Patricia Gaffney

by Mad Dash

  “Me, too. When do you think you could start?”

  She throws her head back and laughs that crowing laugh, orange hair flying, beads clacking. “Tomorrow?”

  She’s so funny. I have absolutely no reservations about this, even though it’s a spur-of-the-moment decision. “How about Monday? It’s a light day for work but heavy for phone calls, people calling for appointments because they made up their minds over the weekend. I’ll come in Monday and we’ll go over everything, how’s that?”

  “Monday, perfect. I can’t wait to tell Joel.” She hugs herself. “I am the luckiest person.” Suddenly she collapses, shoulders hunched, head bowed. “God, I’m being so unprofessional. Thank you, Dash, I accept your job offer.” She dissolves in giggles.

  This is going to be so much fun. It’s like I’ve hired myself.

  three

  Driving back to the cabin at night doesn’t scare me, although if something happened, no one would know. No one’s worrying about me. I guess I miss that. It was a comfort, a pillow between me and danger, that someone (Andrew) was worried about me. Then I didn’t have to worry about myself.

  I put music on to break the silence. I make a cup of tea. There’s a message on the machine from Andrew saying that he’s going to bed early, he’s got another headache, but we need to talk.

  The puppy smiles at me as she sits on her little haunches on the hooked rug by the woodstove. She has the biggest brown eyes. “Hi, sleepy,” I say in a cooing voice. “You were so good today. Weren’t you? Yes, you w——Hey!” She might be smiling, but she’s not sitting on her haunches. She’s peeing.

  We go outside.

  I still can’t get over how quiet it is. No cars, airplanes, sirens, radios, children, televisions. Another light, wet snow is starting to fall, just like last night. It’s unusual, everybody says, snow down here this early; it’s not even officially winter yet. I lift my face to the pearl-bright sky and let snowflakes tickle my eyelids. When I take a deep breath, it smells like innocence.

  When I was a little girl, my mother taught me how to make snow cream: Fill a pot with clean, fresh-fallen snow, add milk, a lot of sugar, some vanilla, stir it up. Give half to your mother and eat the rest right out of the pot. Makes your head throb and your teeth ache.

  Just thinking about it makes me crave some snow cream now. I’ve been thinking, part of the reason I could do such an unspeakable thing as walk out on Andrew, actually leave my home, is because I’m an orphan. My mother and I carried home between us, even though we didn’t live together for the last twenty-five years. She tied me to my past—she was the history of me. My mother was my home. Storming out of that other place, the brick town house in Adams Morgan that Andrew and I bought as soon as we could afford it, the house we loved and fought and built our lives and raised our daughter in—leaving that house seems almost like a technicality. Like checking out of an especially comfortable bed-and-breakfast.

  That’s not true, what am I saying? But still—where you grow up, for better or worse, that’s home. When I dream, Mama’s old clapboard house in Greensboro is always the setting for home, even when I people it with anachronisms like Andrew and Chloe or my dentist. All the domestic dramas in my sleeping dreams unfold in that kitchen with the faux redbrick tile, the dog’s big wicker bed forever blocking the broom closet. Or in the beige-carpeted living room with the baby grand piano nobody could play—Daddy won it in a contest. Or in the deep window alcove at the top of the stairs where I kept my hamster cage and read movie-star magazines. Home.

  The puppy can’t walk far; snow gets stuck between her toes and makes her limp. I pick her up. We’ll go to the end of the driveway, watch the cars go by. This is not much of a snow; the flakes are already growing fat and feathery. It’ll stop soon, but I wish it would last all night, snow and snow, keep snowing till the whole white world came to a halt. A nonviolent, temporary interruption of my life.

  I have another snow memory, a sweet one that’s warmed my heart for two decades. If I get amnesia, if I get Alzheimer’s, if any physical misfortune befalls me except blindness, I won’t forget this one. It’s engraved inside my wedding band: RUBBISH.

