Once Upon a Time, There Was You (13 page)

Henry comes over to stand before Irene. “Keep your voice down. And you
can’t
quit now. You know I’m short today. Those sesame balls are going to come out of the deep fryer in exactly seven minutes, and they have to be served
immediately
!”

Irene takes off her apron and lays it on one of the massive granite counters.

“Oh, for … 
Irene!
We’re going to serve dried fig
souvlaki
! You
love
that! And lobster salad! With corn and basil and zucchini!
Look, I’ll … You can take all the leftovers home.
All
of them. I’m
sorry
!”

“I’m not,” Irene says and walks out the back door, where the sun is shining and the birds are calling and several hours of daylight remain. She’s abruptly quit jobs twice in her life: once, when she was a waitress at an ice cream store and they screamed at her for her uniform being too short—the uniform they had given her to wear, for the record. The other time was when she was a secretary at a company where the sexism was rampant, and her boss closed her in his office and pressed her against him and when she resisted he told her she’d better learn to play the game. She went to lunch that day and never came back. She’d forgotten how good it felt to seize one’s own life back into one’s own hands.

She almost throws her car keys up in the air, but she’d probably miss when she tried to catch them. Instead, she simply picks up the pace, and by the time she comes around to the front of the house, she’s practically skipping.

On the stairs leading from the front door, she sees Jeffrey Stanton. He holds up a hand. “Hey!”

“Hey.”

“You’re leaving?”

“I quit. I just quit my job.” She shrugs. “Ta da!”

“Huh! Want to go and get a drink and teach me how to do the same thing?”

She laughs.

“We can take my car,” he says. “It’s right here.”

Oh. He means it. She sneaks a look at her cellphone to see if her daughter has called yet. No. Oh, what is the matter with Sadie? Why has she become so resistant to nearly everything Irene asks of her? The little Val that lives in her brain says,
Because she needs to separate from you, remember? Let go of her life and worry about your own!

“Okay, I’ll come,” she tells Jeffrey, and she gets a little zip of feeling straight up her spine.

Val’s right. The hell with worrying over Sadie. Let go, let go, let go. Sadie wants to be so independent? Fine. Let her be. Irene will turn off her phone and hope that Sadie calls and gets
her
voice mail. Hopes, in fact, that Sadie comes home before Irene gets back and has to wonder where
she
is. Irene will step
way
back, in fact, and then let’s just see how independent Sadie really wants to be. Ordinarily, Irene would leave Sadie a message, saying where she was going, when she might be back. Not this time. Nope. And look: it’s not as hard as she thought. She’s fine. It’s a relief not to have to constantly report your whereabouts. A relief that, Irene acknowledges ruefully, Sadie longs to feel, too. But! Sadie is eighteen! Irene is … not eighteen!

Maybe if Sadie is not home when she gets there, she’ll put Joan Baez on the stereo. Loudly. Bette Midler. The Glenn Miller CD she loves so much that Sadie can’t abide. (Mom,
it sounds like mothballs
smell!) She will make dinner for a most emphatic
one
. If Sadie comes home hungry, oh
well
. Two can play at this game.

Irene walks over to Jeffrey’s car, and he opens the door for her. A Prius. Light green. What an excellent man.

“How about the Top of the Mark?” Jeffrey asks her, after they’ve both buckled themselves in.

“Really.?”

“No good?”

“No, that’s great,” she says. “Let’s go.”
Cougar
, she thinks. And then she thinks,
No. Not a cougar. I’m too old to be a cougar. I’m an old lioness, stretched out in the sun, not much interested in chasing prey anymore, but not above accepting an offering
. Due
an offering. Yes, a lioness in the sun, who has earned the right to stop running after things that don’t want to be caught
.

14

O
n Sunday afternoon, John goes to a movie so vacuous he has forgotten it by the time he gets to his car. He supposes it’s another sign of aging that he’s gotten so cranky about movies, but must they all be so simpleminded? Must a movie be in some language other than English for it to linger in the mind, to invite further thought and conversation? Not that he has anyone to converse about movies with. Suddenly. Even Sadie hasn’t answered her cellphone in the last couple days.

