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You come home one day, and she's crying.
There were warnings when you entered the house: Her high-heeled Docs, discarded sloppily like she'd yanked them off right in the doorway. The open bottle of wine and the lipstick-smeared glass on the low table in front of the plastic-covered couch, a stack of photo albums just by them, a few opened and in disarray. Her leather jacket thrown right onto the carpeted floor. You knew there was something going on--a bad day with the double class? A fight with Barbara?--and you squared your shoulders as you went up the stairs.
You weren't, aren't, ready for what you hear. You've never heard her cry like that, in real, deep sobs, body-wracking things that must be shaking her to the roots. You find yourself hovering outside the bedroom door, just listening for long, awful seconds, trying to understand it, that that sound could be coming from Melissa. And knowing, because you know her, that she doesn't want you to hear this. That there'll be a fight if you go in that room. No matter how desperate she is to be held and comforted--first, there'll be a fight.
It's how she's always been. Your tears turn her buttery-soft, gentle and sweet, her rough edges showing only when she offers to beat the shit out of whoever's hurt you. But her tears? Her tears are a vulnerability. And Mel--she can't stand being vulnerable. When she knows she's showing weakness, that there's a chance someone, anyone, even you, could go in for the kill, her claws come out, twice as long and sharp.
(She told you, one time, about her dad; how Kristen-Marie's tears would make him do anything to soothe her, turning the gruff, remote man into a teddy bear, cradling his baby girl in his arms. How Melissa's tears would turn him mean, how she was the eldest, she was supposed to take care of her family, and here she was howling and whining like a pathetic pissant baby, and she should go help her Nana with dinner and her siblings with their homework and stop bothering her dad, who worked so hard, sunup to sundown, to provide for this fuckin' family, and don't fuckin' touch me again, Melissa Ann.)
You're getting to be okay with it. She's getting to be better with it, too, which helps. But you know this isn't going to be a time she can reel herself in and catch that anger before it flares. You need to be there for her. You open the door.
She's at her vanity table. You love that she has one of those things; it's so Old Hollywood, covered in the skincare and makeup that didn't fit into her bathroom, a secret stash of gummy bears in one drawer, a picture of her and her Nana, framed, where she can look at it whenever she needs her. You love that picture, Melissa looking so terribly young, her hair still dark and undyed, her Nana with those green Schemmenti eyes and a look of profound love and pride on her aged face.
When she hears the door creak open, Melissa whips around to look at you. She's not that girl in the photo anymore, but you see shades of her in her crumpled, flushed, tear-stained face; you see that woman, young and hurt and afraid, behind the armor that she's been building for so long, layer on layer.
"Baby," you say.
"Fuck off," she barks at you. You wince. She winces, too, hearing herself; her brows knit and her head ducks and she trembles as she fights another sob. "Sorry, I'm sorry, I--" her voice is hoarse. "Babe, fuck, just go," she whines, sounding like somebody else, some scared, struggling stranger. "Just go, I don't, I don't--" you can hear so many ends to that sentence: I don't want you to see me like this. I don't want to hurt you just because I'm hurting. I don't want you to know how vulnerable I am.
"Hey," you say, "it's okay, it's okay," like she's a hurt kid or a shying horse, and every instinct in you calls for you to put your arms around her, pull her to your chest the way she does you when you cry. Instead, you move closer--slowly--and you sit with her. You get down on the floor, maybe a foot from her chair, and you don't touch her. She looks at you with her mouth twisted and eyes narrowed. Tears are still trickling from her reddened eyes; her body is shaking with it.
You want to cradle her face in your hands. You've learned she can't take it, not when she's in the middle of the feeling; she can't stand being touched at all. She has to get the emotions out in their first, horrible frenzy, and then she can let herself be comforted, once the frightened, angry, hurt little girl inside has let go of the wheel and let the grown woman take back over.
Her hands are fists on her thighs. There's something crumpled in one of them, a paper.
"Baby, what happened?" you say.
"You should just fuck off," she says hoarsely. "You should just fuck off outta my life. You're gonna, anyway, so--" her face pinches. She fights another sob that shakes her whole body. Her mascara is a wreck. "I'm gonna hurt you," she says, "and you're gonna hurt me, and I can't take it. I can't take it, so, so--"
"What happened?" You lean forward. A little glimmer of intuition comes. Your own eyes are starting to tear up, seeing her, but your head stays level. You can't get whipped up into her pain or you won't be able to help. "Did Joe do something?"
