Then Came You

by Jennifer Weiner

  “No, it’s not that, it’s that. . I didn’t even think you knew me. Knew who I was. We never talked, and I. .” I shut my mouth and folded my hands in my lap. I’d taken off my shoes and was sitting sideways, my legs curled underneath me. There was a bit of ketchup on my finger, and I licked it off, tasting the sweetness.

  Frank looked at me, and there was no trace of teasing in his voice or on his face. “I’ve had my eye on you for a long time.”

  “But why?”

  Smiling, he touched one of my cheeks with his fingertips. “You’re always smiling.”

  “Not always,” I said, thinking about the fights I’d had with Nancy.

  “When I see you, you’re smiling, and laughing, and there’s always people around you, you know?”

  Now I was blushing, and I imagined that maybe he was, too, although his skin didn’t show it the way mine did.

  “You always have people.” He sounded wistful. I could tell that this was hard for Frank — that he knew what he meant to say, what he liked about me, but was having trouble finding the words. “And remember that one time in gym class?”

  I shook my head, embarrassed that I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “What I said about Ms. Hicks.”

  “Oh, right!” Ms. Hicks had taught phys ed since the 1970s. Some years, she’d show up in September a skinny one hundred and twenty pounds, and other years she’d come for Back to School Night closer to two hundred. That year, we’d been lined up to play volleyball and Ms. Hicks, bulging in her blue polyester gym shorts, had been explaining the rules, when Frank, standing behind me, had whispered, “I think she’s been eating ’cause the Eagles had such a bad preseason.”

  I’d laughed out loud, then turned around, not even sure who had spoken. Frank was staring at me soberly. “I’m serious,” he said, without even a hint of a smile. “The year we went to the Super Bowl? Thinnest she’s ever been.”

  I’d been laughing when Ms. Hicks hurled a volleyball at me, hollering at me to get my head in the game. Later, I’d learned why laughter and people were so important to Frank. His mother had gotten pregnant for the first time at forty-two, after more than two decades of marriage, after she’d given up on the possibility of children and had mostly given up on her marriage as well. She’d loved Frank, but his arrival had been a disruption. Corrinne Barrow wasn’t good with disruptions. Nor was she much of a laugher. She believed in God, and thrice-weekly church attendance; she worked as a medical secretary from seven a.m. to four p.m. each day; she cooked meals for the poor and visited the sick and devoted the hours she wasn’t doing those things to peering through her blinds at the neighbors across the street, who had four kids and innumerable grandchildren and made more noise at one meal than Corrinne and her husband and son did in an entire year. Frank had pegged me right — I did like people, and laughter, music, and stories. I traveled in a crowd, and I loved to have parties, to fill my house with friends, to cook, even if it was just pizza or cookies, to have everyone together, safe and full and happy.

  In the car, Frank took my hand and pulled me so close that I could feel his eyelashes on my cheek. “Okay?” he asked. “Okay,” I answered as he slowly brought his lips to mine. I remember thinking that this was a guy I could love, really love, in a way I hadn’t loved the other boys I’d dated, that he was steady and grown-up in a way that they weren’t. I also knew that parts of Frank would always be a mystery, that there would always be more going on in his head than he’d be able to express with his words.

  Almost without discussion, we’d become a couple that night, and, again, almost without discussion, we’d gotten engaged, then married, and we’d slipped into a life that was more or less the same as the life my parents had. By the time we went to that dance, he’d already been in touch with the army recruiter. He enlisted in the spring of his senior year and was off to basic training the week after we graduated. We got married when he came home after his eight weeks in Fort Benning, with new muscles and a new tattoo. Then he went off to Afghanistan, and I got pregnant the first time he came home on leave. His father died, and we named Spencer after him. Together, we cleared out the garage, where Frank’s dad kept most of his things, and slept some nights. I’d been the one to find his cardboard box full of copies of Barely Legal, and I’d thrown them away without saying a word to Frank.

