... and Baby Makes Two (11 page)

Jane, Karen, and Teresa left the meeting together. The rain had slowed to an active mist. No one remembered who initiated it, but they decided to have coffee and talk about this whole single mothers adopting from China situation. First, they did a pulse check.

Karen was already rolling up her sleeve for the fingerprinting. She was go-go-go ready. She painted a picture of three cherubic Chinese girls singing “Ring Around the Rosie.” She had already started a college fund. It had only $
12
in it, but it was a start.

“You know what my mother said?” Karen asked. “She said, All mothers are single mothers.' Now, okay that's really cynical, but then she's a very damaged person. Still, she thinks I can do it. And she's so stingy with praise and support, forget it.”

“What do you do for a living?” Teresa was fact-finding. Jane could appreciate that.

“I teach soft-skills.” Blank stare. “Management development. Time management, stress management, things like that. I see a lot of single parents in my work.”

“Have you chosen an adoption agency?” Teresa pointed her question at Karen.

“No, but I've been doing tons of research. It's a key factor. There has to be a chemistry there, a reaction. Something. Hey, I couldn't find Mr. Right, but I'm going to find Mr. Right Agency. Or Ms.

Right. Right?” No more coffee for Karen. The more she giggled, the quieter Jane became. She wasn't going to go through with this. No.

Teresa must have noticed Jane's quiet when she said, “There are a million ways to get this motherhood thing wrong. And without a husband to help share the load, well, it all sounds kind of selfish, doesn't it? Still. I want to find out more, and I can't explain why. So I won't try.”

The active mist had retreated. They exchanged phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Jane felt separate from them. Different. They were already walking down this road. She was standing still. She didn't see herself joining them. She didn't see anything. She was not going to do this. It was crazy. Irrational. A phase.

…

You have
two
new messages.

“Hi, this is Peter Mandell. Your friendly neighborhood … neighbor. I seem to recall you know how to do lots of fixing-up kind of stuff. Well, I just bought a bureau-type item from Ikea, and I can't get past the first page of instructions. Is this the sort of thing I can ask you to help me with? Am I totally out of line? Anyway, I'll buy dinner, and who knows, it could be fun.”

Beep.

“Hey Jane, it's me.” It was Sheila. “Look, I take back about eighty percent of what I said the other night. I was PMSing big-time, and the boys were really on a tear. It was just bad timing. Call me. Please don't hate me. I'm sorry”

Beep.

…

Sheila. I'm not going through with this. Probably. I mean. Okay yes, I want to have a baby. I've always wanted to have kids, but then, after Sam died, it just wasn't going to happen. It was too hard and— wait. I'm getting off the topic. Sheil, I've been doing all this research and looking around, and I was thinking about adopting from China.

But I can't do this alone. I can't. I'm not strong enough. I met these women, and they're strong enough. Or, at least, they think they are. And good for them. But I'm not. I'm pulling the plug on this whole crazy thought process. Forget I ever said anything.

She thought it sounded lame and needy. Jane kept trying to polish the speech before she dialed Sheila. In the end, she dialed the phone and said, “Never mind. I was just kidding.”

“You don't have to be. Oh, Jane. I've always pictured you with kids. You could do it. If anyone could, you could.”

“No. I'm not doing this. Forget I ever said anything. Okay?”

Dutiful daughter Jane phoned her mother nine days after their joint birthday party.

“Sorry, honey. Your mother isn't feeling well. She picked up some kind of stomach bug,” said a very weary Howard.

Great way to turn seventy-two. Poor Betty.

“Is she still upset? I mean about the card? From Sheila?” Jane wanted something hopeful to report on her next Sheila call.

“She has a stomach bug. She'll be okay. I'm taking her in to see Dr. Crosby today”

“Can I help? Do you need me to bring crackers or ginger ale or something?”

“We have all that and more, Janie. Right here in New Jersey.”

And Howard had to go. A man who only drives fifteen miles per hour needs a lot of lead time to get to a doctor's appointment. The strain of taking care of Betty was beginning to show on him. If only they still had a Sheila.

