Annie’s sister speaks first, reciting a Langston Hughes poem called “Dream.” Then it is Ben’s turn. He clears his throat and gazes lovingly at the baby. I feel Richard’s hand on my back as I look down at my new shoes and listen to Ben say in a loud, clear voice, “Raymond, I am so happy and proud to be your godfather. My wish and prayer for you is that you will be a person of character and integrity…That you will be strong yet gentle…That you will be honest yet forgiving…That you will be righteous but not self-righteous…That you will always follow your heart and do good and beautiful things in the world. Amen.”
I feel a wave of devastating sadness as I consider what a wonderful father Ben will be. How lucky his son or daughter will be. How glad and grateful another woman will someday be that I felt the way I did about having children. Don’t look at him, I tell myself. But I do anyway. I can’t help it. And maybe it’s my imagination, but as I study Ben’s face, I am pretty sure he is just as sad as I am.
“I should never have brought Richard to that party,” I say to Jess after I’ve returned home and given her the full rundown.
“I’m sorry,” Jess says. “But if it helps, I still think you did the right thing.”
“How do you figure?” I say, unbuckling the ankle straps of my beautiful Manolos that I’m almost positive Ben failed to notice.
“Because,” she says, “you showed him you moved on.”
“But he hates me now.”
“He doesn’t hate you.”
“You didn’t see the look he gave me. He hates me.”
“So he hates you. So what?”
“I don’t want him to hate me.”
“Yeah, you do. You want him to care enough about you to hate you. If he had sat there at the party yucking it up with Richard, you’d be feeling worse right now.”
I grant her the point, but then say, “I feel like such a jerk for doing that to him.”
“Claudia, you brought your boyfriend to a party. Big fucking deal. You know Ben’s dating, too.”
I twist my opal ring around my finger and sigh. “I don’t like hurting his feelings. I feel as if I did it…deliberately. I don’t think he would have done that to me.”
“Look. It’s not like you left him for Richard. He left you. He left you hoping that he’ll meet another woman so that he can get her pregnant and have a family. Keep that straight in your head.”
I nod. She’s right.
“So no more feeling guilty,” she says. “Okay?”
I nod again, thinking that that is way easier said than done. And I’m beginning to see that I might be feeling guilty for more than bringing a man to a party.
Eighteen
Jess is three days late getting her period and is vacillating between panic and jubilation. I know all about Jess’s pregnancy “scares.” She’s probably had about a hundred since I’ve known her. In fact, one of the first conversations we ever had was in the bathroom on our freshman hall. She emerged from a stall, pumping her fist, announcing, “I got my period!” I laughed and told her congratulations, feeling in awe of a girl who would be so open with a virtual stranger.
Jess has mostly been on the pill since that incident at Princeton, but she consistently forgets to take it. She’ll look down at her packet of pills and exclaim, “Shit! What’s today? Wednesday?” and notice that the last white pill to be poked through foil is marked “Sunday.” At this point, she typically swallows three down at once. I always tell her the same thing: Take the thing at the same time every day. Put it by your toothbrush. Leave a note on your mirror.
But she doesn’t. Or won’t. Instead, she carries the pills around in her purse, forgetting to switch them with her choice of handbag. Then there are the times when she fails to fill the prescription altogether. Or the times when she is, in her words, “giving her body a break.”
I think subconsciously—or maybe even consciously—Jess enjoys the drama. There is no other explanation for why such an intelligent woman would behave so haphazardly. She must thrive on our conversations about what she (we) will do if, this time, she really is pregnant. Will she have it? Will she get an abortion? Will she have it and put it up for adoption? The answer changes according to the guy, the time in her life, the wind.
Although I must say, this time seems different. This time Jess really wants the baby. Or maybe she just wants Trey. She continues to dance around a full-on confession, but all facts indicate that Jess tried to get pregnant. She apparently “forgot” to tell Trey that she hadn’t renewed her pill prescription. And she’s “pretty sure” that she had sex with him on day fifteen of her twenty-nine-day cycle.
I can tell that she believes that Trey will be with her if she’s pregnant with his baby. I, on the other hand, am absolutely certain that Trey is going nowhere. He will not leave his wife. Nor will he even tell his wife. In fact, knowing Jess’s luck (although it’s hard to use the word luck when someone is utterly self-destructive), it would turn out that Trey’s wife is pregnant also. I can just imagine the two babies being born in the same month. Maybe even on the same day. They will grow up on separate coasts with no knowledge of the other. Or at least Trey’s legitimate son will have no knowledge of his father’s illegitimate daughter. Jess likely will tell her daughter the truth about everything at a suitable age (an age we will debate for years). Then the two offspring will attend the same college and meet in their freshman composition class. He will fall in love with her, at which time she will be forced to tell him the truth about their father.
None of it would surprise me. Nothing ever surprises me when it comes to Jess.
On the third night of Jess’s missed period, we go get sushi at Koi, a restaurant on Second Avenue near her apartment, even though it is Friday night, and we both had planned to go to separate parties. I’m too tired, and Jess says she has no interest in partying when she can’t drink.
