Looking for Lily Read online

  My main worry was the Super Bowl. Jack could be blunt, and so could Monica. He might make a comment about her football ignorance, or she might say something about his football obsession, and we would have a war on our hands. Neither was one to back down, and I wasn’t sure how I might mediate without taking sides.

  All this ran through my mind as we drove back to my house. Monica had her window open, and I alternated between worrying about the weekend and telling her it was too cold.

  “In Atlanta, this is like spring.”

  I leaned over and turned on the heat. “We’re not in Atlanta. It’s January in Florida, and this qualifies as cold.”

  Monica rolled her eyes. “Aren’t you from the Midwest? You’ve gotten soft.”

  I shrugged. “True. Now can we close the window?”

  Afterward, I decided that it didn’t make sense to worry about Monica and Jack meeting. It was going to happen, and now all I could do was hope it would work out. They were both too important to me.

  * * *

  Monica and I spent the early evening cooking and laughing, remembering all the reasons why we had hit it off from the moment we met. She had a dry sense of humor and a way of cutting right to the heart of an idea. Even though Monica used to be overweight just like me, she had never suffered from the lack of confidence that I still struggled with. I always thought it was because of her family, her mother. She came from a close-knit clan that held raucous family reunions each year, where they wore matching t-shirts and told family stories over and over. I never had anything like that, and I always believed that was the reason why the fat devastated me in a way it didn’t hurt Monica.

  We couldn’t agree on the kind of food we wanted (she wanted Mexican and I wanted Italian), so we compromised and made Asian. Monica concocted a Chinese stir-fry, I made Pad Thai, and we found a bottle of organic sake at the Whole Foods. We couldn’t find fortune cookies, so we agreed that peanut butter was always a good cookie option, no matter what.

  When Jack arrived, he carried a bottle of white wine in one hand and a bunch of flowers in the other. Monica insisted on opening the door and I hung back, watching their faces for first reactions. When Monica noticed the flowers, her face brightened a bit, and then more when he handed them to her.

  “For you. I’m so glad to finally meet you, Monica.” Jack was on his most charming good behavior. I think Monica might have been blushing.

  “So sweet. How did you know I love calla lilies?”

  She glanced at me and I shrugged. “I guess he’s psychic.”

  Jack stepped inside.

  “Not psychic. Just well mannered, thoughtful, charming, intelligent…”

  “We get it.” I stopped him or else we would be standing there all night.

  Monica laughed. “Is modest on the list?”

  “My father always told me that when you’re trying to sell yourself, modesty has no place.”

  “He sounds like a wise man.” Was she batting her eyelashes at him? She gave me a teasing look. I knew what it meant—if Jack and I were just friends, why would I care if they flirted a little? I sighed. She always was a bit of a troublemaker.

  “Actually, he was, and is, a jackass, but it’s probably too early in our relationship to trade family stories.”

  He and Monica spent another moment beaming at each other. I finally had to step between them.

  “Okay, he’s thoughtful and you’re flattered. Can we agree that you guys like each other and go eat? I’m starving,” I said. I made my voice stern, giving them both a mock frown. Inside, my muscles unclenched, and for the first time since Monica announced her visit, I was relaxed. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized just how important it was to me that my two best friends get along. I valued Monica’s opinion, and I had for years. Now I realized how much I valued Jack’s as well.

  “And by the way, you never bring me flowers,” I informed Jack.

  He struck a dramatic pose and looked off into the distance. “ ‘Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.’ ”

  Monica was impressed. “That was beautiful,” she gushed.

  “That was Oscar Wilde. Add literary thief to your list of accomplishments.”

  Jack grinned at me. “So what’s for dinner?”

  * * *

  Super Bowl Sunday couldn’t have been better. The Patriots won, I won my bet with Jack, and from Jack’s perspective, seeing Janet Jackson’s nipple during the half-time show made the loss worth it. More important, Monica had spent some time learning the basics of football. When she wondered what the offensive coordinator would call to counteract the blitz, I never loved her more. She smiled at me. She was a good friend.

  Chapter 12

  “Happily ever after is important”

  During that first week taking care of Aunt Gillian, I developed an intense appreciation for the work of medical professionals. And there were days, more of them than I liked to admit, that I wished I was at the university, teaching summer classes to students who thought that cramming fifteen weeks of instruction into six would be easy. That seemed like a vacation compared to caring for my aunt.

  It had been so long since I lived with Aunt Gillian I had no idea what to expect. When I was a kid, I spent my days at school, and I never had any idea how she spent hers. She napped a lot, which I assumed was normal for an older person, but when she wasn’t sleeping, she puttered around the house starting what she called projects. In my house, these were items or situations that she first criticized, and then insisted on fixing.

  “Where did you get those curtains?”

  “I don’t know, Aunt Gillian.”

  “Well, they’re tacky. I’ll sew you a pair that is more tasteful. Lord knows you never had any taste.”

  So I bought her an inexpensive sewing machine and took her to pick out fabric. She sewed one side of a curtain, declared she was tired and never touched the sewing machine again. I left the loose fabric out, thinking she would come back to it when she was ready. At the end of the week, she frowned at it as if she had never seen it before.

