It felt an overwhelming amount for Joey to assimilate, like the entire ocean queuing up to funnel through a very thin hose. “I wish there was something I could say to make things better, G, but there isn’t, is there?”
“No,” said her grandmother. “No, there isn’t. But there’s one thing you can do for me.”
“Anything, G.”
“Will you hold my hand?”
Her grandmother lifted her hand from beneath her pillow, and Joey reached for it. It was veiny and fragile and soft, and Joey sat there in the dark for a very long time, holding her grandmother’s hand.
* * *
Joey met an unusually restrained Bea in G’s kitchen. Bea wore fitness leggings and a black T-shirt. Her face was scrubbed bare. They sat at the table with a half-eaten bowl of cherries, the pits sprinkled among the whole cherries—a melancholy indicator of solo living.
“I thought you should see it,” said Joey. “She’s not doing well.”
“Yes. I can imagine.” Bea tapped her nails one at a time on the glass table. “Do you think she’ll want to see me?”
“Of course she’ll want to see you. You’re her favorite person on earth.”
At that, Bea winced. “She called you, though, not me. Did you see the part in the messages? I met Milos all that time ago.”
“Yeah, what was that about?”
“His daughter was translating, remember? At that reunion? He said he loved my mother. He said to give her his information. I got the gist then. Here was her ex-lover, not Jewish, and she’d sabotaged my relationship with Rand. Or so I thought. I found it to be the ultimate act of hypocrisy. I was just so…angry at her. So incredibly angry.”
“So when Grandfather died—”
“I didn’t tell her I met Milos.” Her mother shut her eyes. “I suppose I just loved my father so much, and once I met Milos, I realized that maybe my father was always my mother’s second choice. It felt disloyal to pass on the message from Milos. I guess I was punishing her. It was terrible, I see that now. I was terrible.”
Joey didn’t quite have a response for that.
“You know, Joey.” Her mother sighed. “There’s this quote by Diane von Furstenberg. I read it once in Oprah’s magazine. Oprah asked Diane who her hero was, and Diane said, Most people, because most people are just doing their best.”
Joey didn’t know what to say. She wanted to say something kind. She really did want to. But instead she said, “So you’re saying you’re a hero?”
“I know I can’t win with you, Joey,” said her mother quietly. “You’ve made that clear. I’m just saying I’m human. I’ve made mistakes.”
“You’ve made a lot of mistakes.”
“Indeed, I have.” Her mother took a cherry from the bowl. She swirled the stem around in her fingertips. “But I’m hoping it’s not too late to make some of them right.”
Joey’s head was going to combust. It felt like a thousand years since she’d slept. She said, “Take care of G, please. I need to head home.”
She was halfway to the door when her mother said, “Joey, do you hate me?”
Joey stopped before the entry to the foyer. “Oh.” She closed her eyes. When she opened them, the only sound was that of her mother tapping her nails on the table. “I don’t hate you, Mom. No. But what hurts the most is feeling a little bit like you loved Lily more than me.”
“What…Joey, what in the world are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about.” Joey chewed on her lip. “You knew that Leo had found out about your affair. And Leo’s condition for keeping your secret was that you and Rand couldn’t be together anymore, but no…still you went to Taverna Salto like a couple! And then Leo ended it with me, and you knew why. For so many years after, I was broken, and you knew it. You could have protected me.”
“Jo—”
“No! You could have done something to prioritize me. Tried to figure it out. Tried to help me. It just feels like…it just feels like maybe you didn’t love me enough to do that.”
Her mother stared out the window onto the lawn. “Joey, I regret so many things, but trust me, sweetheart, not loving you enough isn’t one of them. Fifteen years ago, well, I was just trying to do the right thing.”
“Okay.” Joey put a hand on the door handle, but something stopped her from turning it. “Maybe it’s not fair,” she finally whispered. “To put my happiness on you.”
“Joey, I—”
Joey put up her hand. She was utterly spent. “Look, you asked me the question.”
“You’re right. I did.”
“Well, you know what they say?” Joey opened the door to a gust of heat through G’s igloo.
