Today Will Be Different

by Maria Semple

  “Put it behind you,” Timby said. “Good job.”

  I shifted into drive and headed up Elliott Ave., a busy thoroughfare lined with rail yards, abandoned factories, and crappy teardowns, all on their way to becoming LEED-certified tech hubs. In other words, no pedestrians.

  Which is why the one guy hulking north caught my eye.

  It couldn’t be. I slowed down. It was.

  “Oh, come on.” I rolled down the window and drove abreast of him.

  “What?” Timby asked. “Why are you stopping?”

  “Alonzo!” I said. “Get in!”

  The top half of him kept walking.

  “I couldn’t do it,” he said over the traffic. “I’m not going back.”

  “I’m in a bus lane,” I said. “Get in!”

  Alonzo fumingly complied. He was in a royal snit, arms crossed, refusing eye contact. I drove off. The seat-belt alert dinged helpfully, then angrily.

  “Seat belt,” Timby said.

  Alonzo didn’t budge.

  “Does he have differences?” Timby asked me.

  “What differences?” Alonzo said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s just they can’t say retarded.”

  Timby tapped Alonzo on the arm. “Excuse me. May I borrow your phone?”

  Alonzo passed it over his shoulder and sat there.

  “Alonzo!” I said. “What happened?”

  “I walked back in and the first thing I saw was a brick of Christmas bows the size of an ottoman. It sickened me and I reversed direction. Did you know that for years I’ve been working on a novel? Ben Lerner’s agent said I could send it to her when I was done.”

  “That’s terrific!”

  “But I can’t finish it because my soul is a slaughterhouse.”

  “‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,’” I said in commiseration.

  Alonzo pressed his back against the passenger door to get a wider perspective of me. “Thank you. But my hell is a private one.”

  “Or not,” I said. “You know that book deal I have? It’s been canceled. My editor doesn’t even work in publishing anymore. She’s editing cheese in Nyack.”

  “Oh no!” Timby cried. “Are we poor?”

  “You and me?” I continued to Alonzo. “We’re artists. We’ve chosen a path that’s ninety-nine percent hardship and rejection. But we’re in it together. That’s what counts.”

  “Save it,” Alonzo said. “You’re a woman with a rich husband. All I have to fall back on is an adjunct professorship. And they’re trying to get me fired from that.”

  “Who is?”

  “Color the Core,” he pronounced. “Or I should say, some Internet cry-bully from Tacoma with a bullhorn and a Facebook page. Under occupation, it says, conversation starter. Conversation starter! Her worldliness is confined to the echo chamber of social media. She wouldn’t know a poem if she wiped her mouth with one.”

  “What’s her beef with you?” I asked.

  “She somehow got her hands on my Intro to Poetry syllabus. Too many dead white males for her liking. And now she’s e-distributing a petition demanding my resignation. Langston Hughes is on my reading list. So is Gwendolyn Brooks. But they’re just ‘proof of my tokenism.’”

  “She can’t really get you fired?”

  “‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,’” Alonzo said wistfully. “Now college students won’t know Yeats said that because he’s the root of evil. Along with Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. Oh, and me. You can’t forget white ol’ me. I’m evil too. I’d offer to die if that would help matters. But nope, she just wants me to lose my house. She’s got it all figured out. She’s angry, so she must be right.”

  “I feel like there might be another take on all this,” I said. “But diversity happens to be one of the subjects I’ve proactively chosen not to care about.”

  “You know what I do when people are arguing?” Timby peeped from the back. “I just agree with the last person.”

  What’s-longer-a-cat-or-a-doughnut? blurted a computerized voice from the backseat.

  Startled, I yanked the steering wheel, just missing the curb.

  “It’s the concussion app,” Timby said, holding up the phone. He turned to Alonzo. “Mom hit her head.”

  “Did she.”

  “It asks you a question every five minutes,” Timby said. “As soon as you can’t answer, you need to go to the hospital.”

  “In most cases a cat,” I said. “Happy?”

  I’d followed the GPS to a random neighborhood. “Yech, Magnolia. Who would want to live here?”

