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Wednesdays by Heather Dewar Amanda was seeing someone new had been since before the divorce. A week after Noah moved out he spotted them walking down the street in Uptown with their fingers entwined, the ankle-length skirt he bought her on their first anniversary straining with her movement against her hips. She was laughing her open-mouth laugh and the new man was gazing into her profile. Noah felt like honking the horn he wanted to scare them, or embarrass them but instead he sat watching, parked at an expired meter, until they turned the corner and disappeared from his line of sight. He returned to the house only once to ask, standing in the middle of the kitchen, "Amanda, are you sure about this?" She was busying herself, moving around him from the counter to the sink to the refrigerator, leaning into its light so her hair fell forward across her face in the careless way that had made him first want her. She stepped back from the refrigerator and moved to the trash, depositing a plastic bag of leftover spaghetti. "I'm sorry," she said, finally turning to face him. He looked away from her to a parading line of ladybug magnets clumsily framing a picture of their six-year-old daughter, Katy. At the door he stopped and with his back to her he said, "You will regret this." An attempt to hurt that surprised even himself.
Noah had established the tradition of Wednesdays before Katy was born. "What will you two do?" Amanda had asked when they lay in bed together at night, her belly pushing at the sheets and Noah's hand there, waiting to feel a kick. "We'll hike," he said. "Watch sailboats on the Bay." He was in his second year of work toward a Ph.D. in English from Berkeley. He and Amanda had met there, when she was a senior and he was just beginning his graduate degree. They had married because she was pregnant. When she gave him the news she was happy, but tentative. "It doesn't mean we have to get married," she told him. "We can have the baby, give ourselves time." But Noah had never been more sure of anything in his life. When Katy was old enough for him to carry on his back he left his books every Wednesday and took her to the Alameda Creek Trail, or, on the Wednesdays when he had more time, up to Muir Woods in Marin. When she grew too heavy for him to carry, he drove to the Marina in San Francisco and the two of them sat in the grass and, on clear days, watched sail boats drifting past on the Bay. At the end of their Wednesdays he always hugged her, a tight squeeze that made her scream with laughter before Amanda scooped her into her arms or she disappeared into some new book or toy. When Katy was four and he finished his dissertation and got a position at St. Thomas in St. Paul a non-tenure-track position, but still, a position he worried about Wednesdays. "What will we do together?" he asked. They had been to the Twin Cities only once, to look for housing and for him to meet with the faculty. "The same things," Amanda assured him. "You'll take walks. There are sailboats in Minnesota." He discovered the Rainbow Cafe. In the wintertime he took Katy there on Wednesdays for a kids' meal and a few spoonfuls of his chocolate malt. Katy liked it because the wooden booths were painted turquoise and the walls were covered with a mural of a brass band; each musician had purple musical notes floating out of the end of his instrument. On her fifth birthday, on the Wednesday before her party at the Roller Gardens, Noah cancelled his afternoon class and came home early with a plastic crown and took her there while Amanda was out running errands. After they finished eating he asked the guitarist who played every night for tips to play her "Happy Birthday." The guitarist rearranged his stool so he was facing Katy and, along with Noah and the cafe's patrons, the waitress and the cook, he sang to her. When they went home to Amanda, Katy was bursting with the story. "Lucky girl," Amanda said, pulling Katy onto her lap. "We're lucky girls," she said, smiling at Noah. Coming home from those Wednesdays, Noah found, was almost as good as the Wednesdays themselves.
