Happiness for Beginners (9 page)

“You're beautiful,” he said.

But I wasn't having it. I felt a burning anger roar through me. I turned around and pointed at him. “Shut up, right now! This whole thing is fucked up, and the whole point of coming here was to get
un
-fucked up. So unless you can explain to me what's going on—in simple words that a non-Scrabble champion can understand—we are done, and I mean really done, like I don't want you even talking to me.”

He looked down. I couldn't read his expression. He looked … I don't know: anxious. Or nervous. Or overwhelmed. He stared at nothing for several minutes.

“Well?” I demanded at last. “Can you?”

He met my eyes then, but he didn't say anything.

I waited as long as a self-respecting person can wait. “Okay,” I said at last. “That's it, then.” I could feel the disappointment on my face, and that just made it worse. “I hope you and Duncan get a good laugh when you tell him.”

“It's not like that,” he said. “I'll never tell Duncan about this.”

I didn't know what to do with the sadness in his voice, or the way his shoulders seemed to slump forward like his heart had been scooped out. I didn't know what to do with any of it. So I did the only thing I could think of.

“Please get off my bed,” I said in my meanest big-sister voice. “I am going the hell to sleep.”

 

Chapter 6

After that, I ignored him.

I ignored him while we slept. I ignored him as the phone rang its wake-up call. I ignored him as we brushed our teeth, checked out, and walked to the car. I ignored the hell out of him—like the tough guy I was trying to become.

It was a bright morning, and Jake offered to drive. I sat at the farthest edge of the passenger seat and leaned my head against the window. I wedged earbuds into my ears and then, even though my iPod wasn't charged, I pretended to listen to music for the next four hours as we left the motel—and civilization itself—farther behind.

Now I knew what I was dealing with. Jake only wanted me when he couldn't have me. That was a genre of man: the “I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me for a member” genre.

I knew that type.

All those years with Mike, he only loved me when I was mad. Or distracted. Or busy. He loved to
chase,
but the minute I let him
capture,
he suddenly felt smothered. I learned early on that I had to keep running to keep him interested. But after a while I got tired of running. After a while, I just wanted to be caught.

When we first met, I wasn't sure if I was interested. But Mike pulled out all the stops: flowers, dinners, love letters. After a while, I was hooked. But just about the time I'd start hoping he'd call, he'd stop calling. It was like he sensed it. Once I realized he was losing interest, I'd make a point to busy myself—with projects and friends, and sometimes other dates. But as soon as I'd manage to move him to the back burner, he'd call more often.

Of course, there were many times in between extremes when we got along great. It's just that everything we did took place within this bigger pattern, and it took me a long time to spot it. Once I did, it took me even longer to stop trying to change it. Or demanding that he change it. Or hoping a marriage counselor would change it. But some things about people just don't change. As much as I knew intellectually that it was his problem, I'd never been able to shake the feeling that there must be something wrong with me.

Was I overwhelming? Or too emotional? Or too needy? I'd never thought of myself that way before, but I guess who you are always seems normal to you because you don't know what it feels like to be anyone else.

I could see the mountains in the distance as Jake kept driving. They really did look purple, and I wondered what trick of physics made that happen. It had been an act of bravery, really, to let Jake catch me last night. In all my recent experience, being caught meant being left.

Yet, here it was, the morning after, and the facts seemed pretty plain. Jake had chased me, caught me, then looked around, wrinkled his nose, and said, “Actually, you know what? Never mind.” Either I was, in actual fact, too much, or something about me attracted men who only wanted too little.

Who knew?

Who cared?

Three years of marriage counseling had taught me that this particular issue was not a resolvable one. It was lucky—
lucky, dammit
—that Jake had hit the brakes. It was one less thing to struggle with. One less thing to regret. I should be thanking him for stopping us. But I didn't feel like thanking him. I felt like punishing him for getting us started in the first place.

That was the whole morning's car ride.

