Heart of the Matter (3 page)

So when the phone rings, I happily retrieve it, feeling relieved for civilized adult companionship (the other day, I was excited when a pollster called) and even more so when I see Cate’s name light up my caller ID. Cate Hoffman and I met nearly sixteen years ago at an off-campus party the first week of our freshman year at Cornell, when we were formally introduced to the collegiate world of beer pong, quarters, and “I never.” Several drinks into the night, after being asked too many times if we were sisters and acknowledging a certain full-lipped, strong-nosed, blond-highlighted resemblance, we made a pact to look out for each other—a promise I made good on later, saving her from a leering frat boy, then walking her back to her dorm and holding her hair out of her face as she puked in a bed of ivy. The experience bonded us and we remained the best of friends for the next four years and beyond graduation. Since our mid-twenties, our lives have diverged—or, more accurately, mine has changed and hers has stayed very much the same. She still lives in the city (in the same apartment we once shared), is still serial dating, is still working in broadcasting. The only real difference is that she is now in  front  of the camera, hosting a cable network talk show called  Cate’s Corner, and, as of very late, has achieved a modicum of fame in the New York area.

“Look, Ruby! It’s Auntie Cate!” I say with exaggerated cheer,hoping that my enthusiasm will rub off on my daughter, who is now in mourning because I will not add chocolate syrup to her milk. I answer the phone and ask Cate what she’s doing up so early.

“I’m headed to the gym . . . on a new fitness regime,” Cate says. “I really need to drop a few.”

“Oh, you do  not,” I say, rolling my eyes. Cate has one of the best figures I’ve ever seen, even among the childless and airbrushed. Sadly, people no longer confuse us for sisters.

“Okay, maybe not in real life. But you  know  the camera adds at least  ten pounds,” she says, and then changes the subject with her usual abruptness. “So. What’d you get? What’d you get?”

“What did I get?” I ask, as Ruby moans that she wants her French toast “whole,” which is a radical departure from her usual demand that her toast be unveiled to her in “tiny square pieces, all the same exact size, no crust.” I cover the phone with one hand and say, “Honey, I think someone may have forgotten the magic word?”

Ruby gives me a blank stare, indicating that she does not believe in magic. To this point, she is the only preschooler I know who has already questioned the veracity of Santa Claus, or at the very least, his travel logistics.

But magic or not, I hold my ground until she amends her request. “I want it  whole. Please.”

I nod as Cate eagerly continues, “For your anniversary? What did Nick give you?”

Nick’s gifting is one of Cate’s favorite topics, perhaps because she never graduates beyond the “thanks for last night” floral arrangements. As such, she says she likes to live vicariously through me. In her words, I have the perfect life—words she delivers in what vacillates between a wistful and an accusatory tone, depending on her latest dating low.

It doesn’t matter how many times I tell her that the grass is alwaysgreener and that I’m envious of her whirlwind social schedule, her hot dates (including a recent dinner with a Yankee outfielder), and her utter, blissful freedom—the kind of freedom you take for granted until you become a parent. And it doesn’t matter how often I confide my standard complaints of stay-at-home motherhood—namely, the frustration of ending a day no further ahead than where you started, and the fact that I sometimes spend more time with Elmo, Dora, and Barney than with the man I married. None of this registers with her. She still would trade lives with me in a heartbeat.

As I start to reply to Cate, Ruby unleashes a bloodcurdling scream: “Nooooo!  Mommy! I saaa-iiiid  whole!”

I freeze with the knife in midair, realizing that I’ve just made the fatal mistake of four horizontal cuts.  Shit, I think as Ruby demands that I glue the bread back together, even making a melodramatic run for the cabinet where our art supplies are housed. She retrieves a bottle of Elmer’s, defiantly shoving it my way as I consider calling her bluff and drizzling the glue over her toast—“in a cursive  R  like Daddy does.”

Instead, I say with all the calmness I can muster, “Now, Ruby. You know we can’t glue food.”

She stares at me as if I’m speaking Swahili, prompting me to translate for her: “You’ll have to make do with  pieces.”

