Patricia Gaffney

by Mad Dash

  “Everything okay?” Mom asks.

  “Her parents filed for divorce. She just wanted to tell me.”

  “Poor thing. Is she very upset?”

  Not as upset as I would be, Chloe thinks. “She’s okay. Basically. She knew it was coming.”

  “You know, Mo…,” Mom says, then hesitates.

  “What?” Chloe has known her mother’s friend Maureen practically her whole life. She and Mom are always trying to get Chloe and Maureen’s son Mark together. As if.

  “Mo said her divorce was like living through a war. Like having her skin burned off and her limbs…amputated.”

  They look at each other gloomily.

  Chloe cannot imagine her parents divorced. Apart from everything else, who would they be with if not each other? Worse, what if by some horrible miracle they each found someone exactly like them? It would be like inbreeding, like corrupting the gene pool.

  Mom goes back to her laptop—she can clean out files and do simple photo work from here—and Chloe tries to go back to her play. The message of a household woe smote on mine ear: I sank back, terror-stricken, into the arms of my handmaids, and my senses fled…

  “Mom?”

  “Mm.”

  “Are we ever going to talk about you and Dad?”

  Her fingers go still on the keys. “We can talk about anything you want. Always.” She doesn’t look up, though. But then, finally, she sighs, closes the laptop, and folds her hands on top. “Okay, first. I want to be sure you understand it has nothing to do with you, absolutely—”

  “I know it has nothing to do with me. I get that, Mom, and I don’t feel guilty or responsible or anything.”

  “Oh. Okay. Good.”

  “And you should understand that you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

  “Honey—honestly, there’s not that much to tell. We’re taking a little break. That happens even in the best marriages.”

  God! It’s like they rehearsed. “Do you still love each other?”

  “Of course. Yes.” Mom has black-rimmed gray eyes that can look positively ingenue-like when she’s telling a gigantic whopper, Chloe’s seen it a dozen times. She’s not lying now, though.

  Chloe feels less fear, more aggravation.

  “But you still can’t go home?”

  Her mother shakes her head.

  “But what if it becomes a habit? I mean, how can you be sure this is temporary? What if you give up, or you run out of energy? Shouldn’t you at least be trying to get back together?”

  “But we are, we talk all the time—we have a therapist.” She laughs and shakes her hands, communicating that having a therapist is the ultimate sacrifice.

  “Dad doesn’t get it,” Chloe says sullenly.

  “Why? What did he say?”

  “Nothing, no details, don’t worry.”

  Twice Mom starts to say something, both times she stops.

  Chloe plays with the dog’s ears.

  “It was nice of you to go with him to visit your grandfather yesterday,” Mom says. “I’m sure Edward appreciated it.”

  “We took Hobbes. I think he’s going a little mental.”

  “Hobbes or your grandfather?”

  Chloe can’t help laughing. This is how her mother dodges the issue, by changing the subject and making jokes. “Grampa. Although Hobbes isn’t doing that great, either. I don’t know which one is deafer.”

  They yawn at the same time.

  “I’m going to go down to Greensboro in June,” Mom says.

  “You are?” She stops herself from asking if that won’t conflict with the summer session in veterinary medicine her mother is thinking of taking. Insanity.

  “Yeah. You’ll be out of school by then—wanna come with me? Mama’s anniversary. One year. I haven’t visited the grave since…”

  She pretends “since” is the end of the sentence, but Chloe knows she still can’t say “died.” “Hey, Mom, did you know…”

  “Did I know what?”

  “Did you know when you talk about Gran, you start talking in a southern accent?”

  She snorts. “I do not.”

  “Yes, you do. Not all the time.”

  “I do not.”

  “Wanna come?” Chloe mimics. “Ah haven’t visited the gra-ave…”

  Her mother stares at her. “My God.”

  “It’s probably normal,” Chloe assures her quickly—Mom looks almost frightened. “You just miss her, so it comes out. I’m sure that’s—”

  “I gave it up in college,” she interrupts, wide-eyed. “My accent—I got rid of it on purpose. I stamped it out. I didn’t want to sound”—her voice breaks—“like a hick.” To Choe’s horror, she starts to cry. “Oh, Mama,” she sobs into her hands.

