Why They Run the Way They Do

by Susan Perabo

“This is our little girl,” he’d said that night, touching the photo with tender fingertips. “Look at her, Lauren. She’s ours, yours and mine.”

  Donald and his wife have three children, two in high school and one in college. They pose on his desk in matching silver frames.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” he’d said, squeezing my hand until the blood stopped at my knuckles. “She’s all ours. She’s nobody else’s. She’s yours and mine.”

  That was a little over a year ago. And the truth was, it had totally creeped me out in the moment. I didn’t tell him this, because he was so obviously moved by it, so blown away by his own gesture, but the whole idea of it made me queasy. Weren’t we using her, this innocent little brown orphan? Wasn’t she an accomplice to something torrid and dirty? But then, almost overnight, it seemed perfectly acceptable, just as most everything in my life that had ever made me inconveniently queasy (i.e.: my parents’ grisly divorce, my absurd broken engagement in college, my temp-job career) had swiftly morphed into perfectly acceptable. After all, I told myself, it wasn’t as if we had taken Mariela from someone else, someone more deserving. Before us she had nothing, and now she had twenty-eight bucks a month and she meant something to someone. So I have grown used to the idea that she is out there—out there and ours—and Donald and I devour the letters with equal pleasure. She is, I am quite certain, the only child I will ever have. She has never barfed on me and she will never break my heart. And yet, when we hold her picture, surely what we are feeling is all the joy and pride of real parents.

  She sends us actual letters. When I first heard about it, I imagined the letters would be something like the sweepstakes notices you get, the ones with your personalized information spliced in:

  Dear Lauren and Donald,

  Thank you for your generous gift of $28. I used it to buy a new goat. Now there is milk for my classmates. I hope the weather in Chicago is pleasant.

  Sincerely,

  Mariela

  But I was wrong. The words are her own—translated, of course, and typed on a piece of flowery stationery:

  Dear Family, (this new letter begins)

  Today at school we talked about rivers and why they run the way they do. After school we played football even though it was raining. I was on the red team and I scored one goal and then a boy named Jorge who was on the green team rubbed mud in my hair. Last week I was sick but I am getting better. Thank you for writing me and helping me to have books and clothes for school.

  Love, Mariela

  “Jorge better watch his back,” Donald says. “I’m gonna kick his ass.”

  The agency has included an updated photo and we sit there on the foldout couch squinting at it, as if even in the photo the distance between us and Mariela is immense. She is standing on a gravel road in front of a squat building that I assume is the school, because she is holding two thick books pressed against her chest, in the same way I and many girls had held books at the age of ten, a shield that hid our bodies, the only thing we could hold so tightly at that age.

  “She looks so old,” I say. “She’s not a little girl anymore.”

  “Soon she’ll be casting spells on all the boys,” he says. “Just like her mother.” He pokes me in the ribs, a gesture I despise. I suspect he is one of those men who tickled his children until they begged for mercy, that he was so pleased with their laughter that he was able to overlook the dismay behind it.

  “I’m not her mother,” I say. “And Donald, your socks have holes in them, okay? You make a hundred and eighty—”

  “You’re as much her mother as anyone,” he says, setting the letter aside.

  “That’s nice,” I say. “I’m sure that would be a great comfort to her. You can’t buy a week’s worth of decent socks?”

  “What’s wrong, honey?” he asks. He puts his big palm on my cheek, a gesture I love, and I forget about his socks and Mariela. Sometimes I feel like I could sleep curled in his hand, like a hamster.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “No, really,” he says. “What is it? Is it me?”

  This is his favorite question: Is it me? Is it me?

  “Don’t freak out,” Tommy says. He is standing in my doorway with a supersize bag of BBQ Fritos. “Whatever you do, just don’t freak out.”

  “What?” I say, closing the door. “What happened?”

  “Just don’t freak out.”

  “Okay, whatever, I won’t freak out.”

  He sits down on the couch, picks up the remote, and turns off the television.