“C’mon, Jess. Do you really think you’re pregnant?” I say, as I break apart my chopsticks.
Jess rattles off her symptoms. She says she’s been exhausted and bloated. She says her boobs feel heavy and sore. She says she can just tell. She knows.
I look at her, thinking I’ve heard it all before. I say, “First, you know that those are also premenstrual symptoms. Second, you are a hypochondriac who wants to be pregnant. You’re going to feel things.”
“I’m not a hypochondriac,” Jess says indignantly.
“Yeah, you are,” I say. “How about the time we went camping and you just knew that you had Lyme disease? You actually joined an online support group for victims!”
“Yeah. I had all the symptoms,” she says. “That was so weird.”
“You thought you had all the symptoms.”
She dabs her napkin to her lips and says, “Well. I think we should get a test after dinner.”
I sigh and say, “How many dollars do you think you’ve spent on those tests?”
“I’m telling you. This time feels different.”
“Okay,” I say. “So tell me. What will you do if you’re pregnant and Trey still won’t leave his wife?”
“He will.”
“But what if he doesn’t?”
“I’d still have the baby,” she says as she dips a California roll in soy sauce. She has already announced that she is staying away from raw fish. Just in case. “I’d just be a single mother. Lots of people do it.”
“Would you keep working full-time?”
“Of course. I love my job.”
“So you’d get a nanny?”
“Or two,” she says.
I almost say, “What’s the point of having a kid then?” but something stops me. Something that tells me that the last thing I should be doing is judging another woman’s decision with respect to the subject of children.
On our walk home, Jess ducks into a bodega and buys a pregnancy test. She scans the back of the box and informs me that she will wait until the morning because results are more accurate then. I look at her skeptically, knowing that ther
e is literally no way that she will resist testing tonight. In fact, I’m putting the over-under at about an hour upon our return.
I start to think that I might be wrong when I hear Jess on the phone, spewing investment-banking jargon. Something about discount rates and exit multiples. She might as well be speaking Portuguese as far as I’m concerned. Then I hear her say, “Look, Schroder. This isn’t rocket science. If you want rocket science go work for NASA. Now. Just get me the presentation by tomorrow morning and get it to me in a fucking font big enough for that geriatric board of directors to read!”
I smile and tell myself that there’s no way Jess is pregnant. Despite all her wishes for a baby, I just can’t fathom it. At least not right now.
But minutes later, she bursts into my room, plastic stick in hand. I sit on my bed and try to catch my breath.
“Look. A cross,” she says, presenting me the plastic stick. Her hands are trembling.
“You’re pregnant?” I ask, still in disbelief. Never mind the scientific results before me.
“I’m going to have a baby,” Jess says, looking teary. The happy kind of teary. The standing on the Olympic podium, mouthing words to “The Star-spangled Banner” kind of teary.
“Wow,” I say, sitting on the edge of my bed. “I can’t believe it.”
“Neither can I,” Jess whispers.
“Did you call Trey?”
“Yeah. He didn’t answer.”
“Did you leave a message?”
“Uh-huh. I said it was important…” Her voice trails off.
“How do you feel?” I ask.
“Scared,” she says. “Overwhelmed…But happy.”
I hug her as I whisper congratulations. We separate, staring at each other, then down at the stick, then back at each other.
“What are you thinking?” she asks after a minute more of silence.
I shake my head, feeling a wave of jumbled, crazy emotion. Mostly I am afraid for my best friend. I know how hopeful she is, how badly she wants things to work out with Trey, and how devastated she will be when reality sets in over the next nine months. I also can’t help but feel a twinge of anger at Jess for doing this to herself, for going about motherhood this way. I resent her for making bad decisions in her life, and can’t help but consider how those ill-advised decisions will impact me and my life. I didn’t want a baby with Ben, my husband, so I certainly don’t want one with a friend. But how awful would I be to move out when my friend is pregnant and needs me? How awful would I be to intentionally distance myself at such a critical juncture?
Then, buried beneath all of the obvious reactions is this other strange pang. This worry that if I do move out and separate myself from Jess and her baby, I will be sidelined. Left out of something extraordinary. That Jess’s life will become so much more than my life. It is almost as if I’m jealous of her. Which is insane because obviously I do not want a baby. I do not.
I start wondering what I always wonder when I have irrational, uncontrollable emotions of any kind: Is it normal to feel this way? Do other people feel wistful over something they don’t want in the first place? I hope that the answer is yes, as there is always something comforting about knowing that you are not alone. That other people feel the way you do. That you are a bit screwed up, but still normal.
Jess reclines on my bed, staring up at the ceiling, as I scramble to come up with an analogy, something that will make sense of the way I’m feeling. My mind lands on my first love, Charlie, whom I occasionally run into when I’m back in Huntington. Charlie is a fire-fighter in my hometown—which means he spends his weekdays rescuing stray dogs and cats and teaching fire safety at our old elementary school. He spends his weekends watching Jets games and chain-smoking Camel Lights with his high school buddies and playing in the backyard with his four kids. I would wager that Charlie doesn’t own a passport and hasn’t read a book since graduation. In short, his life is nothing like mine—and life with Charlie would never have been enough for me. But when I see him, I still feel a small burst of longing remembering the way it felt to be sixteen, emerging from a movie theater on a warm summer night and then parking in Charlie’s car while we made out and listened to his cassette mix of love songs. And yet I do not confuse these feelings for actually wanting to be with Charlie.
