Leaving Sophie Dean

by Alexandra Whitaker

  “But we’re not sleepy,” Matthew was saying. “Just one more, Daddy?”

  “Please, Daddy?” Hugo chimed in.

  “I’ve got a story for you,” Valerie announced in silky tones from the door, and the three of them turned in surprise. She pulled the book out from behind her back and sat down on Hugo’s bed. “Once upon a time,” she pretended to read, “there was a prince who lived in a very big house. It was just about the fanciest house in the whole kingdom.” She turned the book—one on French architecture—to show them all a photograph of Versailles. The boys’ eyes widened, and Adam smiled at her, thoroughly charmed. She smiled back demurely and continued. “But there were too many mirrors, so one day the prince decided to move, and guess where he went next?” As she hunted for another picture to show them, Valerie was aware of a strange feeling of contentment, there in the center of that admiring, all-male circle.

  * * *

  Sophie’s earlier feelings of fright and desolation gave way to anger, causing her to sleep poorly for a couple of weeks. Even asleep she thrashed in bed with such fury that she woke herself up, and then she would fling off the covers and pace the apartment, ranting aloud until she got cold and had to jump back in bed, where she lay for hours, awake and wrathful.

  That continued until she took out a three-month membership at the swimming pool and began to swim every day before shiatsu—Henry’s idea. She swam steadily for an hour, thinking only about her body sliding through the water and her breathing, feeling the air circulating in and out of her. After her shower she burst out of the gym doors and set off for school with a spring in her step, her damp hair flopping in rhythm with her stride, feeling strong and well oiled—feeling, actually, the way she used to before she’d had children. She was becoming herself again, she thought, going around the spiral once more, but this time one coil up, where the view was better.

  Her nights were spent studying, and she was becoming increasingly engrossed in shiatsu. Some of its tenets made sense to her instinctively, and it was gratifying to see those confirmed, but even more interesting were the things she found counterintuitive, because they required her to think again, and to think in new ways.

  The only difficult time of day now was early evening, after the children had gone back to Adam’s and before she was ready to settle down to her books, when she was beset by restlessness and longing. That was when she felt most keenly that something was missing in her life, at that hour when couples meet at home and compare notes of the day, sympathize over hardships, and laugh at silly things. To bridge that lonely spell, she began taking evening walks around the neighborhood, but she felt conspicuous in her solitude. She wandered, flotsam on the human tide, through random streets, stiff with self-consciousness and yearning for the safety of the apartment she had fled, where at least she was shielded from critical eyes and her fundamental pointlessness was her secret. But, of course, waiting for her back at home were the very conditions that had driven her out in the first place.

  It was a problem, until one day she stumbled, literally, onto the solution in the stairway of her building. The lights had gone off on the automatic timer, and in the dark she stepped on something that squealed, making her scramble for the switch. It was a dog, small and frisky. The door of the ground-floor apartment opened a crack, closed again, a chain rattled, then the door opened wide and a musical old voice said, “Oh, there you are, Bertie. I couldn’t think where you’d gone. Come in.” But the dog preferred to dance around the hall, making feints for the street door, and Sophie began chatting with his owner, a woman in her nineties (as she announced proudly and repeatedly), who wore striking makeup, somewhat shakily applied, her hair piled up in a mound of silver curls, and strings of costume jewelry tinkling on her bosom. (“Do call me Dorina, please. You can’t imagine how sad it is when there’s no one left to use your first name.”) The upshot of their conversation, the one golden nugget of useful information that so often emerges in the course of dutiful small talk, was that Bertie was sadly in need of exercise that Dorina could no longer give him, so Sophie offered to take him along on her evening walks, and Bertie made all the difference. No one anchored securely to the earth’s surface by a sturdy dog straining on a leash can be accused of drifting aimlessly. Sophie’s shyness disappeared as Bertie pulled her along, yanking her to a halt when he stopped without warning to smell some dark corner and pee just a measured bit, then trotted on again, full of some busy unknown agenda. She let herself be swept through the darkening streets to the South End, until the thought of home would spring into her mind, glowing and attractive, and they would turn back. Then she would return Bertie to Dorina and climb the stairs feeling that she had done all three of them a favor and eager to get to her books.

