Ethan and I sat across from each other in the teachers’ room, each with a notebook in front of us, ready to brainstorm. Mine was a college-lined composition book, Ethan’s an unlined spiral sketchbook.
A beam of late afternoon sun coming in through the room’s only window landed right on Ethan’s surfer-boy hair. Not so much like a halo, but more like he should be in an ad for Sun In. Did they still make Sun In?
“Obviously, this co-chair deal is all new to me,” Ethan said, “so what if you go first?”
“How about this,” I said. “We have the kids in one class all in reindeer antlers. And we let them dance and sing to a medley of ‘Up on the Housetop,’ and ‘He’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,’ except we change that to the tried and true preschool version, ‘He’ll Be Coming Down the Chimney.’ I’ll tweak the lyrics, make them a little bit more fun. We’ll recruit Gloria and her pitch pipe to keep everybody relatively on key.”
Ethan nodded. “I can build a plywood chimney, three-sided with an open back. We can ask Polly to paint it to look like red bricks, and then we can glue cotton balls around the top to make fake snow. We can set up a little stepladder behind it that the audience won’t be able to see. That way the kids can look out over the top and it will look like they’re inside the chimney.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “The kids can take turns climbing up a couple of steps, doing something cute to give their parents a video moment, and then climbing back down. We’ll put lots of foam on the floor around the ladder. And we’ll have the assistant with the quickest reflexes hiding back there with the kids so we don’t take any chances.”
Ethan turned to a fresh page, sketched away.
He swiveled the notebook around and showed me his perfect preschool chimney.
“Unbelievable,” I said. “You’re just so talented.”
“Polly can draw circles around me,” he said. “You don’t know where she took off to so fast today, do you?”
I shrugged. “I think she was probably just trying to get some space from me so she could breathe.”
“Everything okay?” When Ethan tilted his head, he lost the sunbeam and his hair turned ordinary again.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “You know, living and working together is a lot. Not to mention major construction at the house, so it’s been like playing musical bedrooms. Many animals, even more family. No privacy. And let’s not forget global warming and Mercury in retrograde.”
Ethan didn’t say anything.
“Why?” I said. “Do you think something’s wrong with Polly? Is there anything I should know?”
He turned to a fresh page in his notebook and started drawing what looked like a checkerboard. He scribbled in some of the boxes like he was looking for a way to win the game, or maybe it was a puzzle he was trying to solve.
He looked up. “I’d feel better if Polly moved in with me.”
A curtain of silence fell between us. It was dark and velvety and almost palpable, like we could reach out and touch it if we dared.
“And how would your girlfriend feel?” I finally said.
He began to cover his drawing with big overlapping Xs.
“So, what,” I said. “You’d keep Polly hidden up in the attic? Let her come down when the coast is clear?”
“Life,” Ethan said, “is just too damn complicated.”
“Agreed.” I blew out a puff of air. “And I, for one, really suck at it.”
We both nodded, lost in our thoughts.
“I think the best thing we can do for Polly,” I said, “is not to bring any drama into her life right now. You know, just keep things simple and quiet and uneventful, at least until she has the baby and gets her feet under her again. I’m not saying things aren’t crazy at my house, but Polly’s safe there. And she’s got a big bedroom with plenty of space for the baby once it’s born.”
Ethan turned to a fresh page, started filling it with a honeycomb pattern, like drawing a sturdy beehive might be the first step toward building a durable life.
“I can see that, I guess.” He looked up. “You’ll let me know if I can do anything?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I will. Listen, I know it’s not my business, and I’m the last person who’s qualified to give relationship advice of any kind, believe me, but maybe you should use this time to figure things out with your former wife, current girlfriend, or whatever she is.”
Right after we’d met, Ethan had told me that when his career as an indie filmmaker had imploded, he’d also blown up a marriage to a woman he’d loved with all his heart, and that by the time he’d wrecked his car, blowing up his leg wasn’t even that big a deal.
“Figuring things out was the plan,” Ethan said. He was drawing arrows now, each one pointing off in another direction. “But I think the problem is that the Curse of Knowledge has come into play. You know, once you know something, it’s impossible to imagine what it’s like not to know it.”
