by Lisa Tognola
“But the timing … we had everything timed just right,” I said, placing my hand on my stomach.
The baby was due right after I graduated, just as Wim and I had planned.
Life is full of surprises, I thought, watching the couple next to us eat peanuts and throw the shells on the floor, a popular Clear-man’s custom.
“We don’t have to live in the city,” Wim said, as if he were doing me a favor.
“We haven’t even discussed this and you’re already talking about where we’ll live?”
Wim’s new job would be located in the heart of the most exciting city on earth and the financial capital of the world. He would be working in a skyscraper, chasing his fortune and feeling as tall as the Empire State Building. He was ecstatic. This was his ticket out of LA.
As for me, after three months, my morning sickness had finally subsided, but now I felt as though I were carrying a sack full of sand in my belly. My heartburn had become worse. My breasts were tender, my feet swollen. I had pelvic cramps. “It’s just your uterus growing,” Wim would say, the two of us sitting huddled over a dog-eared copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
“What about after the baby is born? What about my family?” I shifted on the plush leather banquette and instinctively rubbed my hand over my belly in a slow, circular motion, trying to imagine raising a child without my family nearby.
We paused our conversation while our waitress, dressed in a barmaid costume, rolled a cart topped with a grill over to our table, the wheels crunching over the peanut shells scattered along the ground.
She splashed some brandy and lit a long match and suddenly the grill erupted into a small inferno; I could feel the heat through my sweater. She transferred the sizzling steaks to our plates, then reached over me and opened my gigantic potato, spooning in hot au jus, whipped butter, sour cream, chives, and cheese sauce. “Enjoy your meal,” she said before shimmying away with the cart.
Wim stared at the enormous rib eye that took up three quarters of his plate. “Don’t worry. It’s not like you’ll be alone. I’ll be there. And we’re going to have family around, too: my parents, my sister, my brother, Gram …”
I loved Wim’s family. They always made me feel special. And I knew they would help as much as they could—but still, they weren’t a replacement for my own family.
I thought of my grandma Rose, my mom’s mom, and our weekly dinners at her small apartment—located a stone’s throw from my parents’ house—where she always served the same baked chicken or meatloaf, a stuffed potato, and string beans, simple but delicious. She could spend a halfhour at the grocery store just picking out the best-looking beans. “Setz. Essen,” she’d say. (“Sit. Eat.”)
There was a roughness to Grandma Rose, like an unpolished gem, but also an underlying tenderness and affection. As a child, I’d sat with her at her dining room table and she’d patiently taught me Russian poetry by Pushkin, reciting the lines phrase by phrase and prompting me to repeat them until I had the entire poem memorized, much in the same way my mother sometimes taught me Yiddish words Grandma Rose had taught her.
Dessert was two homemade brownies cut into squares—or, as my grandma pronounced them in her strong Russian accent, “skvehs.”
She often stared into my face, sipping tea from a plastic teacup, a single sugar cube bulging from the inside of her cheek, and said, “You look a little like my sister Sonja.” How would I know? I had never met any of her siblings. My grandma had left her homeland after giving birth to my aunt Fran, eight years before my mother was born. She left behind her parents and six siblings to follow her husband to America in order to escape the oppressive environment in Russia before the war. A few years later, her entire family was murdered in the Holocaust. She’d lived with the guilt of leaving, and of surviving, ever since.
There was no comparing our situations. I did anyway. Now I, too, would be leaving my family. Who will stroll my kids at the park? Who will help them memorize Russian poems? Who will teach them Yiddish phrases? Who will squeeze their cheeks with love, call them Dova’leh, and feed them See’s candy?
Wim picked up his fork and serrated knife and cut into his thick steak. “Maybe this will be good for you.”
I folded my arms over my stomach. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve always been so dependent on your parents. You’ve said so yourself.” He always raised his eyebrows when he knew he was right.
I thought if I didn’t say anything, he might drop the subject. I was wrong.
