Chad was right. The highlight of my weekend was supposed to be seeing Cindy and Evie. If University of Michigan won its football game, even better. Never did I predict that the homecoming weekend would begin a chain of events that would fundamentally change my life. Chad once told me that when he painted, the canvas always ended up completely different than what he’d originally envisioned. He said his process was one where unexpected choices had to be made, and that art was about being open to the change that would inevitably unfold before us. I thought it sounded a bit goofy at the time, but now I’d give anything for him to apply this philosophy to my current dilemma.
Chapter 2
From the moment Evie picked me up from the Detroit airport on Friday night, we recognized our present differences before remembering our shared history. Waving her arms at the airport gate, she started mouthing something and laughing as she pointed at me.
“What?” I said as I hugged her. “What were you saying?”
“Omigahd,” she laughed again. “You are such the after shot now. You look so, so New York.”
Youaaare such the aaaafter shaaat naaaw. Michigan. This state has been sponsored by the Letter A.
In college when I teased Evie about her Michigan accent, she smacked me back in place by saying, “Tank Gawd yous New Yawkahs came to teach us how to tawk right.”
I was glad Evie noticed and seemingly approved of my shedding the 1980s leg warmers and big hair for a more urban, new millennium look. I was wearing my straight-lined black suit with a white blouse underneath, chunky black leather heels and a long black leather coat. I now dye my naturally mousy brown hair jet black and spend forty minutes every morning trying to get my short cropped cut to look just-out-of-bed messy.
“Love the glasses,” Evie said of my thick black frames. In the 1950s, they’d have been considered nerd glasses; today they’re hip. “Is there anything even wrong with your eyes?”
“Not a thing. Still twenty-twenty,” I said before hugging Evie again.
“Would you believe I’m wearing bifocals these days?” she asked. Actually, I would. Evie was still an attractive woman, but looked as if someone rubbed over her with an eraser. I wondered if she was thinking the same of me. I noticed that the half moons that formed around the outside of her lips didn’t go away when Evie stopped smiling. I refrained from smoothing over that area of my own face with my finger.
In the absence of response, I smiled. “Let’s grab my bags and go for a bite, okay? I am absolutely starving,” I suggested.
Evie maintained her Talbot’s preppy look from college, but it had matured from knapsack to purse. A band of renegade grays found their way onto her blond head and were threatening a full-on coup any year now.
Cindy said she’d be in at around eight, and we planned to meet her at Rick’s bar at nine for drinks.
“Where do you want to eat?” I asked.
“I can come to Ann Arbor any time. You decide. This is your first time back in, how long, ten years?”
“I haven’t been back since graduation, Evie.”
“Omigahd, has it been that long? Fourteen years? Oh, Prudence, you definitely get to decide where we eat then. You are not going to believe how much Ann Arbor has changed. Where to for dinner?”
“Steve’s Diner,” I asked. “Is that place still around?”
“Lunch,” said Evie.
“No, dinner. Evie, it’s eight at night.”
“No, Steve’s Lunch. It’s called Steve’s Lunch, not Steve’s Diner.”
“Whatever. Does that place still exist?”
Not only was Steve’s Lunch still there, but the place had not changed in the least since we left. How I envied it. Despite its All-American sounding name, Steve’s is a Korean restaurant about the width of two bowling alley lanes. Nineteen sticky black vinyl stools line a glitter-speckled counter overlooking the single grill. Steve’s menu is still posted on a dingy yellow light board on the back wall. The prices hadn’t gone up at all since the place opened its doors in the mid-eighties.
Living in Saginaw, Evie could eat at Steve’s whenever she pleased. The one-man show, presumably Steve, recognized Evie immediately. “Bi Bim Bob?” he asked with the familiarity one would share with a regular.
Evie winked at him. “Hold the meat on one of them. You’re still doing the vegetarian thing, right, Prudence?”
