Once Upon a Time, There Was You Read online

  Also by Elizabeth Berg

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  Home Safe

  The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

  Dream When You’re Feeling Blue

  The Handmaid and the Carpenter

  We Are All Welcome Here

  The Year of Pleasures

  The Art of Mending

  Say When

  True to Form

  Ordinary Life: Stories

  Never Change

  Open House

  Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True

  Until the Real Thing Comes Along

  What We Keep

  Joy School

  The Pull of the Moon

  Range of Motion

  Talk Before Sleep

  Durable Goods

  Family Traditions

  Once Upon a Time, There Was You is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Elizabeth Berg

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Berg, Elizabeth.

  Once upon a time, there was you: a novel / Elizabeth Berg.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-893-5

  1. Divorced people—Fiction. 2. Teenage girls—Fiction. 3. Parent and child—Fiction. 4. Domestic Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.E6996O62 2011

  813′.54—dc22 2010049690

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  To Kate Medina

  Marriage is a funny thing. Even when it’s over.

  Maybe especially then.

  —ROBIN BLACK,

  from If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

  There are two dilemmas that rattle the human skull:

  How do you hold on to someone who won’t stay?

  And how do you get rid of someone who won’t leave?

  —from The War of the Roses

  There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture is, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.

  —COLUM McCANN,

  from Let the Great World Spin

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  When John Marsh was a young boy, he used to watch his mother getting ready to go out for the evening. He stood beside her dressing table and listened to the mbuh sounds she made tamping down her lipstick, and he took note of the three-quarter angle with which she then regarded herself in the mirror, as though she were flirting with herself. He watched how rouge made her cheeks blossom into unnatural color, and how the little comb she used to apply mascara made her blond lashes go black and spiky. She always finished by taking her hair down from pin curls and brushing it into a controlled mass of waves, which she then perfumed with a spicy scent that reminded him of carnations and oranges, both. Finally, “How do I look?” she would ask him, and he never knew what to say. What he felt was: Gone. For though he had stood beside her, watching her every move as she transformed herself, he was never sure that the made-up woman before him was still his mother, and this made for a mixed feeling of fear and confusion. Nonetheless, he always smiled and said softly, “Pretty.”

  Before he turned six, she was off living in another state with a man who did not care for children. The rare times John saw her, she came and stayed in a nearby Howard Johnson, and she would buy him dinner there. While he ate, she would sit smoking, sneaking looks at her watch.

  Many years later, on the eve of his wedding day, thirty-six-year-old John sat in a bar talking to his best friend, Stuart White (Stuart himself happily married for twelve years), about how he was suddenly consumed by doubt. He sat morosely on the stool, chatting now and then with the women there, many of them beautiful, and understood that it wasn’t that; it wasn’t that he wanted anyone else. When the blonde sitting next to him offered a cigarette, John took it.

  “What are you doing?” Stuart asked. “You don’t smoke. And Irene hates cigarette smoke.”

  “Yeah, I know,” John said. “I think she has an allergy or something.” He put a match to the end of the cigarette.

  “Whoa,” Stuart said. “Are your hands shaking?”

  “My hands aren’t shaking!”

  “They are, too, man. Look at them.”

  John looked at his hands, and his friend was right: there was a fine tremor.

  He ground out the cigarette, shoved his face into his hands, and moaned.

  Stuart said, “Okay, okay, buddy, you just need to calm down. Try this. Think about when you asked Irene to marry you. Why did you ask her?”

  John looked over at him. “She didn’t wear makeup?”

  When Irene Marsh was a young girl, she used to have a play space in the basement where she lined up her many baby dolls. One by one, she fed them, burped them, and rocked them to sleep. It brought her a rare peace, to care for her babies. It took her away from what went on between her parents, the yelling and the hateful silences, which were worse than the yelling. She sang lullabies into plastic ears and rocked inert little bodies; she prayed each night on her knees to get old enough to live with someone else, in love.

  Which was why it was a little surprising that, on her wedding day, she sat weeping in the bride’s room. The place was ornately decorated: a multitiered chandelier, embossed ivory wallpaper, two elegant club chairs upholstered in tangerine silk, the table between them holding a bouquet of white freesia and a crystal bowl full of Jordan almonds—for good luck, Irene knew. In the adjoining powder room was a vase of creamy white orchids, pristine linen hand towels, and a gold basket of might-needs decorated by a length of wide satin ribbon. When Irene had shown the bathroom to her best friend and only bridesmaid, Valerie Cox (Valerie herself happily married for nine years), Valerie had said, “Oh, everything is so pretty!” Irene had stood there, imagining herself as the speck on the ground, Valerie as the plane rising higher in the air. What Irene had felt about the décor was only a sense of outrage, at the excess.

