The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

  Somehow, working side by side, we wrestled the twins into submission and got them dressed for the outside. I’d lived my whole life unaware of the difficulties of snowsuits and hats that needed to be tied under the chin, and scarves wrapped around just so, and mittens that came on strings that had to be threaded through the sleeves. California parents have it so easy, I told him.

  As soon as we were ready to walk out the front door, Jeremiah burst into laughter. “Oh, no! Do you smell that? We have a threshold poop situation.”

  “A threshold poop?”

  “Well, that’s the scientific term for it. Those are the poops that happen just as you are trying to leave home. Scientists still aren’t sure of the precise cause, whether it comes from anxiety about leaving the house or if it’s related somehow to the air currents of the front door opening, or the pressure of the outer garments. But whatever it is, we have to take care of this situation immediately.”

  The culprit was determined to be Brice, and Jeremiah swooped him up and laid him down on the living room floor and took off his boots, his socks, his snowsuit, then his sweater, his corduroy overalls, and his long underwear and his diaper while Brice squirmed and tried to escape. Then he changed the diaper while Lindsay and I danced around the room, mainly so I could prevent her from stripping down as well. He put Brice’s things back on him, and we managed to get ourselves to the door once again.

  He picked up Lindsay and I picked up Brice, and we headed for the door once again. I could see sweat glistening on Jeremiah’s forehead.

  “Okay, do we have everything?” he said. “Everybody got boots and mittens and hats? Sleds? Okay, good.”

  As he turned the doorknob, there was a sudden explosion from Lindsay’s diaper.

  “Oh my God,” said Jeremiah. “This is unprecedented. Quick! Man your stations! We are now officially under attack. Put the perpetrator into isolation!”

  “How can this be?” I said.

  He leaned against the wall, covering his nose and mouth with his arm. “I conjured these poops just by telling you about them,” he said. “I will never speak of threshold poops again.”

  But then we had to catch Lindsay, who by this time had thundered off to the kitchen, pulling Brice along with her, shedding her boots and hat and mittens as she ran. “Come on, Bwicey! Let’s go!” she was screaming. We were hysterically laughing. And when, after we had caught her and changed her diaper and reloaded her into all her clothes, we were once again nearing the doorway and Brice squatted down and started grunting, I slid down the wall, unable to hold myself upright anymore. It was all too funny. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe, but it was the kind of laughing that’s bad; I was tottering dangerously on the brink of tears. I knew I would be crying soon. And Jeremiah slid down right next to me while the kids ran back to the kitchen, screeching.

  “You know why this happened, don’t you?” he said. “Because we mentioned the you-know-whats yet again just to say we weren’t going to talk about them anymore. Apparently the universe is very strict today about this sort of thing.” He reached over to pull some piece of fluff—hairs from a mitten—off my chin and then there we were, slumped against the wall, just looking at each other, locked in. Then, well, it was exactly like in the movies, that slow-motion staring into each other’s eyes and everything going all buzzy. I felt as though he could see through to the place where my brother had just hurt me, that he knew about the suicide scare and the guilt and the emptiness of being so far from home. He saw all that; I could see it reflected back in his eyes. I thought I would never be able to take another breath, and he said my name, and, crying then, I said, Oh, Jeremiah, my brother is going to die and then he leaned so close to me, in slow motion, until his mouth was covering mine, and I couldn’t breathe. He kissed me—four long, soft kisses. First kisses, slow and questioning. I counted them, weighed their intensity, and then I felt myself sliding underneath a current of air, which was just as scary as the time I had nearly drowned when my family had first moved into the house with the pool and I didn’t know how to swim yet. There was the same sinking, airless feeling, the panic in the lungs, my heart jackhammering on its way down to this vast, soft nothingness at the center of me.

  WHEN WE sat down to dinner with Carly and Grant that night, after putting the children to bed, I was sure that all our spouses would have to do was take a look at us and they’d know we’d been kissing. It was as though our bodies were having a conversation all on their own, all through dinner. I was aware of every single movement, each time Jeremiah lifted his glass to drink another sip of wine, every nuance of his speech, the curve of his hand, the way his jaw pulsed when he spoke. But fascinatingly, nobody seemed to notice. We ate spinach lasagna that Jeremiah and I had made that afternoon after we got back from the park. Grant, sitting next to me, bent low over his plate and ate quickly, his eyes cloudy with thoughts left over from the day. Whenever anyone would speak directly to him, he’d look up and smile uncertainly, as though he’d had to pull himself back from a dreamworld and hadn’t quite dragged all his faculties with him. Jeremiah leaned back in his chair, one elbow over the back of the chair, and gazed at me, smiling. At one point, Carly, who was doing all the talking, got up to pour us some more wine. For a moment, she stood there at the head of the table and put her long, graceful arms up over her head and stretched, and I had to look away. How could he kiss me, how could he even look in my direction when she was so … so everything, so graceful and filled with sensuality?