Noah told Katy he was moving out on a Wednesday in early spring. They were walking through the Wildflower Garden at Theodore Wirth Park, slowly, so Katy could stop and smell each flower. Amanda had braided the front of Katy's long, white-blond hair into two thin braids so that each time she bent to smell, they fell forward as if she were beckoning the flowers into an embrace. On the drive over Noah searched for a good way to tell her. Amanda had asked him whether he wanted to do it together or apart; he opted to do it alone. "I was thinking you might like to have two bedrooms instead of one," he would say, or, "I thought of moving closer to the Rainbow Cafe, so you could have malts everyday." In the end he blurted, when they were stopped in front of a patch of bloodroot, "I'm getting a new apartment," as if he had just ordered a new pair of slippers through the mail. Katy looked at him without smiling. "For Mommy and me?" she said. He hesitated. "You can come visit whenever you want." She kept looking at him. "You don't want to live with Mommy and me anymore?" He found it hard for a minute to talk. He said, "I will always want to live with you." He had expected her to cry, even raise her voice. Emotion would have been something concrete for him to grab hold of. Instead she turned and headed for the bridge several feet down the path. It crossed a small swamp and when you stepped on it, it shifted slightly, sinking into the water so that wet green moss pushed through the cracks. Katy got down on her knees and pressed her fingers to it. A man and woman passed by dressed from head to foot in hiking gear, as if they were in the Appalachian Mountains instead of a garden in the middle of the city. Noah said hello in response to their greeting and waited for them to disappear around a bend before he walked to the bridge and his daughter. When he reached her she had flattened out from her knees onto her stomach. Normally he would have scooped her up and made a joke about how dirty she was; he would have called her a sack of potatoes and thrown her over his shoulder. Now he was afraid to touch her. "You can come visit me," he said. "Every Wednesday and sometimes on weekends. We'll have lots of fun." He felt like the canned voice that came out of the talking doll she used to carry around with her when she was in preschool: "Hello," it said. "I love you." "Goodbye." "What are we going to do?" Katy asked. Her voice came out muffled through the pier. "We'll do what we do now," he said. "We'll take walks. We'll go to the Rainbow Cafe. You can order your own malt." She pushed herself back onto her knees. The front of her shirt and her pants were covered in a thin layer of mud. She looked skeptical, like he had just offered her a plate of Brussels sprouts and told her they were delicious. "Do you want to walk some more?" he asked. She stood up and, without looking at him, continued down the path. In the car on the ride home Katy held a white anemone Noah had let her pick despite the signs declaring every few feet, "Please do not pick the flowers." She leaned forward and stuck the flower in the car vent so it faced her, as if she and the flower were having a conversation. "As soon as I turn ten I'm going to move back to California and be a flower person. You and Mommy can do whatever you want." What she meant was that she was going to be a gardener. At home Amanda looked at Katy's mud-streaked front and then took Katy's hand, leading her deliberately around Noah to the sink. "You're a mess," she said sadly, as if Katy's clothes were the tragedy.
Noah spent three weeks sleeping on his friend David's sofa before he found an apartment. It was a small two bedroom with a kitchen barely large enough for him to stand at the stove, a refrigerator that groaned persistently in the night, a master bedroom with a floor that slanted toward the window so that the first time he saw it, he imagined the walls of the house collapsing and him falling in his bed from the second floor to the lawn below: "Divorced man for sale, bedding included." For the three Wednesdays he spent at David's he arrived to pick Katy up half-expecting Amanda to have changed her mind. She would welcome him back into the house, explain it had all been a mistake. Instead she was polite and matter-of-fact, holding the door open for Katy and confirming with Noah the time he would bring her home. On the first Wednesday he took Katy to the Rainbow Cafe, where he tried to make conversation and then was relieved when she became interested in a family of four sitting at a table nearby. For the next two Wednesdays he took her to the movies and sat guilty in the dark, ashamed as much at his inability to give her the easy love he had once shown her as he was at his new public status: divorced man, single father, without Amanda's love to return to. At the end of those nights when he hugged Katy in front of Amanda's door their bodies were stiff, Katy's face turned away from his and Noah's arms tentative, as if he were afraid he might break her, or that holding his daughter might break him.
On Katy's first Wednesday in his apartment, Noah arrived early in front of her school and strained to find her amidst a sea of first graders. He and Amanda had agreed it would be best for him to pick Katy up from school and return her there the next day, to make the transition between houses smoother. After ten minutes of sitting with his blinkers flashing, Katy appeared from around someone's backpack and climbed into his car. She sat silently on Noah's front seat with her legs jutting out toward the dash. He pulled into traffic and asked her a list of questions he hoped would hide his anxiety. "How was your day at school?" "Fine." "What did you do?" "Played with Sarah." "What did you eat for lunch?" "Peanut butter and jelly." He stopped at a red light. David had helped him move in on Saturday, and Noah had spent the rest of the weekend and first part of the week hurrying to prepare Katy's room. Amanda had given him a twin bed mattress and frame from the attic, and he bought Strawberry Shortcake sheets, like the ones Katy had on her bed at home, along with a Strawberry Shortcake cartoon drawing he hung on the wall above her bed. David loaned him a dresser and on it Noah put a vase filled with daisies he bought at the grocery store, a last minute inspiration. "Mom says I don't have to come if I don't want to," Katy said. A sharp pain skirted across his chest. He made a right off of Hennepin and drove to the next intersection, stopping for another red light. Without looking at her he said, "No, of course you don't have to come if you don't want to. What else did Mom tell you?" "She says the reason you left is because you were very different people, and sometimes very different people stop loving each other." He turned onto 21st and sped up to pass a car. He couldn't remember a time he had felt more inadequate. "Yes," he said, "well. Your mom's right. Sometimes that happens." Although it was not he that had stopped loving. "Can I have ice cream?" Katy asked. "What?" His mind was on what she had said before that. "I want strawberry ice cream." He slowed at a stop sign without coming to a stop. "You can have ice cream after dinner," he said, ignoring a honk from a car to his right. His answer restored to him a small sense of control. At the apartment building they crossed the lawn together, and he followed her up the stairs, watching her strain in the stairwell to reach the wooden hand railing barely attached to the wall. After jiggling the front door free from the lock, he showed Katy the living room with the sofa he and Amanda had used when he was in graduate school, the kitchen with a wooden table that leaned to the right, his bedroom with its bed sloping into the street, and finally, her room. On Saturday night he'd painted it a pink that dried something closer to white. He saw that the Strawberry Shortcake picture was now hanging at a slant. "What do you think?" he asked. Katy
put her backpack down next to the bed and pulled herself up onto the mattress.
