She, Myself & I

by Whitney Gaskell

“Why not?”

  “I don’t know, I guess I just like the ordering part. When the stuff gets here, I’m too embarrassed to open it.”

  “May I?” Zack asked.

  I rolled my eyes and gave him a half-nod. He pulled back a corner of the white box and shook out a small, clear plastic bag.

  “It’s a bracelet,” Zach said, pulling the sparkly object out of the bag. He tipped his head and shrugged. “It’s pretty. It’s . . .”

  “Diamondique,” I said. “It’s Diamondique.”

  “Cute name,” Zack said.

  “It’s awful. It’s truly awful,” I said, palming the bracelet and staring at it with distaste. It was gaudy and chintzy and not anything I would ever wear. “Why would I buy this?”

  “It’s not that bad,” Zack said. He plucked it out of my hand and fastened it onto my wrist, where it twinkled bawdily.

  “I’m going to return it,” I announced. “I’m going to return all of them.”

  Zack smiled. “Later. Now, I beat you in Scrabble,” he said, rubbing his hands together.

  We smoothed the duvet out, and then I set up the game right on the bed.”I can’t believe this. I got four Os. Are there even four Os in the game?” Zack complained after we’d chosen our tiles.

  I consulted the list of letters. “Yes, there are eight Os in total. You can re-pick if you want,” I said charitably. Normally, I’m a shark when it comes to board games, and especially Scrabble—my family’s vicious games of Sorry are legendary—but in my postcoital bliss, I was feeling magnanimous.

  “Cheat? No, I’m not going to cheat, thank you very much. I plan on trouncing you, even with my four Os.”

  I started first, and put down “viper.” “Ha-ha, look at that! That’s fifteen . . . wait, no, sixteen points, and it’s doubled for thirty-two. Thirty-two points!” I crowed, marking it down on the score sheet.

  “Hey, let me see that. You got ‘viper’ and I got four Os? Is this game rigged? And how do I know you’re trustworthy enough to keep score?” Zack asked suspiciously.

  “House rules,” I said. “Come on, your time has already started to run, you’d better hurry up.”

  “Time? We’re playing with time limits? Is that another house rule?”

  “Of course! You have one minute to put down your word.” I consulted my watch. “But since you didn’t know, I’ll let you start now.”

  Zack added a D and four Os to the V and spelled “voodoo.” “Look at that! Did you see how I’m working those Os? What’s that . . . ten points? Almost as good as yours, oh but crap, I don’t get to double it,” he said. “You don’t have to look quite so gleeful about that.”

  “Sorry,” I said cheerfully. I love winning.

  An hour later, we were nearly out of tiles, and Zack was beating me by twenty-seven points.

  “Grrr. We’re going to have to play again,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t gloat about my victory,” Zack said modestly.

  “Just because you got that lucky break with the triple ‘xylem.’ Otherwise, I would have won,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t have challenged me. I told you it was a real word.”

  “I’ve never heard of it before, I was sure you made it up. Okay, you win, I give up,” I said. I’d been scouring the board, trying to figure out where I could plug in the R and the W I was still holding on to, but Zack had blocked me from the one open A.

  Zack grinned and leaned back against the pillows, his hands behind his head, his elbows splayed out to either side. “So, since I’m the winner, you have to be my slave for the rest of the night, right?”

  I stretched out next to him, lying on my stomach, resting my head on folded arms. “I don’t remember agreeing to that,” I said.

  “Oh no? I could have sworn those were the house rules,” he said. He rolled toward me and poked me in the side, catching me right on my secret tickle spot.

  “Ack!” I squealed, and started to roll away. Zack caught me in his arms, preventing my escape.

  “What was that?” he laughed.

  “Nothing!”

  “Hmmm, if it’s nothing, then you won’t mind if I do it again,” he said, one finger poised mercilessly above my tickle spot.

  “No, no, don’t, please!” I begged. “Okay, so I have one very small, not-worth-mentioning tickle spot.”

  “Ah, so now I have power over you,” Zack teased me.

