“That’s not from eBay,” she said. “I got a subscription. That and
Entertainment Weekly
and
People.
And all the tabloids, too.” The same ghost of a smile revisited her face. “I bring them to the teachers’ lounge when I’m done with them. It’s made me pretty popular.”
I flipped through the folder. There I was in an ad for a made-for-TV movie that had aired on a channel that my mother’s cable system didn’t even carry. There were pictures of me in dresses and jeans, in miniskirts and bikinis, and finally, one of me in my Las Vegas wedding dress.
Razor ad-man Sam Lane and his bride, actress Lia Frederick.
My Hollywood-blond hair was piled on top of my head in the updo I’d let the hotel’s hairdresser talk me into. My stomach was still flat, and I could see, in the background, the brilliant bottle-green feathers of one of the birds in its cage in the lobby.
“Look,” she said. Her hands were shaking. “Here.” At the bottom of the folder was a stack of yellowing programs. She fanned them out in front of me. My name was on the cover, my old name, my high school name. Lisa Urick. “Every single one. Every single night.”
I gripped the edges of the table tightly. “You didn’t want me to go to L.A.”
“I didn’t want you to go when you were eighteen,” she said. “I wanted you to go to college first. And I just didn’t know how to talk to you. You were so angry at me, so angry all the time…”
I said nothing. I had been angry. Maybe I’d been angry at her because she was there, and I couldn’t be angry at my father because he wasn’t.
“I kept track, though,” my mother said. “It got harder once you changed your name, but I think I’ve seen every single thing you’ve ever done. When you were on
The Price Is Right…
”
“Oh, God,” I said, groaning as I remembered my five-day stint filling in for an ailing Barker’s Beauty. “The actual retail value of this showcase…”
“But I guess you missed my television debut,” she said with a sly smile.
“What? Not…”
She nodded.
“Jeopardy!”
“Oh, Mom! Your dream come true! Did you win?”
“Three days in a row. Sixteen thousand dollars. Not enough to come back for the Tournament of Champions, but I got the roof fixed.” She ducked her head. Typical, I thought. Give any other woman in America sixteen thousand dollars, and she’d splurge on jewelry or a spa vacation. Give it to my mother, and she’d fix her roof. “It was hard to come home afterward,” she admitted. “Knowing I wouldn’t have anything to look forward to. And I wondered…well, if maybe you’d see me, and think about getting in touch.”
My eyes filled with tears again. I remembered how Sam had once flipped to
Jeopardy!
—this was on our honeymoon, at that enormous hotel in Las Vegas—and I’d threatened to throw the remote control into the toilet if he ever subjected me to any sort of game show. “As God as my witness,” I’d told him, “I had to watch
Jeopardy!
five nights a week for eighteen years, and I’ll never watch
Jeopardy!
again.” He’d agreed in a hurry, although maybe the fact that I’d been wearing the white-lace merry widow, the one with cutouts over the nipples that one of my friends had given me as a joke, had something to do with that.
“Did you meet Alex Trebek?”
She giggled—actually giggled—as her cheeks turned pink, like a schoolgirl with a crush. I could see her history in her face then, the clear-eyed, smart, pretty girl who’d married Fred Urick and hoped for love for the rest of her life but wound up teaching fifth grade, with a husband who didn’t work and who ran around and a daughter who’d disappeared.
“Mom,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry about everything.”
She nodded. “I know,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, too.”
It was a start,
I thought. Maybe someday I’d be able to show her the other pictures I had of Caleb, the inked footprint I’d brought home from the hospital, the pictures Sam had taken of the two of us in the bathtub, the little knitted white hat I’d made him.
It was a start,
I thought again, as I reached across the table and took my mother’s hand.
Becky sat up in bed and was hit with a wave of dizziness that sent her reeling back to the mattress.
Food poisoning,
she thought, as the room spun. It was an occupational hazard. Typists got repetitive stress injuries, executives got ulcers, chefs got forty-eight hours of vomiting, shivering, diarrhetic misery.
