The Stuff That Never Happened (5 page)

Padgett just shrugs and looks down at her lap, which probably means she’s reading her cell phone. I swear, this woman has had about a billion messages flashing back and forth through dinner—and I am enjoying an image of her in the delivery room texting away while she’s pushing the baby out, and also enjoying the idea that I am the first person to get this news and wondering how people will take it.

Clark clears his throat, and says in his momentous, department-chairman voice, “Wellll—you sure you don’t want to tell them, darling?” When she shakes her head, he says, “No? Well, then I will.” He takes a deep breath. “We’re taking a leave of absence and we’re going to travel the world!”

Grant stares straight ahead.

Now they’re kissing. Planting little tiny kisses all over each other’s faces. Clark pulls away, and his face is sweaty and he’s grinning, gums showing like mad, like he’s a fool for love, he’s so pleased with himself, and he says, “Padgett here hasn’t seen much of the world, so
I
have the pleasure of taking her to all my favorite places. And of course, we’re hoping to find a few of our own.” He puts his big bald forehead onto her smooth, unlined one, like a mind meld you’d see on
Star Trek
, and then they clink glasses, and, tardily, Grant and I toast them, too.

And then Clark leans forward and says in a low voice to Grant, “I’m going to recommend that you take my place as acting chair.”

I can feel the waves of dismay coming off Grant, as he tallies up all the time that little mission will take, in addition to his
book
and his three courses, and the essays he needs to grade. He clears his throat and says this is something he’ll have to think about.

“It’s a career move that I think you’re ready for,” says Clark, which I know Grant will find to be the most condescending remark ever, given that he is two years older than Clark and was trained at Columbia and is definitely slumming it by teaching here at this tiny little college, and everybody knows it. “It won’t be until the fall semester, which will give you time to finish that book of yours, and who knows but by then you may want to goose up your résumé and maybe get some extra attention from all the important awards committees, eh?”

Then he and Padgett go all kissy again, and her phone starts clamoring for her attention, and by the time the four of us have walked out to the parking lot, shivering in the cold, Clark has pretty much made it clear that Grant has to take the acting chairmanship—for God, for country, and for love, and I know this husband of mine: in some corner of his mind, he’s actually flattered, if still a bit stiff about the whole thing. He doesn’t like to be told how to feel about anything.

We drive home in silence for the first five miles, and then Grant says, “Well, I guess it could be a good thing, being chair, you know.”

“Yes.”

“I mean, I never would have sought it.”

“No, of course not.”

“But if it’s not until the fall … I’m on track to finish this book by then, and I could have an easier schedule, not teach so much, who knows, even maybe do some more research.”

“I like the sound of an easier schedule,” I say, and he actually reaches over and squeezes my hand and smiles at me. I think maybe he’s going to apologize for being such a jerk and say that once this book is done, another thing that’s going to get some of his time and attention is our marriage. Instead he says, “God almighty in heaven, shoot me if I ever get like Clark Winstanley!”

“With pleasure.”

“No, really. Get a gun and take me out to the woods if I ever go off the deep end like that. He’s gone stark raving mad for that woman! And is she just the rudest …?” He shakes his head, words having failed him.

I do an imitation of Padgett texting like mad, and when that makes him laugh, I do a monologue in her voice where she’s dissing Clark for liking The Beatles, a group I pretend she’s never heard of.

He pats my shoulder. “Sorry I called you silly.”

“Just don’t ever do it again, buster. Because I’ll
show
you silly. And I would also appreciate it if you could manage
not
to insult my work when we’re in public.”

“Did I insult your work?”

“You always do. You think it’s stupid for me to illustrate children’s books—”

“Annabelle. How many times do we have to go over this? This is a compliment to you. I think your illustrations are very sweet, but I just know you’re capable of so much more than drawing a squirrel named Bobo, no matter how significant he might be.”

I look out the window.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m proud of your work. Really.”

“All right,” I say grudgingly. “Apology accepted. I guess.”

