Measure of Love

by Melissa Ford

  “I’m really sorry,” I tell him again, pulling on my lip.

  Adam trains his eyes on a poster asking him if he’s ready for a college diploma, advertising an online university. “I’ve been trying to understand for months now why you haven’t written about the engagement on your blog. It just didn’t make sense to me. We’re getting married. It’s the sort of thing you tell people. Most people can’t wait to talk about it. And I know you’re friends with a lot of people that you’ve met because you write there. So I’ve been trying to understand why there has been post after post about the book, or the cooking class, or random recipes. And nothing about us.”

  “At first I was just waiting until we told our family and friends,” I begin weakly.

  “We did that,” Adam interrupts. “Months ago.”

  “I know, and then I was waiting because Amy Appelstein thought it could hurt book sales if people knew I was engaged.”

  “Do you really care more about the book than our marriage?”

  “That’s not a fair question,” I say, pulling my head off his shoulder to look at him. His eyes look as if his soul has raced back several yards away from me, like the wrong end of a telescope making the object look farther away. Smaller. “Of course, I put our relationship first. But I also don’t want to do anything to mess up this book. And it’s a divorce book, Adam. Not a cookbook or a blogging book. A divorce book. I’m supposed to be a divorce expert.”

  “Do you really think getting remarried changes that?”

  “They think so,” I tell him, lifting up my phone to indicate my readers and the Amy Appelsteins of this world, which buzzes as if on command. “They’re pissed off that I’m getting married. That we’re no longer all divorced or single together. I tried to talk about this with you back at the Table.”

  Adam’s soul takes a step back toward his eyes, just an inch closer, but my heart lifts at seeing him returning to himself. Until he asks his next question: “Is that the real reason?”

  I snap, “Of course,” and then fall silent the rest of the ride home. I breathe in rhythm to the sound of the wheels underneath us.

  We exit the subway without speaking and walk the blocks to our apartment. Our silence sounds louder than the car horns and traffic. We climb up the steps to our apartment, my muscles suddenly telling me that they’re done for the night. It’s only eight o’clock, but they’ve quit. I push myself to climb one more flight, and I lean against the wall while Adam fumbles with the keys.

  “What are we doing about dinner?” Adam asks, always practical.

  “We can get carryout from somewhere,” I mutter.

  He opens the door to our apartment, and I go into the bathroom to wash up. My reflection doesn’t look quite like myself, like lips out-of-sync with a movie soundtrack. I have made such an incredible mess of things. And the worst part of all is that even with everything coming to a head, I still don’t know what I want.

  What would I wish for if I suddenly stumbled across Aladdin’s lamp? Would I want to rewind time and write an effusive blog post about the engagement, book be damned? Would I wish that I could go back and be upfront with Adam about my ambivalence toward getting married again from the time of the proposal so this wouldn’t come out of left field tonight? Maybe we could have talked our way through these feelings before the invitations were created and mailed. Would I wish that I hadn’t started the blog in the first place, therefore taking care of any attachment I feel to the people now angrily emailing me?

  That final wish sits like a stone in the bottom of my stomach. I love my blog, love my online space, love the people I’ve met through it. I can’t imagine not connecting with them, and yet, for months now, I’ve withheld the most important thing happening to me, processing it on my own. It doesn’t ring true once I realize that to say that I couldn’t have gotten through these last few months without them, not since I left them back there on the other side of the proposal divide.

  When I come out, Adam is standing with the refrigerator door open. I sit down on the sofa as my phone buzzes again to alert me to another message.

  “We don’t have leftovers,” I tell him softly. “I bought chicken for tonight to remake that chicken stir fry dish from a few weeks ago.”

  He shuts the refrigerator door and opens my laptop, leaning on the kitchen counter while he scrolls through carryout menu sites. This is the Adam who came home angry from the office every day, the Adam who shrank into himself and held me at arm’s length for years. I want to go over and rub my cheek against him like a cat, beg him to reach down and stroke my head to let me know that even if things are not okay now, they will be in the future. But he is angrily pecking at the computer keys as if they were the ones who pissed him off with their careless words about his engagement.

  He opens the refrigerator door again and takes out the chicken breasts, a zucchini, and red pepper. He turns back to the computer again and then reaches for an onion from the basket near the sink. I stand up, walking around the side of the counter to peer at the computer screen, which holds my blog post from a few weeks ago, our last batch of chicken stir fry tantalizingly arranged in the plain white bowls I use for my food photography. Adam’s homemade white screen serving as the background.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m making dinner, Rachel.”

  “But you don’t cook,” I say, as if following directions on the screen after completing several weeks of a cooking school is impossible, a feat akin to brain surgery or climbing Mount Everest.

  Adam finally looks up at me and makes eye contact as he removes the plastic wrap from the Styrofoam tray of chicken breasts. “I think I can handle this. You’re an excellent writer. I’m just following your recipe.”

  His words sound hollow, like packing peanuts, and my heart doesn’t know what to do, twisting itself around as it processes the compliment within the frustrated undertone. “Do you want me to help?” I ask.

  “No, we’re celebrating your big night. First book event. You should relax, right?”

