Big Boy: Strangers on a Train

by Ruthie Knox

  This is a terrible time.

  “No, it’s all right. What’s up?”

  I check that Josh is occupied with making a waffle mess and walk into the living room.

  “I’d like to see you.”

  I don’t say anything for a moment. I’m busy putting myself in a yoga pose on the floor, pressing my forehead into the nap of the carpet. It’s an important pressure point, I heard once. It’s supposed to be soothing to push your forehead into things. I guess that’s why cows do it, and horses.

  I’m too excited. I’m going to end up disappointed. He wants to see me for some work-related reason, and I’ll die of it. Or he wants to see me so he can win me back, only that would be a disaster too, because he’s not the guy for me. I proved it already.

  Somebody needs to tell my heart.

  “Why?”

  “I— Can I just come by? I know where you live. I’m in the parking lot, actually. Maybe I could come up.”

  “I’m with my son.” There are skunks on my pants.

  “That’s fine. I’m not—” He sighs, and in my head I see him in a car, raking his hand through his hair. “Please.”

  He’s kind of…begging? Is that possible?

  Begging isn’t a tone I associate with him, but I decide I like it. If he wants to crawl through the apartment on his knees, just saying please to me for a while, I’ll be okay with it.

  He and the babysitter arrive at the same time, which piles one awkwardness on top of another. I let them both in, and Josh gets terrified toddler eyes, complete with wobbling chin, because he doesn’t know Tyler, and he doesn’t like this babysitter very much yet. Once he warms up to her, they’re fine. It’s just one of those separation-anxiety things. It sometimes takes me twenty-five minutes of concentrated wheedling and reassurance to get him to stop clinging to my leg like a screeching barnacle.

  I don’t have time for that this morning. Tyler’s here, he’s got his hands in his pockets, and he looks come-to-Jesus handsome. “Becky, this is Tyler. Tyler, Becky. Can you guys go in the living room?” I point. “I need to do something real quick.”

  Josh is already whining. He’s seen Becky. He knows the score. I open the kitchen drawer that contains my secret arsenal and fish out three fun-size candy bars left over from Halloween. Back in the living room, I find an episode of a vapid cartoon that Josh likes and put it on the TV. I refuse to think about what my ass must look like in these pants from where Tyler is standing.

  I return to the kitchen, grab Josh’s high chair and roll him into viewing range of the screen. His face crumples at the sight of Becky and Tyler staring at him. I open a candy bar, hand it to him and turn up the TV.

  “Come with me,” I say to Tyler, and I lead him into my bedroom and shut the door.

  I wonder briefly how this looks to Becky, but then I get distracted by my room, which is a mess. There’s nowhere for Tyler to sit. I haven’t made the bed. I don’t even have a grown-up bed, just a mattress and box springs on the floor. I keep meaning to buy one, but it’s not a high enough priority. Neither is the laundry. There are dirty clothes in a pile in the corner.

  I turn around, and there he is. Tall. He smells like winter, crisp and cool. He looks like a male model, and I’m wearing skunk pants.

  “I don’t have much time. I have to get ready for work.”

  He swallows, and I stare at his throat. His coat is unbuttoned, and underneath he wears a soft-looking black sweater. I want to press my forehead against his chest. It would be calming, I tell myself, but this is a lie. It would be the opposite of calming.

  “I made a mistake,” he says. “I made a lot of mistakes.”

  I order myself to wait, breath caught in my throat. My cells stop dividing. My blood stops circulating. My heart keeps beating, though, and Josh squeals with happiness in the living room. That would be the candy doing its work.

  “I shouldn’t have said no to you. I want you to give me another chance.”

  “What kind of chance?”

  “A date.”

  “What kind of date?”

  “The kind where I’m Tyler, and you’re Mandy, and I pick you up at seven and drive you to a restaurant and buy you dinner.”

  This sounds like my kind of date. But he’s not done yet.

  “And afterward, we talk about our childhoods over coffee, and you make me laugh, and then I kiss you good night and feel like skipping on my way back to my car because you’re so fucking fantastic.”

