Saturn's Return to New York

by Sara Gran

  And then it all changed. The job at the publisher was degenerating fast into a cycle of boredom/avoidance/boss displeasure/avoidance. My landlord wanted to raise my rent way beyond what I could afford Jim/Nancy—who I liked but didn’t think I loved—wanted me to move in with him

  This is where I stood when Carl asked me if I would move to Miami and open his shop for him. I would be working with another woman, Carolyn, who used to work for him in New York and had been lured away by a big chain to Florida, running their flagship store in Miami proper. Now Carl had lured her back and she was just waiting for me, or whomever, to move down there to start up the store.

  “Have you ever been to Miami Beach?” Carl asked.

  “No.”

  He paused “Have you ever left New York at all?”

  “I lived in New England for, like, almost a year,” I told him proudly.

  “Why don’t you go down for a few days. Check it out Get a cheap ticket, put it on the company credit card. You can stay with Carolyn, I’ve already asked her. You’ll like Carolyn You’ll like Miami. I think you’ll take the job.”

  Carolyn picked me up at the airport in a yellow Volkswagen Rabbit convertible I tossed my little red suitcase in the back and climbed into the shotgun seat Carolyn was wearing a black bikini top, a short black skirt, flip-flops, a few tattoos, and a tan Her navel was pierced. I was stiflingly overdressed in my black jeans and clunky ankle boots. I had never been in a convertible before I had never seen a navel piercing before

  “I called the airline,” she said. “They said the flight was delayed When’d you get in, like ten minutes ago?”

  “Something like that.” I had been waiting for close to two hours. “Thanks for picking me up ”

  “No problem,” she said. Carolyn drove fast and drove well, we were already out of the airport and on a freeway suspended above the city. Palm trees were everywhere, so was pink, and blue and white, colors rare in New York. “How was your flight?” she asked.

  “Okay. They didn’t have any food. Do you think we could—”

  “Great. I wanted to take you to this health-food place for lunch. I wanted to take you to all the local places Avoid all the tourist shit. That way you can tell if you like it here. Are you a vegetarian?”

  “Not really ”

  “You ever drink wheatgrass juice?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s great,” she told me “It’s got all the, you know, enzymes and everything. This is only place on the beach you can get it It’s kind of backwards that way, but it’s cool Miami, I mean Then I’ll show you where the store is going to be, it’s up the road on Collins Avenue Then I thought we’d go to the beach this afternoon. Are you into the beach?”

  “Yeah, but I need to buy a suit somewhere first. If there’s someplace cheap ”

  She turned from the freeway and gave me a strange look. “You don’t have a bathing suit? Not even a tank?”

  “No.”

  She kept up the funny look for a minute and then started to laugh. “Oh, duh Of course you don’t have a suit. What am I thinking? Where the fuck are you going to go swimming in New York—Coney Island?” Coney Island—this sent her into hysterics. We sped past palm trees and the tropical mini-storms that come every few hours in Miami, and past pawn shops and dog races, and past pink and yellow and pale sun-faded blue, down to the southernmost tip of Miami Beach, an island that I was surprised to see hung alongside America at an angle like Manhattan.

  Over lunch Carolyn asked me if I had ever left New York before. I told her about my few months at college, and she said “That is so typical You are such a typical New Yorker ”

  “Because I dropped out?”

  “No, because you’ve never left the city. That is so New York.”

