How to Be Married

by Jo Piazza

  “I need you all to focus on your hips and on your pelvic floor. Focus on it now and you’ll be able to do this well into your nineties.”

  Maybe not, I thought.

  I bought an overpriced, sustainably sourced mint-chocolate-chip ice cream cone from stupidly expensive Bi-Rite, on my way home. Coming out of the store, I walked right into a guy in his twenties carrying flowers, and wondered if they were happy flowers or sad flowers, I’m sorry flowers or I love you flowers.

  “Hi, Violet,” I said into the phone when I called her back. I licked one side of the ice cream to keep it from dripping onto my hand and felt a distinct chill, even though March in San Francisco is warmer than July.

  “Hi, Jo,” she chirped back. “Do you want to get Nick on the phone?” The news was bad. If it were good, Nick wouldn’t have to get on the phone. “Not right now. He’s stuck in meetings all day. We can keep going. Just us.”

  “Okay! Well, I was surprised by your results. You have the genetic mutation.”

  I wasn’t surprised. Ever since she said the chance was 50/50 I’d expected it. Hadn’t I known it deep in my bones?

  My mother and I have very little in common, physically at least. From the start I was a carbon copy of my father, with my dark hair and dark eyes. My mother would laugh about it, but I actually think it bothered her a little bit.

  “This child couldn’t possibly belong to me,” she joked when I was little.

  My dad and I have the same mannerisms. We scratch at our faces and pull on our earlobes when we get nervous. We each take four packets of Sweet’N Low in our coffee, a fact most people find disgusting. We read books the same way, furiously, often in a single sitting, as though we were in a race against time. In a way, I suppose he was. We have the same jowly cheeks.

  Both our lips are a little off center and our left eyes slightly more round than our right.

  “You’re a strange case. Most people show symptoms by the time they’re twenty,” Violet said.

  “My dad didn’t.” I thought about how badly my dad still wanted to live, despite being trapped inside a body that constantly fought him. Every time I talked to him he had a new scheme, a plan to find a transplant for whatever organ had newly begun to fail him due to complications from his muscular dystrophy, complications that no one could predict. Sick people, dying people, don’t want to talk about being sick or dying. They want to talk about being strong and alive, and you have to talk to them about those things even if it breaks your heart every time you have to lie.

  “I know. So we don’t know what to expect. There’s no telling how it will present.”

  How it will present. How it will present. The words skidded around in my head, making less sense each time I repeated them to myself. I knew they were a kind way of saying, We don’t know how much longer you will be able to use your legs. I thanked her and scheduled an appointment to come in and meet with the doctor at a later date to figure out how the disease would progress.

  There’s a kitten café in downtown San Francisco at the corner of Gough and Rose Streets. At any given time they have ten adoptable cats roaming around while they serve strong Japanese tea. I walked there, paid my $15 entry fee, and let a chubby tabby climb all over me while I cried quietly to myself.

  A man wearing a T-shirt that said “It’s Meow or Never” looked at me quizzically but thankfully never said anything.

  I waited to call Nick until I got home.

  “I have it.”

  “Oh, sweetheart. I love you very much. And I don’t think it changes our lives, at least not for a long time.”

  I stared down at the dog. Lady Piazza looked back at me with no comprehension of what was being talked about on the phone. She wagged her tail and looked over her shoulder to suggest we go to the backyard to play ball.

  “It’s frustrating. They know nothing. They know less than nothing,” I moaned. The uncertainty was the worst part of it. I could live more easily with a clear-cut diagnosis, one that said, You have X years before Y terrible thing will happen. After Y terrible thing happens, this is what your life will look like. That I could handle. The unknown would destroy me.

  “I think we have reason to feel optimistic about when it will happen and how it will happen. You’re healthy and strong and there’s new science every day. It doesn’t fundamentally change anything. It only puts a certain perspective on life. Let me finish up here and I’ll be home really soon.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  For some reason this made me think of the first time Nick told me he loved me.

