The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (35 page)

“Breathe,” commands Greta in a soft voice close to her ear, and she does.

“Why is there a
For Sale
sign in the front yard?” Soapie asks her one morning.

They have been over this about a dozen times. “Because we are selling this house, honey,” Rosie says gently. “You said we should sell the house, because you are going to live at the Harbor View. Remember the nice apartment there? It’s going to be available at the end of January.”

“The end of January? Why do I have to wait?”

Rosie looks at her. There is no telling when they start these conversations exactly which way they’re going to go. Sometimes Rosie finds herself talking to the Soapie who wants to move immediately, or sometimes it’s the Soapie who can’t remember she’s going at all. So far, at least, she hasn’t had the Soapie she’d dreaded the most: the one who says she’s not going after all. Sometimes there seem to be storm clouds behind her eyes, but she never argues or complains about it. It breaks Rosie’s heart, this bravery.

“We have to wait because that’s the date they’re going to have your apartment ready,” she says.

“And you’re really going to California?” Soapie asks, as though this is just a normal conversation they might have once had on the pros and cons of moving. “Where is Tony going?”

“He’s getting his own place.”

“And George?”

“George will be coming to see you every day.”

“Will he spend the night?”

“I expect he will. If you want him to.”

“What I want is for us to go to Paris,” says Soapie, swiveling her head over to Rosie and fixing her with a filmy-eyed stare. “That is the only thing I believe I ever asked you for.”

“It’s true, you did ask for that,” says Rosie.

“It was too much to ask,” says Soapie, and she looks away.
Her face these days has changed. It’s lost a lot of the tension that used to hold her muscles in place and sags now, as if everything on her is simply tired of holding itself together. Rosie hopes that the promises she’s made to her can really come true—that she’ll truly be able to live independently at Harbor View, that George will be able to visit, that there will be vodka and dancing—and that she won’t have to go so quickly into the more restricted nursing home unit. Sometimes, though, it seems as if door after door is quietly closing in the room of Soapie’s mind, never to be opened again.

Oh, it is all so hard.

The baby rolls around inside her now, flipping over like an acrobat. Tony calls her a prizefighter baby. Sometimes she has hiccups, which is so interesting—as though after Rosie’s gone to sleep, the baby has gone clubbing, and now the two of them together are experiencing the hiccupping. Also, there are times now when Rosie’s belly gets tight like a basketball and hardens there, gripping hold of the baby. Braxton-Hicks contractions, says Starla Jones. Practice for labor.

It’s good, that practice, it shows that even her old and inexperienced body seems to have the idea of what it needs to do: fire up those uterine muscles and get them ready to push the baby out. Start the milk-production mechanism. Cue the maternal hormones that never dreamed they’d be called into service. But here they are, showing up for active duty, standing in formation, saluting her.

She and Tony go get a Christmas tree together. He is supposed to be simply there to lug it to the car, but then it turns
out he has a million thoughts about trees. He likes the big, showy ones and the kind that smell good, and the kind with needles that don’t hurt. She has allotted approximately fifteen minutes for picking out this tree, which she explains to him. She is in the mood to look at exactly one tree and then buy it on the spot.

“And here’s why this doesn’t matter. We’re all about to move out,” she says to him, standing in the drizzly parking lot of Home Depot, where the plastic-covered Fraser fir trees behind the chain-link fence remind her of recreation time in the prison yard. “It’s crazy even to
get
a tree. I’m supposed to be spending all my time throwing things
out—
”

“If we don’t get a tree, we might as well just throw in the towel on life,” he says. “Come on. Where’s your Christmas spirit?”

“Tony,” she says, “look at us. We’re all pathetic. It’s the end. The credits are running.”

“That’s when Christmas spirit comes in the handiest,” he says. “Let’s get this eight-foot one. It’s Soapie’s last tree. Think of that.”

“Soapie,” she says, “never did even care for trees. She has no Christmas spirit to her, that woman. She wrote Dustcloth Diva columns on how to
avoid
the mess of Christmas. If you could keep a tree out of your house, so much the better.”

“I like this huge one,” he says, as if he hadn’t even heard her.

“But it costs so much. Look at it.”

But he just laughs. “This is the biggest one here. We’re getting it even if we have to go get a bank loan.”

“We don’t have enough ornaments.”

“We’ll cover it with lights. That’s prettier anyway.”

“White ones? I only like the white ones.”

“Nope. Colored ones. And icicles.”

“But those are so gaudy and they make such a mess. Tony, please. I have so much to do. And now I’ll have to both put up a tree and take it down.”

“Oh, Rosie! It’s Christmas. By the way, I don’t know if you know, but you cannot have any eggnog this year. Raw eggs are not good for you.”

“I hate eggnog.”

“Well, then, you’ve got that going for you.” He goes and tells one of the workers that this is the tree for them, and the two guys drag it over to a machine that puts even more net on it. She stands on one foot and then the other. It’s cold, and she left her gloves in the car, so she tucks her hands inside the sleeves of her coat. Jonathan has never once argued about Christmas trees with her. She wonders if he even bothered to pack up their ornaments, or if he just threw them away.

When their tree is finally loaded on top of the car, Tony drives to the drugstore and turns the car off. “I’m going in for lights and icicles, and while I’m gone, you should do ten minutes of stage one breathing, and then if I’m still not back, go into the hee-hee-hoo breaths. Okay?”

She laughs. “I can’t believe you remember all this just from Milo’s birth.”

“Rosie,” he says seriously, “Milo’s birth was a turning point in my life. Of course I remember everything about it.”

He gets out and then comes to her side and raps on the window. “And don’t forget the cleansing breaths,” he says when she opens it. “You always forget those when we practice, and I don’t know what’s going to become of you if you try to go into labor without the cleansing—”

“O-
kay!
” she says. “Go get your lights. I’ve gotta pee.”

