The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

  He stares at her, and then I see him getting interested. He walks carefully over to the bed and leans down. “Wow, look at that thing. It’s big. Can I touch it? Does it move? I mean, I know it moves. But can you make it move for me?”

  “It’s not an it, it’s a she. And, yeah, she moves when she wants to. Here, touch right here. Feel that? I think that’s the knee. She has very bony knees.”

  He reaches a tentative hand over to her abdomen.

  “Press hard,” she tells him. “She’s deep down in there, you know. She doesn’t just hang out on top all the time.” I can see how pleased she is at his interest. “Here. Feel that? Ooh, she just kicked. Did you feel it?”

  He sits back on his heels and looks at her with shining eyes. “That is so bizarre,” he says. “Is it the weirdest feeling ever, having somebody kicking you from the inside? Wow. Like, she lives there. She thinks you’re her whole house!”

  “I know,” says Sophie. “Believe me, she thinks she owns the place.”

  Grant, standing over by the door with his arms folded, looks at me and smiles. I know what he’s thinking—he’s remembering the time when I was pregnant with Sophie and lying against the couch cushions with a plate propped on my belly while I ate a sandwich and read a book, and Sophie suddenly gave a huge kick and the plate went spinning across the glass coffee table, landing so hard it cracked it. After that, he had called her Killer, and after she was born, I said he had to stop with the mean nickname. Of course, he couldn’t; eventually I had had to fine him a dollar every time he referred to her that way.

  Then—is he remembering this, too?—years later, when we were watching her streak victoriously down the field, kicking a soccer ball toward a goal while both her own teammates and the members of the opposing team stood stunned and immobile in her wake, he had leaned over and whispered to me, “My God, she honed that kick in the womb. She really is Killer.”

  We smile at each other now. He mouths the word “Killer,” and I laugh. It’s a nice moment. We’re all together in this tiny apartment, and none of us is fighting. Nicky, in fact, has stretched out on the bed next to Sophie and he’s taken over the television remote while keeping one hand resting respectfully on Sophie’s abdomen, which he’s calling “Beanie’s house.” He clicks over to a Nickelodeon special, something they both remember from childhood, and for a brief minute, they are laughing together. Grant and I step over the duffel bags and the jackets and hats and boots and paraphernalia, and go to the living room/kitchen-on-one-wall area, where he pours us glasses of wine and talks to me while I make pizza for dinner.

  THEY STAY for five days, and really we do just fine, the four of us. Okay, we do pretty well. It’s a little bit like old times, the good and the bad all mixed up together. We sit up in Sophie’s bed with her and play Scrabble and Monopoly and scooch in all together and watch movies at night. I cook all their old favorites, even in this one-horse kitchen: pot roast and lasagna and an apple crumb pie. We make picnics and eat in the bed with a tablecloth flung over the bedspread.

  Bad things: Nicky gets restless and we send him out on errands and to explore the city, and he stays gone too long and doesn’t answer his cell phone. We’re up half the night worrying about him before he returns, and then Grant says this is exactly why he has to go back to college next semester, so we can be sure where he is.

  There’s another bad moment one afternoon when Sophie talks to Whit on the phone, and she’s obviously getting emotional and trying not to cry, and Grant gets so exasperated listening to her side of the conversation that he has to leave the room.

  Good things: Grant, always a sucker for pregnant women, takes care of Sophie, bringing her whatever little thing she wants, and some things she didn’t even know that she wanted, like a photography book about gestation, with gorgeous pictures of fetuses. He also assembles the mail-order bassinet we bought, whistling lullabies while he works. He even likes looking at all the baby outfits and teases Sophie about names he’d like her to consider: Grantina, Grantette, and Grantaluna are his top choices.

  The best thing: The night before he and Nicky are to go back, Grant and I go out to a restaurant together, just the two of us. Nicky agrees to stay home with Sophie, and when we leave, the two of them are in the bed, watching television and eating take-out Chinese food.

