The Birthdays

by Heidi Pitlor

  But now, of course, everything had changed—and even more than they knew. It wasn’t just her pregnancy. Her father and mother were getting older, her brother was in a wheelchair. The three Miller kids were about to become parents. Her life had seemed one long, faintly wavy gray line until a year and a half ago, when the line began to go haywire after Daniel’s accident. She now tried to define what her life had become—a spastic electrocardiogram? or a circle? She wasn’t quite sure yet where or in what way, exactly, her life would continue, and she constantly, desperately worried about her lack of a plan. So she regularly reinvented her future, and at first she’d considered not keeping the baby. As she stared at the plus sign on the plastic wand, she said aloud to herself, What is it, one percent that the pill doesn’t work for? She’d worked in a clinic when she first moved to San Francisco, registering quiet, sad, newly pregnant women—and quickly nullifying the whole thing would’ve been easy. She’d just go to the clinic and get rid of it and continue on as before. But after a pregnant friend showed her ultrasound images of her own baby, and Hilary saw the spine like a strand of pearls in one photo, the boy or girl’s upturned nose in another, she began to wonder what the tiny embryo inside her looked like, and what sort of person it would grow into. She didn’t have too many more fertile years left, and why not just move forward with this? She vowed to become a great mother. She’d learn to cook and clean and dote on the child, and, well, that future quickly came to seem ludicrous—after all, what about work and money and other burdens of reality? She considered asking her father for more money (but she couldn’t; once or twice a year he secretly sent her what he could, but she knew he couldn’t afford any more), or just finding a higher-paying job, day care, then trying to partner up with some friend or man who had kids too and forming some patchwork family. Ideas came and went, each one eventually turning unappealing or unrealistic or just plain impossible. And in the wake of an idea gone sour, she felt a sharp panic that, when combined with thoughts of her parents and Jake learning of her pregnancy, kept her unable to sleep at night.

  She was now considering staying on the East Coast, maybe finding a smaller town here and starting over. A week ago, her apartment was robbed when she was at work, and she’d lost her television and computer. Fortunately, the robbers hadn’t found the ruby earrings and necklace Daniel had given her for her twenty-first birthday, or the ebony bracelet she’d bought herself last year. A few days later she’d witnessed a mugging on her way to work: a pretty, youngish woman in a suit, a long-haired man, a gun. Hilary saw him approach the woman, grab her wrist and press the nose of the gun into the small of her back, and Hilary did nothing—but what could she have done, she asked herself again and again later. He grabbed the woman’s purse and a duffel bag she was carrying and tore down the street. The woman screamed. A crowd gathered and swallowed her and Hilary continued on to work, but all day the sight of the gun pressing into the woman’s back stayed with her. Crime rates were up in her neighborhood, the only one in San Francisco where she could afford to live, and she felt increasingly unsafe as she lay in bed alone each night. Her contract through the temp agency with the insurance company would be up soon—thankfully, since everyone else there was meek and boring and appalled by her, she could tell, appalled just by the look of her. Her hair color constantly changing. Her clothes, her perfume, her jewelry, large and sharp and silver and menacing. And worst of all, she was pregnant with no husband at the ripe age of thirty-five. She had to assume what her coworkers were thinking because they never got close enough to her to express one thing. They just hovered near her, tentatively dropping folders on her desk, smiling tautly. But again, her contract was almost up and her rent even in her neighborhood was ridiculously high and everyone in San Francisco looked happy all the time, carefree, oblivious to the crime, and wealthy and healthy, and eventually she’d come to miss the East Coast, its moody people and weather.

  She had no pets, no plants, nothing that needed tending. Her lease was month-to-month. She’d let several friends know her apartment would be available soon, packed and left.

  Behind the cash register now, the boy/man read a magazine about guitars. Hilary watched his head move slightly as his eyes took in the words.

  “Do you like living here?” she said.

  He looked up. “I like it, but in the summer there are too many tourists.”

  “Ah. What’s it like before we get here?” she asked.

  He leaned on the counter and rested his head in his hands. “It’s nice. Everyone knows everyone.”

  “What’s it really like?”

  He looked at her sideways. “Less crowded, as you might guess.”

  Hilary was disappointed. She’d wanted more, a surprising secret maybe, something only the people who lived here knew. She continued flipping through the magazine on the table, glancing at the advertisements for women’s shoes, handbags, jewelry, perfume. “Maybe you could show me around the island,” she finally said to him, and thought a moment. “I’d pay you to be my tour guide.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Come on. It’d be easy money, and an adventure.”

  “I guess I could.”

  “Just for a couple hours.”

  He shrugged. “I’m free after my shift is over, if you want to wait fifteen minutes.”

  “It’s a plan.”

