Regrets Only

by Erin Duffy

  “Nothing. He’s not doing anything wrong and the only way to admit you know about it is to admit that I looked at Dee Dee’s Facebook page and we both look crazy. Say nothing. Forget about it. You’re divorced. Let him go wherever he wants. Call Fred and talk to him instead.”

  “Okay. You know, I was worried that seeing him for the first time after we were officially divorced would be a little awkward. Now I think it’s going to be torturous.”

  “It’s going to get easier. You’re already doing pretty great. I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit.”

  “Thanks.” I didn’t think that was right. I was giving myself a lot of credit. I almost high-fived myself in the mirror this morning because I shaved my legs in the shower, and blew out my hair and swiped black mascara on my lashes so that I would look put together when I dissolved my marriage. I was very, very proud of that. I was giving myself all kinds of credit. I just didn’t advertise it.

  Ten minutes later, I pulled the car into the driveway and turned off the ignition, but I didn’t open the door. I looked into the rearview mirror, caught sight of my eyes, the mascara now smudged underneath, not quite as sad and hollow as they’d looked in March, but still not bright, or clear, or shiny. It had been four months. When was the pain going to leave for good? When could I wake up in the morning and not fear that my day would end with me lying on the floor under a desk?

  I threw my purse on my shoulder and headed up the porch steps. It was almost 2:00, and Bo would be waking up from his nap. I trudged slowly up the stairs, mindlessly putting one foot in front of the other, and tried not to feel like every step forward was followed by three enormous steps back.

  Chapter 17

  SCREW ALASKA. SCREW Alaska and screw Owen, and screw the penguins, and the icebergs, and the igloos, and the moose, and everything else that was in Alaska because I didn’t really want to go there in the first place. I was far too busy having an amazing Wednesday in Connecticut—which anyone will tell you is far superior to any day of the week in Alaska—to worry about the stupid cruise anyway. Wednesday was now my new favorite day of the week, because Wednesday was the day of the week that Claire Stevens took control of everything, and actually had a routine, and a purpose, and most important, her shit together. I didn’t think about regrets, or divorce, or waffles, I just focused on myself, and all that was good in my life. I woke up earlier than I needed to, so that I could shower and dress in something other than the worn-out black yoga pants and frayed T-shirts that had become my uniform since I stopped having anywhere to go. I threw on a pair of jeans and the navy blue tunic that my mother sent me for no reason other than to silently suggest from another time zone that because I was single now I needed to stop wearing ratty T-shirts every day and should wear that instead. I really did feel like the strong, independent, stylish woman I was meant to be. On Monday I got divorced and found out my ex-husband was taking his mistress on our vacation, and tomorrow my ex-husband would be coming over to celebrate our one-year-old’s birthday, and I refused to spend today lying in bed thinking about it because if I did I’d go mad. I was going to grab this Wednesday with both hands and force it to be nice to me if it killed me.

  I made Bo French toast for breakfast, and cut it up for him on a plastic plate that looked like the American flag, because I had some left over from the non-barbecue we had on the Fourth of July and I always liked the excuse to be festive. I picked him up and twirled him around the kitchen on my hip while I sang him Tom Petty songs I used to listen to when I was pregnant. My little slow-dancing partner smiled and giggled and when I dipped him upside down he actually squealed so loudly my heart felt like it was going to explode. I rocked and bounced and twirled him over to his highchair and then carefully sat him in his seat and fastened his white plastic tray to his chair. While he ate, I made my coffee, topped it off with two scoops of sugar and a splash of milk, and read the paper online. Antonia padded into the kitchen. “I’m going to work down here today. I usually stay upstairs in my room and work there while you’re at the library, but I think today I’m going to saddle up here at the kitchen counter. I’d like to enjoy the quiet house and the chance to be downstairs without having to listen to the theme song from Curious George in the background.”

  “Sounds like a great idea,” I said. “I know this place is crazy most of the day. I don’t know how you’ve managed to get any work done in this house.”

  “It’s not so bad.”

  “You must be very, very good at what you do.”

  “You know it,” she said.