The Irishness in Jane made her good at loyalty, with the occasional desire to argue, and a careful observation of signs (from God, the Universe, Somewhere). Jane's

Irishness also gave her a healthy dose of guilt. This was free-floating guilt, which was the worst kind. Hey, it's not as if Jane were responsible for Sheila's elopement or her upsetting birthday card. Okay so she had been toying with the idea of single motherhood. But she wasn't following through. It was just a phase. She dropped it. So it wasn't her fault that her mother caught a virus. Was it?

Of course it was! Oh, Jane was a terrible daughter. She tried to remedy that with a call to NutraWorld. They sold diabetic sweets. She sent a one-pound Nutra-Sampler box with a get-well card. She checked her reflection. Yes. She was still a terrible daughter—and a foolish one who was sending chocolates to a woman with a stomach flu. Maybe she should follow her mother's advice and hook up with Peter. Maybe that would make Betty happy. Maybe Jane should ignore that little alarm/warning/danger-danger sign in her gut and call him back. And besides, the notion of yet another date gave her an adolescent sense of smugness. The smugness was amplified by the fact that she could help him solve his Ikea problem.

“Hi, Peter. So you went Ikea, did you? I'll help you put it together. And then you'll have it. All put together. And I guess that's all. Call me when you get this. Bye.”

She was still a terrible daughter, but she had run out of ways to fix that.

…

It's not easy to dress for a date where you'll be assembling furniture, but Jane found a way.

Peter lived in Vincent van Gogh's apartment, if Vincent had lived in a Manhattan studio. It was spare. Very. He had bare parquet floors, a bed, a chair, a table, a big box that said
IKEA
in bold blue letters. There was a photograph of his parents (aww) on the table, but no other personal touches. Pretty much the height of spare. There was nothing here to help her figure out who this Peter guy was.

“Come on in. Can I get you something? All I have is water. But it's filtered.”

“I brought my own tools,” Jane said brightly. And she held up the screw gun and the wood glue. As she entered the vacant apartment, she was relieved that she had thought to bring them.

“Oh, good. I don't have anything like that. I use this old computer battery for a hammer.” He proudly displayed the battered battery. Jane smiled and wondered if she should have brought her own chair.

“So,” said Peter. “Um. What can I get for you?”

He may have meant filtered water vs. not filtered water, but Jane said, “Bowls. I'll need some bowls or plates or something. To sort the hardware. That's the best way to start. It looks like I'll need about seven bowls. Okay?”

He only had two plates.

“Sorry. But, hey, I can fix this. I'll order dinner and ask them to send extra plates. Sorry, I don't have real food in the fridge. Just bachelor food. Oh, wait, there's root beer. And all my take-out menus. Would you prefer pizza, Indian, or Chinese?”

She Mona-Lisa-smiled and said, “Chinese.”

They sorted hardware, ate mu shu, and started to work on assembling his bureau-thing. Jane took charge, all the while trying to figure out that danger-danger feeling in her ribs. She failed. No one can assemble Ikea furniture and divine the secrets of a Mystery Man at the same time. Everyone knows that.

“Here. Put this part—this is the back—put it over here. And hold it steady. No, steady. No. Don't let it move around.” Jane was trying to hammer it to some wobbly side pieces, but Peter kept letting it slip, and Jane hammered at the air.

“Oh. You mean, steady. Got it.”

The first thing they did was put the back on backward. The second thing they did was assemble the drawer fronts upside down. The third thing they did was lose the crucial hardware under Peter's bed. Jane cringed. Peter laughed.

“I could have gotten it wrong all by myself, thank you very much.”

He laid on the floor and extended his reach to the far end of the
floor under the bed to retrieve the wayward hardware. That's when Jane realized that he smelled good. Not perfume-good. Men's colognes usually made her sneeze. Peter had a good smell all his own. She leaned in a little to take it in. She jumped up when Peter emerged victorious, dowels in hand.

“Got it!”

Despite the Dowel Victory, Jane knew they had lost this war.

“We have to remove the drawer fronts and do them over,” she announced.

Peter wanted to do no such thing. He decided that they should just build the whole thing upside down. Jane was studying the Swedish directions, though she didn't speak a word of Swedish.

