A Girl Like You Read online

  One of the grandmothers broke away from the group to introduce herself as the cooking instructor.

  “Welcome to winey chicken!”

  The grandmas had all planned ahead and brought aprons, all of them ruffled, one of them decorated with rolling pins, one with cherry pies.

  Already clustered in a circle around the butcher-block island, the grandmothers were doing prep work. One was pounding chicken cutlets in a way that made me think she had come to the class angry. Another was daintily slicing paper-thin mushrooms.

  “Those right there are restaurant quality,” the instructor said.

  The mushroom-cutter beamed.

  “So, let’s start with marsala, an especially dry white wine,” the instructor said.

  Eddie and I looked at each other. Far from wine experts, we nonetheless knew the difference between sweet marsala and a dry white.

  OK.

  “So, everyone get to a stove station and heat up your frying pans,” she said.

  We moved to the stoves and turned on the gas flames.

  “If you can’t control your temperature, turn it off and start over,” the teacher said.

  I looked at Eddie and we both shrugged. The room soon smelled of sizzling chicken

  “By the way, don’t open any of the cupboards with a sticky note on them,” the instructor said.

  The grandmothers, Eddie, and I all nodded without saying a word. She was the teacher, after all.

  “It’s because they may have mice in them,” she added.

  Our jaws dropped in unison. We looked around and saw several of the cupboards had neon yellow Post-Its on them.

  “She’s kidding, right?” I asked Eddie.

  He shrugged again. “Don’t know, but don’t touch them anyway.”

  I had no plans to.

  As we were cooking, the teacher went around to the closed cupboard doors, knocked on them lightly, then pulled out more Post-Its to stick on. Soon, most of the cupboards were contraband.

  The chicken marsala came out beautifully, although maybe a little dry because the one grandma had pounded the cutlets until they were nearly transparent.

  “I’ve set the table, so let’s eat,” the instructor said.

  “Thought it was take-home,” I whispered to Eddie.

  “I think we get to keep the leftovers.”

  We sat at the round table with the grandmothers, picking up our forks to dig in.

  The instructor clapped her hands, startling all of us. “Not before we say grace,” she said sternly.

  We dutifully recited the Lord’s Prayer before eating.

  Our plates were barely empty when the teacher jumped up, clapping her hands again. “Clean-up time!”

  The grandma with the cherry pie apron raised her hand as if she were still in school. “What about the white wine chicken?”

  “Oh, dearie, no time for that tonight.”

  We looked at the clock. We were exactly one hour into the two-hour class. But we followed directions and washed the pans and dishes. None of us were going to touch the cupboards, so we left everything in the drying racks.

  “Here are your leftovers!”

  The instructor handed out Tupperware containers. What? We’d devoured every bit of the chicken marsala.

  I opened the corner of the Tupperware to look inside. There were more chicken cutlets, marinating in wine, completely frozen. It was the chicken piccata preparation, never to be cooked in this very strange night class.

  “Well, it was more entertaining than watching you break things in jewelry class,” Eddie said as we walked to his car.

  “Think it was dementia?”

  Eddie shrugged. “Maybe she drank the leftover wine.”

  “You think there were mice in those cabinets?”

  “Honestly, I really don’t want to know.”

  20

  My cell rang as I was getting ready for bed. I was instantly awake, because the kids and I rarely used cell phones to make actual calls. We always texted. Even Penny raised her head from the bed pillow curiously.

  “Hello?”

  “Jess.”

  It was Bryan. His voice sounded so clear he might have been in the next room. “Bry?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “What’s wrong?” I looked down at my slippered feet.

  “Nothing. Just wanted to hear your voice.”

  “OK. Good. Well, here I am.”

  “What’s doin’ with you?” he asked.

  “Well, I started that new job.”

  “That’s right. How’s it going?”

  “Like a three-ring circus. The work is complicated and I need to concentrate, which is hard because of the three old guys who’ve made the office their home. Yesterday they had a twenty-minute discussion about what breed of dog one of them has.”

