The Bright Side of Disaster Read online

  That was how it started. We fell into a relationship after that. Once Nadia was out of his sights, he found all sorts of things to appreciate about me. The scar on my elbow he liked to trace with his pinkie. My chocolate-chip cookies. My outie belly button. My dimple. The way I could braid my hair upside down. The way I slept with one foot out. The little humming noises I sometimes made when we kissed.

  He still got moody about Nadia from time to time, and so it was a great relief to me when she moved to London for her job. She couldn’t understand why I was dating Dean, and I never quite got the feeling that he was over her. And so Nadia and I fell out of touch.

  Meredith had watched the whole scenario unfold with distaste, and even though she eventually got along pretty well with Dean, she remained “uncomfortable” with our “dynamic.”

  “He’s a nice person,” she said once, before we had enacted the Nice Things rule. “But he’s a bad boyfriend.”

  “He is not!” I said.

  “He should like you more,” she said.

  “He does like me,” I protested.

  “He should be more consistent,” she said.

  He was not, in fact, a bad boyfriend. But he was unpredictable. Meredith had been a psych major in college. She classified his behavior as “variable reinforcement,” explaining it once this way: “If you always give a rat a treat, he loses interest in getting it. If you never give him the treat, he loses interest. But if you occasionally, from time to time, give him a treat, he’s hooked.”

  “I’m the rat?” I asked.

  “You’re the rat,” she said, as tenderly as she could.

  Rat or not, she was right about one thing. I was hooked on Dean.

  Meredith said, “I just want you to be with somebody who thanks his lucky stars for you every day.”

  Dean did not thank his lucky stars for me every day. Probably not even once a week. But when he did appreciate me, he did it well. Like the night we went bowling, and, after about ten gutter balls, I rolled a strike. The two of us hopped around in a little victory dance. It was Monday Nite Disco bowling, and the place had smoke machines and mirror balls. He picked me up to spin me around and, before I knew it, I felt like we were all alone. He put his mouth against my ear. “I’m in love with you,” he said. “Did you know that already?”

  I could have said something brassy, like “Join the club, baby.” But instead, I got shy and put my head into his chest.

  He burrowed his face down close to mine, pressing for an answer. “You know that, right? You knock me out.”

  Meredith was there that night with a fling of hers we’d nicknamed Fabio. She was just a few feet away, but she couldn’t hear us talking. Meredith knew a lot about Dean, but she didn’t know everything. It was easy for her to say mean things about him. She’d never been in love. And love always looks different from how it feels, anyway.

  But on the night I took Meredith’s cat, she was feeling too grateful to say anything mean about anybody.

  “Where is Dean, anyway?” she asked.

  I made an air-guitar motion.

  And she nodded. Because the Nice Things rule applied to Dean’s band as well, of which she had once said, “They’re not a real band. They’re a bar mitzvah band.”

  And that was exactly the kind of gig his band played. Weddings, school parties, high school reunions, and the occasional local club. They played mostly cover songs, though they had a few of their own that they were very proud of. I couldn’t argue with Meredith on the facts. But to me, the band was cute. To her, it was just plain sad.

  “They’re too old to be playing covers,” she said.

  “They just do it for fun,” I said. But that wasn’t exactly the truth. Those guys really did think that they had something special, and they really did hold out hope that they might get famous someday. They practiced every Saturday from noon to six, and many Sundays as well. And even I could tell that they weren’t going to make it. But that was Dean: entry-level retirement-plans analyst by day, rocker by night. He made pretty good money at his real job, and he paid half my mortgage—calling himself a “renter.” But in his estimation, he was an artist. And the copying, stapling, and staring into the computer he did at work was an insult to his integrity.

  “It’s a waste of time,” Meredith said. “How many hours a weekend does he spend practicing with those guys?”

