The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (14 page)

The horrible truth is, she doesn’t truly belong anywhere and never really has.

And now, even worse, she sees that after telling Jonathan she was maybe starting menopause, she realizes that she really is. She got up in the middle of the night one night and checked the Internet, and there were dozens—dozens!—of women who wrote about going into menopause at forty-four. So
that’s
what’s wrong with her, she thinks as she looks at her pathetic, drawn, wrinkling face in the bathroom mirror each day: she got old and tired, and somehow she missed out on having the life she wanted. It’s no wonder she wakes up crying. She doesn’t even know what that life would have been.

One night George brings over ice cream, and the four of them—George, Soapie, Tony, and Rosie—all go sit outside on the patio to eat it. There are supposed to be shooting stars that night, but there’s too much light to really see them,
and so the night is something of a disappointment to Soapie, who says that all the major astronomical events of the century have been just hype.

“Just eat some ice cream and enjoy the evening,” George says. “Listen to the crickets and the frogs. They’re never a disappointment.”

“We have ice cream on a hot night, so how bad could life be?” Tony says.

Then George tells a lovely story about making peach ice cream with Louise on another summer night so long ago, and how ice cream took on a whole new meaning for him after that.

“We churned it until we were both so tired and sweaty. I kept thinking this couldn’t possibly be worth it, and why didn’t I just go to Dairy Queen and get us some? But then—
then
,” he says, and Rosie can see his eyes shine in the darkness, “then the texture, the sweetness, the real cream!” he exclaims. “You think of how people in the world are suffering, and there you are, eating fresh peaches that you’ve whipped up yourself in a churn with cream. It-it …”

Words fail him, and Soapie leans over and pats his leg, and he places his arm around her shoulders and wipes at something in his eye.

“And here we are tonight,” Soapie says, “eating ice cream together, you and me, and the world for us is perfect.”

Rosie, watching in the drowsy twilight, feels as though she’s never known her grandmother at all.

Three weeks after she’s moved in, on an overly warm July night, Tony and George start ostentatiously cooking dinner, some concoction they are quite proud of, involving red sauce and pasta and garlic and mozzarella and every pot and pan in the kitchen. And wine. She and Soapie have been told to sit, the men will do all the work tonight—and Rosie is happy to support this. It’s interesting having sweet, loud, well-meaning men around, with their flourishy cooking.

Soapie is swanning about, and having declared that it’s lovely to see men working, she is seemingly unable to sit down and actually let it take place. She’s made piña coladas for everybody in her inimitable Soapie way, sweeping around the kitchen in her designer bedroom slippers and Vera Wang dressing gown, gathering up the ingredients one by one, narrating her progress and asking for help as she goes and then yelling at the people who give it. The kitchen is a garlicky, olive oil–reeking mess, with pineapple odors thrown in for good measure.

Tony, still wearing his baseball cap backward and gesturing with the knife as he cuts up the garlic, is talking, loudly, about his mother, the finest cook in Hoboken, and how once she won an award for her tomato sauce, but then the prize got rescinded because some lady—and here he is using the word loosely—said that Mrs. Cavaletti stole her recipe from somebody’s Aunt Toots in Mount Kisco, and it was a big
scandal for a while, and Tony and his friends ended up having to TP the lady’s house just to teach her a big lesson. Both Soapie and George need to hear how it is that a person can actually drape a house in toilet paper, and Rosie, who’d put a coat of primer on the guest room walls that day, gets so tired during the explanation that she has to lay her head down on the table for just a moment. When she looks up, they’re all staring at her.

“I’m sorry, but my head is killing me. I think I really just need to go upstairs to bed,” she says. “I think I’m coming down with something.”

“What you need is red meat,” Tony says. “Tomorrow I’m going to make you a big steak. Did you ever have steak with butter on it? Best thing in the world for you when you’re run down.”

“I don’t think I’m run down,” Rosie says. “I’m just old and
tired
.”

“Rare is best. You like rare? With mushrooms? I read somewhere that mushrooms can cure anything.”

That leads Soapie to point out that so many of those food cures are just the thing, and maybe there’s a way for the Dustcloth Diva to incorporate some food cures into her next book. “Give me a pencil, George. I’m going to write down that mushrooms cure anything. We have our first tip.”

“Mushrooms can’t cure everything,” Rosie says grouchily, “and the Dustcloth Diva can’t do food stuff. It’s not right. Your advice has to involve things that can be improved with dustcloths. That’s your brand.”

“So I’ll be the Tablecloth Diva.”

George laughs. “How many divas can one person be? We’re already scared enough of you as it is.”

“You should be scared of me, George Tarkinian,” she says, and leans over and nuzzles against him. “You’ve done a
million things wrong, starting back in 1945 when you married the wrong girl—”

“You, I believe, weren’t available, my dear, having already gone and married another man,” George says, and Rosie wants to hear more—really, this has been going on
forever?
—but Tony claps his hands and jumps in with, “Now, now, there will be none of that talk about the things George did wrong. The past is gone.”

He shepherds them all into the dining room like they’re his own personal patients, Rosie limping and ill, and the two old people toddling along with their arms around each other. Soapie goes to light candles on the dining room table and nearly catches the sleeve of her gown on fire reaching across, and Tony jumps in and shields her right at the last second and then tucks her into her seat, placing her napkin on her lap and her hands close to her plate, just so. She smiles up at him, and Rosie is surprised to see that she has the expression of a compliant schoolgirl, waiting to be given directions. Her eyes are slightly cloudy, and her hands shake as she reaches for the bowl of pasta, which he then gets for her and dishes onto her plate. Some for her, and then some for George.

“You’re always saving us,” Soapie says, and gives Tony a huge smack on the cheek.

