Separation Anxiety - Laura Zigman Page 0,21
coffee with skim or low-fat milk, and I can’t order nothing. Ordering nothing makes people uncomfortable. Why should Glenn have to breathe in the fumes of my failure when all she wants to do is distract herself with some cheap laughs about someone’s too-big forehead?
“Seriously! Look at it!” Glenn pokes the phone screen with her finger. “I need sunglasses!”
I bite my lip with fake guilt. “We’re terrible.”
“No! She’s terrible! For inflicting that giant over-Botoxed moon face on everyone.”
She takes a tiny sip from her wineglass—Glenn always orders prosecco, even in the early afternoon, which it is, and even though she isn’t supposed to drink now, which she does anyway. How am I supposed to get through this without alcohol? she always says. But now I think that Glenn just pretends to drink to create a sense of normalcy or for the taste of alcohol on her lips: the level of her glass today, I realize, hasn’t gone down. In all the months we’ve come, I wonder suddenly if it’s ever gone down. Not knowing the answer to that question, not noticing something so obvious, is part of my denial. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to see. I have been here before and I don’t want to be here now. I especially don’t want to be here with Glenn. She not only published Bird at Black Bear Books but, after that encounter with that boss, it was also her idea all those years ago—a short, illustrated, kids-oriented story about being yourself, a modern version of Free to Be . . . You and Me. At first I’d ignored her—children’s books were just what I did for work, fiction was what I wanted to write—but eventually, after playing around with some very simple pen-and-ink drawings, the story rushed out of me in rhymed verse. I’d tried and failed for years to write a novel, but Bird came together instantly and painlessly, as if it had been inside of me my whole life, just waiting for a way out.
“You don’t wear your hair parted in the middle when you have a giant forehead like that!” Glenn goes on. She grabs my phone again, then creeps on the face, pinching with her thumb and forefinger, to make it larger. “You get some bangs like a normal person, or you part your hair on the side, and you cover that shit up. And you don’t talk about adult coloring books like they’re going to change the world and solve everyone’s problems. I mean, seriously, coloring books? To solve writer’s block? What are we, children?”
I love Glenn. “You could have your own show.”
“What kind of show? A yelling-about-annoying-people show?”
The group at the next table—tweedy ancient Harvard-types—stare at her, then turn back to their conversation. Or try to.
“Oh look,” she says, loudly enough for them to hear, which is her intention. “I’ve offended them with my honesty and my brutal truth-telling.” They try even harder to ignore her, but once activated, Glenn will not be ignored. “I know what you’re thinking,” she says, directly to them now, with a pitch-perfect Boston accent. “Who am I to make fun of someone’s giant forehead and how they do or do not wear their hair, when I myself have no hayyy-ah.” She pulls the hand-knit cap off her head in one quick tug to reveal her bald chemo-head, a sight I’m not used to, no matter how many times I’ve seen it over the years during her illness.
The group is in motion now, trying desperately to gather their things—their books and papers and briefcases, their cardigan sweaters and light jackets—it is October and chilly, of course, in New England, which can’t make anything easy for anyone, ever—so they can make their escape. “Oh no. I’ve scared them!” Glenn rolls her eyes at me, full of disgust. But as the people flee and the space between Glenn and me is suddenly empty and quiet, her eyes fill with tears. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“Don’t be.”
“I’m such an asshole.” She turns quickly to look at the group she scared away, visible now through the glass windows at the front of the shop, whispering and walking close together on the sidewalk. “They didn’t do anything to deserve that.” She puts her hat back on and blows her nose into a napkin. “I just get so angry sometimes. I can’t control it.” She turns around again, trying to gauge if she can possibly catch up to them, to apologize, or maybe to