Page 48 of A Happy Catastrophe

Do you then just get to ask yourself: What would be the happiest thing for me to do today?

No, you do not.

He has to get back to work. A woman is waiting in his head for him to go back to the studio and work through the pain he caused her, the damage he did.

And the people standing here in front of him—they’re in danger of being lost to him, too. Just because he loves them. Or he might. He doesn’t think he even knows what that word means: love. Who gave us the right to throw that word around all the damn time when nobody knows what it means?

So here’s what you have to do, he thinks: You give up your spot in the bed to the woman who should be your mother-in-law, and you move into your studio and sleep on the futon surrounded by your paintings. The ones that you’ve finished and the ones that are unfinished. The ones that are so full of screams that they frighten you sometimes when you look at them, and the ones you try to make peace with even though they came up from the depths of your longing. You tell everyone around you that you can’t get ready for the show unless you live with the work for the time being. You need this, you say. Yell it if necessary, if they don’t seem to believe you.

You tell the woman you love, the one who thinks she wants to have a child with you, that for you to be sleeping elsewhere is the best thing for her, too. She’ll get to concentrate on being with her mother without having to worry about you.

And you say to that little girl with the stubborn chin and the lanky hair that’s identical to yours, the little girl with the impulse to steal money for a cause and explore the world and the solar system, that you’re watching over her, and that she’s fine and lovable—and you make yourself remember that in a few short months, she, too, will leave you and be out of your life.

And you tell yourself that it’s pretty smart of you not to get attached.

Because, in the famous words of Millie MacGraw, everything and everybody will leave you at some point. So maybe that’s the safest plan of all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

MARNIE

“Your mother will be there one week tops,” says my father when he calls me the next morning. He’s using his manly, confident, predictor voice. The same voice he used when he told me I’d grow up to be a financial analyst if I’d just apply myself. “She’s just, ah—well, your mother is going through something I don’t seem able to help her with. Who knows? Maybe you can.”

It’s seven thirty and I’m standing on the sidewalk holding the leash and watching Bedford sniffing the ground. I am yawning more than usual because I think I might have gotten about two hours of sleep. As with every morning, Bedford’s got himself a big decision to make about which patch of grass he’d like to pee on, but the difference this morning is that I’m in no hurry whatsoever to get back inside the house, so he’s free to sniff out gum wrappers, old straws, and previously peed-on grass as long as he wants. I have my coat on over my pajama shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and I jammed my feet into my boots and came outside before anybody could find me. I could hear Patrick and my mother talking in the kitchen as I slipped away.

“I don’t know, Dad,” I say. “She says she wants to move here.”

“I know she says that. But she’s a Floridian through and through. She can’t move there,” he says in his firm dad voice.

“Are you sure?”

“Marnie. First of all, she has her life here. Me, for one thing. And her friends at the pool, at the Y. Natalie and the grandchildren. And second of all, winter. She’s never lived through a winter in her life. No, she’s just going through something right now. I haven’t been needing her enough maybe. You could do me a favor and point out my wonderful qualities and tell her that I really do need her. Trust me, Marnie. This is a temporary rootlessness she’s got going on.”

My father, Ted MacGraw, is a wonderful man, a good provider, and a guy who believed strongly in his daughters’ rights to excel in any workplace and to be whatever they wanted in the world. Unless what they wanted was to be underemployed, like me. Or a witchy matchmaker, like me. Or a person who moved to Brooklyn without a real plan, like me. Luckily he also had Natalie, who became a grade-A, number one scientist who had the foresight to marry a settling-down kind of man and have two children and move into a house in my dad’s neighborhood.

I’ve always adored him, and sometimes I think it would be so cool to be as certain as he is about everything. He knows just how he feels. Good over bad, right over wrong, khakis over blue jeans, football games over soccer matches, Rotary Club meetings over sleeping late on Saturday.

“But, Dad,” I say, “she doesn’t seem sad. She seems almost giddy to me.”

“That’s an act. Don’t you know an act when you see one? She doesn’t know what she wants.”

