Days of Awe: A Novel

by Lauren Fox

  And I laugh out loud. Who’s writing your lines? Need? Need! I suck in my stomach at the sound of that word. Tiny spider veins crosshatch my thighs, new ones popping up like dropped stitches; I just noticed one this morning. I caught a glimpse of my upper arm in the mirror a few weeks ago and it looked like my mother was in the bathroom waving to me. There are seven wayward pounds that seem to migrate all over my body, like accessories. The signs of disrepair are faint but unmistakable. I flash back to that birthday party, just two years ago, but it seems like a decade: No movie star will have me now!

  Okay, I’ll admit that Chris and I still want each other. But need? Need is for your first lover on your twin bed in your college dorm. And Chris, whose chest hair is going gray; Chris, who has never had any fat on his frame, and so it’s his muscles that are softening, loosening a little, his firm stomach growing slightly paunchy, his biceps starting to sag. Need you?

  But here we are again, all the same, answering death with sex. I peel off his sweater, lift his T-shirt over his head. We’ve lost so much. I run my hands down his back, across his chest, his body as familiar as my own. I can imagine this with someone different, if I try: the ways passion would, or wouldn’t, humiliate you. The ways it would release you.

  Chris kisses me, unembarrassed. After a certain amount of time with someone, crisis is an aphrodisiac. It’s probably best not to think too hard about the implications of that one. And we are desperate for this, the flotsam of our intimacy. It’s true. I can hardly breathe for how much I want him. Need him. “Iz,” he says again. “Okay?”

  I let him guide me onto our bed, a tangle of soft sheets and heavy blankets. And I don’t need to answer, but I do: “Yes.”

  ···

  I wake up with a start. It must be hours later, still dark, the dead of night. Chris is lying next to me, snoring softly.

  “Shit!” I jump out of the bed and scramble for my clothes. “Chris, shit, we were supposed to pick up Hannah hours ago. What the hell? One of us was supposed to get her! Shit!”

  Chris glances at the clock and sighs, pulls the covers up to his neck. “It’s three o’clock.”

  “Holy mother of fuck.” I fumble with my shirt, pull it on backward, wriggle it around until it’s on the right way.

  “Izzy, it’s three in the afternoon. We’ve just been…dozing for a few minutes.” He rolls over and runs a hand through his fine, disheveled hair and peers at me. In our marriage—in every marriage?—no annoyed glance holds only the displeasure of the moment. Each one reflects all the irritated glances he’s ever shot at me for all of my transgressions: for lacking discipline, for being brittle and sharp, for overreacting, for swearing all the time, even in front of Hannah, for letting my worst self porcupine out before I retract my quills. Every exasperated look Chris gives me—and there have been plenty—carries the sediment of all the displeasure that has accumulated over the past fifteen years. “Everything is fine,” he says. He exhales through his nostrils like a bull.

  I shrug. “Well, that’s a relief.”

  He shrugs back at me, an unconscious imitation. “I should be getting back to the apartment,” he says, a little embarrassed, and the fact that he is ashamed almost absolves him.

  “You don’t have to call it ‘the apartment,’ ” I say, suddenly uncomfortably aware that I am standing next to our bed half naked and about to be abandoned by my sort-of-ex-husband whom I probably should not have just slept with. “Just say, ‘my apartment. I have to get back to my apartment.’ ” I step into my favorite old pair of sweatpants, which I wear frequently and which Josie used to call a blend of cotton and self-loathing. “You should get back to your apartment,” I say, the bitterness in my voice turning the edges hard.

  Chris sits up in bed and fumbles for his glasses on the nightstand, then props himself against the headboard with a pillow. “Come on, Iz. Don’t. Let’s just…would you just get back in here for a minute?” He pats the mattress next to him, rubs his hand down the sheet: fifteen years of signals we’ve been sending each other, fifteen years of fingers and faces, of communication, understood or missed. Our bed. Chris’s beautiful face, as alien to me now as it was intimate an hour ago.

  “No.” I stand over him, glowering, clothed now. “Nope.”

