The Birthdays

by Heidi Pitlor

  Jake took her hand and pulled her off the table, only then fully realizing the enormity of what they’d just seen. Two babies. At once.

  “Come on,” she said. “It’s so great. It’s good, at least, isn’t it?”

  He nodded, reached for her purse on the chair and watched her turn and rush out of the room. Two babies at once. He clutched her purse to his side.

  In his narrow, bright office that smelled of rubber, Dr. M. explained the risks they faced: early birth, infection, birth defects, death in utero. He spoke plainly, as if he were selling them windows. And for Liz, he continued, there were more risks. High blood pressure, gestational diabetes, hemorrhage, infection. She would need six more weeks of shots and would probably spend at least some of her third trimester on bed rest. After a brief silence and a long sigh, Liz asked him about traveling to Great Salt (“Fine, just don’t push yourself”) and vitamins, caffeine and exercise. “What about sex?” Jake blurted. They hadn’t had any since before she’d gotten pregnant. She’d been too tired, too nauseous, too preoccupied, too something virtually every night. “Is it okay?”

  “By all means, just not for three days.”

  Jake glanced at Liz, but her eyes were on her lap.

  He had told his family that she was pregnant, but he hadn’t told any of them about the twins yet—they would all be together soon enough, and he wanted to tell them in person. Jake and Liz had hoped for children since before he could remember, and he thought having them should feel more singular, more monumental than it did in the context of Brenda’s pregnancy. But now there was the matter of two, he thought as they drove home from the doctor’s office that day. Not that he was competitive, not that he wanted to outdo Daniel in any way, but as the middle child, he was aware that he was always—consciously or subconsciously—vying for the spotlight in his family. He’d read several books about birth order, and middle children finding themselves less special, less visible to their parents than the eldest and youngest. Middle children grow up feeling squeezed, without the rights of the eldest or the privileges of the youngest children, and often seek to establish an identity separate from the family. While doing so helps them assert their individuality, it can also lead to feelings of exclusion and loneliness within the family. He’d read a few passages aloud to Liz, perhaps to explain a few things about himself. She’d seemed interested at first but after a while had begun to fidget, perhaps because she was an only child and couldn’t relate to any of this. Or perhaps because she’d grown tired of listening to Jake constantly try to understand himself, something he couldn’t seem to stop doing despite his best efforts. At any rate, he had read somewhere that psychologists were giving birth order more credence in personality studies and that it could be used in certain cases as a predictor. He wondered now what it would mean to have two children born at the same time. Would there even be a real birth order? Who knew what would happen to such children, and how would this determine their identities? Would they be more competitive with each other?

  Jake and Liz had started trying in earnest to have children five years ago. The first night they’d tried was on the island. Liz had lined the windowsills of the bedroom with candles, and the smell of them—lavender, vanilla, lilac—made his nose itch and run. He must have told her thirty times before that he couldn’t stand scented candles. The waves crashed predictably outside the walls. As she brushed her teeth, he lay in bed and, smoothing the sheets around him, was struck by the force of expectation. The moon was full, crickets chirped outside the windows, a warm breeze blew across his face. The world seemed to be aligning itself in expectation, and he told himself to relax, it was just another night. He’d made love to his wife before—he certainly knew what he was doing. The curtains billowed with the breeze and sank. Liz stepped out of the bathroom wearing her green flannel pajamas. She looked like a big child, a wing of hair poking out from the left side of her head. When they did make love it was no different than it ever was, though perhaps quicker, and afterward, they lay side by side on their backs and stared up at the shadows of moonlight in stripes across the waves, reflecting off the beams of their ceiling. Light twice removed from its source.

