Within Arm's Reach

by Ann Napolitano

  “Happy Monday, Grayson,” I say into his machine. “Sorry, but something’s come up and I have to cancel our meeting tomorrow. Don’t worry, though, my column is going really well this week and it will be on time.” I hesitate, feeling like there is something more I should say. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  Then I hear myself launch into a nervous laugh, and I hang up the phone before I have a chance to completely fall apart on my ex-boyfriend/boss’s answering machine.

  I BELIEVE that you can learn from history. Pay attention to the mistakes that were made before you, and don’t repeat them.

  My uncle Pat, who alternately tried to run away from, please, and horrify my grandfather right up until his death, teaches me that I need to come to terms with my mother. I do not want her to own my life in any way. I am still working on that.

  My uncle Johnny is a prime example of how you need to hold on to the essence of who you are. He was mischievous and wild as a boy. He spent a portion of nearly every afternoon seated at the dining-room table with his hands folded in front of him and his feet flat on the floor thinking about what he’d done this time under Gram’s watchful eye. But he didn’t like school and found it hard to concentrate, so when the Vietnam war started, without telling anyone, Johnny joined the army. In the pictures taken of him the day he left, he is a skinny eighteen-year-old boy with a wickedly charming grin. By the time he came back home, the fire was completely stamped out of him. He is among the most serious, unhappy adults I have ever met.

  But Meggy has the lesson I need to learn from now. She married Uncle Travis when she was twenty because she got pregnant. I don’t think they were ever in love. They are united in resentment, and eternally disgusted with each other for not standing up and demanding better.

  It is Meggy I am thinking about when I finally tell Joel. We are in bed with the lights out. We have just had sex because we always do when he sleeps over. Otherwise, what is the point of him staying the night?

  I cup my hands over my abdomen. When I press down on the center I feel a solid area the size of my palm. I say exactly what I have said to different men so many times in the past. “I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

  I listen to Joel’s breath catch, and then grow shallow. In my experience, men hate to be broken up with. They’re usually not upset about breaking up, but about being on the receiving end of the decision. He says, “What do you mean? I thought we were having fun.”

  “The sex is good,” I admit.

  “It’s better than good.”

  I smile in the darkness. I am sure that for all her scary qualities, Margaret, with her no-nonsense demeanor and helmet of red hair, is not a great lover. Then I remember what I am doing, and why this breakup is different.

  I take a breath and say it. “I’m pregnant.”

  This is the first time I’ve said the words out loud. The news has lived only in my head for weeks. It sounds massive in the air, and irrevocable. I immediately want to take it back. That’s all I can think: I want to take it back.

  I don’t like the sound of the words. They are momentous and stupid and clichéd. “I’m pregnant” is a line right out of every soap opera and sappy movie. And that’s not me, I don’t want to be the girl who has just said that and now waits for the boy’s reaction. I want to explain myself and my situation better. But what else can I say? The language is inadequate. I am trapped by the words, and by this moment. I am that girl, and I am me. And my life has just changed.

  Joel says, in a very cautious voice, “Are you sure?”

  I nod in the darkness. I can’t speak.

  “Are you one hundred percent certain? I mean, did you take one of those over-the-counter tests, or did you go to the doctor? Because those home tests aren’t reliable.”

  “I went to the doctor. I’m almost three months.”

  Joel is lying on his back beside me. He has not moved. Still, his voice seems to come from farther away than the next pillow. “Are you sure it’s mine?”

  “There’s no need to be unkind,” I say. “I don’t want you to be involved. I really don’t. I just thought you should hear the news from me.”

  “You’re going to keep it?”

  I shift my weight. I raise myself up onto my elbows, so he is already behind me. This is the only answer I have been sure of, from the moment I watched the line on the first pregnancy test turn pink. It seemed, surprisingly, like the only possible choice. “Yes.”

  “Yes. Okay . . . yes.” He says the word as if he is trying it out, trying to locate its meaning. “I’m sorry about this,” he says. “I am. But I have to go now. I’ll call you in the morning.”

  “You don’t have to call,” I say.

  Joel is now sitting on the side of the bed. I am looking at his back.

  “You knew, Gracie, didn’t you, that this wasn’t a serious relationship for me? I was trying to get over Margaret. And you never have serious relationships. Everybody knows that.”

  “What do you mean, everybody knows that?”

  There is fear in Joel’s eyes. He is standing, naked, his shoes in one hand and his socks in the other. His mind is on Margaret. He is wondering what she will say. I wonder if any of the men I have been with have ever given me that much thought, that much power. Probably Grayson did, but he gives everything a lot of thought, so that doesn’t count.

  Joel is looking down at the shoes he is holding. He says, in a dazed voice, “I don’t know how this could have happened. I was so careful.”

  I want him to leave. I am sitting up in bed, the sheet pulled to my chin so all of my bare skin is covered. That time is over. “ We, Joel. We. And we weren’t always careful.”

  But I only half-believe those words as I say them. I know, in the deepest part of me, that this event involved Joel in only the most minimal way. This began in me, and it will come from me. This baby is mine. It’s my path, not his. So I am not surprised that he has chosen to argue the point.

