Leaving Sophie Dean

by Alexandra Whitaker

  Sophie’s eyes flew open. “No!”

  Too late. Florence crammed the letter into the mailbox, and the metal jaws clanged shut. The letter was gone.

  Florence sauntered back holding her hands up, palms out, to stave off reproaches. “Sorry, Soph. It had to be done. Happy New Year.”

  Desperately, Sophie tried to recall what the letter said, but the words fled from her memory like cockroaches scattering when the light is turned on. “Florence, you had no right! That was very, very wrong!”

  “I know. But listen. An unmailed letter is a useless piece of paper. A mailed letter is a rusty hacksaw.”

  “I can’t even remember what I wrote!”

  “Who cares what you wrote? You flushed the shit out of your system and returned it to sender. What could be more fair? Now forget it. Fuck him. What’s your real name?”

  Sophie was still staring at the mailbox. “At least it didn’t have a stamp on it.”

  “It does now. Have stamps, will travel.” Florence fished a crumpled roll of stamps out of her back pocket and held them up. “I stuck on five to make sure. Been carrying them for days. I was just afraid you wouldn’t address it, but you did. See how your subconscious—”

  “You had no right to do that,” Sophie said again.

  “Listen to me! What’s your real name?”

  “Szabo.”

  “Oh, wow, Sophie Szabo? It’s like an actress of the silent screen. Some luscious vamp with a cigarette holder and a gravelly foreign accent, just dripping with sexiness. Sophie Szabo…”

  Now forget it. Fuck him. What’s your real name? Sophie switched her gaze from the mailbox to Florence. “Yes,” she said at last. “It is a good name. I like it, too.”

  * * *

  Adam wheeled his shopping cart down the fruit-and-​vegetable aisle with an air of calm efficiency. He’d become so familiar with the layout of the supermarket that he could draw up his shopping list in the order the items appeared in the store—a minor achievement, but one he was proud of, for it should enable him to wheel his cart through just once, getting everything in one pass, and then proceed straight to checkout. No doubling back for forgotten items or time-​consuming trolling of the aisles—in theory, anyway. In practice, the perfect once-only sweep through the store had yet to be achieved, but the attempt to do it lent a certain sporting challenge to these Saturday mornings. Adam had also devised a way of keeping the boys reasonably amused while he shopped, by applying a nautical theme to the task: The cart was a boat, Hugo the captain, and Matthew the nimble first mate. Adam contented himself with the role of simple seaman, navigating the vessel through the waterways and reading the items off the list. First Mate Matthew raced up and down the aisles fetching things, then handed them to Captain Hugo, who “stowed them in the hold.” It was a somewhat cumbersome system, but better than the alternative: boredom and bickering.

  Matthew came running up to the cart carrying a net bag of avocados not on Adam’s list. “Hang on, son. Isn’t that a stowaway?” The truth be told, the game was rather fun.

  “They’re for Valerie. She likes them.”

  “That’s very thoughtful. All right, give them to the captain.” And Matthew passed them to Hugo, who threw them into the cart with a force that made Adam wince. “Let’s see, now, what next? Think you can find”—he scanned the list for something not too heavy, too breakable, or too far away—“some kitchen sponges? Yellow on one side, green on the other?” Matthew dashed away, and Adam looked with pleasure at the avocados, clear indicators of how well the boys had accepted Valerie’s presence in the house and proof that he and Valerie were handling the situation correctly. Matthew came running back and tossed the sponges to Hugo, who dropped them into the cart listlessly. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Can we have these?” He pointed to some cookies in garish packaging.

