The Stuff That Never Happened (8 page)

Grant has been livid about this from the beginning, but I have surprised myself by actually seeing Whit’s point, or glimpses of it at least: this film will be crucial to his career in a field crowded with talented journalists; besides which, he’ll be home in time for the birth itself, and, with Sophie insisting loudly and often that she was not bothered by his going, why
wouldn’t
he go?

What I had secretly
hoped
, though, was that Sophie would come and spend her pregnancy with us, back at home where we could watch over her. I had it all planned out in my mind, how we’d buy baby things together and talk about pregnancy and motherhood, how it would be a wonderful, joyous, womanly time that we’d always look back on fondly. I’d be there for every little kick and Braxton Hicks, and even more important, I’d get to know her better as the adult woman she is, and she could see me without all that adolescent angst hazing her mind. But no. She decided to remain in the city working through the pregnancy, and I had to hide my disappointment. Grant didn’t seem fazed in the least by that part. “Why would she want to come here?” he said. “Her husband is the person she wants right now, not her
parents.”

You see? There is no point on which we agree lately. It’s like yelling to somebody across a big divide.

“So how long do you think you’ll stay?” he says. “Assuming that husband of hers decides that orphans are his top priority and I have to go kill him.”

“Well, who knows? The baby is due in three months, and the doctor told me she had to stay in bed until delivery …”

He blinks behind his glasses. “Three months? You’re going to be gone three months?”

“Yes
. Three months.”

“Jesus. And we didn’t have Wednesday today, did we?”

“No, and we didn’t even have it yesterday, when it really was Wednesday. Either in the morning or at night, when you passed up a fabulous opportunity.”

He makes a face at me. “I like to keep to a schedule. We should have kept to our schedule.”

“Well,” I say. “You certainly have a romantic way of putting things.”

“That’s always been my specialty. And I gotta say, it’s worked for me so far. It won me your heart, after all.”

“Yeah, well. Luckily you had other charms.” I pour my underwear drawer into my suitcase. “Also, you need to be careful with what you eat while I’m gone, okay? You can’t just live on grilled cheese sandwiches and potato chips, you know.”

He rubs his eyes and says, in a weary, put-upon voice, “I can make other things besides grilled cheese. Eggs, for instance.”

“Eggs are also filled with cholesterol. You might have to eat those frozen healthy dinners. Lean Cuisine or something like that. Or—what am I even worried about? I suppose people will invite you over to eat with them once they hear you’re all alone.”

“Please. Would you stop this? Just stop. I’m not going to go eat at anybody else’s house,” he says. “God, what a nightmare that would be. Why would you even think I’d do that?”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t. You might be expected to talk, heaven forbid. But you know they’re going to invite you.”

“I’ve got to finish my book,” he says. “I’m not likely to go looking for company when it’s been bad enough with
you
always needing—”

I stop putting things in the suitcase and stare at him.

“No, forget it. I didn’t mean that,” he says, and laughs. “Oh my God, did I say that aloud?”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, you did. Quite aloud, as a matter of fact.”

“Look, Annabelle.” He pretends to be beseeching me. “Honey, darling wife. I
need
this time. I’ll miss you, but I’m not going to lie to you and say that it’s an unmitigated disaster that you’re going. It will give me a chance to get this book done, and I won’t have to worry constantly that you’ve gotten your feelings hurt because I’m not noticing that you are the unhappiest person in the whole world or that you’re not doing the art you want to be doing, so you’re miserable.”

“Fuck you, Grant,” I say, brushing past him into the bathroom to collect my toiletries.

When I come out, he’s back in his office with the door closed. He does not fight. It would violate some sense of propriety that is vital to whatever the hell is at the core of that man. Long-suffering endurance, that’s his gig. Waiting things out while the crazy-ass people around him go through their little scenes and dramas.

When I’ve packed everything I can think of, shoving things into suitcases and slamming drawers, I go to his office door and say, “I’m leaving. You might as well come out and see me off.”

He comes out and takes my hands and looks guilty. “We shouldn’t be mad when we say good-bye,” he says.

