by Alison Pace
“I’m a restaurant critic,” she says.
“Cool,” he says.
“I mean, um, I mean on Thursday, I’m reviewing this small and supposedly lovely restaurant uptown actually. I was wondering if you’d like to join me?” she asks him.
“Thursday night? I don’t teach that night. I’d love to.”
She gives him the address, tells him the reservation is for eight and she’ll meet him there, and they can just confirm at G-Doga class on Wednesday night. “You know,” she adds on, “if anything changes.” Either she just asked out her yoga and G-Doga instructor, or she just filled a seat at her dinner table, she’s not sure which. Except she is, because she’d been planning, for all the Japanese places, to sit at the sushi bar by herself.
“Sounds good,” Gary says, nodding.
“Great,” she says.
“Great, Meredith,” he says, and it sounds nice, the way he says her name.
“Just one thing. On Thursday, it’s Sarah. Sarah Marin.”
“Okay,” he says, and as his head turns slightly quizzically to one side, she thinks she should elaborate.
“Because I can’t be myself,” she explains. She says it matter-of-factly, confidently, without any hesitation, but once the words are said, once they seem to be hanging in the air, she does wonder if there was perhaps another way she could have phrased it.
He smiles at her.
twenty
not one gold star, but two
At her third Weight Watchers meeting, Stephanie received not one gold star, but two. One for reaching the first five-pound goal (and even surpassing it, true story) and one for sharing her recipe for four-point popovers that take hardly any time to make. She feels positive, she feels on the right track. As she takes out her key and turns it in the door, she feels very much as if things, so many different things, are taking a turn, too; an unmistakable turn for the better.
She enters the kitchen to see Ivy, gleeful in her high chair. She wonders why Jenna doesn’t have her upstairs already, and she can’t help but think, Yes. Yes, see, I was right. Even though Jenna seems competent, and capable, and loving, and like an excellent nanny in so many ways, she’s not. Even though everyone thought it was insane all these months to never leave Ivy alone with her nanny, it wasn’t. Because, look. Look here at my beautiful baby abandoned helpless in her high chair! Ivy reaches two beautiful arms out. She kicks her legs out in the air. That glimpse, that almost stolen view of that delicious little leg makes Stephanie forget everything for a moment; that leg filled with beautiful rolls of fat, kicking toward her, led by its little white baby-socked foot makes her sure for a moment that the world is a beautiful place. Quickly she puts her folder on the counter along with her two boxes of popcorn and her Mini Bars, and rushes over to Ivy. She unsnaps a snap, picks her up out of her high chair, and holds her, “Hello, darling!” she says.
“Hey, Steph.”
She turns quickly to see Aubrey, sitting at the kitchen table, and even though it’s Aubrey, it’s the new, but not improved, Aubrey, so different in so many ways from the old Aubrey. Seeing him there doesn’t startle her nearly as much as it makes her nervous.
“Oh, God, Aubrey. You scared me.” He doesn’t say anything, he cocks his head a little bit to the side and for a second he looks like he used to. For a second, he looks like a ghost. “You’re home early. Didn’t you have Dr. Petty?”
“Yeah. Dr. Petty called and he had an earlier opening so I took that. It was a quiet day at work so I just took it rather than hanging around at the office until seven.” She looks at him and thinks of him and Dr. Petty, how they have their own relationship, their own world that is so separate from her. And she doesn’t even realize she’s about to ask him a question she’s never asked him before.
“Have you been drinking?” She doesn’t know why she asks him that when she has other questions (Where is Jenna? Did you give Ivy dinner? Is it wrong that if you say Jenna isn’t here, that I’ll be a little freaked out that you were here with Ivy alone?). They’ve never talked about it, and she doesn’t really know, but if Aubrey has a substance-abuse problem, does that mean he has a drinking problem, too? Should he not drink? Who would she ask?
