by Jeanne Ray
Her work, she said in one interview, was always informed by the space. She’d cover entire walls with thousands of forsythia branches flown up from Mississippi in March, bringing in teams of men to bind them down to her exact specifications, then she’d turn around and float a handful of cherry blossoms in a flat bowl of water. Her style transferred seamlessly from Japanese minimalist to full-throttle baroque depending on how she was moved.
And she was not above making sixteen-foot arrangements loaded with roses and peonies, of the type one would see in the middle of the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, except hers always seemed like a parody somehow, an improvisation on a classic theme. The only thing consistent about her vision was its perfection.
As far as anyone could tell, no one had ever assembled plant life like Romeo’s daughter, and her talent, coupled with her unnerving beauty and easy manner, made her a superstar in a field that had never had one before. Her name was linked to movie stars in the gossip column of the Post. She was the subject of a front-page profile in the Style section of the Times. And then, last spring, she was on the cover of New York Magazine holding a single daffodil over one eye. She was dubbed the It Girl of the season.
“Why can’t Plummy help me with my Halloween costume?” Sarah complained, as I spread an ancient cake of blue eye shadow over her face. I had found it in the darkest corner of the bathroom linen closet, a cowering refugee from the early seventies.
“Because Halloween is in half an hour, and she’s not coming until tomorrow.”
“Maybe she could get here earlier.”
“It’s not going to happen,” Sandy said, and brushed Sarah’s hair hard until she got it all gathered up into a high ponytail. Sandy had done a truly ingenious job on the costume, sewing a blue bed sheet onto a hula hoop so that Sarah was transformed, awkwardly, into a giant blueberry, just like that nasty little girl Violet in Willie Wonka who was punished for chewing too much gum. She wore blue tights, a blue turtleneck, blue mittens. She smacked blue gum.
“I don’t think that Plummy could have come up with anything better than this anyway,” I said, pulling a green stocking cap covered in large felt leaves down on her head. “There. You’re a vision. Go show Romeo.”
Sarah trudged through the hallway, her girth seeming sadly deflated. She lacked a certain puffiness, and I wondered for a minute if we should stuff her full of pillows. It would keep her warm, but it also might render her completely immobile. If only she had her own little team of Oompah-Loompah’s to roll her from house to house.
“My bluebell!” Romeo said, lifting his head up off the pillow. “My star sapphire! My little robin’s egg!”
“I’m a blueberry,” Sarah corrected.
“I was getting to that one.”
I felt sorry for Little Tony, who was suddenly too tall for costumes and candy. He seemed unfairly banished to adulthood, when I knew that all he really wanted was to tie a bandana on his head and put a paper patch over one eye and wear Sarah’s old stuffed parrot on his shoulder. It was decided that he would take his little sister trick-or-treating, the logic being that most people would take pity on a too-tall boy and give him a couple of pieces of candy just for being a good sport.
“You’d think somebody would give out lottery tickets,” Sarah said. “Even scratch tickets. It’s always candy, candy, candy.”
Sandy put a hand on either of Sarah’s shoulders and looked her daughter in the face. “Sarah, you’ve got to snap out of this. We’re going to have to start sending you to Gamblers Anonymous.”
“I hear it’s a great place to meet other third graders,” I said.
“There’s a drawing tonight,” she said, as if she had ever given us the chance to forget. Then she tilted her head to one side, and gave a very knowing sort of nod. There was something about her blue skin that made her look less like a blueberry and more like a very wise alien. “I’m feeling very lucky.”
“I don’t know how you’d be feeling lucky, when I’ve told everyone to stop buying you tickets,” Sandy said, tying a blue scarf around Sarah’s neck. “Now go out into the night and beg strangers for candy.”
Sarah waddled down the stairs and out the door into the cold wind, carrying an ambitiously oversized plastic bag from CVS. Little Tony trailed sullenly behind her, wearing jeans and a parka, his hands stuffed into his pockets. Big Tony followed them both at a discreet distance with a flashlight. They passed two ghosts and a blond toddler dressed as My Little Pony coming up the sidewalk. I gave out packages of M&Ms.
