Everybody Has a Plan

“Why don’t we ever go to the Cubberley’s house any more for dinner?”

Like most of Olivia’s questions from the back seat of the family’s aging Honda, it seemed to tumble from the sky like a maple leaf. Perhaps it was a maple leaf, her mother thought; the light caught them just so on the roadside line of trees, and perhaps it reminded her of maple syrup, which reminded her of Sunday mornings when the family all ate together, slowly, while Jack presided over the grill, serving up custom creations on demand with mock pomp. “Make me one shaped like a dinosaur, Daddy!” she’d say. And he would.

And this would remind her of  how, with syrup-sticky plates still covering the table, they would talk about the day ahead, how there was still time before everyone had to get dressed - time for comics and Nintendo - just a little, before they needed to get ready for the drive up to the city to see Gramma Jane and Grampa Alan. And how Grampa Alan had an old phonograph, with stacks of wax cylinders that would make scratchy sounds of singers from long, long ago if you could just figure out how to make it work right. And how they’d gotten it to work, once, but now Grampa Alan said he thought something was broken in the springs, so it sat on the shelf, just above where she could see without standing on her tiptoes. And that, she thought, would make Olivia think of Henry’s - Mr. Cubberley’s - workshop and how, when she followed him down the stairs after dinner, he would point out all the different projects he was working on, and how she was sure he could fix anything on earth.

“Why do you ask, honey?”

“Just wondering.”

There was room now, room in the pause afforded by the Honda’s bouncing progress, room in distance between her, peering through the afternoon light for a hidden street sign on the tree-covered lane, and Olivia, musing in back seat. Room not to try and answer that question right now.

Henry always seemed like such a perfect father, didn’t he? Jack probably did as well. Perhaps, they all did, until you knew them better. So who was it that thought of her as the perfect mother, the perfect wife? Anyone?

But Henry - oh, how he would sit with the kids, explaining how the magnet worked while he showed them, patiently, how to wrap the wire around and around, lining up each turn around the big steel bolt as neatly as...oh, as something. She couldn’t really think what. And then he’d hook the battery up and they’d explore the workshop, Olivia and the Cubberley boys together, picking up old nails and loose washers with the magnet, carrying them to table at arm’s length and - with a flick of the wire - letting them drop into paper cups he’d set out for them.

And how he’d always be the first on his feet after dinner, when it was time to clear the dishes. Sheila would make a half-hearted attempt to help, but he’d stop her: “I’ll get them, honey; you sit and keep the Masons company.” Maybe he was just being sweet; maybe he was restless. Or maybe there was something there in the room, something too subtle for her to detect, and he needed fresh air.

She hated that she never seemed to pick up on these things; wasn’t that what women’s intuition was supposed to be about? Jack always teased her about it - gently, of course. “What? I thought that was part of the package; didn’t we have it in the prenup? Section Five, Paragraph Two, right? Wife certifies that she’s equipped with fully-functioning woman’s intuition.”

And on better days, she’d tease him right back.

She heard Olivia shift, restlessly, in her seat. “You need something, Oli? Are you hungry?”

“Can I have chips?”

There it was, she thought, with a touch of satisfaction. But only for the children. She could never ever tell what Jack was thinking, even when he said he had tried to tell her. If she sat across the table and watched him carefully, focused, sometimes she could make out the words he wanted to say: I’m tired, I need more space, more affection, more...something. But it was only sometimes - like she was trying to read his lips after the words themselves were lost in the storm that engulfed them both.

“Mommy?”

Oh, right: chips. “I’ve got Pringles in my bag. You can eat them while I’m in my meeting.”

The thing was, it wasn’t Jack’s storm; he was always the rock - fixed and impassive among the wind and crashing waves. If life were a Monopoly game, Jack’s piece would be a little mountain, the Rock of Gibraltar. No, the storm was hers; she pictured her own Monopoly piece: a tiny tornado cast out of blue plastic, or whatever they made Monopoly pieces out of these days. Everything seemed so complicated for her, so fraught with implications, entanglements and consequences swirling around her head. And it always came out of nowhere: a simple request - brownies for the school play, for example - that rippled into questions about nut allergies, and who needed to be asked and how to reach them, and the other calls she needed to make but didn’t have time because she had to go shopping and… she only realized how loud her voice had become when she saw the frightened look in Olivia’s eyes. After days like those, Jack would find her curled into the couch around some thick book with dragons and princesses on the cover, the remains of a bowl of popcorn littering the floor at her feet.   

