I got upstairs, dumped the food, took off my dress, pulled on my ratty overalls, thinking furiously that I probably looked like Andrea Dworkin. I stomped down the stairs, out the door, and started walking, first down to the river, then north, toward Society Hill and Old City, and finally, west toward Rittenhouse Square.
Part of me— the reasonable part— was thinking that this was not a big thing, just a minor bump on life’s bicycle path, and that he was the idiot, not me. The single guy, he’d said. Was I wrong to think that he was asking me out on a bona fide date? And so what if this wasn’t a date after all? I’d had dates before. I’d even had boyfriends. It was completely reasonable to think that I’d have them both again, and this guy wasn’t worth another second of my time.
But another part— the shrill, hysterical, hypercritical, and, unfortunately, much louder part— was saying something else entirely.
That I was dumb. That I was fat. That I was so fat that nobody would ever love me again and so dense that I couldn’t see it. That I’d been a fool, or, worse, been made a fool of. That Steve, the Teva-wearing engineer, was probably sitting at an empty table, eating calamari and laughing to himself about big, dumb Cannie.
And who was I going to tell? Who could comfort me?
Not my mother. I couldn’t really talk to her about my love life after I’d made it so clear that I didn’t approve of hers. And plus, with Bruce’s column, she’d learned enough about my after-dark activities for the time being.
I could tell Samantha, certainly, but she’d think I was crazy. “Why are you assuming this is about the way you look?” she’d demand, and I’d mutter that it could probably have been about something else, or just a plain old misunderstanding, all the while feeling the truth in my bones, the Gospel according to my father: I was fat and I was ugly and nobody would ever love me. And it would be embarrassing. I wanted my friends to think of me as someone who was smart and funny and capable. I didn’t want them to feel sorry for me.
What I wanted to do was call Bruce. I wouldn’t tell him about this latest humiliation— I didn’t want his pity, either, or for him to think I’d come crawling back, or was planning to, simply because some fuzzy-legged jerk had rejected me— but I wanted to hear his voice. No matter what he’d said in Moxie, no matter how he’d shamed me. After three years, he knew me better than probably anyone else in the world, except Samantha, and at that moment, standing on the sidewalk on 17th and Walnut, I wanted to talk to him so badly that I got weak in the knees.
I hurried home and heaved myself up the stairs two at a time. Sweaty, hands shaking, I sprawled on the bed and reached for the phone, punching in his number as fast as I could. He picked up instantly.
“Hey, Bruce,” I began.
“Cannie?” His voice sounded strange. “I was just going to call you.”
“Really?” I felt a small spark of hopefulness flare in my chest.
“I just wanted to let you know,” he began, and his voice dissolved into harsh, ragged sobs. “My father died this morning.”
I don’t remember what I said then. I remember that he told me the details: He’d had a stroke and he’d died in the hospital. It had been very fast.
I was crying, Bruce was crying. I couldn’t remember when I’d felt so horrible about something. It was so unfair. Bruce’s father was a wonderful man. He had loved his family. He had even, I thought, maybe loved me, too.
But even as I was feeling horrible, I felt the spark growing. He’ll get it now, a voice in my head whispered. Once you’ve had a loss like that, doesn’t it change the way you see the world? And wouldn’t it change the way he saw me, my own fractured family, my own lost father? Plus, he’d need me. He’d needed me once before, to rescue him from loneliness, from sexual ignorance and shame… and surely he would need me again to help him get through this.
I imagined us at the funeral, and how I’d hold his hand, how I’d help him, hold him up, be there for him to lean on, the way I wished I could have leaned on him. I imagined him looking at me with new respect and understanding, new consideration, with the eyes of a man, not a boy.
“Let me help. How can I help?” I said. “Do you want me to come over?”
His reply was dismayingly instant. “No,” he said. “I’m going home, and there’s a ton of people there now. It would be weird. Could you come to the funeral tomorrow?”
“Of course,” I said. “Of course. I love you,” I said, the words out of my mouth almost before I’d finished thinking them.
“What does that mean?” he asked me, still crying.
To my credit, I recovered fast. “That I want to be there for you… and help you any way I can.”
“Just come tomorrow,” he said dully. “That’s all you can do right now.”
But something perverse in me persisted.
