Eliza Starts a Rumor

by Jane L. Rosen

  Alison Le

  Alison Le ducked into Wolf Realty with an extra set of keys to her new home in hand. She had to give a set to someone, and so far, the agent who had rented her the place was the only someone she knew—another reason to shake her head in disbelief over her impulsive move from the city. The key exchange was the last errand on her to-do list. She had no idea what she would do next.

  The receptionist seemed to be expecting her.

  “Mrs. Wolf asked if you could wait a minute. She wants to see if everything’s OK with the new house.”

  “Sure,” Alison replied. She had nothing but time.

  “Can I offer you a cup of coffee? And a heavenly muffin from the Café Karma Sutra?”

  Alison declined. It sounded like some kind of a cult offering. She berated herself for the hundredth time that day. What did you do? What did you do?

  If I were to Karma Sutra, she thought, that could be my mantra. It made her laugh out loud and the receptionist looked at her like she was a bit crazy. Maybe she was right. Temporary insanity, Alison hoped.

  She sat down and picked up the local newspaper, but after a few pages, her mind began to wander to the circumstances that had led her to uproot her entire life and move to Hudson Valley. The biggest catalyst, her fifteen-week-old baby boy, stirred in his stroller. She ran the back of her hand gently over his forehead and he settled back into his nap. She still couldn’t decide if she was a good mother or if she’d just lucked out with a good baby. It was easier to believe the latter.

  Alison had spent her entire life acting like a consummate bachelor. She never wore a dress, cursed like a sailor, and never dreamed of marriage with all of its obligations and distractions. She was smart and had worked hard in school, but she didn’t spend much time thinking about the racially charged stereotypes about Asian kids that went along with that. She was smart because she was, and she worked hard because she enjoyed it and emulated her single mother, who had worked endless hours to support them.

  She attended Wesleyan for undergrad, followed by Harvard Law. After graduation she joined a small firm, intent on being a top criminal defense attorney. At thirty-eight, she was confident she had succeeded. She didn’t worry about the age to marry or her ticking biological clock. The only clock that concerned her was the one that tracked her billable hours. Alison was a planner, but the one thing she had never planned on—an unwanted pregnancy—took her by surprise.

  Alison Le had been seeing Marc Sugarman, the bureau chief of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, on and off for nearly two years. It was an entirely covert affair, as they often tried cases against each other. At first the attraction was ignited by their rivalry, but as time went on, it was really just perfunctory. They each filled a need for the other, figuratively and literally, and they were both on the exact same page when it came to relationships. They both agreed that their careers were their great loves; they even pinky-swore to it on the night of their first tequila-fueled encounter. Neither wanted to be nailed down for longer than the duration of their Wednesday night trysts at the downtown Ritz-Carlton.

  On the night that Alison decided to fill Marc in on her pregnancy, she arrived early to get up her nerve. Such a thing would usually be eased by a scotch, but of course that didn’t feel right. As if leading a witness, Marc entered and quickly offered her a glass.

  “No thanks, I’m not drinking,” she said.

  “Why?” he responded, half listening, half disrobing.

  “Because I’m pregnant,” she answered.

  He stopped dead in his tracks, mumbling, “Oh. That’s unfortunate,” followed by a stronger “How could that have happened?”

  She ignored him; she wasn’t about to school him on the efficacy of birth control. He surprisingly stabbed her impermeable heart again, adding, “You know our deal, Alison, no attachments. I assume you’re taking care of it.”

  She wasn’t sure what she’d expected from him but was quite certain this was not it. Her immediate reaction to his words was to build a case against them. She didn’t know if it was on account of her natural tendency to argue the other side or the newly acquired mommy hormones, but at that moment her pregnancy went from a problem to a gift. She felt ashamed that it took Marc’s heartless apathy to shine that light. She placed her hand on her belly and said, “Yes, I will be taking care of it,” taking a beat before adding, “on my own and very well, thank you. I’m going to take a bath, please be gone by the time I get out.”

  And he was.

  Alison hid her pregnancy at work for as long as was physically possible, but when she entered her fifth month, she felt she had to come clean. She stood up at the weekly partners’ meeting and disclosed that she was pregnant. The other partners feigned happiness for her, but it was clear they had assumed that ship had sailed and were surprised by the news. Surprised was putting it kindly. They were most likely annoyed, as they’d always thought of her as one of them. She noticed the team’s underlying panic and addressed the elephant in the room.

  “Gentlemen, don’t worry. This firm is my life. Nothing is going to change.”

  They smiled as if they believed her.

  Alison lay awake at night worrying about whether she was maternal enough to raise a child. She was afraid that she didn’t have that instinct everyone spoke of. When she saw a child cry, she would often have the urge to laugh: the way they threw themselves on the floor over a lost balloon as if the world were about to end. Then one day, at about thirty-two weeks, she was riding the subway when it came to a jolting stop. She felt the blood rush from her head as her hands slipped down the pole she’d been grasping. A minute later she found herself on the floor of the subway car—her head cradled in the lap of an intimidating-looking man with a string of barbed wire tattooed up his arm beneath the words Live Free or Die. The kind stranger, who quite possibly just escaped from jail, escorted her to the street and put her in a taxi to her obstetrician, who informed her that there was nothing wrong.

