Molly dug her iPod out of her bag and stuck the buds in her ears, shaking her head as she replayed the conversation in her mind. Florence and the Machine began to reverberate through the ear buds, and as the hypnotic, low beat of “Heavy In Your Arms” filled her head, Molly clicked down the street in time to the music, glad for the noise. She needed the crisp air from the walk in her lungs and brain. She was desperately late, but she’d run if she had to, second-trimester belly and all. Molly quickened her pace as she neared the intersection.
She didn’t want to admit it, but Scott had managed to make a point that morning. Not the off-base point about how men weren’t supposed to stay home—Excuse me, Don Draper, Molly thought, but times have changed—but she had to admit she did sort of like the idea of one of them being home with the baby. She had never imagined herself as a stay-at-home mom, though, and balked at the assumption that she should be the one padding around the house with a baby draped over one shoulder and an apron tied around her waist. But she’d overheard enough conversations among her colleagues about their misbehaving children, troubles with day care, and horrible sex lives to be worried about how life was going to change in a few months. Nobody ever made the working-with-child life sound feasible, let alone enjoyable. And this morning, Scott had forced Molly to face a decision she didn’t want to make.
He had a habit of doing that lately.
A wind picked up with a biting force, whipping around the street corners and slowing her pace. Molly dug her hands deep into the pockets of her coat, her skin stinging as much as her thoughts. The tree-filled blocks of luxury brick row homes and boutique shops had given way to the high rises of apartment buildings, and traffic was now filling the streets, car exhaust contaminating the air in her lungs. She stopped at the corner to wait for the light to change. Florence had stopped singing, and all that filled Molly’s ears was the boom-boom, boom-boom of the song’s closing drumbeat.
She’d once asked a coworker of hers how she did it: the woman worked full-time, had a lawyer husband who stayed at the office long into the night, and was raising three school-aged children who, as Molly heard it, were involved in about every activity a kid could do. When Molly asked her how she managed, the woman had responded, “Autopilot. You just have to set yourself on autopilot and go.” And that sentence had stayed with Molly.
Molly didn’t want to live her life on autopilot. She was determined to never take for granted the life of this little person growing inside her, and she didn’t want this resentment toward Scott to keep growing. He was entitled to want what he did, she knew, but so was she. The person you greet at the end of the aisle on your wedding day is going to be almost the exact same person you took out to dinner on your first date, whether you want to recognize it or not. People don’t change all that much, Molly thought. But maybe their expectations do, which is what sends most people staggering after the ring has been slipped onto the finger.
Molly rubbed her hand across her forehead before checking her watch. Another song ended, and, hastening her step, she crossed the busy street.
Emily had been a stay-at-home mom until Molly’s youngest brother, Johnny, entered middle school, and Molly had always felt sort of lucky that she hadn’t had to go to day care. She would race down the school bus stairs after it dropped her off at three twenty and burst into her kitchen to find a snack and a glass of milk waiting for her. She’d yammer away about the crazy experiment they did in science and the way her friend Becky’s new crush had said hi to her in the cafeteria, and the whole time her mother was there, leaning against the kitchen counter, hands resting on the countertop, smiling, nodding. Listening. Their family didn’t take beach vacations, and they couldn’t afford many restaurant meals or name-brand shoes. But Emily could always be counted on to be there, listening.
When Molly was sick, she could sleep as late as she wanted. She’d lie in bed with her comforter pulled up to her chin, dozing in and out of a daze of Vicks VapoRub and lemon Ricola. She’d listen to her brothers gathering their school books and her dad showering for work and could hear Emily hushing everyone to be quiet because little Molly wasn’t feeling well. Later, her mother would bring her homemade chicken noodle soup and ginger ale, and Molly would lie with her head in her lap to spend a groggy afternoon watching The Price Is Right. Because Emily was home, Molly could be home.
She wondered how she was going to handle the intricacies of a daily schedule once her maternity leave was over. What time would she have to wake up? Would she shower and get ready before the baby was up? What if she did try to breastfeed—she’d have to pump breast milk at some point, wouldn’t she? And each time she put on her heels and packed up her laptop, Molly knew Scott’s irritation would grow. It seemed like all the great opportunities the twentieth-century women’s movement created for Molly had evaporated now that her body had a fetal co-owner. She’d read a magazine article one day that told her that she was selfish for working if she didn’t have to, but see a talk show the next that decreed full-time parenthood an antiquated notion reserved for religious types and lazy people. Molly didn’t know who was telling her the truth.
“Grrrr!” Molly exclaimed out loud. She was in Center City now, dwarfed by the high-rises of Penn Center, and her exasperation attracted the startled gaze of a lawyer on his way into the courthouse. She ripped the buds out of her ears in frustration and tried not to cry. The one time she missed a step, wasn’t careful, and this happened. Now she had pants that didn’t fit and a creature inside her making her crave chocolate syrup and Pop Rocks. Molly passed a food truck as she neared her office, and the warm, yeasty aroma of hot dogs and soft pretzels coated with coarse salt wafted on the air. Her mouth watered with a new, ferocious hunger, and she placed a protective hand over her stomach.