  Jeremiah smiled up at her. She refilled his glass, and he lifted it and clinked it against mine, and then everybody clinked their glasses, too, and she sat back down. I kept expecting her to say, “I can no longer have these people in my house. Obviously Annabelle has fallen madly in love with you, Jeremiah.” I was waiting for this. Instead, she started talking about how tired she was, how difficult it was once you were over thirty to get your body to do what you wanted it to do. “Look at these arms,” she commanded us. We looked at her long, thin, muscular arms. “And this abdomen.” She stood up and lifted her shirt a little to show us flat, wonderful abs. “Hideous!” she said. She shook her fork at Jeremiah, and he grinned at her in his customary loutish way.

  “You!” she said to him. “You’re the one who wrecked this body of mine, using it long enough for your own lascivious, selfish purposes. You got it pregnant—and then you had to go and plant two of them, you sly, greedy bastard! But now it’s mine, mine, mine again! I’m reclaiming it!” She fixed her look on me, and I felt my throat tighten. “Annabelle, watch it. That’s all I can say. These men just take your body for their own selfish reproductive purposes, that whole procreate-the-species thing, and then you’re the one with the lumps and the varicose veins and the bulges—and do they even care? They do not!”

  She swatted Jeremiah on the head with a newspaper she picked up off the table, while he ducked out of her reach, laughing. I looked over at Grant, who was laughing, too, although the look in his eyes said he found this way more alarming than funny.

  She got a phone call then, and went off to the living room to take it, and I got up and cleared the table and washed the dishes for once rather than loading them into the oven. Grant hemmed and sighed and finally asked if we minded if he went into our bedroom and worked on some papers he needed to grade. His eyes were tired and sunken.

  My arms were in the dishwater up to my elbows. Jeremiah took up a dish towel. I could feel his body around me; it was like a force field. All I could think of was the way it had been when his lips had been on mine. Already tonight I had walked past that precise spot in the front hall over and over again, thinking of that liquid, flowing way he had reached for me, the way I had melted into him. That’s what it had been like: melting! I wanted to tell him. Everything was so different now—touching these plates, his wineglass (and I knew exactly which one it was), the fork he had touched with his lips—it was all too much. We could hear Carly’s voice in the living room, two whole rooms away from us. She
was making some plan with one of the dancers, in her high, insistent voice.

  “Well, this is certainly getting interesting,” Jeremiah whispered, and then he laughed.

  I nodded and looked down at the sudsy water, barely able to breathe.

  “I am constitutionally unable to think of anything else,” he whispered, laughing. “And may I say that you look wonderful tonight.”

  “I can’t think of anything else either,” I whispered.

  He groaned and smiled at me. “Gives a certain spice to things, that’s for sure.”

  “But it’s not good,” I said. “I mean, we’re both married. Don’t you think we should move out?”

  “We?” he said, and his eyes bugged out and made me laugh.

  “No, not we we. Me and Grant. We can’t live here if this kind of secret stuff is going to go on. Can we?”

  He laughed softly—how could we both keep laughing?—and he reached over and brushed a strand of hair off my face and tucked it behind my ear. “Move out? Don’t you dare move out. I’m normally not a fan of drama, but …” He pulled me close to him and kissed me softly. I let him. I even kissed him back, as though I hadn’t just said the thing about being married and moving out. Look at me; I could forget everything, I thought. I could just go off with this man, rip off my clothes and do it with him right here on the kitchen floor, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with what terrible things might follow. I can’t even remember what those terrible things are, not precisely.

  There was a noise just then from the living room, and we sprang apart. I plunged my hands back into the dishwater; Jeremiah opened the cabinet holding the glassware and stared into it. Carly came into the kitchen, her bracelets jangling on her wrists as she opened the refrigerator. “You know something? We should keep a pitcher of cold water in here, don’t you think? I don’t think I’m drinking enough water these days, and I think the only reason is because it’s not readily available when I open the refrigerator.”

  “Good idea,” I murmured, and Jeremiah said to her, “Actually, you’re never here.”

  She looked over at him. “I’m here now. And are you coming to bed, sweetie? I’ve got an early call tomorrow.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m just going to finish drying these—”

  “No, no, no,” she said. “No! I know you. You’ll finish the dishes, and then you’ll go in the living room and put your headphones on, and then you’ll read, and next thing you know, it’ll be the middle of the night, and when you come into the bedroom, you’ll wake me up. Come on. It’s selfish of you to want to stay up when I need my sleep.”

  He put the dish towel down very deliberately. “Okay,” he said. “Fine.” And without a backward glance, he went off with her. She was laughing and reminding him to be quiet when they passed the children’s room. “And when you go in to pee, aim for the side of the bowl and not the water,” she was saying in a loud stage whisper.

  I finished the dishes myself, turned off the lights, and turned down the thermostat. Grant was working in our bedroom, and I could not go in there. I couldn’t. I wandered into the corner of the formal dining room that had been turned into Jeremiah’s study. It was dim in there, lit only by the streetlight from the window. His bookshelves and wooden desk were piled high with papers and books. A dictionary and a thesaurus. A couple of textbooks about ancient Rome. I sat down in his swivel chair and ran my hands across the spines of the books. There was a desk organizer with little wooden cubbies and piles of books and papers. I leaned over and turned on the green-shaded lamp. A grown-up lamp. His typewriter was on a little tray table next to the desk, and there was a bulletin board with a calendar. “Sabbatical” was written across the top in black Magic Marker, and on different days there were notations written in blue ink, in his expansive handwriting. I stared at it; I’d had a handwriting analysis done once, and I knew that open, loopy letters meant a generous, open, loving personality. It seemed as if he was surrounding me here; his presence was all about. His pens were in a little cup, and I handled each and every one of them, picking them up tentatively and then putting them down. One—a fountain pen that I knew was his favorite—I picked up and then slowly, sensuously, ridiculously licked.

