Once Upon a Time, There Was You Read online

Irene turns around.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No. Well, yes. I was going to tell you at dinner, but we got off on rock climbing. I’ve … Don and I are not going to be seeing each other anymore.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. Should I be sorry?”

  “You mean, was it his idea?”

  “Well, yeah. Was it?”

  Irene leans against the doorjamb, crosses her arms. “Yes, it was. Uh-huh.”

  “But … Why?” Sadie asks. “Do you want to tell me why?”

  “I don’t know, really. He said he was getting back with his wife. But also I think it was that he just wasn’t that attracted to me. So, when you came home, I’d just asked Valerie … I just wanted her to give me an objective opinion of my body.”

  Sadie looks down.

  “I know you must have felt like … Anyway, that’s what it was. I’m sorry you had to walk in on it.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “So how’s Meghan?”

  “Good.”

  Irene stands there, smiling. She looks around Sadie’s room, at the poster of Paolo Nutini taped to her wall, the many photographs of her friends. On her dresser is a book that both John and Irene used to read to Sadie when she was a little girl; it was her favorite one. It’s called Paper Boats, and it’s a poem by an Indian writer named Rabindranath Tagore, about a little boy who writes his name and where he lives on paper boats to float down the stream, hoping that someone will find them and know who he is. Sadie sees her mother looking at the book and says, playfully, “Want me to read you a story?” and Irene says, “Not that one.”

  After she goes back to bed, she lies awake for a while, remembering how John used to read aloud to her, and she to him. It was in bed, most times, but occasionally they would do it in the living room, on the sofa, sitting side by side in their stocking feet. What a lovely thing that was. How safe it seemed, how sweet an offering. She still has never done that with anyone else. A guy she dated a couple of times asked, once. He pulled a book off his shelf and said, “Let me read something to you.”

  “May I?” Irene said and took the book from his hands. “Show me the passage. I’d rather read it myself.”

  6

  Sadie waits until she hears her mother close the door to her own bedroom. She counts to one hundred, slowly. Then she calls Ron. “Hey,” she says. “Are you asleep?”

  “Nah. Hi. What are you doing?”

  She turns onto her side, pulls the quilt up over her head. “Nothing. Just thinking of you.”

  “What a coincidence.”

  “Six more days till Saturday,” she says.

  “A little over a hundred and thirty hours.”

  “That makes it seem longer.”

  “You still feel okay about it, right?”

  “Yeah.” Mostly, she does. She doesn’t like lying to her parents. But neither would ever let her go away for a weekend with a boy, especially one they’d never met! And she doesn’t want them to meet him until … Well, she doesn’t know when. She supposes she wants them to meet him when she’s sure of him. When he’s sure of her. When nothing can threaten what feels so important to her, so vital. And so fragile.

  She looks out her window at the moon. It’s full tonight; it was beautiful in the park. They’d gone over to Golden Gate, and he’d kissed her so many times, and he’d pressed her against him closer, closer, until she’d gasped for him to stop. And he did, just like that. He sat up and smiled down at her. “You okay?” he asked, and for a moment she got almost angry at him. Why wasn’t he all … asunder? Why was he so calm and cool? Didn’t he feel any of this? He said he did, but he sure didn’t act it. There he was, breathing normally, the only sign of their fierce near coupling a bit of hair out of place at the back of his head. And she was still breathing so hard, her jeans embarrassingly (and uncomfortably) damp, and her heart beating so hard she felt sure it must be visible in her neck.

  “I feel stupid,” she said.

  And then his expression changed and he lay down beside her and turned her head so that she was facing him. “No. You’re not stupid. I feel everything you do. It’s just that I …”

  She waited, holding her breath, but he said nothing more.

  She sat up. “You what?”

  He held his arm up over his face, creating a shadow. “Whoa, that moon is bright, isn’t it? I’ve never seen it so bright, have you?”

  “What were you going to say?”

  He looked puzzled. “You mean … When?”

  She sighed, rested her forehead against her knees, and looked at the ground below her. The grass was silvery, the blades all individuated. She wished she didn’t care quite so much for him. But she did.

  He sat up then, too, and rested his palm on her back. “It isn’t time,” he said. “That’s all. You just need to trust me. Will you try to trust me?”

