by Edan Lepucki
He was perfect. A billion traumas would be upon him someday. But not yet. And if they didn’t come to him, he’d seek them out. We all do—look for pain I mean. Until then, my baby was a beloved fool, not a mark on him.
Then Devin did the unthinkable. He looked up at S and said, “I need water.”
I gasped, I couldn’t help it.
S looked up at me, puzzled.
“The prince usually doesn’t let anyone else but me wait on him.”
S bowed her head to Devin. “I’d be honored to be your servant.”
“Uh-oh,” I told her, “now you’re in trouble. He’s very literal.”
“Please?” Devin said. “Please!”
I hired her. Someone else, someone like Karl, would have checked S’s references first, but the thought only flitted across my brain before I dismissed it. Devin had chosen this girl, in his way, and I liked her too. I could fictionalize a background check for Karl. If I said, “I had a good feeling about her,” he’d insist on vetting S himself, and that would take forever.
She would move into the Cottage the following Monday. She’d work four days and one evening a week.
When I handed her the key, she hugged me and Devin, who was slung on my hip. S really came in for a squeeze, and as she pulled away, a sharp hint of body odor, metallic and musky, took root in my nostrils. I wanted to remember it.
—
As soon as S had driven away in “the Camry,” Devin and I went upstairs to find Seth. I knocked on his door twice, and then, together, Devin and I counted slowly to ten. Only after that did I turn the knob. I’d done this ever since Seth was thirteen and I’d accidentally walked in on him naked.
“Seth?”
He was sitting at his computer wearing only swim trunks and a Lakers jersey. The room, as usual, smelled dank. Today Seth had lugged the fan from my bedroom so that he had two going, their heads rotating back and forth like land surveyors. He sat between them and every few seconds his hair lifted in the breeze. He was playing a video game. I hated the video games, but Karl had argued on their behalf, saying I shouldn’t be suspicious of new forms of storytelling. As if a stupid New York Times article could possibly justify the Fallout marathons he and Seth played, but I’d let it go. Before Karl moved out, Seth and I referred to him as “College Boy,” because he dropped big words in his emails and referenced articles from the Times Literary Supplement to bank tellers, and got up before sunrise the day the Booker Prize nominees were announced, even though he wasn’t British or a writer. He was a television producer.
Seth glanced up and I smiled; for once he wasn’t rolling his eyes. He hadn’t cut me any slack since Karl had moved out.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
Seth looked more and more like Marco as he got older: black hair, olive skin, long eyelashes. Swarthy as a swashbuckler. He hadn’t been a cute kid; he’d been too skinny, too haunted-seeming, his nose too big and adult for his face. But he was growing into his looks. Karl had joked that, pretty soon, women would start lining up. “The strong, silent type,” he’d quipped.
Seth paused his game and gave Devin a high five. To some strangers, Seth’s silence was awkward and difficult to handle, a barrier they couldn’t surmount. But if you knew him, Seth was just Seth. To Devin, Seth was his amazing big brother.
“Seff! Seff!” Devin yelled.
“Inside voice, baby.”
“Seff! I have a new friend.”
“The nanny came,” I said. “S. She’s moving in Monday, so you need to vacuum the Cottage for her. You promised.”
I waited for Seth to grab his iPad and type out a message. It had taken years for me to expect, to demand, some response, even if it was merely a shake of his head. I hated waiting and waiting and getting nothing from him.
“Seth,” I said again.
This time, he nodded at the computer screen. On it, an image of a castle, shot from above, was cloaked in mist. For all I knew, it was supposed to be from a dragon’s perspective.
“Only one more hour,” I said. “I mean it. And no more snarky tweets about the gazpacho I made, okay?”
Every day I checked his account, @sethconscious. His tweets were clever and wise, and the #GazpachoFail series had been retweeted two dozen times at least. I just looked at his feed, I didn’t have my own account. Seth said I couldn’t, and Karl said it was like dancing at a wedding. “If you really want to, go ahead,” he’d said, “but you’ll regret those moves the next morning.”
