Once Upon a Time, There Was You (23 page)

“I didn’t know that.”

“Nobody knows that.”

“I’m so sorry, Henry.”

“Thank you.”

“But … didn’t you ever try to contact him, in all these years?”

“That would require a séance, I’m afraid.”

“He died?”

Henry nodded. “Two years after we broke up. Car accident. I read about it in the paper. I actually went to the funeral.” He forced a smile. “
So
. But listen, as long as we’re having our little pity party … Did your mom tell you that James left me?”

“No!”

“Well, he did. He called me a few hours after he left, and I didn’t even pick up. I was sure he’d changed his mind and was coming back. But no. That’s not why he was calling. He was calling to tell me the day he’d be back to pick up the rest of his things. He and his new friend, Bruce.” He inspected his nails.
“Bruce.”
He looked over at her with an expression she had never seen on him before: unguarded. Soft. Weary.

“I’m just saying, Sadie. You know? I’m just here to congratulate you. You know I’m your friend. I hope I can cater for you, if you decide to have a wedding. Your mom will want you to have a wedding. A real one.”

“My mom wants me to get an annulment.”

“Oh, I know. But I’ll talk to her and you’ll talk to her and she’ll talk to herself, and, when she’s done processing all that, she’ll want you to have a wedding. For the cake, I’m thinking deconstructed hazelnut butter cake with salty caramel filling and chocolate ganache for dipping. Won’t that be fun?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Okay, that was a test. Because that would be déclassé. You truly are your mother’s daughter. I want total control of everything. Everything. I don’t want so much as a
thought bubble
from you.”

She laughed. “Fine.”

He stood and adjusted his scarf, his shirt. “Your mother loves you so much, Sadie. She wants to make sure you haven’t made a
terrible mistake, something you might regret for the rest of your life. You have to admit this is rather … 
rash
.”

“Uh-huh. She loves me a lot. That’s why she told me once that she didn’t have to have me.” It hurt again, saying it.

“She
didn’t
have to have you.”

“Well, that sucks. To hear that. She shouldn’t have told me that.”

“Oh, come on. She was angry when she said that. You were fighting, right?”

Sadie said nothing.

“So your mom was frustrated, she was hurt. She’s a person—i.e., fuckup—and she said something stupid. She didn’t say she wished she’d never had you, which, incidentally, my mother told me a million times.” He rolled his eyes, crossed himself. “Your mother said she didn’t have to have you, meaning that she went out of her way
to
have you. If you ask me, she was saying she loved you. That’s what she was saying. Oh, listen, Sadie. You know who does it right? You know who does loving right?”

“Who?”

“Nobody. I mean, people can’t even … If you get a cat because you just
loooove
cats, you’re going to have plenty of days when you
hate
it because it’s acting like a
cat
. Do you know what I’m saying?”

Sadie nodded.

“And another thing. When I was in high school, I had a poem taped over my bed. I read it every day. It was about a person asking another person, over and over, ‘What is two plus two?’ and getting all pissed off because the answer given was always four.”

“See?” Sadie says. “This is why I don’t like poetry. What does that even
mean
?”

“It means that some people are always going to think in a certain
way. And they’re never going to understand people who think so differently from the way they do. They
can’t
. So it’s best to stop asking for something someone simply can’t deliver. Change the question, you know?”

“Which is precisely what I’m doing,” Sadie said. “But I’m not asking. I’m telling.”

“I know. But it’s going to take some time for your parents to accept that. They can’t see you clearly because of all the yous they see every time they look at you. I mean, seeing you off to
kindergarten
probably almost did them in, I’m sure. That’s just the way parents who love their children
are
, they’re just absolute
goosh
bags.

“Look, I know Irene pretty well, and I can tell you she’s trying to understand. She really is trying. She may never agree with you, but she’s trying to understand. It will make your life so much easier if you forgive her. Why don’t you forgive her? I don’t mean for saying something. I mean for being something.”

“I already have,” Sadie mumbled.

Henry was on his way out of her room, and he turned around. “What?”

