The Stuff That Never Happened (11 page)

I wish I knew how much blood she really lost, and how exactly she’s supposed to make more to replace it. And, even more important, if anyone is really doing anything to make sure that baby stays in its place. All those brave things I said to her: does she suspect that I don’t know what I’m talking about? The doctor had sounded so confident—but of course, it isn’t
her
daughter who might yet lose her baby.

Oh, this is not a good path to be going down, but I have no way of stopping myself once I’m on it. I feel like getting out of bed and going into the hallway and calling up Grant. This is just the kind of situation he’s so good at identifying as nonsense. But I can’t call Grant now. I’m mad at him, and besides that, I realize with a pang, there’s nothing he could say that would make me feel better.

So it seems like I spend the whole night alternately half dozing and staring at Sophie, and I get startled and anxious whenever she turns over in bed. I’m almost relieved when the first gray light comes around the shades and it means I can unkink myself and get up and start the day. But naturally as soon as I realize I could get up, I fall into a deep, overheated sleep where there are bad dreams waiting for me. First I’ve run away from home, and there is blood and a car and a baby crying somewhere in the distance and a whole bunch of ominous things that I can’t remember, bells ringing and alarms going off and a woman shouting. And when my eyes fly open, it’s eight thirty and Sophie is the woman who’s shouting. She’s talking on her cell phone, pacing back and forth, and she’s furious.

“No
. It’s not like that at all! … No, I have to stay
in the bed the whole time
. Yeah, like until May.… Yeah,
you
think it’s easy. You just try it.” She looks up at the ceiling and blinks rapidly and then she slumps down onto the floor and sits there leaning against the doorjamb, not facing me. When she speaks again, her voice is no longer angry, but it’s sullen. “Yeah, it’s great she’s here.
Somebody
needed to come take care of me, that’s for sure.… So how much longer do you think? … Good God, Whit. Not even if it’s an emergency? Well, yeah, she’s staying as long as she needs to. She’s my mom! … Okay. No, I know. I know. I will. All right. Yeah, you, too. Bye.”

She slams the phone shut, bursts into sobs, and comes over and throws herself on the bed. “I hate him! I hate him! I hate him!”

I scoot over and hand her a tissue, and she blows her nose and puts her head in her hands, still sniffling.

“Poor Sophie. It’s very hard,” I say.

“He’s a fucking idiot. Dad called it right. Whit cares more about his stupid documentary and those stupid orphans than he cares about me and his own baby. Do you know what he said to me just now? Can you fucking believe this? He said I should keep my chin up. My chin up! Is that something that a sane man would say to his wife who is
bleeding
and might lose their baby? ‘Keep your chin up’?”

“I know, I know. But, Sophie, so often men don’t know what to say. Women have been complaining about this for years. It may now be a national epidemic.”

“Well,
that’s
the understatement of the year! He
never
knows what to say! He’s a fucking spoiled rich guy who’s always gotten what he wants, and he’s never had to care about anybody else before! He’s emotionally stunted, is what he is! And oh, lucky me! I married him!”

“Sophie, honey, you—”

“Look,” she says, and turns on me then. “You are married to a saint, to somebody who knows what it means to love somebody. So nothing you can say right now is going to help me because you don’t know what it’s like to have to talk a man into caring about you. Daddy never would have left you when you were pregnant! He
never
would, and you know it.”

“Sophie—”

“He stuck right there by you the whole time you were pregnant, didn’t he? I bet when you had morning sickness, he would even hold your hair back for you when you barfed. You know what he told me? He said that when you were pregnant with me, you craved Hershey bars with almonds, and that he’d get up and go out every night and get you some because no matter how many he bought the night before, you’d find them and eat them all and then want more. And he didn’t even mind doing it. He was laughing when he told me about it, like it was just the cutest thing about you.
He
wouldn’t have taken any amount of money to go away and leave you then! He just wouldn’t have.”

He did do that, bought me Hershey bars with almonds and sat with me when I was sick. But he wouldn’t do that now. The years Sophie remembers are from when he was all about the family, when we were the highest priority. It seems like a fairy tale now. I look over at her, see how angry and puffed up her face is. Maybe I should tell her that now I couldn’t get her father’s attention if I dyed my hair purple and streaked through the house naked, and that all he seems to want from me lately is precious silence so he can do his work. She wouldn’t believe how many nights I take food up to his study and then go back downstairs and eat alone. Or how it’s even worse when we sit in silence together at that big old dining room table.

