What I Had Before I Had You

by Sarah Cornwell

  We have gotten through all the chocolate and most of the movie—Michael J. Fox is hanging one-handed from the clock tower—when a key turns in the lock. I grab our wineglasses and throw them out the window behind us, followed by the bottle, and the tinkling shatter is masked perfectly by the loud creak of the front door. Pam and Kandy stare at me with puffed cheeks, containing their amused shrieks—again, I shock and surprise!—as my mother steps inside.

  “Hi, girls,” she says casually, as if this is not the first time she has come home to anyone in the house but me and James. She turns and whispers out the door, which tells me that Rocko is standing just outside, and then she comes in alone and drops her purse on the floor. “Nice to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you!”

  This is not literally true. Since she denied my visions, I have begun to lie more and more about whom I see and what I do when I’m outside the house. Part of this is logistical; I am breaking rules and must not let on. But part of it is an amplified need for secrecy itself.

  Outside, the wine soaks into the earth, and a tomato plant starts feeling dizzy. The movie’s epilogue unfurls, but my mother sits on the floor opposite the sofa, drawing focus. “Four is the right number for hearts,” she says, and she deals us in. “What are you girls up to this summer?”

  “Nothing,” says Pam, “just chilling, swimming, hanging out with everybody.”

  “Everybody?”

  “Friends from Burling,” I’m quick to add, to paint an inoffensive all-female tableau.

  “Tell me about yourselves,” she says to them, and nods along to their heavily censored descriptions of their homes, their families, their interests. As they talk, my friends turn toward my mother like plants to sun. The appearance of her deep listening is so inviting, so polished. She is a professional. When Kandy says, “If I don’t find my soul mate by the time I’m thirty, I think I’ll fucking shoot myself,” and my mother laughs musically, a smile of acceptance on her lips, I know she is playing for the win. There is nothing about this statement that, if I said it, wouldn’t send her into a desperate lecture. The concept of a soul mate. The selfishness of suicide. I can see the devious clockwork beneath this friendly normal-mom act.

  Pam pipes up, “Mrs. Olivia?”

  “Myla.”

  “Can you tell our fortunes?”

  “Sure.”

  Kandy hoots with a monkeylike excitement. I roll my eyes and excuse myself to the bathroom, where I hunch on the toilet, half-listening to my mother’s opening ritual. I dawdle. I pinch the baby-fat ring around my belly. The floor creaks. She is going to the sideboard to pull out a deck of tarot cards—probably the standard Rider deck, but the hippie-dippie Morgan’s deck if she thinks that Pam would be impressed. She will hand Pam the deck so her question can pass through her fingertips into the vinyl coating of the cards and on into the spirit world, where ghost babies float above us and everyone’s just-dead fathers wait patiently to forgive them, granted my mother has been paid forty dollars up front.

  When I come back, I see that she is using the Rider deck. I used to play the role of the seeker when my mother practiced. We would lie on our bellies on the loose-looped green carpet, and I would ask ridiculous questions (Will you buy me a pony? Will there be root beer flavor at the water ice place this week?), and she would give me wildly inaccurate readings just to practice her facial expressions and her pacing. She noted the implications of the cards with an inclination of her head, a sympathetic wrinkling of her brow, or a curl of the lip. This is her forte, the buildup of tension—the moment when her client watches her face with perfect attention for a smile or a tic that might mean she knows what will happen to him tomorrow or the next day, that she knows how to satisfy his most secret longings. We would play our roles as seriously as possible until we couldn’t keep it together, and then we would fling ourselves on the carpet and whole-body laugh.

  I used to love watching her read, but now the performance seems showy and false. “You have come through a rough time, but you are very strong,” she is telling Pam. “You are in love with a dark-haired person.”

  “What was the question?” I ask.

  Nobody answers me. Pam stands up and hoists her backpack on. “I gotta get home.”