“No, I haven’t been drinking,” he says. He narrows his eyes, maybe to show he means business, maybe to show that as much as she hates him a little bit lately, he hates her a little bit, too.
“Oh, okay. I was just, you know,” and she doesn’t bother finishing the sentence, there is no way to end it well. “Did you feed her? Where is Jenna?”
“Jenna was feeding her when I got home and then when she was done I told her she could go.”
“And she just left?”
“Yes,” he says slowly, “she just left. Is there a problem, Stephanie?”
She doesn’t say anything. And even with five lost pounds and two gold stars, when he asks her if there is a problem, the only thing she can think is that there are so many. He’s been going to therapy for what is it, over a month? He hasn’t been catatonic and he has assured her there haven’t been any pills. She wonders if it would be shrew-like to say, Yes there is a problem. The problem is that I just have no faith. I have no faith that it will last, and maybe I need a necklace, one that says faith or hope or even love.
“No,” she says.
“Where were you?”
“I went to my Weight Watchers meeting.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, really.” She thinks he’s smirking. “Aubrey, what?”
“No, nothing, it’s just that Weight Watchers makes me think of Richard Simmons.”
“Well, Aubrey,” she answers back quickly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about because I don’t think Weight Watchers has anything to do with Richard Simmons.”
“Sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“You think?” She heads to the door with Ivy and she wants to ask him, wasn’t it supposed to get better? Wasn’t he supposed to stop doing drugs and then they would be happy again? She thinks all she does is support him, couldn’t he say, Good for you, Stephanie, that’s really terrific you’re going to Weight Watchers. Couldn’t he do something supportive rather than just always being supported? He doesn’t say anything.
“Okay,” she says. With her free hand, she grabs a box of Mini Bars and her Weight Watchers week three book off the counter. It’s called Be Active and has a picture of someone wearing red striped tights and roller skates. There’s a caption, it says, Now I’m moving in the right direction. She goes upstairs to put Ivy down, and Ivy settles into her crib, closes her eyes remarkably quickly.
When she returns to the kitchen, baby monitor in hand, she takes a seat at the kitchen table, in the chair right across from Aubrey. She looks at him again, and she sees his eyes, and she didn’t notice it before because they were narrowed at her but she notices it now. They don’t look the same, one looks bigger than the other, and she knows what that means.
“Oh, Aubrey.”
He doesn’t look up at her, and he says the same thing he’s said, so many times already that it doesn’t really seem to make any sense. “I’m sorry.”
And she wonders if she should leave, if she should just take Ivy and go.
She has no idea, no idea how any amount of understanding, how any amount of team spirit (Go Team Cunningham!) is going to get them through this. Even though Aubrey isn’t technically an alcoholic, she knows a lot of the time in AA they talk about a higher power, and she has no idea, she really doesn’t, but she thinks that maybe the whole reason there is the higher power, and the whole reason people talk about it, isn’t necessarily because they’re religious, but more because no one can fathom another way. But she has no idea how to believe in a higher power, in anything. And she has no idea how they’re going to get through this.
He says it again, “I’m sorry,” and she wants to strangle him, she wants to throw things at him, bottles filled with Vicodin, and plates, and pictures off the wall. She
wants to have a temper tantrum and scream, and say, How could you do this? Why can’t you stop? And she wants to protect him, and to make him better, and she wants none of this ever to have happened, and she wants none of it ever to happen again.
“I just can’t be perfect,” he says.
“I don’t want you to be perfect,” she says.
“Yes, you do,” he says, full of hostility and anger and venom and he spits a little bit as he says it. When did Aubrey become a spitter? When did it start? When was the day that he went from being Aubrey to being this? Was there one day that he came home and was this person, half-anger, half-Vicodin, and was she too busy, or too tired, or too exhausted, or too freaked-out to notice? Had she simply said, “Hi, Aubrey, honey, how was your day?” and then he just stayed that way until eventually she caught on? Or did it happen slowly, was it a slow roll down a hill, a pharmaceutical snowball that she could have stopped if she’d just been paying more attention, if she’d watched a little closer, tuned in a little more?
