The Guy Not Taken

by Jennifer Weiner

  God, give me strength, Alice thought. “Maisy, we do not throw food in this house. Food is for eating. And we especially do not throw forks. You scared poor Charlie!”

  “I didn’t want that thing!” Maisy wailed, and upended her soup bowl onto the table. Mark shoved his chair back to avoid the encroaching tide of noodles and broth.

  “For the love of God . . .”

  “Please don’t raise your voice,” Alice asked him. “Firm but patient, remember?”

  “No yelling!” yelled Maisy.

  Mark sighed, picked up the bowl, and carried it into the kitchen. Alice sopped up as much of the mess as she could with a handful of paper napkins as Maisy picked noodles off the table. “Noodles! Yommy!” she said. She tilted her head back and opened her mouth wide. “Mommy, feed me like I am your baby bird,” she said.

  “Can’t we do something?” Mark asked in a low voice as he passed Alice the sponge.

  Alice dropped a noodle into Maisy’s mouth. “Like what? Hire a full-time nanny? Leave her on the street corner?” She’d meant to sound like she was kidding, but when the words came out of her mouth they didn’t sound joking at all. She took a deep breath and fed Maisy another noodle. “She’s just . . . you know . . . spirited,” she said, parroting the lingo she’d gleaned from the parenting books she devoured late at night as if they were pornography. “She’s a spirited child.”

  Mark muttered something that sounded like bullshit and scooped the sodden napkins into his hand.

  • • •

  “We wanted her so much,” Alice said the next week at Mother’s Hour. The leaves outside the windows had deepened from pale gold to rust, and they rustled in the brisk wind. She’d spent ten minutes that morning getting Maisy into a jacket, dreading the day when she’d have to add a hat and boots and mittens to the routine. The mothers balanced on toddler-size chairs while their children mushed homemade Play-Doh at the arts-and-crafts table. (Maisy, of course, had refused to join in and was back on top of the slide.) “She was a very wanted child.”

  A few of the women nodded sympathetically. Victoria fiddled with her studded bracelet, listening intently. “I was thirty-six when she was born,” Alice continued. “We went through two cycles of IVF before we conceived for the first time, and we lost that . . . that pregnancy.” The word baby had been on the tip of her tongue, but she didn’t want to say it. Pam, Tate’s mother, who she knew from Baby Beethoven class, had a miscarriage at sixteen weeks. What was a positive pregnancy test followed by getting her period three days later compared to that? “Maisy was such a wanted child. And now . . .” Her voice trailed off. The private part of her brain, the place where she called Maisy “bad seed,” also had repeatedly advanced the theory that the first baby, the one she’d lost, was the one she’d been meant to have, and that Maisy was some kind of changeling. Either that or a punishment. For what, Alice wasn’t sure.

  “It’s tough,” Lynn the leader said.

  “Two’s hard,” Nora agreed.

  “You ever tried whiskey?” asked Victoria.

  Seven highlighted heads swung around to stare. There was a hint of a smile playing at the corners of Victoria’s lips.

  “You give Ellie whiskey?” Lynn asked faintly.

  Victoria smiled more broadly, shoved the cuff up high on her forearm, and recrossed her long, skinny legs. “Nah. My mom used to tell me she’d put whiskey in my bottle so I’d sleep. But I know better.” She hugged Ellie against her, dropped her voice to a whisper, and said, “I use cough syrup.”

  Someone sucked in a horrified breath. “You’re kidding, right?” Taylor’s mother, Stacy, blurted.

  Victoria rolled her eyes. “Well, duh,” she said. Alice laughed—a bright, uncomplicated sound that one of the children could have made. Her eyes met Victoria’s over the knee-high table covered with fingerpaint and a vinyl Dora the Explorer tablecloth, and Victoria tipped her a wink.

  • • •

  “It’s, you know, the same old story,” Victoria told her after class had let out at noon. They’d crossed Washington Square Park for lattes from Caramel, and were sitting on a park bench with their paper cups underneath the brilliant, cloudless blue sky. Ellie sang to herself while she chased pigeons around the empty fountain and Maisy slept in her stroller, mouth open, a bubble of spit on her pink lips expanding and contracting with each breath. “I got pregnant when I was sixteen, my mom pitched a fit and threw me out of the house . . .”

