by Ann Packer
“What’s going on?”
We were on opposite sides of a screen door, and she pushed it open. “Please come in.”
“I just wanted to drop this.”
“Come in.”
I entered the house. It was a small, boxy place with just two bedrooms. I could tell no one else was there. “Where is everyone?”
She’d taken the basket from me and set it on a table. When she turned around her eyes were wet.
“What’s wrong?”
She shook her head and put her face in her hands.
“What?” I said, stepping close and taking hold of her shoulders. She sobbed and pressed her forehead to my shirtfront.
“Celia?” It was the closest we’d ever stood and I realized just how small she was, probably not even five feet tall.
“They’ll be here in five minutes,” she said. “Three. When can you come back?”
• • •
The following Monday morning, the first of May, I cancel my bike ride with Joe. Celia closes the blinds and we fuck so fast and hard she gets rug burns on her back. “He won’t even notice, he hardly looks at me.” Glasses of limeade on her back step, an awkward foot between us, a terrible mistake we know we’ll repeat.
The May meeting six days after that, so carefully not looking at each other that it would be totally obvious to anyone watching.
A phone call from the Safeway parking lot, late at night. “I said we were out of milk. Hope he doesn’t look in the fridge.” She shifts to a memory from girlhood, a man who looked at her funny, how little David cares about her stories. “That’s how he is. He’s been like that from the beginning.”
I arrange a Wednesday morning off, and she comes to my place, her look of dismay at the grim building, the slatted chain-link fence that divides our garbage area from the movie theater parking lot.
Another phone call and I’m describing my mom and her warm, maternal personality, ha ha. I’ve done so plenty of times before, but it was always comedy. Now it’s completely different. “That’s sad,” Celia says, and I say, “Yeah, I guess it is,” and fuck if I don’t get all teary.
Another workday, painting again but this time a house exterior, a bogus errand for a half-dozen paintbrushes with her kids in the backseat acting as our beards. The older one, Theo: “Why did the Blair come with us?” “I need help,” she says with her eyes on the rearview mirror. “The Blair is a good helper.”
A Tuesday evening, arriving just ahead of me to pick up dinner baskets at the Batchelors’, her boys beg to go inside. We sit in wicker chairs on opposite sides of the porch and stare at each other. “How turned on are you?” she says in a low voice. “I’m dying.”
Over and over again we say: “We can’t do this.” “We have to stop.”
We don’t. We can’t.
A Friday night at the Rankin-O’Sullivans’, Sarah asks about that bike ride thing, did I ever poll people? “Sorry,” I say, “I’m a loser.” “James,” she says. “You can just say, ‘No, I haven’t done it yet. I’ve been busy.’ ” A pause. “You have been busy, right? Something’s different. I’ve been wondering.”
Celia and I take turns arguing for a halt. “No one knows. I’m positive no one knows.” “But how much longer can that last?”
The fantasy of being in love gives way to the clobbering reality. She wants to be with me. I want to be with her. I’ve never felt this way about anyone. She weeps over the possibility of hurting her kids.
Late June, she tells David she’s going to Portland for the night, one of her best friends from college is passing through. “Dawn,” she tells him. “You don’t remember Dawn?” There is no Dawn. It’s too much lie, she frets. We meet at a hotel on the coast. The little bottle of lotion is runny and smells of lavender, but it’s my first time massaging her shoulders, and she says I am an amazingly gentle and kind person, and I have to cancel out the thought that she has me confused with someone else. I’m supposed to be on my way by seven a.m., but I call in sick.
“You had a crush on Sierra, didn’t you?” The phone again: she’s at home in the middle of the morning, I’m on break. “Not really,” I say. “I don’t know. Yes.” “Your dad shouldn’t have let her sleep over.” “Whatever. They were really serious.” “No, not because it was wrong. It took Ryan away from you.” And I can hardly speak, I suddenly miss him so much. Why do I never call him? I remember being six, seven, eight years old and home after school with him, before Robert and Rebecca returned, our mom down in the shed. He’d make me a snack and spread a beach towel on the living room rug so we could picnic in front of the TV. Our favorite was The Doctors, which was about “the brotherhood of healing,” as the announcer always said. “Can we be a brotherhood of healing?” I asked him once, and he said he thought so but we would ask Dad to be sure.