“I will never, ever get over this,” she says to me. “What he’s doing to me.”

“Well,” I hear myself saying lightly, “you might be surprised at what you can forgive and get over. Marriage is a long road, and along the way there are lots of things—”

“No, Mom,
no
. You don’t have any right to compare anything that has happened in your marriage with
this
. You just don’t. So don’t even try. You managed to marry the best, most committed guy in the universe.” She starts to cry and laugh at the same time. “Dad is so committed, he’s even boring. Maybe the most committed, boring person on the earth. But somehow even though you were so young, you knew that was going to be a good combination. How did you
know
? Just tell me that.”

[eight]

1977

I
knew within four days of the wedding that I had made a terrible, awful, horrible mistake in marrying Grant.

It had seemed a good idea to have our trip across the country serve as our honeymoon. After all, he said, what could be more romantic than being alone together in the cab of a U-Haul truck, our wedding presents stacked in cardboard boxes behind us as we camped our way across America on our way to begin our new life? But here is what I learned the first week after the wedding: I’d married a control freak. A nose-drops-dependent, sniffling, geeky,
miserly
control freak.

First of all, there was the matter of the rental truck.
He
had to be the driver at all times; whenever I was at the wheel, he hissed and sucked in his breath. All these histrionics, despite the fact that I was an exemplary driver. And then the entertainment factor: he only listened to talk radio. All talk, all the time. Country music, the staple of the stations dotting the huge middle of the United States, made him ill. He couldn’t tolerate any static whatsoever from the radio; he got headaches. And when we’d stop for breakfast or lunch, he didn’t—or wouldn’t—ever engage waitresses in conversation, even those super-friendly midwestern ones who called him “hon” and tried to flatter him into chatting. He would just sit there blinking uncomfortably, looking pained as I talked to people, trying to make it seem like we were just any ordinary, happily married pair of newlyweds trekking our way to New York City.

And then there were the accommodations. We’d decided to camp rather than waste our wedding money on hotels. We’d need all the money we could save once we got to New York before I found work. I was fine with this, picturing us pitching our tent by lakes and in forests, staring into the campfire at night before falling asleep in each other’s arms. But apparently, Grant had some kind of safety fetish and could only consider staying at AAA-approved, concrete campgrounds—the non-woodsy kind with chain-link fences, on-site managers, and rec rooms (although naturally he wouldn’t set foot in an actual rec room, not wanting to talk to or even see other people on this trip). Campfires were out. So was sleeping in the nude. And he was far more afraid of mosquitoes and gnats than he was of killing us with lethal doses of bug spray while we slept in our tent. I lay awake each night next to him, my skin slick with Deep Woods Off—necessary, he said, to discourage the bugs from biting
him
, even if I was willing to offer my own skin for their snack time.

Oh, I could go on and on. And in my own head, I
did
go on and on, compiling a long list of our differences. Each day—as we covered the required three hundred miles so that we could get the U-Haul truck to New York in the required ten days—looking out at the flat, corn-riddled landscape, and listening to the soporific droning voice of talk radio, I sat silently in the passenger seat, clenching and unclenching my fists and plotting divorce.

I wondered how it would happen. Would I simply get out at the next town while he was using the bathroom in some fast-food place (he wouldn’t go to gas station restrooms, of course) and slip away across the highway, leap over the concrete barriers, and hitch my way back to LA? Perhaps I’d catch a ride with somebody driving a sports car, somebody who’d be thrilled to spend money on motels instead of saving every last goddamn penny by making us camp. Or maybe some kindly older couple would swerve over to the side and stop for me, and I’d go home with them and it would turn out they had a fascinating life story to tell me that would change everything.
I can see in your eyes that you’ve married the wrong man
, the woman would tell me.
Why, when
I met Bert here, he was so good at talking to me that I knew my whole life was going to be one amazing conversation after another. I didn’t care that we were poor. And you know why? We could really, really talk to each other
.

