Once Upon a Time, There Was You (7 page)

Irene stands there, her white cotton, waist-high panties in her hand like a flag of surrender.

“I mean … Don’t you keep the
lights off
, anyway?” Valerie says.

And then, alarmed, they both turn to the sound of the front door opening. “Forgot something!” Sadie calls out and comes into the kitchen to find her mother holding a pile of clothes up against her naked body.

“Whoa.”

“Hi, Sadie,” Valerie says.

“Hey.”

“We’re just comparing bodies.”

“Uh-huh. Okay. I gotta get my phone, I forgot it. See you.”

Neither woman moves until Sadie goes out again. Then Irene
dresses silently. When she sits at the table again, she says, “Well, there you go. Eight weeks of income for some therapist, easily.”

“I don’t think so,” Valerie says.

“Really?”

“I don’t think she cared.”

“Really?”

“You know what it’s like when you’re that age. You don’t think of anyone but yourself.”

“If I were eighteen and came home and found my mom naked in the kitchen with her best friend, I’d care plenty.”

“So you’ll tell her later what we were doing. She’ll get it. She’s a good kid.”

Irene sighs. “I know she is. Hey, she’s going rock climbing for a whole weekend, unchaperoned. What do you think?”

“I think it’s great.”

Irene says nothing, but her face says,
Wrong answer
.

“Do you remember what
you
were doing at eighteen?” Val asks.

“Probably still playing with dolls.”

“Noooo. As I recall it, you were screwing the drummer in that awful band every hour of every day.”

“Not every hour of every day.”

“Well, it sure seemed like it.”

“It was a different time. Not so dangerous. And sex was … it was like a handshake.

“You know, I’d play dolls now if anyone would play with me. Want to play dolls?”

“Nah. Paper dolls, I’d play. Because I’m only interested in changing their outfits. Remember those little hats paper dolls had, with the slits you put over their heads?”

“You can change outfits on real dolls, too.”

“Too much work. I liked the tabs. Easy on, easy off.” Valerie looks at her watch. “Listen, I have to go. Forget about Don. You’ll write one of your dopey ads and be seeing someone in a week. I just wish you’d write a real ad, sometime.”

“I do write real ads!”

“No, you write facetious ads because it’s so hard for you to say anything serious when you feel something deeply. And also so, if you get hurt, you can say, ‘Ha, I didn’t mean it anyway.’ ”

“Thank you, Dr. Val. Will we be seeing you on the Oprah Winfrey Network soon?”

“It’s true that you do that! And as long as I’m being Dr. Val, don’t worry about Sadie. She doesn’t have to listen to you anymore, anyway. Legally, I mean.”

“I know. Don’t tell her.”

“Believe me, she knows. And you know what else? You need to let her do some serious hating on you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she needs to feel free to hate you. Otherwise, she’ll never free herself from you.”

“Yeah, easy for you to say. You have sons.”

“Well, sons do it, too! My sons had to hate me so they could leave and grow up. And they still hate me sometimes. They really hurt my feelings, sometimes! I’ve told you about stuff they’ve done. Come on, Irene. You know that’s the way it goes. Kids are cruel to their parents. You did it, too. When your father used to come and visit, you’d be mean to him, if not in deed, then in thought. Then after he left, you’d be racked with guilt because you loved him.”

“Who said I was so mean to him?”

“
You
did!”

“Well.”

“I have to go, hon.”

“I know.”

Valerie comes over to Irene and hugs her. “Oh, buck up, bucky, things aren’t so bad.”

“Yeah. Thanks for coming over. And for the burlesque show.”

Irene watches from the kitchen window as Valerie walks down the sidewalk and rounds the corner. She dumps out the remains of both her and Valerie’s glasses. Turns on the TV and walks away from it. It’s only the sound she wants, the illusion that someone is in the next room.

At nine-thirty, Irene climbs into bed and opens the cookbook Henry Bliss assigned her to read. She’s to pick out the most enticing-sounding appetizers and make copies of the recipes. “Make sure they’re exotic and beautiful!” he told her. That’s what he always tells her. Last time she gave him recipes, he held one up between two fingers and far away from himself, as though it were not only distasteful but malodorous. “
Pizza
loaf?” he said. “I ask for elegant appetizers, and you bring me a recipe for
pizza loaf
?”

