Before He Finds Her

by Michael Kardos

  “Check,” he said, watching his family, breathing them in, storing them up—the high five that Meg gave Magruder, the smile that Allie flashed, a smile that Ramsey hadn’t seen in ages, a smile that was a promise—a smile that said: I will.

  “Check one,” Ramsey said. “Check two.”

  18

  From her spot on the blanket with her daughter, Allison Miller watched the stage and did her best not to look terrified and torn apart—like a woman whose life wasn’t one big sham.

  After the band’s stupid check ones and check twos, Ramsey thanked everyone for coming—from the bottom of my heart, he actually said, as if this random group of parents, motivated by the simple, desperate desire to occupy their kids on a Sunday afternoon, were his lifelong chums. Then he said an extra thanks to Allie.

  “This performance is dedicated to the woman who’s always been there for me. My beautiful, faithful wife, Allie. I love you, baby.”

  Allie matched his smile with her own and replied from her blanket, “I love you, too.”

  It wasn’t so hard—like saying a password when you no longer remembered what it unlocked. So she had little trouble attesting to loving her husband in front of these people. With one notable exception, none of them could be called a friend. Since meeting Ramsey, she had systematically lost touch with everyone: parents, friends, all those people whom the self-help books would call a “support system.” No one was at fault. When you’re a spouse, you’re with your spouse. Add a full-time career, and your energies go there, too. Then you become a mother—a job that devours absolutely everything—and it’s little wonder that everyone outside your world’s tight nucleus eventually floats away.

  Then your husband throws himself an end-of-the-world party.

  When she considered it (which she had, constantly, these past three months), she was actually glad that Ramsey had confided in her about his coming apocalypse. There was no dismissing an admission like that, no more pretending everything was okay, that the Millers were just another reasonably happy middle-class family in the neighborhood. No more telling herself that if she only tried a little harder, put on a happier face, cooked healthier meals, straightened the house better, stopped resenting Ramsey for being away when he was merely doing his job, then everything would be hunky-dory. Before his confession, Allie would rationalize her unhappiness in myriad ways. Each day, she’d cycle through them, and what they all had in common was that Allie had herself convinced that she could somehow make it better. If only she were a little more self-reliant, a little more fun, more grateful… if only she were a little more, then everything would fall into place.

  For a long time, years, she’d told herself that if she tried hard enough, she could love her husband the way she once had. God, I loved him, she would say to herself aloud. To a twenty-one-year-old college student pissed off with her mother and father, Ramsey was Tom Cruise and Matt Dillon and Bruce Springsteen all rolled into one. He was hot and sharp and smarter than he let on, and he fucking got her. He had a scar on his body and a scar inside, too, one that he revealed to her and her alone. His bare apartment with the secondhand furniture, that shiny toaster he was so proud of. She would push down the TOAST button and then she’d go down on Ramsey, try to get him to come before the toast popped up. Her idea. They were creative in that apartment, the two of them. His ideas usually came at night. He’d kiss her neck till it bruised, graze her thigh with his razor stubble and goose bumps would appear. He’d light candles. Nothing was sexier than a tough guy lighting candles, because it meant the toughness didn’t reach all the way to the core.

  If only we could’ve stayed that age forever, she would tell herself alone at night, wistful, looking at her face in the mirror. If only she could stay twenty-one, he twenty-eight—the age when they got together, each of them yearning for someone to see their own potential, astonished that they’d found each other. They’d be happy and in love forever, the two of them against the world, I will I will I will, till death do they part.

  Since June, she’d been rethinking all of this. And by now it seemed little more than romantic drivel, especially since she’d never been honest with Ramsey. For one thing, her parents had offered to pay for her flight to Florida. And when she got there, if she’d patently refused to repent in front of their new congregation, what, really, would they have done? Nothing. Not when push came to shove. Her father and mother were devout and infuriating but not evil the way she’d portrayed them to Ramsey. But now too many years had gone by, and her talk of being estranged from them had come to pass, all so that a hot guy would find her intriguing.

