Days of Awe: A Novel

by Lauren Fox

  I’m a refugee from happiness with nowhere else to go. And also, oh, I want to see him again. I do—even though every time I imagine sitting down beside him on an uncomfortable chair, or standing near him as I load up a paper plate with an embarrassment of tiny brownies, my left eyelid starts to twitch.

  “You go without me this time, darling,” my mother said this morning. Her voice sounded gravelly, weary. “It should be your thing, not mine.”

  “Come on, man,” I said. “This is your fault. You were my dealer. You got me hooked! Hooked on the wacky weed!”

  She sighed. “Sweetheart. Are we talking about the same thing?”

  ···

  “All righty,” Jillian says. She makes a little looping motion with her index finger, like she’s letting us know she thinks we’re all crazy. But it’s an instruction, of course, and so fourteen of us in the basement of the East Side Community Center obediently drag our folding chairs into a perfect circle.

  It smells musty and sweet down here, as if ripe late-spring mud were trying to reclaim the building, beginning a slow seep through the walls. Jillian sits down primly and folds her hands on her lap. “Hello again to you all, and a warm welcome back to…” The room is silent. I look around at the vaguely familiar faces, the broad strokes of vulnerability and not-quite-dead optimism brushed across their features, all of our features. What effort it takes some days just to get into your car and drive somewhere. Park. Walk downstairs and find the right room. Not run screaming out the door. “Welcome back to…” Jillian says again, nodding in my direction.

  “Oh! You mean me!” They’ve been coming here every week, I guess, coalescing into a tightly knit group of sufferers, a company of misery. “Isabel Moore.” Sometimes when I say it out loud it doesn’t even sound like my name, just its component parts. Is a bell more what?

  “Why don’t we go ahead and introduce ourselves, because I think there are a few new faces since you were here last, Isabel!”

  Cal, five seats away from me, whispers to a pretty brown-haired fortyish woman in business casual. He smiled politely at me when we walked in, said hello, but that was all; now he’s twinkly eyed and chuckling with Liz Claiborne. I’m jealous, although of course I have no right to be. I imagine the two of them, locking eyes empathetically over somebody’s tragic tale of marital betrayal, then making out in his blue Prius in the parking lot, his hands caressing her shoulders, fingertips running down her spine. I can practically hear her, humming with pleasure, quiet as the car’s engine. In my mind they suddenly, confusingly, become one, Cal’s new lady love and his car: compact, attractive, energy efficient. My stomach squeezes like a sponge.

  “Say your name and a little bit about yourself,” Jillian says. “Maybe something interesting or important happened since the last time we saw each other? Something challenging, or something that has helped you grow?”

  Across from me, Harrison the great big bald man smiles shyly at Lee Ann, the young divorcée, his pinkening face betraying him. Lee Ann fiddles with a clip in her hair and stares at her lap, half smiling, too.

  How did I not see until now that this support group is a lonely hearts club? Of course it is! This is why everyone here has changed out of Cheetos-stained T-shirts, why the women are wearing just enough makeup, the men in pants of the nonsweat variety. It’s why we put up with Jillian’s textbook exhortations, her desperate, hopeful group trust games. It’s why we’re here. The Relationships in Transition support group is a meat market! Our tenderized hearts are on display for the taking.

  “Well, I’m Neil,” the man next to me is saying. “Something interesting in my life is, uh, Rainy, my ‘girlfriend’ ”—Neil made air quotes here, his fingers groping in front of him like lobster pincers—“she dumped me for a dude who works at the co-op, I swear to God I think his name might be Kale, and they’re going on a friggin’ cross-country bike trip. Which is what she and I had been planning. So, yeah.” He laughs bitterly. “That’s something interesting.”

  Jillian pauses, her eyes darting. She’s still so new at this, so green. She shakes her head a little, recalibrating. “All right, Neil. Thank you for sharing.”

  “And,” he continues, as if Jillian hadn’t interrupted, “I’ve been thinking, you know…wow. I pretty much sacrificed my whole family for Rainy. My wife and kids, and for what? I…” He presses his fingertips against his eyebrows for a moment and takes a gasping, broken breath. The room is silent. “I’m on my own now,” Neil says. “I really, really fucked…excuse me, screwed up.”

