Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  “Which viewers?” I asked.

  It didn’t matter. Bob’s answer was always the same. The ones they polled or who wrote or called.

  He shrugged. “You know, that’s the only way we can judge.”

  If I referred to Julia Child, he’d say that she was a larger-than-life personality, while it was part of my charm that I was just like the viewer, only livelier, and she was a great chef, which I kept saying I really wasn’t, nor was I the first of the species on television. Furthermore, that was PBS. If I wanted to work for minimum wages and take a chance on having a cookbook that made a fortune someday . . . He knew damned well I never wanted to do a cookbook. Almost all my ideas were other people’s, and besides . . .

  I reminded him of my long-ago “Cucina Casalinga” idea, described some of the dishes I might do for a mother-daughter program.

  “Mmm,” he said calmly. “That’s interesting.”

  “It wouldn’t even have to be just mother and child. You could do different mixes. Parents and kids. Grandparents and kids. All kinds of possibilities.”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s certainly something to think about.”

  I looked at Sheldon triumphantly. Sheldon was looking at his dessert. He understood what was going on better than I did.

  “In the meantime,” Bob said, “there’s someone I want you to talk to.”

  “Talk to?” I was startled. My sister was always saying Livvy should talk to someone, and I thought Bob meant I should see a shrink.

  “His name is Rick Landy, and he’s saved more shows than you’ve watched.” He smiled to assure me that this wasn’t a criticism. “He’s an idea person. You can’t believe the guy until you see him in operation. When they told me about him, I didn’t believe it. He’s in California most of the time. He was just here for a couple of days, and he’ll be back in a week or two. We’ll all have dinner, we’ll talk, and we’ll see what comes of it.”

  On a night in February I slept fitfully, awakened when it was not quite light out, couldn’t fall asleep again. My meeting with Rick Landy was coming up and I hadn’t had any new ideas. In fact, pressure from Sheldon on this score seemed to have caused my brain to shut as tight as a clam Landy would be able to scoop out and devour in a second. I seldom went down to my apartment in the morning these days until well after Livvy, and Pablo, if he’d slept over, were out of the house. But by seven on this morning I felt as though I’d been up for hours. I got into jeans and a sweater, put up coffee for Leon, and went downstairs, figuring I’d make a small pot for myself down there. Pablo bought his weekday coffee near work, and Livvy hadn’t been drinking any lately. I opened the door as the sun was beginning to send a little light through the window over the kitchen sink, decided to settle at my desk before Livvy went to the bathroom so she could ignore me, if she chose. In the past few days she’d been moodier than ever, and morning wasn’t the time to try to talk.

  I washed out the remnants of last night’s coffee, put up a fresh pot and went to my desk, then realized for the first time that there was a light on in the bathroom. As I moved closer, the sounds of retching became clear.

  So much for old explanations and new events.

  I sat at the desk, watched as Livvy opened the door, turned, off the bathroom light, and went to her room without glancing at me or the coffee brewing. She didn’t look like someone who’d decided to throw up. She looked miserable. Nauseated. I turned in my chair so that my eye fell on the coffee pot. Until recently, there’d never been coffee left in the morning, Livvy would always have finished it.

  Since I’d had my first cup, the only time in my entire life when I hadn’t wanted coffee was during the nine months of my pregnancy.

  Girls who threw up to lose weight did it after they’d eaten, not after a night’s sleep, when their food was digested. This hadn’t even sounded like someone vomiting food; it was a convulsive, retching sound, no wetness to it.

  The sky was really light now. It was morning. Morning sickness was the phrase that had eluded me.

  I felt ill.

  I told myself to stop it, but I didn’t know what to stop.

  Livvy left the house a few minutes later. I wanted to talk to Leon before I talked with her, but he was at the hospital already. I needed to talk to Leon, although I didn’t know why.

  Leon was the one who’d been telling me nothing was wrong. Leon was the one who found it easier to reassure me than to help me figure out what was going on in my daughter’s life. I felt very angry with Leon . . . or someone.

