The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

  Cindy gives me a knowing look, one that I can’t read. I take it to be a “we women know what we’re doing” look. But not quite. We get to the restaurant—an elegant, dim place with lots of polished wood and thick, cream-colored napkins—and Clement proceeds to order mimosas all around. But then I really do fight him, and Sophie does, too: pregnant women aren’t allowed to drink alcohol. No, not even one. Yes, times have certainly changed.

  He sulks over this a bit, but then we manage to change the subject. Real estate, weather, the Bartholomews’ recent trip to Italy.

  It occurs to me suddenly, after a few sips of my mimosa, that we haven’t mentioned Whit. So I do it. “Whit’s project seems to be coming along well,” I say. “Do you hear from him very often?”

  The table gets quiet. Cindy nods and looks away. Clement orders another round, although we haven’t finished the first one. Sophie gamely tells a story that Whit told her, about a child he met in a village, who thought that she could maybe come back to the United States with him if the right person won the election. That’s what she thought an election was: a ticket. It’s a lame story, and not totally believable, and after a moment’s polite pause, Cindy asks me if it’s been a rough winter in New Hampshire.

  Later, when I excuse myself to go to the restroom, she follows me there. “Sorry that was so awkward when you mentioned Whit,” she says. “It’s kind of a sore spot now, this whole situation.… Well, I’m sure you know.” She waves her hand in the direction of the dining room.

  I am drying my hands on a paper towel. “Oh, yes. I know how that is. Sore spots,” I say. I think she’s come into the restroom to tell me something about her husband. I know the look of women who are about to report that their marriages are unsatisfactory in some way.

  She is smiling at me. “Well, of course, right now you’re the one most inconvenienced by this whole deal.”

  “Inconvenienced?”

  “Yes, coming here. I mean, I’m sure we all agree that it was most unfortunate for Sophie to go and get pregnant at a time like this.” She leans close to the mirror and examines her lipstick, which has kind of fanned out around the lines of her mouth. “I have been telling my son since he was sixteen years old that he has to take responsibility for birth control. And he didn’t—and look.”

  “Well,” I say, and I let out a tinny laugh. “I think couples sometimes make these decisions unconsciously. These kinds of things do happen.”

  “Yes, but sometimes one of them doesn’t get informed.” She straightens up and fluffs her hair and looks at me in the mirror. “I’m not saying that Sophie did anything wrong. It was his responsibility just as much as it was hers.”

  “Well, birth control has never been one hundred percent …,” I begin.

  “Yes,” she says. “But my son has a promising career ahead of him, and now he’s going to be a father at twenty-three. Do you know how much of a sacrifice that’s going to require of him?”

  “It’s a sacrifice for both of them,” I say quietly. “And right now, it seems that it’s Sophie who’s taken the brunt of it. He, after all, did go to Brazil just as he planned.”

  “His career was at stake. Do you have any idea of the hit he would have taken if he had canceled the film crew and backed out of the project? It was a ridiculous time for a pregnancy. And it could have ruined everything for him.”

  Okay, now I have had it. “Listen,” I say, “I have been on your son’s side, much to the chagrin of my family. I have truly and honestly believed that he is doing the right thing pursuing his dream and completing this documentary, even though he is—”

  “Well, that goes without saying!”

  “—even though he is abandoning my daughter, his wife, in her hour of greatest need. I have stuck up for him and defended his decision. She never once asked him not to take this trip! Not once. But that doesn’t mean that she hasn’t been suffering due to his abandonment. And this pregnancy has not gone smoothly, and yet, until she was put on bed rest, every day she managed to work and keep up the house, even though she was totally and completely alone—”

  “It was her choice,” she says. “I’m a mother of a son, Annabelle, and I see how women can be. Boys—men—are so easily manipulated. They’re victims of their penises. They never see what hit them. A woman comes along and decides she’s having a baby, and that’s it. He’s done for. Career plans: gone. And my son is only twenty-three years old! That’s about fourteen in girl years.”

