by Kate Jacobs
Oh, KC, she told herself. You’ve become your mother. Menopausal and grumpy. And it sucked.
At least one night a week, KC came over to keep Peri company as she worked on her pocketbooks. Ostensibly, KC was there to get private lessons to work on her Georgia afghans, of which she completed one—and only one—every year.
Dutifully, she sat on Peri’s sofa with knitting needles in her hand, one eye on the television and the other on the newspaper. KC was not the type of personality who could sit still.
“You can put the needles down,” said Peri, who was sorting through her yarn colors, comparing how different shades would stripe together. “Everyone knows I knit up your Georgia afghan every year. It’s too good.”
“Yeah, about that,” said KC. “Maybe you could throw in a few mistakes this year.”
“Tried that one before,” said Peri. “I even made those too uniformly.”
“Hmm,” muttered KC, before rushing into the bathroom. She was sweating. Again.
Peri knocked on the door, holding a clean towel. “You’ve got to see a doctor, KC,” she said. “Herbs, hormones, something. Suffering is passé, you know.”
KC poked her head out. “Sometimes suffering is just suffering,” she said. “You have to muscle through it to get to the other side.”
“I don’t think nirvana is waiting for you beyond menopause,” said Peri.
“Well, we won’t know until we find out,” said KC, muttering to herself behind the door. The world, she thought, was lucky she was only smoking.
Typically, Peri’s apartment was quiet. A dinner of salad, maybe a little grilled chicken, and then it was on to job number two. Designing, knitting, felting, updating her website, filling small orders for boutiques. She’d changed the feel of the place completely since the days when Georgia and Dakota lived here, buying just-the-right-size furniture for the space—Georgia had always kept a large sofa in the living area—and making the most of the three rooms—each functioned for multiple uses. In Dakota’s former bedroom, where she kept her computer desk and her studio, the walls were covered in open shelving to house her personal stash, her needles, her works in progress, her sewing supplies, her ten-year collection of Vogue. She’d saved everything that had been Georgia’s, tucking it into the large filing cabinet Marty had helped her to move upstairs. Every so often, Dakota came to look through things, after a Saturday shift most likely. Peri never minded, understood that she needed to reassure herself.
“Have you ever seen a binder around?” she asked Peri during one such inspection.
“What, like a school binder?” asked Peri.
“Kinda,” said Dakota. “I’m looking for something. Sometimes I think it was left behind. I can’t seem to find it.”
Together, they checked all the cupboards, and the top closet that had once housed Georgia’s memory box, but all that could be found was box after box of Peri’s handbag supplies.
“You’ve kinda turned your home into a workplace, you know that?” said Dakota. “You may have made the store sleeker but this place is never going to give you any peace. You have no getaway.”
Peri shrugged. She knew Dakota wasn’t really looking for anything, of course. Who comes back after five years looking for their notes from middle school? But she just needed to touch, to see, to remind herself what it had been like. To ping that lost, secret part of herself from the past.
four
It was better now than it had been, of course. There were moments when Darwin felt an essential and pure happiness that she had never expected to feel, even though her midsection looked like she had a team’s worth of basket-balls tucked under her shirt and the stretch marks on her stomach striped her skin like a tiger. A sort of Christmas-morning-smell-of-chocolate-chip-cookies-finally-having-a-baby combination of joy that made her step lighter and her smile come more easily. She indulged her daydreams more often now as the due date approached, falling into fantasy mode and positively lusting after a crib shaped like a tiny fairy-tale carriage that sold in a chichi Madison Avenue boutique for $23,000. It was a million miles beyond her pocketbook’s reach and offended every single one of her feminist sensibilities, and yet still she found reasons to stop in front of the store window and gape, the carriage crib glittering and winking as sunlight streamed onto the glass.
