She’ll soon realize that she’s still young enough now to find a guy who will want babies with her. She can go off to have all those things she once texted him she wanted—the Boppies and sippies and socks with lace and whatevers. Three years, tops, and she’ll be a woman pushing a stroller with a baby and a diaper bag and a gorgeous husband trotting alongside looking pleased with himself. Looking so smug it’ll be like they invented procreation.
And even though she’s miserable right now, it’s so much better that he did it this way, just ripped that little bandage right off, rather than letting things remain in a downward spiral, both of them thinking that love was going to be enough to see them through. When it wasn’t. This was actually an act of kindness on his part, releasing her to the life she was meant for.
Someday, he’ll be able to say the truth to her: “I broke up with you because I loved you and I wanted you to have the life you’re truly meant for.”
But for now, he’ll just have to put up with her fury.
And of course he needs to start thinking about a plan. Maybe he’ll suggest that he move back to the basement, when Ariana moves out. That way Fritzie’s life will be disrupted as little as possible. In the meantime, he’ll stay out of Marnie’s way, be a polite houseguest who helps with dinner and the dishes, takes the dog for a walk, pays for things, and doesn’t ruffle any feathers. He can be pleasant for—what? Five more months.
And then after that he’ll get his own place. Alone. Somewhere.
He stands there looking at the collection of Annelieses, and he feels proud in a way he’s not felt in a long time. It hurt his hands, forming them, which only served to make them more worthwhile. He hadn’t thought he could ever do sculpture again. It wasn’t going to be possible with all the nerve damage, with the scars. And even so, some days he hurt so bad that he had to get up in the middle of the night and wrap his hands in ice just so he could move his fingers. He lived on ibuprofen and some naturopathic salve he’d found at the health store.
But he’d worked through the pain. Again and again in his life, he’s worked through pain. It’s what he does. And now he can work through the pain of losing Marnie, too.
He thinks of Blix and how years ago she stormed down to his basement apartment and forced him to talk to her, and then—even more daringly—made him get up out of his chair and dance with her. He did not dance, he informed her. But she made him put on a Hawaiian shirt like hers, and she turned the music up loud, and she did this funny version of the hula, totally unselfconsciously, and pulled him out of himself. She wasn’t afraid of anything.
She’d be proud of him for pushing through the pain. She’d made a huge mistake thinking Marnie and he belonged together, but that was probably because she didn’t know that Marnie wanted her own kids. Even Blix would now see that breaking things off was actually a supreme act of love.
He remembers her saying one time, “Oh, don’t be an idiot about love, Patrick! It’s the only force that matters in the whole world. People say such foolish things in the name of love, but you’ve got to let yourself live—and to live, you’ve got to let yourself love.”
Blix was a nice, eccentric wild woman who lived exactly the way she wanted to. And now that’s what he’s going to do, too. Surely she’d be proud of him for that.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
MARNIE
When I leave Patrick’s studio I go straight to my room, and I get in bed with all my clothes on, and I pull the cotton blanket, the down comforter, the quilt, and my twisted-up sheet over my head. I’m freezing cold, and my teeth are chattering, and also my arms and legs don’t think they can work for me anymore.
I put the pillow over my head, too.
And that’s when I let my heart break.
How can I love someone so much who is so damaged and hurting that he can’t let himself have any joy? What the fuck happened that has made him run back to all that agony? I don’t get it. We love each other.
I want to go over and yell it to him one more time. Maybe take him by the shoulders and shake him this time. But nothing would make a difference. I saw the look in his eyes while he was telling me about being sterile.
Somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention, Patrick fell out of love with me. It wasn’t like there was a falling out moment. It was seepage, is what it was. He seeped out of love for me, drip by drip by drip, while I was prancing around the house, entertaining my mother, getting to know the teenagers, helping Fritzie with her homework. The love all drained away, and I have to get over it. And what may be even harder is that I have to face the probable, likely fact that Blix was wrong about everything.
Eventually my mother comes to the edge of my bed. I can hear her breathing from my damp little cocoon.
“Are you all right?” she says. “What’s going on with you?”
I start to cry all over again. “Patrick.”
“What happened?”
“He’s . . . not . . .” I just hope she gets the picture and will realize that I can’t cope anymore, and that she needs to do everything for me from now on. I can’t go on; really I can’t.
“Come out from under the covers.”
This is actually a good idea, because I’ve used up all the air under there. I’m still freezing, however. My feet feel like they are in danger of falling off. But I stick my head out and breathe in some real oxygen.
“Now tell me what happened,” she says. She sits down on the bed and puts her hand on the bumps of the covers where my feet are.
I tell her that Patrick is breaking up with me, and then I tell her all the rest, too: that he’s just remembered that he’s sterile, and that means that he doesn’t want me to stay with him because I want a baby too much. And also he’s been over there making statues of Anneliese for the past few weeks, and that he’s basically still in love with his dead girlfriend, and bottom line: he doesn’t want to be with me anymore.
When I put it all out like this, it doesn’t sound very good for Patrick. He sounds like a mental case, in fact, which is just what my mother thinks.
