Once Upon a Time, There Was You (30 page)

“And they are too young to give up the life of freedom they should be living now.”

“This life of freedom. For what is it?”

“It’s to have fun before they’re settled down. To think about how they want to live their lives without the influence of another. Okay?”

“Okay. But … what if they can have fun being married? What if they can decide together how to live their lives?”

Now Irene grows angry. She looks at her watch. “I’m sorry to be rude, but I’ve got to go.”

“Has your friend arrive?” Huguette turns around in her chair.

“No,” Irene says. “I just … Look, I don’t think this is very productive, the two of us talking. We have very different points of view. What I wanted was for my daughter to be really sure she wanted to be married, before she took that step. I don’t feel she’s mature enough to have made that decision. I mean, come on, do you really think your son is?”

“My son, yes. Your daughter, I don’t know very well, but already I—”

“In addition to that, my daughter is dealing with something that happened to her that was very traumatic.”

“Yes. Ron told me.”

“Well, I think you can see, then, that this is not the time for her to be making rash decisions.”

“Only she has. Here we have the fact before us. And now, the question: Can she stay with this decision? Is it good for her? For her, Irene. Not you.” She stands, picks up her purse. “Sometimes we make choices in our lives. Sometimes our lives make choices for us. I wish for you some harmony in spirit.”

Irene doesn’t have any idea what to say. Huguette nods, and walks away.

A young woman comes in with an older woman who Irene thinks must be her mother, and they begin looking at a magazine together. “This is the dress I was telling you about,” the young woman says, and her mother looks closely at it.

Then she looks at her daughter and says, “I think it’s perfect.”

“Really?” the young woman says. “Be honest, Mom.”

Her mother smiles. “I am being totally honest. Now let’s find shoes and a cake.”

For one moment, Irene has the odd idea that Huguette sent them over. But of course she didn’t; Irene has often seen young women poring over bridal magazines in this café.

Irene turns to her own stack of magazines. She has to admit there are some lovely ideas here. They truly are lovely.

By the time Valerie arrives, Irene has selected a few things to show her. About one cake, Valerie says, “
That
is Sadie!” Irene agrees. She’ll buy this magazine, and when she gets home, she’ll ask her daughter what she thinks about a celebration in October in honor of her marriage. Also, she’ll ask her to forgive her. Then maybe Sadie will help her prepare dinner. She wants to make something wonderful, to send John off. Something he’ll remember.

33

S
adie is sitting on the floor, wrapping fragile things in newspaper to put into boxes. At first, when she hears the knock at her door, she doesn’t answer. But then she says “Yes?” in a way that she hopes will suggest she’s far too busy to have another heart-to-heart. She’s sick of heart-to-hearts.

This morning, when her mother was out, her father came in with some song and dance about how she shouldn’t judge Irene for her wariness not only toward Sadie’s marriage but toward the institution in general. He told her about one time when Irene was a little girl and was lying on the floor of the living room, coloring. Her parents were there, too, her father reading the newspaper, her mother mending. “William?” Irene heard her mother say. Her father did not respond. “William?” she said again; and again, her father did not respond. After the third time this happened, Irene’s mother flung the mending basket down and went into the kitchen. Irene found her there, sitting at the table, her arms crossed, her eyes flat. “What’s the matter?” Irene asked. “Go to bed,” her mother said. “You should have talked louder,” Irene said, and then her mother did look at her. “You stupid girl,” she said. “The things you think will help.”

“Your mother witnessed a lot of bitterness in both of her parents,”
John told Sadie. “She had no choice but to be scared of marriage, growing up that way.”

“And what about you, Dad?”

“Huh?” he said, which was what he always did when he was stalling. Lots of males do that, she’s noticed.

“Did you have the same kind of wariness?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Mine was different.”

Then Ron had called, and her dad had backed gratefully out of her room. Ron was a little sad, believing that Sadie wanted out of the marriage they’d so hastily entered into. But he’d thought about it, he told her, and he’d decided he’d rather lose her than make her feel like she’d lost herself. He reiterated the fact that he wasn’t going anywhere.

