worship that took the form of a spinning trance. She would mix this antique Eastern mysticism with a different kind of wonder, a modern Western wonder, that was Alice in Wonderland’s: a place where reason—and the ground—didn’t remain stable, where the imagination confused good and evil, friend and foe. One Wonderland was about trying to see things as they are, she said, about believing that such a thing as clarity was possible; and the other was about relativism, about seeing things from different perspectives, and also about being seen, and about how being seen differently also changes you. Both possibilities were amazing and frightening at the same time; but only one of them, she said, could lead to wisdom. She wanted her artwork, she said, to offer the possibility, at least, of wisdom. For this, she said, she needed me.
I was too dignified to gush or fawn on her. I had enough masquerade in me for that. I told her—truthfully—that I hadn’t worked with anyone else on an art project since high school—those heady afternoons in Dominic Crace’s lair. I mentioned that I was hoping, now that Emily was to all intents and purposes finished, to continue with the cycle, although perhaps not in chronological order—and that there was, after all, barely any time, just a few hours in the afternoons. But her eyes were smiling at me as though I were actually saying, “Yes, yes, of course, YES!” and I knew that she knew that, and that we were both excited about it.
That was in the middle of a week, the beginning of February; and by the weekend I was canceling another visit to my poor father in Brookline, in order to drive Sirena to a vast used clothing warehouse south of town, recommended by Didi. I’d promised I’d take him to the medical supply in Belmont to look for a raised toilet seat to ease his bad hips, and I figured, guiltily, that another week or two with the old seat would surely not be too bad. Sirena and I were going to choose a mountain of light blue dresses and pinafores—Alice clothes—from which to sew the canopy of her new sky.
There was, to this, an element of the costume department back in college, a sort of “what the hell” good cheer completely antithetical to my pious and oh-so-precise reconstructions; and it was—how could I have forgotten this?—fun. It was simply fun to turn up the radio and the heat in the car to full blast, to sing along, like hams, to Macy Gray—“Try to walk away and I stumble …”—and then to roll into the Avril Lavigne hit of the time that the third graders loved without having the faintest idea about the emotions it expressed. “My Happy Ending,” it was called: “You were everything, everything that I wanted … All this time you were pretending / So much for my happy ending …”—we bawled the lyrics like teenagers, and Sirena’s funny Italian lingering upon the endings of the words themselves (“my happy-e ending-e”) made us laugh still more.
The actual sky was vast and blue and impeccable and American, the very canvas of possibility, the gray highway stretching out before us, salted white as sand, and the bay to our left, as we headed south, all glitter in the winter sun. I was so happy it was like a food, like I’d been stuffed with it, a foie gras goose of happiness; happy enough to know, fully, that I was happy, and foolishly, for one second, to dare the thought: “Imagine—imagine if each Saturday morning could be like this,” and in the middle of the singing I blushed, not even looking at her, because even just having it I knew there was something wrong about the thought. Another boundary crossing—an acknowledgment to myself, so fleeting but so dangerous, of how hungry I was.
I have an old friend from college, long lost, who used to say that you should never let yourself think of a journey as long, because then it will feel long no matter what. By the same token, it’s important, when you’re the Woman Upstairs, never to think of yourself—but never, do you understand?—as alone or forlorn or, God help us, wanting. It will not do. It cannot be. It is the end.
At the warehouse, we rifled through racks and bins of all kinds—vast shapeless nylon granny dresses, shrunken, felted woolen dresses, polyester stretch pants, sheets and blankets, sequined netting, iridescent organza, animal print plush