He moved quickly toward her, as if he could close out what she had said before it escaped the walls of the room. He sat on the bed next to her, preserving a path of space between them. "Do you like the sheets?" He pulled back the pink spread to show her. "They're Strawberry Shortcake." She shrugged without looking at them. He stood up from the bed. "You can be a flower person," he said, lifting the daisies a little from the water to show her. She glanced at them and then looked away. He gestured at her backpack. "Do you have any books to read from school?" "I don't want to read." "Let's take off your jacket." He reached over to help her. The feeling returned again, of being afraid to touch her. The jacket snagged on her wrist and he tried, gently, to pull it free. He sat down lightly beside her, pulling the jacket into his lap. "Is there anything you want to do?" he asked. She shrugged. "We could go to the Wildflower Garden. Or the Rainbow Cafe. Are you hungry?" He had been so preoccupied with showing her the apartment, he had not thought of what they would do next. "No," she said. "What about TV, do you want to watch TV?" Before he moved out, they had had a rule she could watch only one hour of TV a week. Noah wondered if now they could expand it to include TV time at Amanda's and TV time at Noah's. "Yes," Katy said. "I want to watch after-school cartoons." "Well, we'll see what's on." "Mom lets me watch whatever I want." "She doesn't," he said, negating and questioning her at the same time. He
couldn't find any cartoons so he put on something that seemed innocuous enough,
a family sitcom with a canned laugh track. The two of them sat watching in
silence. His sofa and the throw rug and the lone plant he bought on sale at the
grocery store felt bland, like a rental someone would stay in on business and
never remember or miss. "Fine." He kept looking at the TV. "Does Mark come over a lot?" Katy shrugged. "Sometimes." "Does he stay overnight a lot?" He knew he shouldn't be asking her that. But Amanda was vague with him, distant on the phone. "Sometimes." "And do you like him?" Katy shrugged. "He plays with the syrup when we have pancakes. He said he was an airplane coming in. He made a mess, and Mom laughed." "What else does he do?" "He played the guitar once. But he doesn't know how to play songs I know. He can't play 'Pop Goes the Weasel.'" Noah stared at the TV. A commercial was showing an animated squirrel trying to bring too many nuts up a tree. About halfway up, he lost all of them. It was an ad for an insurance company. "Are you hungry?" Noah said. Katy shrugged and kept staring at the screen. "What if I made macaroni and cheese?" Macaroni and cheese was her favorite, the thing she got to eat whenever they hired a babysitter: a treat to make up for her parents' being away. "OK," she said. He got up off the couch and went to the kitchen. He studied the box carefully, as if he hadn't made it a million times before. This would be the first dinner he cooked in his apartment. He had been eating takeout or stopping by David's for a beer and pizza on the way home from work for the few days since he'd moved in. David's life had until now been one Noah appreciated part-time. They'd met at St. Thomas, where David was an adjunct professor of history and a self-proclaimed perpetual bachelor, interested in history and women and beer and baseball. It was a life Noah had enjoyed on the occasional Friday night or Saturday afternoon, when he still had his family to go home to afterward. He cooked and then brought the food the macaroni with hot dogs sliced into it, a salad made out of iceberg lettuce, carrots, croutons out to Katy in two bowls, letting her eat while she sat on the sofa in front of the TV. He was relieved when, at 7:30, The Wizard of Oz came on; it would run until past her bedtime. She fell asleep along with Dorothy and her friends in the poppy fields, and Noah carried her to bed, careful with the weight of his daughter in his arms. In the morning he woke late and dressed her in a hurry before fixing her a bowl of cereal and driving her to school. In the parking lot she got out of the car without hugging him goodbye. He left with a sense of guilty relief that not until next Wednesday would they have to go through this again.
o0o
David had been telling him he should date.
