Once Upon a Time, There Was You (15 page)

“Rock climbing.”

“Alone?”

“No, with a group of kids. For the weekend.”

He waves his hand. “She’s fine. She doesn’t want to call her mother when she’s with a group. It’s
embarrassing
, Irene, come on. I remember wanting to go on a camping trip to Yellowstone with a bunch of guys when I was seventeen and my mother told me I could go if I called her every day. I could just see myself thrashing through the woods every day to find a pay phone. So I didn’t go and I’m still talking about it in therapy. Just relax; Sadie will call you when she’s ready. Or she’ll just come home without calling, and that will teach you the lesson she wants you to learn.”

“Sadie’s not like that. She wouldn’t not call. She just wouldn’t
do
that.” Irene’s getting annoyed. Henry didn’t come here to talk about Sadie.

“Anyway,” Irene says. Pointedly.

“Yes, anyway,” Henry says. “So that’s my offer. I’ll let you work full-time. And I’ll give you a raise.”

“No. I don’t want to work for you, Henry. It’s very unpleasant, actually. You’re a very rigid person.”

“
I’m
rigid! What about you?”

“I’m not rigid!”

“Oh, you
so
remind me of that woman on
Project Runway
who said she wasn’t a manipulative person after Tim called her out! And she was the
personification
of manipulation! Irene, trust me. I’m saying this not only as your employer but as your friend. And don’t you make that face; we are friends and you know it.

“Look,” he says. “Think of this as a mini-intervention, and believe me when I tell you that you are rigid. And controlling.”

“Uh-huh,” she says. “Anything
else
?”

“Well, a bit unyielding. Since you asked. Plus it appears you’re pretty good at holding a grudge.”

“
I’m
unyielding? Are you kidding? My life with you has been nothing
but
yielding. And I’m tired of it! And I quit! So why don’t you just … You should just leave, now. Please.”

Henry points to a pink stain on her robe. “What’s that?”

“What.” She looks down at her lapel. “Oh. Beets.”

“With feta cheese and caramelized onions and pine nuts?”

She says nothing.

Henry goes on. “The recipe which you got from
me
and, as I recall, have made several
times
? And
enjoyed
?”

“So?”

“So you
like
working for me. I just need to … Look, I get it,
okay? I need to tone it down a little. Or
you
need to toughen up a little, because I probably
can’t
tone it down. It’s a problem, I admit it. I am too involved in my work. As a matter of fact, James just left me because of that.”

He adds this last quietly, almost nonchalantly.

“Really?” Irene says. “Are you … 
Really
?”

“Oh
well
.”

“But you’ve been together for … what?”

“Ten years,” he says. “Ten years and four months and six days. If you count today, which, technically, I do.”

“And he left? As in, took his clothes and moved out?”

“Not all of them. He’ll be back to get his stuff when he’s found an apartment.”

“Well … 
Henry
. I’m sorry. I really am.”

He stands. “I made him ricotta pancakes with pecan syrup for breakfast. And he ate them, knowing he’d be dumping me right afterward. What kind of person does that?”

Irene doesn’t answer.

“Honestly? I think he might change his mind. I think he might go and have his little hissy fit
with all that that entails
, and then come back. But he might not. So could you please not quit yet? Don’t quit yet. Just … you know, ignore me. I mean, do what I
say
, but ignore me. My attitude. I don’t mean anything by anything.”

“Yes you do,” Irene says. “You’re a snob and you’re all the time trying to make me feel inferior.”

“You make
yourself
feel inferior.”

“Nooooo. I’m not just walking along, feeling inferior.
You do
something and then I feel inferior.”

“All right, Irene. Here it is. I really need you. I got a call from someone with tons of money and zero taste who wants a retro party with the most ridiculous recipes. I mean,
gelatin
molds.”

“Oh, I have the best one,” Irene says. “Strawberry pretzel salad.”

“Oh, God.”

“You use a stick and a half of butter. And strawberry Jell-O. And frozen strawberries and canned pineapple. It’s so church social. She’ll love it. You know what else is in there?”

“Please don’t tell me.”

“Cream cheese and Cool Whip.”

