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  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: The little guys

  Hey Sheil,

  Wow! Did the boys eat that cake, or just wear it? Anyway, thanks for the clip. They are so adorable it should be illegal. I hope they like the little drum set I sent—and I hope you don't hate me for it. Hee hee!

  It's so funny that you should send me that clip today. I'm seeing lots of babies today, and pregnant women. Hey you're not pregnant, are you? Just kidding. I saw the most gorgeous baby this morning. The sun was bouncing off him in a very halo kinda way. How do babies do that?

  Anyway, I gotta sign off. Work is completely insane, deranged & busy. How is life in the real world?

  xoxoxo Jane

  She saw no babies on her way home. She walked, but at a much slower pace this time, stopping in Chinatown for dinner to take home. She was not sad, not lonely, not like you're thinking. She was definitely tired and would have preferred to be facing her twenty-second birthday, or even her thirty-first. She anticipated hating forty, but being all calm and wise at fifty. What was so bad about thirty-seven? Her life was fine, good, even wonderful, and only a real bitch would complain about this good life.

  No, she wasn't sad. Nor was she stupid. All those babies and pregnant women must have been there all along, she knew that. She was just noticing them now because of some biological alarm that needed to be reset. The hole in her middle was at midabdomen. How annoying was that? The magazines and talk shows told her that she'd be fine on her own, but none of them told her about this ache. What was she supposed to do, become a single mother? Just do that? Just become a mother who was single?

  A single mother.

  She stopped walking. It sounded so plausible. She had a big apartment, she made a good living, and had a supportive family nearby. Well. She had family nearby. She was strong and she was loving. She could go out and get pregnant and have a baby and be happy. She could do this. She could have a baby.

  Jane's life was a movie. (Isn't everyone's?) So, in her head, Jane tried to fast-forward to her life as a Single Mother, and the picture was fuzzy. There was baby food on her blouse, and she stumbled over Legos that were scattered everywhere. But she was smiling. Obviously, the fast-forward technique didn't work every time. She started walking again. Single Mother. That was crazy talk. Whatever phase she was in, Jane would ride it out until menopause. So there.

  She fell asleep late, on the couch, in front of the television. She had a crazy dream that she was at a picnic, playing tug-of-war with a beautiful red velvet cord. She couldn't see her opponents, so she started following the red cord. She woke up before she could find them. The TV was flickering with some medical drama where doctors were urging a sweaty pregnant woman to breathe and push, and they could see the head! And then a six-month-old infant, playing the newborn, artfully smudged with goo, was placed on the mother's chest. She wept with joy.

  Jane remained stoic. She brushed her teeth and went to bed without flossing, proving to herself that she was too irresponsible to be a single mother.

  …

  Dick-Richard was in Starbucks every morning, so Jane opted for the acidic coffee available in the pantry at Argenti, and then quickly converted to tea. After all, she couldn't go get coffee in a place where some temping actor-guy liked her and was flirting with her. The flirting could lead to dating and the dating could lead to love and the love could lead to marriage and babies. This temp could turn out to be the father of her child. Jane wasn't sure if she was afraid of him or of the theoretical baby. Better to keep this whole scary issue in limbo. Wait it out and drink tea.

  The baby haunting continued through the week. Thankfully, some of the little ones were very unattractive. There was the red-faced toddler whose goal in life was to inflict his misery on all of Manhattan. There was the little cherub with the river of green snot oozing from her nose. There was a whole mess of running, screaming children in a playground that must have been there last week, but Jane had never noticed it. Jesus, there were a lot of children in a city that was really designed for adults.

  Saturday came, and Jane made a pilgrimage to Bed, Bath & Beyond. It was jammed with Manhattanites who urgently needed more cookware, better towels, and storage solutions. Plus throw pillows and salsa. Jane was there for hooks, chic entranceway hooks to hold fashionable coats and jackets. She had ugly, boring brass hooks, and that would never do. Surely a big store like this would offer something more attractive—and it did. She carried two sets of hooks as she browsed the store: self-adhesive or needs-hardware. Oh, the suspense.

