“I know. But more and more I think that isn’t the important thing about human relationships,” she says. “Even if they never actually have a wedding, we could still have each other, and I can be the grandmother in your life. Anyway, I would like to apply for the position.”
“I have a grandmum,” says Fritzie, “but she lives in England, and my mum is mad at her because my grandmum said I couldn’t go and live with her, because she said my mum should stay and take care of me herself. Even though my mum really thought my grandmum was going to keep me because she was family.”
Millie looks at Patrick, and he clears his throat. “You don’t really have to go into all that,” he says.
“Oh, but it’s fine,” says Millie. “Fritzie, if that’s what happened, then we’ll just have to say it’s her loss. And out of that you found your real daddy.”
“My bio-daddy.”
“Yes, your bio-daddy, and he’s wonderful to you. Relationships change, and that’s what is exciting about life. I married my husband when I was nineteen years old, and what did I know about myself back then? Nothing, that’s what. And now I find I’m a person who wants to step out of that marriage, and dye my hair purple, go on dating websites, and, who knows, maybe even get a tattoo.”
Fritzie looks at her in uncertainty. “I know how to dye people’s hair purple. And maybe Ariana could tell you where to get a tattoo. If you really want one.”
Patrick blinks. “Are you . . . and Ted divorcing then?” he asks.
“Who knows what we’re doing!” She laughs. “I refuse to make any definitive statements about anything. I used to know so very much, and now I feel like I know practically nothing. It’s actually a lot more fun going through life this way. At least for now.”
Is it? he thinks. Frankly, he’d love to know what he’s doing. To get a handle on things.
Millie is looking at him closely, and he realizes that he’s been scowling.
“What is it, honey?” she says. “What’s wrong?”
So he mumbles something about his painting project, the art show coming up, and his needing to learn to be disciplined again. None of this is exactly it, he realizes, but she fastens on to it just the same. She completely understands, she says.
“Your art is everything,” she tells him, and she looks so sincere that for a moment he’s afraid that she’s going to cross the room and take him by the arms and stare into his eyes while she makes all her points. He won’t be able to stand that. “It’s who you are. I wish I had something like that to sustain me. My whole life was to be a homemaker. Now isn’t that the dumbest thing ever, when you realize your whole purpose was keeping the counters cleaned off and the shirts folded? I can’t tell you how much of a fool I feel. Nothing I ever did was worth a crap.”
“What happened?” he says, glad that the subject has moved away from his so-called purpose. “That made you realize . . . ?”
“What happened? Why, I guess it was a whole string of things. Everybody left me. We forget that everything and everybody is going to leave us, and that we have to be prepared.”
He feels startled, hearing her say that. It’s exactly what he feels, too.
“You know,” she says, “this is what I’m living for now. A happiness therapist told me that you can change your whole life by doing this one thing. Constantly ask yourself this question when you have a decision to make: Would this make me happier, or would that make me happier? It’s like when you’re at the eye doctor, and he says, ‘Can you see better with this set of lenses, or is it better with this other set of lenses? This way or that way?’ And then you have to always pick the thing that brings you the most joy. Never mind all the other stuff. Just go for the thought that feels better.”
Maybe it would be an okay thing for an innocent person to do, he thinks. But what if you did something so horrible that you can never forgive yourself, and every day you’re compounding it merely by seeking your own pleasure? What if it actually pains you to choose something that’s only for you to feel good? That certainly wouldn’t work! You’d pick the thing that feels good, but then it would make you feel worse . . . so maybe you can only feel good by picking the thing that would hurt you. But then, there you are feeling somewhat good again.
He hates the idea that there’s something even called a happiness therapist, but if he had a moment with one, here’s what he would like to ask: What if you already know you can’t love people because it hurts too much when you lose them?
And what if a magazine piece is about to come out that’s going to make it look to the general public like you think you’re some kind of hero when you’ve been responsible for someone else dying, someone who had talent and who loved you? And now you’re in a studio painting pictures, and in love with someone else, someone who thinks life is just all-out fun and joy, while your first love’s ashes are somewhere in a vial—on her parents’ mantel most likely.
Do you then just get to ask yourself: What would be the happiest thing for me to do today?
No, you do not.
He has to get back to work. A woman is waiting in his head for him to go back to the studio and work through the pain he caused her, the damage he did.
And the people standing here in front of him—they’re in danger of being lost to him, too. Just because he loves them. Or he might. He doesn’t think he even knows what that word means: love. Who gave us the right to throw that word around all the damn time when nobody knows what it means?
So here’s what you have to do, he thinks: You give up your spot in the bed to the woman who should be your mother-in-law, and you move into your studio and sleep on the futon surrounded by your paintings. The ones that you’ve finished and the ones that are unfinished. The ones that are so full of screams that they frighten you sometimes when you look at them, and the ones you try to make peace with even though they came up from the depths of your longing. You tell everyone around you that you can’t get ready for the show unless you live with the work for the time being. You need this, you say. Yell it if necessary, if they don’t seem to believe you.
You tell the woman you love, the one who thinks she wants to have a child with you, that for you to be sleeping elsewhere is the best thing for her, too. She’ll get to concentrate on being with her mother without having to worry about you.
