Very early on Sunday morning, so early it was barely light out, I woke not by degrees but all at once. I just found myself awake—wham!—with the cool damp nose of a cat daintily probing my left ear.
Oh.
The cat.
I turned onto my back, and the cat started purring and settled herself in her favorite spot next to my ribcage.
It’s over, I thought. Debbie’s wedding day is over, thank God. And really it all went fine.
She was probably still asleep now, on this very first day of her marriage. I didn’t feel any sense of envy. What person in her right mind would want to go back to being a newlywed? There was so much she had yet to adjust to, she and Kenneth both; I was just glad to be past all that.
Once upon a time, Debbie had sworn she would never get married. Back in fifth grade, this was. Never, ever, she had said. She’d have to be crazy to get married. That was my fault entirely; I knew it even then. I’d fallen in love with another man that year and torn our family apart forever.
His name was Andrew Mason. He was the college admissions counselor at Millwood High, where I taught algebra and remedial math. A medium-height, medium-weight man in his late forties. Short brown hair, pale gray eyes, and a complicated mouth that made his smiles seem slightly held back, slightly reluctant, in an appealing sort of way. He always wore a suit to work, but he wore it casually, as if merely to satisfy some requirement, and his shirt was open collared, without a tie.
I met him on his first day at Millwood, at the start of the 2000–2001 school year. He’d been hired to replace June Cannon, who’d retired the previous spring at the age of (I’m guessing here) a hundred and five. As I was walking back from Bert’s Beans, where I’d just bought the takeout coffee that I liked to begin my day with, he pulled up next to me in a little beige Volkswagen Beetle. “Excuse me,” he called out his window. “Are you familiar with this area?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Would you happen to know if there’s a grownups’ lot around here for Millwood High?”
“A grownups’ lot.”
“The parking lot behind the school seems to be just for students, and I can’t find any grownup parking.”
“Oh,” I said, “the kids must’ve been tinkering with the sign again. It’s supposed to say ‘No Student Parking,’ but they keep painting over the ‘No.’ You’ll be fine there.”
“Thanks,” he said.
And both of us went on our way.
I guessed even then that he might be the new college admissions counselor. So I wasn’t surprised to see him in the front hall that afternoon, tacking a notice up on the bulletin board. “Hi there!” he said, and I said, “Hi,” and gave him a wave.
The notice—as I saw when I passed by again later—announced the specific hours when students could come talk to him without a prior appointment. I thought that showed good sense. June Cannon’s office had been sheer chaos, from the looks of it.
I didn’t see him again until a couple of days after that. I’d stopped by the school library to check the Recent Acquisitions shelf, and I found him doing the same. He turned and raised his eyebrows and smiled. “It appears you’re following me,” he said.
“I can understand why you’d think so,” I told him, “but that must have been my twin sister.”
I have no idea what led me to say that. Well, I do have some idea: it was the first time I’d seen that smile of his, that smile-in-spite-of-itself, and I wanted to make it grow wider. Which it did, in fact. It turned into an actual grin. “My mistake,” he said.
And then we kind of tilted our chins at each other, acknowledging the joke, and I went back to my classroom.
At the end of school hours that Friday, he happened to walk past my office. I had a tiny office of my own that was separate from my classroom—no more than a cubbyhole, really—where I could meet with my remedial students one-on-one, and I was just collecting some papers for the weekend when he paused outside the door. “I should have introduced myself before,” he told me. “I’m Andrew Mason.”
“Hi, Andrew. I’m Gail Baines.”
“Yes, I know you are,” he said, and he took a step in to survey the room, such as it was. Behind my desk was a low bookshelf holding files and half a dozen framed photos—Debbie in a kiddie pool, Debbie and I at a playground, Debbie and Max and I at my parents’ anniversary party. Andrew circled the desk to look at these. Then he said, “I don’t see your twin sister.”
“Oh, she’s here,” I said, and I pointed to the playground picture. “This one’s her.”
“No, it’s not,” he said. “It’s you. I can tell by that little white scar on your chin.”
He was talking about the half-inch line, no wider than a thread, that ran vertically from just above my jawbone to just below it. (A roller-skating injury from childhood.) I was surprised he’d even spotted it. I said, “Actually, we both have that. I got mine first, and then she cut one on her own chin so we could still match.”
“Tisk, tisk,” he said, giving the word an ironic pronunciation. “A copycat twin.” He picked up the playground photo and examined it more closely. “Very unoriginal of her.”
“I won’t tell you which is which in the others,” I said. And the odd thing was that as I stood gazing at the photos myself, I really did feel all at once that they showed two different women.
Which was the case throughout the time I knew him, it strikes me now. Two completely different women: one who loved her husband the same as always, and another who wanted to reach out a finger and very, very gently nudge this man’s smile a smidgen higher at the corners.
It could have gone either way from there. He could have become a good friend who went to the symphony sometimes with Max and me, just like Morrie Gray from the science department. But somehow, I don’t know…For one thing, our encounters happened to take place in private, for the most part. Andrew never ate in the cafeteria, where the teachers gathered in a chatty bunch at a single long table, because noon was one of the times he kept open for drop-in students. Nor did he attend the Friday-morning assemblies; it wasn’t part of his job description. Generally, we’d just fall into step with each other in the parking lot or the front hall corridor. We would both slow down and I might ask how he was settling in (very well, he always said), or he might add some new embellishment to our twin myth. Then gradually he developed the habit of stopping by my office to ask for my advice on how to deal with our difficult principal, or where to take his sister to dinner when she came for a visit. He might even settle on the chair opposite my desk for a moment, if our discussion grew more involved.
He was divorced, and he had no children. The divorce had happened some years ago; the marriage had been brief and—I sensed—lacking in impact. His ex-wife lived in Virginia now with her current husband and their three daughters. He had never wanted children himself, he said; just hadn’t developed the urge, somehow. He lived in a small house in Pimlico, and he referred often to his yard—what fall colors his bushes were changing to and what he thought he might plant next spring—so I gathered he was the gardening type. Which I was not, most emphatically, and neither was Max.
I did mention him to Max, but not in any detail. I might quote something Andrew had said that had amused me, but then I’d move on to discuss the new basketball coach or the latest feud among the English teachers.
Max was dealing with his own issues at the time. He was threatening to quit his job at St. Theresa because they focused too much on religion. “It’s a religious school, for gosh sake,” I said, but he said, “They still shouldn’t be meddling with my reading list.” And so on and so forth. The point is, Max was not fully present right then.
But I realize that’s no excuse.
I confided to Andrew that the trouble with Max was, he didn’t take things seriously. He didn’t take himself seriously. He had a tendency to wander off course halfway through a project, as if his life were just a casual experiment.
“I think most of the world works that way,” Andrew told me. “People look at where they’ve arrived and say, ‘Huh! So that’s how it is!’ as if they themselves had nothing to do with it.”
“Right,” I said. “They’re so…accepting.”
Andrew smiled. He said, “You say that as if it’s a shortcoming.”
“Well, sometimes it is,” I said.
Andrew’s office was on the first floor. So was mine, but my classroom was on the second floor. Anytime I came downstairs to confer with a student in my office I would feel this acute consciousness, this prickly awareness in the back of my neck as I walked past Andrew’s closed door.
When I imagined becoming involved with him—not that I really would! I told myself. Not that I’d actually do such a thing!—I pictured its happening in my cubbyhole. He would stop by and we’d get to talking and then gradually we would fall silent; we would look at each other across my desk; we would know what the other was thinking. Or he would catch up with me in the parking lot and, “Gail,” he would say, “we have to talk,” and then he’d take hold of my arm and lead me to my car. Or I would just be turning my key in the ignition when I heard his tap on my driver’s-side window.
But in fact it happened in my classroom, in my big sunny open classroom with its bank of giant picture windows and its seating for thirty-two students. I was eating lunch at my desk one day because I had a stack of exams to grade before the next period began. I was feeding myself a spoonful of yogurt when I chanced to look up and notice him in my doorway. Just standing in my doorway, watching me. He might have been there for some time. He said, “How long can we keep this up, Gail?”
I had to finish dragging my plastic spoon upside-down along the length of my tongue before I could answer him. I had to swallow. It was awkward. Then I said, “I don’t know how long.”
What I should have said was, “We can keep this up forever. We can go on leaving things unspoken, letting them teeter in the balance, because isn’t everything perfect just the way it is?”
But I didn’t.
In my earlier life, my pre-marriage life, my few scant romances had proceeded as if by mere chance. A guy and I would get close and then closer, and then on the spur of the moment off to bed we’d go. But not anymore, of course. Now we had to make an appointment ahead of time.
