“You shouldn’t buy this for me,” I said, the lightness of the margarita now feeling very far away, and instead, my head was starting to feel dull, achy.
“I’m not trying to rush you,” he said. “But I saw the way you were this weekend. You were so great. That’s all I was trying to tell you before.” He paused. “Just let me buy this for you as a promise, a reminder. A someday.”
“Okay,” I agreed softly. “A someday.”
Between the margaritas and the weekend, Will looked exhausted when we got home. He lay down on the bed, fully dressed, and fell right to sleep that way for the second night in a row. I took my time in the bathroom, examining my face for something as I brushed my teeth. I wanted to see it there, something in my eyes, something that told me I could be someone’s mother. But I only saw what I always did, green eyes, a little tired, a few new crow’s-feet. I stared too hard for too long, searching for something, and the glare from the bathroom lights started to hurt my eyes, started to make my own image feel too bright, unreal, so I had to look away.
I slipped under the covers and turned away from Will. I felt him shift, lean toward me, and put his arm around me. He mumbled something in his sleep. My eyes were too heavy to really wonder what it was, to wonder if he was trying to tell me that he loved me.
And just before I drifted off to sleep, I thought about Kelly’s lilacs.
I was standing in Kelly’s house. There was noise everywhere, colors, light, music. The sound of the bathwater splashing. I looked down and saw the splashing right in front of me: Caleb and Jack playing with a boat. Hannah deliberately slapping her hands on the water, soaking the front of my shirt. My head was pounding from the noise, the light, the sound of the word Mom over and over and over.
The world skipped, like a broken record.
And then there was silence. I was sitting in the dark in the rocking chair in Hannah’s room with Hannah on my breast, sucking quietly and softly. This feeling overtook me, an overwhelming exhaustion, and then, when I looked down at Hannah, her pudgy soft little cheeks, puffing in and out and swallowing, there was something else. This overpowering sense of love, an emotion that filled up so heavily in my chest that I felt it swell, that I felt it about to burst.
When I woke up the next morning, I got out of bed and found the figurine Will had bought for me the night before. The perfect family. I sat there just staring at it for a few minutes, just imagining what it might feel like to have that love from the dream, to have it forever, and not have to let it go once you were fully awake.
Twenty
Author D. H. Lawrence once said, “I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.” I know this because, sitting home alone, with a notebook full of dreams and nothing else to do, I started Googling dreaming. There must be some logical and sensible explanation, I reasoned with myself. Maybe D. H. Lawrence had it right, because my thinking and dreaming became one and the same. I wrote his quote down on a scrap of paper, and left it sitting by the side of my computer. Which came first, I wondered, the chicken or the egg? The dreams or the thoughts?
I heard a ringing sound from far away, and after it came again, a second time, I realized it was the doorbell. I peeked out the window to see who it was. There, standing on the front stoop, her hair sticking out from under a red wool cap, her body swathed in a long red peacoat, was Lisa.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember the last dream I’d had of her, and it came to me only in pieces. She’d been baking cookies, crying into the batter. I heard the doorbell ring again, and I ran downstairs to get it.
“Hi.” She held up a red-gloved hand and waved. I noticed she was holding a tin in her other hand. “I brought you these,” she said. Hanukkah cookies, I remembered. “Hanukkah cookies,” she said.
“I know,” I said. I closed my eyes, and I remembered the Star of David cookie cutter sitting on her counter. The tears that rolled down her face as she cut out little dreidel shapes, and I knew that I had an answer to D. H. Lawrence’s question. My thoughts were a result of my dreams.
“You know?”
“I guessed,” I said, and then quickly added, “Don’t you make these every year?”
She shook her head, “No, I don’t think—”
I cut her off. “Do you want to come in?” She looked surprised, as if she hadn’t been expecting this, me, to be nice, as if maybe she’d expected me to slam the door in her face. And maybe I would’ve, if I hadn’t known, if I hadn’t been on the outside of her world looking in, enough to understand her, to feel her literal pain. If I hadn’t understood it so completely that I wanted to reach over and hug her, despite everything else that had happened.