  Week followed week throughout the fall, until one day after school, about two months after she had left Adam’s house, the boys presented her with that most touching of autumnal child-crafted gifts: drawings of turkeys using the outline of a small hand for the bird’s body, the thumb serving as neck and the other fingers as plumage, all nicely colored in. She stuck the pictures on her refrigerator with magnets and felt a pang whenever she glanced at those innocent reminders of the great American family celebration.

  * * *

  Marion admired the turkey drawings when she came over with a sack of hand-me-downs from her nephews for the boys. She shook the clothes out on the sofa and folded them into neat piles while she talked, occasionally holding up an article for Sophie’s admiration. Her topic was the usual one: “Now Adam’s relationship with this woman will have to run its course and die a natural death, which could take years. I’ll never understand why you left! You’ve been so weirdly passive in all this! Your husband seems to be tired of you, so you obligingly melt out of his life. (Isn’t this shirt cute?) It’s unnatural to be so acquiescent! If you ask me, your parents have a lot to answer for. That mother of yours and the way she mishandled that whole thing…” She flashed Sophie a red sweater for approval.

  “You mean Patrick?” Sophie asked, nodding about the sweater.

  “Yes, Patrick! The way she allowed him to dominate your childhood and how you’ve kept such a tight lid on your feelings all your life that you can’t even—”

  “Marion, Marion.” Sophie held up her hand. “I don’t want to have this conversation. I know all about Patrick and how he affected my upbringing—I’m the one who told you about it, remember? But that’s just the way it is. And if it’s made me into a boring and repressed Girl Scout, then I accept that.”

  Patrick was Sophie’s severely physically and mentally handicapped older brother, who had occupied all their mother’s attention and caused their father to retreat into himself, so that she had grown up with a distant and melancholy father and a mother so overtaxed that she couldn’t cope with another single thing, including Sophie. The emotional larder of the household was depleted before Sophie arrived; nothing was left, because Patrick had taken her share along with his, and gulped down the lives of both parents as well. Even as a child, Sophie knew it was unfair to think that way. Poor Patrick, it wasn’t his fault that he needed and took so much. It wasn’t her mother’s fault that she was tired, or her father’s fault that he was sad; it was just the way things were. And as a result Sophie grew up stoical and self-reliant, careful not to add her weight to the family’s already heavy burden, like someone who didn’t dare to stand on the ground but must, with tremendous effort, hover in the air just above it. She grew up mature and competent beyond her years, but her achievements went largely unnoticed at home. If she made straight A’s, it was only natural; there was nothing wrong with her. Who knew what Patrick might have achieved if he had had her luck? Luck was an important concept in that house. Patrick had been unlucky; therefore his parents had been, too. Sophie alone had been granted that haphazard favor: born pretty, athletic, and intelligent, through no merit of her own. So she received her rewards without rejoicing in them, as a matter of course. “We can leave Patrick and my mothe
r out of it,” she said now to Marion. “As far as I’m concerned, when love is over, so is marriage. That’s all.”

  Marion held up a pair of dark blue overalls. “If human relations were that clear-cut, I’d be out of a job. (How about these?) The reason I’m a counselor is that I happen to believe that human relationships are the most important things we have in this life and they’re worth salvaging. (Aren’t these cute?)”

  “I think relationships mutate. And the wise person moves with them. (Very cute.)” The task of trying to put Marion firmly in her place while showing gratitude for her generous gift was starting to make Sophie bad-tempered.

  “Why jump to the conclusion that Adam doesn’t love you? This affair of his—it might have been just physical attraction or a cry for help.”

