The Truth Is a Theory Page 4

  Deep down, I’ve always blamed myself for that, although on the surface, in our fights, I blamed Dana. It was just so much easier to point the finger at him than to point it at myself. But now that I’m alone, and there is no Dana at night to aim my bitterness at, I can step back and see that maybe it was both of us; maybe we were both hurting.

  Yet he was the one who walked out. On some level, I’ve expected that since the day we got together. Expected it, and not known how to stop it. But now his leaving has forced me to try to sift out my own feelings from the tangle of knee-jerk reactions that has become our marriage, like separating a well-shuffled deck of cards into suits—my clubs, his spades, our hearts.

  Maybe that was his intent when he left. His parting words to me were, “This isn’t working. You need to decide what you want.” Which at face value gives me the power, but really, as he’s the one who made the move, I think he’s holding the cards. For years I’ve stashed the “I can always leave” clause in my back pocket; it was my security blanket, a way to pat down my fear as I felt him—maybe pieces of him—slowly leave me over the years. As I sensed the daily “how was your day” lose any real curiosity, as it became part of dropping his briefcase and shedding his coat and recited with just that amount of heart.

  To be fair, I guess my own curiosity became more and more hobbled by my hurt. And then my anger.

  We’ve been together for a long time—15 years, since our junior year in high school. And we’ve been married for eight of those years. Part of what attracted us to each other, or at least me to him, was that we were different, or as different as you could be at a New England boarding school. Dana grounded my lightning, legitimized my craziness. He was Captain America—handsome, athletic, smart. He was cool in a straight-up way, sporting his seasonal numbered jerseys with more pride in the team and in the game than in the status it assured him around campus. I was more reckless, impulsive. I had my own following, and it wasn’t to the library. We met at a party. He was drinking Molson’s with his buddies (in between seasons of course), and I was getting stoned with some friends. Somehow we ran right into each other (I probably wasn’t looking where I was going, or maybe I just couldn’t see) and although Fate might have had different plans for both of us, on that day our connection challenged those plans and forced Fate to reconsider.

  Dana came from a good family—strong values, close connections. My family… well, my family hung in there as best we could, with no mother, and a father who’s been haunted, bewildered since the day my mother walked out the door close to 30 years ago. I guess he did try his best to raise the three of us kids, but his best was so stymied by the hole Evelyn left that he never really pulled himself together where we were concerned.

  So Dana kept me safe and in line—and possibly in school—and I loosened up his tie. And we were in love. That heady, high school love that completely swallows your heart and your life. We finished each other’s sentences, completed each other’s thoughts, and became each other’s family. And in hindsight, that all-consuming feeling won out over any differences, or future desires, or any vague images we held of who we might become. In that cocoon of high school, where the entire outside world consists of your dorm, your classroom, and the athletic field, it was perfect.

  December 1987: Sophomore Year

  Erikson College

  Allie hung up the phone and shivered, as if someone had just yanked all the blankets off of her on a dark, frosty morning. She yearned to curl back up into Dana’s deep gravelly voice, to crawl back through the coiled phone wire into him. Her fingers hesitated over the numbers on the dial.

  She pictured Dana cracking open a textbook, his highlighter poised and ready, their conversation already ticked off on a detailed to-do list. He would probably dive into chemistry, as he always tackled his most challenging subject first. She frowned. His down-the-hatch common sense often missed the point of right now. He always had his eye on the ball—“Hang in there honey, only seven more days… ” He wasn’t wrong, but sometimes it would be nice to hear that he missed her too.

  “How about we only talk on Sundays?” he had pitched earlier in the semester after a particularly bad phone bill. She had wanted to slam down the phone on his oh-so-practical suggestion, and her “okay” was sharp and intended to hurt. But she had to admit (although never to him) that it had been a good idea, and not only financially. The daily heartbreak of missing Dana had been excruciating; a flicker of his earnest expression or a recent sweetness had her reaching for something solid—a bedpost, a beer bottle, a friend—so that she didn’t disintegrate. Even the shadowy essence of Dana sifting through her thoughts was agony, an instant train wreck, derailing her from conversations, homework, brushing her hair; leaving her paralyzed, the words, the brush, dangling useless.

