Once Upon a Time, There Was You Read online

  “But I want to learn to do this,” Sadie says. “And I’ll be with people who know a lot about it. I have a friend who’s been climbing with his family since he was six years old. He says it’s great. He also says the only way to know yourself is to challenge yourself—in a hard way, so that you’re really scared. He says what you do in times like that is what you are.”

  John nods. “I suppose there’s some truth to that.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you ever done that? Taken on a challenge that really, really scared you?”

  Marrying your mother. Didn’t work out so well. “Not really,” he says.

  “Maybe you should try rock climbing.”

  “Yeah, not for me, I don’t think. So are you going to need ropes and pickaxes and oxygen masks and all that stuff?”

  “Dad.”

  “Well, what do I know?”

  “It’s not mountain climbing; it’s rock climbing. All I need is climbing shoes. My friend gave me a pair of his sister’s—they’re almost brand new, and they fit just fine.”

  “I’ll get you your own pair.”

  “Let’s see if I like it first,” Sadie says, and John feels a rush of pride in his daughter for being so practical and unselfish, for not taking him up on every offer he makes to buy her things. There’s no doubt she understands that guilt is a pretty good wallet cracker after a divorce, even many years after a divorce, and she chooses not to capitalize on that. She was a child who would never dump a bowl full of Halloween candy left untended on someone’s porch into her bag, or even take more than one piece. He used to worry sometimes that she was too good, and took an odd sort of comfort in the times she did act up.

  “What you could do,” Sadie says, “is talk to Mom and convince her to let me try this.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell her it’s fine with me. I’ll tell her it’s important that you take on physical as well as mental challenges. I think I can bring her around.”

  “Thanks. What’s your next challenge?”

  “There’s an old building on Wabasha I’m trying to buy. I’m just starting negotiations. My God, the ceilings on that place are—”

  “I mean a personal challenge.”

  “Renovation is personal to me. Since I was your age. Since before that.”

  “I know. I know all about your matchbox cities when you were a little boy, and how you tried to save your first old building when you were sixteen, and how you won first prize in the science fair for your city of the future.…”

  “That was an incredible city.”

  “I’m sure it was. But I meant more along the lines of when are you going to date again? That kind of challenge.”

  “I’m fifty-six years old, Sadie.”

  “And?”

  “I think I’m all done with that.”

  “You so are not!”

  “I’m not really all that interested.”

  “Well, you should be. It’s not good to be alone. To be honest, I worry about you a little bit, Dad. You don’t even comb your hair half the time.”

  “I have a cowlick.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t comb it half the time, either. And you don’t eat well. I don’t think you’re uninterested in dating; I think you don’t know how to go about meeting single women. Why don’t you put an ad in the paper? That’s what Mom does, and she’s your age. Just write an ad, or go online, and see what—”

  “Absolutely not. I am not dating someone I meet online.” He will never admit that, one night, he looked around on Match.com. Sat before his computer in his shorts and T-shirt, drinking a beer, looking for someone who wasn’t there. Not even close. Something occurs to him. “Are you meeting people online? Are you going mountain climbing with someone you met online?”

  “No, Dad. And it’s rock climbing. And I’m going with a whole group of people from school—if I even go. I’m just saying you should get out more. There’s more to life than work.”

  “As I’ve been told. And told.”

  “Well, there is.”

  He signals for the exit to the airport. “I’ll tell you what. If you climb a rock, I’ll ask a woman out.”

  “Yeah, how will you meet her, though?”

  “I have my ways.”

  “Name them.”

  “You’ll see.”

  “You have one week,” Sadie says. “That’s when the climb is.”

  “Deal.” He pulls over to the curb to let her out and puts the car into park. He lays his hand against the side of his daughter’s face and sighs. Kisses her forehead. “All right. Get out of my car.”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” She leans over to embrace him. “Don’t call me all the time,” she says into his ear, and he says, “Don’t call me all the time,” and then she is gone. Though she does turn back before she goes through the glass doors. Turns and blows him a kiss, and he waves back.

  He pulls out into the traffic and blinks once, twice. Clears his throat. Then he turns on the radio and boosts the volume.

  He thinks about whether or not he should make his next move with Amy Becker. Because what Sadie doesn’t know is that he’s already met someone; it was over a month ago. It was in a way he’d rather not share with his daughter. Or with anyone else.

  2

  On a cold November evening when Irene was fourteen years old, she was in her bedroom doing homework, and her mother was in the kitchen, making hamburger soup. It smelled so good, and Irene was impatient for her father to come home so they could eat dinner. But then the smell changed; something was burning. “Mom?” Irene called from her room. No reply, and the smell intensified. Irene came out into the hall. “Mom?”

