“Or not. Because since we know Meghan isn’t there, maybe that girl wasn’t there, either. Maybe no one has ever been there. Maybe the place in Colorado doesn’t even exist. Maybe Colorado doesn’t exist. When did this come out?”
“I’ve been getting sympathetic looks at bridge for three or four days, so probably then. I was just worried that Leo might have seen it, or heard about it. I spoke to him Tuesday night. He seems to be enjoying his job. He said he had a surprise for you when you got back. I hope it’s a good surprise. I’ve noticed that children’s surprises sometimes tend to be a little miscalculated, if you get my drift.”
I laughed; I was remembering a lifetime of unfortunate surprises. Aunt Maureen doesn’t really care for surprises, perhaps because there were so many enormous ones: the fact that she never had children herself, that she was left almost overnight with her sister’s instead of her own. That’s why she likes the Whitman’s Sampler instead of fancier chocolates. They still print a chart on the inside lid so you know exactly what you’re getting.
“Like the box of baby ducks for Easter?” I asked.
“That comes to mind. And the time you cut your own hair. And when you painted the words to some poem on the walls of your room.”
“Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass.”
“I think Leo is past the writing-on-walls phase.”
“Leo lives in a place where, if you want poetry on the walls, your mom hires a painter who does it in script and illuminates the letters appropriately.”
“Don’t be harsh. Besides, that nonsense doesn’t have its claws into him. Look at that job you’ve gotten him. How many of those boys could do that job and win the trust of those people you work with? He’s kept his footing. Our Meg, too.”
“I think maybe she’s lost her footing.”
“She’ll be fine.”
“She says she can’t come back.”
Maureen poured us both more coffee. Her mug said NURSES DO IT WITH TENDER LOVING CARE.
“She just needs to use her imagination. She should use you as her model. You always found a way to reinvent yourself.”
“Is that what we call it? I thought I was drifting aimlessly.”
Maureen put her mug down with a heavy thunk. “No, you didn’t. You thought Meghan thought you were drifting aimlessly. And she did, and it distressed her, not because it was a bad thing, but because it was something she had no knack for.” Maureen picked up the blue bowl in the center of the table and took out the apples inside it, lining them up by her plate. She flipped the bowl over and pointed to my initials on the bottom. “You’ve done a lot that’s concrete,” she said. “Things that last. Don’t underestimate that.”
Perhaps it was the bowl, and the faint memory of how beautifully I’d shaped the clay, how the roundness had risen under my cupped hands as I’d sat at the wheel. But I suddenly found myself on the verge of tears. I opened my mouth, suspended in that state in which it seems that two ways are possible but one will grow fainter and then disappear as the words roll out on your tongue, as though just past your lips one possibility will vanish like the Cheshire Cat, leaving only a shimmering hint of its former self. It’s that moment before you lean in to kiss a new man, the moment when you hold the unopened letter from a college in your hand, the moment when you know you are going to go one way or the other.
“I’m pregnant,” I said.
“Well, that’s a surprise.”
“To me, too. I thought I was going through menopause.”
“What are you going to do, Bridget?”
“I’m going to have a baby,” I said, and a shiver shook me. It was the first time I had said the words aloud.
“I think that’s a wonderful idea. Wonderful. The best idea in the world. How very lucky you are. Forty-three years old and pregnant.” She took my hand in hers and smiled softly, my aunt who had been betrayed by her own barrenness, who had had to take secondhand motherhood.
“Irving doesn’t want children.”
“So what does he say about this one?”
“He doesn’t know. I haven’t told him. I didn’t tell Meghan, either. I wasn’t sure and I was afraid of what she’d say. You’re the first person I’ve told.”
Maureen sipped her coffee and smiled. “That makes sense. After all, I’m the grandma.”
“And you’re not upset?”
“Because you’re not married? Oh, pooh. Two wonderful people with a baby they will both love. Think about what a great life she will have. Or he. But I have to admit, I’d love to have another girl. I bet a little girl would bring Irving around.”
