Family and Other Catastrophes

by Alexandra Borowitz

  “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry!” Gabrielle said, getting up to hug Marla’s stiff board of a body. “I went through this when my aunt died last year. Trust me, she’s in a better place.”

  “She’s in a morgue, most likely,” Steven said. “The afterlife is a nice story, but let’s not insult Marla’s intelligence here.”

  Gabrielle, perplexed, looked around, unsure as to why nobody else seemed to care about Aunt Ellen as much as she did.

  “Mom, sit down,” Jason said.

  “I don’t want to be rude,” Mark said to Jason in a low voice, “but isn’t this kind of a big deal? She said this woman was like a mother to her. Maybe you should try to be a little more—”

  “Mom hated Aunt Ellen,” Jason said. “She stopped speaking to her more than thirty years ago. I’ve never even met her.”

  “That’s not true at all, Jason,” Marla said. “Aunt Ellen met you when you were a baby. She probably wouldn’t remember it any better than you do, though. She was a raving alcoholic and nearly dropped you on your head because she was so sloshed, but that’s beside the point.”

  “How was she like a mother to you?” Emily asked. “You told me a few years ago that she was your inspiration to go into psychology because she was such a—and I quote—‘pathetic failure of a woman’ and you ‘wanted to have a real life that went beyond slaving away for offspring all day.’”

  “Aunt Ellen was absolutely a failure of a woman,” Marla said. “But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t important to me. If it wasn’t for her, I’d be some complacent stay-at-home mom in Massachusetts with a worthless degree in anthropology.”

  Steven looked prickled. “To be fair, Marla, degrees aren’t ever useless.”

  “Not for professors,” she shot back. “Check with your students in ten years and see what they think is useless. Anyway, this conversation has reeled entirely off topic. I need to grieve for my aunt. Emily, I’m sorry to say this, but I need to fly up to Boston.”

  “What?” Emily got up from her seat. “For how long? You’re going to miss my wedding?”

  “No, I’ll probably come back the morning of. You’ll be fine, trust me, it’s really time for you to be an adult and showing some empathy here would be great personal growth.”

  “Mom,” Lauren said. “I don’t mean to grief-shame you, but I have to agree with Emily and Jason that you barely even liked this woman, let alone loved her. When exactly is the funeral?”

  “She isn’t having one,” Marla said. “They’re just cremating her and her kids are hosting a small get-together for close friends and family at cousin Hannah’s house. I’m not sure how they’re going to fit everyone, though. Hannah’s house is far too small last I checked, just a dinky split-level covered in those tacky cat decorations, it’s really quite absurd. And honestly, I don’t even need to go to that, I just want to go up there and pay my respects.”

  David turned to Emily. “Why are none of these relatives coming to the wedding? I assumed they were all dead.”

  “Dead to her,” Emily said.

  * * *

  David was a great cuddler. Emily didn’t know that someone could be good or bad at cuddling until she met him. He was just so warm, and his body fit perfectly with hers. They snuggled up in bed after Mark, Gabrielle and Kevin went back to the Ritz. It took a few minutes of making out with David for Emily’s family to fade from her thoughts. Every time she closed her eyes, all she could think about was her mother pursing her lips and shaking her head in disapproval. She would probably have thought the lingerie Emily was wearing right now was tacky because it was red and lacy, and not...what kind of lingerie did Marla wear anyway? Did she wear lingerie? Emily didn’t know why she did this to herself. She was making out with the sexiest guy she knew and thinking about her mother’s panties.

  She racked her brain for a fantasy, anything to get her mind to a better place. She envied men—they didn’t have to think about anything, it seemed. Men could reach orgasm with women they didn’t even find attractive. Jason loved to remind her of this when she was in college. That was back when she was hooking up with cute guys for the first time, squeezing in with them on twin-sized college beds with pilly sheets, beer seeping from the pores of their sweaty bodies. No sex, of course—she didn’t want to get syphilis. But making out with a cute boy was fairly harmless, and the validation outweighed her small risk of getting mono. “It’s not a compliment that they’re fucking you,” Jason had said, assuming any guy Emily kissed had also rawdogged her. “Men fuck anything. It just means they think you’re at least a five.” She wondered if that was his way of being a protective big brother. She knew he would never be sentimental enough to admit he actually cared about her safety.