  Andrew and I had a traumatic courtship, defining courtship as the interval between meeting and sleeping together. He was twenty-eight, had just passed the D.C. bar exam, and was fighting with his father over what to do next: teach while he got his Ph.D. in history or join the family law firm. I had a degree in sociology (I asked Chloe if that’s still what you major in when you have no idea what you want to be; she said no, it’s communications now) and lots of dreams and ambitions, but except for dog walking and house-sitting, I was pretty much unemployed. At twenty-four, I was just beginning to worry about that.

  I wasn’t free when we met. I was going out with, in a raggedy, undeclared way, one of the musicians in a garage band I was singing with. Practicing with, rather; we hadn’t had any gigs yet, never been hired to play anywhere for actual money. (I remember Andrew’s face when I told him the name of the band was Goon Squad—he’d imagined I sang in a chamber chorale or something, I realized later.) My boyfriend called himself Hood, but his real name was Larry Heigle. He had peroxide hair and a silver spike in his bottom lip, and this was years before body piercing went mainstream.

  In the morning after the first time we made love, Andrew sat on the edge of my bed to pull his socks on and told me it was all a mistake.

  “It’s not you, it’s me,” he said. And “I hope we can still be friends.”

  I’d just woken up. I lay amid the tangled covers in dawning shock, still dazed from the most thrilling, most complicated lovemaking of my young life. “What? Say that again?” He did, and it felt as if I were being wrenched out of a good dream by a punch in the nose.

  “I don’t think it’s going to work out,” he said sorrowfully. He was dressed in an early incarnation of the uniform, the winter version, khakis and a charcoal-gray crewneck over the blue Oxford shirt. One of the reasons I’d fallen for him was because he wasn’t like anyone I knew, not in those days. Compared to my friends, he was the exotic one, an earnest oak in a crowd of gaudy palm trees.

  “What’s wrong? What’s going on?” When I grabbed for the sheet, I grabbed back all the inhibitions—not that I had so many, hardly any compared to Andrew—that I’d joyfully sloughed off during the long, amazing night. “Are you leaving? This is over?”

  He stood up to buckle his belt. He poked around and finally found his wire rims amid the clutter on my bedside table. Then he faced me in military at-ease posture, hands behind his back, legs apart. Defenseless—taking it on the chin. Behind his glasses his eyes were the clear, bewildered blue that still melts me and, I really think, makes me a better person. Because I don’t want to be anything but kind to him.

  “It’s just that we have nothing in common.” He puckered his serious brow. Just like now, only not as deeply, it furrowed in three places when he frowned. “You’re terrific, but I can’t see this going anywhere. So I think it’s better to break it off now instead of later.”

  “But we’ve always known we have nothing in common. We joked about it.” In a flirty, indirect way, during the period when we were still pretending I was being faithful to Hood. Everything was bittersweet and forbidden then—how could we not fall in love? Twelve hours earlier we’d quit playing that game, though, or so I thought, and now Andrew was telling me it was over? I threw a pillow at him—I’d have thrown a bomb if I’d had one. “What is wrong with you?”

  He put his hands out in the baffled, hunch-shouldered gesture of earnestness that always gets me. “Dash,” he said gently. “Look.” The fact that he didn’t want to hurt my feelings made me so angry, and so horribly alive to what I was losing, I burst into tears. “Oh, please,” he mumbled, but out of distress, not impatience. “Please don’t do that.”

  “Last night you liked everything about me,” I threw at him, wiping my face on the sheet. “About us. What a jerk you are. Go if you’re going, just go.”
I couldn’t look at him, the way his bony wrists hung there, helpless-looking, under the cuffs of his shirt, the unfamiliar body I’d just seen and made terribly familiar, a feast covered up with a cloth before vanishing. Oh, he was so wrong, but I didn’t have the words to explain it to him.

  “We’re different people, that’s all. No one’s to blame, we’re simply—”

  “Are you trying to sound like the woman?”

  “What?”

  “Go away!”

  He started to, his relief obvious.

  “But don’t think you didn’t break my heart!”

  That stopped him. “I’m so sorry. That’s the last thing I wanted.”

  “What do you want? I don’t understand you. Just tell me.”

  “I’ll send your records back.”

