Seven Year Switch (2010) (3 page)

I CERTAINLY DIDN'T NEED ANY MORE CAFFEINE, SO I
skipped the tea and drank a glass of water when I got home. I  had the noon-to-eight-o'clock shift, and the phone didn't waste any time ringing.

“Great Girlfriend Getaways,” I said. “Feisty and fabulous man-free escapes—”

“Two minutes,” Seth pleaded. “Just let me talk to you for two minutes. I've got a job, and I'll have a paycheck in a couple of weeks. I'm staying at my parents' for the time being. Listen, I want to see our daughter. I want to make things right.”

I knew I should just hang up, but I couldn't seem to do it. “Make things right,” I said. “Make. Things. Right.” I could feel a heavy surf pounding in my ears.

I paced across the worn linoleum tiles on my kitchen floor. I started to open the back door, but changed my mind. There was nowhere to go.

“Seth, you cleaned out our bank account when you ran off. Do you know what that did to
our daughter
and me?”

He didn't say anything.

“Do you know what I found out, Seth? That they can't re-possess your car if you're in it. I
slept
in our car, Seth. For weeks.
Our daughter
slept in our car for weeks. In her Blues Clues sleeping bag with her entire collection of Beanie Babies. I told her we were fucking
camping
, Seth.”

“I'm sorry,” he said quietly.

I kept expecting my voice to catch, my eyes to tear up, but all I could feel was a cold, dry rage. I leaned against the kitchen counter and thumped my head into a cabinet.

“In a million years, you could never be sorry enough,” I said calmly, as if I were stating a simple fact, like springtime is beautiful in the Netherlands.

“Why didn't you go to my parents?” He sounded like a little boy when he said it. It might have been
Why didn't you just ask Santa?

“I did, Seth. It killed me, but I finally went to your parents. You know what they said? That they'd spent their whole lives cleaning up your messes, and they were finished. Your
messes
. And then on Anastasia's next birthday, they sent a Hallmark card that said ‘Happy Birthday to a Fine Four-Year-Old' with a check inside for fifty fucking dollars. And I couldn't even afford to rip it up into a million pieces and send it back to them.”

The pounding was back. Waves crashed in my ears like the soundtrack to
The Endless Summer
. I tried to slow my breathing so my head wouldn't explode. I always shocked myself a little when I heard the
f
-word come out of my mouth. It was crude. It was unsophisticated. But right now there weren't enough
fucks
in the world to express the depths of my rage.

“I'm sorry,” Seth said softly.

“Seven years, Seth,” I said. And then I hung up.

Seven years.

The Holo'o clan of the Sidama people in southern Ethiopia offers a sacrifice to their common ancestors every seven years. The Romans had seven deities. So did the Goths. Japanese folklore has the Seven Gods of Luck.

There are seven types of intelligence and seven habits for highly effective people. Hollywood has
Seventh Heaven
and
The Seven Year Itch
. There's even a New Age notion that every seven years you shed your skin and become a completely new person, sort of a seven year switch.

There are seven seas and seven dwarfs, and if you break a mirror, superstition says you'll get seven years of bad luck. When asked to think of a number between one and ten, research shows that most people pick seven.

In twelfth-century Spain, Nachmanides formulated the kabbalistic concept that seven is the number of the natural world: seven days in the week, seven notes on the scale.

On a brisk spring day in twenty-first-century America, Jill Murray determined that a husband and father who stays away for seven years is unforgiveable.

 

EVEN THOUGH I WAS
still tethered to my headphone, I herded all four kids over to Cynthia's house as soon as they got off the bus. No way was I going to let Cynthia's three trash my place while eating me out of house and home.

Cynthia always left a key under her welcome mat, not that a robber would ever think to look for it there. I lifted up the mat. Her youngest, Parker, stepped on my hand.

I screamed.

My cell rang.

Treasure, Cynthia's middle child, grabbed the key. Lexi, her oldest, grabbed it out of Treasure's hand. Treasure screamed. Anastasia adjusted her headband and watched like an anthropologist observing a fascinating new culture.

“Great Girlfriend Getaways,” I said.

