Olivia

by Judith Rossner

  The first thing I should do was find a book for my daughter to read. On the phone she had sounded innocent of any reality that might prevent a mother whose baby was born at the end of August from going to school at the beginning of September. If she was going through with this pregnancy, she should have some sense of what was happening within her. If she couldn’t tolerate the thought of what was happening, well, there was still time. She also needed to know better what was involved in caring for an infant. This business of thinking Pablo could work a long day and take care of an infant who might be up during a good portion of the night was troubling. Maybe I should try to get her to a therapist who could help her through these difficult weeks, give her the advice she couldn’t accept from me. I mustn’t be tempted by my own willingness—eagerness—to care for a baby. Aside from anything else, my fantasies were of kissing its belly when I changed diapers and googling at it in a carriage as we walked to the Village, not of being kept awake all night by a colicky newborn. It was difficult to see how I could do that and function during the day as . . . Of course, I didn’t know whether I’d need to function, and as what. It was slightly easier to figure out how Livvy should be handling her life at this point than to know what I should or would be doing with mine. And whether Leon would go along with me as I did it.

  No wonder men were always going for twenty-year-olds who weren’t toting around the baggage of a lived life, not to speak of the sags and wrinkles. No children of their own to love or hate the new man in the house. No careers that had to be accommodated, unless it was some hotshot New Woman career that earned so much money it seemed for a while real life would be expedited instead of screwed up. No grown children who weren’t grown up enough to care for their own babies.

  If Leon refused to marry me, maybe he’d like the idea of some stairs, anyway. A wedding ring might not make me feel happy at this moment, but I’d be warmer if I could creep up a little spiral staircase and stick my feet against his back.

  I received spoken permission from the landlord to hire people to build real walls around and between both bedrooms, written permission to follow when he saw the plans and approved the company to do the work.

  I bought Livvy What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which someone had told me was the current book on the subject. She came home from school, rushed to her room to listen for messages. She came out and asked what time it was in California. When I said it was three hours earlier, she looked at her watch, then asked if I thought Rick had written her number down right.

  “Oh, Livvy,” I said, “you mustn’t torture yourself with—”

  “I’m not torturing myself,” she said irritably. “I left a couple of terrific ideas on his machine, the way he said I should, and I just want to know if he liked them. You weren’t playing with my machine, by any chance.”

  I shook my head.

  “I bought you a book,” I said. “It’s on the coffee table.”

  She picked it up and dropped it as though touching it had been a potentially fatal error.

  “I just thought it might give you a nice feeling for what’s happening to you,” I said. “It can be wonderful if you—”

  “If it’s so wonderful, how come you don’t want me to do it?”

  “I didn’t want you to because I didn’t think you wanted to.” We’d been through all this already. Nothing I said actually got into her brain, it all just rattled around somewhere in the skull, apart from the rest of her thought processes. Useless. Irritating. “Since you say you do, I thought maybe you should have a better idea of what was going on.”

  “You want me to want not to have it!”

  Guilty.

  I shrugged. “I want you to do what you really want to do.”

  “You promised Pablo you wouldn’t do this! You promised you wouldn’t try to make me have an abortion!”

  “I got you a book about having a baby, not about having an abortion!”

  But she knew better. She went to her room and didn’t come out for the rest of the day, except for food.

  I asked Beatrice for the name of a therapist who might be good for 268Livvy. But when I suggested to Livvy that she might want to talk to a professional, someone “outside the family” about the various decisions she had to make, she said she had no decisions to make, other people were making them for her, maybe I thought there was something wrong with her? I urged her to go just once, see if it was helpful, but she got so angry that I dropped the subject.

  Sheldon called to say “the guys” were working on ideas for me. I told him not to throw away the cable people, and he told me not to be nervous, he wasn’t throwing away anything. After debating with myself whether to bring up the matter, I told him Rick had started Livvy daydreaming about being on television.

  “Well,” he said, “tell her to stop. It ain’t gonna help. Nothing’d happen even if she wasn’t pregnant.”

  “But he was encouraging her, don’t you think?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t give a shit,” Sheldon said. “He’s a mosquito. He takes a little bite outa you, gets the blood he wants, flies away. Leaves you with the itch.”

  It was too good for a reply.

  “The only reason he didn’t fly away yet is Kupferman. The guy loves you. Had a lot of good mail on you. Calls. His wife loves you. Her friends talk about you. He has a spot to fill in September, and he wants you in it.”

  Me or someone who sounded like me and got my mail. Maybe they could do a cooking show with puppets. I would have to suggest it when, if, I ever saw Rick again.

  I kept myself from thinking constantly about a daughter who felt the necessity to bear a baby she didn’t want and a boyfriend who didn’t feel like marrying the woman he’d once thought he wanted to wed by making notes for a restaurant that would never open, classes that might not have students, and TV routines nobody would ask me to do. I had a lot of good food jokes. Surprisingly, most weren’t about Jewish mothers but took place in restaurants.