  Barb, whose husband left her for polyamory and who seemed, at the last meeting, to be percolating a rich and hearty loathing for Neil, tsks sympathetically. Cal gives Neil a consoling nod, then touches his lady friend’s arm—just for the briefest second, but I see it. Neil looks around the room and scratches his beard absently, scritch-scritch, like it’s infested.

  “Thank you, Neil,” Jillian says after a pause and nods at me. “Isabel?”

  I’m going to waive my turn again. I suppose there is something comforting about being here, but I’m not about to share my deepest secrets with Cal and Ann Taylor and the rest of these sorry strangers, to watch their faces and calculate their judgments or endure their pity. Grief beats its leathery wings under my skin. My friend is gone. That’s enough. That’s everything! Pass! I pass!

  “I…um…” My best friend died in a car accident just over a year ago. Her husband is in love with a woman with perfect hair who is partly responsible for her death. My mother had a stroke and she’s getting old and kind of grouchy and will one day die, and nobody has ever loved me like she does. My daughter, on the other hand, hates me. And my husband is dating our couple’s therapist. Former couple’s therapist! I flutter my hand around in front of my face like I’m swatting away an imaginary mosquito. Everything about me is cracked, busted, beyond repair. What part of my life isn’t a relationship in transition? “My dishwasher is broken!” I say, quite loudly as heat rises to my face. I inhale and swat away a tear.

  The room is silent now, the air swollen with my humiliation. Cal gazes at me as if he’s examining a frog under a microscope. Eileen Fisher looks at her feet. Next to me, Neil, who until moments ago held the record for most embarrassing outburst, breathes in and out through his nose with little whistles.

  Jillian, poor Jillian. She’s just staring into the middle of the circle, her mouth open slightly. If there were a caption underneath her, it would say DUMBFOUNDED.

  Cal clears his throat. “My toaster has been acting up lately.”

  ···

  It’s raining hard when the meeting finishes, one of those late-spring midwestern thunderstorms that whips up out of nowhere. The sliver of sky visible out of the basement window has gone black, and lightning sparks through the darkness.

  Jillian taps the schedule that’s posted near the door. “Don’t Let Your Diabetes Beat You has this room in ten minutes,” she announces, “so we need to clear off the dessert table quickly.”

  “It’s the end of Relationships in Transition,” Neil whispers to me, leaning too close and scratching his beard again. “Time for us to break up!” He chuckles at his own joke in time with a sudden loud boom of thunder.

  The last time I was here, Neil had ditched his family for a twenty-four-year-old hippie chick, and now he’s miserable but clear eyed, surveying the wasteland he created. Barb, who practically vibrated with fury two months ago, seems different now, too, maybe sadder but less coiled, as if those vibrations finally shook something loose inside of her. And Harrison and Lee Ann—there’s something between them, unlikely but undeniable. It occurs to me that everyone here is changed, whether by time or by friendship: everyone but me.

  Another flash of lightning, another low rumble of thunder. Hannah used to climb into bed between us during thunderstorms, trembling. Even after they’d rolled away and all was calm, she’d beg to stay with us. I’m still scared! And although our bed was too small for three and she clung to me like a barnacle and
Chris wanted her to go back to her own bed, I always agreed, because I knew: just because the skies were clear didn’t mean you should let your guard down. Fear is tenacious, ungovernable.

  I get up and gather my things, my sweater and purse, then hurry to the back of the room and grab my untouched package of store-bought chocolate-chip cookies from the table and stuff it into my bag. I need to get out of here fast, before I bump into Cal and his girlfriend in the hallway, probably hand in hand, gazing into each other’s eyes, murmuring about how lucky they are to have found each other here, amid love’s ashes. I’ll pull the car to the door so you don’t get wet, sweetie. Don’t be silly, Calvin. We can make a run for it together. I’m not made of sugar. I won’t melt!

  I’m rushing up to the first-floor exit when the fluorescent lights in the stairwell flicker off and then, a long few seconds later, back on. Barb, a couple of stairs behind me, lets out a startled little yelp. “Oh, my!” Her voice echoes as if we’re in a cave.

