“I never thought about that,” he said. “But I have wondered about Cheez Whiz.”
“Philadelphia’s official food!”
“Have you ever looked at the list of ingredients for Cheez Whiz?” he asked. “It’s frightening.”
“You want to talk about frightening, I’ll show you the fact sheet on episiotomies my doctor gave me,” I said. He swallowed hard. “Okay, not while you’re eating,” I amended. “But seriously, what is it with the medical profession? Are you guys trying to scare the human race into celibacy?”
“Are you nervous about labor?” he asked.
“Hell, yes. I’m trying to find a hospital that’ll give me that Twilight Sleep thing.” I looked at him hopefully “You can prescribe stuff, right? Maybe you could slip me a little something before the fun starts.”
He was laughing at me. He really did have a very nice smile. His full lips were bracketed by deep laugh lines. I wondered idly how old he really was. Younger than I’d thought at first, but still probably fif-teen years older than me. No wedding ring, but that didn’t mean anything. Plenty of guys didn’t wear them. “You’ll do fine,” he said.
He gave me the rest of his biscuit and didn’t even flinch when I ordered hot chocolate, and insisted that brunch was his treat, and that, in fact, he really owed me for introducing him to the diner.
“Where to next?” he said.
“Oh, you can just drop me off at Fresh Fields”
“No, no. I’m at your disposal.”
I looked at him sideways. “Cherry Hill Mall?” I proposed, barely hoping. The Cherry Hill Mall was over the river in New Jersey. It had a Macy’s, two maternity shops, and a M.A.C. counter. And my own car was on a weekend loan to Lucy, who’d gotten a job as a singing flower delivery girl on her heartfelt assurances that yes, she could provide her own transportation, while waiting for her spokesmodel career to take off.
“Let’s go.”
His car was a sleek silver, some kind of heavy sedan-type thing. The doors closed with an authoritative chunk, and the motor sounded much more ostentatious than my modest little Honda ever had. The inside was immaculate, and the passenger seat looked… under-utilized. Like the upholstery was still untouched by human buttocks.
We got on 676 and drove over the Ben Franklin Bridge, over the Delaware River, which sparkled in the sun. The trees were covered with the faintest green fuzz, and the sun was shining off the water. My legs were pleasantly tired from the walk, and I was pleasantly full from the food, and, as I rested my hands on my belly, I felt something that it took me a minute to identify. Happy, I finally figured out. I felt happy.
I warned him in the parking lot. “When we go into the stores, they might think that you’re the, uh…”
“Father?”
“Um, yeah.”
He smiled at me. “How do you want me to handle it?”
“Hmm.” I actually hadn’t thought that part through, so enraptured was I with being in this big, steady, powerful-sounding car, looking at springtime through the window and feeling happy. “Let’s just play it by ear.”
And it wasn’t bad, really. At the department store, where I purchased a Pregnancy Packables kit (long dress, short dress, skirt, pants, tunic top, all in some engineered, indestructable, stretchy and guaranteed stainproof black fabric), the aisles were crowded and we were pretty much ignored. Same deal at Toys “R” Us, where I bought blocks, and at Target, where I had coupons for buy-one-get-one baby wipes and Pampers. I could feel the girl at Baby Gap looking from him to me and back again as she rang up my stuff, but she didn’t say anything. Not like the woman at Pea in the Pod, who’d told me and Samantha last week that she thought we were both very brave, or the woman the week before at Ma Jolie who’d assured me that “Daddy will just love!” the leggings I was trying on.
Dr. K. was very nice to shop with. Quiet, but willing to offer an opinion when asked, and to carry all my packages and even hold my backpack. He bought me lunch at the food court (sounds tacky, but the Cherry Hill food court is actually quite nice), and didn’t seem perturbed at my four bathroom stops. During the last one he even ducked into a pet store and bought a rawhide bone at least as long as Nifkin was. “So he won’t feel neglected,” he explained.
“He’s going to love you,” I said. “That’s going to be a first. Nifkin usually works as my first line of elimination with…” Dates, I was thinking. But this wasn’t a date. “New friends,” I finally said.
“Did he like Bruce?”
I smiled, remembering how the two of them had existed in a fragile détente that felt like it would rupture into full-scale war if I’d only turn my back long enough. Bruce had grudgingly agreed to let Nifkin sleep in my bed, like he was used to, and Nifkin had reluctantly conceded that Bruce had a right to exist at all, but there’d been any number of raised voices, insults, and chewed shoes, belts, and wallets in between. “I think Bruce was always about two minutes from drop-kicking Nifkin somewhere far away. He wasn’t exactly a dog person. And Nifkin isn’t easy.” I leaned back in the new-smelling car seat, feeling the late-afternoon sunshine streaming through the sunroof, warming my head.
