I say to Fritzie, “Do you want to take a picture of your room and text it to your mom so she can see?”
“Do you know how to spell the word no?” she says. “N. O. N. O. N. O. N. O.” She says this a hundred more times, at least.
“Okay, okay, I get it,” I say after a while.
We live through this day.
Patrick, who has been working in his studio, comes in from time to time, to offer consolation, wet paper towels, sandwiches, and some expertise with the Allen wrench, but we both know this is my project, not his. I’m the one who knows how important it is for her to have a haven with her own decorations, a place where she can go and shut the door, miss her mom, listen to music, do her homework, do whatever she needs to make this year okay for her.
I feel as though I’m always trying to nudge him toward her, to make him see how wonderful she is. They have a running joke about how Roy thinks he’s her brother and that she’s merely another cat who’s always looking to take his cat treats. I’ll hear her giggling while Patrick is teasing her about how Roy stashes the tuna surprise anywhere he can find.
“Roy sees you looking at that tuna surprise,” I heard him tell her. “He used to hide it in your bedroom, but now you’ve made it so he has to look for new hiding places every day.”
She giggled. “He put it in your shoes today!”
“No, no,” Patrick said. “That’s where you’re wrong. It’s under your pillow.”
“No! It’s under your pillow!”
“Not even close.”
Sometimes he’ll take her with him when he goes to Paco’s, and he buys her gum and sour candies and those little fried apple pies that come in wax baggies. He doesn’t tell me much, but I imagine that he has to be proud to have a little girl who will chat with just about everyone and who is so self-confident that she has to be prevented from going around the back of the counter and demanding to learn to use the cash register.
My mother laughs when I tell her about all this. Well, she laughs once she’s gotten over the shock of Patrick having a child from a previous encounter. It has to be explained to her several times that he didn’t abandon a pregnant girlfriend and then hold out on paying child support. “No, no, no,” I say. “She never even told him she was pregnant.”
“But, honey, didn’t he see her?”
“No, Mom. He barely knew her. Only for that one time.”
“She got pregnant in a one-night stand?” she says. “Are you sure you believe this?”
“Yes. I believe it. Because it’s true. And anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that the mother feels it’s now his turn to do some of the child-rearing, so we have an eight-year-old staying with us for a few months.”
“So you’re somebody’s stepmother!” she says. “I bet you can’t do one thing right, can you?”
“Well, I’m figuring it out as I go along,” I say. But I’m bristling at this just a little bit. It’s hard to explain to my mother how much I already love this child, how this seems like some of the universe’s magic at work, bringing me a gutsy little girl. There are times when I’m helping her with her homework or washing her hair for her or picking out her clothes for the next day that I feel myself floating up somewhere near the ceiling, looking down in amazement at how my life is changing.
But for some reason, everybody wants to make this a story about me getting a raw deal.
Before we hang up, I tell her a few choice details that I think might amuse her: the room decor with the lava lamp, Mister Swoony who looks like he has mange, Fritzie’s desire to dress Bedford and Roy in T-shirts, and the fact that, at the teacher conference I went to, Josie and Karen said she was adventurous, strong-willed, and fearless, and that she hates being left out of anything.
“Ha!” my mother says. “And you just know they mean she wants her own way all the time and is the ringleader for all the troublemakers.”
“Yep,” I say. “Yes, that is probably exactly what they mean.”
“Does she talk to her own mother, honey?”
“Well, she doesn’t want to, but I insist on making a weekly phone call to Tessa, just to keep her in the loop. So far the conversations are pretty short and awkward, but I think she needs to have contact with her mom.”
“Can’t say I blame her, though, for not wanting to. What kind of mother does that?”
“I know, I know. But it just might end up being the best thing for everybody. You know? We can’t rule anything out.”
“Do some of your magic about it,” says my mother, “and then turn your magic wand or whatever it is over to me. I’m ready to lock your father in his den and throw away the key. The only thing is, he wouldn’t even ever realize it. He’d just stay there!”
In the afternoons I hang out with the other moms on the playground, but I am always keeping one eye on Fritzie as she leaps from the top of the climbing structure, chases the other kids around in circles, and goes so high on the swings that my heart stops. By the time we go home, my teeth feel like I’ve been chewing on metal.
“Don’t look,” Elke tells me, when she sees me wincing. “They have to do this. It’s some kind of law of nature. Nobody understands it.”
The people of the Frippery point out that I’ve become a lot less sunny lately. Love, I want to tell them, can do that to you. It can make you downright uneasy until you find your way.
“You’re jumpier,” Ariana says. “Do you need me to come and babysit for you sometime? I think you’re developing a twitch in your eye.”
“A twitch?” says Kat. “The twitch is the least of it. She looks like a prisoner of war, being deprived of sleep and water. Here, my dear, at least hydrate yourself.” She hands me a big cup of tea. “Go smell some of the lavender in the cooler. I’ve heard it’ll change your brain.”
