“Do you want me to call your doctor?” I reached halfway for her phone.
“No,” she said louder. She winced. “No doctors.”
“But they can prescribe you something for the pain,” I said. Flashback to the orange bottles that filled the shelves behind my mother’s mirror. Why was I remembering that now?
She shook her head. She was in too much pain to speak.
I made myself touch her bald head. We were best friends, and she was dying, and if there was a time for intimacy, it was now. “I don’t think anyone deserves to be in pain, Ana.”
“I do,” she whispered. After one more deep breath she rolled over. She pressed a button on her phone and then—just like that—she seemed fine again. “Guess what I’m doing?” Her lips curled into a smile.
“What?”
“Making fake appointments with my ex-hairdresser, Laurel. Because she told everyone I was a witch.”
“A witch?” I felt defensive. “That wasn’t very nice of her.”
“I know! And I tipped her so well.” She picked up the phone. “I’m calling again.” And then it was ringing and then she was saying in broken English (maybe pretending to be Indian this time?), “Yes, Laurel, is the Friday at five p.m., yes yes. Devandra. My phone number is”—she said some random numbers. “Thank you.” She hung up and started laughing hysterically. “Oh, Nan, you do one, you do one. I’m running out of voices.”
I don’t know why I said “Okay” so easily. Maybe to please her. “I’ll do my Southern accent.”
“Yes!” Ana pressed the button and put the phone to my ear. It was ringing.
A man picked up. “Hair Would Go, how can I help you?”
I laid it on thick. “Yes, I’d like an appointment with that there Laurel tomorrow at noon.” Same feeling as at the restaurant: anxiety and excitement and my armpits prickling and my ears burning off my head, and this was exhilarating.
I imagined the man flipping the pages of his calendar. Maybe I heard them. Hard to tell over the noise of the crashing waves. “The earliest I have is next Friday at eleven thirty.”
“That would be dandy,” I drawled.
“Name and phone number please?”
I looked at Ana for an answer, but she was laughing too hard to give me one. “Oh, um, Dolores Greeeeeel,” I said. And then I made up some numbers. I almost thought the man would say, It sounds like that’s a fake name, but he said, “Thank you, see you soon,” instead, and hung up.
“Dolores what?” Ana managed to say through her laughter.
“Greel?”
“This is fun!” Ana exclaimed. “Let’s do it again.”
“Okay.”
“But wait!” She rolled onto her back. She blinked at the sky. “It should be bigger.”
For a second, I thought she was talking about the sky. “I know,” she said. “We should order soil. And get it sent to someone’s house. And dumped in their front yard. So they’ll just have all this soil in their front yard.”
“But then won’t they have to pay for it? Soil is expensive.” I had learned that at Lowe’s.
“We’ll get the cheapest kind,” she said. “I think you should do it in your Southern accent again. I love listening to that.”
I was flattered.
“Pleeease, Nan,” she begged.
I needed more information. “Whose house would you want to send it to?”
“You know who I keep thinking about?”
“Who?”
“That guy who beats his horse.”
“Peter,” I said. I remembered him exactly. His scrawny arms hanging out the sides of the flannel shirt with the arms scissored off, his jittery leg. How he’d left before Ana could tell him his future was so, so bright.
“Peter,” Ana said. “Peter deserves justice for sure.” She puckered her lips, thinking. “But I don’t have his address.” She tapped her chin. “I’m sure I can get it though.”
“How?”
But Ana had already moved on. “Ooh, I know who we’re sending this soil to. My old boss Stan. He was the worst. He offered to let me live in his garage, and when I said I wanted to, he said, ‘You are a grifter and an opportunist!’?” Ana sliced her finger back and forth in the air, making a face like a snarling dog. “Waving his finger at me just like that.”
“No!”
“Yes!”
I was already looking up the number for Lowe’s. And then I was calling. And then the phone was ringing and then I was placed on hold with music that reminded me of music the water polo moms would listen to—soft old hits—and I thought—why?—of my mother walking in on me and a friend making prank calls when I was fourteen and her saying, “You’re not fooling anyone, Nancy.”
When the Lowe’s person said, “Lowe’s,” I snapped back into the plan, which was somehow now removed from what we were actually doing. All I could concentrate on was my beating heart and the need to be totally believable.
“Heya there, sir,” I said. “I’d like to order some soil.” I was first impressed by how quickly I had gotten good at this, and then I was a little scared by how quickly I’d gotten good at this. The man said the minimum for soil delivery was thirty-five pounds, and I heard myself say, “Exactly what I’m lookin’ for.” My ears burned hot, and when he told me the total was three hundred something dollars, they burned hotter and went numb. A voice inside me said, Say never mind, that’s too much money, but then there was Ana’s expectant face and my heart pounding for a decision and you only live once but people only tell themselves that when they want to be reckless but it’s still true that you only live once, and fuck you, Mom, and fuck you, Chuck, and fuck it all, and then I heard myself say, “Perfecto!”
When I hung up, I noticed my trembling hands weren’t actually trembling at all.
“Wow,” Ana said, rolling around on the afghan like a happy puppy, “Nan, that was so good. You’re good at being bad.” She was belly laughing. She couldn’t catch her breath. Waves crashed. And then she said, “How do you feel right now?”
My heart still pounding. I was wide awake. I felt good and I felt bad and I felt caught between the mother at the water polo game and this woman lying on the ground ordering soil to a stranger’s house because he deserved it. And then there was also the woman who was just trying to eat a little better and get her shoulders more defined. Nance and Nan and I was obviously Nancy and I was all these people and none of them, and I didn’t know anything except for exactly what I said, which was “I feel powerful.”
?
We dragged the couch outside and watched the sun lower in the sky. My head on Ana’s shoulder and Ana playing with my hair because she still missed hers so much. “I wish I were going to die with hair,” she said. We watched a mother whale teach her baby to breach in near silence.
“Do you think those are Sylvia’s whales?” I asked her.
Ana chuckled. “All the whales on this island are Sylvia’s.”
It made me sad to think that Chuck didn’t know who Sylvia was. It made me sad to think he was at the bar right now, making things worse. His confusion was exhausting. As was his jealousy. In a stripped and grainy voice, I told her, “My husband is jealous of you.”