Emma

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:

SECTION 1.

Section 691284.5 of the Education Code is heretofore amended to read:

691284.5.

Notwithstanding Section 691284, when the literacy curriculum framework is revised after January 1, 2016, the Instructional Quality Commission shall consider including both of the following:

Age-appropriate information...

Emma blinks to keep the words from swimming across the page. It’s nearly nine o’clock and she’s been reading a single paragraph since crawling into bed a half hour ago. She hasn’t had sex in over a year, but this is what makes her yearn for her former husband. She would have handed this mishmash of legalese to Devin and waited five minutes for him to explain using real, normal human words.

Now, however, this has got her thinking about Devin, which is terrible, because she’s lying in bed. And the thoughts one thinks about in bed bring one’s mind to other places. Places she doesn’t want to go, especially with regard to her ex.

His perfect triangle ratio of shoulders to waist. The way his thighs stayed muscular, even during his softer, rounder spells. Pressing against her hips. Driving her legs open—

Shit!

What the hell is wrong with her.

SECTION 1.

Section 691284.5 of the Education Code is heretofore amended to read:

And again, her brain is adrift within seconds. Heretofore. Such a whispery word. Half of it a sigh, the rest of it rhythm.

Ripe with innuendo.

Devin’s leaning in. Murmuring it.

Heeeretofore.

Here.to.fore.

Here.To.FORE

HERE.TO.FORE.

YES! It makes her scream. But the her screaming isn’t Emma, it’s Greta, the Anglo-Amazon currently sleeping with her husband. YES! Heretofore! Heretofore! Heretofore! OH, YES, DEVIN!

“Shut the fuck up, both of you!” That, Emma screams for real. At which Kanga wakes and Roo yelps. “Sorry.” She’s instantly shamed. “I wasn’t talking to you. I meant your father. He’s turned me into a ridiculous woman and you’re the ones living with the consequences.”

In a show of penance, she pats the duvet, and after silently consulting each other about her sincerity, Kanga follows Roo up the doggy stairs to join her. They’re demons, the pair of them, always getting into something or other. Except the bed. Devin “couldn’t sleep with paws in his face” so prior to his departure, they had been relegated to a doggy bed in the corner. Not that their short corgi legs were any match for the pillow-top California King with the super-deluxe bedding their father preferred, anyhow.

Emma bought the pet stairs before she had the locks changed.

“So, gals.” Roo is still turning circles, ever the picky one, but Kanga is all eyes on Emma. “I need your advice on something.”

Devin hasn’t been the only man crossing her thoughts lately. Benjamin Guy has been texting. And, yes, he has a way with words, but who knew he has such a way with words?

Her phone is on the bedside table. “‘Hey.’” She reads the latest aloud. “‘Visited my mom today and drove down Third. Couldn’t help but remember the night the group of us filled our cars with discarded Christmas trees and sped down the street with them hanging out our doors. Dumped them all in Anderson’s yard, if I remember correctly.’”

Kanga cocks her head.

Emma scowls. “Don’t look at me that way. We were teenagers out having fun.” In her head, she’s right there again, in the back seat of Benjamin’s yellow Chevette, open door flapping, her hands sticky with sap from the tree she’s holding, bits of stray tinsel catching the streetlights as they pass.

“Here’s the good part.” She peers over her reading glasses at Roo to ensure she has both dogs’ full attention. “‘I’ve thought about everyone in that group of kids very fondly over the years. But when I saw you again, I realized something: those friendships instilled a confidence in me that I carry to this day. You, in particular. In your quiet beautiful way, you made it okay for a guy to be smart and quirky and all the stuff a sixteen-year-old boy can twist himself into knots about.’”

She flushes again. For a second, she wonders if he’s thinking of someone else. Certainly not Emma, who was, without fail, the last person at the party, always the most hesitant to join the fun. That night especially. She’d grabbed a tree because someone shoved it into her hands. She hadn’t been given a choice but to come along.

