by Dan Deweese
“I know what I think,” she said. “I want to marry Grant. But he’s older than me, so this marriage might not last forever. Maybe he’ll die before me. Or he’ll find out he doesn’t like marriage. Or I’ll find out I don’t like marriage. Or maybe he’ll leave me for some even younger woman, or maybe I’ll leave him for some even older man.” She gasped silently in mock horror, a gesture so filled with disdain that it took me aback. “I’m aware that people think I’m some kind of child, wandering into something I can’t possibly understand, or that our age difference is some kind of scandal that no one should mention, or that they should treat with some kind of weird, desperately positive spin. Aunt Sheila actually tried to tell me I was smart to marry an older man, because I won’t have to worry that he’ll go after a younger woman, because I’ll always be the younger woman. I didn’t even know what to say to that.”
“There’s no point in trying to respond to her. You know that.”
“But I keep getting all of these frozen smiles and courteous little handshakes from people who I can tell are just doing their best not to reveal their doubts about whether this will really provide me with happiness and security for the rest of my life—as if my goal is to be a little housewife, at home doing laundry for the next forty years. I don’t know what our life will be like. And so what? What does it matter if I know what I’m doing or not? Does anyone know what they’re doing? It just gets harder and harder for me not to scream, ‘Look, this is what I’m doing! I want to be with this person right now!’ It’s nobody else’s business, and if things change at some point, then they change. I don’t think they’re going to change, but even if they do, so what? There are more important things to worry about.”
“Than what?” I said. “Than your life?”
She shook her head. “I know people think Grant is taking advantage of me,” she said. “But he is not.”
I was having a hard time following her. Was she trying to say she was happy, or that her happiness somehow didn’t concern her? And I noticed that in her fervent naming of the supposedly unspoken issues, she had mentioned Grant’s age, but had passed over the fact that Grant was—had been—a friend of mine. “That’s all fine,” I said. “But I don’t think you should enter a marriage thinking of it as a short-term relationship.”
“I’m not,” she said. “But I’m also not sure how you can be all that worried about that, when you and Mom’s marriage didn’t last, right?”
Was her grievance with me personally? Or was I just in the wrong place at the wrong time? “Your mother and I were headed in different directions,” I said. “You know that.”
“But how did you figure that out?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It happened slowly. We each wanted control over our time, I guess, or over how we lived. And we didn’t agree on how to do that, or we couldn’t figure out how to do it, so we made a decision.”
She nodded as if telling me it was all right to stop—as if it wasn’t really the question she’d wanted to ask. “So what happens if Grant and I both want control?” she said.
The question was asked in earnest, and she waited for my response with an expression I knew well: she was a daughter challenging her father to explain how the world worked. And yet I could not help her there. “I guess I don’t know the answer to that,” I said.
“Well,” she said, shrugging. “How could you, right? You and Mom split up.”
If Miranda knew what other people thought about her and Grant, then surely she knew people assumed Grant was in charge. A successful businessman in his late forties doesn’t marry a girl in her twenties so that the girl can tell him what to do. Did she really believe she and Grant were entering into a partnership in which each would have the same amount of power? He had money; she had none. He had traveled extensively; she had gone on a few childhood vacations to mid-level swimming-and-golf resorts, and a few ski trips. The question of what would happen if she and Grant both wanted control was off the mark, because the question didn’t apply to him. Grant would certainly expect to have control over his work and home life, and the idea that Miranda would ever tell him how to go about his business seemed preposterous. “So are you worried about how people are talking to you, or about the fact that your mother and I got divorced?” I said.
“No,” she said, “I know I’m talking about those things, but that’s not it. Or it’s not that simple. There’s really nothing to resolve.”
