An Excellent Choice

by Emma Brockes

  “That’s brilliant!” I say. If offending the right-wing press was a national sport, my lifestyle just put me somewhere near the top of the medals table, and Laura offers to send me a hard copy to frame for my wall.

  “How are you anyway?” I ask.

  “Fine. I’m going to a spa in Greece next week. It’s the kind of place where you don’t speak and get pampered and come out the other end a stand-up comedian or something. I rang my sister, by the way. She’s going to call you.”

  I hang up and a moment later the phone rings again. “Is that Emma Brockes, soon to be mother of twins?” says Tessa. “Darling, did you see the splash in the Mail? You’re so on trend it isn’t true. And it’s so clever of you to have two at once. You don’t have to do all this over again!”

  Talking to Tessa is reassuring until I remember that when she was pregnant alone, her mother moved into a house across the street and her sister lived ten minutes away. When L had her baby, she had a mother and a sister to drop by on rotation, on the days and nights when I wasn’t there. I have my dad, who will be as wonderful and helpful as someone living three thousand miles away can be. But as I browse real estate Web sites that June, clicking on doorman buildings in Manhattan and boutique co-ops in Brooklyn, all I can see are small, overpriced cells of isolation. Every time I study a floor plan or think a lobby looks nice, I have a surge of hope that is instantly unseated by an image of me sitting alone at dusk, watching the door for someone who never comes. Even if I move to within a few streets of L, the demands of her life are such that realistically, she can be expected to look in only every few days. The same goes for Oliver and my other friends. This is the paradox of single parenting: it makes you more, not less, dependent on other people. It makes you think differently about your social networks and your place within them. Who can I lean on more like a brother than a friend? Who will still love me when I’m boring and unwashed and stressed out and exhausted and need more from them than I can ever repay? That last one is particularly shocking. Somewhere along the line, I realize, I am seriously going to have to ask other people for help.

  One afternoon, L sends me an e-mail with a link to an apartment listing that is almost double the rent I am paying in Brooklyn. The floor plan looks familiar, as does the view from the window. Finally I glance at the address. It is in her building, the mirror image of her apartment, but one floor down.

  “?!” I reply.

  “!!”

  I call her at work. “It’s waaaaay too expensive,” I say.

  L takes umbrage at this, as if I were criticizing her apartment. “No, it isn’t. It’s actually not bad value for the neighborhood.”

  I take umbrage at this, as if I don’t know the cost of things and that her neighborhood is so much ritzier than my own. “It’s ridiculous,” I say.

  “Listen.” It’s always bad news when L starts a sentence with “Listen.” “Listen,” she says. “You need a service building.”

  “But do we want to live that close to each other? Isn’t it weird?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I go to see it. The landlord is putting in new flooring and a new bathroom and most of the apartment is under polyethylene, but because it’s an exact copy of L’s, bar the fixtures and fittings, I don’t have much trouble imagining it. It occurs to me, as I walk around, that he may not even want to rent to a single woman expecting two babies. But in any case, it’s too expensive. Even if it’s the kind of building I need, with a mailroom and an elevator and a maintenance team on site; even if it would be amazing to have L upstairs when I bring the babies home; even if the very fact that the listing came up in the first place, in a co-op that discourages rentals, is the kind of coincidence that feels like a gift from above—none of that matters because I can’t afford it.

  It is also, surely, nuts: to kind-of, sort-of live together but not. All my faith in being true to our version of togetherness collapses. It feels like a form of cheating, to have L’s help and support and proximity-to-hand without the hard work of cohabitation. How would we explain it to the children? Or to ourselves? That we like each other sufficiently to be in daily contact, except on days when we don’t? Assuming the arrangement held, what would the kids even be to each other? Not raised as siblings, but not stepsiblings, either. Cousins? Best friends? The victims of a half-assed piece of emotional evasion or beneficiaries of a radical new vision?

  “Isn’t it weird?” I say to Merope on the phone.

