The Bright Side of Disaster

by Katherine Center

  “Money is no object!” my father said, his arm flying up like a flare. Then he reached over to tousle my hair, and said in a conspiratorial voice, “Let’s throw a shindig they’ll never forget.”

  “If money is no object,” my mother said, “I’d like some of Jenny’s college tuition back.”

  “Hello!” I waved at her. “Let’s keep it clean, folks.”

  After much wrangling, my father agreed that he’d put up a lump of wedding cash at the beginning and my mother would bill him afterward for whatever part of his half that didn’t cover.

  “Just don’t spend it all in one place,” he said, handing my mother a check.

  She took it as if it were an old banana peel and dropped it in her purse.

  Later, as she tipped the valet parker and called him “Sugar,” my father ogled her a little and said, “That’s a hell of a woman.”

  On the drive home, just my mother and me, she careened along, talking about my dad, using terms like “patronizing,” “self-centered,” and “obsessive narcissistic agenda.” That last one she had picked up from the only self-help book she’d ever read.

  I felt oddly removed from the whole thing. I would have been happy, I thought, doing something very small in someone’s backyard or in a park. It wasn’t that I didn’t want a big fancy wedding. It was there for the taking, so I took it. But, truly, I was just pleased it was happening at all.

  So it was an undeniably awkward moment when, two months or so later, I met my mother for coffee and told her—before I’d even told Dean—that I had some surprising news. As expected, she teetered for a moment between the “not married” part of the situation and the “grandbaby on the way” part. Happily, she decided to focus on the positive.

  Quick calculations determined that I’d be finished with the pregnancy at least a month before the wedding. After making some dire predictions for my boobs and belly, she decided that the pregnancy would be only a minimal disruption, that the dress could be altered, and that she’d even be willing to hold the baby during the ceremony.

  “You’ll need pads for your bra,” she said, making a note of it on her checklist. “When you were an infant, a baby could cry across the street and I’d be soaked.”

  “What if I’m too tired after the baby comes to even be there?” I said to my mother.

  “You’ll be there,” she said. Then she said the timing could have been worse. “At least you don’t have to walk down the aisle at nine months like an elephant in a maternity gown.”

  “That,” I said, “is a heck of a silver lining.”

  “You’ll still look pregnant even after the baby’s out,” she said. “Just not quite that pregnant.” She looked back down at her list and adjusted her reading glasses. “Anyway,” she said. “You know the rule about weddings: better fat than pregnant.”

  “That’s the rule?”

  She patted my hand. “Just the opposite of true life.”

  But I worried. “Maybe we should just get married in Vegas right now,” I said, “and throw a party next spring instead.”

  My mother thought about it. I could see her thinking. About the twinkle lights we were going to hang in the sculpture garden. About my white-rose-and-wisteria bouquet. About the calligrapher my mother had stalked until she worked us in. About the scandal of canceling.

  “Nobody’s going to Vegas,” she said. “You can have a baby before you’re married. But you absolutely cannot have a shotgun wedding.”

  I was happy about the baby. Of course, there was the initial “not quite married” anxiety. And I did worry that my getting knocked up might freak Dean out. Though he never said it, I sensed he was taking things one step at a time, and I feared two steps at the same time might be one too many. But when he got home that night, I had cooked a yummy tomato-lime Mexican soup. As we sat at the dinette talking, I felt the pleasure of anticipation for all the good things that life was delivering to my door just bubble up out of me. In a funny way, though I never would have chosen to get pregnant out of wedlock, the situation felt exactly right to me. Things were really settled for us now.

  I’d wanted to wait until he had a beer in him, so he’d be nice and relaxed when I said the words. But I could feel my face glowing, and I was failing to repress a whole series of smiles. And finally, Dean said, “What is up with you?”

  And I just burst out, “I’m pregnant!”

  His eyebrows went up. “Hey!” he said. “Hey!”

  “Are you happy?” I asked.

  He nodded, looking around the room like he’d never seen it before.

