Epilogue

Ruth snores almost imperceptibly. Thanks to the Valium that she accepted from Will, she fell asleep before the plane left the ground. Bea leans forward to ensure that Abby, sitting next to Ruth, is also dead to the world. That’s the red wine, paired with Prozac. Abby doesn’t know that Bea knows she is taking it, but when Abby was fishing through her makeup case for lipstick while they sat in the gate area, Bea caught sight of the unmistakable word on the distinct orange bottle: Fluoxetine. She recognized it easily because she has the same prescription. Her mother doesn’t know that either. Bea briefly wonders if either of them might confess to the other and decides that, no, they likely will not.

The entire plane seems to be asleep, and Bea is alert and relaxed. It is a combination of states that she remembers experiencing only twice before on random, ordinary days. The first was in high school French class while she was conjugating the verb devenir aloud. The other occurred several years later while riding in the passenger seat of Ellen Alpert’s VW Rabbit on the way to Chestnut Hill Mall. There were no precipitating events or substances, and the states were brief. Her hope, which she knows is naïve, is that the drug will make this feeling a more common occurrence than two outlying moments in a dozen-year span while reducing her zero-to-sixty bouts of rage to a much less common occurrence. A shot of hope causes an audible intake of breath through her nose.

Fortunately, her reading light is already on, so she doesn’t have to rearrange everything or contort herself or disturb anyone to stretch up and press it on. She reaches carefully into her backpack wedged between her leg and the cabin wall and blindly maneuvers her fingers around until she feels the edges of the small, hard, cloth-covered book. She extracts it, then feels around for one of the numerous elaborate inner pockets for a pen.

Until she packed her suitcase yesterday, the blank book had been in her bedside table drawer, where it has remained as she and the bedside table have lived in four apartments in two cities in the last five years. It retains a faint lavender scent from Flora’s bottom bureau drawer from where Bea had taken it. The bureau drawer had been a favorite rifling spot for Bea when she was little. She would treat herself to it in restrained intervals in order to make everything seem new and exciting again—the handbags with grimy foreign coins in the bottom, stray pillboxes, clumps of scarves, and champagne-colored slips. Sometimes there would be something new. The copy of The Women’s Room appeared when she was eleven or twelve, and it was still there the day before Flora died, the day Bea pilfered a few things from the drawer while Flora was sleeping in the horrible hospital bed they had moved into her bedroom, usurping the spot where Bea’s titular bed used to be. She took a scarf printed with a Mondrian design, pulling it out of a tangle of silk like a worm. She took The Women’s Room, which she didn’t read for another year, and she took the blank book with the fabric cover of brown, orange, and yellow flowers, a pattern that reminds her of the wallpaper in Ruth’s kitchen. An inscription on the inside cover reads, “Write on! Love, Dawn” surrounded by a heart. Bea doesn’t know who Dawn is or was, but Flora never wrote anything in the pages. Maybe this will be the new me diary, she thinks, the Prozac-improved me.

She writes the date—Sept. 16, 1994—in the upper right corner of the first page, and a sickening sense of self-awareness poises itself to pierce the agreeable bubble. She hates journal writing. Journaling—the verb embarrasses her—is a world apart from writing in her diary when she was a kid, when it was enjoyable reportage.

On the plane to Paris. If it weren’t Great Aunt Lillian’s eightieth birthday, there’s no way G.A. Ruth would be sitting beside me—the first time she’s been on a plane since she was younger than I am. I don’t know if my Saturn is returning or if I’m just happy to be going back to Paris or it’s the drug (starting week six of the miracle known as Prozac), but today I feel a little different. Not rapturous, but at ease for the first time since I can remember.

When Bea had taken the artifacts from Flora’s bureau, she felt numb, not sad. Her grandmother was dying mere feet from her. What she felt was a soup of things that didn’t go well together—shame, anxiety, vanity. There was no one competing for these items and no one watching her. Flora was sleeping and Will and Abby were outside in the driveway talking with a neighbor. Bea could see Jan Levy’s furrowed brow from the window. Her arms were crossed tightly across her chest and she nodded her head sympathetically as she listened to Will who was probably sharing ghastly medical details with her. Abby had her hands interlocked behind her back, bouncing them agitatedly against her buttocks and was looking down at the ground.

