A Girl Like You Page 3

  But there were too many bugs for Ian, and Madison swore she heard coyotes in the woods. The kids tramped dirt inside the tent, the batteries ran out in the lights, we burned the chicken. Our site seemed to be at least half a mile to the nearest bathroom, and the kids drank so much soda we had to take them there every hour. Even I had to admit the black flies were bad.

  There was a moment, after the kids crawled dirty-footed into their sleeping bags, when Adam and I sat out by the dwindling fire looking at the stars in what seemed like the biggest sky we’d ever seen. We held hands and talked about having a third child, which wasn’t in the cards. Later on, we zipped our sleeping bags together and cuddled in a way we hadn’t the time to in many months.

  We vowed to get a sitter for the kids and go camping as a couple, but we’d never found the time. We thought about taking the kids again, but after the buggy/coyote-sounds trip, the kids didn’t want to go again.

  Now here it was, this clunky, ugly thing on our driveway.

  “Home away from home!” Adam said.

  “Doesn’t look like home to me,” I said at last. “Doesn’t look like a way to vacation, either.”

  Adam came over and sat next to me. The neighbor across the street came out to look at the abomination in our driveway. I pretended I didn’t see him staring until he went back inside, only to peer out at us from his living room windows.

  OK, it wasn’t rusty or in bad condition, but it was huge and dreadfully out of place in our cul-de-sac.

  “OK, well, I’ve been saving up my bonuses for a couple of years.”

  A couple of years? Without me knowing? What the hell?

  “I’ve been looking at campers and planning trips for months.”

  So that was it. That was what he’d been doing sneakily up in the office. Not looking at porn. Not looking around on dating sites. Researching his next life at campgrounds.

  “Figured we could make some spending money selling a lot of our stuff that we won’t need—you know, big garage sale. We won’t need many belongings, living in this beauty.”

  I closed my eyes, imagining putting price stickers on my beige sofa, wicker rocking chairs from the front porch—hell, even my extra bath towels and blankets, because how would they ever be stored in a thing that clearly had no linen closet? Maybe hang a clothesline and display most of our clothes for a couple bucks per piece: the black sequined cocktail dress I still couldn’t zip, the matching stilettos, more pairs of leggings and sneaks than I cared to count, my favorite Fair Isle sweater, my wedding dress.

  Adam climbed back into the RV and sat proudly behind the wheel. “What do you think?” he said proudly. “Wanna take a pic for Facebook?”

  I did not want to. All I wanted to do was go back into the house and pretend it never happened, rub my eyes, open them, and find the driveway empty.

  Adam kept talking about having a big New England adventure. But something was ringing in my ears: the realization that he didn’t want our life, our lovely, full life, anymore. I couldn’t imagine him thinking I would take to the road with him, leaving behind everything we’d built there. It was our life he rejected, and also me. Adam’s plan to live in the RV and travel was nearly as shocking and hurtful as if there’d been another woman.

  What he was telling me was this: he wanted a different life, a life that wouldn’t include me. Had he honestly thought I’d jump at the idea of living in a home that was never in the same place more than a couple nights? That we’d pick up part-time jobs along the way to buy more hot dogs and canned beans to cook over a fire? Wash our sleeping bags in laundromats and dry them on the roof? There were so many things I’d hate about living on the road, I stopped listing them in my mind and shut down, not even close to being able to take in all that was happening, how our lives had changed in under an hour.

  “Give it some time,” Adam said soothingly. “The travel bug will bite you soon enough.”

  Waiting for that bug to bite me, Adam parked the camper out back beneath the maple tree, spending nights outside by a fire he made in a makeshift pit he’d built from cinder blocks and cement.

  Ian went out some nights to sit with his father. But Adam seemed just as content being alone in the dark by the glow of the fire. He played Bob Marley songs and got into the habit of wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat. He grew a beard, although he had to keep it neatly shaved for work. I hadn’t noticed how gray he was until the beard grew out.

