by Emma Straub
Then there were women who came alone, like her, and who seemed to be having their first babies. Those women were tighter knots, biting their nails, new lightning bolts of worry crisscrossing their foreheads. She always checked their fingers for a ring, and most of the time, there was one. When their fingers were bare, Porter looked closer. Were they younger than her, or older? Were their bellies big enough that their entire bodies had begun to swell, including their fingers? There were, of course, those pregnant women, who had to temporarily remove their rings because their fingers had gotten too fat. She’d then check for a chain around their neck. She didn’t want to care. She actively was trying not to care. There was one Single Mom by Choice group that her doctor had recommended, in addition to a slate of doulas and pediatricians, but Porter hadn’t done more than a cursory googling. In her almost five months of pregnancy, she had only clocked three other women who fit her profile.
Porter pulled her tote bag onto her lap and reached in, feeling around for her book. She was trying to be the kind of woman she’d want to have as a mother—well-read, open-minded, that sort of thing. Harriet was in a book club in Oregon and always sent over recommendations. This one was a novel about a bookstore in Paris that hid Jewish children who had escaped the Nazis, and there was a magical talking bird. Porter knew all that from Harriet’s email—she herself was only on the fifth page, where she’d been for some time. The book was six hundred pages long—at this rate, she’d finish when her yet-to-be-born child graduated from high school.
A nurse came out and called a name. One of the cuddling couples across the room got up and walked forward, beaming like they’d won the lottery. Porter rolled her eyes and someone laughed. Porter jerked her head to the side, a sort of tucked-away corner of the waiting room, the place where the saddest-looking women tended to seat themselves (the sad women in any ob-gyn waiting room were always the ones with no bump, not even the deflating basketball of a former bump, those who were still swearing to themselves on the toilet when they got their period each month). She saw a woman chuckling.
“I saw that,” she said. “Hi, Porter Strick.” The woman was about as big as Porter, with just a waxing moon of a belly. She smiled widely, showing a gap between her teeth.
“Oh my god, Rachel, what are you doing here?” Porter stood up fast, knocking her book to the floor. She toed it out of the path and left it there.
Rachel had been Porter’s best friend in the seventh through eleventh grades. They had worn matching Halloween costumes (Little Red Riding Hoods, candy corn, vampiresses) three times. Her parents had moved to Chicago during their junior year, and they’d lost touch. It was before the internet; it was no one’s fault. Rachel had been back for a few years, Porter knew, but they hadn’t gotten together. They each had their friends, and their lives, and there were always excuses. Or rather, there had never been a reason to try to jump back into the double dutch of their friendship.
“What do you think I’m doing here, my taxes?” Rachel stood up to embrace Porter, and their pregnant bellies bounced together with a satisfying boing. “Let me see you!” She backed up, still holding Porter’s two hands, to take her in. “You look so great. So great. How many weeks are you?”
“Twenty.”
“Me too! Well, twenty-one. Twins! Us, I mean. I’m not having twins, thank god. Anyway, I love it! This is so exciting! Where are you living now, near your mom? I’m, um, we’re on the north side, Clapham Heights-ish, but farther away from the water. Toward Bard.” Rachel’s cheeks were pink. She was wearing a Fleetwood Mac T-shirt and looked a little bit sloppy, like she was probably wearing two different socks, not on purpose, and Porter felt immediately flooded with remembered and renewed love: shortcut love, muscle memory love.
“And your husband, what does he do again?” Porter knew a little bit, from Facebook—she could picture someone small and dark-haired, like Rachel, but didn’t know any details.
Rachel held up her hand—Porter hadn’t checked—and wiggled her unadorned fingers. “At the moment, he does stuff with other people, I guess. Not really sure.” And then she burst into tears and loud hiccupping sobs that echoed through the room. They should have soundproofed for that, Porter thought, as she took Rachel into her arms. It had to happen all the time.
