I'm Fine and Neither Are You
Camille Pagán
ONE
Mistakes were made. The first wasn’t even something I did; it was only a germ of an idea, fleeting but infectious. I had just sat on the toilet and was mulling over the day’s to-dos and why-didn’t-Is when a single thought shot past all the rest:
I want out.
Maybe it was the photo I had seen on my phone moments earlier. One of my college friends was on vacation yet again, and had posted a shot of the vast Caribbean horizon beyond her sandy, pedicured toes. A novel was on her lap, closed to highlight the cover (and, presumably, her sculpted thighs). The caption noted that a cabana boy had fetched the cocktail she was holding in her free hand.
I glanced down at my own legs, which were not so much toned as two-toned. I had recently read that making it through mothering alive required putting on your own oxygen mask before assisting others. Alas—I had failed to make the connection between survival and sunscreen.
But my sudden desire to be somewhere else was probably less envy and more the result of my second child screaming through the half-inch gap where the bathroom door failed to meet the frame. “Mommy! Mom! Maaahhhmaaay!”
“Miles, can I not have one whole minute of peace?” The answer to this wasted breath of a question would remain no for another twelve years and two months—not that I was counting. “Go attempt to wake your father up.”
The knob twisted. Then the door flung open and there stood my son, tight fists resting on his narrow hips. His face was contorted with a mix of lingering rage and the fresh pleasure of ratting out his older sister. “Stevie called me Rumpleforeskin!” he announced.
Still perched on the toilet, I turned and tucked my chin to my shoulder to stifle a laugh. When I had composed myself, I looked over at him. “Well, that’s a silly thing to say. What do I always tell you about how to respond to someone who’s mean to you?”
He smiled angelically. “Punch them in the tenders?”
“Sweetheart, if you do that and tell people I told you to, you’re going to end up living with Cookie.”
His face immediately crumpled and he began to cry. It was true that my motherin-law, Riya, who preferred to be identified as a baked good rather than a grandmother, smothered my children to the point of terror when she bothered to see them. Still—Miles’ tears were a reminder of the microscopic line between being six and having borderline personality disorder.
“Oh, sweetie, come on. Just ignore Stevie,” I said, as though the four hundredth time I uttered this advice would be the one that finally stuck. “Go pour yourself a bowl of cereal.”
“I want waffles,” he said, sniffling. His cheeks, which bore the high color of indignation, were streaked with glossy tear trails. I would have pulled him to me and hugged him, but I hadn’t wiped yet.
Instead, Miles stalked off, leaving the door wide open. It was just far enough away that I couldn’t close it myself, so I quickly reached beside me. My fingers landed on a cardboard roll where paper should have been. The basket beside the toilet was empty.
I needed someone to trek to the dungeon, as my children referred to our basement, and retrieve toilet paper.
“Miles!” I called. “Come back!”
Radio silence.
I decided to try my daughter instead. “Stevie! . . . Stevie?”
Still no response. I was ready to revert to yodeling empty threats into the hallway when Sanjay appeared. He wrinkled his nose. “What died?”
Romance, I thought. But instead of saying this, I reached behind me and flushed, which sent toilet water spraying everywhere. Who needed a bidet when you had decades-old plumbing? “Good morning to you, too. Can you please get me some toilet paper?”
Sanjay shook his head, which had yet to produce a single gray hair. At thirty-nine, his stomach was still as flat as the day we met sixteen years earlier. His bronze skin was nearly as unlined as it had been then, too. Only the dark half-moons beneath his eyes hinted at a string of midlife disappointments. “We ran out yesterday.”
I stared at him. “And you just decided to tell me that now?”
“I told you we were low last week, Penelope,” he said, and since he was using my full name, I knew he was officially annoyed. “Remember?”
I did not.
“I didn’t have a chance to remind you again last night, because you were passed out by nine,” he added.
Yes, yes, I was, because I had been up at two the night before to change Miles’ pee-soaked sheets. And the night before that, I had stared at the ceiling for nearly an hour, wondering if whatever material had been used to make it look as though we were sleeping a few feet beneath the moon would give us mesothelioma. A popcorn ceiling, our Realtor had called it when we bought the house. Sanjay had purchased a mask and spraying solution and a special scraping tool, and stood on a ladder with his neck bent backward for eight minutes before giving up. I had found the number of a guy—a wall guy, as opposed to the roof guy or the lawn guy or, for the sake of parity, the painter gal. Four years later, Sanjay still swore he was going to call him; on principle, I refused to do so myself. Every once in a while, I awoke to find a chunk of plaster at the end of the bed.
Sanjay disappeared. I was about to unleash a string of expletives (under my breath, lest the children hear) when he reappeared and tossed a package of baby wipes at me. “Use these,” he said as the wipes whizzed past me and hit the shower curtain.