He goes to the cleaners and chats about the weather with the friendly Korean woman who works there, avails himself of one of the lollipops she keeps on the counter. He likes this woman for her unalterable cheerfulness, her neat blouses and cardigan sweaters, even—oddly—for the way she remembers his phone number but never his name.

He stops at the hardware store, which he always enjoys doing, in part for the memories it brings back of him going to those stores with his father. His dad seemed able to answer any question John asked about any tool or part, seemed to know immediately what bin to go to for any size nail or screw or hook or washer. There was a confidence Sam Marsh exuded in those places that John enjoyed seeing; later, he thought that it was a way for his father to mitigate the loss of his wife, of his son’s
mother. In the hardware store, things made sense. There was an answer for every problem. In this world, at least, his father knew without question what to do when things broke.

John’s final stop is the grocery store. Here, listening to the Muzak version of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” he pushes his cart listlessly up and down the aisles, selecting too many items from the produce section, as usual. There is a kind of virtuous feeling he gets, loading his cart with heads of broccoli and cauliflower, bunches of carrots, but then he always ends up throwing a good half of them away. There is such a vast distance between the fantasy of him making his own curried carrot soup and the reality of him holding up a carrot so limp it bends nearly in half, then tossing it in with the used coffee grounds. He supposes he should join the single set, the men and women who stand at the ready-made counter in their work clothes, selecting dinners for one, but something about that depresses him. He wants the illusion, at least, that he is capable of cooking for himself. That he is a man who dons a striped apron, puts opera on the stereo, and sings along as he exuberantly adds red wine to the pasta sauce.

When he gets home, he sees that Amy’s car is parked in front of his house, and she is sitting in it. He stands in the driveway holding on to his bag of groceries, waiting for her to come over to him. And though he fears that she has come to collect a bracelet she left, one he found on the floor of the bedroom, he is also thinking about what he bought that he can whip up into a dinner for two. He tries to read the expression on her face, but can’t.

“Hi,” she says, when she reaches him.

“Hi.”

“Okay. I came to tell you something. I miss you. But I’m still mad at you. I think it was really wrong, what you did.”

“I think so, too. And I’m sorry.”

“It made me question your character.”

He nods. “I can understand that.” He wants to say, again, that it was never his intention to deceive her, that he just got in deeper and deeper, and then didn’t know the right way to tell her the truth. But he senses that the best tactic now is to keep his own talking to a minimum.

Which does not exactly work, because Amy turns around and heads back to her car.

“Amy! Could you … Can we talk some more?”

She opens her car door.

“Give me another chance!” he yells loudly, embarrassing himself. Anyone at home on his block is now privy to the vicissitudes of his romantic life. Perhaps anyone in his city.

From the front seat of her car, Amy pulls out a basket with a bouquet of flowers he recognizes from her garden, and a bottle of wine. She walks back up to him. “One more chance. But, John—please, don’t lie to me again. The truth is always better.”

Her cheeks are flushed, her lipstick fresh. She’s wearing a necklace with a pearl that lies in the valley between her collarbones, a flowered dress with a thin black belt, open-toed heels. She is such a lovely woman.

“I know,” he says. “I won’t lie to you again, I promise.”

“I mean about
anything
,” Amy says.

“What if you get your hair cut and you’re really happy about it but I don’t like it?”

“You must man up and tell me. Also you must tell me if something makes me look fat. If I am careless with someone’s feelings. And especially if you’re angry about something—you must tell me about it before you get
too
angry. Look, let’s keep it simple: If I ask a question, you answer it truthfully, no matter what it is. And I’ll do the same. Okay?”

He thinks about this. He wonders if declarations of truth aren’t more important than declarations of love. He thinks they might be. He takes in a breath and says, “Deal.”

She laughs. “You know why I believe you?”

“Why?”

“Because you thought about it for
so long
before you answered.”

“Well, it’s an important question. Listen, I just went to the grocery store. As you can see. You want to have some dinner with me? I can make vegetables and vegetables. And fruit.”

“Yes. And I want to tell you that the man you saw me with in the restaurant is my brother. I just took him to the airport, and on the way there, I told him about you. His advice was that I beat it over here as quickly as I could.”

