Days of Awe (12 page)

Chris limped in on a sunny Monday morning, the first appointment of the day. (Well, there were no windows in the office, so for all I knew the morning sun had given way to dense fog or a tornado or a dust storm; the Fraser Feldman Medical Group was a climate-controlled pod in the heart of a downtown high-rise.) He had a huge brace on his knee, his wrist was wrapped in an Ace bandage, and a large white piece of cotton gauze was taped over his right eyebrow. He was tall and sexy in a wounded way, my favorite kind. He propped himself up on my desk with one elbow and exhaled, smiled at me, and then winced.

“Wow. What the hell happened to you?” I said.

He laughed, then winced again. “It really hurts to smile.”

“Oh. Psychiatry and Mental Health are down the hall.”

He looked at me, baffled. “No, I…I have an appointment with Dr. Feldman. He's taking out my stitches.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was just kidding. Because you said, you know, that it hurts to smile, so I…” I was always doing this, cracking dumb, inscrutable jokes in the presence of handsome men. It was as if I were programmed to alienate, as if somewhere deep down I wanted to be single forever.

“Ha,” the handsome man said, shifting his weight. “My appointment is at nine. Christopher Moore.”

I nodded. The office was empty. My mother was in the back, and the doctors hadn't arrived yet. “Please have a seat,” I said. But Christopher Moore didn't move.

“I was playing basketball,” he said. “I went for a layup and took an elbow right above the eye. I went down like a bag of bricks.” I could tell he wanted me to be impressed.

“That's impressive,” I said. I thought sports were stupid, but I managed not to say that. What I did say, after an awkward silence, was “We're having a special this week, if you happen to also have syphilis. Two for one.” Then my face got so hot I could feel it turning red: a boiled tomato, a roasted pepper, a steamed, dying lobster.

“Noooo,” Chris said, scrunching up the unbandaged side of his face in confusion. “I'm good. Thanks.” Then he walked away slowly toward the rows of empty chairs.

Forty-five minutes later, as I was replaying the whole exchange for the three-hundredth time, Chris hobbled out of Dr. Feldman's office and stood in front of me. He cleared his throat. “My syphilis is cured!” he announced. A woman in the waiting area visibly flinched and stared at us. “Would you like to go out with me?”

“Daddy!” Hannah whirls into the kitchen, carrying her pillow, throws it at Chris. “Mama made teddy-bear pancakes. Do you want some? She could make you some!”
Let's be a family!

Chris pulls her into a hug and kisses her on her head, and the ease of affection between them feels like shards of glass in my chest. “She already gave me some. They were good. But we have to go, Banana. Mrs. Reinhoffer is in the car, and she's probably mad as heck by now.”

“Heck!” Hannah says. “Do you mean hell?” She grabs her backpack and Clucky. “What's she doing in the car?”

“We need to stop at the vet,” Chris says, and I notice he's not meeting anyone's eyes now. “Mrs. R is due for her shots.”

“Oh, goody! Annabelle! I love her!”

I slide the burned pancakes into the sink, run the hot pan under cold water just to hear the hiss. “Who's Annabelle?”

“Dr. Lundy. Our vet!” Hannah says. “She's so great. We love her. She's going to let me help with some of the animals, she said. Like when they come in for shots, they need someone to just pet them and keep them calm? She said I could come in and do that sometime. Right, Daddy?”

“Yep.” Chris himself looks like he could use some sedation right now. “We've got to go now, Hanners.” He looks at me over her head. “I'll be back Tuesday after school. With the part for the dishwasher. Okay? Bye.”

A few hours later, twenty minutes before Cal is supposed to arrive, I pull my robe tight and sit down with a piece of paper and a pen. I can't do this. I realized it this morning as the front door slammed behind Hannah and Chris, and the smell of burned pancakes lingered in the air. I can't. And so, dear Cal,

I set my pen down and examine the list, cock my head to blur my vision just a little, let the letters skid and slide and transform into their component blue lines and dots and squiggles before my eyes: mysterious, unintelligible.

And then, with my remaining seventeen minutes, I go upstairs, brush my teeth, and get dressed. I even put on a little makeup.

“My mother is eighty-nine,” Cal says in the car on the way to the nursing home—the assisted-living facility, as he scrupulously calls it.

“Eighty-nine is the new seventy-four,” I say, meaning it.

