Once More With Feeling, Page 2

  ‘Don’t make this more difficult than it has to be, Sarah,’ he said. Gently, but with that undercurrent of exasperation to which he was not in the least bit entitled. Then he smiled. ‘We’re better than that, aren’t we?’

  I was ashamed of how much I clung to that, how much my heart swelled and my breath caught. His use of the word we.

  Long after we’d separated with an awkward almost-hug in the chilly parking lot, long after I had returned to the empty house on the hill and got back to the important work of hollowing out the perfect position on the sofa cushions to hold me as I brooded and shoved things in my mouth without thought, I still turned it over and over in my head. We. A word that did not, could not, had never, included Carolyn. We.

  Tim did not call or stop by to reiterate any of the things I felt sure were lurking there in that one, meaningful syllable. We. But I still thought it was only a matter of time before the impossibility of living with Carolyn – because he’d told me that, too, that the two of them were now living together in that damned bed and breakfast, right there in the centre of town where every single person we knew would be sure to see them – became clear to him. How could it not? No one could live with Carolyn. In the sixth grade I had moved down into the largely unfinished basement of our parents’ house so that I would no longer have to share the upstairs bedroom with her mood swings and melodramatic demands. College and post-college roommates, boyfriends, even that insufferable hippy she’d been engaged to briefly during her strange period in Portland, Oregon – everyone agreed that Carolyn was too selfish, too immature, too adolescent to live with.

  I held onto that when Tim asked to meet again, about two months after he’d moved out, to discuss the quick, no-fault divorce he thought we should get. As if it were something we could just pick up downtown together from one of the specialty shops, as easy as that.

  ‘It seems to me that there is a fault,’ I said after Tim presented me with all the paperwork and explained that this was the best way out of what he called the situation. As if our marriage were a preposterous guy from New Jersey, all steroids and terrible hair, soon to be discarded and forgotten. He sat there as if his own faux-leather Starbucks chair were perfectly comfortable, and I had the near-uncontainable urge to throw my not-nearly-foamy-enough pumpkin spice Halloween latte at his head. ‘Your fault, in fact.’

  I actually thought it was Carolyn’s fault, but I also thought that there was a lot of grovelling Tim could do – like, any – before I let him know I understood that. I had elaborate fantasies of his extended apologies, all of which I would eventually, graciously, accept with varying degrees of longsuffering goodness, and all of which involved him on his knees. Or prostrate before me on a public street. In tears, of course. Begging me to take him back—

  ‘Do we really want to drag all this out?’ Tim asked, interrupting my favourite fantasy, which featured him somewhat bruised and battered and writhing on his stomach in the driveway. In the rain.

  He smiled in that way that made his blue eyes dance and his dimples show. He reached over and put his hand over mine, right there in front of half of the town, and I thawed a little bit, like a fool. See? I wanted to shout at all the pricked ears and averted eyes that surrounded us. See? We are still a we! We are!

  ‘Are we those people?’ he asked softly.

  And I still wanted to impress him. I still wanted to show him that I wasn’t the one who was unreasonable, who made impossible demands. I could never be those people, whoever they were. Just like I could never be the notoriously demanding, high-maintenance, haughty and sister-betraying Carolyn.

  A week or so after that, Tim and I met to discuss the shape our divorce would take. It could be so much worse, I told myself, as we sat there awkwardly in a more secluded mid-range restaurant this time, a gesture that I found suspicious at best, as Tim was not the sort to think of such things. I was the partner in our marriage responsible for gestures. I could feel the controlling, deceitful hand of Carolyn hovering over everything, and told myself that was why I couldn’t bring myself to so much as pick at the warm bread the waiter had delivered to the table in a big, fragrant basket.

  We would save ourselves the trauma of a long, drawn-out, agonizing divorce proceeding, Tim said. I wouldn’t fight him for anything, he said, right, Sarah? Because we weren’t like that. We were reasonable, logical people, and a big battle over hurt feelings – well, who did that serve? We could share everything. The law practice too, of course! Why should our careers take a hit simply because our marriage hadn’t worked out as we’d planned?