Was she supposed to have stopped him? Was she supposed to walk around and say, “Aubrey, what’s in your glass?” except that that wouldn’t have helped anyway because Aubrey isn’t an alcoholic. Aubrey doesn’t have a drinking problem. Or maybe he does.
“I’m not perfect,” she says and she doesn’t even know what part of what conversation she’s responding to.
“No,” he says vaguely. It’s unclear to her if he’s actually speaking to her. It doesn’t seem like he is, until he says, “You’re not.”
A short burst of sound emerges from the monitor in Stephanie’s hand and for a moment she’s just grateful for it. And then the room she’s in with Aubrey is filled with the sound of Ivy, one floor up, and crying.
“Aubrey,” she says slowly, standing slowly and then she’s looking down at him, his eyes look so glassy and demented, and she’s not afraid of him but she wonders if she should be. “I have to get her. Will you stay here?” As if he’s a flight risk, as if he’s going to run through the house. But he could. She thinks of the time she got a root canal and they gave her Vicodin and it made her nauseous and confused and afterward ravenous, and she can’t understand how anyone could take it for fun. Though it’s not as if it looks like anything Aubrey is feeling right now could be called fun. And it still doesn’t seem like her role in all of this, whatever it may be, is to understand.
“Just leave her,” Aubrey says and when he says that the only thing she can do is hope that he has taken pills. He glares at her. “Perfect’s somewhere else, Stephanie. It’s sure as hell not here.” She’d never understood before how people got divorced and hated their exes. She’d always thought of love as something that was lasting, like it was in the movies, and she’d never understood how love for some people turned into hate so easily. She thinks maybe now she does.
She holds the monitor, stares at it, takes a deep breath, and says, “There’s this place.” He looks up at her. “I looked into it, and I researched it and I think it’s time. I think this is it.” There’s a part of her that’s throwing the baby monitor at him, hurling it across the room, screaming, This is it! This is it!
“Rehab?” he says to her blankly.
“It’s in Connecticut,” she continues, “It’s called Bonfin, and they have a high success rate. I mean, the thing is, none of these places have a really high success rate because it seems a lot of people relapse. But in terms of the relatively low success rate, theirs is high.” And he stares into the fireplace as if there’s a fire in there. She can’t imagine bricks painted black could be so mesmerizing. And she knows she has to be the sane one here, and that it isn’t sane at all to suggest he might enjoy watching Baby Mozart, even though she thinks at this point in time he very much would. “And you know, in French, bonne fin, it means good ending? I don’t know, Aubrey, I think it could be a good sign.”
“Yeah,” he says, “ ’cause you know all about things in France, right?” He smiles a little bit when he says it, and she imagines it’s not because he actually thinks he’s funny, and not even because he is in fact as mean as he has lately been endeavoring to be. She thinks the smile is because there is a part of him, somewhere, buried underneath a pile of Vicodin, that’s trying not to be so awful. But still she clenches her jaw, sets it, and stares at him coldly for a moment. It’s not that she means to, it’s like the reverse of when you tell someone you love them, how it isn’t always planned, how it just pops out.
“You didn’t have to say that, Aubrey.” He looks right at her, and she doesn’t even try to figure out if it’s hostility in his eyes, or hatred, or something else altogether.
“Yeah?” he says, kind of softly. “Maybe I was just trying to show you that I understand.”
She doesn’t say anything. She can’t talk to him right now, but if she could she would want to ask him what it is that he understands. Trying to believe in something better, does he understand that? Or does he just understand that sometimes, in order to get through things, people have to lie?