“I love you,” I said again, and left the words hanging there. Bruce sighed, knowing what I wanted, and unwilling, or unable, to give it to me.
“I have to go,” he said. “I’m sorry, Cannie.”
PART TWO
Reconsider Me
FIVE
Thinking back, there was probably some way I could have felt worse at Bernard Guberman’s funeral. Like if I’d killed him myself.
The service started at two o’clock. I got there early, but the parking lot was already full, with cars backed down the driveway, spilling onto the highway. I finally parked across the street, dashed across four lanes of traffic and straight into a cluster of Bruce’s friends. They were standing in the vestibule, in what were surely their interview suits, hands in their pockets, talking quietly and looking at their feet. It was a brilliantly sunny fall afternoon— a day to look at leaves, to buy apple cider and build the first fire of the year. Not a day for this.
“Hey, Cannie,” George said softly.
“How’s he doing?” I asked.
George shrugged. “He’s inside,” he said.
Bruce was sitting in a little vestibule, holding a bottle of Evian water and a handkerchief in his right hand. He was wearing the same blue suit he’d worn on Yom Kippur, when we’d sat side by side in temple. It was still too tight, the tie still too short, and he was wearing canvas sneakers that he’d decorated with drawings of stars and swirls during some particularly boring lecture. The second I saw him it was as if our recent history fell away— my decision to ask for a break, his decision to describe my body in print. It was as if nothing was left but our connection— and his pain. His mother stood above him with one hand on his shoulder. There were people everywhere. Everyone was crying.
I went over to Bruce, knelt down, and hugged him.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, coolly. Formally. I kissed his cheek, scratchy with what looked like three days’ growth of beard. He didn’t appear to notice. The hug his mother gave me was warmer, her words a marked contrast to his. “Cannie,” she whispered. “I’m glad you’re here.”
I knew it was going to be bad. I knew I’d feel terrible, being there, even after our parking-lot breakup, even though, of course, there was no earthly way I could have known that this would happen.
But it wasn’t just bad. It was agony. Agony when the rabbi, whom I’d seen at Bruce’s house at dinner a few times, talked about how Bernard Leonard Guberman had lived for his wife and his son. About how he’d take Audrey to toy stores, even though they didn’t have grandchildren. “Just to be ready,” he’d say. Which was when I lost it, knowing that I was the one who was supposed to produce those grandchildren, and how much the kids would have loved him, and how lucky I would have been to have that kind of love in my life.
And I sat there on the hard wooden bench in that funeral parlor, eight rows back from Bruce, who was supposed to have been my husband, thinking how all I wanted was to be beside him, and how I’d never felt farther away.
“He really loved you,” Bruce’s Aunt Barbara whispered to me as we stood washing our hands outside the house. There were cars double-parked in the cul-de-sac, cars circling the block, so many cars that they’d had to station a policeman outside the cemetery for the burial service. Bruce’s father had been active in the temple, and had had a thriving practice as a dermatologist. Judging from the throngs, it looked like every Jew or teenager with a skin condition had shown up to pay their respects.
“He was a wonderful man,” I said.
She looked at me curiously. “Was?”
Which was when I realized that she was talking about Bruce, who was still alive.
Barbara wrapped her maroon fingernails around my forearm and dragged me into the immaculate, Downy-scented laundry room.
“I know you and Bruce broke up,” she said. “Was it because he didn’t propose?”
“No,” I said. “I guess… I just felt more and more that maybe we weren’t a good fit.”
It was as if she hadn’t heard.
“Audrey always told me that Bernie said how happy he’d be to have you in the family,” she said. “He always said, ‘If Cannie wants a ring, she’ll have a ring in a minute.’ ”
Oh, God. I felt tears starting to build behind my eyes. Again. I’d wept during the service, when Bruce stood on the bimah and talked about how his father taught him to catch a ball and drive, and I’d cried at the cemetery when Audrey sobbed over the open grave and said, over and over, “It isn’t fair, isn’t fair.”
Aunt Barbara handed me a handkerchief.
“Bruce needs you,” she whispered, and I nodded, knowing that I couldn’t trust my voice. “Go,” she said, pushing me into the kitchen. I wiped my eyes and went.
Bruce was sitting on the porch with his friends around him in a forbidding-looking circle. When I approached, he squinted at me, observing me like a specimen on a slide.