Now she lets the sob out, deep and hoarse. Her clenched fist opens and the paper drops. You recognize it once its face is turned up on the floor: it's a photo from one of the old albums she still keeps, one of the loving records she'd made of a marriage that failed. She let you look through them a few times. ("I don't keep them 'cause I want him back or nothin'," she'd told you. "He can drop dead, for all I care. But I..." A cloud passed over her face then, troubled and sad, and you didn't push; you knew she was giving you a privilege letting you see her like this, much less look at these mementos of a young woman desperate to be loved.)
The photo is her and Joe cutting the cake at their wedding. It's a four-tier monstrosity, probably made by a Schemmenti relative, with thick frosted swags and rosettes and topped with a hokey little bride and groom. Mel's in her big puff-shouldered princess dress, her huge eighties hair and thick makeup. Joe's got a five o'clock shadow and looks like hell from his bachelor party the night before. She's told you how hurt and lonely she was that day, even though she's smiling in all the pictures; how she starved herself, ate one meal a day and drank nothing but water, getting ready to fit into her dress, and he rolled out of bed an hour before the wedding, hungover, stifling burps through the ceremony.
"What happened?" you repeat.
"Nina called," she says.
You straighten. "Are they getting married?" It would make sense: the tears, the photo, the terror of being left again. That sack of shit Joe, you're going to take Edith Houghton and--
"What? No," she says, so startled by the suggestion she's speaking in her own voice again, not the one hoarse and strained by tears. "No, they're not--no." Her other hand opens in her lap and she looks down at the pair of them. You can see her trying to make herself relax, make herself stop crying and shouting. "Sorry, baby," she whispers, "I'm sorry. I don't want to hurt ya. I didn't mean..."
"I know." If you took Melissa at her word every time she cursed, well... "I'm not fucking off anywhere. Can you tell me what happened?"
She gives you a look, harrowed and bruised, then drops her gaze back to her hands. She opens and closes her fingers, working on herself still. "Nina called. I was still at the school. She called to thank me for dinner," she says roughly. "And she said she had to tell me somethin'. She said..."
No marriage. Your next thought is, Oh my god, she's pregnant. That's one of the sorest subjects of Melissa's whole life, and if Nina had the audacity to tell Melissa that over the phone, while she was at work, to deliver such crushing, awful--where's Edith Houghton, you really are going to--
"She thanked me for dinner," Melissa repeats. She's getting more control and tips her head back against the welling of tears in her eyes, like it will save her makeup now. She's staring at the ceiling when she says, "Nina said she had somethin' to tell me, because she knew you and me, and her and Joe, all of us, were gettin' closer, like bein' friends."
That's true. You aren't so crazy about the Joe you know from Melissa's stories, but apparently he's a changed man now, and you can still see shades of the guy Melissa liked so much: his silver head of hair still full and sleek, his trim, Selleckian mustache, his way with a grin and a laugh. You like Nina better than him, a woman about twenty years his junior, tough and smart with arms covered in tattoos. You've never pointed out that she's like a different shade of Mel, a version that Joe hasn't had time to hurt, although you've had the thought many times.
Last week all four of you had gathered at Mel's for dinner. Melissa refused to cook--she'd never cook for Joe again, she told you privately, not after all the housekeeping and nannying and babying she did in their marriage--but you all got takeout and sat around the table and talked and laughed, openly, comfortably, the way friendly couples do, and you could believe that all that history was far behind them, that there was a future where Joe and Mel could admit to their scars and what they'd inflicted on each other, and be brothers-in-arms, veterans of the fight, not soldiers on opposing sides.
"Nina said," Melissa says, and wipes away a tear. "She said they were together. While me'n'Joe were still married."
You stare. "What?"
"They were together," she repeats. "They've been lyin', this whole time. 'Bout when they met. It was way before the divorce. He was fuckin' her on the side." Her lips pinch together and her mouth twists. She stares at the ceiling like the answer to it all is up there and fiercely bats away another tear. "I..." You watch her. Her throat works as she tries to get words together. "Nina said she couldn't keep lyin' to me. That she always felt awful about it. And now I got you and she likes ya and wants things to be fair, for us to... To choose our friends right, and..."
You've always had an impression of Nina as like Mel in this way, too--as rough, but fundamentally decent. Prone to a little lie here, a little sleight-of-hand there, but not enough to really hurt somebody, never playing games where it really mattered. What's awful is that this sounds like her all over, that single-minded sense of fairness, a toughness inside that made her willing to face the music, to blow up this burgeoning friendship if it meant being honest.
