Family and Other Catastrophes

by Alexandra Borowitz

  “I didn’t drink anything. I think I’m getting sick.” With that, she bent over and expelled what felt like another gallon of vomit, splashing Lauren’s checkered Vans. Lauren, in a rare moment of fashion-consciousness, squeamishly backed away and checked her shoes for stains.

  * * *

  The two sisters drove home in silence. Emily had been afraid of another confrontation, another thorough autopsy of her mental failures, but instead Lauren was quiet. Emily couldn’t tell whether she should be relieved, or apprehensive about what was coming.

  “You should drink some ginger tea,” Lauren finally said. “I had terrible morning sickness when I was pregnant with Ariel. Ginger tea was the only safe thing that helped.” She said this clinically, as if to avoid any danger of seeming sympathetic.

  “Morning sickness?” Emily felt like she might throw up again, this time strictly from the dread of potentially being pregnant. She hadn’t really worried about an unplanned pregnancy since college, given that terrorist attacks and drive-by shootings were so much scarier. But now that it was a possibility, she wanted to kick her old self for abandoning pregnancy anxiety in favor of worrying about hypothetical serial killers who targeted fake blondes.

  Lauren continued. “It came on a bit suddenly, around my second month. And it’s not always in the morning—that’s a misnomer. Sometimes I’d throw up at night or in the afternoon. One night Matt asked if we could have sex and I threw up all over him.”

  “We need to go to CVS,” Emily said. “I need to get a pregnancy test.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I was just telling you that story to make you feel better, Emily. Not everything applies to you. You can’t be pregnant. You’re on birth control.”

  “Mom got pregnant on birth control—that’s how I was born! And I did take antibiotics two months ago, now that I think about it. I thought I had a staph infection so I got Mark to write a prescription for me, but it turned out to be acne. The pharmacist told me the meds wouldn’t interact, but maybe she was wrong, I mean, she was wearing braces, she could have been some Doogie Howser impersonator. Oh, fuck.”

  “Relax. We’ll go to CVS, but you’re not pregnant. You always worry about this stupid one-percent-chance stuff. The brain tumors, the STDs from toilet seats...”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Okay, well, when was your last period?”

  “I can’t even remember. I stopped getting it regularly last year, now it just comes a few times a year. It’s common with some pills and my doctor told me not to worry.”

  “Just because you need to calm the fuck down, we’ll go to CVS. My guess is that you just ate something bad this morning.” Lauren made a sharp left turn to drive back to the CVS they had passed five minutes ago, and the motion made Emily throw up again, this time out the window of Lauren’s car.

  * * *

  Back at the house, they sat in the mint-tiled bathroom, Lauren on the edge of the tub and Emily on the toilet. The pregnancy test, placed gingerly on the sink, still had two minutes to develop. At first Emily had been timid about taking down her panties in front of Lauren to pee, not because she was uncomfortable with nudity but because she had a feeling Lauren would criticize her choice to remove her pubic hair. She got a fleeting stare of judgment but luckily nothing more.

  Looking at Lauren perched on the edge of the tub made Emily think of the old days, back when they still looked like sisters—both brown-haired, peachy-pale and girlish, before self-expression and experience changed their appearances—before either of them had a “style.” It was easier to feel like sisters back then. Emily used to look at Lauren and see an older version of herself, or a female ally against Jason’s taunting and Nerf gun attacks.

  “Worst case scenario?” Lauren said, noticing that Emily was staring at her. “Speaking as someone who’s been pregnant, it’s not the end of the world.”

  “But you wanted a kid.”

  “I was pregnant before Ariel. I had a few abortions in college.”

  “A few?”

  “Don’t judge me. It’s no different from using a condom or getting your period. Just more cells going down the drain.”

  “You weren’t sad at all?”

  “Pfffft,” Lauren said. “Fuck no. It’s no big deal. The media makes it out to be so scary and sad just because they don’t want women getting them. But the truth is, if men could get abortions, the government would be handing them out. In Russia, the average woman has had five abortions before the age of thirty.”

