Impractically Perfect: A Romantic Comedy

by Genevieve Lerner

  A moment later, I heard my mother’s voice echoing from the kitchen.

  “Glen, who is that? Glen? Who’s at the door?”

  “It’s me, Mom,” I yelled.

  “Paige, is that you?”

  I sighed. “No, Mom, it’s your other daughter. Chrissy. You know, the disappointment.”

  Mom pretended as if she hasn’t heard that last part. “Oh hello, darling, what a…surprise!” She appeared behind Dad, pushed him out of the way, and instead of hugging or kissing me, placed her hands on my shoulders. And then looked me up and down. “Why are you here?” Not exactly the ecstatic greeting I was crossing my fingers for.

  Why was I here? I wished I had a better answer than, “let’s see, my boyfriend Enrique who wasn’t really my boyfriend ditched me in the desert and I was too scared to come home and let you think you were right about him so I stayed in Texas and tried to find enough work to feed myself for like, nine months, which clearly didn’t go so well so now I’m back here, hoping there’s somewhere I can sleep.”

  Of course, I didn’t say any of this.

  “Um. Well. It’s a funny story actually…”

  Mom just raised her eyebrows. Which was a considerable feat, considering how high up they already were.

  “Well. See, okay. It’s not as bad as it sounds, really. I swear! It’s just…”

  “Christina?”

  I tried a different approach. “Mom, do you really want to interrogate your daughter on why she has come home to visit you? Shouldn’t this be a happy, joyous occasi—”

  Mom held out a hand to stop me from rambling and leaned her nearly six-foot frame down until we were eye-level. She sighed dramatically, as if this was something she had always feared would happen. She looked meaningfully at my abdomen, a constant point of her contention. I automatically flexed. “Christina,” she asked me somberly, “are you pregnant?”

  It took a moment to register her words. Pregnant? Me? I followed my mother’s gaze to my stomach, which, although not completely devoid of pudge, in no way resembled a baby bump. I started laughing so hysterically that she must’ve taken it for a “yes.” Dad suddenly looked as if he had an overwhelming desire to be anywhere else, muttered something about “sandwiches,” and shuffled back into the house.

  She lowered her voice only slightly. “Did you listen to nothing they taught you in health class? There are so many different forms of birth control, I thought something would have stuck with you. But I suppose it makes sense, you did attend public school. But we weren’t sure we wanted you to attend that St. Paul’s, all of those children turn out so odd, and those uniforms…”

  Meanwhile, I was still laughing. Not because everything she was saying wasn’t totally ridiculous; it unquestionably was. But I was laughing mostly because my being pregnant was next to impossible—it was about two steps away from the Immaculate Conception.

  Because in order to get pregnant, you generally needed to have sex. And I could barely even remember the last time I had had sex. In fact, it had been so long, I wasn’t entirely sure if I remembered exactly how it worked.

  If you could even call “it” sex. Mostly it was awkward fumblings freshman year of college with Leonard Gillespie, the Halo 3 champion of my dorm. I had found him so embarrassing that I made him promise to keep it a “secret relationship.” It lasted an entire two months, but that was only because he sometimes let me use his meal swipe at dinner. And gave me marshmallow peeps.

  There was Gus, the outdoorsy, run-fifteen-miles-in-a-day, tennis-playing, downhill-skiing, triathlon-training guy. The miracle wasn’t so much that we dated; it was that we even met at all. I was, by chance, working on one of my short-lived “I will exercise daily” New Year’s resolutions—the one that every year I become more determined to follow through with, yet every year I become less likely to actually still be attempting by January 5th. We met on the campus track during my if-I-don’t-exercise-now-I-never-will morning run; there was sparkage. He had nice legs and pretty eyes; I had a vagina. He broke up with me after a few months, when I accidentally let slip that I was not actually, in fact, planning on running the Boston Marathon with him that summer, that I hated exercise, all sports that end in “-ball,” and was not actually an avid skier and would probably die if I ever attempted it.

  And then there were all those “sexy” cheek-pecks with Enrique. And that horribly unsuccessful one-night-stand…attempt with the guy I met at the Lonestar Café about a week after Enrique ditched me in The Middle of Nowhere, Texas.