  Grant and I walk down to Seventeenth Street to a restaurant I have passed many times and always wanted to go into. It’s cozy and warm in there, with a jazz quartet in the back, and we sit knee to knee in our little booth, and we talk. We’re wary at first, but then the warmth, the wine, and just the fact that we’ve been apart for so long soften the edges of the conversation. He says the book is going fine, ahead of schedule actually, and that Clark has now announced to everyone that Grant is going to be the department chair. He’s lonely, though, he says. The winter has dragged on, and he’s run out of nearly everything in the house at least four times, including clean underwear. He’s had to start washing underwear every day in the shower and hanging it to dry for the following day.

  “You do remember where we keep the washing machine? You’ve lived in that house since you were a baby,” I say, and he laughs. He can’t remember all the stuff he needs to buy. He’s been out of laundry detergent since week three.

  “So let’s change this horrible subject. Tell me this: what have you been doing since you’ve been here?” he wants to know. “Do you just hang out in the apartment all the time?”

  “Mostly,” I say. “I mean, I go to the market every day, and sometimes I go and sit in the park.”

  “It’s scaring me a little, how much you like it here,” he says, but he’s smiling.

  “I do like it. I always did like living in New York. I mean, I like New Hampshire, too, but sometimes I think …”

  “What?” he says. He leans closer.

  “Just that New Hampshire was best for me when we had kids at home. We had the whole community around us then. I felt as though we were part of something. Now—without them, I guess I’ve just lost my footing lately.”

  “Huh! And I thought it was my book that was making you so miserable.”

  “Well, yes. God, yes. The way it sucks you up. But, you know, I think it’s more than that. I was telling my therapist that I feel as though I got fired from my job.”

  He smiles and looks right at me. “You didn’t get fired. You did it right, and got promoted.”

  “That’s what she said. I just have to figure something else out, that’s all. Being here has shown me that I need more contact with the outside world, and not just with the other faculty wives. I mean, I like them fine, but the other day when I handed in my book, I took the subway and went to the publisher’s office, and that’s when I realized what I’ve been missing. Colleagues.”

  “Colleagues,” he says.

  “Yes. I haven’t got it all figured out yet, but I’m thinking that Sophie is going to need some help with the baby, and maybe I can go back and forth—you know, spend some time here each month. I could talk to my editor about taking on a series …”

  “Will I be included in this new life of yours?” he says.

  “Play your cards right, mister, and you could be,” I say.

  We walk back to Sophie’s, hand in hand, in the spring night. When we get to the door, he pulls me over and kisses me. “How many Wednesdays do you figure we’ve missed out on by now?”

  “Grant, honey, don’t take this the wrong way, but I think when I get back we need to suspend the Wednesday program.”

  He makes his eyes go round with mock alarm. “What are you saying? No more sex?”

  “No more scheduled sex. I want spontaneous sex. When it doesn’t feel like part of a to-do list. ‘Clean gutters. Recaulk bathtub. Have sex with Annabelle.’”

  He thinks about this, stroking my face and smiling. “I only did it for you, so at least you’d know that no matter how busy I got, we’d have that time.”

  “Well, thanks but no thanks. You know what I mean? I
might want it three times a week sometimes. I may want it three times in one day!”

  “Now that could be a problem,” he says, and laughs.

  He’s standing close and pressing against me, smiling. He’s looser than I remember. And he smells good.

  “You know what?” I say. “I like you this way.”

  “What way?”

  “When you miss me. When you’re not looking at me like I’m just some impediment to keep you from writing your book.”

  He laughs. “I do miss you. Even all your crazy conversations about people’s sex lives. Speaking of which, do you suppose there’s any way of maybe celebrating the demise of our Wednesday morning sex program … now? Before I leave?”

  But of course there isn’t, short of the radical act of going to a hotel. Hard to do with grown children paying attention to your every move. The fact is, with the way this apartment is configured, I have had to sleep in the bed with Sophie, and Grant and Nicky have had to take the sofa bed in the living room. So instead, we kiss long and hard in the lobby, and for once he doesn’t even seem to mind that people rushing by on the sidewalk can look in and see everything.