  The island was like another planet for Jake as a boy. His parents had taken them a couple of times before Hilary was born. He’d first swum in the ocean here, first seen a girl’s breasts (a big wave had tackled her and yanked off her bikini, leaving her tangled in strings of seaweed on the rocky beach, the poor thing); he’d first gotten poison ivy here; first eaten clams. Everything about the place was rugged and natural and raw. And quiet. A quiet so thick his thoughts and words seemed to hold much more significance here. Jake’s parents joked with each other in their bed, and deep under his blankets against the night cold, he heard them across the room of the bed and breakfast, whispering and laughing, then shushing each other lest they wake the boys. They were lighter and more affectionate here with each other, as well as with him and Daniel.

  After he and Liz married, they visited the island frequently and even discussed moving here. But eventually they decided against it. Their friends and jobs were in Portland, and he could certainly never work from home—the other partners wouldn’t agree to that. Plus life on the island would be too isolated, the frequent winter nor’easters oppressive. Normal people just didn’t live here year-round, not that he’d ever admit this thought to Liz. She idealized the islanders, those earthy men who fished for a living, the innkeepers and reclusive artists and aging hippies. But five years ago, when Jake and Liz were walking along the beach to their bed and breakfast, they spotted a FOR SALE sign in front of a run-down bungalow, its clapboards weathered gray. The house was empty and the walls rotted through in the back. Termites spilled from the side of the kitchen wall. One window was broken, the others etched in jagged cracks, but Jake had not been promoted yet and they couldn’t have afforded much more. The two sneaked around back, looking in at the bowed wood floors and stained walls, the fireplace filled with trash. The sun had just begun to set, and the light blinked at them from a small, dusty mirror on the wall. “Think what we could do with this place,” Liz said, and Jake admitted liking it too. Well, liking its location, really. The house was a complete dump, but Liz had always wanted to live by the water—it’d been her one big dream in life, she’d said. “We could fix it up slowly, just do it in little increments that we can afford. Think of what this land is probably worth. I mean, it’s right on the beach.” And though he had deep reservations about the condition of the place, about the dangers of storms and the possibilities of erosion, about the financial and logistical burdens of maintaining a second home, Jake sold off some stock, drained his retirement account and called it a birthday present to her. She melted with gratitude and excitement and the most palpable love when he first told her about it, and he knew then that he’d done the right thing. He’d never acted this spontaneously before, he often mused, and fortunately they soon had the resources to fully renovate it.

  Jake imagined that when they had children, they’d bring them here and spend days on the water, canoeing or kayaking, and nights shucking clams and husking corn and telling ghost stories. He’d give them the clichéd happy childhood he never had. Most of his family vacations had involved accompanying his father on business trips to auto conventions in Detroit or Chicago, and most of what Jake could remember about such places was fighting with Daniel or Hilary in the lukewarm hotel pool. When Jake was small, he was a little afraid of the water, but Daniel loved to swim. As Jake dog-paddled around the shallow end, he’d watch his brother sprint to the end of the diving board, fly into the air in wriggling motions and land with as much weight as possible. Then Daniel would tear across the water toward Jake, pounce on top of him and hold him under the surface for what seemed like minutes. When Daniel finally let go, Jake would pop back above the water, gasping for breath, choking, streams of snot pouring from his nose, his eyes stinging. Hilary, also fearless in the water, would laugh at him and yell, “Sick! You have green s
not all over your face!” and all the other kids in the pool would turn to look. He’d lunge for Daniel, who’d duck underwater and swim off, and then the whole thing would start again. His mother never stepped in and told Daniel to stop or Hilary to be quiet. His father always off at conventions, Jake remembered his mother calmly holding court on a chaise lounge beside the pool, drinking cans of Tab and chatting with the other parents, whose kids splashed around beside them, her bobbed brown hair held back from her face by a navy blue and white scarf, her chest and stomach bulky in her navy swimsuit with its polka-dotted skirt. Completely oblivious to the torment going on right in front of her.