  Kandy whines: “But it’s my turn!” Pam is the only one with a driver’s license, so Kandy trails out after her, looking wistfully back toward my mother. My mother is calm and radiant, waving my friends off with a condescension they don’t pick up on, pitying their valuation of love. I know how she must see them—innocents baring their jugulars to the pacing tiger. So young, I imagine her saying, and shaking her head.

  Later, when I can’t sleep, I pick the glass shards out of the dirt by flashlight, bleeding from a cut fingertip, and over the next few days, tomatoes ripen furiously and in record numbers. Is it the tannins? The iron from my blood? We roast them and braise them and slice them fresh into salads. We eat them whole, like peaches.

  5

  CARRIE AND I walk until we are in the shadow of the Emerald. A roll of toilet paper rots in a gray puddle. I lead us around to the back and down the stairwell to the basement door. I know just how to jiggle the handle.

  Carrie grabs my arm. “This is crazy,” she says. “This building is, like, falling down.”

  There’s still light to see by. I check myself; I should capitalize on Carrie’s prudence. She could fall through a rotten floor. “You stay outside,” I tell her. “I’ll be quick.” I hand her the beach bag.

  “Why would he even come here?”

  “It’s just a hunch.”

  “It’s just crazy,” she mutters, sitting down on the steps to wait.

  I push the door open. The basement is completely dark. I step inside, and it is just like the first time. Back through the square of the door, I can see Carrie sitting with her elbows on her knees, but the farther I move inside, the smaller she becomes until I can hardly see her at all. The staircase is darker than I remember. My feet bump into the first step. I imagine wild-eyed, murderous men waking in the dark.

  I ascend by feel, and as my eyes adjust, I can make out more and more: the sconces on the walls, the depth of the landings. I call out, “Daniel?” My voice rings to the top of the building and bounces back down. There is a creak above me. At each landing, I call for him, and always the creaking is from a higher floor, until I am at the top, passing between the burned-out studs of what was once the door to the honeymoon suite.

  I emerge into wind. The walls are partial, jagged lath and cinder that comes away in my hand. One whole wall is gone, the suite open to the ocean. I could just step out into nothing. This was the wall with the big window, the one we all climbed out of. I danced here, in this spot. And over there, that was the wall with the mural. I feel each step with my toes before I shift my weight. I call, “Daniel?”

  Something bursts out of the darkness, and I shout. It hits my ankles and glances away. Pale furry hindquarters disappear around a corner. Then the cat creeps back in, staying low, to look at me. He is all bones. The last time I stood here, I would have trapped him in a milk crate and taken him home.

  In my childhood, there were always animals: stinky lovelorn dogs and pregnant cats to birth in our laundry room and broken-legged mice that we kept in shoe boxes full of moss. I never had a stuffed animal, because my mother thought that real ones deserved our care. They were free to come and go, and not a few of them ended up as grease on the parkway, cats especially. We buried front halves and back halves of things so many times that I learned to love generally and with measure. The animals were not allowed in the nursery. That rule was strict. After all, reasoned my mother, cats have been known to smother infants, and even the sweetest dog, when provoked, will bite.

  For a few years when I was very young, we had an old parrot called the Admiral who spouted nautical phrases like “Thar she blows” and “Come about,” sending us into bellyaching fits
of laughter. My mother inherited the Admiral after the death of a client, his secret nautical enthusiasms outed by his bird. The Admiral ate Cheerios from my bowl and rode on my shoulder, to the oohing and ahhing of the neighbor kids. When he flew off, I waited days and days in hopes that he would come back, that he loved me more than he loved the endless sky. When it was finally clear that he was gone forever, I wailed for hours, and my mother held me on her lap and stroked my hot face with her fingers and told me that the only sure thing was her and me, and the rest of the world could do you wrong, and this was how it felt.

