I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (11 page)

WHEN I TURNED thirty a few weeks later I was still single and threw myself one of those parties that is no longer appropriate past the age of thirty—the type where you send out an Evite and ask everyone to meet you at a bar and pay for their own
drinks. I heard that Matt showed up that night, although I didn’t see him. I was busy flirting with an artist who, according to my friend, thought I was cute. I think the only reason he thought I was cute was because we had met months earlier at a party and I completely ignored him. Not on purpose. I just didn’t know he was there.

If I like a guy, I
can’t
ignore him. I can only try to own and
occupy him like a celebrity does a small island. I followed the Artist back to his house in a drunken stupor after my party. I slept over. We made out. I fell asleep halfway through our fooling around so I really did only “sleep” with him. The next morning, the sunlight streaming through his window and onto his bed made me self-conscious. Who knows what kind of cellulite could have developed overnight
as I transitioned from age twenty-nine to thirty? I left and hoped that he would call me. He didn’t call me. I called him. A lot. A week later, I invited him to see
Manhattan
at a revival theater. (He had told me on my birthday that it was his favorite movie.) He said he couldn’t go. But why would he not want to see it with me after he told me it was his favorite movie? It couldn’t be because
I had called him fifty times since we had first met, right? At least I didn’t drop a special-edition DVD of
Manhattan
on his doorstep—only because I couldn’t remember where he lived.

September rolled around and I hadn’t run into Nice Matt from Boston anywhere. I decided that it was time to invite him to my regular Sunday-night karaoke party. I’d never once actually corralled a group of people
together for a Sunday-night karaoke party, but Matt wouldn’t know that. Besides, I’d always wanted to be the type of girl who has a regular Sunday-night karaoke gathering. I sent out an e-mail to a bunch of friends—including Matt—and said, “It’s a Sunday Night Karaoke Party! At the usual place—Sardo’s in Burbank.” Interestingly, nobody wrote back to say, “What the hell are you
talking about? We
don’t have a regular karaoke night. Are you trying to get something going with a boy?”

Matt showed up. I sang my usual karaoke song, Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart”—if you ever see me sing that song at karaoke, it means I’m trying to impress you. And if you’re a cute boy, it means I’m trying to get you to impress your penis on me.

Later Matt sang a nervous rendition of “Brandy (You’re a Fine
Girl)” by Looking Glass. Eventually we were the last ones there. It was like our friends and the patrons of Sardo’s were trying to make the decision for us. Come on, you two, make a move already!

You know when you want to make out with someone and you’re pretty sure that he wants to make out with you because you’re both touching each other’s arms? You think to yourself,
This is Body Language 101. He’s touching my arm because he knows it’s sending me a signal that he’s interested. But wait, who would be so obvious and actually touch someone’s arm? He’s not reading
Cosmo.
Maybe he touches everyone’s arm. I’ve never hung out with him before. That could be his “thing.” I better not act on this and ask him if he wants to leave and go somewhere else. Nope. His flirtation is so by-the-book that I’m suspicious. We should just keep sitting knee to knee in this booth and ignoring the fact that we are blind to everyone else at our table but each other.

Eventually he walked me to my car because he is a gentleman and because my car was right next to his.

We started talking and talking . . . and talking, because it was easier than one of us making the awkward first move. I offered super-smoothly,
“Hey, so, if we’re going to keep talking, we might as well sit in my car. It’s cold.” It wasn’t cold. Matt got in the front seat and I immediately pounced on him. He flinched. When we talked about it later he said that it just seemed like I was about to hit him. To be fair, I do have a lot of testosterone and I did come at him like a flying squirrel, but I landed like a butterfly and
found myself having my first kiss with the man who would become my husband. (I mean, not that night, although there was a ceremony of sorts when Matt had to pee in between our cars.)

The whole next day I tried to remember what song he had sung at karaoke so I could buy it, but I didn’t want to ask him what the song was because I knew that if you asked a guy what song he sang at karaoke, he would
know you’re planning to buy it and listen to it over and over while reimagining your first kiss. I was thirty, but I was not naive.