  For the first time I saw that it was, and I did not like it I did not want to be so typical at the age of twenty-six I asked Carolyn where she was from “Iowa,” she said. I asked her how she got to New York and then to Miami from Iowa, and she told me what I later would learn was one of her favorite versions of her life story In this story, Carolyn was born to a traveling preacher man and his third wife Holy Roller Pentecostals from Arkansas. Carolyn and the four other children rolled with their parents from town to town until, at age sixteen, Carolyn met Winston, her first husband, at a gas station in Little Rock Her parents damned her to hell and she and Winston moved to California, where he continued to pump gas and Carolyn worked as a bikini model, putting herself through high school and then community college In another story she was born in California to two transplanted Harvard professors, and in another she was the proud possessor of a Ph.D. from NYU. The more time I spent with Carolyn, who knew more about books than anyone I’ve ever met before or since, who could as easily list every book written by Danielle Steele as she could every play by Eugene Ionesco, the more I liked the first version, the story I heard over wheatgrass juice that afternoon; Carolyn as blond, big-boobed autodidact

  “So anyway,” she said, finishing her story, “in eighty-one I moved to New York for the modeling. I thought I could do some runway but all I got was a bunch of catalog shit One thing led to another, I got older, and then I was working in a bookstore. I got married again, this time to a painter. You might have heard of him—Basquiat? Anyway, that was another disaster So then I took the job with Carl, then I got this offer from J and H to manage their store down here, now I’m working for Carl again. I love Carl. He’s a cutie. So, are you ready for the beach?”

  “Sure,” I said. I’d bought a bikini before lunch and put it on under cutoffs and a T-shirt back at Carolyn’s apartment, a huge one-bedroom for which she said she paid four-fifty a month

  “Excellent,” she said. “Lunch is on me.” She paid the bill and then she took the heavy glass ashtray we had been using, emptied the cigarette butts onto her plate, and stuck the ashtray in her purse

  “Let’s go,” she said

  So I moved to Miami and got an apartment on the same block as my new best friend. Within two years I had lived through my best boyfriend and my worst breakup, and I had come to see that Carolyn was not kooky or eccentric but insane, and it was then that The Eleven Steps to Wholeness, the book Annette just dropped on my desk, came out. A lot of women in their thirties and forties asked for it. Some of the women looked plain and defeated and some looked chipper and spunky, like they were fighting hard against what the first group of women had. Everyone at the store laughed at The Eleven Steps and the women who bought it except

  Carolyn, who never made fun of self-help books She said that life was too short and too hard not to take help anywhere you could get it.

  I never understood that, until now.

  Chapter 7

  After work Chloe and I go to a coffee shop on Twenty-third and Third for a quick dinner We order cheeseburgers and Cokes and then I tell Chloe about Annette There are only twelve category reviewers, yet somehow she doesn’t know who Annette is Is she the one who always wears sandals, even in the winter? Is she the one who fights with her boyfriend on the phone all day? Is it the cute girl who always leaves early? No one at Intelligentsia is without her skeletons, her embarrassments, her fuck-ups. Except maybe Chloe, whose only sin is downward mobility

  Chloe asks, exasperated, “Is it the woman who brings her lunch every day and only eats like, wheatgrass and carrots?”

  “That’s me, Chloe.”

  “No, I mean the other one.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Wow,” she says. “That’s exactly what Kyra said, right?”

  “That I would get a really perky stalker at work?”

  “No, that things like this would be happening. Look at it like this: What does Annette represent to you, some issue that you haven’t worked out before?”

  “Uh, the fact that I don’t like any of my co-workers?”

  Chloe looks annoyed by my lack of faith in Kyra’s predictions. “Anyway,” she says, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, are you sti
ll writing? I mean, other than what you do for work.”

  “No, not for a long time.”

  “Not at all? Because this guy I know from Trout, he’s starting a literary journal and—”

  “No, not at all Thanks anyway ”

  She shakes her head “You better start paying attention to the signs,” she says. “You don’t want to go through all this shit again when you’re fifty-eight”

  Annette rushes into my office the next morning and hurls herself into what has become her chair with a face of anguished, almost manic worry

  “Mary,” she says, “why didn’t you tell me about this? I can’t believe you’ve been going through this alone ”

  “What?” I’m very focused on my computer as she speaks. I’ve just found a website that delivers custom-made bubble bath

  “Your mother, honey, your mother. Now your mother has mental illness too. Why didn’t you tell me about this? You know my door is always open, Mary. You know that.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Your mother. I read it in the paper today.” Annette pulls a daily tabloid out of her black purse. It’s folded open to the gossip column on page six. She hands it over to me, pointing at the bottom of page with a pale blue manicured nail.