I am, I realize, too cowardly to tell him the things she said last night. Let her tell him about her desire to join the space program and fall in love with new people.

There’s a silence. “We’re a solid couple,” he says. “Everybody envies us. All our friends. Your mom has it good, but, I don’t know, there’s this restlessness lately that’s driving me nuts. She always wants to go, go, go. For no reason, just to get out of the house. She complains I don’t get enough exercise and I won’t go to the doctor for a checkup. Frankly, she’s becoming a little bit of a nag.”

“Dad, are you angry with her? Because you sound a little angry.”

“No, I’m not angry,” he says in the maddest voice ever. “It’s just that she didn’t have to pull this stunt on Thanksgiving Day. Get this. She got up very, very early in the morning and made the turkey and the stuffing and the green beans with the fried onions and the sweet potato marshmallow thing, and then it was all ready by noon, so I came upstairs from watching the Macy’s Day Parade, thinking we’d sit down and eat, and there she was with her suitcases packed, and she said, ‘I’m leaving. I’m moving to Brooklyn. Don’t worry. There’s a cab waiting for me, so you won’t have to worry about getting the car back from the airport. And I’ll talk to you soon.’ And she put her house key on the table, and kissed me on the cheek, and walked out the front door. Didn’t even eat the meal she’d made. Can you believe that?”

Bedford is now eating a piece of a chicken bone he found under some leaves, so I kneel down to take it out of his mouth. “What did you do?”

“What do you think? I’m a gentleman, so I carried her two suitcases outside for her and put them in the trunk of the cab. And I paid the driver for her in advance. And then I went around to the window of the passenger seat and I said to her, I said, ‘I hope you have a very nice trip to Brooklyn, and have a Happy Thanksgiving.’”

“Oh, you did not!”

“I did.” He laughs. “I’m chill. Isn’t that what you kids say? I haven’t even told Natalie yet; that’s how cool I’m playing it. I want to make as little drama as possible. Give your mother some space so that in three days when she decides to come back, it won’t have to be a huge deal and she feels like she loses face or something. I’m not going to beg her to come back. I’m just going to leave her to get this out of her system.”

u then just get to ask yourself: What would be the happiest thing for me to do today?

No, you do not.

He has to get back to work. A woman is waiting in his head for him to go back to the studio and work through the pain he caused her, the damage he did.

And the people standing here in front of him—they’re in danger of being lost to him, too. Just because he loves them. Or he might. He doesn’t think he even knows what that word means: love. Who gave us the right to throw that word around all the damn time when nobody knows what it means?

So here’s what you have to do, he thinks: You give up your spot in the bed to the woman who should be your mother-in-law, and you move into your studio and sleep on the futon surrounded by your paintings. The ones that you’ve finished and the ones that are unfinished. The ones that are so full of screams that they frighten you sometimes when you look at them, and the ones you try to make peace with even though they came up from the depths of your longing. You tell everyone around you that you can’t get ready for the show unless you live with the work for the time being. You need this, you say. Yell it if necessary, if they don’t seem to believe you.

You tell the woman you love, the one who thinks she wants to have a child with you, that for you to be sleeping elsewhere is the best thing for her, too. She’ll get to concentrate on being with her mother without having to worry about you.

And you say to that little girl with the stubborn chin and the lanky hair that’s identical to yours, the little girl with the impulse to steal money for a cause and explore the world and the solar system, that you’re watching over her, and that she’s fine and lovable—and you make yourself remember that in a few short months, she, too, will leave you and be out of your life.

And you tell yourself that it’s pretty smart of you not to get attached.

Because, in the famous words of Millie MacGraw, everything and everybody will leave you at some point. So maybe that’s the safest plan of all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

MARNIE

“Your mother will be there one week tops,” says my father when he calls me the next morning. He’s using his manly, confident, predictor voice. The same voice he used when he told me I’d grow up to be a financial analyst if I’d just apply myself. “She’s just, ah—well, your mother is going through something I don’t seem able to help her with. Who knows? Maybe you can.”

