by Laura Lanni
I smiled. Well, I tried to smile. It probably looked more like I was in some abdominal pain. I gathered myself, shook off her spell, and charged ahead with my prepared speech.
“I’m going to take the MCAT next Tuesday, so I won’t be at recitation. Then on Wednesday afternoon, the first draft of my dissertation is due to Dr. Hornsby. It doesn’t need to be perfect, just presentable, and the data and graphs have to be clear and all. Anyway, it’ll be a hectic week, and if I survive it I plan to celebrate.” I paused, out of breath.
Anna’s dark eyes studied me, the uninvited enigma on her porch. “Oh. So. Um, do you want my problem set rewritten on white paper, then?”
I needed to get to the point before I lost my nerve. “Anna, listen. I’ve been watching you in class. You are very intelligent, and I like the way you help explain things, even to the guys who hate girls telling them anything. You are a very take-charge person.”
I paused. She waited with her head tipped to the left and her eyebrows scrunched together.
“I wondered if you had time next Friday to celebrate the end of the week with me. That is, if I actually survive.”
Her mouth fell open. I held my breath for the rejection that was sure to ensue.
“You’re asking me out?”
I looked down at my Converse high-tops, thinking what she must be thinking: I was way out of my league with this girl. My next thought was What the hell? I met her unbelieving wide eyes, nodded once, and said, “Yeah.”
Anna shook her head and put her hands on her hips and said, “Can you do that? I mean, you’re my teacher.”
“I think I can,” I said. “I just did. I’ve wanted to for a couple months.” She didn’t answer. Her intent stare somehow hindered my muscular function. My brain threatened a shutdown as well. My mouth still worked, so I continued to plead my case. “I’m not really your teacher. I’m just the teaching assistant. Dr. Hornsby is the teacher of record. He establishes grades and writes the tests. Do you see the difference?”
“That’s not the only difference,” she laughed. “He’s old and bald and fat, and I would never go out with him.”
I held my breath and asked, “Will you go out with me?”
Her smile and reply of “Yes” were a blur because my heart was beating so hard I was sure she could hear it.
Anna wasn’t the first girl I dated. I was pretty old when I met her. I was about to turn twenty-five. But no girl had ever flung such an instantaneous, magnetic attraction on me before. We dated for the next two months. Then we both graduated. I earned my Ph.D. and she earned her master’s. She intended to move north and pursue her doctorate, but I messed all that up when I asked her to come with me when I started medical school. My happiness at her acceptance paled in comparison to the fury her mother expressed at our plans.
Now, I finally understand her mother’s pain. I took Anna away from her, and now Anna is gone from me. Gone. She’s really gone.
Anna.
30
April 1, First Date
The day before my birthday in the year we met, April first, was our first date. It was unseasonably warm. The first tempting day of spring had continued into a clear sky on a night made for watching stars. The cool air was so clean and crisp you could cup it in your hands and gulp it down. A perfect night for a first date.
I planned our date as meticulously as the circuitry of a motherboard. We were going to dinner at a steakhouse and then to a movie on campus. The film club was showing old Abbott and Costello movies for free from eight until midnight. If I was lucky, Anna might agree to a walk through the campus after the movie. In the dark. Who knew what might happen?
I rang her doorbell at six-thirty that night, right on time and in a haze of déjà vu. My week had been hectic and painful, as expected, but when I awoke that morning and found myself still alive, my anticipation of time with Anna made me giddy. A giddy graduate student is not a pretty sight, so I stayed home alone most of the day getting ready.
Obviously, Anna had spent part of her day getting ready, too. When she opened the door and shined her smile on me, my gaze fell on her newly cut and permed hair. I had loved her long, shiny, straight hair. It hung down her back and was one of the first things I’d noticed about her. That cape of silk was gone. All gone. I was so shocked that I couldn’t help it—the first thing I said was, “Your hair.”
