The Dictionary of Failed Relationships

by Meredith Broussard

  “Hey, Master Po,” he said, lightly punching Janet on the shoulder. “You been practicing those kicks?” They’d met in karate class, so a lengthy discussion of martial arts ensued, during which I pointedly remained silent.

  And then somehow, while I was spacing out, Janet and her girlfriend jumped to their feet, stabbing their arms into the sleeves of their coats. “Can you give Erica a ride home?” Janet said to him. “OK. Great. Thanks. Bye.”

  They bustled away and abandoned me to Seamus. I hunched down in my seat, staring into my root beer. Seamus did not seem perturbed. He swung an arm over the back of his booth, took possession of the space where Janet had been, slapped on the wood bench in time to the song blasting from the speaker behind us—I hadn’t even noticed any music until just then.

  “So,” he said, “Janet tells me you’re an emotional wreck, too. How long have you been broken up?”

  “About a month,” I stammered. This was not at all what I’d imagined would happen—the two of us bitching about our failed relationships. And yet, now that we’d started, I realized that I would much rather commiserate with Seamus than date him. “We split up so suddenly,” I heard myself say. “Just a few weeks ago, we were in Sears, shopping for a DVD player. And then another week later, he’s emptied all his stuff out of my apartment. It makes you see how flimsy everything is, not just relationships, but everything.”

  Seamus made a low purr in his throat—an oddly sympathetic sound. “You’re not just losing a person, you’re losing all your old habits. Suddenly, you don’t know who you are.” His voice went husky. “The nights are the worst.”

  “Yeah,” I said, swirling around my root beer, refusing to meet his eyes. My cheeks burned. “The nights” evoked a vivid picture in my head: both of us in our respective beds in Northampton, simultaneously squirming under sheets that we refused to wash, curling up like pill bugs around our useless genitals. “Why did you guys break up?” I asked, in an effort to insert his ex into the conversation, like our chaperone.

  “Hell if I know.” He threw his legs along the length of the bench seat, settling in, as if he meant to stay there until he had figured it out. “We kept getting annoyed at each other, then we’d have to process why we were annoyed, until we couldn’t even cook spaghetti together without analyzing why she thought the sauce needed more oregano, and why I didn’t, and what that had to do with our childhoods. But now that we’re not sleeping together, we’re friends again.”

  “That’s admirable,” I said.

  “Actually, I sort of have to get along with her.” He took a slug of beer and shot a glance at me. “I’ve been apartment-hunting for two months—can’t afford anything. I’m still living with her.”

  I couldn’t believe that Janet had failed to warn me about this. “Why don’t you crash at a friend’s house?” I asked, a bit scandalized.

  He shrugged. “All my papers are in that apartment, my computer. I’m in the middle of my dissertation—it was the worst possible time to break up.”

  I nodded as if his reasoning made sense. “So, isn’t that kind of awkward, though? How do you guys date?”

  “We don’t. At least I don’t,” he said.

  Then he drove me home. His two-door Toyota spewed heat from its dusty vents as we glided through the dark. Except for downtown Northampton, most of western Massachusetts is the country. At night, it’s darker than city folk ever imagine the night could be. Your headlights seem to invent the road out of nothing; tree branches and junked cars and fences jump in front of you as you drive along. I hadn’t ridden in cars much since my ex-boyfriend took his away, and I realized how much I’d missed the countryside outside of town, where the streetlights fell away and the stars freckled every inch of the sky.

  “So, if you don’t mind my asking, why the Irish? Why not the Japanese?” I asked.

  Seamus sighed. “I wish I had a better answer. All I can say is, too much baggage. When I see the word Japanese, I picture my dad on the back patio in a brown bathrobe, eating Egg Beaters, reading the stock page. But the Irish—no baggage. I can write about the potato famine, and in some underground, coded way, I’m really writing about the internment of the Japanese-Americans and all the rest of the stuff my family refuses to talk about.”

  I nodded. “That makes sense.”

  “Really?” he seemed pleased. “Not many people think so.”

  “It makes a lot more sense than still living with your ex-girlfriend,” I said, and got a laugh out of him.