  None of this was surprising. In our world, you finished high school and got married, and if you were a girl it was a big point of pride if you didn’t get pregnant before either of those other events. I hadn’t ever thought about college, or traveling, or waiting to start my own family, or having anything that you could call a career as opposed to just a job. I lived my life like a meal that had been set in front of me, never asking if there were other choices or even if I was hungry.

  But then, after Spencer came along, and I knew he’d be my last baby, without ever planning on it, I started seeing, and wanting, other things. A picture of a home office in a magazine, a description of Paris in a book, a restaurant review in the Philadelphia Inquirer of a place I knew we could never afford to go — these things, and a hundred more like them, would start a voice whispering in my head. I want, I want, I want, the voice would say. It wanted a new couch; it wanted a vacation somewhere other than Disney World or the Jersey Shore; it wanted to read the books Gabe gave me and not have to look up a word or two every page, sometimes every paragraph. When I asked the voice how on earth I could ever hope to get any of these things, the voice answered, Simple. Money.

  I’d never known anyone who’d been a surrogate. A wife carrying someone else’s baby, bringing in more money than her husband would earn in a year and a half, walking around with a belly full of someone else’s child. . that was nothing Frank and I had seen from our parents or cousins or neighbors, nothing that was even a possibility when we were kids. I should have known it would never sit right with Frank, old-fashioned as he was. What happened to us should not have come as a surprise.

  At first, it all seemed easy. I got pregnant on the first attempt, in August. There were plenty of things I didn’t know how to do: drive a stick shift, swim underwater, use the microwave for anything other than baking potatoes and popping popcorn. But I knew how to be pregnant. After two boys, I’d even say I was good at it.

  I started showing right away, the same way I had with Spencer. Certain things bothered me — the smell of gasoline, the sound of the spoon squishing through the mayonnaise when I made tuna salad. In the afternoons I found myself napping, sometimes on the floor next to Spencer’s crib, conked out on the carpet like I’d been clubbed in the head. At five o’clock I’d sit both boys in front of the TV and scramble to make sure the table was set and the meatloaf or manicotti or chicken-rice bake or whatever I was making was in the oven, that the boys had their hands and faces washed, that their rooms were picked up and their lunchboxes packed by the time Frank came home, so he wouldn’t see how exhausted I was. When I was by myself, my hand resting lightly on my belly, I still felt that surge of excitement and accomplishment. I am doing something important, I would think. I was bringing a new life into the world, giving a family this incredible gift (never mind that it was a gift they were buying). . what could be better, more noble, than that?

  “How’s Frank handling everything?” my sister asked me when we were at our parents’ house for dinner one night.

  “Frank is fine,” I said, even though I knew it wasn’t even close to being true. Frank, who was at that moment seated in front of the television set, watching the Eagles, was barely looking at me, not at my face and certainly not at my body as it started to change. That night, on the way home, with both boys sleeping in their car seats, I’d ventured a question. “Are you okay? With. .” Frank hadn’t taken his eyes off the road.

  “I guess I have to be, don’t I?”

  “It’s just a few more months,” I said softly. He didn’t answer, but I felt the car speed up, as if by mashing his foot on the gas pedal he could hasten the bab
y’s arrival.

  As the fall went on, he rarely asked how I was feeling, the way he had with both of the boys. Then, he’d been tender and considerate, opening bottles of seltzer so they’d go flat, the way I liked it, before pouring me a glass, sweeping and mopping the floors so that I wouldn’t have to bend. On nights when we were both home, I would prop my feet in his lap and he’d rub them with lotion, massaging them. Whenever we went out with the boys, he’d always double-check to make sure the diaper bag was packed. Now when he was home he’d sit in his recliner, eyes on the television, jaw set. . and, more then once, running errands or at the library, I’d reached into the diaper bag and found that I was missing wipes or diapers or an extra pair of size 3T pants. Frank seemed to have decided that the bag, once his responsibility, was now my job, along with everything else around the house.

