Chapter Three
Chapter Three
I don’t know what to expect. A combination of dinner and…
something. Maybe dinner and a movie. A walk and a coffee?
As long as it’s not a bowling alley or an ice-skating rink, I’ll be fine.
Something about being surrounded by other couples on a first date as we’re starting over makes me too self-conscious.
We begin the night at Keller’s Drive-In, an old-fashioned diner and one of our favorite spots when we were first dating.
I loved it back then because I could afford to treat even though I was broke.
It’s raining again, so we eat in Oliver’s truck with the windows rolled up, and the conversation is easy.
I ask him about work and he tells me about the house he recently flipped.
We finish our burgers and I find myself not wanting the date to end despite the rain now coming down in heavy sheets.
It’s strange, sitting next to Oliver and wishing, greedily hoping, for more and more time.
Like the feeling of finally being in the warm glow of a secret crush.
After dinner, he surprises me and we drive another ten minutes to an interactive museum he read about.
I can’t remember the last time we’ve been to a museum together.
Maybe when Emmy was an infant? When weekends went on forever and we craved anywhere we could walk in air-conditioned loops while she napped in her stroller.
The entrance to the museum is through a giant, glittering mall. Easter decorations are everywhere, with Mother’s Day nipping at its heels.
Inside, the museum is like a gigantic set made to look like a family home, all under one roof, the way I imagine an enormous, old-Hollywood soundstage would be.
Oliver leads us into what looks like a real foyer but is an interactive space with mail to read and phones to scroll through.
There is a stack of headphones on the dining room table so we each take a pair and hit play.
At first, there’s only music, an eerie fairy-tale soundtrack.
Then a woman’s voice, soft and lilting, tells us that a mystery lies within the exhibit and we are encouraged to find clues.
We’re surrounded by visitors who look like they’ve been here for hours combing for clues about what happened to the precocious young boy who went missing after discovering an otherworldly creature.
There are missing posters with his picture on the coffee table and home movies of the family, even a phone with old text messages you can take turns dissecting for leads.
By the third room, my mind is spinning in directions as odd as the soft-voiced narrative.
My attention wanders from the task in front of us and instead I begin to imagine what a museum of my own marriage to Oliver would look like.
What would happen if we let fifty strangers wander our house to investigate when and where we went wrong?
What, exactly, was lost and when? What if they picked through our mail or scrolled through years of our text messages?
The beginnings: can’t stop thinking about you.
The middle: make sure you buy the kind of bread Emmy likes for her lunch and Have you seen the remote?
It’s not in the couch. And finally: I’ll be home late. Don’t wait up.
Would those be the relevant clues? Or would it be the lack of art on the walls because we could never agree on what should be hung where?
Or the couch pillows in the living room misshapen from Oliver sleeping downstairs so often?
The temperature that was never quite right?
Too cold for me, too hot for Oliver. Or would it be less of a physical clue and more of a feeling?
I follow Oliver through the narrow halls of the exhibit. I’m flooded with the sudden need to find this boy.
I pull off my headphones and Oliver does the same. “What are we missing?”
“It looks complicated,” he says. “Maybe more fun just to observe?”
“Excuse me?” I find a staffer with the most beautiful blue hair and brown eyes, wearing fairy wings and a cowboy hat. “Do most people find the missing boy?”
“Mostly. There are clues everywhere.”
“So that’s the game? That’s how we win?”
She looks confused by my question, the competitive edge in my voice, but then she grins and says, “Pay close attention to the electronics.”
We find the family computer and watch home videos of the missing boy talk about new discoveries and a monster that he believes lives in his house. When this doesn’t help, Oliver suggests, “We haven’t read all the postcards yet?”
We relax into the cozy guest room and sit down on the bed.
It’s just us in here for now and the fake window is open and there’s a fan blowing to simulate a breeze.
Oliver smells fresh and clean, and I have the sudden urge to kiss the nape of his neck.
I scoot closer into him, pretending it’s to get a better look at the postcards but really I just want to be near him.
