Chapter 64
The weirdest thing happens. And that thing is … nothing. It’s not Sunday. Maybe we’ve all seen too many movies, but having a massive climax of hashed-out beef really made us think it would end right then and there.
But it doesn’t.
Unbelievably, this otherworldly experience that once seemed impossible to believe has become a fact.
It’s like when you hear about prisoners who find ways to be fulfilled despite their captivity.
There’s a peace and acceptance that’s been missing from my life, and as I talk to the others, it’s been missing from theirs too.
Austin’s jerking from one town to the next, chasing a past that can never be rewritten.
Matt’s turbulent life and its inherent stress, the way it conflicts with his values.
Sammie’s unrest and chaos. My high-pressure, passion-killing career.
What we’d had in life before coming this weekend was not peace or acceptance.
It was a passive resignation of climbing onward but never feeling like enough.
Instead of fighting it and trying so damn hard, we sort of take a pause and allow the time to pass. Or not pass, depending on how you look at it.
And what begins to happen feels an awful lot like those long, endless summers when we were kids. Life on island time.
In the mornings, someone makes coffee and usually gets bagels or cooks.
One of us gets to eat that day’s MoonPie.
Gladys comes by. Sammie and I have started going down to the beach to tan, which usually we’re too conscious of the long-term ramifications of to do anymore.
We’ve been catching up. She told me about the millions of lives she’s lived in the last few years.
I see her chaos now as a vibrant way to be, and something you can only do when you’re young and full of energy.
Can only do if you’re brave and full of hope.
I tell her about the disastrous dates and the celebrity guests and the meals at the restaurant.
I even see my own stress differently now.
Describing it this way and looking at it in the rearview, the anguish and stress have already sunk to the bottom, allowing the amazing, lucky, earned success to be filled, too, with incredible moments.
I’m realizing that even the hardest times in life get the rose-colored-glasses treatment if only you can actually allow them to become the past.
Matt and Nora come down with us sometimes, sometimes they stay inside and read or play Hi Ho!
Cherry-O—the same one from our childhood.
One Saturday, Matt finds a bottle of Veuve in the bottom of the pantry, and we realize we could have been having that every night too. We add it to the daily routine.
What I’d forgotten about this kind of love is that it creates a culture.
A micro-civilization with its own rules and laws and patterns and jokes and language.
It’s as if I’ve been in a foreign country, maybe even on an unfamiliar planet, for so long that I had started to forget what shaped me.
But as we get more and more comfortable together, close again, able to give each other shit and tease and chat for hours, I remember that I was once fluent here and I knew my way around.
I didn’t know where I was going back then, but I knew where I was, and that I was a part of something solid and certain.
During the storm, we play cards or Scrabble, we chat about movies and TV—Matt and I had both devoured this soap opera called Brilliance and excitedly shared theories about why we think it ended.
Sort of our Twin Peaks. Harrison comes by, and now Sammie lets him in.
He hangs out with us the whole day sometimes, or she goes into town with him.
Either way, by the end of the night, she’s all smiles.
When the doorbell rings at night, we all ignore it. Sammie fighting every urge in her to go answer Johnny’s call. But she’s getting better at it. She even breathes now.
Austin and I are just like kids again, always stealing little moments alone and getting laughed at by the others. It’s … honestly, bliss.
Lightning strikes.
Eventually we sleep.
And then we wake up and do it all over again.
Until one morning, when I wake up, and I feel something different.
The day starts as it, literally, always does, but the weird feeling in my chest doesn’t go away. It’s something in me, a desire, a want. A hunger.
I realize by midafternoon, after Gladys has come by but before Harrison, that I am itching to cook.
Austin and I take a trip to the grocery store. A picture of domestic bliss.
Hand in hand, we walk down the old, familiar aisles of Lawson’s, pulling everything we want off the shelves. Usually I have trouble deciding, and once I land on something, I make it as complicated as I can. It’s never just pasta with red sauce, is it? It’s handmade bucatini with confit.
Not today. Today, I feel a million miles from the person who bought those ingredients all those Saturdays ago.
If something looks good, we pick it up and put it in the basket.
Watermelon, corn in the husk, vibrant green cilantro, a block of feta, about three other kinds of cheese.
Popcorn. A bottle of fresh cream, a hunk of fresh bread, butter the color of marigolds.
Bulbs of garlic with streaks of purple in their paper.
Juicy lemons and limes. Vanilla bean I smell before I find.
Ten random jars of local spices. A jar of pickled carrots from someone’s local garden.
It costs hundreds of dollars, but I shrug and say, “It comes and goes,” as I hand over my card.
He stops me, hands his own over to the cashier. He winks, and says, “I invested well.”
To which I ask, “Wait, are you rich?”
“Thanks so much,” he says to the cashier. “Sorry about her, she’s from New York.”
“I am not, I’m from here,” I correct, and then we go out into the rain and back to the car, where, gleefully, I ask him how much money he has in the way you can only do when you’ve known someone as long and as well as I have known Austin James.
Back at the house, I find Babe’s stash of aprons and hand them out to everyone and start assigning tasks.
We listen to records, from old obscure eighties to crackling Hawaiian ones, even a Christmas album when Austin asks Nora to help him pick out the next one.
Sammie harvests tomatoes and herbs and citrus from the backyard in a big basket and then chops them up, as expertly as Babe would have done. Matt puts himself in charge of making a batch of margaritas, having found the Vitamix in the cabinets and a bottle of mezcal in our purchases.
I don’t measure a single thing. I don’t even know what I’m cooking at first. It’s like I’m guided by some food god or Remy in a chef’s hat or something. All I know is that I want this chopped, that rinsed, this pureed.
At one point, I take Nora out with an umbrella to the alley in the garden, and show her the smells of the different herbs. She memorizes them immediately.
