Days of Awe by Lauren Fox Read Free Book Online Page A

garbage rolls through my veins, and I just say, “Pass.”
    “Relationships in transition,” as it happens, can mean a number of things. There’s the forty-year-old married woman who fell in love with her female yoga teacher; there’s the woman who lost sixty-five pounds whose husband no longer wants her. There’s the man whose wife died after a long battle with cancer; there’s the woman whose husband died after a short battle with cancer. There’s Barb, the steely-eyed middle-aged woman whose husband left her to pursue polyamory. “And right before I understood what he was telling me, I blurted, ‘Who is this bitch Polly?’ It may be my biggest regret that I actually
asked him that
!” There’s Neil, the man with the bushy beard who’s thinking about leaving his wife and kids and moving to Alaska “for a while” with a twenty-four-year-old woman named Rainy he met in a rock-climbing class at the Y. You can almost feel the air getting sucked out of the room when he tells his story. Barb, in particular, glares at him hard. Last there’s Cal, handsome and impeccably dressed and older, maybe in his late fifties, who tells us that he and his wife have been separated for a decade but only recently finalized their divorce. “And I find myself surprised,” he says carefully, “by the pain this has unleashed.”
    At the end of the hour, after the litany of mundane miseries, Jillian shoots laser beams of sincerity out of her blue eyeballs and slays us all. The room, electric before with nervousness and untold stories, is quiet now, hushed and embarrassed as if we’d all just met at a bar and gone home with one another, then woken up the next morning in a fog of regret. Chairs rake backward as everyone gets up.
    If Chris were here, he’d be leaking sympathy for the wretched of room B- 117. He’d press his arm against mine, barely able to control his kindness. By the end of the night, he’d have exchanged e-mail addresses with Barb; Lee Ann would be nursing a hopeless, mournful crush on him; even bearded Neil would feel understood by Chris, would promise to do better. Then on the drive home, in the private warmth of our car, I would say something sharp and accidental. I would idly wonder if Neil’s wife drove him away, or I’d giggle about the way Jillian’s makeup stopped at her jawline—and Chris’s concern for a roomful of strangers would freeze before my eyes into a block of solid ice.
    And Josie? Josie would throw her arm around me and squeeze.
You do not belong here,
she would say,
among the chubby and the damned.
    Helene and I wend our way to the dessert table in the back of the room, her hand on my shoulder like she’s the queen. My elegant mother has perfected the art of not looking like she needs help. The table is piled high with sublimated feelings—brownies and cupcakes; biscotti and doughnuts and éclairs; light, jam-filled pastries; fluffy, sugar-dusted shortbreads;
macarons
and macaroons; several varieties of carefully labeled gluten-free chocolate-chip cookies. Not coincidentally, after the broken dam of the last hour, I find that I am jonesing for sugar, almost shaking for it.
    Cal, the recently divorced one, stands next to us, pondering the selections intensely. After a minute, he places two small squares of cream-cheese-frosted carrot cake on his plate and smiles at us. His hair is thick and threaded with gray, and there’s an appraising, off-kilter sexiness about him, like he’s done a thing or two in his life, but he’ll just keep those stories to himself. “I believe if I choose carrot cake, I can justify having two pieces,” he says, making sure to look first at my mother, then at me.
    Helene, her hand still on my shoulder, adds a bit of pressure to her grip. “Definitely true,” she says. “You’re getting your vegetables.”
    We introduce ourselves again, and if a person can die of awkwardness, I think I will, my internal organs about to seize up and grind to a halt as