“Real nice.”
I scuttle up to my bedroom so that I don’t have to say good-bye to him when he leaves, pondering what I’m going to do with my life. I check my phone for missed calls from potential employers, but I have no notifications because no one loves me and I’m a failure. I don’t even have any spam emails.
I scroll through Instagram for five minutes and then have to shut my phone off because everybody else’s lives are amazing and mine is a black hole. I have zero job offers and one fiancé too many. I have an abundance of odious fiancé. How am I going to get rid of him? I cannot marry this mama’s boy.
Every time I picture the wedding I break out in hives. Deborah will want to come on our honeymoon with us, and she’ll switch out my birth control pills for placebos. When baby Nicholas Deborah Jr. comes, I’ll walk into the house one day to find all her belongings stuffed in the right-hand bedroom.I’ve come to stay with you, she’ll threaten with a nightmarish smile, head spinning all the way around.Forever!
I’m putting a pin in plan D and picking up the lost momentum on plan A. I can do this. I can convince Nicholas to call it quits without getting his mother involved. I never want to see her again. I think about eating dinner by myself tonight in this empty house while Nicholas scarfs down a three-course meal cooked by “the woman,” Deborah petting his hair and telling him he’s special. There’s no doubt in my mind that at some point in his teenage life she subjected him to a public mother-son dance.
You can’t pick your parents or your grandparents, but youcanpick your children’s parents and grandparents. I don’t have kids yet, but I think it’s failing some kind of morality test to give them Deborah as a grandmother. It’s particularly important that my kids have sweet, attentive relatives on one side of the aisle because they won’t be getting any from mine. My parents are as distant and withholding as Deborah is smothering and omnipresent, and haven’t expressed much interest in my life’s developments aside from “Aren’t weddings supposed to be in the spring?” They didn’t even come down when I was being shuffled in and out of bridal boutiques with Deborah and her four closest girlfriends, which is supposed to be a momentous mother-daughter experience. Naïvely, I’d hoped for a close relationship with Nicholas’s family, to give me that warm, supportive, grounded sense of belonging I’ve long been missing out on. I have so much unused love sitting inside me with nowhere to direct it.
I like the Nicholas who drops everything and runs when I’m freaking out at the side of the road. The one who wraps his coat around my shoulders and eats a bowl of food poisoning with me. But I can’t wait for that Nicholas to pop up every now and then, leaving me a different version of him to deal with regularly: the man who abandons me in more ways than one to placate his demanding mother.
That’sthe Nicholas I need to be focusing my energy on. I can’t let myself forget.
–
It’s November twelfth and I’ve got to hand it to him, Nicholas is upping his game. I have a new document on my computer thatkeeps score. Sometimes I catch myself regarding it too objectively and from that point of view, we’re immature children who need to grumble forced apologies at each other and shake hands. It goes without saying that I try to stay as unobjective as possible.
The past week looks like this:
Point Naomi: pirate b-day, lol
Point Nicholas: Instagram pic
Point Naomi: Brownie
Point Nicholas: Brownie
Point Naomi: Toothpaste
Point Nicholas: Shoes
Point Naomi: Shoes
Point Nicholas: Underwear
If you think about it, it’s all Deborah’s fault.
After Nicholas ditched me to have Family Fun Night at dear old Mr. and Mrs. Rose’s house, he brought home an ugly set of salt and pepper shakers that Deborah gave him. They’re porcelain babies. If you’ve ever seen a medieval painting of a baby, they look like straight-up demons. They have scary little old man faces and their necks are twisted at unnatural angles.
Deborah’s salt and pepper shaker-babies look exactly like that. I shuddered when I saw them. I was all set to bury her gift in the back of a closet, but Nicholas was all: “They’re family heirlooms! What if Mom comes over and asks where we put them? We have to keep them on the table.” And I was all: “Are you friggin’ kidding me? These things are repugnant.”
At any rate, I ended up sticking one of them under Nicholas’s mattress. The lump was just unobtrusive enough that Ididn’t think he’d realize therewasa lump, just that his back felt achy in the morning. If I’d hidden both shakers, Nicholas would know something was up, so I kept the ugly pepper baby on the kitchen table and threw a potholder over it.
The following day, the saltshaker was back on the table where I clearly did not want it. I was still stewing when we went out to dinner at Walk the Plank, a seafood restaurant. I pretended I needed to go to the bathroom, but instead I flagged down a waiter and told him it was Nicholas’s birthday. I asked if the staff could sing to him, which they did, while he wore a tricorn pirate hat of honor and nearly collapsed from mortification. On Facebook Live. (It was INCREDIBLE—they put a lobster bib around him that had this little plastic parrot on the shoulder, and when he blew out the candle on his cupcake everyone yelled “Tharr he blows!” Lmao forever.)
I thought,Okay, we’re even now. Not so! I woke up to a notification on Instagram. He’d posted a picture of me while I was passed out on the couch. It’s brutally zoomed in so that you can count my every pore, and I do not look remotely cute. I’ve got a six-inch string of drool dribbling out of my open mouth, glistening in the half light. He uploaded the shot in black and white and captioned it with three hearts andAren’t I lucky? I get to gaze upon this absolute work of art every single day. #LivinTheLife #MarryingMyBestFriend #TrueLovesKissFromARose
That picture has accumulated more comments than anything I’ve ever posted, and when I think about it I want to watch his blood drip into a bedpan. I want it to coagulate into a gelatin that I pour over a lemon cake, which I’ll consume using utensils carved from the stone that resides where his heart should be.
My next move wasn’t premeditated. I’d been driving homefrom work when I saw a little brown dog in the ditch licking the cardboard box for a Whopper Jr. He wasn’t wearing a collar and there weren’t any houses nearby, so I assumed he was a stray. Anyone would assume that! When I picked him up and gave him lots of pets and nuzzles, Nicholas’s voice ran through my head:Don’t get any ideas.
I gotlotsof ideas. My ideas had ideas.
I brought him home and cooked a frozen hamburger patty for him, since we didn’t have dog food and he appeared to like burgers. He fell asleep on my lap. According to the Internet, he is probably a mix of Jack Russell terrier and beagle. I decided to name him Whopper Jr. and I loved him more than any human I’ve ever known. When Nicholas came home, he found me carrying Whopper Jr. in one of Nicholas’s nice work shirts, which I’d fashioned into a baby-wearing sling. He said “Oh my GOD, where did you get that,” and I said “You’re a daddy! He looks just like you,” and Whopper Jr. sneezed on the pinstriped shirt-sling. It was so cute.
Nicholas didn’t care about the dog’s cuteness. All he cared about was that we’d have to get him neutered and vaccinated and chipped, anddog food’s not cheap, just so you know, blah blah blah. Whopper Jr. peed on Nicholas’s Sherlock Holmes coat (it was his own fault for leaving it on the floor) and Nicholas L O S T it.
