Morningside Heights

by Joshua Henkin

  She was in a study group with some friends, and one afternoon they went up to the roof and smoked a joint.

  “It’s medical marijuana,” someone said.

  “That’s the advantage of being in medical school,” someone said. “All marijuana is medical marijuana.”

  “That’s why I went to med school,” someone else said. “Because of the pot!”

  Sarah took a few hits like everyone else, but after several minutes she started to cry.

  “Sarah, what’s wrong?”

  “I’m not feeling well.” She got up from her chair and ran down the fire escape, and then she was out on the street.

  * * *

  —

  Four afternoons a week, she nannied for the daughter of two law school professors. She needed the money, and it was good to get away from campus, to sit outside with Daisy by the Donnellys’ pool and sun herself into oblivion.

  Soon it was time for Daisy’s nap—Daisy who slept with so many stuffed animals Sarah was afraid she would suffocate beneath them. She would move the stuffed animals while Daisy was asleep, like someone clearing brush.

  Then Priscilla and John would come home, and they’d pack her up with leftovers: a Tupperware of pasta, watercress salad, a tureen of lentil soup.

  But after she left, she started to cry again. She was spending her afternoons in the company of a four-year-old, waking up in the morning for rounds, going home to eat a stranger’s food, hiding what was happening from her classmates.

  * * *

  —

  She called home one day, and her father answered. She said, “I never get to talk to you anymore. Mom’s a real phone hog, isn’t she?”

  “I’ll talk to you,” her father said.

  “How are you, Dad?”

  “I’m well.”

  He did sound well, better than he had in weeks.

  “What’s that barking I hear?”

  “It’s my dog,” she said. “Kingsley.” She’d named him after Kingsley Road, where they’d spent those Augusts in Vermont.

  “You should bring him for a visit.”

  “First I’d need to learn how to drive.” She heard a noise through the receiver, the sound of a blender being turned on.

  “I used to call you Hepseba,” her father said.

  “So you told me.” Hepseba for a girl and Habakkuk for a boy: this was when her mother had been pregnant with her. “I’m glad you named me Sarah,” she said. “I don’t think I’d have made a good Hepseba.”

  “You’d have made a good anything,” her father said.

  “Thank you, Daddy.”

  Then there was silence.

  “Dad?” she said, but he didn’t answer her. His breathing had lengthened. He’d fallen asleep.

  * * *

  —

  Compared to what others had endured, what she was going through was nothing. One of her classmates had withdrawn from school with stage IV colon cancer; another had lost his mother the first week of school. It didn’t matter that early Alzheimer’s was rare; your pain wasn’t any greater for being unusual.

  On the phone with her mother she said, “How are you going to make it work? You can’t afford Ginny.”

  “I’ll manage.”

  Maybe, she thought, she could be like the other nannies, the women from Mexico and the Philippines, who sent cash home to their families. She would take care of Daisy so she could send money to her mother, who was paying Ginny to take care of her father, which prevented Ginny from taking care of her son.

  When she’d first moved to town, she would go to the bank once a week to purchase a roll of quarters for the homeless. Now she purchased a roll of quarters only every other week. She would give just to the homeless who looked particularly bad off, raising the bar for desperation, like the government raising the poverty limit. She’d stopped eating out entirely, and in these dribs and drabs she saved some money, and she wrote a check to her mother for $400.

  But a week later it was returned to her with the word void across the front.

  She’d maxed out her credit card, and in line at the supermarket one day she was down to her last few quarters.

  “I’m sorry,” the cashier said. “Those are Canadian quarters.”

  She rifled through her pockets, but she was forty cents short. “Can’t you let it go?”

  “I’ll get in trouble with my manager.”

  It was Canada, she thought: the same continent, practically the same country! The line lengthened behind her, like a handkerchief pulled out of a magician’s sleeve. Impatience ran like a current through the crowd. “Come on, lady, you’re holding us up!” Her face grew flushed, and she grabbed a can of beans and returned it to the shelf, swearing she would never come back to this store, but she would have to come back because the food was cheap and she couldn’t afford to be resentful.

  * * *

  —

  Finally, she told Priscilla and John what was happening. They would understand, she thought, and maybe—she hoped—they wouldn’t be surprised. She’d gone back east for a couple of visits; she’d hinted that there were problems at home.

  But they were surprised, and now their sadness had been added to hers, and she had to endure their burden.

  “Do you need time off?” John said.

  “We could give you fewer hours,” Priscilla said.

  “Or more hours,” John said.

  She hated how they tripped over themselves, the contortions they did to accommodate her.

  * * *

  —

  She came home one day to discover that they’d paid her too much. “You made a mistake,” she told Priscilla. “You gave me an extra fifty dollars.”

  “It wasn’t a mistake. We’re giving you a raise.”

  “Is this because of my father?”

  “It’s because you deserve it,” John said. “It’s long overdue.”

