Separation Anxiety

by Laura Zigman

  Almost forty years ago I caused Michael Wasserman’s Passover-themed shoe box diorama depicting Moses receiving the Ten Commandments to fall off the teacher’s desk when I stupidly reached for another piece of matzo that I wasn’t even hungry for. Wasn’t it just yesterday that everyone turned and stared at me without helping to pick it up and put it back together? That he saw the shoe box on the floor; all his hard work, all his careful gluing, his tiny precision handiwork—ruined? We were eleven or twelve then, the age when boys still show their feelings, the age that Teddy used to be when his face would soften and fall with every passing sadness. That day, in the few seconds it took Michael Wasserman to register the accidental demolition of his construction-in-miniature, his eyes had welled with tears like something actually hurt. He looked crushed. I’m certain I’d gasped and covered my mouth with my hands in shame. Was there anything worse than destroying someone’s art project?

  But before I could apologize, he’d bent down in his chinos, carefully picked up the shoe box, put it on top of the pile of books and notebooks he was carrying, and left the classroom for the carpool line. All without saying a word. I didn’t move. My face was red-hot, my stomach churned with embarrassment and self-loathing and recriminations I was convinced would last forever: Why hadn’t I just sat down in my stupid chair with the little side-desk attached? Weren’t my braces already filled with enough chewed-up matzo? If only I hadn’t reached for that second piece, none of this would have happened. I was wearing my favorite powder-blue ski jacket, which meant that it was sometime between March and April, during New England’s tease of changing seasons that never fails to trick and disappoint—there must still have been a chill of winter in the air, despite some light in the sky. The principal, Mr. Wrath—which was really his name and really how he spelled it—poked his head into the classroom and told me that my mother was in the carpool line, waiting. It was six o’clock, time to go home. He didn’t seem to notice the debris on the floor, the accident that had just happened, how time had suddenly and completely stopped.

  Instantly I’d had a flash of my mother’s blue Buick Skylark idling in the chilly dusk while the other mothers—it was all mothers back then, no “helpful” dads—pulled around her and gave her dirty looks—a scene I knew I’d hear about on the ride home, and during dinner, and for years to come: how it was hard enough for her to teach inner-city seventh-graders all day, go food shopping after work, bring the groceries home and put everything into the refrigerator and freezer, and then make it to the temple in time for the mad crush of children desperately pushing through the doors toward freedom, only to have me be late and put her in the incredibly uncomfortable position of holding up the line.

  It never occurred to me, as I got into the front seat and drove off with Mandy Adelson and Rhonda Schlossberg in the backseat, to explain to my mother why I was late that day—just as it had never occurred to my mother to ask me why I was late. We didn’t do that in our family—relate to each other in the moment, with curiosity or empathy. We didn’t interact in an interactive way. My grandparents had all survived the Holocaust and there had always been a very high bar set for true suffering. We never shared even the most basic facts of our days: “I just ruined Michael Wasserman’s diorama and now I want to die.” “One of my students called me fat when I was passing back their spelling tests.” We never would have said those things. We didn’t know how to commiserate or comfort each other. We were three circles, occasionally just barely overlapping, a Venn diagram of connected separateness. Which had always seemed to me to be the loneliest feeling of all: having people around you who you could see but couldn’t ever reach.

  Even if my mother had asked me, I probably would not have had the language to explain the sadness I felt when I looked at what remained on the floor after Michael left the classroom—the little bits of uncooked elbow macaroni and broken Necco wafers and the focal point of the diorama—the Ten Commandments itself—that the janitor would sweep away. To confess how inanimate objects could sometimes make me feel incredibly sad, those two Bit-O-Honeys stuck together to look like Moses’ tablets from God that had landed under the chair. That right before running out of the classroom I’d picked them up and slipped them into the pocket of my ski jacket, the one I’d never actually skied in because the Jews in our world didn’t actually ski, and noticed that the number “10” had been etched into each beige sticky candy rectangle, maybe with a paper clip or a pocketknife or the tip of a dead ballpoint pen to make the indentations. Michael Wasserman, whose mother had died the previous autumn of breast cancer, right before the High Holidays, had taken the time to etch numbers into his pretend Ten Commandments and I had ruined it. How could I ever have explained the sadness of that?

