The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (31 page)

But just then Soapie, who was not at all sure that having such a huge Thanksgiving was something anyone needed, erupts in some kind of minor diatribe over how it’s too cold in the house with the door opening and closing, and then, in a non sequitur, she calmly says that nursing homes may not get much right, but they do make people like Louise appreciate how life on the outside is a goddamned cabaret. “And this, my dears, is my last Thanksgiving on the outside, so it’s a cabaret for me, too!”

Rosie leans down to Dena and says cheerfully, “Oh dear. The old people may have forgotten to bring their insanity filters today. You may have to be called in professionally at some point.”

And Dena laughs.

Carmen arrives with Tomas, and after they get introduced all around, they are happy to go on the tour that Milo is confidently leading, and although Rosie can’t remember if she truly cleaned the upstairs bathroom to withstand all the scrutiny it’s probably getting, she decides that’s just another thing this costumed, play-acting version of herself doesn’t have time to care about.

“And
this
is the rug with flowers on it so it doesn’t show the dirt, Rosie said, and
this
is where they keep the towels!” she hears Milo crow from upstairs, and she goes off to baste the turkey. “And sometimes my dad told me there are mice in the attic, and you can hear them at night!”

Soapie says, “Did we hire that child to sell our house or something?” and Tony laughs and starts passing around drinks. It’s alcohol time.

The party really gets started once Greta and her crowd arrive. They come marching across the lawn in their finest dress clothes, Greta holding one pie and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Sandrine, holding the other. Joe is checking his phone, and the three younger kids—all mop-haired boys looking as though they’d been recently chastened, walk with their heads down, kicking at clods of grass. Tony, who is being the host, flings open the front door and introduces himself to a startled Joe, who may not have been informed about there being a man of the house. He shakes hands with Tony and then looks Rosie over, as if she’s a medical anomaly, and smacks his forehead.

“How did this happen to you, my sweet little flower?” he says, kissing her. “Are we to organize the brotherhood into going out to California and teaching that cad a lesson in personal responsibility?”

“Oh, he’s aware.”

“Well. Perhaps all we need to do is write to the cad in question and let him know that a hunk of manhood is now hosting your dinner parties, and he might want to get home and take care of that,” Joe says, and Greta looks embarrassed and says, “No, no, Joe, now stop it.”

“I’m here taking care of Mrs. Baldwin-Kelley,” says Tony, and Joe claps him on the back.

“But he does attend amniocentesis sessions and doctor visits,” says Greta. “So he’s already better than seventy-five percent of the expectant dads out there. And I hear that—”

“Oh, please, stop it,” says Rosie. “Come in and have a drink.”

Greta tries to force her kids to sit in the living room and make polite conversation with the adults over the appetizers—even the adults who are not quite so mentally intact—but finally it becomes clear by their droopiness that
the children have lost the will to live, and Rosie releases them to the outside. Sandrine grabs her iPhone and scampers upstairs, and the little boys file outside with Milo. Fortunately, it’s sunny, and it’s not long before Rosie sees them running around the yard, Milo leading the pack as though he’s been anointed head sled dog.

All their sports jackets are in the dirt. She can’t say why this makes her happy.

Things don’t start to fall apart until much later.

First, Greta goes upstairs and finds Sandrine cross-legged on the bathroom floor, smoking a joint, and the two of them have a slight freakout everybody can hear from downstairs, until finally Joe has to go upstairs and separate the two of them. (Is it wrong that Rosie smiles, remembering when it was Greta and Rosie smoking the joints and Greta’s mother freaking out?)

Then Carmen gets a text from her mother in Spain that makes her cry great, heaving sobs. Her collie, the dog she’d grown up with, has died in his sleep—and nothing anybody can say helps. People start telling their own dog stories, which makes Carmen cry harder, but then Rosie realizes it’s the good kind of crying—the crying you do when people are being kind to you when you’re upset. One of the children is sent upstairs to bring down another box of tissues. “
Not
Sandrine!” says Greta, and that makes everybody laugh.

Then, in another part of the living room, Soapie runs over Louise’s toe with her walker, and Louise howls just like a toddler would, with big tears spouting out of her eyes.

But all this gets fixed somehow. Joe is stalwart and comforting, and Sandrine, defiant and red-eyed, watches the party going on around her, and after a while Greta slowly stops looking as though the end of the world has come. Tomas holds Carmen’s hand and listens as she tells stories about her sweet old dog. And George, bless him, manages somehow to soothe both Soapie and Louise with his patient smiles.

And then Leila arrives, hours late, thin and willowy despite her round belly, and everything starts to go to hell all over again.

She is accompanied by a surprise guest, her off-again but now on-again boyfriend, a guy named Clem, who is disheveled, unshaven, and in a bad mood. Rosie can’t believe this bad luck. Also, the guy turns out not to be the most perfect Thanksgiving add-on guest. For instance, when he follows Tony into the kitchen to get a beer, he discovers what he calls “the brutally murdered turkey” resting in the pan after being roasted, and he delves into a full-scale lecture about the conditions in which turkeys live and die, and also a description of the many turkey parasites that a lot of people might not know about.

“Also,” he says, loudly enough for everybody to hear, “I’m sorry, man, but why would anybody have to kill something, when you already have Tofurky?” Leila, cheeks flushed, comes over to subdue him by patting his arm, but he shakes her off. “Leila, you told me they were vegetarians! I mean, what the fuck?”

“I’m so sorry,” Leila whispers to Rosie. “He just showed up as I was leaving. He’s the … you know, my baby’s
father
, and he said he didn’t have anywhere else to go. Maybe we’ll just leave.”

“No, no, it’s
fine
,” says Rosie, perhaps with a tad too much vehemence. “You relax and don’t worry about a thing. We’re glad you’re here.”