  She went into the kitchen and turned off the burner, then opened the back door to let the smoky air out. She saw that the light in the garage was on, and supposed that her mother had gotten caught up in cleaning something out there; she was always complaining about what a mess it was in the garage. “Hey, Mom!” Irene called from the doorway. She was in her stocking feet, and didn’t want to put shoes and a coat on. But when her mother didn’t answer, Irene did put on her shoes. She didn’t bother with a coat—she’d only be a minute. She pushed open the garage door and bumped into something: her mother, hanging from the rafter, a length of clothesline around her neck. Wearing her flowered apron. One shoe off, one shoe on. Irene backed away, ran into the house, and called her father at his office. “You must never tell anyone this,” he said later. “And we will not speak of it again.” Heart attack, they told everyone.

  But then in college, Irene did tell someone: her roommate, Valerie. They were in their dorm room, studying, and Valerie was telling Irene about something they’d talked about in psychology class that day, having to do with children of abusive mothers. She said she couldn’t understand how children could love mothers who treated them that way. And Irene began suddenly to cry, and then she told Val about finding her mother. When she finished the story, she was filled with a sense of panic, and with regret at having violated her father’s trust, perhaps her mother’s as well. She asked Valerie to promise that she would never tell anyone else, ever.

  “I won’t,” Valerie said. “But—”

  “That’s all I want to say about it,” Irene said. “I just wanted to tell you. But I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “But don’t you—”

  “Please,” Irene said.

  And Valerie said okay.

  After a moment, Irene said, “I mean it, about never telling anyone else.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Even if we don’t stay friends. Even if you think you should tell someone else.”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I did.”

  “Promise me again.”

  “I won’t, Irene. I won’t ever tell anyone.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you.”

  Valerie reached over to touch Irene’s hand. “Is it …? Do you think it was your fa
ult, Irene? You don’t think it was your fault, do you?”

  “I don’t know. I guess for a little while I did. I kept thinking about one summer when I was six years old, and I used to run away all the time. Sometimes I went out to this big field behind our house. I would just sit there, in the long grass; it grew way over my head. It was peaceful. But mostly I went to the Mentzes’ house. They were a childless older couple down the block, and they were always so nice to me. I used to run away to their house every couple of weeks or so—you know, pack my suitcase, show up on their doorstep. They always gave me some cookies and milk and then brought me back home; but I thought that secretly they wanted to keep me, they were just so nice to me. So I kept on giving them more chances to have me, until finally I gave up.

  “But I know it wasn’t my fault, what my mother did. For one thing, it happened so many years after all that running away. I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “Yes you should have,” Val said. And then, “Irene? Can I ask you just one more thing?”

  “What.”

  “What did your father say when he found out?”

  “He got mad. He started swearing.”

  Val stared at her.

  “Not at me.”

  Val’s eyes were wide, her face a little flushed, and Irene thought she must want to ask a million more questions, say a million more things. She feared Val might move away from their friendship, because now she would think Irene was weird. But she didn’t. She bent her head to her books, and after a while she asked Irene if she wanted to share a pizza.

  They ordered a large sausage and mushroom and ate the whole thing. And then, at midnight, they heard there was a giant snowball fight happening on the quad, boys versus girls, and they put their coats on over their pajamas, slid their bare feet into their boots, and went out to defend their sex. They came back two hours later with snow down their backs, snow melting in their boots and caked in their hair, and even though it was widely held that you couldn’t get colds from being cold, they both got very bad colds, which, in the way of the young, they rather enjoyed.

  Irene sits in her bedroom recalling that night, the details still so clear. She thinks of how, a month after she met John, she told him about her mother, too; he was the only other person she ever told. She extracted the same promise from him, not to tell anyone else. “I would never do that,” he said. And he said nothing more, but he reached out his arms and she moved into them. All she heard for a long time was the sound of them breathing together, and the distant beating of his heart.

  Irene snaps to, and turns to her computer. Now as then: forget the past; concentrate on the present. Here is the present: she is a woman in search of a man. Again.

  She stretches her arms out, cracks her knuckles. How to approach it this time?

  I believe in defacing books, she writes. I think one’s personal library should be full of books with broken spines and meaningful passages underlined, with pages marked by chocolate or coffee or grease stains. If there are comments or questions in the margins, even better. I am otherwise a very neat person, as I believe that external chaos leads to internal chaos. Discuss. (Ha ha.) I believe in going to cafes in the afternoon and enjoying pastry on a porcelain plate, even if it ruins your dinner. This is a bit of an affectation, I suppose, as I only began doing it after I visited Paris and saw all of them doing it. “Them” being the French, of course, and who among us does not trust the French when it comes to food and fashion?

  I believe in bringing home rocks from every place I visited and loved, because I think rocks hold within them an essence of place, and that you can feel this essence—and therefore the place—if you hold the rock tightly in your hand. Naturally you must have patience, as well as an open mind and heart, and, like many spiritual things, it works better if your eyes are closed.

  No. She deletes this last paragraph, then continues.

