by Jancee Dunn
“Well, look who’s here,” he said. He could never quite pull off a lighthearted teasing tone.
“Hi, Dad,” I said in a purposely scratchy voice.
“Are you joining your mother and me for breakfast?” When he didn’t ask me about the weekend, I knew that his discomfort level matched mine.
“You know, Dad, I really need to get a run in. You guys go ahead.”
He left and I shimmied into some running clothes. I didn’t feel like eating.
The two of them were seated at the breakfast table reading the paper when I padded downstairs. “Listen to this,” my father was saying. “You’re not going to believe this loser.” He adjusted his reading glasses and cleared his throat. “So this guy lives in a suburb outside of Toronto with his mother. He’s thirty-five.” He looked at me hastily. “That’s not the loser part, Lillian, just so you know. Anyhow, he gets pulled over on a Friday night as he’s riding home from a bar and gets a ticket for drunk driving. And you know what he was driving?”
My mother and I waited. “His mother’s motorized wheelchair.” He cackled. “Ah, Christ. What a world. That means that he also drove the wheelchair to the bar.”
I quickly poured some orange juice, and it slopped over the side of the glass. Sponge. Where was the sponge? I had the car keys. One more second and I could escape. My mother cleared her throat.
“I’m glad to see you decided to return,” she said. “You know, Lily, you’re a grown woman. Obviously. But when you’re living in our house, just have the courtesy of letting us know your whereabouts.”
“I told you I was going to Christian’s.” I tried to keep from sounding surly. Couldn’t my parents just get off my back for once?
“That was Thursday. It’s Monday. We didn’t know how many to cook for, first of all, and then we left the front-porch light on all weekend and it burned out and now your father has to replace the bulb.”
My father stared at the paper without blinking. He was clearly just going to wait this little confrontation out.
“Sorry, Mom. I’ll definitely call you next time.”
My father looked up sharply. “Next time?”
I looked at the clock. “It’s now nine-twenty, and I’ll be going to the park for forty-five minutes.”
“Ha, ha, Lillian,” said my mother, swatting me.
I ran out of the house, giddy again, got into the car, and sped to the high school. As I pulled into the parking lot, I saw a lone figure on the track. I recognized that red running suit.
Whenever an image of Dawn’s quavering chin in the women’s room popped into my head after the reunion, I had shoved it out. I contemplated pulling away, but I knew she had seen my car. I was not ready to deal with this. I just wanted to run around the track in a trance and think about Christian.
I walked slowly over to the field. Should I wait for Dawn? Should I start running slowly to see if she talked to me? As I stood there, she rounded the corner, keeping her eyes on a point in the distance.
“Dawn…” I began, but she passed me. I didn’t know what else to do, so I loped onto the track, maintaining a distance of ten yards behind her. Around the track we went this way—one lap, two laps. At three laps, I had just decided to leave when I noticed that she had stopped running. She walked over to the bleachers, panting, and sat down.
I tentatively approached and she looked up and met my eyes.
“Dawn, listen, I want to apologize—”
She looked at me with pure hostility and the words stopped in my throat.
“You know what?” she said. “I’m thirty-eight years old, and I thought I was done with this. I’m married. I’m a mother. High school was a long time ago. And I justified a lot of what happened back then by telling myself that we were young and that’s how kids are—they’re cruel, they alienate each other. It’s a survival game. You’re mean to one so that another accepts you. I see it with my own kids.”
“I know I should have—”
She cut me off. “If you’re really sorry, you’ll just listen to me. I have to get this out. Before the reunion, I sat waiting for your call like I was sixteen, while my husband kept saying, ‘I don’t understand why you just don’t call her.’ But of course I couldn’t. Even now, that’s not the way it works. And then at the reunion, you passed right over me. And when I was crying in the bathroom, do you think I didn’t notice how desperate you were to get away from me?”
