The Art of Forgetting

by Camille Noe Pagan

  “I’m just going to the bathroom quickly,” she says huffily, backing away from the door.

  “Uh, okay. Apology accepted,” I say, although I sound more exhausted than confrontational.

  My mother gives me a withering look. “Please, Marissa, no drama today.”

  I glare at her. “Please, Mom, tell me you’re kidding. No drama from me? I’m not the one criticizing my daughter’s meal choices in a crowded restaurant. As if I’m twelve and it’s never occurred to me how many calories are in a fucking slice of pizza! I am a diet editor, for fuck’s sake!”

  “Language, Marissa,” she chides.

  “Fuck fuck fuck fuck!” I practically scream. The word is foreign to me, but it elicits the desired response from my mother, who looks both offended and mortified. She glances around to see if anyone has heard me, and needless to say, at least half the restaurant has, which makes me feel even more triumphant. This is fun. Well, almost.

  A waitress, on her way to the kitchen, stops to ask us if everything’s all right.

  “Peachy,” I tell her, and turn to face my mother. “Now, Mom, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to the table. And when you get there—”

  “Marissa, enough. Just stop,” my mother says.

  “No, Mom,” I hiss, and step closer to her. She looks afraid of me but doesn’t move, so I continue. “I will not stop. And you will not shut me up yet again because you prefer starting fights to participating in them. Now, as I was saying, when you get back to the table, let’s pretend that we actually like each other and that you aren’t disappointed in my every move so that the Bergmans don’t think we’re complete freaks. Then you can go on your merry way back to Michigan tomorrow and call me next century for all I care.”

  My mother stares, her mouth hanging open in disbelief. I decide to make the most of my captive audience. “And by the way, Mom, I’d prefer if you hold your comments about my dietary habits until your plane ride back. I’m sure Phil would be fascinated to know how I’m ruining myself with simple carbs. But I, for one, couldn’t care less.”

  The look on my mother’s face morphs from shock to staged sadness. “I just don’t know why you hate me so much,” she warbles, dabbing at her eye with the corner of her sleeve.

  “Save it, Susan. The only one who hates you is you,” I say, surprising myself with this insight. Then, before she has a chance to respond, I spin on my heels and head back to the table.

  Dave and his parents do their best to salvage dinner, but the mood is off, and I barely make a dent in my pizza. When we get home, my mother goes immediately to her room and Phil mumbles something about her having a headache before following her. Dave, having already profusely apologized to me (“I had no idea she could be that bad,” he whispered in the parking lot, mortified), heads to the bathroom to clean up for the night, as does Len. But when I say good night to Joyel, she puts a hand on my shoulder to stop me. Cocking her head to one side, she smiles kindly. “You know, I think a drink is in order. What do you think?”

  “I won’t say no,” I tell her, although what I’m actually thinking is that if she ends up being my mother-in-law one day, it will definitely be the universe’s way of righting all the wrong things my mother has done to me over the years.

  “Well, that was an interesting evening, wasn’t it?” Joyel says, pouring equal parts vodka and tonic in tumblers. She deftly slices a lime and drops a wedge in each of the fizzling concoctions, then tries one. “Perfect,” she declares, sighing. Then her eyes meet mine, and I see that they are filled with sympathy, but not pity. “How are you doing?”

  “Well, I’ve certainly had better days,” I say. “I’m really sorry to have dragged you all into this drama. And here you thought you probably were going to have an uneventful meet-the-parents weekend.”

  “Dear, you didn’t drag anyone into anything. That was you being dragged.”

  “My mom’s not entirely in the wrong,” I say, looking down at my distended torso.

  “You’re kidding, right?” asks Joyel, somewhat incredulously.

  “Sure,” I tell her, clearly dead serious.

  “Oh my goodness. Obviously, this is all off the record. You know I like your mother a lot, and I’m not trying to bash her. It’s just that sometimes you’ve got to tune that stuff out. I mean, trust me, my mother sent me to a fat farm every summer for all of junior high and high school because I was ten pounds overweight. Ten pounds! Can you imagine?”

