Going in Circles (5 page)

I make miniatures. Well, I used to, anyway. It started when I was little, with my dollhouse. We couldn't afford to buy a lot of doll furniture to begin with, but that didn't bother me. What I wanted was for my doll to have the same things in her house that I had in mine. I spent hours at the kitchen table with colored pencils, construction paper and glue, making sticky, lopsided couches and toaster ovens. My early origamilike representations were sufficient enough to get the point across, but would be destroyed by the end of one afternoon of Today Barbie Has Hot Sex with the Cable Guy.

I stole the little plastic inserts from pizza boxes used to keep the cardboard from meshing with the cheese. For me, they were perfect bases for coffee tables. Where some kids saw broken sunglasses, I saw the possibility of a full-length mirror, or a vanity. A juice-box straw was a fantastic find; it could be fashioned into a lamp, a shower curtain rod, or—for the more adventurous doll—a poolside stripper pole.

My mother, of all people, was the one who encouraged me to keep making miniatures. I think it was mainly because it kept me quiet and out of the way for hours on end. Still, she was the one who took me to the crafts store on weekends. I
loved that grown-up feeling, mom and daughter entering the store together with projects in mind. I was so content being just like all the other women wandering the aisles of crafts supplies, browsing through seemingly infinite possibilities, each lost in her own artistic world. I wasn't tagging along like those other little kids, those
babies,
bored and whiny, who could be mollified with a coloring book and a package of puffy stickers. I had a real reason to be there, to touch the rows of unfinished wood, to sift through yarn balls and doll parts. I was a creator.

Once back at home, I'd work until my little fingers felt spiked with splinters from breaking hundreds of Popsicle sticks into what I thought of as wood scraps. I ruined the carpeting in my bedroom with Krazy Glue mishaps.

It was all worth it for my mom's thirty-fifth birthday present. I made her a shoe-box version of our dining room, with her table and her centerpiece and all the chairs, including the one with a broken leg spoke. The pink wallpaper was perfect, complete with the swirly white flowers just above the chair guard. The chandelier was fashioned out of a paper clip and cotton swabs. No dolls, no representations of people. Just the room, empty and silent, clean like company was coming, waiting to be useful. The way my mother liked to keep it.

I remember her reaction as she perched the old sneaker box on her lap and peered inside. She looked afraid to move an inch, like she might jostle something out of place. She held my hand so tightly I almost allowed myself to tell her she was hurting me. But then I saw the look on her face, and even though I was young, I knew that look wasn't because she was proud of me, but because I had surprised her. I had done something she hadn't known I was capable of. I had made
something way better than a turkey hand drawing or a traced picture of a duck.

Mom grabbed my face by the chin and stared into my eyes. I stared at the tiny dark line between her eyebrows, the present her face had bestowed upon her for her thirty-fifth birthday.

“God has given you a gift,” she said, her thumb too rough against my jawbone. I could feel her nail digging into my skin, but I didn't dare move. “Don't waste this.”

All that seriousness directed at a ten-year-old. Mom was always hard on me, wanting to make sure I did things the way she thought they should be done, that I knew my life wasn't just important to me, but represented everything she had given up in her own life to have a baby. Always these stories about this
child
who stole her dreams, this horrible burden she was suffering with this
kid
someone apparently forced her to create and then raise.

Oh, wait. That's me!

I might have let the miniatures remain something I had done in the past if it hadn't been for Matthew. I guess that was because it seemed like a useless talent. I could make tiny things. Big deal. Then one weekend my mother asked me to clean some stuff out of the garage and I found some of the miniatures I'd done in high school. They were very “I'm a sad teenager” pieces, things like miniature cemeteries glued to algebra books. Matthew thought they were fascinating, and insisted on putting them out on display. When people would come over, he'd ask, “Can you believe she can do that with her hands? I can't do anything like that.”