“Janie, your dad still takes you to get your car washed,” he said.
“That’s his way of showing me he cares.” I pictured my Dad and me sitting side by side on a tree-shaded bench at the Downey Carwash, sharing a vending machine Coke and watching the conveyor belt guide my white Datsun through the long, tunnel-like bay on its way to get soaped, rinsed, and waxed.
“So when he takes you to get your car fully detailed every year, he’s simply professing his love and devotion?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“How about when you returned that red dress you bought at Nordstrom last week because your mom decided it was ‘garish’?”
“It was garish,” I said indignantly, my defenses rising.
He closed his eyes. “I’m not trying to make you feel bad,” he said gently. “My point is, maybe this will help you learn to make decisions for yourself without always needing their approval.”
“Maybe,” I said.
The following weekend, we settled down at my parents’ kitchen table. Morning sunlight streamed through the oversize window; outside, a hummingbird fed from a tall bird of paradise, its flower stretching out like a bird’s beak, its orange and deep blue petals fanning into a crown, giving the flower the appearance of a crane. The hummingbird’s flapping wings reminded me of the fluttering I was beginning to feel in my stomach—partly from our baby’s movements, and partly from my own racing heartbeat as I prepared to deliver my parents news that would change all of our lives forever.
My parents were dressed in their bathrobes, the LA Times strewn across the table: the business section splayed out before my dad, Metro in front of my mom.
“So, to what do we owe the pleasure of this visit?” my mom said. She slid a bowl of cantaloupe in front of Wim. “Try it, it tastes just like sugar.”
Although we’d just eaten breakfast at our apartment, Wim graciously popped a hunk of the drippy fruit into his mouth.
As he wiped his chin clean with a napkin, I shook my head no thanks. Wim gave me an encouraging nod. Taking his cue, I said, “We have some good news and bad news.” I watched the steam rise from my father’s cup of Sanka. He held the mug, filled to the brim, with two hands, lifted it carefully to his lips, and took a small sip. As he did, he and my mom shared a glance across the table.
“Let’s hear the good news first,” my mom said.
“Okay,” I said. “The good news is that Morgan Stanley is offering Wim another job—”
“That’s wonderful!” my mom blurted.
“Congratulations, Wim!” my dad said with an emphasis on “Wim,” a quirky habit of his that made me smile; it was as if he thought emphasizing a person’s name validated the hard work that had gone into whatever achievement they were celebrating.
My dad had always said that Wim had a good head on his shoulders, and I’d been grateful to have my parent’s blessing when we’d married. “Marry a man who will take good care of you,” they’d told me many times—words that had always made me feel conflicted. On the one hand, I knew they only wanted the best for me. On the other hand, I’d always felt that they thought I needed taking care of—that, unlike Wim, I couldn’t manage on my own.
They both smiled at Wim and then turned their gazes back to me, looking at me expectantly.
“Now let’s hear the bad news,” my dad said quickly, a trace of apprehension in his voice.
My palms started to sweat. I was nervous, yet deep down, I knew that part of me was enjoy
ing this. As the youngest in my family, as was typical of my birth order, I had often rebelled as a way of distinguishing myself from my older brother and sister. I was the risk taker, the one who’d always chosen a different path from the other members of my family. Sitting here with my parents, I thought of other times in my life I’d sat in this same chair and delivered surprising news: “Shayna and I plan to backpack through Europe for two months”; “I fell in love with a man who lives in Switzerland”; “Wim wants to move in with us.” I thought about how each of those moments in my life had brought me to this point right now.
I glanced at Wim again. He was twirling his wedding ring in his fingers. Suddenly, I remembered Rabbi Eisenberg’s wedding sermon about what our rings symbolized, how the hole in the center shouldn’t be considered a space but rather a gateway leading to things and events both known and unknown. Now we would be entering that gateway; we were pioneers venturing into a new frontier, about to see what lay beyond the horizon.
