The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel

by Dawson, Maddie

  He hands her a cup of coffee and smiles at her. “So if you don’t mind my asking, what’s the deal with you anyway? Why didn’t you go with your fiancé to California?”

  She gives the short version: teacups, Andres Schultz, sprained foot hurting, too much pain to ride in the truck for days and days. She leaves out: fury, dirty oven, friends being referred to as puppy dogs. None of that feels particularly significant right now, somehow.

  “Now see,” he says, “in a case like that, I myself would ask myself if I didn’t hurt my foot unconsciously to get back at him.”

  “Yes, well, there might have been a little of that,” she says. She pours cream into her coffee cup and stirs it. When are those cinnamon buns going to be done? She wants to get as many as possible and then leave the room.

  “Because—well, didn’t I hear something about how there was going to be a wedding here and then it got called off or something?”

  She sighs. “Yes, you’re right. We had this wedding all planned and everything, and then he decided he had to go to Texas to check out somebody’s teacups, and I had to cancel everything.”

  His eyes bug out. “What? Dude didn’t come to his own wedding because he had to go see some teacups?”

  “Dude even had a whole story about floods and fires and apocalyptic events that might be threatening these little teacups.”

  “Please tell me you’re making this up.”

  “No, but I’m actually making it sound worse than it is,” she says. “I probably should have just hung in there and waited it out. I mean, it’s not like I was even all that mad about not getting married. We’d been living together just fine for fifteen years, and I didn’t even care if we got married, not really. And now I’m here and he’s out there, and it’s all screwed up.” She takes the sponge and starts wiping down the counter. “I think it was just that my foot was hurting.”

  “So now you really miss him.” He stops and looks at her so deeply that she has to look away. “I get that,” he says. “The heart is a funny little animal, isn’t it?”

  “It is.” She feels a lump in her throat.

  “It gets this idea about somebody, and then it doesn’t let go, even when things go bad. Even when they go awful, and anybody else could see plain as day you should get out. There’s your own stupid little heart just bumping around claiming, ‘No, it’s fine! I’m fine! It’s all good!’ ” He does a funny little dance when he’s showing the heart talking.

  “Well, that’s not quite the situation here,” she says. “I just was momentarily mad. But I’m probably going out there to live with him again. Eventually. I just need to get Soapie straightened out first.”

  “Well, sure,” he says.

  “And how’s your situation?” she says.

  “Don’t even ask,” he tells her. Then the oven timer goes off, and he gets busy taking the rolls out, and she gets busy trying not to fall into a swoon over them, which requires balling up her hands and putting them in the pockets of her bathrobe.

  She’s not sure why she’s crying.

  All in all, the first week living back at home with Soapie turns out to be more of a challenge than she’d bargained for. As she told Greta, she’d barely survived living there the first time. Luckily there are other people with them now. Tony bops around the house and makes gin and tonics every evening for everybody and appears ever ready to pick up anyone who happens to fall on the floor. Rosie likes the way he takes the stairs two at a time and how he goes tearing out of the house each morning with his bent-up rake and an old lawn mower, ready to tackle the gardens of North Haven like he’s some superhero in a backward baseball cap.

  And George Tarkinian comes over nearly every night, and Rosie finds herself so pleased to see him again. She and Soapie used to go on vacation with his family when Rosie was little, and she remembers him and his sweet wife, Louise, and their much-older daughters. He had been a voice-over announcer as well as a competitive swimmer, and Louise—she suddenly remembers this—made brownies with instant coffee in them, and Soapie would never let Rosie have any because she said they would get her too “jazzed up.” Of course she had sneaked in and stolen a brownie and then had spun in circles on the front lawn, laughing until she was dizzy, and George had scooped her up and carried her inside when she fell down and cried, holding her against his chest.

  He still has those broad swimmer’s shoulders and, as Soapie points out, all of his original teeth and most of his hair, and a rich, intimate voice that can make you want to go out and buy household cleaning products.