  We’d been dating only two months, and I was the maid of honor in a friend’s wedding. Nick, being the new guy, brought the entire bridal party coffee and doughnuts as we got dolled up the morning of the wedding. “Love you,” he said as he headed out the door, leaving us to be spray-tanned and spackled. I sipped my coffee while my friends erupted like a band of harpies.

  “Did he just say, ‘I love you’?”

  “You hardly know him!”

  “No,” I said, slightly embarrassed. “He must have said something else.”

  But that is what he said, the first of many.

  I hung up the phone and paced the house from the living room down the long hallway into our bedroom and into the second bedroom, filled with summer clothes, an untuned guitar, and a broken Nintendo, the room we kept trying not to call a baby’s room.

  I poured a generous glass of wine and began cooking Cajun catfish and brussels sprouts for dinner.

  I Skyped one more time with Nick before he left the office.

  [3:09:44 PM] Johanna Piazza: Hi

  [3:09:54 PM] Nick Aster: Hi love

  [3:12:30 PM] Johanna Piazza: Are you really ok with all this? Are things OK?

  [3:17:05 PM] Nick Aster: It’s just one moment of our long lives together.

  [3:33:04 PM] Johanna Piazza: I think my biggest fear is still that you will look at me like I am broken

  [3:33:59 PM] Nick Aster: That’s enough of that :-) I love you sweet girl. You’re my darling, that’s just how it is

  [3:40:13 PM] Johanna Piazza: What do we do now?

  [3:41:36 PM] Nick Aster: We live our lives.

  The next day Nick went out and bought me my first tennis racket and a pair of very serious hiking boots, the kind of hiking boots Cheryl Strayed wears in Wild when she takes on the Pacific Crest Trail, the kind you’d wear if you really did want to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, the kind that give you confidence-building blisters.

  We were going to live our lives.

  Love yourself first, and everything else falls in line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.

  —LUCILLE BALL

  A seventy-year-old Israeli woman was feeling me up. I’d been applying the Dead Sea’s curative mud gingerly to my arms and feet with delicate pats and circular motions.

  But I was doing it all wrong. Clearly I was doing it all wrong, because two elderly women approached me and, without asking, scooped up a pile of the mud and patted it directly onto my breasts above my bikini top. I looked up at the “beach” above us. It was more of a swamp filled with loud families with coolers and faded umbrellas. Dads and grandpas all wore Speedos, with their hefty guts protruding toward Jordan across the sea. Empty potato chip bags and plastic Coke bottles clung to the shoreline.

  According to the many companies that sell products made of Dead Sea mud, the murky, salty mixture is a kind of panacea, curing everything from respiratory diseases to acne to arthritis. I only wanted to coat myself in enough of it to take that obligatory picture of myself floating in the Dead Sea with mud on my face so that I could send it to Nick. It would be a picture that clearly conveyed a sense of relaxation. I’m floating. I’m muddy. Look how untroubled and peaceful I am.

  “Good for your skin,” the bigger of the two women, who had the sturdy authority of Bea Arthur as Dorothy in The Golden Girls, said in Hebrew, allowing the sludge to drip through her prun
ey fingers. A nearby English speaker translated for me. “You’ll glow. You’re young. You should have nice skin.”

  I’d taken a bus across the ancient Judaean Desert, below the Ha-He’etekim cliff and past the Qumran caves, where the famous Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, to end up here, the lowest point on earth, the Dead Sea. I’d been expecting to recline and float in the dense, salty water, surrendering the stress of the past few months to one of the holiest places on the planet or, at the very least, to take a picture that conveyed this. I hadn’t been primed for a chat, and so at first this intrusion into my space was irritating.

