september 2008
Julia was at her desk, waiting to receive a pitch deck from her assistant and thinking about Alice. She knew intellectually that her
daughter was grown up and had her own life—she was twenty-five and no longer lived with Julia, after all—but the patterns in Julia’s brain had been set years earlier, and she was programmed to worry about her daughter at least once an hour. Perhaps worry wasn’t the right word: Julia habitually turned her daughter over in her mind as if she were a Rubik’s Cube she couldn’t solve. She knew her daughter better than anyone, but there was some part of Alice behind lock and key, and Julia worried that this was her fault. Her daughter’s life was too simple, too streamlined, for someone in her mid-twenties. Alice never stayed out too late or got too drunk. She never sobbed over a man, or sobbed at all, as far as Julia could tell. Most concerning, to Julia’s mind, was the fact that Alice had never had a boyfriend. Julia was too afraid to ask directly, but she thought there was a strong chance that her daughter was a virgin. This absence in her daughter’s life—of love, of touch, of relationship—made Julia panicky. Why would her beautiful daughter have backed away from intimacy? She knew Alice’s height must intimidate some men but not all of them; Julia only went to bed with men who agreed to her terms, and although she’d given up on dating a few years earlier, she’d never had any trouble finding agreeable men. This blank space in her daughter’s life was presumably deliberate, and Julia wanted to
understand why, but Alice was skillful at steering conversations away from her personal life. Once, when Julia had ignored Alice’s signposts and pushed too hard, her daughter had said, “Why do I have to live the way you think I should? You never needed a man, and I don’t either.”
In college, Alice had delayed choosing a major, because she found most subjects equally interesting. This mystified Julia; her daughter was smart but unfocused on any possible career. “How about graduate school?” Julia had suggested. “You’re good at science—I’d be happy to pay for medical school.” Alice shook her head, a distracted look on her face, and said, “No, thank you.” After college, she worked as a freelance copy editor for a few publishing houses, a job that required her to comb through sentences for ten hours a day and paid barely enough to live on. Alice had never been an avid reader growing up—she’d preferred television—but now she reminded Julia of Sylvie, with her attention always adhered to a book. Sylvie had truly loved to read, though; it was unclear what was gluing Alice’s eyes to the pages. What are you really going to do? Julia wondered. Who are you really going to be? Because this controlled, Teflon version of her daughter couldn’t be the final product, could it? Julia worried—she had always worried about this
—that Alice was depressed, but her daughter seemed too steady, too level, for that to be the case. And when Julia asked her daughter if she was okay, Alice always said yes.
When the light on Julia’s phone blinked, she was happy for the distraction from her thoughts. She picked up the receiver and said, in the confident, professional tone she’d mastered long ago: “Julia Padavano.”
“Hi, Julia.” There was a pause. “It’s William.”
She heard his voice, but it was accompanied by an echoing sound. Julia had closed off her past as if it were a water pipe, and the creak of the valve opening was noisy. She repeated his name, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. “William?”
She never thought about him, because why would she? Her job was to think of Alice, and so she pictured the tall young woman bent over a manuscript, looking for mistakes. At the same moment she had a memory of standing in the Northwestern apartment, her breasts swollen with milk. Julia felt flushed, as if the warm air in that living room had crossed time and distance to find her.
She cleared her throat. “Why would you call me?” “It’s Sylvie,” he said.
Sylvie, she thought. Julia looked around, but no one was staring. No one in her office seemed to have realized that Julia’s past had just reached through a phone line and grabbed her heart out of her chest.
“Sylvie is dying, Julia. She’s all right now, but she has less than a year.”
Julia skimmed over what William had said. She couldn’t go too close, because the words were hot coals. She had the urge to say, I love my job, and I’m one of the best in the world in my field. I made three hundred thousand dollars last year. She wanted him to know that she was successful and therefore too busy, or maybe even too important, for this kind of news. But she couldn’t say that. She had the urge to gently set the phone down, like a child who had picked up the extension on someone else’s call.
“No,” she said.
“The only thing she wants is you, Julia. She needs you.”
Julia looked down. She was wearing a gray-blue suit. She had a slight run in her stockings, which she’d stopped with clear nail polish. She tried to understand; it felt like William was asking her to speak in a language that she hadn’t used for a long time. “Did Sylvie ask you to call me?”
He paused, and Julia remembered that this was how William spoke: with reluctance and hesitation, never sure if he had the right words. Julia had assumed that William and Sylvie were still married, but only because it seemed like news of their divorce would have
made its way to her. Julia never thought about life in Chicago, past or present, at all.
Finally, William said, “No. Sylvie doesn’t know I’m doing this.”