  SAM ASKED IF I loved the man I was sleeping with—the one he found out about—and I couldn’t answer. People talk about love in a binary that makes no sense to me. Check a box, yes or no. The man in question worked at a bike store, and I loved finding grease marks where he had thoughtlessly rubbed the back of his neck as he worked. I loved his square golden jaw and the delight he could take in the stupidest things—YouTube videos of cats, songs he liked coming on the radio, things like that. But he is not someone I could miss. Sam, on the other hand . . . At night, slumber-headed, I am still careful not to tug the covers too far to my side. I find myself picturing vacations we planned but never executed, and he is still there, in the morning at hotels, shaving his incorrigible thick black facial hair, or on the slopes, stacking Daniel’s skis on top of his own and showing him how to take the curves, or leaning over Carrie’s shoulder and pointing at whales surfacing in some tropical bay. So many years of his lemon-and-coffee scent, his neat-freakery, his three forgetful trips back inside before each workday. It didn’t occur to me that I could lose those things, or even that they were things I’d mind losing.

  When I met Sam, we were both twenty-six. He was a sous-chef at a restaurant out of my price range and I was, momentarily, a vegan. I tasted butter in my mashed potatoes, and he came out of the kitchen to apologize, bowing over me and my date, standing his fingertips on the edge of the table. It was his sincerity that caught me. In later years, we would make mashed potatoes yellow with butter and laugh that we met thanks to one of my briefest enthusiasms. No matter how steady and stable I am, with my pills and my set bedtime and my one-glass-of-wine rule, I will always be given to enthusiasms. I know to examine them for source and relevance, and Sam used to help me do that. My enthusiasm for keeping chickens, for instance, we examined and agreed would be reasonable and educational for the kids. My enthusiasm for wooden boat building we examined, found expensive and unlikely, and mutually discarded. Though I would have come to that conclusion on my own.

  I think now that Sam liked being the sane one, the supporter, that maybe it was why we worked for so long. My mild and occasional unsteadiness, my monthly check-ins with my psychiatrist—these things made him feel whole. There are times when my disorder gets wise to the chemicals I’m feeding it, and shape-shifts, resurges, bubbles up. I feel that heating-up feeling, a disproportionate joy, or a sour downward slide, and if I don’t recognize it myself, Sam sees it in the patterns of my behavior, and I go to my psychiatrist for an adjustment of my meds. I don’t always go gently, but I go. It can take a few weeks to figure out the new dosage or the new drug, and during those weeks, I am my own prisoner. I give Sam my credit cards and do my best to be honest with him about my thoughts. In some ways, Sam has been my mood chart; now I will have to work harder for such self-knowledge. Maybe I will keep a written chart again, like my mother’s.

  The kids never picked up on my shifting moods until last time, and then it was only Daniel who understood. Carrie construed my sudden temper entirely as response to her cutting a half-day of school with her friends. She didn’t even use the time well; she went to someone’s basement and watched TV. I let her misinterpret me. I probably should have been angrier, anyway.

  But Daniel seemed to know. For a week I slept only for minutes at a time. I spent the nights reading fat paperbacks that had belonged to my mother, some with her inane marginalia (Shocking! How sad. Delightful). I wonder if she came back to these moments when she needed a kick, as I did now. One night Daniel tripped sleepy-headed from his room to curl against me in my armchair in the yellow lamp glow. “You can’t sleep,” he said.

  “No.”

  We made cookies and did a thousand-piece puzzle. We met each night like this, furtive as burglars, and neither of us mentioned it to Sam or Carrie. I faced the mornings feeling charged, absent my counterweights. At work, I reorganized our administrative systems so well and so lustily that the vice principal ordered early voting for employee of the month and stuck a star sticker to my shirt.

  When I picked Daniel up from the babysitter’s house, he watched me. “Did you eat Froot Loops?” he asked me accusingly. This was our question for inexplicable happiness, an old family joke.

  We drove to the park instead of home and lay eating Swedish Fish from my purse and watching the sun move through the layering leaves, until some tattooed, shirtless young hippies passed close by and I was struck friendly. We learned to play their drums and that two of them were brothers from Alaska and had never before left home. I let them paint sticky henna on Daniel’s back. The characters, they said, spelled wisdom. This seemed excellent.

  Sam found us in the twilight, having spotted the car. He busted into our fairy circle in a polo shirt, clean-shaven, intolerable, jangling his keys in his pocket. I was prepared to stand my ground without quite knowing why.

