“You didn’t ruin it for me.”
“Sometimes I wish I’d married someone else, too. And the weird thing is, I’m not even that unhappy, Judy. Even though we don’t fuck anymore, and even though we sleep in separate rooms and have this weird arrangement that’s kind of a fake marriage and kind of a very real marriage, I still love you. And I probably always will, no matter how things eventually end up.”
I turn my head and rest my forehead on the cold glass of my window.
“You’ve got Teddy, and the dog, and me. You may wish you had more than that, but that’s not bad.”
I don’t want more than that. I’ve never wanted more than that. I’ve just wanted things to be easier. Is that so wrong?
“No one cares how weird your life is, Judy. Or all the ways you think it’s failed you,” Gary says. “Your mother’s gone. No one sees the bird on your head except you.”
Part Three
Bracing for Change
Michael Wasserman
Trying to distract myself from the emotional hangover of our disastrous trip to Vermont, I’m at Costco a few days later, fondling a twenty-count bag of small avocados, while Teddy is off in the video game aisle. I’m hoping to find even one avocado that is soft enough to eat tonight, or tomorrow night, or maybe this month, which I know probably isn’t going to happen, since finding an avocado that’s ripe when you want to eat it is nearly impossible. Everything in life is about timing, about patience, about having faith in the future, but I’ve never believed in any of that. All the cigarettes I smoked before meeting Gary because I was convinced I’d never meet anyone and thus would never have anything to live for; all the times I’ve tried to get back to my work—the writing and the drawing—and failed. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Maybe I’m still not ready. Maybe instead of blaming myself for what happened at Sari Epstein’s I should accept the fact that I’m pushing myself to do something I don’t actually want to do anymore. Maybe I should just move on.
Moving on (“Is ‘moving on’ like ‘giving up’ but with a better publicist?” “When accepting failure is a Good Thing”) is what I’m thinking about when I think I see Michael Wasserman from Hebrew school looking at a jumbo pack of tomatoes. Michael Wasserman, who I’d had a secret crush on all those years ago because of his slim chinos and thick brown hair and perfect teeth and always-white Jack Purcell sneakers, but who had never liked me back. At least I didn’t think he did. Was it possible he’d liked me, too? Probably not, especially since he’d started dating Janie Levy, who also had perfect teeth, during our bar/bat mitzvah year, and to my knowledge, they had never broken up. But now that I’m technically separated, I force myself to question all my default negative thoughts—especially that he could never have liked me because of what I did to him all those years ago by accident.
Almost forty years ago I caused Michael Wasserman’s Passover-themed shoe box diorama depicting Moses receiving the Ten Commandments to fall off the teacher’s desk when I stupidly reached for another piece of matzo that I wasn’t even hungry for. Wasn’t it just yesterday that everyone turned and stared at me without helping to pick it up and put it back together? That he saw the shoe box on the floor; all his hard work, all his careful gluing, his tiny precision handiwork—ruined? We were eleven or twelve then, the age when boys still show their feelings, the age that Teddy used to be when his face would soften and fall with every passing sadness. That day, in the few seconds it took Michael Wasserman to register the accidental demolition of his construction-in-miniature, his eyes had welled with tears like something actually hurt. He looked crushed. I’m certain I’d gasped and covered my mouth with my hands in shame. Was there anything worse than destroying someone’s art project?
But before I could apologize, he’d bent down in his chinos, carefully picked up the shoe box, put it on top of the pile of books and notebooks he was carrying, and left the classroom for the carpool line. All without saying a word. I didn’t move. My face was red-hot, my stomach churned with embarrassment and self-loathing and recriminations I was convinced would last forever: Why hadn’t I just sat down in my stupid chair with the little side-desk attached? Weren’t my braces already filled with enough chewed-up matzo? If only I hadn’t reached for that second piece, none of this would have happened. I was wearing my favorite powder-blue ski jacket, which meant that it was sometime between March and April, during New England’s tease of changing seasons that never fails to trick and disappoint—there must still have been a chill of winter in the air, despite some light in the sky. The principal, Mr. Wrath—which was really his name and really how he spelled it—poked his head into the classroom and told me that my mother was in the carpool line, waiting. It was six o’clock, time to go home. He didn’t seem to notice the debris on the floor, the accident that had just happened, how time had suddenly and completely stopped.
Instantly I’d had a flash of my mother’s blue Buick Skylark idling in the chilly dusk while the other mothers—it was all mothers back then, no “helpful” dads—pulled around her and gave her dirty looks—a scene I knew I’d hear about on the ride home, and during dinner, and for years to come: how it was hard enough for her to teach inner-city seventh-graders all day, go food shopping after work, bring the groceries home and put everything into the refrigerator and freezer, and then make it to the temple in time for the mad crush of children desperately pushing through the doors toward freedom, only to have me be late and put her in the incredibly uncomfortable position of holding up the line.
It never occurred to me, as I got into the front seat and drove off with Mandy Adelson and Rhonda Schlossberg in the backseat, to explain to my mother why I was late that day—just as it had never occurred to my mother to ask me why I was late. We didn’t do that in our family—relate to each other in the moment, with curiosity or empathy. We didn’t interact in an interactive way. My grandparents had all survived the Holocaust and there had always been a very high bar set for true suffering. We never shared even the most basic facts of our days: “I just ruined Michael Wasserman’s diorama and now I want to die.” “One of my students called me fat when I was passing back their spelling tests.” We never would have said those things. We didn’t know how to commiserate or comfort each other. We were three circles, occasionally just barely overlapping, a Venn diagram of connected separateness. Which had always seemed to me to be the loneliest feeling of all: having people around you who you could see but couldn’t ever reach.
Even if my mother had asked me, I probably would not have had the language to explain the sadness I felt when I looked at what remained on the floor after Michael left the classroom—the little bits of uncooked elbow macaroni and broken Necco wafers and the focal point of the diorama—the Ten Commandments itself—that the janitor would sweep away. To confess how inanimate objects could sometimes make me feel incredibly sad, those two Bit-O-Honeys stuck together to look like Moses’ tablets from God that had landed under the chair. That right before running out of the classroom I’d picked them up and slipped them into the pocket of my ski jacket, the one I’d never actually skied in because the Jews in our world didn’t actually ski, and noticed that the number “10” had been etched into each beige sticky candy rectangle, maybe with a paper clip or a pocketknife or the tip of a dead ballpoint pen to make the indentations. Michael Wasserman, whose mother had died the previous autumn of breast cancer, right before the High Holidays, had taken the time to etch numbers into his pretend Ten Commandments and I had ruined it. How could I ever have explained the sadness of that?