Minus Me

by Mameve Medwed

  “Arabella!” her mother exclaims. “Annie,” her mother corrects. “Do you understand what just happened?”

  Uh-oh, Annie thinks. Did she ruin her mother’s thousand-dollar dress? “Not really,” she says.

  “You called me Mother!”

  “I did?”

  “For the first time ever!” Ursula shakes her head in wonder. And then, as if this miracle is too fresh, too fragile to make a big fuss over, she tucks her chin back against her daughter’s hair and says, “It’s not too late.” She releases Annie, stands up, and starts to pace. “Pretend you have a script. All you have to say is something like this: ‘I thought I had cancer. I thought I was going to die and wanted to spare you. Ursula—my mother—took me to New York for a second opinion,’ et cetera, et cetera … until you arrive at the all’s well that ends well.” She flings the corner of her shawl over her shoulder like a matador. “We can rehearse until you learn the lines and feel entirely comfortable voicing them.”

  “It’s not that simple …”

  “I beg to disagree. You’ll be so sympathetic and convincing he will fall to his knees in relief, overjoyed that instead of an Act-Three-Camille death scene, his wife survives.” Ursula mimes what Annie assumes is a tubercular courtesan rising from her sickbed. “Off the bat, I can name several plays in which a husband forgives his spouse all trespasses—Chekhov, alas, not one of them. But then you have done nothing wrong.”

  “In Sam’s view I have. Besides, it’s not a play. It’s real life. It’s my marriage.”

  “A play always springs from real life, darling.” Ursula squeezes Annie’s hand. “Promise me you’ll consider this.”

  “It’s hopeless.”

  “Won’t you try?”

  “I already did. He wouldn’t listen.”

  “Your approach was wrong. You hadn’t mastered your pacing and technique.”

  Annie shakes her head no.

  “You were always stubborn, Annie. Even as a child, once you made up your mind … I remember the day …”

  “This is not helpful,” Annie breaks in.

  “Then your only choice is to give him the manual and let him read it for himself.”

  “Never! It’s proof of all my mistakes.”

  “It’s proof of your love for Sam.”

  “Sam won’t see it that way.”

  “Don’t be so sure. Just tell him everything,” her mother repeats.

  “I can’t. Do you remember my wedding?”

  Ursula shudders. “How could I not?” She looks down at her leopard-skin boots. “All that sand everywhere.”

  “It was a beach,” Annie counters.

  “Which, alas, continues to be a popular venue.” Ursula groans. “At least yours wasn’t vegan like the Viola in my former company, who—can you imagine?—carried a wilted arrangement of red and white radishes. Accompanied by barefoot bridesmaids clutching the most unappealing bunches of kale.”

  Despite herself, Annie laughs. “My bouquet was a gorgeous assortment of wildflowers Sam had picked that morning.” She shifts into serious mode. “What I was about to point out, talking of weddings, is how Sam and I worked and worked on our vows, and their central theme was honesty and the need to be open with each other.”

  “But you wrote those vows ages ago, darling; you can’t expect to be held to the same standard today for promises you made when you were mere children and incredibly naïve. There must be a statute of limitations.”

  “Not on vows.”

  “Believe me, I have made plenty in my time. And now I can’t remember a single one. And neither will Sam.”

  “Oh yes, he will.”

  “Aren’t you a tad too scrupulous? He can hardly hold on to any resentment when you tell him about the cancer and the doctors and all those tests and terrible tribulations you’ve suffered through.”

  “Suffered through without including him. That makes it even worse.”

  “Not the way I see it. In my own wide-ranging experience, men are more than happy to be spared any unpleasantness.”

  “That was my intention. Though I did try, maybe too halfheartedly, until I gave up. After that, I planned to tell him when I developed symptoms. Until then, I hoped to spare him. To protect him from making himself sick over all of this. But Sam isn’t like any of the men you know.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” Ursula changes the subject. “Suppose you receive good news from the fertility tests?”

  “And use a possible pregnancy to trick him? That is, when we’re, if we’re … you know.” She refills her mug. “Didn’t you once play a scheming character who trapped her man that way?”

