Fiction Ruined My Family (27 page)

I felt so lucky I wanted to scream out like Kate had done, but it was not that kind of score. For me, it was her. She was disorganized, a school report card would do just as well as anything for a recipe, she wasn't a precious homemaker, she liked to eat in the kitchen at the big butcher-block table unless she made something complicated and wanted a dining room to honor the dish. Her handwriting looked like the handwriting of every other Catholic girl turned housewife from that period, very neat, slightly rounded cursive. Was she saving a great recipe for rum raisin ice cream or my report card from preschool? Knowing her, probably both.

I wanted things that would help me remember her ordinariness, not her debutante ball or her fancy upbringing or her physical beauty or her equestrian achievements or her sultry movie star voice. Somewhere between her swanky childhood in St. Louis and her tragic death, my mother was ordinary. Cooking, sitting around the kitchen, figuring out what to have for dinner and smoking was her favorite kind of day. It was her best time. I felt this when I read the handwritten rum raisin ice cream recipe. This was what mattered. This was what I decided to take with me. It felt like I couldn't get any closer to her than this thing that she had written, a piece of her handwriting.

She was a mother, and in being that, she loved me, and I loved her. I stuffed it into my bag and went back to the bookshelves.

I
LEANED OUT the third-floor window of a five-story town house on East Seventy-third Street off Madison. I had come to wrangle the hydrangeas. The week before, I had planted these hydrangeas in the window boxes, and then my boss got a call from the lady of the house saying her hydrangeas were sagging; this wasn't metaphor but actual saggy hydrangeas, the tops leaning over onto Seventy-third Street as if they were about to take their own lives.

Dirk, the owner of City Gardens, picked up all his workers at the Bergen Street 2/3 subway station in Brooklyn around seven a.m. and gave us all rides to our various locations for the day. Most of his workers were sober and most were men, but Dirk hired me for the same reason he hired the guys who worked for him: I was clearly someone who couldn't get or keep her shit together and no one else would hire me. I rode in the back of the van, sitting on bags of mulch with all the guys I knew from the sobriety circuit. There was always a day where someone didn't have money for lunch, and today it was me. This guy Mike gave me five bucks. I found a banana someone had left on a flat of liriope, and it was unharmed, so I thought I'd just have that and a bag of almonds I brought from home for lunch and save the five bucks Mike gave me for an emergency.

“Okay, Jeanne, you're working alone at the Fenners',” Dirk said, pulling over.

I hated working alone, and I didn't love this particular house. The house manager always yelled at me for tracking dirt on the carpets, and the young hot Polish nanny made me sad—her life looked so lonely.

I was using little sticks and string to prop up the suicidal hydrangeas. There were five floors, three windows per floor, and about four hydrangeas in each box. I had been doing this shit for hours. Marianne, the tall, fit black woman who ran the house, appeared in the doorway, startling me.

“You left your muddy boots next to the door. Carol saw them first thing when she walked in.”

“Sorry. Who's Carol?”

“The woman who owns this place and is about to come in here and get all Medea on you,” Marianne snapped. Marianne could be made to be fun; it was just a lot of work. We often watched
All My Children
when no one was around.

“Well, Medea killed her own children, not the gardeners, so perhaps you should alert the kids upstairs.” I looked at my watch. “Shit. I gotta go. I gotta catch a plane.” I jumped up and collected my trowels and sticks and the clear plastic sheeting that had to be put over everything.

“You better get one of those other drug addicts to finish this window.”

“Recovering. Recovering drug addicts,” I said, folding the sheeting and putting it in my big bag.

“Oh, right! Recovering. Well, it seems more like resting if you ask me. Taking a break. Resting drug addicts. They always go back.”

“Not always. Three percent of us never use again!”

“Oh, excuse me!” Marianne said.

Heading toward the subway, I decided I needed a slice. Landscaping was the most physically exhausting work I had ever done, which was not entirely a point of woman-pride. It felt pretty stupid most days. What was I trying to prove? Why didn't I just get a regular job? How long could I do this?

I got in line at the pizza place, getting out the five Mike had given me, waiting for the owner of the place to get to me.