  Chloe stands up, but she doesn’t know what to do. She hovers. After a while her mother lifts her head and sniffs the tears back on a long, deep inhale. “Sorry.” She rubs her wrists over her eyes and gives a wet laugh. “Boy, that was stupid.”

  Chloe figures out what to do. She puts her arms around her.

  Immediately everything is better. “I love you, baby,” her mother says. “I love you intensely.”

  “Me, too, Mom.”

  Uh-oh, she’s crying again. “I almost took my mother’s last name,” she says between little hiccups. “Dash Tirva. Dear God in heaven. But don’t worry, everything’s going to work out.”

  “I know.”

  “Your father and I are going to be fine.”

  “I know.”

  “We’ll probably be better when this is all over.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” Chloe’s neck starts to ache from the bending-down position she’s in. “Mom?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  She squeezes her mother’s shoulders. They’re sort of bosom to bosom, cheek to damp cheek. “You’ve gone a little nuts, haven’t you?”

  “I have, baby,” Mom says weakly, not even hesitating. She nods her head against Chloe’s, tangling strands of their hair between their faces. “I’ve gone a little nuts.”

  dash

  twelve

  “Andrew’s coming, but he’ll be a little late—he had a meeting that went longer than he expected.”

  “Ah.”

  “So I just came on. We thought it would be better if one of us was on time.” At the rate you’re charging, I don’t say. It’s on my mind because it’s what Andrew, driving down Rhode Island Avenue, just said to me on his cell phone. After Chloe’s visit, we had to skip two sessions in a row—first Andrew had something better to do, then I did—so it’s a good thing Dr. Fogelman doesn’t make you pay for missed appointments.

  He smiles in a pleasant, professional way I don’t quite know how to take yet. I wonder if psychiatry really works, or if we could do it almost as well by ourselves. On the other hand, I could see someone like, say, me being a very good therapist. I’d be nurturing and softhearted, totally sympathetic to almost everyone, because almost everyone deserves it. I’d give intelligent, healing advice people would be wise to take. So I don’t know. Maybe it works.

  “Would you like to hear a dream, Dr. Fogelman?” I feel like entertaining him while we wait. He’s just sitting there, tapping his fingers together. He has on another cashmere sweater, yellow V-neck, with a button-down shirt and wrinkled slacks. He looks tired. Poor man. Long day, then Andrew and I show up at 7:00 p.m. and unload on him.

  “Please, call me Bill.”

  “Bill.” It sounds strange, but so does “Dr. Fogelman” out loud. This is the first time I’ve called him anything. “It’s a recurrent dream,” I say to entice him. “I’ve had it for years. It starts out, I’m on a highway or a road, and something’s at the end that I want very badly, but I can’t move toward it. It’s a curvy road, not straight, so I can’t see the end, either. Sometimes there’s a brass band playing on both sides of the road: tuba, saxophone, drums. A triangle. And a conductor in a short-sleeved shirt with skinny white arms. I say,
‘You can’t keep me here,’ or something like that, but he just keeps conducting. That’s it.

  “That’s the dream,” I say again when Fogelman just looks at me, his face blank but still pleasant. Maybe he’s perfected a way to fall asleep with his eyes open. Or he’s waiting for me to interpret the dream. In spite of the proverbs and the House of Love and all, I feel rather fond of Dr. Fogelman. I think of him as a required prelude to good times and excellent sex with Andrew. He’s like homework you have to finish before you can go out and play.

  He speaks. “Were you an only child?”

  I’m nodding when there’s a knock at the door. “Yes,” he calls, and Andrew comes in, loose and jaunty in his school uniform, vigorous-looking, his hair a little mussed. The air is soft and sweet in Washington tonight, and it’s cheering everyone up. “Sorry I’m late.” We smile our public smiles, but underneath we’re sharing a secret: tonight. We air-kiss self-consciously, brushing cheeks. His whiskery cheek smells fresh as spring.