  We barely spoke that summer, living in our separate quarters like neighbors more than anything else. Many nights I’d stand with the lights off in our bedroom, now my bedroom, and watch him from the window.

  On a Sunday in mid-August, I walked out back where Adam was sitting against a backdrop of tree silhouettes and fireflies, having a Sam Adams. He was barefoot, wearing cargo shorts and an Eddie Bauer T-shirt I’d given him many birthdays before. Now it was faded at the collar, but the well-worn clothes suited him.

  “Hey,” he said, clearly delighted to see me.

  “We have to talk,” I said, pulling up a blue canvas seat.

  Adam sighed. “Nothing good ever comes after those words.”

  “What are we doing here?” I said, twisting the ends of my hair. “This is crazy, living apart just because you’re having a midlife crisis.”

  Adam sighed again, this time heavily. He took off his straw hat and turned it around in his hands. “This is something I have to do,” he said quietly. “I feel trapped here. I’m suffocating. It’s what I need to do.”

  Bob Marley was singing about everything being all right. The glow of the distant fireflies dimmed. From inside the house, I could hear Madd laughing with some friends.

  “So, this is how it ends, after all these years?” I managed to say.

  “This is how it ends,” he said, his voice echoing with finality.

  9

  The loss set in with indescribable force a month later when Adam packed up and left for his new solo life. I had to drag myself out of bed, and when I did, everything felt wrong.

  I had three fender-benders in two weeks.

  More than once, I sat in my car at a stop sign waiting for the light to change.

  I took acid control tablets four at a time when the instructions said take two.

  I pumped gas and then drove away with the gas cap on the roof of my car, went to the local auto parts store and bought a new one. The next week, I did it again. When I went sheepishly to see the auto guys, they told me they were going to order an extra cap to save for the next time I came in. It could have been funny, but it wasn’t.

  I took a fall on the front steps and bounced on my shoulder down two stairs to the sidewalk, breaking three ribs horizontally. For days I couldn’t raise my right arm, reach out, or pick anything up. Coughing and sneezing brought piercing pain. I waited to puncture a lung. Truth: I almost wanted to get worse so I could retreat to a hospital bed, wear a nightgown, and be served painkillers and lime Jell-O by kindly nurses.

  I cried when I ran out of conditioner. I cried at the supermarket when they didn’t have unsalted rice cakes. I cried when Ian left for high school, because I didn’t want to be alone. I cried until I ran out of Kleenex and had to wipe my nose on an old washcloth. I cried into Penny’s fur until it was matted.

  I ordered immune support and mood-boosting vitamins on Amazon, then forgot to take them. I drank new age cold remedy tea that didn’t stop my nose from running like a hose when I cried. But I had kids to take care of and a household to run as a single mother. I didn’t have the option to take to my bed.

  I tried hard to form a plan but came up empty. The best I could do was to get up every morning and be there for the kids. Get them up and ready for school. Make their lunch, find something for dinner besides scrambled eggs, wrestle with math homework, listen to their stories, remind them to turn out the lights and go to sleep. Tell them their dad loved them but needed to get away for a while, as if the separation weren’t permanent.

  Adam kept in touch with Ian an
d Maddy. I had to give him credit for that. He called Ian every night, which meant so much to our son. Maddy talked to Adam less frequently. Like me, she took it hard that he wanted to live in a camper, traveling the country, rather than in our home that stayed in one place.

  Divorce papers came in the mail seven weeks after Adam left, from a small town in Ohio.

  He must have paid all the legal fees. All I had to do was sign and return the papers in the self-addressed, stamped envelope. Such a small, innocuous way to end a marriage, but when I brought the envelope to the post office to mail, I clung to it as if I couldn’t let go. I tried to breathe with the razors I felt crisscrossing the place where my heart once was.

  The Adam years were over.

  10

  It was six months later that Bryan and I stumbled upon each other, literally, in a restaurant in Ashton where I’d gone with Eddie to watch a live band play.

