Why I'm Like This

by Cynthia Kaplan

  On the rare occasion when my mother looks a little unkempt, I become extremely nervous and start calling her twice a day, and whenever my father suddenly loses weight, I suspect something shifty is going on and grill him so mercilessly that he asks me if I have any plans to leave the country. But you’d think the two of them would have realized by now that I’m supposed to be a mess; I’ve always been like this. They can’t still be surprised. If I clean myself up, that’s when they should worry. At the center of the whirling vortex of our mutual disapproval is the notion that if we all look okay, we all are okay. What a dilemma.

  Not for my future mother-in-law, though. One night, a little over two years after all of this, shortly after her own husband died, and on the verge of a sleeping-pill-induced sleep, she said to me, “I love you, but I hate how you dress.”

  they weren’t brave

  IT is raining when our plane touches down. I look through the double airplane window, wondering how bugs get trapped between the two panes, and I see that it is raining, and I know I’ve made a colossal mistake, an epic mistake. There is a strange man sitting beside me and he is holding my hand. I have no idea who this man is; what is he trying to do? Comfort me? And although I can clearly recall that yesterday, following a brief proclamation from a rabbi, I had agreed to spend the rest of my life with this hand holder, that is hardly reason to trust him with my life.

  I am sure every woman at one moment or another tells some version of this—the husband-cum-stranger bit. It’s a bonding ritual between us, as satisfyingly anecdotal as the locker-room brag. Perhaps more so: I didn’t just fuck him, I married him. But then, oh shit. Newlywed reality is a plane ride to a foreign land and the person sitting next to you is not your mother.

  The first night of my honeymoon is spent in San Jose, the utterly charmless capital of Costa Rica, in a bizarre, slightly squalid hotel designed to look like a bunch of beach shacks surrounding a tropical courtyard. The sliding glass doors of our room face, at ground level, directly into this little commons, which has a pebbly sort of floor and is planted with an array of exotic-looking plants and flowers in order to give one the impression that one is outside. One is not. There is, however, a thatch-roofed bar in the center of it all, where one may avail oneself of whatever tropical drink will best make one’s immediate environs disappear. I make it clear to David that a) I may never forgive him for going to China on business and leaving me to arrange our honeymoon and b) we won’t be having sex here. At bedtime I send him to the conciergo, or whatever, for new sheets because the ones on our bed are nubby. I sleep as if something hanging over my head were thinking about dropping down.

  The adventure begins!

  The big plan is to drive around the Costa Rican countryside, stopping first in the mountains, then heading southeast to the beach, and finally capping the whole thing off with a two-day white-water rafting trip through the rain forest. According to our map, which is about as detailed as a paper place mat in a New England seafood shack (how else would one know where to buy the best saltwater taffy?), there are only five roads and ten towns in all of Costa Rica. The only way to get anywhere is to ask directions, but this is something of a trick question for locals. You can’t give them your final destination and expect to get there. You’ll end up driving for days and if you’re not careful wind up in Nicaragua. You must proceed village by village, stopping in each to inquire of the next. This is how I learn the only Spanish I know besides huevos rancheros and Arriba! Arriba!: Qual es el camino a…? My new husband, however, speaks uno petito of Spanish and we slowly make our way north without running into any contras.

  The roads themselves are terrible—very narrow and full of crater-size holes. Costa Ricans are resistant to the ever-encroaching tide of tourism, so there is probably someone in every village whose job it is to “maintain” the roads with a shovel and a pick, and he is reprimanded if fewer than thirty rental cars per week break an axle. And nearly every turn is a hairpin. I don’t know if it is the fever caused by the bronchial infection I developed two days before our wedding or the nausea I feel as we navigate the serpentine mountain roads in our Jeep 4×4, but every time I look over at my husband I feel sick.

