by Lauren Fox
He said it first, in the middle of a fight.
“You refuse to understand me!” I yelled, or “You have never understood me!” or perhaps “You only understand my feelings when I’m feeling what you’re feeling!” There was a certain refrain to these arguments.
“You take all your crap out on me,” he murmured back, low and dark and growly. Chris never yelled. The angrier he got, the more quietly he spoke, until sometimes, when we were fighting, I would have to ask him to speak up. Wait, sorry, what was that about shellfish? “You take it out on me,” he continued, practically whispering, “and I’m just supposed to stand here and be grateful to be married to someone with so much passion. Lucky me.”
“My best friend is dead!” I wailed. “It’s like you forget that!”
And then he looked at me, and icicles formed in the air between us, and he said, “I don’t want to do this anymore, Iz.”
“Fine,” I said with a shrug. I didn’t want to fight anymore, either.
He shook his head and slumped into a living room chair and if I didn’t know better I might have thought he was about to reach for the remote at the end of a long day. “I really don’t want to do this anymore.”
“Okay,” I said. “I heard you.” And then I understood what he was saying.
There is a peculiar kind of terror you feel when the person you are closest to—for better or worse—begins to formulate the idea of a life without you. I could practically see the vision he was creating, right there in front of me, of a life alone in a cozy apartment, of Hannah on the weekends, of girlfriends and baseball games and books and friends. A medium-sized dog. A game of darts at a bar on a Friday night. It actually looked pretty appealing. I felt something pulsing and hard rise up in my throat, and I swallowed.
“No,” I said, squeaky and pitiful. “You don’t mean that.” I was a tiny version of myself, the tiniest one, a matryoshka me.
Anything can be said in a marriage; anything can be unsaid. We weren’t going to separate. I knew that for certain, and I was wrong.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Fear squeezed my vocal cords into a kinked hose. I almost said, Even though I don’t know what I’m sorry for, but I managed to stop myself.
Chris closed his eyes. “Forget it,” he said. “It’s okay. Forget it.” I stood there for a while, hovering over him, until it became clear to me that he wasn’t going to say anything else, and then I walked into the kitchen to start dinner. I may have been mistaken, but after a while, I thought I heard the soft sound of my husband snoring.
···
“Listen,” Mark said. “I, uh, asked the bartender at that dive on a date…a couple months ago.” He looked at me with a twitchy, embarrassed smile. “She’s twenty-five. I think her name might be Brandy.”
Relief flowed through me like water. “That’s a good name for a bartender.”
“It’s not Brandy,” he said. “It’s Simone.”
“That’s good, too.”
“She said no.” He shrugged, in a resigned, old-mannish way. “She said she doesn’t date clients. Isn’t that funny? I know she meant customers, but she said clients, like she works at a law firm or something.”
“The bar,” I said.
“Ha.” Mark started drumming his fingers again, then caught himself, stopped abruptly. “She has that kind of face that looks like it was carved from a bar of soap. Like you couldn’t imagine her ever having a bad day. Whatever. I was glad she said no. I would have said no to me! Crazy insomniac alcoholic old guy blubbering about his dead wife.”
“Sexy,” I said. The words dead wife lingered. The image came to me of the beach a few miles from my parents’ old house, where every July, a mass of alewives washed up on Lake Michigan’s shore. There were thousands of them, a herring massacre, their tiny, rotting bodies shiny and silver and sparkling in the sun.
“Do you want to know how I asked her out?” He glanced down at the table and touched one of the grooves in the dark wood with his fingertip. He had taken off his wedding ring a few weeks ago; if you looked closely, you could see its ghost, the thin pale line of skin where it had lived. “I said, ‘Um, you’d never want to get dinner with me sometime.’ ”
I laughed. “That’s an unusual pickup line,” I said. “Grammatically unusual.”
“She just looked at me like I was the saddest thing she’d ever seen. Like I was an injured bird. Like I was a dead puppy. A sad, drunk, dead puppy.”
“She probably thought you were an emigrant from the Czech Republic.”
Mark nodded. “And/or Slovakia.”
