Family And Other Catastrophes

“He’s probably going to New York for business.”

“Do you just think that nobody ever has a gun? That there aren’t at least a few terrorists on dry runs in this line? Did you think 9/11 was Photoshopped too? Please tell me you haven’t become one of those people in the YouTube comments section.”

“Actually, you’re one of those people. You honestly believe there are terrorists in this specific security line?”

She could tell he found this somewhat amusing. Her therapist called this “flaunting her pathology.” Sometimes her anxious rants were intentionally comedic, if only to break the tension. If she acted believably insane, it was a problem, but if she hammed it up so much that she could later claim to just be joking, that gave her an out. She knew David found her anxieties annoying, but in the moment she was too worried to care. She would deal with the embarrassing aftermath of being wrong after they landed. Better to be wrong about a terrorist attack and feel like an idiot, than to be right about it and dead. Life had to win every single day. Death only had to win once.

“All I’m saying is that there could be terrorists in this line,” she said. “It would be so easy to pull off. Just look at that guy.” She pointed to a young white hipster with a scruffy brown beard and a bowler hat, carrying a black violin case.

“Okay,” he said, lowering his voice. “I’ll play this game with you. If you were going to do it, how would you do it?”

“I don’t know, I’d have to call some terrorists to learn some options. But it’s easy. For one, last time I packed a full-size conditioner and they didn’t stop me.”

He squeezed her shoulders as they moved toward the body scan. “You really are nervous about this week, aren’t you?” he whispered in her ear. His one-day scruff tickled her neck and she smiled. The shoulder massage felt good. She wished she could stay in this moment forever, his face against hers, his hands on her shoulders. She would always feel safe then. Except in the event of an aneurism.

“Well, yeah, my mom is going to be a nightmare, but that’s not why I’m worried about the plane blowing up. Two different things, babe.”

“She’ll be fine. And don’t say ‘plane blowing up’ at an airport. Watch, you’ll be freaking out about terrorists and then you’ll be the one they arrest. It would be more typical of you to be detained for terror threats before your wedding day than to be killed by a terrorist before your wedding day.”

“Judging by how lax they are about checking that guy over there, they’re not going to pull me aside for saying that. They should, though. How do they know I’m not a terrorist? How would they notice a real terrorist if they don’t even notice a run-of-the-mill crazy person like me?” She forced herself to smile. Sometimes smiling made her feel better. Her fourth-grade teacher had told her that if she pretended to be happy, there was some chemical reaction in the brain that would trick her into being happy. She had believed it, and smiled like a lunatic whenever she was even mildly worried. Her teacher had probably said it to help her do better socially, but as a result she just looked like a grinning freak. She toned down the smiles in middle school when someone put a note in her locker with a picture of the Joker, but she still kept the habit into adulthood—just a watered-down version. David seemed to appreciate her periodic attempts to seem normal, and she often wanted to remind him that he should count himself lucky that his bride’s wedding anxieties weren’t about second thoughts and cold feet, but about bombs and Ebola. Fuck—Ebola bombs. Surely someone was planning that.

“You’ll be less crazy on the honeymoon, right?” he asked, wavering slightly as he said crazy since he meant it in an endearing way but was aware it sounded mean.

“I mean, I’ve always been crazy. I’ve known that since I was four. Thank you, Mom.”

“Your mom definitely didn’t call you crazy.”

“Well, of course not. She says I’m mentally ill and reminds everyone whenever she gets a chance because it makes her look like such a saint for putting up with me. And I can’t even argue with her, because then I look even crazier. This would all be so much easier if I could do my crafting. It always calms me down.”

She was one of the first Pinterest users and an avid crafter in her spare time. Her crafts ranged from no-sew pillowcases to embroidered handkerchiefs to the ominous and pointless “glitter balls” that she insisted she would use if she ever threw a snow-themed holiday party. She spent hours studying the Pinterest pages of her favorite crafting bloggers. The women always looked so pristine and perfect with their strawberry lipstick and winged eyeliner, their pure white kitchens bathed in natural summer light, their unused copper pots hanging from the ceilings. When they baked, they never got flour on the counter. When they crafted, they never got glue on their manicured hands. Who were these women? Emily’s crafts always got messy, and even when they were successful they were useless, like the glitter balls. David was nice enough not to bring it up, but she could sense his amusement every time he ran his fingers across the abandoned glitter balls still sitting on the kitchen counter.

