Miss Fortune (9 page)

She thinks my voice sounds odd. I think her voice sounds odd.

I am a little worried she's mad at me for not sending any more tapes. I'd like to turn the lights on to make sure she's not sitting there with a horse's head on her lap or a loaded gun, but she won't let me.

In the dark, she starts making plans for day trips for us to take. Got to go see that mountain! Got to check out those fish throwers! Got to see this waterfall I heard about! We laugh about how I'd missed that she was coming to see me, but I'm fake laughing. Thanks to my wound work, it sounds real.

Most days, I stay at the theater filing plays for the artistic director, or watching him play video games on his computer. I have no idea what she's doing with her time and I don't want to know. It's going to be something huge and dramatic and I won't believe her and I don't know what she plans on doing here in Seattle. I'm working with a new theater company. And honestly, I don't really need a
roommate. The only reason I'm staying at the lawn care guy's place every night is to give her room. My place is tiny.

Praying she's not home, I'm making a quick stop to pick up some clean clothes. She's not there. At all. Her stuff is gone. She's written me a note on the cover of a
People
magazine (I mean
The Atlantic Monthly
): “Gone to stay in a motel.”

Sure, I'd avoided her completely and been deliberately unwelcoming, but I hadn't meant for her to just leave. I feel awful. And completely relieved.

Nico has also left me a message on my answering machine. Her voice is flat. “Why don't you meet me the Irish Lion at eight
P.M.
? We need to talk.”

At 8:15 I'm standing outside the door of the Irish Lion wishing they served beer on the sidewalk. I'm a nervous wreck. Making eye contact with Nico is impossible. She seems very . . . okay. The nachos arrive. “I read your journal.”

What? She read my journal? I'm trying to think of what I wrote about her. I'm sure I wrote something, but hey. Wait a minute. You can't read my journal. It doesn't matter what I wrote.

“Listen, girlfriend, something was going on with you and you weren't being honest with me.”

“So you took it upon yourself to go into my private things and take what wasn't yours to have? Wow.” Reading a person's journal is too far. You don't read a person's journal. The only thing I think I even wrote about Nico was something about how she annoyed me sometimes. Big deal. I may have mentioned how I think she could be a big old lesbian and was full of shit, but outside of that I think I mostly wrote about what I ate for lunch.

“You aren't yourself, Lauren. You're pulling yourself down and I'm not going to watch.”

“That's a real deep insight, journal reader,” I say to her and order another beer. I don't have to listen to a word she says.

Victims don't have to listen to perps.

“What happened to that little twenty-three-year-old who was working so hard to be okay?”

“Well, what happened to the American-Amsterdam Texas whatever it was called Theater Company? Blah-blah-blah. Big words coming out of a journal reader's face, Nico.”

I'm about to tell her how sick I am of hearing about all her “good moments” and how amazing life is for her and how special she is, when she stands up and throws a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “I don't want to be friends with you anymore,” she says, and walks out of the pub.

•   •   •

It's been almost five years since my ex–best friend and guru paid twenty dollars for four-dollar nachos and broke up with me. I've just started as a cast member for a local half-hour sketch comedy show in Seattle called
Almost Live!

During the first year Nico was out of my life I tried to call her, but her phone was disconnected. I tried her parents' number and their number was disconnected too. Did she make her whole family move because she hated me so much? For a long time, it was tough knowing that the one person who knew me better than anyone else on the earth was out there cursing my name.

I'm sitting at my desk reading a book about doing yoga instead of writing jokes when my phone rings. I jump up and close my door. If a comedy writer overhears a serious conversation it can make them do crazy things like scream “cocksucker” as loud as they can or organize a group of writers to stand in front of you in their underwear to distract you.

“Hey, girlfriend, guess who this is!”

Nico. How on earth she got my work number is beyond me, but
I don't waste time finding out because I have too much I have to tell her. It was a year of hell after she walked out in Seattle, but since then it's been kind of incredible. All the skills she gave me, all that she taught me, helped me start writing plays, and it's been going so well. I got married. He's a bartender but not the gross kind. The sweet, loving kind. He's one of the Okays, Nico. And he says he loves me, and I believe him.

Soon after a producer from this TV show saw me in a play I wrote and now I'm a cast member of this show that's local but it's a big deal here and it should lead to other things. I get in trouble a lot for never writing for anyone but myself, which is embarrassing.

Nico started her own computer repair company, got married, bought a house, has a little boy, and could not be happier. “I'm no rock star. It suits me fine.”

