The Secret of Joy (15 page)

Rebecca flopped down on her bed and stared at the pretty pattern of wallpaper, the most delicate, faded of cabbage roses.

Why
was
she staying? Because Joy was her
sister
. Because that word
did
mean something in and of itself. Because it did and didn’t, didn’t and did. Because Joy was this walking, talking, living and breathing tangible connection to her. A fuzzy connection, maybe, like when an ice storm messes with the cable wires.

She was giving herself a headache. She needed to get out of this room, away from these four walls, however soothing the pale apricot cabbage roses, and somehow internalize this strange new something, this strange new nothing.

I Am Here and Here Is Where? was a game she used to play on long road trips with her parents.
“I am here and here is where?”
she’d ask while peering out the window of their blue car, her parents turning around to smile at seven-, eight-,
nine-year-old Rebecca taking an interest in geography by reading the huge, green highway signs. Mystic, Connecticut. Woodstock, New York. Entering here. Exiting there.

Here, at the moment, was her room at the inn.
Go ask Marianne if she needs help with dusting or whipping up a batch of some exotic new flavor for whoopie pie filling
, she told herself.

“Hello?” came a muted voice as Rebecca put a dark green sweater over her tank top and slipped into her Danskos. “Hello?”

She opened her door and peeked down the hall. Ellie, in red Crocs and a tan trench coat, stood in the foyer, her face crumpling. Were those mascara tracks down her cheeks?

Rebecca rushed toward her. “Ellie, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I just thought I’d come say hi. I remembered you mentioning you were staying here,” she said, then burst into tears.

Rebecca led Ellie inside her room and sat her down on the rocking chair. She grabbed the box of tissues from the bathroom and handed them to Ellie, then sat down across from her on the edge of her bed.

“Tim?” Rebecca asked.

Ellie dabbed under her red-rimmed eyes with a tissue. “Why aren’t I enough? That’s what I want to know?” She dissolved in tears and slumped down in the chair.

Rebecca’s heart squeezed. Oh, Ellie.

“I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do to be what he wants,” she said, sniffling, her eyes pooling with tears.

“You can only be you, honey,” Rebecca said. “And you’re great.”

“Tim doesn’t think so.”

“He married you,” Rebecca pointed out.

“So why aren’t I enough?”

Rebecca wished she had the magic answer for that. And she hated giving Ellie the standard but true answer.

“It’s not about you, Ellie. You know that, right?”

“Of course it’s about me. If I were more something,
somethinger
, we wouldn’t have all these stupid problems. He wouldn’t cheat.”

“Ellie, you know that’s not true, really, right?”

“Then what am I supposed to do to save my marriage? If it’s not me, I can’t fix it, can’t change it. If it
is
me, I can. I can stop nagging so much. I can get my boobs done. I can go blond. I can stop getting into stupid arguments with his moronic mother. Whatever. But if it’s not me, I can’t do anything about it. It’s out of my hands. I need it to be about me so I can change things.”

“But you can’t change
him
. Only he can do that.”

She let out a deep breath and stared at the ceiling. “He came over last night. At around midnight. Pathetic, I know. I called him and told him I didn’t want to talk, I just wanted us to be together. So he said okay and came over. And so I changed into something sexy and turned off the lights and lit the candles and put on Kid Rock, who he loves, and we had the most amazing night. It was like when we first started dating. So romantic. And then in the morning—”

She burst into tears again.

“And then in the morning what?” Rebecca asked gently.

“Well, I made us breakfast—a real breakfast, eggs, bacon,
the works. I even slipped out to the store for orange juice because I know he loves it. And he wakes up to the smell of bacon frying, his favorite smell, and he says he can’t stay, he’s going fishing with his friends. So I say fine, eat fast, and then come over after, and he says he doesn’t know with this big pause. So I tell him I want us to work on this marriage, that we have to work on it. And he said it shouldn’t be such hard work. And when I told him that marriage
is
hard work, he said it shouldn’t be, that his parents have been married for thirty-two years and get along just fine. Which is a total fucking joke, by the way. His parents hate each other’s guts. Anyone with a brain can see that.”

