Goodbye Without Leaving

by Laurie Colwin

  “Oh, my God,” I said, sitting down. “It’s the baby.”

  Johnny turned green. He had been reading quite a lot about premature labor.

  “I’ll call an ambulance,” he said.

  “Sit down, don’t panic,” I said. “I felt it. I actually felt it. It’s totally amazing. It’s like having a little fish inside. Oh, God! There it is again!”

  We staggered through the crowd into the night. It was very, very cold and I was wrapped up in my warmest coat. I felt quite toasty. In fact, I felt cocooned. I was a cocoon, and inside me some little boy or girl was swimming around in all that nice warm amniotic fluid, which Johnny pointed out in wonderment was mostly baby pee. “They float around in baby pee,” he kept saying.

  “It’s sterile,” I said. “It makes a cushion against shocks.”

  “Baby pee,” he said, shaking his head.

  Now my baby was moving around in its little sac of baby pee and I was wrapped up in my big warm coat. I was the big warm container for this tiny little critter, just as the coat was a container for me. Suddenly I felt as placid and serene as a cow. It was a transporting experience.

  At home I lay in bed in a dreamy state, hogging all the pillows.

  “I should get the Nobel Prize because I’m pregnant,” I said. “Women are so wonderful. Aren’t you jealous?”

  “I’ve never seen you like this,” Johnny said. “It’s probably hormonal.”

  “You could look it up,” I said helpfully.

  As the weeks went by, my little fish fluttered more and more often. “It’s his or her way of saying ‘Hi, Mom!’” said my doctor. As I got bigger and bigger, and winter turned into spring, these flutters became more like flutter kicks and then plain old kicks. One afternoon I felt myself the victim of a woodpecker drilling for bugs in my pelvic bones. I reached for one of Johnny’s birth books, which I consulted to see what my developing fetus looked like. It now looked like an actual baby, only small. A drilling sensation, it said, is usually the fetus having hiccoughs.” I dialed Johnny right away.

  “Mr. Miller’s office,” said the smooth, cool receptionist.

  “Oh, hello, Olivia. This is Geraldine. Is Johnny there?”

  “I’m afraid he’s not,” said Olivia, as if she had never heard of me and had no idea what I wanted. Olivia was small-boned and taut and wore her hair in a chignon, never had a hair out of place, a stain on her sweater or a sagging hem. She was perfect and distant and at office parties I found it was necessary to repress the desire to kick her.

  “May I take a message?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Tell him his baby has the hiccoughs in utero. I thought he’d like to know.”

  “Thank you,” said Olivia, and hung up.

  29

  As I got bigger and bigger, I found that I was a magnet for advice.

  Mrs. Willhall took one look at me and said, “Coconut oil.”

  I asked her if I was supposed to drink it or cook with it or what.

  “You rub it on yourself,” she said. “It keeps the skin pliant. And you’ll never get any stretch marks at all. I know this because, aside from Desdemona, the Reverend and I have seven others.”

  Although she did not look sylphlike, neither did she look like the mother of eight, so like a good girl I went around the corner to the botanica to get some oil.

  I had passed this shop hundreds of times. In the window were holy candles, tiny plastic replicas of the Virgin Mary surrounded by what looked like the Seven Dwarfs, tin jars with labels that read “Power in Love” and “High Conquering Incense,” and large bottles of some kind of cologne with shells, herbs and charms floating at the bottom.

  The man behind the counter was a squat, white-haired person with spectacles.

  “Do you have coconut oil?” I said.

  He produced a large brown bottle. “For ju,” he said. “Ju need candles? Or lotion? We also have these for praying. Ju have bad foot, ju take this.” He pulled out a little foot made out of shiny, silvery metal, which Mary later told me was called an ex-voto. “Or for a good baby, here.” He put into my hand a flat silver baby wearing an adult-looking smile.

  “I’ll take it,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

  “Ju are going to have a gwomang,” the man said.

  “Really?” I said. “A woman! I wondered who was inside there.”

