Through Thick and Thin (26 page)

“Yeah,” he says, “ ’cause you know all about things in France, right?” He smiles a little bit when he says it, and she imagines it’s not because he actually thinks he’s funny, and not even because he is in fact as mean as he has lately been endeavoring to be. She thinks the smile is because there is a part of him, somewhere, buried underneath a pile of Vicodin, that’s trying not to be so awful. But still she clenches her jaw, sets it, and stares at him coldly for a moment. It’s not that she means to, it’s like the reverse of when you tell someone you love them, how it isn’t always planned, how it just pops out.

“You didn’t have to say that, Aubrey.” He looks right at her, and she doesn’t even try to figure out if it’s hostility in his eyes, or hatred, or something else altogether.

“Yeah?” he says, kind of softly. “Maybe I was just trying to show you that I understand.”

She doesn’t say anything. She can’t talk to him right now, but if she could she would want to ask him what it is that he understands. Trying to believe in something better, does he understand that? Or does he just understand that sometimes, in order to get through things, people have to lie?

On her way up to Ivy’s room, she stops in their bedroom and gets a pillow, and then the comforter, the blanket, and all the sheets. She pulls everything off the bed. She carries it all with her into Ivy’s room and shuts the door behind her. She locks it. There’s something inside her that’s getting louder, telling her she really has to leave. Ivy’s crying is getting louder, too, but she doesn’t go to her yet. She takes the chair and wedges it under the door. She’d been meaning for so long to get a rocking chair in here, or a glider. She is glad now that she didn’t. She goes to the crib and picks up Ivy and stays there for a while holding her, whispering any number of soothing and reassuring and comforting things to her.

And this isn’t something that she means to spring on you, and it isn’t something that she feels apologetic about not mentioning before because if anything had been ingrained in her growing up it was that this one thing was never to be mentioned. She’s sure that Meredith, for example, doesn’t ever mention it; she’s sure she never even thinks about it, even in her quietest moments, if Meredith has any quiet moments. But she doesn’t want to think about that right now.

The thing is, their father doesn’t really live in France. Stephanie just started saying that a long time ago, because she liked the way it sounded in the movie
Kindergarten Cop
when the cute little kid said his dad lived in France. That the dad who lived in France actually turned out to be some sort of villain was, to her, beside the point. Or maybe it was exactly the point. Because their dad had left, or was perhaps asked to leave, when Stephanie wasn’t even three and Meredith wasn’t even one. He lives in Las Vegas now, and he has a family there. It wasn’t ever presented as, or seen as, a tragic single mom scenario because they lived in such a beautiful house in Bethesda, and went to the theater, and Mom had so many dinner parties, and senators and congressmen and important people were always there. Their childhood was so close to ideal, it really was perfect, everyone said so.

Stephanie had always hated that her father lived in Las Vegas, had always hated that he’d never been home. And as she got older, she thought she hated it less, but she still hated Las Vegas. She thought Las Vegas sounded so unseemly, so bad, a place for gamblers and ne’er-do-wells. So she’d just started saying France, and she thought that was okay; she thought it seemed so much better that way.

Holding Ivy in one arm, over her shoulder, the exact position they are always in, the one that seems to be theirs, gives Stephanie comfort, even now, as she lays out the sheets, the blankets, the comforter, and the pillows onto the floor. She places Ivy gently down—she doesn’t cry—and lies down next to her. There are ways in which she’d like Ivy to be like her, but not this way. She doesn’t want Ivy to say, in all seriousness, “my dad lives in France.”

She thinks her daughter may never know her father. Her daughter may only see her father on weekends. Her daughter may have a father who doesn’t have a job, who’s in and out of rehab, and that might not be an exaggeration. Her daughter may never say “my parents’ house,” she might have to say instead “my mom’s house.” Her daughter, her child, her baby, might never know her father. And she thinks there will be ways she’ll spend the rest of her life trying to make up for that, to make up to Ivy for the fact that her father may live in his own version of France.