  We, we, we. I felt noble. I nodded along, earnestly. He’d cheated on me, in my own bed, with my sister, and yet I sat at the tiny table too close to the busy kitchen and felt gracious. I’ll show him how reasonable and logical I am, I thought fiercely, as if our divorce were a competition and I could actually win it.

  And I was sure that when this insanity with Carolyn died down, Tim would wake up from this spell he was under and remember just how easy I’d made all of this. He might even thank me, I thought smugly. I drove back to our dark, empty home with visions of Tim’s thanks dancing in my head, like bloated pre-Thanksgiving sugarplums.

  Shockingly, the thanks didn’t come.

  But … it could be worse, right? Luckily, everyone I knew was appalled. Scandalized and horrified. They told me so at the supermarket, at stoplights. The joys of living in a mid-sized village in the Hudson Valley were that everyone I met in the course of my day knew the whole of my business. More to the point, they also knew all there was to know about Carolyn. And there was so much to know. Carolyn’s entire history of shocking, self-obsessed, her-needs-above-all-else behaviour, was laid out and dissected in detail over the produce section in the grocery or in the shampoo aisle at the drugstore, and, everyone agreed, no one could possibly trust that Tim now that he’d proved himself to be such a terrible judge of character …

  Until Carolyn announced their wedding plans, to take place in roughly six months, which was, I couldn’t help but note, just about how long it took to get a no-contest divorce in the state of New York. The minute the divorce goes through, is what she meant when she waxed rhapsodic about a June wedding. I wondered if there was fancy wording for that sentiment that she could include on the invitations.

  If so, I felt certain that Carolyn would find it. And use it, with as much shame as she’d exhibited thus far: none.

  ‘I know that somewhere deep inside of you – even if it’s buried right now – you’ll understand that we just want to be happy,’ Carolyn confided to my voicemail, as I had stopped taking her calls after that first, horrible one. ‘And we want you to be happy too, Sarah. We really do.’

  Which was when I started to think hard about plagues. AIDS, I thought fiercely as I considered the laborious process of making a new life for myself when I’d had no hand in dismantling the old one. Bubonic plague. Tuberculosis. I thought about insects. Locusts and bird flu. Ebola, I chanted to myself as I navigated a home town, a courthouse, a gauntlet of clients filled with all those knowing, pitying stares. Mad cow. SARS. Necrotizing fasciitis.

  Because it was getting harder and harder to convince myself that there was anything at all worse than this.

  ‘I think we have to start considering the fact that this is really happening,’ Lianne said, carefully, as if I were inordinately fragile and might shatter if she used the wrong tone. As Lianne was my best and, really only, remaining friend from high school, and had thus known me since we were both infants, I had to consider the possibility that, in fact, I might. ‘I don’t think he’s coming back.’

  We stood together in Lianne’s bright and inviting kitchen, drinking coffee out of charmingly mismatched ceramic cups that somehow seemed perfectly grown-up and planned, like everything else in her happy life with Billy, whom she’d started dating way back in the eighth grade. We were having our longstanding Wednesday midday coffee date that we’d instituted not long after I’d moved back to town three years ago. I
couldn’t remember the last time either one of us had cancelled it. These days I considered it my lifeline – to a degree I was afraid would make Lianne a bit uncomfortable were I to tell her.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Lianne said in that same gentle way, such a far cry from the usual matter-of-fact briskness that made her such a good nurse in the OBGYN practice where she’d worked for years. ‘We’ll get through this. We’ll be just fine. I promise.’

  Her use of we, I noted in a kind of dazed amazement, was even more comforting than Tim’s had been. And also meant exactly what I wanted it to mean – no contortions of reality required.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. It wasn’t. It was any number of things, many of them in direct opposition to each other and all of them changeable and contradictory, but it certainly wasn’t fine. And yet I found myself producing a smile, however faint. ‘I mean,’ I heard myself say. ‘It’s not like we’re those people.’

  Lianne poured some more coffee into my mug even though, after thirty-three years of friendship and the fact that she had given me my first cup of coffee in her parents’ house when we were twelve, she was well aware that I was not the kind of person who liked ‘topping up’ my coffee. I preferred to fix the whole cup myself, so that it had the perfect ratio of coffee to creamer to sugar. But Lianne’s brand of nurturing wasn’t about coddling. It never had been.

