When It Happens to You

by Molly Ringwald

  “It’s kind of a big deal to get this offer,” he had told her after completing a set of push-ups. “I just signed with APA less than two weeks ago, and to get an offer that quickly is a huge vote of confidence.”

  Greta nodded as she regarded the flush of excitement in his face. His color was lighter and brighter than she had seen it since she had met him, and she became aware for the first time how important his acting career was to him. For reasons that she wasn’t even sure of (fear? convenience?) she had incorrectly assumed that his acting was something that he no longer cared about. He rarely spoke of it except to make the occasional self-deprecating comment about the show, and she’d had neither the thought nor inclination to investigate further.

  “I’m really happy for you, Peter.” She sat down on a box with BOOKS scrawled across the side. He sat across from her in the middle of his still nearly empty apartment. “But I don’t think I’ll be able to join you. Maybe for weekends . . .”

  Peter frowned. “But you don’t have a job.”

  “I have Charlotte.”

  “I know you have a kid,” he said.

  His comment unnerved her. The word was harmless, but the way he said “kid” sounded to her like “dog” or “houseplant.” An inconvenience that needed to be fed and watered, looked after by single friends on vacations. Her face must have betrayed her because he smiled and extended his sneakered foot toward her, tapping the toe of her shoe.

  “Vancouver is supposed to be incredible for children. . . .”

  From outside the window a woman jangling a can of coins called out, “Hep hep hep the homeless. . . .” Peter listened for a moment and then walked over to the window and lowered it. He came back and sat next to Greta on the floor. She reached out and ran her hands through his hair. His hair was so different from Phillip’s. Longer, coarser, and curlier. She could never get the thought out of her mind that she was touching something that didn’t belong to her. Peter closed his eyes and leaned his head on her knee.

  “She’s starting school in a couple of weeks,” Greta finally said.

  “Second grade? First grade?”

  “First grade.”

  “So what’s she going to miss if she’s a couple weeks late? The Pythagorean theorem?”

  “No . . .”

  “Are they dissecting Gaddis?”

  Greta stared at him. A frustration with his utter lack of understanding began to gnaw at her, like wearing a shoe a half size too small.

  “She’ll miss making friends. Feeling a part of a community.”

  Peter raised his head as if he were about to say something. Then he seemed to change his mind and laid his head back down on her knee.

  “And anyway, until Phillip and I are divorced, neither one of us can take Charlotte out of the state. Let alone the country.”

  “Well, there we have it.” He gently took her hand from his hair and held it in his on her lap. He kissed her hand before releasing it. “I’ll miss you,” he said.

  He stood up and walked into the kitchen. Greta watched him take a beer out of the refrigerator and open it. He tossed the bottlecap in the direction of the makeshift trash and missed.

  It was exasperating that he could be so oblivious about what it meant to have children. She already deeply regretted letting her daughter know that she was seeing another man romantically, and she was sure that if she hadn’t had such a fragile command over her own emotions, she would have trusted her own better judgment and waited. From the moment he met Charlotte, Peter had valiantly tried his best to charm her, confident that all children were predisposed to like him. Charlotte, however, was a proud outlier. She resolutely refused to accept him. She declined to speak to him, challenged Greta on the most basic request, and as her grand denouement, she began sucking her thumb around Peter, a habit she had quit at two years old. After that, Greta stopped trying to do anything with the two of them together.

  Instead of being more sensitive to her plight, it felt to Greta that the less Peter saw of Charlotte, the less she existed for him. She became a tiny, inconvenient abstraction. She wanted to scream at Peter, “But she is me! You can’t say you are in love with me and not love her!” But she also knew that you can’t make anyone love someone any more than you can make them not love someone.

  They did their best to reconcile before she had to leave for the airport, but Peter’s persistent sullenness pervaded the apartment just as the moisture from the sea permeated his walls and settled into the cracks and dripped from the ceiling—the same wetness that warped the book covers and caused the upright piano that he had shipped from New York to promptly fall out of tune.