“Which means?”
“Which means she knows what I’m like at my worst. And I don’t think she can forget it long enough to believe that it’s never going to happen again.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
Maybe if Ethan went first and figured out his relationship, I might get some new insights that would help me navigate things with John. Like getting a bonus clue. Not that I’d ever met Ethan’s ex, and not that Ethan and John were anything alike. But maybe all relationships flourished or floundered because of the same basic things. And I’d really love to figure out exactly what those things were.
When Ethan leaned back and stretched out his damaged leg, he was back in the sunbeam again.
“I have no idea how it will all play out,” he said. “Sometimes I think it’s like there’s this tree dying in a pot in the living room. You know it’s dying, but you’ve had it for so long and you’re really attached to it and you can’t imagine what it would be like not to have it. And then you stop watering it. You forget, or you just get lazy. But you know damn well that the minute you throw it out, all you’re going to think about is how amazing it used to be, and you’ll be kicking yourself that you didn’t put the time and energy in to keep it that way.”
“If I have one regret about my former marriage,” I said, “it’s that when things were first falling apart, I didn’t try harder to save it. But hindsight 20/20, I think there’s also a point that you can’t look back. You’ve got to focus on moving forward. You know, fish or cut bait.”
Ethan nodded. “Shit or get off the pot.”
“Insert overused cringe-worthy expression here,” I said.
Ethan stared out the teachers’ room window, sketched, stared out the window, sketched some more.
I found a fresh page in my own notebook, started playing around with an idea for “Five Little Icicles.”
Five little icicles
Hanging on the door
One broke off
And then there were four
Four little icicles
Dangling from the tree
One fell off
And then there were three
I turned the notebook around so Ethan could read it.
“You get the idea,” I said. “The kids from one of the classes could dress all in white, with strands of tinsel taped all over them. Maybe we could attach some of those plastic icicle ornaments to cheap plastic tiaras, too. They’d do it as more of a chant than a song, and they’d be reinforcing their counting skills at the same time.”
“Sounds good to me,” Ethan said. “I’ve got an old door in my storage unit we could use. And I could find a big tree branch somewhere, cut off any small branches that might poke the kids.”
I nodded. “Obviously, we’d keep the song going until the icicles are all gone, and then bring them all back for a happy ending. I’ll keep working on it.”
“Great. Hey, and thanks for listening,” Ethan said as he turned to a new page and began sketching. “I’ll keep working on my own happy ending, too. You know, figuring how to deal with that tree semi-dying in the pot and all that.”
I glanced over at Ethan’s notebook, tilted my head to look at the massive tree he’d drawn.
“Not that it necessarily means anything,” I said. “But that tree you just drew looks like something out of Little Shop of Horrors. Just saying.”
John looked up from his laptop when I walked into the kitchen.
“Hey,” I said.
“Listen,” he said.
“Wait,” I said.
“What?” he said.
“Never mind,” I said. I dumped my teacher bag on the floor, opened the dishwasher, started pulling out dishes for the animals.
John’s car wasn’t even in the driveway when I’d finished walking home from the beach last night. I’d brushed my teeth and washed my face quickly, changed into a sleep T-shirt, crawled under the covers in the cat room with a book. Realized it wasn’t even 7 PM yet, but stayed there anyway. When I tiptoed out to the kitchen to get more animal food a few hours later, I heard the Addams Family theme song coming from one of John’s prized pinball machines in the front parlor. I didn’t even look in.
Now John pushed his chair back from the table. He picked up my bag, put it on the kitchen table.
“If I wanted that on the table,” I said sweetly, “I would have put it there.”
John watched as I opened the pet food cupboard.
“Horatio’s already been fed,” John said. “In fact, he’s been overfed a lot lately. Over fifty percent of the dogs and cats in this country are clinically overweight, so it’s something to be aware of. I was thinking I could create an Excel sheet so we can keep track. You know, that way we can check off the feedings. And the snacks.”
“Sure,” I said. “Either that or maybe I can feed my animals, and you can feed yours.”