The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel

by Dawson, Maddie

  Funny, how something like a wedding can fall apart in a hundred ways.

  After it happens, she rather thinks of it as like a Slinky on the stairs, picking up momentum and speed, bumping its way to the bottom, slowly and inevitably at first, and then … well, it’s over.

  Andres Schultz—he who seems to be the chief change catalyst of her life right now—stays and stays at the apartment. For some reason, on day three, which is officially the day when houseguests and fish begin to stink, Andres Schultz, not realizing he had outworn his welcome, declared he was staying for at least another week. And then another. He continued to use up their oxygen supply, continued to refer to her as “Rosa,” continued to stride through the living room, bellowing into his cell phone. By then he had even commandeered the little office that belonged exclusively to Rosie. He had backers to talk to and cajole, and apparently there were other teacup men who needed to be dragooned into participating or donating, as well. Rosie can’t keep track of it all.

  And why should she? Thanks to him, she’s busy planning a wedding and a move, and quitting her job, announcing the news to her students and her friends, even to her grandmother’s doctors and neighbors. She has to get boxes, she has to hire a caterer, she has to let the landlord know they’re leaving, she has to clean the apartment so it can be shown. And she needs to figure out who will marry them; somehow she knows a guy who knows a guy who’s a friendly, cool justice of the peace (because Jonathan says you can’t just have any old justice of the peace) and this person might be free on Saturday, although it’s short notice. Oh, yes, and big big BIG on the list is finding the right caregiver for Soapie. Are they renting a U-Haul truck for the move? Should they sell one car or should they drive separately? Where are they going to stay when they get to San Diego? Did Jonathan extend his health insurance benefits to cover him in California when he told the human resources department at his company that he was quitting?

  All this has to be done while stepping around, in front of, and behind Andres Schultz, who only stops pacing and talking on the telephone long enough to offer his personal observation about the way life can whiplash you around, flinging you into a better place you didn’t even know was there.

  He has, she realizes, a bland, slow-talking positivity that gives her headaches. And, worse, he finds nouns and verbs to be interchangeable. He meetings with people. He and Jonathan need to do a lot of teacupping because, let’s face it, thirty-eight teacups might not platform spectacularly.

  Never mind the grammar, this was news. Thirty-eight teacups were not enough for an exhibit? In what universe is that possibly true? Thirty-eight is a lot of teacups.

  Then, on Thursday night, less than forty-eight hours before the wedding, Jonathan comes into the bedroom and sits down on the bed and tries for a few minutes to make sounds. He keeps opening his mouth and closing it again, and then he cracks his knuckles a bunch of times. She stares at him.

  “I have something horrible to tell you,” he says finally.

  Her hairline freezes. “What? Did you forget to go to pick up the marriage license?” She’d reminded him twenty-two times to do this.

  “Nah, I did that.”

  “Then what?”

  His face is ashen. Ashen, as in perhaps he has a brain tumor and has been told he has a week to live and is curious as to how they should spend it. Should they risk flying to the Bahamas to try for that experimental treatment sick celebrities go for, or should they hunker down in the living room and tearfully watch all the old movies they’d always meant to get to?

  She sits down on the bed beside him, and reaches over and touches his face, and he takes her hands away.

  “I can’t get married on Saturday,” he says.

  “Wait. What? Are you dying or something?”

  “No, I’m not dying. Not unless you kill me.”

  “But … then what?”

  “Andres and I are flying out to San Antonio in the morning.” He gives her a look of abject fear, his eyebrows becoming little tents above his whipped-puppy eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Oh, no, no, no, no,” she says. “Flying out to San Antonio? What are you talking about?” Caterers, justice of the peace, friends, family members. No, no, no.

  Teacups. A huge collection. They have to go pick them up.

  “Let Andres pick them up. We’re having people come to Soapie’s house to watch us get married. There’s a justice of the peace and food—”

  “Andres can’t do it. He doesn’t know anything about teacups.”