  “Well, that sounds like a real utopia.”

  “Minus the homophobia and all the other stuff, it is. Abortions shouldn’t be seen as anything scary or sad. It’s like going to the DMV. It’s not fun, but everyone does it and the worst part is the wait.”

  “What if it really is scary and sad for some people? If I turn out to be, you know...it would make me sad to get an abortion.”

  “So keep it then,” she said flippantly, as if discussing whether to order pizza or Chinese takeout.

  “It would make me sad to keep it too. I’m not sure if I’m ready to be a parent. Wait, did I say not sure? I meant definitely. And I can’t imagine David is ready. He never even wants to talk about kids. The one time we discussed it, he said he wanted to wait until his midthirties. If I kept the baby, he might resent me forever, then maybe he’d leave me, and I’d be a single mom, and...”

  She stopped talking when she noticed Lauren staring at the pregnancy stick on the sink.

  NIGHT 3

  Jason

  IF JASON HAD to hear the song “Let It Go” one more time, he would jump out the window. He had spent the evening alone with Mia—his first in a long time—while Christina went out with friends. He had tried to show her some old toys from his childhood, his beloved G.I. Joe and Hot Wheels, but she had cried and demanded he play Frozen on his laptop. She watched it before falling asleep on the sofa, her little arm dangling off the edge. He picked her up and got her dressed for bed, hoping she’d wake up during the process and want to spend time with him, but she slept soundly even when he pulled the pajama top over her head.

  Women, it seemed, had a built-in advantage with parenting. Mia was attached to Christina from the moment she popped out. Jason had to work so much harder to get any reaction from her, and now that Christina had gotten her addicted to mobile devices, he had to compete with technology too.

  He tried not to dwell too long on his relationship—or lack thereof—with his daughter, realizing that this at least gave him an opportunity to have fun. With Mia asleep and at home with her grandparents, Jason was pumped for another night out. This time, it wouldn’t be at Celebz.

  He looked at himself in the mirror after his shower. His towel was tied around his hips, his small beer belly protruding slightly, wiry hair covering his fleshy torso. The hair on the sides of his head was still thick and dark but had gotten too long, which made him look as if he were trying to distract people from his receding hairline and bald spot in the back. He knew it didn’t really matter—women loved older men even if they were bald, which was why Patrick Stewart’s wife was so hot. That was at least what his favorite pick-up-artist blogs told him: men were attractive because they were confident and charming, regardless of looks, while women were attractive solely because they were young and pretty, regardless of their personalities. Balding and aging sucked, sure, but it sucked worse to be a woman.

  When he was at Colgate, losing his hair was the last thing on his mind. He didn’t think they were his glory days at the time. He thought they were the beginning of something better. Every weekend, at the dilapidated white colonial that housed Delta Xi Tau, he and his fraternity brothers would host a party and invite the girls from the two hottest sororities. The girls from the slightly uglier sororities would invariably wind up coming too. A few times there were some hidden gems in there, or at least girls with big boobs and self-este
em issues. The Delts would set out the liquor on the table, and in a matter of hours the bottles would be empty and placed on the mantel if they were particularly impressive, like a jumbo bottle of Jack Daniels. The girls would arrive, already drunk from their own pregaming and ready to dance. He’d crank up “Californication” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and, more times than not, any girl he approached would be his.

  Except Christina. The senior alpha female of Sigma Theta, she would sit in a corner with her friends, sipping on her drink delicately, laughing as if she were at a debutante ball and not inches away from an empty Coors Light box full of vomit.

  One night, he approached her after he had a few too many shots of Jack. “Why is it that I’ve seen you so many times, and you’ve never said hi?” he asked, breaching the wall of sorority girls that surrounded her. “It’s pretty rude to drink a stranger’s drinks and not even introduce yourself.” He smiled, to make sure she knew he wasn’t actually angry. Normally, such a pickup line would work with women. He believed in the semiconfrontational approach to flirting.

