Once Upon a Time, There Was You Page 4

  “Headed home?” the man next to her asks.

  Sadie holds up a finger. “Just a second.” The ground blurs, there is the scooplike lift upward, and then everything below turns miniature. It always brings a feeling of peace to Sadie, that sudden detachment, that sense of no going back now. Done. Decided.

  As she looks down, she honors another ritual and searches for her father’s house. She never finds it, but she always looks for it just the same. She doesn’t know why; seeing it would only make her sadder. There would be the roof of his house, his sidewalk and backyard and car in the driveway, and then would come an image of him, missing her. Sitting out on the front porch steps, maybe, leaning back with his elbows supporting him, his long legs stretched out before him, calling hello to everyone who passed by. Or down at the nearby park, where he liked to watch the little kids play T-ball.

  Last night, while they were sitting out on the porch, he told Sadie that he’d been approached again about coaching, but he didn’t think he could deal with the parents. “Shouldn’t allow them anywhere near the field,” he said. “All they do is ruin the game with their big fat egos.”

  “You used to come to my games,” Sadie said. And he said, “Yeah. Where I sat and watched you play and kept my mouth shut.”

  “Except when I scored,” Sadie said, and he laughed and said, “Right. Except when you scored.” He looked at her then and his face changed and he said, “I used to love watching you play.” She wondered if he was thinking of her mother then, too, missing her, maybe; but of course she didn’t ask him that. She couldn’t ask him that. She’d tried once, when she was around ten years old; she’d asked him if he missed Irene, and he’d shrugged and said, “Ah, well, you know,” and then changed the subject. And she’d understood that if he’d answered yes, she’d have felt terrible. If he’d answered no, she’d have felt terrible. And if he’d been noncommittal, suggesting he rarely thought about Irene at all, she’d have been devastated.

  As the plane rises higher, she looks to the west to see if she can find the lake two blocks from her father’s house where he used to walk Festus every day and where he taught her to do the breast-stroke and the sidestroke and the backstroke all in one day, then rewarded her with a triple ice cream cone, most of which Festus ate because she dropped it. Her dad offered to replace it, but Sadie refused, saying it wouldn’t be the same, and she was full, anyway.

  “What are you looking for?” her seatmate asks.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Nothing.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to ask you to cease all conversation and put down your reading materials,” the flight attendant says, and Sadie sits still, waiting, her pain and therefore her want growing more intense. Her knee starts to jiggle and she makes it stop. She’ll get the Bloody Mary mix. He’ll get the vodka. In the unlikely event that he doesn’t get it for her, she’ll cease all conversation, put away her reading materials, and sleep.

  4

  It was at the end of June that his friend Stuart had urged John to go to a divorced parents group. They’d been out at O’Gara’s, watching the Twins screw up a close game against the White Sox on the big-screen TV. After the game was over and they’d finished the postmortem, Stuart told John that his wife, Angie, had suggested the group for John—she’d read some story in the paper about it. “Right away, you’d have something in common with all those people,” Stuart said. “You could make some friends, maybe even find another woman. And you want a divorcée, you don’t want a widow or someone who’s never been married. If you get a widow, she’s always going to be mooning over her husband. If you get someone over forty who’s never been married, you’re looking at a whole world of trouble.”

  “I almost didn’t get married,” John said, and Stuart lowered his chin and looked over his glasses at his friend.

  “What, you think I’ve got problems?” John asked.

  “Aw hell, who doesn’t have problems.” Stuart signaled to the bartender that he was ready for the check. Then he said, “Listen, I don’t want to make you feel bad, but you’re getting a little weird. I mean, I’ll bet you walk around talking to yourself.”

  “You don’t talk to yourself?”

  “Not as much as you do. You talk to yourself way too much.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Silence.

