Within Arm's Reach (22 page)

“Sure,” he says, “but I actually already spoke to someone about the job.”

Her eyes widen. “Why on earth would you do that?”

“She’s a wonderful nurse, and she already has a relationship with your mother, and it turns out she’s looking for a more regular schedule that will allow her to be home with her kids.”

My mother looks at my father as if he’s nuts.

“Who?” I say. “Nurse Ballen?”

He nods. “I just spoke to her, Kelly. Nothing is definite. I knew I had to talk to you first.”

“She’s my mother, Louis. I should hope you would talk to me first. For God’s sake.”

I walk away from their voices, into Gram’s room. She is lying on her back, eyes closed, skin ashy. I close the door, but I can still hear the rise and fall of my mother speaking, the steady murmur from my father.

“Gram,” I say, “I have great news. It looks like you’ll be able to stay in your room at the home. Mom and Dad are working it out now. You’ll be able to go back to your old life. Everything will be exactly the same as before. Just like you wanted.”

There is no response from the old woman, the stranger, lying on the bed.

“Gram,” I say, a little louder.

“Visiting hours are over,” a nurse says, from somewhere behind me.

WHEN I arrive home Lila is there. I’m surprised, pulling into the driveway through the twilight, to see a light in the kitchen window. She usually spends the evenings at Weber’s place. When I walk through the back door I find Lila sitting at the table flipping through the newspaper, drinking peppermint tea. I can smell the peppermint from across the room.

I put my purse down on the counter and try to order the thoughts that have rattled through my head these last few days in the hospital. There is so much I want to talk to her about. I try to think of what to say first. I want to tell my sister that I have pictured her, us, in the future. I’ve seen her as an adult with wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and a streak of gray in her hair. I’ve seen her playing games with my baby on the kitchen’s linoleum floor. I’ve seen the two of us growing older, side by side. Finding ways to make use of each other, to depend on each other.

I am wondering if she will laugh, or maybe say something mean, when Lila speaks.

“Your advice this week is really odd,” she says, rattling the newspaper with both hands. “It’s incredibly practical and you answer three letters from guys, which isn’t like you. This advice to the man who really wants to work on his car at night but doesn’t want to hurt his wife’s feelings cracked me up.” Lila smiles down at the paper.

“Oh God.” I had forgotten it was Thursday. Column day. “I didn’t write that,” I say. “I was too upset, what with Gram . . . Grayson must have written it to cover for me. Let me see.”

Lila pulls out the Lifestyles section and hands it to me. “There’s another message from him on the machine. Editor Boy is a little obsessive compulsive.”

“Oh God, oh God.” I sink down into a chair. “He must be furious.”

“Who cares,” Lila says. “You care too much about what other people think.”

Oh sure,
I want to say.
You care so little about what other people think
that you can’t even tell your sister that you’re sleeping with a beer-swilling firefighter?
I know now that I’m not going to tell her about my glimpse into our mutual future. We would both think I was crazy. “He’s my boss, Lila. I’m paid to care what Grayson thinks.”

I skim the column. Grayson is a news writer and his sentences are short and to the point, very different from my more conversational style of writing. His advice is much more specific than mine usually is. He tells the man who is more in love with his car than his wife to bring home flowers and candy on the nights he plans to spend working in the garage. He tells a mother whose teenage son doesn’t want to talk to her to make a list of topics she would like to discuss and to give her son a copy, too. Then they’re to set a meeting time and neither mother nor son is allowed to leave the table until all topics have been touched on. Grayson tells a man who feels that his receding hairline is diminishing his chances with women to wear more hats and try to walk with more of a confident swagger.

I lay the paper down on the table. “He gave them hopeless advice,” I say. “I’m going to get hate letters. The teenage son is going to laugh in his mother’s face. The guy with the car is in huge trouble if he tries to buy his wife off with chocolates. And the man with the receding hairline needs to know that women don’t care about that kind of thing. That’s not why he’s alone.” I put my hands over my face.

“You’re right,” Lila says. “I wouldn’t have thought about it like that, but that makes sense.”

With my eyes closed behind my fingers, all I see are shadows and darkness. “I miss my good advice. I miss having the knack for it. I miss drinking cold beer. I miss everything,” I say. “I miss having sex. I really miss having sex. You’re so lucky that you get to have sex.”

I hear Lila push her chair back. “So go pick some guy up. What’s stopping you?”

“Have you looked at me lately?” I take my hands away from my eyes and the kitchen is bathed with neon spots and bright light. After a minute, I say, “Have you not been visiting Gram because you don’t want to see people from medical school?”