  I smiled back at him and relaxed in his arms.

  “Just don’t tell anyone,” I said.

  “You are so beautiful,” Zack said, and all traces of laughter vanished from his face. And then he leaned over and kissed me.

  A few minutes later, the Scrabble game fell to the floor, scattering its tiles across the pristine, deep-pile white carpeting and under my bed. But at that moment, neither one of us even noticed.

  Chapter Ten

  The next morning, we went to a little dive café on Red River, where the plastic menus were sticky with pancake syrup and you had to throw yourself in front of one of the harried, tattooed waitresses if you wanted to place your order.

  “A tall stack of blueberry pancakes, two eggs scrambled, bacon, coffee, and orange juice,” Zack said definitively.

  “That sounds amazing. I’ll have exactly the same,” I said, surprising myself

  Normally, I’m pretty incorruptible when it comes to breakfast—it has to be high fiber and low fat. I really did have to get this guy out of my system, I thought. If nothing else, whenever I was with him, my appetite spiked.

  “I haven’t been here in a while. I know it’s not much to look at, but the pancakes are worth it,” Zack commented, looking around. His eyes caught on something behind me, and his entire face changed. The light blew out of his eyes, and his mouth tightened. I turned and saw a family sitting in the booth behind us. The parents, decked out in sweats, were entertaining a little girl. She had blonde hair caught up in a ponytail and was wearing a purple sweatshirt and pink pajama bottoms, and she was crooning to an Elmo doll clutched in her chubby arms.

  I looked back at Zack. He seemed pensive and distant, and I assumed he was thinking about his stepdaughter. I didn’t know what to say. I’ve never been good at those Hallmark Card, heart-to-heart moments, and this problem seemed particularly complex. I tried to think of something appropriate to say, but then our pancakes arrived, and after accepting the waitress’s offer of additional coffee, we began to eat in silence.

  “These aren’t as good as I remember them being,” Zack said, pushing a piece of pancake around with his fork.

  “Yeah, they’re a little heavy,” I said, already regretting the syrup-laden pancake I’d consumed. Two more sat on my plate untouched, turning into maple-flavored mush. I’d also lost my appetite for the eggs and too-fatty bacon.

  “Sorry, this was a bad call,” Zack said, and he smiled briefly and then reached forward to take my hand. “What are you going to do today?”

  “Work. I have a trial starting tomorrow, and I have to prep for it,” I said, catching the waitress’s eye so that she’d bring us the bill.

  “Trial? I thought you were a divorce attorney. Divorces don’t go to trial anymore, do they?”

  “Sometimes. We’ll probably end up settling, but it can take the threat of court to force both sides into negotiations,” I said.

  “How do you do it? Deal with divorces all day long, I mean. Doesn’t it depress you?”

  This was something I heard all the time. Why aren’t dentists asked this about their job, or doctors, or garbage men? And what about teachers? I’d rather deal with divorcing spouses than take on a class of oversexed ninth graders any day. Every job has its downsides, and you tend to get used to them. No, I didn’t love bearing witness to the ruin of marriages, and yes, the irony that my own marriage had gone down in flames didn’t escape me. But having to defend my choice of careers wasn’t exactly how I wanted to spend my Sunday morning.

  “No, it doesn’t anymore. Friday afternoons are never fun, b
ut I’ve gotten used to dealing with the clients, and it’s better than doing, oh, criminal law, for example. At least I don’t have to go down to the county jail,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with Friday afternoons?”

  “That’s the day that custody changes hands. Moms are angry when they drop off the kids and discover that Dad’s girlfriend is over. Dads get angry when they go to pick up the kids and they aren’t there. Then they call me, as though I’m going to mobilize the Divorce Police to enforce the custody agreement,” I said.

  “So what do you do?” Zack asked.

  “I instruct my secretary to tell anyone who calls that I’m out for the weekend. If there were a serious problem, something we’d need to bring to the attention of the court, the earliest I could file anything would be Monday morning. And in most cases it’s forgotten by then. Or, at least, it’s no longer so important the client is willing to pay two hundred dollars per hour for me to deal with it,” I replied. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “You just seem so tough when you talk about work. You’re . . . formidable,” he said.