  “I do trust you,” she said, but she didn’t look at him.

  “Sadie?”

  Now she did turn to him, and there he was with that smile, so what could she do? She smiled back. He kissed her lightly, then stood and reached for her hand. “We need to get you back home.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I know. Me either.” But he pulled her to her feet.

  He dropped her half a block away from her house so that they wouldn’t be seen, though he watched her walk all the way to the door of her building, making sure she was safe. He was old-fashioned that way; he’d opened the car door for her until she asked him to stop. (And then, oddly, she missed him doing it.)

  She flips her pillow, turns onto her side. “Am I going to see you tomorrow?”

  “Not tomorrow.”

  “Why not?”

  “I promised I’d help my mother move some furniture around. And then I have to start packing stuff up in my room. She’s going to turn it into an office when I go to school.”

  Sadie can’t imagine this, not with the way her room has been preserved for her in her father’s house in St. Paul. She supposes she’s been expecting Irene to do the same thing with her room here. How would it feel if Irene didn’t do that, if she seemed as eager for Sadie to leave as Sadie was to go? Strange to contemplate; impossible to!

  “How about Monday, then?” Sadie asks.

  “Not Monday, either. I can’t tell you why. It’s a surprise.”

  “Really,” she says.

  “Really.”

  He does not say, “Let’s do something Tuesday,” and she’s not going to say it, either. These are the times her heart takes a nosedive, times when he says or does something that makes her think it could all go away, just like that. And then, if her parents knew about him, it would be awful. Irene would try to help, coming in and sitting at the side of bed and saying, “Do you want to talk?” and it would only make things worse. And her father. He would say, “Who was this guy?” And then he’d try to cheer her up like he used to when she lost a game.

  “Please believe me, Sadie.”

  “I do.” Only she doesn’t, not completely. Oh, it’s awful to care about someone this much.

  “Anyway,” she says. “I just wanted to say good night. And … I don’t know. Nothing. Good night.”

  “Good night.” His voice is soft, sleepy-sounding. It makes her curl her toes. Why won’t he say something about Tuesday? Is he beginning to grow tired of her?

  But now he says, “Sadie? You know those songs, those stories, that talk about how people feel they were made for each other? I feel that way about you. I feel like … I don’t know. Like we are the exact right people for each other. I don’t know why, or at least I can’t say why right now. But … Sleep with that, okay?”

  “Okay.” Now she feels better. “I guess I should hang up.” She says this in a way that she hopes will make him say, “No. Let’s talk until morning.” But he doesn’t say that. He says good night, and then he is gone.

  She holds the phone over her heart. She has just been with him, she has just talked to him after having be
en with him, but she feels bereft. She lies still for a while, watching the play of shadows against her bedroom wall, listening to the faint sounds of the traffic outside. She thinks of her father, who must be sleeping now; she imagines him in his T-shirt and pajama bottoms, and she misses him. It unfolds in her chest: she misses him. He’s a nice guy. He’s such a nice guy! He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s creative. He’s nice-looking. If her mother were to meet him now for the first time, she’d love him. The irony.

  She hears her mother’s bedroom door open, then the sounds of the toilet flushing, the water running. She thinks about her mother asking Valerie to give her an objective opinion on her body. God! She needs to stop trying so hard. Sadie could actually teach her a thing or two about men, if her mother would listen. Which she wouldn’t.

  Sadie has learned a lot of things not to do, in her efforts to help her parents. But what to do? She feels sorry for them, both of them. Sometimes she looks at her mother standing at the stove making something for dinner, and what is it that she sees? She doesn’t know, but it kills her. Her mother’s forehead wrinkled with her efforts. Her dumb apron, her socks falling down; she buys silly socks all the time, then holds them up before Sadie saying, “Aren’t these cute? Kind of funky, huh? I thought they were so cute.” Now and then Sadie still brings her mother presents, like when she was a little girl. A gift for no reason: A cupcake. A scarf. A book. And her mother is always so grateful. Too grateful, like a dog. Then Sadie gets angry that she gave her anything, yet she’ll go out and get her more.