  “In a six-hundred-thousand-dollar house?” Alonzo said. “Me.”

  “Joe’s never mentioned anything about Magnolia,” I muttered.

  “Forgive me,” Alonzo said. “What are we doing?”

  “Daddy’s been going somewhere without telling Mommy so she got the keys to his car.”

  Alonzo looked back and forth between Timby and me.

  “Since she hit her head, she’s been making bad choices,” Timby said.

  I parked at the spot where the map’s dotted line came to an abrupt halt. We were in a development of uniform lots and modernish red-brick houses. The whole look was just the other side of groovy, the houses more heavy than light. I was surprised hipsters hadn’t discovered it yet. If I got out of today alive, perhaps I would discover it. It might be the perfect place to live out your life and die in your sleep, or at least go trick-or-treating.

  I got out of the car.

  The neighborhood possessed an eerie tranquility, the front yards with their rhododendrons and one Japanese maple strangely antiseptic.

  Why on earth would Joe be coming here? There were no clues to be had.

  I looked back. On the dashboard, through the windshield: JAZZ ALLEY. The envelope with our subscription tickets. It had been so light…

  I reached in and grabbed the envelope.

  “Why do you want that?” Timby asked.

  I turned my back and ripped it open.

  A single perforated sheet. One ticket for each concert. Joe had decided to go it alone.

  “Oh no,” I said. “Oh-no-no-no.”

  The door slammed. Alonzo calmly walked to a lawn out of earshot of the car and waited for me on the spongy grass.

  “Maybe you want to talk about whatever’s going on?” he said.

  Muffled music, a heavy beat, a sexed-up singer with an auto-tuned voice: Timby had climbed into the passenger seat and was bouncing happily to “his” music.

  I took a breath.

  “Somewhere along the way,” I said to Alonzo. “My marriage turned into an LLC.” I waved the tickets as proof. “Joe and I became two adults joined in the business of raising a child. When we first met, I’d have gone anywhere with the guy. I listened rapturously to whatever he said. I delighted in his every little gesture. You wouldn’t believe the places we had sex! We got married, and of course I thought, This is what life is. But it wasn’t life. It was youth. And now it’s Joe going to jazz by himself and me cracking jokes about how cold and erratic I’ve become. Twenty years ago I was Johnny Appleseed sowing charm and bon mots. If you stuck your finger in my cheek, it would have sprung back like angel food. Now, my face is a moo shu pancake and people cross the street when they see me coming. And this stomach. It’s disgusting.”

  “For what it’s worth,” Alonzo said. “I enjoy you.”

  “You can’t possibly.”

  “Nobody recites poems like you,” he said. “You attack them so matter-of-factly, with neither pretense nor portent.”

  “But I’m an idiot.”

  “You have beginner’s mind,” Alonzo said. “But it’s a fine mind. You always point out something I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Only,” I said, referring to my insight of earlier that day.

  “Only,” Alonzo seconded.

  The muffled pop music became blaring pop music.

  Timby had opened the
door. “Mom! I figured it out.”

  Alonzo and I exchanged intrigued looks and walked over.

  On the GPS screen under PREVIOUS DESTINATIONS was a list of street names and numbers.

  “The address Dad put in was nine hundred.”

  “Deucedly clever, Mr. Holmes,” Alonzo said.

  I looked around. We were in front of 915.

  Alonzo pointed. Across the street, on the corner, a huge lawn. On the curb, in black-stenciled numbers: 900.

  Beyond the lawn, a low-slung brick building. MAGNOLIA COMMUNITY CENTER. A folding chair propped open a door.

  “I don’t even know what a community center is,” I mused.

  “Hey, Timby,” Alonzo said, leaning into the car. “Can you do a cartwheel?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good,” Alonzo said. “You can teach me.”

  I gave Alonzo a grateful nod and started across the street.

  A voice from the phone in Timby’s hand.

  What-color-is-celery?

  “Celery,” I called over my shoulder.

  I cut a diagonal across the green expanse toward the open door. On the chair, a jar filled with freshly picked anemones.

  From inside, light applause.