  “I try to be—I owe that to my clients. Why, you don’t approve of tough women?” I asked.

  Zack shrugged. “No, it’s not that. I just wouldn’t want to have such a contentious job.”

  “Well then, I guess it’s a good thing that you’re not a lawyer,” I said tartly.

  “Don’t get angry, I’m just trying to understand you,” Zack said, and he jostled my hand gently, as though that would shake out my grumpiness.

  “I’m not mad. I just get this a lot. It gets old having to defend what I do.”

  “Okay, sorry. Answer one question, and I’ll drop the issue entirely.”

  “One question,” I agreed.

  “Is this the kind of law you planned to practice when you went to law school?” Zack asked.

  I thought for a minute and took a sip of my coffee. It tasted awful, like liquid bad breath. I put the mug back down and pushed it away.

  “No. I did want to go into family law, but I initially planned to be a children’s advocate. In fact, my parents were going through their own bitter divorce while I was in school, so the idea that I’d spend my life dealing with people acting like my parents would have devastated me if I knew that’s where I was headed,” I said.

  “How did you end up here?”

  “There isn’t exactly much money in children’s advocacy. Most of the work is pro bono. But now that I’m a partner, I probably could start picking up some casework,” I said thoughtfully, wondering how that would go over with the rest of the partnership. No, forget them. If I wanted to do it, I’d just do it. They’d probably criticize me privately and then brag about it in the firm literature. “You know, that’s not a bad idea. Maybe while I’m down at the courthouse tomorrow, I’ll have the clerk add my name to the appointment roster. Thanks,” I said, looking up at Zack.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said.

  “Yes you did,” I replied, and without thinking, I reached over and squeezed his hand.

  He held on to my hand before I could pull it away, and for a moment we sat there, looking at one another. Zack had such an open face—he would have made a terrible litigator—and I saw an affectionate curiosity reflected there. I was more practiced at masking my emotions; in fact, hiding them now came easier to me than sharing. But if Zack could peer into my thoughts—a frightening prospect—he’d see the growing interest, a hazy desire to pick up where we’d left off the night before, and a growing concern that I wasn’t going to be able to extricate myself from this situation as smoothly as I’d initially hoped. I felt like I should say something to clarify what I wanted—or, to be more precise, what I did not want.

  “Zack,” I began, but then the waitress appeared with the bill, and Zack let go of my hand so that he could grab it from her. I beat him to it.

  “No, the bad pancakes were my idea, I’m not going to let you pay for them,” Zack said.

  “No way. You got dinner last night, so this is my treat,” I said smoothly, and pulled out a twenty, which I left on top of the check.

  “Thanks,” Zack said. He smiled at me. It was the same smile that had gotten me into trouble the night before.

  When we got back to my building, Zack started to park his truck, ready to walk me up, but I shook my head.

  “You’d better not. I have to work, and you’ll just distract me,” I said.

  “That’s what I was hoping,” Zack said. “But you’re the boss. I’ll call you tonight, and maybe we can get together tomorrow, or Tuesday.”

  “Tomorrow?” I repeated. My stomach pinched as I remembered what I was doing here. One night. No emotional attachments.

  “Yeah, unless you’re busy.”

  “I just think . . . Look. Zack. I’m really not looking for something serious,” I said. The words made me wince. I looked sideways at him under lowered lashes and saw his naked discomfort.

  “Well. I guess . . . I guess I misread things,” he said.

  It was painfully awkward. I had to clench my hands into fists so that I wouldn’t reach over and touch his face, as I was sorely tempted to do.

  “I had a good time last night, I did,” I said. “My life is just really . . . crowded right now.”

  I braced myself, and leaned over to kiss Zack on the rough of his unshaven face. He stayed perfectly still, not turning his face so that his lips would meet mine, which I should have been glad for. Instead, stabs of disappointment pricked at me.

  “Crowded,” he repeated, but he didn’t look at me. He was staring through the windshield, off into the distance. You could just barely make out Town Lake from the parking lot.

