Once Upon a Time, There Was You (8 page)

She hears her mother’s bedroom door open, then the sounds of the toilet flushing, the water running. She thinks about her mother asking Valerie to give her an objective opinion on her body. God! She needs to stop trying so hard. Sadie could actually teach her a thing or two about men, if her mother would listen. Which she wouldn’t.

Sadie has learned a lot of things not to do, in her efforts to help her parents. But what
to
do? She feels sorry for them, both of them. Sometimes she looks at her mother standing at the stove making something for dinner, and what is it that she sees? She doesn’t know, but it kills her. Her mother’s forehead wrinkled with her efforts. Her dumb apron, her socks falling down; she buys silly socks all the time, then holds them up before Sadie saying, “Aren’t these cute? Kind of funky, huh? I thought they were so cute.” Now and then Sadie still brings her mother presents, like when she was a little girl. A gift for no reason: A cupcake. A scarf. A book. And her mother is always so grateful. Too grateful, like a dog. Then Sadie gets angry that she gave her anything, yet she’ll go out and get her more.

She looks over at the book on her dresser, the one she offered to read to her mother and her mother promptly declined. Sadie knows why. She was sorry the moment she suggested it. The memories it would bring back of the days when they were still together, and her mother didn’t need to sit scowling at the calculator when she did her taxes, when her father got to eat homemade pie at his own kitchen table instead of buying those pathetic single slices entombed in plastic.

People are stupid. Why are they so stupid? There is an algorithm for the way humans were designed: love and be loved. Follow it and you’re happy. Fight against it and you’re not. It’s so simple, it’s hard to understand.

Sadie closes her eyes and sees Ron’s face, his long lashes, his
full mouth, the way his hair slides over one eye. His long legs, the slow way he puts his jacket on. It makes her full of a feeling that’s close to tears, a desire that is in large part frustration. Her feelings for him are so huge, so complicated, so demanding.

“I trust you,” she whispers. Sometimes saying it makes it so.

7

O
n Monday evening, John and Amy are sitting at his kitchen table, finishing dinner. John made a chicken cacciatore of which he is not unreasonably proud (a generous pinch of cloves is the secret). At one point, Amy gestured to her own chin to let John know he had something on his, and he liked how natural the moment was between them. Amy pointed, he wiped it away: done. Say all you want to about the grand and glorious aspects of a heady romance—lengthy and poetic recitations of love, Sturm und Drang, kissing in the windswept rain—what John likes best are the small and undramatic moments that make for a kind of easy comfort, for a feeling of being grounded in a relationship. A feeling of being
off duty
. You show up on your first date with your best shoes on, hoping to get to a place where you keep your shoes off, is what he thinks.

Amy takes a last bite and then folds her napkin beside her plate. “Thank you. That was delicious.”

“You’re welcome. I’m glad you liked it.”

“May I have the recipe?”

You may have the cook!
pops into his brain, but he doesn’t say it, of course not, it’s much too soon for such pronouncements. “I’d be glad to give you the recipe,” he says.

“Hey. Know what happened to me today?”

He sits back and crosses his arms, smiles. “No. What happened to you today?”

“Well, I decided to take the bus to work instead of driving? And I got on and I sat behind this woman who started crying. She was very quiet about it, just every now and then she would reach up and wipe away a tear. She had this kerchief on her head, this ratty old flowered kerchief, but it was clean and it was tied very neatly, you know. And she had her purse on her lap and she was holding on to it like it was hands. At first nobody else seemed to notice she was crying, but then everybody around her did. And it got very quiet. And then finally this man got up from the back of the bus, and he came up and sat next to her and put his arm around her, and he didn’t say a word, he just stared straight ahead with his arm around her and she kept crying but it was better now, you could tell, she kind of had a little smile even though she was still crying. And I don’t know if he even knew her! I think everybody was wondering the same thing: Does he even know her? I guess he must have known her; otherwise she probably would have leaped up and started screaming or something, but you never know! You just never know, it might have been someone whose heart went out to her because she was crying. And he decided he would comfort her. And she let him. And I think it was a kind of miracle. A living parable or something. Plus it was so interesting! I thought,
I’m going to take the bus every day! This is great!
And I also thought,
See? This is all it is, people need each other
. And it seems like we are always our best selves when we
admit
ourselves to each other, our needs. I think everybody around that woman felt like cheering, we all felt great because she felt better. Of course we didn’t cheer, that would have been … Well, that would have been like one of those movies where, when you see a scene like that, you just roll your eyes and want to walk out and get more popcorn. But anyway, nobody cheered, nobody
even looked directly at this couple except for this one young woman who kind of had something wrong with her and she was just staring right at them and muttering to herself. But the whole thing made me think … Well, I got this overwhelming feeling of … I don’t know. We’re all one. We really
are
all one.”

