New Year’s Eve is tomorrow, and Javier and I are throwing a party together in my apartment. Frankie and I have been inseparable since the Christmas visit a week earlier. We tear open the decorations, blasting the radio, and hang New Year’s banners and streamers on the wall, and dump 2011 plastic glasses on the table along with hordes of other 2011 items that will be of no value by 12:01 a.m. Javier isn’t joining us, and eventually I find him on my bed. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I think so,” he says. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“Except you’re lying in bed staring at the ceiling while we’re in there hanging things up and having fun. You don’t want to join us?”
“Some friends of mine are having a last-minute New Year’s Eve dinner party upstate.”
I can feel the heat of disappointment sweep across my face. “You want to go?” I ask.
“Maybe,” he says. “I don’t know. Do you?”
He never seems to know what he wants or how he feels, and this is making me increasingly nervous. “We have twelve people coming over tomorrow for our own dinner party,” I say. “Lili and Frankie are having a sleepover.”
“Can’t we just cancel?” he asks.
The party is in twenty-four hours. I can’t believe he just asked me that. Or that he’d rather be with his friends than do something domestic with his daughter and me. Even though a week ago I was wondering if I should leave him, now that I feel him leaving me, I’m unglued. I’m trying not to pirouette into panic. Why does this relationship make me feel so off-balance? One week I know where I stand, and the next I don’t. What is wrong with me?
Finally, he glances at my face. “No. No, I don’t want to cancel,” he says. I breathe out in relief. “…I don’t think.” Oh God, why is he doing this? At this point, I don’t care what he decides—he just needs to make a decision. His equivocating makes me more anxious than anything else.
I pretend I’m going to the bathroom, but instead I duck into the pantry and open the party whiskey. I take a long pull and then return to Frankie, who’s done an excellent job of decorating. The whiskey does what I needed it to do: lower the volume on my apprehension. We wrap up, turn off the radio, and then lie on the couch to read books. Finally, Javier comes out. He picks up my guitar and starts playing and singing “Wild and Blue,” and for a moment I am happy again. I long for these minutes to be my entire life, instead of just one turbulent drop on this unpiloted relationship.
Over the past two weeks, I had thought things were finally solved. For the first time in years, I hadn’t felt anxious. Instead, I had been flooded with calm, a surety that time had finally opened its door to me, was allowing me to step through and get what I’ve wanted for so long: a family of my own. This sense of certainty—the faith that I’m adequate, capable, and seen—is what I’ve been chasing my entire life. I’ve felt it once before—with Peter; but as soon I felt sound and certain, he changed his mind. The idea that I could lose this, too, terrifies me.
Later, when he finally says, “Let’s have the party,” he doesn’t look convinced. My stomach is in knots. So much for that whiskey.
“Great,” I say.
Lili comes over the next afternoon, and she and Frankie play while Javier and I cook. I’m trying to tell if Javier would rather be upstate with his friends, but he’s not revealing anything. It doesn’t matter, though. The fact that he had been willing to cancel our party is something I can’t un-know. Inside his waffling is another story I can’t extract, but I recognize it’s an old threat, a story my body knows about being rejected in favor of other people. Like sleeping in the maid’s room so my dad’s new-and-improved children could have their own, glorious bedrooms. At Rebecca’s bat mitzvah, I watched my dad give a speech about how proud he was of her, and I cried silently, jealous that she got my dad in a bargain neither of us made. What I feel now is similar. The central place Javier’s ex-wife’s painting occupies in his apartment, his following her and her boyfriends across the country, wherever they moved…I don’t want to be anyone’s remainders. I go sit on the floor of the pantry to try to stop this spiral of panic.
“What’s going on?” Javier’s head pops in.
Before I can stop myself, I let it all burst out: “What if none of this happens?”
“None of what?”
“This, us. Upstate. Living with Frankie. What if Meredith won’t move, or won’t let you take Frankie? What if the Jersey City house doesn’t sell? What if I can’t get out of my lease? What if you change your mind about me, about all of this?”
“You want to come out of the pantry and we can talk about it?”
“No, no. I don’t want to come out of the pantry,” I say. I’m unstrung and ashamed of having a panic attack in front of him, traumatized by the chance that he’ll think I’m crazy and leave me.
“Can I come into the pantry?” I nod. Javier gets a chair from the kitchen, pulls me onto his lap, and rubs my back. “We can do whatever we want. No one is going to stand in our way,” he says.
“But what if you change your mind? What if you decide you don’t want this, or me, or a family?”
“That’s not going to happen. I want to have a baby with you. I want a family with you. You’re the one. You’re it. We can do whatever we want. We can get married if you want.”
“Really?” I ask. Do I want that?
“Of course. We’ll live upstate; it will be a beautiful, gorgeous life. You have to be optimistic about it. You have to look on the bright side of things.”
“I know, but…you change your mind all the time. You almost bailed on our party.”
“So what? A party isn’t life. It’s not good to see everything in a negative light,” he says.
“This isn’t negativity. It’s worry.”
“Well, it seems sort of negative to me,” he says.
He knows about my anxiety—I’ve even named it for him—though he’s never seen me having an actual panic attack. But now he’s rejecting the identity I’ve shown him, assigning me a new label to match a problem I don’t have. I know this game. It makes me shut down entirely.
“You okay now?” he asks.
I know he’s not going to help me. “Yes. Thanks,” I lie, feeling deadened.
“Good, because…brussels sprouts.” He points to the stove with the spatula. He kisses me and returns to the kitchen. He has dismissed my actual feelings and given me new ones he can understand. How can I make a life with someone so determined to misunderstand me?
Lili and Frankie have been writing fortunes for everyone to pull out of a hat at midnight. It isn’t until I inspect their work that I finally see the difference between Frankie and Lili, and perhaps identify the thing I sensed in Frankie early on: darkness.
Lili: “This year you will find a new nail polish color and get a beautiful new hairdo.”
Frankie: “You will (probably) not die this year.”
Lili: “You will find a million dollars on the ground and you’ll get to keep it.”
Frankie: “At the end of this year, only four people will exist. You will not be one of them.”
“Frankie!” I say. “You can’t put that in there. Write positive ones,” I add, feeling instantly like a hypocrite, and sounding too much like her dad and my mom. I wonder if Frankie is being overlooked for who she is, erased in favor of a preferred and easier child, and that’s when I realize what rubbed me the wrong way was our sameness, like Pilot.
Despite its rocky beginnings, the party is a triumph, and for four hours I am upbeat and untroubled. I feel necessary and loved and known, and I finally understand what my role should be in Frankie’s life: to be the adult who can see her for who she is and protect her. In bed later, I turn to Javier.
“I have something to tell you,” I say. “For years and years I’ve known the name I wanted to give my daughter someday. I’ve been so sure about it I even made my friends promise they wouldn’t use it.”
“Okay?”
“The name is Frances Bird. Frankie for short. Bird is the middle name.”
Javier sits up and looks at me. “You know Frankie’s middle name?”
I shake my head.
“Bette. Frankie Bette.”
The names are so close that cold creeps up my arms. “I think your Frankie is the Frankie I was meant to have.”
“Me too,” he says. “Me too.”