  Even if I could have, I wouldn’t have: telling only made things worse. Reassurance, the erasure of worry, the absorption of anxiety—for the most understandable and saddest reasons, those were not part of my parents’ skill sets. They were barely part of mine, though I’m working on them. I will always be the survivor of survivors, of catastrophizers; always the one to say the darkest, bleakest thing at a moment when a shred of levity could save the day. Just ask Gary.

  “Oh, Judy Hope Vogel, the irony of your middle name,” he always says, when my negativity bleeds unexpectedly into a conversation or an exchange, a permanent marker through paper. But for me it’s never been irony. It’s always been the weight of that middle name, the burden of being the one to carry a positive life force for the three of us. Which is why my Bird on Your Head success had been so sweet, and why my now-descending star is that much harder to bear. I’m letting my whole family down, not just myself.

  Today, I inch away from the rock-hard avocados toward the organic pitted fruit, already out of season and just out of reach, and the berries, to try to get a better look at Michael, to confirm that it’s actually him. It is. I’d know his teeth anywhere. I watch him while he looks intently at his phone—maybe at a text, maybe at a shopping list—maybe at an email from his wife—until his shopping cart finally starts to move.

  “Excuse me,” he says, staring at me like I have a bird on my head. It takes me a few seconds to realize that my cart is blocking his way past me.

  “I’m so sorry!” I smile expectantly but don’t move. I’m waiting for him to recognize me, to say something awkward and adorable and perfect, something we will brag about in the retelling of this moment at the small but intimate rehearsal dinner before our small but intimate wedding exactly a year or two from now. But when my fantasy scenario doesn’t materialize, I realize suddenly what I must look like to him: just another middle-aged female warehouse shopper, oblivious to everyone around her because she feels like she’s invisible anyway. I clear my throat, then force myself to break through the scrim of intense discomfort. “I’m sure you don’t remember me”—I clear my throat again—“but are you Michael Wasserman? From Temple Shalom Hebrew School?” And then, before he can answer that no, he doesn’t remember me, I preempt the possibility of disappointment by blurting: “I’m Judy Vogel. I broke your Ten Commandments diorama. By accident.”

  He smiles slowly, cautiously. It’s all coming back to him now, I’m sure of it, and we will each live better, less burdened lives once this painful memory is cleared up and we each get the closure we so deserve. Such is the magic of living where you grew up, I think: the opportunities for soul-cleansing do-overs are endless. “I am Michael Wasserman,” he says, “but I have no memory of a Passover diorama.”

  “Oh wow. Okay. Great. What a relief!” I lie. I feel oddly disappointed. How is it possible for that incident to have meant more to me as the destroyer than it had to him as the destroyed? That’s not how it’s supposed to work, is it? “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of that day and felt terrible about it. I had this whole awful scenario in my head about how a neighbor had helped you with the project because your mother had just died and your father was too busy being in mourning.”

  When my mouth fin
ally stops moving I reach down into the sling for self-comfort. But I remember that, for once, I’ve left the dog at home. Which must be why I’m saying things I shouldn’t be saying. And why I’ve insisted on reintroducing myself to someone I used to know, even though Gary’s been advising me against that kind of thing for years: They’re strangers, he’d say after each humiliating episode in a restaurant, a mall, or a movie theater, when someone either didn’t recognize me, didn’t remember me after I’d explained our connection, or didn’t care.

