by Tricia Reeks
“It wasn’t bad.”
“Come on, Maggie, it was better than ‘not bad.’ I haven’t seen a show like that since . . . well, ever probably. But it might just be my exceptional company.” He smiled at her, a wide, toothy grin with teeth that weren’t quite straight. Like he’d had braces but never bothered to follow up with his retainer.
“Where is this ‘Maggie’ coming from? For all you know my birth certificate could say Meg. You could be giving me the opposite of a nickname.” She reminded him just because she could, because no matter how shy and generally quiet she was in everyday life, this seemed like the moment to stand up for herself. He seemed like the one to stand up to.
“You’re a hard audience, a real tough crowd.”
“You talk like a C-list comedian from the seventies.” She threw the insult before really thinking about it, glancing towards the front door of her parents’ house, the dim yellow light glowing on the stoop.
“Do you like C-list comedians from the seventies, because I’m open to women who only want to date me for my turn of phrase?”
“Do you ever stop trying so hard?” She laughed and looked around his car, the Pine Sol smelling backseat with the neatly folded sweatshirt, nearly unrecognizable from the identical big, wrinkled hoodie on his back.
“Not yet.”
***
“Do you think it’ll be ugly?”
“No, I don’t think my baby will be ugly,” Meg smoothes a hand over her rounding stomach, folding laundry near the head of the bed. The boy sitting on the foot of the bed narrows his eyes at her, jiggling his feet in a familiar, silent rhythm.
“If it looks like him it will.”
“By him do you mean my husband?”
“Yeah, that asshole.” He shakes his head and looks at his hands, still wearing that same blue sweatshirt.
“Do you have to be so crass?”
“Ooh, crass, breaking out your big words there, Maggie.”
“It’s not Maggie anymore, it’s Meg. Meg Arnold.” She folds one of her husband’s shirts, stroking the soft stretched shoulder seam fondly. “Margaret to you.”
“I’m never going to call you Margaret. That makes you sound like my grandma.” He laughs and turns halfway toward her, unzipped hoodie falling open to reveal that band T-shirt he’d bought on their first date. That band they both loved in high school.
“You know I turned twenty-eight last week, right?”
“I’m more concerned about your thirty-billion-year-old husband.”
“He’s thirty-two and—and I don’t have to defend myself to you, David.” The next shirt gets folded angrily and thrown on the stack.
“Oh, so I’m ‘David’ now. ‘David and Margaret’, it’s like Dave and Maggie grew up and got boring, just like you always wanted.”
“No. We didn’t.”
***
He succeeded when he asked for a second date, for some reason, and a third, for a whole lot of reasons. By Christmas it was comfortable, happy, and Meg stopped complaining that Dave bought her coffee without asking. She stopped being embarrassed when he dropped by her parents’ house without warning.
None of that stopped her from being furious when he heard back from her top choice college, early acceptance.
“I just can’t believe it never came up in conversation. ‘Hey Meg, we’re going to the same college next year—’”
“It’s not set in stone, and it’s a big school. It’s not like we’re the only two people who applied; we aren’t even the only two people in our class to apply.” That easy smile slipped back onto his face, eyes wide and brown, sparkling like he was trying to slide something past her.
She huffed, “I still don’t understand why you wouldn’t tell me.”
“Because I knew you’d get like this—”
“Like what?” She rolled her eyes, “I wouldn’t be thrilled about you following me halfway across the country? I wouldn’t thank you for ignoring any independence I might have wanted to preserve?”
He shook his head, paler than usual, winter-faded freckles translucent across the bridge of his nose. He was smaller when he didn’t have a crowd, smaller within the confines of her bedroom, and for a millisecond she could see him in her dorm room, charming her roommate with that easy, crowd-pleasing humor. In freshman classes with her, taking diligent notes when no one was looking.
“I’m not taking your independence, I’m considering the same massive college as you. Twenty thousand people, you wouldn’t even have to see me if you didn’t want to. You’d have to search me out—”
“Like hell—”
“We’d be in completely different departments, completely opposite sides of human knowledge.” He slapped her desk with the flat of his palm, audible punctuation.
“Right. Dr. Dave.” She meant it as an insult; it was hilarious to think of him in a doctor’s coat, fiddling with a blood pressure cuff like he didn’t understand it, the same damn joke with every patient. Hugging little kids and promising them that needles don’t hurt.
“You don’t have to be like this. I’m waiting on other schools, your independence still has a chance.”
“I don’t—I’m sorry,” she sighed and slumped down onto the edge of the bed, head in her hands. An action that she used to make fun of when her mother did it, but now it just felt natural. “Everything is just . . . I don’t want to marry my college sweetheart and settle down in suburbia and send my two point three children to public school.”
“What does this have to do with me being a doctor?”
“Everything.” She felt suddenly stupid, a reluctant smile tugging at the corner of her lips. “Don’t you know every girl is supposed to want to marry a doctor?”
“Careful, I’m rubbing off on you,” he grinned. “You’re the one talking in clichés now.”
“Never.”
***
“You’re going to be a MILF, Maggie.” Dave bounces drumsticks off of the corner of the desk silently, and her brain fills in the signature click-click-thump.
