by Susan Perabo
“I never said you were done,” I said. “No one said that. Neither of us is done-done.”
“You’re coming across as pretty done-done,” she said.
Which might have been true. When I looked ahead ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, we were still sitting at this exact table playing Scrabble. Maybe there were people in jet packs zipping by outside. Maybe we had computer chips embedded in our necks. But still: seven letters, one rack, eight triple-word-scores, ten points for the Z. But the picture had lost focus for Lizzie. She had outpaced me, beaten me back into the world. Of course, her marriage had ended almost a year before mine, and she had been by herself, here in this town house without a Scrabble partner, until I had shown up ready to play. And now, game over? So soon?
“But you’re not pregnant,” I said.
“No, “ she said. “Two no’s. Pretty definitive. But my period was really late, so, I wanted to double-check. I guess it could be something else.”
The “something else” did not need to be named.
“So can I meet him?” I asked.
He was performing at a community talent show in a small theater on Sunday afternoon. She had been planning to go anyway, so she said I could go along with her.
“We have to sit in the back, though,” she said. “He gets nervous if I sit too close.”
“So you’ve done this before.”
“We’ve been together a couple months,” she said. “Sometimes when I say I’m at meetings I’m not really at meetings. Sometimes I’m with him. I’ve seen a few of his shows.”
Calling his brief performance a “show” was a bit of a stretch. He was one of about a dozen acts over the course of an endless two hours. Half the acts featured groups of preteen girls singing pop songs and doing cheerleader moves. My favorite act was a husband-and-wife comedy team. They were in their seventies and had a litany of “Kids These Days!” jokes. They had a cassette tape player that the old man held the mic up to at the end of certain jokes and pushed the button for a pretaped rim shot, but at least half the time he pushed the wrong button and instead there would be the whirring of fast-forward. There were about fifty people at the community center, very clearly all related to at least one of the performers. Jeremy was the second-to-last act, following (in unfortunate planning) another magician who couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Luckily the fifteen-year-old was all about the rings, whereas Jeremy was a card man.
He was tall and somewhat gangly, with very long and expressive arms, which were useful for his chosen field. He didn’t wear a cape, like the teenager, which was a relief. He had floppy dark hair and that prematurely creased face I always associate with years of toil on the family farm or chronic alcoholism. He had a great smile—Lizzie was right; he was cute—which forced the creases in his face into a pleasurable arrangement.
His magic was slightly above the birthday party level, consisting mostly of variations on “Pick a card, any card . . .” He impressed me once, flinging the deck of cards against the back wall of the stage and revealing that the sole card stuck on the wall—six of hearts—was the very card a girl had chosen and shown to the audience moments before. But the applause at the end indicated that he was neither young nor old enough to really capture the hearts of the crowd.
Afterward we went out for coffee. The born-again counter man gave me a little conspiratorial scowl when Jeremy paid for all three of our coffees; somehow he’d managed to work out that Jeremy was Lizzie’s date and not mine, and now he saw me as a potential ally. But I was determined to keep an open mind, if for no other reason than to insist to Lizzie that I had indeed kept an open mind. We had never been the kind of sisters to bash each other’s boyfriends—to a fault, perhaps—but I didn’t intend to start looking like a bitter old hag at the precise moment when I was most feeling like a bitter old hag.
We sat at one of those awkward coffee shop tables that seemed designed for only one person, or two people who didn’t mind sitting practically on top of each other. There was only one large table at this coffee shop, and as usual some idiot college student had spread out all over it.
“How long have you been doing magic?” I asked Jeremy, trying to avoid getting my legs tangled in his.
“Most of my life,” he said. “But only professionally for the last year. I know—professionally.” He grinned, cut his eyes at Lizzie. “Believe me, I know how that sounds.”
Against my will I liked him. He squeezed my sister’s hand on the tiny table and I saw something light up in her eyes, which made me sad and happy at the same moment. Maybe he was magic after all, I thought. Then I nearly threw up in my mouth.
It wasn’t as if either one of us had been dying to have kids. We both married late, and both thought it might possibly happen, but even before our marriages turned horrible neither seemed the kind of marriage you wanted to bring children into. For years Lizzie and her carnival-ride (Larry) thought of little but themselves and their own drama. They were both creepy smart, high-functioning alcoholics, a double chronic state that, as Lizzie once described to me, caused them to find each other fascinating almost every night and disgusting almost every morning. As for me, I imagined that my husband’s affection for dogs might eventually translate into affection for other vulnerable creatures, but he was so devoted to his cause that the thought of giving it up—giving them up—for something that did not yet exist wasn’t even worth discussing. And it was not as if the two could ever coexist in the same house. It was dogs or babies. It could never be dogs and babies.
“I was in banking,” Jeremy told me. “Before I was in drinking.” It was clear he’d used this line before so I did not give him the satisfaction of acknowledging his parallelism with more than a tepid smile.
“He did a lot of work with nonprofits,” Lizzie said, lest I think he was simply a shallow, money-grubbing banker.