  Three Jews order tea in a delicatessen. One wants lemon, one wants milk on the side, one wants it plain but tells the waiter to make sure the glass is clean. “Okay,” the waiter says when he returns with everyone’s tea, “who gets the clean glass?” Some of the jokes weren’t even Jewish. Q. When will there be a worldwide famine? A. When the Chinese learn to use forks and spoons. Actually, it would be interesting to figure out why the clean-glass joke had to be Jewish. Maybe because Jewish waiters were traditionally surly, unwilling to please. If they’d been sweet and nurturing, maybe someone would’ve thought they were Jewish mothers. It would be interesting to figure out why it was funny that the first time Leon’s Texan friend at the hospital had been served bagels and lox he’d asked someone which was which. Or why my father had chuckled for the hundredth time as he told me the following golden oldie:

  Customer: Waiter, come here.

  Waiter: What?

  Customer: The soup.

  Waiter: You’ve been having the same soup for years.

  Customer: Taste it.

  Waiter: It isn’t hot enough? I’ll heat it for you. Too hot? Blow on it. It’s bitter? I’ll add a little sugar.

  Customer: Taste the soup!

  Waiter: Where’s the spoon?

  Customer: Aha!

  The Korean hell is a place where everyone is given extraordinarily wonderful food and chopsticks not long enough to reach their mouths. What, aside from the implements, made one joke very Jewish? Partly it was the Yiddish intonation, but there was more to it. I had another category, ALMOST, for jokes that were almost about food and would almost make it for television. (Husband: Honey, business is pretty bad. Maybe we should fire the chef and you can learn to cook. Wife: I have a better idea. Let’s fire the chauffeur and you can learn to fuck.) At the moment, none of them amused me, though I’d thought them pretty funny when I entered them in the computer. Anyway, they might not pass for network, as opposed to cable.

  I shuddered. Sheldon had me thinking the way he did.

&nb
sp; I made a pot of meatballs, some for upstairs, some for downstairs. There it was again: Sheldon’s Upstairs Downstairs routine had entered my brain.

  I decided to go upstairs and wait for Leon as though it were any normal day in our lives, then I spent a long time composing a note to Livvy. The easy part was telling her I was leaving some meatballs and I’d make enough spaghetti for everyone, they could come and get it later if they wanted it. Then I needed to convey what Sheldon had said about Rick. I decided to do it as though I were the one who’d been anxious for news. I said I’d told Sheldon how Rick had left us all on pins and needles, worrying about what was going to happen next. Then I quoted Sheldon’s mosquito line, and told her I’d be upstairs if she wanted me. Or some spaghetti.

  I told Leon I’d gotten permission to put in real walls. He said, “Congratulations.”

  I’d deliberately told him while the kids were still in the living room with us, so it wouldn’t sound like a big deal. But Rennie caught his ironic tone and looked over from the TV set to see what was going on. I was rattled. None of the kids knew about Livvy’s pregnancy yet. Rennie asked what I meant about real walls. I explained about making two private bedrooms down there because Livvy and Pablo might be staying for a while after she graduated. Rennie asked who would be in the other bedroom, if I was living upstairs.

  “Oh, well,” I said, rattled, “I’m not sure. They’ll have more privacy when I’m down there. In fact, I can use the second bedroom for my workroom, so I’m not out there in the middle of the apartment when they’re home. And we can use the space where my desk is for more bookshelves. Or something.”

  Annie said, “Or maybe Livvy’ll have a baby.”

  I glanced at Leon uneasily. He wasn’t helping. I forced a smile.

  “Sure. Why not.”

  It wasn’t a question, but Rennie answered it, anyway.

  “Because she wants to go to Harvard, that’s why.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “Harvard. I forgot.”

  The phone rang. Annie picked it up and told Leon it was for him. He had a brief conversation, and said he was going to take a little walk. It was clear that he didn’t want company, so I didn’t offer to go with him, but of course I was curious. By the time he returned, half an hour later, the kids were in their rooms. I asked what was going on.

  “Your daughter,” he said in a deliberate, somewhat sardonic, fashion, “wanted a private conversation with me.”

  I said, “You’re kidding.” She seldom even stayed in a room if he was there, unless Pablo was, too, and then she held Pablo’s hand the whole time. I remembered how she’d come out of her room the other night to hear the argument between him and Pablo.

  “What did she want?” There was only one likely reason.

  “First of all, she wanted me not to tell you she was consulting me.”

  My daughter was always ordering secrecy, never believing she’d get it.

  “Then she wanted to know how late she could have an abortion and whether it could be done without your knowing.”

  Without my knowing. As though I’d disapprove.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I said the earlier the better, but the first three months were always easiest. The second trimester, there were good people who’d still do it. And I said I wouldn’t tell you. But it made me nervous. I don’t know what the legal implications are, but—”

  “Don’t worry. As long as you said yes. There’s nothing to worry about yet. I wish there were.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked irritably.

  “It means I don’t think she’s going to do it.”

  “Certainly not if her mother keeps telling her she doesn’t have to!” He was agitated. He’d risen from his chair and he wasn’t shouting, but his voice was raised and his movements were jerky.