  But now, with their new financially-savvy schedule, she could open up the scab and bleed heavily on Sunday, then slap on a Band-Aid, box up her heart, and stuff it into the back of her closet for the rest of the week, one precious box amidst a wasteland of dirty clothes and crumpled, red-inked exams.

  She clicked on the TV and crawled under her thick down comforter, willing her mind to go blank, to start filing away the weighty ache of Dana, now pressing on her chest and threatening to suffocate her. She focused on her breathing—in, out. Easy. This wasn’t an emergency, more of a standing appointment, the post-phone call hangover, the hour between the bubble-wrap of Dana and the new weightlessness of the week. She could wait it out. It was soothing to hear the low droning of the television.

  Ever since she could recall, the TV had been on in her white clapboard house. Allie couldn’t remember much about Evelyn, or Eva (her mother insisted Eva had more pizzazz), but she did know that television had been Eva’s oxygen. During the day, Allie camped out at the base of the blue paisley couch, setting up her dolls and her stuffed animals on the rug at Eva’s feet, the panty-hosed legs crossed next to her a vertical security blanket. While she changed the outfits on her dolls, the men and women of General Hospital and All My Children floated across the screen in their own ever-changing, technicolor wardrobes. Eva’s rapt face and begrudging, one-word answers told Allie all she needed to know about her own precarious presence in the room. Once in a while however, with one eye still on the screen, Eva would exclaim, “Can you believe she did that?” to no one in particular, and Allie, every time like Pavlov’s dog in ponytails, would leap up from her game, the honor of being included spurring her to her feet, and struggle to come up with the answer, even though the word “tree,” or no word at all, would have sufficed. But incomplete attention was better than none, and Allie learned never to whine. There was no faster way to dissolve the brief commercials of motherly love.

  Their routine varied once, when she was four.

  Allie, waking from her nap with the bright midday sun streaming in through her window, crawled out from under the covers and gathered all of her favorite dolls into an unwieldy jumble in her arms. She bit her lip in concentration as she wobbled down the hall; she did not want to drop anyone. Habit and the chatter of the TV led her towards the den, and she stepped into the doorway with relief—She did it! No one fell!—and prepared to gently release her babies onto a chair next to the door.

  Instead she froze.

  The room was hot, so hot, like the oven when her mom reached in for the chicken nuggets. The windows were shut tight. The thin plastic shades were pulled all the way down and the sun outside lit them a flaming orange, like a jack-o’-lantern lit with a candle. There weren’t any lights on in the room, but the glow from the television and from the fiery shades made monster shadows on the walls.

  Allie’s attention snapped to the couch. Her usually powdered and pressed mother was a ball of flannel—legs tucked up inside her long pink nightgown, head face down on her knees. Her dark hair hung in a stringy web around her. She was rocking back and forth, but not like Allie slowly rocked her baby dolls; her mother was r
ocking fast and jerky.

  A small mewing sound erupted from deep inside of Allie. “Mommy.”

  Eva pried her head up off her knees; her cheeks were streaked with mascara, as if she had scrawled black crayon all over them. She put her head back down. The rocking stopped, but the stillness was even scarier.

  Allie let go of her toys; plastic baby dolls crashed to the floor in a heap of twisted limbs and heads. She swung towards the TV for help, but the toothy smiles and red-lipstick laughter that grinned back just made the nightmare in front of her more terrifying.

  Allie stumbled over to the couch and wrapped her small arms around the awkward bulk that was her mother.

  “Mommy! Don’t cry, Mommy.”

