There was nothing. Day after day of nothing. I couldn’t believe that he would be this cold. That he would turn his back on me— on us— so completely. But it was, it seemed, the truth of the matter. And so I gave up… or tried to make myself give up.
“It’s like this,” I addressed my belly. It was Sunday morning, two days before Christmas. I’d gone on a bike ride (I was cleared to ride until my sixth month, barring complications), put together a mobile made of brightly painted dog bones that I’d made, myself, from a book called Simple Crafts for Kids, and was rewarding myself with a long hot soak.
“I think that babies should have two parents. I believe that. Ideally, I’d have a father for you. But I don’t. See, your, um, biological father is a really good guy, but he wasn’t the right guy for me, and he’s kind of having a rough time right now, and also he’s seeing somebody else” This was probably more than my unborn child needed to know, but whatever. “So I’m sorry. But this is the way it is. And I’m going to try to raise you as best I can, and we’ll make the best of it, and hopefully you won’t wind up resenting me horribly and getting tattoos and piercings and stuff to externalize your pain, or whatever kids will be doing in about fifteen years, because I’m sorry, and I’m going to make this work.”
I limped through the holidays. I made fudge and cookies for my friends instead of buying them stuff, and I tucked cash (less than I’d meted out the year before) into cards for my siblings. I drove home for my mother’s annual holiday open house, where dozens of her friends, plus all of the members of the Switch Hitters and much of the roster of A League of Their Own fussed over me, offering good wishes, advice, the names of doctors and day-care centers, and a slightly used copy of Heather Has Two Mommies (the latter from a misguided shortstop named Dot, whom Tanya immediately took aside to inform that I wasn’t a lesbian, just a dumped breeder). I stayed in the kitchen as much as I could, grating potatoes, frying latkes, listening to Lucy regale me with the story of how she and one of her girlfriends had convinced a guy they’d met at a bar to take them back to his place, then opened all the Christmas presents under his tree after he’d passed out.
“That wasn’t very nice,” I scolded.
“He wasn’t very nice,” said Lucy. “What was he doing, taking the two of us home while his wife was out of town?”
I agreed that she had a point.
“They’re all dogs,” Lucy continued loftily. “Of course, I don’t have to tell you that.” She gulped the clear liquid from her glass. Her eyes were sparkling. “I’ve got to get my holiday swerve on,” she announced.
“Take your swerve outside,” I urged her, and added another dollop of raw potato goo to the frying pan. I thought that Lucy was probably secretly delighted that it was me, not her, who’d wound up in this predicament. From Lucy, an unplanned pregnancy would have been almost expected. From me, it was shocking.
My mother poked her head into the kitchen. “Cannie? You’re staying over, right?”
I nodded. Ever since Thanksgiving, I’d fallen into the pattern of spending at least one night every weekend at my mother’s house. She cooked dinner, I ignored Tanya, and the next morning my mother and I would swim, slowly, side by side, before I’d stock up on groceries and whatever new-baby necessities her friends had donated, and head back to town.
My mother came to the stove and poked my latkes with a spatula. “I think the oil’s too hot,” she offered. I shooed her away, but she only retreated as far as the sink.
“Still nothing from Bruce?” she asked. I nodded once. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “It’s not like him”
“Whatever,” I said shortly. In truth, I thought my mother was right. This wasn’t like the Bruce that I had known, and I was just as hurt and bewildered as anyone. “Evidently I’ve managed to bring out the worst in him.”
My mother gave me a kind smile. Then she reached past me and turned the heat down. “Don’t burn them,” she said, and returned to the party, leaving me with a pan of half-cooked potato pancakes and all of my questions. Doesn’t he care? I wondered. Doesn’t he care at all?
All through the winter, I tried to keep busy. I made the rounds of my friends’ parties, sipping spiced cider instead of eggnog or champagne. I went out to dinner with Andy, and went for walks with Samantha, and to birthing classes with Lucy, who’d agreed to be my birth coach “as long as I don’t have to look at your coochie!” As it was, we’d almost got thrown out the first day. Lucy started hollering “Push! Push!” when all the teacher wanted to do was talk about how to pick a hospital. Ever since then, the mommy-and-daddy couples had given us a wide berth.
