Accidents of Marriage

by Randy Susan Meyers

  She stared at him with wide frightened eyes. “Hate for me?”

  He rubbed her arm. “Never. Roll over. Let me do your back.”

  She pulled up her T-shirt. Ben unhooked her bra, revealing smooth rosy skin. He drew a large loop with his fingernails, then smaller and smaller concentric loops until he hit the middle, and then started again.

  “Do you remember driving, Mad?”

  “No. Doctor said. I’d never remember.”

  “Not the accident, sweetheart. Today. Do you remember driving the car?”

  She turned her head toward him, her face scrunched with effort. “Today?”

  He nodded. “Today. Can you think hard?”

  Her head bobbed with effort and then glee. “I remember!”

  “Good. It’s good that you remember. However, it’s not a good thing to have done. Driving is bad.”

  Like dealing with a three-year-old. Good. Bad.

  Maddy got on her knees, her legs folded beneath her, her face set in a serious expression. “Driving is bad,” she said. “Got it.”

  • • •

  Ben couldn’t do another thing—not buy pizza, not clear the kitchen enough to put out plates, not even search for paper ones. He simply wanted a clean house and hot food, and he wanted it served by someone other than himself.

  They arrived at his in-laws’ house dirty and hungry. Maddy slept during the ten-minute car ride from Jamaica Plain to her parents’ Brookline home. When Ben parked, Maddy woke.

  The kids ran up the driveway, ahead of Ben and Maddy, and barreled into their grandparents’ house. Emma flew behind them as though years were washing away and she’d become ten years old again.

  Maddy still sat in the car, looking stunned.

  “I drove?” she asked for the third time. “I get so stupid now.”

  Ben took her hand and kissed it. “Hey! Five-word sentence!”

  She smiled at him. “Accidental. Car knocked in. Sense.”

  He rapped his knuckles lightly on her forehead. “Don’t try it again.”

  “Don’t leave keys.” She pointed to her temple and laughed. “Brain-dead. Remember?”

  They got out and followed the kids toward the house, holding hands. Ben couldn’t remember the last time they’d done that before the accident. Now it had become their habit. She squeezed, and he squeezed back twice.

  “What would I do? Without you?”

  “You won’t ever have to. No worries, Mad.”

  He brought her in for a hug. She pressed deep, grinding in, bringing an unwanted erection.

  “Whoa.” Ben backed up.

  “Mmm. Want you.” Maddy hooked her fingers into his belt loop, tugging.

  “Right. Me too. But we’re at your parents’, hon.”

  “So? We go upstairs? Huh?”

  He imagined them walking in and heading to Maddy’s old bedroom. “I don’t think so. Your mother has supper ready. The kids are starving.”

  “Kids can eat.” She reached down and stroked him. “We can screw.”

  “Maddy . . .” He groaned, feeling her hand wrap around him through his trousers. “Stop. Please.” He pulled her hand away. Christ, he’d be hobbling into his in-laws’ house.

  “No!” She ran from him, away from the large Colonial and toward the carriage house. “Catch!”

  He stumbled after her, barely able to see in the diffuse light given off by the lavender dusk. “Maddy, wait!”

  “Catch,” she repeated.

  As Ben ducked through the carriage house door, he wondered how her athletic skills could be so intact with her brain so mixed up. Of course he knew it had to do with where her injuries were—not in the brain stem, not in the cerebellum—but what made intellectual sense didn’t make emotional sense.

  The carriage house smelled of softening cardboard. Anne constantly considered expanding her catering business and moving it out here, but meanwhile, it remained what it had been for years—an unused space, a dusty version of how it had been when Vanessa and Maddy were children. Toys, dolls, paint, and craft supplies peeked out of old boxes. Army cots that Vanessa and Maddy had once used to play house were stored in the back room. That’s where Ben found Maddy, sitting cross-legged on the olive-green canvas, grinning, unbuttoning her shirt.

  “Maddy. We can’t.”

  She revealed her breasts button by button. He found the revelation of her white cotton bra under his old denim shirt oddly arousing—her breasts exposed gave him an erection stiffer than he’d felt in years.