“I stop by every day, just not during visiting hours. I know my way around the rules there. I’m not scared of them.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

She shakes her head. “I’m due back to school next week. My sick leave is up.”

“At least you’re having sex on a regular basis,” I say. “The world is magical when you’re having sex, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Maybe you’re doing it wrong.”

“You’re delusional.” Lila looks at me with tired eyes. “You always have been. There’s no such thing as magic.”

AFTER LILA leaves for Weber’s, I heat up a frozen dinner and eat all of it plus two bananas and half of a McDonald’s chocolate shake I had forgotten was in the refrigerator. Then I put my cardigan back on and sit outside on the front steps. I keep forgetting it is summertime. Every time I leave the house, or the hospital, I brace myself for a cold wind and am surprised to find myself sweating in the humidity. New Jersey is brutal in the summer. The high temperatures make the pavement steam. The density of the air makes it difficult to breathe. The heat slows your mind, and people rush from one air-conditioned space to another. From car to house to business to mall.

With the baby heavy in front of me, I sweat more than I ever have. My sweat is smellier now, too. I don’t smell like the person I used to be before this pregnancy. My body emits a salty, earthy odor that I don’t recognize. Several times I have walked into a room and thought, What is that smell? only to realize that it’s me. There are other changes in my body that I didn’t expect. A moss of pale hair has grown across the stretched skin of my belly. And not only have my breasts grown enormous, but the nipples are the width of one of my fingers and stained a deep wine color. They are amazing and a complete departure from the breasts I used to have. I go for days on end without looking at myself naked in the mirror because the sight is so alarming.

A car slows in front of the house and then turns into the driveway. I can tell from the sound of the engine that it’s not Lila’s car. It is hard for me to see through the darkness, and I am immediately nervous. Maybe it’s Meggy, sensing my vulnerability and circling in for another attack. I would like to declare this house a no-visiting zone. The last welcome unexpected guest we had was Gram, and she gave up her driver’s license months ago. Since then, everyone who has shown up has wanted something.

The car door slams and I see a man walking across the lawn.

I stand up. “Hello?” I say. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me,” he says.

I sit back down on the step. “You couldn’t wait to yell at me until tomorrow?”

“You aren’t returning my calls, so I decided to take action.”

I had been feeling guilty about skipping work, but now that I’m looking at Grayson, I’m nothing but annoyed. “You know,” I say, “you could have skipped the column this week altogether, or run an old column, or a ‘best of’ compilation. You didn’t have to do the work yourself.”

He doesn’t even have a chance to respond before I start to cry. This pisses me off even more. I hate for anyone to see me cry. I don’t cry the way a girl is supposed to; my tears are a messy, choking affair. My face gets red and puffy and my nose makes noises. Grayson, Mr. Unemotional, is the last person I want to cry in front of. He doesn’t even have the common decency to look away while my eyes and my nose run. He stares at me through the whole thing.

“Gracie,” he says, loudly, as though I can’t hear him because of the tears, as though I can’t hear him because my life has risen up around me in a shape I can’t recognize. “Gracie, I didn’t come here to talk about your column.”

“My grandmother fell,” I say.

“I came here to talk about getting married. Just hear me out before you object, all right? If you think about it, it makes sense for us to get married. The way I look at it, we can help each other. You need someone who understands you, Gracie. You get yourself so lost, and you have so little confidence in who you are. You need someone who knows what you want. And you know that you need financial help. When we last discussed this—”

“
We
did not discuss this.” A deep exhaustion presses me down into the cement step.

“Fine. When I—”

“I don’t want to discuss this, Grayson.”

He shakes his head, shakes my objections off. “When the subject last came up, you couldn’t have known what it would take to bring a baby into the world. You must have a better idea now of how much support is necessary. Who are you going to get that from, if not from me? It doesn’t sound like the father of the child, or even your beloved gram, is going to be able to provide for you both.”

My voice is very quiet. “No.”

“No, what?”

“I’m not going to marry someone who feels more pity for me than anything else, Grayson. I’ve made it this far, haven’t I? My family thinks I’m a slut, and maybe I am. What is it they say, you reap what you sow? I deserve this. I deserve to be alone with this. I am not your responsibility.”

“This isn’t just about you, Gracie. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I’m thirty-three years old, and I’ve never been in love. I’ve come to believe”—he hesitates—“that I’m unable to fall in love. I’m not hardwired for it. I’m too analytical, too inhibited. There is some part of me that can’t let go in the way that’s necessary to feel that depth of emotion.” Grayson kicks at the cement walkway. “But I still want to experience life. I want to have a family. I want to experience marriage. The problem is, I don’t know that many, or even one, woman who would be willing to marry me on my terms. After all, I make a good living, but I’m not a millionaire. I work all the time. I don’t have anything else to offer. A decent paycheck and no chance at true love isn’t much of a deal.”

