Minus Me

by Mameve Medwed

  And even later, her husband, who had thrown up before breakfast all during her (his!) first trimester, who’d matched her cramp for cramp at each miscarriage, whose every sore throat signaled pneumonia and for whom the slightest nick meant gangrene, ended up in the hospital. “A depressive episode. Exhaustion,” was the official term. “Falling apart. Emotionally fragile,” the first-year resident translated. “Talk about feeling your pain.”

  “It’s his pain too,” Annie said.

  Hasn’t she paid her dues? Hasn’t Sam?

  Now she checks her watch. She knows she should go to the shop. It’s almost lunchtime. Customers will be queuing up, a majority of the hungry masses consisting of locals who grab the same place in line every day exactly at noon. “Please open on Sundays,” they beg.

  “Nothing wrong with peanut butter and jelly,” Sam jokes.

  “Or a lobster roll,” she adds.

  She should be next to Sam now, building the sandwiches, samwiches, wrapping the finished ones in the custom-designed waxed paper, chatting with the customers while simultaneously moving them forward—a talent she’s honed to an art. She should be ringing up sales, slicing tomatoes, checking in with the suppliers. But Megan’s there, Rachel’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Annie’s godchild, who, younger than her classmates, is taking off the year between high school and college. Megan has volunteered to intern at Annie’s Samwich Shop. She hopes to go into the restaurant business, she explained.

  “This is hardly a restaurant,” Sam pointed out.

  It didn’t matter. Megan wanted hands-on experience to help her decide between a liberal arts college and a culinary institute.

  “Okay, but a paid internship,” Annie insisted. “And I, like your mother, strongly suggest liberal arts.”

  “Crack that whip,” Rachel implored. “What better way to send her running toward English and art history.”

  Though Annie agreed to be tough—it was a tough business, after all—she herself had floundered in figuring out a career. What a stroke of fortune when she and Sam decided to buy the shop from the three brothers who had owned it from the time her own father was a child. Three fat, cookie-cutter men of indeterminate age, Julius, John, and Jerome, so pale they seemed dusted with flour, wearing spotless white aprons and white caps. The Pillsbury Doughboys, everyone called them. So much a part of the marble counter and the mullioned windows that everyone assumed they’d die with their immaculate white clogs on, keeled over the last Paul Bunyan of the day with the same lack of fuss with which they spread mayonnaise and sliced rolls. Not a single Passamaquoddian believed the Doughboys would ever desert Maine, let alone sell such a thriving enterprise.

  To Annie’s amazement, as soon as she and Sam became proprietors, she found herself doing something she loved. The accounts. The buying. The assembling. The spiffing up of walls with flea-market renditions of laden tables and kitchen interiors.

  Not that it was easy. The day after the sale, the brothers discarded their aprons, donned Hawaiian shirts, and fled to Florida. Without leaving them the recipe for the Paul Bunyan. Had their lawyer, Bob Bernstein, who’d studied for his Bar Mitzvah with Sam, forgotten to put this crucial requirement in the purchase agreement? Of course not, their affronted attorney exclaimed; they needed to check page seven, paragraph three, subhead a. The parties had signed and disappeared without honoring a critical clause of the agreement. Not his fault. Paul Bunyans were his mother’s milk. He was addicted. Would he ever have left out the most important line in the whole contract?

  Though it took a half hour on the phone, written and verbal apologies, and a bottle of single malt to mitigate the insult to both legal and epicurean know-how, the fact remained that they didn’t have the recipe for the most famous sandwich within a hundred-mile radius. Hell, the most famous sandwich in Maine. Natives who moved from the state and found themselves suffering from gastronomic nostalgia would order Paul Bunyans packed in dry ice and FedExed to places as far away as San Francisco. On visits back home, their hosts would wrap up a few dozen for return flights, causing fellow passengers to either relish the tear-watering smell or ask to change their seats. Without the recipe, Annie and Sam knew their business would bomb.

  She wrote the brothers at their forwarding address; the letters were returned: address unknown. The emails bounced back: invalid recipient. The mailroom in Century Village had never heard of them. Had they started their own Florida satellite despite the noncompetition clause? She Googled. She searched Yelp. She clicked on Gourmet.com and typed in submarine sandwich recipes. She checked public records and actually paid $49.99 for a search. The Pillsbury Doughboys had disappeared.