  “I’m freaking out,” I say.

  “Me, too,” he said. He pauses, then inhales and exhales deliberately like he is on an infomercial for yoga tapes. “We’re moving.”

  “What do you mean, ‘moving’?”

  The word itself feels strange in my mouth. Moving. Moo-ving. A cow plus ving. You might say “I’m moving this couch to the other wall” or even “They’re moving my office at work” but people themselves did not move. Things moved. Tommy and I have lived in this apartment complex for seven years, since literally the day after we graduated from college. When Tommy and Gil became a couple three years after that, Gil moved in; Tommy did not move out. Because Tommy did not move.

  “Gil got this amazing offer to run the ER at this hospital in—”

  “Gil?” I explode. “Since when is this about Gil? Since when is every goddamn thing about Gil?” The irony that Gil’s name comes up approximately once a month, usually in passing, is popping around in the back of my brain like a Mexican jumping bean, impossible to grab.

  “Sweetie,” Tommy says miserably. And right then it becomes apparent that one of us is going to start crying. I’m not sure which of us, but either way it’s something to be thwarted at all costs.

  “Go home,” I say. “I have stuff to do, all right? Just get out of here. I have like a million things to do.”

  He doesn’t move from the couch. “Can I just turn on the TV instead?”

  “Okay,” I say. “Wanna Coke or something?”

  “Okay,” he says.

  We drink our Cokes. We eat the Fritos down to the crumbs. We watch a special on the History channel about a British soldier in World War II who was dropped from an airplane, already dead, with bogus Top Secret documents in his pockets, sent to confuse the Nazis. It’s always good, when you’re feeling really lousy, to watch something about Nazis.

  Usually I skip the company picnic. Usually, as soon as the date is announced, I remember something very important that it conflicts with. This was true even before Donald and I were together. Didn’t I see these people enough during the week? What did I need, exactly, with a bunch of tipsy lawyers and legal secretaries smeared with sunscreen and bug repellent, a bunch of kids running around screaming their heads off, their faces stained with watermelon? But this year an unfortunate turn of events has made it necessary for me to attend. I have won an award. In our annual client survey, the email marked “URGENT” informs me I have received an “unprecedentedly unanimous vote of 10 (excellent) for friendly customer service . . . both in person and on the telephone!”

  “It’s a big deal,” Donald calls to me. He is standing in his private bathroom, in front of the mirror, poking a small red bump that has appeared below his left eye. “If you don’t show up . . . well, it’ll look really, really bad.”

  “You’re telling me I might get fired for not coming to the company picnic?”

  “I didn’t say that.” He pokes his head out the door. “Just . . . it’ll be weird if you don’t come. People might think it’s because, you know, whatever.”

  “I might be sick,” I said. “I might get the flu.”

  He’s back at the mirror. Bug bite? Acne? Cancer? “Okay, it’s dumb to you. Okay. Fine. But some people have been here for twenty years and never won something like this. It means something.”

  “Something besides I’m screwing the boss.”

  He abandons his prodding and comes out of the bathroom. “Are you kiddin
g me? Really, Lauren, you think I had something to do with this? Is it that hard to believe that people think you do your job well?”

  “I’m so proud,” I say, twisting my heels into my shoes. “My college education has finally paid off. I think I’ll call my mother. And imagine how proud Mariela will be when she hears.”

  “Babe, what is it?” he asks. “Is it me?”

  “My friend Tommy is moving,” I say. “In three weeks. He and Gil are moving to New Mexico.”

  “Wow,” Donald said. He sits on the foot of the foldout beside me, puts his hand over mine. “But he’s your best friend.”

  “I told him that. It didn’t seem to make a difference.”

  “I’m really sorry,” he says. And he is. He’s not a bad guy. You hear about a guy like this, a guy—a lawyer, for crying out loud—banging his receptionist at the office two nights a week while his wife keeps his dinner warm, and you think you’ve got this guy all figured out. But you don’t know that when he sees a spider crawling across his office wall, he’ll catch it in a plastic cup and when he has a minute to spare he’ll run the spider downstairs and shake it in one of the plants that line the front of our building.

