Once Upon a Time, There Was You by Elizabeth Berg
“I went out to the waiting room and sat watching the fish, and after a while, the doctor called me back in and I could see my mom had been crying. I thought, Oh, no, something’s wrong with my mom, but then I saw in her eyes that it was me. I remember I got really cold, and I wanted to run. I thought, If I get out of here, I won’t have to hear it, and it won’t be true. It won’t be.
“I looked at the door, and the doctor must have sensed I was thinking about bolting, because he moved to stand in front of it. He said, ‘Ron, your mom needs to tell you something.’ So she stood up and came over to me and she took my face in her hands and she said, ‘Ron, you’re going to be fine, but you’re going to have to have an operation and then some medication for a disease we’ve just discovered that you have.’
“ ‘What disease?’ I said, and she told me colon cancer, and she just kept looking right in my eyes. And all I could think of was my dad, who died of that disease, how weak and thin he was at the end, just totally wasted. I said, ‘Dad died from that.’ And she said, ‘You are not Dad. And we’re going to get through this one day at a time. Today is the hardest day.’ ”
He looks over at Sadie and smiles. “It was a hard day, but it wasn’t the hardest.”
“Did you have to have chemotherapy?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you get sick?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Did your hair fall out?”
“Some. But I learned this rubber band trick; I put a rubber band right at my hairline, and it helped keep the medicine from going to my scalp. I lost a lot of hair anyway, but not all of it. You couldn’t really tell.”
“Were you scared?”
He looks up into the sky. “Yeah. My mom told me I’d be fine, but I did some digging around and I saw that the chances of surviving were practically nil. That was the hardest day, when I read that. Kids don’t fare well with colon cancer; it acts more aggressively in them, and it usually gets diagnosed later. By the time it’s found, it has spread all over. So that got to me. I read all that and I felt really scared. I thought a lot about death, what it might really be, what it would feel like to die. And then, all of a sudden, I just knew I’d be fine.”
“How did you know that?” Sadie asked.
“Well, I didn’t really know it, of course. It was more … I guess I kind of insisted on it. My mom had lost my dad to cancer; and I just decided that was enough for her to take.”
Sadie shakes her head.
“So anyway … Can I ask you something? Is this a big turnoff?” He laughs.
“No.”
“It’s not a turn-on, is it? Because that would be just as bad. That would be weird.”
She rises up on one elbow and looks at him. “It makes me see you better. It makes me know you better, too. I want to know every part of you.”
“Yeah, me, too. You, I mean.”
She lies back down, picks up a blade of grass and considers it. “So did this just completely change your view of life?”
“Well, it was a pretty intense education, right? At first, I didn’t know what to think. On the way home from the doctor’s office, everything looked so vivid. Really beautiful. I saw everything like I was seeing it for the last time or something. But then I kind of got used to having cancer. People say you can get used to anything, and it’s true. One thing that’s lasted is that I always try to find … the better part of everything. Like when I went for chemotherapy, I really liked this one nurse. So when I had to go for treatments, I didn’t think about how sick I’d get; I thought about how I’d get to see Leslie; she was really pretty and she always made me laugh. I guess my general orientation toward life is something that cancer gave me. The idea that, no matter how long we live, we don’t live long enough, so we’d better appreciate each other. And we’d better, you know, take risks, speak up.… I for sure learned that there aren’t many situations where you don’t have a choice about how you want to be about it. So when you said that about your cat … I get it.”
“Yes,” Sadie says.
“Anyway. That’s why I didn’t want to sleep with you. I didn’t want to get too involved if …”
“But now we can get involved?”
He smiles. “Oh, I’d say we’re involved all right. I’d say it’s a little more than that.”
Inside, she feels a wide ripple of pleasure. Of enormous relief. “I like you so much,” she tells Ron. “I love you. Actually.”
“Love’s a big word, Sadie.”
“I know. I know it is. But I do.”
“Okay, I need to tell you something. I had decided that, if I got bad news, I’d break up with you. I wouldn’t want you to have to be in on whatever followed. But if it was good news, I promised I’d tell you something else.
“First, you have to know I was always a very determined little kid. My mom told me about one time when I was three years old and was in trouble for climbing on some piece of playground equipment she’d expressly told me not to play on because I was too small for it. And I said to her, ‘It’s my life.’ I’d not heard that expression; it just seemed so clear to me that the decisions I made were really up to me and me alone, even at that age.”
“Ah!” Sadie said. “So we both came to the same conclusion. You just beat me by fifteen years.”
“Right. Then, when I was twelve, I actually asked my mom if she could sign something for me so that I’d be able to get married.”
“Who’d you want to marry?” Sadie asked.
“Cindy Hollinger. Class beauty. But, as it turned out, also class asshole.”
“That’s the trouble with beauties,” Sadie says.