  I burst in…

  … to a much smaller room than I’d expected.

  In a circle of folding chairs sat ten people with tattoos for twenty. No Joe.

  “Welcome,” said a bald man in a leather vest. “Are you a newcomer?”

  On the walls, posters: EASY DOES IT. KEEP IT SIMPLE. ONE DAY AT A TIME. KEEP COMING BACK.

  Uh-oh.

  All eyes were on me. Their faces were so compassionate and their spirits so broken, I couldn’t help but open up.

  “I’m trying to find my husband,” I said. “He’s six foot two. Brownish hair with gray. Blue eyes. He can’t be a drunk. I don’t think. But I’m out of ideas. I hit my head. I’ve got my kid with me. He’s outside doing cartwheels with a poet who’s essentially my paid friend. I know this is anonymous and all, and you don’t like to rat each other out. But I really, really want to find my husband. So maybe if I tell you his name, you don’t have to say anything, you can just nod like All the President’s Men?”

  Uncomfortable glances were flying, and how. They finally alighted on the man in the vest.

  “If your life is being affected by an addict,” he offered gently, “we have literature.”

  He gestured to a table of pamphlets and books. Beside them, a coffeemaker, a random collection of mugs, and a carton of hazelnut creamer marked SEX ADDICTS ONLY.

  “Ohhhh!” I said. “You’re sex. My husband isn’t that.”

  Perhaps I let some distaste creep into my voice because a woman began to cry softly.

  “How about I just go,” I said, stepping backward. “Good luck with… the journeys.”

  I went outside, covered my face with my hands, and stood there groaning.

  “You’re it!” Timby’s voice through the breeze.

  I looked up.

  Alonzo chased him into a round building at the other end of a breezeway.

  In groovy ’70s font: PRINCE OF PEACE.

  A church. I followed the wide and welcoming path lined with freshly planted flowering kale and purple pansies.

  I grabbed a brass door handle the size of a cricket bat and entered a low-ceilinged, carpeted narthex. That’s right, narthex. It was on a Word of the Day calendar decades ago and of all the words I’d forgotten, narthex wasn’t one.

  Alonzo sat at an upright piano against the wall.

  “What’s your favorite song?” he asked Timby.

  “‘Love You Hard.’”

  “I don’t know that one.”

  “It’s by Pansy Kingman,” Timby said. “The star of I Know, Right?” He noticed me. “Where were you?”

  “Nowhere,” I said. My eyes ached. Maybe it was from going from sunlight to darkness… I needed to sit down.

  “Give me a moment?” I said to Alonzo.

  I pulled open the door leading to the main, big church part (not a Word of the Day, apparently).

  “You’re going to church?” Timby asked.

  “I’m going into a church.”

  Alonzo played a perky intro on the piano and began to sing.

  “‘If it hadn’t been for Cotton-Eyed Joe, I’d a been married a long time ago. Where did you come from? Where did you go? Where did you come from, Cotton-Eyed Joe?’”

  I stepped inside. The church opened up to me. Light filtered in from on high through stained glass. More light through clear side windows. Halogen lights dropped gracefully from long, thin wires. Candles burned in red votives. Incense lingered in the air.

  I sat down in a pew and the thoughts flooded.

  Bucky quoting Buddha! And I’m the shopping cart with a bum wheel going around in circles. No amount of muscle or determination can break me free. Ivy standing there at the airport, her silence an affirmation that I was the raft and it was time to put me down.

  It’s obvious why she did it: Bucky’s world is built on exclusion. The price of admission is slavish loyalty. After Ivy had exposed the truth about their marriage, it was him or me.

  Insight!

  Violet once told me, “Change is the goal. Insight is the booby prize.” She was right, of course.

  I don’t want insight. I want my sister back.

  I’m sorry, Eleanor, Ivy says to me when she drifts in for her three a.m. hauntings, Joe slumbering peacefully by my side. It was a sickening choice I had to make. Always know I do see you for who you are. You are my family. I miss you too.

  Then I wake up in a sweat, ditched, a monster gutted of both softness and strength, of every good quality I ever possessed. The next morning I return to my daily life, which is just a mock-up of daily life because of my secret shame: I’ve been reduced to a thing that misses Ivy.