  She said, “When the train jolted, your maternal instinct kicked in and sent all of the blood to your baby.”

  Alison cried tears of joy. She had a maternal instinct.

  A week before she was due, her water broke in a conference room full of partners and associates. She had already seen a difference in how she was being looked at. Creating a puddle on her chair that she later realized she had left for someone else to clean up as she waddled out of the room had to have sealed the deal.

  * * *

  —

  The door to Wolf Realty swung open with a gust of wind and a young mother came in, baby in tow, courtesy of the all-coveted Thule Urban Glide jogging stroller.

  “Hi,” Olivia York said to the air in general as she moved her hips from side to side in place to keep up her energy. Her baby looked to be around the same age as Zachary.

  “Hi. What a cutie. How old is she?” Alison asked, noting the pink baby blanket tucked neatly under the baby’s dimpled chin.

  Olivia moved the blanket down proudly so that Alison could get a good look.

  “She’s four months today. Yours?”

  “Three and a half. This is Zach,” she gushed, realizing it was the first time she had called him that.

  “So sweet. This is Lily and I’m Olivia.”

  Alison laughed at herself for just introducing her baby.

  “I’m Alison.” She motioned to the baby adding, “She is so beautiful.”

  “So is yours. I hope I have a little boy next.”

  “Oh. This is it for me. For sure.”

  “You can never be sure, right?”

  “I can.” Alison laughed. “I don’t even know how this all happened. One day I was driving on the Taconic, trying to wrap my head around my maternity leave ending, and the next minute I was renting a two-hundred-year-old house on Main Street.”

  “Ha. It sounds like the plot for a H
allmark movie.”

  Alison laughed again. “You’re right, and my old life sounded like a plot from Law & Order.”

  “Well, the Hallmark plot seems better, for the baby at least.”

  “That’s what I was thinking when I decided to move.”

  “Decided” wasn’t exactly the correct word. For Alison a decision usually involved hours of research and thoughtful comparisons. This felt more like it happened with no real thought whatsoever.

  “Marilyn!” Olivia called out as Mrs. Wolf came out of her office.

  “Olivia! How are you? You got the jogging stroller, I see.”

  “Yes, I was actually jogging by to tell you. Great find. Thanks.”

  “You have to join, too,” Marilyn motioned to Alison. “The Hudson Valley Ladies’ Bulletin Board, everything you need to know for living around here. Plus sometimes a good deal on someone’s barely used stroller.”

  Alison noted it in her phone. She needed all the help she could get.

  Olivia smiled at them both. “I gotta run. Have to get home in time to nurse. Nice meeting you!” She smiled at Alison before jogging off.

  Alison handed the keys to Marilyn. “Here, before I forget. I’m so forgetful lately.”

  “And impulsive.” Marilyn laughed while taking the keys. “Easiest transaction of my life!”

  Alison knew that Marilyn wasn’t exaggerating. She thought back to the day she took the house. The wonderful nanny she had chosen, from the dozens she’d interviewed, was set to begin the following morning. Alison found herself driving farther and farther away from the city, questioning everything she thought she was sure about. Zachary had started to fuss, so she’d pulled off at the next exit. A right, a left, and a fork right later, she was driving down the main street of a Norman Rockwellian town. By that time the baby was hungry and screaming bloody murder. She pulled into the first spot she saw, sat herself down on the stoop of the house in front of it, and placed the bottle between his clamoring lips. She adjusted herself so that the sun was not causing his tiny eyes to squint and enjoyed the view of the pretty town while he drank his bottle. She had been lost in thought when Marilyn Wolf approached.

  “Hello!” she sang. “Are you my eleven o’clock?”

  Alison held in a laugh and sang back, “I am not!”

  “Too bad for you! This house is a beauty!”

  Alison moved her diaper bag out of the woman’s way with her foot.

  “No worries,” Marilyn had said. “Take your time.”

  The woman popped open the front door of the house, and Alison peered in. She wasn’t kidding. It was beautiful. She stood in the doorway, while coaxing Zachary to burp, and took it all in.

  The house smelled like a mixture of pine and lavender. She stepped inside to get a better whiff. The entrance foyer led into an oval-shaped parlor with crown molding and parquet floors. The agent caught her peeking.

  “Don’t be scared, honey. Come on in,” she said. “My appointment will be here any minute, but the illusion of competition never hurts. Want to see the upstairs?”

  Alison was happy to oblige.

  The second floor was even prettier than the first. A cozy living room with a wood-burning stove opened into a large dining room. Out the paned picture window off the kitchen sat a big old oak with the platform of a tree house wedged between its limbs. She pictured sitting up there with five-year-old Zachary reading books and eating homemade oatmeal cookies. She’d never baked cookies in her life, but she was sure that if they lived here, she would.

  It was then that Alison knew she wasn’t ready to hand Zachary over to the nice nanny she had hired. Images of a black-robed Sandra Day O’Connor spoon-feeding pureed sweet potato to her toddler flashed before her eyes. She had read once that O’Connor took off five years to raise her children before returning to the law. And she became the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court. Alison had given everything to her law firm; certainly, they would understand if she wanted to take a one-year leave of absence.