Her fingers brushed a wavy strand. She smiled, chin down, head tipped, and looked up expectantly with those big eyes and said, “What?”
She anticipated compliments and praise. Instead, I said, “I liked it better the other way.”
Well, the silence was deafening. Her rage was palpable. Her face clouded up, and she shut the door in my face.
Things were not going well.
I stood on her porch for a full ten minutes trying to work up the courage to talk to her again. I knocked timidly, three staccato taps, and waited. I was afraid when the door didn’t open for quite a few minutes. When it finally opened, just a crack, I heard Anna say, “What?”
“Do you, um, think we could get going now? If we don’t get to the steakhouse by seven they’ll cancel our reservation, or else we might be late to Abbott and Costello. I hate to be late for movies. You know how it is. The lights are out and you have to find your way in the dark to some seats and climb over people who weren’t late who’re trying to see the screen.” I stopped for breath.
From behind the door I heard, “What?” and realized this was the third time she’d asked the same question, and it was the only word she’d said to me so far on our first date. See, I still expected a first date and was still hopeful about the walk in the dark at the end of it. Only, this “What?” was louder than the others and sounded even madder.
I charged ahead. “You might want a sweater. It’s supposed to get cooler later.” I leaned my forehead against the door and started to worry.
Then I heard laughter, so I started to hope.
After two hundred long seconds, which I watched tick by on my sturdy Timex, Anna came out with a sweater and her new curly hair. She didn’t speak to me. She just walked to my car with me trotting behind like a puppy. I was afraid to look at her, but I think she was smiling.
At dinner she started to make some intermittent eye contact, which made her silence louder. I had trouble with my salad with her watching me eat the large hunks of lettuce. She noticed my unease and intensified her stare. Slicing my steak was troubling—I was all elbows. She finally spoke to me when the waiter offered dessert.
“Eddie Wixim, I decided to come with you to get a free steak dinner. Now, I want chocolate cake. But I don’t want to go with you to Abbott and Costello in the middle of campus where everyone can see us. This is our first and last date, and I don’t want people thinking there’s something going on here. Got that?” The waiter beamed at her, pen poised over his pad, and waited to see how I would get out of this mess.
My heart was pounding. What could I do? I asked the only person who knew. “Anna, what can I do to make you stop hating me?”
“I don’t hate you.” That was encouraging. I glanced at the waiter, trying to will him away, but he just raised his eyebrows higher and held his ground.
“Well, then, how do you feel about me?”
She pinned me with her glare and said, “I have never been insulted in the first five seconds of a date before. That makes you a special, unforgettable date. And, I haven’t been on many dates. That also makes you special and unforgettable. But even if I have to live the rest of my life alone, no dates, forever, I will never be so desperate that I will have to be with a guy who is mean to me. Got that?” The waiter snorted.
Now I got it. She thought I was mean to her. I was just in shock because she messed up her hair so bad. But I still found her irresistible, so I said, “I’m sorry I was mean. I didn’t mean it. Please go to the movie with me?”
I was hyperventilating a little, and my anxiety seemed to give Anna some smug pleasure because she smiled when
she said, “I think you are begging me.” She gave her head full of new curls a shake of disbelief. The waiter nodded. He was getting on my nerves.
“You bet. I am. Really I am. This cannot be the last time I see you.” What would I do if I blew this?
“Why not?”
She was waiting. Waiting for some perfect thing I could say that would fix everything.
“Because.”
That wasn’t my best work, but Anna laughed.
“Convincing argument, Wixim. Is that all you’ve got?”
“It’s a very loaded ‘because.’ Because I—. Because you—”
I stalled and cleared my throat.
“Because I’m already crazy about you, and I would be even if you shaved your head. Got that?” I reached across the table and took her hand. And she let me. I smiled at her, and she smiled back. And I knew. I just knew. We were going to make it.
“Chocolate cake for two,” I said to the waiter, who nodded curtly before walking away.
