Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  Don’t worry about it. You wouldn’t understand.

  No, Jenny. No, I probably wouldn’t.

  Paul Fenniger

  Seven Months Ago: December 30, 2009

  Jenny has been slow walking around the apartment all morning. She slides in and out of rooms, confused as to how she got there and where she should go next. I made us pancakes for breakfast and she ate half of one, left the other half on her plate in a puddle of syrup, shuffling off back into her office, then the bathroom, then the bedroom. I watched from the table. One right after the other.

  I walk in on her changing her shirt in the bedroom. She sits down on the edge of the bed, hums words to herself closed-lipped. Her eyes have that pre-cry storm brewing in them, a tightness and tremor at the edges. Fingers dance in her lap, interdependent of her body. She doesn’t realize she’s scratching angry welts into the backs of her hands. I hunch over in front of her and gently separate her from herself.

  If I ask her if something is wrong, she’ll drift inward, because something obviously is wrong. If I ask her what is wrong, she’ll throw up a barricade, because I should know, or at least be able to guess. She’s not wrong about that. When she does tell me what’s bothering her it will seem like a twist in a movie I should have been able to see coming from an hour away. The path into Jenny is to orbit. Bide my time circling and eventually she’ll pity my ignorance and tell me what’s wrong.

  “Do you want to see a movie?” I ask. Something with explosions. A bright and loud distraction. Popcorn.

  She shakes her head. I say, “Good. I didn’t want to see a movie either.” She smiles a little at that. Then, in her quietest voice, she whispers, “Please go and get him.”

  It’s a twist I should have seen coming when we woke up this morning, and it still clubs me sideways. Him is our son. Jenny’s distracted because she’s thinking about our son and now is talking about our son. She means our son. She means his remains. He was a living child. For a short window of time, our son was the youngest child on the planet. Then, for a flicker, he was the closest to death. In between were mere hours, most of them spent apart from us, on the other side of a glass wall, where all we could see was the green shapeless mass of doctors and nurses hovering over him. When one of the doctors came out to tell us that our son had died and they could not revive him, I felt, amid all of the crushing weight, a sense of relief, because now I finally would be able to see him.

  And I did. Jenny did as well. We got to spend as much time as we needed with him—Dr. Mulitz put us in a private room and no one bothered us for an hour. A full hour. I checked the clock on the wall when we sat down, because if someone had come in, needing the room, needing us to leave or give our son back, I wanted to be able to point at that clock and say, “We have only had twenty-three minutes!” After eighty-four minutes a nurse came in and asked us if she could get us anything. Jenny shook her head and said we were ready to go, and so we did. We each gave our son a kiss on his tiny, perfect, dead face, and handed him to the nurse. That was the last time either of us saw him. We never got a picture. I don’t know how to feel about that, not having a picture of him.

  I stand up and leave Jenny in the bedroom, walking back to her office. They gave us our son in a canister, no larger than a cheese shaker at a pizza restaurant. We brought his ashes home and Jenny said that we should put them away. She said I should throw them out first. I couldn’t do that then. She yelled at me for hours, on and off, while I clutched my son in my fist, making sure to not hold him so tightly that I would have dented the thin metal. She yelled at me so much I had to go down and apologize to the neighbors, to explain all the screaming. They spoke only Polish, and they were horrified by what I was holding in my hands, but they understood.

  Jenny finally told me to hide the canister, and to not tell her where it is. She went to the nearest bodega to buy her first pack of cigarettes in nine months. Before she left I made her promise me that if she ever found the canister, she wouldn’t throw it out. She wouldn’t do anything to it. I made her promise twice.