“Tell us what is the very worst part,” commands Lola, leaning forward, her kind eyes beaming into mine. “You’ve got to just say it out loud. Vent a little.”
“Sssh. She won’t do that,” Kat says. “She doesn’t want to be negative. You know Marnie.”
“The worst part,” I say slowly, “is that I want to show her so much love, and I can’t make up for what she went through with her own mother. And the worst, worst part is that I want to make us into a wonderful, big, happy family, and . . . and . . .”
Lola gets up and hugs me, and Ariana declares we need a group hug.
“You’re magic, Marnie,” she says. “Don’t forget that Fritzie landed with you for a reason.”
Oddly enough, that’s the day I feel the very best. As though I might be coming back into myself. When I go outside, leaving Best Buds to go pick Fritzie up from the after-school program, I look up and see the sky and notice that the leaves are changing colors and the sky is a crystalline shade of blue.
Crazy, I know, but it’s like I’d forgotten all about the sky.
“How many more months do we have left?” Patrick asks me one night as we get into bed.
“Of what?”
“Of what? Of Fritzie living here.”
I don’t answer him, so he sends one of his long legs over to my side of the bed and pokes me with his big toe.
“Come on,” he says. “Seriously. When is Tessa coming back for her so we can resume our lives?”
“I know you’re joking about this, and I don’t think it’s funny.”
He laughs. “I am so not joking. This is everything I outlined in advance that was going to be hard about parenthood. Teacher conferences. School projects. Kids’ stares. The only thing I left out was that I didn’t know about how a kid would want to paint a room and in the process would destroy the finish on the parquet wood floor in at least two rooms and a hallway. That I didn’t anticipate.”
“First of all, the finish is not destroyed. I mopped up the paint. And you, my good man, haven’t had to go to even one school conference. And I think having Fritzie—who, just as a reminder, is your daughter—is opening our lives up.”
“Perhaps our
lives were just fine half-closed the way they were.” He comes over to my side of the bed and nuzzles me, trying to get me to smile. “Come on. You know this is a hell of a thing we’re involved in here. It’s astonishing that people live their lives this way. Look at us. We are wrecks of our former selves, and I do not think we’re even halfway done. And please don’t tell me again about life’s great mystery being laid out before me.”
“Halfway done! You think we’re halfway done? This is October, Patrick. October.”
He pretends to look shocked. “So you’re saying this is going to be a lot longer.”
I stare at him. I mean, I know this is his idea of humor, but it makes me mad.
“Patrick, this is possibly not the best time to bring this up,” I say, “but I am actually the one doing nine-tenths of the work around here—both the emotional work and the physical work. So if anyone has the right of complainership, it’s me.”
“Absolutely. I bow to your right of complainership. Please. Go ahead. Complain away. I would love to hear any complaints you have about our current lifestyle.”
“Yes, well, I’m not going to complain, because this is the life I expected to have. This life—with a little girl who needs us, who is brave and funny and smart and heading off every day into a world she didn’t ask for, without her mother—and, well, I find that incredibly moving.”
“It’s very moving. And in fact, it would make a fine documentary someday. But that being said, it’s a hell of a lot of unplanned work. Look at us. We’re both exhausted, and now we’re arguing when in the old days, we could be making love or reading or planning our peaceful tomorrows. Instead we spend all our spare oxygen talking about who made her lunch and did she do her homework, and why isn’t she asleep yet, and . . .”
“Patrick.”
“. . . and who’s going to be home when, and what if . . .”
“Patrick.”
“What?”
“I know what you’re doing, and I’m just putting you on notice that I still want a baby. And, as I may have mentioned, I am thirty-three, which is not all that young when it comes to fertility. And Fritzie is doing well so I think it’s time we started trying on purpose.”
He slowly slides off the bed onto the floor, as though he’s oozing life force.
“Get back up on the bed.”
“I have died.”
“No, hear me out. I think parenthood is easier when you start with a brand-new one and work your way up.”
“That is a theory that has not been proven.”
I get up on my knees on the mattress and stare down at him. He’s sitting on the floor facing away from me, slumped against the bed. “No, no. Patrick, listen. We’ll already know so much about kids from being Fritzie’s parents, that when we have a baby, there won’t be any surprises.”
“There are always surprises,” he says. “This conversation right here is a big surprise actually.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be. We’ve had it before.”
“Yes, but we agreed to wait awhile. Remember that? Your Honor, may I treat the witness as hostile while we review the tapes? You, Marnie MacGraw, said you wanted a baby. I said I didn’t see myself as a father. You said I should think about it. We had sex, during which the condom mysteriously and ‘accidentally’ broke—” He crooks his fingers in the air.
