“Oh my God,” Dana said.
“I came home early to see you; to just see you. But once again, you weren’t here.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “You weren’t here.”
Dana shot up too. “I’m not a mind reader, Allie, how the hell was I supposed to know that? I was at work. Earning the dollars that keep this family running? It’s not like I was out slamming down beers and cheating on you; I was at work.”
“You may as well be cheating, it’s the same thing. You’re not here, Dana. You’re at your desk, talking to clients, eating with colleagues, captivated by other things. And we’re back here, waiting for you to waltz in the door. We’re always second. Always.”
“I’m somewhere else because I have to be.” He rubbed both hands across his face. Then he smashed his pillow again. “I can’t be two places at one time, although God knows, I try. When I’m at work I feel guilty because I know I should be home, and I want to be home. Then when I’m home, I feel guilty about everything I’ve left undone or patched together at work. You think I don’t make sacrifices at work to get home, but I do. I just don’t play the martyr about it.”
He grabbed his pillow and lurched out of bed. “God, Allie, I’m not sure how many times we can keep having this fight. I’m tired in my bones.” He pivoted roughly and stomped out.
Now the tears came, burning hot and heavy. Allie fell face down on her pillow and sobbed like she’d never be able to stop.
————
The next morning, Allie and Dana spoke only when they had to during the usual sprint to get all four of them up, dressed, breakfasted, and loaded with the various briefcases, backpacks, lunches, jackets, lists, library returns, and all the other props they would need for their respective days. The kids didn’t notice the difference.
Both Allie and Dana had spent sleepless nights, wrenching back and forth and side to side, oblivion only briefly granted as the inky night ebbed into the soft pencil-gray of dawn. Their emotions had thrashed around as well, from anger to grief to anger to loneliness to optimism to despair. Both of them had landed briefly on the necessity of taking time for just the two of them to get away and reconnect, re-romance. And both had summarily dismissed the possibility as the immediate demands of a busy life elbowed in. In the guest room down the hall, deadlines and deals, phone calls and reports filled Dana with anxiety as the mini-vacation with Allie packed up and fled his imagination. And under the twisted blankets in their king-sized bed, Matthew and Gillian’s end-of-school pageantry and accompanying emotional regression paraded across Allie’s thoughts of holding hands with Dana on the beach. She also knew that there was no way she could go away and leave Megan right now.
As they climbed into their separate cars, both Allie and Dana resigned themselves to the fact that this fight, along with all their other ones, would get stuffed into the attic trunk of unresolved angst, to be brought down and aired anew another time. They knew that stowing it away just increased the dangerous undertow between them, dragging them in different directions, but neither of them knew if they were capable of the enormous strength it would take to swim back against the unforgiving current.
And they tried not to watch as they drifted further and further apart.
A month later, Dana moved out.
Chapter 13
Journal Entry #13
July 11, 2001
My mother never left a note. Was it because she had nothing to say? Did she feel that her motives were so obvious she need not explain? Maybe the act was so impulsive that she never had time. Or perhaps she was simply in too much pain. I’ll never know. Nor will I ever know her frame of mind at the time; what made her consider it, what the final, determining factor was that spurred her to take her own life. I can guess, and as my father has for 30 years and as I may for 30 more, re-guess. But I’ll never know.
I think that even if she had left words on a piece of paper, they wouldn’t have been sufficient. They would have been two-dimensional, monotone in both the black ink and the state of mind. We would have had just as many gnashing, piranha-like questions: Is this how she felt the day before? The previous year? All her life?
And how could a few scribbled sentences portray all that dumped her at that option, that decision? How could a note give us all we crave to understand? No matter how lengthy the explanation, we would have been left with empty pages, gaping holes into which we would have read our own conclusions, assigned our own interpretations and beliefs. Her true intentions would have been lost in the limitations of black and white, in the struggle to articulate the depth of her feelings, and in our struggle to grasp the intricacies of meaning—layers of delicate lace beneath the words.
It’s a rare thing to truly understand another person’s experience. Even if we are familiar with the story, it’s rare that we are privy to all of the ingredients, can grasp the richness, savor the taste, feel the texture that each fragment of the story had for the teller. We’re shown pieces of someone’s narrative, specific editions that are polished and palatable enough to present. Then once shared, once the chosen words are set free into a conversation, they become pureed with the listener’s own momentary mood and long standing history—as much as he may try to remain unbiased—ensuring that with the retelling, the tale has been filtered into two slightly disparate versions of the original. Both the narrator and the audience then operate on these adaptations as if they’re real; and they are real to each person.
We all have a story. And much of the time, we don’t even know another person’s table of contents. But there I am, standing in a cocktail conversation, chatting with casual friends and acquaintances and sharing a bit of my own tale with the group. I describe an abbreviated experience, using a dictionary of adjectives and verbs that sketch a decent overview, and perhaps drench it all in a humorous tone for effect. There’s obviously a much longer story behind the one I tell, an elaborate framework as to why I felt that way, how the scene unfolded as it did. And I assume people get that, they understand where I’m coming from, we’re on the same page. I’m socially gliding, at the top of my game, entertaining this group of people who are smiling and laughing along with me, getting it, getting me; only to reconsider the story later through a different lens and realize, “Oh my God, they must think I’m crazy or stupid or a cold bitch.” Or even worse, to later learn something about one of the people in that group that makes what I said and how I said it totally inappropriate and even hurtful.
