You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know

by Heather Sellers

  I cleaned the house that morning and thought about how much fun it was to know teenagers, to have them want to come to my house. Last time we’d gotten together, Jacob’s girlfriend, Courtney, had given me a pair of nearly new leopard-patterned stilettos that didn’t fit her quite right. “You are the only adult woman I know who can give these a good home,” she’d said.

  Dave called at noon. Jacob couldn’t come, he told me. He was at a friend’s house and they’d gotten involved in some project—cutting down trees or something—and he wasn’t going to be done in time.

  “But he has a previous commitment,” I said. “We’ve had this planned for so long.”

  Dave took a long pause.

  I told myself: Stop, breathe. Call him back. Wait. “Fuck this,” I said. “No. Why doesn’t he have to come?”

  “Sweetheart,” Dave said in a wide-open way. He never, ever cussed. “We can postpone. We postponed before when you had to. I’ve never once told the boys they had to be somewhere and I am not going to start doing so now. I can assure you. This isn’t that big of a deal.” His voice was very even and very hard, and he spoke so slowly it made me want to do drugs.

  Late that night, I carted the untouched liters of Coke down to the apartment. I’d had a couple of glasses of wine, half a bottle—too much for me. David Junior and Jacob weren’t home. I found Dave sitting on the floor in his closet, sorting coins, a tumbler of wine balanced on the safe before him. He collected gold. He knew the price of silver daily. He kept guns. I pointed to these things.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  I was not good at the Libertarian thing, I said. I sat down on his bed and explained in great detail exactly why his program worked great for a group of individuals but not for anyone trying to be a family, a collective. He called me a communist and I said I was proud to be a communist, red was my favorite color not by accident but by design. We were being ridiculous, but since we were angry, it wasn’t funny, it seemed almost realistic. He called NPR a radical organization and a security threat.

  He brought up Good Night and Good Luck again—a movie he’d walked out of. I said hurtful things about the Drudge Report, the boys’ eating habits. He pointed out that I was the one who was sick all the time; they were fine. Maybe I should consider Doritos instead of organic arugula. He mispronounced “arugula” and I corrected him, in a bitchy, marmy way.

  He said he was just minding his own business, minding his own business. Why did I make him out to be a monster? His face turned a color I hadn’t ever seen before: storm. He stood up from his safe, a maw filled with stuff I didn’t understand and didn’t want him to keep in a safe. He had lumps of gold in his palm. He took off his wedding ring. He shook it around in his other palm. He had a habit of doing this whenever he ate nuts. I watched the ring rattling back and forth in his palm.

  “You took a vow, Heather,” he said. “A vow. For faster or slower. For better or worse. You’re really going to cut and run?” He had tears in his eyes. He wavered in the doorway. “Throw this away? I’m tired of trying to convince you I’m a good person. I don’t need all this constant aggravation.” He said constant aggravation the way Fred said it—the way he said it to me, to my mother.

  “You know what?” I said. It wasn’t me talking, but I was going with it. “Fuck it,” I said. And I sauntered out, swiping a pile of neatly ironed and folded T-shirts off the edge of the bed as I left.

  That night, I took off my ring and put it in a tiny heart-shaped box on my bedside table. I imagined Dave’s wedding ring, engraved with my secret name for him, in a bowl with those gold lumps, deep in the heart of his safe: what he loved and needed most, locked up by fear.

  I’d altered my daily route. Of course, I couldn’t help but see him everywhere. Face blindness was a problem. But so was life.

  I stated my name, my address.

  “This is being recorded,” the judge said. “Please speak up.”

  I said it again. This time I pretended I was on Law & Order. I sold it. I leaned into the mic and answered the questions, trying not to wiggle. I didn’t enjoy getting divorced. But I had trouble resisting performance. What with the podium, the microphone, the good lighting, an audience corralled behind the tiny wooden gate, I felt like I was at a reading. I felt like an officer of the court. I felt like a lawyer. I felt strong and beautiful and unkind.