  It’s then that I remember that Cindy Bartholomew is Clement’s second wife, and that after a couple of drinks last summer, she laughingly admitted that Whit had been conceived slightly before Clement’s previous marriage was terminated. So of course she would see the world this way—that women mastermind pregnancies as a way of forcing men into unpleasant decisions. I’m furious, of course, that she would lump my Sophie into this awful view of women … but while I’m mustering up all my anger, a funny thing happens.

  So what, I think. So what if the worst is true and Sophie did manipulate her way into marrying Whit and then making a baby with him? It doesn’t matter. That’s how marriages start sometimes. That’s how new people have always gotten here. Since the beginning of time, there have always been people standing on the sidelines criticizing, saying, “How could he want to be with her?” or “What does she see in him?” or “What were they thinking, getting pregnant now?” We don’t understand love, that’s the truth of it.

  I turn and look at Cindy Bartholomew, all painted up and twenty years younger than a man who thinks he’s going to always run the world, and it’s as though I can see through to her essence somehow, how frightened she is behind all that puffery and makeup. I see it then—that this is just love she’s expressing, love for Whit, and fear that his happiness might be in jeopardy. He is the child she conceived under questionable circumstances with an already married man, and now her heart aches for what might happen to him. It’s love. That’s all it is.

  So I say to her what I’m always saying to Grant: “We have to let them make their own decisions. It’s no longer our job to manage things for them. We have to let go and let them work it out.”

  It hits me that someday Sophie herself may be standing in just such a ladies’ room, thinking about her firstborn, and fearing for that daughter’s safe passage into love, and for some reason, that thought, all these mothers in restrooms marking out their territory, fretting for their children—well, it just makes me so happy that I take Cindy’s arm and lead her back to the table, where Clement Bartholomew is right then hugging my daughter with tears in his eyes.

  FOUR DAYS later Sophie has a doctor’s appointment. The weather has turned gray and cold again, and we bundle up in our sweaters and coats for venturing out.

  Her cheeks are bright and rosy. “I feel like I’m going to a movie—the movie starring Beanie,” she says. Today they’re going to want to do another ultrasound just to make sure everything’s okay. We love ultrasounds; it’s when we get to see little baby Beanie Bartholomew in all her tucked-in, radiant glory.

  “Maybe she’ll wave to us today,” I say.

  Also, today is March 5, which is only two months from the real due date, and that means that—well, this baby could actually be born. She would be okay. Oh, it would be scary; she’d probably have to spend some time in the newborn intensive care unit. There’d be drama and uproar and I’d have to suck in my breath and pace the corridor. But it could happen. I’ve been here for almost four weeks. Sophie and I have cooked this baby for an entire additional month, and no, I’m not claiming any credit, but I did do my share of making macaroni and cheese and keeping Sophie in her bed.

  “If everything’s okay,” she says to me as we’re getting dressed, “I think we should celebrate by going out afterward.”

  “We should celebrate by coming home and getting in bed and buying ourselves another month of being careful …”

  “Mom. Everything was fine after the lunch the other day. And you said it yourself: i
f the baby was born now, we’d all survive. She has lungs.”

  “She may have lungs, but having a premature baby is no picnic, and it’s you I worry about.”

  “Mom! Don’t worry. It’s fine.”

  “I have to worry. It’s in my job description.”

  “But it would be best if you worried to yourself. That’s what a really good mother should aspire to: silent worrying that she doesn’t inflict on her child.”

  “Uh-huh. And we’ll see how well you do at that in about two months.”

  She laughs. “I said aspire. I didn’t say anybody could really do it.”

  The ultrasound is better than good. When the technician (Nina—we’ve had her before, and she has a calm, motherly presence) puts the wand on Sophie’s abdomen, all three of us gasp. Because there, perfectly formed, is a little round face, eyes open, looking out at us. The head turns, and the baby brings her fist up to her mouth.

