Admission (31 page)

On Wednesday night, when her mother reminded her of Caitlin’s appointment in Hanover the following day, she tried once again
to turn the conversation—which was not, actually, a proper conversation at all—to the girl, her pregnancy, and the baby.

“Look,” Susannah snapped, “can you take her? Because if you can’t, I need to make arrangements.”

“I can take her, of course,” Portia said, straining for a conciliatory tone. “But Mom, at some point we’re going to have to
talk about this.”

“Sure,” Susannah said unkindly. “Right after we get to all the things you’re never willing to talk about.”

And thus ended this particular round.

The following morning, Susannah left with Frieda for Burlington, the two of them stiff and cold in each other’s company. Portia
waited in the kitchen for Caitlin to come downstairs. She had read the paper and did not want to start a folder, since there
might not be enough time to complete it. There were no other obvious distractions. So when her eye settled on the kitchen
telephone, she decided to dial her own number in Princeton, to see if she had messages. Their outgoing greeting had not been
changed in years, not since the previous phone had packed it in. She had recorded it then without much care, reciting her
office number and Mark’s, her cell phone number and Mark’s, and inviting the caller to leave a message in a tone that, she
sometimes thought, sounded a bit offhand, as if she didn’t much care whether they did or not. Once or twice, listening to
herself as she waited on the other end of the line, impatient to retrieve the recordings, it occurred to her that she ought
to do it again, to record it again, to change it in substance or at least make it a bit peppier in tone; but she had never
quite gotten to it. And now, as with so many other aspects of her old life, it was too late.

She waited through the rings, three, four, five, craving, oddly, the sound of this blasé former self who had a partner and
a job and a cell phone, a partner
with
a job and a cell phone, a life somewhere else, and a house in which a phone might ring long and loud through untenanted rooms,
and when the phone gave its distinctive click—
Enough already! No one is here!
—she tensed, eager for her own voice. But it didn’t come. Instead, a breathless Mark recited their number and thanked her
for calling. “You may leave a message for Portia after the tone,” Mark said. “If you are trying to reach me, please try my
office or my new number.” And this he gave. Local area code. Princeton prefix. The beep came, loud and sharp. Portia stared
straight ahead at the kitchen phone, mounted to the wall with a long coiled cord swinging below like a lazy jump rope. It
was dingy with handling, unfashionable avocado in color, and altogether unaltered since the year 1978, when it had been installed,
because it would not have occurred to Susannah to fix what was not broken. Obviously, such a thought had not occurred to her,
either.

Caitlin materialized, wearing layers of sweatshirts. Portia drove them both down the icy drive and onto the road, which was
better, gritty with sand. The road twisted down the hill and out of the woods, into fields of snow, the highway, and the ice-packed
river. Caitlin rode in silence, arms folded across her belly.

“You warm enough?” asked Portia.

“Too warm,” she said. “Hot.”

Portia nodded. This was the entirety of their conversation.

The midwife her mother had chosen was part of a hybrid OB-GYN practice at the south end of town: MDs and midwives, childbirth
educators, even a prenatal yoga teacher. In the homey waiting room, there were framed prints of massive Native American women
with their arms full of corn (they looked ready to squat and produce their offspring on the spot), fat kilim-covered pillows
on the floor, and long, deep sofas. In the corner, a little fountain gurgled, the water running over polished black stones.
Portia took a seat as Caitlin checked in with the receptionist, noting the range of reading material on the low table (the
full ideological spectrum from
Parents
to
Mothering, Prevention
to
Holistic Parenting
) and the women doing the reading: an appallingly young girl in black, clutching the bony hand of her black-clad boyfriend,
a woman in denim overalls and a buzz cut, a woman her own age, heavily pregnant, unwrapping a roll of Tums as she turned the
pages of the
Valley Advocate
. Faculty? Faculty spouse? She wore a man’s roll-necked sweater and sweatpants in the ubiquitous Dartmouth green. Caitlin
sat on the opposite couch with a clipboard.

“My midwife’s at the hospital,” she told Portia. “I have to wait for the other midwife.”

“Did they say how long?” said Portia, paying attention to a small pulse of nausea just beginning to announce itself.

“No. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Portia told her. “I don’t have any plans.”

