Through Thick and Thin (25 page)

And even though you’re supposed to relax and give in to svivasana, the pose at the end of the class where everyone lies on the floor corpselike, pretty much Meredith can’t wait for it to be over so that she can go to him. She wants to hug him, she wants to hold on to him, she wants to tell him that what he said before, it just might have been what’s she’s been waiting a long time—maybe her whole life—to hear.

As soon as the last closing
om
has been
om
-ed, Gary says, “Namaste.”

“Namaste,” he explains, “it translates to, ‘the divine in me recognizes the divine in you.’ ”

Namaste,
she thinks, and then says, as everyone else in the room says, “Namaste,” too. She rolls her mat up and places it in the bin in the corner of the room. A few other people are talking to Gary, asking why he didn’t do a shoulder stand with them today and he’s saying something else about inversions, and so she lingers, she waits. And then the people talking to Gary are gone, actually all the people in the room are gone.

“Gary?” she says. He turns.

“Hey.”

“Gary,” she begins, and she thinks she can feel herself blushing, and she thinks she might be too old for blushing. “I just wanted to say, that what you just said before,
‘Try easy’
? I know this might sound weird, or like I’m getting a little carried away, but it meant a lot to me. It was a really good thing for me to hear right now.”

“It means a lot to me, too,” he tells her. “I first heard that from Baron Baptiste, who was my first yoga teacher. It’s actually one of the things that made me want to teach yoga. And doga,” he adds. “I’m so glad I could pass it on to you.” He smiles, so dewy and fresh and new, even if he’s only, what, two years younger than her, at most three. She thinks about the restaurants she’ll be eating at this week, does a quick weekly rundown in her head. She’s doing all Japaneses this week (a sushi roll? Only three points! And one more survey never hurt anyone). Monday is Jewel Bako, Tuesday is Morimoto, Wednesday is G-Doga class at the Y, of course, and Thursday is a small Japanese restaurant that an involved reader, a tipster, has recommended she visit time and again. She remembers the description he wrote in about it:
“Peaceful, thoughtful, kind.”
She thinks it could be a description of Gary.

“I’m a restaurant critic,” she says.

“Cool,” he says.

“I mean, um, I mean on Thursday, I’m reviewing this small and supposedly lovely restaurant uptown actually. I was wondering if you’d like to join me?” she asks him.

“Thursday night? I don’t teach that night. I’d love to.”

She gives him the address, tells him the reservation is for eight and she’ll meet him there, and they can just confirm at G-Doga class on Wednesday night. “You know,” she adds on, “if anything changes.” Either she just asked out her yoga and G-Doga instructor, or she just filled a seat at her dinner table, she’s not sure which. Except she is, because she’d been planning, for all the Japanese places, to sit at the sushi bar by herself.

“Sounds good,” Gary says, nodding.

“Great,” she says.

“Great, Meredith,” he says, and it sounds nice, the way he says her name.

“Just one thing. On Thursday, it’s Sarah. Sarah Marin.”

“Okay,” he says, and as his head turns slightly quizzically to one side, she thinks she should elaborate.

“Because I can’t be myself,” she explains. She says it matter-of-factly, confidently, without any hesitation, but once the words are said, once they seem to be hanging in the air, she does wonder if there was perhaps another way she could have phrased it.

He smiles at her.

At her third Weight Watchers meeting, Stephanie received not one gold star, but two. One for reaching the first five-pound goal (and even surpassing it, true story) and one for sharing her recipe for four-point popovers that take hardly any time to make. She feels positive, she feels on the right track. As she takes out her key and turns it in the door, she feels very much as if things, so many different things, are taking a turn, too; an unmistakable turn for the better.

She enters the kitchen to see Ivy, gleeful in her high chair. She wonders why Jenna doesn’t have her upstairs already, and she can’t help but think,
Yes. Yes, see, I was right.
Even though Jenna seems competent, and capable, and loving, and like an excellent nanny in so many ways, she’s not. Even though
everyone
thought it was insane all these months to never leave Ivy alone with her nanny, it wasn’t. Because, look.
Look here at my beautiful baby abandoned helpless in her high chair!
Ivy reaches two beautiful arms out. She kicks her legs out in the air. That glimpse, that almost stolen view of that delicious little leg makes Stephanie forget everything for a moment; that leg filled with beautiful rolls of fat, kicking toward her, led by its little white baby-socked foot makes her sure for a moment that the world is a beautiful place. Quickly she puts her folder on the counter along with her two boxes of popcorn and her Mini Bars, and rushes over to Ivy. She unsnaps a snap, picks her up out of her high chair, and holds her, “Hello, darling!” she says.