Or I had to make an appointment. Not so much Andrew. Andrew’s life was spare and orderly. Mine was cluttered. Andrew worked from eight thirty to three, five days a week. I also worked from eight thirty to three, but in addition I had a husband and a daughter to see to. Carpools, playdates, pediatrician appointments…It didn’t leave a lot of room for romantic assignations. In fact, we had to wait three days that first time before we could finally be together. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. On Friday, Debbie would be spending the night with a friend from her school. It was her very first overnight, and she kept checking with me on Friday morning to make certain I would rescue her if she got homesick. “I can call you if I need to, right?” she asked. “I mean, like even if it’s the middle of the night I can call and you will come for me.”
“Yes, of course,” I said, because by then I would have been home for hours. I had to fix supper for Max, after all. “I’ll come in my pajamas, if I have to.”
“Or, but, if I’m just getting into Pam’s mom’s car after school and I change my mind then, I can call too, right?”
“Right,” I said, but more faintly. “Although it might be harder to reach me then. You might have to go on home with Pam and I would pick you up a bit later.”
It was Max who drove Debbie to school every morning, because their schools started later than mine did. But even as I was walking out of the house she was hanging on to my wrist and saying, “You promise? You won’t tell me I should try to stay there when I don’t want to, will you?”
“I would never do that,” I said. And I meant it.
But she managed the whole thing just fine, it turned out. She and I had both worried for no reason.
The plan was that at the end of my school day, I would follow Andrew home in my car. I followed him past the Pimlico racetrack and then northward on a series of little neighborhood streets until we reached a small white cottage with yellowish stains descending from the eaves and all the windowsills. The yard, though, was meticulously cared for. Grass like a flawless green velvet carpet, a row of flowerpots in graduated sizes marching down the steps from the stoop, and a dwarf Japanese maple out front with leaves that glowed magenta. When I stepped out of my car my first words were “Is all this your doing?” So of course Andrew had to give me the garden tour, leading me around back so he could show me his little vegetable plot with its abundance of acorn squash and zucchini even this late in the fall. “Mm-hmm, I see,” I kept saying, and, “Goodness! Look at the size of those!” but inwardly, I was worrying I’d worn the wrong underwear. It was black, and very lacy—too obvious, I realized. I should have worn plain white, as if I’d given the subject no thought. (“And are those bushes lilacs?” I asked.) Actually, I told myself, it wasn’t mandatory that we should have sex on this very first occasion. In fact, I’d prefer not to. I would put him off; I would say I wasn’t ready. I would suggest we meet again next Tuesday, when Debbie had gymnastics practice. We wouldn’t have as much time then—I had to pick her up at five—but it was manageable. And I would wear white underwear, except that my bra would be the extra-nice one with the seashell-shaped cups.
We went inside. (Neat as a pin, but a bit too sparsely furnished. His ex-wife had taken all the best pieces, he said.) In the kitchen I stalled a bit by pausing to run an index finger across the spines of his cookbooks, but that proved unnecessary because next he offered to make coffee. “I’d love some coffee!” I said.
“Is decaf okay?” he asked.
“Decaf is perfect.”
“I can’t sleep a wink if I drink real coffee after ten a.m.,” he said, and I said, “Ten! Well, that is early. I have real coffee with my lunch, lots of times, but I wouldn’t want to risk it any later in the day.”
I don’t know why I was speaking so loudly.
He filled his coffeemaker with water and ladled the decaf in with a measuring spoon. Meanwhile I found the sugar bowl in a cabinet and set it at the center of the table. My scheme was that we should have our coffee in the kitchen. Kitchens were more…vertical than living rooms.
I looked in the fridge for cream (a nicely stocked fridge; he must actually cook), but when I didn’t find any I took out the milk instead. He was probably one of those people who think cream is unhealthy. I poured the milk into a cream pitcher and placed it on the table next to the sugar bowl. Andrew, meanwhile, was watching the coffeemaker burbling away, his focus so intent you’d think it couldn’t have functioned without his gaze.
“Silverware?” I asked, and he turned toward the table then and said, “Oh!” I thought at first he was surprised I hadn’t set things up in the living room, but what he said next was, “I’m sorry you went to all that trouble. I happen to take my coffee black.”
I said, “I don’t, though.”
“Oh, right.”
“Where will I find the spoons?” I asked him.
He gestured toward a drawer.
“And napkins?” I said.
“There beside the toaster.”
The napkins were white linen, stacked in a wickerwork box. Aha, a conversational topic. “I’m impressed,” I told him. “Max and I just use paper, I’m ashamed to say.”
Clumsy of me to mention Max. It was habit; that was all.
“The fact is, I like to iron,” Andrew told me.
“I know what you mean!” I said. “I love to iron.”
“You do?”
“It’s like you get an instant effect when you iron.”
“Exactly. Things start out all screwed-up and crinkled—”
“But then sudden, perfect smoothness.”
“And I don’t believe in steam irons,” Andrew said.
“No, you want to really soak things,” I said. “Do you own an actual sprinkler bottle?”
“I do own a sprinkler bottle!” Andrew said.
We smiled at each other. The coffeemaker stopped burbling, but he just stood there smiling at me. So it was up to me to step forward, finally, and wrap my arms around him and press the length of my body against him and lift my face to his.
After that, he was the one in charge. He drew away from me and took my hand and led me out of the kitchen, and through the foyer, and up the stairs.
It was hard to find places to meet during the run of a normal day. We had my little office, of course, and Andrew’s larger one; but both of those felt so public, even with the doors closed. We couldn’t really do anything. Better to drive separately during lunch hour to this little dog park nearby that nobody else seemed to know about, and grab a hurried twenty minutes together. Better yet, of course, to wait for one of Debbie’s gymnastics days or her after-school playdates when I could go to his house again. But I never took him to my own house, because that would have felt disloyal.
Yes, I know: it was disloyal of me anyplace. But it seemed more so in the house I shared with Max.
Once Andrew said, “Gail? Do you ever think about…making this more permanent? Splitting up with Max, someday?”
“Splitting,” I said.
“I don’t mean this very minute. I know we’d have to wait for the right time, what with your daughter and all.”
As if there could ever be a right time to do such a thing to a child! We’d have to wait till Debbie was forty.
But the answer to his question (an answer I never actually voiced) was yes, I thought about it a lot. I thought about waking up with him every morning, going to sleep with him every night, weaving my life into that measured, considered routine of his where the potted plants descended the steps in the proper order and everything happened according to a plan. I ached for it.
He and I were a couple for exactly ninety-six days. Mid-September till shortly before Christmas. Not quite fourteen weeks.
On Tuesday, December 19, Debbie had gymnastics practice. And I was at Andrew’s, with my internal alarm clock set for 4:45 p.m. so I could get to Debbie’s school in time to pick her up at five.
Somewhere around four o’clock, Debbie dislocated her shoulder doing a dismount from the uneven bars. Her school called me at home and got no answer, so they called Max at St. Theresa. (Neither one of us owned a cell phone, back then.) And Max got someone to cover the after-school study hall he monitored so he could collect Debbie and take her to the ER, which was where I found them both when I drove there directly from her school. They were still in the waiting room, because this was Sinai Hospital, where things always took forever. Debbie seemed more concerned about her future gymnastics career than about any pain she was feeling, and Max had been through a couple of dislocations himself so he took it all pretty calmly. I was by far the most upset. “I’m sorry!” I told them both as I rushed up to them. “I’m so sorry! I was just—I took a drive in the country, and I had no idea this had happened!”
Stupid, stupid. When had I ever in my life taken a drive alone in the country for no good reason? I should have said I’d been running errands; that would have been more believable. But Max was so unsuspecting; all he said was, “No harm done. They’ve already had a peek at her and they say the doctor can fix her up as good as new.”
I sank down on the chair next to Debbie and gave her a hug, avoiding her shoulder. I was out of breath and shaky. “Are you okay?” I asked her.
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“I feel awful,” I told Max.
“Why?” he asked me. “Sweetheart. This is nothing; believe me.”
“I know, I know…”
Then they called Debbie’s name, and the three of us stood up and followed a nurse into an examining room.
Once we were home again, finally—at almost eight p.m., all three of us starving to death—Debbie had to telephone every friend she could think of and give them the gory details. Meanwhile I heated up some frozen tacos and Max tossed a salad. He had put the whole incident behind him by that time. He was telling me about a protest meeting he was planning with a few other teachers at St. Theresa. And I was saying, “Mm-hmm, yes; well, of course you do…” But inwardly I was sick at heart. I couldn’t believe I had been cavorting in bed with some near stranger while my husband and my daughter went to the emergency room without me.