  I went upstairs and lay in bed like a corpse someone hasn’t fixed up yet, all stiff and cold and full of unfinished business. When I looked at the clock I was astonished to see that it was past noon. I wasn’t sure what had happened in my last dream, but I knew from the way I was feeling—hostile, jealous, more worried about myself than about Livvy—that the pregnant woman in the dream had probably been me. Life was too crazy. The last thing in the world my self-absorbed adolescent daughter wanted was to care for a tiny, helpless baby, while I so longed for one that I’d been ready to risk all with Leon to have it. And she was pregnant. And I was not.

  I got out of bed again, washed again, brushed my teeth again, made fresh upstairs coffee, returned some phone calls, barely aware of who was on the other end from one to the next.

  It must be more than a month since she’d begun to suspect . . . Maybe she thought admission to Harvard carried an automatic abortion.

  Stop it, Caroline.

  I should be grateful her heart was still set on Harvard. If she hadn’t been inside a church since she’d arrived in this country, she surely thought of herself as a Roman Catholic. Harvard might be the only institution with a weight great enough to offset the Church’s.

  I told myself I was to stop anticipating trouble where there might not be any. She might simply close her eyes, her mind, whatever she had to close, and have the abortion. Except that if she was going to do that, why had she waited so long? I could only hope she’d be realistic enough to understand what she would be doing to her life if she didn’t. I could only hope . . .

  I went back downstairs, tried to work for a while, turned off the computer when, scrolling through notes for a program about favorite desserts from country to country, I read baba au rhum as baby au rhum. I was sitting at the dining table, my brain arguing with Livvy the matter of whether she should sacrifice these crucial years of her life to a baby she didn’t want and that wasn’t even a baby yet, when she came into the apartment, dropped her backpack, and said, in the tiny, shamed, and shaky voice of a three-year-old confessing to having wet her pants, “I’m pregnant,” and began to cry.

  “Oh, sweetheart!” I stood, walked rapidly to her, held her in my arms, began to cry with her. “Oh, my poor baby!” All other concerns vanished. I walked her over to the sofa, sat with her, cried with her. “My poor Livvy. I didn’t understand until this morning. . . .” For a long time I just held her and rocked her as she wept. Finally, I spoke to her again.

  “Listen to me, Livvy.” (From that day on, for a long time, she didn’t object to the nickname.) “An abortion . . . in this country . . . It doesn’t have to be terrible. I mean, of course you’re upset, but it doesn’t have to be a big deal. You go to a good clinic or hospital, and it’s over in a couple of hours. I know people who’ve had them. . . . It just takes a few minutes. There are clinics that just do that, but also, you know, there’re people in Leon’s department—”

  “I don’t want Leon to know. Or Grandma and Grandpa.”

  “All right. We’ll just go to my doctor. He’s affiliated with a different hospital.” There weren’t family doctors anymore, just families of doctors. If your doctor knew the other doctor, he might treat you like an individual human with a medical problem.

  She began to cry again.

  “I understand that you’re upset, love. And I’m not saying it’s fun. It’s just better than having your life ruined. Changed enormously in a way you don’t want it changed
. I’ll go with you, do everything with you, if you want me to. I mean, you don’t have to do any of it alone.”

  Of course, she wasn’t alone.

  Be careful now, Caroline. Don’t ask the wrong questions.

  I waited awhile. “Have you talked to Pablo?”

  “He wants to get married.”

  Oh, Jesus. I should’ve known.

  Pablo wanted to get married. Angelo had wanted to get married, too. Angelo had wanted a more comfortable base to screw around from. Pablo wasn’t another Angelo, I was pretty sure, but he was another Catholic.

  “You don’t want to get married, do you?”

  In my arms, she shrugged.

  “It’s difficult to see,” I said carefully, “how you could be married to Pablo, and have a baby, and go to Harvard. To any college, but especially an out-of-town one.”

  She began to weep again.

