Every Day

by Elizabeth Richards

  “Fucking lost souls,” I say aloud, in the vernacular of that other time. I mean to include myself. It’s what we were. Lost and trying to capitalize on that fact. So sure of ourselves in a nihilistic way. So arrogant.

  “What do you need me for?” I remember asking him shortly before Isaac was born. We’d established ourselves in a cavernous room above a Korean market in the East Village. “You’d have done this anyway. You’d be here anyway.”

  “Oh, Leigh,” he said. “Let’s not do ‘need’ tonight. ‘Need’ is so schamltzy. Need’ll kill you. You don’t want to be needed, for God’s sake.”

  Although stung, I understood what he meant. But I had no choice at that point, with a baby coming. I was going to be needed, whether I liked it or not.

  But for a long time I did capitalize on the double vision. On the one hand, I was needed (by Isaac), stable (in my goals, in staying in New York where my parents were). On the other, I was an unwed mother with atheistic, separated parents. I was bored unless something outrageous was going on. I liked it, when I met Simon’s father, that he’d spent nights in white-collar prison for extortion. I liked it that his various wives had undone themselves in one way or another (plastic surgery, dangerous dieting, excommunication from their children with previous husbands) in order to accommodate him, only to lose him. I just liked the possibility of him, the alternative he offered as a human being. The message that just beyond where we’re looking, something wild is preparing to enter and shake us up, make us account for what we’re doing, still moves me. I was, in many ways, reminded of Fowler when I met him, the first time, on Fire Island. He was coming off the tennis court, perspiring, bronzed beyond decency. “Tatskela!” he shouted when he saw me, and I felt instantly adored. For a second I could see why women dropped their lives for him.

  He came to our wedding in a leather tux, his wife of the minute dressed as a cabaret performer.

  “Could you believe?” Simon said, when we got to the hotel. “A gangster and his moll.”

  I told him I sort of liked their effrontery, their proud transience. “What does it matter anyway?” I hooted. “That’s the way he is! He’ll always have one foot in the door, one out.”

  Simon stood there, his arms long, helpless against me and his father.

  “You two will get along very well, in that case. You both trade on that.”

  He is a kind and careful man, and he doesn’t believe in being in two places at once. The fact that I do, that I can’t help this, is my biggest failing.

  “I won’t be pigeonholed,” I added, with the seriousness he required at the time. “You are what you are.”

  I cross to the East Side at 57th Street and take a chance on a parking garage off Fifth Avenue. Simon and I don’t go in for this kind of expedience when we come into Manhattan; we plan parking ahead of time. But a person on a mission such as mine shouldn’t get bogged down in too much banality.

  The parking attendant sneers at our downscale wagon. He points out a dent and some scratches on the passenger side to make sure I am aware of their previous incurrence.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m not going to sue you.”

  He smiles stingily. I have always wanted to say that to someone. Now I have.

  I walk over to Fifth and toward the hotel. It is hard to imagine that there are others with similar stories going to meet prior loves to try to make sense of the damage, but there must be. You hear it all the time on the news, estranged fathers and children and the mothers of those children convening, come what will. Most of the stories I hear are gory, occurring in projects and outside city schools, places where gunfire is the rule rather than the exception.

  I stop on 60th Street, sickened, as I’d always predicted I would be if the chance to see Fowler again, to present him with the fact of his son’s existence and mine, ever arose. I have neglected to mention shame. Shame, as I know it, is a chameleon. It appears in your children’s faces when what you have done mortifies them. It reaches you in snippets of others’ conversations, hospital staff, your parents’ friends, your new husband’s business associates. It is inescapable, and it doesn’t transmogrify or dissipate the way that anger and love do. I clutch my bag and step out into the street. I am ashamed, not for what I’m about to do, but for what I’ve done. My son’s fierce granite eyes bore into me from everywhere.

  • • •

  I was at Hastings a whole year before I even connected Fowler’s face with his name. Pam and I were dancing in our room in ski boots. He came roaring in, bellowing about noise and unearned senses of entitlement. He’d been trying to hold an advisee meeting in the common room below ours, could we possibly save it for the slopes?