  I want to not feel my body! I screamed in my head. I want to pretend it doesn’t exist for just an hour. I want to not worry about it. I wanted my sadness and fear and pain and worry to sink into the biblical lake. But these women would not be deterred. Plus, they were kind and gentle and reminded me enough of my big Irish grandma that I let them pat mud into my armpits and the ticklish creases between my thighs and hips. Both of them were covered from head to toe in the brown gunk, which was now drying, cracking, and turning lighter in some places, giving them the appearance of creatures who had emerged from the depths of a swamp. Their teeth took on an anomalous whiteness within their wide smiles. Each of them wore a shiny gold wedding ring that managed to catch the sun despite the layers of mud.

  Since we’d become so intimately acquainted in such an expedient manner, I thought it was only polite for me to make small talk, and so I asked if they had any advice for a long and happy marriage.

  The bigger one of the two laughed. Her whole body shook and flecks of mud flew off her shoulders as they rocked back and forth. She looked at me and grabbed her substantial belly, one hand on each side of it, shaking it up and down. When she said something in Hebrew, my new translator friend chuckled.

  “She says to make sure you feed him.” This was a common refrain from the older generation in most cultures, a demographic of women clearly worried that no one was properly cooking for men anymore, fearful that all of the men were about to waste away due to women who used their ovens for shoe storage. I reassured her.

  “I recently learned how to cook beer-can chicken, and I took a cheese-making class in Denmark.”

  The stout woman screwed up her face and made a rocking motion with her pelvis. My friend sniggered and translated again. “She says her advice is better: Don’t stop having sex with your husband, even when you get really old.”

  The first woman lifted up my ponytail to make sure I had enough coverage on the nape of my neck. “Take care of yourself, neshama.” Neshama, I’d learn during this trip, translates loosely to “my sweet one” or “my darling.” “Take care of yourself.”

  “I’ll try,” I said and walked off into the sea to float alone. On my flight over to Israel I’d been caught off guard by the flight attendant’s safety announcement. Safety announcements are usually just the soundtrack to the turf war with your seatmate over the shared armrest. But, for some reason, this time I was listening. “In the event of a decompression, an oxygen mask will automatically appear in front of you. Place the mask firmly over your nose and mouth and breathe normally. If you are traveling with a child or someone who needs assistance, secure your own mask first before assisting someone else.”

  Why did I feel like this flight attendant was speaking directly to me?

  Secure your own mask first before assisting someone else. Take care of yourself. If you don’t take care of yourself, then what use are you to anyone else?

  With the past year’s focus on learning to be married, building a home, building a future, thinking about planning a family, and taking care of an ill parent from afar, it had been easy to slip into crisis-management mode all the time, automatic pilot where I fell asleep due to exhaustion and woke with a pit of angst in my stomach over what needed to be accomplished next. It made me feel a certain kinship with my mom. Over the past decade, as my dad had gotten sicker and been increasingly confined to the house, I’d watched my mother place everyone else’s needs ahead of her own. I was certain this was one of the things that had contributed to her having a nervous breakdown in the months before our wedding.

  The last time I’d been home to see my parents had been a particularly painful visit. It was right before I’d been diagnosed with the muscular dystrophy, and my dad’s doctors warned that his health was deteriorating more quickly than usual. His liver had failed. Nick and I both flew out to Philadelphia to see my parents and try to help my mom figure out how to manage their dwindling finances. A few years earlier, my father had taken a second mortgage on their house without telling my mother. The money was gone and he couldn’t remember how he’d spent it. My mother’s mental health was so bad she could no longer work. They had no income coming in and mom knew nothing about their savings or investments. My dad was only awake to talk about it for a couple hours a day. At my parents’ house I sat in an armchair next to my dad’s hospital bed. He couldn’t lift his hands to feed himself, so my mom sat on the other side of the bed, spooning soft cheese into his mouth. He stuck his tongue out to receive it like a small child. Most of his teeth had fallen out because his gums could no longer hold them. His entire body was so swollen, he looked like he was covered in a blanket of himself.

  My mother’s hands shook from nerves and anxiety as she lifted the spoon to my father’s mouth. It was as though I were watching a performance that took place several times a day, one in which the actors had long ago ceased to put in the effort to pretend. For my mom, caring for my father had become like caring for an infant—frantic, uncertain, exhausting, and often gross—but with none of the unconditional love a mother has for her child.