  “Mom ate Froot Loops,” said Daniel.

  “I know she did.” Sam gestured toward the parking lot. “Come on, let’s go.”

  “Why?” asked Daniel.

  “Yeah, why?” I echoed, only half joking.

  “Because it’s eight. I’m hungry.” Sam was trying to be politic and not to cite the cause of his worry in front of our new friends, but the hippies latched on.

  “Woman, bake me a pie,” they chorused.

  Daniel stood up and padded over to his father. Sam leaned down and Daniel whispered in his ear. The two of them went up to the car. In half an hour, I felt ready and found them throwing a football in the parking lot.

  “What did he say to you?” I asked Sam.

  “He said I should leave you alone and you’d come up in half an hour.”

  We looked at Daniel, who was throwing the football straight up in the air and diving to catch it. The henna on his back caked terra cotta and flaking, his chest white, almost blue in this waning light. Like a child from some science-fiction tribe. “How does he do it,” he was saying. “He is the most amazing football player in the whole entire history of the world. The people cheer.”

  In this way Sam would rescue me. But what works with a wife doesn’t work with a son. In my rarest and worst moments, people would catch Sam’s eye sympathetically. Once I would not be dissuaded from diving into a pond to try to touch the ducks. People stood with Sam on the shore, watching the ducks scatter, watching me slog back euphoric and covered with guano. They saw his patience and the glint in my eye, and they thought, Here is a good and patient man, to stand by such a woman. But if Daniel did the same thing, they would assume something else altogether: Here is a father with no control over his son. This father’s laxity has put his son at risk. This child is not getting what he needs. Sam did not feel responsible for my behavior, but he did feel responsible for Daniel’s, and that made all the difference.

  We started to split the first time Sam walked away from one of Daniel’s rages. We were trying to seat ourselves ten minutes into a movie, and Daniel refused to sit in the middle of a row. He wanted the end seat, he shrieked, he needed the end seat. He took hold of the armrests and tried to pull the seat out of the floor. A hundred blue-lit faces, parents and children, watching us instead of the screen. Carrie moved ten feet away and pretended to belong to another family. And Sam just walked out to the car and left me there. He sat in the driver’s seat until we came out. A year later, we were through.

  I slept with several men during our marria
ge, and I know Sam was unfaithful at least once—a woman’s gold bracelet left on my bedside table, never claimed. I met mine at the gym, at my various office jobs, in the stands at Carrie’s soccer games. Sometimes I felt somebody wanting me, and it woke some ravenous part of my heart that would not sleep until satisfied. I wonder if this is how it felt for my mother at her most divine—how many of her clients she ravished on the rumpled sofa in her office while I was outside going through their cars. Sam knew how my enthusiasms could play out in this arena, and it was never the poison it can be for other couples. He only pretended it was, toward the end, to justify his cowardice. Something to say in a language the divorce lawyer could understand.

  I STAND AS close as I can to the wall that is gone and look out at the Atlantic. The tide is going out. Foolish boys are trying to surf in the twilight. The sky is a velvety bluish gray now, fading to ink, and the lights of the boardwalk look superstitious, candles burning against the dark. The Ferris wheel turns slowly. Time is passing, and Daniel is not found. I strain my eyes to make out a shape that could be the salmon man’s boat, which I imagine as a small green rowboat, but all I get is a headache and a sense of the wide night flowing together with the dark of my mind.

  6

  IT’S THE FOURTH of July and I am sprawled in Jake’s father’s Sunfish, six of us weighing the little boat dangerously low in the water. We watch the fireworks, lying in a human basket weave, our heads on one another’s stomachs, passing a joint. Pink rain, silver flowers exploding. I tip my head back over the side of the boat to watch our wake: moving lines swimming in and out of contact, drawing moon-hued diamonds and chevrons on the black water. Jake puts Pam at the tiller and scrambles over us to the bow, where his own personal fireworks stash is in his backpack. His calf grazes mine as he passes.