“Can I make it up to you? What if we stop and get some politically incorrect dessert? I’m starving after eating that rabbit food. Do you want to?”

“You know I do.”

“Yeah, I know you do.” He turns into a Friendly’s, and we have sundaes piled high with whipped cream and nuts, and on the way home, we have to unfasten the top button of our pants so that we can continue to breathe. This is the good side of being married so long. It is so nice to be married, to let my stomach poke out.

“She’s wicked, making fun of Clark,” he says.

“She’s just young. Do you realize she’s only a little older than Sophie?”

He laughs a little. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she becomes another one of your waifs and strays. You just watch. A few months from now, I’m going to come home and you’ll be telling me that Padgett is running away from a terrible childhood and that she’s starting some environmental-slash-children’s book illustrators’ group, and you and she are going to cochair a conference where you make hummus together out of organic chickpeas that you grow in the backyard.”

“No, you forget she’s going to travel the world.”

“Well, otherwise, she’s a perfect candidate for the Annabelle McKay Waif and Stray Project.” I have this reputation in the family—unearned, I think—for always trying to fix people’s lives, to put them in touch with the people they need to know, to get them to dress better, or stand up straighter. It’s really that I’m the only one in the family who likes listening to other people.

“You wouldn’t ever do that, would you?” I say, teasing.

“Do what?”

“You know, leave me for some student who wears only politically correct clothes and thinks she knows everything.”

I am not serious; I would just like him to turn and look at me, to join me in playing at being smugly married for just one tiny moment before we walk back into the house. Don’t I have a right to that, at least? For him to hold my hand as we go in through the garage, and perhaps give me even the pretense of suspense that maybe we’re going to get inside and start up some kissing ourselves, maybe unwrap some of the layers we’re bundled in, and—what the hell?—take a Wednesday
night
sex romp.

But he says in a low voice, “Don’t be ridiculous. You know you never have to worry about that. We have our pact.”

“I’m sure Mary Lou thought she and Clark had a pact, too. Isn’t that what wedding vows are?” I say, and I move closer to him and interlace his fingers with mine.

“I don’t mean
that
pact. I mean our
other
pact,” he says, which is as close as he ever comes to mentioning the unmentionable. He doesn’t look at me; he opens his car door and gets out slowly, and then I get out, too, and he walks in front of me through the kitchen door. It’s dark and cold inside the house, which is exactly how I’m feeling inside. He snaps on the light over the sink, and I feel that old awful tugging inside me, that familiar dragging down of my mood. I have more to say. My throat is clogged with the wanting. But what?
What do you want to say to him, Annabelle?
I can hear Ava Reiss asking me that. Could I tell him, “It’s the craziest thing, but lately I keep having these weird dreams, and you won’t believe who’s in them.… Oh, and here’s a strange thing about me: yesterday I just started crying in the grocery store! What can that have been about?” Isn’t there anything we could say to each other? Maybe there’s some stuff there we forgot to examine a long time ago, and couldn’t we just say it? Just
say
it?

I hold my breath and then say softly, ashamed at how scared I am, “Would you like to, you know, skip work tonight and just come to bed?”

He looks at his watch and sighs. “I’ve wasted too much time already. I’ve really got to knock out the rest of chapter five tonight. Seriously.”

“Nice to be referred to as a waste of time.”

“Oh, stop it. You know what I mean,” he growls.

I know what I’d like to say. Now I know. When I asked him if he would ever do what Clark Winstanley did, I wasn’t really asking about him. I
know
he wouldn’t leave me for a younger woman, even if he could find one who wouldn’t mind his constant ahems.

It’s me.

I’m the one whose leaving I’m scared about.

[four]

1977

I
t was my brother, David, who broke the news to me that Edie and Howard, as we called our parents, were in no trial separation. The unthinkable had happened: our mom—our fully domesticated, chicken-roasting, housecleaning, dental receptionist mom—had met someone, and that was the real reason she was moving out.

