I Don't Have a Happy Place (19 page)

But, say what they will, I knew better. Girls are harrowing. They roll their eyes a lot and scream, “No one understands me!” and “I hate your guts!” as they slam bedroom doors. Girls force you to drop them off three blocks away from school. Girls get dodgeballs to the face. And the first person a girl throws under the bus is her mother.

The Junior Mint kicked my spleen into my liver.
Great
, I thought,
already with
the vitriol
. I was doomed. And while I didn't break it to Buzz, I knew he was doomed, too. Our house was just one chewed-up lime and a sack of bad lemons.

A week later, the results came in. The baby had one head, no tail or hooves. She was cleared of any genetic disorders the procedure tested for.

“Those tests are wrong all the time,” I told Buzz.

He didn't say a word, just grinned and went to sweep the stairs. But, let's be honest, if the disorders didn't get the Junior Mint, something else would.

The first night at home with the baby on the outside, we sat on the couch together watching
The Cosby Show
. Well, I did most of the watching. The oversized book said she couldn't see much yet, plus she was crying so loudly I couldn't hear a damn thing. She came out with the requisite amount of appendages. She wasn't deaf, which I know because I frequently dropped stacks of books on the floor just to make sure, and she was breathing and eating and doing all that stuff thriving babies are supposed to do. She
passed the tests in the hospital and wasn't even yellow anymore. I held on to her and did the math:

Nine years before the eye rolling.

Thirteen before she couldn't stand me.

Eighteen before she left for college and I was an empty nester, buying baby goats to keep me company and taking up weaving or canning or bridge.

It was quite possible Rudy wouldn't break Clair Huxtable's heart, but the jury was still out on Vanessa and Denise. And who even knew about Sondra. So far, my daughter wasn't a lemon, but she was still a daughter. It was all just a matter of time.

Be Careful Out There

• • • • • •

I
once spent two hours at a craft store debating the purchase of glitter. There I stood, in the aisle, puffy down coat unzipped, smitten by a very sexy twenty-four-pack of Martha Stewart Essential Glitter. The set showcased a distinguished group of colors with fancy names listed across the vials, names like
BROWNSTONE
and
FELDSPAR
and
LAPIS LAZULI
. But there were other choices on the glitter shelves. Not only different colors but different species—Iridescent, Fine, Tinsel—half the aisle was dedicated to glitter.

And so it began. Should I buy the twenty-four-pack or go off the grid and make my own small collection? But how does one choose between
AQUAMARINE CRYSTAL
and
SMOKY QUARTZ
? Not to mention which glitter phylum to pick. Iridescent had a snow-in-the-moonlight quality but the Tinsel variety was old-timey, plus the thicker flakes seemed easier to get out of my hair. The world, however, would be open to me if I owned the twenty-four-pack. Plus it said
Essential
right there on the front, meaning I kind of needed to have it.

I started overheating in the glitter aisle. Noxious fake cinnamon smells coming off the pinecones in aisle 7 rendered me craft-
drunk and dizzy. Could I justify spending over thirty dollars on glitter? I had walked in there to get an eraser. I didn't have a craft project in mind. I don't even do craft projects. But, oh, the glitter. I knew my life would just be better if I was the kind of person who had twenty-four bottles at the ready. I called a friend for guidance, but she wasn't home, instantly putting her on the list of who not to call in case of emergency. Clearly I was alone in the (craft) world. Still, a decision had to be made, so I placed the twenty-four-pack, plus six individual bottles, into the plastic shopping basket and then walked to the rubber-stamp aisle to decompress.

Moments later, I ran back to the glitter aisle and put all my choices back from whence they came. I did not need any glitter. Or did I? I put the twenty-four-pack back in the basket, along with three of the Tinsel variety in colors not featured in the Essential pack. But if they weren't Essential, did I really need them? I put those guys back on the shelf, then walked over to the bone folders down the aisle, which was a rookie move because seconds later I was back with the glitter.

It was then I saw the oversized bottles.

I sat on the floor, laying out all my options. After 127 minutes of deliberation, I left the store with the twenty-four-pack, a small bottle of turquoise Tinsel, and an oversized shaker of a coarse variety in the shade of
CRYSTAL
. And a bone folder. Totaling over fifty dollars. Two days later, I returned the twenty-four-pack. I still haven't opened the other jars.

