The Guy Not Taken

by Jennifer Weiner

  The woman gave a barely perceptible snort and walked away. Marion sighed and tugged at her nylons discreetly. Evidently, being a great kid wasn’t enough anymore. Then Jason was at her shoulder, handing her a plastic cup of punch. “They’re going to start soon. Want to sit down?” he asked.

  “I want to go home,” she whispered, too low for him to hear her. Then the admissions officer was stepping up to the podium, and his sweatshirted assistant began flicking the lights on and off, a trick Marion hadn’t seen since her own days in school. Parents scrambled toward the seats, and with a rolling surge of panic, Marion realized that this was it. They’d have another three hours, tops, on campus. Another seven, maybe, in the car, not including a stop for dinner. Then they’d be back in Providence, and if she hadn’t figured out how to tell him by then . . .

  Jason listened carefully as the admissions officer talked about the Princeton experience. Marion eased one of the highlighted maps out of her purse and quietly unfolded it in her lap. She ran her finger down the unassuming green that was New Jersey. Down the turnpike, over the Hudson, across the Tappan Zee Bridge into Connecticut, her finger slowed, then stopped.

  She looked at her son. In his sport coat and tie, he could be any bland, bright-eyed prep-schooler. All of his little mischiefs, all of his humor, his sweetness, the detention he’d gotten in fifth grade and cried over for a week, even the scar on his chin from when he’d jumped off the lifeguard’s chair and landed on a seashell—all of his history was undetectable, erased. Jason was gone, and her panic was back, and she was suddenly flushed and so dizzy that the big, fusty room in its mellow creams and browns seemed to tilt and spin. What did she have left? She’d told Jason that she wanted to go home, but there would be nothing for her there. Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. Her house wasn’t on fire, but her children were gone, the oldest three already, and Jason soon enough. The pool was closed up for the season, covered tight with a heavy black tarp. Her eyes filled with tears, and she bit down hard on her lip.

  “Ma?” Jason whispered. Marion winced and shook her head.

  “Shhh,” she said. “The athletic director’s up next.”

  The SAT woman rose to her feet, reciting her son’s scores and grades, asking if they would be good enough. Her son sat beside her, clearly in an agony of shame. He wore an enormous class ring with a huge blue-red stone set in the center. Even from a distance, Marion could tell the stone was fake.

  “And,” the woman trilled in a high buzzing voice, “he was a Westinghouse Science finalist.”

  The admissions officer was trying not to smile. Marion made a strangled noise, and when she looked down she saw that she’d crumpled the map in her lap. Jason was staring.

  “Let’s go,” he whispered, and she nodded, easing past the knees of disgruntled Westinghouse Science finalists, out of the building, down a slate path, through a gate to where they’d parked at a meter on Nassau Street. There was something special about the gate, Marion thought, something important, but she couldn’t remember what. Was it that the students weren’t supposed to walk through it until they’ve graduated? Or that the parents were never supposed to walk through it at all? Too late. She stood by the car door and extracted her keys from her purse. “I’ll drive,” Jason offered, but his mother shook her head.

  “Go to the gym and find the swim coach. I’ll meet you here in an hour.”

  Jason shoved his hands into his pockets. “Tell me what’s going on,” he said. “Please.”

  Marion took a deep breath. “Your father,” she began, and her voice caught in her throat. This is all wrong, she thought, and started coughing. “Ma?” asked Jason, and patted her ineffectually on her back, as if she’d swallowed a mouthful of water. I should sit down with him, somewhere private, explain this reasonably.

  Jason was talking, and Marion forced herself to listen. “What about Dad?” he asked. “Is he sick?”

  Marion’s chest loosened, and she managed to suck in a breath. “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, Jason, nobody’s sick.” She drew another shaking breath, let it out slowly, and said what she hadn’t let herself say for days since Hal had told her. “It’s just that your father is moving out.”

  For a moment the two of them stood silently, looking at each other, posed like swimmers at the end of the pool, holding on to the concrete ledge, readying themselves for the turn. In the distance, Marion could hear the staccato rhythms of a campus tour, the gunshot of the guide’s high heels along the slate path, the rhythm of questions and answers.