  Who the hell is he, anyway? I am consumed not with doubt, exactly, but with self-consciousness, which, I think guiltily, is the last thing I am supposed to be. I am supposed to be totally comfortable and at ease and having the unself-conscious time of my life. We’re finally alone! Tra la la. And it is either look at David or look a foot or so to my right, where the side of the road meets the sky. There are no guardrails and if for some reason we were to be forced off the road, say by a careening livestock truck or an infrequently serviced tour bus, we would end up two thousand feet below in a ravine.

  We wouldn’t be the first whose honeymoon ended in some kind of obscene tragedy. I’ve read of brides and grooms held up by gun-toting banditos or entwined for all eternity in tangled car wrecks. Why shouldn’t we sail silently off some cliff? What will we have left behind? Certainly not each other. That’s good. And our families? They’ll probably be relieved. No one really wants to be an in-law. And our hopes, such as they are, will never be dashed, nor our ambitions thwarted, nor our careers come to nothing. We’ll never get resentful or indifferent. We’ll never divorce each other and marry a younger woman and an older man. What a load off.

  Am I the only one for whom the most mundane of activities lead inexorably to accidental death? Of course, it would certainly be a shame to die on the way to an adventure travel experience. Ignominious, in fact. They weren’t brave; they weren’t even there yet.

  Our few days in the mountains are primarily spent reading, eating, and sleeping to the thrum of a continual tropical rainstorm. I am secretly relieved that the potential for a mud-slide has preempted a four-mile hike up the side of a waterfall, and that the active volcano the Arenal region is known for is completely socked in by clouds. We drive toward the gray mass anyway, and settle for a few minutes of wistful gazing from a low-lying field where I pretend to be disappointed not to see molten lava shooting sparks into the sky. Had the night been clear we would have driven up a narrow, winding road, littered with tree branches and rocks, to have dinner at a restaurant with a world-class view of the fireworks. Ah, well.

  When the sun finally comes out we wend our way back down out of the mountains, and after a blisteringly hot five hours on a sceneless (is that the opposite of scenic?) highway, we arrive in the coastal village of Quepos. My fever is gone and I’m feeling okay about David. We exchange some money at the local bank, which is guarded by two men with semiautomatics, and then buy some Mirinda orange sodas (the gustatory high point of our honeymoon) and some plantain chips from a little grocery. I want desperately to buy a box of Captain Crunch but it doesn’t seem sporting. We walk around the village and when we don’t find any cute shops we get back in the car and drive about a mile up a hill to our hotel, Le Mariposa. Although Le Mariposa is considered one of the best and most exclusive hotels in the region, breakfast here consists of hard-boiled eggs, fruit, dinner rolls, and Kraft-like slices of yellow and white cheese cut on the diagonal. There is no room service and extra towels are a hot commodity, but the rooms are spacious and exotic, if you consider the seventies an exotic decade. Every day at three o’clock hundreds of some sort of monkey fly through the trees outside our balcony on their way home for lunch. Despite plenty of signage asking them not to, the tourists often feed the monkeys, and sometimes, when you’re on the beach at monkey-lunchtime, they drop out of the trees right onto your head.

  On the the second night of our stay at Le Mariposa I am attacked by a ten-inch Costa Rican grasshopper. Apparently a fugitive from some nearby entomological freak show, it appears under a sconce on the opposite side of the dining terrace to the amazement and curiosity of all. Just as David assures me that it would not likely make its way to our dim corner, it promptly lands on my salmon en croute. I jump, nearly upending our table, and reel away with my hands over my fac
e, like Tippi Hedren in The Birds. It would have been funny, had it been funny. A waiter comes over, captures the thing, and carries it off. Some time later, as David and I lounge romantically by the pool, it attacks my hair. I scream at the top of my lungs while executing a variety of graceless evasive maneuvers. Finally it lands in the blue water, and, because there is a God in heaven, drowns.

