If Only

by Jennifer Gilmore

  It’s actually not that funny. Because I can go down a serious rabbit hole and wonder and wonder and wonder. If only. But what would I have wanted? To be, I mean. What?

  Who.

  I wanted my parents—these ones, the forever ones they’re called and it’s true, that is what they are, if only forever was real—I wanted them to stay together. I’m not going to lie. They divorced. I think they tried and tried and tried but sometimes, I think, you just can’t in love. With adoption there’s this extra weirdness, though. You can say it about most things in life, I imagine. Now I have a stepmother and a mother and a birth mother. But I just got one dad. Well, only one that anyone knows about. He’s my only.

  “Should we go play?” Avi asks.

  “Not me, I’m staying outside,” I say. Avi loves Chelsea. All the old guys, swinging sad, swinging happy. Moving. I feel like he looks around and it’s, like, all the ways to be gay. Choose this or this or this. Or maybe he just is. I don’t know. I’m afraid to ask.

  I’m becoming confused over what a choice is anyway. Like can he just choose who he wants to be? Not choose to be gay or not to be, I’m not saying that, but choose how to do it. Like the way we choose how to be girls. Red lipstick, flowy printed skirt, cutoffs, fake eyelashes, leggings, shredded jeans, which is it? It can’t be all of them, together, and you know what it means already.

  Jonathan was chosen. (I don’t mean because he’s Jewish, by the way. . . .) I was chosen, too. And also not. Like the opposite of chosen. Ignored? No, it was of course much worse than that. Much darker. Have you ever known anyone who was pregnant and gave up her baby to be, like, in a good place? Like, a happy sweet place? No way, shit’s sad. And all the forever parents who couldn’t have their own babies. And me, opposite of chosen chosen.

  She chose my parents. They were: cool-looking and creative and interesting and well educated and well traveled, and teachers and art makers and in New York and I think it kind of makes things genetically even because maybe that’s what she wanted. From her own life. They were older, my parents. Forty-two when I got here. But did she know? How could she know? Like, maybe it wouldn’t have been worse with her. Like, maybe she thought she was giving me the world but it wasn’t that way. There is sadness everywhere. In everything.

  But they named me Poppy. Just like a song. As for my name: A-plus.

  The city seems to be the bargaining chip. For all of us. You leave it for this easy beautiful life. But you have to leave it. This. All these boys running through this fountain, shirts off, singing, droplets of water casting rainbows. These musicians, and also the food trucks and behind me this college, all different kinds of people, every color, wheelchairs, naked cowboys, good coffee, any kind of food you want, any price, American flags on little sticks, down the street Soho, over there the West Village, up there every museum you ever wanted to get inside of. My parents took me there. Every week. Jonathan got gold coins but I know who Kiki Smith is and I’ve met her, too.

  My parents didn’t make it through and my family keeps growing. Did she know? Would she have chosen them if she had known mostly it would be Mom and me and then Dad and me separate and equal as if it was a policy that came out of the civil rights movement. I used to wonder if that was allowed. If maybe I would get sent back. Be taken back.

  By whom?

  Lottery, luck o’ the draw, but who’s to say what’s the luck? I’ve got cousins who had everything. Malibu dream. And they are sliding in and out of all kinds of misery.

  Andre says, “Let’s play some Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu pong ball.”

  Jonathan fires him a look. The sun shoots through the ends of his hair. He looks like 1967. He goes to shul on Saturdays, even after his Bar Mitzvah. He’s a social chameleon. But I know it costs him something. Has to, can’t not.

  Only in New York City, my grandmother sometimes says.

  “D’oh!” Andre says. Hate it when they talk all of the day. Talking, I argue, is not a time stamp. “Some gefilte fish bagel table.”

  “Dude, that’s racist,” Avi says.

  “And stupid,” I say.

  “Just so stupid,” Tina says, tapping her boot on the bench. I have often wondered how many coats of paint are on these benches. Tina doesn’t look up.

