by Warren Adler
“Frankly, I don’t understand your attitude, Sheila,” he said, irritated by her apparent indifference. Throughout their intimate relationship, they had never had an argument. If there was tension, it was always the underlying thought that their affair would be discovered.
“I’ve thought about this, Harold. I’ve made peace with the idea.”
“I don’t get it,” he said, feeling his anxiety accelerate.
“OK then, suppose it is your child. Are we prepared to make this admission? Are you prepared to tell your wife that you have fathered a child with another woman? I certainly am not prepared to tell my husband. Why rock the boat? Who needs the aggravation and anxiety?”
“I say abort it and get rid of the problem.”
“I thought about that. Tell you the truth, I hate the idea. Besides, suppose there are complications. Then what? What do I tell Bob? That I secretly aborted his child? ”
“Or mine.”
“Never that.”
“I always thought you were pro-choice.”
“What has that got to do with it? Yes, I am militantly pro-choice. And my choice is to have this child.” She turned to him and patted his cheek. “Hey baby, during my first pregnancy, I felt real sexy. Nothing will change for us. You’ll see; it won’t be long before things get back to normal.”
“Normal? This is normal?”
“Look, Harold. It’s not like I’m single. That would be a whole other matter. I’m married to a good, solid man. We are quite comfortable, as you know. The child will be well cared for, just look at our girls. Stop being a worrywart. Having a child should be a celebration.”
“But whose child?”
“Mine.”
“And mine.” He paused. “Maybe.”
“There is no downside here, Harold.”
“Yes, there is. If it’s mine, Bob will be raising another man’s child, paying the bills, being Daddy, a deceived man.”
“So,” Sheila replied. “He won’t know he’s been deceived. He’ll love this child like he loves Sandy. And if it is yours, you can be content in the knowledge that he is being well cared for.”
He began to pace the motel room, looking nervously at his watch.
“But he might look like me. Be easily distinguishable. If it’s a boy, he’ll grow bald early. Bob has a full head of hair. He’s shorter than me. His eyes are a different color. Look at my nose, my chin. If he’s a male, he won’t look anything like Bob. It could be obvious to anyone who observes closely. And if it’s a girl, she could look like my daughter. Her ears are exactly like mine. Not to mention the differences in our DNA.”
“You’re overanalyzing, Harold. We agreed. None of that.”
“This is not in that category Sheila. This is serious stuff. We’re talking about a human being and that human being has a right to know who his or her father is.”
“OK then, let’s make a determination.”
Then what, he asked himself. It all came down to the aftermath.
“You should have been more careful, Sheila,” he said.
“Well, I wasn’t, or the Pill didn’t work. In that case would you like me to sue the manufacturer?” She laughed suddenly and touched his crotch. “Did it ever occur to you that this is the culprit?”
“Or Bob’s.”
She patted her hair and slung her pocketbook over her shoulder, then kissed him on the cheek.
“Gotta go.”
“There is only one obvious solution,” he said.
“Not to me.”
“How can you expect me to live my life without knowing for sure?”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Harold. Nobody’s life will be disrupted. I’m OK with it. Why shouldn’t you be? Nothing will change for you. I’ll bet there are millions of women in the world who have led their spouses to believe that their children have been fathered by them, even if they weren’t. Don’t sweat it. If he’s not the father, Bob will never know.” She looked into his eyes. “Unless you tell him. I certainly won’t.”
“You talk as if we men are just around to supply the crucial ingredient.”
“But you’ve got to admit that you guys certainly enjoy the process.”
“I haven’t heard any complaints from you.”
“Who’s complaining?”
They exchanged glances and he knew in that moment that this clandestine physical affair was over, but that their attachment would linger for a lifetime in other more mysterious ways.
“You know what I think, Sheila.”
“What?”
She was going out the door, pausing to look back at him.
“You women don’t understand the profound significance of fatherhood.”
“You’re right, Harold. We don’t.”
She closed the door behind her, leaving him alone with his uncertainty.