* * *
—
After their appointments, Porter and Rachel sat in the hospital cafeteria and caught up over a mediocre feast of macaroni and cheese, iceberg lettuce salads, and potato chips. Some years were easy enough to sum up in a sentence or two—Chicago was cold but fun, Rachel had gone to Vassar, her younger brother was married and lived in Oakland, she taught English at Clapham Junior High, and mostly loved it (“Oh! Maybe you’ll have my niece, Cecelia!” Porter interrupted, clapping her hands)—but the recent past took a while.
As it turned out, Rachel and her husband, Josh, had been together on and off for five years before they got married, and then started trying to have a baby pretty quickly. She had a miscarriage, then another, and finally, it turned out that she had what she described as a “funky uterus,” which, coupled with Josh’s low sperm count, made conceiving hard. They did IUI, to no avail, and then IVF, which took three rounds. Porter knew what that looked like—all the needles, all the blood tests, all the peeing into tiny paper cups. She murmured sympathetic noises. When Rachel finally got pregnant, she was relieved and happy and exhausted, sleeping every hour of the day that she wasn’t at school, just the way things were supposed to be. Then one day she looked at her husband’s phone and saw page after page of texts with a woman whose name she didn’t recognize.
“What kind of texts?” Porter asked.
“Not the good kind. Not, like, oh, you’re a woman and also my friend, so what should I buy my wife for her birthday? The bad kind. Like, I want to lick your asshole while you sit on my face.”
“Noooooooooooo,” Porter said, crinkling her nose.
Rachel shoved a handful of potato chips into her mouth. “Oh,” she said, chewing. “Yes. And he couldn’t lie about it, because what was he going to do, rip the phone out of my hand and give me the amnesia drug they give you before a colonoscopy? I don’t think so.”
“So what now?” Rachel swiveled the bag of chips around on the table to make it easier for Porter to take some. She was going to be a good mom. Porter put two of the sweet and salty chips on her tongue and closed her teeth, crunching down like a monster with someone in its trap. There was a tiny part of her that was excited about this story. It was an ugly part of her, a shameful part of her, but it was beginning to glow and dance just the same.
“I kicked him out. He’s staying at his idiot friend’s house in Kingston. My mom came and helped me settle in, and she’ll be here when the baby’s born. Stay for six months, maybe, I don’t know. It’s just too much to deal with. I want to feel protected and happy and ready. I am not fucking around. Doing this alone is not exactly what I imagined. No offense. So, can I ask?”
Porter slapped the crumbs off her hands. “Ask away.” She couldn’t imagine Astrid moving in with her in a million years. She could imagine Astrid giving her the telephone number of a reputable nanny agency, or a woman who helped babies learn how to sleep, but not actually moving in herself, no, not that. And if she did move in, in some alternate universe, what would she do? Would she point out all the things Porter was doing wrong, all the empty teacups scattered around the room like clues to a child’s scavenger hunt? The way that Porter should be eating while the baby ate or sleeping while the baby slept? Astrid always knew the best way to do everything and it was exhausting.
“Who’s the father? Or did you go to a sperm bank? Is that a very rude thing to ask?” Rachel looked at her with wide-open eyes, curious both specifically and in general. Porter could see the future so clearly: Rachel was going to make things out of construction paper and cardboard boxes, she was going to make pancakes shaped like elephants. Whoever her jerk of a hu
sband was, he didn’t matter. Rachel was going to be great.
Porter hadn’t told anyone except her mother. Her OB knew. Her RE knew. The nurses knew. But no one else. In a funny way, being pregnant meant exposing one’s private parts and information to an enormous number of people, all of whom happened to be strangers. It was harder to tell someone who knew about other parts of her life in addition to her uterus. “It’s not rude, you asked first. I went to a sperm bank.”
“You know, I can honestly say that that has never sounded more appealing to me than right at this exact moment. Like, my husband’s genes are fine; he’s handsome, I love his parents, whatever. But the idea that I could have those things without ever having to speak to him again is, like, wow, yes.” Rachel lifted her can of seltzer water.
