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An image came into her head of a gray cloudy sky filled with bunches of pink balloons tied together with white ribbon like bouquets. The balloon bouquets were being whipped ferociously about by an angry wind, and she felt a great wrench of sadness.
Hodges So I told her all about it, as if it was a story. Actually, all of a sudden I was desperate to tell her before she remembered for herself. Before she could write it off as a tiny, sad incident that had happened a long time ago. This is what happened, Dr. Hodges. FYI. Alice and I were both pregnant at the same time. Her baby was due exactly one week after mine. Alice’s third pregnancy was another accident of course, something complicated and typically Alice (typically old Alice; not the new and improved pedicured, manicured, peeled, waxed, and tinted Alice) to do with swapping brands of
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she felt such an intense sensation of happiness it frightened her, because surely there was a price to pay for this sort of bliss.
Every morning I worry that somebody I know will be killed in a terrorist attack that day. That means the terrorists have won, Ben tells me. He doesn’t understand that I’m fighting off the terrorists by worrying about them. It’s my own personal War on Terror.
It’s just that sometimes I want to say to her, “Darling, maybe you don’t get to be a mother, but you still get to be a wife.”
But maybe every life looked wonderful if all you saw was the photo albums.
They take their lives so seriously, these young people. “Just appreciate the fact that you can stomp so energetically,” I wanted to say to him.
I’d pay a million dollars to be Alice and Elisabeth’s age again for just one day. I’d dance like Olivia’s butterfly and bite into crisp green apples and run across hot sand into the surf, and I’d walk, as far as I wanted, wherever I wanted, in big loping, leaping strides, with my head held high and my lungs filling with air. And I’d probably have sex!
“Are you children always this tiring?” Alice had asked. Sometimes it felt like they sucked every thought out of her brain.
“I’m not saying I was perfect,” said Nick, his eyes on the father. “I was too caught up in work. You’d say I was obsessed with it. You always talk about the year I was working on the Goodman project. I was traveling a lot. You had to cope on your own with three children. You said once that I ‘deserted you.’ I always think that year made my career, but maybe . . .” He stopped and squinted out at the harbor. “Maybe that was the year that broke our marriage.”
She was rushing around trying to get the children dressed and instead of helping, he was reading the paper and happily eating his way through the fruit platter, as if Alice were the hired help.
Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It’s light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But love after three children, after a separation and a near-divorce, after you’ve hurt each other and forgiven each other, bored each other and surprised each other, after you’ve seen the worst and the best—well, that sort of a love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.
Each memory, good and bad, was another invisible thread that bound them together, even when they were foolishly thinking they could lead separate lives. It was as simple and complicated as that.
