Start Without Me

by Joshua Max Feldman

  “No, I’ll answer her question,” Mona announced. “I’ve never been afraid of . . .” She appeared to try and fail in an effort to sit up, ended up sliding backward with an “Oof!” down into the recliner, the springs whining. “Where was I? I got no idea. I never ran numbers a day in my life, don’t even know what that is, officer, but did I do a thing or two to keep my daughters fed as a woman alone? You might thank me for some of the things I did one day. And if you’re waiting for an apology that I never let some man put nails in my hands and tell me ‘this is your life, now go get me a beer,’ you better not hold your breath. But you’re a smart girl, you know where I was. I was drinking vodka. And either I forgot or I blacked out. You feel better? You got closure? Now why don’t you call up your husband, tell him why you fucked around behind his back.”

  “Alright, that’s it,” Caitlyn declared, standing and yanking Jade up to her feet and then up to her hip. “Hanley?”

  After a beat, Hanley turned his head to look at her. “Fourth quarter, babe.”

  Caitlyn twisted her torso so Jade’s face was to the door, then lifted her middle finger to him. “I’ll be with your daughter, waiting in the cold,” she announced, then pushed open the door and went out.

  “Chicks!” Special K cried, with barren good humor.

  Marissa turned back to Mona. Her mother took in a low, nasally breath, which she didn’t seem to let out; then another, deeper. Her head was bent steeply forward from her neck: She was crying, Marissa realized. When was the last time she had seen her mother cry? Then Mona’s body slumped to the left, she took in another grumbling breath through her nose, the arm of the recliner pushing into her side. No, she wasn’t crying. She’d passed out. And why not? All the vodka was gone. Special K’d been wrong, she hadn’t made peace with her demon: The demon was all that was left.

  Marissa looked at Special K. “Can you get her to bed?”

  “No, but I’ll get a blanket over her,” he answered.

  It was hard for her to mean it, but she said, “Thanks for taking care of her.”

  She found Caitlyn standing in front of the building, Jade asleep in her arms, cheek pressed into the zipper of Caitlyn’s windbreaker. Caitlyn stamped her feet back and forth, trying to keep warm.

  “Sorry,” Marissa said.

  “Whatever.” Then she grinned a little. “It’s just like a sitcom in there, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I couldn’t stop laughing.”

  “Is she worse than ever, what d’you think?”

  Worse than ever or as bad as always? What was the difference? “I dunno,” Marissa answered. “I guess it was about what I expected.” She closed her coat around herself, crossed her arms over her chest. The afternoon light was fading in the sky. Birds swooped before clouds closer to black than gray, settled on the building opposite’s roof. “Since when does she have a cat, though? Ma’s allergic.”

  Caitlyn made a pssh noise through her lips. “She’s not allergic to cats. She just told us that so we’d stop asking when we were kids.”

  And just like that, Marissa was furious again, ready to go back inside and scream at Mona, conscious or not. “That lying b—”

  Caitlyn was tugging one of Jade’s mittens up higher on her hand, stamping her feet again. “How do you do that?” Marissa wanted to know. “How do you just . . . let it go with her?”

  “I had to do something.” She looked at Marissa, and she added matter-of-factly, “I knew I wasn’t going to Syracuse, so . . .”

  So she’d learned this self-protective forgiveness, forgetfulness: her way of being tough. They’d never talked about it, but Marissa was aware that the two years Caitlyn spent alone with Mona after Marissa went to college, before Caitlyn turned eighteen and got her own place, had been her hardest years. She wished she knew how to apologize for that, justify that—but this wouldn’t be the day to try.

  “I know I haven’t called in a while,” Marissa said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Caitlyn answered.

  “How’s Hanley?”

  “Hanley’s Hanley. No surprises. You appreciate that, after . . .” She jerked her head back toward the building. “And he made good money this year doing the landscaping, and until the spring he’s getting shifts as a bouncer at a sports place by us. He’s a good provider, Marissa.” For a moment, Marissa thought Caitlyn was mocking her, or mocking Robbie, but then she realized that no—Caitlyn was telling her because she was proud. She’d married a dependable provider from Somerville, with a good body, who liked to watch football on Sundays. Some line from a college seminar book darted around Marissa’s head, something about having all the wrong dreams. But she’d had her chance at that. She could have married Brendan and lived in Needham. Only she wanted . . . “God knows what you ever wanted,” she heard Mona saying.

