Tapestry of Fortunes A Novel

WE’RE ON A STRETCH OF RELATIVELY UNINTERESTING ROAD in Indiana heading for Cleveland and Renie is working on her column. “Listen to this one,” she says. “A woman who works at an airline ticket counter is complaining that passengers come to her and ask questions without saying ‘Good morning’ or ‘How are you?’ and she wants to know how to respond to such rude people.”

“And …?” I say.

“And here’s what I’ve got so far. ‘Thank you for asking this very important question. Here is what I’d suggest you say to the next beleaguered person who has waited in a slow-moving line of more than enough people to populate an incorporated town and dares to come up to you with a question pertaining to, oh, say, air travel rather than an inquiry as to how you are feeling at any particular time. I’d suggest you say, “Okay, where’s my gift? You show up here with no gift? Go and get a gift and then get back in line.” ’ ”

“Or,” Lise says, “you could tell her to say, ‘First, on behalf of my airline and myself, I’d like to apologize to you for whatever airline experience you just had or are about to have, because it isn’t going to be good. Now let me see if I can help you with your question. If I can’t, I’ll probably take it out on you.’ ”

“I feel sorry for airline employees,” I say, and Joni says, “Me, too.”

“Look!” Renie says, pointing. “A Carnegie library! Let’s go in and all of us find a good quote. And then let’s eat.”

As we’re getting out of the car, Lise says, “I might start making art boxes,” apropos of nothing.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“You know, sort of like Cornell boxes, only deeply personal. I might start making those.”

“When did you start thinking of doing that?” Joni asks.

“Last night, Steve reminded me that I used to talk about that before we were married. We had seen an exhibit where a woman used old purses to create dioramas, and I felt so drawn by the notion of doing that kind of thing. I wanted to try doing it, using common objects in a very different way. What if this trip changes my life and all I want to do is make art boxes? What if there’s a whole different me under the me I know?”

It seems possible. Already I’ve seen that when you’re pulled away from your normal routine, it’s as though air and sunlight come into your brain and do a little housecleaning. A lifting up of what’s been practically rusted into place to reveal something else, a thing that makes you understand the origin of the phrase new and exciting, a phrase usually offered with irony, in order to hide the longing.

We go into the library, that layman’s priory, that paper-scented oasis of quiet industry and calm. I wander around the place to admire the graceful architecture and to pull books off the shelf to read a little here, a little there. It’s going to be hard to find a good quote, because every book says the same thing: Dennis, Cleveland, tomorrow; Dennis, Cleveland, tomorrow.



WE ARE AT a roadside restaurant that I want to go to for dinner because of the name, Sunny’s No Foolin’ Home Cookin’ Cafe. It looks like a house that’s been converted into a restaurant, and when we walk in, we see that it hasn’t been converted so very much. We are seated in what was a bedroom, which accommodates four small tables. I tell the others to order the meat loaf platter for me, and make my way to the bathroom, which is a bathroom like in a house, complete with tub and a crocheted cover for the extra roll of toilet paper.

When I return to the table, Renie is saying, “Well, I’m going to ask her.”

“Ask what?” I say, sitting down.

“I’m going to ask the waitress if she thinks everyone is carrying a heavy burden.”

“That again?”

“It’s time to start my research. She’ll tell me what she really thinks; I can tell.”

When the waitress appears, I think Renie must be right. The woman is tall and muscular, blond going gray, with a direct gaze and a no-nonsense attitude. “You the meat loaf?” she asks, and I say yes, I am.

“Best thing on the menu,” she says.

“I thought you said the broasted chicken was the best thing,” Joni says.

“It is.” She puts a platter of catfish in front of Renie. “That’s the best thing, too.” When she puts down Lise’s chef salad, she says nothing.

“What, no good?” Lise says.

She shrugs. “It’s a salad.” She puts her hands on her hips. “All set, girls?”

“Before you go, let me ask you something,” Renie says. “There’s this saying, Be kind, for everyone is carrying a heavy burden. Do you think that’s true?”

“Hell, no!” she says, and Renie’s face says, See?