The way she feels right now reminds her so much of when she used to live in New York and take taxis. It reminds her of the feeling you get when you leave a taxi and for a moment you think you left your wallet on the seat, or the moment when you think you left your shopping bag in the restaurant, the moment on the way to the airport, about to go on vacation, when you think you forgot to pack something you needed. And everything stops for a millisecond, but then it starts again because you realize you’ve got your wallet, you didn’t leave your shopping bag, you remembered to pack everything you might need. But this is different, this feeling she has right now is so different from that. Because there isn’t any moment when everything starts back up. Her wallet is in a cab somewhere, her shopping bags are in a restaurant, and it doesn’t even matter if she packed her underwear because she’s not ever going to arrive at the airport and she’s most certainly not going on any sort of vacation.

The restaurant is small, and while it might lack some of the shine of Jewel Bako down in the East Village, there is something very charming about it, and indeed, as the interested reader had said, something thoughtful. Gary arrived before Meredith did, and he waited for her out on the street, and when they went in to their table, it was reserved with a hand-lettered place card with
Marin
written out in beautiful letters over a line drawing of a fish.

“I like your red hair,” Gary says. Meredith smiles; she’s long been a fan of this particular wig.

“I wanted to say,” she says after they have each ordered a Kirin beer, but haven’t yet received their menus, “I really like the chant we did last night in G-Doga class.”

“Rama,” he says, and then adds softly, perhaps a bit conspiratorially, “Rama rama rama.” She resists the temptation to chant along with him, too.

“I think the dogs really liked it, too,” she says, and it’s true, though the dogs do seem to inherently like just about everything Gary does, everything Gary says to them. Dogs can be so wise.

“Yeah,” he says and chuckles softly. “They like it, but they don’t really need it.”

Meredith looks at him, slightly confused. He learns forward, his face brightening up as he begins to explain. She thinks his face brightens because he’s a teacher, because it’s his natural state to explain things. “Well, you know how Rama is Vishnu?” She nods, yes, even though she doesn’t really know that, but she’d like to seem like she does. “And repeating
rama rama rama
means
joy joy joy
?” She nods back at him, with a bit more confidence. “Well, that mantra, that chant,
joy joy joy
, it’s actually more for the people than for the dogs. Joy is so much more innate for dogs than it is for us.”

“Uh-huh,” she says and nods very seriously. She thinks of DB Sweeney, of all the dogs in G-Doga class, of all the dogs she notices now everywhere. Joy. There is a part of her that wants to reach across the table, just so she can touch him. She takes a sip of her just-arrived Kirin instead. She looks across the table at him; he looks comfortable, relaxed, at home. She feels weird. She wishes the menus were here because then she could make suggestions as to what it might be nice to order.

She takes a moment to do some sort of math, as all dieting surely must require math. The Kirin is two points, though it’s a big Kirin, bigger than say an Amstel Light, so maybe it could be three. And if she has sake, and really, she’d like to have sake, that’s another two points, or that could be three. And she’s already had seventeen points today, that’s more than she’d planned for, because instead of one mint cookie crisp bar, she actually had four. (Those mint cookie crisp bars are the best thing going.) At this point she doesn’t have so many points left in her day, which doesn’t leave a lot of options if dinner is going to consist of anything that doesn’t come ready for you in a cardboard box, its name written alluringly across the front.

Having dinner at a restaurant, at any sort of restaurant (even a Japanese one, which is slightly easier) is hard when you’re a Weight Watcher, harder still when you’d like to have a drink. At this juncture, Meredith would like to ask you a question, if she could. She actually doesn’t care who she’s even asking, she’d just really like someone to have an answer. How are you supposed to review a restaurant on six points? Especially when six points, if you haven’t been paying close attention, is roughly the equivalent of two tuna rolls?

She feels the tides of her mood beginning to turn, and it’s not that she would ever have described herself as completely pleasant or even cheerful, but she thinks that since she started dieting, she’s become a lot more moody. Definitely more moody than skinny. She thinks it could be because she’s been trying too hard. She looks across again at Gary, who still looks so at ease, so at home, and she thinks, again,
Try easy
. A dish of steaming, salted edamame is placed on the table between them.
One cup of edamame is four points, this could be two. Cups, that is, not points.
She can’t count anymore. She takes an edamame and bites down, sliding the soybean out of its shell.