  Caitlyn asked her, “You and Robbie really on the outs, like she said?”

  “Ma doesn’t know the half of it,” she admitted. “I got myself pregnant, too.”

  Caitlyn’s eyes widened with surprise, but her mouth stayed even. “And not with . . .”

  “Do you remember my boyfriend, in Needham, Brendan O’Shea?”

  Not even Caitlyn could manage her reaction to that; her mouth dropped open. “Jesus, Marissa! You go to a reunion or something?”

  “He was on a flight I was working.”

  “Come on, Marissa, you have got to be . . .” She stopped, looked at Marissa for another beat, then back at Jade, brought her hand up to the little girl’s cheek. “Can you believe this shit? He’s going to let his daughter get frostbite out here.”

  Marissa waited, but Caitlyn went on pressing her hand to Jade’s cheeks, her ears.

  “So?” Marissa finally said.

  “So, what?”

  “So what should I do?”

  Caitlyn’s eyebrows sharpened above her eyes; briefly, she looked like their mother—she looked, Marissa realized unsettlingly, like her, too. “I went to Massatoilet Community College, you don’t need any advice from me.” It was old, indelible resentment; or else the boundaries Caitlyn had drawn between herself and Mona were also boundaries between her and Marissa. Marissa didn’t blame her sister, either. Maybe Caitlyn was the pretty one and the smart one, too.

  Jade lifted her head and looked around uncomprehendingly. “You waking up, honey?” Caitlyn asked her. “Daddy will be out in a minute.”

  “You’re good with her,” Marissa said.

  “I’m faking it. You’re the one with the touch.” Caitlyn smiled a little. “You remember that time I was playing out on that frozen ditch, God, out in Quincy, and I broke through the ice and got my pants soaking wet in the middle of winter? I was hysterical, and Ma wasn’t home to let us in, so you banged on doors until that Mexican family opened up. You didn’t even say a word to them, just dragged me into the bathroom and starting blowing my pants with their hair dryer.”

  Marissa smiled now, too. “I couldn’t say a word. I didn’t speak Spanish.”

  “We did okay, though.” She repeated, “We did okay.” Marissa wanted to believe this was Caitlyn’s way of acknowledging that if Marissa had left her to go to Syracuse, Marissa had helped raise her for sixteen years, too.

  “You and Hanley’s ex getting along any better?” Marissa asked her.

  Caitlyn gave her a whatdoyouthink smirk. “Tanya still goes out to the bars six nights a week. She never wanted to be a M-O-T-H-E-R.”

  “I wan’ popcorn!” Jade said into Caitlyn’s shoulder.

  “Don’t we all, sweetheart,” Caitlyn sighed.

  Hanley pushed open the door of the building. “Well, who won?” Caitlyn asked him.

  “Niners,” he said.

  “Great.” Caitlyn took a step toward Marissa, hugged her with one arm. “Will you have to work on Christmas?”

  “Probably,” Marissa answered as they parted.

  “Me, too. Maybe we can figure something out the day after. Call me and we’ll talk about it.”

  “Caitlyn
—” Marissa said, then glanced at Jade, at Hanley, who’d slung his arm around her sister’s shoulders. “We did do okay in the end. Didn’t we?”

  Caitlyn considered this—reached out to squeeze her hand. “We survived her, right? Cavano girls can survive anything.”

  Hanley had unclipped his keys from his belt. “Let’s rock, babe, I’m freezing my dick off.”

  “Can’t have that,” Caitlyn said. “All right, let’s get this show on the road.” They walked side by side down the asphalt path. Jade lifted her head, let out another wail for popcorn, then dropped her face with despair back on Caitlyn’s shoulder. Marissa watched them until they were all piled into Hanley’s Bronco, and then she watched the vehicle drive down the hill, and up the street.

  She stood there for a long time, until the skin of her face was aching from the wind and her teeth had started chattering again. Then she walked back toward the parking lot.