  “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Gracie. I really don’t. I never wanted to have anything to do with your feelings. But this just doesn’t feel like it’s true. I don’t feel like it’s mine. It’s not mine.” His pants are on. He is in the middle of the last sentence and in the middle of pulling his shirt over his head when he leaves the bedroom.

  Downstairs I hear the breezy noise of the refrigerator door opening, then the clink of beer bottles before Joel leaves and the house grows dark and empty. Only then do I feel a glimmer of the sweet relief that always comes after a breakup, when I am left blissfully alone. But this time it is only a glimmer, and I am no longer truly alone.

  I MAKE my way into the kitchen the next morning with only one thing on my mind: coffee. French roast with three spoonfuls of whole milk. I haven’t had a cup in eight and a half weeks, since I found out I was pregnant. But I need one now, this instant, as soon as possible.

  I walk straight to the coffeemaker. When I notice Lila bent over the kitchen table it throws me. I forget that she is staying here. My room-mate is usually a stranger whose name I get off the roommates’ Web site at the Bergen Record. I choose a girl who only needs a place for a few months, someone I won’t have to get to know well. One of those girls moved out right before Lila’s housing fell through. It’s been years since I’ve seen my sister in her pajamas. In our normal routine we used to meet for lunch or a movie; we only saw each other fully awake and out of choice. Running into my sister in my own home at odd hours of the day and night is new and strange.

  “Come look at these pictures,” she says. “Gram must have left them the other day. They were in an envelope with our names on it under one of the magnets on the refrigerator. Did you see them there?”

  Only when the coffeemaker is warm under my fingertips and the hot liquid is beginning to splash into the empty pot do I join her at the table to see what she is talking about. Lined up in front of the sugar bowl are three photographs of Lila and me as little girls. I was probably seven, Lila five, but
we were close to the same size and weight. The three pictures appeared to be taken in the course of one afternoon. We were on a hillside wearing winter coats. There was no snow, only waving grass.

  The first picture shows us posed, standing back to back, arms crossed over our chests, our hair whipping past each other’s faces. We were clearly under orders to smile, and had ended up with awkward half-mouthed grimaces. If you looked closely, past the puffiness of our parkas, you could see our elbows digging into each other’s sides. We were each trying to bring the other down either by calling uncle first, or by getting yelled at by Mom for ruining the picture.

  The other two photos show us playing. I was running, fists and body clenched, uphill, while Lila ran past me downhill, her arms stretched out like airplane wings, her mouth a wide O. In the third photo we played dead. We lay on our backs, arms and legs splayed, eyes squeezed shut.

  “I can’t remember that day,” Lila says. “Do you?”

  “No.”

  Lila is still bent over at the waist, studying the photographs as if looking for hidden clues. “I can’t stand it when I can’t remember something. What good is a photographic memory if I can’t remember days from my own life?”

  Our parents had submitted us to a battery of psychological tests when we were in grade school: IQ, personality tests, aptitude exams, etc. They had never told us the results of the tests, which was good, because Lila and I were fiercely competitive and cruel to each other up until I left for college. We might not have survived the knowledge of who had a greater IQ. The only thing our parents did tell us after the testing had concluded was that I had an aptitude for reading and writing, and that Lila had a photographic memory. Lila and I have both been struggling under the weight of these ordinary gifts ever since. I think we both wondered if they were true, or whether we had forced them to be true simply because of how we labeled ink blots and matched vocabulary words in some mustached psychologist’s rec room when we were nine and eleven years old.

  Lila picks up the photographs and puts them back in the envelope. “Did Mom call here last night?”

  “No. Why would she?”

  “Gram was in a car accident yesterday afternoon.”

  I hear her, but the words don’t make sense, so I push them away with questions. “What do you mean? Is she okay? She’s fine, right?”

  “I don’t actually know the details. She got into a fender bender in front of the Municipal Building and Dad brought her in. She needed a few stitches, and the doctor thought she might have had a tiny stroke while driving, which would have caused the accident. But there’s no way to prove that, and she was perfectly clear-headed with me. She’s fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I saw her.”

  “Thank God.”

  I picture Gram behind the wheel of a car careening out of control. I see her eyes widen with fear, and my own fill with tears. I don’t want to cry. My sister is not someone you want to cry in front of. I’m not sure she has ever cried, herself. She must have when we were little, but not that I can remember. I pull at the belt on my bathrobe. If I keep talking maybe I will be able to get rid of this picture of Gram hurt. I say, “Are you going to get mad at me if I tell you something?”

  “What kind of something.”

  “I want to tell you this one thing.”

  “I won’t listen to your boy problems.”

  “I’m pregnant. I told Joel last night.”

  Lila turns her head and looks back at me, still with her searching squint. “You’re pregnant again?”

  I try not to sound defensive. The tears are sitting behind my eyes, waiting for any opportunity to pour out. “Yes. I’m keeping the baby this time.”

  “I should have told them to tie your tubes when I took you to that clinic. Why are you telling me this? You know I don’t want to hear things like this!”

