Matchmaking for Beginners

by Dawson, Maddie

  “I think we’re going to have to pick them up,” I say. One’s gone behind the stove. “We have to chase them down. And by we, I hope you know I mean you.”

  “Wait. Why me?”

  “First of all, because it’s your apartment, and secondly, because I am a known coward, and you’re not. Also, they now look like giant cockroaches to me.”

  “Okay,” he says grimly. He puts on an oven mitt and starts running around after them, while they clatter along, going in circles. He finally gets one and holds it in midair and does a mock bow. “Now what am I supposed to do with this monster?”

  “Put him in the sink. Or no. He’ll get out of the sink—in the bathtub.”

  It takes twenty more minutes to catch two more, and then we have to move the stove in order to capture the fourth, and by then we’re laughing so hard we can’t even stand up.

  And we have a tub full of lobsters that we cannot ever imagine eating.

  The night’s dinner turns out to be pizza, and the lobsters spend a luxurious day and night in Patrick’s bathtub, until Paco finally comes over and takes them away.

  I don’t work at Best Buds on Friday, which is good because that means that Sammy can wait here every other Friday afternoon for his dad to pick him up for their weekend together. Jessica has to work, and besides, she’s never gotten all that good at being nice when Andrew comes to get their son.

  “Do you think my dad and my mom will ever get back together again?” Sammy asks me one day. I glance at him. He has a nonchalant look on his face behind those huge round glasses, but I can hear the anxiety in his voice. He keeps tapping on the kitchen table with his pencil.

  “Well, what do you think?” I ask, stalling for time.

  “I think they still love each other. They’re both always asking me about the other one. My dad goes, ‘How’s your mom? Does she mention me?’ And my mom goes, ‘What did he say to you about the breakup with what’s-her-name?’”

  “Hmm.”

  “Blix said they still love each other. They match, is what she said.” He draws a circle on the table where a drop of milk has spilled.

  “Really? She said that?” I look at him with interest. They do match, I want to tell him. They absolutely belong together. I’m gratified to hear Blix thought so, too.

  “Yeah. I think she was going to do a spell or something on them, but . . . well, then she died.” He shrugs and looks away.

  “Did she do a lot of spells?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Like, one time when I couldn’t find my backpack, she snapped her fingers and she said we could imagine the backpack, and then I knew where it was, but a few minutes earlier I couldn’t have ever remembered that. So that makes me think she put spells on things.”

  “Really!”

  “Yes, and one time the subway wouldn’t come and wouldn’t come, and Blix said she had to put a spell on it, and then it came right then. But she said it like it was kind of a joke. And the subway would have come anyway, you know.”

  “True.”

  “That’s why I like coming here and hanging out. Because sometimes if I close my eyes, I think Blix is still right here, too.”

  He puts down his glass of milk just so on the table and turns his face to me. His eyes are wide and wise; like a lot of only children, he’s older than his years. “So do you believe in all that stuff Blix believed in?”

  “Like what are you talking about? Specifically.”

  He looks me over. “Oh, you know.” He waves his hand around. “How she could make stuff happen. Do spells and stuff like that.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  He gives me an appraising look. “She told my mom that you were a matchmaker. So I think you could get them back together again. How are you going to know if you won’t even try?”

  “I don’t know, Sammy. I mean, your mom is pretty sure she doesn’t want to have anything to do with your dad right now, so maybe we have to wait and see. Not try to change things. You know? If it’s meant to be, they’ll find their way. Right?”

  He gives me a look that holds so much disgust that I almost laugh out loud.

  “My childhood is practically over!” he says. “I’m in double digits already. What if they don’t get together until I’m all grown up? That would be the stupidest thing in the whole world.”

  “But isn’t your dad . . . living with somebody else?”

  “No! That’s the thing! My mom always liked to say that, but he wasn’t really. He had a girlfriend who would stay over sometimes, but I think she’s gone because I never see her anymore, and when I ask him about her, he gets very quiet. Says it’s nothing for me to worry about.”