“I was. But I got rid of my burden, and I’m happy as I guess you get to be in this life. It took me thirty years, but I finally left a husband who it turns out couldn’t wait for me to go. I left the stuck-up suburb we lived in, moved here and took this job, which is mostly just fun, and bought myself a trailer, which is much nicer than you might think. The thing that’s most surprising is the closet in the bedroom; I’m going to tell you, this thing must have been designed by a woman. And I’ll bet she was thinking, What do you need with a bunch of crap in your bedroom? You need a bed and a dresser and a closet that earns its keep. And that’s what I got.

“My place is walking distance from here, over in Arrowhead Court, you can see my trailer if you want. I get off in twenty minutes.”

We look at each other, and she says, “Talk amongst yourselves and decide. Makes me no nevermind. I wouldn’t mind having a little company tonight. If it’s not you all, I’ll find me somebody else.”

She goes out of the room and Renie whispers, “Want to go?” and we all nod.

Forty minutes later, we’re in Wanda’s living room, three of us lined up on a gold sofa, Renie in one of the two swivel club chairs, also gold. We’ve been shown the closet, which is indeed impressive, and now Wanda takes a pack of cigarettes from a drawer in the table by her chair. “Cigarette?” she asks Renie, and Renie takes one. We all do. After a moment, Renie says, “This isn’t tobacco.”

Wanda looks over at her, a mirthful glance. “It isn’t?” She leans back in her chair, looks at Renie. “So let me ask you something. How come you asked me if I was carrying a heavy burden? Do I look like I am?”

“No, it’s just a goof,” Renie says.

“What do you mean?”

“A goof, you know, just a question I keep bringing up for the hell of it.”

Wanda nods, then says, “I’ll tell you, though. I do think all people carry one burden, and that’s fear. It’s a problem, what fear makes people do, and also what it keeps them from doing. I mean, it was fear kept me from doing with my life what I wanted to. And why? I didn’t have any responsibilities to anyone but myself; wasn’t going to hurt anybody by getting out of what I was in, and going in a new direction entirely. But fear, you know, the boogeyman under the bed, you’re just scared of making a change. And then one day you just go ahead and do it anyway and there you are: blue skies.”

She rises up out of her chair. “Anybody want some Cheez Doodles?”

She fills a bowl with them and sets it down where we can all reach it, then says, “Fear and lack of love, those are the A-number-one problems of human beings. Every time there’s another disaster, you know, somebody shooting up a place, you look. Fear. And a lack of love. Or, you know, something wrong with the hard wiring, and they just couldn’t take any love they were ever offered. Or ask for it.”

She eats another Cheez Doodle. “Well, now I’m thirsty. Ain’t that the way? You get one good thing, you just want more.” She goes over to her little fridge and leans in. “Who wants a Dr Pepper or … a Dr Pepper?”

A chorus of I dos, and she hands us each a can. “You all been friends for a long time, huh?”

I smile. “Not so long, really.”

“Huh. Well, there’s an ease to you. I can see you’re having fun.”

“That we are,” Lise says.

“Nothing like a pack of women, having fun,” she says. And then, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, “Anything can happen.”


“WOW,” JONI SAYS. “I never do stuff like this.”

It’s late, approaching midnight, and we’re ready to find a motel, but first we are lying out in a field looking up at a sky that should have put flyers all over town to announce the show it would be giving tonight.

“I do it all the time,” Renie says, and Joni says, “No you don’t.”

“Well, I want to do it all the time, and I used to.”

“Boy, that’s my theme song,” I say.

It’s very quiet, and then somebody snorts, laughing. And then I laugh. And then we all do, we lie in the dark under the stars laughing and laughing. For too long, really. And then Joni rolls up onto to her elbows and says, “I don’t know why I’m laughing so hard.”

“Because we can,” Lise says, and she’s right. It’s as though there’s a dome of power around us, four women lying on the night-cooled earth, looking up and giving props to the same sky Cro-Magnon saw. Though for him the constellations were even clearer, much clearer, I’m sure. But this is enough, this starscape and these women and this moment.

I think I know why Wanda thought we’d been friends for a long time. Because of fate, because of timing, because of our own blend of chemistry, and because of this trip, we do share that kind of friendship. We’re ahead of where we should be. And I realize now that I’ve been gifted, if not by a replacement of Penny, then by some pretty fine compensation for her loss.