  “Okay. Fast, then.” She stopped unbuttoning and reached for the waistband of her jeans.

  “Very fast.” Quick enough to finish before Jake came out searching for them. Though at the moment, he didn’t give a shit.

  Ben yanked the pull chain affixed to the ceiling, shutting out the light she’d put on. He knelt at the edge of the cot, testing it for strength first. “You know I love you, right?”

  “Yes.” Lying back, her arms above her head, shirt half open, and the dim light scarcely revealing her bare thighs. She shimmered.

  He fell on her, hungry, needing no beginning; they were ready to finish. Her legs closed around him. Maybe these tsunamis of hunger for him all came from a particular clunk in her temporal lobe, but again, intellect lost against emotion and he chose to believe they’d carved out this newfound desire despite the horror. That this one bit of good came out of the bad and his guilt.

  No matter how many times they’d made love since Maddy came home, he couldn’t get close enough. Her breasts gave beneath him as he buried his face into her neck, smelling vanilla and sugar from the cookies she’d tried to bake. He pressed her hands above her head, holding back as he felt her building. Her head moved from side to side as she rode out an orgasm.

  Sweat dripped from his forehead as he watched her, her eyes wide-open wild. She slowed, and he went faster, deeper, desperate.

  Even as he came, sadness enveloped him. Though he’d tried and tried, he couldn’t push in deep enough to feel forgiven.

  “So good,” Maddy said. “Sex. Love it. Love you.”

  She rose on her knees, nearly tipping over the old cot. Ben steadied them by placing his hand on the cement floor. “Just have good,” Maddy said. “Always. Okay?”

  “I promise,” Ben said. “Just good.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Maddy

  Maddy felt sad every minute of every day. A bottomless cold lake of depression threatened to subsume her. Gone was the mania that had brought cookies and driving three weeks before.

  Her father tried to fix things in his usual way: money. He gave her a taxi charge account. Ben was upset, though she couldn’t grasp why, but he kept quiet as her father performed his little ceremony, first handing Maddy a set of cards he’d made with the cab company’s phone number written in large numbers and then giving her instructions. “Just tell them your name,” he’d said. “I arranged it. That’s all you have to do. Now you have a bit of freedom, but safely.”

  Plus, they’d programmed a new phone that had only a few numbers coded in. Temporary, Ben promised and her mother swore. They’d return all her friends soon. Right now they didn’t want her overwhelmed.

  In fact, what she felt was underwhelmed in a bleak nothingness.

  She stepped out of the house. The cab company had sent the Russian driver, the one she loved for being silent, for never asking more from her than an address. Emma or Ben wrote out the addresses for where she was going so she didn’t have to wheeze them out word by word. Wordlessly, she handed the driver a piece of scrap paper with the rehab address written in Emma’s deliberate cursive.

  The driver parked in front of the rehab building in a dank end of downtown. All day cabs spit out and then took back the halt and the lame. Getting to Zelda’s fifth-floor office required taking an elevator and then navigating corridors endlessly patterned with brown-and-yellow-checked linoleum. Bright blue, green, and red footsteps guided you, but she always forgot what color to follow.

&nbs
p; She opened her worn notebook, shuffling the pages until she found her foot-color note—Zelda: Blew Feet—and then followed outlines of blue footsteps until she reached the door reading Outpatient Rehabilitation. News played on a fuzzy-pictured television hanging from the wall in the outer office. Damaged people—fellow members of the club—slumped in scratched plastic chairs.

  Ever-changing cryptic quotations, uplifting poems, and what she supposed were meaningful Biblical references covered the bulletin board outside Zelda’s office. Looking for fresh hope, word by word she slowly read:

  Nothing begins, and nothing ends,

  That is not paid with moan . . .

  —FRANCIS THOMPSON

  Thanks, Zelda and Francis Thompson, whoever you are. That sure lifted my spirits. She considered typing up Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here and sticking it on the board.

  If only she could remember how to type.

  Ha! She’d told herself a joke. The next saying seemed designed to remind her how much she was failing.

  The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.

  —ARISTOTLE

  Dignified and graceful. Perhaps that should be her goal.

