by Marian Thurm
“Just put the pants on,” she told him. “You’ll be fine.”
“Not even one cigarette? Just give me three minutes and I’ll smoke it outside and won’t ask you for another one, I promise.” James hung over the front seat, begging.
Stacy and Barbara, a longtime smoker, exchanged a look: the agency they worked for had a no-smoking policy, and it was supposed to be strictly enforced. But what the hell, if the guy wanted a cigarette, at least it wasn’t alcohol he was pleading for, Barbara and Stacy quietly agreed.
“Put your pants on,” Stacy said, “then you’ll get your cigarette, okay?” She handed James a plastic bag and told him to deposit his wet things into it. She and Barbara got out of the car to give him his privacy.
Cars whizzed past them at sixty miles an hour as they shivered in the cold waiting for James to get himself out of his pissed-upon pants, then the door behind the driver’s seat suddenly opened. As James stepped out of the car, lusting after his cigarette, Stacy knew, he passed along the plastic bag containing his sopping clothes to her, as daintily as if he were an heiress handing off a small shopping bag from Tiffany to the chauffeur—not a homeless drunk whose family no longer had any use for him.
Stacy took the knotted bag from him gingerly, unable to avoid the smell through the thin plastic. In the distance she could see a pair of gas stations, and beyond them, Yankee Stadium. No one had to tell her that she needed to toss the bag into the trunk, lock it up, and return to the car; no one ever had to tell her to do the right thing. This time, however, she just couldn’t bring herself to do it, and, instead, pitched the bag into some frost-covered foliage nearby as James lit up his longed-for cigarette and Barbara pretended to look the other way. Stacy, who was so accustomed to doing the right thing, had just done the wrong thing, and all she wanted was to hurry back into the car and drive away from the scene of the crime. But first she had to wait for her client to finish his cigarette. So she had waited, as she waited now, only tonight it was hours and not minutes, and instead of waiting in her down coat and soft woolen scarf, she sat here on the floor of the shower naked and shivering and unable to do a thing to help herself.
At first light, Roger got up to use the bathroom, and it was the sound of the toilet being flushed that awakened her. She burst into tears at the sight of him, then came his cry of astonishment at the sight of her behind the clear plastic. He fiddled with the shower door, cursing, and finally had to wrench it off its tracks to rescue her, stepping into the shower that was scarcely wide enough for the two of them, embracing her with such contrition, with so many apologies on his lips, that she saw, for the very first time, she was the one who had to comfort him.
After they’d returned from their honeymoon and would tell this story to their friends, they recast it as something hilarious—Roger, the big dummy, snoring away in bed while poor Stacy, the other dummy, couldn’t manage to figure out how to get herself out of the shower. Oh, they were a real pair, weren’t they, they said laughingly to their friends.
S
FIRST DRAFT
To my dear family and friends—
I am a tortured soul. My love for my family is everything to me, and I do not want them to suffer. I have thought things through again and again, and each time the result is the same: there is no way out. I am deeply ashamed of my failures, both as a businessman and as a human being, but you must believe me when I tell you that there is no way out . . .
Please forgive me for starting so many sentences with the word “I.”
In addition to all his other failings, his handwriting is an abomination. His third grade teacher, Mrs. Weber—the old bag who taught him what used to be called “cursive writing”—would be disgusted.
S
Roger’s barely eaten all day, but he hasn’t offered up a single word of explanation. He had no breakfast at all, Stacy knows, not even a tentative sip of coffee or a single, half-hearted bite of toast; lunch was half a navel orange, which she peeled and sectioned and handed him in a purple plastic bowl, as if he were a child; dinner is a mere handful of the thick, dark pretzels he likes so much, he’d brought a bag of them along from New York.
“Why does Daddy get to eat pretzels for dinner?” Olivia wants to know, and when Roger snaps, “Because I’m a grown-up, that’s why,” Stacy doesn’t argue with him, though normally the two of them try never to fall back on lazy, reflexive answers like that, those that do nothing to enlighten their children and only reinforce the idea that adults can do anything they damn please.
