Joy gasps. “What a shame! Thank God that didn’t happen to you.”
I stare at her with pure disgust. Is she joking? In her mind, what happened to me was better?
“Broke her heart,” says Adele. “The doctor called it a blighted ovum,” she says with a serious nod.
And then I lose it. I’ve had it. I can’t take any more. The whole thing—the gifts, the food, the specter of my irresponsible cousin happily carrying her daughter full-term—each and every reminder of what I’ve lost crashes down on me, and I’m a goner. Only this time I’m not angry or sad, bitterly gnashing my teeth and crying. This time I’m delirious with the cruel hilarity of it all.
“Blighted ovum?” I ask too loudly. “Isn’t that a Girl Riot band from Seattle?” I snort into my plate. My aunts look at each other, clearly puzzled. “I think I have their first album,” I tell them. A giggle bubbles up from my throat. “Spontaneous Abortion!” I nearly yell, and then I crack up. Double over and roar. I laugh and laugh, slap my knees, suck in huge raw breaths while tears leak from my eyes, spilling onto the deviled eggs. It’s the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever heard, and I can’t stop. Blighted Ovum! Spontaneous Abortion! What a cutup. Every part of me quakes and shivers as I guffaw. I know the room has gone from excited chatter, to nervous twitters, to completely confounded silence as I’m lost in this sick uncontrollable laughter.
I feel a hand on my back, then an arm around my shoulders. I recognize that strong touch. My grandmother lifts me from my seat and leads me from the room, cradled against her body as my laughter breaks into aching sobs.
Grandma takes me into the kitchen and closes the door. This is our sanctuary, the place she has been bringing me to ease whatever ails me since I was very small. And when I’m in here with her again, I feel like that same kid, small and scared and raging inside, who ran away from her parents’ funeral and hid in the pear tree until my grandmother coaxed me out with a pie.
I remember that part of the day clearly. After the service, I’d had enough of all the tears and stares and glance-aways, as if all the sadness in that room was my fault. My cousins all looked at me sideways, squinting as if I were the sun, too bright and hot to stare at. I was a figure of tragedy then. A real live orphan with a just dead mother and father sleeping with the fishes. But I was sick of the formalities, of the muted mourning, of the black velvet dress way too hot for a muggy late summer day, the severe braids in my hair, and too-tight shoes on my feet.
So I took off when no one was watching. I slipped out the door, bolted across the parking lot, dodged between cars, snuck through the school-yard fence behind the funeral home, shimmied past the swings and beneath the slide to the side gate, which was open. I heard voices close behind me, yelling my name. Heard feet smacking the pavement. I tripped and fell. Crashed to the hot black tar on hands and knees. Tiny rocks pressed into my palms, and the skin on my knee opened up. I rolled over to look at my hurt leg. Blood ran down my shin and soaked into my sock, turning it pink. But I didn’t stop. I scrambled to my feet and ran.
My heels ground into the cement, my knee was a balloon, and my hands stung as if I’d smacked someone hard. People on the sidewalks watched me zip by. “Hey, hey!” they yelled. And some people reached out their arms to grab me. But I imagined myself a blur, running so fast in my black dress and frilly white socks that I looked like a zebra with a river of blood down my shin.
At my street, I took the corner too sharply. Slid on loose gravel and leaves. Tumbled off the sidewalk, rolled over the cracking yellow curb, and flopped into the street. I heard the car first. The screech of brakes and tires and the shrieking horn. Then I felt its heat down my back and the shuttering of the metal from the sudden stop right behind me.
“You goddamned kid!” The driver leaned out the window and banged on the car door. “Watch where you’re going! You could get yourself killed!”
I used the front fender to pull myself up and limped to the other side of the road, ignoring the guy and completely unconcerned with how close I’d come to being flattened. He drove off, berating me.
