Bucky quoting Buddha! And I’m the shopping cart with a bum wheel going around in circles. No amount of muscle or determination can break me free. Ivy standing there at the airport, her silence an affirmation that I was the raft and it was time to put me down.
It’s obvious why she did it: Bucky’s world is built on exclusion. The price of admission is slavish loyalty. After Ivy had exposed the truth about their marriage, it was him or me.
Insight!
Violet once told me, “Change is the goal. Insight is the booby prize.” She was right, of course.
I don’t want insight. I want my sister back.
I’m sorry, Eleanor, Ivy says to me when she drifts in for her three a.m. hauntings, Joe slumbering peacefully by my side. It was a sickening choice I had to make. Always know I do see you for who you are. You are my family. I miss you too.
Then I wake up in a sweat, ditched, a monster gutted of both softness and strength, of every good quality I ever possessed. The next morning I return to my daily life, which is just a mock-up of daily life because of my secret shame: I’ve been reduced to a thing that misses Ivy.
I touched the empty bench at my side, something I find myself doing when I ache for my sister.
The comfort, the thrill to have her sitting beside me. To again have a sister who “always came by,” as Spencer had put it. Just imagining Ivy’s flesh and her limbs, something within me rose up, the Flood girls one again, ready to conquer the world.
“Excuse me?” It was Timby. He’d cracked the door and poked his head through. “Can you name three countries in Europe?”
“Spain, France, and Luxembourg.”
Timby gave me the thumbs-up and closed the door.
I started with a new shrink this week. I told him the tale of the Troubled Troubadour, the one I’d been perfecting all those sleepless nights. In it, Bucky was the villain, I the victim, Ivy the pawn. It was so dispassionate it might have been told by a third party. (The Trick strikes again!) The shrink suggested that the worst thing a person can experience is being on the receiving end of “hatred and misunderstanding.”
“What if there were something even worse?” I asked him. “Hatred and understanding?”
Everything Bucky had said about me at the airport that day. None of it was wrong.
Would you like to sample a nutty Gouda? Sorry, Joyce Primm, you’re selling cheese because you wanted the real story of my life but I’d already drawn an X through it.
I raised my face.
The colors of the dusty light were the colors of autumn, the colors of the ’70s: orange, mustard, brown, olive. The stained glass looked more inspired by Peter Max or Milton Glaser than Christianity. A hand holding a dove. The word joy in sock-it-to-me font. The one depiction of Jesus had him with ropy rainbow hair like the Bob Dylan album cover. Mom came home one Sunday beaming with optimism because the choir had sung “Day by Day” from Godspell and the priest had announced that from then on, women would be allowed to wear pants to church. She would be dead within the year.
Daddy used to call the three of us “my girls.” Mom called the two of us “my girls.” What a dishonor to them both, the shameful estrangement of the Flood girls now.
Building a wall around Ivy, Bucky, and the shambles of the past: it seemed like the only solution at the time. And for years, it had worked. Kinda! But today the wall buckled.
I stood up. My heart was as heavy as an asteroid.
I’d turn fifty in May. My accomplishments? To most people, they’d be the stuff of pipe dreams. Everything I’d set out to achieve in this lifetime, I’d done, with grace to spare. Except loving well the people I loved the most.
It was time to try something else. What, though?
Alonzo and Timby were on their feet, an intense playful energy bouncing between them.
“Where did it go?” Alonzo said. “Wait, there it is!”
“Where?” Timby jumped up and down.
Alonzo reached behind Timby’s ear and pulled out a quarter. “There it is! It ain’t right!”
Timby grabbed the coin from his hand.
“It ain’t right!” Alonzo said, and turned to me. “Any luck?”
“No luck at all,” I said.
Together the three of us squinted into the afternoon sun. We headed back down the path toward the car.
The Twelve Step meeting had broken up. Several addicts hung around drinking coffee and smoking. I approached.
“Hi,” I said. “I want to apologize again for interrupting.”
“Pobody’s nerfect,” the vested man said.
The fragile woman watched me warily and sipped her coffee. She drank out of a Color Me Mine special. There was no mistaking the mug’s thickness and sloppy glaze job.
I thought I was hallucinating.
“Can I see the other side of your mug?” I asked.
She turned it: a childish rendering of a walking stick and the word Daddy.
With Timby’s backward Y.
“Joe,” I said. “He was here.”
All eyes quickly looked away.