The Hole We're In

by Gabrielle Zevin

  “I hear you,” the clerk replied. “But just try these first. They’d look great on you.”

  The clerk removed a pair from a case that wasn’t the cheap one. George put on the frames. They were dark red (almost black), oval, with titanium arms.

  “See, I knew it! I’m never wrong,” said the clerk. “They go with your eyes.”

  After years of basically being ignored in stores, George had gotten cancer, lost seventy pounds (only six and a half of which had been breast tissue), and was suddenly the belle of the mall.

  George looked in the mirror. “How much?” she asked.

  The clerk quoted an insane number, and George set the credit card on the counter.

  “Also,” said the clerk, “they have to be special ordered, which means it takes a little longer for them to arrive. Is that all right?”

  “Sure.” When she thought about it, she supposed she had always been something of a gambler.

  THE FLOWERS WERE purchased in town at Buckstop’s lone florist.

  “My, you’re looking fit, Georgia!” said the florist. George was very familiar with the woman as she provided flowers for all of the happenings at Roger’s church.

  “Thank you,” said George.

  “I wish I knew your secret.”

  It didn’t bother George that people from church speculated that she had had her stomach stapled at the same time she had had her mastectomy. It was flattering in a way and just showed how little any of them knew her.

  “I want something kind of sophisticated. Kind of chic,” George told the florist. “My son’s coming in from New York. He’s bringing his girlfriend. She’s Indian.”

  “Like Native American?” the florist asked.

  “From India,” George said. “Her name is Mina. She’s an actress.”

  “Fancy!” the florist said. “Would I have seen her in anything?”

  George knew the answer to this because Helen had looked Mina Vaswani up on the Internet. “Do you know that movie about the terrorists who take over the cruise ship?”

  “Yes! Yes, but I didn’t see it.” The movie had been R-rated and most of the church members didn’t see (or at least claimed not to see) anything that wasn’t PG. When George had first married Roger, the church’s policy had been no movies at all. This had been hard for George as one of her favorite things in the world had been to escape to the cinema. She didn’t mind going alone, didn’t care about genre either. All that was really required was darkness and AC. Over the years, the church had relaxed—better to permit some things than run the risk of losing everyone—but by then, George had lost her taste for movies anyway. All the stars of her youth had died or had plastic surgery, and she didn’t recognize anyone.

  “She was one of the terrorists, I guess,” George replied.

  “Oh. Maybe birds-of-paradise?” The florist held out the orange and purple flower to George. The bloom struck George as vulgar somehow. Like looking at something poisonous. Like looking at a vagina. “No ... I want something cleaner. Simpler, I guess.”

  “How about roses? You can’t go wrong with roses.”

  George shook her head. The flowers had come to seem crucial somehow. She wanted—yes, she could admit it—she wanted Vinnie’s girlfriend to like her. To like her and Roger, but mainly to like George. She wanted the flowers to say, Despite what Vinnie’s probably told you about his horrible parents—his crazy, thieving, weak mother and his religious, foolish father—we’re all right, I swear. The things he thinks we’ve done, we had reasons for. The truth is, we’re just regular old folks. Kind of corny, yes. But we buy flowers for our guests, and we cook nice, wholesome meals. Please tell our only son to come and visit us more than once every ten years.

  She looked around the shop. “How about those?” She pointed at the gerbera daisies that sat in a silver bucket.

  The florist wrinkled her nose. “They’re expensive, you know. And they don’t last worth a darn. Petals all over the place before the weekend’s out. Birds-of-paradise are much heartier.”

  “That’s OK,” said George. “That’s what I want.”

  The woman sighed. “Well, it’s up to you.” The woman began wrapping the flowers in bright pink paper. “So, do I hear wedding bells?”

  “My son, you mean? Um, I don’t know.” George handed the woman her credit card.

  “When the gerbera start dying all over the place, tell the good pastor I advised against them,” the florist said as she swiped George’s card. “I’m throwing in a couple of birds-of-paradise on the house.”

