Why They Run the Way They Do (17 page)

Late the next morning I rummaged through the bathroom wastebasket and there was another test, another minus sign. This one was buffeted by at least half a roll of Charmin. Fearing we'd eventually go broke buying toilet paper, I rolled it back up and went downstairs holding the whole thing in my hand. It was about the size of a small rabbit.

She was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the newspaper with her half glasses. She read all the time when we were kids. I mean
all the time
. The only thing she'd give up books for was board games, which is why—at five or six—I'd started playing them in the first place. Otherwise who knows how many years might have passed before she talked to me.

I stood there holding my toilet paper bundle until she looked up at me, and then at the bundle in my hand, and then back at me.

“I know,” she said, after a moment. She removed her glasses in the manner of one who is about to be punched in the face. “Okay. I know. Go ahead.”

“Go ahead what?”

“Go ahead and tell me. I know it's ridiculous.”

Throughout the last couple awful years of our awful marriages we'd played a never-mentioned-but-completely-understood game called I'm Going To Tell You What You Already Know About this Situation, and I'm Going to Pretend I Don't Know that You Already Know It and Just Aren't Acting On It.

I sat down across from her. “Who is it?” I asked.

“A guy from AA,” she said.

Of course! Why had I not considered this? She had been sober for over three years, but still made frequent voyages to the top-secret planet of AA, the parallel universe that hovered just outside the existence of the common, non-anonymous majority, the little world within the big world. Sometimes at the coffee shop, or just walking down the street, I tried to catch my sister's eye contact with, her flickering acknowledgment of, other alcoholics. Sometimes I wished I had a secret society for the things that had ailed me in life, perhaps a group for others who had been repeatedly attacked by dogs in their own living rooms.

“What's his name? How old is he?”

She sighed. “Jeremy. Thirty-six.”

“Thirty-six! He's younger than me!”

“So what? We're all adults. It's not like he's eighteen or something.”

“Does he have a job?”

“He's a magician.”

I sat back in the chair. “Maybe you didn't hear me,” I said. “I asked if he had
a job
.”

“Ha ha.” She put down her coffee. “Magician is a job.”

“Magician is a job for like two people in all of human history,” I said. “Houdini and David Copperfield are the only people ever to put ‘magician' under ‘occupation' on their tax returns.”

“That's so not true,” she said. “What about, like, you know, like, what about Karl Wallenda?”

“Karl Wallenda was a tightrope walker,” I said. “As you well know.”

She was quiet for a moment, and then she grinned. “Do you think he put that on his tax return? God, I hope he did.”

I smiled also, picturing the impeccable, precise printing of the tightrope walker on the 1040—tightrope walker—and then realized she was trying to change the subject.

“So are you dating him or what?”

“Just
or what
, I guess. It's not really that serious.”

“Serious enough that you're taking a pregnancy test,” I said. “Serious enough that—wait, are you
trying
to get pregnant?”

She turned red. Bam—three seconds. The blush rose from her neck and just rolled up her face. It was the perfect blush, humiliating and undeniable, the kind I normally only saw on high school boys.

“Oh my god, you're trying to get pregnant.”

“Not
trying
trying,” she said. “I'm not guzzling cough syrup to thin out my vaginal mucus or anything.”

“What? What? You
are
trying! Only someone trying would know that that was even a thing! Vaginal mucus?”

“I know,” she said. “It's stupid. It's . . . never mind. Forget it.”

“No,” I said, suddenly feeling like the worst sister in the world, dismissing both a love interest and an innocent little baby in the space of thirty seconds. “No, Lizzie. I just mean. No, it's not stupid, it's just a surprise. Are you in love with him or something?”

She shook her head. “I'm not in love with him. He's just nice. He's, you know, really sweet. I just thought . . .”

Her eyes moved to the Scrabble box on the table. Aversion? Or an answer?

“You're sick of playing Scrabble with me?”

“No,” she said. “No, I'm not. I just got it into my head that maybe I wasn't done after all.”

“I never said you were done,” I said. “No one said that. Neither of us is
done
-done.”

“You're coming across as pretty done-done,” she said.

Which might have been true. When I looked ahead ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, we were still sitting at this exact table playing Scrabble. Maybe there were people in jet packs zipping by outside. Maybe we had computer chips embedded in our necks. But still: seven letters, one rack, eight triple-word-scores, ten points for the
Z
. But the picture had lost focus for Lizzie. She had outpaced me, beaten me back into the world. Of course, her marriage had ended almost a year before mine, and she had been by herself, here in this town house without a Scrabble partner, until I had shown up ready to play. And now, game over? So soon?

“But you're not pregnant,” I said.

“No, “ she said. “Two no's. Pretty definitive. But my period was really late, so, I wanted to double-check. I guess it could be something else.”

The “something else” did not need to be named.

“So can I meet him?” I asked.

He was performing at a community talent show in a small theater on Sunday afternoon. She had been planning to go anyway, so she said I could go along with her.

“We have to sit in the back, though,” she said. “He gets nervous if I sit too close.”

“So you've done this before.”

“We've been together a couple months,” she said. “Sometimes when I say I'm at meetings I'm not really at meetings. Sometimes I'm with him. I've seen a few of his shows.”