Hearing this bit of tough love, she proceeds to grieve the toast that might have been. It occurs to me that a pretty easy fix would be to eat the French toast myself and make a fresh piece for Ruby, but there is something so thoroughly maddening about her expression that I find myself silently reciting the advice of my pediatrician, several how-to books, and my stay-at-home-mother friends:  do not surrender to her demands. A philosophy that runs in marked contrast to the parenting adage I normally subscribe to: choose your battles—which I confess is secret code for  hold your ground only if it’s convenient;  otherwise, appease the subject in order to make your life easier. Besides, I think, as I prepare for an ugly gridlock, I am trying to avoid carbs, starting this morning.

So, my cellulite settling the matter, I purposefully set Ruby’s plate on the table before her and announce, “It’s this or nothing.”

“Nothing then!” Ruby says.

I bite my lip and shrug, as if to say,  Bring on the hunger strike, then exit to the family room where Frank is quietly eating dry Apple Jacks—one at a time—the only thing he’ll touch for breakfast. Running my hand through his soft hair, I sigh into the phone and say, “Sorry. Where were we?”

“Your anniversary,” she says expectantly, hungry for me to describe the perfect romantic evening, the fairy tale she clings to, aspires to.

On most days I might hate to disappoint her. But as I listen to my daughter’s escalating sobs, and watch her attempt to roll her toast into a Play Doh-like ball in order to prove that I am wrong, and that food can indeed be reassembled, I delight in telling Cate that Nick got paged in the middle of dinner.

“He didn’t switch his call?” she says, crestfallen.

“Nope. He forgot.”

“Wow. That sucks,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“So you didn’t exchange gifts? Not even when he got home?”

“No,” I say. “We agreed not to do presents this year . . . Things are kind of tight these days.”

“Yeah, right,” Cate says, refusing to believe something else I tell her about my life—that plastic surgeons aren’t loaded, at least the ones who work at academic hospitals helping children rather than in private practice enhancing breasts.

“It’s true,” I say. “We gave up one income, remember?”

“What time did he get home?” she asks.

“Late. Too late for s-e-x ...” I say, thinking that it would be just my luck for my gifted daughter to memorize the three letters and spout them off to, say, Nick’s mother, Connie, who recently hinted that she thinks the kids watch too much television.

“So what about you?” I ask, remembering that she had a date last night. “Any action?”

“Nope. The drought continues,” she says.

I laugh. “What? The five-day drought?”

“Try five weeks,” she says. “And sex wasn’t even an issue . . . I got stood up.”

“Shut up,” I say, wondering what man would stand her up. Beyond her perfect figure, she is also funny, smart, and a huge sports fan, rattling off baseball trivia the way most women can recite Hollywood gossip. In other words—she is most guys’ dream. Granted, she can be high-maintenance and shockingly insecure, but they never glean that at the outset. In other words, she’s break-up-able, but not stand-up-able.

Ruby preaches from the next room that it’s not nice to say
shut up
as Cate continues, “Yeah. Before last night, I always had that going for me. Never been stood up and never dated a married man. I almost thought the former was my reward for the latter. So much for karma.”

“Maybe he
was
married.”

“No. He definitely wasn’t married. I did my research.”

“Wait. Was this the accountant from eHarmony or the pilot from your last trip?”

“Neither. It was the botanist from Starbucks.”

I whistle as I peek around the corner and catch Ruby taking a surreptitious bite of French toast. She hates to lose almost as much as her father, who can’t even make himself lose to her at
Candy Land.

“Wow,” I say. “You got stood up by a botanist. That’s impressive.”

“Tell me about it,” she says. “And he didn’t so much as text an explanation or apology. A simple, ‘Really sorry, Cate, but I think I’d rather curl up with a good fern tonight.’”

“Well. Maybe he just. . .
forgot?
I offer.

“Maybe he decided I’m too old,” she says.

I open my mouth to refute this latest cynical tidbit, but can think of nothing particularly comforting to say other than my usual standby that her guy is out there somewhere—and she will meet him soon.

“I don’t know about that, Tessa. I think you might have gotten the last good one.”

She pauses in such a way that I know what’s coming next. Sure enough, she adds a wry, “Correction: the last
two
good ones. You bitch.”

“Any idea when you’re going to stop bringing him up?” I ask, both of us referring to my ex-fiancé. “Just a ballpark estimate?”

“Hmm. How about never?” she says. “Or . . . let’s just say when I get married. But wait—that’s the same thing as never, isn’t it?”

