Once Upon a Time, There Was You by Elizabeth Berg

  “Your mother witnessed a lot of bitterness in both of her parents,” John told Sadie. “She had no choice but to be scared of marriage, growing up that way.”

  “And what about you, Dad?”

  “Huh?” he said, which was what he always did when he was stalling. Lots of males do that, she’s noticed.

  “Did you have the same kind of wariness?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “Mine was different.”

  Then Ron had called, and her dad had backed gratefully out of her room. Ron was a little sad, believing that Sadie wanted out of the marriage they’d so hastily entered into. But he’d thought about it, he told her, and he’d decided he’d rather lose her than make her feel like she’d lost herself. He reiterated the fact that he wasn’t going anywhere.

  She wished she were with him. She missed him. “What are your bad parts?” she asked.

  “Oh, I can get very moody,” he said. “Also, I don’t really care if my socks match.”

  In the end, she said she’d talk to him later that night, she was busy packing now. Which seemed to make him feel better, though of course she has to pack if she’s moving to the dorm, too. She still hasn’t canceled her room there. She could move right in, be a freshman student rooming with someone named Laura Erickson, a girl from North Dakota whom she’d written a couple of emails to, talked to on the phone once, too. She seemed like a nice enough person. She’d told Sadie she loved old Led Zeppelin, strictly vinyl. Sadie likes that, too. She asked if Sadie liked blue, because she wanted to bring some blue curtains, a simple style, no ruffles. Sadie loves blue and hates ruffles.

  After that phone call, Sadie had thought about what it would be like, living in a big building full of kids her own age, and how much she had looked forward to the all-night chats she’d heard so much about. She’d thought about studying at the desk in the room, books and papers all around her, her gooseneck lamp shining light down. Maybe an empty pizza box on the floor.

  But now here is her mother before her, an open magazine in her hand. “Look what I found,” she says, and she shows Sadie a wedding cake made up of cupcakes.

  Sadie looks at it, then into her mother’s face. And bursts into tears.

  Irene lets the magazine fall and goes to sit on the floor beside her daughter. She puts her arms around Sadie, rocks her gently side to side, saying, “I know.”

  Sadie pulls away. “No you don’t! You don’t know what I’m crying about!”

  “Maybe not,” Irene says. “But can I tell you what I think you might be crying about?”

  Sadie shrugs.

  Irene sits back on her heels. “I think you’re crying because you’re really confused, and you’re angry about being confused. You think you’ve gotten yourself into something that could be dead wrong for you, but that to get out now might cause too much pain to too many people, yourself included. One second, you think this was the best decision you ever made; the next, you’re horrified that you made it. You look at the marriage your parents had, and you can’t trust that yours won’t end, too. But more than anything, there’s this: You really love Ron.”

  Now Sadie begins to cry harder.

  Her mother moves closer, puts her hand on her daughter’s knee. “Sadie. All I saw in my parents’ marriage was loneliness and anger. They couldn’t reach each other. So what I took away from that is—”

  “I know!” Sadie says. “Dad told me.”

  “Okay. Well, did he also tell you about his parents’ marriage?”

  “I know his mom took off when he was real little. And that what he had left of her was in that cigar box.”

  “What cigar box?”

  “The one he kept some of her stuff in. It was … I don’t know, an empty lipstick casing. A scarf. The postcards she sent him. He kept it until the day before he left for college, and then he took it in the alley and burned it.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t know that?”

  “No.”

  “How could you not have known that, Mom?”

  Irene shakes her head.

  “He knows way more about you than you do about him.”

  “Yes. I was selfish that way.” She looks over at her daughter. “You’re not like that, Sadie.”

  “I don’t know what I’m like.”

  “Well, then I’ll tell you,” Irene says. “You are intelligent, loyal to a fault, inquisitive, honest. Caring of people and of animals and of the world at large. Full of joy, and easy to be with. Wiser than your years. Confident in your ability to make decisions and stand by them.”

  “Until now,” Sadie says.

  “Let’s not say we’re at the end of something,” Irene says. “Let’s say we’re in the middle.” She stands, awkwardly. “My knees hurt. I have to go sit on something. Come sit on the bed with me.”

  “I can hear you from here.” Sadie doesn’t want to sit on the bed with her mother. She wants to call Meghan and go out with her. She wants that fateful day never to have happened. She wants Ron to be sitting beside her, holding her hand. She wants her mother’s knees not to hurt, for her not to be getting so old when she’s so alone.

  Irene says, “I just got back from the bookstore. And all the way home, this one thought kept repeating in my brain: That was then; this is now.”

  “What do you mean?” Sadie asks. “Why were you thinking that?”

  “Oh … For lots of reasons. Because I have a lot of regrets about how I lived my life in the past, and I think I let that get in the way of how I live now. And because I keep focusing on how I want you not be married, when you already are. In the bookstore café, I sat next to a mother and daughter who were really united in their happiness about the daughter getting married. And I felt so ashamed of how I’ve been behaving. Now, it’s true that girl was older than you. But that doesn’t mean that your love isn’t as true, or that your chances aren’t as good.”

  “Plus maybe the groom is only eighteen,” Sadie says, smiling.

