Once Upon a Time, There Was You

  Sadie is beginning her push-ups when she hears something outside. Footsteps?

  She rushes to the door, starts to call out, then stops herself. It could be him. She holds her breath, listening. Nothing, now.

  She feels a great drop into despair, into helplessness, but then just as suddenly feels a great rush of anger. “Let me out, you asshole!” she shouts. “I’m not afraid of you! Let me out! LET ME OUT!” Nothing. She stands there, panting. Waiting. Nothing.

  “Are you there?” she says. And then, “I’m sorry. Could you let me out?”

  Nothing.

  She will not cry. She will not. She goes to her backpack and takes the tiniest sip of water. The tiniest. Puts the cap back on tightly. What if it spills? She puts the bottle in her backpack. Takes it out again. Takes everything out of her backpack and then puts it all back, neatly. Housecleaning. She puts the backpack in the corner opposite the bathroom.

  She goes over to the mattress she slept on and brushes the dirt off it. Maybe it’s cleaner on the other side? She lifts the mattress, then drops it. Shudders. Definitely not, definitely not cleaner on the other side. She sees a weed growing at the edge of the shed and goes over to examine it. She strokes the tiny green leaves. A pet? Art? Something she might be able to eat? What if it’s poison? What if someone comes to rescue her and she’s dead because she ate something poisonous?

  If she picks it and puts it on the mattress, she can look at it through a little hole in her fist and it will be like her bed is covered in vines and will be pretty and that will cheer her up. But then it will die.

  So the weed will be a pet, another live thing, stuck in the same place as she.

  “Help!” she yells, but it is not very loud. Useless, really.

  She might be able to chart the passage of time by the angle of light that makes its way in. When the light seems overhead, lunchtime. Maybe there won’t be a lunchtime. Maybe she’ll be rescued by then. Or the other.

  13

  “What have we here?” one of the party guests asks Irene, taking a cocktail napkin from her and surveying the platter she is holding.

  “What we have here is grilled flatbread with za’atar,” she says. She rights the platter, which had begun to tip sideways.

  “And what is za’atar?”

  What is za’atar? She thinks for a moment, then recites: “It’s a mix of thyme, marjoram, and ground sumac. Oh! And sesame seeds!” She adds this last a bit too loudly, then, more quietly, adds, “It’s a North African spice mix.”

  He takes a bite, nods. “Good!” he says, and little crumbs fly out of his mouth. His face colors slightly, which Irene finds charming. “Sorry,” he says.

  “It’s okay.” He’s a good-looking man: tall, blond hair and gray eyes. He hasn’t been a great mixer; mostly he’s been availing himself of whatever Irene brings out and then going back to stand in the corner of the massive dining room to fool around with whatever device he’s holding—who can keep up? He and Irene have struck up a kind of makeshift friendship. Each time she brings out something new, she offers it to him first.

  Irene is passing appetizers because two of Henry’s staff members are sick. Normally she likes to stay in the background and work in the kitchen. She hates passing appetizers. She doesn’t like the way guests usually treat her, especially at the high-end parties, the way they act as though they’re patting her on the head when they take something from her. As if she cares! If they don’t eat the appetizers, well, then, the staff will. Henry is good at letting his employees take home any leftovers the host doesn’t want. And at the more lavish parties, the hosts don’t usually want anything but the leftover liquor. “Oh, no—you go ahead and take that,” they say, puffed up with their magnanimity. But there is always some sort of hawk-eyed proprietary glance at any tray of food they’re giving up, too. As if they’re being generous because their mommy is making them be.

  “What’s coming next?” the man asks. And then, “My name is Jeffrey Stanton, by the way. Since I’ve talked to you more than anyone else at this party, I might as well introduce myself.”

  “I’m Irene.”

  “Irene …”

  “Marsh.” For a moment, she worries that Henry will come flying out of the kitchen, saying, “No! No! No! You do not give your last name to the guests!” It prompts her to spell her last name, too. Which prompts Jeffrey to spell his, and Irene laughs. This makes her tray shift, and a few flatbreads fall onto the floor. Jeffrey quickly picks them up and puts his fingers to his lips. “Nobody saw,” he whispers.