  There was no response, no change in demeanor or shape. Her little mind scrambled for a better fix. She raced by Kevin’s room—door shut, still napping—and into the kitchen. A drink, something to drink. Juice. She ran over to the refrigerator and grabbed the orange juice. She was about to pull a chair over so she could climb up and get a glass when she saw a box of tea bags on the counter. Tea! She dragged a chair over, climbed up on the counter for a mug and slid back down. She filled the mug with water from the faucet and dropped a tea bag into it—string, tag and all. It floated on the top of the water and Allie paused for a moment—it didn’t look quite right, but she was sure this was how her mother did it. She then put the chair and the orange juice back before she took the mug with the floating tea bag in both hands and turned towards the hall. She stopped. She was scared; scared to go, scared not to go. Her heart was thumping, which was scary too. Finally her fear of being scared all alone pushed her forward, and carrying the mug very carefully so as not to spill, she walked towards her mother.

  The den was empty. The party continued on TV, but Eva was gone.

  That was the last time Allie saw her.

  The reasons Eva left were never discussed in the Mussoni household. But Allie—her long hair without ribbons now that her mother was gone—knew that it was her fault; she had not been good enough, she had not been quiet enough, she had not been enough, and she believed that her mother had left in search of better. In four-year-old Allie’s mind, that was a place where kids weren’t asking, kids weren’t crying, kids weren’t screaming. Where kids weren’t.

  After that, the television stayed on, and the vibrant square became the dramatic centerpiece in a house that had become an emotional vacuum. The random babysitters were more than happy to have the kids electronically entertained, and Allie’s father, who arrived home from work to slump at the kitchen table, received the “Daddy, can we watch TV?” as a gift. After a while, the kids stopped asking.

  ————

  “How’s it going?” Megan opened the door and peeked into their sunny dorm room. These Sunday afternoon calls with Dana were part of her schedule now too and she always disappeared for a while so that Allie had a quiet place to recover.

  For over a year now, the two girls had been entwined, their joy and their pain braided around each other in coded companionship. They shared an infinite, running dialogue—often laced with urgent information—even when they weren’t talking. One girl’s loaded smirk from across the room could tickle the other, waiting in line for the bathroom, and make her laugh out loud. Late at night in their dark dorm room, they whispered their trivia and their deeply personal stories to each other, filling and tying off balloons with their dreams for tomorrow until their heavy-lidded eyes closed and mid-sentence words became soft snores. In the drowsy sun of the morning, they picked right back up where they left off.

  “I’m getting there.” Allie emerged from under her covers. “Thanks.”

  “How’s Dana?”

  Allie’s eyes were puffy, her nose was red. “He’s taking some class that has him thinking about law school.”

  “Whoa.”

  “You’re telling me. I can’t even think beyond tomorrow and he’s graphing out the rest of his life.” She sighed. “He would be a great lawyer though, he’s so damn logical, and he’s an amazing public speaker. No fear.”

  “Remind me where he keeps his superhero cape?”

  “Sickening, isn’t he?”

  “Sickening?” Tess Cleary stood in the doorway, her tentative smile scrunching up her freckles, which for a rare moment were scrubbed clean and on display. “You aren’t by any chance discussing the chicken a-la-something the cafeteria is calling dinner tonight? Because I was wondering if you guys wanted to go get a salad… ” She twisted her gold necklace, debating the importance of a salad over what she really wanted. “Or order a pizza?”

  “Pizza sounds good, but let’s go out and get it. I need a change of scenery,” Allie said.

  “Sounds good,” Megan said.

  “Give me five minutes, okay?” Tess turned and headed towards her room.

  ————

  Tess had been Megan’s lab partner in freshman bio, and the two of them had bonded over their mustached professor’s oddities. He had a strange speech pattern, starting off each thought slowly, then talking progressively faster, so that although most students were trying their damnedest to write down what he said, their notes only captured the first half of each important point. Megan and Tess spent many a class looking at each other with a wide-eyed “Did you get that?” and then smothering giggles when it was clear that once again neither of them had.

  This year, Allie, Megan, Tess, and Zoe had all arranged to live in the same dorm; it was luck of the draw that Tess had ended up only two doors down from Allie and Megan.