  “I wondered if we’d have kids,” he said.

  I said, “Apparently, yes.”

  We curled up on the sofa that night and watched TV. Actually, he watched TV—an action show that involved an alien disguised as a stripper. My mind kept drifting. I thought back to myself in middle school, when my parents were getting divorced, to all the times I had tried to imagine what my grown-up life would be like.

  I had wanted to believe that I would find someone to love who loved me back, but of course, as girls do, I had feared that I would wind up unlovable and alone. Nobody was in love with me then, with my braces and cowlick, so it was hard to imagine things would ever be any different. On the sofa with Dean, I found myself wishing that I could go back and visit that girl and show her a video of all the good things to look forward to. “It’s all going to work out,” I’d say.

  Just a year before, when Dean was needing “space,” and I was worrying that it was the beginning of the end, I never would have imagined this. This ending for us had not been certain. He had wavered between certainty and uncertainty and, in the end, wound up right here, on the sofa, with me. That moment really stands out in my memory: my head against his chest, my eyes closed, me pregnant and him happy about it, our future just curling up in front of us like a gentle dog.

  The next morning, I went out and bought prenatal vitamins and a whole stash of organic fruit. And there, standing next to the B-complex bottles, I set out to become the best damned pregnant woman in the whole history of pregnant women.

  Dean himself decided to quit smoking in honor of the baby. I had been planning to ask him to, but he beat me to it, and I was indescribably relieved. He’d been smoking off and on since he was eleven or so, thanks to his older brother, and I did not at all like the idea of becoming the parole officer who monitored his cigarette-free life. Now I wouldn’t have to. Not twenty-four hours after he’d found out about the conception of our little one, he was dumping his Marlboros in the kitchen trash.

  “Maybe you should go on the patch or something,” I said.

  “No, no, no,” he said. “I’m good. I’ll just quit. No big deal.”

  I was quiet. Too quiet, I guess.

  “What?” he said.

  “It’s just that you’ve tried to quit before, you know, to no avail.”

  “That was different.”

  “What was different?”

  “I didn’t have a good reason to quit before.” He grinned at me. “There’s a baby coming. That’s it. I’m done.”

  Two weeks later, he started up again. But only a little bit. And only out on the front porch. And only because his boss was “riding his ass” at work. The tension, the stress. I acted understanding, of course, but then later took the passive-aggressive approach, every time he lit up, of waving my arms wildly and leaving the area.

  “We’re outside!” he’d say. “There’s more than enough air to go around.”

  “It’s not good for the baby,” I’d say, letting the screen door slam behind me.

  Truly, we’d had this conversation so many times, after a while we could have just played recordings of it and then gone out to the movies. He wouldn’t go on the patch because the patch was for wimps. But each time he tried to quit, he became cranky, jumpy, and totally irrational, and stayed that way for days, until he finally broke down and sneaked a cigarette. I could always tell when he’d done it, because he’d smell li
ke spearmint, and he’d come up behind me and try to chew on my ears while I cooked supper.

  Frankly, this time it was a relief. After a while, we took a break from the quitting project. But then he could smoke only on the porch. And not anywhere near me. And sometimes I’d even refuse to kiss him after a cigarette, calling his breath “secondhand smoke.”

  So I had become a fresh-vegetable–eating prig, and he had gone the other way, smoking, I thought, possibly even more than he had before, because his cigarettes now possessed the added allure of being a naughty pleasure. But I was happy. As long as he didn’t smoke around me, or around the baby, or in the house, or in the car, or leave his cigarettes lying around where the baby could find, eat, or, God forbid, smoke them, we’d be fine. For a while, anyway.

  4

  The week before the garage sale, many months after he first started quitting, Dean must have gone through three packs of cigarettes. I found empty packs in crazy places: Dropped behind the toilet. In a flower pot by the back door. On a shelf in the baby’s partly decorated, unisex room.

