“Don’t you like hanging out with me?” I ask.
“It’s not you, Enid,” he says. “It’s me.”
And now I feel trapped too. Like I’ve been flung into one of those horrible after-school specials.
“Do you know what I did yesterday?” he asks.
I’m afraid to guess.
“I donated a hundred dollars to Greenpeace to help save the menhaden off the coast of Maryland.”
“That’s great,” I say.
Menhaden are fish. Wick found out about their overfished and dwindling population near the Chesapeake Bay. At high school, we’re seen as an environmentalist couple. I’m more concerned about saving whales and elephants and cool-looking tigers and stuff. But I totally support his menhaden position.
Wick groans, walks toward me, then places his hand over the groom’s shoes and squishes them. It’s sort of a relief to see this. I mean, I wasn’t going to be able to use those.
“What’s so bad about giving money to Greenpeace?” I ask.
“Enid, I’m way too responsible. I shouldn’t be worried about environmental issues until I’m in my thirties.”
He tugs at his green rubber bracelet until it slides off his wrist. None of this makes any sense. I don’t know what to do. Should I offer to go do something reckless with him to make him feel better?
“Don’t,” I say.
He pauses, slides the bracelet back on his wrist, and I’m relieved. Maybe I can fix this.
“I think we need a break,” he says.
I bite my lip. Maybe I can’t fix this. It feels like an ax has fallen. A sharp pain radiates through me, and every time I blink, when I reopen my eyes, the world looks a little darker.
“I think we should talk more,” I say. I want him to change his mind.
“After the party,” he says.
“You can’t go to the party.”
I can feel him slipping away, and I don’t want to let him go. Not to the party. Not ever.
“A break makes sense,” he says.
Just an hour ago, I felt so good. Now the ache beneath my breastbone is so strong that I lift my hand and rub my chest.
“We’ll talk more next week,” he says. “I’ll call you.”
I don’t say anything. I watch him walk out of my house. I hear him start his car. I hear his tires turn gravel over in my driveway. A part of me cannot believe this is happening. But another part of me knows that I’ve just been dumped.
My mother is inspecting my killer whales. She turns one upside down and runs her fingertip over its belly. Then she sets it with the rest of the herd. Or pod. Or whatever you call a group of marzipan killer whales on their way to a wedding where they will be eaten by half-drunk guests.
“You do such a great job with the tails,” she says. “The fluting is impeccable.”
My mother kisses my head. She’s already approved of my lobsters, crabs, dolphins, sharks, sea urchins, starfish, and sperm whales. Now it’s time to show her the bride and groom. I don’t have a steady enough hand to paint on the faces. She does that. I surrender two slim figures absent their eyes, noses, and mouths.
“Great shoes,” she says. “But aren’t the bride’s a little small?”
I nod. In a moment of nostalgia, I decided to overlook the sanitation risk and mold the bride’s pumps and the groom’s tuxedo shoes out of what remained of Wick’s failed attempts. It’s not like sweat can kill you. At least, probably not Wick Jarboe’s sweat. Following their assembly, I dusted the shoes with edible glitter. They shimmer and look spectacular.
My mother picks up a paint brush to add the final details. But her hand shakes. She sets down the brush and rubs her eyes.
“I’m tired,” she says.
I’m not surprised to hear this. She and my father attend couples therapy on Friday afternoons. She never arrives home from her session in stellar condition. It must be difficult to face all that truth, to hear about the other women. I hate to admit this, but my father is such a cad.
“The reception is at three. We set up at eleven. I can draw the faces in the morning.”
I nod again.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
I nod, but then stop midway through. Why lie to my mother?
“Today sort of sucked for me.”
“Was it a twin day?” she asks.
I shake my head no. My mother overestimates the demands placed on me when I go to twin studies. She thinks that because I’m the only girl, they’re somehow more difficult for me. But that’s not true. Twin studies are easy. I like them. Once a month, Landon and I join three sets of identical twins for a series of tests: Sov and Munny, Wick and Dale, and Skate and Burr. All the data they gather is supposedly meant to measure our twinergy levels. Except, they’re scientists, and they don’t call it that.
“Twin Friday is next week,” I say. “Today sucked for other reasons.”
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
I don’t know where to start. My father is living in the basement. The distance between me and Wick feels as big as Antarctica. And the pain beneath my breastbone is still there. But she’s so fresh back from her counseling session that I’m afraid if I try to talk about relationship issues, she’ll try to speak to me in therapy language. I hate that.
“I don’t know,” I say.
I want to tell her about the llama drama, but I don’t. Hypothetically, yesterday and today were supposed to be dedicated solely to molding marzipan. Due to the complicated nature of the beach theme, she was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to finish. At least not to her standards.
“Biting into our marzipan shouldn’t be an easy act,” she had said this morning on her way out the door. “There needs to be a moment of hesitation. I want them to wrestle with what they’re about to do.”
“Okay,” I said. “But shouldn’t we want the guest to enjoy eating what we’ve made, instead of feeling racked with guilt for biting into a sugar-based starfish?”
“I want them to fully appreciate what we’ve made before they let their teeth and spit dismantle it.”