  “He’s planning on moving out. He’ll be gone when we get home,” she said. Jason’s face flushed. He balled his big hands into fists.

  “Ohio,” he said dully. “All that time in Ohio. Does he have a girlfriend there or something?”

  Marion shook her head, feeling incredibly weary, more tired than she’d been after labor, or the sleepless nights with each of her new babies. “It’s nothing like that, Jason,” she told him. “It’s just us. Your father and me. That’s all.”

  She reached for his hands. She said his name softly, to comfort him. She thought to tell him that none of them knew, she least of all, and how scared she is about being alone, and how letting her son go will be the hardest thing she’s ever done; harder, even, than losing a husband.

  Jason pulled his hands away from hers. “I don’t know anything!” he cried. Each word was wrenched out of him as if by force. His voice cracked. “Not anything!” At the top of a tall stone tower, a bell tolled, and suddenly mother and son were engulfed in a flow of bodies, as students burst out of their classrooms and streamed outside, calling and laughing.

  DORA ON THE BEACH

  “Hey.” Dora Ginsburg slowed her pace, pulled off her earphones, and looked up at the two teenage girls in bikini tops, shorts, and flip-flops standing in front of a shuttered custard stand. The girl who’d spoken sauntered across the boardwalk to Dora. She was tall and rail-thin, with rib bones pushing against the waxy white skin of her torso, a white handbag made of cheap imitation leather tucked under her arm, and a necklace reading “Amber” in curlicued gold script around her neck. The girl following behind her was shorter and stockier, with broad shoulders and solid thighs and the same unhealthy pallor.

  Sisters, Dora thought. There was nothing except the ink-black hair and the fishbelly-white skin to link them, but still somehow she knew that the two of them were sisters.

  “Yes?” she asked, marching in place to keep her heart rate up. “Can I help you?”

  “Can she help us,” the tall girl, Amber, said to the shorter one. “Why, yes, I think she can.” The shorter girl murmured something Dora couldn’t hear, and shuffled her feet. Dora could see the curving edge of a tattoo—a heart, or a butterfly wing—peeking past the scrap of cloth that covered her right breast. Their clothes, she thought, would be completely inadequate if the temperature dropped. It might be seventy-five in the sunshine, but it was, after all, just ten days until October, and the nice weather wouldn’t last. Her own outfit—loose white shirt, pale blue cotton-blend clamdiggers, and white rubber-soled orthopedic walking shoes, with two inches of Supp Hose in between—was much more appropriate.

  Amber, the tall one, shoved her hands into the pockets of her minuscule shorts. “We’ve got a problem,” she said in a thick New York accent, and tilted her face at Dora, chin first.

  “What’s that?” They were probably lost, Dora thought. They weren’t going to rob her, not in broad daylight. And if they were, they wouldn’t get anything but the little music player she’d bought herself, her keys, the cell phone she’d never quite figured out how to use, and the Philadelphia Examiner she still bought, even though the paper seemed to be falling apart, bit by bit, shedding its book reviews and Sunday magazine and all the columnists she liked. Reading it was a bit like having lunch with a friend who’d developed leprosy and would arrive minus a few fingers or the tip or her nose, and you’d have to be polite and pretend not to notice.

  Amber snatched at Dora’s ha
nd with her pale, bony fingers. Dora tried to pull it back, but the girl’s acrylic nails dug into her skin and held her tight as she turned Dora’s hand over and studied her Medic Alert bracelet. “Well, Dora Ginsburg, it’s like this. My sister and I are experiencing technical difficulties.” She dropped Dora’s wrist and stretched her bony arms over her head. “With our accommodations.”

  Dora nodded, then looked sideways, scanning the boardwalk for sunbathers and strollers, for anyone who’d notice what was going on. But everything was quiet except for the gulls squawking and the roll of the waves. It was 10:15 in the morning. In July or August the boardwalk would have been jammed from Ventnor, where Dora lived, all the way down to the last casino in Atlantic City, but now summer was over. The lifeguard stands were boarded up, the hotels were half-empty, and while the casinos were still full of little old ladies who’d spent twenty-five dollars for a bus ticket and ten dollars in quarters, most of the snowbirds who lived in her condominium had already packed up and headed to Arizona or Florida for the winter.