  “Hungry? You, too, Matt? All right. But no biscuits. We’ll get something better.” Adam wheeled the cart quickly to the delicatessen counter, which meant backtracking and ruining yet another week’s attempt, but it was in a good cause: He had learned that tears followed swiftly upon the first announcement of hunger. Mercifully, there was no line. He ordered half a pound of sliced ham, two of the slices to be rolled up and given to the boys to eat right away. While they ate, a woman who had been watching them flashed a smile at Adam. “That’s a good trick, Daddy. I’ll remember that one!” In her cart sat a large, glassy-eyed toddler. Adam smiled distantly and made his getaway. Single mothers were the natural hazard of these Saturday mornings, and this woman was definitely giving off the lonely/deserving/brave aura of a single mother. In all his years as a bachelor, he had never been as sought after as he was now, in the company of his children, at any frozen-food counter or swing set, but as sorry as he felt for these women—and God knew he could sympathize!—their neediness repelled him and made him all the more grateful for self-reliant and unencumbered Valerie.

  “Daddy, Hugo won’t say ‘Aye-aye!’” Matthew complained.

  “I’m the captain,” Hugo said darkly.

  “You still have to say ‘Aye-aye.’ Everybody has to say ‘Aye-aye’ on a ship. Right, Daddy?”

  Hugo shook his head, looking thunderous.

  Time to distract them. “Listen, sailors, do you know how to dance the hornpipe?” Adam began to execute some hops, arms crossed, knees out, singing softly, “Toodle-oot, toot, toot. Toddle-oodle, toot, toodle-oodle.…” Matthew watched in rapt admiration.

  “Ah, excuse me, please!” came a loud, impatient male voice from behind them. “I’d like to get past, if that’s okay with you old tars?” Adam was blocking the aisle.

  “Certainly.” Adam stood to one side, his color rising.

  “Again!” Hugo demanded.

  “Not just now, dear.”

  “Again!” The checkout line was long; they needed amusing; there was nothing for it. Adam fixed his eyes on the far wall to mask his embarrassment and kept his footwork as discreet as possible. It was a red-letter day for the supermarket imp.

  * * *

  “Matthew’s doing very well,” his teacher told Sophie, “as I told his dad just before Christmas break. I guess you know he came in to talk to me?”

  “You called Adam in for a talk?”

  “No, no. He made the appointment. He just wanted to see how the boys were getting on—you know, check their progress. He met with Hugo’s teacher as well.” She smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry, both boys are doing fine. They seem to be handling your separation very well. I don’t know what you’re doing, but whatever it is, don’t stop—it’s working!”

  “I’m glad.” Something else occurred to Sophie. “Was it Matthew who told you about our separation?”

  “No, his father. He came in—oh, back in October. When the… events… were still recent.”

  “Oh, yes. Fine. Thank you.” The events. Sophie moved off, her smile fading, feeling that Adam had upstaged her. She should have told the boys’ teachers herself, of course she should have. But it hadn’t even occurred to her back at that frantic time. Adam never used to go to meetings with teachers, not even the once-a-year official ones, and now here he was checking up regularly on the boys’ progress. Well, well.

  “An indifferent father…” Hadn’t she called him that in her letter? Sometimes stray phrases from the letter wafted into her mind, but she resolutely pushed them aside. Now forget it. Fuck him. What’s your real name? She was going to put that letter right out of her mind.

  * * *

  “I know I didn’t throw away the original,” she said, rooting through her desk. “Just tell me what you think of it. Now, where… ? Here it is!” She passed the page, blackened with cross-outs, to Henry, who was sitting at the kitchen table eating grapes. “Be honest, now.”

  He stood up, stretched, and took the letter. “You’re sure you want me to read this?”

  “I value your opinion. More than anyone’s.” With a slight shock, she realized that was true. More than anyone’s. She began
to feel a little odd. There was something about the way he was standing there, with his weight on one leg, one hand on his hip, in the other hand the letter… something about the way the light was striking his serious face… his mouth…

  “Hmm,” he said when he had finished reading. “Mean.”

  Sophie’s ears were full of a rushing sound. “Mean?” she asked faintly.

  “It’s a mean letter.”

  “Oh!” She pressed her hand to her sternum with a gasp, her eyes squeezed shut.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s nothing.” She was bent forward now, though, and pressing her hand harder into her chest. “I just felt a…” She exhaled through her mouth before continuing. “A sudden stab of love for you.” She breathed out again slowly, her eyes still closed, and when she opened them, he was studying her gravely.

