Beach Glass (3 page)

I sigh with pain for him. He’s not exactly the most confident man in the world to begin with, and this isn’t helping. “Daniel, you’re not an idiot. Okay, I didn’t say anything. I thought this would, I don’t know, happen organically.”

“But it didn’t, because I thought you understood me.”

“I
do
understand you. I understand you don’t think you’re good enough for almost anything. Not to be a husband or the great, caring father you would be, or to be a record producer instead of just an assistant engineer, like you’ve been since you started working at the studio years ago.”

“I’m definitely not good enough for that yet,” he murmurs.

“Yes, you are! Daniel, why can’t you see yourself the way I do?”

“I could say the same to you,” he counters. “I always told you to write more, like you wanted to, instead of spending all your time doing proofreading jobs. I was the one who told you to blog for
Now News
. And I’ve been saying for ages that you have a book in you, and you always say, ‘Some day.’”

“I will write a book some day!” I try to ignore the ream of blank paper Daniel gave me that’s been sitting by my desk for years. “And that is so not the point. Can’t you see how much I love you?”

His earthy eyes finally meet mine. “And again, I could say the same to you. Katy, if we love each other, can’t we compromise?”

Oh, great. The chess player has shown up for negotiations. “Define ‘compromise’,” I say, folding my arms.

“Move in together,” he says. “See how we do living together, day in, day out.”

It’s a sideways maneuver, but I see where it’s going. We’ll live together, everything will be fine for a while, but when I bring up the subject of marriage again, he’ll give me the classic argument:
If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
“No,” I say. “I want to get engaged and set a date. Then I’ll move in, we’ll get married, and we can start working on having kids.” There. The plan is simple. And, from the look on Daniel’s face, about as subtle as a baseball bat.

“
That’s
your idea of a compromise?” he says.

I sigh and sit back on the bed. “Daniel, we could move in together, but you know I hog the blankets, and I know you never screw the caps on anything.” I’m starting to feel drained. “What are we waiting for?”

He looks equally exhausted. “Maybe for
both
of us to be ready?”

“I’m afraid you’re never going to be ready, Daniel,” I state. “That’s why I had to set a deadline. I can’t wait for my life to begin anymore. I can’t spend another year wondering when, or if, you’re going to decide that I’m the one.”

“Katy, of
course
you’re the one.” Then his face falls. “Wait, what deadline? Katy, what are you saying?”

“I—” I have to force the words out. “I want to marry you, Daniel. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and for you to be the father of my children. But if you won’t do this with me
 . . .
I have to move on.”

Daniel’s eyes cloud over. “A deadline. And I’m guessing that’s tonight.” He nods and looks at the watch he gave me, still in the box. “So technically, I already blew it. And it doesn’t matter that I love you and that I want to spend the rest of my life with you, too. I either propose to you now, or you’ll go find someone who will.”

“Oh, Daniel, don’t make it sound like—”

“So I’m not special at all,” he says, his voice breaking as he picks up his jeans off the floor. “It’s not, ‘I want to be with you, Daniel, so we’ll figure this out.’ It’s, ‘I want to get married and have kids now, and if you’re not ready, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.’ I get it, Katy.”

“No!” I jump up and go to him. “Damn it, I want to marry
you
!”

“That’s not what it sounds like,” he says, grabbing his jacket and thrusting his arms through the sleeves. “It just sounds like you have an agenda and your deadline.” He looks up at me as he pulls on his sneakers, not even bothering to put on his socks, which he shoves in his jacket pocket. “I’m sorry I wasted so much of your time,” he snaps, but his harsh tone doesn’t match with the hurt pooling in his eyes.

I stand there, mute, realizing that everything has gone so horribly wrong, not knowing where, not knowing what to say as Daniel gives me one last look, or how to keep him from walking out the door and out of my life.

Forever.

THEORETICALLY, I’VE done the right thing by letting Daniel go if he won’t commit. But right now, doing the right thing feels like I just got hit by the breakup truck. And dragged a few miles. I haven’t sobbed like this since my dad died, so hard that I can’t even call my sister Bethany yet, and she made me swear to call her at midnight to share what we’d both thought would be the good news. Well, she didn’t make me swear to call her with the bad news.

Crying hard into my pillow, curled up on my double bed where just an hour ago Daniel and I made love—for the last time, a thought that makes me sob harder—my life feels shrunken without him, and it wasn’t exactly huge to begin with. My family is just me, Mom, and my sister, who increased our little clan by two when she married her high school sweetheart, Ray, and had my niece, Celia, the world’s most adorable kid, at least until I have a baby. Looks like she’s going to hold that title for a while longer.

And I guess I won’t be leaving this tiny apartment to live with Daniel. I moved in here when I got laid off from the biggest magazine in the country, the one for women who live their lives to the fullest. I lived vicariously through their life-changing adventures in my job as assistant researcher until I was downsized out, another statistic who suddenly couldn’t afford Manhattan rent. I didn’t want to move in with Daniel just to save money, preferring romance to finance, and besides he’d already told his roommate he could renew for another year. But I’d always figured my tiny cocoon would be temporary.

