The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

  Somebody laughed and yelled, “Holy shit! Evacuate!”

  “Set off the cherry bombs!” somebody else called out.

  “No, firecrackers! I’ve got firecrackers!”

  “Where are the matches? Get the matches!”

  Jay wasn’t even looking in my direction. He was caught up in the swarm of people all busy laughing and grabbing more beers to take with them when they ran. A guy took out a book of matches and started to light a firecracker right near me, and then Grant took hold of my elbow and steered me out of there, like it was just the most natural thing in the world. We went outside through the back door and were already on the sidewalk, walking fast with our heads down, by the time the first firecracker went off. Behind us, we could see the red and blue lights flashing from the squad cars, and hear a cop on a megaphone saying, “COME OUT OF THE BUILDING NOW.”

  Outside, the night was chilly and smelled a little like gunpowder, but as Grant and I walked, it started to smell instead like the ocean, which was only two blocks away. We slipped into a companionable walk, happy to be out of there without getting arrested. Sometimes when the wind was blowing in just the right direction, it felt as though you were inhaling salt and minerals and everything that would lead to good health, I told him. He laughed at that, and I asked him how old he was and he said he was twenty-five. And then he didn’t say anything else, just sort of cleared his throat a few times. He was very tall, and I had to take an extra step to keep up with him, but then he noticed that and slowed down a little bit. He chuckled and said he wasn’t used to walking with anyone so short.

  “Hey, I didn’t get to set off my cherry bombs,” I said.

  “Thank goodness,” he said.

  “I have two of them in my pocket,” I said, and showed him.

  “I’m surprised anything can fit in the pocket of that skirt,” he said. “If it wasn’t also short, you probably couldn’t even move your legs in it, much less walk. It would be mathematically impossible.”

  “Hmm. There’s actually math for skirts?” I said.

  “Well. No. Not really. But I suppose there could be a formula. It would be geometry. Or trig. Could be a new practical use for math.”

  “Anyway, it’s really just my costume skirt,” I said. “I wear it when I sing in a band.”

  “Oh. So you were planning to perform at the party, then?”

  “No.”

  He laughed. “Tell me this. Do you ever make any sense?”

  “What doesn’t make sense about that?”

  “Why would you claim the skirt is short because it’s a costume that you wear when you’re performing, yet then admit that you were wearing it on an occasion when you weren’t going to perform? You twist logic all around.”

  I took a deep breath. “Well. If you want to know the truth, I wore it because I’m in a band with my boyfriend. He’s that guy who came running down from the roof. He’d been up there with another girl all evening, and I wore the skirt because … well, I just wore it because he likes it when I wear it, and I thought he’d pay more attention to me than to her if I had on this skirt. It was stupid, really.” I couldn’t believe I was telling him this stuff.

  “Ah. And what was he doing up on the roof with some other girl if he’s your boyfriend?”

  “Yeah, well, he’s not what you’d call monogamous.”

  “Oh, he’s not? Well, that’s interesting of him.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, he’s pretty interesting.”

  “A real find. Makes you wonder how guys get the deals they get.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  He laughed. “Do I seem like the type of guy women are interested in? Did you notice women flocking over to talk to me at the party?”

  “I talked to you.”

  “You only talked to me because your boyfriend was hanging out with somebody else, and you wanted a beer from the fridge I happened to be standing in front of.”

  “No. I talked to you because you were sort of nice. About art and all.” I smiled at him. I was thinking he might ask me to go somewhere else with him, maybe walk down to the beach or into town or something, but he didn’t. We got to his friend’s Datsun, which was unlocked, but Grant didn’t have the key to drive it. I was thinking that most guys would have assumed we were going to at least sit in the car and make out for a while, but Grant didn’t seem to have the confidence required to suggest something like that. We just stood there, leaning against it, him with his hands jammed in his pockets. I already felt like I needed to take care of him somehow.

  “Are you from California?” I asked him after a long silence.