  “Maddy. Come on in.” Zelda stuck her head out as she turned from Aristotle to Primo Levi.

  Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who stop to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.

  “Just read Bartlett’s? All week?” Maddy thought of Primo Levi’s words. Was this the best she’d have, knowing that she wouldn’t always be unhappy? How dark a balm was that?

  “You can speak better than that.” Zelda stepped aside so Maddy could enter the office. “You’re forgetting to take your breaths before you speak. Relax the muscles in your mouth. Send your energy to your mouth.”

  “Give me. A second. Damn.” Ha! She hadn’t said fuck. She found her way through the piles of books and magazines to the leather chair across from Zelda’s cushioned rocker that helped her counselor’s sciatica. “Let sit. Before lecture.”

  “Let me sit,” Zelda said. “You can’t take shortcuts when you’re speaking. Remember? Verbs. Subjects. You don’t want to sound like a refugee your entire life, do you?”

  Sometimes Zelda’s “just the facts” made Maddy want to kick her, but most of the time she relished being with someone who didn’t look at her with pitying cow eyes. Silver strands mixed with red in Zelda’s long cape of hair. Half witchy, half model—Maddy thought of Zelda as an occupational therapist of the mind. Rehab called her the adjustment counselor.

  “What’s on first today?” Zelda asked as she swung her green suede boots up on her desk. Zelda’s beautiful clothes hung off her dime-thin body like woven money.

  Maddy tugged at the pocket of her tight jeans and pulled out her notebook. Saw her ill-written notations of crap, crap, and more crap. Everything seemed a reminder that she couldn’t drive, or work, or cook, or clean, or mend, or sew, or sow. Sex was her sole skill. She gorged on Ben, but that feast only satisfied her for moments.

  Eating presented the same pleasure and problem. No matter how many cookies or meatballs she stuffed in, nothing satiated her past the eating. On Sunday, she ate half of Emma’s birthday pie and still felt empty. Each week her pants grew tighter, and still she crammed more in her mouth.

  “Fat. Getting fatter,” she said.

  “I’m getting fatter,” Zelda corrected.

  “No. You look good. Skinny.”

  “Your sense of humor is intact,” Zelda said. “That’s good. How lucky that piece of your brain stayed whole.”

  Lucky funny me!

  “Still fat. I am still fat.” She said the sentence one halting word at a time.

  Zelda tipped her head sideways. “Do you remember that we spoke about this last week?”

  Remember, remember, remember.

  “Yes,” she said. “But still fat.”

  “You’ve simply gained normal postcoma weight,” Zelda said.

  Zelda could be calm. It wasn’t her adjustment counselor waist dripping over her waistband.

  “You’re in a period of adjustment,” she continued. “You don’t recognize your satiation point. That’s normal for you at this moment.”

  Right. Her normal would be a stuttering fat woman.

  “Fine,” she said, not wanting to talk about it anymore. “Work. Halloween. Driving. Birthday. Emma’s.”

  “I assume that’s your pidgin-English way of presenting topics to talk about. I pick Halloween,” Zelda said. “What are you thinking?”

  “I told? What happened? Right?”

  “Work on breathing as you speak, Maddy.” She took a slow breath and relaxed her upper body for demonstration. “Yes, you told me what happened. Is it still a problem?”

  Problem? She’d lost motherhood rights, not even able to make costumes for Gracie and Caleb, although at least they hadn’t had to wear shiny junk from CVS. Vanessa atoned for leaving her to smash up the garage and burn the house down by manufacturing a nurse uniform for Gracie, complete with a little Florence Nightingale cap and cape. Then she’d made Sean watch the baby and—oh, shit, a blank. Name? Name? Her niece. Vanessa’s older daughter. What was her name? It was like a bear. Ursine?

  “Maddy?” Zelda recalled her to the moment.

  “Vanessa made Caleb . . .” She stopped and took a breath. “A spaceman.”

  “Right. You told me. However, that’s not what bothered you, correct? It was Gracie.”

  Gracie. Her little heart. Poor baby. Her face fell when Maddy said she planned to go trick-or-treating with her and Ben. She’d covered it with a quick smile, but Maddy saw it. Did Gracie think she’d call people cocksuckers if they gave Gracie hard-candy lollipops instead of chocolate?