  Sex with your ex, I imagine Josie saying. Never a good idea. I turn toward the door. There’s a hallway, then Hannah’s room, pink and sweet a few months ago, filled with dolls and pillows and art projects, transitioning now into a sort of burrow, mopey and dark and defiant. (Where did all her stuffed animals go? She used to have a menagerie, a zoo. Where are they? Has there been some kind of teddy-bear Rapture?) There’s the bathroom where four pregnancies ended—fourteen, thirteen, six, and one and a half years ago, far away enough that I no longer feel a stab of pain when I think about them, no longer note the anniversaries of what would have been their due dates—December 17, February 4, November 1, April 10—then feel stupid for remembering.

  “Izzy, please,” Chris says, but I’m already at the top of the stairs, and I’m just heading down, my bare feet cold on the hardwood floor, as I hear him sigh, loud and annoyed. It’s the kind of sigh that is meant to be heard, part of the vocabulary of our unraveling marriage.

  “I’m trying,” he calls after me, and I want to say, Yes, you are. He’ll get up in a few minutes, put his clothes on, and get in his car and head to his apartment a mile from here, the two-bedroom on the East Side that I helped him pick out, near the lake and full of light, newly decorated with inexpensive but decent furniture and blue rugs and lots of pillows, and far too cozy to be as temporary as we agreed it was.

  He’ll bring my socks to me before he leaves—he’ll have noticed I forgot them. He won’t hand them to me. He’ll place them in front of me on the table, and he’ll stand there for a minute in our messy, darkening kitchen, waiting for me to thank him, to say something, but I won’t. I won’t say a word.

  It’s amazing, really, the things two people think they know about each other.

  I was the one who introduced Josie and Mark. Mark and I had been friends since kindergarten. We were always seated next to each other, all the way through grade school: Mark Abrams and Isabel Applebaum, two little alphabetized Jews, dark haired and slightly lost in a forest of midwestern consonant clusters, all those strapping, blond Schultzes and Metzgers and Hrubys and Przybylskis—strapping even in kindergarten, if memory serves.

  My mother used to tell me things about my classmates, like “Oh, Cindy Eichgrau, her grandparents lived on Locust, right around the corner from us when I was growing up. Once when I was running across their lawn, they yelled at me to go back home and called me a dirty Jew.” She would say these things to me casually, while I was decorating valentines for school or making a guest list for my birthday party or eating breakfast. “Allison Metzger…Metzger…Grandma and Grandpa knew a Metzger family in Frankfurt.” Eyebrow raised, head tilted. “Hmm. Probably not the same ones, though. Hope not.” The implications were clear. You never know….

  This is where my psyche took shape, in the clean white kitchen of my parents’ house. This is where my heart let loose its first defiant yelp. It’s more or less a straight line from Helene Strauss Applebaum’s dark melancholy and gallows humor to my maybe-ex-husband, Christopher Moore: lanky, blue eyed, straightforward to a fault, as likable as Christmas.

  But Mark. Mark was my science partner, seatmate on field trips to the nature center and the symphony, and, not coincidentally, Hebrew-school carpool buddy. He was short and quiet and he really, really loved to read, so mostly that’s what he did, while I chatted to him. “Mmm-hmm,” he would say occasionally, not even looking up from his book, “yup, sounds about right, Iz,” and the dynamic served us both well. We were pals through grade school, we lost track of each other in high school, and then we reconnected during our sophomore year in college, in a course on Chaucer. It was a small lecture, an English-major requirement, and for the first few weeks the seats were assigned alphabeticall
y. So there we were again, the two of us. We read The Canterbury Tales in translation, but Mark, king of extra credit, can still recite the entire prologue in the original Middle English. All I remember is the strange, sad, musical sound of those almost-comprehensible words, like a dirge, a dream…and that the Wife of Bath was a floozy.

  We graduated, and there were no jobs, which gave us a certain kind of reckless freedom. My friends and I packed up and moved to cities that seemed appealing—New York? San Francisco? Prague?—as if we were choosing pastries from the bakery case. Then we signed up with temp agencies and, to make ourselves feel better, we applied to law school or graduate programs in Things We Thought We Might Be Sort of Interested In.