  JEREMIAH WAS home the next week, and Grant had said we needed to make more money, so I took another temp job, working in a bank every day. It was exhausting, but I was glad for the time away. On Friday, it was snowing so hard that they let us leave early, and by the time I got home, it was really coming down. I took the subway, but even so I had to walk four blocks and I was soaking wet and freezing by the time I got to our street. As I fumbled with my key in the lock, Jeremiah flung open the door.

  “Oh my God, look at you!” he said. He laughed. I must have looked a wreck. My hair was wet and filled with snow, and so was my cloth coat. And my pumps were ruined. He led me into the dining room and sat me down and knelt in front of me and took off my shoes and massaged my frozen toes. I kept trying to insist that I was all right and to squirm away from him, but he held up one finger and cocked his head, as though he were listening to something.

  “Quiet, you; your feet have a message for me,” he said. “Okay. Okay, I’ll tell her. They’re aghast that you would walk them around on ice cubes in nothing more than these—these ridiculous straps of leather. They say they’re from California, and they learned to walk around barefoot on hot pavement, but this is the limit. The ultimate limit. And, oh yeah, they say I’m to keep rubbing them until they can get some blood in there to warm them up.”

  I laughed. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, they want bunny slippers, and also they’re requesting that you drink some hot tea. But first I have to bring them back to life.”

  He bent over my feet, rubbing away with his long, delicate fingers, and I looked down at the top of his head, all that brown tousled hair, and then suddenly, without warning, I was completely gone. As though there had been a signal between us, he looked up and smiled at me, and moved his hands farther up my leg, at first tentatively, over my panty hose, massaging as he went, smiling a serious, workmanlike smile, as though he were doing nothing more than kneading bread. I heard myself moan as his hands reached the hem of my skirt and then slipped underneath.

  He took his hand away. “Come on,” he whispered, pulling me to my feet. I leaned against him, and he kissed me until I went out of my mind, and then he started unbuttoning my shirt with his left hand while he held me with his right.

  “Wait,” I said, out of breath.

  “What?” He stopped.

  “Where are Brice and Lindsay?”

  “At a playdate,” he said.

  “No one’s coming home?”

  “No. It’s just us. All us.” I didn’t know where we would go, and I was a little surprised when he led me quietly into the bedroom he shared with Carly—a messy, large, dim room with clothes tossed everywhere, like costumes discarded after a play. We fell on the bed, into the tangle of sheets, and his body bent over mine while we kissed. We started unbuttoning and unzipping like we’d gone mad; clothes fell off or were thrown across the room. I unpeeled my panty hose and he gently removed them, and then we were naked and I heard him say, “Ooooh,” from such a far-down place. I was aware of the sudden smoothness of his skin, the sweet, deep scent of him, the roughness of his cheek brushing against my breasts as he went lower to put his mouth all over me. With every place he touched on my body he unlocked something that until then I’d had no idea even existed. It was that amazing. I closed my eyes and buried my head in his shoulder, breathing him in.

  When I came—a huge whoosh of feeling, an explosion I wasn’t sure I’d recover from—he pressed me to him tightly and held me. And then, a moment later, he closed his eyes tightly and yelled out. He yelled! I had never made a man yell before. Afterward, we lay on our backs on the bed, side by side, panting, quiet. He reached over and stroked my stomach with his index finger and then circled both nipples and pressed his palm against my skin. I found that l
ittle hollow place between his shoulder and his chest and tucked my head there. Everything in my life was now different.

  “You’re amazing,” he said. His penis, glistening, was flopped over onto his thigh, just within my reach. I touched it and he laughed a little and moaned.

  “God. Are we awful?” I said.

  “Reprehensible.”

  “We’re no doubt going to hell for this.”

  “If we both go, though, we can do this in hell. It’ll make the time go faster between the burnings from the hellfire.”

  “I have to ask you something.”

  He flicked his gaze over me, lazily, warily. “Shoot.”

  “Did you ever work as hard as Grant is working—I mean, when you were new? He told me you said everybody needs to work twenty-hour days at first.”

  “Oh God no.”

  “Then why did you tell him that?”

  He bent over and kissed my nipple and ran his tongue around it five times. “Because,” he said, “Grant needs to do that. It’s the only way to make him feel truly safe.”

  “How many hours a day did you work?”

  He laughed. “About three.”

  “Three? That’s all?”

  “I feel safest when I’m not working. My best ideas come when I’m not working.”

  I laughed. “I’m afraid I have a terrible crush on you,” I said. I felt suddenly shy.

  “Oh, yeah? Well, I’ll match your crush and raise you one case of crazy mad love.”