  When he pulled in front of my apartment building, he jumped out and ran around to the passenger side to open the door for me—not out of chivalry but out of necessity. The inside handle of his Toyota was broken.

  “It was great talking to you,” he said, and hugged me, but not the kind of hug that’s a borderline kiss. Instead, we clung together like two people on an icy sidewalk, holding on for balance.

  The first “why can’t we be friends” message came the next night. I was leaning into my refrigerator, sniffing a container of tofu for freshness, when my answering machine clicked on. Suddenly, my ex-boyfriend’s amplified voice boomed through the apartment. I ran into the living room and bent over the answering machine, watching the wheels of the cassette turn as they recorded that familiar voice. “Erica,” he said, “why haven’t you returned any of my calls? You’re making this a lot more awkward than it has to be.” He stopped for a moment, and the cree-cree-cree of the tape cassette filled up the silence. “We’ve known each other too long to end this way. We’re going to be friends.” It sounded like a threat. Then the machine clicked, the tape rewound, and a red light began blinking.

  I slid down to the floor. Five blocks away, my ex-boyfriend had just placed a receiver into its cradle and gone off to do something else—if I knew him, he probably was now sitting in front of his editing system, playing and replaying segments of film, so that the actors on the monitor stuttered as he moved them back and forth through time.

  Occasionally, as he worked, his thoughts would flicker toward me. I was the woman who had once pedaled around town on her bike, tears glittering on her cheeks, searching for him in every bookstore and drugstore, desperate to beg his forgiveness after a fight. I had worn a push-up bra, canceled my subscription to the Whole Earth Review, eaten a Junior Whopper—all to please him.

  If he decided to barge back into my life, I had no power to stop him. For the next hour or so, I stared at the scratches on the floor, contemplating my inevitable future of abasing myself to him. Soon, I would invite him over. He’d show up at my door, eyes cast downward, and give me a stiff hug, as if he were comforting someone at a funeral. I’d lead him into the kitchen, and he’d pull out a chair, which would groan as it slid across the floor. I’d offer tea.

  “I keep the tea on this little shelf now,” I’d tell him, to point out that, on my own, I had adopted new wall furnishings, new ways of organizing my life.

  But as I would lean over to hand him his mug, I’d catch a whiff of the air that wafted out from the neck of his shirt, that smell of a zillion Sunday mornings when we’d nestled under the fleece comforter, gossiping about the other couples we knew, and congratulating ourselves for being more loving than all of them. Then, right there in the kitchen, when I was supposed to be proving that I didn’t need him, I would turn back into his Erica-ferica, his pink cat.

  Now I ran my finger over one of the scratches in the pine floor, breathing in a presobbing way. I could sense him only a few blocks from me, deciding that it was unacceptable that I ignore him.

  And then a random image flitted into my brain: those goofy beads that Seamus had worn around his neck, the color of lollipops, dangling next to the frayed rim of his T-shirt. Suddenly, I knew exactly what to do. I fished a scrap of paper out of my jeans pocket and called it.

  A woman answered. “Hi,” she said brightly.

  When I asked for Seamus, her voice changed. “He’s right here,” she snapped.

  As soon as I had him on the lin
e, I got right down to business. “Listen, you want to be my roommate? I need one by next week.”

  “I probably can’t afford it.”

  “It’s a disgusting basement apartment. Two hundred a month.”

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  “Don’t you want to see it first?”

  “No, that’s OK. Can I start bringing stuff over tomorrow?”

  Sunday night, I was walking home when I caught sight of a giant turtlelike creature, trudging along the sidewalk ahead of me. It turned out to be Seamus, bent underneath his futon.

  I ran to catch up. “Here, let me help.” I took the end that hung behind him and carried it like his bridal train.

  We huffed down the stairs, getting caught in the corners, and finally managed to wedge ourselves and the futon through the door and down the hall. He collapsed on top of it.

  “OK, now I live here,” he said. Boxes teetered all around us. A snare drum sat on top of the refrigerator. A file cabinet leaned against the sofa, one drawer spilling papers. “I’ll put it all into my room tonight. Just let me catch my breath,” he added.

  “I can’t believe you moved everything so fast,” I said, squatting down so I could talk to him eye-to-eye.

