The Bright Side of Disaster

by Katherine Center

  But I had no sooner yanked up the parking brake than she took a gander at my beloved cottage and said, “My God! It’s smaller than our apartment!”

  And that’s how our evening went. As we headed up our walkway, Dean’s mother pointed out a drooping black-eyed Susan that needed watering, a bush that needed pruning, and, right in the middle of the porch steps like a welcome mat, a pile of dog poop. Dean and I exchanged looks. Him: Why didn’t you clean that up before we left? Me: It wasn’t there before we left.

  Inside, she didn’t want to sit down. Maybe she had done enough lounging at the Four Seasons and was ready to be on her feet, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she didn’t want to touch my upholstery. As we waited for my mother, who was meeting us before we all headed out to dinner, she began to move around the house, narrating her own tour: “Paint needs a touch-up. Table leg’s broken. Might want to dust that.”

  Dean never admitted he didn’t like his mother. That said, he rarely called her, or talked to her, or told her anything. She was disappointed in his perverse guitar-playing behavior. And she was a fierce alcoholic, although Dean would never say so.

  “She’s nasty when she drinks,” he once confessed.

  “She’s nasty all the time,” I countered.

  “That’s really not true,” he said. “You have to get to know her.”

  “I have to?”

  She had once told him he had ruined her life, but tripped and smashed their glass coffee table before she got to telling him why.

  “She didn’t mean it,” Dean said, backtracking after he let that story slip.

  And there she was, in my house. Focusing not on its charm—its yellow stucco exterior and white window boxes with butterfly flowers in them, its working fireplace with dentiled molding, its built-in china cabinet with beveled-glass panes—but on its creaky floor-boards and cracked ceiling. She made me defensive. This house had been a find! It had been a total fixer-upper that had not been altered in any way since it was built. It had its original kitchen, original hexagonal tiles on the bathroom floor, and original claw-foot tub. It had wavy panes of glass in the windows and transoms above the doors.

  I’d bought it for a steal, making the down payment with money I’d saved from every job since high school. Then I added central air-conditioning, a disposal, and a dishwasher, refinished the floors and painted the walls, replaced the toilet and sink, and scrubbed every remaining surface until it gleamed. Buying and fixing up this house had wiped out my entire savings account. Everything about this house was me. Standing inside it was like standing inside my body. And Dean’s mother clearly wished she were standing somewhere else.

  “It’s just so cluttered,” she said, by way of explaining the look on her face. “I don’t know how you stand it.”

  “It is kind of messy,” Dean said.

  “The clutter may be mine,” I said, looking right at Dean so he’d know what I thought of him, “but the mess is Dean’s.”

  I looked around the living room, trying to see it with her eyes. It was full of things: a wooden dartboard, a kidney-bean coffee table, an angular 1950s sofa, pillows with birds of paradise on them, curtains I’d made from flour sacks, old quilts, wooden chairs painted dark red and pale green, a lamp with a Dalmatian-statue base, a painting I’d once done of an old shoe.

  My mother, who had slipped in behind us with her own key, defended me. “Jenny has such a funky sensibility. She’s by far the most artistic person I know.”

  “Did you say artistic or autistic?” Dean’s mother said, coughing out a laugh. Then she walked over to my mother, holding out her arms for their first meeting ever. “Hello, Phoebe,” she said, clasping her hands and kissing her on the cheek. “You have such a wonderful Texas accent.”

  She was quite a thing to see. Her words were mean, but her body language was warm and open, as if she were about to start up a conversation with an old friend. But before my mother could even speak, Dean’s mother had turned and walked off to inspect the kitchen.

  I looked to Dean for explanation. “Did your mother just call me autistic?”

  “No!” he said, knowing how lame he sounded. “She didn’t understand your mother’s accent.”

  “I think she just called me autistic,” I said to my mother, who was watching the kitchen doorway.

  “There’s some kind of a dead bug on the floor in here,” Dean’s mother shouted from the kitchen, “but, Jenny, I do love these curtains.”