  He slumps down in his chair and then looks up at me from underneath his fringe of bangs. “Blix had a book of spells. You could use that and maybe you’d learn how to do a bunch of stuff. It could help you.”

  “I heard she had a book, but I’ve never seen it.”

  “It’s right over there,” he says. He gets up and points to a bookcase in the corner, filled with cookbooks. “This is the book she showed me when she looked up a way to make my sore throat go away.”

  Sure enough, there’s a book called The Encyclopedia of Spells sitting right out there for anybody to see, a book I’d somehow never noticed. The binding of the book has a picture of a vine with red flowers. Frankly, it doesn’t look all that legitimate. I think a real book of witches’ spells would look secretive, with hieroglyphics. You wouldn’t be able to read the title from across the room.

  Just then the doorbell rings, and he jumps up and grabs his backpack. “Don’t tell my dad,” he says. “And think about it. Read the book! Pleasepleasepleaseplease!”

  After he leaves, I finish drinking my tea. Periodically I glance over at the book and think about getting it off the shelf and looking at it, just to see . . . you know . . .

  But something holds me back. I go outside, sweep the stoop, then go get some chicken salad at Paco’s bodega for dinner, and find myself watching a lively neighborhood conversation there between the regulars about which kind of people read the New York Daily News and which ones read the New York Post, and whether you can tell the difference merely by looking at people. Paco, in the minority, maintains that you can’t, and looks to me to back up his position.

  I shrug and he laughs at his mistake. “How you going to know? You’re an incomer!” he says. “Now, Blix—she would have talked all day about this.”

  Everybody gets quiet. It’s as though they’re observing a moment of silence for Blix.

  “She was la maga. Our magician,” Paco says softly. And he wipes his eyes.

  THIRTY

  MARNIE

  I am not a maga, so I don’t pretend to know how these things happen. But two nights later I’m walking home from Best Buds and I look up and see Noah approaching the house from the opposite direction—sauntering, really, that sexy walk I remember—and the air fills with little crackles of something, and when we reach the front door, my heart is pounding like it’s going to shake apart. He takes my hand, and we practically fall inside, mashed against the wall with our bodies pressed against each other and his mouth hard on mine.

  All I can think is: Oh my God.

  The door slams; he’s closed it with his foot, and the noise of that makes us open our eyes.

  His hands are in my hair, removing a clip I’d used to pin it up. He says into my neck, “You’ve got me crazy! Being near you but having you no longer in love with me is killing me.”

  My phone rings right then, and I work it out of my jeans pocket and look at it. Natalie.

  “Listen, I’ve got to take this,” I say, and he releases me with a groan and we go inside the apartment, and he heads upstairs to the kitchen.

  “How are you?” I sit down on the floor and listen as she launches into a litany of complaints. Brian is working too hard; she’s lonely at home with the baby. She needs me there. Nobody keeps her company in the daytime. And she’s sorry but she feels betrayed b
y my decision to stay in Brooklyn, even for three months. It’s as though we’d reunited and worked out a wonderful plan for our lives, and then I went and changed everything. Backed out. And now she’s just heard from Jeremy that I even have a job here—and what is that about?

  Listen, I want to say to her. I am . . . I am . . . falling again.

  Noah comes back downstairs, with a plate of grapes and some cheese. He sits down next to me and starts peeling grapes and dangling them in front of my mouth very suggestively, which makes me laugh.

  “This isn’t funny,” says Natalie. “You didn’t even tell me about the job! How come I have to hear it from him?”

  Noah starts unbuckling my sandals and easing one off my foot. I’m having a little trouble breathing.

  “I have to go,” I say to her. “I’ll call you back.”

  And then—well, it’s as though we’ve gone mad, ripping off each other’s clothes and then making love right there on the rug in Blix’s living room, and it’s like no time has passed at all; he’s what I’ve been missing, his mouth and hands and his breath against my cheek, and I have about a million feelings because he’s so familiar and exciting, sexy and infuriating—but then, it’s over. And the second we’re finished, as he’s rolling off me, it slams into me that I’m the worst person ever. Jeremy’s face rises up before me, his eyes wide and hurt, and I hate that I have betrayed him.