Obviously with strangers, there is no way we can know their story, although we almost always think we do. A woman pushes her creaky cart through the grocery store and based on the few things we observe—the items she’s grabbing, the way she’s dressed, the way she’s snapping at her kids—and bang, we know this person. We’ve got it all figured out. She’s a bad mother, she’s rude, she’s trash, she’s no one we would spend time with. We have no idea whether she’s just lost her father, whether she’s at the end of her normally saint-like rope with her children, or whether she’s reached a dead end.
We’re only human. And while it’s human nature to assume, to stereotype, it is also human nature to defy categorization. We tend to forget that side of humanity, we forget to allow for ourselves and for others to be what we are—imperfect, defying stereotype. In the recesses of our minds we understand that everyone has flaws and pain. But all too often in the reality of the moment, we want to catalog, to know, and so we thrust people up on shimmering pedestals of awe, or we snicker at those who we think are more human than the rest of us—people whose stories, we think, are a little easier to read.
As I move through the supermarket now, I try to remember that we’re all just doing our best; our best at juggling all the observable and invisible balls that life has thrown up in the air for us with such high expectations. And maybe at times there are just too many in the air and our best is stymied; some balls fall—our work slips, our patience is thin, we are rude in th
e grocery store. But as we desperately try to keep the most challenging spheres of our life off the ground, maybe that’s the best we can scrape up at the moment. Tomorrow may be easier, or harder, and our best will look different.
Most importantly, when I get home from the store now, I’m working on sharing my dropped balls. It’s terrifying to peel back the layers and stand before Dana, cold and naked, exposing a vulnerability, offering a shameful secret, baring a scar. I tremble–will he leave? And there is no script, no snappy music in the background to assure me it will all be okay. But Dana is there, listening, holding my heart.
And giving me his.
There are many reasons why my mother could have taken her own life. I’ll never know those reasons, and in my eternal quest for understanding, it would be so easy for me to believe the worst about myself. But this time, I’m not going to walk the easy path.
I think she did it because for her, it was the ultimate gift to my brothers and me. In her mind, she took her life to spare us ours; ours which she treasured so much that the possibility that she might hurt us, and the knowledge that she had already hurt Paul, was literally unbearable. Of course, I’m not saying that the choice she made was a good one, far from it. But I guess in that moment, it was the only one she could see.
This theory may not be the truth; but it means I was loved. So that’s the story I’m going to go with.
July 11, 2001
Nantucket, MA
Allie closed her journal and inhaled the thick, salty air. It was early morning and along with the screech of seagulls and the background deep breathing of the ocean, she could hear Dana, Matthew, and Gillian downstairs trying to stifle a bout of laughter and not being entirely successful at it. So often over the years, at five in the morning and stumbling around in the dark, she and Dana had cursed the fact that their kids were perky and raring to go as soon as the sun peeked over the horizon. But this week, in this house packed with four families, she and Dana relished rising early and getting the worm; the worm being a bit of time on their own before all cheery hell broke loose.
After years of wondering aloud about the four families vacationing together, Allie, Megan, Tess, and Zoe had taken the plunge and rented a six-bedroom house on Nantucket. And so far, five days into the adventure, everyone had given themselves over to the potent cocktail of hot-sun relaxation and saltwater buoyancy. The weather had been beautiful, the house just a few barefoot steps from the beach, and everyone, from baby Rose (Megan and Jared’s eight-month-old, who loved the beach so much that she ingested fistfuls of sand at every opportunity) to Matthew (who at seven had become a champion body-surfer) to the four significant others (who had all thought a week with the group seemed, well, daunting) was having fun, to which the spontaneous and constantly erupting laughter was testament.
————
Dana and Gavin shared a chuckle as they jumped into Dana’s minivan. Zoe had asked if someone would run to the store to pick up a few things, or rather she had yelled, “Can someone go to the store?” over the riot of five tired children all clambering for snacks, juice, dry clothes, hugs, and stories at the same time. Both of the men had literally raced each other to the door.
“Was that obvious?” Dana grinned.
“Oh man, I don’t know. But I needed to get out of there.” Gavin smiled back and took an exaggerated breath.
“You know we’re getting old when a trip to the store in a goldfish-infested minivan sounds exciting,” Dana said.
“Pretty sad, huh?” Gavin said. “You’d think we’d have a higher tolerance for the kid-craziness because we’re at the office all day; we should be able to handle them for a few hours, or even a week. And I only have one!” Gavin often felt guilty asking Tess for a break. Hadn’t he just been away from Juliette all day, all week? He believed he should be “on” once he was home, reacquainting himself with his daughter, making up for the lost hours at his desk. To go for a run or to read the paper in solitude felt like a luxury he had no right to request. “Sometimes I don’t know how Tess stays so calm. I feel like a short-tempered ogre next to her.”