31
Wedding
I proposed to my wife without asking. It wasn’t planned. It just turned out that way. Actually, I had no plan, but I felt more confident that day in the drive-thru than ever before. I knew, for certain, that Anna would choose me. And I was right. Without even asking, she knew what I wanted, what the ring meant, and she didn’t surprise me—she just accepted me the way I was, the way we were. At the beginning of our marriage, I could predict her every move. Now that Anna is dead, though, I ache with worry about the choices she’ll make. At the end of our marriage, all of our insights about one another had vaporized. And so I have no inkling, now, of whether Anna will choose me again.
A lousy ending shouldn’t follow such a perfect beginning.
We were married in August, less than eight months after we met. With so little time to plan, we decided to have a small wedding. It was outside on a grassy, sunny hill on campus. One of the philosophy professors was a justice of the peace and agreed to perform the ceremony. Anna found a dress at an antique shop, and I rented a tuxedo because, according to the mothers, that’s what you’re supposed to do. Somebody ordered the tent and food. A friend from the lab played guitar in the corner. It was supposed to be a simple and easy ceremony, perfectly suited to us. I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.
When Anna’s mom lost it at the rehearsal dinner and announced that she did not approve of our marriage and would say so during the ceremony, Anna fell apart. With my Anna in pieces, I feared I might lose her. I decided to reason with her mom.
“Mrs. McElveen?” I said when I called her on the phone late on the night before the wedding.
“Who is this? Are you trying to sell me something? Because I don’t want any.” Slam. She hung up.
I called back.
When she answered, I rushed in with, “Mrs. McElveen, this is Ed. I really want to talk to you about tomorrow. Please don’t hang up.”
“Oh, Lord. Ed, listen to me, there is nothing you can say to change my mind. You want to marry my Anna. You have her brainwashed into thinking she wants to marry you. She is out of her mind and is giving up all her dreams and goals for you. I don’t see any way it is possible for you to make her happy when marrying you means giving up so much of who she is. Therefore, you must see why I cannot endorse this union!”
“Oh.” This was the clever rebuttal from my end of the line.
“It absolutely infuriates me that you’re going to win this battle and your brilliant response to my side of the argument is ‘Oh’.” On that note, she hung up on me. Again.
I didn’t sleep at all that night.
At the ceremony the next day, I was exhausted. And starving. I’d cleaned out my fridge and whole apartment in my frenzy to prepare for our move and our life together after our honeymoon. There was absolutely nothing to eat. For breakfast I contemplated a half-dried jar of mustard with a spoon, gave up, and drank the dregs of the old milk. The ceremony was at eleven in the morning. I wouldn’t be fed until the afternoon.
Unlike Anna, who talked about our wedding every year on our anniversary and cried at every wedding we ever attended after our own, I don’t remember many details about that day. I don’t remember who was there. I don’t remember what we said. If I broke any wedding vows through the years, I am innocent due to ignorance.
I do remember Anna’s face. It was pale. She looked like she might faint at any second during the ceremony. Holding her breath, she didn’t just hold my hand; she clenched my forearm with her icy hands like a vice-grip. I was aware that I was holding her up. A nasty grumbling sound came from my abdomen during a pause in the action of the ceremony. My hunger made me feel like I might puke. If Anna fainted, I decided I might as well hurl. I watched her closely for her cue to begin the festivities of our falling apart as an almost-married couple. She held herself together, barely, so I managed, too.
Somehow, Anna’s dad kept her mom muzzled during the part of the ceremony when the justice asked if anyone had any reason to stop the union. I’m not sure if he physically gagged her, but I appreciated whatever means he employed to make his wife forever hold her peace. In this case, forever can be defined as about thirty minutes. Anna was wound as tight as a spring until that moment passed. After that, all I wanted to do was kiss her. I waited as long as I could and then laid one on her.