Meg almost yells at him, almost tells him he’s going to bang up her furniture, but that’s only giving him the attention he wants, the attention he’s always wanted.
“Don’t call me Maggie.”
“You’re going to be one wicked-hot mother, Margaret.” Dave tries again, tossing one of the drumsticks into the air and catching it neatly. Silence. No wooden thwack, no rasp of well-loved wood against life-callused fingertips.
“This little . . . belligerence routine didn’t work when I was engaged, and it’s not working now.”
“Jesus, Maggie, you already talk like a damn mom.”
“Don’t call me Maggie.” She looks at her reflection in the full-length bedroom mirror, hand on the still foreign bulge of her stomach as she tries to reconcile the grown woman in a black dress that her mother would call “sensible,” and fragile, idealistic Maggie. “Can you stop being childish for two seconds?”
“I’ll give you three.”
“Do I look alright?”
“Isn’t that a question for your husband?” Dave frowns, the expression carved into his pale forehead like marble. For a second, she can see him at forty, gray-haired and falsely cranky for kicks. “Get off my lawn” and all of that nonsense.
“My husband isn’t here right now. You are, for some reason.” She spins slowly and stiffly, imagining herself as a mannequin rather than a woman under his gaze.
“You know why I’m here.”
“Don’t you have someone better to stalk? Your parents—you know your parents still call me. They miss you. They actually wish you were around.”
“They don’t get it like you do.” He starts drumming again, click-click-thump, nice and slow. The silence rings in her ears, so at odds with the motion of the drumsticks. “I don’t want to spend my life wandering around my childhood home, messing with my parents for attention.”
“And I don’t want to go to some stupid Christmas party for my husband’s st
upid job.”
It’s a little too raw, a little too close to high school bonding, mocking each other and complaining about perfect, suburban lives.
“Just yesterday you were bragging about his job and how it’s so much better than the Pretzel Shack at the mall.” Dave smiles, teeth still crooked but no worse than they were in high school. Still shiny white.
“Obviously it’s better than the Pretzel Shack.”
“Hey, I always guessed that when you were pregnant, you’d be wistful for those free pretzels I used to give you.”
“The free pretzels were a perk,” she admits, the room almost comfortable between them.
“Yeah, I was trying to fatten you up. Make sure you were in my league and wouldn’t leave me.”
“Asshole,” she laughs even though she shouldn’t, some small part of her reeling from the compliment. “Just when I thought I could tolerate you for five minutes.”
“You look great, Maggie, you always look great.”
***
But it wasn’t that poetic, nothing ever is. He accepted and so did she, and they’d joked about their dorms being on the opposite sides of campus even though they both knew freshmen get crammed together like sardines.
Graduation loomed like some sort of promise, a deadline, like if high school ended one way it would affirm the rest of her life, the rest of their lives. Their lives would be a thing, a union gilded in graduation blue.
“Prom.” Dave jokingly sat on Meg’s lap in the cafeteria, just to get her attention, before sliding down onto the bench beside her, easy charming smile winning them some measure of privacy. Dave up to his antics again.
Dave still trying to charm his illogically matched girlfriend with the stiff upper lip. “It’s this weekend, and you haven’t mentioned it yet. I’m assuming something is going on with a dress and probably some shoes. And if you’re really a girl, you probably want me to wear a tie or a cummerbund or something that matches.”
“Prom is this weekend?”
“Now, I know you’re not lying to me about being a girl. I have photographic proof—ouch!” He flinched when she smacked his arm with the back of her hand. “In my head,” he laughed, “I have a photographic memory full of all kinds of glorious proof of your gender.”
“Dave,” she cut him off, voice low. Embarrassed.
He was as unflappable as always, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and tucking her into his side. “Sorry.” His hand drummed on her side, that same rhythm, that click-click-thump that his feet tapped out when he relaxed his hand to take a test.
“So. You’re bringing up prom.”
“This was my way of asking you.”
“Oh, romantic,” her lip curled. “What? No massive public humiliation routine? I’d pegged you for the kind to get down on one knee in front of a marching band and shame me into it.”
“You think so little of me,” he laughed. “The marching band would be naked, and I’d have a puppy to shame you into it. I’m not an amateur.”
“Do you really want to do the whole prom thing?”
“You sound so excited about it.” Click-click-thump. Click-click-thump, now on the edge of the table as he leaned away from her. “It’s prom, not marriage.”
“I don’t understand why you can’t just go with your friends,” she looked around the table, at the kids not so covertly watching them, at the looks of quiet awe on their faces, like she had Clooney on her arm. Dave wasn’t Clooney of course, he was unexpectedly wonderful, but Meg hated the stares, the locker room questions after PE about dating The Famous Dave.
“Is he always so funny?” No, he only thought he was. “Is that his bedhead?” No, he just pretended it was. “He said he didn’t study for that chem test.” He’d studied all night. She’d reminded him to sleep on the bad side of three in the morning.
“Maggie,” he grabs her hand in his, squeezing it, “I can’t go with my friends because none of them can rock taffeta, none of them stare at my dimples when they think I’m not looking and because I love—”
“Fine. If only to save you from your friends in taffeta, that sounds horrifying.”