  “When do you think you got pregnant?”

  “December.”

  “You haven’t been to a doctor, have you? I mean, are you certain that . . . you know . . . ?”

  “I do the test every couple of days,” she sobbed. “It’s always positive. And I didn’t get my period at the end of December. Or January.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  She sat up abruptly.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I mean, not nothing, we just want to do this as quickly as we can. It really doesn’t have to be a big deal. I’m not saying it’ll be pleasant. But the actual procedure’s not a big deal. It takes a few minutes. You might feel sad. Upset. But then it’ll pass. Children don’t pass. Or marriages where the people got together just for the children.”

  Especially if the people are Catholic and they’re stuck for life.

  But I wasn’t going to open that door if she didn’t.

  Silence.

  “I guess the first thing we have to do is talk to a doctor, confirm that you’re pregnant. The sooner we do it, the easier it’ll be. You’ll have to miss a day of school. Maybe two, at the most. And I think, it just occurs to me now, that when all this is over—I mean, this is why you haven’t been concentrating in school. When it’s over, I think you’ll be able to focus on your schoolwork again. Think about college.”

  She’d slumped back in the sofa. Her eyes were closed. I smoothed the hair back from her forehead.

  “My poor baby,” I said. “I’m sorry you have to deal with this now. I’m so sorry.”

  She did not open her eyes or acknowledge my words in any other way, but tears began to stream down her cheeks again. I set my hand on hers. My other arm rested on the sofa back, just above her head.

  “Do you know what Annunciata would say if she knew?” The words were whispered so that I barely caught them.

  “The hell with Annunciata,” I said. “She has nothing to do with your life.”

  She curled up against me, her head resting on my breast. I thought her eyes were closed. After a while, I was certain she was asleep.

  I had to call my gynecologist for an appointment, verify the pregnancy, arrange for the abortion. Tomorrow, or as soon as possible. If it was going to be difficult for me not to tell Leon, I had to make every effort to slip her past Pablo. I also had to finish preparing my show for the day after tomorrow. It seemed absurd, at the moment, to think I could muster my forces to do the one I’d planned, on how to start a restaurant, beginning with the differences between cooking in quantity and cooking at home. My daydream had been that “Casa Cara” might lead into another program on “Cucina Casalinga” so wonderful that Bob would send Rick Landy back to California without even introducing us. Now I found myself leaning toward a program that might be easier to plan during a week when I was preoccupied with getting my daughter an abortion and minimizing the miseries attached to same—a show on mistakes and disasters in the kitchen. There were endless possibilities, beginning with eggs, where the potential for disaster was almost as great as for triumph. I could begin with the story of my own first major disaster, go on to anecdotes from other people. There was a book called The Cook’s Advisor in which the author listed a wide range of problems and what could be done about them. I’d forage there, for starters.

  Livvy stirred. I whispered that we should go to her room. She let me help her up, walked there with her head on my shoulder.

  “Mama? Please don’t tell Papa.” Her voice was that of a very upset child, her language, Italian.

  What a relief, not to have to deal with Angelo.

  “I won’t tell anyone, sweetheart,” I said, also in Italian. “You tell anyone you want to know.”

  I helped her to her room, where she lay down on top of the covers and appeared to be asleep. I kissed her, murmured that I’d be nearby, folded the free part of the quilt over her, then returned to the living room, leaving her door ajar so I’d hear her if she called me. Then I made an appointment for ten o’clock the following morning with my gynecologist. If our luck was running, he could perform the abortion the same day. Before she saw Pablo again.

  I made dinner downstairs, and afterward the kids were happy to go upstairs to their Häagen-Dazs, a new brand-name fetish. As Leon and I were drinking our espresso, Livvy’s phone rang. On the fourth or fifth ring, I went to her room. She was sound asleep, scrunched up in a fetal position, a description I tried to push from my mind, particularly since what her curled-up, arms-wrapped-around-herself posture actually evoked was the sense of someone trying to protect herself from harm.

