The food comes on pretty plates with fancy garnish. As always with him, my appetite is not for food, but he cuts into his steak and offers me a piece, which I take from his fork as his foot rubs my calf under the table. I share my lamb and the slab of potatoes that have been ground and seasoned and pressed into a block and sliced, then fried. Everything is delicious, but none of it as lovely as the flavor of his laughter.
Coffee, dessert. We each order and share tastes. And finally, when I can’t put it off anymore, I say, “I have to tell you something.”
Two things happened when I was sixteen.
First, Andrea’s parents split up. Her mom moved out, leaving behind four kids and an angry, embittered husband who had no idea how to run a house. Nobody had clean laundry or packed lunches or got to where they needed to be on time, and they spent hours alone in their big, increasingly filthy house while their father worked. And why? Because Andrea’s mom had developed what her father referred to as “a little love affair with the slots.”
In private, Andrea told me that it would’ve been better if her mother had run off with another guy. Maybe her dad could at least get over that. What he couldn’t forget or forgive was the thousands of dollars her mom had lost in the casinos on all the trips she’d taken with girlfriends to Atlantic City, or the money she’d spent in secret on shoes and clothes and spa treatments, running up their credit card bills to insufferable, unpayable amounts. Andrea’s mom had left the family destitute with her addiction, and though she’d moved into a one-bedroom mobile home and had taken two jobs in order to support herself, she didn’t stop the trips to Atlantic City and Vegas. She couldn’t quit. Her addiction tore their family apart. To this day, Andrea had very little to do with her mom—not because she was angry or hated her, but because the woman had failed her when Andrea needed her, too many times. She’d ruined her daughter’s trust.
The other thing was that Becky Lazar’s mother killed herself. Becky sat in front of me in English lit, and we’d gone to school together since kindergarten. That sophomore year we had the same lunch period and had migrated to the same table because she was friends with a couple kids who were friends with a few of mine. We weren’t close, didn’t hang out after school or anything, but we’d become friendly. I liked her. She was smart, with a dry sense of humor, and once she’d lent me lunch money when I’d forgotten to bring mine.
I’d met her mom only once, a few months before, after a performance of the school musical. Becky’d had the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. She had an amazing voice. I’d gone to the show with Andrea not because either of us were into musical theater, but because she had a huge crush on the guy playing Henry Higgins. Also, it was an official school activity, so Andrea’s dad, who’d gotten a little out of control with rules, wouldn’t restrict her from it. We giggled our way through the entire show, when Andrea wasn’t sighing with the heartache of crushing on a boy who’d never give her the time of day. And after, when the cast members gathered in the lobby to sign autographs and receive flowers and generally bask in their tiny, high school level of fame, Becky waved us over to meet her parents.
Her dad was tall, with a permanent frown and a crease between his eyebrows. Her mom was petite, and out-of-fashion in a floral print dress, and hairstyle that looked like it hadn’t been changed since she herself was in high school. She didn’t say much, just smiled and nodded at us. But she did smile, and that was all I could think about when Kathy Bomberger told me what she’d done.
“Where’s Becky?” I’d asked, sliding my tray onto the table. “She sick today?”
Kathy looked surprised. “No. Didn’t you hear?”
Becky’s mother had run a garden hose from the exhaust pipe of the family station wagon into the cracked-open driver’s side window, and left the car running in the closed garage. Becky’s younger brother, a fifth grader, had been the one to find her. She’d done it in the middle of the week, on a school night, and all I could think about was that smile. She’d seemed happy enough, that one time I met her, but obviously she hadn’t been.
That was when I really learned that smiles can hide a lot of secrets.
I learned a lot of things that sophomore year that followed me into adulthood. The burgeoning power of sexuality, the importance of personal responsibility, how simple it is to break a heart. And also, how easily a mother can destroy her children.
“When I had my children,” I tell Will, after the rest of this story is finished and he’s listened quietly, his green-gray eyes never leaving mine, “I vowed that I would never, ever fuck them up the way Andrea’s mom did. Or Becky’s. I’m not saying I believe in sacrificing everything for your kids or anything like that. It’s important for them to know their parents are human beings. But I did vow I would be there when they needed me. That I would never, ever let my selfishness make a mess of them.”
I draw in a breath. Then another. I want to kiss him, but there’s a table between us.
“My daughters are both getting married. A double wedding, something I never thought I’d be doing. They’re twins, but I always tried to make them their own people. But that’s what they want, so that’s what they’re doing. They need me, and their dad, to be there for them. They deserve that. They deserve—” My voice cracks and breaks finally, and I have to look away from him. “They deserve a mother who hasn’t dropped her basket. So if I have to white-knuckle my way through this, to make sure my kids are taken care of...if I have to...keep it all together for just a little longer... Well. Then that’s what I’ll have to do.”
“I understand.”
“A year,” I tell him. “I have to make it through this next year.”
I look at him then, not sure what I expect to see. Not tears, of course. Disappointment, maybe? Will he ask me to reconsider, to stay? Will he say we can work it all out?
Will he tell me that he’ll wait?