“No. What?”
“They say that the opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference. And I think you can tell that I’m not indifferent at all.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Sarah
Florida
2019
The foyer was dim. Outside, sunlight glittered atop the Technicolor lawn; Sarah swept the curtains across to shroud the windows. Now she watched the shadows play together on the wall—even the shadows were too happy.
As Sarah padded into the kitchen, she caught her reflection in the mirror by the picture of Sam as a boy. Her white hair shot from her head in fifty directions. She looked like Albert Einstein. She registered it and kept moving. Cherries. She would finish the cherries. And have a glass of water.
The last person she expected to see sitting at her breakfast table was her daughter. Bea looked up, and Sarah’s body didn’t react in its usual way—reaching for Bea, always reaching. She almost didn’t recognize her daughter. Maybe it was Bea’s face devoid of its typical irritation or opinion. Or maybe it was that it had no makeup enhancing it.
Her daughter looked older; that’s what Sarah really thought. Maybe the way a person looked changed when you started to resent them.
“I didn’t invite you to come.” Sarah reached for a glass and filled it from the fridge dispenser.
Bea opened her mouth and then closed it. So unlike her to grasp for words. Usually they streamed out like a fire hydrant unleashed on a street corner, dousing innocent passersby.
Sarah drank her water and thought what a foreign thing it was to resent the person whom she loved the most, whom she’d given life, whom for years and years she’d longed for. Previously, Sarah had only experienced negative emotions toward the amorphous Nazis. Toward the boy soldier who’d imprisoned her family. Toward Milos. Toward herself. Toward Sam, even. Oh, Sam. But to feel resentful toward Bea? Well, until today that would have seemed inconceivable.
And yet.
“So Joey filled you in?” Sarah’s feet were cold on the tile, but there was something very alive about the cold, and something very alive about the anger churning in her. “You know that I know. That you kept Milos from me. That he wanted to find me and you…you…”
“I’m sorry, but I thought you kept Rand from me!” A horrible silence thundered between them.
“Yes, Rand.” Sarah lingered evilly on his name, like some sort of movie villain. “I know it all. The man you cheated with, had Lily with. The man you put your entire family in jeopardy and pain for. That Rand, correct?”
“I know. I’m so sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.” Bea set her head on the table in the cradle of her forearms. “I thought you kept his letters from me, and mine from him. I was so wrong.”
Sarah stopped a foot from Bea’s trembling back. Her instinct from years of motherly love—maybe motherly conditioning—was to comfort her, and yet she felt incapable of doing so.
“You should go,” Sarah finally said.
“But doesn’t it matter how sorry I am? How sad I am about what happened to your family?” Bea glanced up. She was crying, yes, but now something like defiance had slipped over her. “It’s what happened to my family too! You should have told me.”
“Perhaps I should have.” Sarah was zapped of it all; t
he reservoir of strength from which she’d fed all these years now ran dry. “Bea, I am telling you to go.”
Her daughter stumbled to her feet, and for a moment, it pained Sarah—the face a spitting image of Sam’s, now exiled from the home to which they’d brought her from the hospital in a precious pink cap and with enough love that it could have filled oceans.
“You’re mad, I understand it. Mother, I do. But please tell me you won’t stop loving me. Mom…” Bea’s voice broke. “I really can’t have you disappear on me too.”
A part of Sarah swelled and wanted to take her daughter in her arms. She thought about her own mother, and the last time she’d seen her, and the time before that too. But sometimes one had to be a mother, and sometimes one had to be a person. And so Sarah walked to the front door and thrust it open. Today she was a person. She was not a mother. Maybe she’d never be a mother again.
That thought nearly undid her. It occurred to Sarah this was anger talking, this was the pain of losing Milos, of losing her family—of losing Bea too, in some measure. But that was all analytical, and what Sarah felt at her core was an inability to pass one more moment in the presence of her daughter.
“For now, I need some distance, Bea,” she said, her lips trembling. “Please go.”