I had Lisa sit down at the kitchen table, and then I made some coffee and arranged the Hanukkah cookies on a plate. They were awful-looking—dreidels that were amorphous blobs, menorahs that looked more like crumpled fists. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Hanukkah cookies before,” I said. At least not like these, I silently added.
“Oh, well, for Chance and Chester’s school. They have a multicultural holiday day. Cookies for everything. Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa.” She waved her hand in the air. “Anyway, I had some extras, and I thought of you.”
I nodded, handed her a cup of coffee, and put the plate of cookies between us, though neither one of us moved to take one. Lisa and I had been the only two Jewish women in the Ladies Lunch Club, so what she said made sense. But I could feel that it was not the real reason for her visit. I stared at her, waiting for her to say whatever it was she’d come to say.
“How are you doing?” she finally said.
“I’m okay,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee. The truth was, I didn’t exactly feel okay, though I couldn’t really put my finger on why. I guessed it was the dreams, the way they hung around in my brain all the time, strange half-truths. “How are you doing?” I asked.
She shrugged, picked up a cookie, and stared at it for a minute before taking a bite, and then said, “Look, I feel terrible about what happened. About my part in it. No one deserves that. You don’t deserve that.” She sounded nothing like Lisa the prosecutor, or the doubles partner, the one so eager to fit in at the club, or the one who cried into her cookie dough. She seemed both sure of herself and remorseful, and it occurred to me that as I’d dreamed about her, I’d already begun to forgive her. She seemed to take my silence as her cue to keep on talking. “You know, I never told you this, but Barry got sued for malpractice once. Back when we lived in New York. It got out, and no one wanted to go to him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling genuinely bad for her. “That must’ve been awful.”
“It was,” she said. “But his insurance settled the claim, we moved here a few months later, and that was the end of it.”
I tried to imagine Barry and Lisa being ostracized the way Will and I had been, and I wondered if that’s why Lisa always tried so hard to fit in, because she knew what it was like to be me, to be the outsider. “The truth is, Jen, tennis has been unbearable without you. Tummy Tuck and her lipstick and her perfect little ass and her perfect little daughter. It’s enough to drive any normal woman insane.” She reached out for my hand. “I miss you. And this”—she picked up a lopsided Star of David with her other hand and held it out to me—“is my lame attempt at an apology. If you can forgive me.”
I nodded, and I took the cookie, her peace offering. “I miss you, too,” I said, the words gushing out of me, a relief. She leaned in and hugged me across the table, and she smelled like ginger and roses, a scent I associated with playing tennis, with fitting in, being a part of something.
“Oh God.” She laughed when she pulled back. “Bethany and Amber spent forty-five minutes talking about their boobs yesterday. Forty-five minutes!” I imagined them standing there in the locker room at the club, lipsticks in hand. “Amber thinks hers are uneven.”
“Time for another boob job,” I said, realizing that I really did
n’t miss it at all, that locker room.
“I know, right?” She laughed again, but then she stopped laughing, and her face grew serious, dark.
“You should quit tennis,” I whispered.
“Oh, Jen.” She sighed.
“I’ve been going running,” I said. “You should come with me sometime.”
“Running?” She chuckled.
“We can jog,” I said. “Or walk.” She hesitated, and then I knew what it was. Lisa might have missed me, but she wasn’t willing to give up her life, her own social standing. “I’ve been going to this park in Oak Glen, by my sister’s house. It’s nice there. No one knows who I am. You won’t run into any of the other ladies from the lunch club. It’s just a bunch of Oak Glen moms with strollers.”
She thought for a moment, and then she nodded. “Okay,” she said.
