by Amanda Stern
A Sense of Rightness
When he shouldn’t think out loud, he does; and when he should, he keeps quiet.
Out of the blue Javier says, “You know, it’s okay that sometimes we don’t like things about the other person. Sometimes your partner will just rub you the wrong way, but that’s just the deal, and you have to live with it.”
“What things about me don’t you like?” He won’t tell me.
I try again: “What if I can change those things, wouldn’t you want that?”
“You can’t change them. Besides, I’m sure there are things about me you don’t like,” he says.
“There are, and I’m happy to tell you.” In fact, I want to tell him, because I do believe people can change.
“Well, I don’t want to know what they are.”
When he falls asleep that night, and I am left alone with my imagination, the field of things to not like about me suddenly expands. I feel vulnerable and held hostage, as if I’m being kept from a part of my own self, a part I want to know, deserve to know; a part he has the power to show me. The feeling is too familiar. My entire childhood I felt kept from my own truth, as though who I am is too dangerous for me to know: Should I be afraid of myself? Is it how I look? Is it my body? Is it my anxiety, that I’m in therapy and take medication? I want to wake him and ask, Which of the million unlikable things about me are the most unlikable things? I can’t let it go. But I’ve learned enough in the last few months to keep my worries to myself.
The other thing keeping me up is the baby conversation. Now that I have someone I could see myself having a baby with, I need to figure out how to make that happen—the sand timer on my ovaries is running out, and the more time I spend with Frankie, the more I want a baby of my own. Yet, in order for that desire to be realized, I need Javier on board, but whenever the topic comes up, he deflects, which makes me think he’s not interested in having another child. He’s invited me to spend a month with him and Frankie in a gorgeous island house off the coast of Maine, and I want to go, badly—I’d love to spend more time with him and Frankie, to have a quiet place to work on my stories and my next children’s book—but there’s no point in continuing our relationship if he doesn’t want another kid. I need him to give me a straight answer, one way or another. I’m almost forty-one. I can’t waste any more time.
In one of our long phone conversations, I try endlessly to frame a question in such a way that he’ll have to answer. Finally, I just ask: “Are you morally opposed to having another child?” I am thrumming with dread at his response.
“No,” he says. “I’m not morally opposed.”
Not exactly an answer, but it’s the best I’ve gotten. “Does that mean I should come to Maine?”
“Yeah, I think you should come,” he says. Relief. There is still a chance.
I fly to Portland, Maine, and then take a bus. As I get closer, I picture our reunion. I haven’t seen Frankie since New Year’s, and imagining her face makes me smile. I wonder if she’ll be looking for me, too, the same way I used to scan the crowd for my own mother’s face. As we pull into the station, though, I can see immediately that they’re not there, and I am slammed by a sudden splash of dislocation, until a motion to the side of the bus catches my attention. Javier and Frankie are running down the street, trying to get to the station before we do. I wish I didn’t read all of his actions as symbolic nods to my standing in his life, but I can’t help it: I’ve taken a plane and a bus to get here, and he’s the one who is late.
Frankie gives me a huge hug and shows me the bag of baked goods Javier picked out for the ferry.
“Want a cheese Danish?”
“No thanks, my sweets.”
She scours through the bag. “What about a croissant?” I shake my head.
“You’re not hungry?” she asks.
“I am, I’m starving. But I’m allergic to dairy.”
Javier smacks his head. “Goddamn it! I totally forgot,” he says.
“That’s all right,” I say, reminding myself that in families, no one keeps score.
On the ferry, Frankie wants to show me everything we pass, so I can see the island as we pull into the harbor. Dots in the distance have names, and Frankie knows them all. She’s excited for me to meet her mom; she keeps telling me so. She wants to show me her bedroom and hang out in her house and stay for dinner and have a sleepover. It’s sweet that she considers me a friend, but I wish every mention of her mother didn’t make me want to vomit. In photos Meredith looks like a French new wave “It” girl. She’s so skinny and straight that in comparison my own small body looks like someone’s zaftig Bubbe. I sense that Meredith is a monumental threat; Javier is patently afraid of her, which means he’s unresolved and still under her sway. Although he has promised he’s on my side, I worry he doesn’t understand my feelings. I think Javier enjoys my jealousy, as though it means something more than that my feelings are slippery. His fear makes me afraid of her also.