"Baby," you say softly, and inch closer on the floor. It's enough. The wall crumbles. Melissa slides straight off the chair onto the floor with you, practically into your lap, and her whole body sways into your arms. You take her, you hold her. She shakes in your grip, crying, still, though no longer those sobs that seemed to scour her from the inside out. You carefully stroke her hair back from her face as she clings to your encircling arms, and you ride it out together.
She comes back from it slowly, stilling, relaxing into you. Then she hiccups, in a loud, distinct hic, and instantly leans back to give you an accusing look, daring you to laugh. She hiccups again. It makes you smile. You touch her red, damp cheek, brushing your thumb against its flushed curve. "It's okay," you tell her. She hiccups. "I'm going to get you some water. You wanna sit on the bed?"
When you come back, she's not on the bed; she's back at the vanity. She's scrupulously wiping her makeup off with little micellar pads, lips still pinched like she's trying not to cry, leaning close to the mirror to make sure she's getting it all. You sit on the edge of the mattress with water in one hand and ibuprofen in the other, waiting, and when she's done, she turns to accept your offerings, her eyes lowered, a little shamefaced.
"C'mon," you say when she's knocked the pills back. "C'mere." She gets up and joins you, crawling right to the middle of the bed, and you crawl after her, settling on your back so that she can curl into the protective curve of your arm. You look down at her face--her long nose with its cute, turned-up snub at the end, the lashes shielding her reddened green eyes, the mark at the corner of her mouth that records every smile and frown--and you don't get it. You don't get why Joe is... Joe. And why he did what he did.
More's going to come, you know that. The air's heavy with it. Finally Melissa starts to talk. She stares across the room while she does it, your hand stroking her hair.
"I knew he was cheatin'," she says. "I think he was bonin' some of the other firefighters' wives. And he probably would go out and pick some girls up, too, some, y'know, whoever he could get his hands on, right. At that point, it was, what, the last few years, and I wasn't puttin' out, so. I mean, I'd blow him, to get him off my back, but not the real thing."
"That doesn't mean it was your fault."
She doesn't answer that. Instead, she says, "I didn't think any of 'em were serious. Like, that it was an affair affair, you know. Like that made it better. Anyhow..." She presses more closely into you. You're sure she can hear your heartbeat, and you feel it as she tries to steady her breathing to match you. "Nina said it was happenin' the last year," she says. "The very last year he and I were married. Funny thing is, I was tryin' to make it work."
You've seen photos from that time in her life. You know what trying to make it work entailed for her: back on the one-meal-a-day diet, trying to get her menopausal body back to a twenty-five-year-old's slimness; the brightening of her hair to fire-engine red, trying to be enough to catch his eye; the clothes she wore, trying to turn herself girly, like her princess-gown wedding dress had been so girly, and so unlike her. Oh, she's always feminine, Melissa--luxuriously, wonderfully feminine--but not girly, pink and wispy, delicate. Not like she tried to make herself for Joe.
"What was it all for?" she says wonderingly, voicing your own thought aloud. "What did I do all that shit for, baby? He was already fucking her. He already... Loved her." Her voice is hollow and lonely. You think of that story about her dad, what he told her, again and again, all her life, about her role in the world, about who she was. You're supposed to take care of this family. You're supposed to give up everything. You're supposed to give us what we want, we're supposed to have our cake and eat it, too, and fuck you if you try to keep even a crumb for yourself. He probably never said it as plainly as that, but it was what he meant.
"S'what I get," she says, very softly, almost to herself; it's a child's voice, meek and small, from that place deep inside where she's forever the self-loathing little girl, crying alone in the kitchen. "S'what I deserve."
"No." Her eyes flick up to yours. "You don't deserve that. You did it all because you cared about him," you say, petting the soft hair at Mel's temple. "Because you loved him. There's nothing wrong with that. That's not shameful." Her eyes dart away. You know you've caught a little bit of what's dragging on her--the shame. The shame of giving up everything for a man who didn't know her favorite color, her favorite ice cream flavor; of sacrificing her dream of a real home, a baby, the life she'd always imagined, for somebody who'd turn around and stick his dick in God knew how many other women.
"I hate him," you confide in her softly. She doesn't quite smile, but the corners of her eyes crinkle tenderly like she feels the smile inside. "I hate him so much." You echo her promises from all the times your roles were reversed, your tear-wrung body cradled in her arms: "You want me to beat the shit out of him?"
