Once More With Feeling Read Free Page B

just want to be happy,’ Carolyn confided to my voicemail, as I had stopped taking her calls after that first, horrible one. ‘And we want you to be happy too, Sarah. We really do.’
    Which was when I started to think hard about plagues.
AIDS
, I thought fiercely as I considered the laborious process of making a new life for myself when I’d had no hand in dismantling the old one.
Bubonic plague. Tuberculosis
. I thought about insects. Locusts and bird flu.
Ebola
, I chanted to myself as I navigated a home town, a courthouse, a gauntlet of clients filled with all those knowing, pitying stares.
Mad cow. SARS. Necrotizing fasciitis
.
    Because it was getting harder and harder to convince myself that there was anything at all worse than this.
    ‘I think we have to start considering the fact that this is really happening,’ Lianne said, carefully, as if I wereinordinately fragile and might shatter if she used the wrong tone. As Lianne was my best and, really
only
, remaining friend from high school, and had thus known me since we were both infants, I had to consider the possibility that, in fact, I might. ‘I don’t think he’s coming back.’
    We stood together in Lianne’s bright and inviting kitchen, drinking coffee out of charmingly mismatched ceramic cups that somehow seemed perfectly grown-up and
planned
, like everything else in her happy life with Billy, whom she’d started dating way back in the eighth grade. We were having our longstanding Wednesday midday coffee date that we’d instituted not long after I’d moved back to town three years ago. I couldn’t remember the last time either one of us had cancelled it. These days I considered it my lifeline – to a degree I was afraid would make Lianne a bit uncomfortable were I to tell her.
    ‘It’s okay,’ Lianne said in that same gentle way, such a far cry from the usual matter-of-fact briskness that made her such a good nurse in the OBGYN practice where she’d worked for years. ‘We’ll get through this. We’ll be just fine. I promise.’
    Her use of
we
, I noted in a kind of dazed amazement, was even more comforting than Tim’s had been. And also meant exactly what I wanted it to mean – no contortions of reality required.
    ‘It’s fine,’ I said. It wasn’t. It was any number of things, many of them in direct opposition to each other and allof them changeable and contradictory, but it certainly wasn’t
fine
. And yet I found myself producing a smile, however faint. ‘I mean,’ I heard myself say. ‘It’s not like we’re
those people
.’
    Lianne poured some more coffee into my mug even though, after thirty-three years of friendship and the fact that she had given me my first cup of coffee in her parents’ house when we were twelve, she was well aware that I was not the kind of person who liked ‘topping up’ my coffee. I preferred to fix the whole cup myself, so that it had the perfect ratio of coffee to creamer to sugar. But Lianne’s brand of nurturing wasn’t about coddling. It never had been.
    ‘Which people?’ she asked, not looking at me. ‘The people who argue about every last detail because they’re heartbroken and hurt and trying to fight back the only way they can?’
    ‘Tim and I aren’t like that,’ I said with a certain loftiness that I suspected was simply because I looked for any excuse at all to say that these days.
Tim and I
. ‘We’re not going to make a big circus out of this, whatever happens.’
    Lianne blew on her coffee as if she expected it to be scalding. ‘Why not?’ She looked at me, then away. ‘This is the end of a marriage. Maybe it deserves a circus.’ She shrugged. ‘Doesn’t have to be the full three rings, but maybe a clown or two? Some trapeze artists? A parade of elephants?’
    Thinking of trapeze artists made me think of Carolyn’srather impressive contortions in bed. In
my
bed. Contortions, I couldn’t help but think, that my body simply wouldn’t perform, yoga or no yoga.