  I moved to Chicago. I would have gone farther, but Helene doesn’t do well when I’m far away. She has a radius of one hundred miles, or a ninety-minute drive, before an anxious tremor creeps into her voice, which I’ve never been able to ignore. Mark went to Seattle and tried to get a job at a magazine but ended up working temp jobs in law firms and banks. A few years later, demoralized and broke, he and his all-flannel wardrobe moved back to Milwaukee and started a master’s program in English literature.

  I had come back nine months earlier, at my mother’s encouragement, to try to land a teaching job. I moved back in with her and worked as a receptionist at her doctors’ office and subbed for the district and then, finally, Rhodes Avenue Middle School hired me. Mark and I picked up where we had left off. We started hanging out, seeing movies, going out for beers after work. I had just met Chris, and I was overflowing with the smug evangelism of the newly coupled. I wanted Mark to be happy like I was happy. I wanted to find him a girlfriend so he could feel what it felt like to be me.

  Mark and Josie were both single, which at the time was kind of enough. I figured that two reasonably good-looking, smart professionals in their late twenties were as likely as not to get along. Josie was on my list for Mark, a list that also included my mom’s friend’s daughter Miranda, who was a couple of years younger and had just moved back from Portland to start med school, and also Lacy, the girl with the pierced tongue and the winking-devil tattoo who swiped my card at the gym. (I had no such corresponding list for Josie, having only just met Chris and still being in the habit of safeguarding available men for myself.)

  When, at their wedding, Mark and Josie raised their glasses in a toast to me, Isabel, for having had the brilliant foresight to recognize when two strangers were meant for each other, I just smiled and shrugged, because, really? I hadn’t. It was dumb luck.

  We met for drinks on a cold night at Heinrich von Raaschke’s Gemütliche Bierhaus. It was a loud and rollicking place famous for an elaborate drinking game involving a two-liter glass shoe filled with beer and a dirndl-wearing waitress who would inflict physical punishment for rule infractions. (Take your turn drinking beer or get a kick in the rear!) It was my favorite bar at the time, because all my life, whenever Helene drove past it, she would shudder and say something like “Later, after zese beers, ve vill burn down ze synagogue.” Frequenting it as an adult made me feel brave and ordinary.

  I’m not sure why I elected to come along on Josie and Mark’s first date. I had invited Chris, but he couldn’t make it, and rather than bow out myself and leave my friends to their own devices, I decided to orchestrate their meeting, to be a conductor of love.

  Josie was twenty minutes late. She came bursting through the door as if she had just gotten her cue backstage. Sometimes, with Josie, you half expected the part of the room you were in to darken as a spotlight switched on and encircled her with its glow. She waved at us and walked over to our table. I remember that when she took her hat off, her hair sprang free as if it had been trapped. She draped her magenta coat over the back of a chair and rubbed her hands together to warm them. It was early March but still the bitter, silent depths of a Wisconsin winter, and we all walked around encased in the long, puffy down coats that were fashionable that year, looking like chrysalises, brightly colored and ready to hatch.

  “You guys!” Josie announced, before I’d even introduced them. Mark gazed at her, at this dazzling, unruly creature who’d just vaulted through space and come to rest next to him. We had ordered a pitcher of beer, and Josie poured herself a glass and took a fortifying sip. “You guys, I have such a great story!” In the years to come, countless get-togethers would begin just this way. I have such a great story! She had wandered into the supply room after school, she told us, and caught Mr. Kleefisch, the art teacher, and Señora Doherty, Spanish, in a clinch on the floor near the bottles of neon-blue industrial cleaning solution. Young, newly married Angela Doherty, legs splayed on top of a stack of paper towels, and old, long-married Jim Kleefisch, known both for his creative use of potato prints and for the tufts of gray hair that escaped his shirt at every opening—wrists, chest, back of the neck. Señora Doherty squealed at the sight of Josie. Kleefisch, hairy back to the door, interpreted that squeal as encouragement and groaned, “Sí, Sí, me gusta, me gusta.”

  “Qué escándalo!” Josie said to us, leaning against the cushion of her coat, her eyes bright and delighted. She was radiating with the energy of her tawdry tale.

  “They’re both married!” I said. “And ew, Kleefisch! He’s got to be fifty! Oh, my God!” Fifty was decades away and seemed, at the time, like the age at which you would settle in for a short rest before dying.

