The Slippery Year

by Melanie Gideon

  “Hey, folks. What can I do for you today?”

  “Remember us?” says my husband.

  “No, sir. Should I?”

  “We bought the memory foam bed and returned it and then we bought the Pureloom?”

  “Oh, yes, about a year ago?”

  “A little over a month ago,” says my husband. “I know it’s past your thirty-day comfort guarantee window, but the bed’s not working out for us.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” says Steve. “But there’s not anything I can do about it. It’s been too long.”

  “See?” I say to my husband. “We can’t return it. Let’s go home.”

  “What a shame. That bed is an heirloom,” says Steve.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him,” I say.

  Steve nods and glances up at Ben, who’s running around the store trying out different mattresses. His technique is to jump on them and then fall down in a heap and pretend to snore. “I have an idea. Perhaps you can pass it down to your son and you folks can get a new one.”

  I gasp. “The Allesandra? But he’s nine.”

  “Steve’s right,” says my husband. “I’ve thought about it and it’s the only thing to do. Give Ben the mattress and we’ll get a new one.”

  “That mattress cost three-thousand dollars,” I whisper to him.

  “I thought you told me it was an equal trade.”

  “Almost equal, but there was delivery and taxes,” I say. “They add up.”

  He shakes his head. “He’ll grow into it.”

  “It’s obscene. No nine-year-old boy should sleep in a king-sized bed.”

  My husband shrugs. “It’s the only solution. Steve, we need a mattress with absolutely no pillow-top.”

  “There are no beds with no pillow-tops,” says Steve.

  “None? Are you sure?”

  “Well, maybe one,” says Steve.

  It’s a slab. A Fred Flintstone bed. It’s delivered the next day.

  “Where do you want me to put this?” asks the delivery guy, propping my beloved Allessandra against the bedroom wall.

  “In there.” I point to Ben’s room.

  “Really,” says the delivery guy, eyeing the Pokémon posters and the Star Wars plastic light sabers scattered on the carpet. “I’m not sure it will fit.”

  “It’ll fit.”

  “Just barely,” he grunts.

  When Ben gets home from school he says, “Did the mattress guys come?”

  “Yes,” I tell him.

  He squeals and runs into his room. He rolls all over the bed, marking it. “I can’t believe this is mine! I can’t believe it! It’s so big. I’m so lucky. What are my friends going to say? It’s like sleeping on a country. On all of Europe.”

  I can’t believe it either. I’m trying very hard not to cry. Down the hallway I can see my future. The sliver of the mattress that I will be sleeping on for the next twenty years. And I hate my husband. I hate him.

  “I can’t believe you’ve done this to me,” I tell him that night. “That you’re making me sleep on this board.”

  “Sleep with me,” calls Ben from his bedroom. “The bed’s big enough for both of us.”

  “She’s not sleeping with you, she’s sleeping with me,” yells my husband.

  “I’m not sleeping with either of you,” I say, getting out of bed and going to the guest room, where I proceed to lie awake all night long.

  I can’t get Ben’s words out of my mind. They’re jarring, coming from a child’s lips—innocent, of course, but there’s also an insistence, an entitlement behind his request for intimacy. The truth is that often I do things with my son that I used to do with my husband. Why? Because it’s easier—nothing is required of me in return. We sit on the couch together, curled into one another like puppies. We eat ice cream from the same spoon. I listen to what he says, intently, as if every word is a poem. I used to listen to my husband that way. Why don’t I do that anymore? What am I afraid of? That there’s not enough love? That I will run out?

  It’s a slippery slope. I sleep in the guest room tonight. And then I sleep in the guest room tomorrow night. And the night after. And the night after. And pretty soon we’re officially sleeping in separate beds. I will tell myself when something bad happens that I’ll go back into our bed. We’ll come back to the us that we used to be, back when we knew that no matter what happened, no matter how bad it got—if we both lost our jobs, and one of us got sick, and there was famine or flood or pestilence, or God forbid, something terrible happened to Ben—we still had each other. Life might strike us down, but we’d go on. Yes, that’s what’s going on. I’ve been squirreling away my love for the day when I’ll really need it.