She wished she were with him. She missed him. “What are your
bad
parts?” she asked.

“Oh, I can get very moody,” he said. “Also, I don’t really care if my socks match.”

In the end, she said she’d talk to him later that night, she was busy packing now. Which seemed to make him feel better, though of course she has to pack if she’s moving to the dorm, too. She still hasn’t canceled her room there. She could move right in, be a freshman student rooming with someone named Laura Erickson, a girl from North Dakota whom she’d written a couple of emails to, talked to on the phone once, too. She seemed like a nice enough person. She’d told Sadie she loved old Led Zeppelin, strictly vinyl. Sadie likes that, too. She asked if Sadie liked blue, because she wanted to bring some blue curtains, a simple style, no ruffles. Sadie loves blue and hates ruffles.

After that phone call, Sadie had thought about what it would be like, living in a big building full of kids her own age, and how much she had looked forward to the all-night chats she’d heard so
much about. She’d thought about studying at the desk in the room, books and papers all around her, her gooseneck lamp shining light down. Maybe an empty pizza box on the floor.

But now here is her mother before her, an open magazine in her hand. “Look what I found,” she says, and she shows Sadie a wedding cake made up of cupcakes.

Sadie looks at it, then into her mother’s face. And bursts into tears.

Irene lets the magazine fall and goes to sit on the floor beside her daughter. She puts her arms around Sadie, rocks her gently side to side, saying, “I know.”

Sadie pulls away. “No you don’t! You don’t know what I’m crying about!”

“Maybe not,” Irene says. “But can I tell you what I think you might be crying about?”

Sadie shrugs.

Irene sits back on her heels. “I think you’re crying because you’re really confused, and you’re angry about being confused. You think you’ve gotten yourself into something that could be dead wrong for you, but that to get out now might cause too much pain to too many people, yourself included. One second, you think this was the best decision you ever made; the next, you’re horrified that you made it. You look at the marriage your parents had, and you can’t trust that yours won’t end, too. But more than anything, there’s this: You really love Ron.”

Now Sadie begins to cry harder.

Her mother moves closer, puts her hand on her daughter’s knee. “Sadie. All I saw in my parents’ marriage was loneliness and anger. They couldn’t reach each other. So what I took away from that is—”

“I know!” Sadie says. “Dad told me.”

“Okay. Well, did he also tell you about his parents’ marriage?”

“I know his mom took off when he was real little. And that what he had left of her was in that cigar box.”

“What cigar box?”

“The one he kept some of her stuff in. It was … I don’t know, an empty lipstick casing. A scarf. The postcards she sent him. He kept it until the day before he left for college, and then he took it in the alley and burned it.”

“He told you that?”

“Yeah. You didn’t know that?”

“No.”

“How could you not have known that, Mom?”

Irene shakes her head.

“He knows way more about you than you do about him.”

“Yes. I was selfish that way.” She looks over at her daughter. “You’re not like that, Sadie.”

“I don’t know what I’m like.”

“Well, then I’ll tell you,” Irene says. “You are intelligent, loyal to a fault, inquisitive, honest. Caring of people and of animals and of the world at large. Full of joy, and easy to be with. Wiser than your years. Confident in your ability to make decisions and stand by them.”

“Until now,” Sadie says.

“Let’s not say we’re at the end of something,” Irene says. “Let’s say we’re in the middle.” She stands, awkwardly. “My knees hurt. I have to go sit on something. Come sit on the bed with me.”

“I can hear you from here.” Sadie doesn’t want to sit on the bed with her mother. She wants to call Meghan and go out with her. She wants that fateful day never to have happened. She wants Ron to be sitting beside her, holding her hand. She wants her mother’s knees not to hurt, for her not to be getting so
old
when she’s so
alone
.

Irene says, “I just got back from the bookstore. And all the way home, this one thought kept repeating in my brain:
That was then; this is now.
”

“What do you mean?” Sadie asks. “Why were you thinking that?”