  She really had to stop thinking of her family. Finally she pictured David as a sexy high school teacher in a tweed jacket and unbuttoned white shirt, and herself as the misbehaving schoolgirl in pigtails and a pleated skirt. In this fantasy, she also had clearer skin. David’s hand stroked up her right thigh and she felt shivers. His other hand fell on her left breast gently.

  “I like your boobs,” David said.

  He was never the best at dirty talking. She sometimes felt he just said things because he thought he should say something. He had a few go-to lines he strategically sprinkled in depending on the situation, but this was a little too seventh-grade, even for him.

  “Shh,” she said, holding back giggles. “My sister is going to hear you. You’re off dirty-talk duty for tonight.”

  “That’s good, because ‘I like your boobs’ was all I had.”

  “We’re not going to have sex less when we get married, right?”

  “Of course not, why?”

  “I don’t know, I just... I look at Jason and the stuff he says about Christina, and the stuff Christina says about Jason and I just wonder if that’s how all couples turn out eventually. And Lauren is pretty tight-lipped about sex with Matt but...come on, can you imagine them ever doing it?”

  “Jason has always been an asshole.” He kissed her again.

  “The gloves are coming off.”

  “Yep. They’ll come all the way off when I’m officially your husband.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  Matt

  Matt came out of the bathroom after brushing his teeth. Lauren was in bed, breastfeeding Ariel, who wore only his tutu and a pair of Cinderella underpants. She had promised Matt that the breastfeeding would stop the year before. She had also told him, at other times, that she liked that it was a natural form of birth control, and that she wouldn’t stop until Ariel wanted to stop. The best form of birth control was, of course, abstinence, and she seemed to be practicing that fairly well. Matt wanted to say something, but he didn’t want her to think he was disapproving of her bodily autonomy. The last thing he wanted was a repeat of the pube dye fiasco.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” he said. “Is he going to bed soon?”

  “He’s asleep now, I think.” Ariel’s mouth was open. His cheek was squashed against her nipple, filmy white milk dripping down his chin. “I don’t want to move him. Look how adorable he is.”

  “It’d be nice to get some Mommy-Daddy time,” he said, giving her a flirty smile.

  Lauren smiled back. “Let’s give this a try.” She gingerly picked up Ariel, her shirt still pulled up over her breasts. He began to stir and started rubbing his eyes.

  “Mommy, are we all going to bed now?”

  Lauren looked at Matt with big eyes. “He wants to cosleep tonight.”

  “How about I put him to bed across the hall with Mia, and you sit here and relax... I’ll come back and give you a nice foot massage. How does that sound?”

  “Matt, I can’t reject him like that. If he wants to sleep with us, I’m not going to banish him.”

  It wasn’t worth a fight. This had been the routine almost daily since Ariel was born. It had
gotten to the point where Matt often had to schedule sex with Lauren days ahead of time, although she seldom kept the commitment. Ariel always needed her in some way or another. On the rare occasions that she agreed to put Ariel to bed in a different room, there was still no guarantee of sex. Usually Matt would massage her, go down on her for about twenty minutes, pulling out all the tricks that he knew—that was the only way she could orgasm, she claimed. After she finished, she would tell him she was too tight and sore for sex, and he would have to jerk off in the bathroom. She was abnormally tiny down there, she’d say—she was just smaller than the average woman. Nothing to do with him. Matt once asked her how this was possible when she had vaginally delivered Ariel, and Lauren yelled at him for purporting to know her body better than she did.

  “It’s fine,” he said with a long sigh. “Ariel can sleep in bed with us.”

  “Aw, thanks, sweetheart.” She pulled her shirt back down and pulled the covers over Ariel, kissing his forehead before yawning and falling asleep in seconds.