  Fifteen minutes before the ceremony was to begin, Irene sat on the bench before the white vanity with her back to the mirror. She had just put on her
wedding gown, a dress that was purposefully plain and might in fact work for everyday, were it not floor length and made from ivory Qiana. Her hair was loose about her shoulders, not as yet styled into the upsweep she’d planned; her satin heels lay in a little jumble on the floor beside her, her veil across her lap. The bridal bouquet sat unpacked in its box in a corner of the room.

  “But I thought you were sure,” Valerie said. She was standing before Irene, holding her friend’s trembling hands in her own. “You said you were absolutely sure!”

  “I know, but I want to go home. Will you take me?”

  “Well …” Valerie didn’t know what to do. She spoke in a near whisper, saying, “Irene. You’re thirty-six years old. If you want children—”

  “I know how old I am! But you shouldn’t get married just to have children. I can’t get married just to have children!” She drew in a ragged breath, snatched a tissue off the dressing table, and blew her nose.

  Valerie spoke slowly, carefully, saying, “I don’t know; getting married to have children isn’t such a bad idea. And besides, you love John. Don’t you?”

  Irene stared into her lap, picked at one thumbnail with the other.

  “Irene?”

  She looked up. “I can’t go through with this. Please, Vee. It’s wrong. Go and get the car, okay? We have to hurry. If you don’t want to, I understand. I’ll take the bus. There’s a bus that goes by here.”

  Valerie cracked open the door to see if anyone was out in the hall: no one. Then she knelt on the floor before Irene and looked directly into her eyes. “Listen to me. If you do this, you can’t take it back. Do you understand that? It’s not just a little tiff and then you apologize and get married next week instead. If you do this, it’s the end of you and John. Do you understand that?”

  Irene nodded. “I do. So to speak.” She tried to smile.

  Valerie stood, crossed her arms, and sighed. “What about all those people out there? There must be two hundred people! Do you want me to make an announcement or something?”

  “Oh. Yes. Yes.” Irene rose and carefully draped the veil over one of the club chairs. “Apologize for me, okay? Say I’m sorry. I am sorry. And be sure to say that I’ll send all the gifts back, right away. Tomorrow. I know this is hard. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

  But then Irene’s father poked his head in the door and said gruffly, “Let’s go,” and Irene put her veil on, stepped into her shoes, and linked her arm through his.

  “Irene?” Valerie said, and Irene said, “No.”

  1

  When eighteen-year-old Sadie Marsh comes from California to visit her father in Minnesota, she sleeps in a bedroom decorated for her much younger self: a ruffled canopy bed, a white dresser with fairies painted on it, wallpaper with pink and white stripes, a bedside lamp with a wishing well base. Neither John nor his daughter has ever made a move to change one thing about that room; Sadie still sleeps under a pile of stuffed animals, the ones she left behind.

  It’s a warm Sunday in late August, and John is sitting on the front porch, feeding peanuts to the squirrel that has ventured up the steps and over to him. He’s waiting for his daughter to come out the door to announce that this is really it; she has everything now, she’s ready to go to the airport. She’s been here for the usual length of time—one week. She’s not even gone, but already he is feeling a wide band around his middle start to tighten. When he drops her at the airport, neither of them will express any regret at her leave-taking: it is an unspoken agreement that they keep every parting casual, that they do not make a bad situation worse with what they both would describe as fussing and carrying on, a phrase that John’s Atlanta-born mother was fond of using, and one that she in fact employed every time they parted. “No fussin’ and cahn’ on, now,” she would say, her white-gloved hand beneath his chin, her eyes crinkled at the sides the way they did when she smiled. “I’m gon’ see you real soon, just you wait; you won’t hardly know I’ve been gone.”

  He did wait. And wait.

  Sadie has Irene’s looks: auburn hair, hazel eyes that lean toward green, a fair complexion that burns at the mention of sun. She’s tall, with a delicate bone structure, wrists so tiny she can almost never find a watch to fit her. But her nature is more like her father’s: she’s an outdoor type, confident in athletics, a person who is more irritated than inspired by poetry, an even-keeled young woman who rarely takes things personally. She has a loud laugh, an infectious one; even when Sadie was a toddler, Irene would say, “You can’t hear her laugh and not join right in, even if you’re mad at her. Especially if you’re mad at her.”

  John hears Sadie coming down the stairs and tosses the rest of the peanuts into a corner of the porch. The squirrel stands there on its hind legs, its tail flicking, then opts for running off the porch rather than heading for the feast. “Hey!” John says. He moves to the top step to watch the squirrel run to the elm tree on the boulevard, then rapidly ascend. From the highest limb, it stares down at John. “Get your peanuts,” John says, pointing, but the squirrel only stares.

