London Is the Best City in America (12 page)

This reminded me of what I was supposed to be learning now, what lessons I was hoping to be taking from the wives. I was so stuck on wanting to see one particular thing from them, I was a little worried I was missing it, what I was really supposed to be learning.

I turned and looked at Grace. “You know, if commuting gets tough or something, you’re welcome to stay at my place. I live right near URI,” I said. “Like fifteen minutes away, tops.”

“Yeah?” she said, nodding at me in a way that told me she already knew that. Josh must have told her. I fiddled with my sandwich, trying not to think about what else he must have told her. Trying—even harder—not to worry about how he was doing right now. What was or wasn’t being decided.

Grace put her sandwich down too, blushing a little. “I’m a little nervous about meeting friends, and stuff. Maybe you can show me what people do around there for fun.”

“Oh, I would, but I don’t have any.”

“Fun?”

“People.”

She smiled, and then stood up and started cleaning the table. “You know,” she said, “your brother used to joke with me that if we never talked about school, we wouldn’t have to go back. To just ignore it when anyone said I needed to do something to get ready.”

I had been standing up to help her, but I stopped, mid-stand, just froze there. And I must have started looking at her funny, which may have scared her, but probably because she thought she’d broken our deal to not discuss them. She hadn’t broken the deal, though—or at least it didn’t matter to me anymore. How could I explain to her that, in ways I wasn’t entirely ready for, different things were starting to?

I tried to recover, quickly, saying the absolute first thing that came to my mind. “So I noticed the lake,” I said, pointing in its imagined direction. “It looks a little like wrapping paper from a distance. You know, that shiny kind. I’m always wrapping it wrong, putting the shine on the inside. Does it look like that close up?”

“Maybe a little,” she said, and started to laugh, which let me know it didn’t. “But we could go sit by it, if you’d like. Pick up a couple of the dogs and bring them with.”

“Not the big dogs,” I said, before I could stop myself. “Or . . . you know what? Let’s just go.”

The pamphlet Grace had handed me in the house explained that in every litter of bullmastiffs, there was the alpha dog—usually the firstborn, always the main protector—that the other baby pups tried to stay near, cuddle into, and ultimately emulate. Then there was the runt. The runt was essentially the alpha dog’s opposite: smaller, weaker, the scaredy-cat of all its brothers and sisters. Ironically, it was the one that was often considered the most aggressive dog because it was more prone to bite. It was prone to try to prove how tough it was.

It didn’t matter that I read this on the way to the paddocks. When we got there, I was drawn to the littlest dog in the litter anyway. Hannibal. Apparently, his name hadn’t predisposed him to prowess. Grace, on the other hand, let out Sam, the biggest dog. The alpha. Hannibal had all of Sam’s features: same chocolate skin, same heavy jowls—all of it just much smaller.

This might be why—despite all evidence to the contrary—I thought it was a good idea to reach straight into his pen and pick Hannibal up myself. Before Grace could stop me, or reach over and control the situation, my new pal Hanny rewarded me by digging in—teeth first—to take a nice-size chunk of skin off my wrist.

“Oh, my gosh,” I said, dropping him to the ground. “He bit me.”

Grace raced over to survey the damage. I turned my wrist over to show her. Right by my wrist bone—where skin used to be—I expected to see a small, red moon. But there was really just a tiny scratch.

“That doesn’t look too bad,” Grace said, reaching into a pocket and coming out with a Band-Aid. “It could have been a lot worse.” She looked down at Hannibal and gave him a scowl. “Not nice!” she said to him.

“Can he hear you?” I asked, blowing on the non-wound.

She picked Hannibal back up, patting him on the head. “She just needs a lot of touching,” she said. “She has to learn that that’s safe.”

I looked up from putting the Band-Aid on my wrist. “He’s a she?”

Grace nodded, reaching into her pocket and taking out an oatmeal cookie.

I shook my head as she tried to hand it to me. “I think I’m okay for now,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Give it to Hannibal. If you feed it to her, she’ll trust you more.”

The thought of putting my hand near her mouth again wasn’t too appealing right then. But I put the cookie up to her lips anyway, like Grace showed me, letting her lick it off my hand, rubbing her head with my free one.

