| |
Gina swirled a lo mein noodle with her fork and leaned in. “So, do you think it was a conspiracy?” she mocked in a high-pitched whisper. “Do you think he acted alone?”
I rolled my eyes and bit into my greasy egg roll.
“Holy shit!” Gina cackled, leaning back in her chair, her knees lifting up as she howled. “What a couple of geeks! I mean, honestly.” She shook her head and went back to twirling her noodle. “Fucking dorks.”
“Shut up. Please.”
“No wonder Grandma and Grandpa quit.”
“I wasn’t cool enough for them?” I asked.
“No. I’m kidding,” Gina said. “They didn’t quit. It doesn’t work that way. But I can see why they needed me. After we knew he’d be there, it was obvious that it was about to get complicated. I mean, not complicated like ‘tracking Oswald to Mexico’ complicated, but you know.”
“Would you shut up?” I glanced up from my egg roll. “Wait, you knew he’d be there? How?”
“We can see things. Like flies on a wall. We could see that the guy you still think about was going on a business trip to San Francisco and that your case was going to have depositions there the same week. And—‘God help us all’ as Grandma and Grandpa would say—we could then see you’d be staying at the same hotel. Of all the gin joints.”
She was wearing one of her white T-shirts. It showed a drawing of a melting ice cream cone with little paper-doll-like children holding hands as they surrounded it.
“How do you know I think about him?”
“We can see that too.”
“You can read minds?” I asked.
“No. We can read hearts.”
“Why don’t I feel that guilty? I mean, I could barely look at Mark when I got home, and I can’t even think about Jessica without feeling ill, but I feel like I should feel worse.”
“Mmm.” Gina swayed her head back and forth as if she were trying to figure out how to phrase what she was going to say next. She stared out toward Queens Boulevard. Light from the streetlamps surrounded her in a sort of golden glow.
The streetlights in that part of town cast shadows on the sidewalks. Gina and I used to try to jump over them, and whoever got caught in a shadow was the loser. We used to go to this restaurant, Hunan Palace, a lot with our families when we were kids.
She was taking too long to respond. I placed my egg roll down. “I know Mark is a good man. But I almost feel like if Mark and Jessica could put themselves in our shoes, they would understand.”
She smirked. “They would understand?”
“Well, they wouldn’t say, ‘Go ahead and be together,’ but they would understand it wasn’t out of malice. It was out of something else—I don’t know—something that has been missing for so long that got found.”
That was bad poetry. But it was true.
“That’s what everyone thinks in these situations. ‘You’d understand if you were me, if you knew how I felt.’”
A server appeared with a pitcher of Coke filled to the brim with ice.
“I know it’s wrong. I tried to talk to Mark, to have a real conversation, before I left for California. It didn’t go well. It was so out of our norm, he thought I was acting weird. Now we’re back to the way it was. Just hollow. Just nothing. There’s just nothing there.” I poured Coke into my glass then pumped the straw through the ice and took a sip. “Have you heard him eat celery?”
Gina cocked her head. The look on her face said, “Are you kidding me?”
“What? I have an affliction. There’s a name for it. It’s called misophonia. A hatred of specific sounds.”
“I think you have Markophonia. And who eats celery quietly?”
“It’s not a matter of quiet. There’s a specific cadence to each bite.”
Gina nodded slowly, in mock understanding. “Speaking of quiet, you did what I said. I saw.”
“It helped.”
“You’re welcome.”
“It helped me see that I wanted a divorce even before running into Todd.” I sipped my drink. “I know that no matter how Mark chews his celery and no matter how much I cringe at everything else he does—how he pinches his eyebrow, everything—he’s not a bad guy. But are we supposed to go on like this for another fifty years?”
Gina picked up a crunchy noodle, dipped it in duck sauce, and leaned forward as she bit and chewed deliberately. Chomp. Chomp-chomp-chomp. Chomp. “You wanna punch me?”
“No.” I laughed. “I think this is the thing. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I don’t love Mark.” I gauged her reaction, but there was no judgment. “Not every bad marriage is bad because the couple fights,” I continued. “Some could be bad because the couple barely speaks, like us. It was wrong from the start. And it just got worse. And then I spent the night with another guy. Nothing happened, but still.”
“Nothing happened, all right. You can say that again. But you wanted it to happen.” Gina’s eyes met mine. “At the end of the day, it’s not a matter of right or wrong. The question is, what will you learn from your walk down this road?”
“What will I learn? Spare me. And hand me a rib while you’re at it.”
She lifted the plate of ribs toward me. “Spare you the truth? I will do no such thing.”