  The drive home took George past the church. She saw that Roger’s car was already in the lot, so she decided to stop to remind him that he was responsible for picking up their son from the airport.

  His secretary, Megan, a bright, young thing, sat at her desk, but the door to Roger’s office was closed.

  “He made it back, I see,” George said.

  “Yes, Mrs. Pomeroy. His plane was early. The pastor’s in there with Janet Phipps and Phil Harris. They’re getting married next week.”

  “I know,” said George.

  “He’ll probably be done in”—Megan stopped to look at her watch—“three and a half minutes.”

  “You know the pastor’s habits to the second,” George observed.

  “Oh.” Megan blushed. “No, I just ... These things always take about the same amount of time.”

  “It’s all right. He’s lucky to have you.” George studied the bright young thing more closely. She was pretty and freckled, leaner and older than Patsy. She wore a denim skirt, a modest white blouse, and pink lip gloss. Her hair was in a hopeful little ponytail. Without knowing why and despite the fact that she had attended an engagement party for Megan Carlson only—when was it?—last year, George had the following thought: When I’m dead, Roger will probably marry that girl.

  Megan worshipped Roger, that much was clear—three and a half minutes indeed—and Roger liked to be worshipped. And though George felt quite sure Roger would be appropriately devastated when she passed, she felt equally sure that he was not the kind of man who would tolerate the widower lifestyle very well.

  “When’s the wedding?” George asked.

  “Next weekend,” Megan said.

  “I meant yours.”

  “Oh! Oh, we’re still settling on a date,” Megan replied.

  The door opened—three and a half minutes, George noted—and Roger escorted the couple out of the office. George was still not immune to the pleasures of watching her husband enter a room. Knowing him as well as she did and as long as she had, she knew that she probably should be immune, but she wasn’t.

  “My, this is a surprise,” he said.

  “Missed you, I guess.”

  Roger took a moment to wrap things up with the couple. “Now, you know my services don’t come without a steep fee ...,” he joked. He’s good at this, George thought. He had been a mediocre high school administrator and, though she had never determined the whole story, something of a disaster as an academic, but he really was an excellent minister. The job suited the worst and best of him somehow.

  “Come and sit a minute,” Roger said.

  “No. I’ve got food spoiling and flowers withering in the car,” she said.

  “Just for a minute.”

  George followed him into the office and thought, I don’t want to die.

  No, it wasn’t that. She didn’t care about being dead. She just didn’t want to have to go through with the dying. She had been hospitalized seven times in her life: three children, two miscarriages, her mastectomy, and the time she had lost her mind. And she had hated every single occasion. She had hated being on display and being in her pajamas when other people were wearing clothes and not being able to keep her own hours. It was all so ... embarrassing. I should kill myself, she thought. But she knew that she was too weak for such things. In life, she had never been a person for the grand gesture, and she doubted she would be one in death either.

  “What are y
ou thinking?” Roger asked.

  “Do you think Vinnie’s bringing that girl to meet us because he’s marrying her?” George asked.

  “Well, unless he’s already married her, they’re not sleeping in the same bed. Not in my house.”

  “Oh, Roger,” George said. “Who even cares? Vinnie’s almost forty.”

  “I care,” Roger said.

  “I’m sure they sleep in the same bed in New York,” George said. She didn’t mention that with Helen, Elliot, Alice, Eli, Vinnie, and Mina all spending the weekend, in terms of the spatial limitations of their home, it would really be preferable for Vinnie and Mina to sleep together, Jesus notwithstanding. But this was her husband, and so it was pointless to argue. Over the years, she had learned that it was simplest to just do whatever she needed to do, even if it involved measures Roger would certainly have disapproved of. Vinnie and Mina would share a bed this weekend, and unless George was foolish enough to make an issue of it now, Roger would never even notice.

  “All the kids’ll be home, praise Jesus. That hasn’t happened in ... well, I don’t rightly know how long it’s been,” Roger said. “Patsy still not coming, I suppose.”