  But you know something? Even as I’m sitting up, grabbing my clothes in the cold air, feeling both guilty about Jeremy and disappointed in myself, there’s a big part of me that wants to block out all thoughts and live in this blinding light of a moment.

  And so I do. I just do. Maybe making love with Noah is something that is bad but necessary. Maybe I’ll understand later what I’m doing. Maybe I can’t think about it now.

  Noah stays in my room that night and the night after that and the night after that, and the moon outside the window shines on us, and cold air seeps through the cracks where the window sash doesn’t quite meet the frame, and branches scritch against the building like in a horror movie. These are the first really cold nights, and he puts his arms around me and we lie there each night after making love before sleep overtakes us, and I listen to him breathing and look at the little chip of the moon from my pillow.

  There’s something that felt so inevitable about all of this, like he’s an old habit that won’t go away. I don’t ask myself if it’s love, or if I can trust him, or if this is the right thing to do, whole-life-wise. Because it’s not. God knows it’s not even close to being the right thing.

  I feel awful. Here’s Jeremy in my head: You’re doing this to me again?

  I close my eyes. During the day, I tell myself to stop. I tell myself that this is simply my need to resolve the past before I truly can accept my grown-up life with Jeremy. And maybe this is a little moment in time—closure, that’s it—and I’ll get Noah completely out of my system and I can move on.

  The fact is, this is just a thing I’m doing right now.

  I’m sleeping with my ex.

  And like the job at Best Buds, like the house in Brooklyn, like the way the sun slants through the trees that are rapidly losing their leaves—it’s all only temporary.

  A time out of time.

  I may have forgotten to wonder what Noah’s motivation is.

  And then one night when I’m nearly asleep, he asks me if he can see the letter Blix wrote to me—you know, just out of curiosity. I am suddenly wide-awake, on alert. Little prickles go off behind my eyes, like the beginning of a headache, and I say no. So that’s what he’s after—Blix’s letter? The thought that he may try to use it against me flits across the landscape of my mind.

  “But why not?” he says. He’s propped up on one elbow, trailing his fingers down my arm, tickling me slightly. “I just want to read it. See what my great-aunt and my wife had in common.”

  “No. It’s private. It was only to me. And please don’t forget that I’m your ex-wife.”

  “But she was my great-aunt, and she didn’t leave me a letter. I feel like—well, I wish I’d gotten to know her better. I’m having a moment, that’s all.”

  I sit up in the bed. Sleep has vanished.

  He laughs, seeing my face. “Okay, forget it! Forget I even said anything. Go back to sleep.”

  But of course I can’t. He closes his eyes, but I stare at him for so long that he finally opens his eyes and lets out a loud, exasperated sigh. “Marnie, for God’s sake. What’s with you? I merely asked if I could—”

  “I know what you asked. But it’s intrusive. And disturbing. You want this house, don’t you? That’s what this is really about. You think if you read the letter, you can find out something that might mean I shouldn’t get the house. That’s what’s going on.” I put my face right down next to his, eyeball to eyeball.

  He moves back, batting my hands away from him. “Stop it! I don’t know what you’re even talking about.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  He flops over on his back and puts his hands behind his head. “Okay, stop being a lunatic and I’ll tell you.” He takes a deep breath. “My parents are really perturbed about the way the will worked out. As you know. So my mom—it was my mom’s idea—she thought that as long as I’m here, one avenue we should check out is what Blix said to you in the letter. That’s all. She asked me to ask you if I could read it, you know, just to see.”

  “One avenue? One avenue? See? I knew this wasn’t all aboveboard.”

