Miss Fortune

by Lauren Weedman

  The blond boy who called me over asks me if I’d like to come back to his house after the game is over to drink beer and watch him and his friends play Magic: The Gathering. Asking me this appears to be as painful to him as making eye contact. He glances up to see if I’ve heard him, but as soon as our eyes meet, he looks away. A shy, nerdy geisha. It struck me in the beginning of the evening as being a bit Aspergery but now I’m thinking that maybe it’s because I’m simply too pretty for him to look at for any extended period of time. Or maybe that’s the bong hits talking.

  “I have no idea if that sounds like any fun at all,” he says to me and hurries to put his headphones on, but I answer before he can block me out.

  “I’m in! Where do you live?”

  This was not the answer he expected. Me neither. “Why not? Sounds fun! I’ll grab some snacks and some vodka. Wait a minute, who wants a Moscow mule? Yum. Let’s do that, or, no, let’s not. You have to get those tin mugs to really make them work. This is insane. What’s your address? Don’t worry about directions. I’ll give the address to the taxi driver—I mean the bus driver! The bus driver!”

  I’m writing down all the details, babbling away, giggling, taking orders, flipping my hair, and the Nerdy Sanchez boys are staring at one another with looks of . . . I can’t tell what the look is. Shock? Excitement? Stress? Do I seem amazing to them?

  What the hell am I doing? I’m supposed to be gathering material for a play. Am I going to write about making out with a twenty-three-year-old boy? No. I’m not. Remember how fun it was to declare, “I was never unfaithful to you, David”? Declaring “I never even kissed a twenty-three-year-old boy I met at Geek Trivia!” would be even better. If it was true. I gave him one tiny kiss, told him, “You’re way too young. This feels disgusting, nothing personal, but this isn’t happening. Sorry, I’d looked forward to telling myself that you worshipped me, but I can’t.”

  The night ends with us standing in front of the Kennedy School, waiting for a taxi to take me back to my hotel, telling them about my divorce. The cute blond boy can’t believe it. “Wow, it’s such a Hollywood cliché—the babysitter?”

  “She’s a human being.”

  Back at my hotel, I’m brushing my teeth in the dark, wondering what this weird life zone I’m in is going to present to me next. I’d fooled myself early on into thinking that four years old was the “perfect” age for your parents to divorce. I mean, if we had to do it, now was the time. Leo polled his preschool class and discovered right away that he was the only divorced kid. “Just wait until you get to kindergarten,” I told him. “You’ll be the wise master advising the others on the perks of a two-house family.” He didn’t get it. How could he? He’s four.

  A few days later, Leo has arrived. David dropped him off on his way to Seattle. We did the handoff in the Portland airport. Leo is proof that I would have made a far better-looking boy. Seeing his face makes me swoon and my heart race like I’m in love. I am in love. Before I know what I’m doing, I’m promising Leo cookies dipped in frosting, helicopter rides, a Skylanders video game, and seven puppies unless he only wants six.

  Leo and I ride the MAX back to the hotel. He complains that it takes too long.

  Thank god he’s here. Instead of going out in the evenings to gather material, I’d been sitting in the dark, drinking wine and watching Intervention, slurring at the TV, “Come on, lady! Get up off the front lawn and get it together! Jesus. Where’s her family? Somebody help her!” Lucky for me, a lot of the addicts lived in Portland so I didn’t feel it was a complete waste of time. The park bench where the heroin addict made her boyfriend sit and wait while she exchanged sex in the bushes for money was in Washington Park, a Portland area I hadn’t yet explored but meant to.

  Now we’re in the elevator of the hotel heading out to explore the city. I’m fighting back the urge to ask Leo if he saw the Human kiss his dad. Instead, I keep it light and ask Leo if he had fun with the Human Being after I left. He gives me a funny look. I’m calling her by her name, so his confused look isn’t because he doesn’t know whom I’m talking about. He honestly looks like he’s onto me. He knows that I shouldn’t be asking him questions that will put him in the middle and that will only cause me pain. He knows.

