Authors: Anna Quindlen
“I’m going to have a baby,” I told him, which is as different from “I’m pregnant” as “I’m home” is from “I’m signing a lease.”
“Shut up!” said Leo.
“Really.”
“Shut up!” This is the current term of art for “you’re kidding.” I think all those New York kids love it so much because they spent their childhoods with middle-aged nannies telling them the words were never allowed.
“Really.”
“Bridey! A baby! I’m totally speechless. Wow. Wow. A baby.” His mouth was ajar. His hair was every which way. If I loved this baby as much as I loved Leo, it would be so loved it would smile all the time. Or maybe that’s what all parents tell themselves, that if they love and love and love, the smoke from that fire will warm its object until the end of time. “It’s a cousin!” Leo said. “It’s a cousin, right?”
“Technically, yes. But if I had to guess, you’ll be more like a big brother. Maybe even an uncle.”
“Wow. I can’t believe my mom didn’t say anything.”
“You talked to your mom?”
“She sends me a letter every day now. Still by fax, though. She says she’s not sure how the mail service is there. She makes it sound as if she’s in the middle of nowhere.”
“She is in the middle of nowhere.”
“Wow, she must have been shocked by the news. The baby news.”
“She doesn’t know.”
“Are you kidding? You didn’t tell her?”
“I didn’t know when I was there.”
Leo looked at me and then threw his unruly head back and laughed. “You’re afraid,” he crowed. “You’re afraid of what she’ll say. That’s so wack. You know what she’ll do. She’ll just spring into Meghan mode. She’ll have a list of what you should eat, what you should wear, what doctor you should go to, what crib you should buy. Oh, man, you are so lucky she’s not doing the show anymore, or you’d have six months of stories about older moms.”
“Don’t be mean.” But he was right. Leo is never mean but always shrewd. He has perfect vision of the spiritual sort. He knew that his childhood had also been marked in five-minute segments or the occasional weeklong series: single-sex schools, self-esteem for boys, the role of team sports, how to choose the right college. Meghan eased into every life passage by turning it into a story designed to benefit all of America, and America liked it. Kate had said at dinner that she’d heard of a group of ditched wives on the East Side who called themselves the Meghan Fitzmaurice Society and who’d taken those two forbidden words she’d uttered at the end of the Greenstreet interview as their motto. “There’s a substantial reservoir of support for her,” Sam had said. “People think it’s incredibly gutsy, just to walk away and leave the network holding the bag.”
“On the other hand,” Kate had said with her lower lip thrust out dramatically, “we saw that putz Murphy at a party and he said she’ll never work again.”
Leo locked the van, and one of the drivers gave Leo the high sign, meaning he’d be on the lookout, although our van was so sad that it was hard to believe anyone would bother to steal it. Leo cut up the sidewalk along the backsides of the buildings and away from the busy center quad.
“You’re going to C, right? Where Margaret lives? There’s a back door that goes right into the corridor and to the director’s office.”
“Nobody’s ever bothered to tell me that.”
“Margaret uses it all the time. The other kids really hassle her a lot. All that Oreo stuff, thinks she’s too good, you know. And a couple of the guys get really rowdy with her, say really bad stuff. The first time I was like, I am going to get so up in that guy’s grille, and she was like, Hello, white boy, just step down and stay safe, and I was like, I’m not putting up with that crap. But then one of her brothers showed up. He’s a good guy. The one who’s going to be a cop. The other one is kind of sketchy. I mean, I think he’s a good guy but he’s got some sketchy friends.”
“The one whose friend has a thing for Princess Margaret.”
“She’s ditching the Princess thing. She ditched it, like, two years ago at school. I mean, c’mon. It’s just ridiculous. Oh, man, this door is locked up tight.”
He was right; it wouldn’t budge. We turned back and followed the path into the quadrangle, dark as a cellar and just as dank. The only way you could tell you were outside was by looking up at the small square of clouds that floated like a trompe l’oeil over the tops of the four buildings. Somebody’d burned up all the benches, and they’d had to remove the trash cans because during fights they always wound up being used as projectiles. Skull fracture, shattered pelvis, broken nose: you can do some real damage with a metal mesh can if you throw it hard enough. I watched as two teenage girls leaning on strollers unwrapped Little Debbie snack cakes and threw the wrappers on the ground. A toddler leaned out of one stroller and grabbed one of the wrappers. In another a baby slept, her bald head encircled by a beaded and beribboned headband in case anyone who missed her pink dress and Sleeping Beauty shoes made the mistake of thinking she was a boy.