  I think I go into some kind of a fugue state then. I must, because I don’t consciously remember how his hands come to be wrapped around my upper arms, and I don’t know why he looks so concerned all of a sudden, or why he’s saying my name.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I’m having trouble processing, uh, you.”

  He kisses me, and it doesn’t help one bit, but it feels dangerously good. His fingers dig into my arms, pulling me higher, closer, as his minty mouth moves over mine, and I fall into him. Plummet, really. His teeth on my bottom lip, his tongue in my mouth. He doesn’t let go until I’m thrumming and wet, and then he does, but it’s too late, because all I can think about is sex. The bed right behind me. What he feels like inside me, and how much I missed him, and how badly I want everything between us to be okay.

  My brain has been hijacked by my libido.

  “That was a mistake,” I say.

  “It felt great.”

  “No more of that.” My thighs are still reflexively clenched. “It’s totally unacceptable for us to have sex, ever again.”

  He closes his eyes with a little groan that makes me want to die. In a good way, though. Le petit mort.

  “That was just kissing,” he says, with his eyes still closed. “Now you’ve got me thinking about sex.”

  He reaches blindly for my waist, but I smack his hand away.

  “Okay, look.” I try to steer through the flotsam in my head. “You saw the toddler out there, right? That’s Josh. That’s my son. And this”—I lift my hand up and sweep it around, encompassing myself and everything in the room—“is my life. This is how I dress a lot of the time. I have to go to work in a few minutes. That’s basically all I do—work and take care of Josh. It’s not glamorous or interesting, and I can’t keep going on dates with you because they’re fun. I lost that luxury when I became a mom. I have to be responsible, okay?”

  I lower my voice. The apartment is small, and I have no idea whether Becky can hear me through the door. I hope not. Christ, I’ll never be able to look her in the eye again. “And you make me want to do crazy, irresponsible things, which is why I liked you so much, but I can’t—”

  He cuts me off. “I’m in love with you.”

  He’s in love with me. I can’t even…no. Just, no. “You don’t know me.”

  “I want to.” He takes my hand, flattening it between his palms and no doubt smearing syrup all over himself.

  He has the prettiest eyes. Hazel. In the dim light at the museum, they’d always looked brown, but in my bedroom, with the clear light of a cold December morning streaming through the windows, they’re whiskey shot through with blue, an eye color that doesn’t particularly make sense unless you’ve seen it, and then it’s your new favorite.

  He looks so damn sincere. Six weeks of nothing, six weeks too late, but he really means it now, this confession of love at the wrong time, the wrong speed. I want to cry.

  It’s too much. I’m condensed under the weight of the way he’s behaving. I wish I could reroute his words in some way so that my heart hadn’t heard them, but it did, and it’s so incongruously happy, while the rest of me is panicked and confused and disappointed.

  “You can’t handle it. You told me so yourself. We don’t fit together right. I’m an adult, and you’re— Well, you’re just skating along, aren’t you? You have sort of half a job, you live with your parents with no real responsibilities… Did you know I’m thirty-four? And having Josh makes me, like, forty-four. I’m too old for you. I think you might have gott
en the wrong idea about me on all those dates. I’m not the sort of woman you’re looking for.”

  “You’re exactly the sort of woman I’m looking for.”

  “If that’s true, why did it take you six weeks to come here?”

  “I’ve got…” He pauses, staring over my shoulder for a second, and then shakes his head and starts over. “I was being an asshole. But you have the wrong idea about me. You need to give me time to explain myself.”

  “I don’t have time. I have to get ready for work.”

  “So let me take you out. Tonight. Tomorrow. Anytime you want.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  He reaches for me again, my shoulders this time, and I let him catch me. “That’s not good enough. Give me a chance. Please, Mandy.”

  I duck out of his arms before he can make me any weaker than I already am. “Don’t push me. I’m not yours to boss around. I said I’ll think about it. Now back off, huh? I have to get ready for work.”

  To his credit, he does. He’s got the hound-dog eyes, the wounded expression, like a tragically misunderstood silver-screen hottie. “Okay,” he says. “You’ll call me.”