Except how to handle her feeling that people’s enthusiasm for her wedding was false. And what would happen the first time she told Grant she didn’t want him to go on a business trip, because he was traveling too much. Or maybe what would happen the first time she told him she didn’t want to go on a business trip with him, because she was tired of tagging along. “You know, when you were a little girl and you threw a tantrum, you had this brain-rattling scream,” I said. “The pitch was so high that the vibrations would basically stop everyone’s brain from working. You would cry, throw things, spit—real Exorcist stuff—and then unleash this scream, and no one could talk to you. The only way to get you to talk was to sit on the floor and let you scream and hit me with your little fists, and whisper to you. And you wouldn’t hear me at first, but you would know I’d said something. So I would whisper it again, and maybe again, until you stopped hitting me.”
“And this worked?”
“Not really. You would still scream. But you would scream what was wrong, right into my ear, and then I could respond.”
“That’s why you keep the car radio so loud.”
“Probably,” I said, and then lowered my voice and whispered, “But Miranda? I can’t understand you right now. You have to tell me what is wrong.”
She laughed, but looked down, avoiding my eyes. “I don’t think that’s going to work this time, Dad. I’ve talked to you, and I’ve talked to Mom, and I’ve thought about it. I just have to make decisions for myself.”
“What is this ‘it’? What have you talked to your mother about?”
“Nothing. I’m just overthinking things. Or I’m thinking about too many different things. I have to—” she started, but then hesitated. “I have to use the bathroom.” She stood, and laid her hand briefly on my shoulder as she passed. I heard her trade a word or two with the waitress, who asked if Miranda knew where she was going, and then her footsteps faded as she left the room.
So there had been no accident. She and Grant had not eloped. And rather than my imagined scene in which she would request permission to disappear, in person she had defended her resolve to do exactly what she was doing. She had expressed uncertainty about who she would become as a married woman, yes, but I wondered how much the marriage’s role in that uncertainty was bit of a smokescreen, anyway. Miranda was only three years out of college, and was gamely trying to use her degree in arts and letters by working as an assistant in an art gallery. Most people her age, trying to find their way into careers and lives, were uncertain about who they might become, and what unforeseen people or powers would take part in their transformation. I realized that what she found most insulting, of course, was that exact conclusion: the belief that at twenty-five she was not yet a full-fledged adult, but still in some protean, pre-adult phase. Maybe this wasn’t what she felt about herself—maybe she felt she was doing exactly what she wanted to do and being exactly who she wanted to be. If so, was it naive of her to believe that, or was it condescending of me to think she was wrong? How she and Grant spoke to each other when no one else was around, how they negotiated their time, how they chose who did what and when: these were things I couldn’t know, and didn’t want to. A series of images fluttered through my head. As I sat there in the restaurant dining room, watching condensation trickle down my glass, I was also adjusting Miranda’s blankets during her afternoon nap when she was no more than a few years old. The room’s white curtains stirred in the breeze as I placed my hand over hers, and was surprised by the heat of her little palm. I watched her let go of a playgroun
d swing as it reached its apogee, so that she could hang in the air, her hair suspended in a float of gravity-defying stillness, before she returned to the earth, landing on her feet with a happy thud. I heard her peal of laughter a few years later, her hat and false nose discarded as she sorted chocolates and candies beneath the glow of the kitchen table lamp one later Halloween night, a girl witch in dishabille, intoxicated with candy bar delight. Among the million images of my daughter that had passed through my eyes, why were these the ones that lingered? Asleep during a toddler nap, aloft above the playground, laughing at the table: each was of Miranda alone, I noticed. Or alone, save for the presence of the mind recording the moments, of course. Save for me.
How long had I been staring at my glass of soda? It seemed too long. A middle-aged couple had been seated across the room, and three young men stood at the entrance, waiting to be shown to a table. I stood, walked past the young men, and continued down the hall toward the restrooms. I stopped in front of the door to the women’s room and thought, The only woman customer is at her table, so it’s just the staff I have to consider here. I pushed the door a couple inches open with my foot. “Miranda? Is anyone in here?” I said. There was no response, so I pushed the door open, taking a half step into the room to do so. It was a standard bathroom: a tile floor, mirrors above each of two sinks set within a beige countertop, and two stalls. From where I was standing, though, I couldn’t see whether the stalls were occupied.
“Can I help you, sir?” the waitress said. She couldn’t have done a better job of startling me if she’d been trying.
