Chapter Seven

June

            SINCE LEAVING SCHOOL, I’D GAINED TEN POUNDS and couldn’t get out of bed before eleven o’clock, so I’m not sure how well the therapy was working. I liked Melody, though, and seeing her gave me something to do once a week. The rest of my time consisted of going to the lake on the Edmund College campus and feeding the ducks, sitting in Perch (Sam’s and my coffee shop hangout), re-reading all the books we’d read together, and watching a lot of TV. Neither of us had ever considered ourselves couch potatoes, but we had our must-sees: episodes of the British version of The Office on the BBC, box sets of The West Wing and Boston Legal series, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report right before bed, baseball and football games, especially during the playoffs, and tennis Grand Slams. Now I watched marathons of sitcoms, talk shows, reality competition shows, just about everything but Fox News. I hadn’t realized how much crap repeated itself, as if all TV viewers suffered from short-term memory loss. Over and over and over and over again.

            Maggie and I called each other at least twice a week, and she often tried to coax me to do more productive things with my time.

            “Make something good come out of this,” she’d say. “Travel. Go see your mom or your brothers. Hell, come see me. Or write. Start those journal articles you’ve been wanting to write. Talk to your editor and work on that new collection of essays.”

            “I just don’t have the desire to write anymore, Mags. All my energy has been sucked out of my body. There doesn’t seem to be any point to it.”

            “What does your therapist say about it?”

            “She’s very into goal setting. And lists. She tries to get me to make a list of things to do for the day, the week, the month…that sort of thing.”

            “And are you doing it?”

            “What’s on the list? Sometimes.”

            “What’s the point of you going to therapy if you’re not going to apply it?” she asked, a hint of frustration lingering.

            “Well, we talk. She asks me a lot of questions.”

            “What does she say about your lack of motivation?”

            “She hasn’t really said anything yet.”

***

            The operative word was “yet.” Sure enough, at our next session, when Melody asked me if I’d achieved anything on my goal list, I’d answered her with the same blasé attitude as I had with Mags.

            “Andi,” she said in a professional tone. “I’m growing concerned about your lack of activity and effort.”

            I gave her the same excuse I gave Maggie.

            “That’s what goal-setting is for,” she said. “It’s to get you over that hump and recharge your batteries. You have no energy because you’re working so hard to avoid the pain of grieving. You’re shutting yourself down as a form of damage control. The leftover is for survival—just enough to get through the day.”

            My insides tightened and felt heavy. “So what am I supposed to do—have another meltdown? I’ve already had at least one, thank you very much. And that one was in the classroom.”

            “And why did you have that meltdown?”

            “I already told you what that was about,” I said, agitated. “My students were talking about getting tanked like it was something glamorous. I couldn’t stand there and let them dis my husband like that.”

            “But they weren’t dissing your husband. They were being young adults getting a taste of freedom for the first time. They were looking for validation to justify their behavior. And they were behaving that way in response to the fear of all the change taking place in their lives.”

            “You sound like them.”

“Who is ‘them’?” Melody asked. “The students?”

“You’re rationalizing using the ‘kids will be kids’ logic. It doesn’t fly with me. I didn’t need to get tanked at their age. I didn’t need booze and pot to be validated.”

            “What did you need?”

            Her question cut off my fury. What did I need?

            I traveled back to my nineteen-year-old self: A girl with big hair and little confidence, yo-yoing with her weight. A virgin submerged in the shame of her sexual inexperience, gone into hiding.  Forlorn, hidden, hardly recognizable. God, she looks so desperate, so lonely, so…

            “I needed to be touched,” I answered, my head down, voice withdrawn and regressed, surprised the words came out at all. Melody didn’t respond right away. She seemed to be waiting for me to cry; and yet, even though I felt the urge to do so, my eyes didn’t water.

            Finally, she spoke in a soft, placid tone. “Andi, the response to loss is a response to whatever is unresolved in us, whatever losses are called up from our unconscious to be re-lived.”