“I still might get back to it.” He looked down at Lizzie; he was probably a foot taller than either of us. “I really might,” he said. “I could do both. The magic banker. The banking magician. It’s not too late.”
“It’s never too late,” Lizzie agreed.
He nodded. “That’s what Carl—” he looked at me “—my sponsor, Carl—that’s what he always says. That’s his big catchphrase. No such thing as too late.”
Somehow the table felt even smaller than when we’d sat down. My resentment for the inconsiderate college student was growing. How could a single person justify hogging an entire four top, while threesomes were clearly killing themselves huddling around a table the size of a large dinner plate?
“I wish I had a sponsor,” I said. “I’d like for someone to say encouraging things to me all the time. You guys get all the good stuff. Secret meetings, sponsors . . .”
“I’m not sure I’d say we get all the good stuff,” Jeremy said. “I’ve been in jail twice. I don’t even have a driver’s license anymore.”
“She’s kidding,” Lizzie said. She shot me a look. It was the same look she would sometimes shoot me when we were kids and I’d bother her while she was in the thick of a book. Can’t you see I’m reading?
“I am; I’m kidding,” I said. “I don’t need a sponsor. I’m my own sponsor. I’m sponsored by me. When I start feeling bad, I just give me a call, and I say to myself, one day at a time, kiddo. Just take it one day at a time.”
“All right,” Lizzie said. “You can stop now.”
“Or, wait, what’s the other thing?” I scooched my chair back from the table, just a tiny bit, undramatically, I thought, but it made a terrible screeching noise. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change? Whew—I feel better already. Internal sponsor, coming through in the clutch.”
Jeremy looked at me in silence for about five seconds, trying to decide if I was an asshole. Finally, probably because he liked my sister, he gave me the benefit of the doubt.
“You’re funny,” he said. “Lizzie said you were funny. You guys are both funny.”
“Maybe we could be in a talent show,” I said.
“I don’t think we’re that funny,” Lizzie said.
Some of the dogs were very small. Little terriers, weighed no more than eight or ten pounds. He’d come home with the stories about what had happened to them, and I’d be like, who would even think of that? He was one of the founders of the first no-kill shelter in our state, but even at the no-kill there were dogs that nothing could be done with, dogs you couldn’t in good conscience adopt out to anyone. There had been four of those dogs living with him when we’d met. By the time I left, there were eleven. There were rooms in my house I couldn’t enter. We’d both been bitten too many times to count, our arms and legs scarred with wounds he’d stitched up himself because if we went to a hospital then a report would have to be made. “When I said no kill, I meant no kill,” he’d said to me on several occasions. And how could you not love a man who cared that much, a man who would stay up all night sitting three feet (no closer, no farther) from a beagle who cried in her sleep, or who cuddled a muzzled greyhound who did not want to bite you, really really did not want to, but would if given the chance?
“Someday they’ll find you both dead in the house,” Lizzie had said once. (I’m Going to Tell You What You Already Know . . . ) “They’ll find what’s left of you. You wouldn’t live with wolves, would you? You wouldn’t share your house with tigers?”
And in the end it was true that, all danger aside, all bites forgiven, I no longer loved him but only pitied him, resented him, only felt foolish and cheated for the years I’d spent in that house competing for his affections when it had never even been close. How could I compete with a one-eyed-chow mix who had suffered his whole life, and now, wordless, asked for nothing in return but just to not be tortured, nothing in return but simple understanding when he snarled and lunged at the actual hand that was feeding him?
“Maybe tomorrow you could let me get a triple word score,” I said to Lizzie, the night after we went out with Jeremy. She had been beating me especially brutally the previous few days, and had just played “LIFE” off my E to claim the last triple word score on the board. “Just one, you know? Just maybe you could leave one for me tomorrow, if you don’t have anything all that great to play on it. What do you think?”
“I thought you didn’t care,” she said.
“I don’t care-care,” I said. “I just feel like sometimes you could not win by quite as much. Are you going to beat Jeremy like this? Because normally people don’t really like being demolished.”
She looked at me over the half glasses. “That’s nice that you’re so worried about him,” she said. “I think he can probably handle it.”
“Well you might just want to warn him. That’s all I’m saying.”
I imagined Jeremy here, at the table with us, the jet packs whizzing by the window, his big stupid octopus magician banker arms reaching out to play some pathetic three-letter word that closed off a whole section of the board, “SIT” off my I with his T on a double letter score, still thinking he had a chance against her. God, three-person Scrabble. The box said “2–4 players” but that was crap. No serious Scrabble player ever played three-person Scrabble, never mind four. The board was too crowded. There were not enough decent letters to go around.
On Friday Lizzie was at an all-day workshop at her school. I left the house a little before noon to walk to the coffee shop, and saw Jeremy standing in the corner of the parking lot, leaning against a stop sign. I had one moment when I was sure he was actually a creepy stalker murderer, staking out our apartment, but then he saw me and waved his big gangly arm and trotted over.
“Hey,” he said. “Can I walk with you for a minute?”
This was when I realized that he had been standing in the parking lot waiting for me to come out. It was muggy and his forehead was slick with sweat. He didn’t drive. Where had he come from? How long had he been lurking there?
