Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  The key grinds into the lock and I leap from the couch. Like a dog, it doesn’t matter whether Jenny has been gone for ten minutes or ten hours, my heart races to see her again. She comes in and puts her bag down next to the doorway, notices the lights are still on, and then notices me, standing there. She assesses, her eyes blinking another Morse message easily read.

  “You didn’t need to wait up,” she rasps.

  “Where were you?”

  “I was with Jonah.” She walks past me to the kitchen, fixes herself a glass of water. “We were working on his novel. He really values my take, Fenn. I like editing him, because you tell authors to do something and they just nod their head and then they don’t even try, or they do but they fuck it up. Jonah just takes a note and runs with it and makes the piece better. I also picked up two freelance gigs today, so you can keep your plasma another month.”

  “It’s almost morning.” My voice sharpens to an edge I don’t like, and neither does she.

  “We lost track of time.”

  Jenny stares into her glass, so I wait until she raises her head again and looks me in the eye. Then, I tell her, “I’m not stupid, Jenny.”

  She puts the glass down, places both palms flat on the counter, grounding herself to brace for a storm. “Do you want to know?”

  I stammer, “Just stop treating me like I’m an idiot.”

  “Do you want to know, Fenn? Do you want me to tell you?”

  “Stop it.”

  “I can give it words. Is that what you want?”

  This is supposed to escalate further. We’re supposed to shout here. I’m supposed to get very, very angry and make demands. Threats are supposed to be made. Doors are supposed to be slammed.

  That’s not what I want. Jenny came home late tonight. She was helping a fellow writer. Not even a friend, just another writer. I turn and go to bed. Jenny showers and then joins me, and we sleep, her spooning me, until noon the same day.

  Jenny loves me more because she chooses to love me. Every day, she goes against the instincts in her being and chooses to love me. For me, there’s no choice in the matter. I have as much control over loving Jenny as I do over breathing—to stop would mean death.

  Five nights later, Jenny comes home early, crying. It’s not full tears, just a hiccupping, short-breath sort of crying. I try to find out what’s wrong, but she locks herself in the bathroom for twenty minutes and sobs. When she comes out she is composed once again, not even a trace of puffiness under her eyes. “I’m so unhappy,” she says plaintively.

  “How do we make you happy again?” I toss that off casual, a gentle smile. I don’t expect there to be an answer, but Jenny gives two.

  “I want us to move,” she starts.

  “Our lease is up next month. Done.” Easy fix. We’ll find somewhere equally affordable or we’ll dip into savings a bit. We don’t need to buy a house, no need to have savings if there’s nothing big we’re saving for. “We’ll start looking for a new place tonight.”

  “Thank you. And I want something else.”

  “Anything.”

  “I want it to just be us for a while. Please don’t audition for anything. I’m not going to join any more writing groups. I just want to spend my time with you, all of it. Just us together.”

  Christmas comes early this year. “I’d love that.”

  “Thank you.”

  I stroke her hair for a while. She presses her head to my stomach. She loves more in our relationship, and my love for her is legion. Hers must be strong enough to melt the world.

  Jenny finds a third thing that will make her happy. She lays it out for me like spreading blueprints across a drafting table. “After we move into a new place, we should have a baby.”

  Paul Fenniger

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  1:43 PM

  When I finally reach the Bedford Street platform, I regard it with awe, like the first time I rode the New York City subway. From Port Authority, fresh off the bus, a cliché in a plaid shirt and jeans. Jenny and I descended at Forty-second Street, and she vamped the one line from the song that she remembered.

  On the avenue I’m taking you to …

  Over and over again, first under her breath, timorous humming, then brassier and brassier. Jenny will immerse herself in anything; nothing intimidates her.

  I had never seen so many people, and this was an average Wednesday in Port Authority, a typical day with people coming and going. The entire population of Cadott standing in one room; it boggled my mind. Every minute a new superlative—this building I’m in is taller than any in Cadott. This street is longer than any highway in Cadott. It was like Madison, the big, bustling, dangerous city, with its office buildings. Only more so. This, this is a city. New York is a metropolis, a word I connected only to Superman comics.

