Authors: Mad Dash
Patricia Gaffney (5 page)
“It’s the clutch,” Eddie said. “It finally burned out.”
“He’s writing something,” Hood said. “What is that, R-U…”
I craned closer, crushing Hood against the window. “R-U-B…”
“Rubbish.” Hood looked at me blankly. “He wrote out ‘RUBBISH.’”
Andrew’s trousers were white to the knees. His hair hung wet and blackish over his pale forehead. His glasses were fogged. His mouth moved again, and over the noise of the engine I finally figured out what he was saying. “That was all rubbish.”
Well, it certainly was. As miserable as I’d been, I’d never believed for a second all that nonsense about people needing to have as much in common as they possibly could, relationships being tricky enough to begin with, blah-blah. Absolute rubbish.
I climbed over Hood, practically fell out of the van. Andrew did fall, scrambling down the bank to the sidewalk, and we cannoned into each other in an ecstatic, terribly romantic embrace, kissing and laughing, Andrew murmuring in my ear the loveliest things about what an idiot he’d been. I was in heaven, pure bliss—but I’d have been even more jubilant if I’d known then how rare a gesture my dignified husband-to-be, whose personal idol is Thomas Jefferson, had just made, all for my sake. A once-in-a-lifetime gesture.
That’s a dear memory, immortalized inside my wedding ring all these years, twenty years this coming May. It’s taken me almost that long, twenty years, but I suppose I finally got it straight that night we found the puppy on the doorstep. Turns out Andrew’s dithery, womanish misgivings about us weren’t idiotic at all. They were prophetic.
I
call the machine at my studio for messages, but there aren’t any. Good. I lock up, turn out the lights, a long process since most of the switches in this cabin are nowhere near the lights. It’s early, but I’m tired. Going to bed.
The puppy’s snoring in her box, dead asleep. I reach down to stroke the soft line between her eyes, and she doesn’t even twitch.
Every night since I’ve been here, I make a conscious decision not to miss Andrew. In bed, I mean. I crawl under the covers by myself and make a point of thinking,
Yes, he’s not here, but he’s safe, and you’re safe except for the mice in the kitchen, and you can live without sex. You can fall asleep without him because, luckily, you were never the kind of people who have to cuddle and spoon and sprawl on each other in order to get a good night’s sleep.
I wonder if I left him for the same reason I married him, only in reverse. When I was twenty-five I wanted the Mommy-Daddy-little-girl ideal I’d had when I was a child, the sort of thoughtless, complacent security you take for granted when you’re fortunate enough to have it. I had it only until I was nine, and that’s too bad, but afterward I got another model, another ideal—the mother-daughter one—and in its sadder, more intense way it was just as sweet. Us against the world, that’s how Mama and I saw ourselves, survivors, an inseparable unit always compensating, compensating, usually successfully, because we were two, not three.
I’m so lucky. A terrible loss split my childhood in half, and yet on either side of it I was happy. The people who loved me made sure of that, or maybe I’m just predisposed to happiness, or maybe there’s a happiness “set point”—you read about that in magazines—and I always return to mine, eventually.
But I don’t know. If Andrew’s driving me crazy and I don’t want his husbandly, fatherly
security
anymore, if I don’t need the safety and the thoughtless contentment of
three
—how do I imagine I can return to the bittersweet closeness of
two
when my mother and my child are both gone? I don’t understand myself. Maybe
three
and
two
are equally irrelevant (how sad; if I think about that for long, I’ll cry). Maybe all that’s left is to find inside myself a coherent and reasonably well-functioning
one.
I should call Andrew. But he’s probably asleep. He makes a head sandwich with his two pillows so he can have absolute quiet, and he sleeps that way all night. Never on his back anymore; he read somewhere that causes postnasal drip.
My hip hurts when I lie on my right side. Arthritis? I’m getting so old. People who say forty-five is young are always old, but objectively they’re right. I could live to ninety—forty-five more years. I could take up a whole new career, people do it all the time. The only reason I got into portrait photography was to help Andrew pay for graduate school after his father wouldn’t. Our first Christmas together, I got a job taking pictures of kids on Santa’s lap at the mall. How
ridiculous
, I’ve been thinking lately, that my entire professional life was determined by something so haphazard.
I used to have grand ambitions. Confused but grand. Everything looked right and attainable to me, an endless horizon of choices like stars on a clear night. Veterinarian—that was one of the big ones. Foreign war correspondent, a journalist for
Audubon
or
National Geographic.
A blues singer or a talk-show host or a TV news anchor, something big and show-offy. But also, the person who sits all alone in the fire tower, scanning the vast green forest for smoke.