  “She was embarrassed,” Maddy said.

  Zelda nodded. “Probably. So what? Who wouldn’t be embarrassed if their mother was swearing or shuffling along beside them?”

  “I don’t shuffle!”

  Zelda nodded again. Nodding was Zelda’s specialty. “Good. Be glad about that. How lucky you are to have so few physical deficits. Okay, so Gracie would have been embarrassed. She wanted Halloween to be completely about her. Big deal, Maddy. It’s normal. You’re head-injured.” Before continuing, she reached down for a pillow to cushion her bony behind.

  “Ah, that’s better.” Zelda settled into the cushion with a sigh of relief. “Patients are incredibly self-centered when recovering from even a fairly mild brain injury—mild being relative, of course. You think everything is about you. Part of your healing progress is recovering empathy in appropriate ways.”

  “Empathy? I worry. About kids. Constantly.”

  “No, Maddy. You constantly worry about how the kids feel about you. That’s different.”

  Had she ever liked Zelda? She hated her. She didn’t want to hear that Maddy didn’t even want to wake up some days. That she had headaches. That she couldn’t drive. That she slept half the day and could barely open a bag of premade salad for lunch.

  After grabbing her chart from Zelda’s desk, she tried to prove her points by reading aloud in her slow stumbling speech. “Poor memory. Reading difficult. Slowed reactions. Altered sexual behavior. Emotional instability. Sensitive to slights.” She stopped. “Why go on? I used to. Write charts like this. Not be the chart.”

  Zelda reached over and took the chart back. “Stop moping about your deficits. All this will get better.”

  “How much? How much better?” she asked. “I want. All the way.”

  “Do you know what Ernest Hemingway said?” she asked.

  Maddy didn’t bother answering—whatever she said, Zelda would tell her anyway.

  “ ‘The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.’ That’s from Hemingway.”

  Maddy rolled her eyes. “You have sayings. For everything.”

  “You can be one
of those people. Strong at the broken places. You won’t be the same. Not ever. But neither will you be this person you feel today.”

  She took her feet off the desk, rose, and then came over to Maddy’s chair, sitting on the ottoman facing her. “There’s going to be an entirely new Maddy. You don’t know her yet; you’re still crying over old Maddy. That’s okay, but not for much longer. We’re not going to let self-pity arrest your mind.”

  She imagined Mr. Self-Pity wielding a billy club, shoving her mind in jail. “That another quote?”

  “A bastardization. Joyce. I’m feeling show-offy today.” She wrapped a hand around Maddy’s ankle and squeezed. “Now, let’s get back to work.”

  “Told Emma. She was mean. Made her cry,” Maddy said. Zelda shot her a look. “I made her cry.”

  Zelda lowered her glasses a bit. “How did that make you feel?”

  “Bad. Horrible.” She took a breath and aimed for longer sentences. “She yells at Caleb.”

  “Is she mean to him?” Zelda asked.

  “Yes. But she has. Pressure. Too much.” She stopped to gather her thoughts and breathe, just as Zelda preached. “I didn’t want to. Make her feel bad.”

  Emma had tried to wipe away her tears before Maddy could see them. She’d turned away when Maddy tried to hug her. Said she was fine in that way that meant the opposite.

  “I say terrible stuff,” she said.

  “Madeline Illica, listen to all the four-word sentences you just made! Great job!” Zelda grabbed a box of tissues and handed them to her. “Saying things like you said to Emma is yet another effect of traumatic brain injury—call it TBI truth serum. You’ve lost your filters. Feel it, think it, say it—that’s your life at the moment.”

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “What are you scared of?”

  She shrugged. “Money. Not enough. Ben. Hating me.” She shredded the tissue Zelda had handed her. “Leaving me.”

  “You’re worried about Ben leaving?” Zelda tilted her head. “Has he said something?”

  Maddy sat up straight, backing away from Zelda’s intensity. “No, no, no. He’s wonderful.” She tried to form the words properly. “But I’m . . . an albacore.”