Rebecca smiled, and Ellie’s face brightened for just a moment.

“So I asked him if he would do one thing for me, just this one thing, and come on Joy’s Rocky Relationships Tour this weekend. Tim really likes Joy and Harry, he respects them, so I figured he’d at least consider it, and he said there’s no way he’s doing something all New Agey like that.”

“Is it New Agey?” From the little Rebecca had heard about the Rocky Relationship Tour it was a camping tour of sorts, but the group would stay in a private lodge with several bedrooms. They would laze around the big room with its wood-burning stove and fireplaces, talk as a group at three designated times—after breakfast, after lunch, and after dinner—then hike the trails, or do absolutely nothing. The
nothing
was supposed to put the focus back on the individual, the couple, without the distractions of friends or buttinsky relatives. The lodge was isolated enough so that leaving on foot wasn’t an option.

“Not at all. There’s no Enya or meditating involved. It’s just about getting away from everyday life, everyday problems. I told him it would be almost like marriage counseling, but without the therapists, which he totally isn’t into. And he still said no.”

“That doesn’t mean he won’t go, just that you need to
work
on him a little. Like you and Maggie told me about Joy: She’ll come around. Tim will, too.”

“You think?” Ellie asked, glancing up.

“I hope,” Rebecca said. “How long have you been separated?”

“Almost two months. But he comes over a few times a week. We have sex, and I think we’re going to work things out, and then it’s back to the same old disappointments, same old problems. No, he’s not going to some marriage counselor. No, he’s not reading any self-help books. No, he’s not agreeing to not going out with his asshole friends for one week.”

“What’s Tim like? When he’s not being a jerk?”

Ellie’s face brightened again. “He’s wonderful. He can be so sweet and tender and funny. And just when I’m thinking I can overlook what I hate, someone will whisper in my ear, ‘I saw your husband out with some bleached blond last night.’”

“Maybe you can’t overlook what you hate,” Rebecca said. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

“I know. That’s why I went on the singles tour. To force myself to accept that he’s cheating. That
he
walked away from this marriage. I know I should move on. I know being with Tim means nothing but heartache. I know, I know, I know. But knowing doesn’t seem to help.”

“Is the heartache mostly to do with the cheating or were there big problems before that?”

“Well, I didn’t know he was cheating for a while. Before I caught on, we argued about everything—what to spend money on, how much to save, if he should go out practically every night after work with his stupid friends and get rip-roaring trashed. Do you know that the last time he went out with those morons one got so drunk that he misaimed a metal dart and it hit someone in the back of the neck?”

“Maybe it’s time for an ultimatum,” Rebecca said, handing Ellie another tissue.

“I’ve tried those. A million times. He gets all scared and comes rushing back, promising me things will be different, and they are for a week. Then it’s back to his old ways. Maybe I just have to accept him the way he is. If I love him. That’s what my mother-in-law says. ‘Men are men,’” she added in a singsong voice. “‘Like the famous saying goes, it’s the wife’s job to be a cook in the kitchen, a hostess in the living room, and a whore in the bedroom, all while not nagging about nonsense like socks on the floor and keeping her figure nice and slim.’”

“Your mother-in-law actually said that? She sounds worse than Maggie’s!”

Ellie nodded, then laughed. “The only good point about my marriage ending is that she goes with the marriage.” Ellie sobered up fast. “I don’t want a divorce, though. I want my husband. But I want him different. I want him to be like the guy he was when—”

“What?”

“I was gonna say like when I married him, but he wasn’t
so different. I just thought marriage would change him. That he’d settle down. God, I’m such a stupid cliché.”

“No, you’re just a woman in love with her husband. A woman who wants her marriage to work.”

Ellie let out a deep breath. “I think he might do Joy’s tour. If I tell him this is it, this is our last chance to try and fix this marriage or I’m filing for divorce. He doesn’t want a divorce. He doesn’t even want to be separated. He just wants to do what he wants and have me, too. Please, please, please tell me you’ll come, Rebecca. Joy is great at getting conversations started and opening dialogues, as she calls it. But you’re the expert. You have to come. You can really guide us.”