Sometimes she worried that she was unbearable—disorganized, distracted and high-strung, leaving a trail of glitter behind her that nobody could clean up. But she knew so many women who were worse. Kathleen, her former friend from college, had cheated on her fiancé during her bachelorette party with a spray-tanned club promoter named TJ and hadn’t even felt bad about it because she said it was part of “finding herself.” One of her cousins repeatedly referred to her husband as “the Idiot” in her irritating Long Island accent, acting as if the nickname was witty and sassy instead of abusive. Emily could have been lazy, materialistic, demanding, emasculating, frumpy, unavailable or cold. She was none of those things. For all her shortcomings, she was outgoing, loving and never once turned David down for sex—even that one time she had a stomach bug—a badge of honor she wished were appropriate to share with other people.

She would never dream of ridiculing him over bottomless mimosas with “the girls,” calling him “the Idiot” or joking about how she pretended to be asleep to get out of sex. Unlike the way some women she knew regarded their men, she loved David because of his flaws, not in spite of them. Her favorite thing about his face was his slightly large ears. If he suddenly became rich (which seemed more and more likely every month he continued working at Zoogli), her favorite things about him would still be the little things, the goofy things. Other women would try to seduce him if he had money, that was for sure, but they would never love him for his weird ears, or feel a wave of warmth in their hearts whenever they heard his off-key rendition of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in the shower. She hoped he knew this. Men always claimed to want women who loved them for them, not for their money, but rich men always seemed to wind up with women who only wanted their money. She wanted to believe she could trust David, but why was he any more trustworthy than the thousands of other future Silicon Valley billionaires who would leave their loyal wives for Russian models?

Even if David never became rich, there was still something else for her to worry about: aging. She was twenty-eight, zooming toward her thirties, a decade she had long believed marked the beginning of a woman’s journey into her new identity as a sexless, living Roomba. Meanwhile, David at twenty-eight was more handsome than ever. Just shy of six feet, with a full head of chestnut hair, and a face like a grown-up all-American lacrosse frat boy but without the arrogance. He was the man she dreamed about marrying when she was a little girl—except back then she had pictured him sporting a shaggy ’90s haircut parted in the middle and a puka-shell necklace. She thought David was better-looking than everyone else did, which was obvious from the incredulous looks her friends gave her every time she referred to him as “out of her league.” Regardless of what her friends said to reassure her that she and David were equally attractive, she didn’t buy it. David was tall and fit—that could carry a man his whole life. It could only carry a woman for a few years before the estrogen dipped and she became another crazy-armed Madonna look-alike, veins popping out and skin sagging over preserved mummy muscles, boobs like two half-empty water balloons bagged in wrinkled beige napkins. She could gain weight and avoid the gaunt face of middle age—perhaps wind up looking like a jolly, pie-baking Mrs. Claus—then use push-up bras and shapewear. That wouldn’t be very sexy, but at least then she wouldn’t have the desperate, roast-chicken look of all the Real Housewives. Her therapist told her these concerns stemmed from her body dysmorphic disorder, but she knew he was just saying that to be nice.

She knew that one day—perhaps not today, perhaps not even in ten years—David would look at her, look at himself and realize just how much better he could do. He was far too sweet and devoted to realize it now, but it was bound to happen by the time he hit middle age. As a result, she had to be vigilant. Plastic surgery was out of the question because of her fear of ineffective but paralyzing anesthesia—it had happened to some woman in Kentucky and the story had trended on social media—but there were other things she could do. Her fitness routine was intense. In college, she only did the occasional dance workout video, but she had come a long way since then. Darius, her fitness instructor at LifeSpin, assessed her as a Level Four during her StrengthFlex test. Her new LifeSpin routine involved light weights, yoga, Pilates and NaturBuzz hydration. She did squats in the shower while the conditioner was in her hair in the hopes of attaining a Photoshop butt.