“Oh … For lots of reasons. Because I have a lot of regrets about how I lived my life in the past, and I think I let that get in the way of how I live now. And because I keep focusing on how I want you not be married, when you already are. In the bookstore café, I sat next to a mother and daughter who were really united in their happiness about the daughter getting married. And I felt so ashamed of how I’ve been behaving. Now, it’s true that girl was older than you. But that doesn’t mean that your love isn’t as true, or that your chances aren’t as good.”

“Plus maybe the groom is only eighteen,” Sadie says, smiling.

Irene laughs. “True. It’s true! But anyway, when I was walking home, I thought, maybe that mother wanted her daughter to marry someone different than the man—or woman—she chose. Maybe she had a lot of things to object to. But here’s what she was doing: standing with her daughter and saying,
This is your choice and I’m with you in it
. And that’s what I want to say to you.

“I also want to tell you I’m glad for you, that you didn’t let fear stop you from doing the thing your heart was telling you to do. It takes a lot of courage to get married, and a lot of work to stay married when the hard times come. And the hard times always come.”

“Why?”

“Oh, because it’s the nature of our species, that why. We’re complicated and contrary beings. Who knows if we’re really supposed to try to live in the way that marriage requires? Yet something in us seems to insist upon it.”

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

Sadie waits. If she waits long enough, if she gets out of her own way, the right words will come, she knows that. She sits staring at the hole in the knee of her jeans, and finally she says, “Do you know the best thing you taught me?”

“No.”

“See? I know you don’t. But I’m about to show you. And can I tell you one more thing?”

“Of course.”

“A
cupcake cake
? Henry would die.”

34

A
ll the way back on the plane, John scarcely moves. He looks out the window and thinks of Sadie, of Irene, and then, finally, of Amy. He feared at first that this trip away from her had made for a permanent rift in their relationship, that he had gone to a place he could not come back from, both literally and figuratively; and he wasn’t sure that what he felt most about that was relief. But the few hours on the plane have told him otherwise. As the miles between him and California increased, his feelings for Amy and Irene grew clearer to him. Does he want to get married again? He thinks he does. Is Irene the one, again? No. He had a thought when he was staying with her, though, that maybe she was. When she sat up in bed and untucked her blouse, when her red hair fell across her face, it launched a thousand feelings in him, including one that said,
We could try again
. It was exhilarating, thinking that. For one thing, he would be where Sadie was, every day. And he might finally fashion with Irene the kind of safe haven he had always longed to have with her,
the palace of we
, as he used to imagine it.

He thought that surely Irene must have entertained the notion herself when he was there; he thought he felt a kind of longing to stay together coming from her, too, every now and
then. When she handed him a breakfast plate with eggs scrambled wet, as he liked them. When she sat with him in worry about Sadie, and they were able to offer each other meager comfort—but comfort nonetheless—in the face of what might be a devastating loss. But he did not ask her. He watched her face during the last dinner they had together, to see if there was some kind of invitation, some kind of regret; he allowed space for her to say something before he walked out the door and downstairs to get the cab, but he did not ask her. At first he thought it was because he was afraid to. Then he realized he didn’t want to. What he wanted was to go back to Amy. Because she offered him something Irene never could, or would: A sense of unwavering stability. A contagious joy. And he can give her something back that he never could—or would—give Irene: an unprotected love. Oh, he has come back to a love for Irene, but it is one not of passion but of compassion. Which is to say, she is his friend; and he is hers. Perhaps that’s all they ever should have attempted.

When he lands in St. Paul, it is late to call Amy, but he does anyway.

Four rings before she answers. “Amy,” he says. “I’m sorry to wake you. It’s me.”

“Oh. John. How are you? Is everything okay?”

“I’m back. Everything’s fine. I wondered … Can I come and see you?”

“Well … It’s kind of late.”

“I know it is, but … You don’t have to get up early tomorrow, do you?”

“No.”

“So …”

“Uh. Maybe tomorrow?”

“I kind of need to see you, Amy.”

“If you have something to tell me, you can just do it on the phone. I understand.”