  “But he knows about boxes, doesn’t he? Why doesn’t he just put them in boxes and fly them out to the museum?”

  “He won’t know if they’re legit. He doesn’t know the historical stuff. Believe me, I’ve thought of all this. I need to see them.”

  “Wait a minute. This does not make any sense at all.” She can feel her eyes narrowing. “Why don’t you go pick them up on Sunday? Why, Jonathan Morrow, does it have to be right now first thing in the morning the day before our wedding?”

  “Has to be. The guy’s house is flooding, and he’s got ’em squirreled away upstairs, but he’s got to get ’em out of there before they condemn the property.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No, it’s true. There was a lot of rain in Texas—maybe you heard about it—and a big storm coming on Sunday, and this collector guy decided that he was going to get rid of his collection anyway because he’s getting divorced, and he needs money—”

  “So let me see. There’s a previous flood, and a divorce, a house being condemned, a predicted flood, and teacups that may or may not be legit, even though he’s a reputable collector. This is beginning to sound like a whole lot of crazy, strung-together excuses, and you know it.”

  “Sssh, please. Andres is going to come running in here to interfere in a minute.”

  She goes over and locks the bedroom door. “Let him try.” Then she stands against the door, with her arms folded across her chest, staring at him, and hisses. “Why is he still here anyway? Tell me that! When is he going to go home? And what is all this really about? Listen, Jonathan, you were the one who started this whole wedding business. I was fine going along the way we were, but you pulled me into this whole thing.”

  “Sssh. I know, I know.”

  “Come on. There is no guy in San Antonio with two floods and a divorce, is there?”

  “There is. There really is. It’s all colossal bad timing. Huge bad timing. But this is the beauty part about being us, don’t you see? We’re people who can just pick another day to get married. We don’t need to have a whole group of people standing around us to make it real. We can do it next week, on a Tuesday. A Thursday even. We don’t care.”

  “Ohhh, so this is what this is about! The party. Or—oh, wait a minute. Is it about holding it at Soapie’s house? Because I asked you and you said—”

  “No, no, none of that. Not the party, not the house. I feel as badly as you do.”

  “Bad,” she says. “If you say ‘feel badly,’ you’re actually describing the state of your fingers, not an emotional state. ‘Feel’ is one of those words that is about how you touch things, or about how you are processing an emotion.”

  “Rosie,” he says. “Please, for the love of God—”

  “Just this once—just this once, I wanted us to stand up and do the thing that we said we were going to do,” she says. “Our friends are going to make fun of us so much for this.”

  He looks at her pityingly. He would never care about that, and he feels so sorry for her that she does care about it.

  On Friday night, when Jonathan and Andres are gone, after she makes all the difficult calls canceling everything—the cupcakes (which she will still have to pay for, so will donate to the soup kitchen) and the justice of the peace and the guests, she wanders through the dark, silent apartment, hugging herself and truly feeling the quiet with a kind of sweet, melancholy relief she hasn’t felt in days.

  Outside, across the river, she hear
s music playing and people laughing and talking, their voices drifting from a party taking place in a restaurant on the water. She stands on her darkened balcony and watches them. A woman in a red dress—and why does she have to be wearing that, if not to signal something to Rosie?—is laughing loudly and dancing around the patio, first with one man and then with another. Rosie leaves the balcony and goes into her study and turns on the light. Andres’s stuff is still in there, but she pushes it all aside into a pile and sits down at her desk and starts writing a poem.

  It’s the first poem she’s written in such a long time. She would have expected to be rusty, but the words pour out as though they’ve been waiting for her to get around to them. It’s about this moment of in between, being married and not married, between New Haven and San Diego, between leaving and staying put. The river is in there, and the red skirt, the friends’ sympathy and disbelief, and the way none of it ultimately matters. It just is.

  I will go to California with you, the poem says, but I’m not going to marry you.