  The judge’s robe was wrinkled and sticky looking. He stared at my folder. He looked very judgmental.

  “Property divided?” he says.

  “No property to divide, Your Honor,” I said. I licked the inside of my cheek. “We never lived together after we were married.” I wanted to add how we’d tried. I wanted to produce my notebook of house information sheets: Exhibit A! I wanted credit for organization. For trying.

  There was a long pause while he sifted through the paperwork.

  I said, “Does the court have further questions?” I felt like I was on television.

  The judge didn’t answer. He grinned. He stamped my forms. “I wish my whole day could be this easy,” he said. He smacked my folder. It was done. Getting divorced had taken less than two minutes.

  As I walked up the aisle to get the papers I’d have to take upstairs for stamping and filing, I said, “May I approach?” I couldn’t resist. I said it mostly to myself.

  Outside, on the courthouse steps, in the hot morning sun, I wondered: Now what? I was divorced. I didn’t have a plan for the rest of the day. Seagulls were screaming. A police officer was writing a parking ticket near my car. I was divorced.

  “You rocked,” a woman said. She was sitting on the wide white courthouse steps, smoking a cigarette. “You should be a lawyer,” she said. Her friend in a red sweater said, “You were so great, you were so awesome, it was all, like, Go, girl.” She was smoking too.

  “Man, I wish you were my lawyer,” the first one said.

  I wanted to hug them. I said thank you. I said, “I wish I was too.” I breathed in their smoke. It helped.

  In my bright orange truck, I blasted Tom Petty. I took off my jacket. I flew down Lakeshore Drive in the fabulous pink Zoë bra and my beautiful white linen skirt. My folder of divorced-ness and my jacket wilted on the seat beside me. Like things that had expired. Things someone just got out of.

  I drove around for hours, singing hard. Not happy, just getting it all out.

  Thursday I was divorced and Friday I was divorced. All summer I was divorced. Dave and I didn’t speak. I didn’t see the boys. It wasn’t like being single. It was like having been somewhere. The only thing I liked about it: I had been married. I had officially known someone. I had been legally known by someone and normal and real for a while.

  Nothing else about it was relaxing at all.

  Two

  When I called my mother to tell her about the divorce, she said, “Oh, that’s okay, honey.” She said it as though I’d told her I had gotten my hair straightened: That’s okay, honey, curly just didn’t work with your features! “You really took on a lot with those boys! And they were getting into the mail. That made me very, very nervous. You might or might not have noticed I stopped writing to you. I felt I had to discontinue when I realized those boys were reading your mail. I know that hurt you.”

  My father said two words: “Goddamn him.” He sounded very sad; I thought I heard him crying.

  “No, no,” I told him. “It’s not Dave’s fault. Dave’s a good guy.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “It’s complex.”

  “Complex,” he said. A coughing attack ensued. “Bullshit.” He announced that he was marrying his housekeeper, Lola, a woman who spoke no English.

  “No,” I told him. “This is not a good idea.”

  I called back later that day. I spoke to Lola in my terrible basic Spanish. She sounded young and afraid. “It is for convenience,” she said in Spanish. She said she meant to take good care of my father. “I believe you,” I said, and I wanted to help, but this was illegal and a ba
d idea. “You two can’t marry,” I said. “Fred must move up here, by me. He has to move to Michigan.”

  I had filled out application forms for Appledorn, a retirement center a mile from my house. I had toured the facility. There were two vacant rooms, adjoining. It seemed perfect to me. A woman in my running group had her mother here; she visited three days a week, brought toothpaste, orchestrated hair appointments. It seemed possible, even fun.

  Helder was horrified by my plan. Bringing Orlando to Michigan was, in his opinion, an awful backward slide. But to me, it seemed as if it would be less distracting to have my parents corralled, close by, cared for; to me, it seemed a way to get things under control.

