Baker's Blues

by Judith Ryan Hendricks

  “This is my dog. And what’s this supposed to be, Santa’s Workshop?”

  He gives me a sheepish grin. “It’s Christmas.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “That was last month. But I’ve decided that just because you want to leave me doesn’t mean I have to make it easy for you.”

  “So you thought it would be a good idea to act like nothing happened?”

  “No. But I can’t stand all this tiptoeing around being polite to each other. Let it out, for God’s sake. Cry. Yell at me.”

  “You know what? I’ve already done all that. I’m through. It’s over.”

  “Hit me. Come on. I know you want to.”

  “I don’t want to hit you.”

  “Yes you do.” He plants himself in front of me. “Right here.” He points to his stomach. I remember you told me once you wanted to kick the shit out of David. I can’t believe you’re not at least that angry at me.”

  I’m seriously considering it when the doorbell rings.

  Standing in the amber circle of the porch light is a very young girl. About sixteen, I’d say.

  “My name’s Kendra,” she says, “and I’m walking the neighborhood for World Peace.”

  The damp night air is making her curly hair stand like a halo around her face. She smiles, flashing her braces. “We want to take money out of the black hole of the Pentagon budget and use it for libraries and daycare and the environment.” She shows me a petition that looks like a familiar blur. “Does this agenda sound like something you could support?”

  “I hate to tell you this, but none of that stuff is ever going to happen.”

  She gives me a look of pity. “Just because we can’t change everything doesn’t mean we can’t change anything.”

  “Who told you that pretty lie?”

  “My father.” Her smile closes over her braces. “Well…sorry to bother you. Merry Christmas.”

  I watch her walk down to the man—presumably her lying father—who’s waiting for her at the end of our driveway. He puts his arm around her shoulders and bends his head to hear about her encounter with the heartless witch who lives in this house.

  “I guess that clarified things for her,” Mac says behind me.

  I shut the door, my chin trembling foolishly. “Wait till she finds out it’s all bullshit. No matter what you do, things never turn out the way they’re supposed to.”

  I snatch up a startled Charles and head up the stairs. Mac divests himself of the Christmas lights and starts up right behind me, but I slam the bedroom door in his face and lock it.

  “Wyn—”

  “Leave. Me. Alone.”

  I shed my clothes in a pile on the floor, brush my teeth and take two pain pills leftover from my visit with the friendly orthopedist. If it hurts don’t do it.

  I get into bed, settle Charles next to me, turn off the light and wait for that fuzzy, spacey little buzz behind my eyes that tells me the drugs are kicking in. Now I understand how you could get addicted to these things. It’s so lovely to just turn everything off and float away.

  I know it’s morning but I don’t want to get up. I turn over, fully intending to let myself slide back into the comfort of darkness, but…I hear someone breathing. Someone other than me. Too loud for Charles. I force my eyes open in the pale light, raise up on one elbow and peer over the edge of the mattress.

  Mac’s lying on the floor curled up under an old quilt, a pillow wedged awkwardly under his neck, sound asleep.

  My throat tightens at the familiar contours of his face. The lines at the corners of his eyes, sprinkled gray in his hair, perpetual little sunburned patch on his nose. Part of me wants to reach down and touch him, but I don’t. Instead I curl my fingers into fists, shut my eyes and let the warm tears leak onto the pillow.

  Wait a minute…

  “How the hell did you get in here?”

  “Credit card.” His voice is thick with sleep.

  I look over the edge again just as he opens his eyes.

  He blinks a couple of times. “Why are you crying?”

  “Because I don’t know who you are. And I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

  “I’m just a guy, Wyn. A crazy, fucked-up guy who’s so in love with you that I can’t make myself believe it’s over.”

  The Kleenex box is empty so I blot my eyes with the sheet. I turn on my back and stare at the ceiling. Charles lifts his head, looks around, yawns.

