Days of Awe (18 page)

“Why are we doing this?” I whispered, but his breathing was deep and even. Our separation was like a tumbleweed now, rolling along, unstoppable, gathering debris. My heart felt thunderous and shaky. I tried to calm myself, to match my breathing to his, but every time I thought I had the rhythm down, I lost it.

The furnace cycled off and created a kind of unexpected silence, where you didn't even realize that just seconds ago there had been noise. Chris mumbled something in his sleep and rolled again, his leg moving abruptly away from mine.

The morning Chris moved out, the actual morning, was February 14. When he realized what day it was, he sat down on a kitchen chair and covered his face with his hands.

“I'm sorry,” he said quietly, his voice muffled by his fingers. Guilt came off of him like heat; he was radiating it. “It's Saturday,” he said, which, of course, I knew. “It was the only day the guys could come,” which I also knew. “I didn't realize.”

“It's fine,” I said. I was also sitting at the kitchen table, force-feeding myself cornflakes. I swallowed a mushy lump. “It's actually perfect.”

He moved his hands away from his face, and I saw, before he turned away, that his eyes were wet, his face stricken, and I scooped up another soggy spoonful of my cereal and thought,
Good.

The doorbell began ringing a few minutes later. Jack Halloran was first, one of the guys Chris played pick-up basketball with on Sunday mornings. He was a urologist who had cheated on his wife five years ago with a drug rep at a medical conference in Houston, and, although his wife, Michelle, never found out, he lived with his guilt by doting on her with an almost-psychotic focus. Gary Sanchez was next. He had three kids and worked with Chris at the DNR, and he confessed to Chris that although he loved his children, he frequently regretted having them. Then Dave Milkowski, another of Chris's work buddies, whose extensive history of juvenile shoplifting convictions had been expunged from his record when he turned eighteen. Then Kurt Grunsmeyer, another basketball pal, a forty-one-year-old serial monogamist who referred to all of his ex-girlfriends as “crazy bitches.” Finally Henry Tan, Chris's college roommate, about whom, a few years ago, Hannah had written the poem, “Henry Tan, the nicest man,” which he was. Henry's rescue greyhound, Zola, peed all over our old living room rug when Henry and his wife were in the hospital having their twins, and Henry, instead of paying to have it cleaned, bought us a new, more beautiful rug.

They were men I knew well, men who had come over to our house countless times, in various configurations: with their wives, with their kids, for dinner or brunch, to watch basketball. They came over now, one by one, and each of these men, whose intimacies and vulnerabilities and mistakes I guarded, was a stranger to me.

“Uh, hey, Isabel,” they said. “Hey.” They stared at my feet as if my eyeballs had migrated there. “Hey, uh, so. You okay? Okay. Good. Okay.”

They would help Chris lift some boxes and lug them out to the U-Haul and then up a flight of stairs to his new apartment; they would carry out a blue chair from our living room and the old futon from the basement and a bookshelf and, later that day, they'd drive with him to Wegman's DIY on the other side of town to pick up a kitchen table and a dining room table and a desk, and these men I'd known for so many years, they would be like the futon from the basement and the chair from our living room and the bookshelf: they would be Chris's now. And if Chris and I ever got back together? I probably wouldn't even want to see that furniture anymore.

I made blueberry muffins, because I didn't know what to do with myself, and because we had agreed that most things in the kitchen would stay, even though, in truth, Chris was the better cook, the one with the vision: I mostly just scrambled eggs or waited for water to boil.

I baked muffins while the men lugged boxes. And maybe a tiny part of me thought that the guys would see the muffins and stop in their tracks.
Oh, Isabel!
they would think.
What a dear, good person she is. Chris!
they would exclaim.
We cannot help you with this vain and foolish task!

Not that Chris wouldn't move out. Just that Henry and Dave and Kurt and Jack and Gary wouldn't want to help him anymore, that they wouldn't be so
eager
to help him.

I set the muffins out on a plate on the dining room table, and in between trips, the guys ate them, still warm, and either they were too embarrassed to thank me, or they thought those muffins had just appeared there magically, courtesy of the muffin fairy.