On her way up to Ivy’s room, she stops in their bedroom and gets a pillow, and then the comforter, the blanket, and all the sheets. She pulls everything off the bed. She carries it all with her into Ivy’s room and shuts the door behind her. She locks it. There’s something inside her that’s getting louder, telling her she really has to leave. Ivy’s crying is getting louder, too, but she doesn’t go to her yet. She takes the chair and wedges it under the door. She’d been meaning for so long to get a rocking chair in here, or a glider. She is glad now that she didn’t. She goes to the crib and picks up Ivy and stays there for a while holding her, whispering any number of soothing and reassuring and comforting things to her.
And this isn’t something that she means to spring on you, and it isn’t something that she feels apologetic about not mentioning before because if anything had been ingrained in her growing up it was that this one thing was never to be mentioned. She’s sure that Meredith, for example, doesn’t ever mention it; she’s sure she never even thinks about it, even in her quietest moments, if Meredith has any quiet moments. But she doesn’t want to think about that right now.
The thing is, their father doesn’t really live in France. Stephanie just started saying that a long time ago, because she liked the way it sounded in the movie Kindergarten Cop when the cute little kid said his dad lived in France. That the dad who lived in France actually turned out to be some sort of villain was, to her, beside the point. Or maybe it was exactly the point. Because their dad had left, or was perhaps asked to leave, when Stephanie wasn’t even three and Meredith wasn’t even one. He lives in Las Vegas now, and he has a family there. It wasn’t ever presented as, or seen as, a tragic single mom scenario because they lived in such a beautiful house in Bethesda, and went to the theater, and Mom had so many dinner parties, and senators and congressmen and important people were always there. Their childhood was so close to ideal, it really was perfect, everyone said so.
Stephanie had always hated that her father lived in Las Vegas, had always hated that he’d never been home. And as she got older, she thought she hated it less, but she still hated Las Vegas. She thought Las Vegas sounded so unseemly, so bad, a place for gamblers and ne’er-do-wells. So she’d just started saying France, and she thought that was okay; she thought it seemed so much better that way.
Holding Ivy in one arm, over her shoulder, the exact position they are always in, the one that seems to be theirs, gives Stephanie comfort, even now, as she lays out the sheets, the blankets, the comforter, and the pillows onto the floor. She places Ivy gently down—she doesn’t cry—and lies down next to her. There are ways in which she’d like Ivy to be like her, but not this way. She doesn’t want Ivy to say, in all seriousness, “my dad lives in France.”
She thinks her daughter may never know her father. Her daughter may only see her father on weekends. Her daughter may have a father who doesn’t have a job, who’s in and out of rehab, and that might not be an exaggeration. Her daughter may ne
ver say “my parents’ house,” she might have to say instead “my mom’s house.” Her daughter, her child, her baby, might never know her father. And she thinks there will be ways she’ll spend the rest of her life trying to make up for that, to make up to Ivy for the fact that her father may live in his own version of France.
The way she feels right now reminds her so much of when she used to live in New York and take taxis. It reminds her of the feeling you get when you leave a taxi and for a moment you think you left your wallet on the seat, or the moment when you think you left your shopping bag in the restaurant, the moment on the way to the airport, about to go on vacation, when you think you forgot to pack something you needed. And everything stops for a millisecond, but then it starts again because you realize you’ve got your wallet, you didn’t leave your shopping bag, you remembered to pack everything you might need. But this is different, this feeling she has right now is so different from that. Because there isn’t any moment when everything starts back up. Her wallet is in a cab somewhere, her shopping bags are in a restaurant, and it doesn’t even matter if she packed her underwear because she’s not ever going to arrive at the airport and she’s most certainly not going on any sort of vacation.
twenty-one
oh, the heart
The restaurant is small, and while it might lack some of the shine of Jewel Bako down in the East Village, there is something very charming about it, and indeed, as the interested reader had said, something thoughtful. Gary arrived before Meredith did, and he waited for her out on the street, and when they went in to their table, it was reserved with a hand-lettered place card with Marin written out in beautiful letters over a line drawing of a fish.
“I like your red hair,” Gary says. Meredith smiles; she’s long been a fan of this particular wig.
