Minus Me

by Mameve Medwed

  Minus Me

  A Novel

  MAMEVE MEDWED

  For Howard, always.

  Chapter One

  Annie pulls up outside Michaud’s Quik-Basket. She’s too near the hydrant, but for once she doesn’t care. She turns off the engine and tries to slow her breathing. She pictures the all-too-cheerful and all-too-serene yoga instructor in the video Sam gave her at Christmas. “Made for type As,” he explained. She watched only half. She’s lousy at relaxing. The harder she tries to breathe from her diaphragm, the faster and more shallow her breathing becomes. So what, she thinks, and opens the car door. Nothing matters now. She leaves the key in the ignition; she leaves the door unlocked; she climbs over the ice bank rather than mincing her way along the skimpily shoveled path. To hell with everything. Let her slip, splayed like a snow angel on the filthy sidewalk. Perfect simile.

  Raoul, the father, and not the son, Ralphie, who sat behind her in high school social studies, is in front of the cash register—her first stroke of luck. Ralphie would want to yak about their classmates, analyze hockey scores, ask about her mother. Not that it matters either. But today, of all days, she does not want to talk about Ursula.

  Mr. Michaud is watching the weather report. It’s February first. Will Punxsutawney Phil come out of his hole tomorrow? wonders the grinning, lumber-jacketed, suspiciously orange-skinned weatherman. His teeth are five degrees whiter than fresh snow, shaming the dirty brown-and-yellow mounds polka-dotting her hometown. “Whatja think, Annie?” asks Raoul, his Canadian vowels harsh against the weatherman’s broadcasting-school diction.

  “Don’t know,” she says. Don’t care either. Six more weeks of winter or an early spring means nothing to her now. Annie points to the racks behind the dusty cash register, its fading photos of Ralphie and his sister Marie in their confirmation clothes, twenty years out of date, Scotch-taped to it. “A pack of Marlboros, please.” She reconsiders. “Actually, a carton.”

  If Mr. Michaud disapproves, she can’t tell. His face is turned to the TV. She pays. He counts out the change. “You want a bag with that?” he asks.

  “Don’t bother,” she says. Let the whole town see evidence of her vice. Her public relapse.

  But the sidewalk holds no witnesses when she exits. No one to ask how she’s doing, whether she’ll be at the city council meeting tomorrow night, if the new pickle suppliers for the Paul Bunyans are up to snuff, and what about that enchanting mother of hers? There’d be a pause, then a glance at the carton, followed by “Is everything okay?” Lucky for her, not a single car passes along the street to see her leaning against the steering wheel as she lights up. Oh, happy day. Hunky-dory day!

  Of course, the lighter is broken. Of course, she doesn’t have a match. With the car still running, she gets out and goes back inside. “Matches?” she asks.

  He doesn’t look up. “Over there.” He points to a Whitman’s Sampler filled with matchboxes from Gus’s Gas across the road. “Have a good one,” he says.

  She drives around the block to the high school. She turns into the last row of the parking lot, territory once claimed by the tough guys who used to smoke their unfiltered Camels and rolled their joints over by the pine trees. It’s the exact spot, too, where the fast girls unhooked their bras, where she and Sam used to make out—how quaint—in his father’s old Chevy when they were teenagers and the movie had ended. By nine, the whole town closed down. At that hour, when glowing living room televisions dimmed one by one along Grove Street, you could almost hear the words “Good night, John Boy. Good night, Jim Bob” from The Waltons reruns she used to watch as a kid.

  Nobody’s around. Hardly surprising, since teenagers have birth control and the comfort of their own beds for overnights. “Better at home than in the back of the car or some cheap motel, since they’re going to do it anyway,” explained her best friend, Rachel, whose daughter had a boyfriend with weekly sleepover privileges. Not that Annie has that problem.

  But the problem she does have is a big one. The biggest. The central theme of literature and music and philosophy—not cigarettes and teenage sex and municipal taxes. Or narcissistic mothers or bland pickles. It’s the major enigma-slash-obsession of all time.

