The Bright Side of Disaster

by Katherine Center

  “That’s a good tip,” I said.

  He had a present for me in his hand, but he seemed to have forgotten about it. He moved around the room as if he were in an art museum, contemplating each view as if he’d paid admission. It struck me how little we know about our parents. I knew he was a surgeon, that he was dedicated to his work in a way that eclipsed all else, that he had a wall full of awards and fellowships. I knew his father had never gone to see a single one of his football games, even after he got a full scholarship to the University of Texas. I knew something was missing from his life that he kept searching for. But a daughter’s perspective is limited.

  “I’ll help you, if I can,” I said. “With Mom.”

  “Just put in a good word for me now and again,” he said.

  I offered him juice, crackers, and a place on the sofa, all of which he declined.

  We stood in the living room, me swaying back and forth to keep the baby asleep. He looked far too tall for my house, and his shoulders seemed to slump down to compensate. So different from when he was doing his TV spots, or strutting around the hospital, or even in sneakers for his 7:00 A.M. squash game. He was larger than life, and somehow that made him too big for my house. Even though he’d been here many times before. It was always this way.

  “Want to see the baby?” I said.

  “Yes!” he said, as if he’d forgotten why he came.

  I turned my shoulder so her little sleeping face was near him.

  “Isn’t she something!” I heard him say to himself.

  When I turned back around, he remembered his present. “Here,” he said, putting a shopping bag that said ST. JOSEPH’S in my hand. “It’s for the baby.” And then, “It’s from the gift shop.”

  “Nice wrapping job,” I said.

  I pulled out a little onesie with the hospital logo on it.

  My dad shrugged. “Impulse buy.”

  And then he was moving toward the door, thanking me for letting him stop by, kissing his fingers and pressing them to my head. “Good luck, kiddo,” he said. “This is the hardest thing in the world.” He clicked the door closed behind him and I was left wondering why he’d even come by at all.

  “Little babies make your father nervous,” my mother explained when she stopped by that evening. “As do older children and adults.”

  “He seems introspective lately,” I said to her. “I think he’s growing.”

  My mother pulled down her glasses and shot me a “give me a break” look.

  My father had left my mother in the typical way. New wife waiting in the wings. Younger, blonder, bustier. She wanted kids of her own, of course, and so within a year of my parents’ divorce, I had a baby half brother. Eighteen months later, another. I didn’t see them much. Any of them. In the standard way, my father fell out of touch after he’d moved on to his new family. I was thirteen when he left.

  When he married Melinda, they bought a big house in a brand-new suburb. They lived there until he left her for his next wife, whose name, unfortunately, was also Melinda. We called them the Mellies, or, if we needed to differentiate, Part One and Part Two. Two more sons from that marriage. Then another divorce. And now he was single again, and dating from a wide pool of nurses at the hospital.

  Standard stuff, really, for men of his generation. But the thing is, my mother never saw it coming. She never, ever imagined that he would leave her. When she married him, she married him forever.

  So he broke her heart when he left. And, worse than that, he took away the future she thought they’d been building. Once she got him out of her system, which took a few years, she never looked back.

  The part of me that was like my mother disliked my father for leaving her. But my dad was also one of my favorite people. Lots of nights, he’d call at dinnertime and say, “They’re grilling up some great catfish over at the Cajun Cage.” Twenty minutes later, we were there, him in his scrubs after a long day, his eyes bloodshot from his contacts, each of us holding a catfish po’boy the size of a sneaker. He’d rest his elbows on the table and lick ketchup off his fingers. He always wore his black leather wristwatch, the one my mother gave him on their first anniversary. Even when he’d been married to other women, he wore it. He had a way of hanging on to things.

  Despite all the money my father made now, and the shiny car he drove, catfish was still his favorite food. And those picnic tables by the highway were still his favorite place to eat. Meeting him there, the sun setting on the parking lot, the wind blowing my hair, the slight stickiness of the painted picnic-table boards—something about it felt like the best parts of my childhood. He had a kind of intuition for offering you just exactly the thing you were longing for most.

