by Kelly Harms
I frown. For better or worse, I wanted him to get it wrong. “It would still hurt,” I say, sounding as petulant as I feel.
“Ok,” John says. “Then I’d apply baking soda poultice. Then ice.”
I nod to myself. “Yeah . . . ,” I say, trying to think of something that would truly stump him. Cori’s Social Security number? But I don’t actually think I know that. So many damn sevens.
“It’s going to be ok, Amy. I’m ready for whatever they throw at me.”
“They’re mad at you,” I say. I’m mad at you, I think. “They might give you hell.”
“Yes,” says John. “I hid behind that for a while. But I created this wall between us, and I’m the only one who can fix it.”
I shake my head. “It might not be fixable,” I tell him.
“It’s my job to try. And who knows,” he says. “It might be good for everybody.”
The bell rings. My stomach churns. I mutter a quick goodbye and rush to my next period, where I immediately break out in a flop sweat. Which is really saying something, considering the institutional air-conditioning we have at school, designed, I suspect, to prevent any excess leakage of pheromones by freezing the teenagers solid. After I greet the kids and get them started on their workstations, I do what I think all librarians do when any anxiety sets in: I make a list.
Here are some of the things that are going to happen while my kids are in the care of their irresponsible, untrustworthy father:
They are going to take up smoking, drinking, and sex in quick succession.
Cori is going to get pregnant, and Joe is going to get herpes.
John is going to get all three of them matching tattoos. Of what, I have no idea.
Neck tattoos.
He will lose the kids in one of those scary old broken-down carnivals from the movie Big, and they will be forced to sleep in cardboard boxes with stray cats and used heroin needles until I retrieve them.
And as likely as all that is, there’s the worst possibility of all:
They will be fine, and I will not be fine.
Though Lena—who, I should note, has zero kids—tells me it’s a “wonderful opportunity,” I’m not interested in being away from my kids for anywhere near this long. I don’t want to tour Europe for a week by train, even if I could scrape up the money to do so. I don’t want to spend the time finding my inner watercolorist or potter. Like every mother in America, I’m tired. I could sleep for a couple of those days straight. But then after that, what? Three days bingeing on HGTV? Take-out pizza and Target wine cubes? A long, leisurely wander through Costco with no list?
I try to imagine my house empty of children. My calendar empty of places to be. I feel some nauseating cocktail of relief and loneliness. I think of the three-day weekend last year when my parents picked up the kids and took them to do the museums and monuments in Washington, DC. Day one: streaming Gilmore Girls, doing about twenty loads of laundry, cleaning every surface of my home, building an IKEA bookcase, listening to five hours of librarian podcasts, and knitting a baby hat. Day two: crying in front of the refrigerator. Day three: “surprising” them a day early at the aquarium in Baltimore. Not one of the proudest episodes of my life.
I’m behind on some of my shows, I think. Maybe I could paint the kitchen.
I look over the students using my media lab. It’s my planning period, and they are all doing their own thing on their iPads. Probably nonstop texting plus a little background research for the School-Wide Seasonal, a massive Country Day project designed to keep the kids just a smidgen engaged in the long, muddy slog from spring break to summer. The students sophomore through senior “declare” a major and spend the first half hour of every day pursuing it, from writing up a fake schedule of classes they’d take based on college course guides, to researching a “thesis” project in their subject, to doing work-study programs in the community. If someone wants to do an SWS major in premed, they have to figure out how to finance med school, how to get all their prerequisites taken without overloading on hours for any semesters, which labs they’ll need, what their books will cost, and which academic groups to join. Then they do a minithesis—ten pages at least—learn about med school entrance exams, and finally, in the last week before summer, shadow a professional in the field well enough to get a good recommendation. Grades are based on that recommendation, their educational plan, their financial plan, and their thesis. And the faculty who grade them are those who aren’t burdened with the grading of normal finals. A.k.a.: me. Me, the counselors, special-subject teachers, coaches, even the nurse. It’s all hands on deck.
