“Wow,” I said. “You just never know.”
“You don’t, do you?”
“You don’t?” said Sam.
“Oh, Sam,” said Kate indulgently.
“You are ready to order?” said one of the grumpy waitstaff to me, since Sam and Kate always had the same thing, steak frites, every time. So do I, for that matter, but the waiters, like my sister’s friends, have a hard time remembering my face. Liver and creamed spinach. My favorite meal is the kind of thing children are forced to eat as punishment. Sam tried to pour red wine into my glass, but I shook my head and took a deep breath.
“I’m pregnant,” I said.
“Aaaaah!” Kate screamed so loudly that the real estate agent and her table stared over at us. The Borowses have three sons and two grandsons, and either will pull out baby pictures at the slightest provocation. This, too, sets them apart from most New Yorkers, especially the ones who insist their grandchildren call them something age-neutral, like Cherie or Belle. The first time a little boy with a full diaper called Kate “Nana,” she became so unhinged with joy that her daughter-in-law had to put an ice bag on her eyes.
“Henri! Champagne over here! Cristal!”
“Sam, you idiot, she can’t drink. You can’t drink, right? None of them drink now.”
“I don’t believe I can drink. I haven’t seen a doctor yet, but everything I’ve read suggests I shouldn’t drink. Or eat swordfish, sushi, or processed meats.”
Henri had a bottle of Cristal in one bucket and a bottle of Perrier in another. There’s little he misses. “That’s bull,” Kate said. “I ate street dogs when I was pregnant. I loved street dogs.”
“And salami,” said Sam. He took her hand across the table. “And blue cheese. Saga blue with pear slices.” They were, after all, food people.
“I’m beside myself. What does Irving say? Are you getting married?”
“Married? God, no.”
“You should get married. Children need structure. Two parents. I know it’s old-fashioned, but I am old-fashioned.”
“What does Meghan say?” said Sam, clinking glasses with me.
“I haven’t told Meghan yet.”
I had, however, told everyone else. I told Ricky at the Cubana Sandwich Shop, my dry cleaner, and my dentist, who said some women have terrible trouble with their teeth during pregnancy. I told Alison and Tequila, both of whom screamed and danced around the office. “Girl, it’s about time,” Tequila shouted, shaking her butt in some ritualistic baby dance.
I told the women in my parenting group, who started screaming so loudly that the security guard from the front door, who manages to ignore blood in the lobby, came to the community room to make sure nothing catastrophic had happened. Once they quieted down, it was Maria who said thoughtfully, “Miz Fitz, you’re too old for this.”
“Get out, girl,” said Charisse. “My mama had her last baby when she was thirty-seven years old. That’s her best child, too, my sister Tanisse, who works the desk at the precinct typing and all that.”
“I’m forty-three,” I said.
“Oooooh,” Charisse said thoughtfully. “You’re not looking it.” I was wearing a sacklike denim sundress I’d been wearing for five years. “When you due?”
“I think it’s November.”
“You need that prenatal stuff,” one of the women said. “You know, the checkups, they give you vitamins, check you out.”
“Don’t go to that doctor up to Hillside Hospital,” another said. “He’s rough and he won’t give you drugs for the pain.”
“They don’t give us drugs for the pain,” Charisse said. “You on Medicaid, they go, Oh, none of that epidural stuff for you. You just lay there and yell.” Charisse narrowed her eyes and picked at her cornrows. “Hold that dress tight against your belly.” I had suddenly passed from teacher to student. They knew things, these women, that I had yet to learn. It was a mistake to focus on their deficits, as so many of the official types did. They knew things.
“Twins,” Charisse said.
“Jesus God,” I said. “Don’t say that.”
“Too big for just one. You what, three months? Look. She’s big.”
The entire parenting class tilted their heads to one side. Lips pursed, foreheads furrowed, fingers raised to lips. The rumination was broken by the security guard again, and all of us turned on him like a witches’ coven interrupted by a feckless human. He proffered a big square box with a stack of paper plates atop it. “That young man drives the van, he thought you all might be needing this,” he said.
