The butler in tails who’d greeted her at the door followed discreetly behind Joey as she went to inspect the art. Her armpits pooled Florida’s steam onto her dress.
A voice said, “It’s made from coffee cup lids.”
Joey turned to greet a very small, really miniature, woman with a teased gray beehive. The beloved Edith Lallouche. She wore her trademark giant, round navy glasses with black skinny jeans, a printed blue-and-white tunic, suede smoking slippers, and a bag made of bright-blue feathers. The purse triggered a color association Joey couldn’t place. Four necklaces weighed down Edith’s neck, each strung with beads the size of golf balls. It seemed to Joey a feat of aerodynamics that Edith remained upright. Last, Joey spied the cane in Edith’s hand, but her corresponding arm was so consumed by blue-patterned bangles that the cane assumed the energy of an average person’s socks. That is, you hardly noticed it.
“Coffee lids, really?” Sure enough, Joey discerned the lids. “That’s amazing.”
“I like unusual art.” Edith patted her purse. Joey had never seen a person wear a purse around her home. This devotion to style impressed her. No wonder Edith and Lily got along.
Ah! It occurred to Joey now. The color of the purse was that of Cookie Monster’s fur.
As she crossed the foyer, Joey gave herself a pep talk. You are a talented and worthy artist, you do really interesting evil eyes, and you’ve even gotten some great press—a year and a half ago, you were written up in that magazine in Bali!
Against her will, her pep talk veered. That magazine in Bali was basically a leaflet distributed in untouched stacks in juice shops.
Joey shook Edith’s bony hand. “Joey Abrams. It’s a pleasure, Mrs. Lallouche.”
“Call me Edith.” She fingered the flutter sleeve on Joey’s dress. “MISA, yes? It suits you.”
Joey nodded. “Thank you. Your home is beautiful.”
“I don’t believe in false modesty, Joey. That is the first thing you will learn of me. My new home is beautiful. So thank you.”
Joey moved closer to the blank wall. “Is this the wall Lily told me about? Or is it another one?”
“This is the one.”
“Wow. It’s very prominent.”
“Joey, I don’t beat around the bush. I have just one question for you.”
“Just one?” Joey crossed her arms, which felt immediately off, but she didn’t want to uncross them for fear of seeming unsure of herself. “Sure.”
“Do you believe in your art, Joey?”
“Do I believe in…? You’re asking if—”
“I’m asking, do you believe in your art? It’s another way of saying, do you believe in yourself? Because I’ve seen your work. Your sister showed me a snapshot of that canvas with all the abstract evil eyes, different irises, some scary, others sweet. I felt you captured something there. Yes, I go by my instincts in life, Joey, and I have an instinct about you. You are not well known. You are not known whatsoever, is the fact. That doesn’t matter one iota to me. Fame equates to complacency, I tend to think. But I don’t do wishy-washy. I don’t do, Am I good? Am I worthy of this project? I do confidence. I do conviction.”
Joey allowed her arms to drop to her sides. “You know, Edith, if you’d asked me this question two years ago, when I was still a lawyer, I think I would have given you a glossy answer. I would have said, Of course I believe in myself. I’m fabulous, Edith.”
“And I would have seen through it,” said Edith, not insensitively.
Joey nodded. “What I can tell you is I think every person is born with a special way of expressing herself, and this is my way. I snuffed it out for a very long time. And you know what, Edith? Now I’ll bet all my money on me. I’m not yet a success in the art world, and I may never be. But I’ll never stop drawing and I’ll never stop painting. And so, do I believe in myself, Edith? Well, excuse my language, but I really fucking believe in myself. I really do.” Joey spoke so fast at the end that her mouth kept moving with nothing left to come out.
Edith snapped her fingers. “I like you. Done.”
“Done?”
“You have the job. Ten thousand dollars now. Ten thousand when it’s done.” Edith reached into her purse and unveiled a stack of crisp hundreds. “I trust cash is acceptable?”
Joey nodded as coolly as she could manage. “Yes.”