“Hey,” I said softly. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
He shook his head and looked away. There was someone in every chair on the porch, and nobody looked like they were moving. As gracefully as I could, I squatted down on the step behind them, just outside of the circle, and sat there, holding my knees. I was cold, and hungry, but I hadn’t brought a jacket, and there wasn’t anywhere to balance a plate. I listened to them talk about nothing— about sports, and concerts, and their jobs, such as they were. I watched as Bruce’s mother’s friends’ daughters, a trio of interchangeable twentysome-things, made their way onto the porch with paper plates full of petit fours, and gave Bruce their condolences, and their smooth cheeks to kiss. It felt like swallowing sand, watching him go out of his way to smile at them and show how he’d remembered all their names, when he could barely spare me a glance. Sure, I knew when— if— we decided to break up, he’d most likely find somebody else. I just never thought I’d have to suffer through a preview. I sat on my hands feeling wretched.
When Bruce finally stood up, I got up to follow him, but my leg had fallen asleep, and I stumbled and went sprawling, wincing as a splinter dug its way into my palm.
Bruce helped me up. Reluctantly, I thought.
“Do you want to take a walk?” I asked him. He shrugged. We walked. Down the driveway, down the street, where more cars were massing.
“I’m so sorry,” I told him. Bruce said nothing. I reached for his hand, my fingertips brushing the back of his palm. He didn’t reach back. “Look,” I said, feeling desperate, “I know things have been… I know that we…” My voice trailed off. Bruce looked at me coldly.
“You aren’t my girlfriend anymore,” he said. “You were the one who wanted a break, remember? And I’m small,” he practically spat.
“I want to be your friend,” I said.
“I’ve got friends.”
“I noticed,” I told him. “Mannerly bunch.”
He shrugged.
“Look,” I told him. “Could we… could we just…” I put my fist against my lips. Words were failing me. All I had left were sobs. I swallowed hard. Get through this, I told myself. “Whatever happened between us, however you’re feeling about me, I want you to know that your father was a wonderful man. I loved him. He was the best father I ever saw, and I’m sorry he’s gone, and I just feel so terrible about all of this…” Bruce just stared at me. “And if you want to call me…” I finally managed.
“Thanks,” he finally said. He turned to walk toward the house, and after a moment I turned to follow him, like a chastened dog, walking numbly behind him with my head hanging down.
I should have just left, but I didn’t. I stayed on through the evening prayers, when men with tallits over their shoulders crowded Audrey’s living room, bumping their knees on the hard wooden mourning benches, pressing their shoulders against the covered mirrors. I stayed when Bruce and his friends gathered in the white-and-chrome kitchen to pick over deli trays and make small talk. I hung on the edge of the group, so full of sadness I thought I would burst, right there on Audrey’s Spanish-tiled floor. Bruce never looked at me. Not even once.
The sun set. The house slowly emptied. Bruce collected his friends and took us up to his bedroom, where he sat down on his bed. Eric and Neil and Neil’s hugely pregnant wife took the couch. George took the chair at Bruce’s desk. I folded myself up on the floor, outside of the circle, thinking with some small and primitive part of my brain that he’d have to talk to me again, he’d have to let me comfort him, if our years together were to have meant anything.
Bruce unfastened his ponytail, shook out his hair, and tied it back again. “I’ve been a child my whole life,” he announced. Nobody seemed to know quite how to respond to that, so they did what I supposed they normally did, up in Bruce’s room. Eric filled the bong, and George fished a lighter out of his suit jacket pocket, and Neil shoved a towel under the door. Unbelievable, I thought, biting back a burst of hysterical laughter. They cope with death the exact same way they cope with a Saturday night when there’s nothing good on cable.
Eric passed the bong to Neil without even asking me if I wanted it. I didn’t, and he probably knew it. The only thing pot ever did for me was make me want to sleep and eat even more than I already did. Not exactly the kind of drug I needed. Still, it would have been nice if he’d offered.
“Your father was really cool,” George mumbled, and everyone else mumbled his assent, except for Neil’s pregnant wife, who made a big production of heaving herself to her feet and walking out the door. Or maybe it’s always a production to get up and go when you’re that pregnant. Who knows? Neil gazed at his sneakers. Eric and George said again how sorry they were. Then everybody started talking about the playoffs.