  Time was getting short. I was due in three weeks. I’d been as laissez-faire about his smoking as possible, but here in Month Nine there was a discernible baby on the horizon. And despite all the research I’d done on how secondhand smoke related to fetal health, infant health, cancer, asthma, attention deficit disorder, grades in school, athletic ability, and future adult happiness, I also knew a fundamental relationship truth: I couldn’t tell Dean what to do. If he couldn’t quit (or wouldn’t), then he couldn’t quit (or wouldn’t). But it seemed to me like it was worth one final try.

  I gathered up his three ashtrays—one with a Houston Astros logo, one made of thick green marble, and one that he’d made himself out of tinfoil. I stood in the archway by the living room, holding them in my hands like a juggler.

  He had his headphones on. It was evening, but he was still in his suit and loosened tie, slumped in his recliner. It was the only piece of furniture from his old house I’d allowed him to keep (and its days were numbered, because I’d already made a garage-sale sign for it that read FREE TO A GOOD HOME).

  He saw me and obtusely pulled his headphones off one ear. “What?”

  “What price should I put on these?”

  “No price,” he said.

  I pushed on. “Free, then?”

  “We’re not selling them.”

  I had hoped that if I approached the whole thing with a mischievous twinkle, we could settle the smoking issue with wit and style.

  “How about we set them out on the curb for needy neighbors?”

  “It’s not funny, Jen.” He snapped the headphones back on and that was it. The conversation was over.

  This is how he’d been all week.

  “It’s anxiety about the baby,” Meredith said when we went for coffee after she got off work. “He’s gone into his Cave.”

  “Well, how long does he have to stay in there?”

  “There’s no way to know. Just leave him be. And for God’s sake, don’t go in.”

  “I can’t go in the Cave?”

  Meredith closed her eyes for emphasis as she shook her head.

  “Well, what am I supposed to do out here? Build a fire and roast marshmallows?”

  Meredith got very Zen when she talked about self-help. “Do the garage sale. You’ll see him when you see him.”

  Meredith and I had been meeting for decaf after work a few days a week ever since I quit my job. We had worked at the same antiques shop together for six years, laboring for a woman named Dahlia, who referred to us on the phone as her “minions,” but who—and this is why we both kept staying—had fantastic taste in junk. She could find beauty in anything: broken yard ornaments, glass bottles shaped like matadors, wooden fishing lures, old dress patterns, hubcaps, boxes made out of seashells, furniture with crackled paint, lamp shades made out of baskets. She understood that beauty could be almost entirely about context. Dahlia brought her finds back in boxes, had Meredith and me arrange them in her clean, bright shop, and sold them for ten or twenty times what she’d paid. She kept us there late most nights, and she didn’t smile much, but the thrill of watching the transformation from trash to treasure kept us glued to our jobs. But now that I was gone, Meredith was lonesome. She kept calling me to meet her after work.

  Meredith was helping me with the garage sale. She loved challenges of display and presentation. She loved the psychology of getting people to want things. She’d been helping me price things, and she was going to come over Friday night to help get it all ready to go the next morning.

  Dean had also promised to help.

  “You’re going to be nice to him, right?” I asked.

  “I’m always nice to him,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “To his face.”

  The sale had been a long time coming. I’d been trying to make it happen for months, despite Dean’s lack of enthusiasm. But now there was an ad in the paper. The hordes were coming and would be assembled on our lawn before the break of dawn on Saturday.

  Maybe it was the anticipation of adding a whole new person to our two-bedroom-one-bath, or maybe it was the fact that I myself had gotten larger, but the house had started to seem small. “It is small,” my mother said when I mentioned it to her. “If it were any smaller, it would be a dollhouse.” I needed to make some room. I’d tried to organize the kitchen cupboards and my closet to make my storage more efficient. But it was no use. I just felt like a hamster rearranging my shredded newspaper. What I needed was a cleaned-out cage.