The next morning it was thirty-six degrees outside, but I bundled up in my parka, a hat, scarf, and gloves, and met Lisa in the parking lot of Oak Glen park. When I got there, she was sitting in her blue minivan waiting for me, and when she stepped out, I saw she was wearing a bright orange ski coat and matching hat and gloves.
“You know, I haven’t run anywhere since college,” she called to me, her cheeks aglow, maybe from the cold, or maybe because she was excited.
“We can walk,” I said.
“No.” She shook her head.
So we started jogging, down the same path I jogged every morning now, the trail littered with chunky moms and bulky strollers. After five minutes, Lisa was panting, and she stopped and hung her head between her knees. “Maybe we should walk,” she huffed.
I slowed down and started walking with her, letting her set the pace.
We walked for a few minutes in silence, until we passed a woman with a double stroller, her little twins dressed in matching pink snowsuits. “Oh, twins,” Lisa said to the mother. She looked up at us and managed a weary smile. “I have twins, too,” Lisa said.
“Does it get easier?” the mother asked.
No, I thought.
“Yes,” Lisa said, and I wondered, if this was easier, what had she felt like before? “A little bit. It does. Mine are in kindergarten now.”
“Oh,” the woman said. “It’s nice to know you made it. That someone survived.”
Lisa nodded, and then we kept on walking. “Poor thing,” Lisa said. “She doesn’t even realize.”
“Doesn’t even realize what?” I asked, wanting to know, this secret Lisa knew that the new mother did not.
“I haven’t survived anything,” she said. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so we kept on walking in silence. “Are you and Will ever going to have kids?” she said after a few minutes.
“Maybe.” I paused. “He wants to,” I said. Someday.
“And you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, you’re always the one who told me not to, who told me it would ruin me.”
“Oh, Jen,” she said, wiping sudden tears off her face with her mittened hand. “It’s so much more complicated than that. So, so much more.”
“What do you mean?” But either she didn’t hear me or she didn’t want to answer because she didn’t elaborate, and we walked to the end of the trail in silence, pulling our faces under our scarves, trying to keep warm.
Later that night, the herbs having washed an enormous sense of calm over me, Will snoring lightly next to me, I closed my eyes and thought about Lisa, thought about what it was about having children that had made her life so hard, and what about it hadn’t.
I was cold, sitting half naked on the examining table, a thin paper sheet covering my legs. “Hello, Lisa,” the doctor said, as she walked into the room. “Howare you feeling today?” A petite blond-haired woman whose smile was tight and fake. I suddenly hated her, though I’d been seeing her for years, since I was pregnant with Chance and Chester.
“Fine,” I said, the word catching in my throat, feeling like peanut butter on my tongue. “I’m fine. “
“Good.” She nodded. “Lie back so I can have a look.”
I lay against the table, my feet landing clumsily near the stirrups, and I knew that there was something wrong. I could feel it in my stomach, in the way it turned and ached. The smell of alcohol and Lysol nauseated me.
I closed my eyes, and I wasn’t sure whether I felt like crying or screaming. Or just running. Standing up and running out of here before she said it, before she told it to me, coldly and matter-of-factly.
This was the end of something. That much I was sure of.
Twenty-one
Iwoke up in the morning, sweating profusely, the feel of the doctor’s table against my back still so vivid that for a moment, when I opened my eyes, I was surprised to find myself in my own bed.
“I’ll stop home for lunch today,” Will called from the doorway as he hurried to leave. “I have an appointment over here at eleven.”
“Okay,” I said, my words sounding far away and dulled, blurry, the way they had in the dream. “I’ll see you then.”
When he left, I rolled over and closed my eyes, and I willed it to leave, willed that image of the doctor’s office, the feel of it, to go away. But it wouldn’t. Maybe because it was something that was always right there, always right near the surface for me. Maybe part of what Ethel said about dreams being a window into the subconscious was right after all. Though I’d dreamed of Lisa, that person in the dream could’ve been me: Five years ago, she was me.
