When It Happens to You

by Molly Ringwald

  At the entrance to airport security, Greta scrambled at the last minute to write all of her phone numbers and times that were good to call her, while Peter crouched down offering his back as a writing board. She impulsively kissed the paper and then, embarrassed, hurried to wipe away the light-pink lip print she had left before he wrestled it out of her hands, causing an uncharacteristic scene from two people who had tried for years, without even knowing they had been trying, to become invisible. She laughed and swatted him away as he grabbed and kissed her dramatically, bending her over backward as if they were ballroom dancing. As he gazed at her head drawn back, eyes squeezed tight in either terror or delight, the vein in her neck pulsing wildly, he thought of trying to exact a promise from her while he held her there, suspended. But he couldn’t think of what. Promise you will love me? Promise you won’t ever stop? And then the thought occurred to him that the moment you make someone promise anything is the same moment you ask them to lie to you. So he drew her up and set her back down on her feet. She looked at him with a question, and though every cell of him wanted to tell her that he loved her, another part of him, the part of him that used to play poker in college, told him that it was too early. And for the first time in years, he listened to that voice. So he kissed the inside of her hand, inhaling the vanishing scent of her skin, and turned away. As he entered the security line, he watched her standing there in the same place, like a beautiful tree. Her hair turned into leaves, her arms into branches . . . her face lost in the canopy. Only her shining beauty was left.

  Every few steps he turned to look back at her, watching to see if she was still there. He removed his belt, his shoes, and anything that could be construed as a weapon and maneuvered his way unprotected through security.

  WHEN IT HAPPENS TO YOU

  WHEN IT HAPPENS TO YOU, you will be surprised. That thing they say about how you knew all the time but just weren’t facing it? That might be the case, but nevertheless, there you will be. You will feel like you have been kicked in the stomach, that your insides have just separated to make room for something big.

  You may not cry at first. You may wonder why you don’t cry, and you may even feel like there is something seriously wrong with you. You might look at yourself as though you were a character in a book or a movie and you might think to yourself, “Why isn’t that woman crying? What’s wrong with her?”

  It isn’t the first time you will think that there is something wrong with you. You will search for the reason why he would choose her over you, why he would choose a girl over a woman. And then you will become certain that it is your age. You are spoiled—like the items in the pantry that were supposed to last indefinitely but somehow the pantry moths found their way inside. You will feel that you were thrown out just like that box of cereal was thrown out to keep everything else around it from becoming ruined.

  If you are lucky enough to have children by then, you will struggle to explain to them why their parents no longer love each other the same way. Your children will assume that it is their fault, and though you will do your very best to explain to them why it isn’t, a part of you will secretly fear that it is. You will have already looked at your children at times with a critical eye and seen all of the youth and freshness that you and he once had, all that vitality and hope, and you will know that they took it away. You can’t ever say that they stole it, because you gave it willingly. Still, once it was gone you missed it and envied it while hoping that you both would be strong enough to bear its absence.

  He will not.

  The girl who will give him back this illusion of vitality for a short time will not think of your children or your marriage. She will not consider the lovely years that you spent together with him. Why would she? She wasn’t there when you both laughed your way through your wedding with a pure and nervous joy. She wasn’t there when you both waited for your first child to be born. When he held your hand and told you how the contractions were coming, with the seriousness of a boy, as he watched the peaks on the machine that was connected to your belly—you listening to the wondrous familiarity of his voice as though all of your lives depended on it, though truthfully your body knew already in the moments before. She wasn’t there when you held him upright at his father’s funeral and then at his mother’s only weeks after. Or for the vacations, alone at first and then with the children. Or the holidays, alternating between your family and his, while they were still alive, then later with just your own. The notes you composed together to the tooth fairy. The nights you stayed up talking, even though you had to work the next day, and held hands as you fell asleep hoping to have the same dream.

  When it happens to you, you will ask him why he would choose to forsake this good, sweet life that you carefully built together for a girl who couldn’t begin to understand him. And then you will realize that that is at least partially the point. He doesn’t want to be understood. He wants to be misunderstood because in that misunderstanding lies the possibility of reinvention.

  When it happens to you, you will wonder if he loved her. He will assure you that he did not, that it wasn’t about love. He will tell you that it was about something else entirely. But even in your quietest moments together, he will be unable to specify what that something else was. He will honestly seem as confused as you, even to the point of bewilderment.

  After it happens, you will hear the girl’s name everywhere. It will seem that every baby born that year will carry her name.

  Of course, you will be reminded that there are worse things. Far worse. Your children are healthy, you will tell yourself. Neither you nor anyone that you know has cancer, for example. That would be a real tragedy. A journalist you will hear on the radio will talk about how he wasn’t allowed to use the word “tragedy” in an article he wrote as it pertained to an artist, a man who had died in his fifties. One can’t use that word, he was told by the editors of the national paper. Not when there is genocide in the world. Not as long as ethnic cleansing exists, and landmines. And rape. And that’s not even taking into account the natural disasters—earthquakes and tsunamis. Floods. Levees that don’t hold. Whole towns that are washed away. Children who are left without parents, or worse, parents who are left without their children. These are occurrences from which the heart does not recover. These are tragedies.