He smiled at me. “Tired?”
“A little bit,” I said, and yawned. “I’ll take a nap when I’m home.”
I gave him directions to my street, and he nodded approvingly as he turned onto it. “Pretty,” he said. I looked at it, trying to see what he saw: the just-budding trees arcing over the sidewalks, the pots full of flowers in front of the brick townhouses.
“Yeah,” I said. “I was lucky to find it.”
When he offered to help me carry things upstairs, I wasn’t about to turn him down, even though I was thinking, as I toted diapers up to the third floor, what my place would look like to him. He probably lived in the suburbs, in one of those grand old houses on the Main Line with, like, sixteen bedrooms and a stream running through the front yard, not to mention kitchens that did not boast Harvest Gold appliances, circa 1978. At least my place was relatively neat, I told myself. I opened the door, and Nifkin catapulted himself into the hall, hurtling into the air. Dr. K. laughed.
“Hey, Nif,” he said, as Nifkin sniffed the rawhide bone through three plastic bags and went into a seizure of joy. I dumped my bags on the couch and hurried to the bathroom as Nifkin tried to burrow into the bag. “Make yourself comfortable!” I yelled.
When I emerged he was standing in the second bedroom where I’d been trying to piece together a crib from one of my mother’s friends. The crib had come to me unassembled, without directions, and possibly missing important pieces.
“This doesn’t look right,” he murmured. “Mind if I give it a go?”
“Sure,” I said, startled and pleased. “If you actually get it together I’ll owe you big-time.”
He smiled at me. “You don’t owe me anything,” he said. “I had fun today.”
Before I could think of what to make of that, the telephone rang. I excused myself, grabbed the portable, and flopped gracelessly onto the bed.
“Cannie!” bellowed a familiar British accent. “Where’ve you been?”
“Shopping,” I said. Well, this was a surprise, too. Maxi and I had been corresponding through e-mail and the occasional telephone call at work. She talked about her travails on the set of PlugIn, the futuristic sci-fi thriller in which she was costarring with a hot young actor who required not one, not two, but three full-time “sobriety managers” to keep him in line, and e-mailed me investment tips and articles about how I should set up a fund for the baby. I’d write her back, talking about work, mostly, and my friends… and my plans, such as they were. She didn’t ask many questions about the impending arrival— good manners, maybe, I thought.
“I have news,” she said. “Big. Huge. The hugest. Your screenplay,” she began breathlessly. I swallowed hard. Of all the things we’d talked about in the months since our meeting in New York, my screenplay hadn’t come up once. I’d assumed that Maxi had forgotten about it, hadn’t read it, or had read it and decided that it was so terrible it would be better for our friendship if she never spoke of it again.
“I loved it,” she said. “The character of Josie is such a perfect heroine. She’s smart, and stubborn, and funny, and sad and I would be honored to play her.”
“Sure,” I said, still not understanding what was happening. “Start eating.”
“I fell in love with the part,” Maxi continued, ignoring me, her words tumbling over each other, faster and faster. “And you know I’ve got this deal with this studio, Intermission… I showed the script to my agent. She showed it to them. They loved it, too… especially the idea of me as Josie. And so, with your permission… Intermission would like to buy your screenplay, for me to star in. Of course, you’d be involved the whole way through… I think that both of us should be able to sign off on any changes to the script, and, of course, on major casting decisions, not to mention who’s going to be the director…”
But I wasn’t listening. I lay back on the bed, my heart suddenly feeling fierce and strange and enormously excited. Making my movie, I thought to myself, a huge smile spreading over my face. Oh, my God, it’s finally happening, somebody’s going to make my movie! I’m a writer now, I’ve really made it, maybe I’ll be rich!
And that’s when I felt it. Like a wave cresting inside of me. Like I myself was in the ocean, being gently tumbled, over and over, by a wave. I dropped the phone and put both hands on my belly, and then came a gentle, almost inquisitive series of tap, tap, taps. Moving. My baby was moving.
“You’re here,” I whispered. “You’re really here?”
“Cannie?” said Maxi. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine!” I said, and started laughing. “I’m perfect.”