“You should find a real girl,” I tell him, not for the first time.
“Are you breaking up with me?” Will puts a lilt into the words, making them light so I can laugh and shake my head.
“Oh, Will.”
He leans back in his chair. “I understand, Elisabeth. I do. You have to be there for your kids, and this isn’t right, anyway. We both know it.”
I know it. I don’t care. “Yes. Of course.”
So formal. Now we’re done. So this is the end, and all the pretty pieces of me are dying inside.
I let him pay the check.
Outside, the sun’s gone down but the late summer heat weighs us. We walk along the quaint street, looking in the windows of antique shops filled with junk. The sidewalk’s made of cobblestones that threaten to snag the heels of my shoes, and I use it as an excuse to hold his hand. And then we’re at the parking garage and there are no more excuses to keep this night from ending.
In the backseat of his car, we sit inches apart. The heat is unbearable, a sauna. The light, orangey-white, creeps in and makes it all too bright when I would rather have shadows.
I don’t know who moves first, just that his mouth is on mine and it’s still so sweet. So fucking good I can’t stand it, and I open for him. My mouth, my arms, my legs.
My heart.
We’ve done more than this, but somehow this furtive, somewhat frantic kissing is more erotic than anything we’ve ever done. I am greedy for it, and him, and I want to imprint every second, every breath, into my memory forever. Because I am leaving him. Ending this.
“We have to stop,” I tell him.
Will’s mouth is still on mine. “I know.”
We kiss again.
Again.
How can I stop this? How can it end? When everything I am and have become is wrapped up in him, when I breathe from one second to the next because I know each breath brings me closer to the time when we’ll be together?
He i
s on his side of the car. I’m on mine. We look at each other across the brief expanse.
“This is ridiculous,” I say. “Like teenagers making out in the backseat.”
His hand curls against the back of my neck. We kiss. His hand slips over my panties, touching me just right, always just right, and before I know it, before I can stop it—not that I want to stop it, I do not, I want it to go forever on and on—before I know it, I am breathless again.
Mindless.
“Give me your tongue,” Will says, and I do.
I will give him anything he wants.
He doesn’t know this and I can’t tell him, because it’s not fair. It’s a responsibility he doesn’t want. And because I love him, a burden I can’t bear for him to carry.
My hands are in his hair, his cupping the back of my neck while the other moves slowly, slowly, slowly between my legs.
How many ways are there to describe pleasure? How many different words can express how it feels to come in the backseat of a car on a hot summer’s night, and the only reason you can breathe is because someone you love is offering you his mouth and his own breath?
Green and gold, the sound of bells, the smells of sunshine.
My orgasm is more than the rush of blood and twitch of muscles.
My mouth moves against his. “Do you want to make me come?”
“Yes.”
We whisper though nobody’s around to hear us.
“Just a little more,” I plead, not caring that I beg. “Just a little more.”
He thinks I mean the stroke of his fingers against me, and I do. But I also mean all of this. Everything. I don’t want this to end, for this to be the last time.
“Please,” I whisper into Will’s kiss. “Just one more.”
These are the words we say, one after another: I want to eat you like a peach, eat you all up. Put your hand under my shirt, kiss me while you touch my stomach. You wanted me to touch you. Oh, God, yes. Fuck, yes, I want you to touch me now. I want you to burn for me.
I want to tear you apart.
The air is so much cooler outside the car, where we stand with inches of distance between us, as though that can take away what we spent an hour doing. I still taste him. I’m sure I smell of him, and of sex. My hair’s a mess. I don’t care.
“Are you okay?” Will asks.
And this is what I think: No, I’m not okay. I’m stuck in a place I don’t want to be, and I don’t see any way to get out of it without hurting everyone around me. And I hurt you, too, just by being me. By all of this. So I make a change and hurt everyone in my life, or I don’t make a change and I hurt you instead, and no matter what happens, I hurt.
No matter what I do, there is casualty.
“I have to go,” I say. Ross may or may not be home, but I promised Jac I’d go over some wedding plans with her via video chat. Oh, technology. “Goodbye, Will.”
Will nods. And, so formal, so distant, we do not touch again.
Not even one last time.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
I am okay.
This is what I tell myself to get through the day, when I make the motions of living. Cook, clean, laundry, pay the bills, take out the trash, unload the dishwasher. I have done all these tasks and can’t remember doing them.
In the shower, in the dark, I put on the songs that make me think of him. I know I shouldn’t. This is masochism. This is as self-harming as if I took a razor to my wrists. This is worse, because if I slit my wrists I would die, and I am still very much alive.
I go to my knees in the shower, in the dark, and the music plays and the water is hot and it pounds on my naked skin, and I press my face into my hands.
I grieve.
I have never mourned the loss of anything in my life as much as I mourn for the loss of what I didn’t really have.
I had thought I might cry, of course. The music. The dark. The shower. But what I do is not crying. I break and shake and shatter; I am undone.
I am torn apart.
When have I ever wept this way? Even as a child, an infant, never. Everything with him has been a list of nevers. This is another. Because even though the shower is my favorite place to cry, it’s never been like this, so fierce and raw and hard that I can’t breathe.