“Hey, Renie,” I say, thinking of the day I met her. “We’re lying outside and looking up at the stars and sharing our innermost thoughts and feelings.”

“Yeah. All we need is to hold hands,” she says, but there’s a softness in it. And when I pick up her hand and squeeze it, it takes her a minute to let go.





“ARE YOU NERVOUS?” JONI ASKS. I HAVE BEEN SITTING STIFF and silent as a mannequin for the last fifty miles. The day before we left, I’d sent Dennis a postcard telling him that I thought we’d arrive today, probably early evening. But because of our erratic route, we’re going to be late. Today we stopped at a ramshackle building missing half its corrugated metal roof called Atlas Garage: Home of the Mighty Fixers; Vi’s Pies, which were not as good as Brooks Daniels’s, but a close second; the Museum of the Stamp, with its earnest curator; and we stopped to take photos of a sign for a small town announcing its population as NOT MANY.

I’d given Dennis my cellphone number again on that postcard, and he’d finally sent me his, a single entry on one of his photo postcards. I hoped that this simply reflected his disinterest in talking on the phone. He’d never been one to engage in long conversations on the phone and in fact disliked doing anything on it but exchanging vital information. “If I’m going to talk to someone, I need to see their eyes,” he always said. But there is also the chance that he’s having second thoughts about seeing me at all. Well, I’ve come too far to hear that on the phone; if he’s changed his mind, let him tell me face-to-face.

All I say to the others, though, is “I’m wondering if we should wait until morning. We may get there too late. He might be asleep.”

“I think we’ll get to Cleveland in another couple of hours or so, maybe around nine,” Joni says. “And then we’ll have to find his house, but that shouldn’t be so hard. So we’d probably be there by around nine or ten at the latest. You really think he’ll be asleep then?”

“He might be. I’ll be tired. I’m tired now. I think maybe we should wait until morning. Let’s just stop for the night and go in the morning. I want to take a shower and look … you know.”

“Well, you should call and tell him, then,” Lise says. “In fact, I don’t know why you didn’t call him a long time ago and let him know we’d be late.”

“My phone is dead,” I say, which is true. Then, before anyone can volunteer the use of their phone, I say, “And anyway, I think it would be fun to surprise him. God knows he did plenty of that with me.” What I don’t add is that I, too, am phone-averse. Penny used to say I wasn’t a real woman, the way I didn’t go in for long conversations while holding a receiver to my ear. Even when I was a teenager, someone would start a good story, and I’d say, “Can you just come over?” I’d always thought that if Dennis and I ever did become a long-term couple, that would be one of the things that made us odd to others but deeply comfortable with each other.

“But what if he’s not even there when we get there?” Lise asks.

“All right; I’ll call him in the morning,” I say, a little more emphatically than I need to.

“Okay, so … motel?” Renie asks.

“How about bowling, first?” Joni says. “It’s too early to go to a motel.” There’s a place coming up on the right, Super Bowl, featuring a big neon sign of flying pins.

“I don’t want to go bowling,” Lise says, and Renie says, “I do.” They wait for my vote; we have been honoring the democratic process.

“I’m in,” I say. “I could use a beer and some humiliation.” I am a terrible bowler, unless you change the rules and count a gutter ball as a strike. Which I am going to suggest.

“I thought you were tired!” Lise says.

“Not for bowling.”

“You are nervous.”

“Maybe,” I say.

I am, of course, but it’s more than that. What’s the worst that could happen? I’ve asked myself, many times over. But as we get closer, what worries me is what could not happen, how we could both be standing with popped balloons in our hands, planning our exit strategy fifteen minutes after we’ve said hello. Or the other possibility: that one will be disappointed, the other starry-eyed.

The idea of all of this has been so thrilling. But what can happen that will live up to the anticipation? How can we keep from being dismayed by the ways in which we’ve changed? He has told me how he looks, and I know he knows I’m no longer the black-haired girl he once knew. Still, I suspect that in each of our brains, in each of our minds’ eyes, is firmly fixed an image from so long ago that it will be hard to reconcile the differences. Even someone who drives past a house she used to live in and finds it changed feels it in the gut.

