The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  And so, sitting in the backseat of Orion’s car and looking at his mother’s head on our way over to the restaurant we’re going to, I think about how I really want to like her, and more than that I want her to like me. I just hope he hasn’t told her that we’re having a sexual relationship because, you know, it’s his mother.

  Our lunch is at this place, The Depot, that used to be a train station but now it’s a restaurant. We sit in the little caboose that’s attached to the main building, at a table that’s really just for two people. Orion sits across from Maria and me, and me and her are kind of squashed in together, which is a little uncomfortable, especially since I’m left-handed and she’s right-handed, and our arms keep bumping into each other. Mostly, it’s just the two of them talking because I feel so self-conscious, and also because I can tell that whenever Maria asks me something, it’s only because she’s being polite. “Oh, I heard from Thea a few weeks ago,” she tells Orion. “Her dissertation has been approved and she’s already gotten a job. At Emory University, tenure track.” When I ask who Thea is, Orion says she was an old girlfriend of his. “Well, she was a little more than that,” Maria tells me. “They were engaged.” They were? Orion was engaged? “Brilliant girl,” Maria tells me.

  “Huh,” I go. “Wow.” Because I can’t think of anything more “brilliant” to say. And then, reaching for the bread basket, I knock over Maria’s water glass and the water spills into her lap. I’m dying about being such a klutz, but Maria says that’s all right, it’s only water, it will dry. Except she keeps dabbing at it with her napkin even after our salads come, and asks the waitress for extra ones because of “our little mishap.” By which she really means my little mishap. “So tell me, Ann, what is it you do for a living?” she asks me. Orion answers for me—tells her how we met at the dry cleaner’s where he gets his shirts done. “Yeah, but that’s just my temporary job,” I lie. “I’m saving up to go back to school. College.”

  Orion looks at me funny. “You are?” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say, looking over his shoulder. “Yup.” When his mother asks me what I’ll be studying, I say the first thing that comes into my mind. “Art.”

  “Art history?”

  “No, just . . . art.”

  And she goes, “Aha. Interesting.”

  After we finish our meals, the waitress asks us if we’ve left any room for dessert. I shake my head because I can’t wait to get out of there, but Orion and his mother decide to share this custardy-looking thing with a crust on top that they break with their spoons. Orion keeps telling me to try some, but I keep going, “No, no thanks. I’m stuffed.” Which I’m not, really. If his mother wasn’t here and it was just me and him sharing it, I’d be digging right in, maybe even as much as his mother is. She’s eating like 75 percent of their dessert instead of 50 percent. Boy, she sure likes her sweets.

  When we drop Maria back off, I tell her again that it was nice to meet her. “Likewise, Ann,” she says. They get out and walk to the front door of the dormitory. I watch them share a laugh about something (me?), and hug each other good-bye. Ann, I think: not Annie or my real name, Anna. To her, I’m just some random Ann that he’s wasting his time with. She’s probably just told him he should end it with me and go back to that Thea person—that he’s making a mistake. When Orion gets back in the car, he asks me how I liked her. “Great!” I say. It comes out fake, a little too enthusiastic, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He says she liked me, too, and I think, ha! That’s a laugh. Tell me another one. He wants to know if I want to go back to his place and I tell him no, that I’m kind of tired. Which I am. All this effort with his stupid mother has exhausted me.

  Back at my apartment, I flop down on my mattress and fall right to sleep. Which was something I hadn’t done much of the night before because I was so nervous about meeting his mother. It’s dark by the time I wake up, and I sit up and start thinking about the dream I’ve just had. Well, more of a nightmare than a dream, I guess. Orion was screaming at me, saying with this angry face that he doesn’t love me—that he never loved me. And for some reason, I was standing at an easel, painting a picture with my own blood.

  A few nights later, I’m over at Orion’s. After we make love, I get up to go but he grabs my arm and tells me not to—that he wants me to stay over, even though it’s not the weekend. So I do. Except I can’t get to sleep. Instead, I just lie there, wondering what that Thea was like, and why they broke their engagement. I decide it must have been her decision, not his, because Orion’s too kind to break someone’s heart. Which is probably why he hasn’t broken up with me yet. He’s restless tonight, tossing and turning in his sleep and mumbling mumbo jumbo. Maybe he’s wrestling with wanting to dump me but not wanting to hurt me. The last time I look at his clock radio, it says 3:13. . . .

