Through Thick and Thin

by Alison Pace

  “Okay, and can I just say, if it’s okay to say, that you look fantastic. I mean, wow, and I mean that only in the best way.”

  “Yes, you can definitely say that, Meres, thanks.”

  “The Zone?” She has to ask.

  “Weight Watchers,” Stephanie says proudly. “It’s the answer. The answer for me, that is,” she adds on quickly.

  “I tried Weight Watchers but I sucked at it. Stephanie, I decided I’m not going to diet anymore,” she confesses.

  “Well,” Stephanie answers thoughtfully, “then good for you if that’s what you want. But, Meres, you know you look so great, too. Did you lose some weight?”

  “I don’t think so, but you know, I can’t really say for sure. I threw away the scale.”

  “Nooo . . .” Stephanie says with her eyes widened, faux dramatically.

  “I really did.”

  “Well, good for you. But you know, maybe it’s not weight but you look so good, so healthy.”

  “Thanks, I’ve been doing a lot of doga.”

  “Doga?” she asks.

  “Yeah, it’s yoga for dogs, but I guess for me, it’s just yoga. Steph, I learned how to stop trying so hard, I learned how to try easy.”

  “You? Yoga? I never would have thought, not in a million years. I have a feeling we must have a lot to catch up on.”

  “I have a lot to tell you. But before we move on, can I just say that you’re looking very pre-pregnancy.”

  “Well, I’m hardly there yet, but thanks. I do feel like I’m on my way though,” Stephanie tells her, and for a moment Stephanie pauses, because she will never be the same person again. Yes, she no longer stands in front of a mirror and thinks her body surely must belong to an alien, but there is still that alien sensation, as if this isn’t really her life. She thinks that feeling will be with her for a while, until Aubrey gets home, and she imagines even after that. But on the other hand, she nods enthusiastically because she has lost a lot of the weight she set out to lose.

  “Okay,” she continues, “I have to admit, I did set my goal weight as a little higher than I actually wanted it to be, because you know, I wanted to reach it, but I think I will reach it. Not right away, but I really have faith, I really do think I’ll reach it.”

  Meredith smiles at her proudly.

  “And,” Stephanie continues, “I think when you reach your goal, you get a key chain. And you know what, I’m so going to use that key chain proudly.”

  “That’s amazing, Stephanie. You’ll make your goal. You’re amazing.”

  “It doesn’t get easier though,” Stephanie says, and thinks that maybe not very much does. “And there aren’t any shortcuts. There are always setbacks, but that’s okay because you learn from the setbacks.”

  “You do,” Meres agrees, and thinks to herself, You really do.

  “I mean, just last week I gained because I’d been really overdoing it with the baby carrots. I ate two bags of baby carrots without even thinking about it. And then I just said to myself, Stephanie, stop looking for happiness in the bags of baby carrots. ”

  Meredith laughs. “Ha, true. Now this is coming from a proud Weight Watchers dropout, so take it with a grain of salt. But I’ll agree with you that maybe two bags of baby carrots in one sitting might not have been the wisest choice.”

  “Oh, but even if it’s not one sitting, I’ll just walk back and forth to the kitchen getting a handful at a time, for hours.” Stephanie adds and they both laugh. It feels good to laugh, and to laugh together, again.

  “I don’t know,” Stephanie chuckles. “Maybe the trick is that you can’t go looking for happiness.”

  Meredith smiles widely, at her sister, at everything. So many lightning bolts, so little time. “Or, maybe,” she says, eyes wide, “the trick is that you actually can.”

  “What’s that, Meres?” Stephanie asks, looking down at Ivy, twirling something shiny and plastic on the stroller’s handle.

  “I’ll explain. Wow, I feel like I have so much to explain,” Meredith says and Stephanie looks at her, kind of confused.

  “What?” she asks again, as Meredith starts bouncing from one foot to the other, pulling slightly on DB Sweeney’s leash. He comes right to her and looks up at her and then at Stephanie expectantly. It looks very much to Stephanie like DB Sweeney is ready to go. (And if she mentioned this to Meredith, Meredith would have explained that DB Sweeney knows everything.)