Roger’s elbow is upright on the dinner table, the side of his face cupped forlornly in his open palm. Sit up straight! Stacy wants to say, like some cranky teacher close to retirement age in a classroom full of exasperating twelve-year-olds. Sit up straight and eat your damn dinner!
“Soooo . . . when I’m a grown-up, I can have pretzels for dinner if I want?” Olivia continues.
“Absolutely,” Stacy promises her. “When you’re a grown-up, you can eat, let’s see, a bowl of whipped cream for dinner, and you don’t even have to use a spoon if you don’t want to,” she adds, as Olivia shrieks happily at the news.
“When I’m a grown-up,” Will says, “I’m going to eat Goldfish for dinner. ‘The snack that smiles back,’ ” he says, and shows off his mouthful of baby teeth outlined in the melted, orangey cheddar of his mac ’n’ cheese dinner.
“Yuck, you’re an idiot,” Olivia says amiably. Then, reconsidering, she says, “Actually, you’re not an idiot, you’re just stupid.”
“We don’t talk to each other like that!” Roger scolds her. “Not in this family—do you understand me!” He’s gone from the table an instant later; even though Stacy’s afraid to go after him, she forces herself up and out of her chair and into the master bedroom, where she finds Roger at the window, staring out at the Intracoastal Waterway and a distant figure parasailing in the sunset, flying off into the ether.
Even though he’s facing away from her, she can tell, as Roger rocks back and forth silently at the window, that he is weeping.
“Please don’t,” she says. “Don’t cry like that, baby.” She’s at his side now, leaning her head against his shoulder, whispering, “Baby, don’t,” into his ear. He doesn’t shake her off, but he can’t seem to stop crying, and Stacy’s more worried about him now than she’s ever been, and guiltily considers, though only for a moment or two, what it might be like to scoop up her kids from the dinner table and tear out of there, leaving Roger behind standing at the window of his parents’ condo, sobbing like a child who has lost his way.
The suddenly audible sound of his weeping makes her stomach hurt, but she stays at his side, listening to him talk about the taste of grief on his tongue and for the very first time she wonders if he’s crazy. Nuts. About to go off the deep end, as he once had long ago. She’s thrown off balance by the thought and imagines the lovesick guy he’d been thirty-five years ago, a gaunt figure sitting around in the day room at Emerald Hills during arts and crafts class, meticulously folding a flock of origami cranes or a rabble of butterflies, a melancholy teenager sitting in silence among his fellow patients, none of them ready to reclaim their lives.
She lifts her head and watches out the window now as the parasailer, someone in a brightly colored bathing suit, miraculously returns to earth.
~ 16 ~
He was dying to start a family, but Stacy wasn’t entirely sure she was ready. “What’s the big hurry?” she would say to him, though she knew perfectly well the nine years between them made a difference, and that Roger had every reason to want to get things going. The September after they were married, she gave in and tossed her birth control pills into the kitchen trash, along with a plastic container of cream cheese that had some mossy-looking stuff sprouting around the edges.
The miscarriage, in the eighth week of her pregnancy, was a sorrowful disappointment to both of them. They were still living on the West Side and on their way in a cab to Clare and Marshall’s early one spring night whe
n, without any warning at all, Stacy felt some painful cramping; on a scale of one to ten, she gave it about a seven and a half. And soaked through her jeans right there in the cab, more blood than she’d ever seen. Roger called Clare on his cell phone, and she came running out with bath towels; one for Stacy to wrap around her waist, the others for Roger to clean up the blood that had pooled in the backseat of the cab. The driver, a Sikh in a pumpkin-colored turban, seemed both horrified and disgusted; he took the fifty-dollar tip and tore off down East End just moments after Roger helped Stacy out of the cab.
The cramping continued in a way that would have to be called relentless, Stacy thought, and it was Clare who took charge of everything while Roger and Marshall stood around looking grim. She ushered Stacy into one of the bedrooms, wiped the blood from her thighs with warm washcloths, helped her into a nightgown, and covered her with a quilt. But a few minutes later, Stacy flew toward the nearest bathroom just in time to feel something slide swiftly out of her and into the sleek, sand-colored toilet; though she could barely bring herself to glance beneath her, she saw what she could have sworn was a large, particularly nasty-looking hunk of calf’s liver. And thought she might faint.