The kids in my room are doing some approximation of that work, and I will be grading some of them. I want them all to get As as a point of pride. So I slowly, dramatically move up to my whiteboard, where a countdown of days left before the project is due waits. An anxious silence falls as I erase the 15 and write in 14. Fourteen days left before SWS finals are due. Then I meaningfully write under the countdown:
Educational Plan?
Financial Plan?
Thesis?
Recommendation?
Saying nothing, letting the list of burdens and the days left in the year speak for themselves, I keep one eye peeled on their screens as I pull out my own tablet and message Lena.
Amy:
I’m living with you while my kids are gone.
Lena:
No.
Amy:
No, really. I am.
Lena:
No.
Amy:
It’ll be fun. I’ll make dinner for us and we can have a Daniel Craig film festival.
Lena:
We do that every Sat. anyway.
Amy:
Why buck tradition?
Lena:
You need to get a life.
Amy:
Aren’t nuns supposed to be sweet?
Lena:
I’m not sure where you heard that.
Ok. So then I won’t spend the week with Lena. I’ll go visit my parents in Florida. I’ll spend the week in the blazing-hot Tampa sun contemplating how exactly a person can be switched at birth and yet still look exactly like her mother and father. Who do not watch anything but Fox News, with the volume turned to just above Jackhammer and just below Permanent Brain Damage.
There’s got to be something I am supposed to be doing during this week alone. Beyond laundry. Something meaningful. I haven’t had a week off from everything since before the kids were born. Surely I’m full of longings and desires that have been unfulfilled over these last fifteen years. Or short of that, responsibilities. Things to do that I’ve been deferring. Continuing education, maybe?
Aha! Continuing education! Now I’m onto something. Country Day faculty are expected to get a lot of continuing ed credits every year. I can get some hours and learn some new software or review a new curricula set for a week, and then I’ll be back home ready to police Cori’s cell phone usage and make Joe go outside once a day for the rest of the summer.
I open up the American Library Educators Association page for conferences and continuing ed. It’s bookmarked, in my librarian way, under two labels—Green: Professional, and Blue: Books. I wish, not for the first time, that the two categories would combine on the screen and form aqua.
The calendar on the website loads slowly. Maybe there will be something in Scranton, a short daily drive back and forth. Or better still, online. I can stay home, eat soup, and study in my pajamas. Please let there be something online I haven’t taken already . . .
New York, NY
June 1–4
Hosted by Columbia University
The School Library of the Future: Learn how new resources are being implemented in the most forward-thinking schools, private and public, throughout the nation. Study new ways to bring the future into your curriculum and keep the best parts of the past relevant. What will be your students’ “normal” in ten years? A multiscreen tablet? A projection watch? A folding phone? The futu
re is in New York this June! 10 CEU—PRESENTERS STILL NEEDED
Huh. New York.
Yes! New York. Close enough to race home if John does something wrong. Far enough to count as an actual vacation. And I haven’t been in New York since . . . since I met John. I used to love New York. My college roommate Talia and I used to come down on the train every chance we got, staying on sofas and in dodgy hotels and once, when we were out dancing until four, on the twin velvet chaises in the lobby of the St. Regis, thanks to a white lie told to the swing shift desk clerk.
Oh, the things we did in New York. I never told John about most of our adventures, much less shared that kind of juice with my kids. As such, I haven’t thought about the city much for the last fifteen years. Since John and I pulled the goalie and got pregnant with Corinne. Since I started craving the settled life and the big house with the pretty kitchen I have now. Of course, I didn’t crave the disappearing husband and the lack of child support payments for three years, but this life was all I wanted, more or less.
Except there was a time when it wasn’t.
A loud, rowdy, fun time. Many, many years ago. When I was someone else.
I open the messages on my tablet again. I haven’t texted Talia since . . . maybe a year after John left? Just after that last promotion she got at the magazine? Either way, it’s been too long. Embarrassingly long.
