April 11th, 2009
Toby
We’re outside Sawmill Market in Old Town Albuquerque, where Rose and I are meeting another one of her “dearest friends” for dinner, when I take in my reflection in the tall windows and mutter to Rose under my breath, “I look stupid.” Rose has been buying me “outfits.” Today, I’m wearing a pale pink button-down shirt with a floral pink tie and gray slacks. She insists I dress like a real man now that we’re getting married. Pink was the one color I told Mom I’d never wear, and she respected that.
“Toby, te ves muy guapo .” You look very handsome. She fusses with my tie, licks her hand, messes with my hair, and then turns toward the restaurant. My feet don’t budge because I don’t want to be here. Shouldn’t Rose be out of dear friends by now? She snaps her fingers. “ Vamonos .”
I follow, head hanging.
Inside, she introduces me to Felipe and Maya, but this couple is like all the other couples: Mexican, the guy is muscular, the girl is petite. Maya is impeccably dressed, and Felipe gives me a once over and then looks down at his own clothing and laughs. “Looks like your lady’s dressing you, too!”
Felipe and I wear virtually identical shirts and ties, but mine are pink and his are purple. They all laugh. I shrug.
The first time we had dinner with one of Rose’s friend couples, I was the life of the party, and I enjoyed it: Rose retelling our engagement in long, drawn-out detail, listening to stories about Rose when she was young, learning about the other couple, and every bit of our conversation in Spanish. But tonight, as the three of them converse, I realize Rose was right—I don’t know what it was like to grow up in a Mexican-American neighborhood and household. Spanish is a language I can speak, like a cool party trick, but I don’t fit in, and I don’t want to wear pink shirts, and I’m sick of eating so much all the time.
Felipe and I stand inside as Rose and Maya catch up. The Sawmill Market is a fancy food hall without the mall. The food is great, the atmosphere relaxed, and the open concept inviting. A couple walks past us. The guy is short, and his date is at least six feet tall, made even taller by the heels she’s wearing. My thoughts turn to JerryAnn, and I question what this woman is doing with a guy who’s shorter than average height, average build, and not great looking. She’s tall and beautiful, and her footsteps are powerful as she crosses the room.
Felipe taps me on the shoulder. He follows my gaze and smiles at the mismatched couple as he whispers. “Poor guy. Looks like he lost a bet.” But the guy has an I-won-the-lottery grin on his face. He pulls out a chair for his tall companion, and she sits down, smiling up at him. Felipe laughs. “They’re a circus act.”
I want to rip Felipe’s thin mustache off his face, and not just because I’m jealous his wife let him keep it, but because, circus act or not, they’re happy, genuinely happy, and I’m not.
Rose nudges me with her arm, “Toby, Maya and I have a lot of catching up to do. Could you?” She tilts her head toward the pasta vendor she’s been craving all week. I make our orders alone—pomodoro for her, puttanesca for me—and meet back at the table they’ve saved for us. Felipe’s arm is around Maya’s shoulders, and she’s feeding him a bite of her calzone and grinning, and yes, his mustache bugs me, but I can’t stand how happy he is, like he’s rubbing it in my mustache-less face.
Rose is retelling our engagement story. I could tell the story in two minutes, but when she tells it, she stretches it to ten, sometimes fifteen. I sit and hand Rose her dinner, and she smiles, and kisses my cheek. I wait for her to finish the story, but it’s her worst telling. Felipe and Maya do a decent job of faking enthusiasm, but the walls and impossibly high ceilings close in on me, and my breathing gets ragged. My inhaler is in my slacks. I pull it out of my pocket and take a puff in the middle of the part where Rose explains how surprised she was as she walked into her classroom after a long weekend to find white twinkle lights spelling out the words “Marry Me” on her wall.
Why isn’t the albuterol kicking in? I can’t breathe. I stand.
Rose finishes her sentence and tosses her hair and head to face me, then levels me a look that says, “You are not leaving me right now!”