But she also had no work with her, which meant that she had no focus, no distraction from her now evident and growing discomfort.
Those files that might have consumed her—and she had many, many still to read—were back at her mother’s house, back in the
dusty office room she’d slept in now for three fitful nights. It wasn’t good practice to take files out in public. Especially
in a college town. Even in an obstetrician’s office. Who knew? Maybe these moms-to-be were already obsessing about college
admissions.

She picked up the nearest magazine and started to read an article about a woman in Connecticut arrested for breast-feeding
at a Denny’s restaurant. But she didn’t like the woman, who was a La Leche instructor and, Portia quickly suspected, had planned
her arrest, and the civil suit that followed, well in advance. Lactation Nazis, Rachel had once called them (this after a
woman in her mothers group had condemned her decision to stop nursing after six months). Portia flipped past articles on aromatherapy
as a means of avoiding gestational diabetes, water birth, the dreaded cesarean, and how to outmaneuver a scalpel-happy (and,
it was implicit, male) doctor. She realized that she was becoming more and more irritated with every page.

“May I see that one?” said the woman in the green sweatpants when Portia tossed the magazine back on the table.

“Oh, sure.” She picked it up again and passed it down the couch. “I should warn you, it’s pretty hard-core. If you’re planning
on taking an aspirin during labor, I wouldn’t read that.”

“Really?” The woman frowned. “You’d have thought the pregnancy wars would be over by now.”

Caitlin, who had finished filling in her forms, was listening.

“You’d have thought.” Portia halfheartedly rummaged through the other magazines. There wasn’t anything she wanted to read.
After a steady diet of Princeton applications for weeks, nothing felt as urgent, as vital. Nothing, she reflected, equaled
the adrenaline jolt of opening the folder and meeting the person inside.

“I haven’t read anything, really,” the woman said. Then she sighed. “You know, I’ve sort of been ignoring this whole thing.”

Portia heard herself laugh. But that was terrible, she thought suddenly. So she apologized. “I suppose you’ve had an easy
pregnancy,” she added. “I mean, if you’ve been able to ignore it.”

“No, no. I mean, yes, I suppose it’s been easy. I just… well, I’ve had a lot of miscarriages. A lot.” The woman shrugged. She
seemed embarrassed, a little out of it. “It got to the point that whenever I got pregnant I’d just start waiting for the miscarriage,
because my doctor told me not to get my hopes up. So when I got pregnant, I more or less tried not to think about it. And
then, last month, my husband and I kind of looked at each other one day and went, you know, ‘Oh, my God, I think we’re really
having a baby.’”

Caitlin, beside her, said, “Oh, wow.”

“I know. I mean, it’s not that we’re not happy, we’re just in shock. And of course they’re mad at me that I haven’t been coming
in all summer and fall, but I just couldn’t put myself through all that again. So now I have to come every week, to get scans
and everything. I haven’t had time to think about the pregnancy wars, or the birth wars, or anything.”

Portia looked at her. The woman was her own age, certainly no younger. The skin around her eyes was loose and dark. Her hair,
halfhearted blond, was dark at the roots. How many miscarriages did “a lot” mean? How many years had her body been conjuring
and expelling unrealized children? She felt, as she thought about this, a wave of powerful aversion—to the woman, so heavily
pregnant, and then to the girl, who would soon be just as heavily pregnant.

“You okay?” said Caitlin.

“Me?” Portia asked stupidly.

“Should I go get someone?”

This was the woman, the older woman. Portia wondered what they were talking about. Then, quite suddenly, she understood that
she was looking at the floor, at her two feet in the warm boots she always wore when she was in Vermont: Abominable Snowman
boots, Mark called them, since they looked like the feet of the mythical Sasquatch. They had bought them one summer in the
sale at the Princeton Ski Haus, though she couldn’t now remember why they had gone in there, since they didn’t ski. The white
furry feet were planted squarely on the carpeted floor of the waiting room, and Portia, who had an excellent vantage point
from between her knees, could see the tufts of synthetic hair curling around the rubber soles.

“Are you going to be sick?” she heard the woman say, but from very far away, like across the room, except that she also felt
the woman’s hand on her forehead, holding her forehead, just as Susannah had done years before, when she was a child and needed
to throw up. It was something a mother did: holding a forehead like that. This woman, Portia thought, already knew how to
do it. She was already a mother.

“You’re going to be fine,” the woman said in her soothing, mother voice. “They say nausea means it’s a healthy pregnancy.”