Serves me right for eating those oysters,
she thought and closed her eyes, groaning. It would be rotten luck for her to get sick. Life was so good. She hadn’t heard from Mimi since the Tragedy of the Christmas Ham. Neither had Andrew. Not a single phone call, not one e-mail, not one page, not a single slutty baby outfit in a package addressed to A. Rabinowitz. Sometimes Becky felt as if she were living under a radioactive cloud that would split open and rain down poison at a moment’s notice, but most of the time it was wonderfully peaceful, blissfully quiet.
Andrew emerged from Ava’s room with the baby, still in her pink pajamas, in his arms. “Not feeling good?”
“Ugh,” she gasped, as another wave of dizziness rolled over her. “I think I’m sick,” she said and flopped back down on the mattress. Andrew felt her forehead and the glands in her neck.
“No fever, but it could be a stomach bug. Want to call the doctor?”
Sure, Becky thought. And get lectured about the ten—no, fifteen—pounds she’d failed to shed since Ava’s birth? “I’ll be okay,” she said. “Do we have any ginger ale?”
Andrew carried Ava down to the kitchen and came back up, five minutes later, with flat ginger ale and a plate of saltines. Becky sipped and munched. “Much better,” she said. “Yum. You know, I don’t think I’ve had a saltine since I was…” Her voice trailed off. She stared up at Andrew. “Oh, shit.”
Andrew had the nerve to look pleased as he carried Ava into her room. “I think Grumbelina and I are going to take a walk,” he said.
“Oh, shit,” Becky repeated.
“Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Andrew said. He was beaming as he carried Ava out of the room. Becky heard him say, “Would you like a little brother or sister?”
Oh, shit,
she thought again and pulled the quilt up over her head.
Fifteen minutes later, Andrew and Ava were back, with a bag from the drugstore.
“What is that child wearing?” Becky grumbled, taking in her daughter’s ensemble of red-and-yellow-
checked corduroy pants, a lime-green onesie, a pink sweater, and a blue ski cap. Andrew was a dear, sweet man, but he was also color-blind. At least he’d avoided the hot-pink fake-fur-trimmed leggings that Mimi had sent, along with matching marabou mules.
“Don’t change the subject,” Andrew said, as he helped her out of bed and steered her toward the bathroom.
“This is crazy,” Becky said. “I’ve got a bug or the flu or something. Don’t you think I’d know if I were pregnant?”
“Humor me,” he said again. “Let’s rule out horses before we go looking for zebras.”
“No,” she muttered, heading into the bathroom, where No became a bright blue Yes.
“How could this happen?” she demanded five minutes later, waving the dipstick in the air.
“Well, Becky,” said Andrew, with a smug little smile on his face and Ava in his arms, “I think we know how it happened.”
“But I’m still breast-feeding! And I used the diaphragm!”
Most of the time,
she thought, remembering the twenty-six nights they’d been stranded on the pullout couch and she hadn’t always been motivated enough to tiptoe up the stairs and risk waking Mimi on her way to the bathroom.
“Well, nothing’s foolproof,” Andrew said.
“I can’t believe it. How am I going to do this? How? I can barely handle one baby, and now I’m going to have two? Fifteen months apart?”
“What do you mean, you can barely handle one baby?” Andrew, to his eternal credit, looked nonplussed. “I think you’re doing a great job.”
“You don’t know…” Becky flopped onto the bed and pulled the quilt up over her head. “I yelled at her one time. We were walking up from South Street. I had to go to Chef’s Market, we ran out of saffron at the restaurant, and she started screaming at Fourth and Pine and she just wouldn’t stop; she was screaming at the top of her lungs for eight blocks. And I did everything I could think of—I picked her up, I tried to nurse her in a coffee shop—she just wouldn’t stop crying, and I yelled at her. I stuck my face right in her stroller, and I said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ People were staring.”
“Nobody was staring.”
