Once Upon a Time, There Was You

  “Mom,” Sadie says. “Can I speak honestly?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “So what?”

  “Okay,” Irene says. “I know that’s kind of a stupid story, but I only mean that once you get married, you—”

  “First of all, you could have told Dad to go to hell. In a nice way. You could have said, ‘You know, once in a while I’m going to need to eat late, so get used to it.’ ”

  With some difficulty, Irene holds her tongue.

  “Or you could have decided that, since he had to get up early, you’d eat out when you wanted to eat late at night.”

  “But I wanted to come home and eat,” Irene says.

  “And Dad wanted to sleep. Jesus, Mom.”

  “Please don’t talk that way to me.”

  Sadie looks at Irene, shaking her head. “We are not at all alike,” she says, finally.

  Irene says nothing. It hurts to hear her daughter say this, with such superiority, with such evident relief.

  “So … Did you want something?” Sadie asks. “I mean, when you first came in here?”

  “Yes. I wanted to ask you to invite Ron and his mother to dinner tomorrow night.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes!” Though now she is not so sure anymore.

  “What time?” Sadie asks.

  “Seven.”

  “Okay,” Sadie says, happily. “I’ll ask.”

  Irene looks around the room. Sadie has made a pile of things to be thrown away. In it is a Barbie doll, lying so her legs are splayed at a ridiculous angle. “Throwing away your dolls?”

  “Well, I thought I’d donate them somewhere. Although they might not want that one on top. I gave her a haircut. Didn’t turn out too well.”

  Irene smiles. “I did that once. I cut my Ginny doll’s hair, and it looked awful. I tried to glue it back, and then it looked even worse. I was going to throw her away, but I thought it was unfair. So I buried her. I gave a funeral, and all the neighborhood kids came. We had cookies and cherry Kool-Aid afterward.” She smiles at Sadie. “Huh. My first catering experience.”

  She goes over to pick up the doll, straightens her legs. Then she holds it up to face Sadie and speaks for it in a high voice. “Hey, Sadie!”

  Nothing.

  Irene puts the doll back in the pile. Nothing works anymore. Nothing.

  She stands. “Sadie? I can help you with household things. I have a lot I can give you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And also, I want to say that … Well, I’m almost there.”

  “Okay.”

  “But if you could just tell me one thing,” Irene says, coming to sit on the bed beside her daughter. “Right before you took your vows, right before you said ‘I do,’ was there any hesitation? Did you feel any ambivalence at all?”

  “No, that was you,” Sadie says, looking directly into her mother’s eyes.

  So it was.

  “All right. I’m going tell you something,” Irene says.

  Sadie waits, wary.

  “I had a friend in high school who got married when she was seventeen, the day after graduation. Lisa Weltner. I still hear from her every now and then. I think she has the happiest marriage I’ve ever seen. So I just want to say, I know you can get married young and have it be successful. There. There’s your first wedding gift from me.”

  “Thanks, Mom. Seriously.”

  “Although I must also tell you the guy she married was five years older. Five years makes such a difference at this time in your life.” She looks at Sadie. “I mean, you’ll grant me that, right?”

  Sadie leans back so violently she bumps her head hard against the bed frame.

  “Are you all right?” Irene asks, automatically.

  “How come you can’t give with both hands, Mom? How come you have to give with one and take away with the other?”

  “I’m only trying to suggest that you haven’t acknowledged that so much of this is … Sadie, I believe you care for Ron. I believe you love him. But what you’re undertaking is so much harder than you know. Not because you’re so young. Nobody knows how hard it’s going to be until they’re in the middle of it, no matter what age they are when they get married! But by entering into this so young, you’re just handicapping yourself further. Couldn’t you have waited a couple of years to get married? Couldn’t you have trusted that everything would last that long? What are you so afraid of that you had to get married so soon?”

  “What were you and Dad so afraid of that you had to wait so long?”

  Irene sighs.

  “I need to be alone, now,” Sadie says. “Please.”

