“I think we should hang a mosquito net above our bed.” It was time to rev up the romance. We were going on six weeks of bed rest and my space needed sex appeal. I thought netting would add a certain je ne sais quoi, leaving the door open for a little role playing. I felt around under the sofa bed and pulled out my tiara. “I’m a princess with chiffon scarves and a canopy bed,” I continued.
“You are divine and I will do anything your tender heart desires. Let me find the ladder and get to work right now, my fair, witty, brilliant lover.”
Okay, that’s how the conversation went in my head before Chris came home from work.
“Can we drill a hole in the ceiling?” I said as he planted an old-lady kiss on my forehead later that evening.
“What?”
“I want to put up a mosquito net. It’s sexy.”
Blank stare.
“Please?”
“I just finished paying off that basement beam. We are not putting holes in the ceiling.”
It was true; we’d learned our lesson regarding the fragility of our little farmhouse only months before we were married. Chris had been puttering around downstairs, hiding from the wedding planning, when he happened to glance up at the rafters in the ceiling. To this day he’s not sure what made him do it; perhaps he registered a subtle noise, or maybe it was instinct, or maybe God just tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Heads up, dude, this is gonna cost you a lot of money.” But he couldn’t figure out exactly what he was looking at. Whatever it was though, it was rusting. After further investigation, he discovered that there was a CAR FRAME holding up the house. A rotting car frame. It is a total game changer when you’re going about your business in your basement and you see the skeleton of a 1954 Chevy pickup above your head. You have to wonder, How is it I never noticed a car frame in my basement ceiling until this very day?
We can only surmise that Chris’s grandfather, whom he called Pop, had felt that the car frame would support the house for a few decades. And so it had. But now that time was up, and we spent our first twelve thousand dollars as a couple on one single beam to ensure the house stayed standing, especially since, according to Chris, we were never ever leaving. So with that in mind, it was decided that I did not really need a pink frilly mosquito net.
This was a minor setback, but I wasn’t giving up on romance so easily. I lay in bed thinking about fate, about how the entire universe conspires just so two people can meet and fall in love in a supermarket. I wondered what my father must have been like when he first met my mother. There was a picture of him hanging in the hallway by the steps in our house that I stopped to look at from time to time as I was leaving for school. He was maybe midtwenties, leaning on a hot rod like he was James Dean, tall and slender, with brooding blue eyes and dark hair that flipped into a small pompadour with neatly trimmed sideburns. The story goes that a mutual friend had slipped him my mother’s phone number on a napkin, but my father didn’t think much of it. It was only weeks later, when he dialed my mother thinking she was someone else he had previously met, that he made a date with her. But it was a happy accident, because less than a year later, as they strolled down Thirty-Fourth Street on their way to a car show at Madison Square Garden, my father asked, “Hey, Hochie, want to get married?” Hochie was a shortened version of my mother’s difficult-to-pronounce maiden name. Hochie said yes, and shortly after, my father presented her with a ring his mother had picked out.
I have no recollection of my father ever holding my mother’s hand or sitting close to her on the sofa, but when I was really young, he’d come home from work and fall into her arms, sharing a long, passionate kiss that caused me to run away in genuine disgust. Late in the evenings, I’d overhear him telling her dirty jokes at the kitchen table, and when they reminisced about the past, I could sense the love between them. Maybe I didn’t need big nets and fancy scarves after all.
The next afternoon I ripped off my boulder-holder bra, took my allotted two-minute shower, and then pushed, squished, and molded my boobs into a strappy maternity dress. I had flowers sent to Chris’s shop and slipped on my stiletto bedroom heels with the black feathers. I could no longer take two steps in them, but they looked damn good in bed. While I waited for Chris to come home, lounging there in my dress and high heels, I came up with a plan.
When he walked through the door with Chinese food, I asked him to break out the Tiffany champagne glasses we had gotten for our wedding and fill them with seltzer and a spritz of juice.
“Nice shoes,” he said. I patted the mattress and gave him an inviting look as he handed me a glass. “I get so bogged down with work. It’s a relief to come home.” He pulled back the sheets and collapsed next to me.
“We have to celebrate. I’m at week twenty-four. The baby is viable.”
“My little family,” he said, rubbing my belly and resting his head on my shoulder.
“We have a living room straight out of That ’70s Show, the house is falling down, you’re a ball of stress, and I’m confined to bed, but this child is growing. It’s like the baby is sucking the life out of us to feed its own. Oh my God, we have a vampire baby. The baby is going to kill us.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen.” He draped his arm over me.
“There’s a real chance our baby will live.”
“The baby would have a lot of problems if you were to give birth now.”
“True, but every day that I don’t give birth brings us one step closer.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Chris said softly. “When things calm down, we should plan another trip to Costa Rica.”
“If only we could teleport to those hot springs in Arenal.”
“Remember the midnight hike through the jungle, and the turtles?” He snuggled closer.
“Life changes so fast,” I mused.
“That’s how it goes,” he said as he rubbed his head lightly against mine. “Those leatherbacks were massive. And their eggs were like dinosaur eggs.” His voice was getting sleepy.
“And that water bug!” I shuddered, hiding my head in the nape of his neck.
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“It was a beast.”
After a late-night trek to watch giant leatherback turtles lay their eggs in the sand, we headed back to our boutique hotel in Tamarindo, a seaside town on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Just as we got into bed, I spied a water bug the size of my hand crawling up into the corner of the room. I jumped, my high-pitched squeal frightening even the sleeping howler monkeys in the trees outside.
“That was one of the first times you got to see me in full panic mode.”
“Well, I always had an inkling it was just under the surface.” He nudged me.
I had demanded the water bug’s immediate extermination, but by the time I shoved Chris out of bed and explained that he absolutely must annihilate the creature, it was gone.
After that I tried to sleep, making a deal with myself that I would open my eyes one last time for a quick look around. Directly above my head was a spotted green gecko scurrying across the ceiling.
“The gecko pushed me over the edge,” I added.
“I thought it was cute.” Chris slurped his tongue in and out like a lizard, leaning in to lick my face.
Upon seeing the gecko, I’d catapulted out of bed and ran in circles around the small hotel room until I felt something hard crunch beneath my bare foot. It was a crab.
“You know, I’d never flattened a crustacean before,” I said.
“Well, luckily the guy with the pistol showed up.” Chris grabbed my hand and kissed it.
Moments after I had called the front desk about the zoo in our room, a short man knocked on the door. He had a gun and a broom. I hesitated. He didn’t speak English, and I spoke even less Spanish. I explained as best I could that I’d take my chances with the water bug and the gecko.
The hotel owner came by after the guy with the Glock left and offered us the suite next door. We packed our suitcases then stepped outside our hotel room, door locking behind us. At that exact moment the power for the entire hotel shut down. I completely lost any semblance of sanity.
“I thought you were going to divorce me as soon as we got stateside,” I said.
“I wasn’t planning to wait that long.”
It was pitch black, we were in the jungle, we couldn’t find our new room, and I was pretty sure something was slithering up my leg. I spent the rest of the trip with a bottle of DEET on the nightstand.
“I don’t know why we don’t use DEET here. I bet it would take care of our wolf spiders,” I said.
Chris laughed. It was a sound I hadn’t heard in a while, and it felt good. His laughter was contagious, and soon I couldn’t catch my breath. It wasn’t even that funny. We were just looking for an excuse to be happy. He grabbed my face and turned to kiss me full on the mouth as I slipped off my shoes.
Seduction.