  “It would have been faster except that my ex and I had to process our feelings for hours. As soon as I took the bed, the breakup became real to her. I explained a million times that you and I are just roommates, but she cried, anyway.”

  “That’s terrible. Listen, if you want, you can tell her I’m gay.”

  He shook his head. “She’s not stupid.”

  “No, really,” I said, and then I explained about how I’d made up my mind to be a lesbian. “I don’t want to date men right now. Because what if I got married and lived my whole life and died without ever figuring out whether I’m gay?” I said. “I’m going to settle this for once and for all.”

  He leaned toward me over his crossed legs, engrossed in my argument. “You’re right,” he said. “More people should have that attitude.”

  “All my other friends think I’m crazy.” I slumped against one of the boxes of books and felt the cardboard settle against my shoulder blade.

  “You’re just taking some time to find out who you are.” He uncrossed his legs and then flung himself on his side, propping his head up on his hand. Seamus liked to throw his body around, stretching his legs out, claiming the space around him. Tonight, he wore a ragged T-shirt with a line drawing of a ukulele on it; the shirt appeared to have shrunk. It stretched over his pot belly. “Look at it this way,” he added. “What has monogamous heterosexuality done for either of us? Maybe it’s time to shift your paradigm.”

  He would have elaborated, but I was bouncing up and down on my haunches, signaling that I needed to speak right away. “I just had a great idea, Seamus,” I blurted. “You should be gay, too! It would be so convenient.” I pictured him in the bleachers as I hit home runs for my dyke softball team; he’d wave a sign that read YOU GO GIRL. Best of all would be the look on Janet’s face when I told her, “You know that guy you tried to set me up with? He’s gay now. Ha!”

  Seamus flopped backward against the wall and squinted at me dubiously. “Oh, man. Do I have to be gay? I’d rather be nothing for a while. I’m so sick of relationships.”

  “OK, you’re nothing,” I said, though I was only humoring him. I knew I’d wear him down eventually. One day we’d both be gay, and Irish, too.

  REGRET

  By Jennifer Weiner

  re·gret ri-’gret verb [Middle English regretten, from Middle French regreter, from Old French, from re- + -greter ] (14th century) 1: to feel sorry, disappointed, or distressed about. 2: to remember with a feeling of loss or sorrow; mourn. . See also: CHAGRIN, PINING AWAY, 20/20 HINDSIGHT.

  1986: At the Vince Lombardi service area on the New Jersey State Turnpike, my mother tells me that she and my father are getting a divorce This sounds like it should be made up, like it’s the first part of a joke, but unfortunately, it happens to be true.

  “I’ve got something I need to tell you,” she begins. I’m sixteen years old, and my mother and I are on our way back from visiting colleges in Philadelphia and New Jersey, on our way home to the two-story, four-bedroom colonial in Connecticut, to my sister, who is fifteen, and my brothers, who are thirteen and nine. We sit down under the flickering fluorescent lights, alongside stainless-steel steam trays full of tired-looking fried chicken and biscuits, and my mother tells me that my father’s leaving, that he’s probably packing, even as we’re sitting there, that he’ll be gone by the time we get home.

  “You know things haven’t been right for a while,” she says, and I nod, because I’ve sensed this, in the vague, nonchalant way that teenagers keep track of their parents’ emotional lives. My mother talks about how sorry she is, and how sad, and how hard it will be. I pull apart a piece of fried chicken with my fingers and think about my boyfriend. He is my best friend’s older brother. He’s twenty-three, done with college, living at home until he figures out what he wants to do besides me. My parents have decided that they don’t want me to see him—have, in fact, forbidden me to see him, which means that I spend a lot of my time sneaking around and a lot more of my time thinking up new and elaborate lies to cover the fact that I’m rarely where I say I am. But if my father leaves, and my mother’s going to be preoccupied with guilt and grief—which, judging from our conversation here at the Vince Lombardi service area, is clearly the case—it’s going to be a lot easier for me to see him. I nod in all the right places, I ask the correct anguished questions (“Why? Why!?!?”), but in truth, I decide, this will not matter much. I am sixteen years old, and next fall, by this time, I’ll be in college, I’ll be free, I’ll be gone.