Better Than Donna Reed
by Warren Adler
“I’m so excited I could scream,” Peggy said as she and Charlie moved out of the Port Authority bus station on 42nd Street into the light-spangled city of New York on a mild autumn day just as the sky darkened. Culture shock could barely describe their disorientation.
Charlie rolled their suitcase through the solid wall of people, trying to get his bearings. Confused by the signs, they had already made a number of wrong turns and had to ask people directions just to get to the exits. In the street they stopped other people, whom they found, contrary to expectations, surprisingly polite, although not informed. Two people had accents neither Peggy nor Charlie could understand.
Finally they made it into the lobby of the Metropole Hotel, which, as had been advertised, was two blocks from the Port Authority terminal in midtown Manhattan.
“Like being inside a zoo,” Charlie remarked as they finally arrived, but she could tell he was as excited as she was.
“Like in the movies,” Peggy said in contradiction, remembering New York scenes.
The movies were her point of reference and her obsession. It was at the very heart of the dream she had for her daughter. Above all else, she yearned to be the mother of a movie star and here at last, she knew in her soul, that Aggie had embarked on the first rung of the ladder that was going to take her straight to stardom. She was absolutely certain that this was going to happen. God’s will, she told herself.
“One day, you’ll see,” she told Charlie. His response was invariably a hopeful shrug. Of course, she knew, he wanted it to happen but it was obviously too remote from his expectations. But then, he had never had big dreams. Peggy was convinced that, at last, this was to be the beginning of her validation, the ultimate “I told you so.”
For months now she had noted that friends, relatives, and co-workers at Wal-Mart had, she was certain, exhibited a kind of smirking expression of sarcastic disbelief in the notion that her daughter Aggie was on the road to celebrity and movie stardom. She admitted to herself that she had been a bit outspoken when Aggie left three years ago for New York to pursue the route to stardom from actress in plays, to discovery, to roles in motion pictures, a path mapped out by her mother from the moment Peggy realized Aggie’s potential.
“My daughter is destined to be a star, just like Donna Reed,” she told everybody within hailing distance in Denison, Iowa, where they lived. It was the same town where Donna Reed had come from and was now a kind of shrine to that late actress who had won an Oscar for From Here to Eternity. “Actually Aggie is more talented and better looking than Donna,” she would whisper as an aside to close friends, although to others she would acknowledge that Donna was Aggie’s role model.
In addition to talent, which everybody agreed she had in spades, Aggie was quite beautiful with cerulean blue eyes, a perfect nose, natural shiny blonde hair that she wore long, and a perfect figure that was the envy of every young woman in town. A miracle, Peggy had decided, considering that both she and Charlie weren’t exactly Brad and Angelina, even when they were younger.
Aggie turned eyes everywhere and was the acknowledged c
elebrity of Denison for her starring roles in the high school plays. She was an absolutely knockout Annie when she was twelve years old and was a wonder as Juliet, not to mention as good as Betty Hutton in Annie Get Your Gun.
“Another Donna.” Everybody said so.
“Better,” Peggy would say with what she hoped was a haughty pose and a knowing wink.
In the last year, she deliberately hid her enthusiasm, acknowledging that Aggie was out there in the Big Apple honing her skills and waiting for her big chance, which was sure to come. She did note, however, that people were asking her less and less about what was happening with Aggie’s career. At times she got downright edgy about it.
Once when she was sitting together with her co-workers in the coffee-break room for employees at Wal-Mart, Daisy Parker, whom she never liked, made some sarcastic inquiry about Aggie’s career, referring to her as a “Donna Reed wannabe,” and Peggy exploded.
“What does a fat ass ignoramus like you know about such things, Daisy? Your kids are ignorant dropout scumbags with the ambition of petrified turds and an intelligence that registers lower than a snake’s asshole.”
“Listen to that overbearing, bragging cunt,” Daisy countered, flinging a stream of lukewarm coffee at Peggy that stained the front of her red Wal-Mart smock. “Thinks she’s hot shit because her little girl is in fuckin’ Noo Yawk waving her pussy around and sucking cock to make it in the big time. Hell, did any of you ever see her in one single flick. Maybe in the pornos.”
