I went to the kitchen for my car keys and a mug of mint tea. I would have preferred coffee. I hadn’t slept well the night before and was worried about getting drowsy behind the wheel. But as an expectant mother-to-be — I hoped — I knew enough not to show up with coffee on my breath.
“Be good,” I told the boys, who’d been bribed with an extra half hour of Go, Diego, Go! “Listen to Aunt Nancy. She’s the boss while Mommy’s gone. Spencer, did you hear me? Do you understand? And Frank Junior, how about you?” I repeated their names, in part so they’d acknowledge my seriousness, in part to increase the chance of Nancy’s remembering them.
“Just go already,” Nancy ordered as I rifled through my purse. There was my wallet, a tube of lipstick, my Mapquest directions, the list of questions I’d printed out at the library, huddling in front of the printer so that nobody could see what I was doing. I knew the longer I hung around, the more likely it would be that the boys wouldn’t let me leave, so I walked to the car and started driving.
Two hours later I was sitting in the Princeton Fertility Clinic. The clinic director, Leslie, trim and brisk in her suit, had walked me back to a room that must have been specially designed for just this moment, when a prospective surrogate and the woman who’d be paying the bills (buying the baby, I kept thinking, and trying not to think) would first set eyes on each other. The walls were the peach of melting sherbet, and there was a painting of a mother gazing tenderly at an infant in her arms. A love seat was upholstered in a light golden fabric. I gave it a quick pat, then a longer one, enjoying its softness and its lack of stains, wondering how long it would last in my house.
The coffee table was set with a china teapot, a carafe of ice water with translucent circles of lemon floating on the top. Fanned out in a circle on a plate was a ring of Mint Milanos that it was taking all my willpower to avoid. I’d been torn about dieting. On the one hand, maybe infertile women would want their surrogate to look robust and healthy, with broad shoulders and wide hips that evoked peasants in the field, squatting to give birth without missing a swing of their scythes. Then again, rich people hated fat people, maybe because they thought that being fat was the same as being lazy, or they were afraid of becoming fat themselves. I ignored the cookies and checked out the china instead. The sugarbowl and cream pitcher had a lacy blue-on-white pattern, and the spoons and the tongs resting on top of the sugar cubes were probably real silver.
“Just a few minutes,” Leslie had said before closing the door, but it had already been more like fifteen. I wondered why she hadn’t just left me in the waiting room, the one I’d glimpsed online and had walked through on my way back here. I could understand why the women hiring the surrogates, the infertile ones, might not want anyone else to see them, but as for me, I was just there to do a job, same as if I’d been back working at Target, and in the waiting room at least there were magazines.
Target made me think of Gabe, and thinking of Gabe made me remember the bad patch in my marriage, the part I hadn’t mentioned on the forms. For distraction, I eased a single Milano out of its place and slipped it into my mouth, letting the sugary wafer dissolve on my tongue. I was trying to rearrange the circle so it wouldn’t look like any of the cookies were missing. Of course, that was the moment the door swung open and Leslie and a slender, graceful, beautifully dressed woman walked inside.
I got to my feet as Leslie trilled the introductions. “Ms. Croft, this is Anne Barrow. Annie, this is India Croft.”
She was Ms., and I was Annie. So it begins, I thought. For a moment, the two of us stared at each other. India Croft had the look I expected, a rich-lady look (rich bitch look, I thought, before I could stop myself), like one of the women from those Real Housewives of New York episodes I sometimes watched when Frank was working. I knew better than to tune in when he was home. “Bunch of silly people who think they’ve got problems,” he’d grumble, and I couldn’t deny it, or explain to him that sometimes the problems were kind of interesting, and it was at least fun to look at their clothes and their houses, and feel good that your kids weren’t half as bratty as theirs.