Children’s photographer—when you come down to it, what kind of a job is that? Today was fun, but, frankly, I get tired of other people’s children. I wanted three or four, but after Chloe we couldn’t have any more. Andrew denied it, but the truth is, he didn’t mind. That infuriated me.
It’s not your womb that’s barren
, I shouted at him—I got quite biblical in my grief. I spent half of Chloe’s first year of life in a dreary blue funk.
That’s what it feels like now. Yes, suddenly it’s clear to me: I’m living the middle-aged version of postpartum depression.
Post
is “after” partum…what is that, birth? I look it up in the dictionary in the bedside table drawer.
Partum
, from
parere
, “to beget.”
Well, there you are. God knows my begetting days are over. My mother’s gone, and Chloe, light of my life, she’s almost as lost to me as the other children I couldn’t have. It’s just me and my barren womb now. Andrew—Andrew’s a rumor. I’m by myself on a wide, flat plain, no one else in sight, just boneless me who can’t even cast a shadow. And Andrew wanted me to
take this puppy to the pound.
To hell with his imaginary headache. I punch the number, the phone rings twice, and he answers, his voice clogged with sleep.
“I’m taking my name back.”
“Dash? Is everything—”
“Tirva, not McGugin—why should I take my father’s name? That’s as silly as taking yours. Tirva.” My mother was Lithuanian. “Although,” it occurs to me, “that was just
her
father’s name, so what’s the difference? Even if I took her
mother’s
, it would just be her
grand
father’s. You guys really stacked the deck, didn’t you?”
“I was asleep,” Andrew mumbles accusingly. “Hold on, hold on.” I can hear him poking around, looking for his glasses, like that’ll make him hear better.
“I’m just telling you, Andrew, this is not for a few days. I don’t know how long, but it’s not going to be just a few days.” As soon as that’s out, I feel better. Whatever else is the matter with me, I’m not a wishy-washy person. Making decisions peps me up.
“Wait now, hold on, this is why we said we’d talk.”
“I know, but I don’t care, Christmas isn’t the deadline anymore. Without Chloe it’s just another day anyway, so let’s let it go.”
“Let it go?”
“It’s just another day, and frankly—frankly, I don’t want to do it anyway, the house, the tree, lights, all the
cooking
, the presents, my
God.
So let’s skip it.”
“Fine. Very well, no Christmas.”
“Oh, yes,
that
should please you. You
never
want Christmas. Oh, this’ll be right up your alley! I should’ve married a Jew.”
“God.” He’s rubbing his face, I hear his whiskers, and probably making that pained expression. “You’re not making sense. We’ll talk it all out tomorrow.”
“I’m not making sense? I’m the most sensible, the most
boring
person I ever met. You even know where I am. I’m right here in our cabin, all nice and safe—”
“Dash—”
“I’m not driving across the country, am I, I’m not taking interesting side jobs, not having an affair with Brad Pitt.”
“What are you talking about?”
He’s touched a goddamn nerve. “I let myself get too old. I’m not one of those women in books who just—walk off the beach one day—I’m not Susan Sarandon or what’s-her-name, my time has passed. Men start a whole new life—you can go to ninety, a hundred, but it’s all over when we turn fifty. I heard that all my life and never believed it, I thought it was feminist bullshit, but you know what, Andrew? It’s the goddamn truth.”
“Now, listen—”
“It’s the goddamn truth, and this is my last chance.”
“Last chance to do
what
?”
“Don’t ask me questions, I don’t have to answer any of your questions. Okay—find myself. Are you happy? I said, ‘Find myself.’ I am now a walking, talking cliché.”
I hate his exasperated silences. I start to say good-bye, but then he says, “Come home, Dash,” in a voice that slips past my defenses. It enters my whole body through my ear. “Whatever you want, Christmas or not, it doesn’t matter. Just come home.”
“No, no, no, no, no.” I have to drown him out to stay clearheaded. “I’m not. Andrew, I’m not. You’ll see, this will be good for us.”
“How can it possibly be good for us? Good for
us
?”
Good
, I think, now
he’s
mad. “How can being alone at Christmas possibly do either one of us any
good
? For God’s sake—I don’t even know where my shoes are.”
“Your
shoes
?”
“That’s not the point, of course—”
“Your
shoes
? They’re at the shoe repair.”
“Which one, the one on Columbia or the one on Eighteenth?”
“You just want your maid back, that’s all this is.”
“No, that’s not all this is.”
