Wanting an intimate relationship doesn’t mean I get one. But to paraphrase Stephen Stills, if I can’t be with the one I love, my best insurance policy against a sad, lonely old age is to love the one I’m with. The one who will never leave me, no matter what, for real.
That one, of course, would be me.
Extrovert or not, intimacy junkie or not, I want to be able to have a nice day alone. I want to enjoy my own company, to believe what Hannah keeps telling me, what my dad told me in our final conversation, and God seems to confirm: that I’m good and that I’m loved, every day of the year.
Otis and I walk together to the dining room and join the line for dinner, which happens to be fried chicken, my very favorite colony meal. Simone waves me into the seat she’s saved me, and I take my place at the table between her and Donald, a filmmaker who screened his documentary in progress last night. Greta, a German director, asks Donald how he got the permissions for his film. Sarah, a costume designer, compliments its set designs. A composer asks about the score. Full of my day, full of fried chicken, full of myself, I sit back and listen, feeling utterly content.
The dessert bell rings, and then something strange happens. The lights in the dining room go out. Through the darkness Marta emerges from the kitchen, her face lit by the candles on the cake she’s carrying. Everyone hoots and hollers as Marta crosses the room and sets the cake in front of me. The lights come back on, and thirty-two people sing “Happy Birthday.” To me.
“Make a wish,” Riya instructs me.
“How did you guys know—” I sputter.
“Hel-lo,” Elaine says. “Facebook much? C’mon—make a wish.”
I close my eyes and ask God what to wish for. What I hear is, “You have everything you need.”
So the wish I make is “I wish to know that I have everything I need.”
As I’m cutting the cake, Otis appears and hands me a small cardboard box. “Open it,” he says.
Resting on a bed of shredded newspaper is a tiny sculpture I’d admired in Otis’s studio: a six-inch-long, detailed, 1940s pinup-style cheerleader in a pleated miniskirt, leaping skyward, one knee bent, pom-poms waving, her face radiating triumph and joy.
“I love her,” I tell Otis.
He smiles. “She reminds me of you.”
Phoebe produces a family-sized bottle of Hendrick’s. “G and T’s, anyone?” she says.
—
JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT, full of gin and sloppy gratitude, I tumble into my room. There I find a huge bouquet of white peonies and pinkish-white roses. “The party follows you,” the card reads. “Because you are love. And loved. XO, Helena.”
I bury my face in the velvety blooms, close my eyes, and breathe in the scent, and the love.
Picking up my phone to call Helena and thank her, I see that I’ve got new voice mails, e-mails, and texts. Ah, here’s my drug. How do they love me? Let me count the voice mails.
The phone rings in my hand. It’s Hannah. My heart flutters with fear. She never calls me at night.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Whew,” Hannah says breathlessly. “I almost missed it. I forgot it’s three hours later there.”
“Almost missed what?”
“Your birthday.” She starts to sing “Happy Birthday” comically off-key, then stops halfway through. “Here’s your present,” she says. “I’m not going to sing to you.”
I laugh. “Thanks for that. But you don’t care about birthdays. What’s gotten into you?”
“I never used to care about birthdays,” Hannah corrects me. “Who knows what I care about now? You’re not the only one who gets to change, you know.”
“How could I not know that?” I say. “Look who I’ve been talking to every morning. I tell you all the time, you’re my hero. You amaze me.”
Unlike me, Hannah doesn’t like what she calls “corny talk,” and she’d rather praise than be praised. I wait for her to deflect, deny, minimize my compliment, as she usually does.
“Thank you,” Hannah says instead, her voice hoarse with emotion. “That means a lot, coming from you. You’re my hero, too.”
“Wow, honey,” I say. “I’m touched.”
“Yeah, well . . . You can tell me about your day tomorrow morning, okay? I mean, it’s late there. I mean . . . I gotta go.”
Her eagerness to escape the emotions of the moment makes me smile. It occurs to me there was a time, not long ago, when it would have hurt my feelings.
“Good night,” I say. “I love you.”
“Love you, too,” Hannah says, and hangs up.
I tuck myself into bed, stroke the smooth solid gold on the ring finger of my left hand, breathe in the sweet scent of the bouquet.
Best birthday ever, I think. Drifting toward sleep, I wonder what I’ll come up with next year. Because it’s never too late to try something new.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is my third book with Becky Cole. If you know anything about Becky Cole, you know why I needed her to be the editor of this book, and you can imagine how much better she made it, and me. Becks, I propose we do thirty-three more books together and then reassess. Agreed?
Gratitude verging on awe to the passionate, powerful, proficient Blue Rider Press people who made sure you’d read this book: David Rosenthal, Marian Brown, Rebecca Strobel, Kayleigh George, and Alison Coolidge.
Linda Loewenthal, my agent, my friend, my hero. It just gets better and better with you. Thank you. I love you.
There are fingerprints all over this book, and they belong to Abigail Thomas, Alice Mathis, Annabelle Gurwitch, Anne Lamott, Ayelet Waldman, Boris Fishman, Christina Baker Kline, Dan Smetanka, Jamie Rose, Jane Juska, Jillian Lauren, Julia Deck, Kate Christensen, Katy Jelski, Kayne Doumani, Kenny Loggins, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Lara Vapnyar, Mary Rooney, Melissa Chadburn, Ron Baron, Sarah Woolner, Shelly Silver, Sheri Holman, Susan Orlean, and Susan Sherman.
Thanks, too, to Marilyn Monroe, for the inspiration and for her advice: “Fear is stupid. So are regrets.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MEREDITH MARAN is the author or editor of fourteen books, including Why We Write and Why We Write About Ourselves. She’s a book critic and essayist for newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Salon.com. The recipient of fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and a member of the National Book Critics Circle, she lives in Los Angeles.
meredithmaran.com
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