“Kai,” he says with this serious face. He has to pause because the audience again erupts from the mention of his name. “Kai, you are magical. Magical! You are what makes this show.” He slams his hand down on the judges’ table as he says this. “Stupendous! Magical and stupendous!”
Carrie Ann is next. “You know, I never know what to expect from you two.” The audience is on bated breath. Sometimes Carrie Ann does the overcritical thing just to prove she’s tough, so you never know with her. She starts in again, “But that was amazing.” They go nuts. “Kai, your charisma can’t be matched.” He smiles and kicks his legs. “And Natalie, you are really improving. Your lifts were great. Your energy is up. And I’m so happy to see you took our advice and wore a bra for this week’s per for mance.”
Len’s turn. Always the toughest judge. He sits stoically for a moment. The audience quiets down. Finally he says in his British accent, “Oi’m spea-chlus.” The audience goes crazy. He shakes his head. “Oi’m spea-chlus.” There are tears in his eyes. He stands up and applauds us again.
We bow. Kai blows kisses. I carry him off the stage. We get back to the dressing room to catch our breaths before we do our interview with Samantha Harris. And then we’ll leave for the wedding.
My mom comes with me to the ceremony. We drive separately so she can take Kai home after the wedding and I can go to the reception. Kai looks adorable.
At the ceremony, Father Jerry takes a moment to talk about Kai and Josh, about how amazing Josh was and how even though Josh isn’t there he is still a part of this special day. I start to cry when he says this. But I don’t cry like I did at Ads’s wedding. At Ads’s wedding, I was hysterical. But at Toby and Nikki’s wedding, I just sit there and let my eyes fill up with tears. I don’t have a tissue, but I don’t want one. I can feel everyone staring at me and I don’t care. I want everyone to see those tears sitting on my face. I want everyone to see me not being hysterical but being appreciative of the words spoken about Josh. I don’t bow my head and pray with everyone else throughout the ceremony. I just sit and look out at the windows at the light shining in on the altar. We take a lot of time to thank God for things and we take a lot of time to ask God for things, and I don’t know how much of it I invest myself in. Sitting in my pew, I am in no mood to bow my head to anyone. But I do cry for Josh.
After the ceremony I see Deedee, Chris (he flew in for the wedding), and Ashley. They sat a few rows back. I can tell the ceremony was hard for them. All of them have red faces and their eyes are swollen from tears. I hug them, but I feel myself pulling away quickly. I can hear people around me talking excitedly about how beautiful the ceremony was, how great Nikki looked in her dress. I don’t want to stand here and talk about how sad we are and how nice those words were about Josh. I heard the speech. I cried by myself and took my moment. Now I want to be happy for my friends. I am not in the mood to be sad. I am so fucking tired of going to happy events and being sad. I’m over this, I think to myself. I’m not over Josh and I’m not over remembering and loving Josh, but I am over sitting at a table, watching all of the people dance around, and thinking about how much my life sucks. I’m over that. I’m over crying hysterically (at least for the moment). I’m over giving people long, emotional hugs and listening to people say, “It’s going to be all right.” I’m over it. Tonight is the first time I find myself thinking this.
After handing Kai off to my mom and hugging Deedee, Chris, and Ashley, I immediately find Mathews. We have about an hour and a half before the reception starts.
“Bar?” he asks.
“You know it.”
I order a vodka tonic.
My FMG orders a dirty martini.
At the reception during the toasts, Toby takes a moment to talk about Josh and I start to tear up again. I used to really hate weddings or dinners or just people in general who thought they knew what to say on joyous occasions about Josh. I was anxious about what Toby was going to say, and before he started speaking, I wished I were in the bathroom. But what he says is the best thing anyone has ever said about Josh. Toby says that Josh isn’t here, but he should be. And if he were here, he would be the “biggest clown” on the dance floor, which is completely accurate. He goes on to say that Josh would want all of us to dance and have a great time. He actually says it a lot better than that but that’s the point he gets across. Then he asks us to bow our heads for a moment of silence for Josh. I don’t bow my head. I don’t feel like it. I sit there with my nose high in the air, taking my own haughty moment of silence. I am so proud and so relieved that Toby said what he had said. Finally someone had given me permission to dance. Someone has told me that I didn’t need to sit slouched over at my empty table while all my friends get drunk and party.
I dance to almost every song they play. I dance, I point, and I throw my hair around and hustle and twist and shout and everything else. It is one of the most liberating acts I have taken in a very long time. Everyone has a great time. Maggie has her Wedding Date Cleavage out. Terrah, who has probably clocked sixty hours this week alone at the bank, dances to rap music. All of Josh’s friends are here. Alex flew in from California. Marcus and Megan have been here for almost a week. The last time I saw most of these people was at Josh’s funeral. It feels so nice to see them at Toby’s wedding.
• • •
Back at school, the poetry unit continues in my ninth-grade class. We have the Robert Frost poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” on the overhead projector. We are using the poem to talk about rhyme scheme. In the midst of labeling the AABA pattern, we start talking about the poem itself.
