A
t the Café Miriam, I'm working double shifts. I go until I can't anymore, then fall into bed and pass out. Waiting tables with morning sickness is not so different from the days when I used to drag myself into work after a night out drinking. Just like then, I head straight to Will, Café Miriam's bartender, for his special hangover remedy and it helps to settle my stomach.
It's the double shifts that wear me out. My clothing takes on the odor of cooking grease. My hair always stinks of it. I start to resent the customers for every annoying thing they do. I stand at the coffee station and stare out the windows at the free people walking by.
One day Janelle comes in and says she's got some dirt. She says Lois, a dancer who worked at the restaurant for a short time, is giving sensual massages out of her apartment. “That means at the end of the massage? She gives the guy a hand job.”
“I bet that's not all she's doing,” Nina says. “Why stop there?”
We talk about what we'd do and what we'd never do. We've all thought about prostitution. Not about doing it, exactly, but about the fact that we could. It's an option for attractive young women and we know it. We also know the money is supposed to be really good.
“It's not that different from having sex with a guy after he takes you out to dinner,” Nina says. “If the guys were decent, it wouldn't be so bad.”
“But they wouldn't be decent. They'd be fat and old,” Janelle says.
“Ewww,” says Sofia. “They'd have hairy backs and bad breath.”
“Well, if you could pick the ones you wanted, it wouldn't be so bad,” Nina says.
A few days later, I'm coming out of a deli on Broadway and practically bump into Lois. She looks great, as always. She's a beautiful girl with a dancer's body. Her hair is pulled back. She's all cheekbones and long green eyes. Her gaze falls to my belly. You jut from my thin frame like a little melon.
“Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing?”
“Hey, Lois.” All I can think about is professional hand jobs.
“Is the father the Mexican guy?”
“He's not Mexican, but yeah,” I say. “Gabriel.”
“He's a musician, right?”
“Uh-huh, a singer.”
“You going to get married?”
“I don't think so.” I'm dying to ask her about the sensual massage, but can't think of a way to do it.
“Well, he has to support you even if you don't get married,” Lois says. “You know that, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.” She doesn't know Gabriel. “I'll figure something out,” I say.
“Don't be stupid.” She digs into her bag and hands me a card. It has her picture on one side and her phone number on the other. “Here. It sounds like you need some practical advice. I know about this. My sister went through it. Call me.”
She's a very practical girl, I'm thinking. She's probably never loved someone so much she couldn't eat or sleep. I can't imagine proposing such a thing to Gabriel. It would only make him angry. My plan is to wait him out. I think if I tread lightly enough, if I never ask him for anything, maybe he'll give me what I want.
“Call me,” Lois says again.
She's a girl who knows how to take care of herself, whatever it takes. I put her card in my pocket.
B
y summer, the morning sickness is gone and I'm only ravenous. I'm hungry for everything, all the time. Potatoes, cake, bread, pizza, enchiladas with sour cream, spinach pie from the Greek diner on Madison. I can eat all day and wake up in the middle of the night starving. I've always been skinny without trying, one of those enviable girls who can eat anything and never gain a pound, but I've never eaten like this before. My belly gets rounder and bigger. I don't know how much of it is you and how much the midnight pizza, the morning coffee cake. I could win a pie-eating contest. I could beat the hot-dog-eating champ at Coney Island.
I look at my body in the mirror and am amazed to see I actually look pregnant.
Your Baby
has color illustrations that show sort of what you look like. If the pictures are accurate, you resemble a little alien. I study the diagrams. They label your shoulder, your eye, the chambers of your heart. You're developing ears and your eyes are starting to open. The book says you're the size of an orange.
My mother puts the word out to her friends, the ones who have daughters with daughters, now three and four, and as the weeks go by, I'm given a secondhand crib, a changing table, and a stroller. The world loves a baby on the way. Maybe she's told them that I'm doing it alone; the cardboard boxes of donations accumulate. They pile up in front of the marble fireplace mantel in my small studio apartment. The cats use them for scratching posts.
My mother calls nearly every day. She proposes schemes to get Gabriel to marry me, but none of them make sense. She doesn't know Gabriel and mistakes him for a normal man, one who can be tricked or talked into doing something he doesn't want to do. I know he's proud of the fact that he doesn't care what anybody thinks, and only does exactly what he wants. To me, he seems a different species from my family, and I like that about him, because I've always felt like I'm a different species, too.