The ferry edges close to the harbor, and I don’t know how we’ll get through the thicket of fishing boats. The island is foggy and gorgeous.
Frankie darts off the ferry, pulling me behind her. “Lobster traps!” she yells. She races ahead, pointing wildly. “Candy store! Post office! Library!” I smile and laugh, while Javier lags behind us.
The smell of low-hovering clouds and wet rocks feels like a secret all my own, as if I’m walking not on the island, but inside it. The coastline is ragged, and the oat-colored linens and cream undergarments clothespinned and sun-drying on front lawns have a decidedly French feel. A woman with a headscarf is working in her garden, listening to the radio. She waves her spade hello to us.
“Lichen! Spruce tree! Moss! Our favorite hike is back that way! The swimming quarry is over there.”
We pass rambling colonial and Victorian houses. The gardens and the surrounding woods are wild and perfect, nothing manicured. Cars pass slowly; drivers lift their palms up off the wheel, an erect flag of fingers in a lazy salute.
“Blackberry bush! Dragonfly! Sumac! Perennials!”
We start up a hill. Frankie points ahead. “That’s Abi and Abu’s house, where you’re staying. My house with my mom is over there,” she adds and points a bit farther down, but I don’t look.
Javier unlocks the door and we walk into the kitchen, where Frankie starts narrating the kitchen appliances. Javier finally starts laughing, too.
“Let’s show Amanda where she’s going to write,” he says.
“Ooooh yeah. You’re going to love this!” She zips ahead and Javier and I follow her up the stairs, through a bathroom, and toward a door, behind which she reveals the most dreamlike writing carrel I’ve ever seen. A sanctuary of wood: beams, floor, desk. A faded army green, vintage metal index-card box sits on the desk, which rests in front of a window overlooking the forest, or what they call “the backyard.”
“Are you sure this is okay with your dad?” I ask Javier.
“Yeah, he’s really excited that you’re writing here.”
“Amazing. This is totally amazing. Thank you,” I say and hug him. A stacked tower of books waiting to be reviewed for the local newspaper, where Abu’s a critic, are waiting for his eye. I’m inexpressibly happy. This is the life I’ve always wanted, where I could be a writer and a mother. They show me the rest of the house, and, strange as it sounds, with every room a sense of rightness grows in me. Somehow this island feels like a place that has always belonged to me. We unpack, and Frankie goes over to her mom’s. Javier takes the car to get groceries, and I stay behind to set up my writing space.
At dinner, Javier and Frankie hold hands, and then reach for mine. Oh no, are they going to expect me to say grace? I put my hands in theirs.
“Every night at dinner we say what we’re grateful for,” Javier explains.
My voice box seizes up. This feels like a test. I’m as nervous as a seventh grader. But they offer normal, bland statements about togetherness and good food, so I do, too, ev
en though my heart is pounding and I feel weirdly naked, but then it’s over. I didn’t say anything wrong.
“Will you come pick me up from school tomorrow?” Frankie asks me.
I’m opening my mouth to say how happy that would make me, when Javier interjects. “Amanda has to write. You can see her when you get home.”
Frankie looks disappointed, so I add: “I’m sure there will be some days I can pick you up, Frankie.”
“Will you come to my school and do an assembly? All my friends know who you are and love your books.”
“They do? That’s crazy. But yeah, I’d love to!”
“I’d love it, too.”
“Frankie, stop talking with your mouth full; it’s disgusting,” Javier tells her.
“Sorry,” she says, mouth full. Big swallow. “Maybe you can come watch me when I do my trumpet lesson.” I nod enthusiastically. “Then you can meet all my friends and I can point out all the kids who don’t like me because they think I’m weird.”
