Three weeks after Ayinde and Richard had brought Julian home from the cardiologist’s office, Clara tapped on Ayinde’s bedroom door. “Someone here to see you,” she said.
Ayinde looked at her curiously. “Who?”
Clara shrugged. Then her hands sketched a belly in the air. “Embarazo,” she said.
Pregnant.
Ayinde felt the hair at the back of her neck prickle, as she lifted Julian into her arms and followed Clara down the stairs.
The woman was standing in the doorway in a pink-and-white wrap dress far too flimsy for the Philadelphia winter. Pale legs traced with bulging blue veins, high heels on her feet, and an expensive pink leather purse dangling from one wrist. Blond hair pulled back from the face Ayinde recognized from the tabloids. No winter coat because you wouldn’t need a winter coat in Phoenix.
Ayinde’s breath rushed out of her as if she were a punctured tire. “Clara, take the baby,” she said, handing Julian over as the woman—the girl, really, Ayinde saw—stood there shivering on the porch.
“What do you want?” Ayinde asked, looking the girl up and down, seeing how uncomfortable she was in the cold and not caring. “Richard’s not here.”
“I know that.” Tiffany’s voice was soft and twangy, the vowels elongated. Her outfit and hair and makeup were too old for her, but her voice made her sound like she was twelve. “I came to see you. Ayinde.” She pronounced the name carefully, as if she’d been practicing.
“Why?”
She wrapped her arms around herself and tucked her chin into her chest. “I came to say I’m sorry for what I did.”
Ayinde blinked. Whatever she’d been bracing herself for—some kind of lurid confession, a plea for more money—this wasn’t it.
“I’m sorry,” the girl said again.
“How did you get here?”
“The night I met Richard…”
Nicely put,
Ayinde thought. “He went to sleep, and I went through his cell phone. I found his home phone number, and I got the address from that. I thought, if I ever needed to get a hold of him.”
“I’d say you got a hold of him just fine,” Ayinde said.
The girl swallowed hard. “So I had his address, and then…” She shrugged, struggled with the zipper of her fancy bag, and pulled out a computer printout. “Mapquest.”
“Aren’t you clever,” Ayinde said coolly. “Your parents must be so proud.”
The girl was shivering. “No, ma’am, they’re not.” She lifted her chin. “I know you probably won’t believe me, but they didn’t raise me for…” She looked down at her belly. “For this. They’re ashamed of me.” She dropped her head again, and her words were almost lost in the wind. “I’m ashamed of myself.”
Ayinde could barely believe what she was doing when she opened the door. “Come inside.”
Tiffany walked as if her legs belonged to someone else and she’d just rented them for the day. Her belly swayed with each step she took as she followed Ayinde into the living room and sat perched on the edge of the couch. The cook edged into the room with a tray of tea and cookies, then hurried out with her head down.
“What do you really want?” Ayinde asked.
“I just wanted to tell you that I was sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for your troubles.”
“What do you know about my troubles?” Ayinde asked.
“I read that your baby was sick,” said the girl.
Ayinde closed her eyes.
TOWNE TOT HEART TERROR
, the tabloid headlines had read, and the hospital had written them a letter promising to get to the bottom of the incident and find out who’d violated patient confidentiality. “So some orderly loses his job,” Ayinde told Richard wearily. The damage was done, and at least there weren’t pictures. And Julian was fine.
“I just wanted to tell you,” said the girl. She bent her head over her teacup, then set her saucer down and rubbed her hands against her legs, leaving pink streaks on her skin. “I know this sounds funny, coming from me, but your husband’s a good man.”
For what he’s going to be paying you, you ought to be walking up and down Fifth Avenue with a sandwich board saying that,
Ayinde thought.
“I asked if he wanted to see me again—you know, when he came to town for games—and he told me, ‘No.’ He said, ‘I love my wife.’ ” She cleared her throat and looked up at Ayinde. “I just thought you should know that. And I’m sorry for what I did. I guess I wanted what you had, you know? How you looked in all the pictures, you and him. So happy.”
Ayinde found that she couldn’t speak.
“But he loves you, and that’s the truth,” Tiffany said.
“It didn’t stop him from…”
Fucking,
she wanted to say. “Sleeping with you,” she said.
“I don’t think he meant to,” said Tiffany.