  When she finally gets up, she stretches her neck, cracking her backbone, working out the stiffness from sitting. And then when she turns—how does it happen?—her foot trips on Andres Schultz’s duffel bag that’s halfway sticking out from under her bookshelf. Her ankle twists underneath her, and she sinks down on top of it, like a ballerina making a graceful little twirl. For a moment, she sits there, too stunned with pain to even cry out. She had felt a snap, and when she makes herself test it out, her ankle will not take her weight anymore.

  After a long time, she manages to crawl to her room, get the ibuprofen and a glass of water from the low bedside table, but even though she can also get to the kitchen, inch by inch, once there she sees that she isn’t able to stand up and reach the ice in the freezer to stop the swelling. It’s too late to call anyone, and she can’t think of what to say anyway, so she ends up spending the night on the little patch of rug between the kitchen and the living room, next to the Lolitas in their boxes.

  She hears the party dying down, and the refrigerator motor turning on and off, the traffic on Quinnipiac Avenue dwindling as the night deepens … and the Lolitas sighing in the night.

  So congrats, you won again, she says to them.

  Oh, we will always win, they whisper back.

  [eight]

  The doctor said it would have been easier to treat the ankle if it had actually been broken. Instead, it’s merely a bad sprain, necessitating ice, ibuprofen, and crutches. If Rosie was something of a klutz before (and she was), she’s now an actual menace to herself, to others, and to the Sheetrocked walls as she navigates the narrow, dark stairways on crutches, sliding, jabbing holes in things, knocking her elbows and knees against banisters and walls.

  It is pathetic. She’s a wreck in so many ways she can’t even count them. Her hair now strays out of its long braid and frizzes around her face in the humidity. Her period is due, but it seems to have started and then stopped again. She’s had a headache for three days, and her foot is killing her, and she’s got a gazillion things she’s supposed to remember.

  The good-bye business is unexpectedly hideous. Well, what had she expected—that it would be easy to leave the place she’d always lived? Her students keep taking her out for lunches and dinners, wanting to thank her in front of their family members, as if they feel she needs a succession of public tributes. She goes to three lunches and one barbecue in one week, pitifully, grouchily, and she fights back tears at each one.

  It’s all almost too much to bear, in addition to being furious with Jonathan, who has come back from Texas without Andres, thank God, but who is acting as though he’s calm when he’s actually buzzing with a kind of irritating energy. He’s doing a thing she realizes she’s always detested: acting passive-aggressive, as though she is the anxious, worried person, when really he’s so paralyzed by change that he can’t make anything happen.

  “I hope you know I’m not going to be able to carry one single box down the stairs,” she says to him on the Tuesday before they’re set to leave.

  He greets this news with a stoic silence.

  “So that means you need to get some movers. Jonathan. I’m talking to you. You have to get the movers. I’ve done everything else. I’ve—”

  “I will, I will.” Sigh, then a put-upon tone. Then he says, “Why are you being like this? Has anything ever not worked out for us? I mean, ultimately?”

  The top of her head explodes. “Well, for starters, just looking at last week alone, there’s the wedding! That didn’t exactly work out for us.”

  “That’s what’s bothering you, isn’t it?” he says. “Well, then, get your purse. Let’s go down to town hall right now and find a justice of the peace. We’ll do it right this minute.” He gets up from his chair.

  “No,” she says. “It’s not that, and you know it.”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “I wanted the red velvet cupcakes. I wanted the party.”

  He stares at her. “We could have had the cupcakes if you hadn’t donated them.”

  “But I can’t wear the red boots. They don’t fit on my foot anymore.” It sounds so ridiculous, and it is, but it’s the truth. He shakes his head and goes back to his laptop.

  And then there is Soapie. How can she even begin to say good-bye to her grouchy old grandmother, knowing she’s falling down all over the place, knowing that she’s probably in more need of Rosie than she’s ever been before, and yet is now even less able to admit to any of it? Is she really supposed to be able to say, “Bye! Hope you don’t get seriously hurt!”—and then leave?