“I don't think that's going to work, Peter. I think we have to go back, fix what's wrong, and then finish the rest of the assembly”

“Why?”

Jane was still working on an answer for that one when the phone rang. She paused for Peter to go answer it.

Instead, he said, “Aren't you going to get that? Or are you screening?”

It was Jane's cell phone that was ringing. Jane leapt to it before the call was lost to voice mail. Emergency at work? Ray having a crisis? What?

“Jane, honey, it's me.” It was Betty. Jane blushed crimson. Her mother was calling her while she was on this date where she was ruining the Mystery Man's furniture. Don't you hate when that happens?

“Mom? How are you feeling? I heard about the flu and all.” She smiled sheepishly at Peter and tried to move toward privacy, but there was none to be had. Empty apartments offer no refuge, and echo loudly.

Peter tried his best to give her privacy by immersing himself in the assembly project, or maybe by just pretending to.

“Oh, Janie, you almost got a call inviting you to my funeral. I wanted to die. I just wanted to die.”

“Don't say that, Mom. It's so morbid.”

“It's true. I was telling your father, I said, ‘Shoot me now and put me out of my misery' I did. I really said that.”

“Well, I'm glad you crawled away from your grave.”

“Crawled is right. I crawled. And I wanted to say thank you for the dietetic chocolates. I can't eat them yet. I'm still living on Saltines and ginger ale. It's a little bit like being pregnant.”

“Okay”

“I think it was that card from your sister. It put me over the edge.”

“That's crazy talk.”

“It did. It upset me, and it lowered my resistance—just in time for my birthday. Thanks a lot for that.”

Peter was done studying, so he resumed the assembly. He was going with the upside-down bureau idea. It would have legs on the top and a flat surface bottom. Jane shook her head and tried to signal to him to take apart the drawers. He waved her away.

“What are you doing, Janie?”

“I'm helping—or at least I'm trying to help—Peter assemble this bureau-thing. I think I got it horribly wrong, and he's just going with that—which is wrong. We can still fix it. It's not that hard.”

“Peter?” There was so much delight in Betty's voice. “Really? Oh, I knew it! I knew you two would hit it off! A mother knows these things. You'll see.”

“What? Mom. Please, I just want to— Peter, take this out and reverse it. Really. You'll be glad that you did.”

He waved her away.

“You're building something? That doesn't sound very romantic. And you know, you're not supposed to do that sort of thing at night. You do it on the weekend. That's when the pieces are ready to be built. Everyone knows that.”

“Mom.”

“What's he wearing?”

“Mom.”

“Well! It says a lot about a man—how he dresses on a first date.”

“It's not a first— Mom. It's— Can I call you back? I need to finish this thing.”

“Get him to tell you about the Peace Corps! You like the Peace Corps. And he was in it. Did he tell you?”

Jane gave up. Betty was going to have this ill-advised conversation. Resistance was futile.

“He's a good one, Janie. He's really looking after his parents a lot. He's got them doing all sorts of social things in the city. Me, I'd never buy into any of that. I don't like the city. I don't know how you stand it. And you know, after you and Peter get married, you should have kids right away. I mean, right away. You're not getting any younger, you know. And then you'll come live out here, and we'll have dinner together every night, practically. Oh, Jane, you've made me so happy! I can't even tell you! You're going to get to experience the miracle of childbirth! And all the pain too, but that's part of the job, right? It'll be wonderful. You'll see.”

Jane was dizzy.

“Mom? Catch your breath. I'll call you from the delivery room, okay?”

They said their good-byes, and Jane went back to the doomed bureau. Peter looked concerned.

“Delivery room?”

“Long story. Look, you don't want to do it this way. You want it right. Let me.”

“I like it this way”

So now Jane tried to interpret the instructions upside down. And they actually made more sense that way. Jane had a feeling for how to put it together, and the feeling filled in the blanks. But she still didn't have a read on Peter. He was so nice. Mr. Root Beer. Mr. Filtered Water and No Dishes. He was too nice. Jane became suspicious. Maybe Mr. Bachelor Food was planning to hide bodies in the
bureau. Or body
-parts!
Aha! She started a deliberate study of Peter. Peter the Puzzle.