  LATER, I wish we’d taken the radical step of going to a hotel. I wish we’d gone to a hotel, and then Grant had just vaporized himself back to New Hampshire.

  The next morning, before they leave for the drive back, I wake up early and make a breakfast of scrambled eggs with spinach and feta cheese, tomatoes, and toast.

  I’m so preoccupied with cooking and bringing things into the bedroom for our last picnic breakfast that I almost don’t realize as I’m going back and forth that Sophie is smiling and talking about me. Why hadn’t it occurred to me that this might happen? That this would come up?

  “Poor Mom,” she’s saying when I come in with the pot of coffee. “She’s been so lonely here with just me to manage, after she’s been accustomed to all her waifs and strays.”

  “Please,” I say. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I’ve been fine. More than fine.”

  “I’m shocked she hasn’t been able to find any waifs and strays in New York,” says Grant, smiling. “Are you telling me nobody in this building needs her services? Nobody on the subway, even?”

  “Well, actually,” Sophie says. “Some of my girlfriends came by at first to get counseled about their bad boyfriends. And oh, wait. She did find herself one waif on her own—actually an old friend of yours! Boy, is he a sad sack if there ever was one! He should be nominated the quintessential waif and stray for all times.”

  I can hear little noises coming from deep in my throat. No, I am thinking. Nooooo.

  But everything seems to go in slow motion, like the seconds before the car crashes, the windshield cracks, the high chair with the baby in it drops to the floor, the 95 mph baseball meets skull. I have opened my mouth to say something, anything, but she’s already talking.

  “Jeremiah,” she is saying. “His name is Jeremiah. She’s seen him a few times.”

  Right?

  Jeremiah? Your old friend?

  Isn’t that right, Mom?

  [eighteen]

  1981

  I am so sorry. I don’t really have the heart to go back to the past right now, given what has happened. What is there to be said, anyway, about our old life? We went to New Hampshire. We had a couple of kids. The years passed. I got old. I loved my husband but sometimes I dreamed about my former lover. Is that enough?

  Okay, I will try.

  AFTER NEW YORK, life in New Hampshire was a complete shock to my system. For a while we lived in the farmhouse alongside Grant’s very polite but practically silent parents. I didn’t think I would ever be able to adjust to a small town, to the idea of a milkman who didn’t knock but simply came inside and put bottles of milk directly into the refrigerator—and who, if he noticed you were out of eggs, might just leave a dozen there as well without even asking you. And how neighbors here assumed you would always be in the mood for a visit. One day Penelope Granger, who lived on the farm next to ours, stunned me by explaining that everybody in town had the same recipe for pie crust, and nobody could remember where they’d gotten it.

  I was asked to call Grant’s parents Father and Mother McKay. I tried to be on better behavior than I had ever been on in my whole life. I shared cooking responsibilities with his mom, who had a lifelong belief that men deserved three square meals a day just by virtue of being men, and that they shouldn’t be expected to help out at all. Worse, she knew I had broken her son’s heart before, so she was wary around me. She was reserved, and I was “from away.”

  Then one night, I woke in the middle of the night to a shrieking sound, and found her outside trying to chase a fox that had gotten into the chicken coop. Together, in the moonlight in our nightgowns, we scared away the fox and then searched in the shadows for the frightened chicken, which was hiding under the boards of the shed, and brought it back to safety. The next day she and I were chopping onions together for dinner and she said, “Dear, do you think you could ever just call me Mother?”

  When winter came, they left for a condo in Florida, and it felt very much as though the mantle of history had passed down to our generation and that the world was a weaker place for it.

