I finished school, at David’s insistence, and it wasn’t half the scandal you might imagine. For a week I was the subject of scrutiny and jokes — my history teacher, I remember, took great delight in addressing me as Mrs. Carter, and the girls all wanted to see my ring — a tiny solitaire on a band of gold — but there were two girls who were pregnant in my class, plus a boy widely suspected of being gay, and it wasn’t long before people lost interest in the oddity of a married woman attending high school, especially once it was clear that I wasn’t pregnant.
Another teacher was hired; and David got a job at a small theater in Hartford, as part of the company, and teaching drama to little kids on Saturday. After classes I’d walk to our apartment, stopping at the grocery store with the list David had given me in the morning to pick up whatever he needed for dinner, and the money he’d given me to buy it. Upstairs, I’d lock the door behind me and pour a glass of wine — an adult pleasure that I’d quickly adopted — and settle on the green velvet couch with my homework, or one of the novels or plays from David’s shelves. The nights he didn’t have shows, he’d be home by five-thirty. “My child bride,” he’d say, gathering me into his arms. I’d pour him his own wine, and sometimes we’d go right to bed and make love, but, more often, he’d go to the kitchen to cook. I’d perch on the counter and watch him chop onions, saute garlic, swirl a melting knob of butter into the pan. “I’ve got to fatten you up,” he would say. He’d scoop pasta into my bowl, grating drifts of Parmesan on top, and keep jars of olives and wedges of cheese around for me to nibble at.
We’d eat, then read together or listen to music from David’s collection of classical and opera albums. On Saturday afternoons, we’d go to the library, filling bags with books and compact discs. On Monday nights, when the theater was dark, we’d go out to dinner and then to a movie, and on Sunday mornings we’d buy the
The hardest part was seeing Raine around town. I glimpsed her once at the supermarket, a different one from the one where she worked. She looked tired and frail in her winter coat, snapping as Sophie and Emma tried to sneak a box of Lucky Charms into the shopping cart, and I’d hidden behind a stand-up display of Entenmann’s cookies until they passed. Once, coming back from the Laundromat with a basket of clean clothes, I saw her and Phil and the girls on their way into church. That time there’d been nowhere to hide. The girls hadn’t seen me, but Raine did, and she looked at me like I was a babysitter whose name she couldn’t quite remember, a sitter she’d used once and never intended to hire again.
I graduated in June. David didn’t attend the ceremony, but he was there, waiting for me outside the high school in his car, which was an immaculately kept baby-blue 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible that he’d inherited from his father and kept in a garage, dressed in a custom-made zippered canvas cover. We went home. He made pasta. We made love, which, while not the rapture the movies and novels had taught me to expect, was at least pleasant enough. In September I planned to start taking classes at UConn. I would study theater and art history, like David had. In August, I found out I was pregnant.
To this day, I can remember the feeling of it, the sundress I’d been wearing, the taste of milk and Cheerios still in my mouth. I can feel the black-and-white tiles of the bathroom floor cool under my feet, and I can see the claw-footed tub with the rust stain around the drain in front of me, the pregnancy test, with its pink plus sign, jiggling up and down in my shaking hand. We’d been using condoms… except a few times, when David would slip inside me for a few strokes without one.
I waited until he went to work the next day to make the appointment at the Planned Parenthood in New Haven, an hour’s drive away. I took money out of the bank — and, I’m ashamed to say, out of his wallet. I drove the Tercel my mother had given me to the clinic, and, when it was over, I bought a bottle of Advil and a bottle of water and just kept driving west. As the miles slid by, the year that I’d endured — my grandfather’s stroke, my trip from Toledo to New London, my brief time with Raine, then the car, then David, had all started to feel like it had happened to someone else. Someone else had slept in the cramped backseat of the car; someone else had gotten married in front of a justice of the peace with bad breath and a wandering eye; someone else had gotten that abortion and woken up alone, a curly-haired, kind-eyed nurse handing her a sanitary pad and asking whether there was anyone waiting to take her home.
In Los Angeles, I bought a driver’s license with a fake name and a birthday that made me twenty-one. Eventually, I lived so long as that girl, India Bishop, that I almost forgot I’d ever been anyone else; a girl whose mother hadn’t wanted her, a girl who’d stolen food and slept in a car, a girl who’d left a husband behind.
My plane landed in LaGuardia just as night was falling. I bought a new cell phone and spent the night in a hotel. In the morning I cabbed it to Grand Central and bought a ticket for the train that would take me to New London for the first time since I’d left David, all those years ago. The trip was only a few hours, through the soupy, humid August air. Kids had opened a fire hydrant on the corner and it was dribbling water into the gutter. In the park in the center of town, teenage girls in bikinis lay on towels, and mothers with babies pushed strollers back and forth in the shade.
David’s apartment was an easy walk from the station. The front door to the old Victorian, long since divided into one-and two-bedroom flats, was supposed to be locked, but it hadn’t been when I’d known him, and it wasn’t now. The stairs had been stripped of the green carpet I remembered, and now the wood of the walls had a mellow gleam. The banister had been refinished, and the walls were painted a pretty cream color, and the ceramic Virgin was where I remembered her, in the little nook at the top of the stairs.
I knocked at the door, and he swung it open and looked at me for a minute, staring blankly. I had to remind myself that I had a different face now. He might not even recognize me. David looked older, heavier, tired around the eyes. His hair — what was left of it — was white, and he wore glasses, which were new, and a white cotton button-down shirt, untucked, and worn corduroy pants. There was a gold wedding band, the one we’d bought together or its twin, on his left hand, and, as I stood in the hallway that smelled like soup, listening to an air conditioner whine and someone’s TV play the nightly news, he smiled at me. His face lit up and he looked handsome again; handsome and as young as he’d been when we were together. “Well,” he said. “Look who’s here.”
It was cool inside. That was the first thing I noticed as David took my Mexico tote bag and set it by the door. “Can I get you anything to drink? I’ve got a nice Scotch,” he said, gesturing toward a bar cart made of wrought iron and mirrored panels. I looked around, remembering: the Turkish rugs he’d layered over the hardwood floors, the colorful abstract paintings on the walls, the green velvet couch, the art books and novels and old vinyl albums lined alphabetically on handmade shelves that stretched from the floor to the top of the twelve-foot ceiling, with a rolling wooden ladder in the corner. I thought back to when I was eighteen and thought this was the most beautiful place I’d ever been. We’d made love, and I’d waited until he’d fallen asleep, then crept out of his bed and ate everything in his refrigerator, including an entire jar of strawberry jam.
“Just some water, please.”
He handed me a jelly glass filled from a filter-pitcher. I sat down on the couch and cupped the cool glass in my hands, letting him look me over. “What,” he asked me pleasantly, “did you do to yourself?”
I managed a little laugh. “It’s been a while, you know.”
“You were so beautiful,” David said. “Why would you want to change?”
I shrugged.
“Sammie.” He reached out and touched my hair.
“I got married again.” The words came out in a croak. “In New York. An older man.”
He had moved to stand behind me. I couldn’t see his face, but I imagined that he was smiling. “Sounds like you’ve got a type.”
“You know,” I said, without turning, without looking at him, “we never got divorced.”