In Amsterdam, Nico had given me answers to help save me from myself, but all of that disappeared once I moved. The loneliness I felt in Amsterdam quadrupled in Seattle. I was so scared when I first moved here, and I didn't want her to see how badly I was coping. I didn't want her to see how awful the lawn care stoner guy was for me. I think she just had too much power in my life and I had to push her away so I could find out who I was on my own. The passing of time and being surrounded by comedians has helped me come to the understanding that we are all fundamentally alone. No matter how many times I think, oh, this is it, I'm okay, I'm home, I'm fooling myself, and within a month or a week or a year, I'm homeless again.

The main thing I have to tell her is how sorry I am for what happened when she showed up in Seattle but how ultimately it was a good thing that I was allowed to save myself.

Nico asks me what the hell I'm talking about.

“Listen, I did crazy stuff back then, so I wouldn't put it past me!” she says, and bursts out laughing.

Maybe she honestly doesn't remember. Or maybe she doesn't trust me enough to get back into it. Or maybe she's bat-shit crazy, which everyone knows is just another way of saying “incredibly gifted.”

Before we hang up she makes me promise that if I'm ever in East Texas I have to look her up. Without hesitation, I make that promise, because the truth is she changed my life, and it's so good to hear the sound of her voice again. And it was also easy to make that promise because I'm fairly certain she mentioned at the beginning of the call that she lived in Tennessee.

D
uring my first appointment with my gynecologist, Dr. Addis, he told me that he was required by law to ask if I'd like a nurse present during the exam. “Are you going to molest me?” I'd asked him. Without missing a beat he told me he wouldn't. “At least not
this
time.” Our Abbott-and-Costello (if Abbott was on his back and Costello had a glove covered in K-Y jelly and was inserting a finger up Abbott's ass) relationship, which has developed over the years, would be considered by many women to be in poor taste. But I love it. His office is in Beverly Hills, so what do you expect? When my dirty artist friends shake their socialist fists at me for getting Pap smears on Rodeo Drive, I tell them it's the best place to get the diamonds that line the inside of my vagina shined—a service the Planned Parenthood clinic in Van Nuys, where I used to go, doesn't provide.

Finally, after ten years of Dr. Addis ending every exam with “Okay, see you next year and don't forget, have a baby!” I get to tell Dr. Addis the news he's been waiting for: I'm preggers. He bounces on his toes, claps his hands like an excited little birthday girl, and starts high-fiving me. “Yay! Yay! We're having a baby! I can't believe it!” It's a far bigger reaction than David's had been, which
makes sense because my having a baby puts money in Dr. Addis's pocket and takes it out of David's. Poor David. At hearing my home pee-test results, David had eaten an entire log of Vermont goat cheese and lay on the bed itching his face all night.

Somehow, no matter how many times I've explained my situation, Dr. Addis never remembers that I'm in a relationship, so his high fives were followed with his feminist support of going it alone. “Good for you! You don't need no stinkin' men, right? Noooo, we don't need no stinkin' men.” He kept repeating the “stinkin'” to get his Mexican accent right, when I have to tell him (again) I have a man. It's an easy thing to forget since I usually come alone to preserve our precious one-on-one time.

I've never had a baby, so my main question for Dr. Addis is if there's anything I should be doing to prepare myself. Like eating cotton balls and feathers to create a nest in my stomach.

“So how old are you now?”

The good doctor puts on a big show of not believing that I'm forty.

“No way! Forty! You're twenty-seven!”

He picks up my chart and makes a “Wowza!” face. “Hey, you are forty! Well, that's okay. Not a huge thing, just a higher chance of Down syndrome and miscarriage. Is your underwear off?”

“It is.”

“Where were girls like you when I was sixteen?!”

He uses the same joke every year. “We'll talk more about babies after I do a breast exam.”

I open my gown with a “Where're my beads?” Mardi Gras joke. I get nothing. In fact, I may have upset him. Usually he jumps right into kneading and poking around with a steady stream of chatter intended to distract me from the “Hey, that guy's touching my boob!” feeling, but today he just stares at my chest, lets out a long,
sad sigh, and says, “Sucks to get old, huh? Yeah, I'm not having an easy time with it. You want to think you've done something with your life, but how do you really know?” My naked breasts have inspired a lot of different reactions over the years, but this is a first.

“The other day I realized that, geez, when my son is thirty I'm going to be seventy-six. If I'm lucky. Right? And I want to be there to see his life. That's all you hope for: just to be able to be there as long as you can. Okay, feels normal in there. Let's check out her sister over here.”