And you say to that little girl with the stubborn chin and the lanky hair that’s identical to yours, the little girl with the impulse to steal money for a cause and explore the world and the solar system, that you’re watching over her, and that she’s fine and lovable—and you make yourself remember that in a few short months, she, too, will leave you and be out of your life.
And you tell yourself that it’s pretty smart of you not to get attached.
Because, in the famous words of Millie MacGraw, everything and everybody will leave you at some point. So maybe that’s the safest plan of all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
MARNIE
“Your mother will be there one week tops,” says my father when he calls me the next morning. He’s using his manly, confident, predictor voice. The same voice he used when he told me I’d grow up to be a financial analyst if I’d just apply myself. “She’s just, ah—well, your mother is going through something I don’t seem able to help her with. Who knows? Maybe you can.”
It’s seven thirty and I’m standing on the sidewalk holding the leash and watching Bedford sniffing the ground. I am yawning more than usual because I think I might have gotten about two hours of sleep. As with every morning, Bedford’s got himself a big decision to make about which patch of grass he’d like to pee on, but the difference this morning is that I’m in no hurry whatsoever to get back inside the house, so he’s free to sniff out gum wrappers, old straws, and previously peed-on grass as long as he wants. I have my coat on over my pajama shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and I jammed my feet into my boots and came outside before anybody could find me. I could hear Patrick and my mother talking in the kitchen as I slippe
d away.
“I don’t know, Dad,” I say. “She says she wants to move here.”
“I know she says that. But she’s a Floridian through and through. She can’t move there,” he says in his firm dad voice.
“Are you sure?”
“Marnie. First of all, she has her life here. Me, for one thing. And her friends at the pool, at the Y. Natalie and the grandchildren. And second of all, winter. She’s never lived through a winter in her life. No, she’s just going through something right now. I haven’t been needing her enough maybe. You could do me a favor and point out my wonderful qualities and tell her that I really do need her. Trust me, Marnie. This is a temporary rootlessness she’s got going on.”
My father, Ted MacGraw, is a wonderful man, a good provider, and a guy who believed strongly in his daughters’ rights to excel in any workplace and to be whatever they wanted in the world. Unless what they wanted was to be underemployed, like me. Or a witchy matchmaker, like me. Or a person who moved to Brooklyn without a real plan, like me. Luckily he also had Natalie, who became a grade-A, number one scientist who had the foresight to marry a settling-down kind of man and have two children and move into a house in my dad’s neighborhood.
I’ve always adored him, and sometimes I think it would be so cool to be as certain as he is about everything. He knows just how he feels. Good over bad, right over wrong, khakis over blue jeans, football games over soccer matches, Rotary Club meetings over sleeping late on Saturday.
“But, Dad,” I say, “she doesn’t seem sad. She seems almost giddy to me.”
“That’s an act. Don’t you know an act when you see one? She doesn’t know what she wants.”
I am, I realize, too cowardly to tell him the things she said last night. Let her tell him about her desire to join the space program and fall in love with new people.
There’s a silence. “We’re a solid couple,” he says. “Everybody envies us. All our friends. Your mom has it good, but, I don’t know, there’s this restlessness lately that’s driving me nuts. She always wants to go, go, go. For no reason, just to get out of the house. She complains I don’t get enough exercise and I won’t go to the doctor for a checkup. Frankly, she’s becoming a little bit of a nag.”
“Dad, are you angry with her? Because you sound a little angry.”
“No, I’m not angry,” he says in the maddest voice ever. “It’s just that she didn’t have to pull this stunt on Thanksgiving Day. Get this. She got up very, very early in the morning and made the turkey and the stuffing and the green beans with the fried onions and the sweet potato marshmallow thing, and then it was all ready by noon, so I came upstairs from watching the Macy’s Day Parade, thinking we’d sit down and eat, and there she was with her suitcases packed, and she said, ‘I’m leaving. I’m moving to Brooklyn. Don’t worry. There’s a cab waiting for me, so you won’t have to worry about getting the car back from the airport. And I’ll talk to you soon.’ And she put her house key on the table, and kissed me on the cheek, and walked out the front door. Didn’t even eat the meal she’d made. Can you believe that?”
Bedford is now eating a piece of a chicken bone he found under some leaves, so I kneel down to take it out of his mouth. “What did you do?”
“What do you think? I’m a gentleman, so I carried her two suitcases outside for her and put them in the trunk of the cab. And I paid the driver for her in advance. And then I went around to the window of the passenger seat and I said to her, I said, ‘I hope you have a very nice trip to Brooklyn, and have a Happy Thanksgiving.’”
“Oh, you did not!”
“I did.” He laughs. “I’m chill. Isn’t that what you kids say? I haven’t even told Natalie yet; that’s how cool I’m playing it. I want to make as little drama as possible. Give your mother some space so that in three days when she decides to come back, it won’t have to be a huge deal and she feels like she loses face or something. I’m not going to beg her to come back. I’m just going to leave her to get this out of her system.”
“That’s probably very wise,” I say.
