Shawn and I met on Match.com six years ago, before he blew up in the Internet world, back when he and I were just Shawn and Willa. He sent me a note with the intro: what are two normal people like us doing here?, and it made me laugh, so I ignored my instincts that Internet dating was for weirdos and cyber-freaks, and I wrote him back and said: Just tempting fate. Which I thought was super-clever given my dad’s theories that fate is what happens to us, not something we have any influence to tempt. I pressed “send,” and then wondered why on earth I was mixing my dad into my dating life. Shawn missed the reference (or didn’t google me right away) and replied within the hour.
I scanned Shawn’s profile, and I could see why he thought we’d be a good match. We were both middle children; we both liked reading classic novels; we both listed “people who argue just to argue,” as a turn-off; and we both listed, “someone who is in charge and confident” as a turn-on. When asked what country he most compared himself to (Match.com urges you to complete their two-page questionnaire “to give potential interests better insight to what makes you you,” and no one dares run the risk that his or her future spouse misses out on you because you stupidly opted to skip the questionnaire…so everyone fills it out), he cited Switzerland. And I thought: omg! I’m totally Switzerland too!
And he was. And I was. And together, we were Switzerland on turbo, Switzerland on crack. Which works very well for a marriage, actually, until it stops working because one spouse finds a receipt from Grape!, and can’t help but wonder if the other spouse is actually, perhaps, North Korea. Or…something.
Accept.
Deny.
Ignore.
My finger twitches over Theodore’s friend request, and I tamp down my instinct to click on any of my options. (“Instinct is nothing more than a human’s misguided attempt to think that he has some semblance of control.” — New York Times bestseller Is It Really Your Choice? Why Your Entire Life May Be Out of Your Control, p. 33) Maybe it doesn’t matter which I choose — I’d lived my life telling myself as much. And yet still, the prospects loomed:
Accept.
Deny.
Ignore.
When did Facebook become the analogy for the rest of our lives?
—
I startle awake at 4:12 a.m. The lights still on, the laptop still perched on my stomach. Shawn still asleep on the couch, I assume. We never used to do this — sleep one without the other — and as I reach to flip off the bedside lamp, I wonder when our habits started shifting.
He’s tired, I think. Working all the time. He was named to Wired’s 40 Under 40 for God’s sake! I can’t expect him to be present in all ways in all places at all times. I bet Mark Zuckerberg sometimes falls asleep at his office too.
My light flips off with a loud click, and I squeeze my eyes shut, hoping sleep will come, hoping that my anxiety won’t win the battle over my fatigue. But before I can even hope to drift into slumber, my phone beeps twice.
Beep beep.
Beep beep.
I slide my index finger over my home page to discover a text from my boss Hannah. A photo actually. Or at least I think it’s her. It’s a close-up of her breasts, of two fat, overflowing, sweaty cantaloupes with a crevasse between them. They could be anyone’s breasts, quite honestly, or anyone who is well-endowed enough, but the necklace charm — the four-leaf clover she never removes — identifies the bosom.
For a moment, I worry that this is some sort of penance she is making me pay for the disastrous Dependables meeting. I consider typing something back, something that says: “Adult Diapers can never be sexy! Adult diapers are about assurance and stability, not flash and come-hitherness!”
I gaze up at the blackness of my ceiling and suddenly realize that my marriage might be a bit like a box of Dependables.
But before I even type my snappy response to Hannah, I lose my nerve. Overt confrontation was never really my thing. Maybe she doesn’t know how poorly the meeting went. Maybe she’s just on a bender, and it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.
So instead I type: Don’t think this was meant for me?
And say a silent prayer that in fact, it wasn’t. Maybe there are such things as accidents. My dad speaks to the big, overarching push-pulls of life: that all is as it should be. But does that mean that my boss can’t mistakenly sext me? And if so, where do these happy accidents begin and end? With a missed connection on Facebook? With a false positive on a pregnancy test?
I roll my fingers over my laptop and it breathes to life.
Google: EPT false positive
Google Search results:
Livestrong: how to take a pregnancy test
Amazon.com: 20% off all EPT tests!
The Wendy Williams Show: I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant!
BabyCenter.com: 3 False positives/Ept faint line??????
Bingo.
From @iluvbooboo: Here’s the deal: I peed every day since day five after sex and each time it showed a line. But maybe that was just a pee line? How am I supposed to tell the difference between a baby line and a pee line?????? Can anyone help?????????
From: @mamabear: The same thing happened to me! EPT sucks! I want to kill EPT. They get my fucking hopes up every time, and then I always get my Aunt Flo. Aunt Flo, I hate you as much as EPT!!!!
From: @dreaminofbaby: Ladies, let’s start a petition against EPT. EPT: do you actually stand for Essentially a Piece of Trash.
From: @iluvbooboo I am IN!!!!!!!!! Where do I sign?
From: NurseEllen: dear @iluvbooboo: false positives are very rare. I suggest you consult your doctor for a blood test. Or maybe this is all part of God’s plan for you.
