The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

  Sophie, who works as an assistant to the deputy editor for La Belle, a general-interest magazine for young women, has been assigned during her confinement to read unsolicited manuscripts—stories that ordinary people send from everywhere, hoping they will get printed in the magazine. Most of them don’t have a chance, but Sophie’s job is to read them and decide if they should get seen by an editor. It could be a discouraging job, having to dash so many people’s hopes, but some of the stories are funny and touching, and she’ll often read paragraphs aloud to me while I paint.

  These manuscripts get brought to her each week by Christina, another assistant from the office, who will often stay and have tea with us. She’s charming and quirky, and I love how she gets Sophie laughing about the office gossip and politics. Soon she becomes a regular for dinner, which is good because we get sick of ourselves sometimes and need new life to be brought in from the outside.

  “You have to be careful around my mom,” Sophie tells her, and slides her eyes over to me. “My mom has this talent—I guess you could call it a talent—for adopting people. You’ll talk with her for five minutes and she’ll get you to tell her all your secrets, and by the end of the night she’ll know everything about you.”

  “Sophie, that is so untrue,” I say, laughing.

  “Nobody knows how she does it.”

  Christina laughs and says she has no secrets, which is of course not so, and pretty soon she and Sophie and I are talking about men and bosses and living in New York, and how you know when you’re happy, and whether men experience happiness the same way women do—which are all fascinating subjects. Not long after that, Lori and her roommate, Tara, start coming up, too, and in the evenings we have something of a salon. We all gather on the bed and on pillows on the floor, knitting and talking and laughing and eating.

  Everybody has man trouble of one sort or another—there are men who are noncommittal, and men who are too clingy, and men who leave wet towels on the floor and who are also too clingy, and then, of course, men who have chosen to go to Brazil—and I love how we sift through the layers of feeling, telling stories, trying to explain the mysteries that can’t be explained. I feel as though I’ve been doing this all my life.

  “How is it that you can know for sure that you don’t love somebody anymore, but then when you hear he’s getting married all of a sudden you want to throw yourself out the window?” asked Lori one night.

  “It’s just wanting what you can’t have,” Christina said. “Human nature.”

  “If you got him back, you wouldn’t really want him,” Sophie said. “Whatever was wrong before would come right back in no time. And you’d just throw him over again.”

  “But what if everything had changed? What if you were wrong before? What if you made the wrong decision?” asked Lori. “How do you know?”

  “My mom’s the one with the happy marriage,” Sophie said. “Ask her how you know.”

  They all looked at me, expectantly, and my throat got clogged and I couldn’t speak. I know less than anyone on this subject.

  ONE DAY Sophie and I are sitting on the bed and I get out my paper and watercolors and start to paint her. I make her look hopeful and radiant. I have noticed that every day she’s getting stronger and happier, except that she always seems to feel down after she and Whit have talked on the phone or after she’s read his e-mails. I don’t think he’s saying things to upset her, but I know that sometimes a man can break your heart worse when he is far away but happy, and you realize how tangential you are to his real life.

  Grant calls her several times a week but does not ever ask to speak to me. And one day he sends a box of Hershey bars with almonds with a note that says: “Just in case you have the same cravings your mom did.”

  “So, I guess you must talk to Dad when you go out to the market or something,” she says once.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I never hear you talking to him. I thought he’d be calling you every day.”

  “Well, he’s pretty busy with his book.”

  “Oh,” she says, and I can feel her looking at me even as I go back to my drawings. I’ve decided that Bobo’s mother’s sweat suit needs just a bit more shading.

  One day while I’m out I call Ava Reiss and let her know that I wish to suspend our therapy sessions for the foreseeable future.

  Making that phone call felt great. “Thank you for all that you’ve gotten me to think about,” I told her voice mail cheerily. “But for now I’m looking forward to simply being with my daughter and living the unexamined life.”

  How lucky it had been not to get Ava Reiss herself on the phone. She does not believe in the virtues of the unexamined life. She would have said, “But Annabelle, we have to explore the fact that you said you don’t want to be married anymore. What about that?”

  Maybe she wouldn’t have said that, I don’t know. I am on vacation from my marriage to Grant; from his silences; from our dark, cold house; from missing my mother; from the way the wind blows against the siding on the north side of the house and makes a howling sound and the way the snowpack builds up on the shady part of the driveway; from feeling that I constantly need to lose ten pounds and make lunch dates with my friends so I can hear of the demise of their marriages and their fears for the future; and from that feeling of dread I have just under my breastbone each morning when I wake up.

  Sophie and her friends are women who have been disappointed by men, but I can tell they are sure that this is only a temporary state; they believe that love will come and transform them. Men will start behaving correctly, or new men will come and carry them to a time when they won’t be confused or disappointed again.

  But then there is Lori’s question: “What if he was the one, and I’ve missed him and can’t get him back? Will I always have to live in uncertainty?”

  That would be the worst thing, they all agree: living with uncertainty.

  ONE DAY I’m working on my watercolor of Sophie, complete with pink cheeks and tendrilly hair, looking like the epitome of young, healthy impending motherhood, and she says, “Will you paint a picture of the lima bean?”