  “No. I grew up in rural New Hampshire, in a place you’ve never heard of.” He told me that he actually had a family homestead, where generations of McKays had lived among a bunch of antiques and cows. Snow, ice, presidential primaries, mountains, skiing, all that. I liked his voice, the way he seemed so sure that home and parents weren’t totally bad things.

  I said, just trying out how it sounded: “My parents are getting divorced.”

  He blinked. “That’s a bummer.”

  “Well,” I said. I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself. “I guess they think they stuck it out long enough. And now that my brother and I are nearly grown, they don’t see why they have to live together anymore. It’s really no big problem. I mean, I am grown up. I can handle this.”

  “Still,” said Grant. He looked at me closely. “You probably didn’t think this would ever happen.”

  “Yeah.” I looked off into the distance. A car was coming toward us down the street, and its headlights swept the road, where a crab was running across the yellow line.

  “Probably makes it easier that you’re at school. You have other stuff to concentrate on.”

  “That’s for sure,” I said. “I have loads of things to think about.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “Is one of those things why you hang out with a guy who’s not monogamous, and why you go to parties where people throw cherry bombs?” He was laughing.

  “Would you just listen to yourself? At least I go to parties. At least I don’t tell people they shouldn’t major in what they’re majoring in.”

  He threw back his head and laughed harder. “Ah, a feisty one!” He ducked, as if he expected I might want to hit him. So of course I pretended to, thinking he’d grab my hands and we’d play-wrestle and then he’d kiss me, and we’d go down to the beach and make out and maybe I could start being in love with him for real.

  But none of that happened. He didn’t seem to know what the possibilities were, and after a while, I couldn’t find a place for him in my overactive love imagination, so I got bored and said goodnight and walked myself home. I threw the cherry bombs in the garbage, and they made a pop-pop-pop sound that almost stopped my heart.

  [three]

  2005

  Grant and I make love on Wednesday mornings at seven o’clock.

  What? You don’t have a schedule for something like that? Perhaps you think that sex should arise spontaneously, whenever both people are so inclined. Maybe you are one of those silly, conventional people who think that passion shouldn’t be regulated.

  Believe me, this scheduling thing was all Grant’s idea. And because I like sex and also because I had decided to try to stop arguing with him over minor things, I agreed to it. He’d read a study that said middle-aged people often get so tired or so busy that they just let sex slip out of their routine. He said it was such an irony, how couples spend all those years trying to do it quietly so the kids won’t wake up, or being so hungry for it between times that they ignore all safety precautions and attempt it in the shower (very dangerous), or else they fall on each other during their ten minutes of alone time during the Saturday morning cartoons (unsatisfying)—and then suddenly, middle age hits, the kids move out, and bam! Nobody’s in the mood, and evenings are spent retreating to their separate corners of the house, and then, and then …r />
  “And then what happens to them?” I asked when Grant first brought up the topic. This was before his book had swallowed him up, but perhaps he already knew it was sneaking up behind him, ready to devour him, and he was trying to arrange all the loose ends and appointment calendars before he succumbed. It was the week after Nicky had gone off to school. We still had not mapped out the shape of our grief, and we were standing in the kitchen with the late-afternoon September sun slanting through the kitchen window, suggesting possibilities.

  “What?” he said, and his eyes twinkled. “What happens to them? Oh. Well, I suppose their penises fall silent, their marriages fail, and then civilization as we know it slides into a deplorable decline. And I, for one, don’t think we want to be responsible for that.”

  So Grant and Annabelle McKay are doing their part for the free world. We make love each and every Wednesday morning, barring flu, final exams, or faculty meetings. Standing there at the calendar that day, Grant said it had to be Wednesday because it’s the morning that he has late classes so he doesn’t need to rush off. And it couldn’t be the weekend because he likes the NPR shows too much—and why rush through lovemaking just for the sake of Car Talk? And it couldn’t be at night when we’ve gone to bed because he likes to take a shower after sex, and since he would have already taken a shower in the morning, that would mean he’d need to shower twice in one day, and that would be a waste of water, as well as a waste of time, and when a man is writing a book, there is no sense in wasting even one second.