I'd like to say the Great Glitter Incident of 2012 was an isolated event, but the truth is I have a small problem with decision making. I don't make up my mind lightly (
see
glitter), and having to choose any thing of any kind brings on a variety of deranged behaviors. It's never the size or scope of the decision that makes me mental, it's the act of decision making itself. When I do finally
make a choice, there are lingering repercussions for all—often weeks of fallout. My having to make a decision is really not good for anyone. And so when Buzz suggested packing up our urban, briefly suburban, existence and moving operations to rural Vermont, I sat down in the aisle of our lives, unzipped my coat, and began to take things on and off the shelf.

I was surprised Buzz even made the suggestion, since our moves to date had not gone very well. He claims not to harbor ill will from our first relocation together, but I know he's not over it. I still contend that one was Denzel Washington's fault. We were four days away from changing our Upper West Side address to a neighborhood in Brownstone Brooklyn, when we decided to rent
Training Day
and eat red licorice. Three minutes into the picture, I began to panic. Something about Denzel's one-man–Good Cop/Bad Cop eyes Svengalied me. A switch flicked on in my brain, causing me to equate the wide front lawns of our new Brooklyn neighborhood with the mean streets of Los Angeles.

Buzz gnawed on his Twizzler, not a care in the world, but I gripped mine, foreseeing the sprays of bullets, cops gone nuts, choppers overhead. I pictured all the ways I could be in the wrong place at the wrong time and, naturally, my inevitable bloody demise.
What have I done,
I wondered,
agreeing to this move?
Why was I leaving the safety of my Manhattan fifth-floor walk-up, a place surely never to get robbed—or rats—because there were just too many stairs to climb?

I'd worked that theory out when I moved in, ten years earlier. Something to the tune of, If a bad guy were to come all the way up 128 stairs to disembowel me, it would be because he was looking for me specifically—a revenge plot of some sort—and there was nothing I could do about that. A revenge seeker could find me anywhere. I took comfort in knowing that although most
people don't really like me, they certainly don't care enough to march up all those stairs and butcher me. My careful, sound, and statistical equation told me I was safe on the top floor. If someone came to my apartment building with murder in mind, he'd probably nab a victim on the first two floors, which is exactly what we'd signed on for by renting the first two levels of a brownstone in Brooklyn. We were practically asking to get slaughtered.

I was antsy on the couch for the remainder of the movie. I tried suffering in silence, really, I did. But at the end of the day I am not skilled in that arena. The second the end credits rolled, I let Buzz know the move was off, assuring him we were being irresponsible by relocating to such a sketchy neighborhood and that we were moments away from being decapitated or chained to a radiator until further notice. At first he ignored me, but I may or may not have been relentless, so before he fell asleep that night he told me we'd deal with this “nonsense” tomorrow. To me that meant we were canceling the move, to Buzz it meant I'd forget about it all by first light. When he woke the following morning, my eyes were staring at him.

“Still with this shit?” he said, putting the pillow over his face.

He will tell you that he made the call to Brooklyn's seventy-sixth precinct to assuage my fear, settle me down, but I knew better. I knew by the look in his eye and the way he punched the little phone buttons that he knew this Brooklyn place really was the epicenter of blood and guts and danger and that's why he made the call. Deep down we were in agreement that those pleasant grassy yards with trees and inviting stoops were just a ruse. Buzz recounted, word for word, what the nice officer had to say. Even the part when the cop laughed at him for making the call.

“There,” Buzz said. “You feel better now?”

Not really. I was sure the policeman told Buzz the place was safe, just as he'd told all the other callers who'd asked
the same question, a verbal form letter. What was he going to say? That the place was crawling with deranged psychos and daily bludgeoning? Naturally, I needed to take matters into my own hands, so I cleared my schedule the following day for research.

The computer gossiped about the glorious world of organized crime that had taken place on the very streets we were heading to. Granted, the information was from years gone by, but people don't change. Tired of mafia stories, I moved on to the big guns, something I save for when I really need soothing—the police blotter. I prefer to read my blotter stories while holding a thin, local newspaper, but in a pinch a virtual one will do. No matter its format, the content always pleases me. A blotter has everything, danger and drama and all the comings and goings of the town. Some people enjoy reading about the good restaurants a place has to offer or what there is to do after dark. I enjoy knowing who got shot.

“You see!” I said to Buzz, following him down the hallway with a fistful of printouts. “There is
too
crime!”