  “Hey,” Stuart said. “Don’t think I’m … I’m just saying I think people are meant to be with people. You suffer in a marriage; but alone, you suffer more. Did you ever read that Mark Twain book Extracts from Adam’s Diary? Adam thought Eve was a real pain in the ass, talking too much, looking at her reflection in the pond all the time, getting them expelled from Paradise, for Christ’s sake! But what he said at the end was that he was better off living outside the Garden with Eve than inside it without her.”

  John said nothing, took a last pull on his beer. It occurred to him to say that Adam didn’t have ESPN, but he got the point. He got it.

  “I think you should give it another shot, that’s all. Go to this group and just sit there and listen. If nothing else you hear some stories other than your own. Maybe you meet somebody to have a meal with, to bounce ideas off of.”

  “That’s what you’re for.”

  Stuart put his coat on, turned up the collar. “Yeah. But I can’t be the one to do it all the time. You know? You need more than me.”

  For so many years, Stuart had been filling in the gaps, propping him up, and John supposed Angie had grown tired of it. So he agreed to find such a group, and Stuart told him there was one meeting the next night, at a Unitarian church not four blocks from him. John knew the building—he’d often admired the architecture.

  “How do you know about that meeting?” John asked, and Stuart shrugged. Meaning, John realized, that Angie had found it because they’d been talking about him. Poor John. Gotta do something about John. It was embarrassing, like someone telling you far too long after the fact that your zipper was open.

  At ten of seven the next evening, John was in the dimly lit basement of the church, searching for the right room. There were a number of things going on, including a cooking class that was filling the hall with the scent of chocolate. He’d taken some care dressing, finally settling on a casual look: white shirt, jeans, black sneakers. A khaki jacket against a light rain. After he arrived at the church, he’d gone into the bathroom for a leak but also to make sure his cowlick was down. Then he came out and walked slowly down the hall. He stopped to read some of the notices on a bulletin board: he didn’t want to be the first one in. He was intrigued by an ad featuring a photo of a well-preserved Karmann Ghia, and even wrote down the email address; maybe he’d go and have a look at it, even though it was a god-awful yellow. He saw ads for volunteering at a walk-in ministry, a room for rent with kitchen privileges, classes in Japanese. There was a flyer for a stay at a monastery, but he figured his own life lately was close enough to that.

  He wondered what he’d talk about in this group. What were the things divorced people talked about? How they and their exes came together? How they came apart? How the children suffered, despite their best intentions and no matter what their ages?

  The first time Sadie stayed with him for her week in August, when she was eight, she got out of bed in the middle of the night and stood before him until he woke up. “What happened?” he said, and she said, “Nothing.”

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He sat up. When he reached for the light, she said, “Don’t turn it on. I’m going right back to bed. I just wanted to come in and see you.”

  “Well, I’m glad you did. But should I turn on the light, and we can go downstairs to the kitchen and have a chat? Share an orange?”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “Happy to do it. Or …” He wasn’t sure about this, but he asked anyway. “Do you … Would you like to come in bed with me for a while?”

  “No,” she sai
d. “I’m too old. I just wanted to see you. We can talk in the morning. Good night.”

  She went back to bed. He checked on her about fifteen minutes later: sound asleep. He stayed awake until four-thirty, then got up to make coffee and sit on the front porch, waiting for the sunrise.

  Then there was the time Sadie was two and wearing her white patent leather shoes, which she had loved. She’d stepped into mud and then looked up at him, dismayed. The ease with which he could fix this problem suddenly juxtaposed itself against the fact that it would not always be so. The world would break Sadie’s heart and try her soul, whether she deserved it or not, because she was of the species Homo sapiens, a bipedal primate living most definitely outside the Garden, and nothing he did could protect her from that. And the realization had gotten to him. Later that night, after Sadie was in bed, he’d told Irene about it. She’d sighed and said softly, “I know. Sometimes I just look at the size of her sweaters, and it kills me what she’s headed for. It isn’t fair. And I know life isn’t fair. But it isn’t fair.”

  He wouldn’t tell either of those stories. He wouldn’t say anything, unless he had to, and then he’d keep it neutral. “Just here seeing if I can learn something,” he’d say. And it would be in a friendly, low-key way that suggested he was not desperate, only curious.