I can hear that Grayson is telling the truth. His wiry runner’s body is bent toward me, willing me to hear him. I shake my head in amazement. “But you’re saying that deal is good enough for me?”

I wonder how this could happen, that as Gram turns away from me, Grayson steps forward. The father of my first baby, the one I threw away, is offering to play father to my second. Is this how it’s supposed to be? Am I supposed to take help no matter who’s offering it and no matter what form it arrives in?

“I care about you, Gracie, as much as I care about anyone. I would even say that I love you. And I can say that with some truth, because, unlike most people, I’ve pushed my way past the front door in your life. When we stopped sleeping together, I made sure we became friends.”

“You don’t even like me half the time.” I wipe my cheeks dry with my hands. “You don’t approve of the way I make decisions. You don’t approve of
this baby
.”

“I have nothing against the baby, Gracie. I will love the baby, I’m sure. I want to be its father. That’s part of my proposal. We have a lot to offer each other. I can steady you, and keep you on an even keel. I can help you make decisions. And you and the baby can give me a life I would have no access to otherwise. We’ll be meeting each other halfway. I see a lot of positives.”

I lean back against the step. My back aches and I have to pee. The baby is sitting on top of my bladder. “I don’t think so, Grayson. I think we both deserve better.”

“This
is
better,” he says. “And I can convince you of that.”

“This is not some editorial for you to push your opinion at people. You’re talking about our lives.”

He nods. “Just let me ask you one critical question. One question, all right?”

“All right.”

“Do you know who you are, Gracie?”

I stare up at him, my insides suddenly as silent and glassy as a lake at midnight. Past and future tears clog up my throat. The McLaughlin in me seals my lips. All I can do is stare. He knows my answer. He knows exactly what he is doing.

Grayson speaks slowly now. He gives weight to each word, closing in for the kill. “
I
know who you are, Gracie. And I promise that as your husband I will teach you.” He pauses. “Don’t you think it’s important for your baby to have a mother who knows herself?”

The baby. This frees my tongue. This gives me the only possible answer. The sound is almost a cry as it breaks out of my throat.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes.”

LILA

Gracie thinks I spend all of my time outside of the house with Weber, but that’s not completely true. I spend a lot of that time in the library, fighting the urge to see Weber. With no schoolwork to do, I have taken to writing letters. I sit in my favorite carrel on the third floor of the library. I write a few letters a week, then tear them up and throw them in the trash. It’s a new experience for me. I let go on the page, barely paying attention to what I write. When I’ve finished a letter, I feel cleaned out, lighter, better, at least for a few minutes.

Dear Abby,

The boy that I sleep with asked me what I believe in and I couldn’t answer him. Why does everyone need something to believe in? Really, I don’t see why faith is so necessary. He believes in fires and beer and New Jersey, for God’s sakes. As if those are things to build your life on.

I know what I don’t believe in, though. Isn’t that something? I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in destiny. I think that life is made up of random events. I don’t think there is a point to any individual’s existence. You aren’t put on this earth for any one reason. And I don’t believe in soul mates. People are drawn together due to pheromones and physical attraction and they choose whether to do the work to stay together or not. I don’t believe in couples staying together for the kids.

My list of what I don’t believe in has been growing lately. Almost exponentially. I could go on for pages. My sleep is filled with making these kinds of lists. What the hell is wrong with me?

There is suddenly a hand on my shoulder, a heavy patting I recognize, which never fails to annoy me. Weber wakes me up in the morning, or sometimes in the middle of the night, by patting the palm of his hand against my shoulder. I don’t know if it is the repetition of the gesture that annoys me, or the gesture itself. Weber always seems to be coming up from behind, startling me.

“What are you doing here?” This is my one hiding place. My one escape. How dare he find me here?

He seems to read my mind. “I’ve always known this is where you go. It’s not like you’re well hidden. Your car’s right outside.”

“Why were you looking for me?”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“And it couldn’t wait?” I have my arm over the letter I have been writing. I am furious that he thinks it is okay to disturb me here. I have been successfully hiding in libraries since I was a child. Everyone else in my life—my mother, father, sister, even Gram—knows better than to bother me in my libraries.

“I’ve met everyone in your family now,” he says.

I stare at him, still so angry I can barely absorb what he is saying.