Celia’s dad is a doctor, too. A plastic surgeon. We talk about how different that is from pediatrics. He’s sixty-five and has had a little work done himself. He promised her a tummy tuck for her fortieth birthday, three years off. “Oh, that’s awful,” I say. “Isn’t it?” she says. “Isn’t it totally? No one else gets that.”
There’s no monthly meeting in July. Too many people will be away. This is the first time they’ve skipped one. We’ve. A thread starts on the Barnboard. “This is sad.” “No, it’s life.” “But maybe it’s the thin end of the wedge.” “The nose of the camel is in the tent.”
“People,” David writes. “Relax.”
Her younger boy is Cesar. He develops a cough in the middle of July, three days before the family is due to go to the San Juan Islands with David’s parents. Then he spikes a fever. The pediatrician says it’s probably okay to go, though if the fever lingers he will need to be checked. The island is a twenty-minute boat ride from the nearest medical care, farther from a chest X-ray. Celia decides to stay home with him. I stop by daily with food and DVDs for him and wine for her. We haven’t been alone together at her house since the first time, at the beginning of May. We’ve had sex at my apartment three times and once each at the coastal hotel and a Days Inn just off I-5. We’ve kissed in my car and made each other come and either laughed or cried at the awkwardness, depending on our mood. Mostly we’ve talked on the phone.
Cesar lies on the couch coughing, dozing, asking for mango sorbet. She tells me he’s not sleeping much because of the cough. He cries from exhaustion and exhausts himself crying. I leave, return. So does the fever. Sunday night it’s 102.5 and she calls the doctor. No, he isn’t blue around the lips. No, his breathing doesn’t seem labored. He vomited once, but that was after he ate a big bowl of macaroni and cheese. “Call again in the morning,” the doctor says, but once Celia has hung up I think of my dad saying the important thing a doctor needs to ask himself is Does this child seem sick? I look at the limp little boy on the couch and tell Celia we should take him to the ER.
He has pneumonia. It doesn’t escape me that in the last year of his life my dad had pneumonia and I wasn’t there for him. Cesar is admitted to the hospital for IV antibiotics, and Celia weeps. She doesn’t want to wake everyone at the island house and so doesn’t call. She curls up in a chair at Cesar’s bedside and tries to sleep while I drive to her house for her toothbrush and a change of clothes. She wanted me to post the news on the Barnboard, and I’m all set to do that from their family computer when I decide it really shouldn’t come from me. Back at the hospital I arrive at Cesar’s room just as a nurse is coming out. “Ah, there you are,” she says. “Your wife’s asleep. Your little boy will feel better in just a few hours.”
After this things change. Everything is more serious, what we feel for each other, how urgently we need to be together and how urgently we need to stop. The Barn praises me for being so helpful when David was away, and he makes a point of thanking me on the next workday. The two of us are helping Margo Komarov assemble an IKEA bunk bed for her kids. “It was really luck
y,” he says, looking at me across an expanse of white melamine, “that you were there so late on a Sunday night.”
“Dropping off orange juice,” I say. It’s the truth and also the thing Celia and I agreed we would say. “I had to work late.” Also true. My shift that day ended at nine p.m.
“Well, thanks again. She never would’ve gone to the ER on her own.”
“My dad was a pediatrician. I’m not smart enough to be a doctor, but I managed to learn a thing or two.”
“I think you’re plenty smart,” he says. “You have this dumbass act going on, but I think you know exactly what you’re doing.”
Celia and I spend hours trying to figure out what he meant. School starts up again and we have more time. Cesar is now in preschool five mornings a week. I rearrange my work schedule to start most days at noon. “Good thing I’m having an affair,” she says one morning as we sit together in my car. “Otherwise I’d be thinking about going back to work, and I’m really not ready for that.”