“I have a full calendar,” Julia said. “I run my own business. I don’t have time to go anywhere.” She lifted her hand in the air and waved it. On the other side of the glass wall, her young assistant popped out of her chair, a notepad and pen in hand, and headed her way. Julia had nothing to say to her, of course. She was going to send her away, just like she was going to send William away. Both were dead ends, blank walls. But she had panicked and set the young woman in motion.
“Julia?” William said.
She waited, and the years pulsed between them, down the phone line.
“I never saw two people love each other like you and Sylvie.” He cleared his throat. “I thought maybe it was just because of how I was raised, that I wasn’t exposed to that kind of thing, but that wasn’t it. I’ve never seen anything like you and your sister.”
Something inside Julia started to crumble, like those awful images of glaciers shedding giant sections to the freezing ocean below. He had said that Sylvie was dying. Her sister, who used to be as familiar to Julia as her own body. Her sister, who had not been her sister for over two decades. Julia coughed, and inside the cough was a strange sound, as if her insides had begun to cry, without tears reaching her surface. Her ecosystem was changing beneath her skin.
“Please come home,” William said.
Julia knew how to control her voice. She had been manipulating outcomes, with men in boardrooms and on dates, for decades. She was an expert at setting a goal and steering in that direction. When her voice came out confident and clear, she was pleased. She said, “I’m sorry, William, but I can’t do that.”
When Julia hung up, she noticed that her hands were shaking. No problem, she thought. I can handle this. She stood up and concentrated on walking gracefully to the bathroom. She chose two different employees at random to smile at on her way across the office. In the bathroom, she splashed cold water on her face and thought: Stick to your calendar, Padavano. What do you have to do next? Don’t think about anything else. After all, it was none of her business that Sylvie was sick. The phone call changed nothing about her current life. Her sister was no longer part of her world.
When Julia left the bathroom, she started a conversation with one of her smartest employees—an MIT grad who, Julia knew, thought she didn’t deserve her position as his boss—about a project they were working on. Julia had a hard time paying attention to the young man’s voice, though. Her attention faded in and out—attention, attention, none—as if it were her heartbeat. She excused herself, said she had an important call to make, and stepped away. When she got back to her desk, she realized she was barefoot. She stared at her heels, which were sitting neatly under her desk. She must have taken them off while she spoke to William, but she had no memory of doing so. Had the MIT grad noticed she was shoeless in the middle of the office? Julia had a personal rule about not being barefoot at work, even when she worked late, and now that was broken.
She opened and closed her desk drawers, as if she was looking for something, because she needed a few moments of blankness to reset. When her cellphone rang, Julia looked at the screen, saw it was Alice, and felt a hiccup of fear. Had her daughter sensed that she’d just spoken to her father? The fact that William and Alice could call her, back-to-back, was supposed to be impossible. William was dead, Chicago was dead. Sylvie was— Julia couldn’t finish this thought. “Hi, sweetheart,” she said, and poured all her effort and attention into employing her normal voice.
“Are we on for tonight?” Alice said. “I don’t mind either way. I have a new project, so I could work.”
The mother and daughter watched a movie or television show together once a week. Alice would come to Julia’s apartment after work, and they’d order in dinner and sit cross-legged on the couch like they had ever since Alice was tiny. Julia knew they both found the experience comforting, even though Julia also felt uncomfortable, knowing that her daughter should be out there living a life, not in here with her mother, as if she were still ten years old.
“I’m too busy. Another night would be better,” Julia said. She had the sense that today’s schedule was tipping away from her, like a plate falling off a table. She was still barefoot; some part of her resisted slipping the heels back on. Then, because the normal Julia
—the one she’d been before William called—would continue the conversation, she said, “What’s the new project?”
“Oh, I’m copyediting a novel. I told Naveen that I don’t like doing novels—I prefer nonfiction—but he said fiction is good for me.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s a modern take on Little Women. Did you read that when you were a kid?”
“Little Women?” Julia’s body felt like it was filled with wet, prickly sand. She managed to make a noise of assent. She remembered lying in bed next to Sylvie in the dark, in their small room on 18th Place. She’d fallen asleep to the sound of her sister’s voice countless times. In their beds, they kept returning to the same argument: which of them was better suited to be Jo March. “I have Jo’s spunk and determination,” Julia had said. “But I’m going to be a writer,” Sylvie said. “I’m the one who could tell our stories.”
“Jo runs a feminist publishing company in New York,” Alice said. “Meg still marries for love, Amy is a hell-raiser, and Laurie is a woman they’re all in love with.”
Julia said, “Does Beth still die?” “Beth dies,” Alice said. “It’s very sad.”
And just like that, the two little girls in their beds on 18th Place were silenced. The child inside Julia lay wide-eyed in the dark, knowing that she was Jo, but only because Sylvie was Beth.