It’s seven thirty and I’m standing on the sidewalk holding the leash and watching Bedford sniffing the ground. I am yawning more than usual because I think I might have gotten about two hours of sleep. As with every morning, Bedford’s got himself a big decision to make about which patch of grass he’d like to pee on, but the difference this morning is that I’m in no hurry whatsoever to get back inside the house, so he’s free to sniff out gum wrappers, old straws, and previously peed-on grass as long as he wants. I have my coat on over my pajama shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and I jammed my feet into my boots and came outside before anybody could find me. I could hear Patrick and my mother talking in the kitchen as I slipped away.

“I don’t know, Dad,” I say. “She says she wants to move here.”

“I know she says that. But she’s a Floridian through and through. She can’t move there,” he says in his firm dad voice.

“Are you sure?”

“Marnie. First of all, she has her life here. Me, for one thing. And her friends at the pool, at the Y. Natalie and the grandchildren. And second of all, winter. She’s never lived through a winter in her life. No, she’s just going through something right now. I haven’t been needing her enough maybe. You could do me a favor and point out my wonderful qualities and tell her that I really do need her. Trust me, Marnie. This is a temporary rootlessness she’s got going on.”

My father, Ted MacGraw, is a wonderful man, a good provider, and a guy who believed strongly in his daughters’ rights to excel in any workplace and to be whatever they wanted in the world. Unless what they wanted was to be underemployed, like me. Or a witchy matchmaker, like me. Or a person who moved to Brooklyn without a real plan, like me. Luckily he also had Natalie, who became a grade-A, number one scientist who had the foresight to marry a settling-down kind of man and have two children and move into a house in my dad’s neighborhood.

I’ve always adored him, and sometimes I think it would be so cool to be as certain as he is about everything. He knows just how he feels. Good over bad, right over wrong, khakis over blue jeans, football games over soccer matches, Rotary Club meetings over sleeping late on Saturday.

“But, Dad,” I say, “she doesn’t seem sad. She seems almost giddy to me.”

“That’s an act. Don’t you know an act when you see one? She doesn’t know what she wants.”

I am, I realize, too cowardly to tell him the things she said last night. Let her tell him about her desire to join the space program and fall in love with new people.

There’s a silence. “We’re a solid couple,” he says. “Everybody envies us. All our friends. Your mom has it good, but, I don’t know, there’s this restlessness lately that’s driving me nuts. She always wants to go, go, go. For no reason, just to get out of the house. She complains I don’t get enough exercise and I won’t go to the doctor for a checkup. Frankly, she’s becoming a little bit of a nag.”

“Dad, are you angry with her? Because you sound a little angry.”

“No, I’m not angry,” he says in the maddest voice ever. “It’s just that she didn’t have to pull this stunt on Thanksgiving Day. Get this. She got up very, very early in the morning and made the turkey and the stuffing and the green beans with the fried onions and the sweet potato marshmallow thing, and then it was all ready by noon, so I came upstairs from watching the Macy’s Day Parade, thinking we’d sit down and eat, and there she was with her suitcases packed, and she said, ‘I’m leaving. I’m moving to Brooklyn. Don’t worry. There’s a cab waiting for me, so you won’t have to worry about getting the car back from the airport. And I’ll talk to you soon.’ And she put her house key on the table, and kissed me on the cheek, and walked out the front door. Didn’t even eat the meal she’d made. Can you believe that?”

Bedford is now eating a piece of a chicken bone he found under some leaves, so I kneel down to take it out of his mouth. “What did you do?”

“What do you think? I’m a gentleman, so I carried her two suitcases outside for her and put them in the trunk of the cab. And I paid the driver for her in advance. And then I went around to the window of the passenger seat and I said to her, I said, ‘I hope you have a very nice trip to Brooklyn, and have a Happy Thanksgiving.’”

“Oh, you did not!”

“I did.” He laughs. “I’m chill. Isn’t that what you kids say? I haven’t even told Natalie yet; that’s how cool I’m playing it. I want to make as little drama as possible. Give your mother some space so that in three days when she decides to come back, it won’t have to be a huge deal and she feels like she loses face or something. I’m not going to beg her to come back. I’m just going to leave her to get this out of her system.”

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