The Ballad of Lisa and Lacey (Part VI)
(for Part V click here)

            The telephone rang on Wednesday afternoon.  It woke Lacey and before she was conscious enough to ignore it, she picked it up and said hello.

“Hi, Lace.  This is Lisa.” There was a giggle, “Remember me?”

Foggy with sleep and fooled by her dreams, Lacey sank her head back into the pillow, relieved.

“Oh, Lis.  Where’ve you been?  I was so worried.”

There was a second of silence.

“Wisconsin?” Lisa questioned.

Lacey didn’t understand and there was more silence.

“Are you alright, Lace?  Did I call at a bad time?”

“Yeah — uh.  No, I’m  good.  No — um — I must have fallen asleep.  I — uh — What time is it?”

“Lace.  It’s the middle of the afternoon.”

Lace?  Nobody called her Lace.  Lisa called her Lace.  Lisa?  Lisa!

“Lisa?”

“Just so. Surprised?”

Lacey was surprised.  She sat up on the sofa, closed her eyes tight, yawned and stretched her free arm out in front of her, fingers wide.

“What are you doing?  Where are you?”

“I’m at home, but I’m coming to see you — tomorrow.  I’ve got some people I need to meet and some papers I have to sign, so I’m going to fly in, in the morning.  I’ll be busy all day but we can have dinner at my hotel.  Okay?  Say, seven?”

Lacey had talked to Lisa so many times in the last few months: in the shower, on the bus, at work, slowly falling asleep.  She had said so many things to her, but now all she could manage was:

“Yeah, that’s good.  Yeah.  Seven.”

“You remember the hotel?”

“Uh huh — yeah, no problem.”

“Okay, it’ll be great.  You can tell me all your good stories and we’ll drink wine and have that chocolate — uh — chocolate, whatever we had last time.  I’m at work, Lace.  I have to go, but I’ll see you tomorrow.  Okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, go back to sleep.  See you tomorrow.  Bye.”

“Bye, Lis.” But the phone was already dead.

Lacey didn’t remember what happened next — it was so long ago.  But the ache was real — she could remember that — and the excitement and the hurt at the very bottom of her belly and how all the anger dissolved away like sugar in the rain when she saw Lisa sitting in the restaurant.  She tried to appear casual.  She stopped and looked deliberately where Lisa wasn’t, but Lisa was already out of her chair, the purpose of her heels sounding on the wooden floor.  When Lacey turned her head back, Lisa was there and she had her hands on Lacey’s shoulders.  She pulled her in like a plush toy.

“Oh, I’ve missed you.  I’ve missed you.  I’ve missed you.” Lisa said, running all the words together.

Lacey knew the voice and the feel, but it was the smell of Lisa’s hair and her makeup that made Lacey cry.  She swallowed as Lisa stepped back and ran her hands down Lacey’s arms to hold her in place.

“You let your hair grow.  I love it.  Come,” Lisa said, turning and pulling Lacey along, “I’ve got the same table we had last time.”

The server was already there, holding the chair out for her.  Lacey stopped and carefully touched the tears out of the corner of her eye and then sat down.

“I’ve ordered Cote du Rhone something or other.  Can you remember what we drank on the river?  Are you hungry?  No? Right, we’ll look at the menus later.  Let’s try the wine and talk for a minute,” Lisa said, sitting down, pushing the menus aside and pointing at Lacey’s glass — all in one motion.  The server immediately poured wine for Lacey.

“Pick it up.  Pick it up.” Lisa reached across with her wine glass. There was a loud “cling” as the two women misjudged the distance between them and the glasses collided.  A couple of people turned their heads to the sound.

“I’m so excited to see you.” Lisa sipped her wine, “How are you?  You sounded terrible over the phone.  I thought I was going to have to come and pick up the pieces.”

“I’m fine, Lis.”

And Lacey knew she was going to Rome.