  Evelyn Forrest, New York literary legend and longtime editor of the Greenwich Village Review, has suffered from a mysterious medical malaise for at least six months, sources say Evelyn, who founded GV with the late Michael Forrest in 1963, is said to suffer from memory lapses, disorientation, and emotional distress Rumor has it the already overworked and underpaid staff has had to work overtime to compensate for the once-great Ms Forrest’s lapses No word on a diagnosis as of yet Everyone here at Page Six is praying for a hasty recovery, although the prognosis doesn’t look good

  I try to figure out who is responsible for this gossip Lilly Chemper, she works at the paper. Lilly approached my mother last year about publishing a piece in GV, an insider’s look at the gossip industry, and Evelyn declined it. I throw the paper across the room and it thumps nicely against the door Annette says something like I guess I’ll be going now and splits. I think, How dare this fucking gossipmonger print a lie about my mother. I take a box of paper clips and throw it against the door Then a few books, then my in-box. I pick up the phone and slam it back down and then throw the phone across the room. Someone knocks on the door and I say, Please leave me alone. Next goes a cup of pens and a memo pad, then a few more books and a lamp. It’s not only for my mother that I’m so angry—it’s because now it’s real.

  When my office is nicely trashed I leave, and spend the rest of the day shopping for black cardigans downtown.

  At home that evening I call Evelyn at the office. She’s not upset by the newspaper piece.

  “Gossip. I should be flattered, at my age, that anyone wants to gossip about me. Besides, it’s a help in a way. Now it won’t come out of the blue.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, I thought I had told you. I decided I’m going to retire ”

  “Oh, Mom—”

  “Listen, did I ever tell you the story of how I found out I was pregnant with you?”

  She has, she’s told me dozens of times, but I know she wants to tell me again so I say no

  “Your father and I went to dinner at La Vignette, a French place we used to like over on Bedford and Barrow. It’s a juice bar now, that corner. Anyway, we got in a terrible fight. I don’t remember what it was about. The magazine, I’m sure. That was the main thing we fought about that year. Nineteen seventy.

  “Anyway, after dinner we walked home. It was almost Christmas, and it was very cold No one else was out, and we weren’t speaking. It started to snow, just a little flurry I remember, it was so quiet, I remember thinking that I never would have imagined such quiet in New York City. My stomach started to hurt I thought it was cramps. Of course, I wasn’t speaking to your father, so I didn’t tell him. We got home and I went right to sleep in the bedroom. Your father was going to sleep on the couch, like he always did when we fought. My stomach got worse and worse, I took everything in the medicine cabinet, it’s still getting worse. So I called an ambulance, from the phone in the bedroom Your father slept right through it, I didn’t wake him up.

  “So I got to the hospital, and they took some blood and poked and prodded and, to make a long story short, I was pregnant with you, and almost having a miscarriage. I didn’t even know I was pregnant. I was always irregular with my periods. He was starting to get sick again, and most nights he fell asleep on the couch. They wanted to keep me there, in Saint Vincent’s for the rest of the weekend, so I called your father at home. It was morning by now. He was pretty surprised. He didn’t even know I had left the house. He had knocked on the bedroom door a few times, and he thought I still wasn’t speaking to him.”

  She tells me this story, again, by way of showing how durable she is under pressure and pain. Pregnant for two months and didn’t even notice Now that’s tough. She tells me this to put my mind at ease, to reassure me that she can take whatever might come her way

  “So don’t worry,” she tells me. “This is no big deal I’m gonna have tests and tests and more tests “ Through the telephone I can hear her drawing cigarette smoke deep into her lungs and then pushing it back out through pursed lips. Maybe a little lipstick. Maybe a mauvish, sweet-smelling lipstick. “I guess this is what your father felt like before he died All these tests, these doctors, in and out of the clinics.”

