by Nina Solomon
“Please talk to him, Emily,” Charles had said when he called. “He asked me if we were orphans.”
Nothing she said could stop Zach from crying.
“We’re ruining his life,” Charles had said when he brought Zach home twenty minutes later. She reminded him that he was the one who’d left, which was technically true, though she’d made it impossible for him to stay.
“Where are you going to go?” she asked him now. “Your brother’s?”
“I don’t want the whole family to know.”
“A hotel?”
“I guess,” he said, his shoulders slumping.
The same force that had initially prevented her from being kind in the lobby rose up again. It felt like the poles of two magnets repelling each other. Her default response would have been to bait him into a confrontation. She thought of that weekend in Vermont when she’d sent him away after he’d driven half the day to see her.
She got a blanket out of the linen closet. “The top bunk is made up. You can take Zach to school in the morning.”
Charles looked as though she’d just thrown him a life preserver. One night. It was the least she could do. When she heard his electric toothbrush whirring, her body tensed just as it had when they were husband and wife.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SNOW JOB
CATHY HAD BEEN LOOKING FORWARD to this weekend for months. From Me to We: Manifesting Your Man! The workshop of workshops where she would finally find the key. The only downside: it was at a yoga retreat in the Berkshires. A vegan yoga retreat. But the former Brownie believed in always being prepared and what this situation required was an electric teakettle and enough freeze-dried food for a mission to Mars: beef stroganoff with noodles, chicken à la king, scrambled eggs with bacon, Neapolitan ice cream, and low-fat Laughing Cow cheese. She’d lived off the stuff in college after discovering it not only survived, but improved, sans refrigeration. She wondered if NASA knew. She’d also bought a Garmin, because the salesperson told her she could download the voice of the navigator and David Hasselhoff was free! Next Monday Sean was giving a fire safety assembly at her school. Talk about a conspiring universe! She was long overdue for a personal day.
With David Hasselhoff at the helm, charting the course, she felt secure that she wouldn’t get lost or wind up behind a herd of cows. And unlike that French GPS lady, he never snapped at her or made her feel inferior. Virtual or not, he was the only man in her life at the moment besides her father whom she could depend on.
That morning, she’d sent e-vites to Beatrice, Max, and Emily: Soul Mate Soirée Skating Party! 11/11/11!
It was an auspicious once-in-a-century event. A perfect day to get married. No bridegroom would ever forget his anniversary, not that she intended to wait another hundred years to walk down the aisle again.
Beatrice was the only one who’d responded so far. I think SOS is more like it.
Cathy was still puzzling over the statement from her home owner’s insurance company. Her policy hadn’t covered all the damage to the house from the fire, after all. Somehow, there was a $2,500 discrepancy. But when she called the contractor, he told her the balance had been paid in full. Was it the universe giving her a helping hand? When she inquired further he said a tall man, who he’d assumed was her husband, wearing a fireman’s windbreaker, had dropped off a check. Lawrence Weiner! He’d try every which way from Tuesday to smooth her over and get into her pants, even resorting to surreptitiously paying her bills!
One thing Sean had been right about was that she’d been very lucky. Aside from extensive water and smoke damage, which had necessitated removing the wall-to-wall carpeting, the only structural repair that had to be done was to the roof rafters and the floor joists in the attic. But most of her personal possessions had been lost. Her soul mate altar, once a shrine to love, was a pile of embers. Gone were the fifty-three Buddhas she’d bought at the Antique Mall and the seventy-five different varieties of incense (although that certainly made for an interesting fire). The seven chakra candles that she religiously lit every morning and night had melted in the heat and looked like squashed dwarfs. Angel ornaments, fairies, and vintage valentines were reduced to ash, hovering like the “black butterflies” of Madame Bovary’s wedding bouquet after she’d thrown it in the fire. The only objects that survived were a few seashells, associated with mermaid energy, a tile mandala she’d made at a Nichiren Daishonin workshop she’d thought was a cult, and a VHS cassette of The Lake House, a movie that made her yearn to be loved the way Keanu Reeves loved Sandra Bullock and cry so hard Mrs. Beasley went into hiding for three days. The video had melted like a chocolate bar left on the dashboard, but somehow was still playable.