But I know that she’ll understand—that the minute we are in the same room together again, it will be like not a day has gone by. It’s always been like that between Talia and me. All at once I want to see her again, see what life is like without kids and husbands and a wardrobe acquired almost entirely at Target while there anyway for toothpaste and panty liners. I type:
Hey girl. Coming to NYC
1st wk of June. Coffee or
a drink?
There’s no response. Then three dots. Then nothing. I get a little nervous. Will she be mad at me for not being in touch? Does she even have my number anymore? So I add:
It’s Amy.
Amy Byler.
Then the three dots again. Ok. She saw the message . . .
Talia:
Amy . . .
AMY!
That seems like a good sign.
Talia:
AMY BYLER WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?
I start to type back an apology. I’ve been busy. Life has been kind of hectic. I let her fall off my radar—
Talia:
You’re staying with me.
I delete what I wrote and type:
Amy:
Really?!?!??! Are you sure you have room?
Talia:
Can’t talk. In meeting. Call when on way.
I stare at my tablet in happy surprise. Well. Now I won’t have to bunk with some strange librarian from Idaho at the conference and spend $200 a night for the privilege. I can use my per diem, should Country Day offer me one, for actual food. Or . . . drinks.
Amy:
Ok that sounds amazing. Thank you! I will call you.
Talia:
Leave me alone I’m working
Amy:
Sorry. Just excited
She doesn’t respond, no dots, no emoji, nothing. Conversation complete. I put down my tablet. I’m positively shaking with excitement. Could it be this easy? Could life be this aligned for once? A short trip to the big city to hang with fellow book nerds and reconnect with a footloose and fancy-free old friend, and all within my budget? While my kids are looked after by their once-absent dad? Is this a real thing or some kind of weird trap set up by the universe?
My tablet blinks at me. I bring it back to life and look at the new message. It’s Talia. A map link. I click it, and it takes me to a block in an unbearably hip neighborhood in Brooklyn. This is where she lives. The map is studded with location flags. Bars. Restaurants I’ve heard about in magazines. Shopping. An artisanal organ meats store. Good god. Talia is so cool.
The tablet blinks again, and I click back to the message app. Talia, in her succinct way, doubling down on her cool in four little words:
this party is on
—
Fate or no fate, I am still me, so I still insist that John come over and have a family dinner with us to prep for the week after school’s out. And since I am still me, there is an agenda.
Agenda for “Family Meeting,” Tuesday, May 9, 5:30–?
No minutes from previous meeting
Plan for first week of summer:
Discuss Sample Daily Schedule, weekly obligations
Behavioral expectations: Joe
Behavioral expectations: Cori
Parenting expectations: John
Ground rules
Daily communication plans
Tutorial: using the EpiPen in case of accidental peanut ingestion
Tabled issues:
Why did John leave Amy?
Why is John back now all of a sudden?
Does John still love Amy?
When will Amy ever have sex again?
Needless to say, I do not plan to share my agenda with the meeting participants.
John is fifteen minutes early, and I am not exactly emotionally prepared for this, but here he is, standing at the door, looking at me expectantly. I take a moment to look at him. He is still so handsome, so square and broad and sure. In a rush it all comes back. Dad jokes at family dinners. Pokémon hunts in the neighborhood. Toddler touch football, where Cori squealed in joy whenever he would pretend Joe was the ball. John’s impeccable Daffy Duck impression.
“Where are the kids?” he asks. Not in his Daffy voice.
“Home in a half hour or so,” I tell him. “Cori is finishing up her thesis, and Joe is at debate. Cori’s going to work at school until he’s done and walk him home.”
“I thought the kids would be here,” he tells me.
“Yeah,” I say, unapologetic. “They’re busy kids.”
“Of course,” he says. Then, “I kind of left work early. I was eager to see them.”
“It’s a very sudden-onset eagerness,” I say.
