Gary? Really? The first book you ever gave me and you put weed in it?” I remove the elastic band, open the cover of the book slowly, and see a deep square cut into all the pages. A miniature Altoids tin sits like an embedded jewel in the middle. I shake my head, hand him back the empty book and elastic band, then look out the window.
“God. How old are you?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Just drive.”
“Where?”
“You figure it out.”
* * *
At first I assume we’re going to simply turn around—our usual trick of leaving early before even arriving somewhere we never really wanted to go to in the first place would never be so perfectly timed—but we head toward the highway. I’m not sure if Gary has a destination in mind—a plan B for the free lodging at his mother’s—or if he’s just continuing to move forward because forward is somehow easier than backward this one time.
As we slowly approach the highway, my hotel app is showing either zero local vacancies or super-high rates for a few available rooms—clearly there’s a Dartmouth home game that I failed to take into account—so now we’re really in a bind.
I text Glenn the current marital calculus: the emotional and logistical coordinates and debts owed—I owe Gary for giving his mother the wrong date: he owes me for cutting the guts out of the most sentimental object of our relationship: I owe him for insisting the People Puppets stay with us: he owes me for embracing them more than I’d planned and for bringing his weed with us on the road and almost getting us arrested: I owe him for turning our marriage into a platonic relationship and for the fact that we’re on a trip we can’t afford. Plus minus plus minus plus minus. I spare her the news about the CEO; why should she have to see Gary in an unflattering light right now? Though she was divorced once and widowed once and considers herself a failure at marriage, she is the most decisive person I know. Her response is quick and definitive:
Stay over at The Forehead’s.
But we haven’t been invited. And I have a plus-one: Gary.
Tell her the inn lost your reservation and everything else is booked because her incredibly popular retreat has taken up all the available rooms.
Flattery, as we both learned at Black Bear Press, always works.
But it’s less about the awkwardness of asking to stay with Sari Epstein and more about the prospect of socializing with her and her husband that is my concern right now. Since our “separation,” Gary and I have stopped going to other people’s houses, and we don’t invite other people to our house for dinner, either. This voluntary curtailment of our social life just happened to dovetail with the fact that we’ve run low on friends anyway: the older Teddy got, and the further away from the preschool and elementary school years we’ve moved, the fewer obligatory back-to-school nights we have to go to and the fewer Saturday or Sunday afternoon paintball or indoor-rock-climbing or bowling parties Teddy is invited to. In fact, he hasn’t been invited to any this year, and maybe not last year, either.
Gary is thrilled to be relieved of having to behave well and maintain the ridiculous pretense of being interested in other families with whom he’s always felt that he has absolutely nothing in common except a child the same age at the same school or one who has a shared extracurricular activity. But it’s different for me. I face the empty calendar every month with sadness—wondering why, when other families routinely have to turn down invitations because of being double or even triple booked, not a single one of us seems to have a social life.
It was always torture for Gary to listen to another dad describe, in mind-numbing detail, an ongoing do-it-yourself project—a bathroom redo or the installation of new kitchen cabinets, or a drain-snaking method found on YouTube to circumvent the plumber. Gary would stare at me over bowls of hummus or plates of bruschetta, making Let’s leave early eyes as he was led out into the backyard like a hostage to see a recently installed firepit or a raised gardening bed using recycled wood, or to hear about some magnificent adventures in organic composting. He didn’t want to see anyone’s reorganized toolshed or a family’s dirt bikes suspended from a garage ceiling; he had absolutely no interest in bending down to inspect a fully insulated cat door