Financially, she is entirely dependent on David. Financially, I am a joke. There’s no way she can leave him.
Naked, she is an endless series of curves, the slope of her hips, the inward arc of her waist, her small, round ass. When I put my finger inside her, the first dip is like reaching into honey. She laughs when I say this and then tells me not to stop, to shower her with sexy talk, she’s never gotten any from David. I’ve said plenty to women but never meant it. “Perfect match,” she says, and then she’s crying again.
We go a week without any contact. It’s impossible. The whole thing is impossible. “What would we do?” she asks when we see each other again. We’re at my apartment, another Monday morning. Still dressed. Holding each other like old people. “Find a way,” I say. “We’d find a way. I know you don’t want to go back to work, but . . .” “I was joking,” she says. “Of course I would go back to work.” “Kids go through it,” I say. “They survive,” she agrees.
September winds down. There’s a big rainstorm, early this year. Four days. The sky stays a dull gray, even when the rain stops for a few hours. Our October meeting happens early, on the first of the month. October has five Sundays this year. July did, too, and so did January. We call these long months. We go an extra week between monthly meetings when this happens.
The parks are wet, so we gather at the Smith-Berkoffs’ house. Same place as last November, when I first saw her looking at me. It makes no sense that a woman was looking at me and now this. I don’t recognize myself. It’s weird. It’s awesome.
The first half hour is milling, and then we sit in our circle. We added a ninth family, a lesbian couple with a baby, and now we are thirty. The older kids stay upstairs, but still it’s crowded. Terri Batchelor leads. She announces news that isn’t really news: the Kinsellas will be dropping out. Stan says they’re glad they got to be part of something so special. The thing is, they feel the difference between themselves and the families with kids. Mike and Priscilla Lee say they understand but are in for the long haul. “However,” Mike says, and he tells us they’ve been feeling that the dinner baskets aren’t really fair. This is something we’ve talked about, how the smaller households give more than they get. Mike says maybe the households with two or fewer people should make dinner baskets less frequently than the households with three or more people. Margo Komarov says she thinks the cutoff should be three, not two. Melissa and Kat, the new couple, say that would make them uncomfortable, they’re three but want to take their turn as often as anyone else. Margo says it’s different because she’s one adult with two kids, whereas Melissa and Kat are two adults with one kid.
We’re all a little cranky by the end of the meeting. Food is laid out and people fill their plates and scatter. I take only salad and don’t eat much of it; I’m not hungry these days. Celia and I have stopped talking at Barn events, but after a while she sits next to me on the stairs, where a moment ago the Rankin-O’Sullivan twins were telling me about the mountain bikes they got for their birthday.
“We’d lose this,” she says.
“I know.”
“The boys love it. I love it, even when it’s like today.”
“Me, too.”
A couple weeks go by and then one day, out of the blue, she asks me to leave town. I don’t want to, and we have our first fight. I have vacation days, she points out. Sick days. It’ll do us good to spend some time apart, to figure things out.
I say it won’t do me good, it’ll do me terrible. Finally, still pissed, I say okay. I tell my boss I have a family emergency and post a message on the Barnboard saying the same thing. “What?” people write. “What is it, can we help?” I say no, it’s personal.
I’m betraying the Barn by lying. I’m afraid I will lose it regardless—with her or without.
• • •
Portola Valley was childhood and then it was failure. Typically I landed at home between bad ideas and good ones, the bad always what had just happened, the good where I’d go next. I’d be there for a few days, two weeks. In the house with my dad. Then off I’d go again.
Until 9/11. I went home and stayed for eight months. From the safety and comfort of my childhood bedroom I launched offensives against my entire family, arguing with my dad, insulting Robert, mocking Rebecca, teasing Ryan about the fuckfest he and Marielle were conducting in the shed. All kinds of things set me off. People in favor of bombing Afghanistan, people against it. Someone being rude, someone else being overly polite. Oh, after you. No, no, after you.