  She looks over at the book on her dresser, the one she offered to read to her mother and her mother promptly declined. Sadie knows why. She was sorry the moment she suggested it. The memories it would bring back of the days when they were still together, and her mother didn’t need to sit scowling at the calculator when she did her taxes, when her father got to eat homemade pie at his own kitchen table instead of buying those pathetic single slices entombed in plastic.

  People are stupid. Why are they so stupid? There is an algorithm for the way humans were designed: love and be loved. Follow it and you’re happy. Fight against it and you’re not. It’s so simple, it’s hard to understand.

  Sadie closes her eyes and sees Ron’s face, his long lashes, his full mouth, the way his hair slides over one eye. His long legs, the slow way he puts his jacket on. It makes her full of a feeling that’s close to tears, a desire that is in large part frustration. Her feelings for him are so huge, so complicated, so demanding.

  “I trust you,” she whispers. Sometimes saying it makes it so.

  7

  On Monday evening, John and Amy are sitting at his kitchen table, finishing dinner. John made a chicken cacciatore of which he is not unreasonably proud (a generous pinch of cloves is the secret). At one point, Amy gestured to her own chin to let John know he had something on his, and he liked how natural the moment was between them. Amy pointed, he wiped it away: done. Say all you want to about the grand and glorious aspects of a heady romance—lengthy and poetic recitations of love, Sturm und Drang, kissing in the windswept rain—what John likes best are the small and undramatic moments that make for a kind of easy comfort, for a feeling of being grounded in a relationship. A feeling of being off duty. You show up on your first date with your best shoes on, hoping to get to a place where you keep your shoes off, is what he thinks.

  Amy takes a last bite and then folds her napkin beside her plate. “Thank you. That was delicious.”

  “You’re welcome. I’m glad you liked it.”

  “May I have the recipe?”

  You may have the cook! pops into his brain, but he doesn’t say it, of course not, it’s much too soon for such pronouncements. “I’d be glad to give you the recipe,” he says.

  “Hey. Know what happened to me today?”

  He sits back and crosses his arms, smiles. “No. What happened to you today?”

  “Well, I decided to take the bus to work instead of driving? And I got on and I sat behind this woman who started crying. She was very quiet about it, just every now and then she would reach up and wipe away a tear. She had this kerchief on her head, this ratty old flowered kerchief, but it was clean and it was tied very neatly, you know. And she had her purse on her lap and she was holding on to it like it was hands. At first nobody else seemed to notice she was crying, but then everybody around her did. And it got very quiet. And then finally this man got up from the back of the bus, and he came up and sat next to her and put his arm around her, and he didn’t say a word, he just stared straight ahead with his arm around her and she kept crying but it was better now, you could tell, she kind of had a little smile even though she was still crying. And I don’t know if he even knew her! I think everybody was wondering the same thing: Does he even know her? I guess he must have known her; otherwise she probably would have leaped up and started screaming or something, but you never know! You just never know, it might have been someone whose heart went out to her because she was crying. And he decided he would comfort her. And she let him. And I think it was a kind of miracle. A living parable or something. Plus it was so interesting! I thought, I’m going to take the bus every day! This is great! And I also thought, See? This is all it is, people need each other. And it seems like we are always our best selves when we admit ourselves to each other, our needs. I think everybody around that woman felt like cheering, we all felt great because she felt better. Of course we didn’t cheer, that would have been … Well, that would have been like one of those movies where, when you see a scene like that, you just roll your eyes and want to walk out and get more popcorn. But anyway, nobody cheered, nobody even looked directly at this couple except for this one young woman who kind of had something wrong with her and she was just staring right at them and muttering to herself. But the whole thing made me think … Well, I got this overwhelming feeling of … I don’t know. We’re all one. We really are all one.”

  John leans forward. “I see the LSD in the red sauce is kicking in.”

  Amy flushes, puts her hand to the side of her face. “Oh, God, I talked too much, didn’t I? I always talk too much. I don’t mean to, but it’s like all these thoughts start bidding for placement—pick me, pick me!—and I don’t know what to pick, and so, you know, I pick them all and then I just talk too much. And then I can’t stop, I just keep going. As you see. Although sometimes I remember that I talk too much and then I don’t say anything. Which is also bad. Though probably not as bad. Oh, look at this, logorrhea central, I’m sorry, take out my batteries.”

