What We Have

by Amy Boesky

  A tear plopped down on the table.

  “And Mom,” I said, switching gears. “All I hear about from Mom is you and Jon! She can’t talk about anything else. She’s obsessed.”

  She loves you more than me, I thought idiotically, though I didn’t say it.

  Julie let out a long, sad sigh. “She’s unbelievable,” she said. “Do you know what she said to me when she came out here in July?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’d just gotten home from the hospital, and she walked into our kitchen and looked at me and burst into tears. And she said, ‘But you’re usually so good at growing things!’ ”

  We both thought about that. Julie still had tears in her eyes, and so did I. But the image of my mother comparing Emily to a philodendron was so ludicrous, and so like her, that it made me start to laugh, despite myself. That was my mother all over—like pregnancy was an AP exam, and Julie had only managed to score a three.

  “Only Mom,” I said.

  At least this broke the ice.

  She should’ve told me about Portland weeks ago, Julie admitted, but it had all been up in the air for so long. They hadn’t known for sure. They’d actually wanted to leave the area for a while, but they’d never admitted it to themselves until they lost Emily. They’d had it with the city, the traffic, the congestion. Everything cost so much, took so much effort here. At first, the idea of moving was just a fantasy—something to distract them from what had happened. Now it looked like it was really happening.

  “But you love DC,” I reminded her numbly, stirring and stirring my tea.

  I’d picked DC because of her, remember? She was the family I had here. Without Julie and Jon, DC was just a place. An alphabet soup of streets. Planes buzzing low over the campus, heading elsewhere. Everyone heading elsewhere.

  She couldn’t meet my eyes.

  They’d gone to Portland in August, just to get away, and they’d both loved it. It felt like being on vacation there, Julie said, but they decided to put it on the back burner, and then, out of the blue, a headhunter called Jon. A firm in Portland needed a labor lawyer. They even had some part-time work for Julie.

  They’d found a house to rent in Cape Elizabeth, ten minutes from Portland, a few blocks from the ocean.

  “So,” Julie said. “I guess it’s really happening.”

  “Well,” I said, trying to sound happy for her. “I guess that’s good.”

  According to my AAA chart, it is 562 miles from Washington, DC, to Portland, Maine.

  “It won’t happen for a while, Mellie,” she said, putting her hand near mine on the table. “We still have to sell our place and find a place to live.”

  We called each other “Mellie”—my mother, my sisters, and I—whenever something hard came up and we wanted to be ironic about it instead of getting emotional. It came from watching Gone with the Wind so often when we were growing up. Mellie, of course, is Scarlett’s gentle, loving cousin, the one Ashley really loves. The one played by Olivia de Havilland, who we all thought we should really want to be, instead of Vivian Leigh, the conniving, hard-hearted heroine. The scene that kept us riveted was the one where Scarlett was pulling the wagon out of burning Savannah, and Mellie was rolling around in the back in utter agony, in labor and dying at the same time. “Hang on, Mellie! We’re almost there! We’re going to make it!” Scarlett kept crying.

  We’d grab one another’s arms, all four of us, and shriek along with her, “Hang on, Mellie! Hang on!” as if somehow we could keep her going, from our couch-bound, 1960s vantage.

  Years later, my parents, Julie, and I took a trip together in northern Italy during the spring break of my second year at Oxford. Sara was already living out in Olympia and teaching full-time, so it was just the four of us. We met in Florence, my father rented a car, and we took a hairpin drive through the Apennine Mountains. Unbelievably narrow roads bent back and forth at right angles around the rapidly escalating heights, and if you peered out the window, like Julie did, it was a sheer drop down. Italian drivers kept barreling down at us from what appeared to be the same lane, honking furiously. My father was trying to curse back at them in Italian, and Julie, who had a miserable cold, clutched her backpack on her lap and shook all over, she was so scared. “Mellie” started then. “Hang on, Mellie,” I crooned meanly, tucking my arm through hers as a truck rounded the bend in front of us, swaying dangerously. “I think I see—Tara!”