I nodded. Five minutes later, my taste buds were on a sentimental journey delivered in a metal bowl. Steve’s specialty was a half basketball-sized silver bowl of rice, vegetables, ground meat and a fried egg on top. And of course some secret ingredients that prevented civilians from trying to recreate the meal at home.
As we left Steve’s, Evie told me we had fifteen minutes to walk around campus before meeting Cindy at Rick’s. Stepping into the autumn night in Ann Arbor was like being slapped in the face by a piece of frozen aluminum siding. Evie and I turned up our coat collars and looked at each other to confirm that we were really going to go through with our journey.
I saw the arch of the West Engineering Building, where legend had it that couples who kiss underneath at the stroke of midnight remain in love forever. I remembered the night Matt and I did this after dating for about two months. It was an unusually sweet gesture from a guy who was far too cool to engage in any type of romantic sentimentality. Luckily for me, he’d drunk quite a bit that night.
On what’s known as “The Diag,” the very center of the Michigan campus, coat-bundled students passed a joint around in a circle. Signs welcoming the graduating classes from different years hung between the old trees. Hand-lettered announcements about protests, boycotts and teach-ins cluttered kiosks. I felt betrayed that Ann Arbor had gone on without me, guilty that I had abandoned it.
A breeze blew the front page of the Michigan Daily down the street. It rushed to greet me the way a dog does his owner. “Gross,” Evie apologized, peeling the campus news from my thigh.
“It’s in color now,” I said.
“Hmm?” Evie asked.
“The Daily. They print it in color now. I’m not sure I’m crazy about that.”
“Oh,” she dismissed. “I guess they thought it looked better that way.”
“Shit!” Evie said looking at her watch. “Cindy’s probably waiting for us at the bar.”
Cindy was already standing at the bar flanked by the only two guys at Rick’s so early in the evening. She had this effect on men wherever we went. Cindy is now a journalist in Minneapolis, where she lived with her husband and two children. Her look is neither mother nor newspaper reporter. She has a mass of long, wavy “come fuck me” hair and a body so perfect it only reinforced the invitation. She was tall — most of it legs — and thin without looking emaciated. Her boobs were so round that you’d swear they cost her three grand. However, in one of life’s many great injustices, my pal Cindy had never once been under the surgeon’s knife, not even for a necessary medical procedure. She’s just nature’s little way of saying, “Look what I can do if I really concentrate.” Cindy spoke with such animation that her hair bounced around from side to side whenever she really got going with a story. I could imagine Minneapolis city officials being interviewed by her, mesmerized by her hair, mindlessly spilling the confidential information that would cost their corrupt boss’s head.
Cindy hopped off her stool when she saw Evie and me at the entrance. “Bye guys,” she said as she gave her dismissed fan club members each a simultaneous pat on the shoulders. She ran to us with arms wide open, and pulled Evie and me close to her with a hug. “I am so excited to see you two!” she exclaimed. “God this place is dead, though. I forget the night is young for these kids. Nine o’clock and I’m ready to collapse, but these kids aren’t up at seven working and cooking dinner and changing poopy diapers now, are they?”
Why must she keep saying “these kids”?
“Can we get a nice Merlot?” I asked the bartender.
He stared at me for a moment, then flashed a gorgeous sheepish smile.
“I’m new here so you’re going to have to help me out. What’s in a Merlot?”
I needed that Merlot more than ever. “Grapes,” I smiled broadly, hoping he thought my smile was as attractive as I found his, but at the same time knowing he couldn’t.
“Grapes?” he puzzled. “Oh, okay. Merlot is wine. Grapes, I get it. Okay, okay, I know we’ve got some wine around here somewhere. Let me check in the back.”
He returned to our table five minutes later with a bottle of white wine. Wiping the bottle with his bar rag, the bartender flashed us his winning smile again. “A very good year,” he said in a charmingly self-deprecating way.
“Indeed,” said Cindy as she watched him walk away.