Edith placed the stack in Joey’s hands. Joey hadn’t received a paycheck in a year and a half. Her legal savings were nearly fully depleted. Lately, she’d been selling bags and shoes on The RealReal to maintain her equal contribution toward rent and expenses. Not that Grant demanded it. He said his money was hers. But she didn’t want to rely on him. Joey gripped the bills, not ready to part with them for placement in her purse. Not even her astronomic legal salary had yielded this measure of gratification.
“I need it by next Thursday, dear. For the event I trust Lily filled you in on. You have complete reign. Robert there”—Edith indicated the butler—“will let you in day or night. I’ll try to leave you to it, not to interfere. But as the wall lives by my front door, and I do have a thriving social calendar, we may bump into each other from time to time.” Edith began to walk off, necklaces clicking like castanets with each languid step.
“Wait!” Joey called out. “But you haven’t told me what you want. I mean—what you want me to paint.”
Edith turned at the mouth of a hall with walls covered in round, evenly spaced 3-D spheres in pinks, oranges, and yellows. The effect was of life-size versions of old-fashioned candy dots, the kind that tasted partially of sugar and partially of the paper they adhered to.
“I thought I was clear. You believe in you, and thus I believe in you. So put on that wall whatever you like.”
“Seriously? You don’t want to give me any other direction? Color? Scale? Portrait? Abstract? Landscape?”
“No. It doesn’t even have to be evil eyes.” Edith shuffled off. “Just create, my dear. It’s only a wall. It’s only paint.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Joey
Florida
2019
The apartment hummed with the sound of appliances in resting states. Joey went to the kitchen, and a tangle of dirty towels nearly sent her sprawling. She righted herself and remembered that the fridge guy had come to fix the leak. She flung open the freezer and rummaged for the cookie dough she’d buried beneath a bag of frozen corn.
Hello old friend, she whispered, and she was back where she’d been so many times, right there on the edge. Lost, and then found, at the end of a cookie dough tube.
Joey placed the tube on the counter, her heart racing, transported back to when she’d returned from that Leo-less trip to Nice. When she’d flown to her client’s important family office meeting in Baltimore and collapsed in their all-glass-and-chrome lobby. Panic attack, the medic had said, strapping an oxygen mask to Joey’s face.
“It’s okay not to be okay,” Joey’s therapist had told her a few days later, at their first session.
Joey had asked, “How?” Because G needed her to be okay, and her parents needed her to be okay, and her firm needed her to be okay.
You just sit in the not-okay-ness and you try to be nice to yourself.
Joey had never thought of herself as a person to whom she owed it to be nice. What her therapist said had felt bold. Soft. True. Sometimes Joey wondered if things would have been different if she’d started with her therapist after Corfu instead of a decade later.
Her therapist had given her steps to take when she felt a binge coming on and also prescribed anti-anxiety meds. You don’t have to suffer, but meds aren’t a cure-all. She’d given Joey homework to do: write a list of her triggers, a list of nice things she could do for herself while allowing a stream of not-okay-ness.
It wasn’t that lighting a candle or taking a bath had solved all her problems, but Joey had begun to meet a stronger, happier self in the nooks and crannies of a life gradually unstuffed. Still, her not-okay-ness returned
from time to time. Joey hadn’t had a true binge in years, but it would be easy to slide back down the hole.
Joey eyed the cookie dough. She felt very much not okay.
She unwrapped the yellow cover. Slowly. Then she tore at the dough. She ate and ate and ate. Her stomach throbbed, and she sank to the tile marred by dirty work boot prints and ate more. At first, she tasted all the nuances. Sweet. Salt. And then there was no taste, just more dough, and more.
She’d failed. She’d failed at kicking bingeing, and she would fail at everything else. A minuscule bite remained, calling back all those mind-fuck games of yore. If she left a little, then she hadn’t failed the full extent of the tube. Joey emptied the last of the cookie dough into the garbage and sprinkled salt atop it. And then, because she knew from experience that salty cookie dough could indeed be stomached, even enjoyed, she poured the residue of her morning green smoothie from the blender over the garbage.