"You're in a slump," he said, as if Noah were a football player gone too many
games without a touchdown. The evening after his first Wednesday with Katy, Noah
had fled to David's apartment to escape his own. The two of them sat on the sofa
and drank beer, watching the innings of a Twins game creep by in a monotony
interrupted only occasionally by frenzy. Noah grunted. In California he hadn't watched much baseball; there he and Amanda had watched tennis, sometimes basketball. Halfway through the eighth inning, when the game went to commercial, David hit mute. "Lisa Elliott," he said. He snapped his fingers as if he were a magician and the rabbit had just reappeared. "That's who you should go out with. You've met her. At that Christmas party last year, or the year before whenever, right after you moved here." David showed him her picture. Noah had no recollection of her face. She looked young David said she was twenty-nine, three years younger than Noah with dark brown eyes and reddish brown hair that in the picture she had pulled back into a pony tail. She looked cute, like a girl out of a Gap commercial. She was smiling as if she had just finished laughing, or was just about to begin. David said she had never been married. David turned the sound back on. "Pull the trigger," he said, then disappeared into the kitchen for another beer.
Noah called on a Thursday, after two more Wednesdays with Katy. Both times he had found himself planning ahead so there wouldn't be too much time to talk. The first Wednesday he took her to McDonald's for a Happy Meal the kind of food he and Amanda never allowed her to eat and then to a movie; on the second, he took her to the Rainbow Cafe, only to find it was temporarily closed for construction. They had ended up on the sofa, watching cartoons and eating pizza. "I've got two words for you," David said when Noah arrived at his house, depressed. "Lisa, and Elliott. Or are you waiting for the earthquake? It ain't gonna happen my friend. It's Minnesota we're living in here." Noah spent close to half an hour picking up the phone and then replacing it before he called. When he finally dialed he closed the shades in his office, shutting out the students studying on the lawn on the other side of the window. He felt both stupid and guilty, as if he were doing something illegal, although he wasn't sure what charges a court of law could hold against him. "Hello?" he said when she answered. He spoke as if he were testing the connection. When he heard her voice he suddenly had no idea what to say. "Hello?" she said, for the second time. He positioned in front of him the piece of paper on which he had planned his part of the conversation. "Hi," he said, "this is Noah Burns. I'm a friend of David's?" He felt as if he was asking for permission to be David's friend. "Oh, hi," she said. Her voice was friendly. "David told me about you. His colleague at St. Thomas, right?" "Right!" She knew who he was. He felt relieved, as if he had just discovered that his car had not, in fact, been towed. "He talks about you a lot." Noah hadn't known David spent that much time with her. She was probably just being nice. "Does he?" he said. "I won't ask what he says." "Nothing bad." "That's a relief." He laughed. He wondered if he sounded as ridiculous as he felt. "Well, I was just calling to see if you wanted to go out sometime. David seems to think we'll get along." He had his pen in his hand and he was spinning it between his thumb and forefinger, like a top. "That'd be great," she said. "I'd love to." He dropped the pen next to his computer and stood up from his desk. "What kinds of things do you like to do?" He walked to his office door and then back to his chair. "David mentioned you like to hike." "I love to hike!" He sounded juvenile, like he was nine years old and trading baseball cards in his basement. "Do you know the Wildflower Garden in Theodore Wirth Park?" The thought occurred to him that David had told her he liked to go there, that she was just doing David a favor by going out with him at all. He put the thought aside. "One of my favorite places," he said. "How about 2 p.m. on Saturday? We could meet there." "Finally," David said when Noah called him that night. He invited Noah over for a beer, to celebrate.