  Rattled, I push through the heavy door at the top of the stairs and into the entryway. Harrison and Lee Ann are already huddled together in the doorway, giggling, his bare, meaty arm slung protectively over her thin shoulders.

  The lightning is spectacular, wild, dangerous. Lately I’ve been trying to vault over my skeptical heart and find traces of Josie in the natural world. Why should the devout be the only ones who get to talk to their dead? So I’ve been looking. Is her spirit alive anywhere? In the red-tailed hawk who occasionally comes to perch in the low branches of the elm tree in our backyard? In the unexpected rainbow that arced over the green garbage bins in the alley behind Rhodes Avenue a few weeks ago? Of course, the only thing I feel when I silently ask a tulip if it’s Josie is ridiculous. The only place I’ve ever felt even a fleeting glimpse of my dead, dead, dead friend is in the black sky of a thunderstorm, the angry hard pellets of cold rain, the flashes of electricity that could kill you. I know Josie’s not actually there, in a storm, but that’s what it feels like to miss her, mad and irrational and altered.

  I want to be home, right now, in my bed, huddled under the covers. I dig around in my bag for my keys, feel for their reassuring edges.

  And that’s when I remember that I walked here. “Crap on a cracker.”

  “Still worked up about that dishwasher?” Cal is standing behind me. Next to him, Anne Klein adjusts her skirt and gazes out the wide window.

  “I just remembered that I…don’t have my car.” Two hours ago, it seemed like a good idea to take a nice, mile-long stroll on a warmish night.

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” Cal says. “Well, see ya around!” His girlfriend looks at him, her eyebrows raised. “Kidding!” he says. “I’m kidding. Isabel, please allow us to drive you home.” Us.

  “Oh, but I don’t…this isn’t that bad!” I’m trying to quickly gauge the depth and truth of the connection between Cal and this woman, trying to decide if I could tolerate being the mortified reject in the backseat, witness to their giddy rain-drenched affection. I’m thinking that risking my life walking through tree-lined streets in a thunderstorm might just be preferable, when another flash of lightning fizzes through the sky, followed by another, and then another, and then a triple-strength crack of thunder as loud as a bomb.

  “You’re right!” Cal says. “It’s not that bad.”

  His ladylove extends her hand to me with a little sigh. “We haven’t been formally introduced,” she says mildly, “although Cal has told me about you. I’m Joy Peterson.”

  Joy. I’ve never met a happy Joy. She’s wearing a breezy, light green cotton shirt and a black skirt. There’s a delicate gold chain around her neck with a tiny oval pendant that rests in the dip of her clavicle, like a little cat’s tongue. She’s sexy in a precise, fine-boned way that makes me feel like an elephant.

  She squeezes my hand. Joy Peterson has a surprisingly solid grip and a quick release. She didn’t speak during the meeting, but I imagine her as the recently divorced mother of a pair of rowdy eight-year-old twin boys, and that her handshake is a reflection of her parenting style: firm, no-nonsense, a little bit heroic. Mason, Trevor, you boys go to your rooms right now! Do I sound like I’m kidding?

  We wait a few awkward moments until it’s clear that we’ve reached the scientific limit of our comfort level with each other here in the entryway, and then we make a dash for the car. We are, of course, soaking wet by the time we scramble in, and very quickly the chemical-floral-doggish scent of wet hair fills Cal’s little Prius. Joy, in the front seat, pats her head, and then turns around to me and gives me the tightest smile in the history of smiles, a very slight stretching of her lips across her teeth.

  “Thank you for this,” I say to her, trying for a sisterly bond: Thank you for the ride, but you and I both know what I really mean; thank you for letting me interrupt your date; Cal and I have a little history, sure, but don’t worry, I’ll step out of your way; he’s yours now, this hunky older fella.

  But Joy just smooths her hair again and turns back toward the front of the car. “Don’t thank me,” she mutters.

  It’s loud in the car, but I’m pretty sure I hear Cal chuckle to himself, unable to mask his delight with the situation—two women in his car, younger than he is by decades, and are we vying for his affection? Clearly we are. It strikes me for the first time since I met him, and with the mighty force of the previously ignored obvious, that Cal is a player. My hair drips in my eyes, and my shirt is damp against my body. And something else: a nervous quickening; desire, for once without scrutiny. That long-dormant dragon suddenly twitching its spiny tail.