  “What is it?” Bry laughed.

  “A mutt! And he brings the dog to the office every day.”

  “Isn’t there some kind of dog rule to keep them outside?”

  “There don’t seem to be any rules there,” I sighed.

  “So are you gonna bring Penny to work?”

  “Are you kidding? Their dog is so big, Pen could ride on its back. He could trample her!”

  “Sounds like a doggone mess.”

  We both laughed.

  “Tell me about Ben.”

  “He’s amazing, Jess. He’s fearless; he runs straight for the ocean, doesn’t even care if the waves could knock him over while we all chase him, which makes him run even faster. He dips his fries in grape jelly and hates all the same veggies as me.”

  “Carrots? Peas? Everything but corn?” I knew Bry’s picky eating habits by heart.

  “Yup. All of the above.”

  We were silent for a moment, neither of us wanting to hang up or be the first to say goodbye.

  “Well for now I’ll just say good night,” he said, as if he knew what I was thinking.

  “Good night, Bry. Talk soon.”

  I settled back down next to Penny, nuzzling her neck, and even though she was sleeping, she moved her warm back closer to me.

  I pictured Bryan in his little apartment with a table and chairs and Blu-ray player watching DC Comics movies with Ben. I missed him. Maybe we’d been wrong to separate and divorce.

  Then I thought about him in the last, long, terrible months of our marriage, spending most of his time on the couch, wrapped in a blanket because he was always cold. It had been the right thing, even though it hurt on so many levels. He was getting better, and I was—well, keeping busy.

  21

  One morning in May I realized my bedroom was exactly the same as it had been for the three years I was married to Bryan. I looked around the bedroom at the dark navy comforter, the nautical striped curtains, the dresser top where I still piled clothes. It was time for an overhaul.

  I spent more than an hour and over $200 at Home Space, lugging shopping bags home and dropping them on my bed.

  I cleaned until every surface of my bedroom shined. I vacuumed, then got down on my hands and knees to use carpet cleaner on tiny, barely visible spots on the rug. I folded all the clothes on my dresser to put in the chest of drawers that had been Bryan’s.

  I hesitated in front of it, running my fingers over the wood. I remembered the shock I felt when I found all the drawers empty, the sick feeling when I opened his sock drawer and found nothing but a few runaway nickels and dimes. I’d helped Bryan pack; why would I be stunned by the emptiness?

  Taking a deep breath, I opened the top drawer, where he’d kept his boxers. A black pen without a cap rolled toward me. In the back of the drawer was a rolled-up piece of paper. When I smoothed it out, I saw a grocery list in Bryan’s handwriting. I held it for a few moments, then put it back in the drawer.

  I filled the dresser with my clothes, taking up an entire drawer for Halloween leggings, then took all the shoes tossed in the bottom of my closet and lined them up inside the third drawer, congratulating myself for my c
reative use of space.

  But when I opened the bottom drawer, I drew in a sharp breath. There was a white T-shirt with a Day of the Dead skull on the front. It was so neatly folded that it looked as though Bryan had left it there for me. I broke down then, holding the shirt to my face, using it to wipe my tears.

  After a while, I composed myself enough to unpack my shopping bags and put on the new comforter, seafoam green with violets scattered like they’d been blown by wind. It was oversized on the bed, but I liked it that way.

  I fluffed the light-purple ruffled pillows and set them against the headboard. I’d bought candles in squat little jars that I put on my bed stand and both dressers, arranged the purple and yellow flowers in the green vase, put the jewelry tossed on my dresser top into a little china bowl.

  The last thing I did was carefully refold Bryan’s T-shirt, and tuck it under the bed pillows.

  “Come on,” I said to Penny, who had been watching with wonder, as if she’d never seen me clean before.

  “We’re done for now,” I told her, and the room too.

  22

  One problem with the town job, even with the amusing geriatric atmosphere, was the amount of time I spent sitting on my ever-expanding ass. I got only half an hour lunch and could barely squeeze in a short walk through the downtown business district while still having enough time to eat something.