“I don’t believe any of this. He’s lost his mind,” she says. I remember all too well now this side of her—the no-nonsense mom force-marching Natalie and me through any of our childhood traumas, using platitudes, commands, and whatever else she had at hand. It was part of her mom arsenal—an arsenal I realize now that I’ll never need to develop. I’ll never have my own child. I start to cry all over again.
“He hasn’t lost his mind. He doesn’t want to be with me, is all. It’s not going to work. It doesn’t matter what he’s saying the reason is. He’s just telling me every way he knows how that it’s over.”
She sighs. “I think the world of men has gone mad,” she says. “Is it the full moon? Or, as you would say, is Mercury in retrograde?”
“It doesn’t matter. He just doesn’t love me anymore. He needs solitude all the damn time, and I keep creating chaos all around. So it’s over. End of story.” I pull the covers back over my head. Enough oxygen for now. I can’t take the way my mother is looking at me, like I’m a project that’s defeating her.
“You should have some soup. I’m going to bring you some soup.”
“I don’t want any soup.”
“You need soup, and Patrick needs soup,” she pronounces. She gets off the bed, and there’s a cold patch of air hitting me now. “Both of you have gone completely bonkers here for no apparent reason, and soup is going to be just as good a cure as anything else. This is patently ridiculous of him. It’s just the stress talking.”
“Go tell him that. I need to be alone.”
She’s still standing next to my bed, breathing.
“Please,” I say.
“I just want to ask you one thing, and I mean this with no disrespect,” she says. “What good is all this magic stuff you’re always talking about if you can have your whole outlook shattered in one day like this? Don’t you have to have faith in it for it to work?”
If I had the stren
gth, I would throw my pillow at her.
When Fritzie gets home from school, she comes in and sits on the edge of my bed. She’s eating an apple. The crunching at first seems unbearable, and then feels like it might represent something holy and life-affirming. Eating! Like love, however, it is something for other people, not for me.
“Are you sick?”
“Yes.”
“What have you got?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why are the covers and pillow on your head?”
“Because I’m freezing.”
“Oh.”
Crunches.
“Do you have homework?” I say after a while.
“Oh! Patrick says I should tell you he’s not coming over for dinner.”
“You should leave Patrick alone.”
“I wasn’t bothering him, Marnie. I just went to see if Roy wanted a cat treat.”
“Do you have homework?” This is way more conversation than I want to be having.
“No.”
Crunches.
“Marnie, can I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“Are you in bed because you’re sad?”
“No. Yes. I’m a little bit sad.”
I feel her little hand coming over to my shoulder, tentatively at first, and then patting me over and over again. A steady stream of little comforting pats.
That’s when I know I should come out from under the covers—for her sake. Get up, start moving around the house. Life has to go on.
So I get up.
The next morning Patrick’s in the kitchen with Fritzie when I get out of bed. He’s made her breakfast—her latest favorite, a three-minute egg nestled on a piece of toast with a circular hole cut out of it. She examines it for precision; it’s as though everything we do for her is a test of our commitment. This morning the hole is found to be a little lopsided, and to my surprise, he wearily agrees to make another one for her and to cut it more exactly.
He doesn’t look in my direction.
“It’s okay, Patrick,” she says after a moment. “I’ll eat it this way.”
Normally he and I would have exchanged a look of triumph at a moment like this, but I don’t look at him, and I can feel him not looking at me. My mother comes over from Lola’s house, exclaiming about the snow that fell last night, and how it’s slippery on the steps, so be careful.
“Shouldn’t school be closed in these conditions?” she asks.
There’s a silence, and then Patrick and I both start in at the same time, beginning to explain that Brooklyn doesn’t usually have snow days. Embarrassed, we stop talking at the same time. And then worse, start up again at the same instant.
Fritzie laughs. My mother says, “Never mind. I get it.” She gets herself a cup of coffee and goes out to the living room, shaking her head at us.
I do him the favor of disappearing back to my room. I hear him organizing Fritzie into Getting Ready to Leave—and although I’m the one who usually walks her to the bus stop these days, I don’t go out there and offer today. It’s painful to listen to—he doesn’t know how to pack up the backpack, forgets and has to be reminded about the lunch, and then doesn’t understand that her suede boots won’t work in the snow. She needs the big fur-lined rubber ones. I lie on the bed and listen to his hopelessness as he learns these things. Serves him right.
“Patrick,” I hear her say. “You are just a mess!”
And then they are gone.
We’ve almost made it through the first twenty-four hours. I can’t even begin to think how awful my life is about to be. At some point, my mother will go back to Florida, the teenagers will move out and into their lives—and Patrick, whom I now detest, will take my sweet Fritzie away. And the house will be so quiet. So very horribly quiet.
I take a little mental inventory. And here’s what we’re left with. Magic doesn’t work, love may not run the whole universe after all, and those little silken sacks with spell-casting herbs I’ve cultivated and carried around—well, maybe I shouldn’t have wasted my time. Patrick and I were never meant to be together. Blix was wrong. I was wrong, and I am so sad that it takes everything to get up and face every new horrible day.
