“Your right knee should be directly over your ankle.” Neale walks among the students, tracing a winding path between their mats. They are in warrior two, an easy lunge with one arm stretched out in front, the other behind. Neale puts her hands on Cate’s shoulders and gently presses them down, a little longer than necessary. An adjustment, but also a tiny piece of connection in their long friendship.
Taking classes at the studio, Cate can observe Neale in her floral movements, folding this way, then that, bending in a nonexistent breeze. Neale doesn’t look like anybody else. She doesn’t even look like her parents, who are short and nondescript and careworn. She appears to be composed entirely of recessive genes. Movie-star threads in her DNA. This doesn’t make her vain, but she definitely operates out of a keen awareness of her body. This is where her confidence lies. She walks into a room and can calibrate how much of it she occupies.
She’s careless with her beauty. She often gives herself (terrible) haircuts. Wears a couple of pairs of jeans she’s had from when they were called flared, through a long period when they were so out of style they weren’t called anything, to the current moment, in which they are called modern boot-cut. She broke her nose twice playing volleyball in college, and never bothered to get it reset. Now it just (beautifully, of course) detours a little at the bridge. She carried herself with assurance even when the two of them were teenagers. Neale never went through an awkward phase. She’s always been physically arrogant. Riding her bike through storms, dodging falling tree branches, exploring construction sites. Cate, her hand already damaged, was hesitant about making wrong moves.
Cate is not a natural yogi. She goes to classes because it’s a way to hang out with Neale.
“If you find your attention drifting,” Neale is saying now in her tranquil yoga voice, “return your focus to your breath.”
Cate tries to follow this suggestion, but it’s not easy. Although she is glad she has breath, keeping track of it is never interesting enough, and so, almost immediately, her focus loosens and she drifts off into a thicket of random thoughts. Paint she has to buy for the desk. A nearly due credit card statement on which she at least has to pay the box. Otherwise they will tack on their 270 percent or whatever interest fee.
“Bring your right foot onto your left leg.” First Cate wonders how this will be possible, since she is in a lunge. Then she sees that Neale and the class, in her absence, have moved on to tree pose, standing balanced on one foot. She repositions herself awkwardly and is able to pull her attention way over to her breath for maybe a second, before it once again gets yanked off, this time into replaying something really stupid she said to Hugh Prendergast, the director of At Ease. From there, Mick Jagger and Jack White jump in front of a microphone, their mouths as close as lovers’, singing Gimme little drink. From your loving cup.
When the class is over, Neale asks if Cate can come home with her to fix a blocked drain.
“This is why I hang out with you. For the social life.”
Then she loiters in the lobby while Neale hugs prodigal students newly returned to the fold, offers workarounds to young women with shin splints or ankle sprains. A lot of the reason people come to yoga, Neale says, is to get a pastel sort of attention from the instructor, encouragement and understanding that’s not about the rest of their complicated lives.
When the two of them are finally in the car, Cate says, “Do you think Joe is trolling social media, asking girls at school to send him nude selfies?”
“Oh God, no!”
“I read this article—”
“You know what? I’m just going to stop this speculation in its tracks. NO. Joe is a complicated kid navigating a difficult landscape. And he is just hitting puberty. But he is also one of the most decent humans on the planet. He is not asking girls for nude photos of themselves.”
“You’re right, of course you’re right.”
“I’m sorry I clipped you. I just so totally believe in him. Even if I wind up being interviewed. I mean, when he turns out to be the Fox River Killer. And I’ll be saying he was such a good, quiet boy.”
“Joe!?” Neale goes in the back door first and shouts up the staircase.
“In my room.” A muffled shout. “Kiera’s here.”
“Are they doing homework?” Cate lies next to Neale on the kitchen floor, at the ready with a wrench, a plumber’s snake, a plastic tub, a rag that was recently a T-shirt.
“They don’t really give homework anymore. The kids are too busy with their after-school activities. Joe has band practice until five, three times a week. And then they’re too exhausted. Their parents are exhausted, too. Everyone goes around in a stupor.” Neale’s voice is deadened by resignation, also by coming from inside a small cabinet. She comes out with a fairly large smear of troublingly colorful plumbing gunk across her forehead, in her hair.