Immediately after supper, while Max was loading the dishwasher, I ducked into the den where we kept the computer and sent Andrew an email. I can’t see you anymore, I wrote. I’m sorry. I didn’t even bother explaining; that’s how eager I was to get the whole thing over with. Then I shut down the computer quick-quick and was back in the kitchen in time to wipe the table and turn off the lights.
I lay awake for hours that night. We were living in Roland Park at the time, but not in the fancy part, and I could hear the traffic from Cold Spring Lane and the occasional hoots of Loyola students heading home from the bars. Max, beside me, slept almost without moving. Maybe he’d found Debbie’s accident more draining than he had let on. And I didn’t hear a peep from Debbie’s room.
I wondered if Andrew had answered my email yet, or if instead he planned to wait till we could talk about it face-to-face. Or maybe we’d never talk about it. Maybe he would accept my decision in silence and back off gracefully. That was what I hoped for.
I could have gotten up and gone downstairs to check the computer, but I couldn’t bear to deal with one more issue just now.
I did fall asleep, finally, and woke much later than I should have. Max was already up; I could hear Debbie chattering away to him down in the kitchen. So I washed and dressed in a hurry, and I ducked into the kitchen just long enough to ask her how her shoulder felt (sore, she said) and to give her and Max a peck on the cheek before I rushed off, grabbing my jacket from the coat closet on my way.
“Don’t forget I have a meeting this afternoon,” Max called after me.
“I remember,” I called back, even though I hadn’t.
For the past few weeks I had chosen my clothes so carefully, always with an eye to how Andrew might judge them, but on that particular morning I wore the outfit I’d worn the day before, knit slacks and a gray sweater, although the sweater was the kind where the neck gets stretchy after one wearing and it really should have gone in the wash.
Andrew’s VW was already parked in the lot, and when I walked past his office door I could hear the rumbling of his voice, either talking on the phone or in conference with somebody’s parents. It was still homeroom period, the principal’s announcements still crackling over the PA system, but first bell rang even before I reached my classroom. A few of my students—the loners and the misfits, the ones without a gang of friends to horse around with in the hall—were already at their desks, and more started trickling in by twos and threes, nodding at me as they entered but seldom answering my “Good morning.” I made a business of draping my jacket over the back of my chair and stowing my purse in a bottom drawer, and by that time second bell had rung and I went out to the hall to round up the last stragglers.
Except that Max was in the hall.
Max stood in front of me, not even wearing his jacket, his face grayish white and stony.
“What,” I said. I grabbed hold of him with both hands. “What’s happened? Is it Debbie? Where’s Debbie?”
“Debbie’s still home,” he said. He seemed to speak without moving his lips.
“Is she all right?”
“She’s fine.”
“Then what—?”
“See him how?” he asked me.
I stared at him.
“See Andrew how? How did you mean that, ‘can’t see you’?”
I dropped my hands.
“What’s going on, Gail?” he asked me.
I couldn’t find words.
“Are you having a…? Is this some kind of…affair? Is that what you meant?”
“No, I—”
“Just tell me it’s nothing,” he said.
“It’s nothing!”
“Then why did you write that?”
“I just meant—”
“Is this why we don’t have sex anymore?”
That was the question that made me aware, finally, of the roomful of students behind me. To this day I’m not sure if they heard him. All I remember is rushing back into the room for my belongings and rushing out again, not even looking in their direction; but I suspect (I hope) they were oblivious, too busy with their own all-absorbing lives to pay any attention to mine. I don’t think I even closed the door behind me. I snatched a handful of Max’s sleeve and pulled him along. It felt like dragging a reluctant dog. I pulled him toward the stairs, I pulled him down to the first floor. “This is not what it looks like,” I told him. “You have it all wrong.”
He halted outside on the front stoop and wrested his arm away. “What is it, then, Gail?” he asked.
“He’s just a friend,” I told him. “You’ve misunderstood.”
“ ‘I can’t see you anymore,’ you said. What else could that mean?”
“You had no business whatsoever reading my private mail,” I told him.
“It was sitting right there on the screen, already open!”
“This is what happens to people who—what?”
“I was going to send out a reminder about this afternoon’s protest meeting and there it was, just sitting on the screen waiting to be sent.”
“It hadn’t been sent?”
“I need you to explain,” he said.
But instead of waiting for my explanation, he turned and walked on down the front steps, out toward the parking lot. I had to run to keep up with him. When he reached his car he got in and immediately started the engine, but he neglected to unlock the passenger door, either accidentally or on purpose. I had to rap on the side window frantically till he leaned over and raised the button. And I wasn’t even properly settled in my seat before he pulled out of his parking space.
“You know how it is,” I told him. “You have a friend who talks on and on about his troubles and whatnot; sometimes you just think, Enough! And so you tell him—”
Max drove silently, looking straight ahead of him. It wasn’t any use.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I am so, so sorry.”
He said, “Are you going to leave me?”
“No!” I said. And then, when he didn’t react: “I told him! You saw what I told him; I said I couldn’t see him anymore.”
“But you didn’t say, ‘I don’t want to see you.’ ”
“Well, I don’t,” I said.
We turned onto Cold Spring Lane. There was some kind of roadwork happening, men in bulky jackets conferring around an excavation in the middle of the pavement. We had to come to a stop for a while. The silence in the car was something I could almost touch, like a curtain.
“Debbie’s not in school?” I asked belatedly.
“I left her at home,” he said.
One of the workers gestured us forward, and Max maneuvered around him and drove on.
I said, “She’s not going in today?”
“I’ll take her later.”
So we were missing in action, all three of us. Debbie late for school, Max and I ditching our classes. My car was abandoned in the Millwood parking lot. My students were unattended, and probably raising a ruckus. But none of that seemed important.
I wanted to say something. There was so much I wanted to say. But I made myself wait till we could have a solid block of time.
When we got home, Debbie was watching TV in the den. “Where were you?” she asked Max, and then to me, “Why aren’t you at work?”
“Sorry, hon,” was all Max said. “Grab your backpack and let’s hit the road.”
Her backpack was already waiting beside the front door. Max had to help with her jacket, though, because of her shoulder. He slid her good arm into one sleeve and then zipped the jacket shut around her other arm in its sling. “Have a nice day!” I said, giving her a hug.
“Bye, Mom.”
The instant they were gone, I walked into the den and turned on the computer. i cant see you anymore im sorry, the screen told me. I sent it off without a thought and shut down the computer. Then I reached for the phone and called Millwood. Told the secretary I’d been struck by a violent stomach bug and apologized for not giving more notice.
I think I half assumed that Max would come back to the house once he’d delivered Debbie, and that was when we’d have our talk. Hash it all out. Clear the air. But he didn’t come back. He went on with his normal day, evidently, while I sat miserably at home. When he failed to show up even during his lunch hour, I risked leaving the house just long enough to take a cab to Millwood so I could collect my car. Needless to say, I was careful not to be seen. I ducked behind the wheel like a thief; I drove home at record speed. There was no sign that Max had been there during my absence, thank God. In fact he stayed away even for his after-school study hall and his after-after-school protest meeting. Debbie and I had to wait supper. Debbie was begging to start without him, but I said, “Just a teeny bit longer, okay?” Privately, I was frantic. When he finally arrived, though, all he said was, “Well, that was a waste of time. Nobody wants to rock the boat, as it turns out.”
“Oh, what a pity,” I said.
“A bunch of scaredy-cats.”
I’ve never been gladder in my life to chitchat about a protest meeting.
But after supper, after Debbie had gone upstairs to do her homework, I went into the den where Max was watching the news. I sat quietly beside him until a commercial came on, and then I said, “Max.”
“Hmm?”
“Can we talk?”
“Not right now, hon. I’m bushed,” he said.
Should I have insisted? I still don’t know the answer.
Because from that time on, Max behaved as if nothing whatsoever had happened. For the following days and weeks and months it was Everything’s fine! and What could possibly be wrong? He was his usual good-natured self. He was blithely, blandly cheerful.
Except…
Except he didn’t think I hung the moon anymore.
Yes, I know this was what I deserved. But still, I felt crushed, and all the more so because everything was unspoken. Max simply did not speak of it. Our lives proceeded as pleasantly and uneventfully as always.
Andrew, on the other hand…
On Thursday morning, when I returned to work, Andrew knocked at my cubbyhole just before second period. “Gail,” he said, the instant I opened the door, “what is it? Did Max find out about us?”