“Sure,” I said.
“Something’s happened,” he said. He stuffed his hands in his shorts pockets, which stifled his gangliness in a disconcerting way. “Something amazing but I feel really bad about it. My wife and kid are coming back from Ohio.”
I only missed one step, but it was a big one, off the curb, and it took me four more steps to not fall down. “I didn’t know you had a wife and kid in Ohio,” I said, once I had righted myself.
“We’ve been separated for almost two years. Because of the drinking. Lizzie knew about it. I thought it was all over. But yesterday Julie called and said she wants to give it another go.”
I stopped and turned to him. “Does Tina know about the magic?” I whispered.
“What?”
“Nothing. Never mind,” I said.
“Listen.” He grabbed my arm. It was the kind of grab that was just one degree too rough, the kind of grab that set off warning bells. But maybe he was just frantic. He looked frantic. He looked like he hadn’t slept. “They’re coming back,” he said. “They’re getting in the car and driving here. Today. Until I met Lizzie, this was all I ever thought about. This was everything. My girl’s seven years old. Next week she’s eight.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said. “Tell her I said happy birthday.”
He let go of my arm. “Why are you such a bitch to me? You don’t even know me.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Why are you standing on a street corner telling the sister of the girl you’re dating that your wife and kid are driving in from Ohio? Why don’t you call your sponsor? Why don’t you talk to, I don’t know, Lizzie? Maybe?”
“I don’t know what to say,” he said.
“Do you want to give it another go?”
“Of course,” he said. “It’s my wife and kid.”
“And what about Lizzie?”
“I know,” he said. His creases creased. He deflated like a big gangly armed parade balloon. “That’s the part I feel so bad about. She’s a great girl. But, you know. It’s my wife and kid.”
“And why are you telling me and not her?”
He gathered himself again, looked at me square. “I thought maybe you could tell her for me,” he said.
Because men, I thought. Because this was what they did. Because they were capable of love but they were always loving the wrong things: bourbon, Labrador mixes, wife&kid in Ohio. And then they could never get themselves out of anything. There were no tricks for that.
She was at her workshop until late so it was after ten when we started playing.
“Listen,” I said. “I have to tell you something.”
“That sounds bad.”
“It is. Jeremy told me he’s going back to his wife. Or his wife is coming back to him. Wife and kid. From Ohio.”
“Wow,” she said. “He told you that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He was waiting in the parking lot, all lurky. He didn’t want to tell you himself.”
“I don’t blame him,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to tell me, either.”
She was quiet for a minute. She drew her tiles and began to arrange them on her rack. She didn’t seem particularly sad. As a child I always imagined she was too smart to be sad, that the two things did not naturally coexist, that sadness indicated some sort of intellectual failure—a lack of grasping the complete situation, perhaps—of which she just wasn’t capable. Of course, I grew up and realized this wasn’t entirely true, but her sadness still seemed smarter and more respectable—somehow muted, less pathetic—than my own.
“That was his big dream,” Lizzie said. “When I first met him, when we were just friends, he told me that was the thing that kept him sober, thinking that might happen.”
“Well,” I said. “Yeah. I guess it did.”
“It must be nice,” she said. “To get a prize for not drinking. A reward.” She rearranged two letters on her rack. “You know, to win. Must be nice.”
I tried to think of something funny to say but I couldn’t come up with anything. For the first time since I’d moved into the
townhouse, the days and years ahead seemed like they might be days to be endured instead of relished.
Then she said, “Too bad I don’t drink anymore.”
She had never said anything like this to me before, not even as a joke. “Do you need to call your sponsor or something?” I asked.
She looked up from her letters. “You are my sponsor,” she said. “And I’m yours. We sponsor each other.”
“Since when?”
“Since the Carter administration.”
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t get the memo.”
“Well, now you finally know what you’ve been doing all these years.”
It was late. But we had nothing to get up for in the morning. We could play all night if we wanted. There was no one to answer to.
“As your sponsor,” I said, “I will now let you beat me at Scrabble.”
“That’s very big of you,” she said.
This is not a story about a new beginning. This is not a story about screwing up your courage and getting back out there. This is just a story about closing the door and playing Scrabble with your sister. At least for a while. At least for the summer.
“Draw your letters already,” Lizzie said.
A PROPER BURIAL
It had been three days and the dog was still in the freezer. Simon went down every couple hours to check on her, though what exactly he was checking for he couldn’t say. Each time he opened the lid she was still a stiff chocolate Lab with frosted whiskers, stretched the length of the Frigidaire Elite. He’d gaze at her until he felt he was letting too much of the chill escape, and then he’d gently lower the freezer lid and climb the basement steps, the cordless phone moist in his hand.
He’d been trying to reach Rachel since Sunday night. She’d taken Charlie skiing in the Poconos, where her parents had rented a cabin for the week. They’d planned the trip long before the dog had been diagnosed, so of course Simon had initially agreed to it, but when Rachel had come to pick up Charlie on Saturday morning Simon had greeted her grimly at the door, shaking his head.