I lean over and whisper in her ear. “I’m worried about Gordita.”
My new apartment doesn’t smell like Mom because I got rid of a lot of her stuff. Gordita wanders around the apartment lost, looking for Mom’s bed where the sun shines in the afternoon, but last night she curled up in a ball on my bed and hasn’t moved since. She’s breathing, but it’s like she’s given up. “I don’t want her to die alone,” I whisper. It sounds stupid, but I want to be there for her like I was there for Mom.
Rose glares at me, gestures to my untouched puttanesca, and says through her tight smile, “ Come algo .” Eat Something. My eyes widen, and I sit.
The slurred cadence of Spanish dialogue circles me as Rose and Maya talk, but their words are a haze. All my life, Mom dressed me in clothes I didn’t want to wear, and when things went wrong, her solution was to tell me to eat something. She ordered me around and insisted I needed a little Latina woman to keep me honest, but I’m honest and I keep myself honest. She spoke only Spanish, but I think in English, and Mom lied to me about Dad, shielding me from truths I needed to hear. She fussed over me and insisted she knew what was best for me. She devoted everything she had to me, and I knew it, and her love was coated in guilt, which she slathered on like butter on toast.
I face Rose, whose face morphs into Mom’s. I’m not engaged to the woman my mother would have picked for me. I’m engaged to my mother! Rose’s petite voluptuous frame will turn into Mom’s in twenty years, and she will spend every day of my life dressing me in clothes I don’t want to wear, insisting the solution to every problem is to eat something. But I’m not hungry. I love Rose. She’s everything Mom was, and I’m engaged to her because years of twisted guilt have me believing I owe it to my mother to marry Rose.
I’m not sure what happened to the conversation, but silence falls among us, and all eyes turn to me. I stand, knocking my chair backward, and the tightness in my chest, which has nothing to do with asthma, intensifies. I clear my throat. “I’m sorry, I’m not feeling well. Please, stay and eat. I’ll just wait in the car.”
I walk out of the building and don’t turn back. The last place I want to be is in the tight confines of Rose’s car, so I walk, hands in my pockets, my empty stomach digesting my feelings. For the past few months, I’ve been ignoring the vice squeezing tighter around me, slowly. I loosen the tie around my neck, take it off, shove it in my pocket, and unfasten the top button of my shirt. I meander onto the grounds of the Albuquerque Museum and stand beside a big blue geometric metal sculpture. A tear slips down my cheek, not because I don’t understand what the art is supposed to be, which I don’t, but because I’ve messed up, and Mom isn’t here to fix it for me.
The walk back takes me less than ten minutes. I sit on the steps and wait. Rose’s laugh pierces the air from behind me, and I stand, watch Rose hug her friend, and hang back as they say their goodbyes. That’s the thing about Rose—they are all her dear friends. She loves them, and that’s what makes what I’m about to do so difficult.
She sidles up next to me and slips her tiny hand into mine. We walk toward her car. I’m wearing a pink shirt and Rose is driving me in a car with eyelashes. How did I ever think this relationship would work?
Rose breaks the heavy silence. “Are you all right?” I don’t answer because I’m not all right. “I’m sure Gordita is fine,” she says as she opens her door. I’m a jerk who has been so wrapped up in myself for the last forty minutes that I haven’t thought of Gordita at all. We sit in the car, and Rose faces me. “She’s an old, tough cat.” She places her hand on my knee, starts the car, and pulls out onto Bellamah Avenue as a tear slips down my cheek. I love Rose and her hand on my knee, and I don’t think Gordita is any more fine than I am.
I wipe my eyes on the sleeve of the shirt I’ll never wear again, and then clear my throat. “Rose, are you happy?” Her silence is long and heavy, and several seconds pass when neither of us says anything. I turn and look at her. “Do I hum?”