  A door to one of the buildings opened, and salsa music drifted across the cold air. The dusk had that sudden and irretrievable quality she associated with coming out of a movie theater to find the day was almost over. Robbie loved going to the movies in the late afternoon. Suddenly, she remembered the missed phone call. She grabbed her phone from her purse: a missed call and a voicemail from an unknown number. She had a good guess who’d called. She was lifting her phone to her ear to listen to the message when the phone rang in her hand: Robbie. She bunched her hair around the back of her head. Cavano girls can survive anything, she reminded herself.

  She took a last, long breath, and pushed the button on the screen’s face to answer. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi, Izzy,” Robbie said, his tone very calm. And the Izzy took her by surprise.

  “Robbie, I’m—”

  “So this is how this will work. I’ll do the talking, you’ll do the listening, you’ll make a decision, and that will be that.”

  The brusqueness and formality were so unlike what she’d expected, so unlike him; his tone was very—lawyerly. But what else could she do but agree? “Okay, that’s fine.”

  “We need to make some changes, Marissa. Maybe we both have some growing up to do. I’m going to spend the time between now and next fall finishing my movie, and in September, I’m going to start law school at Harvard. My parents will help make that happen.”

  He’d always spoken of law school with such dread and contempt—everything Roz and Leo imagined for him and he didn’t want for himself. But again, all she could do was agree. “Harvard. Okay. In Cambridge?”

  “Cambridge isn’t Boston, Marissa,” he said, short-tempered.

  It was, but: “Right, I understand.”

  “And you’re going to quit being a flight attendant. That doesn’t work for us. If we’re going to make it, you have to do what’s necessary, too. I think at this point, Marissa”—he said her name like it was a slur he’d just decided to start using—“we can both agree you have been pretty fucking selfish. You can go back to waitressing if you want, but it’s been ridiculous for you to use money as an excuse to be away all the time. You don’t get to do that anymore. If there are money issues, my parents are willing to help on that front, and there is no reason in the world not to accept that.”

  She’d told him that she would do anything—anything. So why was she crying again as she stood there on the asphalt path, the phone against her ear? Weren’t they reconciling? What was she losing in this negotiation? “Robbie, we need to talk about—”

  “Nope,” he said. “No, we don’t. Not for a while, anyway. What we need right now is a fresh start. And whatever you have to do to . . .” He paused. “It’s on you to resolve your situation. Do you understand what I mean?”

  He meant: You need to have an abortion, and I don’t want to hear about it. And he’d never want to hear about it. He might extract a few more pounds of flesh over Brendan, but the abortion would lie buried and unspoken of at the bottom of their marriage. She lowered the phone, wiped her face, and said, “I understand what you mean.”

  “Okay, then. Like I said, we need a fresh start, Izzy. Maybe that means—well, I’m still figuring out what it means.” But whatever it meant, he would decide, and he wasn’t going to get boxed in now by giving the specifics. How much coaching, she wondered, had he been given by Roz, by Laila, fuck, maybe Leo, too, the whole family, before making this phone call? Then again, she’d gone scurrying off to her family, too.

  “Robbie . . . ,” she began, then didn’t know what to say to him.

  “We can put this behind us, Izzy,” he promised, his voice for the first time a little more familiar. “I am willing to put this behind us. You have a lot of apologizing to do, of course.” He was back to the lawyerly. “And maybe I have some to do, too,” he conceded, and she had an image of Roz standing at his shoulder, giving him a Thumbs-Up sign. “But we can get through this, because we love each other.”

  She stared straight up into the darkening clouds. Marriage was a matter of adaptation, of survival, like Leo said. You could make arrangements, compromises. You had to. And she still loved him, didn’t she? Like it or not, she did. So she had to decide what she could live with, and she had to decide quickly. “All right, Robbie,” she said. “I’ll quit, we’ll move to Cambridge, I’ll apologize, for forever if I have to. But I want to have kids.” It sickened her how badly she wanted this—how easy it would be for him to say no. “Please, if you promise me that, I’ll . . .”