  And yet you will find that when it happens to you, your heart won’t listen to reason. Because for all the wisdom you will have accumulated up to that point, in all the years you have been alive, your heart is just a muscle like any other. Full of blood and veins, hungry for oxygen. Your heart doesn’t think. Your heart is stupid. It doesn’t consider the relativity of tragedy when it breaks.

  You will ask him for details, and reluctantly he will give them to you. But no matter how many he gives, it will never seem to reach critical mass. You will want to know more. You should know that even one detail is too much, but you will think (mistakenly, of course) that if you know them all it will make it less special. That in the retelling it will seem banal or even sordid.

  And so he tells you.

  You will find out that one day, when it first began, they had sex more than once. You will know the color of her pubic hair, the little that she had left after waxing. He will tell you how she played Mozart on the violin in bed before they put their clothes back on, and how he openly cried in front of her while she played. He will tell you that she orgasmed through intercourse. He will tell you this, knowing that it is something that you tried and failed your entire life to accomplish, but he will only do so under duress. Your hands will be balled into little shaking fists at your side as you threaten to strike him unless he answers, and yes, he could lie to you, but he will have had enough of lying by then. You both will have had enough of it.

  Any sane person will tell you that these are details that you don’t need to have, but there again, the stupid heart doesn’t listen.

  When it happens to you, you think that you might die. You won’t. This isn’t the kind of th
ing that you die from, but at night when you can’t sleep from all of these details that keep you from resting and you’re gasping for air, you’ll wish that you would die. You’ll wish that it would happen by accident so that your children won’t have to live wondering why you would ever do such a thing. During the worst nights, you will find yourself plotting.

  And then one day, you’ll stop.

  And when you look in your children’s bright faces in the daylight, you will feel shame that you could ever have considered it and still call yourself a mother.

  And then you will cry. And then you won’t stop crying. You will turn to him for comfort because you won’t know where else to turn. There is no one else who knows the intricacy of your pain. And he will bear it because he has to.

  You will try everything to heal yourself. You will take drugs prescribed by doctors. You’ll take drugs not prescribed by doctors. You will find yourself praying, though you stopped believing in God a long time ago. No matter, you will start praying like you were taught to do when you were a child. You will even get down on your hands and knees to do it.

  You will go to therapy and strive to find your part in it. Your complicity. You will nod when the therapist tells you that if you do the work, you can have the marriage you always dreamed of. But I had the marriage I always dreamed of, you’ll tell her. No, she will assure you. You only thought you did. You will try to make sense of this “hall of mirrors” way of looking at your life. Mostly, you will just miss the marriage that you had but didn’t have.

  And then, if you haven’t already, you will look at yourself closely to see if there was something you did in your life that made you deserve this. And when you do, chances are you will think of me.

  When it happens to you, you may wonder if after all this time you were forgiven.

  Ask me then, Theresa, and I will try to answer.

  THE LITTLE ONE

  BETTY LOOKED OUT HER WINDOW and there again was the girl. She was hidden, or at least attempting to hide, but Betty could clearly see her curly white-blond hair sticking out of the overgrown rosemary bush that Harry had planted years ago, in between relapses. What was she doing in there? Waiting for her? She thought of coming out on the porch and calling out to the girl, inviting her in to play on the out-of-tune piano or to look through the old encyclopedias, but the thought of entertaining the six-year-old now frightened her. She backed away from the window and stalled by making herself a pot of chamomile tea. By the time the tea finished brewing, she told herself, she would go out and deal with the child. Explain to her, yet again, the rules that she must learn to abide by if she is to enter into someone’s home. Rules that her own parents should have taught the girl themselves but obviously hadn’t.

  Not to say that Betty herself was a model mother. She wasn’t, as her own daughter, Mandy, from whom she has been more or less estranged for the last twenty years, reminded her whenever reconciliation was attempted. When Harry came out of remission for the last time, though they both would have preferred the peace that surely would have prevailed had they neglected to inform their only daughter, Harry convinced her that it would be far worse for Betty once he was gone if they shut Mandy out of this last all-important moment. Give her a chance to say good-bye to her father—the man she had antagonized her entire life in a misguided attempt to force him to prove he loved her.

  Betty shuffled from the stove to the butcher-block island with the teakettle. With her good hand, she poured the steaming water over the loose chamomile leaves into the Hable teapot that she and Harry had bought in Sausalito after they married, back in 1959. They were both grad students at Berkeley then, where they would stay through all of the demonstrations and riots and then fall with embarrassing comfort into teaching positions for the next twenty years, amidst the atmosphere of chaos and revolution swirling around them. The politics were a part of life, and Harry and Betty managed to lean to the left without ever getting sucked into it. It was a romantic, tumultuous background to their own love story, but neither wanted to commit much time to politics. The world was changing from the one they had known as children, and yet Harry and Betty felt that the boldest and most daring, the most downright countercultural statement they could make was to love only each other. And that is what they did. And then, despite the great pains they had taken to not get pregnant, Mandy was born in the latter half of the sixties, and everything changed.