* * *
It was the middle of the night, and Sarah hadn’t yet drifted into sleep. Her mind was on Milos and holding hands on the ferry over the sea, their future an unblighted stretch, and then her mind was on Bea and the bunch of daisies she’d picked Just for you, Mom! at the park when she was five. Sarah sat up in bed, drenched in sweat. Her longing for her daughter was sudden and consuming.
If only Sarah were a person who could stay angry longer. Bea deserved it. Or did she? She was abrasive, her daughter, self-centered, surely, but she did love. She showed her love in odd ways—the vagina painting for Joey, a true oddity. The articles she sent to Sarah ad nauseam about the queen and her wellness regime. And the surprise Bea had been toiling on for months for the wedding. It was going to be magnificent. Sarah dialed her daughter’s cell phone.
Bea answered on the first ring. “Mom?”
“Yes.”
“You’re still my mom?” said Bea, and Sarah could make out the quiet weeping. Sarah was crying herself now, and something in her chest had unclenched. That’s what it was to be a mother. Your child could do a terrible thing, even to you, and still love beat in your heart whether you wanted it to or not. You didn’t get to choose whom you loved in this life. Sarah had learned that lesson long ago, and now she was being reminded of it. Knocked over the head with it, perhaps.
“I’m always your mom,” said Sarah, and found it to ring true. Maybe she’d never fully get over what Bea had done, or maybe she would, but earlier when she’d tried to separate being a mother and being a person—well, it wasn’t possible to do that for long. Both identities were woven like a tapestry, inextricably bound within her, and that was that.
“I’m really sorry.” Bea went off on a fresh spate of tears. “I wish you’d gotten to speak with Milos. He loved you. That was clear.”
Sarah could only say, “I know he did.” And then because she was a mother and her daughter was crying, she whispered, “It will be okay.”
And Sarah surprised herself for a moment by thinking maybe it would be.
Chapter Forty-Four
Joey
Florida
2019
Grant tossed the keys to the valet. He wore citrus-green shorts, a white button-down, and boat shoes—his chosen attire when encountering his three sisters, whom Joey internally referred to as the Lilly Pulitzer Fan Club. As Joey exited the car, Grant’s eyes darted to her feet like a cartoon character with a neck capable of executing a full swivel. “Flip-flops?” He laughed and kissed her cheek.
“See how I save us money? A lot of brides buy exorbitantly priced shoes. Instead it’s these old Havaianas for me, and I’m taking them off the moment we hit the yard.” Joey grabbed Grant’s hand, and with her other one dug for the evil eye charm inside the right pocket of her seventies-esque emerald-green silk jumpsuit.
“For richer and for barefoot.” Grant broke their handclasp to drape his arm over her shoulder.
“To love and to frolic in your parents’ grass.”
“Get a room,” said Lily.
They wove around the property, Lily trailing behind them. They passed the tennis court and the library loggia. They brushed by the life-size stone chess set that Joey suspected had never been played in its multiple decades of existence. They cut through the garden whose centerpiece was the majestic fountain with tiles sourced in Morocco. And at last they landed on the upper lawn of the mansion belonging to the illustrious Dot and Lawrence Newman—the Atlantic Ocean a sapphire stretch beyond. Waiters in white tails traced figure eights among tables overflowing with pink peonies. An eight-piece band played Adele beside the pool bordered in jasmine-blanketed trelliswork.
When Joey had first visited Newman Manor, Dot had delivered a ten-minute explanation about the pool’s limestone coping. Joey hadn’t known what limestone coping was, let alone that ten minutes could be expended discussing it. But she’d found Grant’s floral-adorned, design buff of a mother endearing. Dot could go on endlessly about such subjects as the blanket in the guest room that once belonged to a Navajo chief and the ottoman upholstered in Lee Jofa chintz that was on back order for four years. Waiting for that, my dear—that’s the definition of stamina.
“Emergency!” shouted a figure in hot pink darting toward Joey. It was Dot.
Joey said to Grant, “Palm Beach is literally the only place on the planet where a gathering of Jews involves more pink than black.”
She and Dot did the triple cheek kiss. Dot had a Swiss ancestor, Grant once explained.