The plan was that Nora and Alex were coming over to help us hand out candy. They had never had a single child show up at their Back Bay condo, and while this had always been considered a plus in years past, now that Nora was pregnant she thought it was a tragedy. “I want to see what everybody’s wearing,” she had said. They were supposed to come before Sarah left so they could take pictures, but now it was well past dark, and they were still no-shows.
“She probably got busy at work,” Sandy said. “She probably had to sell some mogul a house. Nora doesn’t know a thing about making a promise to a child and keeping it.”
The doorbell rang, and we doled out candy to a fireman and a kangaroo. I thought of Tony and slipped a little packet of candy to a young father who was lingering at the bottom of the stairs.
Sandy had stayed on the bitter side ever since receiving the news of her sister’s pregnancy. It was as if Sandy had been the one who was pregnant, and Nora had somehow stolen it away from her.
“It could just be that she’s late, you know,” I told her.
“You can’t be late when you have children,” Sandy said.
I looked at her with deep incredulity, wanting to tick off every time she’d been late in the past week alone. “Sure you can.”
Sandy stuck her hands deep into her curls and turned her head from side to side as if she was trying to screw it off her shoulders. It was a funny little thing she did when she got frustrated with herself. Even as a little girl, she would manually work her head back and forth when she did something stupid.
The doorbell rang again.
“Go upstairs with Romeo. I’ll answer it,” she said.
I felt like I should be able to be some sort of comfort to Sandy, but on the other hand I wanted to comfort Romeo, too. What I needed was some as-yet-uninvented product: a pressurized canister with which I could spray foamy comfort from room to room. Trying to comfort an entire house full of people manually was getting to be too much of a job. Sandy looked at me and pointed up the stairs. “Go,” she said.
Romeo was sitting on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor. He smiled at me.
“Look at you!” I said.
“It’s progress. I’m almost ready to get out of here.”
I sat down beside him and took his hand. “It’s not as bad as all that.”
He smiled. “Oh, Julie, if I were going to be held prisoner in anybody’s bedroom, I’d want it to be yours.” He did a small movement that was at once a turn and a lean forward. He was moving in to kiss me, but when his mouth came within two inches of mine, he screamed.
“What!”
Every muscle in his face tightened up. “Back down,” he gasped. “Back down.”
And so I helped him lie back and picked up his feet and very carefully stretched them out in front of him. I got him a pain pill and a glass of water with the bendy-neck straw. Someday, when he was ready, Romeo would go, but it wasn’t going to be anytime soon.
When Dr. Dominic and Father Al showed up in a stream of cowboys and swamis and fifties girls in poodle skirts, I just pointed them up. They came back down five minutes later shaking their heads.
“I didn’t think I’d have to spell this out for you, but stay away from all amorous activity,” Dominic said. “No kissing.”
After they left Sandy gave me a mildly horrified look. “What have you done now, Mother?”
But I had other things on my mind. Sarah and the two Tonys came back with their loot, and
still there was no Nora, no Alex. I called them at home and on Nora’s cell phone, but I didn’t get an answer.
“She’s going to miss the drawing.” Sarah had taken off her blueberry husk and was now wearing only the blue tights, turtleneck, hat, and gloves. Every shade of blue was slightly mismatched. She looked like a little blue worm.
“The same numbers will come up if she’s here or if she’s home,” Big Tony said logically. “Nothing’s going to change.”
But Sarah was a gambler and gamblers, especially the eight-year-old variety, are impervious to logic. “You don’t know that,” she said darkly.
Little Tony was going through the stash of candy in his pockets. He ultimately wound up with so much that at one point in the evening he had tightened up his belt and started dropping candy down the front of his shirt, so that now he wore a little potbelly of undigested sweets. “I got almost as much as Sarah did, and I didn’t have to dress up like a blueberry.”