She held on to the edge of the marble countertop, and counted very slowly to ten, and then to twenty. In the mirror, she could see that her face was drained of its natural color and tinted an ashy gray. She looked ghastly, as her mother would have said.
She was thirty-five years old; would she ever stop missing her mother?
Standing in the doorway now, she called for Clare, who bravely took a look.
“That’s the placenta, sweetie,” Clare explained, then dialed the obstetrician for her and held the phone to Stacy’s ear.
What Stacy heard was Dr. Burnes calmly telling her that yes, that was the placenta she’d seen floating in the water, and that she needed to come in for a D and C tomorrow. “These things, you know, happen from time to time,” Dr. Burnes added. The doctor herself had once been “Miss Indiana” in a beauty pageant and had two daughters and an infant son. She always managed to sound dispassionate, which never failed to disappoint Stacy just the slightest bit. She waited now for Dr. Burnes to say she was sorry about the miscarriage, but quickly understood that the silence at the other end meant the conversation was over.
“That bitch should have been more sympathetic,” Clare— who never cursed—told Stacy. The two of them were the closest of friends these days, even though Clare was eleven years older. “Did she at least tell you to rest?” she asked Stacy.
“I can’t remember,” Stacy said. Clare escorted her back to bed and covered her with the quilt again, and it hit Stacy, who’d been thinking only of herself, that Clare had been through this a number of times, that she’d had several miscarriages of her own, and that this thing that had happened to her tonight must have evoked distressing memories for Clare. Even though, of course, Nathaniel was a big boy of ten now, and that struggle of Clare’s to carry a baby to term had ended years ago. “I’m so sorry,” Stacy said. “I mean, sorry you had to see this.”
Still looking grave, Roger knocked politely at the open door.
“She’ll be fine,” Clare told him. “And please, no apologies,” she said to Stacy. “Don’t be nutty!”
Roger sat down on the edge of the bed and put his hand on her belly.
“Gone,” Stacy said. She thought again of Clare’s attempts to have a baby on her own, and wondered if she and Roger would also be faced with the prospect of having to travel to Colombia—or China or Vietnam—if they wanted a child. Was this a journey she was prepared to make? She wasn’t sure, and kept the thought to herself.
The cramping had subsided, and she was able to smile at Roger, whose disappointment was apparently so great, he couldn’t bring himself to smile back at her.
S
SECOND DRAFT
To my dear family and friends—
I am a tortured soul. My love for my family is everything to me, and I do not want them to suffer.
IT’S BEST FOR ALL OF US THIS WAY.
I am drowning in debt and have thought things through again and again, and each time the conclusion is the same: there is no way out.
Listen to me, please: There. Is. No. Way. Out.
None.
Hard as it may be, please find it in yourselves to forgive me.
~ 17 ~
“Hate to say it, but these Lamaze classes are kind of a joke, actually,” Jefrie confided. It was a little more than two years after Stacy’s miscarriage, and Jefrie rode along next to her in a hospital elevator packed with pregnant women and their husbands, most of them carrying pillows from home tucked under their arms so that they could do their exercises on the floor. Roger had apologized for missing the class, but he’d been delayed at work and couldn’t get here in time, and Jefrie had instantly agreed to take his place when Stacy called her. “I mean, who are they kidding?” Jefrie continued. “Pain-free childbirth is a fucking oxymoron if I ever heard one,” she whispered. “Not that I’m trying to frighten you, sugar, but you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘pain’ until you’re eight centimeters dilated and stuck there, contemplating death and how much you’d welcome it if only your labor coach would just let you die right then and there.”
“Hmm, let’s see, you were in labor six long years ago,” Stacy pointed out. “How come your memories are so . . . um . . . horribly vivid?”
“Are you kidding? Who could forget a nightmare like that?”