That was too much for Peggy to bear and she lost it and swung a fist right into Daisy’s face, knocking out two front teeth. The incident brought her to the attention of the manager, who mandated that she take a month’s therapy in anger management or lose her job. She complied, of course. The company, thankfully, paid for Daisy’s dental work. Unfortunately, the incident was broadcast all over town and greatly diminished any further temptation for Peggy to offer any news about Aggie’s progress in New York.
The anger management course seemed to help, although Charlie told her that he would often hear her mumbling nasty curse words in her sleep. Apparently while she was learning to inhibit any overt anger, agitated emotion was seeping into her dreams.
The undeniable facts, as Peggy interpreted them, were that Aggie was destined by fate and the miracle of talent and beauty to be everything that her mother dreamed she would be. In school, she starred in every play from the fifth grade on. Peggy had made certain that she was taught all the skills required by a budding performer. She could sing and tap dance, and she had taken acting lessons from Mrs. Meyers, who had appeared in two movies and one Broadway show in her career.
“Just like Donna,” Mrs. Meyers acknowledged about Aggie, although she had come to town long after Donna had gone.
“You’re gonna be a movie star, baby,” Peggy enthused. The line became a mantra, and it was apparent as Aggie matured that she had absorbed its message of unbridled hope as certainty.
Watching her daughter perform on stage was the absolute zenith of Peggy’s early motherhood experience. She would attend every single performance, and invariably when she saw her daughter onstage, her eyes would fill with tears of pride and it was all she could do to restrain her sobbing. It was, she acknowledged to herself, a profound spiritual experience.
Peggy had drummed it into her daughter that, under no circumstances, was she to go steady with one boy, that God had singled her out to be a movie star celebrity and nothing, but nothing, must interfere with that goal. She had dates, of course, and it was perfectly natural for her to go out with the stars of the athletic teams, which she did. What she feared most was that Aggie would get pregnant like many of her friends and find herself in a situation where she would be waylaid from her career goals.
“There are other ways to keep these horny goats calmed down,” Peggy instructed, leaving out the gory details. It was an accepted fact of life that young people in small towns started having sex very early, perhaps out of boredom or peer pressure. It had happened to Peggy. Charlie had impregnated Peggy before she had graduated from high school.
Thankfully, blessedly, Aggie had apparently obeyed the parental constriction and had concentrated on the dream inculcated by her mother. As evidence of the possibility, aside from the miraculous rise of Donna Read, Peggy had rattled off the biographical facts of numerous female stars who had grown up in small towns and came from humble beginnings. She would always cite Frances Gumm, who became Judy Garland, and everyone knew that Donnabelle Mullenger had become Donna Reed. By the time Aggie was fifteen, Peggy had amassed a notebook full of possible stage names. Both favored Melody Francis as a perfect choice, a lot more interesting and mainstream than Agatha Pachowski.
Aggie’s brother Ben, two years her senior, had no such grandiose ambitions and was content to work in a paint store on Main Street. Charlie worked at his brother’s used-car lot at the edge of town and the Pachowskis were able, with the help of Peggy’s Wal-Mart job, to squeak by financially, although it was a stretch to provide Aggie with all the expert instruction she needed to prepare for a show-business career.
It was inevitable that after high school, Aggie would head to New York to hone her acting, singing, and dancing skills and, as it was ordained, she would appear in various stage plays and follow the usual path of discovery and stardom. Both mother and daughter were not naïve enough to believe that such a discovery would happen instantly. There were dues to pay as evidenced by the biographies of stars that Peggy had read. Kirk Douglas and Sylvester Stallone both worked behind delicatessen counters, and everyone brought up on Golden Age of Hollywood lore knew that Lana Turner was discovered in a drugstore.
