London Is the Best City in America (25 page)

Berringer turned me on my side away from him and started unzipping my dress. His hands were cold and quick on my bare skin, like glass.

“Let’s just rest for a while,” he said. His hands were on my stomach now, crisscrossed around each other, holding me.

“With your hands like that?” I said.

“We could try,” he said.

I turned around to face him, his hands on my back. “Okay,” I said, but I was already kissing him while I said it. He looked so nervous that it freed me somehow to not feel it myself—how nervous I was.

Which was a good thing.

Because if I had done anything differently—if I had looked away from him, had let him look away from me, if he hadn’t touched my skin, lying down above me, close, we might have thought better of this.

We might have stopped.

But instead he held me there, pushing my hair back with his fingers, his eyes open on my eyes, watching, everything happening so slowly at first, as though we’d been here, right here, a thousand times instead of one, as though this time we might be able to hold on to it. Locate it. Something old and quiet and lost that you can see again for just a few seconds, see in a bright flash, before you have to blink, close your eyes against it, start to quickly let go.

I must have drifted off because when I woke up, I was naked and Berringer was gone, which made me
feel
more naked. I got up slowly, but I felt it anyway—the sharp squeeze of it—my heartbeat moving around in my foot. I lay back down, taking an uncomfortable breath in. As I did, my cell phone started ringing from the bed. I reached for it, careful not to move my foot, which was as heavy as a cannon.

JOSH.

Man. “Where are you?” I said.

“The city still,” he said. “Where are you?”

“Home.”

“You’re home?”

I cleared my throat. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t want to bring up Meryl, or push him on what was happening with her back at the hotel. I wanted him to tell me when he was ready. I was hoping, now, he wouldn’t have any trouble actually telling me when he was ready.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m actually looking for Berringer. Did he come by the house? Have you seen him anywhere?”

I shot up, grabbing for my dress. “Why would I have I seen him anywhere? Why would I have seen Berringer? Anywhere?” I knew I was rambling, but I couldn’t help it.

“Emmy,” he said. “Easy.”

“I’m easy,” I said. Again, not really the best response.

“Look, if he calls the house, will you just tell him I’m looking for him? I was supposed to meet him at midnight. But I’m going to be a little late.”

Midnight. I was supposed to meet Matt at midnight. I turned and looked at the clock: 11:36. Oh, my God. It was 11:36. The diner was fifteen minutes away. If I got up right now and didn’t even shower—if I put on the first thing I saw—I might be able to be there on time.

“Hey, Josh, I really have to go,” I said. “I’ll see you when you get back here okay?”

But he didn’t hear me.

“What?” he said.

There was no time to repeat.

So I just hung up.

There were a couple of rules of the universe that I had learned, and felt like I could stand by. The first was that if I was in a rush to get anywhere—whether it was to get married or get to where I was going or to find out what happened next in my life—I would inevitably be late for it, slow myself down, as soon as I dared say the words out loud, as soon as I admitted, even in my head, that I wanted to be somewhere else, right then.

The second was that my mother would make me eat something first.

I opened the front door, holding the car keys, to find her and my dad on the other side of it, no longer in their wedding clothes—my dad carrying the tallest white box I’d ever seen.

“When did you get home?” he said from behind it.

“When did you guys get home?” I said.

I started shaking out my bad foot, holding on to the doorknob for support. My mom instinctively looked down at it, her eyes moving up and checking out my outfit: sky pajama pants with very sparkly clouds all over them, and a white V-neck T-shirt that said “I ♥ Mt. Airy Lodge” across the chest in matching sky blue.

“That’s a great look for you,” she said, nodding at my outfit before motioning for me to get out of the way so my dad could get into the house. She followed behind him. “Come into the kitchen with me for a minute. I want to talk to you.”

“Mom, I’m really late,” I said, pointing to the front door with the scribbled note still on it.

She was already in the kitchen. “Well, you’re going to have to be a little later then,” she called back to me.