Later that day, Valentine's Day, moving day, Chris called me from his apartment. He had been planning on coming back for one last box of books and some clothes, but Gary and Dave had been able to fit these things into Gary's minivan, and so, Chris said, there was no need for him to come back, and anyway he would see me the day after tomorrow, to pick up Hannah.

“It'll be okay,” he said. I heard Kurt's deep, jovial voice in background, echoing through Chris's new apartment: “Where do you want this piece of shit?”

“Yup.” I stood in the middle of the living room, which didn't look so much empty as confusingly rearranged, like one of those games in kids' magazines: how are these two pictures different? A shelf of books missing. A spot where the chair used to be. The couch where my friend would never sit. A certain quality to the air.

“Iz, it will be.”

I breathed in, out. “Yeah,” I said.

“Okay. Bye.”

Cal stood, inches from me, his hand still resting lightly on the kitchen table next to mine. Everything added up to “stay.” All these months, I had been learning the singular lesson that sadness was an infinite resource, accumulating like snow in winter. So why not stay, let a bit of it melt?

“I have to go.”

Cal backed away. “All right. I'll take you home.” And, yes, there it was, underneath the patience, underneath the truly kind exterior of this amused and tolerant human: the rumble of irritability, finally; the exasperation of another man who had had enough.

He walked over to the living room closet, handed me my jacket, helped me into it. “I'll just go grab my keys.” He touched my arm, avuncular now,
pat-pat.

He was someone who would have cushioned the landing. And yet here I was, jacket on. Sunlight streamed in through the windows. “This has been my favorite day since my husband moved out,” I said, and a tragic little noise came out of me, a little hiccup-laugh.

“All right,” Cal said. “It's all right.” He took his keys from the hook. His hand was on my back now as he led me, ever so gently, toward the door.

“Iz,” Mark's e-mail said. “I still want to do it this year. Will you come?” It was early December. Josie had been dead for nine months.

“I know you and I haven't spoken in a while,” he wrote. That was true. We hadn't talked since I'd stormed out of the Pig's Knees in September, after the Andi Friedman revelation. That was how I'd been talking about it to Chris, in those words—the Andi Friedman revelation—like it was the name of some mediocre jazz quartet. Mark had texted me a few times since then, but I never wrote back. Sometimes my righteous indignation was the only thing that got me through the day.

“I know it will be hard without her,” his e-mail went on. “But I think Josie would have wanted us to celebrate.”

“Bullshit,” I typed quickly. “You're the last person who knows what Josie would have wanted. And how's your girlfriend, traitor?” Then I deleted those sentences. I wondered, as I had been wondering for months, how much Mark knew: if Josie had confessed to cheating on him, if he knew about Alex Cortez. “Okay,” I wrote. “We'll be there.”

Our yearly get-together had started out a decade ago as a path through the tangle of the holiday season. December is tricky for Jews and orphans. Josie's strategy was to employ a military level of productivity, methodically baking dozens of tree- and snowman-shaped sugar cookies while trumpet-heavy Christmas music blared continuously in her kitchen. Chris grew quiet and gloomy, the month of December his yearly descent into darkness, a longing for something he couldn't even name. Mark grumbled and snarked from the minute the Halloween decorations in the stores came down and the colored lights went up. For my part, I thought,
Let's just be together: Josie and Mark, Chris and Hannah and me. Like always.

Chris and I had never bothered to discuss religion when we were dating. I assumed we'd celebrate all of the holidays with both of our families until we had kids, and then we'd raise them Jewish. It was, I thought, the obvious option when your mother's family had been decimated in Germany. Our team needed the numbers.

As it turned out, this was news to Chris. He had grown up steeping in a Christmas brew of passive-aggressive muttering and silent, seething disappointment, and he wanted a do-over. One year, he told me, his father gave his mother a four-pack of felt-tip pens and wrote on the card, “For the lady who has everything. Best regards, Edward,” and his mother took to her bed for two days. Chris wanted, for Hannah, the warmth he had only seen on the Christmas specials—a heart that could grow three sizes, a scraggly Christmas tree made beautiful with a couple of ornaments and a blue blanket and love. Love. That was hard to argue with.

Then again, so was Helene, who, one Passover, as we were leaving her house, handed Chris a box of matzo and said, “You'll get used to it.”

