Going in Circles

by Pamela Ribon

  Sure enough, she asks, “Do you like this wine? Because I think we might have it on the table during our wedding dinner. Do you think this wine would go with fish? Does fish need white wine? Because the fish is red. Well, pink. It’s salmon. Maybe that’s boring, but it’s the one thing that doesn’t seem to conflict with all the food issues everybody has now. You know what I mean? Oh, of course you do. You’re married, you’ve done this.”

  I nod, smile, and gulp my wine, pretending it’s filled with all the words I’m swallowing.

  Suzanne’s whole face changes, and it’s like a supernova. It’s stunning. She goes from twinkle and shine to a black hole of remorse. I know she’s trying to move her face into a shape she recognizes as grief, but since she’s never had one bad day in her life, she’s only mimicking the pain she’s seen in others. It looks painful, as if the muscles a face would normally use for sadness have atrophied due to lack of use, and are now twitching and writhing in useless confusion.

  “God, Charlotte, I’m sorry.” She clamps her hand down on my arm too tightly. “I shouldn’t be having these conversations with you, when I’m getting married and you’re getting . . . going . . . what you’re doing . . . through.”

  That’s kind of the best thing I’ve ever heard. That’s exactly what it feels like. I’m getting going what I’m doing through. My failures force others to think of themselves as more fortunate, and therefore they need to choose their words carefully as they talk to me, as if I’m a c-h-i-l-d who might u-n-d-e-r-s-t-a-n-d what they’re really saying.

  “It’s cool, Suzanne,” I say.

  “You’re better off without him.”

  Eventually that statement was coming, but it still drives me nuts every time. What a terrible thing to say to anyone who is going through a separation or a divorce. It’s as bad as the opposite clichéd phrase people fling at me all the time: “If you’re meant to be together, it’ll work out.” What Disney fairy godmother came up with that twisted logic? If you can even buy into the concept of “meant to be together,” which implies that people are destined for one another, paired off in the future beyond their own control, abandoning the idea of free will and reducing us to molecule bundles bouncing around until we bang into the other fated atom ball. To me, that isn’t romantic. Taking out the element of choice means that no matter what happens, no matter what anyone does in life, there’s only one way things can be, all because some other thing or being or force or whatever declared it to be so. We’re all just human puppets dancing on the invisible strings of an unknowable creator. How depressing.

  What I really don’t understand is how anyone can look someone in the eye and say it’ll only work out if you were meant to be together. Why would anyone dare to sound that ominous with someone’s heart? It seems cruel to make such whimsical predictions that could go horribly wrong.

  And on that subject, there’s one more seemingly optimistic line of bullshit people keep giving me.

  “At least you don’t have kids.”

  Let me go ahead and expand that to any sentence that begins with: “At least you . . .” I don’t need to hear people say how it could have been even worse, or rate my “luckiness” in this terrible situation. Whenever someone says to me with that wistful, patronizing squint, “At least you don’t have kids,” I want to look her (always a her) right in the eye and say, “We tried for years. It’s because I’m barren. But thanks for reminding me of another reason why my husband might have left me.” I just want to watch them suffer.

  I’d rather they said, “At least you were never in a car accident in which you lost your legs.” That sounds like something I should be giddy over. But being grateful over the lack of having a child with someone I love sounds twisted. I understand splitting up would be harder on everyone if there were children involved, I do, but there would be children, which sounds much more . . . I don’t know, hopeful.

  If I never go back to Matthew, there will never be a family. Our family. He’ll slip away, wander off, and someone else will find him. Someone else will love him. Someone else will start a family with him. Which means one day she might whisper into his ear, “At least you never had kids with her.” And right then no matter where I am or what I’m doing, I will feel those words like bullets through my stomach.

  So now I try to stop listening the second anyone begins a sentence with: “You’re lucky . . .” They are going to finish it up with something so insulting I will feel smacked in the forehead with their shortsighted observation that minimizes my life decision into something as trivial as the voting-off of a reality show contestant.