“They were totally staring.” Becky rolled over, pulling the quilt more tightly against her. “And I won’t be able to work for a while. And Andrew…” She looked at him and wiped her eyes. “I like working. I love Ava…I mean, I totally love her almost all of the time, when she’s not screaming for eight blocks, but I’m so happy when I drop her off at the hospital and I get to go to work. It feels like being paroled some days. Like I’m Sisyphus, and I finally get to quit pushing the rock.” She twisted a lock of her hair. “I’m a terrible mother.”
“Ah, yah,” Ava chirped, as if in affirmation.
“Don’t listen to her,” said Andrew. “You are not a terrible mother.”
She sighed again and sniffled. “I love the restaurant. I’m never going to be able to do it with two babies. I should probably see if Sarah wants to buy me out.”
“Don’t be silly,” Andrew said. “It’s not a life sentence. And there are things we can do.”
Becky wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “I guess I might as well get it over with,” she said. “I’ll have—what? Another two or three years of diapers and nursing, and then that’ll be it. Done. Over and out.”
“Unless we have another one.”
“Oh, no, sirree. You’re getting snipped.”
“What?”
“Snipped,” she repeated. “I’m not running the risk of this happening again.”
He set Ava down on the bed and bent his head against her belly. “Hello, baby,” he whispered. Becky’s eyes filled with tears. Instead of feeling thrilled the way she’d felt when she’d found out they were expecting Ava, she felt sad and confused and disloyal somehow. Ava was the baby. Now she’d be a big sister at fifteen months old. Becky hadn’t wanted it that way. She figured that they’d have years together, just the three of them, years for Ava to be the center of their world, their little star. Now they’d be four. And she’d be exhausted.
“You have the most wonderful big sister,” Andrew said, as he stroked Becky’s hair with one hand and patted her tummy with the other. Becky put her hand on top of his head, stroking his hair. How could she love another baby as much as Ava? How would she even be able to manage another baby?
God,
she thought. She’d be one of those women with the double strollers, burdened like a Sherpa with backpacks and diaper bags, bowls full of Cheerios, pockets full of binkies and rattles and half-off coupons for Pampers.
“You have the most beautiful mommy,” Andrew said. Becky shut her eyes, feeling a rush of dizziness and nausea and, worst of all, déjà vu. They’d done this all before. Andrew rubbed cocoa butter onto her skin, his hands moving in slow circles, and in her ninth month, he’d read
Goodnight Moon
to her belly. It had all been so special, so new. How would it feel this time around?
“Becky,” he said. He wrapped his arms around her.
“Do you realize I’m going to have to wear those fugly maternity clothes again?” she asked. She leaned her forehead against his. “Promise me that this will be okay,” she said. “Promise me it will.”
“We can hire a nanny if we decide we need it,” Andrew said. “Or we can have the cleaning ladies come twice a week. I know it’s not perfect, but really, we’re lucky, when you think about it.”
Lucky. She mouthed the word against the warm skin of his neck and knew that it was true. If there was one lesson she’d learned from new motherhood and from her friends, it was that any bit of good fortune had to be counted as lucky…and that there was always, always someone worse off than you.
The doorbell rang at ten o’clock Friday morning, an hour after her husband had left, half an hour since she’d shucked her sweatpants and T-shirt and scrambled into the perfectly pressed suit that she’d snuck home from the dry cleaner’s the day before. Kelly slipped on her heels, laid a clean blanket over her shoulder, and laid Oliver, dressed in Oshkosh overalls and a red-and-
white-striped onesie, on top of it. Then she checked her lipstick and opened the door.
“Hey, Kelly!”
Amy Mayhew was even younger than she’d sounded on the phone. Twenty-four, tops, Kelly thought. She wore a knee-length skirt, a navy sweater, and knee-high boots with kitten heels. The photographer was a bearish man of fifty or so in khakis and a baseball cap. His hands were warm as he shook her hand and tickled Oliver under the chin. “What a handsome fellow!”
“Thank you,” she said, and led them inside, through the nearly empty living room that she’d gotten up at six to clean. “Can I get either of you some coffee?”
