“Seriously! Look at it!” Glenn pokes the phone screen with her finger. “I need sunglasses!”
I bite my lip with fake guilt. “We’re terrible.”
“No! She’s terrible! For inflicting that giant over-Botoxed moon face on everyone.”
She takes a tiny sip from her wineglass—Glenn always orders prosecco, even in the early afternoon, which it is, and even though she isn’t supposed to drink now, which she does anyway. How am I supposed to get through this without alcohol? she always says. But now I think that Glenn just pretends to drink to create a sense of normalcy or for the taste of alcohol on her lips: the level of her glass today, I realize, hasn’t gone down. In all the months we’ve come, I wonder suddenly if it’s ever gone down. Not knowing the answer to that question, not noticing something so obvious, is part of my denial. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to see. I have been here before and I don’t want to be here now. I especially don’t want to be here with Glenn. She not only published Bird at Black Bear Books but, after that encounter with that boss, it was also her idea all those years ago—a short, illustrated, kids-oriented story about being yourself, a modern version of Free to Be . . . You and Me. At first I’d ignored her—children’s books were just what I did for work, fiction was what I wanted to write—but eventually, after playing around with some very simple pen-and-ink drawings, the story rushed out of me in rhymed verse. I’d tried and failed for years to write a novel, but Bird came together instantly and painlessly, as if it had been inside of me my whole life, just waiting for a way out.
“You don’t wear your hair parted in the middle when you have a giant forehead like that!” Glenn goes on. She grabs my phone again, then creeps on the face, pinching with her thumb and forefinger, to make it larger. “You get some bangs like a normal person, or you part your hair on the side, and you cover that shit up. And you don’t talk about adult coloring books like they’re going to change the world and solve everyone’s problems. I mean, seriously, coloring books? To solve writer’s block? What are we, children?”
I love Glenn. “You could have your own show.”
“What kind of show? A yelling-about-annoying-people show?”
The group at the next table—tweedy ancient Harvard-types—stare at her, then turn back to their conversation. Or try to.
“Oh look,” she says, loudly enough for them to hear, which is her intention. “I’ve offended them with my honesty and my brutal truth-telling.” They try even harder to ignore her, but once activated, Glenn will not be ignored. “I know what you’re thinking,” she says, directly to them now, with a pitch-perfect Boston accent. “Who am I to make fun of someone’s giant forehead and how they do or do not wear their hair, when I myself have no hayyy-ah.” She pulls the hand-knit cap off her head in one quick tug to reveal her bald chemo-head, a sight I’m not used to, no matter how many times I’ve seen it over the years during her illness.
The group is in motion now, trying desperately to gather their things—their books and papers and briefcases, their cardigan sweaters and light jackets—it is October and chilly, of course, in New England, which can’t make anything easy for anyone, ever—so they can make their escape. “Oh no. I’ve scared them!” Glenn rolls her eyes at me, full of disgust. But as the people flee and the space between Glenn and me is suddenly empty and quiet, her eyes fill with tears. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“Don’t be.”
“I’m such an asshole.” She turns quickly to look at the group she scared away, visible now through the glass windows at the front of the shop, whispering and walking close together on the sidewalk. “They didn’t do anything to deserve that.” She puts her hat back on and blows her nose into a napkin. “I just get so angry sometimes. I can’t control it.” She turns around again, trying to gauge if she can possibly catch up to them, to apologize, or maybe to just explain the reason for her rudeness, but even if she were healthy and quick the way she used to be, it would be too late. They are already gone.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, but Glenn is slumped in her seat. She makes circles around the top of her glass with her finger.
“Tell me something right now, right this second, that will take my mind off the fact that I’m dying and that I scared off some incredibly uptight but completely innocent people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
I still can’t believe that Glenn’s breast cancer—which was diagnosed right after my third book, and second dud, Why Don’t You Like Me Anymore? came out—returned a year and a half ago with such a vengeance, to her bones and her liver, the way she always feared it would. Before that, her nonstop cancer-talk annoyed me, as if illness was her identity and she couldn’t let it go; she’d been healthy for over five years, and it seemed ridiculous to keep worrying about recurrence. She. Was. Fine. She should get over it already. I’m embarrassed to say that I actually thought that. Then came the news that changed everything: it was back, and it was bad. I’d just lost both my parents and Teddy both his grandparents: How would we all survive this now?
Glenn was told she might have three years, or ten years. But only a year of chemo and radiation and two clinical trials later her cells are dividing and redividing faster than ever. In fact, if I’m honest with myself, which I hate to be—I much prefer the fog of dissociation and denial—she looks worse today than she did two weeks ago. I’m worried that she’s on a downward trajectory that can’t be stopped.
“Shit. Now I’ve traumatized you, too,” she says. “I shouldn’t have used the d-word, but everyone’s dying. We’re all dying. All the time. You know that more than almost anyone else.”
I nod, and suddenly we’re both crying—then laughing, then wiping our noses and eyes and sipping from our drinks, which don’t even taste good anymore.
“Please,” Glenn whispers, trying to sit up straight and wincing, though to anyone watching it would have looked like she was just recovering from the kind of breathlessness that comes from laughing too hard at some great girl talk. “Distract me. I don’t want to think.”
I tell her about Mr. Noah and his new man bun and his bib; about how tall Teddy is getting and how every day I miss him even though he’s still right here, sort of; about Gary and I leaving our most recent couples therapy appointment early; about being behind in tuition and about wondering what will become of us if I can’t find a better paying job than Well/er or if I can’t ever write another book. And then I tell her about my disastrous school presentation, how it was interrupted before it even began, and how the school is bringing in People Puppets from Vermont for Inhabitancy this year.
“People Puppets?” Suddenly she’s paying attention.
I describe the photo Mr. Noah showed of adults wearing animal costumes, taken outside, on a farm, near bales of hay. “The school is looking for host families,” I explain. “They’ll even give you a credit toward tuition if you host them.”
She is sitting up now. “Host them.”
“Are you kidding? You know that Gary is phobic about anything in costume, and Teddy would die: at his age, all he wants to be is invisible. The last thing he’d want is a bunch of weird people living in our house.” I can’t help remembering the younger version of Teddy, who would have begged me to let them come and stay, how he loved anything and everything that involved filling our house with friends, with voices and energy, with life.