Dear Mr. You (11 page)

“An extra toothbrush,” you mumbled. I stopped at the door and turned. You were nearly asleep again but one of the new eyes winked at me, and the new snout whispered something in your ear, which put you in floods of tears. I couldn’t make out every word, but you were sputtering about how we never did anything since I was always working and you never got enough respect. Bonus head mouthed the words “Blow me, chickadee” to me as you wept. I set about calming you, made you a grilled cheese and rubbed your feet until both of you drifted back to sleep, two heads snoring in stereo.

The next day I came in modeling my new parka. “Let’s go to Dubai!” I jumped up and down holding first-class tickets and the hotel brochure, with photos of the indoor skiing school. I’d set it all up. “Cool,” you said.

A week after we were back you both began to sulk. I scrambled for a solution.

“Who’s up for a dude ranch?” I ran in dumping bags of cowboy boots, and fell in your lap. I flashed a picture of your own personal stallion, Digger. I’d set it all up. “Cool,” you said.

In airport security on the way home you got wistful. You missed Digger.

“Who’s ready for a week with holy men in India?” Bonus head yawned, but you swatted at him, said,

“Cool. Do I have to pay for anything?”

“Oh. Uh. You could tip the Sherpa?”

“How much is that?”

“We can sort it out.”

“Cool. Can my mom come?”

On the way back from India you had a meltdown, saying you were always surrounded by my life. “I need to get back to my roots,” you said. “I want my family to come visit.” I said sure, but it was a challenge. Your brother pinched my sister’s nipples on his way to the fridge, and your sister sat farting on my Civil War quilt, calling me a lousy feminist. She was correct, but still. Your mother said my aura was off and I should go in the closet and jump, to clear it, which I did, just as an excuse to get my circulation going since you’d been patrolling the thermostat. You required a cold temperature to paint your canvases, you said, or you would never connect to the chill in your soul. I said I bet you can access that chill even in a heat wave and you said don’t get sassy with me, I said sorry but you haven’t painted in months and my fingers are turning blue. I snuck into the living room one afternoon to turn up the heat but Bonus head ratted me out. Marching
to the center of the room, you whistled. You clapped and stamped one foot and I hopped up, thinking, oh cool, square dancing! You were not interested in dancing, though, you were issuing an edict and you said

Everyone needs to remember at the end of the day that they are under my roof

This threw me because it was I who wrote the check for that roof and it cleared my bank.

You said

Who wears the pants in this family, who works harder than me?

I said I um. I said I do. I said please get out and that means cousins in the guest room, too. You said I’m leaving. I said, yes, you’ve been asked to. You said, I’m going and once I leave I’m not coming back, and I said yes, please pretend like it was your very own idea if you like, just shoo.

You said does this mean I can’t go to Hawaii?

Years sped by,
I had two wee ones of my own. Romantic love felt silly by comparison. I was useful.

One evening I made some tea and went into my den, and there you were. You were on your phone and when you saw me you waved excitedly. Putting your hand over the receiver you whispered, “One sec, I’m on with the president.” You blew me a kiss.

“Who are you?” I asked.

You held up your hand and whispered, “Five more seconds, sorry!”

I took a sip of my tea. You definitely looked familiar, but I couldn’t remember from where. You hung up your phone and sauntered over.

“I’m in such a different place now.”

“From when? Do I know you?” I asked.

You put a finger to my lips to shush me and said, “I promise not to be fatuous.”

It started to dawn on me. You were that guy. For years you would drift into my personal space and goose me. Yes! The guy with the vocabulary who did all the mean imitations that had people in stitches! We had taken a trip together? And then you had disappeared. Then we’d taken another trip together? And you’d disappeared again. I’d blocked most of it, but you seemed so nice now.

You made a pouty face and said, “I think we could pull it off: being married, kids, all of it. I rented a villa in Italy for your birthday and everything. I bid on it and got it. Go, or no?”

“I guess go?” I said.

There was a lentil in your front tooth. You leaned in, said, “This feels like home to me. The corner of carnal and home.”

How strange, I thought. He sounds like someone wrote him. It would be like having a prosthetic arm that I didn’t really need, or a toy vegetable garden.