I laugh, and tell her I have to run as my memory is jarred back to Ryan, my college sweetheart, and our engagement. And by engagement, I don’t mean that Ryan had just proposed. Rather, we were mere weeks away from our wedding day, knee-deep in honeymoon itineraries, final dress fittings, and first-dance lessons. Invitations had been mailed, our registry completed, our wedding bands engraved. To everyone in my life, I was a typical, glowing bride-to-be—my arms toned, skin tanned, hair shiny.
Literally
glowing. Everyone but my therapist, Cheryl, that is, who, every Tuesday at seven o’clock, helped me examine that blurry line between normal wedding anxiety and commitment issues stemming from my parents’ recent, bitter divorce.

Looking back, the answer was obvious, the mere inquiry suggesting a problem, but there were so many factors clouding the issue, confusing my heart. For starters, Ryan was all I really knew. We had been dating since our sophomore year at Cornell and had only ever slept with each other. I couldn’t imagine kissing anyone else, let alone loving someone new. We had the same circle of friends with whom we shared precious college memories I didn’t want to taint with a breakup. We also shared a passion for literature, both of us English majors turned high-school teachers, although I was about to start grad school at Columbia with the dream of becoming a professor. In fact, just a few months before, I had talked him into moving to the city with me, convincing him to leave his job and his beloved hometown of Buffalo for something more exciting. And although it was exciting, it was also scary. I had grown up in nearby Westchester, making frequent trips to Manhattan with my brother and parents, but living
in
the city was a different matter, and Ryan felt like my rock and safety net in the uncertain, scary real world. Reliable, honest, kind, funny Ryan with his big, boisterous family and parents who had been married for thirty years and counting—a good sign, my mother said.

Check, check, check, check, check,

Finally, there were Ryan’s own sweet assurances that we were perfect for each other. That I was just overthinking things, being my usual neurotic self. He truly believed in us—which on most days was enough for me to believe in us, too.

“You’re the kind of girl who will never be completely ready,” he told me after one session with Cheryl, the details of which I always divulged to him with only the most minor edits. We were sitting at an Italian restaurant in the Village, waiting for the gnocchi special, and he reached his long, lanky arm across the table and patted my hand. “It is one of the things I love most about you.”

I remember considering this as I surveyed his pragmatic expression, and deciding, with a certain degree of sadness and loss, that he was probably right. That maybe I wasn’t hardwired for the sort of all-consuming, unconditional passion that I had read of in books, seen in movies, even heard some friends, including Cate, describe. Maybe I would have to make do with the cornerstones of our relationship—comfort and compatibility and compassion. Maybe it was good enough, what we had, and I might look for the rest of my life and never find better.

“I
am
completely ready,” I said, finally convincing myself that it was the truth. I still wasn’t sure whether I was settling, but in my mind at least the
issue
was settled. I was going to marry Ryan. Final tlecision, last word.

Until three days later, that is, when I first laid eyes on Nick.

I was on the subway, during my crowded morning commute to school, when he walked onto the train two stops after mine, holding a tall thermos of coffee and wearing blue-gray scrubs. His dark, wavy hair was longer than it is now, and I remember thinking he looked more like an actor than a doctor—and that maybe he
was
an actor playing a doctor, on his way to a TV set. I remember looking into his eyes—the warmest brown eyes I had ever seen—and feeling overcome by a crazy, gut feeling that can only be described as love at first sight. I remember thinking that I was saved by a moment, by a person I didn’t know and probably would never know.

“Hello,” he said, smiling, as he reached out and held the same pole I was gripping.

“Hi,” I said, catching my breath as our hands touched, and we rattled our way uptown, making small talk about topics we’ve both, remarkably, forgotten.

At one point, after we had delved into a few personal matters, including my Ph.D. program and his residency, he nodded down at my diamond ring and said, “So when’s the big day?”

I told him twenty-nine days, and I must have looked grim when I said it, because he gave me a knowing look and asked if I was okay. It was as if he could see straight through me, into my heart, and as I looked back at him, I couldn’t stop myself from welling up. I couldn’t believe I was crying with a complete stranger when I hadn’t even broken down on Cheryl’s tweed couch. “I know,” he said gently.