There was more: Darwin kept a secret container of talcum powder hidden in her underwear drawer and would take hits of sniff during the day, savoring the old-timey baby scent. Her bedside table was ready to buckle under the weight of the seventeen parenting books she’d read, augmented by a binder’s worth of handwritten notes. She programmed a chart on her computer comparing and contrasting differing parenting suggestions and kept a rating scale in order to determine if she wanted a family bed or if she was going for cloth and a diaper service over disposables. Had to factor in all that water use for the washing, you know.
But then she’d catch herself.
“Nothing jinxes life more than getting excited about it,” she’d told her husband each time. “There’s always a smackdown.”
She thought about this danger as she waddled her way across the crosswalk—no more jaywalking for her with two babies on board!—and stared up at the window of Walker and Daughter.
She would have liked to talk about her impending motherhood with Georgia. Of all people, Georgia knew about things being unfair. It was funny how Darwin felt closer to Georgia now, more than she ever had when Georgia was alive. Somehow, over the years, with the disappointments and the keeping up of appearances, Darwin came to believe she finally understood Georgia. She’d have been happy, now, to listen to Georgia’s struggles, in a way that she’d never had the patience for when she actually knew her. It was a great irony that suffering could bring the gift of compassion.
Darwin had a feeling Georgia would understand, better than anyone, her mixed-up emotions over the years. That she wouldn’t judge her for the ambivalence that crept up sometimes about having a baby. Babies. Plural. Of the sheer dread of all the changes that were coming. Followed swiftly by the guilt over not being in a state of perpetual joy and counting her blessings and instead, harboring deep, deep fears of something going wrong. That’s what she felt more than anything. The certain knowledge that things wouldn’t turn out well. After all, they never had before.
There had been the miscarriages. Three additional losses after the first miscarriage more than five years ago, back when she was still working on her dissertation. Before she became a lecturer in history at Hunter, teaching an eager crew of younger versions of herself. She remembered that time in her life, when she was bold enough to know everything with certainty and feel powerful because of it. Quite frankly, Darwin could use a little of that moxie back.
Each miscarriage had taken a little bit more of her heart and left her with more questions than answers. The last one came in the middle of the second trimester, after everyone had already sighed with relief and she and Dan had started talking seriously about moving to a bigger house.
“If we hadn’t phoned the realtor,” she had told him then, “this wouldn’t have happened.” And her husband had held her and silently cried into her long dark hair, hoping she wouldn’t notice even as her scalp grew cool and wet.
The no-reasonness of things was always the hardest to take. She thought of Georgia then, too, how she’d handled her own illness with grace. Darwin thought of her during the many trips to the doctor, then to a different doctor, then on to a fertility clinic. Special care for special problems. She thought of her as medical professional after medical professional stumbled around her insides trying to figure out why she was such a failure. When they discussed testing embryos, implanting only the healthy ones. It was easier, too, thinking about Georgia, because she’d suffered the most. Being dead and all. Darwin liked to imagine her lost babies in a big nursery in some other dimension, where her long-dead grandmother would watch over them and, from time to time, Georgia would pop in and say hello. Tell them she’d just bee
n watching over Dakota and the group at Walker and Daughter and that Darwin was thinking of her kids, even as she struggled to remain sociable.
It’s a peculiar grief: the loss of someone no one else has ever known. A private bereavement.
Darwin felt a kinship with Georgia, being separated from her only daughter by death; Darwin had been separated from all of her children by their nonbirth. Darwin had never known how much she desired a baby until she couldn’t have one, and then every fiber of her being ached for a child.
How sad Georgia must be, she would think, to miss out on seeing Dakota each and every day. And so, over the last several years, Darwin began to spend many a Saturday afternoon at the shop, especially if Dan had rounds at the hospital, to check up on Dakota. She never hovered: Anita, Catherine, and Peri did that. Instead, Darwin took on a different sort of role, advising Dakota as she prepared for college admissions and introducing her to all sorts of women’s studies titles that Catherine and Anita had never heard of. Darwin settled into the role of academic mentor, and in doing so, found a small way to distract herself. To honor Georgia.