  “Oh, my goodness!” says Sophie and starts to cry. “Look at her!”

  I feel my eyes stinging, and I lean over and squeeze Sophie’s arm. “She’s beautiful. She looks like you. Look at that adorable little nose!”

  I’m so moved that I get out my cell phone and call Grant and describe the baby’s face to him. “She looks like your grandmother Petra.”

  “You never met my grandmother Petra,” he says.

  “Is there not a picture of her hanging in the hallway right at this very minute? A picture I have looked at nearly every day of my married life.”

  “Is there really?” he says.

  “Grant, do you live in the same house I do?”

  “Apparently not,” he says drily. “I don’t seem to run into you here.”

  I’m silent for a moment. And then I say, “You’ll be here soon, though. Spring break, right?” And I’m surprised to feel this great warmth spreading through me—a great warmth that for once isn’t a hot flash. I want to tell him about Cindy Bartholomew and something that I figured out about men and women and new people coming onto the planet, but I’m sitting there in the doctor’s office and tears are running down my face and there’s a baby’s face looking placidly out at all of us.

  Then, best of all, Sophie gets out her cell phone, too, and she calls Whit all the way in São Paolo, Brazil.

  “Whit,” she tells him. “Beanie is a girl. Yes, a girl! And you know what? She’s smiling at me right now! Yes, on camera! An ultrasound! She has the cutest little nose, and my mom says she looks just like I did when I was a baby.” She closes her eyes, listening, and then she starts to cry. “I love you, too. I know … not too much longer.”

  TO CELEBRATE, we go to lunch at a deli down the street from the doctor’s office.

  “Pastrami on rye with mustard,” Sophie tells the waitress. She is elated, her face pink and glowing. “Piled high with cheese and onions. And coleslaw. Oh my God, coleslaw. Keep it coming. Ooh, and also I want a half-sour pickle. And a Coke.”

  I do not say, “What about heartburn?”

  We sit in the booth and eat and look at the portrait that Nina snapped of the baby’s face. Sophie says she will scan the picture and e-mail it to Whit, so he can see, too. I say we need vegetables for dinner to make up for this salty, sinful, fat-filled meal, and that we are near the neighborhood where I used to live, and there was the most adorable little market. Does she feel like she can go with me to see if it’s still there, or should we just go home?

  “I can completely go!” she says. “I feel wonderful being out.”

  And so we go. I am possibly wrong to allow her this, but I do it anyway. We’ll hurry right back afterward. We walk with our arms linked together, and I’m telling her about how I used to love coming to this particular market in New York more than almost anything else about the city. It was such a shock to find in New Hampshire that a person needed to do the grocery shopping for a whole week …

  I am still yammering on happily about sweet potatoes and rows of tangerines, rye breads, and half-sour pickles when we get to the market, and then suddenly the world tilts on its axis and slides out from underneath me. Everything goes so hazy that for a moment I think I am still in my bed, dreaming.

  Jeremiah is there. Right there in the crowd.

  Jeremiah. I see him. I could go over and talk to him. He is looking at apples. It’s unmistakably him.

  It can’t be him. Look again.

  It is him. How could I not know him? He has the same face, the same way of moving—everything’s the same. His ear. His way of standing. He’s wearing jeans and a jacket. His hair curls over the collar slightly. He picks up some apples and places them in a string bag. I stop talking; my mouth simply stops working, making sounds.

  How—? But how could he be in this same space with me? So many millions of people, and now here he is, in the same market where we used to shop for food together? Who would believe this?

  Believe it. Maybe I’ve gone through a wormhole in the universe—Nicky used to tell me about wormholes—and it’s really 1977 again, and the twins will come bounding out from behind the cantaloupes, like that day we had to dismantle the whole display in order to find my house key, which Brice had dropped into the pyramid of fruit. It had worked its way all the way to the bottom, as if it were a living thing seeking darkness. I see Jeremiah’s unshaven face from then, feel his sleeve brush against mine as he handed me pieces of fruit to hold. Even the hard times, I thought then, were so good, so funny and rich.

