A Happy Catastrophe

I say to Fritzie, “Do you want to take a picture of your room and text it to your mom so she can see?”

“Do you know how to spell the word no?” she says. “N. O. N. O. N. O. N. O.” She says this a hundred more times, at least.

“Okay, okay, I get it,” I say after a while.

We live through this day.

Patrick, who has been working in his studio, comes in from time to time, to offer consolation, wet paper towels, sandwiches, and some expertise with the Allen wrench, but we both know this is my project, not his. I’m the one who knows how important it is for her to have a haven with her own decorations, a place where she can go and shut the door, miss her mom, listen to music, do her homework, do whatever she needs to make this year okay for her.

I feel as though I’m always trying to nudge him toward her, to make him see how wonderful she is. They have a running joke about how Roy thinks he’s her brother and that she’s merely another cat who’s always looking to take his cat treats. I’ll hear her giggling while Patrick is teasing her about how Roy stashes the tuna surprise anywhere he can find.

“Roy sees you looking at that tuna surprise,” I heard him tell her. “He used to hide it in your bedroom, but now you’ve made it so he has to look for new hiding places every day.”

She giggled. “He put it in your shoes today!”

“No, no,” Patrick said. “That’s where you’re wrong. It’s under your pillow.”

“No! It’s under your pillow!”

“Not even close.”

Sometimes he’ll take her with him when he goes to Paco’s, and he buys her gum and sour candies and those little fried apple pies that come in wax baggies. He doesn’t tell me much, but I imagine that he has to be proud to have a little girl who will chat with just about everyone and who is so self-confident that she has to be prevented from going around the back of the counter and demanding to learn to use the cash register.

My mother laughs when I tell her about all this. Well, she laughs once she’s gotten over the shock of Patrick having a child from a previous encounter. It has to be explained to her several times that he didn’t abandon a pregnant girlfriend and then hold out on paying child support. “No, no, no,” I say. “She never even told him she was pregnant.”

“But, honey, didn’t he see her?”

“No, Mom. He barely knew her. Only for that one time.”

“She got pregnant in a one-night stand?” she says. “Are you sure you believe this?”

“Yes. I believe it. Because it’s true. And anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that the mother feels it’s now his turn to do some of the child-rearing, so we have an eight-year-old staying with us for a few months.”

“So you’re somebody’s stepmother!” she says. “I bet you can’t do one thing right, can you?”

“Well, I’m figuring it out as I go along,” I say. But I’m bristling at this just a little bit. It’s hard to explain to my mother how much I already love this child, how this seems like some of the universe’s magic at work, bringing me a gutsy little girl. There are times when I’m helping her with her homework or washing her hair for her or picking out her clothes for the next day that I feel myself floating up somewhere near the ceiling, looking down in amazement at how my life is changing.

But for some reason, everybody wants to make this a story about me getting a raw deal.

Before we hang up, I tell her a few choice details that I think might amuse her: the room decor with the lava lamp, Mister Swoony who looks like he has mange, Fritzie’s desire to dress Bedford and Roy in T-shirts, and the fact that, at the teacher conference I went to, Josie and Karen said she was adventurous, strong-willed, and fearless, and that she hates being left out of anything.

“Ha!” my mother says. “And you just know they mean she wants her own way all the time and is the ringleader for all the troublemakers.”

“Yep,” I say. “Yes, that is probably exactly what they mean.”

“Does she talk to her own mother, honey?”

“Well, she doesn’t want to, but I insist on making a weekly phone call to Tessa, just to keep her in the loop. So far the conversations are pretty short and awkward, but I think she needs to have contact with her mom.”

“Can’t say I blame her, though, for not wanting to. What kind of mother does that?”

“I know, I know. But it just might end up being the best thing for everybody. You know? We can’t rule anything out.”

“Do some of your magic about it,” says my mother, “and then turn your magic wand or whatever it is over to me. I’m ready to lock your father in his den and throw away the key. The only thing is, he wouldn’t even ever realize it. He’d just stay there!”

In the afternoons I hang out with the other moms on the playground, but I am always keeping one eye on Fritzie as she leaps from the top of the climbing structure, chases the other kids around in circles, and goes so high on the swings that my heart stops. By the time we go home, my teeth feel like I’ve been chewing on metal.

“Don’t look,” Elke tells me, when she sees me wincing. “They have to do this. It’s some kind of law of nature. Nobody understands it.”

The people of the Frippery point out that I’ve become a lot less sunny lately. Love, I want to tell them, can do that to you. It can make you downright uneasy until you find your way.

“You’re jumpier,” Ariana says. “Do you need me to come and babysit for you sometime? I think you’re developing a twitch in your eye.”

“A twitch?” says Kat. “The twitch is the least of it. She looks like a prisoner of war, being deprived of sleep and water. Here, my dear, at least hydrate yourself.” She hands me a big cup of tea. “Go smell some of the lavender in the cooler. I’ve heard it’ll change your brain.”

“Tell us what is the very worst part,” commands Lola, leaning forward, her kind eyes beaming into mine. “You’ve got to just say it out loud. Vent a little.”

“Sssh. She won’t do that,” Kat says. “She doesn’t want to be negative. You know Marnie.”

“The worst part,” I say slowly, “is that I want to show her so much love, and I can’t make up for what she went through with her own mother. And the worst, worst part is that I want to make us into a wonderful, big, happy family, and . . . and . . .”

Lola gets up and hugs me, and Ariana declares we need a group hug.

“You’re magic, Marnie,” she says. “Don’t forget that Fritzie landed with you for a reason.”

Oddly enough, that’s the day I feel the very best. As though I might be coming back into myself. When I go outside, leaving Best Buds to go pick Fritzie up from the after-school program, I look up and see the sky and notice that the leaves are changing colors and the sky is a crystalline shade of blue.

Crazy, I know, but it’s like I’d forgotten all about the sky.

“How many more months do we have left?” Patrick asks me one night as we get into bed.

“Of what?”

“Of what? Of Fritzie living here.”