Nearly six months to the day after I’d met Will, I’d found the lump: a tiny little squishy thing no bigger than a pea. I found it in the shower, and I tumbled out in tears. “I’m going to die,” I announced. Will stood there, half of his face covered in shaving cream, looking alarmed.
Will went with me to see Dr. Horowitz, who said it was probably nothing, but that they would biopsy it, just to be sure, just because of my family history. Will took the day off work to take me to the biopsy.
And there I was, in the hospital gown, in the cold, cold room, lying back against the table, smelling the putrid alcohol smell.
When it was over, after the needle had punctured my anesthetized and freezing flesh, after I’d gotten dressed, I’d wandered out of the room in a state of shock that felt something akin to frostbite, where you are so, so cold that you are numb; suddenly, there was no feeling left.
Will walked toward me and pulled me into a hug, and then he whispered into my ear. “Marry me, Jen.”
“What?” It was something I thought he might ask me, someday. Someday on a beach, on a hillside, over a romantic dinner at Il Romano. Not then, not like that.
“You heard me. I want you to marry me.”
“Will, I don’t know.” I pulled back. “I might die,” I said.
“No,” he said. “You won’t. I won’t let you. It’s all going to turn out to be nothing.” And it sounded like he actually believed it, that he was big enough, important enough, to be able to pull this off.
“Even if it is nothing this time, it might not be next time. I’m damaged goods,” I said.
“Jen,” he said. “I love you, no matter what.” He paused. “I want to be with you.” He held me with his eyes, oceanic in depth and color. “Forever.”
“Forever,” I promised back, leaning into him, thinking that forever was not such a long time for a girl who might be dying.
The lump did turn out to be nothing. Just a scare, Dr. Horowitz called two days later to report. But it’s good to keep on top of it. Be cautious. He recommended I start getting yearly mammograms and breast MRIs even though I was only twenty-seven at the time. Early detection is so important.
When I told Will, he wanted to celebrate, and he poured us both a glass of wine. “You can take it back now,” I whispered to him, three glasses later, as I lay against him on the couch. “I’m not dying.” Yet, I silently added. Not yet.
As an answer, he kissed me; his lips pressed so hard against mine that it felt like he wanted something from me, needed something.
His hands rushed across my body, barely skimming my breasts before he was lifting my skirt up, on top of me, inside me.
Afterward I lay there and I wondered if Will had proposed because he really wanted to marry me, or if, in some way, he only wanted to save me, wanted to save me in a way that he hadn’t been able to save his parents. And I wondered if I only said yes because I wanted him to, wanted to be saved, because before Will, no one had bothered to try saving me.
The phone rang, startling me out of my half sleep. I saw Lisa’s name on the caller ID and picked it up. “Are you running today?” she asked.
I glanced at the clock and saw it was already after nine.“Shit,” I said. “I overslept.” Then I realized it was Wednesday. “Don’t you have tennis?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I just felt like running today.” She paused. “But don’t worry about it. We’ll go another time. I should’ve called you first.”
“You’re at the park?” I pictured her standing outside, shivering, waiting for me.
“I just thought you went every day.”
“I do,” I said, thinking of her on that cold, cold doctor’s table and feeling terrible that she was waiting out in that freezing parking lot, all alone. “I can be there in twenty minutes,” I said. “If you want to wait.”
“There’s a Starbucks across the street. I’ll go over and get some coffee,” she said.
Lisa was still sitting inside the Starbucks, nursing her cup of coffee, when I arrived, so I went inside to join her. I’d left the house so quickly that I hadn’t had time for my coffee, and now I needed it. My head was hurting, and everything felt a little blurry still.
“You okay?” Lisa said. “You seem a little out of it. Are you sick?”
Sick. I shook my head. But maybe I was, on the verge of some kind of flu, or, a possibility that sunk in my chest, something worse. Maybe that’s why I’d been feeling so strange lately. “I don’t think I slept very well,” I said, explaining the feeling away to both her and myself. “I had a weird dream.”
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