  We bought fare cards. Jenny sulked over that, her first disappointment in New York. She wanted a subway token, but they had discontinued them. I learned that later. That first day I didn’t want to seem like a tourist, or like the rube I was, so: no questions. Narrow my eyes. Act like I’ve been here before. Pound the “aw jeez” out of my accent. Jenny already had. She adapted before we came, studying stereotypes of New Yorkers and then gradually working them into her personality, like taking on an acting role for a show that never shuttered. Walking faster, speaking at a harsher, speedier clip in a voice so distant from what I knew that she sounded almost British. I got her drunk in the first few months to hear her old voice, that’s how far she took it, until gradually all the levels evened out and Jenny became Jenny again.

  That first subway ride we stood on the platform and waited for the A train. It seemed famous, as if we should ask the train itself for its autograph. I stood back from the platform edge, but Jenny put the tips of her toes on the pebbled warning strip, looking at me over her shoulder and poking her tongue through her teeth.

  On the ave-eh-nue I’m taking you to …

  The train scared the show out of her. She took three quick steps back, ran into me. It came in so fast, I couldn’t imagine how it would stop, but it did. It slowed with a squeal and stopped, fitting the length of the platform perfectly. The doors opened. Jenny hesitated. “Let’s get on,” I said to her, reverently, as if the greatest adventure was beyond those doors. Truth be told, I was worried that if we were waiting on the platform when the train pulled away, our tickets would be invalid and I’d have to buy two more. God bless the verdant, they keep New York young.

  The A train was packed, and once it started Jenny and I were both thrown back, nearly off our feet. She grabbed on to a man’s shirt and he caught her, chuckled at her clumsiness. “So sorry,” she said in her odd Mary Poppins voice. We gripped a metal pole until our knuckles were white, our bags tucked between our feet, shifting our hips whenever the door opened and people got off, or people came in, nudged us in one direction or another, stared at us because we didn’t belong yet.

  It took weeks before the subway lost its magic for me. Go down some stairs at any time of day or night and you can go anywhere. Even after they raised the rates, and when they raised them again, and again after that, I didn’t begrudge them their money. Anywhere.

  Even to Brooklyn. Especially to and from Brooklyn, shuttling across the river, day in and day out.

  *

  • • •

  At Bedford I climb the steps to get off the tracks, set just off to the side in the gully. A giant fan roars next to the turnstiles, so I stand in front of it for a minute, let the hot air dry me off. At street level people have been enlisted to steer me up Bedford Avenue and into McCarren Park. These are the helpers, and I thank every person who moves me along, reciting their instructions and then giving me a gentle shove. The entire street has been shut down to traffic—we can walk in the middle of it, and we do, like zombies, blinking hard against the sun, all the brighter for our having been in the tunnel. It doesn’t feel any cooler up here. I stare to my left, toward the city, seeking out some sign, so
me mushroom cloud or giant lizard, but I can’t see anything in the sky. Everything above me is a blue so blue it hurts.

  I’m welcomed at the park entrance by a man with coolers of bottled water. He puts one in each of my hands. “If you need medical attention, walk behind me about twenty yards.” He gestures with a bottle where some tents have been set up, providing shade for people lying down underneath.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “You’re the thousandth person to ask me. I’ve heard flooding.”

  That seems unlikely. “It hasn’t rained.”

  “We had a volunteer EMT here earlier, and he told me that there are these pockets underground that collect seawater, like behind cement walls, even really far inland, because it seeps, and today one of them just burst. They’re supposed to be everywhere. These pockets. But that’s just what I’ve heard. Mayor is giving a press conference at six.”

  “It’s not terrorism, though?”

  He squints back at the city, surveying a field. “Maybe. Lots of people leaving the city for a flood. Whole lot of guesses, that’s all. Electricity has been all come and go, and cell service is down.”