  The rain hammers the Prius, and the thunder is an almost-constant drumbeat. The streets are dark and mostly deserted. We hydroplane through an enormous puddle, and Joy lets out a high chirp of fear. Cal is driving west, away from my house. I’m quiet in the backseat, waiting.

  “Oh,” Joy says, after a few minutes. “Oh, you’re dropping me off first?” The disappointment in her voice is like a missed note in a familiar song. She recovers quickly, like a professional. “Yes, that’s fine. Good idea. Thank you, Cal. I do need to get home.” From behind, I see her raise her hands to her throat. She’s adjusting the clasp of her necklace, recentering the pendant.

  After ten more minutes he pulls into the steep driveway of a small blue house on a busy street, across from a shopping area: an empty video store with a FOR LEASE sign in the window; Lucky Shrimp, a Chinese takeout place; and Fashion 4ward, a down-market women’s clothing store. Joy has her hand on the door handle before the car has even stopped moving.

  “Hang on,” Cal says. “Wait.” He gets out quickly and jogs around to the passenger side with an umbrella that he seems to have procured from thin air. He opens it, and Joy steps out of the car and under the umbrella with an economy of moves, balletically. She tilts away from him as they walk to her front door, arranging as much physical space between them as she can. The sky is brightening behind her little blue house. The rain still thrums on the car’s roof, but it sounds less menacing now, not an artillery, just a cloudburst.

  I watch as they pause at her front door. Cal is getting wet, holding the umbrella above Joy’s head as she searches in her bag. I’m thirty feet away in the cheap seats, but I can see the drama play out between them: Cal says something; Joy shrugs. Cal says something else, gestures with his free hand. Joy nods, slings her bag over her shoulder and turns away, stabs her key into the door, turns halfway back to Cal.

  And then she’s inside her house, and after that who knows: maybe her grubby twin boys rush to her for hugs, or the babysitter greets her with apologies for the mess, or her little sister, who is visiting from Indianapolis, says hello from the couch where she has just started watching The Notebook, and how about she starts it over so they can watch the whole thing together? Or nobody is home, because nobody else lives there, and Joy slips off her wet shoes and turns on the light and breathes in the lonely quiet and feels a tiny pinprick of grief over this one small lost possibility.
>
  Or maybe none of those things. It’s impossible to guess.

  ···

  Cal is quiet as we pull out of Joy’s driveway and head back toward my neighborhood, and I’m still in the backseat, which suddenly and again feels unbearably awkward, so I say, “Are we there yet? I’m bored! Are we there yet?”

  “Don’t make me turn this car around,” Cal says sternly, and here we are, pretending that this man who is almost old enough to be my father is my father. Cal turns onto a quiet side street and pulls over. “Would you please sit in front with me?” he says.

  “Joy seems nice,” I say, next to him now. “Is she a Turk?”

  “Worse,” Cal says. “Much worse. I believe she’s a Swede.”

  “Oh, boy,” I say. “I knew a Swede once. Knew, if you know what I’m saying.” Now that we’re alone in the car, it’s more true that we haven’t seen each other in two months.

  “She is a lovely person,” Cal says. We’re stopped at a red light, five minutes from my house. The rain is down to a drizzle, the sky smudgy and pinkish, as if it’s embarrassed by its recent display. “I told her that, at her door. I said, ‘You are a lovely person,’ and then she just went inside.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  “Isabel,” he says. “Do you remember at the first support group meeting when Jillian suggested we keep a pen and a notebook by our beds, and every morning, before the day starts, write down one thing we’re looking forward to that day, and one thing we’re apprehensive about?”

  “Uh, no. But I haven’t been paying the best attention at these meetings.”

  “Well, I’ve found it to be a useful exercise,” he says. “Therapeutic, really. And every Thursday morning for the past two months I’ve written, ‘Seeing Isabel.’ ” He’s looking straight ahead. I can’t tell what this admission has cost him, if it’s cost him anything.