“So, do you live in this neighborhood, too?” she asks.

“No,” he says, placing a soybeanless edamame shell next to hers. “I live in Williamsburg.”

“Brooklyn?” she asks.

“Brooklyn,” he says with one of his patented grins. They should be patented. “I’m a big Brooklyn fan.”

Meredith takes another edamame, and takes a moment to consider this. It could be the first bad sign. They’re always out there, waiting. Meredith is an admitted Manhattan snob. She is aware that there are people who adore Brooklyn, who embrace it wholeheartedly as a vital, vibrant part of New York City. She knows these people are many, that their legions are myriad and vast. She’s just not one of them.

“Do you know I’ve never been?” she says in lieu of anything else.

“Really? How can the restaurant critic for
The NY
not have been to Brooklyn?”

“Um, well, Andrew Bamfield?” she says, referencing the critic who covers Brooklyn restaurants. “He does all of Brooklyn, and I do all of, most of, Manhattan, so I don’t really ever have the time to get out there.”

“You should one of these days, it’s really terrific,” he says enthusiastically. “It’s really lovely.” Meredith has never thought of it as a place that might be lovely, or as a place that might be terrific, she has really only ever thought of it as
far
.

“It’s a lot quieter than Manhattan,” he continues, and there’s a small part of her that thinks, after ten years of living in Manhattan, quiet would be very nice. “I can’t see living anywhere else,” he says.

And she can’t quite imagine living there, under any circumstances, and so she just says, “Yes,” in lieu of anything else.

“Manhattan,” he continues, “there’s just too much honking, too much noise,” and she thinks, but doesn’t say,
It’s Williamsburg, it’s not Iowa.

“Uh-huh.”

“I wake up to birds chirping every morning. What do you wake up to?”

“My Bang & Olufsen CD player,” she says matter-of-factly. He stares at her blankly for a few seconds. And then the menus arrive.

“Well, great then,” she says, “let’s take a look,” and she redirects all her focus on her menu. A few minutes, a few edamame, and a few more sips of Kirin beer later, Gary speaks up and says, “Just let me know,
Sarah
, if there’s anything special you’d like to me to order.”

“Well, funny you should mention it,” she says, looking up from her menu and over at him. “I’m going to get the sashimi, the oysters with ponzu sauce, and the octopus and cucumber with spicy sauce to start.” His eyes widen ever so slightly. She continues, “And then the Chilean sea bass as an entrée. Do you think you could order as many of the deep-fried appetizers as you’d feel comfortable? Or, let’s say the tofu, the lotus root, and the crabmeat?”

“No problem,” he answers. “Oh, and do you mind if I get the sea urchin, too?”

“Oh no, by all means, get whatever you want. As long as it’s not the same as mine. And that’s fine, because I am
definitely
not getting the sea urchin. Though if you could get some of the fried appetizers, too?”
And tell me maybe what they taste like.
She wonders how much detail she can get him to put into his descriptions of the tempura, of all the fried appetizers, so maybe she won’t have to try them at all. And she knows that’s wrong. As wrong as say, sea urchin.

“Sure,” he agrees.

“But, sea urchin, really?” she has to ask, and just saying the words
sea urchin
suddenly makes it so hard to swallow, suddenly makes it so that she could very well be in danger of gagging. Sea urchin is not the only thing in the world that she can’t abide, oh there are a few others, but it might be the only edible thing she can’t bear. She thinks it might be the only food she’s never eaten, and that’s saying a tremendous amount, as she’s eaten quite a lot.

“Big fan,” he says, displaying more of his teeth, and she thinks,
Brooklyn
and
sea urchin
, and she thinks maybe it’s not just that the tides of her mood are turning but that the tides of the evening are actually turning, too. Brooklyn and sea urchin (gag) might be working together to point out that this, she and a guy named Gary, a country music-loving doga instructor, might not be a match made in heaven. The waitress arrives, they place their orders, and she makes an executive decision, the kind she’s good at making: she won’t linger too long on the sea urchin, as nothing good can come of sea urchin. In fact she’ll change the subject altogether.