Chapter 41
ROCHELLE AND I ARE both working at BOCES—a school for children with special needs. Three years have passed since that day I walked, numb, from the pond after graduation. And five years since I last spoke to my father.
I am an assistant teacher working primarily with a little girl named Christine who has been diagnosed as emotionally disturbed. She also has mild cerebral palsy. I love our time together and think she is brilliant. Every afternoon I wait for her in the school library. She has a limp, and I can hear her foot dragging and her talking to herself from down the hall far away. She always smiles when she sees me—her face lighting up, perfection, despite her imperfect world.
I have found that exercising has helped curb the anxiety, and so I swim at the Y in the afternoons after work.
One Friday night, Rochelle and I go to a restaurant/bar owned by her cousin in downtown Ithaca. Across the room in one of those movie moments I see a man with dark hair and a beard. He quite literally takes my breath away. He is sitting in a corner with some people.
We don’t speak, but I find myself thinking about him the next several days, and a week later I go back to the same bar.
It’s Halloween night. Complete mayhem. Through a maze of people I get a fleeting glimpse of him sitting in the corner. Somehow the crowd pushes us closer, and we start talking, shouting really, through all the noise and music. We see each other again the next week, and the next, and finally I agree to go with him for coffee.
His name is Doug and he tells me he has lived in Ithaca for fifteen years, graduated from Cornell, and is an architect with his own design/build business. He says he is divorced and is a father. I am a little wary when I hear the last part and learn he is thirty-four, nine years older than I. Quick calculation reveals that when I was playing school with my Irish setters, leading them out to recess, clacking in my mother’s blue high heels, Doug was about to begin college.
He takes me to his house, and standing in his living room, he explains it used to be the garage. I am impressed, struck as much by his talent as by those sky blue eyes. But I am also cautious, familiar with the magnetism of a new relationship; the perfection of those first stilled moments. I understand well that surreal light of distortion that comes from not really knowing someone. The initial politeness, graciousness, that certain reserved kindness. I know how a person might initially look flawless in unfamiliarity, and I also know how quickly the simplest word can cut through that illusion, shred that picture. Someone you think you know can be entirely different, and when the mask slips, someone you really never knew at all.
At first I am a little cautious when I think of Hal’s words about my last relationship—“You are trying to replace your dad”—and I wonder how my dad would feel about my dating someone nine years older than I am, but the more Doug and I are together, the more that fear begins to dissipate.
When we’re not working, we are almost always together, and there is a lightness, an easiness. Even something else, something I haven’t felt in a long time—joy.
One day I take him swimming with me at the YMCA (having no idea that sliding into the pool is the last thing he really wants to do). He tells me, “I had to buy this suit today.” He pauses with a little embarrassment and then adds, “It’s the only one I could find.”
It’s a silly suit with sailboats on it, like one a child might wear. Neither of us realizes that he has put it on backward until he starts to get into the water and we both notice at the same time and start laughing. He quickly swims over to me, and by now we are both laughing so hard that he swallows a large gulp of water and has to make his way to the side of the pool. He is coughing and sputtering intensely, and when the lifeguard leans down beside him and asks, “Are you okay?” we become even more hysterical.
Things feel easy with Doug. We like the same movies and some of the same books. We share similar values and tastes, and our politics are the same. And perhaps what I am most touched by—what I love especially is that when he watches a really good play or a sad one or sees someone with extreme talent, or even if he’s just tremendously moved, he’s not embarrassed by the tears rolling down his cheeks.
The fact that he adopted a three-year-old African American child, Michael, is something that would have impressed my dad enormously.
After several months, I move in with Doug. One morning I make breakfast for him and two of his kids, Nicole, eleven and Michael, twelve. I am a little nervous and want them to like me. I decide, for some reason I can’t fathom now, to add a little vanilla to the scrambled eggs. After all, it tastes so good in chocolate chip cookies is my early morning reasoning. When his kids wake up, walking sleepily into the kitchen, I tell them in a cheery voice, “Breakfast!”
They sit down yawning and stretching and finally begin to eat the eggs I have placed before them. Delighted smiles are what I’m hoping for, but instead when I look at them, they are expressionless. I then take a bite, mumble “Oh, God, that’s awful” with my mouth full, and immediately spit the eggs out. They are such troopers to be so nice to their dad’s girlfriend. By then we are all laughing, noisily clearing away the plates and Doug is already stirring a new batch of normal scrambled eggs, looking at me over his shoulder and smiling.
In the summer of 1983, when I am twenty-seven, Doug and I marry on the cottage porch. It has been eight years since my father’s death. The progression of our wedding day is a blur in my memory, but I remember my sister couldn’t find her shoes and had to borrow someone’s. They were too large, and I remember her clomping down the stairs. I know that I forgot my flowers and that my mother, who walked me across the grass, whispered, “Where are your roses?” and after a fleeting instant of deliberation, I raised my hand to the minister mouthing what he couldn’t possibly understand, “I’ll be right back!” and raced into the house to grab them. Everyone laughed and applauded when I returned. I held the flowers up and pointed at them. Still there must have been some who wondered if I had just changed my mind.
I barely remember the minister reading the vows we chose, but I know he made reference to the children we might one day have and what we wished for them. I remember imagining these barefooted, faceless, nameless children running through sprinklers across that sunlit, green summer lawn. And I remember, too, someone toasting my father: “To Rod in absentia.”