Cate says, “Maybe you should be doing something to give yourself a little quality time. I’m thinking crystal meth.”
“Can you hand me the rag?”
“I saw this documentary and there was this toothless mother in front of a farmhouse and she was saying, ‘I get the kids off on the school bus and then I put the baby down for her nap and then it’s my me time, when I do my meth.’ ”
Joe moves into the kitchen stealthily, startling them both when he says, “Good thing I was upstairs when you needed help with that. Hey, Cate.” He says this without making eye contact. He and Cate both hate eye contact. Also hugging. They stick with fist bumps. They are close in their own way. She was there when he was born. Not having gotten it together to have a kid of her own, she mooches a little of him off Neale. She’s tried to occupy a place somewhere between parent and friend and aunt. Nondisciplinary like a friend. Older, with good advice at the ready, but not the aunt whose crepey, powdered cheek he’s required to kiss. And after Neale’s marriage was over and Joe’s father was off to India, Cate tried to be around even more. But as he heads into adolescence he has started building in a little distance.
“What’s up?” Neale asks him.
“Just listening to some, you know, music or whatever.” Which, of course, means noise music. He and Kiera and their friend Theo listen to this deconstructed sound on their headphones. To Cate it sounds nihilistic: well, of course—that’s the point of it. The kids go to noise concerts together. They follow a local duo, Japanese sisters called the Mexican Porno Nuns. When it’s Neale’s turn to take them to this or that venue, she wears earplugs and covers her head with a hoodie and stands in the back so she’s not an embarrassment to them. Joe would like to make noise music himself, but does not have an acoustically insulated studio where he could practice. He is second percussion chair in the school band. His noise music demonstration for the band director—opening pre-shaken pop bottles to a tape of a woodpecker—got him a respectful hearing, but he is still confined to triangle, tambourine, and maracas. To be played in sync with the rest of the band. “But really, do you need help down there?”
Cate watches him scrabble around in the cupboards like a raccoon.
Neale has her head back inside the cabinet. “No, I’ve got this little situation under control. You do your share. You catch bugs and take them outside without killing them. You handle the recycling. You keep your room not a total mess.”
He nods at the justice of this assessment, then takes a carton of milk and a box of doughnuts and heads back upstairs. Watching Joe come into himself makes Cate envy Neale. But Cate has never had the money or a partner willing to shoulder the burdens of parenthood. Her one husband, so far back now, was not interested. And now, at forty-two, she’d probably have to get fertility treatments or in vitro and wind up still single and fairly broke, but now with triplets. Or she could adopt, which would have the element of good deed to it, taking on someone who might need a break. But this would have the downside of responsibility for a complete unknown. The nature part would already be in place; her input would only be the nurture. Which seems more than she might be able to handle on her own; a solid partner in place would help, and she doesn’t have one of those. None of this keeps her from wishing now and then that she was having the experience of raising someone, the million small moments of guiding and being surprised by a child.
And she sees it as an inequity between her and Neale, a badge of maturity and wholehearted engagement with life that Cate lacks. She does have Joe in a peripheral way. She gets to enjoy the issues and problems and solutions around him, second-guessing Neale. Now she says, “Doughnuts? I thought you were going to stop buying those.”
“I know, but he loves them. They probably won’t do much damage now. I mean you never hear about teenagers having clogged arteries, or being on statins. I have to pick my battles.”
“If he and Kiera are up there listening to music on their headphones, isn’t that sort of lonely?”
“No, they’re probably texting each other.”
“Oh.”
“I know. It’s weird, isn’t it? How talking isn’t so big anymore. But in the new way, they’re super-close. Some of what they’re about is making themselves look bigger together than they would be alone. I hate how scary school is now. Maybe the scariest place outside of those warlord areas in Africa. You have to have a buddy. Being alone attracts trouble.” A longish pause, then Neale says, “Euwww. Very bad under here. Can you hand me that tuppery thing? I’ve got a real mess going.”
