Let's Pretend This Will Work

by Maddie Dawson

“You know something? I think you’re going to be the great love of my life.”

“I don’t like to show up at home not knowing the news,” he said to me when he hung up. “I need to prepare either my Consoling Father face or my Thrilled Father face.”

Don’t get married to someone who requires that you act quote, unquote, ‘normal’ in order to please him, okay? You don’t have to be anybody’s idea of normal. You’re wonderful and you’re an acquired taste, not just some generic woman who might be a match for just any old random guy. Remember that, and let him see the whole wonderful you.

“Yeah. Seems like it. I’ll stay in our house,” he says. Our house. The house he hasn’t lived in for the past twelve years. The house that he gave to Judith in the divorce settlement, according to the report from Ruth. At least he’s figured out the shirt buttons, though.

“It actually breaks my heart to see her this way. She was so feisty, so opinionated, such a brilliant hard-ass.” He looks grim. “We used to fight about everything. And now she talks in odd little snippets, and she’s just a placid, mostly vacant, sweet stranger who is living in my wife’s body. Smiling at me. Being grateful.” Wife, he said. Sweet, he said. Grateful.

Standing there at the window . . . all I can think of is, What the actual hell is my life about? Am I really going to just live here in New Haven, alone with cooking projects, waiting to be employed? Am I going to always be looking out the window at other people having real lives, real love? Why the hell am I living in thrall to a man who runs in and does a quick, jiffy rendition of sex, and then runs back to his family?

Possibly this is how kids tell you how inappropriate you are, which is exactly why I find them terrifying. I don’t know exactly what children know, but it’s possible they know everything, that they see into the heart of us, just how we all are bumbling around looking foolish while pretending we know what we’re doing.

He’s like one big mushy cake filled with pudding—kindness and worry and fear and love all smushed in together, stirred up with the grief. What’s going to happen when he cracks open, I wonder. Who is there to comfort him?

“I will tell that baby, ‘You get out, baby! This is my mommy!’”

It’s a very important point, they tell me, to realize that experts don’t have all the knowledge about your own dear child.

Will change diapers in exchange for human companionship and gossip.

People here think that little kids get all the learning they need just by playing and being read to and figuring out how to get along with each other. Also, there’s no punishment stronger than a time-out and a hug. They don’t want to shame kids. If someone is hitting or biting, the way they see it, that child needs comforting and understanding just as much as the kid who was hurt.”

“You know what he told me?” Joyous says, laughing. She goes into a singsong voice and waves her hand in the air like she’s in a ballet. “That love is a butterfly, and when it lands in your hand, you can’t squeeze it . . . or . . .” “It flies away, and it’s lost forever,” finishes Emily. “Oh God. I am so sick of that analogy.”

“I don’t know about you, but I thought life was supposed to be that you finished up with all that dating crap and you got married, had a kid, and then the rest of your life was just going through all the boring stages of raising children, going to work, and vacuuming the living room on your day off, until you retired from your job and got old and died. And then it turns out it’s nothing like that.”

“I don’t know anybody who has exactly the marriage they expected, do you?

News flash: Mimi, you are not part of his family in any way. I stand there in the park, idiot that I am, and I realize again that I’m just the secret woman, hidden around the corner, waiting for his morsels of attention. Lying beside him late at night when he comes over to make love. And aching for more. Always that ache.

What the hell, Ren? You can’t keep living a double life, buddy—not with me in the picture, you can’t.

After that, I put away the chicken and mashed potatoes in the refrigerator, which is another place that seems to have been marauded by wild bears. A bottle of syrup is canoodling with a bottle of ketchup, both splattered with the other’s drips. “You two are not a good match,” I tell them. “Syrup, you belong with the butter, if anything.” I move it away and put the ketchup by the mayonnaise. “Please tell me you’re not talking to the refrigerator,” she says. “No. Sorry. Just to the syrup and the ketchup bottles,” I say. “They were spilling on each other. Getting too familiar.” When she looks blank, I say, “Never mind.”

I don’t want to die, but I’d love to see the look on his face when it happens.

Listen to me. You can’t be this guy’s doormat. Geez, I don’t know anything about love or dating or reasonable timetables, but he’s totally taking you for granted. One hundred percent.”

“Yeah. I don’t even know for sure if we are engaged anymore,” I say. “In his version of things, he only wants to see me at night.” “To enjoy those things that are not candies.” He lifts his eyebrows.

So that’s it. I’m officially the daycare octopus.

“Hmm. My duties seem to have expanded here. Let’s see, I’m now Alice’s minder, and a person who agrees to take whatever daycare job you make me take, as well as the provider of the only barbecued chicken that Alice will eat, and apparently now I’m a full-time relationship guru for you.” “Don’t forget that in return, I’m the guy who will remove all couches from stairwells for you. And listen to men propose marriage to you.”

“If you leave this daycare after making me take the position of octopus, I will never ever forgive you,” I say. “Also, may I just go on the record as saying that other people don’t get to run your life, no matter how much they love you or how supposedly nice they are. You get to run your life.”