  There’s really only one sentence someone can say in this situation that is 100 percent accurate and appreciated. It takes only two words, but they go right to the heart of the matter, and while they can’t heal, they can at least empathize.

  “That sucks.”

  It’s the only sentence that’s appropriate.

  I’m afraid Suzanne thinks I’ve blacked out or gone into some kind of schizophrenic personality shift, so I rejoin the conversation by changing the subject. “I like your new hair color,” I tell her.

  Her hand flies to her locks, and she pulls. “I hate it. It’s all wrong. Robert hates it, too, although he’s too nice to say it.”

  “Where is Robert tonight?” I ask. “You got him at home stamping invitations?”

  “I wish,” Suzanne laughs. “He’s off at some poker game with Pete.”

  “Ah,” I nod. “Probably with my husband.”

  And then we stand there enjoying the thirty or so seconds of awkward silence I’ve just accidentally created.

  The funny thing is, I never call him “my husband.” Never. Not to people. I always call him Matthew. Because that’s his name. Matthew. Not Matt or Matty. He’s not into nicknames, and he doesn’t care for the baby talk of sweethearts, so he’s not Babe or Honey or even Sweetheart. He was Matthew. He is Matthew. But I didn’t mean to bring him up in front of Suzanne. It’s just the truth. Robert plays poker with Petra’s husband, Pete, and therefore plays poker with Matthew. So if there’s a poker game going, odds are they’re together right now.

  Abandoning the job she so recently assigned herself, Suzanne finds a reason to be in any other room in the apartment immediately. I step outside for some air and silence. I decide not to speak for the next twenty minutes. It’s the least I can do to help these other people.

  Squished onto the tiny back porch, smoking a cigarette like it needs her full attention, is the Goth girl from work, Francesca. Her tiny fingers are pressing a closed cell phone to her lips; her nails are flecked with bits of red nail polish. She’s peering through her dark bangs into the back window of the neighboring apartment. I follow her gaze to see she’s watching their television. Letterman is interviewing someone I don’t recognize. For some reason I find Francesca’s presence to be very comforting, like that of an old dog napping on a porch.

  It’s good I’m in the middle of a twenty-minute vow of silence, or I might have just told her that. She nods at me, but that’s it.

  I roll the stem of my wineglass between my thumb and forefinger as I think about Suzanne’s ridiculous conclusion.

  “You’re better off without him.”

  It’s as if suddenly everyone feels free to tell me I’ve been making a terrible mistake all this time. Were they all thinking that when they raised champagne glasses at our wedding? Did they take bets in the bathroom between dinner courses?

  Every time someone tells me that Matthew isn’t good enough, I can’t help but worry that at that moment someone, somewhere, is trying to talk Matthew into believing the exact same thing about me. Someone is saying monstrous things about me, confessing their utter contempt and disdain for my personality, my voice, my figure. Do they tell him he’s lucky he didn’t have kids with me? That I would have made a lousy mother? Do they rip me apart and dismiss me with Matthew the same way some of my friends act as if I’d broken things off with a casual fling?

  When t
hose words come at me, someone else’s judgment of the kind of man Matthew is, I want to stomp them, deflect them. I find myself defending Matthew’s actions, even the things that drive me crazy, things that upset me or hurt me. I don’t want to be told we outgrew each other, like one of us is stunted, malformed.

  No matter what, he’s still my family. He put a ring on my finger and became my family. Nobody gets to talk smack about my parents, so why do they think they have the right to talk about my husband in such a manner? These women say kinder things about my hips than about Matthew, and my hips have done way more damage to my self-esteem over the years than Matthew could ever achieve.

  From inside the apartment, Petra’s yelling for everyone to gather. “You have been ordered by the birthday girl!” she adds.