It wasn't uncommon for him to wander into tricky topics for patient/doctor relations land. But knowing he loved expensive German cars, hated Obama, and dined with NRA-loving celebrities was tolerable compared to this existential hell he was pushing me into.

I try to change the subject and ask him if McCain is a nice man in person, but he doesn't hear me and switches over to my right breast.

“Yeah . . . you know what's funny about me? I know I'm going to die. I get it. That's why babies are born crying . . . because they get it too . . .”

At the end of the exam he snaps off his rubber gloves—“I can't believe we're going to have a baby!”—and tells me to start taking prenatal vitamins.

Before I got pregnant, I'd see a child and think, “Welcome to the earth, little spirit. Enjoy your journey—and what are you here to teach us?” Then I'd throw sand on their feet to make them grow. Now that I'm pregnant I see a baby and think, “Oh my god. His head is so flat.” Kids are freaking me out. And so are the ones who make their heads flat, the
mothers.

People keep assuming that I'm going to be this wacky mom type. They're assuming that my whole “I'm an asshole who can't do
anything right!” is real, and I'm going to play that shtick right into motherhood. That's not really me. Yet when it comes to what kind of mother I'll be, I have no idea.

Will I be the mother who relishes the bond with my child to such an intense degree that I refuse to stop breastfeeding in public? Even on airplanes after the child unlatches himself to ask a flight attendant, “Hey, can I get a Pepsi with this? The whole can?”

Will I be the mother who is so sensitive and attuned to her baby's needs that instead of diapers I just wait for that certain twinkle in her eye that tells me it's time to hold her over the sink so she can pee?

Or will I be the fifties-style martini drinking mother—“The only reason I'm not holding my baby is because a pamphlet I read told me not to. Now hand me the olives.”

“Oh, babies are fun. Don't get too deep about it.” My sister Emily has just arrived from Indiana with my teenage niece, Kaitlin. They've never been to Los Angeles and are hoping to see the big attractions like Tori Spelling. Emily has two kids and is now a single mother. I've admired her tenacity as she's gotten out of a bad marriage and how she dedicates herself to her kids. At the moment, both Emily and Kaitlin are trying to convince me that having a baby is no big deal. I ask Kaitlin how she can know this at fifteen and she tells me that she's seen every episode of
I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant.
“Basically, you're just going to be standing in line at the bank thinking, man, I got to take a BM, and next thing you know you've got a baby in your sweatpants.” Okay, so, sure, child birthing—outside of the money it would take to pay for the cleanup—is a breeze, but what about all the years after that? The birth was not my worry; it was everything else after that. Jack would be long gone by the time this kid was old enough to talk. The kid would have only elderly parents to entertain him. No brothers or sisters. But maybe that wasn't so bad. I have only two older sisters, Emily and Joyce, yet
whenever I go home for holiday dinners at my parents' condo it still feels like a mob scene. This is exactly how my parents like it to feel. They tried to use the old “I'm tired of mowing the lawn” excuse when they sold the two-story, four-bedroom Colonial home we grew up in. Lawn care had nothing to do with it. Their dream retirement home was one that was just big enough for the two of them. “Well, we're out of chairs, guess you better go home.” My parents love their cozy retirement condo. It's bright and sunny and it smells like dogs, vodka, and dusty Christmas candles—nothing like the house I grew up in.

The house I grew up in smelled like dried cat shit, microwaved Weight Watchers ravioli, and my middle sister, Joyce. My gritty sibling childhood memories all involve Joyce. Emily, with her long straight hair, like a red-haired Cher, tossed her cheerleading pom-poms in the back of her little yellow Datsun and took off to join a sorority, leaving me behind with Joyce, aka “the mean one.”

My best friend in third grade would take one step into my house and start sniffing the air like a dog. She was picking up the scent of Merle Norman's Ice Blue eye shadow mixed with stamp collecting and cystic acne cream. “Joyce's here, isn't she?” Before I could answer, she'd suggest we play in the street, where it was safe.

She didn't want to witness the jail-cell violence that went on between my older sister and me, because it was ugly and raw, and because the warden who should have broken it up was an eighty-nine-pound ex-ballerina. My mother would sit licking rice crackers as my sister pinned my face down with her knee in the family room. Joyce would wait until my mouth was wide open, screaming into the carpet, and then she'd tell me, “Right where your mouth is, that's where the dog threw up last night. That's why it's still damp.” Then she'd rug burn my face.

