Family And Other Catastrophes. Alexandra Borowitz
like someone who doesn’t want people to think he’s a terrorist. Look, he isn’t even bringing a carry-on, just a backpack. Ready for jihad.”
“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