The kids disappeared into the house, leaving a trail of backpacks behind them like supersized bread crumbs.

Fortunately it turned out to be just a question about collecting on trip insurance, so all I had to do was recite the toll-free number of the insurance company from memory.

I was only a few steps behind them, but the kids had already grabbed snacks from the kiddie snack station, complete with miniature undercounter refrigerator, micro wave, and snack drawers. Parker was heading for the mammoth flat-screen TV in the great room with a goji berry juice box and a bag of Spicy Nacho Doritos, and the three girls were carrying bottles of Perrier Pink Grapefruit and tubes of Kiwi Kick Go-Gurt to the three-computer kiddie work station in the large alcove off the great room, what ever that was called. The second greatest room?

I had to swallow a great big green gulp of envy every time I walked into this house. The excess was appalling, but also kind of seductive. I put my hand on a cool black granite counter and tried to guess which floor-to-ceiling cherry cabinet the adult refrigerator was hiding behind, since I could never remember until Cynthia opened it. Maybe it was part of the design strategy—make rich people thin by hiding the food.

My phone rang again. “Great Girlfriend Getaways,” I said.

“Does she always talk into that thing?” Lexi asked from the middle computer.

Anastasia shrugged. Her shoulders stayed up around her ears. I knew that meant she was hoping against hope that her embarrassing mother would go away. This was a good thing. It was developmentally appropriate that she bond with her friends at my expense.

I walked down the long center hallway while I finished the rest of my spiel. “How can I help you?” I finally said.

“I'm in Spain?” a woman's voice said.

“Is that a question?” I asked.

“No, no, I know I'm in Spain. But I'm wondering if I should take the side trip to the Dalí museum in Figueres, or just stay here in Barcelona, since we went to the Picasso museum yesterday.”

I opened a door off the hallway and stepped into a huge master bathroom: dual vanities, huge tumbled travertine tiles everywhere, a curved glass block wall that reminded me of an igloo, a toilet, a urinal. No, actually it was a bidet. Apparently someone forgot to tell Cynthia that bidets went out in the '80s.

I wasn't the kind of person who would normally snoop, but it was just a bathroom. I stepped inside and pulled the door closed behind me. A wisp of a pink negligee dangled from a heavy metal hook on the back of the door. I looked closer and saw that the tag was still on it. Maybe it was only a prop.

I walked across the room and peeked into the master bedroom, which had an unmade bed the size of a small continent, then closed the door again.

“Hello?”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “It's just that I'm not sure I'm following your question.”

On a raised platform in the corner of the bathroom, a double, or even triple, garden tub looked out over the manicured backyard through a bay window. A remote rested on the ledge of the tub, and at one end, a flat-screen TV covered most of the wall.

“I mean, if I go all the way to Figueres, is it going to be same old, same old?”

You mean, are there going to be a lot of Picassos in the Dalí museum?
I wanted to say, but I restrained myself. Surely this woman couldn't think if she'd been to one art museum, she'd been to them all.

I kicked off my shoes and climbed into the tub. I stretched out and picked up the remote, turned the television on and the
volume down low. I flipped through the channels and imagined what it would be like to do this every night after Anastasia was in bed, only with water. I'd soak and I'd soak until I was a total prune.

“You have to go to both,” I said. “As artists, they're completely different in many ways, but you'll also be able to see how Dalí's work was in part a reaction to Picasso's. And don't miss Miró while you're there, whether you're a big fan of Miró's work or not. It houses an incredible collection of contemporary art by other artists, too.”

I slid down in the tub and tilted my head back. “Go, go. Go to every museum you can find. Just drink it all up, every single drop, because you can never really know for sure if you'll ever have the chance again. And when you finish with Miró, make sure—”

“Okay, thanks,” the woman said. She hung up with a click before I could launch into my litany of regrets.

Even more than the museums, Seth and I had loved wandering the streets of Barcelona, from the harbor to the Gothic District, through the twisty, tree-lined avenues to the straight shot of Las Ramblas, listening to the tourists chattering, checking out the kiosks that sold everything from flowers to canaries. Our hostel was in a great location, a former pension within walking distance of just about everything. The shower stalls had doors, but no temperature control for the lukewarm water that dribbled out when you pushed a button. There was no hot water at all in the sinks and no power outlets in the big dormitory-style rooms.