"Yeah," Melissa says at once, "please." She sniffles, then hiccups. "Jesus." Her head lolls against your chest. Her arm drapes over your waist and pulls you tight against her. "I really liked her," she says softly, into the quiet room. "That's... What fuckin' sucks about it, huh? I liked her, and I... I was likin' him again. He was my best friend, before you'n'Barb. And I... Wanted my friend back."
"It's okay." You scratch your nails gently against her scalp, tracing the sensitive skin at her nape. "It's okay you wanted him back, as your friend. You can still care about him. About both of them. And be angry, and hate them, even though you care, and not talk to them for a long time. What you feel is okay."
She takes a deep, shuddering breath. You wonder if she's ever heard those words before. If Joe or anyone else in her life has embraced this chaos of contradictions, this woman so full of passion that she can't help but feel, all of it, everything at once. That's why she's so tough, you know. Because despite it all--her shitty dad, her vicious sister, her awful ex, and everyone in between--she never lost that thing they all zeroed in on, that weakness. She never lost that sensitive, loving heart. She had to protect it; no one else would do it for her.
Now you can. Now you will. You lean down and kiss the top of her head. She hiccups.
"You want me to run you a bath?" you ask. Her head bobs against your shoulder in a little nod. You give her another kiss and start to extract yourself from her arms. She rolls into the warm space left by your body as you enter the en-suite.
You love Melissa’s bathroom, same way you love the vanity table. It’s an extension of herself, a little bit organized and a little bit chaos: hair care and skincare products on every available surface, eyeliners worn down to a nub, her perfume, her lip gloss. Tucked into the edge of the mirror, wrinkled from long exposure to the steam of her baths and showers, are two pictures. One is herself and Barbara at Barb’s sixtieth birthday party. “We looked like a whole meal,” Mel told you frankly when you asked about it. They’re both in dresses that cling to the generous curves of their bodies, heads tilted together, wearing mirror smiles and a shade of red lipstick that’s nearly the same. It washes you with tenderness to see it.
The other picture is her and you. The guy she dated before you tried to take her to Dave & Buster’s on a first date, so of course, you two had to go. It’s a strip of photos from an automated booth, the two of you in outrageous poses: her pretending to take a bite out of your cheek in one, your tongues lolling and eyes crossed in another. In the last photo, the camera’s just caught you looking at her, eyes full of love, while she’s squinting over her glasses at the lens, trying to tell if it’s taking the next picture.
You start the bath running. You make sure it’s hot as hell, just the way she likes it, and add a judicious amount of the first body wash you grab, letting the water churn it into bubbles. A shuffle and a rattle behind you; it’s Mel in the doorway. “Hey, baby,” you say. She looks like shit, which you don’t mention. “It’s filling up. Here, I’ll let you relax.”
“Stay with me,” she says.
You sit next to the tub while she lowers herself into the water. Her clothes are a messy pile on the floor; you pull them toward yourself and start folding them, piece by piece, making her roll her eyes affectionately. She tips her head back against the edge of the tub and looks at you, and you feel yourself prickling with the focus of that gaze.
"What are you thinkin'?" she asks at last, quietly.
"I'm thinkin'," you echo, rubbing the fabric of her silky pink blouse between your fingers, "that you're tired, and I'm tired, so in a little bit, I'll order some dinner." Maybe Indian? You've learned never to get Italian with Melissa; everything's scrutinized, down to the texture of the breadcrumbs. "Then I'll wrap you up in your bathrobe. We'll watch a movie..." You move on to her jeans. They're still warm from her body. You smile a little to yourself as you tidy them into a small square. "A Paul Newman movie." Her favorite. "And drink wine. And then you're going to go to bed. And you're not grading anything tonight, okay? And I'll hold you until you fall asleep."
"What are you thinkin'?" you ask, and look at her. What you see makes you straighten your spine, makes you feel spotlit and strange.
She's staring. She looks... How can you describe it? Unsmiling, but not unhappy; tender, but not amorous; vulnerable, but not afraid. She looks... Wonderstruck.
She reaches out with one small hand and her manicured nails brush your cheek gently. "I think I never been taken care of the way you take care of me," she says. Her thumb brushes your lower lip. "Thank you, baby. I..." You see the questions in her green eyes, the sensitivity and confusion: How did this happen? Will I get to keep this? What will happen to me when it's taken away?
"I'll always take care of you," you promise her, voice soft. You dip your head and kiss the pad of her thumb. Kiss her palm, making her sigh. You take her hand in yours and she squeezes hard. You make her a soft promise, one you know she's never heard before: "Melissa... It's what you deserve."