  “Enjoy the quiet. There’s coffee!” I said over my shoulder before I disappeared with Bo downstairs into the basement.

  I buckled Bo in his stroller and pushed him down the driveway and into the street. The library was only a ten-minute walk, just past the high school and the rec center, but before the grocery store and the train station. When we arrived, I pushed the stroller by the toddlers playing on the lawn out front, and the nannies and other young mothers sitting on benches lining the rust-colored brick walkway, keeping watch over their children while drinking six-dollar lattes and typing on their cell phones. I pushed the stroller up the ramp, and parked it with the others against the far wall next to the water fountain, but out of the way of the automatic door used for the handicap entrance.

  I was pretty sure that Bo liked the library, but it was hard to say since he couldn’t actually tell me one way or the other. He paid attention when Lissy sang, and never cried, or fidgeted, the way he did when he wanted me to pick him up and carry him around. He clapped and babbled and stared and seemed to enjoy being around other kids, which made me happy. I liked to think he recognized Lissy, and maybe that made him more comfortable, but it probably didn’t matter. If you put puppets, and music, and books with pop-out dogs in front of a baby, odds were he’d pay attention. I loved that we had this place to visit, just the two of us, where we fit in with everyone because no one knew us, and I didn’t have to worry about mean mommies causing me to lose my day planner in the hallway.

  Lissy was a bit of a legend at the library, at least among some of the other mothers who were well versed in kid-friendly activities around town. I heard that there had been other readers at story time, but that no one had ever been anywhere near as good as she was. I had a feeling if Lissy tried to quit there’d be a revolt, where angry stay-at-home moms would show up at her house with torches and riot gear, and refuse to leave until she agreed to come back. She played the guitar, and displayed a felt board with flowers, and trains, and the letters of the alphabet, and she let the kids place them on the board while she sang nursery rhymes. She was at home with these kids, probably because they didn’t judge her, or wonder if there was something wrong with her because she decided to pierce her left ear twelve times. They only cared that she neighed like a horse, and mooed like a cow, and barked like a dog when the song she sang required her to neigh, or moo, or bark. Kids were great like that.

  Since Bo was comfortable at story hour, so was I. Sometimes, we’d sit on the floor up front and not on the chairs in the back. He rocked with the music and laughed and sometimes bounced his knees like he wanted to start dancing, and it made me feel good because these were the moments where I felt like maybe Owen and I hadn’t screwed him up. Maybe, because he’d never remember his parents living in the same house, his family wouldn’t seem weird to him. Maybe all of my fears had been unwarranted, and a loved kid was a loved kid and that was all that really mattered. The rest of it was just geography.

  Lissy broke into my favorite song, “Down by the Bay,” which I wished I’d known as a child. I would have liked to make up rhymes about seeing a horse on a golf course, or a hog in a bog, or a pig in a wig. Another woman I recognized, the mother of a little girl who wore purple sneakers and carried a stuffed duck with an orange beak, made eye contact with me and we smiled as if to say “hello.” We spoke briefly last week when she left her purse on the floor next to her chair, and Bo decided to rifle
through it and remove her wallet. I returned it to her with sincere apologies and more than a little embarrassment that she assured me was unnecessary. She had four children, she told me. Over the years, she’d had to return more wallets, car keys, and makeup bags than she could remember. The Wednesday moms were so much nicer than the Friday moms. No one here looked at me sideways, or talked about me when they thought I couldn’t hear them, or worse, knew I could hear them and didn’t care enough to whisper. Nobody here knew that I was Claire of the Claire, Owen, and Dee Dee love triangle from hell. I was just the woman with the kid who stole wallets out of purses when their owners weren’t looking, and that was such a better person to be.