For the next hour, Cindy and Evie swapped photos and stories of their children, which was interesting for the first five minutes. After twenty, I started playing a game where I counted how many times each said the word “we” or “our.” In fairness, Cindy did have quite a few outside interests, but just as all roads lead to Damascus, all conversation eventually came back to the blessed hearth and home. Part of me felt like their lives of spreading peanut butter, slicing cake and driving to tumble gyms (something I’d never heard of till then) sounded like pure servitude. I had visions of Evie like Sisyphus pushing a stroller up one of Michigan’s few hills every day. I saw Cindy wearing bright red PVC leg shackles made by Tonka. On her, they looked cute. The other part of me felt a bit envious. I didn’t want to trade in my life for a lawnmower and PTA membership, but I did want a “we.” I wanted to say “our.”
Cindy and Evie had thick family albums stuffed with Sears portraits, and husbands who wanted more attention. I had an impressive stock portfolio, and a roommate who wore a wedding ring I once gave him.
Cindy said she was generally fulfilled, though she had a few complaints. She listed them with chipper resignation while holding her wine glass out to the center of the table. Sort of like a reverse toast. “I’d like more time, more money, you know, the usual stuff,” she said. I silently chuckled at Cindy’s characterization of her relationship with her husband as having grown into something more “real.” Real never translates well. Real people are almost always terribly average and unexciting. Reality television always showed people at their worst. Reality, in my book at least, was highly overrated. “It’s different now with kids,” Cindy explained. “More meaningful. More real.” For the first time, I noticed Cindy has a millisecond of an uncomfortable laugh, though I instantly recognized it from a thousand times before. Like a soprano huff.
Evie maintained that, like the rest of her life, her marriage was numbingly dull.
Reluctantly I admitted that mine was, well, comfortable. There were no surprises with Reilly, which wasn’t an altogether bad thing. He never went on weekend drinking binges or lost our retirement fund gambling in Vegas. What he lacked in excitement, he made up for in stability. Reilly was a blue-chip spouse all the way.
Silently I toasted, To Discontent great and small.
Cindy tapped her phone and showed more photos. “Michael’s into anything that crawls, slithers, or is in any way poisonous. Vicky is just mama’s little angel, such a girly girl. Her teacher always says, ‘Owww that Vicky is such a little girl, into princesses and babies.’”
Fascinating.
“And here we are at Disneyworld this summer,” she continued, showing us the family in mouse ears.
Holy fuck.
Birthday parties. Santa’s lap. Chicken pox. Cradle cap. Baby Einstein. Buster Brown. And on and on it all went until the eventual question all mothers ask of their child-free peers.
“So,” said Cindy. “Are you and Reilly ever going to have kids? You know it’s not too late. My friend Corinne just had a baby and she’s forty-three. You haven’t started menopause yet, have you?
“Cindy, I’m thirty-six, same as you. Have you started menopause?”
“Yes, well, that’s true, isn’t it? Why would you start any younger than me?” she pondered. “My bad! So are you and Reilly ever going to start a family?”
“No, Reilly and I are both very committed to our careers and….”
Stop defending your decision.
“No, never. I’m never going to have kids,” I dismissed.
“Never say never,” said Cindy, playfully scolding me with her index finder.
“No really, you guys. I’m glad you are happy with your children, but they’re just not my thing. Really. I’m never, ever going to have children. Reilly just had a vasectomy this summer. Here, I’ve got some pictures of the procedure,” I said, pretending to reach for my phone.
“Well, that’s a valid choice too,” said Evie after an awkward silence.
Gee, thanks.
“To be sure,” assured Cindy. “I think it’s great that people have options.”
I could practically repeat her speech verbatim because I’d heard it so many times before from parents grappling with their discomfort with my decision not to join the ranks of the breeding. At parties, I could always see the thought bubbles looming over people’s heads as they tensely smiled and nodded.
Selfish, one thinks while smiling at me.
Can’t love.
Afraid to love, another analyzes.
Infertile.
Who will take care of her when she’s old? another wonders.
What the hell is wrong with her?
Lesbian, they all charge somewhere in their consciousness.
