The Stuff That Never Happened (31 page)

I can hear little noises coming from deep in my throat. No, I am thinking.
Nooooo
.

But everything seems to go in slow motion, like the seconds before the car crashes, the windshield cracks, the high chair with the baby in it drops to the floor, the 95 mph baseball meets skull. I have opened my mouth to say something,
anything
, but she’s already talking.

“Jeremiah,” she is saying. “His name is Jeremiah. She’s seen him a few times.”

Right?

Jeremiah? Your old friend?

Isn’t that right, Mom?

[eighteen]

1981

I
am so sorry. I don’t really have the heart to go back to the past right now, given what has happened. What is there to be said, anyway, about our old life? We went to New Hampshire. We had a couple of kids. The years passed. I got old. I loved my husband but sometimes I dreamed about my former lover. Is that enough?

Okay, I will try.

AFTER NEW YORK, life in New Hampshire was a complete shock to my system. For a while we lived in the farmhouse alongside Grant’s very polite but practically silent parents. I didn’t think I would ever be able to adjust to a small town, to the idea of a milkman who didn’t knock but simply came inside and put bottles of milk directly into the refrigerator—and who, if he noticed you were out of eggs, might just leave a dozen there as well without even asking you. And how neighbors here assumed you would always be in the mood for a visit. One day Penelope Granger, who lived on the farm next to ours, stunned me by explaining that everybody in town had the same recipe for pie crust, and nobody could remember where they’d gotten it.

I was asked to call Grant’s parents Father and Mother McKay. I tried to be on better behavior than I had ever been on in my whole life. I shared cooking responsibilities with his mom, who had a lifelong belief that men deserved three square meals a day just by virtue of being men, and that they shouldn’t be expected to help out at all. Worse, she knew I had broken her son’s heart before, so she was wary around me. She was reserved, and I was “from away.”

Then one night, I woke in the middle of the night to a shrieking sound, and found her outside trying to chase a fox that had gotten into the chicken coop. Together, in the moonlight in our nightgowns, we scared away the fox and then searched in the shadows for the frightened chicken, which was hiding under the boards of the shed, and brought it back to safety. The next day she and I were chopping onions together for dinner and she said, “Dear, do you think you could ever just call me Mother?”

When winter came, they left for a condo in Florida, and it felt very much as though the mantle of history had passed down to our generation and that the world was a weaker place for it.

But then Sophie was born, and life filled up with all that lovely, confusing chaos—crib and stroller and baby powder, breast-feeding and pacifiers and diapers, sleep deprivation and late-night drives in the car to get her to stop crying. She had colic and trouble getting teeth, and for months I wore her on the front of me in a corduroy pack. Women—all ages of them, young and old, from the college and from the farms and from the shops in town—came by to bring dinners and to sweep the floors, to point out that peppermint drops could ease colic and that a baby rocked to sleep near the clothes dryer would sleep longer and more deeply.

We made friends with other couples, and for a while we were all just entranced with ourselves for this incredible discovery we’d all made: it was possible to create new humans! Along came playdates and couples nights, when we got together at friends’ houses and cooked dinners together. Theme nights: taco night, beef Wellington night, Indian curry night. There were backyard barbecues in the summer. Birthday parties. Trips to the lake. Faculty parties. Apple-picking. Caroling in winter. Ice-fishing.

I fell in love with my husband. I’d loved him up until then, sure, but now it was in a whole new way, as though a new room had opened up in my brain—I was swamped with love. It was rather like a second-stage rocket booster kicking in just when the first rocket had lost all its power. I was still overwhelmed most of the time, but suddenly alongside me was this sensitive, able, sexy guy I’d had the good sense to marry. He was in his element, was what it was, and he was happy. He made me laugh. Plus, he knew how to do so many things I’d never even thought about: he could ice-skate and fix the toilet when it ran and keep the pipes from freezing and bursting. He stoked the woodstove and taught me how to ski downhill. He shoveled snow, he complimented my cooking, he didn’t mind playing king to Sophie’s princess. He could play Candy Land all Saturday afternoon without once screaming, or cheating, and then kiss me ardently once we’d finally gotten Sophie to sleep.

Nicky was born in the flush of our love. We got a dog, a cocker spaniel, and later that year a picnic table and a swing set. We planted a vegetable garden and grew Swiss chard and tomatoes and marigolds, bachelor’s buttons, and roses. Over the years, we acquired goldfish, guinea pigs, a tabby cat, and for one memorable year, a pair of guinea hens. A litter of kittens was born in the laundry basket. The children needed tubes in their ears one winter after eight ear infections. The boiler gave out one Christmas Eve, and we had to keep the fireplace going for days until we could get a guy out from New London to replace it.