“I already
have
.”

“Fabulous. You might want to let her in on that.”

Sadie opens the window to the warm day. She can see seagulls wheeling in the sky; she can hear their faint cries. She leans on her elbows and looks down at the street below. She really does feel like a prisoner. But she will honor the agreement she made to stay home and spend time with both her parents. For one thing, last night she had another nightmare, and when she awakened, she was so glad she was at home, in her own bed. She got her rabbit out and held him, though she made sure to hide him again as soon as she woke up.

It’s been so long since her family has all been together. And,
despite all the yelling and fighting and confusion, it’s been kind of interesting. She watches her parents watching each other, and she wonders what they’re thinking. Sometimes she sees things that make her understand how they got together: a shared perspective, a similar sense of humor. After all this time, they still finish each other’s sentences. They still have inside jokes.
“C’est Robespierre,”
Irene said last night at dinner, and her father burst out laughing, said, “M. Smokes!” and then they both laughed and said together, “There is no tax on Mr. Max!”

“What are you
talking
about?” Sadie asked, but neither of them answered. Finally, her father said, “Nothing,” and her mother said, “It was a long time ago.”

“When?”
Sadie said.

“Hey,” her father said. “Want to play poker?” So they played poker, and the clock ticked on the wall and the hours went by and it only came up once more that night, had she thought about annulling the marriage? No, she had not. Tick, tock.

After they all went to bed, Sadie called Ron and held the phone under the covers with her. His warm voice. Him. Mostly they talked about mundane things, what each of them had done that day, how his mother and her parents were thawing or not. But there was something new in their talking to each other, now. Sadie had once seen something on the dining room wall of some people she babysat for, a wedding gift they’d received. A piece of what looked like parchment paper on which were these words:
I am my beloved’s/And my beloved is mine
. That was what was between them now.

She knows she will never tell her mother about the sweetness of Ron and her finally having sex on their wedding night, of all the quaint things. Everything bad that had happened became a distant, nearly unreal thing; Ron was all she saw. She wishes she could explain to Irene that, when she and Ron made love, she understood
the idea of consummation in a way she never had before, the idea of commitment. She lay trembling under him when he entered her, and he kept asking, “Am I hurting you?” his own face full of pain at the thought that he might be. And she kept saying, “No, no, I’m okay,” because even though he was hurting her, she wanted that hurt, and she was all right, she was more than all right, she was safe and she was
home
.

Afterward, he held her so tenderly, and she was full of calm. At one point a breeze came through the open window of the funny old hotel where they had stayed that night, it passed over them like a benediction, and it came to Sadie that the only ones who needed to understand how and why they had gotten married were they themselves. And this realization gave her an enormous rush of freedom. She had a thought to tell Ron that she needed to go outside, she needed to stand under the big black sky and the many stars because this room was too small for such a feeling, but she didn’t. She rested her chin on top of Ron’s head, and measured the rise and fall that corresponded to her breathing, and she let the little room they were in contain her happiness.

She would not tell Irene about that, nor would she ever tell anyone else, not even Meghan, because it belonged to the institution of Ron and her, as would many things to come; she felt she’d lain the first things down in the hope chest, long past hope.

25

A
t ten o’clock on Thursday morning, Irene is in the kitchen, ironing. She has out the wicker basket in which she keeps her large collection of vintage handkerchiefs, and she is methodically going through the pile. She draws comfort from the scent of warm cotton, the rhythmic creak of the ironing board, the ease of folding the hankies into perfect squares. She enjoys looking at the various designs: the cabbage roses and purple pansies and forget-me-nots; the four-leaf clovers and interlocking hearts and carved pumpkins and Christmas trees; the embroidered initials, the kittens dressed in overalls on the children’s hankies. She likes carrying clean and pressed hankies in a sandwich bag in her purse; it has happened more than once that she has come upon someone crying with nary a Kleenex in sight, and it pleases her to offer a hankie on such occasions. Once, a woman in the security line at an airport stood quietly weeping, wiping away her tears with her hands; and she offered profuse thanks when Irene gave her a hankie. But then she began crying much harder. Irene wasn’t sure if that was because she so appreciated the gift or because, now that she had a handkerchief, she was really going to let go.

