Fiction Ruined My Family (28 page)

The next day we headed to the airport. Nick had to go back to L.A. and I was going with him. We didn't talk extensively about where we would live. He owned a house in Los Angeles. I had a landscaping job in Brooklyn. I wasn't going to win this one. As we were waiting for the plane to take off I thought about how my mother left the world so slowly, so achingly, with many false starts, much suffering for herself and my dad and my three sisters. And here was this kid who popped into the world as easily as my mother had left painfully. I am getting on a plane to go to Los Angeles and have a baby, I told myself, as if it was simply my next gig. I could do that.

Right after we got to Los Angeles, I began vomiting out our car window, into a bucket by our bed, next to taco trucks while Nick got a couple
al pastor
. Then, as I gripped the plastic blue bucket that now rested at my side like a pug in a Goya painting, it hit me: I live in L.A. I vomited several more times. It seemed like in order to grasp the fact that I was pregnant I had to first figure out where the hell I was. I called my friends in Brooklyn. They confirmed my theory.

“You live in L.A.”

“Yes, my pal, you live in L. fuckin' A.”

Nick drove everywhere for the first trimester, partly because I was liable to get sick but also because I felt that if I didn't drive, then I wasn't really there. And if I never figured out where anything was or how to get anywhere, we'd just have to move back to New York where I could be pregnant along with Katharine, who was four months pregnant with her second child. She was due in August, I was due in December. After I'd been there for a few weeks I figured it was time to call Dad and tell him I was pregnant before Katharine or Eleanor let it slip.

“Hi, Dad. It's Jean. Yes, I'm still out in California. Nick and I have some news. I'm pregnant.”

“And getting married?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Nick and I had talked about getting married and he wasn't that excited about the idea, he hadn't been divorced that long, but I wanted to get married, which surprised me. It's not that I had always thought marriage itself was bad, what I thought was that marrying the wrong person was bad, really bad. That's what will leave you wanting to jump off a chaise longue to your death. And I thought that if you had a lot of kids, I don't know, more than two maybe, that you could go insane just taking care of them, especially if you never had any money for an occasional babysitter or something. But other than going insane or being suicidal, I thought marriage and kids was probably a good thing. I didn't want to get married because I was worried anyone in my family might think it was important, which my dad definitely did. I wanted it spontaneously, after the nausea cleared, because I wanted to tell everyone I knew the good news, to celebrate. Mom's death was about large, complicated emotions, with grim specifics, and no one in the family wanted to do anything public. Which I understood. But, the way I saw it, my last family had just ended so sadly, and if Nick and I were truly happy about this family, which we were, why would I want to be discreet about it?

Trying to love L.A., as Nick and Randy Newman did, wasn't going as well. At a movie, a man in the aisle in front of me was eating not popcorn I noticed, but a bag of raw spinach. And unlike everyone else, I was just not that impressed with sunshine. It was okay, it was fine, yes, of course it was lovely at the right time. But blazing, nonstop, meaningless sun that washed out everything wasn't beautiful to me and I couldn't get away from it. Sometimes I just got so mad at the sun I yelled, which made me look insane. Nick didn't understand why I was so incensed that it was sunny all the time.

“Well, you must miss your friends but you can't beat the weather!” a stranger said to me at a coffee shop.

“Yeah, I guess.” And then I said it. “I don't love it, the weather.”

I got that look, the one that said, Wow, you're so . . . toxic or negative or angry. Like that was a bad thing.

In my mind, L.A. was not a place to grieve. It was just too sunny. You can't mourn your mother in eyeball-scorching sunshine. Also, when you're trying to feel the end of someone, it's appalling to be sitting next to fifty-year-olds in coffee shops who are wearing pink Vans sneakers and red skinny jeans and T-shirts that say things like “You Can't Make Me.”

I was so used to people in New York asking, “What do you do?” that when people in Los Angeles would look at my pregnant belly and ask, “When are you due?” I would reflexively answer, “I'm a writer.” I discovered people in L.A. don't want to be judged by what they do. People here are all human beings, not “human doings.” Turns out I liked human doings better.