I just want to be out of there. I look down at my shoes.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s put all this aside and let our last few minutes be pleasant. Do you need me to say I’m sorry? Because I am sorry.”

I sigh.

“Maybe you need me to get down on my knees and beg you for forgiveness. Is that what it’s going to take?” He sees my expression and gets down on his knees on the carpet and takes my hands and closes his eyes. “Oh, please baby please, please baby please, don’t go away mad.”

“Just get up,” I say. “You’re not taking anything seriously.”

“I am. I swear I am. Just tell me my crimes. I’m guilty as hell. I’ll sign anything you got. It was a terrible thing to say. I don’t want you to go. I really and truly don’t.” He takes me into his arms, mashing my face against his sweater. Then he laughs and squeezes me tighter. “I just want to write my book. Oh God, I just want to write this book. So much I want to write this book.”

“Fine,” I say. “Will you help me take my suitcases out to the car?”

“Anything! Just stop giving me the stink eye.”

I go upstairs and get the illustrations out of my study to take along. Then I gather my coat and scarf and gloves while he hauls the suitcases out of the bedroom. When we get down to the car, the wind kicks up, and we don’t seem to be able to think of how to say good-bye.

“So,” he says. “I guess this is it for a while. Drive carefully, and call me when—”

“Grant, stop it. Look at me. Just look. Don’t you even know that everything is wrong?”

He rolls his eyes. “What?
Why
, Annabelle? Why does everything have to be wrong?”

“Because you don’t really even see me anymore, and it makes me sad. You just don’t.”

Now with the loud sigh. “For God’s sake, Annabelle. How can you say that? I see you. I love you.”

“But you don’t love me passionately.”

He gives another sigh, even more weary, this one meant as a warning. “Why do you need to do this right now? Of course I love you. What do you want? We’ve been married for twenty-eight years. Wait. Is this because we didn’t have our usual Wednesday? It is, isn’t it?”

“No!” I hit him in the arm. “God damn it, how can you think that? That
usual
Wednesday is all part of the problem!”

He looks blank.

“Nobody has to schedule passion!” I fold my arms. “Did you even know that? Nobody but you would even think of that. You’re so bound up, so tied to your work that you don’t even see me! You don’t care about my feelings!”

He closes his eyes. “Why are you doing this? Why can’t you let things sort themselves out before you make all these sweeping statements? Why do you have to see things so globally? That’s the trouble here. You—”

“What evidence is there that you love me passionately, Grant McKay?” I say. I can’t stop myself. “Come on. What
evidence
is there? And don’t you dare say our Wednesday morning
appointment
for sex. Don’t you dare.”

“Good God. What is this? What’s with you?”

“Tell me one other piece of evidence. Before I go away for three months, tell me one other piece of evidence.”

“What? Are you sixteen or something? This is ridiculous.”

I just keep staring at him. I adjust my purse to my other arm, signaling that I’m here for the long haul. He has to think of something.

“Well, I want you to drive carefully,” he says after a while. He smiles at me. “And also I won’t eat butter while you’re gone.”

“Great. You don’t want me to die. And you don’t want to die of a stroke. That’s good. That’s real evidence. Thank you so much for that.”

“Look, Annabelle. I do love you, and you know it,” he says. “But I don’t like to be pushed this way. This isn’t ever a good way, you know that. We know each other too well for this.”

He gives me one of his ominous, meaningful looks over the top of his glasses, and suddenly I have an almost uncontrollable urge to just fling Jeremiah’s name into the air. I can picture how it would happen, this unthinkable thing. I would lean toward him. “Jeremiah,” I would say in a whisper, feeling the name roll around on my tongue, filling my mouth. “Jeremiah.” I might say it again, for effect. Then how would I stop myself?
Jeremiah, Jeremiah, Jeremiah, Jeremiah
. I’d fill up the whole winter afternoon with it. The whole world would reverberate with the sound of it.

But
then
what would happen? I have this moment to weigh it carefully. Would Grant turn pale, tighten his mouth, and then swallow whatever anger he felt—or would he blow up at me, hurling all the suppressed anger of twenty-eight years? And would that really be it, the end of everything, the way he once said it would be? The day we agreed.
We won’t speak of him. It didn’t happen
.

