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Dave
Before I start, I need to put one thing out there: I was born Ivan Alexander Hallsett Ratislav Stefanik IV, Exiled Prince of Greater Moravia and Lower Bohemia. But for fuck’s sake, call me Dave.
Five years ago, I was living just far enough outside Newark that it didn’t feel like I was anywhere near Newark. I’d bought and renovated an estate halfway between Montclair and Falls River. It was ten acres, with a long driveway and rolling hills. When I first saw it, the real estate agent called it palatial. Exactly.
But the house and name aside, I was otherwise pretty much an ordinary guy from New Jersey. I liked my coffee black and my Jets games close until the second half of the fourth quarter. I paid for my Beemer in cash, and I had all my bills on autopay. I mowed my own lawn, because who the hell doesn’t like riding a John Deere, but I had a service do my laundry because doing laundry is dead-ass in the middle of the category of life is too goddamned short.
Not to be an ass about it, but for a guy in my late thirties, I felt like I was a pretty good catch. I could hang with those militant fanatics at CrossFit if I had to. I could run a half marathon without getting totally winded. I took a lot of hard looks in the mirror and thought, Solid. Not like some fairy-tale prince or whatever, but not bad. Good head of hair, strong jaw, respectable abs.
And doing just fine on the money front.
Unlike the Ivan Alexanders I through III, who burned through the family “fortune” like a god-awful Fourth of July mishap in a bone-dry national forest, I had no choice but to make my own way in the world. So I did. After I got my MBA, I decided I’d focus on what I’d decided was the only sure thing after death and taxes.
Mattresses.
Yeah, yeah, I know. You thought I was going to say food-delivery apps or drones or some shit. But no, mattresses. Everybody needs a mattress. A good mattress, though. Not one of those cheap, springy pieces of shit that jabs you in the spleen all night long. I got into the game before Tempur-Pedic and Posturepedic and the rest. Royal Mattress was the first: I zeroed in on the luxury mattress market, and wouldn’t you know it? It worked. Like pennies from pillow-top heaven, the money rolled in. I had everything I could ever want. Cars, houses, vacations, a killer stock portfolio. A regulation-sized pool table. I was thinking about buying a yacht. But there was one thing I didn’t have: the most important thing of all.
Someone to share it with.
I had shit luck with women, and I always had. Truly, epically, comically bad luck. The kind of shit luck that my buddies laughed about until they cried into their beers. Fuck, remember the time that woman put a flaming empty popcorn bag of dog shit on your porch? Hideously bad. The thing was, I had an old-fashioned belief in the one. I really believed, in my gut, that somewhere out there, there was a woman who needed me as much as I needed her. I really thought that when I met her, I’d know. I believed we would be two parts of a whole. I once knew a guy from Mexico who said that down there they say two halves of the same orange. I felt it in my bones. I was waiting for her, the other half of my orange. She’d make everything fall into place.
I looked for her everywhere. I kept my mind open. I didn’t pull some douchebag move about only liking skinny blondes or some shit. No way. I figured she could be anybody—the sparkle had to be inside someone, and all I had to do was keep looking. So I became a serial first-dater. I went out with a kind-hearted nurse. A red-lipped gold digger. Two different socialist vegans. Women with rhinestones stuck into their nail polish and who said things like, “Totes awesome!” A librarian. A preschool teacher. A lady who specialized in some rare fern fossil found only on the eastern slope of Colorado. I ran the whole gamut. But the one wasn’t anywhere to be found.
Part of it, of course, was totally my fault. Who the fuck walks into the ocean and says, “I’m looking for a fish, but I don’t know what kind of fish. All I know is, not that fish.” Or maybe only idiots believe in orange halves. But what I did know was it wasn’t all my fault. The other part had nothing to do with me, but it was something I’d inherited. And no, I’m not talking about my name.
I’m talking about Grandma Katrina.
Unlike me, who had about as much interest in claiming my “hereditary title” as picking up a medication-resistant skin infection at the gym, Grandma Katrina was into it. Her online poker handle was BaronessStefanik. When she met someone for the first time, she’d hold her hand out, palm down and wrist bent. Totally Queen of England. She was old-school exiled royalty from irrelevant dissolved non-nations. (There are more of us than you’d think. Seriously.) But Grandma Katrina was also a goddamned unicorn in the world of “where’d-you-say-you’re-from?” royal families. She was one part Serbo-Croat-Moravian-Bohemian princess, one part card-carrying Wiccan, and a 100%-devoted gold-level member of Ancestry.com. And she was absolutely determined to see me married before she “drop-kicked the bottle of Smirnoff.” Her words, not mine.
One wintry Sunday night, when she was over at my house for dinner, I studied her in the way people study statues and paintings and the wreckage of non-fatal car accidents. She’d outlived two husbands, both my parents, and an African gray parrot named Franz Ferdinand. Fucking told you. Unicorn. Nobody, including me, had any idea how old she was. Somewhere between 80 and 119. Strong as an ox, whip smart, no filter at all, and no patience for bullshit whatsoever.
At that moment, she was hunched over the iPad I bought her, with a phone book beside her, scanning the names. Around her neck, on a long piece of pink yarn, she wore a glass God’s Eye that she bought on her retirement cruise to Greece. In addition to being a practicing Wiccan—so help you God if you stumbled into her bedroom unannounced—she had a seriously unnerving interest in grassroots revolutionary movements. That night she was wearing her favorite hoodie, with Che Guevara’s face on the front. She believed that the only way to reclaim the lands formerly known as “Greater Moravia and Lower Bohemia,” but now known as, you know, the Balkans, was by a carefully planned royal coup. Like I said, into it.