  “That must have been awful,” Alice said reflexively.

  “It was a blessing in disguise,” said Victoria. “She and I never really got along. I moved in with Tommy’s family.”

  “Tommy is your boyfriend?”

  “My husband,” said Victoria, sounding proud and shy. “We got married when I was six months pregnant. We lived with his mom and stepfather for a while, then with his sister and her husband, but that didn’t go so well.” She made a face and tugged at a strand of blue hair. “So we saved up and moved here, and Tommy works as a bicycle messenger. We’re both taking classes at community college, and we found this great place in University City. Well, west Philly. It’s not really that near the university. But it’s not so bad.” She looked sideways at Alice as the wind sent leaves rattling past their feet. “You guys could come for a playdate some day.”

  “Sure!” Alice said, recognizing her husband’s too-loud, too-hearty tone coming out of her own mouth an instant too late. West Philadelphia was what the newspapers called a neighborhood in transition, the kind of place where Mark would drive only if he got lost, and where he’d take pains to lock the car doors until he escaped. “I mean, we’d like that,” she said, more quietly. “Poor Maisy,” she said, bending down to pull a wayward leaf out of her daughter’s hair. “The way she carries on, I don’t think she’s going to have any friends unless I make some for her.”

  Victoria shrugged. Alice braced herself for one of the platitudes her friends, her own mother, the other mothers she knew, would have delivered. Oh, no, she’s just sensitive! Don’t worry, she’ll outgrow it!

  Instead, Victoria said, “She is a little bit of a drama queen, isn’t she?”

  “From the moment she was born,” said Alice. “They put her on the table, and she looked up at the nurses with this expression of absolute disgust.” She sighed. “Then she started screaming, and sometimes I think she hasn’t stopped since.” She shook her head. “Maybe I should put cough syrup in her sippy cup.”

  “Couldn’t hurt,” Victoria said. Ellie trotted over, beaming at her mother, with a pigeon feather clutched in one hand.

  “Is it lunchtime?” she asked. There wasn’t a trace of a whine in her voice, Alice noticed. How had the high school dropout, the teenage mother, wound up with this angelic child while she, who had a master’s degree and a mortgage and a husband, who’d insisted on a drug-free birth and had breastfed even after her daughter bit her at least once per feeding, ended up with a shrieky, miserable brat?

  Victoria glanced at her heavy man’s watch, then at Alice. “You want to go get a burrito?”

  In the stroller, Maisy opened her eyes. “Hungry!” she said.

  “Sure,” said Alice. “That would be great.”

  • • •

  The second Friday in October, Alice rang the buzzer beside the purple door, then tightened her grip on Maisy’s shoulders, looking down the street, past the glass-littered sidewalk at her minivan, which she devoutly hoped would still be there when the playdate was over. The street didn’t fill her with optimism. Victoria’s building looked fine, but the house next door had graffiti painted on the boarded-up windows, and the house next to that had about half a dozen guys in puffy down coats sitting on a sagging couch on the porch, staring at the sparse traffic with hooded eyes while they bobbed their heads to the beat of the music coming from a radio on the windowsill.

  “Hello down there!” Victoria called from a third-floor window.

  “Hello up there!” Maisy said, giggling. Victoria opened the w
indow and tossed down a key.

  “Did you make it okay?” Victoria asked as she opened her front door.

  “No problem at all,” said Alice, taking in the apartment. The living room walls were buttercup yellow and the couch was draped in a cheerful plum-and-rust tapestry. A little radio played a tape of Kids’ Corner, and there was an aquarium where a television set might have been. “Come see!” Ellie said, grabbing Maisy and Alice by the hands and tugging them over to the fishtank, where fish in shades of silver and blue and orangegold swam around a tiny plastic treasure chest.

  The girls played with wooden blocks on the living room floor. Victoria and Alice sat on the couch, drinking spicy tea and nibbling the sugar cookies Victoria and Ellie had baked that morning. After an hour, everyone went to the kitchen for lunch, where plants in painted ceramic pots lined the sunny windowsill. Alice sat at the table with the girls while Victoria stood at the stove in tight black jeans and a red tank top, flipping grilled-cheese sandwiches.