“That’s my girl.”
She wanted to snip that she didn’t belong to him, but he looked too honestly happy to ruin it. So much happier than he did with that smug little grin during a practiced dashing entrance.
***
“He’s a dick.” Dave sits cross-legged in the middle of the coffee table. Meg can’t see the TV so she leans more pointedly into her husband’s side. He smiles and wraps his arm around her back, idly stroking the side of her stomach. “I keep telling you he’s a dick, I’ve always known he was a dick. You never listen to me.”
“How did anyone make money off of this movie?” Meg’s husband laughs in her ear, and she nods too vigorously.
“I’m wondering if we should get rid of the coffee table.”
“Why would we do that?” Her husband leans forward and picks up his beer, which Dave mimes knocking out of the man’s hand.
“It’s breaking up the room, I don’t like it.”
“Is this some nesting thing?” Her husband laughs and Meg shrugs again.
“See? He’s treating you like a pregnant lady, next he’s going to offer to rub your feet and get you ice cream and pickles at the same time.” Dave frowns, “You’re more than just some pregnant lady, Maggie.”
She wants to tell him that she is a pregnant lady—a stay at home suburbanite with her career on hold, prepping to be someone’s mother. Domestic engineering. She used to mock women who called it that; she used to practically shout about how PhD came before Mrs. in her dictionary.
She turns to her husband, “Can you turn it up?”
“Absolutely.”
***
“It’s not working.” Meg stood frozen in her doorway, the bass from the graduation party they just left still ringing in her ears. “It’s not working anymore, I can’t take this.” She gestured between them with a shaky hand.
“What? You can’t take me? What did I do—”
“It’s not anything that you did,” she shook her head. “We’re completely different species. We’re about to go off to college and I bet it’ll be less than a week before you’re invited to everything and I start to look boring—”
“And you don’t even want to try. You just want to throw this away.” He accused her, drumming on his thigh. Click-click-thump, click-click-thump.
A million little stabs flitted through her mind. Him abandoning her with people she’d never talked to at the damn party she didn’t even want to be at. About the fact that he called her at three a.m. with stupid jokes she wouldn’t laugh at in the daytime. How he didn’t really like her, even after six months, he liked the idea of her, the potential reformation. He liked exposing her to things, places, and people. He liked making her laugh and the fact that he could make her quibble and budge like no one else.
And despite all that, she still liked the boy that held the door. She liked the boy that asked her out even though she was uninteresting. And it was dangerous, and she needed to be done.
“This is a high school relationship. We shouldn’t drag it off to college with us.”
“You think college is going to magically transform you into another person or something. Like you’re going to move into your dorm and suddenly be a goddamn intellectual.” He shook his head, “It doesn’t work that way, Maggie. We’re still going to be the same people with the same feelings—”
“Do we have the same feelings?” She said it in a low voice that should have been soothing. Calm. It was anything but, and Dave looked at her, really looked at her, and she swore she saw something shift in his eyes.
The light went out. She would swear that the goddamn light went out.
“I love you.” He said it like a puppet, like someone else was controlling his normally snide mouth, the hands that limply waved towards her.
“It’s not working.”
She expected more of
a fight somehow, more emphatic little gestures repeating the same sentiment over and over and over. There was nothing that Dave couldn’t run into the ground, no molehill that he couldn’t make into a mountain.
All he did was shrug and look at her like she was a petty thief, like she’d nicked a twenty out of his wallet.
“Bye, Dave, I’m sure I’ll see you around.”
There wasn’t a grieving period, not really. It wasn’t some ice cream-eating, torturous chick flick-watching thing. For the next two days she lived life as normal, worked at her summer job, ate dinner with her parents, and dissected current events with her dad, like she actually knew something about the repercussions of the rising rate of homelessness in the county.
The call came on Thursday, during dinner, and something stirred, something told Meg she should excuse herself and answer it. It was Ann, Dave’s mother who always refused to be Mrs. Anyone. Meg liked Ann—so many of Dave’s better qualities were from his mother. She missed him for the first time, staring at the caller ID, and shuddered slightly as she picked up the phone, pressing it to her ear.
“Maggie honey?” Ann was crying, a frantic sort of sob barely held back in her throat.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“I—Oh God, I don’t know how to say this, sweetheart, I don’t know—”
“What happened?” Meg bit her lip, keenly aware of her parents watching from the table, probably waiting for some reunification that just wasn’t going to happen. Meg’s parents liked Dave; they said he was good for her.
“David, oh my David he—” a scuffle on the other end of the phone, soothing tones of Dave’s father.
“Maggie?” He was crying too but holding it together better. “You might want to sit down.”
***
“I would have gotten you back, you know.” Dave ignores the closed door, stretching across unperturbed couch cushions and ignoring the way that Meg flinches away from him, pouring over a baby book.
“Oh?”
“You don’t sound impressed, but I would have. I had it all planned out, naked marching band and puppy and all.”
“You really loved me.” She shrugs. “You thought you really loved me, at least.”