Why Can't I Be You (2 page)

I
got stuck in
the middle seat on the airplane, crammed between a man who looked like a linebacker, with shoulders that pushed into my seat space, and a woman wearing so much perfume I could taste it. The fake, flowery soapiness of her scent made me remember when I was about five or six and I ate a huge mouthful of bubbles in the bathtub because I expected them to taste like candy. They didn’t.

I sat between the two of them, trying hard not to cry and failing miserably. The linebacker pretended to ignore me, giving me the side-eye every now and then from behind his
New York Times
, and the woman who smelled like Mr. Bubble kept sighing and clucking every time I sobbed, like she wanted me to talk about it with her. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to be that absurd cliché—crying on a stranger’s shoulder on an airplane. But when the attendants came around and gave us all little bags of peanuts, I remembered how much Deagan hated them—he always gave me his bag—and suddenly only having one little bag of stale airline peanuts seemed like the loneliest state of being in the world. I let out a sharp, loud sob that sounded like an angry goose honking.

“Oh, honey,” Mrs. Bubble said, patting my arm.

“He used to give me his nuts!” I wailed.

The man in the seat in front of us actually stood up and turned around to stare at me. Mrs. Bubble shooed him away, waving the back of her hand at him.

The linebacker handed me his peanuts, which made me cry even harder. He hurriedly reached for the in-flight magazine in the seat pocket and pretended to be engrossed in an article titled “The Top Tapas in Ten Cities.”

Mrs. Bubble fumbled through her purse and handed me a wad of yellow napkins. I didn’t want to take some stranger’s grubby old Wendy’s napkins, but I’d been crying so hard that the front of my shirt was drenched.

“The thing is,” I said, mopping tears off my chin with one of the napkins, “she’s not even any better than me.”

“Of course she isn’t,” Mrs. Bubble said, with the kind of universal assuredness women who are pros at mothering all seem to have.

But I wasn’t looking for reassurance. It was true. Faye wasn’t any better than me. She was barely even any different from me. It was insulting. If Deagan had left me for a supermodel or an acrobat, or even someone who played volleyball really, really well, it wouldn’t have felt like such an enormous slap in the face. The fact that Faye was average at everything—just as average as me—was maddening. He wasn’t even upgrading.

“And why,” Mrs. Bubble said, “would you want to be with someone who doesn’t know a good thing when he sees it?”

My friend Luanne would have shuddered at anyone calling me a “good thing,” regardless of the intention. “You’re not an object to be bought and sold by men,” she’d say defiantly. Actually, she would have shut Mrs. Bubble down at “oh, honey.” No one could ever call Luanne “honey” and get away with it. Same with “sweetie,” “deary,” “sweetheart,” “doll,” “baby,” or any other term of endearment, no matter who it came from. But Luanne would have agreed with the core of the advice: Why would I even want someone who didn’t want me?

Even though I knew I shouldn’t still want Deagan, I did. Even after everything he’d said at the airport, I wanted the life we’d planned, and if he called and told me he’d made a mistake, I would have taken him back without question. I would have pretended it never happened and that Faye didn’t even exist. We’d planned a life together, and it was going to be a good one.

I hadn’t been the only one planning. I hadn’t built up our plans for the future alone. It wasn’t like the way I became convinced Donatella’s was Deagan’s favorite restaurant because it was my favorite and I didn’t hear him when he said otherwise. For months, our Sunday morning game was to think of baby names while we drank our coffee in bed. And it wasn’t just me picking the names; he’d chime in too.

“Luke,” I’d say, “if it’s a boy.”

“Lukas Malcolm,” he’d say, “after my father.”

“Lukas Malcolm Holmes,” I’d say. “Or Lukas Malcolm Shaw-Holmes.”

