Etiquette for the End of the World

by Jeanne Martinet

  When Richie reached down to pet Carmichael (after the offending underwear had been removed), Tess told him that the cat seemed to take to him the way he never did to strangers.

  “But it’s probably because I’m not that strange,” Richie leaned down farther, as Carm purred and stretched his face up toward Richie’s.

  “Wow. I go to the bar so much, maybe he recognizes your smell,” she said with a laugh.

  Richie had not been lying about being handy. He barely looked at the instructions; he seemed to know instinctively where each piece went. Tess could not even identify Parts A and B, never mind Parts C, D, E, and F.

  “I dabble a bit in furniture making” was all he said when Tess praised his know-how.

  It took about half an hour to get the four main beams attached completely. Only the smaller braces remained.

  “Hand me the Allen wrench,?” Richie said.

  Tess picked it up off the floor, shooing Carmichael away with her elbow for the tenth time. She crouched alongside Richie, holding a beam up so that he could more easily affix two hard-to-reach bolts. She had opened the window as far as it would go, but the old radiator was still blasting away and they were both sweaty and hot. Richie took the wrench from her, and a lock of his shaggy hair fell into his eyes. Tess, fighting off an impulse to reach up and brush his hair away from his forehead, felt a faint but surprising rush of desire.

  God, Tess thought, I guess it doesn’t matter who he is, when you are thirty-nine and single and there’s a man in your bedroom. She tried to shake off the feeling by imagining Peter lying naked in her bed. But for some reason at that moment she could not conjure up a clear picture of him. All she could see in her mind’s eye was a tuxedo and a head of perfect wavy hair, gray at the temples.

  Chapter Eight

  Tess awoke to the irritating sound of sleet pelting the air conditioner outside the window. She rolled over but kept her eyes closed, trying to will the noise to stop. She did not want to wake up. She wanted to sink back into the dream she was having… .

  She was in an enormous, sunny classroom, filled with old-fashioned desks of dark wood. A billboard-sized blackboard covered the wall at the front of the room. Everyone in the class was getting up, one by one, to perform a song—a song that was supposed to represent who they were, what their life was about. There was a graduation-party atmosphere, with a lot of cheering and laughter in the audience. It was the end of the school year, a big final project. Tess’s turn was coming up. She was surprised she was not more nervous; she was actually looking forward to singing. The only problem was that the song was in Spanish and so she was going over and over the pronunciation in her mind. There was some kind of universal translator in the audio system so everyone could understand any language. But at the moment, the thin, curly-haired boy who was trying to sing up at the microphone was having trouble getting the words out; there was something wrong with his throat, his face was red and he was just sputtering, “Ffput, ffput, ffputtt!” And suddenly Tess saw with alarm that his teeth were falling out, one by one, and then she realized with increasing horror it was her own teeth that were falling out, they were just dropping all bloody out of her mouth into her cupped hands, and she frantically tried to put one front tooth back into her upper jaw … .

  Tess woke up again to the staccato rat-a-tat, ffput-ffput of the icy rain. She felt an overwhelming sense of relief that she had been dreaming and that her teeth were still intact. Then, as she surfaced into full consciousness, she was hit by the unwelcome memory of the last three weeks.

  Why did people always talk about how soothing the sound of rain was anyway? Maybe if it were rain on the roof—say, a nice shingle cottage roof somewhere out in the country, on a summer evening—it would be more comforting, less punctuatingly pingy. As it was, it was just like really mean people outside throwing pebbles, trying to annoy her out of bed.

  Tess sat up and looked out the window. It was always dark in January in her bedroom, but had it always been this dark? “Carm, has the world ended already?” Tess muttered absentmindedly to the cat as he came over for his morning nuzzle.

  She swung her feet over onto the floor, and as she got out of bed she ran her hand along the side of the new bed frame. It was so smooth and sturdy. The one solid thing left in her life. She was not sure now if anyone but her would ever see it, but she was still glad she had bought it. Even though the whole purpose for it had never taken place.

