15 The Standard Advice
15
THE STANDARD ADVICE
Teddy
On break between sessions, I flew home to take care of a few things. Namely making sure Karlie was actually going to be out of my apartment before I returned for good at the end of the summer, and accompanying my sister to her first therapy appointment.
The Karlie part was anticlimactic. I’d texted her a couple days before I was set to arrive, saying I’d be in town and wanted to chat. When I got to my apartment, I found it empty. There was a bottle of bourbon on the kitchen island with a note in her familiar loopy handwriting that said, “Thanks for letting me (over) stay.”
Well, that had been easy. Unnervingly easy.
I didn’t have an Instagram account, but I went to a browser and checked out hers. She hadn’t posted for a week, which was unlike her.
Now I was officially worried. I FaceTimed her.
“I thought you were staying till the end of August,” I said when she picked up. I’d just wanted to make sure we were on track for that. I’d been planning to offer to hire movers if need be. “You didn’t have to vacate immediately.”
“I kind of did, though.” She smiled fondly. “That’s the problem with you; you’re too nice.”
“You’re the only person in the world who has ever said or thought that.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t let people know you, not really. Not anyone but your sister, anyway. And maybe Scott.” She quirked an eyebrow. She and I had not spoken about the band’s demise, but presumably she’d read about it.
“Yeah, I thought I might try to make up with Scott, but I think I’m gonna leave it.”
“That sounded like a question. Are you looking for my opinion?”
Why not? “Sure.”
“You outgrew him. You outgrew the band. Maybe he did, too. It sucks, but it happens.”
“You got all this wisdom since I last saw you. What are you up to? You have a place to stay?”
“I have a new project.” She set the phone down, stepped back, and pulled the shirt she was wearing—an oversize men’s button-down—tight over her… pregnant belly.
“Holy shit!”
She came back to the phone, laughing. “I can see you doing panic math there, but dude, I’m only five months along, and you and I haven’t had sex in almost a year.”
“I know, I know. I’m just surprised.”
“You and me both.”
“Not that it’s any of my business, but is everything good with the father?”
“Yeah, yeah. He’s great. But it’s been… interesting. This wasn’t planned, but we decided to go for it, both in terms of the kid and the relationship. He’s excited about the baby—he’s really cute about it, actually—but he doesn’t want any of it on social media. Like, any of it. Not the pregnancy, and not the kid once it’s here.”
“Sounds like a smart guy.”
“He is. It’s caused me to have to seriously think about why I do what I do—or maybe did what I did. Was influencing about the money? Or was it something else? Attention?”
“And what did you conclude?”
“I don’t know yet. But it was easy enough to take a step back, at least initially, because I had bad morning sickness.”
“So this guy is treating you well.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m happy.” She paused. “I know it seems fast.”
“It doesn’t seem fast.”
It did seem fast. But maybe that was how it happened sometimes, when it was right. “I guess I was never Mr. Right.”
“It’s not that. Well, maybe you weren’t Mr. Right for me. It’s more that I always thought relationships were supposed to be hard,” she went on. “You hear that, you know? Like, marriage takes work, or whatever. But maybe that’s not actually true. Maybe when it’s right, it’s not that hard.” She snorted. “Though I am rethinking my entire career path and identity, so maybe relationships are hard.”
“Maybe that’s not hard so much as it is an overdue reckoning.”
“‘Overdue reckoning,’” she said thoughtfully. “That’s a good phrase. That should be the name of your next band.”
I chuckled. “I actually think I’m going to put out a solo record.” But wait. What was this “I actually think” equivocation? I tried again. “I am going to put out a solo record.”
“Good for you. You must be having a good summer, then.”
“I’m having… a really interesting summer.” And it was only half-over. I was surprisingly excited to go back for the second half, though at the same time, the prospect was daunting. I wasn’t sure I could take another month of such intense creative and personal upheaval. “I made a lot of progress, chilled out a bit,” I finished, keeping things purposefully vague.
She smiled. “I’m glad. You’ve been running yourself ragged for literal years.”
I had been. I could see that now. I thought about what Marion had said to us about the importance of rest.
