Nine
Tuesday
For a split second when I opened my eyes Tuesday morning, it felt like a normal day. Then I spotted the teal vest. Yesterday
afternoon I’d found it crumpled under my sweats on the floor of my bedroom, gone through its empty pockets, and left it slung
over my mom’s old Eames dupe office chair in the hopes something about it would trigger my memory. But now it triggered a
paralyzing surge of anxiety instead.
Still I dragged myself out of bed, shoved the vest into the back of my closet, and started the morning whirlwind of kid wakeup,
teeth brushing, breakfast. Being furloughed might mean I was extra broke, but at least once I’d gotten the twins on the bus
I could sit at my kitchen table, slumped over my phone and a cup of coffee, and have an uninterrupted panic attack. But my
email contained a reminder from the twins’ teacher, Mrs. Glidewell, that I was supposed to speak at eleven o’clock for Job
Talk Tuesday.
When Mrs. Glidewell first hit me up, I’d suggested she ask a firefighter or garbage collector. My gig at the Capitol Grill
wasn’t the stuff of second-grade dream jobs. But she’d told me not to worry. “The kids are obsessed with the state capitol,”
she’d said. “Just tell them about the underground tunnels and they’ll be all in.”
I considered canceling for mental health reasons. But Phoebe and Alice were so excited about me speaking to their class. I
didn’t want to disappoint them. And once I went to the police, they might start scrutinizing my recent behavior. Right now,
more than anything, I needed to act like everything in my world was normal.
I put my coffee cup in the kitchen sink.
Like most horizontal surfaces in my mom’s place, the window ledge above was lined with fake food.
A plastic peach, a wooden crème br?lée, a rainbow of inedible patisserie.
If my mom had had to name a religion, it would’ve been camp.
She loved outrageous artificiality, bright colors, and anything so out-of-date as to be hilarious.
Her style definitely wasn’t my style. But I couldn’t bear to throw away a single slice of plastic quiche. Even the twins knew
to return Grandma Lulu’s fake food to its rightful place after playing with it. I picked up a plastic macaron, as if it might
help me channel my mother’s wisdom. No such luck.
Though driving with a dead guy in my trunk was a terrible idea, black ice coated the sidewalks and roads, so I couldn’t bike.
My friend Patzi—a witch who works at House of Intuition in West Hollywood—once told me that a powerful spiritual practice
is thinking about things you have now that you once wanted. So to calm myself down as I headed toward the twins’ school, I
thought about how much I’d once longed to be a mom.
Comedy tends to attract sex addicts, alcoholics, people who are hogs for attention and like to put themselves first. So I
was as surprised as anyone when I woke up one morning at thirty-six with a longing for a baby as powerful as hunger or thirst
or the kind of horniness you only feel in your teen years.
I was waiting tables at a fancy sushi place near Abbot Kinney to make rent. My OB/GYN warned me I didn’t have a lifetime left
to find Mr. Mom. Any baby I carried would be at risk of a million unhappy scenarios merely because I was old enough to remember
the release of Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. When I finally met the man of my dreams, I would probably yell, “What took you so long?! You’ve put our baby in danger!”
My mom was the one who said: “There are plenty of women who have babies on their own.” She didn’t have to remind me she was one of them.
She offered to pay for my IVF. “I think of my savings as your inheritance anyway,” she said.
“You might as well spend it now.” (At the time, I had no idea that my mom didn’t have savings.
It was a second mortgage on her duplex that paid for my fertility treatment!
But maybe I should’ve known.) She promised once I had a baby, she’d come stay with me a week at Thanksgiving, two weeks at Christmas, a week at spring break, and I could come to Boise for a month in the summer.
We would make it work. And in LA, I had two waitress friends I could nanny-share with and a host of pals who promised they’d babysit while I showered or ran to the grocery store, or even did an open mic night.
My mom had a pal from yoga who ran the sperm bank in Boise, so she managed to qualify me for a massive discount. I had a whole
stand-up bit about that. (“You know how you should never buy chicken once it’s been marked down? Food poisoning lasts twenty-four
hours. Bad sperm lasts a lifetime.”) But the joke was on me, because the sperm was super-powered—I got pregnant on the first
round.
The wildest, most intense moment of my life happened when my OB first showed me two heartbeats. Twins! I’d never imagined
such abundance. Sobs wracked me. Two babies! I was terrified, sure. But more than anything I felt like the Universe had seen
my yearning and blessed me twice over. Twins are strange. Twins are a phenomenon. Twins are Nature herself whispering that
life is full of mystery and magic.