  That was my entire sexual history. Pregnancy was out of the question.

  Besides, maybe I had gained a little bit of weight since my parents had last seen me…but it couldn’t have been that much. There was no way I looked pregnant. Did my mother just assume I was pregnant because she thought I was stupid?

  No, no. I’m just the disappointment.

  How could I forget.

  “Mom,” I said slowly, “I sort of…ran into some difficulties. In Texas.”

  “With that awful forty-year-old?”

  I grimaced. I wasn’t completely over that yet. “Yeah, with him. And uh, well, I don’t actually have any money. Or anywhere to live. Or anything. So I was hoping that maybe I could bunk in with you guys for a bit…while I sort of…”

  “Get back on track?” I couldn’t decide if she looked constipated because she was upset that she’d have to house me for an indeterminate amount of time, or because she was restraining herself from singing “You should have listened to your mother!” as loudly as she could for the entire neighborhood to hear.

  “Sure. Get back on track.”

  Without breaking eye contact with me, she suddenly shrieked, “Glen? Glen, could you come here for a moment?” It was creepy how she never blinked.

  After some grunting noises and a few crashes, Dad appeared.

  “She wants to move in with us, Glen. She wants to move back home!”

  Dad eyed me suspiciously, but with a hint of a smile. “Is she serious?”

  “She sounded serious.”

  I didn’t bother reminding them I was standing right there, could hear everything they were saying, and didn’t appreciate being spoken about in the third person.

  Dad arranged his face into an expression that would have read as “concerned” if you hadn’t known that he can hardly take anything seriously. “That doesn’t sound like my Christina! Wanting to move back home? She’s been trying to get out of here since she was nine years old!”

  He was only half joking. I had tried to run away from home more than a few times in my early years. The most memorable had been when I escaped wearing my pink Care Bears backpack containing only three pairs of socks, monkey pajama shorts, and fourteen cans of Spaghetti-O’s. If I had only thought to sneak the can opener out of the kitchen drawer, I might have even succeeded.

  My mother lowered her voice. “What should we tell her?”

  “That,” my dad said, a bright smile suddenly stretching across his face, “we’d love to have her. Welcome back, Christina.” He wrapped his arms around me again to envelop me in a warm hug, and I melted into him. My mother looked torn.

  “She’ll have to find a job, of course,” she finally squawked into his ear.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” my dad said, hardly listening.

  “It’s fine Mom,” I said, my voice muffled against the wonderful squishiness of my dad’s belly. “I can, like, start over. I’ll do all my own laundry! And…” I hesitated. I was nervous about sharing the thing I had been considering for the past two years, but never had the guts to do. “I think I want to apply to culinary school for the fall semester.”

  For the first time, Mom said nothing. She just cocked her head and examined me for a moment. And then she smiled slightly and went back inside.

  Dad turned my chin up with his finger and looked into my eyes. “I’m proud of you, Pumpkin,” he said, even though I was at least a decade too old to be called Pumpkin. “I knew you’d do the right
thing.”

  I figured it best to leave out the details of why it wasn’t so much “Chrissy doing the right thing” as it was “Chrissy needing to consume calories at one point or another during the day, and also needing to sleep somewhere that is preferably not the street.” So I just nodded. And suddenly, strangely, I felt myself tearing up. I rubbed my eyes quickly and scooted through the front door before my dad could notice.

  For the first time that I could remember, I was glad to be home. Glad to be back with my OCD mother and my slightly clueless father, glad to be in a neighborhood where I knew every street by heart, glad to be back where the world was the same and safe and familiar.

  Because sometimes, no matter how old you are, you still need to be called Pumpkin.

  So. I’m going to be slightly big-headed here.

  But only slightly. Because I really hate when people talk themselves up and then turn out to be completely terrible musicians, or writers, or figure skaters, or whatever they claim to be “gifted” at. It’s even worse when they talk about it with that pretentious air about them, like their “talent” is really the most important thing in the world, and everyone should really just stop what they’re doing at once and watch them already, because it’s honestly all that really matters.