            “What does that mean?”

            “It means you’re not just grieving the loss of Sam.”

            “Great,” I said. “As if that’s not enough.”

            “All the losses of your life—even the ones that seemed insignificant at the time, like losing a competition or a favorite toy—are going to resurface.”

            “Should I start making a list?”

“This is an opportunity for you. It’s a wonderful opportunity, really. You can finally acknowledge those losses, and choose how to respond to them. And you can make choices other than not responding, or pretending like everything’s okay.”

“You mean, faking it.”

“Yes. I don’t think faking it works for you.”

“Tell Miranda that,” I said.

            “So, what’s another choice you can make?” She sounded like a school counselor.

I didn’t answer her. The responsibility of choosing was too big, too overwhelming.

            “Think about it,” she said. “Why did you react the way you did to those boys? It was completely out of character for you, yes? You told me that you’re the one who fights for students’ rights and respect, that you took pride in that. So why would you, in turn, choose a response of complete disrespect? What were you really reacting to in that moment?”

            I stared at the floor, my head swimming in confusion, trying to access the answer that lay in waiting on the tip of my tongue. Did I not know it, or did I not want to know? In that moment, a wave of terror broke on top of me, and I gripped the sides of the boat-like chair.

            “Oh God, Melody. How could I have done it? How could I have fucked up like that? I mean, my career was the one thing that I always held together. Before Sam, my love life was a train wreck. But my career was always on track. I had complete confidence. And I was good at it—my I’m cited in conference papers and scholarly articles. Nedra Reynolds would come up to me after a conference session and say, ‘Great stuff!’”

As if Melody knew these people.

“Even Peter Elbow, the Paul McCartney of rhetoric and composition, once introduced me as ‘The Next Big Thing’. I was trying so hard to get that back.”

            “The important thing is not to get stuck in what I call ‘The One Wrong Move’ syndrome,” she said. “You’ve got to accept it, forgive yourself, and move on. Don’t let it paralyze you. Otherwise you’ll never heal.”

            I looked at her, dejected, my insides fluttering with fear. How was movement possible when I’d all but thrown my career away, and the one who’d turned my love life into just plain ol’ life was gone?

            “I’ve lost everything,” I said, defeated.

            Melody nodded as if I’d just told her it’s raining outside.

            “So,” she said, a hint of optimism in her voice, “what are you going to do about it?”

            Later that evening, I sat in Sam’s study with yet another draft of his eulogy in my lap. Donny Most curled his plump, orange and white body beside me on the sofa and purred lackadaisically. He too now spent the majority of his time in this room. As I read through the draft and re-wrote above crossed out words and sentences and crammed notes in margins, I thought about what Melody said about getting stuck in One Wrong Move. No matter how many times I revised it, even if I turned the eulogy into a prize-winning piece of writing, it could never make up for the crappy draft I’d written and read at the funeral, no more than a leave of absence or a lifetime of therapy could make up for what I’d said to those students that day.

            I could almost hear the thunder of powerlessness so heavy I thought it would bury me alive as it collapsed on me yet again, while the incessant ache for Sam tortured and wrenched every muscle in my body.

Too late, I thought. I was paralyzed for life.

           

           

           

           

           

Chapter Eight

July

            I WAS SPRAWLED OUT ON THE SOFA IN THE DEN watching a Yankees-Red Sox game while the air conditioning unit whirred obtrusively. Hideki Matsui just hit a triple, putting the Yanks up seven to four in the bottom of the fifth inning. One out. All of Yankee Stadium roared and jumped to their feet in the midst of the heat.

            Sam and I used to watch these rivaled games with a fierce, often arousing competitive edge. The winner had to “console” the losing opponent by performing some kind of pleasurable act: cooking a certain meal; a backrub; oral sex; you name it. One time Sam made me wash his car.