  Meredith, who loved all kinds of music, had thought he was kidding when he first played her a track of one of their songs. After he was gone, she said, “The worst thing about them is their name. But the music is also very bad.” I couldn’t argue. The band’s name was so bad that when asked, I used to pretend to forget it. Or make something else up on the spot. When Dean gave me a band T-shirt, I “lost” it in an unfortunate laundry incident. But here it is. They called themselves the Hard Drives.

  There were things Meredith liked about Dean. She freely admitted that he had a nice ass and good forearms. She liked his shaggy hair, his baggy corduroys, and the way he dressed in resale bowling shirts with names like “Hank” on the pocket. “He looks like a musician,” she said. “He just doesn’t sound like one.” She was willing to admit that he had a genuine charm and a je ne sais quoi. “If only he could put that on a CD,” she said.

  And she even came with me to Dean’s gigs sometimes. If I went alone, I usually sat at the bar. But if she came with me, she’d give me a “what the hell” look and start dancing, and I would, too. In that way, she was good for our relationship. But she made no secret about her bottom line: As a boyfriend and as a musician, he was subpar.

  And that’s why, the night I took Dr. Blandon, after a few questions about how I was feeling and what the baby was up to “in there,” we talked about Meredith. As Dr. Blandon sniffed around the house, I made tea, and Meredith told me she was going to break up with her boyfriend.

  I said, “You are really crazy.”

  “It’s just not right,” she said.

  Meredith had been through five boyfriends in two years. She’d fall in love on the first date and then spend the rest of the relationship racked with disappointment. She left men for many reasons: too hairy, too quiet, bad breath, tattoos of teddy bears, bad flossing habits, video-game addiction, and mispronunciation of words like espresso and et cetera.

  “I’m not superficial,” she insisted. Her current boyfriend was a sweet waiter at an Italian restaurant who sneaked her free cannolis. She’d been with him for three months, but we were still calling him the Waiter. She was ending it for this reason: He did not like to read.

  “He quit halfway through The Catcher in the Rye,” she said.

  “In high school? We’re talking about high school?”

  “The point is, he started the book and then he lost interest. He made a choice to stop reading.”

  “Who cares?”

  “I think J. D. Salinger would care.”

  “You’re looking for a reason to leave.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m looking for a reason to stay. And he can’t give me one.”

  “You’re a hard-hearted woman,” I said.

  And then we came to the part of the conversation that was so familiar to us we could have been reciting movie lines.

  “You’re too picky,” I said.

  “And you’re not picky enough.”

  Before Meredith left, she got a box of Dr. Blandon’s things from her car: A Snoopy food bowl that said THE DOCTOR IS IN, a cat toy that looked like a dead mouse, some hair-ball paste, a bag of food, a cable-knit cat sweater, and, of course, his new little leash.

  “I’m not using this,” I said.

  “I snuck him out to the park last week,” Meredith said. “He likes it.”

  I looked at Dr. Blandon. He looked at me.

  “No, he doesn’t,” I said.

  I left Dr. Blandon licking his belly fur on the sofa, hoping that Dean wouldn’t notice him right away. But Dean did notice him—as soon as he came to bed. He woke me at around three in the morn
ing, saying, “Why is there a raccoon sleeping on your face?”

  “It’s Meredith’s,” I said, shoving Dr. Blandon down to the floor. “We’re cat-sitting.”

  “For how long?”

  I yawned on purpose and said, “A few days.”

  Taking Dr. Blandon was, perhaps, a decision I did not think through very well. Dean hated cats. Hated them enough that he refused to pet one, even if it came over and started brushing against him. And my mother was so allergic that her eyes watered if she even had lunch with a cat owner. Across the table! And even I, in just about a month, was going to have more caretaking to do than I’d be able to handle. But, in my own defense, I didn’t really know much about the future at the time.

  3

  I wasn’t sleeping well. In between deep, comalike periods during which I drooled and snored with great abandon, I was awake and restless. Shifting positions in bed. Getting up for water. Standing at the window.