Ayinde felt laughter, high and wild, rising in her throat. “So, what? He just fell in?”
“More or less,” the girl said carefully. “And I’m sorry about it. I’m sorry I talked to the reporters, too. That was a mistake. I kind of got my head turned.” She shook her head and rubbed her legs again. “My mother says that.”
Mine does, too,
Ayinde thought.
“And I’m sorry…” Tiffany wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth. Ayinde looked at her, wondering how far along she was and whether she was sleeping or whether she lay awake at night, by herself, feeling the baby kick. “I know I made a mistake with what I did. I’ve made a bunch of mistakes, and I want to do better, you know? For the baby?”
“For the baby,” Ayinde repeated. She couldn’t believe it, but she felt—could it be?—sympathy for the woman who’d brought about so much misery. Her baby wouldn’t have an easy time of it—not black, not white, not one or the other, with a single mother, too. The world hadn’t changed much since Ayinde’s own parents had told her that she was a pioneer. It hadn’t improved fast enough.
Tiffany wiped her eyes. “I’m going back to school,” she said in a shaky little voice. “I don’t think this dancing thing’s going to work out unless I go, you know, to New York or L.A., and now…” She pressed an embroidered pillow into her lap. “I was thinking of maybe sociology?” Her sentences tilted up like shallow bowls at the ends, turning statements into questions.
Twenty-one,
Ayinde remembered. She was only twenty-one.
“I think that’s a fine major,” she said.
“And I thought maybe…” Her words were coming quickly now, tumbling over each other. “I don’t know how you’d feel about this, but I’d like my baby to know its father. And brother. Half-brother, really. I want the baby to know that he has one.”
Ayinde sucked in her breath.
“Would it be okay if I called you sometime? After the baby’s here? I don’t want to bother you or your husband, but I just…”
Ayinde shut her eyes against the trembling vision in pink that was Tiffany. It was too much. It was too much to ask of any woman, too much to ask of her. What would Lolo say? Why, she’d arch one of her pencil-thin eyebrows, tilt her cheekbones just so, and murmur something that sounded pleasant on the surface but was devastating underneath.
Ayinde could hear Tiffany breathing, could hear the sofa creaking softly as she shifted her weight. She remembered her parents talking to her when she lay in her canopied bed, bending their faces close to hers, telling her what a lucky little girl she was to live so well, to go to such a fine school and travel to nice places for her vacations, and how it was her obligation, as a lucky girl, to be kind to those who weren’t lucky. She remembered how they’d instructed her to always have a few dollars in her pocket for the homeless men who slept outside of her building, how if she didn’t finish her dinner she was to have it boxed to go and leave the box beside a subway station because there was always someone poor and someone hungry who would need what she could spare. You have to be brave because you’re lucky, Lolo had told her. She was still lucky…but could she be brave?
“I’m sorry,” Tiffany said, after the pause had stretched out too long. “I guess I shouldn’t have come. It’s just…well, I’m scared a little, I guess, of having a baby…I know I should have probably thought of that before….” Her voice trailed off. “My mother won’t talk to me,” she said softly. “She says I got myself into this mess, and I have to get myself out of it. She says it’s my own fault for…you know. For what I did.”
Ayinde could hear the click in the girl’s throat as she swallowed. She could hear Julian babbling to Clara upstairs, making noises that sometimes sounded like actual words and sometimes sounded like Chinese and sometimes like a language all his own. His heart would eventually heal, the doctors had told them. Ayinde hadn’t believed it.
You can live all right with a hole in your heart?
Dr. Myerson had given her a wry shrug.
You’d be surprised at what people can live with,
he said.
“Tiffany.”
“Yes?” the other woman said eagerly.
“I don’t think I’d feel comfortable with you coming here.”
“I figured,” she said sadly. “I guess I’d feel the same way.”
“But maybe you could give me your number,” Ayinde said. “I could call you.”
“Really? You’d call me?”
“I’ll call you,” she said. “Take care of yourself, okay? Take care of the baby.”
“Thank you!” said the girl. “Thank you so much!”
“You’re welcome,” said Ayinde. Once Tiffany was gone, she walked upstairs slowly. Clara was cradling the baby in her arms. She handed him over without a word, and Ayinde rocked him and kissed his cheeks. “You’re going to have a half-brother or half-sister,” she told him. He gurgled and grabbed at her earrings. She closed her eyes.