  Back at the foundation I showed my silver baby to the Bopper.

  “Oh, you went to the voodoo store, yeah?”

  “I did.”

  “They sell some weird shit in there,” the Bopper said. “I had a Puerto Rican girlfriend once. She wanted me to marry her. She went and got this stuff called Agua Conunga. I woke up one morning smelling like a French whorehouse. She put it all over me while I was asleep.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Well, almost,” said the Bopper. “Then she painted it on this other guy and he married her. I got some for my sister. I told her, ‘This stuff is Get-him-to-marry-me lotion.’ It worked on her boyfriend.”

  “The guy in the botanica told me I was going to have a gwomang.”

  “You’re not,” said the Bopper. “I’ve got a great record on this. You’re having a man, take my word.”

  As I sat in my local coffee shop one morning putting Tabasco on my scrambled eggs, the woman next to me said, “Never eat pepper when pregnant. It makes the children excitable.”

  I was told not to travel on the subway (because of squashing) or the bus (because of jolts) or by car (potential crashes). I was told to drink large quantities of milk (for bone development) or no milk at all (because it makes babies mucousy) and to eat lots of meat (for protein) or no meat (possible parasites).

  As for my mother and mother-in-law, between the two of them I felt more squashed than in any subway. Finally they had me where they wanted me. I was something they recognized. The daughter who had run off with a rock and roll act and who refused to dress nicely, the daughter-in-law who worked up in God-knows-where for God-knows-who, had turned into a classifiable object: a pregnant woman. With Gertrude on one arm and Dolly on the other, I felt about to be led off to jail. They took me to a nice ladies’ luncheon place and fed me chicken salad sandwiches.

  “I’ll have coffee,” I said.

  “No, darling,” said Dolly. “Coffee’s bad for the baby.”

  “All right. Tea.”

  “Tea has the same amount of caffeine and is more corrosive,” said my mother. “Now, after lunch, we thought we’d take you over to Saks to see about a layette.”

  “I don’t want a layette,” I said. “It’s not even April Fools’ Day. This kid isn’t due till the Fourth of July. It’s bad luck.”

  “You ought to be prepared,” said Dolly. “My mother saw to it that I was totally outfitted long before Johnny came along.”

  “Besides, first babies often come early,” said Gertrude. “Like that poor Feldman girl. Her baby looked like a mouse.”

  “A mouse,” I mused “How interesting. Then it would have been way too small to fit into any regular stuff in a layette, right?”

  The real purpose of this lunch was to get me to quit my job.

  “We’re very worried,” said Dolly.

  “There are too many variables,” said Gertrude.

  “It isn’t a safe part of town,” said Dolly. “Johnny’s really frantic.”

  “After all, it’s our grandchild you’re carrying,” said Gertrude.

  “We’d be happy to go up with you and explain everything to that nice minister you work for.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to envision the Reverend Willhall, surrounded by his wife Queenie and Desdemona, being confronted by two white matrons in mink coats.

  I said, “I’m not quitting. I get fed a terrific lunch every day and I love my job.”

  “I think you ought to have a better sense of priorities,” said my mother. “You may be endangering your child.”

  “I don’t think working in Harlem endangers my child. After
all, there are tons of children in Harlem.”

  “Yes, darling, but not our children.”

  “Ma,” I said. “That really sounds like a first-class racist remark.”

  “That’s very unfair,” my mother said. “You know how many colored members of the Artists League there are. I have many black colleagues. Eva Toussaint is on the board with me, a lovely woman. It isn’t about black people. It’s about the neighborhood you work in.”

  “Which is full of black people,” I said

  “Now, Geraldine, you are hardly being fair to your mother,” said Dolly. “We both have a perfectly legitimate cause for concern.”

  “In my pregnancy book it says that harassment of the pregnant mother by mothers and mothers-in-law is bad for the developing fetus,” I said.

