A Girl Like You Page 2
“Why don’t you talk to a doctor?” I asked him one Sunday afternoon while he was huddled on the couch.
“A doctor? What kind of doctor?” he answered without opening his eyes.
“Well, not a psychologist really, maybe a specialist that prescribes meds…?”
Bryan opened his eyes. “You think I haven’t thought of that, or tried it?”
“What do you mean?” I sat down at the end of the couch and he reflexively moved his feet away from me.
“Yeah, I saw docs, more than one. One said Seasonal Adjustment Disorder. Another said social anxiety. Another said I was fucking bipolar. Every one of them had their own ideas.”
I was startled by his anger. “So, what did they say?”
Bryan sat up, kicking the blanket off his legs impatiently. “Listen, Jessica, I tried a bunch of antidepressants, mood stabilizers, anything they could throw at me. I took shit for more than a year.”
It was silent in the living room. Even Pen, who had been watching us in wonder about his raised voice, hunched down in her dog bed.
“What happened?” I asked.
“They made me jittery or exhausted, dry-mouthed and afraid to leave my house, my palms were sweaty, my heart raced, and worst of all, I couldn’t get it up for sex.” He put his head in his hands, covering his face.
“Well, there are some new ones out there—”
“Stop it! Just give it a break! Stop trying to fix me like I’m one of your kids.” With that, he got to his feet and stormed out of the living room.
I leaned back on the couch pillows, my hand on my chest, feeling like I’d been talking to a stranger.
But I was also angry. In all our talks about his moods, why hadn’t he told me he’d gone for help? When was this? Years before I’d met him? Months? What else didn’t I know? And how dare he use my kids in an argument against me? That, to me, was the greatest cruelty.
As I thought back to the months before, I realized I’d done a lot of cajoling, cheering, joking, anything to try and get Bryan to respond. I’d run out of ideas—and worse, I had no plan whatsoever.
5
“I’m not happy,” I said one night after work while he was cooking chicken.
Bryan didn’t turn around. The oil was splattering on the stove; he had it on too high.
“Are you happy?” I asked.
“As happy as anyone, I guess,” he said.
“Is that good enough?”
“What are you saying, Jess? That you’re not happy with our life? With me?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying. Are you saying you’re happy?”
Bryan turned down the heat on the chicken, came over and put his arms around me. His gray scruff scraped my chin. He’d grown the beard to try and keep his face warm. I wasn’t crazy about it but if it helped, I didn’t care.
“What else can we do to make it better?” he asked.
I breathed in the smell of his shirt, a mixture of mountain fresh dryer sheets and the paprika he was sprinkling on the chicken.
We used to cook together, tossing pasta around, simmering sauce, trying but never managing to master braising beef or baking pumpkin scones, covering the kitchen and ourselves in flour and corn starch and pepper. We always planned to take gourmet cooking lessons but never got around to it.
Bryan used to be up for anything: a spontaneous game of mini-golf at 10:00 at night, shopping for Halloween decorations even in September, or choosing the perfect blue paint for the bathroom from among dozens of swatches. We once went to an all-night discount store for shovels because we’d bent ours trying to dig out our cars from the enormous snowbanks the plows had made.
I was always reminded of my childhood in New York in the wintertime. My older sister Katrina and I would bundle in so many layers we could barely move our arms, and only our eyes and noses showed. Weekends, we’d be up early to get suited up and head outdoors to meet our neighborhood friends. We built tunnels in snowbanks, dug up chunks of crusty snow and called it pizza, stamped out dirty words with our boots in fresh snow in a field where our parents would never see. We’d stayed out until our mom hollered for dinnertime, our cheeks stinging and flushed when we went inside. Our mother always made us take off our boots and lay them on the radiator even though they had no chance of drying out because we scarfed down tomato soup and grilled cheese so we could get back outside. Nighttime came early in the winter; the sun set around 4:30 p.m. and we reluctantly returned home, every layer of our winter clothes wet. Katrina even wore a hole in the knees of her snow pants and got a brand-new pair for Christmas, something I resented to this day because I had to wear my old crappy ones until they were the length of capris.
When I was growing up, a local rec field was flooded every year and turned into a makeshift ice rink. The ice was always choppy and caused lots of falls, but we didn’t care. I had to wear my sister’s hand-me-down skates and my mother always asked me if I could wiggle my toes to keep them warm. We pretended to be figure skaters, doing shaky figure 8s, or speed skaters with our shoulders hunched down, racing each other. Katrina, two years older, always beat me. I remember crying so hard when I lost the races that she bought me hot chocolate from the refreshment stand for 25 cents. It badly burned my tongue, but I didn’t care.
I liked New York winters, the howling winds and flurries giving a perfect excuse to bundle under cozy comforters and read. I’d never had a fireplace but hoped one day to buy a house with a large one in the family room. Despite the burned tongue of childhood, hot chocolate was a staple in the wintertime.
Winters in New York were something I never considered living without. I’d raised my kids on snowmen and snow tubes and sleds and hot chicken soup to warm up a winter chill. The seasons were part of my everyday life, like the sun rising in the east and setting in the west—part of who I was.
