Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [89]
“Oh, right! Recovering. Well, it seems more like resting if you ask me. Taking a break. Resting drug addicts. They always go back.”
“Not always. Three percent of us never use again!”
“Oh, excuse me!” Marianne said.
Heading toward the subway, I decided I needed a slice. Landscaping was the most physically exhausting work I had ever done, which was not entirely a point of woman-pride. It felt pretty stupid most days. What was I trying to prove? Why didn’t I just get a regular job? How long could I do this?
I got in line at the pizza place, getting out the five Mike had given me, waiting for the owner of the place to get to me.
There is definitely a difference between working shit jobs when you’re in your twenties and all your friends are working shit jobs, too, and working shit jobs when everyone except you has decided to fuck being an actress and has gone to law school and/or gotten married, is having kids and wearing comfortable clothing while you’re still “doing your thing.” I was headed to Palm Beach to do Sally on the Mount at my friend’s boyfriend’s house. I was going from being the gardener at a fancy New York town house to being the talent at a house show in Palm Beach. It was an upgrade, definitely, but I wasn’t sure why I was doing it other than for the money, which was reason enough. I thought it made sense. I couldn’t tell anymore.
The pizza guy repeated something he’d said while I was spacing out.
“What can I get you, sir?”
Sir? Sir? I was now a sir? I now looked so hideous, so dirtcovered and disheveled and ugly that people thought I was a man? I was paralyzed. He must have needed glasses, or would realize his mistake momentarily. He continued looking right at me. “Sir?”
Fuck it. What was I going to do? “One plain.” Shit. I took my slice and left, eating while I walked to the number 6 train at Seventy-seventh Street.
AT HOME I TOOK OFF my Carhartts and my City Gardens sweatshirt and jumped in the shower. My boyfriend of five months, Nick, called to see how I was doing. Nick used to have a junk shop on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. Katharine and I would go and check him out occasionally on the weekends. He got married and moved to L.A., but he’d come back to Brooklyn occasionally. One day I ran into him on the street, and he told me he was getting divorced.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, having no idea whether my face was matching my words.
And then a couple months later we were dating. I’ve always felt that the ideal way to live is to go to bed with someone and wake up alone. Heaven. But Nick had a quality that I hadn’t found in guys for about a decade: he didn’t drive me insane. I was doing my show in L.A., staying at his house, when my mom died. Nick’s dad had died only about a year earlier. His father, unlike my mother, died suddenly. He was struck by lightning while out for a run in the rain in Tampa, Florida, which, according to Nick, is the lightning-strikingand-killing-you capital of the United States.
“Are you okay?” Nick asked.
“I feel okay, but some guy just called me ‘sir,’ so maybe I don’t look so great. I was a little nauseous earlier, but I think it was this banana I found in Dirk’s truck. Maybe it was bad.”
“A bad banana? Not likely. Stop eating food you find in Dirk’s truck, baby. You’re probably pregnant.”
“Ha! Yeah.”
“You are, I bet.”
“Stop it, Jesus.”
“It’d be great. I love you. I love our baby—”
“STOP!” I laughed.
“Go run to the corner and get an EPT.”
“I don’t need to do one of those.”
After getting off the phone, I realized I did need to take an EPT. If only because he had now made me anxious. And maybe excited. I threw on some sweatpants and went to buy a test. I got home and did it immediately. It said I was pregnant. I took another one and it said “ditto.” I called Nick.
“I’m pregnant.”
“I told you!” he yelled. He was happy. I was happy. We were happily pregnant. He was meeting me in Florida the following day.
When I got off the plane in Palm Beach, my old friend Cassie was standing outside the terminal