  See? I’m doing it again—telling things all wrong. I’m making him sound like an automaton, when the truth is that I like making love with Grant; he’s enthusiastic and good and efficient at it, and it’s kind of sexy knowing that on Wednesday morning I am going to get his full attention for at least twenty minutes. Just the other day I got together with some of the faculty wives for lunch, and we got to talking about husbands and sex, as occasionally we’ve done through the years, standing together at faculty parties and on the sidelines at our children’s soccer games. This time we had a shocking agenda item: the history department chairman, Grant’s boss, had upped and left his wife of thirty years and married a grad student—a student—with no warning whatsoever. Naturally we had to have an impromptu meeting about that, hear all the stories, point fingers at the wronging parties, discuss what we would do if that were ever us.

  Everybody else was stunned and disapproving—you could see it in their faces—but I was a little, well, fascinated. So we got to talking about sex, and it turned out that Grant may be right about the middle-aged thing: lots of couples just aren’t doing it anymore, and for no other reason, it seems, than that they fell out of the habit. There were complaints and justifications around the table: husbands who stay up too late watching sexy movies on cable rather than come to a flesh-and-blood wife, and ones who have let themselves get run down, and then encourage their middle-aged wives to have boob lifts and start wearing black lacy things. Some husbands have become boring old farts. They can’t talk without lecturing; they read their wives edifying articles from the New York Times. We laughed and shouted and spilled things and banged on the table with our fists. Julie McNamara, who insisted we all order a bottle of wine if we were going to talk like this, suddenly turned to me and said, “Oh, Annabelle, don’t you dare complain. You’re so lucky to have somebody like Grant. At least he hasn’t gained so much weight that he has to wear one of those breathing machines just so he won’t die in the night.”

  This is the gold standard for judging husbands—that he doesn’t have to breathe into a machine to keep from dying? Everybody laughed about how Grant never does anything wrong, and then Joanna Caprio, whose husband, Mark, made a pass at me at a party ten years ago, said that the best thing about Grant is that he’s got a reputation for being totally immune to any kind of extramarital funny business. At parties, year after year, she pointed out, you can count on him to stand off to the side and chat about labor statistics all night long, and not once get drunk and go off dancing with any of the other women. And nobody has ever heard of a student trying to entice him into giving her a better grade by offering to sleep with him. The whole idea is unthinkable, said Joanna, and I could see everybody picturing my staid and upstanding husband trying to score with some student—a thought that made them laugh and shake their heads.

  I joined in a little uncomfortably, glad they couldn’t see the way I was shredding my napkin in my lap. Yes, I wanted to say to them. Yes, that is all true, but he is coiled up like a spring. You complain about your husbands boring you by reading you articles from the newspaper, or pontificating about the nightly news, but my husband doesn’t speak. It’s as if I’m not there at all.

  And if something takes place that Grant doesn’t like—well, then it’s as though it never happened.

  ANYWAY, SO Wednesday morning arrives, and sure enough, I wake up to the radio coming on at precisely seven o’clock. I can hear Grant tapping away at his laptop in his study. Jeremiah is once again just flitting out of my head, after a dream in which we were on a train that doubled as an outdoor café where you could buy croissants.

  From down the hall, Grant clears his throat with that “ahem” sound he makes. And then he calls, “Annabelle? I’ll be there in just a minute, okay?”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Don’t start without me.”

  “Then you’d better get in here. You know how impatient I am.”

  He laughs, and I hear him typing furiously. Finally he appears in the doorway, blinking and rubbing his hands through his hair, looking like he just pulled himself out of a trance. Which I suppose is what he did. At least half of him is still in 1908.