  “I guess.”

  “Don’t you think it was hard on him?” she says.

  “Of course it was hard on him. I know that.”

  “Do you think he wanted to be sick like that?”

  “No,” I tell her, “of course not.”

  “He couldn’t help it, you know.”

  “I know. I know ”

  She doesn’t believe me and she’s getting upset “You don’t know You don’t remember from before He was a wonderful man. He was tenured before he was thirty, you know.”

  “I know”

  “You don’t know. You don’t remember He was a genius. I had never met anyone so smart before. He was like an encyclopedia, you could talk to Michael about anything Art, movies, philosophy, history”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t know. Mary was two when we started the journal. And he always helped, always. We started the magazine together and we raised the girl together He loved her so much We were so close, we were like a regular family. Mary was so smart, right away you could tell, she was her father’s daughter. Oh, he would dress her, take her to play dates, she used to play with Philip Roth’s daughter, John Updike’s kids. I have a picture of him having a tea party with her. He loved her so much. He never meant to hurt her. Never.”

  “I know. I know I know I know I know I know I know.”

  Yes, it’s real, all right.

  Chapter 8

  Four years ago, in Miami, I once found Carolyn in her office popping a handful of pills from a bottle marked ARSENIC 100x. I thought she was trying to kill herself and very nobly knocked the pills out of her hand. Annoyed, she explained to me that the pills were a homeopathic preparation Like cures like. I asked what she was trying to cure and she answered with a laundry list of ear infections, stomach aches, allergies, liver dysfunction, and more.

  “You seem so healthy,” I told her, shocked.

  “I am,” she said “It’s age. Everything starts falling apart. Once you hit thirty there’s always something wrong. And it’s always cancer.”

  Now I’m twenty-nine, and I come down with cancer or worse at least once a month Cramps are no longer innocent cramps, they’re pelvic inflammatory disease, an ectopic pregnancy, or ovarian cancer. A mild pain in my arm is not a tendon inflamed from a day of typing but the first sign of multiple sclerosis On New Year’s Day I wake up with a throbbing, probably infected, probably cancerous right sinus. I haven’t gone out on New Year’s Eve since before the turn of the
nineties so it couldn’t be a hangover symptom. Having a library at home the size of a small public school’s is not always an asset; in the hundreds of books is a small but deadly collection of medical titles I can browse at the first sign of dysfunction or degeneration and drive myself into a panic attack. I already have every entry for dementia, memory loss, and neurological disorders bookmarked, along with every entry for PID and multiple sclerosis I spend New Year’s Day researching the sinus An unglamorous cavity. I ignore the allergies and simple viruses and skip to the good stuff. I learn it’s unlikely to be cancer, the incidence of cancer in the sinus is 1 in 1,253,987. Most likely it’s an incurable infection that is the first sign of AIDS.

  Echinacea does not help the cancerous, AIDS-ridden sinus, neither does goldenseal, megadoses of vitamin C, small sweet Bi Yan Pian pills, Belladonna 60x, self-induced acupressure, or a dairy-free diet. So on January fifth, I go to Dr Elaine Houseman, who I’ve been seeing on and off since my early twenties Elaine Houseman: medical doctor, licensed acupuncturist, homeopath, certified Bach Flower Remedy practitioner, chiropractor

  Elaine will not give me a blood test because I’ve been tested every six months for the past two years—more often than I’ve had sex But she does agree to give me a physical She begins by taking my pulse in six different spots. Then she listens to my lungs with a stethoscope and examines the color of my tongue She puts a sugar cube, and then a wheat berry, and then a soybean under my tongue and tests my resistance as she pushes against my arm She reads the irises of my eyes and announces a verdict

  “You’ve got a rotten tooth,” she tells me. “You need to get a root canal or get it pulled ”