I folded my hands on my lap and took a deep breath. “The bad news is …”
Wim looked up and gave me another encouraging nod.
“The job is in New York.”
My mother’s mouth dropped open. “New York? How long will you be there?”
“It’s a permanent move,” I said gently.
Tears welled up in her eyes. My father looked shaken but remained calm. Always stoic, he immediately launched into a speech about the importance of following one’s career.
“But what about the offer you put in on that house in Manhattan Beach?” my mom was asking. “That corner lot with no backyard …”
“We didn’t get the house,” I said. An image came to mind of the four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath California ranch. It had been cramped and dated, and we’d lost it in a bidding war. In upscale Manhattan Beach—safe, smogless, good schools—even the most derelict houses didn’t stay on the market more than a few hours. We hadn’t really expected to win the bid. However, I had expected that our first home would be thirty miles away from my parents and not three thousand miles away.
I looked around my parents’ kitchen as though it might be my last time. I remembered how the cabinets, now stained walnut, had once blended with the dark green exterior of the refrigerator and matching oven range, a color choice my mother came to regret a decade later. Back then, earthy shades were “in.”
I recalled the wallpapered breakfast area, once bright with mod flowers in burnt orange and avocado green—the same wallpaper my brother Adam had once splattered with a fistful of spaghetti when our game of playful pea tossing suddenly escalated into a full-blown food fight. The paper had long since been stripped and replaced with neutral off-white paint. Now that my siblings and I were grown, food fights had been replaced with fits of laughter around the table—storytelling, poking fun, bathroom jokes—all of which I’d no longer be a part of.
The sound of metal hitting glass jolted me back to the present. Wim’s ring had slipped from his fingers and fallen to the table with a loud clink. The thick band of gold vibrated against the glass surface until Wim clamped his hand over it and returned it to his finger.
“So the house hunt is over?” my mom asked.
“It is in LA.” Part of me felt disloyal, as though I were betraying my entire family. “I’ll fly home as much as I can. We’re hoping you’ll come visit us a lot.”
“Of course we will.”
“New York is the shopping capital of the world,” I added.
“Actually, Janie’s not going to leave yet, only I am,” Wim interjected, explaining that he planned to start his new job the following month and that I would be staying back to finish my social work degree.
For the past several days, he and I had been mulling over our dilemma, asking ourselves how I could finish out my degree, and my pregnancy, without us being separated. I had considered transferring to a graduate school in New York so we could live together, but with only five months left, it made little sense.
“We wondered if Janie could stay with you until she’s done with school,” he said. “I’ll be visiting as often as I can, but we thought it would be easier for her if she wasn’t alone.”
“Of course,” my parents said in unison.
“She can stay as long as she likes,” my dad added.
My first pregnancy was one of the most important milestones in our marriage, yet my husband wasn’t going to be there to share it with me. Instead, my parents would play surrogate spouse.
“Don’t worry, Wim,” my dad said, reaching out and patting my head. “We’ll take good care of her.”
As I pushed my chair back from the table and stood up, it occurred to me that maybe Wim was right. Maybe at twenty-eight years old, it was time for me to stand on my own two feet. I knew that it would be good for me. I just didn’t know that it would turn out to be harder than anything else I’d ever done.
Again, we were living apart, but this time we didn’t write letters to each other; we were too busy, Wim with writing credit analyses for real estate deals, me with writing term papers for school.
Five months later, on a bright, cloudless, May day, I boarded American flight 2400 from LAX to LaGuardia, the last flight I’d take before our baby was born. Sitting on the tarmac, waiting for my plane to take off, I felt excited about what lay ahead yet torn up over what I was leaving behind. As I stared out the small oval window, I remembered how just a few days earlier, my mother had taken me shopping for maternity wear that would get me through my last month of pregnancy. “You can mix and match these shirts with the jeans or blue skirt we got you, and you’ll have four new outfits,” she’d said with the enthusiasm of a personal shopper.