  I breathe slowly, in order to calm us both down. I don’t have the energy to deal with her anger. Lila has inherited a tsunami-like rage from our mother, who inherited it from her father. Lila is aware of the trait, and its path down our family tree, and it infuriates her. She concentrates on remaining very calm. Over time she has created a clinical, cool personality that harnesses all emotions underneath. But her demeanor is not a completely successful roadblock. When she is surprised, as I have surprised her just now, her control can blow away as easily as a thin piece of paper on a windowsill.

  When Lila becomes angry, all logic, rationality, kindness, and volume control are lost. I have never been so hurt as I have been beneath the hard-driving, pointed, obliterating sleet of my mother’s and sister’s words. My father and I have tiptoed around them from day one, careful not to offend, or provoke, or, in Lila’s case, surprise. I have misstepped this morning. I should have put some thought into how I would tell her.

  But Lila catches herself in time. Her slow breathing matches mine. We face each other. Lila is two inches taller than me, so I gaze slightly up, she looks slightly down. I can see the corollaries running through her mind: I’m not married, I’m not in love with Joel, I’ll have to tell Mom, Dad, and Gram, I don’t make enough money, I have a problem with commitment.

  “Does Gram know?” Lila asks.

  This almost makes me laugh. How could she think I’d be anywhere near ready, or able, to tell Gram that I am pregnant with an out-of-wedlock baby?

  “Of course not.”

  “Have you lost your mind?” My sister sounds curious.

  The smell of the coffee, steaming, waiting for me across the room, makes my eyes fill with tears. I want it so bad.

  I had an abortion five boyfriends and two and a half years ago. Three-quarters of the women my age that I know have had at least one. The trip to the abortion clinic (preferably one several towns away from where you live) is a massive silent rite of passage among white, well-educated girls of my generation. It is a careful, deeply held secret even the bigmouthed among us don’t discuss. Of the hundreds of Dear Abby letters I’ve received, only a handful have touched on the topic of abortion, and none have asked my advice on how to recover from one. This is a godsend, as I do not know the answer. My physical recovery was fine; the emotional recovery was a different matter. I was left with an emptiness inside me, and a very Catholic ache that told me I had sinned.

  Maybe Lila and Joel are right to be upset with me. Maybe I’m self-destructive. Maybe I wanted this. Maybe on some level I had, despite a semi-consistent regimen of Ortho-Novum pills and Trojan ribbed condoms, tried to get pregnant. Maybe my body knew that this was my only path to redemption and decided, without consulting my brain, to go for it. I believe in my decision to keep this baby, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s necessarily the right decision, or that I recognize the girl who made it.

  My sister raises her eyebrows. She has no use for ambiguity, vagueness, or long pauses. When something confuses her, she wants an answer. She is waiting; wanting to understand why I would veer so sharply off my life’s path. She wants to match up the sister in her memory—the one she’s known from early childhood to this Sunday morning—with the girl who stands before her now with the big, unwelcome news.

  I wish I could help her. I always want to help Lila, although usually it ends up working the other way around. “Maybe I have lost my mind,” I say, as calmly as possible.

  Then I turn my back to her and putter around the kitchen, trying to compose myself, trying to stay away from the coffee, trying to figure out where I am going to find the strength to stand behind this decision for another ten minutes, then for the remainder of this day, then for the rest of my life.

  LILA

  Two days after Gracie tells me she’s pregnant I catch her sneaking some guy out of her bed and out the back door. It is five in the morning. I’m barely conscious, huddled over a cup of coffee in the kitchen. I’m scheduled to be at the hospital by six.

  I haven’t turned any lights on because I find it’s best to ease myself into the day. I am not a morning person. I feel I
have been deeply wronged every time I have to wake up before seven A.M. It is probably for this reason—because I am already on the defensive—that at first the noise in the center of the house scares me. I straighten up and take a step toward the steak knives. I think: Burglar, rapist, six o’clock news, please don’t hurt me.

  But then the noise draws out and separates into two sets of footsteps. I don’t bother to reach for the knives. I realize what is going on. No one is breaking in. Someone is breaking out.

  I hear Gracie whisper, “The third step.” But he doesn’t hear her in time, and the third step gives a sharp whine. They both freeze for a moment, are silent, and then start again. She leads him not through the kitchen, which is directly under the bedroom I’m staying in, but through the dining room to the back door. My sister is good at this. At the door I catch a glimpse of him while they kiss good-bye. I’ve never seen him before. He’s a black guy, really skinny, holding his sneakers in his hand. Then the door is carefully, silently opened, and he is gone.

  This pisses me off. It’s five fucking A.M., and all I wanted was a little peace and quiet with my coffee. But Gracie can’t help herself. Even when she isn’t trying, she’s throwing her life in my face, trying to make me share it with her. And the truth is, as she very well knows, I’m not interested. We used to understand each other, before I moved in here. We had a nice balance. We respected each other’s differences and we didn’t push too far. But when I moved in with Gracie, all balance was lost.

  I think, If only I hadn’t lost my housing and been forced to stay here.

  If only Gracie had kept her mouth shut. And her legs.

  If only I could have slept until a civilized hour this morning. If only there wasn’t so much I had to do.