“We just have to be extra careful with the runt generally, and spend more time,” she said. “Not less. Less gets you into trouble.”

I pulled my hand away. “Sounds like most people I know,” I said.

We headed down toward the lake, Hannibal in Grace’s arms, Sam in tow behind me. Grace seemed happier—or more comfortable, at least—now that the dogs were around. When we got down to the lake, she sat herself down on the edge and took her shoes off, put her feet right in the water. I followed suit. It didn’t feel so nauseatingly hot when our feet were in the water. I felt, automatically, a lot cooler—and happier—a chill racing up my spine for the first time all day.

“You want to know a secret?” Grace said. “Well, maybe it’s not really a secret, but you want to know the real reason I don’t want to leave here?”

“There’s a boy,” I said for her. “He’s the reason?”

“How did you do that?”

“I’m not that old.”

“You’re pretty old,” she said.

“I am,” I said. I put my head in my hands, shaking my head. “How did that happen?”

Grace started laughing. I looked at her and smiled. I hadn’t been that much older than her when Matt and I started dating. And I remembered it so clearly—that feeling at the beginning—that incredible feeling that this was the first real thing that had ever happened to me. I wanted to tell anyone who would listen: my mother, my friends, the mailman. Even if I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I think I believed that talking about Matt made us more real, somehow, more permanent. In some way, maybe it did.

“The thing is, he’s a year behind me in school,” she said. “He has a year left here, but the problem is he doesn’t want to go to college at all, even when he can. Except maybe the community college here, which is pretty terrible.”

It was called Baruch. Baraque. Something like that. I had seen it driving in. The entire campus was composed of three small buildings, a circular driveway. No ocean access that I could see.

“He wants to just stay here and keep everything like it is. His family has these two flower shops. One here, one the next town over. And he’ll be fine. He can do that forever, and be content. He wants to do that forever.”

“What do you want?” I said.

“I want to keep him happy,” she said.

I looked down at the water. Sam was standing right on the edge, getting closer to waddling in. Hannibal was busy digging, nestling into my side headfirst. I reached out, gingerly, to pet her. My junior year of college, Matt had been a finalist for a great internship at an architecture firm in Chicago, and he would have taken it, wouldn’t have let us being apart from each other stop him at all, if they had taken him. It was the first time I questioned my own decision to attend NYU instead of going out to California like I’d originally planned. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to go, but it had been such an easy decision for me to choose being near him, keeping him happy. I couldn’t understand why, all those years later, our being apart wasn’t a harder one for him to make. It took a long time for me to understand that the fact that I feared him going contributed to him not being scared himself. That was often the truth. Someone’s affection would give someone else freedom.

“I just think if I stay here for the year and commute, we’ll figure it out, you know? He’ll see college isn’t so weird. Maybe he’ll want to come with me the next year.” Grace shook her head, almost angrily. “I just think people forget what it feels like to really be in love, you know? Like when that’s the only thing in the world that matters. I just don’t want to decide it’s not that important. Do you know what I mean by that?”

I knew exactly what she meant, which made it harder to figure out how to tell her what I wanted to say, which was that it wasn’t always everything. Love. And still, what did I know? The reason Matt and I hadn’t worked out wasn’t because I loved him like that. It was because he stopped loving me like that. And really, why did that have to be the end of the story? I had made it the end because I was too scared about what might be coming next—some watered-down version of what we’d once been. What had come next instead? Me, motionless, unable to do much without him. The watered-down version of what I’d once been.

“So did you have a serious boyfriend when you were in high school?” Grace asked. She put her hands in the lake to wet them, petting Sam’s back, cooling him down.

“Kind of.”

She looked at me, confused. “Kind of serious?”

“Kind of high school,” I said. “He was already in college when we met. It’s a long story.”

“How did it end?” she said, but before I could even answer, her brow was tightening, her eyes getting nervous. And I could tell she wasn’t wondering about Matt and me anymore, not really. She was wondering how she could avoid it happening to her.

“Do you miss him?” she whispered.

Every day,
I wanted to say. “You know, I wouldn’t compare it really, anyway,” I said. “I think it sounds totally different. For starters, I just wanted to keep him happy.”