  Ursula turns wistful. “There were so many …” She finishes her tea. “Very well. Don’t say that Ursula Marichal doesn’t realize when to throw in the towel.” She reaches into her tote and pulls out an enameled art deco compact. “Oh dear,” she frets, a woe-is-me wrist pressed to her forehead. She rattles the bag; she digs around some more. “Where is that …?” She pats her pockets, turns them inside out. “Could I have left my favorite lipstick in the guest room the last time I visited? It seems a lifetime ago. I’m going to have a look.”

  While Ursula’s upstairs, Annie carries her mother’s mug into the kitchen and sticks it in the sink, scouring off a scarlet lipstick print. She should have offered her mother a shot of brandy, not an Earl Grey tea bag dunked in a Gus’s Gas giveaway mug. Hell, she could have used a shot of brandy herself.

  Soon enough, Ursula reappears. She makes her entrance, all smiles. She holds up a gold tube of lipstick sparkling with a border of rhinestones. “Voila!” she exclaims, waving it with the kind of triumph with which she’d hoist an Oscar, if she ever won one. “I found it on the windowsill, of all places, rolled behind a drapery. What a relief. It’s a special color created solely for me by Antoine on the Champs-Élysées. Brilliant. Half red with peachy undertones and a tinge of purple.” Ursula unzips her tote and drops it in. “Actually, the color will suit your complexion, darling.”

  Annie is pretty sure that no amount of red and peach and purple, however brilliant, could even begin to mitigate the toll her return home to Passamaquoddy has taken on her skin. Let alone her heart.

  Ursula checks her watch. “Alas, I have to tootle back; I’m expecting the delivery of a new mattress I ordered for Ambrose’s bed. I guess you might say, our bed.” She giggles. “No wonder his mattress was such an excruciating torture; it was constructed entirely of horsehair. Imagine!” She brushes her lips against Annie’s check. “I love you, Annie,” she says.

  “And I love you too, Mother,” Annie replies, astonished that she means it.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The day after Ursula’s visit, Annie’s in the kitchen poaching eggs. Sam’s at the breakfast table, head buried in the newspaper. Despite her earlier adamant refusal to follow Ursula’s advice, she’s decided to try again to tell Sam. Agitated, she lay awake all last night, pondering the pros and cons. She was awestruck by the mathematical formula he must have calculated to position himself at the greatest possible distance away from her while still sharing the same bed. Alongside the silent rebuke of Sam’s body, she mapped out stage directions, considered pacing and technique, invented her lines, practiced her delivery. She was sorry she had so blithely declined her mother’s expert coaching.

  At three in the morning, Sam stomped out of bed. “I’m going to the guest room,” he announced, “I can’t sleep with all your thrashing about.” He picked up his pillow.

  His departure gave her a greater incentive to fess up. A wall was one thing, but absolute secession terrified her with its prospect of permanence. What next? The living room sofa? Someone else’s sofa? Someone else’s Sealy Posturepedic, horsehair or not? How easy it might be for him to get used to a separate room free of what he viewed as a hulking betrayal on the far side of their joint mattress. Maybe her mother was right—oh, please, let her mother be right.

  She looks at him. His eyes are glued on the paper. She pu
lls apart an English muffin, toasts it to golden perfection, butters it, settles an egg on each half, grinds pepper, adds a sprig of parsley, and slides the platter next to the Corn Flakes.

  “Don’t have time for these,” he grumbles.

  “Oh, come on,” she coaxes. She sits across from him with her own plate, a little less perfect, a little less culinarily accessorized. She ticks her teaspoon against her coffee mug. “Can this meeting please come to order.”

  He doesn’t raise his eyes from the paper.

  She clears her throat. “Sam,” she says.

  More silence.

  “I have something to tell you,” she persists.

  He turns to the sports section.

  “Sam,” she repeats.

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “How can you be so sure until you hear what I have to say?” she asks, her voice tuned to a reasonable and conciliatory frequency. From the pages covering his face, she can see that Marden’s is having a sale on single sheets. Buy one get one free, she reads.

  “It doesn’t matter. Whatever happened belongs to the past,” he says.