  They sat glum and silent on the mattress in the bedroom as Greta helped to organize his duffel bag for Canada. She rolled his mismatched socks into balls and folded the T-shirts, separating the short- and long-sleeved, while Peter thumbed through a graphic novel.

  When she emerged from his apartment, she hurried down the rickety wooden steps and ran to face the water, hungrily gulping in the ocean air. By the time she put the key into the ignition of her car, she felt exhausted, crushed by the unpleasant sense that she was doing nothing more than driving from one child to the other.

  Greta had just reached the short-term parking lot at LAX when she received a call from the airline informing her that her mother had neglected to sign the release form for Charlotte. Despite being paged several times, Greta’s mother was unreachable and the airline would be unable to hold the flight any longer.

  “But she’s six years old!” Greta cried. “I’m here at the airport waiting for her.”

  “I understand that, Mrs. Parris,” the representative said. “But we have rules which clearly state the guardian at the location must sign the release form for the unaccompanied minor and must also stay until the plane departs.”

  “I understand,” Greta moaned. “Can you just let me try to locate my mom? Or maybe have my father come to get her? He can take a cab. . . .”

  Greta was told that Charlotte would be in the care of an employee from the airline, and depending on how long it took to locate Greta’s parents, there was a chance Charlotte could take the later flight, scheduled to depart within the hour. Greta frantically dialed her mother, father, and nephew but reached the voice mail for each one. The last person she dialed, and the only person to pick up, was Phillip.

  By the time Phillip arrived at the airport Greta had already received the news that Charlotte would have to be sent on the first flight out in the morning. Her mother hadn’t realized her error and was surprised to arrive home to find Charlotte seated at the table eating pizza with her husband and grandson. Greta was still yelling at her mother for leaving her cell phone in the car when Phillip took the phone from her and calmly spoke to a rattled and defensive Ilse.

  “It’s hard to remember things at my age,” Ilse cried. “They didn’t tell me that I had to sign any form. We didn’t used to have to do that!”

  Phillip reassured her that everything was fine, and they would pick up Charlotte in the morning. Greta followed his Volvo to the overnight parking lot and then he took over the wheel and drove a shaken Greta back to what had once been their home.

  Phillip hadn’t been in any room other than the kitchen and Charlotte’s bedroom since they had separated, and feeling disconcertingly like a stranger, he followed Greta into their bedroom. She talked to him over her shoulder as she headed into the bathroom to shower.

  “Can you open a bottle of something?” Greta called out. “I want some wine. There might be something open on the counter.”

  He turned and circled back toward the kitchen, marking the small, subtle changes that had taken place since he had left. The walls had been painted a shade or two darker. He peeked into what was formerly his office and found it stacked high with file boxes that didn’t belong to him. Upon closer inspection, he noticed the word “Layton” scrawled across the sides.

  The sisal rugs that had been on the floor since they moved in were replaced
by Turkish kilim rugs. For years they had talked about investing in the expensive rugs together, and now it looked like Greta had taken the initiative. The rugs were warm and imperfect and made the modern, forbidding walls of the showpiece house they had built together seem for the first time like a home.

  Charlotte’s room was the only room that was unchanged. It was also the only place that contained a picture of Phillip and Greta together. It was of the two of them in Spain. They had asked a passing man to take the picture outside of the Prado. They had unknowingly asked a man who was in town curating an exhibit on Goya. When he found out that they were on their honeymoon, he invited them to attend a private showing following a cocktail reception. In the photograph, Phillip had his arm wrapped around Greta’s waist, and they were both laughing. He wished now that he could remember at what. Phillip placed the photo back beside the framed picture of Charlotte and Thinmuffin when she was a kitten.