She’s crying and wipes her eyes with a tissue, then glares at me at the stop light. “I’m sure you can hum, Toby. It’s not rocket science.” She’s speaking in English, and I’m grateful. She may not think in English, but she knows I do.
“No, I mean, do I hum when we’re together?” Silence. “Have you ever heard me hum?”
Rose pulls into a closed tire shop and puts the car in park. She crosses her arms and turns her body to face me, eyes tight. “No, Toby, I’ve never heard you hum. Do you want me to hear you hum?” In a heartbeat, her expression changes from sad to mad. She unfolds her crossed arms, and her fingers become clenched fists. “Well, are you going to hum or not?” She groans. “Toby, you ruined our evening because of your cat? Maya thinks you’re a jerk, and now here we are sitting in an empty parking lot while I wait to hear you hum. What is wrong with you?”
After taking a deep breath, I calmly ask. “Rose, what do you do when you’re happy?” She groans, a loud frustrated sound, and throws her hands in the air then brings them back down into fists. I place my hand softly on one fist. “Please, answer the question.”
She rolls her eyes, refolds her arms, and answers, “I bake.”
I nod my head. “You haven’t baked in months, except for work.”
“Toby, unlike you, I am planning a wedding!” It’s a sore point between us. She doesn’t think I’m doing enough, and I think she’s doing too much. It’s all we ever talk about, and when it comes to the wedding, Rose’s perfectionism is in high gear. She blurts a string of Spanish expletives followed by, “I want our day to be perfect!”
Her fingers pick off a polka-dot from her leather ladybug steering wheel cover, a habit she has when she’s frustrated. The poor ladybug has lost a lot of dots recently.
I let out a puff of air. “Why do you want it to be perfect?”
Picking at the steering wheel, she doesn’t face me. “Because it’s our wedding day. Because it’s the most important day of our lives. Because…” Groan. “It’s the one thing I can control.” A dot falls into Rose’s lap, and she looks up at me, her vulnerability, her hopes and dreams wrapped up into a day she’s been planning since she was a little girl, and I’m about to crush all of it.
“Shouldn’t a wedding day be a celebration, not something to control?” I whisper. I want her to see where I’m coming from, to understand my perspective, but I also realize I’ve been coming to this conclusion for weeks. I’ve had time to travel through the stages of grief, but Rose is angry, and she’ll be there for a while.
“No, Toby. No, a wedding should be the one day in a woman’s life that she can control. Her husband might turn out to be a liar, a player, a heartbreaker, a felon, but for one day…” Rose’s pointer finger is in my face. “Every woman is entitled to one day of a good man!”
My eyes widen. This is what Rose thinks of me—that I’m as much a liability as her father and my father were? Are her expectations so low that she’d be satisfied with one perfect day and nothing more? “You deserve better than that, Rose.”
Rose’s eyes ignite, and she levels her pointer finger for a quick jab to my chest. “Then be better, Toby!” She starts up her car and drives while I think.
She pulls into my new apartment complex. It doesn’t feel like home because even though it’s nicer, it isn’t filled with memories of Mom. Rose follows me inside, but we’re silent until I close the front door and we’re sitting on the sofa. “I hum when I’m comfortable and happy,” I whisper, trying to pick up where we left off.
Rose has shut down. She sits next to me but won’t look at me.
“I haven’t hummed in ages, and you haven’t baked in months.”
“Then hum, Toby,” she snaps. “Hum your little heart out.” She faces me. “And you know why I don’t bake. It’s because you don’t eat, like you don’t even care about my cooking anymore.”
Rose is right. Ever since JerryAnn said, “Food only solves one problem: hunger,” I haven’t needed food like I used to—and it hasn’t solved problems the way it used to either. I pull Rose’s chin gently upward. “Do you want to be with a man who doesn’t appreciate your cooking?”
She shakes her head from side to side. “No,” she cries. I scoot closer to her and put my arm around her shoulders. She peers up at me and whispers, “You’ve changed.” She’s right.