John leans forward. “I see the LSD in the red sauce is kicking in.”

Amy flushes, puts her hand to the side of her face. “Oh, God, I talked too much, didn’t I? I always talk too much. I don’t mean to, but it’s like all these thoughts start bidding for placement—
pick me, pick me!
—and I don’t know what to pick, and so, you know, I pick them all and then I just talk too much. And then I can’t stop, I just keep going. As you see. Although sometimes I remember that I talk too much and then I don’t say
anything
. Which is also bad. Though probably not as bad. Oh, look at this, logorrhea central, I’m sorry, take out my batteries.”

He laughs, and leans over the table to kiss her forehead. “I love to hear you talk. And I know what you mean. I know exactly what you mean.” He gestures to the front porch. “Want to go out and set a spell?”

She nods happily. “Let’s wash the dishes first.”

“No, no; you’re the guest. I’ll do it later.”

She hesitates, then says, “I don’t want to be the guest. I want to help you clean up. Okay?”

“Okay.” But something shifts in him. He’s nervous, saying it, and he thinks she hears it; and then he regrets that he has altered the mood in this way.

Together, they clean up the kitchen, she pointedly silent, now, a dish towel tucked into her skirt band. They work well together, and he feels himself beginning to relax. He likes her a lot. He really likes her. A woman who talks too much and admits it, how refreshing. And it’s nice how much she talks, it’s a welcome relief
from taciturn women who maintain that cool and blaming reserve. Irene was cold like that, at the end. A few days before she left, she sat stiffly on the sofa beside him, and he asked her, “Where do you go, when you’re here?” They’d been watching
Meet the Press
, a show they used to enjoy, and they’d even relished the commercials because that offered them time to talk excitedly about what they’d just heard. They were aligned politically, and it reinforced their closeness to carry on together about what they saw as gross errors of the government. Toward the end, Irene no longer talked with him during the commercials but instead continued to stare straight at the screen. They both did. They watched, with apparent interest, something in which neither of them had any interest at all. They sat unmoving, unspeaking, like mannequins, but their faces were absent even of the barely there expressions those storefront figures wore.

On that day, when he asked her the question about where she went when she was there, she rolled her eyes and walked away, and he watched the rest of the show alone. He was aware of a familiar ache in his gut, and he realized everything in their marriage had come to either sadness or anger. He tried to think of when it all started, but he couldn’t point to a time. He tried to think of what the reason was, but there wasn’t one, really. It had just happened. It was an old story, and it had happened to them: a particular kind of erosion started, was inadequately treated, grew, and finally could not be treated.

When John was in junior high school, he was in a play, Edgar Lee Masters’s
Spoon River Anthology
. John’s role was that of Fletcher McGee, and his first lines were “She took my strength by minutes, she took my life by hours.” He was troubled by those lines, as he was by those of another character, Mabel Osborne (played by Jill Santos, a radiant brunette on whom John had a huge, hopeless crush). Mabel, speaking about a geranium planted
over her grave, says, “Everyone knows that you are dying of thirst, yet they do not bring water! They pass on, saying: ‘The geranium wants water.’ ” During the weeks of rehearsal, when John heard those lines over and over, he would wonder how people once in love could come to such things. If he could just get Jill Santos to notice him, he would marry her and they would never be like that. They would be so happy, and they would have a bunch of handsome children chasing each other across the front lawn, laughing. Later, when his marriage with Irene became so completely unraveled, he understood all too well about a neglected geranium. A thing like that becomes ugly pretty quickly, and then you just want it to finish dying so you can get rid of it.

