The Bright Side of Disaster

by Katherine Center

  The letter was written on my stationery, which meant he must have tiptoed into our bedroom to get it while I slept. Had I been drooling? I hated the idea that he’d been able to stand in our room without my knowing it. That he might have watched me twitching through an REM cycle with a critical eye. That the events of my life had been unfolding without my participation.

  The handwriting started out big and got smaller as the letter wore on, as if he’d realized how much he had to say only after he started writing. There were a number of scratch-outs, which would hold my attention weeks later as I tried to make out the words underneath them.

  Most of the letter I can paraphrase. Standard stuff, really. Stuff I’d heard before, if not seen written down, in other breakups. And that’s what this letter was: our official breakup. A document I had neither consented to nor participated in. But there it was. I had been served papers on my own stationery. A double-sided sheet, drenched in Dean’s musings on the character of our relationship, with JENNIFER INGRID HARRIS embossed across the top, as if I’d sanctioned the whole thing. As if it had come from me, and Dean was just my penmanship-challenged assistant.

  Dean had talked about leaving so many times before that I had built up a tolerance to the idea. Each time he brought it up, I felt less like he’d actually do it. Still, to be perfectly honest, I had never been a hundred percent certain that we would make it to the altar. Only, say, ninety. But that had seemed like enough.

  So, he was leaving me. He was unhappy, this wasn’t working for him, he felt trapped, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. On and on about his malaise and his discontent. I wasn’t the girl for him, and he’d known it for a while, but he’d been trying to stick it out for the baby, whose college tuition he still planned to pay (or, in truth, let his parents pay). He was sure I would be a great mom and he would try to help in any way he could. Blah, blah, blah. The words kept coming, the handwriting got smaller, and I felt completely numb.

  Why on earth, if all these things were true, had he proposed? Why was it that this time last year he’d been so sure about me that he’d proposed all on his own—with no prompting or encouragement from me? I hadn’t even suspected he was thinking about getting married. I wanted to, but I never even mentioned that fact to him, and I certainly never issued the dreaded “shit or get off the pot” ultimatum. I was just doing my thing. Working at the shop. Hitting the estate sales with Meredith on the weekends. Taking Spanish for fun. Teaching myself Italian cooking. Trying to take a good long walk at least once a day.

  We were living together, and though I might have been a tiny bit of a control freak about home decor and which items he was allowed to bring into the house (i.e., none), he didn’t seem to mind. He was slogging away at his awful financial job, trundling off in his suit every morning. But he came home to cannelloni and fresh pesto in the evenings, and on the weekends, we played Frisbee in the park.

  And then, one day he took me out to dinner, to the seafood restaurant with the crab on top that we loved so much. He had a ring he’d picked out himself, and he couldn’t wait until dessert, as he’d planned, to show it to me. That was it: He offered, I accepted, and then we drove down to Galveston, to the beach, and walked along the shore in the blue night, our shoes hanging from our fingers. It was easy.

  So this was my question: How did we get from that night to this morning? And why. Why wasn’t I the girl for him? Why wasn’t it working? Why did he feel trapped? Why on earth did he think I would be a good mother, especially since he had never even seen me hold a baby?

  And there, sandwiched between the awful, insulting “Dear Jane” text of this letter and his crazy, illegible signature, was a paragraph written in microscopic words that held a kind of an answer:

  I didn’t have an affair. That’s the truth. But maybe I was in love. With the girl from the plane. She was going to see the band. I’d burned her a CD. I didn’t sleep with her. Just gave her a ride home from work a few times. She never invited me in. But there was something there. And now she’s gone, and I don’t feel the same about you anymore. It’s not my fault.

  And then, his conclusion: “I’m going to do some traveling. I’ll be in touch. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Dean.”

  And poof. I was alone.

