Once Upon a Time, There Was You Read online

  And so here she goes, writing another ad. Back on the horse. Too many fish in the sea. No use crying over spilled milk. Et fucking cetera.

  Maybe she swore too much. She does swear too much. But all her friends do, and then it just becomes sort of contagious. Don said “darn” and “gosh” and “heck,” which she initially thought was charming—even trendsettingly retro!—but came to find annoying and possibly passive-aggressive. Recalling him using those pale epithets, she rolls her eyes and nods her head, as though she’s the one who initiated the breakup and now she’s confirming the vote.

  “Eeeyup,” she says, and then, alarmed, looks at her watch. Sadie’s plane will be arriving in a couple of hours. Irene had wanted to go to the market and take some time selecting ingredients and then slow-cook a nice dinner for her daughter’s homecoming, but instead they’ll go to Hunan, which they both love. Over scallion pancakes, she’ll casually mention that she and Don are all done. Sadie will make sure her mother is okay, and then she’ll say she’s glad, Irene would bet on it. She tolerated Don, but Irene knew she didn’t see him as a proper match for her mother.

  Sadie often understands things before her mother does. Babies always seem so wise when they’re born, and both Irene and Valerie think Sadie has never lost that quality. There is something in Sadie’s eyes that goes so far back. Valerie calls her “Buddha Girl.” For her part, Sadie calls Valerie “Gypsy Woman” for her long skirts and oversize hoop earrings and many bracelets; and she calls her mother “Betty,” as in Crocker. Irene doesn’t mind. In many ways, she’s flattered. She thinks people who value creating a home and caring for children are vastly underrated. Vastly, vastly, vastly. Plus more vastly than that, and then some. What better thing than to have a skinned knee tended to by someone who feels the injury along with you? What deeper comfort after a bad dream than seeing a familiar silhouette at your doorjamb, feeling a familiar weight settling itself at your bedside? A table set properly, folded clothes, a stocked refrigerator. Who can say they do not appreciate the idea of home when it conveys such riches—not only appreciate it but also, in certain moments, grant it the elevated place it deserves?

  Before she had Sadie, Irene was for many years a speech therapist. Sometimes her patients struggled so hard for words she could never understand, and this brought despair to both of them. But whenever Irene asked, “What do these things represent?” and showed them pictures of objects like a lit lamp next to a reading chair, a bathrobe hanging from a hook, a window box full of riotous geraniums, a pie cooling on the counter? Then! They might manage only “Halk!” but there would be that earnest look in their eyes, that light, and Irene would say, “Yes. Home. Good.”

  After Sadie started grade school, Irene went back to work part-time. But when she moved to San Francisco, there were no part-time jobs for speech therapists. So she worked for several years sharing a position as a receptionist at a temporary employment agency—she didn’t want to work full-time until Sadie was in college; and with her own savings and alimony, she didn’t have to.

  A couple of years ago, a man named Henry Bliss called the agency, looking for someone to assist with making appetizers at a wedding that Saturday. Irene loves cooking, and she told the man she’d take the job herself. He ended up hiring her to work three, sometimes four times a week as a kind of culinary girl Friday. She does everything from shopping for groceries and general cleanup to food prep. By his own admission, Henry can be a bit of a challenge, but he adores Sadie; and the feeling is mutual. Sometimes he hires Sadie to help at events, too, and he pays her generously—mostly for hanging around and admiring him rather than passing trays of appetizers.

  On occasion Henry has advocated for Irene’s position when she and Sadie are having a dispute, and that keeps Irene mostly silent about what she would call the abuse she takes from Henry. In addition to that, she loves grilling eggplant, crimping quiche crusts, lining up three plump raspberries just so next to an artful squiggle of chocolate on a gold-rimmed dessert plate. She loves inhaling the aroma of the fresh herbs she is chopping. But her favorite thing is helping herself (when Henry isn’t looking) to chunks of lobster or slices of exotic cheeses or spoonfuls of lemon curd or whipped cream or cake batter or cold blueberry soup. At her age, another job would be hard to find. She hopes to work for Henry full-time after Sadie starts college.