  Fogelman wants to get right to it: no pleasantries, straight to our homework.

  “F-E-A-R,” he begins. “False Evidence Appearing Real. That’s what fear is, and it’s what drives most of our misunderstandings with each other. And how do we defeat it? With forgiveness.” He smiles, Buddha-like. He’s really a nice man, but I thought shrinks mostly sat back and listened. This one gives sermons.

  He quotes a Chinese maxim, he quotes Winston Churchill. He wants us to tell three things that we don’t “understand” about each other—three things we hate, in other words—and then pretend we’re the other and explain why we do what we do. “Remember, this is not an exercise in faultfinding,” he says, leaning forward and making earnest gestures, “but in empathetic thinking, putting yourself in the other’s place. Think of the African saying ‘He who forgives ends the quarrel.’ Let’s get some of our disappointments and disagreements out in the open, and then we can start to shine the light of understanding on them. Dissolve the phantom of fear with forgiveness.”

  Okay. I’m in favor of forgiveness and understanding. But what a downer, like sleet on the cherry blossoms. Andrew and I look at each other—he’s pulled the stick on his chair and is actually reclining along with Dr. Fogelman—with wry, helpless expressions. Fogelman asks who’ll go first.

  “I will,” I say to be a good sport, but I’ve got no enthusiasm for this. I didn’t prepare, either; I forgot the assignment as soon as he gave it to us.

  And yet my first gripe slides out like cranberry sauce from a can. “Andrew’s a hypochondriac.”

  I haven’t said the actual word to him in a long time, not since his symptoms were just beginning. When they were still sort of cute. Before I knew I’d have to put up with them the rest of my life.

  “I am not.” He won’t return my smile. I can’t believe he’s offended!

  “Yes, you are. You are, Andrew. How could you not know that?”

  “I’m careful about my health, as any reasonable fifty-year-old man with heart failure in the family would be.”

  “Your father’s eighty—it doesn’t count.”

  “Of course it counts. Why do you always speak of things you know nothing about with such authority?” He doesn’t smile when he says that, either!

  “Is that one of the things about Dash that bothers you, Andrew? Hold off on that for a moment if you would, I’d like to go in a different order.”

  “No, I just thought of it. It’s not on my list.”

  I stare at him. “You made a list? Of course you made a list. Of course he made a list. That’s Roman numeral I, Sub A on my list—his incessant list making.”

  “You can’t have subnumbers. Three things, that’s it. Believe it or not, the rules apply to you, too.”

  “Excuse me,” Fogelman says, making a time-out sign with his hands. “Dash, I’m hearing from you that Andrew has issues about his health—and now it’s your turn to role-play as Andrew, who’s expressed some reservations about your opinion.”

  “Okay, all right.” I can see how this could get very childish very quickly. “All right, I’m Andrew. This is what I have to say about my hypochondria.” Andrew rears up. “What my wife thinks of as my hypochondria, excuse me. It started when we had Chloe. Before that I was normal—ha-ha, relatively speaking—but Dash had a hard time with the birth, in fact she almost died. So I guess that did something to me. I don’t know how it works, why I’m now obsessed with my health instead of theirs, but that’s the way it came out.”

  Andrew gazes at the ceiling, his martyred-saint look. “Do I need to point out that that’s not what I would say?”

  “Chloe fell out of a willow tree at my mother’s house—sorry, my motherin-law’s house—when she was four and a half, and after that it got worse. He was a wreck, no help at all, my rock, and basically he went to pieces.”

  “‘I,’” Fogelman corrects. “Remember, you’re Andrew.”

  “I, Andrew, me. Anyway—no, see, the problem is, Bill, I have no idea why Andrew is the way he is, so how can I explain it to you?”

  Andrew’s dramatic sigh is so heavy, I can see it filling the room with gray air.

