Free Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple

school. (Six she was. Being raised by a fourth-grader.) I didn’t dare tell her the truth. I was a fat kid with red hair and freckles. New to town, having moved midyear from New York, I was tempting prey for the tough kids. As I walked on the path between classes, they’d push me into the pond. I wouldn’t fight as they filled my backpack with heaps of fresh powder. Snowbaths, these wintry interludes were called.
    But at home, in my afternoon reports to Ivy, I’d have the last word, mocking the bullies’ appearances, ridiculing their names, belittling their intellects. “You’re awful!” Ivy would say through her laughter, my audience of one.
    But she knew I wasn’t awful.
    Once, years later, when we were in our twenties and walking up Madison Avenue, Ivy took my hand, just to hold. Such was our ease.
    Despite everything that’s happened between us, when I’m taken by surprise, the feeling I have of Ivy is one of tenderness: that day, taking my hand.
    Now, with Ivy erased, I’ve become The Trick. I’m a grotesquerie going out into the world fetching observations and encounters to perform for someone who long ago left the building.
    As I sat there at home, in Joe’s office, a toxic, roiling mass bloomed in my stomach. Guilt, longing, regret: name it, it was in me, black, corroding me from within.
    I couldn’t help that being coldcocked with a reminder of Ivy triggered this wave of nausea and weakness. What I was feeling? It wasn’t me . It was an isolated sensation that appeared in my stomach. It had edges. My job was to recognize it as an entity separate from myself.
    Smell the soup. Cool the soup.
    I’d rather be me right now. Ivy was off living a life of idiotic facades, laughable values—
    I stopped myself.
    I wasn’t doing that. My business was my life. My life was an honorable one of self-generating abundance. I was healthy. Timby was healthy. Joe was healthy. I was loved. I’d made an impact as an artist. I had a graphic memoir to write. So what if I didn’t get along with my sister?
    I stood up, still a bit trembly, and started to leave, then stopped.
    On Joe’s desk. A telescope of some kind. Gray, the size of a demi-baguette, on crouching insect legs. It was aimed out the window.
    How bizarre.
    “I want to see!” It was Timby, followed by Spencer, his face covered in tiny flower stickers.
    “Get away.” I hip-checked Timby before he could get his hand on it.
    “You’re mean.”
    “Out, out.” I herded them into the living room.
    “Mom, can we use your computer to watch walking-stick videos?”
    “I have to get going,” Spencer said.
    “One second.” I shut the door.
    I stepped behind Joe’s desk, tucked my hands behind my back in reverse prayer, and lowered my face to the eyepiece.
    Between the putty blur of foreground condos, a distant yacht leaped brightly into view. Black-hulled and sleek, just the prow peeked through in sharp focus.
    I walked to the window. There it was, at a random dock at an industrial waterfront I never thought about but did pass on my way to Costco.
    Hmm. A ship.
    I stepped back, knocking over a date-tree stalk that was propped against the wall. Waist-high and edged with triangular spikes, sharp like shark teeth, a hundred twiny fronds dangled from the top like a prehistoric pom-pom.
    Joe had brought it back from Turkey where he’d gone to do contracture-release surgeries. While there, he’d met a man who’d crossed the desert from Iraq with his cloudy-eyed father; they’d heard American doctors could make the blind see. As payment, they’d sawn off a branch from the family’s date tree, heavy with fruit. Joe explained he wasn’t that kind of doctor. They insisted Joe try a date anyway. The sweetness of the fruit might change his mind.
    Joe lugged that stalk on four planes so he’d never forget those men. “ I want to forget them!” I cried when Joe told me the wretched tale. “Get that thing out of here!” He’d brought the stalk to work only