  There was a special in-store demonstration on baby-proofing. Jane thought, for a moment, that this was a way to keep babies out of your home. She came to realize that it meant keeping babies from opening drawers.

  She paced herself, well aware of the server maintenance that awaited her that evening. She would be required to supervise people who were doing something by rote. These people were already bored before they woke up. She was their overpriced babysitter. Jane browsed, she touched, she sniffed. Everything was bright and clean.

  “Hey, Jane!”

  Dick-Richard. It was Dick-Richard.

  “Are you coming to my show tonight? I think we have, like, three reservations. You have to come and make it like four.”

  It's a big, crowded store in a big, crowded city. This sort of thing simply never happens in New York, except when it does.

  “Oh. I'm sorry. I can't—”

  A woman pushed her stroller between them. The sleeping baby taking the ride stirred, but continued to sleep. Jane lost her bearings for only a moment.

  “I have to work.”

  “At night? Come on! You're, like, an executive or something, aren't you? What are you doing working on a Saturday night?”

  A long explanation followed. Richard seemed to get some of it. He nodded and did lots of active listening, then launched into an animated description of the play the company, the rehearsal process, his role, and what happened when he dropped a line last night and it was so funny and the audience had no idea.

  Jane's mind wandered. She had always believed in signs. It was part of her Irish heritage. This guy was not sweeping her off her feet right away, but there was something to be said for the fact that she kept seeing him and seeing him. And babies. She kept seeing him and babies. She should be courageous, she should get out of limbo, and she should buy the hooks that required hardware. Brave girl.

  She took his flier and his personal business card, which featured a grinning photo and a list of his union affiliations. She gave him her number. Her real number. Very brave girl.

  …

  Over the years, Jane had managed a lengthy series of repairs to her apartment. Once, she was a fix-it junkie. But this time, she went home and managed to decimate her wall attempting to insert the necessary hardware for her hooks. She left the new crater, and all the plaster dust, and retreated for the predictable safety of the of- fice, where teamsters would never have allowed her to attempt this hook fiasco.

  Server maintenance is not nearly as thrilling as it sounds. Oh, no, it's actually a tedious process, and Jane's presence there was somewhat ceremonial. If anyone had made a disastrous error, it would have been Jane's responsibility to contact powerful people and apologize. She had hours to kill and a search engine at her disposal. She sat at her computer and Googled.

  She Googled Dick-Richard. Richard. She should really think of him as just Richard. She found him mentioned in a handful of reviews for Off-off-Broadway plays:

  …

  What Now, Chairman Mao?—a musical that was not well received

  The Peanut Butter Plan—a children's play that was very well received

  When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder—for which he did carpentry Riverside Scene Night—wherein he performed a monologue by Christopher Durang

  …

  Jane couldn't make much of this. Did it mean that he was talented or not? Had he ever appeared on Law &
Order, and how could she find out? She tried to find out about that program, but only learned that their upcoming episode was about a homicide over the custody of a baby.

  Eventually, Jane's mind wandered to the phrase that had been rolling around in her head. Single Mother. She typed it in carefully, barely tapping the keys, and she Googled. She got 2,370,000results in 0.26seconds. She added “new york” to her search and was still sifting through 1,120,000results.

  There were articles, support groups, condemnations, personal essays, chat rooms, and dating services, and that was just on the first page. She kept looking, which was odd because she didn't actually know what she was looking for. An answer? A solution? To what, the baby haunting? She didn't mind the baby haunting all that much. She needed no exorcism. She liked babies.

  She loved babies.

  She wanted a baby of her own.

  No, she didn't.

  Did she?