Outside, the wind whistled against the double-paned windows. I poured myself a scotch and looked out into the blowing snow. I heard the sound of Grandma putting a line through something in the phone book with her stubby golf pencil, which made me suspect she was up to no good again. Then she hammered out some letters into the iPad and gasped.
“Honey buns! Look!” Grandma said. “This lady…” She peered over her bifocals at the phone book. “This Julie Dubrovnik. She could be just the one. That name checks out, and look at all these leaves!” Grandma held up her iPad to show off the family tree of yet another woman whom I’d never met and had no plans to meet.
“Christ. Not this again.”
“Yes, this again! How are we going to retake our lands without an heir and a spare?”
I doubled my scotch and ran my hand down my jaw, scraping my stubble, extra thick because it was a Sunday. “I’m not dating a woman you picked at random and who might be my distant cousin. We’ve been through this.”
“Shh! This one might still be single. And she’s cute! Kinda. Maybe a big forehead and a gummy smile, but that’s okay.” Grandma scrolled through Google, using her ergonomic stylus to flip through the search results. “Goddamn it. No. Married! Why are they all married?”
The timer dinged behind me, and I crouched down to look at the roast in the oven. If there was one thing Grandma loved more than revolution and trying to match me up with total strangers, it was a roast leg of lamb. I grabbed the thermometer and stuck it in the thickest part of the roast and then shut the oven door. As I watched the temperature climb out of rare and head toward medium, I told her, “You need a new hobby, Grams. I’ll buy you a Segway. Fuck, I’ll buy you a Tesla. Just knock this off.”
Grandma broke her bifocals in two at the magnet in the nose, and each half flopped down like glass ears onto Che Guevara’s portrait, making a weird Mr. Potato Head thing happen. “I’m telling you, you’re a natural! Bribery, honey! That’s the key! Long may he reign!”
I gave her an only half-joking glare. “Listen, Baroness…”
Completely unfazed, she snapped her bifocals back together, went back to her phone book, and crossed off Julie Dubrovnik.
Using silicone hot pads, I pulled the roast from the oven and put it on a rack to cool. Then I tented it with a piece of foil while I listened to Grandma pound out the name of yet another unsuspecting stranger into Ancestry.com. And not for the first time, I thought, Maybe I should buy her another parrot.
Grandma didn’t live with me. She lived about ten miles away, in a 55-and-over retirement community where everybody did water aerobics together and where all the widows flirted shamelessly with widowers over games of Cards Against Humanity. No shit. I saw it with my own eyes. She absolutely loved it there. They called her Hurricane, as in Hurricane Katrina. Fucking perfect.
She came over every Sunday for lamb, and that Sunday was no exception in spite of the weather. “No way is some pansy-assed winter storm named Lola gonna stop me from practicing my God-given right as a Moravian princess. Give me lamb, or give me death!” But as I turned off the oven and started dealing with the salad, I realized Winter Storm Lola might not be just a storm. The conditions outside were fucking awful, and then there was even more proof of something out of the ordinary happening: On the muted TV was Grandma’s other obsession—The Weather Channel. A red bar flashed across the bottom that said, STATE OF EMERGENCY / TRAVEL BAN / SHELTER IN PLACE ORDER FOR THE FOLLOWING COUNTIES: PASSAIC, BERGEN, MORRIS, HUDSON, UNION, ESSEX…
“Turn that up, would you?” I asked her.
“How do you feel about cougars?”
“Christ.” I ditched my hot pads and grabbed the remote to turn up the volume. The weather guy, who looked weirdly like Al Roker and yet weirdly not, read from a printout. “We’ve just received word from the National Weather Service that Winter Storm Lola has been upgraded to a major blizzard, but that’s not all.” On the screen flashed a new version of the radar map that had been repeating on a loop all night. The regular rotation seemed to…stall out, almost. Like it was running into an invisible wall. All the clouds and precipitation behind the line smashed into the invisible space. I’d never seen anything like it. And believe me, thanks to Grandma, I knew my shit when it came to weather.
Not-Al-Roker could barely contain his excitement and was actually clasping his hands together, just about one move away from Here’s the church, here’s the steeple. “Blizzard Lola is currently experiencing a rare weather phenomenon, known as explosive cyclogenesis. For those armchair weathermen out there, bombogenesis. Some of you may remember the storm that inspired The Perfect Storm, and Blizzard Lola is behaving in very much the same way. However, because conditions are so cold, we are looking not at nine to ten inches of rain, but instead ninety to one hundred inches of snow.”
Grandma looked up from her iPad with her stylus perched in midair. “Holy shitballs,” she said as the map shifted from a swirl of blue and white to what looked like a mess of finger paint flung onto the screen with a motherfucking vengeance. But all of it seemed focused on one county in particular. Not-Al-Roker zoomed in on the graphic, and I saw that the eye of the storm hovered just about exactly on top of my property.
The weatherman put one hand to his forehead, because now, even he seemed worried. And then he looked straight into the camera and said, “Hold on tight, Essex County. It’s going to be one hell of a night.”
Holy shitballs, indeed.