Love & Other Natural Disasters

by Misa Sugiura

“A spot on the exclusive wait list at Oak Vista. That elder care community on the Peninsula. Remember, we took you there the other week? They’re in very high demand, so it was really lucky that we were able to get it,” Stephen says.

  “As soon as a new unit opens up that meets your requirements, you get to move right in,” Dad adds. “They’ll redecorate the whole apartment for you. You get to choose the carpeting, the wall colors . . . isn’t that great?”

  Baba, whose eyebrows have been drawing themselves further and further downward as she listens, says, “I have my own house. Why should I pay extra money to keep the apartment there?”

  She can’t possibly think that’s what this news means. Max nudges me under the table. I know he’s saying I told you so, and I wish he wouldn’t. Dad clears his throat and looks at his hands and says, “Ah. Right,” and then looks at Stephen, who raises his eyebrows back at him and nods meaningfully. Dad taps his fingers together and tries again. “So. The thing about the exclusive wait list is that they expect you to move in as soon as they notify you that a unit is open. Not instantly, of course, because they have to redecorate. As for the house, you could sell it. Or rent it out.”

  There’s a long, uncomfortable pause before Baba says, “No.” Her mouth is set firmly in a stubborn line. “I don’t want to.”

  “Mom,” Stephen begins, but Baba shakes her head and says sharply, “Nn-nn.” Then she says, “You are my children. You cannot tell me what to do, just like that—pahn!” She claps her hands once.

  “But Mom, it’s really nice there. Remember? There are activities, there are people to help you with anything you need—”

  “No!” Baba’s voice is sharper now, almost shrill. “I am fine! I want to live in my house!”

  Dad looks at me and Max, and then at Baba, and says, “Mom, please. The kids,” and I know that my role as a tantrum-prevention measure is a good and useful thing, but I suddenly feel like a tool and a traitor. I stare guiltily at my French toast. I don’t know how I feel about this operation anymore. Before it felt manipulative, but necessary. Now it just feels manipulative.

  But it doesn’t matter, because Baba doesn’t care. “Kids can hear! You are setting the bad example for them, how to take care of the parents,” she says without lowering her volume a single notch. People are starting to stare, and I begin to consider sliding down in the booth and under the table. I wish Baba wouldn’t yell.

  “Mom!” Stephen mutters. “Please! People are staring!”

  “Please calm down, Mom,” adds Dad. “You’re making a scene.”

  “You are making the scene!” she says inexplicably and with rising hysteria. “You are the failed children. You don’t know how to show the love of your family. I have failed you as your mother.” She’s quivering with emotion. “I quit. Mou, iya.” She scoots out of the booth and stalks out of the restaurant.

  After exchanging looks with Stephen, Dad gets out of the booth and rushes after Baba. Stephen groans, covers his face with his hands, and leans forward, resting his elbows on the table.

  I get how Baba must feel; if anyone knows what it’s like to be ambushed with bad news, it’s me. On the other hand, how could she not have seen this coming? How could she be so unreasonable when Dad and Stephen are just trying to do what’s best for her?

  “Well,” says Max gloomily. “That was fun.”

  Dad texts and says he’s caught up to Baba and is trying to persuade her to go home, so Stephen gets boxes for the rest of our brunch and drops me and Max off at home before heading over to Baba’s. He and Dad return within an hour in the midst of a heated argument, having left Baba in the care of her next-door neighbor.

  “I did prepare her,” Stephen is saying. “We’ve gone through the attic, sold a bunch of her stuff, taken her on the tour . . . I thought she’d see it coming.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant by preparing her, and you know it. You know she can’t take a hint.”

  They enter the kitchen and don’t even see Max and me sitting at the table finishing our brunch with Lance. “I was trying to be gentle!” Stephen says.

  “You were being a coward.”

  “I’m sorry, did you tell her you were marrying a man? No, wait. That was me. Remember what happened after that?” Stephen walks over to Lance and lays a protective hand on his shoulder.

  “Hey, love,” says Lance quietly, and puts his hand on top of Stephen’s.

  Dad sighs. “Fine. You’re right. You’re not a coward. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t know why I always have to be the one who tells her stuff she doesn’t want to hear,” says Stephen.