  Before Irene goes out the door, Sadie says, “So … is dinner still on?”

  “Yes,” Irene says, but she thinks her daughter probably knows something about what she is feeling. Which is that she wishes she could rescind the invitation. She’s not ready after all. Even if she wants to be, she’s not.

  “Can Meghan come?”

  Irene turns around. “Sadie. Sadie. One of the reasons I’m struggling with this is that you seem to think this is … This isn’t fun. This isn’t a lark. This is serious. My inviting these people to dinner because—”

  “These people are my husband and my mother-in-law. And the only reason I’m not living with them right now is because Ron wants me to try to get things right with you before we find our own place.”

  Irene ignores this, which is a little like ignoring a knife in your side. She speaks calmly. “Inviting Ron and his mother to dinner is not so much a social event as it is—”

  “An inquisition?”

  Irene looks at the thin band of gold Sadie is wearing on her left hand. Sadie told her she and Ron picked it out at a pawnshop. She thinks of a friend of hers, whose daughter recently got a two-carat diamond and was planning a wedding that would cost over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Irene thought it was gross. She remembers thinking, I hope when Sadie gets married, she keeps it simple.

  “I’m trying to meet you in the middle, Sadie. I really am.”

  Sadie nods. “Yeah. When’s Dad coming back?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Irene closes her daughter’s door, goes into her bedroom, which at the moment is not even her bedroom, and closes that door, too. She sits at the edge of her bed, stares into her lap.

  Fine. Let her go. Good riddance. She sees John’s sneakers by the bed, and she picks up one and flings it at the closet door. When’s Dad coming back? She picks up the other shoe and throws that one, too.

  From Sadie’s room come the muffled sounds of her talking. Telling someone about her nutty mother, no doubt. Good riddance.

  28

  “Okay, so we’ll be there at seven tomorrow night,” Ron says. “My mom wants to know what we should bring.”

  “Peace,” Sadie says.

  She hangs up the phone, leans back against her headboard, and listens to see if there are any more sounds coming from her mother’s bedroom. No. It’s quiet now. Sadie looks at her watch: seven-thirty. When is her dad coming home?

  Irene just can’t settle down. Sadie can’t have practical conversations with her mother the way she can with her dad; she can hardly talk to her at all. For instance, she’d told her father that she and Ron had decided he would pay the first few months’ rent on whatever apartment they found; she would buy the necessities from the money she’d been saving for dorm extras. After that, they’d split everything. They’d both be in school starting in September, but they’d each have a part-time job. In fact, Sadie had already secured hers; as soon as she got into Berkeley, she went to student employment and got a job for the fall in a research lab, where she’d be cleaning out the cages used for white mice. Ron will find something half-time at night, he’s said. And Ron’s mother has agreed to help them with groceries if they need it. They’ll get by. “You might need a little help with cash,” her father had said. “When you need it, let m
e know.” She could see the struggle in his face, the way he wanted to tell her that this life was not what he wanted for her, but he made way for what she wanted; he respected her.

  But her mother. At first, hoping for the best, Sadie had tried to explain to Irene what it was that made Ron so special to her, right from the beginning. She did not say that she hadn’t introduced him to her because she was afraid Irene would ruin everything; she said she hadn’t introduced him because she wanted to be sure that her own feelings were real. And then, more quickly and certainly in a far different way than she’d ever imagined, she’d seen that they were. She actually took her mother’s hand and moved closer to her when she said this, when she tried to explain that the horrible thing that had happened to her was not the reason she wanted to get married but that it had served as a kind of catalyst for something that seemed destined to happen anyway. The moment hung in the air, Sadie’s chest ached with longing for her mother to understand, but then Irene pulled her hand away. “Uh-huh,” she said.

  Sadie heard the disbelief, the condescension in her mother’s voice. As she later told Meghan, a deaf person would have heard it. She thought, That’s the last time I’ll confide in you.

