Once Upon a Time, There Was You

by Elizabeth Berg

  “Look,” he says. “Think of this as a mini-intervention, and believe me when I tell you that you are rigid. And controlling.”

  “Uh-huh,” she says. “Anything else?”

  “Well, a bit unyielding. Since you asked. Plus it appears you’re pretty good at holding a grudge.”

  “I’m unyielding? Are you kidding? My life with you has been nothing but yielding. And I’m tired of it! And I quit! So why don’t you just … You should just leave, now. Please.”

  Henry points to a pink stain on her robe. “What’s that?”

  “What.” She looks down at her lapel. “Oh. Beets.”

  “With feta cheese and caramelized onions and pine nuts?”

  She says nothing.

  Henry goes on. “The recipe which you got from me and, as I recall, have made several times? And enjoyed?”

  “So?”

  “So you like working for me. I just need to … Look, I get it, okay? I need to tone it down a little. Or you need to toughen up a little, because I probably can’t tone it down. It’s a problem, I admit it. I am too involved in my work. As a matter of fact, James just left me because of that.”

  He adds this last quietly, almost nonchalantly.

  “Really?” Irene says. “Are you … Really?”

  “Oh well.”

  “But you’ve been together for … what?”

  “Ten years,” he says. “Ten years and four months and six days. If you count today, which, technically, I do.”

  “And he left? As in, took his clothes and moved out?”

  “Not all of them. He’ll be back to get his stuff when he’s found an apartment.”

  “Well … Henry. I’m sorry. I really am.”

  He stands. “I made him ricotta pancakes with pecan syrup for breakfast. And he ate them, knowing he’d be dumping me right afterward. What kind of person does that?”

  Irene doesn’t answer.

  “Honestly? I think he might change his mind. I think he might go and have his little hissy fit with all that that entails, and then come back. But he might not. So could you please not quit yet? Don’t quit yet. Just … you know, ignore me. I mean, do what I say, but ignore me. My attitude. I don’t mean anything by anything.”

  “Yes you do,” Irene says. “You’re a snob and you’re all the time trying to make me feel inferior.”

  “You make yourself feel inferior.”

  “Nooooo. I’m not just walking along, feeling inferior. You do something and then I feel inferior.”

  “All right, Irene. Here it is. I really need you. I got a call from someone with tons of money and zero taste who wants a retro party with the most ridiculous recipes. I mean, gelatin molds.”

  “Oh, I have the best one,” Irene says. “Strawberry pretzel salad.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “You use a stick and a half of butter. And strawberry Jell-O. And frozen strawberries and canned pineapple. It’s so church social. She’ll love it. You know what else is in there?”

  “Please don’t tell me.”

  “Cream cheese and Cool Whip.”

  “Oh, God. I’m putting you in charge of this whole affair. I’m not even going. You take care of everything. And don’t bring any of my cards to this event.”

  “I didn’t say I’d do it. As of now, I am not in your employ.”

  “Irene. I am what I am. Okay? So. Do you want to quit or do you want to accept a twenty-five percent raise and more responsibility and keep working for me? It’s not going to be so easy for you to find another job, by the way.”

  “Thirty percent,” Irene says.

  “Fine.”

  “No, wait, forty percent.”

  Henry looks at her.

  “No?”

  “Thirty.” Henry is heading for the door when his cellphone rings. He takes it out of his pocket and checks to see who it is, then looks triumphantly over at Irene. “It’s him. He’s come to his senses. I’m not even going to talk to him. Let him just wonder where I am. And you stop worrying about Sadie. She’s the most responsible person I know. And to be honest yet again, maybe she’s just taking a little space that she needs—and deserves, Irene.”