By the time we pulled up to the historic wood-and-stone hunting lodge that served as the headquarters for the Back Country Survival Company, I had erected a pretty solid imaginary wall between us.

As he yanked up the parking brake, I turned toward him.

“Hey—” I said. My first word in four hours.

“Yeah?”

“Do me a favor, okay?”

He met my eyes. “Of course.”

“We don't know each other.”

“We don't?”

“We did not drive here together.”

“We didn't?”

“And you have never stuck your tongue in my mouth.”

He took that in. “That's harsh.”

“I'm trying to do something important here,” I said. “This is not a joke to me.”

“It's not a joke to me, either.”

“I came on this trip for a reason, and it wasn't to mess around with my little brother's goofy friend.”

He tilted his head like that smarted a bit. “Okay.”

“Whatever that was yesterday, it doesn't matter.” I was frustrated that four straight hours of pretending not to give a damn hadn't worked better. I wanted so badly not to feel humiliated. And rejected. And pathetic. I'd had enough of those feelings to last a lifetime. I was supposed to be turning myself into a badass superhero—not a sniveling teenybopper. I just had to shut it all down. By whatever means necessary.

“I never really liked you,” I said. Then I looked at him, dead serious, and added, “And I wish yesterday had never happened.”

He looked away. “I wish it had never happened, too.”

Here was something surprising. Even though I had just spoken those exact words with no feeling at all, the sound of them boomeranging back at me really stung. I made my voice falsely bright. “Great. I agree. So let's do that.”

He frowned. “Do what?”

“Pretend it never happened.”

He tried to read my expression. “That's what you really want?”

“What I really want is for you to not be here. And to never have been here.”

He shrugged.

“Right. So I'll take the next best thing. Strangers.”

“But we're not strangers.”

So true. “Nobody knows that but us.”

“You want to pretend to be strangers?”

I nodded. “I want to pretend so hard that we almost believe it.”

He took a deep breath and then looked into my eyes, as if trying to decide something about me. “I'll pretend for you, Helen,” he said at last. “But there's no way I'm going to believe it.”

His intensity flustered me a little. “Okay,” I said. “That works.” Then I wasn't sure what to do next. I stuck my hand out. “I guess this is good-bye, then.”

He looked at my hand a second before he took it. We shook.

“Good-bye,” he said, without looking up. He let himself out of the car. And then, just like that, we were strangers.

*   *   *

Jake turned out to be good at pretending. At check-in, he stood an anonymous distance behind me. When I climbed the stairs to take my stuff to my room, he did not watch me go. I didn't see him again until the orientation meeting that afternoon, where I sat near the back, and he took a seat right up front like he didn't even know I was there.

Good,
I thought.
Perfect
.

But nothing felt good or perfect. As I watched the room fill up, I felt more and more out of place. It was all college kids, which, as I thought about it, made sense. Who else has this kind of time off in the summer? Or ever? As one tall, lanky, coltish twenty-year-old after another appeared in the doorway, the sameness of them smacked me in the face. They wore the same kind of T-shirts—all with Greek letters commemorating some party or another—and the same kind of nylon shorts, and sneakers in some shade of neon. They wore the same kind of lip gloss and applied their eyeliner the same way. They were all the same shade of tan. Their shoulder-length hair was all blow-dried straight in the same shape. All only slight variations on the same twenty-year-old theme.

It was ridiculous, of course, to think they were all the same. As the weeks wore on, I'd come to see them all as distinctly different, no matter how hard they tried to match. But that didn't do me any good at the time.

There seemed to be only two kinds of people gathering for the trip: all of them, and me. Pale me. Freckled me. Wavy hair a cross between red and brown twisted in a knot at the back me. I had on black yoga pants, of all things, and plain black flip-flops, and a cute little batik-print halter top from Old Navy. I had liked that shirt very much when I bought it, and when I packed it, and even when I put it on that morning. Now it felt like the thing that was going to keep me from fitting in. That is, until a mental list of all the other things that were going to keep me from fitting in started to write itself in my head: my age, my divorce, the fact that each of my toenails was painted a different rainbow color. I was nothing like these kids. I was doomed.