  But then what had she expected from a woman whose “wedding album” served only to parody the institution? Once, a few years after her parents’ divorce, Irene was cleaning out a bedroom closet when Sadie came into the room. It was a hot summer day; Sadie had been outside playing with friends and wanted to come in for the relief of some air-conditioning. On the floor of her mother’s bedroom, on top of a pile of dresses and skirts, was a thin white leather album, silver script across the front saying, Wedding Memories. With Irene buried in the closet, continuing to toss out clothes and shoes, Sadie flipped through the pages. On the first page, written in pencil, was the name of “The Bride,” Irene Alexandra Dunsmore, and “The Groom,” John Robert Marsh. Next came a copy of Our Wedding Invitation, which was quite pretty, a ring of flowers encircling elegant gold typeface. The next page held the signatures (in ink, Sadie noticed) of guests who had attended the wedding. After that, there were pages that were meant to hold photos. But in the one labeled Our Wedding Cake, there was a picture of a Hostess cupcake. On the page for Our Bridesmaids, there was a picture of three ancient women sitting on a park bench, all with canes, all with stern faces. Later, Sadie would come to know that the picture had been torn out of a magazine. But then, at eleven years old, she was simply confused. My Gown featured another page from a magazine, a redheaded, sultry woman wearing gold lamé pants and a polka-dot halter top. At the point when Sadie reached that page, Irene backed out of the closet. “Whew!” she said, smiling over at her daughter. But when she saw the wedding album in Sadie’s hands, she snatched it away.

  “What is that?” Sadie asked.

  Irene said, “Nothing. It was just a joke.”

  “Where is your real album?” Sadie asked. She had seen other wedding albums, big fat ones; some of her friends’ parents had them within easy reach, or displayed them with pride on their coffee tables.

  “We didn’t have one,” Irene said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’re just silly,” Irene said, and Sadie heard some anger in her mother’s tone. So she got a drink of water and went back outside. She never saw the album again; she assumes her mother threw it out that day.

  Sadie lies down on her bed, rests her pillow over her stomach. She used to love her mother so much. Maybe it was too much. Maybe she should have allowed herself some righteous anger at Irene for taking her away from a father she adored, for being moved somewhere so far off, meaning she rarely got to see him. Maybe she should have had some screaming knockdowns with Irene about how she never got a vote and she was plenty pissed about it. All the things her father had missed! The school plays and concerts, the athletic events in which Sadie had performed so well, the teacher conferences, the countless nights he was not there to lie on her floor and philosophize with her. But she had never confronted her mother about all she had missed with her father. It lived hidden within Sadie, that anger; it did not announce itself even to her except as a vague ache that came and went, came and went. It behaved itself. It did not give in to itself. Until now. Now something is uncoiling.

  Sadie thinks that she kept so many things from her mother because she saw herself as the stronger of the two, and so she put up with Irene’s neediness. Her oddness. For example, the way she came in on her mother standing nude before Valerie that day. What does someone do in the face of behavior like that? What does someone do with a mother so removed from self-knowledge that she won’t even admit to her own loneliness? Irene acts as though she wants to have a long-lasting relationship, but then all she does is sabotage herself, one way or another.

  Her mother would be the first to deny this, of course. “What?” Sadie imagines Irene saying, if ever Sadie offered this observation. “I’m trying! Are you kidding me? Can’t you see that I’m trying?” But to Sadie’s way of thinking, she’s not trying at all. The space and time that Irene is saying Sadie needs? That’s what her mother needs for herself. She needs to stop plugging the hole and find out what’s causing the leak in the first place. Instead, she goes from one stupid relationship to the next, never really investing herself and then saying it was the man’s fault she didn’t. Sadie has borne witness to this all her life. Ron was right when he suggested that her mother has taught her well what a good marriage partner must be—not like Irene.

  Sadie looks around at her room. She remembers various incarnations of it; how once she had a bright yellow table and chair beneath her window where she sat to teach school to her stuffed-animal pupils. She used to have flowery curtains that Irene made for her, and for which she herself had selected the ribbon for tiebacks. She remembers how Irene redecorated her room for her thirteenth birthday while she was in school, giving her the bright red beanbag chair she wanted, as well as a much bigger dresser, a computer desk, and a framed poster of Michael Jackson.