  “Right,” Irene says. But what she feels is not that Sadie is taking a “little space” but that she is in trouble of some kind. It is true that she has worried about her daughter unnecessarily in the past. But there was also the time when Sadie was five and had gone on a field trip with kindergarten class—they were going to a u-pick farm for strawberries. Irene was out weeding the garden when an ominous feeling came over her. She went inside and checked to see if anyone had called. No. She shrugged off the feeling and went to the sink for a glass of water. She’d almost finished drinking it when the phone did ring. Sadie was in the ER; she’d been brought there after having been bitten by a dog. Irene called John and arrived at the hospital just after him. She found him sitting with Sadie, whose hand was wrapped in a big white bandage, and John was praising her for being so brave. “I got stitches but I didn’t cry,” Sadie told Irene. Irene did, though only a little. She and John locked eyes over their daughter’s head, and despite the circumstances, what Irene was feeling was an immense sense of gratitude for their circle of three.

  She goes into her bedroom and sits at the edge of the bed. It occurs to her to call John, but she is reluctant to sound the alarm, as placing such a call would do. She looks at the clock: it’s almost nine. She tries Sadie’s cell: no answer. Maybe she turned her phone off when she started the climb and has yet to turn it back on. Irene supposes the group could be having a celebratory dinner, after which Sadie will finally call her; surely she will remember by then that she was supposed to let her mother know as soon as she completed the climb. Irene regrets not having asked more questions, written down the names of people Sadie was climbing with, where they were going, what the exact timetable was. How could she have let her go, knowing so little? But she was chastised for the few questions she did ask. And the truth is, unless Sadie’s in school, Irene is often ignorant of where she is. “I’m going to a movie,” Sadie says. Or “I’m going out with Meghan.”

  Meghan! Irene knows her number; it’s on her cellphone from a time Sadie was with Irene and had forgotten her own phone and needed to call her friend. She scrolls down the numbers, finds what she thinks is Meghan’s, and calls it. She gets Meghan’s voice mail. Where is everyone?

  With some trepidation (Mom! Sadie will say), she leaves a message: Hi, Meghan, this is Irene Marsh. I’m trying to find Sadie, and I’m not having any luck. Just wondered if you knew where she was. Please call me if you do. Or ask her to call me. She stretches out on the bed, picks up the novel she’s reading. A few chapters, and maybe by then Sadie will have called. If her phone is on and she sees that her best friend is calling, she’ll pick up. Meghan will say, “Your mom called; better call her back.” The first thing Irene will say to Sadie is, “If you say you’re going to call, do it.”

  Some time later, Irene wakes up with the book still in her hands. She checks the clock. Eleven! “Sadie?” she calls out. Nothing. She goes into her daughter’s darkened room and turns on the light. Not there. She goes back to her own bedroom and tries Sadie’s cellphone once more: nothing. The police? She doesn’t think they’ll do anything until Sadie is gone longer. And anyway, what would she say? My daughter went rock climbing with a bunch of people, none of whom I know, and she’s not home yet. The police will ask, Your daughter’s age? And she’ll say eighteen, and they’ll look at each other and then tell her that Sadie is free not to report in to her mommy. And she will say, But you don’t know my daughter. Now, though, she wonders if it’s she who doesn’t know Sadie.

  She goes into the kitchen to the bread box and shoves a piece of sourdough into her mouth. Then another. A kind of clock ticks louder and louder inside her. She calls Valerie to ask if she thinks she should call the police. No answer. Then she remembers that it’s movie night; Valerie will be out with her husband seeing two movies, between wh
ich they’ll have dinner. She goes to the window, to see if there is anyone coming down the block. All she can see is her own helpless face, looking back.

  She sits in the banquette, folds her hands on the table, and feels herself beginning to relax. This is always the room in a house that brings her comfort. When she was looking for a place to live in San Francisco, it was the kitchen she always went to first. “You’re quite the cook, I gather,” the real estate agent finally said. And Irene murmured something that could go either way, because it was too hard to explain. Irene loved kitchens not because she was such a good cook but because the kitchen was always the place where a need was unambivalently expressed and met. Hunger. Food. When her mother died, Irene crept into the kitchen in the middle of the night with a blanket and a pillow. She lay beneath the kitchen table, where she finally slept.