  He smiles at her and holds out his arms. “Look at you! Let me just tell you how glad I am that you’re here with us,” he says.

  With us. He and Soapie are clearly a couple—and yet both of them talk about Louise as though she’s a very dear friend they have in common, someone unfortunate whom they both adore and wish were with them. It’s the very oddest, sweetest thing: he goes to sit with Louise in the nursing home every day, and then comes to Soapie every night. The two of them hold hands and take long walks, and Rosie has come upon them practically making out in the kitchen.

  Late at night, they walk upstairs to Soapie’s bedroom, arm in arm, both of them holding their glasses of water, Soapie carrying her cigarette case, and they close the door and spend the night together.

  Rosie has to admit that it’s actually kind of wonderful.

  At the end of her first week, Jonathan calls her in the middle of the night. She fumbles in the dark for her phone, before she quite comes awake, and then there he is in her ear.

  “I just wanted to say I miss you and I love you,” he says, his voice crawling up right there next to her brain.

  Maybe she’s dreaming. “Are you really there?”

  “I am.”

  “I love you, too,” she says, but her voice feels as if it’s coming from very far away.

  She flips over her pillow, which has gotten hot in the night. She’s going to have to get up and turn on the air conditioner. It’s stifling in this room. What time is it anyway? 3:23.

  This can’t be a good time to be awake. She tells him something important, but it turns out that it was a thought left over from sleep, and he says she doesn’t make any sense.

  Then he starts filling up the air with his facts. He knows the average daily temperature in Nevada versus the average daily temperature in Arizona for June. He’s got the goods on rainfall situations everywhere. Gas prices. The cost of an average night’s stay in hotels across America. He says he fears for the teacups when he goes over the mountain passes. Also, there is no good radio in the middle of the country. And it is hot already. Vicious, wicked hot.

  She is silent.

  “You should go back to sleep,” she hears him say, and then he is gone.

  After that, it’s like the “I Miss Jonathan” switch in her brain has been activated. She was better off for the first few days when she thought she might hate him. In her suitcase she finds one of his T-shirts, packed there by mistake, and she takes it to bed with her each night because it smells like him. Some days now she aches for her old life: the way the river’s reflection danced on the ceiling, the hibachi on the balcony, the way he held her in bed.

  She finds herself trying to explain to Greta how furious she was, and how much she now misses everything about Jonathan.

  “You’ll end up going back with him,” says Greta. “It was sensible not to ride in that truck with a broken foot. You did the right thing.”

  “I know,” she says. “But I probably should have married him when he wanted to, two weeks ago.”

  “Don’t worry. When your foot heals, and you get Soapie settled, you can fly out there and join him,” Greta says. “Right now you can just have some drifty time. And I hate to say this, but it’s probably the last big chunk of time you’ll get to spend with your grandmother. It would be good if you could enjoy it.”

  Greta’s right. After that, Rosie spends the next two weeks cleaning out Soapie’s office, making pil
es of old files to throw out. She collects paint chips for the guest room. She spends time talking with Soapie about the possible new Dustcloth Diva book. But the whole time, she’s aware that there’s something wrong with her: she’s tired and sad, just dragging around, really, like somebody who has a low-grade fever and probably this minute she’s growing a catastrophic brain tumor or something. Maybe it’s only that she really does miss Jonathan more than she ever thought she would, but she wakes up crying some mornings. And then, as she lies in bed debating whether it’s worth the trouble to get up, she thinks that maybe she’s coming face-to-face with the real lack in her life: the fact that she never really had a mother and that in a deep, fundamental way, she’s always been an unwelcome addition to Soapie’s life.

  The horrible truth is, she doesn’t truly belong anywhere and never really has.