  But here’s the thing. The day when I really need it will be when it’s too late, the existential kind of too late, and on that day I know I’ll be doing something stupid, like xeroxingmy taxes and I’ll be doing something even stupider, like xeroxing them at my office in San Francisco (a bridge away from home) because my toner’s magenta cartridge will have run out of ink and I will have refused to spend the $90 to remedy the situation just on principle. I am not the kind of person who prints in pink. Why should I pay for magenta?

  One of my friends will run into my office screaming something along the lines of: “We only have thirty-two minutes left! Go find your family and get the hell out!”

  Studies show that in a disaster we humans do one of three things: flee, fight, or freeze. I’m quite certain I will flee. It won’t occur to me to question why thirty-two minutes or how anybody could know so precisely when the end is coming. I will just get in my car and like millions of others try and make my way over the bridge and home.

  Traffic will flow nicely for a while and then it will just stop. I will drum my hands on the steering wheel and try not to be upset. But the waste! I won’t be able to stop thinking about the waste. All my preparations for naught!

  At home I will have three closets, each designated for a different disaster. The closet in the guest room will be for terrorist attacks. Besides twenty gallons of water and three quarts of bleach, there will be rolls of plastic sheeting and duct tape and a fake gun in case the terrorists come door-to-door.

  In the office will be the closet for avian bird flu. On these shelves I’ll have contraband Tamiflu I ordered from Canada, ten boxes of Kleenex, lots of disposable bags for puke and hundreds of rolls of toilet paper for diarrhea.

  In the laundry room will be the closet that contains the earthquake supplies. In here will be a solar-powered radio, coils of mountaineering rope, carabiners, headlamps, a pickax, $1,000 in small bills and three boxes of white wine.

  Thirty-two minutes. What can you do in thirty-two minutes? Wash a load of whites? Bleach your teeth?

  I’ll get out of my car when I realize I’m going nowhere. So will everybody else on the bridge. It will be like those disaster movies where tragedy strikes so quickly that a sort of preternatural calm descends upon everybody and everything. Nobody will scream. Not one person.

  How will the world end? Will it be an earthquake? Will it be an asteroid? A nuclear bomb? Or will the universe buckle and fold? Will something just nail it? Bring it to its knees? I can only report how I’d like the world to end and you’ll have to draw your own conclusions.

  The blue will begin dribbling down from the sky as if someone were pouring it out of a pitcher.

  “You, hold my hand,” an elderly woman who has just stepped out of a Mercedes will say to me.

  “No, thank you,” I’ll tell her. I am from Rhode Island. I don’t touch people I don’t know.

  “Do you have children?” she will ask.

  “Yes, a son.”

  “A husband?”

  I will nod.

  “Hold my hands,” she’ll say. “Pretend I’m your husband and your son and I’ll pretend you’re my mother.”

  I will cry then, but softly so nobody will hear it. My baby. Alone. Crouched under his desk, his head cradl
ed in his arms. Having memorized all those multiplication tables and state capitals for nothing. And my husband. In his van. On the bridge, just a few hundred cars behind me, a mere quarter mile away, but I will never know how close he was because that’s just the way it works in these kinds of scenarios.

  “Don’t,” the woman will say. “You’ll see them soon.”

  And I’ll believe her. What else can I do?

  We’ll hold hands. We’ll look up into the sky. It will smell grape, like Sweet Tarts.

  A few seconds later it will lap us up.

  I have something to tell you,” says my husband the next night.“This mattress is too hard. It’s too hard even for me. We have to return it. I’m very sorry I put you through this.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I say.

  He nods. “I’m afraid I am.”

  There’s only one thing to do. We drag our old futon, our first shared bed, out of the closet. We slept on this bed when we had nothing. Before ACL injuries and age-related shoulder impingements, when we ran five miles a day just for fun, just because we could and it felt good.

  “Do you know you never snored when I first met you?” I say as we are putting on the sheets.