  “A cry for help!” Sophie laughed. “Then he shouldn’t have torpedoed the lifeboat! And I’m getting sick of this ‘just physical attraction’ crap. What is ‘just’ about physical attraction? It’s a complex matter, and supremely important, the proof being that marriages are based on it and it’s how we all get conceived. So come on, now, let’s drop it. Any plans for Thanksgiving?”

  “We’re going to my mother’s. Who are the kids spending it with?”

  “Milagros.”

  “Ooh.”

  “Now, stop it. There’s nothing sad about that. They love her, she invited them, and they’re delighted to go, so let’s not lay on the violins.”

  Marion relented somewhat after that, but a few days later Sophie got a similarly irritating visit from Lydia, the woman she used to help with the play group. Lydia was divorced, and she lived with her children out in the sticks—that was how Sophie now thought of Adam’s neighborhood. Having gotten Sophie’s address from Marion, Lydia dropped by unexpectedly one afternoon. Somewhat warily, Sophie invited her in and put on the kettle for tea.

  “I’ve been through it all, you poor thing. You don’t need to tell me, I’ve been there!” In her nervousness Lydia was almost shouting, one arm out of her coat, the other still in, her hair flopping in her face. “What a cute place you’ve got here! Wow, am I jealous!” She launched straight into a long account of her own breakup, creating frequent openings for Sophie to offer some tidbit of her own as corroboration, but Sophie held steadfastly to the role of listener. “Well, that’s a man for you, every time,” Lydia wound up at last, rather lamely. “But I suppose I don’t need to tell you that, right? I guess you’ve been through pretty much the same thing with Adam? Men are such bastards. I mean, aren’t they? Childish, selfish, fickle, vain!” She yelped with laughter.

  “The difficult part comes now,” Sophie said composedly, “trying to be good separated parents. One relationship is dead, but the other, more important one is not. He’s still their darling daddy and still my partner in child raising—still my co-worker in the most important job of our lives.”

  Lydia nodded, looking disappointed that it was all going to be so tame. Then, “I’ve noticed—I mean, everyone’s noticed—Adam has the kids, doesn’t he? It’s sort of an unusual arrangement, isn’t it? Not that I see anything wrong with the father having them!”

  Sophie waited, aware that Lydia was on a fact-finding mission.

  “Not at all!” Lydia continued. “All power to him—and to you, too!” She gulped some tea, then frowned seriously. “So are they going to stay with him permanently? Is that what you’ve decided?”

  “Just for the time being, while I’m getting my life straightened out. It seemed like the easiest way to handle things at first.”

  “Oh, sure! Yeah…” Lydia cast about for something to say. “You’re lucky to have a man who’s willing and able to do that.”

  “I am,” Sophie said with some surprise. “I am lucky that way.”

  “I mean, Trey would never have taken the kids, are you kidding? Of course”—she flashed a smile and closed in on the target—“Adam has help with yours.…”

  “Milagros, yes. She’s wonderful.” But from Lydia’s sly yet eager face, Sophie saw that she did not mean Milagros at all, and she felt a flash of anger at Lydia’s prurience. But the important thing was to squelch speculation that might get back to the children. So, “Oh, you must mean Valerie,” she said collectedly.

  “Valerie?” Eyebrows high.

  “Adam’s partner is named Valerie.”

  “Oh! Oh, ye-es, maybe I have seen someone around.…”

  “She’s also wonderful with the children,” Sophie invented. “She studied child psychology, and she’s done internships in children’s hospitals and monitored foster families. She worked in an orphanage in Trinidad, and she also set up a hugely successful children’s puppet theater in Guatemala. So she’s really perfect for the job.”

  Confused by this detailed résumé, Lydia could only murmur, “How marvelous,” and take mental note of a possible new helper for the play group.

  “Very,” Sophie said firmly. She held a smile on Lydia for a moment, then rose, giving her thighs a single slap, in the accepted manner of a polite hostess about to throw someone out of her house.