  I believe in keeping my eyes closed at the dentist’s and imagining Tahiti even though I have never been there. But I have seen pictures, and every time I go to the dentist I imagine me in those pictures with the blue, blue sea and the waves coming in. (As a kid I had a dentist who gave every patient a card for a free Dairy Queen cone after each visit. Devil or angel? I still can’t decide.) I will never be thin again and I am interested in meeting a man who is just fine with that. Not that I’m fat. But I am average, and average is not thin. Average to zaftig, I guess would be more precise, and I still have very good legs if you care about that sort of thing, which I do. I believe in holding hands in the movie show when all the lights are low, and if you know and like that song, we’re already off to a good start. I kind of hate writing these things, as I’m sure you can tell, but I understand and accept the need for them.

  She rereads what she wrote, then gets up from the little desk in the corner of her bedroom and moves to the window. She crosses her arms and sighs, leans her head against the cool glass. Across the street, an old Asian woman pushes a little cart full of groceries uphill. She has a brightly patterned scarf knotted under her chin, an open black coat, and she is wearing house slippers and nylon stockings rolled to the knees. Irene can see a baguette sticking out of one of the grocery bags, the fernlike tops of carrots, and what look like baby eggplants. She wonders what the woman will make for dinner. She wishes she could call out and ask her; she feels as though the information would comfort her. Would ground her. Life goes on. One makes dinner. One must eat. You are not alone, we are none of us alone, see how we all eat dinner? !

  Oh, it was a lovely day today, the sky a bleached turquoise color, no fog, only a few clouds that looked like clotted cream, placed as though by children’s hands—oddly irregular that way. She wishes the dark weren’t coming so soon.

  This morning, Don Strauss called to tell her that he was getting back together with his ex-wife. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I was going to tell you to your face, but then I thought it might be less painful if I just called. Because what would we do after I told you to your face, you know? I mean, it would be so awkward for both of us. I want you to know I’ve not had any contact with her since I met you—this came out of the blue. She just now called, we had a really long, really honest talk, and we realized we’re still in love with each other. And I think we have a chance to make it work this time. I’m happy for myself, but I’m sorry for any pain I caused you. I know you were a lot more invested in this relationship than I.”

  “What?” Irene said.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I just meant—”

  “I wasn’t more invested than you! What makes you think I was more invested than you?”

  “Well, you did say a number of things that—”

  “You know, you make that clicking sound with your jaw when you chew, and it just about drives me up the wall.”

  “Okay, Irene.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know how much longer I would have been able to tolerate that. And did anyone ever teach you the virtues of using a toilet brush? Have you ever heard of a toilet brush?”

  “I guess we’re not going to be able to talk about this. I’m sorry for that. You’re a wonderful woman when you’re not outraged, and in fact I wanted to let you know that my friend Larry, whom you met at that art gallery we went to last week, was very taken with you, so if—”

  Irene hung up. She called Valerie and got her voice mail and said, “Call me. Or if you can, come over. Minor crisis. Minor.” She went to the refrigerator and looked in, closed the door. Opened it and looked some more, closed the door again. “Damn it,” she said, quietly, and then, louder, “Damn it!” And then she cried, just a little, tears more of humiliation, of frustration, than of pain.

  She flung herself into the kitchen banquette, and while she cried she looked through the Williams-Sonoma catalogue, and then she blew her nose and called to order the azure blue, three-and-a-half-quart Le Creuset oval Dutch oven, vowing to use it for the white bean soup recipe she’s had taped to her refrigerator for mont
hs. After she placed the order, she almost reflexively called Don to tell him she’d gotten the pan—he’d told her she should buy it when she showed it to him after the catalogue arrived last Saturday. Yes, last Saturday, when Sadie had gone to see her father, and Irene and Don had made love in the afternoon and then they’d gotten up in a lovely golden light and she’d made them feta cheese and spinach omelets and Greek toast and served it with retsina and he’d said it was divine. But instead of calling Don—whose number she had never memorized, by the way—she’d gone over to her computer to compose yet another ad for the local paper that let you place personals of any length for free, so long as they were in the “Over 55” section. Mercy for the half dead. She’ll write another damn ad—that’s how she had met Don. She doesn’t want to use online dating services, which scare her. She went on Match.com one day, surveyed the men in her specified age group, and felt a little blip of hope. A blond man who was an attorney, wearing a nice blue sweater and gray pants. An international businessman who was bald but still very attractive; he exuded a kind of Yul Brynner confidence. Then she surveyed the women close to her age, her competition, and immediately gave up. “Why?” Val asked when Irene told her that. “You’re every bit as good as they are!”

  “No,” Irene said. “I’m not. Those women are all happier than I am. Healthier. Nicer. Richer, too.”

  “Irene, if you posted a picture, people would say the same thing about you. You look beautiful when you’re smiling. You look happy and healthy, too. You’re supposed to try to make yourself look as good as you can on those websites. That’s what everybody does! Then, after a few dates, the warts come out. That’s the way it works. You pretend you’re perfect, and by the time they find out you’re not, they hopefully like you a little, anyway. And you them.”

  “I like blind dates,” Irene said. “And I like to show my warts first.”

  “It’s a wonder anybody ever contacts you, with the ads you write.”

  “It’s because I’m a relief from the usual love-to-walk-on-the-beach, that’s why.” That’s what Don had told her.