  Tess opened up her oversized makeup bag and dumped out her social palette; dozens of cosmetics, in all shapes and sizes, clattered out onto her bureau. She separated the various tubes and compacts by function and then browsed the selection for just the right colors. After rubbing out her freckles with foundation, she swiped on blue eyeliner, black mascara, rosy blush, and pink lipstick; then she brushed her pin-straight dark blond hair until it shone. When she was finished, she dialed down the volume on her mother’s imagined disapproval and scrutinized her handiwork, still amazed that she could see her whole face at once. In high school, she’d had to apply her contraband makeup in the visor mirror of a friend’s Buick, which only illuminated one plain feature of her face at a time. She sighed at her reflection and clicked off the light, her mother’s voice grumbling like an old muffler in the background.

  ————

  From as far back as she could remember, Tess’s mother Ann had clothed herself in the mantra that beauty shines from the inside; that looks don’t matter. Trying her best to instill resilience, Ann pounded the message into her daughter at every opportunity. When Tess skipped home from school bubbling with the joy of a new friend or a scribbled note—John thinks you’re cute!—her mother would glance up from the stovetop and offer solemn advice: Make sure they like you for you.

  A hobby! A passion! Her mother had incessantly crowed that this was the key to happiness. Ann’s was cooking; her entire day revolved around preparing dinner, the only full meal she ever consumed. Each morning over hazelnut coffee she crafted a shopping list, using special colored pens to organize the items into categories (Tess would forever associate dairy with purple ink). Sometimes she even hummed while she worked. Then, wearing whatever baggy ensemble she had thrown on in the morning, Ann wheezed and waddled her way down the supermarket aisles—“My exercise,” she said—the detailed list an all-important shield against people staring, and trying not to stare, at her obesity.

  From midday on, she immersed herself in her ingredients, stirring, sautéing, tasting—and tasting some more—a gourmet meal for four. All afternoon the house simmered with delicious aromas—garlic softening in butter, rosemary and basil wilting in rich sauce, thick lamb or chicken roasting. But as the aroma intensified, Ann’s humming died away. Pots and pans clashed and banged like cymbals, utensils scraped and whisked as if the flavor was hidin
g deep underneath the metal. No one actually heard her swear, but that was because Tess, her brother, and her father stayed far away, choosing hunger over entering battle.

  Her bark to dinner snapped the family to the table, tails between their legs. They placed napkins on their laps and both feet squarely on the floor, bracing at least their bodies for what was to come. A mouth-watering feast, artistically garnished with a sprig of herbs or an edible flower, lay in front of them; but no one was tempted to lift a fork. Instead, they held their breath as Ann wiggled her girth into her chair, and then, like another family’s benediction or cheery “Bon appétit,” Ann’s mood burst. Pent-up bitterness—mean, belittling comments or loaded, glaring silence—spewed across the succulent success of her day, destroying every appetite in its path. Tess, her brother, and her father ate dinner wordlessly, tremulously, as Ann ferociously sliced and stabbed her way through every morsel—and then slapped on seconds—as though she had just had a violent argument with the Delmonico potatoes.

  Tess was not keen on finding a hobby.

  ————

  “You know, pizza is the white button-down shirt of foods,” Zoe shouted into the bathroom as she sat on Gavin’s bed and buttoned his shirt over her breasts.

  There was no answer from behind the half-open door.

  “Think about it, it goes with everything,” Zoe continued. “It can be snazzy or plain; it can be an appetizer, a meal, or even an activity, right? I mean people order pizza just for something to do. It can even be a lifesaver for an agoraphobic.” She heard the shower turn on. “Pizza; the best idea ‘round.” She raised her voice. “Get it? Round? I know you think I’m brilliant.”

  “Brilliant and sexy,” Gavin yelled from the shower. Then he stuck his head out from behind the yellowed plastic curtain. “But right now pizza is medicinal. Pepperoni.”