The Bright Side of Disaster

by Katherine Center

  I waited until after he’d dropped it off to find out. Pulling away from the Salvation Army, I asked, “What’s going on with you?”

  He was ready. He’d been waiting for me to ask. “I thought you were pretty rude this morning.”

  I was so dumbstruck, I almost ran a red light.

  I screeched on the brakes and then had to back up a few feet. We sat, nose in the crosswalk, for a quiet minute while a pedestrian walked around the car. Dean had to be kidding. Finally, I said, “Are you staging a counterattack as a red herring?”

  “I don’t see what’s so awful about me doing something fun once in a while.”

  “Okay,” I said, hitting the accelerator perhaps a bit more violently than I should have. “Let’s identify the asshole here. One person in this car promised to help another person with something that she was physically incapable”—here I patted my belly—“of doing. He then left her alone on a Friday night, went out, got drunk with a bunch of strangers, stumbled in at some insane hour, slept in his clothes, and, when morning came and his services were desperately needed, refused to even attempt to do the things he’d promised to do when the woman that he’s supposed to love had no one else to turn to.”

  We flew over a set of train tracks. I didn’t even brake.

  Dean stayed quiet, in a locked-jaw “I’m not even going to dignify that with a response” way.

  I eased us up onto the freeway. It felt better to go fast.

  “Hello?” I said. “Do you have any kind of response?”

  “I guess I’m just wondering if everything always has to be about you.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s a hell of an accusation.”

  “I just don’t think it would kill you to let me go out with the guys once in a while without acting like I’m violating your God-given right to access me at all times.”

  “Dean!” I shouted. “You let me down!”

  “You let me down, too.”

  “How?” I demanded. “Exactly, how?”

  “I don’t think it’s my job to spell it out for you.”

  I begged, then challenged, then dared him to spell it out for me. And then, somewhere around the I-10 interchange, after several miles of Dean staring out the window, I gave up. We drove a long way in silence. Until he said, “Just because you wanted to have a garage sale doesn’t mean that I did.”

  At home, I took a long bath, with Dr. Blandon watching me from a perch on the toilet seat. Then he watched me towel off and put on a pair of chenille maternity sweats. He joined me on the bed, and we both curled up for a long, numbing nap.

  When I woke up, Dean was out but had left a note that said BACK SOON. DEAN. It occurred to me to fixate on the note’s lack of the word love, but I decided to pick up some Indian food for supper instead.

  It certainly took more energy to fight than to make up, and I was low on energy these days. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like he was picking a fight with me. Dean had a list of shortcomings as long as Meredith’s arm, but things like being blatantly neglectful and being petulantly confrontational were not on it. Something was definitely going on with him, but frankly, a part of me didn’t want to go looking for what it was. I decided that maybe if I ignored it, it would go away. I resolved to be sweet with him when I got home, and then to ply him with spicy food in the hope that we could recover enough to make our final childbirth class bearable. He had, after all, bowed out of a gig tonight so he could be there. That was something.

  When I walked in, Dean was on the couch messing with his guitar. He looked up, then back down.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said. “I got dinner.” I held up the bag from the New Delhi Café.

  “You know what? I just got a burger like an hour ago.”

  “Oh,” I said, and watched him a minute. “Want to come and sit with me anyway?”

  “I would like to,” he said. “But I’m trying to get this chord progression down.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling kind of limp.

  And then he continued, “For our gig tonight.”

  Tonight. “Hey, um,” I said. I really was so tired of fighting. I was hoping that maybe he’d just forgotten. “Tonight’s childbirth class. Did you forget?”

  “Well,” he said, “Sam called and the guy who was going to fill in can’t make it, so I kind of have to be there.”

  “You also kind of have to be at childbirth class,” I said, starting to gear up.

  Dean closed his eyes, as if to block me out.

  And then, deus ex machina, the bag of Indian food slipped out of my hand and hit the floor at just the right angle to pop open one side and splatter saag paneer and mango lassi all over the rug, the wall, my shoe, and my leg.

  I had no choice but to cry. I bent down to start cleaning up, but I just sort of crumpled there on the rug instead. After a few minutes, I could feel Dean kneeling down beside me and purposefully scooping up spinach, moving containers, making trips to the kitchen for paper towels and water. He took care of it, even wiping my leg for me. And then his hands were on my shoulders, helping me up and over to the couch. And then his arms were around me, and his hair brushed my cheek as he gave me little kisses.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  But what did that mean? It’s easy to feel sorry when you’ve made someone cry.

  “I’ve just had a hard week,” he said. “I’m just tired.”

  I sat there on the sofa and let him kiss me and stroke my hair. It felt so good I could have stayed all night in that very spot. I was hungry, but also starving for affection. If I were Dr. Blandon, I would have been purring. But after a little while, he said, “We’re going to have to get you fed if we’re going to make it to childbirth class on time.”

  My eyes were puffy, and my lips, too. I said, “Both of us? To class?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course. Both of us.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Months later, it would occur to me to wonder if a person should thank another person for something she’d had to beg for. Wasn’t the begging itself thanks enough?