At the center of everything were the children with their plump little arms, their dirty faces, their need for us in the middle of the night. Life was tactile, messy, earthy, inseparable from love. The children said funny things, and we kept a book in which we wrote down their memorable quotes. Even their ear infections, the time we all had the flu at once, the nights they were afraid of the dark, the nights we were all tucked in while the storms raged outside and shook the foundation of the house—all of it was rich and throbbing with life. I slept spooned up against Grant, and so what if we ended up getting up most nights two or three times, tending to children or the dog or stoking the fire in the woodstove? And what if sometimes there were cold silences that fell between us? There were fights and arguments and tears, times when I sat in the mudroom with the phone blubbering to Magda that he was insensitive and could be harsh, that he didn’t listen. And then there was make-up sex, us falling on each other while cleaning up the kitchen, or else my awakening in the night to feel his questioning hand coming over to ask forgiveness and acceptance.

And there were all those nights I would look across the pillow at him and wonder who was this stranger that I shared so much with, how remarkable it was that we were together when we had such differences. Times when I was overwhelmed in the world and would run home to find him there, ready to listen and understand—the time my friend Jennie accused me of not working as hard as everyone else on the middle school auction committee. It sounds silly now. Of course it is. But it was real.

Then there were times I’d be washing dishes or throwing in a load of laundry and Jeremiah’s face would inexplicably show up, flickering there in the outskirts of my mind. But that wasn’t wrong, was it?

Or maybe it was just life.

Once my brother came to visit. It was a big deal, getting the place ready for someone who was paralyzed. I coached the children to be nice and welcoming to him. Grant built a ramp for his wheelchair so he could come in the back door. We were glad to have him there, but it was awful to see David so limited, so unhappy. You could see it in his eyes. He talked to the kids in almost a formal, stilted way, like he didn’t want to get to know them, and Nicky especially was scared of him.

And two months after he flew back home, he died of a drug overdose. Grant was resolute in claiming it was accidental, that it had to be, but I was sure it was suicide, and could not be comforted. I had seen the shadow fall across him.

That was the beginning of things starting to fall away. I should have seen it coming: first there was David, but then, one by one, our parents, the cocker spaniel, and the barn, which burned down in a fire. Our best friends moved away and didn’t write or call, another dear friend got sick with cancer and became famous, briefly, by writing about it, and then died … and finally the children moved out.

And now perhaps our marriage is another casualty.

I have lost so much, and I will lose this, too.

Oh, I am so tired. I want to lie down on Sophie’s couch and stare out the window at the sky, at the birds that occasionally fly past in groups—and what do they call that, a group of birds? I’ve lost that word, too. A school of birds? A gaggle? A flock. Yes, that’s it. A flock. A flock of birds.

I want to try not to think anymore. If only I could just not think for a little while, things would be so good.

[nineteen]

2005

A
fter Sophie said the sacred, unsayable word
Jeremiah
, after Grant’s eyes had gone opaque and after he had said in his cold, final voice, with all of us staring at him, “Well, that is
that
, then, isn’t it? That’s the end of anything else that needs to be said,” and had gone off to pack his stuff, Nicky comes and wraps his arms around me, his wild-man arms, and whispers, “Don’t let the turkeys get you down.”

“What?” I say.

He laughs. He’d heard that one of the presidents had written that note to his successor and left it in his desk in the White House—and he’d always wanted to say it, too. “It sounded good,” he says. “I don’t know what this is about, but one thing I do know is that you’ve got it going on where the wife stuff is concerned. Ten to one Dad’s being an asshole.”

“No,” I say and disentangle myself from him. “That’s not the way this is.”

I go into the living room and say to my husband’s back, “Grant, please. It’s not what you think.”

“And just how is that?” he says.

“Listen, I ran into him—Sophie and I ran into him one day while we were at a market buying stuff for dinner. We had just come from a doctor’s appointment, so we were in a different neighborhood, and there he was. Buying ice cream.”

He does not turn, just keeps folding things and putting them into his suitcase, his shoulders moving methodically, unemotionally, back and forth.

“Grant, I can’t stand it if you don’t listen to me about this.” I can’t see his face, so I go around to the other side of the couch. “The statute of limitations is up on this,” I tell him. “You have nothing to fear from him.”

He stops for a moment and looks right at me. His eyes are hard. “Well, now, Annabelle, that just isn’t precisely true, is it?”