  But I must have fallen into a deep sleep after that, because the next thing I know, it’s light out and I’m waking up to the sound of him in the shower. My panic’s gone now. Why would he say he loves me, wants to show me new things and take me to new places, if he doesn’t? That was just my scared middle-of-the-night thinking. My worrying for nothing. “Morning,” he says when he comes out of the bathroom wearing just a towel. I smile. Watch him. Sometimes in the middle of making love, he whispers that I have a beautiful body and I have to stop myself from correcting him, pointing out all my flaws: stubby legs, smallish boobs. The truth is that he’s the one with the beautiful body. Those wide shoulders and runner’s calf muscles. The little line of hair that starts beneath his belly button and goes down. When he pulls off the towel, I watch him walk across the room to his dresser, his penis bobbing. In the months we’ve been together, I’ve gotten to know his body inch by inch. And then I think about Thea—how she must have known it as well as I do. How, maybe when she thinks about him now, she realizes she made a mistake. Wishes she hadn’t ended it with him. She could call him tomorrow—today, even!—and tell him she wants him back.

  Tying his tie in the mirror, he tells me he has to go in early for some meeting. The coffeemaker’s gurgling in the kitchen, and I ask him if he wants me to get him a cup. No, he says. I should stay in bed and relax. “You don’t go into work until noon on Tuesday. Right?”

  It touches me that he knows my schedule. “Right.” A few minutes later, he brings me a cup of coffee, kisses me on the forehead, and reminds me to lock up when I leave. He goes out the door whistling.

  I’ve been alone in his apartment before, but until this morning I’ve never snooped. I don’t know Thea’s last name, so I go through his whole Rolodex and there’s no Thea in it. There’s no evidence of her in his bedroom closet, either. But when I think to look under his bed, I pull out the plastic storage bin that’s under there and take off the lid. It’s mostly his old college stuff—papers he’s written, notebooks with notes in them. But there’s a thick envelope in here, too, and I take it out. Spill what’s in it onto his bed: pictures, letters. Most of the photos are of him and this same woman who must be Thea. She’s thin and beautiful and has long brown hair, long fashion model legs. There’s one of Orion and her in dress-up clothes, and a bunch of pictures of the two of them at some fancy resort or something. The one of him kissing her has writing on the back in what must be her handwriting because it’s not his. O and me at the Ocean House, July ’77. O, she called him instead of Orion. Even her penmanship is pretty. In the picture I hate the most, Orion’s between Thea and his mother, his arms around them, the three of them smiling. I hear Maria say what she said at that lunch we went to: Brilliant girl. Talented and gifted, I think. The kind of girl she thinks her son deserves.

  When I’m done looking at the pictures, I notice that one of the letters he’s saved has a return address that says Thea Kingsbury, 64 Egmont Street Apt. 3-C Brookline, MA. I take it out of the envelope and read it. They must have just had a fight or something, because she says she’s sorry about what she’s said—that she’s been under a lot of pressure lately and didn’t mean to be such a “dolt.”
Until we had that lunch with his mother, I’d been thinking that maybe—maybe—he and I might have a future together. Ha! If she wrote him another letter like this one, he’d drop me like a hot potato. I stuff everything back in the bin and shove it under Orion’s bed. Everything, that is, except the picture of him and Thea with his mother. I rip that one up and bring the pieces into his kitchen. Turn on the faucet and the garbage disposal and watch them disappear down the drain. There’s a bowl of peaches on his counter. I grab one, bite into it hard, and my teeth hit the stone. This peach is like life, I think. Juicy and delicious on the outside until you get to the pit.

  After I leave his apartment and go home, I call work and say I’m sick. Which I am, except not with a stomach virus like I tell Mrs. Skiba. It’s my first sick day since I started working there. “Bananas and toast,” Mrs. Skiba says. “That will settle your tummy.” All day long, I go back and forth about what I should do. Or shouldn’t do. And by late afternoon, I’ve reached my decision.

  It would be too painful to break up with him in person, so I do it over the phone. At first, he doesn’t say anything. Has he hung up on me? No, because I can hear his breathing. “I just don’t get it,” he finally says. “Have I been missing something? Because if I have, let’s talk about it. Work through it.” Like he’s my psychologist, which he isn’t. I tell him I can’t talk about it. He goes, “Why not?” Because if we did, I might start telling him everything. That I snooped around in his apartment and found those pictures. That his mother doesn’t think I’m good enough for him. I might keep going until I told him every single thing I’ve kept from him. “I thought things were going so well for us. Jesus Christ, Annie, the least you can do is give me an explanation.”

  “It’s just that . . . we’re a mismatch. And it’s better we face it now than later. I have to go now. Bye.” I hang up on him and start to cry. And when he calls right back, I don’t answer the phone. I don’t answer it the next two times either. Or the next day. Or the one after that. Then the phone stops ringing.