  I tried to talk to him, but every time I asked if there was something wrong, he denied it. “What could be wrong?” he’d ask with a tight smile. That smile scared me, which meant that I never tried to ask follow-up questions, to point out the things I’d noticed, the way his eyes slid away from my belly, the way he hardly ever touched me anymore. The first time we’d tried to make love after the test had come back positive, everything had been fine at first — his mouth nuzzling the skin beneath my ear, my hands roaming over the deliciously taut muscles of his shoulders and his back. When he’d rolled on top of me I’d been wet and more than ready, pushing my hips up hard to meet him… but there’d been nothing there.

  “Sorry,” he’d muttered, rolling onto his side so that I couldn’t see him. “Guess I had too much to drink.” Except he hadn’t had anything more than a single beer before dinner, and dinner had been five hours ago. I touched his shoulder, then the tattoo on his arm. “Is anything bothering you?”

  “I’m fine.” His voice was loud.

  I pulled up my panties and pajama bottoms. “It happens,” I said to the ceiling. At least I’d heard that it happened. It had never happened to Frank before, and I knew what was wrong, even if he didn’t want to say anything: it was the baby. He was worried about this baby in a way he’d never worried about his own. We’d made love right up until the ninth month with the boys, only stopping because I’d gotten too tired to do anything in bed except sleep, but now that I was carrying someone else’s baby, Frank couldn’t. . or wouldn’t. I was never sure, because I couldn’t get him to talk about it, and there was no one I could ask.

  The real trouble started when I was thirteen weeks along. I was in the living room with the boys, the three of us putting together a giant puzzle of the White House on the floor — I’d bought it for a quarter at a tag sale — when I heard a crash from the kitchen, and Frank cursing. I ran in to find him throwing a loaf of bread at the wall. “Goddamn stupid crap!”

  “What’s wrong?” I looked at the plate on the table and saw the ragged remnants of half of a sandwich. He’d tried to fold the bread in half, only instead of folding, it had crumbled.

  I crouched down to pick up the mess. “It’s organic.” It was true, the bread India wanted me eating, made without additives or preservatives, was considerably harder to fold than the Wonder bread I normally brought.

  “It’s crap,” he said again, and kicked the wall on his way out. I winced, hoping the boys hadn’t heard.

  It took me a while to realize that it hadn’t been a coincidence, Frank losing his temper the day after we’d done our bills. We paid them the same way we always did, in the living room after the boys were asleep, Frank in a chair with the stack of mail, me on the couch with the checkbook, only for once things had gone smoothly, thanks to the money from the clinic I’d deposited in our account, the first installment of the fifty thousand dollars I’d eventually get. We paid off the balance on one of our credit cards, and another two thousand dollars on a second card, instead of just the minimums the way we normally did, and we hadn’t had to decide whether to be a few days’ late with one of the utilities. For once, there was enough to go around, with money left over at the end, and I’d been stupid enough to smile about it, to say, “Wow, this is great,” without realizing how my comment would hurt him.

  “Couples fight when the woman gets pregnant,” India said via Skype the day after our fight. It was funny, listening to her talk like she was some kind of expert on marriage after less than two years as a wife. Since the insemination, I’d gone to New York twice, arranging for my mother to pick up the boys after school. India and I also chatted by Skype every few days on the brand-new laptop she had insisted on buying me.

  At first I’d been worried that it would feel like India was checking up on me, but gradually we’d started to feel. . not exactly like friends, but more like coworkers who were friendly, who could share a meal and gossip about their lives.

  “Men have mood swings and cravings,” she told me. “I saw a thing about it on the Today show.”

  “How about you?” I asked. I’d told her about the argument, leaving out the particulars — the broken plate, the cursing — and now I was eager to steer the talk toward safer ground. “Are you having any cravings?” That was, of course, a joke: even on the computer screen that only showed her from the neck up, I could see she was skinny as ever, her skin smooth, her eyebrows and makeup all perfect.