The owner of the Pig’s Knees, a guy from Racine who pretended to be British, came over with a basket of fries for us. “Right you are,” he said. “Your chips, mates.” He set it down. “Cheers.”
“It’s okay if it’s too soon,” I said.
“It’s never too soon for chips, mate,” Mark said. He saluted me with a french fry.
“For dating.”
One of the women at the nearby table looked over at Mark and smiled. I noticed that she was wearing a thick coat of lip gloss, but then I realized it was probably just the grease. I could see that, despite his failure with Simone, Mark might be very attractive to women now. In public, at least, he wore his sadness like a rumpled shirt. He made you want to come over and fix the collar.
“Iz.” Mark grabbed my hand from across the table. “There’s a little more.” He let go of my hand abruptly, left it stranded in the middle of the table, five pale, shipwrecked fingers.
I looked at his face, and I had the sudden memory of something that happened when we were kids, one day after school. It was dusk, one of those Wisconsin midwinter late afternoons when the sky and the snow turn a ghostly lavender for a half hour, and then it’s completely dark by 5:00 p.m. Mark was standing in the front hallway of our house. His mother had just pulled up to collect me and take us to Hebrew school. Mark hadn’t rung the doorbell, because I’d seen them driving slowly up the street in their unmistakable old brown station wagon and I’d opened the door while I went to get my coat. They never honked. Mark’s mother didn’t believe in disturbing the neighbors. (My mother didn’t care.)
Mark walked in just as Helene was finishing a sentence. I’d been telling my mother about a new kid who’d moved into the neighborhood, a blond girl named Ellie Krakowski. Ellie and I had been assigned to do a science project together, and I was describing it to Helene. It had something to do with magnets, or maybe gravity; I don’t recall, but I remember that I was pretty excited about it. Ellie, I told her, seemed nice. We were in the seventh grade, so I was twelve. I definitely remember that.
“I’m glad you have a new friend, honey,” Helene said from the kitchen as I made my way toward the front closet. She was emptying the dishwasher. Plates and silverware clattered and clanked. “Krakowski,” she said. “Krakowski. Just make sure her family didn’t put our family into the ovens.”
She just lobbed it out there, as casually as some parents, I imagined, admonished their children to look both ways before they crossed the street or to bundle up in the cold. With Helene, specific family stories were off-limits, but grim admonitions about gas chambers were perfectly fine. Every time she said something like this, the blood rushed to my face. What kind of family ended up in ovens? Whose mother talked about it like this, like we’d better invest in good running shoes that are easy to tie, because our neighbors were probably coming for us with pitchforks any minute?
I had, until that moment in our foyer, been able to keep this particular habit of Helene’s a secret.
Ugh, my parents are so embarrassing, kids were starting to say to one another at school. My dad wears black socks with shorts! The other day at the mall my mom called me “sweetie” in front of all my friends! Ugh, they’re so embarrassing!
But really. Make sure her family didn’t put our family into the ovens? It was so much more than embarrassing. It was bright and primal, practically alive, something veined and hissing in the attic: a ge
netic mutation of familial shame and tribal terror. Although I wouldn’t have said that then.
I stared at Mark, paralyzed. He stared back. His mouth dropped open a little bit. Into the ovens, I thought. “Um, my mom’s baking bread?” I muttered, hoping he would think he’d just misheard, and then I looked down, waiting for the humiliation explosion in the form of Mark’s inevitable guffaw.
He pulled off one of his heavy gloves with his teeth, then eased the other one off with his free hand. His puffy nylon jacket squeaked as he moved. “Hey, Iz,” he said. “I’ve been reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s so cool. It’s all I can think about, even when I’m not actually reading. My mom says she called me for breakfast three times this morning and I didn’t hear her, I’ve been so distracted. Come on, let’s go.”
···
The bartender was putting out clean pint glasses. The soccer fan was shouting obscenities. The girls at the table a few feet from us were finishing their oily lunch. Mark and I had more than just memories of Josie in common, more than just the deep puncture wound of her loss. We had loved each other for a long time.
“What is it?” I asked.