“Do not air-quote the word ‘accidentally.’ You know as well as I do that—”
“May I proceed, Your Honor? Later that week, we find out we’re going to be raising a child for a year in circumstances that can only be described as surprising and completely out of left field and not of my choosing. But okay. One year. Which brings me back to my original question: Is the year up yet?”
“Yes, the condom broke. But it didn’t result in pregnancy, and then you said we could try again, so I think in view of the fact that I am close to being in my midthirties and you have agreed to try to have a child, that legally I am entitled to as many chances as possible. I want to buy a thermometer and start doing the charting of ovulation and all that.”
“You would say this to a man who is currently lying on the floor of your bedroom, gasping for his life?”
“All I am asking is that you get yourself up on the bed and take your clothes off.”
“Why are you so bossy?”
“Because I love you, and I am not getting any younger.”
“You! You are killing me.”
But he scrambles up onto the bed anyway, and I slather him all over with love, and by the time we’re ready for sleep, I do not think he is even close to dying.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PATRICK
It’s November, the month that Patrick thinks should include a trigger warning on the calendar page.
November was the month he was released back into the world after his hospitalizations from the fire, and each year around the anniversary of that, there is always a morning when he awakens to find the world has turned cobwebby and dusty. When he can’t lift his head. The sharp smell of autumn, the particular slant of light as it comes through the windows, and the shortening of daylight settle once again into his very bones. He thinks he can even still smell the acrid odor of the smoke. His cells know. They are keeping records.
This year, on the anniversary morning, as every morning, he makes a mug of coffee and goes into his studio. Roy, who has decided to live in there full-time since life has gotten so busy in the main part of the house, greets him disdainfully like the fellow refugee/traitor he is. Roy sits majestically on top of the pile of unused canvases, licking his nether regions as though he’s in his own private spa and the weak little sunbeam he is occupying was designed for him alone. Indeed, this studio is the place where both he and Patrick can seize even the smallest vestige of their previous life.
More and more, this is the moment Patrick waits for each day, this time of entering the studio, shutting out the world, seeking the seductive dark comfort of his pain. But today there is no comfort anywhere. He knows he’s not pulling his weight in the household. He sees Marnie looking at him, measuring how much more she’s doing than he is for Fritzie. She seems made for the mad dash of domesticity, while he feels lumbering and slow. He makes Fritzie’s breakfast each morning, and he starts the coffeepot—and today, heroically, he was the one to locate her missing shoe, which Bedford had taken into the living room and hidden under the couch.
And then, as every morning, he was there at the front door, to see them off. Perfunctory possibly, but he does it. Each day he watches as the two of them toddle off together, heading toward the subway carrying their bags, adjusting their sweaters and their hats. Today he saw Marnie reach over and straighten Fritzie’s hat, then lick her finger and clean her chin. The universal gesture of moms.
He turned away and closed the door. The piercing pain in his heart wasn’t from witnessing this touching moment between two people to whom he’s connected. No. It was the realization of his own emptiness. Down at the very heart of him, there is nothing. No sensation.
He knows he is not going to let himself love this child. He can’t. That would be setting himself up for a heart-stopping disappointment when she is reclaimed by her mother. Anyway, it’s better this way, maintaining his distance. He is far too screwed up for her to count on him. That’s what nobody but him seems to see. It’s like he’s howling in the wilderness to the universe: I am not to be trusted. I have a bad track record with other humans. Do you not remember that I was present at the death of one of your very best ones? I could not be relied upon to save her, and I can’t help any of the others either.
Patrick goes to the other room, where he’s placed the paintings he’s worked on and then put aside. He doesn’t know what he was expecting them to say to him, but what he sees levels him. Here it all is, laid out before him, caught on the canvases: the smell of the hospital room, the rampaging fire, the lost self figuring out how to go on and failing at that and then failing again—all of this is right here in the work.
&
nbsp; He sits back on his heels, staggered.
Will anyone want to see all this pain? Is there even any particle of beauty or hope in these? He examines them closely.
Goddamn. Everything he’s done is despair. Everything. There are the two big uncompleted ones and five individual paintings that are finished, or nearly so. They are crap. How could he not have seen? How did this sneak up on him? This whole show he’s doing is turning into a retrospective of his doomed relationship with Anneliese. There is no mercy in these paintings. They show only his crabbed view of the world, his well of desolation.
Anneliese, he sees, is his ghost and muse. And he doesn’t know how to get free of her. She is always going to be there in his mind, jumping in when he’s making love to someone else, screaming when he’s sleeping, throwing herself at him when he is doing something as simple as picking up a paintbrush.
No wonder he is wrung out by the end of each day. Because every day she lives and dies again. Every day there is the fire that answered the question of who they were to each other. If he is completely honest with himself, he knows that they were an ambivalent couple. She was a difficult woman. He was a clueless man. They were locked in strife sometimes, and sometimes, even sculpting next to each other in the same room, breathing the same air, they were as far apart as any two people could be.
A Happy Catastrophe Page 13
