What did I know about breakups? I married my first
boyfriend.
Everything I knew about breakups I learned from my younger
sister, Miranda. She'd been broken up with at least ten
times in her twenty-nine years,yet she never saw it
coming. It was always the same story. They were in bed
(usually his, because Miranda had roommates), she asked
where the relationship was going, and ten or twenty or two
hundred minutes later, she was informed that the
relationship was going nowhere because it was over. She
then tearfully collected her toothbrush and facial
cleanser, the box of Tampax under the sink, her nighties
and her books (purposely leaving something behind, like
her leather jacket or contact lenses), stuffed everything
into a large brown paper bag she'd found wedged between
the refrigerator and oven and ran crying out of his
apartment building.She stopped at the corner, huddled
under the awning of a twenty-four-hour deli, and called me
from her cell phone while the paper bag ripped, the
contents of her life with Jim, Mark, Peter, Ethan, Andrew,
Gabriel, et al, dropping to the sidewalk.
And so at midnight or two in the morning, my phone would
ring, Miranda sobbing and sputtering on the other end.
Miranda: "Eeeee…woo…uhh mahhhh."
Me: "He threw up on you?"
Miranda sobs harder: "Eeee…bwoh up wi muhh!"
Ah. Translation: He broke up with me.
If my husband happened to be out at midnight or two in the
morning delivering a baby (he's an obstetrician), rather
than go pick up my sister and leave our twelve-year-old
daughter, Amelia, alone in the apartment, I'd instruct
Miranda to calm down, take deep breaths and hail a cab.
Since she rarely had more than six bucks on her, I'd meet
her taxi in front of my building and pay the driver. Then
I'd take her torn brown paper bag, hand her a few tissues
for her running mascara and red nose, sling an arm over
her shoulder and lead her upstairs, where we'd order in
Chinese food and watch her favorite movie, Muriel's
Wedding, until she was ready to tell me what happened.
What happened was always more or less the same thing, with
minor variations: she was too this or too that; he met
someone else; he was moving to Boston/Botswana/the Upper
West Side and wasn't into long-distance relationships; she
caught him cheating; he didn't want her to leave a
toothbrush in his toothbrush holder; it wasn't her, it was
him; it was her, she asked where the relationship was
going. Et cetera.
Miranda would scarf down her spring rolls and her shrimp
dumplings and half of my sweet-and-sour chicken and break
open the fortune cookies, looking for assurances of future
love, and I'd hold her hand and reheat her tea and hand
her another box of tissues. Then she'd burst into a fresh
round of tears and croak out, "I…tau… eee…wuv-d…muh."
Translation: I thought he loved me.
The last time was six months ago and had taken even me by
surprise. Miranda had been so in love, and the boyfriend,
Gabriel, had shown up at every family function during
their year-long relationship. I'd liked him, my daughter
had liked him — even my husband, who couldn't stand any of
Miranda's boyfriends, had liked him.
After every breakup, she'd sob out the same
question: "What's…wong…wid…meeee, Luceeeee?"
What's wrong with you is what's wrong with me, little
sister. Which was: we were bad at reading signs. I
attributed this to growing up with an odd mother who would
be, say, making a quiche lorraine from scratch,then
suddenly take off her apron,hang it up on its peg by the
cookbooks,announce she was leaving and then not return for
a few days. During our childhood, our mother left a total
of forty-nine times. We never saw it coming, because there
were no signs. When her internal bomb imploded, it was
time for her to go, and she went quietly, no muss, no
fuss. Sometimes she was gone for an hour, sometimes for
days. Never longer than one week. Once, she rented a house
at the Jersey shore in the middle of winter, and when I
asked her what she did all alone for seven days in the
freezing cold, she said she read four Janet Evanovich
novels from the town library and knitted herself a scarf
(half of one, anyway).
My father was a quiet, even-tempered man and let her have
these "moments."
"Your mother is taking some me-time," he'd tell us when
she'd get up from the couch in the middle of Wheel of
Fortune and return three days later.
"Your mother is crazy," Miranda would whisper to me,
rolling her eyes. And then she'd link her arm around mine,
her attention seemingly focused on Vanna's sparkly dress.
So when Larry — the husband I chose because he lacked a
crazy gene — went completely nuts during Thanksgiving
dinner this afternoon, I was as shocked as everyone else.
"Has he been acting strangely lately?"the various
relatives sitting around the dining-room table asked me.
Nope. He hadn't been. Or at least I didn't think so. As I
said, I was bad at reading signs and I knew nothing about
breakups. So I didn't know that my husband's temper
tantrum — over a paper plate — was a big neon sign that a
breakup was coming.
We had two Thanksgiving traditions. The first was that
dinner was always at our apartment. Actually that was less
a tradition and more a result of the fact that no one else
ever offered to host. Aunt Dinah (my father's sister)
hadn't cooked a hot meal since Uncle Saul died."Who wants
to cook for one?" she'd say before driving off to Boston
Market for her contribution of two pounds of mashed
potatoes. My sister couldn't cook and had the
aforementioned roommate. My husband's sister couldn't fit
more than three people into her tiny studio apartment.
Larry's parents, recently retired professors of
comparative literature at Rutgers University,where they'd
met and had a long tenured life together,were staunch
vegetarians and brought their own food to all family
functions. My parents took off for their gated community
in Florida the second the forecast called for temperatures
under sixty-five. And Larry's elderly grandparents could
barely lift a fork.
