Within Arm's Reach

by Ann Napolitano

  “You’re the one who scheduled the meeting,” I say.

  “Why did you cancel last week?”

  “Something came up.” I sit up straight, trying to look professional. But I have never felt professional and it doesn’t help that I was distracted while getting dressed this morning and am therefore wearing sneakers with my pantsuit. “Wasn’t my column all right?”

  “Actually, no,” he says.

  I take my glasses off. “I spent hours on it—what are you talking about? It was great this week.” Then I feel a twinge of doubt. “Wasn’t it?”

  “I can tell from the letters you’re choosing to answer that something’s wrong,” he says. “A few months ago you wouldn’t go near the depressed teenage girls, now you can’t get enough of them. And do you even read the advice you’re giving them? You told one heartbroken girl, and I quote, ‘to stay in the darkness for a while and to learn from it.’ You can’t say that to a fifteen-year-old, Gracie—that means suicide! We had to edit the line out before the column printed.” Grayson raps a pencil against the stack of papers in front of him. “Just tell me what your problem is. You know that if you don’t tell me I’ll find out anyway.”

  I am slightly appalled. I remember writing that line, but it didn’t sound that negative and frightening in my head. I had meant it to be comforting. I was suggesting growth and self-awareness to the young girl, not death. But I know better than to argue the point with Grayson. Like Lila, he is very logical. When it comes to the newspaper, he doesn’t care about intentions, only about what appears in black and white. And the newspaper is everything to him, if something can mean everything to someone as cool and controlled as Grayson.

  Grayson is thirty-three. He wrote for the Local section all through college and then became editor of the section three years after graduation. That was all he had ever dreamed of, careerwise, but then his father, who was editor-in-chief of the paper, suffered a massive heart attack at a Giants football game. Before he died he called a staff meeting in his hospital room and named Grayson to replace him as editor-in-chief. The deal was that Grayson would try the job for six months, and if he didn’t work out by consensus of all the editors, he would return to his old position. The six-month trial period came to a close three years ago, and though there have been a few complaints, Grayson has held on to the job.

  “I hate it when you rewrite my columns, Grayson. You don’t do that to your other writers.”

  “I edit all of my writers.”

  “I’m not talking about editing, I’m talking about rewriting.” I am stalling. Grayson is the one person who always thinks highly of me. I don’t look forward to watching his eyes dim and grow hooded.

  Grayson shakes his head. “Don’t change the subject. What’s wrong?”

  “My gram was in a car accident.”

  “I heard about that. Four stitches but she’s fine. Try again.”

  “My mother is driving me crazy.”

  This gets a small smile, as it is very old news. But his eyes are distracted behind his glasses; he is thinking. “You also chose several letters over the last few weeks involving the problems of pregnant women. So we have depression and pregnant women.”

  The pink glasses were a pointless defense. I could wear a sack over my head and Grayson would look to see how my breath moved the material and if my head was bowed and whether he could detect a sigh, or a sob, or a giggle.

  When I broke up with Grayson I told him that it was because I didn’t want to be in a relationship anymore. That was true, but the larger truth was that I had just found out I was pregnant with his baby. He never knew about it. Lila was the one who took me to the clinic, waited for me, and drove me home. She was the only person I told. I never thought of that pregnancy as having much of anything to do with Grayson. I thought of it only as a mistake. Maybe that is why I have never been comfortable with the idea of losing Grayson entirely. He is my link to that experience. And now that I am pregnant again, I can’t help but look at the past in a different way. I don’t owe Grayson that truth—I will never tell him about my abortion—but I do owe him something. As my belly grows, I’m afraid all my cards will be laid on the table.

  I fiddle with my glasses in my lap. Which time is it? Time to hold my cards, or time to fold and make a run for it? What if all of the truth, not just part of it, comes rushing out?

  Grayson meets my eyes, and I squirm. The air in the room is so heavy I feel like I could swim out the door. He sees the truth; I watch his brain click on to the answer.

  He says, “You’re pregnant?”

  There’s no reason for me to respond.