  “I snored,” he says. “We were just drunk all the time so you didn’t notice.”

  “We weren’t drunk all the time.”

  “We drank a lot. Every night. It was the nineties. Everybody did.”

  “Those were the days.”

  “Should I get you a glass of wine?” he asks. “A shot of tequila?”

  I look at my husband and I see him. I mean I really see him. Something falls away, and all the men he’s been in the years I’ve known him pulse beneath the surface of his face: the twenty-four-year-old who so staggered me with his animal grace, the thirty-three-year-old father tenderly cupping the head of his newborn son, the forty-year-old who taught himself to surf because he needed a new challenge, he needed a religion.

  You act like a woman in love. You become a woman in love. I don’t know who said that, but I believe it with all my heart.

  “How about a piece of that blueberry pie?” I say. “One spoon.”

  August

  YOU GO FIRST,” I WHISPER TO BEN. “AND TRY AND ACT NORMAL.”

  He hesitates and I give him a little shove and he scampers through the metal detector, looking both terribly guilty and terrified, as if he’s about to be zapped with 1,000 volts of electricity.

  “Phew,” he says, having made it through.

  He would make a very bad drug mule.

  “Next,” says the security agent, motioning to me.

  I walk forward, trying not to betray my nervousness, for in my carry-on bag, which is being x-rayed right at this moment, is a gallon-size plastic bag full of white powder.

  I watch as the screener stops the belt. She screws up her face as she turns the image of my bag from left to right, trying to figure out what the hell is in there.

  “Put your shoes on,” I say to Ben.

  The screener motions to her coworker. They both stare at the image. Then they stare at me. I fold Ben protectively in front of my chest.

  “You told me to put on my shoes,” he says.

  “Quiet,” I hiss.

  “Okay, so you’re wondering what that bag of white powder is,” I say to the screeners. “I don’t blame you. I know it looks suspicious. I would wonder, too.”

  The line of people behind me takes a collective step back.

  “Shit,” I hear somebody say. “I’m going to miss my plane.”

  “It’s my dog,” I say loudly.

  The screeners look at me like I’m crazy.

  “My dog in the Ziploc baggie. His ashes.”

  One of the screeners shudders. “I’m very sorry for your loss, ma’am,” she says and starts the belt again, waving the line on.

  “It happened a while ago,” I say. “Last December.”

  “That’s not very long ago,” the screener says, looking at Ben, her face softening.

  “No, it’s not,” I say, wondering what this can buy me. Early boarding? An extra cookie?

  “Heel,” whispers Ben to my carry-on bag as we make our way to the gate.

  “I’m so sorry,” says a man who was behind us in line.

  “On your left,” says his wife, pushing past us.

  “That’s okay. We’re okay,” I say, moving out of the way.

  A few hours later, somewhere over Colorado when I’m half asleep, I hear Ben telling the flight attendant, “My dog died.”

  “Oh, sweetie.” She squats by the seat.

  He nods sadly. “He’s under the seat.” He kicks my carry-on bag. “In a baggie. Would you like to see him?”

  “Ben,” I reprimand him. “I’m sorry,” I say to the flight attendant.

  “Oh, no, that’s okay,” she says, her gaze flitting to the front of the plane. “Let me see if there’s something I can do. To make you more comfortable.”

  She scurries down the aisle and I sit up. Properly. Formally. Trying to look like somebody who belongs in first class.

  “Put your shoes on,” I tell Ben.

  “Why?”

  “I think she’s going to see if there are any seats in first class,” I whisper.

  I jam my feet back into my sneakers.

  “We’re going to sit in first class? I’ve never sat in first class!” Ben yells.

  “Shhh,” I say, looking around furtively. “People don’t want to know about your good fortune.”

  “What if there’s only one seat?” he says. He gives me a worried look. “I guess I’d be okay up there all alone.”

  The attendant walks briskly back toward us.

  “Here you go,” she crows, handing Ben a pair of plastic captain’s wings. “These are from the flight deck. For bravery,” she says. “And a pillow and a blanket,” she hands them to me. “To make Mother more comfortable.”