  The next time he looked at his watch, it was six minutes after, and he started walking quickly down the hall—if he recalled correctly, the room was just two doors away. A woman rushed past him to go into a classroom where there was a circle of about fifteen folding chairs occupied by mostly middle-aged people, more women than men. Here goes, he thought, and followed the woman in.

  She turned out to be Amy Becker, a blonde with a charmingly off-kilter smile. He was instantly attracted to her, wildly attracted, in fact, in a way that both surprised and invigorated him. She had brown eyes, and he loved that combination, a blonde with brown eyes: Angie Dickinson, who didn’t love that combination? She wore very little makeup, if any. She was younger than he, he thought, but not that much younger. She had a nice figure, and was dressed in a flowered skirt and a simple white blouse, pearl studs. She wore red, low-heeled shoes, which the woman she sat next to complimented her on, saying, “Oh, look at the flower!” He heard Amy say, “Thanks. I just got these and I was worried that the flower was silly. But then I thought, well, even if it’s silly, that’s okay. Silly is fun. Especially on shoes. And hats, of course. So I bought them. Actually, I bought two pairs. The other pair is green, the most beautiful green, like grass.” John looked down, smiled to himself. He liked women who put on inadvertent little shows like this. It was something that had initially attracted him to Irene; she could be very much like this woman seemed to be.

  Amy pushed one side of her longish hair back behind her ear, took in a breath, and looked around the group. She froze for a moment when she got to John, and he figured it could be because he was new, but he hoped it was because she found him attractive, too.

  “Okay, last call,” a man, obviously the leader of the group, said. “I’d like to invite you all to help yourself to something to eat or drink before we get started—we’ve got refreshments tonight courtesy of Mike Stroger.” A thin, fast-talking man with an overly prominent Adam’s apple and what appeared to be recent hair plugs said, “Yeah, my ten-year-old daughter made those; she was all proud and wanted me to bring them.” John joined a few others at the small table against the wall and grabbed a cup of coffee and a chocolate chip cookie, bit into it, and took one more. He got back into the circle just in time for the introductions. He was positioned to be the last to speak, and he was glad, especially when he found out that he’d accidentally gone into the room not for divorced parents but for bereaved spouses.

  “I’m John Marsh,” he said, when it was his turn to speak. “This is my first time here, and I guess what I’d like to do is just mainly listen.” He hung his head a little in the way he thought a recently bereaved man might. He told himself that he would just listen, then never come back to the group again. He also told himself that he’d invite Amy to coffee afterward and immediately confess his error.

  He did one of the three: the third time he went to the meeting, he invited Amy to have coffee with him afterward, and she said yes, conditionally. “I’d love to, but let’s not get coffee. Let’s get a drink at Frost’s; and let’s avoid saying one word about our spouses or grieving or death. Let’s leave all that for the group.”

  “Okay!” he said.

  What they did talk about was gardening. Amy had a big vegetable garden, and John volunteered to help her care for it—he told her he liked working in the dirt, as he did.

  “Do you mind worms?” Amy asked, shuddering a little, and John said, “No, worms? I like worms. I’ve got a worm for a roommate.” Amy laughed and said she wished she didn’t mind them, she knew their worth for aerating and hydrating and fertilizing the soil, but they had creeped her out ever since some kid in grade school had chased her with a whole bunch of worms hanging from a stick.

  “Well, yeah. Because he liked you, right?” John said.

  She nodded.

  “I once beaned a girl with a snowball so hard, I knocked her down. I was nuts about her.”

  They talked about dogs, because each of them was contemplating getting one. They talked about Amy’s job as a producer for an afternoon show at WCCO. Then they moved on to his job, and his ideas about what architecture really was, how he wanted to focus on building beautiful things that would last, and Amy watched him talk, her chin in her hand, smiling. Then they decided to move from the bar into the dining room for some dinner, and he thought, This is going well, and then damned if she didn’t say that very thing. She looked over at him, her head tilted, a little smile on her face, and she said, “Well! This is going well.”