“For some people.” Cal taps his horn at the car in front of us, whose driver is lolling at a green light, texting. “But she's…she's eighty-nine. Anyway, thank you again. This will only take a few minutes, and you really should feel free to wait in the car. This is awkward, and there's no reason for you to—”

I cut him off by putting my hand on his knee. “Cal, it's fine. I'm happy to come in with you.” He smiles and pats my hand, then moves his back to the steering wheel. “I've always wanted to meet your mother,” I say.

“I know. I'm sorry I've kept you two apart for so long.”

When Cal walked in the door fifteen minutes ago, I could tell something was wrong. I'd come downstairs and was eagerly waiting for him in the living room, even as my own emotions left me with a feeling of psychic whiplash. But I had exorcised my demons, at least for the day, left them impotent on a scrap of paper in the kitchen, and now I was just looking forward to seeing Cal. I even briefly considered seducing him. I had a hunch it would be easy, although I had never actually seduced anyone before.

I invited him in. I thought for a second that he'd been here last night, but then I remembered we'd said goodbye outside. We walked into the living room. There were things I hadn't noticed just a few minutes ago: a bowl of soggy cereal on the side table next to the couch, a pair of Hannah's socks in a ball next to the TV. The afternoon sunlight cast a theatrical beam on a tumbleweed-sized clump of dust in the corner. “My house needs a little attention,” I said. “Don't look at anything too closely.”
Including me.

“Okay,” he said. He sat down on the edge of my favorite chair and stared at his feet, sighed softly, then looked up at me with big, sad, regret-filled eyes.

Shit,
I thought.
So soon.
Such a quick turnaround from this morning. I sympathized, though, even as I felt stung; after all, I'd composed that list. What would his excuse be?
I don't want a woman who's sixteen years younger than I am; I want one who's
thirty
years younger? I'm not looking for anyone quite so still-married?
Well, I wasn't going to let him be the one to end this…whatever it was…first. I'd salvage a scrap of dignity from the wreckage.

“Um, Cal,” I said, a little shakily. “I'm so sorry, but I'm not really up for—”

“Isabel.” He cut me off. “I spoke with my mother this morning.” He paused and glanced around the room as if he were just realizing where he was. “She's elderly. Obviously.” He smiled, or possibly winced. “We speak every morning. Today she seemed…well, she wasn't herself. She seemed a bit disoriented, or maybe just unusually sad. I tried to convince myself that she was fine and that you and I could still spend the day together. But I'm afraid I do need to go check on her.”

My system flooded with a relief-shame cocktail. I took a breath, delighted that I wasn't being rejected, then quickly adjusted my face into a sympathetic frown. “It's okay,” I said. “Of course! Some other time!”

Cal shook his head no and said, “Yes,” as if he'd suddenly confused assent with negation. He was troubled, flustered, the opposite of the calm and assured man he'd been the other two times I'd met him. The sands shifted; my perception of him altered in ways I couldn't figure. I felt my chest click open one tiny notch. And then I offered to come along.

My hand is still on his knee in the car, which I realize, too late, was a poorly planned gesture. What will I do, just keep it here until we get to the nursing home? In fact, I have no idea where we're going. What if it's forty-five minutes away? What if it's in Detroit? Maybe I'll just leave my hand here forever, deadweight, heavy and growing increasingly sweaty, on Cal's sharp knee. Finally, desperate, I snatch it away, pretend to cough and cover my mouth.

After a few minutes of silence, during which I contemplate what a mistake it is for me to ever leave the house, we finally pull into the parking structure of Lutheran Manor, Assisted Living for Seniors.

“We have arrived at
Lyootheran Manor
!” I announce in an English accent, and luckily Cal laughs. It's a beige, defiantly bland rectangle of a building, pocked with tiny windows. If you didn't know better, the Manor could be a plain old apartment building built in the 1960s, a brick-and-concrete fortress against whimsy.

We drive down into the bowels of the parking structure. “The Manor is very charming, isn't it?” Cal says, as he pulls into a space next to a pillar.

“Rather.”

Cal walks around the car and opens the door for me, just like nobody ever used to do. “This will be more fun,” he says, “than a colonoscopy.”

Chris introduced me to his parents for the first time on his mother's sixtieth birthday. Chris and I were newly in love, and my heart was wide-open. His parents were hosting a party at their country club. When we arrived, the champagne had been flowing for quite a while.

“Isabel!” Chris's mother flung her bony arms around me. “Isabel Applebaum! Christopher has told us sooooooo much about you.” As a result of vigilant, military-style maintenance and the diet of a squirrel in February, Ginny Moore is the size of a sapling. Her hug was like being poked by the spokes of a broken umbrella. “Your name sounds like a poem! IZZZZabellll APPLEbaum!” She trilled it.
“It's dactylic!”
she whispered, and kissed me on the cheek with an actual
mwaaah,
then moved on to hug Chris, who looked like he was being asked for directions to Neptune.

