Rise and Shine

by Anna Quindlen

  “Home is not a place,” she said. “It’s a series of arrangements. There is your job, and all the people you know through your job, and all the things that happen because of your job. There are your friends, and all the things you do with your friends, and all the people you meet because of your friends. There are your children. Or, in my case, your child. There is your marriage. It’s the biggest arrangement of them all. You make me look smart and I make you look kind. You make me look rich and I make you look generous. You make me look interesting and I make you look credible. That’s why after a while it’s all one word. Kate-andsam. Motheranddaddy. It sounds like a corporation. It is not about whether people like each other or love each other or have sex with each other or want to be with each other. It is a deal. Does that sound harsh?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are such a baby. Do you remember how you used to sit in your walker and hold on to the back of my skirt and let me pull you around the house?”

  “No.” If I had a memory, it was only one cobbled out of the hundreds of retellings throughout my life.

  “You had this wooden walker with big colored wooden beads on a metal strip around the edge. I pulled you all over the house. You couldn’t move without me.”

  “I know.”

  “I married Evan. I loved him. He loved me. You wouldn’t believe how rare that is. I’ve met more people who didn’t even like each other when they got married than I can count. Whatever. But after a while you’ve heard the same stories and the same jokes over and over. Plus there’s all the small shit. Kate and I got drunk one night and we agreed that if you could get past listening to him chew you could get past anything. You could even deal with infidelity if you could deal with the chewing thing.” Meghan made very loud chewing noises. She didn’t sound like Evan, whose habit of taking very tiny bites has always driven me insane. She sounded exactly like Irving Lefkowitz. Maybe that was the point.

  “Evan still insists that there’s no one else.”

  Meghan waved her hand in the air. “Not the point. The point is after a while you understand that you’ve made a deal. Meghanandevan. Totally separate from either of you individually. I had this shrink on the show once who said the biggest single determinant of whether two people stay married is whether they’re determined to stay married. I remember Josh called me in because I told the shrink that sounded like a tautology, and Josh was worried that most of our viewers didn’t know what that meant. Probably because he didn’t know what it meant. Jesus. Josh.” Meghan stubbed out the end of her joint on the stone of the patio. “Now there’s something that seems so far away. Josh.” In the silence I could hear what sounded like laughter from the beach. “Anyhow, what? Oh, the shrink. That shrink was right. You made a deal, you keep to it. It’s like two trees. You can hang a hammock between two trees. You can’t hang a hammock with only one tree, or two trees that are too far apart.”

  “Did you just make that up?”

  “No, Christ, I must be drunker than I thought. It’s from some book I once had to interview the author of. God, it’s amazing the crap your mind retains. Do I know anything I didn’t learn through interviews with idiots?”

  “Yeah, so the hammock was for Leo. What about Leo?”

  “Leo was supposed to be in Boston this summer working at the public library as an intern, although apparently he changed his mind. Last summer he was down south. He called me twice when he was down there. Not that I’m complaining, but that’s how it is. The summer before…Oh, damn, I’ll remember. London! University College. Leo has a life that doesn’t include me. Which is as it should be, I guess. Children stop needing their parents. Parents start needing their kids. Except for us orphans. No hammocks for us.” Meghan giggled. “We are hammockless.”

  “Leo needs you. I need you. I miss you. Come home.”

  “To what? To a life in which I would be the woman who used to be Meghan Fitzmaurice? To a life as the extra woman at dinner parties where everyone else is married? Have you ever seen an interview with one of those Yankees players who is fat and fifty and standing there listening to someone talk about something great he did twenty-five years ago? That’s what my life would be. I remember when Evan used to take me to those business dinners, before the men there were more interested in me than in him. There was this one really nice, smart woman who was always there. Julie. Julie something. And then she just disappeared. And finally I said to one of the other wives, I haven’t seen Julie. Where’s Julie been? And she said, Oh, her husband left her. Just like that. She’d been disappeared. It wasn’t that her husband was gone. Her life was gone.

  “Sometimes if I get stoned enough, I look out there and I feel like I can see New York on the horizon,” she continued. “You know what it looks like? It looks like a mouthful of sharp silver teeth. It’s the scariest thing you’d ever want to see. It’s all right if you’re nobody, and it’s great if you’re on the way up. But man, it is a place that is cruel to used-to-bes. Divorced wives, has-been writers, rich guys who aren’t rich anymore. Actors who aren’t famous anymore. Rise and shine, my Irish ass.”

  Meghan got up slowly from her chaise and stretched her arms over her head. “I’m going swimming,” she said.

  “You’re crazy. You’re drunk.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “And it’s pitch black out there.”

  “I know. But if you open your eyes there are glowy things down at the bottom, like lightning bugs in the ocean. Come see.”

  When we were little, Meghan would put a jar of lightning bugs on the nightstand between our beds. I would go to sleep with the twinkle, first in front of my open eyes, then as an afterimage behind my closed ones. But in the morning the jar was always gone, the creatures freed, probably soon after I fell asleep. I never woke in the night, even when our parents came home late, stumbling up the steps.

