The Precious One (6 page)

M
Y FRIEND TRILLIUM
’
S FIFTH
life rule was that every woman must have one friend for whom a lunch-and-shopping trip is always the solution, no matter what the problem might be.

While many of us have life rules, even if they are, as in my own case, so flexible as to hardly count as rules at all—things like “Never, ever lie, unless it’s to spare someone’s feelings or to weasel out of something you really don’t want to do, but
only
if not doing that something will not result in bodily or even psychic harm to another human being, unless that human being is exceptionally mean in which case minor psychic harm is permissible”—my friend Trillium had gone so far as to collect her rules in an actual rulebook and get it published, not just here in the United States but in so many other countries that we eventually stopped keeping track. It was a handy, pocket-sized (or handbag-sized, since Trillium has another rule about never, ever carrying things in your pockets), bright turquoise, spiral-bound volume titled
Trillium Shippey’s Life RULES!
The little book had flown off the shelves and onto bestseller lists, helped along by multiple talk-show appearances and NPR interviews, each more drop-dead charming than
the last, as well as by countless starry-eyed and unsolicited celebrity endorsements along the lines of “Trillium, will you be my BFF? #puregoddessgenius” @AnneHath on Twitter.”

Trillium was my most famous friend, and while you wouldn’t have to be very famous at all to fill that particular niche, she was. Was, is, and no doubt always will be because Trillium Shippey—from her name to her laugh to her pinup girl curves—is different from the rest of us, built for fame the way Michael Phelps was built for swimming. I would say that I knew her when, except that I doubt very seriously that there was ever a moment in Trillium’s life when she wasn’t palpably, obviously a celebrity; she was just one that had yet to do the thing she was celebrated for. I lucked into her, although she would say she lucked into me. She was my best friend. She was also my first ghostee, and I was her ghost.

We met at an adult ballet class, a true hodgepodge. There were a couple of former professional dancers, long on limbs, neck, and thoroughbred skittishness; some mothers with varying degrees of experience who were killing time while their little sons and daughters took class in another studio; a few men, including Dr. Simon, my dentist; some true beginners; a trio of luminous women in their sixties who had been dancing more or less consistently for fifty years and who knew everything about ballet; and a few students like me, women whose growing up had been steeped in ballet and who had failed to become true ballerinas for some reason or another, like college or babies or short legs or injury or—as in my case—a father whose scorn at a daughter forgoing college and grad school to dance for a living would have been scorching and whose opinion held sway with said daughter long, long after it should have. Plus, I probably wasn’t good enough to become a real ballerina. Plus, I really, really liked to eat.

And then there was Trillium. By rights, she was one of the beginners, but somehow it was impossible to group her with the others, just as it would turn out to be impossible to group her with anyone ever. On her first day, she sailed into the room like Cleopatra on her golden
barge, chignoned head held aloft, swathed in a royal purple leotard and layers of legwarmers, chandelier earrings flashing. And then she proceeded to move with such focus and authority and natural rhythm that you almost didn’t notice that she had no idea what she was doing.

Afterward, in the sedate dressing room, she bestowed hoots, high fives, and bear hugs on us all. Coming from anyone else, this would likely have gone over like a ton of bricks, but because it was Trillium, we felt something akin to blessed. When she turned to me, caught both my hands in hers, and said, “Your ankles and feet are so gorgeous, they make me want to lie down and cry. Will you have coffee?,” it didn’t occur to me to say anything but, “Yes!”

That coffee led to more coffee, and then drinks, and dinners, and at every get-together, we talked, mostly about Trillium. Not because she was tedious or self-centered, but because at the particular moment I met her, when it came to the story of her life, Trillium was a woman on fire. This hadn’t always been so. For most of her adult life, Trillium had never talked much about her past.

“It wasn’t because of shame,” she was quick to tell me, resting one long-nailed hand on my arm, “but because I was so softhearted about it. It was so much mine, like a child.”

