Finding ways to make use of each other, to depend on each other.
I am wondering if she will laugh, or maybe say something mean, when Lila speaks.
“Your advice this week is really odd,” she says, rattling the newspaper with both hands. “It’s incredibly practical and you answer three letters from guys, which isn’t like you. This advice to the man who really wants to work on his car at night but doesn’t want to hurt his wife’s feelings cracked me up.” Lila smiles down at the paper.
“Oh God.” I had forgotten it was Thursday. Column day. “I didn’t write that,” I say. “I was too upset, what with Gram . . . Grayson must have written it to cover for me. Let me see.”
Lila pulls out the Lifestyles section and hands it to me. “There’s another message from him on the machine. Editor Boy is a little obsessive compulsive.”
“Oh God, oh God.” I sink down into a chair. “He must be furious.”
“Who cares,” Lila says. “You care too much about what other people think.”
Oh sure, I want to say. You care so little about what other people think that you can’t even tell your sister that you’re sleeping with a beer-swilling firefighter? I know now that I’m not going to tell her about my glimpse into our mutual future. We would both think I was crazy. “He’s my boss, Lila. I’m paid to care what Grayson thinks.”
I skim the column. Grayson is a news writer and his sentences are short and to the point, very different from my more conversational style of writing. His advice is much more specific than mine usually is. He tells the man who is more in love with his car than his wife to bring home flowers and candy on the nights he plans to spend working in the garage. He tells a mother whose teenage son doesn’t want to talk to her to make a list of topics she would like to discuss and to give her son a copy, too. Then they’re to set a meeting time and neither mother nor son is allowed to leave the table until all topics have been touched on. Grayson tells a man who feels that his receding hairline is diminishing his chances with women to wear more hats and try to walk with more of a confident swagger.
I lay the paper down on the table. “He gave them hopeless advice,” I say. “I’m going to get hate letters. The teenage son is going to laugh in his mother’s face. The guy with the car is in huge trouble if he tries to buy his wife off with chocolates. And the man with the receding hairline needs to know that women don’t care about that kind of thing. That’s not why he’s alone.” I put my hands over my face.
“You’re right,” Lila says. “I wouldn’t have thought about it like that, but that makes sense.”
With my eyes closed behind my fingers, all I see are shadows and darkness. “I miss my good advice. I miss having the knack for it. I miss drinking cold beer. I miss everything,” I say. “I miss having sex. I really miss having sex. You’re so lucky that you get to have sex.”
I hear Lila push her chair back. “So go pick some guy up. What’s stopping you?”
“Have you looked at me lately?” I take my hands away from my eyes and the kitchen is bathed with neon spots and bright light. After a minute, I say, “Have you not been visiting Gram because you don’t want to see people from medical school?”
“I stop by every day, just not during visiting hours. I know my way around the rules there. I’m not scared of them.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
She shakes her head. “I’m due back to school next week. My sick leave is up.”
“At least you’re having sex on a regular basis,” I say. “The world is magical when you’re having sex, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Maybe you’re doing it wrong.”
“You’re delusional.” Lila looks at me with tired eyes. “You always have been. There’s no such thing as magic.”
AFTER LILA leaves for Weber’s, I heat up a frozen dinner and eat all of it plus two bananas and half of a McDonald’s chocolate shake I had forgotten was in the refrigerator. Then I put my cardigan back on and sit outside on the front steps. I keep forgetting it is summertime. Every time I leave the house, or the hospital, I brace myself for a