He says nothing but looks stung. I try to swallow my anger, but seeing him here, in this house again, makes me feel hot and red, like a star right before it goes supernova. “Would you help me out?” I manage to ask him in a normalish voice. “The dining table is serving as makeshift study carrels right now. I need it to go back to being a dining table.”
On days when they don’t have after-school stuff, the kids come home and do homework on opposite sides of our six-seater dining table. Because Cori is too good at turning algebra drudgery into the fine art of distracting her brother, we constructed this little divider between them from two back-to-back paperboard science fair presentations. On top of the Are Potatoes Electrical Conductors? side, Joe made a vision board of good grades he’s received in the past, colleges he’d like to attend, and careers he’s interested in learning more about. Reminder: this poor child is twelve.
In place of the Measuring the Heat of Colors side, Cori put up pictures of the guy from Arrow and Benedict Cumberbatch. We just call him the Batch.
I do not entirely mind that from the kitchen, where I tend to be at this time of day, I can only see Cori’s side.
John looks all this over with eyebrows raised. “I’m really hoping this side is Cori’s,” he tells me, gesturing to a shirtless Stephen Amell. And though there have been signs that Joe suffers from a crush on a slightly older girl named Macy Feathers who usually beats him at chess, I let myself erupt a bit at John’s narrow-mindedness.
“Oh? Worried I might have let your son go gay?” Then, archly, “Would you walk out on him if he were?”
He colors, as he should. “Sorry. You’re right. I don’t care either way. It was just me being awkward and nervous.”
“You should be awkward and nervous,” I tell him. “You did a terrible thing, and we”—I gesture at the study carrels, as though the Batch is one of the family—“are the people you did it to.”
John sighs. W
e made it to better terms after a while, but that first couple of months after he left us, I called his voice mail on a pretty regular basis to tell him what a sleaze he was, to compare him unfavorably to a segmented earthworm, or to try out words heard previously only on HBO original series. So my anger won’t be totally new to him.
“I see you’ve been frozen in time for three years,” he replies.
“I have not,” I say indignantly. Defensively. “I have been frozen in place, maybe. I have been working and taking care of two kids and sacrificing everything I need or want so that they can go to a good school and eat good food and have a good home. I have learned how to live on a teacher’s salary alone and how to fix a toilet without calling a plumber and how to make an Elizabethan costume out of rickrack and Goodwill clothes. I have learned how to survive on coffee and office naps and the sale flavors of Lean Cuisine. Busy busy busy!” I snap. I sound kind of manic. “Hardly frozen in time,” I add more quietly. But by now I know I’m protesting too much.
John looks equally guilty and annoyed. This expression—which seems to suggest that he feels terrible enough already, and I should not be feeding the fire—has always made me feel contrite. “What can I do, then?” he says wearily. “I’ve said I’m sorry a dozen times.”
I have no useful answer. “Go back in time and don’t leave us high and dry and vanish to Hong Kong, maybe. Have you thought about that?” Or go back even further, I think. Two years before that. And this time, when the chips are down, come through for me.
He sighs wearily. He is always the injured party in the end, and today will be no different.
“I’m here now, Amy. Can we make it a tiny bit less painful before the kids come home?”
I don’t respond to that. “Clear the table, please.”
He clears. I cook. In five minutes we’ve become some reasonable facsimile of a couple, a very tense couple, getting dinner on the table, coming together as a family. It all feels so familiar to me, and at the same time so sad. These moments are, after all, part of what I lost when I lost John. This is what I’ve spent three years convincing myself I didn’t need.
I’m roughly chopping basil and garlic for pesto. A big salad is waiting to be dressed with red wine vinaigrette. This is not haute cuisine, but neither is it our usual Monday fare of veggie fried rice with pot stickers out of the bag. From the corner of my eye I see that he’s setting the table, having no trouble finding what he needs from the buffet. Everything is right where he left it. Even me.
