Until the Real Thing Comes Along (2 page)

I have imagined a fleshy constellation of small children and me, spread out and napping on my big bed while the newest baby sleeps in her crib. The pulled-down shades lift with the occasional breeze, then slap gently back against the windowsill. If you listen carefully, you can hear the small breathing sounds of the children, their soothing, syncopated rhythms. There is no other sound, not even from the birds; the afternoon is holding its finger to its lips. All the children have blankets and all of them are sucking their thumbs. All of them are read to every night after their baths. All of them think they are the favorite. None of them has ever had an illness of any kind, or ever will. (I mean, as long as I’m imagining.)

What I never imagined was the truth: me at thirty-six years of age, lying around on top of my made bed on a beautiful winter afternoon with shades pulled for an entirely different reason, thinking, Why didn’t I marry Johnny Tranchilla? So he was shorter than I was. He was very handsome and very romantic. He had black curly hair and naturally red lips. He sent me a love note in the mail after our first date and he was only nineteen, how brave! His father was loaded. He wore Weejuns with no socks. I could have been happy. Then I go on through the rest of my short list, thinking of the men I might possibly have married. Ron Anderson, who became a mildly famous artist and now lives in a huge A-frame in the Rocky Mountains with his blonde wife, who is more beautiful than I’ll ever be but not as much fun, I can guarantee
it. She would never have broken into the planetarium like I did with Ron, would never have entered into the famous mustard-and-catsup fight at D.J.’s diner at three in the morning.

There was Tim Connor, too, who was quiet and tender and reliable—not exciting, but one grows tired of that after one is, oh, say, ninety-five. Frank Olds became a neurosurgeon! I could have lived in material comfort instead of making dinners out of soda crackers and cottage cheese and repeatedly showing houses to people who will never buy any of them.

The reason I didn’t marry any of the various men I might have is always the same: Ethan Allen Gaines. I fell in love with him in sixth grade, and I never, never stopped loving him, not even after we tried to have a serious relationship in our late twenties and failed, and he took me out to dinner to a very nice place to break off our engagement and told me it was because he was gay. “Oh, Ethan,” I said, “that’s okay, I’ll marry you anyway.” It was as inadvertent and embarrassing as a piece of meat flying out of my mouth. Ethan nodded, looked away. And then back at me. And I knew that was the end of that. Knew it in my head, anyway. The heart is always a different matter. I kept the ring. It lives in a box as beautiful as it is.

“I told you,” my friend Elaine said the day after we broke up. “I
told
you! Who else would keep rolled-up towels on their bathroom sink?”

“They were
hand
towels,” I said.

“… And?”

“A lot of people roll up their hand towels.”

“Patty. It wasn’t just the towels.”

“
I
know,” I said. “I know!”

But I hadn’t known. I hadn’t let myself.

Because consider this: once Ethan and I were at a lake and he rented a boat because I said I had never learned how to row. He told me what to do, made me get in alone, and watched from shore, shouting encouragement. I got stuck. I dropped an oar. Ethan was telling me how to come in with one oar, but I was just going around in circles. “I can’t do it!” I yelled. He put a hand to his forehead, shielding his eyes, and yelled back, “Yes, you can!” But I couldn’t. And so he waded out to me in his beautiful new brown tweed pants and white sweater and pulled me in. And I sat, hanging onto both sides of the boat, watching the sun in his yellow hair and the moving muscles of his back. And when he got me in, we sat in the grass and he was wringing out his pants and sweater and dumping water from his shoes and I said I was so sorry, I knew how expensive those clothes were—they were from Anthony’s, a very exclusive men’s shop that served you Chivas in a cut-crystal glass while you fingered linens and silks. Ethan asked if I wanted to go shopping and I said sure, I’ll buy you some new clothes, but not from Anthony’s. He said no, I’ll buy an outfit for both of us. I said, I ruined your pants! Why would you buy me an outfit? And he said because you can’t row a boat.

The day before that, we’d been to see a movie with an exquisitely sad ending, the kind that makes your insides feel made of glass. My throat ached when the lights came up; I wanted to just run out of there so I wouldn’t have to hear anything anyone said. Ethan’s face seemed full of what I felt, too. “Run,” he whispered,
and we did. We ran to his car and slammed the doors and sat still, staring straight ahead and saying not one word. Then I looked over at him and he took my hand and said, “I know.”