  Mac groans softly, gets to his feet, stretching. He stands there a minute, then the bed sinks as he sits down cautiously. Charles crawls across the quilt on his belly to rest his chin on Mac’s thigh.

  Growl, damn it. Bite him.

  “Remember that night down in Baja at the fishing camp?” Mac says quietly. “You don’t know how many times I wished I’d just kept swimming. I think the only thing that stopped me was the thought of you waiting for me. How cruel it would be to just disappear. How it would hurt you. So I came back and I disappeared in a different way and hurt you anyway. But I swear I never meant to.”

  I’m crying and glaring at the light fixture. “I could just kill you. I hate you. Why are you telling me this now? Why not six months ago? Why did we have to go through this? I could have helped—”

  “Wyn, listen to me. The one thing I was right about from the start was that there was nothing you could do. I have this thing, this…sickness. Depression. Call it whatever you want. I’ll never not have it. I have to figure out how to live with it.”

  Now he’s lying on his side, facing me, Charles sprawled between us like a small rug.

  “I missed you,” he says. “Even when I didn’t want you. Even when I was crazy.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I know.”

  A few tears leak out of my closed eyes. He brushes them away so lightly that I’m not even sure it’s real. Damn. There it is. That pesky little surge of hope. We can get it all back if we try really hard.

  “Don’t,” he says. “I can feel you getting all determined. You can’t Teddy Roosevelt your way through this one.”

  Against my will, I start to laugh. He could always make me laugh.

  How did this happen? How, without making a conscious choice, no piece of paper divided into two columns, pro and con?

  Charles squirms out of the way as I roll over on my side, bury my face in Mac’s shirt and cry.

  If life was a Hollywood movie this would be the end. We’d kiss and the camera would pan to clouds at sunset, a long shot of a convertible on a winding mountain road. Or there’d be a montage of scenes from our future, gray haired and smiling walking on the beach, waving to Skye as she runs to meet us at the airport, holiday dinner with my parents, maybe even a tearful reunion with Suzanne.

  However, this is not a movie; it’s life, and you don’t get to look away during the scary parts.

  twenty-two

  My mother took a picture of us—Mac and me—sitting by their tree on Christmas Eve. For a while I kept it stuck on the refrigerator door with a little magnet. Whenever I looked at it I got that vertigo sensation, the way your stomach feels at the top of a cliff, the way the empty air pulls you towards the edge. Finally I took it down and put it in a shoebox in the closet, the repository for all the photos I swear I’m going to put in an album as soon as I get three weeks with nothing on the calendar.

  Who is the man in the picture, this kinder, gentler Mac? In some ways he’s even more of a stranger than the evil troll who lived above Alan’s garage. Now he goes to therapy once a week down in Laguna Beach. It seems like a long way to go, but the therapist (Willow Maidenhair—a name I can barely say without choking) comes with an endorsement from Sylvia, so she must be good.

  He keeps a mood journal and gets up at 6 AM to meditate. Suddenly he wants to “share his feelings” with me. He wants to “focus on positive thoughts.” He talks about coping strategies and avoidance behaviors.

  As CM has reminded me, there’s nothing inherently wrong
with these things. It’s just that they’re so not Mac. I can’t reconcile them with that little cynical edge he always had. Where did that go? I miss it.

  Two thousand and one arrives with hardly a ripple. The bakery is thriving; Mac is writing—or at least trying —and he and I are stumbling together like beginners in tango class, attempting to execute the unfamiliar steps of this routine.

  Tyler’s departure for Greystone is a wrench. It’s like when someone dies after a long illness…you know it’s coming and you try to prepare yourself, but it still seems to happen suddenly, without warning.

  When I offer to drive her up, she gives me a look like I’m a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

  “It’s not like I’m seventeen and going off to college. Besides, I need my car.”

  The night before she leaves I go over to her apartment, ostensibly to help her finish packing, but when I get there, all her bags, boxes and suitcases are stacked by the front door.

  “Should we put these in the car?” I ask.