            A forceful knock at the door jolted me as I flashed back to the night Sam was killed. Tentatively creeping to the door, some part of me expected to see the police officers on the other side, waiting to address me: “Mrs. Vanzant?”

            I cracked the door ajar, then pulled it open when I saw Jeff, a milkshake in each hand, one of which he sipped.

            I exhaled a sigh of relief. “What are you doing here?” I asked, taking a step back to let him in.

            “Here, take this—I can’t feel my fingers anymore.”

            “Thanks.” I took a sip. Strawberry-Banana.

            Dressed in tan Docker shorts, sneakers without socks, and a faded, moth-eaten, 2004 Red Sox World Champions t-shirt, Jeff looked like he should be out barbecuing rather than sipping milkshakes. He’d cut his hair extra-short for the summer, almost crew cut style. I didn’t like it. I had donned a pair of Sam’s ripped jeans—they fit me now—and transformed them into cut-offs, accompanied by a heather grey NU t-shirt, size large.

            “What’s up, kid?”       

“Matsui just got a triple,” I reported.

            With that news, he headed straight for the den, cursing. I followed behind.

            “Damn,” he said, fixated on the screen. The new Yankee rookie was at bat.

            “You never know, they might pull through. It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

            He smirked at me, knowing my appeasement was a sham. The rookie grounded out to third and ended the inning.

            “Sorry about the pop-in, but I was out running errands and realized I haven’t seen or spoken to you in too damn long, so here I am.”

            “Bullshit you had errands. During a Yankee-Sox game?”

            “Sox-Yankee game.”

            I cocked an eyebrow at him. He smiled. Jeff was good-looking. Not like Sam, but attractive nonetheless. Except for the crew cut.

            “Okay,” he confessed. “I came to see you.”

            “I’m flattered,” I said. “Really.”

            “You should be. So? What’ve you been up to?”

            I shrugged my shoulders. “Nothing much, really. I get up. I do whatever. I go to bed.”

            He ambled from the den to the kitchen so as not to let the game distract him.

            “That’s it?”

            “Pretty much. I’m bored out of my skull, actually.”

            “How’s the shrink working out?”

            “Fine. I mean, I like going.”

            “Made any progress?”

            “Hard to tell.”

            A moment of silence passed between us. We both sipped our milkshakes. Mine gave me goose bumps every time I swallowed.

            “Getting out much?” he asked.

            “You mean, socially?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Not really,” I said.

            “Why not?”

            Sam and I weren’t social butterflies, but we’d dined with friends at least twice a week, together or separately. We had friends like Jeff and his wife Patsy, with whom we hung out in couples, as well as our own friends, like Miranda (and Maggie, in New York) for me and Sam’s best friends George and Justin. Occasionally we’d either attend or host a dinner party consisting of our colleagues—we often liked to combine Edmund faculty with NU faculty and watch them try to one-up each other like competitive cousins. During the first few weeks after the funeral, they’d all called or dropped by to “check in” on me. By Christmastime, with the exception of Maggie and Miranda, I’d started avoiding their calls. By January, they’d pretty much abandoned me. I didn’t take it personally. My guess was that they felt the way I did: that to face each other was to face the conspicuous absence of the man we so dearly loved, a man who livened up dull parties, who was our best buddy, thoughtful and funny and all around great guy.

            “Everyone fell off the face of the earth. Or maybe I did and they stopped looking for me,” I said.

            Jeff looked at me earnestly. “I owe you an apology.”

            “For what?”

            “I cut you loose after the incident at school, and I didn’t mean to. I guess I figured you needed time. Or maybe I did, I don’t know. I didn’t like seeing you that way.”

            “I don’t blame you. Besides, I didn’t see it as you cutting me loose. You did your job.”

            “But to not call you all this time? I’m your friend first. At least, I should be.”

            “You have other priorities,” I said.

            “Friends should be a priority. Life is too short.”

