Other People We Married (20 page)

The bunk itself was a giant tent on a wooden platform, with twelve cots. It reminded Jim of movies about Vietnam.
The bathroom, shared by several bunks, was a short walk up a hill. This was why they’d included flashlights on the pre-camp shopping list. The Amherst boy saw the look in Jim’s eye and started gibbering on about the buddy system, as earnest as if he’d invented it. “Fine,” Jim said. “Sounds fine.” He put Bobby’s trunk at the foot of his bed.

By the time they left, Bobby had already found three boys from his school and was talking with great excitement about a bear that had been seen in the area. The counselors told all parents not to say good-bye just before they drove away, but to skulk off as if they were going to the movies and leaving him with a new babysitter. Franny couldn’t resist blowing kisses, and Jim honked twice, as though the horn could say everything that he wanted to. When they saw Bobby wave in the rearview mirror, Franny cried, but only for a few minutes, and then she was back to playing with the radio.

“It is far,” she said. “Maybe we should have some lunch. Emily Dickinson? She had to eat, right?” She found a station playing the Beach Boys and sat back, crossing her arms over her chest.

The main drag in Northampton was lined with shops selling handmade dream catchers and incense sticks. Grown women wore tie-dye. On a traffic island, a man played a tuba and bubbles came out. It was everything Jim had never liked about summer camp, all in one town. Fran was in heaven.

“Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore,” Jim said.

“Dorothy, we were never in Kansas,” Franny said back.

It was already two thirty, and most places were closed for
lunch. There was a diner that served breakfast all day, and it seemed like the best they could hope for. Fran and Jim slid into a vinyl booth at the far end of the room, several tables away from the nearest patrons. She opened the trifold laminated menu and propped it up on the table in front of her.

“A grinder is a hoagie is a slider is a sub, yes?” she asked.

“Something like that.” The room smelled like bacon and orange juice, not unpleasantly.

A waitress in a red-and-white gingham apron sauntered over. She was chewing gum. Fran ordered a short stack of pancakes with whipped cream on top, and made a sheepish face, as though she really shouldn’t have, all for the waitress’s benefit. Jim ordered wheat toast and some fruit, and even before the words were out of his mouth, Fran was fuming.

“Thanks,” she said, as soon as the waitress had vanished into the kitchen. “Now I look like a pig.”

“She’s a waitress at a diner, Fran,” Jim said. “I think people have ordered pancakes before.”

“You just always have to do that, don’t you?” She glared at him.

When the waitress came back with their coffees, Fran turned her head the opposite direction, like a pouting child who refused to eat her pureed vegetables. Jim thanked the waitress twice for good measure.

“So,” Jim said, imagining the remaining three hours of the drive home, “you think he’ll be okay?” Bobby was the kind of boy other boys always adored, and thrived when he got to disappear into a group of his peers, like a dog. Jim knew he’d be fine, but wanted to hear Franny say it.

“Sure,”
Franny said. She looked at Jim as though summer camp had been his idea. “God, the house is going to be so empty.” She stared into her coffee cup.

Jim tried to remember what they’d done with their time before Bobby was born, how they’d spent their evenings. There had been more drinking. If they weren’t doing fractions or sounding out three-syllable words, who were they? But Jim resented the implication that without Bobby there, they’d be limping through the summer, always feeling the acute loss of their parental selves. It was not as though they had nothing to talk about. There was something, though, behind her worry. Jim watched her swirl her sludgy coffee, swishing it one way, then the other.

“I’ll be there.”

Fran raised an eyebrow and put the cup back down on the Formica. A few drops of coffee slipped over the side of the mug and drew an archipelago across the speckled white surface. She wiped it up with her paper napkin. “So will I.”

Not only could Jim not remember their life before Bobby, he couldn’t remember a single conversation they’d ever had. It was as though they’d both been replaced by actors, a man and a woman who were choosing their roles anew. Jim looked at his wife and saw her familiar face, the curve of her cheeks and the exclamation point of her chin. She could have been sitting across from anyone. There was no hazy affection floating over the table, or between their feet.

“Let’s just eat and go,” she said, as the pancakes arrived, three fluffy ones the size of the plate. Fran poured maple
syrup back and forth, back and forth, making a softened grid out of the liquid sugar. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Jim said, and did what he was told.