“My daughter,” I said, stepping back and allowing the door to swing shut. “She said she was going to the bathroom a while ago, but she hasn’t come back.”
“You can’t go in there, though.”
“I understand. But I think it’s empty.”
“I’ll check.” She pushed the door open, stepped in exactly as I had, and said, “Is there anyone in here?” She walked in, letting the door close behind her, and a few seconds later stepped out again. “There’s nobody in there,” she said.
“Is there anywhere else she might have gone?” I said. “Are there other bathrooms?”
“This is it,” she said. “But if you want to go back to your table, I can look around.”
So not only was I not allowed to call Miranda’s name into the women’s restroom, but I wasn’t allowed to walk around the restaurant, either. I was in trouble, it seemed. I told the waitress thanks, I would appreciate that, and headed back to my table while she went into the kitchen. From my table, I watched a young couple walk in the front door, look at me and the others in the dining room, share a quiet look, and then turn and leave.
“I asked the kitchen staff,” the waitress said, returning. “They said they might have heard someone go out the back door, but I went out there, and I don’t see anyone. I’m not sure where else she could be.”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess I’ll try her phone. Thanks for checking.”
I dialed Miranda’s number, but there was no answer. I left a message saying I was in the restaurant wondering where she was, and then placed the phone in front of me on the table, studying it while I thought about how cell phones seem to exist primarily so that people can avoid ever actually having a telephone conversation. And then the phone buzzed in a way that was entirely new and confusing to me. I picked it up and said hello, but not only was there no answer, there wasn’t even the sound of an empty line. What now? I thought. When I looked at the display, it indicated a message waiting for me. I dialed voice mail, but there were no new messages there, so I hit the menu button and found that there was, indeed, a menu titled “Messages,”0m titled “can’t talk now. h.” When I opened the message, it read:
Can’t talk now.
have to go. see you later.
sorry.
I understood what a text message was—the tellers at the bank were doing it all the time—but this was the first one I, personally, had ever received. I pressed the respond button and stared at a little blinking cursor. This was a form of communication for young people, I felt—it was ridiculous for me to try to take part. What could one even communicate by pressing numbers on a telephone? And this was a strategy, I thought: Miranda knew a text message would limit my ability to respond. With great concentration and the correction of some mistakes, then, I managed to type:
okay.
I stared at the ridiculous response, wanting to add to it. Communicating this way seemed laborious and pointless, though, so I gave up and hit send. A little animated envelope cartwheeled across the screen amid flashes of color, and then the standard display returned, as if nothing had happened. Had the message been successfully sent? I hadn’t the slightest idea. When I looked up and saw the waitress walking toward the couple across the room, I briefly considered asking her the meaning of a cartwheeling envelope on a cell phone screen, but decided against it. Instead I said, “Is it too late to cancel our order?”
I didn’t think it was necessary for her to slump as dramatically as she did—this was the worst news she had ever received, it seemed. But I left a five-dollar bill on the table anyway, which worked out to a twenty-five percent tip for her on the price of two drinks. And then I walked out of the restaurant and paused, blinking, in the midday sun. I wondered which direction Miranda had gone. There was no way to know.
ON A SATURDAY MORNING only a few weeks after our trip to the coast, I drove up to St. Joseph’s, an older neighborhood on the north side of town. St. Joseph’s, which had been its own city until being annexed in the 1920s, had maintained a thriving commercial district into the early 1970s. It had fallen on hard times then, however, and by the 1980s the words St. Joe’s primarily evoked a sense of crime and disrepair. It had been a couple years since I’d had any reason to visit the neighborhood, but the two-story buildings, faded awnings, and stenciled lettering on the dusty shop windows that lined Petrus Avenue, the neighborhood’s main drag, were exactly as I remembered them. When I parked, I examined the parking meter on the curb to confirm that it was even functioning. It appeared to be, so I fed it a few coins, walked past a hardware store that seemed open for business, an empty pet store that did not, and arrived at the address Grant had given me: a storefront which featured stenciled white letters on its window, spelling a single word: TAILOR.