  And now, even worse, she sees that after telling Jonathan she was maybe starting menopause, she realizes that she really is. She got up in the middle of the night one night and checked the Internet, and there were dozens—dozens!—of women who wrote about going into menopause at forty-four. So that’s what’s wrong with her, she thinks as she looks at her pathetic, drawn, wrinkling face in the bathroom mirror each day: she got old and tired, and somehow she missed out on having the life she wanted. It’s no wonder she wakes up crying. She doesn’t even know what that life would have been.

  One night George brings over ice cream, and the four of them—George, Soapie, Tony, and Rosie—all go sit outside on the patio to eat it. There are supposed to be shooting stars that night, but there’s too much light to really see them, and so the night is something of a disappointment to Soapie, who says that all the major astronomical events of the century have been just hype.

  “Just eat some ice cream and enjoy the evening,” George says. “Listen to the crickets and the frogs. They’re never a disappointment.”

  “We have ice cream on a hot night, so how bad could life be?” Tony says.

  Then George tells a lovely story about making peach ice cream with Louise on another summer night so long ago, and how ice cream took on a whole new meaning for him after that.

  “We churned it until we were both so tired and sweaty. I kept thinking this couldn’t possibly be worth it, and why didn’t I just go to Dairy Queen and get us some? But then—then,” he says, and Rosie can see his eyes shine in the darkness, “then the texture, the sweetness, the real cream!” he exclaims. “You think of how people in the world are suffering, and there you are, eating fresh peaches that you’ve whipped up yourself in a churn with cream. It-it …”

  Words fail him, and Soapie leans over and pats his leg, and he places his arm around her shoulders and wipes at something in his eye.

  “And here we are tonight,” Soapie says, “eating ice cream together, you and me, and the world for us is perfect.”

  Rosie, watching in the drowsy twilight, feels as though she’s never known her grandmother at all.

  [ten]

  Three weeks after she’s moved in, on an overly warm July night, Tony and George start ostentatiously cooking dinner, some concoction they are quite proud of, involving red sauce and pasta and garlic and mozzarella and every pot and pan in the kitchen. And wine. She and Soapie have been told to sit, the men will do all the work tonight—and Rosie is happy to support this. It’s interesting having sweet, loud, well-meaning men around, with their flourishy cooking.

  Soapie is swanning about, and having declared that it’s lovely to see men working, she is seemingly unable to sit down and actually let it take place. She’s made piña coladas for everybody in her inimitable Soapie way, sweeping around the kitchen in her designer bedroom slippers and Vera Wang dressing gown, gathering up the ingredients one by one, narrating her progress and asking for help as she goes and then yelling at the people who give it. The kitchen is a garlicky, olive oil–reeking mess, with pineapple odors thrown in for good measure.

  Tony, still wearing his baseball cap backward and gesturing with the knife as he cuts up the garlic, is talking, loudly, about his mother, the finest cook in Hoboken, and how once she won an award for her tomato sauce, but then the prize got rescinded because some lady—and here he is using the word loosely—said that Mrs. Cavaletti stole her recipe from somebody’s Aunt Toots in Mount Kisco, and it was a big scandal for a while, and Tony and his friends ended up having to TP the lady’s house just to teach her a big lesson. Both Soapie and George need to hear how it is that a person can actually drape a house in toilet paper, and Rosie, who’d put a coat of primer on the guest room walls that day, gets so tired during the explanation that she has to lay her head down on the table for just a moment. When she looks up, they’re all staring at her.

  “I’m sorry, but my head is killing me. I think I really just need to go upstairs to bed,” she says. “I think I’m coming down with something.”

  “What you need is red meat,” Tony says. “Tomorrow I’m going to make you a big steak. Did you ever have steak with butter on it? Best thing in the world for you when you’re run down.”

  “I don’t think I’m run down,” Rosie says. “I’m just old and tired.”

  “Rare is best. You like rare? With mushrooms? I read somewhere that mushrooms can cure anything.”

  That leads Soapie to point out that so many of those food cures are just the thing, and maybe there’s a way for the Dustcloth Diva to incorporate some food cures into her next book. “Give me a pencil, George. I’m going to write down that mushrooms cure anything. We have our first tip.”