  “It is weird, my little love, but you’re forgetting you are quite weird.”

  My dad, who comes from a background in which people got married and stayed married until somebody died, believes, as he always does, that I am overthinking it. “Sounds like the perfect solution,” he says.

  “I can’t afford it.”

  “Can you afford not to do it?”

  For a second, I consider taking offense at this—yes, that’s it, usher us toward a more conventional union so no one has to worry about my being alone—before I realize that the main person who wouldn’t have to worry is me. L thinks I should take it, too, partly for loving reasons and partly, I suspect, because after our years of fighting over the merits of Manhattan versus Brooklyn, this would count as a decisive victory in her favor.

  “It’s not just the money,” I say petulantly. “I don’t want to live up there, it’s boring. I hate the Upper West Side. I don’t know anyone there. Who will I talk to?”

  “You won’t talk to anyone, you’ll be looking after two babies.”

  Eventually, the landlord says other prospective tenants are interested and do I want it or not? Two steel front doors, a concrete floor and as much bureaucratic distance between us as between two complete strangers, and even then I’m not sure it’s enough. And yet faced with the prospect of losing the deal, something unexpectedly rakes through my heart. I have no idea if it will work, or if it will expose the limitations of our relationship in a way that finally, decisively drives us apart. But until then, it feels like a life raft. Something else, too. We won’t be living together, but we won’t quite not be living together, either. For the first time, the outline of something surfaces that, during my endless agonizing about what we are or we aren’t, I had never thought really applied: family.

  * * *

  • • •

  YOU MIGHT WONDER at how “I can’t afford it” changed overnight to “I’ll take it” and the answer is fantasy math. This is something that, ordinarily, I deploy only to justify spending more than one hundred dollars on a single item of clothing, which is to say almost never. Now, after signing the lease and by drawing on every creative fiber of my being, I use it to rationalize an extra twenty-four thousand dollars on my annual rent bill. I’ll cut my gym membership. I’ll make my own sandwiches at lunchtime. I’ll cancel HBO. I’ll have my babies and never go out again; no booze, no dinners, no movies, no takeout. I’ll wear my hair in a ponytail so I never have to get it cut and I’ll go back to work the minute my body has healed. Obviously, I’ll start spending my savings. If things get really tight, I’ll sell my apartment in London, a measure that is 100 percent guaranteed to get me out of a hole, given the rock-solid dependability of the pound and the fact that I don’t understand capital gains tax. Worst-case scenario—and this is the real psychological enabler of middle-class life—there is always the parental spare room.

  All my doubts about the Upper West Side, meanwhile, dissolve in the head rush of having made a decision. “This the BEST result,” I say to L. “Oh my god, I’m so happy.”

  “You’re an idiot,” she says.

  I celebrate by doing something I haven’t felt brave enough to do for almost a year. I used to enjoy going to meditation at Fiona’s once a week, but while I was trying to conceive and in the early days of the pregnancy, it left me too frighteningly alone with my thoughts. On Tuesday night, a week before the move, I walk the two neighborhoods between my hom
e and hers, where the two of us and our friend Daniella sit cross-legged on Fiona’s bedroom floor, with the windows open and a summer storm rustling through the trees outside.

  Thinking about the disjunct between my thoughts and my body—the trick of focusing on my breathing until it brings on a sense of my corporeal self as something distinct from the thing I call “me”—is something I usually find grimly unsettling. It gives me a feeling of how fragile life is, how easy it would be for the machinery to stop. Tonight it is different. In the first few moments of the session, a slew of terrifying words pop into my head—“amniocentesis,” “bed rest,” “labor”—but once I’ve swiped them away, I settle down comfortably into my body. I feel its heft, its solidity. The babies, who once seemed like alien invaders, now make sense of my body, their weight the physical manifestation of the joy that I feel. It used to be that whenever a woman over forty had a baby and wrote about it in the press, commenters would queue up to tell her that not only would she die before the baby grew up, but that she couldn’t possibly identify with it when the age gap was so huge. As I sit there cross-legged, I have never felt so young and vigorous, as if I have five extra pints of blood flowing around my veins. I feel an animal-like power in my own physicality. I am ready to spring up, knock someone out, lift a house above my head. I am as young and strong and vigorous as my mother had seemed, in my youth, to me.