  But there he was, the old Dean. I was just grateful to have him back. In the kitchen, I ate the parts of the saag and baingan bharta that had survived the fall while he made me a cup of hot tea. On the drive to childbirth class, he told me about a song he was writing.

  “It’s kind of about lost love,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said. Usually, his songs were about things that were specifically not love. Cigarettes. Cheeseburgers. Reality TV.

  “You know, how people come into your life, and then they’re gone.”

  “Sure,” I said, committed to keeping everything pleasant and very glad that he was talking to me again. “That happens all the time.”

  “It’s the human condition,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s the name of the song. ‘Human Condition.’”

  “That’s a great title,” I said. Lying, but what can you do?

  By the time we got there, he was humming the tune to me. And in the parking lot, he paused to give me a little taste of the guitar solo, holding an imaginary guitar and strumming some imaginary strings.

  Our time in the parking lot made us a few minutes late to class, but we did walk in holding hands.

  The woman who ran our childbirth class was named Betty, and she moved like a hummingbird. She was so perky I worried she might explode. She looked about thirty (Dean had once made the unfortunate mistake of describing her as “hot”), but she had two grown kids. She was blond, and tan, and amazingly fit. And despite her Midwestern accent and blow-dryer hair, she was the most radical person I had ever met. Taking her class was an indoctrination. Breast-feeding was good, bottle-feeding was evil. Home births were good, hospitals were evil. Midwives were good, doctors were evil. Nipples were good, pacifiers were evil. Pain was good, epidurals were evil.

  She’d given us article after article on all these topics, and
others. She’d shown us videos of women giving birth in their own beds, giving birth underwater, giving birth on soft moss in a forest. She’d filled our heads with trivia. Women who had epidurals were more likely to have episiotomies. Babies whose mothers took pain medication during delivery were more likely to become drug addicts in later life. Formula-fed babies were more prone to allergies.

  I was a good student. I took notes in outline form. I sat at rapt attention through the entire class, which was supposed to be two hours long, but was always at least three. I believed that there was a right way to give birth and a wrong way. And I was hell-bent on doing it the right way. Looking back, it’s funny to think how easy it is to be sure of yourself when you have no idea what you’re doing. It’s funny to think that I was at my most confident about parenting when I had never even changed a diaper.

  Dean was more relaxed. So relaxed, in fact, that he routinely fell asleep during our end-of-session meditations. I found myself, time after time, elbowing him in the ribs. I did not want Betty to think we were slackers. I wanted to be her star childbirthing pupil. I was looking for any signs that I’d be a good mother, and it couldn’t hurt for her to like me.

  Of the six dads, only one had made it to every session. A good half of the fathers regularly stumbled into class late and got the hairy eyeball from Betty. One of them was always taking cell-phone calls and disappearing out into the parking lot. Others asked her questions like “Are Big Macs okay for pregnant women?” the answer to which, if they’d read her handouts, they would have known: Fast food is never okay for anyone, least of all pregnant women.

  I loved Betty. She was tall and strong, and she had great shawls. She wore them in class because she didn’t know how to manage the air-conditioning in this borrowed office, and it wasn’t something she was interested in learning. She brought a collection of lamps with her every week to warm up the lighting, and if someone accidentally flipped on a fluorescent light, she shrieked as if in pain. She believed in tending to all parts of the soul, even the ones we’d learned to ignore. She was a gentle animal with mothers, but absolutely fierce with anyone else.

  Dean did not want to see pictures of botched C-sections or discuss the inner workings of the vagina. He did not want to question the way that Western women gave birth, or try to come up with a new paradigm by studying ancient cultures. If it were up to him, I would just show up at the hospital, get my epidural, and pop the baby out while drinking a beer and shouting out answers to Jeopardy! He thought Betty was making mountains out of molehills. When she talked about how the rate of C-sections had tripled in recent years, her voice rising in despair, I decided to write an editorial about it for the local paper. Dean, in contrast, glanced at his watch.

  All of it was so much worse for him, knowing that at the very moments that he was trying to breathe deeply and imagine the birth canal in that dimly lit office building, his band was carrying on without him, grooving at a bar mitzvah or practicing for that elusive next CD. If class had taken even a half an hour’s less time, he might have been able to meet up with them after. But class never took less time. In fact, each week, it took more. Even to me, a total groupie, it was hard to make it to the end without stifling an onslaught of yawns.

  Tonight was the last one. Our eighth and final. Betty had planned a “graduation” party, and she’d made us all promise to be there.

  “I’ll never make you take another birthing class with me again,” I said to Dean as we pulled into the parking lot. “For the rest of our kids, I’ll just take a refresher course.”

  “The rest of our kids?” Dean said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You know, at least one or two more.”

  “Three seems like too many,” he said.

  “But two seems like too few.”

  “Two point five, then,” he said, and I laughed, just to remind us both that we were not fighting anymore.