  I was inching my way to the bar for a dirty martini for Eddie and a vodka cranberry for myself when a cute guy suddenly turned with a draft beer in each hand, and even as he tried to balance the mugs, they sloshed all over the front of my white T-shirt. Well, it wasn’t really mine; I’d borrowed it from Maddy because I had no cool bar clothes.

  It was a wet T-shirt contest gone very wrong.

  “I’m so sorry, let me help—”

  “It’s OK,” I said, even though it wasn’t.

  “Here,” he said, shrugging off his jean jacket. “Take this.”

  “No, I can’t—”

  “I don’t want you to have to leave before the band comes on,” he said, tipping his head a little to the side, as if trying to figure out whether he’d seen me before.

  “Well, all right.” I put it on, and it covered the beer stains.

  “I’m Bryan,” he said, extending his hand.

  “Jessica.”

  “I’m sorry again for the way we met, but I’m glad we did.”

  We found a quieter corner of the bar where we could talk without yelling. Eddie gave me a discreet thumbs-up before heading out.

  When he left, I still had the jacket in my closet. Never did give it back.

  Bryan was the opposite of Adam—wiry, about 5’ 10” to Adam’s 6’ 3” with a flat stomach and muscular arms that flexed in the snug black T-shirts he wore. He was also completely bald, but it suited him. He shaved his head, which looked great because it was perfectly symmetrical. Adam loved to talk and make people laugh but Bryan was quieter, an intent listener, following every word I said.

  Bryan had a tattoo of Batman that he’d designed himself, spanning the space between his shoulder blades. He was a gifted artist. He could sketch cartoons, paint modern acrylics on huge canvases with wide swaths of red and blue and yellow, sculpt garden gnomes by hand. He was working on a clay chess set and every playing piece was perfect.

  I loved to watch him work, so focused on the small details of his project that he didn’t notice anything going on around him, blue eyes intent on what he was creating, his long fingers sketching or painting or molding.

  Bryan made his own Halloween costumes. Once they were done, he was completely unrecognizable. He made a latex face piece so closely resembling The Joker in Batman that it was startling. Another year he was Penguin from the DC comics, with a wide padded belly, webbed feet, and beak. OK, so he was also a bit of a comic book geek.

  We loved to go out the weekend before Halloween to bars in Ashton because he always won the contest for the most original costume. It wasn’t enough for me to wear Halloween-themed clothes one day a year, so I’d developed a somewhat obsessive habit of buying leggings online with Halloween themes and wearing them throughout the year. I scoured internet consignment and secondhand sites and amassed an impressive collection of leggings with mummies, dueling pirates, skulls and roses, witches stirring cauldrons, and dancing skeletons. My favorites were black with goth green Frankenstein faces. Or maybe the vampires with fanged teeth. Or the Day of the Dead sugar skulls. It depended on my mood.

  Bryan was patient, while I always felt rushed. He took his time with everything.

  We got married, partly on a whim, eight months after we met, in a small ceremony with a few friends and my kids, followed by pasta and meatballs at our favorite Italian place.

  Time flew while we were having fun.

  Bryan and I accumulated layers of memories during our three years together. We loved all the holidays and celebrated every single one to the hilt. In March there was a big St. Patrick’s Day parade in downtown Ashton, something we looked forward to all year. We scoured the internet for Irish apparel, choosing a green fedora and stick-on orange eyebrows, moustache, and sideburns for Bry. I wore a green beanie with an orange pom-pom and long fake orange braids hanging down my back. We wore every green thing we had in our wardrobes, right down to green socks. Bryan told me I should buy a green bra; it would be festive, and also sexy to him, but when I was too busy and never got around to it, he ordered one online—a push-up bra with shamrocks over the nipples. He asked me to wear it other times of the year because he liked it so much.

  We’d lined up early on State Street, joining enormous crowds of people toasting the holiday, many of them already slurring their words at noon. We sang along to “Irish Eyes are Smiling,” hooted for the dancing leprechauns, felt the thunder of bagpipes in our chests as rows of musicians marched by. Street vendors sold Irish flags, long green horns that made strange moose call noises, streamers, balloons, and huge blow-up shamrocks. The parade marchers threw out chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil to the kids, who scurried into the street to scoop them up and stash them in their pockets.