Lucky,
her parents had told her. She guessed it might even be true.
In Becky and Andrew’s years of marriage and parenthood, Mimi Breslow Levy et al. had never sent them a letter.
Phone calls, yes. E-mails—many of them marked
URGENT
and festooned with red exclamation points, certainly. Hundreds of faxes, packages by the dozen for A. Rabinowitz. But they’d never gotten an actual pen-and-ink missive until the Thursday afternoon Becky came home from work and found Andrew sitting on the couch staring glumly at a pair of handwritten pages.
“What’s that?” she asked.
Bad news,
she thought, just from the look on his face.
“It’s Mimi,” he said dully. “She’s disowning us. She says she doesn’t ever want to see us again.”
Through a mammoth effort, Becky was able to suppress her first instinct, which was to break into a joyous buck-and-wing while belting out “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
“What do you mean?”
Wordlessly, he took Ava out of Becky’s arms and handed her the letter. Becky sank onto the couch and started reading.
Andrew,
I don’t know if I can find the words to express the way your actions of the past month have hurt me. Clearly, you and your wife have decided that you don’t want me to have any part in your life or to have a relationship with my granddaughter. I can’t imagine what I’ve done to make you feel this way…
“Oh, please,” Becky murmured and snuck a glance sideways to where Andrew sat on the couch looking as though he’d lost a few quarts of blood.
…but ever since your marriage, and especially since my granddaughter was born, you have done nothing but treat me with a shameful lack of respect.
I have always tried to do what was best for you, even when it wasn’t easy or when it came at my own expense. I sacrificed my own wishes so that you would always have everything you wanted and everything you needed.
Sacrificed what?
Becky wondered. From what she’d seen of Mimi in action, there’d been precious little sacrificing and a whole lot of doing precisely what she wanted, garnished with a side of “I deserve respect” and a guilt trip for dessert.
She kept reading.
Your behavior has been nothing short of disgraceful. You are a disappointment as a son.
“Andrew, this is ridiculous,” she said. He pressed his lips together, saying nothing. “You’re a wonderful son! You’re so good to her. You’re patient, and you’re kind, and you’re generous. You’re so much better than any other man I know would be. You’ve been nice to her, you’ve included her…”
“Did you read the whole thing?” he asked.
Becky let her eyes skim the final paragraphs.
Disowning you…lawyers will be in touch…pushed me away…made a mockery of Christmas, which, you should know, is so important to me…I want nothing to do with either one of you ever again.
One phrase jumped off the page and practically slapped her in the face.
You have turned me away in favor of your wife and her family, who come from nothing and have no idea how to behave in decent company…
Oy. Becky folded the pages. Andrew straightened up.
“You know what?” he said. “Maybe we should just let her go.”
She blinked at him. Her mouth dropped open. “What?”
He got to his feet and ran his hands through his hair, pacing the length of the living room. “You’re right. She’s awful. She’s awful to me, she’s awful to you, and she’s probably awful to Ava when we’re not around.” He took the letter out of her hand and shoved it back into the envelope so hard the paper ripped. “She wants to disown us? Fine. Good riddance. We’ll be better off without her.”
Becky closed her eyes. This was what she’d wished for, dreamed of, prayed about, and now here it was, handed to her on a silver platter. So why did it feel like such a hollow victory?
“Andrew,” she said.
“What,” he asked, folding up the envelope and shoving it into his pocket.
“Maybe we should think about this.”
“What’s to think about?” he asked. “She’s manipulative, she’s demanding, she’s needy…”
“But she is Ava’s grandmother,” Becky said, hardly believing that those words were issuing from her mouth. “And the player-to-be-named later.” She patted her belly. “She’s this baby’s grandmother, too.”
Her husband stared at her as if she’d grown another head. “Are you sticking up for Mimi?”
“No, of course not. You’re right. She’s done terrible things, and as far as saying that you’re a disappointment as a son, well, that’s just beyond belief. But…”
Good God,
she thought,
what am I doing?
“I feel sorry for her,” she said. “Imagine how lonely she’d be without us to harass.”
Andrew narrowed his eyes. “Have you been taken over by the pod people?”
She handed him the phone. “Call her,” she said. “We need to work this out.”