“Oh, God. I’m putting you in charge of this whole affair. I’m not even going. You take care of everything. And don’t bring any of my cards to this event.”

“I didn’t say I’d do it. As of now, I am not in your employ.”

“Irene. I am what I am. Okay? So. Do you want to quit or do you want to accept a twenty-five percent raise and more responsibility and keep working for me? It’s not going to be so easy for you to find another job, by the way.”

“Thirty percent,” Irene says.

“Fine.”

“No, wait, forty percent.”

Henry looks at her.

“No?”

“Thirty.” Henry is heading for the door when his cellphone rings. He takes it out of his pocket and checks to see who it is, then looks triumphantly over at Irene. “It’s him. He’s come to his senses. I’m not even going to talk to him. Let him just wonder where I am. And you stop worrying about Sadie. She’s the most responsible person I know. And to be honest yet again, maybe she’s just taking a little space that she needs—and
deserves
, Irene.”

“Right,” Irene says. But what she feels is not that Sadie is taking a “little space” but that she is in trouble of some kind. It is true that she has worried about her daughter unnecessarily in the past. But there was also the time when Sadie was five and had gone on
a field trip with kindergarten class—they were going to a u-pick farm for strawberries. Irene was out weeding the garden when an ominous feeling came over her. She went inside and checked to see if anyone had called. No. She shrugged off the feeling and went to the sink for a glass of water. She’d almost finished drinking it when the phone did ring. Sadie was in the ER; she’d been brought there after having been bitten by a dog. Irene called John and arrived at the hospital just after him. She found him sitting with Sadie, whose hand was wrapped in a big white bandage, and John was praising her for being so brave. “I got stitches but I didn’t cry,” Sadie told Irene. Irene did, though only a little. She and John locked eyes over their daughter’s head, and despite the circumstances, what Irene was feeling was an immense sense of gratitude for their circle of three.

She goes into her bedroom and sits at the edge of the bed. It occurs to her to call John, but she is reluctant to sound the alarm, as placing such a call would do. She looks at the clock: it’s almost nine. She tries Sadie’s cell: no answer. Maybe she turned her phone off when she started the climb and has yet to turn it back on. Irene supposes the group could be having a celebratory dinner, after which Sadie will finally call her; surely she will remember by then that she was supposed to let her mother know as soon as she completed the climb. Irene regrets not having asked more questions, written down the names of people Sadie was climbing with, where they were going, what the exact timetable was. How could she have let her go, knowing so little? But she was chastised for the few questions she did ask. And the truth is, unless Sadie’s in school, Irene is often ignorant of where she is. “I’m going to a movie,” Sadie says. Or “I’m going out with Meghan.”

Meghan! Irene knows her number; it’s on her cellphone from a time Sadie was with Irene and had forgotten her own phone and needed to call her friend. She scrolls down the numbers, finds
what she thinks is Meghan’s, and calls it. She gets Meghan’s voice mail. Where
is
everyone?

With some trepidation (
Mom!
Sadie will say), she leaves a message:
Hi, Meghan, this is Irene Marsh. I’m trying to find Sadie, and I’m not having any luck. Just wondered if you knew where she was. Please call me if you do. Or ask her to call me
. She stretches out on the bed, picks up the novel she’s reading. A few chapters, and maybe by then Sadie will have called. If her phone is on and she sees that her best friend is calling, she’ll pick up. Meghan will say, “Your mom called; better call her back.” The first thing Irene will say to Sadie is, “If you
say
you’re going to call,
do
it.”

Some time later, Irene wakes up with the book still in her hands. She checks the clock. Eleven! “Sadie?” she calls out. Nothing. She goes into her daughter’s darkened room and turns on the light. Not there. She goes back to her own bedroom and tries Sadie’s cellphone once more: nothing. The police? She doesn’t think they’ll do anything until Sadie is gone longer. And anyway, what would she say?
My daughter went rock climbing with a bunch of people, none of whom I know, and she’s not home yet
. The police will ask,
Your daughter’s age?
And she’ll say eighteen, and they’ll look at each other and then tell her that Sadie is free not to report in to her mommy. And she will say,
But you don’t know my daughter
. Now, though, she wonders if it’s she who doesn’t know Sadie.