“So anyway,” Karlie said, “thanks for letting me overstay. I haven’t really been in the apartment in any meaningful way for a couple months. I was more just holding on because I do like having my own space—but of course it was never really my place.”
“Yes it was. It was yours and mine.” I paused, not sure what else I wanted from her but not quite ready to hang up. “We good, Karlie?”
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry I was a shit a lot of the time.”
“Well, it took two to tango.”
“We had some fun, though.”
“We did.”
“Anyway, I gotta go. I’m getting more into the furniture stuff, and I have a potential buyer coming to look at a piece.”
“Bye, Karlie. Take care of yourself.”
“See you around, Teddy.”
Well. Knock me over with a feather. Apparently item one on my list had taken care of itself.
Which left Auden. I was due to see her tonight. What was I going to do with myself in the meantime?
I was going to rest.
I headed for the bedroom. I really did have some fancy-ass sheets.
“How was it?” I asked Auden the next day in the elevator on the way down from her first appointment with a psychologist. I’d offered to accompany her, and she’d wanted me to but asked me to wait in the lobby, which I’d been happy to do.
Well, not happy. More like nervous, worried, consumed with guilt that I hadn’t seen all this shit my sister had been carrying around for so long.
She didn’t answer right away, which was fine. I wasn’t going to push it. I mean, did I desperately want to know everything that had been said? Yes. But I also understood that wasn’t my right, or my role.
She spoke to the taxi driver and exchanged pleasantries with her doorman, but she didn’t speak to me.
We rode the elevator up in silence, and I started to fret that she was mad at me. I wouldn’t blame her. I’d always thought we were close, but I’d missed a hell of a lot.
As soon as I closed her apartment door behind us, she burst into tears.
Auden didn’t cry, generally. She got mad. Maybe sometimes she got a little teary watching a sad movie. But even when we’d been kids and things had been bad , she hadn’t been a crier.
I was having some kind of adrenaline-fueled fight-or-flight response. I felt like we were kids again, at that low point, when we realized Mom was well and truly gone. The worst period of my life. The panic over how to make sure Auden graduated high school. Where we would live. How we’d get money for food.
I took a breath and told myself that we were safe. We had food. We had homes—nice ones with Egyptian cotton sheets and shit. There was nothing to fight, except maybe Auden’s fears, and I didn’t know how to do that. But I could learn. I could rely on her to guide me.
So I opened my arms, and she stepped into them. I didn’t know what to say—I didn’t want to offer false platitudes—so I said, “Remember the lemon tree? The actual tree but also the song?”
“How could I forget?”
“I don’t know. I sometimes don’t know if what I remember is the way it actually went down, or if I’m giving things more importance in retrospect than they actually had.”
“We hated that fucking tree.”
“We did, right?”
She pulled away, wiped her face, and studied mine.
I beckoned her farther inside. We stopped in the kitchen, where I filled two water glasses from the tap and led her to the living room.
“There was a keyboard in my cabin at camp,” I said, “and the first night I got there, ‘Lemon Tree’ came into my mind, and it… got its claws in me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. But I also couldn’t play it. I think I played every other fucking song we sang with Mom back in the day, but I couldn’t play that one.”
I wasn’t sure why I was telling her this. Maybe it was just that I was trying to do what Gretchen said—lean into the bullshit as a way of trying to discharge it. Maybe doing that would help Auden. Show her that it was possible.
“But then the second-to-last day,” I said, “I suddenly played it.”
“And?”
“I don’t know.” Well, that was dumb. I had been there. It was hard to explain, though. But wasn’t that part of the point of the lean-in exercise? Putting to words things that felt ineffable? “It was anticlimactic, but in a good way. It felt like… just a song. I mean, I guess it will never be just a song. But the feelings I used to associate with it felt further away.”
“Why does she still have so much power over us?”
That was the big question. “I don’t know.”
“Over me, anyway,” Auden said. “It sounds like you’re making progress.”
“If I am, it’s accidental. Well, no.” That wasn’t giving credit where credit was due. “It’s more that…”
“What?”