  “Have to? She doesn’t have to! You and I know she should, but should isn’t the same as have to!” I told him about what I’d begun to think of as the TV Dinner, described how Livvy had gotten caught up in Rick’s ideas for turning our lives into television crap without benefit of chewing or digestion. “I think the reason she’s even considering an abortion is she has some fantasy, she’ll be an actress, a character on a TV show these guys’ll do.”

  “Who cares what the fantasy is?” he asked. “As long as she does it.”

  I nodded. “I agree. Up to a point. But the abortion’s not about to happen, fantasy or no fantasy, show or no show. That’s my Catholic daughter and her Catholic boyfriend-husband telling you that. Not me, as you seem to want to believe. They’re talking about a church wedding.”

  He said, “Oh, shit.” But it didn’t have any force to it. A young girl’s marrying for life to someone she wouldn’t want if any of her other plans worked out wasn’t as scary as her being pregnant. He brought out an open bottle of Chianti and two glasses.

  “Maybe,” he said, when we’d sipped the wine in silence for a while, “you can get them to postpone the date until she hears from the colleges.”

  The colleges. He also hadn’t believed me when I told him about the intensity of her focus on Harvard.

  “Maybe.” I was exhausted. “If I can get anybody to do anything.”

  “Feeling helpless,” Leon said, “is usually an excuse to not do anything.”

  I sat up straighter, stared at him as I fought with myself, and lost or won, depending on where you were sitting.

  “The only thing I didn’t feel helpless about was getting you to marry me.”

  Not that I’m certain at this moment that I want to marry you.

  His grin might have been endearing in other circumstances.

  “Your daughter’s pregnant, so you get married?”

  I didn’t think it was the least bit funny. I told myself to keep my mouth shut, this wasn’t like television, where more than two seconds of silence could get you banished from the realm.

  He said, “I thought we weren’t going to talk about all that until after the Livvy business gets settled.”

  I said, “What if it doesn’t get settled? Does that mean we’ll never talk about it?”

  He said, “I don’t understand the sudden urgency.”

  I said, “It’s not sudden. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. This has been nice, but it’s also awkward. I feel it more now because everything’s awkward. Unsettled.”

  “When you think about the future,” he asked after a long time, “I mean, let’s say the worst happens, she has the baby, a church marriage. Then what?”

  “I can’t tell yet.” He’d put me on guard. “They can’t move before she graduates. I’m only praying she gets away with the two-lives bit. She means to wear black sweaters and jeans to school, she’s afraid someone’ll realize and she’ll get kicked out.”

  “Are you kidding? If kids got kicked out for being pregnant, half the schools’d be empty. As soon as anyone knows they’re pregnant, they start getting a hundred different social services, nobody can do enough for them.”

  “All right. I didn’t know that. Let’s say she just doesn’t want them to know. They mean to look for an apartment for when she graduates, and if they find it, I hope it’ll be nearby so I can help with baby-sitting.” Maybe he wouldn’t think about the fact of which I was acutely aware, that it would be irrational for them to move if their primary baby-sitter was upstairs. If I hedged on that, I’d have to be very straight about everything else. “Livvy’s still talking about going to school in September. That’s crazy, but for all I know, she’ll be able to do it in January. Not Boston, but New York. She’d surely get into Columbia, or NYU would be better, in terms of traveling. Anyway, if she does it, I’ll be happy to take care of the baby when she’s in school.”

  “Well,” Leon said, “you’ve got it all worked out, don’t you.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “And did you envision a double wedding in this outline?”

  I stood up.

  “Oh, va ‘ffa ‘nculo. Forget it, Leon.
I don’t need you for any of it.” My voice cracked. “It just would have been nicer. I’m going downstairs.”

  He slapped his thighs, stood up.

  “I’ll go with you. If they’re downstairs, maybe we can all talk. I need a little leeway here, you know. I’m feeling a lot of lives closing in on me.”

  They were in the living room, watching television. Livvy looked back and forth between us, trying to divine what Leon had told me. Pablo nodded in my direction, lowered the sound on the TV.

  I asked, “What’s doing?”

  Livvy said, “Nothing.”

  Pablo said, “Well, something, actually. We found out the first Saturday we can have the church. March twenty-eighth.”

  I smiled, kept myself from glancing at Leon as Livvy looked back and forth between us. We had the rest of February and most of March to do what had to be done. If it had to be done. I had to pretend, for now, that I had no doubt the wedding would occur.

  “Well, now we know that part, and we just have the rest to figure out.”

  Livvy said she wanted to check her answering machine, she thought maybe it was broken. Pablo said that people who didn’t get some call they wanted always thought their machine was broken. Before he could finish, Livvy had gotten up and gone to her bedroom. I met Pablo’s eyes; he looked away from me. Leon was thumbing through a magazine.

  “Well,” I said, “we have a lot to do. Invitations . . . First, I guess, we have to figure out who you want to invite, and where you want to have the party. You want a party afterward, don’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “To me,” I said, “the nicest way to do it would be here in the house.”

  “You mean it?” He brightened up. “You mean, you want to do it here?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It feels nicer than some hall. Or restaurant. And it’s cheaper. Maybe your mother and aunt can come to dinner next week, or soon, and we can figure out a menu from both sides.”