“You don’t have that problem.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not a beauty.”
“I think you are.”
She swallows, looks away from him.
“Sadie? Are you okay?”
Silence.
“Did you just now think about what happened to you?”
She nods, and then she turns toward him. He pulls her close, and they lie still for a while. There’s a group of children playing nearby, and their sounds are so happy and bright.
Finally, “What else?” Sadie asks.
“What else?”
“There’s something else you wanted to tell me.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Tell me,” she says.
He looks over at her.
“Tell me! Just say it.”
“Okay. This probably isn’t the right time, but I’ll tell you anyway. As soon as you’re ready, I want to marry you.”
She laughs.
“I mean it,” Ron says.
“Okay,” she says. “Well, let’s go do it.”
“You think I won’t? I will.”
“Aren’t you afraid of marriage?”
“No. I’ve always known I wanted to get married. I guess I was inspired by my parents.”
“Yeah, well,” Sadie says. “For me it was the opposite. I had a front-row seat for watching a marriage fall apart.”
“So you learned what not to do. I learned what to do. Between the two of us …” He looks over at her.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“I shouldn’t have told you all this. Not today.”
“It’s okay. I’m glad you told me.”
“You know, my dad died young, but because they were married so young, he got to be with my mom for a pretty long time. They got married when they’d known each other for just two weeks. Two weeks!”
“How old were they when they got married?” Sadie asks.
“My dad was eighteen; my mom was sixteen.”
“What a recipe for disaster!”
Ron shrugs. “And yet.” He puts his finger gently to a nearly transparent green bug that has landed on his arm, and it flies away, and Sadie thinks the bug was lucky to have been on Ron’s arm.
He says, “I actually think getting married young might be the best thing to do. You grow up together, and you grow close, doing that
“Plus the babies have more problems,” Sadie says. She once heard a conversation about that very thing between two older women walking on the street ahead of her. Sadie figured they were mad because their children were dawdling over giving them grandchildren.
“Hey, Ron? Did the doctors ever tell your dad he was cured?”
“No. Nope, he never got to hear that.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Do you believe in God, Sadie?”
“I don’t know.”
He looks at her. “You don’t know? So you’re an agnostic, then?”
“I’m not even sure enough to be that.”
“I believe in God,” Ron says. “And sometimes I believe I feel my father’s presence. I mean, I really do.”
“That’s nice,” Sadie says, softly.
“I told him all about you,” Ron says. “He approves of you.”
“Good.”
They lie quietly for a while, listening to the voices of people passing through the park, all the different languages: French, German, something Sadie identifies as Spanish but Ron says is Portuguese. When she asks how he knows, he tells her he speaks Portuguese—he learned it because someone told him it was difficult. He also speaks French and Spanish fluently, and now is learning Japanese.
Sadie is pleased with his knowledge, proud of it.
The sun drops lower in the sky, and it grows cooler. Ron asks, “Are you hungry?”
“What time is it?”
“That will let you know if you’re hungry?” he says, laughing.
“I don’t know. Yeah.”
“It’s six-thirty.”
“Okay, yes, I’m hungry. Let’s go and get some dinner.”
“Where do you want to go?”
She thinks for a minute, and then she says, “Someplace quick. We’ll eat, then I’ll tell you the rest of my plan.”
He pulls her toward him and tilts her chin up. “Can I kiss you?”
She nods, and when he presses his mouth gently to hers, she thinks of how nice they must look, a couple under the trees, their arms wrapped around each other. They are a force against the world, young people who know how to love, who are brave enough to.
19
Late Monday night, John peers at his bedside clock and tells Amy, “It’s after one, on a school night. We should go to sleep.”
“First tell me just a little more,” she says. “I love hearing about this, and besides, I’m not tired. Are you?”
He considers the question. “Actually, no. I feel like I just had a great workout. Which I did.”
She sits up, leans against a pillow, anchors her hair behind her ears. She does not bother to cover her breasts, something Irene always did, and he isn’t sure how he feels about it. There is a bit of the Puritan in him, he supposes; he embarrasses easily over things such as this. And it makes it hard for him to concentrate on what he’s saying. He sits up beside her, kisses her forehead, then stares straight ahead.
“Do you mind my asking all these questions about you?” Amy says.
“Not if you’ll answer my questions about you.” He looks quickly at her, then away.
She pulls the sheet up over her breasts. Got it, he imagines her thinking. He regrets himself: she is lovely, her breasts are beautiful; and now he has made her self-conscious. But she only says, “So. Erector sets and Tinkertoys. What else?”
“Blocks, before that,” he says. “My mom says I loved playing with blocks. I’d make towers as high as I could, then knock them down and start over. Apparently I did this for hours.”
“In your little striped shirts and corduroy pants and Buster Brown shoes?”