Which left me. I'd managed to make an entire traditional
feast for eleven and edit a manuscript for work (I was a
senior editor at Bold Books) without a) getting turkey
guts on a single manuscript page or b) burning anything
because I was so caught up in the unauthorized biography
of Chrissy Cobb, the nineteen-year-old pop singer who had
lifted her shirt on live television six months ago and got
herself banned for life from the networks.
"Like I need those conservative assholes?" the gorgeous
but grumpy singer countered in a Rolling Stone magazine
interview."Like Oprah or Live with Regis and Kelly are
TRL. Puh-leeze!"
All of which made her a worthy subject of a Bold
Books "instant" book. Instant books are conceived,
written, edited and sent through the stages of production
at warp speed to capitalize on the timeliness of a media
frenzy. The life and times of a nineteen-year-old didn't
amount to many chapters, so it was a short biography,
something to be grateful for on this Thanksgiving Day when
I was working and cooking inside a too-small, too-hot
kitchen and being interrupted for more Diet Coke, more
hummus, more ice cubes by the relatives. The edited
manuscript was due to production on Monday, and since I
was gunning for a promotion at Bold (the editor in chief,
Futterman, had announced his intention to promote one of
his three senior editors to executive editor), I had to
spend the entire weekend working on it. Whora Belle —
oops, I mean Wanda Belle — senior editor of romance, had
the whory edge (I had a suspicion that she and Futterman
had once been involved), and Boy Wonder (oops again, I
mean Christopher Levy), senior editor of true crime and
mysteries, had the male-bonding edge, but I had the
seniority. Which meant absolutely nothing to a jerk like
Futterman.
Although I'd given the assistant editor, who was my one
staff member, two weeks to do a preliminary edit on the
Cobb Bio — a luxury in the world of instant books
(overnight was more like it) — she hadn't done anything
but take the manuscript and then give it back. Forget the
glaring inconsistency in the second chapter, she didn't
even catch the typo in the first sentence:
When pop singer Chrissy Cobb lifted her tiny tank top on
national television, baring her silicone-enhanced brests
for all of America…
Ah,something else to be grateful for — yesterday had been
the assistant editor's last day. Hence the untouched
manuscript — what was I going to do, fire her? Give her
another mediocre performance review? Under a mangle of
black tights and loose M&M's in her desk drawer,I also
found four unread book proposals on the eighteen-month-old
baby boy who survived alone in the woods for three days
after getting separated from his parents on a camping
trip. ABC was airing a TV movie on the story in June, and
Futterman wanted an instant book on shelves exactly one
week before airtime, to capitalize on ABC's promotion.
Working today — all weekend, really — would help land me
that promotion. And it wasn't as if I were taking time
away from my husband and daughter, which led me to our
second Thanksgiving Day family tradition: the Thanksgiving
Day parade.Every year,Larry and Amelia took the cross-town
bus from Manhattan's Upper East Side,where we lived, to
the Upper West Side to watch the parade, unless one of
Larry's patients went into labor, a hazard of marrying an
obstetrician. Regardless, every year, Larry's entire side
of the family came over two hours early and were always
annoyed that Larry and Amelia weren't home.
Did I mind that I was stuck entertaining the relatives
(mostly Larry's) while Larry and Amelia escaped to the
Thanksgiving Day parade in this year's terrific weather
(fifty-one degrees!)? No. Larry often disappeared with
Amelia moments before company was due, especially if the
company included our various relatives, even his own. Did
I yell at him for it? Nope.I'd rather he spent some alone-
time with our daughter than save me from his parents,who
were prone to conducting long, dry debates about
the "death of literature" while sipping white wine.
Larry's job called him away from home at odd hours,
evenings, weekends, middle of the night. Daddy-and-me time
was precious to Amelia.
Larry Masterson, M.D., OB, was a darling of the Upper East
Side moms who flirtily referred to him as Dr. Master-ful.
I did and didn't get it. Larry is a good-looking man, yes,
but he'd slowly morphed from the hot med student I'd
married at twenty-two to a soft-bellied, balding thirty-
four-year-old in comfortable slacks and horn-rimmed
glasses. Yet despite his fleshy cheeks and Pillsbury
stomach and the Rockports, the mothers swooned.
Perhaps it was his bedside manner, which was spectacular
outside of our bed. My marriage had been blah for months
now. Not years. Just months. Just recently.
An affair? I wondered occasionally. But when? How? Larry
was either delivering a baby at three in the morning or
spending weekend afternoons enlightening Amelia on the
finer points of menstruation in dry, dull clinical terms
that held her enrapt. Amelia, who had the attention span
of a toddler but the worries and questions of an
adolescent, loved listening to her father's documentary-
style monologues on Your Body. He was a doctor. He knew.
What he said was official.
Between Larry's office hours and all the weekend calls
from his service about water breaking and preterm labor,
Amelia rarely saw her father, despite our living only
three avenues and two blocks from his Park Avenue
practice. So if he actually had the opportunity to take
his daughter to the parade for a few hours while I got
stuck with the Mastersons, fine with me.
Besides,I had Miranda to entertain me.My sister was funny
as hell (Amelia idolized her "super-cool!" aunt,
especially in contrast with her super-uncool aunt, Larry's
sister). And if Miranda was with me, she wasn't standing
in front of her exboyfriend's apartment building at one in
the morning, staring up at his windows and wondering if he
was in bed with someone else.I had no doubt he was;
Miranda held out hope.
Rewind to fifteen minutes ago, when Larry and Amelia
returned from the parade.