  She pulls a pack from the carton and begins to tear it open, still wearing the ruffled purple gloves Ursula sent her. The leather is so fine, a second skin, the cashmere lining so fitted to its outer layer that she manages to extract a cigarette even though her hands are trembling. She hasn’t smoked since her first pregnancy, except for one or two during Ursula’s high-stress visits. But never through the other doing-everything-right pregnancies, four of which ended in miscarriage. And the last, a daughter, stillborn—the never-again. After that, she lost the taste for it.

  Is this why? The smoking? Something to keep her hands occupied when she felt shy at a party, a country bumpkin’s glaze of sophistication. A no-cal substitute when she looked through the drugstore window and spied one of her friends demolishing a hot-fudge sundae at the soda fountain. This despite so many hard-won tobacco-free years? Despite all those meetings of Smokers Anonymous in dark church basements and shabby cafeterias? Add to that a childhood swathed in secondhand smoke erupting from Mt. Ursula and a teenaged bout of pneumonia, which, according to the doctor, might have compromised her lungs and led to problems in adulthood.

  “I’m so sorry,” Dr. Buckley said, clasping her hand in both of his, squeezing back tears.

  Of course, she thought. Her just desserts. Not only from her original sin and a child’s sense of invincibility, but let’s face it: too much wine, too little broccoli. Dropping out of exercise class the first week. Her yoga aversion. The extra ten pounds she blames on the Paul Bunyan special—that nutritionally challenged continual source of income and marital harmony and local fame.

  “Just bad luck. Just life,” Dr. Buckley added.

  “Screw life,” she says now. She’s only thirty-seven, dammit. Not that her mother would appreciate the only. “Darling,” Ursula demanded when Annie turned thirty, “let’s keep your age entre nous,” in the same voice she’d used to insist that her toddler daughter address her as Ursula, more sororial than the maternity-revealing Mama.

  Annie strikes the match, lights the cigarette, holds it between the second and third fingers of her still-gloved hand. The cigarette nestles right in, as if she’s just restored a missing digit.

  Annie inhales, coughs, and feels awful—dizzy, like her twelve-year-old pudgy self when her mother first offered her a Parliament, promising a trim waist. Her mother was right. Annie kept at it. The cough—at least then—disappeared; the pounds fell off. “What a pretty little thing,” people cooed. Flaunting the cigarette, she felt worldly, Parisian. Not that that was a quality the boys in her high school seemed to value. Their ideal was less urbane and more juvenile delinquent, a better match for bad boys like Ralphie Michaud, with their nose rings, their moussed-back hair—a single lock bisecting their forehead, a couple of heavy-metal tattoos.

  Sam wasn’t one of those guys. And she wasn’t one of those girls who glued themselves to the side of such boys like an extra rib. She and Sam had gone through Benjamin Franklin Elementary School together, in the same class, their birthdays three days apart. In second grade, he gave her a heart-shaped box of fudge for Valentine’s Day. In fourth, he was her Secret Santa. By junior high, he had become so handsome she couldn’t stop staring at him. Shy, diffident, a little absent-minded, he never realized how good-looking he was. (And still doesn’t seem to, no matter the second glances and flirty compliments.)

  But they really found each other freshman year of high school, where they clung together, two outcasts bad at sports, smart no matter how hard they tried to hide it, and only children among big, constantly proliferating families. What’s
more, they were minorities: he, Jewish; she, Unitarian, in a community centered on St. Peter’s Catholic Church. Even worse, they both lived in the fancy part of town, which meant—viewed through the narrow scope of Passamaquoddy, Maine—no tires in the front yard, a half bath tucked under the stairs, an air conditioner sticking out a bedroom window, and a dishwasher in the kitchen. She and Sam were a clique of two.

  Now she takes another puff and feels even worse. She opens the passenger side window, stuffs the pack back into the carton, and flings the whole thing into the snowbank. Should she feel guilty for littering? Should she feel guilty for corrupting a minor if some kid comes along and pounces on it? Should she feel guilty for starting some other poor soul on the road to disease? She has a better idea. Forget indulging in a social conscience. She’s going to indulge in a hot-fudge sundae with chopped walnuts, melted marshmallows, whipped cream, and a red-dye-maraschino cherry on top. The works.

