Fast-forward in time and here I am, living a life I never imagined. I lie here in bed and I feel the sheets move to the rise and fall of my husband’s breathing. I listen to the clicking his mouth makes when his tongue gets stuck to the roof of his mouth and I wonder how long it will take him to come to the surface of sleep just shallow enough for his brain to remind itself to create more saliva. Click. Click. Click. That is the sound of our marriage. Like the ticking of a clock. His mouth makes the noise of our marriage.
Cammy
Sometimes I wish my mother was dead. I wouldn’t want her to die painfully or anything. Just, like, in her sleep. Only because … it’s just that … I mean, if she was dead no one would blame me for wanting to find my real mother. If Samantha was dead I wouldn’t hurt anyone’s feelings. My real mom would say things like I knew they’d be good parents and I know I can’t replace her but I’d like to be whatever kind of mother you’ll let me be. Bob would be fine with just the boys, and with Samantha gone I wouldn’t feel like I’m betraying them, like I sometimes do now. Bob and the boys would come over to my real mom’s house and we’d make them dinner and fill her in on all our stories.
Monica’s brother has ADD and she stole his Ritalin. The whole freaking bottle. She gave me half the pills. This stuff is amazing. I’m trying to pace myself. I’m trying not to take it too many times a day because I don’t want to run out. Anyway, this stuff helps me focus on not thinking about her. My birth mother, I mean. Also all the school shit. This tiny pill makes me concentrate on other shit. I even get my homework done, miracle of all miracles. I’ll do anything to keep from going insane wondering where that goddamn letter from the adoption place is. My biggest fear is them calling the house. I’m pretty sure I didn’t write our home number on the form but I’m not positive. I get so focused on the Ritalin and then at night I zone out with Benadryl and it’s all good. Three Benadryl knock me senseless.
I just think if Samantha left us, like divorced Bob and left us and started her own life, I could relax a little. I know I’m going to hell for saying this but whatever. I’m a bastard child so I’d be going to hell anyway. Plus, this is my diary and no one’s ever gonna read it but me. I’ll end up burning it when I move into my own place. I do wish she was dead sometimes.
Samantha
My mother died when I was in high school. Sixteen years old. She never saw me graduate. She never knew I was an honor student in college. She never met or knew Bob. She never met my children. I wish I could turn back the clock. I wish my mother had paid attention to her cholesterol and stayed away from all that fried food. I wish she’d listened when the doctor told her she had high blood pressure and should cut back on all the smoking. I got hold of her medical records from her last couple of doctor visits and there it was in writing, Patient has been informed of the risks involved with her smoking and her high cholesterol. Patient urged to begin an exercise regimen and urged to have regular physicals.
Nowhere in the file is a record of her following up with any of the doctor’s suggestions. The same recommendations were made on subsequent visits.
If I could wind the clock back, I would pick the day I first noticed her holding on to the banister. That day I could hear her raspy breathing. I could hear her sigh.
“I must’ve stood too quickly,” she said when she caught me staring.
I wish I could go back in time to explain to her that she was killing herself. I was too young to know all that at the time. It was unimaginable to me that she would disappear from my life.
“Mom, we’re going to the doctor,” I would say. “Get in the car.”
And then I would get her a health-club membership and we’d work out together.
“You’re so young,” I would say. “You shouldn’t be having so much trouble going up and down stairs. I’ve made an appointment, so there’s no getting out of it. The car’s out front. The air conditioning’s on. Let’s go.”
I don’t know if my father ever did this. He withdrew so quickly when she died and then years later I didn’t want him to feel bad about it so I never asked. I’m sure the thought, the regret, occurred to him. I wonder if it haunted him. As for me, I think about her every day. It’s a skipped heartbeat when I get to the family-history section on medical forms. To have to say yes, heart attacks do run in my family—my mother had one.
Then to have to answer the inevitable how’s she doing with oh, she’s passed.
It killed Dad when Mom died. I wonder if it would kill me in the same way if Bob died. I would feel sad, certainly, but would I die without him? Absolutely not.