“And suspenders,” John says.
A marriage counselor once told him and Irene that they needed to know about each other as children, that it would help bind them together in important ways. But at that time, he already knew a good deal about Irene as a child; she’d told him things, and he’d asked her a lot of questions. He knew that, all through fourth grade, she used to lie in bed trying to figure out what the highest number in the world was, and she would nearly weep in frustration because, no matter what she thought of, all you had to do was add one and there, it was higher. He knew that when she was twelve years old she once snuck into a church and stared at the crucifix, because a Catholic girlfriend had told her if she watched carefully, she could see Jesus bleed. She said she stared so long she thought she did see bleeding. He knew she made cookies to give away to strangers she met on the street; he knew that for years she longed for a sea horse she saw advertised in the back of a magazine; he knew that, in Brownies, she was too shy to sing the “Day Is Done” song at the ends of the meetings and so got booted out for being uncooperative. He knew that, when she went to the hospital to have her tonsils out, she thought her parents were going to leave her there because they didn’t say they’d be back in the morning. He knew she used to go over to her best friend Sally’s house every Saturday morning and that they would practice kissing on Sally’s parents’ bed. He knew that losing her virginity was anticlimactic, that she’d smoked dope for the first time when she was eighteen and hadn’t liked it. He knew that she had never been given a birthday party, and, more astonishing, she saw nothing unusual about that. He knew that she once kept a dead bird in a shoe box under her bed for a week because she thought love could cure it. He knew that she had once shoplifted makeup—a tester lipstick in the color Creamy Toffee—and then felt too guilty to use it.
Irene was not as curious about him. She did not like to hear any stories involving his mother. After she heard a few, she asked him not to tell her any more. It seemed to hurt her, though she did not say that—rather, she said it made her angry. What he saw in her eyes when he told her those stories was not anger, though. It was a kind of vulnerability she was loathe to show anyone.
She did know his first job was teaching skiing to little kids, and that he was soon given the position of lead instructor. As such, he was approached by the other teachers to ask the boss for a raise. When he did, the guy fired him, so John started his own school. He ended up with one third of the school’s clients and eight of the instructors, and he did very well. She knew that the next year he went to Europe and hitchhiked all around: Brussels, Luxembourg, Florence, Athens, Paris, Marseilles, Zurich, Munich, Dublin. He was galvanized by what he saw: old, old buildings that not only had been maintained but were being used. People were eating, drinking, and being entertained in urban spaces. He was a product of middle-class suburbia, but he had seen the light. This, he thought, was what was needed in America. This was what he’d do. Irene liked that story. She told it to their friends, in front of him, and he was proud when she did that. But that was pretty much all she knew.
When he tells these same stories to Amy, though, she seems to want to know even more; he’s flattered by it, and it gives him hope that they really are forging a solid relationship. At first, when she began asking questions, a kind of weariness fell upon him. Here we go, he thought. What’s your favorite color, what’s your favorite food? It was like reading the same picture book over and over to Sadie, when she got fixated on one of them. But there was a kind of pleasure in reading it to her, too, a kind of anchor that, if John couldn’t get in one place, he could at least get in another.
And so he will answer all of Amy’s questions and she will soon know that he adores grapefruit and hates mango, that his blood sugar bears watching, that he once built a sailboat in his living room, carried it out sideways, and sold it immediately; he didn’t want to sail it, he only wanted to build it. She’ll know that his first professional project was a dilapidated nursing home that used to be a mansion, that he rented rooms out to college kids while he restored it, in order to fund it. She’ll know that he c
The day after the paperwork was done, John got in his car, a used Jaguar that was on its last legs, and drove over to look at the building. On the way, he turned up the radio and sang along. He couldn’t help it; he was thrilled. But when he got to the building, there was a formidable-looking black man sitting on the front steps. He was dressed all in black and wore a choker made of silver dollars. He watched John get out of the car, watched him approach. John nodded and sat on the steps beside him, offered his hand, which the man refused. “I’m John Marsh,” he said, “and I’m the new owner of this building.”
“Yeah,” the man said. “Well, I’m the manager of this building. You dig, motherfucker?”
“I’m here to have a conversation, not a confrontation,” John said. “If we have a confrontation, you’re going to win. But here’s the deal: I’m going to rehabilitate this place. You don’t have to pay rent; nobody does. I ask only one thing. I know the building hasn’t been cared for, but don’t wreck it any more. And let me know when you all are ready to go.”
The man nodded. He looked over at John’s car, then at him, and John was struck by how red the guy’s eyelids were. The man said, “I know the yuppies on they way in.”
John had a thought to defend himself, to say he’d bought the car for a song because it looked so beautiful, choosing style over substance as usual, and that he’d be lucky if it lasted a month. But he said nothing. He supposed he was a yuppie.