The Stuff That Never Happened (9 page)

“I’ll bet you can get him to turn his life around and start smoking dope with you,” he said.

“Oh, no, no, I’m quitting,” I said. “This is it for me.”

“Get out! You are not.”

“No, I am. I don’t really care about this.”

“You’re crazy. You won’t be able to quit.”

“Watch me. Last inhale. Here goes.”

He shook his head. “Okay. If you say so.”

“You could stand to cut back, too, you know.”

“To each his own.”

“David,” I said.

“What?”

I told him I loved him. What I meant to tell him was that those nights out by the pool with him had been the best. And that Grant and I would always love to have him come to New York to visit. “Just because I’m getting married doesn’t mean you and I can’t keep in touch,” I said.

And so, on the hot and gusty evening of August 7, with the Santa Ana winds blowing the palm trees all around and kicking up little dust eddies in the street, the wedding took place in a small stone church on Reseda Boulevard. The bougainvillea and oleander were in riotous bloom outside the church. I marched down the aisle, holding on to my father’s arm, and in front of everybody, a clergyman said to Grant, “Do you take this woman …?” and my brain just went on the fritz right then. Woman? Was he possibly referring to
me?
I almost couldn’t remember anything else about the ceremony, except that I promised a whole bunch of things, and Grant stood there blinking and blinking and promised a whole bunch of things back, and people threw rice at us, and then we released two doves, which flew in opposite directions. Later we danced and got drunk and Magda and my brother made toasts to us.

The next day we left to drive the three thousand miles to New York City, to begin our new life as married, upstanding, fully functional adults, inspired by the example of our four seemingly happily married parents, who stood in the street jumping up and down and flapping their arms and waving us off, screaming, “Good-bye! Good luck!”

When my mother hugged me good-bye, she whispered, “I’m sorry about all the mistakes I’ve made, and I just want to say that I think Grant is a wonderful guy. But promise me that you’ll stay true to yourself, even though you’re married. It’s not easy to do, but you have to try. Promise?”

I was getting pretty good at making promises that day, so I said yes to this one, too, and then felt my throat constrict and my eyes turn to liquid. My mother’s eyes filled up, and she shook her head and placed her fingers on my lips. “No, no, no, don’t cry now. You’re going to be okay,” she whispered. “I know you will. Just take care of
you
. Take care of Annabelle.”

By the time I joined Grant in the U-Haul truck, my throat hurt so much from unshed tears that I felt as though I’d swallowed glass, and I already missed my mother so much that I couldn’t breathe.

[seven]

2005

Y
ou forget how small a New York apartment can be. Sophie and Whit—well, not Whit so much these days, but
Sophie
lives in an apartment on Twenty-second Street, a beautiful place owned by Whit’s father, who is so wealthy and generous that he charges them nothing to live there. It has trees outside and an exposed brick wall inside, a black wrought-iron fence, a hedge (which now is merely sticks, of course), and an elevator that can make you remember all the upsetting things you ever learned about the law of gravity as it lurches and moans while hauling you up to the fourth floor.

But once you get there, you have a newfound gratitude for life, as Sophie once pointed out. You step out of the wire cage and you feel like kissing the carpet.

I get to New York City at about ten that night, and amazingly enough, find a parking spot right on her street, which, unlike New Hampshire roads these days, is not filled with snow. In fact, the air feels almost balmy in comparison. I step out of the car and for a moment feel I’ve been transported back in time. We didn’t live specifically here, Grant and I, not in this neighborhood, but there’s a way in which all of New York is alike when compared with, say, New Hampshire.

Sophie’s friend from downstairs, Lori, buzzes me in, but Sophie comes running out from her bedroom and we stand there in the hall even though she should be in bed every single minute. I can’t stop hugging her. I had told myself I wouldn’t cry, but when I see her huge gray eyes filling with tears at the sight of me, I feel my eyes tearing up, too. We both dissolve into blubbering pitiable wrecks.

“Oh my God, today was so hard—I’m so glad to be here!” I say into her shoulder, and she clutches me and says, “Oh, Mom, I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you,
thank you
for coming to me.”

Is there anything more heart-wrenching than having your child weeping and thanking you for doing the very thing that you
should
do and want to be doing?

Lori smiles at us and pats us both, tells us to call her if we need anything, and then she slips out in the hallway with us both hollering thank-you’s after her. We are giddy with thank-you’s.