  Ever since, all of us used the name at moments of risible discomfort. It was a communal nickname, Mellie, shared, with its remnants of irony.

  It meant: “I know you’re upset, but don’t lose your sense of perspective.”

  Now, Julie used it—to appease me. To distract me from worrying how soon they’d be gone. And how far away they’d be.

  She probably had the boxes packed already.

  I couldn’t be glad for them about moving. But not being glad was strangely uplifting. It leveled the field between us. It meant I didn’t have to feel so guilty about the baby.

  “I’ll get you an ice pick as a housewarming present,” I told her.

  As luck would have it, they found a place easily. Someone made an offer on their house, and they made plans to move in late January or early February. Winter in Maine. Eighty-two inches of snow so far that year, and temperatures had been ranging from the low single digits to the low teens. She might really need that ice pick.

  After a while, it stung less, thinking about her in Portland. Under the rational note in Julie’s voice I heard something else, and I thought, This will always be the place for her where Emily died. That was the real problem with DC, and it was never going to change.

  MOST OF MY FIRST WEEKEND post-teaching I lay on the couch, feet up (Dr. Weiss was hoping gravity might make the baby flip upside down). “You never know,” I told Annie when she called and made fun of this idea. “It could work.” In the seventeenth century, they might have applied leeches.

  Lying on the couch, I went through blue books, reading what my students had written about Margaret Cavendish and Samuel Pepys. Everything seemed suddenly slowed down. I felt like I was being inflated with an invisible pump: Each breath I took seemed to stay inside me. If I got any bigger I might explode. How was it possible I could be this big, when according to Dr. Weiss’s most recent computer clicks, the baby weighed barely five pounds? Even my little fingers were puffy.

  My womb was still inhospitable, but they were willing to give us a chance. Now Dr. Weiss used a tape measure at each visit as well as ultrasounds.

  Baby still breech, she noted at my last appointment.

  SELFHOOD IS A PERFORMANCE. PEPYSappears to keep the diary for himself, but every “confession” is actually an attempt to articulate an identity for a wider audience.

  BETWEEN BLUE BOOKS, I WATCHED dust motes filter through the afternoon light. Once in a while I recited things to the baby, fragments of poetry I remembered from my oral exams.

  When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

  I summon up remembrance of things past—

  Or

  The mind is its own place, and in itself

  Can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell

  I wanted to stay like this forever, in between, not one thing or another. Not one, not two. Inside of me, the baby pulsed: Every second of every minute of every hour, the baby was growing, cells multiplying, limbs lengthening—I didn’t have to move an inch, lift a single finger, and so much kept happening.

  The baby was good company, even though I didn’t know much about it yet. Boy or girl? Its features in my last sonogram were soft and blurry, like someone caught off guard, moving before the camera snapped.

  I tried not to notice he or she wasn’t moving again. Knuckling it from either side, I tried to picture health. Wholeness. Peace.

  One more knead, and the baby popped back into motion, like a giant cork.

  All will be well, little one, I crooned, almost believing it. We needed no words. We breathed, we turned, we
slept. Cell by cell, we grew larger.

  Birthday (I)

  SUNDAY EVENING, UNUSUALLY MILD FOR December. Jacques and I were in bed, talking before sleep. We’d had dinner that night at Dave and Lori’s, whose baby girl was ten months old. She’d sat through almost all of dinner in her high chair, burbling at us, so solid and human-looking. Dave and Lori looked like they had life all figured out. Our “lead indicators,” Jacques called them. We spent most of dinner asking for advice, and then, finding the advice overwhelming, trying to ignore it.

  This was the stretch of time—between the end of the semester and my due date—I’d blocked out for getting ready for the baby. I had it written in my day planner in capital letters, with a long arrow to show how much time I had. GET READY FOR BABY—————, right there from December 3 to December 31.

  There are lots of ways to get ready for things. My focus was on the baby’s room.