  I shake my head, because I can’t. Even now, in her early sixties, Joyel is lean and fit. “And you weren’t worried that you’d raise Sascha to have a complex?” I ask, referring to Dave’s sister. “Because honestly, that’s what gets me the most. I don’t want to pass on this kind of crazy fat phobia if I have a daughter.” In fact, it occurs to me—although I don’t say it out loud—that my mother’s paranoia undoubtedly has more than a little to do with why I ended up being a diet editor.

  “Honey, I think you should be more worried about yourself than about your future children,” Joyel tells me with a wistful smile. “Because trust me, it’s the weight of someone else’s expectations that’s the hardest to lose.”

  Thirty

  On Monday, I call Sarah on my lunch hour for a post-Chappaqua briefing.

  The phone rings several times. I’m about to hang up when she picks up.

  “Sorry,” she says, out of breath. “Had to run to get the phone. Was on the elliptical.”

  “Must be nice,” I tell her, because working out in my own personal gym in the middle of the afternoon sounds almost as luxurious as having a cabana boy feed me bonbons while I lounge at the side of the pool.

  She snorts. “Sure. I love spending forty-five precious, kid-free minutes sweating my butt off while watching Oprah discuss how women should exercise for a full hour a day.”

  “We should also give ten percent of our salary to support the children, right?” I respond, laughing. “Anyway, should I call you back?”

  “Nope. But don’t mind my heaving and ho-ing. I’m going to put you on speakerphone and get back on the machine while we talk. So how was it?” she asks, referring to the weekend.

  “Let’s just say it wasn’t The Brady Bunch reunion.”

  “I had a feeling that was the case. I picked Mom and Phil up from the airport yesterday. They tried to act normal and said the Bergmans were, quote, lovely people. I still got the distinct impression that it didn’t go well.”

  “It didn’t start out too bad, but Mom doesn’t have the warm fuzzies for me right now.” I recount our face-off at the restaurant.

  “Oh, Mother.” Sarah sighs. “I have to say, Dave’s parents sound like saints. Now I know where he gets his temperament from. Can you imagine if the situation were reversed?”

  “I know. The crazy thing is, Len and Joyel didn’t act the slightest bit fazed by Mom’s atrocious behavior, although Joyel went out of her way to be nice to me after it happened.”

  “That’s because she loves you, dummy,” says Sarah. “You’re perfect daughter-in-law material. That is what this whole meet-the-parents thing was about, wasn’t it?”

  “Nooo,” I respond, glad that no one’s in my office to see me blushing.

  “Yesss!” she shoots back. “I know you’re turning red over there.”

  “Brat.”

  “You can call me names all you want, but I know the truth: Marissa’s in loo-ve, Marissa’s in loooo-ve,” she teases. “On a happy note, I’m assuming this means Nathan’s off the roster, no?”

  “Um . . .” I quickly bring her up to speed on As the Nathan Turns, including our dinner and his e-mails.

  “Marissa!” Sarah scolds. In the background, I hear the whooshing of the elliptical pedals slow and then stop. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you had dinner with him! What happened to moving on?”

  I’m not sure what I was hoping to get out of our conversation, but Sarah’s comment rubs me the wrong way. “Never mind. I’m sorry I even mentioned it.”<
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  “Oh, come on, don’t be like that. I should be able to ask you why without you flipping out.”

  I don’t respond.

  “Marissa,” Sarah says gently. “You know I love you. So much. You’re my blood.” It is a funny, almost antiquated thing to say, but it’s touching, and a reminder of just how far Sarah and I have come over the past several months. “I just want you to be happy,” she tells me. “I’m pretty sure that sabotaging your relationship with Dave is not the best way to accomplish that.”