Of course I can’t breathe; isn’t that how it’s been with him since the start? I gasp and choke, I clutch at my face, my fingers dig deep into the meat above my heart, and I open my mouth and cry and cry and scream.
The sounds of grief and pleasure can be so much the same. Am I crying or coming? Who would be able to tell? I’m not sure I can determine the difference. The rush and rise and force of this feeling is no pleasure, not like an orgasm, but the relief of it spilling out of me is almost the same.
There is a pain in my heart, a real physical pain. Because my heart is breaking. It is broken. I press my hand against it, and imagine the beat of it has stopped—but it hasn’t. It goes on and on, and each time it is sharp and stabbing, a knife beat.
Afterward, still dripping, I look in the mirror and do not know my face; I have made myself a stranger. I didn’t know it was possible to cry so hard you give yourself a black eye, but there it is, the visible proof of my grief, the dark red burst of blood in the soft places of my skin.
I am not okay.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Every day I wake up thinking this will be the day I stop thinking so much about him, and every night I go to sleep with the ache still as firmly entrenched in my heart as it was the day before.
It is almost impossible to fully grieve in the presence of others. When you need to break down, you always have to do it alone. My pretty breakdown takes place in public bathroom stalls, where I stifle my sobs with the back of my hand and force myself to breathe. It happens without warning, when Jac talks of wedding dresses and bridesmaids and the cost of carved roast beef instead of chicken Cordon bleu, and I pretend to sneeze, complaining of allergies to explain my red eyes.
I’m on a different sort of train now. Jac is the engineer of this one, her sister and I along for the ride. Kat has her own ideas about what sort of wedding she’d like, but she’s letting her sister call the shots.
“You don’t have to do what she wants, you know.” I tell her this in the dressing room of the bridal boutique, where she’s trying on another gown we both know she won’t like. My Kat’s not a frills and flounces kind of girl.
She looks in the mirror at the beaded bodice, letting her fingers run over it. “This is pretty, Mom, don’t you think?”
“It’s beautiful.”
She eyes the price tag and gives me a wry grin. “It’s five grand.”
We both burst into laughter that has Jac pounding on the dressing room door. I put a hand over my mouth to keep in the laughs that threaten to become sobs; I close my eyes when Kat leaves the room to show her sister the dress she will never, ever buy.
These are my girls, my life. So I pull my shit together and watch them parade around in dresses the way they used to when they were small and playing princess. They are beautiful. They are my pride. They are the best thing I have ever done.
Jac, typically, finds three dresses she can’t decide among. Kat stands quietly in front of the triple mirror, studying her reflection and smoothing the fabric of a simple satin gown in a vintage style. But when I ask her if she wants to buy it, she just shakes her head.
“No, Mom,” she says. “I’m not sure about it.”
“Then you shouldn’t get it.”
Kat, face solemn, nods. She smooths her hands down the front again, then gives me a small smile. “It’s pretty, right?”
“It’s beautiful, honey. Very you.” I haven’t checked the tag on this one, but what is money for if not to spend? “But you shouldn’t settle.
Not when it should be something so special. You should make sure it’s what you really, really want. And even then,” I say with a small laugh, “you’ll probably look back on it in twenty years and wonder what on earth you were thinking.”
She turns to me. “Do you?”
I think of my wedding dress. I’d wanted to wear my grandmother’s 1940s suit with its padded shoulders and peplum, the sleek skirt. My mother had talked me into a mermaid-style dress, a monstrosity of lace and satin that had never fit quite right no matter how many times we’d had it altered. I haven’t looked at my wedding pictures for a long time.
“Yes. I’d have picked something different. So you should make sure,” I say, looking across the room to where her sister is now twirling in front of the mirror in a fourth choice, “to pick something you really really love, at least right now, because that way even when you look back and can’t believe you picked it, you’ll remember how much you loved it when you did.”
Kat, like me, is not a hugger, but she hugs me now. Tight. “Thanks, Mama.”
Jac comes over with a hand on her hip. “I didn’t find anything I really liked. Oooh, Kittykat, that’s nice.”
Kat and I share a look. I gather both my girls to me, squeeze them hard. “Dinner,” I say.
Ross calls as we’re leaving the boutique, and though it’s supposed to be girls’ day out, he meets us at the restaurant. How could I tell him not to come? They’re his daughters, too, and he sees them even less than I do.
We go to one of our favorite places. I haven’t been there since my birthday, and I’m suddenly starving for their good Greek salad, the gyro platter. We order too much food. And because we took a cab to the store and Ross will drive us home, drinks, too. It’s still strange for me to have cocktails with my daughters, who will forever be tiny and precious to me even though they’re all grown up.
It’s the best time I’ve had in a long while, the four of us laughing and retelling our favorite stories. This is what I love best about our family, all those shared inside jokes. Vacations, holidays, school plays. The good times, and the bad ones, too. All our lovely misadventures that have made us the unit we are today. The girls don’t live with us anymore, but we will always be a family.