“You sure you’re okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “Yes. I’m fine.” I tightened my grip on the diaper bag and tried to think of what I should say next; how normal-people conversations went. It felt like forever since I’d had one.
“So what do you think?” the super asked, giving his tie another tug.
Okay, Lia, you can do this,
I thought. “It’s nice. Very nice.”
“So what brings you to town?”
A goose,
I thought.
It walked over my grave, and it flew me back home. Like the stork, only in reverse.
“Homesick, I guess. I’m from here. Well, not
here
here, but Somerton. Near. Near here.”
God, Lia, shut up,
I told myself.
“Are you going to be working in Center City?”
I looked down at my dirty shoes and prayed for a response to deliver itself directly to my mouth. “I will be,” I said. “Eventually. Soon. I mean, I’m okay for money,” I hastened to add, because I didn’t want him to think that I was a deadbeat waiting to happen. I wanted this apartment. It had good vibes, or feng shui, or whatever. It felt safe. “I’d like to take the apartment.”
“Good,” he said, as if I was a first grader who’d completed some bit of addition. “Good for you.” I filled out an application, noticing the way the super’s thick eyebrows rose when he glimpsed the wad of cash in the bag when I handed over my deposit.
“You don’t have a check? Well, lemme just write you a receipt for this,” he said, fingering the bills a little uneasily.
“Don’t worry, I’m not a drug dealer or anything,” I said, and then mentally kicked myself, knowing how guilty that made me sound. “I’m not,” I said in a smaller voice. “The number I gave you is my mom’s number. You can call her if you need, you know, a character reference…” And I kicked myself again, wondering what my mother would actually say about me if he were to call. “I’m sorry,” I said helplessly.
“Don’t worry,” he said kindly, taking down my cell phone number. “I’ll be in touch by tomorrow morning. You can stay as long as you like. The door’ll lock behind you.”
I wandered into the bedroom, then into the closet, where I breathed in the scent of Murphy’s oil soap and the ghosts of outfits past. There were a dozen empty hangers, a few dust bunnies, empty metal racks where shoes had once been.
Tired. Oh, I was so tired. I hadn’t been asleep in hours. I checked the door to make sure it had locked. Then I spread the down coat on the floor of the bedroom, pulled down the blinds and curled up in the center of the room, holding perfectly still until the world stopped spinning and I was asleep.
I dreamed the dream I’d been having since the night I arrived. It always started the same way—I’d find myself standing in the doorway of Caleb’s room. I saw the cream-colored carpet, the walls Sam and I had painted pale yellow, the bookshelf full of board books, the poster of Babar doing yoga on the wall.
The crib was where it was supposed to be, waiting in the center of the room. I walked toward it, looking down at my stained pink shoes, the ones that had carried me from Los Angeles back home, holding my breath, knowing what I’d find even as I leaned over the crib, because the dream always ended the same way. I’d reach down and pull back the blanket, only to find a pile of leaves where the baby should have been. When I brushed my fingertips against them, they all blew away.
“I wish you wouldn’t go,” Ayinde said, staring at Richard’s shoulders silhouetted in the lights from the walk-in closet, as she cradled Julian in her arms. The baby was four weeks old and he’d finally topped eight pounds, but he still felt light as a bag full of feathers in her arms, and every bit as fragile.
“I wish I didn’t have to,” he replied, selecting a suitcase from the row of suitcases just inside the closet door. “But I promised the sneaker company I’d do this more than a year ago, and I shouldn’t back out.” He opened the suitcase and took a look inside, knowing before he’d even finished with the zipper what he’d find—a suit, still in dry-cleaner’s plastic, a sports jacket and two pairs of pants, three button-down shirts, the appropriate complement of pajamas, socks, and underwear. He had half a dozen bags like this, each one packed for stays ranging from an overnight visit to a week out of town. Actually, Ayinde thought, there were two week-away bags—one stocked with bathing suits and beach shoes, the other containing a ski parka, cashmere scarves and sweaters, and a pair of size fifteen fur-lined boots. When Richard came home, he’d just leave the suitcase by the door, and someone—the maid, the butler, someone—would unpack it, wash the underwear, dry-clean the suits, probably even change the blade in his razor, repack the whole thing, and replace it in the closet, where it would be ready to go for the next trip.