“Good advice.”

In the kitchen, John puts down the bags and turns to face her, then lifts her hand to kiss it.

“You are such a sweet man,” she says.

“I only did that so you would peel the carrots.”

She comes closer and lightly kisses his mouth. “I’d love to peel the carrots. And I’d love to have dinner with you, but I have to tell you, I’m not starving. I could wait a while. If you wanted to … you know, wait a while.”

“I’m so glad I got nonperishables,” he says, taking her hand and leading her upstairs.

It is nine-thirty by the time they come back down, and they are both ravenous. They forgo making dinner and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, then a hastily concocted fruit salad. And then Amy goes to get her purse and pulls a piece of paper from it. “Are you ready?”

“For what?” He tightens the tie of his bathrobe, leans forward to see what’s on the paper. He feels an odd rush of trepidation, as
though everything that just took place between them is bogus, and now she is going to present him with something suggesting she wants out of their relationship after all.

But when she lays the page down on the table, he sees that it’s a computer printout of the image of a puppy—the image is not clear, it but looks like a mixed breed, one ear standing straight up, the other down.

“I think I found something,” she says. “Do you want to go and look at him with me and see if you agree?”

“Sure.”

“I think we should agree. I mean, he’ll be my dog, but he’ll probably be around you a lot, too. Right?”

“I hope so.”

She studies the photo, then looks at him, and the overhead light catches her face in a way that makes her seem older than her years, but lovely. He thinks he knows how she will age, what she’ll look like in ten years, even twenty. More important, he thinks he knows what she’ll be like. After they made love, they spent a long time talking and he was again struck by her optimism, by her kindness. Before he met Amy, he had resigned himself to thinking he’d probably be alone in old age, had told himself that he’d be better off that way, but now some light has slipped under that door.

Amy slept briefly, and he lay beside her, deeply comforted by her presence: the warmth of her body, her measured breathing, the scent of the perfume she always wears, the notes of which he cannot identify but somehow reads as
green
. He lay in the dimness of evening, listening to cars going by, to the sounds of children playing, to the repetitive calls of the robins that have nested in the tree between his and the neighbor’s house. He thought of Amy sitting in her own bedroom during her husband’s last days, how her heart broke a million times over, watching him leave that
way. And he thought of the decision she’d made that would haunt her for the rest of her life. So much can be done to a life with one impulsive decision.

“Leave, then!” he’d told Irene. “I want you to. I’ve wanted you to for years!” And Irene, pulling a suitcase out of the closet, weeping, saying she hated him and couldn’t wait to be gone. And then she really was gone, she and Sadie both.

After they drove away, eight-year-old Sadie looking out the window at him standing helplessly on the front porch in his stocking feet, his fists clenched, he’d gone upstairs and knelt before the toilet, because he thought he had to throw up. But nothing happened; he’d hung his head over the bowl, his mouth open, aware of the circumscribed coolness of the tank water, the little ripples caused by his exhalations, and nothing had happened. After that, he’d sat bewildered on the bathroom floor, staring straight ahead, unblinking. Then he’d called Stuart.

John closed his eyes against the memory, then reached over to gently touch Amy’s hair, and she opened her eyes and smiled at him. And he smiled back, immensely relieved to be back in the present.

“So you’ll go with me, tomorrow, maybe around ten?” Amy says, of the dog whose photo she just showed him.

“Yes,” John says. “Will you stay with me tonight?”

“Yes.” She nods, tucks a stray hair behind her ear, and nods again.

He thinks,
I knew she’d do that, nod twice
. It sits solid in him, how well he knows her already.

15

W
earing mismatched pajamas and her bathrobe, Irene sits before her computer. She stares at the screen, and tries to think of what she might say in yet another ad but can only think of how short-lasting was her gay disregard of her daughter. The truth is, she’s frankly worried about Sadie now. She may have resented having to call Irene, but she would have called. Wouldn’t she? Does Irene suddenly not know her own flesh and blood? Well, it’s five after eight, not that late. Too soon to get frantic. She’ll save being frantic for her late Sunday evening activity.