“Yeah, well, here’s a truth: I just want to be happy. I don’t care what I learn.”
“Yes, you do. That’s why you’re here.”
“Where? At Hunan Palace?”
“Living. On earth. You’re going through life to learn your lessons.”
“I am?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of the purpose of this whole thing.” She cut wide circles in the air with her hands.
“Ugh. Please. I have bigger fish to fry than this esoteric bullshit. I need to get out of this marriage in a way that will cause the least amount of harm to Mark and Ethan. And Jessica and her kids too if, you know, it works out with Todd.”
“This esoteric bullshit will help you figure all of that out,” Gina said.
“What have they done to you here? Were you always like this? Talking about the purpose of life?”
Gina cackled again. “You could say I have a new perspective.”
I took another sip of my icy Coke. “How come we never hung out in the city?”
“You were too busy with your fancy lawyer friends,” she teased as she bit into a spare rib.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m kidding. I wasn’t calling you to hang out either. I had cooler friends.”
“Ha. True.”
Gina leaned in. “What happened to JFK’s mistress’s diary?” She was back to her mocking whisper. “Do you think it was burned?”
“Shut up!” Then something occurred to me. “Hey, you must know the truth. Now that you’re here, you must know! Tell me. Was it a conspiracy? While we’re at it, did aliens land at Roswell? What really happened to that nurse who mysteriously died after seeing one of the alien bodies?”
“Ha! It doesn’t work like that.”
“Pffft. Figures. So if you don’t get handed a file with all the big secrets revealed, then can you use your ‘fly on the wall’ powers? Read over someone’s shoulder at the CIA in your invisibility cloak? Did Oswald act alone?”
“What I mean is, I don’t care. I mean, I care, on a soul level. I care that someone passed and that his family grieved, but my focus is you and my family. I care about your journey and what you learn.”
“My journey? They’ve turned you into a greeting card.”
“Two people died that day.”
“When?”
“November 22, 1963. Well, a lot more than two people died that day, but I mean related to this event.”
“You mean the police officer? JD Tippit?”
“Yes. And do you think when both souls crossed over, they had a bigger party for the president? Of course not. No one is famous here. No one is more important than anyone else. All that matters is the journey they were on and what they learned, how much their souls evolved.”
“So Marilyn Monroe wasn’t greeted by throngs of fans?”
“Marilyn Monroe was greeted by the people who cared about her and her journey, by her spirit guides and her loved ones who’d gone before her.”
“That begs another question, dear cousin. Couldn’t they help her get her shit together like you’re helping me?”
“Her mistakes were part of her journey. They had to happen. They were part of her lessons, part of what made her soul evolve, which is the whole point of coming to earth. And that’s what I’m supposed to help you learn—there are no mistakes.”
“So I’m not making a mistake with Todd?”
“There are no mistakes, only lessons. Remember?”
“That wasn’t the response I was looking for. I wanted to hear, ‘Not a mistake. You’re finding your happily ever after with him now after all.’”
I studied her face for some validation of my hope, but she was back to her lo mein and sucking up a single noodle. “Eat!” she finally yelled.
“When you don’t sound like the Dalai Lama, you sound like Grandma.”
“You should have seen your face when you saw him.”
“Todd?”
“No, the fucking Duke of York. Yes, Todd.”
“I can imagine. At least I have you to talk about it with. Even if I won’t remember this when I’m awake.”
“But you’ll feel something when you wake up. Gut feelings are messages from this side. Pay attention when you’re awake.” She smiled. “So you don’t think Veronica would at least appreciate the coincidence?”
“She thinks he’s a piece of shit. So, no. And anyway, even though we do text sometimes and have lunch, I couldn’t share this with her. We text about things like the JFK assassination—go ahead, laugh—and some interesting parenting articles, but we’re not really connected in the way we used to be. One of those parenting articles was about how lonely motherhood can be. It’s true. It’s like friends just seem to float away. I don’t know. And I certainly can’t confide in any of the mommy group ladies for obvious reasons. Besides, we’re not that close to begin with.”
“Danielle seems cool.”
“She is.”
“Reach out to her. Get your head out of your own ass for once.”
“Is that my next assignment?”
“Yes. Remove head from ass. Check. Hang out with a new friend. Check.”
“Yes, teacher.”
“It’s okay to have different friends at different times in your life.”
“Is it okay to have none? I can’t even talk to my sister. I wish I could, but you understand.”
Gina nodded.
“Your sister is like my sister,” I said. “No desire to leave Queens. Husbands they met in high school. Two cute kids. Always posting about reality shows.”