  The weather on St. Patrick’s Day in upstate New York was always unpredictable. One year it was so balmy we were sweaty in green hoodies. Another year the wind chill was so bad we had to leave halfway through because Bryan couldn’t stand the cold. As we drove away, we could still hear the sound of bagpipes from the Interstate.

  We walked Penny, who pulled at her leash to greet strangers, on a familiar route that wound past the ice cream stand, down to the antique shop, and through a church parking lot. Penny was the perfect companion dog, tail wagging furiously when she saw something interesting.

  Penny was my first dog. My parents didn’t allow pets outside of cages or glass bowls. My sister and I had our share of neon tetras, guinea pigs, and hamsters. I waited until my kids were old enough to help with a pet, but from the moment I got her, she was mine in the way a third child might have been. Despite her small, compact, eight-pound body, Penny bravely took on winter, trying to climb snowbanks, standing on three legs to warm up one paw, then switching. There was a small wooden table on the back porch she liked to stand on to keep all her paws from freezing. I had a dozen brightly colored fleece jackets for Pen that zipped her up snugly and kept her warm as she sat outside and watched me shovel.

  Shoveling is hard work. Especially after the snowplow piles icy clumps at the end of the driveway. When I was young and had to help shovel, I used to push the heavy snow out into the middle of the road and leave it there, until our neighbor complained because it all ended up in his driveway. But shoveling is a hell of a good workout, and right where I needed it, twisting at the waist and throwing a shovelful up to a rapidly rising snowbank. Besides, Ian took care of the deep white stuff with a snow blower, so all I had to do was clear the sidewalk.

  But as the seasons progressed, winter increasingly took its toll on Bryan, sapping his energy and making him miserable to the point where he answered questions with grunts and head-shaking. He was thin and never seemed to put on weight, a fact that always irked me because I put on a pound when I ate an Oreo, but his lanky build gave him less insulation.

  He abandoned his art projects; the chess pieces collected dust and he put his painted canvases in the back of a closet. One of the garden gnomes lost its little clay hat and Bry told me to just throw it away because he didn’t have the energy or desire to make a new one.

  Bryan worked ten-hour days
at the silk-screening shop where he screened designs on shirts, banners, garden flags, and just about anything else needing a logo. He’d been there for eight years and the work had become monotonous—and worse, grueling. I knew this. But I always thought I could snap him out of his deepening despair. Turned out, I couldn’t.

  I’d even suggested marriage counseling, but after his experience with doctors prescribing meds that didn’t help, Bryan refused to consider it.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said into Bryan’s shoulder while his chicken sizzled. “I feel like we’ve tried everything and we’re running out of ideas.”

  11

  That March, when winter refused to let go, I’d run out of ideas to reconnect with Bryan. And so I knew it was time. Time for lingerie.

  Not that I didn’t have anything sexy. There was the St. Patrick’s Day bra with the shamrocks barely covering my nipples. A little skimpy Santa chemise. Somewhere in the back of my underwear drawer was a stretchy black thong. Truth was, Bryan and I hadn’t really cared about the wrappings; we were always in a hurry to get to the good parts. He was lithe and limber and adventurous in bed, which thrilled me after years of uninspired, vanilla marital sex.

  I spent more than an hour shopping Amazon for racy, uncomplicated lingerie that I would be able to slip out of seductively, or at least without losing my balance and falling over.

  Anything with a garter belt was out of the question, because it highlighted the exact part of me I wanted to underplay: my upper thighs.

  There were hundreds of pleather bodysuits and over-the-knee platform boots, most accessorized with a whip. Not interested. I had no desire to dominate a man. If I were ever in a dom/sub relationship, I knew I would be the one submitting.

  Crotchless panties? Pass. Role-play outfits? I considered a Little Red Riding Hood costume that was actually kind of hot. But it would barely cover my ass, another part of my body I hoped not to spotlight.