  ‘Which people?’ she asked, not looking at me. ‘The people who argue about every last detail because they’re heartbroken and hurt and trying to fight back the only way they can?’

  ‘Tim and I aren’t like that,’ I said with a certain loftiness that I suspected was simply because I looked for any excuse at all to say that these days. Tim and I. ‘We’re not going to make a big circus out of this, whatever happens.’

  Lianne blew on her coffee as if she expected it to be scalding. ‘Why not?’ She looked at me, then away. ‘This is the end of a marriage. Maybe it deserves a circus.’ She shrugged. ‘Doesn’t have to be the full three rings, but maybe a clown or two? Some trapeze artists? A parade of elephants?’

  Thinking of trapeze artists made me think of Carolyn’s rather impressive contortions in bed. In my bed. Contortions, I couldn’t help but think, that my body simply wouldn’t perform, yoga or no yoga. Carolyn was built willowy and bendable. I was curvier and shorter and significantly less flexible. I thought of myself as solid. I wasn’t flashy, like Carolyn. I kept my more-dirty-than-blonde hair in a sharp, professional bob that I hadn’t cut since That Day. I wore professional suits that had to pass muster in court. I didn’t lounge around in tattoos and kohl, like Carolyn.

  ‘Is this supposed to be helpful?’ I asked, and I could hear the rage in my voice, but knowing it was unfairly directed at Lianne did nothing at all to dampen it. ‘Don’t you think this is humiliating enough? My fucking sister is sleeping with my husband, planning a June wedding to my husband—’

  ‘I have one question for you,’ Lianne said in a calm, wholly unperturbed way that was more effective than slapping a hand across my mouth. She met my gaze, her own steady and sure. ‘And I really want you to think about your answer.’

  ‘Am I tired of you talking to me like I’m a crazy person?’ I asked dryly. ‘The answer is yes.’

  ‘Are you upset that you lost Tim?’ Somehow, her very calmness made it worse. ‘Or are you upset that Carolyn took him?’

  I spent a lot of time spinning that question around and around in my head. Luckily, I had nothing but time. It was increasingly more humiliating to leave the house and see anyone, because every single person in this town knew what had happened to me – what was still happening to me, right this very minute in the bed and breakfast in the centre of the village – which meant I had a lot of time to sit alone and brood when I wasn’t working, explaining to Rivermark’s drunk and wealthy why the state of New York was not going to be impressed with their pedigrees.

  It was getting harder and harder to cling to my belief that Tim would shake this madness off one day, and come back to me, the way I knew he should. But I was nothing if not tenacious, hide it though I might beneath the veneer of pathetic despair and questionable dietary choices. My belief in what should happen, what had to happen, only grew as the days passed – took root and spread wide, created whole forests. I knew, I just knew, that Tim would come back to me. He had to.

  He had to.

  And then came the lovely day two weeks before Thanksgiving when nosy, gossipy Mrs Duckworth, who had always been such a stalwart supporter of mine, always eager to talk about Carolyn’s numerous trespasses with relish and glee, made that awkward, embarrassed face in the bread and cereal aisle at the supermarket where I had never, not once, seen the faintest hint of my sister. I had been secretly regarding that as incontrovertible proof that Carolyn’s unholy alliance with Tim was therefore doomed. Because I knew the earth would be well into another ice age before it occurred to Tim to do the shopping.

  ‘These things do get complicated,’ Mrs Duckworth clucked, holding a family-sized loaf of multigrain bread between her pudgy hands. I looked down, dazed, to see I’d clenched great big grooves into my own skinny, newly-single-person’s baguette. I forced myself to loosen my grip. Mrs Duckworth shrugged. Guiltily, I thought. ‘But it’s different when it’s love, isn’t it?’

  Which was when I accepted the fact that maybe it couldn’t actually get much worse, after all.

  But, of course, I was wrong about that, too.

  2

  ‘I can’t hear a word you’re saying, Mom,’ I said, frowning, barely able to hear my mother’s voice over the sound of Lianne’s family’s noisy Thanksgiving evening game of running charades – which mostly involved her kids careening into walls and their boisterous accusations of cheating. ‘Are you in a wind tunnel?’