There is definitely a difference between working shit jobs when you're in your twenties and all your friends are working shit jobs, too, and working shit jobs when everyone except you has decided to fuck being an actress and has gone to law school and/or gotten married, is having kids and wearing comfortable clothing while you're still “doing your thing.” I was headed to Palm Beach to do
Sally on the Mount
at my friend's boyfriend's house. I was going from being the gardener at a fancy New York town house to being the talent at a house show in Palm Beach. It was an upgrade, definitely, but I wasn't sure why I was doing it other than for the money, which was reason enough. I thought it made sense. I couldn't tell anymore.

The pizza guy repeated something he'd said while I was spacing out.

“What can I get you, sir?”

Sir? Sir? I was now a sir? I now looked so hideous, so dirtcovered and disheveled and ugly that people thought I was a man? I was paralyzed. He must have needed glasses, or would realize his mistake momentarily. He continued looking right at me. “Sir?”

Fuck it. What was I going to do? “One plain.” Shit. I took my slice and left, eating while I walked to the number 6 train at Seventy-seventh Street.

 

 

 

 

AT HOME I TOOK OFF my Carhartts and my City Gardens sweatshirt and jumped in the shower. My boyfriend of five months, Nick, called to see how I was doing. Nick used to have a junk shop on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. Katharine and I would go and check him out occasionally on the weekends. He got married and moved to L.A., but he'd come back to Brooklyn occasionally. One day I ran into him on the street, and he told me he was getting divorced.

“I'm so sorry,” I said, having no idea whether my face was matching my words.

And then a couple months later we were dating. I've always felt that the ideal way to live is to go to bed with someone and wake up alone. Heaven. But Nick had a quality that I hadn't found in guys for about a decade: he didn't drive me insane. I was doing my show in L.A., staying at his house, when my mom died. Nick's dad had died only about a year earlier. His father, unlike my mother, died suddenly. He was struck by lightning while out for a run in the rain in Tampa, Florida, which, according to Nick, is the lightning-strikingand-killing-you capital of the United States.

“Are you okay?” Nick asked.

“I feel okay, but some guy just called me ‘sir,' so maybe I don't look so great. I was a little nauseous earlier, but I think it was this banana I found in Dirk's truck. Maybe it was bad.”

“A bad banana? Not likely. Stop eating food you find in Dirk's truck, baby. You're probably pregnant.”

“Ha! Yeah.”

“You are, I bet.”

“Stop it, Jesus.”

“It'd be great. I love you. I love our baby—”

“STOP!” I laughed.

“Go run to the corner and get an EPT.”

“I don't need to do one of those.”

After getting off the phone, I realized I did need to take an EPT. If only because he had now made me anxious. And maybe excited. I threw on some sweatpants and went to buy a test. I got home and did it immediately. It said I was pregnant. I took another one and it said “ditto.” I called Nick.

“I'm pregnant.”

“I told you!” he yelled. He was happy. I was happy. We were happily pregnant. He was meeting me in Florida the following day.

When I got off the plane in Palm Beach, my old friend Cassie was standing outside the terminal smoking a cigarette, talking on her BlackBerry.

She hung up and screamed, “AHHHH! What's up, nigga?”

A black man got out of a car in front of her.

 

 

 

We headed to some swanky spot in town for lunch. The whole weekend was their treat, and I was also getting paid nicely. The menu was filled with dishes—aged carpaccio, pork loin salad, whole roasted Chilean sea bass on a bed of fennel—I hadn't eaten since before the War on Terror. Cassie told me about some recent trips she and Harry, her boyfriend, had taken.

“You would have loved Croatia, Jeanne. We had to refuel there after Russia, so we hopped out for a few days. The Croatian people are incredible.”

I couldn't imagine whom they could possibly have been hanging out with. Did they rent a Croatian couple for the long weekend? Lately, before seeing her, I had started prepping myself with an ancient Buddhist mantra: She can't help it. She can't help it. She can't help it.

I looked at her diamond studs, Cartier watch and Mafiawife handbag. I could live for six months on her dry-cleaning bill alone. Raskolnikov would have clubbed her over the head with his whole roasted Chilean sea bass already.