Aboard the plane, she rolled on two tight black knee compression socks. They looked stupid with her dress, but this was one of the few health-over-beauty sacrifices she made. If there was anything she worried about more than her declining looks, it was her health. She had recently read a Dr. Oz article about deep vein thrombosis, the silent killer. There seemed to be way too many silent killers out there for one thing to be given the title, but as far as silent killers went, deep vein thrombosis—and its aggressive cousin, the pulmonary embolism—played the part quite well. They could strike any person, at any time, and one of the symptoms was “no symptoms.” She shuddered just thinking about it.

“You should listen to some music,” David said, handing her a pair of white earphones, the speaker area lightly dusted with his orangey earwax. They would be so gross if they came from anyone but him. Maybe that was something she could incorporate into her wedding vows.

“I actually popped a Benadryl right before we got on the plane. I’m going to sleep.”

“I wish I could sleep on planes. My neck always hurts and then I wake up as soon as there’s any turbulence. I don’t know how you can be so anxious and still have such an easy time sleeping in public places.”

She laughed. “That was a compliment, right? You should try to sleep too. We won’t get much sleep when we arrive. Everyone is going to ask us how work is going and a gazillion other questions we don’t want to answer.”

“Ugh, I hate talking about work.”

“Me too. I want to talk about fun things.”

“Like parasites?”

She gave him an indignant look. “Like fun things.”

“You’re cute.”

“Want to have sex in the bathroom?” she asked perkily. Sometimes she liked to throw out offers like that. David was too vanilla to ever take her up on them, but they made her appear kinky, so she could fulfill the roles of both seductive “other woman” and loyal, nurturing wife. If she were giving him so much sex, he wouldn’t have any energy left for all the other women she imagined were sneaking around him, waiting to strike as soon as she turned thirty. Sometimes she swore she could hear the popping of their bubblegum and the sizzling of their hair underneath curling irons when she walked down the street.

“Sex in the bathroom sounds illegal, but you can give me a hand job underneath my blanket.” She assumed he was kidding, but he really did have one of those fleece blankets given out by the flight attendant, so maybe he was serious.

“Just you? Like, I don’t get any...you know...under my blanket?” Having sex with a guy in the airplane bathroom was sexy, Pan Am, Mad Men stuff. Giving a hand job under a fleece blanket while everyone on the plane watched reruns of How I Met Your Mother was just sad. But if David really wanted it, she’d look so cold and withholding if she said no.

“Finger banging is harder to maneuver,” he said. “You don’t have to give me the hand job, though. I just thought...” He gave her a flirty smile.

“I’m just joking. I’ll give you the hand job.”

“Wait, seriously? I was joking too.”

“I don’t know why you would joke about that. People do this stuff all the time.”

“Have you?”

“No. Just people do.” He never wanted to hear about, or even think about, her previous sexual experiences, even though on their first date she was twenty-five and had obviously had relationships before him. No one-night stands, though—she was too afraid of antibiotic-resistant chlamydia. He had never even divulged his own number, which led her to believe it was either embarrassingly high or low.

“Okay, you can give me a handie, but only after the safety demonstration.”

“I can give you a hand job? I’m not begging to do it, I was just offering.”

“I mean, can you give me a hand job after the safety demonstration?”

A peppy blonde flight attendant popped her head into the row and reached her arm around David’s lap to make sure his seat belt was fastened. She pursed her mauve lips.

“Sir, in the future please do not have a blanket on your lap when we are checking seat belts,” she said, in a way that managed to be both unnecessarily friendly and unnecessarily rude.

“Uh, sorry.”

“And, ma’am?” the flight attendant asked. Emily realized her blanket was covering her seat belt, as well, and lifted the blanket to reveal that it was, in fact, fastened. Not that it would mean anything, if there were a terrorist on the plane. Why did anyone even check this? They should have been going around making eye contact with all the passengers to check for secret signs of nervousness, the way she once heard people did in Israel. Why didn’t she live in Israel? Her cousin Rebecca did Birthright in 2007 and kept going on about how the police presence “ruined the experience.” Of course, Rebecca was being stupid, because police were the only thing making the experience possible in the first place. Maybe if Emily lived in Israel, she’d feel safer. Except there would be a lot more threats in general—she wasn’t sure if the police presence outweighed the increase in threats.

“Thank you,” the flight attendant said.

“Oh, I have a question,” Emily said.

“Sure, ma’am.”

“Did you call me ma’am because you thought I was old, or because you say that to all women over the age of eighteen?”