  “I don’t ski,” I told him.

  “That’s of no consequence,” he said.

  Pam and I happened to be drunk, and Fowler’s rage thrilled and amused us. He was insufferably handsome, with finger-combed streaky blond hair and dark eyes, a combination that continues to be compelling for any girl who lays eyes on Isaac. I expected sarcasm and meanness from a guy like Fowler, but I was taken in by something else: a business, a rush to be done with this interview so he could get to the next thing, a total denial of weariness. An energy. He had energy, what were the senior boys saying that year, out the wazoo. You couldn’t keep up with him. Yes, he was handsome. Yes, purported to be brilliant. But he didn’t have time to devote to his appearance or his brilliance. He had things to do, people to advise, places to go. You could hop aboard, see if you could stomach the ride, or just sit back and watch his dust.

  “I’ll see you two Monday morning at seven-thirty in the Hall of Languages. You can tell me and the acting disciplinary synod what you’ve been drinking that makes you think you can ski indoors.”

  He picked up a glass that said New York Rangers. (Pam had a car; we were forever filling up the tank for our AWOL runs to the liquor store and being awarded free glasses featuring sports teams we had no interest in.) He sniffed. “Forget rum. It ruins the taste of the Coke.”

  He was gone. Some people just leave. Fowler was able to vanish. Extreme, he was. A big deal. He made me tired, and he hadn’t been in our room but four minutes.

  “What was that,” I said to Pam, who’d begun her unbuckling.

  “Fuck him,” Pam said. “Man’s got the biggest chip on his shoulder since Richard the Third.”

  I laughed and fell back on my messy bed. But I thought Pam was wrong. There was no chip. Fowler didn’t give a damn about who had money and ski boots. He just didn’t want them to get in his way, to waste his time with extravagant excuses. I closed my eyes. I thought about seeing him up close again, getting a chance to say something, stopping him dead in his blurry tracks.

  • • •

  For English my first year at Hastings I’d been the only girl in the class of Mr. Inslee Brinkman. “Some names you just don’t know what to do with,” my father had said when I told him. There were various unkind nicknames, ranging in their aptness. I went with “Pinky” or “Sprinkles,” which seemed the most fitting. Brinkman was a bachelor close to retirement who knew grammar as one does one’s own face. He could be seen of a Saturday afternoon in the fields beyond the athletic buildings, his back bent, in search of rare breeds of mushrooms. Everyone in his class learned the word “myxomycophetan.” I actually liked him in the end, and I even saw reason in his giving me a C.

  My second year, the year of the ski boot incident, I had Chip Greenaway for English. He had a Dartmouth smile and a thick neck. He was also the varsity football coach. He spent more time stamping on the desktops than he did with his feet on the floor. He was emphatic, but no one seemed to know about what. I didn’t learn a thing from him except to shield my head whenever I perceived an overhead shadow. He did fall once, toppled by passion over some abstruse literary conceit. A lot of people got A’s in his class, evidence, we felt sure, that Greenaway was of a lower order.

  Then I was put in Fowler’s class. Advanced Placement. This is what my A in
Greenaway’s class earned me. I knew I had no business in AP anything, but by this time I was enamored of the notion of collecting experience for experience’s sake, no matter how painful it promised to be. I’d learned this not from the Lake Poets, but from Pam, my roommate of all three years. Pam had schooled me in the thrills of marijuana, alcohol, and shoplifting. I still didn’t believe her on the sex issue. I went into Fowler’s hardball English class in the fall believing that he could teach me about that at the very least, and maybe I’d learn something about poetry too.

  I’d been on Martha’s Vineyard all summer, staying with Pam in her family’s lavish compound, by day earning minimum wage for shoveling French fries into waxpaper-lined baskets that also contained gourmet burgers and by night testing the limits of my tolerance for vodka and gin. We’d been sharing the house with an endless battery of male guests: bartenders, sailing and tennis instructors, the odd college grad enrolled in a business training program at a bank set up by Pam’s real-estate-broker mother. No night was predictable. There were no set sleeping arrangements. One morning I woke up in Pam’s arms. “He left,” Pam muttered, and then rolled over and slept until I got home from work. By Labor Day I thought I’d seen it all. My father, a Polish Jew who wouldn’t have been allowed to play tennis where Pam and I went to hit in the late afternoons, couldn’t understand why I’d wanted to sling hash instead of come with the family to Fire Island for the four hundredth summer in a row. My mother said, “Let her go. It’s a nice place. She’ll have fun there.” She knew. She used to summer there until she married my father.