“He’s pretty adamant about this. I’m not sure anything is going to bring him around. I might have to do this by myself.”
Maureen stood to clear the plates. “Don’t get up,” she said. “Is that why you didn’t drink your second cup of coffee? Do you need the name of a good OB? I still have an excellent medical network.”
“I think I have a line on a woman that everyone seems to really like. But unless Meghan comes back soon, I might need a Lamaze partner.” I had been Meghan’s Lamaze partner. Evan faints during the company blood drive. They brought him in at the crucial moment to cut the cord and wound up having to give him oxygen and put him on a stool at one side of the birthing room.
Aunt Maureen put a glass of orange juice in front of my place. “If you need me, I will willingly be the oldest person on earth to go to Lamaze classes. But you shouldn’t worry about Irving. The problem is that when most people think of having children, they think about having other people’s children. They look at a bunch of four-year-olds screaming on the playground or some nasty teenager snarling at his parents and think, Not me. And then someone hands them their own child. And all of that other nonsense is forgotten. Irrelevant. They change in an instant.”
She put the apples back in the bowl one by one. “It might not have happened to me with a baby in a hospital. But it happened to me, so I know exactly what I’m talking about.”
MONDAY MORNINGS IN my part of the Bronx are quieter than you’d expect. Certainly quieter than Mondays on my Manhattan block, when the graphic artists, corporate lawyers, midlevel managers, and ad execs come trudging out of their lobbies and down their stoops, the Times tucked under their arms, the grim determination of the dedicated joyless worker in the set of their mouths and their shoulders.
But when I get off the train in the Bronx on Monday morning, the feeling of the place is different. Even the sandwich shop, with its siren smell of processed meat, is sleepier than usual. Ricky, who owns it, named it the Cubana Sandwich Shop even though he is Puerto Rican because he says everyone hates Puerto Ricans. His mother tends the plants on the sill, the world’s largest and leggiest geraniums and an assortment of snake plants in terra-cotta pots, the kinds of plants that are purely an exercise in survival, not a display of beauty. Farther up the block there are a few shopkeepers sweeping Sunday’s garbage into the gutter and some kids heading for school late with preternaturally furrowed brows. But in our neighborhood Monday morning is a bit of a sleeping-in day. Of course some people are long gone by the time I break into sharp daylight from the disorienting fluorescence of the subway station. The people who have to be at work at six, the people who clean the trains, who make the school breakfasts—their day is already half gone when mine begins. But many of the others are in bed, exhausted, from a weekend of work. Vacuuming corner offices, busing tables of twelve on Lexington Avenue, selling fruit and baked nuts from stands along Sixth Avenue to tourists who act as though they’ve never seen an almond. No Monday through Friday for the working poor: they take it where they can find it. Once I heard a young cop say that the streets were quiet on Monday morning because they were all on the government tit. Irving had been with me, picking up sandwiches at the Cubana for a bunch of guys working a big drug bust over at Hunts Point. He flicked the young guy. Flicking is the most demeaning thing an older officer can do to a young one, as though to suggest he’s such an insect he’s not
worth a good slap. “Don’t be ignorant,” Irving said.
At my office I figured it wouldn’t be slow at all. Mondays are almost always busy for us. Saturday dinners turn into Saturday parties turn into Saturday arguments. That’s true everywhere, from Fifth Avenue to Staten Island, but in the precarious lives many of my women live, a Saturday argument can turn into Sunday morning on the street, a sister or an aunt whispering, “I’m sorry, baby, but he just don’t want you here no more.” There were more fires on the weekends, too, and more DV incidents, which is what we call it when a guy gets pissed that his wife is pissed that he has a pregnant girlfriend and turns her arm at that funny angle that makes it go snap so loud the kids, hiding in the next room, can hear it. Actually, sometimes we get the pregnant girlfriend instead, who’s gotten kicked in the stomach because she wants to know when he’s going to leave the wife. The answer being, When hell freezes over. Or, as Tequila said after one of her volcanic chesty “Huhs,” “When Jesus climbs down from the cross, walks into Mickey D’s, and orders an extra-value meal with a chocolate shake.”