  Adam turns his back to me and starts chopping the vegetables, moving them deftly from the chopping board to a bowl with the side of his knife blade. He washes the chicken breasts and pats them dry with paper towels. Slivers the chicken, dropping the pieces into a ziplock bag, just as the recipe suggests. He avoids glancing in my direction as he pours in the marinade: soy sauce, vegetable oil, and a sprinkling of sugar. Though he pauses by the pantry, trying to find a bottle marked sherry.

  “It’s on the top shelf,” I tell him. “Toward the back.”

  “So what is the real reason for not writing about it?” Adam finally asks.

  “I told you the real reason.”

  “Whenever you tell me nothing is wrong, you pull on your lip. You’ve been pulling on your lip a lot.”

  I drop my hand, which was mid-twist of my lower lip, as if I’m leading it through stretching exercises, and self-consciously squeeze my fingers into my palms. He adds the marinade to the chicken and vegetables, making it easier somehow to talk to him when I only have to face his back. I take a deep breath and shrug my shoulder even though he can’t see me.

  “I don’t understand why we’re moving so quickly. We just started dating again last spring, and then suddenly we’re engaged, and I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”

  “I thought you didn’t like waiting,” Adam says softly.

  “Waiting for what? What’s wrong with waiting?”

  “When we divorced, you told me that it was because you spent too much time sitting on that sofa waiting for me. And now you’re telling me that you’re anxious because we’re not waiting. Rachel, I don’t need to think about this anymore. I am sure that this is right, that this is what I want. And I want our life together to start now, not postponed to some random far off date. We’ve both spent too much time waiting for som
ething to happen. I wanted to make something happen. That’s why I proposed.”

  I can see Adam’s profile as he tosses the chicken and vegetables in the hot pan, half concentrating on their doneness, half concentrating on what we need to say to one another. Under the hiss of the marinade burning off in the heat, I hear him tell me, “You need to decide what you want, Rachel.”

  I stand awkwardly by the counter, unsure of my place, not just in the kitchen, but in my relationship, in my writing career, in my friendships. It’s as if my edges have suddenly warped, and I no longer fit into all the spaces I was comfortable before. Once again, I feel like I’m in a runaway car with someone else at the wheel except this time, I’ve shoved open the back door and jumped, and now I’m just free falling.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I HEAR THE shower go on before five in the morning, at least two hours earlier than we usually wake. Adam’s side of the bed is empty, the sheets rumpled into tiny ridges from tossing around through most of the night to get comfortable. Neither of us ended up sleeping, but we also didn’t talk. I just listened to him breathe, knowing he was awake, unsure of the first words that should leave my mouth.

  Adam comes out of the bathroom and gets dressed quickly, moving around the room as if we just had a one night stand, and he’s trying to slip out without me waking. I don’t make this easy for him; I prop myself up on my pillow and watch him.

  “Why are you up so early?” I finally ask.

  “I have some reading I want to get done this morning. I’m going to head out to grab some coffee and catch up on work.”

  Something in his voice makes me uneasy. I get out of bed and follow him into the kitchen where he stuffs a few books in his backpack and slings it over his shoulder. He reaches into the refrigerator and pulls out a Tupperware container of chicken stir fry leftovers.

  “What about everything?” I try again.

  “Everything is a pretty broad category,” Adam says lightly.

  “We went to bed last night not really talking about the elephant in the room. The whole wedding thing.”

  “I don’t know if there’s a lot to discuss until you decide what you want. I need a little time to decide what I want too.”

  This final thought is ominously delivered at the exact moment Adam finishes tying his shoes, as if he has just closed something off and pulled it tightly for good measure. He stands up and grabs his bag and lunch again.

  “I have the bachelorette party tonight,” I say softly, wishing he’d stay so we could talk about this now in the two hours before he has to be at work. Should I show for the party? Do we really need a wedding sendoff if there might not even be a wedding?

  “Maybe we can talk after that if it’s not too late.”

  He doesn’t give me his usual goodbye kiss, and I don’t walk him to the apartment door. We just stand, looking at each other for a long time until Adam sighs and heads out, and I listen to him until even the sound of him disappears.

  It feels like that first day in my new apartment after the divorce, when I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t know what to eat, or what to wear, or what to do. I just wandered around picking up things and putting them down, as if I had been clocked in the head and suddenly couldn’t remember what anything was. Who I was. It was an awful feeling then, and it’s an awful feeling now. I force myself to stop walking aimlessly and start a pot of coffee brewing.

  As it drips into the waiting pot, I sit down at the computer. My blog is still up on the screen, the recipe from weeks ago cheerfully shining back at me. I scroll to the top of the page and click on my title to make the screen refresh and bring up the most current post. It’s about the book event. When I left last night, there were a handful of comments. Now, there are over four hundred. I can’t bring myself to scroll down and start reading them yet; I don’t even know what I’d write back to the commenters. Would I apologize? Tell them that it’s my own damn life, and I can choose what I reveal or don’t reveal? Admit that writing about the wedding makes me nervous in a way that no other subject has made me anxious. That the mere act of putting words on a screen concerning my engagement fills me with a dread I didn’t feel when writing about the divorce. It makes me wonder if I’ve developed an allergy to happiness.