  On closer inspection, the sheets have clowns on them. “Nothing happened. It’s not what you think.”

  “Fine.”

  “I need you to hear me out.”

  “Some things are best left unsaid.”

  She points to his plate. “The eggs …”

  “Not hungry.” He slides back his chair.

  “Are you thinking …” Her throat constricts. She forces out the words. “… our marriage …?” Okay, if she hasn’t quite expressed the inexpressible, the question is still a trial balloon floated up in the air between them, hovering.

  “I’m thinking of nothing but getting to the shop before the morning rush.” He stomps out of the room.

  She studies her own plate; the yellow yolks look like accusing eyes or, worse, mocking embryos. Her stomach sours. So much for Ursula’s advice. So much for her own intentions. She scrapes both their plates into the sink. She listens to Sam gather his papers, zip on his boots. She did try, she can assure her mother. She even rehearsed, offering up as stage props his favorite eggs. What could be a more direct, more impossible-to-misinterpret line of dialogue than I have something to tell you? It’s not her fault that her full court press didn’t result in a score.

  How can they continue the way they are, tiptoeing on the very eggshells now discarded in her sink? You don’t have to be Rachel to know that buried resentments can cross sandbag-sheltered, barbed-wired boundaries, ready to flare into battle at any trigger—a plate of eggs, a haircut, a few gifts on the closet floor, a frown. Despite Sam’s insistence that what happens in the past stays in the past, she’s sure he doesn’t mean it. The one thing she is sure of is that she cannot live like this.

  She rinses the dishes and stacks them in the dishwasher. Then again, maybe deep down she’s relieved she didn’t get to deliver the self-incriminating soliloquy. What did she expect? In Sam’s view, her dishonesty about something so crucial to his own life might loom as a more profound breach of trust than the cliché of a fling.

  Still, he’s never proposed a status change; he’s never told her not to come into the shop or suggested she check apartment listings in the Passamaquoddy Daily Telegram. Maybe, in the end, she won’t be exiled to single sheets with clowns printed on them.

  But will that be enough?

  In a little while, she’ll take a shower and head for Annie’s. When her whole world is falling apart, she can still make a sandwich, still rinse a cup. Working alongside Sam, she can hope the repetition of old habits and familiar rhythms will at least deaden pain, if not restore a marriage to the glow of its former prime-of-life past.

  From the driveway, she hears the car turn over, once, twice. After a few more gasps, the engine goes silent, a barometer of freezing weather. And a sign, also, that the Volvo is long overdue for a tune-up. In light of all the recent drama, she’s let so many chores slide—the ice dams on the roof, the worn upholstery on the sofa, the toilet upstairs that runs no matter how hard she jiggles the handle.

  Yet again, the car emits a puny spurt, then stops. If the ignition won’t catch, she and Sam may be forced to drive in together. At last, trapped shoulder to shoulder in the self-contained capsule of her car, just the two of them, radio off, heater warming up, windows fogged with their frozen breath, she can try once more to tell him.

  The car sputters three more times before it catches. She hopes he remembered the scarf. She hears tires skid along the gravel.

  A split second later comes—oh, no!—the sound of squealing rubber, followed by a screech, a bang, crunching metal, the blare of a stuck horn.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  In the hospital waiting room, Ursula grabs Annie’s hand. Annie clings to her. Without Ursula’s steady grasp, she’d be floating up in the air like one of Chagall’s women with nothing to anchor her to reality.

  The reality is this: Sam is in surgery. Has been for the last two hours. Ambrose has reassured her that his injuries, though multiple, are not life threatening. She doesn’t believe him. It’s all her fault. If she hadn’t tried to tell him the truth, he would never have left in a huff, anger propelling him to a reckless back out from their driveway onto the street and right into an oncoming garbage truck. Fortunately, no one in the garbage truck was hurt. Unfortunately, Sam was hurt, very hurt. An ankle broken in three places, a shattered collarbone, cracked ribs, a concussion, bruises, contusions. When she saw him loaded onto the stretcher, she barely recognized him.

  Oh, what has she done?