  In fact, when she was being the most honest with herself—now, for instance, watching Ramsey and his friends jump around with their instruments on their homemade stage like teenagers trying to impress the neighborhood girls—she wondered if there had ever been that strong a connection between the two of them. Maybe their respective desperations, with their unrelated causes, had simply come into alignment long enough for desperation itself to become its own form of romantic momentum, pushing them forward like a wave through courtship and marriage and pregnancy before receding again.

  Which was why Ramsey’s confession back in June was as useful as it was alarming. Had he not revealed himself to be fucking delusional, their marriage might have lumbered on forever—Allie looking into the mirror each night and convincing herself that there was no problem, not really, and if there was, then it was her fault. Before his confession, leaving Ramsey had never seriously crossed her mind. As long as no one hit anyone or screamed all the time, there were always more reasons to stay together than to split: because of the child, because you don’t want your parents to think they were right all along, because of inertia, because of denial.

  Now, at least, denial was out of the picture.

  As the band played its first song, a too-fast rendition of “Honky-tonk Woman,” she clapped Meg’s hands with her own, presenting to her neighbors the image of an adoring wife sitting on a blanket under the late-day sun, enjoying her husband’s music. She wasn’t in denial. She was pretending. But she saw every-thing now for what it was: The music, shit. This day, shit. Her marriage, shit.

  “David,” she said. He couldn’t hear her over the music. “David!” He turned to face her. He was standing alone, not far from the blanket, wearing his pressed blue jeans and NY Giants T-shirt that was too large on him, holding a beer, looking as uncomfortable as a freshman at a homecoming dance. When he crouched down to hear her, she said, “You didn’t have to do this.”

  “Are you kidding? It’s a party,” he said. “Anyway, I love these guys.” When she raised an eyebrow at him, he grinned. “I own all their albums.”

  She smiled. “Well, thank you.”

  He stood up again, making some distance between them. Awkwardly, he tapped his foot and watched the stage. A good man.

  She hadn’t ever mentioned David around Ramsey, because you do things like that for your spouse. You make their life a little easier. Ramsey was jealous at heart—she’d always known that—and he wouldn’t understand why Allie might have a friendship with a man who wasn’t her husband. Especially with a man who was on TV. A man who was going places. Anyway, she hadn’t set out to deceive Ramsey. For a long time, she and David weren’t friends, only neighbors. But Allie was fairly compulsive about walking Meg around the block after dinner, and David was one of those slow-and-steady joggers, and when they passed on the street, they would smile and sometimes say hello—

  Can’t you do something about all this wind?

  I don’t make the weather. I only predict it.

  —and gradually they began to chat, and over time the chats became longer and more substantive... and by the time they were what might possibly be called friends, it was too late to say anything to Ramsey. He would think she’d been hiding something all along.

  But over the last half year or so, she and David had become closer. Their relationship was like none she’d ever had before—it was wond
erful, frankly—even if from time to time she found herself wondering, What if?

  The first time they made plans to meet up for breakfast at a diner, rather than waiting for their walking/running schedules to coincide, Allie felt her face become hot as she said, “I want to be clear with you that I have no romantic intentions.”

  He laughed at her formality, but when he spoke his voice became serious. “First of all, you know I’m also married. Second of all, TV people are horrible. I work in an terrible industry, and I don’t make friends at work. I miss having friends. I think we can be friends. I think we already are.”

  “I think we are, too,” Allie said.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I don’t think you’re all that good-looking.”

  He could make this joke because she was obviously beautiful and he was obviously not. Still, he cringed until her own expression let him know that his joke had been received okay.