  She took a sip from her red Solo cup of Franzia sauvignon blanc. “Because I have a boyfriend?” He tried to focus on the light bouncing off her Tiffany charm bracelet. He knew if he didn’t, he’d be looking at her perky chest, her blue eyes or her perfect lips.

  He normally ignored girls with boyfriends because there were so many other willing girls who were single. But he couldn’t get Christina out of his mind. She looked like a Victoria’s Secret model who required no retouching. It was like a tragic Greek myth: someone had created his perfect woman and then made her unavailable to him.

  He asked her sorority sisters and discovered that Christina’s boyfriend went to Stanford, and they saw each other only a few times a year. He considered waiting it out until they broke up but didn’t feel like taking the risk that she would be the one-in-a-million girl who actually stayed with a long-distance boyfriend. He had to take action.

  Knowing that girls like Christina would never refuse an opportunity to dress up and go somewhere fancy, he organized a fraternity winter formal that would blow all previous formals out of the water. He put pledges to work organizing it from top to bottom, making sure everyone pitched in their money to get the best venue. Geography limited him to the Utica Radisson, but that was better than all the previous formals held in the school annex. He made formal wear mandatory and told the pledges they had to rent tuxedos or stay away.

  When he asked her to be his date—only as a friend—she bit her glossed lip and looked down at the floor. “Only as a friend.”

  The night of the formal, Jason and his friends rented a stretch limo to pick up the girls at the sorority house. Christina emerged in a sequined floor-length ice-blue gown that hugged her hourglass body. She picked up the hem so that it wouldn’t get wet in the snow and climbed into the limo next to Jason. When he scooted closer to her, she edged away slightly but smiled at him.

  “How would Mr. Stanford feel about you sitting so close to me?” he asked with a wink.

  “He wouldn’t care because he knows we’re just friends.”

  “He knows about me?”

  “No, but...you know what I mean.”

  At the Radisson, Jason requested that the DJ play TLC, Christina’s favorite group. He handed her a martini, which became two, which became three. Without her usual entourage of best friends—he had instructed his brothers not to invite any of them—she found herself in conversation with Jason and only Jason. As the two of them drank more and more, Jason told her about the amazing job he had lined up at IBM after graduation. This wasn’t true at all, but Christina’s eyes lit up.

  Westlife’s “If I Let You Go” began playing. He asked her to dance. Her hands rested on his shoulders, but she laid her head on his chest, so he let his hands migrate to her butt. Later that night she told him that she didn’t think things were going to work out with her boyfriend after all.

  That first night with Christina was probably the best sex Jason ever had—probably, because, having drunk so much, he couldn’t remember the details. But he remembered waking up the next morning next to the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, wondering how on Earth she got there and feeling a deep sense of panic as he realized he would need to find a job at IBM as soon as possible before graduation.

  The story he later told Christina was that he had been promised the job but at the last second they gave it to one of the senior executives’ sons instead. Much to his relief, she understood, and even better, consoled him with sex. Crisis averted. As the days ticked off to graduation, he sent his résumé to dozens of tech companies. He wound up at a junior sales job at a third-tier computer hardware company called PushComp.

  They moved to New York City together after graduation, where Christina began her career in marketing. He wasn’t making that much, but what he made he spent on her: clubbing in the Meatpacking District, designer clothes, towers of sushi.

  Four years into their relationship, Jason began finding bridal websites in Christina’s search history. At one point she had been the perfect woman, but by now he had seen her with a stomach bug and without makeup, and he knew how the bathroom smelled after she used it. Little signs of her tanning addiction were starting to show on her young face. He had become a senior sales associate at PushComp. If he hadn’t moved in with his college girlfriend, who knows what kind of women he might have met? Perhaps ones who continued to give blow jobs after the first six months—something Christina insisted was gross and degrading.