  “You need to clean up around here. I know I taught you better than to keep house this poorly.”

  Then things started getting lost and showing up in weird places. We spent one whole morning looking for the remote before I found it inside a box of cereal. The next day, my aunt spent fifteen minutes looking for her glasses until I pointed out they were perched on top of her head. I must have said this with a note of sass.

  “Don’t be a smart-mouth, Ernestine. It’s not becoming.”

  Aunt Gillian had always been moody, but I noted now that her moods were unpredictable and often inexplicable. She was excited when I suggested we go to the salon to get our nails done, something I knew she liked to do. But when we got there, she complained that the girl doing her nails didn’t speak English, and she told me not to leave a tip. I left double the normal tip while my aunt wasn’t looking and apologized to the technician, who was Korean but spoke perfect English.

  I decided that I needed to adjust my thinking and treat my aunt more like a patient and less like a normal family member joining the household. There was a certain irony in this. My aunt had always wanted me to be a nurse, like her. Being like my aunt, deliberately or otherwise, was the last thing I wanted. And aside from wanting to oppose her, I never wanted to be a nurse. I wasn’t one of those people who grew up wanting to help people. I had little interest in medicine, even less in the gritty details and precision of biology classes. The smell of blood has always made me queasy. I hate needles.

  What I loved was reading. When I was nine years old, I spent the summer reading every book in the Cleveland City Library’s children section. I did not discriminate; Judy Blume was as fascinating to me as R. L. Stine. It wasn’t the subject of the books that mattered; it was the feeling I got when I read. Books helped me escape the reality of my neighborhood, which was by that time well on its way to being run-down and forgotten. Whe
n I read, I could play in distant cities, countries, worlds, instead of riding my bike up and down the block in front of our house, staying within my aunt’s range of vision. Books took me away from home and the disapproval that was punctuated by icy silences instead of yelling. Books allowed me to be someone other than Tina; between the pages I was as pretty as Deenie, as funny as Ramona, as clever as Nancy Drew. Books saved me.

  What I really wanted was to be a writer. I always thought I could write a children’s book, one about a girl like me, an overweight girl, who finds her value in what’s real, not just the superficial. It would be a book about loving oneself not in spite of differences but because of them. The main character would not run from imperfection but would embrace it. And she would have a family, a mother and a father, brothers and sisters. A big, loving, messy family in which no one kept secrets or told lies.

  I knew it was self-indulgent, maybe even far fetched. But it was still my dream. I even did the research. I read all the children’s books I could, studied the illustrations, thought about plot and narrators. I made lists. First, I started with the basics:

  1. Keep it simple

  2. Use humor

  3. Use made-up words and rhyme

  4. Show, don’t tell

  5. Use words kids can understand

  I kept adding to my lists, getting more detailed and specific:

  6. Develop interesting characters

  7. Make an outline; have a general understanding of the beginning, middle, and end of the story—and of how the characters will interact and evolve

  8. Conflict: A good story usually has some sort of conflict or obstacle that the main character has to resolve

  9. Happily ever after is important

  Sometimes the lists were more complicated, more like self-encouragement than guiding principles.

  10. Start writing today

  11. Write every day

  12. Believe in yourself

  13. Find illustrator

  Her name would be Brianna. It was the kind of name I’d always wanted for myself. Her challenge would be something simple, like wanting to join the volleyball team but being told she was too slow and too fat for sports. She would practice until she was so good they had to take her, fat and all. People would see beyond her outside and look at what she could do, what she was, as a person. Brianna might not even be skinny, but she would be a great volleyball player.

  I thought it was a great story. I thought that someday I would write this book, and it would be the start of a whole series of books about Brianna and her friends, all of whom had to overcome something in order to find their place in the world. I even wrote out a rough draft, but I never showed it to anyone because I was afraid it wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t ready to give up the dream, so I couldn’t let anyone tell me my idea wasn’t a good one.

  I kept the draft on my desk at home as a reminder that someday I had to take that next step. I didn’t even know Jack had seen it until he presented me with a folder on my thirty-second birthday.

  “I usually like jewelry,” I said, looking at the folder with mock disdain.

  “Just open it.”

  I did, and I found drawings of a girl inside. She had deep brown skin and a wide smile. Her arms and legs were plump and she had a little pot belly. She held a volleyball and wore a uniform shirt with her name on it. Brianna.

  I looked up at Jack, my mouth open. He held up his hands.

  “I know you shouldn’t go through the stuff on someone’s desk. But I was using your computer one day and I happened to see your story. It was right there out in the open.”

  I still couldn’t speak.

  “Anyway, it’s a great story, and I thought you might need some illustrations to go with it.”

  Jack watched me, worried that I was angry. I was in shock that another person had read my book, that he liked it. Most of all, I couldn’t believe he had taken the time to make illustrations. I flipped through the pile. They were perfect.

  I felt tears coming, but I didn’t want Jack to see me cry. I cleared my throat.