But it was something Bryan had never experienced, my love of New York, and no matter how many snowball fights we’d had and snowmen we’d built, there was no enjoyment in winter for him and never would be.
6
I’d met my first husband, Adam, in a photography class at college. His photos were so good the teacher used them as examples for the rest of us, who, like me, produced grainy images more gray than black or white.
He took one of the most classic photos I’ve ever seen that summer, or any summer since, of a Grateful Dead fan wrapped in an American flag on his way to an outdoor concert in the rain.
I ruffled the fur on a stuffed teddy bear and titled it a “bad bear day.”
“When are we getting married?” Adam had asked on our third date.
We were twenty-two; our love was relentless, voracious, so real it was palpable. We had one of those outrageous four-tier wedding cakes with pink cascading frosting flowers, topped with a plastic bride and groom with dark hair—they were supposed to be us. The ruffled train on my dress trailed all the way down the aisle. We danced to “Wind Beneath My Wings,” singing the lyrics to each other. In all the pictures, in every single shot of us, we look so freaking happy I swear there is sunlight shining from behind our eyes. We were shimmering. I remember how my face hurt from all the smiling.
* * *
Maddy and Ian were both planned for and loved at first sight. Adam was still a great photographer and took beautiful shots of the kids that he framed and gave me for Christmas.
We’d been utterly clueless with Maddy, wishing she had been sent home with an instruction manual when we left the hospital.
At least six times, we were convinced Maddy’s cough was croup. We called our pediatrician’s answering service to leave frantic messages, then sat with her in a steamed-up bathroom, the shower running hot water. It cleared out all our nasal passages and calmed her cough, which of course never was croup.
Once, when she was a toddler, Madd sneezed and a string of spaghetti came out of her nose, something she had for dinner hours earlier. We chided ourselves for not noticing she had snorted some of her pasta, but she showed
no signs of suffering from the stray strand of spaghetti.
I saved every one of her baby teeth, documented her first steps and words and waving bye-bye, in a journal for posterity. I taped a lock of blonde hair from her first haircut, during which I cried as they trimmed only the ends of her hair, leaving it long like mine.
Ian came along when Maddy was four. His first smile was for his sister. We used to put Ian in his baby seat and gather around him, all of us, admiring him like a Christmas present, the best gift we’d ever received. Ian thrived from all the attention.
Adam had been a hands-on father in the beginning—changing diapers, cleaning up baby food flung to the floor, coaching Ian to say his sister’s name. He’d come up with the great idea of floating a handful of Cheerios in the toilet and telling Ian to aim for them with his pee, a game that had him potty trained within a week.
We got a Big Wheel with an extra seat on the back and Madd rode it around the kitchen, Ian belted safely in the back, blowing kisses at us every time they circled. I carried Ian to walk Maddy to the bus stop for kindergarten and he looked for her everywhere while she was gone.
When he was barely two, he was waving and yelling goodbye to his sister, and when her bus came at the end of the school day, he would run from the front porch where we were waiting and throw himself into her outstretched arms.
I had a busy freelance writing business, writing ad copy and editing textbooks and college catalogs until my eyesight blurred. As time went on, Adam began to focus more on his job selling medical equipment across a wide area of the Northeast, a job that required quite a bit of travel. I relished the role of primary caregiver for the kids. Adam took care of all the household finances; I was never interested in anything beyond balancing a checkbook.
Adam spent most Saturday afternoons out in his Ford truck taking landscape photos: trees with branches extended like arms, the sun slanting through leaves just before sunset, a peach pit he found on a sidewalk. His work was as beautiful as when we’d met.
We lived in a modest middle-class neighborhood where all the children were growing up together. We had birthday and Easter parties for the kids, making so many cupcakes I still feel sick at the thought of buttercream frosting. The kids did their own Halloween parade around the cul-de-sac, ending up at our house for pizza for the kids and hot toddies for the adults.
How had the years flown by so quickly? I volunteered at the elementary school, putting on a witch costume for Halloween and helping kids bob for apples in third grade, filling balloons with water for kids to toss at each other outside on field day in middle school. I chaperoned trips to Mystic Seaport, the Bronx Zoo, and the Boston Aquarium, my kids never seeming to be embarrassed being seen with their mother. We still had a magnet shaped like a shark’s tooth, from the aquarium gift shop, on the fridge.
Adam had given Maddy extra money to buy a plush polar bear at the zoo, something she still slept with. While he listened to their stories at the dinner table, he disappeared afterwards to go onto his computer. Working at the computer had become his favorite pastime.
Every year as they grew older, I wished like hell I could freeze them in time and keep them young. They were my favorite people in all the world.
But as hard as I tried to hold on to them, the years slid away.
Time was going too fast for me to keep up.
7
We were, the four of us, a cohesive family, happy children, adults who were partners and had fallen into a groove of parenting. It worked. For a long time, it worked. I never imagined it breaking.
Unless he was at the gym, Adam was always home after work. Sometimes he missed dinner when he went out Saturdays to take photos, but I knew he was doing something he loved.