She smiled tightly. “I mean, I understand. I was kind of horrified to be crying, too. But that’s the point, Lillian. I don’t like the person you turned me into. Or the person I always was that you brought me back to.” She sat for a moment and I forced myself not to talk.
“I spent years after high school trying to build up my confidence and forget certain things,” she said slowly. “I was really looking forward to the reunion, because I was a different person. But then when you snubbed me, I went back to that time period where I accepted that sort of treatment. And then for the rest of the night, I just couldn’t shake that feeling. I wasn’t myself.” She sighed. “I ended up leaving early. We still had a few hours with the babysitter, so we went to Friendly’s. Dave got me a hot fudge sundae and I ended up telling him all about my pathetic high school years.”
“You weren’t pathetic,” I faltered.
She smiled to herself and shook her head. All of her hostility had suddenly vanished. “You still don’t get it. I wasn’t saying that I was pathetic, I was saying that high school was pathetic.” She stood up and grabbed her car keys.
“I’m going to make this easy for you, Lillian,” she said. “You don’t have to apologize anymore. I’m going to find somewhere else to run, but when we see each other, I’ll say hi to you. Don’t worry, it won’t be awkward. I just don’t think we’re healthy for each other. Let’s just leave it at that.”
She walked to her car without looking back. I watched her, brushing away tears with the sleeve of my tracksuit. My heart twisted when I thought of the night at Benihana, but my sadness was mingled with undeniable relief that I didn’t have to deal with her anymore, didn’t have to think about her anymore. There was only room in my head for one person.
chapter twenty-five
Christian didn’t call Tuesday. Or Wednesday. By the time Thursday rolled around, I was reduced to eating two granola bars a day and compulsively checking my e-mail every few minutes. I had gotten a quick note from Kimmy and Sandy, both along the lines of Running the kids to soccer practice, talk soon, miss you, love you. Funny how quickly it all dissolved.
The only message I had received all day was from Andy, my classmate with the port-wine stain. As I opened it, I reminded myself that I needed to stop identifying him in that way. It was a very small port-wine stain.
Hi Lily,
Your old friend Andy here, the one who is afraid of choking on a Chinese spare rib and dying a lonely death in a dark hallway as my neighbor watches through a peephole. Remember? Yes, I’m the one who told you within the first five minutes that I’m frequently jobless and hanging around coffee shops. (I’m actually at a coffee shop now but lest you think I’m completely degenerate, I start a gig next week, one that I’m pretty excited about.)
I didn’t see you for the rest of the reunion, but later, I did see Raymond “Heinie” Heinemeyer trying to get raunchy on the dance floor with your friend Kimmy. I’m sure it’s an image she’ll never forget. I know I won’t.
In our brief and weirdly dark conversation, you mentioned that you were changing apartments in the city. Maybe I could show you around Red Hook sometime. It’s a little rough around the edges but that’s the charm, and you can get much more space than you can in Manhattan.
Well, there’s a homeless man who has been edging closer to me and now he’s reading this over my shoulder, so I should probably go.
WBS (that’s “write back soon” if you don’t remember),
Andy
He was pretty funny. Weekends were reserved for Christian, but I did need a
n apartment. And I had nothing to do. “Sounds great,” I wrote back. “How about this week? What day is good? WBS.”
Then I did my customary trolling of the New York papers for tidbits about Adam. He was ridiculously easy to track because he and his new girlfriend never seemed to spend a single night at home. Aha. A photo in the New York Daily News:
Spotted…Elyse Brooks, handbag designer and daughter of hedge-fund honcho Marvin Brooks, with Realtor boyfriend Adam Sheffield, at last week’s Guggenheim gala.
I rolled my eyes. Adam, who wore a wrinkled suit at our own wedding, was in a tux, while Elyse wore a dark, low-cut dress, her glossy hair blown stick-straight. Drew had told me that Adam was thriving at his new job because Elyse’s rich friends threw him a lot of business.
Elyse had wrapped both arms around Adam, and they were grinning. I looked more closely. No, Adam was beaming like a kid on Christmas morning.