She was tremendously jealous of Lucie back then, even as she loved her best friend and adored little Ginger, often babysitting. Still, there was more than one time that Darwin returned from a trip to buy Ginger a teeny pair of mini-sneakers for her chubby toddler feet and ended up crying at her desk in the corner of the bedroom, pretending to work, Dan watching TV in the other room. Knowing her well enough to leave her be.
The worried glances between her parents and her in-laws at holiday dinners, the sympathetic looks when the knitting club got together, the evenings she overheard Dan on his cell out on the balcony, talking with med school friends who’d gone on to specialize in fertility: it had all gone on around her and she held her breath, flipping willy-nilly between despair and hope.
Darwin understood, of course, that it would have been easier on everyone to be optimistic, for her to express the chipper “It’s going to happen for us, it will!” can-do spirit that eases everyone else’s discomfort and would leave her to lick her wounds in private. But that had never been her personality, and in the end, it just became too hard.
She’d been grouchy and frustrated for much of the last five years, and she still felt the sting of embarrassment about bursting into tears when Lucie’s daughter, Ginger, blew out the candles on her cake at her birthday a few years ago. A sweet girl whose hair she’d brushed, whose lunches she’d made, whom she’d tucked in on countless occasions when Lucie had gone to dinner with potential film producers, and then whammo! Suddenly Darwin let forth with great, hulking sobs as the pigtailed dynamo was clapping along to the Happy Birthday song and accidentally spitting all over the pink frosted cake as she tried to make her wish. Humiliating. It’s not that she courted the attention. Or that she wanted to make Lucie, her dearest friend, feel torn between cutting slices of moist chocolate cake for oversugared, ants-in-their-pants little kids or following Darwin into the bathroom to offer a shoulder to cry on. No, Darwin would have preferred to be quite invisible. But it’s not as though she could pick the appropriate time for a mini-breakdown. Her heart did that for her, and on Ginger’s sweet birthday, the pent-up anger and hurt had simply all flooded out.
She wished she hadn’t had to endure the endless banter of “When are you having kids?” followed up with blame (“You really ought to give Dan some kids”) and topped off with prurient curiosity (“Is something wrong?”) that she experienced from her colleagues and family.
Don’t ask.
Don’t tell.
You’d think these unspoken rules would be obvious.
After all the goodie bags had been handed out and Darwin helped Lucie wash dishes, trying to scrub off the thick ring of embarrassment she felt for crying in front of Lucie’s mom friends, she had accepted a hug mutely from Lucie’s mother. From their initial meeting at the hospital after Lucie had given birth to Ginger, Rosie and Darwin had forged their own relationship, a curious connection growing out of their close proximity. Rosie had spent a life tending to a boisterous family, cooking and cleaning and wiping noses. Fully aware of Darwin’s disapproval of her single-minded housewifery, Rosie “adopted” her nonetheless, plying Darwin with endless jars of homemade tomato sauce and canned peaches and admiring every professional accomplishment as much as Darwin’s own mother back in Seattle. Possibly even more.
Rosie, Lucie, Dakota, the rest of the club, their families: everyone was excited for Darwin and Dan. Everyone felt, too, that their private hopes and energies and even prayers—in the case of Anita and Rosie—had helped in some small way. Darwin’s pregnancy was a great cause for celebration.
And yet, with only nine weeks to go, Darwin remained nervous. She had kept a list in her backpack of Things That Could Go Wrong, to which she added new thoughts as they arose.
Item #1: A taxicab could hit me as I cross the street.
Item #2: A taxicab could hit me when I’m in another cab on the way to the hospital.
Item #3: A taxicab carrying Dan could hit me in my cab on the way to the hospital. . . .
Dan caught her writing furiously at three a.m., read the list, discussed each and every item on it as a statistical improbability—taking special care to go over all her medical concerns—and then tore the list up and put it in the wastepaper basket.
The next morning, Darwin fished out the pieces, put them in an envelope, and started a new list. No one, not even her dear husband, was going to jinx things.