Chris's father, a tall, graceful man with a crinkly Robert Redford grin, handed me a party hat and blew a festive paper horn in my face.

I laughed and looked around the Lakeshore Country Club party room, at the sprays of white roses and lavender irises and the beautiful tables and the slim, bejeweled ladies draped lightly on the arms of their portly men, and I felt weightless, free. These were people who drank champagne and told stories about golfing. Did they carry burdens? Probably. But did those burdens involve the lingering, inherited terror of imminent loss? I felt certain they did not.

Chris had told me that his parents were snobbish and reserved, inaccessible, emotionally hobbled by their devotion to complicated rules of propriety. But none of that restraint was in evidence at Ginny's party. Chris's mother touched my arm, and his father brought me a glass of white wine, and I could practically see our loving connection arcing across the divide.
That Isabel,
they would say to Chris later.
She's one of us!
That was the moment I decided that if Chris and I got married, I would take his name. It wasn't that I thought that changing my last name would erase the murky, old-world echoes of disruption and loss; I wasn't deluded. It was the sound of it, the way it seemed that Chris's last name could round out my edges, smooth me down to a polished gem. Isabel Moore. I was through being dactylic.

But Chris was right, of course. That day was just a tipsy aberration. As it turns out, Ginny and Edward Moore might as well be extras from the cast of
Ordinary People.
They skulk about their well-appointed home in suburban Chicago in brooding silence. You can go a whole weekend with them, and the only sounds you'll hear are the wingbeats of magazine pages and the clink of ice in their glasses.

In the fifteen years since that party, the most effusive I've ever seen Ed and Ginny was when Chris and I told them we were getting married. We were staying with them over Memorial Day weekend and had just finished a very light lunch on their deck. I was fantasizing about bread when Chris broke the news.

“Ah, well done,” Ed said quietly, and popped out of his seat to get a bottle of champagne, while Ginny raised her wineglass and said, “Hear, hear!” Later that day I overheard Ginny stage-whisper to Chris, “It's just that we always pictured you with someone more…
athletic.
”

All of this slides through me now, a decade and a half of ambivalent connection to Chris's family, the pinpricks and knife wounds that eventually became, through some benevolent, gravitational pull, hilarious: How Ed wandered away in the middle of toasting us at our wedding. That they sent Hannah a fruit basket for her fifth birthday. How Ginny insists on things about me that aren't true:
You don't like the theater! You're allergic to mascara! You never eat cheese at night!
These stories, repeated, were threads that wove Chris and me together.

The thought of having to accumulate a new history with someone makes me feel uneven, as if my legs are two different lengths. I take a deep breath of stale air and steady myself for a second against a Honda Civic. Just when I think I've dug down as far as I can go, a new layer appears, silty sediment underneath the rock.

“I should tell you something about my mother,” Cal says, pressing the elevator button in the parking garage. “She's…opinionated.”

I picture a frail old lady in a magenta tracksuit, ranting about the Democrats. “Noted,” I say. “I promise not to start a kerfuffle with her.”

Cal doesn't bounce anything back to me. He just nods, and I feel foolish and a little chastised. How is it that, at forty-three, I still can't read the room? We're inside the overheated building now, walking down a carpeted hallway that smells like macaroni and disinfectant. It's long and wide, with rubber bumpers on the sides, like a bowling alley at a child's birthday party. I have the urge to stop in my tracks and pivot, to head straight back down the hall and out the broad, pneumatic door through which we entered.

But Cal reaches for my hand instead. “ ‘Opinionated' may be the wrong word, actually. She's…she can be kind of hateful. I probably should have warned you earlier, but honestly, I didn't think you'd need to know quite so soon.”

We pass the dining room, empty; the TV room, where seven or eight people sit in wheelchairs in front of a game show; and the recreation lounge, which is decorated to the hilt with blue and green streamers and balloons and a huge banner strung across the wall,
HAPPY 95TH BIRTHDAY, BETTY
!
The lounge, like the dining room, is completely empty, a ghost ship.

We take the elevator up to the fourth floor, where, Cal explains, the more independent residents live in small apartments until they're unable to live on their own. It's like the day-care center Hannah went to when she was two: children progressed from classroom to classroom as they got older, from the Bunny Room to the Dolphin Room to the Penguin Room. This is just like that, except not at all.