  In the kitchen, Phillip found an open bottle of Sangiovese on the counter next to the stove. He opened the cupboard where the wineglasses were kept and found that they had been inexplicably relocated to another cupboard. He poured two glasses and waited for Greta.

  She appeared in the kitchen wearing a white tank top and jeans with a towel wrapped around her head like a turban. Phillip handed the glass to her, and she sat down on one of the stools next to the counter. Greta had always been the most beautiful to him when emerging from water. Swimming pools, oceans, bathtubs. He didn’t realize that he was smiling at her until he noticed her expression change.

  “What?” She eyed him with suspicion.

  He paused, considering whether to tell her what he felt. He had sworn off anything vaguely complimentary for months now, sensing that it only served to hurt her.

  “What?!” she insisted.

  “You look beautiful,” he said.

  “Why do you tell me that?” She undid the turban, running it across her short wet hair.

  “Because I’m thinking it. I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to hear it.”

  She shrugged. “It isn’t unpleasant. I just don’t know why you tell me that now. It makes me think you want something.” Greta swirled the wine around in her glass. She held it up to the light and then brought it up to her lips for another sip. “My fucking mother. Who doesn’t keep a cell phone on them when they are watching a child?”

  “Your fucking mother,” Phillip said, smiling.

  Greta shook her head. “It’s like she does it on purpose.” She took the bottle off of the counter to pour herself some more wine, but it was empty. She walked over to the pantry and took out another bottle. Greta had never been much of a drinker, and Phillip felt slightly wary as he watched her fussing with the corkscrew, the bottle tucked under her arm.

  “Let me get that for you.” He reached his hand out. “Maybe we should eat something?”

  She handed him the bottle and opened the refrigerator. She bent down on her knees and moved jars and old take-out boxes around. “I don’t have a lot in here.” She took out an egg carton and opened it up, counting the eggs. “I could make omelets. I think I have some onions and hang on—” She opened up the vegetable drawer and located one red pepper, which she held up triumphantly. “Ta-da!”

  Phillip refilled their wineglasses and put the cork back in the bottle.

  “It sounds perfect,” he said. “If it isn’t too much trouble.”

  Greta rolled her eyes at him. “I cooked for you for over twenty years. I think I can manage an omelet now.”

  She fetched a bowl from under the stove and cracked the eggs into them. She added a splash of milk.

  “I hope this doesn’t mean that Charlotte isn’t going to want to go and visit my parents anymore,” she said as she beat the eggs into a yellow froth.

  “She sounded fine,” Phillip said. “It was probably an adventure for her.”

  Greta shook her head. “Things can be scary when you’re six years old. Last week she wouldn’t go to sleep in her own bed for three nights after she found a spider in her room.”

  “What can I do?” Phillip asked, gesturing to the bowl.

  Greta tossed him an onion. “Julienne that,” she said.

  He took a knife off the magnetic strip on the wall and began peeling the layers away. As he sliced through the middle of the onion, the enzymes released in the air stung his eyes. He pressed on his eyelids with the back of his hand. “You’re trying to make me cry.”

  “Turnabout is fair play,” she said.

  She replaced the carton of milk in the refrigerator and took a sip of wine. “Thinner,” she said, pointing to the onions with the tip of her own knife. She took her place at the counter next to him and started chopping the pepper into skinny red pieces. “Like this,” she said. They stood shoulder to shoulder, chopping silently.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time that my parents forgot me in a shopping mall?” Phillip asked. He handed her the small plate with the onion and leaned back against the counter. Greta emptied the onion into a sauté pan with the pepper. She switched on the overhead fan.

  “What do you mean they forgot you?”

  “My mother was there to buy a paper that was running an ad for our restaurant. I guess they couldn’t find it at any of the newsstands, so my mom ran in with me to the bookstore and my father stayed out in the car listening to a ball game on the radio. It must have been around the same time of year as now. Dad was obsessed with baseball. He had hoped to play professionally at one point. I didn’t know that until after he died.”