The block was quiet then. Everyone was at the funeral. No one out to ask me what I was doing. Why my dress was ripped. Why I was bleeding. Why I cried as I crawled up the stoop on all fours like a tired dog. I threw my weight against the front door. The glass rattled, but it didn’t budge. I did it again and again, as if I could break it down with my tiny, determined forty-five-pound frame. Then the door opened, and I tumbled into the foyer. I landed at feet, looked up legs, baggy pantyhose, and a frumpy skirt to find Aunt Livinia holding open the door. I have no idea why she was there. She probably couldn’t have handled the funeral. I didn’t stop to ask her to explain, though. I scurried across the slick wooden floor away from her. The throw rug tripped me up, and I crawled down the hall, toward the kitchen, leaving bloody knee prints behind.
I ran straight through the house to the back door, then out into the garden. My mother’s pear tree gently rustled its bright green leaves in the hot humid breeze. Rotting pears littered the ground and filled the garden with the intoxicating scent of fermenting fruit. My mother had shown me two knobs on the back of the trunk, near the chain link fence. Using those as toe holds and the fence to balance myself, I could easily climb into the lowest branches, then work my way up high into the densest part of the tree so that I was hidden.
As I sat in the silent tree with my back against the rough bark, everything went away. There was no funeral. No priests. No angry grandmothers and sad cousins. No weird aunts opening the door as if I’d just strolled in from the playground. There was only the smell of pears and the memory of my mother and father, standing below the tree, looking up at me, smiling. Encouraging me to be daring. To climb up and throw down soft, ripe fruit to them. All of this calm was shattered a few minutes later when I heard the banshee shrieks of my aunts as they came into the house.
“Oh, my God!”
“Blood!”
“She’s hurt!”
“Lemon!” they called in frantic tones as they searched from room to room. I watched their shadows pass by windows, but kept myself hidden.
Then I saw my grandmother, standing in the back door, hands on hips, looking straight at the tree. Had Livinia ratted me out? I climbed up higher, probably shaking the branches and giving myself away. But when I looked again, Grandma was gone, and I thought that I had outsmarted her, which disappointed me a little bit. Would any one ever find me? How long would I have to stay in the tree? I resolved to eat pears forever and drink rainwater. I’d never come down.
The next time I peeked through the leaves, my grandmother was walking slowly down the back steps, carrying something in her hands. My aunts crowded in the doorway, one behind the other. A four-headed monster ready to devour me. Grandma held up her hand and shot them a stern look before any of them could open their mouths or come out to the garden, then she shooed them away with a flick of her wrist. They slunk back, whispering to one another as they retreated into the dark hall.
Grandma stood beneath the tree and looked up. “You’re pretty high,” she said. I didn’t answer. “I’m too old to climb up there after you.” I stayed quiet, pretending not to hear. She sighed and kicked a few pears away from the base of the trunk, then lowered herself down to her haunches, still holding the thing that was covered in a blue-striped dishtowel.
After a few minutes she said, “I went to Staten Island a few weeks ago. Before—” She stopped and I peeked down at her. I could see the top of her head. Blonde strands wove through the gray. “I took the ferry to Aunt Poppy and Aunt Livinia’s house. You remember what grows out behind there? Where nobody else but us knows?”
I knew what Grandma was talking about. Secret black raspberry bushes grew up along the old railroad tracks. Grandma took me there every year in early July just before my birthday, when the berries were first ripe. Aunt Poppy and I loved to pick the berries because we were just the right height to find the best ones, hidden deep in the bushes.
We filled up plastic buckets and ate every third berry. We worked until our fingertips were the same inky black as our tongues and we were covered in mosquito bites.
“I picked the last black raspberries special for my little lemon girl,” Grandma said. “I made a pie crust with cold butter and a pinch of salt, just like I taught you. I put the berries inside with some sugar and cornstarch and pats of butter. Then what’d I do, Lemon?”
She brushed the top with milk so the crust would get toasty brown. I knew the answer, but I couldn’t say it.
“If you come down from up there, I’ll give you the pie.” She looked up, but I didn’t budge.
Then she took the dishtowel off and showed me the pie, with a pinched crust and four steam holes that looked like a star in the center. I knew how that crust would feel on my tongue. Crumbly like sand. Flaky like snow.