  Irene stretches, then goes back to her computer. She stares at the blank page, then writes: Yesterday, while waiting in line at the grocery store, I heard the woman behind me say, “Oh, I wish to hell they’d never even invented computers!” I wanted to turn around and hug her, but I didn’t want to interrupt the conversation she was having on her iPhone, which I believe is a computer. This, I think, is the essence of a lot of the problems we face today. We need what we hate. And vice versa. Discuss. (ha ha)

  3

  Sadie slides onto a stool at the airport bar and orders a Bloody Mary. “ID?” the bartender asks, and she laughs.

  “I need to see your ID,” he says, and she says, “Are you kidding me? I’m twenty-four. Twenty-five in a week!”

  He stands there, his beefy arms crossed, and finally she gets off the stool and goes into the French Meadow café, where she orders a turkey-avocado sandwich and a cream cheese brownie and milk. After she eats, she goes to her gate. It’s crowded there; only two seats are available, both next to businessmen blabbing loudly on their phones, and so she sits on the floor in the hall opposite the gate. She calls Ron Savage, and when he answers, she says, “Ready or not, here I come.”

  “Hey,” he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice and she feels that little tornado low in her stomach. Practically everything Ron does gets to her: he can just stand there and she’ll feel a zinged-out kind of helplessness. It’s so odd how long it took her to notice him. She knew him as a quiet member of their senior class: captain of the debate team; a pretty good actor, according to those who had seen him in plays; an excellent guitarist who sometimes played at parties; a good writer who contributed essays to the school paper, mostly having to do with a young person’s take on current events, although occasionally he did a humor piece that was actually really funny. He hung with the arty crowd, she with the jocks, but then one day early in May she was behind him in the lunch line and they started talking and she thought, Whoa! She knows the line “Where have you been all my life?” ranks right up there with the cheesiest of clichés, but that’s exactly what she felt, that day. She doesn’t even remember what they talked about, but something he said or the way he said it made her really see him for the first time. Her best friend, Meghan, says it’s pheromones, that that day in May was the first time Sadie had been close enough to Ron to smell him. “You can’t fight pheromones,” Meghan had said. “Or if you were together in a past life, you can’t fight that, either.”

  Whatever accounted for Sadie’s instant attraction to Ron, it was mutual, and they’ve been together ever since. She hasn’t told her mother about him yet; he’s too special to her. Sadie doesn’t want anything her mother says or does to ruin things for her—Irene can be wonderful, but she can also be really strange. And Ron seemed in no rush to meet her mother anyway, or for Sadie to meet his. Sadie likes this, the way that what they have together belongs to them alone. Meghan covers for Sadie when she goes out with Ron, although she’s starting to get tired of it, Sadie knows. The last time she’d called Meghan and said, “Ron and I are going out tonight, okay?” Meghan had sighed and said, “How much longer, Sadie?” And Sadie had said soon. Soon she’d tell both her parents about him. But not yet. Maybe when she’s in school and Irene’s hand isn’t in every one of Sadie’s pies. She can’t wait for that kind of independence, which seems impossible to achieve when she’s living under the same roof with Irene. She’s heard that single mothers can do this—take helicoptering to a whole other level—but she’s had enough. And it was Ron who helped her realize that. Not in a cruel way. Just in a matter-of-fact way. Like pointing to a kid who’d had training wheels fa
r too long and saying, “Want to try to ride without those?”

  So much about Ron is so different from any boy she’s ever known. If this is love, she hates it and she wants more. She wants to hook up with him, but so far he won’t. He won’t! And he’s not a virgin—he told her once he’d had his first sexual experience with a much older woman, when he was sixteen. She was a neighbor who lived next door to them for only a few months, a twenty-one-year-old whose husband was at war and who, after their encounter, stopped speaking to him, though she was the one who’d initiated everything.

  Sadie is a virgin, though not inexperienced in oral sex. When she was a junior, she was at a party and someone dared her; and she’d gone into the bedroom and done it with the guy she was going out with at the time, Gary Stevens. She’d found it odd: maybe slightly erotic, but mostly odd. She’d told Gary that, and he’d offered to do the real thing, but she’d said no. She didn’t see what the big deal was about either thing, actually; she thought of sex as a lot of fussin’ and cahn’ on about not much.