From: @iluvbooboo: Nurse Ellen, respectfully, both you and God’s plan can go fuck yourself.
I try to log on to add my encouragement to @iluvbooboo. Something simple like: You go girl! Or: Who are you to say what God has planned? Or: So only people who are lucky enough to have a plan with God get a kid?
I try several user names — WillaGolden; WillaChandler; Willa ChandlerGolden — but can’t remember the right one. Sorry, this user does not exist! Which is just as well anyway because right when I give up, Hannah texts me back.
Oops. Srry. Not for u.
There, I think. Accidents happen. Maybe my dad isn’t always right.
—
My father didn’t become totally obsessive about his theories on fate and inevitability until his twin brother died. By all accounts — and surveying my grandmother’s worn, sepia-toned photos in which he looks like a perfectly normal, perfectly perfect little boy, this information seems verifiable — he didn’t truly fall into the deep end of never-ending rationality until the accident. In my dad’s defense, William’s death was an honest-to-God act of total randomness, a confluence of events that came together as a perfect storm — both literally and figuratively. A road trip through Florida, a last-minute hurricane, a downed palm tree smack through the roof of their crappy highway hotel. The tree trunk landed on the right bed — William’s — completely shattering his chest cavity and killed him instantly. My father — in the left bed — jolted awake and saw that the distances between life and death, between coming out totally unscathed and having your heart crushed inward, was simply nothing more than the decision to pass out on the mattress closest to the door.
My dad spent days, weeks, months asking himself, “What if? What if it had been a different motel? What if it had been a road trip through Tampa, not Miami? What if we’d stopped for chicken noodle soup and not driven all the way through?”
But none of this brought William back. None of this changed anything.
So my dad pressed on with his Ph.D., and he quit trying to come up with reasons why and what and how he could have done things differently, and instead, he set about proving why, in fact, nothing could have been done dif
ferently at all. Over the years, he burrowed further and further into this hole.
My mom likes to tell me the story of when I was born: that when I came out kicking and bloody and purple, the doctor held me up and cheered, “It’s a girl!” And my mom shouted, “Impossible! She was supposed to be a boy!” She began weeping in the way that only seriously hormonal, post-birth women can — after all, she’d already painted the nursery and bought only navy onesies and beanies.
But my dad? No, this wasn’t surprising to him. By then, he was well into his third paper for the Journal of Science, well on his way to the next coming of Einstein. Instead, he looked at me and shrugged and said, “Well, we’re still naming her William. That’s life. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t change it now.”
My mother pointed out that now was exactly when they could change it, that the birth certificate hadn’t been signed, that announcements hadn’t been printed or mailed. But my father insisted, and since my mother was her own worn-down version of Switzerland, the version that comes after years of loving a man who you have realized may be completely off his rocker but also might be the most brilliant man alive, she acquiesced. They compromised on Willa when I entered kindergarten because everyone assumed I was just a boy who liked to dress up in girls’ clothing. And I might have been little, but I can still remember the joy I felt at receiving my new moniker: that after so many years as William, it was a relief to try to be something new.
4
“I need something super-awesome to impress Nicky with this weekend,” I say to Vanessa the next morning, the early June air thick with humidity, clogging our pores, matting wisps of hair firmly against our temples.
“A prostitute?”
“He’s twelve.”
“So next year.”
“Right. Put a pin in that.”
“At thirteen, he becomes a man!” Vanessa throws her arms up in the air in mock-rejoice, and a cabbie yells out his window, “Great ass!”
She blows him a kiss, and we turn a sharp right into Central Park, Vanessa’s elbows pumping furiously to authenticate actual exercise.
“You know, we’re not actually ‘power-walking,’” I say. “’Power-walking’ implies real speed, an attempt to increase your heart rate.”
“I am attempting,” she says. “Besides, can’t you just be happy that I got out of bed to walk you to work?”
“You say that every Friday.”
When Shawn and I married, Vanessa made me swear that I wouldn’t become one of those women who lost herself entirely to her new husband. Whose sentences always started with “we,” whose plans always had to be confirmed with the other half. (Though admittedly, with our mapped-out life plan — children and a white picket fence and that cushy volunteer job at the library — we became pretty much this exactly.) It wasn’t that she wasn’t happy for me — she was, but still, she made me promise. I assured her that she and I would never drift apart, even while considering that one can never be sure of anything that the future may hold — the future just…was. And so dutifully, we walked through the city each Friday morning: me, on my way to work; her, searching for inspiration for her writing from whatever pulsed around us.
“So I got the job,” she says, as we wind down past John Lennon’s Imagine Circle, through the thicket of tourists with their cameras slung around their necks, already bottlenecking the walkway in the early hours of the day.
“Job?” I ask.
“The Dare You! companion guide, remember? Daring Yourself to a Better Life: How These Simple Steps Will Put You on the Road to Happiness.” She’s stymied by a Japanese man who doesn’t seem to know if he should move left or right. “Listen, I mean, I know it’s not for a Pulitzer or anything, but it’s a huge paycheck with a pretty sweet bonus.”