  He pulled the rag across the front counter. His arms were lined in small muscles and his shoulders stretched wide. It finally dawned on her—of course, he looked a little like one of the possible fathers, Bill David. So ridiculous, she still thought, his two first names. Bill, her neighbor, was a struggling musician by night and a secretary at a real estate firm by day. She’d pictured him in a tie, his hair pulled neatly back, bringing other men coffee and typing up their letters. Inexplicably the images touched her at first. Bill had a cat, also strangely touching, who regularly climbed out his window and onto the ledge of hers. Beatle scratched at the wooden frame and refused to stop until she let him in. The first time she heard the scratch of claws, just after she’d moved in, she thought someone was trying to break in. She grabbed an umbrella, the closest thing to her, and hid in the kitchen. The scratching continued, and then a whining, something she mistook for a door creaking. She panicked and sat on the floor of her kitchen, brought her knees to her chest and edged herself back against her cabinets. She remembered reading something yesterday about another attack in the neighborhood. She pushed her lips together, squeezed her knees tighter. An eternity passed, and the clawing continued, the whining, and then came a louder noise, a definite meow. She slowly uncurled herself, her chest still thumping, and headed back into her bedroom, where she made eye contact with a heavyset tabby. “Fuck you,” she said aloud. “Fuck you and your family and your owners.” She went back to what she was doing. What was it? Reading? Was she about to take a shower? The scratching continued, the meowing grew louder. Hilary walked back to her bedroom window and engaged in a staring contest with the cat, who made it clear that he was going nowhere, not now, not ever, until at least she let him inside. So she did, hoping that if the thing got inside it might realize her apartment was nothing special and finally leave her alone. Hours later, when Beatle was nestled like a hen at her feet as she read a magazine, a knock came at her door, and it was Bill David.

  The boy/man motioned for Hilary to follow him. A stout older woman appeared behind the register and he handed her a set of keys, then led Hilary through a storage room, its walls lined with boxes of cups and lids.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Alex.”

  “Alex, I’m Hilary. You’re not going to take me somewhere and hurt me are you?”

  He laughed. “That’s not exactly the way we do things here. This is probably one of the safest places on earth.”

  “Good to know.”

  In the unpaved parking area, he pulled a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door of a small, beat-up green car. He got in and re
ached over to unlock her side, and she squeezed herself into this car that smelled of gasoline and animals. She was reminded of Bill David and Beatle again, and Bill’s girlfriend, a short redhead he brought home a few weeks after he and Hilary had begun sleeping together. He was very open about Jackie, a name that made Hilary think of clowns, for some reason. Bill introduced them and beamed at Hilary when he brought Jackie home for dinner, as if to say, Isn’t it great? Isn’t she great? Hilary winced—she would like to have been consulted, at least, especially when Bill and Jackie decided soon after to move into another apartment together—but all the while, down in San Diego was George, Possible Father #2, whom she saw every few months, and who made the situation, if nothing else, more balanced.

  They drove out of town and passed the ocean beneath a steep hill to their left. “So you’re pregnant,” he said.

  “Indeed.”

  “Any father for it?”

  “Actually, I’m going to have the baby on my own,” she said. She’d said the words plenty of times before, but they still sounded odd. Her mother would faint. Jake would be speechless.

  “I figured as much.”

  “You did? You figured at all?”

  “Sure,” he said, and slid his hands from the top to the bottom of the steering wheel. “I imagine what’s going on with most of the customers. How do you think I stay awake at that place?”

  “Coffee?”

  “Ha.”

  They passed a large pond on the right where a group of kids fished and another skimmed stones. Hilary thought it an odd but happy sight. Kids here still skimmed stones over water. It seemed something that would have faded with black-and-white television and poodle skirts. She decided her child would skim stones. She would teach her, or him. He/she would climb trees and swim and they would go camping, she thought, though she’d only been once herself, and only as an adult, but as a child she’d always wanted to load up the family car and head into the woods with her brothers and parents. She remembered suggesting this and her mother balking at the idea of bugs, her father saying he’d done his sleeping outside in the war, Jake whining about bears and coyotes. Daniel liked the idea, and promised her he’d take her one day when they were old enough, and eventually he did. Alex probably went camping with his family when he was young. He probably still camped.

  “What else did you imagine about me?” she asked.

  “You’re the youngest.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “You’ve got this rebellious way, but all you really want is to be different from your older siblings. It’s a classic thing, really.”

  “You sound like a book.”

  “I can’t help it. I work around them.”

  “What else?”

  “I can’t figure out the father thing. A friend, maybe? A coworker?”

  Hilary held her hands together on her lap. “Could be.”

  “You’re not going to tell me.”

  “No.”

  “Well then. Be mysterious.”

  She leaned the side of her face against the cool window. “What about you? Tell me something about yourself. Do you have brothers and sisters?”

  “I’m an only child. I’m pretty textbook—self-absorbed, immature, all the good stuff. I live for adrenaline. Get bored easily.”

  “And apparently you’re self-aware,” she said. She couldn’t help thinking he was trying to prepare her for something. “Where are you taking me?”

  “It’s a mystery.”

  “I see. That’s how it works here.” She didn’t know who’d started this banter, but it buoyed their conversation, and though she wanted to hear more about what he apparently knew about her, she couldn’t think of a way to turn the conversation back without seeming self-absorbed. She decided just not to say anything, to let him take her somewhere and to try to enjoy this private tour. She looked out at the passing houses perched like eager girls wearing pastel dresses close to the side of the road, and soon the houses became more dilapidated, their porches sagging and paint peeling. On one house hung a battered Soviet flag, on another an enormous sheet spray-painted with a peace symbol.

