When I get to Gracie’s house, she is sitting at the kitchen table, Dear Abby letters spread out before her.
The minute I walk in, she says, “Lila, I’m so sorry about the other morning. Please don’t be mad at me.”
I listen to her beg me, for what must be the hundredth time in our lives, to tell her that no matter how questionable her behavior, she’s a good person, and everything will be all right. I lean into the refrigerator pretending to look for something to eat.
I choose an apple and turn back around. “How are the losers doing this week?”
“They’re not losers, Lila.”
When she started this job, Gracie used to make fun of the letters with me. After all, the premise is ridiculous. Scores of people, mostly women, send their heartfelt questions and painful secrets to a complete stranger. They actually want, wait for, and take this stranger’s advice. And what are the stranger’s qualifications to play God? Don’t even get me started. For my sister, it was sleeping with the editor of the newspaper. So now women all across northern New Jersey are leaving their husbands, making up with their teenage children, and signing up for college courses because my sister, the good lay, the pregnant, unmarried twenty-nine-year-old, thought it sounded like the best solution.
“It’s the letters from the young girls that get to me,” Gracie says. “I have seven letters this week alone from girls whose boyfriends are pressuring them to have sex. They don’t know what to do because they don’t feel ready, but they also don’t want to lose their boyfriends. There are also three letters from girls who want help because they’re depressed.”
Gracie spreads her hands over the rows of letters. Like mine, her hands are pale, without creases, but her fingers are slender where mine are stubby. She looks as exhausted as I feel. “Who am I to give them advice?”
I can’t argue with this, so I concentrate on my apple, which is a little mealy. A picture of Gram in the hospital flashes through my mind: old, bandaged, shaken. I wish suddenly that my sister had been there with me to see Gram. I don’t want to be the only grandchild with that image in my head. I wish that my memory was able to let go every once in a while. It has been too noisy in my head lately, too raucous. I miss the silence I used to be able to create locked in my dorm room or in my favorite study carrel at the library.
If I were at the library now, I would reread a chapter in my medicine textbook. Maybe the one on epidemiology, which was always a favorite. I’d review the causes and symptoms for Lyme disease, Chronic Fatigue, Epstein-Barr. I’d read about the suppressed immune system that lets in all germs, infections, and viruses and makes a bad situation worse. I am a fan of these kinds of diseases, which are vague in their symptoms, heavy in fatigue, capable of blurring the edges of the people they strike. These illnesses dull everything—personality, skills, drive, memory. I like to imagine, when I am tired and burnt out, that I have contracted Epstein-Barr, and that I now have the chance to step away from my life, and lose myself.
“Are you going out tonight?” I ask.
Gracie gives a rueful smile. “No. I’m off men for a while.”
“Literally and figuratively?”
“Funny.”
“Well, I’m going for a walk.” I’m surprised to hear this come out of my mouth. I rarely go for walks. I am more a lie-in-front-of-the-television-until-I-fall-asleep kind of girl.
But once I’m outside in the cool night air, I know it was the right decision. I had to get out of that stuffy kitchen, away from my sister, away from the letters full of unanswerable questions and inconsolable grief.
I round the block and approach the Green Trolley with its painted sign of a green train car. I consider going inside. Maybe I need to raise some hell. I haven’t been drunk since college. I haven’t had sex in, well, a long time.
But my legs take me past the front door of the bar. After all, it is Gracie’s place. I stare straight ahead so I won’t have to make eye contact with half of my high-school class. But out of the corner of my eye I see Joel and his buddy Weber standing beside some overgrown adolescent who is throwing up in the parking lot. Joel freezes at the sight of