“One of the, um…” He stopped talking, took a sip of his beer, and smiled at me.
“Well, that’s good to know!” I said.
“No, listen, one of the, one of your…Andes called me the other day. You know how you and Josie used to call them that? You used to laugh at them?”
Mark always chided Josie and me for making fun of the Andes. He never understood that mocking them was our only defense. “Oh, no, Mark, we weren’t laughing. Well, okay, we were. But only because they were—”
But Mark wasn’t interested in hearing my explanation. “Andi Friedman,” he said. “She called me.”
Andi Friedman was the most purposeful of the Andes, and the one who seemed to have the most differentiated inner life. I could give her that. I’d see her alone sometimes, striding down the hallway in her heels, click-click-click, lost in thought. On Monday mornings, when the three of them would sit together in the lounge and scroll through their phones, sharing photos they had taken over the weekend, Oh, my God, that guy! I know, right? How was I supposed to know he had a girlfriend? Andi Friedman seemed to listen more than the other two, to absorb rather than constantly emit. She sat still. She was not the prettiest or the sparkliest. But if you had to choose which of them to be trapped with in a mountain cabin in a snowstorm, you would probably choose her. Or if you were trapped with all of them for an extended period of time, you’d eat her last. Plus she had not been there with us, on that trip to Lake Kass. Although later, she was just as culpable. She’d had just as much to say as the other two.
“Andi’s grandparents and my parents used to go to Beth Shalom together.” Mark was still talking about her. “They knew one another pretty well. Isn’t that funny? She was really sweet. She said her grandma told her to call me, but that she had wanted to, ever since Josie died.” Mark fiddled with his glass. His knee had begun to bounce under the table, thumping a dull, repetitive rhythm against the wood.
“Her grandparents and your parents,” I said. I took another sip of my horrible, horrible beer.
Mark grew still, and then he looked at me with pity. There is nothing worse than pity from the pitiful. “We went out for dinner the other night,” he said. “We went to that new Vietnamese place on Brady. We, I…I don’t know, Iz. She was…nice. She was so nice. It was just good to be out with someone who…I don’t know. It was easy. I like her.” He shrugged, as if that last part were a question. “I like her a lot,” he said.
And there it was, the image of Mark and Andi, a vision I didn’t want, but I was having it: Mark’s mouth on her bare neck; her smooth, traitorous face flushed with pleasure.
“I don’t want to know this,” I said, clipped and furious. “Is this why we’re here? Is this why I came to your house, why you cried over Josie’s hair-care products? I don’t need to know this.” Now I was blind with rage. A bright red scrim appeared in front of my eyes; I thought, Wow, it’s not just an expression, you do see red. “I’m so happy for you,” I said. I was out of breath. My tongue was a slab of meat. I tried to slide out of the booth. I wanted to make a swift and elegant exit, but I was so clumsy. Instead of sliding, I scuttled along the bench like a crab, thunk, thunk, thunk, until I was out, until I was standing at the edge of the table. “I’m delighted,” I said, my voice high and loud and embarrassing, the tears already starting to pool up behind my eyes.
“Izzy, don’t. Please don’t. I’m…this is so hard. You can’t feel worse than I do.” Mark put his hands up to his stubbly cheeks and rubbed.
“You know she just wants to save you,” I said. “You know there are women who want to do that. That’s all she wants.”
“Iz.”
I understood that Mark and I were in a competition I would never win. The betrayal of my dead friend spooled out in front of me like an unraveling skein of yarn, and I had the feeling, right then, of losing something that was already gone.
···
Cal calls me the morning after our trip to the grocery store for ice cream, our strange and jolly evening with my mother.
“My son tells me there are rules,” he says, by way of hello. “A requisite three-day waiting period before I’m allowed to call you. But I don’t think that applies when you’re nearly sixty. Time is of the essence!” He laughs to himself, that easy sound I already know I like. “So I’m calling right now to see if you’d like to go out with me. On a date.”
It’s Saturday, and too early for this phone call. I’m standing at the stove, listening to the sizzle of pancake batter on the frying pan, waiting for it to bubble. I’m wearing my fuzzy pink robe, my green monkey slippers—the kind of getup that says married, done trying.
