I flipped on my back and thought about what I’d felt at Thanksgiving dinner. That tiny hand, waving. Ridiculous, really. The thing probably didn’t have hands, and if it did, it certainly couldn’t wave them.
I’d always been pro-choice. I had never romanticized pregnancies, intended or otherwise. I wasn’t one of those women who sees her thirtieth birthday coming and starts cooing at anything in a stroller with drool on its chin. I had a few friends who’d gotten married and started their families, but I had many more friends in their late twenties and early thirties who hadn’t. I didn’t hear my clock ticking. I didn’t have baby fever.
I rolled back over and commenced a lazy breaststroke. The thing was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had been somehow decided for me. As if it was out of my control now, and all I was supposed to do was sit back and let it happen.
I blew a frustrated breath into the water, watching bubbles roil around me. I’d still feel better about all of this if I could have heard God’s voice again, if I knew for sure that I was doing the right thing.
“Cannie?”
My mother swam into the lane beside me. “Two more laps,” she said. We finished them together, matching each other breath for breath, stroke for stroke. Then I followed her into the locker room.
“Now,” my mother began, “what is going on with you?”
I looked at her, surprised. “With me?”
“Oh, Cannie. I’m your mother. I’ve known you for twenty-seven years.”
“Twenty-eight,” I corrected.
She squinted at me. “Did I forget your birthday?”
I shrugged. “I think you sent a card.”
“Is that what it is?” asked my mother. “Are you worried about getting older? Are you depressed?”
I shrugged again. My mother was sounding more worried.
“Are you getting any help? Are you talking to anyone?”
I snorted, imagining how useless the little doctor, drowning in her clothes, would be in a situation like this. “Now, Bruce is your boyfriend,” she’d begin, flipping through her ever-present legal pad.
“Was,” I’d correct.
“And you’re thinking about… adoption?”
“Abortion,” I’d say.
“You’re pregnant,” said my mother.
I sat up straight, my mouth falling open. “What?”
“Cannie. I’m your mother. A mother knows these things.”
I drew my towel tight around me and wondered whether it would be too much to hope that this was one of the few things my mother and Tanya hadn’t made a bet about.
“And you look just like I did,” she continued. “Tired all the time. When I was pregnant with you I slept fourteen hours a day.” I didn’t say anything.
I didn’t know what to say. I knew I would have to start talking about it to someone, at some point, but I didn’t have words ready.
“Have you thought about names?” my mother asked me.
I gave a short, barking laugh. “I haven’t thought about anything,” I said. “I haven’t thought about where I’ll live, or what I’ll do…”
“But you’re going to…” Her voice trailed off delicately.
“Seems that way,” I said. There. Out loud. It was real.
“Oh, Cannie!” She sounded— if it’s possible— at once thrilled and brokenhearted. Thrilled, I guess, that she’d get to be a grandmother (unlike me, my mother was prone to cooing over anything in a stroller). And brokenhearted because this wasn’t a situation you’d wish for your daughter.
But it was my situation. I saw it then, that moment, in the locker room. This was what was going to happen— I was going to have this baby, Bruce or no Bruce, broken heart or no broken heart. It felt like the right choice. More than that, it felt almost like my destiny— the way my life was supposed to unfold. I just wished that whoever had planned it would drop me a clue or two about how I was going to provide for myself and a child. But if God wasn’t going to speak up, I’d figure it out myself.
My mother stood up and hugged me, which was gross, considering that we were both wet from the pool, and her towel didn’t quite make it around her front. But whatever. It felt good to have someone’s arms around me.
“You’re not mad?” I asked.
“No, no! How could I ever be mad?”
“Because… well. This isn’t the way I wanted it…” I said, briefly letting my cheek rest against her shoulder.
“It never is,” she told me. “It’s never just the way you think that it’ll be. Do you think I wanted to have you and Lucy down in Louisiana, a million miles away from my family, with those horrible army doctors and cockroaches big as my thumb”
“At least you had a husband,” I said. “And a house… and a plan…”
My mother patted my shoulder briskly. “Husbands and houses are negotiable,” she said. “And as for a plan… we’ll figure it out.”
She didn’t ask the $64,000 question until we were dried off and dressed and in the car on our way home.
“I’m assuming that Bruce is the father,” she said.