  Lissy was having a really good performance, one of her best ones yet. She was exuberant, and inventive, and her ability to throw her voice and make the cow puppet sitting on the top of her head actually look like it was talking was nothing short of spectacular. She handed out little plastic fruit rattles for the kids—bananas, and oranges, and apples, and pears that were stuffed with little beads or marbles that the kids could shake while she sang “Copacabana,” but most just ate them, and she didn’t seem to mind. I sat on my chair and watched my son and my friend, and decided that this was a nice moment that I’d think about for a long time on nights where I felt sorry for myself and told myself that I was the worst mother in the world. I wasn’t. I wasn’t the best, but I wasn’t the worst, and if I was admitting that, then that meant I’d made some legitimate progress. I smiled a little wider because I’d take any progress I could get.

  My phone buzzed in my bag, and for once, I actually located it in the pocket designated for cell phones, and not swimming on the bottom under loose makeup, loose raisins, loose change, and three pens that had been there for over a year. I read Fred’s text. He didn’t admit it, but I knew he was starting to see the advantages of text messaging over calling and that you can still be traditional while embracing modern technology.

  It’s quiet today, so I’m thinking of sneaking out early. Are you around?

  I was, but I wasn’t. After story time at the library, I let Bo play out on the lawn with the other kids, though they didn’t really play with each other so much as they randomly bumped into each other and stole each other’s sippy cups. Then I went home and fed him lunch, put him down for a nap, and did one of my Tracy Anderson workout DVDs on the floor in my den. I was planning on getting aggressive today, and actually using a set of ankle weights to do my leg lifts and curls, but Tracy was strong, and I suspected it wasn’t as easy as she made it look in her demo, so I probably wouldn’t bother. Tomorrow was Bo’s birthday, so I was going to start blowing up some of the balloons I bought at Party City and clean the house so that when Owen and his mom arrived they could stare in awe at my glistening countertops. But I didn’t want to tell Fred that I wasn’t available, because I really wanted to see him, so I figured I’d make time and blow up the balloons while I watched the late news. I didn’t want him to think that I was playing games or trying to be coy. I was a thirty-six-year-old divorcée with a baby. There was nothing coy about me and I liked that about me now.

  I texted him back: I’m free from about 1–3 while Bo naps assuming Antonia is around. Would love to do something.

  Fred: Great. Wear comfortable clothes and sneakers. I’ll pick you up at 1.

  Just in case Fred couldn’t be any more promising, he encouraged me to wear gym clothes and sneakers on our date. That sounded like a perfect idea to me. I didn’t give a damn about Alaska. I never liked the cold anyway.

  “I CAN’T DO this. This is maybe one of the worst ideas ever,” I said as I let a man strap a harness between my legs and fasten a helmet to my head. “I’m telling you this is not going to end well.”

  “You’ll be fine! It’ll be fun, trust me. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “Once you have a child you realize that adventure is not your friend most of the time.”

  “This is perfectly safe and it’ll be a lot of fun. Come on, I’ll race you!”

  I stared up at the rock wall I was meant to climb, and tried not to look as scared as I was. It wasn’t that I had a problem with heights or anything, it was just that I didn’t think climbing up a wall using nothing but three-inch-wide fake rocks to support me seemed like the best idea on a Wednesday afternoon. I didn’t want to look like a wimp, and I didn’t want to disappoint Fred, but I also really didn’t want to climb the wall, and so it seemed I had a problem.

  “Okay, I’ll climb. Hell, I’ll even race you, but what do I get if I win?” I asked.

  “What do you want?”

  “A pony. I asked Santa for one when I was eight and I’m still waiting on it.”

  “Deal. And if I win, I want to come over for dinner and get a cooking class from Antonia on how to make a proper Bolognese. Mine always comes out oily and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

  I jammed my foot onto the first fake rock and used my upper body strength to pull myself up. Then I began to climb the wall like Spider-Man, if Spider-Man had worn a harness, a helmet, and a pair of black yoga pants that were pilling across the ass. “How do I know you’re not using me to get to my beautiful Italian roommate?”

  “You’ve figured me out. Damn. I was so hoping that wouldn’t happen until we at least got to the top of the wall,” Fred said, as he skillfully moved to his left and climbed another three feet above me.