  Matt had heard David and Emily having sex through the walls when he was showering. It began with the unmistakable rhythmic bed-squeaking noise and ended with moaning. He and Lauren hadn’t been like that even before Ariel was born. He once read an article about how some marriages fail due to mismatched sex drives, but Lauren didn’t have a low sex drive. She had three brightly colored, glittery vibrators the size of bear penises. She had even released a vlog on YouTube for Cunt Magazine about masturbation techniques in which she described herself as a “high-drive woman.”

  He exhaled deeply, put a T-shirt on that read Women Poop Too, and climbed into bed, giving his son a kiss on the cheek before falling asleep.

  DAY 3

  Emily

  “SO WHAT ARE we looking at here?” the hairdresser asked. Emily sat in the swivel chair, an unflattering black cape draped over her body. She looked like one of those dolls with a lifelike plastic head and a mismatched cloth body, but no arms. It was creepy.

  “Well, it’s a trial run for my wedding. I want my hair to look full, curly and long.”

  On the walls of the salon were posters of hairstyles that Emily assumed had been cutting-edge fifteen years ago—angry-looking women with heavy black eyeliner and short, choppy hair with stripy highlights. The photos made her worry that this Westchester salon wouldn’t be able to do anything modern, but Eva, the hairdresser, had great reviews online.

  “Emily, are you sure you don’t want an updo?” Gabrielle asked.

  Gabrielle almost seemed more excited about the hair trial run than Emily. When she picked Emily up that morning she had stuck her head out the window of the car and honked the horn, shouting, “Toot, toot! The beauty train is here!” She brought an unenthused Jennifer with her.

  Gabrielle was an event planner and could turn the most commonplace task into an event that required planning. For the salon visit, she had brought a two-inch binder full of magazine cutouts showing a variety of makeup and hairstyles. Emily couldn’t tell if Gabrielle’s pregnancy hormones were responsible, but she had somehow become even more energetic and organized than usual. However, this was nothing compared to one of Gabrielle’s Pinterest boards, entirely devoted to garter ideas for Emily.

  Emily had invited Lauren to the hair trial run too, solely out of a sense of obligation. Although Lauren claimed that she didn’t mind being passed over for maid of honor, Emily felt guilty about it. Still, having invited her to the salon, she hoped Lauren wouldn’t come because she didn’t want to deal with her inevitable comments about the unrealistic beauty standards on parade in the women’s magazines in the waiting area. Luckily Lauren had declined because she wanted to take Ariel to the playground, but said she would pick up Emily to take her to the meeting with the caterer afterward. Sure enough, when Emily arrived at the salon, there was an issue of Glamour sitting there at reception with the headline Shrink Those Thighs!

  Eva raised an eyebrow. “Honey, I don’t think you are going to get much volume no matter what we do,” she said, in her low, Eastern European voice. She was a tall, slender woman in her midthirties with the clothing style of an angsty teenager, a lip ring and white bleached hair in a choppy bob that covered one eye.

  “Well, whatever you can do. If it needs to be straight, that’s fine too.”

  “That’s not going to work either. Either you do updo, or we cut.”

  “Cut? I really don’t want it short. I spent the past year growing it out.”

  “And highlighting it and styling it, right? Yeah, I thought so. Your hair is damaged. There nothing for us to do but trim it.”

  “I’d go for it,” Gabrielle said, putting her hands on Emily’s shoulders and inspecting her in the mirror. “You’re already paying for the salon appointment. You might as well get a good trim while you’re at it.” Emily felt awkward looking at herself in the mirror, baggy-eyed and tired, next to Gabrielle. Gabrielle insisted Emily was more beautiful because Emily was a size two while Gabrielle wore an eight. But Emily envied Gabrielle’s youthful, feminine face and perfect skin. Gabrielle was older than Emily and was repeatedly mistaken for the younger of the two. Gabrielle got told she looked like Kerry Washington all the time (a comparison Gabrielle felt was more racist than flattering because she didn’t think they looked much alike), and Emily once got told she looked like Camilla Parker Bowles (a comparison she hoped was just racism, but couldn’t be). Emily liked Gabrielle in spite of all of this.

