“Right,” he says. He doesn’t know why this makes his chest feel tight, but it does. When he can collect himself, he says, “Okay. So then after school, I, Patrick Delaney, will meet you at the bus stop and bring you here.”
“Unless I get invited to go home with a friend.”
“Unless you get invited to go home with a friend, correct. Which you will tell me about.”
“I will try to remember.”
“No, no. That’s one of the rules. I have to know where you are. At all times.”
“What if I’m downstairs with Ariana and her friends?”
“Then you’ll tell me.”
“What if I’m on the stoop with Bedford?”
“Then you’ll tell me.”
“What if I’m in the bathroom?”
“Fritzie.”
“What?”
“You know you can go to the bathroom.” He takes another slice of pizza. “By the way, is your name seriously Fritzie Peach?”
“Yep.”
“And how did you happen to get that name?”
“I gave it to myself.”
He laughs. “You’re quite a piece of work, you know that?”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
He stands up and starts clearing the table. “It means . . . it means . . .” His phone buzzes in his pocket. It’s Marnie. “Oh! I gotta take this,” he says to Fritzie.
“Okay, but do we have a rule about getting my ears pierced?”
“We do,” he says. “You’re not to do it.” And then he clicks the phone. “Hi.”
Her voice is odd. At first he thinks that maybe the worst has happened, that she didn’t make it to Florida in time to see her father before he passed away, but no. He realizes it’s just her new, formal, dealing-with-Patrick voice. That kind of voice. Official.
“Just going up to see my father now in the Cardiac Care Unit. How’s Fritzie?”
“She’s fine.”
“Good.” Then there’s a silence. He’s supposed to say something else, so he says, “How are you?” even though she probably just covered that. Going up to see her father in CCU, right.
“Don’t let Fritzie forget to put her homework in her backpack,” she says.
“Fritzie, put your homework in your backpack,” he says. Then: “How was the flight?”
“Good. A bit of turbulence, but nothing so bad.”
He tells her it snowed and they went to the park. Which just about covers it if you don’t want to go into the part about haircuts, dog nearly getting lost, Patrick’s name being shouted seventy kazillion times. Just park, pizza, snow. He’s fine. Bedford’s fine. Fritzie’s fine.
He looks over at Fritzie. Oh God, she is so un-fine. That hair. Now that he looks at it, really looks at it in the kitchen light, he sees that she seems less like a jaunty POW and more like she might have had a bad case of mange.
He decides it’s best not to mention this on the phone. He doesn’t feel he’s qualified yet to explain the concept of arting one’s hair. In fact, he’s grateful when Marnie says she has to go, and they can stop talking.
The next day, after looking at Fritzie’s hair and feeling like an abject failure at parenting, he invites Ariana upstairs for a hair consultation, with Fritzie’s permission. In spite of himself. He has to ask for help, day two.
“We’ve had an incident of hair-arting, and I’m thinking you might be able to art it into something more . . .”
“Attractive?”
“Well, less like it was chewed off by rodents. More like it was done on purpose.”
She does exactly that: snips and shapes, and she recommends a bit of hair gel for the mornings, something that would make it stick up ever so slightly.
“Thank you,” Patrick and Fritzie say at exactly the same moment. For probably completely different reasons.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
MARNIE
“Just so you know, I’m not sorry,” says my mother at the airport, out of the blue.
I look over at her. We’ve been sitting at Gate Eighteen with our cups of tea, waiting for the plane to board. Around us are a bunch of pale New Yorkers in flowered shirts laughing as though they’re being freed from weather prison. My mother has mostly been grimly typing something on her phone, stopping to stare into space in an unfocused way, and then furiously typing again in response to a ding from her phone.
After a few attempts to make conversation with her about such neutral things as airport security lines, the taste of hot tea in Styrofoam cups versus cardboard cups, and annual snowfall amounts in Brooklyn, I too have fallen silent.