  This time I had to stay awake until Meghan returned from the endless expanse of black and silver water that lay before me. I was convinced if I didn’t she would drown, and then I wondered if perhaps that was the point, that one night she would get wasted enough to stroke stroke stroke toward the horizon and then drift off to sleep above the glowy things. I lay on the chaise and listened to a faint slapping sound and couldn’t tell whether it was her tireless arms or the ocean sliding toward and away from shore. There was another shooting star, and another. I closed my eyes for just a minute, and when I opened them again the sky was a clear violet-blue and there was a faint gold nimbus over the mountains as the sun struggled upward. I heard the slapping sound again, but this time it was Meghan’s running shoes as they hit the macadam of the main village road outside the gates. “Get up,” I think she said before she left, but maybe I just dreamed it.

  IF THE WORLD were different than it is, if Meghan were different than she is, I would have understood her decision completely. Not only would I have understood, I would have envied her. The air was so light and clear, and it smelled so good, like the water, the flowers, occasionally like the smell of smoke when the stalks of sugarcane were being burned off farther down the island. None of the things that normally concerned us were of any importance. I found it telling that sometimes I would mention something that was utterly of New York, about some acquaintance having a droopy eye because the doctor put the Botox in the wrong place, of another offering Amherst a new dormitory if only the college would accept a C student with a nasty Ecstasy habit. And neither of us could get any traction on the conversation. The thing about New York is that while you are in it, of it, it seems unequivocally the center of the universe. Your metabolism rises to meet it, so that your heart seems to beat faster, your mind to jump more quickly from one thing to another. The earth seems made of concrete all the way down to its core. But far enough away, it seems not only improbable but impossible. As we lay on the dock by the sea or hiked into the hills to see where the coffee grew, the lizards bragging of their prowess with the thrum of the bright flaps of skin at their throats,
the hummingbirds hanging with a loud hum over some fuchsia flower, it was not only that the concerns of that other life seemed beside the point. It was that it was impossible to believe that another island, choked with steel uprights, underground trains, endless moving lines of people, existed in the same universe with this one.

  I followed her routine. In the morning we had mango and papaya, then swam down to the beach and back. There was a double kayak, and we took it along the coast to a mangrove grove, looking for the crocodiles the fishermen had sworn took shelter there. There was lobster salad for lunch, and a couple of hours of reading in the shade when the sun was at its most brutal. In the late afternoon, Meghan again swam for an hour and I treaded water off the dock or on the narrow strip of sand at the beach while some of the children stripped out of their putty-colored school uniforms and washed themselves. At night, as we had that first night, we had dinner and lay on the chaises, talking. I talked a lot about my work, about the women in my parenting class, about Delon and Annette, about the building collapse and the refugees it had left behind for us to solace. “You should be really proud of what you do,” Meghan said softly, and then she cleared her throat and said, “I am really proud of what you do.” All these years later and it was just as it had been when I was a girl; my heart inflated with her approbation. The only difference was that when I was younger, when she said my essay was good or my dress was pretty, I thought she was saying so as a kindness. This time I realized she was speaking the truth.

  “I should have done more of this kind of stuff in the city,” she said the third night, our stomachs filled with goat curry. “Gone out to lunch with you, had a facial, maybe a bikini wax. Forty-seven years old and I’ve never had a bikini wax.”

  “You don’t want a bikini wax,” I said. “I had one once and it was like having your eyelashes ripped out.”

  “Yow. That’s a vivid image. Okay, no waxing. How about a pedicure?”

  “Meghan, you did all that stuff.”

  “No, not the way I’m talking about. Having lunch with the CEO of a publishing company, having a facial once a week to get rid of all the on-air crap in my skin and having it wedged in between a lunch speech and a dinner party—that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about living at non-warp speed. Like this.”

  “This is good. Do you want to snorkel tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, let’s snorkel. That’s not what I meant, though.” She reached across the small space between us as we lay on the lounges and took my hand. “I mean just lying around talking about stuff. When’s the last time we did this?”

  “We never did this.”

  “Ah, no, that’s not true.”

  “Sure it is. Warp speed and all that.”

  “What about when we were kids?”

  “You always went to bed later than I did. I was asleep by the time you came to bed. You studied a lot harder than I did. Look at what I’m reading.” I held up the battered old hardcover I’d found on a bedroom shelf. “A Tale of Two Cities.”

  “Which we had to read in freshman English.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t read it. I read the first chapter and the last chapter, and the paper you wrote on it.”

  “You get an A?”

  “I didn’t plagiarize it. I just got a sense of the thing from it. I got a B. I always got a B.”

  Meghan sighed. “Another obsession that seems incredibly inane at the moment.”

  “You know when we did this? We did it once. The morning you did the Gregor story.”

  “Jesus. The Gregor story.”

  The Gregor story is the linchpin of any profile of Meghan. She was working as a summer intern at the network affiliate in Boston and I was working as a waitress at a tourist trap by Faneuil Hall. She was twenty-one and I was seventeen. Evan was living with us, too, taking a summer class at Harvard in macroeconomics. There was a pullout couch in the living room where I slept. “Shhh, shhh, shhh,” I would hear Meghan saying sometimes from the bedroom, when the two of them still had that kind of sex. It was the first time they’d had a double bed for the purpose instead of a college dorm twin.