At our forty-minute reception in a tent on the field, the temperature soared to almost one hundred degrees. Anna and I smushed red velvet cake into each other’s faces. It was delicious, and the cream cheese frosting sent sugar buzzing to my brain. I can’t remember why the cake came first. Probably because no one was in charge. We chugged huge goblets of cheap champagne, and my odds of puking spiked again. Then we ate real food—some kind of chicken—tossed the bouquet, jumped into the limousine, and escaped to our honeymoon.
The clearest detail of the day is burned in my memory as the first of many cryptic conversations I was to have with my new wife during our life together. We were on our way to the airport.
“Eddie, do you remember what everyone said when you kissed me?” she asked.
“People said something?” I hadn’t heard a thing.
“Yeah,” she insisted. “They all said the same thing.”
“Sorry, babe, I didn’t get it,” I admitted.
“They said ‘Aw.’” She was beaming.
“Oh. That’s great.” I was lost.
But Anna wasn’t finished. “If you think about it, little boys say something different when they see people kiss, like in movies, you know? While I was smushing cake into your face and you were chowing it off my arm—that’s when they all said it.”
Still lost. Being married to Anna was looking like it might be intellectually challenging.
She filled in the gap. “They said ‘Ew!’” Her eyes were big, and she started to laugh. My diagnosis: too much champagne, too little sleep and food.
I just smiled a little and tried to get her to come closer to me. If I couldn’t understand her thought process yet, it was okay. I knew I was nuts about the rest of her. She pushed me away and said, “You don’t get it, do you?”
I shook my head in mock despair. “But can I get something else instead?” I begged.
Anna shook her head and laughed again. “You have to get this first. What are your initials?”
“E. W.”
“And that spells?”
“Ew.”
“Right, like what they said when I smushed the cake into your face. Got that?”
“Yep.”
She continued down her personal brain path, dragging me along by the hair. “And what are my new initials?”
“A. W.”
“And what does that spell?”
“Aw.” Finally got it. “Like what they said when we kissed.”
“Isn’t that cool, Eddie? You are Ew and I am Aw, now. We sort of go together.” My wife was so happy in her own strange-thinking world.
“We definitely go together,” I said, and pu
lled her to me and silenced her lips.
When we came up for air, I said, “Aw.”
And my new wife said, “Ew.”
32
Awed
On the day Bethany was born, my job was to run interference. It didn’t matter that I worked at the hospital as an intern in pediatrics. That day, I was just the husband, the frantic first-time dad. I was enraged that my wife was in pain and frustrated that I couldn’t bear it for her. She was going to try to have a natural delivery—her choice. It was the “in” thing to do. No drugs for Anna—just controlled breathing to ride out each wave. I became her slave. I did whatever she said. I pushed on her back. I wiped her forehead with a cold cloth. I brought ice chips. I supported her when she insisted on walking. I saw why they call this labor.
“Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.” Under her breath, Anna reported the pain. She didn’t yell. She didn’t cry. She breathed and said “ow” all afternoon.
“You’re doing great, honey,” I crooned.
“Don’t honey, me. I’m not your honey.” Anna lay on her side, the only position she’d tolerated for the last hour. Her hands gripped the stuffing of a rough hospital pillow. The paper-thin gown was pulled up above her giant belly. “Untie this damn thing, will you? I’m boiling.”
I pulled the strings apart behind her and yanked off the gown. She was splendid. Huge and full of life. Red-faced. Mascara smudged under her eyes. Hair in a flopping ponytail on top of her head.
She gripped my forearm for the next contraction, and I remembered our beginning, our wedding day when she clawed my arm the same way. She needed me, and she centered me. While I watched helplessly for hours as she writhed in pain, somehow it helped her to have me there.
“Dammit, Eddie, get me some ice. I’m on fire. If this kid doesn’t get out of my body soon, I’m getting out!”
As I scampered out to refill her ice cup the nurse smirked at me and said, “Transition’s starting. It won’t be long now.”