“It’s about suicide!” Krystal with a K yells from the back of the room. This sometimes happens with students when one teacher, one parent, or one peer tells them one random detail about a piece of literature (or poetry in this case) and that’s all they ever remember. Usually the detail doesn’t do much when it’s remembered in total isolation from the rest of the text. “I heard Simon is Jesus!” they say about the small quiet boy in Lord of the Flies. “Gene [from A Separate Peace] is gay!” “Holden steps on the peanuts because he’s given up on man!” (What? This one never makes any sense to me.)
The speaker in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” finds himself at a deserted barn on a dark, snowy night. It’s actually the “darkest evening of the year.” He contemplates staying, and he almost does, but then decides to move on. So I can see where some people think it’s about a guy thinking about suicide. He thinks about staying in the darkness. He even admits there would be something comforting about it, but then he decides he needs to keep going. For me, when I read this poem this year (which is probably the twentieth time I’ve read the poem), I conclude that I connect with this poem more than any other poem in the world. For the last year, I feel like I’ve been in dark, cold, desolate, snowy woods. And now, as the one-year mark of Josh’s death looms, I’m starting to realize that I don’t have to stay here all of my life. At Toby’s wedding, when I was dancing to “Thunderstruck” and “The Love You Save,” that was the sign of the coming light and warmth. The last four lines of Frost’s poem read, “The woods are snowy, dark and deep. / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / and miles to go before I sleep.” Sometimes I find myself thinking about these lines, or I find myself humming them under my breath. I could stay here. I could walk with grief by my side for the rest of my life. And like the snowy woods, having grief as a companion isn’t necessarily a sad or tragic thing. There is something comforting about having grief loom around day after day. It can be lovely because the grief is also a testament to how much I love Josh. I never want to get rid of that pain.
But I can’t stay here forever. I can’t raise a son while looming in darkness and I can’t pretend to be truly happy for the rest of my life. I have miles to go before I sleep. And in one month, after I have a very sad day, a day that includes a lot of long hugs, tears, and sad faces and swollen eyes, after that day, maybe not right afte
r, but sometime after that day, I am going to get on my horse and walk out of these snowy, dark woods. I have miles to go before I sleep.
• • •
Mother’s Day comes around and everyone is scheduled to go to breakfast at this nice place about a mile from my parents’ house. At the last minute my mom and I decide to walk to breakfast with Kai in the stroller. We take an umbrella in case it rains; the clouds are being a little ominous. A few minutes into the walk a light drizzle starts. We consider turning back and getting the car but decide against it. Halfway there it really starts to pour. There we are clomping along in our open-toed shoes, both crouched under one umbrella that is being held over the stroller and trying to entertain Kai all at the same time.
My FMG walks behind us. She is wearing a knee-length cotton skirt that has clearly not been ironed, running shoes, and the one T-shirt she owns without any juice stains on it. It’s a faded navy blue V-neck she bought from The Gap six years ago. “I keep it for special occasions,” she says.
We are almost there. Our rear ends and the backs of our calves are soaked. The umbrella couldn’t quite cover them. Deedee drives by us. “Wanna ride?” she yells from the car. We refuse. We’ve made it this far. Ashley drives by. “What are you doing? Why didn’t you drive?” she shouts from the window. We wave her by.
Finally we make it. We think we are hilarious. How emblematic that our Mother’s Day celebration consists of us hovering over the baby in the pouring rain, walking a mile in the cold while everyone else drives by.
I surprise myself. I have a lovely day. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Josh’s absence. I spend time with my mom. Our walk in the rain with Kai was the most imperfectly perfect celebration I could have asked for. I spend time by myself. Kai takes a long afternoon nap. It rains the whole time he sleeps. I don’t sit and cry. I think this is the first holiday since Josh died where I haven’t cried.
• • •
The reality TV show The Bachelorette has started its fifth season. As much as I like books and literature, sometimes I can’t resist a good train wreck of a reality TV show. I hate the fact that I am intrigued by this show, but I am.
The Bachelor/Bachelorette series is a show where they take one single guy (The Bachelor) or one single girl (The Bachelorette) and put them with twenty-five singles of the opposite sex. We (the audience) watch as the women (or men in this season’s case) battle it out for attention and approval of the one network-deemed stud or studette. The show is ridiculously unrealistic.
Clearly these people are living in an isolated environment and are unable to receive calls from their mothers or friends who would surely say, “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing making out, getting drunk, and crying in front of television cameras?” The Bachelor, with one guy and twenty-five single women, is obviously way more dramatic. Girls yell at each other, cry all the time, and after they get kicked off the show, most of them say something to the confessional camera like “I just don’t understand why I wasn’t good enough for him.” And I always want to yell, “Good enough for whom? The random guy that ABC picked up in the middle of a mall, threw a suit on, and gave his job some flashy name like ‘entrepreneur’? I got news for you, sister, that joker doesn’t even own those nice clothes, he can’t afford that trip to Fiji, and ‘entrepreneur’ is just some fancy name they give to people who are unemployed because they got fired from being a sales clerk at Men’s Wearhouse.” I don’t know what prompts these people to be on this show. Whenever I see previews for a new season of The Bachelor, I always see all those pretty girls and think, “You don’t have to do this to yourself.” But it doesn’t get me thinking about dating.