“Don’t forget their Quality Shopping Network products.”
“Oh my God. The duster sweaters. Orly has one in every color. I just saw Andrea with one on in a picture.” I squeezed out another packet of duck sauce for the rest of my egg roll. “Why are they happy with the simple things, and you and I always wanted more?”
“We’re different people. We all have different things to learn. Some of them can be learned by going out and seeing the world, and others can be learned by not doing that.”
“So who’s more evolved, as you would say?”
She smirked. “It’s not a race, Jada. I guess it’s like a scavenger hunt with different prizes for each participant.”
“So they started at home base in their scavenger hunt and thought, ‘Hmm, not so bad here,’ and just squatted down. And we were like, ‘Off to wander. Later!’”
“Nothing wrong with either one. Everyone who participates in the scavenger hunt gets a prize: they evolve in some way just by living.”
“So everyone gets a participation trophy. Those are bullshit.”
“In competitive sports, maybe. But again, this is not a competition,” Gina explained.
I bit into the other half of my egg roll and spoke with food in my mouth. My mother would have called me a “gavone” for doing such a thing, but this was a different plane, where there were no calories and no judgment. “I think the Gina I knew would have said ‘Todd’s hot. You should have had sex with him.’ But this version of you is all ‘This is affecting the evolution of your soul and blah blah blah.’”
She guffawed and spit out a piece of spare rib, which made me laugh, which then made her laugh even more. If we were outside, jumping over streetlight shadows, I would have pushed her in one and yelled, “You lose.” Then I would have run up the street, and we would have cackled like we used to.
“So why didn’t you sleep with him? Or even kiss him? I mean, I know you tried and ended up on the floor of the restaurant, which was real sexy by the way. But later, why didn’t you go for it?”
“I didn’t want to cross that line, and I think, deep down, it felt like it should be more than that. Not just sex. I mean, what are the chances I’d run into him for just one night? It’s got to mean something, right?” I looked her in the eye. “It’s got to mean that we should try this. We should try for our happy ending. Right?”
“Every ending is happy.” She wiped her hands on one of the hot towels that suddenly appeared.
“Oh, come the fuck on, Gina! No, they’re not. Your ending wasn’t happy. What happened to you was not a happy fucking ending! And what it’s done to us, to your mom, to your family.”
“We’ll talk about that another time.” Gina lit a cigarette and blew the smoke toward the window. “What I mean is, no matter what happens, you’ll learn.”
I wanted to scream at her, “Enough with the learning and the lessons! Everything happens for a reason, and sometimes the reason is that you learn something is bullshit!” But I’d said all that already, and she hadn’t stopped.
So I thought about how to prove her wrong as I picked up a fortune cookie. “You know, it was a mistake to marry Mark. What the hell did I learn from that? Yes, I have a beautiful child. But what did I learn?”
“You’ll see.”
“Whatever. Now I have a chance to do what I should have done and be with the person I should have been with. If I do, I’ll be happy. If I don’t, I’ll just continue to be stuck. There are only two options. I don’t see it any other way.”
“Of course you don’t.”
I cracked open the fortune cookie. “This should be interesting.” I pulled out the little slip of paper. It was blank. I threw it onto the table. “Wonderful. I have no future.”
“Of course you do. Pick that back up.” She jutted her chin toward my fortune atop the pile of ribs. She pulled a pen from behind her ear that wasn’t there before and held it out to me.
“Let me guess. I have to write my own future. I have to find my own happiness, whatever the situation. Like the memes on social media tell us. Ugh.” I grabbed the pen and washed down my disappointment with my ice-cold soda.
“Okay, here goes.” I read aloud as I wrote in tiny letters on my blank fortune. “You will learn nothing and just be happy.”
“In bed.”
“Huh?”
“You’re supposed to add ‘in bed’ to fortunes,” Gina said.
“Oh yeah. Ha! Well, I hope so.”
Gina held her cigarette between her teeth and grabbed the pen. She crossed out “Learn nothing and just.” Then on the other side, she wrote, “And you will learn.”
She removed the cigarette and declared, “You will be happy. And you will learn.”
“In bed? I hope so. It’s been so long. I almost forgot how to do it.”
We fell into a hard fit of cackling again until she smashed her cigarette in the old-fashioned glass ashtray and hopped up. “Let’s go.”
I watched as she hurried out of the restaurant and zigzagged across the street, her arms spread out as if she were about to fly away. I followed her, and we jumped over the streetlight shadows together. Neither one of us, it seemed, felt the urge to push the other in a shadow and run off.