  But then Sophie was born, and life filled up with all that lovely, confusing chaos—crib and stroller and baby powder, breast-feeding and pacifiers and diapers, sleep deprivation and late-night drives in the car to get her to stop crying. She had colic and trouble getting teeth, and for months I wore her on the front of me in a corduroy pack. Women—all ages of them, young and old, from the college and from the farms and from the shops in town—came by to bring dinners and to sweep the floors, to point out that peppermint drops could ease colic and that a baby rocked to sleep near the clothes dryer would sleep longer and more deeply.

  We made friends with other couples, and for a while we were all just entranced with ourselves for this incredible discovery we’d all made: it was possible to create new humans! Along came playdates and couples nights, when we got together at friends’ houses and cooked dinners together. Theme nights: taco night, beef Wellington night, Indian curry night. There were backyard barbecues in the summer. Birthday parties. Trips to the lake. Faculty parties. Apple-picking. Caroling in winter. Ice-fishing.

  I fell in love with my husband. I’d loved him up until then, sure, but now it was in a whole new way, as though a new room had opened up in my brain—I was swamped with love. It was rather like a second-stage rocket booster kicking in just when the first rocket had lost all its power. I was still overwhelmed most of the time, but suddenly alongside me was this sensitive, able, sexy guy I’d had the good sense to marry. He was in his element, was what it was, and he was happy. He made me laugh. Plus, he knew how to do so many things I’d never even thought about: he could ice-skate and fix the toilet when it ran and keep the pipes from freezing and bursting. He stoked the woodstove and taught me how to ski downhill. He shoveled snow, he complimented my cooking, he didn’t mind playing king to Sophie’s princess. He could play Candy Land all Saturday afternoon without once screaming, or cheating, and then kiss me ardently once we’d finally gotten Sophie to sleep.

  Nicky was born in the flush of our love. We got a dog, a cocker spaniel, and later that year a picnic table and a swing set. We planted a vegetable garden and grew Swiss chard and tomatoes and marigolds, bachelor’s buttons, and roses. Over the years, we acquired goldfish, guinea pigs, a tabby cat, and for one memorable year, a pair of guinea hens. A litter of kittens was born in the laundry basket. The children needed tubes in their ears one winter after eight ear infections. The boiler gave out one Christmas Eve, and we had to keep the fireplace going for days until we could get a guy out from New London to replace it.

  At the center of everything were the children with their plump little arms, their dirty faces, their need for us in the middle of the night. Life was tactile, messy, earthy, inseparable from love. The children said funny things, and we kept a book in which we wr
ote down their memorable quotes. Even their ear infections, the time we all had the flu at once, the nights they were afraid of the dark, the nights we were all tucked in while the storms raged outside and shook the foundation of the house—all of it was rich and throbbing with life. I slept spooned up against Grant, and so what if we ended up getting up most nights two or three times, tending to children or the dog or stoking the fire in the woodstove? And what if sometimes there were cold silences that fell between us? There were fights and arguments and tears, times when I sat in the mudroom with the phone blubbering to Magda that he was insensitive and could be harsh, that he didn’t listen. And then there was make-up sex, us falling on each other while cleaning up the kitchen, or else my awakening in the night to feel his questioning hand coming over to ask forgiveness and acceptance.

  And there were all those nights I would look across the pillow at him and wonder who was this stranger that I shared so much with, how remarkable it was that we were together when we had such differences. Times when I was overwhelmed in the world and would run home to find him there, ready to listen and understand—the time my friend Jennie accused me of not working as hard as everyone else on the middle school auction committee. It sounds silly now. Of course it is. But it was real.

  Then there were times I’d be washing dishes or throwing in a load of laundry and Jeremiah’s face would inexplicably show up, flickering there in the outskirts of my mind. But that wasn’t wrong, was it?

  Or maybe it was just life.

  Once my brother came to visit. It was a big deal, getting the place ready for someone who was paralyzed. I coached the children to be nice and welcoming to him. Grant built a ramp for his wheelchair so he could come in the back door. We were glad to have him there, but it was awful to see David so limited, so unhappy. You could see it in his eyes. He talked to the kids in almost a formal, stilted way, like he didn’t want to get to know them, and Nicky especially was scared of him.