From my bed, which is at the far end of a short space, I can see my whole world. My small antique desk and chair, where I thought I’d become a good writer. My dining table with two mismatched vintage chairs, my loveseat-masquerading-as-a-couch, my coffee table that fits two plates and coffee cups.

Above my bed, a constellation of photos smiles down at me. There are a lot of photos, but they’re of the same people. My sister and her family, my parents, both together and apart, and me with Daniel. My small world. I’ve got friends, but the two people I’m closest with are Daniel and my sister, and now one of them is gone. Actually, now both of them are gone.

Bethany and I used to hang out constantly and talk every day, sometimes being on the phone together for an hour
before
we hung out. Our sign off was, “I’d better get going, or I’m going to be late to meet you.” Two years ago, Bethany’s husband, Ray, got transferred to Santa Monica, not far from Long Beach, where our father moved after Mom divorced him. I was thirteen and Bethany was nine, and we stuck a pin in the heart of his new city, which was two whole feet away from New York on our poster-sized map, and wrote “Daddy.” Pathetic, I know, but we were just kids.

Dad was so far away. Bethany is so far away. My mother has always been emotionally distant. And even though Daniel’s not technically that far from me, just a few trains between Jersey City and Brooklyn, the distance between us now seems incalculable. I’m the girl on the moon, alone.

I used to go out to California to visit Bethany almost every other month until I got laid off. Unemployment checks and sporadic freelance assignments don’t buy many plane tickets, and Bethany’s so busy being a mom that we don’t talk as much as we used to. I don’t know if I’ve ever needed to talk to her as much as I do now. Besides, the only other person I could talk to about this situation is my mother, and if I hear her say, “I told you so,” I may hurl myself out the window. And I live on the ground floor, so that’s not going to do much. I speed-dial my sister’s number, my agony making each ring hellishly long.

“Hey, it’s the birthday girl!” says my brother-in-law when he answers the phone. When he hears nothing but sniffling and sobbing on the other end of the line, Ray utters a clumsy, “Uh-oh. Katy, are those tears of joy, possibly, hopefully?”

“N-no,” I choke out.

“Oh jeez, Katy, you didn’t do that birthday deadline thing to Daniel, did you?” In the background, I hear my sister hiss, “Let me talk to her!”

In the two seconds between Ray surrendering the phone to Bethany and her taking it, I realize that everyone who signed off on the Thirtieth Birthday Ultimatum—sister, mother, friends—was a woman. I never asked a man. Is my brother-in-law, a fair and stand-up guy, siding with Daniel in male solidarity, or was this a really bad idea, and I’ve just screwed up my entire life?

“Talk,” my sister orders, sensing we’re in relationship DefCon 4. “Everything. Go.”

“Oh, Bethy,” I whimper, using my childhood nickname for her.

“OMG,” she says. “Not on your birthday. Oh no, he didn’t.”

“No,” I croak, “he didn’t.”

Bethany knows enough about my history with Daniel to be able to fill in the blanks between my fish-gaspy sobs and the annoying hiccups that have come on. “Oh, Katy,” she sighs, “I’m so sorry. No wonder you had to say ‘Check please.’ He’s such a child.”

“I know,” I say. “It’s like he took a vow of puberty or something.”

My sister laughs uproariously, which makes me start to laugh, too. And then cry again. When Bethy realizes this, she makes soothing noises at me over the phone. She’s such an excellent mom, which is odd considering how un-mommy-like our own mother was when we were growing up. “Oh, Katy. I wish you lived here so you could come over and we could gorge on Fluffernutters until we went into sugar comas,” Bethy says.

“M-me too,” I sniffle.

“Are you coming to LA any time soon, maybe for work?” she asks.

“I don’t have any work,” I say, wiping my eyes and seeing slashes of black mascara on my hands. Oh, what I must look like. But what does it matter? There’s no one here to see me, not even a cat. I’ve been wanting to adopt one but held off because I thought I’d be moving in with Daniel and his rescued pit bull, Finster. Well, I can go ahead and get a kitty now. I can get twelve. Hell, I can be the Crazy Cat Lady of Jersey City because no one will know or care. I can do anything I want.

Wait a minute
 . . .

“I’m coming out,” I tell my sister.

“Really?” she says. “Do you have a freelance assignment? Can you afford it?”

“No and no, and I don’t care. I can’t stay in this apartment and wait for Daniel to call. I want to see you and Celia and Ray. I want out of here.”

THERE ARE ONLY a few things keeping me from visiting my sister. Actually, a few hundred things.

My eyes are still puffy from crying last night until I didn’t have a drop left in me, but with all my bills spread out on the floor, I can see my financial situation clearly, and it’s as red as my eyes. I just paid the rent, gas, cable, and electric, so I have enough money left to eat. But I have exactly zero work on the horizon, my phone bill is due, and now I want to buy a round-trip ticket to Los Angeles. And the fares aren’t cheap, especially when the desired departure date is now.