“I know how you feel, honey,” he once told her, crouching beside where she lay. “I feel that way too, sometimes. Really.” A pause as he squeezed her hand. “And you know, when I do, I’ve been trying to follow Sheila’s advice. She says that there’s some sort of ‘energy turbine’ - that’s what she calls it, an energy turbine. She says she forces herself to put energy in by going to the gym or something, and it comes out as more energy that lets her do the stuff she needs to do.”

“Just shut up about Sheila, would you?” The anger in her words surprised her.

“Look, I’m sorry. I’m trying to help. I’m trying to fix things. That’s what I do, isn’t it?”

She looked up, studying him from her nest of pillows: earnest, hurt, frustrated. Yes, he was trying to fix things, the poor dear. But couldn’t he understand that sometimes, just sometimes, she didn’t want things to be fixed? That sometimes all she wanted was that word of sympathy, of commiseration, that word of assurance that he loved her, just as she was.

But how did Sheila manage? She had three kids (three!) and still managed to look - okay, she’d say it - fabulous. Five days at the gym every week, boxing lessons, volunteering at the Children’s Museum, oil painting, writing and still being a perfect mother to those boys. And beautiful, smart, kind - you wanted to hate her, but couldn’t.

A storm - a different storm - rose in her, and she clawed her way to the safety of the task at hand: 7515 Loyola Way; he’d said there would be a sign, and the street numbers were going in the right direction. Couldn’t be more than a few blocks.

“How do you do it?” she’d asked one morning over coffee.

“It’s the gym. I’d die if I weren’t always on my way to the gym.”

“I’ve tried the gym, Sheila. I’ve spent weeks going nowhere on those damned bicycles. Just makes me more tired, sitting there, spinning, thinking about all the other stuff I should be doing right now.”

“The bikes? Oh god, I know what you mean: the bikes are useless.”

“So what do you do at the gym?”

“Depends on what I need.”

A moment of silence; thoughts running in too many directions at once.

“And what sorts of things do you need?”

She wished she could remember Sheila’s face when she’d asked the question; was there anything? A trace of recognition? But she hadn’t known yet, not really, and hadn’t been looking; there’d been a sound from Olivia upstairs, or from the kitchen. Or maybe her mind had just run off of its own accord, and she was wondering whether she should get more coffee, or freshen up the tray of biscuits and…

“That depends on what the morning’s been like. If I was able to get the boys to school and Henry out of the house with matching socks then I usually just go for basic weight training. I don’t understand how it works, but just hauling around on some dead weights gets me as buzzed as a Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino Heart Attack.”

“And with less than half the calories!” She’d cocked her head, trying to sound like a TV announcer touting the latest fad, but now it sounded stupid to her, and she hated herself for saying it.

Sheila was unruffled. “Yeah, but before anything else, I always start with a run. Fifteen minutes on a treadmill, or out on the track if I’ve got stuff to work through.”

“Stuff?” A momentary panic - should she be taking notes?

“You know - mom stuff. When the kids have just used my new Tory Burch as a cape, or when Henry says, ‘Hey honey, I know we were planning on a quiet night, but I’ve invited the team over, and….’  I know he means well, but when he does that I’ve got two choices: I can tear his head off, or I can get out on the track and run like hell.”

“Isn’t that what the boxing is for?”

“Oh, no, no, sweetheart. You don’t want to go punching your way out of that sort of feeling.”

“So what is the boxing for?”

“Clarity.”

“Clarity?”

“Clarity.”

There was another moment’s silence, and she wondered if it was her turn to talk again, but Sheila had only paused for dramatic effect, gathering her words.