We stand there, looking at each other. I am trembling with the feeling of the name rising up in the back of my throat. It’s almost like nausea, this name … but then, what the hell am I thinking, even contemplating setting this fire when I am going away for three months? I finally say, “I have to go.”

“Well,” he says, and he licks his lips and looks right at me, and there’s a glimmer of the old Grant behind his eyes. He puts his hands in his pockets. “Listen. Drive carefully,” he says. “You’ve got to get on the road, and nothing is going to get solved between us today. I’ll call you later.”

And that’s it. He just turns away and goes back into the house without looking back. Without looking back! How can you not look back when your wife has just accused you of not loving her enough? I get into our old Volvo station wagon—the symbol of our family life and everything that’s gone—and slam the door as hard as I can, and then I can’t resist burning a little rubber on my way out of the driveway, which is not so easy to do when there’s a little bit of snow on the ground. You have to really work at it, but I’m up for the challenge.

[six]

1977

T
he first good thing about getting engaged was that I discovered I still had the power to shock my mother, who seemed to be making it her life’s goal to go around shocking everybody else. We were back in the Orgasm Diner when I told her, and at first she just stared at me, and then she started fanning herself with the large maroon menu and laughing and clutching her chest and rolling her eyes. I waited. Then she leaned forward, narrowed her eyes, and said, “So tell me: are you just trying to act out some latent teenage rebellion against me? Why would you ever do this to yourself?”

“I happen to be in love,” I told her.

She stirred her coffee without looking at me. Then she said, “May I offer an alternative plan for your consideration?”

I sighed and scratched at a scab on my elbow, which she took to mean, “Oh yes, Mother, please tell me an alternative plan to getting married to the man I love.”

She said, “I think you should live with me for a while and work until we can both earn enough money to send you back to college. I see that I’ve made a mistake not having you live with me instead of being chief cook and bottle-washer for your father and brother. That would be enough to make anyone rush into a premature marriage.”

“That is not it at all.”

“You and I could join forces, you know. We’ll both work and do art together. I’ll make jewelry and you can help, and we’ll go around to swap meets and crafts shows. And when we have enough money, we won’t have to depend upon some man to—”

“How could that ever work? You live in one room, and you have a guy who comes to sleep over. How can you even think that I should live there, too? It would be awful.”

She laughed. “Well, we’d have to find a bigger place, of course. But we could do that.”

The waitress came over to the table. “I’ll have a chef’s salad,” I said. My mother ordered a hamburger and fries, and then as soon as the waitress left, she started talking about empowerment again, and a meeting she’d gone to where the women had all vowed to support the sisterhood. And that led to her telling me about a woman who had a crush on Dmitri and how hard this was for my mother, who was, of course, his girlfriend. How could my
mother
be any guy’s
girlfriend?

She didn’t seem to notice that I’d gone catatonic as a way of discouraging her from speaking. She kept drawing little circles in the puddle left by her water glass, and staring down at the table. “You know, it’s
good
, really, to explore all of society’s expectations about relationships. I mean, I was certainly not put on this earth to make Dmitri happy, nor he to make me happy. So if we find something good between us, then it doesn’t make any sense to insist that we
always
have to do it. You see, that’s what kills love—those expectations.”

She looked at me, and I was obviously supposed to say something, so I nodded.

“You know what Dmitri told me? He said love is like a butterfly—”

“I know. And if you try to hold on to it, then you squash it,” I said in my most bored tone of voice.

She looked surprised. “Yes! That’s what he said. You already knew that. It’s so … interesting to see things that way, isn’t it? Really opens your eyes.”

I nodded and waited a few beats. Then I said, “So. Just to recap, I’m in love, I’m getting married, and I’m moving to New York.”

She looked at me. “Now
who
is this boy again?” she said. “Is this that Jay somebody? The sexy one?”