  Emotions aside, it’s difficult to scramble around in the fifteen minutes it takes Jenny to buy a pack of cigarettes and smoke one to find a hiding spot in the apartment. The cap on the canister was screwed on tightly, so I didn’t worry that I was going to spill him out, but there didn’t seem to be an appropriate room. The bathroom was out of the question. The kitchen seemed intensely cruel, where I would hide him in an absurdist comedy were he the cremains of a curmudgeonly miser and not my barely born son. I sought a spot in our bedroom, tucked away in a drawer, but the truth there was that I didn’t want his presence in that room with us all the time. The weight of our loss was oppressive enough—I didn’t want to go to bed at night knowing he was literally five feet away from me and there was nothing I could do as his father.

  We created a nursery for him. We had every intention of bringing him home and putting him in this nursery, so I opened the closet and dug around until I found my box in the back. I had brought it from my bedroom in Cadott, a collection of knickknacks from my childhood. Baseball cards, magic tricks, a photo album of Polaroids—there’s no way Jenny would ever throw this out. I laid my son gently into that box, devastated to realize that he will never have a box like this of his own, the sum of a young life, but instead be laid to rest for the time being next to all the joys of my boyhood. I closed the box, went to the kitchen, got a Sharpie from the crap drawer, and wrote on the lid VERY IMPORTANT—DO NOT DISCARD.

  That is where, five months later, I find our son. I cradle him in the palm of my hand, willing myself to stay steady. When I get back into the bedroom Jenny still sits on the edge of the bed, texting on her phone. She looks up and sees what I’m holding. “It’s time,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t want to carry this loss into the new year. And tomorrow there’s this fucking party, and I can’t do this and that in the same day. And I want to do that. I want us to do that so we’re not sitting by ourselves and grieving, Fenn. Do you want to do this?”

  “It’s a good idea.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s a good idea,” I repeat, numb. I’m holding my son. This I can do for him.

  “Okay. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Where do you want to scatter him?”

  She hadn’t thought about that. Once we release him he is everywhere and nowhere, but we remain somewhere. If ever we were to move from New York, he would remain behind, at least the way Jenny and I think about him. She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  “I think we should go to the water, and scatter him in the East River. Because it’s not going anywhere, and then we’ll think about him every time we go into Manhattan.”

  She considers this. Then she starts crying. “That’s real good, Fenn,” she sobs out.

  Jenny composes herself in the bathroom—for whom, I don’t know. Herself, I suppose. I gather our jackets, tucking our son in my pocket. On our front stoop she pauses, lights a cigarette, sends another text, and wraps her arm in mine. We walk purposefully, in silence, grim and unyielding against a wind coming off of the river.

  We reach a patch of green off Kent Avenue, something set aside for the residents of all the new construction popping up along the water. We may have witnesses to this ceremony, which doesn’t bother me, but I know Jenny would not want to be watched. At the end of a pier we find a bench and sit for a spell, the canister in my hand, in my pocket. Jenny curls herself into my side.

  “You would have been a great mom to him,” I tell her. Her chuckle comes out corrosively bitter, but she clutches me tighter.

  She replies, “Best thing I did for this kid was pick the right father.” I rub my fingers against the canister, stroking his sleeping head, his cheeks, his stomach rising and falling with each breath. I stroke the metal that holds his ashes and wait for Jenny to tell me what to do next.

  “You remember how much I used to drink in college?” she asks. I can’t te
ll from her tone whether I should answer.

  “You didn’t drink any more than the rest of us.”

  “I did, and not by a small margin. I was a grand old pickle.”

  “You don’t drink too much now.”

  “I know. Listen. It didn’t worry me, because I thought that I was getting it out of my system. I remember thinking that when I added a job and a family then there wouldn’t be the time to drink, so I’m just getting it out of my system while I can. Get my fill in, and then I won’t miss it when it’s gone. Thought I’d do the same thing with cigarettes—just get it out of my system.”

  “You can quit smoking. I’ve seen you do it before.”

  She furrows her brow. “No, I … Yeah, I guess I can. Sure. Listen to me.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “My point is that my system may be my system. No matter how much I think I’m getting things out of it, I can always make more. That’s how my system works.”

  “We can try again when you’re ready.”