  I really dislike those people.

  And now that we’ve got that cleared up…

  I’m a pretty fantastic cook. Or at least I used to be.

  It had actually been years since I picked up a skillet; I had accidentally set fire to my Aunt Ruthie’s oven while cooking a ham, and had been terrified to even put on an apron ever since. But before The Incident, at least, I was…well, let’s just say I knew my way around a kitchen. And I’m not just talking salads and chickens and pasta and your basic sauces. I mean…you say it, I made it. Anything. Well, mostly anything. But you know.

  It didn’t take me long to realize that the only way to make Mom happy now that I was back at the Valentine residence was to offer my services in any way possible. So it was time, I decided, to get over my phobia of burning down houses and start cooking gourmet meals again. Because I can! Or at least, I could.

  My very first night was pretty upsetting. Not only because I had to re-teach myself how to make potato soup, but because I had to deal with Mom breathing down my neck and popping out from alcoves at random intervals, asking me things such as “Are you sure you’re feeling okay?” and “Are you sure you don’t want to add another pinch of salt?” and repeating over and over, “Well, you were gone!”

  She was referring to my bedroom. And the way that she had repainted it taupe and piled it full with the cardboard boxes stuffed with wedding gifts that had been sitting in the basement for my entire life. She hadn’t bothered to save any of my belongings, except for a few crucial items, as well as—of all things—all of the old school papers she could find. A considerable feat, seeing as I had trashed, burned, flushed, wiped up cat-puke with, and paper-planed out of my bedroom window as many of my school papers as I could throughout my life. Not that I couldn’t have done well in school, if I had wanted to. I just didn’t always feel like putting in the work, or the time, or the effort.

  But it’s not like I’m a slacker or anything.

  In addition to somehow tracking down at least half of my papers, quizzes, and tests from over the years, Mom had managed to strategically stack them up so that the poorest grades were magically at the very top of the pile, and those with the best were buried way at the bottom. Even though it had been years since high school, rifling through F after F after D- wasn’t exactly my idea of a “fresh start.” My beautiful room, which I had painted bright purple with my best friend since forever ago, Gloria, was now nothing more than a warehouse of gravy boats and disturbing high school memories.

  After serving dinner and hardly eating anything myself, it became my mission to carve some sort of sleeping arrangement out of the Vortex of Terror that my old bedroom had become. It only took a few paper cuts, a bruised elbow or two, and tripping over a giant cardboard box to dig out my bed from the overwhelming mess. My eventual falling asleep that night was nothing short of a miracle. I was in a place I despised, with people I had tried for years to escape from, my stomach full of nothing but air and a hint of dread. That night my dreams consisted of steaming chicken pot pies, motorcycles, and inexplicably, an evil rubber ducky that was trying to take over Japan.

  It was 2:53 am when my iPhone’s insistent vibrating blasted me awake. It took me a moment to realize that I wasn’t dreaming, and a full three times trying to hit “snooze” on the cracked touch screen with my eyes closed before coming to the realization that it wasn’t actually my alarm after all. My phone was ringing, which was especially weird because nobody ever called me anymore.

  I was far past groggy when I slid the arrow to the right to answer, ignoring the glass splinters in my thumb from the spiderweb of cracks across the screen. Had I been even a little more conscious, I would have thought to check who was calling.

  “Wha?” I groaned into the phone.

  “Heyyy, Chris? Sorry, it’s late, I know, but I really need to talk to you…”

  My brain was processing at about a third of its normal speed. “Eh?”

  “Okay…wow. Hi, Chris, it’s me. Gloria? Remember? Gloria Hernandez, your best friend? That girl who stole all your Cheez-Its in kindergarten? You know, dark hair, brown eyes, practically perfect in every way?”

  I groaned again, but not quite as loudly this time. I missed Gloria—a lot—but this was not the way I had pictured breaking the news to her that I was living with my parents. “Shut up, Mary Poppins, it’s just…early.” I rolled onto my stomach. “And why are you whispering?”

  “Well. I’ve kind of gotten myself into a little situation—”

  “With the police? Again? What did you do this time?”