  And cleaning my cage entailed pricing everything I could get my hands on. In particular, things like the cracked bike helmet, mismatched free weights, and laminated NFL place mats that belonged to Dean. Not to mention a garage full of bachelor-pad furniture that had not been allowed to cross my threshold.

  Understandably, Dean wasn’t too enthused about the project. But he had promised me he’d help. I had squeezed his hand to underscore the importance of my words and said, “I really need to get this taken care of.” He’d heard me, good man, and he’d canceled band practice for the weekend. It was his job to do the heavy lifting, since I was so rotund I could barely turn over in bed. He’d said he was up to the task.

  That was weeks ago. Then he was helpful. Now he was in a mood. And apparently also in a Cave. And I still had heavy things that needed lifting.

  That Friday afternoon, Dean got asked to help somebody from Retirement Plans move to a new apartment after work. Dean and some of “the guys.” He told me about it as soon as he got home, lingering only long enough to change into jeans.

  “What guys?” I said.

  “The guys at work.”

  “You have guys at work?”

  “Sure,” he said, and shrugged.

  “And they help each other move?”

  “You weren’t cooking tonight, anyway.”

  “But now I’ll just be out in the garage, pricing things by myself.”

  “You’ve been out there by yourself every night this week.”

  “Yes, but now we’re in the home stretch.”

  “I thought Meredith was coming over,” he said as he stuck his wallet in his back pocket.

  “She has a date with her veterinarian,” I said.

  Dean raised an imaginary glass to him. “Good luck, buddy.”

  “If you stay,” I tried again, “I’ll do the rest of my pricing topless.”

  He kissed me on the head, completely untitillated. “I won’t be out late.”

  “Dean!” I said, in one last try. “There are cockroaches out in the garage.”

  “They’re just as scared as you are,” he said, and clicked the door closed behind him.

  And so I pouted. This was not how I had pictured things. He was supposed to be helping, teasing me about my crazy knickknacks: a set of snowflake earrings, a mug in the shape of a cowboy boot, a wiener-dog paperweight. We were supposed to be in this together. The garage was full, stacked high with the t
hings I’d been carting out all week.

  I priced alone until my eyes were bleary and my butt ached. Then I hauled myself up and headed back inside, stumbling over a fallen branch in the yard on the way. Inside, I put on my nightgown and got into bed. It was twelve-thirty.

  When Dean said he wouldn’t be out late, what exactly did that mean? Was it possible that he was having such a good time with these guys that he could not tear himself away, even knowing that I was alone in our cobwebby garage? What kind of guys were these, anyway, rousing at the end of a long week to lift heavy furniture together like at some kind of Amish barn raising? Since when did they help out co-workers? As far I’d seen, it was just row after row of gray cubbies.

  Maybe they were bonding. Maybe they’d gone out for a beer afterward. Maybe they were joking around about the guy with three paper shredders or the guy who always wore bow ties. Maybe this night out would make Dean’s days at the office more meaningful.

  Or, and this thought popped my eyes open, maybe, instead, his Explorer had rolled over on the way home. He could be in a hospital, doctors leaning over him, working frantically to stop the bleeding, using words like “clamps!” and “stat!” It was too much to bear thinking about, and the thought of him calling out for me in the unearthly light of the ER kept me from sleeping for a good long while.

  I tried to imagine life without him. No one to eat PB&Js and leave the crusts on paper towels all over the house. No one to rent disaster movies. No one to make Saturday-morning pancakes with chocolate chips and marshmallows. No gentle, obsessive guitar strumming as the background music to my life. No kisses. No arm across my stomach while I slept. No one coming home.

  It was too much. I turned on the light and read movie-star magazines to turn my brain off until I finally dozed off, with a page full of “Stars Getting Parking Tickets” spread open on my belly.

  I don’t even remember him coming to bed. But by four-fifteen, when I had to shift position, get up to pee, walk around the house for a while, and bemoan the fact that I was not sleeping, there he was, passed out on his side, still wearing all his clothes, reeking of cigars and some kind of manly-man liquor.