We moved slowly. Appearances were made and you mingled beautifully. You could decorate and play backgammon. It all felt adult and you remembered to bring flowers and carry suitcases. There were weeks of disappearing but I was used to that.

Winter came. After five days of radio silence you blasted in smelling of gin. You were in a state. After hacking your ex-wife’s email you discovered she was telling everyone you were a dog and that I needed to brush my hair. This time you were not letting go, you said. Face slick with sweat, you stormed to the bathroom and your shirt hit me in the face as you ripped it off and threw it. My view was partially blocked but in the mirror opposite the medicine cabinet, I saw them. I backed up in shock and nearly fainted. The two dog heads I’d disentangled myself from in years gone by were back. They hung from either side of your collarbone like shoulder pads with noses. I almost rolled my eyes. Three? Though maybe this was the answer? With better weight distribution and symmetry maybe you’d be the man I could count on? Or maybe I should call the cops? Now I understood why all the ascots. I was worried my little ones would wake and see you so I threw a towel around you and steered you to the bed. I tried to put my hand to your forehead to feel your temp but the other two heads snapped at me. Your eyes flew open as if you were remembering your cue and you stuck your tongue out at me, and said, “I want to say all roads are leading me pertinaciously to you but you don’t do any social media.” You belched. “Go pray, why don’t you. Go meditate.”

“Are you drunk?” I asked, but you were already sawing logs, the two auxiliary heads busy mapping out a game plan for how to best lick your testicles. I went out on the balcony, flabbergasted. My heart was throbbing from the shock but as I sat there, all the clues I’d ignored trickled in. The myriad things I’d let slide. I remembered then how terribly wrong it was, when, beast. I am sorry to call you out, but. You did. You cheated at laser tag.

I thought about that, and grew cold on the balcony.

I flashed on Head #3 throwing his birthday presents at me after opening the first one and saying that it was not what he’d wanted and

Did you even buy it yourself or just send someone to get it?

The image of Head #1 refusing to speak to my parents because they didn’t order champagne to toast our engagement, they only hugged us and said congratulations and he said

How fucking hard is it to get a bottle and raise a glass and say something nice about me

And Head #2 calmly reminding me

If I raise my fist to you again just turn and go because if I start hitting you I may not stop

I’d said

But where will I go next time? I live here

One head had said

If I sit here on this couch any longer I’m worried I will kill you and kill myself

I didn’t know who that was, that last one. I could see the face and knew the name but everything else was too hard to understand, so maybe I hadn’t
counted correctly and there were more. Maybe that was my problem—I couldn’t count? Why else would I go hollow and take it? Why would I never call the pound? I said sorry so many times that I believed I was, but was I supposed to be sorry?

A ringing then, you were calling me on the phone, saying, I need you. I said okay but you seem really mad. You cleared your throat and said,

“Yeah. I think you are picking up on my resentment toward you.”

Then began your
J’accuse
-athon, your attack on me for being rude to a man two years before. At the top of your lungs you shouted, but as me, shouting at the man. You were imitating me but doing the Korean soap opera version of it, as though I’d foamed at the mouth and clawed at his face; I was calling the man a motherf-er and throwing things at waiters. YOU HAVE TO BE KIND TO EVERYONE, you kept saying. Then all the heads were chiming in and attacking me, “Which one is this?” I said, and, “Wait, who’s attacking me now? I can’t even tell.”

“You were so horrible to your nanny!” you screamed. The poor nanny could barely enjoy the massage I got her because my children were so demanding, you snarled, and so what if she cleared out my minibar. “The nanny deserves a drink at the end of the day!”

“Didn’t you have sex with your kid’s nanny?” I asked, “Like for months and months?”

There was a silence.

“That’s different. I was at the bottom of my life.”

Then you started on my children. We were a bunch of fakes, you said, with our going to church and meditating. You said your children couldn’t believe how awful my kids were, which was when I started to hang up, but you began mimicking me again and I was fascinated as I realized, wow, that sounds exactly like your imitation of your ex-wife.
I am hearing a preview
, I thought. I’ve become an anecdote. He was trying it out on me first. I would be coming to a cocktail party near you, told between dinner and dessert. Convenient, too, since you were using the same voice for me and your ex-wife, you could just do a medley.

