She hangs up and immediately turns to her computer. In a flurry, she signs into her personal e-mail and finds the note from Eloise; she doesn’t bother rereading it, she just clicks reply. Flexing her fingers, she types furiously, punishing the keys: Yes. Absolutely. Count me in. Xo. A. Send.
Alice watches the e-mail vanish into the ether, then she leans back in her chair and breathes. She glances around the corner of her cube to see if she can spot Jonathan; he’s on the phone. Beyond him, smog wraps around the shoulders of the Hollywood Hills. She fantasizes for an instant about what he’d look like dressed as Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Shit, she thinks. She sent that e-mail too quickly. The way Eloise had reached out to her had been so precise and charming, filled with just enough anglicisms to remind Alice that she lived in London (colour, theatre, aubergine), while coming across as only mildly pretentious or phony. She’d even told her to bring a date, for Christ’s sake. And how had Alice replied? With five words. Not even a complete fucking sentence; just a string of brutish fractals.
She opens a new window and begins to type. Dearest Eloise, she writes. Please forgive me. But then—no. God, no. That sounds like she fucking killed someone. Try again. She cracks her knuckles. My apologies, dear sister. “Dear sister.” Too Little House on the Prairie. And also, Paul was right: she is their half sister. She’s not good at this; she doesn’t think in platitudes. Eloise, look, I’m sorry. I was yelling at Paul, who was being very Paul. She holds down the delete button again. Throwing Paul under the bus—now she’s just being a traitor. She snaps both her fingers together and blinks, trying to will herself into inspiration. But then, reaching for the keyboard once again, she catches a glimpse of the time, bold and angular in the left-hand corner of the screen: 2:45.
She’s going to be late.
*
The Healing Women’s Grieving Group meets on Tuesdays at three o’clock, in the basement of a community center near Robertson and Melrose. It sounds drabber than it is, Alice tells herself as she circles the parking lot at ten past three, searching for a space. Last year, the city renovated the center; men were hired to paint over the graffiti and update its utilities and install oceanic-themed steel cutouts along its fa?ade: zigzaggy waves hiding the gutters on the roof, a dolphin leaping over the front door. It all combines to create a sort of early aughts, South Orange County aesthetic (all the lettering’s done in stainless steel; there’s an enthusiastic embrace of both teal and purple), but still, despite her taste, she finds it charming. She pulls her Camry into a spot in a far corner of the lot, next to a utility shed. And besides, she thinks as she grabs her purse and locks up, they have free food. Weak coffee and these cheap butter cookies that she’d never be caught dead eating in public, but that here, in the community center, she devours by the handful. It’s fine. I’m allowed. I’m grieving.
“Oh, gosh,” she says. The door to the basement slams shut behind her, and she can hear its metallic echo bouncing up the staircase. The women in the group have already arranged themselves into a rough elliptical (“the healing circle”), and each of them turns to look at her. “I’m so sorry I’m late. There was … traffic. On Santa Monica.”
The group’s leader, a postmenopausal Diane Keaton–ish figure named Karen, smiles. “It’s fine, Alice. We were just getting started.” In one hand she holds a steaming cardboard cup; with her free hand, she points to an empty folding chair. “We’ve saved a place for you.”
Alice mouths thank you and bows shallowly. She immediately regrets doing this—the whole namaste bowing thing. She always does, and yet she can’t seem to stop. Whenever she wanders into somewhere vaguely metaphysical—a one-off yoga class, a high-end spa in Brentwood, grieving groups—she finds herself hinging over, bowing. It’s a weird, uncontrollable affectation, and a phony one, at that. It’s not that she actually believes bowing to be some transcendental sign of respect—she doesn’t. Rather, it’s more a matter of fear of getting found out, she figures. Like if she doesn’t bow, these women will see her for the person she really is: someone who doesn’t buy into the healing power of groups, or crystals, or kelp facials; someone who’s here because her brother begged her to go; someone who suddenly wants a stiff whiskey-soda, light—very light—on the soda.
“Okay,” Karen says, once Alice is seated. “Now, where were we?”
She’s acting ridiculously, though, she thinks, glancing around her. It’s not like any of these women are hiking into the Himalayas to discover their own inherent Zen anytime soon, either. They’re professional, stylish, put-together. Save the dark circles beneath the eyes of the blonde sitting next to her, or the puffy cheeks of the new redhead across the circle, they look, for the most part, like her: educated and reasonable; healthy, save a few secret weekend vices; the unlucky targets of random tragedies.
The women collectively stare into their cardboard cups. Someone’s phone, lost in the depths of a purse pocket, buzzes against a set of keys. Struggling with the silence, Karen ventures an answer to her own question.
“Right,” she says. “The opening mantra.”
Karen stands and takes the limp hands of the women on either side of her, and, after a bit of gentle prodding, the rest of the group follows suit, standing and forming a loose ring of ambivalence and sweaty palms.
Karen says, “Good. Now, let’s begin.” She breathes in and closes her eyes. “This is whole and complete. That is whole and complete. This and that are whole and complete.”
With each clause, another voice joins her …
“From wholeness comes wholeness.”
… until the room reverberates with a sort of morbid, spoken symphony. Alice mouths the last sentence of the mantra—When a portion of wholeness is removed, that which remains continues to be whole—but she can’t bring herself to say the actual words.
“Peace,” Karen sighs. “Peace, peace, peace.”
Alice glances around her: heads are bowed, and eyes are still closed. There’s one exception: the new redhead stares back at her. She raises an eyebrow and risks a smile. Alice grins back before Karen instructs the women to sit back down.
She retrieves a clipboard from beneath her chair and slips on a set of wireless frames, perching them on the end of her nose.
“Before we get started, I’d like to take a moment to make just a few announcements.”