Mimi had deigned to meet with them on a Sunday afternoon. Three days after her letter had arrived, Becky and Andrew left Ava with Lia and made the trip out to Merion, up the long, curving driveway that led to a teeny-tiny Tara. Mimi didn’t answer the doorbell, and, after Andrew had opened the door with his key and led them inside, they found her sitting on a spindly gilt chair wearing a cashmere halter top with her head held high.
“I am not,” she began, pointing at Becky and lifting her nose into the air as if she’d smelled something foul, “talking to her.”
“My wife has a name,” Andrew said.
Mimi glared at him as if she were observing him through a microscope. “I don’t have anything to say to either one of you.”
Eye-ther one of you.
Becky bit back a giggle. Queen Mimi, grande dame of a kingdom that only existed in her own imagination. “The only reason I agreed to this meeting is because I would like to see my granddaughter.”
“Your granddaughter
Ava,
” Andrew said. Becky squeezed his knee.
“I have been insulted,” Mimi said, stabbing upward with one fingertip. “I have been threatened. I have been ridiculed. I have been more than generous to the two of you—more than generous,” she repeated, in case they’d missed it the first time. “And my generosity has been repaid with nothing. You’re a disappointment as a son,” she concluded. “And you,” she said, raking Becky with her gaze, apparently forgetting that she had nothing to say to her. “The way you’ve spoken to me is unforgivable. You are beneath my contempt.” With that, she got to her feet.
“I should have just cooked the freakin’ ham,” Becky murmured. Then she raised her voice. “Mimi, come back. Sit down,” she said. Mimi’s pace didn’t slow. “If you don’t want to do it for me or for Andrew, do it for Ava.” Becky swallowed hard and forced herself to say the words. “Your granddaughter.”
The pause seemed to stretch out forever. It ended with Mimi turning on her heel. “What,” she said coldly.
Becky hadn’t prepared a speech. She hadn’t prepared to do anything except sit quietly by Andrew’s side “Let me do the talking,” her husband had said, and she’d agreed because if one thing had become clear in the course of her marriage, it was that she had absolutely no idea what was going on in Mimi’s head or how to make any sense of it, and Andrew, at least, could handle her, even if his bag of tricks amounted to a single shopworn strategy—
Give her what she wants.
But Andrew either wouldn’t talk or couldn’t. Which left Becky with the floor.
She looked at Mimi, who’d resumed her seat and was glaring at the both of them. The woman who’d ruined her wedding, insulted her and her family, snubbed her mother, guilt-tripped her husband, and dressed her daughter as the world’s littlest streetwalker. She breathed in deeply through her nose.
Feel your connection to every living, growing thing,
she remembered Theresa telling them in yoga class, back when she and her friends were mothers-to-be. She forced herself to breathe slowly and not see the woman in front of her, with her bird bones and brittle black hair, her threats and demands and pretension. She forced herself instead to imagine Mimi as a baby, an Ava-sized Mimi, standing in her crib, crying, with her little hands wrapped around the bars. Crying and crying with nobody coming to lift her up, nobody coming to help her.
The vision grew so clear that Becky could almost reach out and touch it—the soaked diaper and wet pajamas, the tears on the baby’s face. And she could hear the baby’s cries, the same indignant, self-righteous tone she’d gotten used to from Mimi…only imagining those cries from a baby made her hear them differently. She imagined baby Mimi’s wet face, the trembling bow of her lips, the way her breath would catch in a hiccup in her throat before she’d start crying again. Crying and crying and nobody coming to help.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. And she was sorry for the baby in the picture. Where were her parents? Andrew hadn’t told her much about Mimi’s mother and father. They’d died before he was born, when Mimi was a teenager, a year before she’d embarked on her series of marriages. Mimi’s father had been briefly, tremendously successful and then lost everything—bad investments, a partner who cheated him, something about embezzlement. And jail time. For the grandfather or the partner? Andrew wasn’t sure. Mimi’s mother had been strange. “Strange how?” Becky had asked, and Andrew had shaken his head, shrugging, telling her that Mimi wasn’t what you’d call a reliable narrator, and he’d probably never know what the story there really was. All they had to go on was the evidence in front of them, and that evidence suggested damage. What had Lia told her, all those months ago?
She’s the way she is because she got hurt.