Buzz refused to read about the knife fights and break-ins and urged me to stop looking up all the horrible things that could happen to me. I told him he didn't even understand what the Internet was for. Unfortunately, my campaign was weak and we moved anyway. And no, we didn't get murdered or knifed on our way to buy bananas at the health food store. We did suffer some lawlessness, though, when a box of Pampers was stolen right from our front stoop. And, of course, there was the squirrel break-in. I'm sure Buzz was on some sort of ego trip because we didn't get murdered, as he'd predicted, but I didn't let that interrupt my vigilance. I remained an informed citizen, staying abreast of bank robberies and car thievery until, like with most things, I lost interest.

Seven years later, the subject of moving came up again, this time to the suburbs. It was common in our part of the world to emigrate beyond the boroughs now that we had two small school-aged children. We'd lost our will to fight with shopping bags weighing down our strollers, wanted to let our four-year-old son out to roam the yard like a family hound, and finally admitted that we never went out to museums or for Ethiopian food at 1:00 a.m. We'd stopped using New York City and were ready to move to what our Realtor called Brooklyn West.

The first order of business was finding a house. We saw fifty-one. We toured schools and talked to suburban veterans as well as the newer recruits. We did not call the precinct. Montclair, New Jersey, was home to stately trees and liberal folks and a good school system. Buzz sussed out real estate taxes and I went straight to the crime. This was not your mother's suburb. There were multiple robberies and crack busts in school zones and gun assaults and spies. Spies! Montclair had the finest police blotter I'd ever laid eyes on.

We moved into the prettiest house I'd ever live in. Buzz would return home on the train from a day of show business and I'd be at the door with news of fresh crime. He'd shuffle past me, muttering how this stuff would never happen to Don Draper.

There is something about reading the blotter that mellows me, like caffeine to an ADD-addled person. It's a form of self-medication that usually works, but, as festive as the Montclair blotter was, things were gloomy for me in New Jersey. I was able to get myself out of bed in the morning and the kids off to school, but my despondency was acting up and the crime business was no longer keeping me cheery.

I came up with another equation: decisions + action = transition and change. If decisions make me mental, then
transition and change make me take to the bed. My brain was tricked into believing that moving would fix me. A different location would be the new sweater to change my life. It was the first time I understood the expression
Wherever you go, there you are
. I realized I probably should have moved to New Jersey without me.

Chin up, Jersey Girl, I told myself, all those sad sack ­computer-investigating hours were not feckless. As it turns out, difficulty making decisions is actually a thing. It seems to be a real issue for people who have anxious personalities, which, I am pleased to report, I do! I didn't read the whole article, mostly because it was kind of long and I noticed they started mentioning other things wrong with the uneasy and agitated crowd I run with and I didn't want to kick myself when already down and living in Jersey. I just scanned the piece to confirm that others were equally plagued and tacked this ailment to the running list of things wrong with me. It was validating.

I thought these revelations would cheer me up, but it was still all rainy days in my brain. It was then that Buzz jumped in again, to fix things, to help. Buzz is a producer by trade and by nature and I love him for it—when it works in my favor. If I need to pack for a trip or make a schedule, it's heavenly. But when he uses his powers to “get me out of my funk,” as he calls it, I wish he were a plumber instead.

“Why don't we move to Vermont?” Buzz said.

We had lived in New Jersey for seven months but we had built a small house in southern Vermont five years earlier. Settling there permanently was an idea we'd flirted with for years, something we'd talk about forever but never really do. Knowing it was there if I needed it was sufficient. It was the secret money stashed inside the Chock full o'Nuts coffee can. “Now? I thought we were going to retire there.”

“Well, let's go while the kids are still young. Let's try a whole new way of living. Something totally different.”

I no longer recognized this character standing before me. Nor did he have any clue who stood before him. I didn't care for new things. I liked old things. I was set in my ways, a seventy-seven-year-old man. I drive only on roads I know, I always sit in the same chair. I don't want people touching my television, I think everyone steals from me when I can't find something, and I don't like advances in technology. I am old-fangled. Do not wave some electronic tablet for me to read on, I like to hold books. Do not try to force me into sharing an online calendar with you, I prefer the oversized paper one Zaida Max used. I like pens and pencils and writing stuff down. I don't want to ride in your flying car. Don't get me wrong, I'll sample a new brand of seltzer that comes on the market—I'm not insane—I just don't think I am suited to trying a completely new way of life in the middle of mine.

“So you'd rather stay in New Jersey?” Buzz said.

“Yes.”

“Even if you're miserable.”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I hate moving. I don't ever want to move again. I hate those boxes and the sound of the ripping tape and I hate the trucks and the contractor bags I have to run out and buy for all the stuff I forgot to throw into the boxes.”

“But you're so unhappy here,” Buzz said, again with the fixing of things.

“I'm unhappy everywhere!”