  I nod. “I’ll call you.”

  When he goes, I have to sit on the bed and take deep breaths for several minutes before I’m ready to face the fact that I have to put on clothes and go out in the world and be a professional.

  I teach a three-hour seminar class, The Myth of the American West, and I’m horrendous. Basically, it’s two hours and fifteen minutes of group work and video clips and phoning it in, and then I send them on their way because I can’t keep my mind off the subject of Tyler.

  I can’t decide if he deserves a second chance. I can’t decide what to think about the real-world version of him, the man who so cruelly denied me twice and then showed up on my doorstep penitent, six weeks too late.

  I still haven’t decided when I step out of the classroom to find him in the hallway, waiting for me.

  “Have you thought about it?” he asks.

  He says it kind of quiet and humble, which strips me of the ability to hate him for being so pushy. “Yes.”

  “Have you made up your mind?”

  “No.”

  He nods, as if this is what he expected. “I want to show you something. It might help you decide. But I’ll have to drive you to my house. Is that okay? Or do you have to go home to Josh?”

  I have office hours scheduled, but early December is the doldrums before exam panic sets in, and I don’t get a lot of students showing up to see me. Plus, I think whatever this is between Tyler and I, we’d better figure it out soon, because I wasn’t doing all that hot when I was walking around bleeding internally for six weeks, and I’m doing even worse now.

  “Let me put a note on my door.”

  So we go to my office together, and I unlock it and write a note that I’ll be missing my office hours, and I tape it to the door. All the while, Tyler examines the spines of my books. He’s an exotic creature in my office. He doesn’t look young or immature. He looks like a man who’s comfortable perusing scholarly books—like a man who actually gives a damn about my chosen profession, which is exceptionally rare.

  It occurs to me that if our relationship weren’t doomed, we could be great together.

  He drives a Nissan. Black on the outside, gray on the inside, totally immaculate. He doesn’t look too young when he drives, either. With his hands on the wheel, navigating through the streets of Green Bay, he looks competent, adult, and extraordinarily hot.

  For a long moment after he turns off the car, we sit in his driveway, immobile. Finally, he glances at me over the ticking sound of the cooling engine and says, “You told me your sister went through the ice. What actually happened?”

  “She got killed by a drunk driver. Her, and her husband, and my niece.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. So am I.”

  He smoothes his hands over the wheel, from twelve o’clock to six o’clock in two hemispheres. “When we go in there, I just want you to watch, okay? And I want you to know, I told you all this, same as you told me about your sister.”

  I have only the sketchiest notion what he means, and no idea what I’m agreeing to. “Okay.”

  I follow him inside. The side door takes us into the kitchen, where there’s a large, older man at the table being fed soup by a raw-boned woman in scrubs.

  “Hey, Ty!” she says. “We didn’t expect you back for a while.”

  The man is hunched over the bowl. He looks at Tyler sidelong with mean, squinty eyes. I think he must be over six feet tall, carrying the weight that all men seem to pack on in their latter years in the Upper Midwest. He has a few days’ growth of beard, a wrinkled white T-shirt, sweatpants.

  Tyler makes a gesture with his hands and says, “Hey, Nancy. I wanted to bring Mandy by to meet Dad.”

  “Oh, this is Mandy?” Nancy sizes me up in a friendly way, and then gestures at the older man. Tyler’s father. “Look, Paul! Tyler brought Mandy to meet you. Doesn’t she seem like a nice young girl?”

  Tyler’s dad makes an awful, choking, moaning sort of noise and glares at me. The hand that isn’t holding the spoon rises from the table and carves out a rushed, jerky shape in the air.

  “Nice girl,” the nurse says. “That’s right, Paul, she is a nice girl.” She picks up the napkin and wipes his mouth.

  I’m slow on the uptake, but I guess I’ve figured out enough. That he’s deaf, and declining in one way or another. I remember that Tyler told me once, on our second date, that he grew up on an isolated farm in Appalachia, and his parents were both deaf, so he learned to sign before he could speak.

  Not a story. The truth. More or less.