  So I called my mother. She thought I’d gone into labor, based on the tone of my voice when I said, “I have to see you right now.” Fifteen minutes later, she showed up at the door with a baseball cap and a sport water bottle, ready for action. But I didn’t even say anything to her at the door. I just pulled her in by the hand, led her over to the sofa, and handed her Dean’s letter.

  The rest of the day went by fast. The sobbing, the telephone calls to friends, the sobbing.

  My mother tried to create an aura of calm acceptance. She stayed the whole day, fetching me Kleenex with lotion and going to pick up Cuban sandwiches for lunch. While I was on the phone, she did my dishes and swept the kitchen floor. She folded a giant pile of laundry that had been mounting on the guest bed. She even folded Dean’s boxers.

  “Just throw them away,” I said when I found her holding the pair with mermaids on them.

  “He’ll be back,” she said. “I’m putting them in the dresser.”

  During quiet moments, she sat by me and we processed it all again, examining every angle up and down, trying to get a handle on things. She was very patient. She must have said “It’s better to know now” a hundred times. She accentuated the positive.

  But all I could say was “This can’t be fucking happening.”

  My mother’s favorite movie was The Sound of Music. At some point during the day, she began quoting from it. “‘Where the Lord closes a door,’” she said, “‘somewhere He opens a window.’”

  “Thank you, Fräulein Maria,” I said. And then I thought about it. “What if I don’t believe in God? Do I still get a window?”

  “Of course you do, darlin’. Everybody gets a window.”

  “Maybe like a drive-thru window for me, though. Not a nice wooden one with window treatments and tie-backs.”

  “Sugar,” she said, her voice as soft as cotton, “if there’s one thing I can guarantee you in this life, it’s window treatments.”

  We paused in conversation long enough for me to go back to my lamenting. “This can’t be happening,” I said again.

  My mother looked at me. “You really don’t believe in God?”

  I said, “I don’t believe in anything today.”

  Meredith was at an antiques auction in Bellville that day and didn’t get my messages until she started the drive home. She took the highway going ninety, made it back in a record fifty-three minutes, and then let herself in the back door, shouting, “I can’t fucking believe it!” She paced the floor trying to figure out where he might have gone. As if we were going to hunt him down. As if knowing his location would change anything. “Look at you!” she kept saying, throwing her arm in the direction of my belly. “Look at you!” She had a lot of energy for ranting, and I was glad to let her take over for a while.

  Meredith’s approach was different from my mother’s. Meredith wanted to pile his boxers, and indeed each and every one of his belongings, out in the street and light them on fire. She wanted to call up all his friends and tell them that he’d left me by the side of the road on the way to the hospital with the baby halfway out. She wanted me to get so angry, and stay so angry, that there would never be room for feelings of sorrow, or loneliness, or loss.

  But after a while, even Meredith got tired. By ten o’clock, the three of us were collapsed in the living room, eating take-out Mexican food and listing all the things we hated about Dean in hoarse voices. Turns out, nobody had liked the styles of facial hair he’d sported over the years: a goatee, some mutton chops, a Fu Manchu. But both of their lists were far longer than I’d suspected.

  “That ankle tattoo,” my mother said.

  “The little snort when he laughed,” Meredith said.

  “The pouting,�
� I said.

  Our list went on: his UP YOURS T-shirt, his smoking (and his insistence that he wasn’t addicted), the way he shushed everybody when a song he liked came on, his collection of Matchbox cars, his affection for ZZ Top, his unwillingness to see any movie he deemed “too girly,” his love of Budweiser, his crooked bottom tooth, his use of the word dude (“Who says that?” Meredith kept saying. “Who talks like that?”), his pretentious handwriting, his love of the Three Stooges, his refusal to eat any vegetables besides ketchup, his inability to appreciate Japanese woodblock prints, his dislike of cats, his occasional tendency to forget to flush, and, of course, unanimously, his penchant for air guitar.