“Come on, this is ridiculous! Okay, fair enough. I saw Jeremiah Saxon. Twenty-six years have passed, and big deal! I run into him in a market, against all odds. And then,
yes
, I go for coffee with him. I sit in Starbucks with the man and hear about his boring, trite, dull life.”

“And then apparently you went for
more
renditions of his boring, trite, dull life.”

“One more time, Grant. I went one more time, but that isn’t the point. That isn’t what matters here. The point is—
the point is
—that after all this freaking time, you should know what I’m like. You should be giving me the benefit of the doubt. Even if I had seen him
ten
more times, a hundred more times, even if I’d invited him to come to New Hampshire to visit us, you should know me by now.
That
is the point.”

He zips closed his suitcase and stands it upright. “Annabelle, there are so many things operating in my head right now that I cannot possibly sort them all out. But first and foremost is that you have lied to me before about this man, and you are not above lying again. Interesting that it was Sophie and not you who told me about your seeing Jeremiah—”

“And why do you think that was, Grant? Why in the world would I ever tell you something like that, knowing this was the kind of response it would get?”

“—and interesting that you didn’t see fit to mention it, not even when we were alone last night and you were exclaiming how much you
love
New York City and telling me how you basically
never
go anywhere except to go to the market or to sit in the park. You don’t bring up the one man,
the one man
, Annabelle, that we have an agreement about.”

“Did it ever occur to you that we shouldn’t have ever made such an agreement as that in the first place? That that so-called agreement is what is at the root of all our problems?”

“The root of all our problems,” he says quietly, “is that you are in love with someone outside our marriage. And you haven’t gotten over him.”

“That is not true, Grant.”

“Nicky!” he calls. “Get your stuff and take it to the car. Sophie, come give your old dad a kiss. We’re heading out.”

There’s a flurry of activity then, the kids showing up and doing what he says. We all go through the motions of good-bye, just as though everything might be normal. His perfunctory kiss glides right off my cheek. And then, like that, he is gone.

ONCE THEY have left, Sophie goes into her room and closes the door against me. I take the sheets off the sofa bed and fold everything up. I stare out the window at the street for a long time, and then do some therapeutic dish-washing. Later, I make spaghetti for dinner. My mother used to say that red food is good when you are desolate.

I miss my mother. I wonder what she would say to me now, what possible good spin she would put on this. I try to summon her and the way she would always say something comforting about whatever love trouble I’d gotten myself into, but now that she’s been dead for so long, she does not come.

When the fragrance of spaghetti sauce has filled up the house with comfort and warmth, I knock on Sophie’s door and ask her if she wants to eat by herself or if she’d like some company.

She takes a long time before she says, “I guess I don’t want to be by myself.”

I bring in our food on trays, and we sit on the bed and eat, watching a rerun of
Friends
.

“This laugh track is giving me a headache. I hate phony laughter,” she says and turns off the set, and then we push the food around on our plates in silence, not looking at each other.

“So you cheated on Dad with Jeremiah, is that it?” she finally says.

“It’s more complicated than that, Sophie.” I sigh. “This is stuff that happened between us a long time ago—long before you were even born.”

“You know what gets me the worst? All this time, all these conversations we’ve been having about marriage and about being faithful, and I kept asking you about what you would do if Dad ever cheated, and you were just so blasé. And then all along it was you!
You
were the one cheating. I can’t believe it. I mean, I can’t wrap my head around the fact that
my mother
was out with somebody else, and my
dad
was the one trying to—trying to—”

“Sophie—”

“How
could
you? That’s what I want to know. How could you do it?” She is crying now. “You have the sweetest, most faithful guy in the whole world. Remember when we were talking the other day and I said that about him? And you stood there
agreeing
with me and yet the whole time you
had
to be thinking that you were the one who had cheated! How does a person—”

“Sophie. Stop it. Listen to me.”

“What?” she says. “Say it. Give me your excuses.”

“Baby, there aren’t any excuses. Every marriage has its problems. Everybody goes through different things and we all make horrendous mistakes at times. We hurt each other, we do things we regret, and we come to our senses if we’re lucky—”

“Mom!
Did you see his face? He was
devastated
. You didn’t come to your senses, Mom! Dad thinks you’re still cheating on him! And I don’t blame him! You are, aren’t you? You went out with Jeremiah again and again! I don’t believe it. I can’t believe this.” She is rocking back and forth, her voice getting more and more shrill. “I can’t even trust you anymore! How can I believe anything you say?”

“Sophie, stop this,” I say. “You have to stop. If you want to have a sane, rational discussion about marriage and about my life, then I have to insist that you tone it down. I am not going to have you speak to me like this. We are talking about something that happened
twenty-six
years ago.”