  He usually comes in with his shirts on Tuesdays, my late day, except the following Tuesday, he’s a no show. I’ve been dreading seeing him all afternoon, but now that it’s closing time, I’m disappointed. When Mrs. Skiba asks me what’s wrong, I tell her I don’t want to talk about it and she backs off. I miss him so badly that it’s like I hurt physically. And hey, I do hurt physically: headaches, stomachaches, diarrhea. I keep thinking about calling him and telling him I was being a dolt, but I don’t. Better that I ended it before he could have. Or that he didn’t end it but wished he had. He’s probably already reconnected with Thea by now, his real girlfriend. Which is probably why he’s stopped calling me and started going to a different dry cleaner’s. Every day when I go into work, I check the slips to see if he’s brought his shirts in and I just missed him, but I haven’t. He’s probably getting them done at the Troy Laundry now.

  The night he shows up at my door, he looks awful and his breath smells boozy. “Have you been drinking?” I ask him.

  “Yeah, every fuckin’ night since you lowered the boom,” he says. He’s got the same mad face he had in my dream and says he needs to come in. When I ask him why, he says because I owe him a better explanation than that we’re a mismatch. Why did I just cut and run like that? How are we such a mismatch? He pushes the door open and barges past me, makes a beeline for one of the beanbag chairs, and sinks down into it. It sighs under his weight; it’s weird how they do that, these chairs. I sit down on the other one.

  “It just wasn’t going to work,” I tell him.

  He shrugs. “Why not?”

  “Because I’m me and you’re you, that’s why.”

  He shrugs again. “What the fuck does that even mean?”

  “It means you’re a psychologist and I never even went to college. And I’m not going to go either. I just said that to make your mother like me.”

  “She does like you,” he says. “And I don’t give a shit whether you went to college or not. I love you, Annie, not your freakin’ curriculum vita.” My what? “So come on. Don’t leave me in the dark like this. What else?”

  There were a million other reasons. Where should I start? “Because . . . because you have nice furniture and I don’t even have a bed frame yet. Because I buy my clothes on clearance and you wear fancy monogrammed shirts.” He laughs. “It’s not funny! I just don’t deserve you, Orion. Thea deserves you. I bet you any amount of money she’s sorry she broke up with you. And that if you picked up the phone right now and called her, she’d—”

  He kicks over my coffee table. First he fixed it for me, now he’s trying to wreck it. “What the fuck does Thea have to do with anything?” he wants to know. “And for the record, she didn’t break it off. I did.”

  “Oh,” I say. “You did? Why?”

  “Because she was a narcissistic bitch! A spoiled little trust fund baby! And because I could feel the noose tightening around my neck! Annie, she and I were the mismatch, not you and me. I want to be with you. Take care of you. Was I just deluding myself? Because I thought you wanted that, too.”

  “I did,” I say. “I do.”

  “Then what the fuck is the problem?”

  We end up on my mattress, and the makeup sex is pretty intense. When Orion comes, he says, “I love you . . . love you . . . love.” And I burst into sobs of joy and relief. Hold on to him so tight that it’s like he’s saving me from drowning.

  He proposes to me two days later. Instead of saying yes, I ask him if he’s told his mother yet. He looks at me like I’m weird. Wants to know why he’d do that. “No reason,” I say, “Uh . . . when are you thinking you’d like to—”

  “Soon. As soon as possible. I don’t want to wait unless you do. Do you want to wait?” I shake my head.

  We go ring shopping and I pick out one of the smaller diamonds. “Really?” he says. “Because I kind of like the one three down from that one.” He means the one that’s my real favorite but looks like it costs way too much.

  “Yeah, that one’s gorgeous.”

  “Exquisite,” the jeweler says. I try on both of the rings, but I stick to my guns and say the other one’s fine. Then I get my finger sized and we leave the store and go to town hall to apply for our marriage license. I blush a little when the clerk tells us we’re a cute couple.

  The next night, Orion comes over with a pizza. And while we’re eating it, he reaches into his pocket, takes out the little blue velvet box, and hands it to me. I open it and there it is: the beautiful, more expensive ring. “Don’t give me any arguments,” he says. “I know which one you really wanted. Try it on. I want to see how it looks.” And when I do, he looks up from my hand to my eyes and smiles. Takes me in his arms and kisses me. “I love you so much,” I tell him. And I do, whether I deserve him or not. While he’s holding me, I look at my ring finger resting against his shoulder and sparkling in the overhead light. Am I still plain old Annie O’Day from foster care who almost got trapped into marrying Albie Wignall? Because I don’t feel like that girl right now. I feel more like Cinderella. Who, come to think of it, had a shitty life, too, until she went to that ball. And who almost blew it like I did until they put that glass slipper on her and it fit.

  Cinderella and her glass slipper? Happily ever after? No, I’ve long since stopped believing in fairy tale endings. But if what I have now with Viveca isn’t perfect, it’s still special and real, despite my misgivings. I love her. She loves me. I walk over to her desk, sit down, grab a pen. Flip the prenup to the places that need my signature and scrawl my name. There. It’s done. So much for that.