“Eighteenth Street, the Korean guy. Now I have to go to bed, I’ve got a long day tomorrow. Hang up,” I say, so he’ll know I’m not hanging up on him. A long time ago we promised each other we would never, ever do that.
“Look,” he says, “I’ll be in the office all day tomorrow. Call me. We can have dinner. Here, not out—I’ll make beef Stroganoff.”
It’s all he knows how to make. “What did you have for dinner tonight?” I picture him pouring spoiled milk over a bowl of Cheerios. Can he even make a salad?
“I went out. I had dinner out.”
“By yourself?” No, I don’t want to know. “We can have dinner,” I say, “but I don’t know when. Not tomorrow. I don’t know when. Tomorrow’s going to be another long day for me. We’ll set something up. Maybe Christmas Eve.”
“
Christmas Eve
?”
“I don’t know. Yes, maybe. Okay, signing off. Good night, Andrew. Hang up,” I say, and hang up.
Well, that accomplished nothing. There are good, sound, solid reasons for what I’ve done, I just don’t know what they are. That is, I don’t know how to
express
them. It’s like when I try to argue politics with him. I always lose because he knows more and he argues better, not because he’s right and I’m wrong. I wish I could organize my grievances, all the
second
-to-last straws—the dog was the last straw—and make Andrew shut up through a long, eloquent, uninterrupted presentation. And be convinced at the end, say, “Oh, I see. Yes, obviously, you’re absolutely right.”
That won’t happen, so my next-best course is to stay out of his way. Dinner—I don’t think so, not yet. I don’t want to normalize things, pour oil on the hinges so they don’t squeak anymore. There’s something the matter with the whole
door.
How humbling. I see Andrew is not the only one who’s horrible at analogies.
andrew
four
I
t was Wolfie, the boy from the next block, who pointed out to Andrew that his shoes didn’t match. “Yo,” Wolfie greeted him on a frosty Thursday morning as Andrew was unlocking his car, preparing to drive to school. “Whassup with your shoes, man. Where your ol’ lady at? She let you go out like that?”
The incident unnerved him, especially since it was the kind of thing much more likely to happen to his old lady than to him. He went back in the house and changed his shoes—one dark-brown brogan in place of one black one; not that alarming; could happen to anyone—and went on to work.
Then he forgot about a history department meeting. Tim Meese stuck his head in the door to his office. “Where were you?” Andrew all but slapped his forehead. “I forgot!” Tim was as amazed as he was. Faculty meetings were skull-crushingly boring and frustrating wastes of time, but Andrew never missed them, at least not by accident.
A little later, Mrs. Melman, his next-door neighbor, called to say that the key wasn’t in the mailbox, so she couldn’t get in the house to let Hobbes out, a favor she’d been doing for him since Dash left on the days when he had a late class. The key, the key…it took him too long to remember: It must be in the pocket of his sweatpants, where he must’ve slipped it instead of in the mailbox after his morning jog. More absentmindedness, but still, nothing to worry about. Just because his father was going senile didn’t mean he was.
Then, proving things could happen in fours in one day as easily as threes, his car sputtered out of gas at a red light on Sixteenth Street. Evening rush hour; honking horns; the humiliating push from good Samaritans; a ten-block walk, round-trip, for gas in a freezing wind.
What the hell?
The last time he ran out of gas he was sixteen years old.
Unbelievably, Wolfie was loitering in front of the house when he got home. He was bouncing the same basketball he’d been bouncing this morning, but he couldn’t have been there all day; he had on different clothes, a hooded sweatshirt instead of a Windbreaker and stocking cap.
“Aren’t you freezing?” Andrew asked.
“No.” His full name was Wolfgang Coleman. He was eight years old and small for his age, almost frail; when he grinned, his permanent teeth looked too big for his face. “So, man, where your ol’ lady at?”
He’d dodged the question this morning. Wolfie was Dash’s little pal more than he was Andrew’s; small children made him uncomfortable. “She went on a trip,” he said, turning his back on a shock of cold wind whipping up the sidewalk.
“A
trip.
”
“Yes, a trip.”
“She be back?”
“Oh, yes.”
Wolfie’s large eyes gleamed with skepticism. “My ol’ man went on a trip.” He waited, palming the huge-looking basketball in his wiry palm until Andrew said, “Really?” “Yeah. Only he
never
come back.”
He didn’t care for the implication. They stared at each other. “Do you want to come in?” Andrew asked finally, more out of exasperation than hospitality.
“Don’t got time. You need your walk shoveled?”
“Now?” He glanced at the stretch of clear, windswept walkway to his front porch. “No, thank you.”
“Tomorrow?”
“If it snows, if it sticks—very well, tomorrow.”