  “I didn’t know you could draw. Like this. They’re beautiful.”

  His face brightened. “So you want to use them?”

  I did. But that would mean I’d have to actually write the book, for real, not just a draft. And that prospect was still scary. Jack was my friend. Of course, he was supportive. Maybe the rest of the world wouldn’t be.

  I tried to explain this to him without sounding like a wimp. He nodded.

  “Well, whenever you’re ready, I am.”

  * * *

  According to Aunt Gillian, writing wasn’t a career. She said the only way she would help pay for me to go to college was if I chose a sensible career. When I was a senior in high school, I pleaded with her. I could be a librarian, an editor, a reviewer, even a writer, I told her. She suggested medicine and Howard University, thinking I would be a prominent black doctor, or at the very least, marry one. I chose Georgetown and an English major. I got a scholarship, maintained a perfect GPA, and ignored Aunt Gillian’s complaints. I went to graduate school for longer than my aunt felt was appropriate, becoming Dr. Jones after all. Aunt Gillian came to watch me receive my Ph.D. from Maryland, although she made it clear that a Ph.D. was not as good as an M.D. in her book. Through it all, books and the fat around my waist and thighs were my constant companions.

  When I began my job at Mizner University in West Palm Beach, I found another love: teaching. I soon realized that many of my colleagues were writers who taught. They spent most of their time outlining essays and books, plotting to become the next Henry Louis “Skip” Gates or Harold Bloom. I too wrote and had published articles in my specialty, African-American poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But I did so under duress. I was a teacher who wrote.

  Before my first class, I worried that I would feel uncomfortable with so many people sitting there, staring at me, staring at my fat. But, after those initial classes, my students related to me in a warm way. I listened to them talk about their other professors, and I realized that my classes were different, more relaxed. It took me months before I realized that they didn’t like me in spite of my imperfections; they liked me because of them. My weight took me down a few notches, from vaunted professor who could do no wrong to professor who was more like a regular person, with problems just like everyone else. Many of my colleagues would balk at being pushed off the careful pedestals they constructed for themselves, but I welcomed it. I wanted my students to be engaged and talkative during my literature classes, and if my weight was helping me reach that goal, well, it had finally proven to be good for something.

  And I loved being on campus. Mizner University occupied premier waterfront property, right on the Intracoastal in West Palm Beach, just blocks from my house. Named, as so many South Florida edifices were, for architect and benefactor Addison Mizner, the University was one of Mizner’s designs. The original buildings dated back to 1920 and were lovelier when you learned that Mizner had no idea how to draw blueprints and had no formal training. What he had was his vision of Florida as a tropical Mediterranean, filled with barrel tile roofs, terra cotta stucco, and projecting understated elegance. The University was a collection of one- and two-story buildings spread out over more than one hundred acres, with the most high-profile departments and administrators in buildings facing the water and the rest creeping inland. It was located not far from downtown West Palm Beach, but once inside the gates, the school was a like a green oasis, both at one with and separate from the hustle of the city.

  I loved the look of the campus, where the breezeways opened at either end into arched doorways and every window arched as well. I loved the muted mustard tones of the buildings on the outside, and the noninstitutional décor inside. I even loved the man-made lakes dotting the campus, because although they paled in beauty compared to the Intracoastal and the ocean, they were surrounded by leaning palms and tropical vegetation.

  My own small office
was spare and severe in many respects. There were only three pieces of furniture: a long, narrow desk, the leather chair I sat in, and another, less comfortable chair for guests. The walls on two sides were lined with ceiling-to-floor bookshelves, and a large window took up nearly the entire wall behind me. I sat with my back to the window so that I faced the door and could see any visitors right away. I’d taken down the blinds from the window, so the office was bathed in light even on the cloudiest days. The walls were white, but I planned to lobby for permission to paint them a more soothing color after I received tenure.

  There was something about Mizner University that felt like home to me, and it was where I was closest to being the Tina I wanted to be. It wasn’t perfect, but if there was one thing I had learned about life, it’s that being a perfectionist, like my aunt, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

  Chapter 13

  “Go get me some cigarettes”

  I longed for the classroom during those first weeks with Aunt Gillian, and the fact that she had gotten her way was not lost on me. I’d found myself playing nurse that summer, caring for a cranky, ungrateful patient who lived in my home and sometimes surprised me by forgetting my name. It turned out that Aunt Gillian’s dementia was more advanced than I had thought, and I was at a loss for ways to deal with it. The only bright spot in those first few days was that my aunt was much nicer to me when she thought I was a stranger.

  I could always tell when it was one of those times when she forgot our history.

  “Good morning,” she chirped at me when I came into her room. Then she would give me instruction on the handling of her laundry, her meal requests, and a few pointers on cleaning so that the room was truly clean.

  At first, this annoyed me, but I soon realized that Aunt Gillian was a lot nicer when she treated me like a servant. It wasn’t polite to be rude to the help. Family, now that was an entirely different story. Aunt Gillian was at her nastiest when she remembered who I was and why she was in my home.