She licked her lips, forming the beginning of a laugh. “Man. I really walked into that one, didn’t I?” she said.

“Look,” I said. “The truth is that no one can know. That’s what no one wants to tell you. It may work out beautifully between the two of you. You may celebrate your seventieth anniversary, right here, by this lake. Despite whatever you do or you don’t do. It’s happened before,” I said.

“It has,” she said. “It has happened . . . I wish you could meet him. You know what? The shop’s like fifteen minutes from here. We could go stop by. Or I could call him, and he could come by here. I know he’d love to meet you. I know he’d love to meet Josh’s sister . . .”

Josh. Where was he now? How was it that in the midst of all of this, I had managed to forget about him, forget about what was at stake for him, if only for a couple of minutes? Maybe because part of being here let me realize it. How much was at stake, even besides him. I looked down at my watch. Almost two. If we left right now, we would be home with enough time to get ready for tonight. If that was what he wanted. But only if we left right now.

“Oh, sorry. Forget it,” she said. “It’s probably not the best time for introductions.”

“No, I’m sorry. I’d like to meet him. It’s just that I don’t know what Josh is doing.”

“Who does?” she said. Then she shrugged, wiping her wet hands on her jeans. “Besides, what can meeting someone really tell you anyway? What did you tell from meeting my mom? I know you didn’t really get to, but can I tell you something, then, honestly? I mean if I told you Josh and my mom were like that, like that much in love, would it make you want to throw up?” she said. “Would it be so corny that you’d have to puke?”

I smiled. “I’m not going to puke.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Because they’d always just do this thing, you know, after they thought I was sleeping,” she said. “They’d come down here and dance by the lake. They didn’t even bring music. No CD player, no radio. They’d just dance. And I know everything else. I know he’s had a girlfriend for a long time. I know it’s hard for him to imagine leaving her. I know he wasn’t honest about it with my mom. I get all that. But what about the dancing? Especially because they’d always do it so well together. I mean,
really
well. Like they were hearing the same song or something.”

I looked out at the lake. The world I knew felt so far away. Everything but this felt far away and imaginary and untrue. And I knew the rest of it would come screaming back soon enough. But for a minute, just one more, I tried to hold it. So I’d remember. So, whatever happened, I wouldn’t decide that this wasn’t true too.

“I just don’t understand how the same thing can be playing in both of their heads like that,” she said. “If it isn’t love between them, how did the same thing get there?”

A few minutes after we made it back to the kitchen, Josh and Elizabeth got back from their walk. Elizabeth came through the door first, Josh right behind her. His shirt was off—the long-sleeved one that had been under the short-sleeved one—now he was just wearing the short-sleeved one. And they weren’t talking to each other. I tried to read the situation, but I wasn’t sure how. It didn’t really seem like a bad kind of not talking. It didn’t seem like they were about to leave each other again.

“Hey, guys,” Josh said, patting my back as he walked past me at the table and over to where Grace was. “How’s your day been going?”

He tried to give me a smile. I tried to give him one back, but I think my attempt was even less successful than his.

“Emmy got attacked by Hannibal,” Grace said, as Josh bent down beneath her chair.

“You all right?” Josh asked, turning toward me, but it was Elizabeth who came over quickly, looking for where.

I put out my wrist to show her. “I’m really fine. There’s barely even a scratch,” I said. Trying to point it out to her, I actually had trouble finding it.

Elizabeth turned toward Grace. “That’s not funny to joke about, Grace,” she said.

Grace gave her mother a look and turned back toward Josh. “It’s a little bit funny,” she said to him. “Don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,” he said.

Then he wrapped his hands around the back of her chair’s legs and moved in closer. At first I thought I was having déjà vu or something—the scene looked so familiar. It took me a second to realize that this was how my dad used to talk to us when he was trying to explain something. Like the time I burned my hand on the grill and didn’t tell him all day because I thought I’d get in trouble for touching the grill when I knew I wasn’t supposed to. It was this way he had of looking right at us from a certain angle so that we knew he still loved us—whatever he was going to say to us next. Josh was talking low, and I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but Grace was nodding her head, softly, in agreement.