  In the weeks after I had Maxie, he called me often. I’d swing on the porch with the cordless and strategize with him about ways to woo my mother. I maintained that it was hopeless, but I also found myself rooting for him. And one thing I was sure of: If anybody in this world possessed enough charm to pull it off, it was my dad.

  17

  By the fifth week of motherhood, I had a sense of the terrain. There was no predictability or rhythm to the day, but I had at least become familiar with the mechanics of mothering. The diaper system was in place. The onesies were all in a certain drawer. I had learned how to stick Maxie in the kangaroo-pouch carrier, even though she never looked comfortable.

  Part of the sheer terror of those days was figuring out how to comfort her. When she cried, I ran through a checklist of things she might want: Hungry? Dirty diaper? Too cold? Too hot? Sleepy? A hair wrapped around a finger or toe? (This last one never actually happened, but I’d read about it in a book and I checked for it every single time she cried.) My mother always thought she was crying because her diaper was poopy, but I swear she could have sat in a poopy diaper for days. She didn’t notice or care.

  Mostly what soothed her was being walked. I walked her around the house, making laps from the kitchen to the front door. I’d leave the TV on and catch pieces of whatever was on. My stitches were still hurting then—I’d be cauterized at my six-week checkup because “this should have healed ages ago”—and my muscles were still sore. Nothing about me felt right at all.

  I’d hoped that after the birth, my old self would just pop back into place, but there was no pop. I still looked and felt pregnant for weeks after the delivery, except that now, instead of a taut, round belly, I had a droopy one. Everything else was the same: the stretch marks, the loose ligaments, the swollen ankles. Then add sore stitches, headaches, and a couple of unexplained bouts of explosive diarrhea, and I was actually worse off than I had been before. But still, I walked. It was what she wanted, and I was in no position to deny her anything. No matter how much spit-up was caking my T-shirt, or how long it had been since I’d showered, I paced the block with her in the carrier or in my arms for what seemed like hours.

  It was lucky for me that Maxie also liked the porch swing. When I just couldn’t walk anymore, or when it was too late or too early to be out and about in the neighborhood, we did the swing. And Maxie turned out to be an early riser, so, many mornings at five, after I’d paced the living room until I thought I’d lose my mind, we wound up on the swing. It was there, in the early mornings, that we discovered that my garage-sale neighbor was a predawn jogger.

  The first time I saw him, he was running down the block, his dog, Herman, trailing leashless behind him. The second time I saw him was the first time he saw us. He stopped short when he noticed us on the swing, even though he’d just started running, and walked up the front walk.

  “Morning!” he said.

  The sun had not even started to rise. “I’m not convinced that it is morning,” I said.

  “This must be your baby.”

  I held her up and said, “Maxie.”

  He smoothed his big palm over her head.

  “She’s a morning person,” I said.

  “And so are you,” he said.

  “I am now.”

  He
rman the dog was lingering near my bushes, eager to get going on the jog.

  As always, I was starving for someone to talk to. Even at this early hour.

  My neighbor started to move back toward the road. Then he turned back and said, “Where’s your husband? I haven’t seen his SUV.”

  “Oh,” I said. “He wasn’t my husband.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “He was scheduled to be,” I offered. “But the plan got—” I paused. How could I talk about this without seeming like a wounded animal?

  “Revised?” he suggested.

  “Yep,” I said. “That’s pretty much it.”

  He got it. In twenty-five words or less, he knew my whole, sad, clichéd story. And knowing the story seemed to make him angry. Most people seemed angry when they found out. But there was something extra nice about his response. A touch of big-brother protectiveness. I breathed it in like a good aroma. Cookies baking, say. Or onions sautéing in butter.

  “He left you after you had a baby,” he said incredulously.

