Miss Fortune (10 page)

At the end of a long day, I take them to a café so I can watch my sister drink. We go to a place that I thought would have a Venice Beachy vacation feel but instead it's a complete date-rape sports bar.

As we stand at the hostess podium, my niece starts hiking her miniskirt up—or down (what's the difference, really?)—and
ferociously weeding the stuck hairs out of her patch. She notices me watching her and tells me that “Mommy can bring one for you tomorrow . . . You'll love it. You're never hungry.”

As soon as we sit down I realize that, yes, indeed, I've taken them to the wrong place.
Again.
The chairs are these odd plastic balls with no backs. We have to grip their sides with our thighs to prevent slipping off. My niece, who is absorbed in taking pictures of herself with her camera, doesn't seem to mind that she's sitting on an egg. I still want to make sure that they're comfortable and that they won't go back home and tell my dad that their vacation felt like they were just back at home—sitting on eggs in a sports bar, just like every afternoon.

“Are you guys okay? Do you want to sit in a booth?” Emily and Kaitlin share a look, but both insist they are comfortable. Without speaking, Emily opens up a pillbox. Kaitlin puts out her hand, and her mother pours about ten pills into her palm. Kaitlin throws them all in her mouth, swallows, then turns to me and speaks to me in the same tone that I'd used with her when I asked her not to scream “cockblocker” at breakfast. “Um, Aunt Lauren, can I give you some advice that's going to help you be a parent? You need to calm down. Right now. And stop caring about what people think all the time. You really need to relax . . . I'm not kidding. You're going to drive your kid crazy if you're like this all the time.”

She gives her mom a sort of “
Now
I know what you mean about her” look.

I reach out and start patting her leg. Little staccato pats. I can't stop. The pats just keep going and going. Five minutes later, when her leg has gotten a little pink, I stop, take a deep breath, and get right in her face like a basketball coach. “I DON'T THINK THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH BEING A PARENT. YOU ARE MY GUEST AND I WANT TO MAKE SURE YOU
GUYS ARE COMFORTABLE. DO YOU WANT TO SIT IN A BOOTH OR NOT!?”

Either my screaming in her face was the most relaxing thing that has happened to her all day or else her Xanax has just kicked in, because her face lights up in a big smile and she says to me in this little baby girl voice, “Nooo . . . I like my egg!”

After Kaitlin and Emily fly back home, not only do I worry they didn't have a good time, but I miss them. According to Emily, they had a great time and Kaitlin is planning on moving to LA as soon as she graduates. I'm four months pregnant with a baby boy. I'd love if Kaitlin moved to Los Angeles. She could help me. Even if I heard “Bitch, I'll cut you” coming from the nursery, it would still be nice to have family around.

The best thing so far about being pregnant has been David. He is running around washing apples, fetching napkins, making salads, and telling me that a bigger butt is an exciting pregnancy bonus.

My face is covered in brown splotches, I throw up after every Fiber One toaster pastry, and I can't stop burping and shitting my pants. Perfect time to get my sex drive back! This morning David said, “You look so beautiful,” which made me start laughing because I felt so gross. Then he said, “Whoa, watch those double chins.”

We watched
So You Think You Can Dance
last night and he had one hand on my stomach the whole time. So he wouldn't miss a moment of gas. I've had people putting their hands on my stomach to feel kicks of the baby, and I'm fairly certain now that it's been gas bubbles bursting. I should just be honest and shout, “Oh my god, give me your hand . . .
gas!
You've got to feel it!”

Our French ultrasound lady sent us home from our last exam with a photo of the baby with his hand up over his head like
he's waving. Whenever I pass by the photo on the refrigerator I wave back. It's exciting to see that he's going to be good on a parade float. I like this “growing a baby” thing. Why didn't I do it sooner? Oh, because I had no desire and was petrified of being so poor I'd have to learn to make a baby diaper out of car wash coupons.