  I made an apologetic face at Lianne, who had just handed me her house cordless phone, and took myself out into the slightly quieter front hall. Behind me, her oldest girl screamed out a condemnation of her nine-year-old sister, with the kind of high-pitched outrage only a thirteen-year-old girl could manage to produce. I was smiling when I finally concentrated again on the phone call.

  Not that I wanted to concentrate on this phone call. I’d boycotted my own family’s Thanksgiving dinner this year, and my mother had made her displeasure about that abundantly clear. I can’t make you change your mind about coming to Thanksgiving dinner with your family, Sarah, she’d said with a sniff, but it seems you’re determined to lash out and hurt your father and me as much as you’ve been hurt, and I can’t support that.

  I imagined she was calling now, at almost ten o’clock at night, to rub a little more salt in that festering wound.

  ‘Are you there?’ I asked, girding my loins for the usual mother–daughter battle of wills. And, if I was totally honest, kind of anticipating it, too. Mom would be sad and wounded and often cold; I would, I swore, be calm and rational and not too ‘lawyery’, as she liked to accuse me of being. I’d been practising my speech all day in Lianne’s downstairs bathroom mirror.

  ‘I am not in a wind tunnel,’ came my mother’s frosty reply.

  As far as I could tell, my mother had been this particular level of quietly angry with me ever since I’d thrown Tim out of the marital home, thereby, quote, sharing your private business with the whole town. Carolyn’s flaunting of said private business in a bed and breakfast in the centre of the village, subject to the eyes and ears and gossiping mouths of all our neighbours? Apparently not as grave a violation of the family honour. Thanksgiving had only made it worse: my ‘choice’ to ‘abandon the family’ and ‘force us to choose between you and your sister’ being confirmation that I was ‘determined to punish’ her. I checked the weary sigh that threatened to come out.

  ‘I’m at the hospital,’ she said. ‘You need to come at once.’

  I felt a single greasy punch of nauseating fear, hard and incapacitating.

  ‘Is it Dad?’ I gasped, as terrible scenarios chased through my head.

  I
wrapped my free arm around my waist. I should have gotten over my damned self and gone to Thanksgiving at my parents’ house, the way she’d wanted me to do. I shouldn’t have taken a stand and refused to attend simply because they’d invited Tim and Carolyn as well. We can’t take sides, Mom had said, in that surprised, somewhat affronted way as if I’d suggested she shiv her firstborn in the shower. She’s our daughter too. I shouldn’t have replied with such ferocity. Pretending not to notice the problem is actually taking sides, Mom, I’d snapped back. Was it worth it now?

  ‘What happened?’ I gasped out.

  ‘Your father is fine,’ Mom said, her voice thawing slightly, but only slightly. ‘It’s not him. I’m afraid it’s Tim.’

  I stared out the glass panel in the front door at the dark November night beyond. Something frighteningly large yawned open inside of me, too dark for me to look at directly.

  ‘I think you called the wrong daughter, Mom,’ I said evenly. When I could speak.

  ‘Carolyn is already here.’ Mom let out a small noise too sharp to be a sigh. ‘She tried to call you herself, repeatedly, but said you refused to answer her calls.’

  I pressed my fingers hard against my forehead and told myself this was not the time to address all the problems I had with that statement.

  ‘What happened to Tim, Mom? Is he all right?’

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘He went out after dinner to pick up some beer. When he didn’t come back and he didn’t come back, Carolyn called him and an EMT answered his phone. Apparently the roads were icy and his car spun out. He crashed into a tree a few blocks down from the supermarket.’

  I was outside of myself. My mother’s disembodied voice was in my ear, stringing together nonsensical words. The sounds of Lianne’s family shouting and laughing down the hall floated around me but didn’t touch me. The cold of the November night was a shock against my palm when I pressed it against the glass panel in the door, but I pressed harder, as if that could make it real somehow. Make me real, right here, living in this terrible moment. I saw that scrap of bright-blue silk, flying through the air, making as little sense as this. I struggled to pull in a breath.