On the night Ethan told me he was gay, I said that admitting it must be a very liberating experience, that it must feel good. He said it did in many ways, but it hurt him that he had to hurt me. I said, well, we would always be best friends, wouldn’t we? He said of course.

I didn’t cry until I came home and climbed into the bathtub. Then I sobbed for a good twenty minutes. And then I leaned back, laid the washrag over my chest, inhaled the steamy air, and thought about when Ethan had come over when I was sick, just a few weeks earlier. He’d made chicken soup and three kinds of Jell-O, brought with him a variety of cheeses and crackers and fruit. He’d treated me with a tenderness that was somehow too competent. I’d watched him, longing for him to come over to me, kneel down, knock over my ginger ale, ignore it, take my hand, and say, “If you ever die, I’ll kill myself.” But he didn’t do that. He ran his hand sweetly over my forehead, went to adjust the flame under the soup; then, frowning, flipped through the channels on the television. He covered me with a quilt he’d laundered, patted my feet affectionately, then made a phone call. I felt as though he were zipped into a self that was hiding the real him—I could get close, but not
there
. I had put it down to a normal kind of male reticence, the kind that has a woman sigh and put her hand on her hip and call a girlfriend. I had believed that with the trust and intimacy of marriage it would get better—he would open himself completely to me.

But that night, with my engagement ring newly off my finger (though the stubborn indentation of it remained), I slid deeper into the water and thought about all the times Ethan and I had made love. Then I thought about those times again, and saw them true. I pulled the washrag up over my face. Beneath it, I think I was blushing.

I
have always thought that part of my problem is my name: Patty. That’s what my parents named me. Not Patricia. Patty. Patty Anne Murphy. Sounds like one of those huge dolls that walk like Frankenstein’s monster. Sounds like a huge, Irish-Catholic, curly-headed doll, not a desirable woman whom you want to marry and impregnate.

I don’t know what my parents were thinking. Well, yes I do. I asked them recently, and they said they were thinking it was a clean and healthy name, a fun name.

Fun? I said.

Yes
, they said, and then both of them started getting that hurt look that makes you feel like you’re beating a puppy.

“You
can
change it,” my mother said, sniffing, and I said no, no, I liked it, really, I was just wondering how they chose it.

“Why?” my mother said, happily suspicious. “Do you need names?”

Ma, I said, and she said all right.

She doesn’t care if I’m married or not. Not anymore. She’s
crazy about children, too. She understands the overwhelming want I have. She thinks the hell with a husband, if I can’t find one—just have a baby. She’ll help me, my brother and sisters will help me—they’ll give me a million hand-me-downs. Probably Elaine could even pitch in on the weekends, she said, the last time she got going on this. Elaine could do a little baby-sitting on the weekends so I could go out and show houses, couldn’t she? Might do
her
some good. My mother is mystified as to why neither Elaine nor I have married and had children. I don’t exactly have a lot to pick from. Elaine’s problem is that she has too much to pick from. My mother also told me about those services they have now, Parents in a Pinch, had I heard of them?

“Ma!”
I said, finally. She smiled primly, then rose from the dinner table to clear the dishes, pointedly refusing my help. A dubious punishment, in keeping with her usual methods. Both of my parents were always terrible at punishing; if, for example, you were sent to your room, one or the other of them would inevitably join you up there.

People say, Wow, your mother’s pretty liberal. But they’re missing the point. The point is, she makes me feel so much worse. At work, when I’m supposed to be doing comp sheets, I sit at my desk, my hand over my uterus, thinking about how I have so few good eggs left. I imagine my inventory: rotten eggs, eggs empty of insides, misshapen eggs, all tumbling down my weepy fallopian tubes. And every now and then a really good egg, perfumed and made-up and beribboned, calling out, “I’m
ready
!”, her little voice echoing in the vast darkness. “Yoo-hoo!” she calls, to no one. My uterus drums its fingers, yawns, wonders whether it should close up shop early, what’s the point.

I once went to a bookstore to see if I could find something on keeping my eggs healthy. I didn’t see anything, so I went over to customer assistance. I waited in the longer line, so I could have the woman, and then I said, very quietly, “Would you have anything on … you know, keeping your eggs healthy?”