That familiar distended exhaustion sent her scurrying to the bedroom. Joey heaved herself onto the bed, furious with herself. After everything, how could she have done it?
A boulder trundled over Joey’s eyelids.
When Joey woke, it was with the disorientation of a nap stretched too long. Her eyes blinked open to the outline of Grant. He was staring at the glow-in-the-dark constellation he’d had framed to put up on the wall when he’d proposed. It was his favorite constellation, Perseus and Andromeda with their grand love legend. He’d showed Joey that constellation in Bali and said he always wanted to stare at it with her. Stargazing together on their balcony with glasses of wine was one of their favorite evening pastimes, and Joey always felt content as Grant pointed out and explained things about all the different stars.
“I’m so sorry, Jo,” said Grant as she shifted, and he turned to face her.
“What?” Joey clutched a pillow to her chest—a salve or a shield, she wasn’t sure. Her stomach was now surprisingly sedate. But that was just the physicality of her binge; her shame was fresh, curdled on top.
“I’m just so sorry, babe. I’m sorry for leaving you alone last night. You told me the most awful thing in your life, and I ran.”
“You had the right to run,” said Joey, as a feeling flooded her. She couldn’t pinpoint it exactly. Relief, but threaded with unease.
“No. I didn’t have the right.”
Joey breathed in his spicy Armani cologne. She buried her face in his chest. “I should have asked if you’d be okay with—”
“It doesn’t matter.” He tipped her head up. “I’m so sorry for what your mom did to your family.”
“Yeah…” She was eager for the pillow of him. She didn’t want his eyes.
“When I think about you finding out about Lily—”
“Can we not…?”
“Okay. So…you saw Leo again today?”
“Yeah. He took me out on his new yacht.”
“His yacht?”
“Yeah. Leo owns yachts. He has a crew operating the first in Monaco, and apparently he’s going to the Caribbean with this next one.”
“Leo owns yachts,” repeated Grant. “You couldn’t have an ex-boyfriend who was, say, a garbage collector?”
She laughed. “Sorry.”
“Do you have a picture?”
“Oh.” Joey reached for her phone. She flipped through the roll. “That’s Leo in front of his new boat.”
Grant studied it for a few beats. “Good-looking guy. He’s got big arms, huh?”
“I didn’t notice.” Joey squirmed against Grant’s biceps. “The important thing is, he agreed to keep things quiet for now. He’ll stay until after the wedding, and we’ll tell them all before we go back to Bali. And…maybe you guys should meet.”
“Leo? We should. Yeah.” Grant was quiet, a contrast with his general tendency not to draw breath between words. “How about Tuesday? I can get out early. I’ll grill.”
“Okay. I’ll ask him. It’s probably fine. He’s got nothing but time down here.”
“Did you get hit by the rain on the boat today?”
“No.” But Joey followed his logic. Grant always knew the exact weather in like ten different cities. It was a dorky trait Joey loved. “We were in Fort Lauderdale though.”
“That explains it.” His eyes fixed on the glow-in-the-dark constellation.
Finally Joey whispered, “Grant, do you still want to marry me?”
“What?” He pulled her to him and kissed her forehead. “Of course, I want to marry you. Of course I do, baby.”
And then they lay in each other’s arms, and Joey didn’t have deserts, she didn’t have two Joeys, only Grant and the safety she felt with him and the pretend night sky blinking its stars from the wall.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sarah
Florida
2019
“G, where did you put the mailbox?” called Joey from the kitchen.
“I moved it, darling. It’s in the oven.” Sarah heard rummaging and then the oven clanging. The moisturizing mask birthday present on her face bubbled. It was the height of skin-care innovation. Apparently. The mask was a frivolous thing she wouldn’t have ever thought to do prior to her granddaughters introducing her to the concept of skin care. Joey and Lily had brought an undeniable light to her life, along with a little hip-ness she’d never previously embodied. Even though Sarah didn’t understand most of the fashion and music her granddaughters talked about, she enjoyed listening to them and inhabiting their carefree world.
