Separation Anxiety

by Laura Zigman

  “We got you a whole bunch of new food,” I say, opening the refrigerator door. “Healthy food! Vegan food! Puppets-from-Vermont food!” I don’t register Phoebe’s frozen and fading smile. “Kale-this and quinoa-that.”

  Phoebe blinks, looks miserable. “Great.”

  I touch her lightly on the arm. “Don’t worry. We’ll only be gone two days.”

  She looks at me like I have a bird on my head.

  I open the freezer and the cabinets above it. “Teddy eats regular food. Frozen pizza. Chicken fingers. Cereal. You know, teenage-boy stuff.” I roll my eyes like I can’t believe he’s related to me, even though just saying all those words makes me suddenly want to eat all his food. “With kids you just have to pick your battles sometimes.”

  She seems oddly interested in what’s in the freezer and the cabinets now, trying to peer around me and my hair, but I assume it’s because she’s horrified by my parenting and is making mental notes to regale her puppet friends later. “Here are all the emergency numbers,” I drone on. “Our cell phones, and the vet’s number, though I’m sure the dog will be fine.

  “Speaking of the dog.” I lift the sling off and put it over Phoebe’s neck. She tries to extract her ponytail out from under the back of it but the sling is too heavy and she gives up. I feel weightless and empty and anxious suddenly without the extra twenty pounds of living breathing pet on me. The dog doesn’t look much better: inches away from me, hanging from around Phoebe’s neck, she looks terrified. Or maybe she’s completely relieved. Like every Yelp review I’ve ever read (“It’s the best restaurant!” “It’s the worst restaurant!”), there’s simply no way to tell—it could be either extreme.

  “So I really have to wear this?” Phoebe asks, trying again to free her ponytail and finally succeeding.

  “You don’t have to, but you might want to throw it on once or twice a day. For, like, a few minutes, or an hour, or two, or three. I find it actually helps me feel centered. I just wouldn’t want the dog to feel totally abandoned and have to go completely cold turkey by not being worn at all. That would be weird. For her. Don’t you think?” I rub my stomach, since I can suddenly. I could swear Phoebe rolls her eyes but again I’m not entirely sure. When there’s nothing in the house left to show her, and nothing left to say, I leave her alone in the kitchen. Free of the dog, I run quickly, moving easily down the basement stairs to check on things before we leave. I haven’t been down there since they moved in.

  There are no boxers or bras hanging from the lampshades; no bongs, still warm and fragrant, in plain sight. Just duffle bags spilling with socks and sweaters and sweatpants, and a soft pile of sheets and a comforter on the floor instead of on the bed. I step over and around things as I peek at the room, and then, as an afterthought, I pick up the Emily Dickinson book, which is still on the coffee table. I flick the rubber band guiltily: it’s been years since I read poetry, let alone this poetry, but the notion of transformation during this road trip seems to be sticking. I put the book in my bag, along with the other props of my nascent artistic life, and head back up the stairs.

  After we say our goodbyes to Teddy—I manage to plant a kiss on his cheek and extract a half hug out of him before Gary forces a bear hug—we get into the car. Gary backs out of the driveway slowly, while they—Nick and Phoebe and Teddy and the dog—our doppelgänger family—wave from the doorway. We wave back. I can’t help but think, sadly, that this is the first time we have ever left for a road trip without having Teddy with us, either strapped into his car seat or belted into a booster seat behind us. The vision of him on the front steps—lanky, awkward, turning back toward the house before we’re even gone—makes me sad, and Gary, too, though he won’t admit it. It’s why, halfway down the street, neither of us has said a word. Suddenly, The Forehead’s retreat doesn’t seem like such a great idea. What was I thinking, leaving Teddy—and the dog!—alone with virtual strangers who will probably ignore our pet and starve our child. What is wrong with me?

  “Well this is fun!” Gary says as he pulls onto the highway with a lilt in his voice. The false cheer means he’s lying. “And if it’s not fun, we can always leave early!”

  “We can’t leave early. Not for what I paid for the workshop and spent on vegan food for the Puppets at Whole Foods.”