  Her eyes snap into slits, but then she takes a long breath, lets it out with curls of steam, nuzzles her face into my shoulder instead. We sit like that, watching a tugboat go past, absurd and antiquated. It comforts me that our son will be in this river. It’s a timeless place. I’m doing something right for him.

  “I want you to know how I love you, Fenn. I never get that out of my system, either,” Jenny says slowly, deliberately.

  “I love you too.”

  “I want you to know how. Listen to me.” But she doesn’t say anything after that. I wait and wait to learn how, but she stares out at the river, tight-lipped. The canister feels cold beneath my fingertips. I can reassure myself on an intellectual level, but a visceral part of me wants to get our son out of the chill.

  “Can we give him a name, please?” I ask. Jenny sniffs hard.

  “I don’t want to, Fenn. We lost him. He didn’t live long enough to get a name. It’s easier for me to think of him as our son.”

  “I really want to name him, Jenny.”

  I brace myself for anger, but she rubs my forehead with a soft hand. “Can you name him and not tell me?” she asks. I can do that. “I’ll say good-bye, and then you’ll say good-bye, and you can call him whatever name you would have wanted to give him, and then we’ll say good-bye together. But you can’t ever tell me the name you were going to give him, okay?”

  I can do that. She takes the canister from my hand and walks to the railing at the end of the pier. She’s out of earshot, and it kills me to not know what she’s saying to him. Jenny would have been the most brilliant of mothers. She still may be. But not for this child. All she can do for him is pass along whatever it is she’s passing along now. I know enough to not ask her what she said when she comes back to the bench and hands him back to me. She’ll never tell.

  At the railing it occurs to me that I don’t know what name I would have given our son. For the small fuss I just made over it, I didn’t have a name picked out. Jenny wanted those super-literary names, and I was happy to go along. Left to name him on my own, I can’t think of anything. A quiver starts at my knee, a shaking I can’t control. I’m wasting my last moments with him trying to think of what to call him.

  Paul Jr. doesn’t sound right. I couldn’t do anything for my son; it’s not right to give him my name. There’s no historical figure I feel enough admiration for to name my son after. I run through all the names of my friends growing up, my baseball heroes, names of men at the firm, a Rolodex in baby book form racing through my head. What would I have wanted to call him for the rest of my life? How would I have wanted to introduce him?

  This is my son, his name is … and I am so proud to be his father.

  My dad’s name is Hank Fenniger. He drives a bus in Cadott, Wisconsin, and when I told him I was moving to New York with Jenny, he whistled and told me I was going to have quite the adventure. When I called my dad to tell him he was only a grandfather for a very little while, I said that one of the saddest parts about this was that I would have raised my son the way Hank Fenniger had raised me. That’s the highest praise, I suppose, a son can pay, to view his own dad as a fatherhood manual.

  Hank isn’t his actual name, of course. It’s Henry, and so that’s what I name our son. Henry Fenniger. I say hello and good-bye in the same speech. In between I fit a lifetime of hopes and advice and dreams and warnings and love and love and love for this child I barely met. The quiver spreads. “Jenny, come here,” I yell. I can’t move from the railing. I can’t move or I’m going to break down. I’m going to crumble and drop him and then he’ll roll off the pier and into the water and stay sealed and never get to grow up and move away from us and find his own way. “Jenny, come here please.”

  She puts her hands over mine and together we open the canister. Jenny doesn’t want to look in but I do. I see Henry’s ashes. Hello and good-bye.

  We wait until the wind dies down, then we tilt Henry up and out over the railing and into the East River, where our son is carried away in the air and water like smoke.

  Paul Fenniger

  Seven Months Ago: December 31, 2009

  “Let’s dress up,” Jenny proclaimed. She leaped out of bed this morning, actually bounced herself off the mattress, and declared her desire, even adding that she had a “capital idea.” I naturally agreed and picked out a suit from my closet. Dressing up for me bears many similarities to dressing for work. Rather than being aggrieved at having to wear a suit on a day off, I like this idea, dressing up for a party. Jenny escaped after breakfast to shop the tiny boutiques along our street. She found a green dress she says is too thin for winter but she’ll wear a big coat over it. She waved the bag around, spinning and dancing through the apartment, holding the dress up against her body, using my adoring eyes as her mirror.