Porter blushed, more relieved than she realized to have told someone she cared about and for them to have had a positive reaction, and clinked her can against Rachel’s. “Thank you. I mean, we’ll see. I’m sure it’ll mean some serious conversations with my child down the road, but everyone has those—adopted kids, kids whose parents split up, parents who have to tell their kids that their grandmother was run over by their school bus. It was the right thing for me, and it was the right time. You know what’s funny? Because I’m one of three, I always thought that I’d have three, but I can’t imagine I’ll have another. I guess it could happen, but the odds seem against it.”
“Wow,” Rachel said. “Yeah. I always assumed that we’d have a few, but now, I don’t know. Man, I hadn’t really thought about that.”
“Don’t mention it, though, okay? Obviously you wouldn’t. Just please don’t. Okay? I haven’t told anyone about the baby. Or the donor.” Porter worried that she sounded ashamed, or embarrassed. She wasn’t either of those things, she was just thinking ahead. For the moment, the baby still felt like a secret hidden inside her body, and she wanted to protect both of them from the outside world, whatever the weather.
“To sisters doing it for themselves,” Rachel said, and then took a long swallow of her water, letting out a demure little burp. “Next time, with booze. Oh, you know who I saw the other day, in the grocery store? Jeremy. Your boyfriend.”
“When we were in high school.” Porter’s cheeks burned.
“Yes, but still. I don’t know if it’s my hormones or what, because I mostly hate all men at the moment, but he looked like an ice-cream cone. He was always a dick, but he’s a cute dick.”
“Yep,” Porter said. “He’s cute all right. Always was. He has a cute wife and cute kids too. Cute dog. Probably cute mice in the floorboards.” An image of a half-naked Jeremy appeared in her mind’s eye. She had heard that pregnancy made women horny, but until this moment, it had seemed unreasonable, as she had heretofore been horny only for antacids and Saltines. But there he was in her brain, Jeremy Fogelman, her first love, as sexually formative as Phoebe Cates coming out of the swimming pool in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, or a Judy Blume novel. So much of becoming an adult was distancing yourself from your childhood experiences and pretending they didn’t matter, then growing to realize they were all that mattered and composed 90 percent of your entire being. If you didn’t remember how you felt during that one game of Truth or Dare when you were a sophomore in high school, who were you? It was nice to know that those twangy feelings, deep inside her body, hadn’t vanished for good. And part of the truth of staying close to home was that you were never very far from other people who remembered everything you’d ever done. It was like being surrounded by an army of terra-cotta soldiers, only they all looked like you—the time you threw up at Homecoming, the time you bled through your pants in math class, the time you got caught stealing condoms at the pharmacy.
“’Tis a pity,” Rachel said. “Next time with martinis.”
“Next time with whiskey and martinis,” Porter said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Chapter 10
NFG
Astrid wanted everyone to show up at eleven, but Elliot’s twins napped at noon, so brunch was at ten A.M. They were nonstop, Aidan and Zachary, and Astrid knew that Wendy cherished those solid hours in the middle of the day when they were asleep. Of the three of Astrid’s children, she’d always thought that Elliot would be the one to have a truly big family, in part because he was the one least likely to actively parent on a daily basis, and so what was the difference between one and five children except a decibel level at mealtimes, but he was thirty-eight when the twins were born, and Astrid was pretty sure that Wendy was closed for baby-making, in part because she wanted to go back to work someday and also because the boys were such hellions that only a fool would willingly ask for more.
Sometimes, when more than one of her children were in the same room, Astrid thought about their father walking in—their father, her husband, Russell, who hadn’t made it to the twenty-first century, who had never had a cellphone. Sometimes Astrid thought about that, about Russell traveling to and from his home and office, landline to landline, and it seemed impossibly quaint. She had lived most of her life without one, too, of course—she’d had a flip phone until Cecelia was born, and she understood the pull of always having a camera in her pocket—but Russell never even touched one, she didn’t think. One of his college friends, a rich show-off who they had occasionally visited in California, had a car phone the size of a shoebox, and it was something that they laughed about, this hotshot fool who thought what he had to say was so important that he needed to be reachable even in his car. She’d had a dream about sitting at a restaurant with Birdie and seeing Russell walk by outside, and running out the door to catch him, but by the time she got outside, he was gone, and it turned out that she was barefoot anyway, and then the restaurant was gone and she had to walk home. Dreams didn’t mean anything. Nicky thought they did, but Nicky had always been so good-looking that he believed in all kinds of things that less good-looking people weren’t allowed to believe in, because people would laugh at them. No one laughed at gorgeous white men. It was a design flaw in the universe.