  “I don’t have to promise you a thing, Marissa. And to be honest, that is the last thing on my mind right now. Maybe after law school, but even then—I mean, the fact you’d bring it up makes me wonder . . .” He paused, then resumed, more calmly, “I’ve been clear and I’ve been fair. I still want our marriage to work.” He even sounded like he meant it. “So, what do you want?”

  What did she want? She stared up at the sky. What did Marissa ever want?

  IV

  Let’s Start a Band

  [ 1 ]

  Thelonious Monk at the Hungry Panda

  Adam wandered around the bus station for a while. He followed the right turns of the station hall past the long ticket counter, manned by a single agent; past a bright little shop that sold lottery tickets, magazines, soda, chips in palm-sized bags; past the numbered glass doors out to the curb where the buses came and went; past the cream-tiled entryway to a pair of restrooms, Men to the right, Women to the left; past rows of bolted wire chairs, above which a television displayed a screenful of times and destinations; past an alcoved pizza place, neon sign switched off, the counter behind the glass barrier bare; and back to the pair of revolving doors, through which he’d entered. The lines of overhead fluorescents in their plastic husks cast a chalky light that did not reach the bases of the walls. The waiting area had a cloying smell of powdered sugar, the restrooms smelled like bleach.

  He really didn’t know what to do. He considered continuing with the charade of going to Ann Arbor—riding the bus to Hartford, to Cleveland, to Detroit, finally arriving at his destination ten or fifteen hours later. But then it would just be a different bus station. He hadn’t spoken to Johanna’s parents in years; all that tethered them now was a shared grief, and even that tether was frayed. They’d probably never forgiven him for not showing up for Johanna’s funeral, something for which he had a hard time forgiving himself. He’d meant to go—but he’d needed some drinks to steel himself, and by the time he felt ready, he’d missed his flight by four hours. No, the only reason to go out to Ann Arbor would be some ass-backward sense of loyalty to Marissa, but actually getting on the bus wouldn’t get her her money back, wouldn’t do anything to make good her gesture. Plus, she’d never know.

  The longer Adam made circuits around the station, the emptier it seemed. The presence of other people scattered here and there only seemed to build to a shared solitude. The scowling, pock-nosed agent at the ticket counter, face bent over a magazine; the Mohawked guy in army fatigues, big red headphones on his ears as he sat against the wall n
ear the bathrooms; the woman pacing before the gates, shouting on her cell phone in Russian, a bottle of cough syrup in her hand; the older man with sallow, malign features, eyes screwed up to the display of times and destinations: There was something remote in all these faces, like they appeared in the old sepia portraits you found jumbled in shoeboxes in antiques stores. And even if he could talk to anybody here, what did he have to say?

  There was, of course, only one sensible thing for him to do, the same sensible thing he ought to have done all day: find his way back to the airport in Connecticut, then get his ass back to San Francisco. But he’d succeeded so thoroughly in not doing this so far, it was hard to justify doing it now. Anyway, as he imagined climbing the stairs to his one-bedroom in the Outer Mission, he was struck with the same sense of pointlessness as when he pictured stepping off the bus in Ann Arbor—or, for that matter, continuing to walk around this bus station all night. He’d only go to San Francisco out of habit, or maybe obligation, an obligation to who or what he didn’t even know. He was like a marionette who’d gotten so tangled up in his own strings, he hadn’t noticed that he was the only one left doing the pulling. He worked at a Citibank; he went swimming five times a week. But, why?

  He passed the station entrance, where a stooped man with peculiarly swollen features and thick, hairy brows, dressed in an overcoat on top of layers of sweatshirts, was leaning against the partition of a pay phone. “Excuse me for a second, you got change?” he called when Adam passed, but Adam ignored him. When Adam passed again, the man scowled knowingly at him. On his next trip around, the man was gone. As if in repentance for this—repentance for something, anything—Adam left the envelope of tickets on top of the pay phone. When he came back again ten minutes later, the tickets were gone, too. Maybe someone had attempted to trade them in for cash, or maybe hopped on a bus to try his or her luck in Michigan, or points in between; for Marissa’s sake, at least, Adam hoped the tickets would do whoever’d come upon them some good.