“He’s happy,” I said softly.
He deserved happiness. He wasn’t a bad person. We were not the right match. For the first time, I felt no animosity toward either of them.
I shut down the computer and made myself leave the house. I did a double run on the track to make the day pass, but when I came back in the afternoon, there was still no word from Christian. I took a long shower, stopping to turn off the water when I thought I heard the phone. Nothing. An errand-filled weekend with my parents loomed, and I listlessly debated taking up Drew’s invitation to go into the city to see his latest Film Forum opus.
I was about to phone him when my mother called me down for dinner.
“You haven’t had much of an appetite lately,” she said, handing me place mats to set the table. “But I have a feeling you’re going to eat tonight when you see what we made. We went all out! Your father splurged at Costco.”
“Look at this,” he said, holding up a platter. “Restaurant quality.” My father’s “splurge” was steak that had been trimmed and pre-marinated, which boosted the price a dollar per pound. This time, he proudly announced, he had gotten Costco’s herb-and-garlic-marinated filet mignon.
My father examined the small pile of meat on the platter. “I bought a pound and a half,” he said worriedly. “It shrank a little. But that just means the flavor’s more condensed.” He took out a serrated knife from the utensil drawer and tried to slice it, but it was so tough that he had to dig out the electric carving knife from the back of the pantry to cut it into thin slices, fanning it out on the platter so it looked more abundant.
Ding went the microwave, and he took out a jar of gravy and dumped it over the meat. The gravy made a sucking sound as it slurped out of the jar.
“Walla,” he announced. “Who says you need to go to a steakhouse?”
My father asked me to finish the mashed potatoes. “The water’s boiling already,” he said. “Just read the directions.” The potatoes were another Costco specialty. They came in a pack of eight envelopes—two plain, two roasted garlic, two “fresh” herb, and two with the intriguing title of “Loaded,” which meant that the dried potato flakes were blended with more dried flakes of sour cream, cheese, bacon, and chives.
“What kind of potato mood are you in, Dad?” I called to him as he put the meat platter down on the coffee table in the TV room.
“Are you kidding?” he called back. “We’re having filet! Loaded, of course.”
I opened the bag (Homemade Taste in Four Minutes!) and peered inside. The potatoes looked like grayish-white fake snow, dotted with a few specks of green, brown, and yellow. I fished out a tiny brown fleck and sniffed it. It smelled a little like a dog treat. I put it in my mouth to see if it tasted like bacon. It had a smoky yet chemical flavor, not unlike the way the air tastes when you pass a factory on the New Jersey Turnpike. Then I dumped the potato flakes into a saucepan of water, covered it, and let it sit, as directed, until it thickened up. Walla.
Just as we took our places at the coffee table, the phone rang. I leapt to get it, remembering that my folks had a policy never to answer the phone during dinner.
“Hello?” I said breathlessly, taking a risk that I’d be chatting with an elderly member of one of my parents’ volunteer groups.
“Hey.” It was Christian. “What are you doing this weekend?”
Get across that you weren’t waiting for him, I told myself. “I’m not sure,” I said in what I hoped was a casual tone. “I was thinking of going into the city, to a film festival that my friend does. This time it’s French gangster movies from the forties. Maybe you could come with me.”
“Or you could come down here.”
My heart jumped into my throat. “Well, the festival goes all week, so I guess I could go later,” I said. Who was I kidding?
“Great. See you tomorrow? In time for dinner.”
“Okay!” I chirped. “Until then.”
“Bye.”
I weaved back to the coffee table, sat down, and started eating the steak in big bites.
My mother put down her fork. “Let me guess,” she said. “That was Christian.”
“Yes, and I’m going to his house for the weekend. I’ll be back Monday and I’ll definitely call you this time.”
My father blotted some gravy with a dinner roll. “Who is this person?” he said. “This is the kid you went out with in high school?”
“Yes, I told you. You remember Christian. He works at a re-branding agency called EDJ. They’re based in London, but they have a New York office, and he moved here.”