  Michael Wasserman, a virtual stranger, is still staring at me, but he hasn’t walked away yet. I take this as a good sign, or at least as a sign that all is not lost. Yet. He nods his head slowly. “Mrs. Shapiro.” He edges our carts out of the line of rabid shoppers desperately foraging for dinner at the nearby whole-roasted-chicken counter, then speaks slowly, a memory gelling with each word he adds: “She lived next door, with two girls, so her house was full of arts and crafts stuff. We sat at her dining room table the night before the diorama was due and she helped me do the whole thing.” He pauses, then smiles, all teeth. “Actually, she did the whole thing while I just watched.”

  I’m as sad now for him as I was years earlier. “I didn’t mean to bring up a painful memory.”

  “I’d completely forgotten about the diorama until now. Clearly I’d blocked it.”

  As a crowd at a frozen pizza sample counter continues to gather, we move our carts out of the way again.

  “So what did you do after I destroyed your diorama?”

  “I became an orthodontist.”

  “No way.”

  “I know. So boring.”

  “Are you kidding? When you’re a writer there’s nothing boring about a normal career with a steady income.” I haven’t self-identified as a writer in ages and I have no idea why I did just now.

  “That’s right,” he says, smiling again. “Congratulations on all your success!”

  I wave him away. “That was such a long time ago.”

  “Was it really?”

  “It feels like it. It feels like a million years ago!”

  “Well, my kids loved the book. And the show. I used to tell them that I knew the girl who created them, that I sat next to her in Hebrew school.”

  I roll my eyes. “The girl with the bird on her head.”

  “That’s not how I remember it. I remember you being the supercool girl that I was too scared to talk to.”

  “Shut. Up.”

  “Remember what you used to say to the principal when he told you to smile? You’d say, ‘It’s my face.’” He laughs. “It’s my face. That was really something.”

  “Smiling was not part of my skill set back then.”

  “Well, you’re smiling now.”

  I blush, then look in his cart: cereal, organic macaroni and cheese, peanut butter. “Tell me about your kids.”

  He taps his phone and then shows me—three adorable dark-haired children in various stages of toothlessness, against a backdrop of epic foliage. “This was a few years ago. They don’t like to be photographed now. They’re in their tweens now.”

  “They look just like her,” I say, with a wry smile, remembering Janie Levy. She was the prettiest girl at the temple, and she and her twin brother, David, were the bat mitzvah circuit heartthrobs. I remember Michael and Janie dating around the time of all those awful parties, her perfect hair and his perfect teeth, neither of them needing braces, and how awkward and unsightly the rest of us seemed by comparison. “I can’t believe people actually marry their Hebrew school sweethearts and live happily ever after.”

  He looks at me like I have a bird on my head. “I didn’t marry Janie.”

  “Then who did you marry?”

  But before he can answer, Teddy materializes as if out of thin air from the video game aisle. I reach for his arm. “Teddy, this is Michael, an old friend of mine from when I was your age.” I prod him to shake hands, then whisper into his ear: “Now smile. With teeth.”

  He pulls away. “Why?”

  “Because Michael is an orthodontist. And I think you need braces.”

  Michael smiles and manages to get a glimpse of Teddy’s mouth, and then mine. He hands me his card. “He does. And so do you.”

  Adult Braces

  Your bite is off,” Michael says, a week later in his office, his gloved fingers in my mouth, my chair tilted all the way back and the bright examination light blinding me. His mini metal dental pick taps lightly on my offending lower teeth, then hovers above my lower lip. He offers me a little hand mirror so I can participate in the conversation about the possibility of a second round of orthodontia, instead of being a passive victim like I was the first time. “You see that?”

  Actually, I don’t. I’m too busy admiring my hair, which I blow-dried for once, and the perfectly thin and straight coat of eyeliner that I somehow managed to apply with a steady hand despite wearing the dog—all in preparation for my date with my orthodontist.

  “I’m kidding. He’s not officially my orthodontist,” I tell Glenn when I call her from the parking lot with Teddy trailing far behind me. “I’m just going to ask him before Teddy’s appointment what he meant by his remark that I need braces, too.” As usual, I’m all over the place.