Why my mother feels the need to develop a code of ethics for marzipan consumption is complicated, creepy, and most likely related to my adulterating father.
She envelops the bride and groom in plastic wrap.
“Is your brother home?” she asks.
I shake my head no.
The last I saw of Landon he was headed out to go biking around Lake Champlain. As he walked through the door in his tight biker shorts and neon-striped shirt, I considered asking him if he was biking alone or meeting up with somebody. But I didn’t. I might have been afraid of the answer. Before the e-zine, Landon and I often biked around on Fridays with Skate and Burr. After my falling out with them, the biking ceased. But for the last couple of weeks, Landon has picked it up again.
“Did he go biking?” my mother asks.
I nod.
“With Skate and Burr?”
I shrug. Then frown. Then shrug again. “Probably.”
“You’re giving that stupid sonnet way too much power.”
“Maybe,” I half admit.
“If you stay hung up on that, it’s going to start affecting your relationship with Wick.”
My mother is a mind reader. Which is probably how she was able to figure out my father’s latest affair. I look at the ceiling. I look at her. Why not just tell her?
“It already has affected it. We’re taking a break.”
My mother walks toward me and gives me a prolonged hug. “No wonder your day sucked. That’s terrible news.”
“It’s not terrible. We’re not totally broken up. It’s a break. People take them all the time.”
“Be careful, Enid. Think of the larger group here. You don’t want to ostracize yourself over this situation.”
This is something my mother should have told me three months ago when I did not consider the larger group and began to ostracize myself over this situation.
She releases he
r hug and continues to rub my back.
“Do you want to know what I think is going on?” she asks.
I’m too tired to be psychoanalyzed.
“It’s your way of grieving.”
I really don’t want to be having this conversation. I know it was an unspeakable accident. It was a tragedy. And of course I am still grieving for Mr. and Mrs. Riggs. And for Skate and Burr too. But a tragedy doesn’t give somebody license to do anything they want. You still have to be a responsible human being. You have to keep being nice.
“You’re pulling away to protect yourself. You’re angrier than you need to be, because it’s your way of keeping distance from Burr and Skate. Because deep down, they are your friends. They’re like our own family, Enid.”
I feel myself holding back tears. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
Maybe my mother is right, but at the moment I don’t want to think about it. I actually try not to think about Mr. and Mrs. Riggs very much at all. Because thinking about them won’t bring anybody back. It just makes me sad. We used to barbecue with them almost every Sunday during the summer. Mr. Riggs grilled the meat. A few times we traveled to Maine together to camp in Acadia. Their absence is something that I purposely ignore.
“They’re good kids. It’s going to take them time,” my mother says. “But they’ll get there.”
She is a much more sympathetic person than I am. And this realization makes me feel rotten.
“I guess,” I say. Even during the good times Skate and Burr were hopelessly immature. They wore stupid T-shirts with juvenile messages printed across their chests. Burr’s: I’VE UPPED MY STANDARDS, SO UP YOURS. And Skate’s: I CAN’T, I’M MORMON. Skate and Burr talk about being Mormon quite a bit. But they don’t behave like they come from a conservative religious persuasion. Presbyterians, maybe.
As my mother and I place the marzipan pieces in Tupperware containers, I’m tempted to tell her about the llama adventure. I want her to see how strong and brave I was. But I was supposed to be home wrestling almond paste into sea creatures. Not off fooling around with Wick. I mean, we weren’t really fooling around in a sexual sense. Frankly, the llama catastrophe came upon us before we even got to consider that.
My mother presses the lid closed on the last container. “Great job. Thanks for sacrificing your Friday. Maybe next week will suck less.”
If I had the words to explain my feelings, I would give them to her. But I don’t.
“I can only hope,” I say.
“Enid, things will get better.” Even though she delivers this statement with complete certainty, it feels like a guess.
“I want to share something I learned today in therapy,” she says.
I have no desire to hear about the intimate details of my father’s betrayal. I wrinkle my face. “Please, nothing graphic.”
“Sit down.” My mother pulls out a chair and I pull out a chair, and we sit across the table from each other with a wall of Tupperware between us. “You’re one of the main reasons I go to therapy.”
This surprises me because I consider myself a fairly easy-to-raise daughter.
“I want you to seek out a healthy dynamic with a man. I don’t want you to accept your father’s behavior as normal.”
“I don’t,” I say. “I know he’s a pig.”
To say that the relationship I have with my father is complicated is an understatement. Up until counseling started, he often spoke about the need to fulfill the thrill. Presumably this statement referred to everything from skydiving, which he’s done numerous times, to boinking his secretary, which he’s also done numerous times.
“People aren’t perfect. If you focus solely on the ways they’ve disappointed you, you’ll wind up a perpetually wounded person.”
I shrug again. “You’re being way too easy on him.” I think of Wick. I think of Simone. I think of my bikini-clad neighbor. Some naïve person centuries ago said that love is blind. I wish that were true. I wish that once you fell in love with a person that you both went blind to everyone else, especially attractive people. Life would be much simpler.
My mother doesn’t say anything as she stands. She walks down the hallway toward her bedroom and says, “Don’t stay angry. It will eat you up.” She closes the door.