  “Day before,” I corrected him in a voice that was both perky and bitter. “He left, and then I went into labor. My midwife said it was all the—” I stopped myself for a second. He was all ears, waiting. Fuck it. “All the sobbing.”

  “His baby,” he said. It was a question, but it was also a declaration, because he already knew the answer.

  When I nodded, he looked away in something like disgust.

  I got lots of disgust from the women I told, but the men just usually seemed uncomfortable. In this story, men were the enemy. I was the Good Woman, an archetype for all the Good Women out there who were done wrong by their men. Men heard this story and averted their eyes. They may not have been bad men, but they were certainly no match for a Good Woman. They felt guilty by association. But this man looked right at me. It didn’t even seem to occur to him to feel guilty. And at this moment I suddenly knew that he was decent and kind and—

  Herman the dog took off trotting down the street. Tired of waiting, he was starting without my neighbor. My neighbor moved to follow him. Time to get going.

  “You must be exhausted,” he said, walking backward. “My older sister has two kids fifteen months apart.”

  “So you know all about it,” I said.

  “Brutal,” he said.

  “Yeah, that word comes up a lot.” I was stroking Maxie’s soft, bare legs. “But parts of it,” I said then, “are better than the best thing in the world.” I waved Maxie’s little hand at him.

  He started off after his dog, and then he turned to call out, “If you ever need anything, let me know.”

  “You bet,” I said, with no intention of ever doing it.

  It had been nice to have some conversation, and I stayed out on the porch for a good long while, hoping we might catch him on his way back in. But he must have been quite a runner, because an hour later, there was still no sign of him.

  It was worth waiting, though, because I was lonesome. Getting out was far more difficult than I had ever imagined, especially because I felt shy about nursing in public. So we mostly stayed home and hoped for visitors. Of course, my mother did come by twice a day, though she often stayed out on the porch with Maxie to avoid dander. And other folks made an effort to check in. And I talked on the phone some. Occasionally, I’d see Meredith, but she had fallen in love with the real Dr. Blandon, and that was keeping her pretty busy. They spent every free minute together and called each other six times a day. When I did see her, she smiled a lot and said things like “He really does have a washboard stomach. I’ve never seen one of those in real life.”

  I wasn’t the greatest company, either. I was totally preoccupied with tending to the baby. And since I had little interest in Dr. Blandon, and Meredith had little interest in Maxie, we were kind of at an impasse. I missed her, though.

  That day, Maxie and I walked up and down the street a lot, sat on the porch swing, napped, chatted on the phone with a friend living in Paris, and ate an entire bag of shelled pecans. It was a pretty typical day.

  When night came, Maxie went down easily. She nursed to sleep in five minutes flat, I rolled her into the bassinet by my bed, and we were done.

  She wasn’t turning out to be the greatest sleeper, though, and most nights we were up three or four times, nursing and walking and singing. I had two or three hours, roughly, between wake-ups. That night, I chose not to do the dishes, even though I’d suffer for it the next day. I chose not to take a shower, even though I had not managed to change my underwear yet. I just crawled into my unmade bed and pulled out a couple of home-decorating magazines.

  I piled pillows up all around me and savored the anticipation of two whole hours stretched out ahead and no one to worry about but myself. It was eight-thirty. She’d be up by ten-thirty, ready to nurse again. The pleasure of flipping pages gave way to the pleasure of anticipating sleep, and I dropped Country Home on the floor after about fifteen minutes and closed my eyes.

  And then the phone rang. I sat up and grabbed it on the first ring, terrified that the noise was going to wake Maxie.

  “Hello!” I said in a hoarse whisper, trying to make clear that the caller had really caused a problem for me by calling after bedtime. Then I looked at the clock. It was two-thirty in the morning. Maxie had slept straight through. What a brilliant, fabulous, beautiful child.

  “Jenny?”

  I held my breath.

  “Jenny?”

  It was, unbelievably, of all people, after all this time, Dean.

  “Is this who I think it is?” I whispered.

  “Jenny, are you okay?”