I gave her the rundown on the facts: he was
not
Jay, he was
Grant McKay
, and he was twenty-five and a labor historian, born and raised in New Hampshire,
normal
parents (here I gave her a pointed look), a farmer’s kid, responsible, genuine, met him at school, new job at Columbia, loves me, I love him. What else?

“Is he a Republican at least?” she said.

“No, and neither am I.”

“Well, that’s too bad. That means he won’t be making any money. Democrats don’t care about money.”

“Mom, Daddy’s the only real Republican in the family. You’re basically a Democrat, too, and you know it. You just don’t want to admit it. You’re even in favor of legalizing drugs.”

She fixed one of her stares on me. “What I want to know is why you can’t just sleep with him for a while until you get him out of your system. I don’t see why you think you have to get married. You’re not nearly old enough. Hell,
I’m
not old enough.”

“Because I want to get married to him. And he asked me. He wants to get married before he moves to New York.”

“Well, sure
he
does. But what is the possible advantage to you? Do you know that statistically, when a couple divorces, except for the financial problems women typically experience, a woman
thrives
emotionally and moves on with her life, while men just crumble up into a mess? Do you know what that says?”

“I’m not going to get divorced from him.”

“Oh, hell. How do you know that? You can’t know that. Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. Look at me!”

“But I’m not you.” I looked at her coolly. “And anyway, you and Dad are both doing fine now. You both got over this whole breakup thing in record time.”

She laughed. “Yeah, because he found some other woman who’ll completely submerge her life in his.”

“This has nothing to do with me.”

“Well, it should. If you love Grant, don’t get oppressed by him. Just enjoy him for who he is, and then when you’ve had enough, you can walk away.”

“I don’t want to walk away,” I told her. “Just because you made a big mistake doesn’t mean I’m making one, too. This is it for me.”

“Think of it. The rest of your life,” she said. “Married to this guy.”

“Mom, it’s going to be fine.”

“Is he good in bed, at least?”

“He’s fine.”

“Do
not
settle for fine.”

“What do you want me to say? Okay, he’s stupendous. He’s a physical gymnast, he was the secret ghostwriter of
The Joy of Sex
, and women everywhere are jealous of me for landing such a stud muffin and sex machine.”

She laughed. At least she had the grace to laugh. But then she looked off into the distance and bit her lip. “Oh, you poor, poor deluded baby.”

DESPITE HER protests about my getting married, my mother still insisted on putting together a wedding with as much fanfare as a person could gather in a month’s time. It was as though in her mind the
wedding
was something separate from the act of marriage, and she was programmed to do it up just right, in a certain way. A church, a bouquet, a white dress, something old and new and borrowed and blue, the whole bit. I drew the line at bridesmaids and ushers and also at the idea that I was to wear her Empire-waisted wedding dress, which she’d kept under her bed all these many years, but I was powerless against the Edie Bennett machine once it was rolling and insisting on a rented hall, pleated pink napkins, and white doves released during the ceremony. Oh, and shrimp-wrapped-in-bacon appetizers, served to the guests by young women carrying trays and wearing flowered sundresses. I invited Magda to be the best woman—I refused to call her the maid of honor—and even though she was blown away by the idea of my getting married when we were both far too young, as she put it, she agreed to come as long as she didn’t have to wear a dress with a back bow and matching shoes.

I heard my mother telling her friends on the phone that it was hilarious that while most people’s kids
refused
to get married anymore—they were all shacking up with each other
—she
, discovering in herself all the elements of new radicalism, instead had to contend with a daughter who
insisted
on getting married.

Despite this, she told my father that we had to work on family togetherness. This was a time to come together for my sake. All three of my surviving grandparents were coming from across the country, and they were to remain secure in their belief that my parents were still living together. Why hurt the innocent, after all?

“This seems to come from a primitive place in her brain,” I explained to Grant. I was standing on his feet, and we were swaying together. “The tribal wedding lobe, up there near the frontal lobe, I think. She actually wants to invite all the uncles and aunts and all her friends and everybody I went to high school with. And she wants ice swans.”

He wrinkled his nose and leaned down to kiss me. “Can’t we just elope? No fanfare.”

“Apparently that would be unforgivable.”