  Dean headed in to get the bug. “It was the accent,” he insisted again before he opened the door.

  It took me weeks to recover from her visit. The day she left, I couldn’t even drag myself off the sofa to eat. Dean had to bring me soup and prop me up.

  “Your mother!” I kept saying.

  “She’s not so bad,” Dean replied every time.

  “Keep telling yourself that, buddy,” I said.

  “She grows on you after a while,” he said. And after watching my face for a minute, he added, “Like a fungus.”

  I tried not to smile, but I did, just a bit. “How did you turn out not to be a serial killer?” I asked.

  “She has a loving side,” he said.

  “I hope I never see it,” I said.

  And I didn’t. The best thing about her, as far as I could see, was that she sent Dean money every month. Or maybe the family secretary did. But I was grateful for the checks.

  8

  By the time I was a week past my due date, I was obsessed with Dean’s distant behavior in a way that felt pathetic even to me. I was dreaming about it and talking about it nonstop. I was worried enough that I even decided to go watch his band play. I called Meredith on my cell phone on the drive over but didn’t tell her what I was up to.

  “You’re making it worse,” she said. “But I’m not allowed to say anything bad about Dean, so I really can’t elaborate.”

  “Just talk!” I said.

  “Talk freely?”

  “Yes!”

  So she did. She performed a concise and, even I had to admit, totally accurate analysis of my relationship with Dean. And “that mother” was her explanation for almost every struggle in Dean’s life. For when he quit his job at the guitar store to take an office job he hated. For when he couldn’t quit smoking. For when he talked about feeling trapped in our relationship and toyed with the idea of leaving me. And now that he’d gone into his Cave, apparently never to reemerge, Meredith blamed his mother.

  “Okay,” I said. “But that doesn’t really help me.”

  Meredith was on the phone in the bathtub, and now she made me wait a minute while she toweled off.

  “What am I supposed to do, send him to therapy?” I said.

  There was a pause, and then we both decided it was a pretty good idea.

  “Yes,” she said.

  It was totally preposterous. Therapy was something Dean would never do. In fact, he would resent the hell out of the suggestion. But after Meredith’s analysis, it started to seem like the only possible answer.

  “Where are you, anyway?” Meredith asked.

  “Um…” I said.

  “On your way to see the band,” she guessed.

  “Sort of,” I said.

  Meredith made a barfing noise.

  “Cut it out!” I said.

  “You said I could speak freely,” she said.

  The club was in sight. I did not want to go in alone.

  “Come with me,” I said. “I’ll buy you a Tom Collins.”

  “I have a date,” she said.

  “Who with?”

  “Dr. Blandon,” she said in a “who else?” voice.

  “He’ll never measure up to the cat,” I said.

  “That may be true,” she said, “but I’m going to let him try.”

  “I thought that first date was a disaster,” I said.

  “There can be a bright side to disaster,” she said. Then she had to go. “Go tell Dean to change his life,” she said as we hung up.

&nb
sp; And that’s how I came to shout the word “therapy” at Dean during a set break at a club called the Keg.

  This place was the worst of the worst, in my opinion, though Dean did not agree. It was dead last on the list of places I was willing to go. It was small, suffocatingly hot, and absolutely filthy, even for a club. It had pool tables, beer, a dance floor, and a deck out back where people went to make out. The bartender wore his hair in a gray rattail braid, the women’s bathroom had no toilet seat, and the college kids who piled in every weekend were so drunk that it was not possible to make it through the night without watching someone vomit into an empty beer pitcher. Still, to Dean, it was just fine. People danced. Some even tried to sing along. If you squinted, you could almost pretend it was a decent place.

  I hid near the back—ankles as puffy as leg warmers, protecting my belly with my hands, toying with the idea of breathing through my shirt fabric to screen out the smoke.