She’d spent days cleaning the soot and charred debris from her soul mate altar. She’d polished the marble with baking soda and powdered chalk until it gleamed like new. The slate had been wiped clean. Luckily, Buddhas were a dime a dozen and her soul mate altar would be cluttered up in no time. Among the debris she found a silver dollar, which she took as a propitious sign, a symbol of her desire that her soul mate be financially solvent. She had put it in her purse as a kind of talisman, but then ended up accidently throwing it into a tollbooth basket.
The first time she had walked through the house after the fire she’d been shocked by the damage. She was disoriented, as if she were on an ocean liner in rough seas with nothing to hold onto. The ground was shifting beneath her. Her shoes echoed off the hardwood floor, now stripped of carpeting.
Of course, when she’d looked out the window on that first visit, whom did she see walking up the driveway but Lawrence, wearing a terry sweatband and jogging shorts as though just back from a run. Didn’t he realize he’d never get anywhere with her?
Before knocking, he looked up at the roof. Who did he think he was? The fire marshal? He was still the same kid from fifth grade who’d brought his father’s miner’s helmet for show-and-tell.
“Just came by to give you moral support,” he said, peering inside. “Looks pretty bad. Are you going to use an ozone generator for the smoke?”
“My insurance won’t cover it.”
“Sealers can be just as effective. But not oil-based; make sure you use shellac. It’s thin, so you can use a cheapo sprayer, but I think you’d be wise to spend a little more and rent a compressor. If you need an extra hand, I’m a gun for hire. A sprayer gun,” he added, just in case the reason she hadn’t laughed was because she didn’t get the joke. “Gorgeous floors, by the way. I love old-growth eastern white pine. Who’d have guessed it was under that old shag carpeting?”
* * *
The sun was going down. Cathy was grateful for David Hasselhoff’s soothing and confident voice guiding her, but she wished he was there in the flesh when she pulled into a sketchy-looking gas station. She hated self-service stations, another good thing about New Jersey. The clerk gave her a creepy look when she went inside to pay. She was definitely not going to ask for the key to the ladies’ room. She reached for a tin of Altoids when she sensed a guy leering at her from the greeting card section. Who buys greeting cards at a gas station? He looked kind of familiar. Had she seen him on America’s Most Wanted? He was wearing pleated blue Dockers (a questionable choice), but nothing says mental patient like a pair of brown slip-on crepe-soled shoes. He was still staring at her when she hurried out the door without her Altoids.
When she arrived at the yoga retreat, a blond guy at the front desk told her that the workshop had been canceled.
“Drat!” she said. “I’ve been looking forward to it for months. How come?”
“There’s a freak snowstorm predicted and the presenter couldn’t fly in. There’s room in the Rumi workshop if you’re interested.”
“Thanks, but I have vertigo,” she said. “Besides, it sounds a little out there.”
He laughed. “I’m going to upgrade you to the wellness package. You get a complimentary massage. Dahval, our best Ayurvedic massage therapist, has time tomorrow morni
ng. He’s amazing. You’ll feel like you died and went to heaven.”
What was it about this area that kept putting up roadblocks and making it impossible to leave? Two weeks ago it had been a herd of cows and now a freak October snowstorm. It must be a sign. She should be home in New Jersey, where she belonged, where cows were on packages of cheese, not roaming the streets, and even if there was a freak snowstorm, the snowplows would have it cleared by afternoon.
She reminded herself that all obstacles are for the best, but as she walked the Spartan halls—passing a roomful of hippies wearing saris and spinning as fast as dervishes—to her small white room with a single cot, a tiny sink in the corner, and no lock on the door, even she didn’t believe it. The last thing she remembered before falling asleep was thinking the blinking red light of the smoke alarm was a firefly.