He walked out of the closet, looking cheerful. She knew that, in his head, he was already traveling, shaking hands and smiling his game-day smile. Maybe he was thinking about the airplane, that big seat in first class, with a drink on the armrest and headphones shutting out the noise. No babies crying, no exhausted, bedraggled-looking wife who flinched every time he touched her. He crossed the room with a spring in his step, retrieving a pair of cufflinks from the dresser drawer, and a pair of loafers from one of the specially built cubbyholes that held everything from dress pumps to golf cleats. Then he looked at his wife and baby, both of them sitting in an upholstered armchair that the decorator had sent over that morning. “Do you really want me to stay?”
Yes,
she thought. “No,” she said. “No, you go on ahead. I know this is important to you.”
“Important to both of us,” he said, adding the latest issues of
Sports Illustrated
and
ESPN: The Magazine
to his leather carry-on duffel bag.
She nodded reluctantly. She understood that Richard’s willingness to do anything his corporate sponsors required—to show up at their events, dine and golf with their executives, autograph endless basketballs for their kids—was part of what made him so valuable. It was funny, she mused, shifting in the chair, still feeling tender between her legs, even though Dr. Mendlow had assured her that her stitches had healed beautifully. They thought they were giving Richard a vacation—a week on the golf course in Paradise Island; a long weekend on the slopes at Vail—but Richard treated the trips like work, and he took them seriously, researching the names and histories of the men he’d be meeting days ahead of time so that he could watch their eyes widen each time he’d work a name or place into a conversation.
How are Nancy and the boys? They’ve got to be getting big now, right? Eight and ten?
Or,
I was sorry to hear about your mother passing. How are you holding up?
The men’s delighted faces would say,
Can you believe it? Richard Towne knows my wife’s name! He knows how old my boys are!
When it had been just the two of them in Texas, Ayinde hadn’t minded the travel. Sometimes she’d stay in their big, modern mansion, picking up weekend shifts at the station to make up for the game weekends she’d be gone. Or if Richard was heading east, she’d fly with him and visit her parents in New York. She’d go to the theater with her father, and her mother would drag her to Bergdorf Goodman or Barneys after dumping Ayinde’s suitcase on the bed, pinching a skirt or a jacket between her fingertips, and saying, “Is this what passes for high fashion out in the sticks?”
She watched her husband pack, wondering when all the trips, the weekends away, the ceaseless courting of businessmen who sold soft drinks and sneakers and cereal would end, when Richard could finally let himself relax into a well-deserved retirement. Chasing after endorsements was a full-time job in itself, and one that Richard didn’t really need. But it was more than the money, she thought. It was about the security that Richard had never had growing up, the rock-solid certainty that there would always be enough money for food, for clothes, even for college.
“You know I don’t like leaving you two all by yourselves,” he said. Ayinde nodded, thinking how strange it was, because in her life,
all by yourselves
meant all by yourself except for the maid, the cook, the driver, the gardener, the Pilates instructor who came Friday mornings, and the decorator, who had her own key and wasn’t afraid to use it—Ayinde had already bumped into Cora Schuyler, of Main Line Interiors, twice before eight o’clock in the morning, once when she’d let herself in to deliver a plate she wanted hung in the kitchen and again when she’d been dropping off handcrafted soaps for the powder room.
There was a business manager, who toiled in the twelve hundred feet of office space above the six-car garage; the part-time publicist, who worked in the office next to his; and the bodyguard, who earned what Ayinde felt was an exorbitant sum for the job of driving up and down their street in a menacing-looking Hummer, taking down the license plates of anyone who turned into their cul-de-sac. There’d also been a baby nurse Richard had hired to stay for three weeks. Ayinde had sent her away after five days. The nurse, who was a perfectly nice lady in her fifties named Mrs. Ziff, had let it slip that her next client was a working woman with a two-and-a-half-
year-old who only had twelve weeks of maternity leave. Ayinde felt guilty since Julian was her only baby, her only responsibility, and she had no business hogging this woman’s time, even though she—well, Richard—had paid for it already.