  “Nice bracelet,” Fowler said, tapping the gray rope bracelet on my wrist. “Let me guess: summer on an island, lots of people, you don’t remember a single name. Great stuff. You must be tired. Time to get down to brass tacks.”

  He handed out a reading list no elderly person with time on his or her hands could have tackled in five years: The Book of Job, Tristram Shandy, The Divine Comedy, Middlemarch, Ulysses, Moby Dick, War and Peace. I looked up with glazed, tired eyes that begged to be impressed.

  He was smiling at all of us, waiting for us to look up in horror. I steeled myself. No way. I’d drop the course in the afternoon. I’d laugh my way back to the dorm. As Pam had said so often, “Fuck him.” Mr. Nowhere doing his Nowhere thing in the middle of Nowhere, Massachusetts. Getting over his brilliance. Fuck him.

  He took the roll, making checks as each student responded grimly to the reality of being present. Again he looked up, victorious.

  “You’re here. Get ready. This is going to break all of your backs. But it’ll be good. You’ll all be as tired as Lisa over here.”

  “Leigh,” I corrected.

  “You should be as tired as Adelman over here. Don’t worry. She can handle it. So can you.”

  I swallowed. My last name still rang out like the shofar in this bleak wilderness of pristine WASPdom. I watched him sift through a pile of Xeroxes, decide which to hand out first, start them around, give no instructions, assume everything of us, assume I hadn’t taken offense. And, oddly enough, I hadn’t.

  • • •

  “It was great,” I told Pam, who seemed eager to know. “You know, the kind of class everyone who has no life should take.”

  We were in the snack bar, smoking, waiting for our group to assemble: Bill, Murph, and Todd, I could have died of boredom, were buying food. It was amazing what they could put away, not so amazing to me now that I see how much Isaac needs to sustain him for a mere morning. “Totally repulsive,” Pam had said the night before. She’d never met people who actually ate.

  “You call this a life?” she said, indicating the panorama of students in booths stuffing their faces with grease and sugar.

  “I know,” I said, my voice sliding like Pam’s. “I’d much rather be in the dorm reading Job.”

  “Look,” Pam warned, “at least he’s fun to look at. All I do in English is stare at Greenaway’s nose and try to figure out how many times it’s been broken.”

  Todd and Murph slid their burgers onto the table. “Scoot over,” Murph told me. He hip-checked me. He was tall and beefy, like most of the boys at Hastings. He made a show of wanting me, but he always had to get to bed early because of a game the next day, thank God. He was from a town outside of Hartford. Todd, from Greenwich, was in the daily habit of pressing Pam to accompany him to the woods for drugs.

  “Hopeless,” she called him.

  Our intolerance for these boys had magnified since I’d begun Fowler’s class and our discussions about him had become regular. I thought Pam might have been miffed that she didn’t have a daily crack at getting his attention.

  “Hey, nymphet, where are your wings?” Todd said to Pam between bites of burger.

  Pam sucked hard on a Parliament. She spoke before exhaling. “Come again?”

  Todd chuckled to himself, and Murph waited respectfully for the other shoe to fall. Bill, our wrestler, was unwrapping a Hostess fruit pie.

  “I thought all angels had wings.” Todd smiled, his eyes red, dopey slits

  “I can’t deal,” Pam said. She looked at her watch, which was intricate enough. “Time for my enema. Bye, fuzzy-wuzzies.”

  She got up. She waited for me to get up. I stubbed out my cigarette on the top of a Coke can.

  “This is so where I don’t want to be,” Pam said as we walked across the golf course, knee-deep in mist, the lake, still and silver, to our right. To our left, the library lights were being shut off, window by window. Ahead, downhill, was our dorm. My sandals were wet from the grass, and I was sliding a bit as I walked.