Hannah just got home from her sleepover, grouchy, with dark circles under her eyes and a wild, tired look on her face. She’s thumping around upstairs now, music coming through the ceiling. Girl, you look so fine fine fine. Say that you’ll be mine mine mine. This is the same song that was playing in the car the other day, the one Hannah asked me to stop singing along to: “Mom. Please. Ew. This song is heinous.”
Come over right now, I want to say to Cal. Can we just skip all of this? Come over.
He walked me home last night, kissed me sweetly on the cheek at my front door in a pool of light. I went inside and I poured myself a glass of grapefruit juice, splashed some vodka into it—Chris’s, a birthday present from his father—and I stood in the middle of the kitchen and I said, out loud, to myself, to an empty house, “Well, Isabel, how do you feel?”
And the answer was stirred. Gently stirred. Pleased to be the object (finally, again) of someone’s affection. I was happy, if I let myself admit it, happy for the first time in months, like I was being given a chance….And also, if I was being completely honest, I felt a tiny bit like I’d been kissed on the cheek by Dr. Carlsson, my old orthodontist, who used to like to talk about the trip to Alaska he and his wife had taken in 1976. He would jabber endlessly about it—the elk! the moose! the midnight sun!—to his captive audience as he tightened the wires in my mouth, his dexterous fingers working around my canines and bicuspids, his face always so near and intimate, every detail held close for my examination: the spotty brown sun damage on his cheeks, the hairs in his nostrils quivering as he breathed. This is the price you pay for expertise. The rough planes of a lived life. Attraction, repulsion. Cal’s kiss was maybe just a little bit like that.
Hannah clomps down the stairs and throws herself into a chair, drops her backpack and Clucky, the rubber chicken she sleeps with, on the floor next to her, and rests her elbows on the table, her face in her hands. Chris will be here soon to pick her up, my poor nomad, itinerant victim of her parents’ failure.
“I would like that,” I say to Cal, quietly, the phone tucked between my shoulder and my ear.
“Are you free this afternoon?” he asks. “I have some ideas.”
“Yes.” It’s a sweet secret now, a tiny jewel nestled among the lint and old Kleenex in the pocket of my robe. “This afternoon.”
I end the call and set a pancake in the shape of a teddy bear down in front of Hannah, round ears and a slightly misshapen face, into the middle of which I’ve placed two chocolate chips for eyes, a smiling row of them for a mouth. I know the risk I’m taking and brace myself for a sneer. But she looks at it and grins, delighted. Then she looks up at me and dials back her smile. But it’s still there.
“Thanks, Mama,” she mutters. The tender skin under her eyes is so dark it looks bruised. Is she wearing mascara?
I turn back to the stove, busy myself with the pancake batter. Hannah and I are slipping back into the cogs of our Saturday morning routine—a functioning twosome, but still, after all these months, I feel Chris’s absence like a presence, an object. It’s there in the chair by the window that stays tucked under the table, the gallon of milk in the refrigerator that always ends up going bad before we can finish it, the extra pancake batter.
“I’m starving!” Hannah says, and for a second I envy her hunger, how easy it is, still, when you’re almost twelve, just to want something. I make more teddy-bear pancakes, bunnies, snowmen, a fat H. She devours them all.
“Hey.” I slide another one onto her plate. “How was the dog? Lucy? Was she so cute?”
She tips her head up to me, her body still hunched close to her food. Her hair is a tangled mess, and there’s a dot of syrup on her chin. She looks a little feral. “Not Lucy,” she says. “Lucky. Annoying. Unlucky. Barked all night.”
“So you probably didn’t sleep much,” I say.
She glares at me full on. “I didn’t sleep at all.” She touches the back of her hand to her chin and wipes off the syrup. “Whatever. I wouldn’t have slept anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
Hannah rolls her eyes. I have to stop myself from backing away from my child.
“Do you think I ever sleep? Do you think I, like, lie down at night and just close my eyes and, like, dream about princesses?”