Cammy was six and a half when I sat Bob down and asked him about trying for more. I’d been thinking about it for a while but we were never in one place together for long enough to have that talk.
“Oh, Jesus, not again,” he said when I asked if he ever thought about having more kids. Cammy was asleep, the dishes were done and Bob was still awake. The trifecta.
“This time it’ll be different,” I said. “We’ve got Cammy. If nothing happens it won’t be the end of the world or anything.” I truly believed that. More kids would be better for us. Bring us closer together. Yes, I truly thought that.
It only took one round of in vitro and voilà we were shopping for a double stroller for the two boys. Jamie and Andrew. I got blankets and towels monogrammed and Bob hunkered down at work and I hardly ever thought about the distance between us.
I rubbed anti-stretch mark cream on my huge belly. I bought maternity blouses with busy patterns that would help camouflage my monstrous popped-out belly button. I waddled to the baby stores, buying the tiny clothes, the bassinets, the cribs. In the sixth month I started to have the sick feeling it was all a big mistake. I wanted my mother to tell me everyone felt that way and it was only natural to be scared. I wanted her to warn me to keep track of the space between Bob and me, to make sure it didn’t widen too far.
He started going gray in my eighth month. We were young but suddenly Bob seemed weary and creaky in his movements. And he started hating work. One night I made macaroni and cheese and Cammy was uncharacteristically quiet, so as I was pouring the unnaturally orange cheese powder onto the slimy pasta, I asked him how his day was. Usually he’d say “fine” and that would be it, like a television series in the fifties.
“Yeah, how was your day, Daddy?” Cammy asked.
I smiled at her and looked at Bob, but he didn’t seem to think it was that cute. Lately she’d been echoing everything I said, so I’d started watching my swearing.
“It stunk,” he said.
“It stunk,” Cammy said.
“Don’t say that,” Bob said. He was on his first scotch, but if I didn’t know better I’d say it was number two.
“So it wasn’t a good day workwise?”
“That’s why they call it work. If it was fun it’d be called something else.”
“Remember when you used to love it?” I said.
“Yeah. So?”
“What changed?” I asked.
“The industry changed, that’s what,” he said, loosening his tie. “Shoes used to be designed. Now it’s all about athlete endorsements. If some high-school draft pick likes black stripes on his basketball shoes, that’s what we spend weeks drawing up. Straight stripes or are they angled up from the heel to the laces? Then we’ve got to send the PDF to the kid’s agent to see if he likes what a whole team of us has been agonizing over. That’s where the money is. Endorsements. Never mind that we had to switch to foam and felt inserts because the kid wants the stripes in leather not nylon. Eighteen years old.”
“I’m hungry,” Cammy said. “Is it ready yet?”
I turned the burner off and spooned the mac and cheese onto two plates for us, a little plastic plate for Cam.
“Ten years ago the kid would’ve been laughed out of the conference room and now we’re bowing and scraping like he’s the I.M. Pei of the shoe world.”
“Why don’t you quit?” I asked him.
&nb
sp; “To do what?” he snorted. “What else am I qualified to do? And what about this little family of ours?”
“Jeez, Bob. Nice talk,” I said.
“Nice talk, Daddy.”
“Never mind,” he said. “Sorry. I just had a shitty day.”
“Swearword!” Cammy shot out.
I tried to rally back. To ignore what he’d implied.
“What would you do if you could do anything in the world, if money wasn’t an issue?” I asked.
“I’d invent a time machine so I could go back and actually design shoes instead of decorate them.”
I called Bob when my water broke but his secretary told me he was on his way to a meeting. It was 1999 and not many people had cell phones. The people walking and talking on them were considered pretentious show-offs. I called Sally, who was wearing a sweater with baby ducks and Easter eggs on it. I vividly remember that sweater. Sally has a theme sweater for every occasion. For Halloween. And Christmas. The Fourth of July one has a hidden battery to light up the flag across her chest so she has to keep it buttoned up and I’ve always wondered if she regrets the purchase on those sweltering sunny summer days. The minute the first leaf falls in September or October, Sally changes a seasonal flag that hangs over their front porch. The summer one featuring two beach chairs at the edge of the sea is switched to the fall one with pinecones the day after Labor Day.
