The folding chairs creak as a few of the women shift their weight. Footsteps thunder from upstairs, where the center’s staff prepares for a birthday party. Alice tears at a cuticle.
“I’ll start with the most … well, the saddest,” Karen says. “I got a call from Valerie Gonzales this morning. Her husband, Richard, finally passed last night. Stomach cancer, I think most of you will remember. She seems to be doing about as well as one might expect, but she did say that she wants us all to know that…” Her eyes fall to the clipboard. “That … she really cherishes the support that we’ve been able to provide her through this … this difficult time, and that she hopes to be back in a few weeks or so.” She adds: “The funeral’s scheduled for this Friday, at St. James Episcopal on Wilshire.”
There are murmurs of condolence. Alice nods solemnly. She wonders if any of the other women are secretly thinking the same thing that she is, or if she’s alone in counting Karen’s grim announcements as the most therapeutic part of the weekly meeting. It’s not that she wishes ill on any of the women sitting around her—that’s not it at all, is it? No. Of course it isn’t. She likes Valerie Gonzales. Really likes her, actually. And yet, here Alice is, finding acute, Germanic comfort in the fact that Valerie’s husband has just died. While her luck has been shit, for someone else it’s been shittier.
She keeps nodding, and wonders if it’s possible to feel spectacularly better and worse about herself at the same time.
“Okay, then.” Karen flips to the next page on her clipboard. “Alice,” she says.
A radio voice trickles down from upstairs. L.A.’s number-one station for hits from the eighties, nineties, and today.
“Yes?”
“It’s your turn to share.”
“Didn’t I just share last week?”
“You last shared in February.”
“And wasn’t that last week?”
Alice strains to hear the first three chords of the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.”
Karen says gently, “Today’s May seventeenth.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Alice.” Karen leans forward. She crosses her knees and rests her elbows on her thighs. “If you want to conquer your grief, you’ve got to let it speak.”
The song rattles on. Robert Smith wails.
“I just feel like whenever my grief speaks it bores people,” Alice says.
Karen frowns. “I don’t think that’s true. We’re here for you,” she says. “We’re here for each other.”
The woman seated to the right of Alice—a bottle blonde called Beth—squeezes her knee. From the rest of the circle, she’s offered nine variations of the same weak smile. The redhead arches an eyebrow.
Alice stands and flattens out the wrinkles from her jeans and blouse. She clears her throat. “All right. Okay.”
Karen folds her hands across her lap, and Alice tries picturing her as Kay Adams, or Annie Hall, or Nina Banks from Father of the Bride. She imagines her wearing a white turtleneck, drinking a glass of merlot in the middle of some fabulous kitchen. Big bay windows. Countertops of reclaimed wood and white swirling marble. Basil growing on the windowsill. Bowls full of fruit that’s actually meant to be eaten.
“I had a miscarriage,” Alice says. “I was at the end of my second trimester, and I had a miscarriage.”
She begins to sit down again, but Karen asks, “When?”
Alice wants to not hate this woman; she wants to trust her, to be guided by her, but right now all she can think of is throwing Karen clear off a high overpass onto the 405. She’s just doing her job, Alice tries telling herself. Even though she knows the answers to her own goddamned questions, she’s just doing her job. It’s all part of the process: explore your grief until you’re the one telling the story, instead of the story telling you. She had read the brochures, had spoken to former members; she had signed up for this.
“It’ll be six years this September.” Alice sighs.
Beth squeezes Alice’s knee again, and when she slides her hand away, Alice wonders if she could ask her to keep it there a little bit longer.
She’d been living in Mexico City, she explains to the group. For a little over a year. Ever since she graduated from UCLA with a double major in Cinema & Media Studies and Spanish. (She leaves out details that she deems unimportant: That she’d gone to UCLA because she hadn’t gotten in to Stanford or Pomona. That she spent the first year and a half sulking about it, making friends selectively with other undergrads who had been relegated to their safety school, trying unsuccessfully to transfer to those two other institutions that didn’t want anything to do with her. That it wasn’t until she took a survey course in Latin American film, during the spring of her sophomore year, when things began to turn around. After watching Cuarón’s Sólo con tu pareja in a darkened lecture hall, Los Angeles seemed to open up to her; the streets and palm-lined boulevards now unfurled themselves in ways that seemed beautiful and chaotic, as opposed to crowded and unorganized.)
“I was lucky,” she says. “At school I joined the Latin American Film Society and met a rich kid from Mexico City. A Chilango. His uncle knew a woman who ran a small production company. Banditas, it was called. Their distribution arm was looking for an assistant. Someone who could eventually help them leverage the American market.”
The women nod; they understand. This is Los Angeles.
She had taken to D.F. immediately. She got an apartment in La Condesa, a big alcove studio right off Calle de Durango, a five-minute walk from the Parque México. She liked the messy energy of the place, how it straddled a thin line between progress and disaster, how it couldn’t decide what to do with, or how to treat, the European echoes that Cortés had left behind. She spent her weekends in the Bosque de Chapultepec, reading magazines in the shadow of the old castle, lying to the odd American tourists who approached her for directions, telling them in a halting English that she didn’t speak their language. In the afternoons, if the weather was nice and if the smog wasn’t stinging her eyes too badly, she’d buy a torta from a street vendor (she only got sick twice, and she never once was kidnapped, despite Paul’s incessant predictions) and sit at the base of the Monumento a la Independencia, where she’d watch quincea?era parties pose for pictures along the flanks of long pink limousines. Fourteen-year-old boys wearing ill-fitting tuxes who reached into the girls’ loud gowns, through folds of tulle and lace and silk, so they could grab a handful of flesh.