Sarah switched the television on and sat back to peel a Star-burst fruit chew. “Feeling very lucky,” she said.
“I don’t like this one bit,” Sandy whispered to Big Tony.
I wondered if she didn’t like it for the same reason that I didn’t like it. It felt too scary to get caught up in the possibilities of Sarah’s hope. With that kind of money, I could pay off the mortgage on the house and the one I should never have taken out on the store. Sandy could pay off her credit cards, and Big Tony could go to medical school, and they could all have a house of their own and go to private schools and take cello lessons and go to the Cape for two weeks in the summer.
With all that money, we would all be freed from all our financial worries. Think about all the time we’d have then. We’d never have to waste those hours feeling nervous over stacks of bills, and we’d never have to rush to make a matinee instead of going to the movies for full price in the evenings. We wouldn’t have to pick one thing over another—not that we needed to have everything, but wouldn’t it be lovely not to waste so much time trying to decide? Adults knew better than to allow themselves the luxury of pinning their hopes on crazy schemes, but watching Sarah do it, it was hard not to get swept away by the moment.
“Quiet!” Sarah said, though no one was talking. “This is it.”
But it wasn’t it. Ball after ball shot up and came to nothing. Even though she had managed to hustle eleven tickets from various sources, none of them had more than one of the numbers necessary to win.
Sarah stared at the television set after it was over, waiting for Dawn to come back on and say that she’d made a mistake, that she wanted to call the numbers again. “It’s all Nora’s fault,” she said. “She promised she’d be here.”
Sandy crouched down in front of her blue daughter and brushed the loose springs of hair back with the flat of her hand. “It isn’t Nora’s fault, sweetheart. It’s just bad luck.”
“I’ll win next week,” Sarah said, in a voice so tired I wasn’t even sure if she believed it herself. “Next week the jackpot will be bigger, and it will be even better to win then.”
“There isn’t going to be a next week for the lottery,” Sandy said quietly. “This isn’t the place you need to look for a golden ticket.”
Sarah was crying a little, making muddied streaks in the eye shadow on her cheeks. Sandy picked her daughter up in her arms and carried her up the stairs like she was still a little girl, then washed all of the blue from her face and make her brush the candy out of her teeth before putting her in her bed.
Sandy was right about the bad luck. At eleven o’clock that night, Alex called from the hospital to tell me that Nora had started to bleed.
“She didn’t lose the babies,” he said. “She didn’t want me to call you until we knew for sure, but the doctor says they’re all still there. She’s going to have to go on complete bed rest, but he thinks if she stays really still, she might be able to hold on to them.”
“Them?” I said. “Alex, is Nora having twins?”
“Triplets,” he said.
I was no stranger to counting to three. It was something I had managed easily even as a very young child, but now the skill completely eluded me. One and one and one. I couldn’t make the numbers add up. I tried to see three babies in my mind, three babies sitting in a row, but each time I put that third one in the picture, the other two fell away. I couldn’t even make myself see three babies, much less make myself think about what three babies would mean. I couldn’t tell what was good luck and what was bad luck anymore. The two concepts had collided in my mind.
But for Sarah, the concepts were perfectly clear. The next morning it was announced on the radio that Kay Bjork from Stamford, Connecticut, had won the Big Game Mega Millions, all 234 of them.
“Be Jork?” Little Tony said. “What kind of a name is that?”
Sarah started to cry fat tears. “It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair! She isn’t even from Massachusetts.”
But the numbered Ping-Pong balls that blew up from the long, clear throat of the lottery machine knew no state loyalty. The pot, at least for the present moment, was again empty.
Chapter Eight
“I HAVE AN INCOMPETENT CERVIX,” NORA SAID WHEN she called the next morning.
“Are you still in the hospital?”
“Do you think there’s any insurance plan in this country that would allow me to stay overnight in a hospital for an incompetent cervix? They told me basically I wasn’t allowed to walk until after the babies were born, and that I should see myself out.”