  I’d become an expert at making meatless burgers and kept a good supply in the freezer. I brought them most days for lunch. But the Kaiser rolls weren’t exactly helping diminish my midsection, a muffin top that spilled over skirts that had once been loose at the waist. Even the elastic waistbands of my leggings were snug, something I ignored as long as possible.

  It was time for drastic measures. It was time for the Y.

  The Meridia Y was just ten minutes from my house. I went one Friday after work, circling the crowded parking lot for a good space. Ironic, because I needed exercise, but I didn’t want to park too far from the gym’s front doors.

  I had a Pillsbury canvas bag I’d gotten for free after earning points for buying twenty-five tubs of cookie dough from Madison to fund a class trip. It seemed to work well as a gym bag to carry my sneaks, an old T-shirt of Ian’s, and my sweatpants.

  The silver-haired man at the front desk looked up as I went in. His nametag said Marvin and boasted a sticker of a man flexing his biceps.

  “New member?”

  “How did you know?”

  Marvin didn’t answer, and that made me more nervous than I already was. Maybe I should have gotten an actual gym bag.

  “Single membership?”

  Again, how did he know that?

  “Yeah, single,” I said, trying to sound casual instead of defensive.

  “How often are you planning to come, twice a week? We recommend five or six visits to recapture fitness levels.”

  I was wearing a heavy coat, but clearly, he could see I needed to restore fitness rather than maintain. I was starting to feel the urge to tell him I was in the wrong place and bolt back to my car.

  “Does it matter how often you come? For a single membership?” I brushed my hair out of my face, wishing I’d tied it back.

  “No, no,” Marvin said, briskly tapping the computer keys. “Just giving you some pointers.”

  OK. Well keep those tips to yourself, mister, I thought. Then again, he was in excellent shape and must be pushing seventy. Clearly he had recaptured his fitness, or maybe never lost it in the first place.

  I handed over my credit card for a one-year membership. There was a four-week trial period during which you could cancel, no questions asked. In other words, you could give up and slink away and no one would make you admit to your failure.

  “Is there a weekly weigh-in?” I said, attempting to joke with Marvin.

  “There’s a scale in every locker room,” he said. “Don’t weigh yourself every time you come; there will be ups and downs, and we don’t want you to get discouraged.”

  Discouraged? I was a middle-aged woman with a Dough Boy bag in a gym for the first time since 1997 when I took a Mommy & Me tumbling class with Madison. I’d been told I had to recapture my fitness by someone twenty years older than me named Marvin.

  I straightened my shoulders and pulled up the Pillsbury bag that had slid down my arm.

  “Is there a tour?”

  “Locker room’s that way,” Marvin said, pointing left. “Track is upstairs, you can see the pool and exercise room behind me. Trainers can help you out in there. Good luck!”

  He could tell I needed it.

  In the locker room, there were about a dozen women of all ages and all sizes in various stages of nudity undressing. On a bench near the orange lockers, a woman who was completely naked sat rubbing lotion on her arms. In front of a mirror by the sinks, an older woman was blow-drying her hair, also nude.

  * * *

  In high school, all the girls were required to shower after gym. It was widely rumored that the female gym teachers looked into the shower stalls to make sure we were naked and wet, not standing in there with our gym clothes on. I had been a “late bloomer,” as my mother always said, and spent much of my freshman year terrified of a gym coach peeking behind the shower curtain. That, and aging, had resulted in what was apparently a higher level of modesty than most women’s—clearly something I needed to work on overcoming.

  I took my Pillsbury bag into a bathroom stall for a quick change in the Y women’s locker room before heading down the hall to the equipment room. There was ’90s music piped in, but most people were wearing headphones. I didn’t have any portable music. At home, I listened to a stereo/radio.