  “I’m sorry, too,” I say.

  “You have to be my date,” I tell Tommy the next night, during Animal ER. “You owe me big and I’m not going alone.”

  “Sure,” he says. “I’ll be your date. I’d love to be your date. Is Fatty going to be there?”

  “He’s not fat,” I say. “Just because you weigh seventy pounds doesn’t mean everyone else is fat.”

  “Ouch,” Tommy says, because on TV a golden retriever is having a fishhook removed from his floppy ear. He changes the channel: $100,000 Pyramid, the real one, with Dick Clark.

  “Yes!” we say, in unison.

  “Is the wife coming?” he asks.

  “Probably. I don’t see why she wouldn’t.”

  “What’s her name again?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, which is a lie. Her name is Carol. But I prefer to refer to her in my deliberate detached way as “the wife,” the missus,” or “the old ball and chain.”

  “I’ve never been to a company picnic before,” Tommy says.

  “Are you packing?”

  “For the picnic? Too soon, I think.”

  “You’re funny.”

  “I’m packing a little,” he says. “You could come help, you know. We could hang out at my place.”

  We rarely hung out at his apartment. It smelled a little, I thought, like aftershave.

  “I have more channels.”

  “This is true,” he says. “I only have a hundred and five. We’d never be able to find anything to watch.”

  “New Mexico,” I say. “Have you ever even been to New Mexico? Have you ever even been through New Mexico?”

  “I’ve been to Arizona.”

  “I can’t believe he’s making you go. Of all the selfish—”

  “He’s not making me go,” Tommy says. “It’s exciting, okay? Going someplace new, starting over. I might even get a job myself. I’m ready for a change.”

  “Since when? Since last week? Since he told you you were ready for a change?”

  “Lauren—” he says harshly. He starts to say something, then thinks better of it.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he says.

  We leave it at that. And I realize, as I turn back toward the TV, that I am all about leaving it at that. If I could leave it at that forever, if I could get away with never having another conversation of substance, with anybody, I might just take it and run.

  Dear Family,

  Today a dentist came to look at our teeth. He said mine were second best and all he did was give me a toothbrush. Some other kids had to have some teeth pulled and Jorge was one of them and his cheek swole up and everyone laughed at him. But I didn’t. The dentist was a tall American man with a beard and one of the girls asked if he was Santa Claus. Then later somebody said that the dentist might adopt one of us so we all tried to guess who it would be. I think it will be the girl who asked if he was Santa Claus.

  Thank you,

  Mariela

  “Poor Jorge,” Donald says. It’s the night before the company picnic and we are sitting on the middle of the foldout eating Chinese food from stained boxes. “Nobody’s ever going to pick poor Jorge.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s going to pick any of them. After they’re babies, nobody wants them.”

  “You never know,” he says. “They might get lucky.”

  “Maybe I’ll go get her.”

  “Who?”

  “Mariela.”

  “Oh,” he chuckles. “Right.”

  Of course I’m not even remotely serious, but as soon as he says “right” the whole thing racks into focus and makes more sense than any thought I’ve had in years.

  “So what would you do?” I ask. “What would you do if I just showed up one day with her? Just one morning I come in to work and she’s tagging along behind.”

  “Lauren,” he says. “Come on. Cut it out.”

  “You started it,” I say. “You’re the one writing the checks. So what do you say? Let’s go get her. We’ll bring her back. She can live here in the office and we’ll raise her. Two nights a week we’ll order in pizza, rent some movies. The rest of the time she can just hang out around the building waiting for us to show up.”

  He looks weary. I know what he is thinking. Someone probably told him this would happen—one of the other lawyers, or his psychiatrist—that at some point the receptionist would get needy, go a little crazy, even, that at some point his joyride was going to end and the stakes were going to get higher and he was going to have to get rid of her somehow.