  “I love your place,” said Alice, thinking what a contrast the cozy, sunny little nest was to her own too-big house, where each and every room, from the basement to the attic, was filled with expensive toys that Maisy had either broken or ignored.

  Ellie slept in a tiny room where most of the space was taken up by the washer and dryer. In a wicker toy box at the foot of her bed, she had a little xylophone, a set of ABC blocks, a handful of books, and a box of crayons. That was all, and she seemed content. Certainly happier than Maisy ever was. I should downsize, Alice thought, plucking at a thread on her sleeve as Victoria slid quartered sandwiches onto purple plates. Get rid of all of the electronics that lit up and whooped and flashed when Maisy pressed the right color or letter, ditch the portable DVD player that had been their saving grace on long car trips, invest in a set of fingerpaints and some construction paper, a few well-chosen board books . . .

  “Hey, baby.” The front door opened, and in came a man who looked like Victoria’s twin brother—tall and pale, with intricate tattoos covering both of his forearms, a knit cap pulled low over pierced ears, and a slim silver bicycle hitched over his shoulder.

  “Hi, Tommy!” Victoria’s face lit up as she leaned in for a kiss. Alice saw Tommy’s hand linger at the small of Victoria’s back, pulling her closer so that her hips bumped his. She swallowed hard. Had Mark ever touched her that way? Even before the saga of their infertility and the treatments, before sex had become something he’d scheduled into his Palm Pilot, before the baby? She wasn’t sure. Victoria patted her husband’s chest, pushing him gently away.

  “We have company,” she said.

  “Oops,” said Tommy with an amiable grin. He had traces of teenage acne on his forehead and beautiful teeth, perfectly straight and blindingly white. Alice wondered about his parents, back in Harrisburg, who’d presumably paid for the orthodontia, and whether they were shaking their heads over the baby their baby had had. The boy stuck out his hand. “I’m Tom Litcovsky.”

  Alice shook his hand and murmured her name. Tommy cadged half a grilled-cheese sandwich, kissed his wife, and headed out the door.

  “He comes home for lunch?” she asked Victoria.

  “Well, technically. He never gets to, you know, stay and eat anything.” Victoria had never looked like more of a teenager to Alice than she did at that moment, when she smiled. “He says he doesn’t like to go too long without seeing me.”

  “That’s so sweet,” said Alice.

  “Sweet,” Maisy repeated, with her mouth full of grilled cheese.

  • • •

  “I don’t get it,” Mark said late one night in early November.

  Alice rolled over. “Don’t get what?” she asked, even though she knew exactly what he was talking about. Mark had come home from work unexpectedly early that night, while she and Victoria had been making soup in the kitchen. They’d put the little girls to work dumping water in and out of a plastic mixing bowl at the sink while they chopped carrots and onions and gossiped about the other mothers in the group.

  “Oh, hello!” Mark had said at the kitchen door, his gaze taking in Victoria’s hair (she’d added green streaks that week), her lip ring, and the elaborate tattoo peeking over the waistband of her low-riding jeans. He’d politely seconded Alice’s invitation to stay for dinner and, as they ate, he’d been on his best behavior, asking polite questions about Victoria’s neighborhood and Ellie’s toilet training. But once the table was cleared, Alice had spotted him in the kitchen running Victoria’s silverware under the hot water for longer than she thought was technically necessary, and he’d gotten Ellie’s name wrong twice.

  “That girl,” Mark said. “What’s the deal?”

  “The deal is, I met her in Mother’s Hour and I like her. What’s the problem?” Alice asked.

  “Well, you have to admit, she’s a bit of a shock to the system.”

  Alice shrugged. “I didn’t know that my friends had to follow a dress code.”

  “It’s not just her clothes. It’s everything. I mean, Jesus, Alice, what is she? Nineteen?”

  “So?”

  “So what do you two have in common?”

  “You mean besides our daughters, who were born a month apart in the same year?”

  Mark sat up with a sigh, as if the conversation was exhausting him. He flicked on the light and leaned against the headboard. “Yes. Besides that. Does she have an education?”