I fully expect all the couples I’ve insisted belong together to come, one by one, back into my life to point out that things didn’t go so hot after all. Lola will phone and say that William Sullivan was her worst mistake to date. That couple from the restaurant, too. They’ll be in, retracting everything. Dozens of people will all come shaking their fists at me and claiming I’ve misled them.
One morning I look over at the toaster on the counter and start to laugh. The toaster, even! Had I actually gotten myself to believe that Blix was a force who was still around, who flung toast out of the toaster to give me a message? Honest to God, I’ve been a lunatic! Dancing around through life, thinking the little sparkles in the air were evidence of love and that I could meddle in other people’s lives! Who did I think I was?
There isn’t any magic to me, and there never was.
As if to prove that, I get a text from him: A proposal for going forward. In order to disrupt F’s life as little as possible wondering if U wd be OK w/me living in the studio until school is out & she goes back to Tessa. I’ll try to stay out of UR way. P.
I think it’s the abbreviations that hurt the most. He prides himself on typing out every word, on using proper punctuation. It was even a joke between us. Our thing.
“Can you believe this shit?” I say to my mom, who shrugs. “Dude writes me a note!”
“He doesn’t dare talk to you in person because he loves you so much that he knows he’ll break down and start sobbing,” she says. “Already he’s regretting what he’s done.”
“No, he’s not,” I say.
“I’m just saying he’ll be back. You’ll see.”
But he does not come back.
And then one morning my mother and I are walking to Best Buds together and she looks at her phone and says, “Oh my God, your father’s coming.”
“O. M. G,” I say. “He is? He’s coming to visit you? Or is he coming to take you home with him?”
“Well, he’s certainly not going to take me home with him!” she says emphatically. “Not unless he plans on kidnapping me. I don’t really know what he expects to happen. That man! Honestly. He’s made a reservation for two weeks from now. Why? Why is he coming here? I’m not ready for this.”
I know why. He’s coming because, after forty years of marriage, he at last senses some change in the marital air currents. My dad may be slow to catch on, but he’s no fool. He’s coming to reclaim his wife from the smarmy Randolph Greenleafs of the world. He’s coming because he’s sick of watching golf in Florida without her to ask him to change the channel.
And basically, he’s coming because he’s in love with my mother, and he knows through some unspoken deep connection they have, like a cable running between them from Florida to New York, that she’s in love with him, and they need to be back together. Enough of this separation nonsense. I get it.
I get it, but I think my father is going to be stunned by the new Millie MacGraw. She’s turned bold without him around to silence her with his disapproving sigh. There’s no one to veto her purchases, to set his mouth in a line when she comes home with a new skirt, to say, “But did you need that?” There’s no one to make her feel small or tentative, to question her choices.
Poor man: he thought it was his birthright to be the man of the family, to be the final, deep-voiced authority benevolently ruling over a small domestic kingdom. He did it well, too—with a chuckling demeanor most of the time, kind and loyal. He was accustomed to being obeyed, his fairness never coming into question. That coffee table? That vacation plan? No, no, no. This is how it’s done. He had no reason to think he wouldn’t spend his whole life that way.
But something happened, and his wife is a force now. If you ask me, she’s turning into the Resident Crone and Wise Woman in the Frippery
, and as her daughter, I’m alternately proud and horrified listening to the way she asserts her opinions.
For instance, I heard her tell Ariana the other day that she’d be so much more attractive to “a better class of young men” if she sat up straight. (Ariana didn’t even get mad; she laughed and her eyes caught mine and she mouthed, “What the HECK?” and adjusted her posture just in case.)
“Millie,” I said. “Ariana has Justin, and he is a wonderful class of young man.”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” my mother said. “At her age, she needs to experience a fuller range of young men. That way she can see her way more clearly to what she really wants in life. We women don’t have to settle for the ragtag group of guys we see right in front of us when we’re teenagers, you know. In fact, with all due respect to your matchmaking powers, may I add that we may not need to settle for any man at all.”
And now, having gotten Ariana to sit up straight, she’s fired up to go on to fashion advice: pointing out that it’s considered kind of mysterious and even classy when a woman doesn’t quite show her midriff in every single outfit. And that leggings are perhaps not exactly the same thing as pants. To my surprise, the Amazings just take Millie’s fashion advice as if it’s something eccentric and adorable and worth following.
I almost can’t stand being at the Frippery lately. I feel as though I’m just going through the motions, a person who has been forsaken by magic. Everything I believed in feels like it’s been shown to be stupid and wrong-headed. Magic? Sparkles? Oh, please. I don’t remember how it is that matchmaking happens. I look around for sparkles in the air, and even when I squint hard, I can’t find them. And I can’t even find the energy to participate in all the lively, bustling conversations taking place. Everything seems a little bit ridiculous, if you want to know the truth of it. I find myself yawning a lot, wanting to be in the back room adding up numbers into columns, filling out the forms for ordering. Kat, who told me she was sure this day would never come between Patrick and me, now looks at me with worry in her eyes and just shakes her head.
A Happy Catastrophe Page 25