  “I love you,” he says. “Do you understand that? This isn’t just like . . . a thing. I’m not like other people who do this. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know,” I say. “You’re like . . . like you who does this.”

  “Tell me what to do,” he says. “I need someone to tell me what to do.”

  “That’s the most pathetic thing I’ve heard in my entire life,” Tommy says. “Jesus Christ, what a big baby.”

  We are on our way to the picnic. The sun is blazing in the sky. My feet are up on the dashboard and I realize I shaved only my left leg this morning. The end is near, I think. But what the hell? First you stop shaving your right calf, soon your fingernails grow ragged, eventually you stop brushing your teeth. Even the simplest matters of personal hygiene fall by the way. Next thing you know the health department is knocking on your door, and there you are on your couch, all alone, covered in bags of Doritos. And you, not even quite thirty. What happened to you?

  “You’re a little pathetic too,” I tell Tommy. “Don’t forget that. We’re all a little pathetic.”

  “Exactly,” he says. “Everybody gets to be a little pathetic. But you can’t have more than your share, or there’s not enough to go around. You can’t be a hog about it.”

  The wife is adorable, cute as a shiny little button in that pushing fifty kind of way; her brown hair is bobbed, her makeup tastefully applied, her blouse bright and sleeveless, her walking shorts khaki and slimming. I can’t think of a single bad thing to say about her, watching the two of them standing by the barbecue pits, standing close enough that their matching shorts brush against each other. Owning not a single outfit that falls between what I wear to work and what I wear in front of the television, I am grossly overdressed, despite my one stubbly leg.

  “I should have worn my sweat pants,” I say, trying to not allow my eyes to linger on the wife.

  “You’re making a statement,” Tommy says. “You’re telling the world that no occasion is too casual for heels. Soon women all over America will be playing softball in two-inch pumps.”

  I look at the schedule of events posted by the picnic tables, hoping that the awards ceremony is early on the agenda, that we can eat a quick burger and I can collect my prize (f
ramed certificate, coffee mug) and be headed home inside of an hour. To my dismay I see that the ceremony comes last, after food, volleyball, and . . .

  “Races!” Tommy says. “I didn’t know there were races!”

  I refuse the potato sack and egg-on-a-spoon, but after considerable badgering I agree to be Tommy’s partner in the three-legged race, despite the fact that even with the heels kicked off my skirt promises to slow us down. Just before the starting gun—a teenager popping a Baggie—Donald and the missus hustle up to the starting line, all giggles and flushed faces. We are on one end of the line of competitors; they are on the other. Between us are three other couples who tumble into heaps barely out of the gate. Tommy drags me along; I feel like deadweight, and see Donald out of the corner of my eye, grimacing, trying to catch me. I believe in this moment he has forgotten who I am, so intent he looks upon winning the race. Tommy hurls himself through the blue-streamer finish line and drags me with him. We high-five and bounce off each other. We make complete fools of ourselves, long after it is appropriate. The wife comes over to congratulate us, and Donald comes panting along behind her, a slightly panicked look on his face.

  “Congratulations,” the wife says. “You’re quite a pair.”

  “This is Lauren,” Tommy says.

  “Oh, the famous Lauren!” she says. “Congratulations on your award.”

  “Yes, congratulations!” Donald exclaims. He shouts it so loud his wife winces and gives him a look. “We’re all very proud,” he says at a normal level.

  “Is this your husband?” the wife—Carol—asks.

  “No,” I say. “This is just Tommy.”

  In the car I completely dissolve. One moment we’re sitting calmly at a red light and the next moment I’m blubbering.

  “I can’t believe you’re actually going to leave me. I can’t believe you’re actually—”

  “I’m not leaving you. For God’s—”

  “You stupid shit . . . mother . . . damn . . . freaking—”

  “Good one,” he says.

  “Shut up,” I say. “Don’t you dare make me laugh, you—”