“KEEPING YOUR
EGGS
HEALTHY????” the woman asked.

I blushed, nodded.

“This would be a COOKBOOK, right?” she asked, and started punching keys on her computer. She looked up at me over her half glasses, her spiky earrings swinging.

“Um …” I said. “Sure.” And then I stood there and waited until she told me why yes, they had a book called
Safe Food
that would probably be exactly what I needed. Thanks, I said. And actually went to the shelf she pointed to. Actually looked through
Safe Food
, which had many frightening graphs and statistics and boldfaced definitions of digestive ailments. I looked through it for what I thought was a respectful length of time and then I put it back on the shelf. I felt like I needed to wash my hands. And then I felt bad for not buying the book, because the woman had gone to the trouble of looking it up.

This is how I am. It’s really bad in small stores. If I go into one, I have to buy something. Otherwise I worry about hurting the feelings of the people who are working there. “You’re so crazy, what do you
think
?” Elaine always says, when I buy useless items that I often donate to the Salvation Army without taking them out of the bag. “You think everyone who comes in that store buys something? You’re
allowed
to just
look.”

“I
know,” I say. “I just look, sometimes.” But not in small stores.

This misguided tenderness of heart may account for my dismal
record at work. My low number of sales. I have been at Rodman Real Estate for two years and I have sold one house. Which I did the first week I was there. It was a $3.2 million house and I just happened to answer the phone at the right time. The buyers had always admired the house and the moment it came on the market, they snapped it up. They told me how to do everything; they’d bought and sold a lot of houses. They were so
rich!
I wonder sometimes when people are that rich if they get annoyed that they can only get so good a brand of toilet paper, a kind anyone can have. You know, there they are in their luxuriously appointed bathroom, with the gold fixtures and the Italian marble floor, and all they can put on their $700 dispenser is quilted Northern.

I am currently living off the last bit of my profit from that sale, and waiting for the next fluke. It has to happen soon or I’ll have to find another job, which I really don’t want to do. Because even though I am lousy at it, I love the real estate business. I like helping people find a home where they think they’ll be happy. And I like seeing how other people live, imagining myself frying eggs in this country kitchen, watching television in that blue-carpeted family room. Here I am in the English garden that you get to through white French doors; there I am in my library, the walls lined with oak paneling, the leaded-glass windows reaching from floor to ceiling. Or, my favorite: Here I am in a little bedroom in my little cottage that is right on the water. I am in my baby’s room, rocking her, listening to the rush and pull of the waves outside the window, and singing a made-up song into an ear more shell-like than shells. My baby’s fist holds tightly onto my finger, even as she fades into sleep. I look at the faint scribble of vein
across her tiny eyelid. I pick up her foot, examine her littlest toe, softly exclaim my delight.

Always back to the same place, lately.

It’s an obsession, I’ll be the first to admit that.

Anyway, in real life, most of my showings are to the Berkenheimers, who are looking for a vacation home. Crystal Cove, Massachusetts, where I live, has an interesting mix of small cottages and huge mansions, and everyone seems to get along. Upscale restaurants and those that serve dinner specials for $3.99 exist side by side; the cooks smoke and chat outside their backdoors. You can shop at Theresa’s, where the elegance of the decor makes customers speak in hushed tones (and you can pay $140 for a cotton summer dress); or you can shop in the basement at Winkle’s—that’s where they have their women’s department, in the basement. There are no changing rooms—you take it all off in the aisles and inspect yourself in mirrors that are hung on support columns and filmed over yellowly with time. There isn’t a woman alive who wouldn’t appreciate a mirror like that on certain days, if not, in fact, on most days.
NO MEN
! the big sign hanging above the stairs down to the basement reads. Because of that sign—held up, I happen to know, with dental floss—you don’t have to worry about some guy seeing your torn underwear, or your belly in the not-held-in position. It’s like a locker room for women of all ages—without the worry of an upcoming game. I like to hang out there even when I don’t need clothes. I like to hear the support that women give each other, biting their lips and telling the truth about whether back fat shows in a bathing suit. (“Just tuck it in,” I once heard a woman tell her friend. “And then
hold it down with duct tape. That’s what they do on
Miss America
.” “Is duct tape waterproof?” her friend asked, and the room stilled to listen to the answer.)