It's hurling a pair of Tevas into the backyard after you suck them up in
the vacuum and the whole thing breaks down because he left them in the living
room again, right smack in the middle of the carpet in front of Oprah.
It's serving meatloaf by candlelight to add romance to a Wednesday, and
it's making meatloaf a month of Fridays later because crafting a perfect loaf
requires pounding, whacking, beating, walloping, and punching a blob of
ground chuck that looks more like his face every time you look at it.
It's buying furniture at garage sales when you first start out, and it's
having a yard sale later to get rid of the furniture he left behind when love
wasn't love any more, just the rotten thing that happened to me and Izzy.
Isadore Wayne DePianto, Isadore because it ran in his family like the
crooked nose and the way back hairline, Wayne because his mom worshipped The
Duke and his dad hadn't been around to comment. Izzy to me, the Izzy I fell
for in high school, worshipped through college, and recently kicked out on
his butt.
Izzy with the B.S. in Electrical Engineering, and what does he do with
it? Zero. Izzy does zero on a full time basis.
That was fine for a short time after graduation, that last summer idyll
when we all kicked back, deciding to decide about our life courses later on.
That's not fine five years later. It's not fine when we planned and dreamed
and decided and I held up my end of the deal while Izzy was content to do
zero.
So that's why.
Twenty-seven years old, and I got tired of waiting. Tired of having a
good job in public relations with Kaufman and Crane and coming home each
night to Izzy, who was happily selling suits at Mervyn's in the new mall.
That was a summer job for chrissakes, it was never meant to become a career,
but it did.
It's good enough for him, he says every time he plunks down his lousy
paycheck, which barely covers the next installment on his student loan.
Money to fund a degree he got for decorative purposes, apparently. Never
mind what Izzy announces so proudly, that he's always the first employee
consulted when the store's display lights flicker or go out completely. Like
he's some kind of electrical genius.
I love Izzy, don't get me wrong. I love his pea green eyes and his Rhett
black hair, and the way he can lay in bed with a package of Oreos across his
chest and devour two entire rows without throwing up or getting fat, without
even coming close to that packed-to-the-gills, slumber party feeling of
teetering on the verge of nausea I get just by looking at that many cookies.
I love the way he sneaks up behind me, snakes his arms around my waist
and mashes me against him. I even love Izzy's mom, Felicia. I love the
cloud of Lady Stetson she lives in, I crave her steaming pans of lasagna and
chicken tetrazini. I love Izzy and I miss him, I roll over at night and hate
the cold spot where it should be warm, and the quiet which should be
punctuated by his raspy breathing.
Most of all, I hate the reason he left, that I was twenty-seven years old
and I wanted. I wanted, he said, all the time. Like that excused him. Like
that made it right for him to disappear the way he did.
A baby and a home is what I wanted, and I wanted him to use his education
because, I said, it was time to stop selling ties for godssake and get a
career.
"Not ties," he'd explained. "Whole suits, hon. There's no shame in
retail sales. All those guys with the careers you want me to have don't work
naked, do they?"
I'd watch him straddling a wicker chair in the breakfast nook, black hair
falling over soulful St. Bernard eyes, and I'd explode.
"I want a baby, Izzy! I'm not getting any younger."
"We've got tons of time, Caroline. We're young."
Izzy and I used different dictionaries. In mine, 'young' meant planning
for the future. In Izzy's, it meant putzing around in a dead end job and
hanging out with Chris, Wayne, and Max. The Party People, who charged into
our cramped apartment on a regular, unshakable basis for Friday Afternoon
Club, a testosterone festival with two cases of Bud Light and countless darts
overshooting the board and stabbing holes in the paneling of the spare
bedroom, each pointed impact diminishing our security deposit.
Chris, Wayne, and Max, college buddies of Izzy's, single but devotedly
plugging away at careers. Chris was a field service engineer, Wayne was the
administrator of the new clinic in Daly City,and Max was in software design.
None of them found it strange that Izzy pushed suits at Mervyn's, which of
course drove me nuts.
"Izzy's always been laid back," Chris explained, digging a dart out of
the wall. "He hasn't decided what he wants to do. But you know doll, he'd
do anything to make you happy. Just anything at all."
But not the one thing I wanted: Get A Real Job.
We weren't going to make it forever on my income alone, I couldn't sign
off on a thirty year mortgage predicated on suit sales, and I'd heard Izzy
complain way too many times that I was way too demanding.
But most of all, I hated it when he threatened me.
"It's not a threat," he'd say. "It's the truth."
Izzy's truth: There are not an unlimited number of persons on this earth
that you can, or will, love. Your best bet is to hang onto those you find
and appreciate them for what they are, not waste your life trying to make
them into something or someone else.
"Why don't you use what you studied in school, Izzy? Why don't you
appreciate that?"
"I said I'd get my degree and I did. That's all I ever promised, if
you'll remember."
"Izzy, we've got to get a life going."
"I've got a life, Caroline. I'm living it. I thought you were, too."
That's how we left it, because when he said that I exploded. A
self-contained Mt. St. Helen erupting right there in the middle of our blue
and white kitchen. I told him I didn't give a damn what he was doing, but
what I was doing was getting a divorce.
I mashed his things into our battered suitcases and a couple of crumbling
fruit boxes dragged out of the carport, screaming at him to just get out, and
to get a damned lawyer.
It wasn't the first fight we ever had, but it was the first time one of
us walked out and all through that night, there was no scrape of a key in the
lock, no creak of shoes on the stairs, nothing but dull flat night silence
occasionally broken by the hum of the refrigerator's motor.