  I always loved the story of how John and Tracey Piazza met. It’s the one story of my parents as a couple where it sounds like they were truly happy. My mother was a striking debutante from Denver with corn silk–blond hair cascading down to her butt. She grew up riding horses imported from South America and hiking in the Rocky Mountains. She went to Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, with no ambitions beyond finding a husband, preferably a doctor or a lawyer. My dad was the scrappy and brilliant son of a truck driver and a nurse from Scranton, Pennsylvania. One of five kids, he hitchhiked his way to college, also at Drake, and paid his own tuition as a bartender at the campus bar, the Doghouse.

  He met my eighteen-year-old mom in the bar on her very first day of college, fresh out of a Delta Gamma sorority meeting. Dad was very handsome, like Al Pacino in The Godfather, with a hippie vibe, black hair, mysterious eyes, and a serious jaw—nothing like the boys back home in the Rockies. He said she was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. My mom later joked that was because his hometown, Scranton, wasn’t known for pretty girls. As family legend goes, he charmed her with dirty jokes and plied her with strong margaritas before convincing her to come back to his apartment to go swimming in his pool. With a flick of her silky blond hair and a giggle, she agreed.

  Only once she was in the water did she realize my dad had brought her to trespass in someone else’s pool. When I first heard the story, I loved the fun and frivolity, but looking back, I saw it as a metaphor for a forty-year marriage based on half-truths, paper cuts that became gashes, and broken promises.

  At home with me four decades after that first date, my mother sat on their back porch with a faraway look in her eyes. This bout of depression had transported her to a place that felt very far away from me.

  I tried to hold her hand, but she winced. This wasn’t the mom I was used to.

  Before she got sick and before I met Nick, Mom would take the train from Philadelphia to New York to visit me for a few hours almost every Sunday. We’d have lunch at a grungy diner across the street from my apartment. She was my biggest cheerleader back then, particularly on the mornings where I was slightly hungover and nursing a bad breakup. “I’m not worried about you,” she’d say, shoveling eggs and home fries into her mouth, her diet of the month always put on hiatus when she visited me. “You’r
e going to find the perfect person for you one day, Jo. I know it in my bones.”

  Now I had found the perfect person, but my cheerleader had misplaced her pom-poms. She was deflated. I wanted to tell her I was still disappointed that she hadn’t been a bigger presence at our wedding. She was the one thing missing from that day. In the weeks leading up to the wedding she was bedridden with depression and wasn’t sure she’d be well enough to make it to the ceremony. I didn’t see her until I walked down the aisle. It was Nick’s mom, Patsy, who came to see me in my bridal suite, hugged me, wished me luck, and gave me a pair of earrings she’d asked the jeweler to make me just for my wedding day.

  It wasn’t my mom’s fault. She was sick, but I resented her for it all the same. I wanted her to snap out of it, to be the mom in the diner, my cheerleader, my friend, and then I felt selfish for not having more compassion.

  “I’m sorry you’re going through this,” I said. I looked at her matted hair and the dried skin peeling off the backs of her hands. The truly unfair difference between my dad’s disease and my mother’s was that his was so apparent, so physically imposing. Because everyone could see he was sick, they treated him like a sick person. But mental illness takes cover inside a normal-looking body. No one tended to my mother or treated her with kid gloves, because it was easy to dismiss her depression as a choice, even for me.

  “Are you happy for me?” I asked her, regretting the words the second they left my lips. What if she said no?

  “I like Nick,” she said in a remote voice. “Your father and I were children when we got married. We didn’t want the same things. We fought all the time. We fought so much.” I could see the tears welling up in her eyes and I reached out to put my hand on her arm as gently as I could.

  “You made a better choice than I did. I lost myself in our marriage and I don’t know how to get it back,” she said. It was the first real thing we’d talked about in more than a year. I don’t want to end up like you, I thought, feeling terrible that the words had even entered my brain.