Still, it's nice to have my mother with me. She likes to come into the city to see musicals on Broadway. I don't like them much but go with her anyway. The air-conditioning feels good and it's comforting to have her company. We go to museums on the Upper East Side. The Whitney is right by my apartment and is small enough to see in its entirety. We stand in front of a black painting by Mark Rothko and laugh.
“Even I could do that,” my mother says.
My youthful rebellion has been cut short by your lovely form pushing against me, the way I once pushed against everything. I listen to my mother tell me I could run a day-care center, or get a degree in education and teach as she does. I try not to let it get to me, although often it does.
Every day I play my guitar. I always have a new song I'm working on. Every one is better than the one before. I try to write melodies that go to unexpected places. Gabriel loves that about my songs. When he shows me a new chord, I surprise him with a whole new batch. “Pajarito, you are the best female songwriter I know,” he says. The songs make him fall in love with me again. That's what it feels like.
But not even my songs can make up for this thing that I am doing to him. He kisses me good-bye and disappears for a week. I take the phone to bed with me so I won't miss his call. When he resurfaces, he says, “Baby, where
are
you?” As if I've been the one avoiding him. “Come over,” he says, and I do, but he doesn't want to talk about you.
By Christmastime you'll be here. It's hard to imagine Christmas in the heat of July. People will be walking quickly on the street, holding their coats closed against the wind. The air will have a crisp bite to it. Christmas tree vendors will travel from Maine and Vermont to set up on Broadway and fill the street with the scent of pine needles. I'll wrap you in a soft blanket and take you to see the shop windows at Macy's and Bergdorf Goodman, buy you woolen mittens and hats. Fat snowflakes will fall. We'll get a tree and decorate it with white lights.
I'll be a mother. And Gabriel will be a father, whether he likes it or not. I can't help but picture our tree set up in a corner of his living room, a fire burning in the fireplace, all together, a family.
I
tell Gabriel I need to talk to him and we make a date to meet at his place at the Sheridan. The apartment is technically a two-bedroom, but Gabriel has knocked down a couple of walls, put in French doors, and turned the second bedroom into an office. Except for the fireplace, there's nothing cozy or charming about it. The walls are covered with framed photographs of him at different stages of his career and posters of his concerts from all over the world. The furniture is cheap and kind of tacky. Next to the king-size bed, a fancy lamp sits conspicuously on an end table, an obvious gift from another woman. There's absolutely no reason why any woman in her right mind would want to live there. Except I do. I want to move in and make the office into a baby's room. I want the three of us to live together as a family.
I take the bus across town in the early evening. The light casts a beautiful glow on the buildings of the Upper West Side. They look especially three-dimensional, like an Edward Hopper painting. The sky is a deep blue, strewn with a few cumulous clouds dipped in purple. It makes me glad to be alive just to witness it. The world is so beautiful, Little Fish.
I get off the bus at Columbus Avenue and it's just a few steps to the entrance of the Sheridan. I take a deep breath and enter the building, heart already pounding.
The doorman gives me a wave and I make my way to the elevator around the corner. My mouth is dry. I'm nervous I'll be shot down before I've even been invited inside.
Gabriel is waiting for me in the doorway. “Hi, baby.” He embraces me.
I'm wearing a dress he thinks looks good on me. It's tight across the belly, but I've managed to close the zipper. My legs are bare and tan. I've got a little makeup on, but not too much. It takes a lot of thought to be the girl he wants me to be.
He leads me directly to the bedroom, although I attempt to resist. I'm hoping to speak to him while I've still got his attention, while he's full of desire and in a good mood. The changes to my body excite him. My normally small breasts are spilling out of my bra. I probably seem like a completely different woman to him.
“Wait, wait,” I say as he unzips my dress. “Can we talk first?”
“Let's talk second,” he says.
So we begin our talk after making love, sheets tangled around us.
“Baby, don't you want to see your daughter grow up?” I ask him. My heart is fluttering in my throat.
“I want to see
you
grow up,” he says, and I hear the beginning of anger in his voice. “You can stay here whenever you want. Why would you want to
live
here? You love having your own place.”