India Croft was white, like I’d expected, with smooth, unlined skin. Her heart-shaped face narrowed to a neat little chin. Her lips were full and glossed, her nose was small, adorably tilted, her brows were perfectly shaped, and, beneath them, her eyes were wide, almost startled. That, I figured, was probably the Botox — lots of the Real Housewives had that exact same expression, like someone had just pinched their behinds. Her hair was somewhere between chestnut and copper, with all the shades in between, long and thick and shiny. She wore a pale-lavender cashmere sweater set — at least, I thought it was cashmere, but, not owning any cashmere myself, I was really just guessing — and a crisp skirt, chocolate-brown with a pattern of loops and swirls embroidered in darker-brown thread across it. I would have never thought to put brown and pinkish-purple together, but it was perfect. The contrast between the pastel of the sweater and the rich cocoa of the skirt, the soft cashmere and the crisp linen, was like something I’d see on a mannequin or in a magazine. Her legs were tanned and bare. She wore dark-brown cork-soled espadrilles with ribbons that wrapped around her slim calves. I could smell her perfume, something flowery and sweet, and that, of course, was perfect, too.
Standing there, my mouth full of Mint Milano mush, sweating in my long-sleeved dress, I felt big as a battleship and just as ungainly. I swallowed, ran my tongue over my teeth, and stepped forward, saying the words I’d rehearsed in the car: “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Hello,” she said. She tugged at one lilac cuff, then the other, shaking that gorgeous hair against her back, and I felt the strangest sensation of being seen. . not seen, exactly, but recognized. It felt as if, somehow, she was able to see me standing there in my cheap dress and my not-right purse and know me, everything I was, everything I hoped for: how I wanted to redo my kitchen and build a little office, that I wanted to buy my sons new winter jackets, that I wanted, someday, to go to Paris, and go to college, to have shelves full of books I’d read and understood, to have an important job. I felt like she saw me not just as a mother or wife or person in a Target pinny who knew how to find the Lego sets and the scrubbing pads, but as myself, loving and complicated and angry sometimes.
“Anne. . Barrow, is it?” she said, in a pleasant voice. I pegged her at forty. A pretty forty, a young-looking forty, a forty who probably watched what she ate and worked out every day, but still, forty was forty, and forty was, in my opinion, a little too late to get started with the whole baby-making thing. I wondered why she’d waited, what her story was, and if I’d ever get to hear it.
“Annie,” I told her, and held out my hand.
BETTINA
After thinking it over for a few days, I’d decided to tell my brothers what Kate Klein had found out, thinking they’d be just as alarmed as I was and that one of them would know what to do.
Trey had been with Violet when I’d called — I could hear her babbling in the background — and he’d told me, in between her trips up and down the slide at the neighborhood park, that I shouldn’t rain on my father’s parade. “It’s America. Everyone gets a second act,” he said after I’d given him the most damning portion of India’s dossier. Which left me with Tommy. I had just bought a ticket for his upcoming show, thinking I’d present the evidence in person, when my cell phone rang. The number on the screen was for Kate Klein’s office, but Darren Zucker was the one on the line.
“How are you doing?” he asked me.
“Fine,” I said.
“Busy?”
“Not really.” I’d been looking at Victorian jewelry that morning, gorgeously worked, ornate pieces, necklaces and engagement rings, the kind of thing I’d want for myself — small and special, the opposite of India’s ostentatious rock.
“You sound busy.” Darren himself sounded vaguely insulted. I softened my tone, reminding myself that he was a messenger, albeit a messenger in goofy glasses, and it wasn�
�t his fault that India was a liar. A thought occurred. “Would you like to go to a concert with me?”
“What, like a date?” Now he sounded surprised.
“As friends,” I said firmly. I wasn’t interested in Darren, with his limp handshake and his hipster affectations. In addition, he knew exactly how much my father was worth and probably how much I was, too, and, while it wasn’t as if this information was some big secret, knowing that Darren had access to specifics made me want to keep him at a distance. I didn’t like him… but I didn’t like the thought of traipsing through Hoboken by myself, either, and all of my friends had put in their time at my brother’s performances.
“You got a man?” he persisted.
“None of your business.”