  “Hey, I had to tell her about the divorce.”

  “That was different. You’re her favorite. And it was Jennifer’s fault.”

  Huh? “So Baba knows Mom cheated on you, too?” I cut in. “Am I the only one who didn’t know?” Not to make this all about me, but I feel betrayed all over again, like everyone’s made a fool out of me . . . a little like Baba must have felt earlier today, actually.

  Dad looks at me blankly. “You . . . how did you . . . ?”

  “And while we’re on the subject, Mom said that she asked you to go to counseling and you refused. Is that true?” The anger I’ve been holding in since Friday night spills over.

  He looks at Max, who shrugs defensively and says, “Mom told her.”

  Then he looks at Stephen, but Stephen shakes his head and says, “This is between the two of you.”

  Dad turns to me again and says, “Zo, I never meant for you to—” and then interrupts himself. “This is more than I can handle right now. Can we talk about it later?”

  Sure. When it’s stuff I don’t want to talk about, he’s Mr. Let’s Have a Heart-to-Heart, but when it comes to stuff he doesn’t want to talk about, he runs for cover.

  I glare at him. “When?”

  He shuffles his feet uncomfortably and clears his throat. “I don’t know, Zozo. I’ll be busy taking care of stuff for Baba, so—”

  “How about lunch tomorrow? Max can babysit.”

  “You mean Baba-sit,” quips Max, and I roll my eyes.

  Backed into a corner like this, Dad has no choice but to agree. “Fine. Okay. Lunch tomorrow.”

  36

  DAD SHOWED UP AT WORK AND BROUGHT ME TO Tartine, the legendary bakery where, uh, legend has it that Steve Jobs tried to cut in line but the staff made him go to the back and wait his turn for a sandwich like a normal person. I can’t decide whether I find that refreshingly down-to-earth and egalitarian or snooty and self-important, but anyway, their bread and their Scharffen Berger chocolate croissants are supposedly famous among foodies, and it’s been on Dad’s San Francisco bucket list for a few years now. Dad gets a ham sandwich: gourmet Spanish ham, organic brie cheese from Marin, locally grown organic arugula, and organic fig confit on their famous sourdough; I get a chocolate croissant.

  We get our food to go and walk to the top of the hill at Mission Dolores Park, where we find a spot on the lawn and Dad fusses with the blanket he’s brought with him and asks me if I’ve got sunscreen on. Finally, we sit down and take in the view. “This is so San Francisco, huh?” says Dad. “Exactly what you’d expect.” He takes a massive bite out of his sandwich and beams at me, and then at the skyline, munching and making contented little eating noises.

  I only have an hour for lunch and we’ve spent nearly half of it standing in line, so I don’t have time to mess around talking about how much I love my croissant, even though it’s so flaky and delicious that I bet even Dela would like it. I jump right in. “Did you really refuse to go to counseling when Mom asked you?”

  Dad stops mid-chew and looks mournfully at his sandwich, as if it had secretly promised to help him get out of this conversation and suddenly changed its mind. He takes a second, slightly less enthusiastic bite and says after a while, “It’s hard to accept that your marriage is in trouble. It’s easier to tell yourself that perfectly happy marriages are a fairy tale, and your marriage is the
reality that everyone lives with.”

  “So, yes.”

  He sighs. “Yes.”

  “Things were bad, and you lied to yourself about it.” Just like Baba. Just like yesterday, in fact, when he and Stephen convinced themselves that breaking the bad news to Baba at the restaurant would make things easier.

  “In my defense, love is—”

  “Never easy,” I finish. “I know. But Mom asked you and you said no.”

  He just looks sad. UGH.

  “And did you really ask Mom to go to counseling to try to save the marriage, like you told me this spring? Or was that a lie, too?” I ask next.

  “No! No, that’s true. I begged her, Nozomi. But she said it was pointless to pretend there was any reason left to stay.”

  I remember Mom saying those very same words: It was pointless to pretend there was any reason left to stay. And that was why she decided to leave . . . which means . . . “You only asked her to go to counseling after she told you she was leaving?” Incredulity makes my voice shrill.

