Amanda Bright @ Home (29 page)

As they waited for their dinner to arrive, Amanda glanced uneasily at the two extra chairs across the expanse of white tablecloth. She imagined a booster seat strapped to one, containing a toddler banging a spoon on the table.
What is your choice this evening?
What was her choice indeed? The little grain of rice was dividing itself as she sat there. In less than a month, it would resemble a cocktail shrimp; a month after that, a funny combination of squid and hippopotamus, with a bulging, translucent head and the flutter of a nascent heart; a month after that, every aspect of it human, but in miniature, a dollhouse baby. Amanda might not yet be attached to it, but it was attached to her. Within its spirals of genetic coding, as mysterious and beautiful as a nautilus, the story of Bob’s and Amanda’s ancestors could be traced back generations, just as, when Ben was born, Amanda could trace in his tiny face the soft outline of her grandmother’s forehead, her mother’s nose, her grandfather’s brown eyes. Whatever her child would become was already contained in the grain of rice; it just needed to unfurl itself—if Amanda would let it.

Could she live with the knowledge of the empty chair?

“Bob,” Amanda said, suddenly aware of the clatter of cutlery and plates being put down in front of them. “I don’t think I could—”

She didn’t have to say anything further. Bob looked at her sheepishly, as if they had both wasted time elaborately working out a problem whose answer was obvious from the beginning.

“I know. I wouldn’t ask you to. I wouldn’t want you to.”

“Really?”

“Really. I’m—I’m ashamed you thought I would ask you to do something like that.”

“But you said we should think about it. That there was time.”

“If you didn’t want to go through with it, I didn’t want to put pressure on you. I suppose the right thing to do was to have acted overjoyed.”

“No. I think you did the right thing. I needed to think it through.”

Bob raised his beer bottle in a toast.

“Then if there’s nothing to do but celebrate, we should celebrate.”

A light rain had dampened the heat. They left the restaurant and began walking in the direction of their house. Ben for once seemed content to trot alongside without volleying a thousand questions. Bob pushed Sophie’s stroller, and Amanda held his arm.

“When will you know about your job?”

“When I go back on Monday.”

They crossed busy Connecticut Avenue and turned down their side street. All of a sudden it was lush, peaceful. At this time of year, Washington was overrun by foliage, like an ancient city crumbling into obscurity. Untended ivy clambered over fences and spilled onto the sidewalk. Hedges too tall to clip sprang unruly new shoots, and shaggy green branches cloaked the rooftops of houses. The sun was sinking a little earlier, and Amanda enjoyed the glimpses into other lives offered by lit windows. What did their cracked brick dwelling, with its tricycle on the front porch and scorched geraniums, show to the world?

Just this, Amanda thought: here lives a family, another family, with small children, a mortgage, a car that needs replacing, and not enough time or money to fix the place up.

Not great—but maybe not so bad, either.

Bob collapsed the stroller. Amanda went inside and checked their phone messages. There was just one, from her mother, threatening a visit.

“It’s hot as hell in New York, and I assume it’s hotter than hell down there, but at least I could be catching the new show at the National Gallery. I’ve gotta get out of this stinking city for a few days.”

“What should I tell her?” Amanda asked Bob.

“Maybe she could put it off?”

“You can’t tell my mother to put things off.”

“Then I suppose she’ll have to come.”

“But it’s the worst possible timing.”

“Why should that be different from anything else?”

Chapter Eighteen

SHE ARRIVED EARLIER than either of them expected. On the Monday morning that Bob returned to work, Amanda’s mother telephoned at seven-thirty from Penn Station. She was boarding the eight
a.m.
Metroliner from New York City and would arrive in Washington at eleven. Bob bolted for the office as early as he could. He promised to call Amanda as soon as he emerged from his meeting with Sussman. At eleven-thirty precisely, Amanda’s mother barged through the front door, carrying a knapsack and a battered paper shopping bag from Macy’s.