Javier kicks her chair. “Frankie, sit like a normal person, please.”
Frankie unbends her legs and sits properly, but he continues to pick on her. I don’t like it.
After dinner I make tea and we sit around the table. It’s only 7 p.m., but I’m exhausted and ready for bed. “Island time,” Javier explains.
In the morning, Javier and Frankie are already gone, so I make coffee and begin writing. I am the most productive I’ve been in a long time. Something about the carrel makes me take myself more seriously. I make a sandwich; I make more coffee. At some point in the afternoon, the carrel door swings open and Frankie’s sweet little face pops in.
“How many words did you write today?” she asks.
I look at my computer. “Two thousand!”
“Wow! That’s like a hundred pages,” she says.
“Four, but close enough.” We grin at each other.
Frankie leaves to visit her mom and returns at dinnertime.
“Look what Leo made me!” Frankie yells, barreling through the screen door, wielding a sword.
It’s wood, carved intricately and painted silver. “Holy cow, that’s beautiful,” I say, awed by the craftsmanship.
“Papa, look!” Frankie holds up the sword to Javier, who barely looks.
“Nice,” he says.
Frankie and I exchange looks. Hers says, I’m worried. Mine says, Don’t worry. She is disappointed, and she doesn’t understand that Javier doesn’t want to hear about Meredith’s boyfriend. I know the feeling.
At dinner, I lean over to Frankie. “What was the best part of your day?”
“When my teacher said I was a natural at trumpet!” she announces, proud. “What was the best part of your day, Amanda?”
“When you came into my office and asked how many words I wrote,” I tell her. “Because seeing you made me happy.”
She giggles, happy and embarrassed. “Papa, what about you?”
“The best part of my day was cooking you guys dinner and the worst part of my day was having to tell you to stop talking with your mouth full.”
Frankie looks down at her plate.
* * *
While island time slows things down, the month seems to speed past. One afternoon we make a picnic lunch and take it to one of the island’s preserves. Through dense woods, the two of them scramble up the path, much faster than me, and I can’t help but notice that Javier, having promised to take care of me on this trip, doesn’t look back to make sure that the branches and brambles haven’t locked his city girlfriend in a half nelson. I follow them out across slabs of granite to the flat surface where we eat and look out onto the bay. Frankie goes to collect rocks, and Javier and I sit quietly. I can’t tell if this is his normal station, or if he’s just being inordinately quiet. Though we’ve been dating for eight months, we haven’t spent enough time together for me to even know. I get up and walk out onto the rocks by myself to see how far I can get just jumping. I’m pretty far out onto the bay and I turn to wave at Javier, but he’s not looking at me. Even when I’m in his sight, I feel out of his mind.
Being here is worth it, though, since Frankie pops her head into my office every day after school. As soon as I’m ready she grabs her sword and we go for girls-only walks, where, in between times of her pretending she’s a ninja, she confides in me things she doesn’t reveal to her parents.
“That’s my dad’s house,” she says, pointing her sword at a large, rambling white house. “People rent it from him during the year and we use it during the summer. I don’t have my own bedroom, though.”
“You don’t? Why not?”
“I have to share with my cousins. But it’s still my house, right? Don’t you think I should have my own room?” she asks.
I know better than most people how important it is to have a bedroom at your dad’s house. But I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes, and I certainly don’t want Frankie racing back to either Meredith or Javier and telling them I was criticizing their parenting. While I’m the least diplomatic person on earth, Frankie has brought out in me a different, more measured person—when I’m with her, I feel like I know what I’m doing, like a real adult.
“You know, I think it’s hard for people whose parents never divorced to become divorced parents themselves. They don’t know what it feels like to be the kid shuttling between two places, so they don’t quite understand what matters and what doesn’t. That’s why you have to tell them what matters.”
“I have told him, but he doesn’t get it. He says we’re only there for the summer, so what do I care?”
“Could your mom talk to him about it?” I ask.