But my first day back at the office was quiet and the news was good. Two of our residents had gotten jobs. One lady who lunches sent up a flare for a housekeeper; another saw a sign for a job at a fancy take-out joint and called Alison to have one of our residents come down and try out. In New York it is, of course, who you know, even when you are homeless and are qualified only for a job that revolves around ammonia, rubber gloves, and a dust mop.
“Delon is going into a preschool program in the fall for toddlers.” Mary, who oversees the kids at the transitional housing building, read from her notes at our staff meeting. “Annette is on a list for Section Eight housing. She may get a one-bedroom by July.”
I nodded. Toddler programs are good. Housing is good. My mind was as untethered as a balloon with a snapped string. Perhaps it was the knowledge that by the time Annette got into Section 8 housing I would be in maternity clothes. How thrilled my parenting class women would be! Perhaps it was that Leo had not come home the evening before and that I was concerned about his welfare. “Where do you think he can be?” I’d asked Kate when I called to report on Meghan. “Probably wherever he is when he’s at college and he’s out all night,” she said. “Calm Mom,” Kate’s coffee cup at Maureen’s would have read.
Or perhaps it was being able to see Meghan now in my mind’s eye, her arms moving so swiftly and surely through the lapis water, the muscles of her legs in high relief beneath the freckles and the dark skin, the drink and the joint in her hand. Soon I would have to send her a fax: BABY. Baby baby oh baby.
And of course there was Irving. I had been rehearsing a conversation with Irving for weeks now. They say that women intuitively know when they are pregnant—or, as one of my parenting students had once said, “I felt that bomb drop!”—and this had been true in my case. I had intuitively known it when I threw up at the faintest smell of clam sauce. I had intuitively known it when the idea of hot dogs made me nauseous. But I had ignored my intuition. There is something faintly ridiculous in pregnancy over forty-three.
It is more than faintly ridiculous to take a home pregnancy test, too, which I had found out Saturday night when I squatted over a stick in my windowless bathroom. And then it had occurred to me that that was the point. A dignified way of getting the news would not be the right preparation for what was to come: skirts with elasticized pouches, the signature flat-footed waddle, and the eventual intimate involvement in the bodily functions of another human being, one who would spit up on you as soon as look at you.
“Madonna and child,” Meghan had said drily one morning as the nanny held the baby and she finished using an electric breast pump, which looked like a mysterious home appliance. She’d had one in her office, too, in the drawer beneath her Emmys. Maybe I could bring the actual baby and breast to the office instead. But that was among the logistics I hadn’t figured out yet, including how I was going to afford anything better than a resident delivering his first baby on our paltry health insurance plan, how I was going to be able to buy diapers on my good-works salary, and where I was going to put a baby in a one-bedroom apartment. “They have kids, they wind up in the burbs,” Irving had once said with a shrug. Irving uses the term burbs the way epidemiologists use the term cholera epidemic.
For a sixty-seven-year-old man raised by what sounds in anecdote like the most fearful woman on earth and two older sisters whose motto was apparently “I’m allergic,” Irving is remarkably flexible, perhaps because he’s had to adapt to two wives and many girlfriends over his adult life. There are few things on which he absolutely insists: white clam sauce, not red; a suit and tie, not simply a jacket, in temple or church; no sideburns under any circumstances; and no children. There was no negotiating position in the news I had to deliver.
“We got to decide whether we’re going to keep this chess club just for our kids or for the whole neighborhood,” Mary said, looking over her notes.
“Since when do we have a chess club?” I said, shaking myself awake.
“Leo did it,” Alison said. “We all let him go ahead because, honestly, I don’t think any of us thought the kids were going to go for chess. But apparently he got them so invested in the knights and the king and some story he told about all of them that there’s a group who are playing every day after school. He’s got a couple of the middle school kids who brought friends home, and the next thing we know we’ve got ten kids in the living room playing or looking over each other’s shoulders.”