“Can’t argue with cake,” Charisse said with a satisfied smile.
I’d told Leo the day after I’d told Irving. He was a wizard in our old van, adept at skirting the busiest intersections and maneuvering through the narrow side streets to get to the welfare offices or the Tubman projects. I had a late-afternoon meeting with a housing official so that we could see if a Tubman apartment that kept turning over would do for a family who had been in our transitional housing for more than a year.
It’s difficult to believe that sentient humans designed most New York City housing projects, but Tubman is a particularly bad example of planning. One of its buildings backs up to the expressway. As a result, its residents are treated to car tires hitting pitted asphalt at fifty miles an hour at night and, during the day, the fumes from hundreds of idling engines working their way through stop-and-go traffic. Some years ago a researcher at one of the medical schools did a study showing that rates of upper respiratory infection, asthma, and attention deficit disorder were three times as high in that building as in the one farthest from the highway. It was the third story on the local news networks that night, after a pretty blond accountant who’d been found dead in her East Side apartment and the mayor’s plan to offer free opera every week in Central Park.
Leo had found a parking spot at the side of that building, right across from a hydrant that is never used in the winter and is on all the time in the summer so the neighborhood kids can play in it and the guys can wash their cars. There were two cabdrivers there with buckets and rags, both black, both middle-aged, the kinds of black men who shame the young miscreants and criminals into leaving them alone by giving off an unmistakable but uncommon daddy vibe. The bravado boys avoid guys like this, ministers, store owners, cab and livery drivers, token clerks, as though they know that the men, as modest as their jobs may be, have achieved something they can never dream of. Most of them were still sleeping in their mothers’ apartments even this late in the afternoon, or talking tough on the packed-down earth of the center courtyard that anchors the Tubman towers. An old woman in the building once told me that she had been among the original tenants, and that the city had sodded the four quadrants divided up by cement walkways and even planted a skinny shivering tree of some sort in the center of each. No one seemed to have made allowances for the facts not only that the children of Tubman would use the grass instead of the sidewalks but also that the four towers were so tall and boxy, so monolithic and forbidding, that except for about an hour in midsummer they blocked out the sun. The jagged stump of one of the trees still sticks out of the bare earth, and every couple of years a kid falls on it and pierces a cheek or a knee.
The good thing about the bulk of the buildings is that on warm days they provide plenty of shade, although after dark, shade becomes cover and crime blooms there in a way the trees never had. Both of the cabdrivers looked us over thoroughly as we sat in the car. Leo waved at one of them, who inclined his head slightly. Leo’s freckles had darkened, and even wearing a Yankees hat and a T-shirt that said “Amsterdam Rocks!” he looked like Tom Sawyer’s East Coast cousin.
There was such an improbability to the progression of him. My own life seemed a seamless skein unfurling beneath my feet, but Leo in my mind was a herky-jerky series of Leos, like a silent movie or a flip book. Meghan in a hammock in the first house they’d had in Connecticut, the one with the low ceilings and enormous Federal fireplace, reading
some government report and drifting off to sleep as I watched random movements beneath her maternity shirt. Evan looking up from the toilet and missing Leo’s first real boy pee, Leo’s face as he looked at me the face of someone who has done something incredible. Meghan pointing my camera as Leo went to Biltmore for the first time in the navy uniform polo shirt and the khaki shorts. Leo diving in the lake, Leo debating the question of the flat tax in the auditorium, Leo taking his friend Samantha to the prom at the Waldorf. Leo driving me to Tubman, knowing his way around.
“I’m going to have a baby,” I told him, which is as different from “I’m pregnant” as “I’m home” is from “I’m signing a lease.”
“Shut up!” said Leo.
“Really.”
“Shut up!” This is the current term of art for “you’re kidding.” I think all those New York kids love it so much because they spent their childhoods with middle-aged nannies telling them the words were never allowed.
“Really.”