After dinner, Soapie and George take their drinks and go off to the living room, pretend-bickering over whether they’ll dance to Frank Sinatra or Frankie Laine tonight. George is arguing that Frankie Laine is too moody and gloomy, but Soapie claims that she can’t find the Sinatra record. Tony goes and helps them turn on the stereo and look for the record, which was right on the record player, he tells Rosie when he comes back into the kitchen. She’s piling the plates in the sink.

“Here, I’ll do that. You rest,” he says.

“I’m really okay.”

“No, I insist. Go sit down. Once I’ve made you steak and mushrooms,
then
you can work.”

She goes and sits down. “Look, you really don’t have to fix me a steak. It’s just that I was painting the guest room today and I got tired.”

“Yeah, but you look—I don’t know—like you might be sick.”

For a moment, she thinks how much fun it would be to wallop him, but then she thinks better of it and merely says, “Well, I said I was coming down with something.” Anybody with any sense would realize she also means, “So leave me the hell alone.”

But of course he doesn’t. He stops loading the dishwasher and stares at her, coming closer so he can more easily peer into her face.

“What?” she says.

“Is there any chance you could be … pregnant?” he says. “I mean, not for nothin’, but you look to me like you got a classic case of baby-on-the-way.”

She glares at him and shakes her head. “No, no, no.”

“I mean, sometimes I’m a guy who can just
sense
pregnancy,” he says. “I don’t know why. My ex said I should hire myself out as a human pregnancy test, save people a lot of money on those home kit thingies. I knew right away when she was expecting Milo, even before she missed her period. I can just kind of
read
it. I don’t know how it works, it just does.”

She rolls her eyes. “You might have known about Milo, because you were the one who had sex with her. Right?”

“Well, yeah, but there’ve been some other cases, too. I swear it. It’s a gift.”

“Well, that’s a nice gift to have, I’m sure, but I’m not
pregnant,” says Rosie, although her voice is shaking as she says it.

He shrugs and goes back to loading the dishwasher. “Steak’ll be good for you either way, pregnant or not,” he says.

“Yeah, but I’m really not,” she says. She’s about to explain to him that the Internet thinks she’s probably in menopause, but why engage him in thinking about her hormonal life at all? Why encourage him?
This is ridiculous
. “I’m just tired from painting in the heat, that’s all this is. That, and I’m missing Jonathan and my old life. I used to have a very nice life.”

“So why
are
you painting the guest room?” he says.

Rosie speaks in a low voice. “I’m trying to get this place in order for when Soapie can’t live here anymore and we have to sell it. Her doctor said he’d like to see her in an assisted-living place sooner rather than later, because of the little strokes she’s having.”

“That’s wack,” he says. “She’s in there
dancing
, for God’s sake. She doesn’t need assisted living.”

“Well, I know it may seem that way to you right now, but the doctor’s point is that she could get used to it before she really needs all the services, and she could be in the independent-living part and then get increasing amounts of help as she needs it.”

He scowls. “She’s fine. The best place she can be is here with us. We’re assisting her with living.”

“Yeah, but who knows how long we’re staying?” she says. “As my fiancé points out, we need to be practical. And she doesn’t seem to want to take care of herself.”

He puts the plates on the bottom row of the dishwasher. “I hate this kind of talk. She just wants to have fun. Eat good food, do fun things, have a little romance, enjoy the neighbor’s peonies. I don’t see what’s so wrong with that.”

“Well, of course it’s fine for
now
,” she says. “It just won’t stay this way. She’s going downhill, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“But why should we rush it?” he says. He frowns as he wrestles the pots onto the top row of the dishwasher and closes the door, and Rosie can absolutely feel what he’s thinking about her right then: that she’s the type of person who would gladly put her grandmother in some kind of facility just so she can go out and join her noncommittal, teacup-loving boyfriend who doesn’t care enough about her to marry her, even when she had the celebration all arranged. And that she’s even too clueless to know that she’s pregnant. Which, by the way, she is not. He is clearly the bossiest, nosiest person she’s ever met, and he’s given her a headache.

“It’s not how you think it is,” she says to him, getting to her feet. “Things aren’t always the way they look, you know. That’s what you learn when you get older.”

She heads up the stairs to bed.

“If I were you, I’d go buy a test,” he calls after her.

She eats the steak dinner he makes for her the next night, and she has to admit it’s good, even if the sight of the mushrooms make her a little bit skeevy. All that slimy brownness. She eats them anyway, just so he won’t get on the pregnancy bandwagon again—telling her how food sensitivities are just more evidence. She’s armed tonight, though, with news she gleaned from the Internet: getting pregnant at age forty-four is pretty much considered a freaking
miracle
—and the
odds of having gotten pregnant at that age in one accidental time of unprotected intercourse are practically incalculable. She very much hopes, though, that she will not start talking about her sex life with Tony Cavaletti.

Soapie and George go into the living room after dinner again; more slow dancing to Frank Sinatra. Rosie looks in on them, and she reports to Tony that what they call dancing looks more like standing in the middle of the room and swaying one inch in each direction.

“
Dancing with the Stars
, here they come,” he says. “Gotta love it.”

“It’s hugging to music,” she says. “I can’t get over it.
The Dustcloth Diva Finally Falls in Love
. Now that’s the book she ought to be writing.”

“Except she’s having too much fun to write it,” Tony says. “Say,” he says in an artificially bright voice, a change-the-subject voice. “I’ve kinda been wondering this. Why do you call her Soapie anyway? Is it because of those cleaning books? Because she’s so clean?”

“No. Hardly that. When I was three, I probably couldn’t pronounce Mrs. Baldwin-Kelley.”

He looks startled. “What? She didn’t want you to call—oh, you’re joking.”

“Well, not by much. I think she wanted me to call her Sophie, and I heard it wrong or something.”