So we would get together in late December every year, just the five of us. Mark and Josie always had a Christmas tree that Mark actively hated. He
delighted
in hating it. “Look,” he would say to me, conspiratorially. “It's a goddamn pine tree, and it's
in our house
!” We'd light a menorah some years, if there was overlap. Mark always raised a glass and said, “Here's to the Jews, who put the
s
in ‘Happy Holidays'!” We brought each other dramatically awful white elephant gifts: a little figurine of a praying angel; a creepy fish that wiggled its fins and sang “I'm dreaming of a white fishmas”; a sweater for our cat, Mrs. Reinhoffer, that said
TEACHER'S
PET
on it. Mark and Josie doted on Hannah. Over time it came to be the thing we treasured, this little party.

And what would I bring to the festive gathering this year, the first since Josie's death? What would adequately represent the spirit of this holiday season? A bag of dog shit? A horse's head?

“We'll be there,” I wrote. “Can't wait.”

Mark was hosting it at his new apartment. His parents' house had sold quickly in October, and he'd moved into a big two-bedroom near the lake.

“I want you to know that Andi will be there,” he wrote, right after I'd said yes. “Please don't back out. Please just come, Iz.”

Andi answered the door before we even knocked. “I saw you from the window!” she said, wringing her hands. “
There they are,
I said to myself, and here you are! How are you, Isabel? How are you?” Her eyes darted from Chris to Hannah to me, and she looked like she might start crying from nervousness. I wanted to lift her pretty shawl, a blue-green silk wrap that hung delicately over her slim shoulders, and strangle her with it. But here she was, looking so desperate and hopeful. I reached for her hand in spite of myself.

“We're fine, Andi,” I said, giving her fingers a little squeeze and then letting go. “You look gorgeous.” She did; she looked gorgeous. She wore a charcoal-gray dress that hugged her perfect little thirty-one-year-old body, cinched with a slim black belt around her tiny waist.
How is that fair?
Hannah was always saying to me, raging against the injustices of her life.
How is that fair?
When Andi moved, her shawl seemed to shimmer in little rippling waves, like water. Her dark hair was newly short—just to her chin, accentuating her lovely stem of a neck.

I was wearing the black pants and blue sweater I'd worn to school that day. I considered it a victory that they matched.

Hannah gazed at her as if Andi were a travel brochure for an exotic vacation. She tucked a hank of her own long, thick, unruly hair behind her ear and looked at her feet. I put my arm around her, protectively. She shrugged it away.

“I love your jeans,” Andi said to Hannah. “I have a pair just like those.” And Hannah lifted her eyes to Andi, besotted.

“Let's mosey on in!” I said, and my daughter snorted quietly with disgust.

Chris handed Andi a bottle of merlot and we walked into the apartment. He took it in, surveying the room quickly, like Rain Man, mastering the details. “A photograph of Josie on the mantel,” he whispered to me. “Her watercolor on the wall by the hallway. And a little sculpture on the table underneath the window. And no tree. Obviously.” I grabbed his hand, laced my fingers through his. We had started seeing a couple's therapist three weeks earlier. “Try to remember that you're on the same team,” she had said.

Mark spotted us and moved in our direction, weaving his way around the other guests. Other guests: that was something new. Before, it had always been just the five of us. Now there were some old neighbors, a few of Mark's fellow adjunct English lecturers from the technical college, a couple of teachers from Rhodes Avenue—Debbie Huddleston, the music teacher; Sanjay Shah, P.E. The Andes were conspicuously absent, and for that I felt a wave of gratitude that bore a confusing resemblance to pleasure.

“Oh, Hannah,” Mark said. “I haven't seen you in so long. You look so pretty and grown up!” He grabbed her in a rough hug, more of an awkward wrestling move. “Sorry for sounding like such a dorky adult.”

“It's okay, dork,” Hannah said, from underneath his elbow. “Hey, it smells like latkes in here.”

“Andi has been cooking
all day.
” He looked at me, gauging my reaction; I smiled without showing my teeth, gave away nothing. Let him figure it out. “She really knows how to fry a potato.” There was something familiar and unsettling about the way he was talking, a new rhythm to his speech, an overemphasis on certain words. Josie was disappearing from his speech patterns. Andi was moving in. “I'm so glad you're here,” he said to us, still looking at me. “So glad.”