  Dolly and my mother sighed and drank their glasses of white wine. We finished our lunch, but the subject was far from closed. For the rest of our time together we discussed such fascinating subjects as why breast-feeding was old-fashioned (neither of them had done it), why I should have a baby nurse (since I obviously didn’t know what I was doing, and they had had baby nurses) and how good it was that I was having a summer baby but not a late summer baby so it could ripen up and gain weight for the cold weather. Apparently it was the only thing I had done right, so I didn’t have the heart to tell them it was a matter of pure luck.

  30

  For a while it seemed to me that my condition would make social life easier. After all, a pregnant woman is a conversation starter. Didn’t strangers on buses ask me when my due date was or where I was going to deliver? I figured Johnny’s colleagues—at least the women colleagues—might ask me a question or two and I could give a normal answer. But it was not to be. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to talk about having babies. They had either had them a long time ago, like Betty Lister, or had decided not to have any for a while, or had had them a few years ago and now were more interested in things like social adjustment and reading scores.

  However, I could not be denied. Johnny and I went to another of the Listers’ dinner parties—they loved a dinner party as hogs love mud, and Betty must have felt that it was rude to let me sit there like some excrescence without giving me so much as a flicker of acknowledgment Besides, I was quite a sight. A brief tour of the shops that sold maternity clothes had convinced me that I would rather be fried in boiling oil than wear what was considered proper for a pregnant woman. It was strange enough to be pregnant without having to redo my style totally. So instead I found a skimpy, yet shapeless black garment which I wore with black suede boots. I found myself drawn to eye makeup and would have worn my old false eyelashes from my dancing days had I not been stopped by my husband.

  We sat having drinks in the Listers’ living room, or rather everyone had a glass of wine and I had ginger ale, since alcohol was damaging to the developing fetus. Betty’s foundation gave money to a group that did prenatal outreach to poor women and encouraged them not to drink or smoke and to have frequent checkups.

  “If no one was permitted to drink, there would be no babies born in France,” said Adrien McWirter, who was also drinking ginger ale. He had gone on the wagon and was now allowed back at the Listers’ hearth. I had longed to meet him. Hadn’t he slipped a cornichon down the dress of the wife of the dean of the law school? Hadn’t he once tried to sit on the lap of the Chief Justice of London?

  “Now, Adrien,” said Betty. “You know that isn’t true.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Adrien. “My three children are perfectly civilized and intelligent, and Helen drank whatever she pleased through each pregnancy. And it didn’t do them a scrap of harm.”

  “But we know better now,” said Betty. “Besides, think how many of their brain cells might have been killed off. They might have been geniuses.”

  “They are geniuses,” said Adrien. “Maybe Helen was just pretending to drink. Maybe it was white grape juice all along and the old girl was having one over on me.”

  “Oh, Adrien, do shut up,” said Betty fondly.

  “I will shut up, if you let me sit next to that nice young mother-to-be at dinner.”

  “Now, Geraldine,” Betty said, sitting down next to me. “Here are the most important two words of advice I can give you—I’m an old, old hand at babies. Stein Agency.”

  “Are they in the music business?” I said, confused.

  She laughed. “No, dear. They’re the best baby-sitting agency in the city. They’ll find you baby nurses and nannies and night sitters. They are perfectly wonderful, and totally reliable. We used them for years and years. Our baby nurse came from the Stein Agency and so did both our nannies, and when our regular baby-sitters—we had a nice squad of teenage girls in the neighborhood—when they couldn’t make it, we’d simply dial up Stein and they’d send some really wonderful person over.”

  “You mean, you left a baby with someone the baby had never seen before?”

  Betty Lister gave me a kind of consoling look. She said, “It isn’t the way it sounds at all. Children take terribly well to someone whose only apparent interest is them. You’ll see. The most important thing is your relationship with Johnny. So many women of my generation let that go all to hell. Baby this! Baby that! Walking around with baby spit-up on their shoulders, looking a fright! Never going out! Totally fixated on their babies. That’s not good for anyone.”

  Here at last, I thought, was the second opinion.