  “What do you think, Jennifer?” Emily asked.

  Jennifer had been staring at herself in a different mirror but turned around quickly, embarrassed. “I think you would look totally cute with anything.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t look cute with a shaved head.”

  Jennifer shrugged. “What about Natalie Portman? She looked hot.”

  “Yeah, but that’s because she’s Natalie Portman. She still looked better with long hair.”

  “Everyone, stop freaking out,” Gabrielle said. “Nobody is getting a buzz cut. Emily, it’s just a trim. I think you should go for it. You do seem to have some split ends.” She took Emily’s hair between two fingers and rubbed them back and forth.

  “Your pregnant friend is right,” Eva said, matter-of-factly. “She smart lady. Like my Yaya used to say, when you carrying baby, you absorb its brain.”

  “Fine,” Emily said, “but just remove whatever is damaged, nothing else. I still want it to be long.” She clutched her hair, both frizzy and straight at the same time. It was like a corpse on her head. Yes, all hair was dead, but hers was rotting. Still, it was the only thing keeping her feeling remotely feminine-looking.

  “Of course,” Eva said, in an almost offended tone. “Why cut what you don’t want cut? You think I want you to be unhappy?”

  “No—I’ve just spent a really long time growing it out and I don’t want that to go to waste.”

  “Nonsense. I will cut what is dead, nothing more. Your hair cannot grow if it damaged.” She grabbed Emily’s hair in her fist and began twirling it around, displaying her ends and fanning them for emphasis.

  “Fine, I’ll do it,” Emily said.

  “You do nothing. I do the cut.” Emily reached for a Cosmopolitan with the headline, The Sexy Issue. Isn’t every issue the sexy issue? she wondered. She flipped to the back where all the sex stuff was. She wondered if she could write in to Cosmo about the hand job on the plane. It might make it into the Cosmo Confessions column, although she had started to wonder whether most of those stories were made up. The one about the military wife having her mother-in-law walk in on her double-penetrating herself with a giant purple double-sided dildo seemed a little farfetched.

  She flipped to this month’s confessions. The page was dog-eared already—thank goodness she wasn’t the only one who read this stuff. There was a separate page for male submissions. One man, a firefighter from Kansas, told a story of how he fi
ngered a girl on an exhilarating Ferris wheel ride. The story was juxtaposed with an image of a shirtless male model, apparently meant to represent the Ferris wheel diddler. Another man, identified only as Aaron, age twenty-nine, proudly regaled the Cosmo editors with a story of how he had sex with his side chick who left her underwear at his place, only to have them discovered later by his girlfriend, who just assumed they were hers and wore them. Then, after she was done with the panties, he kept them and sniffed them because they now had the scents of two women on them. Emily gagged a bit while reading it. She had already been a little nauseous that day—probably from taking her LifeSpin VytaPack on an empty stomach—and that story didn’t help.

  Emily thought that Jason was like Aaron, age twenty-nine. She had spoken to him only sporadically over the past few years, but even before Christina left him, Emily knew about some of his unfaithful episodes. To call them “affairs” would be giving Jason too much credit, assigning romance and drama to something that was only heartbreaking and gross. Of course, the details emerged once Christina left. None of his sexual exploits were romantic, and that, paradoxically, became his defense after he was found out by Christina’s private investigator. He insisted women were secretly aroused by promiscuous, unfaithful men, as long as their interest in other women never became emotional.

  Emily wanted to say that assessment was ridiculous—and the arousal part was, at least for her—but she would have been far more devastated if David had one emotional affair than a series of meaningless flings. Whenever she saw an attractive woman, she imagined David on a date with her, laughing and having fun, or even announcing their wedding or the birth of their child. That upset her more than imagining David having sex with them. It also disturbed her how easy it was for her to imagine any of those scenarios. What if all men had it in them to be like Jason? Maybe they just didn’t realize it until the opportunities presented themselves.