  “Is that so?”

  She gasped and leaned forward in a fresh spasm. “No, stop it,” she whispered. “It hurts.”

  He put his arms around her, and she kept very still, her face pressed to his shirt, feeling his heart beat against her cheek. The sound seemed to come from a long way inside him, and she pictured the valves opening and closing to the rhythm of the pulsation, like frilly sea creatures tossed in the waves.

  The letter lay forgotten, facedown on the floor.

  * * *

  Adam was at that moment drawing his own much neater copy from its envelope. He had not wanted to read it at home, for reasons he didn’t care to examine, so he’d brought it to work that morning but put off opening it all day—why, again, he didn’t care to look into. Something to do with the strange bulkiness of the envelope, perhaps, or the long row of stamps, slapped on crooked and upside down. Strange. Valerie had already gone home, assuming that he had, too, when she got no response to her light tap on his door. Around him the building had grown quiet as everyone left, and still Adam had hesitated. At last he ripped open the envelope, and as he pulled out the single sheet of paper, something else slipped out and dropped into his lap: a mirror, the small, round kind women use for putting on lipstick. With a sense of foreboding, he unfolded the sheet of paper and scanned the short paragraph written in Sophie’s once-so-familiar handwriting. The words “failed,” “mediocre,” and “faithless” leaped out at him at once, making his heart pound. In vain his eyes sought somewhere they could land without pain, but the whole thing was studded with thorns: “pitiably,” “indifferent,” “inadequacy.” When he came to the end, he could feel the blood throbbing in his face. He began at the top again, slowly this time, reading every line:

  Adam,

  There can be no happiness for you. A man who cannot read his soul and communicate what he finds there will never find contentment. You are a small man, a failed man: an indifferent father, a mediocre worker, a faithless lover. The only grand and exalted things about you are your pitiably unrealistic expectations of yourself, which serve only to dwarf your rare achievements. Nothing will ever make you acceptable to yourself. You will continue to run, and dodge, and hide from your own inadequacy until there is nowhere left to go, and finally you will die knowing you have wasted the gift of life.

  Sophie

  Adam turned the mirror over in his hands, then held it up and peered in. Reflected there he saw one worried eye.

  * * *

  “Where’s Mr. Dean?” Valerie asked when she got home, shaking out her umbrella. Milagros and the boys were sitting at the kitchen table, Milagros already in her raincoat. The boys looked at each other and climbed down from their chairs.

  “He called to say he’s running late,” Milagros said, rising to go. “I can’t wait.” She picked up her bag, wrinkled her nose at the boys, and strode away, her lips pursed.

  “Oh, great,” Valerie said when the door slammed. “Just great.” Then she noticed that the boys were standing rather formally side by side in front of her. “What’s up with you two?”

  “Aren’t you going to kiss us?” Matthew asked.

  “We don’t mind the lipstick,” Hugo said, and Matthew shot him a warning glance.

  “Oh!” Disconcerted, Valerie dipped down and gave them each a quick peck, realizing guiltily that it would never have occurred to her to kiss them unless Adam were in the room. They turned away and began surreptitiously to scrub their cheeks.

  “Oh, I see what you mean!” she said with a laugh. “It’s supposed to be no-smudge, so you don’t leave telltale traces on anybody’s collar. But I guess it’s not, eh?”

  “We don’t mind very much,” Matthew said.

  “I have an idea. How about if I just give you those insincere, actressy air kisses to either side of your head? Then I won’t touch you at all. Look, it’s kind of fun. You do it at the same time I do, see? We just brush cheeks, and instead of kissing we say, ‘Mwah! Mwah!’ in this really fake way, and then we both shout, ‘Dar-ling!’ Come on, let’s try it.”

  Shy but willing, they rehearsed this exchange until they had it down and all three of them were giggling. Then Valerie lost interest.