  He guessed it, but there is still shock in his eyes. “You’re keeping the baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was this planned?”

  My face is burning. “No. Joel and I broke up.”

  He leans back in his chair. He is a small man with glasses and curly brown hair. He runs in the early mornings, and he has a runner’s tight, compact body. “Charlene told me that someone I was close to was pregnant, but I didn’t pay attention to her.”

  Charlene is the gossip columnist for the paper. She is the worst kind of gossip, mean and nosy. I do everything I can to avoid her. “How the hell would Charlene know?”

  The answer comes to me almost immediately. Joel must have told Charlene, or maybe it was Weber. That fat jerk. He’s probably working his way through the phone book making sure all my ex-boyfriends hear the news, having the time of his life. I say, “I wanted to be the one to tell you.”

  Grayson’s hand is in his hair now, tugging at the curls. I used to tease him that he should break himself of that habit, because there was no way his Jewish hair was going to straighten out. He is staring at me, and I wish he would stop. He says, “Do you want to get married?”

  “I told you Joel and I broke up.”

  “Well, yes.” I can see how my news has caught him off balance. He is thinking out loud, something he never does. “But you could marry me.”

  I shrink back until each rung of the chair digs into my spine. My voice comes out thin. “Do you think that’s funny, Grayson? That’s your idea of a joke?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t need pity. I’m going to be fine.”

  “How are you going to be fine? You don’t make enough money. You’ll have to get a higher-paying job, and no one will hire a pregnant woman. Besides, what else are you qualified to do?”

  I am close to tears. I can hear Gram in my head: Calm down, Gracie . I hear her say: I will take care of you and the baby. I say, “Back off, will you?”

  “Why do you want to have this baby?”

  “Stop it,” I say. “Stop interviewing me. I don’t have to answer your questions. I don’t have to explain anything to you. I’m going to have this baby. We’re going to be fine, just the two of us. You’ll see.”

  I stumble on my way through the door. My legs have gone numb while sitting in the chair. I lurch into the hallway, my lower half full of pins and needles.

  “You’ll need help,” Grayson calls after me. “You won’t be able to do this alone.”

  I LEAVE Hackensack by way of Route 17. I pass the huge new mall, then the older smaller mall, and turn off at the exit for Ramsey. I am not headed home. There are only three places Joel goes in the course of a day, and I know all of them. At night he’s drinking beer at the Green Trolley. In the late afternoon he’s at the firehouse. During the rest of the day he’s doing spy work for Mayor Carrelli.

  I drive in circles around the Municipal Building, slumped behind the wheel. I don’t see anyone I recognize. How dare Joel tell anyone my news? How can I be expected to walk around my own life if I have no idea who knows what? Gram is talking again, telling me to calm down. She calls getting upset “losing your head,” and she thinks I lose my head too often. She’s right. She must be right.

  I drive a little faster now, turning the corners surrounding the Municipal Building so fast my tires screech. I go around
six times, until I’m dizzy. I never see Joel. I see my father on the sixth go-round, sitting on the front steps of the building. I hear the bark of the mayor’s old Chow. I see a flash of red that could be Margaret’s hair. She and Charlene are best friends. She surely knows already. I cannot stop what’s already in motion, and I don’t want to get in Margaret’s way. What if she does hit Joel? She loves him; what would she do to me?

  When I am forced to stop at a red light directly in front of the Municipal Building, I slump down further in my seat. A single fat bead of sweat runs from the nape of my neck underneath the hook on my bra, down to the waist of my pants. My back aches, and I keep shifting so the bottom of the steering wheel doesn’t push into my abdomen. The light stays red forever.

  I hear a noise; there are footsteps beside my car. I look up praying feverishly that I am still alone and that no one has seen me. But I’m not alone. There is a three-year-old girl standing in front of the open car window in a lime green dress. As unbelievable as it sounds, I know immediately that this is my unborn child. I recognize her. She is looking at me with her head tipped to the side.