  Would the ache disappear someday, or would it expand and amplify the thump of her pulse and drive her mad, like a telltale heart? Jane stopped thinking and returned to her search. It didn't take her long to find a thread in the glowing, blue-underlined world of blogs. She clicked on one and followed it to the world of Choosing Single Motherhood. CSM. They offered the thing Jane craved: information. They were located in Manhattan, and they were scheduled to have a meeting next Saturday. Somehow that meeting got itself entered into Jane's electronic calendar. What was that—satisfaction? Joy? Progress? An endorphin rush?

  Jane needed to breathe deeply. Typing this into her electronic calendar was absolutely not a commitment. It didn't mean anything, did it? It was a week away, and a lot could happen in a week. Maybe the Christ Child would appear again and give her a sign. Maybe Dick-Richard would give signs of an appealing future. Jane was good at extracting information from signs, even when the signs were vague and the information nonexistent.

  She printed four articles and called for a car service to take her home. Work late—get a car home. What a perk. Jane pushed through the lobby doors, and there was Celeste, her favorite driver, waiting and waving. Celeste was as old as Jane's mother, but not nearly as cranky. Her laugh lines curved up to her forehead. Her baby-fine hair was dyed orange-yellow, and she seemed happily unaware of the bright pink lipstick she always wore on her teeth.

  “Janie! You working late again? I'm gonna get you home, baby”

  Jane put away her reading material for a cozy chat with Celeste.

  “What you reading, Janie?”

  “Oh, some articles. Stuff. About kids.” This felt like an enormously brave step.

  “Oh, yeah? You got kids?” Celeste asked.

  “No. But I'm thinking about it.” Jane felt drunk with the freedom to talk about this crazy idea, this motherhood thing. She could just spill the idea right there to Celeste! She even said, “I'm not married, but I have this feeling I'm supposed to have kids. I can't explain it, but I'm supposed to be a mother. I think I know it. Does that sound crazy?”

  Celeste nodded and said, “Oh, darling. I understand it.” There was no traffic, there were no pedestrians. Celeste could have driven faster and run a string of green lights, but she slowed down. She checked the rearview to watch her passenger in the backseat. Jane leaned forward.

  “This makes no sense. I shouldn't want this. I'm probably being selfish or stupid or irrational. But I've had this urge before, and I'm starting to feel afraid. I'm almost thirty-seven, and if I wait much longer, I'll be in diapers along with the kid. You know what I mean?”

  “Of course.”

  “You've never mentioned any kids, Celeste. Do you and Theo have kids?”

  “No, sweetheart, my Theo and I, we always talked about kids, but that's not how you get them! And there was so much going on. He started the store and he was working all the time, and, darling, I do mean all the time. It was terrible. And then he got the blood pressure thing and then, I don't know, we stopped talking about it and a lot of time went by.”

  “And then?” They were two blocks from Jane's home.

  “And then it was too late for me to make a baby. I went through the change, and that was the end of that. No kids. Not for Theo and me. And, of course, then he had his accident, and here we are.”

  Jane had already revealed something important about herself, so she felt safe in asking, “Do you ever regret it?”

  A block away from Jane's apartment, Celeste suddenly pulled the car over. Jane was pushed back and startled by the squeal of the brakes.

  Celeste turned around in her seat, so that she could look directly at Jane and say, “Every minute of every day I regret it. Every minute. Every day. You understand?”

  She waited for Jane to nod before turning back to the wheel and driving that last block. For Jane, that was The Moment.

  …

  Jane couldn't sleep until she'd read all her articles and made notes in the margins. Celeste's words and The Moment had seemed scary on the surface, but Jane was happy. A tumbler had turned and a lock clicked open. Gravity was pulling her toward her destination, and, oh, she was happy to have a destination that she could name. When she finally slept, Jane dreamed about fruit trees dropping apples that turned into pears, while her mother hissed in disapproval.

  …

  The next morning, Jane was too restless to sit and drink tea. There was a galloping feeling in her body, like something was on its way. An event. A change. She reminded herself about her birthday. That was the event/change, remember? Getting old? That's what's coming up. She pushed aside thoughts of Celeste and The Moment. Maybe The Moment was just a jarringly personal conversation and nothing more.