“I went to visit your grandmother today. She was the last one.”

I can only repeat his words. “The last one?”

“Well, I already knew your lovely sister, so she doesn’t count. But now I’ve spoken to each of the others, your mom, dad, and grandmother. I introduced myself. It’s been really interesting. Educational, even. Seeing the different parts of Lila Leary scattered around her family.”

I remember at the last moment where I am, and manage to strangle my voice into a whisper. “Why would you do that? Are you insane? Who did you introduce yourself as?”

“Your face is turning all splotchy,” he says.

“Can we leave here, please?” I say. “Right now?”

Weber shrugs. He is draped over the study carrel behind me, perfectly relaxed. He is wearing an old pair of blue shorts and a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt. He has a vast T-shirt collection centered around New Jersey bands. There is an intricate value system to his collection that he explained to me one afternoon. The performers are ranked by the quality of each of their albums: Bon Jovi is at the top, then Bruce Springsteen, then the Fountains of Wayne and someone named Slapstreet Johnny, and then a series of local bands I’ve never heard of. As a means of protecting his collection, Weber wears the most valued T-shirts only once a month so they don’t wear out. The
Born in the
USA
T-shirt he is wearing now is one of his favorites.

“Sure thing,” he says. “I have the afternoon off. Where do you want to go?”

I stand up, careful to block my letter from his sight until after I have closed the notebook and stuffed the letter in my pocket. I walk past him, down the stairs. He follows, and we travel down two more floors, then through the newspaper section, past the mimeograph machines, and out the front door.

In the hot, sticky summer air, he says, “My vote is Dairy Queen.”

I am still working on what he said, on what that means. I say, “You talked to my mother?”

“I didn’t have to go see her, actually. I ran into both her and your father. I only had to specifically visit your grandmother. I bumped into your mother on Main Street last week. I helped her out, actually. She tripped and her bag went flying. I helped her gather everything up while we talked.”

I have trouble picturing this. I have never seen my mother trip. She is always perfectly composed, pulled together, even-gaited. And the idea of her crouched over a hot sidewalk picking up keys and lipsticks and papers and personal items while chatting with Weber . . . is too much.

“She talked awfully fast. I think she was afraid, at first, that I was going to tell her I was yet another guy Gracie had been schtupping. When I said I was a friend of yours, she looked relieved.”

“That’s what you told her? That you’re a friend of mine?”

“I may have said boyfriend. I don’t remember my exact phrasing. As soon as we got past that introduction, she acted like we’d been friends forever. She can be very charming, can’t she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do. You can’t claim to know everything in every book you’ve ever read, and not know that your own mother is charming.”

“Are you trying to ruin my life?”

Weber scratches his stomach, right across Bruce’s guitar. “I wanted to meet your family, Lila, and I knew you weren’t going to introduce me to them.”

“You never even asked me to!”

“If I had, would you have said yes?”

“No!” I am practically yelling.

“I’m sweating,” he says. “Can we please continue discussing your paranoia at Dairy Queen?”

“I’m not paranoid,” I say, allowing him to lighten the tone slightly. I head toward his truck. “All of my concerns are totally valid.”

“Well, my favorite person was your grandmother,” he says. “She is totally cool.”

We are in the truck now, and the blast of air conditioning stands the hairs on my arms on end. I look over at Weber, and his beer belly and his T-shirt, and the way he says “totally cool” depresses me. I can’t believe I let him have sex with me. I can’t believe I enjoy it.

“I think your grandmother and I were meant to know each other,” he says. “I felt that so strongly when I was with her in her room. It’s just one more reason that you and I needed to cross paths.”

“I can’t stand it when you talk like that,” I say. “You know I can’t stand it when you talk like that.”

He gives me a look meant to show that he has endless compassion for my ignorance. “Lila, just because you’re a little lost right now is no reason to attack my belief system.”

“I’m attacking you, you bastard, not the bullshit you believe in. You raided my life without my permission.”

“Well, your grandmother and I talked about all that bullshit and more. Life, love, relationships, you name it. She told me that I reminded her of the best of both of her parents.” Weber nods, and taps his thumb against the steering wheel. “You know what? I’ve only met her once, but I think I love your grandmother.” He nods again. “I do. I love her.”

I feel something flicker in my chest. I think, Am I jealous? I shake it off. I shake all of it off, because how can I respond to his loving my grandmother after spending fifteen minutes with her? How can I respond to the absurd way he talks? All I can do is brush past the fluff and look for the facts.

“So,” I say, “you have essentially told my entire family that we’re involved.”