Chris had admonished me in the car on the way over, quietly, privately, underneath Hannah's music: “This is really important,” he said. “Be happy. Or at least act happy. Fake it if you have to.” I knew he was right.

“Okay, okay,” I said now, trying for a light tone. I punched Mark in the arm. “Calm down, buddy. We're glad to be here, too.” Hannah, eyeing me carefully, smiled.

“Are you hungry? There is so much food, it's ridiculous. I don't know how that happened.” Mark shook his head and shrugged in mock incredulousness. He was wearing a dark purple shirt and a geometrically patterned tie. He looked less like he had gotten dressed and more like someone had dressed him. His face was clean shaven, his hair neat. He looked fresh. Happy. There were certain women who cared what their men looked like, who viewed their partner's appearance as a reflection on their own. Josie had never been one of those women. Andi, it seemed, was.

“We're hungry!” Chris said, and Mark escorted him and Hannah over to the table that was loaded with drinks and snacks.

I drifted away and wandered around the large, open living room, tried to get my bearings. I examined everything, the curious integration of furniture and knickknacks from Mark and Josie's old house with things I'd never seen before—their dusky-blue pillows on a new gray couch; their crystal candlesticks sitting on a pretty Arts and Crafts coffee table I didn't recognize. Under the coffee table was an indigo and deep green rug I could not place—was it one they'd had up in their old bedroom? Or was it brand-new, acquired specifically for this apartment, this new life? I pictured Mark choosing it carefully at Namdar Carpets in the Third Ward, near Solitano's, the Italian bakery we liked. Maybe he'd stopped in for biscotti after he picked it out—alone? With Andi? And where were Josie's rugs? Life was a tender accumulation of possessions, quickly discarded.

Hannah sidled up to me. “Mama,” she whispered. “This is no good. Can we go home?”

Her hip bumped against me lightly, her arm bounced against mine. Oh, I wanted to leave, too. I wanted to carry her out of there like a koala bear. I wanted, wanted, wanted to go home. “I don't think so, Banana. Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“We've only been here a few minutes. We should stay for a bit. Did you get a snack? Something to drink?”

Hannah took a ragged breath. “I don't want anything. And it stinks in here. It stinks like latkes. My hair is going to smell. My stupid hair is going to smell, and I just washed it this morning, and I hate it here!” Her voice was getting louder. Deb Huddleston, midconversation, looked over at us, concerned.

“Shhh,” I whispered to Hannah. “Please. Shhh.”

“I hate it here!” she said again. “You made me come. Don't you understand? This is all wrong! I want to leave!”

“Hannah, we can't. It's not…we can't…” I was paralyzed in the face of my daughter's keening need, a Pompeian trapped underneath the flowing lava. “We just can't yet, it's not…”

Chris was walking over to us, smiling, holding a plate stacked high with food. When he noticed Hannah's stricken face, my rising helplessness, his smile shriveled into a tight scowl. “Iz,” he hissed. “You promised you'd try.”

“Hannah wants to leave, actually,” I said. “Not me. Hannah.” She looked up at me, confused, her eyes teary. In the marital trenches, once in a while even your own child was cannon fodder.

Chris softened immediately. “Oh, Hanners,” he said. “Come on.” He handed me his plate and put his arm around Hannah's shoulders, led her away.

And so I was alone in the middle of the room, balancing a ridiculously heavy plate of latkes and sour cream and grapes and chocolate-dipped pretzels. The plate was beginning to leak oil; I could feel it seeping onto my hand. I thought briefly about setting it down in the middle of the blue-and-green rug. I looked around at the little clusters of people, the festive murmur and sparkle of it all. A love song by Charm School that I hadn't heard in years, “I'll Pull Out,” banged from hidden speakers with their signature, jangly cowbell rhythm. (
We don't need protection/from our sweet affection/Don't want nothing to come betweeeeen us.
) One of Mark's colleagues from the English Department, a tall woman wearing a velvet jacket and a porkpie hat, was laughing loudly at something Sanjay Shah was saying. A pale, dark-haired woman who looked like Andi—she had a younger sister—was holding court with three men I didn't recognize; probably, based on scruffy haircuts alone, they were Mark's colleagues. I stood there for five or ten minutes, maybe longer. The room was too bright, too loud. I wondered where Chris and Hannah had disappeared to.