Why I'm Like This by Cynthia Kaplan

occurred to you before. Why should it have? But then something happens, some thing happens, and the veil drops. It may have been totally insignificant, like the way your mother ran her finger around the lip of her wineglass at dinner parties as if she were one of those water-glass musicians, or how your father mixed Bosco straight into the milk carton and didn’t tell anyone else. Or it could have been something huge, like the night not long ago when your mother told you she felt like her dad was the only person who ever loved her exactly as she was. Or the moment you realized your father was truly incapable of changing, even to save his own life. These are just moments, really, blips on the parental screen, during which they reveal their humanity, and that they are in the world, flailing about as helplessly as everyone else, everyone who is not your parents. Blowing it. Surviving. Hanging on by their nails. That they are at once more spectacularly resourceful and more deeply flawed than you mighthave ever imagined inspires both scorn and admiration, two emotions you’d always reserved for nonrelatives. But, happily, between the blips, they are just the same as they have always been, annoying, yet impeccably dressed, and you breathe a sigh of relief. It is too painful for them to be human.
    On the rare occasion when my mother looks a little unkempt, I become extremely nervous and start calling her twice a day, and whenever my father suddenly loses weight, I suspect something shifty is going on and grill him so mercilessly that he asks me if I have any plans to leave the country. But you’d think the two of them would have realized by now that I’m supposed to be a mess; I’ve always been like this. They can’t still be surprised. If I clean myself up, that’s when they should worry. At the center of the whirling vortex of our mutual disapproval is the notion that if we all look okay, we all are okay. What a dilemma.
    Not for my future mother-in-law, though. One night, a little over two years after all of this, shortly after her own husband died, and on the verge of a sleeping-pill-induced sleep, she said to me, “I love you, but I hate how you dress.”

they weren’t brave
    I T is raining when our plane touches down. I look through the double airplane window, wondering how bugs get trapped between the two panes, and I see that it is raining, and I know I’ve made a colossal mistake, an epic mistake. There is a strange man sitting beside me and he is holding my hand. I have no idea who this man is; what is he trying to do? Comfort me? And although I can clearly recall that yesterday, following a brief proclamation from a rabbi, I had agreed to spend the rest of my life with this hand holder, that is hardly reason to trust him with my life.
    I am sure every woman at one moment or another tells some version of this—the husband-cum-stranger bit. It’s a bonding ritual between us, as satisfyingly anecdotal as thelocker-room brag. Perhaps more so: I didn’t just fuck him, I married him. But then, oh shit. Newlywed reality is a plane ride to a foreign land and the person sitting next to you is not your mother.
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    The first night of my honeymoon is spent in San Jose, the utterly charmless capital of Costa Rica, in a bizarre, slightly squalid hotel designed to look like a bunch of beach shacks surrounding a tropical courtyard. The sliding glass doors of our room face, at ground level, directly into this little commons, which has a pebbly sort of floor and is planted with an array of exotic-looking plants and flowers in order to give one the impression that one is outside. One is not. There is, however, a thatch-roofed bar in the center of it all, where one may avail oneself of whatever tropical drink will best make one’s immediate environs disappear. I make it clear to David that a) I may never forgive him for going to China on business and leaving me to arrange our