by Lynda Curnyn
Maybe it was that letter and its unknown contents that sent me into the next flurry of activity: putting the produce in the kitchen, hanging up my coat, straightening the stack of magazines that I had yet to review, wiping down the kitchen counters. Then curiosity must have won over the fear throbbing through me, and I found myself slipping out of my shoes, curling up on the couch and taking that letter in hand with the sense of fatalism that had been subtly stalking me ever since I had sent my own letter seven months ago.
I carefully broke the seal on the envelope, pulled out a single sheet of ivory stationery decorated with flowers at the top. My first thought was that it reminded me of the stationery my grandmother used. The second was that there was only one page of loopy scrawl. I briefly wondered at that, then settled in to read.
Dear Grace Noonan,
I thank you much for your letter some months back and I write to tell you how sorry I am that I did not make my reply sooner but so much has happened. I have news of my sister, Kristina Morova, to share, but I am so sorry to tell you it is not good. My sister died this past December, of breast cancer. I am sorry to bring you such sad news but I know my sister would want you to know.
I also write to tell you that you have a sister, Sasha, just sixteen years old. She is with me now, in Brooklyn.
I am not sure if you still want to meet with us, but I want to honor my sister’s wish and I want to invite you to come to our home. I give you my number in Brooklyn and hope to hear from you about this matter.
Sincerely,
Katerina Morova
I read the letter three times before the contents sank in. Before the cruel truth beneath that shaky cursive and stilted grammar broke through.
She was gone. Kristina Morova was gone.
I felt a momentary relief that at least there was a reason for all the silence of the past months. Followed by a disappointment so keen, tears rushed to my eyes.
Gone. Gone.
Still, no tears fell. Maybe because for me, she had never really been there. Could I really mourn someone I did not technically know?
I stood up from the couch with some idea that I should do something. But uncertain what that thing was, I walked woodenly to the kitchen, stared at the bags of produce I’d left there and, as if on autopilot, pulled out the cutting board. Grabbing a head of garlic from the bag, I peeled away the crisp outer shell on one of the cloves and began to chop, with some idea that this meal must be prepared, come hell or high water. Not that I was hungry, but I needed some sense of purpose, even if it was simply to keep this newly purchased bag of produce from rotting, neglected, in the bottom drawer of my fridge.
It wasn’t until I got to my eighth clove of garlic—about four cloves more than I actually needed—that I came out of my dense fog. And this only because I had somehow managed, in all my stoical chopping, to take a sliver off my index finger.
“Fuck!”
And then, because I felt a rush of tears that was most definitely more than this little cut could possibly provoke, I stopped, took a deep breath, and after dousing the wound with cold water, wrapped my finger in a napkin and grabbed the phone.
“Angie, it’s Grace,” I said into my best friend’s machine. When she picked up the extension, I felt a noticeable relief wash over me.
“What’s up?” she said urgently, as if she sensed some underlying emotion in the three words I’d uttered on her machine. More likely she was just surprised to hear from me. It wasn’t like me to call her on a Friday night to chat.
Then, as casually as I might convey a car accident I had witnessed from the safety of the curb, I told her everything.
“Good God, Grace, are you okay?” she sputtered. Then, “Never mind. Don’t answer that. I’m coming over.”
I didn’t have the energy to argue. Or, maybe for once I didn’t want to. Because whatever feelings I thought I should or shouldn’t be having about Kristina Morova’s death, I did at least sense that something momentous had occurred. Something that couldn’t be glossed over in my usual fashion.
And so I let Angie march into my apartment that night, even felt emotion clog my throat when she hugged me fiercely. It was this, more than anything else, that convinced me I should allow her to console me, to sit on the couch and regale me with advice because I somehow couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. And when she was done with that, to feed me.
“How can you tell if the chicken is done?” she called from the kitchen. She had insisted on finishing the meal— I think the way I sat mutely on the couch during her consolatory speech convinced her that she needed to do something for me. So I had curled up on the couch with the glass of wine she poured me, only to remember that when it came to matters of the kitchen, Angie was one who should have stayed in the living room with the glass of wine.