I stand back and get a good look at Sophie. Frankly, she looks as pale as I’ve ever seen a human being look, and besides that, she looks like a waif. This is perhaps because she’s wearing a big sweatshirt of Whit’s (“for luck, and so the baby will know him by osmosis, maybe”) and flowered pajama pants and big fluffy bunny slippers, and her blond hair is tied back in a ponytail. She’s such a combination of Grant and me; she’s tall and willowy the way he is, and she has my round face and big eyes but his coloring.

“Hey, let’s get you back in that bed,” I say. “Aren’t you supposed to be there full-time?”

“I know, I know. But I can’t stay in bed every single minute, and I just want to make sure you’re comfortable. Come on, let’s get your coat off. The closet is too full of stuff, so I’ve been storing coats on the kitchen chair. But if that’s too full, you can—”

“I’ll figure it out. You go get in your bed,” I say, and I take her by the shoulders and steer her back to her room, where her bed is all rumpled and the television set is on. I fluff her pillows and tuck her in, pulling the lavender sheets and comforter up. She looks up and smiles at me, and—I don’t know—her eyes are so sad behind her smile that I have to fight the impulse to crawl right in next to her and just hold her for the rest of her pregnancy. Instead I say, “Oh, my! Just
look
at that nice mound of baby you have there. Wow! You’ve gotten so much bigger since Christmas. You look like a
real
pregnant person now.”

“Yeah, try telling my body that.”

“What are you talking about? Your body knows that. Your body is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.”

“Mom, I know you’re trying to make me feel better, and that’s very nice of you. It’s in your job description as mom. But it’s very obvious that my body has no freaking idea what it’s supposed to be doing, or otherwise it wouldn’t be trying to kick this baby out of me.”

“Kick the baby out of you? That is not what is going on. The placenta, which does not have a brain after all, just lost its sense of direction and got started in the wrong place. You’re going to be fine.”

“Only with medical miracles.”

“Well …,” I say, and falter. She’s looking at me with her chin tilted up just so, and I know she can read the worry on my face. “You have all the help you need. We’re going to make sure that if it takes medical miracles, then you shall have them.”

I tell her that I’ll make us some tea. I’d actually stopped at a health food store in New Hampshire and bought some pregnancy tea, filled with herbs that will help any baby get a good start, I say brightly.

“Even a baby that’s getting evicted,” she says. “Good luck to it.”

I smile and pat her belly and then escape to what passes for a kitchen in this tiny apartment. The kitchen is really just one wall of the living room, which is two steps past the postage stamp-size bathroom and approximately ten steps of hallway from Sophie and Whit’s room. It’s an ingenious use of space, actually; everything necessary to life is arranged on various shelves that line the exposed brick wall. The bowls are stacked on top of the dinner plates; the flatware drawer is designed to be a cutting board, too; the twenty-four-inch kitchen table is also Sophie’s desk, and holds her laptop and a couple of file folders. Cookbooks, photo albums, towels, bed linens, unopened bars of soap—all these are luxury items that have had to be stored in decorative crates around and under the shelves and tables. It’s like a Chinese puzzle, Grant said: each thing has to nest into something else, or serve at least two purposes. Even the couch can become a double bed, which Grant and I slept in the last time we were here—when we brought Sophie back after Christmas—and as I recall, one has to be careful to keep one’s toes out of the fireplace. I sigh, looking around the living room, marveling. How is it possible to downsize a life to the point where bringing home an additional box of tea bags can tip the kitchen into chaos? And yet I had lived this way myself for years in New York. So what was I thinking, bringing two suitcases? Where can I possibly put my things? And where in the world do they intend to put the baby’s stuff, the diapers and paraphernalia—in the fireplace? We’ll have to get to that.

While I’m waiting for the water to boil, I go into the bathroom, pee and splash water on my face. I can hear Sophie’s cell phone ringing, and I stop and listen to her talking. It’s obviously Grant. She’s telling him I just got in, I’m in the bathroom, would he like to speak to me? No? Okay. Yeah, everything seems fine. Yeah, she’s going to take it easy. Yes, she talked to Whit. He’s upset. No, he probably can’t come home just yet. Waiting and seeing. Okay, love you lots. Good-bye.

After I’m sure she’s done with him, I open the door, and she calls to me. “That was Daddy on the phone. He said to tell you that you can call him back if you have anything you want to say. Otherwise, he’s going to bed soon.”

“No, I don’t have anything in particular,” I call back to her, in as even a tone as I can manage. This, of course, is an act of war from Grant, calling her cell phone instead of mine. Well, fine. If he wants to play the silent game, I’m all for it. It’s much easier to deal with a marital standoff from five hours away.
Bring it on, baby
.