I don’t want a baby, either, but I feel a pang anyway. A very small pang, but still one that makes me blurt out to Jess, “If I had known this were going to happen…”
Jess’s eyes widen. She says my name slowly, as a question.
“What?” I say innocently.
“Are you having second thoughts?”
“About what?” I say.
“About Ben? About having a baby? About having Ben’s baby?” she says, looking concerned, suspicious, and hopeful all at once.
“No,” I say emphatically. “Don’t be ridiculous. No second thoughts here.”
“Well, I guess that’s a good thing,” Jess says slowly. “Because if you were having second thoughts, your life would be, like, ten times more fucked up than mine is right about now.”
I look at her and say again, “No second thoughts here.”
The next morning I stay in bed, reading Wuthering Heights for about the fiftieth time. It is my favorite book of all time. And I think I love it even more now that my own relationship has ended. In a perverse way, I almost enjoy feeling as tormented as Cathy was over Heathcliff.
I find my favorite lines and read aloud to myself: “My great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be…He’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure…but as my own being.”
I sigh and flip to another clutch passage: “Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”
Then, just as I’m getting all riled up in the satisfying, melodramatic throes of passion and despair, I think of how, early in our relationship, Ben read the book at my insistence. His first words when he finished the book were: “Well. That Heathcliff is a real laugh a minute, huh?” I smile, remembering how I laughed then.
And in that instant, my cell phone rings. I irrationally expect it to be Ben calling, but when I look down at the screen on my phone, I see that it’s just Daphne. I answer, and she asks me what’s new. It’s not until that second that I process how bad it will be when she finds out about Jess. I take the path of least resistance and tell her nothing is new at all. Jess can share the news herself. I’m not going to unless I absolutely have to.
“What’s going on with you?” I deflect.
“Oh, not much,” she says.
“Did Tony’s results come in?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says. “They did.”
“And?”
“He’s fine. No problems at all,” she says, her voice sounding strangely high-pitched and happy. It occurs to me that maybe she is pregnant, but I don’t dare ask. Instead I keep the conversation safe and say, “So what else is going on?”
“Oh, you know, just getting back in the swing of the school year…Working on some new bulletin boards and stuff.”
“That’s good,” I say. “Your bulletin boards are amazing.”
“Aww. Thanks, Claudia,” she says.
There is a long pause and then Daphne says, “So, Claudia, do you think you can come over for dinner tomorrow? Around seven? I want to make you my lasagna.”
“Is Maura coming?” I ask.
“No.”
“Mom or Dad?”
“No. Just you. I thought it would be fun!” she says.
“Sure, Daph,” I say, concluding that she’s probably not pregnant. If she were, she’d likely invite us all over. But the way my life is going, I’m pretty sure that some baby talk will be involved.
The next evening I take the train to Huntington. As I step down from the platform, I see Daphne wav
ing at me from her bright yellow Mini Cooper. I walk toward her and can see something in her face that looks unnatural and exaggerated. Like a beginning actress pretending to be happy.
When I get to the car, I say, “Hey, Daph!” recognizing the false cheer in my own voice. I realize that it’s mighty difficult to act normal when someone else is behaving oddly.
We make small talk on the drive back to her house, discussing her kids at school. She also tells me, in terms that go way beyond effusive, how much she adored Amy Dickerson’s novel. She says she selected it for her book club even though they usually stick with chick lit.
“The girls are going to love it,” she says. “It’s just so…thought-provoking.”
I glance at Daphne, thinking that it is quite possibly the first time Daphne has ever referred to her thoughts as being provoked. My sister is not at all dumb, but she is far from introspective.
When we get to her house, Daphne clicks open the garage door. I see Tony’s black minivan parked inside and mentally rule out marital problems. At least anything imminent. Then again, this strange brand of chipperness would not really make sense in the context of divorce. Something else is going on.
“Home again, home again, jiggity jig!” Daphne says with a nervous laugh. It is what my father says every single time he pulls into our garage. Daphne picked the habit up. Maybe I would, too, if I had a garage to pull into.
I follow Daphne into the kitchen, say hello to her two yapping Yorkies, Anna and Gary, and survey a hearty spread of crab puffs made from English muffins and a lot of butter. Daphne is not a fancy cook—she just does the basics exceptionally well. Tony is sitting at the counter watching a baseball game, but when he sees us, he stands, walks over to me and kisses me on the cheek. “It’s wonderful to see you, Claudia!” he says, sounding as stilted as my sister.
“It’s wonderful to see you, too, Tony,” I say.
Daphne turns down the volume on the TV and says sweetly, “Could you please turn the music back on, honey?”
He obliges, as I say, “Wow, Daph. Crab puffs. What’s the special occasion?”