  We had never spoken to anyone in our birthing class. There was never time. We didn’t know their names, so we had nicknames for them. There was the Giraffe—very tall—and her husband, Abe Lincoln, who liked to say, “Now, wait a second here!” There were the Oompa Loompas: short and round. The Mute and the Talker were a well-matched couple. Julia Child spoke in a strange falsetto, and her husband, the Pirate, kept one eye closed whenever he heard his wife’s voice. The Lizard licked his lips a lot and had beady eyes (Dean also claimed that he changed color depending on the color chair he’d picked for the night, but that point was up for debate), but his wife, Nipples, who should’ve brought a sweater to class, didn’t seem to mind. And then there was me and Dean.

  “What should our nicknames be?” I asked one night in bed.

  “Beauty and the Beast,” Dean said.

  “Are you the Beauty?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, touching my hair. “You are the Beauty. You are the Beauty.”

  7

  The baby did not come on its due date, which was March 11. The day came and went like any other. I felt as normal as any person in my condition could feel. I kept hoping for a cramp or a glimmer or a twinge. Something that said it was time. But there was nothing.

  Betty had warned us that the hospital scene everybody sees in the movies was not the way it happened in real life. We would not have the drama of my water breaking, say, in the grocery checkout line, and then the frantic race, in traffic, to the hospital while I screamed in agony and shouted, “You got me into this!” at Dean. Birth would arrive in its own way in its own time, and we could expect many different signs to let us know it was here.

  She was right, of course. Dean and I did not have the standard Hollywood birth drama. We had a very different one.

  Many women, toward the end of pregnancy, can’t wait to get the baby out. They are staggering under the weight of their bellies. Things that were once easy, such as putting on underpants, become riddled with complications. At birthing class, I once heard the Giraffe say to Julia Child, “It’s time to get this thing out!” as if it were some frozen ham that’d been stuffed down her shirt. I was not one of those women. I was happy being pregnant, and I was in no rush for it to be over.

  And I found that, as a very round pregnant woman, I was at ease in my body in a way I hadn’t been before. Even though my breasts were bursting out of my old bras, I had taken on the characteristic pregnancy waddle, and my belly projected so far beyond the normal edges of my body that I routinely hit it while closing the car door.

  Pregnant women aren’t subject to the same rules as regular women. Pregnant women are allowed to gain weight and be round and move slowly. Oddly, in the most visibly sexual state I’d ever be in (you don’t get knocked up like this by reading a book at the library), I felt totally shielded from roving eyes. I didn’t have to look sexy. I could waddle all over the grocery store, or the mall, or the jogging track at the park. I was doing something more important than looking good.

  For most of the pregnancy, Dean had been as randy as ever. That said, since that night he told me about the plane crash a month before, he’d been low on attention. I’d been trying not to talk about it, strategically staying outside the Cave, but after a while I couldn’t stand it. Then, at last, my nervous-girlfriend questions came tumbling out: How ya doin’? How’s it goin’? What’s up? What’s shakin’? Are you okay? Are you feeling all right? Is something wrong? Is something not right? What’s up? What’s wrong? Just tired? Okay?

  “Is it me?” I tried again, two nights after my due date, out on the porch swing. There was a speckled moth orbiting our porch light with such energy I kept thinking it would exhaust itself and fall to the floor.

  “Is what you?” he asked.

  “Whatever’s bothering you,” I said.

  “Nothing’s bothering me,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said. “You seem weird lately.”

  “Well,” he said. “I’m not.”

  I was hesitant to launch these conversations because they only seemed to piss him off. He had already told me nothing
was wrong so many times that he couldn’t have anything new to say.

  But something clearly was wrong. I wanted to talk about it.

  Because it wasn’t working for me. I was overdue. I wanted someone to rub my feet and tease me about my belly. I wanted a friend, a distraction from the interminable waiting, anything to give me some assurance about something.

  “It’s all because of his mother,” my mother declared.

  “Thanks, Freud,” I said.

  “She’s the worst mother in the world.”

  “I think she has a little trophy for it, actually.”

  My mother and Dean’s mother had met once, when Dean’s parents visited from New York, right after we told them about the baby. It was the only time they ever visited Dean in Texas. They stayed at the Four Seasons, and his father remained in the hotel every day of their four-day jaunt, having declared he’d seen too many Westerns to want to see Texas for real. Instead, he played some racquetball, dined in the hotel restaurant, read faxes from work, and ordered French fries from room service.

  Dean’s mother was more adventurous. She even came out one evening to see our house, which I had been cleaning for a week in anticipation of her arrival. As we drove her from the hotel back toward our neighborhood, I found myself wishing I’d washed the car again after the rainstorm earlier that week. I also found myself trying, at the last minute, to figure out the most scenic route home.

  Alas, there was no scenic route. Houston is a sprawling city, the ugly and the lovely all mixed up together. She didn’t take it well. At each washateria, strip mall, or titty-bar billboard, she winced, gasped, or cried out. The occasional grassy parkway or gentrified historic avenue provided relief for all of us in the car, and though I hoped to hear happy noises to counter her moans of despair, in the scenic spots she was just quiet. I was glad to pull, at last, into our driveway.