  Gary looks at me. “They’re not vegan.”

  “Of course they are. They’re puppets!”

  “They’re not. In fact, Nick asked me where they could get ribs.”

  I fling myself back against the headrest. “This is why we’re broke.”

  “You should have told me you were doing a shop!”

  “You should have told me you had the food-preferences talk!”

  I recline the seat and try to close my eyes, knowing I should check my hotel app for last-minute lodging for the following night, but it isn’t long before I feel the car slow to a crawl. Sitting up, I see the traffic stalled, snaking along the posted signs for scheduled construction. Gary grabs his phone and opens his favorite GPS app—Waze—which is the opposite of my favorite GPS app—Google Maps. In minutes, he’s being bossed around to get off the Mass. Pike and rerouted onto secondary roads.

  “Why bother?” I say. “It’s always wrong.”

  “It’s not always wrong.”

  “Why do you always defend her?”

  “Because she’s always right.”

  But within minutes, just as I’d predicted, we’re lost, miles past the last strip malls and gas stations and fast-food outposts. I turn my app on instead, which leads us back onto the same highway his app had instructed us to leave. Gary turns to me, expecting a snarky remark, but I say nothing, and we drive in silence: him looking at the road, me looking out the window at the blur of colorful foliage whipping past us. When Gary’s phone buzzes with a text notification, I’m tempted to grab it and see if it’s from the CEO, but he grabs it first, turning it off before either of us can see it.

  “So let’s talk,” I say.

  “Later.”

  “Suddenly you’re the reluctant one.”

  “I’m not reluctant. I just don’t see what the rush is. We’ve been in the car for five minutes. Neither of us is going anywhere.”

  I pretend to be annoyed but secretly I’m grateful for the reprieve. Anything to delay the inevitable parsing of our marriage. I hand him a piece of the nut bar I’ve just torn open from our snack bag—dark chocolate maple bacon coconut almond quinoa Paleo Dream. “It’s really good,” I whisper, though it tastes like wood dust and broken dreams and death.

  * * *

  In an hour we’ve crossed the state line from Massachusetts into New Hampshire, and an hour after that we’re in front of Gary’s mother’s once-grand Colonial, peeling white with green shutters, circular gravel driveway, dormers and gables and mullioned windows and old rugs in tatters that always fascinated me, someone who was exposed to the color-coordinated wall-to-wall carpeting and drapery and scalloped window shades of the Early American Jew decor of the late seventies. Despite the vestiges of the glorious fall now fading—pumpkins shrinking on the steps to the house; the last of the unraked leaves, red and orange and dry and noisy, blowing against the side of the house and into the scrubby bare bushes—there are no signs of life: no lights on inside; no car in the driveway. When Gary calls her from his cell phone, we both hear the house phone ringing and ringing inside the house.

  “You’re sure you told her we were coming today?” Gary says.

  “Of course I’m sure. I said Friday the twenty-sixth.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Today’s the nineteenth, Judy. The twenty-sixth is next week.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “And now I really have to pee.” He starts looking around at trees and bushes, but I shake my finger at him.

  “No way. Remember what happened last time?” Who knew that public urination in the woods off a dog park trail was considered indecent exposure in New Hampshire and carried with it the fine of $1,000. (We didn’t.) “Can’
t you wait?”

  “Do I look like I can wait?” He is hopping now, his voice an octave higher.

  “Do you have a key?”

  “No, but sometimes she leaves the back door open. Maybe she just went to the supermarket.”

  We walk around to the side of the house, and while Gary makes another call I try the mudroom door, but it’s locked. Gary’s hopping gets even more frantic and I tell him to just go in the bushes already.

  “No! I’m not taking any chances this time.”

  I drop my bag on the ground and eye the mudroom window, then struggle to push the storm window up, then the window itself. Just as I get them both open and wave at Gary in triumph, I hear the distant sound of a police siren and Gary shouting at his mother.