  One morning as Rosie is hobbling around on crutches, trying to put things in boxes, Soapie calls on the phone and says, “Well, the boy is leaving me. I guess you know that.”

  “Tony?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he going back to his wife?”

  “I don’t know what he’s doing. I have to go take a nap when he starts talking about his life. It’s too complicated for any ordinary human being to follow. But that’s not why I called you. He says that I should tell you that I’m having that British woman come when he goes.”

  “What? You’re having Mrs. Cynthia Lamb come back?”

  “Yes, her. Whatever her name is. She starts tomorrow.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s great,” Rosie says, trying not to show how relieved she feels.

  “It’s great until she tries to keep me from doing things I need to do, and then she’s out of here. I won’t have it.”

  “Of course,” says Rosie, smiling. “So that’s when Tony is leaving?”

  But Soapie doesn’t hear her. Instead she just starts in on how she hopes Rosie’s not going to get maudlin with good-byes, because nobody likes good-byes. They’re stupid and pointless, and they just stir up stuff that doesn’t need to be stirred up.

  “Well, I do need to come over and bring some of my coats to store at your house, if that’s okay,” Rosie says, “but I promise I won’t say good-bye to you.”

  “I mean it. When you walk out the door, just don’t say anything. Don’t even let me see when you go.” Soapie’s voice has gotten rough. “We’re not having drama.”

  When she gets there on Thursday evening to drop off the coats, she expects to see Mrs. Cynthia Lamb in the kitchen making dinner—bangers and mash, perhaps—and Soapie resting on the couch, downing gin and tonics. But instead, Tony’s there, and he and Soapie are standing in the garden, looking at the rosebushes, heads together, conferring about something. Rosie parks the car, and as she gets out, she hears Soapie laughing.

  Then Tony says, “No, no, forget it!” and he’s shaking his head and laughing so hard that his backward baseball cap falls off, and he has to stoop down to pick it up off the lawn. Soapie, who’s wearing a red chiffon blouse and white pants, reaches down and cuffs him on the shoulder as Rosie comes hobbling over, fighting her crutches, which keep sinking into the soft grass.

  “Rosie!” Soapie calls. “Tell Tony t
hat he needs to go over and steal some of Helen’s peonies for me.”

  “I am not stealing peonies from somebody else’s garden,” he says. “You’re crazy!”

  “It’s not polite to call people crazy. And I need them,” Soapie says in her wheedling voice. “They go with these roses so beautifully. Think how nice they’ll look together in a vase. Tell him, Rosie.”

  “I can’t, I can’t,” he says. “You know Helen will come after me. She already thinks I’m charging her too much for gardening—which is due to you telling me what to ask for, by the way.”

  “I did you a favor. And you can tell her you’re putting in overtime, pruning her peonies for her,” says Soapie, and then they both dissolve again into laughter.

  “It’s nice to see the two of you having such a good time,” Rosie says.

  “Yeah, well. It’s all a good time until she gets me put in jail,” says Tony.

  “You know what? I’m going to march over there and get them myself,” says Soapie. “I’ve been stealing Helen’s flowers for years, but usually I wait until she’s at church. If she comes out, I’m just going to pretend I’ve gone senile. You both can come and lead me away.”

  “Why don’t I just go and buy you some peonies?” Rosie says, but Soapie takes the shears away from Tony and makes her way across the yard. She has her mouth fixed in a serious pout, but she’s clearly in danger of bursting out laughing again, and she’s doing an exaggerated tiptoe walk, like something from the Pink Panther movies. They watch her slip into the flower bed and start snipping Helen Benson’s glorious light pink peonies.

  Rosie shakes her head. “I can’t believe she’s doing this,” she says. “Look at her.”

  “Shoplifting in other people’s gardens. She’s bad-ass.”

  “Incorrigible, really,” says Rosie. She looks over at him. “Hey, I’m surprised you’re still here. I suppose Mrs. Lamb is in the house cooking dinner?”