Fourth Comings (7 page)

eighteen

I
haven’t seen Sara in about six weeks, not since the babymama shower. I was the only one in Sammy invited. As you might recall, Manda and Sara were former BFF’s, the cornerstone of the Clueless Crew back in their Pineville High heyday. But Manda hasn’t forgiven Sara for so gleefully informing all of Pineville that the former had turned into a quote carpet muncher unquote in college. And Sara hasn’t forgiven Manda for so gleefully informing all of Pineville that the former had dropped out of college after getting knocked up after two minutes of unprotected passion in the Bamboo Bar parking lot.

I was not an obvious invitee. High school graduation brought with it many liberations, including my emancipation from the alphabetical guarantee that D’Abruzzi, Sara would be assigned to sit in front of Darling, Jessica in homeroom
and
every single honors class from seventh through twelfth grade. Since I threw my mortarboard into the air back in June 2002, my relationship with the guest of honor has consisted of rare, random run-ins around Pineville. I was only dragged to the shower by my sister, who felt obligated to attend because of her husband’s ongoing business partnership with Sara’s father, the Jersey Shore Junk Food King, Wally D’Abruzzi. These two families have gotten insanely wealthy off Americans’ insatiable desire for frozen custard and deep-fried dough, having opened up twenty-five new drive-through Papa D’s Donuts/Wally D’s Sweet Treat Shoppes in the past year alone.

Wally D spared no expense on his daughter’s celebration of accidental fertilization. But I don’t need to relive the
gitchy-gitchy goo-goo gag-me
details because it was hardly any different from a typically torturous baby shower. Not that you, Marcus, would have any idea, since you were lucky enough to be born with a penis. The only significant deviation was how there was more talk about the bride-to-be than the fetus-that-already-was.

“Omigod! You should see my Vera Wang!” Sara brayed. “It’s so
quote
Jessica Simpson
unquote.”

“Scotty proposed?” I asked. “Uh…”

“Congratulations!” my sister chimed. “That’s fantastic!”

Sara flinched, then quickly recovered. “Well, we’re not technically
quote
engaged
unquote,”
she said brightly. “Not technically. But it’s like everything but technically. We’re living together, and he totally wants this baby.”

My eyes bulged in disbelief. Bethany elbowed my ribs to shut me up.

“It was
practically
his idea to have it! Any other guy would have wanted me to
quote
get rid of it
unquote.
But he was all like, ‘Do you want to keep it?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, I totally do.’ And I know he totally wants to get married, so I’m just, you know, helping him out, getting things started because he doesn’t have a lot of money and I do, so…”

So
Sara—unemployed college dropout and daughter of self-made millionaire Wally D’Abruzzi—bought herself the three-carat solitaire diamond that she will start wearing as soon as her ring finger shrinks to its prepregnancy size. Nothing Sara said could make me believe that this was anything other than a devious get-married gambit. By purchasing her own ring, Sara had put a new and demented twist on the classic Impregnation Equation:

ENGORGEMENT
+
ENTRAPMENT
=
ENGAGEMENT

“Think of all the bad girls who have been transformed by marriage,” she said at one point during her insane, estrogen-spiked monologue. “Christina Aguilera. Avril Lavigne. Pink. Omigod! Getting married is, like, the best makeover ever.”

There was only one little
quote
glitch
unquote
to getting hitched: Scotty hadn’t proposed. And despite this minor setback, all this wedding talk was only occasionally interrupted by the cranky unborn human who had taken over Sara’s uterus.

“Ow!” She winced, groaned, then admonished her stomach: “Destiny, settle down in there!”

Destiny?

“Omigod! We’re naming the baby Destiny Estrella. Did we tell you that?”

No, she had not.

“It’s because Scotty and I totally think it was
quote
destiny
unquote
that brought us together.”

Really? It wasn’t the Natty Lite?

(If the Dalai Lama were there, he would’ve made the same joke. But being His Holiness and all, he probably could have gotten away with saying it to her face.)

“And Estrella means
quote
star
unquote
in Spanish….”

“Uh,” I said, this time out loud. “Didn’t you take Spanish for four years?”

“Yeah, so?” she huffed.

“So you should know that the Spanish
l
isn’t pronounced.”

“What do you mean it isn’t pronounced?” Sara sniffed.

“The
l
in Spanish doesn’t sound like
l,
it sounds like
y,”
I explained. “So it’s Es-STRAY-ya. Not Es-STRELL-A.”

I was trying to spare Sara the embarrassment of mispronouncing her daughter’s middle name for the rest of her life. And you know what I was thinking about when I did this? What you told me about the Four Abodes of Buddhism: kindness, compassion, joy in others’ joy, and level-headedness. The Four Abodes are just great, Marcus. Really. They make sense to me. They kick the Ten Commandments’ ass. I mean, you’d have to be a total dick not to be down with the Four Abodes. And yet whenever I speak with the Four Abodes in mind, I still sound like a bitch.

“Whatev,” Sara said. “I like it my way.”

“It’s a great name,” Bethany said, snapping my bra strap in admonishment.