“What do you mean,
met someone?”
I said. I was on the pay phone at the student center. If I looked out, I could see the campus lagoon sparkling in the sunlight. I almost couldn’t breathe. I stuck my index finger in and out of the rotary dial, hitting every number in rapid succession, a kind of finger hopscotch.

“Yeah. A young guy. A stud artist guy, I don’t know.”

I laughed. Now this part couldn’t be true. “A
stud?
Our mother is with a stud?”

There was a silence. David was a freshman, but he lived at home and went to the local junior college. He’d always been kind of a stoner guy, shy and gangly, with one girlfriend he’d had since seventh grade. They’d probably been quietly and earnestly doing it since they were thirteen. Once I’d found a condom in his room. After a moment he said, “Yeah. You won’t believe this, Annie. He drives a VW bus with writing all over it, and he teaches art at some adult-ed class she went to. She’s gone off the deep end, doing this whole weird feminist thing.”

“Feminist thing? This is the same woman who cries if Howard is even two minutes late getting home.”

“Yeah. I told you. She’s gone off the deep end or something.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Are they fighting and yelling and screaming?”

“No,” he said. “Howard’s drinking again, but all he’ll say is that Edie is just taking a little vacation from being a grown-up. She’s not really here very much anymore. She’s with that guy.”

Two weeks later, my dad called me to say he’d been demoted at the bank because the bastards there didn’t appreciate true service. I couldn’t remember ever talking to him on the phone for longer than it took him to pass the receiver to my mother. Now he was slurring his words. A man works at a place for twenty goddamn years, rises up to district manager, and then he has some goddamn personal problems and he has to take some goddamn time off to sort them out and to
rest
while he figures out what he’s going to do, and they just take away his responsibilities and bust him back to reading loan applications. He kept letting out little hacking coughs that I could tell he was trying to hide from me. Probably in addition to drinking, he’d also started smoking again.

“So, unless I win big at poker, you can forget about me paying your rent for the rest of the semester,” he said. “And I certainly can’t pay for college next fall. You might as well know all this right now so you can make your plans. Them’s the breaks, kid. Life isn’t fair, and it just got a lot more unfair.”

I swallowed hard and tried to speak in a very adult voice. “Is this because you’re so upset about Mom?”

“Listen, I won’t have you talking bad about your mom,” he said way too loudly. “You can’t go through life blaming other people. That’s the trouble around here, is all the goddamn blame for every goddamn thing.”

“I’m
not
blaming her—but what the hell, Daddy?”

“Stop it! And I won’t have you cussing, either. Your mother doesn’t know what she’s doing, and she deserves our sympathy. She’s with a man who could be her son. She’s going to need lots of luck in her second childhood.”

“Do you—do you want me to come home?”

“Do what you want. Nobody’s going to pay your tuition or your rent, so you figure it out. I didn’t raise an idiot.”

There was a muffled noise as he dropped the phone. When he spoke again, his voice sounded far away. “I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe your mother’s boy toy will pay your rent and tuition for you. Try that,” he said, and after about thirty seconds of fumbling, he managed finally to hang up the phone.

BECAUSE TROUBLE has always come for me in clusters, three days later the guy in the apartment above mine fell asleep while his bathtub was filling, and water came through the ceiling—and then the ceiling itself came down in big wet chunks. The landlord said he couldn’t get to it for another few weeks, and that we shouldn’t use our tub in the meantime. He suggested we wash in the bathroom sink, which made us howl with laughter.

Luckily for Magda, she had a married sister who lived in Santa Barbara who agreed to take her in, but there was no room for me there, too. As it was, she was going to have to share a room with her five-year-old nephew.

And then the club where I performed once a week with the Oil Spills decided we weren’t pulling in the big crowds anymore and they wanted to try out other bands.

“Before the universe sends the locusts and frogs, I think I have to go home,” I told Magda. “I am obviously meant to take this quarter off and put my family back together.”