Over the course of the next two hours, the house gets warmer from the heat of the stove and starts to plume with the harmonious aroma of ingredients born to be together.
There is nothing better than salt, garlic, butter, and onion cooking in a pan.
Each perfect in their own right, but so much better when they combine.
I mix together roasted, fresh, and sauteed garlic with a dash of white wine, some cream, and flour—not even thinking about Babe’s garlic sauce. And of course. That’s how I figure it out, after attempting all those days ago.
I make a creamy tomato basil soup with grilled cheese sandwiches, a salad of freshly roasted corn, juicy watermelon, more tomatoes, cucumber, cilantro, and feta with a spicy watermelon vinaigrette.
It goes beautifully with Matt’s watermelon mezcal margaritas—which he thankfully made way too much of.
I spread the garlic sauce on the bread of the sandwiches and drop it in the center of the tomato soup.
Sammie lights every candle on the porch and we eat with the music cranked up loud. We laugh and argue and form perfect bites to share with each other.
Austin tells me it’s the best tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich he’s ever had—a record previously held by his Irish cousin, Cillian.
We don’t clean up the kitchen. Matt jokes that it’ll just be clean in the morning anyway.
I’m not so sure. The reason I’m not bothering is not because of the time loop. It’s because it’s not as important to me that everything be spotless, like it was a few days ago.
Nora discovers an iPod and asks what it is, and then we gather in the living room, spending hours picking songs on it.
It was out-of-date even when we were teenagers, but we had loaded it with our music anyway, all of us wanting to share music with Babe the way she shared her records with us.
In the end, it ended up with about sixty gigabytes of all our favorite songs.
At one point Sammie stands up on one of the chairs and says, “Who’s going to give me bangs?”
“I am,” says Matt, immediately.
I want to say that it’s a huge mistake. But that’s old Didion.
“Do it!” I say instead.
She laughs. “Why not, right? They’ll just grow back tomorrow.”
“And if they don’t?” Austin asks, amused.
She looks at Matt. “Then they better look good.”
They run off into the kitchen to find the scissors.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say they look like they’re sixteen again,” Austin says, warmly.
I feel a wave of fondness as I remember him at sixteen. Fearless and, yes, probably much gawkier than I remember him being. I pull his face toward mine and kiss him.
The other two come out cooing at the sight of us.
They actually cut the bangs, and despite how many margaritas he’s had, Matt does a pretty good job.
Even so, Sammie screams at the sight of herself—her hair has always been precious, she was one of those children who cried if anyone tried to cut it—and at first I worry she’ll be upset, but then she laughs so hard she falls on the ground and I decide to make popcorn.
We reminisce about the past some, remembering when Austin did an accidental belly flop after miscalculating off the high dive at the indoor pool at the athletic club.
When Matt watched Suits and then we put together in real time that that is why he became a lawyer.
I remember when Sammie found Babe’s vibrator and asked what it was in front of everyone.
And unfortunately, everyone remembers the time I accidentally texted all of them something I had really only meant to send to Austin.
I even stand up at one point, taking center stage the way I never do anymore, and tell a story. I did the voices and everything. It’s one of those nights that cannot be forced, where we laugh until our stomachs seize and we cry, and in Sammie’s case, nearly pee ourselves.
Without it feeling sappy or like something we should do, we talk about Babe.
Her food, of course. Her music—she loved Kate Bush and Fleetwood Mac, and none of us can hear either without thinking of her.
Her style. How she never shied away from anything any of us told her, no matter how embarrassing or silly.
She treated us all like adults—for better or worse.
Matt mentions how much she hated to be embarrassed.
“Did she?” I ask.
And everyone agrees so wholeheartedly that I’m surprised.
“Where do you think you get it?” asks Sammie.
She’s teasing me, but then she says, sadly, “So much of her reasoning for wanting to die this way was the with dignity part. She kept saying she didn’t want us to see her when she was so far gone, didn’t want to be remembered that way.
I know that the disease is hell. But I think that she didn’t want to be …
a sick person. Didn’t want to need anything from anyone. ”
Sammie could just as well be talking about me, and we’re all aware of it.
So much of the distance I put between us all was to do with feeling deeply embarrassed. How embarrassing.
She backpedals a little. “At least that’s what it seemed like from the conversations toward the end.”
Amazingly, this doesn’t tank the night. Somehow, a few minutes later, we’re all laughing again, even though the realization about me and my mother would ring in my ears for a long time to come.
We carry on until it’s very, very late—though we don’t know what time it is, only stopping when Sammie falls asleep, Disney princess–like on the couch, her arms folded under her chin, Babe’s old witch hat from the garage still on her head from when she retrieved it earlier.
“I’ll take her up. Getting tired too. I don’t know what time it is, but the sun is starting to come up, and I think that’s my cue,” says Matt, just as he had done with Nora hours before. “See you guys tomorrow.”
He leads her upstairs, and she goes with him, body drooping contentedly, leaning so completely on his in a way I don’t think mine has ever done on anyone.
“Want to go to bed?” asks Austin. Never gets old, getting to answer that question together.
I nod, and we turn everything off. For a moment, I stop and linger in the den. Look at the casket for a long moment, and then turn back to Austin.
Once upstairs, I see Matt shutting the doors to Babe’s room.
He whispers, “She wanted to sleep in there.”
I wait for this to feel weird, but then it doesn’t.
Matt says goodnight again, and then goes into his bedroom.
I look up at Austin. He understands implicitly, though I don’t say a word. He leans down and kisses me gently before saying, “Goodnight, Red.”
And then I go into Babe’s room. As soon as I do, Sammie lifts her messy-haired head.
She smiles sleepily. “You came.”
I grin back and crawl onto the familiar mattress, flopping down on the pillow next to her. “Of course I did.”