The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel

by Dawson, Maddie

  “Are they pissing on that bush?” Tony asks. He starts to pull the car over.

  “No, no. It looks like they’ve got a magnifying glass. This is very good, scientific exploration they’re doing here. No worries,” says Rosie.

  “I just got to drive by another time,” he says, turning down a side street.

  “This is what you do, all the time then?” she says.

  “Yeah. I drive around the block a few times, and then I park sometimes across the street and eat a sandwich and just watch him to make sure everything’s okay.”

  “This is, what? Parenting by car?” she says.

  He pulls up across the street from the house. “Too bad we don’t have a sandwich.”

  “Really, Tony,” she says after another few minutes have gone by. “You have to get a handle on this custody stuff with Annie. You need a lawyer and a plan. This is ridiculous. You can’t just watch your family through the car window. You can’t.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?”

  “We’ve got to get you out of the car. You need a regular visitation schedule, where he comes to you.”

  “How’m I gonna get Dena to do that without pissing her off?”

  “Maybe you can’t. Maybe lawyers can do it, though. Whatever. You just have to.”

  “You can be my lawyer. You handled the first thing great. Now we just need to do it again.”

  “You know what? I’m gonna invite them to Thanksgiving dinner. In fact—here’s a great idea—let’s you and me have a huge Thanksgiving thing, invite everybody we know, decorate the house, cook a bunch of food, have a big blowout. Really! We’ll go for broke.”

  “Really?” He looks at her sideways.

  “Yeah. Let’s do it. I’ve never cooked Thanksgiving dinner before. Jonathan hated the whole idea. Oh, wait. Feel right here. The baby’s kicking.”

  He reaches his hand over, and it’s large and warm and when he moves it around, searching for the kicks, she almost moans. “What’s the dude got against Thanksgiving?”

  She pulls herself together. “Oh, I don’t know. Something about how he doesn’t want the American culture dictating anything about what he’s supposed to be doing or thinking, up to and including eating turkey and mashed potatoes,” she says. “Really, though, it’s about how he hated having to dress up and act special for anything. Called it enforced fun.”

  He looks at her and shakes his head. “Well, didn’t you have a say? Wow! That was a big kick. I felt it.” He moves his hands away.

  “I guess I did. I mean, I could have. But what fun is it if you always have to drag the other person to do what you want?”

  He shrugs. “What fun is it if you never get to have it your way?”

  She gives him a pointed look. “You may have had some experience with how sometimes it seems easier to just give in than to argue.”

  He looks down at his hands. “Ah, yes.”

  “Yeah. That’s why we’ll have them for Thanksgiving and we’ll be so good and kind and love them so much that they can’t say no. The charm offensive.”

  It’s supposed to be just a quick pop-in visit for a weight and blood pressure check, but then Rosie remembers that Dr. Stinson doesn’t know yet about Jonathan’s conversion to fatherhood and family, as she’s come to think of it, so she tells her the whole thing, and how this means she might end up giving birth in California instead, and would that be a problem?

  “Well, you can give birth anywhere, but I’d prefer it obviously if you were here, where I can monitor things,” she says. “I like to see my patients through to the end. Just a personal preference of mine. Why doesn’t he just come here for the birth? Why do you have to be the one who travels?”

  So then she starts explaining. Or trying to. Museum. Commitments. Trying to make things easier for him. He’s always been a little unsure about things, so if she can do this one thing to make it easier …

  Dr. Stinson stares at her. “Rosie, you’re the one having the baby.”

  “I know, but by then my grandmother will be in the nursing home, and Jonathan feels that we should start our new life together. He actually wants me to come now.”

  “Well, that’s frankly more sane from a physical standpoint than going at the very end,” says Dr. Stinson.

  “But I can’t leave my grandmother right now.”

  “But, playing devil’s advocate here, is it going to be easier to leave her when she’s just gone into a nursing home?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know what to do!”

  Dr. Stinson sighs. “Well, whatever. People do strange things when they’re pregnant. I can’t tell you how many of my patients move in that last month. Usually not across the country, but somewhere.”