“Bridey! A baby! I’m totally speechless. Wow. Wow. A baby.” His mouth was ajar. His hair was every which way. If I loved this baby as much as I loved Leo, it would be so loved it would smile all the time. Or maybe that’s what all parents tell themselves, that if they love and love and love, the smoke from that fire will warm its object until the end of time. “It’s a cousin!” Leo said. “It’s a cousin, right?”
“Technically, yes. But if I had to guess, you’ll be more like a big brother. Maybe even an uncle.”
“Wow. I can’t believe my mom didn’t say anything.”
“You talked to your mom?”
“She sends me a letter every day now. Still by fax, though. She says she’s not sure how the mail service is there. She makes it sound as if she’s in the middle of nowhere.”
“She is in the middle of nowhere.”
“Wow, she must have been shocked by the news. The baby news.”
“She doesn’t know.”
“Are you kidding? You didn’t tell her?”
“I didn’t know when I was there.”
Leo looked at me and then threw his unruly head back and laughed. “You’re afraid,” he crowed. “You’re afraid of what she’ll say. That’s so wack. You know what she’ll do. She’ll just spring into Meghan mode. She’ll have a list of what you should eat, what you should wear, what doctor you should go to, what crib you should buy. Oh, man, you are so lucky she’s not doing the show anymore, or you’d have six months of stories about older moms.”
“Don’t be mean.” But he was right. Leo is never mean but always shrewd. He has perfect vision of the spiritual sort. He knew that his childhood had also been marked in five-minute segments or the occasional weeklong series: single-sex schools, self-esteem for boys, the role of team sports, how to choose the right college. Meghan eased into every life passage by turning it into a story designed to benefit all of America, and America liked it. Kate had said at dinner that she’d heard of a group of ditched wives on the East Side who called themselves the Meghan Fitzmaurice Society and who’d taken those two forbidden words she’d uttered at the end of the Greenstreet interview as their motto. “There’s a substantial reservoir of support for her,” Sam had said. “People think it’s incredibly gutsy, just to walk away and leave the network holding the bag.”
“On the other hand,” Kate had said with her lower lip thrust out dramatically, “we saw that putz Murphy at a party and he said she’ll never work again.”
Leo locked the van, and one of the drivers gave Leo the high sign, meaning he’d be on the lookout, although our van was so sad that it was hard to believe anyone would bother to steal it. Leo cut up the sidewalk along the backsides of the buildings and away from the busy center quad.
“You’re going to C, right? Where Margaret lives? There’s a back door that goes right into the corridor and to the director’s office.”
“Nobody’s ever bothered to tell me that.”
“Margaret uses it all the time. The other kids really hassle her a lot. All that Oreo stuff, thinks she’s too good, you know. And a couple of the guys get really rowdy with her, say really bad stuff. The first time I was like, I am going to get so up in that guy’s grille, and she was like, Hello, white boy, just step down and stay safe, and I was like, I’m not putting up with that crap. But then one of her brothers showed up. He’s a good guy. The one who’s going to be a cop. The other one is kind of sketchy. I mean, I think he’s a good guy but he’s got some sketchy friends.”
“The one whose friend has a thing for Princess Margaret.”
“She’s ditching the Princess thing. She ditched it, like, two years ago at school. I mean, c’mon. It’s just ridiculous. Oh, man, this door is locked up tight.”
He was right; it wouldn’t budge. We turned back and followed the path into the quadrangle, dark as a cellar and just as dank. The only way you could tell you were outside was by looking up at the small square of clouds that floated like a trompe l’oeil over the tops of the four buildings. Somebody’d burned up all the benches, and they’d had to remove the trash cans because during fights they always wound up being used as projectiles. Skull fracture, shattered pelvis, broken nose: you can do some real damage with a metal mesh can if you throw it hard enough. I watched as two teenage girls leaning on strollers unwrapped Little Debbie snack cakes and threw the wrappers on the ground. A toddler leaned out of one stroller and grabbed one of the wrappers. In another a baby slept, her bald head encircled by a beaded and beribboned headband in case anyone who missed her pink dress and Sleeping Beauty shoes made the mistake of thinking she was a boy.