“I tried it!” Irene said. “It’s good! And it has pesto and tapenade! Isn’t that a little exotic?”

Henry said, “Irene. Everyone in San Francisco knows about pesto and tapenade. They’re like salt and pepper!”

“Well, I don’t think everyone knows what tapenade is,” Irene said, and Henry closed his eyes and shook his head. Then he said, “You’re a Minne
so
tan. Your people just discovered that lemon juice doesn’t have to come from a green bottle. But that doesn’t mean
everyone’s
so benighted!”

One of these days she’s going to hand him the recipe for pigs in a blanket. For Lipton onion soup dip, which she happens to think is divine.

By the time Sadie comes home, Irene has fallen asleep with a cookbook opened to a page with a recipe for glazed tofu that calls for yuzu peel and shiso leaf and dashi kombu. She awakens to the
sound of her daughter’s voice, and gets out of bed to go and stand before Sadie’s closed bedroom door. She knocks gently. She hears Sadie say, “I’ll call you back,” then, “Yeah?”

“Can I come in?”

“Yeah!”

Irene pushes open the door and stands there. She’s not quite sure why she’s come. Maybe she’s still asleep. “Okay,” she says. “Good night.” She starts back to her bedroom.

“Mom?”

Irene turns around.

“Is something wrong?”

“No. Well, yes. I was going to tell you at dinner, but we got off on rock climbing. I’ve … Don and I are not going to be seeing each other anymore.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. Should I be sorry?”

“You mean, was it his idea?”

“Well, yeah. Was it?”

Irene leans against the doorjamb, crosses her arms. “Yes, it was. Uh-huh.”

“But … Why?” Sadie asks. “Do you want to tell me why?”

“I don’t know, really. He said he was getting back with his wife. But also I think it was that he just wasn’t that attracted to me. So, when you came home, I’d just asked Valerie … I just wanted her to give me an objective opinion of my body.”

Sadie looks down.

“I know you must have felt like … Anyway, that’s what it was. I’m sorry you had to walk in on it.”

“It’s okay.”

“So how’s Meghan?”

“Good.”

Irene stands there, smiling. She looks around Sadie’s room, at the poster of Paolo Nutini taped to her wall, the many photographs
of her friends. On her dresser is a book that both John and Irene used to read to Sadie when she was a little girl; it was her favorite one. It’s called
Paper Boats
, and it’s a poem by an Indian writer named Rabindranath Tagore, about a little boy who writes his name and where he lives on paper boats to float down the stream, hoping that someone will find them and know who he is. Sadie sees her mother looking at the book and says, playfully, “Want me to read you a story?” and Irene says, “Not that one.”

After she goes back to bed, she lies awake for a while, remembering how John used to read aloud to her, and she to him. It was in bed, most times, but occasionally they would do it in the living room, on the sofa, sitting side by side in their stocking feet. What a lovely thing that was. How safe it seemed, how sweet an offering. She still has never done that with anyone else. A guy she dated a couple of times asked, once. He pulled a book off his shelf and said, “Let me read something to you.”

“May I?” Irene said and took the book from his hands. “Show me the passage. I’d rather read it myself.”

6

S
adie waits until she hears her mother close the door to her own bedroom. She counts to one hundred, slowly. Then she calls Ron. “Hey,” she says. “Are you asleep?”

“Nah. Hi. What are you doing?”

She turns onto her side, pulls the quilt up over her head. “Nothing. Just thinking of you.”

“What a coincidence.”

“Six more days till Saturday,” she says.

“A little over a hundred and thirty hours.”

“That makes it seem longer.”

“You still feel okay about it, right?”

“Yeah.” Mostly, she does. She doesn’t like lying to her parents. But neither would ever let her go away for a weekend with a boy, especially one they’d never met! And she doesn’t want them to meet him until … Well, she doesn’t know when. She supposes she wants them to meet him when she’s sure of him. When he’s sure of her. When nothing can threaten what feels so important to her, so vital. And so fragile.