  “Do you know what fucking time it is?” I was still whispering.

  I could hear him suck on his cigarette—could actually hear it crackle—before he said, “It’s late.”

  “It is two-fucking-thirty in the morning.”

  And then that was it. Maxie had heard the phone. And me talking. She started to cry.

  “The baby’s up now,” I said, attempting to convey in that one sentence that the only chance I’d had of getting even a bad imitation of a normal night’s sleep was now gone. And that I was fucking exhausted. And that everything, absolutely everything, was his fault. And that even still, as pathetic as it was and as much as I didn’t want to, I missed him. Stupid me. “I’ve got to go, Dean,” I said in a normal voice. “She’s crying.”

  “Wait!” he said.

  I paused.

  Then he said, “It’s a girl?”

  “You don’t know one fucking thing,” I said, and hung up. That was all I had time for. I could have asked him a thousand questions at that moment. But Maxie was crying, and that was that.

  And then I was reaching for her, swooping her up, and settling the two of us in my rocker. She stopped crying the minute I touched her, and as I gathered her in my arms I felt her ribs under her baby fat, all tucked inside the soft casing of her cotton pajamas. The feeling of her little self was like a tonic, and I felt so grateful to her that she’d let me sleep so long. It was as if she’d given me a gift. She was wide-awake as we settled into the chair, and looking at me with those big eyes that always looked so black at nighttime. I closed my eyes, hoping she would, too, and we nursed there. I was holding her, but she was holding me, too.

  And so, the big question: Why was he calling? Was he just drunk and overly emotional, perhaps boasting to some bartender that he had a wife and baby at home? Or was it better than that? Was he thinking about coming back? Was he calling to test the waters? If so, my multiple uses of the word “fucking” had, perhaps, not conveyed any encouragement. But why would I even want to encourage him? Maybe he’d call back tonight to finish the conversation. Or in the morning, to apologize for waking me. Maybe this was it. Or maybe not.

  How was it possible that he did not know about Maxie? His parents knew all about her. I’d even sent them some pictures of her in the pink onesie with the tulip on it they’d mailed. I figured at least he’d be getting reports o
n us from them. Even if shame, or confusion, or a narcissistic focus on his own life to the exclusion of all else had kept him from calling me, I figured he must at least have been talking to his folks, hearing about us, safe in the knowledge that we were okay.

  Apparently not. Apparently, he was truly carousing around the country. Maybe dreadlocking his hair and smoking dope. Or maybe he’d joined another bad band in a new city, repeating his old mistakes in new surroundings. Maybe he had a new girlfriend, one who thought he was brilliant and talented. Dean was in my thoughts every day, as sad as that was. If he had been thinking about me even a tenth as much as that, he’d have found a way to check up on how Maxie and I were doing.

  But he hadn’t. That was the amazing thing. He was gone, and we were forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind.

  So that was it. The call I’d been waiting for, even though I never would have admitted it out loud, and now it was over. The truth was, even though I fully recognized that he was a bastard for the way he’d left me, letting him go was not as easy as it should have been. I wanted to believe that I was the type of woman who never looked back at any man who did not meet her high standards, but that wasn’t exactly the case.

  With Meredith and my mother, I put my hands on my hips and said, “Good riddance.” But in some crooked little place in my heart, I waited for him to come back. My plan, if he ever called, had been to (a) describe my pain to him in such a vivid way that he would feel the pain, too, and then (b) move on to other topics and be so witty and fabulous that he found himself desperate to be near me, then (c) tell him about Maxie in such glowing terms, perhaps sugarcoating the experience a bit, that he’d ache to come home and be a proper father. It was a three-pronged plan many late-night nursings in the making, and I hadn’t even gotten to prong one. No caller ID. No way to find him or call him back. But what was I going to do, leave Maxie screaming while I tried to lure her unwilling father back home against my own better judgment? It couldn’t have gone differently. Unless Dean had thought to call at a normal, decent, human hour.