I felt a smile trace its way across my mouth as I uncurled myself from the couch and meandered into the kitchen. A smile I quickly lost the moment I saw the havoc Angie’s latest culinary attempt had wreaked: mutilated vegetable carcasses littered the counter while strips of what looked like chicken fat swam in an olive oil spill near the stove. The meal itself looked like a disaster in the making. The vegetables were cooking just fine—in fact, they were probably over-cooking. But the chicken was still in huge, cutlet-size hunks.
Apparently, Angie had never made stir fry before.
“Mmmm…I’m not sure it’s going to cook that way,” I said, stepping in and taking over. Once I began pulling the chicken out of the pan and cutting it into smaller strips, I felt better. All of Angie’s coddling had only made me feel helpless, and that wasn’t a feeling I liked to cultivate.
Now Angie stood by helplessly but also visibly relieved that I had taken over, though she kept apologizing.
“Maybe we should order in,” she muttered, eyeballing the still-pink flesh of the chicken as I began to toss the strips into the pan. Angie had a fear of death by microbacteria.
“Don’t worry, I’ll make it edible,” I said, slicing up the last cutlet and stirring it into the mix.
By the time we sat down to eat, I was feeling like myself again. In control. Satisfied. And no longer in the mood to dwell on things that might have been. I hadn’t really lost anything. I was still the same Grace Noonan I was the day before. There was no funeral to attend, no condolences to accept. I wasn’t, technically, the grieving family. So technically, there was nothing to grieve, right?
I had also come to a decision, despite Angie’s prodding that I meet this newfound aunt and sister. Although I was more curious about them than I let on, I decided I didn’t want to know them. Didn’t want to care for the family who had only contacted me out of a sense of obligation.
“That was delicious, Grace,” Angie said, leaning back in her chair, having eaten so heartily of the stir fry once she had been assured the chicken wouldn’t kill her, she looked ready for a cab ride downtown and a pillow. That was fine with me. I was more than ready to be alone.
Unfortunately, Angie had other ideas. “So, I brought over a toothbrush and a change of underwear….” she began.
“Oh, Angie, you don’t need to stay,” I immediately protested. But feeling bad at the hurt look in her eyes, I relented.
She beamed. “Great. I’ll run out and get us some Double Chocolate Häagen-Dazs. This is gonna be fun, Gracie. Just like old times when we used to do sleepovers back in Brooklyn….”
It was more like old times than even I expected, especially when Angie forewent the sofa bed, insisting instead on sharing my bed.
So there we were, lying side by side in the dark, just like when we were in junior high. We had indulged ourselves on ice cream while Angie talked excitedly about the location Justin had found to shoot the opening scene in his film. We eventually moved on to other topics we shared in common, like men.
Angie listened quietly while I expressed my relief over having Ethan out of my life. “I don’t think he would have handled this whole business with Kristina Morova very well….”
I said, unexpectedly bringing up the subject I had studiously avoided all evening.
I felt Angie’s eyes on me in the dark. As if she sensed the unease I was feeling. Without saying a word, she took my hand in hers. And despite this independent front I was trying to put on, I was painfully glad I wasn’t alone right then. Even so, it wasn’t until I heard Angie’s breath fall in the deep, rhythmic pattern of sleep that I allowed myself to weep.
I’m not sure how long I let the tears roll quietly down my face, my body shaking with the effort of holding back any sobs that might wake Angie, but the tide eventually stopped, allowing me to turn and look at my sleeping friend with a sad smile. I really hadn’t lost a thing, had I? I still had my best friend. My family, whom, I realized with a sudden shiver of unexpected anxiety, I needed to call.
There was no hurry, I thought as I felt myself slip into sleep. And I was nearly submerged in a blissfully unconscious state when the sound of a cell phone ringing jarred me awake once more.