  “I went straight back to work,” Betty said. “I was just starting out at the foundation. Let me tell you, between you and me, babies are just a tiny bit boring.”

  Naturally this conversation depressed me. It seemed so likely that I might be the sort of person who fixated on my baby and had baby spit-up all over my shoulders. Besides, I had hated baby-sitters as a child and I thought the idea of leaving a baby with someone it had never seen before was sort of sociopathological.

  I perked up considerably at dinner. Adrien McWirter sat next to me.

  “Please don’t put a cornichon down my back,” I said.

  “Aha!” he said. “My beautiful reputation precedes me. Now listen. You and I know …” He leaned over and whispered into my ear. “… that Betty is really full of shit. Her children are now the most awful fascist slime. Don’t listen to her. Babies are delicious. When mine were little I was working at home and I sniffed ’em and bathed ’em and changed their little diapers. I personally adore baby spit-up, and you will too.”

  “Gee, I hope so,” I said. “I hear there’s quite a lot of it. Everyone’s talking about it.”

  “Ah, birth. Amazing. Sitting next to a pregnant woman makes me feel all tingly. I adore what you’re wearing, by the way. Most women wear the most terrible things when they’re in pig—to cover up the essential fact.”

  “Essential fact?”

  “Sex, heat, eros,” he said. “That’s what it’s all about, yes? I get on the subway and see all these pretty young women big as houses. Christ, they’re apartments, with little babies rattling around inside, and you can’t but look at them and speculate about the way they got there.”

  “Mostly it’s the usual way,” I said, mashing my spoon delicately into my chocolate mousse. “Although sometimes it’s more high-tech.”

  “You know what I mean,” he said. “You imagine them at it.”

  For the first time in my adult life, I felt myself blush.

  “You wouldn’t have lunch with me, would you?” he whispered.

  “I don’t think that would be too cool,” I said.

  “What are you two conspiring about down there?” Betty said. “Come on, join the conversation. We’re talking about Latin America.”

  “I’m trying to get this young woman to have an assignation with me,” said Adrien McWirter.

  “Now, Adrien, try to be good, you silly man,” said Betty.

  “You seemed to have a lot more fun tonight,” Johnny said. “Being pregs is a big asset. Was McWirter really trying to pick you up?”

 
; “No,” I said. “He was just being silly.”

  “That’s what we thought,” said Johnny.

  “How lucky,” I yawned, “of you to be right.” And I fell asleep on the spot.

  31

  Finally the spring burst forth. The leaves shot out on the trees and the buds exploded into flower, causing hay fever sufferers to suffer. The Reverend Willhall, solemn and funereal on the best of days, now seemed to be a man in constant tears. He was allergic to almost anything that grew and he was a mess. He walked around the foundation, his eyes streaming, blowing his nose into an enormous handkerchief the size of a pillowcase.

  I myself felt wonderful, but I could barely overcome my constant urge to nap. At my desk I yawned constantly. Tears from yawning spilled down my cheeks and onto my papers. My unborn baby, now known as “Little,” had become a positive acrobat. When I sat down or curled up to take a nap, he or she began a strenuous aerobics routine.

  My mother was not pleased that, although I had had the test for genetic abnormalities also revealed gender, Johnny and I had decided against asking what we were having.

  “It’s just nonsense,” my mother said. “Your doctor knows. Why shouldn’t you know?”

  “My doctor also knows what my cervix looks like, Ma,” I said.

  “It’s hardly the same thing,” said my mother. “Think of all the planning we could do if you knew.”

  It was her opinion that only girls kicked so ardently. I had kept her awake night after night after night. Now I was kept awake. My baby knocked around inside me all night long, and then spent the morning knocking the coffee cup off my lap. It was only when I walked that he or she took a nice little snooze, and all I really wanted was a little snooze, too.

  Eventually it occurred to me that I must quit my job. In truth I had run out of things to do. Johnny wanted to go to his parents’ summer house for a week, and I was tired of dragging myself up to the foundation. As much as I hated to do it, I knew I had to. On a hot day in June, I did it.