He comes back with ten boxes of colored lights—ten!—and a bag full of silver icicles, a Christmas candle, and a
can of spray that says it smells like fir trees, since he doesn’t think this tree has quite enough of a fragrance for him.

They do hee-hee-hoo breathing all the way home, even when she starts laughing so hard that she loses all semblance of bladder control.

He just looks at her and laughs. “God, you’re a hot mess,” he says. “Never mind. All those muscles are relaxing. You’re getting ready for the baby.”

“No one ever told me about the humiliation factor,” she says.

“Yeah, well, you’ll be fine,” he says. “Everybody survives. Most people.”

He turns up the radio—“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is playing, which she tells him has got to be the most melancholy Christmas song around, and shouldn’t have even qualified for being a holiday song. When it gets around to that part about being together again if the fates allow, he joins in singing.

“From now on, we’ll have to muddle through somehow,” he sings, extra loud, with feeling.

“What kind of a Christmas carol talks about muddling through somehow?” she says. “What about decking the halls and all the joy we’re supposed to feel?”

“Nah, this is about the real Christmas,” he says. “We have to muddle through to
make
the joy ourselves. That’s why we got the biggest possible tree.” He looks at her. “How is it you don’t know this?”

Her phone rings, and she reaches over and turns down the radio and takes the call. It’s Greta, all harried, saying she can’t make the Lamaze class tonight—a teacher conference has been changed and changed again, and now this is the very last time she can schedule it.

“Joe says he’s going to go with you,” says Greta.

“Joe?” says Rosie, and Tony mouths to her, “I’ll go.” She tells Greta Tony’s going.

“Tony?”
Greta says his name as though Rosie has just said that she’ll pick up a hitchhiker to take along to Lamaze.

She laughs. “Yes, he has a child, remember?”

“Oh, yes. I remember. Well,” says Greta, “I suppose it makes sense. Give my regards to Starla, will you? Do you think I should call her and let her know that I can’t come?”

“I think Starla can probably cope with running the class without you, just this once,” she says, perhaps a little more sarcastically than she means to, and when she hangs up, she says to Tony, “God! That woman is driving me absolutely crazy! She and Joe are worried about …”

“Me and you?” he says.

“Well,” she says. “Actually, yes.”

By now they’ve arrived at the house. He cuts the engine and turns to look at her. “Okay, I’ve been dreading saying this to you all day long, but I gotta say it before we go and do more stuff together.”

“What?” she says.

He drums his hands on the steering wheel. “I got my own place, and I’m moving out this weekend.”

“What?” she says. “But I need you!” She can feel her breath high in her chest, fluttering like a bunch of insects have taken over.

“No, you don’t. Jonathan’s coming for Christmas, and he doesn’t want me around, I’m sure. Also I can’t—I really can’t keep doing this. For me and you.”

“You just talked me into a gigantic tree,” she says. “And what about helping me with Lamaze? Jonathan doesn’t know anything about Lamaze.”

“I’ll still do Lamaze with you when Greta can’t. And I’ll help you with the practices, because you gotta practice. It
doesn’t come completely natural, even though they call it natural childbirth.”

“No, okay, fine,” she says, and looks away because tears are dangerously close to the surface.

“Aww, don’t be that way,” he says. “This is just the hard part, now.”

She wipes at her eyes. “What about Soapie? What’s going to happen? How are George and I going to pick her up off the floor?”

“She doesn’t fall anymore since she got the walker,” he says. “She doesn’t need me, and you and Jonathan certainly don’t need me around.” He touches her arm. “This is for the best, believe me.”

She would like to point out that Jonathan isn’t coming for another ten days, but she can’t bring herself to beg him to stay. Heartsick and numb, she goes in the house and heads upstairs. She can hear him bringing in the tree and setting it in the stand she set out. He’s talking to Soapie and George, and maybe he’s even got them helping him put the icicles and the ornaments on. The stereo is playing Christmas carols, but she doesn’t come back down until it’s time to leave for Lamaze, not even when she can tell he’s at the bottom of the stairs, bellowing out “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” with all his might.

Greta had said once that Christmas is like a giant art project competition that everyone is working on, and that the whole reason it gets stressful is that everybody is imagining that the projects happening at other people’s houses are even more elaborate, more perfect, and far more harmonious than those at one’s own house.

And, looking at it that way, Rosie knows she had been doomed from the start. She doesn’t know how to put on a Christmas any more than she knew how to put on a Thanksgiving. She and Jonathan were only good for low-key holidays—a tabletop tree and an optional wreath, maybe one string of white lights strung along the window panes—and now Tony has dragged this giant
monstrosity
into their lives and decorated it with gaudy colored lights, strung pieces-of-aluminum-foil icicles across its branches, recorded a bunch of Christmas music CDs, and then moved away.

Rosie thinks she never knew such an angry, unreliable person. What kind of man saddles you with a huge tree when you’d told him you wanted a tiny one, and then leaves?

She also feels like she may have a limb missing.

“I know why he had to go,” says George, “but I wish he’d waited until after Christmas. This is feeling just the slightest bit gloomy.”

Tony, in fact, has gotten a job bringing Christmas to others. He told Rosie he’s taken a job in a nursery, helping people decorate their houses. The service is for people who
are too busy to put up their own trees and holly wreaths. But she can’t help but picture innocent people coming home to find every inch of their homes strewn with tinsel and colored lights, all blinking and singing Christmas carols. They are likely going to get more Christmas than they bargained for when they bring in Tony Cavaletti.

She looks at their monstrosity of a tree, draped in silver tinsel and colored lights. True to the song, he’s put a star on the highest bough. It makes her want to cry.