Before Barbara died, Astrid had thought about telling her kids about Birdie, but it never seemed to matter. Now it was time. It was time. They were adults, and so was she. Astrid could say the words.
It was 10:20 and no one had arrived yet. Even Cecelia was still in her room, though Astrid heard her clomping overhead.
Maybe it wasn’t fair to compare daughters-in-law, just like it wasn’t fair to compare sons, but Astrid couldn’t help it. Children were the people they were from the beginning and, with the exception of a few social mores (public nose-picking, chanting about poop), rarely changed drastically from toddlerhood on. Nicky had always been a leaf in a river, content to float. His ease in his own skin had made him irresistible to other people, all his life. Elliot was the opposite—he tried so hard to be big enough, smart enough, charming enough, that he was none of the three. He was dedicated to the idea of perfection. As a boy, he’d whined for the largest toy, the biggest scoop of ice cream, the starting spot on the JV basketball team, no matter his skill. And both Nicky and Elliot had found the partners they needed. At least they’d found partners, unlike their poor sister.
It felt something like haunting the house of your widower and his new wife, to see the needs your adult children possessed and the people who filled them. Nicky met Juliette at a party, and they were married at City Hall two weeks later, their fingers always clutching and unclutching like mating spiders. She was decisive and focused, if self-destructive, she was French, and once Astrid met Juliette, she could see it all: the love affair, the unplanned child, the swan dive into normalcy, the gradual separation, the end. She felt psychic with visions of doom. Never mind that they were still married—they were trying to live some easygoing fantasy concocted in a forest ceremony, guided by a crystal. It was hooey, and everyone knew it but them. With Elliot, it was the reverse. Both Elliot and Wendy lived to check the boxes of adulthood. They had an engagement party. They ha
d a wedding with two hundred people, three-quarters of them Wendy’s enormous Chinese family, and a reception with a costume change halfway through. They had a baby shower, a gender-reveal party, and at each one of them, Elliot and Wendy would smile in the exact same way, even and false, their hands light on each other’s backs, and Astrid would think, What the fuck? In some ways, Astrid thought that Wendy was just like her, a perfectionist, and was flattered that Elliot had looked for his mother, in some ways, just like the Greeks said. But Wendy’s perfection didn’t have anything to do with Astrid, not really—she cared about nutrition, not taste. She cared about calories, not exercise. But mothers-in-law don’t matter in marriages except as points of contrast.
Russell Strick had never understood a single word that Astrid’s mother had said, her English both heavy with Romanian and low in her throat, but he had liked her kasha varnishkes. His mother had been quiet, a dormouse, and Astrid knew that he liked having a wife who was not afraid to speak. Their mothers were not part of their daily lives, as parents. They were not on the rug in their socked feet, playing with the children, the way grandparents were nowadays, the way Astrid’s children expected her to be. Russell had been the softie of the two of them. He would have let Cecelia cover his face with stickers, would have let the twins use his body as a trampoline. What would Russell have thought about Birdie as his successor in Astrid’s bed? He would have liked her, and then he would have handed her his dirty plate to take back to the sink. He wouldn’t have understood. Russell was the kind of man who met women who had lived with another woman for fifty years and thought, Oh, how nice, roommates. But Astrid herself had changed in the last twenty years—no doubt Russell would have too. That was a melancholy mystery: how his chest hair would have grayed, how he would feel about gender-neutral bathrooms, what he would make of Donald Trump. Some days, Astrid felt like she was the same person she’d been when her husband died, but most of the time, that person felt like a distant relative, a cousin in another time zone, seen mostly in old photographs wearing unfashionable clothing.