  “But none of them life threatening,” repeats Ambrose, his eyes shooting superhero spine-bracing bolts into her crumpled slump of misery.

  She is beyond comfort. This is worse than exhaustion, his depressive episode. It’s all my fault cycles through her head. All my fault.

  In the ambulance, she struggled to find an inch of bruise-free flesh to kiss. “I’m so sorry, so sorry; I love you, Sam,” she wailed over and over, until the EMT explained that the patient was not only in shock and thus unresponsive but in fact couldn’t hear her at all.

  What if he could hear? He needed to know how she felt. That she loved him. That she was sorrier than she had ever been in her life.

  She grips her mother’s hand tighter. Although it must hurt, Ursula doesn’t flinch. Ambrose excuses himself to make some calls, leaving the waiting room empty except for the two of them.

  Only a half hour ago, three sisters sat here, marking time until their brother’s hernia operation finished.

  “You look familiar,” one said to Ursula.

  “The spitting image of Aunt Ethel,” the other supplied. “And as interfering,” she added when Ursula climbed a chair to change the channel on the overhead TV, tuned to a talk show about knitting wardrobes for pets. Unable to switch the station or lower the volume, she finally yanked out the plug. Causing the sisters, three abreast, to march out in protest.

  On a normal day Annie might have apologized for her mother’s peremptory behavior and disregard for a democratic consensus. Remorseful, she would have switched the TV back on. However, this is not a normal day, and she is glad to be spared the details of Marmalade’s tricolor sweater or Duke’s angora-and-mohair booties.

  Now Annie turns to her mother. “I tried. He wouldn’t listen.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It will never be okay. Whatever he expected me to say upset him so much he crashed the car. It’s all my fault.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “He could have been killed.”

  “But he wasn’t, darling.”

  “Will he ever forgive me?”

  “Nothing to forgive. You love each other. That’s all that counts.”

  “I’m afraid he doesn’t love me anymore.”

  “He does. You’ll have to take it on faith, Annie. A mother just knows.”

  They sit in silence. From the corridor outside, gurneys rumble by. Anno
uncements squeak from the loudspeaker. Will Doctor Otten please report to operating room three. An elevator pings. Nurses laugh. An orderly whistles.

  Ursula cuts in. “I could fetch coffee, which I suppose will be completely undrinkable.”

  “Sure.”

  “Would you like a muffin or a banana? It seems as though we haven’t eaten for hours.”

  Annie pictures the eggs scraped into the garbage bin and Sam’s accusatory bowl of Corn Flakes. A breakfast—or nonbreakfast—that seems a century ago. “Just coffee, thanks,” she says.

  Alone, she flips through a stack of magazines. She avoids the medical ones: warning signs of prostate cancer, spinal stenosis treatment, physical therapy for Parkinson’s disease. She ignores the rainbow-illustrated brochures on gratitude and thankfulness. She picks up a woman’s magazine three months out of date. She turns to the page titled Ten Steps to a Good Marriage. She looks at number ten—Forgive and Forget—and slams the magazine shut.

  She’s just about to return it to the rack and exchange it for a People when Ursula reappears, carrying two Styrofoam cups. “Oh, the lines,” Ursula complains. “It would have taken me far less time to walk outside and find the nearest espresso bar.” She hands Annie the coffee. “Any word?”

  Annie shakes her head.

  “I called Ambrose’s cell, but his phone was engaged.” She looks at her watch. “It’s been three hours. By now, they must be finishing.”

  They sip the coffee, bitter and too weak, but it gives them something to occupy their hands and mouths. Too bad she didn’t learn to knit an outfit for a pet, a little snowflaked ski sweater for the dog she advised Sam to get after her demise. Ursula grabs a leaflet on what a woman should do if she feels abused. She glances at it, frowns, and deposits it in a bin marked RECYCLABLES.

  When the door opens, they both jump up, but it’s only a nurse searching for the three sisters whose brother was just wheeled into the recovery room. “Try the cafeteria,” Ursula says.

  “The hernia is all repaired,” the nurse informs them.

  “What excellent news,” replies Ursula with phony glee. “Do you want to take a stroll?” she asks Annie.