“Hey, Steph.”

She turns quickly to see Aubrey, sitting at the kitchen table, and even though it’s Aubrey, it’s the new, but not improved, Aubrey, so different in so many ways from the old Aubrey. Seeing him there doesn’t startle her nearly as much as it makes her nervous.

“Oh, God, Aubrey. You scared me.” He doesn’t say anything, he cocks his head a little bit to the side and for a second he looks like he used to. For a second, he looks like a ghost. “You’re home early. Didn’t you have Dr. Petty?”

“Yeah. Dr. Petty called and he had an earlier opening so I took that. It was a quiet day at work so I just took it rather than hanging around at the office until seven.” She looks at him and thinks of him and Dr. Petty, how they have their own relationship, their own world that is so separate from her. And she doesn’t even realize she’s about to ask him a question she’s never asked him before.

“Have you been drinking?” She doesn’t know why she asks him that when she has other questions (Where is Jenna? Did you give Ivy dinner? Is it wrong that if you say Jenna isn’t here, that I’ll be a little freaked out that you were here with Ivy alone?). They’ve never talked about it, and she doesn’t really know, but if Aubrey has a substance-abuse problem, does that mean he has a drinking problem, too? Should he not drink? Who would she ask?

“No, I haven’t been drinking,” he says. He narrows his eyes, maybe to show he means business, maybe to show that as much as she hates him a little bit lately, he hates her a little bit, too.

“Oh, okay. I was just, you know,” and she doesn’t bother finishing the sentence, there is no way to end it well. “Did you feed her? Where is Jenna?”

“Jenna was feeding her when I got home and then when she was done I told her she could go.”

“And she just left?”

“Yes,” he says slowly, “she just left. Is there a problem, Stephanie?”

She doesn’t say anything. And even with five lost pounds and two gold stars, when he asks her if there is a problem, the only thing she can think is that there are so many. He’s been going to therapy for what is it, over a month? He hasn’t been catatonic and he has assured her there haven’t been any pills. She wonders if it would be shrew-like to say,
Yes there is a problem. The problem is that I just have no faith. I have no faith that it will last, and maybe I need a necklace, one that says
faith
or
hope
or even
love.

“No,” she says.

“Where were you?”

“I went to my Weight Watchers meeting.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, really.” She thinks he’s smirking. “Aubrey, what?”

“No, nothing, it’s just that Weight Watchers makes me think of Richard Simmons.”

“Well, Aubrey,” she answers back quickly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about because I don’t think Weight Watchers has anything to do with Richard Simmons.”

“Sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“You think?” She heads to the door with Ivy and she wants to ask him, wasn’t it supposed to get better? Wasn’t he supposed to stop doing drugs and then they would be happy again? She thinks all she does is support him, couldn’t he say,
Good for you, Stephanie, that’s really terrific you’re going to Weight Watchers.
Couldn’t he do something supportive rather than just always being supported? He doesn’t say anything.

“Okay,” she says. With her free hand, she grabs a box of Mini Bars and her Weight Watchers week three book off the counter. It’s called
Be Active
and has a picture of someone wearing red striped tights and roller skates. There’s a caption, it says,
Now I’m moving in the right direction.
She goes upstairs to put Ivy down, and Ivy settles into her crib, closes her eyes remarkably quickly.

When she returns to the kitchen, baby monitor in hand, she takes a seat at the kitchen table, in the chair right across from Aubrey. She looks at him again, and she sees his eyes, and she didn’t notice it before because they were narrowed at her but she notices it now. They don’t look the same, one looks bigger than the other, and she knows what that means.

“Oh, Aubrey.”

He doesn’t look up at her, and he says the same thing he’s said, so many times already that it doesn’t really seem to make any sense. “I’m sorry.”