  “Well, did you have fun with her? She’s fun. You did. I love her. You love her, so it’s fun. To love someone. It’s okay. So did you have fun?” Leo stares at me for a moment before he answers, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He says, “You’re not making any sense really,” before he changes the subject to how many doughnuts he’ll be having at breakfast. He tells me, “I think you’re confused right now, Mama.” How does he know not to answer me? It could have been the manic tone of my voice, sweaty armpits, and tears in my eyes that made him feel his mother was unhinged. Or maybe he’s a warlock.

  Two well-dressed men with their silky gray dogs get on the elevator. It’s that expensive breed of dog that is really good about wearing vintage hats and high heels for photo shoots. They are talking about everyone’s favorite topic, Portland.

  “You know, Portland is known for being one of the cities with the least amount of people procreating. Thank you, Jesus. And it’s also known to be one of the smartest cities in the world. So . . . you know. Two plus two.”

  Portland is actually a pretty kid-friendly place for the most part. They serve beer at indoor playgrounds, so it’s easy to go out and feel like you’re not just sitting around waiting to be an adult. But people in the Pearl District, a very high-end neighborhood with warehouses converted into fancy condos, where our hotel is, don’t like kids. They don’t realize that Leo isn’t a kid. He’s a little person wearing a four-year-old-boy skin suit. Gross, I made him sound like a serial killer. Or the son of one. The Pearl is more of a dog area. Once we’re outside the hotel I’m about to encourage Leo to blend in and take a shit on the sidewalk when he says to me, “You don’t like her because Dada loves her and not you, so now you hate her.”

  I don’t know where it’s coming from or how or why he says this—I have not mentioned anything to him about the affair, only, “You know how you fight with Riley at school and it’s better if you don’t play with him unless you want to get sand thrown in your face? Well, that’s like Mama and Dada.” Maybe he heard me on the phone or heard David say something?

  My phone rings. I’m not in the best of moods, but I am glad to see that it’s Lori Jo; hopefully she’ll leave a message.

  Lori Jo is a friend of mine I met in Seattle who recently moved to Portland. I love Lori Jo. She’s an earth-mother kombucha drunk. She’s always saying things like “Oh, Lauren, don’t let me drive today. I’ve had too much kombucha. Oh my gosh, I really feel it today.” Whenever she appears in my life it feels like a butterfly landed on my finger, and I don’t want to scare it away, so when she calls me up and invites me to her house for a party Friday night, I accept, even though I’d have to leave Leo with a babysitter and he just got here, so that makes me feel guilty again, and even though she referred to it as a “salon.” That’s how much I like her.

  A babysitter. The last time I was going to leave Leo with a babysitter, I called and canceled before she could get to the house. “You’re not babysitting today. You’re never babysitting Leo again,” I’d said on her voice mail, hung up, and walked around looking for something to destroy. Five minutes earlier, I’d found the evidence of the affair. My whole life I’d imagined the moment of walking in on an affair and the dramatic scene that would follow. Slashing of tires. Screaming “I hate you! How could you do this to me!” and slapping everyone in the room including myself. Leo was in the apartment watching TV when I found out. Nausea made it impossible for me to even tip over a chair.

  They are the two lovers who found each other and I’m the old wife, the employer they escaped from. I’m the putz. My therapist can tell me over and over again, “It has nothing to do with you. What those two did and do i
s not a reflection of you.” What else is he going to say? “You are older and more demanding and they are scared of you”?

  I’m glad to be out of the marriage, but boy do I feel like a sad, embarrassed, heartbroken asshole. He must have really hated me. Telling people what happened, I feel old and ugly. “We fell in love . . . ,” they say. The ones who were cheating and who are now together are the sexy “we can’t help it, we’re soul mates” ones. I must have been horrible for someone to lie to me for so long. So unlovable. Someone who was easy to hurt. Maybe cheating on me felt like stealing a pen from Citibank. Men probably secretly admire David. And fear me. “What did she do to drive him to that?” I’ll come up with an answer. I’ll say I was too loving. Too sexual. Too funny. Too driven. And I made fun of him constantly and knew I didn’t want to be with him early on but stayed with it anyway.

