Life From Scratch (25 page)
Gael watches me without saying anything. He reaches over and squeezes my ankle.
“I’m usually not that squeamish about killing them, but for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to hit this one up by the ceiling. Maybe I secretly just wanted Adam to come home and take care of me. I convinced myself that if I hit it and I missed, it was going to land on my head. So I sat on the edge of the tub, watching it, and waiting for Adam to come home and kill it for me. I called him at work, but he told me that I was ‘bothering’ him, and once he said
that
I couldn’t very well admit that I wanted him to come home to kill a cockroach.”
I wipe the condensation off the outside of the glass with my finger. “I sat on the edge of the bathtub for . . . hours. I probably sat there for
four
hours watching this half-dead cockroach on my wall. I didn’t want to leave the bathroom because I was scared that I wasn’t going to be able to find the roach again if it moved. And I didn’t want to sit in the bathroom staring at a cockroach because . . . well, I’m sure you understand.”
“I do,” Gael says simply.
“I picked up the phone and set it down a dozen times. It’s an awful feeling; not being able to be truthful with your husband. To just admit that you’re scared of a bug, that you want him to come home and take care of you. I could never tell him what I needed, because I couldn’t find the words. They shriveled up inside of me whenever I heard that tone that told me that I was
bothering
him.
“I know I sound like I’m crazy, but it wasn’t about the cockroach. I mean, it
was
about the cockroach because I convinced myself that it would fall on me if I tried to kill it. But it wasn’t about the cockroach. It was anger at myself for being unable to tell Adam what I needed, and it was anger at him because I had this strong sense that if I
had
found the words, he wouldn’t have cared.
“I just had this sense that if I called him to say that I had fallen down the stairwell and had broken my leg, he would have told me to call an ambulance instead of coming home. Or if I had told him that someone had followed me home and was now in our building and I was terrified, he would have told me that he had a brief he had to write. He always put work before me.
I never felt like he had my back.”
“I see,” Gael says gently.
“A little after
, he came into the apartment, and he called out to see where I was. I told him I was watching a cockroach in the bathroom, and he didn’t come in right away. I could hear the water running in the kitchen and hear him changing his clothes. Finally, he came in the bathroom, smacked the cockroach with the heel of his shoe, and then walked out of the bathroom without saying anything. He just went into the bedroom to go to sleep.”
“So you left?” Gael asks.
“I told him that I wanted to separate. It was the first time I used that word—separate. Isn’t it crazy? I couldn’t find the courage to ask him to come home and kill a cockroach, but I heard myself tell him that I wanted to separate. It was sickening to say it, but once I used the word it also didn’t feel right to take it back. We had crossed a line. We had one of our usual talks about my expectations and his schedule. And how he ‘worked so hard for me,’ which was why he was angry that I was also bothering him at the office. But it wasn’t about the bug, his schedule or his rationale for working all the time. I knew at that point that we weren’t going to reconcile. That was it.”
I wait for Gael to suggest that we head home, cut the evening short. Anything to get away from the crazy cockroach lady who cries at weddings. But he nurses his beer, taking his time.
And I like him for listening.
Give yourself a day
to feel bad.
First I write that advice in my book and then I follow it myself and have a twenty-four-hour mope, setting a time limit rather than giving myself a drill sergeant pep talk about bucking up that I’m not going to listen to anyway. Twenty-four hours to cry at sad movies and eat fattening food and not shower. A twenty-four-hour cleanse, like an emotional colonic, to get over the garbage feelings I put in my body by attending Amanda Flaum’s wedding before I was ready. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready for taffeta and tulle again.
I spend the day alternating between bed and the kitchen. My sister calls and informs me that I sound depressed. She rattles off a list of three psychiatrists she would recommend, a few anti-depressants she thinks I should try, and finishes off with an invitation to Penelope’s ballet recital all the way out in Park Slope in the same tone of voice one would use if giving a sibling a free vacation to Hawaii.
“Do you think that could also be the cure for my depression?” I ask. “Dragging the spinster aunt to see young girls with their lives ahead of them prance around an auditorium stage? I’m not depressed; I’m allowing myself a twenty-four-hour mope.”
“You’re becoming very sour,” my sister informed me with some detachment. “I thought you’d have a wonderful time visiting us. You don’t have to take it out on Penelope.”
I instantly feel terrible, because when it comes down to it, I am the worst aunt in the world. Despite the emergency babysitting I provided a few weeks back, I rarely attend any of Penelope’s various recitals and performances—ballet, piano, or mini-debate team. With the exception of the dollhouse, I usually fail to buy her cool gifts, and I’ve never taken her to an American Girl store. I don’t even slip her forbidden candy, for fear of my sister’s wrath. I literally wouldn’t be surprised if I discovered one day that Penelope had started a blog called
Worst Aunt
that cataloged all my transgressions.
“Please tell Penelope I’m sorry that I’ll miss her recital. I actually already have something scheduled that day,” I lie. “I really do want to be there.” I’m not in the mood to tell Sarah that I bumped into Adam at the party and hear her thoughts on that. She hangs up after muttering some sulky things about the dinner party Arianna is throwing for me.
The thing with a twenty-four-hour mope is that it has time limitations. As long as I don’t answer the phone during the time period or leave the apartment, I don’t even need to involve others in my pity party. It really is a healthy alternative to get it all out in one big vomit-of-a-depression. I watch romantic comedies from the 1980s and scream at the screen. I use my sleeve as a tissue. I avoid my blog at all costs, because nothing good can come from tearful blogging.
I make foods that are fattening. Chocolate mousse. Fettuccine alfredo with huge pats of butter and a mound of extra, grated, parmesan cheese. Broccoli with flecks of hazelnut. I eat the whole meal—four or five helpings—in front of the television and polish off most of the mousse.