  “She called me once, a couple of years ago. Vanessa Gregor.”

  “I know. You told me. They’re divorced, right?”

  “Long time ago. I think they got divorced pretty soon after the fire.”

  Meghan was out having drinks, after work, late, with a young producer, who’d fallen in love with her, and two camera guys. They were at one of those small neighborhood places in an area where row houses were now called brownstones and the old plumbers and longshoremen were being supplanted by young publishing honchos and associates at law firms. They were all sitting at the front window when they saw flames leap from the third-floor window of a small house wreathed in scaffolding across the street. A man and woman were standing on the sidewalk screaming.

  When Meghan had climbed under the covers of the sofa bed with me that morning, she’d still smelled like smoke. “At first I just wanted to help them,” she said. “The woman had on this flimsy nightgown. You could see right through it. So I gave her the sweatshirt Al had in his trunk.” Through the woman’s screams and the sound of sirens growing louder, Meghan made out that the couple had six-month-old triplets. “The very first night! The first night!” the mother kept screaming. The first night in their own nursery on the top floor instead of their parents’ room a floor below. Two boys and a girl. Three years of treatments. All the miscarriages. The firefighters tried and were pushed back by the flames. The husband had to be given oxygen in the ambulance, but the wife just kept talking. Her name was Vanessa.

  Everything about life is so mysterious. If only the electricians had used a more experienced guy to wire the room instead of the apprentice. If only the smoke detectors had been in the right place instead of a corner of the stairwell where the air stayed deceptively clear. If only the weekend anchor who was dispatched to do the story had not had a flat tire and arrived after the eleven o’clock broadcast had already begun. If only the camera guy had not had an early assignment and so had his equipment in the car.

  “I think it’s a pretty big story,” Meghan had whispered in my ear.

  “This is what true tragedy looks like,” she began. Her voice was quavering. Her forehead was shiny from the heat, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. There was a smudge of soot near the neck of her white T-shirt. Somehow it made the whole thing more compelling. Three children had died, three children whose parents had gone through years, tears, tens of thousands of dollars to have them. They put Meghan on the late news, but the story was also on the network morning show next day. Vanessa Gregor would not speak with anyone but Meghan. She stayed with the story and was hired the next year. She went network when she was twenty-four. That was her calling card: the story in which she looked like she was in it, instead of outside it.

  She had known that morning, waiting for Evan to wake so she could tell him, too. She had been up all night, but she was more awake, more alive, than I had ever seen her. “I felt so bad for them,” she said over and over, but then she would describe how she had written a kind of script for herself on a receipt she’d found in her pit of a purse, how she had decided not to put on lipstick, how the executive producer had decided they were cutting it close and had no choice but to let her do it, especially since the police lines had gone up. None of the other reporters could get close; because of the way Vanessa talked to Meghan, the way Meghan put her arm around Vanessa’s shoulder, the police assumed she was a friend and left her alone. The camera guy shot her inside the police barricades. It made her seem so much closer to the story than anyone else.

  “She’s remarried,” Meghan said. “They never had kids. I never asked, but I figure she just couldn’t handle it. She sent me a crib quilt when Leo was born.” Meghan was on the air up until she went into labor, and as she got bigger and bigger, the shots of her got tighter and tighter. She used to joke that in her ninth month she’d be just a mouth saying, “I’m Meghan Fit
zmaurice.”

  “God, the Gregor story. I haven’t thought about that in years,” I said.

  “Neither had I until I got here. But one night at dinner when I was still at the Cove, someone was talking about how she met her husband in the First Class lounge at LAX because her flight was delayed. It was one of those what-if stories, you know, if the flight had gone her life would have been completely different, his life would have been completely different, you know the deal. And all I could think of was all the things that came together on the Gregor story. Ed having his camera, Jill having the flat tire, the fire starting when it did, me eating at that place, I can’t remember the name of it, it closed about a year later. And suddenly there I was.” She tightened her hand around mine and squeezed. “And suddenly here I am.” She smiled.

  “Do you think you were so pissed at Greenstreet because of the Gregor story at some subliminal level—you know, because of the kids and the infertility and the surrogate? Or do you think it was all because of what had happened the day before with Evan?”

  Meghan smiled again and shook her head. “Nah, I think it was only slightly about the Evan thing, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the Gregor triplets. I wish it was that interesting. It was just the truth. I looked at Ben Greenstreet and I listened to him and I said to myself, This guy is a fucking asshole, something I’ve said to myself a million times before. The difference this time is that I said it out loud. I did the unthinkable. I told the truth on national television. That’s what I’m getting killed for. Because if we told the truth, what the hell would happen? If we said, Nice to see you, Stan, but, jeez, this book is boring? If we said, I see you have a new movie and a new husband, isn’t that interesting considering you can’t act and you’re a lesbian?”

  “Now that’s a show I would watch.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”