  Appledorn’s paperwork was explicit: they did not accept anyone with mental illness. For several nights I tossed and turned, trying to imagine what would happen to my parents if they couldn’t get into a decent, normal nursing home. Finally, I signed in the little box affirming that my parents didn’t suffer from mental illness. Surely there would be doctors involved at some point; surely I could pretend not to know their conditions. Age and dementia were masking the craziest parts of these two people. True, it was difficult to imagine my father, with his ponytail and panty hose, among the stolid, ancient Dutch farmers. Nor could I see my mother dealing with strangers coming in and out of her room, dispensing medications, and preparing food for her in a large, hidden kitchen. It would be a torture worse than death for her. But these were things I did not need to think about. Somehow, it would all work out.

  When I called my mother to talk about the details one Saturday afternoon, she didn’t know who I was. “I don’t think I can help you,” she said. “I feel terrible. I feel like I wish I could. So very badly. But I can’t. Thank you for calling!”

  Helder said, Fantasy, fantasy. Be careful, he said. Having them here could easily derail normal life. He was concerned about my focus, my avoidance of dealing with my face blindness. “You have some momentum. A giant forward step. This is a real engagement with life, and you have to tell people now, ‘I’m face-blind.’ ” He vultured all over the room, flapping his wings. “There’s no drama here. There’s no crisis in face blindness. It’s just a plain, simple, clear thing. Would you please tell people?”

  “I don’t see it happening,” I said. I wanted credit for the divorce. I wanted pity. Had I not done enough?

  The way I’d lived with Dave—not “with with” him—was too close to the way I’d lived as a child, Helder preached. “You’re a very relational person, and we are meant to be relational. In divorcing Dave, you’ve come out of hiding. You’ve come into a fuller sense of who you are. Now you have to come out as face-blind,” he said. “It’s way past time. Tell people. Lean into relationship.” He leaned in his chair. “It’s not a big deal.” He grinned and opened his palms. “Easy! Just tell! Tell your bike group!”

  “Aren’t you supposed to not give advice?” I crossed my arms. “You’re really very pushy and bossy and directive. It’s not effective.” I was frowning.

  He laughed. He said yes, he was pushing. Absolutely.

  My whole life, my mother and father had pushed the theory that something mental was wrong with me: Heather is emotionally troubled, she needs help. No one in my family was uncertain. I was the only one. I hadn’t fit into my family. But like them, I had a thing that made me separate from the world. I blended into my family enough to survive; I had dual citizenship. Face blindness was both passport and extradition.

  Helder said: Let the story go. Let the story go. Don’t try to make a story out of it.

  I knew what he meant. We explain ourselves to ourselves, and it’s never accurate, it’s often unhelpful, and the self-story becomes obsolete, but we cling to it. Okay, I said, so I let the story go. Done. But I didn’t know how to explain it. Without a story, who was I?

  He laughed and pulled back, wide-eyed. “You don’t need a story. And yes, you do know how to explain it. You’ve been explaining it to me in no uncertain terms for almost a year! It’s the faking—all the work you have to do to try to figure this out, every second of every day—that is what distances people. That is where the problem is. Let people in.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You said to push you. You said that.”

  Andrea was always late. I was always early: I relied on being found, so as not to have to struggle with and fail at finding. The intimate restaurant was crowded and I sat at a table with my back to the wall so I could see the whole of the restaurant, monitor each person who came in. I studied the menu of spaghettis and sandwiches. I had once considered Andrea Reesman my best friend and closest colleague. When I’d first come to the college, we had kickboxed and shopped together. Both single, we’d gone to art openings every Friday night, and on the weekends, often we’d take the train to Chicago, treat ourselves to art and restaurants and triathlons, where she often placed in her age group. But in Holland, I would find myself in long conversations with a tall, handsome woman—downtown, at the grocery store, at the mall—completely unsure of who it was I was talking to until she said the name of one of her faculty or cats, or cocked her head a certain way: Andrea. Over the past couple of years, we had drifted apart. We hadn’t had lunch in almost a year.