I despised that question! So gossipy, so intrusive. And what right did he have to call Max by his first name? They hadn’t even met! It was all I could do to say, “Yes, Andrew, he did. Sorry; I meant what I said in my email.” Then I shut the door in his face.
After that, we were two strangers. We said, “Good morning,” in the hallway. And in the spring, when he began to be seen around and about with Mamie Fox from the Spanish department, I felt nothing but relief. It was as if he had been burned out of me. Seared out. There was nothing left of him.
It did occur to me that it might be fear that made me feel this way—fear of losing everything I valued most—and I wondered if maybe much later I would allow myself to mourn him. But in fact, that never happened. I forgot about him, basically, and in the rare moments when he came to mind I wondered what had ever drawn me to him. Why had I, who truly loved my husband—at least in the on-again-off-again, maybe/maybe-not, semi-happy way of just about any married woman—broken apart my whole world for a man I never really knew? But maybe that was just it: I hadn’t known him. There are times when that can be the strongest draw of all.
I hadn’t expected to get back to sleep, but suddenly my eyes were blinking open again and the cat was long gone and the sun was casting bright yellow squares across my bedspread. Why couldn’t we have had this weather for the wedding? I got up and went to raise the window. It was cooler outside than in but still humid, so I lowered the window again.
By the time I was dressed, I could hear Max moving around downstairs. I found him emptying the litter box into the garbage container under the sink while the cat wove in and out around his ankles. “Morning!” he said, straightening. He gestured toward the garbage container. “Don’t worry; I’ll carry this out right after breakfast.”
“How long have you been up?” I asked him.
“Not that long.”
“Are you about to take off?”
“Take off?”
“For the Eastern Shore?”
“No, no, it’s Sunday. Not much need for an early start on a Sunday.”
Sunday was exactly when you’d want an early start. Traffic would get heavier hour by hour until evening. But I didn’t point that out. I said, “So, what would you like for breakfast?”
“Why don’t I fix us something. How’d you sleep?”
“Like a rock,” I said, “At least, till the crack of dawn. How about you?”
He said, “I dreamed about Debbie.”
“Good or bad?” I asked.
“I dreamed she came and told us she wanted to go back to college and would we be willing to pay for it. And we said, ‘What’re you planning to study?’ and she said, ‘Well, I’ve always secretly wished that I were a beautician.’ So we said—”
And there he went, ambling down the rabbit hole of his dream as he carried the litter box back to the powder room. I could hear him pouring in fresh litter, and it struck me that doing this so shortly before he left was suspicious timing. Surely he didn’t imagine I might decide to keep the cat after all? But that was Max for you. Sixty-five years old, and yet he still believed that human beings were capable of change.
Once again, though, I held my tongue. I started a pot of coffee brewing, and when he came back to the kitchen he took the egg carton from the fridge.
“I was thinking I might go over to the school and collect my things,” I told him.
“What things?”
“The stuff in my desk and all.”
He turned from the stove. He said, “So you were serious? You really are planning to quit?”
“I might as well,” I said with a shrug.
“But you don’t have anything else lined up yet.”
“Ha! How many times have you quit a job with nothing else lined up?”
“That’s different,” he said. “I’m not the worrying type.” He dropped a pat of butter into the frying pan. “Besides, you can’t just waltz into school on a Sunday and abscond with all your belongings and never be heard from again.”
“Why not? What can they do, fire me?”
He gave a grudging little hiss of a laugh.
I filled two glasses with orange juice and set them on the table. Then I got out the bread and put two slices in the toaster.
“You know what?” Max said. “Later today, I’m going to phone Levy.”
“Who’s Levy?”
“The head of my school. I’m going to ask if he has a job for you.”
“Max.”
“You’d love it there! It’s got these really nice students, needy students; they’ve just had a bad break, is all. Enough of those rich-kid types you’ve been dealing with.”
“It’s not their fault they’re rich,” I said mildly. “Besides: I bet there’s a rule of some kind against hiring relatives.”
“You and I are not relatives, though,” Max pointed out.
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
“And once you show Levy your references, he’ll be dying to hire you.”
“Not if Marilee mentions the people-skills thing.”
“People skills, schmeeple skills,” Max said, and he rapped his spatula sharply against the rim of the frying pan.
I was a little bit disappointed. You would think he could have come up with a better rebuttal than that.
He turned off the burner and brought the frying pan to the table. His eggs looked like a puff of pale yellow clouds. I said, “Is it okay that we’re eating all these scrambled eggs and omelets and such?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” he asked.
“Aren’t they bad for our cholesterol or something?”
“That was last week,” he told me. “Everything’s changed.” He dished out a serving for me and then put the other half on his own plate. Meanwhile, I got up to retrieve the toast from the toaster. “Face it, though,” he said. “You’ll have a better chance of being hired if you don’t have a break-and-enter on your record.”
“It wouldn’t literally be breaking and entering,” I said. “I do own a key, you realize.”
“Even so,” he said.
“Maybe I should just give up on teaching and sell asparagus instead.”
“You jest,” he told me, “but it’s true the pay might be better.” He started spreading butter on his toast, about a quarter-inch thick. (Talk about cholesterol!) “However, I’d hate to deprive our students of such a talented teacher,” he said.
“Why, thank you,” I said.
The phone rang.
“Who is it?” Max asked me.
I rose to check the caller ID. I said, “Oh!” and snatched up the receiver. “Debbie?” I said.
“Hi, Mom.”
Max set his toast down.
“Is—?” I said. I was about to ask if everything was all right, but I changed it to “Isn’t it awfully early for you to be up and about?”
“Yes, but neither one of us is packed yet, if you can believe it. There was just so much else to—but I wanted to call you and Dad and say thanks for all you did. I thought it went really well, didn’t you?”
“It went perfectly,” I said. “It was a beautiful wedding.”
“Is Dad still with you?”
“Yes, we’re just eating breakfast.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“No, no…Let me put him on,” I said.
I held the receiver out to Max, and he stood up to take it. “Hey there,” he said. And then, “Couldn’t have gone better, I thought. What did Kenneth make of it?”
Darn, I should have asked that myself. I should have said something that showed that I’d moved on, that I’d forgotten there had ever been any issue with Kenneth.
“Good!” Max was saying. “He’s exactly right. His folks supplied the glitz and then your folks dialed it down to a more reasonable level. Perfect teamwork.”
I whispered, “Don’t hang up when you’re done.”
“What?” Max asked me.
“I need to tell her one more thing.”
“Okay,” he said. “Deb? Hold on; your mom has something to add. So, have a good trip, hon. Bye.” He handed me the receiver.
I said, “Sweetie, I just wanted to suggest that maybe you should call Sophie and Rupert and thank them too.”
“I already did,” Debbie said.
“Oh.”
“They both agreed it was a big success, except Sophie thought the flowers weren’t so great.”
“What does she know?” I asked. And then, “Okay, sweetheart, I hope you have a wonderful honeymoon.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
I hung up. I told Max, “She phoned Sophie and Rupert before she phoned us.”
“Well, sure,” Max said. “They were the duty call. She wanted to get that over with.”
“And she said Sophie thought the flowers weren’t so great.”
“And you said, ‘What does she know?’ ” Max said. “As you should have.”
We smiled at each other.
“So,” Max said. “Do you still take a Sunday walk these days?”
“A…? I don’t necessarily have to,” I said, because I didn’t want to seem to be hustling him out the door. “I mean, it’s not written in stone.”
“I was just thinking I might come with you,” he said.
“That would be very nice,” I told him.
“Unless you’d prefer solitude.”
“No, you’re welcome to come along,” I said.
Then I started eating my scrambled eggs. Before that, I’d been sort of dawdling.
My Sunday walk always followed a fixed course, passing the Ashton School at one point and including a fairly steep hill both coming and going, because I figured downhill worked a whole different set of leg muscles from uphill. The entire walk took exactly forty-five minutes. “Is forty-five minutes too long for you?” I asked Max.
“Not in the least,” he said.
“Do you mind climbing a hill?”
“Who do you take me for?” he said. “I already told you, my doctor has me walking two miles daily.”
“I just wanted to make sure.”
He rolled his eyes. You couldn’t blame me for asking, though. He was such a tub of a man, and he was wearing his usual crepe-soled shoes, whereas I always walked in Adidases the size of two watermelons.
I went upstairs to put them on as soon as we finished breakfast, and meanwhile Max cleaned up in the kitchen. It wasn’t like him to be so conscientious. I started worrying that he felt sorry for me, first because I’d just said good-bye to my only daughter and then because I was about to be jobless. So when I came back downstairs, I made a point of acting brisk and unconcerned. “All set?” I asked. “You didn’t bring any shorts, I don’t suppose,” because I myself had switched to clamdigger pants that hit just below my knees.
