The Marriage of Sticks

The driver was a big old man who wore a San Diego Padres baseball cap and didn’t utter a sound other than a resentful grunt when he banged my suitcase into the trunk of his car. That was fine because I sat in the back with a cell phone and returned calls to people I’d avoided while in L.A. I had the practice down to an art—call someone and tell her you’re on your way to the airport but just had to touch base with her before you left. Then she told you everything in a five-minute chat she would have taken two hours to tell over an expensive di

In the middle of my last call I had my eyes closed and didn’t register what the driver said until a moment later. When I opened them we were passing an astonishing sight: there by the side of the freeway was a woman in a wheelchair.

It must have been eight at night and there were no streetlamps, only the stab and drift of headlights across the Los Angeles darkness. Only a moment to glimpse her and then we were gone. But for that moment there she was, illuminated by the car in front and then us: a woman sitting in a wheelchair on the shoulder of a superhighway out in the middle of nowhere.

“Nuts. L.A. is full of nuts!”

I looked in the rearview mirror. The driver was staring at me, waiting for me to agree.

“Maybe she’s not nuts. Maybe she’s stuck there, or something has happened to her.”

He shook his head slowly. “No way. Driving a cab, you see things like that four times a day. You want to see how crazy the world is, drive a cab.”

But that didn’t satisfy me and I called 911 to report it. I had to ask the driver exactly where we’d been on the road. He answered in a curt voice. The operator asked if there were any more details. I could only say no, there’s a woman in a wheelchair on the side of the road and something’s wrong with that, you know?

The whole flight to New York I kept thinking about that half hour in the drugstore and then the woman in the wheelchair. Both made me uneasy. But then we landed and there were so many things to do that week before I met up with Zoe.

Even the idea of seeing my old best friend and doing what we’d pla

Events like that always sounded great months before they happened. Then as the time closed in, my enthusiasm began to curdle like bad milk. With this reunion, part of me wanted to know what had happened to certain classmates after all those years. The other part was both petrified and appalled to be seen by people who’d owned my life when I was eighteen years old.

Now I am unconcerned by my past, but at thirty-three I wasn’t. Back then, embarrassment still arrived in capital letters. I cared very much what most people thought of me. Even fifteen years after high school, I wanted to walk into the reunion sure that most of my old classmates would be pleased, impressed, or jealous—and not necessarily in that order.

Zoe was different. Compared to my life since high school, Zoe Holland’s had been a shooting gallery, with her as the target. She dropped out of college freshman year and married when she found out she was pregnant. The culprit was a vain little scorpion named Andy Holland who, three months after they were married, started sleeping around with whomever he could find. Why he wanted to be married neither Zoe nor I could ever figure out. They had two children in quick succession.

Then, out of the blue, Andy a

She had been one of the queens of our high school class—high grades, lots of friends, and the captain of the high school football team, Kevin Hamilton, was her love. Everyone looked at Zoe and sighed. But she was such a nice person that almost no one resented her good fortune.

She was an optimist and, even in the midst of her later torment, believed if she worked hard and remained kind, things would improve.

She took a couple of part-time jobs and struggled through. When her kids were old enough to go to school, she enrolled in community college. There she met the next disaster in her life, a handsome guy who began beating her up a few months after he moved in.

Suffice it to say, Zoe’s philosophy wasn’t correct and throughout the ensuing years more bad happened to her than good. By the time the class reunion rolled around, she was living in a sad little house in our old hometown; one of her children did serious drugs and the other didn’t have much to say for himself.

I took the train up from Manhattan. Since my parents moved to California, I hadn’t been back to Co

I hadn’t seen Zoe for years, although we spoke on the phone now and then. She was waiting for me at the station looking happy and exhausted in equal measure. She had put on weight, but what really struck me was how large her breasts were. In high school one of our constant ru

There were people walking by so I didn’t want to say anything too obvious. I shook my head and said, “Impressive!”

She hugged herself a moment and gri

We got into her old Subaru station wagon and drove through town. All the way to her house she rhapsodized about new boyfriend Hector, who was the greatest thing to happen to her since she didn’t know when. The only problem was, Hector was married and had four children. But his wife didn’t understand him and… You can take it from there.

She had the look of a saint in a religious painting. I kept looking from her face to those movie-star breasts and didn’t know what to say or think. Married Hector held her life in his hands but she seemed thrilled. From the sound of it, she was just happy someone was interested enough to want to hold her life, take the weight from her while she rested up.

Her house was so small that it didn’t have a driveway, so we parked on the street in front. At first glimpse, it was the kind of house you see in biographies of famous people as the home where they were raised, or the first one they owned when they were starting out, poor but enthusiastic.

She had arranged for her kids to be away for the weekend so we could have the place to ourselves and not worry about them.

As she fumbled through her keys searching for the one to the front door, I felt a momentary squirt of fear go up me. Suddenly I didn’t want to go into this house. Didn’t want to see what was there. Didn’t want to see the concrete results of my friend’s life on the mantelpiece, the walls, the coffee table. Things like photographs of kids gone bad, souvenirs from places where she’d been happy for a few days, a cheap couch that had known a million hours of unmoving asses watching TV with no real interest.

But I was completely wrong and that broke my heart even more. Zoe had a wonderful home. Somehow she had distilled all of her love and care into those few small rooms. Walking through them, admiring her taste, sense of humor, and talent for putting the right things in exactly the right places, I kept wondering, Why hasn’t it worked for her? Why has everything gone so wrong for such a good person?