Even with all of her furtive crib window-shopping, she had been firm with Dan that they had better not paint the nursery—which was really just a corner cordoned off the living room—or buy any burp cloths or onesies, and definitely not hold any showers. No baby showers! That was her hard-and-fast rule. Only after much negotiation had she consented to attend birthing classes. Darwin had been adamant about wanting to try a natural birth and had researched diligently for a doctor who was willing to let her try.
“We’ve got to go, Darwin,” Dan told her, even though he’d delivered five babies in med school and a handful of emergency births since then. “It’s important to be prepared and besides, what if I forget?”
Dan never forgot anything. Unless he chose to. Like her one ill-fated night with that friend of Peri’s, long, long ago. They’d counseled it out and then it had floated away, just one more piece of their shared history, not necessary to remember. For this, even when she was annoyed with him for tearing up her list, she was eternally grateful.
Though it wasn’t like he was going to be doing the actual doctor part anyway. He was supposed to be one-hundred-percent dad in that hospital room—and that meant staying by her side. Because this time was going to be different from all the others. This go-round they were going to come home from the hospital with two babies, of their very own, breathing and sleeping and cuddling. She could feel it rising again, the bubble of hope, and she could see that shiny crib in her mind’s eye, could smell that baby powder. Darwin heaved her heavy body up the steep stairs to the yarn shop, heard the excited yelping and Shhs coming from her friends as she paused on the landing, hoping to catch her breath before going inside. It took a brief second for the full knowledge to register: The club was throwing her a shower.
Excitement and superstition battled for equal time as KC swung open the door.
“I thought I could hear your huffing out here,” she shouted. “Get in here, Professor Chiu! You’re the one bringing the guests of honor.”
Darwin looked inside cautiously, at her friends rushing toward her with drinks in hand, and Dakota standing at the table and making faces as she pointed animatedly to a large gift suffocated in shiny yellow paper.
It wasn’t her overpriced dream crib. But it was close enough. Darwin grinned as the members of the Friday Night Knitting Club swarmed around her, letting Catherine and KC and Anita and Peri feel the two partygoers inside her kicking with glee.
Maybe it was okay to be happy, she thought. Just a lit
tle bit.
five
Walker and Daughter was drowning in gift wrap as Darwin tore through her newly acquired baby-stuff booty.
“This is just what I needed,” she exclaimed over every burp cloth, rattle, and tiny pair of socks, tossing the wrapping paper over her shoulder as Peri tutted around her with garbage bags and an electric hand vac.
“Let me just get that,” squeaked Peri. The floor, newly sanded and refinished, had yet to have its first scratch and all that new paint hadn’t seen a smudge. It was nerve-wracking, one eye on Catherine’s heeled boots grinding into the floor and another worried about the tape ruining the finish. When did she get so uptight? she wondered. She’d been wringing her hands for days over what everyone would say about the remodel—would they criticize the changes? judge her for pushing the timetable?—but she’d never considered that she was more freaked out by the prospect of one of the members of the club scuffing up the wood. Maybe she was losing perspective, she thought to herself, switching off the DustBuster.
“Thank God,” said KC in a stage whisper. “I thought I was going to have to yell to hear myself think.” She reached over and took the gift wrap from Peri’s hands and threw it back on the floor. “Do it later,” she said. “I’ll even help—for a few minutes. Five, tops. But c’mon, enjoy yourself. Live a little. Watch our Darwin open her toys.”
“What’s that smell?” Peri sniffed the air and looked at Dakota. She lowered her voice. “Have you been smoking?”
“No,” said Dakota. “Not my scene.” Dakota walked away. Over to stare at the gray wall of purses where once she’d flopped on the shabby old office couch and chatted about the day with her mother. Back in another lifetime.
The smoky scent lingered right around . . . there.
Peri leaned in closely to KC and then put her arm around her friend, casually guiding her to the window but in fact exerting more than a little pressure to propel her forward.