Peggy had also learned a great deal from watching Barbara Walters on television and was an avid reader of People magazine and other celebrity-featured publications that she read off the Wal-Mart magazine racks. She prided herself too on having viewed every movie on tape and DVD that was offered in the Denison public library.
Every year watching the Oscars, a very serious mother-daughter ritual, Peggy would remark: Some day, Aggie, that will be you walking up the red carpet.
It had been three years since Aggie had gone off to New York. At first, she had been a dutiful daughter calling every week reporting on her various courses and adventures, bubbling with excitement and enthusiasm, working odd jobs to pay her share of the rental of an apartment in Manhattan.
That first year she came home for Christmas. Her mother threw her a big party and invited all her relatives, co-workers from Wal-Mart, and friends from high school, many of them now married with kids. As always, Aggie was the center of attraction, ever the local star, on her way to celebrity status in the Big Apple. She sang the Annie song “Tomorrow” and got a roaring round of applause.
“It will happen, you’ll see,” Peggy told everyone. “One day she will be walking that red carpet on Oscar night.”
Aggie called less frequently from New York and on occasion Peggy called her, but, after a mild admonishment by Aggie that her calls on her cell sometimes came at inopportune moments, Peggy, out of respect and considering that her daughter was doing important work for her career, desisted.
Although the calls from New York became more and more sporadic as time went on, Aggie was always optimistic and chatty although increasingly non-specific in answering Peggy’s questions about her career progress. No, Aggie had not yet gotten an agent, but she was auditioning and getting “callbacks.” Peggy, from careful listening, had learned the lingo, and tried her best not to show any anxiety or disappointment when Aggie did not get chosen, although her insides raged with anger and disappointment. Most people don’t know great talent when they see it, she told Charlie numerous times.
All budding actors went through the terrible disappointment of rejection she had learned from reading the biographies of stars. Undeterred, Peggy continued her cheerleading since, in her mind, it was impossible for Aggie to remain undiscovered.
“Maybe she should try something el
se,” Charlie had suggested one day with obvious timidity, revealing that he had not entirely bought into Peggy’s dream for her daughter. Peggy’s reaction was thunderous and demolishing, revealing all her pent-up disappointment and frustration. It was as if she had backslid from what she had learned in her anger management course.
“Why? Because you are a loser, Charlie? Because you never had a dream or the guts to pursue anything worthwhile? All your brains and your ambition are in your balls, Charlie. Eating, beer with your buddies, sports, and fucking is all you care about. Marrying you was the worst decision of my life. I dropped my drawers for a dumb bastard and here I am paying the piper. And now you’re suggesting that your daughter follow in your footsteps. That kind of negativity is what destroys people and ruins people’s lives. It sure has ruined mine. No way, Charlie. I will continue to believe that Aggie will be a star as long as I have breath in my body.”
“All I said . . .” Charlie began but words failed and, as always, he quickly acknowledged defeat. In fact, Peggy knew, that was his destiny, to reaffirm his own defeat by his clumsy submission. Worse, he had brought her down with him. Indeed, Marlon Brando’s quote from On the Waterfront had always resonated in her mind. “I could have been a contender,” was the line. Not that she had ever had an ambition for herself, a real ambition not a fantasy, to be a real contender for anything. But she was an obsessed and determined contender for her daughter and that was the focus of her life.
Peggy was well aware that she had intimidated Charlie enough to keep such negativity at bay. Then, out of the blue, Aggie had informed them that she had finally gotten a part in a play. Peggy was ecstatic.
“You see. It’s happening,” she enthused to Charlie and anyone else that she encountered. After all, most of their friends and relatives had begun to avoid the subject of Aggie’s march to stardom. Charlie welcomed this respite from intimidation, visibly remorseful that he had dared to suggest that Aggie try something else.
The trip to New York would be a surprise. To keep to a strict budget since the trip was a financial stretch, they took a bus from Denison, a twenty-hour grind, and made reservations at the cheapest Manhattan hotel they could find. Thankfully, the bus had arrived on time and they would be able to freshen up and make curtain time at a theater somewhere in a place strangely called Noho.