Amy and the photographer, whose name was David, both said they’d love a cup. Kelly set Oliver, who’d been fed, burped, diapered, and slipped a good-behavior-ensuring dropperful of Infants’ Tylenol forty-five minutes previously, into his Ultrasaucer, and walked into the sparkling kitchen, humming as she poured coffee and set the cups on the tray Becky had come over that morning to arrange. There was a bowlful of sugar cubes, a pitcherful of cream, a plate of half-moon-
shaped cookies dusted with confectioners’ sugar.
Perfect,
Kelly thought, carrying the tray into the living room, admiring the way the sunlight spilled across the freshly mopped floors, the way the air still smelled faintly of the pear-scented candles she’d lit the night before. You could hardly see how awful the Ghetto Couch was underneath the queen-sized cream-colored cashmere throw Ayinde had lent her, and the cardboard boxes covered with an antique lace tablecloth made a perfectly acceptable stand-in for the coffee table that Kelly did not, as yet, possess.
She sat on the couch and smiled at the reporter. “So,” she said. “What can I tell you about my life?”
Amy Mayhew’s laughter sounded admiring. Kelly wondered what she would have made of this cozy domestic scene when she’d been single herself. “Let me give you a little background. My piece is focusing on a new generation of women—the ones who’ve refused to accept the working woman/stay-at-home mom dichotomy and have found innovative ways to balance their families and their careers. Why don’t we start with your biography?”
Kelly smiled as she recited her siblings’ names, the town where she’d been born, the year she’d finished at Penn, the venture-capital consulting firm that had kept her on the road for two hundred days of the two years she’d worked there. Oliver bounced in his Ultrasaucer, occasionally yelling out, “Brr!” as Kelly told them about growing up in Ocean City and how she’d single-handedly started a gerbil craze in her school. Amy Mayhew laughed appreciatively as Kelly explained how she’d brought a gerbil of her own to class, petting and fussing over it, and when she’d built the demand, she’d purchased more gerbils at rock-bottom prices from the pet store and sold them to her classmates for five dollars apiece. And then she’d lucked into the purchase of a pregnant gerbil, and she’d earned more than a hundred dollars before her mother told her she was sick of living with cages full of furry rats and put a stop to Kelly’s rodent cottage industry.
She told Amy how she’d planned her own birthday parties and those of her siblings since she was five years old, leaving out that her early planning skills were largely a result of her mother being too drunk or disinterested to care. She covered her family history as fast as she could, lingering on Maureen, who was pursuing a Ph.D., and skipping over Doreen, who’d gotten laid off at the DMV. “And your parents?” Amy asked.
“My father works for the post office. My mother is deceased,” Kelly said. The reporter made sympathetic noises and didn’t ask, ‘Of what,’ which left Kelly from finding some fancy way to say
cirrhosis
or giving any indication that her death had been a relief.
“La la la, ga ga ga, da da da,” Oliver said, waving his stuffed bear over his head.
“Dada?” asked the photographer with a smile.
She leaned toward Oliver, smiling at him, feeling her heart lift as he smiled back and the camera clicked just in time to capture it. “Dada’s on a business trip!” she said brightly. Dada had actually been dispatched to Sam’s Club with a shopping list as long as his arm, after Kelly had explained her daylong cleaning frenzy by saying she’d invited her girlfriends over for lunch, but the
Power
people didn’t need to know that.
Oliver gurgled, displaying his gums and both of his two teeth. He reached for Kelly, and the camera clicked as she lifted him into the air. “Great,” David murmured, as Kelly swooped him over her head. Just then there was an ominous gurgling noise. Oliver opened his mouth, and watery, pinkish vomit came pouring out, soaking Kelly’s suit and puddling on the floor.
“Oh my God!” Amy Mayhew said, stepping backward so fast that she almost went crashing down on—and through—the cardboard box masquerading as actual furniture.
“Oh, dear,” said Kelly, as she settled Oliver, who was shrieking, onto her shoulder. “Just give me a minute. We’ll be right back.”
Shit,
she thought, hurrying down the hall. It must’ve been the Tylenol. She ran into the baby’s room, yanked off his outfit, and looked around wildly for a replacement.