  Months before, the Human had given me a coat of hers I’d admired over the years. A teal blue faux leather coat with a faux fur collar from Forever 21. Or Forever 51, as I like to call it. “I was going to give it away but you’ve always said how much you like it, so I want you to have it.” I ripped that coat out of her hands, put it on, and ran to the mirror. It felt inappropriate to be wearing a twenty-year-old’s coat, but hey, it did look good on me. It also felt inappropriate to take a hand-me-down from the babysitter. Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around?

  Whenever David saw me in the coat, he’d give a sweet laugh. “Hey, I have to admit. You look pretty good in it; she was right!”

  At the time it struck me as odd not that our babysitter could never make eye contact with me or that often she refused to take money for babysitting, but that at some point she’d said to David, when I wasn’t around, that her coat looked good on me. It seemed like an adult thing to be saying to another adult, and she was a kid.

  When I found out, instead of slashing tires or slapping anyone, I headed straight for that coat. I grabbed it off the coat rack to cut it up into shreds with a knife, burn it in the alley, tear it apart with my teeth, but instead I hung it up on a hanger and put it in the back of my closet. It was a cute coat. It shouldn’t be a total loss.

  When I see the babysitter the theater sets me up with, I’m relieved, even though David is nowhere in sight. She’s a stocky twenty-nine-year-old with dyed gray hair and nose rings. After she meets Leo, she apologizes for being so low energy and promises to drink some coffee after I go. Right before she came over she’d had an argument with her boyfriend over whether hula-hooping was a career or not. “I don’t even understand what we were fighting about. It is a career.”

  I love Lori Jo’s house. It’s a classic Craftsman-style Portland house. Smells like verbena and rosemary. The walls are covered with photos of dogs and Buddhas, and Buddhas with dogs. A cool-looking chick walks by me with a tattoo of a jellyfish swimming across her chest. “I love your tattoo. Where did you get that?” I ask her. With an exhausted sigh she tells me she was born with it and walks away. She’s right. I’m being exhausting. Trying too hard. Who’s the out-of-towner old lady, chirping, “Hey what’s that there picture on ya? Can I snap a photo?” Why am I so uncomfortable? I need to calm down.

  This is the most active group of partygoers I’ve ever seen. There’s no standing around talking with a drink in your hands. Everyone is busy doing something. It looks like a commune getting ready for the long winter ahead. People are grinding millet for bread, making homemade candles, sawing wood for extra chairs. I have no skills to offer. We’ll be dead by sunrise because of me. I’d offer to put a tablecloth on the table but I don’t know how to use a loom. Look out, dating world, I’m a real catch.

  David would have been right at home here. He was the cook. Give him some apple cider vinegar and a few cloves of garlic and he’s off. God, will I miss his salad dressing. I’ll miss all of his cooking.

  There’s a group of women in the kitchen all huddled around a mixing bowl balling up some earthy mushroom-looking mixture. They all look like different versions of that French movie character Amélie. Quirky and unique. Vintage dresses, flapper-girl haircuts, boots with buttons, and hair with little bows. They look like the kind of women I would be friends with if I lived in Portland. Or rather whom I’d like to be friends with. I shove myself into the circle and offer to help make what Amélie #1 tells me are “energy balls.” I roll the balls in hemp seeds and listen to Amélie #1 talk about how she just got back from getting her PhD on the flora and fauna of Botswana. Amélie #2 is in the middle of converting an old funeral home into a music venue that’s going to have a sustainable food bar, and Amélie #3 just ended a vow of silence she took for one whole year. “I just didn’t like what my words had been doing anymore.”

  These women are amazing. Yoga Amélie asks me what the play I’m writing is about. “I have a better story than that,” I say and tell the Amélies about my failed marriage. Amélie #1 chides me. “Why did you put candy in front of a baby like that?” Yoga Amélie agrees. “If you are on a diet, do you bring chocolate into the house?” No, I wouldn’t bring chocolate into the house, but the problem was that I wouldn’t feel I had the right to tell someone else not to bring chocolate in. If that someone wanted a chocolate bar, that was their problem and I simply would have to be strong. The Amélies were right. They all stated it like it was a rule of life that we all knew. If your nose is running, you blow it. If the cops show up, the party’s over. If your husband’s handsome, hire babysitters who smell like bad butter if you want to save your marriage.