•   •   •

When I told David that I wanted to stop our “Get off me now!” birth control method so we could try to get pregnant, he panicked. “Oh. Okay. Well, I don't know. I'm really busy, I've got a lot of stuff to do and things to take care of at these places with some people. Maybe in a few years when I have less stuff with people in places.”

The timing did feel particularly cruel, but isn't freedom just another word for nothing left to lose? Besides, my ovaries were threatening to puff out dust clouds.

The real panic inducer for both of us was money. I had no idea how much money David actually had. He rinsed out and reused old ziplock baggies from the eighties to store the Altoids he bought in bulk from Costco in the nineties. I'd always assumed he was super-thrifty in order to support the teenage son who needed to be clothed, fed, and deloused, but he could have been an eccentric millionaire trying to keep me off the scent.

No matter. The baby idea was mine. I'd pay for it. I was the stable one, because we always knew what to expect when it came to me and money. Give me fifteen hundred dollars or fifty thousand (please give me that), and without fail, I'd still be three months away from being completely broke. My friends like to joke that I spend money like a rapper—if I suddenly had a lot of it I was buying iPads and gold teeth for all my moms.

After I promised to “feed it, wash it, put it to sleep, and find a way to pay for everything,” David had said yes.

Once the decision was final, he was excited. According to him, kids were pretty fun up until age eleven. He told me that I had better hope that I'm a movie star by the time the kid turns eleven so I can afford boarding school.

David's only son, Jack, whom he'd raised alone since Jack's mother died, had just left for college. At a dinner party, I'd overheard David say to a young-looking dad type seated next to him, “That's it, man. I'm free. I'm gonna buy a tent and camping gear. I'm going to go on road trips. Learn to parasail. Maybe I'll jump in the ocean and just start swimming, because after eighteen years, I'm free!” He'd then thrown his head back and started laughing, tears of relief and joy running down his cheeks.

Here we are, five months later, pregnant at Jack's high school graduation. I love Jack but I hope nobody tells him that, because he'll try to borrow money from me. I'm so happy we're having a boy. It's cheaper and everyone keeps saying, “Boys love their mothers so much”—hard to enjoy when I think about Jack. Jack's mother died when he was eight. When that graduation procession music kicked in, I could have sobbed and pounded my chest. Instead I got teary and dabbed. There were a lot of families shouting back and forth at each other. “Can you believe it! It's a miracle. I thought the day would never come.” It seemed like every kid at the school just barely graduated. Or maybe it was just our section—we were in the very last section of the arena because we got there late. All the parents sitting closer than us were shouting “Stanford! Thanks for asking. And you?”

The day after Jack's graduation, David left for his new job working on a salmon-fishing boat in Alaska. He's been gone now for three weeks. This morning I woke up and thought I felt something in my stomach. I'm like a giant who's swallowed a little
person. It was just gas again, but this time it's sadness gas. I've heard nothing from David since he left. When he said it was remote I thought he was just trying to sound macho, like when he described the housing as “barracks.” What if he made up the whole “Oh, I'm going to Alaska . . . no cell phone reception . . . I'll call when I can” and then I never hear from him again? My friends keep telling me that I'm worrying about David so much because of my hormones. I think it's more from the fact that I've eaten nothing but Fiber One toaster pastries since he left.

Yesterday, I was on an elevator going to my manager's office and Janice Dickinson got on. Right as I was thinking how she looks like Mick Jagger in the form of a tall, thin woman she turns to me and screams, “
Are you leaking yet?
” The two men on the elevator started pushing the buttons to get them off at the next floor as quickly as possible. I was so thrilled she was talking to me, I told her, “Now I am.” And then: “No, I'm not, but other gross things are happening to me.” To which she responded, “
No! You're beautiful! Do you hear me? You are beautiful.
” She had to get off the elevator, but not before turning again and screaming back at me, “
You are!
” Later that day, I got the news that Michael Jackson died and I saw the helicopters fly over me rushing to take him to the hospital. This is the surreal world I'm bringing a child into.

•   •   •

David is finally back from Alaska. It was a good season. Something to do with the massive global warming.

