Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace Read Online Free PDF Page B

for a while after that. Forty-five minutes after our appointed time, when I was about to give up, tear my useless new underwear to shreds, and gobble up the contents of my freezer, my buzzer rang.
    I was living at the time on Fourteenth Street and Avenue A,an area of New York City that has since moved to hip, through fashionable, and on to staid. Back then, however, it was the kind of place where you crunched crack vials beneath your shoes every morning on the way to the subway, and were not infrequently awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of gunfire.
    I tried to buzz Michael into the building, but the buzzer was, as usual, broken. Too impatient to wait for the elevator, I rushed down the stairs. There he was, standing in the entryway behind the glass door, his hair even wilder than in the photograph on the jacket of his books, his eyes even more blue, his smile goofy and broad. Bells didn’t ring, angels didn’t sing, but I did, indeed, fall in love at first sight. I know this because a single thought entered my head. “Now I can
finally
stop dating.”
    I am cynical and pessimistic, and I don’t believe in love at first sight. I believe you have to know someone to love him, have to see his good and bad sides, his flaws and foibles. I believe that love grows, and that attraction or infatuation cannot be the basis of a real life together.
    And yet.
    There is a word in Yiddish—
bashert
—that translates more or less as soul mate. Intended. The one that God, or fate, meant for you. The legend associated with this word says that before you are born, an angel appears to the soul of your infant self and takes you on a tour of your life. You visit your future, or a version of your future. One of the things the angel shows you is the person whose soul is a match for yours. The person with whom you are meant to share your life. Then the angel strikes you beneath your nose, leaving that subtle channel in the skin between the nose and the mouth, your philtrum. The blow causes you to forget what you have seen. But there remains a vestige of memory, an unconscious sense of what you saw and learned. Enough of a memory to evokea jolt of recognition when you stumble across your
bashert
. When, for example, you see him standing behind a pane of bulletproof glass, a bouquet of purple irises in his hand.
    We went out to dinner, to a romantic restaurant with banquette seating and dim lighting. For the first and last time in our relationship, we drank an entire bottle of wine. *
    After dinner and that unlikely bottle, we walked over to the Bowery. Somewhere between Spring and Prince streets Michael leaned over and kissed me. We kissed in that face-mashing, lip-groping way of teenagers. And we kept kissing. At Max Fish, an agonizingly trendy bar. At a tiny table in the Ukrainian café Veselka. On my corner. In my postage stamp of a lobby. In front of the elevator. We kissed and kissed and kissed. And then he left.
    That’s how I knew it was forever. It was the first time since I was approximately fifteen years old that I did not sleep with a man on our first date. That, and the fact that within the first hour of my meeting him, he told me that, because he was a writer and worked at night, he intended to spend his days taking care of his children, so that his wife could pursue her career.
    Here he was, the man I’d been looking for all along, the man my mother had sent me out in the world to track down and bring home. Funny and smart, Jewish and successful. And harboring ambitions of being a househusband. He would take care of my childrenwhile I worked. He would be an equal parent and an equal partner. He would make it easy for me to be the kind of woman my mother and I had planned for me to be. Is it any wonder that I proposed to him three weeks after our first date?
    Not only did he, dear reader, marry me, but he followed me first to San Francisco, where I had a clerkship with a judge, and then to Southern California, where