She stops talking and puts her hands over her face, a pitiable, forlorn child who will not look at me.

I get up and go to the bathroom, splash water on my face, and stare at myself in the mirror. When I go back into her bedroom, I sit down softly on her bed and reach over and touch her foot.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She nods and blows her nose.

“First, let me just tell you that this happened long before I ever really felt
married
, if that makes any sense to you. And it was wrong—I’m not denying that it was wrong—but it just happened. I fell in love with two men. That’s what happened. I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t trying to hurt your father. But, you know, Sophie, what I have learned is that sometimes love happens to you when you
don’t
expect it. Love just comes for you. It was like—it was like some primitive force …”

She looks at me, and then her face crumples. “This can’t be happening! I don’t want to hear about this
primitive force
of yours. I can’t listen to this!”

I stand up. “It’s okay. You don’t have to hear about it.” I start putting on my shoes.

She’s still crying. “You and Daddy had the per—the perfect marriage, and he’s been wonderful to you, and now
nothing
is what it seems like, and how am I supposed to feel? You want me to feel sorry for you because you fell in love with two men? Look at what you’ve done to all of us!”

I turn and leave the room, and then, because that’s not far enough away from her, I leave the apartment and go down the elevator and out onto the dark street.

ONCE I get outside, I can’t think of anything else to do, so I call Magda on my cell phone. My hands are shaking. It’s chillier outside than I had reckoned, and I forgot to put on my jacket. I have so much to tell her. The last time I talked to her I told her about what had seemed like the astonishing coincidence of running into Jeremiah. During that call, I was still giddily deciding whether to go for coffee with him or not.

She’d been very funny about the whole thing. “I think before I can hear any more about Jeremiah, I need you to tell me that you’re
not
in some train station reenacting your runaway plan with him,” she’d said. “Because I would need to lose a few pounds and grow my hair longer before I could even consider coming to collect Grant. He wouldn’t even
look
at me the way I look today.”

It’s always been our joke—ever since she masterminded my getting back with him—that if I blew it again, she would no longer help me but would take him for herself. Even at the most difficult times of my marriage—times that I now know were just mud puddles compared to the ocean of trouble I find myself in—even when I was complaining loud and long about some slight of his, coming home too late, being thoughtless about Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day, she was resolutely in his corner.

So I walk blocks and blocks and tell her about my two visits with Jeremiah, which would have been worth a whole phone call just on their own but I didn’t have time—and then I have to tell her that Grant found out and is furious with me, and that Sophie is now up in her bed with her fingers in her ears saying, “LALALALA” when I try to talk.

There’s just the long-distance cell phone hum when I get finished.

“Hello?” I say. “Did we get disconnected? Can you hear me now?”

“I’m actually speechless, Annabelle,” Magda says. “I don’t know what the hell you should do. Walking the streets sounds like the sanest idea of all.” And she laughs. “Jesus. You know what I actually think? I think this is one of the best reasons I can think of never to have children—so they don’t find out that you’re just a regular human being and then hate you for it.”

“Now that you mention it, that is a good reason,” I say. “I remember hating my mother for everything she did. I hated her finding feminism and leaving my father, then being with that jerk she was with, and
then
going
back
to my father. I was the most unforgiving about that. I saw that as her forsaking her feminist ideals, when I’d hated that she ever had any in the first place.”

“Yeah. God. Mothers and daughters,” Magda says. “Hard ride. But, geez, it seems particularly unfair that you’re being hated for something you did before Sophie was even born. Doesn’t the statute of limitations ever expire on something like this?”

“Well, that’s what I want to know,” I say.

“And I was just sitting here feeling sorry for myself because I forgot to get married and have kids.”

“Yeah, well, if you ask me, you lived your life perfectly.”

“Who knew?”

“If I could turn back time—isn’t there a song that says that?”

“So what are you going to do, besides walking the streets of New York until your cell phone battery gives out?” she wants to know.

“I can’t actually imagine.”

“Well,” she says, “if I could just make one suggestion, baby?”

“Please. I insist. Give me anything you got. I got nothing here.”

“Well, I think you should stand strong and firm. Remember that you have nothing to be ashamed of. You’re a wonderful, open, loving person, and you’ve given your life to raising these kids and being Grant’s wife. Your long-ago affair with Jeremiah was the result of factors that have nothing to do with who you are now. You’ve done it all splendidly, Annabelle—much better than any of the role models you had growing up, that’s for sure. And whatever happens—well, you have that.”