  “Yeah, I knew you were too good to be true,” I said, hoping that the altitude up here ten feet off the ground hadn’t just made me lose my inhibitions and say something presumptuous I’d regret once I was back on solid ground. Things with Fred were wonderful. He was kind and smart and easygoing and he had no problem dragging his date to a rock wall and expecting her to climb and that was something I never knew I wanted until now. I never climbed anything with Owen. When I climbed to the top I looked around and smiled because Fred had been right, the view from up here really was so different than it was on the ground, and this view was of a sweaty indoor gym. I had no problem believing that the exhilaration of doing this outdoors was like nothing else, but I still had no intention of ever finding out for myself.

  “I don’t want to rub it in, but I won,” Fred said.

  “Two out of three. I really, really want my pony.”

  Fred loosened the slack on his cable and lowered himself slowly to the ground. “Okay. Two out of three. I’m willing to risk it if you are.”

  “Funny,” I said as I followed him back down. “I was thinking the same thing.”

  Chapter 18

  “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BOO Boo Bear,” Marcy sang as her overly perfumed, pantsuited body breezed into the house to celebrate Bo turning one. The air trailing behind her became instantly heavy and sticky with the scent of orchids and gladiolas. I’d always hated her perfume, because it reminded me of a funeral parlor, which frankly was where I’d hoped she’d be the next time we met. This was just not my year.

  Even now, even after Owen and I divorced, and I didn’t have to pretend to be happy to spend every other Christmas with her, Marcy was difficult to be around. I tried for a long time to develop some kind of relationship with her where we would talk, or text, but she never once reached out to me. She loved her son, and her grandson, but she would’ve preferred that a stork had dropped Bo on Owen’s doorstep than have to suffer through the horror of having me as a daughter-in-law. Owen’s sister, Chloe, moved to California after college, realized that her East Coast mother was bat-shit crazy, and never came home. I always liked Chloe, though I never got to know her very well. I liked to think we would’ve been friends if I’d had more time with the family, if Owen hadn’t decided to trade me in for a different woman, like a car whose lease had come due after you’d put a few thousand miles on it and dented the fender.

  If Marcy felt awkward at this being our first meeting since Owen and I divorced, she didn’t show it. She removed her white purse straps from her bony shoulder and handed her purse to me in one smooth motion as she
continued past me into the kitchen, treating me more like a coat-check girl than her former daughter-in-law. I opened the closet next to the basement stairs, hoping that Marcy didn’t notice the vacuum cleaner hose fall on me before I was able to stuff her purse next to my winter coats, the tablecloths for the dining room table that I would probably never use, and various cleaning supplies. I’d done my best to clean the house for the party, refusing to let Antonia lift a finger, because I wanted everyone to see that I had it all under control—everyone being Marcy, Antonia, Lissy, Owen, and Bo. I also wanted to send a video of the cake and the decorations and the clean house to my mother, who was apparently buying my brainwashing, and while it was kind of scary to realize how easily you can fake your life through pictures, it was kind of awesome to realize that you can totally fake your life through pictures.

  I tried my hardest to make sure that Bo felt special on his birthday. I tied blue balloons to the lamppost outside because I wanted the neighbors to know that once upon a time I was a nice, normal person who had friends, and family, and would’ve been able to invite actual guests to a birthday party. I bought Bo some Lego Duplos, a few new puzzles, a stuffed Elmo hand puppet, and a toy elephant that blew plastic balls out of his trunk if you pressed a button on his foot. I wrapped them in paper covered with monkeys and bananas, and tied them with bright yellow bows. Antonia made him pancakes for breakfast, and we piled them high and drenched them with syrup and lit a sparkly candle on top of the stack. We took pictures while he stared at the candle, and then again when he attacked his pancakes, even though he only ate one and threw the rest on the floor. We sang “Happy Birthday” to him, and hugged him, and kissed him, and reminded him that he was the best little boy to ever crawl on this earth. That’s what you do when your only son turns one. Now that it was time for the makeshift family party I felt confident that it would be like every other little boy’s birthday party, complete with pizza, balloons, a Carvel ice cream cake, royal blue paper cups and plates that I’d gotten to match the balloons, and parents who would rather not be in the same room with each other.