He grimaced. “Well, then count me in. I don’t want to do anything unforgivable right off the bat.”

I wasn’t completely sure he was going to be able to stand up to the whole Southern California social experience. He might as well have come from another planet. Even my parents were charmed by him in a sociological kind of way—a genuine New Englander flailing around in our brutal celebrity sun culture, the land of swimming pools, adultery, and divorce. It was as if a Puritan had fallen out of the smoggy sky and landed there, charming them with his quaint ways. My father flung his arm around Grant’s shoulder and took him to meet his bookie and all the guys at the convenience store, sort of a baffling introduction to what men needed to know to thrive in our world. My mother, who was hanging around the house more and more, introduced him to homemade tacos and burritos and then sat up late, soulfully discussing his parents’ staid and faithful marriage with him far into the night, and ended up weeping over the fact that she had never had the opportunity to be supported by such a steady, church-going, God-fearing community.

“Do you know what a difference that would have made? To have had that kind of centeredness?” she said, and, watching her dab her eyes with a tissue as Grant melted, I had to get up and exit the discussion.

Then, two weeks before the wedding, without any warning at all, she moved back home. At first she told me it was only because all the grandparents were coming, as well as Grant’s married and stable parents, and she needed to make our lives look a little less haphazard. She needed to create a united front, make a good impression, she said.

I was relieved. I didn’t want us to come off looking as unraveled as we were. I didn’t know Grant’s parents since there hadn’t been time for us to go to New Hampshire to introduce me, but it was unthinkable that his mother had ever gone to meetings to publicly look at her lady parts. My mother moved into my bedroom and declared we were like girlfriends having sleepovers. At night, in the dark, she told me she was disappointed with Dmitri after all, and that her theory was that a person’s wedding set the tone for the entire marriage, and maybe that’s why she and my father hadn’t been as happy as they’d deserved to be: their wedding had been a quick ceremony at the justice of the peace because nobody had enough money to make a big wedding. What did I think of that theory, hmm? That’s why she was personally making sure that
my
wedding would not be to blame if my marriage didn’t make it. This was practically a scientific experiment, to see if a perfect wedding would lead to a perfect marriage.

Truthfully, all this prenuptial stuff was beginning to feel a little show-offy and over the top. Much to David’s and my amusement, Edie had turned the dining room into a wedding headquarters, managing the nuptials like a business enterprise, shuffling piles of folders and papers, invitations, placards, and RSVP lists. She barked orders into the phone, yelling at florists and photographers and people who rented folding tables. The wedding presents arrived daily by mail, and were opened, catalogued, and then piled along the walls and under the table, awaiting their thank-you notes.

Living at home was really all for show, she had said gaily when she moved back in, but then we all noticed that it wasn’t. She and my father, who had been chilly to each other at first, began spending more and more time together. Soon she was cooking dinner as she always had, and bringing my father drinks while he was skimming the leaves out of the pool. The woman across the street stopped issuing hot-tub invitations. There was no word from the mysterious Dmitri. After a few days, my mother said it was too cramped living with me in my bedroom, and she complained that I came to bed too late and then made noises in my sleep and got up to use the bathroom too much, so she might as well just move back into the master bedroom. Just to make things simple, she said. Besides, she didn’t want
her
mother to be suspicious when everybody came to town.

By the time all the grandparents arrived for the nuptials, along with Mr. and Mrs. McKay from New Hampshire, my parents could have gotten an Academy Award in the category of Impersonating a Happily Married Couple. David and I were fascinated.

“Edie and Howard have now reached the limit, the absolute limit. This is
it
. The limit has been reached,” I said to him one evening.

“And then some,” he agreed, and we both started laughing. We were indulging in what we were calling the “Last Brother and Sister Reefer Smoke Fest” out by the pool. David had been pressed into service as the best man since Grant’s friends from home couldn’t make the trip, and so the two of them had spent a certain amount of time together. Being measured for the tuxes, for instance. David called Grant the nicest guy he’d ever met in his whole life and then he said, “But do you think he even has one fraction of a clue?” and we laughed.