I’d come home later that day to find my laundry folded in neat piles on my bed, courtesy of my dad, the same way he’d done since I’d moved back in with them. Soon, there would be no more folded laundry, no more outings to the carwash, no more walks together through the hills. There would be no more year-round sunshine and no more shopping sprees.
When the pilot announced that the flight would take an estimated five hours and forty minutes and that the weather in New York was currently “a cool 53 degrees with heavy rain,” I quietly groaned. What’s worse, I wondered, the long flight ahead with this watermelon balanced on my bladder or the frigid temperatures awaiting me when we land?
But the harsh weather wasn’t the only thing I worried about. I’d never lived outside of LA, except for my time in college, and even then I’d been only two hours away. The idea that I would soon be entering another world where, other than Wim and his family, I wouldn’t know a soul, was terrifying. To me, this move meant loss.
The engines spooled up for takeoff, and the seat belt sign went on. My heart fluttered. An announcement came over the loudspeaker: “We are ready for takeoff. Please make sure your seat belt is fastened and your tray is in an upright position.” A passenger coughed. A baby let out a short wail. I loosened the blue nylon strap and extended it as far as it would stretch over my oversize belly.
I tried to lure my thoughts back to the idea of my new independence but found myself obsessing over all the birthday celebrations I’d miss, the weekly dinners with my grandma that would come to an abrupt end. I pictured my grandma squeezing me tight, our bodies rocking together from side to side, as we said our tearful goodbyes. “Beris’ druzhno, ne budet gruzno,” she’d said—“Take hold of it together, it won’t feel heavy”—reminding me that Wim and I would need to take care of each other.
As the plane sped down the runway, it felt like a buzz saw was reverberating through my chest. Will being independent make me happy? I wondered.
“Due to high winds over the Midwest, we are anticipating heavy turbulence in some areas, so please keep your seat belts fastened at all times when the safety light is on,” the pilot warned.
I double-checked my seat belt buckle, closed my eyes, and prepared myself for the bumpy flight ahead.
CHAPTER 8: SMELLS LIKE POO
Raymond Ave, Rye – June 2006
As Wim and I sat side by side on plastic lounge chairs, legs splayed like untrussed turkeys, we took in the first rays of summer. We waved to our Raymond Avenue neighbors, Bonnie and Maurice Schreiber, who were home from their condo in Key West and playing Canasta with friends, their zinc-coated faces barely visible under wide-brimmed straw hats. Maurice had been a successful bank executive at Goldman Sachs. He and Bonnie lived in a modest colonial home with a small yard, drove practical Hondas, and belonged to the same casual swim club we did, the kind without a golf course or fancy dining room. The kind without a strict payment policy where if you’re late paying the bill, you’re forced to suffer either humiliation by public listing of your name for everyone to see or a stoning by martini olives. The kind where one hundred dollars buys you a membership, versus the local country club, where the same amount bought you a hot dog. Wim and I had lived next door to the Schreibers for the last eleven years and had always admired their restrained lifestyle. We prided ourselves on living the same way.
I remembered when the FOR SALE signs started popping up in our neighborhood, how Wim and I often privately pooh-poohed our neighbors’ decision to move up to their dream home. Many were, like Wim, in the financial industry, an industry packed with distortions, the prize always moving just beyond your grasp. No matter how well you did, there was always someone doing better. You always had the feeling that, despite the fact that you were probably earning more than you ever dreamed you could, everyone around you seemed to be making more. It was a life-sucking industry, and yet we were dependent upon it.
We shook our heads and sighed when we heard that the Smiths, a young family who’d only lived in our neighborhood for four years, had just purchased a six-bedroom spec home with a heated in-ground pool and shuffleboard court in Rye Township. “They’ll miss the kids cutting through each other’s backyards to play … They’ll miss being able to walk to the bagel shop … They’ll miss their old mortgage payment when the new one doubles,” we said. “Not us,” we told each other. “We live within our means.”