Now, Seth made one of our old signs: You got it, Ninja Mama.
Thanks, Burrito Flower, I signed.
Love times a million, he signed.
“What him doing?” Devin asked.
“Seth’s playing video games. You know that’s for bigger kids, right?”
Devin shook his head violently. “With his hands! What him doing?”
Seth grinned. He held his two hands in a prayer position and then clapped the lower halves together three times. That was our sign for Mambo time, which meant, basically: You’re busted!
“It’s just something Seth and I do,” I explained. Devin had learned a little ASL, but none of the special signs. “Instead of talking. You know that.”
Devin sucked on a finger contemplatively and Seth crossed his eyes until his brother laughed.
“Come on, Devy-Dev,” I said, hitching him higher onto my waist. “Let’s go draw a picture for S. Isn’t she the best?”
2.
I wasn’t born with the name lady. My birth certificate reads Pearl, and I was called that for the first year of my life until one evening, as my mother was getting ready for a party, I stepped into her shoes. They were so big, the heels so high, that I couldn’t lift my feet. I had to ski across the room to her.
“Look, Mommy,” I said.
My mother glanced up from her jewelry box or her address book or her vodka soda and said, “What a lady.” Like that, I had a new name. Like that, I became someone else.
It would be a sweet little story if my mother weren’t so damaged. She didn’t talk to anyone in her family, wouldn’t say why, and she rarely let me see my dad until it was too late and he was in the hospital with the stroke that would kill him. For as long as I could remember, it had always been just my mother and me, marooned on our pathetic female island. If she forgot to pick me up from school—which was more often than I want to admit—I’d have to walk the three miles home. Once I took the bus and my mother was appalled. “We do not take public transportation!” she cried. In the eighth grade, I hitched a ride from a woman who said I looked like an orphan, shivering like I was, my hair a mess.
“There’s something to that,” I told her.
When I was a girl, my mother would sing me “Happy Birthday” at night as a lullaby. If that sounds cute, it wasn’t. Even now I equate the song with darkness, with the long toss-and-turn to dawn, and on my birthday, I still ask for something else. “Sing me Elton John or whatever,” I’ll say, because I don’t know his songs, not really. Marco once refused me this request, and I wouldn’t blow out the candles. They burned down to little eraser-tops, the wax pooling into the white frosting until Marco intercepted, pulling the candles out in a mad rush, extinguishing the flames between his fingers. I wish I could say that was our last birthday together, but then I got pregnant with Seth so we dragged things out for another year or so.
Did you know that if you bite on a real pearl, it should feel gritty against your teeth? I learned that when I was in my twenties, and ever since I’ve wished for my old name back. But I’m Lady now, for better or for worse, and people love the name, or they say they do.
Marco told me all the time. He’d sing “Lady, lady, my fair lady,” when we were drunk, the two of us staggering home from one neighborhood watering hole or another. “How ladylike,” he’d say whenever I got dressed up. On the back of the only photo I still have of the two of us, the one I hide in an old cigar box in my bedside table drawer, Marco scribbled “Lady and the Tramp, 1997.�
�� In it, we’re in the deep armpit of the Valley, outside the dialysis center where his mother went for treatment. Marco is leaning against a wall, wearing the vintage mechanic’s shirt he cherished because his name was embroidered in cursive across the front badge. He’s smoking a cigarette and I’m standing next to him, looking at him with a mixture of admiration and irritation. I’m twenty-two and you can see my nipples through my too-small VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS shirt. Even now I can conjure Marco next to me—or, not him, but how he felt. How he smelled. We would make love and for the next few hours I thought I could smell the nicotine every time I went to pee.
His mother was dying when she took that picture. “Smile,” she said, and because we were young and didn’t like being told what to do, we didn’t.