Rose leans into me, and I rub her back while she cries into my shirt. I cry with her and think about how stupid I’ve been, unhappy for months, maybe even since I made out with Rose in the family consumer science room after basketball. I’d been dragging my feet in applying for a doctoral program, but money wasn’t the issue, I couldn’t care less about having a doctorate. Being a professor and finding a little Latina wife were things Mom wanted for me. I don’t want those things for myself.
Rose pulls her head out of my shirt and looks up at me. “You’re calling off our engagement, aren’t you?”
I wipe the tears from her cheeks with my thumbs. I want to tell her no, but telling her no would make me into everything she expects me to be: a liar, a player, a heartbreaker. “No, we are breaking off our engagement because we both know we’d be happier with other people.”
Her eyes turn fiery. “Is there someone else?” She wants there to be another woman to help her save face.
I kiss her forehead. “No, there isn’t anyone else.” She slinks downward, disappointed in my answer, and rubs her hand across my chest. She knows what she’s doing, knows how much I love her hand on my chest, how much I love the way her hair smells under my nose, and how her closeness, this intimacy, is the one thing that could make me change my mind. She tilts her head toward me, and I feel her exhalation against the stubble of my chin and smell the after-dinner mint on her breath. It would be easy to move a few inches and meet her lips, and she wants me to. I feel her longing, her heart—and mine—racing.
Rose whispers, “Let’s just get married and see how it goes.”
My heart skips and slows. Marriage isn’t something you try on and return when it doesn’t fit. When I marry, I’ll stay married. I slip out from under her embrace and stand. “Rose, marrying you isn’t going to bring my mom back.”
Rose jumps off the couch and smacks her hand across my face. The slap stings, but I deserve it. Her fists clench at her sides, as if this is my fault, but she’s right—I’m the guy in that book about the Idaho hiker, except instead of hunger and thirst, I was starved for affection, and when I finally got some, I guzzled recklessly, too much, too fast, and now I’m standing here, sick, not hurling, but sick of myself and my stupidity. “I’m so sorry, but I thought marrying you would be doing one last thing for my Mom.”
She slaps me again, harder. I should shut up. She’s silent, fuming, breathing hard, glaring at me, and I’ve never been good with silence. “Rose, I’m not good enough for you and deep down you know it. You don’t want to marry me.”
“So this is my fault?” She stops breathing, and I hold my tongue, standing still as her fists loosen, her shoulders sag, and the fight in her evaporates. “Please,” she begs. “Do you have any idea how humiliating this is going to be for me? Your proposal is all over my classroom wall.”
I shove my hands into my pockets because I want to hold her, to tell her everything will be all right, but holding her will remind me how hard it is to let her go.
She moves in close and places her hand on my chest. “Can we wait to announce our wedding is off until school is out?”
I cringe. School isn’t out for another month and a half, but if it means allowing Rose to save face, I can play along. “Sure.”
We go over canceling wedding plans, and I agree to take the financial hit because I’m not planning to pursue a doctoral degree. She agrees to give Mom’s ring back after the school year ends and then slams the door behind her.
I must have been holding back because once she’s out the door, my tears fall harder, and I shuffle into my bedroom where Gordita lies on one of Mom’s knitted scarves in the center of my bed. I place my hand on Gordita. She’s breathing. Without changing my clothes, washing my face, or even brushing my teeth, I curl up next to Gordita and cry into her fur. She doesn’t move and doesn’t mind getting wet. Somewhere during the night, I fall asleep.
I wake in the night with my hand on Gordita’s chest, but her heart has stopped. Life has gone out of her just like it did with Mom.
She’s just a cat, but I loved Gordita. It’s like Mom dying all over again. I lie on the bed crying, trying not to feel guilty for throwing out so many of Mom’s things, and I have to remind myself that eating a dozen donuts won’t bring Mom or Gordita back.