But then there came what she refers to as “The Dark Night of the Orange” (which became the title of the introductory chapter of her book), the winter night on which, after decades of devout citrus avoidance, she had come home from a boring date to find a package on her doorstep, a thank-you gift from a student for whom she’d written a letter of recommendation. The box was packed with navel oranges, a dozen, each tucked tenderly inside its individual square cardboard nest of paper grass. They were perfect, softball sized, and so profoundly orange they seemed to give off their own light.

“They were still cold from sitting on my porch all day. And all I can say is that it came over me that I had to eat one. I couldn’t not.”

One bite, that first brilliant burst on her tongue, and there it was, all of it, in full color and surround sound, beginning with Trillium at
three years old in the orange grove, screaming inside a cloud of bees.

Her story filled her; she teemed with it. Two days later, she came to her first ballet class (as a child, she had always wanted to take ballet, had fashioned tutus out of every available material, trash bags, newspapers), and met me, and handed over, in great gleaming swaths, the story of her life. To say we were bonding doesn’t cover it; we were bound: she couldn’t not tell and I couldn’t not hear. It was like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” except that no birds were killed, and the telling was nothing but beautiful for the teller and the listener.

I laughed. I cried. Sometimes, hours or days after I’d last seen Trillium, some tiny, jewel-colored piece of story would come winging toward me out of the blue, and I would laugh or cry again.

The story itself was classic Americana, a gritty, sublime, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps tale, punctuated by moments of terror, of heartbreak, of joy and luck and shining grace. Her mother, Elena, was a migrant fruit picker, sixteen years old when Trillium was born; her father was—if you can believe it—the son of a plantation owner, a college kid named Packham Boyd who got Elena pregnant over fall break and then went back to school without a backward glance.

Through a combination of smarts, looks, audacity, luck, and an ineffable iridescent effervescence that I would come to call Trilliuminosity, Trill had scratched, scrambled, finessed, floated, and earned her way from fruit picker to Ivy Leaguer to bond trader to revered university professor and inspirational speaker to—and here’s where I came in—bestselling writer.

Her story was good. Supergood. Much better than most, but one morning, about two days after she’d finished, after all those hours of telling—and the hours stretched over months—I realized, with a jolt, that it wasn’t so different, on its face, from others we’ve all heard. Rags to riches. The triumph of the human spirit. Et cetera. What made the story special, what made it thrilling and irresistible was Trillium herself: the cadence of her throaty voice, her leaping mind, the way she’d throw words out like handfuls of confetti one minute, and select them,
one by careful one, the next. Trillium spoke with her whole body; sentences shot out the tips of her long fingers, ran off her like rain.

I told her to write her story down. I was a writer myself, a freelance business writer and editor. I worked for corporations and law firms, mostly, got occasional work from one of the nearby universities or hospitals. It was a far cry from the kind of writing I’d always hoped to do, but, honestly, I liked it. There was something satisfying about taking raw, messy material, no matter how bland it might be, and giving it shape, rhythm, clarity, a dash of razzle-dazzle. On good days, I like to think I even gave it a little poetry. It was something that had always made me happy, putting words on a page in an order that pleased me. Even writing grocery lists was a small, contained joy; sometimes, I’d add items I didn’t need—lemons, figs, buttermilk—just because I liked the words, and then I’d buy them because they were on the list and that’s what the list was for.

But Trillium, as it turned out, with her gold mine of a story and her gift for bringing it to life,
hated
to write, had only ever done so in school, under duress, and at the last minute.

“There’s nobody
there
,” she groaned, referring to the writing process. “It’s so dull and lifeless and cold, like the
tundra
.”

“Actually, there’s plenty of life on the tundra, if you look,” I told her.

“You! You and your
Planet Earth
. Like what, for example?”

It’s true; I was and am an enormous fan of the BBC series, while Trillium was a die-hard speciesist, adored almost everything that involved people, no matter how questionable (theme parks, reality television, jury duty), and almost nothing that did not.

“Shrubs,” I offered in my best David Attenborough voice. “And sedge. A veritable ocean of sedge. So much sedge that the sedge can be seen from space.”

In the end, she talked; I wrote. When I brought her the first chapter, the one about the bees, she read it, then sat down on the floor and burst into tears.

