by Lauren Fox
“Hannah and I were up late watching that show you hate. Skin Diseases of the World.”
“Nice.”
“It was fun. We had chips and guacamole.”
“Ew,” I said.
“I know.” He yawned again, and we were both silent for a while.
“Okay….Six o’clock.”
“Right. Hey, do you still want me to come take a look at the dishwasher?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s still not working. I mean, I haven’t gotten it fixed. I was hoping it would fix itself, actually. But I don’t want to put you out.”
“No,” Chris said. “It’s fine. I’ll come by later this afternoon. Does that work?”
I wondered if this meant we were going to sleep together. I wondered if “fixing the dishwasher” would become our code, and then, later, something we would laugh about, a phrase we would remember almost fondly, with nostalgia, when we were safely back together and had no need for secret codes and liaisons. My skin felt tingly—Skin Diseases of the World! A little termite of hope gnawed its way into my chest cavity. “That works,” I said.
There were kitchen noises in the background, clinks and clanks. “Uh-oh, sounds like Hannah’s making breakfast,” Chris said. “I better go.”
“Get the day started,” I said, and swallowed hard.
“Bye, sweetie,” he said, and then, quickly: “Bye, Iz.”
···
I clean the kitchen, grade some papers, pass the morning alone, then finally, a little adrift, decide to drive myself to the movie theater early. It’s in Gooseburg, a little village thirty minutes from the city, far enough away that I can comfortably sink into anonymity. Chris and I used to go to movies here, back when it was an unrenovated theater with a crowded and slightly dingy concessions counter, two screens, and purple carpeting that smelled funny. Now it’s a multiscreen movie house/café where waitresses wander up and down the dark aisles whispering, “Can I get you another basket of fried eggplant?”
I park in front of the theater and realize that I have forty-five minutes to kill, so I walk over to Praise Cheeses, my favorite vegetarian sandwich shop, run by Seventh-day Adventists with a sense of humor.
I wouldn’t say I’m starting to feel good. I wouldn’t say that. I would say that I’m starting to realize that I can take a breath and look around, survey my surroundings, and find a flicker of happiness in the things I recognize: my mother, pulling out a plastic grocery bag from her purse and securing it onto her head to protect her hair from the rain. Chris, answering the phone with his warm unguarded morning voice. Hannah, humming to herself in the kitchen. I will admit that it’s useful to note certain not-unpleasant moments. All the sad things that have happened are different in scope, in quality, in fact, from all the sad things that haven’t happened yet. There is comfort in pausing.
I’m standing in line behind a very petite woman wearing a high ponytail and a purple polka-dot sweater that can only have come from the children’s department. I remember Josie calling my attention to a similarly child-sized woman once and whispering to me, “Look, it’s Polly Pocket!”
I’m smiling at this memory and considering the grilled tempeh with Lettuce Pray and Let There Be Light mayo. I’m thinking about Chris coming over later, to fix the dishwasher. I’m thinking about how hungry I am and how good it will be to sit alone at a small, solid table and not even pretend I’m waiting for someone, just to eat my sandwich and watch people go by.
And that’s when I see them.
They’re sitting at a cozy table near the window, warm light flooding their faces like a religious painting, full, fizzy drinks in front of them in jewel tones of emerald green and garnet red: a man who closely resembles my husband and his companion, a very small, pointy, foxlike woman who looks unpleasantly familiar.
At first it’s like seeing something so weird and impossible your mind immediately rejects it: It’s snowing in August? Your brain spirals, trying to invent a plausible explanation, anything, anything at all—It’s January, and I’ve been in a coma for five months. Oh, I forgot I moved to Australia! But then, depending on your constitution, you rearrange your thoughts, and quickly or slowly—but eventually—accept the impossible. Chris and Dr. Gwendolyn Grieco, our couple’s therapist, are having a romantic vegetarian lunch together.
I press my shaking hands against my thighs, turn around, and take stock of the line that is rapidly growing longer behind me. I have two escape options: head back outside against the crowded restaurant’s traffic or slowly ease my way through the line to the front and pass by Chris’s table.