  “You’ll send them?” I’d lent him some CDs, hoping to turn him on to punk rock. The pain and politeness and the badly disguised anguish in his face while he listened to them had wrenched me even deeper into helpless love. “You’ll send them?”

  “I’ve thought about it all night,” he said—a patent lie; I’d heard him snoring. “Relationships are hard enough anyway and, em, I just believe two people need to have as much in common as possible before they…before they even start.”

  “My parents had nothing in common.” I couldn’t believe I was arguing with him—how low could I go? But I thought of my mother and father, how different they were and how ecstatically happy together. I wanted that, but until then I’d never realized it, I think because my mother and I were everything to each other after Daddy died. Andrew—not that he was like my father, but he was the only man I’d ever met whom I could imagine being a father. Or a husband. He seemed ready-made.

  And here he was turning me down. “You and I,” he said, “we’re like…” He squinted in thought; he’s always been horrible at analogies. “We’re like Nixon and James Brown. I just don’t think we’re right for each other.”

  “What about opposites attract?”

  “Attract, yes. Yes,” he agreed. “But then they repel.”

  Repel. The sting of that was scalding. “Didn’t you like fucking me?” I said on purpose. He hates it when I swear, so I don’t anymore, or hardly ever. But I did then, like a sailor, and I wanted to see him blanch.

  “There, that’s—exactly it,” he said. “Don’t you see?” I saw, but then he rubbed it in: He made a gesture that took in everything I suddenly realized he hated about my room, the messiness, the—oh well, the chaos. It’s hard to keep a one-room efficiency apartment neat and tidy. I’d noticed his veiled incredulity the night before, and I’d imagined he was comparing my place with the spare, barrackslike apartment on Twenty-fifth Street he called home. I knew a symbol of incompatibility when I saw one, but I resented having it thrown in my face by him.

  “Okay, leave!” I shouted. “Leave right this instant!”

  He slunk out.

  All day, while I moped, it snowed. Late in the afternoon, Hood and the rest of the guys picked me up in the band’s ancient van, a noisy, foul-smelling, smoke-spewing rust heap they kept registered in Maryland because the inspection laws were looser. We were going out to College Park to practice with another band, maybe hook up with them and start playing country rock, since our punk careers weren’t going anywhere.

  I’d spent the day watching snow swirl past the window, comforted a little by its erasing power, able occasionally to imagine not feeling wretched but cleansed and free, the way I used to feel. Like, yesterday. I was young, and I was also young for my age, but the hurt was real and I knew what I’d lost. Numb as a widow, I stayed all day at the window and watched the snow, trying to make sense of this massive personal catastrophe, this violation of my deepest instincts. I loved Andrew. I did, and it wasn’t infatuation or lust, although it certainly was those, too. I’d met my match, my man, and I knew it, and he’d said, “We don’t suit,” and walked away. The injustice.

  I took my seat in the back of the stinky van, wedged between an amplifier and Hood, who kept trying to cheer me up—last night had meant absolutely nothing to him, which somehow made it even more distressing to me. “Hey, whatever,” he said while he patted my knee, “it’s not like this big, like, love affair, right? Right? Guy’s an asshole, you’ll—” I looked away, out the window, and there was Andrew waving to me from the snowy sidewalk.

  Just then Eddie, the drummer, started the van and it roared into rattling, hacking life, belching plumes of foul blue smoke. Andrew started shouting and windmilling his arms. Hood turned to see what I was staring at. “What the fuck?” he said. Eddie said the same thing, “What the fuck?” but he was talking about the van. It wouldn’t move, even when he tromped on the accelerator.

  “Who’s that guy?” wondered Greg, the guitarist, before his attention joined Eddie’s on the mystery of the motionless van. I sat still, imagining hopeful things one second, hopeless ones—Andrew had decided to bring my CDs back rather than send them—the next. His mouth kept forming the same phrase, but I couldn’t make it out over the engine roar. He flapped his hands; he grabbed his neck, made a slashing gesture across his throat. He wanted to kill himself? The last snowplow had left a high, filthy bank of snow between us and the curb; Andrew couldn’t get closer to the van without going around to the other side, but rush-hour cars and the slick street made that a potentially suicidal idea.