  She sipped her tea and watched an episode of Your Baby and You.

  She sipped her tea and reread her articles about single motherhood.

  She put down the tea, took off her clothes, and looked in the mirror. See? Jane was a brave girl. Could you do that right now?

  Jane saw her very good body. Strong legs, abs you could see (if you had the right lighting), healthy breasts. Uneven, but healthy. This body did what she asked it to do. But could it make a baby? It had worked so hard for nearly thirty-seven years—was she asking too much? Was that a gray hair down there? Oh, God.

  When the phone rang, she jumped back into her shirt before she picked up. It was her mother.

  “Janie, Janie, Janie. Next Sunday, darling. You and me. Another year older.”

  Jane's birthday came first—May 21, while her mother's followed on May 30. But Betty liked the expedience of mother-daughter celebrations, and this year, Jane's birthday fell on a Sunday. This Sunday.

  “Who's going to be there?”

  “The usual cast of characters, Jane. You, me, the pope. Who do you think is coming? Family. What a question. Your father, your brothers, the kids.”

  Family. Jane had two older brothers, Kevin and Neil, whom she still owed on a long-standing debt of Indian burns and loogies. She had never been close to the boys. Maybe it was because Kevin was already twelve years old, and Neil ten, when Jane was born. Maybe they were still bullies. They were not the whole family. Jane had always been close to her younger sister, Sheila, but Sheila would not be coming to the party. Sheila's name could not be mentioned, not in Betty's presence. In fact, it was probably a bad idea to think about Sheila too much. Betty might sense it and start yelling. Jane felt Sheila's image surfacing in her mind and grabbed the first words that pertained to something else.

  “I'm just tired. I had a late night last night. Server maintenance. You know, these days we try to avoid power outages and …”

  Betty didn't know what servers were, so Jane shouldn't talk about them. She remembered her Saturday CSM—Choosing Single Motherhood workshop. Jane shouldn't mention that either.

  “Sweetheart, you can bring a date, if you like. Let me know if you're bringing someone, and I'll order a deli platter. I'm too old to cook for these things. Oh, did I mention that Kitty thinks she's pregnant—again? I mean, I don't know what they're using, bu
t it's not working. Your poor brother looks so tired with three kids. How is he supposed to manage with four, I ask you?”

  “Not exactly my business, or yours, oh mother of four children.” Ouch. This was an indirect reference to Sheila. Conversations with Betty always took place on a tightrope.

  “Three children. I have three children.” An indirect way of declaring, once again, that Sheila was dead to her. The direct references had been shouted and sobbed. Now she turned to ice or steel when Sheila was mentioned, even indirectly.

  “Mom.”

  “Janie, Janie, Janie. I'm just saying. Kevin's hair has gone all gray, and now he's going to start pulling it out. You'll see. And Neil and Linda still can't get the baby to sleep through the night. They finally closed on their house, and poor Dylan has to switch schools. This late in the year? What are they thinking? And next year, they're sending little Jason to preschool for eight thousand dollars a year. For preschool! None of you ever had preschool, and you turned out just fine. I never had to waste twelve cents for you to learn to finger paint.”

  “I think there's a compliment in there, so I'll say thank you.”

  After Betty finished the family litany, she reminded her daughter to bring that really good dip and that cheese that no one else can find. And a date.

  “Will you have time on Saturday to pick up that cheese? What are you doing Saturday? Can you come out here and help me clean?”

  Jane saw two truths in the front of her mind:

  i. Turning down her mother's Saturday invitation to clean = a firm commitment to the Choosing Single Motherhood meeting. That looked, sounded, and smelled like a first step toward actually doing this.

  2. Item #i would require a convincing lie to her mother, which is, by definition, a quick lie. No hesitation. Show no fear.

  There was no time to create any pro/con lists. Her synapses fired out a quick “Oh, Mom, I have to go into the office on Saturday. And then I have to go pick up the cheese—it's a busy, busy day. Look. I'll come by early on Sunday and help. Okay?”