“Don’t hyphenate,” he said. “It’s tacky. Either take my name or don’t, but don’t make it Luke’s problem.” And he said it like Luke was already a person, already our son, and we were just waiting for the right time to meet him—after I got promoted to full account executive and he made project manager, after the wedding, when we bought a renovated Victorian in the South Wedge neighborhood in downtown Rochester and stenciled a picture of the Holmes family crest on the nursery wall, just like the room Deagan grew up in. Those were things we’d planned together. We’d even started saving for the house. Not just me. Both of us. Left to my own devices, I would never even dream of painting a big red Celtic lion on any wall in our home, let alone over my baby’s crib. Left to my own devices, I would rather move out to the country than buy a house downtown. And, if I was going whole hog on being honest, being an account executive was starting to feel like it might not be tops on my list either.

I told Mrs. Bubble all of this. It was ridiculous, but it felt so good to say it out loud that I couldn’t stop myself. She was a really good listener.

The linebacker had exhausted the magazine and thumbed through the SkyMall catalog for a while before he fell asleep. Mrs. Bubble and I giggled as he snored, and it surprised me that I could laugh—that my whole, entire world had fallen apart, but a stranger snoring was still funny.

W
hen we landed
in Cleveland, I helped Mrs. Bubble get her travel case from the overhead compartment. “Sounds like you have a lot of thinking to do,” she said, as we parted ways at the gate. The linebacker gave me a sheepish wave before heading toward baggage claim.

I decided to buy myself a nice lunch at the airport pub during my stopover. I’d expense it. I’d indulge. It would cheer me up. Instead of feeling sorry for myself, I would celebrate being an intelligent, professional woman off in the world on her very first business trip, company credit card in hand. This trip was a very big deal.

When Monica, my boss, realized her sister’s wedding was the same weekend as the seminar she’d already signed up for, she picked me to go instead. Out of ten junior account executives, I was the one she chose, even over Luanne. And it’s not like Monica picked my name out of a hat. She actually and purposely chose me. Maybe Deagan dumping me was a sign—the dawn of a new era in the life of Jenny Shaw, power executive. Maybe I needed to flaunt my newfound freedom.

But when the pub was out of the salmon I’d finally decided on, I spilled salad dressing down my brand-new blouse, and I realized a scotch and soda didn’t taste as elegant as it sounded, my brave face started to crack. And when my connecting flight to Sea-Tac got delayed, and some snotty kid sitting behind me in the waiting area spit his gum into my hair instead of his mom’s waiting napkin, I turned into a complete and total mess. I bought myself a cup of coffee, found an empty row of chairs over in the corner, far away from any and all gum-spitting kids, and called Luanne, while picking sticky strands of what smelled like watermelon bubble gum out of my hair.

“This is why I take Xanax when I fly,” Luanne said, sighing, after I told her what had happened.

“Yes, so when your future husband breaks up with you, and you end up with a germ wad of gum in your hair, you’re perfectly relaxed about it—exactly.”

“I’m just saying air travel is stressful.”

“Comfort me, dammit!” I said, and started sobbing all over again.

Things had been a little strained between us since I got picked for the trip and she didn’t. When Monica announced it at the weekly meeting, I saw the way Luanne’s face fell. She shot a feeble smile in my general direction and excused herself to make a phone call as soon as the meeting ended.

She was still on the phone when I went to see if she wanted to grab lunch. She held her hand over the receiver and whispered, “It’s fine, you go,” like it was nothing, but I could see the hurt in her eyes, the way she couldn’t stand that I’d gotten something she thought she deserved.

I drove to Wegmans and wolfed down a takeout tray of California rolls in the parking lot by myself, because I didn’t want anyone to see the hurt in my eyes. It was stupid and selfish, but I really wanted Luanne to be proud of me. If she’d gotten the trip, I’d have whisked her off to lunch at her favorite restaurant to celebrate over midday gimlets and goat-cheese crepes.

That afternoon, I asked Monica if I could take Luanne with me. I just wanted to appease everyone. I wanted things to go back to normal. Monica told me I needed to learn how to take a compliment gracefully.

I watched a plane slowly pull away from the gate.

Luanne sighed. Her breath made static in the phone. “You can do better than Deagan,” she said weakly.

“Thank you,” I said, just as weakly. Tears dripped between my face and my cell phone. With my luck, the moisture was somehow increasing the phone’s radiation, I’d develop a big, inoperable tumor on my face—and then no one would ever love me.