“Taking that as a no,” he said cheerfully, and, over my protests, told me he’d meet me in front of my apartment at nine o’clock Friday night.
“So what’s the band called again?” he asked as we walked along a sidewalk in Hoboken.
“Dirty Birdy,” I said, keeping an eye out for broken glass and dog excrement. “They were Cöld Söre for a while. With umlauts.”
“But of course,” Darren said.
“But then the bass player left, and they reformed, and now they’re Dirty Birdy.” The band was third on the bill, not scheduled to go on until midnight, which, realistically, could mean much later than that. Darren, who still seemed to be laboring under the misapprehension that this was a date, took my arm as we navigated past a puddle of what looked like vomit. It was nice having him with me, sort of like having our old golden retriever, Mittens, loping along at my side.
I looked at the doorways, then down at my iPhone. “It should be right here. The club-slash-coffee-shop is called Drip, and I checked the address before leaving my apartment.” But there was no sign on the plain red door, no number, nothing to indicate that there was a business behind it.
Darren looked at my screen, then looked at the door. Then he knocked. The door swung open. Smoke and loud voices poured out into the street, and a muscled bouncer held out one tattooed mitt. “Ten dollars,” he said.
Darren peeled off a twenty. “You need a sign,” I told the bouncer, who looked at me like he didn’t understand English. “Seriously,” I said, twisting through the crush of bodies, pulling my earplugs out of my pocket and hoping against hope that there’d be something as pedestrian as a table in the place. Fat chance. There were no tables in sight, just a bar that ran the length of the room, a couch upholstered in hideous paisley sagging against one wall, and a makeshift stage up front.
“What can I get you?” Darren asked.
“Whatever,” I said, trying not to sulk, or yawn. The room was hot and crowded, crammed with people who all seemed to be having more fun than I’d ever had in my life. Girls with glitter on their faces and tattoos on the smalls of their backs swigged from cans of Pabst and Coors, waving their arms in the air and swinging their hips as they spun around in tiny circles.
“Beer?” he asked. “Wine? Sloe gin fizz?”
“Vodka and tonic,” I said. It had been my parents’ summertime drink. In the Hamptons, they’d carried thermoses of V and Ts to the beach. I was ready for the worst, but the drink came in a clean glass, frosty on the outside, with a thick wedge of lime balanced on the rim. I took a sip, watching the girls dancing, trying to decide if they were high.
“Not bad,” Darren said, as Dirty Birdy finally took the stage and launched into their cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” “Is that your brother? He’s really good!”
I nodded, wondering if Darren actually enjoyed this noise, if anyone could. Tommy had a nice voice — he’d sung in choir in school — but all of his sweetness was drowned out by the volume of the pounding drums and the squealing guitars.
Forty minutes later, Tommy bounded off the stage, sweaty and smelling of beer and cigarette smoke. I introduced them, and my brother and Darren exchanged “hey, mans” and handshakes. Then I asked Darren to excuse us and walked Tommy to the bar, where I pulled Kate Klein’s folder out of my purse. “It’s about India,” I hollered into my brother’s ear. Tommy looked inside the folder for a minute, then looked over at the blonde in a ridiculously tiny T-shirt making eyes at him from the corner. After a minute, he sighed and pushed his beer at me. I pushed it right back.
“You know what, Betts?” His voice was raspy after shouting into the microphone. “This is none of our business.”
I drew back as if he’d slapped me. “Of course it’s our business! He’s being used. This woman is taking advantage of him.” My voice trailed off. Tommy patted my shoulder the way he would a puppy’s head. “Let it go,” he whispered in my ear. Then he lifted his head. “Hey, you and Derek want to hang out?”
I glared at him. “His name is Darren. And it is two o’clock in the morning, so no, we do not want to hang out.” He shrugged. I watched him go, standing like I was frozen on the sticky floor of the bar in Hoboken — Hoboken! I’d gone all the way to Hoboken! — before pushing the folder into my bag and stomping out the door in the jeans I’d bought for the occasion. Not that they made any difference. Even my jeans were wrong — too loose, too new, too dark, the wrong cut, the wrong brand, the wrong something.