  Jake’s father returned to the hotel room each night, flopped across the bed and switched on the television as their mother helped them into their pajamas. He would, however, read to them before they drifted off to sleep, and sometimes tell them stories of his day, of a strange new car he’d seen that was shaped like an egg, of a salesman he’d met who had ten children, and another who’d visited every baseball park in the country. Because they didn’t see him as much, he came to seem more mysterious than Jake’s mother, more intriguing and thus important. With an unremarkable sentence or two, Joe had the power to put Jake utterly at ease. When he once pulled his father aside and told him about what had happened in the pool earlier, Joe said solemnly, “I’ll have a talk with your brother and sister, all right? Try to put it out of your mind now.” Jake nodded and, amazingly, his frustration toward his siblings completely dissolved.

  *

  Liz sat in the car as Jake carried out their bags and slid them into the trunk. Jake had forbade her from helping him pack or load the bags in the car. He doted on her these days, though she continually reassured him that she felt fine, that she wouldn’t break in half, nor would the babies. “I’m pregnant, not dying,” she said as he’d walked her to the car just now, and he replied that he was well aware of this fact, and he was. He simply enjoyed taking care of her. “I got it,” she said as he opened the door for her and guided her forward. “I feel just fine, I promise.” A thought popped into his head: Then perhaps you’ll be in the mood for a little something once we get to the island. After all, it had been four days since the bleeding, longer than the doctor recommended, and eight weeks or so since the last time they’d made love, and they had to enjoy themselves now because once the pregnancy progressed and especially once the babies were born, he suspected that they wouldn’t have the opportunity or simultaneous desire or energy level for sex, at least for a very long time.

  She drummed her fingers against the window and gazed out at their house. Once he’d filled the back seat with the plywood he’d bought to make a ramp over the front step and the new bathtub bench for Daniel, he walked to the passenger’s side and pressed his lips against the outside of her window. She made a disgusted face, and when he took his seat behind the wheel, she said, “That window’s dirty.”

  “I don’t care,” he said, and leaned toward her again.

  “Get those filthy lips away from me,” she barked, and he pushed his face against hers. “Yuck! Stop!” she howled, and shoved him a little too hard. His arm smacked the steering wheel and then the horn, and he felt a quick ache in his wrist, as well as a flash of irritation that she wouldn’t just kiss him. She was now laughing at a squirrel that had been next to the car and leapt into another squirrel after it heard the loud honk of the horn.

  They headed out and Liz reached for the radio dial.

  “You feeling up for a little something this weekend? Maybe before everyone gets there?” he asked.

  “What?” She settled on classical music. Chopin, he guessed. “I don’t know, maybe.”

  “Dr. M. said it was fine. It’s been four days. And, what, eight weeks before that?” He immediately regretted saying it this way, as if he’d been keeping track.

  “Frankly I am happy to take a prolonged break from doing it so much.” She looked at him. “Come on, you got tired of it too. I distinctly remember you saying you were worried that your pecker would fall off from overuse. Remember, before that last IVF?”

  “I guess you’re right.” He gazed at the traffic light ahead of them. “But my pecker’s still here. It managed to hang on.”

  “All right, all right, we’ll give it some attention later,” she groaned.

  It was as if he were demanding the moon from her right now. But she was just tired because of the pregnancy, he reminded himself. She was just grouchy and tired. Let it go. He drew a deep breath and tried to think of a way to change the subject.

  The drive slipped by, and they brainstormed a list of what they’d need to buy when they returned home after the weekend: another crib, car seat, stroller. Liz jotted down the list in the small blue notebook she kept in her purse. She chewed on the end of her pen happily as she thought of more items, and her cheerfulness began to rub off on him. He imagined announcing the news of the twins to his parents, and wondered what their expressions would be, and then what his brother and sister would say. He couldn’t help smiling.

  —

  Hilary knocked on the front door, but she was three hours early and no one answered. She looked up at the clapboard house perched on a slope overlooking the ocean. It was obvious they’d added on a side porch and a couple of rooms to the right, but the addition was tastefully done. The house had been stained a subdued gray, and tall rosebushes lined the front, the flowers electric red in contrast with the gray. She could have been looking at the pages of a magazine. Jake had done well for himself. This fact still amazed her.