  “That’s enough,” she snapped after the thirtieth repetition, just as it was really getting to be fun. She poured herself some wine and dropped into a chair at the kitchen table. “Now, run off and play. I have work to do.” With a sigh they went into the living room, but something they found there brought them right back. Matthew came in looking grave, followed by Hugo, looking doubly so. Silently, Matthew extended his hand. In it he held gingerly between thumb and forefinger, like something he hardly dared to touch, a packet of her cigarettes.

  “Oh! Thanks.” Embarrassed, she stuffed them in her bag.

  “Smoking makes your insides black,” Matthew said. “Then you get sick.”

  “Is that what they tell you in school?”

  He nodded. Hugo, too.

  “Well, it’s perfectly true. Smoking is bad, so don’t you ever do it.”

  Matthew moved closer and put his hand on her arm. “I don’t want you to get sick.” Hugo squeezed in on her other side, and she sat between their solemn upturned faces, unsure what to say.

  Then Matthew asked, “Can you read us that book again?”

  “What book?”

  “About the prince in the palace.”

  “Yes!” Hugo’s face lit up, remembering. “But it wasn’t fancy enough, so he went to another house and another and another!”

  “Oh, right. That one. Well. After that there was a recession in the property market, and he went broke and ended up sleeping in a cardboard box. The End.”

  Matthew hung his head, and Hugo said in a barely audible voice, “I wanted to see the pictures.”

  Oh, God. All you want to do is a little work, and you’re going to be fired if you don’t, but if they’re going to be so pathetic about it, all right. Let’s see now… something fun to do with kids when it’s raining… “I know,” she said brightly. “Let’s make a cake!”

  * * *

  “Well, you know how it goes,” Valerie related to Agatha from her office the next morning, ruffling her hair idly with the hand not holding the phone. “You start out all serious with a recipe book in front of you, and the next thing you know, you’re slinging cake batter, the kitchen’s a mess, everybody’s screaming with laughter—and then big, bad Adam comes home. Fee, fie, foe, fum. ‘What the blazes is going on in here?’ I explain, and you know what he says to me? In his tight-lipped English way, he says, ‘Two children in this house are quite enough!’ Can you believe that? Talk about a stick up the ass.”

  What Valerie didn’t know was that the boys had found her performance heroic. They thought her immensely brave for facing their angry father, and they were deeply grateful to her for taking all the blame.

  “I can’t win, that’s clear,” she continued. “If I do nothing with the kids, he acts like a martyr. If I play with them, he gets furious and insults me. It’s a loser’s game.” There was silence. “Agatha, are you there?”

  “Mmm.” Agatha was sitting in her cluttered study, clen
ching the phone to her shoulder with her chin, hands on the keyboard, eyes on the screen. She had an article to send off in half an hour. There are limits to how much a person still owes someone for befriending her in high school when she was plump and taking her to a prom. Or, put another way, exactly how fat would you need to have been to still be indebted to that person twenty-three years later?

  “I mean, to call me a child, just because out of the goodness of my heart I was amusing his kids when I should have been working! And where was he, you ask? I’ll tell you where he was—walking the streets! In the rain. Alone, or so he says. But I’ll bet he was kissing the boss’s ass behind my back, sucking up with that partnership in mind.” She raked her hair with her fingers so it stood in the air and pursed her lips poutily at herself in the mirror across from her desk, like a model in a hairdressing magazine.

  There was a fresh silence, which, when it filtered through to her attention, Agatha filled with a vague, “Oh, yeah. Well, I think parents are like that.”

  Whatever the hell that meant! “Agatha, are you even listening to me? I’m in this whole goddamned mess because of you. ‘Give him an ultimatum,’ you said. I’ve been such a fool. What kind of a jackass would take advice from a loser like you?”

  That got Agatha’s attention nicely. She was never that fat. “Hey, I never told you to move into his house. This is all your own fault. You’re just pissed off because home wrecking isn’t turning out to be as easy as you thought it would be.”

  “What?”

  “And you know what? I’m glad it’s not easy. I’m glad that destroying other people’s lives isn’t a cinch. Now let me ask you one thing. Did you clean up that kitchen?”

  “What?”

  “Did you scrape the cake batter back off the walls?”