She puts her phone away and leans over closer to me. “I probably won’t be talking about this much in the next few days, but I just wanted you to know that my time in Brooklyn was perfect the way it was,” she says. “So thank you. And I don’t feel guilty for being away, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
That is what I’d been thinking. “Well,” I say. “That’s good. I’m glad. Guilt is sort of pointless.”
“There are some things I didn’t tell you that I might as well mention now,” she says. “Just because I want you to know. I did have a little fling. I didn’t tell you about him because I didn’t want to burden you with all that. But I just texted him to tell him what’s happening and that things are over.”
“Oh, Mom,” I say. I squeeze her hand.
“Yeah. I’m processing it all now, as you young folks say.”
“Well, I guess so,” I say. “You must have a lot of—”
“I don’t know if you’ll be able to understand this,” she says, interrupting me, “which is why I’m going to tell you now so if you ever come up against this in your own life, maybe you’ll handle it differently. I’ve realized that none of what I was feeling was about your father, not really. Sure, I felt neglected by him, and taken for granted, and ignored a lot of the time—but I now see that what was really happening was that I was the one taking the easy way out. I was being lazy with my own life. Not taking responsibility for my own happiness.”
“Please. Don’t even tell me that you’re going to say it’s your fault because you needed to try harder because he had lost interest in you.”
Her eyes search mine. “No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. Listen, because this is important. What I’m saying is that I expected him to provide all the excitement for me, all the praise, all the . . . attention. I didn’t think of myself as a person who had any right to any restless feelings, or unpleasant feelings, or longings—so I just kept pretending and acting like I was perfect and happy, while I was burying my real self. And at the same time expecting him to come and excavate me. But it wasn’t his job. Never was.”
“I’m not sure . . .”
“Marnie, unlike you, I haven’t ever done anything that’s really hard. You’ve gotten married and divorced, you’ve broken off an engagement, you’ve moved far away and started your own business, you’ve decided to believe in magic, you’ve made a million new friends. And I . . . I’ve never upended anything. I got married young, I bought a house, had kids, threw dinner parties, joined the PTA, got my hair done every week, baked cookies and dusted the lamps, and basically just let myself go along a road that I never even looked at. I aced the big things, don’t you see? I got myself a great husband and two daughters. He’s nice to me and he makes a good living, and so what if he got grumpy sometimes? I just accepted everything about my life. I didn’t ever do anything outside of what was expected. I didn’t have to think about my life. Don’t you see? Somehow I realized I never even ice-skated or kissed another man or went to the top of the Empire State Building or asked myself what wild and reckless thing I wanted to do with my life if I had the chance. I’ve never even lived alone, much less smoked dope or gotten really, really drunk, or bodysurfed in the ocean, or told anybody off or even disappointed anyone on purpose so I could suit myself.”
“Oh, Mom.”
“What? What are you thinking?”
>
“I don’t know. It’s just so sad. That that’s what it comes down to.”
“Well, it’s less sad now. Because now I’ve done some of those things. And no matter what happens, I know I’m going to do more of them.” She sits back in the black plastic airport seat and folds her hands across her purse. She smiles. “I’m no longer this upright person I was so smug about being. I’ve had a little extramarital fling—and I would thank you to not look shocked, young lady, but I did—and even more than that, I smoked some dope and I went to a Broadway show, and I went up to the top of the Empire State Building.”
“Good lord, Mom.”
“I had me some good, good days,” she says. “I know you’re the expert matchmaker and all, but I want to tell you one thing. I can see that things are broken between you and Patrick right now”—she holds up her hand to stop me when I start to protest—“and, let me finish, I don’t know if you’re going to be able to put things right between you or not. I hope you are if that’s what you want, but whatever you do, I hope you’ll never do what I did and narrow your life down to fit his. Or let yourself be so dependent on his attention that you pretzel yourself around to fit his view of how life should be. There are so many ways to live life. It’s not only one way. We get ourselves thinking that we have to make something work because we’ve put so much time into it already . . . but you have free will. Remember that.”
