jokes like: Where’s the groom? She likes the attention and she thinks it makes boys imagine marrying her. This backfires somehow.
• Kramer dies?
There was a crashing sound in the kitchen, a plate breaking. “Shoot,” Kay heard her mother say.
• Elaine has an unbreakable dinner plate that breaks and that she has been trying to return to Bed Bath & Beyond. But the guy behind the counter looks at the bag with the pieces of plate in it and says they can’t take it back because she dropped it on too hard a floor. The guy says: “Sorry, your floor’s too hard.” Elaine makes a face at him like, what?
Kay went to bed without finishing her homework. Deb came, as she had been doing these last few nights, to sit with her daughter in case she cried, which mostly Kay didn’t. She’d been going to bed earlier each night because it was taking her longer to fall asleep.
For her mother Kay had always been the more difficult, difficult because she would not make herself so. She would not speak up as Simon did, and so it was impossible to know what she thought and felt, how much she understood. Deb knew that adults were always underestimating what an eleven-year-old understands, but she was too far from that age to remember how much.
She had tried. “It’s okay,” she’d said that first night after Simon had gone to his room (part of his
prerogative,
those days, to be always the first to leave). Sometimes a married person meets someone new, someone they think is nice, or exciting, and sometimes they’ll make a mistake. Lots of married people, women too, but mostly men, lots of them do this. “But it doesn’t mean anything. And it isn’t about you.”
And Deb left her daughter to sleep, not knowing that she’d said the wrong thing—so easy to do when you are a parent. Where she’d gone wrong, it was just a word, how could she have known. What she should have said: It doesn’t mean
everything.
Instead she’d said that it didn’t mean anything, and Kay had lain awake picking paint blisters off the wall, trying hard to believe that the things her father had done were okay. If this was the world that was waiting for her, it would be a good idea to stick a toe into it now, let her body adapt to such a future, which was cold, not at all a place she wanted to be.
Everyone does these things.
You know what was a lie, then? Television was a lie.
Friends
and
Everybody Loves Raymond,
where married dads didn’t have sex with other women. Maybe they did and just never talked about it. Too obvious to get its own episode.
When she was little—Kay’s stories often began this way, with the old people in the room always shouting, “You’re
still
little”—but when she was little, maybe four years earlier, Deb brought home a DVD of
The Little Mermaid
from a peddler down by Battery Park. Only it wasn’t the version she’d seen before: Here the Ariel was blond, and her name wasn’t Ariel but Marina, and instead of Sebastian the crab there was a dolphin named Fritz. It was the original fairy tale, not Disney but Hans Christian Andersen, and in the end Marina turned to foam, was happy to turn to a clear, fine sea-foam so that she could float or buoy or do whatever sea-foam does near her prince. Kay had cried at the television, “Don’t they know kids are supposed to watch this?” (Adults loved that part of the story, that she’d said that.)
If that was a fairy tale, what was
Seinfeld
? She knew she’d been watching something, not the truth, but not something entirely foreign. Life wasn’t like television, but did it have to be so different?
Stranger things happen. Stranger things happen than this.
So the girl was not answering. So what? That was like her, to blow a storm in from nowhere and then just disappear. How many calls back in winter had he let go off in his pocket? How many messages had he let sit weeks, unplayed, until one came in for work, something he needed? Only then had he cycled through the
• Kramer dies?
There was a crashing sound in the kitchen, a plate breaking. “Shoot,” Kay heard her mother say.
• Elaine has an unbreakable dinner plate that breaks and that she has been trying to return to Bed Bath & Beyond. But the guy behind the counter looks at the bag with the pieces of plate in it and says they can’t take it back because she dropped it on too hard a floor. The guy says: “Sorry, your floor’s too hard.” Elaine makes a face at him like, what?
Kay went to bed without finishing her homework. Deb came, as she had been doing these last few nights, to sit with her daughter in case she cried, which mostly Kay didn’t. She’d been going to bed earlier each night because it was taking her longer to fall asleep.
For her mother Kay had always been the more difficult, difficult because she would not make herself so. She would not speak up as Simon did, and so it was impossible to know what she thought and felt, how much she understood. Deb knew that adults were always underestimating what an eleven-year-old understands, but she was too far from that age to remember how much.
She had tried. “It’s okay,” she’d said that first night after Simon had gone to his room (part of his
prerogative,
those days, to be always the first to leave). Sometimes a married person meets someone new, someone they think is nice, or exciting, and sometimes they’ll make a mistake. Lots of married people, women too, but mostly men, lots of them do this. “But it doesn’t mean anything. And it isn’t about you.”
And Deb left her daughter to sleep, not knowing that she’d said the wrong thing—so easy to do when you are a parent. Where she’d gone wrong, it was just a word, how could she have known. What she should have said: It doesn’t mean
everything.
Instead she’d said that it didn’t mean anything, and Kay had lain awake picking paint blisters off the wall, trying hard to believe that the things her father had done were okay. If this was the world that was waiting for her, it would be a good idea to stick a toe into it now, let her body adapt to such a future, which was cold, not at all a place she wanted to be.
Everyone does these things.
You know what was a lie, then? Television was a lie.
Friends
and
Everybody Loves Raymond,
where married dads didn’t have sex with other women. Maybe they did and just never talked about it. Too obvious to get its own episode.
When she was little—Kay’s stories often began this way, with the old people in the room always shouting, “You’re
still
little”—but when she was little, maybe four years earlier, Deb brought home a DVD of
The Little Mermaid
from a peddler down by Battery Park. Only it wasn’t the version she’d seen before: Here the Ariel was blond, and her name wasn’t Ariel but Marina, and instead of Sebastian the crab there was a dolphin named Fritz. It was the original fairy tale, not Disney but Hans Christian Andersen, and in the end Marina turned to foam, was happy to turn to a clear, fine sea-foam so that she could float or buoy or do whatever sea-foam does near her prince. Kay had cried at the television, “Don’t they know kids are supposed to watch this?” (Adults loved that part of the story, that she’d said that.)
If that was a fairy tale, what was
Seinfeld
? She knew she’d been watching something, not the truth, but not something entirely foreign. Life wasn’t like television, but did it have to be so different?
Stranger things happen. Stranger things happen than this.
So the girl was not answering. So what? That was like her, to blow a storm in from nowhere and then just disappear. How many calls back in winter had he let go off in his pocket? How many messages had he let sit weeks, unplayed, until one came in for work, something he needed? Only then had he cycled through the
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