  “So do you need . . .” Dora’s voice trailed off. “Directions?” she asked hopefully.

  The girl with the tattoo—Dawn, Dora remembered—fiddled with the strings on the side of her bathing suit bottom underneath her shorts. Amber shook her head curtly. “Nah. We need a place to stay.” Her voice was as harsh as the seagulls’ cawing, her eyes as hard as two pebbles.

  “Oh!” Dora felt relief flood through her. “Well, there’s the Radisson, just up the boardwalk. And . . .”

  Amber grabbed Dora’s wrist again and pulled her over to a bench on the edge of the boardwalk. She pushed Dora’s shoulders until she sat down, then she sat beside her, with her naked thigh flush against Dora’s blue pants leg. Dawn trailed them reluctanctly, dragging her feet. Dora’s music player slipped out of her hands and bounced underneath the bench. “How about your place?” Amber said. “How about”—she grabbed Dora’s wrist again and flipped her bracelet over—“3601 Brighton Court?”

  Dora tried to wriggle sideways, but Amber kept one arm around her shoulders and one hand clutching her wrist. She opened her mouth to scream, then closed it. The wind was blowing. Nobody would hear her. And who knew what this crazy girl would do if she tried to call for help? Instead, she gave a foolish smile and said, “I’m not really set up for visitors.”

  Amber bent down and reached into her big scuff-marked purse. Dora felt something hard jabbing into her ribs. “You feel that?” the girl whispered, her breath hot in Dora’s ear. “You know what that is?”

  Dora moaned. Dawn slipped off her flip-flops and curled her painted toenails against the gray planks of the boardwalk. Then she bent down, picked up Dora’s music player, and offered it to Dora. Amber snatched it away.

  “Amber . . .” the girl said.

  Amber ignored her. “My sister and I have been watching you. Your building’s back there, right?” She pointed her chin at the Windrift, a glass-and-stone high-rise tower half a mile away, where Dora had an apartment. “Nice,” she said. Her thin lip curled away from her crooked front teeth. “With a swimming pool and everything. Very nice. You’ve probably got a pullout couch for when the grandkids come to town.”

  Gooseflesh dotted Dora’s arms. There’d been a rash of robberies over the summer—push-ins, the police called them on the news. The victim would be coming home, unlocking the doors of her apartment when someone would come up behind her, push her through the opened door, take what they wanted, and break the rest. One woman had suffered a heart attack in the middle of a robbery, Dora remembered. Critical condition, the news had said. “We’ll have advice on how to keep yourself from being a victim coming up after the break,” the perky newsanchor had promised, and what had Dora done? She’d turned off her set. Of all the nights to go to bed early!

  She locked her knees so the girls wouldn’t see them shaking. “I’ll take you to my apartment,” she said in what she hoped was a reasonable, conciliatory tone. “You can take whatever you want. I’ve got a TV set and some jewelry and some cash. You can have it all as long as you won’t hurt me.”

  “Come on, Amber,” Dawn said softly, as she tapped her flipflops against her thigh. “Let’s just go home.”

  “Nobody asked you, Dawn,” Amber said. She shoved the muzzle of the gun harder against Dora’s side. Dora gasped, knowing she’d have a bruise there the next morning. Ever since she’d started taking blood thinners, everything gave her bruises.

  “You can’t do this,” she blurted.

  “Sure we can,” Amber said with an icy grin. “We just did.”

  • • •

  Dora didn’t have sisters. Her husband, Sidney, had been dead for two years. And Sam, her only son, had called her the week before to say that he was dropping out of graduate school to work as a party motivator at bar and bat mitzvahs.

  “So all the dancers are Jewish?” Dora had blurted, after Sam had finished explaining that he’d be earning a living by dancing for crowds of thirteen-year-olds in what Dora just bet was an embarrassing outfit. Her son, who hadn’t even danced at his own bar mitzvah!

  “No, Ma,” Sam told her wearily. “Two of the other dancers are black. Nobody cares whether we’re atheists or Hindus or what, as long as we keep the party energy up.”

  Dora sat on her couch, the phone in her hand and the TV remote control in her lap, with no idea at all of what to say. “I don’t understand . . .” she began.