Ellie Burnside Bright was a stout woman in her mid-fifties who had long ago shorn away every aspect of her appearance that might be misconstrued as feminine. As a young woman she had worn her thick brown hair long and flowing, but now it was lopped off and razored at the sides like a man’s. She dressed in functional clothing that could be rolled and unrolled over her shapeless figure without the fuss of pressing: today she wore a wide purple T-shirt, jeans, and orthopedic sneakers. Her once sharply defined cheekbones could still be discerned underneath a padding of flesh, like the lines of a wire hanger beneath a bulky winter coat, but she never bothered with cosmetics and was untroubled by the two unruly whiskers that sprouted out of a mole on her left cheek. Her most striking feature remained her eyes, which glowed in their settings like two fire opals. These had not faded with age; if anything, they burned more intensely than ever. Pinned to her shirt was what she called her “trademark,” a political button she changed daily. Today’s unfortunate choice was
my grandchildren are wanted grandchildren
.

“So how is the future first female president of the United States—oh, and my little Supreme Court justice?” Ellie Bright kissed the tops of her grandchildren’s heads.

“You’re looking—weary,” was her greeting to Amanda. “Where do you want this?” She indicated the knapsack.

“Just leave it. I’ll move it out of the way.” Amanda hauled it to the living room like a stevedore, trying to suppress her irritation at her mother’s remark. Every time she saw her mother, Amanda presented a cheerful front—and every time the front collapsed in a matter of seconds.

Her mother, meanwhile, withdrew two presents for the children from her shopping bag.

“Look what I brought for you.” She handed Ben a package labeled Sand Art. She offered Sophie a kit to make a small plastic bulldozer. Both children failed to conceal their dismay.

“You can make beautiful pictures with colored sand, Ben.” Their grandmother’s enthusiasm was undiminished by their reaction. “See the directions? On the back? You can make a sunset or an elephant … Sophie, honey, that’s a
really good toy,
but you have to construct it. It’s very simple.” And to Amanda, “I checked—they’re age appropriate.”

“Isn’t that nice of Grandma?” she prodded the children, in a happy falsetto. “Can we say ‘thank you’ to Grandma? Ben? Sophie? Say thank you!”

“Thank you, Grandma,” they said, without looking up.

“Why don’t you go play with those wonderful toys now. I’m going to give Grandma some tea.”

The children headed toward their rooms. Before they had moved eight paces away, they had negotiated a swap.

“I’m going to make a pwetty picture!”

“And then I’ll bulldoze it,” came Ben’s cheerful reply.

Ellie Bright affected not to hear them and followed Amanda into the kitchen.

“So tell me everything that’s going on with you.”

Amanda set down a pot of black Chinese tea, the only kind her mother would drink.

“Not much,” Amanda said. “The usual.”

Amanda had learned to answer all maternal questions about her life with the wariness of a suspect under interrogation. She knew her uncommunicativeness disappointed her mother. Each Christmas, Ellie Bright gave Amanda a clutch of new novels about warm, earthy mother-daughter relationships: novels in which mothers and daughters fought each other, laughed together, and in the end confided in one another, “coming to terms”—as one of last year’s dust jackets put it—“with the quiet truths of living and loving and simply
being
women.” So long as Amanda could remember, she and her mother rarely laughed together, and they confided in each other even less. On the few occasions that Amanda had been lured into unburdening herself, her mother, eyes flaring, demanded to know “how any daughter of mine could possibly think that way.”

“Really? You don’t look so well.”

“I’m tired. Sophie woke up in the middle of the night.”

“That’s not it. You seem unhappy.”

“Mom, you just walked in the door. Why would you instantly assume that I’m unhappy?”

“I can see it for myself. I’m your mother.”

“Honestly, I’m tired. That’s all.” Amanda thought of her secret baby. She had already determined she would not speak to her mother about it.

“Fine. Have it your way. Tell me about Bob.”

Bob had lately become their safe topic, which was surprising given her mother’s mistrust of husbands in general and her opposition to Amanda’s marriage in particular. Ever since Bob had become involved in the Megabyte case, however, he had earned her highest accolade: he was now a “crusader.”

“I’ve been following the whole thing,” her mother continued when Amanda hesitated to answer. “Imagine! Bob attacked by the
Wall Street Journal and
Mike Frith—in one week! I’ve been telling everyone he’s my son-in-law. He’s giving them real hell. You must be so proud.”