“He doesn’t want to get back together, even if I asked him to,” I say. “When the school year is over, he’s told me he’s going to move out.”
She pats me on the hand. “I’ve seen what’s happening. He’s a wonderful man, Patrick is, but I know he’s not easy.” Her eyes search my face. “Do you want my advice?”
“Okay.”
“My advice is—don’t listen to anyone else’s advice.” She smiles. “No, really. I mean this. Trust yourself. No one knows whether you and Patrick can weather all this. This could be a trial you’re in right now that will lead you to something deeper. Maybe it’ll still work and maybe it won’t. Don’t think it’s necessarily over. Love can survive worse than this.”
“Not if one of the people doesn’t want it to,” I say.
“Well, that’s true,” she says. “But it sounded good, didn’t it? And you can’t give up on magic.” Then she smiles and reaches into her carry-on bag. “Just so you know, I brought along Blix’s spell book. Just in case you might need it.”
She hands me the old, worn-out volume that I’ve checked and rechecked so many times, the book with the vines and flowers on the front that I’ve always kept nearby. Inside, I know, it’s stuffed with handwritten pages that Blix wrote when she was thinking up spells for people. There’s also a page in there on which she wrote PATRICK AND MARNIE. PATRICK AND MARNIE. PATRICK AND MARNIE, long before he and I knew of each other’s existence.
Blix thought he was my destiny when she was writing that down. But she was wrong about a lot of things. And Patrick just may be one of them. He was my destiny for four years, maybe, but not beyond that. And I have to let it go.
I feel myself flush. “Thank you, but I don’t want that stuff anymore.”
“Take it,” she says in her mom voice.
So I do. I shove it in my bag and roll my eyes at her. I’m not going to let it pull me in again, though. Magic didn’t cure Blix’s cancer, and it didn’t save Patrick from the aftereffects of the fire. I think the evidence is in that it’s not worth a whole hell of a lot.
There is no such thing as destiny or meant-to-be. We’re just all out there, slogging through as best we can, and some of us aren’t doing so well at it just now.
We find my father in the Cardiac Care Unit, sitting up in bed, looking like a grayer, tinier version of himself. He gets a big smile on his face when he sees us, and holds out his arms to my mother, who goes over to his bedside and leans down and kisses him on the forehead and holds his face in both hands as she kisses his cheeks and looks into his eyes.
“Look what I had to do to get you home!” he says. “God, I sure hope the insurance covers this, because otherwise it’s been an awfully expensive way to get your wife back.” Then he looks at me. “And, ducky, how are you doing, baby? Thank you for bringing her home to me and saving me from having to go up there and endure me some winter. I saw on the Weather Channel they got some snow up there today even.”
And that’s the way it goes conversationally: Weather Channel, hospital food, tests the hospital has done, the nurses’ demeanor, the needles, the beeping machines. He’s Ted, always the hearty salesman—jovial as he can be under the circumstances, glad to see his family, and making jokes when the nurse comes to adjust his IV and add some medication. Now that his wife is here, he tells them, he expects to be sent right home where the real good care is going to be. Not that he hasn’t been getting excellent care from them, he hastens to add—but now he just needs the love cure.
“Can you imagine me—me—having this happen?” he says to me, his eyes wide with disbelief. “I’m the healthiest guy I know, and yet I’m the one getting the chest pains and the mild heart attack. Luckily the doc says it was just a mild one. Got one of those balloon things installed, and so I’m good to go. I tell everybody it was just that I missed my wife. My poor old heart was just sick of beating as one.”
I look at my mother smiling and patting his arm, being his wife again. She’s slipped right back into being who she always was, adjusting his sheets and his hospital gown, asking him if he wants a foot rub, or more water, or something from the cafeteria. Which nurse is his favorite, she wants to know, and how often has Natalie been in to see him? Any of the fellows from work come to visit? How’s the house?