  “Should we hire a private detective?” she asked Sam.

  Sam laughed. He was sure they could use the remaining stock and their collective gustatory memory to analyze the sandwich layer by layer. They would deconstruct and reassemble the prototype, arranging and sifting through its segments like so many archaeological shards. Salami, olive oil, onions, cheese. How hard could it be?

  The two of them took notes, made diagrams. Here was the formula: Its base, the soft roll from the local bakery cut down the middle. First came chopped green peppers; second, exactly three slices of tomato, followed by a thick filling of diced onions marinated in oil, salt, garlic, and red pepper flakes and some other mysterious ingredient: Mayonnaise? Worcestershire sauce? Vinegar? (Balsamic? Cider? Wine?) Mustard? (English? American? French?)

  Like the Pierre and Marie Curie of home economics, they separated out and sampled each in turn. Using an algorithm Sam devised, they subsequently—and painstakingly—tried all possible combinations until they came up with the closest approximation to the original. Once they nailed the sauce, they placed four squares of unnaturally yellow American cheese, the texture of thin rubber, over the onions. Next, they covered the cheese with three circles of overlapping salami studded with green peppercorns—all garnished with a precise row of five fluted pickles.

  Their Eureka moment didn’t last, however, because of the unexpected difficulty in finding just the right bricks and mortar for the Paul Bunyan. In the years—decades—since the brothers had started their business, even Passamaquoddy, Maine, had begun to embrace the organic. “Nutritious Diets” and “Healthy Eating” sections were colonizing more of the supermarkets’ square acreage. Variety stores and fast-food joints were inserting the word gourmet on their signs. It wasn’t easy sourcing the nitrate-laden ingredients with their artificial coloring and large proportions of fat to lean. The establishments that sold them were in the sketchier parts of town where the shelves were dusty and the shelf life long.

  But finally, Annie and Sam managed to paste together a gastronomical Grecian Urn that they could reproduce. They held a tasting for loyal customers. “A miracle,” declared the local police chief. “Like Helen Keller discovering the word for water,” marveled the nursery school principal. “As good as ever,” wrote the food columnist in the Passamaquoddy Daily Telegram. Though a few curmudgeons voiced doubts, most letters to the editor were positive, striking a you-can’t-go-home-again-but-this-comes-close tone of approval.

  They also needed a new name. For obvious reasons, The Three J’s wouldn’t work. They brainstormed. Maine Chance? Maine Squeeze? The Big Bite? BUNyan House? With the addition of a Pinot Grigio, they became sillier and sillier. “PtoMaine,” Sam suggested, writing it out. By the time they agreed on Annie’s Samwich, the second bottle was half-empty.

  * * *

  Now she texts Sam: Everything ok? Can you spare me to run some errands?

  Under control, Sam texts back. Luv u. Miss u.

  She stares at the text. Miss u scrolls across her eyeballs like breaking news on CNN. How can I tell Sam? she laments yet again.

  * * *

  In her front hall, she kicks the mail to the side, throws her coat on the floor, drops her pocketbook on the table. Her four-leaf-clover key chain breaks—no surprise—and the keys scatter and roll, one tilting precariously on the heating g
rate. She doesn’t bother to chase after them.

  She flops onto the sofa, wrapping herself in the afghan her mother-in-law gave her when Sam’s parents moved to a gated community on the Gulf Coast. Its colors are tropical: oranges and yellows and chartreuses and pale orchid. Her mother-in-law, when she knitted it, must have already been dreaming of nicer, warmer places that offered oversized tricycles and pastel cocktails topped by parasols.

  Annie doesn’t want a nicer, warmer place. She wants what she has now. This job. This husband. This house. This life.

  She knows, of course, that people die young. She’s donated to bone marrow searches and Kickstarter campaigns for kids with leukemia and a young woman who wanted only to finish her college degree before her heart/lung transplant. She supports a fund for wounded soldiers and one for scholarships to memorialize lives cut short in their prime.