Magda was a prime believer in signs from the universe. We both agreed that we’d find a way to room together again in the fall, one way or another.

That day I walked across campus to the admin building to see what you had to do to withdraw from classes, and whom should I see but Grant, riding his bike toward me. He blinked and slowed the bike, almost heading off the path and derailing two other riders behind him, who slid into the dirt.

“You!” he said. His bike skidded, and he jumped off. The two guys behind him flipped him the bird.

“Oh,” I said. “Hi. Just so you know, you nearly killed those people back there.”

“Sorry.” He gave them a little wave and turned back to me. “How are you doing?” His cheeks were bright pink, and he was sweating.

“I’m fine, I suppose. Leaving school tomorrow. Going back home.”

He cleared his throat. “Why would you do that?”

“I have to,” I said. “I have so many good reasons you wouldn’t believe it. Bad luck is raining down on me. You’re actually taking a big chance even standing here talking to me. An airplane could fall out of the sky on us.”

“Maybe I like to live dangerously. Give me the first three reasons.”

So I told him about the ceiling falling down in my apartment, and my band getting laid off from its usual gig—but when I started telling him about my family’s troubles, I could feel a lump in my throat.

“Everybody’s falling apart at home, and my father has gotten demoted at his job, all because my mother has left him for a guy who’s some kind of artist stud and drives a VW bus with writing on it. And I’ve run out of money, so I figure I’ll just go try to help my family,” I said.

“But why don’t you just wait until the end of the quarter? Haven’t you already paid for the whole quarter?”

“I haven’t paid the rent for the quarter, and my dad can’t help me—”

“Wait,” he said. “There are only five more weeks left. You can find a way to support yourself for that long, can’t you?”

I shook my head.

He looked down at the ground and cleared his throat, and then he looked up at the sky and squinted off in the distance and shifted his weight to his other foot. He said, “I think you should stay. You’re an idiot if you give up your whole life just to try to save your parents. Why don’t you stay with a friend for a while? Or get a part-time job as a waitress. You could make enough money to eat.”

“Maybe, but my mom is obviously having some kind of crisis. And my dad might even be a serious alcoholic by now. Who’s going to help them if I don’t?”

Just then Jay came up behind me, as he liked to do, always scaring the hell out of me by running up and grabbing me. I saw Grant flinch as I was tackled and nearly lost my balance on my platform shoes. I yelled, “Jay! Will you
stop it?”
but he was laughing as he wrapped his arms around me and rocked us back and forth.

“Jay, this is my friend Grant,” I said, struggling to duck out of his grasp, “so behave yourself, will you? We’re having a
conversation.”

“Hi, man,” said Jay. “Babe, I got us a gig at the Bluebird tonight.”

“Really? The Bluebird?” I said. We’d always wanted to play there. It was a real townie place, not just for students. “Are they paying us?”

“Twenty-five. And free drinks.”

“See?” said Grant. “Work is already coming to find you.”

Jay looked more closely at Grant, with a quizzical who-the-hell-are-you smile. I could tell that he was going to try to stake out his territory in front of Grant. Like the way a dog has to pee on something to show he owns the place. And sure enough, there went his hands, snaking their way around to the front of my shirt, heading over to my boobs.

Grant said something about suddenly remembering that he had someplace he had to be. “Good luck to you,” he said to me. “Hope you get back to painting.”

“Stop it,” I said to Jay, and slapped his hands away. He pretended to slap me back, and we got into a tussle, slapping at each other in a stupid, playful way, and when I looked around, Grant was pedaling off. His butt wasn’t even resting on the seat; he was standing up as he rode, swaying back and forth, with those hopeless, job-interview khaki pants bound around his ankles with a rubber band.

“Who was
that
guy?” said Jay, and I said, “Oh, he’s just some guy who enjoys telling me how stupid I am for going back home. He thinks I can just crash someplace until the end of the quarter.”