“All of this stuff - running, weights, biking, if that’s your thing - it’s you acting on the world. You’re in complete control, and there’s nothing coming back, nothing to help you get centered. You’ve got your shopping list going, and that latest stupid song you’re sick of, and whether the carpet cleaner is going to be able to get dog barf out of the rug. You go running with all that in your head? It’ll help you turn the volume down, but it’s all still there. Weights? Same.

“But that’s the thing about boxing - I swear, it was a revelation to me. I mean, it was fun spending time on the bag, spending time on posture and footwork. It’s like aerobics, you know. But it was that first time in the ring, dancing around there with my coach, throwing punches at him and he said ‘Okay, now I’m going to take a swing at you,’ and he did. And I ducked it, because he was taking it easy on me, and he threw a few more my way. And I was getting into a rhythm, and really liking it. Even had a little sound track going in my head, like I was Rocky or something.

“Then... BAM!”

“What!?”

“He didn’t hit me hard. I mean, it was just a tap by boxing standards, and what with the gloves and head guard, I don’t suppose it even hurt. But Jesus Christ, he punched me right in the face, just like that. So fast I didn’t even see him pull back, let alone see it coming. And everything just fell away. It was like he’d flipped a switch, and all the noise in the world suddenly stopped. All that crap in my head about global warming and Crimea and shopping and carpets and Henry and the kids? It was gone, and there was just me standing there flat-footed in the ring with Rudy. And it was like I was able to hear and see and think clearly for the first time in my life.

“He hit you?”

“It’s what he said he was going to do, right? It’s what I was paying him for.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Anyhow, I think I scared him for a second - I guess I was just standing there, straight as a board, like my brain had gone off. He stopped and said something like, ‘You okay?’ and I said ‘Yeah’. And he asked if I’d ever been hit before, and I shook my head no. And he asked if I wanted to take a break, and I told him ‘Hell no’. Then he got an odd kind of a smile and said that sometimes that happens the first time you get hit. And he says I got back into my tuck with a crazy look on my face and put my guard up and said, ‘Try that again.’ He still teases me about it: ‘Try that again.’”  She said that last bit in a husky, Latino accent, bobbing her head like a prizefighter.

“So you liked it.”

Sheila looked at her sideways, like she wasn’t sure if she was being teased. “No, not like that.” Then she bit her lower lip and gazed up at the ceiling. “But yeah. It was...useful.”

“You mean in case you need to punch somebody out for stealing your perfect hubby?”

And there it was, just like that. The saucer under Sheila’s cup missed the edge of the coffee table and hit the floor sideways with a decisive crack and the sound of scattering porcelain.

She was out of her seat, scooping the thin white slivers into her palm, protesting over Sheila’s stammered apologies, saying that it was nothing, that these were cheap Pottery Barn cups and that they had a dozen more of them in the cupboard. But when she looked up, she saw that Sheila had gone pale.

That was the last time they’d spoken.

…

“Okay Oli, hop on out. We’re here.”

The trees had given way to a block that looked like a small, forgotten neighborhood from another time and place: a long-closed service station on the corner punctuating low industrial cinderblock warehouses. The address was here, third building from the end, its incongruous sign looking oddly professional against the season-scarred walls. She pulled into a spot in the half-empty lot and let the engine die, catching herself spinning half a dozen excuses for starting the car again, for just driving away. She didn’t have time for this. This wasn’t what people like her did. She didn’t belong here. But...wasn’t it trying to belong that had brought her to this point?

She held the girl’s hand as they pushed open the tinted glass door and raised her voice to be heard over the unexpected din. “I don’t know how this is going to go, Oli, but when I talked with Mr. Ramirez, he said there was a quiet place you could sit and read. I’ve got your chips and juice box here, and we’ll get you settled before we begin.”

The woman hunched behind the metal desk looked up, expectantly. Broad shouldered and wide hipped, with beautifully-defined muscles tracing the contours of her arms; she could have been an art student’s anatomical study, if not for the sweaty tank top and gym shorts. Behind her, rough percussive sounds echoed unevenly over the concrete floor.

“Heya. Can I help you?”

“Yes - I’m here to see Rudy Ramirez.”

“And this is about…?”

“Boxing lessons. I need to learn how to take a punch.”