By Meg Bloom Glasser
He used to throw water balloons at my head from the balcony of our apartment in Battery Park City. I’d be taking our dogs out to poop and I was really pregnant. It was hilarious. Now that we have children, he doesn’t throw objects at my head anymore. I miss it.
He is a bond trader. We bonded from the get-go, but I still don’t even know what a bond is because I am a talent agent. I don’t use that side of my brain. He’s explained it to me a million times, but it never sinks in. It’s like the Lincoln Tunnel. You can draw me diagrams, but I still don’t understand where the fuck the water is.
My husband and I met on a blind date. My sister set us up. She hoped I wasn’t his type. She was disappointed that he liked me. She’s competitive that way. She wanted to give me a taste of what I couldn’t have.
We live in New Jersey now. We have two children. David is three and Griffin is a year and a half. I quit my job to stay home with them. I regret it.
We are at a beach house at the Jersey Shore. We rented it for the last two weeks of August. We go home tomorrow.
I am downstairs packing. My husband is upstairs. The children are sleeping.
I am wrestling with the Pack ‘n Play which is meant to contain the children, but children can’t be contained. I hear a woman’s voice whispering my husband’s name, “Tom, Tom.” It scares the shit out of me, so I race up the stairs and look for Tom. He is in the kitchen loading the dishwasher.
“I just heard a ghost,” I tell him. He doesn’t believe in ghosts for himself, but he believes in ghosts for me.
The next morning Tom packs the car. David, Griffin, and I sit on the deck and watch him. Griffin is on my lap. Griffin is the docile one. David is the asshole. I know you shouldn’t label your children, but I do it anyway.
David finds a praying mantis and wants to take it home. If I let him take it home, it will die, just like the bucket of sand crabs he left sitting in the sun too long or the hermit crab that he threw out prematurely. It was only shedding its skeleton. It wasn’t dead.
Praying mantises are different, though. If you harm them, you have bad luck. I don’t want bad luck. David has a fit and he won’t get in his car seat. He does the back arch and the leg kick. I bribe him with a bag of chocolate and vanilla taffy.
“Why did you give him the whole bag?” my husband asks, and even though I know he’s right, I roll my eyes. I shouldn’t have given him the whole bag. It was mine and I had only enough to get me through September.
Sometimes I am mean to my husband. I do it because I resent him. I gave up my job but he gets to go back to work after the weekend. Yes, David starts his first day of preschool next week, but it’s not even a full day.
On Saturday, we get a babysitter, a last hurrah before summer ends. We go to New York City for the day, and we walk around our old neighborhood. We laugh our asses off like old times. He buys an ugly pair of shoes. I tell him they’re ugly and that his partners at work are going to make fun of them. Wall Street is a tough crowd.
“What’s wrong with them?” he asks.
“They’re too pointy,” I tell him.
He is back at work first thing Monday morning. He doesn’t wear the ugly shoes. He must be having second thoughts. They’re still in the box. He calls me from his desk at Two World Trade Center like every half hour. He wants to come home early. He misses us.
Tuesday morning, he leaves for work at 5:30 am. I am not fully awake. I can hear him getting dressed but I don’t say goodbye. He calls me when he gets there. I am eating peanut butter. David and Griffin are watching a Barney video in the den. My husband tells me to turn on the TV and watch the news. Tower One is on fire. I can’t tell him what’s happening because I don’t know. The newscaster is talking about a small plane hitting the trade center.
My husband calls me again to say that they are going into a meeting. He’ll call me back. While I wait to hear back from him, an airplane hits Tower Two.
He never makes it home.
I find his shoebox and it is empty. He wore the ugly shoes. I regret calling them ugly. I regret many ugly things that I’ve said over the years. I will make it up to him when I find him.
I go to New York City to find him, but he can’t be found. I go many times over the next two weeks.
One day after a trip to the city, I come home and there is a UPS delivery waiting for me. A box of vanilla and chocolate taffy.