She looks out her window at the moon. It’s full tonight; it was beautiful in the park. They’d gone over to Golden Gate, and he’d kissed her so many times, and he’d pressed her against him closer,
closer, until she’d gasped for him to stop. And he did, just like that. He sat up and smiled down at her. “You okay?” he asked, and for a moment she got almost angry at him. Why wasn’t he all … asunder? Why was he so calm and cool? Didn’t he
feel
any of this? He said he did, but he sure didn’t act it. There he was, breathing normally, the only sign of their fierce near coupling a bit of hair out of place at the back of his head. And she was still breathing so hard, her jeans embarrassingly (and uncomfortably) damp, and her heart beating so hard she felt sure it must be visible in her neck.

“I feel stupid,” she said.

And then his expression changed and he lay down beside her and turned her head so that she was facing him. “No. You’re not stupid. I feel everything you do. It’s just that I …”

She waited, holding her breath, but he said nothing more.

She sat up. “You what?”

He held his arm up over his face, creating a shadow. “Whoa, that moon is
bright
, isn’t it? I’ve never seen it so bright, have you?”

“What were you going to say?”

He looked puzzled. “You mean … When?”

She sighed, rested her forehead against her knees, and looked at the ground below her. The grass was silvery, the blades all individuated. She wished she didn’t care quite so much for him. But she did.

He sat up then, too, and rested his palm on her back. “It isn’t time,” he said. “That’s all. You just need to trust me. Will you try to trust me?”

“I do trust you,” she said, but she didn’t look at him.

“Sadie?”

Now she did turn to him, and there he was with that smile, so
what could she do? She smiled back. He kissed her lightly, then stood and reached for her hand. “We need to get you back home.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I know. Me either.” But he pulled her to her feet.

He dropped her half a block away from her house so that they wouldn’t be seen, though he watched her walk all the way to the door of her building, making sure she was safe. He was old-fashioned that way; he’d opened the car door for her until she asked him to stop. (And then, oddly, she missed him doing it.)

She flips her pillow, turns onto her side. “Am I going to see you tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow.”

“Why not?”

“I promised I’d help my mother move some furniture around. And then I have to start packing stuff up in my room. She’s going to turn it into an office when I go to school.”

Sadie can’t imagine this, not with the way her room has been preserved for her in her father’s house in St. Paul. She supposes she’s been expecting Irene to do the same thing with her room here. How would it feel if Irene didn’t do that, if she seemed as eager for Sadie to leave as Sadie was to go? Strange to contemplate; impossible to!

“How about Monday, then?” Sadie asks.

“Not Monday, either. I can’t tell you why. It’s a surprise.”

“Really,” she says.

“Really.”

He does not say, “Let’s do something Tuesday,” and she’s not going to say it, either. These are the times her heart takes a nosedive, times when he says or does something that makes her think it could all go away, just like that. And then, if her parents knew about him, it would be awful. Irene would try to help, coming in
and sitting at the side of bed and saying, “Do you want to talk?” and it would only make things worse. And her father. He would say, “
Who
was this guy?” And then he’d try to cheer her up like he used to when she lost a game.

“Please believe me, Sadie.”

“I do.” Only she doesn’t, not completely. Oh, it’s awful to care about someone this much.

“Anyway,” she says. “I just wanted to say good night. And … I don’t know. Nothing. Good night.”

“Good night.” His voice is soft, sleepy-sounding. It makes her curl her toes. Why won’t he say something about Tuesday? Is he beginning to grow tired of her?

But now he says, “Sadie? You know those songs, those stories, that talk about how people feel they were made for each other? I feel that way about you. I feel like … I don’t know. Like we are the exact right people for each other. I don’t know why, or at least I can’t say why right now. But … Sleep with that, okay?”

“Okay.” Now she feels better. “I guess I should hang up.” She says this in a way that she hopes will make him say, “No. Let’s talk until morning.” But he doesn’t say that. He says good night, and then he is gone.

She holds the phone over her heart. She has just been with him, she has just talked to him after having been with him, but she feels bereft. She lies still for a while, watching the play of shadows against her bedroom wall, listening to the faint sounds of the traffic outside. She thinks of her father, who must be sleeping now; she imagines him in his T-shirt and pajama bottoms, and she misses him. It unfolds in her chest: she misses him. He’s a nice guy. He’s such a nice guy! He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s creative. He’s nice-looking. If her mother were to meet him now for the first time, she’d love him. The irony.