—
I couldn’t tell Karl that I’d hired S because she seemed natural with Devin in a way that I wasn’t with Seth when I was her age. He’d claim I had issues about being maternal.
“That’s because I’m not,” I’d said once. This was right after Devin was born.
“Would you please just look at yourself? Your baby is sucking milk right out of your body.”
“I realize my argument is shaky.”
“It sure is. Look at Seth! You’ve been a natural. Always.”
But Karl hadn’t known me always.
3.
I was different with Seth. as soon as I found out I was pregnant with him, I drove to Planned Parenthood on Vermont in my beat-up hatchback. I wanted to pee in a cup, have it confirmed by a doctor, or at least a nurse, I didn’t care whether their clinic was in a mini-mall. I’d forgotten how long the wait could be without an appointment, and by the time the beleaguered Filipina woman told me I was indeed carrying a child, I was so hungry I could barely think.
She held up a plastic wheel with numbers on it. “When did you say your last period was?” I told her, and she bit her bottom lip as she turned the disk. It was like some ancient device. I imagined Cleopatra owning one.
“You’re about ten weeks along.” She glanced at the disk once more and told me my due date.
“What are my options?” I asked.
She was waiting for me to elaborate, so I did: “I want to terminate the pregnancy.”
I’d said those words before, it wasn’t a procedure I was unfamiliar with. I’d already fallen from grace four years before, when I was eighteen. Not that the words rolled off my tongue.
“Do you have some almonds or something?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m, just, really hungry….”
And that’s when I pitched forward, off the exam table. My nose hit the linoleum. When I came to, there was blood all over the nurse’s hands and chest. Edwina, that was her name. “I’m gonna need some help in here,” Edwina was yelling, like we were on a medical drama and I was dying of heart failure.
They got me back on the exam table and gave me some Gatorade and, weirdly, a fig. This was before every woman carried an energy bar in her purse. Now I never faint.
They called Marco. He took three hours, who knows what he was doing, probably helping some guy do a thing. That night he told me to move into his studio apartment in Koreatown. “Have my baby,” he whispered.
Of all the stupid decisions I’ve ever made in my life. A mother isn’t supposed to regret her child, so I won’t. What I will regret is my belief in Marco—because, even now, I can’t regret Marco. That night, I let him hold a bag of frozen broccoli to my face with one hand as he undid my jeans with the other. I let him say “I hope it’s a boy” as he pulled my jeans and then my underwear down my legs and off my ankles, the bag of broccoli balanced across my whole face so that I could neither see nor breathe very well. I let him yank off the bag and pull me on top of him as he said, “I guess we don’t have to be careful anymore.”
I wanted to believe that Marco and I could make a family. It didn’t matter that he only worked once a week at the Bagel Broker, plus odd jobs in his pickup truck, claiming that making money was a waste of a life. Or that he wrote spec scripts that no one ever read, or would read. Or that he sometimes didn’t call me for days at a time, or that he’d introduced me to his coworkers as his friend. So what? The baby would change him, and us. Had I known that Marco’s one and only wish was to give his mother a grandchild before her kidneys failed her for good, I might have stopped to reconsider. I wasn’t a genie in a bottle, I was a twenty-two-year-old woman. I should have known that he was doing it for his mother because he called her that same night. I heard them talking when I emerged from the bathroom.
“No, Mom. Lady.” A long pause. “A baby! Can you believe it?”
At the time, I was working as a personal assistant to an older actress. She was an actress in name only; she hadn’t worked in over a decade. Not that it mattered; she lived off her dead husband’s money and had the dubious honor of playing, in 1972, a woman slashed to death in some it’s-so-bad-it’s-good cult horror movie. She very seldomly traveled to conventions to sign autographs, and I’d tag along to make sure she had a functioning pen and a hot mug of ginger-lemon tea. When we weren’t traveling, it was my duty to book her doctor’s appointments, take her cat to the vet, and pick up her dry cleaning. Occasionally, I’d have to shoo away a schlubby fan who rang the doorbell, the scary-movie-themed star map clenched in his fist. It was an easy job, and the Actress’s damask curtains and self-playing piano comforted me. They were the sorts of things my mother might buy if she had a mansion on Benedict Canyon Drive. My mother and I hadn’t spoken since I began dating Marco, and I wasn’t so dumb that I didn’t see my job for what it was: the Actress paid me to be her best friend, and because I needed a mommy, I allowed the Actress to kiss my cheek as she handed me my paycheck.