  She drives the half block to Miller’s Drug and backs into the parking space someone else is just vacating. Though the never-repaired squeak in the door announces her arrival, nobody looks up. A couple of toddlers with their harassed and exhausted mothers are sitting at one end of the counter. One child has stirred a dozen straws into his milk shake. A little girl keeps trying to grab them. “Some days …” her mother sighs, mopping up the spills.

  “Believe me, I know,” the other mother commiserates.

  Annie scowls. You have no idea how lucky you are, she wants to shout. She chooses a stool at the opposite end of the counter. “Drowning your sorrows?” asks Mr. Miller when he takes her order. “This seems to be the day for it.”

  “Really?’

  He nods. “Agnes Bouchard was in here just two minutes ago and wolfed down two banana splits. Seems old Mrs. Bouchard died …”

  “Yes, it was in the paper. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Ninety-one years old and as nasty as they come. You can’t imagine what Agnes put up with taking care of her. At her beck and call every second. The old lady used to call and scream at me when her blood pressure medication wasn’t delivered fast enough. As if she was the only customer in Passamaquoddy. As if we offer white-glove service here. Then she goes and dies intestate.” He mops a scattering of sprinkles off the counter. “Without a will.”

  “I know what intestate means.” Annie feels the need to defend herself.

  “Now all these far-flung relatives are turning up under rocks and demanding their share. Worse than if she’d left her money to her cat, which Agnes had figured she’d do.”

  “I hope the banana splits helped,” Annie says.

  “Not sure. Though I sent her home with a strawberry milk shake. On the house. It’s a lesson for us all. I’ve already made an appointment with my lawyer to do my own will. Never too early …”

  Or too late, thinks Annie.

  “Not that you have to worry,” he adds.

  “You never know.”

  “Ain’t that the truth. Well, on to more cheerful things,” he says. “How is that lovely mother of yours?”

  “Great,” Annie says, not bothering to muster up the usual fake enthusiasm and present her unembellished report of Ursula’s overly embellished life. She’s used to this. Over the years, she’s become desensitized, like people with allergies who, given increasingly larger doses of what they’re allergic to, develop tolerance to the very thing that once caused hives. At the start of every school year, “How is your mother?” was the first question each new teacher asked her. Soon enough, Annie would take preemptory action and, before the words were even formed, announce, “My mother is great. Great,” prompting the guidance counselor to send out a memo to staff suggesting they inquire only about Arabella herself. She saw the memo on Miss Cleary’s desk once, along with the words What a sensitive and shy child. Arabella is, alas, so unlike her mother. Even now, all these years later, that alas has—alas—become part of what defines her.

  She unfolds the paper napkin in her lap, studies it, pleats it into a fan, then flattens it, her attention clearly and pointedly not on her mother. But Mr. Miller doesn’t notice. “I saw her in that series a while back,” he continues. “She made the rest of the cast look like pikers!” He squirts an extra turret of whipped cream on her sundae and adds a second cherry as—Annie assumes—an homage to Ursula. “Will she be returning to the old sod anytime soon?”

  That’s all she needs, Ursula as Angel of Mercy, clad in Dior white, swooping down and seizing center stage, taking over, grabbing all her daughter’s sorrows as her own. The role of a lifetime. The role she’s been playing all of Annie’s life.

  When Annie’s father died, Ursula, draped in black, a few sequins bordering her décolletage, rhinestone buckles twinkling on her satin shoes, carried on in such a way you would have thought she was still married to the just-deceased instead of on her fourth spouse. Henry Stevens had served a short sentence as number two, just long enough to produce Ursula’s sole offspring, whom he had nicknamed Annie, deeming the Ursula-mandated Arabella too highfalutin for Passamaquoddy. After the funeral, all the mourners crowded around the sobbing widow, basking in Shalimar and theatrical tragedy while ignoring the daughter, the child who had loved her father and was truly bereaved.

  Except for Sam, who never left her side.