John and Sadie have gone for a walk; Sadie wanted to show John some of her favorite parts of the city, and to have some time alone with him, too, Irene thought. She was glad for it. She knew
it was good for the two of them to be together that way, and she relished the oasis of solitude she was granted. But soon after they left, she began feeling terrible. She called to make a lunch date with Valerie; then she dragged out the ironing board.

For years, now, she has ironed handkerchiefs when she is upset. She irons handkerchiefs or she lays the table. The first time Sadie came home from school to find their dining room table set for two—with the good floral china, and the silver, and the little individual salt and pepper shakers—she’d been in third grade. She asked, “Who’s coming for dinner?” She and her mother never ate from those dishes; they were strictly for special occasions.

“No one,” Irene said.

Sadie moved closer to look at the way Irene had positioned everything just so; she touched the white linen napkins pulled through their monogrammed silver rings.

“Then why is the table all fancy?” she asked.

Irene leaned against the doorjamb that separated the dining area from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “I just think it looks pretty. Don’t you think so?”

Sadie shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Well, that’s why,” Irene said. “I just like to look at pretty things.”

“But … you don’t think someone is coming, right?” Sadie asked. She spoke slowly, carefully. She ran her finger along the gold edge of a plate, keeping her eyes down. Even then, she understood far too much about her mother’s loneliness. Even then, she was taking on a burden she should not have had to bear.

“No, silly!” Irene said. “It’s like when you used to have tea parties, remember? Remember how you used to like to set up all the little teacups and saucers?”

“But I was little,” Sadie said.

Irene clapped her hands. “Guess what I made you for a snack? Come quick, and wash your hands.”

Sadie ate her snack, her half apple decorated with raisins to look like eyes and grated carrots to look like hair, and then she went to her room. Later, she called for her mother to come to her room.

When Irene arrived, she saw that Sadie had found her old tea set and set it up on a quilt on her floor. “Welcome to my party,” she said, and Irene took off her apron and sat down. Sadie had made construction paper flowers with pipe cleaner stems, and arranged them in a jelly jar vase. She had made name tags:
MOMMY
.
SADIE
. They had water and saltine crackers, which each of them pronounced delicious. And that night, Irene lay in bed weeping, trying hard not to make any noise.

She looks at her watch. Too early to leave for lunch, but she’s going to leave anyway. She turns off the iron, unplugs it. She goes out into the hall for her jacket and purse, then back to the kitchen to see if she’s turned off and unplugged the iron. She never used to have to do this, check things twice. She worried about her faculties until she confided in Valerie, who said, “Oh, I check things three times. At least! Sometimes I feel like I’m walking around in a circle, over and over, checking things. I feel like that little boy who turned to butter.”

“What do you mean?” Irene asked.

“You know,” Valerie said. “That boy? With the tigers? Who went around and around in circles under the tree until he turned to butter?”

“Oh!” Irene said. “Yes! But didn’t the
tigers
turn to butter?”

Valerie looked at her blankly, and Irene felt immensely better about her own abilities.

Driving to the Huntington Hotel, where Valerie has offered to treat her to lunch, Irene thinks about having left the basket of hankies on the ironing board. She should have put them away. If
Sadie and John come back, Sadie might tell her father about the last time her mother hauled those hankies out. Sadie had come into the room when Irene was ironing the Minnesota handkerchief. “She looked so sad,” she imagines Sadie saying. “I think she misses Minnesota.”

“Does she?” she imagines John saying.

Irene has seventeen state handkerchiefs thus far, all decorated with little motifs representing what the state is famous for: last Christmas, Sadie gave her Iowa and Texas. Irene especially liked the Texas one, the bowlegged cowboys whirling their lassos, the bluebonnets, the oil wells. But most of all she loves the Minnesota one, with its lakes and leaping walleye and North Star.