Sure, I’ll do the baby’s laundry,
Steve had been telling her for the past three days. She opened the dryer. It was empty. She opened the washing machine and groaned as she saw all of Oliver’s clothes, still soaking wet. She kept one hand on the wailing baby on his changing table and yanked drawers open one after another before she realized, with mounting fury, that the only clean things for the baby to wear were his christening gown or pajamas. Pajamas, she decided, pulling a clean navy-blue pair onto the baby’s legs as he kicked and howled.
“Is everything all right in there?” Amy Mayhew called above the baby’s shrieks.
“Just fine!” Kelly called back. She did the snaps, found a clean blanket, and carried Oliver into her bedroom and laid him on a blanket on the bed. She shucked off her sodden, sticky suit and pawed through the hangers in the closet, shoving Steve’s abandoned suits aside until she found a clean skirt that she thought would fit. Oliver whimpered. She swabbed his cheeks and chin with a diaper wipe and dialed the phone with her free hand.
“Hi, this is Kelly Day. I’m calling about my son, Oliver…” She kicked off her shoes and yanked hard at her skirt’s zipper, which didn’t want to close, bending forward to press her forehead against Oliver’s belly so that he wouldn’t wiggle off the bed. “I gave him some Tylenol about an hour ago, and he just threw up…”
“Were you treating a fever?”
Thank God,
Kelly thought,
it was a different nurse than the one who’d answered after Oliver had fallen out of his high chair.
“I’m sorry, what was that?”
“The Tylenol,” said the nurse. “You mentioned you’d given him Tylenol.”
“Oh, um, he’s been teething…” A total lie, but what was she supposed to say?
I’m medicating my child so that he’ll behave during a magazine interview?
Between this and the high-chair accident, she’d officially forfeited her shot at Mother of the Year. “You know what? He seems fine now. I’m going to try to nurse him, and I’ll call back later.” She hung up the phone before the nurse could say a word and rifled through the closet. Her favorite sweater was in the to-be-dry-cleaned pile, covered in dog hair. Her second-favorite sweater now fit her so tightly that it made her look like a Varga girl after a long weekend at the All-U-Can-Eat buffet. She ran her right hand over the dusty top shelf, finally hitting the Lord & Taylor box Doreen had sent her for Christmas. She grabbed it and flung it on the bed. The sweater inside was lavender. Low cut. Fuzzy angora. But at least it was clean. She yanked it over her head and hurried back to the living room with Oliver in her arms.
“Sorry about that!” she said, smiling brightly. “Everything’s under control now.”
The reporter and photographer gave each other a dubious look. Kelly stifled a sneeze as a bit of angora drifted into her nose.
“So, you went back to work when the baby was how old, exactly?”
“Sixteen weeks,” she lied. It had actually been twelve, but she thought sixteen sounded better. “And it was only a few days a week, a few hours a day at first. My manager was great about letting me ease into things.” Another lie. She’d jumped in with both feet, basically cramming forty hours’ worth of work into a twenty-hour work week to prevent them from having to dip into their savings. And to give her a few hours a day away from the spectacle of her husband lounging around with his fly down, away from the baby who demanded all of her attention and both of her hands.
“And you’ve got a nanny while you work?”
“I had relatives filling in for a while, and now a friend of mine babysits,” said Kelly. “I know how lucky I am to have her.” That, at least, was true, as long as Steve counted as a relative. And she was lucky, compared with the majority of women in the country, who’d be lucky if they got six weeks off after having a baby, who’d have to put their babies into day care or hope there was a responsible and willing relative within driving distance. She was lucky that her family still had benefits (true, they’d only have them for six more months until Steve’s COBRA ran out, and they were outrageously expensive, but it was better than nothing). She was lucky to have friends who, in a pinch, would watch Oliver if an emergency came up.
“And my boss lets me work from home, so I’m usually just right down the hall,” she concluded, turning Oliver deftly before he could perform his latest trick, which involved grabbing onto the neckline of whatever she was wearing and trying to pull himself up—and, consequently, pull her top down. That was Lie Number Three, but she couldn’t very well tell them that she worked on a laptop from a coffee shop because her husband had taken over her office, which he apparently needed to manage his ever-increasing number of fantasy football and baseball teams.
