Once Upon a Time, There Was You

She eats the yogurt and then calls Ron. “Guess who went out on a date?” she says.

  “Your parents?” he says. “No way.”

  “Way.” She is surprised at how she sounds, saying this. Sad.

  “What’s wrong, Sadie?”

  She clears her throat, laughs. “It’s weird.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it is.”

  “No, I don’t mean them going out is weird. Although it is. What I meant is, it’s weird that I don’t know how I feel about it. Whether I’m glad. Or sad. Or mad!”

  “Maybe all those things,” Ron says.

  “Maybe.”

  “Want me to come over?”

  “No. It’s okay. They’ll be back soon.”

  “And?”

  “And,” she says.

  “My mom really likes your parents, especially your dad.”

  “Too late, he’s taken.”

  Ron is silent, and she says, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. I know you didn’t mean she liked him that way.”

  “No, she didn’t like him that way.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shifts his tone to say, “Hey. We’re moving in together on Sunday.”

  “I know.”

  “Our own place!”

  “Right.”

  “Sadie, are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah! I just … I’m in my room. You know? I’m just sitting here in my bedroom.”

  “But you’re okay. With everything.”

  “I mean, I’d be leaving anyway, right? I’d be moving to the dorm anyway.”

  “It’s a different thing, to move to a dorm. Very much different from getting married. Sadie, I just want to tell you … I just want to say I love you and I don’t regret what we did. If you do—”

  “I don’t!”

  “Just listen. If you do, it’s okay. We can undo this and wait until later to get married. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I don’t want to undo this!” She tests out how it feels, saying this for herself alone and not in a defensive way to someone else.

  “I mean, what would we wait for?” she says.

  “For you to be really sure.”

  “Well, are you?”

  “Am I sure? Yeah! I mean, I know we’re young. We’re really young.”

  “Oh, my God,” Sadie says.

  “What?”

  “You aren’t okay with everything! You’re just trying to get me to say it for you. Do you just … Do you want out of the whole thing?”

  “Sadie, I’m just trying to read you. Okay? You seem like … I’m just trying to read you. I told you how I feel and I meant it. I know we’re young, but I feel ready. I just want you to feel that, too. It seems like you’re all of a sudden questioning some things.”

  “I’m not!”

  “Okay,” he says.

  “I’m really not.”

  “Okay.”

  Sadie pulls her quilt up to her chin. “I think it’s just … When I came home and nobody was here? I got scared. I got really scared.”

  “That makes sense. I think that things like that are going to come up now and then. A lot happened to you, Sadie.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It will take a long time to even realize all that happened, don’t you think?”

  “Yes. My mom thinks I should see someone about it.”

  “My mom does, too.”

  Sadie lets out a little laugh of astonishment, and Ron adds quickly, “In a good way. She likes you. She wants you to be okay.”

  “I am okay! Why won’t anybody believe I’m okay? And now you!”

  “Whoa,” he says. “Back up. I don’t quite understand what’s happening here.”

  “I have to go,” she says. “My parents are home. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” She hangs up the phone. Her parents aren’t home. She’s alone. She walks around the house, back and forth, from end to end. Below her, she hears the sound of the neighbor’s television set. She’s not alone. There are people all around her. She could call Meghan, but it’s not the same between her and Meghan, now. Meghan is distant, guarded, with her. She says she’s glad for Sadie, but she’s gone, somehow. She supposes Meghan would say the same thing about her.

  Sadie goes to the living room window and presses her forehead against the glass, looks down on the street. She sees her parents coming up the block toward the house, their arms around each other. She flees to her bedroom and closes the door, turns out the light.

  32

  On Saturday morning, Irene arrives at the bookstore early. She’s going to look at magazines for brides. She never looked at such things before she got married. Now, standing in front of the magazine rack, she is astounded at the great variety available. She selects several with an odd kind of embarrassment; she might be picking out porn magazines.

  She carries a heavy load into the café, finds a window to sit by, and begins flipping through. The variety—in rings, in gowns, in cakes, in venues—is astonishing. She wants to try to enjoy the experience, but all she can feel is a kind of revulsion at what she sees as blatant exploitation.

  She looks out the window at the people passing by, and starts when she sees Jeffrey. He’s across the street with an older woman, one about her age, very pretty. She gives Jeffrey a smile, a kiss on the cheek, waves goodbye, and they walk off in different directions. Jeffrey is coming toward Irene. She turns her attention to the glossy pages of the magazines, but mostly she wonders if he’ll see her sitting there.

  She hears a knock on the window, and there he is. She smiles, he smiles back. He pulls his cellphone out and points to her, and her phone rings. “Hello?” she says, laughing.

  “That woman is a client of mine,” he says.

  “Oh. Very nice-looking.”

  “Guess what. I’ve decided to give you one more chance.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well …” She looks around at the near-empty café. “Why don’t you come in and we’ll talk in person?”

  “Can’t. On my way to a meeting. Why don’t you say yes to the ball game, and we’ll talk then?”

  “Do I still get meat loaf?”