“Call your yoga friends,” he said, zipping up his bags and setting them outside the door. During the night, the driver would fetch them and place them in the trunk of the town car that would take Richard to the airport first thing in the morning. “Have a hen party.”
“Friends,” she repeated. Richard looked at her.
“They are your friends, right?”
She nodded, still feeling a little surprised by it.
“So go to a spa or something,” Richard said. “Relax.”
“Please stay,” she said, surprising them both, struggling out of the armchair with Julian in her arms, hurrying across the perfect room, their bed with the pillows that Clara plumped at least twice a day, the marble fireplace and mahogany mantelpiece with newly framed photographs of the baby on top.
“Aw, baby,” Richard said. Ayinde burrowed her face against his upper arm, feeling the warmth of his skin through his cashmere sweater.
“Stay,” she repeated in a small voice. “Please stay.”
Richard reached down to hold her, and Ayinde caught the look of confusion in his eyes. She wasn’t like this. She wasn’t needy, or clingy, or whiny, or any of the things that most of the women in Richard Towne’s orbit—the ones who didn’t work for him, at least—usually were.
I’m not a damsel in distress,
she’d told him…and it had been true at the time.
“I’m sorry,” she said, making an effort to look normal—
Chin up, shoulders back, have some pride, girl!
she heard Lolo whisper. She smoothed her hair with her free hand and wished that she wasn’t still wearing the bathrobe and pajamas she’d spent the whole day—actually, the better part of the week—in. “I’ll be fine.” And it was true. She’d always done just fine on her own. She remembered Christmas when she was eight years old. Her parents had left the night before for one Greek island or another, but Ayinde handn’t wanted to miss her school play, in which she had two lines as one of the Three Wise Men. She made arrangements to sleep at a friend’s house, and her parents had hired a car to pick her up there and take her to the airport. Unfortunately, they’d accidentally taken her passport with them.
“We’ll be back as soon as we can,” her mother had said, her voice faint but angry over the crackling overseas connection, as if the whole thing had been Ayinde’s fault, not hers. “Monday at the latest.”
Ayinde had a house key that she wore on a ribbon around her neck. “Back so soon?” the doorman had asked as she wished him a merry Christmas and headed for the elevator. She knew if she told him the truth, he’d be worried about her and maybe even miss his own Christmas. She knew he had kids—he kept a picture of them at his desk. So Ayinde said she was fine, waved at him as the elevator doors slid shut, and spent a very happy two days in the empty apartment, wrapped in her down comforter, eating butter cookies from a tin the housekeeper had left as a Christmas gift, making hot chocolate and noodle soup with water from the kitchen taps because she wasn’t allowed to use the stove, and reading Nancy Drew books until her parents (Lolo chagrined, Stuart apologetic, the both of them bearing enough gifts for a dozen eight-year-old girls) had come back home.
More than twenty-five years after that Christmas, Ayinde lowered her eyes. She had known the deal she’d made when they married, and it was too late to change its terms. She had been the very model of the modern woman—strong, smart, self-sufficient, barely bothered by even a locker room full of hostile, naked men. And once Richard promised to do something, he’d do it, no matter what. She’d known that, too. “Don’t worry about us,” she said, wondering whether it would have even occurred to him to worry about her in the first place.
“Have fun,” he said, and smiled and kissed her, then bent carefully, knees creaking, to address the baby. “Little man, you take care of your momma.”
Take care of me,
Ayinde thought, and looked down at the top of her husband’s head and was shocked to see what looked like the beginning of a bald spot.
Take care of me,
she thought again, and cradled Julian close to her heart.
“Sorry I’m late,” Becky whispered to Kelly, thumping into a seat in the hospital auditorium five minutes into the Breast-Feeding 101 lecture. “Restaurant crisis. Our supplier sent us pine nuts instead of avocados. Total disaster.” On stage was the instructor, an off-duty nurse in a pair of dark-blue scrubs over a long-sleeved T-shirt. In her right hand she had a laser pointer; in her left, a larger-than-life-sized model of a breast, complete with retractable nipple.