  Now in her late fifties, Andrea had recently become the college’s head of business management, and she’d ditched her northern California flax jumpers and loose linen shifts and Birkenstocks, cut her long black hair super-short. Today, I was on the lookout for an elegant woman in a boxy suit, a matching purse and pumps, and perfect hair in a pouf—a kind of dressy raven. I checked each person who entered to see if she looked at me, if she was headed toward my table. And then a woman flung herself into the chair opposite me.

  “So sorry I’m late! The hideous meeting refused to end.” She strung her big pink purse on the empty chair across from me and took up her menu. She whispered huskily, leaning across the table. “The man in charge of this committee I’m on is a stupid, stupid man. The president and the provost are right there in the meetings and he just gets away with it!” She picked up the menu and said, “Can we drink at eleven-thirty in the morning, do you think? If I order wine, will we get fired?” She grinned, sweet and wicked—Andrea all over—and I could see she was fighting back tears. She worked very hard for the school. She and the committee head, the man who was driving her nuts, were both up for promotion to vice president. Only one of them would be chosen. She recounted in great detail all her frustrations with him, with the school politics. It was fascinating. She could see all the players and the issues with a clarity I could never muster. At meetings, on committees, I never even knew exactly who was who—or, it seemed, what was what.

  As Andrea talked on, I waited for an opening to say, “I’m divorced—and there is more.” There’ve been times we have talked and I haven’t known who you were until you mentioned your cats or our plans. There’ve been times I think you waved to me, but I’m not sure—there are so many people who look like you. I don’t want you to think I’m rude. Our friendship is so important to me. I wonder if I have walked past you and not greeted you. I have a condition, face blindness. It’s the reason you called me aloof, why we aren’t as close as we once were. Sometimes I know who you are. Sometimes I do not. I probably come off as defensive, distracted, strange. This is what I’m dealing with: prosopagnosia.

  Behind her, a waitress seated a group of men, then came over to us. She said, “Hi, Heather.” She wasn’t wearing a name tag.

  Andrea ordered coffee.

  I ordered tea.

  Andrea talked for most of the lunch. “He is so stupid!” she concluded when we were done eating. “He’s a short-sighted, entitled, ridiculously petty, incredibly wealthy man.” She laughed. “Okay. I’m done. High road. How are you?” She checked her watch and squawked. “Heather. I have talked the entire time. We didn’t get to you!” She thanked me for listening and held her arms up, staring around the room and making the little hand motions for signing a bill. “Do you
see our person?” she said.

  I looked around. A waitress scooted past, loaded down with a tray of lunches. I didn’t know if she was our server or a different one. They all wore white shirts and black skirts and little green aprons. I turned back and looked at Andrea. I visualized Helder on the couch. Don’t apologize, he’d said. You aren’t sorry you have it. There’s nothing to be sorry for. Just explain. Tell the facts. No drama. I have a rare neurological disorder.

  On the sound system, Frank Sinatra was singing “My Way.” Andrea turned all the way around, searching for our server; she had a one-o’clock meeting. Then she turned back around, in slow motion. Her mouth was agape. Her face was expressing surprise and dismay. She was using more than her face. She held her enormous purse tight to her chest. She leaned low over the table, shrinking down into her chair at the same time. Then she put her face on the white tablecloth, where her plate had been. She let out a small squeak of pain. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me? He’s sitting right behind me, with the president and the provost and your dean! He’s right there,” she whispered, hoarse. “Heather!”

  I looked at the men at the table behind Andrea. I’d seen them come in, the quad of men, and I’d noticed them eating. Men in suits, clean, prosperous, powerful men, each with short gray hair, crisp white shirt, tie and jacket. Men in uniform. Men I’d never seen before in my life.

  I was speechless. I looked at the top of Andrea’s head. I wished she’d lift it off the table. “Do we work with them?” I said gingerly. Maybe Andrea was wrong. Surely these weren’t those men. Normal people occasionally mistook people; this happened all the time. Perhaps it was happening now.