  I was trying to keep a pregnancy journal—you know, collected wisdom for the baby. I had read about it in one of my many pregnancy books, and it’d seemed like a good enough idea that I went to an art supply store to buy a special acid-free notebook.

  But when I actually started to write, it felt weird. For one, the baby didn’t seem real at all to me. Even with seven ultrasound pictures on the fridge, I could not wrap my head around the fact that there was a person inside my body. The kicks that are supposed to be so thrilling felt more like muscle twitches than anything else. And I felt cheesy writing to a person I’d never met. We didn’t know each other at all, really. We were strangers sharing a placenta.

  Still, I tried anyway.

  Dear Baby,

  Even though I am a happy person in most ways, and my life has turned out far better than I thought it would, I still find myself worrying about you. My mother did the best she could with me, and I turned out fine. But I want to do better than that with you, so that you never have to feel sad or discouraged or worthless. I plan to give you a hundred kisses a day. I wonder if that will do the trick.

  Love from your mama

  Even mama felt strange. I wasn’t anybody’s mama yet. But I figured I should keep making myself say it. Eventually it would be true.

  My acid-free notebook was green and gender-neutral, even though the baby was, in my mind, without question, a boy. It had been Dean’s idea to wait to find out the baby’s sex. He thought it would be “cool”—cooler than what everybody else did, which was to find out as soon as possible. “Do you really want to be just like everybody else, Jenny?” he’d said, as though he already knew the answer. “Don’t you think it’s better to find out with your own eyes than from some ultrasound technician?” And when he put it that way, finding out in advance didn’t seem so necessary. I didn’t mind waiting, anyway, because I knew, I just knew, this baby was a boy.

  “How do you know that?” Dean had asked one night on the porch.

  “A mother knows,” I said, pulling rank.

  I loved being pregnant, and I basked in the warmth of pregnant life. When you are pregnant and seem happy about it, people project their best dreams for the world on you. You epitomize hope and new beginnings, and people are drawn to talk to you about it and touch your belly.

  When I started to show, I also started to use the word husband for Dean—even though he wasn’t going to be my husband for several months yet, and even though it felt just as weird as calling myself someone’s mama. I also worried that it might just be bad luck. But it simplified things, especially for old ladies and grocery checkers who wanted to believe that I was doing things properly, that everything would be taken care of for this baby I was making.

  When a ninety-year-old woman leans in to you and says, “Your husband must be thrilled,” you simply cannot raise a twenty-eight-year-old eyebrow at her and say, “Let’s hope he makes it to the altar, lady.” You have to say, “Yes,” with a shy smile and a pat of the belly, “he sure is.” It’s like a community service. And so, in that spirit, long before our wedding date, Dean became my “husband.”

  After all, we were engaged before we got pregnant. We had a venue and a florist and everything. So we’d played a little fast and loose with the birth control. So the timing was a little off. Our intentions were good.

  Now we had a big wedding, planned largely by my mother, set for a month after my due date. My mother was a decorator, and that’s exactly what she’d call herself, despite the movement to say “interior designer.” She was very good at what she did, and she didn’t need a fancy label to prove it. For all the same reasons that she loved decorating, she loved planning our wedding. Flowers! Fabrics! Romance! The arranging of everyday things—chairs, food, guests—to make them look extraordinary was a challenge my mother loved.

  And I didn’t mind. I also took an interest in the aesthetics of things, but I was a dinette set to her Chippendale. I remember once asking my mother if I could work for her as an assistant and she said, with a squeeze to my arm, “Oh, honey. You’re too funky for me.” She claimed to have no memory of this moment.

  My mother hardly ever called me by my name. I was—as were all the people in her life, from the lady at the post office to her best friend, Larry—always “honey,” or “sugar,” or “sweetheart,” or if she was feeling sassy, “lady” (as in, “Where’d you get those cute shoes, lady?”). It was very Texas. And she was very Texas. And boy, could she decorate. With my wedding, as with other things in my life, it seemed wise to follow her lead.