I leaned my cheek against the cool glass. “Correct.”
“And you’re not back together?”
“No. It was…” How could I possibly explain to my mother what had happened?
“Not to worry,” she said, effectively ending my attempts to think of an appropriate euphemism for sympathy fuck. We drove past the industrial park and the fruit and vegetable stand, over the mountain, on our way home. Everything looked familiar, because I’d driven past it a million times, growing up. I would swim with my mother early Saturday mornings, and we’d drive home together, watching the sleeping towns wake up, on our way to get warm bagels and fresh-squeezed orange juice and have breakfast together, the five of us.
Now, everything looked different. The trees had gotten taller, the houses looked somehow shabbier. There were new traffic lights at a few of the more dangerous intersections, new houses with raw-looking wooden walls and torn-up lawns on streets that hadn’t existed when I was in high school. Still, it felt good, and comfortable, to be riding beside my mother again. I could almost pretend that Tanya had stayed in her obsessive-compulsive codependent ex-girlfriend’s apartment and out of my mother’s life… and that my father hadn’t abandoned us so completely… and that I wasn’t in my current condition.
“Are you going to tell Bruce?” she finally asked.
“I don’t know. We aren’t exactly talking right now. And I think… well, I’m sure that if I told him, he’d try to talk me out of it, and I don’t want to be talked out of it.” I paused, thinking it over. “And it just seems… I mean, if I were him, if I were in his position… it’s a lot to burden somebody with. That they’ve got a child out in the world”
“Do you want him in your life?” my mother asked me.
“That’s not really the issue. He’s made it pretty clear that he doesn’t want to be in my life. Now, whether he wants to be in…” I stumbled, trying to say it for the first time, “in our child’s life…”
“Well, it’s not completely up to him. He’ll have to pay child support.”
“Ugh,” I said, imagining having to take Bruce to court and justify my behavior in front of a judge and jury.
She kept talking: about mutual funds and compound interest and some television show she’d seen where working mothers set up hidden videocameras and found their nannies neglecting their babies while they (the nannies, not the babies, I presumed) watched soap operas and made long-distance phone calls to Honduras. It reminded me of Maxi, prattling on about my financial future.
“Okay,” I told my mother. My muscles felt pleasantly heavy from the swimming, and my eyelids were starting to droop. “No Honduran nannies. I promise.”
“Maybe Lucy could help out some,” she said, and glanced at me when we were stopped at a red light. “You’ve been to your ob/gyn, right?”
“Not yet,” I said, and yawned again.
“Cannie!” She proceeded to lecture me on nutrition, exercise during pregnancy, and how she’d heard that vitamin E in capsule form could prevent stretch marks. I let my eyes close, lulled by the sound of her voice and the turning wheels, and I was almost asleep when we pulled into the driveway. She had to shake me awake, saying my name gently, telling me that we were home.
It was a wonder she let me go back to Philadelphia that night. And as it was, I drove home with my trunk stuffed with about ten pounds of Tupperware’d turkey and stuffing and pie, and only after giving her my solemn promise that I’d make an appointment with a doctor first thing in the morning, and that she could come visit soon.
“Wear your seat belt,” she said, as I loaded a protesting Nifkin into his carrier.
“I always wear my seat belt,” I said.
“Call me as soon as you know the due date.”
“I’ll call! I promise!”
“Okay,” she said. She reached over and brushed her fingertips against my cheek. “I’m proud of you,” she said. I wanted to ask her why. What had I done that anyone could be proud of? Getting knocked up by a guy who wanted nothing else to do with you wasn’t exactly the stuff she could brag to her book-club friends about, or that I could send in to the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Single motherhood might be getting more acceptable among the movie-star set, but from what I’d seen from my divorced colleagues, it was nothing but a hardship for real-life women, and it certainly wasn’t a cause for celebration, or pride.
But I didn’t ask. I just started the car and drove down the driveway, waving back at her until she disappeared.
Back in Philadelphia, everything looked different. Or maybe it was just that I was seeing it differently. I noticed the overflow of Budweiser cans in the recycling bin in front of the second-floor apartment as I made my way upstairs, and heard the shrill laugh track of a sitcom seeping beneath the door. Out on the street, somebody’s car alarm went off, and I could hear glass breaking somewhere nearby. Just background noise, stuff I’d barely notice most of the time, but I’d have to start noticing now… now that I was responsible for somebody else.