“You look beautiful, darling. Not bridal, but I know. You’re alternative. Now I have the emergency calligrapher here.” Dot gestured to a woman in a skintight black tuxedo pantsuit. “Grant only gave me a few hours’ warning about the new guests. A…” Dot consulted a Smythson notebook. “Mr. Rand and Mr. Leo?”
“Ah, yes.” As if on cue, Joey watched Lily scan the lawn. Her little sister wore an ethereal champagne slip dress, her hair in loose pigtails, the combination of which gave her a rare delicate vibe.
After Joey had spelled the Winns’ names for the emergency calligrapher and Grant had wandered off deep in conversation with his brother, Joey found herself alone in the sea of guests. In her periphery, she spied people who made her smile and others she’d never before seen, but she felt content on her own, in a column of quiet. She slipped off her flip-flops and stored them behind a hedge. Then she mushed her feet into the grass and sipped her champagne, until someone stole up to her side.
“Boo!” It was Siya—thank God.
“Ah!” They shared a squeeze. “Where’s Aadesh?” asked Joey, at the same time Siya said, “You look gorg, Jo, but what’s been happening since that crazy dinner? You’ve been avoiding my calls.”
“I know, I’m sorry. But really, where’s Aadesh? I haven’t seen him in forev—”
“Josephine Abrams.” Siya’s eyes narrowed. “Aadesh isn’t going to save you from me. Too bad for you that you can’t send me to voicemail. I want to know about the Leo situation.”
“There’s no more Leo situation.”
Siya’s eyebrow raised. “Look, I remember in college when you and Leo were over. After that summer, you changed. You said you were going to law school. I thought I heard wrong.”
“I got a one-seventy on the LSATs,” Joey said quietly, watching all the guests—her guests—talking and laughing. “How could I not go?”
“That’s when I knew it wasn’t just a funk. That wasn’t my Joey talking.”
“My dad was thrilled. The day I got into Columbia, he basically printed up my business cards.”
“Law wasn’t the only way you changed though. I predicted you’d play the field post-breakup and instead, nada. Remember?”
<
br /> “Even my vagina remembers.” Joey stared out at the ocean so that eventually she didn’t see people—just a haze of blue. “Three years and I didn’t so much as kiss a guy. If he tried to hold my hand, I pulled back like he was some sexual deviant. God. It took me until law school to feel normal again.”
“I think it took you until Bali to feel normal again.”
“Maybe that’s true. I wasted a lot of time. But I’m finally really happy.” She was, wasn’t she? She was pursuing her passion at last. Living by the sea, with a man who loved her deeply, whom she loved in return.
“Are you?” asked Siya, her face in deep study. “Are you sure you are, Jo?”
“I’m sure.” Just as Siya was opening her mouth to respond, Joey let out a little gasp. “Oh, I can’t believe it. He actually came.”
She watched two men she’d recognize anywhere cross the lawn, neither of whom sported any element of pastel. Rand, with his hair now more salt than pepper, his hands shoved into trousers, that nonchalant stroll. Leo with his back to Joey, striding toward the pool.
Siya turned. “Is that…?”
“Yep.” Joey watched the worlds before they collided. Bea in an elaborate flower crown, flirting with the bartender. Lily perched on the Newmans’ limestone coping, taking a selfie. Just then, a woman in a sheath dress with impressive biceps tapped Joey’s shoulder—she was Dot’s Pilates instructor, did Joey remember her?
The evening began to blur. It could have been the lingering sadness from the catastrophic family dinner, followed by G’s horrific revelations. It could have been Joey’s three glasses of champagne, which she didn’t usually love or throw back, but the stuff they were serving was goooood. Or it could have been her eyes darting from Lily and Rand to Lily and Leo to Bea and Rand, the latter of whom chatted animatedly at a high-top table for at least an hour. Then there was the cordial reunion of Rand and Scott, which Joey watched while half participating in a conversation about monograms with the entire Lilly Pulitzer Fan Club. That there existed such polarizing opinions about monograms surprised her. Sisters #1 and #2 had nearly brawled.
When We Were Young Page 29