  But now she thinks she understands what the big deal is, and she wants the real thing with Ron, she wants him inside her because she wants that closeness; she wants to say something to him that she cannot say with words. Once, when they were on the phone intentionally driving each other a little crazy, she said, “Honest to God, Ron, if we don’t do it soon, I’m going to explode.”

  He made a sound she couldn’t quite interpret, and she said, “Don’t you want to?” The question made her blush to the roots of her hair, even on the phone; she instantly regretted asking it.

  But then he said, “Of course I want to,” and she felt better.

  She made her voice low and soft. “Okay then, so why don’t we—”

  “It’s complicated,” he said. “I told you. Just let it be for now, okay?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Then let’s stop teasing each other and talk about the Tet Offensive.” She and Ron were doing summer reading for a history class they were both taking that fall when they started college at UC Berkeley. Learning about the sixties and the Summer of Love wasn’t doing much to quell her desire for a certain type of exploration.

  “How can you even think I don’t want to?” he asked. “God! I can’t wait to see those beautiful breasts and unzip your jeans and—”

  “Okay,” she said, laughing. “I’m hanging up.” But then something occurred to her, a dark thought. “Ron? Can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  “Do you have … a communicable disease?”

  He laughed so readily and so loudly she believed him when he said no. It was something else, then. And she vowed to make it her business to disabuse him of whatever was holding him back. She wanted him to be the first. It was time, she was overdue, and she saw now why she had been waiting: it was for someone like him.

  “How was your dad?” Ron asks.

  “Same as always. He’s such a good guy. Him, I want you to meet.” She looks out into the crowd of people sitting at the gate, trying to find someone who looks like her dad. No one does. No one looks the least little bit like him.

  “Maybe sometime soon I can.”

  “He’s coming to San Francisco in a few months. You can meet him then, if you want.” Her stomach tightens at the thought—not of her father and Ron meeting, but at the notion of her and Ron staying together that long. Things can fall apart so easily. Only last week Meghan had been dumped by her boyfriend Brian without one word of warning. Meghan came over with her face still swollen from crying half the night. She sat on Sadie’s bed staring blankly at nothing and refusing Sadie’s offers to do something, anything: a movie, shopping, a walk by the ocean, a little weed. “Are you kidding?” Meghan said. “That would make me feel worse.”

  “No,” Sadie said. “It would put it all in perspective.” But even as she said it, she wasn’t sure it was true. She ended up just sitting quietly with her friend until Meghan got hungry, and then they went out to Octavia Street, to Miette bakery, where they ate the better part of a Tomboy cake.

  Boarding begins, and she tells Ron, “I have to get on the plane in a minute. But I wanted to tell you I think our trip is on. My dad said he’d persuade my mom to let me go rock climbing. She almost always listens to him, even though she says she never does.”

  “Rock climbing?”

  “Yeah, you know Tate Shiller and all those guys are going rock climbing. I said I was going with them. It would be pretty hard to get away for the weekend otherwise. I didn’t want to ask Meghan to cover for me again; she’s getting kind of tired of it.”

  “Your dad believed you?”

  “Yeah. He trusts me.”

  For just a moment, Sadie feels bad about lying to her dad. But it’s a little sin for a greater good; someday it will be a funny story she tells about what happened in the very early stages of her and Ron.

  “Upright dude. Are you sure you don’t want to tell him the truth?”

  “I can’t tell him and not my mom. And if I tell my mom, she’ll say I can’t go.” The gate agent calls out Sadie’s group number. “I have to get on the plane,” she says. She stands, shoulders her backpack. “I’ll call you when I land.”

  “Tell the pilot to hurry,” Ron says, and she smiles and touches the phone where his voice came out before she hangs up. She stands in line behind a woman in a navy suit and a ruffled white blouse, on her phone saying goodbye to her significant other, apparently, for she says, “Love you, babe.” She listens to something, then laughs, a deep, throaty laugh. “You first,” she says. Sadie looks at the woman’s left hand: an engagement ring, the diamond huge. Whenever Sadie sees engagement rings, she feels a strange mix of emotions: a kind of excitement mixed with a vague sadness. A longing for a specific kind of inclusion she both aspires to and fears. And, oddly, she feels a sense of failure, of shame. She knows it’s nonsensical, but there it is, big inside her, this sense of having screwed everything up, of having lost something she never had.