  “You’re staying where? I can’t hear you! For how long?” He covers the phone and turns to me. “Her house is being sprayed tomorrow for termites!” The sirens are getting louder. But as I get closer to Gary I can hear his mother telling him she can’t talk now—the alarm company just called to tell her that somebody is trying to break into her house and the police are on their way.

  * * *

  “It won’t be much longer,” the officer says from the front seat, eyeing us in the backseat, in the rearview mirror instead of turning around. He has the heavy-voweled accent of a native New Englander, but he doesn’t drop his rs with the savage disregard of a Bostonian. Unfortunately. “As soon as we reach the alarm company, you’ll be on your way.”

  “Great.” Gary rolls his eyes just at me.

  “Sorry,” I whisper out of the side of my mouth, then shrug, as if it’s not really my fault that I messed up the date of our visit. Before Gary can complain about my shitty nonapology-apology, another officer approaches the car, holding my shoulder bag—the one I’d dropped outside the mudroom window.

  “This must be yours,” he says, opening the bag and peering inside before he hands it over to me through the open backseat window. I open it up and Gary sees what’s inside.

  Gary’s eyes widen. He’s panicked. “You brought the book?” he whispers.

  The cop points at the bag, then at me. “Just make sure everything’s in there.”

  I reach into the bag, take each thing out to confirm its existence: “Wallet, keys, phone charger, Emily Dickinson.”

  Gary grabs the book out of my hands, holds it against his chest inside his jacket.

  “I think the officer has been through enough already with our false alarm! Let’s not assault him with poetry!”

  I look at him like he’s insane until sounds of static and then an “all clear” come from the police officer’s radio. They tell us we’re all set and to have a good trip.

  “But no more breaking and entering, Thelma and Louise!”

  Out of their car and on our way to our own, we smile warmly at the officers, then quickly drop the act. Gary continues to hug the book until we’re back in our own front seat.

  I swat at him. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Why’d you bring that book?”

  “For old times’ sake!”

  Gary tries to shove the book under the front seat, but I wrestle it from him and hug it to my chest with both arms like a flotation device.

  “Why were you trying to hide this?”

  “Because it’s got my shit in it!” he whisper-hisses.

  “But it’s medical marijuana! It’s legal!”

  “Not this shit—it’s Nick’s! A special road-trip blend!”

  I glare at him. “Really, Gary? Really? The first book you ever gave me and you put weed in it?” I remove the elastic band, open the cover of the book slowly, and see a deep square cut into all the pages. A miniature Altoids tin sits like an embedded jewel in the middle. I shake my head, hand him back the empty book and elastic band, then look out the window.

  “God. How old are you?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Just drive.”

  “Where?”

  “You figure it out.”

  * * *

  At first I assume we’re going to simply turn around—our usual trick of leaving early before even arriving somewhere we never really wanted to go to in the first place would never be so perfectly timed—but we head toward the highway. I’m not sure if Gary has a destination in mind—a plan B for the free lodging at his mother’s—or if he’s just continuing to move forward because forward is somehow easier than backward this one time.

  As we slowly approach the highway, my hotel app is showing either zero local vacancies or super-high rates for a few available rooms—clearly there’s a Dartmouth home game that I failed to take into account—so now we’re really in a bind.

  I text Glenn the current marital calculus: the emotional and logistical coordinates and debts owed—I owe Gary for giving his mother the wrong date: he owes me for cutting the guts out of the most sentimental object of our relationship: I owe him for insisting the People Puppets stay with us: he owes me for embracing them more than I’d planned and for bringing his weed with us on the road and almost getting us arrested: I owe him for turning our marriage into a platonic relationship and for the fact that we’re on a trip we can’t afford. Plus minus plus minus plus minus. I spare her the news about the CEO; why should she have to see Gary in an unflattering light right now? Though she was divorced once and widowed once and considers herself a failure at marriage, she is the most decisive person I know. Her response is quick and definitive:

  Stay over at The Forehead’s.

  But we haven’t been invited. And I have a plus-one: Gary.

  Tell her the inn lost your reservation and everything else is booked because her incredibly popular retreat has taken up all the available rooms.