There is something about high-fat food that can comfort better than even a manicure and hand massage. I stare at the television, not really seeing the image, while I dream about becoming a recluse in the apartment, eating fettuccine alfredo from morning until night, until I become so large that the paramedics cannot lift me off the sofa.
Adam would read about me in the
New York Times
, his eye catching on my continuing use of his surname:
Rachel Goldman of Murray Hill discovered she was stuck to her sofa late Sunday afternoon when her knees refused to bend. Goldman says, “I was essentially part of the furniture in my old life, therefore, it’s fitting that I actually merged with it in this life.”
I don’t bother to wash the dishes in the sink. Nor fill the dirty ones with water. I let the alfredo sauce congeal on the sides of the bowl. Even my kitchen looks depressed.
Arianna stops by with Beckett and asks me to hold him for her while she untangles herself from the Ergo carrier. It’s her fault that I’m indulging in my twenty-four-hour mope.
She
is the inventor of the productive mope, the person who taught me about setting pity party time limits. You would think that she would be smarter than to set foot over my threshold while she knows I’m detoxing on romance movies and mousse.
I start sobbing wildly, scaring Beckett into his own crying jag.
“I’m a divorceeeeeeeeeeee,” I cry, dragging out the final sound of the word.
“You are,” Arianna agrees, bouncing Beckett on her knee until he calms. He eyes me suspiciously, so I ball up my Kleenex against my face so I can stop freaking him out.
“But that is old news. You need to pull yourself together. It wasn’t even the wedding of someone you know.”
“I still have eight more hours,” I tell her. “You need to give me my full twenty-four-hour mope. I still have
Sleepless in Seattle
to watch.”
“For the love, sweetie,” she tells me, cleaning up some of my used tissues with her bare hands. That’s a true friend.
“Do you know what I don’t get?” I tell her after she promises that she’ll grant my remaining eight hours in exchange for turning off the movies and doing my dishes. “Why Adam couldn’t tell me that he is reading my blog. I feel like if he had been honest with me at the party, I could have been honest with him. But it’s his lack of forthcoming that makes me too nervous to tell him anything real. It was like that in our marriage and apparently, we still haven’t figured out how to be honest with one another. I don’t think he told me anything real in the last five years of our marriage, and I think I followed his lead.”
“Maybe he was scared,” Arianna consoles. “Maybe he was just as nervous as you were; just as thrown off to see you there at the party when he didn’t expect it. You don’t know; maybe he came to the same realization and changed his mind, but there wasn’t time to show you. Maybe he went to get a beer in the kitchen so he could collect his thoughts and talk to you about your blog, except you left the party without giving him a chance.”
“You think I should have given him more time?” I ask incredulously.
“No, hell no,” she adds hastily. “You should do it on
your
terms. You’ve done too much already on his terms.”
The phone rings, and I let the answering machine pick up. I hear a young woman clear her throat and haltingly tell me that she read my book proposal and loves it. It sounds as if she is reading another, unrelated piece of paper while she speaks, her mind pulled in two different directions. She clears her throat a few more times. She has made a few small tweaks to my proposal that we can talk about when I call back. She will email me an agency agreement, and we can get started once I mail it back.
I dive for the phone, but she has already hung up, so the answering machine whirls and clicks off as the message ends. I hit redial, but I get voice mail where I tell her in what just might be the shakiest voice she has ever heard that I am thrilled that she will be representing the proposal.
I can’t believe this is happening.
I let out a shriek the moment I set down the phone.
And then I dance around the living room, swinging Beckett through the air, laughing for real as I willingly toss away the last eight hours of my mope, all thoughts of Adam and Laura temporarily out of my mind.
After I call my siblings
and let them know that I’m about to be a published writer—perhaps a bit premature, since all I have is an agent, a low hurdle to clear—and I chat with my mother about how I can now legitimately call myself an author-to-be, and I even call my grandmother down in Boca Raton, making her late for her Yiddish Club, so I can tell her about my huge accomplishment. I post the news to my blog and collect several hundred comments of congratulations as well as an arm-load of unsolicited advice about the writing process.
My mother may be a talented lawyer and my sister may be a brain surgeon, but being a writer with a book in Barnes and Noble trumps both of those, at least in my mind. For the first time ever, I don’t feel like the black sheep of the family insofar as accomplishments. Now I am more like the glittery star atop the Christmas tree of professions.
Ethan stops by with copies of his latest photographs. The coffee seeping into the cracks of a table; a carpet of sugar collecting on a coffee shop floor. He refuses to take my bait when I ask him how it feels to be the only rudderless Katz, now that I’m about to become a famous author.
He is completely content to live hand-to-mouth, barely scraping by, and taking photographs that most people will never see. I would love to study his brain, boil down the essence of what makes Ethan tick, makes him confident that each idea is a great idea. I’d like to bottle it; drink a little myself. As the gracious, soon-to-be-published older sister, I endure listening to how his coffee table book is going to revolutionize the world.
“It’s meta. It’s a coffee table book about coffee on tables. Think of the possibilities for other projects after this one. A book about paper-making made out of paper that was made through the paper-making recipes in the book.”
“Do you really think people want to buy that kind of book?” I ask. I’m not saying it to be cruel, but to understand how he can dump his eggs into this very strange basket.
“Probably not. Which is why I’ve taken on other photography work to earn money. And why you’ll hire me to do the photos in your book when it comes out. I’ve been practicing with food.”
“Maybe I’ll hire you to do the cover,” I say generously, not entirely sure this is how publishing works.
“So, Ari said that you bumped into Adam at a party?”
“Seriously, she’s
my
friend. Why are you talking to her?”