Wolfie raised his free hand. It took Andrew that telltale, old-white-guy second to realize it was for a high five, and by the time he did, Wolfie had spun around and started for the corner. His basketball made tinny, echoey thuds on the sidewalk in the icy quiet.
I’m falling apart.
Andrew studied his face in the black window of the microwave while his Hungry-Man Steakhouse frozen dinner circled inside. He looked gaunt, beaky, a raptor in glasses. Were the whites of his eyes jaundiced? He squinted, going closer, closer—then jerked back. Now they claimed electromagnetic emanations from microwaves were harmless, but not long ago they were saying just the opposite.
The problem was, he wasn’t thinking about what he was doing while he was doing it. He wasn’t
awake.
Right now, eating his dinner on a stool at the kitchen counter, he couldn’t remember what he’d had for breakfast this morning, or lunch for that matter, or precisely how he’d passed the time between classes this afternoon. Yesterday was mostly a blur, too, except for the fifteen minutes he’d spent talking on the phone to Chloe. How to account for these lapses? Dash was the daydreamer, not him. It had something to do with time, which was passing in a peculiar, unfamiliar way, going by in a rush and yet taking forever; no wonder he couldn’t keep track of it.
And no wonder he’d missed the department meeting this morning—it just occurred to him: He’d forgotten to make his list last night. What would Dash say about that? She thought his list making was obsessive-compulsive behavior, a “fetish,” she once called it. Nothing of the kind, merely a tool for time management. He liked making his at night in bed, last thing before going to sleep. Last night he’d forgotten, and look what happened.
What Dash failed to appreciate was what a leap of faith list making was, touching, really, and how many positive things it suggested about a man’s certainty in the future. Things, frankly, Andrew wasn’t altogether sure he believed in, given his family health history. And yet—the lists didn’t lie. If he could jot down “$$ to Chloe” or “drugsto.,” think how sanguine his expectations must be of indefinite check writing and Pepto-Bismol dosing. He would tell Dash that the next time she called him a pessimist. “How could I be,” he’d say. “I make lists.”
He put his empty plate in the trash and washed his fork. Start to finish, dinner had taken nine minutes, including cooking it. For the first few days after she left, he’d sat in his usual place at the dining-room table, enjoying his hot dog or bowl of soup with a cloth napkin, sometimes a small glass of wine. But over time that got to be too much trouble, or else more noticeably pathetic, and now he ate in the kitchen, frequently standing up.
Not that she was a slob, not precisely, but one unexpected side effect of Dash’s absence was a new cleanliness, he might even say radiance, around the house. He liked to stand in the kitchen door and survey the shiny, uncluttered surfaces of counter and stove, the crumbless kitchen table and footprintless floor, Hobbes’s clean, sweet-smelling blanket jumble beside the refrigerator. Everything remained just as he left it, the dish towel folded lengthwise in thirds over the swing-out holder by the sink, dishes not languishing in the drainer but put away, the sink empty and bright. Each evening he would perfect the space a little more, clean a new cabinet, rearrange the spice rack, but he’d finally run out of improvements. Tonight everything was just right.
He made a cup of tea, disposed of the bag, added a teaspoon of sugar, wiped the stove with a clean sponge, and carried his mug out to the living room.
Here the differences were subtler but even more satisfying. At last, all of Dash’s photographs on the walls were at precise angles to one another, and they stayed that way because as soon as one went out of alignment he righted it. He could sit in his easy chair and look around at perfect symmetry: no small pleasure. He knew where the newspaper was, and he knew it was all there, his wife hadn’t taken the Style section upstairs or into the bathroom and abandoned it. The oak doors to the “entertainment center” stayed closed unless he was actually watching television, a rare occurrence, and the CDs were no longer scattered all over the credenza but neatly stacked in the holder and back in alphabetical order by music genre. He even knew where the remote was.
Hobbes, who’d followed him in from the kitchen, wobbled blindly in the middle of the room, waiting for him to settle. When he did, the dog collapsed at his feet with a tragic sigh and fell back to sleep.
Andrew rested his mug of tea on the scarred arm of the leather chair that had once belonged to his grandfather, Edward Bateman Sr. Andrew had inherited it via his father, Edward Jr., who, instead of keeping it for himself, had given it to twenty-year-old Andrew as a bribe. As if putting his backside in the wide, creaky, redolent chair would make the profession of law seep into him osmotically, would make the desire to be anything but an attorney in the Bateman family firm miraculously, physiologically disappear. It hadn’t worked out that way, and yet, over the years, Andrew had never associated the chair with winning, never taken any gloating pleasure in the fact that he hadn’t had to pay for it in the way his father had wanted. Just the opposite, actually. As comfortable as it was, the chair always seemed to exude faint reproach.