But once they’re all seated at the table, Clem, now with some beers backing him up, wants to discuss the political party system, specifically whether there’s enough difference between the two parties as to make elections even worthwhile. And that leads the two mommies to explain that, as a matter of actual fact, the Democrats have made gay marriage possible, which is wonderful.

They sit there smiling at each other, and Rosie’s heart sinks, knowing what’s coming next. And it does.

“As a matter of fact,” says Dena, sliding her eyes over to Annie, “we’d like to announce that we’re going to have a wedding very soon.”

“As soon as one of the brides gets divorced,” says Tony in a low voice.

“They’re what?” says Soapie. “Did they say they’re getting
married
? How is that a good idea?”

“Shh. Girls can marry girls now,” says George. “It’s a good thing.”

“But is it a
good idea
?” says Soapie, undeterred. “Marriage is highly—”

“Yes,” says Rosie. “It’s a good idea.” She turns to Annie and Dena. “My grandmother doesn’t believe
anybody
should get married. Ever.”

But all this leads Clem, bleary-eyed but passionate, back into his
real
beef with life, which is that government shouldn’t have any say whatsoever in how people live their lives in the first place.

Rosie tries to beam a thought over to Tony:
Talk to Leila. Turn to Leila and talk to her. She’s wonderful
.

But he doesn’t. People start earnestly passing dishes
back and forth and eating their food, but now Louise’s Alzheimer’s starts acting up, possibly because Clem is talking loudly again and waving his arms, reflecting on the plight of the Native Americans.

George goes all Greatest Generation on Clem and tells him that he
must
settle himself down some, and that makes Joe leave his seat and come over to take Louise’s pulse, which triggers some primordial fear in her, and she jerks back, and her water glass falls over, as well as one wineglass, which spills into the Tofurky, possibly making it even more ruined than it already is.

But it’s all okay. That’s the thing to remember, that this dinner is going to end and that they will all survive it. Soapie stands up and starts dumping the salt shaker over the tablecloth, quoting herself from the first Dustcloth Diva book, looking pleased.

“ ‘To get red wine out of a tablecloth, you need to pour salt over the stain,’ ” she says loudly. “ ‘And then let it sit overnight, and rinse it out in the morning. Of course, pouring white wine over the stain also works, but better you should drink the white wine while you wait for the salt to do the work.’ ” She beams at them all, and then says, “I should write another book. Rosie, weren’t you going to help me write another Dustcloth Diva book?”

“We tried that,” says Rosie. “It didn’t work, remember?”

“Wait, you’re the Dustcloth Diva?” says Dena. “My mother had all those books!”

“Oh, thank you, dear! We
were
going to write another one,” says Soapie. “This one would have stain tips as well as information about not wasting your life on cleaning all the time. Where is that book, Rosie?”

“The editor changed her mind,” says Rosie.

“What are you talking about? I’ve got all the notes.”

“It’s okay,” says Rosie. “They said they’ll just release the first one again.” This is a lie, but she’s proud of thinking of it on the spot like this, and Soapie smiles, confusedly placated.

But then there’s Clem again. “I’m not sure red wine goes with Tofurky,” he says.

Tony laughs and says, “No color of wine goes with Tofurky, man. Beer is the best Tofurky can hope for.”

Rosie’s heart leaps up when she sees Leila smile at Tony and he smiles back at her, but then he claps his hand across Clem’s shoulders and says something in his ear that makes them both laugh.

Rosie feels that the universe is really missing one of its better chances to make something good happen. Really, how hard would it have been for Clem to get mad and insulted and leave the premises, to have Tony and Leila get to talking, for them to both realize how much they needed each other? Here she is, months from giving birth, and he’s over there suffering because the two mommies have just dropped a bombshell on him. And instead of getting to know her, there he is, talking instead with the bad boyfriend, and Leila isn’t even looking their way.

The children come into the dining room just then and say they want pumpkin pie, and Greta goes off to the kitchen to get all the desserts. Carmen and Sandrine start clearing the dishes away, and Tomas asks if he can put the coffeepot on.

Rosie looks around the table, feeling as though she’s an anthropologist watching the native species through binoculars from very far away. Leila, between the two mommies, is talking about pregnancy, and Dena says that she’d like to give it a try herself, and they’re thinking of looking at sperm donors soon. Tony, heading to the kitchen with a handful of wineglasses, seems once more like a truck has hit him, and
he gives Rosie one of his looks, like a man drowning in feeling. She touches her fingers to her lips and holds them out toward him in a comradely salute.

George adjusts the napkin draped across Louise’s chest, and as his fingers lightly brush her magnificent, dowager bust, Rosie has a sudden image of the two of them as young lovers decades ago, Louise bright and shiny and bosomy, and George, eager and ardent—isn’t that what Soapie said?—without that shadow behind his eyes. Back when he was full-tilt happy.

Soapie looks over at them and smiles fondly, a crooked, generous, stroke-patient smile, and Rosie sees something she never realized before, that they all three once had a story for this little three-way dance they’re in. And maybe the story was that George just had more love to spend than he could give away and everybody was fine with him having two women, or maybe they’d all been jealous and mean and secretive. Who knows?

Rosie feels tears spring into her eyes.

We all tell ourselves such ridiculous stories, she thinks, true and untrue, all the stories piling up like leaves along the curb. Carmen and Tomas are a couple, already writing themselves a romance. And Tony, bruised and unable to move on with his life, might any minute turn and look at Leila and see that she needs rescuing from Clem, and his story might get rewritten starting tonight. And if he doesn’t? Will Leila decide to keep going on with Clem, or might she find the courage to tell herself the story of how she and the baby don’t need him?

Soapie and Louise and George will die.

Rosie’s baby, propelled by a force quite outside herself, is going to live.