“Good evening, ladies,” the nurse said. “Gentlemen,” she added, waving the breast at the pair of fathers-to-be who’d braved the auditorium. “And congratulations on being here. You’ve taken a very important step in making sure that your baby gets off to the best possible start. How many of you were breast-fed?” Becky was shocked when Kelly raised her hand.
“Really?” she whispered.
“Don’t be impressed,” Kelly whispered back. “My mother wasn’t progressive or anything like that. I just think they couldn’t afford eight kids’ worth of formula.”
“We have some props tonight,” the nurse said, walking backstage and returning with a cardboard box filled with infant-sized plastic dolls. “Take one doll and pass the rest along.” Becky got an Asian-looking baby in a disposable diaper and a Pennsylvania Hospital T-shirt. Kelly reached into the box. “Oh, look, I got a black one!” she said. People two rows in front of her turned around to stare.
“Won’t Steve be pleased,” Becky whispered. Kelly’s fair skin flushed.
“Now,” said the instructor, once each woman had a baby, “have any of you had breast surgery? Breast implants?” A few hands went up. Kelly craned her neck.
“Don’t stare,” Becky said, whacking Kelly’s shoulder with her Frequently Asked Breast-Feeding Questions handout.
“Breast reductions?” A few more hands went into the air. Kelly looked studiously down at the notebook she’d brought. “How many of your doctors have asked if you’ll be breast-feeding?”
Everyone raised their hands.
“How many of your doctors have looked at your nipples?”
Nobody raised their hands except one woman in the front row.
“Okay, how many of you know what an inverted nipple looks like?” the nurse asked. There was absolute silence. The nurse shook her head, frowning. She raised the stuffed breast into the air, then jammed the nipple down. “Ouch,” Becky whispered.
“That’s a flat nipple,” said the instructor, “and that”—she gave the nipple another shove—“is an inverted nipple. Both can make breast-feeding a challenge, but there are things we can do to help.”
“We can rebuild you,” Becky murmured. “We can make you better.”
“There will be nurses in the bathroom during the break if anyone wants her breasts inspected,” said the instructor.
“Are you going to go?” Kelly asked.
Becky shook her head. “My breasts are okay,” she said. “And honestly, I’m sick of being looked at.” She pressed her lips together, remembering the misery of her five-month ultrasound, lying on the table while some sadist in scrubs squirted her belly with warm goop and proceeded to press and shove the receiver against Becky’s stomach so hard she gasped.
“Can you please be a little more gentle?” she asked.
The nurse shrugged and said without looking away from the screen, “Because you’re obese, it’s harder for me to visualize the baby.”
Obese.
Becky could have died. She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling pride and excitement draining from her heart and being quickly replaced with shame. She was only glad that Andrew had been tied up in surgery and wasn’t there to hear it as she sat up on the table, gathered the sheet over her midsection, and told the technician that she wanted to see her supervisor.
Up on stage, the instructor was using her doll and the giant breast to demonstrate different positions—the cross-cradle, the football hold, “which works best for large-breasted mothers.”
“And here are some handouts you might find helpful,” she said. Becky pulled one off the stack and made a face.
“Pacifiers: The Devil’s Teats,” she read.
“Really?” said Kelly.
“I’m giving you the condensed version,” Becky said. She looked at her watch and got to her feet. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Ten minutes later, they met Ayinde in a coffee shop on South Street, where they ordered noncaffeinated beverages, cooed over baby Julian, and told the stories of how they’d gotten pregnant.
“It was like a bad joke,” Kelly said, scowling at the mint tea she’d ordered instead of the espresso she told them she really wanted. “My mother got pregnant every time she so much as looked at my dad, my sister Mary’s completely fertile, and it took us six months of trying, and Clomid.”
“Six months is average,” Becky said. The bells on the doorknob jingled briefly as the door opened and closed, and a woman in a bright blue coat walked tentatively up to the counter.
“Yeah, well, it felt like forever. And it turns out that I wasn’t ovulating regularly, so I took the Clomid, and that worked. But it really threw my schedule off.”
“Your schedule?” asked Becky.
“Well, I’d planned on getting pregnant when I was twenty-five instead of twenty-six. That way, I’d have my first when I was twenty-six and my second when I was twenty-eight…”
“Wait. Hold up. Your second baby?” Ayinde asked.