  “Helen said she was going to try to call her and—”

  Roger interrupted, “Talk some sense into her I hope. It’s bull-headedness, pure and simple. Most of her troubles she’s brought on herself, and the things she thinks we’ve done are mainly in her imagination. She only lives ten miles away from us. Why shouldn’t she want to come? Why shouldn’t she want to see her brother and her sister? That girl is ...” Roger shook his head.

  George took the opportunity of Roger’s pause to remind him to pick up Vinnie and the girlfriend from the Chattanooga airport at 8 PM. (She resisted saying, “Be nice to the girl! Try to keep the Jesus talk to a minimum. Not everyone has the exact same opinions as you, you know?”) Having accomplished her mission, she kissed Roger on the cheek, said good-bye to his secretary, and drove home to prepare for the arrival of the prodigal son.

  It had been a day and then some already, she thought. The news at the doctor, of course. And the awful way it had begun with that poor girl crying on the phone about her mother. George wondered if her own daughters would cry over her that way. Probably not, she decided. She certainly hadn’t cried for her own mother that way. She hadn’t cried at all. Now that she was older, George felt a certain tenderness toward the woman that she had never come anywhere close to feeling in life. She imagined it would be the same for her own daughters. Years after George was gone, Patsy or Helen, probably Helen, would be driving down some road, and something would remind them of some small kindness George had given—even though she was broke at the time, my mother knew the importance of a vellum overlay on a wedding invitation—and she’d have to pull the car over to the side of the road, sick with missing her. She wasn’t so bad, they’d think. She did the best she could. She did the best she could when you consider what she had and where she came from.

  Her own mother, Grace, had gotten pregnant at seventeen. The father had been the married foreman at the hat factory where Grace worked in Smyrna, Georgia. He had given her five hundred dollars in cash and told her to either take care of it or get the hell out of town. Grace had chosen to leave. She bought a bus ticket to New York City. Somewhere around New Jersey, she fell asleep. For whatever reason, the bus driver didn’t notice her, and she ended up at the bus’s final stop in Burlington, Vermont. When she opened her eyes and looked out the window, there was a blizzard. Grace always told it the same way (and only when she was drunk): “I wiped the sleep out of my eyes and thought to myself, So this is New York City. Guess I won’t be able to see those skyscrapers until the snow melts.” Once she got off the bus, Grace immediately realized her error but decided to stay anyway. Back then, Burlington was a snow globe of a town, and she reasoned that the four hundred or so dollars she had left would stretch a lot further there. “But I really thought I was in New York! What a dummy, I was,” she’d say, usually as George was helping her into bed. “Promise me you’ll never be that dumb, Georgie.”

  The image of the girl her mother had been, younger by far than either of George’s daughters, looking out a bus window at the wrong city, made George feel as if her heart might break, and though she was only a mile from home, she had to pull the car to the side of the road. I wish you had loved me, George thought, and I wish I could have loved you. She gathered herself enough to continue the drive and resolved that, yes, she would have all three of her children in her house that weekend: no matter what it took, she would convince Patsy to come home, too.

  Vinnie at Lunch and After

  IT WAS NEARLY 1 PM, and Hamilton Banish, the producer Vinnie was to meet with, still hadn’t shown up. The lunch had been scheduled for 12:30, which, considering that Vinnie’s plane left from LaGuardia at 4:17 PM, had been cutting it close enough already. Banish had had no other time that week, or the next one either, and after that, the man was back to London, where he lived during half the year. Vinnie had been trying to get the meeting for months, so he had decided to accept the less-than-ideal time.

  Vinnie called Banish’s assistant on the phone. As far as the boy knew, Mr. Banish was on his way, nothing had changed.

  He looked at the clock on his cell phone: 1:05. He decided to send Mina a text message: “take our suitcases and I’ll meet you at the airport. big fish is late. no time to go home first. Love u.” Mina would be pissed, but what could he do? There weren’t exactly tons of people out there who were willing to help raise money for documentary films.