There was a person actually growing inside of her, and Molly was determined not to mess it up. Not another step. She wasn’t missing another chance to toe the line. One mistake was enough for this lifetime, she thought. Stupid unplanned pregnancy.
In the same instant she felt guilty for the thought.
“Sorry, baby,” Molly said, and patted her belly with a soft hand. Finally arriving at her building, Molly entered the wide marble lobby and got in line for one of the small elevators. She noticed a very pregnant woman exit through another pair of elevator doors and waddle past her. Molly smiled at her as she passed, feeling for a minute like they were both members of some secret girls-only club to which no one else had the password.
Molly had been watching too many DVR’d episodes of A Baby Story lately and, as her own delivery date grew closer, was starting to get frightened of realities like “episiotomy” and “forceps.” But she was going to get to become a mom. In a few months, she was going to get to meet this baby and have a little boy or girl who would be all her own, and the thought—of a toddler holding her hand on their way to the ice-cream truck, of her child playing with blocks on the rug beside her, of the smell of baby shampoo when she kissed her infant’s head before bedtime—made her flush with a kind of thrill she hadn’t even known she longed for. But she hadn’t imagined that it would happen like this. Not when her career was really taking off. Not before she and Scott had really had a chance to be married for a while. All her dreams of a honeymoon backpacking through Europe were traded for the reality of schlepping the baby to its grandparents’ houses in the suburbs on the weekends. Instead of bottles of white wine, she’d be chilling bottles of breast milk. And as for rolling around in the bed of some quaint Italian boutique hotel in Tuscany, well, she wasn’t quite sure how anything that involved being sexy and naked was going to happen if she’d have a baby attached to her boobs every hour and a half.
Molly smoothed her hair over her shoulders and buttoned her blazer as the elevator car rose slowly to the twentieth floor. Of course, she thought, if Scott had his way, she wouldn’t be working by the time they had a honeymoon, and they might not be able to spend the money on a Europe
an vacation anyway. Molly was starting to think that having a baby was going to be more expensive than either she or Scott realized. She had to hold on to her job. It was the only thing keeping her head above the murky waters of uncertainty right now. Scott had to realize that eventually, Molly figured. Maybe.
With a start, Molly realized that she was trying to get Scott to change, too. It’s really easy to moralize when you’re the one standing at the pulpit.
Thirty seconds later, Molly was rushing through the front door of Shulzster & Grace, taking off her coat, and pulling files out of her bag before she reached her office. Everyone she passed was already at their desks, heads bent over keyboards, phones held to ears. One look at Bill’s face told Molly that she should have been one of them. It wasn’t the first time this week he’d given her that look, and she felt a pit form in her stomach. Molly dropped her bag and coat on her desk and strode back to Bill’s office. Once she entered, she sank down into the seat across the desk from him, glanced at the clock, and, as an apology, gave her boss a little sideways smile.
Bill leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms across his chest. He was a narrow reed of a man not that much taller than Molly, with thinning hair cut very close to his head. He favored gold watches and neckties with huge, unfortunate geometric patterns, but he was fair—tough, but professional. Bill was ten years older than Molly and had been married for twice as long as that. By the number of framed photographs on his desk and bookshelves—fifteen at Molly’s last count—he was a man who was content at home, with his soft, kind wife, four children, a dog, and a cat. Molly thought that Bill’s life seemed about as all-American as it could get. It was normal, and a tad predictable, but it was the life he’d worked very hard to achieve. She could almost forgive him the obviousness of naming his dog Fido.
Right now, though, Bill wasn’t smiling over his blessings in life. Right now, he was pissed off at his star employee.
“Molly,” Bill said. “You missed the eight o’clock conference call with the Hooper company. They were looking forward to talking again with the woman who got all of America to ‘Hooperize’ their online accounts.”
Molly slapped her hand against her forehead. “Oh, no. That was this morning?”
Her boss nodded.
“Bill, I’m so sorry. I had it in my calendar for tomorrow. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” She registered the look of disapproval on Bill’s face and stammered a little bit. “Oh, come on, Bill, you know this isn’t like me! Even Wonder Woman had to lose her golden tiara now and again, right? How—how can I make it up to you?”
“Well, for starters,” Bill said, “you could think about starting to show up on time again. And possibly making some of these evening events. And answering your phone when I call you, even if you’re at lunch. Just like you used to.”
Bill glanced at the open door behind Molly and lowered his voice.
“Molly, there are rumors that you dozed off at your desk yesterday afternoon”—Molly felt her face grow hot but said nothing—“but I’ll just assume you were doing some restorative meditation during your lunch break.” He clasped his fingers together. “Molly, I’ll be honest with you. You’re slacking off. This is unlike you. We’re in the middle of layoffs, and the big shots are looking to cut corners wherever they can. What are you thinking? It’s like you’re trying to get yourself canned.”