  When she checks the mirror, she looks the same as always. She’s no Mimi from La Bohème, all skin and bones whittled away from a wasting disease. Okay, she’s tired after long hours at the shop. Who wouldn’t be? And the dry cough could well come from inhaling onions and Tabasco sauce all day, not to mention the unrelenting cold of February in Maine. Half the town is going around hacking into their lumber-jacketed and down-stuffed sleeves. Is this the bargaining stage of grief Elisabeth Kübler-Ross talks about? Hasn’t she always had a sense of doom? Get a grip, she tells herself. She’s feeling otherwise completely fine. At least she was before her doctor’s visit.

  The doctor.

  Her chest x-ray, CAT scan, and PET scan glowered from his monitor. Grasping a letter opener, Dr. Buckley pointed to the white areas on her lungs. He used words like multiple masses, pulmonary nodules, swollen chest glands, until she covered her ears. She turned away from the tip of his pointer, where the blob overlapped the outline of her lungs like a salami slice annexing a square of cheese. She remembered the pictures of diseased lungs they’d projected onto a screen at Smokers Anonymous. Scare tactics. Okay, she was scared. Is scared. Instead she concentrated on the letter opener, on its shiny silver side, its scrolled handle, the engraved words: To Ambrose Buckley in grateful appreciation … Because his fingers covered the rest of the inscription, she couldn’t tell who was grateful or in appreciation of what. A life he saved?

  Her life couldn’t be saved; that much she had gleaned from what she had assumed was an ordinary appointment. Dr. Buckley had delivered her. He’d brought her into the world, into life. And now … Tears spilled down his baggy, grooved cheeks.

  She’d protested the biopsy. She needed to think about it. Why go through surgery to confirm what already seemed so clear? she reasoned. After her exam, he’d sent her to radiology, where the techs said nothing and the young radiologist refused to meet her eye.

  “There are specialists,” he said.

  She pointed to the monitor and the report on his desk. “Isn’t that irrefutable evidence?”

  “I’m not an expert. I would be remiss in not referring you. And at your young age—at any age—it is only sensible to seek a second opinion.”

  “I can’t decide anything now. I need some time to process this.”

  “Of course,” he conceded. “Though let me send on your PET scan to the son of a colleague, a thoracic surgeon in Portland, a rising star. Don’t wait too long. There are all kinds of new medical treatments that an old country doctor like me has never even heard of.”

  “Okay,” she granted. She looked once more at the monitor. At the digital proof of hard facts that even a rising star could not refute. “How long?” she asked.

  He twisted the letter opener over and over. He studied it so hard it could have been an exam question on the medical boards. “What I tell my patients in your …” He paused. “… in your situation—in any situation—is to get their affairs in order.” He reached over and took her hands. “Dear Annie,” he said. “One thing I know is that your mother and Sam will be a great support to you.”

  * * *

  Now she pulls the afghan up over her head. If only she could shut out the world as easily as she hides under this blanket. The afghan smells slightly ripe from the remains of buttered popcorn and pizza during Downton Abbey marathons, in addition to—why not fess up—that bit of in-honor-of-Maggie-Smith sex. She ought to take it to the cleaners. Or ask Sam—a rare request, since she’ll have to explain that it can’t be put in the industrial machines, that it can’t be commercially dried. It’s always easier to do things herself.

  Though how much longer will she be able to keep doing things?

  “Make another appointment for next week,” Dr. Buckley advised. “We should have the thoracic surgeon’s report as well as a referral to a specialist. And I want to check you out. Also … we must talk about what to expect.”

  What to expect when you’re expecting … what? She didn’t want to know. She fled the waiting room before the receptionist could even grab the scheduling chart.

  She’ll need to explain everything to Sam. How to work the washing machine, how to care for the silver, what polish to use on the furniture, how to fit the slipcovers over the sofa’s arms, how to bolster the desk leg with two and a half matchbooks, how to clean the oven, how to RSVP to a formal invitation, how to repot the philodendron, how to fix the running toilet. He’ll have to learn to remember doctor and dentist appointments, to renew subscriptions, to fertilize the lawn, to buy mop refills, to pair socks—an endless list of instructions. Theirs is not an equal division of labor. Sam pays the bills and takes the cars to Gus’s Gas for tune-ups. On his way home, he’ll fetch clothes already laundered, appliances already repaired. She does everything else. The domestic. The social. The practical. The pain-in-the-neck stuff.