  The pendulum of her moods, capricious in general, swings a wider arc of late. She must have thought she’d have to oversell the dressing-up idea, because her voice immediately launched into that breathless speed, a torrent amped up to shock and awe. She needn’t have wasted the energy, though it was a sight to behold. I’m not used to seeing Jenny snap back to a good place so fast; I thought she’d swing low for a while after yesterday.

  These past few weeks, she’s retreated into her new office to read or write and ignore me for hours, which is unusual for her. She loves to shout her thoughts to me as I walk by, draw me into whatever room she’s in to recount the story she just read. Or, she barnacles herself to me while I cook or read, touching me, as if to make sure I haven’t disappeared. That part I love, her nearness and affection, how she rubs my back or just runs her hand along my shoulders as she walks by me at the stove. When we went grocery shopping last night, I left her in the produce aisle for a minute while she turned over every head of romaine to find the most pristine one, with the fewest sullied leaves. I left her to that for a moment, so I could grab vinegar. One aisle over. When I came back she hugged me, wrapped her arms around my waist and held me tightly, in the middle of the store. “Put a bell around your neck, Fenn, so I always know you’re near,” she swooned wistfully.

  Armchair-psychologist me wants to attribute this to the weight lifted after yesterday. Jenny is ready to start anew. All of this recent scattershot emotion was the buildup, and yesterday she flushed it out. This is what I keep telling myself, crowding out other voices, other explanations.

  Jenny’s behavior strikes me as simultaneously erratic and familiar. I’ve seen her eyes move independently of her head before, like she’s checking around corners that aren’t there. I’ve seen her monitor my movement in and out of a room. I’ve seen her look at me before as if I’m a stranger, a lodger renting a room.

  I think she’s had a fight with Michael. Whenever I bring him up, usually in the context of the job he’s done on the room, she brushes it off or says something small and cutting about him, about his personality. “Do you want to skip their party?” I asked her again last night. “We can say I’m sick.”
>
  “No.” She gazed off to the side. “We may as well go.”

  “We can tell them what we did,” I said gently.

  Her eyes narrow. I’m a stranger again. “Let’s have some things be our things, okay?”

  December crams metaphors into perspective. The only thing for me that changes tomorrow is the number I put on a check, but Jenny gives this day greater heft. Or December just brings with it a vague sense of time passing, while Jenny’s growing dissatisfaction with her life gets compounded exponentially twice every year—once on her birthday and once tonight. I’m her only constant, and when she gets melancholic and withdrawn, I wonder if the reason—or rather how much a part of the reason—is her disappointment in that stability.

  But it’s okay. January will bring with it the old Jenny, somewhere in between clingy and sullen, making future plans and discussing celebrity marriages at length.

  New Year’s Eve. Getting ready to go to a party. Noisemakers and champagne. While I’m leaning over the end of the bed, tying my shoes, she comes into our room wearing her green dress. She still drops my jaw, every damn time.

  She points at my chest and cocks her head. “Is that really the tie you’re going to wear?” She doesn’t wait for my answer, just turns and waits by the front door, impatient.

  On the subway ride over, most revelers behave at least three drinks in. The couple next to us talks loudly, critiquing each other’s resolutions. Jenny gathers herself into me, burrows into the fabric of my coat. “Do you remember New Year’s 2006?” she asks.

  Oh I do. I grin at the memory. “I’m afraid I don’t,” I say slow enough that she knows it’s a joke, that she knows I remember every second of it. “Refresh my memory. Did we spend that year together?”

  “We did. I forget how we spent it, but I do recall making lots and lots of awful puns about balls dropping.”