Bea kissed Flora’s warm, slightly damp forehead. “Love you,” she said to her grandmother. Just before leaving the bedroom, she impulsively opened the louvered doors of the large closet. She ran the back of her hand over the sleeves of the blouses and dresses hung there, all silky and colorful. Flora was fashionable even into her seventies, never letting up on looking nice, even when she got sick. At the end of the rod, against the wall of the closet, was a blue blazer. Bea hadn’t seen it on Flora since she was a child, but she recalled it instantly. She pulled it gently off the hanger and put it on. It fit perfectly. She went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror above the countertop where her grandmother’s powders and lotions were now intermingled with pill bottles and forbidding, baffling medical devices. Bea liked the way her blue eyes looked with the blazer. She put her hands in the pockets and posed. In the left-hand pocket she felt what she assumed to be a crushed-up foil gum wrapper, but when she removed it, she was astonished to find in her fingers what appeared to be the remains of a joint.

The next morning, Bea had woken up in her old room in her parents’ house—now Abby’s house—and was disoriented for several distressing moments. Before the divorce, Kevin had installed a floor to ceiling bookcase that held Abby’s psychology texts, various paperback best sellers, and some of Bea’s books—The Little House on the Prairie series, a dozen Nancy Drews, two editions of Little Women. As soon as Bea had gone to college, the room had been de-shrined, with careless permission from Bea, so that it no longer held any of her other childhood relics. Her mother had saved Polka, a stuffed bear that had been Abby’s childhood totem, and he sat slumped on the top shelf with his desiccated, crumbly innards and remaining glass eye.

Abby had come into the room in the middle of the night, put her hand on Bea’s forehead, gently waking her. Bea smelled the ghost of Vick’s VapoRub—the confluence of the room, the gentle but insistent hand, the preceding fitful sleep—and for a moment or two she was five years old. “Grandma died, honey,” said Abby.

Despite waking in the disoriented state, when she remembered that moment, she knew it wasn’t a dream. She hadn’t cried when Abby told her, nor had Abby. Bea simply nodded. “I’m going to Grandpa’s now,” Abby said. “You stay and sleep if you can.”

In the years since Flora died, Bea has cried very little about the loss. She looks at the old photo albums Will bequeathed to her, lies awake at night ineffectively counting herself to sleep, pushes the lavender-infused scarf to her nose, all in an effort to flush the feelings out because she’s been told it’s important, that they’re blocking something. Her psychology readings and her dogmatic, overbearing fellow graduate students all harp on the imperative to fix oneself before attempting to fix anyone else. She misses Flora every day and even has conversations with her in her head, about small worries or annoyances, things they would ardently agree were worth getting angry about.

The sudden or inopportune times that she has expressed visible emotion about Flora have been few enough to recall. Once when Bea was driving with a friend, another driver cut her off and she screamed, “Fucking rat fink!” Her friend laughed, and Bea did, too, but it quickly turned into ugly, air-sucking sobs. Another time she was in line for ice cream and the late afternoon shadows, temperature, and particular quality of the breeze were such that she felt sure Flora was standing right beside her and that the present was only a dream. That time she didn’t realize she was crying until tears were dripping off her chin.

Bea closes the journal, leaving the pen inside the first page. She looks at her mother and Ruth, dreaming who knows what. She can imagine Flora sitting with them, her soft, powdered face resting against her neck pillow, snoring softly along with her sister and her daughter, and she thinks, “Maybe I will cry now.” That would make for a fitting and wistful gesture for this moment in time. But she can’t will it. Do people cry on Prozac, she wonders, or is everything always even? There’s a difference between balanced and flat, after all, isn’t there?

They talked about anger in one of her classes recently and Bea replays it with a pang of irritation. “It’s just masking something else, usually sadness or fear,” one of the other students said, someone also in her late twenties like Bea, who spoke with unwarranted world-weariness. “It’s never really about the anger itself.” Bea disagreed but didn’t say so. She has seen how that is perhaps true for some people, especially for men, who aren’t allowed to be emotional. But anger is its own thing, and as much as she hates hers, she needs it, and sometimes she even thinks she enjoys it. Maybe she won’t like the Prozac. Maybe she won’t like being a psychotherapist.

Relishing the quiet and artificial solitude of the environment, Bea decides once and for all, for the hundredth time, not to worry about it. Not any of it. She opens the journal again and writes.