  I take out my phone, forgot I had it this entire time. Not that it was much use in the tunnel. Couldn’t call Jenny from the tunnel. Couldn’t text. All it would have been good for down there was to play Sudoku while I walked. This thought is so funny to me that I start laughing. I raise my phone into the air and start laughing and the water guy starts laughing with me, but I keep laughing long after he stops, and then some more after that, big heaving belly laughs that I keep laughing and laughing and laughing until my head hits the ground and this bright sunny world goes black.

  Michael Gould

  Seven Months Ago: December 30, 2009

  While Jackson speaks in an alphabet comprised entirely of shrieks, Rebecca answers him with the utmost seriousness. Everything in agreement. “We are going to Fairway. You’re very observant to pick that up.” She sounds like she’s speaking to a hair-trigger dictator.

  When we pass the liquor store, a few blocks before the supermarket, I ask Rebecca, “What would you think of serving mulled wine?” She thinks it’s a splendid idea but elects to wait outside, in the winter chill, with our son in his stroller, while I run in to get something red. While the clerk rings me up, Rebecca sits on the front step, rocking Jackson back and forth, holding a conversation. She doesn’t see me through the window watching her bond with him, watching her solidify those emotional ties. It swells the heart, but there’s a tinge of jealousy as well. There are a thousand reasons he’ll want to kill me and marry her, but the main one is that he simply loves her more.

  I cringe at the Fairway lot. It’s full, which means bringing a stroller into the market will be like packing a Saint Bernard onto an elevator. Jackson, of course, doesn’t care. It’s his father who will get the looks of scorn. “Hey.” I get out that much and only that much of protest before Rebecca hands off the stroller and yanks out a cart. She relinquishes parenting duties to me from produce to checkout. Along with the kitchen, the supermarket is Mommy’s office and she has work to do.

  Tomorrow night she plans to cook a festive meal for Jenny and Paul. She hummed with energy last week at the idea of having them over for New Year’s Eve. I thought we had friends in the plural sense, but when we sat to make a list she dismissed everyone we used to know. The single were too single (“I don’t want to play matchmaker”), and the couples had one or two members that Rebecca didn’t want to deal with. Some people she rejected because she simply hadn’t seen them in so long and was hoping they had forgotten she ever existed. Our guest list ended up being Dawn de la Puente, who declined by text without explanation, and Paul and Jenny, the last survivors on Friend Island. She genuinely likes both Jenny and Paul, but there’s a tablespoon of compassion in the invite. It’s a topic not worth open debate whether it’s better for her to forever look at Jenny as tragedy wrapped in skin or to see her as the woman her husband might be in love with.

  Rebecca charges ahead, leaving me and Jackson to get out of the way as best we can. “Everyone is an asshole the day before New Year’s. You are very perceptive,” I mutter. Today’s trip will consist almost entirely of recon. Rebecca aims to plan the meal around what looks good, and then to have me come back tomorrow and pick it all up. Today we test the fish; tomorrow we buy and cook the fish. There’s a limit to what bearing me a child will induce me to put up with, and Rebecca edges ever closer to that threshold.

  But we buy the dry goods today, so as to ensure that we don’t forget anything. It’s safety net shopping. That’s a thing to my wife. Rebecca, when we get home, will line up everything we’ve purchased on the counter, posing the meal for a before picture, and she’ll check off the ingredients on each recipe card. Anything that remains unchecked either should be bought the day of or was forgotten but can still be acquired, since we’ve given ourselves a buffer.

  I cannot express how numb I have become to this. This passes for normal when my wife entertains guests. My journey has gone from bemused to endeared to annoyed to totally compliant. While Rebecca molests squash to judge ripeness, Jackson and I keep strolling, up and down produce aisles, the colors capturing his attention and keeping him happily babbling.

  “I agree,” I tell him. “People here are spending too much for asparagus because they think it grants them social status. That is very sad. You’re astute to pick up on that.”

  My phone vibrates, and I stop pushing Jackson to check it.

  I wish you were here today.

  I’m at Fairway instead. Rebecca is going to great lengths. I think she may be trying to get you into bed.

