Let's Pretend This Will Work

by Maddie Dawson

was just a girl with unruly brown hair, hazel eyes, and a routine figure, looking like some kind of naive, wide-eyed little chicken, disheveled and discombobulated and alone. Certainly I was nobody’s idea of a great love.

Coincidentally, that was the day I also learned how loud it is when five boxes of wide-ruled filler paper, a carton of Sharpie highlighters, and four cases of manila folders all crash to the floor at once.

But I get it now. I get all the ways he’s punishing himself. For some reason, this brings me to the brink of tears.

Sure, he asks Alice permission for things that most of us would just never think to ask about—but maybe that’s what being attuned to all her needs looks like just now. Maybe this is what love looks like to a wounded, grieving child. If love can get people through—and I think that it’s the only thing that can—he and Alice are going to be okay. If I were Lauren, I would probably like to know that.

“Well, I just think that when that first love comes along, it brings with it a huge thunderclap of feeling—something so amazing that we get overwhelmed with it. And that it’s tempting to think that it’s the only love there ever could be in the world. But then it ends. Most of the time it ends. And then, a long time later, we look back and see that that whole experience of love was just a little kiddie pool we were paddling around in. And that actually a really huge ocean awaits us.”

I think that when you see bitter people out in the world, people who’ve been married for forty years and they tell you that love isn’t really real, that it never works out, those are the people who settled for the kiddie pool, and it dried up, and they never knew what was really out there for them. Saddest thing in the world.”

I feel like an orphan watching through the window. I have this teeny-tiny little opportunity to see this breathtaking view of family life, even with this tattered remnant of a family. Let’s face it: Jamie and Alice simply do not have the numbers. Being here, looking around, I just want to join their little team. Where is the sign-up sheet?

I tell you, she’s a woman who makes me understand violence.

“How about you could stick to building custom furniture?” I say. “I’ve heard rumors from your heart that that’s what you really want to do.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but my heart right then takes the first step toward breaking itself into pieces.

“Letting go is the most wonderful feeling,” I tell him. I remember that part. I also remember him telling me that that’s exactly why he’s going back to New York. He’s letting go. He’s letting go of Judith and his guilt over his marriage, he’s letting go of running his daughters’ lives, he’s letting go of his dream of being the world’s best playwright.

“I want to know if you think I could ever be the ocean, too. Like if maybe there’s more than one ocean in one lifetime, you know? You don’t have to answer now, but I was thinking that maybe she was the Atlantic, and I could be the Pacific. Someday. Maybe.”

“Oh my God, Mimi, I love you, too, you know I love you,” he says. “You are the ocean and the seagulls. Also, the sky. And probably the kelp and all the grains of sand, too. I don’t know what in the hell is going on with the fabric of the universe, that suddenly you appear right here today when I wasn’t even scheduled to be here, and I was pretty sure you weren’t coming back ever, but whatever. Is it that skirt? Who knows?”

when we were together, there was a kind of bone-deep loneliness that permeated my soul and made me ache in a way I couldn’t bear. When he snapped at me, “I don’t need a postmortem on this,” I said that felt exactly like part of the problem. There was never any real talking, never any real depth to us. I wanted to tell him what I learned about first love being the kiddie pool, and how great it felt that I had just climbed out of it and taken the plunge into the ocean. “We didn’t hit the heights you required,” he said. “Is that what you’re telling me?” “I’m telling you that my heart was crying out for more,” I said. “And I have to go find what it wants. But I also want to say thank you for loving me. And that we’re both better off apart.” And then I replaced the receiver very quietly. I think he might have already hung up.