“So, gals, you see why I don’t know how to respond.” The fact that she’s seeking social advice from her dogs is not beyond her. “I have refused to accept his dinner invitation, but he’s very persistent.” Okay, so there had been no mention of meeting up in person again. But Ben’s messages hadn’t slowed. “And who puts that sort of a thing in a text? ‘You made it okay for a guy to be smart and quirky...’ Is it a compliment? Or does he mean that I was smart and quirky, too, which could be taken as an insult. Granted, it’s most likely nothing but a platitude. He’s just buttering me up. But still. I can’t not respond to it.” The double negative catches her ear, as well. “Or can I?”

Roo drops her head with a grunt.

Emma’s fingers hover for just a moment before typing,

Molly Ringwald is in her head now, wearing a bridesmaid’s dress and sitting atop a glass dinner table across from dreamy Jake Ryan. The Thompson Twins are singing “If You Were Here.” The video is wobbly, the worn VHS tape reminding her it can only be played and rewound so many hundreds of times.

She adds,

That’s not too much to admit. They had been friends, after all. At least Benjamin seems to think so and who is she to argue with his memories?

She whispers her goodwill to her old friend across the digital universe. And heretofore, Devin disappears.

White linen tablecloths are lovely on nearly any occasion except a first date. Emma finds herself consumed by keeping the one in front of her now clean, lest it become a Rosetta Stone to her emotional state. Crumbs must be swept away by trembling fingers as she tears apart her dinner roll. An errant wrinkle beckons, insisting it be rubbed flat.

“What an exciting life you’ve lived, Benjamin.” A smear of brown balsamic vinegar bleeds slowly into the tablecloth’s fibers, threatening to transfer itself onto the sleeve of her blouse. “You make your fellow Spartans proud.” Who is she, the head of the 1990 reunion committee?

“Every day is a different challenge. That’s the part I love most.”

After weeks of their text-based walk down memory lane, Ben again suggested dinner.

Emma doesn’t know what drives him to want to reignite their friendship after three decades apart, but she’s begun to suspect she is trying to revert to a time when the future felt ripe and full. Attempting to regain the happy “world’s your oyster” sensibility she’d felt when she and Benjamin were friends. Unrealistic, perhaps. But tempting all the same.

This morning, her hips actually cracked as she got out of bed. Not creaked. Creaking was benign—the aftereffects of a strenuous workout or sleeping in a strange bed. No, this morning, they popped so loudly the dogs leaped to their feet. “Oh!” she’d exclaimed. Adding, “Gracious!” the same way her grandmother did every time her brother, Sam, filled his diaper as a toddler.

Maybe that was a good conversational topic for tonight. Do you ever find yourself behaving like your grandparents?

It doesn’t help her nerves any, either, that she had to shoo Kent’s dog out of her yard multiple times this afternoon. The last time in heels. She sank into the grass and nearly sprained her ankle. If that ever does happen, she’s sending Kent the medical bill.

You’re fine, she reminds herself. She didn’t hurt her ankle, nor did the dog do its business on her grass. And right now, she has a salad to eat. She will not be one of those women who picks at her dinner, then goes home to swallow a pint of ice cream. No. Nope. Not ever.

They’ve met at a bistro in Sebastopol, far enough away from home she doesn’t have to worry about bumping into anyone she knows. Explaining Benjamin would be too mortifying right now, as she’s not anywhere close to ready for inquiring minds. Introducing him as “an old friend” is accurate, but no relationship other than his being immediate family would eliminate the appearance of possible romantic involvement, and that’s a question she knows will tie her tongue into humiliating knots.

Then again, is this a date?

“You must feel the same way about teaching, I’d imagine.”

She’s wandered off, leaped forward several hours to the conundrum of whether to accept a good-night kiss. Is there a signal she’s supposed to send now to help avoid humiliating him later? “Pardon me?”

“Teaching. Does it continue to stretch you after all these years?”

“Oh, yes,” she manages. Though now she’s having to erase the image of herself dressed in a leotard. Stretching. Probably pulling a hamstring.

Benjamin studies her quietly for a moment, and leans in. “I worry I may have come across a bit strong.”

“When?” Their texts have retraced years of teenage terrain. “Back in high school?”

She recognizes instantly that she’s misinterpreted.

“No. I mean with this, here.” He motions between them. “I get the sense I’m making you uncomfortable. I apologize.”

“Nonsense.”