  “I’ll take them back to the kitchen and dump them.”

  “Oh, don’t do that. Go and offer them to that guy over there.” He points to a man who has his back turned. Silver-haired. Imposing, even from behind.

  “Who’s that?” Irene asks.

  “My boss. Emerson Cummings. Spelled A-s-s-h-o-l-e.”

  “Ah,” Irene says.

  “Actually,” Jeffrey says, “I wouldn’t want you to give him dirty flatbread. I wouldn’t want you to give him anything.”

  The swinging door to the kitchen cracks open, and there is Henry Bliss, giving Irene the Look. “Gotta go,” she says.

  When she gets back into the kitchen, Henry can hardly contain himself. “What are you doing? We’ve got pork belly skewers that have to go out right now; they’re getting cold. And you need to pass the bresaola.”

  “What bresaola?” She puts down the platter of flatbreads, and eats one that hadn’t fallen on the floor. She thinks.

  “The bresaola with shaved brussels sprouts and horseradish. It’s over there, Sandy’s just putting the orchids on the tray. We need to get this stuff out, Irene!” He puts his hands on his hips. “I swear, I hate to fire people, but I think maybe I’m going to have to fire you.”

  “You know what, Henry? No need. I quit.” She’ll go back to speech therapy. Or she’ll find something else. She’s had enough.

  “Oh, stop it.” He walks away from her to open the oven door and waves the warm air toward his nose, closing his eyes and inhaling deeply. “I’m going to need the walnut vinaigrette for these beets really soon! Irene, go help make it. Hurry up.”

  “No, Henry,” she says, speaking loudly. “I quit.” The other workers in the kitchen fall silent: Tommy, the handsome young Asian man who almost never stops giggling. Linda, the aspiring pastry chef who lives in fear of Henry but also worships him. The self-named Cayenne, who’s pierced everything she can and now is after Irene to get herself a nose stud.

  Henry comes over to stand before Irene. “Keep your voice down. And you can’t quit now. You know I’m short today. Those sesame balls are going to come out of the deep fryer in exactly seven minutes, and they have to be served immediately!”

  Irene takes off her apron and lays it on one of the massive granite counters.

  “Oh, for … Irene! We’re going to serve dried fig souvlaki! You love that! And lobster salad! With corn and basil and zucchini! Look, I’ll … You can take all the leftovers home. All of them. I’m sorry!”

  “I’m not,” Irene says and walks out the back door, where the sun is shining and the birds are calling and several hours of daylight remain. She’s abruptly quit jobs twice in her life: once, when she was a waitress at an ice cream store and they screamed at her for her uniform being too short—the uniform they had given her to wear, for the record. The other time was when she was a secretary at a company where the sexism was rampant, and her boss closed her in his office and pressed her against him and when she resisted he told her she’d better learn to play the game. She went to lunch that day and never came back. She’d forgotten how good it felt to seize one’s own life back into one’s own hands.

  She almost throws her car keys up in the air, but she’d probably miss when she tried to catch them. Instead, she simply picks up the pace, and by the time she comes around to the front of the house, she’s practically skipping.

  On the stairs leading from the front door, she sees Jeffrey Stanton. He hol
ds up a hand. “Hey!”

  “Hey.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I quit. I just quit my job.” She shrugs. “Ta da!”

  “Huh! Want to go and get a drink and teach me how to do the same thing?”

  She laughs.

  “We can take my car,” he says. “It’s right here.”

  Oh. He means it. She sneaks a look at her cellphone to see if her daughter has called yet. No. Oh, what is the matter with Sadie? Why has she become so resistant to nearly everything Irene asks of her? The little Val that lives in her brain says, Because she needs to separate from you, remember? Let go of her life and worry about your own!

  “Okay, I’ll come,” she tells Jeffrey, and she gets a little zip of feeling straight up her spine.