  “That’s so thoughtful,” says Mother. “May I ask you a question? Do you think there’s any chance we—”

  “My dog died a few years ago,” the flight attendant stage-whispers over Ben’s head. “He ate rat poison. Poof. Gone like that.”

  I nod empathetically. We’re now officially members of the Dead Dog Club. Everybody has a dead dog story, and once your dog dies they want to share it with you, kind of like everybody has a birth story and once you get pregnant you are required to hear all the details of your friend’s protracted labor and how long she pushed and the drugs she took or didn’t take and how her partner was e-mailing on his BlackBerry right up to the very last moment the baby was crowning and your friend screamed at him to get off his goddamn phone or she’d stick the phone so far up his butt that the doctor would have to suction it out with a vacuum.

  “What was your dog’s name, honey?” the flight attendant asks.

  “Bodhi,” says Ben.

  “Oh, like in that Patrick Swayze movie?”

  “Exactly,” I say.

  “No, like in Buddhism,” says Ben, giving me a dirty look. “The Bodhisattva. The enlightened one?”

  “Wow, smart kid,” she says, after a beat, and then hightails it out of there.

  We are on our way to Maine for our annual summer vacation. Our first stop is Freeport. This is where my younger sister, Sara, lives. It’s also where I used to live right before we moved to California. In short, Sara is living the life I thought I would have, but she’s living it so much better than I ever could, with a huge backyard, a mosquito zapper, a kayak, three children, and the quaint Bow Street Market directly across the street from her house.

  Sara really has the Maine life down. For instance, she takes full advantage of L.L. Bean, the flagship store of the Freeport outlets. When I was living in Maine I did not know you could have play-dates there. I did not know that in fact, playdates were encouraged. It made sense. Where else were you going to go during the eight months of winter? Also they have convenient mothers’ hours, as they are open twenty-four hours a day.
r />   Sara might call one of her friends and say, “Hey, meet me at Bean’s, in Tents and Shelters at 5:34 a.m.”

  Her friend might say, “We did Tents and Shelters yesterday. The kids are Tented and Sheltered out. How about Gear and Tackle?”

  Sara might say: “Gear and Tackle has an age requirement of eight. I can meet you on the stairs in front of the stuffed beaver, or in the elevator. How about a playdate in the elevator?”

  Besides being family-friendly, L.L. Bean’s also has the best return policy of any store in the world. You can even return stuff you never bought there.

  “Um, sir, I’d like to return this pocket flashlight.”

  “Certainly, madam. Were you not satisfied?”

  “No, I was not satisfied. My three-year-old put it in a cereal bowl, poured milk over it and sprinkled it with sugar and it wouldn’t work after that.”

  “I’m sorry, madam. And when was this?”

  “This was—well, it must have been—1976.”

  “Oh, welcome back, madam! Welcome back! Very well, here is your money. We are giving it to you with adjustments made for inflation and 2008 pricing and emotional distress. That’s ninety-nine dollars and seventy-five cents. Would you like that in cash? I am very sorry the pocket flashlight did not live up to your expectations. And is this cute little tyke your grandson? Did you know we have a playdate program here? No, I would not come between five and six a.m. It gets very crowded, especially in Tents and Shelters. The mothers tend to sleep in the tents, while the children pee on them. What’s the little tyke’s name? Oh, a fine name. May I give you a tip? Do not bring little Achilles to Archery. In fact, avoid Scopes and Rangefinders, too. May I suggest Water Fowl?”

  It’s late in the afternoon when we arrive at Sara’s. She greets us at the door holding nine-month-old Josie in her arms. Her boys, five-year-old Julian and three-year-old Alek, peer through her legs shyly. It’s been a year since we’ve seen them.

  “Oh my God, you’re here,” she says and immediately we both start crying.

  I have never met Josie. I’ve only seen pictures. I flap my hands enthusiastically and Sara hands her over. She makes dolphin sounds and smells of pears. I’m instantly in love.