  “Have an affair with the guy, would you?” Pam said.

  “You have an affair with him.” Of course I didn’t mean this. I was close. I’d been going for extra help. He’d suggested Saturday morning coffee elsewhere. He’d probably never met a girl who was half Jewish.

  “No can do,” Pam said.

  “Why not? You’ve got a better shot at him than I do.”

  Pam was languorous, blond, ready. I was thinner, more nervous, smaller in almost every way. She dropped a whole, burning cigarette into the grass and laughed self-consciously.

  “I don’t want to get near the guy. He might find out how dumb I am.”

  “So?” We laughed.

  “It’s not like it’s a government secret,” Pam said. “All you have to do for people to figure out you’re brainless is to get yourself sent to a school where at least one building bears your family name.”

  We stopped at some trees near the north entrance

  “Fucking amazing moon.” Pam said.

  “God, will you look at it? I might puke,” I said. I was referring to a dorm meeting I could see taking place in the common room. A lot of the girls were already in sleepwear. Pam and I wore T-shirts to sleep, even if it was below zero out.

  “Could I have a camera over here?” Pam yelled loud enough to be heard through the open window. “Is this an ad for Lanz?”

  I stayed under the trees. I watched Pam, for once not envying her, thinking there was something sad and off-balance about this beautiful rich girl yelling to no purpose in the New England wilderness, and wondering what my connection, a girl of very different social and economic bearing, who was actually in love and not just playing at it, to her really was.

  • • •

  That my truancy, and not Pam’s, became public, has left me very sour on the subject of her. Although I have no cause to see or speak to her now, and the only news I have of her is that she lives in Newport with her husband and a pair of stunning twin daughters (their picture was featured in an alumni bulletin, which amazed me, as the Pam I knew would have torched such mail before responding to enclosed questionnaires), I sometimes imagine a reunion. We have lunch somewhere ludicrous for my budget, cheap for hers, and she tells me how bored she is and that she’s having her house redone at great expense. I show her my children’s pictures, one of Isaac in his sky-blue baseball jersey ready to swing, a young Fowler with his eye
s typically narrowed to focus on any place other than where you stand beholding him. One of Jane ready for a birthday party on the front steps, looking ever so pleased with herself. One of Daisy in a sunhat, a wondering smile directed at our tiny garden. She shows me a clipping of her twin beauties, each holding up a tennis trophy. We eat, laugh a bit, and then I tell her I haven’t forgiven her for telling whoever it was that I was pregnant, for forcing me into hiding, for making a fiasco out of what could have been seen simply as a misfortune. Of course, I was the obstinate one, wanting to go through with Isaac. But I can’t think of anything without him in focus, and Pam is only guilty of having a bigger mouth than I thought she had.

  She was out cold, not even under the covers of her twin iron bed, after a brutal field hockey scrimmage, the night Fowler knocked once and blew into our room. I was at my desk, my Bible open to Job, my mind on Fowler as an undergraduate at his Southern college. I’d been reading up on him in the orientation handbook for the fiftieth time, mulling over his credentials and trying to picture him in a pair of ripped jeans and sandals, fine hair to his shoulders, in the middle of some campuswide protest. Impossible. He didn’t waste time on politics. He probably tore around that campus as he did ours, white shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, tie loosened to accommodate his whirlwind, leaving trails of people dazed or irritated or swooning or all three. He probably hadn’t even waited around to attend his own graduation.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’re going to the movies.”

  I didn’t say a word. I turned off the desk light, grabbed my school sweatshirt and some loose dollars from the bureau, and followed him out.

  • • •

  We drove into New York State and saw a double feature of Jules and Jim and The Four Hundred Blows. I tried not to read the subtitles. He sat with his elbows on the armrests and his hands pressed together under his chin as if in prayer. Occasionally he’d turn and whisper, “Watch,” then “See?” as if there was something more of note than the characters’ expressions or gestures could communicate and I’d be privileged to pick up on it. I’d seen both movies before, could have lived without The Four Hundred Blows, but I didn’t mind seeing Jules and Jim again, which has always struck me as the happiest possible portrait of a ménage à trois.