  “Shit,” Francesca mutters, flicking the cherry off her cigarette before jamming what’s left of the butt into the front pocket of her jeans. She then holds the door open for me. “Hey,” she says. “You really don’t have to be here, you know. You’ve got this free pass. I don’t know why you aren’t using it. I’d be as far away from this mess as possible.”

  One of the million things that’s supersensitive on me right now is my Bullshit Detector. I can spot insincerity in the slightest inflection, the tiniest of twitches.

  The flip side is that when someone is being legitimately compassionate, it goes right to the core of me. Francesca wasn’t just trying to convey empathy; I felt it. It’s real. Empathy is my Kryptonite. I can’t even thank her because it’ll make me break down like I did with Andy in the kitchen. Instead I nod.

  “Feel free to tell me to shut up,” she says. “I just figured if you’re hiding on the porch with me, you’re rethinking being here. You should bolt.”

  “No, I’m okay,” I say. “It’s Petra’s party. I can make it through a party, can’t I?” This is how my life goes now: asking a near stranger to tell me if I’m going to be okay.

  “I’m sorry I weirded you out in the break room earlier,” she says. “I should’ve told you I brought you that Happy Meal.”

  When she realizes I’m too shocked to say anything, she shrugs, blushing. “I thought you needed some Happy.”

  • • •

  Petra’s standing at her dining room table above a massive display of crafts materials. Markers, glitter, poster board, and stacks of magazines cover the middle of the table. “Come on, everybody,” she says. “I thought we’d all have fun doing this.”

  Everybody has their own notion of what makes up a party. For some it involves alcohol, mingling, and music. For someone like Petra, it’s bonding and soul celebrating. She tells us that we’re each to take a poster board and create a “Wish Collage.” She’s put out all these magazine clippings and leftovers from her scrapbooking phase to make us goop together a visual representation of all that we haven’t yet accomplished in our lives. Bright side: at least I won’t be the only one focused on what’s missing from her life. It’s a real good thing there’s booze at this party.

  We sit at the table, most of us reluctantly. But twinkle-twinkle Suzanne dives right in, holding up a bridal magazine, laughing. “I don’t need this one anymore!” The heavy tome bends around her knuckles as she looks for someone to congratulate her. But the only sound is the rapid-fire snapping of pages and pages of glossy magazines flipping in determined focus. A blonde eating from a bag of popcorn snatches the magazine out of Suzanne’s fingers without a word.

  Petra pastes a magazine cutout of a hammock onto the poster board. “This year, I will focus on being relaxed,” she says. “I’m going to put this up in my office, and I’m going to remember this year that peace is only a mental decision away.”

  Only the rich can have this kind of impossible, selfish life wish.

  I watch these women scratch their heads, staring at advertisements of happy women, thinking, “Do I want that underwear she’s wearing? Would that make me happy? Getting new underwear this year is a realistic goal.” With one well-intentioned project, Petra is undoing years of collective therapy.

  I recently heard that 40 percent of Americans say they don’t worry about anything at all. I don’t understand how that’s possible. There are things to worry about everywhere. Fine, get past the major things, like health or traffic or the sudden changes in weather or wars or the possibility that one day there will be no such thing as TiVo. Maybe most people don’t spend time worrying about the personal decisions their friends and family have made, or about when to do laundry, or what’s for dinner, or if they remembered to lock the back door when they left to do laundry. Almost half of America says they never spend a second worrying about why they can’t fall asleep or what will happen when they do fall asleep and end up sleeping through the alarm because they’re so tired from staying up late worrying about not being able to sleep. Then what do they spend their time thinking about? Do they just walk around all day with dial tones in their heads?

  I’m worried about what to put in my wish collage, and I’m worried about what not to put. If I focus on one thing, something else is going to suffer. If I layer a ton of pictures on top of each other, something’s going to get smothered. What if one picture being bigger than another makes it more important? What if one font grabs the universe’s attention more than another? What if I can’t find a picture of the thing I really want?

  And if I knew what it looked like, wouldn’t I have figured out a way to have it by now?