No one tells you that if twins are magic, carrying twins is an ancient, fairy-tale-level curse. By the time I was eight months
pregnant I was almost as big around (60 inches!) as I am tall (64 inches!). I was literally shaped like a beach ball. A bumpy
purple-gray rash called “prurigo of pregnancy” made my skin resemble the hide of an elderly elephant.
When the doctor laid both babies on my chest, my mother was there with me.
They were the most wrinkly, gunky, funny-looking creatures—perfectly identical except for Phoebe’s Florida birthmark—and I loved them so much something inside me cracked open.
I promised myself I’d be the best mom, always there for them.
But I’d also show them a woman could be a mother and still pursue her creative dreams. And with the help of my own beloved mom and my misfit gaggle of artsy weirdo LA friends, I would raise them surrounded by love and community.
But sometimes life doesn’t go according to plan.
Now as I slipped into the twins’ second-grade classroom, Alice’s wave was enthusiastic, Phoebe’s too-cool-for-school. At their
elementary school in LA, they’d been in different classes, the policy being to separate twins so they had a chance to develop
their own identities. But in Boise, they’d been put in the same room, and I hadn’t objected.
A bulletin board dedicated to the Heroes of the United States of America was decorated with kid drawings. Martin Luther King
Jr. George Washington. Thomas Edison. Meanwhile, Phoebe had drawn Joan Rivers with a halo and real sequins glued all over
her kaftan. Alice had sketched a stooped woman in a hat, clearly meant to represent comedic trailblazer Moms Mabley. Often
my life felt like a long series of failures. But when I saw those drawings, I had the sense I was doing something right.
A dad stood at the front of the room wearing crisp jeans and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. A hot dad. Maybe
Mrs. Glidewell had found a firefighter after all. School events like this made me worried for the day my kids would come home
upset they didn’t have a father. But if that happened, I’d tell them what I’d always told them. That I’d wanted babies so
much. That I loved them so much. That our family was perfect and enough.
That last part was maybe a lie. Because while my mother had loved the girls as much as a second parent, without her our family
was a wagon missing a wheel.
A kid in the row in front of me picked his nose and ate it. Hubert the Booger Eater. The twins had told me about him. I tried
to focus on whatever Hot Dad was talking about. But his pecs were distracting. A glance at his left hand revealed a bare ring
finger. Interesting.
“So basically, my main job is to take guns away from the bad guys who shouldn’t have them,” he was saying. “I don’t go undercover myself. But I provide a lot of support to undercover agents. Any questions?”
Was he Boise PD? Or Ada County Sheriff’s Department? Sitting up straighter, I tried to look like a woman who definitely did
not have a dead guy in her trunk.
Alice’s seatmate, Johnica, raised her hand.
“Why do the bad guys have guns?” Johnica asked.
Hot Dad considered the question. “Some of them want to sell the guns. A lot of them think they need to protect themselves
from the government. Only a small percentage want to commit mass murders or actually overthrow the government. I definitely want to get guns and explosives away from them.”
A glance around the room showed twenty-six horrified faces. Hot Dad obviously didn’t spend much time with kids. Hot Absentee
Dad, I should call him. Mrs. Glidewell must’ve pulled out all the stops to guilt him into speaking to the class. Which kid
in the room was his? My bet was on a boy in the second row with big ears and adoring eyes. Poor kid. Lame, disappointing dads
made me feel better about the fact that my kids had no dad at all.
Hubert shot his hand into the air. “How do I get that job? It thounds tho cool.” The twins hadn’t mentioned his endearing
lisp.
“Basically you have to avoid doing anything illegal your whole life,” Hot Absentee Dad said. “Like don’t do things in Vegas
expecting they’ll stay in Vegas. Don’t think weed’s no big deal now just because three-fourths of Oregonians are stoned out
of their minds on gummies at any given time. You’re not in Oregon.”
“Amen,” I said.
Hot Dad smiled at me, and I could feel it in my toes. Mrs. Glidewell cleared her throat.
“You have to take a lie detector test when they hire you,” Hot Dad continued. “So all illegal things are out.”
“What would you lie about?” Johnica asked, looking concerned.
Mrs. Glidewell jumped in, clearly worried Hot Absentee Dad would start listing possible peccadillos. “Can we all give a big thank-you to Agent Duran for talking with us today?”
“Thank you, Agent Duran!” the kids intoned.