I glance over at the two of them. Dr. Grieco is saying something, gesturing with her hands. Chris is leaning on his elbows, gazing at her, enthralled. He stops one of her hands midgesture and grabs it, turns it over, examines it. She quits talking, looks at him.
He read my palm, too, on our first date, on that Fourth of July picnic fifteen years ago. “Whoa, check out that head line!” he said to me. “I wouldn’t want to get into an argument with you, Madam Brainiac! Mmm, and your love line….It starts late,” he said softly, “but it’s deep.”
“Oh, please,” I said, flushed. “You don’t believe in this nonsense!” I let my hand stay in his, resting there.
He looked up at me and smiled such a private, sizzling smile, full of heat and promise, all my bones melted. “Maybe I do.”
Dr. Gwendolyn Grieco throws back her head and laughs. The sandwich shop is packed, a Saturday lunchtime rush, but her laughter is as loud as a bell; I think I can hear it ringing over all the noise, jangling, clinking, clanging in my skull. Or maybe I’m just imagining it.
But suddenly I’m like one of those mothers who can lift a truck off of her child by herself, powered by pure adrenaline and fire. I can practically feel Josie’s hands on my back, pushing me forward. No way, Izzy. No fucking way. “Excuse me,” I say, bumping into Polly Pocket, tearing through the crowd, making my ill-considered beeline to their table. “Excuse me, excuse me.” And then I’m standing above them, a mute waitress. Today’s special is rage!
I have one fleeting moment of perverse pleasure on seeing their faces, their thunderstruck faces, Gwendolyn Grieco’s lovely olive skin draining of color and turning a seasick shade of greenish gray, Chris’s mouth dropping open and then closing like a big stupid tuna’s.
But then that pleasure is gone, and in its place is shame: a full-body transfusion of it.
“You are…,” I squeak, not knowing what will come next. My heart is cracked, shattered; an avalanche of shards cascades down, down to the floor. I fix my gaze on Gwendolyn Grieco. “You are…a really bad therapist!”
Dr. Grieco, well trained, places her hands flat on the table in front of her. Her nails are short and neat and shiny; she’s the kind of woman who probably indulges in a weekly mani-pedi but doesn’t want it to look like she does. “Well, I’m not your therapist anymore,” she says quietly. “Which you know, of course.” She glances at Chris, who doesn’t meet her gaze but instead looks down at the table—at least, I think, ashamed.
There’s a little girl at the next table who has been staring at me the entire time. She’s gnawing on a slice of green apple, and she can’t take her eyes off of me. Her hair is a fuzzy tangle of brown curls, and she looks like she’s about two. I feel a piercing stab of love for her, for this tiny stranger, unsculpted, all beating heart and hunger. Nobody knows that a running clock in my brain still calculates the ages my babies would be, my own private doomsday clock, counting forward from my personal apocalypses. And, yes, there would be a two-year-old, but never mind about that.
Dr. Gwendolyn Grieco is still talking. She’s midsentence, and so it seemed to me, when I stop listening. I smile and wave bye-bye to that staring baby and then it’s shockingly easy: I just turn and leave.
···
I’m halfway down the block from the café, shivering in the joyless spring chill, when Chris catches up with me.
“Isabel.” He’s jogging toward
me, a little out of breath. I pick up my pace. “Isabel!”
“I’m actually going to a movie right now,” I say. “I’m meeting someone. I’m late.” An older couple holding hands walks past us; the man nods. Ahead, two teenage girls in identical short plaid skirts are all exaggerated gestures and hysterical laughter. If Hannah were here, she’d be studying them like a scientist. One of them does a cartwheel in the middle of the sidewalk. “You are completely insane!” the other one shrieks.
“Iz.” Chris reaches out to touch my shoulder, then thinks twice, pulls his hand back.
“Did you get new glasses?” He’s wearing small, black, rectangular frames. They used to be a little rounder, slightly larger.
He pauses for a second, smiles, barely, lifts his hand to the edge of the frames. “I broke mine last weekend playing basketball….Good job noticing.”
