Why They Run the Way They Do (11 page)

Tommy's partner of four years, Gil, is a doctor. He's one of these appallingly high-energy people, works in the ER, almost exclusively the graveyard shift. This plays out well for all of us. When I am at work Tommy is with Gil. When Gil is at work Tommy is with me. When both Gil and I are at work, Tommy rides his bike. To see him splayed across my couch in the evenings, his hand buried in a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, you would never know he logs forty miles every morning. He is a competitive racer. He was in the Olympic trials when he was eighteen. Now he competes in local races where he wins trophies and gift certificates to Applebees. He doesn't have a job. He defines himself not as independently wealthy, but as independently comfortable. And except for his racing gear, he and Gil can live off what Gil makes at the hospital.

The fourth letter from Mariela arrives on a Monday. Donald flashes me a glimpse of the flimsy gray airmail envelope when he passes me after lunch; he is bursting with excitement, but it is a rule that we can not open the letter until the office is closed and we can do it alone, without fear of interruption. At 5:00 Donald sends me the official signal that he can stay late—he opens his door halfway. This means I should go kill a few hours, until much of the office has cleared out, and then return. Sometimes I go to the movies, the rush-hour special, though because I am still in my work clothes—fitted blouse, gabardine pencil skirt, heels—the movie feels like another part of my job, and I find myself sitting unnaturally straight and smiling pleasantly regardless of what is on the screen.

Mariela was Donald's anniversary gift to me. When we had been together one year he presented me with her picture and her paperwork. She is ten years old and lives in an orphanage in Paraguay. Every month we send her twenty-eight dollars (less than a cup of coffee a day!) to help pay for her food and clothes and school books.

“This is our little girl,” he'd said that night, touching the photo with tender fingertips. “Look at her, Lauren. She's ours, yours and mine.”

Donald and his wife have three children, two in high school and one in college. They pose on his desk in matching silver frames.

“Isn't she beautiful?” he'd said, squeezing my hand until the blood stopped at my knuckles. “She's all ours. She's nobody else's. She's yours and mine.”

That was a little over a year ago. And the truth was, it had totally creeped me out in the moment. I didn't tell him this, because he was so obviously moved by it, so blown away by his own gesture, but the whole idea of it made me queasy. Weren't we using her, this innocent little brown orphan? Wasn't she an accomplice to something torrid and dirty? But then, almost overnight, it seemed perfectly acceptable, just as most everything in my life that had ever made me inconveniently queasy (i.e.: my parents' grisly divorce, my absurd broken engagement in college, my temp-job career) had swiftly morphed into
perfectly acceptable
. After all, I told myself, it wasn't as if we had taken Mariela from someone else, someone more deserving. Before us she had nothing, and now she had twenty-eight bucks a month and she meant something to someone. So I have grown used to the idea that she is out there—out there and ours—and Donald and I devour the letters with equal pleasure. She is, I am quite certain, the only child I will ever have. She has never barfed on me and she will never break my heart. And yet, when we hold her picture, surely what we are feeling is all the joy and pride of real parents.

She sends us actual letters. When I first heard about it, I imagined the letters would be something like the sweepstakes notices you get, the ones with your personalized information spliced in:

Dear
Lauren and Donald,

Thank you for your generous gift of
$28.
I used it to buy
a new goat.
Now there is milk for my classmates. I hope the weather in
Chicago
is pleasant.

Sincerely,

Mariela

But I was wrong. The words are her own—translated, of course, and typed on a piece of flowery stationery:

Dear Family,
(this new letter begins)

Today at school we talked about rivers and why they run the way they do. After school we played football even though it was raining. I was on the red team and I scored one goal and then a boy named Jorge who was on the green team rubbed mud in my hair. Last week I was sick but I am getting better. Thank you for writing me and helping me to have books and clothes for school.

Love, Mariela

“Jorge better watch his back,” Donald says. “I'm gonna kick his ass.”

The agency has included an updated photo and we sit there on the foldout couch squinting at it, as if even in the photo the distance between us and Mariela is immense. She is standing on a gravel road in front of a squat building that I assume is the school, because she is holding two thick books pressed against her chest, in the same way I and many girls had held books at the age of ten, a shield that hid our bodies, the only thing we could hold so tightly at that age.

“She looks so old,” I say. “She's not a little girl anymore.”

“Soon she'll be casting spells on all the boys,” he says. “Just like her mother.” He pokes me in the ribs, a gesture I despise. I suspect he is one of those men who tickled his children until they begged for mercy, that he was so pleased with their laughter that he was able to overlook the dismay behind it.

“I'm not her mother,” I say. “And Donald, your socks have holes in them, okay? You make a hundred and eighty—”

“You're as much her mother as anyone,” he says, setting the letter aside.