  * * *

  “You know what?” Sophie asked Henry the next day before class. They were doing the chi gong exercise called “Turn to Catch the Moon” used to loosen the spine and warm up the kidneys. “It’s all becoming clear to me. I didn’t know it, but I actually hated my old life and the people in it. I was just being a good sport. I think that’s why Adam left me, too. Because I was too good a sport. That’s interesting, don’t you think? I mean, getting expelled from the game because you played by the rules?”

  Raising his arms as he rotated his torso, Henry exhaled before saying, “The only way I can keep track of it all is by thinking of it as some kind of board game. Adam starts to move out, but no, you block his move. You move out instead, into your apartment. Adam moves back into his house. Then—hop, hop—she moves into your old place. Gosh, I wonder who’s going to move into whose house next!”

  Sophie broke her stance and faced him. “It doesn’t feel like a game to me.”

  He lowered his arms. “Don’t worry, Sophie, the switch is on its way. One day you’ll get the switch.”

  “Oh, right. The switch. Aren’t you going to snap your fingers?”

  “Okay, sourpuss. One day you’ll get the switch.” Snapping his fingers that time. “It’ll click your mind into a new groove and jump you onto another track—and not a moment too soon, my friend.”

  * * *

  At last the children were warm and dry, in pajamas and robes and slippers, their hair combed and neatly parted, trooping down the hall, ready for supper. As they passed the bathroom, Adam glanced in and winced. Clothes in heaps, towels strewn everywhere, bath toys languishing in the dying foam—it was a mess best left to Milagros. He started down the hall again. Then—no, damn it, Milagros had enough to do! He turned back and began to tidy the bathroom briskly. The new deal that Milagros had cut with him was… well, it was okay. She worked fewer hours now, but for the same pay. Fair enough. She was due for a raise, so fine. Now she arrived in the afternoon, cleaned the house (although she didn’t touch any article belonging to Valerie), and made supper, then drove to Sophie’s to pick up the boys, brought them home, and played with them until either Valerie or Adam got home from work. Then she left, after a few friendly words with Adam, if he were home first, wordlessly if it were Valerie. She no longer stayed to do the bath, give the boys supper, and put them to bed. All of that had become Adam’s job, and why shouldn’t it be? He was happy to do it, really. It was the only chance he got to spend any time with his children during the week. Valerie didn’t help, because… well, why should she? They weren’t her kids, and nobody expected it of her. And who needed her help, anyway? Adam could manage fine. He even knew how to make horns now out of shampoo lather. Speaking of which—before leaving the bathroom, he thought to set a clean towel handy on the edge of the tub, ready for “Eye! Eye!” tomorrow night, and he felt pleased with his foresight.

  In the
living room, he found Valerie sitting in his chair, drink in hand, listening to Chopin and frowning over some papers from her briefcase. “You’re home early!” he said in what he hoped could pass for a jocular tone. She’d been working late every night that week, sometimes appearing in time for supper but more often not until the boys were in bed, when he was too tired to sit down at the table again with her. She glanced up, saw a weary man with wet sleeves and a dirty towel slung over his shoulder, and laughed.

  “You’re a regular Mrs. Dainty! Ever read those stories? They’re collector’s items. Agatha adores them. ‘Busy, busy, busy!’ tut-tutted Mrs. Dainty, flicking her feather duster over the mantel’…? No? Doesn’t ring a bell? She was a superb housekeeper.” She lifted her glass to him in tribute and turned back to her work.

  “Where are the boys?” he asked after a silence. “It’s their suppertime.”

  She didn’t respond for a beat or two, unable to tear her eyes from the page in her hand. “Hmm, what?” she managed at last.

  “The boys. Their whereabouts.”

  “Oh…” She still wasn’t looking at him.

  He waited, his left cheek pulsating slightly.

  At last she looked up and read his expression. “I’m sorry, Adam. I would have come back earlier to lend you a hand, but they’re really turning the screws at work. New clients.” She shrugged apologetically.