“Miz Fitz! Miz Fitz!” One of the girls was waving her snack cake. I recognized her from a stay with her mother in the shelter three years before. I had given her a magic wand with a star atop it that for some reason had been in the goody bag at the Leukemia Society’s black-tie dinner at the Pierre. She’d carried the wand around for weeks, until it turned from silver to gray.
“Hey, honey,” I called back. Women at cocktail parties, girls at Tubman—it’s remarkable how successfully that endearment covers up the fact that I can’t remember names.
“I’m coming to your classes! The court say I got to go or they’re gonna make my mother the guardian person for the baby, and I’m saying, Nuhhuh, if she’s such a good guardian how come I got a baby when I’m fourteen? So I’m coming next week.”
“I’ll see you then. You take good care of her till I see you.”
I looked sideways at Leo as we walked away. “Stop wincing. You got to learn early on not to wince. And not to assume. You know how old Tequila was when she had Baruch? She was fifteen. Some of them turn out all right.”
“It’s just that sometimes I feel like a fraud, being here. Like when I was in high school, we had this day called Community Service Day, and it was totally bogus, because we’d go to soup kitchens or whatever and all the girls from the girls’ schools would use it as an opportunity to meet guys, and the next day we’d be talking about, wow, life is really hard for people in some places, and then we’d forget about the whole thing. It was like it was a museum exhibit: Now, boys and girls, here we are in the hood. Be careful and don’t touch anything.”
“Think how Princess Margaret must feel.”
“It’s a nightmare. She says Tequila is looking at this house over on Kelly Street to buy, get them all out of here.”
As if to prove the point, the elevators opened and a group of young men sauntered out in gangsta uniform, long shorts, big shoes, hooded eyes as though they’d just rolled out of bed. I nodded. Leo nodded. They brushed past, way too close, to make the point that we were on their home ground, not the other way around. One of them was Tequila’s son Armand. He’d flunked two of his courses spring term at community college. I figured one of the other guys was his friend Marvin. They were on the cusp, all of them. A lucky break, a decent job, and they’d go one way. A bad circle of friends, a pressing need for cash, and they’d go the other. The cusp was as good as it got in Tubman.
“Yo, Bus Boy!” one of them called as they strutted out the double glass doors. “Bus Boy! We talking to you! Bus Boy, that your girlfriend? She a little old for you.”
“Shut up” I heard in a low voice. Armand, probably. He’d known me since he was thirteen.
“Bus Boy!” another cried. “You best not be going to Armand’s place. His sister got other things to do.”
Leo never looked up, but his shoulders were as stiff as if his T-shirt had been starched. The director’s office was at the very back of the building, down another long corridor, but he was looking at his shoes the whole way.
“You having trouble here?”
“Nothing I can’t deal with. I mean, I understand why they don’t like me. I try to show my face as little as possible.”
“Bus boy?”
“Because I drive the van.”
I told him I needed him to wait in the director’s office with me so he could drive me back, that I was tired and my feet hurt, both of which were true. But I also didn’t want him walking out alone, and when we left we went through that back door. I almost asked for a key.
“Y
OU’RE A WITCH,”
I said to Tequila once when we were watching a news bulletin on our grainy television in the transitional-housing living room. A political figure had announced that he was returning to private life to spend more time with his family several days before, and Tequila had turned down her mouth, raised her eyes, waved her hand, and said, “That man’s trouble, mark my words. A lady friend, probably, or money. One or the other.” It had turned out to be both, embezzlement for the purpose of keeping the lady friend, a former exotic dancer, in a love nest on Staten Island. “You’re a witch,” I said again.
“Let me tell you something. We know things.”
“We who?”
“Black women, that’s we who.”
“Wait, we’re supposed to pretend we’re all the same, but it turns out you all got the intuition?”
“And you all got the money, the power, and the straight hair. Don’t give me this all-the-same hoo-ha, sister girl.”
