Elise stared. “What?”
Dee Dee chuckled. “I can run a marathon, but I have all the subtlety of Shrek when it comes to yoga. And then I’m so tall!” Her voice held a slight whine, leftover perhaps from the days when she was a kid and towered over everyone else. “I look like an inebriated female Goliath stumbling after David!”
Flattered, Elise shook her head. It had never occurred to her that anyone was watching. Now she felt self-conscious. “All I can say is, if I can do these poses, anyone can. And that’s the truth.”
“Well, it’s good to see you back and to meet you, officially, at last,” Carmen said. “I thought you’d dropped out. Did you pull a muscle or something? Or maybe . . .”
Elise had quickly returned her attention to her bag. Now, where is that lip gloss? It wasn’t lost; she knew exactly where it was: in the first place she’d looked. Over the past few months she’d become an expert at dodging or, if cornered, answering questions like Carmen’s.
“Just . . . taking care of some work issues.” The image of the manila envelope popped into her head again. This time she banished it, like she briefly had banished the image of a small bowl of pad Thai with three spring rolls, and she switched the conversational gears. “You know what? I’m starving. I barely ate lunch today, and I have a craving for overstuffed tacos, salsa, and a salty margarita. What do you say?”
“Are you talking about the place on the next block?” Carmen asked. “I’ve been there. Their fajitas are to die for. Count me in.”
“Hold on a minute.” Dee Dee’s thumbs flew across the surface of her mobile. “Just texting Satan’s spawns.”
“Satan’s . . .”
“My daughters. They’re going through puberty. Both of them.”
Elise winced, remembering the days when she wondered if she or her sons—now grown—would survive their teens. “You have my sympathy.”
With a flourish, Dee Dee tapped the SEND key. “There. Car pool activated. Okay. I thought I heard something about food. Like red meat, tequila, guacamole, none of which are on my North Beach diet.”
Carmen grinned. “There is no North Beach diet.”
Dee Dee clapped her palms together. “Perfect.”
Now it was Elise’s turn to smile.
* * *
Margaret Rita’s—the restaurant was named after Chef Francisco’s grandmother—specialized in an excess of everything bad for you: loud music, oversalted house-made tortilla chips, chunky guacamole, strong margaritas, and noise, lots and lots of noise. The mariachi band CD was playing so loudly that Elise was shouting just so Carmen and Dee Dee could hear—and they were sitting less than two feet away. Between the eye-watering hot salsa, the coarse salt, and the yelling, her throat was getting sore. But she was having fun, a rare treat for her these days. Elise ran her finger along the ridge of her glass and licked off the salt. Mmmm . . .
“I said,” Carmen shouted, “how long have you taken yoga? You move so effortlessly. I’m jealous.”
“Me too!” yelled Dee Dee, leaning over the table in the booth. “I’ll be a hundred years old before I figure out pigeon pose.”
“It’s nice of you to say that. It just takes practice. I know, that’s boring,” Elise yelled back. “I took yoga for the first time years ago, before the boys were born. Some woman had a TV show on PBS. Then Alexander came along, then Wade, and suddenly”—she snapped her fingers—“I was too busy to take anything except the bus to work. I started again a few years ago to increase my flexibility and build strength—I didn’t want to be a brittle old woman. It is challenging, but really, if I can do it, you all can.”
The booming mariachi music morphed into a ballad at a lower volume.
Carmen sighed as she scooped up a dollop of shredded chicken with her fingers. “Yeah, it only takes concentration, which is the one thing I don’t have. I’m too ADHD. And meditation baffles me. My mind flies off in a million directions.”
Dee Dee nodded in agreement as she swallowed, then licked salt from her upper lip. “Me too, plus with the kids, the job, there’s no time to be peaceful, mindful, or any of the other ‘fuls’ that bag of bones nags us about.”
“I think Jasmine’s full of shit,” Carmen murmured.
The other women laughed.
“Don’t worry,” Elise commented. “Children do grow up, much faster than you think. How many do you have, Dee Dee?”
“Just the two girls, and that’s enough. Phoebe and Frances, twelve and fifteen going on twenty-five and thirty!”
“I have nieces about that age,” Carmen chimed in. “Lord, they’re a handful. They stay with me for long weekends sometimes, in the summer. They run me here and there—buy me this, buy me that. I’m ready to crawl into bed for a week by the time they go home!”
“No kids of your own?” Elise asked.
Carmen shook her head. “Nope. Career woman. No kids, one ex-husband, just a few African violets and an aloe plant. It’s hard to kill an aloe plant.” She dunked a chip into the salsa and scooped up enough of the chunky treat to fill a small coffee cup. “Good thing you don’t have to water them very often.”
Elise settled back in her seat in the booth, glad to feel the cushion against her spine. A little soreness was there, and her shoulders felt tired. A hot bath was just what she needed. Dee Dee and Carmen continued their conversation about children, careers, and corporate politics, and for a moment, Elise’s mind flitted off to other branches of thought, then wandered back in time.
God, that balancing act! Career, children, husband, home, the mantra that you couldn’t do it all or have it all. And yet she had. Somehow. But perhaps the mantra should have been expanded: you can have it all at the same time just as long as you don’t expect to remember it! Her past lives were a blur: teaching, her master’s, more teaching, consulting, marriage—thirty-plus years—kids, school football games, college trips, divorce, then a book, then travel, and Daddy’s illness, and the images slammed into each other and became one multilayered collage of color, texture, sound, and light. A few moments stood out. For many years there just hadn’t been enough money and Elise’s throat would close with angst whenever she wrote a check. Her father’s stroke had been a family challenge and painful. Daddy always had been so vibrant, so much in control of himself. She’d tried to be there for the family, for her mother, but Lord, it was hard. Most of the time she didn’t think she had the strength.
“Elise dear, you can get through this. You can get through anything,” her mother had told her. “You’re stronger than you know.”
Her mother.
“. . . so I said to him, ‘Look, it’s been nice but the smell of eggs in the morning turns my stomach, and the only thing I want to grab that early is . . .’ Elise? Are you all right?”
She hadn’t even realized she was crying until Carmen’s words cut through the renewed mariachi, the yelling, and the clinking of dishes that had numbed her eardrums. Her brain had stopped functioning when the word “mother” had entered her consciousness. Her vision blurred, and she wiped away the tears with the back of her hand, then reached for a napkin. A large packet of tissues swam into view.