Элисон Скотч - The Theory of Opposites

I gaze up at the blackness of my ceiling and suddenly realize that my marriage might be a bit like a box of Dependables.

But before I even type my snappy response to Hannah, I lose my nerve. Overt confrontation was never really my thing. Maybe she doesn’t know how poorly the meeting went. Maybe she’s just on a bender, and it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.

So instead I type: Don’t think this was meant for me?

And say a silent prayer that in fact, it wasn’t. Maybe there are such things as accidents. My dad speaks to the big, overarching push-pulls of life: that all is as it should be. But does that mean that my boss can’t mistakenly sext me? And if so, where do these happy accidents begin and end? With a missed connection on Facebook? With a false positive on a pregnancy test?

I roll my fingers over my laptop and it breathes to life.

Google: EPT false positive

Google Search results:

Livestrong: how to take a pregnancy test

Amazon.com: 20% off all EPT tests!

The Wendy Williams Show: I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant!

BabyCenter.com: 3 False positives/Ept faint line??????

Bingo.

From @iluvbooboo: Here’s the deal: I peed every day since day five after sex and each time it showed a line. But maybe that was just a pee line? How am I supposed to tell the difference between a baby line and a pee line?????? Can anyone help?????????

From: @mamabear: The same thing happened to me! EPT sucks! I want to kill EPT. They get my fucking hopes up every time, and then I always get my Aunt Flo. Aunt Flo, I hate you as much as EPT!!!!

From: @dreaminofbaby: Ladies, let’s start a petition against EPT. EPT: do you actually stand for Essentially a Piece of Trash.

From: @iluvbooboo I am IN!!!!!!!!! Where do I sign?

From: NurseEllen: dear @iluvbooboo: false positives are very rare. I suggest you consult your doctor for a blood test. Or maybe this is all part of God’s plan for you.

From: @iluvbooboo: Nurse Ellen, respectfully, both you and God’s plan can go fuck yourself.

I try to log on to add my encouragement to @iluvbooboo. Something simple like: Y ou go girl! Or: Who are you to say what God has planned? Or: S o only people who are lucky enough to have a plan with God get a kid?

I try several user names — WillaGolden; WillaChandler; Willa ChandlerGolden — but can’t remember the right one. Sorry, this user does not exist! Which is just as well anyway because right when I give up, Hannah texts me back.

Oops. Srry. Not for u.

There , I think. Accidents happen. Maybe my dad isn’t always right.

My father didn’t become totally obsessive about his theories on fate and inevitability until his twin brother died. By all accounts — and surveying my grandmother’s worn, sepia-toned photos in which he looks like a perfectly normal, perfectly perfect little boy, this information seems verifiable — he didn’t truly fall into the deep end of never-ending rationality until the accident. In my dad’s defense, William’s death was an honest-to-God act of total randomness, a confluence of events that came together as a perfect storm — both literally and figuratively. A road trip through Florida, a last-minute hurricane, a downed palm tree smack through the roof of their crappy highway hotel. The tree trunk landed on the right bed — William’s — completely shattering his chest cavity and killed him instantly. My father — in the left bed — jolted awake and saw that the distances between life and death, between coming out totally unscathed and having your heart crushed inward, was simply nothing more than the decision to pass out on the mattress closest to the door.

My dad spent days, weeks, months asking himself, “ What if? What if it had been a different motel? What if it had been a road trip through Tampa, not Miami? What if we’d stopped for chicken noodle soup and not driven all the way through ?”

But none of this brought William back. None of this changed anything.

So my dad pressed on with his Ph.D., and he quit trying to come up with reasons why and what and how he could have done things differently, and instead, he set about proving why, in fact, nothing could have been done differently at all. Over the years, he burrowed further and further into this hole.

My mom likes to tell me the story of when I was born: that when I came out kicking and bloody and purple, the doctor held me up and cheered, “It’s a girl!” And my mom shouted, “Impossible! She was supposed to be a boy!” She began weeping in the way that only seriously hormonal, post-birth women can — after all, she’d already painted the nursery and bought only navy onesies and beanies.

But my dad? No, this wasn’t surprising to him. By then, he was well into his third paper for the Journal of Science , well on his way to the next coming of Einstein. Instead, he looked at me and shrugged and said, “Well, we’re still naming her William. That’s life. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t change it now.”

My mother pointed out that now was exactly when they could change it, that the birth certificate hadn’t been signed, that announcements hadn’t been printed or mailed. But my father insisted, and since my mother was her own worn-down version of Switzerland, the version that comes after years of loving a man who you have realized may be completely off his rocker but also might be the most brilliant man alive, she acquiesced. They compromised on Willa when I entered kindergarten because everyone assumed I was just a boy who liked to dress up in girls’ clothing. And I might have been little, but I can still remember the joy I felt at receiving my new moniker: that after so many years as William, it was a relief to try to be something new.

“I need something super-awesome to impress Nicky with this weekend,” I say to Vanessa the next morning, the early June air thick with humidity, clogging our pores, matting wisps of hair firmly against our temples.

“A prostitute?”

“He’s twelve.”

“So next year.”

“Right. Put a pin in that.”

“At thirteen, he becomes a man!” Vanessa throws her arms up in the air in mock-rejoice, and a cabbie yells out his window, “Great ass!”

She blows him a kiss, and we turn a sharp right into Central Park, Vanessa’s elbows pumping furiously to authenticate actual exercise.

“You know, we’re not actually ‘power-walking,’” I say. “’Power-walking’ implies real speed, an attempt to increase your heart rate.”

“I am attempting,” she says. “Besides, can’t you just be happy that I got out of bed to walk you to work?”

“You say that every Friday.”

When Shawn and I married, Vanessa made me swear that I wouldn’t become one of those women who lost herself entirely to her new husband. Whose sentences always started with “we,” whose plans always had to be confirmed with the other half. (Though admittedly, with our mapped-out life plan — children and a white picket fence and that cushy volunteer job at the library — we became pretty much this exactly.) It wasn’t that she wasn’t happy for me — she was, but still, she made me promise. I assured her that she and I would never drift apart, even while considering that one can never be sure of anything that the future may hold — the future just…was. And so dutifully, we walked through the city each Friday morning: me, on my way to work; her, searching for inspiration for her writing from whatever pulsed around us.

“So I got the job,” she says, as we wind down past John Lennon’s Imagine Circle, through the thicket of tourists with their cameras slung around their necks, already bottlenecking the walkway in the early hours of the day.