  She sat on the front stoop, rubbed her fingertips together, an old habit, and reached in her handbag for a piece of chewing gum. She’d had to give up smoking six months ago and, well, that’d be one thing her family would be grateful for. Not that she’d ever smoked in front of them. Only Daniel. Only he could handle such a thing, and only he knew that she was pregnant.

  Leaving her suitcase, she walked around the house and down a sandy path that had been cut into dense reeds to a rocky beach where seagulls pecked at an enormous black lump. The air smelled of something dead. She turned from the birds and the water rumbling in short waves to the shore. Hilary had never liked the beach, the sand everywhere, invading shoes and bags and books and food, the men and women who were content to sit still for hours outside until their skin resembled cured meat, but in Maine the beaches were different and far less crowded. They were rockier, more dangerous, and the weather was entirely unpredictable. She respected these things. She’d only been to Maine once, in high school with a friend, but she still remembered walking barefoot on the beach at night and skinny-dipping in the frigid water with some older boys they’d met.

  Yesterday, she’d taken an overnight flight from San Francisco and, from the airport in Portland, a bus to the ferry. A short old man who worked on the boat had carried her bag up the gangplank and offered to buy her a soda. Another had gingerly lifted her bag down the gangplank and led her to a cab. She wouldn’t have expected such kind treatment—she’d all but written off Northeasterners as stoic and icy. The cab she took to Jake’s house was a beat-up station wagon painted pink and purple, and the driver a funny elderly woman who told raunchy jokes the entire way. Hilary listened as she struggled to remember the punch lines and accidentally gave them away too early. “Christ,” the woman said, “I do that sometimes.”

  “It’s all right. No one’s perfect.” When they’d reached her brother’s house, Hilary pressed a large tip into the old woman’s hand.

  Now she decided to walk the mile or so back into town to kill time. She rarely walked much of anywhere anymore and she thought the exercise would probably do her good. She’d never been to Great Salt Island. So far it appeared to be a typical New England tourist spot: quaint, candy-colored houses with picket fences, and, back near the ferry, an ice cream stand, a seafood restaurant named the Mermaid’s Table. She didn’t see the appeal of such a place that throttled visitors with its cuteness. She walked along the road and a stooped old ma
n looked up from his yard at her, this tall, pregnant thirty-five-year-old woman with black hair, pasty skin, a nose ring, several tattoos. She wore large black sunglasses, a floppy straw hat, a black sundress and carried an oversized black bag. Hilary called loudly, “Well, hi there, sir. Nice day, isn’t it? It sure is beautiful,” and the man nodded carefully and turned back to his house.

  In town, she found a bookstore, Books & Beans, where she ordered decaffeinated tea and sat on a tall stool at a metal table. The place smelled of San Francisco—of coffee and musky incense and something clean and fake, maybe room deodorizer. In the corner stood an unmanned counter where lottery and ferry tickets were sold. As far as she could see, she was the only customer in the place. The weather was warm and sunny except for a few scattered clouds, and everyone else on the island was probably at the beach—except for the boy, or man, who’d sold her the tea. Now he was wiping off the table next to hers with a stained brown rag, and he cleared his throat. Something about him was faintly familiar. Tall, somewhat attractive, with an endearingly round face and a closely trimmed beard, he could have been anywhere from eighteen to thirty, maybe older. Hilary picked up a magazine that lay on the stool next to her.

  “It’s nice out there today.” His voice was quiet and deep.

  “Nice enough,” she said.

  He turned and continued wiping the tables.

  She rubbed her fingertips together, looked at her watch and saw that she still had over two hours before she had to be at Jake’s. With the money her father had sent her, Hilary had been able to travel across the country. Five years ago she never would have come, though her father would have insisted and her mother would have told her she was being selfish. Jake would have called and lectured her about being a good daughter, and Daniel would have sent her a drawing of him alone on a beach, half smiling, half frowning.