But Amy. Another good thing about Amy is how she dislikes travel, and would not badger him about going here or there all the time. Irene did that, and it always made him feel like home with him would never be enough for her, she wanted to go to Italy, she wanted to go to Africa, she wanted to buy a summer home so they wouldn’t be
here
all the time. She said that last looking out the window at the backyard one rainy day, and he wanted to say, “What are you seeing when you say that, Irene? The grass that we finally got to be heaven on bare feet? The little vegetable garden with the chicken wire Sadie labored to install and then photographed, in her pride? The blueberry bush that you yourself insisted upon? The rope swing under the elm tree? Or maybe the double hammock, in which one night, while Sadie slept in her room upstairs, we crept out and made love most adroitly?” He didn’t ask her that. He did ask her why she always wanted to leave home, and she gave him a withering look and said, “People go on
vacations
, John. People
need
to go on vacations.” Well, he didn’t need to. He didn’t like to, really. All that packing and unpacking. Those awful stacks of mail upon return, the forgotten milk turned sour in the fridge. Amy was a woman who apparently
shared his convictions, a woman who saw the vacation in going nowhere at all.

It’s more important than ever that he reveal the truth to her about him not being a widower. He has to do it tonight.

Just after they are settled out on the porch with their glasses of wine, Amy suddenly sits up straighter in her chair. “John. I have a confession to make.”

He laughs. “Funny you should say that. I do, too.”

“Can I go first?”

He gestures expansively:
Be my guest
.

She looks down at her lap, tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, speaks softly. “This is about my husband, about when he died. I think I told you he died at home.” She looks quickly over at John, and he nods.

“Well, on the last day, I was sitting beside him and I had been up all night—again—and I was so exhausted, all the way down to my bones. And he was such a
mess
by then. I’m sorry to say it that way, but he
was
a mess—that’s the way he described himself, too. We even laughed about it one day. He’d asked for a mirror, and he looked at himself in it, and he got real still; and then he just started laughing, and I did, too. Oh, that was such an odd and dear moment.

“But anyway. He looked nothing like himself. And the room reeked from him. It did, it just reeked all the time, nothing I did helped. But that day I was sitting there with him, and he all of a sudden started having trouble breathing, he was gasping and snorting and …” She pauses, gathers herself. “He wasn’t able to talk at that point, but I knew he was having trouble breathing. And I knew what to do to help him; I’d done it before. I’d readjusted him, I’d suctioned him a million times. But that time, I didn’t do anything. I just sat there. And he died.”

She looks over at him, her eyes full of tears. “The doctor had
told me he didn’t have much longer, maybe another few days, but I let him die then. I never told anyone this. But in those last moments, he looked over at me, needing help, and I did nothing. I think he was aware that I was choosing to do nothing. And all that was in his eyes …” She swallows hugely. “All that was in his eyes was love.

“I was wrong to do that. I was so wrong. And I see that day over and over. I wish I’d helped him. But I didn’t. You must think I’m a terrible person. I killed him.”

“Amy.”

“I did!”

“
Cancer
killed him.”

She says nothing, wipes a tear from beneath one eye, then the other.

“I wonder if he wasn’t grateful to you.”

“I don’t think he was
grateful
.” Her torso jerks, holding back a sob.

“Well, want me to tell you what I think?”

She nods.

“I think the last thing he saw was a wife who loved him and did not want him to suffer any longer. He knew he was going to die. I suppose one way he might have died is after having become unconscious. Or alone, after having suffered more. Instead, he died looking into the face of the person who loved him best, the one he loved best. To me, that’s a good death.”