Fiona and Jane(31)
“I really have to go, Mom.”
“Tell me before Wednesday night, or else I lose my place in line. I’ll FedEx some samples for you to try this week.” Her mother cleared her throat, and it led into a phlegmy cough. Fiona held the phone away from her ear while her mother hacked. When the spell ended, her mother said, “You’re still young, you can make a change, just like that. Think about it. We’ll call it Lin and Daughter!”
More often lately, her mother needled her about moving back to Los Angeles. Conrad had left home when he turned eighteen, two years ago. His dad, Fiona’s stepfather, long gone. Maybe her mother was feeling lonely. Fiona was turning thirty this year, but she knew her mother didn’t see a problem with her grown daughter moving back in. Did the vitamin capsules home business stand in her mother’s mind as a real proposal? Or was it a farfetched tactic to get Fiona packing her bags, shabbily disguised as a cry for help?
Her mother cut a supremely unlikely figure for pushing healthy dietary supplements. She was overweight and prediabetic; last year, an episode of gout forced her into a wheelchair for two months. After she got her legs back, Mom switched from Newports to Mild Seven menthols. She cut down to three cigarettes a day, the best she could manage, despite her doctor’s warnings. Still, her mother nagged Fiona all the time about quitting herself.
She kept walking, drifting east toward Gramercy. Eight years in New York City. Her mother had never visited, not even once. And what did she want to show her mother, anyway? Fiona imagined her life through her mother’s eyes, wreathed in disappointment. The law degree left unfinished, though she was still paying down the loans; a string of attorney-adjacent jobs that didn’t add up to a career. Unmarried, childless. The mess with her ex, Willy. At least her mother didn’t know about that.
Last Christmas, she’d brought Willy home to meet her family. Her mother had read Willy’s face and declared him blessed, five seconds into the introductions. Oh, just look at that intelligent forehead, she’d said, and such big, beautiful earlobes. Fiona translated loosely: Mom likes your face. Willy was fourth-generation and didn’t speak a syllable of Mandarin, Cantonese, Toisan, nothing. Her mother added, in English, “Lucky. Rich!” Fiona had snorted out a laugh, then recovered by hiding it as a cough. Willy’s business cards, which he had designed himself and printed up at Kinko’s, said he was a documentary filmmaker. He was twenty-eight, a year out of Tisch. He scraped together a living on thin royalty checks from downloads of his MFA thesis, a short doc on Coney Island sideshow performers; the occasional DP gig on shoots that paid in IMDb credits, MetroCards, and catered food. Willy’s only consistent cash flow came from delivering laundry bundles for his uncle’s fluff-n-fold on Henry Street. She had laughed at her mother’s read on Willy’s face, but Fiona also wanted to believe that her mother knew something she didn’t, some greater future for Willy, and for herself. Willy was a hustler, one of the things she had liked most about him. She’d just never imagined that she could be one of his marks. And after all these years in New York, where she’d learned how to live as if always on guard.
This most recent Christmas in LA, she’d invited Jane over one night. She’d introduced her to Willy as “my best friend,” though in truth they’d hardly kept in touch. A distance between them Fiona felt acutely, marked by unspoken things, added up. She knew the contours of Jane’s life, not its interior. If Fiona moved back to LA, what would their friendship be like—no longer held aloft by the nostalgia for their high school years, the romance of their present distance?
A fire truck blasted its urgent sirens a few blocks up. It was moving away, not closer. Everywhere she looked people walked in pairs, holding hands, filling the street with their smiles and knowing, intimate glances. Where the sun touched her face, her body, Fiona seemed to feel more and more alone. Cars passed up and down the streets she crossed. Every once in a while a yellow cab stopped on the corner and someone got out, and another passenger waited to slide in, then slammed the door shut. Her eyes followed a bike messenger riding up Broadway, weaving through the traffic, until she lost him to the distant horizon.
She thought of Gabriel. How might her mother read his features? The prominent curve of the Cupid’s bow on his upper lip, those high cheekbones, his laughing brown eyes. Did color matter? What fortunes might her mother glean from Gabriel’s burnished-copper complexion? Then she shook her head, remembering Tish’s warning about her tendency to settle into relationships, careening from one man to the next. You don’t know nothing about him, babe. Trying to fall in love with his teeth? It occurred to her that she didn’t even know Gabriel’s last name.
Fiona forgot about her mother’s vitamin business proposal until she lay down to sleep that night. She breathed in the dark. Her mother wanted five thousand dollars. She thought of the money she gave her mother, the night before she boarded the plane to New York. Fiona had kept the other half of the inheritance from her grandfather for herself. Of course she didn’t have it anymore; that money had been spent long ago, many times over. And now, Fiona didn’t even have five dollars to spare.
* * *
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Wednesday night, Fiona texted Tish she might meet up later, depending on how her date went. Gabriel had suggested a Cuban place on First Ave. When she was out of the subway and above ground again, her phone beeped with a new voicemail message. She listened to it, walking toward the restaurant.