  “I’m sorry. I know you’re right,” I concede. “It’s just such a touchy topic for me right now, because I know I need to get Nathan out of my life, but it’s like my best intentions aren’t enough—he keeps lingering, anyway. There’s nothing good that can come of it at this point, and I hate myself for even striking up this weird quasifriendship with him again in the first place.”

  “You want my honest opinion?” Sarah asks.

  “Can I say no? Because I suspect you’re going to give it to me anyway.”

  “You know I am.” She laughs. “I think you’ve been letting too many things happen to you. Like, Nathan shows up in New York and wants to go to dinner? Sure! He thinks it’s a good idea to keep talking to you? Why not?! Sit and watch Julia undermine your relationship with Dave, and give her a free pass because she’s not one hundred percent right in the head? Okay! You see what I mean? I just think you might want to think about being in the driver’s seat for a change,” she says, echoing what we discussed last November. “Especially given that we’re talking about your future with Dave. You’re so lucky. Don’t give that up for something—someone—that doesn’t matter.”

  “You’re so lucky.” Sarah’s words remind me of something Julia once said. In an instant, I am eighteen again, lying on a plastic raft in a red bikini that cuts into my hips, with Julia floating next to me.

  “God, I can’t believe this is it,” she said, her face pointed up at the sun. “All that pomp and circumstance and I feel the exact same way I did before I got my diploma. It’s sort of like losing your virginity. Like, what’s all the fuss about?”

  I nodded in agreement, even though I had yet to be deflowered and Julia knew it. We’d just graduated the previous day, and were in the middle of what she called our “official post-grad rehash” at her pool. My, ahem, tan had long since become the same color as my bathing suit, but I couldn’t bring myself to get out of the water. As though if I just lay there a little longer, I could stop time.

  I turned to look at Julia, who had somehow managed to avoid frying and had instead turned an enviable shade of caramel. “I don’t know,” I told her. “Maybe I do feel a little different. Kinda sad. Things are never going to be the same again. You know?”

  “They might be even better,” she told me, dipping her hands into the pool to splash herself with the cool water.

  “So you really meant what you said today?” I asked her, referring to the salutatorian speech she’d given at the ceremony. Speaking so passionately that some of my Kennedy classmates were moved to tears, Julia urged us to embrace the change we were about to face, even if we weren’t ready for it. “Life will happen either way,” she said. “The difference is how you handle it. You can grab the wave and ride, or be pulled under with the current.”

  “Of course I believe it,” she told me, flipping over onto her stomach. Reaching over with her left hand, she pulled my raft close to hers, and lifted her sunglasses up. Then she gently pulled my glasses off the bridge of my nose, so we could see each other. “I know you’re nervous,” she said. “But good things are going to come your way. Just you wait.”

  “I only wish I was half as sure about that as you are,” I said, smiling wistfully.

  “Mar, the very first day I met you, I thought to myself, That girl is charmed.”

  “Pshaw. Now you’re the one trying to charm me. I’m not one of your silly boyfriends, you know,” I told her.

  “Have I ever lied to you?”

  “No . . . not that I know of.”

  “Whatever. You know I haven’t,” she said, splashing me. “But seriously. You know why we’re such a good pair?”

  “Why?” I asked. “Because we both like strawberry wine coolers? And we wear the same size shoe?”

  “Nope,” she said. “We’re lucky people. You can’t have one lucky and one unlucky friend. It doesn’t work.”

  “Correction: You’re lucky,” I said. “I’m not the one with mile-long legs, a full ride to college, and a pool in my backyard.”

  “Oh, Marissa,” Julia said, sounding almost weary. “You’re so lucky. And one day you’ll realize it. But I think luck isn’t nearly as important as what you decide to do with it.”

  Julia was right; I am lucky, I think as I spin back and forth in my office chair. I’m healthy. I have great friends. A beautiful home. A family who, although not faultless by any stretch of the imagination, I love. A boyfriend who loves me more than I probably deserve. So the only question that remains is the one Julia posed so many years ago: What am I going to make of my luck?