“No, all I have is these,” he said, meaning the khakis that he’d arrived in.
“Well, luckily it’s not so hot today.”
Our exit from the house was complicated by the cat’s suddenly taking it into her head to come with us. I was turning to shut the front door behind me when I felt something soft tickling my shins, and I said, “Whoa!” and nudged her back inside with the toe of one shoe. “What—is she accustomed to going outside?” I asked Max as I turned the key in the lock.
“I have no idea,” he said.
“Because a lot of the neighbors have bird feeders,” I told him, “and they would not be happy.”
“I think it’s more that she’s gotten fond of you,” he said. “She just wanted to come with you.”
The man would not give up.
But I didn’t bother debating the issue. “Right here is where we should cross,” I told him, “because I see Fred Parrott pruning his hedge up ahead and he always has to stop everybody and talk and talk and talk. Then once we hit Tribal Lane, we’ll hook a left and—”
“Or we could just wander any old which way,” Max suggested.
I said, “I don’t think so.”
We passed the Nicholsons’ house, and the place with the plaster Madonna in the yard. By then we were directly across from Fred Parrott. I said to Max, barely moving my lips, “Keep your head turned away or he’ll flag us down.”
We walked by with our faces averted.
“So, the people around here are friendly?” Max asked.
“More or less.”
“Were any of them at the wedding?”
“At Debbie’s wedding? No.”
“How long have you been living here?”
“Twenty-one years,” I said. “Twenty-one years in March.”
Although he should know that as well as I did.
My father died in 2001, the fall of 2001. It wasn’t unexpected—he’d had a lung condition for years—but when it finally happened, one Sunday afternoon as he was watching TV with my mother, I felt it came out of the blue. My mother took it much more in stride than I did. She dealt efficiently with the funeral arrangements and the paperwork, while I just basically sat there in a stunned heap. And it was she who informed me of the money he’d willed me, not a huge amount but a nice little chunk. I knew right away what I’d do with it. I don’t even remember going through a decision process. I told Max before I went to bed that night that I wanted to buy someplace small where Debbie and I could live on our own. He himself, I said, could do whatever he chose—go on renting our current house, find himself an apartment, move to a whole other town, if he liked. It was entirely up to him.
“Are you saying…divorce?” Max asked me.
I said, “Right. Yes. I am.”
“But why?” he said.
“Just because,” I told him.
“Is it that guy?”
Even then, he didn’t mention Andrew’s name. Nor did I. “No,” I said, “it’s me.”
“Great, Gail. The old ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ line.”
“No,” I told him. “This is more like ‘It’s not you; it’s the me that I am when I’m with you.’ ”
“What?”
“I used to be…” I began.
I used to be the girl who stood in a vast golden field of wheat or oats or barley while Max Baines took my face between his palms as if it were something precious. He cupped my cheeks; he traced the scar on my chin with the tip of one thumb; he blinked as if he had trouble believing anyone could be so…well, perfect.
I used to be perfect.
But of course I couldn’t say this aloud. What I said was, “I know I can’t expect you to feel the same about me as you used to.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Now, as for Debbie,” I went on, “we’re going to have to make this as stress-free for her as we can. We don’t want her to feel torn between us. I’ll let you see her whenever you like, of course; no quarrels about custody or anything like—”
“You’ll let me see her?”
“I mean…you know what I mean,” I said. “And she should never hear us arguing about it; she shouldn’t see any sign of disagreement between us. We have to make it clear that we’re on the same—”
“I get it,” he said. Then he said, “You know what the operative word here is, Gail.”
“The what?”
“The operative word is ‘waste,’ ” he told me. “Sheer, pointless, empty waste.”
And he walked out of the room.
This came as a relief, to be honest. It was high time he got angry! Let him go ahead and fume, let him clamp his lips and slam the door and pretend not to hear when I spoke to him. We could talk things over later, I thought.
We never did, though. Just a few days after that, he moved out. Rented an apartment down on St. Paul and packed all his belongings and vanished. No further discussion. That was harder than I had expected, I have to say. I had thought things would get simpler once we’d disentangled our two lives, but for a while they seemed more complicated. More subject to misunderstanding. I asked him on the phone once where he planned to take Debbie to supper and he said I had no right to cross-examine him. “I didn’t meant to imply—” I said, but he’d already hung up. I invited him to her school play, and he said that of course he’d be there, because opening night happened to be one of her nights at his house; and that I should wait till the second performance before I came myself.
But after he took the job on the Eastern Shore, things got easier. The only times I saw him were when he came to Baltimore to pick Debbie up or drop her off, and gradually even those occasions grew less frequent, first because of the distance involved and then because Debbie developed a busy social life of her own as she grew older.
One time he phoned at the very last minute to cancel some arrangement they’d made, and I said, “She’ll be sorry to miss you,” and he said, “She won’t miss me.”
“Of course she will!” I said, but he said, “Last week when I went to her school to pick her up she was out on the track field cheering.”
“Cheering?”
“She was practicing one of those cheerleading chants that girls do at sports events. Jumping up in the air and waving these pompoms and then coming back down to earth and hugging the girl next to her and laughing her head off.”
“Okay…” I said. Because of course she was laughing. She was fourteen years old at the time and she was with friends her own age. Only I knew how distressed she still was with both of us for what we had done to her life. (Go ahead, call me a coward; I never admitted to her that I alone was the one who had done it.)
But Max said, “She won’t even notice I canceled.”
“That’s just not true,” I told him.
But then only a month or so later, she came home from a weekend with him and said she was never going back. She said she didn’t like his girlfriend. “His what?” I asked.
“She’s fat,” Debbie said.
“He has a girlfriend?”
“He has a girlfriend whose name is Roxanna and she’s big as a house,” Debbie said.
“Well…good for him,” I said faintly.
Debbie made a snorting sound. “Grandma says men are just easily hoodwinked,” she told me.
“Grandma! When did you talk to Grandma?”
“I, like, called her from Dad’s place,” she said.
“You…?”
“I was upset, okay? And Grandma said men are just naturally weaker than women, so they can’t admit they’re getting old and that’s why they leave their wives for young hussies.”
“But that’s not— Wait, Grandma said hussies?”
“Hussies who take advantage of married men in their moment of weakness.”
“Debbie, please do not use the word ‘hussies.’ ”
“I didn’t use it! Grandma did.”
“I can’t believe that,” I said.
“You think I’m lying?”
“No, I—but your grandma hasn’t the slightest notion what she’s talking about, trust me.”
“Anyhow,” Debbie said. “You don’t have to worry about me. I already know I’m going to be a nun.”
“Oh, stop; you’re not even Catholic,” I said.
“So will you call Dad and tell him I’m not ever coming back?”
“You call him,” I said. “I’m staying out of it.”
Because I do know how to do some things right.
Although I admit that I had a few bad weeks there, after I heard about Roxanna. I had to give myself a stern talking-to. (“Face up, Gail,” I said. “This is exactly what you deserve,” I said.)
As for Debbie, maybe she called Max and maybe she didn’t; I never inquired. And after a brief interval, she did resume her visits to him. For one thing, in January of the following year she got her driver’s license, which meant she could borrow my car—a huge inducement, at least during that early stage when driving is a novelty. She never lost her dismissive tone when she referred to Roxanna, but eventually I noticed, tucked in her bedroom mirror frame, a snapshot of her and a woman who had to be Roxanna standing in some kind of farmer’s market, and they had their arms slung around each other and Debbie was smiling and relaxed looking. What’s more, Roxanna was beautiful. Till then I’d felt sort of smug about her much-vaunted obesity, but some overweight women are so lush and creamy-skinned and sublimely confident that you have to wonder why thinness is considered an asset. There were dimples in both her cheeks, and she had lovely, pillowy mounds of breasts and a gentle curve of a belly.
I can’t recall when it was that Debbie stopped mentioning her. It just dawned on me, after a couple of years or so, that Roxanna’s photo was no longer in Debbie’s mirror frame. And something Max said later, when a divorced friend of ours remarried (“Getting married would be so much work, after a certain age,” he said), made me wonder if he and Roxanna were simply at two different stages in their lives.
At any rate: time passed, and whatever dealings Max and I had became more matter-of-fact. He and I attended Debbie’s high school graduation together, and then her college graduation. We sat side by side for the awarding of her law degree, and on a couple of occasions he and Debbie came to my house for dinner when he happened to be spending the night with her.