Where were the grown-ups? The guys having midlife crises? The stockbrokers with lumberjack fantasies? The carpool moms with something to prove to their personal trainers? I had expected another adult or two, at least. But they weren't on this trip. This trip was one big frat party. We might as well have had a keg.

I want to state for the record that, at thirty-two, I was hardly “old.” Thirty-two isn't “old.” It's just adult. A pretty nice age, actually. I'd never disliked being thirty-two.

Until now.

Surrounded by nothing but college kids, I decided I wasn't a huge fan of college kids. They were far too confident for my taste—far too proud of themselves. They were the Self-Esteem Generation, and they were all
awesome
. Where was the doubt? The angst? The self-hatred?

I couldn't literally be the oldest person on this trip. I kept waiting for the instructor to come in. Surely he—or she—would be an adult, right? Some grizzled old leathery mountain guy with a flannel shirt, and a trick knee, and a scar from a bear fight under his beard? I would have loved an instructor like that: a wise and comforting Grizzly Adams type.

But that's not what I got. At three
P.M
. on the dot, a high schooler appeared in the doorway and eyed the room without coming in. Nobody noticed him but me. I watched him there for several minutes before deciding to pipe up and direct him to the Junior School meeting across the hall—just as he introduced himself as our instructor.

I gaped. He couldn't be a day over sixteen. Not with that little wispy goatee and overgrown frame that didn't even have its muscles yet. He was stringy, pale, and a little pimply, with oily hair and a home-knitted stocking cap the color of beets. I would have pegged him for a video game programmer, easy, or a movie theater concession stand worker, or even a misfit paperboy. But not—
not
—the person who was going to lead me through the greatest journey of my life.

His voice was as stringy as his facial hair. “Listen up, people,” he said. “It's time to get schooled.”

I couldn't help it. I raised my hand.

“It's not time for questions,” he said.

“Are you the instructor?” I asked.

He pointed to a patch on his backpack strap. “Is this an instructor's patch?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Is it?”

“It is,” he said, “and I am.”

“How old are you?” I asked. It just popped out.

He stood up straighter. “Old enough,” he said.

But he wasn't. He really wasn't. I felt a tingle of alarm.

He turned to the room. “I'm Beckett,” he said. “And for the next three weeks, I am your only link to survival.”

He crossed his arms and squinted as that sank in, then said, “I'm about to introduce myself—and our program, and the wilderness—to you. But I want you guys to go first.” He sat down in an empty chair and leaned forward, instructing us all to volunteer our names, ages, and what, exactly, had brought us here.

It felt like a big question, that last one. What exactly had brought me here? I was still wrestling with that question. I didn't know how to answer it for myself, much less a clump of overconfident kids.

He waited for volunteers. Finally, a J. Crew model in a tank top raised her hand—showing a total absence of upper-arm fat. This one, I noticed, was a little different from her peers. She had long blond hair and wore no makeup. Of course, she was so striking she didn't need makeup, but even just that little variation was enough to get my attention. “I'm Windy,” she said. “And I'm here because my older brother did the same trip five years ago, and he said it changed his life. Not that my life needs changing!”

Beckett nodded. “How old are you, Windy?”

“Twenty-one.”

That was all Beckett wanted, it turned out. I had overthought it again. He didn't need our life stories, or our hopes and dreams. Just name, age, and a one-sentence summary. In a way, that was easier—and much harder. Windy looked like she expected more questions, but Beckett was on to the next volunteer: a tall guy with a backward baseball cap. “I'm Mason,” he said. “I'm a junior at the University of North Carolina, I'm taking this course for college credit, and I'm hoping for a near-death experience.”