“Hey, you okay?” Darren asked, following me into the darkness, toward the train that would take us back to the city. I could feel sweat gluing my blouse to the small of my back, where I would never have a tattoo. “Not great,” I’d said.
“Can I help?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Thank you for coming,” I said. We rode home in silence. He escorted me up the subway stairs, bought me a bottle of water at the Korean grocery store on my corner, and walked me to my door.
“If you want to talk about it. .” He looked sweet and hopeful, even cute, if you could ignore the glasses, but all I wanted was to be alone.
“I don’t,” I said. He handed me the water. Then he set his hands on my shoulders. Surprised, I stumbled backward, catching my heel on the curb. I would have fallen if he hadn’t been holding me. . but, of course, if he hadn’t been holding me I wouldn’t have tripped in the first place. Then, just like that, his lips were on mine, warm and gentle, and he’d pulled my body against his so that we were chest to chest, hip to hip. In that instant, I wasn’t hot, wasn’t tired, wasn’t irritated at the way the night had gone or worried about how exhausted I’d be the next day. I wanted to keep kissing him, to have him keep kissing me, even though I’d never approved of couples who kissed on the street. Then, as suddenly as he’d started, he stopped, releasing my shoulders, stepping back onto the sidewalk. “Betsy,” he said.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Tina?”
“Family only.”
“Betts?”
“Only if I get to call you Dare.”
He grinned, tipped an imaginary hat, and set off in the direction of the subway, hands in his pockets, whistling.
Upstairs, I got out of my clothes and into the shower and stood there, letting the cool water wash over me. It was almost three in the morning, and I’d met with nothing but frustration as I’d tried to make my family see the absurdity of what my father and India were attempting… but still I fell asleep with a smile.
The following weekend I went to the one person I thought would see the gravity of the situation; I made my first trip ever to my mother’s ashram. I booked a ticket to New Mexico and flew out from LaGuardia on Saturday morning. I rented a car at the airport and followed the GPS’s directions through forty-five miles of blasted-looking desert interrupted by gas stations, the occasional casino, and clusters of Native Americans selling blankets by the side of the road.
The Baba had done well for himself. The parking lot was paved, the grounds of the Enlightenment Center beautifully landscaped, oases of jewel-green grass accented with fountains and manicured beds of flowers. I sat for forty-five minutes on a stone bench in the cool, tiled lobby of a little adobe building that I refused to call a yurt, listening to
the tinkling of water into a basin, sipping tea that tasted like boiled twigs, and glaring at a young woman in a white linen caftan who answered the telephone in an annoyingly mellifluous voice. “Love, light, fulfillment,” she would singsong. When I pulled out my iPhone she used the same dopey voice to say that electronic devices were not permitted (“They disrupt your aura”).
Eventually, my mother glided in, dressed in white robes of rough linen, her familiar musky, sandalwood-and-patchouli scent filling the air. I felt my eyes burning, and I looked away, blinking, not wanting to let her see how much I still missed her, how jealous I was of the people who had their mothers there to help them through their twenties. A mother could help you choose and furnish your first apartment; she could listen to however much you chose to tell her about your love life; she could offer a loan or a sympathetic ear or even just a night when you could go back to the place you’d grown up in, sit in the kitchen while she made your favorite meal, and be a child again. All of that had been denied me, thanks to her selfishness, and to the Baba.
I clamped down on my fury as she led me to an empty yoga studio and handed me a buckwheat-filled bolster to perch on, explaining, as she arranged her own body, the importance of opening our hips. I sat cross-legged, awkward in my skirt and heels and sleeveless silk blouse (I’d taken off my jacket and left it in the car). My mother laid a woven Indian blanket over my lap, then looked me over with a tolerant and utterly infuriating smile.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s just that we don’t see many women dressed like you are.”
Then Came You Page 15