  Val’s right. The hell with worrying over Sadie. Let go, let go, let go. Sadie wants to be so independent? Fine. Let her be. Irene will turn off her phone and hope that Sadie calls and gets her voice mail. Hopes, in fact, that Sadie comes home before Irene gets back and has to wonder where she is. Irene will step way back, in fact, and then let’s just see how independent Sadie really wants to be. Ordinarily, Irene would leave Sadie a message, saying where she was going, when she might be back. Not this time. Nope. And look: it’s not as hard as she thought. She’s fine. It’s a relief not to have to constantly report your whereabouts. A relief that, Irene acknowledges ruefully, Sadie longs to feel, too. But! Sadie is eighteen! Irene is … not eighteen!

  Maybe if Sadie is not home when she gets there, she’ll put Joan Baez on the stereo. Loudly. Bette Midler. The Glenn Miller CD she loves so much that Sadie can’t abide. (Mom, it sounds like mothballs smell!) She will make dinner for a most emphatic one. If Sadie comes home hungry, oh well. Two can play at this game.

  Irene walks over to Jeffrey’s car, and he opens the door for her. A Prius. Light green. What an excellent man.

  “How about the Top of the Mark?” Jeffrey asks her, after they’ve both buckled themselves in.

  “Really.?”

  “No good?”

  “No, that’s great,” she says. “Let’s go.” Cougar, she thinks. And then she thinks, No. Not a cougar. I’m too old to be a cougar. I’m an old lioness, stretched out in the sun, not much interested in chasing prey anymore, but not above accepting an offering. Due an offering. Yes, a lioness in the sun, who has earned the right to stop running after things that don’t want to be caught.

  14

  On Sunday afternoon, John goes to a movie so vacuous he has forgotten it by the time he gets to his car. He supposes it’s another sign of aging that he’s gotten so cranky about movies, but must they all be so simpleminded? Must a movie be in some language other than English for it to linger in the mind, to invite further thought and conversation? Not that he has anyone to converse about movies with. Suddenly. Even Sadie hasn’t answered her cellphone in the last couple days.

  He goes to the cleaners and chats about the weather with the friendly Korean woman who works there, avails himself of one of the lollipops she keeps on the counter. He likes this woman for her unalterable cheerfulness, her neat blouses and cardigan sweaters, even—oddly—for the way she remembers his phone number but never his name.

  He stops at the hardware store, which he always enjoys doing, in part for the memories it brings back of him going to those stores with his father. His dad seemed able to answer any question John asked about any tool or part, seemed to know immediately what bin to go to for any size nail or screw or hook or washer. There was a confidence Sam Marsh exuded in those places that John enjoyed seeing; later, he thought that it was a way for his father to mitigate the loss of his wife, of his son’s mother. In the hardware store, things made sense. There was an answer for every problem. In this world, at least, his father knew without question what to do when things broke.

  John’s final stop is the grocery store. Here, listening to the Muzak version of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” he pushes his cart listlessly up and down the aisles, selecting too many items from the produce section, as usual. There is a kind of virtuous feeling he gets, loading his cart with heads of broccoli and cauliflower, bunches of carrots, but then he always ends up throwing a good half of them away. There is such a vast distance between the fantasy of him making his own curried carrot soup and the reality of him holding up a carrot so limp it bends nearly in half, then tossing it in with the used coffee grounds. He supposes he should join the single set, the men and women who stand at the ready-made counter in their work clothes, selecting dinners for one, but something about that depresses him. He wants the illusion, at least, that he is capable of cooking for himself. That he is a man who dons a striped apron, puts opera on the stereo, and sings along as he exuberantly adds red wine to the pasta sauce.

  When he gets home, he sees that Amy’s car is parked in front of his house, and she is sitting in it. He stands in the driveway holding on to his bag of groceries, waiting for her to come over to him. And though he fears that she has come to collect a bracelet she left, one he found on the floor of the bedroom, he is also thinking about what he bought that he can whip up into a dinner for two. He tries to read the expression on her face, but can’t.