It was that same feeling I'd had when Mom paraded me around the crafts store. It wasn't so much validation as it was
the confirmation that I was special. Someone I loved thought I was unique. And being unique confirmed what I needed to be true: that I wasn't replaceable.

That night in bed, as I was babbling on about the next year with Matthew, I mentioned that there was enough interest in the photographs of my miniatures I'd posted on the Internet that I might be able to get my miniatures seen in the real world, in bigger places. Maybe I could get a show going.

“That sounds exciting,” he said. “Get seen outside our living room.”

I liked the way he dressed for bed, in actual pajamas. He'd comb his blond hair over to the side and tuck himself in like a dad from the fifties, complete with the day's crossword puzzle from the newspaper. I often wanted to buy him a little pipe he could stick in the corner of his mouth after he fluffed his pillows. It made me smile, how he always seemed very official.
This is bedtime.

I tapped him on the newspaper. “I wonder what's going to happen to me,” I said.

Matthew lowered his crossword as he jammed his pen into his mouth. He stayed that way for a while, long enough that I decided he was pondering the answer to nine-across, and not my future.

But then he said, “You never say, ‘I wonder what I'll do,' or, ‘I can't wait for this to happen.' You sit and wonder what will happen
to
you. As if you have no choice. As if life just does things to you. You have free will, you know. You can make things happen for yourself.” He picked up the crossword and whacked it back to upright, concentrating again on the lower right quadrant.

With as much drama as I could muster, I fairly levitated off the bed, like I was consumed with the spirit of indignant
outrage. “You're right,” I said. “I
can
make things happen for myself. So I'm going to use all my free will to go sleep on the couch.”

He leaned his head back against the wall and made a sound deep in his throat, as if I were somehow being unreasonable. “Charlotte . . .”

“No, you seem to think it's okay to talk to me like a parent. But I am not interested in sleeping with my mom,” I told him.

“Don't you mean your dad?”

“Not when you sound exactly like my mother. It's creepy. And stupid. Good night.”

I made sure to make my motions in the living room as noisy as possible, so he would know that I wasn't finished with our conversation. It worked, and Matthew came out to the living room a few minutes later to apologize. “Don't sleep out here. Please.”

“Why would you talk to me that way?”

“I'm sorry” was all he said. Because back then, that was all it took. One smile from Matthew, one apology, one touch of my lower back, and I would find a way to get back to how I had felt just before I got upset.

When it comes to problems or misunderstandings, I'm like a sitcom character. I want anything bad or uncomfortable to be over within twenty-four minutes. Less than half an hour later, I want us to be swapping apologies, each of us insisting we are more to blame, but have learned “something very important” from all of this. I want things resolved so the credits can roll, so that I can find rest.

More than likely, things went bad between Matthew and me because I rushed the sitcom ending. I rushed through our problems so quickly we rarely discussed what was actually
wrong. Things got ignored, or at the very least diminished. They got squished down and shoved inside me, piling up higher and higher, until one day I guess they clenched my jaw shut.

That night, after I'd left the couch and once we were back in bed, I curled around Matthew. He stroked my hair and whispered, “What's going to happen to us?” We kissed, and then answered that question together, silently, in the dark.

There was a time when I looked at Matthew and only saw All Things Good. I pushed everything else aside. I saw him and I smelled him and I felt him and I wanted that to be my future. But then.

Two words that hurt: “But then.”

I once had hope.

But then.

W
hen I get back to my desk, I find a McDonald's bag sitting on my chair. A Happy Meal, with a Hello Kitty toy.

Jonathan enters. “What are you doing?” he asks. I don't get tricked; I know he's on the phone, his tiny glowing earpiece on the side of him I can't see. If Jonathan isn't actually sitting at his desk, he will be on the phone with his wife. Cassandra likes him to give constant updates on his life, apparently worried that if he has a single minute to himself, one that hasn't been thoroughly dissected with her, he will morph into a different person and they will grow apart. Mostly Jonathan spends his time placating Cassandra about whatever it is that's currently spinning her world into chaos. I would try to convince Jonathan that this is no life, but first of all I am not one to be giving out relationship advice, and secondly it appears Jonathan likes feeling needed.