* * *
She awoke the next morning to the pleasant sound of a muted gong. She hadn’t felt this rested in weeks. Starving, after two failed attempts at rehydrating eggs, she went to the dining room for a silent vegan breakfast. There was a talking dining room, but no one was in it so it defeated the purpose.
She had an hour before her complimentary massage, just enough time to take a dip in the Jacuzzi. Luckily, she’d brought her Miraclesuit. The salesperson at the Paramus Park Mall said that not only would it completely change her body, it would change her life. And so far, body-wise at least, it seemed to be living up to its promise, sucking, lifting, and reallocating what resources she had into a semblance of the desired hourglass shape. She noticed a Clothing Optional sign and was thankful, as she demurely shed her towel and climbed down the metal steps into the hot bubbling water, that it was single sex.
Two well-endowed naked women were lamenting the lack of quality men at the yoga retreat. Ordinarily she would have chimed in, but the sight of belly-flopping breasts on the water made her feel like keeping to herself.
“This is a bust,” the blond one said.
“Yeah, tell me about it. I took a class at the Learning Annex on how to meet rich men. They recommended going to the races, charity events, Christie’s—but don’t raise your paddle or you’ll go home with a Picasso. They told me to dye my hair red and move to Fort Myers. That’s where the highest concentration of rich single men live.”
“Did you meet any?”
The redhead leaned back on her elbows and laughed. “I don’t like rich men. I want an intelligent, faithful man. But I already know where to find one of those: at the planetarium. They’re cosmic. But you have to burn all their clothes.”
Cathy thought of Lawrence. Burning all of his sweater vests and high-tech parachute pants might violate EPA standards.
A few minutes later she was escorted to a small room lit by candles for her massage. A jar of Sole Mate callus cream was all she needed to know for certain that a conspiring universe had led her there. She undressed and slid under a soft white sheet, lying facedown on the warm padded massage table.
The door opened. She felt a current of air move around her. “Namaste. I’m Dahval.”
“This is my first massage,” she told him. “Not counting those vibrating chairs at the Short Hills Mall.”
“Close your eyes and relax. You’re in good hands.”
She flinched when Dahval touched her. At least she’d kept her underwear and bra on, and Spanx underwear was heavy duty. She tried Embracing the New Okay, an exercise in The Love Book, to not judge her feelings, rather to accept the fact that it was “okay” that things were not okay. It was “okay” that she was nervous and that she felt like running out of the room. It was “okay” that a stranger was unhooking her bra. It was “okay” that his hands were touching places no man had ventured in years. And the reason it was “okay” (and this was by far the most challenging aspect for her to reconcile, especially as she lay half-naked on the massage table) was precisely because it wasn’t “okay.” Embracing the New Okay had made so much more sense when she was reading it.
Dahval spread warm oil on her back. Soon all her inhibitions disappeared and this experience was not only “okay,” it was incredible. Her body melted into the table. The last thing she remembered before she drifted off was how much she was looking forward to her freeze-dried Space Beef Stroganoff.
A little while later, her eyes fluttered open. Through the headrest, there as plain as day, she saw them—blue Dockers and brown, crepe-soled shoes. Mental-patient shoes.
Her body stiffened. No two ways about it, getting a massage from a mental patient was definitely not “okay.” Operation New Okay was officially aborted until further notice.
For the first time since beginning this soul mate–seeking process, she felt truly frightened by her summoning abilities. She had been judgmental and suspicious at the gas station and the universe had responded in kind. Who was she to try to rearrange events like molecules in an atom to suit her own agenda? The laws of physics could tend to themselves. The universe didn’t need a special ed teacher from Bayonne meddling in its affairs. There was an order to things beyond what she could see. But how in the world had she manifested an escaped mental patient in the first place? Where had she gone wrong? She imagined the local authorities finding her floating in a lake deep in the woods. Cancel! Cancel! She tried to act naturally. The last thing she wanted to do was provoke him into doing something drastic. She’d seen on an episode of Oprah that if a woman is attacked, she should never allow a “perp” to take her to a second location. Cancel! Cancel! She weighed her options. She could run out of the room screaming or remain silent in the hope that the mental patient would turn out to be a gentle giant like Lenny in Of Mice and Men. But didn’t Lenny kill that baby rabbit? She prayed and tried not to react when the guy held the sheet and instructed her to turn over. She decided it was better to comply. Prone or supine, what was the difference if she was going to be murdered? Logically, she knew it would be helpful to be able to give the police an accurate description of her assailant (if she lived to tell the story), but try as she might, she couldn’t bring herself to open her eyes.