Inside, there was a long, unmanned counter at the front—the place had maybe been a dry cleaner’s at one point—and beyond it, a few racks of suit coats and trousers along one side of the room, and some dressing rooms and mirrors on the other. The only people present were Grant and a short, gaunt older man dressed in a three-piece wool suit, whom Grant, after beckoning me to join them, introduced as Mr. Anthony. When Grant had told me he needed a new suit for work and he wondered if I, too, might be interested in the experience of buying a tailored suit, I had been intrigued. Now, though, standing in the old store, in front of an actual Mr. Anthony, I was uncertain. Did I really need a tailored suit? A shirt and tie were required at the bank, but I had never seen a teller, at my branch or any other, wearing a suit. “You can just try some things, if you want,” Mr. Anthony said quietly, reading my uncertainty. “You’re not obliged to make any decisions today.”
His tone surprised and reassured me, and it was only five minutes later that Grant and I stood next to one another on small pedestals, wearing white undershirts and unhemmed wool slacks as we studied ourselves in a mirror. Mr. Anthony knelt at our ankles, working quickly and methodically with pins and a measuring tape, a situation so foreign to me that just a few polite questions from Grant about how I was doing elicited a nervous chattiness from me, and I found myself going on about what a nice time Sandra and I had had at the beach, and how much we’d enjoyed spending time with Grant and Gina. I even mentioned how the more I thought about what Grant had said on the deck of the restaurant, the more I realized that this was a time in my life when I was entering new situations, and that I really did appreciate his willingness to tal
k to me about those things. “And then inviting me here today, to a place where I can learn about some of this stuff directly,” I said, “I appreciate it, because I don’t know anyone else who would invite me to do something like this, or who would even be able to tell me where I should go if I wanted to try and do it on my own.”
Grant had no reaction to any of this other than to nod while studying himself in the mirror, as if the cut of his pants were a subject so consuming that it made responding to anything else impossible. And when Mr. Anthony, bustling about my ankles, accidentally stabbed me with a pin just above the heel and I cried out in an embarrassingly girlish fashion, Grant just smiled politely. Mr. Anthony quietly apologized to me, the four or five straight pins he held between his lips lending him the diction of a street tough in an old gangster movie, and then told us he had the measurements he needed.
It wasn’t until we were slipping back into our own clothes that Grant spoke. “I’m glad you’ve enjoyed spending time with us,” he said. “And I’m glad you’re okay with what I said at the beach. I felt like I didn’t do a very good job of explaining what I meant. I probably came off like the exact asshole I didn’t want to be. But there’s something I have to tell you that I guess is kind of regrettable now, which is that Gina and I have broken up.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of the entirely neutral expression on Grant’s face as he watched himself tucking in his shirt in the mirror. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, dismayed by the strangely modulated tone of voice I heard myself use.
“It’s my problem, really,” he said. “Because Gina is wonderful. It’s just that sometimes things don’t work out. I mean, if anyone knows what I mean, it’s you, right?”
Did I? I had dated Gina for a couple months during my junior year of college, and our relationship had occurred primarily because she had just broken up with some kind of long-term, supposedly serious boyfriend, and I was a nice, unthreatening guy who happened to be doing a group project with her in a communications class. I suspect Gina asked if I wanted to see a movie with her mostly because she so outclassed me socially that she could feel completely in control—she could be confident she was signing up for nothing more than a movie, a confidence that was certainly confirmed when, after shocking me by asking if she could stay the night, she had gently made so many suggestions in bed that she was, for all practical purposes, taking on the role of instructor. I had perfect attendance to my college classes, delivered pizzas four nights a week, had been inside a bar no more than three or four times, had never done any drugs, and had had sex all of two times. After what was certainly fairly unsatisfying sex for her, Gina had told me it was good for her to be with “a nice guy, for once,” a remark I naively took as a compliment. A couple months later, she thanked me for being so nice, but said she felt it would be better for her if she weren’t in a relationship at all for a while, so maybe we could just be friends. Summer break started a few weeks later, and I never heard from her again.