It energized her, this idea of getting to start anew, to choose something just because she liked it, or even just to make a name up. And then Elise had called. Foolishly, naively, just trying to distract herself, Natalie had run some of these names by her ever-so-rational and steady older daughter, all in a misguided attempt to sound upbeat. “Natalie Nevermore?” she’d asked Elise, with a little laugh, though she wasn’t really joking. “Natalie Northrup?” She’d always loved alliteration. “Natalie Nouvelle? Natalie Valentino. Natalie Wood!” Irreverent, perhaps, but a conversation starter!
Elise got very quiet. And then told her she was acting crazy. And then told her there was an accident up ahead, snarled traffic, and that she had to go.
Now Natalie sat on the floor of her apartment and watched the news with the sound turned down, free to wallow in private, to think how unfair it was that she could have spent her most vital years pouring all of her wisdom and understanding of the world into her daughters, guiding and nurturing them to the best of her ability, only to have one of those daughters grow up and decide, in the middle of a very bad day, that she was nuts. Or acting nuts, whatever. Natalie looked at the phone with narrowed eyes. Elise was probably already calling Veronica, spreading the news of their mother’s demise. Everything would be taken out of context.
The problem with the phone, she considered, was that you couldn’t see the other person’s face or surroundings. You couldn’t know what kind of situation you might be interrupting with your friendly call from California just to say hello. Elise, for example, had no way of knowing that her mother had, only moments before the phone rang, come home from work to find this note taped to her door:
NO DOGS MEANS NO DOGS. IT’S GONE TOMORROW OR YOU ARE.
Lou
Furthermore, Elise, who only called when she was driving, her headset in place, her young, newly married body cradled in one of her lime green Volkswagen’s custom-ordered leather seats, couldn’t have known that during the entire conversation, her mother had been lying on the floor of her apartment, pretty much where a couch should be.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t have any furniture. On the other side of her living room sat the leather armchair she had purchased from Pottery Barn, 15 percent off, just three years ago. She’d convinced Dan they needed a new chair for the living room—they had to get rid of the stuffed armchair they’d had for over a decade, which still had large red marks across the cushion—Veronica, when she was three, had gotten to it with one of Elise’s Magic Markers. Dan agreed, so Natalie had gone out and bought a new chair. They needed a chair, and so they’d gotten one. As simple as that. And she still had the chair. But right now, coming home from the mall to her own apartment, she hadn’t wanted to sit in a chair. She wanted to lie down in the living room, and to do that, she needed a couch. But she didn’t have one. She was forty-nine years old, and after the divorce, she’d been saddled with almost three decades’ worth of family furniture and mementos and a Ping-Pong table and a bunch of other junk that was a chore to get rid of; and yet somehow, she didn’t have a couch.
Dan, she imagined, had a couch. He’d moved into a furnished condo, leaving everything from their old life behind, like a crab scooting out of a shell. She had been left with the mess, the garage sales, the sorting, the throwing away. And in the middle of all this, the dog, moments after a seizure, had peed on one of the emerald green cushions of the living room sofa. Natalie had actually been a little pleased, the dog’s infirmity providing her with an excuse to get rid of the sofa, which was symbolic, she’d decided, of her old life with Dan, which also seemed a little peed-upon, ready to be thrown away. It would be fun, she thought, and equally symbolic, to replace it with something new, something striped, maybe, something contemporary, with a hide-a-bed for when one of the girls came to visit.
She’d tried. Sometimes, after work, instead of leaving the mall, she headed straight to the furniture sections of the big department stores, just to see what was out there. She’d sat on striped cushions and pressed her