  It’s what she prefers. She’s good at the day-to-day. Sam is nicer, smarter, more loving, but he hammers his nails in crooked, and he never notices if his shoes need new soles. When he was sixteen, his mother still sewed name tags into all his clothes and ironed his jeans while everyone else was courting grunge. During his college years, Sam sent his laundry home and days later it would reappear, pressed, folded, buttons reattached, holes expertly darned, with foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses tucked between his undershirts. His mother kept both the infirmary and the school dispensary on speed-dial. He’d had a rheumatic fever scare as a child, and though it turned out to be a simple, treatable strep, his mother had declared her strapping son “frail.”

  To their credit, Sam’s parents never complained that he’d married a Unitarian instead of the nice Jewish girl they might have hoped for him. Whoever he picked was just fine. They trusted his choices. They wanted only his happiness. The day Sam’s parents moved south, his mother bestowed the afghan on the two of them, then took Annie aside. “Marty and I can leave without worry,” she confided, “now that I know my boy is in such good hands.”

  “That husband of yours is incompetent,” Ursula has grumbled on several occasions where Sam has failed to rise to the level of her requests. One involved a complicated dress and a baffling configuration of hooks and eyes. “Though don’t get me wrong, I love him to death.”

  “Just let me,” Annie said, clasping a ribbon of black silk at Ursula’s shoulder.

  “His mother spoiled him rotten. And now you’re doing the same.”

  Sam wasn’t spoiled, she knew. He was just the sort of person people wanted to take care of. He was kind and sweet and unselfish, the opposite of Ursula. It was hardly his fault that he had grown used to having so many things done for him, his way magically smoothed by devoted parents who tucked him into bed with prophylactic chicken soup and ginger tea during flu season, who doted on his earnestness, his intelligence, his humor, his good nature.

  And a wife who did the same, who felt lucky to do the same, despite a few never-voiced grumbles about a lack of personal space and a husband’s occasional neediness. On a balance sheet of debit and credit, Annie had clearly hit the jackpot; she basked in the unconditional love that was Sam’s huge return for her small services rendere
d.

  Now she pulls the afghan off her head. She folds it over the arm of the sofa. She thinks back to Dr. Buckley’s words: “One thing I know is that your mother and Sam will be a great support to you.”

  Forget Ursula.

  But Sam …

  Telling him will make it real, put a name on it. And every time he looks at her … But how can she not?

  She sits still. On the landing, the grandfather clock ticks. The radiators steam. Out in the street, a snowplow scrapes patches of ice. From somewhere—the backyard next door?—a child laughs with delight. She thinks of the joy that day when she and Sam discovered the formula for the Paul Bunyan. Her next step will bring no joy.

  Chapter Three

  She hears Sam’s car in the driveway. Just her luck that he’s earlier than usual. She could invent an errand, driving round the block to give herself extra minutes to prepare. Would a few whirls through the intersections of Elm and Main make her revelation easier—or just delay the inevitable? If she were Ursula, she’d be great at picking the right words without any need to rehearse this particular soliloquy. Why couldn’t she have inherited both Ursula’s talent and her confidence? Has there ever been a daughter so unlike her mother? But then, consolation (or not), Ursula’s never had a Sam.

  Annie peeks out the window at Sam’s Volvo, its bumper sticker flaunting the familiar logo and sketch of the Bunyan. One of its corners is curled and stripped, the A in Annie’s nearly torn off. She’s feeling stripped and torn herself. Stripped bare, defenseless, scared.

  Which makes what she’s about to do even more urgent. At least she’s got the starting point. Her sundae gluttony has paid off, not just the predictable sugar high (if only), expanded hips, and oral gratification, but also unexpected dividends: the gift of Mr. Miller’s revelations about Mrs. Bouchard’s lack of a will has supplied her introductory paragraph, egged on by Dr. Buckley’s “get your affairs in order.” She’ll move from the general to the specific, starting with the will and segueing to her illness. How can she not tell Sam? How can she even contemplate hiding such momentous information from the closest person on earth to her? They’ve never kept secrets from each other. He would want to know the truth, wouldn’t he? Even though she’ll be destroying him. Her. Them.