Cate shoves the plastic container into Neale’s fluttering, gunk-covered hand. She knows she will likely receive this same container, rinsed out and filled with cookies, at Christmas. Neale’s housekeeping tempts the fates, all of them. From the outside, which is even worse than the inside, the house looks like the house in Psycho. It’s an artifact of Neale’s marriage. She and Claude were going to be urban pioneers in their dicey neighborhood. They were going to rehab this crumbling monstrosity. And then the marriage was over and Claude was off to India, leaving Neale in a perpetual state of disillusionment. Also only a block over from a sketchy patch of halfway houses and vacant lots with their own furniture, home to a vibrant drug marketplace staffed by serious guys in enormous jackets. But she’s staying. Partly a political statement, partly out of stubbornness. She’s the guy who makes them build the new freeway around his shack.
She emerges with the leftover container, now half-filled with what looks like shoe tongues boiled in sludge. “Where does this even come from? It’s like someone is running a workshop down here while we’re asleep.”
She’s the soul of do-it-yourself, a continuing student at YouTube University. She has taught herself to rewire lamps, fix the toilet when it runs on, glaze windows. She does her own oil changes. This is a stare-down of small challenges. Of course, it’s also about the financial pit, staying a ways shy of it. She has small savings and a going business with her yoga studio. And now with the new healthcare, she and Joe have decent insurance. The policy she had before only covered catastrophes, and even those had catches and loopholes. Because she’d had fibroids in her twenties, they’d only insure her from the waist up.
“Maureen’s taking me to some foodie restaurant tomorrow night. It’s trending, apparently, whatever that means. I haven’t even heard of the place. She had to get the reservation a month ago.”
“She’s plighting her troth.” Neale dumps the sludge into the trash, washes her hands in the sink.
“Maybe.”
“Doesn’t it feel like she’s on a mission? Isn’t that a little scary?”
“No, no. I’m grateful she’s after me. I think she’s my best shot at making something more than another pile of tinder. Something to live in, not set fire to. All that wastable time I had? I used that up. I have to get down to business now. It’s not old age I worry about—I haven’t even gotten to that worry yet—it’s middle age. I don’t want to be in my fifties and in some lesbian sinkhole. Alone, obsessed with gluten. Accumulating cats. Old cats with health issues that keep me housebound with their medication schedules. Maureen is part of my new plan to keep that from happening.”
To herself, she calls this new plan Plan C. She didn’t really have a Plan A. Plan B was using her MFA to get a tenure-track teaching job. But by then she was doing sets for Adam Pryor and thought settling into academe would pull her off the artistic path. Now Adam is gone and Cate is broke. Drifting, but now into the reeds.
For a long time, her circumstances didn’t seem reduced in comparison to anyone else’s. Cate had a cohort of theater friends who were staying alive on a week-to-week basis. Everyone had fifty dollars in the bank. They made ten-dollar withdrawals from the ATM. At first she didn’t notice that their ranks were thinning. Somebody got married, then had twins. Somebody moved to L.A. for a movie and is now in a lot of movies. Her friend Brooke now heads up the theater department at a private school in Oak Park. Two guys who did excellent sets struck out on their own to become decorators, filling houses for wealthy clients on the North Shore—a more lucrative end of their trade. The friends came and went all along, but as time went on, more of them went than came. And many of the replacements were from a further subgeneration assembling their own cohort. By then Cate had spent the postdivorce remnant of her twenties pushing furniture around darkened stages, sleeping with the girls in backstage black, smoking dope, reading Victorian novels. Now even her thirties are behind her, a third of them spent on Dana in an underside life—freezer burn on her elbows, sleepless from 4 a.m. phone calls that might only last a few minutes but kept her awake through the rest of the night. All of which has landed her exactly here, in her early forties, standing on a hard patch of bare ground and clear horizons, trying to set off in some better direction.
Plan C attempts to find this direction via four main points:
Neale pulls a bag of taco chips out of a cabinet. “Your problem is how hard it’s going to be to find someone to follow Dana. To match that ferocity.”
“Yes. That’s the bitch of it, right?”