  Hilary often wondered what she’d tell her child about its father once it was old enough. She could tell him or her something romantic: your father died for a cause, in a war, for me, for you. But when she thought about her child she pictured a smaller version of herself, and how could she really tell this person such a large lie?

  Daniel had asked about the father after she’d told him over the phone that she was pregnant. When she confessed that she didn’t know who it was, that it could have been more than one person, he said, “You’re kidding.” “I’m not.” “How straight out of a soap opera. I love it.” She begged him not to tell the others she was pregnant, as she wanted to herself and in person. They wouldn’t take it as well, especially Jake, who’d been trying to get his wife pregnant for years. Hilary figured that in person they would have to be at least slightly polite and supportive. And she supposed that another, smaller part of her just couldn’t resist opening a door, standing there and looking at their stunned faces.

  Alex pulled off the road and onto a small dirt path and the car rumbled through sparse woods. “Almost there,” he said, and suddenly she felt a flash of concern—what had she been thinking, jumping in his car so eagerly? He could be a murderer. But she told herself to calm down, this was New England, Maine, a small island. An enclosed, finite place where no criminal would be able to hide for long. He was calm and in control and seemed in no way psychotic.

  He stopped the car and cut the ignition. They were at the end of a dirt road, facing a sprawling field of tall grass and brown reeds, the sky now solid gray above them. They could have been in the middle of America. The ocean, even the sound of it, was gone.

  2

  Dichotomies

  Daniel only had a few memories of his family trip to Great Salt: his mother squeezing his hand as they walked off the ferry amid a small crowd of tourists, his father hoisting him onto his shoulders after the two had played Frisbee on the beach. They were, in fact, memories of being tended to more than specific images of the island itself. When he and Brenda went on vacation, they preferred to travel farther, or at least to more interesting places, although traveling anywhere had, of course, become more difficult now with the wheelchair. As they drove toward the coast of Maine, Daniel thought about Jake’s vacation home being no more than an hour away from his house in Portland. “We should have taken my father somewhere like Paris. Or Istanbul. Somewhere with monuments and mosques. He loves his war and history.”

  “Has he been to Europe?”

  “He and my mother went to Italy years ago but my father’s wallet was stolen. I think they had a terrible time. And of course he was there in the war—but he was practically a kid then.”

  “Your dad seems happy with their trips to the Cape and D.C. That was the last one, right?”

  “Niagara, and I think that if he were given the chance, he’d be more adventurous. After all, it is his seventy-fifth. We should’ve gone to Istanbul.”

  “Don’t be silly. This is easier and cheaper. Hilary and your parents could never afford Turkey.” She turned the car into the fast lane.

  “Hilary would love Istanbul—all the ancient history, all those mosques and palaces. She studied anthropology in college.” He traced a square on the window. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that they wouldn’t be able to travel as much with a baby. In three months Brenda wouldn’t be able to jump in the car and drive to a store the way she could now; they wouldn’t be able to work late or sleep in on weekends. Andrea had told them that the donor would not even know of the baby. The man probably had other children at that point, several or more. Hundreds, even, all across the country. The thought was an almost pleasant one, as it made the man seem more a distant, avuncular patron than the father of Daniel’s wife’s child.

  When they stopped for gas, Daniel watched Brenda lift the pump from its hol
der and shove it into the gas tank. She yawned and leaned against the car, her head to the sky. She thinks I’ve become a grouchy old bastard, he thought. She’ll grow tired of me and leave me. He swallowed his breath. When she finally looked at him, he formed what he considered a sympathetic smile.

  Across the parking lot was an old man selling corn from the back of a pickup truck. He sat on a beach chair with his legs stretched flat, tapping his bare feet together and reading a newspaper. Beside him was a young boy kicking a bottle. The boy saw Daniel gazing at him, smiled wide and waved furiously. Daniel wondered if he thought he knew him, and wasn’t sure whether to wave back. He lifted his hand and held it there for a moment.

  Brenda walked inside the small building to pay, and when she returned she looked over at the truck. “I suppose you’re going to comment on that man’s bare feet being an affront to humanity.”

  “No, actually I wasn’t. I was going to say that it’s cute, a boy and his grandfather selling corn.”

  She revved the engine and headed out. “Why do I doubt that?”

  “Because you think I see nothing positive in the world anymore? I do, you know, see positive things. I did think that was a sweet sight back there.”

  “All right.”

  “You don’t believe me.” He pressed his hands against his lap. “I did think it was nice. It seemed like some kind of pure sight, almost like an anachronism, and, and why why why am I trying to convince you that I’m not a horrible person right now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He adjusted his glasses and inhaled a long, slow breath. He had several projects due next week: a book jacket for a novel set in Cuba, and a pamphlet for the Children’s Museum, and a menu for a bar his friend owned back in Brooklyn. The projects couldn’t be more different, and in his mind he tried to merge them. A palm tree; an inflatable toy palm tree; a small plastic palm tree sticking out of a margarita. He’d drifted so far from his earlier work, his abstract drawings and paintings. It’d been years since he’d made any real art.