  I’m suddenly struck with what I can only describe as a revelation. Every time Nathan reaches out to me, he—we—are making our story a little longer, a little more complex, a little more memorable. My urge to fix the past is strong, and it’s made me hesitant to completely walk away. But now I’m beginning to understand that trying to tie our loose ends into a neat bow is the worst thing I can do.

  “You know what, Sarah?” I say to my sister. “As of this second, I’m vowing to cease contact with Nathan. I’m not going to talk to him, e-mail him, or even speak about him anymore. I think it’s the only way to get past this ridiculous mess. Will you hold me to that?”

  “That sounds like a good plan,” Sarah says. “And of course, I would be honored to be your enforcer. Just ask Ella: If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s policing bad behavior.”

  “Excellent. Then we have a deal,” I tell her, feeling as though I’ve just lifted a twenty-ton weight off my shoulders.

  Although I feel relieved after my call with Sarah, there’s one little thing that’s still nagging me. I know I have to come clean—as in, completely, 100 percent spotless—with Dave.

  As usual, he’s working late, so when I get home, I decide to get dinner ready. I order Chinese takeout, but rather than tossing plates on the coffee table, where we usually eat while watching TV, I put place settings and a bottle of wine in the dining room and turn music on low.

  “What’s this all about?” Dave asks when he walks in the door. “Special occasion?”

  “I just thought it might be good for us to talk for a change, instead of zoning out in front of the tube. And,” I say, pouring him a little wine and handing him the glass, “there’s something specific I want to discuss.”

  “Please tell me you’re not leaving me,” Dave says, loosening his tie with his free hand. “Because after the day I’ve had, I might just lose it.”

  “No, sweetie,” I say. I wrap my arms around his waist. “Things have been so amazing between us lately. I hope we’re always this good.”

  “Haven’t things been great?” he says. The pleased look on his face gives me a tiny glimpse of what he must have looked like as a little boy, and my heart swells with love. How could I have ever doubted that he was the right one?

  “It’s just that I feel like there’s something I need to explain about Nathan.”

  “Oh, brother. That guy again.” He groans.

  I swallow hard and take his hand. “It’s not what you think. I was never going to cheat on you with him. But when he showed up again a few months ago, I did have a lot what if? thoughts. I was questioning everything that had happened between him and me—and even wondering what would have been if I hadn’t listened to Julia all those years ago. I feel like the worst person in the world admitting that out loud, but it’s something you need to know.”

  Dave looks at me long and hard. “Marissa, I don’t like this guy, and I don
’t want him in your life. You know that. But you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t question your past. I think about Tanya sometimes, even though I’m pretty sure she’s off boiling bunnies in some poor guy’s kitchen,” he says, referring to his ex. “What Julia did to you was not cool, and because that choice was taken from you, you were bound to ruminate over it. What I need to know”—he pauses, searching for words—“is whether your ‘what ifs’ made you realize that everything worked out the way it was supposed to. Or are you still searching for a second chance? Because bad day or not, I want to know that right now, rather than a year from now. Or worse, after a decade passes.”

  “I don’t want that second chance,” I say with conviction. For years after I broke up with Nathan, I secretly believed that we’d be together again one day, which is part of the reason why I’ve had such a hard time detaching from him this time around. But seeing Dave in front of me, it’s perfectly clear that I don’t want or need the opportunity to relive my past—especially when it means I’ll be destroying my future in the process.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said to me a few weeks ago,” I tell Dave. “About my attraction to volatile people.” I motion for him to sit down next to me at the table. “If there’s anything that’s become clear to me over the past six months, it’s that I need this. Us,” I tell him. “I want stability. I want a relationship that’s solid and adult, and yes, even a little boring.” As I say this, I think of the cozy house we’ll have in Chappaqua one day; the little brown-eyed toddlers who will reward our steadiness and predictability with an unbelievable amount of love; the way that we’ll grow old and gray together—and in that instant, I know that there’s no other path for me than the one I’m on now.