“When you call me sister girl, I always know you’re making fun of me.”
“Damn straight.” Tequila was the only person on earth with whom I’d ever had an honest conversation about race. Actually, we may be the two people in New York City to have had an honest conversation about race.
I remembered Tequila’s insistence on race-based intuition the next time I went to teach parenting classes. Charisse looked at me and rolled her eyes around like she was going to have a fit. “So?” she said.
“Twins,” I replied.
Pandemonium broke loose in the community room. The old woman across the hall was in the middle of making sweet potato pie, she told us, but she came across anyhow. “I thought somebody won the lottery,” she said in her soft voice. You had to hand it to the women in my parenting class; their kids might wind up leaving school, going to jail, or if they prospered, leaving the neighborhood behind. But they still thought having two babies at once was almost as good as making a big win on the Lotto.
That’s when I’d finally told Meghan, when I left the doctor’s office after seeing those grainy moonscape images: a heart, a hand, an eye, a foot, a heart, a hand, an eye, a foot. The room filled with the thumping percussion of two heartbeats not quite in sync, so that they sounded like bad audio, stereo reverb, a three-second delay. My aunt Maureen took the train down to sit with me. We must have looked like inept mimes. An enormous grin followed by a quivering upper lip and then the tears. Unlike the heartbeats, we were almost exactly in sync.
“Yep, there are two,” said the technician.
“Let’s have an ice cream sundae,” Maureen said. Hot fudge, too.
That afternoon I sat down and wrote, “Dear Meghan, I just found out that I am expecting twins. It was a shock for me and it will certainly be a shock for you. Please come home. Leo is fine and sends his love. XOXO Bridget.”
Twenty minutes later I heard the laborious mechanical breathing of the old fax machine. Tequila came in with five sheets of paper. They were covered with lists: the names of neonatologists, of pediatricians, of prenatal yoga and exercise classes, of places to buy strollers, of the best strollers to buy.
“Score one for Leo Grater,” I said aloud.
“Now you talking to yourself,” Tequila called from her desk. The last page said: “I am wild with joy. XOXO M.”
I faxed back the Polaroid from the sonogram, although by the time the fuzz of the image had become the fuzz of the Polaroid and then the fuzz of the fax it must have looked like a sleet storm at midnight. I sent a list of names, and she sent it back with big black lines through half of them; Fitzmaurice Lefkowitz, for one, did not make the cut. One day I sent along a couple of paragraphs about the yoga class, which was absurd on its face, a brace of women trying to find their centers when they were not only off center but off center in a slightly different fashion with each passing week. Another morning I sat down first thing and typed out a description of how Ricky at Cubana Sandwich Shop gave me two each time I ordered one and put hot sauce on everything for some complicated reason that apparently had to do with hair growth, although it was unclear whether the hair involved was mine or the babies’.
One afternoon as I was preparing to go home, Edward Prevaricator called. “Your sister wanted me to pass along this phone number,” he said.
“She has a phone?”
“No, but Derek does. You remember Derek from your visit. He and his wife have a telephone, and if there is an emergency he can drive down to the house immediately.”
I looked at the number on the paper. Leo’s letters, my dispatches, a phone number: my sister was edging back into the world.
“I think your mother will come home soon,” I said to Leo that afternoon as we sat on the front steps licking lemon ices.
“I don’t think so. I told her to stay awhile longer.”
“What? You did? Why?”
“I don’t know. It seems like she’s spending a lot of time thinking about stuff, and I just figure you guys don’t get enough time thinking about stuff. When you’re a kid, you spend all your time in your room listening to music, playing video games, but mainly thinking about stupid stuff. I mean, not all stupid—like when Jack Wallace’s little brother had some weird cancer, he was thinking about important stuff. And when Nate’s parents split. But like, the point is that we just have a lot of time to think. But you guys—there’s just no time. Work, dinner, trips, whatever. It sounds like my mom has all this time to just think. And I figure she hasn’t done that in a long time and maybe we should just leave her alone to do it.”
“May I say something?”
“Oh, jeez, Bridey, whenever you say that it means you’re going to say something really nice to me that’s so over the top that I feel like a jerk.”