  He dragged his feet on the proposal while he created anonymous accounts on dating websites with no photograph and no bio. When she was out or asleep, he scrolled, surveying the single women in New York at his disposal. He resisted messaging. But he started taking a stand with Christina. At one point he even told her that he believed marriage was a sexist institution and that, as a woman, she shouldn’t be interested in it. This gambit did nothing to forestall her ultimatum and, when it came, he panicked at the thought of losing her. He told himself that, perhaps, his doubts were temporary: he was only twenty-six, so of course he was afraid of marriage. Things would work out. He spent a year’s worth of commission to buy her an engagement ring at Tiffany.

  When their sex dwindled from every other day to once a week, then once every two weeks, she told him she just didn’t have as high a sex drive as he did. She still smiled and giggled when he took her to dinner at expensive restaurants, but when they were home she spent most of her time flipping through Architectural Digest, watching HGTV and shopping online at west elm. When he tried to touch her, she recoiled as if her entire body were ticklish. One day he overheard her on the phone telling her mother that Mr. Stanford had become a VP at Google.

  He wished he had listened to his brothers when they told him not to mess with a girl who had a boyfriend. As his hair thinned and his metabolism slowed, the handsome, smiling frat boy in old photographs became his nemesis, taunting him about his lost youth. He was determined to turn back the clock. He logged on to one of his anonymous dating accounts and added a photo. He began taking off his wedding ring whenever he was out with friends. The girls didn’t quite fall into his lap as he had hoped, but with hard work and perseverance, he did find a fling here and there: an aspiring “TV personality” working as a Hooters waitress, a single mother in her midthirties who genuinely believed he wanted to be her boyfriend, a married woman on his sales team who was just as discreet as he was and as many erotic masseuses as he could afford.

  And suddenly Christina was pregnant.

  He pretended to be happy about it, went to all her doctor’s appointments and held her hand, but all the while he was thinking about the Thai massage place around the corner from PushComp, the strip club on the West Side Highway and his hot coworker Jill in Compliance.

  In spite of all his ambivalence, once Mia was born, the DNA kicked in and Jason found himself falling completely in love with h
is daughter. Mia, on the other hand, preferred Christina from day one, and Christina was just so much better with her than he was. Jason found himself jealous of both of them, they were so close. Christina loved Mia more than she had ever loved him, and Mia loved Christina more than she could ever love him. The only advantage of this was that Mia kept Christina so busy, she no longer had time to monitor Jason’s actions. She was taking Mia to Mommy and Me classes, to Gymboree, to a music class called Little Chopin where parents paid one hundred dollars a session for their toddlers to sit in a circle and suck on dirty plastic flutes. Jason had more time to himself than ever, and he spent it doing what he loved most, without guilt. Why should he feel guilty? Their whole marriage began with infidelity. Was she really any better than he was? If she really wanted him to be faithful, she would have sex with him more often. Besides, it wasn’t as if he fell in love with the other women he was with. It was only sex—he might as well have been masturbating.

  When Mia was five months old, he was laid off from PushComp. Going to job interviews was intimidating and demoralizing. He thought his work in sales had prepared him for rejection, but he hadn’t expected to be blown off so many times by email. When the subject line included the words thank you he knew what was coming. On the rare occasions that he tried to express his frustration to Christina, she claimed that there were jobs out there—he just wasn’t looking hard enough. The boyish charm and good looks that once seemed to get him everything he wanted had deserted him. He was in his thirties with no job, no sex life and a daughter who cried whenever he held her.

  It was only a matter of time before Christina found out about the other women. He had expected a fight, maybe even a few cut-up Oxford shirts strewn across the living room floor in revenge, but as it turned out, Christina had no qualms about pawning her engagement ring, changing the locks and filing for divorce.

  The first time he had slept with Christina, that night of the winter formal, it had been the best night of his life. Thirteen years later, despite hundreds of attempts to top it, it still was.