to go on Family Feud with you people,” I said.

  A huddle had formed near a hulking green sculpture.

  “Did it always have this dent in it?” came a voice.

  “Dent?” Spencer spun around to look.

  “You can go,” I told him, because it seemed like that’s what he wanted. “I release you.”

  Spencer bolted to the sculpture. Now the museum director was craning her neck to see.

  “You can go too,” I told her. “Everyone who wants to go, go.”

  The museum director and the installer scampered over, leaving just me and Timby.

  I stroked his hair. “How are you, darling?”

  “I wish you’d get up.”

  “Then I’ll get up.” I sat up. “Are you happy now?”

  “All the way up,” he said, tugging my arm.

  “This steel is an eighth of an inch thick,” said someone near the sculpture. “Look at the dent she put in it.”

  They all turned to me with grudging admiration.

  “Brett Favre!” I announced triumphantly.

  “Lie back down,” said Spencer.

  “Brett Favre is the quarterback I couldn’t remember, the one with the thumb.”

  “That’s really good,” Spencer said. “Just lie down.”

  “Don’t,” Timby threatened.

  “If you forget a name and you can’t recall it,” I told Spencer, “it could be early-onset Alzheimer’s. But if it pops into your head later, you’re good.”

  “I’ve heard that too,” said the museum director.

  She had perfect posture. That’s the way I was going to age. Let everything go, but dress with flair and stand up straight. “Living out loud” they call it, unless that’s something different. And those giant black glasses: I’m definitely going to go that route. Like Elaine Stritch. Or Frances Lear. Or Iris Apfel. Where were these names even coming from? I was on fire with useless references!

  “Go when you can, not when you need to,” I said.

  They all looked at me.

  “Advice about going to the bathroom,” I said. “Sound advice.”

  Writing me off completely, they returned to their panicky huddle.

  “We’re covered,” the museum director explained to someone quietly. “We have liability.”

  “For the show,” said the blue hands. “But the show hasn’t started yet.”

  “That’s not how insurance works,” the museum director spit back.

  “I’d put my money on her,” I called over. “With age comes wisdom.”

  Spencer narrowed his eyes at me. The worry patrol situated themselves so I could see only backs.

  On the floor. My purse. The set of keys.

  D-E-L-P-H-I-N-E.

  Oh God.

  “Come,” I whispered to Timby. I grabbed the keys and stood up. My head was lead and positioned wrong on my neck. I blinked a couple of times, righting my center of gravity. “See?”

  Timby’s answer was drowned out by an approaching siren.

  Spencer and the rest were too absorbed in their whisper-fight to notice us slip out.

  Aw, Spencer, poor Spencer. I hoped he’d find success one day.

  Oh, wait…

  The only sign of life as we headed up the Galer Street steps was a bunny hopping around the front lawn.

  “Aww,” said Timby.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  “Raking leaves out back.”

  “The whole school?”

  “With our homeless buddies,” he said.

  An empty school! This playe
d perfectly into my gutless plan: to slip in without anyone seeing, return the keys, and slip out.

  What I had done was truly unforgivable. Because of me, some young mom had spent the day half out of her mind searching for her keys. I don’t care how thin or pleased with yourself you are, nobody deserves that.

  As for why I couldn’t just admit that I had to learn from the goddamned newspaper that my sister has a daughter, so in a farkakte attempt to get back at her, I stole the keys of a woman with a daughter of the same name…

  Would you?

  The whole thing left me badly shaken. In the past, I’d often been called crazy. But it was endearing-crazy, kooky-crazy, we’re-all-a-little-crazy-crazy. Stealing that young mom’s keys? Even The Trick couldn’t spin that into anything other than scary-crazy.

  I tugged open the front door and crossed through the foyer. The conference room was dark; the table still had an enticing cornucopia of spots in which to tuck the keys and scram. I grabbed the doorknob. Locked!

  “‘Happy birthday to you…’” filtered through the hallways.

  I followed the voices into the administration suite. The outer office, Lila’s area, was empty.

  “‘Happy birthday, dear Gwen-sie! Happy birthday to you!’”

  They were all in Gwen’s office having cake. Perfect! I reached over Lila’s counter and plucked a Sharpie out of her cup. I grabbed an envelope and, in big block letters, wrote, FOUND THESE.

  But then, a voice… a loud voice… a voice in the same room with me: “I’ll get a knife!”

  It was Stesha, the afterschool coordinator.

  “Hi, Eleanor!” Stesha did what she always did when she saw me: rolled up her T-shirt to show off her Looper Wash tattoo. She was a Vivian apparently.

  “There it is!” I said. Because what can you say?

  “Do you need Lila?” Stesha asked.