Chapter 23 Sustained Silent Reading
Sustained Silent Reading
How are you doing?” Jack asked when they’d ordered food and settled in with their drinks.
It was a good question, and Blair wasn’t sure how to answer it.
Because she didn’t know how he meant it.
On the surface of things, she was great.
The restaurant was cozy and warm, and Jack’s historic neighborhood, just across the Mississippi River from the Minneapolis skyline, was charming.
She was glad to be here. As she’d told him last fall, a change of scenery could reinvigorate a person.
He repeated the question as he listed toward her and bumped her shoulder with his. “How are you doing?”
“I’m doing OK. I’m happy that Green Light is finally”—she knocked on the table—“happening.”
She was immediately disappointed in herself for treating the question as a mere pleasantry.
She was even more disappointed when he leaned back away so he was properly centered on his own stool. So she tried again. “But… I’m trying to be OK in spite of that or, I don’t know, underneath that.”
She was rewarded when he leaned back over—she didn’t think he was doing it consciously—and rotated so he was half facing her.
“Do you know what hurricane shutters are?” she asked.
“Protection for windows in hurricanes, right?”
“Yes, but it’s more complicated. High wind causes negative pressure when a hurricane whips over your house. When you have broken windows during a storm, the air pressure in the house rises, and the difference in pressure means the roof could collapse.”
“So hurricane shutters don’t just prevent the windows from breaking, they protect the whole house.”
She nodded. “It’s too heavy-handed a metaphor, isn’t it?”
“I think you and I specialize in metaphors that are too heavy-handed, don’t we?”
She smiled, experiencing a wave of affection and appreciation for this man, her unlikely friend and ally. “There was that one time you were stuck on a plane and you couldn’t write your book.”
“Exactly.”
She and Jack had made up, over text. They’d both apologized for how things had gone down in LA. She had shared her diagnoses. She hadn’t been sure how much more she was going to tell him when they reunited in person. He didn’t need to know everything, she’d told herself.
From this vantage point, here on a stool in a cozy, candlelit bar, she couldn’t remember why she had ever thought that.
“What you saw was the third episode in my lifetime of what I always used to call ‘the cyclone.’ I thought of the cyclone as a storm, like in The Wizard of Oz, which in some ways wasn’t wrong, but they were of course panic attacks.
And when I say ‘episode,’ I don’t mean a singular episode, but a period of time—months, generally—when I’ve dealt with them.
The first was when I was a teenager, in the months after my debutante ball, when I was facing all the uncertainty of the future. The second was COVID.”
“When everyone was facing the uncertainty of the future.”
“Right. And then…” How to begin to explain when she was still struggling to grasp it all herself?
“When you were alone for the first time in your life, and Green Light, which had become a huge symbolic thing both because you loved it so much and because Angela died, was falling apart.”
She blew out a breath. “Hey, you should become a therapist if this writing thing doesn’t work out.” He made a face. “I was kidding. It’s going to work out. It is working out.”
“Maybe. But my turn for the shrink’s sofa later.”
“Really?”
He rolled his eyes and made a dismissive gesture, but it was uncharacteristically self-deprecating.
“Anyway,” she went on, “so, generalized anxiety disorder. But OCD, too, as I said. That part is new. Apparently perimenopause can trigger it—lucky me.”
“Perimenopause,” he echoed.
“Yeah. The ten-or-so-year period before my ovaries give up the ghost—although since I don’t need them anymore, I wish they would just hurry up already.
Apparently there’s a lot of hormonal stuff going on.
” Who would have thought, back at the Zoom of Doom, that she’d be sitting in a bar with Jack Branksome talking about the slow death of her reproductive system?
“Anyway, I have this psychologist now who kind of embraced this metaphor of a cyclone, except, in all our talking about my childhood in Savannah, she suggested we change it to a hurricane.”
“Hence the hurricane shutters.”
“Yes. If you want your house to withstand a hurricane, you put up the shutters. It’s a lot of work, and here’s the key: The shutters aren’t just one thing.
Different levels of hurricanes might require different interventions.
Medication, talk therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, which is about redirecting your thoughts. All that hippie-dippy stuff.”
“Doesn’t sound that hippie-dippy to me.”
“Yeah, I guess it could get a lot hippier-dippier. I could be chanting in a circle of crystals.”
“Exactly. Chanting in a circle of crystals is not a proven method for repelling hurricanes.”