Only I see the shadow of the real person right there behind her eyes. The person who’s sitting back for now but who has vowed not to disappear.
I leave my parents alone and take a walk through the hospital. The sun has gone down now, and the hospital is lit up like a shopping mall, with fountains and a gigantic atrium downstairs—palm trees and ferns lit up with spotlights. The only thing that differentiates this from your run-of-the-mill shopping plaza is that there are more wheelchairs than you’d perhaps normally see. And there’s no kiosk selling sunglasses. I get a candy bar from a vending machine and think about calling Patrick back now that Fritzie has probably gone to bed.
But then I remember all the little sculptures of Anneliese in that studio, and his voice when he told me he loved her. I’m not the one he wants. Someday, maybe, I could be a stand-up comedian, and do a routine about how my ex-husband tried to break up with me at the altar on our wedding day—and then how the next guy left me to go back to his dead girlfriend. Would people laugh?
I wonder.
My father gets released two days later, and we take him home. We treat him like the invalid he hates being, lavishing him with attention and foot rubs and vegetable smoothies and lap blankets to protect him from “a possible chill” while he tries to bat us away and convince us he’s as strong as ever. I sit outside with him on the patio and adjust the shade umbrella so that he doesn’t get sun on his face. My mother gets to work making him healthy meals and going to the grocery store, lining up appointments, fixing up a sickroom for him. He has a whole sheaf of papers telling him what he can and cannot do, and we all read them and pass them around. He has written instructions on how he must change his life to prevent another heart attack.
“The next one, I might not be so lucky,” he says.
“I know,” I say. “It’s good you’re taking care of yourself.”
He slaps his knee and laughs. “I’m just kidding you! There’s not going to be another. I got my sweet better half back. I just needed me some of Millie’s Marvelous Thursday Night Meat Loaf. This was just a fluke, trust me. Probably wasn’t even a real heart attack. Just a warning.”
“If it was a warning, it was a pretty serious one,” I hear my mother say to him. “They don’t put balloons in people for fake heart attacks, I don’t think. You need to f
ollow instructions and take it easy.”
“But I feel like a million bucks,” he says. He does not look like a million bucks. He looks like no more than one dollar and thirty-five cents. “I want to get out there on the golf course again. That’s what eases my stress. That, and seeing you back at home, my dear. Hate to admit it, but I’m no good on my own.”
When he and I are alone together, he lets down his guard and sinks down into himself, letting his chin rest on his chest, tapping his fingers on the plastic arms of the outdoor patio chairs. He says, “I didn’t ever think she’d stay that long. What was she doing anyway? Who the hell goes to Brooklyn for the winter?”
“She was having a nice time,” I say. “Went to the theater, talked to people in the flower shop. Helped out with Fritzie.”
Went to the top of the Empire State Building. Rode the subway. Smoked pot. Dated some new men.
“I don’t get it,” he says. “Forty years married, and I guess I’ll never figure women out.”
“It’s not too late,” I say. And feeling bold, I add, “You don’t have to figure all women out. All you have to do is love this one woman as hard as you can. Which I think it’s in your power to do.” Then, getting even crazy bold now, I say, “What if you tried listening to her like you really, really want to know what she’s feeling and like you’re on her side completely?”
“I am—” he says, but I hold up my hand to stop him.
“And stop talking to her in that fake way, like you’re reading a bad sitcom script. The ‘better half’ and ‘Millie’s Marvelous Meat Loaf.’ No one wants to hear that stuff. Be real.”
I brace for what he would have said at any other time in my life, any time I tried to give any advice to him, the infallible Ted MacGraw, salesman extraordinaire, pillar of the community, good all-around nice guy. He would have said, “No one knows people like I do! I’m a people person, so don’t go trying to tell me what’s what. I’ll talk to my wife the way I want!”
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