“See how tiny it is?” she asked. “The perfect size for you. You want it?” Grandma smiled up at me, sad. I loved that smile. It melted my heart and it made me ache, because my mother had that same exact smile with the crinkly nose and ears that moved up even when the smile meant that she was sad. That was the smile my mother gave me every time she stood at the front door, ready to leave, and now I knew that I’d never see it again.
I lowered myself from branch to branch until I could reach out my hands toward my grandmother. She quickly grabbed my arms and pulled me out of the tree, then held me tight against her chest. I inhaled the scent of flour and salt and sugar from the pie as she rubbed my tight back, kneading it like bread, trying to get all those knots of anger out.
God, I wish it were that easy now. I wish my grandmother could soothe all of this anger and frustration and disappointment away from me with the perfect pie. Instead, we sit across from one another and stare out the window at the tree where I found solace during the other saddest part of my life.
“It was too soon,” my grandmother says without looking at me. “I shouldn’t have expected—”
“It’s my fault,” I say.
“Hush,” she says. “None of this is your fault.”
I nod, but I don’t believe her. Outside the kitchen, I hear the rest of my family whispering, uncertain whether to continue. I feel bad for interrupting. For trying to be a part of this celebration when I should’ve stayed away.
“Want me to call Eddie to come get you?” Grandma asks.
“No,” I say. “I think I’ll walk home. I need some time to myself.”
My grandmother reaches out her hand and covers mine. Her skin is soft and smooth, her touch warm. “You take your time,” she says to me. “I mean it now. Do what you need to do for yourself.”
“Okay,” I say and squeeze her fingers in mine. “I’ll try.” I stand up from the table and bend to kiss her cheek. “Please tell them good-bye for me.”
As I leave, I don’t look back at the silly decorations on the front steps. I need to get away from all these reminders and move on. The only way I can imagine doing that is by going back to work.
Chapter
Twenty-Three
O n Monday I go to Dr. Shin, alone. I don’t want Eddie with me, and he seems happy not to come. We’ve organized our lives into a polite exchange of civilities and small domestic matters. “Do you want to order Chinese or Indian for dinner?” “Shall we watch a movie or a sitcom?” “Is there a reason the milk is on the counter?” This seems to work well for both of us now. He doesn’t have to see me upset, and I don’t have to worry about his reaction to my perpetual dolor.
At the doctor’s office, I sit in the reception room and fill out the form that asks me if anything has changed in my medical history since the last time I visited. Oh, no, nothing much, I want to write. Just a tiny thing. A one-word thing. A miscarriage. No big deal. We’re all over that now. Moving on!
Across the room two women chat. One is hugely pregnant, and the other holds a toddler on her lap.
“Didn’t he just turn one?” the pregnant woman asks.
“Last week. We had a party. My parents came from Chicago. When are you due?”
“In three weeks. I’m so ready.”
I nearly laugh and think, What kind of cruel joke is this that I have to sit here and listen to them talk about their babies? But what else can I do? I learned that lesson when my parents died. Stood with my forehead pressed against the leaded glass window of the funeral home and watched kids play at the school across the street. How could they be happy? Jumping, dancing, singing, tossing balls, when something so bad had happened to me. It’s the truth of the world, though. Life goes on. Just because I’ve lost my baby, or fetus, as Eddie calls it, doesn’t mean that no one else will have joy. I watch them smile fondly at the kid squirming on his mother’s lap. Assholes, I think, but I wish like hell I was one of them.
In the exam room, the nurse draws blood and takes my urine, then Dr. Shin slips me the ultrasound one last time. “This is great!” she says cheerily as she scans my insides. “Good news for you.”
What possible good news could there be in this situation? I wonder as I lie flat on my back, looking at the empty space inside me. Did she find my baby with that sonar machine? Is it still alive and living somewhere in Jersey? I imagine my tiny twelve-week fetus, sitting on an overturned shot glass at a seedy bar, smoking an itty-bitty cigarette, and grousing to the bartender about the hardships of being embryonic in this world.