With a sigh of exasperation, I lie back on the yoga mat I unfurled to do some exercise and get out of this depression. So far, the only pose I’ve done is Curling In a Ball and Weeping Pose. Yoga has always been my go-to for getting calm, but even that can’t help me now. It’s Sunday afternoon, when Daniel and I would normally be cuddling on the couch, me reading the Styles section of the
Times
, him listening to music, both of us starting a lazy discussion about what to have for dinner. Instead, I’m on my floor, still in my pajamas and my tear-fogged eyeglasses, broke and lonely and trying to keep from checking my phone every three minutes. But Daniel still hasn’t called since he left without saying goodbye last night.

Not wanting to believe the simplest explanation, that he just isn’t speaking to me, I’ve been concocting fantasies that something bad happened to him on the way home. He left in the middle of the night and had to take two trains back to Brooklyn. I have to keep myself from calling him to make sure he got home okay. I know this is just an excuse for me to talk to him, even though there’s nothing more to say. I’ve considered his compromise, of us moving in together, but it doesn’t seem like that would do anything to get Daniel over his fears of being a bad husband and father. As if. He’s such a kind person he can’t even eat animals, which makes eating out a real pain as he quizzes waiters and asks for vegan substitutions. Looks like I won’t have to deal with that again, I think as the tears start anew.

The too-loud ring of my phone makes me jump, but the caller ID tells me I can relax—sort of. “Hi, Mom,” I sigh.

“Katy.” Her voice is typically matter-of-fact. “Your sister told me your birthday didn’t go well. What happened?”

My mother has never been much on easing into difficult discussions. The first time I realized this was her shtick was when she sat Bethy and me down and said, “Your father and I are getting divorced.” That’s it, no warm up. Dad was a poet, so he liked to come up with stories, a way of working up to
And that’s just like the situation we’re in now, kiddo
, and then explaining things gently. Sometimes he was so gentle, I wasn’t even sure what he was talking about. Dad was too evasive, Mom too direct. I’ve tried both their ways and experienced failure. However, I might as well cut to the chase since my mother prefers to take her facts black and white, no sugar. “Daniel doesn’t want to get married or have kids, so I said we were through.”

“Hmmm,” my mother murmurs, and I detect the dreaded tone of
I knew it
. She branded Daniel as trouble from the first time she saw the tattoo of a cartoon superhero mouse on his forearm, telling me he was too young and wild to ever settle down. Wild? Try born to be mild. One of the biggest bonds Daniel and I have is living cautiously.

“Please, Mom, don’t say ‘I told you so’,” I beg.

Thankfully, Rebecca McNamara, aka the Almighty Mom, is in a merciful mood. “I wouldn’t do that to you,” she says. “You’re in enough pain as it is.”

I say a silent prayer of thanks. My mother may be somewhat hard, having been raised by a distant mother herself, but she’s not unloving.

“I’m sorry this had to happen, Katy,” she says. “But maybe it’s for the best.”

Yeah, that’s what she told us about Dad when he said he needed to go find himself, and she told him to go use another F word. I don’t remind her about that now, though. Besides, in both cases, it’s a debatable point.

My mother and I switch to catch-up talk, though on my end there’s not much to say. As for her, she’s still teaching at a school in a tough area of Harlem. She tells me how some of the kids have no money for lunch, so she’ll make a big pan of lasagna, and they’ll all eat together and study. She made Bethy and me study over meals when were kids, too, but it just felt like more school at home, not fun.

“Hey, did you see a doctor about that tight feeling in your chest?” I ask her.

“I did,” she reports. “Everything’s fine.” Before I can ask more, she changes the subject, telling me that her boyfriend, Vic, another teacher at the school, wants her to move in with him.

My throat catches. My mother is in her late fifties, was married, had two kids, got divorced, has been solo for years, and now, she’s thinking about moving in with her boyfriend. I just turned thirty and have yet to experience
any
of these things, and, judging from the events of the past twenty-four hours, I won’t any time soon.

So, in addition to the agony of breaking up with my boyfriend because he doesn’t want to start a family, which means I’m even less likely to start a family because I’m alone, and all of this happening on my thirtieth birthday, now I get to experience the icky feeling of being jealous of my own mother. I fall back again on my yoga mat and assume the corpse pose. Just kill me now.

I spend the rest of the afternoon hoping Daniel will call, say he’s sorry, and tell me that I’m right, we should absolutely get married. Then, I debate whether to move in with him, convince him that we should try to get pregnant, and worry about the ring later. By sunset, I’m ready to settle for just
talking
about moving in together. And by the time I climb into bed, having checked my cell phone hourly to make sure it’s still working and that I haven’t missed any calls, I realize I probably don’t have to think about this anymore, because none of it is going to happen.