Calling his brief performance a “show” was a bit of a stretch. He was one of about a dozen acts over the course of an endless two hours. Half the acts featured groups of preteen girls singing pop songs and doing cheerleader moves. My favorite act was a husband-and-wife comedy team. They were in their seventies and had a litany of “Kids These Days!” jokes. They had a cassette tape player that the old man held the mic up to at the end of certain jokes and pushed the button for a pretaped rim shot, but at least half the time he pushed the wrong button and instead there would be the whirring of fast-forward. There were about fifty people at the community center, very clearly all related to at least one of the performers. Jeremy was the second-to-last act, following (in unfortunate planning) another magician who couldn't have been more than fifteen. Luckily the fifteen-year-old was all about the rings, whereas Jeremy was a card man.

He was tall and somewhat gangly, with very long and expressive arms, which were useful for his chosen field. He didn't wear a cape, like the teenager, which was a relief. He had floppy dark hair and that prematurely creased face I always associate with years of toil on the family farm
or
chronic alcoholism. He had a great smile—Lizzie was right; he was cute—which forced the creases in his face into a pleasurable arrangement.

His magic was slightly above the birthday party level, consisting mostly of variations on “Pick a card, any card . . .” He impressed me once, flinging the deck of cards against the back wall of the stage and revealing that the sole card stuck on the wall—six of hearts—was the very card a girl had chosen and shown to the audience moments before. But the applause at the end indicated that he was neither young nor old enough to really capture the hearts of the crowd.

Afterward we went out for coffee. The born-again counter man gave me a little conspiratorial scowl when Jeremy paid for all three of our coffees; somehow he'd managed to work out that Jeremy was Lizzie's date and not mine, and now he saw me as a potential ally. But I was determined to keep an open mind, if for no other reason than to insist to Lizzie that I had indeed kept an open mind. We had never been the kind of sisters to bash each other's boyfriends—to a fault,
perhaps—
but I didn't intend to start looking like a bitter old hag at the precise moment when I was most feeling like a bitter old hag.

We sat at one of those awkward coffee shop tables that seemed designed for only one person, or two people who didn't mind sitting practically on top of each other. There was only one large table at this coffee shop, and as usual some idiot college student had spread out all over it.

“How long have you been doing magic?” I asked Jeremy, trying to avoid getting my legs tangled in his.

“Most of my life,” he said. “But only professionally for the last year. I know—
professionally
.” He grinned, cut his eyes at Lizzie. “Believe me, I know how that sounds.”

Against my will I liked him. He squeezed my sister's hand on the tiny table and I saw something light up in her eyes, which made me sad and happy at the same moment. Maybe he was magic after all, I thought. Then I nearly threw up in my mouth.

It wasn't as if either one of us had been dying to have kids. We both married late, and both thought it might possibly happen, but even before our marriages turned horrible neither seemed the kind of marriage you wanted to bring children into. For years Lizzie and her carnival-ride (Larry) thought of little but themselves and their own drama. They were both creepy smart, high-functioning alcoholics, a double chronic state that, as Lizzie once described to me, caused them to find each other fascinating almost every night and disgusting almost every morning. As for me, I imagined that my husband's affection for dogs might eventually translate into affection for other vulnerable creatures, but he was so devoted to his cause that the thought of giving it up—giving them up—for something that did not yet exist wasn't even worth discussing. And it was not as if the two could ever coexist in the same house. It was dogs or babies. It could never be dogs
and
babies.

“I was in banking,” Jeremy told me. “Before I was in drinking.” It was clear he'd used this line before so I did not give him the satisfaction of acknowledging his parallelism with more than a tepid smile.

“He did a lot of work with nonprofits,” Lizzie said, lest I think he was simply a shallow, money-grubbing banker.

“I still might get back to it.” He looked down at Lizzie; he was probably a foot taller than either of us. “I really might,” he said. “I could do both. The magic banker. The banking magician. It's not too late.”

“It's never too late,” Lizzie agreed.

He nodded. “That's what Carl—” he looked at me “—my sponsor, Carl—that's what he always says. That's his big catchphrase. No such thing as too late.”

Somehow the table felt even smaller than when we'd sat down. My resentment for the inconsiderate college student was growing. How could a single person justify hogging an entire four top, while threesomes were clearly killing themselves huddling around a table the size of a large dinner plate?

“I wish I had a sponsor,” I said. “I'd like for someone to say encouraging things to me all the time. You guys get all the good stuff. Secret meetings, sponsors . . .”

“I'm not sure I'd say we get
all
the good stuff,” Jeremy said. “I've been in jail twice. I don't even have a driver's license anymore.”

“She's kidding,” Lizzie said. She shot me a look. It was the same look she would sometimes shoot me when we were kids and I'd bother her while she was in the thick of a book.
Can't you see I'm reading?

“I am; I'm kidding,” I said. “I don't need a sponsor. I'm my own sponsor. I'm sponsored by me. When I start feeling bad, I just give me a call, and I say to myself, one day at a time, kiddo. Just take it one day at a time.”

“All right,” Lizzie said. “You can stop now.”

“Or, wait, what's the other thing?” I scooched my chair back from the table, just a tiny bit, undramatically, I thought, but it made a terrible screeching noise. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change? Whew—I feel better already. Internal sponsor, coming through in the clutch.”

Jeremy looked at me in silence for about five seconds, trying to decide if I was an asshole. Finally, probably because he liked my sister, he gave me the benefit of the doubt.

“You're funny,” he said. “Lizzie said you were funny. You guys are both funny.”