Becky raised her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
Mimi glared at her, looking ready to spit. “What did you say?” she asked shrilly.
Becky looked at her without seeing her. She was still seeing that baby girl, abandoned in her crib.
Come here, baby,
she would say and scoop her into her arms, the way she’d done with Ava a thousand times. She would change her diaper, put her in clean clothes, feed her, soothe her, and sing her to sleep.
Bye and bye, bye and bye, the moon is half a lemon pie.
Andrew’s fingers were gripping her knee so hard she was sure they’d leave bruises. Becky tried to imagine birds with broken wings, dogs with crushed paws, and the baby in the crib, wailing away, crying for parents who wouldn’t come. She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deserved—
when I’m hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me
—and how that absence could warp you so that you’d lash out at the people you loved, driving them away when all you wanted to do was pull them closer. And, at that moment, she meant every word of her apology.
“I’m sorry if I overreacted about Christmas,” she said. “I can see now how much it meant to you.”
Mimi’s lips were opening and closing like a fish’s.
“I don’t think I’d ever be comfortable with having a tree in my house, but next year, I’d be happy to help you have a holiday dinner here,” Becky said. “You’ve got more room, anyhow. And two ovens.”
“I…you…we’ve already missed my granddaughter’s first Christmas,” Mimi said. Her manicured hands were clutching the arms of her chair convulsively. She looked confused, small and old and desperately unhappy. “You were visiting your mother!”
“Yes,” Becky said calmly. “But just because we visit my mother doesn’t mean we don’t care for you. Ava can have her first Christmas next year,” she said. She curled her toes in her shoes and tried desperately to keep the image of baby Mimi in mind, trying to remember how badly Mimi must have been hurt, instead of remembering the ways that Mimi had hurt them. “Andrew and I know how much you love Ava,” she said. “She’s lucky to have a grandmother like you.”
Mimi bowed her head. Becky watched the other woman grip the arms of her chair. And then she got to see a sight she could never even have imagined. Mimi’s eyelashes were fluttering rapidly. She raised one thin hand to her face and pulled it back, staring at the moisture on her fingertips as if she’d started leaking. Becky wondered how long it had been since Mimi had cried anything that weren’t crocodile tears.
“I’ve got to fix my face,” she said and bolted.
“Okay,” Becky called to her back. “Happy New Year!” And then, not wanting to push her luck, she tugged Andrew to his feet and hurried him out the door.
It was cold but sunny, and the wind blew hard against Becky’s cheeks as they walked along the icy veranda to their car. “What was that about?” Andrew asked, looking as bewildered as a man who’s been bound and gagged to await the executioner’s machine gun, only to find out it fired bubble-gum bullets.
“I don’t know. Milk of human kindness?” She smiled. That was Sarah’s joke about the tres leches cake they served at Mas. When customers asked what the three milks were, she’d say, “Evaporated, condensed, and the milk of human kindness.”
“Milk of human kindness,” Andrew repeated.
“You don’t have to look so shocked. I do feel sorry for her, you know.” She clutched Andrew’s arm as she edged her way around a patch of ice. “She must be so lonely. And she probably doesn’t have any idea of what little girls are like, or what they want, so maybe that’s why she keeps buying Ava all that slut-wear…”
“All that what?”
Oh, dear. “Well, you know, all those things that say
SEXY
or
HOTTIE
or whatever.”
“She probably just thinks it’s fashionable.”
“I feel sorry for her. I do,” Becky said. Andrew held the door for her and helped her into the passenger’s seat. “And I guess I was thinking about my friends. If Ayinde can forgive Richard and talk with that girl from Phoenix. And if Lia…” She sighed and bent her head. “We’ve got it pretty good, you know?” She yawned and stretched in the seat. “Of course, you should feel free to remind me of this the next time she does something outrageous.” But even as she said it, she wasn’t sure there’d be a next time. She suspected—or maybe just hoped—that all of the fight had been knocked out of her mother-in-law.
Or maybe that was too much to hope for. Maybe she would have to take it one day, one week, one holiday at a time, lurching from one crisis and blowup to the next in an endless loop of recrimination and rage. Maybe Mimi would be a misery to them until the day she died. But with so much joy in her life, perhaps, Becky decided, a little misery was in order. It was like the horseradish on the Passover plate—the bitterness that reminded you of how sweet life was.