  She hadn’t realized how much she’d been needing a friend until she had one. Where before there was nobody, now there was somebody with whom, for instance, she could talk about her job. Such a simple thing. Yet Ramsey seemed to think that her job selling pharmaceuticals consisted of dolling herself up and shaking her ass like a cocktail waitress. Whenever she’d get into the details, he’d smile as if he knew the real story. But David understood how it was to work in a competitive environment, having to look your best and act professional at all times. He was actually interested in the complexities of her career: how she had to be a veritable chameleon in dealing with the various physicians and nurses and office administrators, an expert in persuasion one minute, an expert in fibromyalgia the next.

  She found herself, over time, letting her guard down in a way she never could with Ramsey—about how hard and frustrating the daily grind was when working full time and raising a child more-or-less singlehandedly. Or how sometimes the thought of spending her life married to a trucker, living in this quiet neighborhood, nothing ever changing, was enough to make her want to run naked through the street.

  And he would tell her that, yes, parenting must be frustrating at times, but look at Meg: a happy kid, thriving, well adjusted. Or when David had no words of wisdom, then that was okay, too. Sometimes the unburdening was enough. And David unburdened himself, too, talking about being picked on as a kid, and how his too-thin body still embarrassed him. His balding head, his weak chin. How his wife, a Wharton MBA and news producer in New York, still intimidated the hell out of him after two years of marriage.

  Not that she and David saw each other all the time—-sometimes three times in a week, other times not at all for two or three weeks at a stretch. But now, even when the TV news came on, a simple weather report was like a friend speaking directly to her. Any lingering rain will be moving out to sea overnight. And tomorrow? Well, I think you’re in for a treat.

  She was so lost in thought, she didn’t notice that the band had stopped playing and that her husband was speaking into the microphone again. The word “weatherman” snapped her back to the yard.

  “...our resident celebrity over there”—he was pointing at David—“said it would rain today. Rain, rain, rain, he said. But look!” He looked up at the sky. “Barely a cloud. Soft air. A perfect day for a block party.” He forced an easy laugh. “A weatherman must be the only job in the world where you get paid for being wrong half the time. Ain’t that right, Magruder?” Another laugh, but the sound was tinged with meanness. Ramsey’s face was red and pinched. “But I’m honored you came. Welcome, welcome—glad you found the time to slum it a little.” Ramsey toasted him with his beer. How many was that?

  That’s when Allie realized: drunk.

  In all their years together, she’d never seen him with more than one drink in him.

  She looked up at David, who was looking back at her. He shrugged. “I think I’ll go now,” he said.

  “This is... wait here, Meg.” She deposited her daughter on the blanket beside her and stood up. “This is absurd.” People were watching her, watching the two of them. “David, you don’t have to—”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “Really. I’m just going to go.” He set the half-empty cup of beer on the grass, gave the briefest of waves/smiles to the small crowd gathered in the yard, walked to the side fence, and let himself out.

  On stage, the band watched him leave. From across the yard, Allie saw the change come over Ramsey’s face, as if he’d put on a mask, or maybe taken one off. She watched him, and he glared back at her with an expression she’d never seen on him before. There was no word for it other than hate, and it took her breath away.

  As he held her gaze for two or three interminable seconds, she realized that at some level, she’d convinced herself that her husband was a faker—that all his end-of-the-world talk was some weird play for attention, a midlife crisis, maybe, or a more manly way to be depressed than curling up in bed. Until this moment, she wasn’t aware of the extent to which she’d convinced herself these past three months that Ramsey’s behavior was ultimately rooted in immaturity, rather than in something far scarier.

  He finally broke their gaze and, his face relaxing again to a smile, he turned around to the band. “Okay, fellas,” he said, “let’s hit it.” Paul clicked his sticks four times, and they launched into the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated.”

  Sedation sounded like a damn good idea right now, and she poured herself a beer. Then she and Meg got food and returned to the blanket. She’d felt bad earlier about not circulating more, playing the hostess or at least the host’s wife. But fuck the neighbors, she was thinking now. She owed them nothing. She and Meg would have their own picnic right here, the blanket their own island, their entire world. Allie knew now. Even when she thought she was no longer in denial, she still had been. But not any longer. This was real. This party: real. Her husband, on stage, losing it? Real. She didn’t know what she was going to do about it, but she could no longer do nothing.