  Then she checks Rosie’s blood pressure and frowns.

  “It’s high. Probably because of what we were talking about. I want you to rest here for a bit and then we’ll take it again,” she says. “Sit here and think nice thoughts. And drink some water.”

  In ten minutes, though, when the nurse comes to take it again, it’s still high. Maybe higher.

  They do a urinalysis to see if there’s protein in the urine, which would apparently mean she has preeclampsia, which is very bad, but when that’s negative, Dr. Stinson just tells her she has to relax a little more.

  “Should that adorable guy in the waiting room come in and cheer you up?” she asks.

  “You know about him?”

  “Yeah. He’s been asking about you. He’s had the nursing staff laughing out at the desk.”

  “Yeah, sure. Send him in,” says Rosie.

  He comes trotting back, his eyes shining. “It’s been so long since I’ve been back in one of these rooms,” he says. “Wow, look at all this stuff. You know? If you were from another planet and landed in here not knowing anything, you’d probably think this was all for torture.” He indicates all the instruments, the speculums, the little hammer they hit your knee with, the huge light.

  “You can’t make me nervous now,” she warns him. “If my blood pressure doesn’t come down, I don’t know what kind of punishment I’ll have to have.”

  He wanders around the exam room with his hands in his pockets, making faces at all the equipment. And then he goes over to the shelf where the birth control device samples are on display and picks up the diaphragm.

  “Whoa, look at this,” he says, and makes a little hand puppet out of it. It reads aloud from People magazine and dances around a bit. And then—hearing footsteps—it flies over and jumps back on its shelf just as the nurse returns to take her blood pressure again.

  Which is now fine.

  They walk out to the car, in the gathering darkness, not saying a word. And when he goes to unlock her car door, he takes her head in his hands and kisses her again. “Tony …” she says, but then she leans against the car and just lets it happen, knowing that she shouldn’t, but not wanting to think about that right now. The day has been too complicated, and somehow these kisses feel lifesaving.

  She gets into the passenger seat, and he goes around to the driver’s seat, and she doesn’t let herself look at him until they’re all the way home.

  Which, coincidentally, she decides, is also the moment that will kick off the first day of the rest of her life, the day when she really, really, really gets her life under control.

  [twenty-two]

  By the time Thanksgiving comes around, Rosie is huge with plans. She lies in bed in the mornings, making lists and menus, seating charts, invitations. She wants cranberry relish; fluffy dinner rolls with whipped butter; a roasted turkey with chestnut stuffing. Not only that, she wants faces around the table, lots of them, all illuminated by candlelight. She wants conversation, someone to say the blessing, the good china and crystal, the “little table” where the kids will congregate, and slabs of pumpkin pie with whipped cream piled high.

  Greta says she’s crazy to think this way. Thanksgiving is a migraine of a holiday, she says. No one’s family behaves. Nobody e
ven agrees on the best way to thicken gravy or whether to cook the turkey right side down or right side up, or whether to just chuck the whole thing and go out to dinner. Most people dislike the cranberries you so heroically prepare, and vegetarians (her two older children included) want something called Tofurky instead of the real thing. Men huddle around the television, while women do all the work. People are expected to iron tablecloths, even though gravy is probably going to be spilled on them.

  “Great!” says Rosie. She wants it—all of it.

  The two mommies agree to come, because it’s just that kind of fever dream: everyone can come. She invites Carmen and Tomas, from her class, after they happen to mention that they aren’t going to be having a Thanksgiving celebration. Then George says he was hoping to bring Louise out of the nursing home for the day because it’s so sad to have her there alone, and Rosie hugs him and says of course she can come, too. The next day, shopping at Edge of the Woods, getting some Tofurky for Greta’s kids, she has the best idea she’s ever had in her life. She can’t imagine why she didn’t think of it before. She asks Leila to come for Thanksgiving, too. After all, Tony will adore her, she’s so pretty and young and pregnant, and that will make Thanksgiving so worthwhile, just to see him light up in love. And Leila will probably fall in love with Milo right away, and the two mommies will approve, and when Rosie goes off to California, no one will have to be sad.

