Dating Big Bird (11 page)

“I wish—I just wish we could—”

“I know,” he whispered again. “I’m sorry.”

“Is it me?” I asked, which is what I always asked at moments like this.

“It’s not you.” He let out a heavy breath. “It’s not you.”

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t know.”

I considered asking again if he would go to see someone—a shrink, a therapist—someone we could see together—who could help him untie the knot that was strangling him—or even if he would go back to his psychopharmacologist who could try to switch him to a different antidepressant—but that had never really worked.
He’d only say maybe, and later, days later or weeks later, it would become clear that he hadn’t made any calls, and then the subject would again be dropped.

I put my head on his shoulder and then turned my face into his neck, to where his tie would have been if he hadn’t ripped it from his collar the second he’d gotten home the way he always did. He smelled like soap and clean laundry and garlic and onions, and I closed my eyes again, feeling my eyelashes blink against his throat, and I wished we were just a normal couple—just two normal people sharing a normal moment together before dinner.

“This can’t be good for you,” he said quietly.

I lifted my head and looked into his eyes.

“You should be with someone else. Someone younger. Less complicated. Less damaged. You shouldn’t be wasting your time with someone like me.”

“But I don’t want someone else,” I said. “I want you.”

“I don’t give you anything.”

“Yes, you do.” I thought of the comfort and safety and closeness I’d felt with him and that I’d come to need and to rely on so much the past year. The possibility I might lose even that terrified me. “You
do
.”

“I don’t give you the important things. I can’t,” he said, “give you the other things. Things you need, things you want. Things you deserve to have.”

I wiped my eyes again. “It’s okay,” I whispered, though I knew better. I knew this relationship, as it was, wasn’t good for me, and I knew, once again, that I was rationalizing the lack of our physical intimacy.

“No. It’s not okay. You should want those things. A young attractive woman should be touched. Should have an intimate relationship. Don’t extinguish those parts of yourself like I have. They’re too important. Too precious. And once they’re gone, they’re gone for good.”

I pulled at his arms under his shirt cuffs. “But we could try,” I said. “I could help you.”

He shook his head.

“I could,” I said. “I could bring you back.”

He shook his head again. “People don’t come back from where I’ve been.”

“Yes, they do. If they want to, they do.” I stared at him, wishing my eyes could bore holes in him, tunnels through which my words could enter his body and take root. “Don’t you want to? Don’t you want to try?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s anything left of me. I don’t know if I have the courage. Or the strength.”

“But I’ll help you,” I said, raw pleading in my voice. “I’ll
help
you.”

He met my eyes, and when he did, I could see the defeat give way slowly to confusion, then bafflement, and then to something else—hope? trust?—that I’d never seen in him before.

“But why?” he said. “Why would you even want to?”

“Because.”

“Because why?” His hands tightened their grip on my arms, and it felt almost like he might shake the answer out of me.

“Because—I love you.”

The words came out before I could stop them, before I even knew they were there, as if a bright light had been turned on in a dark room and made them visible. I had never said those words first, had never been willing to risk so much up front, but now that I had, I felt brave suddenly, and alive—as if the sheer power of truth and will and faith could save us both.

“How can you love me?” he whispered.

I shrugged. “I just do.”

“But why?”

“Because I believe in you. Because I believe you’re still in there.”

Pain and disbelief and relief laced through the lines of his face. “How can you love someone who might not exist? How can you believe in something you’ve never seen?” He put his hands gently on either side of my face and held them there. “How can you be so unafraid?”

“So unafraid of what?”

He searched my eyes for the word. “Of disappointment.”

“Because I want this to work. You’re different from anyone I’ve ever known. You have grit—sheer grit—to have survived everything you’ve survived. And because of that—because you understand pain—I trust you. More than I’ve trusted any man.”

“But I can’t promise you anything. I don’t know how long it will take for me to get better. And I don’t even know if—I can’t guarantee that I’ll ever get better.” He paused. “That way.”

“I think you will.”

“What if I don’t, though? You’ll have wasted your time for nothing.”

“I’m willing to take that chance. I’ll wait, if you want me to.”

He leaned his forehead against mine and clenched his jaw.

“Yes. Wait for me,” he finally answered. “Please wait for me.”

Late the following Thursday night, my parents called. Thanksgiving was in two weeks and they were packing for the trip up to Maine, where we were all meeting to spend the holiday together. But they were also packing for an Elderhostel in the Berkshires, to which they were going straight from Lynn’s. Packing for one trip was bad enough, but packing for two—one immediately following the other in two similar but slightly different climates without time to go home first and unpack before repacking!—was unheard of. I could just imagine my father’s flow charts and clipboards and checklists (he’d been a mechanical engineer before retiring) and my mother’s increasing fear that four suitcases would not be enough (she’d grown up in the Depression).

“I can’t believe you’re going to another Elderhostel,” I said. “I feel like you just came back from one.”

“We didn’t just come back,” my mother said. “We came back in October.”

“Over a month ago,” my father added.

I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. They were in stereo, on the speakerphone, talking way too loud as usual. “It just seems kind of excessive.”

“It’s not excessive. We like to learn.”

“We’re active people. Just because we’re retired doesn’t mean we—”

“Have no interest in learning.”

“I think it’s great that you like to learn. But maybe you could learn someplace closer to home. You know, so you wouldn’t have to keep traveling. And packing.”

And torturing me
.

“But we like to travel. And packing isn’t such an ordeal.”

“We’re getting it down to a science.”