Noah got there first. He parked his car away from the three others in the lot, two of them minivans; he guessed there would be families on the trail, mothers and fathers together with their children. He could ignore that if the date was good. He wondered how long it would last. He'd cleared his evening of the plans he hadn't had to start with, just in case she wanted to get dinner afterwards. She arrived at 2:07 by the green illuminated numbers on his car clock. She was driving a black Toyota Corolla. When she got out of her car, he saw she was dressed like she had taken hikes before, but also like she cared how she looked: she wore tennis shoes, jeans and a solid-colored green T-shirt with a fleece zipped over it. The zipper stopped at her breasts, accentuating her chest, but not overly so. Her hair was in the same pony tail he had seen in the picture. He got out of his car and walked around it to greet her. "Hi," he said. "Lisa?" "I'm guessing you're Noah." She smiled and stepped away from her car to shake his hand. "Nice to meet you." Her handshake was firm. They hiked down a slight hill to the head of the trail. There were a few people walking ahead of them, parents he guessed, and two teenagers along with a younger child, a boy he guessed was a few years older than Katy. Two women huddled in front of the trail map. "Do you come here often?" he asked. They passed the women and the map and started onto the trail. "Every once in a while," she said. "The first time I came here it was with a friend who came to town for a visit from San Francisco. She'd heard it was a good place to go." "I used to live in the Bay area," he told her. She asked if he was from there, and he told her about Berkeley, his research, and how much he'd liked living there. He talked around Amanda and Katy, creating a version of his life that gave him a surprising amount of relief. "I'd move there in a heartbeat," she said. "If only I could afford it." He found himself imagining it: a story he allowed himself the fringes of and then, once he'd touched it, he eagerly embraced the whole thing. He and Lisa would fall in love and move back to Berkeley, they would get married, he would find work there, he would talk to Amanda and Amanda would understand he would need to be with Katy, Amanda would want to move back, too she had always liked it there and he and Katy would go back to the Marina, back to the Alameda Creek Trail. Back to before things fell apart. The path narrowed, and he stepped back so Lisa could hike in front of him. "So you're a teacher," she said. When she talked, she turned her head so he could see her profile. Her features were chiseled and distinct, different from Amanda's. David had been right: she was an attractive woman. "American lit," he told her. "The Beats." "Kerouac," she said. "Ginsberg. Burroughs." "Yea," he said, "all those guys." It was nice she knew that. He found himself smiling. "I guess Berkeley's the perfect place to get your degree then." He tried to keep his mind focused, to think about how perfect it had been to get his degree there without thinking about Amanda. Amanda had attended one of the lectures he'd prepared as a teaching assistant during his first year of graduate school. She had come up to him afterwards, asked if he wanted to get coffee sometime. After that first date he'd found it hard to think about anything besides making love to her. Even when they were married he had felt desire for her almost every time she was in the room. He wanted to know if she had asked Mark out, too, if their lovemaking was better for her than it had been with Noah. Lisa stopped in front of a patch of pink lady's slipper. The bloodroot had faded. "Those are beautiful," she said, pointing at the ground. He pushed Amanda aside in his mind. He imagined coming here with Lisa and Katy. Lisa seemed like the kind of person who could make Katy laugh. Then things wouldn't be awkward between him and Katy anymore: they would have their Wednesdays back. Lisa would look at him the way Amanda used to, in the beginning. Lisa would love him. "They are," he said. "Beautiful." He felt a surge of happiness, as if the ending he had long been preparing for had suddenly been wiped away and, miraculously, replaced with a beginning.
On Sunday he called David to ask how long he should wait before calling her. The date had ended in the parking lot, she'd had dinner plans with friends, but before parting she leaned forward and kissed his cheek. For a moment he could smell the sweat on her skin mixed with lotion or perfume, he thought it was lilac. "You liked her?" David asked. Noah could hear the baseball game on in the background. "Did she like me?" "I wasn't there, remember?" "Did she call you?" "She didn't call me. Not that that means anything. The date was only yesterday, right?" "How long do I wait?" "What did you guys do?" "We hiked." "And then?" "We just hiked. She had to meet friends for dinner." "Don't let that worry you. I'm sure she wasn't making it up." "I didn't think she was." "Holy shit! You're not gonna believe it! Mauer just hit a home run!" "Really?" "I'm not even fucking kidding you." "Good. So how long do I wait?" "I don't know, call her this week sometime." "Beginning of the week or end of the week?" "I don't know. Whenever." "I'm counting on you not to give me bad advice." "I wouldn't do that if I were you." "I'm serious." "If you really like her, call her on Tuesday or Wednesday. That's a respectable mount of time. She'll be flattered." "Thanks. What's the score?" "3-0." "Nice. Okay, talk to you later." "Later." Noah hung up the phone.
He called on Tuesday afternoon expecting to leave a message on her voicemail. She picked up. "It's Noah Burns," he said, suddenly worried that she might have forgotten. "Oh, hi." Her voice was warm. "How are you?" He asked if she wanted to come over for dinner. "I was thinking I could cook for you," he said. He was a decent cook; David had said women liked that. "You cook!" she said. "How modern of you." He couldn't tell if she was serious or making fun. He kept talking. "What do you like to eat?" "Anything but red meat." "That shouldn't be too hard. Do you like fish?" "I do." "Salmon?" "Sure." He asked what night worked for her. She paused. He hoped it was because she was checking her calendar. "This week I've got something every night but tomorrow. Then I'm busy for the next two weeks, a lot going on at work." "Tomorrow then." "Okay," she said. "Tomorrow." She paused. "Tomorrow's Wednesday. Eight o'clock okay?"