  “Hi,” she says, when she reaches him.

  “Hi.”

  “Okay. I came to tell you something. I miss you. But I’m still mad at you. I think it was really wrong, what you did.”

  “I think so, too. And I’m sorry.”

  “It made me question your character.”

  He nods. “I can understand that.” He wants to say, again, that it was never his intention to deceive her, that he just got in deeper and deeper, and then didn’t know the right way to tell her the truth. But he senses that the best tactic now is to keep his own talking to a minimum.

  Which does not exactly work, because Amy turns around and heads back to her car.

  “Amy! Could you … Can we talk some more?”

  She opens her car door.

  “Give me another chance!” he yells loudly, embarrassing himself. Anyone at home on his block is now privy to the vicissitudes of his romantic life. Perhaps anyone in his city.

  From the front seat of her car, Amy pulls out a basket with a bouquet of flowers he recognizes from her garden, and a bottle of wine. She walks back up to him. “One more chance. But, John—please, don’t lie to me again. The truth is always better.”

  Her cheeks are flushed, her lipstick fresh. She’s wearing a necklace with a pearl that lies in the valley between her collarbones, a flowered dress with a thin black belt, open-toed heels. She is such a lovely woman.

  “I know,” he says. “I won’t lie to you again, I promise.”

  “I mean about anything,” Amy says.

  “What if you get your hair cut and you’re really happy about it but I don’t like it?”

  “You must man up and tell me. Also you must tell me if something makes me look fat. If I am careless with someone’s feelings. And especially if you’re angry about something—you must tell me about it before you get too angry. Look, let’s keep it simple: If I ask a question, you answer it truthfully, no matter what it is. And I’ll do the same. Okay?”

  He thinks about this. He wonders if declarations of truth aren’t more important than declarations of love. He thinks they might be. He takes in a breath and says, “Deal.”

  She laughs. “You know why I believe you?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you thought about it for so long before you answered.”

  “Well, it’s an important question. Listen, I just went to the grocery store. As you can see. You want to have some dinner with me? I can make vegetables and vegetables. And fruit.”

  “Yes. And I want to tell you that the man you saw me with in the restaurant is my brother. I just took him to the airport, and on the way there, I told him about you. His advice was that I beat it over here as quickly as I could.”

  “Good advice.”

  In the kitchen, John puts down the
bags and turns to face her, then lifts her hand to kiss it.

  “You are such a sweet man,” she says.

  “I only did that so you would peel the carrots.”

  She comes closer and lightly kisses his mouth. “I’d love to peel the carrots. And I’d love to have dinner with you, but I have to tell you, I’m not starving. I could wait a while. If you wanted to … you know, wait a while.”

  “I’m so glad I got nonperishables,” he says, taking her hand and leading her upstairs.

  It is nine-thirty by the time they come back down, and they are both ravenous. They forgo making dinner and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, then a hastily concocted fruit salad. And then Amy goes to get her purse and pulls a piece of paper from it. “Are you ready?”

  “For what?” He tightens the tie of his bathrobe, leans forward to see what’s on the paper. He feels an odd rush of trepidation, as though everything that just took place between them is bogus, and now she is going to present him with something suggesting she wants out of their relationship after all.

  But when she lays the page down on the table, he sees that it’s a computer printout of the image of a puppy—the image is not clear, it but looks like a mixed breed, one ear standing straight up, the other down.

  “I think I found something,” she says. “Do you want to go and look at him with me and see if you agree?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think we should agree. I mean, he’ll be my dog, but he’ll probably be around you a lot, too. Right?”

  “I hope so.”

  She studies the photo, then looks at him, and the overhead light catches her face in a way that makes her seem older than her years, but lovely. He thinks he knows how she will age, what she’ll look like in ten years, even twenty. More important, he thinks he knows what she’ll be like. After they made love, they spent a long time talking and he was again struck by her optimism, by her kindness. Before he met Amy, he had resigned himself to thinking he’d probably be alone in old age, had told himself that he’d be better off that way, but now some light has slipped under that door.