I laughed out loud. “Have you broken the four-suitcase barrier yet?”

“We’re going to try to get away with three this trip,” my mother said with pride.

Through the receiver I heard papers rustling and my father moving around. “Well, not if you count the presents for Nicole. And the carry-on shoulder bags we keep in the backseat. And the shoes that won’t fit in the—”

“Don’t be so technical.”

“I wasn’t being technical, I was trying to be honest.”

Whatever.

“Anyway, what’s the educational focus of this Elderhostel?”

“Jewish music,” my mother said.

“Jewish music again?”

What was so endlessly fascinating about klezmer music that could sustain studying it for an entire week?

“What do you mean, ‘again’?”

“Didn’t you just go to one on Jewish music?”

“No. The last one was on Jewish literature.”

“And the one before that was on Jewish films?”

“Israeli films,” my mother corrected.

It was all starting to come back to me. The literature trip was in northern California in the fall; the film trip had been in Miami in June. How could I ever forget the endless summer/autumn weather-related questions; the climate questions; the casual-versus-dressy questions? I couldn’t help wondering whether their constant Elderhosteling would be less annoying to me if they studied some subject unmodified by the adjective
Jewish
, but I doubted it. They’d still need to know what to pack for an ashram.

It didn’t take long for me to dispense with this trip’s winter-related and general clothing dilemmas (“Yes to the L.L. Bean wool-lined field coats
and
to the down parkas”; “No to the two separate dressy outfits, since you probably won’t even wear the one”; “Only one pair of Rockport walking shoes each”). But that was a mixed blessing. Being done with them only meant they could focus on me. Which I dreaded.

My father got off the phone, and then it was just my mother and me, now.

“So?” she asked.

“So … what?”

“So … what’s new?”

“New? Nothing’s new.”

Nothing was ever new.

“
Nothing’s
new?”

No man? No marriage proposal? No plans for the future?

“That’s right.”

And when something is new, you’ll be the first to know.

“Oh.”

“You sound disappointed.” I knew she was just curious, just trying to figure out if I was happy or not, the way any other mother would—but I couldn’t help being defensive. There was always some sort of judgment in her questions—or
maybe I only heard it that way—and I was tired of always feeling like I had to justify myself and my life to her. It was something I’d felt compelled to do ever since I was a child, and I’d never outgrown it. If I ever had children of my own, I vowed I would never make them feel judged. How predictable.

“I’m not disappointed. I’m just wondering if we’re ever going to meet your friend.”

“What friend?”

“Malcolm.”

Malcolm?

“Now’s not a very good time.”

“Will there ever be a good time?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, you’ve been seeing him for a while now, and we still haven’t met him. We were just thinking that it would be nice if he came for Thanksgiving, that’s all.”

“Yes, it would be nice.” And I had to admit, I would have loved for him to meet my sister and my Pickle.

“So will you ask him?”

“Sure, I’ll ask him.”

But I didn’t have to. I knew he wouldn’t come.

Like every other normal person in the world, Amy was dreading the holidays. Since I was too, especially after the previous evening’s conversation with my parents, we felt we needed to talk each other down off of our respective ledges. Friday night after work, she came over to my apartment, and we ordered dinner in. When our sushi arrived, we sat on the floor in the living room on opposite sides of the coffee table and ate like pigs.

“I hate them,” she said.

“I know. Me, too.”

“Does anyone like them?”

“I don’t know. Probably not.”

“There must be some people, somewhere, who like them.”

“You think?” I went into the kitchen and returned with a flask of sake I’d heated up and two small ceramic cups.

“There has to be. People who are normal. Who aren’t depressed. People for whom Thanksgiving and Christmas are just pleasant painless meals to be shared with family.”

“You mean, like people for whom a cigar is just a cigar?”

“And a holiday is just a holiday.”

I tried to picture who would fit her description, but I kept coming up with the same visual: Teletubby-type aliens with those metal antennae on springy metal coils attached to their heads.

Amy eyeballed me, as if she were waiting for an actual answer. “Maybe people in the South like the holidays. Or people in the Midwest.”

“People who wear fleece, you mean.”

“Don’t start in on that again.”

“Sorry.”

“I’m serious. I mean, why can’t we be like that?”

“Be like what?”

“The kind of people who like holidays.”

The same visual as before appeared in my mind—only this time she and I were the Teletubby aliens with the boinging antennae. “Because we’re not.”

“But why can’t we be?”

“Because. We’re not wired like that. We’re too …”

“Too what?”

“Too
complex
,” I said, heavy on the sarcasm.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes I think that’s bullshit. Like we just overcomplicate everything.”

“You mean, that we choose to be miserable?”

“Yes. And that we could, just as easily, choose not to be miserable.”

I thought a minute. “Positivity,” I said, feeling quite clever about having thought of this new word, “instead of negativity.”

“Exactly. Positivity.”

I moved my empty containers away and pushed back from the coffee table to lean up against the couch. “Well, feel free to pursue positivity if you want to, but I’m going to stick with negativity. It’s worked just fine for me so far.”

“No, it hasn’t.”

“Yes, it has.”

“What’s it gotten you?”

“Who says I’ve wanted anything?”

She looked away, and when she did, I knew it was time for me to ask her what this whole preamble was leading up to.

“I’m just dreading going to Chicago to meet Will’s family.”

“So why are you going?”

“Because he invited me. And because I’m supposed to be grateful that after a year and a half, he’s finally letting me meet them. Or letting them meet me. At least you don’t have to deal with this shit.”