Wednesday. He hesitated. He remembered. Katy. He wanted it to be okay. He wanted
to see Lisa sooner than two weeks from now. She was waiting for his answer.
"Eight o'clock?" he asked. "Eight o'clock is when I have my daughter." "I'm sorry?" He was nervous, tripping over his words. "I'm sorry. What I meant is, Wednesday is the night I have my daughter." "Your daughter?" "I
have a daughter, Katy. She's six. But I would still like you to come. You could
come later in the evening. She goes to bed early." He was talking fast, aiming
to outrace rejection. "We could just do dinner after she goes to bed. What if we did that?" She was silent. "She goes to bed at 8:30," he said. "You could come at nine. Is that too late for dinner?" "Well, no." "I could have everything ready then. I mean, I'm assuming you have to get up early to go to work in the morning." "Yes." "So, tomorrow at nine. Don't worry about bringing anything. What kind of wine do you like?" She told him she usually drank white. "Perfect! White will go with the fish. So I'll see you tomorrow at nine." "Well ," she said. "I'll look forward to it," he told her.
He called Amanda from his office to tell her. He considered not calling, but Katy would go home with stories. Noah wanted to tell his version first. "A woman is coming to dinner," he said. "Oh?" Amanda waited. She used to do that to him when they were married: wait for him to speak when he was trying to have a conversation with her. He hated that. "She's coming around nine," he said. "Katy will most likely be in bed." He imagined Amanda leaning against the counter, the phone clutched between her ear and her shoulder; he wondered if Mark was in the house. "If she knows someone's coming over, she won't want to go to bed," Amanda said. "Has she met this woman before?" "Her name is Lisa." "OK, Lisa. Has she met her?" "No." "You won't like me saying this, Noah, but I don't want Katy waking up with another woman in the house, especially one she doesn't know." Noah tightened his grip on the phone. "She won't," he said. "Not that she hasn't woken up how many times with another man in the house." "This is not about Mark." Amanda's voice remained calm. Noah hated that. "Katy knows Mark. Mark has become a stable part of Katy's life. Katy meeting a fling of yours is completely different." "She's not a fling," Noah snapped. "Although it's none of your business, Lisa and I are serious." Or they would be. He believed that. "I'm glad for you, Noah, I really am. I just don't want to put Katy in the middle. Can't you introduce her to Lisa in some other setting? Couldn't you all go out for dinner before she meets her in your living room?" Noah had wanted Amanda to be jealous. He had wanted to hurt her. He had wanted her to ask about Lisa, to ask whether Noah loved Lisa. He was prepared to tell her he did. "I hardly think," he said, "you're qualified to give advice about who to bring into my living room. After all, you fucked another man in ours." This was not how he'd imagined the conversation going. He squeezed his eyes shut; he tried to breathe. Amanda was quiet. Then she said, "I'm sorry I hurt you." Noah stood up from his desk. "I'm late," he said, although the feeling he'd been having since learning of Amanda's affair was that he'd arrived too early: that if he just waited long enough, the lights would come up or someone would tell him the joke was finally over.
At 4:30 Noah pulled up to the curb at Katy's school and waited once more for her to appear amidst the cluster of children looking for busses. When she got in the car he said, "I got some new videos for you to watch." Over the weekend he'd bought her some Disney movies and a few cartoon shorts. They made him feel less guilty about letting her watch TV. Before she could respond he continued, "And tonight will be a little different. After you go to bed, a friend of mine is coming over for dinner." "Mom told me." His stomach clenched. "What did your mom tell you?" "Someone was coming to dinner who's a girl." Katy looked as if she was not very interested in the topic. "She's nice," Noah said, aware that he was trying to coax Katy to his side, whatever that was. Guilt replaced frustration. "I got you chocolate chip cookies," he said. "You can have them after dinner."
