“I don’t know. Maybe the universe wants us to put on All’s Well.”
Grace lights a cigarette. Right there even though there’s a NO SMOKING sign on the wall above her head. She doesn’t give a fuck. She doesn’t believe in messages from the universe. She believes in reality, the troubled earth spinning in a cold, black godless universe full of dead suns, in which there is no such thing as fairy dust, serendipity, heavenly design. She believes in the evidence of the senses, her own eyes and ears that see things simply as they are. What happened yesterday seems a little too far-fetched to be coincidence. It reeks of interference from some all-too-human quarter.
“You seem different, Miranda,” she says to me now. But she doesn’t say it like Hugo. Not smiling. Not curious. She looks at me with narrowed eyes like little pinpricks.
“Do I?” I feel fear. Why do I feel fear?
“You seem a little more… I don’t know. Alive. Peppy.” She says the words accusingly.
Is she accusing me? I think of our first meeting, my job-interview day. When I was just a potential hire smiling nervously across from her at that terrible Tuscan restaurant—the dinner portion of that interminable day. Sweating fear bullets in my mall blazer. Trying and failing to charm a table of socially inept hags from the English department who all just blinked at me grimly—the Sisters Grimm, Grace and I would call them later. Grace was the only person there from Theater Studies. Silently, she watched me nod along, equivocate with the hags, my smile wavering. All day, I’d performed wellness wonderfully, miraculously, before her and the dean, the hiring committee. I was withering now.
So, Miranda, I read that you worked at Disney World as a princess? one of the hags said. Is that true?
Just for one summer, I said. And I laughed like it had been just an ironic, postfeminist exercise rather than a part to which I’d given my soul.
A demanding role, I’m sure. They smiled tightly, dipping their torn bits of bread into a saucer full of pungent oil. I wanted to throttle them all—Fuck you, fuck this!—and limp defiantly out the door.
Instead I surprised myself by saying, Actually, it was very demanding. I learned many valuable lessons under that Snow White wig.
They all looked at me, including Grace, a strange smile on her face now. Such as?
How to deal gracefully with pricks.
Silence from the hags. Then the sole laughter of Grace like a roar. She even clapped her hands. When she drove me back to the hotel after the dinner, she offered me a cigarette, the first of many we would share together over the years. Nearly five since that first night, which seems so long ago. Long ago and far away, as Snow White might say. The way she’s looking at me now in the theater is definitely more Sisters Grimm.
“I had a lot of coffee today,” I tell her. I realize I didn’t take my palmful of pills before rehearsal. Just one instead of my usual three. Only one pill last night too, come to think of it. Grace gazes at me standing on both legs. Not so crooked. Not leaning so wildly to the left. No longer so terribly afraid of the right side of my body.
“How’s your pain?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. It’s so hard to tell, isn’t it? The pain comes from so many different places.”
Grace blows smoke into the ceiling and says nothing.
“It’s a cumulative effect,” I continue, borrowing Mark’s language. “From compensatory patterns. So it’s very hard to compartmentalize.”
Grace just stares at me. “You seem better,” she says.
“I’m not, really. I mean I’m still in a lot pain,” I try to say it softly, to reflect the pain that I’m in. And it’s not a lie, I am.
“Like in my back. Right now.” I touch it to show her. “And my hip. And my ribs.” I hunch forward. I do affect a sorrow indeed, but I have it too. To show her the pain that’s— “You seem better,” she repeats.
“Well, I’m not,” I say, insisting. Why am I insisting like this?
“It’s good to see,” she says. She smiles at me sadly. She reaches out and touches my shoulder. I feel a surge of emotion, remembering the early days of our friendship. I hid my physical limitations from her at first. Prevaricated whenever she asked me to do something more strenuous than drinking. How about we go hiking? How about we go sailing? Want to take the bus to New York to see the ballet?
I was always busy.
Doing what? Grace would ask.
Getting divorced. Seeing another surgeon, another wellness charlatan. Gazing into the void of my life. Busy with another production, I’d tell Grace.