“No! Oh my God, no, Bill!” Molly felt her skin break out into the same cold sweat she’d felt when she’d been speeding down Route 202 and a police car had pulled up behind her, lights flashing. She dug her fingers into the sides of the chair’s seat. “I love this job. I’ve just been going through a slump. And that slump is hereby over, officially, at this very second. I am slump-free. De-slumpified. This, right here”—Molly gestured widely over her head and torso—“is a no-slump zone. I am—”
“Okay, Molly, I get it.” Bill shrugged and threw up his hands. “You’re back. Good. Now, get in your office. We have a call in three minutes.”
“Okay. I’m there.” Molly stood up, smoothed her new black maternity pencil skirt over her thighs and started for the door.
“Oh, and Molly?”
Molly turned. “Yes?”
“Be careful. Stay on your game. The bigwigs are especially watching you.”
Molly gulped. “Consider me warned. Thank you.”
The sun was setting that following Monday, casting a sharp red-tinged glare on Molly’s office window. She’d spent the entire weekend holed up in the guest quarters of Scott’s parents’ home, eating caviar for brunch instead of catching up on work as she’d intended to do. Even as long as she’d been dating Scott, the lifestyle in which he’d grown up still stunned her. She was used to casual Sundays at home, with her dad standing over the stove in his slippers, a coffee mug in one hand while he cooked up scrapple and scrambled eggs to eat before they rushed off to church. At Monica and Edward’s house—the Manor, as Molly thought of it—a cook prepared omelets to order when they came together for a lazy, late-morning meal. There were bowls of fresh fruit and yogurt parfaits and French-pressed coffee. At Molly’s childhood home, the family wore pajamas to the table and traded sections of the Sunday paper. At Scott’s, one was expected to change clothes before eating and remember which fork to use. It was a whole other world, and everything in it sparkled.
Molly had been working double-time today to make up for the lost hours over the weekend, Bill’s warning still reverberating in her head. The last beam of sunlight disappeared behind City Hall as Molly closed her laptop and stretched her neck. She was surprised at how many of her clients had no idea how to navigate social media, and she had spent the afternoon creating pages for two of them on various sites. She could be just as focused as her father and just as thorough as her mother. She rolled through the websites now on her phone to assess the positive feedback they’d already received. She decided that she had just enough time to send one more email to Bill before meeting Jenny for dinner. Her eyes felt like they could close any moment, and her back ached. She looked down to see that her feet were swelling a little over her shoes, making the thin heels look like a set of doll’s slippers that had been forced on under her heavy ankles. Molly was soon going to have to figure out how to make Target flip-flops work with her new Topshop maternity dresses. She wondered how it would feel to waddle down the halls of S&G to meet a client in a few months. She fished the last chocolate-covered mint out of the bag on her desk and chewed the candy without really tasting it. The company was going to have to lay somebody else off just to afford to expense her business dinners.
Molly felt her stomach rumble at the thought of food. She looked out at the floodlights popping on below the statue of William Penn on his perch above City Hall, illuminating his regal stare over the city, his aloof stance high above the rush of traffic still trickling out through the clogged streets. She thought of Scott, probably home by now, and the empty room on the second floor of the house that would be the nursery. This time next year, a baby would be sleeping in that room.
Molly looked around her office, which was filled with the imprint of her personality: a potted fern kept clipped of all browned leaves, framed diplomas hanging on the wall next to a Sixers pendant, and a vintage, autographed photograph of Lena Horne. She had bookshelves filled with reference binders, photographs of Scott and her nieces, a stuffed doll of UPenn’s mascot—the Quaker—all arranged with care and dusted at the end of each week. There were duplicate chargers for her phone and tablet and computer, a drawer filled with individually wrapped chocolate squares and instant-coffee packets, a spare pair of heels under the desk, and an extra coat hanging from a single hook on the back of the door. This room was as much a part of her as her bedroom at home. Molly stood to close the blinds on her window and gathered her files. She slid them into her leather bag, grabbed her phone and her coat, and shut her office door behind her.
Molly was on time
to join Jenny at Pattaya, their favorite Thai restaurant in University City. It was a small place, and warm, patronized by college students and aging professors. The women had discovered the casual eatery one night after a seeing an awful independent film at the now-closed Bridge theater. It had quickly become their favorite destination, mainly because it was one of the few quiet places in the city where they could catch up without running into somebody one of them knew. Philadelphia, as big as it was, was a lot like any town: live there long enough, and one day you realize that you recognize at least one person wherever you go. Most of the time Molly found comfort in the predictability. But some days, like those when she was halfway through a pregnancy, with skin that’d exploded like a teenager’s and a new tendency to burp without warning, she was just as okay being anonymous.
“Hey!” Molly waved to Jenny, who was at the bar and halfway through a tall glass of what Molly recognized as a Tamarind Dream. To Molly, it might as well have had a red flag in it rather than an umbrella. Jenny hitting the hard stuff this often was like seeing snow fall in Texas in June. It meant something was going very, very wrong in her world.
“Ah, bar stool, blessed bar stool.” Molly sighed when she reached Jenny and sank onto the tall chair beside her. “How I’ve been waiting for a seat like you.”
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