I make us tea and toast, and when I come back to the bedroom, chattering about how raspberry-leaf tea is supposed to be just the thing for pregnant women, Sophie is sitting on the bed looking big-eyed and frightened. She looks exactly like she did on her first day of kindergarten when she got mixed up and missed the school bus home, and she was sure they were going to kick her out of school for being too much of a baby to follow directions. By the time I had gotten to the school to pick her up, she’d been holding herself rigidly together for so long that at the sight of me, she burst into loud sobs, much to the mystification of the kindly principal, who had been standing there telling me how brave Sophie was.

“What? What is it?” I say. I put down the cookie sheet that’s doubling as a tray for the tea.

For a moment she can’t even speak. I sit down and rock her against me and make soothing noises, just the way I did back then, and finally she says, “Ohhh, Mo-ommm, I-I’m so scared.”

“It’s okay, it’s going to be okay.”

She can barely get words out she’s crying so hard. I hold her and pat her back like I did when she was a little girl. “I didn’t feel this scared until, until you came—bu-but now that you’re really here, I know a really, really bad thing must be happening for you to come all this way.”

“No, no. It’s not so bad. You’re going to be fine. I’m here just to keep you company while you stay in bed.”

“Mom
. You know it’s not fine. The
baby
might not be fine.”

“The baby is going to be perfect. You’ll see. Now, come on, why don’t you take a sip of this pregnancy tea I brought you? Raspberry leaves are—”

“How can you
say
that? What if everything goes wrong? What if my body doesn’t know how to do this?” She blows her nose and throws a Kleenex on a huge pile of used ones.

“Listen,” I say. “Your body knows how to do this. It’s nature. And this happens sometimes, with the placenta. But the baby is fine. The doctors wouldn’t have let you come home if they thought that baby was in any danger at all.” I stroke her hair.

She sniffles and looks at me with her big eyes.
Go on
.

So I think of more stuff to say. “I think that this time, now, is the very worst of it, because of the uncertainty. But you know what? Here’s something my mother used to tell me when I would worry, and it really helped me. She’d say that no matter what happened—no matter how scared I got—we’d always be okay because we’d face it together. You won’t have to be by yourself. Ever.”

She buries her head. “This has been the most terrible time!”

“I know it has.”

“No, not just this. Everything. The whole pregnancy. Ever since Christmas … when I came back … all I do is just cry and cry. And—and sometimes when I’m going to work or when I’m coming home, I think I can’t breathe. The other day on the subway I had to sit down and put my head between my knees because I thought my heart was beating so hard that I was going to pass out.”

“Oh, baby. That’s an anxiety attack. You should have let me know.”

“And at work, all the women in the office go out for drinks at night and have di-dinner together, but I never go. I
can’t
. And I just don’t know people who are like me. I’ve always had, like, a million friends, and now nobody even talks to me! Nobody my age is having a kid, just really older people are pregnant, even at the OB appointments, they’re all in their
thirties
, and they all have husbands and nannies and … all I do is just come home every day all by myself. And Whit is so far away, and he doesn’t get it.” She throws herself down on the pillows, really wailing now. “I have
nobody
, and he doesn’t even care!”

“He just doesn’t understand,” I say. “He cares, I’m sure, but he doesn’t know what it’s like. Even I didn’t know you were having such a hard time. You hide it so well, darling. You seem so competent all the time.”

“But I’m
not
competent! Maybe I used to be competent, but now I’m a stupid crybaby—and I’m all alone and my husband doesn’t even love me enough to know he’s supposed to be here with me!”

“He
does
love you—you told him that it was fine with you for him to stay away,” I say, and she practically screams,
“I’m supposed to have to tell him I need him?
He doesn’t just know that? I’m carrying his
child!”

I can’t think of anything to say, anything that would help. I love her, I adore her, but she’s so different from the way I was at her age. What do you say to someone who’s never really been disappointed by life before, who has always gotten all she wanted so easily?

She was at the center of everything back in high school: captain and top scorer of the field hockey team, the lead in the school plays; she ran the student government and made the honor roll every single semester. Even more important, she was always surrounded by people who wanted to be around her. She was almost never alone. It strikes me now that she didn’t know how to be.

After high school, she didn’t want to stay local and go to college near home, which surprised me a little. I suppose I shouldn’t have been shocked. She was a college professor’s daughter, after all, and Grant had been talking to her about the need to get as far as she could in her career. She picked Brown University, majored in communications, and despite my misgivings, did perfectly well away from home. I remember Grant shaking his head and chuckling as he said to me, “Of
course
she had to leave—to spread that Sophie magic around the region. New Hampshire had its turn with her for eighteen years, so it was only fair to give Rhode Island its chance.”