Dr. K. had become my new e-mail buddy. He’d write to me at the office once or twice a week, asking how I was doing, giving me updates on my friends from Fat Class. I learned that Esther had purchased a treadmill and lost forty pounds, and that Bonnie had found a boyfriend. “Let me know how you’re doing,” he would always write, but I never felt like telling him much, mostly because I couldn’t figure out what box to put him in. Was he a doctor? A friend? I wasn’t sure, so I kept things topical, telling him the latest pieces of newsroom gossip, and what I was working on, and how I was feeling.
Slowly, I started telling the people close to me what was going on, starting small, then moving in ever-widening circles— good friends, then not-so-good friends, a handful of coworkers, a half-dozen relatives. I did it in person, wherever possible, by e-mail, in Maxi’s case.
“As it turns out,” I began, “I am pregnant.” I gave her the condensed, PG-13 version of the events. “Remember when I told you about the last time I saw Bruce, at the shiva call?” I wrote. “We had an encounter while I was at his house. That’s how this happened.”
Maxi’s reply was instantaneous, two sentences long, and all in capital letters. “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?” she wrote. “DO YOU NEED HELP?”
I told her my plans, such as they were: have the baby, work part-time. “This isn’t what I would have planned,” I wrote, “but I’m trying to make the best of the situation.”
“Are you happy?” Maxi e-mailed back. “Are you scared? What can I can do?”
“I’m sort of happy. I’m excited,” I wrote. “I know my life will change, and I’m trying not to be too scared about how.” I thought about her last question and told her that what I needed was for her to keep being my friend, to keep in touch. “Think good thoughts for me,” I told her. “And hope that this all works out, somehow.”
Some days, though, that didn’t seem likely. Like the day I went to the drugstore to stock up on appealing pregnancy necessities including Metamucil and Preparation H and came across Bruce’s latest “Good in Bed” column, a treatise on public displays of affection entitled “Oh, Oh, the Mistletoe.”
“If it were up to me,” he’d written, “I would hold E’s hand forever. She has the most wonderful hands, tiny and slender and soft, so different from my own.”
Or from mine, I’d thought sadly, staring at my own thick-fingered hands with their ragged nails and picked-over cuticles.
If it were up to me I’d kiss her on every street corner and hug her in front of live studio audiences. I don’t need seasonal excuses, or random bits of greenery dangling from the ceiling as incentive. She’s completely adorable, and I’m not shy about showing it.
It makes me unusual, I know. Lots of men would rather hold your shopping bags, your backpack, possibly even your purse, than hold your hand in public. They’re okay kissing their mothers and sisters— years of conditioning have worn down their resistance— but they’re not so great about kissing you when their friends can see. How to get your man over his hump? Don’t stop trying. Brush his fingertips with yours while sharing popcorn at a movie, and hold his hand as you walk out the door. Kiss him playfully at first, and hope he’ll reciprocate with more passion, eventually. Try tucking that mistletoe in your brassiere, or, better yet, that lacy garter belt you’ve never worn
Lacy garter belts. Oh, that hurt. I remembered how, for my birthday and for Valentine’s Day, Bruce would show up with boxes full of plus-size lingerie. I refused to wear it. I told him I was shy. In truth, the stuff made me feel stupid. Regular-sized women are ashamed of their butts and bellies. How could I feel good about pouring myself into the teddies and thongs he’d somehow procured? It felt like a bad joke, like a mean trick, like a Candid Camera stunt, where as soon as I showed that I was dumb or gullible enough to think I’d look good in this stuff, Allen Funt and his crew would pop out of the closet, bright lights flashing and wide-angle lenses at the ready. No matter how Bruce tried to reassure me (“I wouldn’t have bought it for you if I didn’t want to see you wear it!”) I just couldn’t bring myself to even try.
I shut the magazine. I paid for my things, shoved them in my pocket, and trudged home. Even though I knew he’d written his December article months before he’d gotten my letter— if he’d gotten it at all— it still felt like a slap in my face.
Because I had no party plans (not to mention no one to kiss), I volunteered to work on New Year’s Eve. I got out at 11:30, came home, bundled Nifkin in the little fleece sweatshirt he despised (in my heart, I was sure he thought it made him look silly… and in my heart, I had to admit he was right), and packed myself into my winter coat. I stuck a bottle of nonalcoholic grape juice into my pocket, and we walked down to Penns Landing and sat on the pier, watching the fireworks go off, as drunken teenagers and South Philly denizens screamed and groped and kissed each other all around us. It was 1999.