  “There’s something else I need to tell you,” Sam said. “Kerri and I are splitting up.” Dora slumped against the throw pillows, suddenly dizzy. She wondered how her son had chosen the order in which to break the news: I’ve dropped out of my Ph.D. program in order to gyrate to Kool and the Gang and, oh, by the way, my wife and I are getting a divorce.

  “Sam, no,” she said.

  Her son sighed. “It’s a done deal.” There was a pause. “I’m sorry, Ma.”

  “I like Kerri,” Dora managed.

  Sam had sighed again. “Yeah, I like her, too.”

  She hung up the phone and started to cry, weak, helpless tears streaming down her wrinkled face. She’d gone wrong with Sam, somehow, but she wasn’t sure when, or what it was she’d done wrong, or failed to do in the first place. One minute she’d been twenty-one years old, dizzy in love and saying “I do.” A minute later and she was thirty-three, the mother of a perpetually sullen, closed-mouthed seven-year-old and the wife of a man who had secrets of his own.

  She’d been making dinner one Wednesday night when the telephone rang, and on the other end of it was a woman whose voice she’d never heard before. The woman was laughing: a gaspy, desperate, distinctly unamused sound. She was laughing and saying, You keep him, I don’t care. Stay with him. Better you than me. Dora had listened to her laugh, holding the pot into which she’d just dumped a cup of rice, thinking that she hadn’t known there was a competition. When Sidney came home he kissed her, same as he always did, and that night, it being a Wednesday, he made love to her, same as he always did. Dora never mentioned the telephone call. Not then, not over the years and decades that followed, not even in the midst of their worst fights, not even after her miscarriage, when the doctor had come to her hospital room, asking whether they wanted to know the gender of the baby they’d lost, and Sidney had said no without even looking at her, as if it was his decision to make.

  Sidney had died when he was sixty. Diabetes had taken its time with him, first shutting down his kidneys, then leisurely robbing him of his vision, then his toes, and then his left leg, until he’d ended up on a hospital bed looking like a pile of sticks beneath a blanket. He had a morphine drip in his arm and, near the end, he called some other woman’s name. Who’s Naomi? one of the nurses had asked, and Dora had lied. My middle name, she said. He calls me that sometimes. The nurse had nodded sympathetically. They’d patted her shoulders and called her poor thing.

  And then Sidney was gone, and Sam was in New York City, and Dora was alone in the house in Silver Springs.

&nbs
p; Where? she wondered, after the men from the Salvation Army had finished hauling thirty years of her life out the door—the sofas and dining room tables she and Sidney had picked out together; the paintings and objets that had come later, when Sidney had insisted on a decorator.

  Where? She remembered her honeymoon in Atlantic City, all those years ago. They’d stayed in a little hotel right on the ocean. She remembered the bed with chipped blue paint on its metal headboard, and how the people in the next room had pounded on the wall when they were making love late one night, and Sidney put his hand over her mouth to stifle her giggles. She could recall the feel of the sunburn she’d gotten on her cheeks, the taste of fried fish and cold beer, taffy from one of the stands on the boardwalk, saltwater washing over her knees, and seaweed tangling in her toes as Sidney scooped her up and carried her into the ocean, out past where the waves were breaking.

  After the house sold she’d decided on two condominiums: one in Clearwater, for the snowy winter months, and one in Ventnor, a few miles from where she’d honeymooned, much nicer for retirees than Atlantic City, the agent had said. It was a one-bedroom unit in a building with a doorman and underground parking, a swimming pool with water aerobics for seniors five mornings a week, floor-to-ceiling windows giving her a beautiful view of the ocean. September was her favorite time of year. The air was clear, the water was warm enough for wading, but the children had gone back to school, leaving the beach and the boardwalk quiet enough for her to walk for hours if she wanted, alone with her thoughts and her memories.

  • • •

  “Lunch first,” Amber said. She kept her arm around Dora’s shoulders and the gun jammed in her side. She instructed Dora to lead them to her apartment building, where her car was parked. The two of them marched along the boardwalk with Dawn trailing a few yards behind, pausing every few minutes to lean against the railing with the wind blowing her hair back, staring dreamily out at the sea.