  I can see that she is about to ask, Mommy, why are you hiding? And I can also see that there is no suitable answer to that question. I am not behaving like a mommy. Go away, I hiss at her. I’m not ready for you yet.

  Beyond her, on the steps of the Municipal Building, my father looks unhappy. I have the sense that he is thinking of me. His face is so sad, tears push at the back of my eyes. I can feel in that moment my child and my father worrying over me. Their worry bores into me like a drill. I am not strong enough. They both see my weakness: I don’t know who I am.

  The light finally turns green, and I slam my foot on the gas. I need to get away. My head is splitting when I finally nose the car into a straight line. I drive across town and don’t stop until I reach Sarachi’s Pond. Once there, I pull into the dirt parking lot where the teenagers drink and neck after the sun goes down, and turn off the car’s engine. I am alone. There are no other cars. Sarachi’s is a pond surrounded by heavy woods. There are picnic tables scattered near the water’s edge. On weekend afternoons couples bring their young children here to feed the ducks and geese.

  My family came here only once that I can remember. I was thirteen and Lila was eleven. We came here for a picnic, and it remains the only picnic I’ve ever been on in my life. We are not big on the outdoors in our family. We don’t like bugs or sweating or sitting on the ground. We sunburn easily. This one picnic was an exercise in forced spontaneity. My dad bought fancy sandwiches at the gourmet supermarket, and Mom pulled an old blanket from the upstairs closet. Lila was assigned to bring her Frisbee and I had my Monopoly board. Mom and Dad had told us their plan in the middle of the previous week so we wouldn’t have a chance to back out. When we asked why we were going on a picnic, they answered that we just were, and that was that. It had seemed like a strange thing to do, and a strange time to do it. Lila and I hated each other at that age. We couldn’t have been more different. I had just fallen for boys, and I couldn’t think about anything but how to get one, and once I got one, what to do with him. I slept with my hair in curlers and anti-wrinkle cream smeared under my eyes. I spoke with a horrible English accent that I thought made me sound sophisticated.

  At eleven, Lila was a friendless, straight-A student who was obsessed with reading the newspaper. She read my parents’ copies of the New York Times, the Star Ledger, and the Bergen Record every day and focused on the really bad news. She cut out articles on plane crashes, shootings, abandoned children, and freak fatal accidents. Whenever Mom gave her almost daily plea for someone to please talk about something at the dinner table, Lila would pull one of the articles out of her sock, where she stored them. My sister was a weird kid, and I wanted nothing to do with her.

  I can see now that the picnic was an attempt on my parents’ part to pull our family together. I’m sure it was my mother’s idea. She didn’t recognize or particularly like the two daughters who were pulling away from her. She would try to brush my hair and tuck me in at night, and I bristled under her attempts to make me stay a child. Lila and I were more relaxed with Dad. We mystified him, but he still enjoyed our company. Mom would be the one to think a picnic would be a great quick fix.

  Of course, it wasn’t. It was a humid day, and after we ate our turkey and Brie sandwiches, I complained that my hair was beginning to frizz. I walked over to the water’s edge to check my reflection, and while I was leaning over, Lila beaned me in the back of the head with her Frisbee. Caught off balance, I took a step forward and lost my right sneaker in the watery muck of the pond. I was mortified, because there were other kids from my school at Sarachi’s Pond who might have seen me get hit in the head, and because my sneakers were brand new. It took ten minutes for Dad to convince me that if I took off my other sneaker I would look fine, and I calmed down enough to return to the blanket.

  Our parents sat between Lila and me while we played Monopoly. There were strong and sudden gusts of wind, so we had to tuck our cards under our feet, and clutch the fake money in our fists. Silence fell over us, and the game dragged on and on. I began to think I would turn fourteen still sitting on that blanket. Lila kept pulling her favorite article of the day, about a car wreck in South Jersey, out of her sock and then sliding it back in. At one point, just before I threw down my cards and begged to go home, I grew aware of what we must look like to other families, couples, and children in the park. Unhappy, and ill-suited to one another. I realized, in that moment, that even though we were a family, we did not necessarily belong together. We did not necessarily work.