“Right. Steve and I want two.”
“I’m just trying to survive this one,” Ayinde said, gazing down fondly at Julian. “I can’t believe you’re already planning number two.”
Kelly dumped the packets of sugar and sweetener onto the table and started arranging them by color. “I like to have a plan,” she said. “If you want to know the truth, my ideal situation would have been twins.”
“You’re crazy,” Becky said. “Do you have any idea how much work that would be? Ayinde, tell her!”
“It’s hard,” Ayinde said, smiling wearily. “You two shouldn’t even be here. You should just go home and sleep while you can.”
“Well, I know it would be really hard for the first few months, but then you’d have two kids and you wouldn’t have to try to get pregnant again, and you wouldn’t have to be pregnant again…and you can breast-feed two babies, remember?” Kelly said.
“Just because the instructor can do it with two dolls doesn’t mean it’s going to work in real life,” Becky said.
“So how about you?” Kelly asked. “Did you and Andrew get pregnant right away?”
“Oh, Ayinde can go next,” Becky said. “My story’s kind of short.”
“I guess we were average,” said Ayinde. “It took us about six months. Maybe a little longer.” She slipped off Julian’s hat and tucked it into her purse. “Although I think Richard thought he’d hit the jackpot on his first try…” She shrugged. “He’s used to getting what he wants.” She sipped her glass of milk. “I know I’m lucky,” she said. “So many of the players have kids everywhere, they’re hit with paternity suits left and right…”
“Oh, yeah, same with doctors,” Becky said. “The groupies are unbelievable.” She turned one curl around her finger. “Andrew actually wasn’t in a hurry, either. He’d say that we were having such a good time by ourselves and that a baby would complicate things. Which it will, of course. But in a good way. At least that’s what I hope.”
“Did you get pregnant right away?” Kelly asked.
“It was kind of a joke,” said Becky. “We wanted to wait until Andrew had finished his fellowship so he’d be home a little more, but we got pregnant the first month I went off the Pill. We weren’t even officially trying yet, but I’d already convinced myself that I was never going to get pregnant.”
“Why not?” Kelly asked.
“Well, I was doing all of this reading on the Internet about, um, heavier women and pregnancy. I had really long menstrual cycles…” Becky took a sip of her water and took a minute to ponder the strangeness of discussing her menstrual cycles with her still-new friends before deciding she just didn’t care. “Anyhow, I thought I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, where you get your period but you don’t actually ovulate, so you can’t get pregnant. Lots of, um, larger women have it. I even called an infertility specialist before I went off the Pill, just to get a checkup. They didn’t have any openings for six weeks, and by the time I got there…” She shrugged, unable to keep from smiling, remembering how thrilled she’d been and how the doctor had shaken her hand and told her to go home and stay healthy. It had been the first time since she was twelve that she’d felt anything other than shame in a doctor’s office, where visits started on the scale and always included a variation on the
What are we going to do about your weight?
lecture. “And that was thirty-seven wonderful weeks ago.”
“Wonderful?” asked Kelly, wrinkling her nose.
“Well, adequate. I was tired all the time at the beginning and queasy in the middle. Oh, and there was a week when I didn’t eat anything except English muffins. But other than that, it’s been a normal, boring pregnancy.” She smiled again, remembering how she’d felt her daughter give her first little flutter at week nineteen.
Gas,
Andrew had said.
Gas,
her mother-in-law Mimi had pronounced with a magisterial nod, as if she’d birthed dozens of children instead of just Andrew. But Becky had known that no matter what they said, it wasn’t gas. It was her baby.
Kelly took another sip of tea and grimaced. “My pregnancy’s been awful. I’ve had so many things go wrong that I’d turn my uterus in for a refund if I could. I was spotting for the entire first trimester, so I had to go on bed rest for a while, and then my quad screen came back questionable, so I had to have an amniocentesis and go back on bed rest again after that. And I’m just so uncomfortable!” She looked down at herself, resting her hands on the mound of her belly. “I’ve never been this big in my entire life!”
“You’re still smaller than I was before I got pregnant,” said Becky. “Take heart.”