  “Nope,” she’d said. “I’m very horny, though.” My mouth must have fallen open because she’d laughed. “Don’t look so shocked,” she’d said. “I’m not that old.” This was true — she wasn’t that old, but her husband was. I’d met him after my first doctor’s appointment in the city. “Look at me,” he’d said, escorting us down the sidewalk, “taking two beautiful ladies to lunch.” We’d gone to a French restaurant near the doctor’s office, a place with white tablecloths and a long, skinny loaf of bread in a paper bag in the center of the table, along with a crock of unsalted butter. Marcus, who I knew was a very big deal, had been friendly, asking questions about my house and my boys and if I followed the Phillies, but he’d been distracted when the food came, tapping at his BlackBerry, and excused himself after downing his steak frites (I’d ordered the same thing; India had sea bass en papillote). He was nice-enough-looking for a man his age, with thick hair and big white teeth. I could feel the energy of the room change when we arrived, and I noticed people looking at him, the hostess’s respectful manner as she took his coat. Marcus was polite to her, and interested in me in the same way, but most of his attention he reserved for his wife. He clearly adored India, but I couldn’t imagine him having sex. I couldn’t even picture him without a suit and tie. That must have shown on my face, because India started to laugh.

  “Oh, look at you!” she said, her cheeks turning pink. “You’re making me feel like a dirty old lady!”

  I turned down the volume on the computer, angling the screen so it faced away from the bedroom, where Frank was still asleep.

  “I’m just jealous,” I confessed.

  “So you guys aren’t, um, active?”

  I didn’t want to say, but my face must have given her an answer. “Men get weird about it,” she said. “Get him drunk! Buy some scented candles! Wear something fitted! I just saw the most gorgeous cashmere sweaters in these scrumptious colors…”

  I nodded politely. India lowered her voice. “Do you think the baby’s listening?”

  “I don’t think the baby has ears.” Honestly, I wasn’t sure what the baby had and didn’t have. With Frank Junior and Spencer I’d signed up for e-mail updates telling me what the fetus was doing or growing at that very moment. I’d been tuned in to every change in my body, every flutter and kick, but now, with two boys to care for and a husband who wasn’t inclined to help, plus the knowledge that this baby wasn’t mine to keep, I wasn’t paying the same kind of attention.

  “So what’s the problem?” India asked.

  “Everything’s fine. We’re going at it night and day. Right on top of Mount Laundry, while the boys are kicking a soccer ball at the bedroom door.”

  India sighed. “I f
eel bad.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, worried, again, that she thought I was hitting her up for more money. “It’s no big deal!”

  “I’d be happy to hire a cleaning lady…”

  “I don’t work,” I said. “I can clean.”

  “But you’re tired.”

  “I’m fine,” I said firmly. My mother had hated housework, heaving epic sighs every time she fetched the vacuum out of the closet or the bucket out from underneath the sink, but I’d always liked it. There were few things I found more peaceful than carrying a basket full of warm, clean clothes into the empty TV room and folding them while I watched one of my shows.

  “You’re so cute,” India had said fondly when I’d told her how I liked doing the laundry, and I’d smiled, but in the back of my mind I was thinking of another book, The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel Gabe had recommended after I’d asked him, half teasing, if all the books he read were by men. The book was set in the future, where fertile women were given to powerful men and their old wives to have babies for them. I remembered the way the old commander’s wife had hated Offred, the handmaid, the one who was supposed to bear her children, and I wondered sometimes whether, behind all the smiles and the friendliness and the gift cards for Whole Foods, India secretly hated me, too.

  Then it was Christmas. We were hosting Frank’s mother, Corrinne, and my parents, plus Nancy and Dr. Scott. On Christmas Day, I tried to take our usual picture in front of the tree. Frank Junior and Spencer looked adorable in their suits and bow ties. I looked pregnant in my black velvet dress. Frank, standing behind me, with one hand on each of the boys’ shoulders, looked glum. Beyond glum. He looked miserable. “Smile!” I called, running back and forth from the tripod to the fireplace, where the boys kept trying to turn around to see if Santa had refilled their stockings between shots. Frank never smiled. His eyes were hooded, his lips pressed tightly together, like he was trying to keep himself from shouting. I knew, before I even looked at the shots, that none of them were keepers.