“Deagan always looked like he was bad in bed anyway,” Luanne said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know. He’s all golf shirts and argyle, like an overgrown preppy frat boy, and I just think that’s probably the extent of his skills in bed—frat-boy sex.”

“Frat-boy sex?” I said, trying not to laugh. Luanne was doing this on purpose to distract me. It was one of her special skills. Deep conversations weren’t her forte, but she could turn any situation into a one-woman stand-up act. It wasn’t necessarily comforting, but it was better than sitting in the airport alone, feeling sorry for myself.

“All the grunting and moaning like there’s crazy stuff happening, when really it’s some kind of modified missionary and he comes if you move even just the slightest little bit.”

“Lu!”

“Ha! I’m so right!”

“You’re not!”

“‘Oh! Ooh! Oh!’ That was the extent of your sex life.”

“No,” I said, wiping my wet cheeks, whispering into the phone. “You forgot to add ‘Yessssssss!’”

“See!” Luanne said, laughing. “You’re going to be fine. When you come back, we’re going on the hunt. We’ll get you some hot dentist sex or some steamy science teacher action.”

“Dentist sex?”

“Nerds are way better in bed than frat boys,” Luanne said. “Trust me. They’re grateful
and
creative.”

“Are you at work?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sitting in your cubicle, moaning and talking about dentist sex right in the middle of the office?”

“That’s how much I love you,” Luanne said. “Plus, Monica’s gone, so it’s kind of raucous around here anyway.”

“You’re the best,” I said, looking up at the flight board. “Crap!”

“I’m the best crap? That’s so sweet of y—”

“They just moved my flight back another three hours!” I could feel the sobs creeping into my throat again. Delayed flights, like breaking a glass or having the water suddenly run freezing in the shower, always made me cry, even on a good day.

“Go get the gum cut out of your hair,” Luanne said. “The last time I got stuck in JFK, I went to a salon on the main concourse and got a pedicure. They have to have something similar in Cleveland. You could use a haircut anyway.”

“Thanks,” I said flatly. “So my hair is all wrong too?”

“It is full of chewing gum,” she said.

L
uanne was wrong
about the salon. They didn’t have anything similar in Cleveland. I ordered a bagel with peanut butter from a coffee shop in Concourse A. In the ladies’ room, I stood at the sink scooping globs of peanut butter from tiny white plastic tubs with my fingers, and rubbed it in my hair to try to dissolve the gum. I’d heard peanut butter was a great way to remove something, and I was pretty sure it was gum. I don’t know if I was wrong, or if peanut butter doesn’t work on gum in hair for some reason, but it all just turned into a huge wad of messy that wouldn’t wash out. And there’s a reason no one makes peanut butter scented shampoo.

While I was covered in peanut butter, my phone rang. I dug it out of my jacket pocket with sticky fingers. It was my mom. I didn’t answer. Ignoring her calls always made things worse later, but I couldn’t stand the idea of having to tell her that Deagan had dumped me. I didn’t want to hear the lecture—how disappointing it was that she didn’t have any grandchildren yet, how she was giving up on the idea once and for all, because it would be easier not to get her hopes up.

I cut the sticky mess out of my hair, strand by strand, with a pair of nail clippers, trying to salvage as much as I could. Luanne was right about my hair. It was such a mess that my butcher job didn’t even make it look all that much worse. The adorable layers my hairdresser gave me five months ago were now all ragged and uneven anyway. I’d been working so hard on being the kind of junior account executive that gets sent on business trips in her boss’s place, and the kind of girlfriend I thought would make Deagan want to move in with me, that I hadn’t even had time to get a decent trim. I’d been hoping to get a life-changing, fantabulous haircut at the spa salon while Deagan and I were away. I’d been hoping for a lot of things.

I slept through most of the flight from Cleveland to Seattle. It was the kind of sleep where you drool a lot and feel even more tired when you wake up, but I was thankful for the break from my thoughts, and that I had a window seat, so I was the only one party to my drool.

I walked to baggage claim and stood with the crowd of passengers waiting for the conveyer belt to start, for a good five minutes before I remembered that my carry-on was the only baggage I had.