By 9:20 Noah had glanced out the window in search of Lisa's car too many times to count. Katy had eaten her dinner almost three hours before and was sitting in front of the TV in her nightgown. She had a plate with the remnants of a cookie sitting next to her. The fish was cooking, the kitchen table was set, and the smoke alarm had gone off twice, both times making Katy scream and cover her ears and run to her room. He opened the windows in the kitchen and, after the second time, took out the battery. He checked the fish and then walked into the living room. "Time for bed." He moved to turn off the television. "I want to meet your friend who's a girl." Katy's legs bounced up and down on the sofa cushion. She looked anything but tired. "You can meet her another time. Now it's time for you to brush your teeth and go to bed." They had been having this conversation for the past hour. "I want to meet her now." "Katy." His voice flattened out into anger. He didn't want Lisa to walk in and find his daughter still awake. He didn't want Katy to have any stories to bring home to Amanda. "You have to go to sleep," he said. "Now." He heard a car door slam. "She's here!" Katy screamed. She slid off the sofa. The plate went tumbling to the floor. It landed upside down and broke into four pieces. "Katy!" Noah strode to the sofa, picked up the pieces and then hurried to the window. Lisa was walking up the front path. Her hair hung loose past her shoulders, and she was wearing a skirt that hit her right above the knee. She reached the door and rang the buzzer. "She's here!" Katy said. She was standing in the middle of the living room. "She's here!" She climbed onto the ottoman and began to jump on it, screaming. He buzzed open the outside door and nearly ran into the kitchen, tripping over one of the kitchen chairs in the process. He disposed of the broken plate and hurried back into the living room. "Katy!" he said. He tried not to yell, but he needed her to stop: he needed to be able to think. He lifted her down from the ottoman and opened the door just as Lisa reached it. He stood trying to catch his breath, suddenly aware that he was holding the TV remote in his hand. He had meant to turn the television off and then set the remote back down. "Hello," he said. He tried to look relaxed. She looked at him without making eye contact. Her smile was nervous. "Hello," she said. She remained standing in the doorway. She smelled of smoke and beer. She must have met friends after work. He was wearing an apron over a pair of khakis and a blue shirt he had labored over the outfit for half an hour in front of the mirror. He felt old and ridiculous. He had a mess of cookie crumbs on his rug and the tail-end credits of a Disney short rolling past on his television. She had a social life. He stood back from the door. Katy, suddenly silent, stared at her as if she were an animal at the zoo. "Katy," Noah said, "this is Lisa. A friend of mine." "You're my dad's girlfriend," Katy said, her voice less confident but still loud. Noah
blushed. "No honey," he said. "She's a friend of mine, who happens to be a
girl." "My mom has a boyfriend," Katy said. Her eyes went to Noah. "Can I have another cookie?" Noah shook his head no. His face was flushed. It was too much at once. "It's time for bed," he said. Parenting in front of Lisa restored for a moment his confidence. He moved to turn off the television and retrieved her teddy bear, lying face down on the sofa. "Now go to the bathroom and brush your teeth. I'll be right in to say goodnight to you." Katy looked disappointed but she took the teddy bear and went running. Noah turned to Lisa. He asked for her jacket. She shrugged it off into his arms and he hung it on his recently acquired garage sale coat rack. He led her to the kitchen. "Have a seat," he said. "I got some wine." He lifted up a bottle of uncorked sauvignon blanc and showed it to her. When she nodded he poured some into her glass. He turned to the oven to check the fish. It was done, nearly burnt. "It's ready," he said. He straightened and faced her. "I just have to put her to bed. Then we can eat." "Of course," she said, quickly. "I have some magazines there," he began. "It will just be a minute..." She waved him away. "I'm fine," she told him. He found Katy standing in front of the bathroom sink with a toothbrush in her mouth. He leaned in to wipe away a line of toothpaste dribbling down her chin. "Okay Katy, now spit," he said. "You'll get toothpaste all over your nightgown." She spit. He took the toothbrush and handed her a plastic Mickey Mouse cup full of cold water. She rinsed and spit again. "Time for bed." He took her hand and led her to the bedroom. "I don't want to sleep." "I know. But you have to. You have to get up early for school tomorrow." He let go of her hand. She remained frowning in the doorway. He walked to her bed and turned down the sheets. "Come on, Katy," he said. "Hurry up." He regretted the impatience in his voice. Lisa was waiting. The fish would be dry. She reluctantly crossed the room and climbed in, sliding her body under the sheets. He pulled the covers up under her armpits. "Good night." He kissed her on the forehead. "Go to sleep now." He turned off the light and walked to the door, leaving it open a crack. In the kitchen he found Lisa looking through a Victoria's Secret catalogue. "This yours?" she asked. She was smiling. "Whoever lived here before me." He blushed. "It still comes here." "Mmm." Her foot was slowly bouncing at the end of a bare leg. He thought of taking her out to his car right then, making love to her in his backseat out of gratitude for her smile. Then he thought he was not fit to be a father. "Dinner's ready." He filled up two plates and brought them to the table. He poured himself a glass of wine. "Very impressive." "More