Sheets cost extra, but when we'd arrived in Barcelona, we were both flush with money, me from the check I'd received just before I bailed from a job guiding Asian tours for an American company, Seth from a job he'd just quit teaching English in a Japanese school.

Breakfast with juice, coffee, cereal, and bread was served from seven-thirty to nine-thirty, so almost everybody was up and out of the hostel early. Seth and I would roam the streets for a while, looking for pieces of the Roman wall or examples of Gaudi architecture, but we'd circle back again and again to the hostel until we found our eight-bed room empty.

Because the best thing about this hostel was that each bed had a hospital-like curtain that pulled around it to create a small oasis of privacy. And you haven't really made love until you've made love in the middle of the morning in Barcelona.

I shook my head and picked up the remote from the edge of the tub. I started hunting for the volume button. Maybe it would drown out my entire memory bank.

Before I could find it, a male voice called out from the other side of the door.

“Hey, babe, I'm home,” it said.

I JUMPED OUT OF CYNTHIA'S TUB FAST ENOUGH TO GET
whiplash. I couldn't seem to fit my feet into my shoes, and when I tried to turn off the TV, the remote slid out of my hands and crashed into the tub. I dove for it and clicked off the TV, a hammering
shitshitshitshitshitshit
playing in my head.

I picked up my shoes and yanked the other bathroom door open. I literally slid on my socks out into the hallway, like a bad imitation of Tom Cruise in
Risky Business
. Fortunately I was wearing pants.

“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” Cynthia's kids were yelling.

“What are you doing home?” Lexi, or maybe it was Treasure, said.

“Is it the weekend, Daddy?” Parker said.

I followed the sound of their voices, down the hallway, through the kitchen, to another hallway. I wondered if houses like this came with built-in GPS stations in case you lost your family.

Finally, I poked my head into an exercise room. Anastasia and the two other girls were jumping up and down on a row of three minitrampolines. Cynthia's husband was down on his hands and knees, and Parker was riding on his back.

“Faster, Daddy,” Parker yelled. “Giddy-
yap
.”

Cynthia's husband, Decker, looked up and smiled. He looked like the Pictionary definition of cute, rich husband: white
button-down shirt with tie removed, top button open, sleeves rolled up. Premature five-o'clock shadow, gelled hair, blue eyes, brilliant white smile.

“Weren't you a blonde when I left this morning?” he said.

“Ha,” I said. “Uh, um, Cynthia should be back any second.”

“I've heard that one before,” he said.

Treasure jumped off her trampoline and grabbed Parker by the back of the shirt. “Daddy, it's
my
turn.”

Lexi jumped off hers and grabbed Treasure by the arm. “It's
my
turn, Daddy.”

Anastasia was still jumping up and down. Her face was flushed and her ears were red, the way they sometimes got when she was too excited.

“Daddy,” she yelled midjump. “It's
my
turn, Daddy.”

The room went horribly, painfully quiet. Anastasia stopped jumping. Everybody stopped everything.

I knew I should say something, but I couldn't think of what.

Finally, Cynthia's husband reared up on his hind legs and neighed. He bucked Parker off his back. Lexi and Treasure lunged for him, but he shook them off and cantered over to Anastasia.

“Hop on, kiddo,” he said.

 

I WAITED TILL
Anastasia and I were sitting down to dinner to bring it up. I took a bite of the boxed macaroni and cheese I'd upgraded with fresh steamed broccoli. Anastasia loved broccoli. When she was a toddler, she used to call it
little trees
. She'd point to it from her high chair and say, “Mo little trees, please?”

She was a two-fisted broccoli eater back then. She'd hold a stalk in each chubby fist, and alternate bites from first one, then the other. Seth and I would smile at each other, enthralled by her sophisticated palate. Enthralled by her.

To night she picked at the food on her plate with a fork. Maybe it was just an overdose of Go-Gurt and Perrier.

I took a deep breath. “So,” I said. “It must be hard sometimes to see the other kids with their dads.”