Failure
, the cushions sighed in a disappointed, paternal whisper. His uneasy chair.
He looked up from a student essay he was grading on the Second Continental Congress, recognizing the piece he’d unthinkingly put on the stereo. Mozart, the D-minor piano concerto. He dropped his head back, enjoying the sinister opening. Dash could listen peacefully to the whole first movement, not even wagging her head in time, and during the romanza she stayed relatively subdued. But the moment she heard the first five-note trill of the rondo, she would leap to her feet and start conducting. Move aside, Igor Markevitch. She turned the piece into a ballet with her wide, theatrical arm sweeps, putting her whole body into it, her fingers mimicking the piano notes, and her face—what tragic drama in the tightly shut eyes, the painfully furrowed brow, what
sympathy.
It was a bit like watching a silent film star conducting an orchestra, every emotion exaggerated, telegraphed.
He used to enjoy the concerto in a modest way, a bit of a guilty pleasure, because compared to, say, the C minor, it was more facile (as Dash would say, “It’s catchier”). But now he couldn’t listen to it without seeing her conducting it. In a way, she’d ruined it for him, turned it into dance instead of music, an opéra bouffe. But in another way, he liked the D-minor concerto much better than he used to. It happened all the time: Dash took over one of his simple, straightforward pleasures and made it at once more enjoyable and less what it was in the beginning. Less his.
T
he next day, he put on shoes that matched, made certain Mrs. Melman’s key was in the mailbox, drove to work without mishap, and arrived at a curriculum meeting with time to spare. It was all in the list.
The last item on today’s list was “Write Chloe.” He had a few minutes before class—he’d send her a quick e-mail.
As usual, his computer mailbox contained a post from Dash, one of her mass mailings to every person in her address book. This one was about breast cancer awareness, but it could’ve been saving gorillas, voting for the feminist candidate, sending money to this or that charity or cause; or worse, some feel-good joke complete with music and graphics that took eons to download. None of her friends complained, though. It was so Dash, they said, exuberant, generous, activist. Exasperating.
Dear Chloe: Trust check arrived and you are not spending it all in one place, ha-ha. You’re right, a credit card would probably be handier for you, simpler for me. Still see no need to rush into it, however. Would only note, you turn 19 in two months. Tangible proof of our faith in your fiduciary trustworthiness may then be forthcoming.
He suspected Chloe found his notes ponderous and hard to wade through, eminently skimmable, probably because of sentences like that. He meant them humorously, but to be sure she took them that way he would have to add more “ha-has” or even smiley faces. Unthinkable.
Glad to hear you’re enjoying your independent study break and putting it to good use. You should do even better this term than last, if only because everything’s not brand new anymore. And that’s not pressure! Your mother and I simply could not be prouder of you. You’re handling college the way you’ve handled every other challenge, with confidence, enthusiasm, and good sense. If we’ve set high standards, it’s only because we know you always rise to them.
Nothing much new here. They’re calling for snow again. Wish you were here, we could go sledding in the park.
Rushing—more later. Love always, Dad.
His finger hesitated a second before he hit Send. Leaving out the most important thing, that he and Dash weren’t living together, made him uneasy, as if he were telling Chloe a lie. But Dash thought it would be better to keep it between themselves for now, and deep down, he wasn’t sorry. As long as no one knew, it stayed in the realm of the temporary. The not-worth-mentioning.
Dash thought she had a monopoly on missing Chloe. As if that were her exclusive domain, as if maternalism trumped paternalism by definition. He didn’t bother to dispute it; he sensed it gave her a perverse comfort to believe it. But she was mistaken. When he thought of his daughter, he felt a sharp pang of sadness perfectly mixed with delight, the strangest combination; like biting into a delicious piece of fruit with a sour spot, a sudden bitter taste. He missed the sound of Chloe’s voice, he missed her bizarre music playing in her room. The way she slouched in front of her computer, intense as a hawk. Mostly, he missed his last chance to be her father, at least in the old way, the father of a girl. His time was up.
He wished he had a blood pressure monitor here in the office. There was one at home, but why not have two? He put his fourth finger on the inside of his left wrist and counted the beats of his heart to the second hand of his watch. Twenty seconds, twenty-three times three—sixty-nine. Good, but he was sitting calmly in his office in Douglas Hall with nothing scheduled, no meetings or student conferences, nothing remotely stressful in the offing except his Early Republic class, and he looked forward to that.