Rebecca would love to go. To see if she could really think about a career in counseling, if going to graduate school wouldn’t be a waste of her paralegal certificate. And to spend the weekend with Joy again, in a setting of sharing and opening up, could do wonders for their stalled relationship. But Rebecca couldn’t imagine Joy suddenly saying,
“Sure, stick around even longer, listen to my most innermost problems and the details of my marriage.”

“Ellie, I would love to, really, but I don’t think Joy wants me sticking around until the weekend.”

“I’ll bet she wants you to come. She might not be able to handle one-on-one with you yet, but she seems comfortable with group stuff. She asked you to come this past weekend, didn’t she?”

She did. That was something. Something big. It wasn’t just an impersonal cup of coffee at Starbucks. It was a weekend away with her
friends
. The Wiscasset Divorced Ladies Club wasn’t made up of random singles who Joy barely knew. These
women had known about Joy’s father. They knew about her marriage. And however grudgingly, Joy had invited Rebecca to come on their weekend away.

“I’ll ask her,” Rebecca said. “But I can’t promise anything.”

Ellie nodded. “If she says okay, will you go? We really need you. Not just me and Tim, but Joy and Harry, too. You’re a divorce mediator from New York City. That’ll mean something to Tim and Harry. They’ll respect what you have to say.”

Whoa. Joy and Harry were
both
going? Rebecca hadn’t known that.

But still. “Ellie, I’m not a mediator. I’m not a therapist. I’m a
paralegal
. And given that I didn’t show up at work this morning after a week of bereavement leave, I’m very likely going to be an unemployed paralegal.”

Ellie shook her head. “Experience is experience,” she said. “Right?”

After Ellie left, with two of Marianne’s whoopie pies in her hands and an assurance to knock on Rebecca’s door anytime, day or night, Rebecca called Joy.

“I’m not calling to ask you to coffee for the hundredth time, I promise,” Rebecca said. She explained about Ellie, about the Rocky Relationships Tour. “I’d like to come, if it’s okay with you. Maybe I really can help.”

Silence.

And I think it could help me, help me figure out what I’m supposed to be doing with my life when everything waiting for me in New York feels so wrong
.

“Ah, I just realized you must think I’m a total idiot for thinking I can help when we haven’t even talked about what you envision. I heard a bit about what you’re planning, and Ellie filled me in, but—”

“No, it’s not that.”

Rebecca waited for what it was, but Joy didn’t say anything. “I think the tour would help me, too,” she rushed to say. “I know what I
don’t
want to do with my life is help couples divorce—even nicely. And that’s been my job for the past two years. I want to help couples
not
divorce. I want to help them work toward reconciliation, toward what made them fall in love in the first place, toward how to honor that every day while dealing with everyday crap. If that’s what you envision for the Rocky Relationships Tour, then I do think I can bring something to the table.”

Silence. Perhaps Joy didn’t go for corporate speak.

Rebecca let out a silent sigh of frustration.
You
are
emotionally frigid
, she wanted to scream.
Respond! Say something! Get all pissed off the way you did in Portland. Tell me to go away
.

But don’t really tell me that
.

“Well, why don’t you think about it and let me know,” Rebecca said, liking the idea of Joy having to call Rebecca one way or another.

“Actually, I do think you’d be a big help on the tour. You’re more than welcome to come.”

Rebecca’s heart leaped. She closed her eyes and sat down on the edge of her bed, relief flooding through her. She now had a purpose, a defined reason to stay through the coming weekend.

And she would get to know Joy on a whole new level.

“And I have no idea if what I do envision is even going to work,” Joy added. “This is the first time I’m leading this type of tour. And I’m one of the participants. So this is new territory for me, too. Weird territory. If I envision anything, it’s three couples—well, three if Tim agrees to go—being away from the distractions of their everyday life, with a little shop talk, a little relaxing, a little enforced time together. But considering I am one of the participants, I think having someone impartial, someone with experience with warring couples, would be great.”

“So I’m hired?” Rebecca asked.

“You’re hired. Not that I can pay you.”

Rebecca laughed. “I know.”