“A friend from camp told me something that resonated with me. She said that when you’re in a situation like we are, where a person, or a memory, or whatever, has a hold on you, you should lean into it.”
“What does that mean?”
“In my case, I thought about those old days. Sang those old songs. The idea is that trying to avoid this stuff only makes it retain its power. But if you face it, you can discharge it.” I shrugged. What did I know? “Maybe?”
“I think that’s basically what the psychologist told me today, though not in exactly those words. And I gather that in my case, the ‘facing it’ part is meant to be slow and controlled and supervised.”
“But you got a good feeling from her? Because if not, you know you can try someone else.”
“I think she’s good. Good enough to get started, anyway. And she recommended a psychiatrist who can prescribe meds, which she thinks is a good idea.”
The relief I felt was massive, but I didn’t want to freak her out, so I just said, “Good.”
“I told her about my past in broad strokes. It was only a quick overview today. But do you think you could…”
Yes. I didn’t even have to know what she was going to ask to know that the answer was yes. But of course I had to let her speak.
“Do you think you could come with me to some of the sessions where I tell her about…”
“… the lemon tree?” I supplied when she trailed off, knowing it stood for all this junk we were talking about.
“Yes. The lemon tree.”
“Name the time, and I’ll be there.” I’d fly in from anywhere. Except Wild Arts. “After August, though. I can’t leave Wild Arts in the lurch.” Apparently, even though I’d started off phoning in my artist-in-residence duties, I was now committed.
She raised an eyebrow. “You can’t leave Wild Arts, or you can’t leave your ‘friend’ you’re hooking up with there? The dancer with the pink hair, right?”
I made a face at her. “I can’t leave Wild Arts. Gretchen isn’t even there for the second session.”
“Gretchen,” Auden said quizzically. “And can I assume Gretchen is also the one who gave you all this sage advice about Mother Dearest?”
“She is,” I said warily. “Was.” I kept having to remind myself that Gretchen was in my past. She’d specifically said we weren’t going to keep in touch, but I still hadn’t absorbed the fact that I would literally never see her again.
“You like her!” Auden said in a singsong voice, teasing me in a juvenile way she never had when we were actual juveniles. I took that as a kind of progress—for both of us. Life had been dead serious, for the most part, when we were kids.
“I do like Gretchen. Did.” I was doing it again. “But not in that way. She was… fun.” That was understating it entirely.
“Fun and wise. Maybe you shouldn’t have let her go.”
“Maybe it wasn’t up to me.” That was as close as I would come to admitting that if more had been on offer, I might have been down with it. Auden was still looking at me with that damned raised eyebrow. “Anyway, I can’t get into something now. Isn’t the standard advice after a breakup—and I’ve essentially had two, if you count Scott, which I kind of think I have to—to take some time for yourself? Be alone for a while?”
“Oh, screw the standard advice.”
“Well, I don’t have Gretchen’s phone number. I don’t know how to get ahold of her,” I said, like this was my only, or main, obstacle.
“OK,” Auden said, backing off in a way I found both uncharacteristic and destabilizing. “I see how it is.”
I suddenly thought about how Karlie had said my next band should be named Overdue Reckoning.
I thought about it on the flight back to camp, too. I was having my overdue emotional reckoning, right? I’d played “Lemon Tree.” Not only alone in my cabin, but in front of Gretchen. We’d sung it together. And I’d grappled with what it meant for my life, what it stood for in terms of acknowledging how much damage my mother had done. I’d decided to let Scott go. I’d written some new songs. Auden had confided in me about her troubles, and we were making a plan to tackle them. I’d made peace with Karlie. When I came back to New York in a month, my apartment would be waiting for me.
That was a hell of a lot of reckoning for a month. I should be happy. Or if not happy, exactly, satisfied. Content with a job well done.
Then why the hell was I so sad?
Sad was a new one for me.
I wondered if that was because sad was subtle. Maybe sad could hide beneath other, bulkier emotions like fear and anger. Emotions that could make a person smash a TV in a Hilton Garden Inn. Maybe I’d finally excavated the sadness that had been under the surface all along?
That didn’t feel quite right, but what the hell did I know? I was a beginner at this emotional shit.