“Yes—” Amanda wondered how much she should say. “It’s caused a bit of trouble for him—”

“
Pshaw.
You can’t take those right-wing bastards seriously. They’re always exaggerating.”

“Well, the Justice department is listening to them. Did you see the article in the
National Standard
?”

Her mother sipped her tea. “I never touch that rag.”

“Neither do I. Not usually. But it ran an article last week saying that Bob might become the fall guy. Hochmayer’s a big donor to the party. The
Standard
said that’s why the president wants the case against Megabyte pursued. Sussman—you know, Bob’s boss—is upset about how it all looks. We’re both actually a little worried about what’s going to happen.”

“More right-wing propaganda,” Ellie Bright said dismissively. “Although I’d agree on one point: the whole system is corrupt. But Bob will be fine. The Justice department should be treating him like a hero.”

“We’ll see, I guess.”

Amanda began to remove the tea things.

“I’ll be off then,” Ellie Bright announced, standing up. “I’ve got three galleries to do before supper.”

“Did you maybe want to do something with Ben and Sophie? I’ve got an appointment this afternoon and—”

“Maybe tomorrow. I’ll check the papers, see if there’s any children’s theater going on. Wait, I’m visiting some friends tomorrow … Well, we can discuss it this evening. What time do you want me back for supper?”

“I don’t know. Six-thirty?”

“Fine.”

Her mother marched down the front walk, a fanny pack strapped to her waist and a floppy canvas fishing hat perched on her head. She paused at the street to consult a map of the Washington subway system, and then headed off briskly in the direction of the station.

Amanda closed the screen door and went upstairs to check on the children. They had scattered the colored sand all over Sophie’s carpet. Ben was bulldozing it into little piles. Sophie had created a beach for one of her dolls and was in the midst of supplying it with an ocean carried in from the bathroom sink.

“Oh God.”

Before Amanda could clean it up, Bob telephoned from his office.

“Everything’s okay,” he said.

This was unreassuring—it was the way he might have prefaced an account of an accident with the words
No one’s dead.

“I don’t want to go into it now,” he continued, “but I’m still—employed—”

“Is there going to be an investigation?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“You
don’t
think so?”

“No. But please, let’s discuss this when I’m home. It’s awkward right now—I just wanted you not to worry.”

“Okay.”

“Is your mother there?”

“She’s gone out to the galleries.”

“That’s good, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll see you tonight then.”

“Bob?”

“Yes?”

“I—I love you.”

His voice warmed. “You too, darling.”

The midwife worked out of a medical building a short drive from Amanda’s house. Ben dived headfirst into the elevator when it opened, nearly knocking down an elderly woman with a walker.

“So sorry—” Amanda pushed the button for the third floor. As they stood in silence watching the numbers change, Amanda’s hand fixed tightly on the back of Ben’s collar, Amanda remembered all the other times she had been here, in this same paneled elevator, her ankles swollen, her belly fat with Ben, then Sophie …

The office was at the end of a corridor of identical pale blue doors. Small silver signs identified the practice of each, but outside the last door there were two: one listing a group of obstetricians, the second stating simply,
sarah blumstein, midwife
.

Amanda knew that Sarah Blumstein would have preferred to work out of a less institutional office. The medical building was an odd location, after all, for a woman who believed that modern birth should take place as naturally as on the African veldt. But as Blumstein explained,
some
of her patients preferred to give birth in hospitals, rather than in their bedrooms or homey birthing centers, and the only way she could accommodate them was to affiliate herself with an obstetrical practice. (Amanda belonged to these unfortunate
some.
Despite pressure from both her mother and the midwife, Amanda had succumbed to the lure of the hospital labor room with its movie channel and push-button reclining bed and painkillers—the last of which Amanda had pleaded for when the midwife had left the room.) Blumstein referred to her impersonal surroundings as “high-techy” and in retaliation she had decorated her small office like the embassy of a developing nation, with colorful tribal prints, masks on the walls, and a hand-knotted rug on the floor. Over her examining table she had thrown an orange batik tablecloth that she removed when the table was in use.