  Annie shovels the ice cream into her mouth. It tastes like medicine. The chocolate sauce clumps around her tongue. The nuts feel like grit. Can all the pleasures of the world abandon one so abruptly? she wonders. She can’t even commit the sins of cigarettes and sundaes without such forbidden fruit turning into bitter herbs. She slaps ten dollars on the counter and hops off the stool.

  “Something wrong?” asks Mr. Miller.

  You better believe it. “Not at all,” she lies.

  “You aren’t going to finish that?”

  “As my mother always said, ‘A minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.’ ”

  “Guess it paid off for her.” He looks wistful. “Well, tell her we miss her.” He wipes the counter. “And give my best to that husband of yours.”

  That husband of hers. Sam. Oh, Sam. Dear Sam.

  How will she ever tell Sam?

  Chapter Two

  How can she ever tell Sam?

  Sam, her cherished cohabitant, her coworker, her co-owner, her co-replicator of the Paul Bunyan. Sam, at her side 24/7—except when she’s running errands or sneaking cigarettes or scarfing down sundaes. Or … Her breath catches.

  Or going to the doctor.

  How she hates it when she hears one celebrity or another call a boyfriend, sweetheart, partner, husband, or wife “my best friend.” Such a cliché, so trite, so tacky, she always notes. A view that doesn’t stop Sam from introducing her as “Annie, my wife and best friend.”

  “Wife, yes. Best friend, no,” she informed him. “Rachel owns that title.”

  “Just because you and Rachel pricked your thumbs and mixed your blood when you were kids.” He held up his hand. “Give me a knife,” he laughed. “Seriously,” he continued, “you’re all I need.”

  Though she understands how a family of two, biologically limited, might cling together to the exclusion of all others, statements like these make her feel both claustrophobic and contrite. She needs Sam. Of course she needs him. After seventeen years of marriage, he’s as much a part of her life as the streets of Passamaquoddy and the scuffed floors of the sandwich shop. Still, Sam seems to lean on her more than she does on him.

  “In every marriage, the balance is off,” reports Rachel, graduate of a master’s-degree program in social work, specialist in adolescent angst, eating disorders, and post-divorce therapy. “One partner always loves the other more.”

  Annie is sure this isn’t true, though she doesn’t argue with Rachel. She knows she and Sam love each other equally. But on the playing field of dependency, the seesaw tips.

  “I can’t imagine not having you by my side,” Sam tells her at the shop, in bed, at the grocery store, o
ver a glass of wine, under a shared umbrella, inside the movie theater, outside their front door. “I don’t get those couples who lead separate lives. How would I ever cope without you?”

  “You don’t have to. I’m not going anywhere” is always her answer.

  Was her answer. Her smug, satisfied answer. Is she being punished for this certainty? After all, Rachel’s husband surprised the hell out of her, running off with that ditzy dental hygienist with the (ironic, oxymoronic) bad breath. Who can predict?

  Given their superglue togetherness, Annie was convinced she and Sam would walk into the sunset, hip replacement to hip replacement; they’d occupy matching rocking chairs on their assisted-living porch, then go gently into that good night, if not exactly with Romeo-and-Juliet timing, at least within a few months of each other.

  Not that she doesn’t know life is unfair. All those people she went to school with popping out kids as easily as blowing their nose. All those people with intact families, healthy-hearted fathers, loving siblings, and a mother who doesn’t embarrass them. All those people who didn’t have to hold a dead daughter against their breast, a perfect, perfect baby with a lace of pale-blue veins fluttering over her eyelids, a sweep of lashes that a Disney princess would covet, a flawless valentine of a mouth, a comic fuzz of hair like a baby chick’s.

  The nurse had to pry her out of Annie’s arms. Finger by finger, wrist, elbow, shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” the nurse kept saying.

  “It is not okay,” Annie screamed.

  “What shall we call her?” she asked Sam, the baby book with their checked-off favorites still tucked into her overnight bag.

  “Better not to,” he whispered, his words a sob against her ear.

  Later, in her narrow hospital bed, as her uterus contracted and bled, he held her all night, his arms the same unrelenting vise with which she had clutched beautiful, anonymous, perfect Baby Girl Stevens-Strauss.