A while back, when the nurse at my school was going through a divorce, she told me, “What I’m aiming for is that Steve and I should have a civilized friendship with each other, the way you and your ex do.”
“We do?” I said. And then, “Oh. We do.”
I didn’t tell her how many years of ups and downs and icy silences and hurt feelings we’d had to go through to get there.
The sun felt a lot warmer now. The rows of houses became rows of shops intermingled with smaller houses, and then the houses turned into podiatry offices or one-man insurance agencies, and then we took a right onto Ashton Street and I saw Mayella’s Produce and the lake trout joint and beyond that, my school. Which reminded me: “I was thinking,” I said (a bit breathlessly, on account of the hill we’d just climbed), “maybe I should send Marilee an email wishing her well with her procedure.”
“What procedure is that?” Max asked.
“She’s having a cardio-something tomorrow to change the rate of her heartbeat.”
“That sounds serious,” Max said.
“Cardio…gram? Graph? Cardiolysis? I didn’t have a chance to wish her well on Friday because she was so busy questioning my people skills, but I can see where I might have sounded a bit, maybe, uncaring.”
“If you want to prove your people skills you should telephone her, not email.”
“Oh, that would be false advertising,” I said, only half joking. “I don’t have that many people skills. Besides, what’s wrong with emailing? We might even say it shows respect. Respecting her private time with her husband the day before her…cardioxy?”
“Phone calls convey a more immediate concern,” Max said. “Like, ‘Forgive me for intruding, but I’ve been sitting here feeling so worried about you that I just had to pick up the phone and ask you what I can do.’ ”
I said, “Ha! She would wonder what had gotten into me.”
The Ashton School was closed and silent, I saw, with all the classroom shades pulled down to exactly the same level just as our custodian liked them; no bothersome teachers or students interfering with his preferences. Once we’d walked past it, we made a U-turn and started back the way we had come. I said, “I hate forgetting words. Hunting through my memory for them; it’s like asking the Magic 8 Ball, you know? ‘Will I be rich when I’m grown?’ ‘Will I travel?’ And then waiting for the answer to float up slowly, slowly in the glass.”
“ ‘It is not yet clear,’ ” Max intoned in a solemn voice. “ ‘Ask again later.’ ”
“But at least it did float up, when I was young. Now that I’m old, it sometimes doesn’t. I’ll say, ‘It will come to me by and by,’ but it doesn’t.”
“Yeah, welcome to the club,” Max said lightly.
“I hate it,” I told him.
He looked over at me.
I said, “It makes me feel…vulnerable.”
“Oh,” he said. “Sweetheart.”
“But you’re right: welcome to the club!” I said. “Gosh, is that a red-winged blackbird?” And we both turned to watch it fly up from a mulberry bush, black as ink with its epaulettes of startling scarlet.
“You and I were going to grow old side by side, once upon a time,” Max said.
I don’t know where he expected that remark to go. I didn’t answer, and we walked the rest of the way in silence.
Even though I hadn’t let on at the time, I thought seriously about his advice to wish Marilee well by phone. He might have a point, I thought. So after we came home, while I was upstairs changing out of my walking clothes, I sat down on the edge of my bed to give her a call. I had to look up her number in my little bedside phonebook; that’s how seldom I phoned her. “Gail!” she said when she picked up.
“Hi, Marilee.”
“I’m glad you got back to me.”
“Right,” I said. I’d forgotten all about her answering machine message. “Well, I just wanted to say I’m hoping things will go well tomorrow.”
“Why, thank you,” she said. “That’s very thoughtful of you. Now. What I’d called about. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I happened to remember that before you hired on as my assistant, you were teaching math at Millwood High.”
“Yes…”
“Teaching remedial math.”
“Right.”
“So on Friday after you left I phoned Emmy Lawton,” she said.
Emmy was head of the mathematics department at our school—not terribly bright, but I liked her.
“I asked if she had any interest in acquiring a specialist in remedial math,” she said, “and she said absolutely she did. Ever since Covid times set our students so far back, she said…But, so, I don’t want you to feel insulted by this suggestion; I realize you’ve long since moved up in the world…”
Count on Marilee to imagine that administration was a move up in the world.
“Still, would you ever consider the possibility of going back to teaching?” she asked.
“You mean at the Ashton School,” I said.
“At least mull it over?”
“Huh. It’s a thought,” I told her. And it was—but kind of a complicated thought. I set it aside, for the time being. I said, “So, maybe your husband could give me a call tomorrow to tell me how things went with you.”
“Thank you. I’ll let him know,” she said.
It would have sounded more personal if I’d remembered her husband’s first name. I didn’t, though.
After I’d hung up I crossed the hall to the guest room, where Max was packing. “I did it,” I told him.
“Did what?” he asked.
“I phoned Marilee to wish her well.”
“Excellent,” he said.
“And she happened to mention that the Ashton School could use a remedial math teacher.”
“Oh,” he said. “I see.”
To myself I said, “Darn. I should have asked her what that cardio procedure’s called.”
“Now, promise you won’t get mad at this,” Max said.
I looked over at him. I braced myself.
“But I did just now phone Sam Levy,” he said. “I asked if by any chance we needed a remedial math teacher at our school. And he said, ‘Are you kidding? I would kill for a remedial math teacher.’ ”
“Who would he kill?” I asked.
“Whom,” Max said. And then, “Are you mad?”
“No,” I said. “You were nice to go to the trouble.”
“It’s only that I was thinking change is sometimes a good thing, don’t you find?”
“Right,” I said. “Except, you know. Here I am in Baltimore.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
“Hey!” I said. “I have an idea. Are you leaving right away? Because if you don’t mind sticking around awhile, I could invite you out to lunch before you go.”
“I’d be happy to stick around.”
“Lunch at the Cultured Crab, maybe, since you get such a kick out of the place. How does that sound?”
“That would be very nice,” he said.
After that I ran out of things to say, so I went on downstairs.
I was reading the Sunday Sun on the couch next to the cat when Max came down himself. “Care for some of the paper?” I asked him, and he said, “Thanks,” and accepted the front section and took it over to the rocker. “Do I really want to know this?” he asked the top headline as he sat down.
I went back to reading the “Ask Amy” column. I’d always liked how Amy doesn’t put up with any nonsense. “Darn right!” I said aloud at one point. “The nerve of some people!” and the cat sent me an uneasy glance and edged a few inches away.
“The pay would not be that great, I grant you,” Max said. He seemed to be speaking again to the newspaper headlines. “But you should bear in mind that the cost of living is much lower there.”
“You mean…on the Eastern Shore?” I asked him.
He looked over at me, finally. “You could pick up a really nice house for practically nothing,” he told me.
“Well, sure; it’s a depressed area,” I said.
He said, “As if Baltimore isn’t depressed!” And then, “Just think, though: once Debbie and Kenneth have kids they can bring them for summer vacations. I suggest you bear that in mind when you’re considering how many rooms you’ll need.”
“You’re talking as if it would be a beach house,” I said, “but the cost of living at the beach is astronomical.”
“No, I’m talking about my neck of the woods,” he said, “Cornboro. They could stay with you in Cornboro and then drive to the nearest beach every day in not much more than an hour.”
“Oh, you’re right,” I said. “And the drive would be so undemanding that Kenny Junior can take the wheel as soon as he gets his learner’s permit.”
Max looked confused, but only for a second. “True enough,” he agreed.
“Max,” I said. “I appreciate the thought. But the fact is that I believe I have only one span of life allotted to me. I don’t feel I have the option of just…trying out various random ideas and giving up if they don’t work out.”
“Yes, well,” Max said with a sigh.
He himself, apparently, assumed he had an infinite number of lives.
Someday I’d like to be given credit for all the times I have not said something that I could have said.
For our lunch outing we took my car, since I needed to gas up before heading to work on Monday. (I was beginning to acknowledge that I might not be quitting quite yet.) The car’s interior still smelled faintly of hair product, I noticed. I rolled down my window before we took off. “Let’s do the gas on the way back,” I told Max. “I’m starving, all at once.”
“Me too,” he said.
The Cultured Crab was in Lutherville, near where he had grown up. It had been his parents’ chosen restaurant for important family occasions. Now that they were long gone you would think it would make him sad to go back, but it didn’t seem to. He gazed out his window contentedly as we traveled up the York Road corridor, with its mishmash of car dealers and barbecue joints and strip malls and discount tire warehouses. “When Deb told me she and Kenneth were getting married,” he said, “I took the two of them to the Cultured Crab for a celebration dinner. Did she happen to mention that?”
“No. What did Kenneth think of it?”
“He loved it.”
“Although, what else was he going to say?”