PART FOUR
Suzie Lightning
FIFTEEN
I’d never had any luck with Hollywood. To me, the movie industry was like a guy you lusted after from across the high school cafeteria— so good-looking, so perfect, that you just knew he’d never notice you, and that if you asked him to sign your yearbook at graduation he’d stare at you blankly and grope for your name.
It was an unrequited love affair, but I’d never stopped trying. Every few months I’d importune agents with query letters asking if they were interested in my screenplay. I’d wind up with nothing to show for my troubles but a fistful of preprinted rejection postcards (“Dear aspiring writer,” they’d begin), or occasionally a semipersonal letter advising me that they were no longer handling unsolicited material, unknown writers, novice writers, unproduced writers, or whatever they were using as the derogatory term du jour.
Once, the year before I met Bruce, an agent did meet with me. The thing I remember most about our appointment was that during the entire ten minutes or so he granted me, he never once said my name, or removed his sunglasses.
“I read your screenplay,” he said, pushing it across the table toward me with his fingertips, as if it was too distasteful to risk full palm contact. “It was sweet.”
“Sweet’s not good?” I asked— the obvious conclusion one would draw from the expression on his face.
“Sweet is fine, for children’s books, or TGI Fridays on ABC. For movies, well… we’d prefer it if your heroine blew something up.” He tapped his pen across the title page. Star Struck, it read. Except he’d doodled little fangs coming out of the S’s, so they looked like snakes. “Also, I’ve got to tell you, there’s only one fat actress in Hollywood”
“That’s not true!” I exploded, abandoning my strategy of smiling politely and keeping quiet, not sure what I was more offended by— his use of the term “fat actress,” or the notion that there was only one of them.
“One bankable fat actress,” he amended. “And really, the reason is, nobody wants to see movies about fat people. Movies are about escape!”
Well. “So… what do I do now?” I asked.
He shook his head, already pushing himself back from the table, already reaching for his cell phone and his valet parking stub. “I just can’t see getting involved with this project,” he had told me. “I’m sorry.” Another Los Angeles lie.
“We’re anthropologists,” I murmured to Nifkin, and to the baby, as we flew over what might have been Nebraska. I hadn’t brought any of my baby books with me, but I figured, if I couldn’t read, I could at least explain. “So just think of it as an adventure. And we’ll be home before you know it. Back in Philadelphia, where we’re appreciated.”
We— me, and Nifkin, and my belly, which had gotten to the point where I pretty much regarded it as a separate thing— were in first class. Actually, as best I could tell, we were first class. Maxi’d sent a limo to my apartment, which had whisked me the nine miles to the airport, where a block of four seats had been reserved in my name and nobody so much as batted an eyelash at the presence of a small and ter-rified rat terrier in a green plastic carrying case. We were currently airborne, at our cruising altitude of 30,000 feet, and I had my feet up on a pillow, a blanket spread over my legs, a chilled glass of Evian with a twist of lime in my hand, and a glossy assortment of fresh magazines fanned out on the seat beside me, beneath which Nifkin reposed.Cosmo, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Mirabella, Moxie. The brand-new April issue of Moxie.
I picked it up, hearing my heart start thumping, feeling the sick feeling in the pit of my belly, and the familiar cold sweat at the back of my neck.
I put it down. Why should I upset myself? I was happy, I was successful, I was flying to Hollywood first class to collect a bigger paycheck than he’d ever see in his life, not to mention the mandatory hob-nobbing with superstars.
I picked it up. Put it down. Picked it up again.
“Shit,” I muttered, to no one in particular, and flipped to “Good in Bed.”
“The Things She Left Behind,” I read.
“I don’t love her anymore,” the article began.
When I wake up in the morning, she isn’t the first thing that I think of— whether she’s here, and when I’ll see her, and when I can hold her again. I wake up and think about work, my new girlfriend, or, more likely, my family, and my mother, and how she’ll manage in the wake of my father’s recent death.
I can hear our song on the radio and not instantly punch up another station. I can see her byline and not feel like someone large and angry is stomping on top of my heart. I can go to the Tick Tock Diner, where we used to go for late-night omelets and fries, where we’d sit side by side in a booth and grin dopey grins at each other. I can sit in that same booth without remembering how she’d start off sitting across from me and then, halfway through, get up and plop herself down beside me. “I’m just being sociable,” she’d say, every time. “I’m paying you a visit. Hello, neighbor!” she’d say, and kiss me, and kiss me until the waitress with the blond bouffant and the coffee pot in each hand would stop and shake her head.