Matt and I spent the next week fucking off at our day jobs and e-mailing each other all day instead—those types of stories that you’ve told a million times and can’t wait to have a new audience for. He told me his favorite childhood memory about the time his middle
school gym teacher murdered his wife and claimed that the blood on the walls was marinara sauce. I reminisced about the time that a priest at our church wore a lavaliere microphone and ranted in his Sunday sermon about how gay people were destroying parades because they throw condoms off floats and into the street, and he let out a fart under his robe that was amplified through the speakers that
hung next to the stations of the cross on the sides of the church.

I don’t know why that happens—that when you’re hanging out with someone you know you’re going to fall in love with, you just don’t know where to begin and you start picking up pieces of your life as though they’re old photos randomly gathered in a box and handing them over to a virtual stranger for safekeeping. It’s like saying,
“Here. I’m excited and hopeful and I don’t know where to begin but I think one day we’ll eventually have enough time to unpack this thing and make some sense of it all.”

When the Red Sox won the World Series in October 2004, I felt like I had reversed my curse too. I wanted to tell Matt that I loved him but I didn’t want to overwhelm us. (We were already crying like a couple of postmenopausal
women who had just won bingo on a seniors cruise.) I liked a boy who liked me back. He wasn’t a creep who only wanted a one-night stand. He didn’t find me more attractive the more unavailable I was. We were grown-ups.

Except for one thing. He was renting a bedroom in the very nice
house owned by his always-home-and-hogging-the-living-room friend. I was sleeping on a borrowed (stolen) futon from
a(n) (ex-)friend while renting a small apartment the size of a Cracker Jack box that was across from an actual crack house with my constantly suicidal and oft wailing friend Krista. Without our own places and living in neighborhoods we either couldn’t afford on our own or couldn’t afford to move out of, Matt and I were not grown-ups. We were grown-up-adjacent.

BECAUSE I’M A stand-up comedian
and I talk honestly about my life onstage, and because he was obviously lurking around my gigs all the time, waiting for me to forget I’d met him, Matt knew intimate details about my life before he and I ever had our first conversation. One of the first sentences Matt ever heard me utter was a joke that goes, “When I’m in love with someone it doesn’t dawn on me to want to have their baby. I just don’t
think I’ve ever had that urge to . . . ruin our lives.” So by the time we went on our first date, we’d already had an important (albeit one-sided) discussion about me not wanting to have children.

Matt knew what he was getting into with me—or what he was not getting into, like late-night feedings (except for my two-in-the-morning burrito cravings). After we finally said “I love you” and realized
that our thing was going somewhere, because neither of us was looking to go anywhere (else), I revisited the kids topic with Matt almost monthly—and not just when my period was late.

I was very concerned with making certain that Matt was absolutely sure that he didn’t want children. I didn’t want him to just go along with what I was saying simply because his current circumstances led him to not
even be able to fathom what having a kid would be like. I wanted Matt to picture himself coming home at night to a pregnant me, lying on the couch in my elastic-waist jeans, yelling for him to bring me a diet ginger ale and then screaming when he brought it to me because he did it wrong. I wanted it in a
glass with
lots of ice.
He had to start thinking like a girl, obsessing over the future and
daydreaming about our childfree life together. I know guys don’t normally picture anything beyond the next pair of boobs they might be seeing naked.

Matt and I had a State of Our Union a few times a year, not just to talk about how we felt about kids (they should be banned from airplanes and not allowed to touch
every single
elevator button with their germ-laced fingers) but also to talk about
what we wanted out of life. We both agreed that what was most important was the freedom to do what we wanted, whenever we wanted, whether that meant pick up and travel, move, change jobs, quit jobs, take four jobs—things that require the freedom of not having a family to provide for. I did
not
want to be one of those women who were willing to travel as long as they had the time to squeeze all
of their breast milk into many three-ounce travel-size bottles. Matt sometimes worked on projects that had him sleeping all day and staying up all night, which is not conducive to child rearing unless you are a vampire. And I know vampires are considered sexy by groups of misguided tween girls who are taught to love men who could potentially kill them, but the reality is that vampires make bad dads
and shitty husbands. They hibernate all day and then disappear at sunset—never able to tuck their own kids in at night.

