Looking for Me (32 page)

I
stood in Olivia’s kitchen and looked around. Gone were the gumball machines, the dusty hand puppets, the Felix the Cat wall clock, and the tons of glass decanters she’d collected over the years. The walls had been freshly painted the color of lemon custard, the woodwork was white, and the old pine floor had been polished to a warm glow.

But Olivia looked bewildered. “I made a mistake by painting the walls yellow. It’s too
happy,
isn’t it?”

“Actually, the color is really soft. Maybe you’re just in shock at how different it is from those old blue walls. Once we get the artwork hung, I think you’ll love it.”

“I hope you’re right. If I have to repaint these walls, I’ll scream.”

“So what made you decide to do all this?” I asked while adjusting the ladder. “I can’t believe that you didn’t tell me about it.”

“Last Thursday morning I came downstairs to make coffee and it hit me like a slap in the face. My house looked like hell—like a crazy person lived here. Before my toast popped up, I had already started to clear things out of the kitchen. I didn’t tell you about it because, well . . . I felt a little embarrassed.” Olivia raised her eyebrows and looked at me. “I really let things get out of control after Eric left, didn’t I?”

I gave her a wink. “Maybe a little. Well, okay—a lot.”

“Why didn’t you say something, Teddi?”

“It wasn’t for me to judge. Our friendship isn’t based on what you have in your house. I knew you were having a rough time and figured you were trying to fill up your empty heart. Instead of using food, you used gumball machines and puppets,” I added with a slight laugh.

“Yeah. What man wants to sit in a kitchen and have coffee with sixty sets of glass eyes staring at him?” Olivia scanned the bare walls and chewed her lip. “Now that I’ve got a clean slate, I’m not sure what would look good.”

“No problem,” I said, selecting a small oil painting of an apple orchard. “I’ll start with this. And that Chagall print would look wonderful on the wall by your table.”

Olivia smiled. “I already feel better just having you here. I made egg salad,
and
since you’re helping me when you could be doing something a whole lot more fun on a Sunday afternoon, I made a loaf of cracked-wheat bread, too.”

“Great. Let’s get these hung. I’m really hungry.”

While Olivia stood at her kitchen counter and opened a package of picture hooks, I grabbed a tape measure and a pencil. We jabbered about her most recent restoration project, a first edition of
Stuart Little
that had survived a house fire but was covered in soot, and we laughed when she confessed how, just the night before, she had unashamedly gone through her neighbors’ garbage when she saw they’d thrown out two boxes of books.

But when I told her about my Ferris-wheel adventure with Sam, Olivia’s smile faded. She picked up a rag and began cleaning the frame of a photograph. Her voice was barely audible when she said, “That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”

After pounding a hook into the wall, I stepped off the ladder and set the hammer on the counter. “Olivia, are you upset?”

“No,” she said, avoiding my eyes as she polished the glass. “If ever I’ve known someone who deserves happiness—it’s you. ‘Upset’ isn’t the right word for what I’m feeling. It’s incredibly childish and small of me, but I’m envious. You met a nice guy when you weren’t even looking. And then there’s me—Olivia ‘The Pathetic Loser’ Dupree.”

“Stop it. You are not pathetic.”

“Well,” she said with a small shrug, “I’m just being honest. That’s how I feel. When Eric left me, I thought I’d die. Then, when I finally accepted that he really was gay and there was no hope for us, I thought my life would open up—brand-new start and all that happy self-help bullshit. But it’s like everything went retrograde and stayed that way. While I was painting the kitchen, I started thinking that maybe it’s time I called a dating service. And then—”

She stopped talking and heaved a long sigh. “Honest to God, I don’t know why you put up with me, Teddi. I am
so
sorry. Seems like all I do is bitch about my life. I shouldn’t have hijacked the conversation about Sam with my ridiculous self-pity.” She did her best to smile as she handed me the photograph. “So tell me more about him.”

I set the framed photo next to the ladder and said, “Look, I was going to talk to you about this while we were having lunch, but I might as well say it now. Remember the plumber?”

“You mean the one who had his stories published?”

“Yes.”

She held up her hand and avoided my eyes. “Please don’t give me another lecture about how I screwed that up. I know I’ve made a mess of my life.”

“Hey, I’m not going to give you a lecture. What I’m trying to tell you is that he’s no longer dating Carla Fry. I ran into her at the grocery, and when I asked what was new, she said they broke up last month.”

Olivia rolled her eyes. “Boo-hoo for Carla.”

“Wow, you sure are snarky today. Anyway, I’m telling you this so you can call him. The timing is perfect.”

Olivia gave me a sour look and began cleaning a painting. “Call him? No way. What would I say? Hey, sorry I blew you off when you asked me for a date, but I’ve spent the past year going through the Judgmental Bitch twelve-step program and now I’m—”

“Oh, for the love of Pete! Just call and make an appointment for him to look at a water problem you’re having. Then you can strike up a conversation about his book.”