Up on the third floor, my apartment had grown a thin layer of dust in the five days I’d been away, and it smelled stale. No place to raise a child, I thought, opening windows, lighting a vanilla-scented candle, and finding the broom.
I gave Nifkin fresh food and water. I swept the floors. I sorted my laundry to wash the next day, emptied the dishwasher, put the leftovers in the freezer, then rinsed and hung my bathing suit to dry. I was halfway through making a grocery list, full of skim milk and fresh apples and good things to eat, before I realized I hadn’t even checked my voice mail to see if anyone… well, to see if Bruce… had called me. A long shot, I knew, but I figured I’d at least give him the benefit of the doubt.
And when I found that he hadn’t called, I felt sad, but nothing like the sharp, jittery, anxious-sick sadness I’d had before, nothing like the overwhelming certainty that I would die if he didn’t love me that I’d felt that night in New York with Maxi.
“He loved me,” I whispered to the neatly swept room. “He loved me, but he doesn’t love me anymore, and it’s not the end of the world.”
Nifkin raised his head from the couch, looked at me curiously, then fell back asleep. I picked up my list. “Eggs,” I wrote. “Spinach. Plums.”
TWELVE
“You’re what?!?”
I bowed my head over my decaffeinated skim-milk latte and toasted bagel. “Pregnant. With child. Expecting. In a delicate condition. Bun in the oven. PG.”
“Okay, okay, I’ve got it.” Samantha stared at me, full lips parted, brown eyes shocked and wide-awake, even though it was only 7:30 in the morning. How?
“The usual way,” I said lightly. We were in Xando, the neighborhood coffee shop that turned into a bar after six at night. Businessmen perused their Examiners, harried moms with strollers gulped coffee. A good place, clean and bright. Not a place for making scenes.
“With Bruce?”
“Okay, maybe it wasn’t the usual way. It was right after his father died”
Samantha gave a great exasperated sigh. “Oh, God, Cannie… what did I tell you about sex with the bereaved?”
“I know,” I said. “It just happened.”
She allowed herself another sigh, then reached for her DayTimer, all brisk efficiency, even though she was still wearing black leggings and a T-shirt from Wally’s Wings advising “We Choke Our Own Chickens.” “Okay,” she said. “Did you call the clinic?”
“No, actually,” I said. “I’m going to keep it.”
Her eyes got very wide. “What? How? Why?”
“Why not? I’m twenty-eight years old, I’ve got enough money…”
Samantha was shaking her head. “You’re going to ruin your life.”
“I know my life’s going to change”
“No. You didn’t hear me. You’re going to ruin your life.”
I set down my coffee cup. “What do you mean?”
“Cannie…” She looked at me, her eyes beseeching. “A single mother… I mean, it’s hard enough to meet decent men as it is… do you know what this is going to do to your social life?”
Truthfully, I hadn’t given it much thought. Now that I’d gotten my mind around losing Bruce irrevocably, I hadn’t even started thinking about who I might wind up with, or whether there’d ever be anybody else.
“Not just your social life,” Samantha continued, “your whole life. Have you thought about how this is going to change everything?”
“Of course I have,” I said.
“No more vacations,” said Samantha.
“Oh, come on… people take babies on vacations!”
“Are you going to have money for that? I mean, I’m assuming you’ll work…”
“Yeah. Part-time. That’s what I’d figured. At least at first.”
So your income will go down, and you’ll still be spending money on child care for when you are at work. That’s going to have a major impact on your standard of living, Cannie. Major impact.”
Well, it was true. No more three-day weekends in Miami just because USAir had a cheap flight and I felt like I needed some sun. No more weeks in Killington in a rented condo, where I’d ski all day and Bruce, a nonskiier, would smoke dope in the Jacuzzi and wait for my return. No more $200 pairs of leather boots that I absolutely had to have, no more $100 dinners, no more $80 afternoons at the spa where I’d pay some nineteen-year-old to scrub my feet and tweeze my eyebrows.
“Well, people’s lives change,” I said. “Things happen that you don’t plan for. People get sick… or lose their jobs…”