Filing out of the elevator, the group found its way to a big drafty classroom—with all the desks and chairs pushed against the walls—where they were met by a thirty-something nurse in a lavender uniform, new white rubber clogs, and what looked like an optimistic smile.
“Get comfortable on the floor, people,” the nurse said. She insisted that everyone introduce themselves in a “loud, clear voice” and encouraged the mumblers to speak up.
“We wanna know who you are,” she told a woman in a saffron-colored sari, who, faint-voiced, said she was named Raihana.
“I don’t wanna know, do you?” Jefrie whispered to Stacy.
The nurse Gabriella stood alongside a blackboard wiped clean of everything except a diagram of a uterus and a set of ovaries and fallopian tubes. “Do you have something you’d like to share with us?” she asked Jefrie.
Flashing an insincere smile, Jefrie said, “Oh, I was just remembering what a fabulously rewarding experience giving birth was for me. Without all those unbelievably helpful Lamaze classes, it might have been a disaster, though.”
A woman seated between her husband’s legs heaved herself up from the floor. Her earrings—a black enamel question mark in one ear, an exclamation point in the other—swung as she yelled, “You’re SUCH a liar! You think I didn’t hear you in the elevator saying Lamaze was a joke? And if I were you, Gabriella, I’d throw this . . .this . . . person right out of here. We don’t need any negative karma in the room, that’s for sure.”
Gabriella wrung her hands. “All right, you guys,” she said, “let’s all take a deep cleansing breath and start over. Labor coaches, that means you, too.”
“Excuse me, what exactly did you mean by ‘start over’?” Jefrie called out, not the least bit embarrassed, Stacy was glad to see.
“I meant that we’re going to pretend we just walked into the room this minute and that our minds are empty of everything negative, especially fear.”
“I’m terrified,” Stacy murmured, as the sound of deep breathing pervaded the room and a feeling of dread filled her chest. There was Jefrie beside her as Stacy stretched out on the floor, a pillow reeking of fabric softener beneath her head.
Rubbing Stacy’s belly, her palm moving in endless concentric circles, Jefrie took Stacy’s hand and said, “Now you.” Together their hands swept along the hard mound of her belly, performing a dance so slow and intimate that Stacy nearly wept.
S
THIRD DRAFT
To my dear family and friends�
�
I am a tortured soul.
I am drowning in debt.
I am trying as hard as I can to get this exactly right, but I’m at a loss here. Please forgive me.
And please know that my love for my family is EVERYTHING to me, and that I do NOT want them to suffer.
IT’S BEST FOR ALL OF US THIS WAY.
~ 18 ~
Stacy and Roger officially became parents in the middle of a heat wave during the summer of 2002. Because of the varicose veins she’d developed during her pregnancy, Stacy, who normally went around bare legged all summer, had been forced to wear support hose, every damn day, that were twice as thick as regular pantyhose, and that kept her miserably uncomfortable over the course of one of the city’s hottest summers. She’d never been a complainer, but for the last month of her pregnancy, she couldn’t seem to stop squawking about the substandard air-conditioning in her office, the thirty-two pounds she’d gained, and her puffy feet which, by the end of her ninth month, fit into nothing except flip-flops, which went beautifully with her support hose. She also cursed a lot, referring to “the fucking hot weather,” her “fucking varicose veins,” and even, once or twice, “this fucking pregnancy,” as in, “When will this fucking pregnancy ever be over?” (Roger hated to hear this, but out of deference to Stacy’s suddenly high-strung temperament, all he did was roll his eyes.)
Fortunately for both of them, Roger thought, he kept his equanimity all summer long. He replaced the four air conditioners in their apartment with the most powerful ones their co-op would allow, made it home from work early almost every night—by seven thirty or so—and cooked dinner and washed the dishes afterward so that Stacy could relax until bedtime. He sympathized with her when she complained she couldn’t sleep at night, and when she worried about the direction she had allowed her life to take. Though he knew he had no idea what he was talking about, he promised that the deepest sort of love and contentment would make their way into her life—into their life—once the baby arrived. And reminded her that Clare had assured them there was nothing like the lovely weight of a baby in your arms.