As we waited at the hospital for Gracie’s blood to be washed and irradiated, she and Gabriel stacked plastic cubes with realistic beach scenes inside. Each cube contained real sand, mini–palm trees, tiny beach balls that rattled against the clear walls. They fascinated Gracie. She was transfixed by a world miniaturized enough to fit into the palm of her hand. She shook the cubes gently to make the palm fronds sway. While Gracie stacked, Gabe sat beside her, handing her cubes one by one as she built upward. As she placed a block on top, Gracie peered down at Gabe. “Gabe!” she said, as though she’d just remembered to tell him something important. “Guess what? You don’t need blood!” As a reply, he handed her a tiny ocean encased in plastic.
On the way home, with two pink and sleeping kids in back, I asked Brian to stop at the food co-op. I wanted to run in while he waited with the kids in the car, but Brian resisted. He hadn’t written all weekend. He barely had time to write at all now that he was teaching so much to support us, and he wanted to get home to the keyboard while he still had mental power. He had the jagged energy of an addict deprived of his fix. But we were out of bread, milk, my favorite sharp cheese.
We negotiated, compromised. “I’ll run in for essentials only,” I said. “Ten minutes. Fifteen tops.”
Walking around alone—without a person hanging from my hip or arm, without sticky fruit leather fingers in my hair—felt so luxurious. I lingered over the imported olives and popped wasabi almonds from the bulk bins in my mouth, aware that I was over my time limit. After a while, I didn’t care. I decided to get everything we needed, or even wanted, so that I wouldn’t have to come back later in the week.
When I got back to the car Brian was livid. It had been nothing remotely like fifteen minutes, more like forty. Maybe forty-five. Both kids were still sleeping, but he’d lost his window for writing. He started to say something condemning, but I had been practicing a preemptive counterpunch in the checkout line: “I was shopping for our family,” I said before he could say anything. In my head this phrase had sounded like a moral home run. Who could argue with that? But I’d miscalculated. You can’t slip sloppy moralizing past Brian.
He’d gotten out of the car to help load the groceries, so we stood face to face. “How noble of you, to shop for our family.” His voice was tight, derisive. As he said this, he bowed, a full-body, bent-knee bow until his forehead touched the concrete.
“Oh fuck off, Brian,” I said.
If I’d just said fuck off, without the aggressive casualness of oh or without using his name, that might have been OK. As soon as I said Brian, I knew I’d made a mistake. Saying Brian proclaimed my anger as not only free-floating anxiety, desperation, what-have-you, but as a force I was willing to leverage against him.
The grocery bags were sitting next to the car. Brian reached into the closest one, grabbed an organic pear, and chucked it over the car, onto Seventh Avenue. “Was that for our family?” he shouted as he threw it. Not at me but over me. He picked up a sourdough baguette and hurled it into the middle of the street. He kept on pitching groceries, one after another, over the car into the road, “What about this? Is this for our family?” A container of organic maple yogurt arced up and over the windshield, splattering where it landed near a storm drain.
This was Brian as I’d rarely seen him. Not never but hardly ever. He once told me how an old girlfriend described his confrontational style, his fuse, as nice, nice, nice, nice—boom.
I was trying to gauge how out of control he was. He seemed to be sticking to the soft foods. Nothing was hitting the car, only arcing over it. He was a decent shot, even in a fit of rage. Was he dangerous? He shoved one of the bags out of the way, to reach into another. A glass bottle of juice broke.
“Get out of here,” I shouted, pointing down the street. “Get away from us.”
Brian didn’t move. I didn’t move.
“This is over,” I said, operating on the level of primary risk assessment.
I grew up watching my mom tolerate a man who flew into rages. A violent man whom she allowed to go on living with her and with me and with my brothers. My small, vulnerable brothers. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want a grocery thrower, even if the groceries weren’t aimed in my direction.
“This is over,” I said again.
I didn’t know exactly what this was. It might have referred to the relationship, the fight, the ill-fated trip to the co-op. All I knew for sure was that I meant something, and that I wanted him to get away from me, from the car, from the kids.
A tentative crowd had gathered. Or rather a few people exiting the store lingered, hoping not to get involved but also feeling obligated to make sure all was OK. Brian had begun to calm down, and he looked as if he wanted to help clean up. He hesitated, then began to walk away, down Union Street, in the direction of Manhattan. The kids, fabulously, were still asleep.
A man and woman approached me as I picked up food items off the street, “Can we help?” I brushed off their help, embarrassed, and got into the car as quickly as possible, leaving our mess. Worse things had surely been spilled on Seventh Avenue, but I felt as if I was fleeing the scene of a crime.
I’ll move back to California, I thought. I can leave now. Tonight. I have credit cards. I have options. I can drive West. The kids are already in the car! This seemed like a viable plan. I could drive cross-country with the two of them in the back. They were a complete system: problem and solution, donor and donee. Brian and I could disassemble this family as fast as we’d assembled it. Fuck him. Seriously. Fuck him.
But then I would be in California with two small children. Without Brian.
I called Cassie, hyperventilating into the phone. She understood maybe every third word. She said calming things. In her calming voice. She reminded me to breathe, which seemed reasonable enough. I slowed down. I didn’t get on the highway. I drove toward Webster Place, sobbing. “You are under stress,” Cassie said, “too much stress. One of you, or both of you, is bound to blow up.”
I relaxed a tiny bit. If this fight was not about grocery shopping or Brian’s writing time, we might be OK. As I sat in the car, parked in front of our house, Brian appeared at the end of the block. I told Cassie it was all right, and I’d call her later.
I was surprised to see him. Any other time I’d pushed Brian away, he’d gone away. He wasn’t one to be disinvited twice. The old cold shoulder never worked with him; he’d drift farther off. But, this time, he’d come home.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. Do you want me to go sleep at Mark’s?”
“Yes. I do.” Not because I did, but because I thought I should err on the side of distance, sequestration. Time in my own head.