“So what does this mean, exactly?”
“It means that my cervix is lazy. It’s slothful.”
“They called your cervix slothful?” I pictured a cervix that lay around the uterus all day smoking cigarettes, never picking things up.
“Maybe not in so many words, but you could tell that’s what they were thinking: She has an indolent cervix, an insubstantial and unreliable cervix. Everything they said seemed very judgmental to me. Frankly, I don’t think it’s right. I’m forty years old, and I’ve never asked my cervix for anything. It’s had a free ride all my life, and now that its moment has come, it’s turned faineant.”
“Faineant? I don’t know that one.”
“It’s an irresponsible idler.”
“That’s a medical term?”
“No, actually, it’s French.”
My daughter was carrying triplets, and as long as they were the size of hairless mice, we could make jokes about how they were going to stay put, but once they got to be proper baby size, I could see that you’d want vigilance in a cervix.
“So what are you going to do?”
“Alex and I have been talking about it, and we both think it would be best if I came over there.”
“Should you be riding around in a car? I can certainly come and see you.”
“I thought about that, but you don’t know how much longer Romeo is going to be stuck up on the second floor. It would be a hard time for you to leave.”
“Don’t be silly. I can leave.”
Nora was quiet for a minute, then she made a little hiccupping sound.
“Nora?”
She was crying. “I just didn’t know you’d be so great about everything.”
“What are you talking about? Did you really think I wasn’t going to come and see you?”
She sniffed, then inhaled sharply. “I’m sorry. It’s all the hormones. I have four human beings worth of hormones coursing through my veins. It’s just that, well, I know you weren’t so crazy about the idea of my having a baby.”
“That was before I understood that you actually wanted one.”
“And so I imagined you’d be less than thrilled that I’m having three babies.”
“We haven’t even talked about that yet. I’m really not able to think in terms of three.”
At this Nora laughed, and I laughed with her. “I just want to tell you I appreciate it. Your support, your help. You’ve been so nice about everything. The t
ruth is I really do want to come over there, so that’s that. Alex is going to drive me.”
“You do whatever makes the most sense to you,” I said, my voice brimming with motherly love. I was feeling good; I’ll admit it. Nora and I didn’t manage many warm moments and I was glad that she had turned to me and I had been there for her.
“We’ll wait a couple of hours. I’m going to call now and have the hospital bed delivered.”
“Hospital bed?”
“The doctor said they’re a lot more comfortable for the long haul, being able to put your legs up and down, things like that. Have them put it in the living room, okay? I’m going to go tell Alex what to pack. I love you, Mom.”
She hung up the phone and as soon as I heard that long dial tone, everything stopped. It stopped, and still I had the presence of mind to parrot back the sentence, “I love you, too,” but she wasn’t there to hear it. She was already packing to move home.
This is nothing a mother should admit, but I will say the happiest day of my life was the day that Nora left for college. The very fact that she was admitted into college with her wildly uneven grades, frequent delinquencies, and regular suspensions seemed like a miracle in itself. She scored in the top one percent on all the standardized testing and came up with a very poignant essay about choosing to walk away from a liquor store robbery that one of her boyfriends had encouraged her to participate in. That was enough to land her a spot at the University of Colorado.
She insisted on driving out in a U-Haul with a girlfriend, and Mort and I knew better than to argue. We stood there in the driveway as she pulled away, and I waved and looked sad, but really I was experiencing an enormous sense of lightness. Nora had gone off into the world. Nobody in the house was fighting. I went upstairs to take a nap and didn’t wake up until noon the next day.
My life was transformed by Nora’s absence, and for all I know, her life was transformed by my absence. When she crossed the Continental Divide, she managed to leave her old ways behind her. She was a new girl in the Rocky Mountain time zone. She arrived in Boulder a top-flight student, a mover and a shaker. Everything she touched was golden.