  I touched the empty bench at my side, something I find myself doing when I ache for my sister.

  The comfort, the thrill to have her sitting beside me. To again have a sister who “always came by,” as Spencer had put it. Just imagining Ivy’s flesh and her limbs, something within me rose up, the Flood girls one again, ready to conquer the world.

  “Excuse me?” It was Timby. He’d cracked the door and poked his head through. “Can you name three countries in Europe?”

  “Spain, France, and Luxembourg.”

  Timby gave me the thumbs-up and closed the door.

  I started with a new shrink this week. I told him the tale of the Troubled Troubadour, the one I’d been perfecting all those sleepless nights. In it, Bucky was the villain, I the victim, Ivy the pawn. It was so dispassionate it might have been told by a third party. (The Trick strikes again!) The shrink suggested that the worst thing a person can experience is being on the receiving end of “hatred and misunderstanding.”

  “What if there were something even worse?” I asked him. “Hatred and understanding?”

  Everything Bucky had said about me at the airport that day. None of it was wrong.

  Would you like to sample a nutty Gouda? Sorry, Joyce Primm, you’re selling cheese because you wanted the real story of my life but I’d already drawn an X through it.

  I raised my face.

  The colors of the dusty light were the colors of autumn, the colors of the ’70s: orange, mustard, brown, olive. The stained glass looked more inspired by Peter Max or Milton Glaser than Christianity. A hand holding a dove. The word joy in sock-it-to-me font. The one depiction of Jesus had him with ropy rainbow hair like the Bob Dylan album cover. Mom came home one Sunday beaming with optimism because the choir had sung “Day by Day” from Godspell and the priest had announced that from then on, women would be allowed to wear pants to church. She would be dead within the year.

  Daddy used to call the three of us “my girls.” Mom called the two of us “my girls.” What a dishonor to them both, the shameful estrangement of the Flood girls now.

  Building a wall around Ivy, Bucky, and
the shambles of the past: it seemed like the only solution at the time. And for years, it had worked. Kinda! But today the wall buckled.

  I stood up. My heart was as heavy as an asteroid.

  I’d turn fifty in May. My accomplishments? To most people, they’d be the stuff of pipe dreams. Everything I’d set out to achieve in this lifetime, I’d done, with grace to spare. Except loving well the people I loved the most.

  It was time to try something else. What, though?

  Alonzo and Timby were on their feet, an intense playful energy bouncing between them.

  “Where did it go?” Alonzo said. “Wait, there it is!”

  “Where?” Timby jumped up and down.

  Alonzo reached behind Timby’s ear and pulled out a quarter. “There it is! It ain’t right!”

  Timby grabbed the coin from his hand.

  “It ain’t right!” Alonzo said, and turned to me. “Any luck?”

  “No luck at all,” I said.

  Together the three of us squinted into the afternoon sun. We headed back down the path toward the car.

  The Twelve Step meeting had broken up. Several addicts hung around drinking coffee and smoking. I approached.

  “Hi,” I said. “I want to apologize again for interrupting.”

  “Pobody’s nerfect,” the vested man said.

  The fragile woman watched me warily and sipped her coffee. She drank out of a Color Me Mine special. There was no mistaking the mug’s thickness and sloppy glaze job.

  I thought I was hallucinating.

  “Can I see the other side of your mug?” I asked.

  She turned it: a childish rendering of a walking stick and the word Daddy.

  With Timby’s backward Y.

  “Joe,” I said. “He was here.”

  All eyes quickly looked away.

  I cried out in frustration. “Is there anyone in the vicinity who is not addicted to something? I have one basic question.”

  “They all left early and took a bus down to the Key,” offered a woman leaning over to scratch a cat.

  “The Key?” I said.

  “The Key Arena.”

  The Key Arena was part of the Seattle Center, seventy acres in the middle of the city, home of the ’62 World’s Fair. The pristine campus now boasted five museums, seven theaters, a dozen restaurants, and zero places to park. I bit the bullet and used the valet.