Then I went home and did something I probably should have done much earlier. I got a big cardboard box and started packing away all the things I had around that Bruce had given me, or the things that reminded me of him.
In went the half-melted globe candle that we’d lit together in Vermont, and in whose flickering sweetly scented light we’d made love. In went all of the letters he’d sent me, each folded neatly into its envelope. In went all the lingerie he’d bought me that I’d never worn, and the vibrator and the edible body oils and the pink fur-lined handcuffs, which were probably things I shouldn’t have lying around anyhow, what with a baby on the way. In went a hand-painted glass bead necklace his mother had given me for my last birthday, and the leather bag from the birthday before that. After some deliberation I decided to hang on to the portable phone, which had managed to lose its association with Bruce… after all, he wasn’t calling. And I kept the CDs from Ani DiFranco and Mary Chapin Carpenter, Liz Phair and Susan Werner. That was my music, not his.
I bundled it all up, taped the box, and walked it down to my storage area in the basement, thinking I could maybe sell some of the nicer stuff if it came to that, but for now, it would be out of sight, and maybe that would be enough. Or at least, a start. Then I came back upstairs and cracked open my new journal, a beautiful book with a marbled paper cover and thick lined pages. “1999,” I wrote, as Nifkin hopped up and sat on the arm of the couch beside me, looking over my words with what I hoped was approval. “For my baby, whom I already love very much.”
It rained through most of January and snowed almost constantly through February, turning everything white for about ten minutes, until the belching city busses and the guys hawking snot on the streets turned it gray again. I tried not to look at the red foil hearts in drugstore windows. I tried to avoid Moxie’s red-on-pink Valentine’s Day issue to which Bruce, the cover informed me, had contributed a piece entitled “Make Him Wanna Holler: 10 Sizzling New Sex Tricks for the Erotic Adventuress.” One ill-fated day I’d flipped to his column while waiting in line at the convenience store, and had been assaulted with a full-page picture of Bruce wearing lipstick-red silk boxer shorts and an expression of abject bliss as he lolled on bed with a woman I sincerely hoped was a Moxie model as opposed to the mysterious E. I’d thrust the magazine back into the rack as if I’d been burned, and decided, after in-person consultations with Samantha (“Just let it go, Cannie,”) and e-mailed debate with Maxi (“I could have him killed, if you like,”) that the best thing to do would be to just ignore it, and be grateful that February was a short month.
Time passed. I developed a new and interesting set of stretch marks, and started craving the imported Stilton cheese that they sold at Chef’s Market on South Street for $16 a pound. A few times, I came close to slipping a wedge in my coat pocket and slinking out of the store, but I never did. Too embarrassing, I reasoned, having to explain my cheese habit to whoever would have to come and bail me out after my inevitable arrest.
I actually felt pretty good, which was how most of the relentlessly upbeat pregnancy books I’d read described the second trimester. “You’ll feel radiant and alive, full of energy!” read one, beneath a picture of a radiant and alive-looking pregnant woman walking through a field of wildflowers, hand in hand with her devoted-looking spouse. It wasn’t that great, what with the occasional overwhelming sleepiness, and my breasts aching so badly some days that I had fantasies of their falling off and rolling away, and the night I ate an entire jar of mango chutney while watching a rerun of Total Request Live on MTV. Occasionally— well, maybe more than occasionally— I’d feel so sorry for myself that I’d cry. All of my books had pictures of pregnant ladies with their husbands (or, in the more progressive ones, partners)— someone to rub cocoa butter on your belly and fetch you ice cream and pickles, to cheer you up and urge you on and help you pick out a name. I had nobody, I would mope, conveniently ignoring Samantha and Lucy and my mother’s twice-a-night phone calls and weekly sleepovers. Nobody to dispatch to the convenience store in the middle of the night, nobody who’d stay up late debating the relative merits of Alice and Abigail, nobody to tell me not to be scared of the pain and not to be scared of the future and tell me that everything would be fine.
And it felt like things were getting more complicated instead of less. For one thing, people at work were starting to notice. Nobody’d come right out and asked me yet, but I was getting the occasional stare, or hearing the occasional hushed silence when I came into the ladies’ room or the cafeteria.