  Phillip paused for a moment, wiping his eyes with the back of his wrist. “So, we went into this bookstore that had a good magazine stand, and while she’s looking through the paper, I wander away to check out at the scratch-and-sniff books in the kids’ section. Remember those?”

  “Loved them.” Greta reached behind the stove for some rock salt. She sprinkled a few grains over the vegetables and tossed the remainder over her shoulder.

  “I don’t even think I was in school yet, so that was about the level I was at. After a while, a grown-up—must have been an employee—comes up and tells me that I’m scratching the books too hard, and if I want to read and scratch, then I’m going to have to buy it. So, I got up to go find my mom and she’s gone.”

  “What do you mean gone?”

  “No idea. She just left. And I was too young to know my telephone number, didn’t even know my parents’ first names. I just knew Mama, Papa, Tony, and my own name.”

  Greta lowered the heat and stirred. The onions were beginning to change color, becoming translucent.

  “Were you scared?”

  Phillip was thoughtful for a moment. “No. I mean, maybe in that first rush of finding that I had been left. I suppose I must have been scared. I had to have been, right? I imagine I cried. But honestly what I remember more than that was the attention. I was taken into a room. Given candy—which was a big deal considering that my parents wouldn’t even let us have sugarcoated cereal like all the other kids. Tony used to call me the Little Prince, but for once I was actually treated like one.”

  Greta smiled. “Little Prince. I remember that. It was featured heavily in his wedding toast.”

  “Jesus.” He laughed. “What an epic disaster.”

  “Foreshadowing,” Greta said.

  Phillip sighed. “No, Greta. Not foreshadowing. Alcohol.”

  “Anyway, what happened to you at the bookstore? I’m surprised you never told me anything about it.”

  “I didn’t remember it. Until today. Thinking about Charlie at the airport.” He paused, remembering the excitement in Charlotte’s voice when she told him about the game that she was playing on the airline employee’s iPad.

  “I didn’t want to go back,” Phillip told Greta. “I would have been happy just staying with these big benevolent strangers, drinking soda, eating candy, playing tic-tac-toe. Feeling like someone special. It was like a little whiff of celebrity. Or what I imagine celebrities must feel. What draws
them to it.”

  “How long until you were reunited with your parents?”

  “My parents showed up, it was probably only a half hour later. The look on their faces made me feel so ashamed that I had taken any pleasure in the adventure. They looked . . . stricken. I remember how red my mother’s eyes were. My father’s jaw was locked. He was furious. Clearly blaming my mother for her absentmindedness. She had been terrified. Both of them were.”

  Greta flipped the soft vegetables in the pan with a wooden spoon.

  “We never talked about it. Even years later, my mother was too ashamed to discuss it. And I never allowed myself to get lost again.” Greta looked up when she heard Phillip’s voice break, but he had turned his face away from her; all that was visible was a fraction of his profile, contorted and grieving. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I just miss you. Our family. I know you don’t want to hear it. I didn’t mean to start.”

  He wiped roughly at his eyes with the cuff of his shirt, angry with himself for breaking down in front of Greta. He found his weakness humiliating; already she thought of him, he knew, as tedious in his remorse, and the last thing he wanted was to confirm this dingy portrayal of himself. He was surprised, then, when Greta reached out and touched the top of his shoulder. He hadn’t been expecting it—he couldn’t remember the last time she had deigned to touch him—and in a kind of disbelieving trance, he laid his cheek on her hand. She left it there, and he rubbed his cheek across the back of her hand. After a moment, she gently removed her hand and returned her attention to the eggs. She molded the egg mixture into one hefty omelet, which she transferred onto a single plate.

  He met her at the table, and together they ate the omelet. It was warm and salty, and he took large, greedy bites. The intimacy in this simple pleasure, an intimacy that had been absent since they fell apart, left him ravenous, and when the omelet was gone, he desperately wanted to go back and make it again.