And she wonders if she should leave, if she should just take Ivy and go.

She has no idea, no idea how any amount of understanding, how any amount of team spirit (Go Team Cunningham!) is going to get them through this. Even though Aubrey isn’t technically an alcoholic, she knows a lot of the time in AA they talk about a higher power, and she has no idea, she really doesn’t, but she thinks that maybe the whole reason there
is
the higher power, and the whole reason people talk about it, isn’t necessarily because they’re religious, but more because no one can fathom another way. But she has no idea how to believe in a higher power, in anything. And she has no idea how they’re going to get through this.

He says it again, “I’m sorry,” and she wants to strangle him, she wants to throw things at him, bottles filled with Vicodin, and plates, and pictures off the wall. She wants to have a temper tantrum and scream, and say,
How could you do this? Why can’t you stop?
And she wants to protect him, and to make him better, and she wants none of this ever to have happened, and she wants none of it ever to happen again.

“I just can’t be perfect,” he says.

“I don’t want you to be perfect,” she says.

“Yes, you do,” he says, full of hostility and anger and venom and he spits a little bit as he says it. When did Aubrey become a spitter? When did it start? When was the day that he went from being Aubrey to being this? Was there one day that he came home and was this person, half-anger, half-Vicodin, and was she too busy, or too tired, or too exhausted, or too freaked-out to notice? Had she simply said, “Hi, Aubrey, honey, how was your day?” and then he just stayed that way until eventually she caught on? Or did it happen slowly, was it a slow roll down a hill, a pharmaceutical snowball that she could have stopped if she’d just been paying more attention, if she’d watched a little closer, tuned in a little more?

Was she supposed to have stopped him? Was she supposed to walk around and say, “Aubrey, what’s in your glass?” except that that wouldn’t have helped anyway because Aubrey isn’t an alcoholic. Aubrey doesn’t have a drinking problem. Or maybe he does.

“I’m not perfect,” she says and she doesn’t even know what part of what conversation she’s responding to.

“No,” he says vaguely. It’s unclear to her if he’s actually speaking to her. It doesn’t seem like he is, until he says, “You’re not.”

A short burst of sound emerges from the monitor in Stephanie’s hand and for a moment she’s just grateful for it. And then the room she’s in with Aubrey is filled with the sound of Ivy, one floor up, and crying.

“Aubrey,” she says slowly, standing slowly and then she’s looking down at him, his eyes look so glassy and demented, and she’s not afraid of him but she wonders if she should be. “I have to get her. Will you stay here?” As if he’s a flight risk, as if he’s going to run through the house. But he could. She thinks of the time she got a root canal and they gave her Vicodin and it made her nauseous and confused and afterward ravenous, and she can’t understand how anyone could take it for fun. Though it’s not as if it looks like anything Aubrey is feeling right now could be called fun. And it still doesn’t seem like her role in all of this, whatever it may be, is to understand.

“Just leave her,” Aubrey says and when he says that the only thing she can do is hope that he
has
taken pills. He glares at her. “Perfect’s somewhere else, Stephanie. It’s sure as hell not here.” She’d never understood before how people got divorced and hated their exes. She’d always thought of love as something that was lasting, like it was in the movies, and she’d never understood how love for some people turned into hate so easily. She thinks maybe now she does.

She holds the monitor, stares at it, takes a deep breath, and says, “There’s this place.” He looks up at her. “I looked into it, and I researched it and I think it’s time. I think this is it.” There’s a part of her that’s throwing the baby monitor at him, hurling it across the room, screaming,
This is it! This is it!

“Rehab?” he says to her blankly.

“It’s in Connecticut,” she continues, “It’s called Bonfin, and they have a high success rate. I mean, the thing is, none of these places have a really high success rate because it seems a lot of people relapse. But in terms of the relatively low success rate, theirs is high.” And he stares into the fireplace as if there’s a fire in there. She can’t imagine bricks painted black could be so mesmerizing. And she knows she has to be the sane one here, and that it isn’t sane at all to suggest he might enjoy watching
Baby Mozart
, even though she thinks at this point in time he very much would. “And you know, in French,
bonne fin
, it means good ending? I don’t know, Aubrey, I think it could be a good sign.”