  She means the baby. She’s been calling it a lima bean, or a baked bean, or just Beanie. “You mean … from the ultrasound picture?” I am trying to think how this could possibly work. A portrait of someone curled up like a Cheeto?

  “No, no.” She waves her hand. “The way you imagine her to look. A portrait of our fantasy of her. When she gets born.”

  “Um, excuse me. Back up just a second. Did you say … her?”

  She laughs and squeezes her knees. “Oh, did I?”

  “Sophie! Is that true? Oh my God! Beanie is a girl?”

  She nods, and her eyes fill with tears even though she’s smiling. “She is. I’m having a girl. I just found out. That day …”

  I put down my paintbrush and go over and hug her. “Oh, baby! Oh, my goodness! A daughter? This is so exciting! Wow, wow. What did Whit say when you told him?”

  “Um, I haven’t told him yet.”

  “No? Not yet? You’re waiting for just the right moment.”

  “Yeah, and the right moment will be when he’s here and the doctor is handing her to him.”

  I laugh. “Really? Wow, you have a lot of self-control. I’d probably not want to tell him, but then I’d be on the phone blurting it out.”

  “No,” she says, still smiling, but it’s furious, chin-thrust-out smiling. In a moment, she could cry again. “It’s not self-control. I just don’t want to tell him. This is knowledge that is just mine, all mine—and well, now yours, too.”

  I hug myself. “A girl! A little girl. I can’t get over it.” I sit on the bed next to her and hold her, and I can’t help it, I think of my mother—this whole chain of women we’re making, how far it stretches into the past and how much further it will go into the future. My mother would have loved to have been here for this moment. It’s almost as though she knew it would arrive. One day not long befo
re she died I was visiting her in the nursing home, and we sat together in the sunroom, talking. She’d been divorced from my father for years by then, and had had a decade-long happy marriage to a man she met at a singles dance, who died one day of a stroke when he was taking out the garbage. After a few years on her own, she’d moved to a retirement community in New Hampshire to be near us. We sat looking out through the huge floor-to-ceiling windows. There wasn’t any sun, just snow heaped up on the pond outside, but it was beautiful just the same, we agreed. Not a California beachy kind of beautiful, but still, filled with the kind of scenic wonder you might see on a calendar on the January page. How in the world, I had asked her, had we California women been transplanted to a winter worthy of the January page?

  And that’s when she shook her head and said, “All because of Grant—a man we didn’t even know for most of our lives. We couldn’t have predicted it. You being here. Of course, looking back, it was the thing that had to happen, but you’re so far away from what I thought your life would be.” She adjusted the turban she’d taken to wearing since her hair had fallen out. “And it’ll be that way for you and Sophie, too. You won’t recognize who she becomes. You know that, right?”

  I squeezed her hand, too choked up just then to speak. She said, “I just hope she has a little girl so she can know what it’s like to be challenged every day of your life, the way we’ve been.” And we both laughed.

  See? says Ava Reiss in my head. You think you can go on vacation from the unexamined life, but you really can’t.

  I turn and tell Sophie, whom I still recognize just fine, “You know what I think we should do in view of this new knowledge? I think we should get ourselves on the computer and order us some pink outfits. And a white wicker bassinet with ruffles.”

  She looks uncertain, but then she says, “That’ll be so much fun. I guess it’s really real, isn’t it, when you know this is a person who actually has a gender. You realize you’re going to have to buy her stuff.”

  I pick up her laptop from the floor by the bed and together we sit and cruise all the cool baby sites. We buy little onesies and stretchy suits with farm animals on them, bath towels and some newborn pajamas, little knitted booties, blankets, and hats. It’s a riot of fun. And then—click—we purchase a bassinet, the kind that comes with a canopy and gingham bumpers. Laughing, Sophie says she doesn’t know where she’ll put all this stuff when it arrives.

  But you have to have things for the baby, I tell her. And besides that, there’s always room. You make room, is what you do.

  IN THE game of chicken that Grant and I are apparently playing, he is the one who gives in first and finally calls me. This is a major triumph, of course. He has never liked long, involved phone conversations, and now he sounds like somebody who has a list of talking points in front of him. He ticks them off. He has a cold. Chapter six is giving him fits. His knees are stiff. It’s just snowed. The oil delivery guy came today. How am I? What is Sophie doing? How is the weather in New York? Do I get out much? What does the doctor say?

  I answer him in a careful voice that is devoid of any anger or passion. I say I’m sorry about his cold, his chapter, and his knees, but then I don’t rush to fill the silences, as I would have done before I took a vacation from dealing with him. While I’m talking, I take a notepad and sketch a picture of Sophie’s bedroom, the bedside table with our cups of tea and a plate of brownies next to the lamp.

  I tell him that Sophie is fine. She had an ultrasound last week, and everything seems to be going well. No more bleeding.

  “Oh,” he says. “So I suppose that’s made her feel better.”

  “Yes, every day that goes by, she’s getting stronger.”

  “Good, very good.” Silence. “And is she feeling well?”

  “Would you like to speak with her?”

  “No, no, that’s fine. I talked to her earlier today. I just wanted to see how things were going with you and see if you need anything.”