  There was the band, up onstage. And Dean, it appeared, was singing the lyrics of the ZZ Top song “Legs” to a very drunk coed in a halter top. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and she had that kind of lean wild-animal body girls that age sometimes have. Later, she was grooving to the band’s rendition of “Kiss” when she blew Dean a kiss of her own. I saw it happen. And then, as crazy as it sounds, I saw him wink at her. Maybe he just got caught up in his band persona. In any scenario other than this one, she was way out of his dating league. But whatever the circumstances, the vibe he was giving off on that stage was not one of an almost-married father-to-be, but of a horny, single band guy, working it with the ladies.

  I could not have been more out of place in a bar like that, which was all about being young and drunk and skinny and wild. My mind, my whole life, could not have been more tame. I was up past my bedtime. I was wearing panties that came up to my rib cage. I had just taken up knitting. By the time I located Dean on the back deck, I was in fine form.

  He was standing by himself, a beer in one hand, dragging on a cigarette so hard it seemed to burn all the way down in one deep, slow breath.

  I showed up next to him. “I can’t believe I’m here,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said, glancing around. “I can’t believe you’re here, either.”

  “I saw you wink at that girl.” I glared at him.

  He took a deep sigh and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, I was still there, waiting.

  “That,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s just part of the whole thing.”

  “Just part of the whole life-in-a-band thing?” I said. “Just one of those concessions you have to make for your cover-band art? Life on the road? Life as a rock star? What can you do if pussy just throws itself at you? You can’t say no! You can’t deny your sexy self to your cover band–loving, bar mitzvah–going fans!”

  He was starting to look pissed. How was it that he got to look pissed?

  “You need to calm down,” he said.

  “And you,” I said. “You need to get into therapy.”

  “What?”

  And that’s when I shouted loud enough for half the people out on the porch to glance over at me. “Therapy!”

  Dean started to walk away, but I grabbed his arm.

  “Something is wrong. Something is really wrong. It’s been this way for a month. I can’t have a baby like this. Where are you? Meredith thinks you need to talk to somebody professional, and I think she’s right.”

  All Dean could say was “You’re telling me Meredith wants me to go to therapy?”

  “Dean.” My hand was still on his arm. “I’m begging you.” Then I leaned in. “Dean,” I said again. “We’re getting married. You need to pull yourself together.”

  He put his head down then. He rubbed his eyes for a minute, and then he looked back up at me.

  “Okay,” he said. “Something is wrong.”

  There it was. I was right. But how good is it to be right about something being wrong?

  “Okay,” I said, bracing myself. Dean’s kiss-blowing girlfriend was across the porch now, laughing too loudly as a boy in a backward baseball cap pretended to spank her.

  “I guess we need to talk,” Dean said. “But not here.” The band was starting up again now. A cover of “California Girls.” He glanced back toward the stage. “We’ve only got one more set. I’ll finish up here, and then meet you at home. Take a good long bath, and I’ll be there before you’re even out.”

  I thought about staying to keep an eye on him. But I let him lean over my belly and kiss me on the forehead and then send me toward the parking lot with a very gentle push. Partly, I was tired. Partly, I did not want to stay there. Partly, a bath sounded like a great thing. But mostly, I think, it was the tenderness in his voice. I hadn’t heard that in a long time. I drove home feeling oddly relieved. I drove home with this funny sense that everything was going to be okay.

  He did come home and meet me. And I had taken a bath. I wore a maternity sleep shirt my mother had brought me that said JAMAICA ME CRAZY and was balancing a book called Raising Your Kids to Be Smarter than You on my belly. When he walked into the room, he headed straight for the bed and started kissing me. I couldn’t imagine what had sparked such passion in him. It had been over a month since he’d shown any interest in anything. Our midwife had actually said that sex could help bring on labor—something to do with the chemicals—and tonight, for the first time since I’d gotten pregnant, I wanted to get that frozen ham of a baby out. I wanted to be my old self again.