  I can worry about all of this and 40 percent of Americans don’t even come close to thinking about these kinds of things? Well, then I’m really worried about them.

  I’ve got Monkey’s Paw–level anxiety over this wish collage. It has become the most important series of decisions I’m being forced to make, and even doing nothing is doing some damage to my future.

  After half an hour, my wish collage contains only one image: a bottle of sunscreen.

  A skinny girl I recognize from the break room looks over my shoulder. “That’s so great,” she says. “A very simple message to your spirit. ‘Take me out of here.’ ”

  Skinny girl, you are reading my mind.

  The women around me are clucking and chuckling to each other, trying to make jokes about their unfulfilled needs. At some point there was a shift in which the women began focusing on tangible things. Objects. New cars. Shoes. One girl plastered a picture of a laptop to the corner of her poster board. “This is the year I’m going to change jobs. And maybe write a book.” Then, realizing she has just announced her desire to leave the company to a room filled with coworkers, she adds, “I mean, once I write the book, maybe I can change jobs. Otherwise, I’m so happy getting to hang out with all of you every day.”

  Francesca elbows me, peering out from under her dark hair. “I wanna hide the word herpes in all of their wish collages. So a year from now, they have the man they want, the house they want, the job they want, and raging, fiery herpes.”

  This makes me laugh. “See, I’d rather hide a surprise pregnancy in there,” I tell her. I switch to a ditzy voice: “Well, I got everything I wanted, but then I got this baby, so now my carefully planned life is over.”

  “What are you two giggling about?” Petra asks suspiciously, glaring over her bottle of glue. “Don’t make fun. Some of us take this seriously.”

  “So do we,” Francesca says, turning her wish collage on edge so it’s on display. “Extremely seriously. I made sure to include everything I want to happen for me in the next year.”

  She’s assembled a sentence, ransom-note style: MAKE SURE LUNGS AND HEART KEEP DOING THEIR JOBS.

  “I’ve never been very ambitious,” she explains.

  Suzanne clicks her tongue against her teeth. “This thing really works, you know,” she says. “Last summer, I swear to you, I wish-collaged Robert into existence. He wasn’t there, I made the collage, and two days later I saw him on Match.com, saw he was looking to get married as well, so I asked him out and now we’re getting married.”

  “Romantic,
” Francesca murmurs under her breath, but a couple of the other women near us also hear her, and they are unsuccessful at stifling their giggles.

  Suzanne’s face falls into something that seems like disappointment but is probably more like pity. “I would think that you two, of all people, would want to give this a try. I mean, no offense, but you both could use some help.”

  Petra lifts her head from her project, trying to decide whether or not to intervene.

  Francesca says, “I didn’t see the porno magazines on the table. But I guess you did, since you clearly put a picture of a vagina on your wish collage.”

  The shocked sound that comes out of me is so sudden and uncontrolled, I think I just barked.

  Francesca raises both of her fists and shakes them in celebration. “And hey, look, Suzanne! It does work! Your wish came true! You’re a total cu—”

  I clamp my hand down onto Francesca’s arm, forcing her to change her curse word into a yelp.

  The other women quickly dip their heads back into their work, a silent ring of brown-rooted blond crowns moving in unison, as Suzanne’s face flashes crimson with fury.

  “Just be careful,” I hear myself say. “What you put on there, I mean.”

  Now the eyes in the room are back on me.

  Charlotte Goodman should probably shut up right now, but unfortunately she hasn’t even filled that Lexapro prescription yet, so she’s completely on her own here. Let’s watch as she ruins yet another night of her life using only her voice and her complete lack of self-control.

  “Because you could get everything you want and then realize it all came at a cost. Like, by the time you finish renovations on your bathroom, your husband is having an affair. That might sound a little extreme, but I’m warning you. You don’t get something for nothing. Make sure that car is really something you want, because you could end up being very alone driving in it.”