  “Stephanie, I feel like I have so much to tell you. I feel like so much has happened, or maybe it’s just that it’s about to, but I have to go first, I have to do something first. I have to go, and then I’ll be back.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I am. I’m good. I’m great. I promise. The bus stop is right near here, right? Do you think there’s a bus?”

  “Yeah, it’s right up the hill. I’m sure there’s a bus soon—”

  “Okay, I’ll call you later and explain this, all of it. But don’t worry because it’s all good.” Meredith says, and then leans in and hugs Stephanie again. She pulls back and looks at her right in the eye, and says, very seriously, very much like the Meredith one would expect, “It’s all going to be okay. You know that, right?”

  “Well,” Stephanie says, going somewhere else for just a moment, but then coming back, “we’ll see.”

  “No, really. Aubrey’ll pull through this with you there to stand by him. He will.”

  “Ah, Aubrey,” Stephanie says, looking down at the ground. “Aubrey, Aubrey,” and as she says it, the repetition of his name, twice in a row, it reminds her of something so concretely, so completely, even though it was so many years ago now, even though it was, now that she thinks of it, a lifetime ago. She wonders if Meredith remembers, too. She wonders if there’s something about that, the Aubrey, Aubrey, Aubrey that has transported Meredith back to the living room in the apartment they shared on Eighty-fourth Street, so close to the river.

  She looks up at Meredith, and Meredith is, almost in spite of herself it seems, grinning. She stops grinning and looks over cautiously at Stephanie. Stephanie smiles and shakes her head, it’s okay, and Meredith takes a breath first, and then says joyously, “Aubrey, Aubrey, Aubrey. He of the very cool name,” and laughs and Stephanie laughs, too, and then she smiles. It’s a bittersweet smile, part of it is at least, because it makes her think that you have no idea of how things are going to turn out, when you’re so young and so hopeful, and that no matter how much you try to make it so that everything looks perfect, so that everything could be a little bit perfect, it’s not going to be. And there’s a part of the smile, too, that doesn’t have any bitterness to it at all; there’s a part of it that remembers her and Meredith’s apartment and how she used to feel when Aubrey used to call. There’s a part of her that still believes that some things could go back to how they used to be.

  “Okay. I’m gonna run!” Meredith says, looking over her shoulder to be sure a bus is not yet on the approach. “I’ll call you later. And I’ll explain all this running off to the bus!”

  “Call when you can,” Stephanie tells her. “I’ll pick up on the first ring.”

  “Oh, argh!” Meredith exclaims. “Ugh, don’t. Pick it up on the second. Or even the third.” And she’s almost turned around and then she pivots back toward Stephanie, gracefully pivots, Stephanie notices. Meredith leans in and hugs Stephanie one more time tightly, and lets out a joyous, “Whoop!” the likes of which Stephanie is sure she’s never heard come from her sister. Meredith puts her fingers to her lips and kisses them, releasing the kiss in the direction of the sleeping Ivy. She turns and starts running.

  As Stephanie watches Meredith sprinting up the hill toward the bus stop, this little wonderful dog named DB Sweeney running jauntily along at her side, she reaches her hands up, clapping them together right above her head, without even realizing she’s doing it. She takes her eyes off Meredith for a moment to see if Meredith’s whooping or her clapping may have woken Ivy. And look at that, Ivy indeed is
awake, but not crying or fussing or anything at all. She’s just staring out of her stroller, very serenely. Stephanie reaches in and unstraps a strap and pulls Ivy up to her. Together, they watch as Meredith crests the hill, right as the bus back to New York pulls into view.

  She thinks about the things that she and Meredith said today. And she knows she’ll think about it all more, and they’ll talk about it all more, and she smiles at the realization of how very much she’s looking forward to later on this evening, or tomorrow, or sometime soon, receiving Meredith’s next call. She smiles also at the realization that she’s looking forward to something. As she turns away from the hill, holding Ivy over her shoulder, lightly pushing the stroller with her free hand, she pauses for a moment on the image of Meredith’s smile, on the image of her own, when they used to say, “Aubrey.”

  “Aubrey, Aubrey, Aubrey. He of the very cool name.”

  Meredith always said Stephanie had a special skill for meeting guys with the very cool names. And Meredith, so often lamenting the Jims, the Matts, the Joshs, had once told Stephanie that she felt she liked the Scottish names, the Gaelic names, the Celtic names best. Depending on the translation, Aubrey means King of the Fairies or Ruler of the Elves.