  Dad looks tragic. “Sometimes, Zo, it takes a disaster to reveal how bad a situation is. And you know me. I like to make the best of things. I thought that we could go to counseling and fix things. She didn’t.”

  “That’s not my point!” I want to throw my croissant at him—but that would be a waste of the best croissant I’ve ever tasted. “My point is, she’s not the bad guy! And you’re not the good guy!”

  “No. I never said I was.”

  “But you let me believe it!”

  Dad turns his sandwich over in his hands; he looks like he’s lost his appetite completely. I know I have. Well, maybe not quite. I take one more cautious bite—for the record, it’s still delicious—and wait for him to respond.

  “I did,” he says. “It was wrong of me. I wanted to believe that I’d done everything I could, and it helped to focus on that part of the story. I’m sorry for misleading you.”

  This is completely bonkers. How could he have lied to me like that?

  “Hey, at least you’re less angry at your mom now,” he says with a hopeful smile, as if he hadn’t just flung my very last crumb of faith in him to a metaphorical flock of faith-devouring Canada geese.

  “Nope,” I say. “Still pretty furious with her. You’re both bad, but she’s the one who cheated. And I’m still mad at you for not telling me.”

  He sighs. “She asked me not to.”

  “Why? Why would you agree to that?”

  “Because what happened was between us. It had nothing to do with you.”

  “It had everything to do with me! I’m her daughter, Dad. She betrayed our entire family.”

  “She only left me, Zozo. She didn’t leave you.”

  “I don’t care!” I splutter. “She’s still a liar and a cheater, and someone should have told me.”

  “She’s also still your mother. I don’t want this to poison your relationship with her.”

  “Well, it has, and she deserves it. And your lies have poisoned my relationship with you.” I take a savage bite out of my croissant and chomp on it angrily—partly because of Mom, and partly because Dad’s being the good guy again, and what am I supposed to do with that?

  The thing is, it’s hard to be angry and appreciate a delicious pastry at the same time. Damn. I take a short break from my anger so that I can enjoy my food, and Dad must sense that I’ve let my guard down, because he chooses this moment to pounce.

  “And what good is this knowledge doing you now?”

  “What good is—” I’m too confused to keep going. What?

  “Are you glad you know the truth?”

  “I—” Am I glad? No, of course not. But is it better than not knowing? I settle on saying, “If you’d told me when it happened, I wouldn’t have felt bad about blaming her for leaving. I wouldn’t have felt like such a dupe when Max told me. I would’ve handled it better.”

  “Quite frankly, I don’t think you are handling it very well right now,” he says.

  “Being angry at my mother for cheating isn’t handling it well?” I ask. “Am I supposed to think it was okay for her to do that? Because she seems to.”

  “No, you’re right, Zozo. Anger is an entirely appropriate response. But I don’t want you to cut yourself off from her.”

  “Why? Why do you care if I have a relationship with her? So you can be the good guy again?”

  “Because she’s your mother, and I know how much she loves you. That’s why. Because you deserve to have a good relationship with her. I know it’s hard to get over the damage. But I also know you love each other enough to have something worth saving.”

  Something worth saving. Ha. Not likely. But even as I think this, I know it’s not true.

  I look at him and can’t help wondering out loud, “So if you and Mom didn’t have something worth saving . . . did you ever love each other?”

  Dad looks out over the city for a long time before saying, “I think we did.”

  “You think you did?” Not helpful. Because what I need to know now is, how do you tell the difference between real, lasting love and some other kind of love that’s doomed to implode? How do you know when to hope and when to give up?

  “I wish I could give you a better answer, Zozo,” he says. “If it’s any comfort, I’m not sorry I married your mother. I’m just sorry I couldn’t love her in the way she needed.” He regards his sandwich and seems to decide that it might still be good to eat after all, and takes a bite. “So don’t give up on loving people, okay? In the end, it’s always worth the risk to follow your heart.”

  37

  FORGET ABOUT DAD’S MANTRA, “LOVE IS NEVER easy.” It’s so far beyond that. Love is exhausting. Love is painful. Love is diabolically confusing. My life is descending into chaos, and it’s all because of love.

