How to End a Love Story(100)
The house she’s picked isn’t in a part of town she’s overly familiar with and the fussy floral curtains and pink carpets remind her of Mrs. Stover, the fussy, floral geometry teacher from her sophomore year of high school. The owner is a Polish man in his late fifties whose kids are now off to college, and he brings Helen warm cookies when she checks in. He asks her what she does for a living and writes down the titles of her books so he can send them to his daughter at Columbia.
Mom opens the door when she rings and her eyes sweep from Helen’s face to her toes.
“I already made a cake,” she says, but takes the box of cupcakes from Helen anyway.
“Nice to see you too, Mom,” Helen says as she takes her shoes off.
She resists the urge to run upstairs to Michelle’s old bedroom and instead follows Mom into the kitchen, where various pots and pans sizzle and steam deliciously with soy sauce and ginger and green onion. Dad’s sitting on the couch, watching some bootlegged Chinese historical drama series on his iPad. He gives her a casual wave.
“How’s work?” she asks him first.
Dad tells her it’s not going very well at all. He thinks he’s gone as high in the company as he can go because of his English, and he’s getting too old to be as impressive as the kids coming straight out of college. He tells her he’s been thinking of getting into the start-up business back in China, that there are more opportunities for someone like him, and his English language skills would be more appreciated back there.
“I think your English is great,” Helen says, and means it. Dad grumbles, and asks how the show is going.
Helen tells him about postproduction and how the program she’s using to sit in on the edit sessions remotely is glitchy and terrible and sometimes she isn’t sure it’s really worth her being there at all. She tells him about how occasionally, an edit session will go long and Suraya will leave the session to make dinner for her kids, and then Helen takes point, and those are her favorite sessions of all, when she and the lead editor unfold their bodies on opposite coasts and talk random shit about their lives while they wait for sequences to render for playback.
It’s like therapy, in some ways—sitting on a couch and revisiting all the mistakes of production and highlighting the good parts and then cutting and trimming out the awkward pauses, then finding perfect takes blown by the most inane things like a fly landing in the actress’s hair, and getting mad all over again at someone off camera dropping an apple box during the big climactic speech. Watching the editor reshape and polish a scene until it resembles the thing in her brain the closest, she feels like she experiences a million cycles of excitement (the raw footage is so good!), disappointment (why did the director pick that take?), frustration (oh, that’s why), fuck-it-I-don’t-care-anymore (throw in the weird take with the fly, maybe no one will notice), and pleasant surprise that no, actually, with a few creative strokes of the keyboard, it all worked out in the end.
“And your next book?”
Helen doesn’t have an answer for that yet. Her agent did tell her she could probably staff as a screenwriter on someone else’s show, if she wanted. “We’d have to bring on someone to represent you full-time in that area, if that’s something you’re interested in.”
She flirted with the idea of really trying it out for a while, but the truth is, she has no idea what that would look like. She isn’t sure she could casually float from show to show and let go of things because it’s not her baby and she’s just here to do a job. She thinks maybe she could learn something working under someone else, another Suraya maybe, but then she wonders—does she even want to learn whatever vague lesson that might be, or does she want to find a way to fix whatever’s blocking her from doing her real job, that she loved so much once (loves still, her heart insists reflexively, and she thinks, be quiet, we’re not talking about him), so she can deliver on the promise of the premise of herself as a novelist.
“I’m still trying to figure it out,” she tells Dad, and Mom claps her hands in the other room to announce that dinner is ready.
She finds herself repeating most of the things she told Dad to Mom across the dinner table, and Mom nods and blinks rapidly and sometimes looks like she’s thinking about a million other things while Helen’s talking, but finally she says, “You will figure it out soon. You always do.”
Helen’s surprised by the warm gust of air that seems to blow into her chest from that and she says, genuinely, “Thanks, Mom.”
Mom waves off the acknowledgment like it’s a fly in the air, and Helen feels something familiar settling into place. This is what reconciliation looks like, in our family.
“I’m sorry,” Helen says, suddenly gripped with a need to say it out loud. “For what I said in the hospital that day. I was angry and hurting, and I—I wish I’d handled it better, instead of trying to make you hurt like I did.”
Dad gives Helen a short, embarrassed nod. Mom stands abruptly to clear their bowls.
“It’s time for cake,” she says briskly, without looking at Helen.
The cake is a Betty Crocker angel food cake and Helen remembers making this with her mom when she was little—so little, Michelle was too small to help. She had watched her mother crack the eggs and marveled at how magical they looked, their golden yolks trapped in a clear aura. She had learned that word from some animated movie and it radiated such a perfect elegance that she looked for excuses to use it everywhere for an entire year.