We took Sally’s station wagon with labeled bins in the back (Soccer, Volleyball, Frisbees/Misc.) and I felt bad the whole way to the hospital because I was sure I was getting her seat wet. I didn’t know if it was bloody water or not (I couldn’t remember what the books had to say about this), but either way her car had upholstery instead of leather and I kept envisioning unspeakable stains, so as we turned into the parking lot for the emergency room, I offered to have it cleaned.
“Don’t be silly, of course not,” she said.
But I saw her glance at the seat when I hauled myself out of the car and even during a contraction it occurred to me that she would drive directly to the car wash that minute.
Bob came running in through the automatic double hospital doors that make everyone look like they’re making a grand entrance. He hurried alongside my wheelchair on the way to our assigned labor room. I ignored the fact that he smelled like perfume. It wasn’t the first time I wondered about him cheating, but I wasn’t about to bring it up on a gurney giving birth to my twins. Our twins.
A nurse named Doris was just wonderful during labor. I remember she was wearing scrubs with little teddy bears holding bunches of balloons and was the kind of person who strokes your head like she would a Labrador puppy. Doris repeatedly told me that an epidural was just moments away and she and I both knew she was lying because I hadn’t dilated enough but I appreciated her efforts to keep my mind off the pain, which was excruciating. There is nothing I can add to all the stories about labor pain. It’s terrible and mine was no different than anyone else’s. I stupidly wanted to experience natural childbirth.
“You’re doing great, just great,” Bob said, and I remember him grimacing from my squeezing his hand so hard.
“How could you have thought this was a good idea?” I screamed at Bob. “This is a nightmare I’ll never wake up from!”
The linoleum floor bounced the words up and back into the air of the hospital room and for a second it seemed as if everyone had stopped moving. It was like that game I used to play with Cammy—Red light, Green light.
“Honey, you’re in pain—she’s in pain,” he said to me and Doris the nurse. “It’ll all be okay in a little while. Just get through this and it’ll be fine.”
I think about that day in the delivery room and how I felt like the air had been pulled out of the room by a giant vacuum. Now, years later, I’m driving my regular route home from the kids’ school that insists on frequent fund-raisers and pep rallies. I steer the minivan past a long boarded-up carpet shop promising same-day service. A garage on the other end of the block advertising fast oil changes sits empty. They are two ghosts bookending a sprawling Barnes & Noble towering over the middle of the block like it’s flexing its muscles. Like it’s challenging someone to a fight. It swallows up everything nearby and for good reason: why go anywhere else when you can eat your lunch, take advantage of free Wi-Fi and play with your kids in the children’s book section that’s become an amusement park with puzzles and blocks and stuffed animals all for sale. I inch left, onto Lincoln Avenue, pausing for a man in a suit talking on his cell phone, unaware the light has changed and I have the right-of-way. He doesn’t break his stride, as if he is alone on the sidewalk and road. Waiting for him to reach the other side of the street, I glance into my rearview mirror at the boys, quietly watching a DVD. Their heads cocked at identical angles, their smooth little legs splayed open, each holding a corner of the DVD player because by now they know I mean it when I say if they can’t share it I’m taking it away. I love them. Those hours in that suffocating delivery room are long past and I cannot imagine life without these children of mine. But that space, that distance between Bob and me? It’s so wide right now it’s like a river where you can’t see the person on the opposite shore. We’re dots to one another.
I accelerate to make up time but it’s futile: I hit every red light. The radio traffic reporter is saying Lake Shore Drive is free and clear in both directions but the on-ramp from Belmont is jammed and, inching up to get onto the Drive, I can see all three lanes are jam-packed. No one’s moving.