“Miz Fitz! Miz Fitz!” One of the girls was waving her snack cake. I recognized her from a stay with her mother in the shelter three years before. I had given her a magic wand with a star atop it that for some reason had been in the goody bag at the Leukemia Society’s black-tie dinner at the Pierre. She’d carried the wand around for weeks, until it turned from silver to gray.
“Hey, honey,” I called back. Women at cocktail parties, girls at Tubman—it’s remarkable how successfully that endearment covers up the fact that I can’t remember names.
“I’m coming to your classes! The court say I got to go or they’re gonna make my mother the guardian person for the baby, and I’m saying, Nuhhuh, if she’s such a good guardian how come I got a baby when I’m fourteen? So I’m coming next week.”
“I’ll see you then. You take good care of her till I see you.”
I looked sideways at Leo as we walked away. “Stop wincing. You got to learn early on not to wince. And not to assume. You know how old Tequila was when she had Baruch? She was fifteen. Some of them turn out all right.”
“It’s just that sometimes I feel like a fraud, being here. Like when I was in high school, we had this day called Community Service Day, and it was totally bogus, because we’d go to soup kitchens or whatever and all the girls from the girls’ schools would use it as an opportunity to meet guys, and the next day we’d be talking about, wow, life is really hard for people in some places, and then we’d forget about the whole thing. It was like it was a museum exhibit: Now, boys and girls, here we are in the hood. Be careful and don’t touch anything.”
“Think how Princess Margaret must feel.”
“It’s a nightmare. She says Tequila is looking at this house over on Kelly Street to buy, get them all out of here.”
As if to prove the point, the elevators opened and a group of young men sauntered out in gangsta uniform, long shorts, big shoes, hooded eyes as though they’d just rolled out of bed. I nodded. Leo nodded. They brushed past, way too close, to make the point that we were on their home ground, not the other way around. One of them was Tequila’s son Armand. He’d flunked two of his courses spring term at community college. I figured one of the other guys was his friend Marvin. They were on the cusp, all of them. A lucky break, a decent job, and they’d go one way. A bad circle of friends, a pressing need for cash, and they’d go the other. The cusp was as good as
it got in Tubman.
“Yo, Bus Boy!” one of them called as they strutted out the double glass doors. “Bus Boy! We talking to you! Bus Boy, that your girlfriend? She a little old for you.”
“Shut up” I heard in a low voice. Armand, probably. He’d known me since he was thirteen.
“Bus Boy!” another cried. “You best not be going to Armand’s place. His sister got other things to do.”
Leo never looked up, but his shoulders were as stiff as if his T-shirt had been starched. The director’s office was at the very back of the building, down another long corridor, but he was looking at his shoes the whole way.
“You having trouble here?”
“Nothing I can’t deal with. I mean, I understand why they don’t like me. I try to show my face as little as possible.”
“Bus boy?”
“Because I drive the van.”
I told him I needed him to wait in the director’s office with me so he could drive me back, that I was tired and my feet hurt, both of which were true. But I also didn’t want him walking out alone, and when we left we went through that back door. I almost asked for a key.
“YOU’RE A WITCH,” I said to Tequila once when we were watching a news bulletin on our grainy television in the transitional-housing living room. A political figure had announced that he was returning to private life to spend more time with his family several days before, and Tequila had turned down her mouth, raised her eyes, waved her hand, and said, “That man’s trouble, mark my words. A lady friend, probably, or money. One or the other.” It had turned out to be both, embezzlement for the purpose of keeping the lady friend, a former exotic dancer, in a love nest on Staten Island. “You’re a witch,” I said again.
“Let me tell you something. We know things.”
“We who?”
“Black women, that’s we who.”
“Wait, we’re supposed to pretend we’re all the same, but it turns out you all got the intuition?”
“And you all got the money, the power, and the straight hair. Don’t give me this all-the-same hoo-ha, sister girl.”