  When the timer rings at the end of the session, we lie down on prayer cushions to talk about how it went. “I wasn’t really into it,” says Daniella. “I was daydreaming like I was at the bus stop.”

  “I felt like the oldest lady alive,” says Fiona.

  “I felt like an animal,” I say and we adjourn to the kitchen for dinner. Fiona, who is in her forties and single, is slight and pretty and, thanks to the success of her business, owns a large house in which she is embarrassed to live alone, and for which she is sure the contractors doing her refurbishment are judging her. Daniella is a fluent Mandarin speaker who used to cover China and the Far East for one of the big news agencies. She has one child and is forever being badgered by semistrangers as to when she’ll have another. As we talk over dinner we all realize that looked at in outline, all three of us would be judged harshly by, as Fiona puts it, “people in villages.”

  “At least you have a husband,” I say to Daniella. She makes a face. Not for much longer.

  “Aren’t you afraid of the overheads of doing it alone?” asks Fiona.

  “I am. But I figure if nineteen-year-olds can do it, a nearly forty-year-old should be able to.”

  “You know,” says Daniella thoughtfully, “sometimes you eat your own twin, in the womb.”

  “Really?” says Fiona.

  “Yes. People who, like, have an extra finger, it’s because they’ve eaten their own twin.”

  “How do we know if we ate our twin?” I say.

  “We don’t.”

  We consider this for a moment and then Daniella tells us about twin brothers she knows, John and Alan, both of whom had wanted to be doctors but only Alan succeeded. The dynamic between them was difficult, she says.

  “John should’ve eaten Alan while he had the chance,” says Fiona.

  It is dark by the time I leave and I feel like a walk, so rather than taking a cab I stroll slowly back through the dark Brooklyn streets. Without a second parent, I want my children’s lives to open up outward. I want them to feel, through the example of the people around them, that our family is just one variable among many. I want them to know women who live alone, those who have kids and who don’t. I want them to see that doing things differently entails not only an expense of will, but a degree of anxiety that, as long as you can sit around picking it over with friends, is a cost it is possible to bear. “It’s all so interesting,” my mother would say, of practically everything that crossed her path, even, in the end, of the chemo ward. Every week they wheeled over the IV machine and for three hours we sat there as the translucent liquid dripped down the tube into her veins. We speculated on the other patients. We poked mild fun at the do-gooders who crept around the ward handing out biscuits. “It’s all so interesting,” said my mother, with the slightest strain in her voice that only I heard. As a way of looking at things, it softened her passage through life, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

  * * *

  • • •

  AS A KIND of housewarming gift, L is resisting getting overly involved in my move and as a result, I do something stupid. One morning while I’m out, UPS dumps fifteen flat-packed boxes I have ordered from U-Haul on the sidewalk. L would, I know, tell me to go to the Turkish restaurant around the corner and offer the guy in the kitchen twenty dollars to come help me, the kind of thing she does very well and I do self-consciously and can’t quite carry off. Gingerly, I pick up one of the boxes. It’s heavy, and hugging it to my chest, I manage to wrestle it up one and a half flights of stairs before pausing to rest on the step. I see myself as if from the outside: fat, slow, overheated and alone, lugging heavy moving materials up two flights of stairs in defiance of everything I have read about miscarriage. I am being stupid and reckless and have pushed my self-reliance too far. And yet in that moment I feel close to elation.