“Maybe you only get thick-skinned if you’re around it all the time. My mom had four kids, and she was really patient. Bossy, but patient.”
“I’m one of four too,” Gavin said, “and my brother has Down’s. Somehow my mom always held it together. Or maybe that’s just what I remember in hindsight.”
Dana took his eyes off the road and glanced at Gavin. “I didn’t know about your brother.” He paused. “So, your new job at Special Olympics… ”
Gavin smiled.
Dana looked back at the road and nodded.
“My whole life I felt all this pressure to be… I don’t know, stellar… for my brother, for my parents. But in the end, they were happy when I was on Wall Street and they were happy when I quit. Turns out, they just want me to be me. I thought they wanted me to be someone else.”
They watched the road in a comfortable silence.
“How is it that the generations before us had such huge posses of kids?” Dana said. “Were they more intelligent or completely insane?”
“I think it was lack of contraception.”
Dana chuckled. “You ready for number two?”
“Are you ever ready?”
Dana shook his head. “For Allie, the second was a piece of cake—she was already knee-deep in diapers and sleepless nights. It was adjusting to the first that was challenging for her. For me though, Gillian’s arrival was harder. With number two there’s no sitting on the bench; you’re a full-time player.”
“I love being a player, it’s definitely the best game in the world. But the bench time is key.”
They parked and walked into the store, their flip-flops clicking.
“You’ve got the list?” Gavin asked.
Dana pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “Fish, bread, cheese, salad stuff, hot dogs, wine.” He chuckled. “The wine is in all caps.”
Gavin grabbed a bag of Doritos and held it up with a twinkle in his eye.
“And Doritos.” Dana laughed.
“You guys thinking about moving from man-to-man to zone?” Gavin asked as he pushed the cart down the aisle.
“We’re thinking about it, but right now we’re just taking things one step at a time.”
Gavin nodded as he threw a bag of potato chips into the cart. “After this vacation, I’m cutting all this stuff out. I’ve got to lose a few pounds.” Then he grinned as he threw in a pound bag of M&Ms. “After vacation.”
————
Ever since Tess had floated the idea of this vacation—ever so casually over steaks one night—Gavin had avoided the conversation if possible, and had been vague when pressed.
“We’ve got to give them an answer,” Tess finally said one day as they were painting the nursery light green. “We’ve dragged our feet for as long as we can.”
“You’re nice to say ‘we.’” Gavin smiled.
“Well, now I’ve got you trapped in here, notice my strategic position near the door? And you’re not getting by this stomach without a decision.” Tess stuck out her pregnant belly so that it blocked the door.
Gavin sighed and continued painting long, even strokes of Spring Fern. “There’s just so much going on, I’m not sure it’s a great time to take off. My new job, your job, the house, our new addition… ” He leaned over and kissed the top of Tess’s stomach.
“Don’t think that’s your ticket by me.”
He looked up at her. “Are you sure you want to go?”
Tess was quiet for a moment. “The elephant in the room here is Zoe, right? And P.S., how great is it that I’m not making a fat joke?” She smiled. “But seriously, I know you’re worried about Zoe and me, in a sweet, protecting-me way.”
Gavin stared at her.
She smiled again. “I on the other ha
nd, am looking at it differently, as a chance to start, maybe not fresh, but just again.” She sat down on a chair and put her hand over her stomach. “It’s funny, Zoe and I have been in the same group for what, 10 years? But we’ve never really been friends.” She snorted. “In fact, we’ve often resented each other, all while being connected in this tight little circle. But we know a ton about each other, maybe now more than ever.”
Learning about Zoe’s unwanted pregnancy and witnessing her obvious alcoholism had humanized her for Tess. There was after all, a chink in Zoe’s expensive suit of armor, a scratch in her brilliant 24-carat life and persona. No glee accompanied this realization, no vengeful satisfaction; just acknowledgement that even Zoe could, at times, feel powerless.
Gavin had also told Tess about his visit to Zoe the day he walked out. She listened with wide eyes to how Zoe, after hearing the whole story of Tess’s affair, had told Gavin to go home, to forgive Tess. Support from Zoe? Tess was shocked. She wondered if she had just misread this woman through her own veil of bitterness.
Tess looked at Gavin. “I feel like we might be able to move on. Honestly I’m ready, and I think Zoe is too.”
“But we’re not just talking about a dinner here.”
“I know it’s weird for you when we all get together now. I know you feel like I’m watching, she’s watching.” Tess shrugged. “Old habits die hard. But it’s not with the same vinegar in my mouth. And if you and I can talk about it at the end of the day…”
“You really want to do this?”
“So much has changed, for the better, right? Hey I’m pregnant and some days, I actually feel sexy.” She smiled.
He smiled and then kissed her on the mouth. “You want to prove it to me?”
————
“This is truly decadent. I could get used to this,” Tess said as she eased onto a lounge chair in the sun next to Zoe.
The Truth Is a Theory Page 34