  After Sadie buckles herself into her window seat, a man sits beside her. He’s overweight, round-faced and pink-cheeked, and making a mighty effort to suck in his gut. “How you doing?” he says, and immediately she knows he’ll buy her a drink. Most guys she sits by on an airplane will, so long as there’s no one else in the row with them. This plane is configured to have only two seats on one side, so Sadie’s got it made. After the flight attendant explains the many things the passengers should do to save themselves in the unlikely event of a crash (when what’s really unlikely is that anyone will survive), Sadie will make her request: “Hey, if I give you the money, would you buy me a drink?” Usually the guys just wave her money away and pay for the drink themselves. She lets them. The only bad part is if, later, they do things like ask her if she’d like to join them in the bathroom. In fantasies, the idea might intrigue her, especially if the guy is hot. The reality, though, would be something else. Sliding zippers down. The absurdly small space. How it would be to sit beside the guy afterward, his smell on her. The sad nothingness of an encounter like that.

  While people shuffle slowly down the aisle, shove their bags into the overhead, and take their seats, Sadie stares out the window. She thinks of her father putting his hand to her cheek before she got out of the car to go into the airport. She thinks of how, when they ate dinner one night, she asked if he’d ever consider moving to San Francisco. He was silent for a long time. Then he said, “I don’t think so, Sadie.”

  They ate with their heads down for a while, the sound of their forks on the plates amplified in the sudden silence. Then, “Would you ever consider moving here?” he asked brightly, almost in a jokey way, and she said maybe. She said it as if she had never thought about it before, as if, having thought about it now, she might really do it. “Maybe!” Then they both felt better.

  She thought of how she’d come upon him making her bed for her one morning, and she’d said, “Dad, I can do that!” and he’d held his hands up and said, “Okay, okay!” and then ha
d made her bed the next day, too. Made her bed and placed her old stuffed animals on it, just so. She thought of how he was sitting in the kitchen before breakfast that morning, his head down, his hands clasped between his knees. He didn’t see her, and she tiptoed back upstairs, then came down again, making a lot of noise this time. She found him at the cupboard, digging out his cast-iron pan to make her his famous hash browns. “You want two slabs and two staring up to go with this?” he asked.

  Two slabs and two staring up. A line that the character of Grover, from Sesame Street, once used when he was a waiter ordering bacon and eggs over easy from Charlie, the short-order cook. John and Irene and seven-year-old Sadie had all been huddled together on the sofa and watching the show when Grover said that. Her parents had burst out laughing, and then explained to Sadie what the terms meant. They were under a flannel quilt John’s aunt had made for him when he was a little boy, drinking hot chocolate. Outside, a blizzard that had canceled work and school dumped eighteen inches of snow on the ground.

  After dinner, Sadie and her parents went into the backyard and built three snowmen and a snow house for them to live in. Later, after they’d tucked Sadie in, she saw John grab Irene in the hallway and kiss her. And then they went to their own bedroom and she heard those sounds that at first she’d thought meant pain but had learned did not. Those were the days when Irene laughed loudly and clasped her hands under her chin at the funny things Sadie’s father said; when she hummed folding laundry and licked cake batter from her fingers with outsize relish. It was when she made homemade birthday cards for both Sadie and John, and decorated every single room of the house for Christmas—even the dog wore a little ornament on his collar. In those days, Irene used to answer the phone every afternoon around four-thirty and tell John what they needed, and sometimes she said, “Just you.”

  The plane starts to taxi, and Sadie watches the runway move past faster and faster. She always likes to watch the takeoff and the landing, not only likes to but feels she must. It’s as though she’s in charge, as though it’s her powers of concentration that will let them become safely airborne and then earthbound again at the end of the flight. It seems to her that a lot of people on planes feel the same way: she sees people attend to takeoffs and landings as gravely as she, and is often tempted to ask if they’re doing what she is. But she never does. You don’t ask some things. People hide.