  Peter Barrett. What an asshole. She still could not believe that he had dumped her the way he did. Without a call, without an email. Without even a flimsy excuse or a bad breakup line. He had just vanished like an overdressed, sleazy one-night stand.

  He had told Tess he was flying to California to go to his sister’s for the Christmas weekend, so when she did not hear from him during the week before Christmas Tess had at first just assumed he was overwhelmed. Everyone got that way over the holidays, right? And she knew she was going to see him for the casino New Year’s party. In preparation for Peter’s first overnight at her place she cleaned her whole apartment, even the outside of the windows—not an easy task in the middle of winter. She was nervous; what if he expected something more architecturally digestible? Something less shabby-chic? She could not do too much about the areas of the ceiling that needed painting, but at least she had thrown out Carmichael’s old faux-leopard bed—which was, she had to admit, pretty ratty—and bought a brand-new one in red velvet. (Ginny had reminded her about the way many men felt about women with cats, so Tess wanted everything to be as unhairy as possible.)

  But as the days went by, and he did not return her emails or phone call, the twisted-up feeling in the pit of Tess’s stomach became a solid lump of doom. Most of her friends were away for Christmas, so Tess had holed up and ordered pizzas and Chinese food and watched movies on HBO. She watched one dumb Robert Downey Jr. movie three times. (She kept thinking the whole time, Get out of the car, Robert! Why are you riding across country with this bum?) She ate chocolate-covered cherries—a fence-mending present from Stuart’s wife, Nancy—in bed while rereading her entire collection of young adult novels from the 1950s: Saturday Night, The Fabulous Year, Men are Like Streetcars, Stag Line, Angel on Skis, Princess in Denim (the girl always got the boy in the end). She stayed away from Facebook, which she knew would make her even more depressed, between the possibility of accidentally seeing holiday posts from Stuart and the general cyber-cheeriness (or, as Tess liked to call it, bragging) abounding there. “Here’s the whole clan up in Vermont! Everyone in the family had a great time,” everyone was always posting, or “Here’s our little Amy with her very first skating medal!”

  Now, as Tess dragged herself into the kitchen to make coffee, she thought, Maybe I should go on Facebook and post a picture of the New Year’s dress that never left my apartment. I could write: “Here’s the dress I wore for being stood up on New Year’s Eve! OMG! LOL! LMAO!”

  She had gotten all ready to go out New Year’s Eve, even though she hadn’t heard from Peter since the night at his Gramercy Park apartment two weeks before. She was still thinking he would show up at the door in his tuxedo with a dozen roses and a somehow believable explanation for his radio silence. He lost his cell phone, been arrested for drunk driving. He hit his head getting into a limo and been unconscious for days (but the first thing he thought of when he finally came out of it was her). The minutes ticked by in an excruciatingly slow way. She called his phone six times. She emailed him in all caps. She texted him a whole line of question marks, and then a whole line of exclamation points. (For one crazy moment she had an impulse to go knock on the door of Feng Shui Sarah to see if somehow she had gotten her claws into Peter too.)

  At around two in the morning Tess suddenly remembered the psycho ex, Marla, and her hurt feelings slid over onto the worry side of the scale. What if Marla had tracked down Peter when he was in California and done something horrible to him? Gone off her meds, and gone off her rocker? Stabbed him while he was inside his coat
this time? Or tied him up so he could not use the phone? Maybe Tess should be calling the LAPD. By the next day she was pacing around in a state of near panic.

  But then, on the evening of January 2, she received the following text from Peter: Business trip. Not sure when I will be back. Thanks for everything.” Thanks for everything?!! Tess wanted to take the phone and throw it out the window. There went her last hope that he might be lying in a ditch somewhere. He had just up and left her, flat.

  So now here she was three weeks later, still suffering from a big, disgusting Peter Barrett hangover. I am obviously a naïve idiot, she thought, as she laboriously cranked the handle of her antique coffee grinder, hating the contraption, wondering why she ever thought it cool to grind beans by hand, and wondering if it would ever finish so she could at least have a cup of fucking coffee. She had not heeded the warning signs with Peter, she had not wanted to. He was way too handsome, too charming. And he was too sophisticated to be working for a kooky outfit like WOOSH.