  “Not a thing. We’re fine.”

  Long silence.

  He says, “Well, then I’ll hang up now and get back to work.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh! Yeah. I was thinking, though … maybe for spring break, you know … maybe Nick and I could take a drive and come see you and Sophie.”

  “Oh. That would be good, I guess. If you’re far enough along on your book.”

  He laughs a little. “Well, I won’t be. But I should come and see her. And you. Before the baby comes, you know.”

  “When is that?”

  He laughs. “Well, who knows when babies come? Don’t they have their own timetable that nobody really knows?”

  I stay silent.

  He clears his throat. “Bad joke. You mean when is spring break? Don’t worry. It’s two weeks from now. This is just advance planning.”

  “Okay, then. Sounds nice.”

  “Okay. Well, we’ll talk. So … good-bye, then.”

  “Bye.”

  “I do love you, Annabelle.”

  “Yes. Me, too, you. Good night.” I click my phone closed and look up to see Sophie staring at me with wide eyes.

  “What?” I say.

  “Oh, nothing.” She gets busy smoothing out the covers and yawns and stretches. Then, after a few minutes, she says, “Um, are you and Dad mad at each other?”

  I smile at her. I am still trying to be a good example. “No. You know how he hates talking on the phone.”

  She laughs. “Well, that’s true. He definitely is an in-person kind of guy,” she says, but she looks uncertain. “Still, I thought he wouldn’t be able to stand having you out of his sight. I thought he’d be calling you every night.”

  I can’t help but laugh at that idea. “To tell you the truth, Sophie, I think he’s a little relieved to be alone these days. He’s really working hard on his book. And also, he knows you and I are having good bonding time. I think he doesn’t want to interrupt us.”

  She rubs her mound of belly and yawns. “He’s such a good guy. You know?”

  “Mmmm.”

  “So what’s this book of his about anyway? He hasn’t even told me about it.”

  I tell her the short version, that it’s the labor history of a factory, about a time when the factory shut down at the turn of the century, and how the workers all mounted a protest and took it over and kept it going so they wouldn’t lose their jobs. He’s doing the first comprehensive study of this shutdown and its results, interviewing the sons and daughters of some of the workers …

  “Wow, that sounds fascinating,” she says. “And this is the first study of it? And the book is going to get published and make him rich?”

  “I don’t know about rich, but it’s certainly going to be published. And the thing is, it looks like he’s going to be named acting chair of the department in the fall, so he wants to fin—”

  She frowns. “Why? What happened to Mr. Winstanley?”

  “Well, it’s been the gossip of the whole year, actually. I can’t believe I didn’t tell you. He left his wife and married a grad student, and they’re—”

  “What? He married a student? Jen’s dad married a student?”

  I had forgotten somehow that Jennifer Winstanley was in the same class as Sophie. That’s the trouble with small towns; there are a million connections you have to keep track of. Everybody’s in on everything in some way you aren’t able to remember.

  “Well, yes, a grad student, and they’re—”

  “Oh my God. Mr. Winstanley? That is the ickiest thing I have ever heard of. Ewww. He married one of his students?”

  “Actually, she wasn’t his student. He met her at a conference, I heard, and then she transferred to the college, and they fell in love, and then when he realized he had feelings for her, he got divorced.”

  “Poor Jen! And her mom is so nice! God, I can’t believe he left Mrs. Winstanley after all those years because he got the hots for some student. That is so sickening I think I’m going to barf right here.�
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  “Sophie, come on. You know this kind of thing happens. It’s practically a cliché it’s so common.”

  “Not to people like the Winstanleys! He was a strict, upstanding guy. I always thought he was nice when I’d go over their house.”

  “Over to their house. You didn’t go over their house; you’d be in midair.”

  This old line does not distract her from her outrage; in this, she’s exactly like all the faculty women. We all want to hear the details and then to express the mighty outrage. We all love the drama of the situation, and of course, the delicious opportunity to pity poor Mary Lou.

  “God. You hear stuff like this and it’s enough to make you hate men. You know? You don’t hear of women doing this—deciding when they’re middle-aged that they’ve just had enough of their husbands. What is with these guys?”

  “It happens both ways,” I say lamely. “People change, they get bored, they see that their lives are drifting away and they’re not happy, they feel trapped … who knows what it is?”

  She stares at me. “I can’t believe you’re defending him!” She throws a wadded-up Kleenex at me. “He’s a jerk.”

  “Well, no, I’m not defending him. I’m just saying that it’s simplistic to assume there’s just that way of looking at the story. There are always more sides to these things than it looks like on the outside. And people change; their needs change …”

  “Yeah, Clark Winstanley changed, all right. He changed into a letch. And you can defend him all you want, but you know that Dad would never, ever do this kind of thing. He just wouldn’t. You must know that. I bet not many women can say they feel that sure of their husbands.”

  She says this accusingly, as though I’ve had it too easy. Unearned security or something. I want to say something more about complexity and about all the ways marriages fail, but she’s a woman with a husband far away, and I can tell she can’t hear it now. And God knows I don’t want to upset her. When you’re scared for your life, there is comfort in at least being on the right side of the moral divide.