  “Well, we’ve had a busy morning,” the nurse tells Tyler, signing so Tyler’s dad will understand. “I got him to drink some orange juice with the thickener, and I tried to get some toast in him for breakfast but we just didn’t want to eat today, did we, Paul? And we refused to get dressed.”

  Tyler winces. “He didn’t hit you again?”

  She shakes her head and stops signing. “He took a swat at me, but I saw it coming. I thought it wouldn’t hurt him to stay in his sweats until you got home. It might be getting on time to let him wear the sweatpants all day, anyway.”

  “He would’ve hated that.”

  “I know, honey, and I know you want him to have his dignity, but you’re doing everything you can for him. Part of keeping sane with this illness is just accepting the changes as they come.”

  Tyler nods. “I’ll think about it. But for now, I think I’ll get him dressed.” He starts signing again. “What do you say, Dad? Want to get your clothes on for the day?”

  His father grunts and slashes at the air. Definitely a no.

  I stand back against the wall and watch the rest of it play out. Tyler coaxes his father out of the chair and helps him shuffle slowly—painfully slowly—out of the room. Paul leans on Tyler’s shoulder with one hand and uses a three-footed metal cane in the other. He looks heavy. So heavy.

  The house falls silent as they move into what must be a bedroom out of sight, and then I hear nothing but a bump and the creak of weight on a mattress to the accompaniment of Tyler’s muffled grunt. It takes them a while. Afterward, Tyler helps his father to the bathroom.

  The nurse looks at me. “He wears himself out,” she says quietly. “Day and night. His mother was just the same.”

  “You’ve known him a long time?”

  “I started coming over a few hours a week when Paul first needed extra care and Mrs. Janssen wanted to run out for groceries. Tyler was in school then, commuting down to Milwaukee for classes and living at home to help his mother.”

  “But she died,” I say in a whisper. “And he took over.”

  He’d told me that, too. A story about his sainted Aunt Beedie, and how she’d taken care of his uncle when he got dementia until it plumb used her up. How he’d had to arrange for his uncle’s care,
because it was what Beedie would’ve wanted.

  “How much do you help him?” I ask.

  “Not enough. Just when he’s working at the museum, and a few hours here and there so he can do his errands. And I used to come by one night a month so he could see you.” She looks down at the table, maybe thinking she’s overstepped.

  Tyler and his father come back into the room, a process that takes a good five minutes before Paul is completely resettled in his chair. The nurse feeds him some crackers. Tyler is unusually disheveled now, his hair falling in his face, but Paul’s is neatly combed, and he’s wearing navy slacks and a cardigan over a button-up shirt. Dignified.

  My father was a natty dresser, Tyler had told me. He’d polished his nails on his sweater and blown on them, a teasing light in his eyes. Runs in the family.

  You’re vain, I’d said.

  Gotta flaunt what you’ve got. Mama always said it was those peacock feathers of his that grabbed her attention in the first place. I reckon it takes a little something extra to win a girl who’s worth it. How about you, sweetheart? You fancy a fella with nice feathers?

  I do fancy him. I fancy him like crazy, and it dawns on me that if he’s been a complete jackass, so have I. We were both groping for a connection without being willing to take any risks.

  I’d thought we were poorly matched, but it’s the opposite. We’re too similar. Too many burdens in our ordinary lives, too much joy in the escape, and no fucking sense whatsoever about how to find each other, how to share ourselves, how to tell the truth.

  But maybe we can get better at it with practice. I sure want to try.

  Tyler’s talking to Nancy, making plans for the rest of Paul’s day. “You want to see the house?” he asks me when they’re through.

  I do. He shows me around, starting upstairs with his bedroom, which isn’t a kid’s bedroom at all. He has a nice headboard, actually, a sleigh bed in antique cherry. A neat stack of clean laundry on the chair. He shows me the bathroom, the office, the guest room, the dining room. I see the couch in the living room, close to his father’s bedroom, with an afghan folded over the arm and a full-size pillow on the back. That’s where he sleeps, I think. To be nearby if his father needs him.