The Ballad of Lisa and Lacey (Part V)
(For Part IV click here)

It wasn’t sadness; it was worse than that.  It was the utter futility of normal.  They had left each other at the airport.  Lisa had a connecting flight, so there was no time for any real goodbyes — just a few inane remarks, a long tired hug, and Lisa holding Lacey’s hands together and pulling them to her lips.

“I had such a wonderful time,” she said, smiling and warm, and kissed Lacey’s fingers.  The two women stood for a few seconds, wordless.

“Au revoir,” Lisa said in a whisper and turned and walked away.  Lacey watched her go, saw her change, almost immediately, from a casual strolling tourist to a clip-stepped deliberate professional. And then she simply melted away into the crowd.  That was the first alone, standing on the edge of Europe, unable to step off — the heavy Versace bag Lisa had bought her, keeping her from floating into the air.  And the strange thing was she would have willingly floated away because the other alternative was — what now?  And she honestly hadn’t thought about that.  She hadn’t ever considered that Lisa and Lacey would eventually end.  So she just stood there.

“I should go home,” she thought.  But … she didn’t even know where to get her suitcase — Shannon’s suitcase.  Shannon?  A faraway friend that Lacey vaguely remembered.

“I should probably go home.”

And she did go home, instinctively, moving through time and space until the taxi stopped somewhere familiar — and her key fit the lock, and she closed the door behind her, exhaled and left her suitcase in the hall.  She sat down in the living room, under the windows on the same brown sofa.  She slid the Versace bag Lisa had bought her off her shoulder onto the floor and lay down.  She  hugged the throw pillow to her head with both hands, and after a few minutes she fell asleep.

Days, weeks, even months later, things hadn’t changed.  She’d got her job back at the coffee shop when she showed up in a too-tight t-shirt and offered Tony a bag of dead grandma guilt for firing her.  She eventually went back to school, and even though her exams were difficult, they weren’t impossible.  Her GPA suffered, but she passed.  After the final final, she met Shannon and a few others for drinks. Too much tequila and she started to cry.

“You must miss your grandma a lot,” Shannon said.  It didn’t help, and Lacey went home. She called the parents.  Talked to her brothers.  Telephoned an ex-boyfriend, but that ended badly with her screening her phone calls and anxiously counting the days until her period.  After that, she mostly just went to work and came home.

She felt tired, used up — as if she’d been washed too many times and now she was gray and dull and shapeless — like some discarded dishcloth tucked in the elbow of the pipes under the sink.

After resisting the urge for several weeks, she googled Lisa and found her, smiling and warm, at a Farmer’s Market in Milwaukee.  The website was Radisson River, a family-owned food processing company in Wisconsin, and Lisa was the majority owner and CEO.  She was married with two children, and the company made a variety of condiments and sold them in Japan.  And after that, Lacey didn’t care anymore.

She tried texting but couldn’t figure out what to say, so she just said “hi” a couple of times, but that didn’t get a response.  Finally, she telephoned and a very nice woman said Ms. Anderson was out of the office but she could leave a message and Ms. Anderson would return her call — “Who could she say was calling, please?”  It was all too confusing for Lacey.  She didn’t want to talk to Ms. Anderson; she wanted to talk to Lisa, and she couldn’t say who was calling because she didn’t know who she was supposed to be.

“What is this concerning?”

“That’s fine.  I’ll call back, thank you.”

But she didn’t call back; it was too difficult.  So she went to work and came home and usually watched TV most of the night.  She ate mac and cheese and frozen pizza and leftovers from the coffee shop.  She got angry with Lisa, angry with herself, and half cleaned the apartment several times.  She went clubbing for awhile and found another ex-boyfriend, but that didn’t last.  She decided this was stupid and she needed to get on with her life — but that didn’t last either.  And by the end of the summer, she’d fallen into sleeping late and doing nothing, unconsciously caught in the slow leak of her life, watching the endless tick of minutes accumulating — until it was time to sleep again.