She goes into the kitchen to the bread box and shoves a piece of sourdough into her mouth. Then another. A kind of clock ticks louder and louder inside her. She calls Valerie to ask if she thinks she should call the police. No answer. Then she remembers that it’s movie night; Valerie will be out with her husband seeing two movies, between which they’ll have dinner. She goes to the window, to see if there is anyone coming down the block. All she can see is her own helpless face, looking back.

She sits in the banquette, folds her hands on the table, and feels herself beginning to relax. This is always the room in a house that brings her comfort. When she was looking for a place to live in San Francisco, it was the kitchen she always went to first. “You’re quite the cook, I gather,” the real estate agent finally said. And Irene murmured something that could go either way, because it was too hard to explain. Irene loved kitchens not because she was such a good cook but because the kitchen was always the place where a need was unambivalently expressed and met. Hunger. Food. When her mother died, Irene crept into the kitchen in the middle of the night with a blanket and a pillow. She lay beneath the kitchen table, where she finally slept.

She gets up to make a cup of chamomile and reaches into a high cupboard where she keeps a china tea set from Tiffany’s. John gave it to her one year for Christmas, and at the time, she wondered why. She didn’t drink tea, then. When she opened it, the look on her face expressed a kind of puzzlement that comes when you are given a gift you didn’t expect or want. “I can take it back,” John said, and Irene said, “Oh, no, it’s beautiful. It’s just a surprise.”

She uses it often, now, at times when she feels she needs to take a little extra care of herself—times when she’s hurting, or discouraged, or feeling the kind of weariness that cannot be cured by sleep. As she rinses out the teapot with hot water, she realizes she never really thanked her then-husband for what was, especially at that time, an extravagant gift. “John,” she says. “Thank you.” Saying his name out loud makes it almost seem as if he is there, now. If only he were.

16

E
very so often, Sadie gets up and feels her way around the now pitch-black space, tries in vain to see out, calls out. She believes it is Sunday night, and tomorrow, when she can see, she will make two scratches on the wall. Also, she will periodically mark the movement of light across the walls of the shed, and in this way fashion a rudimentary clock. Just before darkness descended, she dug a deep slit in the bathroom corner, into which she defecated. She covered this with dirt, wiped herself off with dirt; then, in a similar manner, tried to wash her hands with dirt. After that, she wept a little: for the humiliation, for the hopelessness, for the pain she has in her shoulders from throwing herself against the door.

For a while, she let herself blame her mother for this happening. If Irene weren’t so uptight and overbearing, Sadie wouldn’t have had to lie to her about going away with Ron. She would have felt safe to introduce him to her mother, and none of this would have happened.

Then she remembered something.

Not long ago, Irene had an appointment for a physical, and she was furious by the time her doctor came into the examining room, because she’d had to wait for nearly an hour and a half, counting the time in the waiting room. Dr. Miller had come in and greeted Irene by saying distractedly, “How are you?” And
Irene had said, “I’m angry! This is too long to
wait
, Dr. Miller!” The doctor had acknowledged that this was true, and said she’d gotten to the clinic late because she’d had an emergency at the hospital, and then there were two emergency phone calls to take care of when she arrived at the clinic. She’d looked into her pocket, where something was buzzing, and said, “And it looks like someone else is paging me now.” Irene said the doctor had stood there, staring blankly, and then she’d said, “I’m so tired.” “I thought she was going to cry,” Irene said. “And I all of a sudden
saw
her, and she had lost so much weight and she had big circles under her eyes.” They started talking about how the doctor had gone into medicine because her father was a doctor and she loved medicine, she loved helping people. But now. Now she was constantly overworked, being assaulted by insurance companies until she felt, as she described it, “like raw meat.” She was seeing way too many people in not enough time, and so many of her patients were depressed because of the economy, because of the ongoing escalation of violence everywhere, because of political polarization and extremism and hopelessness. Her mother said she’d told the doctor to hop up on the examining table and Irene would have a look at her. The doctor had laughed, and then Irene had hugged her and told her to go home that night and eat a bunch of mashed potatoes and butter, and then Irene had gotten examined.