I picture us in a long slow kiss. We could lean back into this bed and stay here until the museum closes.
Oliver smiles, reading my mind. “Don’t you want to find him?”
I take in all the clues in this room: the clocks all stopped at 7:06 p.m. , the purposefully rumpled blankets on the floor, the tap from the bathroom set to a steady drip. All around us, museumgoers come and go, a swarm of serious-looking treasure hunters and Keith Morrison obsessives.
Oliver shifts beside me on the bed. His knee grazes mine and a shiver runs through me.
We’ll never be able to solve the mystery.
Our brains are too fuzzy. They can only handle one strong urge at a time, and my desire to be close to Oliver is all I can focus on.
With my lips to his ear, I whisper, “Let’s go. ”
“Go where?”
“Somewhere. Just you and me.”
When Oliver stands, I can see the outline of his erection, tight against his jeans.
It makes me feel giddy and ridiculous and powerful all at once.
I smile and follow him through the haunted backyard like we’re moving through a dream.
Our desire for each other is floating us through this dark space on a cloud.
And then it hits me, all at once. Under the faux stars of this unfamiliar backyard, like a slap in the face, I realize exactly how strangers would know we were doomed.
It would be Oliver’s dirty socks in our laundry basket.
At some point, I had stopped washing them.
A quiet protest to the inescapable panic that I had become his mother, maybe.
Or that we no longer saw all the million little things we did for each other.
There was a tally being taken and we both, silently, dug in.
Our domestic tasks remained split down the middle, and I didn’t stop doing laundry altogether, but something in me refused to wash another pair of his socks.
And he didn’t bend either. He was equally good at this game, carrying equal parts resentment.
He started wearing my socks, which horrified me.
Then a pair of fuzzy snowmen Christmas socks from his mother, then trampoline socks from the local bounce house.
I stopped washing his socks and he stopped bringing me cold water for my nightstand.
First we gave up on the little things and then flat out begrudged the others.
The realization leaves me feeling cold, then slightly panicked, like we’ve overstayed our welcome in a place we were already unwelcome. I rush us through the rest of the exhibit to the exit. Let the boy stay missing. It’s really none of our business.
We’re spit out of the exhibit’s exit into the mall’s atrium. I follow Oliver’s gaze to the Claire’s Accessories that Emmy would have spotted and then begged us to have her ears pierced. “Should we have brought her?”
I look up into Oliver’s blue-green eyes, bright and calm. He takes my hand and I feel the familiar reassurance of his touch. The panicked feeling washes away, followed by a charge, a headiness as he closes the space between us. I make a sound, a muffled giggle that I quickly swallow.
“What is it?”
I press my lips together and shake my head thinking of those two faraway souls and their dirty socks. Far enough away that it’s like a funny story. Inconvenient details of a stranger’s life. A house full of them. “Nothing. I’m just happy.”
Oliver lifts my chin. I slip my arms around his neck and pull him close. We kiss like this for a long time, under the bright lights of the mall at night.
—
On our second date, Oliver and I drive to a dance hall in Mesquite. He always surprises me on the dance floor. He shouldn’t be this good at it. He played baseball and was in the chess club. He wore pressed khakis as a teenager and tucked in his polo shirts.
But the first time he led me onto a dance floor he moved so effortlessly.
Never too showy or too drunk, just comfortable in his own body, the easiest dance partner from one song to the next.
I liked that no one ever seemed to notice this the same way I did, like only I could really see him and, therefore, he was all mine.
The tin-ceilinged dance hall is dressed up in strands of white lights.
Inside it’s cavernous and wood-beamed with a bar near the front where you don’t dare ask for anything fancier than a Jack and Coke.
It’s loud and happy and people are here to dance.
Oliver leads me onto the dance floor, down in front near the stage, and takes my hand in his, warm and strong.
I once asked him where he learned to dance so well and he had shrugged. “Cotillion. Where every hormonal Texas teen with sweaty palms learns how.”
I ask him again tonight and he gives me a similar shrug.
“Really, where’d you learn to two-step? Not at cotillion.”