That’s what I used to say to Hannah when she was little and she made an observation about something, anything—a new box of Kleenex in the bathroom, an ant on the sidewalk. Good job noticing! Chris thought it was the most ridiculous thing to say to a child, the most absurd example of overpraising. Good job swallowing that water, he would say to her. Good job having toes.
And Hannah, clever child, not more than three or four, would giggle like crazy and give it back to Chris: Good job sneezing, Daddy. Good job walking to the refrigerator. Good job having a face!
“Yes, I’m an excellent observer,” I say now, aiming for soul-piercing sarcasm but sounding, even to my own ears, pathetic.
Here’s what I expect Chris to say: It’s not what you think. It’s not like that. There’s nothing between us. It’s not what it looked like. Ha-ha-ha, this is all just a crazy misunderstanding!
Here’s what he says: “Iz, oh, God. This is hard. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t. I’m sorry. I promise I would tell you if anything ever…if I ever, if things got…whatever. Of course I would tell you.”
He wrings his hands and stares hard at the ground. He looks like a little boy, trying to talk his way out of a jam. I swear I didn’t copy my answers!
“She is our couple’s therapist,” I say, my teeth chattering with cold and ache.
“Was. She was our therapist. She’s not anymore.” Chris’s light hair is a little shaggier than I remember; it fluffs out like feathers in the wind. “She made sure, you know, that we were done with counseling. She was insistent about that.”
“How professional of her.” I look away from Chris, scanning our surroundings. We’re standing near a crosswalk, this busy avenue intersecting a leafy neighborhood. A scrap of paper flutters close to my feet. In front of a nearby house, a dog barks. “She’s a gem,” I say.
“I…I…I,” he says, still wringing his hands.
“Great,” I say. “That’s good to know.”
“Iz.”
I shrug. “It’s fine. It’s kind of sketchy, to be honest. A little bit in the moral gray area, I think. But whatever! Whatevs!” And then I walk away again, getting more practice at leaving than I ever wanted.
···
I make my way to my car, as panicky and wound up as an overstimulated baby. I can’t process the information I’ve been given. I get into my car and barely make it home before I power down into a three-hour nap.
When the doorbell rings, hours later, I’m still on the couch, but I’m awake. Through the living room window, I catch a glimpse of Chris on the porch and sink down as low as I can into the cushions.
“Iz!” Chris calls, and knocks. “Izzy, come on!” He rings the doorbell again and then knocks again, loudly.
I introduced Chris to my mother fifteen years ago, at a Greek restaurant. Over stuffed grape leaves and spanakopita, he told her colorful anecdotes of internecine strife at the state DNR office, and she told him a gossipy story about the local celebrity who recently threw a fit in the waiting room of the dermatology clinic where she worked. (It was Carolyn Stafford, the weekend anchor on channel six, but I’ll deny it in a court of law!)
I could tell she liked Chris, and I was giddy with relief: I knew I was going to marry him. Afterward, when he went to get the car, she said, “Isabel, he’s wonderful.”
I nodded and grabbed her arm and whispered, “He would definitely hide us in an attic!”
Helene tilted her head at me and paused for a long moment, and then she said, “Well, let’s hope it won’t come to that.”
“Isabel,” he calls through the door. “Please let me come in!”
In an hour, I’ll get up. I’ll brush my hair and my teeth, and I’ll check to make sure there’s not a splotch of toothpaste or a large coffee stain on the front of my shirt that would make Hannah cringe and say, Mom, are you even aware that there are mirrors in our house? I’ll get in the car and I’ll drive to Katelyn’s, where her cheerful mother will greet me at the door. The girls were terrific, she’ll say. Delightful!
I’m so glad, I’ll say. Thank you. Thank you so much, and Hannah will see me from the other room and smile, recognizing me as her mother.
That will be later. For now I hunch low on the old, forgiving couch. Chris knows I’m here. He might even be able to see the top of my head. He knows this trick.
He still has his key, of course, but it seems that, as a small concession, he’s not going to use it.
I reach up behind me and feel blindly for the cord of the window shade and, as carefully as I can, I pull it down. Unfortunately there are three more windows in this room, all of which look out onto the porch, and none is as easily accessible to me at the moment.