“Forget it,” she huffed, tossing the rag into the sink. “I’m not calling him. I refuse to grovel.”

I planted my hands on my hips. “Excuse me? Who said anything about groveling? While he’s looking at your plumbing problem, just casually bring up his short-story collection. I’ll bet anything the two of you will be talking about books within minutes.”

“I don’t
have
a plumbing problem, and I’m not going to pretend that I do. Let it go, Teddi. It wasn’t meant to be.”

I don’t know what got into me, but before I even thought it through, I picked up the hammer. With all my might, I smashed it against the side of Olivia’s faucet. Her mouth flew open in shock when a geyser of water shot up and slapped her in the face.

Grabbing a dish towel, I tried to seal the break while Olivia screamed a string of expletives and threw open the cupboard door beneath the sink. She was still swearing a blue streak as she cranked the shutoff valve. Though it took her only a few seconds to get the valve tightened, there was water everywhere.

When I looked at Olivia sitting on the floor in a pool of water, I started laughing hysterically. “There,” I said with a snort. “
Now
you have a plumbing problem!”

It was just two days after I wrecked Olivia’s faucet that all communication from Sam came to a halt. At first I thought it was because of his heavy work schedule, but when I hadn’t heard from him by Wednesday, I started to worry. Since we’d begun dating, Sam and I had fallen into a comfortable schedule: He usually called me every day or two, we had dinner at least once during the week, and we hadn’t missed spending a single Friday or Saturday night together.

When I hadn’t heard from him by Thursday afternoon, I called his office, only to be told by the receptionist that he wasn’t in and she didn’t know when to expect him. I left no message. On Friday I sat at my desk and stared at the phone, willing Sam to call, but he didn’t. And when I got home from work, I went straight to my answering machine, but there was no message from Sam.

I arrived at work on Saturday morning feeling so low I could barely force myself to talk with customers, let alone feign some semblance of interest. Every time the phone rang, I sprinted to answer it, but none of the calls were from Sam. When he hadn’t phoned by the time I closed the shop, I walked home with crazy scenarios banging around in my head. Was this his way of cooling things off? Had he met someone else, or had something happened?

Eddie greeted me at the door with a tennis ball in his mouth, his tail wagging so hard it slapped against his flanks. “What do you think?” I asked when we went outside to the garden. “Is Sam done with us?” I flopped onto the chaise, and my faithful pup jumped up and lay by my side as if to say,
We have each other, so what’s the big deal?

But it
was
a big deal.

Though I tried to stay busy and not let my imagination take me on a dangerous journey, the evening dragged. By seven o’clock I was certain that Sam was out on a date with a younger woman who was far more interesting than I could ever be. When the hands of the clock reached seven forty-five, I curled up on the living-room sofa and stared out the window. My thoughts spun back to the first time I’d met Sam in person, and then, one by one, I relived each encounter we’d had over the course of our eight-week relationship. Even in hindsight I could detect nothing in his manner or his words to indicate that things were going in any direction but forward.

As the sky deepened, I remembered something I’d thought about only once or twice in the past twenty years. In light of what I was going through, it was more profound than I could have imagined.

AUTUMN 1970

A school dance was scheduled for Friday night. Excitement had been building all week, and I was aflutter with anticipation that David Tyler would ask me to be his date. In a rare moment of mother-daughter sharing, I told Mama about David, how he teased me and pulled my ponytail whenever he passed me in the hall.

I waited and waited for him to ask me to the dance, but he never did. When I arrived home from school on Friday, I ran straight to my bedroom and curled up on my bed with my annihilated ego. Mama came upstairs to see what was wrong, and when I told her what had happened, she nodded and quietly left the room.

A little while later, she knocked on my door and peered in. “I made you something.” She walked in and put a chocolate milk shake on my night chest and sat down on the bed. “Teddi,” she said, resting her hand on my thigh, “don’t let this bring you down, or the entire weekend will be ruined.”

“My weekend
is
ruined.”

Mama put her hand beneath my chin and leaned close. “If you allow things like this to ruin your day, pretty soon you’ll wake up and your life will be nothing but an endless string of ruined days that stretch as far back as you can remember.”

She turned toward the window, her profile soft and blurred in the afternoon light. “Believe me, if you let disappointments take you too far, you’ll end up getting lost. You’ll never find your way out of it.”

“But I hurt everywhere, Mama. How do I make it stop?”

She looked at me with a sad smile. “I don’t know. Only you can figure that out. But try to remember something, Teddi: Never tie your happiness to the tail of someone else’s kite.”

Mama gave my legs a pat, rose from the bed, and left the room.

And though that conversation took place a long time ago, tonight I felt just as hurt and confused as I did back then. I closed my eyes and remembered my mother’s touch, how gentle it had been. I even remembered the apron she was wearing—a pattern of tiny violets with green piping sewn on the tops of the pockets. That was the only time we’d ever talked about the tender places in a woman’s heart. I wondered what other words of wisdom she might have shared if we’d been closer, if I had reached out to her, if I had not been so independent and stubborn.