  Irene laughs. “True. It’s true! But anyway, when I was walking home, I thought, maybe that mother wanted her daughter to marry someone different than the man—or woman—she chose. Maybe she had a lot of things to object to. But here’s what she was doing: standing with her daughter and saying, This is your choice and I’m with you in it. And that’s what I want to say to you.

  “I also want to tell you I’m glad for you, that you didn’t let fear stop you from doing the thing your heart was telling you to do. It takes a lot of courage to get married, and a lot of work to stay married when the hard times come. And the hard times always come.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, because it’s the nature of our species, that why. We’re complicated and contrary beings. Who knows if we’re really supposed to try to live in the way that marriage requires? Yet something in us seems to insist upon it.”

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  Sadie waits. If she waits long enough, if she gets out of her own way, the right words will come, she knows that. She sits staring at the hole in the knee of her jeans, and finally she says, “Do you know the best thing you taught me?”

  “No.”

  “See? I know you don’t. But I’m about to show you. And can I tell you one more thing?”

  “Of course.”

  “A cupcake cake? Henry would die.”

  34

  All the way back on the plane, John scarcely moves. He looks out the window and thinks of Sadie, of Irene, and then, finally, of Amy. He feared at first that this trip away from her had made for a permanent rift in their relationship, that he had gone to a place he could not come back from, both literally and figuratively; and he wasn’t sure that what he felt most about that was relief. But the few hours on the plane have told him otherwise. As the miles between him and California increased, his feelings for Amy and Irene grew clearer to him. Does he want to get married again? He thinks he does. Is Irene the one, again? No. He had a thought when he was staying wi
th her, though, that maybe she was. When she sat up in bed and untucked her blouse, when her red hair fell across her face, it launched a thousand feelings in him, including one that said, We could try again. It was exhilarating, thinking that. For one thing, he would be where Sadie was, every day. And he might finally fashion with Irene the kind of safe haven he had always longed to have with her, the palace of we, as he used to imagine it.

  He thought that surely Irene must have entertained the notion herself when he was there; he thought he felt a kind of longing to stay together coming from her, too, every now and then. When she handed him a breakfast plate with eggs scrambled wet, as he liked them. When she sat with him in worry about Sadie, and they were able to offer each other meager comfort—but comfort nonetheless—in the face of what might be a devastating loss. But he did not ask her. He watched her face during the last dinner they had together, to see if there was some kind of invitation, some kind of regret; he allowed space for her to say something before he walked out the door and downstairs to get the cab, but he did not ask her. At first he thought it was because he was afraid to. Then he realized he didn’t want to. What he wanted was to go back to Amy. Because she offered him something Irene never could, or would: A sense of unwavering stability. A contagious joy. And he can give her something back that he never could—or would—give Irene: an unprotected love. Oh, he has come back to a love for Irene, but it is one not of passion but of compassion. Which is to say, she is his friend; and he is hers. Perhaps that’s all they ever should have attempted.

  When he lands in St. Paul, it is late to call Amy, but he does anyway.

  Four rings before she answers. “Amy,” he says. “I’m sorry to wake you. It’s me.”

  “Oh. John. How are you? Is everything okay?”

  “I’m back. Everything’s fine. I wondered … Can I come and see you?”

  “Well … It’s kind of late.”

  “I know it is, but … You don’t have to get up early tomorrow, do you?”

  “No.”

  “So …”

  “Uh. Maybe tomorrow?”

  “I kind of need to see you, Amy.”

  “If you have something to tell me, you can just do it on the phone. I understand.”

  “What do you understand?”

  “Well, John, I understand you’re still in love with Irene. I knew it when you called her ‘wife’ and not ‘ex-wife’ when you were packing to go to San Francisco.”

  John stops walking, and the person behind him bangs into him with his bag. “Sorry!” the man says, and John waves his hand, It’s okay. He moves to the side of the terminal, next to the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, to continue talking.

  “I said that? I called her ‘my wife’?”

  “Yes, uh-huh, you did, you called her ‘my wife.’ So I kind of knew then. I tried to tell myself that, when you came back, we would pick up where we left off, but—”

  “That’s what I want to do. Amy. That’s what I want to do. I’m not still in love with Irene. I love her, it’s true, but as a friend. Honestly.”

  Silence.

  “Honestly!”

  “Where are you?” she says.

  “I’m standing in the airport next to the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory.”

  “Well, okay. Come over. And bring me a caramel apple.”

  “They’re closed. But if you want, I can break the glass.”

  She laughs, and he thinks, if she can laugh, she isn’t going to tell him anything bad.

  When he pulls up in front of her place, she comes out to the curb and then walks up to the porch with him. “Do you mind if we sit out here?” she asks.

  Uh-oh, he thinks.

  He sits on the rattan sofa; she sits on a chair opposite, and again, he thinks, Uh-oh.

  She smiles at him, her hands clasped together on her knees. “So I’ll just tell you what I need to say, and then I’ll listen to whatever you want to say. Okay?”

  From inside her house, he hears her phone ringing. She looks toward the sound, then back at him. “I have no idea who could be calling me so late,” she says.