We went to our all-day birthing class yesterday. The teacher was blissed out of her mind on babies. She described the importance of skin-on-skin contact. “You're going to lay that baby on your chest, next to you, the yummiest baby you've ever seen, and you're going to just eat him up.” It was a little cutesy for me. I feel about using “yummy” to describe something that isn't food the way
other people do about “moist panties.” David was taking copious notes while I scanned the room looking for people older than us. There weren't any.

We were by far the oldest in the room, I think. There was one abusive Dutchman who seemed somewhat old, but that may just be because he looked crabby. His wife kept having weepy breakdowns that she claimed were about being scared of birth, but I think she was trying to give the class subtle hints to call the cops and get her out of her relationship. Next door to the class, the hospital was giving out flu shots to family members who worked for the hospital and it was like they were murdering children in the next room. There were SCREAMS OF TERROR, kids just screaming their heads off as our instructor taught us how to slow dance with each other to help the labor pains.

The birth is coming up. Today's doctor appointment lasted less than ten minutes. I walked in. I peed a teaspoon of pee into a cup. (It's getting harder and harder to do that—I asked the nurse if next time I could get seven or eight people to help me and she said, “How about a funnel?”) The report was that he was “perfect.” I'll be sure to use that against him when he's older: “You were sold to me as being
perfect.
What happened?”

I've been having trouble sleeping. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about how we live on a dark planet with dark horrible people, a place where monkeys eat other monkeys' faces off. Sophie had to make a choice. John F. Kennedy Jr. crashed his plane, and the show
Intervention
will never run out of addicts to follow. If JFK Jr. could die, anyone could. The curse of the Kennedys. The curse of being born and knowing no matter how much money, power, or muscle tone you have, you will be a bad pilot. A baby is born into the cycle of suffering. It's going to have to face my death and its own death. Oh my god, what have I done? I just wanted
something to hug and go on walks with and now suddenly everybody is dead. After a few days of nonstop death anxiety I have a breakthrough—an Oprah “aha” moment. There is a death here. A part of me is dying forever. It's what I want, but it is a death.

I've decided to spend the day with my friend Julie because she is my one friend who has not let having kids change her one single bit. Being around her is the comfort I need right now.

I go over to spend the afternoon at her house, and she's standing in her kitchen trying to figure out how many Weight Watchers points are in a cosmo. “The glasses were minuscule, plus my husband kept taking sips from each drink with his big old horse mouth, so I'm rounding down . . . Fuck it. Ten. I'm saying ten.” She says all of this while managing to also complain about her mother.

“She's selfish! Did I tell you about our trip to see her last weekend in New Hampshire? Oh my god. She was up all night playing her banjo! ‘Five foot two, eyes of blue . . . could she, could she?' She's a kook! And she knew my kids needed to get to sleep but she had a contra-dancing concert to go to the next night, so she insisted on staying up late and practicing. I told her she was being loud and my kids needed to get some sleep, but she doesn't even care. She cares more about her sheep than she does her grandkids. All she cares about is her sheep and her banjo! And she's cheap. I know she's got money but she won't buy the kids new gifts. It's always something used. I'm sick of it. She's an insane person. She just spent all this money on some special electrical fence for her sheep.”

By the time she gets to the word “sheep” her voice is so shrill I feel like my ears are going to start bleeding. And my nose. And maybe my feet.

“Yeah,” I say, “the last time your mom was visiting for
Christmas and I came over to visit her, all she did was show me pictures of her sheep wearing wool sweaters that she made out of them.”

Julie throws her head and back and screams, “Ahhhh! She should be showing you pictures of her grandkids—not her sheep.” She starts shoveling what looks like homemade tapioca pudding into a coffee mug.

“I can't talk about her anymore. Okay, let's go get Annabelle and Henk out of the hot tub.”

Annabelle and Henk are Julie's kids, and they are five and six years old. I didn't even know that they were home because I've been here for more than an hour and haven't heard them screaming and fighting like I normally do. I just assumed they were being driven around town by their seventeen-year-old live-in nanny from Yugoslavia who doesn't have a driver's license. Per usual.