  “Only if you act now. Limited-time offer here.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “I’ll call you next week.”

  “Yes, okay.”

  He closes his cellphone, mouths I’ll call you, and walks briskly down the sidewalk. She watches him, thinking about what it will be like to see him again. It makes her feel good to think a man like him is actually interested in her, but in the end … In the end, what?

  She thinks about being in the hotel bar with John last night. Despite their intentions to go somewhere fancy, they’d elected instead for what they came to first: a nondescript bar in a nondescript hotel. A dim room, five or six black vinyl swivel chairs lined up in front of a bar stocked with off brands; a blaring television set, a few round wooden tables, the surfaces sour with the scent of the cleaning rag. But they didn’t care. They had arrived at a place of equanimity they had not enjoyed in years; Irene figured that John, too, wanted less to partake of any particular kind of atmosphere than simply to enjoy each other’s company.

  After they sat down at the corner table, John said, “I don’t know about you, but I always think the safest thing in these places is to have a beer.”

  “I’m getting a Rob Roy,” Irene said, and when John asked what that was, she said she had no idea.

  “In that case, I’m getting one, too.” John said.

  After they were delivered watered-down drinks, the contents of which they could not identify (dishwater mixed with men’s cologne? John suggested), they sat in silence for a while, watching the people at the bar. There was a line of three men sitting there, all dressed in suit pants and shirts with the sleeves rolled up, all hunched over their drinks and chatting in a dispirited kind of way whenever commercials interrupted the ball game. A solitary, overly made-up woman sat at the end of the bar, eyeing th
em and chewing on a swizzle stick. She was older, maybe sixty-five or so, with a frizzed-out blond perm and what must have been at one time a pretty spectacular body now stuffed into a blue silk dress, a glittery pin at the shoulder. The men, Irene and John decided, were in town for business; and what with the economy in the shape it was, this was the hotel they were assigned to stay in. The woman? They weren’t so sure. “I don’t think she’s a prostitute,” Irene said, whispering.

  “Maybe it’s my mom,” John said.

  Irene looked quickly over at him. What an odd thing to say, she was thinking, and what a sad thing, too. “If your mom were alive, she’d be in her eighties,” she finally offered.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking down into his drink.

  Then he looked up, smiling, and said, “Remember when Sadie was four and she helped me wash the car for the first time?”

  “I do remember that.” Sadie had helped wash, then dry the car; and when John had told her, “Okay, time to wax it,” she’d flung down her rag, lay in the grass, and said, “Oh, God, take me now!”

  “That was you in her,” John said, but it was with a kind of affection that Irene had never before felt from him, about her tendency to overdramatize. A kind of acceptance.

  She nodded. She didn’t want to look at him; she didn’t want to tip the balance away from this perfect middle. She stared into her drink to ask, “Remember when she was learning to ice-skate and she fell and broke her wrist?”

  John grimaced. “How could I forget? I felt so bad when I realized what had happened. She was hurt really badly, but she just kept on skating.”

  “That was you in her,” Irene said, looking up.

  He shrugged.

  “You’re so … not a complainer.”

  “I guess.”

  “John. I want to tell you … I just really want to say I’m sorry.”

  A long moment, and then he said, “I am, too.”

  “And also … I did love you.”

  “Yeah, once upon a time. Me, too.”

  She leaned back in her chair and regarded him, her head tilted. “Are you different now, John?”

  He sighed. “That’s a hard question. But I think I am. Are you?”

  She stared soberly at him, felt tears starting to well up, and John quickly stood and offered her his arm. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said.

  They walked up and down the hilly streets in the fog. They didn’t talk much, but just before they rounded the corner to go home, John turned Irene toward him. “I have to tell you something,” he said.

  “What?”

  “When Sadie was missing, I had this thought that, if she never came back, you and I would stay together. Because we would be all that we had left of her.”

  Irene nodded. “I had the same thought.”

  “And it brought me some comfort.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I also felt really guilty, thinking that.”

  “Of course. I did, too.” She smiled. “You know what’s kind of wonderful? No one will ever feel about Sadie the way that we do. Nothing will ever take away that bond between us.”

  He stood there, staring into her face. Then he hugged her tightly. “We did Sadie right,” he said.

  “Yes,” Irene said, her voice muffled from being smashed into John’s shoulder. Stepping back and looking up into his face, so close to hers, now, she asked, “What else did we do right?”

  He looked at her, something came into his eyes, and she knew he was thinking about kissing her. She knew it because she remembers this about him, the way he so often looked at parts of her face before he kissed her: the line of hair at the top of her brow, her ear, her chin, and then, finally, her mouth, he looked at it right before he kissed it, as though he’d been waiting politely for it to be delivered, and was now so very glad for its arrival. “Hat-in-hand kissing,” Irene had called it, when she’d first started dating John and had described the way he kissed to Valerie. “He starts out tentatively,” she’d said, “but that’s not how he finishes. He makes your toes curl, you know? That man can kiss.” She’s still never found anyone who can kiss like John.