  “We’re getting a little off track. It’s important to stay in character when we role-play, really work on putting ourselves in the other’s place. It’s difficult but not impossible with a little practice and good faith. Before we go on, though, I’d like to sidetrack for a sec. Dash, you said something interesting—you said Andrew was your ‘rock.’ Could you elaborate on that?”

  “Oh, you know, that he’s steady and sensible, that I depend on him. My rock.” I sit up. “But in the hospital, I was in a difficult labor with my first and only child, and he’s yelling at the doctor, ‘I knew it, I knew it! They’re both going to die!’ Such a comfort. Chloe got a concussion when she fell, and he left me. In the emergency room. I found him walking around in the parking lot smoking a cigarette—he’d bummed it from somebody, he doesn’t even smoke! So that’s the first thing on my list. It didn’t used to bother me, but now it does. It’s not terrible, and I know it’s his problem, not mine, worse for him than me and all that. I guess I’m just tired of it. It feels like I’m living with a crazy man.”

  Something’s happened to me in the last few minutes. I’ve lost my desire to soften what I say so it doesn’t sound critical. I want to spit these things out like cherry pits, even if they hurt Andrew’s feelings. It’s Fogelman who’s making it possible, and not in a good way, not like a kindly referee who’ll keep us safe—more like a mob egging me on, urging me to let go of my discretion and inhibitions and my usually decent instincts. It’s thrilling and perverse and irresistible.

  “So, now what? Does he get a turn or should I keep going?”

  “I think we’ll give Andrew a turn,” Bill says, as if he’s breaking with his customary practice. Uh-oh. He wants to minimize the ganging-up factor in this game, but suddenly I don’t want to hear Andrew’s number one complaint against me. Why didn’t Bill ask us to pick three things we appreciate about each other? Telling three things we’re grateful for would bring us together, which you’d think would be the point of couples counseling. No wonder Maureen and Phil split up.

  At least Andrew doesn’t take out his notebook. Or is it worse that he has his list memorized? “My three are in no particular order,” he begins, and immediately I resent it that he has a warm, clear, teacher’s voice, carrying but not loud. It makes the words sound important even when they’re not, like a British accent, obviously an unfair advantage to him and a disadvantage to me in the circumstances. “Number one is unpredictability. And I should say, in the same way my so-called hypochondria used to not bother Dash, her…I suppose inconsistency is another word, used to not bother me. But now it does.”

  “All right, very good. And if you were Dash, what would you have to say to that? You’re unpredictable. What might be her response?”

  “‘Yes, but it’s part of my charm. What fun is consistency, the hobgoblin of little minds?’”<
br />
  “I would never say that.”

  “Quite. Because you don’t know Emerson. May I continue? As I said, this only became a problem within the last year or so. Before that—”

  “A problem for who?”

  “For whom. For me, but I should think also for you.”

  “Let’s remember to—”

  We wave Bill off.

  “So it was part of my charm, back when you were the kind of man who could appreciate unpredictability or whatever you call it. Spontaneity—that’s what you used to call it. And please don’t correct my grammar in public.”

  “I don’t mind unpredictability, actually. It’s unreasonableness and irrationality I find hard to ‘appreciate.’”

  “Oh, now we’re getting to it.”

  “Much less live with. My second item is ‘constant upheaval,’ and I see it’s related—in fact, it’s basically the same thing.”

  “Wait, you can’t do your second thing first, it’s my turn—finickiness. And if I were you, I’d say, ‘It’s not finickiness, it’s neatness. I’m an orderly man, I have to have a place for everything and everything in its place. My wife’s a slob. I alphabetize my record collection. You could eat off the floor now that she’s left me. I wear the exact same outfit every day because—well, the hell if I know. No, I know—because it simplifies my life and I have more time to think deep thoughts. I don’t bother communicating them to her, though, because they’re mostly over her head. I have a Ph.D. and she barely got out of college. She probably had dyslexia or attention deficit disorder growing up, but it was a backward little southern town so nobody noticed.’”

  Silence.

  “Interesting. Some hostility, clearly, I think we can—”

  “Emotionalism,” Andrew cuts in. “Romanticism, sentimentality, illogic, exaggeration.”