I couldn't grasp that real writers live in Los Angeles. I actually called my old writing teacher and asked, “Do you think I could write a book in L.A.?” And he said, “People have done it, you know.”

Moving across the country, for all my derring-do onstage and in life, was totally against my character. I was a New Yorker, and if you are a real New Yorker, you don't leave. You want to leave all the time but you don't. That's something fake New Yorkers do. The same way that if you're really part of a family, you don't leave it. To leave the family physically felt more drastic. Like leaving a self behind. What getting sober felt like. Not that I planned on being a Californian. But I did have to get rid of my tear-jerkingly cheap Park Slope share.

On a quick trip back East to pack up my old apartment I told Nick I needed more time to box things up and that he should go back to L.A. and I'd meet him back there in a day or so. He looked at me and said, “I'm not going back to L.A. without you.” The mixture of devotion and mistrust was touching. He got me. He knew I loved him and our unborn child. He also knew how much I loved the hot-and-sour soup at the corner of Sixth and Union.

I insisted that we spend the last trimester in New York, where we would get married and I would give birth a month later, otherwise who the hell was going to visit me in the hospital afterward? Nick complied and we crowded into the Brooklyn apartment with our subletter. I bought the 1971 embryology sleeper
From Conception to Birth: The Drama of Life's Beginnings
at one of my favorite secondhand bookstores, Heights Books on Montague Street. According to the authors, intelligence and personality emerge in the third trimester, a time I had now ensured we would be spending in New York. Who was disorganized pregnant lady now?

The wedding was on a barge in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in my eighth month. As my dad began walking me down the aisle, or “the plank” as he called it because it was again, a barge dock, the
QE2
began pulling out of the harbor. I made him stop and wait for the ship to pass, because otherwise I was going to be this preggo bride with an ocean liner behind me and that was too disturbing an image to have in my memory. I was gigantic, having miscalculated how pregnant I was going to be, thinking seven months but I was actually eight months pregnant. My friend Cassie had loaned me the most outrageous high shoes to wear with my silver sequin dress. I could definitely have swung them. Nick was not happy about me walking in high shoes at eight months pregnant, and the day before the wedding he forced me to go to Aerosoles, the comfortable-shoe store, and get some two-inch numbers that someone's grandmother might wear. I ended up writing a poem to read during the ceremony about going to Aerosoles with him, about how he was, certainly, the more practical of the two of us and that our differences were what made us us.

So while we waited for the
QE2
to pass, Dad talked about Kennedy's inauguration day. He also let me know he was “flying on prednisone,” his steroid medication for his asthma. The next day, many of my friends let me know that my dad had told them he was “flying on prednisone” as well.

We had just a few weeks as married people before the baby was due. My due date was December 7, Mom's fake birthday. December 7 came and went, no baby. Then her real birthday, December 11, passed, no baby. I was somewhat relieved these two dates were not my baby's birthday. On December 15, my son was born. In less than a year my mother had died, I had gotten pregnant, gotten married, moved to Los Angeles, and had a baby.

Four weeks later, we were getting ready to go back to Los Angeles. Nick checked our tickets to verify the departure time the next day and came running into the room where I was nursing and yelled, “It's today! Our flight is today not tomorrow. Today! In three hours! Come on! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go!!!!!”

I was running around, throwing diapers in bags and clothes in bags, when my dad called. This is the kind of phone call that the second you pick up the phone your whole body says, WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO THAT FOR? THAT WAS THE WORST DECISION YOU HAVE EVER MADE! YOU'RE CRAZY! YOU'VE ALWAYS BEEN CRAZY!

“Jean-Joe, how goes it?”

“Not good, actually, I can't talk.”

“I'm in your neighborhood.”

“Oh. Um, well, we thought we were leaving tomorrow but it's today. Like right now.” I was opening the fridge and chucking Chinese food containers in the garbage.

“I'll just drop in and see you off.”

“Oh, gosh, I don't know, Dad. We have to get this whole operation to JFK in about forty minutes.”

“I'm at the bookstore across the street.”