After a couple of minutes, when she could speak, she said, “It’s like living it all over again. It’s
sheer and unadulterated perfect gorgeousness
. It’s
genius
! It’s
me
—it’s so
me
!”

She wiped her eyes, caught her breath, and then said, “But the pancakes, the ones at the hospital, they were blueberry, not chocolate chip. Big, fat, purple splotches in the pancakes. I thought I told you that. Purple. And, oh! You need to include how the epinephrine made me shake, my whole body trembling like a leaf. Not like a leaf! When do leaves actually tremble? Like something else. Something trembly. I’m sure you’ll think of it.”

This would turn out to be our process: she talked, I wrote, she read, cried, gushed, called me a genius, swore my writing was perfection, and then ordered changes. It was exhilarating. I had never loved any job more.

I discovered that I had a gift for capturing people with words. Wait, capturing is wrong. More like channeling. I might have been a ghostwriter, but I was the one who was haunted. When I wrote, I was ten times more Trillium than I was myself. When I got stuck, I exercised more patience than I had maybe ever, waiting for the right question to come to me (What was the best gift you ever got as a kid? Who is your favorite March sister?). When it did, I’d ask Trillium the question and her answer would unstick me, reveal the path I needed to take.

Trillium’s book sold like hotcakes, stayed on the
New York Times
bestseller list enough weeks to choke a goat, as Trillium liked to say. After that, I ditched the business writing and became a ghostwriter for real, and the right question became my secret weapon, my ace in the hole. It never stopped amazing me, how the tiniest fact, once discovered, could pop open a window with a vista-sized view of a person’s inner world. How you could learn, for example, that a person had had six dogs in his lifetime, all named Boxer, even though none of them was a boxer, and—boom—there you were, standing smack in the middle of at least an acre of the man’s soul.

But getting back to rule number five of the follow-up to her memoir:
Trillium Shippey’s Life RULES!

The second after I finished telling Trillium, in one, long manic rush of words, about my impending visit to my father’s house and all the accompanying anxieties, layer upon layer of anxiety, an
anxiety trifle
, she said, “Okay, I’ll be at your house in five minutes. Meanwhile, here is what you need to do.”

Her voice dropped, got soft and rhythmic, like a rocking cradle. “Close your eyes and draw a magic circle in the sand. Inside the circle are clear air, sunlight, birds singing. Nothing bad can enter the circle, not one bad memory, not one fear for the future, not one regret, not one perceived personal shortcoming.”

“Thank you for ‘perceived,’” I told her.

“You’re welcome. Be quiet. Now, step into the circle, really picture yourself doing it. One leg, the other leg. And once you’re in the center, simply be. Root yourself. Let the peace soak into you, all the way into the marrow of your bones. Soak and soak and soak. Is it soaking in?”

And, you know, it really sort of was.

The next thing I knew, we were at the mall.

While it may be hard to maintain a sense of bone-marrow-saturated peace at malls, I mostly like them. They suit me, particularly as I am a mission shopper. If it’s a black dress I need, I start at one end of the mall and go store to store, methodically trying on one dress after the next, leaving no stone unturned, spurred ever onward by the possibility that the perfect black dress, the oh-my-God-you-are-the-spitting-image-of-Audrey-Hepburn dress (even though Audrey would naturally never spit) might be waiting, a shining sleeve of night sky on a hanger, in the very next shop.

But going shopping with Trillium is something else altogether. “Shopping” is far too prosaic a word. She’s more like one of those people who lead expeditions into rain forests, seeking out new kinds of orchids or thumb-sized lacquered tree frogs or cures for cancer. It’s amazing, how she’ll walk into a store, zero in on, say, a rhinestone
headband, lift it to eye level, gingerly, using just her fingertips, and begin to describe its virtues, the individually clasped stones—five prongs!—the woven silver vines of metal, all in such hushed, wonderfilled tones that you forget that the thing costs $11.99, that you are standing in a teenybopper store with a display of
Cat in the Hat
hats to your right and boy band lunch boxes to your left. All you see is a tiny thing of beauty, a delicate, dew-jeweled spiderweb of loveliness.