This was a sore subject. Jay lived with three other guys, but he had his own room, and anybody but Jay would have invited me to come and live there with him. Two could fit in that single bed just fine. But he and I both knew that this would violate something very basic in our relationship that I was just beginning to understand: he was never going to be willing to help me with anything.

The next day, with my portion of the twenty-five dollars from our gig, I packed everything I owned in my beat-up blue VW. I kept losing heart for leaving, though, and when I finally went out to the car with the last of my stuff, I decided to give the universe one more chance to reverse its signs. If the radio was playing a happy love song, I’d call up Jay and tell him he had to let me live with him, and if it was depressing, I’d go home to my parents.

The next song was “No More Tears” with Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer, which was a problem. Are women happy or sad when they’re singing, “Enough is enough” with their fists pumping in the air? I couldn’t tell, so I had to wait for another sign. I drove around Isla Vista, passing the apartment I’d lived in freshman year and the bar that Magda and I walked to the night her mother died, and then I rolled past the building where I’d met a guy named Jack and all those guys who turned out to be surfers from La Jolla. I parked and walked on the beach—sometimes at night you could see the waves lit up by microscopic sea animals that provided their own light, like magic. Nothing seemed to be a sign.

It wasn’t until I pulled into a gas station to fill the tank that I saw my sign: Grant, pumping air into the tires of his bike. He came over to my car and leaned in, looking at all my stuff packed up on the roof.

“You can’t save them, you know.” His voice was very quiet. “Don’t throw away your life just to save them. It’s not a fair trade, your life for theirs. And also, just so you know, that non-monogamous jerk you’re seeing is an idiot.” He gazed off in the distance, maybe over at the mountains, and then he leaned back into the car. “Look,” he said, and sighed. “If you want, you can stay at my place for the rest of the quarter. I’m mostly awake all the time anyway, working on my thesis, but I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

I WENT home at the end of the quarter and immediately discovered that my father didn’t know the first thing about getting my mother back. He was hopeless. All you had to do was walk in the front door to see that. For one thing, the house smelled like raw onions, and I had to pick my way through dirty clothes to get to the kitchen, where the overflowing garbage can was stuffed with empty TV-dinner trays. And the curtains were closed. My father hadn’t even bothered to open them. How did he think he could get her back, if he wasn’t even going to do that much? Edie was a firm believer in such amenities as air fresheners and light. She was a minty-smelling dental receptionist, after all; her values involved brushing and flossing twice a day, keeping your room clean, eating fruit, doing homework, performing good deeds for other people. This was the woman whose singsongy “Good
morning
, Dr.
Blan
don’s office” was a deep comfort to dental patients all over the Valley. The truth was, my mother was a prize housewife, never once appearing bored with cooking and baking and cleaning and making little craft projects. She could do anything.

For my whole childhood, my father went away every morning to work in a bank, and he came home tired and crabby. He had but one job around the house, and that was to clean the swimming pool and manage the required chemicals. He’d go outside in the afternoons after work, still wearing his suit pants and his undershirt, and first he’d put a sample of pool water into test tubes, glaring at the results. I loved watching him do that, although it scared me, too. He hated being watched. If he caught you, he’d say something like, “What are you staring at?” So I always had to pretend I was out there doing something else. Then, after he’d gotten the pH corrected and the disease-causing strains of whatever was in our pool eliminated, he’d stand there like somebody who was hypnotized, skimming the oleander leaves out of the deep end. I’d play hopscotch on the patio while he worked because I liked to keep an eye on him. You never knew when he was going to say something funny. He was mostly quiet and mad-looking, off in his own world, but sometimes he’d do something like make a mustache out of tree bark and do a whole Groucho Marx act, from out of nowhere. You had to watch him. Sometimes I could coax him into coming into the pool with me, but he didn’t really like to do things people asked him to do. He’d say he was too busy, but then when you weren’t asking, he’d suddenly fly out of the door in his swim trunks and jump in, flailing around like a crazy man, and spend the next hour letting you climb on his shoulders.