  Thirty seconds later, Mina’s reply: “go to hell. I’ll see you @ lga. Xo, m”

  Ah Mina. It had been her idea to take the trip to Tennessee. They had been together seven years, and she thought it was “positively disgraceful” that she had yet to meet his parents. About six months ago, she had accidentally (so she said) answered Vinnie’s cell phone. Roger had been the caller. “He didn’t sound so bad,” Mina had reported later. “He was charming.”

  “How long was your conversation? Three minutes?” Vinnie’s father could certainly muster three minutes of charm.

  “He said your mother’s been sick. You didn’t tell me that,” she had continued.

  Vinnie shrugged.

  “They won’t live forever, you know.”

  Mina was a smart-enough girl, but Vinnie thought her obtuse in certain ways. Because her own parents (her father owned a chain of grocery stores, her mother was a therapist) had been tolerant and loving, she couldn’t conceive of families unlike her own.

  The discussion of whether they would visit had continued for the next four months. Vinnie felt terrorized by the topic. He had no way of knowing when or what would inspire Mina to resume talks. It might be an article she was reading online or a movie they had seen or a man pushing another man in a wheelchair. It might be nothing at all. “I don’t want to move to Tennessee,” Mina had said one day while she was sitting on the toilet. “I just want to go there once, get rubber-stamped, and that’ll be that. We never have to visit again.”

  Vinnie shook his head. “Don’t you get it? I don’t care if they rubber-stamp you. I rubber-stamp you.” She flushed the toilet, and he kissed her on her forehead.

  “Vincent, I do not expect them to love me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  Of course, Vinnie knew that this was a lie. Mina expected everyone to love her. She wanted her yoga students to love her and her acting teacher to love her and the doorman in her mother’s building to love her and the men who sliced the salmon at Zabar’s and, sometimes, even her friends’ boyfriends and husbands, too. It was her worst and best quality, Vinnie supposed.

  Mina continued, “I know they’ll probably loathe me because I’m not Christian ...”

  “No, my dad’ll just try to show you the error of your ways,” Vinnie joked.

  “Your mother will love me, though. Mothers always love me.”

  “I don’t care if my mother loves you,” V
innie said.

  “I’m very lovable, you know.”

  Mina had booked the tickets that night.

  “Should we stay at your parents’ house or a hotel?” she had asked.

  “Hotel.”

  “Hmmm,” Mina had replied. “I think I’d rather have the full-on Tennessee experience if it’s all the same to you.”

  That was what she would get, Vinnie thought as he waited in Le Pain Quotidien, which Hamilton Banish had specifically chosen for their meeting. Vinnie hated Le Pain Quotidien—not the restaurant itself, but more what it said about how important Banish considered their meeting. The place might have a pretentious French name and wooden tables, but it was basically fast food. Le McDonald’s.

  Vinnie checked his watch. It was 1:25 PM, and Banish was nearly an hour late. Vinnie wondered when it became acceptable to leave. Or rather, at what point did it make Vinnie seem pathetic to stay?

  At 1:26 PM, Vinnie thought about taking that editing job in Canada and bailing on the whole idea of shooting another documentary feature.

  At 1:27 PM, Vinnie thought about the tiny bump in his prostate.

  At 1:28 PM, Vinnie thought about Mina and the likelihood that they would break up after their weekend adventure in Tennessee.

  At 1:29 PM, Hamilton Banish walked through the door of the restaurant. Banish spotted Vinnie immediately, which suggested to Vinnie that the assistant had found his photo on the Internet—probably from some second-tier film festival he’d gone to; maybe 2006 when he’d taken his first documentary feature to Slamdance? “I’m so sorry!” Banish unleashed a reasonably compelling cascade of mortification such that Vinnie almost believed the man was sorry. “I’m so, so, so sorry! I’m soooo glad you haven’t left yet. I’m never this late. It’s so rude. Don’t hate me. I had a minor disaster on the way here, but don’t worry, it’s all good now. I’m starved.”

  Banish ordered quickly: a sandwich that the restaurant referred to by some vaguely Gallic word and a lemonade with mint. “Do you want anything?” Banish asked.