  That spring, with my bags packed, I find out that the circumstances of my parents’ divorce are not as they were initially presented. My mother had given me the standard party line: grown apart, difficulty communicating, relationship broken down. The rest I’d figured out on my own. It boiled down to this—my father had decided he didn’t want to be a father anymore. I felt proud of myself for arriving at this conclusion. I say it a lot, imagining how sophisticated it sounds, like a strand of pearls slipping from my fingers.

  “He doesn’t want to be a father anymore,” I repeat to my friends, whose own fathers had decamped for other cities, other beds. I say this in the cynical, hard-bitten, world-weary manner that we’ve all decided to adopt.

  In fact, that’s only part of the story. In fact, there is somebody else. I learn this from my mother’s friend Julia, who is tiny and chic, who drinks vodka and tonic and smokes cigarettes, and who has herself been divorced for years. “He’s having an affair, Jenny!” she says from her perch on a wooden bench on our porch. It’s getting dark, and the only lights come from inside the house and from her lit cigarette, but I can still see the look on her face, a look that strongly suggests that I’ve been naive and foolish to ever think otherwise. “Everyone knows!” The reason everyone knows is because my father leaves his red sports car parked in the other woman’s driveway, for all the world to see. The other woman’s name is Vicky. She is my mother’s boss.

  “Excuse me,” I murmur, getting up from the table, all of the cynicism and sophistication gone whooshing out of me as surely as if I’d been kicked in the throat. I’m ashamed, and furious at him for being such a dumb cliché. And I feel mad at myself, because I don’t care . . . or, rather, I shouldn’t care. I’ve already decided not to.

  The night before my high school graduation, my father picks me up to take me out to dinner. He’s drunk and drives too fast, and he quickly confesses to the girlfriend, like he’s been waiting for me to ask, like he wants to talk about it. Vic, he calls her. I imagine a foreman at a construction site, a hard hat, tattooed, beefy arms. At the fancy restaurant, I try to charm him in the manner that I’ve seen other teenage girls successfully employ on different sitcoms. “Do you like my
new shirt?” I ask. He glares at me, gulps his drink. “No,” he says. I bow my head over my plate, blinking back tears, because if this is a scene from a sitcom, and if he’s just a cliché, why should it matter what he thinks of me? Why should it hurt?

  The meal progresses at an agonizing crawl—oysters, duck, vodka, and wine. My father wobbles disconcertingly down the steps to the parking lot. I ask for the keys. He snarls something in response that sounds like it contains both the words fuck and you. But fathers don’t talk to their daughters that way . . . not even when they’ve decided not to be fathers anymore. Do they?

  We make it home alive. He roars into the driveway, swaggers out of the sports car, and decides that he wants the keys to my mother’s car, too. “It’s mine!” he bellows at the door I’ve locked behind me, in an unprecedented display of foresight. “Mine!” he yells again. My mother doesn’t answer. My grandmother, who’s come up from Florida for my graduation, looks scared. “Frances, should I call the police?” she asks. My mother’s face is stony. On the other side of the door, my father starts to cry. “Please, Fran,” he begs, from the other side of the back door. “I don’t want this divorce. Please,” he says, weeping. I sit in the living room, thinking of the jokes I will tell about this to my divorced-father friends. I think about my boyfriend, how I’ll tell him the story of this night, how I’ll spin it for maximum sympathy, how perhaps I’ll even cry.

  At some point in the years after the divorce, in his sporadic communications with the four of us, my father has stopped referring to himself as our father. He’s not “Dad” anymore. In private, my sister and brothers dismissively call him Pap. He calls himself the Old Man, in what I think is a reference to Hemingway. “Jenny!” his voice booms on my answering machine. “It’s the Old Man!” He has news, he says. “Tying the knot,” he announces, and tells me where and when. I decide to go. I decide this the same way I decide to slow down and look at wrecks on the side of the highway, the same way young men decide to cough up five dollars for a peek at the bearded lady and the two-headed man. I’m not choosing to be there—I’m impelled, by invisible forces much, much larger than I am. Plus, I figure, I could maybe use the material some day.