“Tell me how your clients have reacted,” Amy asked. “Do they mind that you’re not available eight hours a day?”
“Actually, I find that I’m able to be just as connected as I was when I worked at the office. I carry a cell phone, of course, and I’ve got a pager for emergencies.”
“But what if you have something to deal with and your friend’s not here? What do you do with…” Amy snuck a fast look down at her notebook. “Oliver?”
Kelly bit her lip. In cases like that, what she did was hand the baby off to Steve, along with a stack of board books and toys. “I take him for walks!” she said triumphantly. “He’s always happy when he’s in his stroller, and I talk on my headset, so I can use both hands to push…”
Amy was looking at her skeptically. “But what if you need to consult a document? Or a memo or something? Isn’t it hard to work when you’re not right in front of your computer?”
“Well, if there’s something I really need, I can print it out, and, um, refer to it as we’re walking…” Yeah. Right. She imagined herself walking up Walnut Street, Oliver in his stroller, cell phone in her ear, trying to read a crumpled-up printout folded against the handlebars. “Or when we’re sitting at the park. Or I can wait until he’s napping, or asleep, or…well, I’ve got friends, they’re mothers, too, and we kind of cover for each other if there’s a crisis. I could have one of them take him. If there was a fire I really needed to put out.” There. That sounded nice. Cozy, even. Sort of
Little Women
–ish, all these nice new mommies swapping babies and homemade coffee cake across the white picket fence. She wiped her hands surreptitiously on her skirt as she heard the camera clicking away. Her heart was pounding. If faking Having It All was this hard, actually having it all must be impossible. “And a lot of my events are at night, after the baby’s sleeping, and my husband’s home, so that works out well.”
“I think it’s amazing,” Amy said. “The idea of taking care of another person…most days I can barely take care of myself!”
You don’t know the half of it, sister,
Kelly thought. “Enjoy yourself now,” she said. “You’ll be here soon enough.”
Amy Mayhew smiled, but Kelly could tell she didn’t really believe her. Or maybe she thought that the world would have reinvented itself by the time she was ready to reproduce, that science and sociology would have yielded some perfect solution, allowing babies and jobs to exist in perfect harmony.
“So give me a day in your life,” Amy said.
“Well, I wake up at six or so…,” Kelly began, running through her morning, leaving out the parts about dragging an unhappy golden retriever down the block.
David began unpacking boxes of equipment, setting up a light in one corner. “Is your life the way you pictured it?” Amy asked. “Like, when you were in college. Is this what you imagined things would look like?”
“Um. Well. Hmm.” Kelly tried to remember exactly what she’d imagined. A husband who’d be earning at least as much as she was, for one thing. She’d envisioned a few years of fourteen-hour days, travel, all-nighters, weekends, whatever it took to establish herself. She’d imagined her wedding, of course, and then an apartment just like this one, only with more furniture, a perfectly decorated nursery with a perfect, silent baby lying at the center of a perfectly appointed crib. She’d pictured herself pushing a stroller, her hair shiny, nails polished, wearing the same size jeans she’d worn in high school, doing all the things she wouldn’t have time for as a working woman—sipping a latte, browsing in bookstores and boutiques, meeting friends for lunches, during which the baby would lie like an angel in his stroller or, perhaps, sit on her lap so that her friends could admire him. She’d envisioned herself in the kitchen, preparing dinners from scratch while the baby napped. She’d dreamed of a candlelit bedroom, a husband she’d still want to sleep with, luxurious, inventive sex. She’d imagined all of the trappings of motherhood—the crib bumpers and bedsheets, the stroller she’d push—but not the reality of it. Not the reality of a baby who, in her fantasies, had appeared as little more than a kind of chic accessory, the thing to have this season. Not the reality of a husband who wasn’t what she’d thought he was when she’d said her vows and made her promises.