  Everyone chooses to laugh at me. I can sometimes be more witty, when I’m trying. Or I could be serious, say: What are you afraid of? Don’t hate. But I don’t say this because I can’t today. Can’t be the voice of all the voices.

  Don’t know why but the day already feels ruined. Like clouds have passed over me. Being around Jonathan can trigger me like that. Makes me think too much about what makes me me. I’m telling you, it’s not pretty in here always, not always my braided hair and aviators, not always so sunny and bottle blonde here.

  My mom is a good cook. And my dad is a great painter. We all gave up everything for each other. My mom doesn’t dance anymore. She’s too old. My father teaches and has two young stepkids. He still has a studio but it’s in a room in his house in Queens now. His wife’s house. My dad just moved into it.

  So I might not be here forever, I can’t say. College. It could take me anywhere. What holds someone? What holds someone to where they’re from, who they are? What makes me me?

  New York.

  New York City is my mother. All of them. And from them I have learned how easy to is to turn and walk away, to never look back, to never even say good-bye.

  Bridget

  Late May 2000

  “They don’t have to be your friends. They are going to be parents. I mean, you know what I’m saying?” says Dahlia from across the table.

  I rub my belly because I guess that’s what we all do. Weather’s bad so we’re at our table at the café and I’m silent. I touch my belly, secretly, I don’t even mean to do it anymore. When you see all the pregnant ladies on benches and walking through the mall do this it’s because that’s just what happens. It’s like: to see if it’s still there, to see if it’s grown at all since last time you touched it, to see if it’s kicking yet, to see if you are still the same.

  Four and a half months and bigger and harder and harder to hide.

  This morning my mom came and sat on the edge of my bed and said, “Bridget, this isn’t something you can hide anymore.”

  Mama, I had wanted to say, just out of sleep, groggy, waking. But I got hold of me. “Mom.” I shook myself awake. “Hiding is not the issue here.”

  She patted my thighs hard. “All children are blessings from God, and he has a plan for each one,” she said. That, I know is from the Psalms.

  “What is the plan, though?” I asked her. Because I’m open to God telling me what to do here, in a very specific way.

  “You are also precious,” my mother said. “To God,” she said, and I felt the qualification, believe me.

  Now, with Dahlia, who is just so much easier to decide with, I look down at you. But you are not the same of course, you’ll never be the same, will you? Are you there in there? Who are you? I’m thinking about the night it happened. I want it to be clear: Baylor and I loved each other once. It was Sadie Hawkins and I wore a corsage and he had a boutonniere, a red rose. I bought it at the florist and I kept it in its little plastic pod in the fridge all day.

  It was not the first time but it was nice, at Amelia’s house, her parents were away. It was nice and it was slower than it had been the other times when it had been in, like, Bay’s friend Eric’s car, or the time in the yard, which is why I thought it would be okay, that once. Why didn’t Baylor have a condom? I don’t know, other than sometimes we felt bad about it—Baylor’s mom is even more religious than mine; it’s a born-again thing, I think. We always thought we weren’t going to do it—that part anyway—again, but then we couldn’t stop. Or we’d tease each other from across the room. We didn’t want to stop. Once you’ve already done it why not always just do it? That will be the way it always ends now.

  And now. Now. And.

  “Yeah, I guess if I
wanted the parents to be all down with the kids I might as well keep her. I want them to be parents, it’s true, actual real parents,” I say.

  “What does that mean?” I can hear the hiss of the espresso machine. Like I need that kind of commentary.

  “I think a real parent is an adult.”

  “We’re adults,” says Dahlia, but then she bursts out laughing.

  We were in love, though, is what I’m saying. Baylor and me. He was above me and we met up in all the right spots and it was hard to say no to each other because we didn’t want to. Maybe she will know that one day: how hard it is to think ahead when right then feels just right.

  “Do you think I should mention how much I wanted to be having sex with Baylor in the letters?” I pick up the pen to make a point of it, like I’m working, like I’m doing my homework here. “I want to let her know there was love there. In general, but also on that night. Like it came from . . . good,” I say.