  I smile at him. At fifty-three, he looks exactly like what he is: a patient, enduring labor historian, professorial and calm. He was never what Sophie and her friends would call a hottie, but I have to say he’s held up well. He still has most of his formerly full head of blond hair, faded now but flopping over his forehead in the front and sprouting a fence of cowlicks in the back. Unlike me, he also still has the same flat stomach he had twenty-eight years ago, and his knees and elbows are so pointy that he can do serious damage to me when he turns over in bed. Even his monogamous penis—I probably shouldn’t be talking about his penis, but what the hell—even his penis is gangly, like he is, yet professorial and dignified.

  He doesn’t say anything, simply starts taking off his yoga pants and T-shirt, folding them up in a neat pile, frowning.

  “How are you?” I say, pulling the down comforter and quilt aside to welcome him back to bed. I catch only a brief glance of his flat, pale butt, his professorial penis—and then he gets in and presses his freezing-cold skin against me. I yelp. “Good God! You’ve turned to ice!”

  “It’s February, Annabelle.” He pronounces the first r in February very precisely. I always say FebYOOary, which drives him nuts. “It’s even snowing outside.”

  “It’s always snowing outside here, and that is why God invented fleece bathrobes for people who get up early. Here, never mind. Put your hands here, and I’ll warm you up.” I put his frozen hands under my sweatshirt, at great personal sacrifice, and press my face against his. He blinks at me; he is always blinking his watery gray eyes. He probably needs lubricating eye drops, and I should talk him into going to see Sam, the eye doctor. I’ll have to remember to make him an appointment. Maybe he’ll even keep it. “I think you may be technically halfway to being cryogenically frozen. How long have you been up?”

  “Since four. I didn’t sleep well,” he says heavily, then clears his throat. Quite unattractively, actually. “I was tossing and turning all night so I finally just got up and went in to write the new section.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. Did you get a lot done, at least?”

  “Some. Not really. I don’t want to talk about it. It’s time for our other concerns now.” He sighs and closes his eyes and concentrates, which means we are entering sex mode now. I kiss him on his cold lip
s and he smooches me back, but I know him well enough to know that he’s not thinking about me or sex; he’s still locked in his book, and his body is not going to consent to anything else right now.

  “Uh-oh. Factory World seems to have followed you back to bed,” I say lightly.

  He’s silent for a moment, and then he says, “It’s awful. This morning I realized that I’ve got to interview more descendants. I don’t have enough. Not nearly enough.”

  “It’ll be okay,” I say. “You’ve gotten five survivors, and the pictures of the kids inside the mill, and the daughter of the foreman—”

  “It’s not enough, Annabelle,” he says, a tad sharply. “And now I’ve got to stop for days and grade exams. I have dozens of essays to read. Dozens! And on top of that I’m not sleeping.”

  I stroke his hair. “Well, if you’re tired, maybe you should go back to sleep for an hour or so. We certainly don’t have to—”

  “Wait,” he says. He sits up, round-eyed with alarm. “Do you have any paper in the nightstand?”

  “Stationery, yes.”

  “Can you get it?”

  I roll over and get the box of fine powder-blue Crane stationery, which came from my mother’s condo when we cleaned it out after she died, and I find a ballpoint pen and roll back and hand the box and the pen to him. I have a momentary pang of sadness—this stationery, my mother. “This will just take a sec,” he says. “Then we’ll go on with our schedule.”

  “Fine. Don’t worry about it. I have all day.”

  He frowns while he writes, and the tip of his tongue sticks out. I lie propped on one elbow and watch him, notice how gray his whiskers have recently become. But I am thinking that this moment could be funny, you know. We could both laugh about how lovely it is to know somebody so well that you’re relaxed enough to stop making love and, oh, say, take some precoital notes on a labor relations problem. Instead—and maybe this is just because of Jeremiah floating tauntingly around the room—I feel a growing wad of irritation just under my breastbone. I know this feeling: it’s a cousin of the mood that made me cry among the pork chops.