  He gets up on one elbow. “Well, what’s it to you, really? I mean, you’re going to sell this place. You don’t really care anything about it. And I’m not defending my mom because you know I am not one hundred percent in agreement with Wendy Spinnaker about anything, but she said to me that there’s at least a chance you’re not going to want to stay here the whole three months since you’re a Flah-ridian, so they should be on the watch for ways to keep the house from going to a charity. And she wondered if I might just ask you if I could see the letter. Okay?”

  “Uh-huh,” I say. “Right. Sure. I’m surprised she’s not rigging the place with booby traps to get me to move out.”

  “Don’t give her any ideas. Now could we go back to sleep, please?”

  I flop back down on my pillow and spend the next ten minutes tossing and turning.

  Finally I say, “Noah, I think I need to sleep alone tonight.”

  “Fine,” he says. He gets up and goes back to his own room, and I close the door behind him and lock it. Then I get the letter out of my purse and sit on the floor reading it again.

  The letter, Blix’s voice, pulls at my heart.

  I told you when we met that you are in line for a big, big life . . . Darling, this is your time.

  I sit there for a moment trying to figure out why I feel so violated. Then I roll up the letter and hide it in the sleeve of my sweatshirt way at the back of my underwear drawer.

  THIRTY-ONE

  MARNIE

  One morning later that week the doorbell rings at just past eight. Surely not more lobsters! I have the day off from the flower shop, so I’m still in my bathrobe, losing my daily fight with the coffee press thing, and Noah is choking down a piece of toast and reading the messages on his phone, getting ready to go to class. Of course we argue about who has to answer the front door. I say he should since he’s dressed; he says I should since he has to leave in a couple of minutes.

  So I go, and Lola is standing there, wearing her marvelous red sneakers and a gray sweatshirt, carrying coffees in a cardboard holder and a bag of something that I’m thinking could possibly be scones. Or doughnuts. She looks up at me with a huge grin.

  “Wow, are you the coffee fairy?” I say. “And does this mean that today I don’t have to vanquish the evil spirit that lives in that coffee press? Please, please, come in!”

  “Are you sure, dear, because I don’t want to interrupt your privacy,” she says. “But today I just couldn’t help myself. I used to come over and eat breakf
ast every morning with Blix and Houndy, and I—well, I just feel like this is where I’m supposed to be.” She shrugs. “I know that’s not right, this isn’t my house, and Blix isn’t here anymore, but—”

  “Stop! Come in! I’ve been wanting to see you.”

  “Well, if you’re sure . . .” She steps in and looks around, and once again it’s like she’s drinking in the surroundings, gaining strength simply from being in Blix’s house. Then she turns her eyes to me and says quietly, “Also, I need to talk to you about love if you have some time.”

  “Love? Sure, I have time. Who doesn’t have time to talk about love?”

  Then, wouldn’t you know, Noah comes charging out of the kitchen as though the word love summoned him, juggling his coffee cup while he shrugs his way into his backpack, and I see her eyes widen just slightly at the sight of him. Of us. Even though we’re not an us, I know we look like it.

  “Hi, Lola,” he says. “Off to school. Marnie, see you later.”

  “Fine,” I say, embarrassed.

  He looks for a moment like he’s going to come over and kiss me good-bye, but then he just says, “Keep it real, ladies.” And he’s gone, slamming the door behind him so hard that the glass rattles. I look over at Lola and her knowing little smile.

  “Yep, he’s still here,” I say. “It’s weird.”

  “Well,” she says. “It’s certainly on topic.”

  “Noah is not about love. Noah is about the convenience of living here because he’s taking classes.”

  “Oh,” she says. “You forget that I’ve learned a few things from Blix.”

  We go upstairs to the kitchen, and just as she’s gotten settled in the rocking chair by the window, there’s the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Sammy bangs his scooter into the kitchen door, like he does every morning, and I hear Jessica saying, “You’ve got to stop doing that. Marnie isn’t Blix, and she might be sleeping,” and he says, “She isn’t sleeping. And I just want to say good morning to her!”

  Lola claps her hands. “Oh, I’ve missed this so much! Sammy heading for school! Ah! It’s been way too long!”