  He’s in New York. My mouth goes dry.

  Jeremiah, hello. Yes, this is my daughter, Sophie. Why, yes, she does, doesn’t she? She does look just like Grant. Of course.

  Sophie’s mouth is moving; she’s talking, agreeing with me, I think, about the luxury of shopping every day. Or maybe she said this minutes ago, and the words are just now making their way through the cotton batting taking up space in my head. “It makes so much sense to buy what you need every day …” Her voice is fuzzy; I don’t hear the rest of the sentence. I look down quickly. He’ll go the other way. Gravity—or some benign force of the universe, centripetal force or something—will pull him away from me. We are not destined to meet again. Or … well, if he comes this way, he won’t recognize me. I look completely different. We’ll pass each other, and there’ll be this blankness in his eyes when they fall on me. He won’t have any idea. I’ll pretend I’m looking at something on the shelf. I can’t talk to him. I don’t want him to see me.

  He turns the other way and starts walking. I see his hair, thinner in back now and shot through with gray. His dark jacket is slightly too big for him. His posture never was good, but he always moved like somebody who was spring-loaded; now he’s more slumpy than he used to be, stooped really, but it’s a humble kind of stoop, as though he doesn’t want to take up too much room in the aisle, as though it’s out of consideration for the other customers who are rushing. A woman with two little children is near him, and I see him stop and reach over and pat one of them on the head, and then the other. He’s in profile, and I see him smiling. He loved kids. He did. Does.

  This is the present. This is happening, and Jeremiah is in this store with you.

  Sophie is saying, “Should we get apples? I used to love Granny Smiths, but now they give me heartburn. I think Galas are better …” but her voice comes in and out, as if someone is playing with the volume control button.

  Jeremiah suddenly stops, and I hold my breath, thinking that he’ll turn and come toward me, but then he doesn’t. After a moment, he keeps going, walking away from me, and then he turns the corner. I can’t see him. I exhale. “What?” I say to Sophie, and we both hear the edge in my voice. She looks up sharply. I don’t want to talk about apples. I can’t.

  “Are you all right? You look flushed,” she says.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Do you want Galas?”

  “What? Sure. They’re fine.”

  “But how many?”

  “I don’t know. Four, I guess.”

  “What? I can eat t
hree myself!” She laughs. “Are you paying attention?”

  “Then three.” My hands, clutching the basket, are clammy. I feel like I might just faint.

  She laughs. “No! Not three. You want some, too, don’t you? How about we get six?”

  “Whatever. That’s fine.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “The fluorescent lights are driving me crazy. Don’t you hear that hum? I hate that.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Do we need anything else? Besides ice cream. I have got to have ice cream. I want Chunky Monkey. That has healthful bananas, at least. God, I hope I don’t suffer from eating all that pastrami. Why did you let me eat all that when I’m seven months pregnant? What kind of mother are you, anyway? They should take your license away.”

  “I just want to go. Let’s go. I’ll go to the other market later if we need anything else.”

  “One minute.”

  I stand rooted to the spot while she goes off to the freezer compartment and comes back with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. We make our way to the checkout counter—Jeremiah is nowhere to be found, and I feel the most unexpectedly sharp pang of disappointment. This is ridiculous; it’s like high school. Walking down the wrong hallway, seeing the guy. The crush. Just like then, I don’t know what to hope for. It’s surely wrong to see him, but how can I not? I look at the magazines. Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt are now living in different houses. Will they file for divorce? I turn the pages quickly and put the magazine back, and then there he is. It is 2005. I haven’t seen Jeremiah since 1980. I was still a child.

  He’s coming toward me, joining my line. Oh God. I could touch him. My hair over my face, I lean down and stare at the collection of gum and candy, and one of my hands flies up unbidden and cups itself around my eyes. He leans over to get some cough drops, my hand jerks downward, and our eyes meet.