“I threw up every morning until my sixth month,” Kelly continued, “and I’ve got killer heartburn…”
“Oh, heartburn. Me, too,” said Becky. She’d forgotten about the heartburn. Maybe pregnancy wasn’t as blissful as she’d been telling herself.
“I had to get prescription medication,” said Kelly. “The over-the-counter stuff wasn’t helping.” She looked at Ayinde. “How about you?”
“It was fine,” Ayinde said, resting one hand on the edge of the car seat, smoothing Julian’s blanket as her enormous diamond flashed. “Up until the surprise ending.”
“Oh, come on,” Kelly wheedled. “You can tell us.”
Ayinde said nothing.
“Did you have killer heartburn?” Kelly asked. “Morning sickness? Did you pee when you laughed?”
A tiny flicker of a smile moved across Ayinde’s face. “My feet,” she said, with an I-give-up shrug. “My feet have gotten bigger. My calves, too. I have these boots that zip up…”
“Ugh, zippers,” said Kelly. “Don’t get me started.”
“My hands were swollen, too,” Ayinde said, looking down at them regretfully. “Still are, actually. I ought to take my rings off.”
“Soap and warm water works,” said Becky.
“Oh, I think I could squeeze them off,” Ayinde said. “But I won’t.”
“Why not?” asked Becky.
“ ’Cause then I’m just another baby mama without a man,” Ayinde drawled in a flawless around-the-way accent. “And I don’t want people looking at me that way.”
Her confession knocked Kelly and Becky into silence. “You really think that people…,” Kelly began.
“Oh, yes,” Ayinde said with a large, insincere grin. “Oh, yes, indeed. Black girl, no ring, it’s an obvious conclusion.”
“Even though you’re…” Kelly’s voice trailed off.
Ayinde raised her eyebrows. “Biracial? Light skinned?”
“Rich, I was going to say.” Kelly’s cheeks were so pink that they practically glowed. “I didn’t know you were biracial.”
Ayinde put her hand on Kelly’s forearm. “I apologize,” she said. “I shouldn’t have assumed. My father’s white, and my mother’s black. Well, African-American and one-quarter Cherokee, to hear her tell it. But that’s not what most people see when they look at me.”
“You guys?” Becky’s voice was quiet as she looked over Kelly’s shoulder. “Don’t stare, but that woman in the corner keeps looking at us.”
Kelly’s head swiveled so abruptly that Becky heard her neck creak. “Don’t stare!” Becky whispered sharply, thinking that the woman looked so off-balance that one wrong look would cause her to bolt. Ayinde cut her eyes discreetly to the right, where a woman in a blue down parka with lank blond hair hanging past her shoulders sat with her hands wrapped around a mug and a newspaper spread on her table.
“Do you know her?” Ayinde whispered.
“I keep seeing her,” Becky whispered back. “I don’t know who she is, but I see her everywhere.”
“Is she pregnant?” asked Kelly.
“I don’t think so. Why?” said Becky.
“Well, ever since I’ve been pregnant, I’ve been seeing pregnant women everywhere. Have you guys noticed that?”
Becky nodded. “But I don’t think she’s pregnant. She’s just everywhere. I know I’ve seen her in the park…and on the street…”
Kelly turned her ahead again. “Don’t stare!” Becky said. “Or I’ll hit you with the breast folder again!”
“She looks…” Kelly wrinkled her nose. “Lost.”
“Like I-can’t-find-Independence-Hall lost, or…”
“No,” Kelly said. She tried to come up with something better, but the first word was the only one that seemed to fit. “Lost lost.”
The woman raised her head and looked at them.
Lost,
thought Becky. Kelly had it right. The woman looked lost, and sad, and haunted. When she spoke, her voice sounded rusty and underused. “Little boy?”
The three women exchanged a fast, worried glance.
“I’m sorry,” said the woman. The hesitancy with which she talked made Becky wonder whether English was her first language, or if she was translating from her native tongue into theirs in her head. “Is your baby a little boy?”
“Yes,” said Ayinde cautiously. “Yes, he is.”
The woman nodded. She seemed about to say something else or to stand up and approach them, but when she got to her feet, she changed her mind, gave them one last despairing look, and bolted out the door.