  She was petite, with dark brown hair (“I want mahogany,” she told her colorist) that she pulled back in a sleek ponytail. She had lovely pale skin and wore red lipstick for a “splash of color.” She was always pressed and put-together. She wore shiny alligator shoes and silk scarves tied just so around her neck. She had giant, cartoonish, light-adjusting glasses with lipstick-matching frames that she wore so devotedly it was hard for me to imagine her face without them. She was fancy and feminine but never stuck-up or prissy. All that silk and perfume was balanced by her big Texas personality. Five feet, one inch of feistiness, and I adored her.

  We were not much alike. “You just take after your daddy,” she once said to me, leaning in and pressing her nose to mine. “But you got all his good stuff.”

  For the wedding, we’d had to reserve everything a year in advance, and the very afternoon that we’d told our parents about the engagement, my mother was on the job. Weddings were big business. All the good places and caterers and florists went fast. We’d wanted to do it a little sooner, but my mother put her foot down. “I’ve waited for you two for a long time,” she said. “We’re doing this right.”

  And so: the standard yearlong engagement. Dean and I picked a weekend, and in under a month my mother had secured the sculpture garden near the museum, a florist who’d been in House & Garden, a cake lady with the unexpected name of Rosita Rosenstein, and the most expensive caterer in town.

  My long-divorced parents, who did not speak to each other unless forced, came together in honor of the event-planning. We met for lunch near the medical center, and my mother sat frozen with her lips pursed in a pout the whole time. She did manage to argue with my father and to eat her entire salad, leaving only streaks of orange dressing on the plate, but she never lost that pout.

  My father, who, at six-four, was over a foot taller than my mother, had the handsome gray hair and easy athletic movements of a man who was more comfortable in public than in private. In recent years, he’d become a regular “consulting physician” on a local morning TV show, and folks all over town now came up like old friends and called him “Doc.” He’d whitened his teeth for the gig and done a little time at the tanning booth—though I was sworn to secrecy about those things.

  My dad was late to lunch because he’d been in surgery. (“They don’t have cell phones in the OR?” had been my mother’s greeting to him.) He showed up in his scrubs, and people kept coming up to our table like he was a movie star, reintroducing themselves and wait
ing for recognition. He punched them on the arms and called them things like “buddy” or “sport” or “chief.” He was affable and popular. And rowdy. My mother’s attention to propriety brought out the devil in him.

  It was hard to think of two people less suited for each other than my parents. When they met, in college in the late sixties, she wore her hair in a smooth ponytail. He was joyriding a motorcycle he’d just fixed up at his part-time job, and he smelled like motor oil. He pulled over at a crosswalk and asked my mother for her number. And in a moment of recklessness, she gave it to him.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked her once.

  “Oh,” she said, closing her eyes just for a second, “he was so handsome.”

  It was strange to think that they had ever been together. And at the same time, it was easy to pretend that they had never been apart.

  “Jenny,” my father said, “we’re thrilled. We never thought you’d do it.”

  “Don’t speak for me,” my mother hissed.

  “Jenny,” my father started over. “I, myself alone, never thought you’d do it.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Being your mother’s daughter, I figured you’d repel men like Deet on a mosquito.”

  My mother glared at him.

  “Okay, kids.” I said. “Just a friendly little lunch here. Let’s not get vicious. Deep breaths.” I took a gentle, illustrative breath, and I noticed with some tenderness that my father followed my lead and took one, too.

  “I’m kidding,” my father continued. “You’re not repellent at all.” He winked at my mother, who looked away as if he’d flashed her. “The way your mother is.”

  This was my dad being affectionate. He loved to piss people off. And the more over-the-top his insult was, the more you just had to realize he was messing with you. My mother, needless to say, no longer enjoyed being messed with.

  “I don’t know if you should invite Aunt Elsa,” my mother finally said.