A Happy Catastrophe

But finally we get dinner ready, and she carries the pie up to the roof while Patrick and I bring everything else, and then she tells him about her classroom and the hamster and how the teachers want to be friends with the kids, and that’s why you don’t have to call them Ms. Her eyes are sparkling as she tells him all this, and he teases her about being friends with teachers.

Despite the slight reprieve while she eats dinner, I can see in her eyes that she’s shell-shocked and sad, and that the hurt welling up inside her is so huge it is swamping her. After that, despite my efforts to have everything go smoothly, we argue over whether she needs a bath (I lose), whether she should brush her teeth (I win), and when it is time for bed (nobody wins; she argues and stalls and thinks up increasingly ridiculous topics to complain about until after ten, when we are finally all exhausted).

I lie down with her and Mister Swoony, and even though she says she’s never going to sleep, and never going to be happy again, and never going to speak to her mother or be nice to Richard, she finally, finally drifts off. Once I’m sure that I’ve heard every last peep from her, I ease myself off the bed. My back is stiff, and my neck has a crick in it. And not only that, I have cramps and a headache. I stagger into the bathroom, blinking in the bright light. It’s past eleven by now.

And there it is: my period.

Hi, it says. You didn’t really, really think that little rip in the condom four weeks ago was going to bring about a BABY, did you? You DID? And you think of yourself as somebody who has a sense of magic and possibility? And you didn’t know I was waiting for you? Hahahahahaahaha.

My period is always a little bit mean and capricious, but I never knew it would be this terrible.

I slide down the wall and lie on the floor with my face against the cool tile. I don’t want to think about anything right now except how the fibers of the tan bathroom rug are quite irregular. It’s fascinating, really, how there are different shades of beige and tan and ecru, all woven and twisted together, sticking up and leaning on each other. You might miss these if you never took the time to lie down on the floor, I think.

Should I cry? Maybe I should let myself cry. I am sadder than I think I have ever been.

Patrick comes in to brush his teeth. I don’t move. I just stare at his feet in front of me on the rug. Patrick’s perfect, unburned feet.

“Um. What are you doing?” he says.

“I’m feeling sorry for myself.”

“Oh,” he says. And then, “Ohhhhh.” He’s noticed the box of tampons on the edge of the sink. “Can I do anything?” he says. “Do you want some tea?”

“No. I think I am going to lie on the floor and cry for a while.”

“Okay.” His toes don’t move. I close my eyes. And then I feel the warmth of him surrounding me. He joins me there on the floor, and at first he simply rubs my back and my cheek, and then he gathers me up and holds me against his chest, and he says, “You know. If tonight is any indication, we might have dodged—”

“Don’t even,” I say.

“I mean, just saying—”

“Patrick. I mean it. Stop.”

He kisses my hair, a hundred little kisses. His heart is beating against my cheek. We stay that way for a long time. I feel tears burning under my eyelids. I am so tired and so sad.

“Marnie,” he whispers. “If you really want—if this is what you need, we can try again.”

I pull away and look at his face. “On purpose this time?”

He closes his eyes for a moment. “God. I must be a lunatic, but yes. On purpose. But could I ask you one thing? Could we wait? Can we get settled with this halfway-grown one first? Can we just make sure we can live through this before we embark on another?”

“All right,” I say.

“I must be crazy, saying this. I am crazy.”

“Don’t overthink it, Patrick. Just take it as it comes. It’s life.”

“Okay, but can you please, please come to bed now? Because God knows we are going to need our strength.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

MARNIE

And then the first weeks of having Fritzie go horribly. Like, the worst.

For one thing, she won’t talk to Tessa on the phone when she calls. She says from the next room, “Tell her I died.” Another time she yells out to me, “Please just tell her I hate her, and also I don’t remember her name.”

The following Thursday she says, “Tell her I’m your daughter now and she can stay away.”

On the following Sunday, she’s doing her homework when Tessa calls and she says, “Tell her I already grew up and left home and I’m living in my own pensione with a man who is handsomer than Richard and nicer.”

Each time, Tessa hangs up without pressing the issue. She actually said to me the last time it happened, “Well, I guess this shows what I was saying all along. She doesn’t miss me.”

“No, no!” I said quickly, but it was too late because she’d already hung up. No, I would have told her. It proves just the opposite. She misses you so much she can’t bear it.

Three weeks later, as September slides into October, Fritzie and I get around to painting her room a routine but comforting pale blue. I’m relieved that’s the color she’s picked because it seemed equally plausible that she’d go for—oh, I don’t know—metallic rainbow splotches or Death to Civilization Black. I’m so happy with the pale blue that when she picks out gold foil stars to stick onto the walls, as well as gold filmy bubble curtains for the windows, I’m game. In fact, I’m game for almost anything. My heart is one big wet pulsating ball of sympathy for her right now. We go through stores like we’re members of the Kardashian family, piling into the cart anything she wants: posters of unicorns and pugs and one of Dumbo with his mother as well as a large pillow in the shape of a pretzel, a lava lamp, assorted stuffed animals with enormous eyes, and an alarm clock that also tells the weather. We get a beanbag chair and white Ikea bookshelves, a new bed, a desk with a swivel desk light, a dresser, a chair on wheels, a rug with stripes, and baskets for her toys to go in.

While I’m on a ladder painting with the roller, she careens around the room, nearly stepping into the paint tray four separate times, and then insists on helping me paint the corners, which means that at one point a whole brush full of paint goes flying across the wood floor, and I have to run for wet paper towels, and while I’m gone, she steps in the paint tray and tracks even more light blue footprints across the room. When I (very kindly and patiently) convince her to stop, to never again in her life move even one muscle if there is painting going on anywhere in the vicinity, she dresses up Bedford in her baseball hat and one of her T-shirts, and the two of them run through the hallway, barking and shrieking, which causes Roy to come dashing into the bedroom, screeching, with his fur totally puffed out, and it’s clear that between the paint fumes and the interspecies noise-making, he’s having his well-earned nervous breakdown. He of course skids right into the puddles of paint on the floor and turns in midair and flies off down the hall making an unearthly sound. I am so sorry for him, but I have to capture him and wash his paws with water, which he hates more than anything. Then I have to wash the floor in the hallway. And the places on the wall, where he somehow touched, because I swear he was airborne at several points.