“I’ve asked, but she always forgets!” Frankie runs toward an abandoned house. There’s a bicycle on the roof, which makes her laugh, and we try to see through the windows. “Did you have your own bedroom at your dad’s house?” Frankie asks me, her face pressed to a window too dark to see through.
“I didn’t,” I say.
She pulls away from the house and starts stabbing the ground with her sword. “Did that matter to you?”
“Very much. Especially because my dad and stepmother had two kids together, who had big, beautiful bedrooms, on the same floor as my dad and my stepmother. Eddie and Kara and I were downstairs all the way in the back, off the kitchen, stuck in the maid’s room. A room so small you could barely open your suitcase.”
“Like Cinderella,” she says, pulling up her sword and skipping ahead. “Were the maids mad about sharing a bed with you?” she asks.
I smile and explain while we pass a low wall built of rocks. She climbs up on them and starts walking. She keeps one hand on my shoulder and we walk in sync.
“I’m the only person in my entire family whose parents are divorced.”
“Really?” I ask. “That’s surprising.”
“You’re the only grown-up I know who understands about this stuff.”
“Well, I bet you that’s not true, but I’m glad you have me. If you want me to talk to your dad with you, I will. Just say the word, okay?”
She smiles, but her eyes look glazed, like she might cry, and she jumps off the rocks and bolts ahead, then down into a squat, cutting the air with her sword. “Death to my enemies!” she yells. Frankie is uncertain about her father’s love, and I realize that’s another thing she and I have in common.
We make ice pops, we play Boggle, and she reads me her dark and beautiful poems that are beyond her years. Javier spends his days painting someone’s house, and one of those days, it’s just me there when the phone rings.
“Meredith?” a guy asks.
“Uh…no. This is Amanda,” I say.
An awkward laugh. “Woops. Sorry. This is Earl. Is Javier there?”
Earl is the guy Meredith left Javier for. “No, sorry. Can I take a message?”
“Yeah, tell him to call me when he can. Sorry I called you Meredith,” he says. “Weird for us both, I guess.”
When Javier gets home I give him
the message. “That’s Meredith’s Earl?”
“Yeah. He’s staying in my Jersey City apartment.”
“He’s staying in your apartment?” Something about this creeps me out.
“Yeah. We’re friends.”
Later, Leo, whom Meredith left Earl for, comes over to help Javier move a table. There is too much line-crossing here for my comfort. Where are their boundaries? How is this even appropriate? It all rubs me the wrong way and makes me feel disoriented, like one of us is improperly interpreting the world.
The next day, my iPad goes missing. Javier hasn’t seen it, but I hear giggling coming from Frankie’s room. I knock on the door, but she doesn’t answer.
“Frankie?” I call. No response.
I push the door open and see Frankie and a friend, giggling on her bed, playing a game on my iPad.
“There it is! I’ve been looking for that.” Frankie pretends I don’t exist. “Frankie, can I have my iPad back? I need it for work.”
She continues to ignore me. This is unlike her, at least the her I know, and it reminds me of the beginning when I wasn’t sure about her. But now I think I get it. She’s got a mini teenager living inside her who is mad as hell. I am still hovering in the doorway, unsure what to do, when Javier barrels past me and grabs my iPad out of Frankie’s hand.
“Not cool,” he says. I follow him downstairs, and he’s fuming. “What the hell! There are scratches all over the screen.”
“Lemme see.”
He hands it to me, and, sure enough, there are tons of tiny fingernail scratches in semicircles fogging up the black mirror. He turns around and shouts Frankie’s name and is about to storm upstairs.
“Javier!” I snap. “Don’t. This is my battle. Not yours.”
He stops. “She scratched your iPad.”
“I know, but let me deal with it.”
“Suit yourself.”
I do some work and after Frankie walks her friend out, she tries escaping back to her room.
“Hey, come here for a sec, okay?” I ask.
Frankie comes over and sits on my lap. Javier steps in from the kitchen to watch, and I become aware that what I’m about to do is as much for him as for her, and I pray that this new approach works.