I remember now. I’d loved the book’s concept in theory—daring yourself to live outside the lines and change your life from within — though probably less so in practice. Also, I didn’t really believe in any of it. But still.
“I think it’s awesome,” I say. “Who needs a Pulitzer?”
“Your dad?” she says, and we both smile.
We hit the park traverse and stop in tandem for a horse and carriage plodding by us.
“Theo friended me two days ago,” I say, knowing that I have to tell her sometime.
“And you wait to tell me until now?” She ties her sweatshirt around her waist and rewraps her ponytail.
“I’ve been distracted. For one, Adult Diapers tanked. Hannah’s going to be a mess today.”
“Because of her coke habit.”
“No. Well, that too. She inadvertently sexted me at 4 a.m.”
Vanessa emits a deep-down belly laugh. “God, what a disaster she is.”
“But she’s still going to be a mess because the meeting was as horrendous as a meeting can go. Jesus, did the universe screw me this week.”
“The universe didn’t screw you, Willa. Hannah did. You can’t expect for life to go smoothly when you spend your nights inhaling the better half of a kilo of cocaine.”
“Well, I mean, maybe she doesn’t have control over…”
Vanessa halts abruptly and flashes a hand. “Stop. Just stop. Before you even start in with that crap from your dad. No one has a choice. We all lead the lives we were meant to live. Oh, bullshit, Willa. Just bullshit. Hannah has a choice to stop doing coke. She just doesn’t choose it.”
If you didn’t know Vanessa, you might think that these mantras are part of her new self-help gig, like she’s next in line to be the next guru for better living. But Vanessa’s been this strident for as long as I’ve known her. Own your choice. Live your life. Be brave. Be bold. She had the entire Nike campaign — Just Do It! — tacked to her college dorm wall when we first met. And besides, why argue with her now when I’m not even sure what I’d argue in return? Vanessa is sure about her truths, but I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know about free will and fate and destiny and my father’s New York Times bestseller, which was hailed as “the greatest self-help book since The Secret!,” even though I grew up swaddled in this mumbo-jumbo, swaddled tightly enough to sometimes feel suffocated, like if I didn’t break free, I could be smothered alive. But a lot of it made sense to me all the same. And besides, isn’t it easier not to upset the apple cart?
But if I said that aloud, Vanessa would tell me that there I go again, not owning my choice.
“Well, anyway,” I say, matching her step through the park. “Today is going to be damage-control, and Nicky’s coming tonight, and I’m still not pregnant, and so I forgot to mention Theo.”
“I’m sorry about the still-not-pregnant thing,” she says, meaning it.
“Ugh,” I moan and actually shake my fists at the sky. “Fuck you, universe!” A mom pushing a Bugaboo scowls at me and makes a sharp perpendicular turn away from us.
Vanessa shakes her head and grins, and I drop my chin to my chest.
“Actually, the truth is…I’m not even devastated by the whole not-pregnant thing. I know that I should be, but…” I watch the mom stride down the path, then loop under a bridge and disappear out of view. “But…maybe not everyone is meant to be a mother.” Maybe @nurseellen is right, I think.
“According to you, everyone is meant to be whatever he or she’s meant to be,” Vanessa says. It does sound ridiculous when she puts it that way.
“Touché,” I say. My shoelace has come untied. I crouch to fix it. “Also, I think Shawn might be cheating on me. But that’s probably insane. It’s probably nothing. Just, you know, an overreaction on my part.” I don’t meet her eyes until I find that I have to.
She holds my eyes for a beat, then offers me her hand, pulling me up.
“Sweetie, you never overreact. It’s not in your gene pool.”
I exhale and lose myself for a minute, staring at the exp
anse of buildings in front of me, their steel, their power, their unquestioning architecture. Life should be like that, I think, fully aware that my dad spent a lifetime proving this theory: one brick on top of the next, each with its place, each with its purpose. Eventually, you reach the highest floor, and you can stare down with the understanding how you got there.
There I go again, agreeing with my father. I find myself doing that sometimes, even when I wish that I knew better.
—
Hannah looks uncomfortably warm when I arrive in her office. She’s wearing a navy turtleneck better suited for February, and her cheeks are too pink, like the underbelly of a pig. For a second, I imagine her as bacon. Her hair is matted to her temples with a sheen of perhaps both sweat and some sort of day-old gel or mousse, if anyone still uses mousse anymore.
Hannah’s gaze rolls off me and moves to the files on her desk.
“Let’s not talk about the text,” she states flatly.
“Consider it never spoken about again.”
I fumble with my hands and try to think of something to say to make this any less awkward than it already is. But before I can, she starts:
“So when I told you to knock the pants off Dependables, you knew that I meant, like, do a good job, not a totally shitty one, right?”
“Pun intended?”
Her already puffy eyes narrow to slits.
“Sorry, sorry. Bad timing. Shawn made the joke last night.” I pull back the chair in front of her desk and sit. And that’s when I notice the empty boxes stacked in the corner.
The Theory of Opposites Page 3