  “Mushrooms can’t cure everything,” Rosie says grouchily, “and the Dustcloth Diva can’t do food stuff. It’s not right. Your advice has to involve things that can be improved with dustcloths. That’s your brand.”

  “So I’ll be the Tablecloth Diva.”

  George laughs. “How many divas can one person be? We’re already scared enough of you as it is.”

  “You should be scared of me, George Tarkinian,” she says, and leans over and nuzzles against him. “You’ve done a million things wrong, starting back in 1945 when you married the wrong girl—”

  “You, I believe, weren’t available, my dear, having already gone and married another man,” George says, and Rosie wants to hear more—really, this has been going on forever?—but Tony claps his hands and jumps in with, “Now, now, there will be none of that talk about the things George did wrong. The past is gone.”

  He shepherds them all into the dining room like they’re his own personal patients, Rosie limping and ill, and the two old people toddling along with their arms around each other. Soapie goes to light candles on the dining room table and nearly catches the sleeve of her gown on fire reaching across, and Tony jumps in and shields her right at the last second and then tucks her into her seat, placing her napkin on her lap and her hands close to her plate, just so. She smiles up at him, and Rosie is surprised to see that she has the expression of a compliant schoolgirl, waiting to be given directions. Her eyes are slightly cloudy, and her hands shake as she reaches for the bowl of pasta, which he then gets for her and dishes onto her plate. Some for her, and then some for George.

  “You’re always saving us,” Soapie says, and gives Tony a huge smack on the cheek.

  After dinner, Soapie and George take their drinks and go off to the living room, pretend-bickering over whether they’ll dance to Frank Sinatra or Frankie Laine tonight. George is arguing that Frankie Laine is too moody and gloomy, but Soapie claims that she can’t find the Sinatra record. Tony goes and helps them turn on the stereo and look for the record, which was right on the record player, he tells Rosie when he comes back into the kitchen. She’s piling the plates in the sink.

  “Here, I’ll do that. You rest,” he says.

  “I’m really okay.”

  “No, I insist. Go sit down. Once I’ve made you steak and mushrooms, then you can work.”

  She goes and sits down. “Look, you really don’t have to fix me a steak. It’s just that I was painti
ng the guest room today and I got tired.”

  “Yeah, but you look—I don’t know—like you might be sick.”

  For a moment, she thinks how much fun it would be to wallop him, but then she thinks better of it and merely says, “Well, I said I was coming down with something.” Anybody with any sense would realize she also means, “So leave me the hell alone.”

  But of course he doesn’t. He stops loading the dishwasher and stares at her, coming closer so he can more easily peer into her face.

  “What?” she says.

  “Is there any chance you could be … pregnant?” he says. “I mean, not for nothin’, but you look to me like you got a classic case of baby-on-the-way.”

  She glares at him and shakes her head. “No, no, no.”

  “I mean, sometimes I’m a guy who can just sense pregnancy,” he says. “I don’t know why. My ex said I should hire myself out as a human pregnancy test, save people a lot of money on those home kit thingies. I knew right away when she was expecting Milo, even before she missed her period. I can just kind of read it. I don’t know how it works, it just does.”

  She rolls her eyes. “You might have known about Milo, because you were the one who had sex with her. Right?”

  “Well, yeah, but there’ve been some other cases, too. I swear it. It’s a gift.”

  “Well, that’s a nice gift to have, I’m sure, but I’m not pregnant,” says Rosie, although her voice is shaking as she says it.

  He shrugs and goes back to loading the dishwasher. “Steak’ll be good for you either way, pregnant or not,” he says.

  “Yeah, but I’m really not,” she says. She’s about to explain to him that the Internet thinks she’s probably in menopause, but why engage him in thinking about her hormonal life at all? Why encourage him? This is ridiculous. “I’m just tired from painting in the heat, that’s all this is. That, and I’m missing Jonathan and my old life. I used to have a very nice life.”