In the morning, a weary and haggard Izzy in my voice mail: "Caroline,
maybe you know what's best. I love you, and I want you to be happy. So I
won't be back."
The worst part was, he meant it.
I didn't go to Mervyn's, I didn't call Felicia, I didn't anything but
work. And wait. For twelve Fridays I waited on the arrival of the Friday
Afternoon Club, even knowing they weren't coming.
I missed the Party People.
Then it became official, I got my life back.
I'm putting the key in the lock one Friday after work, balancing a bag of
groceries on one hip with my Daytimer on top, squashing a loaf of wheat
bread, and I hear someone call out, "Caroline," really soft and I'm hoping
it's Izzy even as I whip around, but it's not.
It's a heavy set man with cheap plastic glasses over beefy jowls, in a
really awful denim and yellow cotton sweater. I'm not immediately afraid of
being mugged because this is a decent complex and for whatever reason, I
can't imagine any mugger would make that much of an effort to accost me and
that small of an effort with what he was wearing. The yellow was visible for
blocks.
"Caroline DePianto?"
"That's me," I said warily, the Daytimer sliding to the Welcome mat. As
I bent to retrieve it, a thick, square envelope slammed into its place on the
groceries. The bread was totaled.
"I hereby complete process of service."
When I looked up, the bright yellow man was gone.
I stood there long enough for Mrs. Rapasardon, on guard as usual at her
peephole next door, to crack open her door and crane her neck around at me.
Her head was neatly held in place by thick blue plastic rollers.
"Caroline, are you all right, dear? Did you break a heel?"
Squatting on the mat, staring at that grocery sack, at that square, wheat
colored envelope, I guess maybe I did look like I'd just suffered a blow out
with my shoes. If only it had been something so simple. If only it hadn't
been a blow out with my entire life.
"I'm fine, Mrs. Rapasardon," I said, rising unsteadily and tucking my
Daytimer into the bag, slamming it hard against the mashed bread. She
continued to stare as I unlocked my door and disappeared inside our
apartment. She was an excellent argument in favor of moving. I needed to be
away from people who had nothing better to do than watch their neighbor get
served with divorce papers.
Irreconcilable Differences.
He wasn't coming back for the rest of his stuff, because everything he'd
left with, right down to his old yearbooks, was neatly itemized on his side
of the sheet listing community assets and anything not so listed was to
remain mine. He hadn't said a word about my stock options at work or his
savings account, and he hadn't taken so much as one dime out of the joint
account, so the only thing to do was to show up in court and maybe order new
address labels.
Was I getting divorce papers because he didn't care, or because he wanted
to make it easy for me? I didn't know and I didn't find out that night,
soaking for an hour and a half in a bath so hot it left red splotches all
over my body, drinking Bud Lights left over from the last Friday Afternoon
Club and wishing I knew where to find him, or at least where to look.
Sometimes love isn't love any more, not in the romantic sense you read
about in Danielle Steele books and hope for when you marry someone.
Sometimes it's that time when the romance is as dead as the leftovers in the
fridge and you can't remember what furniture you picked out together because
it's been such a long time since either of you cared what you sat down on and
you can't remember the day you spent furniture shopping because it's all been
so long ago.
That's what happened to me and Izzy.
It's been three years now.
I never did find out where he was staying, but I did see him in court.
He hugged me when it was all over and when I got outside, someone had
written, "I love you, kid" in the dust on my car. He offered to come by and
patch up those holes by the dartboard but I told him I'd be moving soon, so
thanks but never mind.
And I did move, I got a townhouse in the new Willow Creek development,
and I think Izzy is still at the mall but I'm not sure because I don't shop
there.
I always thought that when you really loved someone there'd be a struggle
at the end, it would be tough to let go, and neither person would want to. I
never thought the other person would just leave, disappear, take you at your
angriest word when you screamed at them to get out.
I believe it now.
Some Fridays when I'm sitting home, if I'm not out on a date, if I'm not
out there again giving it all another whirl, I wonder why I haven't gotten
married again. I wonder why I can't even fall in love, because the men in my
life now have all the qualities I wanted for Izzy.
I once read in Cosmopolitan that if you can find a man who eats Oreos for
breakfast you should marry him first and ask questions later. I thought it
was a joke, but it's true.
I know that now.
I've got my house. It's not as big as the one I thought we'd get
together, but it's mine, and I can do what I want. The baby thing came and
went like some weird kind of virus; I still think about it, but the urgency
has faded.
There's just one thing, one worry that wakes me up at night. What if
Izzy was right?
Maybe there really are a limited number of people in the world that you
can love or will love, and you're not supposed to let go of someone just
because there's a few small details you want to change. Maybe Izzy and the
Party People were my happy destiny and I've messed things up. Maybe there
will never be anybody else who will make me feel like Izzy did. Maybe the
days of lying in bed watching someone plow through neat rows of Oreos without
getting sick are over, forever.
I try not to think about that much, I usually flip on the TV and hope
there's something good on the late movie, something to keep my mind occupied.
It's hard to get to know people. It's not like being with Izzy, because
he knew everything about me. We shared a history. Sometimes I catch myself
trying to talk about something that happened when I was in high school, or
when I was a kid, and the man I'm having dinner with at the time doesn't
understand, just smiles politely and takes an awfully long time blowing on
his soup before he changes the subject to something else, like his latest
coup in the sales meeting. So we talk about that, instead.
I should be over him by now and it scares me that I'm not.
I spend a lot of time thinking about tracking him down, just long enough
to explain this to him. We could have lunch, I think. Maybe he'd listen to
me.
Maybe, if I asked him, he'd tell me he feels the same way.