  “King of the Fairies,” Stephanie says softly to herself, “Ruler of the Elves.” And the thing is, she thinks, is that there isn’t any way to know it at first. Because really, how could you? But what eventually happens is that as you get older, as you learn some things, as you “grow up,” as the saying goes, you figure out that elves don’t really exist, not even in the North Pole. Eventually you see that fairies aren’t real.

  Stephanie holds Ivy close, and together they turn toward home.

  twenty-six

  good things come to those who wait

  It has been a festival of public transportation to say the least. The bus from Ridgewood dropped her off at the Port Authority. From there, she took a crosstown bus over to the east side, and then a subway back to Union Square where it seemed she’d just been, maybe a lifetime ago. It’s actually turned out to be a very warm day, and she’s been hurrying, and carrying DB Sweeney over her shoulder in his Sherpa bag. She’s not looking her best.

  She makes her way through the labyrinth of the Union Square station, and she has to look at a subway map, and then she’s on her way, she’s on yet another subway, and the announcer is saying, in a way that is helpful and informative yet also somewhat unintelligible, “Last stop in Manhattan.” And she thinks that’s nice that they say that, in case you weren’t ready to leave, in case you weren’t quite ready to go.

  She scrolls through her iPod; she needs the right song. She briefly considers David Gray’s “This Years Love (It Better Last)” but even though she’s a pretty big David Gray fan, there’s something too sad about that song, there’s too much of a hint of “No, this isn’t going to work out after all” in it. And she’s sure that can’t be right. Keith Urban, “Making Memories of Us”? Too Nicole Kidman. Lighthouse, “You and Me”? No, she thinks, too Gwyneth Paltrow and Jake Gyllenhaal in the movie Proof. REM, “You Are the Everything”? Too something. Johnny Lee’s “Looking for Love”? Ha, she thinks, look at that. And then she smiles to herself, and then she takes her headphones off, turns off her iPod, and puts it away.

  When she gets off the train, she reaches into her bag again and finds his card inside her wallet. She looks at the address on the front, and stands for a while in front of a map protected behind plastic, until she locates his address. She takes DB Sweeney out of his bag and looks around, nothing is blurry, everything is clear and in focus. She makes a left on Berry Street and begins walking quickly, and then jogging, in what she hopes, what she thinks, what she’s actually pretty sure is the right direction. She stops for a moment, and notices how quiet it is. Look at that, she thinks, you really can hear the birds chirping in Brooklyn.

  And she’s standing right outside his building.

  I’ll wait, she thinks, if he’s not home, I’ll just sit down on the stoop right here, and wait.

  She locates 2R on the nameless list of apartments and presses it. There’s a pause, a long one. And then, Gary.

  “Who is it?” His voice comes through the intercom, crisp and clear and alive. And she knows that in yoga you’re supposed to really concentrate on living in the present, but for that one crisp, clear, and alive second, she’s pretty sure she can see her future. She can see herself looking across a room at Gary. He’s separating the movie section out from the rest of the paper, opening it up, spreading it out across the floor. DB Sweeney is there, too, right next to Gary. He’s pressing his two front feet into the floor, arching his back, and stretching his tail skyward. The upward facing dog. Gary is looking up at her, and he’s smiling. She’s pretty sure that in this future she can see, that DB Sweeney is smiling, too. And so is she.

  Oh, and in the background? Pete Townshend is singing, “Let My Love Open the Door (to Your Heart).”

  “Who is it?” Gary asks a second time.

  She takes a deep breath, and presses the Talk button. And then she says, “It’s Meredith.”

  adopt a dog today!

  A few resources if you’re hoping to adopt a dog or help homeless animals:

  The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

  www.ASPCA.org

  Animal Haven Shelter

  www.animalhavenshelter.org

  Brooklyn Animal Rescue Coalition

  www.barcshelter.org

  The Humane Society of the United States

  www.hsus.org

  Maddie’s Fund

  www.maddiesfund.org

  North Shore Animal League

  www.nsalamerica.org

  Petfinder

  www.petfinder.com

  The Washington Animal Rescue League

  www.warl.org