            Had he really been thinking of Sam today, and that’s why he dropped by? Regardless, his words touched me, and my eyes misted. I slurped my milkshake, then kissed him on the cheek, my lips cold and puffy. I suddenly realized how much I missed hanging out with Jeff. Hell, hanging out with anyone, really—laughing, shooting the breeze, entertaining, feeling free and light and happy.

            “Apology accepted,” I said.    

            He blushed. “Anyhoo, Patsy and I wanna have you over for dinner next week. So pick a day, and ‘no’ is not an option.”

            Jeff never liked to leave anything up in the air. I picked Wednesday.

            “Perfect.” He looked out the kitchen window. “When was the last time you cut the grass?”

            “I don’t know how to use a mower,” I replied sheepishly.

He looked at me as if to say, typical girl.

“What can I say?” I said. “I had older brothers, then a string of apartments, then a husband who actually loved doing it, the freak.”

            He laughed, and looked at me in a moment of recognition; even I felt the split second of normality.

            “Well, I’m sure he’d be freaking out if he saw his beautiful lawns in such condition. Geezus, you’ve probably got lions and tigers grazing back there and don’t even know it.”

            “Oh, please—it’s not that bad! I paid a neighborhood kid to do it about a month ago. Then again, maybe it was closer to six weeks…”

            “Well, I’m gonna do the front now, and come back tomorrow to show you how to use the mower and help you with the back.”

            As he went out to the garage, the condition of the rest of the house had suddenly come into sharp focus: dishes piled in the sink; leftover Chinese food cartons lining the counters; a mountain of laundry covering the washing machine; bed unmade; dust bunnies procreating in corners; and paper everywhere—books, magazines, newspapers, syllabi and handouts and student papers from the last two semesters, unfinished essays, you name it—atop just about every table and chair in the house.

            What a freakin’ mess.

            While Jeff mowed the lawn, I triaged the kitchen counters and wiped them down. I then searched the fridge for something to serve him as a thank-you: a slice of leftover pizza, three eggs, half-empty jars of peanut butter and jelly, and frozen waffles. Lots of cookies, though.

            About fifteen minutes later, he re-entered the house without knocking, sweaty and covered with grass clippings stuck to this calves and ankles.

            “Now I know why Sam liked moving the lawn,” he said. “That machine is wicked awesome.”

            I couldn’t help but smile; Sam was a stereotypical guy when it came to electronics and power tools.

            “Yeah, he used to go on and on about it, but I never listened to him. The neighbors probably envied it, though.”

            “He was a lucky guy.”

            “Not lucky enough.”

            I could tell Jeff was as sorry for what he said as I was for what I said.

            “So,” I pressed on, “I still make a kick-ass PB and J. Go in and watch the rest of the game while I fix you one. Yanks are still up, bottom of the seventh.”

            “Thanks, but I should go before Patsy thinks I actually drove out to Fenway. Besides, the Sox are gonna lose.  Rain check for tomorrow?”

            “Suit yourself.”

            He helped himself to a glass of water, and turned the faucet on and off to inspect the washer. “Tell you what. I’ll do a run-through of the house tomorrow and see if there’s anything else that needs fixing.”

            “That would be great.” I put my arms around him and hugged him tight. “Thanks,” I said. “For everything.”

            “No problem,” he replied, squeezing me. “It’s long overdue.” We let go and I dabbed my eyes. “You gotta start living again, kid. You and Sam were like a pair of gloves. I’ve never seen a better couple. But you were also individuals, with lives of your own—that’s what was so great. It’s as if you buried that with him. You need to get that back.”

            “We’ll see.”

            Jeff kissed me on the cheek. “See ya tomorrow.”

A cheer erupted in the background, signaling yet another home run for the Yankees. He shook his head and cursed again, while I gave him a cocky smile as I closed the door behind him. It’d been a long time since I’d smiled like that, since I’d felt a man’s presence around the house, since I looked forward to company. How grateful I was for Jeff. Best of all, the Yankees won that day.