Attach ments(22)

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Mitch read your story at breakfast this morning, and he was p;ssed. He loves that theater. He saw The Goonies there six times. (His seventh-grade girlfriend had a crush on Corey Feldman.) He said that the Cinerama screen could make any movie look good.

<<Beth to Jennifer>>

1. Mitch had a seventh-grade girlfriend? Play on, player.

2. I hope he wasn’t implying that The Goonies was a bad movie. I love Martha Plimpton, and Corey Feldman was excellent. He never deserved to become a punch line. Did you see Stand By Me? The ’Burbs? The Fox and the Hound?

3. I love picturing you guys reading the paper together over breakfast. It’s so blissfully domestic.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Not this morning, it wasn’t.

I was reading the National page, and there was a story about a mother whose son tied her up because she wouldn’t buy him a PlayStation, and I said, “Jesus, one more reason not to have kids.” And Mitch snorted (really, he snorted) and said, “Are you writing these down somewhere? All the reasons we can’t have kids?”

I told him not to be mean, and he said, “You don’t be mean. I know that you’re not ready for a baby.

You don’t have to rub it in.”

“Rub it in to what?” I asked. “Are you wounded?”

Then he said that he was tired and that I should just forget it. “I love you,” he said, “I’m going to work.” I told him not to say it like that, like he had to say it to be excused from the table. And he asked if I would rather he left without saying “I love you.”

I said: “I’d rather you said ‘I love you’ because you were so full of love for me that you couldn’t keep it in. I would rather that you wouldn’t leave the house mad at me.”

And then he said that he wasn’t mad at me, that he was mad at the situation. The kid situation. Or, rather, the lack-of-kid situation.

But I am the lack-of-kid situation. So I said so. “You’re mad at me,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m mad at you. But I love you. And I have to go to work. Good-bye.”

Then I worried that he’d get into a car accident on his way to work, and I’d have to spend the rest of my life thinking about how I didn’t say, “I love you, too.”

I purposely didn’t take my folic acid pill after breakfast—to spite us both.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> When did you start taking folic acid?

<<Jennifer to Beth>> After my last pregnancy scare. It seemed like it would give me one less thing to worry about. Do you think I should call Mitch and apologize?

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Yes.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> But I don’t want to. He started it.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Maybe all of your pregnancy anxiety is starting to get to him.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> It is. I know it is. I don’t blame him. But I’m no good at apologizing. I always end up making it worse. I’ll say, “I’m sorry,” and I’ll be all sweet, and then once I’m forgiven, I’ll say, “But you really did start it.”

<<Beth to Jennifer>> That’s awful, don’t do that. That’s exactly what your mother would say.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> That’s exactly what my mother has said, to me, a million times.

I inherited it. I’m genetically programmed to be a terrible person.

Speaking of my mother, I foolishly told her last weekend that Mitch and I had been fighting about having a baby. And she sighed—have you heard her sigh? It’s like a balloon dying—and said, “That’s how it starts. You better watch yourself.”

“It,” of course, is divorce. Which she’s sure I inherited along with her straight teeth and her evil apologies. She’s just waiting. She keeps poking my marriage with a toothpick. Almost done!

So I was like “Really, Mom? It starts with fighting? And here I thought it started with my third- grade teacher.”

(Which, of course, is where her divorce started. Though one could argue that my parents’ divorce started the day of their shotgun wedding, that my father’s affair with Mrs. Grandy was more of a symptom than a disease.)

So, after that horrible, caustic remark, my mother and I were fighting, and I said more awful things, and she finally said, “You can say what you want, Jennifer, but we both know who’s going to pick up the pieces when this all falls apart.”

So I hung up on her, and Mitch—who had wandered into the room, but didn’t know what we were fighting about—said, “I wish you wouldn’t talk to her like that. She’s your mother.”