  And so we passed the time. Meredith didn’t go home until one in the morning. My mother tried to leave then, too, but I begged her to stay. She had her purse on her shoulder and her hand on the knob when I started to cry. Without a word, she set down her things. We started to make up the sofa bed, and that’s when Dr. Blandon, for the first time all day, decided to make an appearance.

  He walked right into the living room, his belly almost dragging on the floor.

  “What the hell is that?” my mother said, holding herself completely still.

  “That’s a cat,” I said.

  “What happened to its eye?”

  “Hit by a car.”

  “What’s it doing in your house?” my mother said, taking a step backward.

  “He’s staying with me for a while.”

  My mother took another step back, and Dr. Blandon took that as his cue to walk over to her, though she was tearing up just looking at him, and start doing figure eights around her ankles.

  “Well, I can’t stay here,” my mother said. “I’ve been sitting in this house thinking I was coming down with a cold.”

  As soon as she said that, I started to cry again, and finally, bless her heart, she agreed again to stay the night. As long as the good doctor was locked up in my room. “I refuse to wake up and find that thing sleeping on my face,” she said.

  “He’ll be on mine,” I promised.

  And then my dear mother made me a glass of milk, “to soothe your nerves,” and she tucked me into bed. She sat beside me and smoothed my hair.

  “Don’t tell Dad yet that the wedding is off,” I said.

  “Dean may come back, honey,” she said.

  “Even still,” I said. “The wedding is off.”

  My mother nodded, and then she kissed me on the forehead, and at that moment I wished like anything that I were still her little girl.

  As she went out, Dr. Blandon tried to follow, but my petite mother gave him such a hard shove with her foot that he went scrambling off under the bed, his paws hydroplaning on the bare floor.

  When I said the end began with a plane crash, this is the end I meant. The end of my engagement. The end of the Dean I thought I was going to marry. The end of the life I thought I was going to have. I wasn’t sure if Dean would be back in the morning, out of gas and unshaven, or if I’d never see him again. And if he did show up, I wasn’t sure if I’d shoo him off the porch and shut the door or let him squeeze his way in. But I was sure that something in me was a little bit broken, and that it was going to take me a good long while to figure out how to fix it.

  I lay in bed for a long time after that, wondering what it felt like to go into shock, and then I fell asleep with the light on. As it turns out, I didn’t go into shock. But I did go into labor.

  10

  About an hour after we went to bed, I found myself awake with stomach cramps. At first I thought maybe I’d just eaten too much. I was relieved when the feeling passed. Then it came and went again. It’s amazing that after all those months of preparing for and reading about this moment it took me as long as it did to figure it out. But I was absolutely obtuse, sitting on the toilet at three in the morning. Until it hit me: It wasn’t beans. It was labor.

  Betty had told us how to handle it. We weren’t supposed to rush to the hospital. In fact, we were supposed to wait as long as possible to go. Once we were there, she explained, we were in their hands. Once we were there, they were in charge. As long as we stayed home, we could still eat, if we liked, or take a bath, or curl up in our beds. Once we were there, we’d most likely be in a little gown that didn’t close up the back in a strange, sterile room, a fetal monitor around our bellies and IVs in our arms. Home had certainly sounded more appealing at the time, but as I tried to wait, I found myself wishing I were in the hands of trained professionals. I suddenly didn’t feel prepared.

  Betty wanted us to enter labor calmly, as if from a tranquil sea. She wanted us drinking tea—preferably herbal, and mixed specifically for mothers-to-be. She wanted calming music, foot rubs, good conversation, hair stroking, back massages, swaying back and forth. Her whole approach was to avoid tension. Tension came from fear. It made labor slower, harder, and more painful.

  Of course, I was already worked up that night. But as the cramps came, Dean’s leaving started to seem like it might lose top billing. I woke my mother up and gave her the news. I went to put the kettle on while she pawed through my hospital bag and found my folder from Betty’s class. She found a list of suggestions for dealing with the situation. She offered me a foot rub. She spoke in a soothing voice. She found me some very soft socks—of Dean’s, actually, but I put them on anyway.