  I LAY my hand on my stomach and watch the ducks flap their wings and quack. I visited Sarachi’s Pond often as a teenager and then later during college vacations. I lost my virginity here, to Billy Goodwin, when I was sixteen. Soon after, I became an expert on having sex in cars. I knew how to do it in the front passenger seat, with the guy on the bottom, me sitting facing him, pelvis to pelvis, my legs spread as wide as they’d go. I learned, after a few bad bruises, how to avoid the stick shift.

  But sex in the backseat was always the best, my head against one door and my feet propped against the other. That was my locked-in position, where I shimmied and quaked beneath the boys. “Free Fallin” or “Brown Eyed Girl” or something from Billy Joel’s Glass Houses album played on the radio. The inside of the car smelled like an overripe mixture of Naugahyde seats, sweaty towels from wrestling or football practice, and a sweet hint of the red Slurpee we’d shared earlier at 7-Eleven. I would bury my face in the plush seat and breathe that smell in. I have to say that having sex in bed is overrated. Sometimes it is better to have less space, less range of motion, fewer options. Cramped spaces lead to greater acts of creativity and a special kind of intensity. I had some very good evenings at Sarachi’s Pond.

  I slide my hand down and touch myself, through the fabric of my pants. Just a soft pressure to say, I haven’t forgotten about you. I miss you. Then I pull my hand away, and cross my arms over my chest. Unborn little girls or insanely jealous redheads could approach my car at any moment. Even alone, I’m not safe.

  I suddenly hear Grayson’s question, Why do you want to have a baby?

  His voice, in the still car, is inescapable.

  I don’t try to come up with an answer. I don’t have one. I am obviously good at getting pregnant, no one can argue with that. Maybe I have found my gift. Maybe this is what I am meant to do. Maybe I will be like Gram and spend the rest of my premenopausal life bearing children.

  The problem is, I am not as uninformed as that reasoning sounds. For my own peace of mind, I wish I were. After all, I have written numerous Dear Abby responses to teenage girls telling them that having a baby is not an answer. When the girls complain of a feeling of emptiness inside, I have told them in no uncertain terms to find another way to fill the void. Join a team. Be the creator of something— an art project, or a play. Write in your journal. Try to have a conversation wi
th your parents. Wait until you have grown up and into yourself.

  That is what I would have told my teenage self as she was steaming up Billy Goodwin’s mother’s Volvo at Sarachi’s Pond. But I needn’t have bothered. I knew better back then. I was vigilant with birth control. I went on the Pill three days after I lost my virginity, and took it religiously every morning for thirteen years. I also insisted that the guys I was with wear condoms. I relaxed my doubled-up birth-control regimen with Grayson—maybe because we were together for so long— and that’s how I got in trouble the first time. And then, even before Joel, I began to grow forgetful. In the middle of the week I’d remember that I had forgotten to take my pill for a few days. I grew tired of reminding guys to put on a condom.

  I was ultra-cautious as a teenager because I was terrified by the idea of getting pregnant and having my family find out. That was what would wake me up with night sweats. That’s what would make my head hurt while I waited for my period to start each month. I was terrified of the reaction of my mother, grandmother, father, and aunts. Pregnancy without marriage was unthinkable in our family.

  I honestly don’t know what changed. My family still scares me. Gram knows now, and somehow her knowing and planning for me is more frightening than her not knowing. I wake up in the middle of the night sweating, heart flip-flopping in my chest, thinking, Why did I do this? Why?

  I have told my readers again and again that a baby is not an answer to anything. Don’t make that mistake. Don’t fall into that trap. Keep this in mind: A baby is simply, and decisively, and irreversibly, a baby. To give birth to a child is to take on the responsibility of another human life.

  KELLY

  My first memory is of the day my sister died. I know that child psychologists would say this isn’t possible, since I was only eighteen months old at the time. They say the brain isn’t developed enough to hold on to images until a child is closer to three years of age. But, in my case at least, they are wrong.