“And, ducky, just do me a little favor, will you?”
“What would that be, oh father of mine who has missed every single signal he needed to see?”
He laughs. “Show her all the ways Brooklyn is not Florida. Shiver a lot! Tell her how dirty and disgusting the subways are. I don’t know. Tell her you miss the Florida beaches. She’s a Florida girl. She’ll come home.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
MARNIE
My father is dead wrong. My mother is not one bit interested in going back home. And this is fine by me. Two weeks in, and we are actually having a good time in our new capacity as girlfriends. She’s asked me if I could possibly call her Millie instead of Mom. It would make it easier for us to talk about real things, she said. We sit up late talking at night, covering nearly all subjects of interest—things I never thought I could talk to her about—like bad boyfriends, men who turn into couch potatoes when you’re not looking, the evidence for magic, bad hairdressers who rely on too much hairspray, the fact that my mother always thought that she and I were kindred spirits while the other two family members were too rigid, whether boredom constitutes grounds for changing one’s life . . . aaaand the pros and cons of me getting pregnant.
I don’t think me getting pregnant is going to happen soon, at least not until Patrick’s show is over. He’s getting more and more withdrawn. I have taken to organizing what I call Jiffy Conjugal Visits when I make him sit with me in the living room under the fleece blanket—for whole minutes at a time—drinking our mugs of coffee on the couch after we get Fritzie off to school and before my mom gets up for the day. It’s not ideal conditions, of course, but if a couple wanted to have sex under those circumstances, they could. We apparently are not that couple, however.
We sit there together, and every now and then I let my hand drift over to his thigh in a reawakening kind of way, and . . . well, nothing happens. It’s as though there’s a force that pulls Patrick away from the real, tangible world of feelings and love and lures him back into the conflicted world of art and misery. Sometimes it seems that there is just a little remaining bit of Patrick that’s still mine, a little schmear of him that doesn’t belong to this project, but it’s in danger of disappearing, too.
So maybe, not to get all dramatic about it, this is nothing less than a battle for his soul. That’s the message I seem to get from Toaster Blix, when I have asked. Fight for him, her voice says.
So one day I throw caution to the wind and get myself naked under that throw. He looks horrified, and I tell him that it’s time we remembered what’s good in the world. Remember making out? Remember making love and how nicely things fit together?
So I worked at it and got us started, but then he thought he heard the creaking of the hinges on the bedroom door and he leapt off of me like he’d been shot out of a cannon, and took up a sitting position, with his arm flung casually over the back of the couch. “So, how about the Mets this year? Any good prospects?” he said in a loud voice.
I laughed and whispered, “Get back on top of me; that was just the wind.”
“Marnie! What if she comes in here and sees us?”
“Well, Patrick, she and I are now BFFs and not mother and daughter, and I think she’d tiptoe away back to the bedroom and silently cheer for us. She knows this is the way babies get made, and she knows we want a baby.”
But uh-oh. A shadow crossed his face at that.
“Didn’t we agree to wait on that plan?” he said.
“I believe the minutes would show that we decided to wait, and then I pointed out, accurately enough, that I am older than dirt, and that I wanted to get started on tracking my ovulation—”
He closed his eyes, shut himself right down. “Not now, please,” he said, as though he was in actual physical pain at the thought. “I can’t take on anything else.”
“You do know that it takes nine months to actually form a little human
,” I said, pushing my luck. “It won’t be an instantaneous new person.”
“After my show,” he said. And then he added, “Maybe. If there’s anything left of me.”
Which I should have addressed right then, except I was too scared. What the hell was he talking about? Did he mean that the little schmear of him that I’m getting was going to get even smaller immediately? Was he going to make it disappear altogether?
I looked into his eyes, and I couldn’t find him.
That was when I actually got really frightened.
Hang on, the toaster said.
Just when I’m settling in to the new reality—being BFFs with my mom, having a bold eight-year-old to look after and a houseful of teenagers hanging out in the basement, all while trying to hold on to the rapidly disappearing Patrick—the world abruptly takes a major shift into The Holidays. I have always been a big fan of the holidays—all the tra la la stuff and the decorating and the sparkly things—but it also means that there are more flower orders coming in, more red velvet ribbon needed, as well as poinsettias filling up every available space, and along with that comes the fact that more people are likely to burst into tears in the Frippery over all that jolly deck-the-halls propaganda.
And Fritzie, who has been simmering along, takes this opportunity to go crazy.
It starts at a land mine–filled little tradition called Parent Day Luncheon held by the school. The notice arrives in the backpack one day. I see it as I’m unpacking the lunch box and pulling out the homework folder (MATH STORY PROBLEMS DUE TOMORROW: HAVE FUN WITH THESE). And there, just behind the promise of the delightful story problems, is an even more promising notice, printed on purple paper: PARENT DAY LUNCHEON AT SCHOOL ON FRIDAY.
“Oh!” I say. “Fritzie, shall we go to this?” I’m so on top of this, already thinking how fraught this must be for Fritzie, and how I can ask Kat if her friend Sal can help out with the orders that morning while I dash out to the school.
A Happy Catastrophe Page 20