I spent everything I had on a plane ticket to Peru and stayed in South America for a year and a half, keeping a roof (or sometimes a tent) over my head by teaching English as a foreign language. I managed to pick up enough work and to be decent enough at it to stay solvent, but I couldn’t seem to get comfortable.
There were Internet cafés everywhere, but during one stretch I couldn’t get online for a week or so, and a long string of emails awaited me. My dad had had a stroke, and over the course of a dozen messages my siblings updated me on his condition. The final one was from him, subject line “Don’t worry, I’m OK,” but it was too late for me not to worry. Three minutes of speed-reading bad news at a café in central Arequipa is not good for a guy with chronic traveler’s diarrhea, and I spent the next few days in agony. When I reached him I was holding a borrowed satellite phone on a tiny twin bed in a grimy hostel, knees drawn to my chest because my belly hurt less that way. “You don’t sound so good yourself,” he said, and damn if I didn’t spill a hot tear or two.
He was okay, apparently this was true. But each time I talked to him after that—and there were exactly three of them, three more times in my life that I spoke with my dad—he sounded weaker. “How are you?” he said the last time. It was Christmas Eve, and I knew the family would gather soon to hang stockings and eat candy off the roof of the homemade gingerbread house we were given each year by his former nurse.
“Lonely as fuck,” I said.
“Oh, honey, maybe it’s time for you to come home.”
I was in a phone booth, and I looked through the smudged glass at the throngs of people doing their final Christmas Eve errands, couples arm in arm, families gathering before church. I said, “Hey, I should get going, but merry Christmas, okay?” And he was dead eight days later, his own gut acting up.
When I left Eugene to give Celia space, I knew going home would remind me of all those other times I went home in trouble or in desperate grief, but where else could I go? I didn’t want to spend any money, not with the possibility that I’d need every penny and then some to make a life with her.
I was in a foul mood and did nothing to hide it. Hell, I made the most of it, I’m not proud to say. I was an asshole, especially to Robert, though he sort of seemed to enjoy it.
Celia and I talked—while Theo and Cesar were at school, or in the middle of the night, Celia taking her phone into the garage s
o David wouldn’t hear her. We forgave each other for the stupid fight. I came up with the idea of selling the Portola Valley house, but I didn’t say anything to her about it, not wanting to get her hopes up until it was settled. We had short conversations about Barn news, long conversations about all kinds of things. On Halloween night we somehow got onto our youthful misadventures, and I told her about the time I broke my arm trying to scale the fence around a neighbor’s swimming pool. She told me about a weekend when she and a friend shoplifted twenty-seven packs of gum from eleven different drugstores in order to get wrappers for a chain they were making. “You shoplifted?” I said, and she told me that the following summer she stole a necklace on a dare. “My seagull necklace,” she said. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.” I said, “I always wondered about that necklace,” and she said, “You mean why I wear it every day? It’s to remind myself that I can be brave. I know it’s not exactly the most ethical reminder, but . . .” “No,” I said, “I wondered why you wore a seagull. I was afraid maybe it had something to do with Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” And she laughed and said, “It had something to do with what was right in front of me when the saleswoman turned around.”
Her seagull story reminded me of the gold cross I stole on the evening Ryan and I watched Sierra tripping on mushrooms. I’d told Celia about that night, but not about the morning that followed, when I saw my childhood toy stuck in my mom’s artwork. I described this to Celia now, and she was horrified.
“That’s so violent. What a thing to do. And why on earth would she put a stuffed animal in her artwork?”
I explained how my mom jumped from sand candles to ceramics to collages and then finally settled on these ridiculous collections of household junk.
“I can’t imagine,” Celia said, “how she could’ve thought that was okay. Her child’s security toy?”
“Well, she never would’ve used Ryan’s badger. His love for that thing was epic.”
“But she could take yours?”