Sarah ventured a finger along her temple, and an edge of her mask curled off.
“Not yet! We still have five more minutes.” Joey reappeared with her own face Martian-silver, unwrapping a caramel candy.
Sarah smiled. She removed her hand from her face. When Joey was little, Sarah had bought a kitschy tin mailbox at the flea market. She’d filled it with treats so that, when Joey slept over, and then Lily, they’d find little surprises to collect. It still gave Sarah joy to watch Joey enjoying the traditions they’d developed.
“G, why did you move the mailbox inside the oven?”
“Well, I don’t use the oven anymore, darling.” Sarah propped up her feet on an ottoman. Her feet were clad in blue booties after being smothered in a solution that would cause them to peel intensely in three days and then unveil baby-smooth soles. They’d planned the timing of this spa session deliberately; with the wedding a week away, their feet would have time to shed and regenerate.
“Why don’t you use your oven?”
“I have that friend now.” Sarah winked two fingers on each hand like quotation marks, as one was supposed to do to express these things. “She cleans twice a week and brings me catering. Your mother said I must stop cooking. Queen Elizabeth is my age, you know, and she doesn’t cook. Never mind that she’s never cooked in her life; your mother loves to send me emails about the queen to convince me. It’s fine. I never much liked cooking for just myself. So the oven is empty now. It’s a smart use of space.”
“Oh.” Joey tucked her legs beneath her. “It’s just, the mailbox has been in the cabinet with the red paint smear for, like, forever.”
“Things change, darling.”
“Yeah. They’re changing a lot.”
The phone rang, and Joey’s mouth pursed. Sarah would bet a million dollars it was that woman on her cul-de-sac, the drama queen Trudy. The nerve of that woman—Sarah had told Trudy just this morning about her spa date with Joey. Did she have to spell out the supreme law of grandparenthood? When one was with one’s grandchildren, one was not to be interrupted.
Sure enough, her friend’s high-pitched chortle blasted from the machine. “Sarah, sweetheart, you must ring me back immediately. Ian just—you’ll never guess!” There was a rustle, and then, “He proposed! I’m enga—”
Sarah yanked the machine’s cord from the wall.
“G, you should have picked that up,” said Joey.
“Oh, that woman has been married three times already. A fourth engage
ment is hardly worth disturbing our time together.”
“Okay. Hey, G, can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
Joey tipped her silver face to the side. “It’s kind of a weird thing to ask in my thirties. I should have asked you a long time ago. It’s just, I realized I don’t know how you escaped the Holocaust. Grandfather was sent to Auschwitz with his family, I know that of course, and I know your family got sent there too, but I have no clue what happened to you. I’m sorry I never asked.”
Sarah’s heart began to beat so violently she feared it might explode. “One day I’ll tell you the story,” she managed to say calmly, “but you’ll indulge me, darling, if I’m not up to it today.”
What strange, strange timing. Why in the world was Joey asking this now?
“Of course, G. I understand.” Joey squeezed Sarah’s hand. When they untangled their fingers, Sarah’s skin pulsed from the touch. “Can I ask you something on a happier topic then? How did you first know you loved Grandfather?”
Oh my. Death by a thousand questions. “Oh, Joey, I don’t remember. It was so long ago.”
“But you have to remember something. Was there a moment? Something he said? Something about Grandfather that made you confident he was the one?”
As Sarah grappled for an answer, the alarm blasted from Joey’s phone. “Time to get beautiful,” Sarah said, and pushed herself up off the couch.
Joey followed her to the bathroom. They removed the silver masks. Like Joey had explained, they didn’t need to be rinsed but rather peeled off like rubber.
“How do I look?” asked Sarah, picking at a few silver bits that remained. She adopted a cheery tone. “Fresh-cheeked and seventy again?” In actuality, she didn’t think her face looked any different, but then it was home to so many wrinkles it was conceivable this mask had closed up shop on one or two of them.
When We Were Young Page 20
