Page 83 of Still Me
“Yes. Straddling strange men’s naked bodies.Quitethe employment.”
“That’s enough!” Mr. Gopnik was on his feet. “You are quite, quite wrong, Tabitha, and you must apologize.”
“Why? Because I can see her without rose-colored spectacles? Daddy, I’m sorry to say this but you are totally blind to what this woman really is.”
“No. You are the one who is wrong!”
“So she’s never going to want children? She’s twenty-eight years old, Dad. Wake up!”
“What are they talking about?” said old Mrs. Gopnik, querulously, to her daughter-in-law. Veronica whispered something in her ear. “But she said something about naked men. I heard her.”
“Not that it’s any of your business, Tabitha, but there will be no more children in this house. Agnes and I agreed this point before I married her.”
Tabitha pulled a face. “Oooh. Sheagreed. Like that means anything at all. A woman like her would say anything to marry you! Daddy, I hate to say it but you are being hopelessly naïve. In a year or so there will be some little ‘accident’ and she’ll persuade—”
“There will be no accidents!” Mr. Gopnik slammed his hand on the table so hard the glassware rattled.
“How can you know?”
“Because I had a goddamn vasectomy!” Mr. Gopnik sat down. His hands were shaking. “Two months before we got married. At Mount Sinai. With Agnes’s full agreement. Are you satisfied now?”
The room fell silent. Tabitha gaped at her father.
The old woman looked from left to right, and then said, peering at Mr. Gopnik, “Leonard had an appendectomy?”
A low hum had started somewhere in the back of my head. As if in the distance I heard Mr. Gopnik insisting that his daughter apologize, then watched her push back her chair and leave the table without doing so. I saw Veronica exchange looks with her husband and take a long, weary swig of her drink.
And then I looked at Agnes, who was staring mutely at her plate on which her food was congealing in honeyed, bacon-strewn portions. As Mr. Gopnik reached out a hand and squeezed hers, my heart thumped loudly in my ears.
She didn’t look at me.
17
I flew home on December 22, laden with presents and wearing my new vintage zebra-print coat, which, I would later discover, was strangely and adversely affected by the circulation of recycled air in the 767 and smelled, by the time I reached Heathrow, like a deceased equid.
I had actually not been due to fly until Christmas Eve but Agnes had insisted I go sooner as she was making an unheralded short stop back to Poland to see her mother, who was unwell, and there was apparently no point in my staying there to do nothing when I could be with my family. Mr. Gopnik had paid for the change to my ticket. Agnes had been both overly nice and distant with me since the Thanksgiving dinner. In turn, I was professional and amenable. Sometimes my head would spin with the information it held. But I would think of Garry’s words way back in the autumn when I’d arrived:
See nothing, hear nothing, forget everything.
Something had happened in the run-up to Christmas, some lightening of my mood. Perhaps I was just relieved to be leaving that house of dysfunction. Or perhaps the act of buying Christmas presents had resurrected some buried sense of fun in my relationship with Sam. When had I last had a man to buy Christmas presents for, after all? For the last two years of our relationship Patrick had simply sent me e-mails with links to specific pieces of fitness equipment he wanted.Don’t bother wrapping them, babe, in case you get it wrong and I need to send them back.All I had done was press a button. I had never spent Christmas with Will. Now I went shoulder to shoulder with the other shoppers in Saks, trying to imagine my boyfriend in the cashmere sweaters, my face pressed against them, the soft checked shirts he liked to wear in the garden, thick outdoor socks from REI. I bought toys for Thom, getting a sugarhigh from the scents in the M&M store in Times Square. I bought stationery for Treena from McNally Jackson and a beautiful dressing gown for Granddad from Macy’s. Feeling flush, as I had spent so little over the past months, I bought Mum a little bracelet from Tiffany and a wind-up radio for Dad to use in his shed.
And then, as an afterthought, I bought a stocking for Sam. I filled it with small gifts: aftershave, novelty gum, socks, and a beer holder in the shape of a woman in denim hotpants. Finally I went back to the toy store where I had bought Thom’s presents and bought a few pieces of dollhouse furniture—a bed, a table and chairs, a sofa, and a bathroom suite. I wrapped them and wrote on the label:Until the real one is finished. I found a tiny medical kit and included that too, marveling at the detail contained within it. And suddenly Christmas felt real and exciting, and the prospect of almost ten days away from the Gopniks and the city felt like a gift in itself.
—
I arrived at the airport, praying silently that the weight of my gifts hadn’t pushed me over the limit. The woman at check-in took my passport and asked me to lift my suitcase onto the scales—and frowned as she looked at the screen.
“Is there a problem?” I said when she glanced at my passport, then behind her. I mentally calculated how much I might have to pay for the added weight.
“Oh, no, ma’am. You shouldn’t be in this line.”
“You’re kidding.” My heart sank as I looked over at the heaving queues behind me. “Well, where should I be?”
“You’re in business class.”
“Business?”
“Yes, ma’am. You’ve been upgraded. You should be checking in over there. But it’s no problem. I can do it for you here.”