  “No, I’ll just throw them in tomorrow.”

  I look around at the empty rooms. “What are you sleeping in?”

  “My sleeping bag.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Just bring your suitcase over to our house and—”

  “Wyn…” There’s no mistaking the warning in her voice. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m staying here tonight.”

  She takes two bottles of beer out of the fridge and opens them. “I saved these for us.”

  We sit on the floor among the boxes, backs against the wall, sipping our beers and nibbling dry roasted almonds from a can.

  I say, “I’m going to miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you, too. But it’s time.”

  I lean my head against the wall and look over at her. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s time for me to do something.”

  I sit up and turn to face her. “Do you feel like you haven’t been doing anything for the last eight years?”

  “No, of course not. It’s just that I’ve never really done anything on my own.”

  “Nothing except run the bakery.”

  “Your bakery.”

  “I offered to make you a partner—”

  She reaches over and gives my hand a condescending pat. “Can you just listen to me for a minute? Please?”

  She takes a swig of beer and sets the bottle on the floor. “I’m 28 years old and I’ve never done one thing on my own. You’ve been my mother and my big sister and my best friend. Everything I’ve got came from you. But you know, if you were my mother, everyone would be saying, Geez, when’s the kid going to leave home? I need to see what I can do. Without you standing down there with the big safety net.” She’s looking at me intently. “Do you understand?”

  “I’m still going to miss you.”

  She gives me a five-second hug. “I’ll call you and email you. Give you progress reports.”

  “Do you think you’ll get to come home on the weekends?”

  “Probably not,” she says. “They keep you pretty busy. And I’ve never been to the wine country. There’s a lot I want to see. Besides, I don’t have a place here anymore.”

  “You could stay with me.”

  She emits a long, controlled sigh. “No. I couldn’t.”

  We finish our beers and she rinses out the bottles and sets them on the counter.

  “Mac said to tell you goodbye. He said to tell you he’s proud of you.”

  “He did not.”

  “He did. That’s what’s so strange. Are you going to stop by the bakery in the morning?”

  “Nah. I’ve already said goodbye to everybody. And it’s out of the way. I want to get an early start.”

  “Okay. Well…” I open the front door. I know she’s so eager to get on with her adventure she just wants me gone. “Have fun and do good things. And be careful. Remember to take your probiotics and get plenty of sleep and—”

  “Thanks for everything, Wyn. You know…” Her face softens. “You know I love you.”

  It’s warm tonight—for January—so Mac has grilled lamburgers and we have them in pita bread with feta cheese and cucumbers and marinated red onions. I drink a glass of red wine and he has a non-alcoholic beer which he says tastes like carbonated cat pee. Afterwards I make decaf and we linger at the kitchen table.

  It looks very cozy and domestic, me sorting email on my laptop, Charles drowsing at my feet, Mac reading the paper.

  I love the way he looks, sitting there with his legs stretched out in front of him. He has new reading glasses that make him look like the English Lit prof I had a crush on my sophomore year. He folds the pages vertically, like my father used to.

  Suddenly he looks over at me. “Do you miss Alex?”

  “What?”

  “Do you—”

  “Of course not. Why would you even ask that?”

  “You’re just so quiet lately. Like you’re always thinking about something.”

  “I’m always thinking about lots of things. None of which is Alex.”

  After a long minute of silence it dawns on me that I’m evading his question the way he used to evade mine. So I push the computer away and I pick up my coffee cup and I say,

  “I don’t miss Alex. I miss you. The way you used to be.”

  “How did I used to be?”

  “Remember the night you free climbed up to the bakery roof and cut down the sign for Ellen? That’s who I miss.”

  He laughs a little. “Yeah. I miss that guy, too. He had his shit together, didn’t he?”

  I want to laugh with him, so we can pretend it’s funny.

  “The problem is, I’m not him anymore. I’m not sure I ever was.”