For Matt, it was a decision not to be a dad, rather than a non-feeling. He said he didn’t make the decision in a day—it was just a shift from ambivalence to “no fucking way” over time. He likes how unscheduled his life can be. In his own words he says, “I can spend time alone
if I want. I can make career decisions without restriction.” And perhaps the best reason of all: “Kids? What the fuck am I going to do with a kid?”

WE HAD A dream engagement. He proposed to me on a hot summer night in July under a full white moon from our private balcony at a small bed-and-breakfast in Malibu. After I said yes, we went to
a restaurant and sat on the romantic beachfront patio
right next to another couple and their three screaming children.

I can’t blame the kids. It’s fun to scream on a semideserted beach on a summer night. I screamed when Matt proposed and I promptly ran into the ocean in my dress. I didn’t know that salt water would cause it to disintegrate. The couple with their three screaming children probably wondered why this man was taking this hobo woman
in a shredded lace maxidress to dinner and why she couldn’t get through any bites of her food without crying and saying, “No. No. These are happy tears. We’re engaged!”

I realized that what made it possible for this couple to keep the romance alive was taking their kids to local paradises like Malibu instead of a Chuck E. Cheese’s in a strip mall. At least once the kids were asleep, they could
listen to the waves crash against the rocks, snuggle, and talk shit while digesting a four-star dinner: “What the fuck is wrong with them? Why do they scream in public? Why do we do this to ourselves?” I imagine going to bed with your husband after your kids have ruined your nice dinner out to be similar to the time that Matt and I bonded over his psycho ex-girlfriend showing up at a party just
to yell at him for not liking her anymore.

One year later Matt and I stood at the altar of a nondenominational church, getting married by our Jewish justice of the peace, who was once my elementary school librarian. We wrote our own vows. There were two mentions of Bob Fosse and zero mentions of children. (At her wedding, fifteen years earlier, my sister Violet had acquiesced to having a Catholic
mass. When the priest asked the traditional question, “Will you accept children lovingly from God, and bring them up according to the law of Christ and the Church?” she answered, “Yes.” She turned to me immediately after and mouthed, “No.”)

By the time I got married, a Catholic mass for their daughter was no longer important to my parents. Their biggest concern was that I help pay.

Matt and
I went from table to table, thanking our family for attending, which is the most illogical of all wedding reception
traditions. We just got married. Can’t we fucking sit down and eat? We have to watch our salads wilting at our special little table for two as we visit every relative who is already half in the bag? Our pinot grigio–breathed aunts kissed me on the lips more times during the reception
than Matt kissed me. A few of our relatives hadn’t heard yet that we didn’t plan to have children and made some jokes as we thanked them for coming. There was a lot of, “You two better get to work! You’re a little behind!” In other words, “Jen is older than you and pretty soon she won’t even get her period anymore.” I wished we’d included this in our vows: “Dear Matt, I promise to love you. You’re
a good egg. Speaking of which, I probably only have one egg left. I’m comforted by this but still paranoid about having some ‘miracle’ pregnancy. I vow to always take my birth control pill at the same time every night and am hoping that you might continue to use condoms as a backup until I hit menopause.”

Some people didn’t just ask Matt and me when we were going to have kids but took it a step
further with, “Why would you
get
married if you don’t want to have kids?”

I had no idea that marriage was only supposed to be between two people who wanted to get between the sheets and make more people. What ever happened to marrying for love—or to get on your partner’s health insurance policy, or for presents? No one was going to buy two people in their thirties a four-slice toaster if we just
continued to live in sin.

The next question always seemed to be: “But what if your husband changes his mind and starts to resent you?” The way I see it, when you marry someone, you ask him or her to take a vow in front of friends, family, and God, promising to pay your bills if you need it, take care of you when you’re sick, and not have sex with anyone else
ever again.
I have a feeling there
will be plenty of opportunities for resentment.