  “I was just thinking that,” he said, and the happiness he felt at that moment was something that … what? Unloosened him. That’s how he’d put it. If he were to say it. Which he wouldn’t. He was more of a snowball man.

  And then, after the fifth meeting, she came home with him. She took off her blue dress in the dim light of the bedside lamp, and she sighed so sweetly when he entered her, he nearly wept. Her innocence. His deceit. How to make it right. And something else. The same feeling that had plagued him the last few times he’d had sex, that ineffable sadness. For a while, he wondered if he was just coming to terms with getting older, if he wasn’t feeling some bittersweetness in making love because the writing was on the wall in terms of how much longer he’d be able to land the dart on the board. No more beating on this breast, pounding out his invincibility. No, the time had come when he was paying reluctant attention to the ads featuring silver-haired couples soaking in hot tubs together, smiling their triumphant little smiles. But this particular sadness wasn’t about being past his prime, about preparing himself to offer embarrassed excuses to some flush-faced woman who would say it was okay, it didn’t matter, no, really. He didn’t know what the hell it was, but it wasn’t that.

  He pulls into a gas station. He’s lucky he and Sadie made it to the airport; he hadn’t realized the tank was so low. Irene never let the tank get lower than one third full, which was ridiculous, but it did prevent them from ever running into trouble. Gas-wise, anyway. While he watches the numbers click higher and higher, he decides his deception has gone far enough. He’ll call Amy and ask her over tonight, and he’ll tell her the truth. He hopes she’ll still want to see him. If not, well, there’s always the group he was meant to go to in the first place. Or he can go back to the ease of solitude. It’s really not so bad, being alone, never worrying about what has to be done for, or with, or in the interest of another. It’s like you let your mind stay in its pajamas all day. What’s wrong with that? The only one he really has to answer to, the only one he owes anything to, is Sadie. Although, as she is fond of reminding him on a nearly daily basis, she can take care of herself.

  5

  “No,” Irene says. “I don’t
care what your father says. Your father is not your primary caretaker. I am your primary caretaker, and I do not feel it is safe for you to go unchaperoned with a bunch of kids to spend a whole weekend rock climbing.”

  Sadie draws lines with her chopsticks through the black bean sauce left puddled on her plate. “What are you so afraid of?” There is a half smile on her face that does little to mask her frustration.

  “Oh, boy. Where to start?” Irene cracks open a fortune cookie, unfolds the slip of paper, and reads aloud: “Grace falls from unexpected place. Hmm. Plus how to say ‘thank you’ in Chinese: x-i-e, x-i-e. How do you pronounce that, I wonder.”

  “I’m really good at climbing, Mom. And I’ll be with even more experienced climbers. I’m not an idiot. I won’t do anything risky.”

  Irene sits back in her chair, exasperated. “I just don’t understand this sudden desire to spend so much time climbing! Why do you need to go and hang off the side of a rock? Isn’t life dangerous enough?”

  Sadie raises an eyebrow, stares directly at her. Irene knows that now she has said too much. Now she’s moved from what might be seen as reasonable concern into her own neuroses, a bad habit of hers. Why should she make her naturally athletic and incredibly responsible daughter a victim of her own multifarious fears? Just because Irene would never go rock climbing doesn’t mean Sadie shouldn’t.

  An hour before Sadie landed, John had called, ostensibly to brief Irene about his and Sadie’s time together, to offer his usual glowing assessment of their daughter, the one thing they still had in common. But he’d also made a case for Irene letting up on Sadie, and Irene knew he was right. Sadie will be leaving home very soon, going off to live in a dorm at college, and, rather than getting used to the idea of her daughter’s independence from her, Irene realizes she is resisting it more and more. “For everything, there is a season,” Valerie had told her recently, and Irene had said, “Yeah, well, how do you know for sure what the season is?”