  Our house was narrow and tall, and we’d decided to put the baby in the middle room on the third floor, the one with the fan-shaped window and distant view of the aviary. In the mornings you could hear birdcalls, which I figured the baby would like.

  The room was mostly done. We’d set up white shelves in the closet, scrubbing the walls with Fantastik. Every few days I added something: a small stack of towels. A Kleenex box. We had royal blue carpeting installed, hung up blue-and-yellow borders, and fitted in a fresh white bureau and changing table. Everything was there but the crib, which had been on the top of my to-do list for weeks. I’d actually found one that seemed perfect a few weeks earlier at Baby World in northern Virginia—simple, white, pristine—but Jacques, who likes comparison shopping, still wanted to check out a few other possibilities.

  Why couldn’t we just get the one at Baby World? It was perfect.

  For someone prone to criticism, I’m easily satisfied when it comes to material objects. Many of them strike me as ideal, just the way they are. Not Jacques. He likes the hunt.

  “What’s wrong with the one we saw?” I asked on Saturday, my first weekend since the semester had ended. After hours of lying on the couch, coaxing the baby to turn, I was ready to get out a bit.

  “Oh,” Jacques said, deep in the paper. “I still want to check out a few other options.”

  “What other options?” I asked. Was he thinking maybe something that rocked ?

  I set my jaw, the way I do when I want something to happen now and he wants to delay just for the sake of delaying.

  The crib wasn’t the real issue, though we ended up arguing about it that afternoon. A new problem had inserted itself into our lives.

  A job had turned up in my field in Boston.

  I say this like the job found me, instead of vice versa, and in fact, this wasn’t true. In September, when I did my usual quarterly scan of the Modern Language Association job list, there it was—a job in Boston. In my field. Given that I knew who was teaching seventeenth-century at every British university in Boston, this qualified as a near miracle. I called Annie immediately to read her the ad, just for a reality check. Then I applied for the job and tried to put it out of my mind. No one at Georgetown knew about my application except my chair, one of the kindest academics on earth. And he seemed to forget about it right after e-mailing the department in Boston on my behalf. That made it easier for me to stop thinking about it, too.

  I’d managed to repress it pretty well, in fact, though my mother hadn’t. When are you going to hear about the job in Boston? How many other people did you say applied? What will you do if they want to interview you? “We’ll see,” I kept saying. Or sometimes, less kindly, “We’ll see!” Then that weekend, right before Jacques and I headed over to Dave and Lori’s, I got a call from the chair in Boston telling me I’d been chosen for an interview. I was dumbfounded.

  As a hypothetical, the job had seemed appealing. But as a reality—

  Be careful what you wish for, I was thinking now. Applying for the job had made more sense in September, when I could still get up and down stairs without hanging on to the banister. The baby was due in three weeks and three days. How was I possibly going to make it to an interview in another city the week after Christmas?

  They were nice, the people from Boston. They understood there was no way I could make it to the convention. But what if we set up a telephone interview next week?

  My situation, the chair pointed out, was not insurmountable. Of course, if I ended up getting a callback interview . . . her voice trailed off. I knew the chances of that were slim. That wouldn’t be until late January or early February, she said, and by that point—

  “Oh, by that point,” I agreed, matching her low chuckle. I could certainly make my way to Boston by then. If, of course—

  Late January seemed as far off as the moon.

  I was mulling all this over, Sunday night in bed.

  All weekend, Jacques kept finding ways to sneak in the virtues of Boston, and it was starting to grate on me. What happened to “wait and see”? Where was this newfound desire to plan coming from? I found myself shooting back all the advantages of the District. Short winters! Friendly people! It wasn’t just Boston versus DC, I realized now, shifting uncomfortably. It wasn’t even the prospect of the job—it was everything. The more I thought about our dinner with Dave and Lori, the worse I felt. Lori seemed so sure of herself, so experienced. What was I going to do? I had no idea what babies ate or how to get them in or out of their various pieces of equipment or what you did when you spent time alone with them. Sara and Julie were the ones who’d babysat during high school—I’d taken a job selling handbags at B. Siegel instead. Before Christmas, all sorts of nice middle-aged men would come in and open the bags up and look inside them, bemused, and after a lot of deliberations, they’d say, OK, I’ll take this one, and I’d ring them up and gift wrap, and then, the day after Christmas, the women themselves would come and wait in line to return them. “Things just fall right to the bottom of this!” one cried, shaking the bag at me like I was the harebrained designer. What a waste of time. I could’ve been learning to diaper and soothe.