As soon as I thought that, I opened my eyes and looked over at Grant. He was hunched over the steering wheel, frowning as he drove, and humming some tuneless thing, the same four notes over and over again under his breath. Here it was, the height of the summer, and we were driving through Kansas, through heat and humidity, yet he was wearing black pants and white crew socks, and the pants were too short for him, so his skinny little ankles in their pathetic little ribbed socks stuck out. He scratched his nose and ran his hands through his hair and then started humming again. He’d forgotten to shave on one side, and he was squinting hard over the top of his sunglasses. I had always thought that the whole Grant shtick was just so adorable, the way he couldn’t be bothered to care about so many things because he was in his own little world, but now I felt nothing but despair.

“What are you thinking about?” I said.

“What?”

“What are you
thinking
about?”

“Oh.” He shrugged and smiled, a little sheepishly. “I don’t know. I guess I’m thinking about labor unions.”

“Labor unions. You’re really thinking about labor unions.”

“Yeah.”

“But what about them? Are you thinking about the people who belong to them, or their history? What is there to think about? Are you … counting them?”

He laughed. “Well. No. I’m thinking how great it is that they saved this country.”

I folded a map that was crumpled up on the floor at my feet. “Do you ever think about us? About our marriage? Or about what it’s going to be like when we get where we’re going?” I said slowly. “You know, our
marriage.”

“No,” he said. “I figure that part will just take care of itself.”

“No, no. You’ve got it backwards. It’s
labor unions
that will take care of themselves. Us, you have to actually think about.” I looked out the window and felt my eyes stinging. What, what had I done?

Grant reached over and put his husbandly I-have-a-right-to-be-here hand on my knee. “Do you know where you want to stay tonight? Did you look at the Triple-A book?”

“No,” I said, looking out the window.

“Well, it’s four thirty. We should look soon.”

“I don’t want to look.”

“You don’t want to—Wait. Are you … crying?”

“No. Yes.”

“Holy shit. You
are
crying! What’s the matter? Wait. Are you unhappy?” We were nearing an exit just then, and to my surprise, he pulled off and stopped the truck. There was wheat, wheat everywhere. Maybe even some corn, who knew? Clouds of dust came up around the windows, and we sat there, both of us looking through the windshield. The engine ticked slowly in the sunlight.

“Are you unhappy?” he said again.

I started to cry harder.
“Yes
, I’m unhappy. I’m miserable.”

He pursed his lips and cleared his throat and started tapping on the steering wheel, playing imaginary drums.

Finally he said, “I guess this isn’t something to do with your not wanting to look in the Triple-A book, is it?”

I stared at him.

“No,” he said. “Is it because I said I was thinking about labor unions instead of marriage? Because if that’s all it is, I just don’t know yet how to
think
about marriage. I think I’ll learn, if—”

“It’s
everything,”
I said. “We didn’t get a honeymoon, and we have to stay in the most ridiculous, sanitized,
stupid
campgrounds every single night—not even anywhere beautiful, not even places with lakes and flowers! And I’m sick of talk radio. I
hate
talk radio! And I don’t like it that you won’t ever let me drive, and I hate our tent!” I didn’t know until that moment that I had any particularly negative feelings toward the tent, but I was throwing in everything I could think of. I even dragged up the fact that my thighs were so sweaty they were sticking to the plastic seat—he jumped in to say that’s why he wore long pants—and I blew up and said we should just turn on the air conditioner, and he said that made the gas mileage too hideous to be believed, and I burst into fresh tears and said, “This is supposed to be our honeymoon! Who has a summer honeymoon in the middle of the country without goddamn air-conditioning?”

He was quiet for a long time, and then he said, “Okay. I know what we have to do. This is one of those times when you have to regroup, go back to square one. Call in the reinforcements. We’re going to a motel. And then we’ll go out to dinner, to a great restaurant—”

“Somewhere with tablecloths.”

“Abso
lute
ly there will be tablecloths,” he said. “And flowers, fresh ones—”

“And no red plastic ketchup bottles on the table.”

“None! No ketchup even in the restaurant at all—that’s how fancy. And you can order anything you want. We won’t even think about money tonight. Okay? Tonight is all about
us
.”

I put my head down and cried harder. I hadn’t expected such kindness and understanding.