They got back in the car a few minutes after three. Jim drove, and Franny kept the map open on her lap, as though they would need it. Jim saw her out of the corner of his eyes, fingering routes to places they weren’t going. The mountains of North Carolina. The Oregon coastline. Las Vegas. If Jim had taken a right and started driving there, Franny wouldn’t have noticed until they hit the desert: why not? There was no one waiting for them at home. Still, he kept straight and let the highway unfold in front of him. Over their heads, the sky was unseasonably gray, and Jim had to struggle to keep his eyes open. He drove for an hour before Franny announced that she had to pee. They were in Hartford, a city whose skyline seemed to consist only of smokestacks and abandoned office buildings. Jim pulled into a gas station and sat in the car while Franny scampered inside. He was happy for the break.

They’d talked about having more children before. When Bobby was small, teetering around the house on his tiny legs like Frankenstein’s monster, it seemed like the natural thing to do. Siblings were healthy; everyone said so. Even though Franny didn’t have any, and Jim didn’t particularly like his, a sister or a brother still conjured up images of Christmas trees and endless games of war. Bobby would be better for it. But that was before Fran was going to exercise class, before she’d gone back to work. Before Jim knew it, Bobby was three, then four, then five. Now he was eight, and Franny looked at Jim like a felon whenever he brought it up.

It was starting to rain. Small drops hit the top of the windshield and scattered, forming intricate pathways to the hood of the car. Franny pulled the latch and leapt inside as quickly as if she was being chased. She slammed the door and shook her head like a wet dog.

“It’s just water,” Jim said.

“Please.” She was annoyed by the rain, and doubly annoyed by him. “You know about my hair.”

Instead of turning the key in the ignition, Jim put his hands on the wheel and watched the streams rush and intersect on the windshield. Was it raining at Camp Mohawk, too? Bobby’s yellow rain jacket was folded in his trunk, along the left side. Jim hoped he knew where to find it, or that one of his counselors would be there to help if he couldn’t. He was only eight. Now that he wasn’t in the car, eight seemed young, far too young to spend an entire month without his parents. If he had a brother, they could have gone together, always stopping to tie each other’s shoes.

“I think we should have another kid,” Jim said. “I really think we should have another kid.”

Fran looked at him like he was from Mars, or somewhere even less habitable. “Right now?” She gestured to the small backseat of the car. “I don’t think there’s room.”

“I’m serious, Franny.”

“Well, so am I!” There were drops of rain suspended in her hair, tiny perfect orbs of water. She leaned against the seat and closed her eyes.

The house could easily hold another child. It could hold three more! There would be noise on the staircase and shouts and crashes. Bobby would be the grand marshal of the
parade. Jim looked at Fran’s closed eyes and saw that she was right to wonder what they would do when they were all alone. If he’d suggested turning around and driving back to the camp, Jim knew she would have agreed. They sat in the parking lot of the gas station until the rain let up, both silently plotting their exit routes. Both had put in enough time. If they weren’t going forward, Jim refused to tread water indefinitely. He opened his mouth, as if the rain would crack open the glass and land on his tongue, cold and dark, like mercury. When Jim started the car, he didn’t care where they were going, just that they would get there quickly.

T
he vacation was Teddy’s idea: see the West! If you asked Richard, driving across deserts and mountains in the middle of the summer sounded more like punishment than a reward, but Teddy was exuberant, and that could be convincing. Richard thought that if he put it off, and waited until just the month before to say yay or nay, Teddy would give up, as he often did, and they could spend the summer dashing across the city from air-conditioned room to air-conditioned room. Instead, when the semester was over, and all of Richard’s grades were in, with the students’ papers marked and duly returned, Teddy pulled a gigantic, messy burrito of a file folder out from under their bed. Tiny newspaper clippings slipped out onto their duvet. Richard worried about the smudgy ink against the white cotton, but let it happen anyway. He could clean up when Teddy, distracted, left the room.

“How have I not vacuumed that up?” Richard asked.

“You only vacuum on Thursdays,” Teddy said. “On Thursdays, it lives in my closet.” He tittered, so pleased.