“That's nice,” I say. “I'm sure that would be a great comfort to her. You can't buy a week's worth of decent socks?”

“What's wrong, honey?” he asks. He puts his big palm on my cheek, a gesture I love, and I forget about his socks and Mariela. Sometimes I feel like I could sleep curled in his hand, like a hamster.

“Nothing,” I say.

“No, really,” he says. “What is it? Is it me?”

This is his favorite question: Is it me? Is it me?

“Don't freak out,” Tommy says. He is standing in my doorway with a supersize bag of BBQ Fritos. “Whatever you do, just don't freak out.”

“What?” I say, closing the door. “What happened?”

“Just don't freak out.”

“Okay, whatever, I won't freak out.”

He sits down on the couch, picks up the remote, and turns off the television.

“I'm freaking out,” I say.

“Me, too,” he said. He pauses, then inhales and exhales deliberately like he is on an infomercial for yoga tapes. “We're moving.”

“What do you mean, ‘moving'?”

The word itself feels strange in my mouth. Moving. Moo-ving. A cow plus
ving
. You might say “I'm moving this couch to the other wall” or even “They're moving my office at work” but people themselves did not move. Things moved. Tommy and I have lived in this apartment complex for seven years, since literally the day after we graduated from college. When Tommy and Gil became a couple three years after that, Gil moved in; Tommy did not move out. Because Tommy did not move.

“Gil got this amazing offer to run the ER at this hospital in—”

“Gil?” I explode. “Since when is this about Gil? Since when is every goddamn thing about Gil?” The irony that Gil's name comes up approximately once a month, usually in passing, is popping around in the back of my brain like a Mexican jumping bean, impossible to grab.

“Sweetie,” Tommy says miserably. And right then it becomes apparent that one of us is going to start crying. I'm not sure which of us, but either way it's something to be thwarted at all costs.

“Go home,” I say. “I have stuff to do, all right? Just get out of here. I have like a million things to do.”

He doesn't move from the couch. “Can I just turn on the TV instead?”

“Okay,” I say. “Wanna Coke or something?”

“Okay,” he says.

We drink our Cokes. We eat the Fritos down to the crumbs. We watch a special on the History channel about a British soldier in World War II who was dropped from an airplane, already dead, with bogus Top Secret documents in his pockets, sent to confuse the Nazis. It's always good, when you're feeling really lousy, to watch something about Nazis.

Usually I skip the company picnic. Usually, as soon as the date is announced, I remember something very important that it conflicts with. This was true even before Donald and I were together. Didn't I see these people enough during the week? What did I need, exactly, with a bunch of tipsy lawyers and legal secretaries smeared with sunscreen and bug repellent, a bunch of kids running around screaming their heads off, their faces stained with watermelon? But this year an unfortunate turn of events has made it necessary for me to attend. I have won an award. In our annual client survey, the email marked “URGENT” informs me I have received an “unprecedentedly unanimous vote of 10 (excellent) for friendly customer service . . . both in person and on the telephone!”

“It's a big deal,” Donald calls to me. He is standing in his private bathroom, in front of the mirror, poking a small red bump that has appeared below his left eye. “If you don't show up . . . well, it'll look really, really bad.”

“You're telling me I might get fired for not coming to the company picnic?”

“I didn't say that.” He pokes his head out the door. “Just . . . it'll be weird if you don't come. People might think it's because, you know, whatever.”

“I might be sick,” I said. “I might get the flu.”

He's back at the mirror. Bug bite? Acne? Cancer? “Okay, it's dumb to you. Okay. Fine. But some people have been here for twenty years and never won something like this. It means something.”

“Something besides I'm screwing the boss.”

He abandons his prodding and comes out of the bathroom. “Are you kidding me? Really, Lauren, you think I had something to do with this? Is it that hard to believe that people think you do your job well?”

“I'm so proud,” I say, twisting my heels into my shoes. “My college education has finally paid off. I think I'll call my mother. And imagine how proud Mariela will be when she hears.”

“Babe, what is it?” he asks. “Is it me?”

“My friend Tommy is moving,” I say. “In three weeks. He and Gil are moving to New Mexico.”

“Wow,” Donald said. He sits on the foot of the foldout beside me, puts his hand over mine. “But he's your best friend.”

“I told him that. It didn't seem to make a difference.”

“I'm really sorry,” he says. And he is. He's not a bad guy. You hear about a guy like this, a guy—a
lawyer
, for crying out loud—banging his receptionist at the office two nights a week while his wife keeps his dinner warm, and you think you've got this guy all figured out. But you don't know that when he sees a spider crawling across his office wall, he'll catch it in a plastic cup and when he has a minute to spare he'll run the spider downstairs and shake it in one of the plants that line the front of our building.