  “I’m not supposed to do this alone,” I said.

  “You won’t be alone,” she said. “I’ll be there with you.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  She brought me some tea called Super Soother, but I didn’t want to drink it. I couldn’t even imagine being calm and tranquil. And the thought of Dean out on the interstate in his SUV, listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival, his arm out the window, the wind ruffling his hair, thinking he’d done the right thing, congratulating himself on finally making a move—the idea of him tooling along like a free man made me so angry I wanted to punch a hole in the wall.

  “This sheet of paper says you should do everything you can to relax.”

  “I don’t want to relax,” I said. “I’m too mad to relax. Relaxing sucks.”

  And then, before my mother could try to talk some sense into me, a real contraction. Up until that point, we’d been in the minor leagues. I’d been thinking I could handle labor easily because I’d always had such knee-buckling cramps with my period. It had seemed to me, all those years, like my body must have been preparing me for something. That I was going to be kind of a natural at the whole “giving birth” thing. Especially with my hips, which our midwife, Nicole, had described admiringly many times as “wide.” But when this contraction hit, it was so much fiercer than I’d even contemplated, I was a little stunned. I bent over on the couch.

  “Holy hell,” I said when it started to subside.

  “I know you don’t want to relax,” my mother said. “But you might think about changing your mind.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I wasn’t going to need a hospital to make me feel afraid. The contractions were going to do the job plenty well on their own.

  My mother and I did some breathing. She, the most Texan woman I can even imagine, she, who ate steak four times a week and who confused yoga with yogurt, was telling me things like “Find your center” and “Hold the pain in your hands like a moonbeam.” She was reading off the sheet and trying to sound convincing. Instead, she just sounded like my mother, badly cast in a play about people who talked this way.

  We decided she should draw me a bath. “That I can do,” she said. “A bath I can do.”

  I got hit with another one while she was turning on the water. I grabbed hold of the bookshelf. I wasn’t supposed to be scared. I was supposed to know that my body was built for doing just this exact thing. But I felt like a volcano getting ready to blow. “I think this is bad,” I said to my mother when she found me with my face pressed up against a boxed set of Jane Austen novels. “This is not
at all how I thought it would be.”

  Part of me had wanted Dean to see me in such agony. It might break his heart to see me suffer, especially in the effort of bringing our own child into the world, and he might love me even more as a result. And even though Meredith had told me that I was “so fuckedup” when I told her this, I had insisted that the pain of childbirth made women noble and wise. Now the pain was so much worse than I could have imagined, and Dean had no idea. And instead of loving me more at this moment, he most certainly loved me less.

  It seemed impossible to me that Dean had really left. My mother’s theory was that he was panicking about the baby and that he’d turn around when he’d traveled far enough to leave the pressure behind. “He’ll get to the state line,” she predicted, “and suddenly feel okay again. And then turn around and come back and fall at your feet.” And for her, if he was back soon enough, his leaving didn’t count. Anybody could have a moment of panic.

  She was sure that’s what it was. This was not the time for a man to leave his woman for real. There were too many questions unanswered for him: What would it be like to see his child? To hold it for the first time? What would the child look like? Would it be healthy? What would it be like to be a family? It was like leaving a movie right before the end. Didn’t he want to see how it turned out?

  “The newness has to wear off before they really leave you,” she said with total certainty. She herself, of course, had been left in the traditional way—with a child in middle school and no job. “That’s the way it always happens,” she said. “After the thrill is gone.”

  I agreed with her. There was simply no way that Dean had really left me. Not in this way, at this moment.

  “Maybe he had a breakdown of some kind,” I said, thinking how odd it was to be rooting for a breakdown. But it was hard to imagine. Truthfully, the only thing I could imagine was his pushing his way through the front door, his face contorted with remorse and self-hatred, begging my forgiveness as he clung to me. And maybe then I’d have another contraction, so he’d feel even worse.