One sunny Hoosier spring day, as Joyce pretended to burn me
with her candy cigarettes, my mother's voice came screeching through the house. “
Joyce! Come to the kitchen!
” The
kitchen.
The kitchen is where we went to be told things like “Santa is dead.” Or “You're adopted.” Or “I've signed you up for Weight Watchers. At seven years old you'll be their youngest member. Congratulations.”

Something was going down. Maybe somebody had died. I ate two cigarettes while I waited for Joyce to emerge.

Ten minutes later, the kitchen door flew open and Joyce came running full speed, heading directly toward me. My first thought was that my mother had given her a knife and directed her to kill me. “Go, run. Do it now before she suspects.” But before she hit the shag carpet of the family room, my mother screamed, “
Lauren . . . come to the kitchen!
”

I kept a wide berth around Joyce as I ran toward the kitchen.

As soon as I'd climbed up on the kitchen stool, my mother began. “Listen, I don't care how much pain you put each other through physically, but I don't want you two hurting each other mentally. Those scars
never heal
, okay? So I want you to promise me that no matter how angry you get at your sister that you will
never, ever
tease her about not having any friends. That is off-limits. Okay?”

I couldn't believe what my mother was saying! Joyce had friends. There was Lori, her friend from middle school, who got her addicted to candy cigarettes, and her cat, Demon. If my mom really didn't think she had any, then why didn't she help get her some? Get some stamp-collecting types over here. Get her some acne medicine. Host a foster kid—do something. And, geez, if you say that about her, what do you say about . . . Oh no. I'm not sure why she chose that day to do this. We hadn't been fighting more than normal. Maybe it was my mom who thought these things about us and she was making a preemptive strike.

It took me about five seconds to run out of the kitchen and find
Joyce. She was waiting for me on the couch in the family room. As soon as she saw me, she stood up. I walked toward her. Neither of us spoke. She looked at me for the first time in my life like she maybe felt sorry for me. Sorry that I was the only adopted kid in the family, sorry that she'd turned me in every single time she even suspected I was doing something wrong. We'd been through a lot, but we were still sisters. We were still—

“You're fat,” Joyce said.

“Well, you have no friends,” I replied.

I waited for her to crumple, and to my horror she did. She fell to the floor, and while she was down there she picked up a piece of dried cat shit and hurled it at my head. I wish I could say she missed me, but she didn't. It hit my forehead. A direct hit.

Nowadays Joyce and I are golden. Her superpower of not caring what others think of her has led to a successful career in middle management. She laughs easily and you can forget to call her back for weeks and she never gets mad—all the best qualities in a sister.

After I share the story of growing up with sisters with my niece, Kaitlin, she tells me it's another example of why I need to make sure I have only one kid. “And you better hope it's a boy, because I'm the princess in this family, and I'm not going to be happy if there's another girl grandchild. I can't guarantee her safety.

Kaitlin is all about hip-hop, and coincidentally, the one part of her body that I'm getting to know during the first day of their visit is . . . her
hip.
That's the part of her body where she wears her Ritalin patch. If she doesn't wear her patch, according to Emily, she's moody.

Over the years, when I've complained to Emily that I don't believe in putting minors on drugs to alter their moods just to suit our comfort levels, my sister reminds me of my last trip home.
“Remember when Kaitlin screamed at me, ‘Motherfucker, don't touch my yearbook!'? She wasn't wearing her patch that day.”

Because the patch is like a giant piece of packing tape, my niece has decided to follow a pattern of (1) reapplying her lip gloss; (2) yanking her mini skirt down; (3) yanking at the hairs that have gotten stuck to the patch. The patch is a repository for every imaginable hair—cat hairs, sweater hairs . . . hairs that were blowing by in the wind.

Our first stop on “Lauren's Hollywood tour for visiting family” is the Rose Café in Venice for brunch. Light and airy and lovely and sunny. My niece and sister say nothing about how lovely the restaurant is, which makes me think they're mad there isn't a race car hanging from the ceiling. Kaitlin's been spending most of the meal hoping her friend will text her. She likes this one friend, she tells us, even though that friend is a real
cockblocker.
The word “cockblocker” is like a magic wand, tapping me on the forehead and,
poof
, turning me into a shocked granny. Clutching my heart, I ask her if she still has the finger puppets I'd given her for Christmas when she was three. “Or have you been using them as whimsical condoms?”

Then we go shopping. Kaitlin insists on being taken to Beverly Hills and then refuses to go into any of the stores. “I can't handle it. You don't know me. Once I decide I want something, I do whatever it takes to get it. If I walk into Chanel and see something I want and I can't get it, well, somebody could get hurt.”