  “You can plan and plan, and something won’t work out,” Greta warns. “You know that, right? And when that happens, and you find you want to drive your car through the dining room wall and take out the entire guest list, just remember that you have to take a deep breath, and everyone is fine, and we all still love you. Okay?”

  “Okay,” says Rosie. What she’s thinking is that she’s got Greta down for two pies, an apple and a chocolate cream, and that Carmen is bringing a relish dish as an appetizer, and Tomas is bringing some wine and beer, and Leila—what is Leila bringing? Not that she has to bring anything. Rosie has been stocking up on vegetables and baking bread and making two other pies, and she’s pretty much gotten everything figured out. She’ll make garlic mashed potatoes. With the skins on. And green beans with almonds instead of those fried onion things. This—putting on parties—just may have been her calling all along, and she wishes that people would stop warning her that everything just might go wrong. It won’t.

  “I’m also doing a little bit of matchmaking,” she confides to Greta. “I think that Tony needs a girlfriend, and I’ve picked Leila, from Edge of the Woods. She’s pregnant, and her baby daddy is some kind of rat.”

  Greta stares at her. “More evidence, I’m afraid, that you have gone insane. You can’t run a dating service for pregnant women.”

  “I’m not,” Rosie says, laughing. “I’m running a dating service for Tony, and the woman I picked just happens to be pregnant.”

  “You know, I’ve been meaning to ask you why he’s still living there.”

  “Because—because he just is, that’s all. Why shouldn’t he be?”

  “Well, didn’t he supposedly come to take care of Soapie? And now you’re there, so why doesn’t he go back to his regularly scheduled life?”

  “I don’t know. I guess he’s just between things in his life right now. His wife hooked up with another woman, and he’s kind of in need of family. He’s waiting.”

  “Oh. Drama,” says Greta. “Why is there always drama?”

  “We’re all just waiting in that house,” says Rosie. “We’ve become sort of a weird, makeshift, temporary family. All of us are people on the way to somewhere else.”

  Greta looks at her a little too long, starts to say something, and then closes her mouth firmly, for which Rosie is divinely grateful.

  Rosie gets up at five on Thanksgiving morning to start the turkey. It’s dark and cold in the kitchen, but she puts on the teakettle and basks in the quiet. How this kitchen used to intimidate her, this room in which she and Soapie made their TV dinners and then devoured them at the kitchen table once the beep had sounded. It was never home. It was the room that seemed to epitomize the coldness that enveloped her life with Soapie.

  She catches a glimpse of herself in the dark window, her hair all piled up on her head, her face rounder than it has ever been, her eyes so black with excitement they look almost triangular. Oh my God, just look at me, she thinks, standing here in this crazy, temporary life.

  Soon enough, act two will begin—but for now, in this day, she can stand off to the side, watching all the players line up for her Thanksgiving show. Later, she watches Tony, dressed up and not wearing his baseball cap, setting the table and getting the extra chairs in place, and George hovering so sweetly over Louise, who is sturdy and smiling, and willing to simply sit in a chair and watch everything going on. Periodically Louise claps her hands, such as when Milo and the two mommies arrive with a flurry of coats and bags and confusion. And then she claps again when Milo, jumping up and down exactly like there’s an invisible pogo stick underneath him, loudly exclaims that he wants to give them a special tour of the house, to show them the room with the fireplace where his dad sleeps, and the special bathroom with the tub with “cool, claw feet” and then outside where he and his daddy slept in a tent one time.

  The two mommies keep reaching over and touching Milo as if to calm him down, but also smiling—Rosie is pleased to see—in that way parents do when they’re really quite happy to see their kid excited. Dena, plump and gorgeous, looks nervous, like somebody is going to ask her for her credentials soon, and Rosie, who knows just how that feels, goes over and thanks her for coming, and tries to steer her into a conversation about how terrific Milo is.