  I hesitated, my hand on the door handle, trying to think of what to say, overcome with an urge to take it all back, to smooth his hurt feelings, to grab back what I’d felt the night before. It had been the first pure joy I’d experienced since my miscarriage two years earlier.

  I opened my mouth, but before I could speak, Zack turned to me with a small, tight-lipped smile. “Bye, Paige,” he said.

  The words that would make everything okay stuck in my throat.

  “Bye,” I said.

  I got out of the car and walked into my building without looking back.

  Chapter Eleven

  Two weeks passed by. I tried not to think about Zack as I went about my business of ending marriages. I tried not to think about him while I took long, steady runs along Town Lake, enjoying the coolness of the late autumn air against my face. I tried not to think about him while I was sorting my laundry and found a few Scrabble blocks that had mysteriously ended up in the hamper. And I tried not to think about him as I gathered up all of the Home Shopping Network boxes, scrawled “Return to Sender” across each one with a Sharpie marker, and dropped them off at the post office after business hours. The only item I kept was the Diamondique bracelet Zack had fastened to my wrist, which I now squirreled away in the drawer of my bedside table.

  Zack called me a few times, and left messages on my answering machine. I hesitated before erasing each one, not accustomed to the pang of regret I felt when hearing his voice.

  Clearly, I’d made a huge mistake. The idea of a strings-free relationship sounded good in theory, but it had been a misstep to attempt it with someone I actually enjoyed spending time with. I should have found some easily forgettable guy, one with an irritating laugh or criminally low self-esteem or serious mother issues—basically any guy I ever went out with before my marriage. Had I chosen my fling more wisely, I wouldn’t be having the disconcerting sensation of missing someone whom I hadn’t known for very long.

  And then Soph’s baby shower rolled around. Worse still, I was hosting it. I spent an entire Saturday morning hustling around my house, vacuuming the carpets, scrubbing the kitchen, cleaning the bathroom. And then, since Sophie’s my sister and I love her, I put up all of the tacky-to-the-point-of-kitsch baby shower decorations—a paper banner that spelled o
ut “Congratulations,” balloons in the shape of storks, little plastic rattles scattered around all of the tables. I’d picked up trays of finger sandwiches, crudités, and cookies earlier in the day, and I put them out, before mixing up a punch of cranberry juice, sparkling wine, and lemon-lime soda.

  My mom and Mickey, home from school for the weekend, arrived at one o’clock.

  “Here, I brought some cheese and crackers, and some brownies and lemon bars that I made last night. Michaela, let’s put out the flowers that we brought. Paige dear, where are your vases? Are these the only ones you have?” Mom said, looking doubtfully at the modern vase collection I’d ordered from West Elm.

  “That’s it,” I said. I relieved Mickey of the flowers, handing them off to my mother, who began arranging them around the living room, and then gave my little sister a quick hug. “Hey, kiddo, it’s good to see you.”

  “Mom’s driving me crazy. Have you found anything out about her and Dad?” Mickey whispered in my ear.

  “No, she refuses to talk about it. Every time I bring it up, she says something vague about how they’re ‘just good friends,’ and changes the subject. But I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. They’ve probably called a truce because they’re about to become grandparents,” I whispered back.

  “Well, I guess it would be nice if they could be in the same room without killing each other. But it’s just so weird, I can’t get used to the idea,” Mickey said.

  “Have a glass of punch. I spiked it with white wine,” I told her, and laughed when she said “Ooo, yum” and hustled off toward the punch bowl.

  Mickey was such a goofy sweetheart of a kid. And now, looking at her, tall and slim and looking just a little awkward in her skirt and heels, envy squeezed at me. She had her whole life spreading out in front of her. All of the major decisions were still ahead: what kind of medicine she’d practice, whether she’d marry, and if so, who, where she’d live, and what kind of a life she’d lead. And even when she screwed up, it would be fine, because the mistakes you make in your twenties are always the ones that you learn from. You’re still young and pliable and capable of change.