  I had no idea what to do with a baby. I had a vague plan to work on my book while the baby slept next to me, but I got the sense from Lori that might not be realistic.

  “You’re really planning to work from home?” Lori had asked. She’s a prize-winning reporter; their ten-month-old was on a schedule; they had a great nanny. But Lori didn’t even try to work from home. Too many distractions, she said, not meeting my eye.

  “Are you going to have help?” she asked, when I mentioned my writing plans.

  Trust me, I’ve never been a hero when it comes to doing things on my own. I use full service in the gas station. I get things fixed at the dry cleaners. If I get a flat tire, I call AAA. I’m happy to delegate any and all tasks, it’s just that taking care of the baby hadn’t quite registered yet as a task. I stammered something: “We’ll play it by ear,” with a “flexible schedule” and “work from home” and another Jacques-ism or two thrown in for good measure. When I wasn’t looking, Lori and Dave exchanged the knowing glances of people who have been to the Dark Continent and barely survived.

  Now I was thinking this over. “We may have to reconsider the nanny issue,” I said, and right as I said it, I became aware that something wet was whooshing out of me in unbelievable quantities. All over my side of the bed. It was like a bathtub had been unplugged. What on earth—?

  I began shaking Jacques’s arm. As I did, I guessed what had happened—my water had broken. But—it wasn’t time yet! I still had more than three weeks left!

  Twenty-four days, as a matter of fact. The due date was right there in my day planner—six days after Christmas. In ink.

  For once, I wasn’t ready. Truly not ready. I hadn’t packed yet. I wasn’t done grading blue books. We didn’t even have the crib!

  This was the last inhospitable act of my inhospitable womb. It was like ushering a guest to the door while dessert was being served.

  S
orry to rush you, little one. But it looks like it’s time to get going.

  I’M SURE EVERY PERSON’S EXPERIENCE of labor is different. For us, it started by arguing over where to park the car. “How long do you think we’ll be?” Jacques asked, squinting up at the parking rates at the entrance to the hospital lot. I shrugged. I hadn’t had a single contraction yet. That might mean days. On the other hand, Dr. Weiss was meeting us. We were being taken care of. “Go for the short-term lot,” I advised. Ignoring me, Jacques headed to 24 Hours or More, carefully trolling each level for the optimal spot.

  Jacques wasn’t the only one taking his time. The people in Labor and Delivery were all moving in slow motion. One woman behind the desk was on an interminable phone call, her back to us. “I know! I know!” she kept saying, her shoulders shaking with suppressed mirth. Another was sleepily riffling through paperwork. Yawn, riffle, yawn. After what seemed like forever, she jackknifed a clipboard in my direction.

  Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork. So many forms to fill out. Mother’s maiden name. Mother’s social security number—“social,” as it was cozily abbreviated by the woman at the desk through another yawn. State of birth? Date of birth? Allergies? Next of kin? Primary care physician? Ob-gyn? I signed and stamped and addressed and authorized, wondering why this never happens in the movies. Finally Dr. Weiss came in, snapping on a natty little blue jacket with OR efficiency.

  Dr. Weiss, at least, was ready for action. “So,” she said when she saw us. “What have you two decided?” No preliminaries, not even a hello.

  The baby was still breech, and Dr. Weiss wanted to know how I felt about trying “version.” “Turning the baby gently while we monitor all its vital signs in the hope that we can maneuver the baby into position” was how the process was described, which two months later we learned Blue Cross considered elective and charged us for. A thousand dollars a minute, and I didn’t even enjoy it.