“But I want us to live together as a family,” I say.
“
¡Puta su madre!
I'm sick of this shit!” He pulls the sheet back and gets out of bed.
“We're not a family,” he says. “You're my girlfriend and you're doing this thing I don't want you to do. You're forcing this thing that I don't want. Do you hear me? It's not going to be good. I'm telling you right now.” His voice escalates as he says this. By the last of it, he's shouting and I'm cowering under the covers. I don't know what to do when he gets mad. I go numb. I can't think at all.
Minutes later, I find him on the couch watching videos on MTV. He takes my hand and kisses it. “I'm sorry I lost my temper, baby. Do you want to order some Chinese food? Go grab a menu from the kitchen.”
I get the menu from a kitchen drawer and come back, sit beside him on the couch. We decide what we want and I call in the order.
We watch a video by an Australian band called Men at Work. The song has a reggae feel. It's called “Down Under.” I can see Gabriel's wheels turning. He's moving to the music, thinking about how he can do something like that. He's watching the lead singer and seeing himself there instead.
B
efore I knew your father, I didn't know who or what I wanted to be. I'd dropped out of school and was estranged from my family. I drank too much, stayed out all night, smoked a joint if I had one with my morning coffee. I had a number of boyfriends, but nothing ever lasted very long. I'd leave them at the bar, or in their beds, and make my way home alone. I can't tell you how many times I lost my keys and had to climb through that front window on East Seventy-eighth Street, which wasn't easy. You had to balance on a wrought-iron banister and reach across to the window. Drunk as I was, it's a miracle I never fell and cracked my skull.
Once a burglar climbed in that window when I wasn't home. He didn't steal a thing from me, because there was nothing to steal. I had a TV with a wire hanger for an antenna. The thief made his way from my building into the house next door and robbed a rich guy who was very unhappy about it. I had to have a gate put on the window. After that, when I lost my keys, I was out of luck.
When I met Gabriel, he was like a father to me in some ways. I needed to be loved by a strong man. I needed guidance and care, someone to tell me what was what.
Every day that first year, I took the crosstown bus at Seventy-ninth Street and met him on the West Side. Total strangers couldn't help but smile when they saw how much in love we were. Walking around the neighborhood, arms wrapped around each other, the world went slightly out of focus around us.
Being in love with him gave me confidence. He thought I was smart and I felt smart. He thought I was talented and I knew it was true. We played each other songs on the guitar, read to one another from the books we loved, talked about everything and anything. Sometimes, when it rained, we went to the movies all day, from one theater to the next.
We traveled to faraway places, for his concerts, or for fun. I'd never been anywhere before. We played dominoes and rode bicycles in a Greek seaport town; had breakfast in Paris in a room with a view of the Seine; raced at dawn to a plane waiting on a Bogotá runway; listened to the waves crash, late at night, on a beach in St. Barts.
I learned how to be a lover, how to please and be pleased. He told me stories and asked me to make them up for him, too. We spun each other's fantasies out of thin air.
Sometimes, in a perfect moment, I'd hold my breath to make time stop. I'd make a deal with God or whoever it is that listens to prayers in the dark. I'd say, “If I can hold my breath for forty-five seconds, you'll let it stay just like this.”
Gabriel didn't drink at first. He'd gone to AA. He said I should watch my drinking, too, so I stopped. I still smoked pot, though. I left a baggie of it under his mattress to smoke when I couldn't sleep, which happened a lot when I waited for him to come home after a gig and he was late. Gabriel found the pot and freaked out. He said drugs were for lowlifes. So I quit that, too. For the first time since I was fifteen, I had no substances or alcohol in my body. My love for him was all the drug I needed.
But after a while, for some reason, we started drinking again and right away things took a turn for the worse, and our magical connection began to erode. I think it was the threesomes that did the most damage. Fantasies were one thing; it didn't mean I could bear to see him do the things he did to me to someone else.
Sometimes I found girls of my own in the bars on Columbus Avenue. I kissed them in bathroom stalls. It was easy to become him when I was drunk enough. Once I even brought one back to his bed when he was out of town.
“You seem like the kind of girl who knows what to do,” that girl said to me, though it wasn't true. I was accumulating secrets to beat him at his own game.
Things change. No matter how long you can hold your breath.