  She held still, waiting to see in what direction he’d go, because what he did next would dictate everything else that would follow. “What else did we do right …” he said, frowning. And then, “Well, I’m sorry, Irene. I can’t think of anything.”

  A moment, and then she started to laugh and said, “Me, neither.” And John laughed, too. They stood on the corner laughing and laughing. Finally, John made his face overly stern and shook his finger at her, then at himself, and said, “Not funny!”

  “No,” Irene said.

  He threw his arm around her and began marching forward. He said, “Come on. I’m taking you home.” He kept his arm firmly around her all the way back, and it took her a few steps to realize she had put her arm around him, too; it had happened that easily, that naturally.

  Irene is startled by someone tapping her on the shoulder. She turns around to see Huguette. “Oh,” Irene says. “Hello.”

  “I see you are sit alone,” Huguette says. She gestures to the chair. “May I?”

  “Of course,” Irene says. “I’m just waiting for a friend.”

  “You are looking in the bride magazines?”

  “Well. Yes. But the truth is, I’m having a hard time with all of this. I feel my daughter has made a terrible mistake.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “Not because of your son,” Irene rushes to add. “It’s just that they’re too young.”

  “Too young to …?”

  “Well, to be married! Much too young to be married! I mean, I know you married very young, and you think age is just a number, but that’s not really true.”

  Huguette leans forward. “Perhaps this can be seen from two ways. In my life, I am right. In yours, you are. But we are right now talking about Sadie and Ron. What do you think they are too young to do?”

  “They are too young to make a commitment such as this! Marriage is a very big commitment! Or should be.” She adds this last more quietly.

  “What else?”

  “They are too young to have children.”

  “Ah yes! On this, I agree with you.”

  “And they are too young to give up the life of freedom they should be living now.”

  “This life of freedom. For what is it?”

  “It’s to have fun before they’re settled down. To think about how they want to live their lives without the influence of another. Okay?”

  “Okay. But … what if they can have fun being married? What if they can decide together how to live their lives?”

  Now Irene grows angry. She looks at her watch. “I’m sorry to be rude, but I’ve got to go.”

  “Has your friend arrive?” Huguette turns around in her chair.

  “No,” Irene says. “I just … Look, I don’t think this is very productive, the two of us talking. We have very different points of view. What I wanted was for my daughter to be really sure she wanted to be married, before she took that step. I don’t feel she’s mature enough to have made that decision. I mean, come on, do you really think your son is?”

  “My son, yes. Your daughter, I don’t know very well, but already I—”

  “In addition to that, my daughter is dealing with something that happened to her that was very traumatic.”

  “Yes. Ron told me.”

  “Well, I think you can see, then, that this is not the time for her to be making rash decisions.”

  “Only she has. Here we have the fact before us. And now, the question: Can she stay with this decision? Is it good for her? For her, Irene. Not you.” She stands, picks up her purse. “Sometimes we make choices in our lives. Sometimes our lives make choices for us. I wish for you some harmony in spirit.”

  Irene doesn’t have any idea what to say. Huguette nods, and walks away.

  A young woman comes in with an older woman who Irene thinks must be her mother, and they begin
looking at a magazine together. “This is the dress I was telling you about,” the young woman says, and her mother looks closely at it.

  Then she looks at her daughter and says, “I think it’s perfect.”

  “Really?” the young woman says. “Be honest, Mom.”

  Her mother smiles. “I am being totally honest. Now let’s find shoes and a cake.”

  For one moment, Irene has the odd idea that Huguette sent them over. But of course she didn’t; Irene has often seen young women poring over bridal magazines in this café.

  Irene turns to her own stack of magazines. She has to admit there are some lovely ideas here. They truly are lovely.

  By the time Valerie arrives, Irene has selected a few things to show her. About one cake, Valerie says, “That is Sadie!” Irene agrees. She’ll buy this magazine, and when she gets home, she’ll ask her daughter what she thinks about a celebration in October in honor of her marriage. Also, she’ll ask her to forgive her. Then maybe Sadie will help her prepare dinner. She wants to make something wonderful, to send John off. Something he’ll remember.

  33

  Sadie is sitting on the floor, wrapping fragile things in newspaper to put into boxes. At first, when she hears the knock at her door, she doesn’t answer. But then she says “Yes?” in a way that she hopes will suggest she’s far too busy to have another heart-to-heart. She’s sick of heart-to-hearts.

  This morning, when her mother was out, her father came in with some song and dance about how she shouldn’t judge Irene for her wariness not only toward Sadie’s marriage but toward the institution in general. He told her about one time when Irene was a little girl and was lying on the floor of the living room, coloring. Her parents were there, too, her father reading the newspaper, her mother mending. “William?” Irene heard her mother say. Her father did not respond. “William?” she said again; and again, her father did not respond. After the third time this happened, Irene’s mother flung the mending basket down and went into the kitchen. Irene found her there, sitting at the table, her arms crossed, her eyes flat. “What’s the matter?” Irene asked. “Go to bed,” her mother said. “You should have talked louder,” Irene said, and then her mother did look at her. “You stupid girl,” she said. “The things you think will help.”