  But if it wasn’t because of her father, then why were Priscilla and John packing her up with food—and not just with leftovers, as they always had, but with entire meals? John placed a lasagna in her arms, and Priscilla added a pound cake, and John followed suit with a quiche. As she walked out the door, she said, “This food looks delicious. And the good thing is, now I won’t have to sell my eggs.”

  * * *

  —

  They started to hire her at night. They would go to a movie, a play, a concert, a dance recital. There were only so many restaurants in Westwood, so they drove to West Hollywood or Santa Monica. They used to go out once a week; now they were going out twice a week, sometimes even more. It was as if they were going out just to pay her.

  “We could hire you for other tasks,” Priscilla said. “Can you pull weeds? Are you good at gardening?”

  But she wasn’t good at gardening, and although she could pull weeds, there weren’t many weeds to pull. Nor was there much gardening to do, because what passed for a garden was just a tiny patch of dirt out back, and another patch by the side of the house where Priscilla and John kept gardenias.

  * * *

  —

  One night, Priscilla and John came home late, and John, saying he was tired, went to sleep.

  “I’ll drive you home,” Priscilla said, but when she came into the living room she looked as if she’d been crying.

  “Priscilla, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Actually, I don’t know.” She sat down across from Sarah. “A couple of weeks ago you said, ‘And the good thing is, now I won’t have to sell my eggs.’ ”

  Sarah nodded.

  “You were kidding about that, weren’t you?”

  “I think so.”

  “People say lots of things they don’t mean. I know I do. It’s just…”

  “What?”

  “I want a
nother baby.” With Daisy, she’d gotten pregnant on the first try, and maybe that was why she’d thought it would be easy this time, too. But she’d been thirty-six when she got pregnant with Daisy, and now she was forty-one. “I guess those five years make a difference.”

  All at once, Sarah understood. “You want me to be an egg donor?”

  “I know,” Priscilla said. “John said it was crazy.”

  “Don’t people want nineteen-year-olds? Aren’t they looking for blond, blue-eyed lacrosse players who are also members of Mensa?”

  “That’s the stereotype.”

  “But I’m twenty-nine.”

  “You’re still eligible,” Priscilla said. “And Daisy adores you. If the egg can’t be mine, you’re the one I’d want the baby to be related to.”

  All at once, a horrible thought occurred to her. The pay raise, the free food: Priscilla and John had just been buttering her up.

  * * *

  —

  The signs had been there all along, pasted to lampposts, on bright pink paper, and in the classifieds of The Daily Bruin: Educated Healthy Women Ages 22–30. Help Others for Great Compensation. Make a Couple’s Dream of Parenthood Come True. One ad promised $10,000. Another ad read Earn up to $60,000 for Six Cycles.

  Ten thousand dollars would cover more than three months of Ginny’s salary. Sixty thousand dollars would cover almost two years.

  * * *

  —

  Now, whenever she came to work, Sarah would take out the board games and the cards, or help Daisy change into her bathing suit—anything to avoid Priscilla and John.

  A week went by, then another. When they were home, Priscilla and John skulked around, and Sarah skulked around, too. A month passed, and she hadn’t gained any clarity.

  Priscilla and John came home one day and took her into the living room.

  “I know,” she said. “You want my answer.”

  “We’ve been thinking it over,” Priscilla said, “and we’re not sure we want you to be an egg donor.”

  John said, “Your relationship with Daisy is what’s most important to us. We don’t want to complicate things.”

  “Things wouldn’t be complicated.” The complications: that was why she’d delayed. But now that they were pulling back, she felt as if something had been grabbed from her, taken like a bone. “I want to do it,” she said. “I want you to have my eggs.”

  “We’re touched,” Priscilla said, “but the more we thought about it, the more uneasy it made us. I probably shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “But you did bring it up.” Suddenly it hit Sarah. Priscilla didn’t want her eggs because the baby might grow up to have Alzheimer’s.

  “That’s not it,” Priscilla said.

  John said, “Even if the baby grew up to have Alzheimer’s, we’d be long dead at that point.”

  Not if it was early onset. And what did they care if they were long dead? No one wanted that for their child, whether they were dead or living.

  Priscilla said, “We don’t think egg donation is the right path for us. We’re planning to adopt.”

  But a week later, Sarah was flipping through The Daily Bruin and she came across an ad for an egg donor, with Priscilla and John’s phone number attached. They wanted the nineteen-year-old, after all: the blond, blue-eyed, lacrosse-playing Mensa member. They didn’t want her father: he was infected, and she was, too. She didn’t know how she could ever see them again. She would have to find another job.

  Part V

  20

  It was hard, at first, with Arlo gone. The hamper felt empty without his blue jeans and hooded sweatshirts, without his cargo pants. Pru would buy too much food and watch it go to waste. She announced dinner one night, and she mistakenly called out his name.

  But as the weeks passed she felt a lightening. Sarah was in high school now, off to one extracurricular or another, and Pru would go out to dinner with Spence or Camille. She’d gotten back in touch with her graduate school friends—Theresa, Claire, and Marie—and they went bowling one night, of all things, and got a little drunk.