  “All set, Dad,” Sadie says. She has her overstuffed backpack in one hand, her suitcase in the other, and he can tell from the tone of her voice that she, too, is having a hard time keeping upbeat. Never mind a deep and abiding love; he and his daughter really like each other. One week four times a year is not enough for either of them, but it is the best solution for now. In winter and summer, Sadie comes to St. Paul; in spring and fall, John goes out to San Francisco, where he stays in a hotel and visits with both Irene and Sadie, but that never quite works out—if he sees Sadie alone, she seems to feel bad for her mother; if they all get together, it’s excruciating. The truth is, John doesn’t like Irene much anymore, and he doesn’t think she cares for him, either. They’ve grown apart in large ways and small. Irene identifies herself as a conservative liberal now, which John can’t fathom. She’s overly concerned about order and cleanliness in her flat—it’s impossible to relax there. She prefers cats to dogs, which is almost worse than being a conservative. She’s taken to wearing makeup and recently dyed her hair to cover the gray—Sadie says it’s the influence of her latest man friend, a guy named Don Strauss, who believes aging people should “fight the good fight.”

  “Oh, please,” John said, when Sadie told him this. And Sadie shrugged and said, “He’s not so bad. He makes really good vegetable lasagna. He puts goat cheese in there.”

  “Well, that counts for something,” John said, but privately he was thinking, Right, I’ll bet he’s another vegetarian. Another Unitarian vegetarian who holds up peace signs at street corners every Saturday afternoon and aspires to live in a Mongolian yurt. He waited for Sadie to say more about Don, but she didn’t, and he didn’t ask. Another unspoken agreement. He didn’t ask about the men in Sadie’s mother’s life; Irene didn’t ask about the women in his. Not that there were many to ask about. The last time he had a semi-serious relationship was five years ago, and that blew up when he wouldn’t agree to lock his black Lab mix, emphasis on mix, out of his room on the nights she slept over. The woman complained that the dog snored and farted; John allowed that she did, too, and that was that. Festus died last year, and John thinks he’s almost ready to get another dog. An Irish wolfhound, he’s thinking, mostly because Sadie said she knows of a rescue group that recently took one in. “They’re awfully big,” John told her, and she said, “Exactly.”

  On the way to the airport, John looks over to see Sadie fooling around with her iPod. “Don’t you dare put those plugs in your ears and disappear,” he says. “Please.”

  “I’m not. I’m just getting it ready for the plane.”

  “I don’t see why you young people can’t step away from electronics for ten seconds of your life.” Young people! Well, that’s it: he’s officially old now.

  “Dad. I hardly used anything at your house the whole time I was there. I texted, like, twice.”

  John doesn’t believe her. He saw the light under her
door when he went past at night, and he heard the tap-tap-tapping. But he doesn’t challenge her; at least she was courteous enough not to be constantly texting in front of him. He resents the very posture of people who are online, the way they bend their backs over their various devices, blocking out any possibility that they might engage with a real live person, who would never come with enough apps to satisfy them, let’s face it. Virtual is so much more exciting than real. But only if you don’t know how to look and listen, is what John thinks. He made Sadie sit out on the porch swing with him one night, just to hear the crickets and, later, to see the fireflies. He was gratified to hear her say, after about fifteen minutes, “Wow. This is nice.”

  Sadie puts the iPod in her backpack and zips it shut. “I’m going to get you one of these,” she says. “I’ll load it up with good music; you can see what I listen to.”

  “Sweetheart?”

  “No, you’d like a lot of the songs! You really would.”

  “Okay, but no rap.”

  “Some rap. You’ll see.”

  He stops for a red light and looks over at her. “You’re an awfully pretty girl, you know that?”

  She rolls her eyes.

  “You’re going to break some econ major’s heart.”

  “Econ?”

  “Veterinary medicine?”

  “Better.”

  A great sadness comes over him, but he makes his voice light to say, “So! What’s in store for the last of the summer?”

  “Well. A challenge. A bunch of us are going rock climbing next weekend. If Mom will let me. So far she says no way.”

  “What are you going to climb?”

  “Just Mount Tam, and only the lowest slab. Some people wanted to go to Mammoth Mountain, myself included, but that’s a six-hour drive.”

  “Since when do you know anything about rock climbing?”

  She shrugs. “I’ve done it a lot in gym class. Mom doesn’t want me to do the real thing. You want to hear her pithy words of wisdom? ‘Sadie, if you go rock climbing and you fall, you’ll land on a rock.’ ”

  She looks over at John, and he has to smile. That would be Irene.