“Dad, I uh . . .”

“Well, I've gotta give Hudson this present I got him.”

OH! Present, well, why didn't you say so? Come on over.

We hung up and he buzzed our buzzer in under two minutes. He followed me back to the kitchen where he handed me a brown paper bag. The present.

“Did you know Murray's cheese shop was closing? Well, I ran right over there, Jean-Joe—my God, was I in shock. Turns out they're just moving across the street.”

I opened the bag, and there, in some waxed paper, was a hunk of blue cheese.

“Damn good blue there I got for Huddie. Stilton, I believe.”

I looked up at my dad. “Well, Dad, he can't, uh, he's only, you know, four weeks.”

“Well, if you think he doesn't want it—” he said, as if my son were particular.

“It's not that he doesn't want it—he's not a snob or something, Dad, he's a newborn.”

“It's a soft cheese,” he said, taking a bite of the cracker he made for himself.

“No, I know . . .”

“Let's have at it ourselves, shall we?” He plunked some on a cracker and handed it to me. I took it appreciatively and when he turned his back to make another one for himself, I threw it in the freezer. It was ten-forty a.m. I wasn't eating blue cheese before noon, I didn't care if Murray's was relocating to the Gaza Strip. I was still hobbling around from my hatchet job of an emergency C-section, hoping my gut didn't bust open after lifting suitcases and putting stuff into them.

“Tell me, did you get a chance to look at that photocopy I made you of that essay on structural metaphors in Fitzgerald's short fiction? I know you've been busy.” I told him no, not quite, been kinda swamped and stuff but I would definitely get to it.

“What are you reading lately?” he asked, and I paused, shutting the fridge door, picturing the copy of
The Happiest Baby on the Block
on my nightstand.

“Um, you know, just some, um, Joyce.
Dubliners.
”

I knew this would make him happy and I wouldn't be seeing him for a while so what the hell, I thought, as he lit up. “Oh, really? Terrific! Now, tell me, have you read it before? I thought you were just lukewarm on Joyce . . .” he said, beginning a Joyce monologue that would require only head nods and umm-hmms from me for the next twenty minutes.

He gave me a photocopy of Hudson's namesake, Captain Thomas Hudson's, honorable discharge notice from the Mexican-American War. He promised to send other historical documents as he digs them up at his house. He gave me a hug and shook Nick's hand and left. We raced around and somehow made it to the airport and made our flight, but I was a little worried that this episode might be representative of our new life. Getting married and having a baby had done nothing to make me into a calm, organized adult. My dad was never going to be the comforting, elder statesman grandfather. Was this my destiny? I didn't know. But I was going west (again) and I had definitely expanded.

MY FATHER, despite being a single, nonexpecting, sexually inactive seventy-eight-year-old man, has an ob-gyn. He gets a kick out of saying, in the presence of his daughters, things like “Well, my ob-gyn says it's fine to eat the occasional piece of bacon after the first trimester.” He was referred by his internist to this obstetrician-gynecologist, Dr. Carl Wallace, a man who apparently shares a love of books with my dad. Lately, with the help of his man Dr. Wallace, he's zeroed in on a hot little piece of information about Zelda Fitzgerald's obstetric history.

After her second baby, Katharine struggled in her hospital bed to get her new daughter to latch on to her breast while my father sat in the chair to her left, talking animatedly about his new finding: “Turns out the doctor was a man named Lakin. Dr. Lakin apparently performed Zelda's abortion at the Plaza Hotel in 1922. Now, plenty of biographers have known and written about this secret abortion at the Plaza, but I really think they've downplayed it, particularly in Nancy Milford's book, out of some kind of respect, which is understandable; but here's what none of them—and I mean none of my competitors—have gotten right: I believe Scott made her have this thing about four months after their daughter, Scottie, was born and it made her incapable of carrying another child to term, which mentally wrecked her. Totally. There was a fix-up job in Rome a bit later, so obviously her womb was ruined by the abortion, and Dr. Wallace says that could very easily drive a woman over the edge. Now, Katarina, let's have a look at that baby.”