  Wasn’t being sweet. I mean it. Wish you weren’t somewhere else today.

  Everything okay?

  Rebecca shows up at my elbow and I tuck my phone back into my pocket. It vibrates against my thigh, insisting that I give it attention. “Should I do a soup?” Rebecca asks.

  “Yes,” I reply. Go. Go and get your ingredients for soup. Or just note what ingredients I should get tomorrow. The phone vibrates again. Go.

  “Are you saying that because you think soup is a good idea, or are you saying that because you’re already annoyed to be here?”

  “I’m saying that because if they’re boring and we want to poison them, it’s easiest to hide that in soup.”

  Rebecca giggles, then checks her list again. “I reserve the right to send you back here later to pick up soup makings. I’m going to go research cheese.”

  My thigh tingles once more. “We’ll be out of the way somewhere.” Rebecca charges over to the cheesemonger, who’s dressed head to toe in white: apron and toque. He slides around an egregiously expansive display of cheese for a private consultation.

  Jackson has discovered his left foot, one of his main sources of entertainment these days, so I push him out of the way and get my phone back out.

  Today is a hard day.

  I just needed you and you’re not around.

  It’s not anybody’s fault. Bye.

  It’s that bye that gets me. I don’t know why Jenny’s having a hard day, I don’t know why she needs me, I don’t know whose fault it should be, would be, could be, but evidently it’s not anybody’s, which in my experience means it’s going to be thought of at least somewhat as mine. And then this bye, like a high school poet’s suicide threat, the sign-off of jaded youth.

  What’s going on?

  I hit send and immediately cringe. Connotation doesn’t come through in text form. Those three words can be read as disinterested, or aggressive. I should have written I’m really concerned about you. Please tell me what’s upsetting you, but that scans to me as trying to talk a robot down off a ledge. I hold my phone at my side, waiting for it to vibrate, to see whether I’m getting an answer, or hostility, or both in response. Rebecca stands on the other side of the room, and the cheesemonger stands very close to her.

  “Curious,” I say to Jackson. He babble
s his reply. “That’s true. The cheese guy is all up in Mommy’s personal space. Let’s go bail her out.”

  I push Jackson forward but stop when I get a little closer. Rebecca is laughing at something the cheese guy said, and then she puts her hand on his forearm. It’s covered by his white coat, it’s not skin to skin, but it’s still personal. He’s got a knife in the other hand, one he keeps slicing her whisper-thin wedges of cheese with, wiping the blade down on his thigh, and then another joke, and then another laugh. Cheese, joke, laugh.

  She’s not wearing her wedding ring. This isn’t unusual, she takes it off all the time when she maniacally cleans the apartment because people will be coming over. She just forgot to put it back on and now the cheese guy thinks this pretty lady is (a) single and (b) not lactose intolerant. I stand ten feet away watching this mating ritual, enthralled, and not jealous in the least.

  I’m not jealous, or angry, or possessive, or any of those things. I don’t want to beat that man to death with a wheel of cheese, only in part because he’s holding a twelve-inch blade in his hand.

  Maybe this is how my mind works. That nothing belongs to anybody, from neighborhoods to families. The normal is always new, ever-evolving; only the bitter and disenfranchised try to dispute this. Better to envision your wife flirting with a cheesemonger and not let your blood pressure crest 120. “You’re right, Jackson,” I say, watching Rebecca accept another small wedge of cheese, soft and formless, as if painted by Dalí. “You’re one hundred percent spot-on. Everything can be taken or given freely.” His foot has reached his mouth. He wiggles pea-shaped toes against his gums. “Except for you,” I amend. “You belong to me.”

  Rebecca comes back with a sampling of cheeses. I look over her shoulder and the cheese guy has moved to another customer. Still, I give her a kiss there in the store. She tickles Jackson underneath his glistening chin and ambles off to the olive bar for more recon. We follow at a distance, trying to stay out of the way of the crowds and failing miserably with every turn. My thigh vibrates again and I yank my phone out like a gunslinger.