She shrugged.

“It's okay to feel that way,” I said.

“Duh,” she said.

I let it go. I took a sip of my milk.

“Sometimes,” I said, “what you know in your head and what you feel in your heart can be two different things.”

Anastasia speared a piece of broccoli. “
Sometimes
,” she said to her plate, “kids have two mommies.
Sometimes
they have two daddies.
Sometimes
they don't have any parents at all.
Sometimes
they don't even have arms or legs.”

My phone rang. Anastasia looked up.

I pushed the button. “Great Girlfriend Getaways,” I said into the mouthpiece.

“Are you going to keep doing that for the rest of my life?” Anastasia said. She picked up her plate and headed for the living room.

 

I REPLAYED IT
over and over again after Anastasia went to bed. Had I only made things worse? Obviously it had to be hard for her to see other kids with their dads. But, then again, one-parent families were practically the norm these days.

I did my best to be honest, matter-of-fact, and nonjudgmental when I talked about Seth, and I was pretty sure I'd pulled it
off reasonably well, given the circumstances. I mean, what the hell do you say?

I told Anastasia Daddy had gone away, but it didn't mean he didn't love her. I told her he was in the Peace Corps, in Africa, and that made us sad, but he knew Mommy was taking good care of her. Actually, I only knew the Africa part secondhand, from Seth's parents, but I didn't tell her that.

I told Anastasia I didn't know if he'd be back, that sometimes grown-ups do things that don't make sense, and it's okay to be sad about it. That I was sad about it, but I knew we'd be okay without him. We were a team. We were fine. I'd always be there for her. Mommy wasn't going anywhere.

I knew I could have gotten Seth kicked out of the Peace Corps. It would only have taken a phone call. I could have gone after him for child support, too, which would probably also have gotten him kicked out of the Peace Corps, since I was pretty sure they wouldn't have taken him if they knew about Anastasia and me.

I could have done lots of things, but I just didn't. A part of me kept thinking he'd call, or he'd write, or he'd come home because he missed us, but he just didn't.

And the years went by.

The funny thing about life is that even the most unbearable things start to feel normal after a while. Hearts heal. Memories fade. Anastasia had a scrapbook filled with pictures of her dad that we kept on the bookcase next to the fireplace. I couldn't even remember the last time she'd taken it out to look at it.

She was fine. The daddy slip didn't mean a thing. She'd just gotten caught up in the moment. It meant she wanted a horsie ride, goddammit, not that she was desperate for a daddy. A daddy who would probably visit her twice before he took off and broke her heart again.

It was after nine, an hour past the end of my shift, and I realized I was still wearing my headphone. I took it off, threw it onto the kitchen counter, opened the refrigerator, closed it again.

I paced a lap around the living room. Then another.

Eventually I opened the door to Anastasia's room just a crack. She'd kicked the covers off and had one arm wrapped around the neck of her favorite stuffed animal, a monkey named Banana.

She still slept with the same night-light she'd had since birth. It was a cow jumping over the moon. I knew soon, very soon, she'd notice it and say it was a baby light. She'd insist on trading it for something covered in pink and purple daisies. And not long after that she'd declare a moratorium on night-lights of any kind.

But to night it bathed her face in its soft yellow glow.

I tiptoed into her room and reached for her covers to pull them up, so she wouldn't wake up cold in the middle of the night. Her pink plaid diary was sprawled open on the sheet beside her, the key sticking out of its lock.

I picked it up.

I was so not the kind of mother who would ever snoop in her daughter's diary. But I did it anyway, standing in the hallway outside her bedroom, my heart beating wildly, because I knew my daughter would totally flip out if she caught me. Maybe most mothers eventually break their own code of ethics this way, and in our defense I would have to say it comes from the fiercest kind of love. The world is a tough place, and children are so terrifyingly fragile. Making sure your kid is okay trumps everything.

I'd only look at the last page—just a quick mom check. I flipped quickly through the blank lined pages in the back of the diary, listening for footsteps from Anastasia's room.

And then I came to this:

 

D
id you have to go away?

 

A
ll I do is miss you all day long

 

D
o you have to stay so long?