  People were stair-climbing, furiously pedaling, not just running but downright sprinting on treadmills, and in the back of the room, guys with oversized muscles were using weight machines I’d never seen before. A woman with wide rubber bands on her ankles was walking sideways down the middle of the room. Two teenagers were doing yoga stretches on an exercise mat, and a man whose upper body was comprised entirely of muscle was doing chin-ups. In front of the room, two guys with Y T-shirts who apparently worked there were standing behind a red counter, texting.

  There were women of all ages in all stages of restoring their fitness, all of them wearing black capris and bright spandex tops with crisscrossed straps on the back that showed their sports bras underneath. Oh, come on. A dress code at the gym? I was literally the only woman wearing sweats, and other than the men, the only one with a baggy T-shirt. Thank God I’d decided against the spiderweb leggings, and my sneakers were fairly new.

  I started with the treadmill, which was at least somewhat familiar. Once I got on and pushed “go,” it jerked forward, picking up speed right away, so fast I stumbled. For a moment, I thought I might slide right off the back of it.

  I looked around to see if anyone had noticed.

  Nope. Everyone was in their own plugged-in world; no one was making eye contact. Wasn’t the gym supposed to be a place to meet people? How exactly would that be done? All I could think of was to fling off a treadmill at their feet, disrupting their own machine.

  Overestimating my own level of fitness, I bumped up the treadmill to a slight incline, walking briskly and wishing I hadn’t tied my sneaks so tight. Twelve minutes later I was sweaty, breathless, and certain I’d already developed blisters on my heels. I hit the button to see how many calories I’d burned, certain it would be enough to share a bucket of spaghetti with Ian back home. The monitor said I’d burned 68 calories. Certain it was broken, I hit more buttons, but they only gave me more dismal news about my average speed and distance.

  Wearily, I climbed off the treadmill and headed back to the locker room, wishing I’d brought soap and a towel to shower.

  I had a long way to go, but every hope of recapturing some semblance of fitness.

  23

  It was time for me to learn how to manage small household tasks when Ian wasn’t around to help. I started with pounding a nail into
my bedroom wall to hang a new framed print of children in old-fashioned swimsuits, collecting shells at low tide. I was proud of myself for not hammering my thumb, and for hanging the print straight. I stood back to admire my work.

  In the middle of the night, a large crashing noise startled Penny and me awake. I turned on my bedside lamp and stared at the wall where the print had been hanging when I went to bed.

  Turns out, you need to find a stud in the wall before you nail something up.

  I got up and looked behind the dresser. The nail had pulled loose from the wall, the print had slid down smashing the plastic outlet cover into small, sharp pieces. Somehow, the glass frame hadn’t broken, and it was still standing straight on the floor behind the dresser.

  I used two nails the next day to hang it, but had to ask Ian to put in a new plastic outlet cover.

  “How did you manage this, again?” he asked in disbelief.

  “Just fix it, smart ass.”

  Next on the list was letting the gas out of the snow blower to store it until next winter. I went out to the shed and pulled open the wooden door. Inside, it looked like funnel winds had blown through. There were snow shovels on top of beach chairs, boxes of rock salt to melt ice, a tangled badminton net, broken sleds, abandoned bags of topsoil, two tipped-over bicycles, and the boxed spiral light-up trees we put out at Christmas.

  Tucked into one corner was a small green pail that Bryan used to water a strawberry plant he’d tried to grow, but the rabbits beat him to the berries. Inside was a plastic toy shovel like ones used to make sandcastles. I put them on a shelf in front of the shed. I liked to imagine Bryan using them with Ben at the beach.

  Way in the back, I could see the lawnmower and the snow blower, half-hidden by plastic blue tarps we once used in the garden to try to eliminate weeds. I climbed over the piles, kicking aside the deflated wheelbarrow tire, the garden hose we never remembered we had and kept buying new ones, butterfly nets the kids hadn’t used in fifteen years, a bocce set, and anything else that got in my way. When I finally reached the back, I grabbed the snow blower handle and wrenched it, banging my elbow on the wall of the shed.