  Josie swallowed another sip, the muscles in her throat working. “Disgusting!” she agreed gleefully.

  “Who knew,” Mark said under the din, “that a middle school could be such a den of lust.” He looked at Josie, and on the word “lust,” his cheeks went pink, and she smiled and absorbed the admiration that spilled out of him.

  “Oh, you have no idea,” she said. “No idea.”

  A little light clicked on in my brain: this was it. These two, here, this night: they were going to decide to become soul mates.

  In my whole life I had not, until Hannah was born and a kind of fear-based maternal instinct kicked in, had any moments of intuition, any bold premonitions of anything at all. I have mostly been an observer of people and situations who later thinks, Oh, yeah, that makes sense, I get it now. But at that moment fifteen years ago the night opened up in front of me like a book I had already read. I saw exactly how Mark and Josie would draw closer, fingertips grazing; how they would talk about books and teaching and their families and their dreams; how those details would add up to something specific and amazing (Really? Me, too! Me, too!); how Josie and Mark would want to understand each other, and so they would, and that would be love.

  I looked at my life at that bright moment and I knew for sure that it would be joyful and that no one I loved would ever leave me. Unlike everyone else, everywhere, in the history of everything.

  ···

  I think now about moments that skittered by but left a trace in my memory. I recalibrate the weight of events, and I wonder: How did I miss that? How did I not see who she was?

  And so now, of course, I remember this: It was a chilly November afternoon, a Sunday, four months before Josie died. Hannah was sick with a cold and a fever. Josie stopped by, like she did whenever Hannah was sick, with treats for her: a giant bag of M&M’s, a little plush stuffed giraffe, a pretty pink notebook. Things had not been great between Josie and me, but I was glad to see her, and Hannah, of course, was delighted.

  Hannah was lying on the couch in her pajamas, her forehead sweaty, eyes glassy and tired. “Thanks, J,” she said, sniffling. She tucked the giraffe into the crook of her elbow and closed her eyes. She had been dozing on and off and half watching a show about a group of high-school kids who open a smoothie shop. (All of the TV shows Hannah liked that year were about beautiful teenagers in fantastically contrived situations where there happened to be no parental supervision—a group of counselors at a camp for aspiring models, a group of talented surfers at surf school. It didn’t take a genius to pick up on the theme.)

  Josie bent down and kissed H
annah on the cheek, and then on the forehead. Middle-school teachers don’t worry about catching viruses; our immune systems are superpowered. “Feel better, H,” she said.

  “The customer is always right,” one of the gorgeous smoothie-shop girls shrieked to her gorgeous coworker, “except when she’s trying to steal my boyfriend!”

  Josie and I left Hannah to her laugh track and wandered back into the kitchen. “I miss Sesame Street,” I said, as we sat down at the table. My voice sounded stilted, even to my own ears, forced and artificial. I was trying hard.

  Josie took a white paper sack out of her bag and pulled out two croissants, set each on a napkin, a display of normalcy. “What was that show,” she said, “the strange cartoon with the little girl and her parents, and the stories were so, so boring?” She slid a croissant across the table to me. “There was never any conflict. Like the biggest thing to happen in an episode would be the family would go for a drive, or someone would get a letter in the mail.” She took a bite of her pastry, chewed slowly.

  “Oh, God,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Poca Polpetta.” It was a weird Italian import, inexplicably popular with preschoolers. Poca polpetta means “little meatball,” and, true to her name, she was a very round-headed little girl. She had preternaturally patient parents and a scampering puppy named Ravioli. When Hannah was little, we used to watch it on the weekends in endless repetition.

  “It was so soothing,” Josie said.

  I pulled off a piece of my croissant. “Once Hannah and I were watching it,” I said, “and the image popped into my mind of Poca Polpetta’s parents having sex.”

  “Her cartoon parents,” Josie said.

  “Yes.” Poca Polpetta’s mother and father looked just like her: heads like soccer balls, button eyes, pink smiling mouths. “Mama and Papa Polpetta, just screwing their brains out,” I said, and Josie snorted. “But how else did Poca come to be?”