New York was bad in the heart of the summer; that was true. Richard could trade stickiness for scenery. They’d fly into Denver and rent a car, head toward the Pacific. Teddy’s idea of a good time was pulling off the highway every so often to look at giant man-made objects: balls of twine, plaster dinosaurs, diners shaped like hot dogs. He’d grown up in Ocala, Florida, which had given him a taste for the bizarre, that and the need to add sugar to most beverages. The rental car was small and boxy, Japanese. Teddy liked to say
arigato
to parking garage attendants and teenage girls working drive-through windows, but still complained they weren’t driving something larger, more imposing.

“Like a pickup truck?” Richard had asked.

“Ooh,” Teddy said. “Yes, please.” He mimed a giant steering wheel, and careened off the road. Most of the time, Teddy rode on the passenger’s side, an open map ignored in his lap.

“Do you know how much gas it takes to fill up a truck?” Richard said.

“Killjoy.” Teddy was younger by five years, still in his early thirties. When they met, Richard had been an older man. Somehow, though, no matter how much older Richard got, Teddy never seemed to age. Every year at Richard’s birthday party, which Teddy invariably threw, he would cover his ears and shriek at the number, as though such a thing could never, never come for him.

*  *  *

Richard’s
therapist, Robin, was a large woman—not merely heavyset, pleasantly plump, but so big she spilled out of her normal-sized office chair in several different directions. She reminded Richard of Edna Turnblad from
Hairspray—
Divine, not John Travolta. This was one of the things he liked best about her. Richard didn’t spill, exactly, but he was what Teddy affectionately called “schlubby,” and he was soft everywhere one could be soft, right down to the wispy brown hairs still clinging to his hairline. Richard had been proud when the word came out of Teddy’s lapsed Catholic mouth—a win for the Jews.

Robin believed in Jesus, which Richard knew from various objects in the office and on her person—a cross here, a cross there. She also seemed to believe that Richard and Teddy could make it work, which Richard chalked up to the fact that Robin had never actually met Teddy, and was picturing someone far more suitable. She was interested in success. During their sessions, Robin and Richard talked about ways he could stop condescending to Teddy, which she seemed to think was a problem.

“And your last fight?” Robin sat at a desk, which Richard liked. It made the whole thing seem more official, less touchy-feely. These were real problems—why should he be on a couch? During every session, Robin demolished an impressively large bottle of Mountain Dew. She used a straw, which had something to do with her tooth enamel. Richard had asked.

“Oh, you know, more of the same.” Richard thought about
ways to make himself sound less insensitive, less harsh. Teddy was the better looking of the two; that had always been the case, and still was. He had a rakish quality, with slightly wild eyes and hair that seemed to betray Teddy’s usual state of excitement. Was it so awful that Richard had noticed the growing belly, the softer cheeks, when Richard himself had always possessed such things?

“Yesterday, I was telling him about one of my students, and right in the middle of the conversation, he looks at me and says, ‘You didn’t tell me I looked cute today.’ And then he made a pouty face! Right in the middle of what I was talking about.”

“Uh-huh.” Robin’s face was impassive—all white, all clear. Her dark brown hair hung straight to her shoulders, curving out slightly to accommodate her cheeks. She nodded, which Richard knew didn’t mean she agreed with what he was saying.

Here was the goal: see the country. New York was always the same. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston. There were the same boutique hotels, the same shops, the same museums. Richard and Teddy were looking for the parts in between. It was either this or go on a gay cruise, and Richard had some pride, after all. He hadn’t driven so much since he was a teenager on Long Island, and the wheel felt good in his hands, the pedal familiar under his foot. Teddy cheered every time they crossed a county line, sometimes giving Richard’s biceps a little squeeze. They made it out of the city in less time than expected.

Motels with flashing vacancy signs lined the main drag of
Glenwood Springs. The springs themselves were the reasons that Teddy wanted to stop. He read aloud, rapturously, using his finger to guide his eye across the small type. “Featuring the world’s largest outdoor mineral hot springs pool, this touristy town offers innumerable activities, both for the active traveler and those in search of relaxation…” Richard scanned the shops and bars and gleaming new chain stores. Colorado didn’t look that different from Long Island, if you took the mountains and rivers away.