  You don’t even know how she usually sleeps! Maybe she’s that way all the time!

  I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Mrs. Ferrante.” Pablo was uneasy. I never answered her phone. “Is Olivia there?”

  I touched her very gently, whispered that Pablo was on the phone. She turned over in bed, muttering that she didn’t want to talk to him. I returned to the phone, told Pablo she was sleeping. He said he would call again in an hour.

  I said, “I don’t think she wants to talk to you, Pablo.” I paused. “She’s told me.”

  “I make a good living,” he said immediately. “I can take care of her.”

  “That’s very nice, but . . .” I’d started to say it was nice but not enough reason to get married. “But she wants to go to college. She’s not ready to be a mother. You don’t seem to realize how young she is.”

  “She was the one who didn’t care,” he said, fiercely defensive. “She was the one who kept saying don’t make a big deal, nothing’!! happen. I was—” He cut himself off.

  I closed my eyes.

  “Pablo,” I said after a while, “I think maybe, if we talk, it should be with Olivia.”

  And if we’re lucky, it’ll be after she has the abortion.

  “Yes,” he said. “All right. I’m at work, she can’t get me. I’ll call later.”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I said. “She’s really out like a light.” With a little luck, we’d be out of the apartment before he called.

  When I returned to the living room, Leon asked what miracle had occurred that had allowed me to walk freely in and out of my daughter’s room and answer her telephone.

  I looked at him uneasily, started to frame a lie, realized I couldn’t do it.

  I said, “I’m not supposed to tell you.”

  He laughed. “She thinks she’s pregnant? You think she’s pregnant? Sooner or later someone’s got to be pregnant, right?”

  I stared at him. I felt my face grow hot.

  “Keep your fucking voice down,” I said, my own voice as low as before. “Her period is six or seven weeks late.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Leon said. “All right. I’m sorry.”

  There was a lengthy silence. Then he asked how he could be helpful. I told him I’d already gotten her an appointment with my gynecologist, whom I liked, and that she didn’t want my parents to know. Or him, for that matter.

  He nodded. “There’s always someone they don’t want to know.”

  Clinical-cynical. She could have b
een a patient seeing him for the first time.

  I said, “When I’m talking about one of your kids, I don’t say, ‘they.’ ”

  He said, “I don’t understand.”

  I said, “It makes her sound like some kid who walked in off the street to the clinic. Someone you don’t care about.”

  Maybe Livvy wouldn’t have gotten pregnant if he’d been as much a father to her as I’d been a mother to his kids.

  He shrugged. “She’s kept a pretty good distance from me ever since . . . you know.”

  I knew. On the other hand, “That was a long time ago. Maybe now she’s ready to . . .” To what? Have a father again?

  He smiled, a little smugly, I thought. “It’s hard to see how I could help her through this if I’m not even supposed to know about it.”

  I said, “Last year you wanted to marry me.”

  He laughed without amusement. “Am I supposed to understand the connection?”

  I said, “That’s the problem. This way nothing’s connected to anything else.” I thought of how he’d dragged me to the hospital for a blood test that night. Of course, there’d been an air of desperation to it, as though it was an ordeal he could only subject himself to if he didn’t think about it too much. “I remember perfectly well, I was the one who suggested we try living together. But in my mind, that was what it was. A trial. And it’s worked, at least as far as I’m concerned.” I waited, but he didn’t say anything. “We get along. As far as I know, we love each other.” I waited a longer time. With something that looked like reluctance, he nodded. “At least if there’s something wrong I don’t know about it.”

  “No,” he said, “there’s nothing wrong. That’s the reason I don’t think we should make any changes.”

  “You mean there’d have to be something bad for us to get married?”

  He smiled grimly. “I seem to be in a no-win argument.”

  I said, “If you think it’s an argument, forget it.” I stood up and began to clean up the kitchen. I thought he might just clear out, leave and go upstairs without waiting for me. The two apartments with their separate locks and keys and no inside connection seemed a perfect metaphor.