  I open my email and take a deep breath, clicking on Amy Appelstein’s note, the only one in the queue that I can’t avoid. I squint at it at first, as if I’m viewing a car accident, and then lean in eyes wide as I try to read between the lines of her email:

  The publicist has an alert emailed to her whenever your blog name is mentioned on the Internet, and she got a few tonight from bloggers writing about your engagement. When I told you to keep things discreet, I didn’t mean to alienate your readers by not mentioning it at all. Katie wants you to do damage control today to ensure that this doesn’t affect book sales.

  Brief. To the point. No emoticon.

  I close the email, not sure how she expects me to do damage control when I have no clue what to say. I can’t tell my readers things that I don’t even know myself. Like what Adam meant when he said he needed time to decide what he wanted too. Does that mean that he may make the choice and call the wedding off? Why doesn’t that idea fill me with relief?

  It’s the opposite of relief. My heart has become the thumping baseline that accompanies the young woman in the horror movie creeping forward to check out the noise in the house, the one that makes the viewer cringe as the actress pulls open the door to see the monster in her living room. What sort of monsters are we going to find if we delve too deeply into seeking out why I’ve been dragging my heels toward the altar?

  I open a blank post box on my blog and begin writing, stringing together sentences on why I want to invent a good baked doughnut recipe, whether or not to change your last name back following a divorce, a story about a family vacation from when I was eight years old. I save all the posts to draft instead of hitting publish, knowing that it’s not what anyone wants to read right now and knowing that I can’t write what they want to hear anyway.

  I SPEND THE entire afternoon in front of the computer, compiling an impressive number of meaningless blog posts. Writing is the only way I know to make sense of everything happening in my head. After my second cup of coffee, I move to writing up food posts, whipping up a bowl of pasta arrabiata—angry noodles—and photographing it in our plain white bowls.

  I write up a recipe for crepes filled with chive-studded scrambled eggs, a carrot ginger soup, brownie batter made on the stovetop. By two o’clock, I’ve run out of ingredients, so I grab my keys and head out to Whole Foods, trying to burn off my nervous energy until Lisbeth arrives to take me to the bachelorette party. How can I have this many people in my life and still feel as if I have no one to talk to?

  I walk to Union Square with my set of reusable canvas bags, thinking about Michael and his desire to save the world through his future child. I half expect to see him in the crowd, crossing the sidewalk in his khaki trousers and pale blue, button-down shirt—what I’ve come to think of as his uniform. But if he’s there, his face blends in with all the other New Yorkers racing through the square on their way to other places.

  I press my way inside the store and head immediately downstairs to the basement level. The Whole Foods is overly bright, with unnaturally beautiful fruits and vegetables stacked against one another in miniature produce pyramids like an edible Giza. I place two Vidalia onions in my basket even though I don’t need them. I grab miniature zucchinis and Jerusalem artichokes, a container of raspberries, a navel orange—none of which are on my list but placing them in my basket anyway as if my hands have decided that they’re going to make some decisions without me. The basket starts weighing on my arm as I place inside almond flour, barley malt syrup, and a carton of French onion soup.

  This Whole Foods always seems busier and more crowded than any other place in t
he city, as if it’s a magnet dragging all New Yorkers inside to gawk at the fish display cases and buy expensive cheese. I wait in a line to make my way back upstairs to the prepared foods, fighting to squeeze between a slow-walking student distracted by something on her iPhone and an enormous family who has come to the market seemingly for a field trip. I grab a muffin and baguette from the bakery and throw them precariously in my basket, trying to tuck the bread under my arm a bit so it doesn’t topple onto the floor.The checkout lines are unusually short considering the crowd in the store, or maybe I just caught them during a brief lull. I walk upstairs to sit down at one of the café tables and eat my muffin while I read some blogs on my phone, maybe even peek and see what people have written about me, but all of the seats are taken. There are scruffy men camping out with stacks of newspapers and women with untouched cups of coffee between them talking animatedly. I stand in the back, trying to decide which table looks closest to becoming vacated, and finally do something I absolutely hate: I touch the back of an empty chair at a table where a student is reading his text book and ask him if I can join him since I’m going to be reading too.

  He shrugs and pulls his book closer to his body, making room for me while looking as if he expects me to grab his highlighter and start marking up his chapter on the Russification of Finland. Sharing a table is annoying, especially if you’re the person who got to the table first and will now seem rude if you don’t grant the other person use of the chair and a few inches of tabletop. I slide into my seat, looking out the large windows at the square below, and take my first bite of muffin.

  I feel so incredibly lonely in this Whole Foods, lonelier than I felt in my apartment now that I am surrounded by people. I imagine all of them have orderly lives where they know how they feel on a wide range of subjects from who they want to be when they grow up to whom they want to love. I bet everyone else here is in good standing with their best friend. I eat my muffin feeling sorry for myself, sort of wishing that I hadn’t ventured out of my apartment so I could continue to ignore the fact that the world is filled with functional people while I’m falling apart.