  Flattery, as we both learned at Black Bear Press, always works.

  But it’s less about the awkwardness of asking to stay with Sari Epstein and more about the prospect of socializing with her and her husband that is my concern right now. Since our “separation,” Gary and I have stopped going to other people’s houses, and we don’t invite other people to our house for dinner, either. This voluntary curtailment of our social life just happened to dovetail with the fact that we’ve run low on friends anyway: the older Teddy got, and the further away from the preschool and elementary school years we’ve moved, the fewer obligatory back-to-school nights we have to go to and the fewer Saturday or Sunday afternoon paintball or indoor-rock-climbing or bowling parties Teddy is invited to. In fact, he hasn’t been invited to any this year, and maybe not last year, either.

  Gary is thrilled to be relieved of having to behave well and maintain the ridiculous pretense of being interested in other families with whom he’s always felt that he has absolutely nothing in common except a child the same age at the same school or one who has a shared extracurricular activity. But it’s different for me. I face the empty calendar every month with sadness—wondering why, when other families routinely have to turn down invitations because of being double or even triple booked, not a single one of us seems to have a social life.

  It was always torture for Gary to listen to another dad describe, in mind-numbing detail, an ongoing do-it-yourself project—a bathroom redo or the installation of new kitchen cabinets, or a drain-snaking method found on YouTube to circumvent the plumber. Gary would stare at me over bowls of hummus or plates of bruschetta, making Let’s leave early eyes as he was led out into the backyard like a hostage to see a recently installed firepit or a raised gardening bed using recycled wood, or to hear about some magnificent adventures in organic composting. He didn’t want to see anyone’s reorganized toolshed or a family’s dirt bikes suspended from a garage ceiling; he had absolutely no interest in bending down to inspect a fully insulated cat door lined in felt weather-stripping or hear about how a snowblower could be retrofitted to run on canola oil instead of gasoline. Being forced to interact with people he didn’t necessarily like or care about made him feel trapped and anxious, then angry.

  I struggled less with th
ese interactions myself: during Teddy’s elementary school years I was always in demand as a friend—obviously!—my résumé practically guaranteed that I would be the first picked for coffee dates or yoga class invitations—I’d written a children’s book, after all, that had been turned into a PBS animated series! All the women I met had children who read children’s books and watched children’s television. I loved inspecting the reorganized kitchen cabinet project, the newly alphabetized disappearing rolling spice rack, the gleamingly clean refrigerator vegetable bins, the perfect basement home office or home gym—I loved escaping into the fantasy of how such a well-ordered world must correlate precisely to a well-lived and happy life—how women who had been smart enough to pick solid-earners for husbands were now reaping the many benefits of such sage decisions—even though I knew better about all of it. But I couldn’t enjoy any of it, knowing that Gary couldn’t bear it, that as soon as the quinoa was cleared and the gluten-free cupcakes were devoured and the fair-trade decaf was served, he would make it clear it was time to go.

  I’m never doing that again, he’d say in the car, vibrating and agitated. I’m never going to another dinner like that again. I can’t take it.

  I would close my eyes, and sigh, and look out the window. Did other couples suffer this much? Did all husbands unravel after only an hour or two of harmlessly annoying parents? I’d stare out into the darkness, trying to focus on houses and trees and storefronts and street signs, but I could never see past those questions.

  Sometimes I wished I’d married someone who loved to entertain, who filled the house with people every weekend, dimming lights and pouring drinks and explaining where the cheese was from and how we’d first discovered the wine we were serving. But every part of that fantasy was ridiculous: when we’d met, Gary was already sober, and people had annoyed him even then. And maybe it was for the best, since once my career started to wane, I found it easier not to have to explain why yet another book I’d written hadn’t been reviewed or wasn’t being stocked in giant stacks at Costco, or why another television possibility wasn’t going to happen. So when we stopped having anywhere to go, and anyone to go with, I couldn’t help but think that, like everything else I had somewhat willingly given up, it was almost better that way. Leaving the social scene early had made things easier for both of us.