  He folds the paper and sets it on the table. “I wish I could explain it. This thing I have…it’s so strange. Sometimes it’s just a sadness…kind of intricate and rich. I can see things I’ve never seen before and see familiar things in a whole different way. I don’t know if that’s me or if it’s part of the illness. Or both. I can’t always separate myself from...it.” He stops. “This must sound really weird to you.”

  I think it’s the first time in all the years I’ve known him that he’s ever seemed to truly want me to understand him, to see what he sees.

  “I want you to tell me anyway.”

  “Other times everything just gets black and cold and empty. At those times all I can feel is anger. It isn’t about anything. I’m not really angry at you. Nothing you did or said. Or if there is something, it’s just a trigger, not the real reason. On a different day I might not even notice.”

  “When did it start? When did you first think something was wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I think it was happening for a long time. I just didn’t realize it. If I think about it, I can remember things from a long time ago. In college. Maybe even high school.”

  “But you’re better now. Not like you were.” I feel like if I say it as a fact, he can’t disagree.

  “It’s dormant,” he says. “If it was cancer, you’d say it was in remission.”

  “So you think it could happen again.”

  “It’s just a question of when.”

  “Isn’t there anything…some kind of medication?”

  He’s silent for a minute, seemingly locked in some internal debate. Finally he says, “I don’t want to take meds. I’m afraid it would just plane everything down to the lowest common denominator. It could make writing impossible.”

  “What if nothing else works?”

  He comes over to my chair and bends down to kiss me. “I’ll try everything. Therapy, hypnosis, eagle feathers. Herbal tea. Even meds, if nothing else helps. Just don’t leave.”

  When he goes up to bed, I think I should go up too. Part of me wants to, but I’m hesitant. Or maybe just too tired for all the bargaining we have to do these days.

  Sex used to be like spontaneous combustion. It was recreation. It was communication, bridging the gap left by a careless word. We too
k it for granted. Now we approach with caution, with calculation and analysis. Does he want to? Do I? Can he? Is he embarrassed? Do we have time? Is it worth the trouble?

  Delusional as we are, we still pretend we can do it whenever we want. We’ve developed elaborate rituals to communicate ability and inclination. The truth is, we’re both afraid. Afraid of not wanting it if the other does. Afraid of wanting it too much and then disappointing each other.

  I open my email program and a few messages straggle into the inbox. One of them catches my eye, makes my stomach turn over.

  Alex.

  It was a lie, of course. What I said to him. That I don’t miss Alex. It’s not as if I sit in my office doodling his name on my notepad. I delete his occasional emails after reading them…well, mostly. But I do think of him sometimes. Probably more than I should. And on bad days I feel like I was a drowning swimmer and Alex threw me a lifeline, which I batted away. Of course that’s not true.

  What I miss is the easiness of being with him. His openness. The feeling that I could say whatever I wanted and he would do the same. The shorthand way we talked about food and work, each of us understanding the other, no explanations required. Or maybe it was just because I didn’t care what he thought of me. I didn’t love him, so I didn’t need to please him. Which somehow pleased him.

  I pause, listening for sounds upstairs, and hearing nothing, I open the email.

  Thinking of you. Rained all day, more coming. Seattle on Friday, pick up the boys and head for Hawaii. Rented a house in Hilo for a month. They’re already asking about broadband and movies. Hopefully they’ll get over having nothing to do but hiking and biking, surfing, fishing and sailing and the whole Pacific Ocean as their back yard. Back in Eastsound Feb 10th. Shoot me a note and let me know you’re okay. A.

  I type quickly.

  Hey—Tyler left last week for Napa, miss her! Cheryl is working hard; I’m sure she’ll be fine once she finds her feet. Just a little crazy right now. A month in Hawaii sounds like heaven. Mac is doing well.-I back space.-Mac is better. CM married her old flame Nathan on New Year’s Day. They honeymooned in Mexico, are now in New York. Hope you and the boys have a great trip. W.