back to the television set.
It all started the day before my birthday. Now that I was married, my in-laws wanted to take me out to dinner to celebrate my turning one year older. We went to a nearby Italian restaurant called Supper. My husband’s brother and his wife joined us with their two kids, Alana and Adam. The place was lit in that wonderful New York way where you can barely make out who is sitting next to you. I could mistake a Pilates ball decorated with a beard and curly hair for my husband. You have to use sonar to find the bread basket. It’s the best atmosphere for pimples.
After dinner, we walked several blocks to get ice cream at a place called OddFellows where they hand-press their own waffle cones. The smell—sweet and delicate—is exactly how I imagine the scent of Betty Crocker’s armpits.
I do not often interact with kids; they scare me because they’ll look at you and say things like “Why is your nose crooked?” or they will smile, stare straight into your soul, and then say something creepy like “You’re going to be dead.”
I constantly judge if I want to have kids depending on the kids I observe around me. When I think of the kid in Jerry Maguire, the one who has glasses and that adorable case of asthma, I want to get pregnant immediately. But when I see real human kids who aren’t reading off a script in a romantic comedy, I usually want to tie my tubes.
My mom, who wants nothing more than for me to proliferate her genes, knows this about me and gets very concerned if there are kids around us who are misbehaving. She will say, “It’s different when they are your own.” In the past year, she has grown even more sensitive to crying babies than I am. Once, we were at the grocery store looking at Triscuits and she said, “You know, it’s different when they are your own.”
“Well, we can buy them,” I said. “They’re on sale for $2.95.”
She cocked her head sideways, and it was only then that I noticed the distant wails from the dairy aisle.
But on this particular evening, things were different. The kids and I ordered the same flavor of ice cream—sprinkles. This made us feel bonded. Alana linked her arm through mine as Adam hooked onto my other arm. They did not look up and say, “You have hairy nostrils.” Instead they smiled and giggled as we walked in tandem. They yelled, “Let’s walk faster! Faster!” We powered forward, weaving around the crowds, leaving all the other adults behind.
It was one of those rare moments when I thought, I could do this: I could have kids.
After ice cream, everyone headed back to our apartment for a final cohesive farewell. When the kids entered, they wanted to sit on my aqua-colored velvet sofa chair. This was not a hand-me-down. This was my first and only real piece of adult furniture. And I went big. Again, in case you missed it, we’re talking about an aqua-colored velvet sofa chair.
I finally understood why my mom got so upset when people called her first luxury car—a LeBaron convertible—beige. “It’s actually champagne,” she’d correct them.
Every piece of furniture I had before this piece—it was so elegant that it certainly qualified as a “piece”—was inherited from the street, and the only other sofa in our house was a little maroon number that I’d guess was about fifteen years old and probably hosting the plague.
The new sofa chair felt all the more precious because we almost lost it before it made it into our apartment. In the spacious furniture store, the chair had looked tiny, like an ottoman for gerbils, but after lugging it up two flights of stairs, the deliverymen found that it wouldn’t fit through our doorway.
“Fucking shit,” shouted one.
The other one wiped sweat from his brow. “Jesus Christ. This again.”
Apparently, it’s not uncommon for people’s furniture fantasies to be much bigger than their apartments.
“Did you even measure it?” asked the deliveryman who most looked like he wanted to break my face.
“Yes,” I said. I left out the “with my mind” part.
I’m usually great at spatial stuff. I can look at a pot full of leftover soup and then select Tupperware to match the amount to perfection. It is one of my greatest gifts.
Johnny, the super in our building, eventually saved the day by taking off our front door, giving us a critical extra two inches. To put our door back on, he then charged us sixty dollars. I got upset with him for price gouging, but then I remembered that time he retrieved a hairball the size of a llama out of my shower drain and that reminded me that he should be given the Medal of Honor and be added to Mount Rushmore.
I mention all this only to explain that on the fateful night that the children arrived, I had been experiencing inappropriately strong protective and possessive impulses toward my chair. Ever since the chair was delivered several days earlier, I’d had trouble sharing it with even my husband. It seemed unwise to have something so fluffy and pristine touched by too many asses. What I once viewed as abominable—the plastic sofa cover—I now thought of as a brave and courageous choice made by grannies the world over. What a beautiful ancient practice!
So when the kids walked in and wanted to plant their butts on my chair, I felt a lot of resistance, but we’d also just returned from such a lovely evening together. I had been so engrossed by our jaunt back to the apartment—they were so fun—that I’d barely even noticed New York City’s classic eau de parfum, a bouquet of rotting rat corpse melded with stale urine, which was constantly brewing on our corner.
Also, and most compelling of all, my husband was giving me his famous and highly effective death stare. The only thing that was missing was a red laser beam shooting out from each of his pupils. He could see it in my face, in my posture, that I didn’t want our niece and nephew to sit in my new chair, and he did not approve of that inclination.
Reluctantly, I gave the kids permission to sit down.
They sat for a moment—scooted around—but then they quickly became bored. Part of me was relieved that they exited the chair without defiling it while the other part of me was offended that they got over the revelatory seating so fast. I sat down in their stead while they returned to the living room rug, where they dismembered Mr. Potato Head.
We said goodnight and then my in-laws left.
The next day was my actual birthday. It is the one day out of the year that I have profoundly unreasonable expectations for how I should be treated. Logically, I believe it is a gift to be on this planet and we should all spend the day of our birth picking up litter, but something comes over me and I become a complete beast. I feel terrible for my loved ones. By evening, my husband is usually calling me the Birthday Maranster (Mara + monster = Maranster). I even get upset at inanimate objects. Red traffic lights piss me off. Do they not realize that on this day many years ago I came out my mother’s womb and therefore, in my presence, they should turn green?
I don’t know how I came to feel so entitled. The only thing my parents did for my birthday was let me choose what we were having for dinner. I always picked poached sole over steamed rice with a splash of Knorr instant hollandaise sauce. Besides that, it was business as usual.
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