  She gets up to make a cup of chamomile and reaches into a high cupboard where she keeps a china tea set from Tiffany’s. John gave it to her one year for Christmas, and at the time, she wondered why. She didn’t drink tea, then. When she opened it, the look on her face expressed a kind of puzzlement that comes when you are given a gift you didn’t expect or want. “I can take it back,” John said, and Irene said, “Oh, no, it’s beautiful. It’s just a surprise.”

  She uses it often, now, at times when she feels she needs to take a little extra care of herself—times when she’s hurting, or discouraged, or feeling the kind of weariness that cannot be cured by sleep. As she rinses out the teapot with hot water, she realizes she never really thanked her then-husband for what was, especially at that time, an extravagant gift. “John,” she says. “Thank you.” Saying his name out loud makes it almost seem as if he is there, now. If only he were.

  16

  Every so often, Sadie gets up and feels her way around the now pitch-black space, tries in vain to see out, calls out. She believes it is Sunday night, and tomorrow, when she can see, she will make two scratches on the wall. Also, she will periodically mark the movement of light across the walls of the shed, and in this way fashion a rudimentary clock. Just before darkness descended, she dug a deep slit in the bathroom corner, into which she defecated. She covered this with dirt, wiped herself off with dirt; then, in a similar manner, tried to wash her hands with dirt. After that, she wept a little: for the humiliation, for the hopelessness, for the pain she has in her shoulders from throwing herself against the door.

  For a while, she let herself blame her mother for this happening. If Irene weren’t so uptight and overbearing, Sadie wouldn’t have had to lie to her about going away with Ron. She would have felt safe to introduce him to her mother, and none of this would have happened.

  Then she remembered something.

  Not long ago, Irene had an appointment for a physical, and she was furious by the time her doctor came into the examining room, because she’d had to wait for nearly an hour and a half, counting the time in the waiting room. Dr. Miller had come in and greeted Irene by saying distractedly, “How are you?” And Irene had said, “I’m angry! This is too long to wait, Dr. Miller!” The doctor had acknowledged that this was true, and said she’d gotten to the clinic late because she’d had an emergency at the hospital, and then there were two emergency phone calls to take care of when she arrived at the clinic. She’d looked into her pocket, where something was buzzing, and said, “And it looks like someone else is paging me now.” Irene said the doctor had stood there, staring blankly, and then she’d said, “I’m so tired.” “I thought she was going to cry,” Irene said. “And I all of a sudden saw her, and she had lost so much weight and she had big circles under her eyes.” They started talking about how the doctor had gone into medicine because her father was a doctor and she loved medicine, she loved helping people. But now. Now she was constantly overworked, being assaulted by insurance companies until she felt, as she described it, “like raw meat.” She was seeing way too many people in not enough time, and so many of her patients were depressed because of the economy, because of the ongoing escalation of violence everywhere, because of political polarization and extremism and hopelessness. Her mother said she’d told the doctor to hop up on the examining table and Irene would have a look at her. The doctor had laughed, and then Irene had hugged her and told her to go home that night and eat a bunch of mashed potatoes and butter, and then Irene had gotten examined.

  That was Irene. Right when you were ready to scream, she’d ingratiate herself with you. That was what Henry said about her mother, and it was true. That was what her mother said about Henry, too; and it was equally true.

  Sadie gets up and stretches, calls out once more in the darkness. Like evening prayers, she thinks.

  Finally, she is tired again, and she lies on the mattress and feels herself descending into sleep, a little mercy.

  Sometime early the next morning, she is startled awake by the sound of a car door slamming. She scrambles to her feet, puts on her wrecked bra, straightens her blouse. Is she rescued? Oh, God, she is rescued! “Hello?” she says. Her voice is so hoarse, she can hardly hear herself. “Hello?” she says. Nothing.