“And no more talk radio,” he said. “Music, even if it’s filled with static.
Country music
, even!”

That night, after a dinner of lasagna in an Italian bistro in the middle of a town we called Cow Fart, Kansas, we stayed in an air-conditioned motel, in a real bed with clean sheets. We took a shower together in the white-tiled bathroom and soaped each other up. He shampooed my hair and washed my ears with the tips of his fingers. I told him I loved him, and later, in the middle of the room, stark naked, he actually clicked his heels in the air, like a cartoon character expressing joy. We turned on the radio and learned that Elvis had died that day, and in honor of him, we turned down the lights and danced in the hotel room to the Elvis songs they were playing on the radio. I danced with my feet on top of Grant’s.

“You see?” he whispered to me. “We can be happy. We’ll be okay.”

AND THEN—well, then my brother got shot in the head.

He didn’t die. The bullet went through his skull, grazing a part of his brain, and then went out through the back of his head, knocking him unconscious. Some schoolchildren found him lying in a puddle of blood on the sidewalk.

I found out the day after it happened, when I called my mother from a pay phone outside the diner where we’d eaten breakfast. I called her just to say hello, to check in. It was the first time I could trust myself to call home without crying or begging her to send a posse out across the country after me. There, standing in the dusty phone booth in the parking lot, with little pebbles gathering underneath my toes in my pink striped flip-flops and gnats swarming around my newly shampooed hair, I learned that my brother was in intensive care.

“He’s alive—for now,” my mother said in a voice that sounded like it was packed in cotton batting. “They don’t know much else.”

I twisted the cord of the pay phone around and around my index finger until it cut off the circulation. The little white numbers on the phone were raised, like bumps. I’d had sun poisoning once; my fingers thought these bumps were like the itchy rash I’d gotten and had scratched, even though I’d been told over and over not to touch it. Bumps and bumps. There wasn’t any air in the phone booth, not any that was suitable for breathing, so I kicked the door open and hurt my toe. Grant was standing far away with his hands in his pockets. He was staring across the street at a strip mall and grinding his toe in the dirt. For him, it was still just a regular day. He’d made his wife happy, and now he wanted to get back on the road.

David was in the intensive care unit, with round-the-clock care, my mother said again. It was as if she was simply programmed to go through a list of things to tell people who called, and sometimes there was a glitch and she repeated herself. She talked in a high, thin, urgent voice, like a little girl’s, shaky and uncertain. She told me several things, and then repeated them: The bullet had missed all the really important, kill-you-outright places. He was on sedatives and pain medication now, so he just slept all the time and couldn’t talk, but he’d been conscious right after it happened. He’d joked with the ambulance driver, someone said, so there was that. His speech was still intact. But the joke had been about how the world had gone black and he was going to have to learn to see with his ears.

“But who would shoot
David?”
I said.

It was just one of those senseless things, she told me. A stranger did it. Just came up to him when he was in his car, stopped at a red light in South LA, and shot him in the face point-blank. Crime wave, she said. Terrible things happened that we didn’t even know about.

“South LA?” I cried. “Oh my God. He shouldn’t have been there.”

“You know David. He has friends from everywhere,” she said.

But my heart sank. I knew that South LA meant it had been a drug deal. My brother had been buying drugs in South LA so that he could sell them to his friends in the Valley. He was such an idiot. Such a stupid idiot. But I had sat out there by the pool and smoked weed with him, so in a way I was a collaborator. And if you
really
want to know the truth, it had been me who had introduced him to marijuana in the first place, years before. I’d brought some home and for fun had put it in the spaghetti sauce, as though it was just any spice. Like oregano, I thought. I’d see what my family acted like when they were high. Wouldn’t
that
be fun, seeing my father get stoned unknowingly? Then, as it happened, my parents had gone out that night, and David, who was fourteen, had eaten plates and plates of the spaghetti and then had been so overwhelmed with giggles he’d fallen on the floor in a heap. We’d played Twister, laughing so hard we could barely breathe and falling all over ourselves. I’d told him, before he went to bed that night, “This is weed you’re experiencing—you’re high,” and watched as his eyes widened. A month later, he’d bought his own ounce of the stuff, and two months after that, he had a thriving dope business.