  “Are we stuck on the ice?” Greg said.

  “What’s he doing?” Hood asked, looking out the window at Andrew.

  Hatless in a camel chesterfield coat, he seemed to be walking around in circles on the steep slope in front of my apartment building. Not walking, more like shuffling, pushing snow aside with his loafers, and every few seconds he’d take a giant step to the side and start shuffling again.

  “It’s the clutch,” Eddie said. “It finally burned out.”

  “He’s writing something,” Hood said. “What is that, R-U…”

  I craned closer, crushing Hood against the window. “R-U-B…”

  “Rubbish.” Hood looked at me blankly. “He wrote out ‘RUBBISH.’”

  Andrew’s trousers were white to the knees. His hair hung wet and blackish over his pale forehead. His glasses were fogged. His mouth moved again, and over the noise of the engine I finally figured out what he was saying. “That was all rubbish.”

  Well, it certainly was. As miserable as I’d been, I’d never believed for a second all that nonsense about people needing to have as much in common as they possibly could, relationships being tricky enough to begin with, blah-blah. Absolute rubbish.

  I climbed over Hood, practically fell out of the van. Andrew did fall, scrambling down the bank to the sidewalk, and we cannoned into each other in an ecstatic, terribly romantic embrace, kissing and laughing, Andrew murmuring in my ear the loveliest things about what an idiot he’d been. I was in heaven, pure bliss—but I’d have been even more jubilant if I’d known then how rare a gesture my dignified husband-to-be, whose personal idol is Thomas Jefferson, had just made, all for my sake. A once-in-a-lifetime gesture.

  That’s a dear memory, immortalized inside my wedding ring all these years, twenty years this coming May. It’s taken me almost that long, twenty years, but I suppose I finally got it straight that night we found the puppy on the doorstep. Turns out Andrew’s dithery, womanish misgivings about us weren’t idiotic at all. They were prophetic.

  I call the machine at my studio for messages, but there aren’t any. Good. I lock up, turn out the lights, a long process since most of the switches in this cabin are nowhere near the lights. It’s early, but I’m tired. Going to bed.

  The puppy’s snoring in her box, dead asleep. I reach down to stroke the soft line between her eyes, and she doesn’t even twitch.

  Every night since I’ve been here, I make a conscious decision not to miss Andrew. In bed, I mean. I crawl under the covers by myself and make a point of thinking, Yes, he’s not here, but he’s safe, and you’re safe except for the mice i
n the kitchen, and you can live without sex. You can fall asleep without him because, luckily, you were never the kind of people who have to cuddle and spoon and sprawl on each other in order to get a good night’s sleep.

  I wonder if I left him for the same reason I married him, only in reverse. When I was twenty-five I wanted the Mommy-Daddy-little-girl ideal I’d had when I was a child, the sort of thoughtless, complacent security you take for granted when you’re fortunate enough to have it. I had it only until I was nine, and that’s too bad, but afterward I got another model, another ideal—the mother-daughter one—and in its sadder, more intense way it was just as sweet. Us against the world, that’s how Mama and I saw ourselves, survivors, an inseparable unit always compensating, compensating, usually successfully, because we were two, not three.

  I’m so lucky. A terrible loss split my childhood in half, and yet on either side of it I was happy. The people who loved me made sure of that, or maybe I’m just predisposed to happiness, or maybe there’s a happiness “set point”—you read about that in magazines—and I always return to mine, eventually.

  But I don’t know. If Andrew’s driving me crazy and I don’t want his husbandly, fatherly security anymore, if I don’t need the safety and the thoughtless contentment of three—how do I imagine I can return to the bittersweet closeness of two when my mother and my child are both gone? I don’t understand myself. Maybe three and two are equally irrelevant (how sad; if I think about that for long, I’ll cry). Maybe all that’s left is to find inside myself a coherent and reasonably well-functioning one.

  I should call Andrew. But he’s probably asleep. He makes a head sandwich with his two pillows so he can have absolute quiet, and he sleeps that way all night. Never on his back anymore; he read somewhere that causes postnasal drip.