Are we always doomed to be bumped around by people who claim they know what’s right for us?

Who am I to tell him he’s got to follow his own heart, when I’m not even on a first-name basis with my own heart?

“I should get me some spirit guides. Because mine would then challenge her spirit guides to a psychic duel, and mine say you’re marrying him,” he says.

“Things have kind of gone astray since I lost the magic skirt,” I say. He laughs and makes his eyes bug out. “Oh, please. I was so hoping there was going to be a magic skirt somewhere in this story.” “Are you making fun of me?” “I am totally not making fun of you. Well, five percent making fun of you until I hear the evidence for the skirt being actually magic.”

He shakes his head. He is very close to me, and we’re both laughing, and then he does the most extraordinary thing. He reaches over and touches my lips. “There’s some secret sauce here,” he says. He’s looking into my eyes. And then he leans in just a bit closer and kisses me very quickly and softly on the mouth. Both of us are shocked, I think. He draws back and says, “Sorry! Good God in heaven! What am I doing?” “Yeah, what are you doing?” I say lightly. “The unpardonable sin of kissing an engaged woman—but, if I may say something in my own defense, it was because your psychic’s spirit guides came through just then and informed me that you needed a kiss.” I laugh. “Those rascals! They also just told me you needed one!” And I lean over and give him what I’d meant to be a quick kiss but which turns into a little bit more. “Are we drunk? I feel like I’m drunk,” I say. “Goodness,” he says. “I’m taking you home before these guys give us any more instructions.”

“He’s a handsome devil, isn’t he?” says Jamie. “He would never have as much secret sauce on his shirt as I do right now.” I laugh. “No, he definitely wouldn’t.” “And, um, he looks pretty disgruntled. Pretend the force is with you.” “What force might that be?” “The magic-skirt force. The daycare-octopus workday force. You figure out which of your many forces are operational. Also, he doesn’t get to be part of the caper. If we do it, which we won’t.”

“Of course. Waiting must be so hard for you.”

I can’t quite push the picture out of my head—the Yardleys at the park, smiling, bobbing their heads together like they were a well-oiled machine of a family, the love having been factory-installed. And then there was his behavior with me the other night. It’s like a storm is brewing.

So there you have it; he said that’s the way a marriage crumbles, in little slights, arguments, cold stares, distances, hatred.

“It’s always so fascinating what people say right after you’ve broken up with them, the projections they let slip.”

“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.” “Wow,” I say. “Yeah. Just something to think about.” “But what if I’m scared of the ocean?” I say. “Oh, we’re all scared of the ocean. Every single one of us. But here’s what I think: if you had married this dude, you would have eventually found out about the ocean anyway, and you would have started to hate him for keeping you in that little kiddie pool. 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.”

She wasn’t my first love, but she was my ocean, the stars, and all the sea turtles.”

I’m pretty much the vice octopus now.”

“Okay. I’m terrified that I might be making the huge mistake of kind of falling in love with you, and you’re then going to tell me that nope, it’s that grandstanding blowhard that you really love, and I won’t be able to recover. My heart has seen a lot of action, you know.”

I think of how he’s leaving his fingerprints behind, everywhere he touches, and I could touch those objects, too, and then we would be together somehow. I would have a part of him on me.

It occurs to me that Ren never gave me an opportunity to want him. He was always just there, two steps ahead of me, unbuttoning, unzipping, removing clothing, breathing his hot breath into my ear. It was sexy most of the time, but now I see there is something holy about longing.

Why do I only pick men who are hung up on other women who are completely unavailable? When can I be confident enough to get a man who is unencumbered, who just wants me? Is it too much to ask that I be first in some guy’s heart?

It could break your heart watching how careful they are, how hard three-year-olds can try.

I lie down on my back and look at the starry points of light up so high, feeling full of love and relief and kindness. I belong here. You did magic today, La Starla’s voice says to me in my head. This is what I’ve been talking about.

I’m more ready than you would believe. I’m just careful with my heart. This is too important to risk plunging in too soon.”

“You must remember back to the five most pleasurable moments in your lives, and that’s where you have to go whenever you feel afraid.”

“Don’t you just love saying ‘the usual,’ like we do this all the time? We’ve done it twice, and yet I think of it as a thing we do.” “Big Mac, lots of secret sauce, fries, and twelve ketchups,” I say. “I’ll remember that order to my dying day. And what about the Sprite?” “What the hell is this Sprite talk? I’m getting a chocolate shake.” “That’s telling ’em,” he says.

“They’re my family! They’re Alice’s family!” he says. “You don’t really have a family, so you don’t know what it’s like. You make sacrifices for family. That’s what people do.”

“If family is a bunch of people who get to control you and tell you how to make a living and how to raise your kid and when to eat and when to sleep, then I’m glad I don’t have one. I always thought family was supposed to be the people who love you and want the best for you because it’s what you want.

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

“You’re grieving your wife, and so you’re clinging to her family,” I say to him. “You said you were ready, but you’re not ready, and you might never be ready. Or maybe I’m just not the right one for you. I don’t have a family to give you, as you so kindly pointed out. I don’t have what you need.