“Omigod! I know! It was gonna be
quote
star
unquote
in Italian, you know, because of my heritage and all, but
star
in Italian is
quote
SteLLa
unquote,”
Sara said, going out of her way to overpronounce the
l
’s. “And Stella is, like, an old lady’s name. Like someone with drooping boobs who pushes a mop for a living.”

I followed my sister’s cue and nodded vigorously.

Sara covered her mouth, then burped into her hand. “And
star
has a deep significance for us as a couple because there were all these stars out the night that we, you know,
quote
conceived
unquote.
But Destiny Star is, like, a porn name. Destiny EstreLLa is, you know,
quote
classy
unquote.”

Oh, yes. The mangling of foreign words is always considered the epitome of genteel refinement. As is referring to oneself as “classy.”

Sara burped again, only this time she didn’t bother covering her mouth. “Scotty and I have known each other since kindergarten, you know, but we never even thought to hook up with each other until we started meeting up at the Bamboo Bar on breaks and we realized that we had so much in common, like the same core values. It was destiny. Destiny…”

So it was
destiny
that got Sara knocked up. Not the drunken, unprotected sex under the stars in the Bamboo Bar parking lot. Got it.

(I’m sorry, Marcus. This is how I really think, despite my failed efforts to think otherwise. Isn’t it better you know the truth than live with the illusion that I am a kinder, more evolved person than I really am?)

And just when I thought we had finally exhausted the subject of baby names, Sara told a long and gassy story about how she would have named a boy baby Alessandro Destino after her father, whom everyone calls Wally, and how that’s just a childhood nickname stemming from his siblings’ taunts about his being “wall-eyed,” and how the reclamation of that insult was proof of his resilience, and how she hopes Destiny Estrella inherits her grandfather’s strong character and savvy business sense but not his crossed eyes and—

Sara abruptly clutched her gut. “Omigod! Why am I even telling you this?”

I was wondering the exact same thing.

“I should be telling you about my Vera Wang. I ordered a size two!”

I was speechless.

“That’s, uh…” I turned to my sister for help. “Uh…”

“Ambitious,” Bethany finished. “It’s a lot of work taking care of a newborn, and planning a wedding….”

“I’m gonna breast-feed, too,” Sara said.

“That’s really great,” Bethany said. “Doctors say breast is best….”

“Oh yeah, it helps ward off infections, especially in the first year,” Sara said, all of a sudden surprising me with a hint of maternity. “And I’ll look so hot in my gown. Omigod! Did you
see
Angelina Jolie’s rack after she had the baby?”

Now both Bethany and I had lost the ability to speak.

“Destiny is due on August twenty-fourth,” Sara said. “I’ve got exactly ten months to snap back into shape!”

It will be the snap heard around the world. Perhaps you have heard some pregnant women described as “all belly.” It usually means that the pregnancy weight has settled into a cute, compact, baby-shaped ball right there in the belly. If the term “all belly” were used to describe Sara, it would mean that she had literally become “all belly,” that the entirety of her physical being had been consumed by her belly, so that even all body parts that were unrelated and far removed from the belly, such as her ankles, or her earlobes, had become indistinguishable from the belly. Sara was one huge, rotundous belly with one month to go.

I know it sounds like I’m criticizing her for packing on major pregnancy pounds, but I’m not. In her pre-babymama days, Sara was well into the maintenance phase of anorexia, when the starvation wasn’t such a struggle anymore because it was one of many habits—chain-smoking, mainlining Starbucks, inhaling horse tranquilizers—incorporated into her totally unhealthy lifestyle. So not unlike every Hollywood actress who gets knocked up, Sara had to gain about twenty-five pounds just to be in the normal weight range for an unpregnant woman. And once the pounds started piling on, she couldn’t stop them. In eight months of gestating she’d more than made up for all the food she hasn’t eaten in the last decade. And yet, paradoxically, for all her bellyness, Sara
looked
more attractive than ever at that shower in that au naturel, glowing-from-within way that pregnant women often do. It’s a shame that her anathematic personality offset these improvements in her appearance.

Babydaddy Scotty showed up at the end of the shower for the express purpose of piling all the presents into a luxury SUV and bringing them back to the condo they now share in Seaside Park. At twenty-two, Scotty seems prematurely middle-aged, with a thinning hairline and a thickening waistline. To look at him, you would never know that just four years ago he was voted Most Popular and Class Athlete in the Pineville High School Class of 2002 yearbook. (That Scotty and Sara’s ex-BFF, Manda, “the carpet muncher,” were voted Class Couple is not discussed. Ever. Nor the fact that Scotty tried—and failed—to get into my pants for four years, even when he was half of the celebrated coupling.) Scotty is the personification of every Springsteen song about burned-out, packed-in, broken-down, and washed-up high school heroes. You know, the former stars whose best days are long behind them, whose dreams of post-graduation glory are dashed and scattered among the wreckage on the dark, lonesome highways twisting through the abandoned carny towns along the Jersey Shore…

Or something like that.

Scotty and I exchanged the briefest of banal pleasantries.