  Stephen is stressed about the gala and Dad is stressed about Mom, so naturally they’ve been bickering a lot about Baba, who has been crabby and uncooperative. Max is annoyed with me because Mom keeps asking him to tell me to unblock her and I keep refusing. And then, of course, there’s this surreal problem of being in love with my formerly fake girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s real girlfriend.

  Compounding that last problem is the fact that I’m not even sure how I feel. Yes, I had that epiphany about Dela the other night, but it’s not like the Willow Crush Bus simultaneously came to a screeching halt. I still feel kind of dazed when I’m with her and when I remember that I’m really-for-real dating her. And how can I end things with her so soon after she opened up and told me how much she liked me—and my response was to kiss her all night? I’m sure I would feel like I was in love with Willow, if it weren’t for Dela.

  Sigh.

  Dela’s on my mind even now as I’m out with Willow, shopping for a dress to wear to the gala. Willow has cajoled me into going with her to Fillmore Street, which is where she and her mom found her gala dress, and I keep thinking that in the unlikely event that Dela would have agreed to help me buy a dress, we’d be done by now and enjoying an ice cream somewhere.

  I’m not one of those girls who hates shopping. But when nothing fit at the first store, and Willow rejected everything at the second store, I began to revise my stance. After eleven dresses and three stores, I think I might hate not only shopping, but fancy events, the fashion industry, and capitalism generally. But nothing can stop Willow—not the astronomical prices, not the endless racks of dresses clearly designed for someone much richer and cooler than me, not my flagging enthusiasm or my sagging confidence. At this point, my sole purpose is to make it through the afternoon without screaming. Why am I so hopeless at this?

  In my little curtained-off dressing room in store number three, I’m trying on garment number twelve: a cobalt-blue sleeveless, backless, sequined jumpsuit with a plunging neckline. I twist and turn in front of the mirror. I’m not a bright sparkly colors girl or a plunging neckline girl, but it does look good on me, as long as I stand with my back ramrod straight and don’t m
ove my arms. What would Dela think? She’d probably laugh.

  “Come out and let me see!” calls Willow from the other side of the curtain, and I step out stiffly, feeling self-conscious and exposed. “What do you think?”

  “Oh my god, it’s gorgeous!” she exclaims, adding, “Pull your hair up, like an updo.” I lift my arms cautiously so as not to shift the fabric and expose a boob, and twist my hair together and hold it up at the back of my head. She gasps. “Oh, Nozomi. Look in the mirror.” She takes my shoulders and turns me to face the mirror in my compartment.

  “You have to get this,” she says as I gaze doubtfully at my reflection—at our reflection. “You look like a goddess—my goddess.” She slides her arms around my waist and kisses me, then turns back to the mirror. “Mmm. You’re perfect.”

  Mmm . . . if that’s how she feels about it . . . I guess I can spend an evening without bending my back, raising my arms, twisting my shoulders, or making any sudden movements. It could be good for my posture.

  Which explains how I end up buying a dress that makes me feel like a sexy goddess-mannequin.

  It’s fine.

  It’s fine.

  Oh, who am I kidding? It’s not fine. Not at all.

  How do I get myself out of this mess?

  Two more days of bickering with Max, stressing about Baba, avoiding Dad, making out with Willow in the gift shop office, and dreaming about Dela, and I’m still—surprise!—stuck. Willow’s parents are making her volunteer at a pediatric clinic today, so I have the afternoon free. I wander around the museum with the vague idea that art might somehow help me figure this out.

  Max was right. I’ve been ignoring what’s in front of me and chasing after an impossible dream. I’ve had this image in my head of the perfect girl—beauty queen looks, movie star glamour and charisma, rising star talent—and I’ve spent my summer—my life, really—chasing her, putting her on a pedestal, and trying to make myself worthy of her, all of which is messed up. If I keep going like this, I’ll end up like Baba, who thinks she can live alone forever, or like Dad, who only admitted that his marriage was in trouble after Mom had an affair and asked for a divorce. When I’m with Willow, I’m either taking care of her, or I’m pretending to be something I’m not—as if I don’t like who I actually am. And I guess I didn’t, when I first got to San Francisco. I didn’t want to be the girl who Helena rejected and laughed at.