  Oh, and she remembers Irene sleeping on the floor beside her bed when a flu virus that Sadie caught took a worrisome turn. She remembers feeling bad about her first junior high breakup, telling her mother, “David doesn’t like me anymore. I didn’t do anything. He just doesn’t like me anymore.” Irene, seemingly more distraught than she, all but wrung her hands, saying, “I’m so sorry, I know this hurts, but believe me, there will be another boyfriend.” And when Sadie said, “When?” Irene went out on a limb and said, “Three weeks,” and she was right, in part because Sadie, having heard what she interpreted as a directive, made it happen. That was when her attitude was that one boy was pretty much the same as another. That was before she met Ron and, through him, a new self.

  When she called Ron, he was with his mother, looking at an apartment in Berkeley that a friend of hers was renting out. “I think it will be perfect for us,” he said. “If you like it, we’ll take it. She’ll give us a really good deal, four hundred dollars a month, and it’s on Hillegass Avenue, really pretty. We’ll be able to walk to classes.”

  “Go ahead and rent it,” Sadie said

  “But you haven’t even seen it!”

  “I know. Surprise me. Again.”

  “Ma!” she heard him say. “Sadie’s parents would like us to come for dinner tomorrow night at seven. Okay with you?”

  Sadie could hear his mother’s response: “Of course! Naturally!” She sounded like such a happy person, grounded and at home in her own skin. Ron has told Sadie that his mother is someone who is able to navigate a life lived alone; she doesn’t seek out the company of men. She goes out occasionally, but mostly she is content being by herself.

  Recalling that, Sadie feels a sudden rush of protectiveness toward her own mother, and this both surprises and gladdens her. She puts her hand up on the wall that separates them and spreads her fingers wide. “Mom,” she says, so quietly she’s not sure she’s really spoken.

  29

  On Friday evening, Irene
adds a thin stream of olive oil to the salad dressing she’s making, whisking it in perhaps a little too vigorously. Dinner is half an hour away, and she’s nervous. And she’s still hurt, still angry, still confused. She feels like a marble on a moving floor; she just can’t get positioned and stay there. So she’s taking it out on extra-virgin olive oil and fig-flavored vinegar. “Never buy flavored vinegars,” Henry told her, not long ago. “Buy a good plain vinegar and then add the flavor using fresh ingredients.” That day after work, she’d stopped and bought three flavored vinegars including this one, which she thinks tastes just fine. Also three flavored oils, which she found less tasty.

  While Irene finishes meal preparation, John sits at the banquette, drinking wine. He’d poured a glass for each of them, but Irene’s wine is as yet untouched. She’s not sure she should drink anything. She fears the volatility of her emotions. She could cry or yell or otherwise embarrass herself. She’s never been much of a drinker, and tonight is not the night to experiment.

  “He’s not even that good-looking,” Irene says and whacks a clove of garlic with the side of her knife. She whispers this, though Sadie is in the shower and wouldn’t hear her if she spoke normally.

  John shrugs. “I don’t know.” He’s barefoot, fresh from the shower himself. He looks good; he went out today to buy a few clothes. He hadn’t packed much, hadn’t cared to even think about what he might want to wear at the time he left. But now he sits in a nice blue-and-white-striped shirt Irene ironed for him, and she thinks he looks handsome, though she supposes now is not the time to tell him. She’d just finished ironing the napkins she’ll use tonight when John came home, and so she offered to iron a shirt for him—the board was set up, the iron still hot. “Give it here,” she said, holding out her hand. There was the briefest hesitation before he accepted, as though this would be too intimate an act for her to perform for him. And there is a kind of intimacy in ironing a man’s shirt, smoothing your hands across the collar, along the sleeves, over the back. Handy as John is, he has never learned to properly iron a shirt. So he gave her the blue and white one.