“Shit,” I say, catching myself, looking into the mirror to see if my swearing registered with the boys. I’ve got to work on my swearing.
There’s nothing I can do about the traffic so I switch from news radio to NPR. All Things Considered. A gentle voice is quietly reading a story about carrier pigeons. It’s a miracle, really, how these birds fly distances specifically calculated by their owners. There are long pauses between sentences to better hear the coos of the pigeons and I start to feel sleepy, like I always do when I listen to NPR. I switch to the classic-rock station programmed into the number-two button on my radio. The guitar part of “Whole Lotta Love” wakes me right up. On cue the cars around me start moving like all they needed was some Led Zeppelin to hurry things along.
Saturday is nonstop. Bob takes the boys to soccer. I throw in a couple of loads of laundry and make it to Whole Foods before the crush of confused-looking stroller-dads who’ve promised wives they’ll take the kids to do chores on the weekend. Their wives aren’t sleeping in, though. They’re doing all the stuff they’ve been meaning to get to all week but haven’t been able to because of the kids. I remember to send flowers to Ginny, whose mother died of pancreatic cancer a few days ago. I call the florist as I pull in to a parking space at the Jewel for a paper towels/toilet paper run. All the non-food things that’re prohibitively expensive at Whole Foods. Do we really need ten-dollar geranium-scented organic counter cleaner? I mean, come on. I pick up dry cleaning and stop by Alamo Shoes to return Jamie’s Crocs because I accidentally bought him the wrong size. I check off all these things at a stoplight. The pen pokes through to the steering wheel, so I don’t bear down too hard crossing off.
At three, Bob breezes in with the birthday present we need to bring to Kelly Voegele’s party at Waveland Bowl at three-thirty. The one errand I’ve asked him to do and he’s acting as if he should have a laurel wreath placed on his head. The boys want to go to Kelly Voegele’s party only because it’s bowling not because it’s Kelly who they call a dork. I wrap the gift in sixty seconds and gather the boys up and we’re out the door piling back into the car. Charlie Spencer’s parents are picking them up at the end of the party, so we’ve got a break.
“Want to rent a movie or something?” I ask Bob when we get home. “It’s Saturday night, Cammy’s in her room and we both know she’s not going anywhere and the boys are eating dinner over at the Spencers’ and I give it an hour until they call asking to spend the night there. So for all intents and purposes we’ve got
the house to ourselves.”
“I’m not really in the mood, sorry,” he says. “I’ve got to hop online for a while and motor through some stuff I didn’t get to this week so …”
“Aw, come on … we have the house to ourselves. It’s like all the planets have aligned and for a split second the earth is standing still.”
“Honey, I’ve got so much to do it’s crazy,” Bob says.
“I could help get rid of some of that stress for you.” I do a slinky belly-dancey kind of move toward him.
“Seriously …” he says. “I’m not in the mood.”
“But you haven’t been in the mood for months.” Bad move. Bad move, Sam.
“Months?”
“I don’t know. Yeah, I guess it’s been a while. Maybe eight or nine months?” These words are a cartoon balloon over my head and I know we won’t be having sex tonight. Good job, Sam.
“I didn’t realize you had a calendar out. I didn’t know you were keeping score.”
“I’m not,” I say. “Forget it. I was just thinking maybe something’s wrong.” The question mark of another woman, another bedroom, threatens to clip the thread that’s holding us together.
“You know what? You saying that puts me in even less of a mood.”
“Bob, come on …”
“Come on, what? I’m going upstairs.”
I wait a few minutes and go up after him.
“Honey, please,” I say.
He spins his desk chair around. “What do you want?”
“I don’t know why you’re so mad at me, first of all. What did I do?”
“Nothing, just forget it,” he says.
“I just feel so disconnected from you,” I say. “I’m not keeping score, I swear. I just feel … okay, wait. Let me rephrase it. Sometimes do you feel lonely? Like even when you’re here at home? Like this isn’t really your life, you’re just going through the motions?”