  She stopped right in the middle of grinding and closed her eyes in self-disgust, shaking her head. When she met Peter she had been in such a tailspin—from her job, her brother, Matt—and what did she do but glom right onto this perfect cardboard cutout of a man. Now she saw everything about him in a different light. His phony super-salesmanship, his reluctance to talk about anything real. Why had she ignored it all?

  She knew she should write the whole relationship off as a wild fling, like the ones you have when you are traveling in foreign countries. But the problem was, she missed him. She had loved the feeling of his firm hand at the small of her back as they entered a restaurant or theater, with all eyes on them (well okay, on him, mostly), and the way he could make her laugh at anything. They had played like kids; they were always improvising scenes for taxi drivers, bartenders—pretending they were fighting, pretending they were criminals. They had finished each other’s jokes like a seasoned comedy team. Tess felt she was always waltzing, or flying, when she was with him. Peter had made her feel that all the people who had ever rejected her had all been incredible fools to let her go. With every look he implied he had discovered priceless treasure. (So then why had he decided to toss her away?)

  She leaned on the kitchen counter and buried her head in her hands. She had to figure out her life before it was too late. Wake up Tess!

  She longed to email Ginny but didn’t want to bother her on vacation. Ginny was in Barcelona and Seville for a rare month-long trip, which her husband had insisted they take. Before she left she had sent Tess, as a joke Christmas gift, a whole box of self-help and New Age books from her office—some that Ginny had published, some that people had given to her. Despite her usual disdain for the genre, Tess had perused them over the last few weeks, in between her consumption of 1950s YAs. She had thrown Eat, Pray, Love across the room after the first chapter. The writing was good enough, but how the hell were you supposed to feel for someone in her mid-thirties whose only real problem is an unhappy marriage, and who is rich enough to go running off to live in Italy, where she eats great food and takes Italian lessons from gorgeous hunky identical twins?

  If being dumped yet again wasn’t bad enough, she had not yet received her WOOSH check. Now she could not be certain Peter had even put in for it, as he had promised her. Who knows what he had been lying about? She was completely white-knuckled at this thought. She was dead meat without this money. She had put her New Year’s Eve home improvements on a credit card, and yesterday she had gotten overdue notices from Con Ed and the cable company. Plus her back tooth was hurting in a way that felt ominously like a $1,500 crown, or even root canal. Was that why she was dreaming about her teeth falling out?

  On top of everything else tomorrow was January 26, her birthday. Last year, on her thirty-ninth, she had been fantasizing about the big party she was going to have for her fortieth. Now that seemed like a hundred years ago. The poker gals had made some noises about doing something, but without Ginny Tess didn’t feel like it.

  She was, however, having dinner with her aunt in Connecticut. This was an annual event, always held on the actual night of her birthday, and Tess found herself looking forward to it, as if it were a lifeboat in the middle of an empty sea. As eccentric as Aunt Charlotte was, she was practically the only family Tess had left. And it was better than staying home alone, wondering where the hell Peter Barrett was holed up, and what she could possibly have done to make him run from her like an escaped convict with hounds at his heels.

  ***

  The little rose-colored station house in Cos Cob looked the same as it always did, pristine and pretentiously quaint, like one of the props in Tess’s childhood train set that used to get put up around the Christmas tree. Aunt Charlotte was waiting for her in the parking lot, in the old Buick LeSabre wagon with its fake wood side panels. Charlotte’s gray hair was frosted blonde and permed, circa 1980. Her hairstyle evolution had pretty much stopped there. Under her black wool coat she had on an amber necklace with beads the size of golf balls, and an orange and green paisley muumuu. She wore muumuus almost exclusively. Tess had always thought her too thin for them. On larger women they could look stylishly bohemian; on skinny women they just looked like big sloppy robes.