What is it, this need of hers to want everyone to love her, only to grow uncomfortable when they eventually do? She’s gripping her salad fork so tightly that her knuckle is throbbing, and she’s looked everywhere but in his eyes. Yet, to hear him express his disappointment so early in their evening is almost enough to kill her. And she would deserve it.

Marriage to Devin was a twenty-four-year exercise in trying to convince herself she was enough. She recognizes that now, thanks to her therapist, Nikki, and the self-help section at Barnes & Noble. In fact, she’s grown to accept that she had probably known she was unhappy for years but had assigned herself a penance. That if she’d been fine with the power differential at the beginning of their life together, she would have to continue to be. When she said, “I do,” she’d meant it.

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t benefited. Devin’s oversize personality came with an oversize lifestyle. Once, she’d overheard one of his partners describe him by saying, “big balls, big deals.” Beautiful home, exotic travel, high-end details. He hadn’t failed to dream, nor had he failed to achieve. Devin was the month of March, always coming in like a lion.

That made Emma the lamb. Which had been fine. Until it wasn’t.

She finds herself drawing swirls in her vinaigrette with the tines of her fork. “I no longer know how to talk to people.”

“Excuse me?” Benjamin’s leaning in even farther now, palm tucked behind his ear. “I didn’t catch that. My hearing is decades older than I am.”

His face. It might be the first time she’s allowed herself to look at it. “Why me?” That’s not what she’d said before but it’s closer to what she meant.

“Why you?” He doesn’t understand. She’s clearly flummoxed him.

“I realize I’m not making any sense. It’s just, why me? Why are you here with me? You have a gigantic career and an even bigger brain. I teach second graders. Which is wonderful, and difficult. But it’s a small life, and it’s mine, and admittedly it’s taken me too long to be able to say this, but I don’t need Morocco in the fall.”

At this, he sits back, refolding his napkin in his lap and smiling as if she’d just complimented him on his tie. “I met your ex-husband at the party.”

So, she’s a cliché. “This isn’t about Devin.”

“That’s not what I’m implying.” He raises a hand in apology. “Or maybe it is. Which probably sounds terribly presumptive and a little bit gross.”

“You think?”

He accepts the admonition with a chuckle. “I guess what I mean is, if I’d asked you the same question—why me?—the baggage surrounding it would have been about my ex-wife.”

Emma had not known he was married, though she’d assumed, and she suddenly burned with curiosity. The picture of a beautiful brunette, all legs but with a head for numbers burst into frame. She hates her instantly.

“Amelia,” he offers in lieu of forcing her to ask. “She’s a surgeon. She lives in Atlanta. It took me a while to get my feet back under me after the divorce.”

“Do I seem wobbly?” She ought to be embarrassed at the insinuation, but she’s not. Instead, it feels as if he noticed her struggling with the door and offered to hold it for her.

“Put it this way. We’ve been texting for close to a month. Nearly every night recently. And you just asked me why I’m here with you.”

“It’s a fair question.” Her fingers release ever so slightly on her fork.

He nods. “Of course, it’s fair. I’d just hoped it would have been obvious.”

They don’t say any more on the subject, too close to crossing into territory for which they’re not ready. Their entrées and dessert disappear beneath the familiar gauzy haze of old memories, of people they once knew and the times they shared.

She forgets to ask the question about him acting like his grandfather.

At the valet, the lone attendant is hustling to fetch keys and return cars, and the line is several people deep. Benjamin parked in a lot around the corner but insists on waiting with her.

“I had a lovely evening, Benjamin. Thank you.” This is the third or fourth time she’s thanked him since the waiter dropped off the check. “I know it wasn’t easy trying to wrangle a commitment from me.”

She’s waiting for a sign, something to indicate whether he, too, enjoyed their time together. The fact that he walked her directly to the valet without suggesting an after-dinner drink means tonight is over. This is a relief of sorts. She wouldn’t have slept with him, regardless, and this releases her from having to dodge or make excuses.

There is still hope for a kiss, though. A sweet peck on the cheek, a brush on the lips—neither of those would be objectionable.

“It was lovely to see you again,” he says. But with each word, he’s farther away, and by the time the valet asks for her ticket, they’re too far apart to even shake hands. “I look forward to keeping in touch.”

She feels the rejection like a kick to the stomach.

He’d all but said her favorite word, no. And she didn’t like the sound of it.