“You passed the pregnancy beautifully,” Dr. Shin says. “No clots left. Your have a clean uterus. Your blood work looks good. You could start trying again as soon as you have a period.”
I snort and shake my head as she pulls the wand out. “No way,” I say. “That’s it for me. By the time I’ll be ready to try this again, I’ll be fifty, and my ovaries will be as dry and shriveled as currants.”
Dr. Shin pats me on the knee. “What you went through was perfectly normal.”
“Oh, yeah?” I say. I wish that I could ask her for a certificate proving that I’m perfectly normal, because so far I only feel like a fat, ugly, stupid loser.
“Lots of women lose their first one,” she assures me.
Every time she says this, it makes me feel worse. As if somehow I’m totally overreacting to my miscarriage. What do other women do? Drop their half-formed fetuses into trashcans on their way to power meetings on Wall Street and never miss a beat? Could someone else have gone through this and been tougher, stronger, better? Is something wrong with me?
“It’s a common thing,” she says.
“But we had the heartbeat,” I tell her as if I’m pleading my case. “You said an eighty percent chance.”
“The body’s very efficient. When it decides it’s time, it shuts things down quickly.”
When she says “the body,” she means mine. My body quickly and efficiently snuffed out another little life. “What did I do wrong?” I ask. I mean it to come out calm. A simple question. But the words are thick with my sadness, and it comes out as a pathetic plea.
She pats me on the leg. “You didn’t do anything wrong. It was probably a chromosomal defect. Down syndrome, most likely.”
The words make me shudder. I think of the woman with no arms that I saw on the train, and I wonder why she made it through. Did her mother love her any less? I think of the tiny creature that grew inside of me. “I would have loved her anyway,” I say angrily.
Dr. Shin looks at me for a moment, then she scrawls something on my chart. I imagine her writing, “Hysterical woman, not to be trusted with infant,” on my permanent records.
After I leave Dr. Shin’s office, I walk toward Lemon with a sinking sense of dread. I should be happy to be going back to my sparkly kitchen, my six burners, my two ovens, my shiny sinks, my gleaming counters, my frosty walk-in, my oddball staff. But mostly I feel overwhelmed by all the tasks ahead of me. What I’d really like to do is go home, crawl into my bed, and sleep like I’ve done for the past ten days. As I round the corner to the restaurant, I see Ernesto out front, putting a bag of garbage in the
apartment bins.
“Buenos dias,” I say to him.
When he turns and sees me, he breaks into a huge grin. He reaches for me and pulls me into an enormous hug. “I didn’t know you were coming back today. How’re you feeling?”
I’m sure Ernesto knows. Franny must’ve told him. Or maybe she didn’t. Her reaction to the whole thing has been bizarre. Whatever he knows, I don’t want to talk about it. And I don’t want my coming back to be full of sap. And I don’t want to be treated any differently because something sad has happened to me. So we stand and smile at one another for a moment, then I ask, “You prepping this morning?”
“I’ll come down in a little while,” he says. “I’m painting the bathroom right now.”
I search for my keys. “Franny got you doing her housework?”
“It was my idea,” he says.
I find my keys in the bottom of my bag. “You stay here a lot?”
Ernesto looks at me quizzically. “I live here,” he says.
This is news to me. “You mean you live here for real? You pay rent? All your stuff is here?”
“You know me, I don’t have much stuff.”
“Since when?” I ask.
“I’ve never had a lot,” he says.
I’m still stuck on the fact that Ernesto and Franny are living together and nobody bothered to tell me. “No, I mean how long have you been living here?”
“More or less since you moved out, I guess.”
I’m stunned. Shocked. Which is stupid. What did I expect? And why would it bother me? But it does. Mostly because they didn’t tell me.
“You okay?” Ernesto asks.
“Sure. Yeah. Fine,” I say as I fumble with all the locks and open the front door.
“Good to have you back,” Ernesto calls after me as I disappear into the dining room.
Franny is in the kitchen, chopping onions and singing along to some sappy Spanish ballad. She is glowing. Pink and pretty. She moves her hips to the rhythm and accentuates the beats with her knife.
Luscious Lemon Page 21