“You’re a star!” I said after lunch at my desk, chicken soup and saltines and Lord let it stay down, when Leo came banging into the outer office.
“Wait, wait, hold that thought,” he said, collapsing into the chair across from my desk. Did they all do that, enter a room as though they were ransacking it, fall into a chair as though they had been felled by a blow or had fainted away? Suddenly I looked at Leo and saw him as a succession of people—a baby, a toddler, a boy, a man. I looked down at my lap and saw the future.
“First, can we keep the kitten? Second, how’s my mom? Third, why am I a star? Fourth, have you seen Irving?”
“Yes, good, chess, no.”
“Wow.” He pitched forward, his elbows on my desk. “That was cool.” He messed around with his hair, although it was hard to tell what effect he was after. If it was neatening, he’d missed it. “So, okay, we can keep the kitten, which is great. I found her in the yard and she was really freaking out, crying and everything, and I had to bring her home in my backpack, and man, that was an experience, let’s just say I can’t use that backpack anymore. And my mom’s good, which is cool. And they told you about chess club, and you haven’t seen Irving yet but you will tonight because he’s taking me to the Yankees game, the commissioner’s tickets, how cool is that?”
“How much coffee have you had today?”
“Sorry, I’m really hyper. We got up in Newport this morning and drove all the way back here. And I didn’t get a lot of sleep while I was up there. But I had a whole lot of fun. You tell about the trip. I’ll tell about the chess.”
I must have talked for fifteen minutes, telling him about the little house, about the running and the swimming and the snorkeling, about the meals we had and some of the things we talked about. And yet as I spoke, all I could think of was how much we lie to one another with all the best intentions, how nearly every conversation has somewhere within it, often throughout it like veins in marble, obfuscation or avoidance or the kind of shading that shaves off the hard edges of the truth. Kindness and custom have turned us all into cowards.
“Come on, Bridey, how crazy is she?” Leo said, putting his big sneakers on my desk, laughing as I pushed them off.
“She’s not crazy. She’s a little hard. But her communication with you has been nothing but a comedy of errors. Apparently she left you endless messages on your dorm machine at school and the voice mail at the apartment.”
“Neither of which I ever listen to.
Yeah, I know. I’m going to have a Momathon tonight. I’m going to start with the first message at school and go straight through to the most recent one at the apartment. She says she thinks there are maybe fourteen messages in all. That’s a lot of messages.”
“You talked to her?”
“Not exactly. When I got here this morning, there was this long letter she sent on the fax machine. Handwritten and everything. I’m going to write her back, too. That’ll be cool, you know. It gives you more time to think. And you can hang on to a letter afterwards.”
“That’s great. Speaking of something you can hang on to, she sent you something.” From beneath my desk I lifted an enormous conch shell, speckled brown and cream, a gorgeous thing called Triton’s trumpet. Percy had brought it the day after he took us snorkeling, as an apology, I imagine, and Meghan had asked me to bring it to Leo.
“Man,” he said, turning it carefully in both hands, peering inside, holding it up to his ear. It seemed incomprehensible that a week ago this creature had been crawling in the grass in the warm blue water, and that what was left of him was in a cramped office in the Bronx, a gift from an absent mother to her boy-man.
“How did they get the guy out of there?” asked Leo. The one question he was certain to ask, the one best not answered. “They poured salt on him and he oozed out,” I said.
He put the shell down on a pile of papers. “That’s harsh,” he said.
I nodded. “It’s an empty house,” I said.
When he’d left to go drive two of the women to job interviews, Tequila came in and picked the shell up. “That’s a beauty, mon,” she said in an amped-up accent. “How much you pay?”
“A gift.”
She jerked her head toward the door. “You know how to play chess?”
I shook my head.
“It’s hard, I tell you that. I was watching last week, the kids are like, this one only moves like that, that one only moves like this. Give me checkers instead. Nice and easy.”
“So you think this is a waste of time.”