As time went, the years so fleeting, Adam’s interaction with us changed. He started to seem robotic, as if he were there in person but not giving any thought or taking any interest in anything around him, with the kids or in our life.
It took me a while to even notice.
The kids were teenagers and had their own soccer schedules, band practice, and meet-ups with friends. I taxied them around until they got their driver’s licenses. Maddy passed the first time, but Ian had to take it twice because he was so chatty with the instructor, he missed a right turn. He’d been friendly and outgoing all his life. I credited his sister’s mothering for this.
One year when Ian got the highest grade at a science fair for making a replica of a beehive to warn people of nest desertion, Adam had been at work. But when he got home, Ian was waiting by the door to tell his dad. Adam had congratulated him heartily, and together they made a wooden frame for his certificate.
As the kids grew into their older teens and went out at night with friends or to part-time jobs, I found myself alone. It felt like I no longer had a partner in my life. I had a sinking sense that Adam and I had grown irreparably apart in the years we’d focused on earning a living and raising the kids. Could we ever become close again?
The last time we’d had sex, we were both tired and probably relieved when it was over. My sexual appetite was always greater than Adam’s, but we’d made it work over the years, even if I had to resort to rubbing out an orgasm by myself. We’d watched porn, but the camera shots bothered Adam’s sense of artistry, so we switched to looking at Tumblr photos that were still graphic but far more tastefully done.
But Adam spent increasing amounts of time in the fourth bedroom we’d turned into his office space. I could hear him clicking away on the keyboard, but when I asked him about it, he’d said he was just searching the web for sports updates or looking at the work of various photographers.
I posted notices for freelance work on Craig’s and got a steady stream of clients, which kept me occupied evenings when Adam was upstairs. One night, when he was working late, I couldn’t shake the sense that something was going on. I went into his home office and tried to sign onto his desktop computer. It was password protected.
I did what I do every time I need help: I called my best friend Eddie.
I’d met Eddie in high school art class. I was a lowly freshman and he was a senior. He was a brilliant sculptor/painter/illustrator. I had an interest in everything but talent in none. One day back in high school, I was nearly crying over a ceramic spoon holder I’d made for my mother’s stove but which exploded in the kiln.
“Air bubbles,” said Eddie. “You gotta really work the clay.”
He showed me how and my next project—a paperweight in the shape of a turtle—survived the deadly kiln. We sat together in art class from then on, and some of his magic rubbed off on me. I managed to pull a B in class, which kept my GPA up despite my lousy math grades.
I could always count on Eddie to be by my side during all my triumphs and disappointments. This time, it didn’t feel like anything good was coming.
“I don’t want to sugarcoat this, so I won’t,” Eddie said in his usual candid manner. “Could there be another woman?”
Of course I had considered that. Adam was still great-looking; the gray at his temples only made him look more distinguished. He went to the gym, was a great listener, wore suits and jeans equally well. I was sure I wasn’t the only woman to find him sexy.
“Can’t you break into his computer?” Eddie asked.
“What is this, Mission Impossible? How exactly would I break in? Like cracking some code?”
“Do you know his password?”
I didn’t. In fact, I’d been surprised he’d used a password to sign on. If he was catching up on news and sports, why was he so guarded?
“It’ll be OK,” Eddie said. “It can’t be that bad.”
8
Turned out, it was not only that bad, it was worse.
On a Saturday morning in March, when the first buds were appearing on the flowering cherry tree, I was writing at the kitchen table when I heard the screech of brakes like someone was slamming on them to stop. When I went to the window, I saw Adam, with an enormous smile on his face, cli
mbing down from the driver’s seat of a camper as long as two dumpsters, jutting out from the end of our driveway and into the road.
I went outside in wonder.
“Well, what do you think?” Adam asked, actually patting the thing affectionately. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”
All I could think was that he’d rented the RV for a trip à la the Chevy Chase vacation movies. But he hadn’t even talked about a trip like that.
“Nice,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “What’s it for? Planning a vacation?”
“A vacation of a lifetime,” Adam said, using his sleeve to shine the door handle. “She’s ours.”
“Ours? I don’t understand—where’s your truck?”
“Sold it to buy this beauty.”
I sat down hard on the front lawn, trying to take it all in. Sold his truck. Stashed money. Bought a camper. Without me even knowing?
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Jess, I’m serious. Thought we’d take weekend trips, all of us together. And there’s more good news: the company expanded my territory across New England all the way up to Maine. So, I’ll be on the road more—sorry about that part—but I figured instead of hotels, I’d take the RV and stay at campgrounds.”
I tried to make sense of his words. But I couldn’t get past his statement that we’d all go camping on weekends.
The kids were too busy with their own lives and wouldn’t give up a weekend with their friends to go away with us. And my idea of going away for the weekend was watching the sunset from the balcony of a little B&B.
Sure, we’d been camping when the kids were young, hauling out a tent big enough for the four of us, portable grill, sleeping bags, a bag of marinated chicken, water sandals, towels, marshmallows, even lights to string on trees near our site.