I know I was only married for a year and a half, but I think it gave me a tremendous amount of insight on what marriage and a relationship is really all about. Now that weddings and marriages are more a spectator sport for me, I watch as other people go in with a very idealistic mind-set and then I listen to the women call in to Dr. Joy and talk about how things just aren’t what they used to be. In addition to all of this, being a single mom has enlightened me to what really matters in life and what I would want out of a partner if I ever decided to do it again.
I think about all of this when I watch The Bachelorette. This show is hilarious to me because none of the women and men actually ever talk about anything. They just look at each other a lot, make out, and every now and then they say something that would make for a good commercial. So it’s basically about good looks and “having fun.” I was married for a year, and although I loved every moment of it, I know enough to know that these superficial conversations aren’t enough to determine anything. With my knowledge of the reality of marriage and the demands of life, I think I would make an amazing bachelorette. Maybe they would call my show The Widowette.
Instead of asking, “Okay, what’s your idea of a perfect date?” I would ask, “Is your definition of washing the dishes (A) washing and putting the dishes away or (B) taking the pots and pans and dumping soap all over them and then ‘letting them soak’ so that I have to clean the pots and pans at six o’clock the next morning when I get up for work?”
In addition to condescending questions, I’d also insist that the entire show be filmed here, in Michigan, in the middle of February when the days are gray and bleak and snowy and no one has a tan. The first guy to wake up early and scrape the ice off of my car and shovel the driveway gets a rose. And he doesn’t get a rose for shoveling the driveway like a ten-year-old. He needs to make clean, clear lines, and no, we don’t use the front walkway, but he still has to shovel it for the mailman. These are the challenges in my life, in any real life, that a man would have to meet. It would be brutal.
“Dates” would first consist of a strict interview process. I would sit and ask suitor number one a series of questions, and if any one, any one, of his answers does not fit what I want, there will be no second date, no suspenseful rose ceremony. I may even leave before the food arrives, and by food I mean the Primo’s pizza that I ordered because we’d be sitting in my messy living room. The point is that it is simply not worth my time to pursue anything less than perfection. (The second part of the date would consist of a game of Scrabble.) I would have twenty important questions.
Do you have any experience in household chores such as emptying the dishwasher, folding laundry, and running a vacuum cleaner?
Are you willing to spend every Fourth of July in northern Michigan? Never, for the next eighteen years, will my son or I be anywhere except northern Michigan on the Fourth of July. If you have another Fourth of July location, tell me now. Personally, I don’t care if it’s the goddamn Hamptons, we’re not going.
Do you read? If so, name the last five books you have read.
Do you listen to talk radio? If so, name your three favorite talk radio programs.
Are you a competent driver? (Actually, this does not even have to be a question, but I absolutely will not be with someone who does not demonstrate impeccable driving skills. Anything subpar and they will be eliminated immediately.)
Are you okay with the fact that every Christmas will be spent with my family? If this is unacceptable to you or your family, speak now. Your family needs to be aware that I want nothing to do with them on major holidays. I have enough families and enough major holidays.
Do you play Scrabble? What is the highest score you have ever earned in Scrabble?
Do you play any stupid fucking video games? If so, how many hours a week, on average, do you dedicate to stupid fucking video games? (The follow-up to this question addresses YouTube videos.)
Identify three goals you have for yourself, both personal and professional, that you would like to accomplish in the next five years. If you do not have any personal or professional goals, please tell me now.
What time do you wake up on Saturday morning?
Do you like to try new foods?
Do you have any stupid friends? Identify one activity that you and your friends do f
or fun. Would you call that activity stupid or would you call it fun?
In five years, would you be willing to move to a community in Berkley, Michigan, and raise my child in the Berkley School District?
Do you have any financial debt? If so, how much?
How long has it been since you lived with your mother?
Speaking of mothers, tell me about yours. On a scale of one to ten in the category of “overbearing,” where does she rank?
Can you throw a good punch?
Do you have a problem saying “I’m sorry”?
Do you have a problem saying “You were right all along”?
How would you describe your level of physical fitness?
If any derogatory language is used during the interview (fag, homo, etc.), the date will be terminated immediately. Also, there should be no swearing on the part of the suitor. I can swear, but he can’t. The suitor must also demonstrate an above-average command of the English language. Any discrepancies in the area of subject-verb agreement, proper verb tense, using adjectives in place of adverbs, and so on will be noted. A double negative will also result in immediate termination of the date.
Also, during the interview, the candidate will be evaluated on character. Internally I will ask myself the following questions about the candidate. He will have no knowledge of the fact that he is being evaluated on the following criteria.
Are you a funny person? Have you made me laugh at all?
Would I describe you as stupid-funny or witty-funny?
Signs of Life Page 22