My mother frowned. “So he has a place in the city and at the shore?”
“No, just the shore. He’s staying at his parents’ house until he gets situated.”
My parents exchanged looks. “So you’re both living at your parents’ houses?” said my father.
“It takes a while to find a place in the city, Dad.”
“What did his father do?” asked my mother.
“He’s an accountant, but he’s retired,” I said, careful to keep the irritation out of my voice. “Why is it that parents always want to know what other parents do for a living?”
“So Christian’s some sort of ad executive?”
“No, he’s a marketing and branding consultant. He creates new visual identities for companies that want their products to be cool.”
My mother frowned. “Is that a full-time job? It doesn’t sound full-time.”
“Oh, it definitely is. It definitely is.”
My father belched lightly. “Has he ever been married? Any kids or any of that?”
“No. He was engaged but they called it off.”
“Why?” they both asked.
I waved my hand vaguely. “For the usual reasons that these things get called off. It didn’t work out. He said they both weren’t happy, and they talked about it a lot, and decided to split.”
My father glowered. “‘Am I happy?’ ‘Are you happy?’” he imitated in a high voice. “Your generation, I swear to Christ I never heard so much self-analysis. Everyone sitting around and asking themselves over and over and over if they’re happy. Is my job the be-all and end-all? Is my wife my soul mate? Am I fulfilled? Am I satisfied? Our generation didn’t do that, and you know what? I think we’re happier.”
I looked at my father and sighed. “You know what, Dad? You may be right.”
That threw him. He looked suspiciously at me but said nothing further.
“Now,” I said. “Are we done with twenty questions about Christian? I have to pack.”
“Twenty questions with no answers,” barked my father. He picked up an old newspaper and scanned it, frowning. “Sharon, what’s for dessert?”
I passed on the fat-free pudding cups and made my escape to go pack.
chapter twenty-six
I pulled into Christian’s driveway, and a thrill raced through me as I saw that he was sitting on the porch waiting for me. He was wearing battered jeans, a fisherman’s sweater, and a navy blue ski cap. His face, lightly tanned from being outdoors, offset his gray-blu
e eyes even more vividly. He looked relaxed and confident and masculine sitting on the porch holding a cup of coffee to keep his hands warm. All that was missing was a fluffy golden retriever at his side.
“I see you came prepared,” he said, eyeing my thick sweater. “I had your spare sweater here just in case.” My V-neck from last week was folded on the porch. Without saying anything, we started our walk to Bob’s.
We had a routine, and it was only a couple of weeks. He had brought me a sweater.
As we walked, I asked him the questions I had forbidden myself from bringing up during our first two weekends, and he filled in some of the tantalizing blanks. After college, he taught diving for a while in Nantucket before he met a girl and followed her to Los Angeles. He fell into advertising when one of his roommates got him a low-level job at his agency. People were always doing things for Christian. After he broke up with his girlfriend, he joined a friend on a trip to Paris and ended up staying for a year, where he assisted a photographer he had met at a party.
He eventually moved to London, where he got a job at EDJ and met Saskia. After their breakup, he needed a change so he volunteered to helm projects from their New York office. “I had had enough of London, anyway,” he said. “Too expensive.” Now he worked for EDJ three days a week on a freelance basis (to my chagrin, my parents were right; it wasn’t a full-time job).
“I make what I need,” Christian said. “I do it just enough that it stays interesting to me.”
He didn’t ask, but I supplied my truncated biography, too. When I ended with my divorce, his only question was “So what was wrong with Adam? How did he lose you?”
I flashed on Adam telling me that he was bored to death of us. “I guess I just outgrew him,” I said smoothly.
After dinner, we walked back to his house. As he turned the key in the door, I gloried in the familiar musty smell of the living room. “Sorry for the mess,” he said, flicking on a light. Empty bottles of wine and stuffed ashtrays littered the room. “I had a little get-together last night.”