  Tess had once used Charlotte for the subject of her column; the title of the piece was “Just Say No-no to Muumuus.” Charlotte wore them to the grocery store, she wore them to lunch, she wore them to the opera. She had hippie Indian print muumuus, and black silk dressy muumuus. She had African ones and Hawaiian ones. In the summer she wore them with big straw sun hats while she swept the area around the pool with big dramatic swooshes. Tess and Stuart had always been convinced that Aunt Charlotte’s obsession with muumuus—which according to their mother began when she stopped dancing professionally in 1974—had been a reaction to the many years of torturous toe shoes and tight tutus.

  “Halloo, Tess, halloo!” Charlotte said, leaning over to the passenger side to grab Tess’s face in her hands. Her aunt’s skin was lined and spotted but her laugh was the same child-like trill it had always been, cascading up the scale and then back down again. She could not quite reach over far enough toward Tess for an actual kiss, so she just went “mwah, mwah” into the musty air of the car.

  “Knock, knock?” Charlotte said gaily, while maneuvering the big boat of a car out of the small lot. Tess took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a brief second, steeling herself. Other people got lavish fortieth birthday parties at the Algonquin or the Plaza. Tess? Tess got Aunt Charlotte.

  “Who’s there?” Tess singsonged obligingly.

  “Abby,” said Aunt Charlotte.

  Charlotte had taught her this ditty when she was eight or so, along with her famous dinner table trick where she transformed a linen napkin into an extremely pointy white bra. “Abby who?” Tess tried to sound happy to play.

  “Abby Birthday!” Charlotte went into peels of delighted giggles. She never got tired of that old joke.

  Tess climbed up the steep cobblestone steps to the bright blue wide-planked kitchen door she knew so well and stepped into the low-ceilinged colonial kitchen. The place was even more packed with stuff than it had been the year before. There were piles of magazines on the counters and kitchen table, and glass jars lined up in rows on the shelves like an apothecary’s. Some of the jars were filled with herbs, some with pencils and pens, some with sea glass, some with nails and bobby pins, some with coins, some with marbles, some with rubber bands, some with knives and forks and chopsticks, and some with coupons.

  The tall glass cabinet on the far wall still housed the large collection of Charlotte’s salad dressing, leftover samples from one of the several failed businesses she had started after she stopped dancing. The company, her very own brainchild, had been called I’m Dressing. All the dressings had been made from her personal recipes, and were all natural, with no preservatives (which turned out to be somewhat of a problem as far as shelf life went). It was packaged in hourglass-shaped bottles, beari
ng names like I’m Dressing Japanese, I’m Dressing Blue (Cheese!), I’m Dressing Russian, I’m Dressing Ranch, and I’m Dressing Lite. Charlotte had posed for the labels herself, in different costumes; that had been her late husband’s idea. Charlotte’s husband, Charles—Tess’s father’s brother—had been a commercial artist who’d worked for Disney as well as on Madison Avenue. He and Aunt Charlotte used to love to call each other by the nickname Charlie, telling everyone who would listen they only got married because they had the same name. At family dinners everyone would always call, “Charlie and Charlie! Time to eat!”

  Tess’s birthday dinner was takeout from the local Italian restaurant, with a supremely delicious flourless chocolate cake for dessert. Charlotte didn’t cook, at least not since Charles had died. The best news was a bottle of extremely good Bordeaux. (Charles had been a wine collector, and the wine cellar had enough fine wine in it to last for decades.) The worst news was the salad dressing Charlotte blithely brought to the table: her own I’m Dressing Italian, which Tess was terrified would make her sick, seeing as how, although the bottle was sealed, it had no preservatives and was god knows how many years old. She told Charlotte her new thing was eating salad with no dressing. “You kids and your trendy diets,” Charlotte said, shaking her head. “So, Tess, tell me how this year has been for you, sweetie.”

  During the course of the meal Tess explained to Charlotte about losing her column and finding her current writing assignment, knowing that WOOSH would not faze her aunt one bit. Indeed, Charlotte looked at her with her exotic cat eyes (emphasized by thick dark eyeliner that slanted up slightly toward her temples), smiled brightly, and said, “That is fascinating, Tess. So great you have landed on your feet! But then you always do, my brilliant niece, famous New York writer!” Tess smiled politely. Superlatives were the bread and butter of Charlotte’s conversational larder.