  Why aren’t I at a nice resort? Why am I in the middle of nowhere, eating freshly killed pet chicken sandwiches at “family restaurants” that consist of one picnic table surrounded by the squawking of the remaining pet chickens? Why am I in a country where I consider an Oh Henry! bar a suitable reward for surviving an afternoon of kayaking over giant swells in the Gulf of Mexico? Who am I trying to impress? David? Of course, David. I have known him for a year and a half, and I am still trying to convince him that I am of hardy stock. I want to be of hardy stock. I want to fit in with his friends, who are of hardy stock, who ski off-piste and hike up Mount Olympus or some such and camp out in places whose names in English mean “The End of the Earth.”

  Through the tropical nights I dream of a paddleless double kayak washing up on a deserted shoreline, a lone Teva floating in the waterlogged front cockpit. I dream of a vicious, fatal attack by starved orangutans. Of searing volcanic ash and washed-out mountain roads. Of kidnapping, carjacking, plane crashing. Of contaminated water. Of poisonous red ants.

  Probably the only reason I can function at all on a daily basis is because my body has courage. It does things—drives, flies, lives—in spite of me, maybe to torture me. To get back at it I conduct psychological experiments on myself: I have written the obituaries of myself and everyone I love. I have contracted every conceivable fatal illness and been the victim of nearly every form of accident with the exception of an anvil falling on my head, which even for me seems farfetched. I don’t do it to get attention. I do it to anticipate the grief, to see if I could live with the loss. I’m the worst kind of empathizer; I feel despair over unconfirmed future events.

  The only time in my life when I wasn’t fearful was when I was lonely. High school, most of college, my twenties. When I was lonely my loneliness was so big there wasn’t much room left for illogical concerns like will the ancient gargoyle be knocked from its perch by the drunken frat boy and give me a fatal head injury. There was only room for: here I am, drunken frat boy. In my twenties, my loneliness acquired a flapping, manic, jokey quality that was in itself scary enough to keep other fears at bay. Then I met David and there was some joy. But joy is no match for worry, and the two of them duke it out in an endless refrain. Guess who wins? And, of course, the last thing I needed to worry about was a husband. Maybe he’ll just quietly go away.

  I suppose I agreed to go white-water rafting on my honeymoon because I’m an idiot and because I’d bragged about being an expert canoer. I am, actually, a certified canoeing instructor and I wanted this to mean something, to count, if anyone besides me is counting.

  We depart San Jose for our launching point in the rain forest in the pouring rain. After an hour or so the bus stops at a large lunchroom where everyone but me has rice and beans and the guides await a phone call from the tour operator, Aventuras Naturales—that’s Natural Adventures. There seems to be some concern about how high and fast the river may be as a result of all the rain, and about the lightning, but the word comes that we will press on. How this decision is arrived at I do not know. Maybe they figured that nothing the river could do to us would be worse than going back to San Jose without a hotel room. My feeling is that nothing the river could do to us would be worse than going back to San Jose with a hotel room.

  It is still raining as we set off in our rubber boats, and the idea of a rain forest finally makes sense to me. The river is, indeed, fast and rough and almost immediately we are drenched with cold river water. In fact, there is so much water coming at us from all directions that it soon seems as if it isn’t raining at all. And we’re really flying down the river, but no one seems worried about it. We’re all forward-paddling and back-paddling with enormous zeal, smiling and whooping each time we emerge intact from a hairy section. It’s pretty exciting.

  After a while we reach a quiet stretch, and all the rafts pull up to the shore. Some German hikers and their guides are just up the river taking turns riding a bodyboard type of thing through the rapids and David, who in his head is in constant competition with an ex-marine buddy of his named Bill, feels he has to try it or be forever branded a sissy. The guides throw out a safety line at the end of the run, to pull him in, but they miss him, and he continues to float down the river toward the next set of rapids. Just in time he gets caught in some branches and is able to hang on until the guides arrive. He loses a Teva, though, and it sails away without him into oblivion.