  Lori Jo grabs me and leads me to the living room. “You have to meet John. You’ll love him. Go talk to him, Lauren. Go!”

  John is a handsome silver-haired gentleman standing in the living room with a two-year-old perched on his shoulders. The child is holding on to his head like a monkey. He asks me if I’d like to feed his son a cracker, says something in French to his son, and hands me a cracker to feed him.

  “I love you brought your kid to a party,” I tell him as I feed him the cracker. “I wish I’d brought my son, Leo, with me. But I get so worried about his bedtime and—”

  “Bedtime?!” John says with surprise. “What, does the kid have a job or something?”

  That’s a good point. Leo should get a job. Why am I so uptight about stuff like that? Then again, I’m not sure Leo is the type to hang on to my head and eat crackers. He’s so hyper.

  “Well, children pick up on the energy of their parents,” John says to me with a little smirk.

  Don’t think I haven’t heard that one before, buddy. John is looking at me with a mixture of pity and amusement. Uncomfortable, I offer him a cracker; he refuses. “No gluten for me.”

  He asks if he can ask me a question. “Do you ever find living in LA that the concept of fame gets in the way of getting any real work done?”

  Dang. I’d like to write that down but I don’t have my journal with me. Yes, of course it does, and this is where I’m going to be raising my son as a single mother? If Leo grows up in LA, he’ll be good-looking, but I want more for him; I want him to rich, too.

  Lori Jo announces it’s time for the salon to begin and all the guests are to go sit in the living room. Lori Jo asks me in front of all of her friends whether I’d be willing to go first. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. Lori Jo says that anything goes. Whatever I’m feeling. Sing a song. Read a poem. Whatever I’m feeling. I ask if it’s okay if I get up, take off all my clothes, and stand in front of everybody sobbing? I get a pass. The cool chick with the jellyfish tattoo stands up; I clap a few times but stop when she shoots me a look. She walks to the front of the room and opens her notebook. “I’m going to be reading a poem I wrote called ‘Naked and Sobbing.’”

  The next night, I decide, that’s it. We are going out on the town, Leo and Mama. I’m taking Leo out to dinner. Sure, it’s past his bedtime, but who cares? Does he have to get up for his job at H&R Block in the morning? We get out of the Pearl Distric
t and I take him to an old vaudeville theater that’s been converted into a pub, the Bagdad Theater & Pub. The minute we sit down at a table Leo starts making a big hubbub about wanting to watch a DVD. I look around at all the other kids with their families who are playing games with their fingers or staring off into space with big smiles on their faces, being surprised by their own thoughts.

  “We don’t do that anymore!” I loudly announce, but it’s late and I’m getting stressed that it’s the first night I’ve taken Leo out past his bedtime. What if he has some sort of awful meltdown and ruins the meal? I want to enjoy our first night out. So I get the DVD player, make a joke to the waitress about how “he just wants to see how The Omen ends” and throw my coat over him. He complains he can’t breathe but I know he’s fine. He’s got a sleeve.

  A drunken guy stumbles into the restaurant and makes a beeline to sit at the table right next to us, like he came here specifically to meet me. He sits down and starts talking to Leo. “Look at you hanging out with your mama!” He’s swaying from side to side and I can feel the eyes of the happy families on us. What’s this drunk man about to do? You never know. He’s talking with the shrill slur of a drunk doing his best to sound “friendly and harmless.” “You’re lucky, hanging out with your mama, aren’t you? You are. You are one lucky, motherfucker. One lucky—”

  Before he can say it again, I jump in with a friendly, “Oh, we’re trying not to call him that anymore! He’s just an asshole now. We’re gonna wait until he’s five to call him that. Make him earn it! Okay, you have a good night!” I shut the DVD player, grab Leo, and leave the pub. Leo’s upset but I tell him that we’ll get ice cream and I’ll buy him a toy. I’ve got to stop promising to buy him toys every time he seems upset. It’s a ridiculous thing to promise. Especially because it’s pouring rain outside and it’s eight at night.