Chapter 9 Not That Different
Bridget is seventy, with bouncy brown hair and naturally pink cheeks. She wears pearls around her neck and sends her clothes out to the dry cleaner’s, and she owns thirty pairs of slacks. As soon as I told her about my blood pressure, she pointed to the automatic machine in her room for me to take it again.
“How about this one?” she asks while holding an outfit on a hanger.
“You wore pink a lot last week,” I tell her.
What I don’t tell her is Wilma was wearing a pink shirt when I saw her watering her lawn this morning and they already look alike as it is.
“Oh, that’s right. Maybe green? I really like the way it brings out your skin tone.”
She’s the queen of compliments. “I think it’d suit you too, B.”
I’m happy to be able to hide in her room until the end of my shift. My coworkers pulled out their phones this morning, asking, “This your man? Damn, girl. Isn’t he worth millions? Why are you working here?” But regardless, it always feels nice when the rooms on my list are taken care of and I can come hang with Bridget until someone needs me. Out on the floor, I ache to be in the shop, pouring oils and crinkling up flowers to add to glass jars instead of changing bedsheets and picking up wet rags from the carpet. But Bridget tells me to sit on her couch when my feet hurt and she can tell I’m not feeling good without me saying it.
My blood pressure is higher than it was earlier: 155/98, and I’ve been awake only a few hours. I write the numbers down in my Notes app, and Bridget turns around to frown at me.
“Not surprised your doctor thinks it’s stress,” Bridget randomly groans. “If you’re a woman, it’s always stress to a doctor who can’t see past it. My doctor has a vagina like everyone else in her office. You should go there. Bet you’d get better care from someone who probably worries enough to wipe front to back.”
I laugh. “Pretty sure most men wipe front to back too, Bridget.”
“You would think that,” she says like she’s had an ill experience that proved otherwise.
“I’ve been with my doctor for years. And he does seem to care,” I say, then realize I’m not entirely sure if that felt true during our visit this morning. “But I’ll certainly keep that in mind.” I point to the mint-green outfit Bridget laid out on the bed. “That one is going to be perfect for today.”
“You think he’ll be watching from wherever he is?” she asks about her ex-husband, who is not her late husband. He’s very much still alive but left her twenty-seven years ago for another woman while they were traveling through Costa Rica. Bridget has made a tradition of mourning their marriage.
“He’ll think you’re a hottie,” I say.
She’s heading out soon to lay flowers on the plot she bought for said ex, whose body is doing what living bodies do in a different country. The words It was a marriage while it lasted are written across his black slate tombstone. I think the most cathartic part is that her eldest son goes with her once a month, and he too speaks at his father’s grave with a champagne flute in his hand to toast with his mother. This is the same son I see visiting Wilma’s house sometimes, though to avoid causing tension I’ve never asked if Bridget knows he does. But after my ridiculous dream, I’m more curious about the reason two people would abandon a lifelong relationship, and I can’t help myself from asking, “So, do you think you’ll ever talk to your sister again?”
“Who?”
“Bridget!”
She laughs, then shrugs one shoulder. “Possibly when we’re on our deathbeds. Though I should make her a tombstone too. I’m sure we’ll both hold on for eternity so that one of us doesn’t die before the other.” Her mouth curves into something like a smile. “You’re desperate to know what happened between the two of us, aren’t you?”
“Definitely yes.”
She nods, then: “Help me with these buttons, and I’ll tell you a very boring story.”
The story goes: Once upon a time, a woman named Penelope raised her two granddaughters. She made sure they were properly dressed, that they could cook but also build a desk without the help of a man. When she died, she left more insurance money than two twentysomethings knew what to do with and the house she spent so many years loving them in. The younger of the two, Bridget, didn’t linger in her grief, didn’t care when a lawyer mentioned selling her grandmother’s house, was ready to live. So Bridget left her older sister, Wilma, who decided not to sell the house, and traveled the world with her lover, later turned shitty husband, David. All the while, Wilma expressed her hurt by berating Bridget over reckless decisions, and the two stopped talking after arguing on the phone (Bridget was sipping a fine mojito on a beach in a foreign country; Wilma had just caught a splinter in her big toe from the old hardwood floor in their grandmother’s passed-down house). When David left his wife and the two kids they made while traveling, Bridget decided to come back to Rhode Island, where she started an insurance company with the money that remained. The two sisters never got in contact, even after Wilma was severely injured in an accident that meant she’d walk with a cane forever. Because somehow it was easier to feed the distance and let it grow than face the fact that they should’ve fought harder to stick together.
There’s a flurry of feeling in my chest when Bridget finishes, my voice is waterlogged when I thank her for telling me. Suddenly, a different part of their relationship has been revealed and I’m not sure how to feel just yet. Especially about Wilma. A thought hits to drag Bridget back to my street, force them to speak, but my mom would tell me to mind my business. Except, it also makes me think of Issac and I briefly wonder if I should tell him I’m worried that our physical distance might be causing an emotional one too.
While I’m adjusting Bridget’s shirt, she pokes my chest with her pointer finger.
“Ouch,” I say. “When’s the last time you clipped those sharp claws?”
She ignores my question. “You’re worried about ancient history between me and my dear sister, but you didn’t tell me about your beautiful fiancé, Issac Jordan,” she says.
I should’ve expected it from Bridget, who uses social media more than me and knows all the gossip in this hotel. But my stomach jumps at the word fiancé. “We are not engaged. One hundred percent not my fiancé.” For all the nonanswers I’ve given people since yesterday, it feels good to be sure of something I can say.
“That’s too bad.” Bridget smiles. “He’s the hottie, and you’d look beautiful in a gown. You could even wear my grandmother’s diamond earrings for something blue.”
I laugh, fix her shirt collar, feeling touched. “That’s really sweet, Bridget.”
“My question is, does he know how hard you work here?” She straightens out her pants and looks at herself in the mirror. “I love seeing you, but a man with money…letting you work two jobs the way you do? He sounds like David, and who would want a David?”
“And you sound like my coworkers,” I say, catching her eyes in the mirror and fighting the urge to defend Issac, who is definitely not a David. I wish I could tell her he made it all up just to make sure my future involves doing something I love. And if Issac knew we are usually working short-staffed, and how exhausted I really am, he’d never want me to work another shift here in my life. But I shake my head.
“That’s old-fashioned, Bridget. I can make my own money. I want to make my own money. You did it. Without David and did it well.”
“You make your own money too,” she says. “But it seems like he’s supportive of your business. Why wouldn’t he offer to help you with it? What are partners for if not to help?”
Oh.There’s a smile on her face and it has me wondering if she has a feeling that Issac did what he did on purpose. She’s a smart woman, very perceptive, and she might just be trying to get juice out of me. I keep my mouth shut and start fastening her bracelets.
“Fine,” she says, “keep the story to yourself, even though I told you my sordid past. But at the very least tell me you brought more of your mother’s lotion. It smells like heaven, and Lord knows I need to smell something other than the literal shit I smell walking in the hall because the man in room 1010 keeps clogging the toilet.”
My gum gets lodged in my throat when I laugh. Bridget taps my back, but I’ve already swallowed it. Moments like this remind me she and Wilma have more in common than even I’d like to admit.
“I’ll get some for you when I leave here,” I say, “and you’re foul sometimes.”
“At least I don’t smell foul,” Bridget says.