  Dinner that evening is cooked by the guides in an open, two-level structure on the riverbank, and later they entertain us by throwing a cat off the second story so it whizzes, screeching, by us as we play hearts with another couple on the lower floor.

  It rains through the night.

  When I told my friend, Lynn, about the proposed white-water-rafting portion of our trip, her only comment was: “You’re a good swimmer, right?” But as we continue down the river on the second day and I hear the fierce, panicky scolding of our river guide—we have somehow managed to let ourselves be carried to the wrong bank of the raging, rain-swollen river despite his expert instructions and are now back-paddling furiously, desperately hugging the mossy rock wall that banks the river, poised at the edge of a swirling black hole—it occurs to me that the point is moot. There will be no swimming. The previous day’s exhilaration has morphed into a horrible dread. The river is deadly; the guide is afraid. Christ, could there be anything more ill-boding than the fear of a professional? It cuts a swath through me. If the boat flips, if we are all tossed out, we will never recover in time for the next set of rapids. I feel a familiar heart pain in my chest and am for a millisecond actually comforted in the knowledge that it is induced by real, live events.

  Earlier, our guide had jauntily disclosed to us that in the United States we would not be on a river like the Rio Pacuare. At the end of a heavy rainy season (end?) it offers class four and class five rapids—class five rapids are for professionals only—but liability lawsuits are not a fundamental part of the Costa Rican infrastructure, so here we are. Now, without a jot of jaunt, he warns, “We do not want to be on the far side of the river, you understand?” But then, funny, there we are. “We do not want to go under that waterfall!” What waterfall? I look up. The sharp peripheral spray of it stings my cheeks, and we float beneath it, unequivocal. The guide screams at us. We paddle literally for our lives. The front of the boat bends ninety degrees into the vortex; half of us are ejected into the roiling foam. The noise is immense. Rushing water is loud, you know? Niagara Falls must be deafening. What kind of honeymoon is that? It is the sound of death. Which leads me to the fact that here, finally, is the moment I have been waiting for. My body has caught up with me. Or I with it. Whatever.

  It is much quieter down below the bubbles. I don’t know where up is, but the guide had said, “Try not to panic; the river will spit you out.” So I don’t fight. I wait, patiently, in the swirl, to see what will happen. In time—it seems like a long time but I know it is not—I am spit out. David is too, but I wish I had seen him down there: Here we are, together.

  Long afterward, after we were all back safely in the boat; after we paddled to a place where the river slowed and yawned and we rested beside a tiny piece of shore; after I sat on a rock with my head between my legs and my heart beating out of my chest like the heart of a lovesick cartoon character; after the raucous, celebratory dinner in San Jose with our new friends, the husband and wife who had snatched us from the calamitous froth (You saved our lives! We just grabbed and held on! Oh, my God! Cheers!); after we flew home; long after everything; I remembered the calm. I remembered the silence in my head. No endless, contrapuntal refrain. No fear, no lone
liness. No false bravado. Peace. Release. Is that what joy is?

  what happened after the chicken crossed the road

  FOR many years I believed that death would come to my New York grandmother, Dorothy Kaplan, in the form of a chicken. Maybe kosher, maybe not. I predicted that she would engage the chicken in a seemingly endless cycle of freezing and cooking until its molecular structure was so altered that it would combust spontaneously and consume the old woman in ball of fire.

  I ate that chicken every time I had dinner at my grandparents’ apartment, which, from the time I moved to New York after college, was about once a month, not counting holidays and other family gatherings. When I arrived in the late afternoon the table would be set and the challah would be growing hard in a napkin-lined basket. The chicken would have been in the oven since noon, defrosting and re-cooking, acquiring its signature teeth-gnashing consistency. On the plate it looked like petrified wood and in your mouth it felt like a ball of twine. That it had been basted with lemon juice and then lightly dusted with powdered garlic and paprika was not to its advantage. And how, after all that cooking, it would wind up on the plate at room temperature is still a mystery.