“Shit,” I heard Angie mutter. She glanced at me as I eyeballed her groggily. “Sorry, Grace,” she said, scrambling from the bed.
I watched her shadowy form move across the bedroom and out the door, which in her hurry to get out of the room, she had left ajar. Open just enough for me to hear her rummage through her pocketbook, locate the still-ringing phone and silence it.
“Hey, sweetheart…” I heard her say.
Justin, I realized drowsily.
“I know, I know. I miss you, too, baby….”
I felt my insides soften along with Angie’s voice as I imagined Justin in their apartment alone, longing for Angie just as surely as she was longing for him.
To be so loved—
My heart sank with sudden swiftness.
I realized I had lost something tonight. Something even greater than a fifty-one-year-old woman I had never known, yet was bound to in the most intimate of ways.
Hope.
6
“You may admire a girl’s curves on the first introduction, but the second meeting shows up new angles.”
—Mae West
The last person I expected to revive my spirit was Irina Barbalovich, but when I stepped into the office on Monday morning and found a seven-foot-tall cardboard effigy of her staring me in the face, I felt oddly bolstered. Maybe it was the way her pretty blond hair blew in the nonexistent wind, or the way she stood, hip jutting, chin tilted as if she had every reason in the world to be happy.
I suppose she did, judging by the amount of money the Dubrow clan was dangling before her pretty blue eyes, hoping to lure her in.
“What’s with the Irina doll in the lobby?” I asked Lori, who was already at her desk.
“Dianne ordered it,” Lori replied. “I think she’s planning on inviting Irina up to the offices for a tour.”
I nodded at this bit of information, studying the face of the woman everybody wanted to call their own.
“She’s pretty amazing, huh?” Lori said, coming to stand beside me. Her gaze roamed from Irina’s cardboard face to mine. “You know, you could be her mother.”
Her mother? Alarm shot through me and my hand went to my cheek, as if my advancing age was suddenly apparent for the entire world to see.
Lori blushed, probably because she realized her comment had landed right on my thirty-four-year-old ego. “What I meant was, you two kinda look alike. You know, similar coloring, the shape of the face…”
I smiled. As a face-saving comment, it was a good one. I suppose it’s not every day a woman gets compared to the reigning supermodel.
I studied the image more closely, then realized that whatever faint resemblance Lori saw likely had to do with the fact that we both had roots in Eastern Europe. I guess there was a similarity in our facial structure and in the slight tilt to our eyes, but she looked more Slavic than I did. “My mother was Ukrainian,” I said, unthinkingly. Then I realized that was probably the first time in my life I had ever referred to Kristina Morova as my mother. And in light of the new revelations I had had over the weekend, the word stabbed at me.
Lori blinked, then frowned. “Really? Didn’t you tell me your parents were Irish?”
Now I was frowning. I suddenly remembered that no one in the office knew I was adopted. Mostly because I didn’t feel a need to share my personal history with anyone, outside of Angie, Justin, the DiFranco family and the few boyfriends I had allowed myself to open up to. According to ninety percent of the world, my parents were Thomas and Serena Noonan, a retired history professor and his lovely musician wife, living in New Mexico.
“My father is Irish,” I said, backpedaling. That was true. Black Irish. My adoptive mother was, technically, a mix of Irish and German and a bit of English thrown in. I bit back a sigh as I thought of my parents, realizing that I still needed to call them—had assured Angie I would do so.
But suddenly I wondered what telling them would accomplish. Nothing had changed in my life. Not really. In fact, once I let go of the harrowing disappointment the letter sent through me, I found myself feeling lighter. More free. I suppose there was something to the notion of living without expectation. If you had nothing to look forward to, you had nothing to lose.
“Her hair’s longer than yours. And not as blond,” Lori was saying now.
“Yeah, well, that’s a good hairdresser for you,” I said, a hand moving to my chin-length locks as I tried to engage myself. “Her eyes are bluer,” I added absently, my thoughts still on all that I did not want to talk about.