I don’t think I’m that angry. I pop off one of the Tupperware lids so I can look at my sea urchins one last time. Staring at them lined up into four tidy rows gives me a real sense of accomplishment. I replace the lid and walk to my room. My father isn’t home yet from couples therapy. He has a separate session after their dual session. The therapy started three months ago. My mother thinks it began twenty years too late.
Sleep did not come easy last night. The pain beneath my breastbone spread. I just lay there on my bed and physically ached. It’s like I’d been hit by a Mack truck hauling two tons of heartache. I want to call Wick. But I’m not an idiot. I know that such a move on my part would probably push him further away. It’s exactly like Pam Van Dorn used to say: “A relationship is like a rubber band.”
The first time I heard about the rubber-band principle was in eighth grade during lunch. Pam and I were sitting together on the front lawn, sharing her ham sandwich. She held a rubber band between her two index fingers.
“Tension is good. It’s what you want. But when I start doing this”—she moved one of her index fingers closer to the other one—“I lose the tension. And the relationship ends.”
I watched the rubber band slide down her finger and dangle in the air.
“So I’m a finger?” I asked her. “And the guy I like is the other finger?”
“Exactly,” she said. “And the relationship is the rubber band. And that’s why you should never chase a guy. When you move closer, you lose the tension, ultimately dooming your relationship to be nothing more than a flaccid loop of elastic.”
I stared at the dangling loop.
“Okay,” I said. “But using this model, you never get to touch your guy.” I held my fingers up and imagined a rubber band stretching between them and two people never meeting. Love seemed hopeless.
Pam took a big bite of her sandwich and shook her head. “The rubber band is a psychological metaphor. Physical stuff works differently. You’re totally allowed to touch your guy.”
“Cool,” I said.
Pam was always so smart about life. And she had an impressive vocabulary. Plus, her mom made pretty good ham sandwiches. We were close all through junior high. Then she started dating Billy Rome and I started dating Wick, and my life took off in a new direction.
In hindsight, our coupling seemed destined. The year before we dated, Wick and I had the same biology class. We knew each other, obviously, from twin studies. And we were both on the swim team. And we’d had that early iguana encounter. But even though fate had put us in the same classroom five days a week, and in the same swimming pool twice a week, nearly the whole year passed before something romantic happened.
Then, there was the field survey assignment during summer break. There were a dozen different things you could do. Test water at Lake Champlain. Sample soil in Waterbury near the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory.
Collect and dissect flowers near the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe. Wick and I ended up in the same field survey. We both signed up to take granite samples from Rock of Ages in Barre. I don’t even care about granite. I don’t even know how it happened. One day, I drove to Barre to complete a boring assignment. The next thing I knew I spotted Wick’s head a few people in front of me in line at the granite quarry.
He was so mature. He saw me and made his way to me. And so we toured the whole quarry together. Laughing at each other’s mausoleum jokes. Offering each other breath mints and pieces of chewing gum. And then, afterward, instead of getting into our separate cars and driving back to Burlington, he suggested getting a panini at a restaurant in Montpelier. And he didn’t stop dialing up the romance there. When we got to Sarducci’s, instead of letting us take a table indoo
rs, he requested a table on the patio that overlooked the Winooski River.
He was a prince. He didn’t sit there and talk about himself while he ate his sandwich. He asked me a lot of questions about my life. He wanted to hear my thoughts on everything from deforestation to the flat tax. We talked about Pablo Neruda’s poetry and Nadine Gordimer’s short stories. He asked me personal questions about what it felt like to be a fraternal twin. I mean, he was curious about how I perceived my individual identity. It reminded me of the phrase “fit like a hand in a glove.” During our panini moment, Wick was the hand and I was the glove.
And when I thought things couldn’t get any better, the most mind-blowing thing happened: everything got better. Wick started talking about how we seemed to be in each other’s orbits: biology, swim class, twin studies. And I loved that idea. I wanted to think of myself as a moon or maybe a planet being drawn to another moon. Like the path I was on with Wick was more significant than anything on earth; it was celestial.
And then, right when the check came and he paid for my panini, Wick said things that were so mature it made me question whether I was mature enough to be in Wick’s orbit. He said, “I’ve liked you for a while. We should do more stuff together.” And that’s when I realized that the granite quarry hadn’t been a coincidence. Because Wick said, “I asked Mr. Tober which field study you were doing.”
After that our orbits merged, and we began going out for sushi, and turnovers, and foreign films. Pam used to say that falling in love is all about meeting the right person in the right circumstance. God, she was smart. Maybe I should call her and solicit some advice. She and Billy are still going strong. She must know something about interpreting male behavior that I don’t. I try to stop myself from thinking about Wick and guys. I force myself to get out of bed. I must get up.
After contemplating getting dressed but deciding not to, I walk toward the kitchen. I should make some toast. Or pour a glass of orange juice. But I’m not hungry. I feel broken and empty in a way that doesn’t require food. When I reach the end of the hallway, it’s as if the kitchen phone wants to jump out of its cradle and leap into my hands. I pause at the doorjamb. If I called Wick right now, what would I say?
Sharks & Boys Page 2