wine?" She said yes. He poured for her and then sat down. The glass was halfway
to her lips when he said, "A toast." She paused. He couldn't think of anything
to say so he merely moved his glass towards hers. They clinked. They drank. They
set their glasses down and fell into a silence brought on by the first few
bites. The fish was dry. He hoped she didn't notice. "It was fine," she said. "Uneventful. How was yours?" "Good," he said quickly. He told her a story about a student who had come in apologizing for being late, looked down at a watch he wasn't wearing, and then darted back out of the class. "He wasn't even in my class to begin with," Noah said. He wanted to see her laugh at something he said. She did, a little. "I always thought teaching must be hard." "There are good days and bad." They continued to eat in silence, the sound of their forks loud against their plates. The refrigerator clicked on and began its low groan. "How do you like the food?" he asked. She hadn't eaten much. She was almost finished with her glass of wine. "Good," she said. "You're a good cook." He
leaned back. He could feel the wine beginning to settle into his veins. He moved
forward and put his hand on the table, close to her plate. "I had a good time on
Saturday." "I'm sorry about Katy being awake when you got here." It had been awkward but the feeling he'd had on the hike returned: this was a beginning, the past could be erased. "Noah." She leaned towards him. He could smell the smoke on her skin, the lilac beneath. Her hair was tucked behind her ears so he could see the line of her jaw. He wanted to reach out and touch her face with his fingers. She continued. "I just want to be clear that I like you, I really do. We're both friends of David's, and David didn't want me to say this yet, but..." She finished the wine in her glass and looked over his shoulder at the stove. "This is hard for me to say, but, I'm not interested in dating someone with a child right now. I thought I could. It's just..." Noah hadn't heard Katy's footsteps leaving her bedroom; he wasn't aware of her until he saw her out of the corner of his eye running into the living room and grinning at the two of them, trapped in front of their plates. He was thinking about Lisa's fingers, resting lightly on his leg, he was noticing them slide away, wanting them not to. He was not thinking that Katy was awake and standing in the living room, placing her head upside down on the ottoman and her hands on either side of her ears. He didn't realize what she was doing until he saw her feet getting ready to launch up from her shoulders. When she straightened, her arms shaking from the strain of it, her head sinking into the pillow, Noah could see her upside-down grin. She was impressed with herself for holding her body there, aloft. She was oblivious to the fact that her nightgown had fallen down in one sliding movement, revealing flat round nipples and her white cotton panties, splashed with Strawberry Shortcake pink. Before he could think, he shoved back his chair with his heel and strode over to Katy. He reached over to catch the body that crumpled out of its headstand in surprise at Noah moving at her in anger. In one swift motion he lifted her up towards his chest, as if he were embracing her the way he had before their Wednesdays fell apart, and he held her to him and hit her once on her bottom, his palm coming down hard. She jerked away from him, straining against him. He released her, and she ran, a cat darting from oncoming headlights. He turned back to the table. Lisa sat, motionless, staring at the spot where Katy had been. When Noah walked towards her her eyes snapped to him and she stood up from her chair. "I should go," she said. He stopped, feeling the ache inside him rise up. He had never hit his daughter before; he found it hard to believe he had done it now. Amanda and he had called it pathetic, people who thought hitting their children would somehow teach them a lesson. A sound rose up from his throat that he couldn't control, as if he were a can of soda that had been shaken and then opened. Lisa moved quickly away from him to the door. He made no attempt to stop her or touch her, to shake her hand or give her a hug. He didn't ask if he could see her again. She was turning to leave. Her car key was out. She was gripping it between her fingers. He opened his mouth to apologize. "I'm sorry...," he tried, but it was hard for him to talk, hard for him to breathe. She waved him off. "It's okay," she said. "I just... I should go." Her words dropped to the floor between them. She turned for the door and then she was gone, her heels receding rapidly down the stairs. Noah closed the door and locked it behind her. He walked to Katy's room. He stood in the hallway, staring at her lying in her bed in the dark, rolled over on her side, her back to the open door and her hair splayed out behind her on the pillow. She wasn't asleep. He could see her body rising and lowering beneath the covers, her breath too fast, trying to slow itself. She had taken the sunflower he put in her vase the day before and thrown it onto the floor; it was lying in the doorway beneath his feet. He should go to her, apologize, explain he had made a mistake: he should hold her. But he knew she would reject him. He
backed out of the doorway and walked down the hall to his bedroom. He sat down
on his bed. He had seen Katy's face when he hit her. All of their Wednesdays
crumpled at his feet in an instant. He would take her back to San Francisco to
watch the sailboats. He would let her pick as many flowers as she wanted. He
would buy her ten thousand malts. And still: Amanda was seeing someone new had
been since before the divorce. |