I crumpled the note up, following her into the kitchen, reluctantly, and taking a seat on one of the stools. My dad was putting the box on the counter. He removed the top, slowly, revealing the glorious yellow pineapple cake. All six tiers of it.

“It’s bad luck not to eat some of the wedding cake,” my mom said, taking a seat on the stool across from me, pushing her hair back off her face.

“But they didn’t get married,” I said.

She gave me a look. “Are you going to argue with me about everything for my entire life? Let me know now.”

My dad kissed us both on the forehead—my mom first, then me—before heading toward the stairs. “You can bring mine up to me,” he said. “I need to take a shower for the next nine hours.”

“I’ll meet you in there,” my mom said, watching him go. And, just like when I was little and lived here, I had the same strange reaction I always had when I watched them flirt: somewhere between nausea and relief. She turned back to me, smiling. “Now,” she said, taking two forks out of the container on the counter, handing one to me. “I want to hear exactly what you’re thinking.”

“About what, Mom?

“Where your brother’s going now. After he deals with tonight, obviously, and this mess he’s made. Which is quite a mess, I might add.” She closed her eyes, as if against the whole situation. “Do you think that he is going to see her now? To his other friend?”

“You know about his other friend?” I said. “You know about Elizabeth?”

“Is that her name?” She held her bite of cake in front of her mouth. “That’s a nice name,” she said.

“That seems to be the consensus.”

She put the bite of cake in her mouth, starting to chew slowly. “Eat just a little,” she said.

I shook my head, looking at the bottom tier—the sugary-white inside showing from where my mom had taken her scoop. “I can’t,” I said. “I told you. I’m really running late.”

She looked at me questioningly as if to say, For what? I didn’t answer, which, I guess, was the only answer she needed.

“Ahh,” she said, putting her fork down.

“Mom, I’m not . . . I’m not getting restarted with that. With Matt, I mean. I love him. But I can’t. I know that now. I do know that,” I said.

And as soon as the words were out, I knew that I was telling her the truth. I understood, finally, that I couldn’t go back to Matt, and not worry, every day, about ending up right back here again. In this place where I had no idea how to really begin to make myself happy.

“You know, I’ve got to say, I’m not sure I understand my children,” she said, wiping her hands on her napkin. She pointed toward the front door. “That one spends years moving between two women, hoping one of them will eventually make the decision for him that only he can make. And this one organizes her life so even the choices she makes, she is always making the other one at the same time. She leaves, she stays. She stays exactly where she leaves.”

I tried to smile at her, which made me start to tear.

“When you were little, you were always saying that Josh got to make all the choices because he was older. ‘Why does he get to make all the decisions around here, Mom?’you’d say. ‘How is that fair?’ So for your seventh birthday, your father said you could pick where we went on the summer trip. You could pick any city in America as far away as Seattle, as close as Manhattan. You know which city you picked?”

I knew it without her even saying that much. I’d always known it, and I was starting to understand something else too—where she was going with this. What I wouldn’t allow myself to see before now.

“London,” I said.

“London,” she repeated. “And the thing was, it didn’t matter how many times I told you that we weren’t paying for four plane tickets to London. That a driving trip was the only option. It was like you couldn’t see anything else. And when even Dad took out that map and tried to explain to you that London wasn’t even in America, you just kept arguing with him. ‘But I want to go to London. It’s the best city in America. I’ll only go there.’ For weeks around here. You were like a broken record.”

“Where did we end up going instead that year?” I said, trying to remember. I couldn’t recall it.

“Hershey, Pennsylvania . . . which you loved. You turned to your father the very first day there and said, ‘Dad, I think Hershey, Pennsylvania, is even better than London would have been.’ ”

Hershey. All I could visualize with any certainty was the car ride up there, sitting behind my father in the backseat, staring sullenly at the back of his head. “Really? I said that?”

“No.” She shook her head. “You complained the entire time. ‘This restaurant isn’t London. This candy store isn’t London. Over here, this isn’t London either.’ ”

“How can I not remember?”

She shrugged, picking up her fork again, fixing a bite for me this time. “You were too busy complaining.”