“I see you,” Chris says. He’s come around to the window. His voice is disconcertingly close, a little tinny and distorted through the glass. “I want to talk to you. I’m sorry, Iz. I don’t know what to say. I really am!”
···
Years ago, when Hannah was about four years old and we were happy, the three of us went for a little hike on a Saturday morning. It was late September, and the world pulled us into it—the explosion of colors in the trees; the sweet, melancholy whiff of autumn. We drove to the Audubon Nature Center and took an easy path through the woods, crunching on the fallen leaves, Hannah skipping ahead, shouting, “AY-kern! AY-kern!” every time she saw one. She was collecting them in her mitten, naming each one as she dropped it in—Mindy, Greg, Kansas City, Sneaky Pete. She still has that acorn collection, twenty or thirty of them lovingly stored in a cookie tin.
Chris held my hand as we walked, and together we gazed upon our daughter with an almost-shameful pride, the thing you secretly harbor but can admit only to the bearer of the other half of your child’s DNA: We made her. Can you believe we made her? She sang to her acorns, and Chris warmed my hand with his, and I was suddenly overwhelmed with the knowledge that this was a moment to pay attention to: this day, this air, these two people. I felt the perfection of the moment and, inside of it, I felt its demise. I was almost dizzy with it.
“Britney,” Hannah said tenderly, dropping another acorn into the mitten. “You will be delighted to meet your friends.”
“Weird kid,” Chris whispered to me.
We emerged from the wooded area into a clearing, and an expanse of prairie opened up ahead of us, the thick grass mostly faded to a dull brown, a few hearty purple flowers still in bloom. In the distance was a bird tower. We meandered toward it. A wooden staircase wrapped around the inside of the structure. It was a little rickety looking, but Hannah had raced over to it and was already halfway up the first set of stairs. Chris jogged to catch up with her, but I took my time. It was warmer out in the open; the sky was a deep, cloudless blue. By the time I got to the bird tower, Chris and Hannah were already at the top.
“Come up, Mommy!” Hannah called. She waved to me from the narrow observation ledge. Her blond hair blew in her face, and her red jacket reflected the sunlight. “There are telescopes!”
“It’s gorgeous up here,” Chris called, his hands on Hannah’s shoulders. “You can see for miles!”
I didn’t want to see for miles. I didn’t want to peer into a telescope and spot the highway in the distance, the farms on the periphery, the birds in formation. I wanted to stand at the base of the bird tower and crane my neck toward Chris and Hannah, bathed in sunlight, golden. Love was foolish and inevitable. We were just waiting to be shattered by it. The days were finite, full of awe.
···
“Iz!” Chris shouts again from the front porch. He taps on the glass. “I’m not leaving until you let me in.”
I sigh and get up stiffly, walk to the front door, unlock it. Chris steps inside and then gazes past me, and a look of surprise passes over his features, as if he doesn’t recognize what was once his. He takes off his glasses and cleans them with his T-shirt, puts them back on. His body sags a little.
We stand together in the doorway, and neither of us has a clue. “I have to go pick up Hannah,” I say, even though we both know it’s two hours too early. The soft, late-afternoon light casts a homey, orange glow in the living room, a little cosmic taunt.
“I’m sorry,” Chris says, an echo of all the dumb “sorry”s of our marriage: I forgot the eggs, I used the last of the shampoo, we’re out of coffee.
I shrug. “It’s okay.” My voice comes out croaky, scratchy from my long nap.
“It’s not,” he says.
And it’s really not, but maybe eventually it will be.
And so I find myself here again, at another meeting of the Relationships in Transition support group.
And has it been two months since I last laid eyes on Cal Abbott’s kind face?
“We’ll see each other again soon!” I’d said through the half-open car window in my driveway on that spring day: hopeful, confused, disoriented as a blind puppy. And did he say, in response, “Perhaps we will,” followed by the car’s whirring shift into reverse, the automatic thunk of the doors locking?
And did I, very briefly, cyberstalk his ex-wife?