  “Good sex? For reals? Would you want to know that?” Dahlia is talking with her hands again. Her nails today are purple and bright. They chip easily from all the ice-cream scooping. “I meant that your parents had hot sex the night they made you?”

  “Gross.” And it’s this kind of talk that makes me realize that Dahlia got raised by Lulu, who never found religion like my mom. Or maybe she lost it? I don’t know but I have always wondered how, two girls, same spot on the planet, boyfriends come from the same war, but everything is different.

  Sometimes I can feel the girl parts of her, of my baby. Please don’t ask me what those are. I mean, the body, yes, the body, hers. They are things you just know, like heart stuff, sparkly puffy sticker inside who you are things. Little girl things.

  “You need new clothes,” Dahlia says. “Let’s go to the mall this weekend and just get you some stuff to get through summer.”

  By school, this will be gone. This could be gone.

  Or could be with me.

  “I can’t.” I shake my head. I mean, if I could just go to Eagle and pick out an array of shit in larger sizes, this wouldn’t be happening, right? Or would it. Because even if I was a bazillionaire, I’d still be sixteen. “And I can’t ask my parents for, umm, pregnancy clothes.”

  “Maternity.”

  “Maternity,” I say.

  “You can if you choose some parents,” Dahlia says. “Let’s choose us some parents and go to the mall,” she says, and it’s hard not to giggle.

  I’ll do this with Dahlia, not Baylor, I think. Not my mother. I look at her. It could be us who raises her, I think. Like some kind of movie about best friends. I look over at Dahlia. My beauty Dahlia, but why would she stay? It’s a random dorky thought but it makes way more sense to me than my mother deciding she’s going to get a rocker and start knitting little booties and help me do this thing, more sense than Baylor and trying to get him away from Rosaria. And relying on him. For anything.

  “Let’s do it,” I say. Out the window the trees sway sort of violently. “It’s going to storm,” I say.

  “Ooh, spring storm. Let’s go out in it,” says Dahlia.

  I move to leave. Not many people know this about me but I am a girl who looks at trees. I love them. The shade the wind the green the swaying. Tree me.

  I look up when we get outside and just start walking down to the creek over stones, careful not to fall though for a second I think I could fall and this would all be done with. I stop. I can’t.

  I look up and I can see my hopeful face over the tips of the leaves, this strange reflection that goes out into sky, like I’m dead or something. Here I am calling down from heaven, Dahl. Here I am hovering above you, above us. Why don’t I know the answer, then? Why don’t I know if; why don’t I know who?

  What I say is, “Thank you for helping me.”

  Crooked Dahl smile. And one foot pointed in the water. She looks up. “Of course. You okay?” she asks me.

  I sit down, slowly, all of me now, bigger than ever. I imagine it. Walking out the door and all of this behind me, into the never was.

  Dahl crouches next to me.

  “I am.” I can feel the damp of the ground spread along my growing butt. For a moment I feel like I’ve wet myself. Imagine one line instead of two. That is the smallest difference. It’s everything.

  “How about we raise her together?” I smile, cheeky.

  “Sure thing,” Dahlia says.

  “Naah.” I sit down, still my heart. “I mean, it would be nice, you know? Start like a new world. Made of girls.” I feel around the soft mossy earth, soft as a baby’s skull. What’s under there? Is there a hole in the earth I can slip through, come out as the me before this happened?

  Dahlia sits next to me. “Let’s choose some awesome parents for the superhero you are housing in there.”

  I laugh but already my laugh is bitter, I can feel it. So many kinds of laughs, so many kinds of tears.

  “I take it back,” she says, rising to her feet. She reaches out, pulls me up. “You’re the superhero.”

  “Yeah, right,” I say. “If superheroes had premarital sex and got knocked up and can’t figure out what to do with their lives.”

  “I’m sure at least one of them did,” Dahlia says. “We see them all grown-up. In any case, they have now.”