“This is so cool! I'm so glad you decided to come,” she said.

I looked around the restaurant at the Palm Beach women: lots of plastic surgery, Lilly Pulitzer–covered wheelchairs, blond toddlers in navy blazers.

“Do you think Harry is going to like my show?” I asked.

“Harry loves your show,” she said.

“He hasn't seen it yet,” I said.

“You know what I mean,” she said.

 

 

 

My room was above some kind of billiards-in-Africa-themed room with a giant bar. There were stuffed animals, photo albums from safaris her boyfriend had been on, leather club chairs.

My quarters were gigantic and had a view of the water and looked down on the patio. There was a big telescope in my room, but I couldn't figure out how to use it. I was eager for Nick to get here. I went to sleep wondering what it was going to be like to see him now that we were a family. I barely knew Nick at this point. I mean, yes, we were in love but we'd been dating only for five months and on different coasts. This was how I did everything. How I wrote everything. By instinct, without thinking. One day I'm trying to avoid cat shit while planting shrubs outside a housing development in Crown Heights, the next I'm deciding I'm ready to be a mother?

 

 

 

The next morning from my window, I spied Cassie on the patio so I made my way down.

“Is your room okay?” she asked.

“It'll do.” I smiled. “I'm pregnant,” I said.

“What?”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Holy shit, Jeanne. You're going to be a mom.”

“Okay, okay, let's not get dramatic.” Like when I quit my job at Sundance and my therapist let out a squeal of horror, I hated when people had big reactions to my life. It made me feel like my impulsiveness and running my life on instinct (Am I brave or stupid?), the things I worried about in myself, weren't exactly going unnoticed. “What are you doing, you broke-ass, disorganized lunatic?” was what it felt like they were saying.

Nick came in from L.A. that night. He was going to film the show and, as it turned out, have a lot of fun filming me throwing up and moaning in bed. When we hugged at the airport, it was sudden and strange and shocking how much things had changed, and also how much I was okay with it. We could do this. I could be a writer
and
be in a relationship
and
have a child. Writing did not require a solo life, and artists did not have to be shit-faces.

Back at the house, Nick and I lay around, me drinking ginger ale for my nausea, trying to figure out if it was possible that I got pregnant the week my mom died. Maybe the same day? Nick seemed to get who I was, what I liked to do with my time—mainly spend copious amounts of it alone writing plays and then putting them on and wearing costumes and having some laughs with my friends afterward. He seemed to understand this about me. He had a lot of his own things going on, too, which comforted me. He was a painter who ran his own art galleries and did the occasional real estate flipping. A life together seemed viable and exciting.

 

 

 

The show was happening the Saturday night before Easter Sunday in Palm Beach. The weird factor was sky high. Formal invitations had been sent out. There were one hundred and fifty guests expected for drinks around the pool, then dinner for a hundred and fifty on the patio. Caterers were running around setting up. There was valet parking, a stage had been built, gardeners were hanging extra vines on the house to make it look nice, a piano was brought out to the white tent–covered performance area, there was a lighting person, a piano tuner, and a DJ for dancing after my show. This was a show that began in my living room in Brooklyn as a way to raise my rent money.

I got out of my sick bed about twenty minutes before showtime and put on my fishnets, high-heeled gladiator boots, bustier. I tailored the open to the setting, wearing a crazy Palm Beach hat and Lilly Pulitzer hot pants, making jokes about tax day and Easter. All the tanned oldies in their blue blazers and penny loafers were with me, really laughing, but after the open I noticed people were making repeated trips to the bar and getting quiet, aka drunk-sleepy. By about halfway through, a third of the audience was asleep. I could have given a shit, really. I wanted the chance to perform my show for a demographic that simply was not going to find me at an experimental jazz club on the Lower East Side. So what if half of them didn't get the jokes or fell asleep? It was unusual and house theater, which I loved, and most important I got $3,500 for doing my show for one night. I could live on $3,500 for two months in Brooklyn and it made me feel like maybe I could make money as a writer.