She smelled geraniums, then a whiff of alcohol, or was it chloroform? The mental patient placed his warm hands over her forehead. Was he getting ready to strangle her? Asphyxiate her? Cancel! Cancel! And then, just like that, he walked out of the room, closing the door gently behind him. She sat up, wrapped herself in the waffled sheet, and slid quietly to the floor. Before she’d taken three steps, she heard the squeak of crepe-soled shoes and froze. The door opened. In walked a young man with blond chin-length hair and blue eyes, offering her a glass of water with a sprig of mint. He smiled. Blue Dockers and mental-patient shoes had never looked so good.
* * *
Monday morning, back in New Jersey, Cathy led her class into the auditorium. The women in the Jacuzzi were right: the weekend had been a bust. She was still no closer to finding her soul mate. It took several minutes for her students to settle down. It had been her first night back in her own house and she’d completely forgotten to set her alarm. She still might have been sleeping if Lawrence hadn’t called and woken her up.
“Why are you calling me so early?” she’d snapped.
“I wanted to catch you before you left for work,” he said.
“But it’s only—” Cathy looked at the clock. “Oh, fudge! I’m late!”
“You still haven’t RSVP’d to the reunion.”
“Why can’t you take no for an answer?”
“I’ll put you down as a maybe.”
“That reminds me,” she had said before hanging up. “How dare you pay my contractor!”
Her students kept asking what the assembly was about but she had no idea. There were never assemblies on Tuesdays. But then she realized it wasn’t Tuesday. It was Monday! How could she have forgotten to take her personal day?
The auditorium grew dark. Red strobe lights flashed and a siren began wailing. Sean and two firefighters—one in a blue uniform, the other in a firedog suit—walked onto the stage. She slumped down
in her chair, hoping he wouldn’t notice her. The kids cheered as the firedog pretended to spray them with a confetti hose.
“Firefighters always work in pairs,” Sean said. “Can I get a teacher volunteer? I see one in the second row.” He pointed to Cathy. “Who would like to see if Ms. Baczkowski can get dressed faster than Firefighter Bill?”
Her students began to cheer. She shook her head in protest, but the firedog ran down and escorted his reluctant volunteer onto the stage as circus music began to play.
The firedog jumped in his toy fire truck and started the countdown. “On your mark, get set . . . go!”
Sean fastened a mesh hood over her head and whispered, “Why’d you stand me up?”
“You know exactly why,” she whispered back.
“I wouldn’t be asking if I did.”
Next, he helped her into a pair of insulated pants with suspenders, holding her arm as she stepped into a huge pair of steel-toed boots that came up to just below her knees. Firefighter Bill was way ahead of them, but pretended he couldn’t find his goggles.
“Why didn’t you return my calls?” Sean asked as he Velcroed her jacket and fastened the hook straps.
“This isn’t the time or the place,” she said.
The air tank on her back might as well have weighed a hundred pounds. She could never be a firefighter. She wouldn’t be able to make it off the stage, let alone up a ladder. Next, he put a pressure mask over her head and a pair of thick fireproof goggles. She was already sweating. She felt claustrophobic, weighted down. The audience was cheering, the firedog was racing around, but everything was muted, as if she were underwater looking through a fishbowl, breathing through a tube, the way her father must feel when he’s hooked up to his oxygen tank.
The firedog was blaring his siren. The auditorium was spinning. Cathy felt like she was about to keel over.
Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .
Sean put a huge helmet on her head. “I was really disappointed when you didn’t show up,” he said, his voice barely audible through the pressure mask.