I took the bite from her. It was sweet and fruity and a little on the warm side—from the car or the blackout or both. The taste stayed strong in my throat. “I’m sorry about that,” I said.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” she said. “You just have to try to understand what I’m telling you. I’ve told you the story of how your dad and I met, right?”

“Only a couple dozen times.”

“But do you remember?”

“Of course I remember,” I said. “You saw him and you left the bathroom and you knew you had to be with him. You just knew. From that moment on. It would be the two of you.”

“Absolutely not,” she said.

I looked at her in disbelief. “Okay,” I said. “You’re really starting to freak me out here.”

“What I knew was that if I walked out of the bathroom and said good-bye to him, I would be fine. I would go to the play and meet someone else—if not that afternoon, then another afternoon—and I’d have an entirely different life. I’d be married to this new person or I wouldn’t. Or I’d rekindle my romance with my first boyfriend, Neiman Mortimar, who happens to be the biggest distributor of women’s prom dresses anywhere in the Northeast, now. And I’d have a different house. Different furniture. White furniture, maybe. And I’d have these big, wonderful Shabbat dinners. And I’d like my mother-in-law very, very much.”

“Susan Mortimar? The tiny woman with the cane at Whole Foods who you always say hi to? The one with the pink hair, and the mini-size cart?”

“Isn’t she lovely?”

I couldn’t help it anymore. I really started to cry. Pineapple was sticking the wrong way in my throat. My mother moved in closer to me, covering the space of the counter between us.

But she didn’t reach for my hand, or lean farther forward so she could touch my face. She just shrugged. “What happened the day I met your father,” she said, “is that I learned you have to choose. For better or for worse. You have to choose what your life is going to look like.”

I tried to swallow, tried to think of what I wanted to say, what I was really thinking. “I just don’t feel like I have good choices yet,” I said. “It makes it hard to give up the old ones.”

She waved me off. “Well. You’re behind all that anyway,” she said. “You’re still stuck on the same part you were stuck on at seven.”

“What part is that?”

“The part where you need to choose among the choices that are there, and not the ones that aren’t anymore. At least not how you need them to be. You’re still stuck on some imaginary idea you have of how it could have been. You need to think about how it is now. And how you want it to be.”

How it might have been. How I want it to be. The list was forming in my head. In the “might have been” column there was Matt and me, Meryl and Josh. There was a trip to London that still hadn’t happened, and there was a future—a hundred of them, or one—that I still hadn’t begun to imagine. What was in the “how I want it to be” column? What could I find to put there? Did a new set of questions count?

But I didn’t ask her. I didn’t say anything. Not when what I was thinking was, I had no idea how far my life had gotten from any life I had wanted for myself. I was living in a small town, all alone, which would have been fine if I had chosen it for myself. But I had just
not
chosen anything else, and all of a sudden, it became very clear to me that this wasn’t at all the same thing.

My mom took her fork back, making herself a final bite, big and full of icing. “And don’t be offended, okay? But I wouldn’t wear that shirt again. No one
really
loves the Mt. Airy Lodge. Even when they pretend to.”

I was just under twenty minutes late by the time I got to the diner. It didn’t look like it had changed a drop in the last decade: big open windows lining the entire restaurant, large white pillars on either side of the entranceway, a huge neon sign shining in bright pink. I searched for a spot, parking the car haphazardly near the garbage tub in the back, making a beeline on my one good foot for the front door. All of a sudden I couldn’t get there fast enough.

It wasn’t that I was looking forward to saying no to Matt, or that I had magically figured out what I needed to say in order to completely let him go. But I did want to tell him I was sorry for leaving the motel room—not because it was the wrong thing to do, but because I finally understood that it stopped us from doing the only right thing. Saying good-bye in a way that I would believe it was for real. I was ready to do that now. And I wanted, very badly, to wish him luck in Paris. I wanted to wish him luck.

Only, when I got to the diner, he was already gone. The host told me he came in earlier and didn’t even sit down. He didn’t sit down or even really take a look around. He just handed him a large manila envelope and asked him to give it to a girl named Emmy.