  Meg wouldn’t try the hamburger but loved the potato salad and especially the pickle, which made her pucker.

  “That’s a funny face,” Allie said.

  “Then laugh, Mommy.”

  It wasn’t easy convincing Meg to leave the party and come inside to get ready for bed, and Allie was in no shape emotionally to deal with a full-on tantrum or to summon the energy that went into preventing one. For a while, there’d been a strategy. Allie had found it in some parenting book several months back, when the tantrums had become unbearable—frightening, really—and Allie and Ramsey were desperate for guidance. The idea was to teach your kid the words for their emotions, get them to say it at the moment they were feeling angry, sad, whatever. A kid who could name her emotions, according to the book, was halfway there.

  Meg herself had turned it into a game. One morning at breakfast, she smiled at Allie, who said, “Are you happy?” And Meg said, “Little happy.” Then she widened the grin and said, “Big happy!”

  They’d practiced that morning over their frozen waffles, mother and father and daughter: They made sad faces—“little sad”—and really, really sad faces—“big sad.” Ramsey asked Meg what “little mad” looked like, and Meg scrunched her face into a scowl. Then, unprompted, she whacked the tabletop with her open palm and shouted, delighted, “Big mad!”

  They played this game at random times in the day. And sure enough, before long Meg’s tantrums started becoming less frequent and less violent. When she’d start to show signs of a meltdown, Allie or Ramsey would ask, “Are you mad right now?” and even if Meg admitted to being “big mad,” the naming itself, the awareness, nearly always had the effect of letting some steam out of the pressure cooker.

  Ramsey seemed to take special pride in this particular act of parenting. But as with everything else, the solution was only temporary, and Meg’s temper these days was as unpredictable as ever. Thankfully, though, after several high fives with strangers, a trip to the stage between songs, where she insisted on precisely three hugs with Daddy, and a fruitless
search for the moon, Meg finally looked up at her mother and asked the magic question—“Where are the stories?”—which required the proper answer—“On your bookshelf”—which meant that Meg would now deign to be led up the porch steps toward the back door and into the house.

  Allie welcomed the routine activities of Meg’s approaching bedtime. It was already past 7:30, so she skipped the bath, but she gave her daughter’s face a good scrubbing with a washcloth, helped her brush her teeth, and changed her diaper. A flash of guilt jabbed Allie. She should have started the toilet training by now. There was a girl Meg’s age down the street who... But this was a project that Allie needed to gear up for, and... Okay, she promised herself. Next week.

  Pajamas on, stuffed animals properly arranged in the crib (Shouldn’t Meg be sleeping in a real bed by now? Another guilt- jab), stand-up fan turned on for white noise. The fan somewhat drowned out the music in the backyard. With any luck, all the excitement would tire Meg out. A last sip of water (from an actual cup—at least Meg no longer relied on sippy cups), and then mother and daughter sat side by side on the wide rocker and read two books. Then one more.

  Sure enough, with the last book, Meg was leaning her head against Allie, her eyes heavy. When the book was done, Allie stood up with Meg in her arms and, as always, quietly narrated the day. We played with puzzles, we watched the beginning of The Little Mermaid, we ate special cheese with apples for lunch, we played at the park, we rode around the block in our stroller, we played in the yard, we had a picnic and listened to Daddy’s band play music. We had a good day, my beautiful girl. And now it’s time for bed.

  Allie shut off the bedroom light. Then one last kiss, and—sweet dreams, baby—she gently lowered Meg into the crib. Meg immediately rolled onto her side, a good sign, and didn’t make a peep as Allie eased the door shut, keeping the knob turned so that when it latched, there would be no click.