  “I’ll take it,” she’d said to the agent, rifling around her diaper bag for her checkbook so that the woman knew she meant business.

  “You don’t even know the details.”

  She knew enough about real estate to know that subletting her two-bedroom apartment on lower Fifth Avenue would cover the cost of this house and then some—then plenty, actually. It was the perfect plan for her, taking off more time without running through her savings.

  As she sat in the office now, she hoped that she hadn’t made a huge mistake.

  CHAPTER 10

  Eliza

  The day was long, so long that it felt like the equivalent of two or three combined in Eliza’s ordinarily mundane life. At its start she surveyed the spread on her dining room table and filled with pride, pride laced with rebellion. Since food had never been a staple in her house growing up, Eliza always got a little extra satisfaction from filling that same dining room table with a cornucopia of calories. Her mother had maintained her figure by washing down Dexatrim with cans of Tab, while Eliza had sustained herself on boxes of Pop-Tarts and bags of Cheez Doodles she’d kept hidden under her bed next to the Entenmann’s donuts. Her mother would regurgitate dieting idioms one after the other like a walking, talking Jenny Craig Pez dispenser:

  “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels!”

  “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst, for they are sticking to their diets.”

  “Brain cells come and go, but fat cells live forever.”

  And the crowd favorite:

  “A moment on your lips, a lifetime on your hips.”

  Of course, the disparity between her and her mother’s relationship with food felt much bigger to Eliza than her mother’s pithy slogans had suggested. It’s hard to know if Eliza equated her mother not feeding her with her mother not loving her, or the other way around. Either way, one needn’t be a shrink to see why Eliza spent her adult life feeding everyone else.

  Eliza had been planning today’s menu for weeks, scouring online cooking sites and saving new recipes on her computer in a folder marked “Delicious” to mix in with her family’s favorites. In the end, the winners were cinnamon roll French toast, morning glory muffins, crustless spinach quiche, scrambled eggs with lox and onions, and her grandmother’s noodle kugel. She made everything herself, except for the fruit salad and bagels, and it all turned out so well you might have thought it came from a caterer. Even in her current mental state, she managed to keep up her Martha Stewart ways.

  Eliza had arranged for household items and the dry cleaning to be delivered and joined a farm collective and healthy cooking meal club under the pretext of losing weight. Her strict diet gave her a solid excuse regarding eating out, and Luke seemed thrilled to walk in nightly to the delicious smell of a home-cooked meal. He worked hard all week, golfed most fall weekends, and was usually too spent by the day’s end to care about going out. Not that their recent routine resembled the second act either of them had imagined.

  This fall should have been filled with weekend excursions to the city for Broadway plays and concerts at the Garden, meeting Luke in town for a bite after work, and Eliza finally taking up golf, after threatening to do so for just about ever. Even today’s party originated as an excuse—when Luke suggested they do something special and take the kids to see Hamilton, she had produced a quick reason not to.

  “We can’t. They have their hearts set on one of our all-day brunches!”

  The kids were psyched that their parents were throwing a party in their honor, but if they had gotten wind of the Hamilton plan they may have broken out in song, protesting: “I am not throwing away my shot!” Kayla had played the soundtrack so often her senior year of high school that the whole family knew every word. Of course, Eliza was too far gone at this point to sit in a crowded Broadway theater.

  It had been six wee
ks since Eliza and Luke had brought the twins to his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, and six weeks since the triggering event from graduation prompted a severe panic attack at the Madison Bed Bath & Beyond. There, another shopper told the manager that a hysterical woman in the bathroom needed help. The two strangers somehow calmed her down enough for her to inconspicuously rejoin her family. It had been six weeks since she had retreated to the safety of her home, and aside from yesterday’s excursion, nearly six since she’d left it.

  She looked over the dining room table. No amount of crustless spinach quiche could assuage her guilt.

  Family friends with younger kids and a few cousins were the first to arrive. Eliza sent the kids out back to toss a football and play on the swing set. Luke had wanted to tear it down years ago when the twins outgrew it, but Eliza had insisted they keep it. At times like this she was glad she did. She watched the children through the kitchen window, flashing back to that time in their lives when the swing set was king. She’d loved those days of being able to watch their every move. She often found herself longing to have them back.

  Luke entered the kitchen and wrapped his arms around her from behind. She was so lost in her happy memories that she welcomed his embrace. It may have been the first time since the twins’ graduation that she had. It was also the first time he acknowledged their lost connection. He spun her around and kissed her warmly on the lips.

  “I’ve missed you, Eliza.”

  “I’m sorry—I just haven’t felt very . . . sexy lately.”

  “I wasn’t talking about sex. I’m just talking about . . . us.”

  She of course knew what he was talking about. The space between them that had always been filled with peace and serenity felt suddenly closed off. She knew she was the one who had erected the barrier, but in all fairness, it didn’t feel like Luke made much of an attempt to break through. Kevin came into the kitchen, interrupting what could have been the start of a long-overdue conversation. It was fine, as it certainly wasn’t the time or place for it.