“Oh no,” Caitlin said loudly. “She’s not pregnant. I’m pregnant.”

Portia shot to her feet, bashing her shins against the low table. This hurt terribly, but the pain also cleared her head.
She climbed past Caitlin’s knees and away from the woman, the mother. “I’m sorry,” she said, not looking at either of them.
“I think I need to go outside. I need some fresh air.”

“Okay,” Caitlin said amiably. “You don’t need to wait with me.”

“Can I meet you?” she asked. Her voice sounded absurdly cheery. “Do you know that café up at the top of Main Street? It’s
called the Dirt Cowboy?”

“Sure,” said Caitlin. “I’ll just walk over there when I’m done.”

“Great.” She took her coat from a hook near the door. “Hey, good luck with your baby,” she told the woman. “I’ll see you!”

And she went outside.

The day was cold and bright, a classic Hanover day. Portia walked slowly up Main Street, taking deep breaths of the hard air.
She did not understand what had happened, how she had lost that time between sitting politely on the couch and eyeing the
carpet between her Bigfooted feet. She had a terrible idea that there was some element to the story that eluded her, like
an identity—the woman’s identity—known but beyond reach, which had somehow upended her. Faculty? she thought again. Faculty
spouse?

She began, without any real attentiveness, to skim her own remembered directory of Dartmouth personnel, department by department,
building by building, across the campus, but it was a pointless exercise. She had been gone for years, ten years, an eternity
in college time. And even when she’d been a part of this college community, she’d hardly known every face or every name. It
wasn’t a big school, of course, but Dartmouth’s faculty were scattered far afield around the Upper Valley. They lived on winding
wooded roads, out of sight of other homes, in old farmhouses in Etna or glass-and-steel boxes up in the hills with views of
the Connecticut, and somehow you didn’t run into them at the supermarket or the movies. She abandoned the project as she walked,
giving herself over to the diversion of shopwindows. Two days before Christmas the town was empty, and this was a town unused
to being empty. Dartmouth functioned year-round as a college, and the students were eternally present, trawling the few streets,
queuing up at the same restaurants, trying on the same green T-shirts at the Coop. In any season they dominated the sidewalks,
outnumbering the grown-ups, outmaneuvering the Appalachian Trail through-hikers who stumbled out of the woods, stunned to
find so many human beings in one place. Looking ahead up the hill, Portia saw no one at all, just a short man in khakis and
a down jacket washing the window of Campion’s.

Without really planning to, she turned down Lebanon Street, which ran behind the massive Hopkins Center, the art and performance
building that doubled as Dartmouth’s post office. The street, indifferently plowed, was pocked with holes and ruts and packed
with dirty snow. Portia walked, her hands in the pockets of her parka, stepping with care to evade the ice, feeling the cold
in her face. She supposed she was headed for the place she had once lived, her first off-campus apartment in the year after
her graduation, though she knew the building was no longer there. It had risen three unlovely stories behind an excellent
ice cream parlor called the Ice Cream Machine, fondly dubbed the S’Cream Machine, now similarly departed. The S’Cream Machine
had been the site of many an evening run while Portia was a student, and after, ostensibly for defensible items like coffee
but, inevitably, for double cones of coffee fudge. She was not yet a cook. The first few years of her so-called adult life,
she ate pretty much the way she had as an undergraduate: lunches at Collis (the student center), takeout, toasted sandwiches
in a grill contraption that looked like a waffle maker.

She wasn’t sure when it had closed. After they’d moved to Princeton, she hadn’t come back for a year or two, not until Dartmouth
hosted one of the annual Ivy League conferences: minority recruitment or debates on the common application, forty or so admissions
officers, newly out from under the cloud of April 15, crowded into the Hanover Inn. That first night, she had waited until
after the dinner in one of the private dining rooms, then stolen out back for her fix of ice cream (the memory of which, swelled
with nostalgia, had assumed ambrosial proportions), only to find a hemp and incense emporium where the S’Cream Machine had
once been. Gone, very long gone, she had thought, standing in front of the Hempest, eyeing the coarse purses and dubious toiletries
through the window and conjuring for some reason a title from Mark’s library, of a book she had never actually taken down,
let alone read. She wasn’t really sure which she was thinking of: the ice cream parlor or herself. Gone from here. Long gone.
And not coming back.