  Spence, on the other hand, was despondent. Sarah was, too. “Nothing’s the same without him,” she said. “I don’t even know where he is.”

  “He’s in Iowa,” Pru said.

  “He might as well be on Mars.” On Mars, at least, he would have had reason not to write, but he was in Iowa, in the United States, and a month had passed and they hadn’t heard from him.

  Spence wrote him every day. Sarah wrote him almost as often. Pru wrote him, too.

  “Why did we let him go?” Spence said. He should have insisted that Arlo finish out the school year. Then summer would have come, and he might have stayed for the rest of high school.

  21

  Ames, Iowa, Arlo thought: how in the world had he ended up here?

  “What’s wrong with Ames?” his mother said. She listed the town’s population, spoke of its air quality, the number of Boy Scout troops, as if she’d discovered it on a list of America’s Most Livable Cities, which for all Arlo knew she had. Rents were cheap, and his mother had found a ramshackle house that gave them each some privacy. And he had his music and his headphones. But he didn’t care about livable. New York wasn’t livable—there were rats on the subway tracks—but there was nowhere he more wanted to be now that he was gone.

  He would rail against the coffee (“It tastes like piss”), and the bagels (“They’re insipid”: now that he’d left, he was using his father’s vocabulary words), and the local bands (“They’re also-rans”), until his mother said, “I lived in London these past two years and do you see me complaining?”

  “What’s so great about London?”

  “Try Buckingham Palace and Big Ben.”

  Buckingham Palace? Big Ben? It was as if his mother hadn’t lived in London at all, as if she’d merely seen it on a postcard.

  But one night Arlo found her passport, with London’s Heathrow Airport printed on the front page. On the second page was France’s de Gaulle. On the third page was Portugal’s Lisbon Portela. “When were you in Portugal?”

  “Oliver and I traveled there,” his mother said. But at that word, Oliver, a shadow crossed his mother’s face.

  “What’s he doing now, anyway?”

  “I have no idea. He broke up with me.”

  Arlo had thought his mother had come back because of him. Now he understood that Oliver had left her and she was coming back anyway.

  * * *

  —

  One night his mother said, “You’ve changed, Arlo.”

  Of course he’d changed. The question was, why hadn’t she changed, too? She was the same as she’d always been, only more so, as if she’d settled into a deeper, truer version of herself. She would walk around the house in only her underwear and her Toledo Mud Hens T-shirt, and when she went to the bathroom she would leave the door open, and he would have to turn away.

  “Arlo, you’ve become a prude.”

  Was she right? In New York, he’d paraded around naked to get his father’s goat, and now his mother was peeing with the door open and he couldn’t look at her.

  She found him one night with a book on his lap and said, “When did you become such a reader?”

  “It certainly wasn’t because of you.”

  “Arlo, that’s not fair. I read as much as the next person.”

  “I didn’t read when I was with you because I didn’t know how to read. Mom, I’m dyslexic.”

  His mother just stared at him.

  “You’re inattentive, Mom, you know that? You’ve been inattentive my whole life.”

  She started to speak, but he wouldn’t let her. “I miss Dad,” he said. “I hate it here.”

  * * *

  —

  It was April, too late in the year to start at a new school,
so his mother suggested they find jobs. They passed a bakery one morning with a help wanted sign out front, and his mother went in and said she wanted the job. “In fact,” she told the manager, “we both want it. It’s a two-for-one deal.”

  “Two workers for one paycheck?”

  “Two workers for two paychecks.”

  She must have won the manager over with the force of her resolve, because she was told to report to work the next day and to bring Arlo with her. They would be on cash register duty, the manager said.

  The rest of the workers wore name badges, so Arlo reluctantly wore one, too. But he refused to wear the white baker’s hat everyone else was wearing. His mother, though, took to her new uniform. She would stand beside the ovens in her baker’s hat, though she was supposed to be up front at the register.

  One day, when she thought no one was looking, she removed a five-dollar bill from the tip jar. A couple of hours later, she removed a ten.

  “I saw you stealing from the tip jar,” Arlo said.

  “You can’t steal from yourself.”

  “Those tips are pooled.”

  Maybe so, she said, but some workers were better than others. That woman who left the five? Arlo’s mother was the one who had served her. She’d thrown in an extra napoleon, and the five had been her reward. And the man who left the ten? He liked her pretty smile. If someone else had a pretty smile, they would get ten dollars, too.

  They were walking home beneath the dogwood trees, and Arlo’s mother said, “Steal from the rich and give to the poor.”

  “Steal from the rich?” His mother was stealing from the other workers. She was stealing from him!

  * * *

  —

  One day, Arlo’s mother said to the bakery’s owner, “Arlo has good business sense. I bet he’d have some ideas for you.” She turned to Arlo. “Tell Nancy what you think.”