  He’s back. And he has brought someone else. She hears the sound of two men’s voices. Here it comes. It is coming and she sees that she has deluded herself in the most spectacular and ridiculous of ways. She is afraid, and that is all. She is not ready to forgive, she is not ready to die, she is not ready for anything. She is only afraid, she can taste it, she can smell it, and now she feels the back of her throat begin to tighten so that she can hardly breathe. “No,” she says, in what little voice she has left. “Please.”

  “Stand back!” she hears, and the door is broken in and there before her is a police officer, who says, “I’m Officer Dickinson. Are you Sadie Marsh?”

  She nods, squinting in the sudden brightness, astonished at how wide outside is.

  “I’d like you to come with me. I have to ask you some questions.”

  She is helped into the back of a squad car, where she is given a bottle of water and asked if she feels ready to talk. “Yes,” she says. She hears her own voice newly. She is aware that the girl she was when she left her house on Saturday morning is not the girl she is now. She doesn’t feel like a girl at all, anymore. She feels like a member of a species living for an indifferent amount of time on the planet Earth, a species in which most members assume a false security nearly every day of their lives. She is no longer among that group. She has been singularly and irrevocably educated.

  17

  “Want some of this?” Valerie asks. She’s standing at the stove in her flowered robe, flipping bacon in the pan and drinking her first cup of coffee. Irene had come over at eight, when Valerie and Ben were still in bed.

  Irene doesn’t answer. She’s hardly slept. Early this morning, she went to the police station to file a missing person report, which she told Valerie was such a surreal experience. The endless and heartbreaking questions. The way she had to describe Sadie’s eye and hair color, the little birthmark on her chest, which, as a toddler, she used to try to wash off. When she described the clothes Sadie had on when Irene last saw her, she’d begun to sob. “Most times, these things turn out fine,” the cop had said. “No reason to get yourself all worked up until there’s something to be worked up about. Most times they turn out fine.”

  “I told him thank you,” Irene said, “but what I was thinking was, What about the other times?” She told Valerie she couldn’t wait to get out of there and get back home, she kept thinking she should never have left home, but when she finally did return, when she opened the door and called, “Sadie?” no one answered. When she checked the landline, no one had called. When she pushed open the door to her daughter’s bedroom, it was just as Irene had left it: the bedside lamp on, the covers turned back in anticipation of a daughter who, after she was good and yelled at, would surely need sleep. She sat in her living room for a while, then bolted over to Valerie’s and burst into tears.

  Valerie had been sympathetic, but Irene sensed
that her friend disapproved of her going to the police, thought she’d jumped the gun. When she asked Valerie that very question, Val said, “Well, to be honest? Maybe so.”

  Now she comes to sit at the kitchen table with Irene. A shaft of morning sunlight lies wide on the tabletop, and Irene thinks that, under other circumstances, she would find this beautiful, the way the light bisects a vase of flowers. “Do you think I should call John?” she asks.

  “Why?”

  “Because Sadie is missing!”

  “I’d give it one more day.”

  “Well, if she lived with John and she were missing, I’d want to know. Why is no one taking this seriously but me?”

  “Okay, Irene, you know what? This is Sadie’s declaration of independence. It’s here. And it’s been coming. You know that. You know you’re too close to her. I swear, you’re the only mother I know who used to get sad when school started. She’s not calling you because she shouldn’t have to.”

  “I just wanted to know that she was safe, Val! She’s not on a class trip to Paris with thirty-five chaperones and looking at art, she’s rock climbing.”

  “She’s done it before.”

  “In a gym. And if she wasn’t going to call me, she wouldn’t have said she would. That’s the thing. That’s the real thing.”

  “If she had said she wouldn’t call, you wouldn’t have let her go. Right?”

  Silence.

  “Right?”

  Valerie goes back to the stove to turn the bacon again, pops some bread into the toaster. “Eat some breakfast. Then you’ll feel better. Then go and find something to do. She’ll be home before you know it. And then you can yell at her, won’t that be nice?”

  Irene stares at her hands.

  “Ben and I are taking the day off and going to Carmel.”

  Irene nods.

  “You want to come?” Valerie asks, but Irene knows a mercy invite when she hears one.