“Congratulations,” I said lamely.

“Yeah,” he said, doing pop-a-wheelies with the Bugaboo stroller filled with pink and white paraphernalia.

“A girl,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Yeah,” Scotty said. “Sara says so. Every firstborn in her family for the past one hundred years or something has been a girl. It’s the D’Abruzzi Family Legacy.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Sara and I call it”—he paused here and spread his impressively thick hands in the air, as if he were calling attention to an imaginary marquee—“the D’Abruzzi Pussy Legacy.”

Now,
that
would have been a memorable motto for the parting gifts: miniature baby bottles filled with pink bubble-gum jelly beans. Instead, Sara had attached a tiny “Save the Date” card that read like a promo to a cheese-ass romantic comedy I’d never pay ten dollars to see in a theater but might watch on an airplane if the headphones were free.

SARA D’ABRUZZI & SCOTT GLAZER.

ALWAYS & FOREVER & DESTINY

BEGINS JUNE 24, 2007.

(
FOREVER.
Is your final postcard on its way?)

nineteen

“
B
OOM—pssh—BOOM-BOOM-pssh-BOOM-pssh-BOOM-BOOM-pssh!”

Shea’s beat-boxing brought me back to the conversation in a most unpleasant manner. High-hatting spit was spraying all over the Cupcake.

“B-b-b-babymama, g-g-g-go head be g-g-gone wit dat thang,”
Shea rapped into her cupped hand/mic.
“G-g-g-g-get dat thang c-c-c-cut out…”

“Get that thing cut out?” Manda screamed. “It’s a human being, not a tumor!”

“To
-may-
to, po
-tay-
to, fuck
-fuck-
yo.”

I am living with K-Fed’s retarded half sista/brotha.

Manda turned to the more civilized participants in this conversation.

“Sara is, in fact, scheduled for a C-section today,” I said, remembering what my sister had told me. “I bet she’s pissed that Destiny’s late. I mean, she’s lost two weeks of workouts before the wedding. That is, if Scotty ever—omigod!
—quote
technically
unquote
proposes.”

Hope giggled because she loves my nasally Sara impression, but she refrained from further comment. Manda remained serious. That is, as serious as one can be when one is wearing booty shorts before nine
A.M.

“It’s so weird,” Manda said. “Like while we’re sleeping all day”—because Manda seemed to be under the impression that we
all
sleep during daylight hours—“Sara will be having a baby. Today.
Sara.
A baby. I mean, she’s a total bitch and I hate her, but she
was
my best friend. It’s so weird that she’s having a baby.”

“Scotty’s
baby.”

And we muttered various incredulities.

“Well,” Hope said, ever the optimist, “I hope they’re happy together.”

“Me too,” Manda said without a trace of meanness.

And I was just happy that all this talk of Destiny had drawn the attention away from my own hypothetical milestones.

Heavy footsteps stomped on the ceiling.

“Ursula!”

We are united in our fear of Ursula, that if any of us says or does the wrong thing, she’ll kick us to the curb with one of her pointy-toed roach killer boots. We froze, hoping we would be spared her morning wrath.

“Yo, I’m headin fo’ bed before she come down.” Even Shea knows better than to fuck
-fuck-
yo with Ursula.

“Me too,” Manda said. Then to me: “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about
your
situation.” She tapped the ring finger on her left hand as she backed out the door.

“Crap,” Hope said, looking at the clock. “I’m getting picked up in ten minutes. Another Sunday, another Long Island wedding…”

“Speaking of weddings…”

“This is too big to talk about in ten minutes or less.”

“I know,” I replied. “But what were you going to say before we were interrupted?”

She jumped from the top bunk and stuck the landing. She had to wind her way through the maze of unpacked boxes to get to the closet.

“Do you think you can finally put these away?” she asked, pointing to a stack of taped-up cardboard boxes, all unhelpfully labeled. For all my anal-retentive tendencies, I have a rather aimless and unorganized packing style, as one box claims to contain
SOCKS, COFFEE FILTERS, PSYCH BOOKS.

“I will, I will,” I promised, as I’ve promised for the past three months. When I moved out of Bethany’s guest room in June, I stuffed all my summer clothes and shoes in my duffel. My bedding came along in a Hefty Cinch Sak. Everything else was sealed in those cardboard moving boxes, which have remained sealed and triple-stacked since you helped lug them here on move-in day. That was your first trip to Sammy. (Do you realize that you only visited once more before your seven-day visit last week?)

I watched Hope as she pulled a sleeveless black dress off a hanger and over her head. She slipped her feet into a pair of unadorned black flats with a thick rubber sole. Since getting the job with Capture the Moment, she’s built a whole wardrobe designed for comfort and blending in with the background, the latter of which is pretty much impossible when you’re nearly six feet tall with miles of orange hair.

“So what do you really think about the proposal?” I asked when she was finished getting ready. “I need you to tell me the truth.”

Hope gulped loudly. “I think…” She paused to pull a pile of hair off her shoulders with the twist of an elastic band. “I think that this is so Marcus.”

And on that point we were in total agreement.