  “She has her GED,” Alice said defensively. “She’s taking classes. She’s a wonderful mother. And I like her. I shouldn’t have to defend my decisions.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Mark, yanking the covers up to his chin.

  “I don’t complain about your friends.”

  “My friends,” said Mark, “are not punk-rock Goth girls with lip rings.”

  “No, they’re overweight executives in Dockers. That’s much better.”

  “I’m going to sleep,” he said, turning the light off and rolling onto his side.

  They lay in the darkness in silence. Five minutes passed, according to the glowing numbers on the digital clock, before Mark spoke again.

  “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry. If you like her . . .”

  “I do,” said Alice.

  “Then that’s fine,” he said. He kissed her cheek and closed his eyes again. Lying there in the darkness, Alice remembered the way Tom had kissed Victoria in their postage-stamp kitchen that smelled of butter and toasted bread, the way his leather-cuffed hand had lingered on the small of her back.

  • • •

  Three weeks later, they were getting dressed for Mark’s firm’s annual holiday party. Maisy was shrieking in the family room (“Want my Mommy. Want my Mommy”) while the sitter—one in a series of high school girls who, Alice knew from experience, would never return for a second stint—fluttered ineffectually in Maisy’s orbit, offering toys that Maisy accepted only long enough to hurl at the sitter’s head. Mark was fastening his cummerbund. Alice was sweating, pierced by her child’s screams and pinched by her control-top pantyhose as she pawed through her jewelry box for the sixth time, searching in vain for her diamond-and-pearl earrings.

  “You’re positive you didn’t put them back in the safe-deposit box?” Mark asked for the third time.

  Alice shook her head without bothering to answer. She’d worn them on Thanksgiving, and put them back in her jewelry box on the dresser rather than making the trip to the bank, knowing she’d be wearing them through the holidays.

  “Check your coat pockets,” Mark suggested. Alice balled her hands into fists to keep from wrapping them around her husband’s neck and explaining, again, that she would never pull off a pair of expensive earrings—the one thing she’d inherited from her grandmother Sarah—and just shove them in her pockets.

  “Well, never mind. You look fine without them. Let’s go.” They tiptoed out of the house without saying good-bye, knowing that farewells would only make the Maisy situation worse. In the car, Mark laid his coat carefully in the ba
ckseat, adjusted the vents so that the flow of warm air was to his liking, and casually inquired, as he backed out of the driveway, “Has Victoria been over lately?”

  “Yesterday,” said Alice. She was distracted, fumbling through her beaded clutch on the off-chance that she’d put the earrings there. “Why?”

  “Was she in the bedroom?”

  Alice snapped her purse shut. “Oh, you have to be kidding me.”

  Mark held up his hands defensively, then put them back on the wheel in the nine and three o’clock positions. “Just asking a question.”

  “My friend is not a thief.” Alice blew a strand of sweaty hair off her forehead and tossed her bag into the backseat. “I’ll find them,” she said. “They’ve got to be in the house somewhere.” But even though she spent the weekend combing the house—emptying her underwear drawer, peering under the bed, even using a screwdriver to remove the shower drain—the earrings never turned up.

  • • •

  After the final Mother’s Hour of the year, when Victoria asked if Alice and Maisy wanted to join her for a burrito after class, Alice made an excuse about having to return something at the King of Prussia Mall. For the next two weeks, there was no class. The Parenting Center was closed for the holidays. Victoria called once after Christmas. Alice saw her name on the caller ID and, feeling a strange, pinched feeling in her chest, let the phone ring.

  On New Year’s Day, Alice left Maisy with Mark and ran out to pick up coffee and milk at the organic grocery store. She’d grabbed a basket and was headed through the produce section when Tate’s mother, Pam, a petite strawberry blond in fur-lined suede boots and a pearl-buttoned cashmere sweater, stopped her. “Did you hear?” she asked, raising her voice over the hissing spray of the misters that kept the eggplants and radishes glistening like jewels.

  Alice shook her head. “Hear what?”

  “Ellie’s in the hospital. She hurt her head—they think maybe a concussion—and broke her wrist.”