A couple of years ago, I came across a set of photos a girlfriend had taken of me to give to the guy du jour. This was a very handsome guy aptly named Ken, if you consider the plastic perfection of Barbie’s boyfriend of the same name. My Ken was going to law school and in possession of some impressive musical talent. He could play guitar like Leo Kottke, he could play piano and the ukulele, and he wrote songs. Unfortunately, that was about it. He was not good in conversation; he had no sense of irony or playfulness; he favored minute planning over spontaneity; he was, as my friend Donna put it, how gray got born. When I defended him to her, she said, “Oh, you just can’t admit you fell for a piece of ass.”

It was true, as it happened, but until I was willing to admit that to myself, I was trying to win him. To that end, Donna took some flattering pictures of me. I thought it was really generous of her, given her opinion of the intended recipient. I gave him the photos, about which he said, “Nice,” and then he tossed them into a drawer with his condoms, which were red, which always used to make me kind of upset.

Last year, I found the negatives for those photos and had prints made, and when I picked them up, the images shocked me. I had been along for the ride, getting older, the changes had come gradually, but when I saw those pictures of me then versus me now, it was devastating. I thought of all I had lost and all that I had yet to lose, I thought of how youth is wasted on the young, and then I came to my senses and sent a donation to Doctors Without Borders and took a walk. But. Dennis will have a photo experience, so to speak, and so will I. And although how we look doesn’t matter nearly so much as what we are, what we are is old enough that there are probably not all that many good years left. So what’s the point?

“Nurse or purse, that’s all a guy would want us for now,” I overheard a woman about my age telling another. I suppose she might be right. And yet some stubborn part of me thinks otherwise. Don’t we all want company in some form, are we not attracted to the idea of a body beside us in a thunderstorm, or another voice to help decide on dinner, to share astonishment at the latest political buffoonery or appreciation for the lush sets on Downton Abbey? Are we not, at our most basic, social animals, people who need other people, whether we want to or not?

But I have that now, in the company of these women I live with. It’s true that we don’t give each other the intimacy of a romantic love, and I guess if I’m honest I have to admit I’m not past wanting that. I guess I want to be like the old couples I sometimes see whose love still burns so bright it makes me stop and stare.

I watch the bowling balls rolling down the alley and the pins flying up in the air and think about how one of the hardest things in life is fessing up to what you want most, because if you do that, and you don’t get it, it’s so hard to be without it. I wonder if most people fully invest in what they care about most. There is a Kazantzakis quote I once taped to my computer that said, I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free. But I took it off because the truth is that although I might have admired the words and anyone who might be able to honestly say them, they were very far away from the person I am. I live in fear of a lot of things. I recognize that I am not free. And all my life, I have hoped for everything.

A face comes up into my line of vision like a rising moon. Renie. “Hellllooooo,” she says, and I laugh, and she says, “Your turn,” and then, “What were you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

“Liar,” she says.

“Liar,” I agree. I grab a ball, squint at my adversaries all lined up at the end of my lane, and think about how I might actually knock some of them down. Then I let go of the ball, which bounces (as much as a bowling ball can) before it rolls leisurely toward the end of the lane. Regrettably, it is not my lane. I knock three pins down in the next lane over, and the guy who’s bowling there is pissed.

“What the f*ck!” he says, slamming down his ball. He comes over to me, his hands on his hips. I see a lot of coarse black hair curling out of the V at the top of his shirt and I just don’t know what to do.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I say. He is wearing a black bowling shirt and lots of gold jewelry that is lacking only a Playboy logo or some other demeaning image of women like that so often displayed on the mud flaps of eighteen-wheelers.

“You think this is funny?” the man asks. Oh God, he’s at least six three.

“No, I think this is scary. And I’m sorry. I’m just a really bad bowler.”

He nods in a kind of calculating way, the way a lot of men look when they’re tonguing a toothpick, but then seems unable to think of anything else to say. He goes back over to his lane and picks up his ball. On the bench, a thin, curly-headed blonde sits staring at the floor. “Get me a beer, goddamnit,” he yells at her, and the woman jumps up.

“Get it yourself, you pig!” Renie yells at him.

He starts toward her, and I say, “Relax, we’re going, see? We’re leaving.” I pull on Renie’s hand. Joni and Lise have already fled.

I walk out quickly, my heart racing, holding back laughter. I’m wide awake, thrilled. There’s nothing like getting in trouble to make you feel young.