You’d think people like me would get a pat on the back for possessing the self-awareness not to enter motherhood lightly. But instead I get pitiful looks, thinly guised as respect.
“To choice,” said Cindy, raising her wine glass. Every year or so I get the “I really feel sorry for you so I’m going to toast what I pity to show how comfortable I am with your choice” routine.
The last time I got this was at a client party where a woman, who assured me she “loved being a mother and would never wish her kids weren’t born,” told me it was nonetheless “very cool” that I was doing my own thing. Mothers are a funny lot. They preface their complaints by telling you how much they love their kids and couldn’t imagine life without them. As if were they to admit that they’re sometimes ambivalent about parenting, the furious hand of God Almighty would reach from the sky and yank their children by the necks up to the heavens. Another guy said it was “just great” that I was “willing to go against nature.” Like I was some sort of knight suited in Styrofoam armor jousting at bluebirds.
Most days when I’m thinking straight, I feel very comfortable with my decision not to have children. Of course I sometimes wonder if I’m missing out on something. If parents are really right and life without a child really is incomplete. Then, honestly, all I need to do is spend a little time with a kid, and I remember my reasons. When I’m with Sophie’s five-year-old twins I find them to be delightful — as long as it’s in thrifty little spoonfuls of two hours. Everyone insists that I’d feel differently about my own. I doubt it, but sometimes I still wonder.
I waited for Cindy and Evie to tell me that they sometimes imagined what living my life would be like, but neither did. The wrath of God thing.
I never brought it up with them because it would invite a call from the missionary of breeding. Do parents have some sort of system set up where they can show proof of conversion and redeem it for a coupon to Costco? How much would filling my uterus be worth? New lawn furniture? A gas grill? Perhaps Cindy was saving her coupons for something really special like the speed boat parked at the entrance of the superstore.
* * *
In the morning, the three of us went to breakfast and ordered the two-dollar bacon-and-eggs special before heading over to the Mud Bowl to watch the fraternities and sororities play messy touch football before the big game. When we went to college, Matt’s fraternity was one of the houses that participated in the game every year. I loved watching his transformation from clean-cut jock to the Loch Ness monster after he spent several downs in the mud.
In either state, he looked beautiful. He started out in his light blue fraternity jersey and gray sweat pants cut off at the knees. The deal-clinchers for me were the backwards baseball cap and, don’t ask me why, the mouth guard he wore.
I have never matched the level of chemistry I had with Matt. I don’t know what it was about him, aside from his athletic good looks and charming sense of humor. Perhaps it was the way he squinted his blue eyes and flashed a cocky smile when he saw me. Maybe it was how he was never totally available to me, but something about Matt penetrated my memory so clearly that my heart raced just knowing I was standing across the street from where he lived fourteen years ago.
I was disappointed to see that Matt’s fraternity house now bore different Greek letters. The team wore green shirts with Delta Something Something on the front.
“Nothing like young boys in mud,” said Cindy, creating a visor with her hands. As the teams ran into the mud bowl, the smile dropped from her face. Neither Evie nor I had to ask what the problem was. “Are these? Are these?” Cindy asked, knowing that the combination of alcohol and horror could likely make her sick if she finished the sentence. “Students?” she managed to complete. Evie nodded. “Here? Are they students here? They’re in college?!” she asked, panicked and nauseated. Evie nodded again, pursing her lips apologetically. “Lord have mercy, I can’t watch this,” Cindy said, holding one hand over her eyes.
“What’s the problem, Cindy?” I asked. “You were flirting with two little ones at Rick’s last night. You just now noticed that we’re twice their age?”
She nodded her head, panicked. “I don’t know, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the daylight, but they look so pudgy-cheeked now. Like fucking cherubs or something. Let’s get out of here.”
“Here, here,” I seconded. “Evie, let’s go. I feel like some sort of pervert ogling little boys.”
Evie insisted we were insane, but left anyway. As we walked away, we heard the sororities begin their house cheers.
The Wife of Reilly Page 2