  Laughter on the other end. “No, don’t be ridiculous, come on.”

  Despite my state, I giggled. “I’m not being ridiculous, that would be, what, the fourth time this year? Alright, I’m coming over, what’s the bail?”

  “Stop changing the subject. Besides, Texas isn’t exactly a ten minute drive from San Francisco.”

  I froze. “Um, yeah…I was just joking. What, did you think I’d move back in with my parents without telling you or something?” I forced a laugh.

  “I just need to talk to you.” She sounded almost serious for a second. “And it’d be the third time, not the fourth.”

  “Okay, sorry…what’s up?” I blindly swatted around my bedside table for my glasses, and proceeded in knocking a flimsy cardboard box off it, which led to a the sound of what I could only assume was breaking china. “Shit.” Dust flew into my eyes and my lungs, and a wild coughing fit ensued.

  “Chris? What’s going on with you?”

  “Nothing, I just…never mind. Keep talking.”

  “Okay. Well. See, I don’t really know where to start.”

  I grabbed my glasses and shoved them on, then reached down over the side of my bed and tried to pick up the box without actually getting up. “Well, try starting at the beginning. Seems to work well for most people.” My fingertips brushed something cardboardy and box-shaped, and I dragged it towards me and ripped it open, one-handed. China plates. Some of them shattered. Some of them intact. All of them hideously engraved with a giant, ornate “V.”

  “Do you remember Stephan?”

  It took only a moment before I remembered Stephan. “Oh, god.”

  “Yeah…I’m kind of in the bathroom of his apartment.”

  “Hence the whispering.”

  “Yes, hence it. Long story short, he called me, said he missed me, I agreed to go out for drinks with him. One thing led to another…”

  “…and now you’re back at his place.” Years of college had prepared me for this moment. This moment of giving much-needed advice to a friend who ended up somewhere she really didn’t want to be…or did want to be? I wasn’t sure. Clarification was necessary. “
So, what exactly is the problem?”

  Gloria sighed. “It’s kind of embarrassing.”

  I waited.

  “Well, I thought we were going back to his place to…you know. But as it turns out, when a guy asks if you want to come over to help him train his parrot to sing the Law and Order theme song, he actually means he wants you to come over and help him train his parrot to sing the Law and Order theme song.”

  “How could you possibly mistake that for anything else?”

  There was a bang on the other end. “Whoops, just knocked over the…” There was a pause. “…bottle of Rogaine? So…that actually was a bald spot on his head.”

  “Well what did you think it was?”

  “I don’t know, he’s like, twenty-four! I didn’t know twenty-four year olds could bald! Unless he’s not twenty-four…oh, my god. What if he’s older? What if he’s, like…twenty-eight?”

  “Hey Glor?”

  “GRRRRRRRR. I mean, yes?”

  “Aren’t you like…deathly afraid of birds?”

  “Yes. That’s why I’m hiding in the bathroom.”

  “I see.”

  There was another bang on her end, followed by a splash. “Crap, just knocked a magazine into the toilet…Us Weekly? Really?” Distracted by my broken china, I didn’t respond. “Chris, what the hell is going on with you? Where are you?”

  “Good luck, I’ll call you later,” I said, ending the call. Even though I really did miss Gloria and her outrageous phone calls (not quite as much the hours during which they occurred), I couldn’t risk her finding out my situation. At least not until I had things under control.

  And now, there were some stupid high-schoolers yelling outside my window. So much for going back to sleep tonight. I really wished I had something useful to throw at them, but the only objects within arm’s reach were some plate shards and my phone, neither of which I was interested in breaking any further.

  Night one at my parents’ house: off to a great start. I buried my face into the flowery throw-pillow that was doubling as one for my head, as I couldn’t find a real one (my mother had apparently relocated the linen closet to who-knows-where sometime in the last twelve months), and tried to pretend I was anywhere but here. Specifically, somewhere warm and peaceful, where my parents didn’t exist. Oh, and with a beach! And puppies. Somewhere that my hips were magically three sizes smaller and my teeth were three shades whiter, and I had enough money to buy a new phone, and there were ponies, and rainbows, and…