  He laughs, and leans over the table to kiss her forehead. “I love to hear you talk. And I know what you mean. I know exactly what you mean.” He gestures to the front porch. “Want to go out and set a spell?”

  She nods happily. “Let’s wash the dishes first.”

  “No, no; you’re the guest. I’ll do it later.”

  She hesitates, then says, “I don’t want to be the guest. I want to help you clean up. Okay?”

  “Okay.” But something shifts in him. He’s nervous, saying it, and he thinks she hears it; and then he regrets that he has altered the mood in this way.

  Together, they clean up the kitchen, she pointedly silent, now, a dish towel tucked into her skirt band. They work well together, and he feels himself beginning to relax. He likes her a lot. He really likes her. A woman who talks too much and admits it, how refreshing. And it’s nice how much she talks, it’s a welcome relief from taciturn women who maintain that cool and blaming reserve. Irene was cold like that, at the end. A few days before she left, she sat stiffly on the sofa beside him, and he asked her, “Where do you go, when you’re here?” They’d been watching Meet the Press, a show they used to enjoy, and they’d even relished the commercials because that offered them time to talk excitedly about what they’d just heard. They were aligned politically, and it reinforced their closeness to carry on together about what they saw as gross errors of the government. Toward the end, Irene no longer talked with him during the
commercials but instead continued to stare straight at the screen. They both did. They watched, with apparent interest, something in which neither of them had any interest at all. They sat unmoving, unspeaking, like mannequins, but their faces were absent even of the barely there expressions those storefront figures wore.

  On that day, when he asked her the question about where she went when she was there, she rolled her eyes and walked away, and he watched the rest of the show alone. He was aware of a familiar ache in his gut, and he realized everything in their marriage had come to either sadness or anger. He tried to think of when it all started, but he couldn’t point to a time. He tried to think of what the reason was, but there wasn’t one, really. It had just happened. It was an old story, and it had happened to them: a particular kind of erosion started, was inadequately treated, grew, and finally could not be treated.

  When John was in junior high school, he was in a play, Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. John’s role was that of Fletcher McGee, and his first lines were “She took my strength by minutes, she took my life by hours.” He was troubled by those lines, as he was by those of another character, Mabel Osborne (played by Jill Santos, a radiant brunette on whom John had a huge, hopeless crush). Mabel, speaking about a geranium planted over her grave, says, “Everyone knows that you are dying of thirst, yet they do not bring water! They pass on, saying: ‘The geranium wants water.’ ” During the weeks of rehearsal, when John heard those lines over and over, he would wonder how people once in love could come to such things. If he could just get Jill Santos to notice him, he would marry her and they would never be like that. They would be so happy, and they would have a bunch of handsome children chasing each other across the front lawn, laughing. Later, when his marriage with Irene became so completely unraveled, he understood all too well about a neglected geranium. A thing like that becomes ugly pretty quickly, and then you just want it to finish dying so you can get rid of it.

  But Amy. Another good thing about Amy is how she dislikes travel, and would not badger him about going here or there all the time. Irene did that, and it always made him feel like home with him would never be enough for her, she wanted to go to Italy, she wanted to go to Africa, she wanted to buy a summer home so they wouldn’t be here all the time. She said that last looking out the window at the backyard one rainy day, and he wanted to say, “What are you seeing when you say that, Irene? The grass that we finally got to be heaven on bare feet? The little vegetable garden with the chicken wire Sadie labored to install and then photographed, in her pride? The blueberry bush that you yourself insisted upon? The rope swing under the elm tree? Or maybe the double hammock, in which one night, while Sadie slept in her room upstairs, we crept out and made love most adroitly?” He didn’t ask her that. He did ask her why she always wanted to leave home, and she gave him a withering look and said, “People go on vacations, John. People need to go on vacations.” Well, he didn’t need to. He didn’t like to, really. All that packing and unpacking. Those awful stacks of mail upon return, the forgotten milk turned sour in the fridge. Amy was a woman who apparently shared his convictions, a woman who saw the vacation in going nowhere at all.