Why was he being so nice? She wasn’t sure what to do with this version of Jack.
“What I want to know,” he said, “is why no one ever noticed this.”
“You noticed.”
He dipped his head.
“Well, each successive instance was worse. But I think Mimi knew. I think that’s why she told me to go to LA. She probably didn’t understand exactly what was happening, but she knew I couldn’t stay in Georgia and live the life that was being laid out for me.”
“What did she say to you that day? Will you tell me? I’ve wondered since you told that story.”
Blair had always thought of those words as a gift Mimi had given her, a gift that belonged to her alone.
But here, now, she didn’t mind telling him.
In fact, she wanted to tell him. She wanted him to know her.
He did know her, of course; he was the one who, not to be too melodramatic about it, had saved her—or pushed her to save herself. But she wanted him to know all of her.
“My mother always hosted this massive Independence Day picnic. All our extended family came, and lots of friends. I was sitting with a bunch of people, including my mother and Mimi and two of my mom’s sisters. I was talking about the movie New York Waltz.”
“Directed by Morton Afonso!” Jack exclaimed.
“Yes! I had written a paper about it for school. Which, by the way, I have since fully retracted given what I have learned about Morton Afonso from Mrs. Afonso.
“Anyway, at the time I thought it was a work of great genius, and I was opining on the subject in the self-impressed way only teenagers can.
I was talking about how the movie was filmed on a soundstage in LA made to look like New York City, and I made an offhand remark about how it would be so exciting to live in either of those cities.
“When I was done with my little monologue, one of my aunts ‘whispered’ to my mother, ‘She’s getting above her raising.’ It was one of those stage whispers we were meant to hear.
But we were also meant to pretend we hadn’t.
Not Mimi, though. She just looked at my aunt and said, calmly, but very loudly, ‘I sure as hell hope so, but the jury’s still out. ’”
“Mimi sounds pretty great.”
“She was. Then, later that night, as my dad was taking her home, she hugged me before she got in the car. Mimi wasn’t a hugger.
She didn’t really do physical affection, so it startled me.
But she hugged me tight, and she whispered in my ear, ‘Sometimes a girl has to get above her raisin’.
Go make hay while the sun shines, girl.’”
Jack clapped his hands together, seemingly pleased with Mimi’s instruction. “And you did.”
“I did. I mean, I got lucky. One of the first auditions I went to was a huge cattle call. They were looking for a sidekick for this teen rom-com. I made it through the first cull somehow and at one point was super confused when they had me do a screen test with the romantic lead. What they hadn’t told anyone was that the female lead had gone to rehab and they’d decided to recast her role. ”
“And you got it.”
“Yep. Thus began my run as the queen of the rom-com. The funny part was, when I had the idea to move to LA to try to be in the film business, I thought, Well, OK, this means I’ll be an actor.
I couldn’t imagine anything else. I must have known that there were directors and all kinds of other jobs that might have suited me better.
But I just went with what I knew, and since it was working out, and since I ended up having kids so young, I just kept doing it. ”
“How come you never told me all this?”
It was a good question. “You were working on your book. I wasn’t supposed to be talking to you.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, but that notion went out the window right away. Anyway, so Mimi noticed your troubles the first time around, and I noticed the last time. But that second time, during COVID: Weren’t you locked down with your family? Where was Reggie?”
“He was there, but he didn’t see it.”
“That is…”
“What?”
“I’m not sure how that’s possible, for one thing.”
“He wasn’t a great husband.”
“Clearly.”
“But also, I worked pretty hard to hide it. Everyone was spending a lot of time in their own rooms, and that house was unreasonably large.”
“What about Tiffany?”
“She used to call me on being too intense. This last time around, she thought I was being a hermit because I was depressed from the divorce.”
“Esme thought that, too.”
“Maybe. Anyway, they all know now—the kids, Reggie, Tiffany. Part of the whole therapy thing was coming out of the closet. I even told my parents. You can imagine how that went.”
“Good for you.”
“I’m talking about it like it was easy.”
“It doesn’t sound easy.”
She was just going to ask the question that had been swirling around in her head all evening. “Why are you being so nice to me?”
She expected him to send her an eye roll, or deliver a witty rejoinder. She wouldn’t have minded. In fact, she might have appreciated the chance to return their conversation—their relationship, whatever that meant—to more familiar footing.