  I love moving. I love the sense that I am streamlining my life, editing it down to the bare essentials. I can’t be stuck in one place if I’m literally moving, right? Literally moving while pregnant gives me, for those few days when everything I own is in seventy-five boxes, a sense of a life governed by order. My babies are in good hands because I’m finally jettisoning two thirds of my A-level notes and some gas bills from 2003. Everything I find makes me cry: old letters, photos, books, receipts, whatever random stuff made it over in the crates shipped from Britain. Even recent things reduce me to tears. Going through my fridge is like visiting a fertility graveyard. At the back is the half-finished packet of raspberry tea. Two open bottles of Gatorade stand in the door. In a black bag on the top shelf there are one thousand dollars’ worth of leftover fertility drugs and an injector pen I am too superstitious to throw out. Finally, in the vegetable tray, I find a pulpy Ziploc smeared with brown liquid. I hold it up for a moment before realizing what it is. I am sentimental even about the blood clot.

  I pack to music that night. Having my iPod on random play reminds me that the only time I’ve ever looked with envy on friends with younger parents was when they showed off intimate knowledge of the pop charts. Where their parents had Radio 1 on in the kitchen, we always had Radio 2, which was full of all sorts of horrors, but particularly on a Sunday evening when something called Sing Something Simple would come on, featuring a male voice choir and a man on an accordion and might as well have been called Music to Die To. My mother would get a dopey look on her face and say, “Songs from my youth,” and even though I hated them at the time, they became songs from my youth, too. A single bar of this music affects L like a full moon on a werewolf, but it’s too late for me, and as Vera Lynn’s hits from the Second World War start playing, I curse my mother once again for conditioning me to like them. “There’ll always be an England,” warbles Vera, “While there’s a country lane.” I’m only thirty-eight, Mother; what did you do to me? After Vera pipes down, Sondheim comes on—Sunday in the Park with George, a musical I love, although I used to find the song “Children and Art” curiously soppy, a number that by Sondheim’s standards is practically a crowd pleaser. I had always assumed that, when it really came down to it, Sondheim believed only in the “art” half of “Children and Art,” and had thrown in the “children” bit to appease the out-of-town crowd. Then, a couple of years ago, I interviewed him. Toward the end of our meeting, I asked him what he’d have done differently had he come of age in a gay-friendly era. “Oh, I have no idea,” he said brusquely, but a moment later he relented. “Wait a minute; yes, I do. I would love to have had children. And if I’d been one generation later, I would have.”

  After Sondheim, it
’s a quick slide through Carousel, Annie, the soundtrack to the TV adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, Petula Clark, Dana and Mary Hopkin, South Pacific, My Fair Lady (the Julie Andrews stage production) and Cabaret (the Judi Dench stage production) before I hit Brigadoon. People think Brigadoon, the 1954 musical starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse as time-crossed lovers, is awful, but they are wrong. I once made Oliver sit through it and he spent a long time afterward trying to figure out the film’s philosophical underpinnings; whether, as he put it, the town of Brigadoon, which appears through the Scottish mists once every hundred years, was being presented as a breach in the space/time continuum or merely as “a property of the observer”—an inquiry that goes a long way toward explaining why I love him.

  “Brigadoon,” sings the ghostly chorus, as I wrap plates and glassware late into the night. “Brigadooooon.” I glance down at my belly, bumping up against the table like a mammal trying to push open a door. Hi, girls, I think. Welcome to the next eighteen years of your life.

  ELEVEN

  England

  “WHEN ARE THEY DUE?” asks Jack a few nights later, during dinner at Dan’s house. My friend Dan used to date women but now he is dating Jack and it’s a great improvement. Jack is neither blond and stick-thin nor dull and unstable. He is funny and erudite and charming and cute. I think it annoys Dan how his friends keep going on about how much we love Jack, in the same way it used to annoy me when friends got overenthusiastic when I switched to women from men. Oh, all right, I would think irritably; be all bloody liberal and delighted for me. I sensed in their enthusiasm the implication that they had seen this coming before I did, and yet here I am, following Dan into the kitchen to hiss in his ear, “Jack’s wonderful, I LOVE him.”