  He kissed me all over my neck, and I closed my eyes and tried to pretend that these were old times. His hands were on me, pulling me to him, and I let him slide my sleep shirt up over my head. His eyes were closed intently, and I unbuttoned and unbuckled him. In minutes, we were both naked on the bed, as we had been hundreds of times before. It should have been easy, but I couldn’t keep my concentration. Dr. Blandon had hopped up on the bed and was watching us and purring. I wondered if I should move him, if he understood what we were up to, if Dean was distracted by the purring, too. Also, was I too big for Dean now? Was it scary for him to see this giant belly? Why on earth were we doing this, anyway, at this moment?

  It became clear pretty soon that I was not going to get there, sexually speaking. He seemed to be stalling, too. We were losing momentum. I was just about to suggest taking another tack when he said, “This isn’t going to happen. I’m sorry. I need to stop.”

  And then he turned away and sat up. I pulled our comforter over me, feeling suddenly bashful, like I didn’t want him to see me naked. He moved to the edge of the bed and put his fingers on his eyes like he had at the club.

  “Something is wrong,” he said.

  “I know that,” I said. “I’ve been saying that.”

  He stood up, and Dr. Blandon and I watched him while he put his boxers back on, then his jeans. I thought he might stop there and sit on the bed to talk to me, but he went on to find his shirt and turn it back right-side-out and put it on. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and started on his shoes. Dr. Blandon tried to rub up against him, but he pushed him off the bed.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I’m out of cigarettes,” he said.

  “So?” I said.

  “I really need a cigarette if we’re going to have this conversation.”

  “Can’t smoke in the house,” I said.

  “We’ll talk on the porch.”

  “I’ll be on the porch. You’ll have to stand out in the yard.”

  He stood up, shoes on. He grabbed his wallet and keys. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “Do you need anything?”

  “I need you to hurry up and talk to me,” I said.

  He nodded and headed for the door. “I just have to clear my head.”

  “You’re torturing me right now, you know that?” I said.

  He turned and looked straight at me with his hand on the doorknob. “I’m sorry.”

  Then he was gone. I heard his car start up, and I
put my nightshirt back on, plus a sweatshirt, with a strange feeling like I was suiting up for battle. Too bad my armor was cotton velour from Target. Then I peed, brushed my teeth, and tried to glam up a little for his return—a touch of mascara, some lip gloss—in case looking good would gain me any advantage. And then I sat back down on the bed with my book and waited.

  But here’s the unbelievable truth: Dean did not come right back. He did not come back before I finished my chapter. He did not come back before I tried his cell phone nine times and never got an answer. He did not come back before I gave myself a pep talk about giving him the space he needed. He did not come back before I accidentally fell asleep waiting for him on our bed. And he did not come back before I woke the next morning to find my full-term-and-one-week pregnant self completely alone.

  9

  At first, I stumbled from room to room, thinking I might find Dean sleeping in some crazy place. The sofa, maybe, or the guest bed. Maybe he’d forgotten his key and was out on the porch. Maybe he’d passed out drunk in the kitchen. I waddled laps around the house, my belly leading the way—checking rooms, trying to wake up fully and think straight. Maybe a car accident. I’d have to call all the hospitals. Or maybe—would he do that?—the halter-top girl. No. He wouldn’t do the halter-top girl. It had to be an accident. He was in the ER. He was calling out for me. I had to find him. I headed for the phone book.

  Then I saw the letter on the coffee table, and I stopped dead still. No ER. No accident. No one to find. Instead, a Crane’s envelope in ecru. On my kidney-bean table. I picked it up and looked at my name on the front in his handwriting: the big sloppy J, the dumb little spiral at the bottom of the y. This is where we’d been heading for weeks. I knew what it said already. What else could it possibly say? I didn’t even have to read it.

  But it was impossible. I sat down carefully on the sofa and balanced the letter on my belly. I wanted to tear it open and devour every word. And, just as badly, I wanted to slip it into the kitchen garbage, and then maybe dump some old coffee grounds on top of it, and let it go out with the Monday trash. It was a pretty thin envelope. He’d never been much of a writer. I stuck my finger under the lip and, as slowly as I could, ripped one side to the other.