  But just then Soapie, who was not at all sure that having such a huge Thanksgiving was something anyone needed, erupts in some kind of minor diatribe over how it’s too cold in the house with the door opening and closing, and then, in a non sequitur, she calmly says that nursing homes may not get much right, but they do make people like Louise appreciate how life on the outside is a goddamned cabaret. “And this, my dears, is my last Thanksgiving on the outside, so it’s a cabaret for me, too!”

  Rosie leans down to Dena and says cheerfully, “Oh dear. The old people may have forgotten to bring their insanity filters today. You may have to be called in professionally at some point.”

  And Dena laughs.

  Carmen arrives with Tomas, and after they get introduced all around, they are happy to go on the tour that Milo is confidently leading, and although Rosie can’t remember if she truly cleaned the upstairs bathroom to withstand all the scrutiny it’s probably getting, she decides that’s just another thing this costumed, play-acting version of herself doesn’t have time to care about.

  “And this is the rug with flowers on it so it doesn’t show the dirt, Rosie said, and this is where they keep the towels!” she hears Milo crow from upstairs, and she goes off to baste the turkey. “And sometimes my dad told me there are mice in the attic, and you can hear them at night!”

  Soapie says, “Did we hire that child to sell our house or something?” and Tony laughs and starts passing around drinks. It’s alcohol time.

  The party really gets started once Greta and her crowd arrive. They come marching across the lawn in their finest dress clothes, Greta holding one pie and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Sandrine, holding the other. Joe is checking his phone, and the three younger kids—all mop-haired boys looking as though they’d been recently chastened, walk with their heads down, kicking at clods of grass. Tony, who is being the host, flings open the front door and introduces himself to a startled Joe, who may not have been informed about there being a man of the house. He shakes hands with Tony and then looks Rosie over, as if she’s a medical anomaly, and smacks his forehead.

  “How did this happen to you, my sweet little flower?” he says, kissing her. “Are we to organize the brotherhood into going out to California and teaching that cad a lesson in personal responsibility?”

  “Oh, he�
��s aware.”

  “Well. Perhaps all we need to do is write to the cad in question and let him know that a hunk of manhood is now hosting your dinner parties, and he might want to get home and take care of that,” Joe says, and Greta looks embarrassed and says, “No, no, Joe, now stop it.”

  “I’m here taking care of Mrs. Baldwin-Kelley,” says Tony, and Joe claps him on the back.

  “But he does attend amniocentesis sessions and doctor visits,” says Greta. “So he’s already better than seventy-five percent of the expectant dads out there. And I hear that—”

  “Oh, please, stop it,” says Rosie. “Come in and have a drink.”

  Greta tries to force her kids to sit in the living room and make polite conversation with the adults over the appetizers—even the adults who are not quite so mentally intact—but finally it becomes clear by their droopiness that the children have lost the will to live, and Rosie releases them to the outside. Sandrine grabs her iPhone and scampers upstairs, and the little boys file outside with Milo. Fortunately, it’s sunny, and it’s not long before Rosie sees them running around the yard, Milo leading the pack as though he’s been anointed head sled dog.

  All their sports jackets are in the dirt. She can’t say why this makes her happy.

  Things don’t start to fall apart until much later.

  First, Greta goes upstairs and finds Sandrine cross-legged on the bathroom floor, smoking a joint, and the two of them have a slight freakout everybody can hear from downstairs, until finally Joe has to go upstairs and separate the two of them. (Is it wrong that Rosie smiles, remembering when it was Greta and Rosie smoking the joints and Greta’s mother freaking out?)

  Then Carmen gets a text from her mother in Spain that makes her cry great, heaving sobs. Her collie, the dog she’d grown up with, has died in his sleep—and nothing anybody can say helps. People start telling their own dog stories, which makes Carmen cry harder, but then Rosie realizes it’s the good kind of crying—the crying you do when people are being kind to you when you’re upset. One of the children is sent upstairs to bring down another box of tissues. “Not Sandrine!” says Greta, and that makes everybody laugh.