  I can hear the steady rush of the water over stones. Clouds, flat and mean and gray, are gathering overhead. How many years have those stones been there? Smooth stones. Time. It all just undoes me now.

  Dahlia is talking and talking. Girl superheroes. Baylor. Summertime. Fireflies. It’s kind of closing in. I think of keeping her. Just for today I think it and I will not worry about anything else, I will just follow Dahlia home.

  If Only

  Lansing, New York

  Ideally the milk reaches a temp of at least 145 degrees, and not much higher because then it can burn. It’s supposed to rest, just for a second or two. This allows the foam to rise to the top, which you need for layering. When you pour for a cappuccino, first fill the cup about one-third and then slowly add the espresso. Next, spoon some of the frothed milk onto the drink to fill up the rest of the cup. The espresso should be layered between the foam and the steamed milk. For a latte use a spoon to hold back the foam as you pour.

  I learned this my first day of work, from my mom’s best friend. She bought this café—the Blue Bird—a few years back and now she has a baby and so I’m working here after school to help out, but also to make some money other than from taking care of kids. Taking care of kids is exhausting. Coffee? A little less but I hadn’t realized Dahlia would be so uptight about coffee—she went on to discuss integrating the flavors at length—but so it goes and so she is. Guess that’s why she bought the café.

  Anyway, I’m learning.

  This place is outside of town—it hangs over a creek and there are evergreens surrounding it, which you can see through the big-paned windows. It’s covered in ivy, which, Mom says, is how I got my name. You kind of feel like you’re high up in the world. Or how I imagine it would be in the Pacific Northwest, at least from the movies I’ve seen. The café in town is where the college kids hang—here we get like true off-gridders who live way rural, or the hippies who come down from the monastery after a weekend of, like, not talking and eating mung beans. We also get regulars on their way to work, some professors who live out of town, near the falls. It’s where my mom met her current and probably forever boyfriend, who teaches math at the less fancy college in town.

  Now my mom walks through the door. That dumb bell that will drive me mad by 7:00 p.m. jingles, and she slides up, comes in all nonchalant like.

  “Hey, Ivy,” she says.

  “Hey, Ma.”

  “Hmm.” She puts a finger to the side of her nose as if to show me she is thinking, and hard. “I’ll have a flat white.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “I was just in the nabe,” she says, and if you can believe it, the word doesn’t sound ridiculous on her.

  Here’s the th
ing about my mom. She’s young. That’s, like, her defining quality, always has been. Though I will say she is getting older now. Another thing: it was a nightmare growing up with her due to this. Well, let me rephrase. Not a nightmare, both of us were just kids. We grew up together. It was like having a sister except for when she tried to be a mother.

  My mother was in high school when she had me. She didn’t finish; she got her GED later, and then she was in community college and she was always pushing herself to finish, and kind of blaming me for all her not finishing. My grandmother sort of raised us both, at the same time, which meant a lot of church and a lot of tuna casserole. Mom and I slept in the same room for the first ten years of my life.

  It was confusing. But now? We moved out of my grandmother’s house on Eagle Pass; we live with Mom’s boyfriend now, near Ten Mile Creek. We have three dogs. And I’m about to have a sister. When my mother has her I will be the age she was when she had me.

  Modern familying. That’s what we do ’round here.

  That my mother is a young mother actually gets more obvious as we get older. It’s strange. Like, I thought we would be able to stop telling the story now, about how, yes, this is my mom, but she had me when she was sixteen. Now we look closer and closer in age. Like when we’re old ladies? It’s never going to make sense to some people. And I will say this: we have been on the street and had some men say some really tough crap to us. Like about how hot it is. Like, come here, ladies, twirl on this kind of crap. My mother goes deep ballistic then. That is when she is mama bear and I am baby bear.

  I like being baby bear, I’m not going to lie, because there were a lot of times in my life where I was comforting my mother when, looking back, I could have used some of that love for myself. Some of that mama-ing. I don’t get to be the baby bear very often.