“No, don't try to fix it,” he says to Cassandra. “We'll go buy a new one.”

As he lowers himself into his desk chair, I notice the tag from his khakis poking out over his waistband. It's making his shirt ride up, exposing a tuft of dark back hair.

Jonathan's not very tall, not very fit, not very smooth, and always just a tad sweaty. I don't exactly know how, but he makes this work for him. There's something about this that comes off as confidence rather than having given up, which is much closer to the truth. It doesn't make any sense. The unhappier he is, the more people like him. The ruder he gets, the more people laugh. I've tried to figure out his secret, because if I could determine whatever it is that makes this short, damp, hairy man one of the most popular guys on our floor, I would be a bajillionaire.

I rap my knuckle on my desk to get his attention. I point to my bag of McDonald's and mouth a thank-you. He shakes his head, eyebrows up, like he doesn't know what I'm talking about. “Whichever one you want, my love,” he says into the air. “And if that lamp isn't good enough, then we'll get another new one, and another, until I buy you the sun if I have to.” He pauses. “No, I'm not being sarcastic. But I have to go.”

He flings the earpiece at his desk, but it lacks the flair of slamming down a phone. “Half an hour I've been hearing her complain about a lamp,” he says. “I need my wife to have more friends. Do you girls honestly call each other and complain about lamps? How do you stand each other all day?”

“Thank you for my lunch.”

“Honestly, I didn't do that.”

“Okay, play it that way,” I say, as I turn back toward my computer. I glance at the screen and then freeze.

For the first time in a long time, there's an email from Matthew. Subject line:
PLEASE READ
.

This can't be good. Lots of other subject lines out there he could have chosen. This one needs attention.
My
attention. My hand trembles as I drag the mouse and click.

C—I was trying to make some room for my weight bench, and I was wondering if you would come pick up your sewing machine. I'll put it in the closet if you don't want it, but I thought I'd offer before I moved it.—M.

When I read the message to Jonathan I can't help the sarcasm that pours out of me. I practically shout the initials Matthew used as placeholders for our names. As if anybody ever calls me C. As if that's how we talked to each other. “Oh,
C,
my darling. My sweet. My one and only. I love you. I love you,
C.
”

But somehow Jonathan doesn't get how flippant and arrogant Matthew's message sounds. Instead he asks, “So, are you going to pick up the sewing machine?”

“I think there are more important things to talk about than the sewing machine,” I scoff.

He slumps down in his chair, the heel of his right hand mashing his forehead. “Oh, no. Don't go crazy.”

I play with the mouse cord, bending it into little loops. “I'm not. I won't.”

“You
are.
I see your loony brain working. You're making a big deal out of a couple of sentences.”

“Well, in those couple of sentences he's saying a lot.”

“He's saying he wants to make room for his weight bench.”

“Obviously he wants to exercise more.”

“What an asshole.”

I rip open the Happy Meal bag, stuffing cold french fries into my mouth. As the only thing that truly soothes a woman scorned is chilled salty potato.

“I know you know what this means,” I say.

“He wants to be in better shape?” Jonathan snakes his hand up the bottom of his shirt to root around his belly button.
The friendship boundary between us has long been clearly defined and is constantly reinforced.

“Exactly. To impress someone. Someone obviously not me, because he wouldn't want to move my things to do it.”

“Where does he keep his weight bench now?”

“That's the thing. He didn't have a weight bench when we were together. This is new. This is New Matthew, the one who works out with a weight bench.”

“I think if he was really looking to meet chicks, he'd go to the gym. Not work out at home. How lazy is that dude?”

I shove more fries into my mouth, enjoying the mushy-salty feel against my tongue. I shrug. “He's trying to claim territory in the house. That's why he wants me to go get my sewing machine.”