“No, seriously, I think he really did. He said it was one of a kind.”
“Well, that I can believe,” I said.
“But I should warn you,” Max said. “Since Covid times, the place has undergone a bit of a conversion.”
“Oh!” I said suddenly. “Cardioversion!”
“What?”
“Marilee’s procedure. It’s called a cardioversion.”
“Ah.”
“This jolt to her heart to make it start beating right.”
“Modern medicine,” he marveled. “Okay, so, what they did was set up a lot of outdoor tables à la French sidewalk café, and they still haven’t taken them away. You see what I’m talking about.”
Because by now we were nearing the restaurant. The façade was unchanged—a white clapboard cube with a neon crab in a chef’s toque dancing on the roof—but the space out front had become a jumble of tables and chairs and collapsed umbrellas, all bordered by the trash bins and newspaper boxes lined up as usual along the edge of the curb. “Paris, France,” he said with a wave.
“I see,” I said.
“Just don’t tell them you’re too fool.”
“Right.”
That’s something you forget when you’ve been on your own awhile: those married-couple conversations that continue intermittently for weeks, sometimes, branching out and doubling back and looping into earlier strands like a piece of crochet work.
I found a parking space a short distance up ahead, and we got out of the car and threaded our way between the outdoor tables. None of them were occupied, and when we stepped inside the café we found most of those tables empty as well. A young woman seated near the window was nursing a cocktail, while two older men across the room studied their menus with their foreheads knotted in frowns. I was fairly sure I know why they were frowning. They had probably wandered in assuming this was your average Baltimore seafood joint. The idea behind the Cultured Crab, though, was that it was more upscale. Ordinary steamed crabs weren’t even on the menu—too messy, too much work for the diners. The crabcakes, so-called, were thumb-size croquettes studded with charred shishito pepper bits. Crab parfait layered with wasabi-spiked crème fraîche. Crab salad with marcona almonds under a yuzu glaze. Max’s parents had taken this food seriously, but Max himself found it hilarious. As we walked in he was actually rubbing his hands together, and the minute we had been seated by the hostess (a thirteen-year-old, from the looks of her), he had to read the tablecloth. Each tablecloth was different—an Irish linen facsimile of a newspaper page, meant to duplicate the actual newspapers where other crabhouses dumped their vats of steamed whole crabs. Our particular page included reports of a city council oyster roast and a squeegee-kid party where the mayor himself had handed out hot crab heroes. That one Max read aloud. I said, “Notice they don’t say which mayor.”
“It’s like a time warp,” Max said. He was gazing now at a corner table across the room. “Remember when we were all sitting over there and my sister announced she was pregnant?”
“Oh, Lord,” I said, because his sister had not been married back then.
“And Dad stood up so suddenly that he knocked against the table edge and our candlestick fell over and set Mom’s menu on fire.”
“Happy days,” I said.
“Would you guys care to start with a drink?” our waitress asked us. She seemed to be another teenager. Evidently all the “hon”-type waitresses in their sixties had taken early retirement during the pandemic. “Just water, please,” I told her, and Max said, “I’ll have the iced tea.” The Cultured Crab’s iced tea was famous; it was seasoned with cumin or turmeric or some such that turned people’s teeth yellow.
“And now that baby is a grown woman who just attended our daughter’s wedding,” Max said once we were alone again. Evidently he was back on the subject of his sister’s pregnancy.
“She’s getting a few gray hairs, even,” I said. “I noticed while we were talking together after the ceremony.”
I was scanning my menu as I spoke, trying to find the least bizarre combination. I’ve never been a fan of foods I didn’t eat in my childhood. The tin-can taste of mango, the bad-breath taste of cilantro—I might have been fine with them if I’d met them as a three-year-old. Max, of course, went in the opposite direction. Now he said, “What do you guess asafoetida is?”
“I hate to even imagine,” I said. Then I said, “You know what ‘cardioversion’ makes me think of?”
“What,” he said.
“Remember in the old days, when people used to tap their watches?”
“They still do, if they’re smartwatches,” he told me.
“Those are not watches; they’re computers on wristbands. But a normal watch like mine,” I said, “why would I need to tap it, these days? It runs for years on one battery.”
“Why would you tap it even back then?” he asked me. “Though come to think of it,” he added, “my grandfather used to tap his watch when he wanted to point out how late we were.”
“Yes, so did my dad,” I said. “But I guess it could also mean the opposite. Like, ‘Is this thing dead? Because I could swear I’ve been at this party for hours, but my watch says it’s only eight thirty.’ ”
“Or also, ‘Stop right here, watch. Stop exactly where you are now.’ ”
“Well, I’ve never seen that one,” I said. “And let’s hope not in Marilee’s case. We’re talking about a heart, remember.”
“Or ‘Go backward, watch,’ ” Max said.
“Backward!”
Our waitress set down our glasses and asked, “Have you guys decided yet?”
“I’ll have the crab-and-rhubarb strata,” Max told her.
“If that’s your decision,” she said.
I said, “I’ll have the rockfish, minus the honey-sumac sauce.”
“You got it.”
She took our menus from us and left. No sign of pen and paper, but I guess at her age she felt she could trust her memory.
Max said, “Haven’t these past three days felt like going backward in time together?”
“Like Groundhog Day,” I agreed.
“Groundhog Day?” He looked puzzled. “Scared of our shadows?”
“Groundhog Day the movie,” I told him. Count on Max; he wasn’t much of a moviegoer. “Where people live through the same one day over and over until they get it right.”
“Exactly,” Max said. “We’ve been given another chance to get it right.”
“And yet, did we?” I asked. “You show up uninvited, just the same as when you moved in with me and my roommates after Polly got married. You bring an unannounced pet, just the same as when you brought your dog.”
“It’s true,” Max said happily. “And, hey! We even had Jared Johnson hanging around again!”
“Yes, come to think of it.”
“We even had your losing-your-job issue.”
“Right.”
“So, how many times did it take them?” he asked.
“Take whom?”
“The people in Groundhog Day. How many times till they got it right?”
“Lots,” I said. “I lost count, in fact.”
“Wouldn’t that be great?” he asked me. “If the world really worked that way?”
I’d been about to say that it had taken them so many times that I had very nearly walked out of the movie in the middle, but instead I said, “Well, yes, it would, I guess.”
Then our waitress came back to tell us, “I forgot to mention our special appetizer: raw shrimp in tequila with salmon roe.”
“No!” we said—even Max—and she went away again.
After lunch, we stopped to buy gas at the nearest Exxon station. “I’ll do this,” Max announced as we pulled in, but I said, “No, no, I will,” because I worried he would insist on paying for it. (We’d already argued about my paying for our meal, even though I was the one who’d invited him.) I hopped out of the car before he could and unhooked the pump nozzle, which meant I accidentally skipped the step where I should have pressed my gas tank’s release tab. So Max got to act all patient and forbearing as he leaned across from his seat and pressed it himself. “I was going to do that!” I told him. “I’ve done it a million times.”
Long story short, therefore: I ended up with hands that smelled like gasoline. So when we got back to my house, the cat took one whiff of me at the front door and then promptly vanished, straight up the stairs. “Celine?” I called after her.
Max said, “Who?”
I said, “Oh, the…cat.” I turned away. I went to hang my purse in the closet. “Honestly!” I said. “Such a delicate flower, she is.”
“Wait, her name is Celine?” he asked.
“No, silly. I just had to call her something in a pinch,” I said. I closed the closet door.
“So, does this mean you might want to keep her?” he asked, trailing after me into the living room.
“No, no. It just means I don’t believe in letting an animal walk around nameless,” I told him.
“Oh.”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Okay,” he said. “Well, I guess I ought to go finish packing.”
“You’re leaving right now?” I asked him.
“I thought I would.”
“I figured you’d want your nap first.”
“No, I should get out of your hair,” he said.
I said, “All right.” And then, “Although it’s not as if I have anything else to do today. You’re welcome to take your nap if you like.”
“No, that’s okay,” he said, and he turned and started up the stairs.
I would have called the cat again, but I felt self-conscious about repeating her name in Max’s hearing. Instead I went out to the kitchen and checked my answering machine. One message: my mother. “Hello, dear,” the recording said. “Sorry I missed you! I hope you’re not feeling too bereft after the wedding.”
