Maddie Dawson - The Stuff That Never Happened

TO JIM,
for everything

2005

I started crying at Crisentis yesterday, over by the frozen foods. This was not cinematic, attractive weeping either; it was full-frontal, nose-running, eyes-streaming near-blubbering. I had to pull my cart over to the side of the meat case while I searched through the lint in my coat pocket for a tissue.

I could not begin to tell you why this happened now, except to say that its February in New Hampshire, which if you ask me might be reason enough to break down. Its been six months since Nicky went off to college and Sophie got married, and somehow on an ordinary Monday afternoon at the supermarket, it all caught up with me. Id made it through Christmas all right, and the first anniversary of my mothers death, and then through the seasons first eighteen snowstormsand suddenly I was crying about all of it: how life is never going to be the same as it was when the children were home, and how Grant has never forgiven me for stuff that happened twenty-six years ago, and how I have somehow gotten to be almost fifty years old and all I have to show for it is a bunch of picture books.

Picture books! That makes them sound dignified, like art perhaps. But Im talking board booksthe kind with animals dressed up like people. Pigs in dresses! An aardvark who wears plaid scarves! Ive just finished illustrating a book about a mama squirrel trying to get her babies to go to bed. And you know the weird part, the thing that Grant would never believe? I love this mother squirrel. I love the fact that I painted her wearing a yellow workout suit and that when she was nestled on her little couch reading to her babies, she looked radiantly happy in a very non-rodent way.

Remembering that, I had to put my hand over my mouth so the sobs wouldnt escape.

Mrs. McKay? said the boy behind the meat counter. Not a boyhes a man, really. He was one of Sophies friends. He had been at our house dozens of times over the years, one of the hordes of young people who were always there playing basketball in the driveway, skating on the pond, eating dinner, even sleeping over. He had the lead in the school play the year Sophie was a sophomore. Brad, thats his name. Brad Simeon.

And because young people should not have to see the older generation falling apart and guess whats in store for themselves, I straightened myself up out of the collapsed-crazy-lady position.

He smiled, wanted to know if I was okay. Perhaps the pork chops werent to my satisfaction?

I looked down at the package of two thin, gray pork chops I was holding in my hand and actually laughed. Do they see a lot of that in grocery storespeople breaking down in tears of disappointment over the meat products? I said they were just fine, perfectly wonderful, and then he asked how Sophie was getting along, and regaining my footing, I launched automatically into my proud motherly spiel: Oh, shes just fine! Married, yes, and living in New York, and pregnant now, actually. Did he know? Yes, Im going to be a grandmother. Why, thank youno, I dont feel old enough to be a grandmother, but in our family, we reproduce young, ha-ha.

And Nicky?

Mother spiel number two: Oh, so happy at the university! Doing winter hiking just now, and yes, still playing hockeycan barely get that boy to open a book, hes so busy with the other things (I dont say we suspect girls, drinking, and drugs) but hell learn. Just hope he doesnt get kicked out before he figures out hes there to get an education! I gave a good imitation of my whattaya-gonna-do laugh.

Just then, thank goodness, Brads boss called him back to the ground beef machine, and he shrugged and smiled and slipped back into that little brightly lit, glassed-in room they have for the meat guys. Tell Professor McKay hello, he said as he left, but by then he was turned the other way, so when my eyes filled up with tears again, he didnt have to see.

SO I tell my therapist about it, pork chops and all. (Therapists like to be notified of any public breakdowns, you know.) Ava Reiss is her name. Ive been seeing her for just over a year, ever since my mother died, and we sit together once a week examining all the mundane and not-so-mundane incidents of my life, like two ladies sorting through mismatched socks. I am always just about to tell her that Im not coming anymore, that this isnt really working, but then I keep on.

You cried in the grocery store? she says. And what were you feeling?

Well, for starters, it was embarrassing.

No, I mean why did you start crying then, do you think? What did the pork chops represent? She is about forty-five and has straight brown hair, and she wears cashmere sweaters and long skirts with tights that always match her sweaters. I think that says something about her personality. You have to be a very conscientious shopper to get sweaters and tights that match, dont you think? Once I told her that it makes me uncomfortable that she wont ever let herself laugh at any of my jokes, and she said that I use humor to deflect real feelings, and I said, So? What do you suggest I use? which she didnt appreciate.

The pork chops the pork chops, I think, represented, ah dinner? I say, and she purses her lips as though Im deflecting again, so I explain that dinner is a topic fraught with complicated feelings for me. Dinner, you see, was the time I always loved the best. We were the family in the neighborhood with the house where all the kids congregated. Every community has a house like that; who knows how it happens, how kids discover they can go there and have a social center, and maybe a second home, but they just do. For years that was our place. I felt so privileged, so honored to be there orchestrating it. I loved the noise and the music and even all the complications. We hadactually, we havea long oak dining room table, scarred and beat-up but beautiful because of those scars, and it was always heaped up with homework and art projects and science labs, costume-making projects, wonderful jumbles of clutter and chaos and Id be there in the middle of it all, listening to the kids talking and gossiping and teasing each other while I worked on my book illustrations and cooked, and then Id push everything aside and bring out a pot of chili or big platters of eggplant Parmesan, blue bowls of chicken soup, spaghetti, pots of my spicy beef stew, homemade bread and rolls. There was something bustling and safe about the big kitchen, the light and the noise, the table and the laughter.

I try to explain to her how thisbeing the neighborhood househad been new to me, like nothing Id experienced growing up. I was born and raised in Southern California, in endless acres of a subdivision consisting of stucco four-bedroom houses, all built just yesterday and all with sliding glass doors and swimming pools and kids drag racing down the streets and never congregating anywhere. This whole small-town New Hampshire quaintness was something I thought existed only in the movies. But Grant grew up here, in the very house we now live in, playing hockey, sledding, and skiing, and for him, this is just what normal means: a mom and a dad, two kids, a clapboard house, ice skates hanging in the mudroom, a woodstove, rocking chairs on the porch.

Meant. What normal meant. We are now finished with that phase of normal, and, if he has anything to say about it, I fully expect we are going to turn into his parents any day now. Now