  Here we go.

  “Amy,” he says.

  She holds up her hand. “I get to go first, remember?”

  “Right. Okay. Go ahead.”

  “Well, when you were in San Francisco, almost right away I could hear a change in your voice. And not just your voice, but your feelings. I could feel you moving away from me. And I kept trying to deny it, but I noticed it more and more every time we spoke.”

  She clears her throat, repositions herself. “I thought about how you were there with Irene, bound together in the way that crisis makes you be, and I knew that it would make you close. And then … Well, then you would rediscover feelings about each other, and that would lead to your wanting to be together again. Which is completely natural. I understand that. If I could be back with my husband, I would be, too.”

  John has been leaning forward, listening to her intently. With this last, though, he pulls back, stares at his hands. “I know you would be with your husband if you could, Amy. I think you had a great marriage.”

  “We did.” Her voice is full of such simple sorrow.

  “But love at this age is bound to be complicated. Don’t you think? What I want with you is all we can make it be. I know you still love your husband. I know you always will. But you have the rest of your life to live.”

  Her phone rings again, and this time she stands to go in. “I’m sorry. I’d better see who this is.”

  She goes to the phone, has a brief conversation, and comes back smiling. He waits for her to tell him what it was about, but she doesn’t, and he understands that he has no right to ask, really. Apparently, she’s moved on.

  Well, fine. He’s tired. He’ll spare her having to tell him.

  He walks over to kiss her forehead.

  “Are you leaving?” she asks.

  “Yeah, it’s late.”

  “But—”

  “It’s okay,” he says. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

  She looks sad now; she pulls her sweater more tightly about her; the night air is cool.

  He starts down the steps.

  “John?” she says.

  He pretends not to hear her, and heads for his car. He hears her door closing. He gets into the car, drives a block, then turns around and comes back to Amy’s house, goes up to the door and knocks loudly.

  When she opens it, she says, “Oh, good. Get in here.”

  He doesn’t move. “Are we done?”

  “I hope not.”

  “That wasn’t some other guy calling?”

  “No!”

  “Why did you get that dog without me?”

  “Because I thought I was losing you and I might as well at least have him.”

  “Well, I wish you hadn’t named him already.”

  “We can change it. He doesn’t come to it, anyway. I don’t think he likes it. We can call him whatever we want, John. Come in. Please?”

  He comes in and kisses her for so long it makes him dizzy. Then he goes to sit at her kitchen table and drink a glass of wine with her and listen to her talk. There is one story she tells in a long stretch of her usual meandering monologue that he intends to hold in his memory forever:

  I was in my car yesterday at a red light, and I was singing along to Johnny Mathis, they were playing “Chances Are” on the radio and, oh, I just love that song, and as for Johnny Mathis, well. He was on the Phil Donahue show once—remember the Phil Donahue show? It was the first time women were given that kind of respect. I remember the first time I watched it, I thought, Oh, my God, he’s giving a normal woman a microphone and just letting her talk! I mean, I thought it was a mistake, I just couldn’t believe that he would give such respect to ordinary women! Who are so worthy of respect, but he was the very first one to show that on television. Oh, I loved Phil Donahue, I got my favorite piecrust recipe from the Phil Donahue show. But anyway, Johnny Mathis was on Phil’s
show and this one woman raised her hand and Phil went running over, that man used to get such a workout every time he did a show, he’d go running around to all the women who wanted to say something and his suit jacket would be flapping in the breeze. But this one woman in the audience said to Johnny Mathis, “I don’t know if this is much of a compliment to you, Johnny, but you sure make cleaning the toilets easier.” And everybody laughed, but everybody knew exactly what she meant, and you know what, that remark has stayed with me all these years. But wait, the point is, I was in my car at the red light singing along with Johnny Mathis and I all of a sudden felt someone watching me, and I looked over and there was my neighbor Jenny, in her car, and she was just grinning like the cat that ate the canary. I rolled down my window and said, “I’m singing along with the radio.” “I know,” she said. “It’s Johnny Mathis,” I said, and she said, “Oh, God, Johnny Mathis!” “ ‘Chances Are,’ ” I told her and she put her hand over her heart. And then the light changed and she said, “I’m going to call you!” And it was such a joyful moment. It was just one of those accidental moments of joy, singing in the car, someone you like seeing you do such a silly thing and knowing exactly why and sharing it with you. And I just think that we need to collect these joy berries wherever we find them and put them in our big yellow buckets. And you know who that was calling when you were here? That was Jenny, I’d left her a message after you called me and were coming over and I wasn’t sure what to do. She called back to say that I’d better open up and admit my feelings to you and not let you go. So, you know. Stay.”

  35

  On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Irene answers the phone on the first ring. “Henry?” she says. She’s expecting his call. After Henry and James’s first counseling session aimed at reconciliation, James told Henry it was a “nonnegotiable need” that Henry stop working so much, so that they could have more time together. So Henry told Irene he was going to sell his business and he’d like to work for her. They’re due to open tomorrow.

  “Now, you know what kind of food I’m going to have,” Irene had warned, before she agreed to hire Henry. “I’m talking green bean bake here.”