We pull into the Dairy Queen parking lot, and Weber screeches into the only remaining parking space. The place is packed with kids and parents and teenagers. It appears that half of Ramsey has decided to go out for ice cream at the same time.

“We need to approach this situation seriously,” Weber says, scanning the crowded scene. “You find two seats at a picnic table, and I’ll order. You want the usual?”

I nod, and climb out of the truck. Ordinarily I would never allow myself to be seen with him in such a busy public place, but that doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Everyone important knows. Everyone is free to judge me, or ask questions, or laugh behind my back. My effort to keep myself apart, to keep up the facade of perfection, is failing in every part of my life.

I find a seat at the end of a picnic bench and then look at him, standing fourth in line at the ice cream window. He jiggles on the balls of his feet, his hands in his pockets. I wonder what the hell I am doing. I accuse Gracie of being self-destructive by bringing a child into the world when she barely has the judgment to pick out her own clothes in the morning, but am I any better? I am taking myself apart brick by brick instead of using my sister’s method and running myself over with a steamroller.

I check to make sure Weber is lodged firmly in line, and then pull the letter out of my pocket. I wrote it less than an hour earlier, and the words still catch in my throat. I have no pen, but in my head I add,
Things are only getting worse
. I smooth my hand over the piece of paper, pressing it flat against the wooden table. I study my handwriting. I wait to feel the peace that writing these letters sometimes gives me.

Instead I am distracted by the sound of someone directly behind me crying. A woman is sniffling into a handkerchief, not making even the slightest effort to muffle the noise. I tell myself that this is my own fault. If I had been paying closer attention when looking for a seat, I never would have sat down next to a crier. I would have steered in the direction of some happy family whose hands were sticky from melting ice cream cones. Some cluster of people I could ignore, and who would ignore me. But now I have a dilemma. Do I pretend I don’t hear this woman sob, or do I turn around and say something? She is sitting beside me on a picnic bench. As a doctor in training, I should want to help a person in trouble. It may even be my responsibility. During a white-coat ceremony on the first day of medical school, we all took an oath to that effect. The oath said something about devoting ourselves to the service of mankind both day and night, when it’s convenient and when it’s not. I didn’t pay attention to the exact content of the words when I repeated them, because the oath seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. How could I promise to do
anything
for the rest of my life?

The woman gives an extra-large sob, a watery noise that makes me think of a goldfish named Crocodile that Gracie and I had as a pet when we were children. All day long Crocodile would race around his small bowl, making waves lap against the rim of the bowl. Gracie and I laughed and clapped at his speed, not realizing at the time that Crocodile wasn’t playing or showing off, but desperately trying to find an escape from his too-small bowl. He did finally make his way out. Two years after we won him at a school fair, we found him lying on his side on top of Gracie’s bureau one morning, a few inches from the bowl. He was stiff and dry and cold. Crocodile was our first and last pet. Dad was too traumatized by Gracie’s days of crying after Crocodile’s death to even think of bringing another pet into the house, and besides, Mom was allergic to cats and dogs and any other animal that might make a mess of the carpets.

I don’t think it’s polite, or appropriate, to cry in public. It’s a pathetic attempt to grab attention from a group of strangers. And besides, if a person does choose to cry in public, Dairy Queen is the last place that he or she should choose. Dairy Queen is an ice cream store; it is meant to be a happy place. It’s filled with children and families and couples who simply want to consume too much cholesterol and too many calories in the bright summer air without feeling bad about anything. And this woman, sobbing and whimpering, is obviously out to make everyone around her feel bad.

I look down at my letter and mouth the words “Dear Abby.” Then I hear Weber’s voice behind me. “Are you all right? Miss? Are you hurt? My girlfriend’s a doctor—”

“No doctors,” the woman says through her tears.

“She’s right here. It’s no problem,” Weber says. “Babe?”

I hate it when he calls me babe. How dare he do this to me? I turn around slowly. For the hundredth time I am convinced that it is time to finally end things with Weber. There is only the matter of how and when to do it. Should I just walk away now, without a word or a look? Or should I wait to lower the boom until he’s driven me back to the library for my car? Or—and this option makes me feel morally terrible and warm between my legs at the same time—should I go back to his place and fuck him one more time before I end things?

“I’m not a doctor,” I whisper, looking at Weber across the bent figure of the woman. I tell him with my eyes that he has really messed up. I can see that he doesn’t understand why. My expression takes him by surprise, and I enjoy a feeling of triumph. He looks ridiculous, crouching beside the picnic table with an ice cream cone in each hand. I reach out and take the chocolate cone.