  Now it had been almost seven years since Harry had been gone. Dead. She should be able to say that word, Betty knew, but it still got stuck in her throat. She still found herself, when forced to have conversations with people—admittedly few now that she had retired from her teaching position at UCLA—talking about him as though he were still there. She reminded herself each time she began a conversation to say, “My late husband,” but couldn’t quite get out the word “late.” “Late.” What did this word mean in this context, and why should she connect this word to Harry, who was never late once in his life? Harry was early for everything—classes, parties, funerals. He was early to the point where it verged on the hostile, as one of their old Berkeley friends, Joyce, used to say. And my “dead” husband was out of the question. So he just remained Harry—“my husband, Harry”—whom he had been for nearly all of Betty’s life, and with a determination that her daughter Mandy dismissed as “mulish,” that’s what he would remain.

  Betty went to the cupboard and took out two cups and saucers and set them next to the teapot. Seven years was enough time to stop this nonsense and she knew it, but the anxiety that she felt pouring just the one cup for herself was far greater than the knowledge that she was just a little “touched”—not to mention the waste of it. When people were there, she managed not to pour Harry’s cup or to fix Harry’s plate, but when alone, as she was now, and there was no one there to comment, she gave in to her weakness. But as she filled the two cups, side by side, she could see Mandy in her mind’s eye shaking her head at her, with an expression that said, “Mother. Get a hold of yourself.”

  The first time she met the girl, Betty was out in the yard trimming the camellias. The girl had just returned home from grocery shopping with her mother, and while the trunk was being unloaded, the girl raced into the little plot of land that separated the two properties and climbed the tree.

  “Not too high, Charlotte,” her mother called out to her as she toted the bags of groceries from her car into the house. She waved to Betty, and though she and the girl’s mother had never spoken, Betty waved back.

  She went back to her pruning, carefully cutting on the angles above the buds. It took her much longer than it used to take since she had to use her good hand, which was not the dominant one. The doctors had failed to find exactly what it was that ailed her; carpal tunnel, arthritis, Ulnar Nerve Entrapment—it was diagnosed as all of these at one time or another, but no one could explain why it affected only the one hand. She eventually just gave up on the drugs—they never seemed to work anyway—and concentrated on becoming ambidextrous at age seventy-two.

  “I like your hat.”

  Betty looked up and saw the girl’s legs dangling from the tree.

  “Were you speaking to me?” Betty asked.

  “You’re wearing a hat, aren’t you?” the girl said. Her tone contained exasperation but no malice.

  “Why, yes I am,” Betty said. “You have very good powers of observation.”

  The girl jumped down out of the tree and sidled over to the edge of Betty’s property.

  “What’s oversation?” she asked, mispronouncing the word.

  “Ob-ser-va-tion,” Betty said, enunciating each syllable. “It comes from the word ‘observe’—to notice, to see things. I just told you that you are good at seeing things.”

  The girl shifted her weight from one skinny leg to the other.

  “It’s just a hat,” she said.

  Betty reached up and touched the brim and smiled at the girl. “It’s a very special hat, you know.”

  The girl leaned
forward, curious.

  “What’s special about it? What’s it do?”

  “It’s special,” Betty said, “because Harry gave it to me.”

  “Who’s Harry?”

  “Harry is my husband. He gave me this hat many, many years ago, probably before you were even born.”

  “I’m six. Almost seven,” the girl said, scratching a bug bite on her leg.

  Almost seven, Betty remarked to herself with disbelief. Most likely, this girl was growing in her mother’s uterus as the cancer was growing and ravaging Harry’s body. Betty tried to distract herself from the grim, morbid thought by removing the brown leaves from the plant so that only the glossy green ones remained.

  The girl found a stick and poked at the pieces of bark she was standing on. “So how would you say . . .” she began, “like for example, if I was good at doing what other people wanted to do instead of just what I wanted to do, you’d say I’m flexible—”

  “Are you flexible?” Betty asked, looking up.

  The girl frowned. “I wasn’t finished. But no. I’m not. Louisa and Rose are flexible. I’m organized.” She puffed out her chest, creating a distinct C curve in her back and belly that seemed incongruous with the rest of her. “That means you keep things in order, and everyone says that I do that the best out of everyone.”

  “You look organized,” Betty said.

  “It isn’t really something you can tell by looking,” the girl said. “But what I wanted to know was, if I was good at that word you said . . .”

  “Observation,” Betty said

  “Yeah, if I’m good at that . . .”

  “Then you would be observant.”

  “Oh.” The girl ran back to the tree and grabbed one of its lower branches and swung her legs up onto it. She hung upside down from the branch, her hair tumbling in long blond curls toward the ground.