Then you, as me, yelled out a word that is not a word I have ever said, or a word my children even know. It rhymes with not smaller.

My stomach went tight and my eyes popped out of their sockets on springs.

I punched you in my mind so hard that you said ouch through the receiver. I stepped on the phone and ended you, walking out on your performance of me. I hung up on you, dog, for the last time. You cured me of overvaluing potential.

I have to admit also that having sex with you was like making snow angels under a rhino.

Bittersweet, my dove,
though you must have known all things slow to a stop. The childhood scars of you are not for me to pinpoint and shave flat. Go to your local library and check out some after-school specials. Go to church. Line dancing, anything.

You didn’t expect me to tell the whole truth, did you? No one
would believe how mean you were. It would have seemed like a fable, which is only as effective as its moral, and I happen to have one of those, finally:

She woke up in Brooklyn
and stretched. She went to the bodega to buy tangerines and an atlas. She strolled home at her own pace and checked on her pet geode. Turning up the volume on Sinatra, she bounced on the trampoline.

Look at that. She’d come to her own rescue.

She wrote stories and when she was low on words her daughter brought her some, carefully written on scraps of paper. Her son threw poems over rooftops. They laughed so hard that the downstairs neighbors poked at their ceiling with a broom. Warriors, all three of them.

One night she stopped by the window because of a shadow. She put on her glasses and peered out. Knelt there.

It was you, dog, and you were failing. You walked in a circle and lay on your side breathing smoke. Those two extra heads were shrunken and lost in your fur, now overgrown and gray. Oh lord, she thought, we’re all just poor dogs in the end.

She called out and you lifted your head wearily, laid it back down between your paws. You were ashamed and she was too. She’d done enough bad things to be the beast in someone else’s story.

She started very soft, just air at first, and sang. Her wee ones in their beds could hear her somewhere in their dreams. She went on until you were breathing evenly. You sat up, moving in under the tree and her heart caught on something when she saw you limp. It was a shock how old and broken you were.

“Lie down, beast,” she said gently, and you did. When your eyes closed she inhaled deeply and told you this whole story. It went on until her eyes were little hyphens and her neck was stiff. It took a while but she knew that when you woke you’d crawl away forever, and then. She was I and I am older now and I am done. All over.

Oh, you are so tiny now. I can barely see you out there, beast. I don’t need you anymore. Believe me when I say I am grateful for all of it. My aim was off, but true. Sleep tight, little monster.

How’d you get so happy?

Maybe you could always get everyone to join you on the dance floor, even when there is no dance floor.

Last Thanksgiving, we were all around that coffee table in the living room. Some people were on the rug, others in a heap on the couch. The kids got to stay up late. You played your adungu, the homemade Ugandan harp. Starting with a song in Swahili, you tried to get Hunter to join in, remember? He was too humble and wanted you to sing, but you wouldn’t take no. You went on your knees, pleading, “Siiiing something, Hun-ter, siiiiing out, my brother . . .” Leaning across that table until you were up in his face, your singing dropped to a whisper and then rose to a howl. You sang that one line, entreating him to join you in Swahili, and then English, you lay down and sang it old and frail and jumped up and made it funky like James Brown. Hunter was holding his stomach, laughing so hard, and you’d both put back some
Ugandan gin, I won’t say how much. That was the highlight of the party. Everyone sprang to life despite being spent from all the pie and Thanksgiving haiku.

It could be that you’ve always had that pied piper thing, but your life took a hairpin turn when you were so young. I can’t imagine there were any parties for a long time after that. There was too much to do.

When you threw down your weapon mid-battle you had to be quick, or the rebel army who kidnapped you might catch you. They would surely kill you in ways that would make you wish during your death that you’d never been born. What they did to escaped child soldiers is so far off the scale in terms of human atrocity that I can’t believe I was alive anywhere drawing a safe breath while that was happening somewhere else. I can’t hold those images in my consciousness and sustain the idea of a benevolent creator, but your faith does not waver. You believe in God.