  “I thought you said he was married.”

  “I did, but now, in retrospect, I think I also got a divorced vibe.”

  “Based on what?” Glenn always wants me to provide specifics, to show my work. In the manuscripts of the books of mine she edited, that need for substantiation appeared in the form of notes in the margin—queries on Post-it notes—Why would she say this? Or, How does she know this is what her mother is thinking? Or, Do we know if the bird on her head has thoughts and, if so, what they are? If I couldn’t answer to her satisfaction, she would make suggestions on how I could rework something to make it deeper, richer, or clearer. I can tell she doesn’t quite trust my divorced-vibes—if this were a story I’d written, her marginalia would include, Was he wearing a ring? If he told you he hadn’t married Janie, why didn’t he tell you who he did marry? Even though he didn’t tell you who he did marry who wasn’t Janie, why wouldn’t that give you married-someone-else-instead vibes? At the very least, she didn’t understand what I was basing my cues on. And indeed I couldn’t articulate them—now or then, when Teddy and I were driving home from Costco and I’d replayed our encounter in my head. It had been years—decades even—since I’d done that level of conversational parsing and analysis, holding every word up to the light and shaking it to see if it had meant something more than what it seemed: a chance encounter with a childhood acquaintance who I used to have a giant crush on. At the time, it hadn’t, but in the days since, my mind, so desperate to avoid reality, swelled with possibility. The possibility that maybe Michael, not the dog, is my true vine.

  The light poking and tapping of the tiny dental tool bring me back to the present.

  “Your teeth are starting to crowd. Which means you need braces.”

  “But I already had braces. Isn’t once enough?” I look in the mirror again, this time biting and rebiting, baring my teeth like an angry baboon, trying to grasp the fact that there’s a seismic shift—mesial drift—going on inside my mouth, especially in my lower teeth.

  “The older you get, the more your teeth move to the front of your mouth,” he explains. “It’s called ‘relapse,’ and if you don’t stop it, it just gets worse.”

  “Maybe they don’t want to be alone. Like that final scene in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, remember?” I describe how, after their final broadcast, everyone in the newsroom comes together in a group hug, and then stays in that formation as they scuttle across the floor to answer a ringing telephone. He laughs, and when he does I look at his teeth. “How come yours aren’t relapsing? How come your teeth still look perfect? We’re the same age. I don’t understand why I need braces right now and you don’t. It’s not fair.”

  “It’s just luck.” He pokes my lip with the metal pic
k and I open, and close, one last time.

  Passing quickly through anger and denial, I now enter the bargaining phase. “If I decide to do this, can I get the invisible kind of braces, like Tom Cruise?”

  He scoots a few inches away on his seat with wheels, snaps off his gloves, and tells me that invisible braces aren’t as good, which means you end up wearing them for twice as long as the regular kind. And, they’re more expensive. “Nothing beats good old-fashioned metal hardware.”

  “How long would I have to wear them?”

  He tells me that we could probably correct what’s wrong in eighteen months, then scoots back. “It’s not so bad.”

  “Easy for you to say. As I recall, you never even had braces once. Unlike the rest of us, you were born with perfect teeth.”

  “I could have used some minor correction, probably just a few bands on the front tops and bottoms, but there was a lot going on at home at the time. As you know.”

  I watch him move around the office, putting tools away for later cleaning, his back to me. I want to ask him about that time, what it was like, those dark teenage years, but I can tell he’d rather not talk about it, so I don’t. “How much would it cost?”

  “Why don’t you set up an actual consultation on your way out today so we can have more time to go over your options and I can answer all your questions.”

  “I know. I ask a lot of questions.”

  “You should.”

  My eyes dart toward the waiting room, where Teddy stares into space at a muted cartoon on a wall-mounted flat-screen television. His teeth are the priority here, not mine.