“Still, there’s something there,” Lori persisted, as if sensing some unease in me and hoping to cover it over by raising me to the heights of Irina’s beauty.
I stared hard at the effigy, suddenly wanted to resist any link to the supermodel. Any link that might somehow tie me to Kristina. But as I studied Irina’s cool confidence, I realized there was something I could learn from her. What was Irina Barbalovich but a farm girl from Russia with a pretty face? She had started her life afresh the moment she had landed in this country. I could start anew, too.
It was all marketing, after all.
So I quickly put aside any lingering emotions and refashioned myself as Grace Noonan, daughter of Thomas and Serena Noonan. Brooklyn born. Long Island bred. Columbia University educated, compliments of my father’s tenure in the history department. Talented, successful, smart.
It was a good thing I did, too. Because despite the fact that Claudia had tried to claim the Roxy D campaign for herself, she needed me.
And, I discovered, I needed this campaign, too. If only to forget…
Forget I did. I even canceled my therapy sessions in favor of the soothing rhythms of work. In fact, I worked so hard, it got to the point where I didn’t even know what day it was.
“Lori, did that agency ever get back to us with a bid?” I said, stepping out of the whirl of paper that had become my office over the past two weeks. I glanced down at the proposal I still held in my hand. “Says here they have to get back to us by October second. Maybe you ought to give them a reminder call—”
Lori giggled, causing me to finally look up at her.
“Grace, it’s the ninth already,” she said, her exasperation apparent. Lori thought it was hysterical how I could sweep through blocks of time without ever realizing what month we were in, or what day we were on. I don’t know why it happened—I didn’t question it. Maybe I figured it might keep me younger longer if I completely ignored the passing of time.
I glanced down at my watch, as if to verify the truth of her words. I frowned. “Ummm, would you give them a follow-up call?” I said. Then, turning on my heel, I headed back to my office, filled with a vague sense that some other event, momentous or otherwise, should have taken place in this time frame.
I was about to consult my day planner when realization hit.
My period. My fucking period.
It was…late.
A flurry of other realizations followed. Like that persistent ache in my breasts of l
ate, with no follow-up act. And my cramps—was it my imagination, or did they feel different?
My gaze dropped to the half-eaten corn muffin slathered in butter that sat on my desk. I never ate corn muffins. This morning I’d had a raging lust for one. With butter, no less. I never ate butter except when I was in restaurants and couldn’t resist the bread basket. This morning it was all I could think about. It was all I craved…
Suddenly the half-muffin I had already ingested felt in danger of making a reappearance.
I sat down, rolling the rest of that muffin right back up into its wrapping and depositing it promptly in the wastebasket next to my desk.
It didn’t mean anything, I told myself, consulting my day planner and trying frantically to remember when I’d had my last period. I never really kept track, but I could usually figure out approximate dates by events in my life, as what I wore was sometimes impacted by the period factor. Ah…here, we go, I thought, spying the words “Met Fund-Raiser” written into the last week of August. I remembered I didn’t want to wear my silver-blue dress because of the old bloat factor—that Botticelli belly of mine sometimes bordered on blubber right before my period. Then came the weekend with Ethan, when he opted out of sex because I was menstruating (he was a bit squeamish—another reason to be glad he was out of the picture). My finger skittered forward to the next event I’d marked. That dreadful Wagner opera that even Ethan hadn’t wanted to endure any longer, so we snuck out, went back to my place and—
“Fuck!”
“Grace, are you all right?” Lori called.
I leaped from my seat, startled. Then, as if by instinct, I strode toward the door. “I’m fine…fine,” I said, nodding distractedly at her. “I, ummm, need to… Uh, hold all my calls.”
I shut the door, went back to my desk, stared down at my day planner once more and began to calculate, counting the days between my period and that ill-fated night. Oh, dear God. I could have been ovulating, for chrissakes.