Bereft was exactly how I was feeling. But I wasn’t sure I could blame the wedding. I stood looking at the phone, knowing I should call her back and yet putting it off. And then the cat wandered in of her own accord. “Hey there,” I told her. She brushed against my ankles invitingly, but before I picked her up I went over to the sink and thoroughly washed my hands and forearms, all the way to my elbows. Then I dried off and gave one wrist a sniff. Not too bad, in my opinion. And when I stooped to gather her up, she didn’t try to escape. She herself smelled like clean woolens. I buried my nose in her neck and drew in a deep breath of her, and then I carried her out of the kitchen and up the stairs. At the guest room doorway, I paused to watch Max folding a shirt. He kept his eyes on what he was doing, though, as if he were still alone.
“So, I’m wondering,” I told him. “Suppose I did decide to keep the cat; didn’t you say your shelter would object if you didn’t bring her back with you?”
Now he looked up. He stopped folding his shirt. “You mean, keep her for good?” he asked.
“Because she does seem comfortable here,” I said.
“Oh, she loves it here! She loves it! You won’t regret this, Gail, I promise. As for the shelter: you’d just need to fill out some paperwork, but I can email you that. It might be a bit more complicated because you live in a different state, is all.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
I hoped I wasn’t going to regret this.
“Now, about her supplies,” he said. “Her litter box and such. Her bag of kibble. Why don’t I just leave you with what I brought. We’re allowed to, when the new owner’s not equipped yet.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“This is great!” he told me.
“Right,” I said.
I stood there a moment longer. He laid the shirt in the duffel bag on his bed and went over to the closet.
“So…that’s all settled, I guess,” I said finally, and I turned to carry the cat back downstairs.
When I reached the living room, she jumped out of my arms like someone who’d just accomplished something. She proceeded straight to the kitchen, and I followed to watch her start picking at her bowl of kibble.
I would need to buy a dedicated feeding dish, I decided. In fact, maybe a continuous feeder, for when I was out of the house. And cat treats. The whole time she had been here, I’d been wishing I had some cat treats to entice her with.
Would she like a scratching post? What cat wouldn’t like a scratching post? Maybe one of those tree-shaped affairs with several levels to it. I could set it by a window so she could watch birds to her heart’s content.
I heard Max’s footsteps upstairs, but they weren’t drawing any closer. Finally I settled on the couch, and the cat wandered in a moment later and sat on the rug to wash her face. Now Max finally did cross the hall and start down the stairs. I stayed seated, though.
“All set,” he said as he arrived in the living room. He had his duffel bag slung over one shoulder and he was clutching the Lerner Brothers bag. “So, the cat has been chipped,” he told me, “and all her shots are up to date.”
“Chipped?” I asked.
“Electronically, by the vet. In case you ever need to verify her records. Also, I don’t foresee any complications with the out-of-state issue, but I’ll check into all that before I send you the paperwork.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“No, thank you!” he said. Then he said, “It’s another Groundhog moment, right? You didn’t want my dog at first, either, but then you got into a knock-down-drag-out fight with your roommates to keep them from evicting her.”
He was exaggerating, of course. I’d just had a civilized discussion with them. But I said, “Well, sure, because that was Barbara! Good old Barb.”
“Good old Barb,” he agreed. Then he turned to the cat and said, “So long, Miss Celine. You’ve found yourself a pretty cushy berth, let me assure you.”
Celine went on washing her face industriously.
“She’s pretending not to hear,” he told me, “in case I still have any plans to take her with me.”
Then he headed toward the front door, and I rose to follow him. The day was downright hot now, I could tell the instant I stepped outside. I said, “It’s lucky we took our walk early.”
“Yup.”
We descended the front steps. I said, “I didn’t think to ask whether you’re working this summer.”
“Only part-time,” he said. “Some of our kids do stay on if they don’t have anyplace else to go, but in summer it’s more like a day camp.”
“That sounds nice,” I said.
“Yup.”
We stopped beside his car. It was a decent distance from my own car, for once, since I’d been the last to park. He unlocked his trunk to put his duffel bag inside, and then he chucked the Lerner Brothers bag in after it.
I said, “What’s the name of your school, again? I forget.”
“Cornboro Special,” he said.
“Ah, yes.”
An unfortunate choice, I’d aways thought. “Special” sounded faintly suspect. But of course I didn’t say so. I just stood smiling and looking into his face. He didn’t pursue the subject, though. He said, “Okay, then, I guess. Thanks for letting me stay with you.”
“Anytime,” I told him.
He lifted one palm in a sort of salute, and then he went around to the driver’s side and got in and started the engine. I watched until his car turned left at the end of the block before I went back to the house.
Celine hadn’t stirred from the rug, but she’d progressed from face-washing to shin-washing. “Hi, sweetheart,” I told her. She didn’t look up. I went to the kitchen and loaded a couple of glasses into the dishwasher. Wiped off a counter. Hung up a towel. Pulled a chair out from the table and sat down to phone my mother, finally.
“Hi, Mom,” I said when she answered. “Sorry it took me a while to get back to you. I still had Max here till a minute ago.”
“Well, I just called to make sure you’re not missing your girl,” she said.
“No, I’m okay. I mean, of course I miss her, but I’m happy the wedding went well. She did phone earlier today to say she’d enjoyed it.”
“Yes, she phoned me too,” Mom said.
“Oh, good. And I know she called Sophie and Rupert.”
In fact, should I be concerned that she’d spent so much time with us all on the phone instead of focusing on her new husband?
No, I thought. Let that go.
“It must have been quite a strain having Max around for this long,” Mom was saying.
“Not at all,” I said. “We even went out to lunch today before he left. At the Cultured Crab.”
“Ooh! Do tell,” Mom said, “what’d you order?”
“Just, I don’t know. A fish thing. And I’m keeping that cat he brought.”
“You’re not,” Mom said.
“She’s turned out to be really nice.”
“But what will you do when Kenneth comes over?”
“Kenneth,” I said. “Well, I don’t think it’s that big a problem. He can just use his…whatchamacallit if he gets wheezy.”
“Have it your way,” she said. “You know I’m not a huge cat fan. I’ve always felt they were coldhearted.”
“Cats are not coldhearted!” I said. “They’re only protecting their dignity, in case they get rejected. ‘I’ll just reject you first,’ they’re saying.”
“Yes, so you’ve always told me.”
“Anyhow,” I said. “I’ll be in touch later this week, okay? Maybe we can go to a movie together, if there’s anything worth seeing.”
“That would be lovely,” she said. “Good-bye, dear.”
“Bye, Mom.”
I hung up.
I went back to the living room. I sank down on the couch. It was more like collapsing, really.
What was I supposed to do with the rest of my life?
I’m too young for this, I thought. Not too old, as you might expect, but too young, too inept, too uninformed. How come there weren’t any grownups around? Why did everyone just assume I knew what I was doing?
It was a good thing I had Celine. She had hopped up beside me by now, and I could busy myself with running the tip of an index finger along the length of her elegant nose, which made her close her eyes and purr.
What I should have told Max was…
What I should have asked…
What I should have made clear to him…
Oh, why was I so bottled up?
How was it that, standing in a field of gold, I had not had the faintest idea whether it was wheat or rye or barley? Why had I registered Max’s awe as he cupped my face, his look of utter adoration, but given not one passing thought to whether I had adored him?
The doorbell rang, but I ignored it. The cat, however, fled instantaneously, without even seeming to collect herself for her leap.
Until now, I had imagined that I’d been drawn to Andrew Mason because he was so unknowable. In fact, though, I had known him all too well. I was him. I had recognized his separateness, and his held-back smile, and his absolute certainty that since he took his own coffee black, there was no need whatsoever to set out cream and sugar for anybody else.
From the front porch, I heard a man call, “Gail?”
I told myself that this was…I don’t know. A neighbor? Someone from school? The only reason it sounded like Max was that I’d just been thinking of Max.
I rose and went to open the door. “I had this sudden idea,” Max told me. He was standing back a bit with his hands down at his sides, as if to prove that he meant no harm. “This idea about the adoption papers. You know what might be easiest? If we put my name on the papers. I’m a Delaware resident.”
I said, “Oh.” I said, “I hadn’t considered that.”
“With your name too, though, I’m saying. Yours and mine both, jointly. It wouldn’t be a lie, exactly. Especially not if you came to live in Cornboro, by and by.”
Then he tilted his head. “Gail?” he asked. “Do you think?”
The year was 2023, and nearly every man, woman, and child in America owned a cell phone, including Max Baines. He could have called me while he was driving. Or pulled over to the side of the road and called. Or even waited till he got home and called me then. And yet here he was in person, standing on my front porch.
Which gave me the courage, finally, to step out onto the porch myself and cup his face in my hands. I studied his sweet, bristly cheeks, and the satiny skin below his brown eyes, and his forehead creased with concern, and I committed them all to memory before I kissed him.
End