The stability was nice too; back then everything felt a little precarious. My three roommates and I made just enough money to cover rent, food, and booze. It was a questionable lifestyle: the shower mold, the stolen cable, and a gangster neighbor who came over with his bong every now and again. I thought I was all right with it, but when I decided to have Marco’s baby a great relief sputtered through me like an undone balloon. I’d been a middling student of English in college, and I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. I was in love with a man my mother had called a “pathetic loser.” Now that I was having his baby, I had a plan, a purpose. “I’m moving out,” I announced to my roommates at the next house meeting. “I’m going to be a mom.” I didn’t try to hide the triumph in my voice.
If I could have been pregnant forever, I would have. I loved watching my body change, it was like puberty but without the emotional trauma, and I loved being doted on. The Actress gave me a bloomer set from Neiman’s and a check for $5,000. Now that I was carrying his baby, Marco called me his girlfriend and always returned my calls. We painted a wall of his studio a bright yellow. The crib would be pushed against it.
I didn’t tell my mother. I imagined one of her friends seeing me at the supermarket and reporting the news, shocked. That I hadn’t broken our stalemate to tell her myself would wound her, and I knew she’d pretend to already know. She was like that: a liar.
Instead, when Marco’s mother asked me to call her Mom, I complied. And when she left our apartment I let Marco fuck me until I neighed and kicked like a horse. Afterward, naked and slick with sweat, my belly so large I couldn’t bend over to tie my own shoes, I let Marco feed me: he knew how to poach eggs, and I loved poached eggs. The yolk would slime down my chin and I’d lick it back into my mouth. I was going to be a mother and for the first time in maybe forever I was happy.
For those thirty-some weeks, Marco and I were in love. I finally held his attention, which was what I’d wanted all along. Did Seth, in his amniotic chamber, intuit all that was happening? Some parents-to-be are too disturbed to have sex during pregnancy. It didn’t bother me, I understand the basics of anatomy, and I felt that if my unborn child were somehow witnessing my congress with his father, it would be a privilege. His papa
loved his mama.
But I must have known that Marco’s attention was temporary. That made me want it all the more badly.
Seth has always been a keen observer, watching at the edge of a scene without offering a single line of dialogue. I bet he came to know the sounds of traffic on Normandie, where we lived, and the tension born of too little residential parking. He must have recognized the coos of his grandmother, Marco’s mother, and felt my annoyance at having to raise the volume on our TV for her. He would have heard the sound of the needle hitting whatever record Marco wanted to play, no matter what time of day or night it was, and the rasp of the Actress’s voice when she called for me from her bedroom. When Seth smelled potpourri and Tiger Balm, he no doubt knew we were in her large dark mansion. I bet he could feel my heart cartwheeling each time I opened the Actress’s front door to see those wide, carpeted stairs, how they split into two at the second floor, like a giant letter T. “A staircase fit for Fred and Ginger,” I said to Marco once. Marco didn’t get it, he didn’t watch old movies, but Seth would.
If Seth came to recognize what was present in his world to come, he must have also sensed what was absent. My mother, for one: her voice, and her hand on my stomach (not that she would have wanted to touch a pregnant belly, but I would have made her). Also: my father and Marco’s father. Both men were dead, which meant that the only male Seth heard regularly was Marco, and Marco didn’t have much use for conversation. I hate to confer magical powers on a mute, but even now I wonder whether my son decided in the womb that he wouldn’t speak. He’d keep it all inside.