We All Want Impossible Things

Ash and Edi’s brother Jonah are talking in bed after having sex. As they discuss Edi’s deteriorating state, Ash’s teenage daughter, Belle, bursts into the room and asks Ash to sign her field-trip permission slip, then leaves to finish making dinner. Ash and Jonah get dressed and go downstairs. As Ash helps Belle get dinner ready, her estranged husband, Honey, arrives. Over dinner, he tells everyone about his visit with Edi, since he was the most recent one to see her. After dinner, Belle goes to finish her homework and Jonah leaves as well. Honey stays behind to drink a glass of wine with Ash, who reflects on what their marriage used to be: “He still wears the tiny silver hoop earring I gave him when we were first dating. He still wears his wedding ring. My love for him feels like a cramp under my ribs” (20).

In the hospice center, Edi and Ash listen to Cedar play a song by Simon and Garfunkel, and Ash answers various text messages from people asking about Edi and her condition. Edi’s father texts Ash but is clearly doing so out of duty rather than real interest. Edi falls asleep and Ash leaves the room with Cedar.

In the hallway, Olga, the hospice aid, talks Ash into helping her give another resident a haircut. Returning to Edi’s room, she sits down on the bed and looks into her friend’s face: “Even in hospice, with her teeth getting bigger by the day while the rest of her face seems to be evaporating, Edi looks like an Italian movie star” (25). Edi wishes she could be home in Brooklyn with her husband and son. She feels pained at the prospect of leaving them behind when she dies.

At home, Ash is interrupted in the bathroom by Belle, and the two trade light-hearted banter. Joking about whether she might be pregnant, Ash recalls a miscarriage that she endured over a decade ago: “I was furious, I was lonely […] and it surged through my brain, obliterating both hope and reason” (31). Pushing the thought out of her mind, she begins to set up for the dinner that Honey is bringing over that evening. They eat Indian food together, but after dinner Ash gets a phone call from the hospice center asking her to come over as soon as she can.

Ash arrives at hospice and discovers that while Edi is still stable, she’s having an unusually difficult night. Ash finds that Edi has leaked and had an accident in her bed, and she helps get her out of her dirty clothes and into something clean. Afterwards, Edi tells Ash how thirsty she is, and Ash gets Edi a soda, then they sit by the window in her room and talk. At one point Edi’s son texts Ash asking about his mom, and Ash responds that she’s doing all right. Ash reflects on how different she and Edi are, with Edi loving the city and Ash content living a less urban life. She also recalls the long years of infertility that Edi dealt with while Ash had her two daughters, and the relief and joy both felt when finally, after years of treatment and therapies, Edi conceived and gave birth to her son, Dash. After Edi falls asleep, she leaves to meet up with Edi’s doctor, whom they’ve nicknamed Dr. Soprano, and they have sex in a laundry closet.

Edi and Ash play a game that they’ve been playing since they were children in which they pretend to be dead, and they laugh at the morbid irony of the game. Edi isn’t eating, and she says that what she really wants is a slice of Sicilian lemon polenta pound cake: “Sicilian lemon polenta pound cake is Edi’s holy grail. She bought a piece at Dean & DeLuca in the mid-1990s, claimed it was the best cake she’d ever eaten, and then could never find it again” (46). Ash walks to the community kitchen to try and find something for Edi to eat and feeds some of the residents’ dogs while doing so. When she returns to Edi’s room they reminisce about their childhood dentist and the rumors about him, while Fiddler on the Roof plays down the hall and somewhere a baby begins to cry.

Ash asks her daughter about why she is skipping school. Belle dodges the question, and Ash gets a text message from Edi asking her to come and take her for a walk outside. Belle and Ash meet Edi at Shapely and go on a walk together, accompanied by one of the resident dogs. As they marvel at the stars and vastness of the night sky, Edi exclaims, “It’s the ceilings inside that were the problem!” (57), expressing her wonder at the brilliant expanse. A few minutes later they head back inside, Belle and Edi singing along to the Fiddler on the Roof soundtrack that they hear playing down the hall.

Belle barges into her mother’s bedroom and interrupts another one of Ash’s sexual liaisons. Belle leaves, and Ash lies in bed wondering why she’s been acting out, contemplating her need to feel wanted and her ambivalence about the actual physical intimacy that follows. Later that morning Ash texts Belle, Jonah, and Edi’s husband, Jude, updating them on Edi’s condition. Ash texts her other daughter, Jules, and has a short conversation with her parents about how the family is doing.

Ash’s parents care deeply for Honey, which causes her to think back on the origins of their relationship. Technically he’s blameless in their separation; it was her fault for cheating on him with an old high school boyfriend. She told Honey right away, but he didn’t react very strongly, already well aware of Ash’s fickle and insatiable nature: “You’d hate me if I tried to contain you […] I love you, but you want impossible things, Ash” (65). Ash admits to herself that what Honey said is true.