Little Earthquakes

by Jennifer Weiner

  BECKY

  The war started innocently enough, with a package in the mail addressed, in Mimi’s scrawling hand, to A. RABINOWITZ. Mimi still had not let go of the idea that her granddaughter should have been named Anna Rabinowitz. Like it would kill her to write Rothstein, Becky thought, tucking the package under her arm. She tossed it on the kitchen counter and forgot about it for two days. When she finally got around to opening it, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing when something satiny slithered out of the box. Something made of red and green diamonds, with Ava’s name embroidered at the top.

  “Is this what I think it is?” she asked Andrew, holding the offending item pinched between her fingertips.

  Andrew glanced up briefly. “It’s a Christmas stocking,” he said.

  “Andrew.” Her husband looked up from his coffee cup. “This may come as a surprise, but as it turns out, we’re Jews.”

  “Well, yes, but . . .” He shrugged and took another sip. “Mimi does Christmas. And now that she’s in town, I guess she wants to do it with us.”

  “What do you mean, Mimi does Christmas? Is that like Debbie Does Dallas?” Becky turned the box over and groaned when a red-and-green BABY’S FIRST CHRISTMAS! bib fell out.

  Andrew poured himself more coffee. “She just figured that just because we are Jewish is no reason for us to be deprived of Christmas.”

  “We don’t believe in Jesus. That’s a pretty good reason.”

  “Becky, please, let’s not fight.”

  She folded the stocking back into its box. “So you had a Christmas tree?”

  Andrew nodded.

  “Hung up stockings?”

  Another nod.

  “Sang carols?”

  “On occasion.” He added milk to his cup. “She thought Christmas was more of a secular national holiday than a religious event.”

  “But . . .” Becky’s mind was whirling. “So now she thinks that Ava’s going to celebrate Christmas.”

  He shrugged, shifting his weight in his seat. “I never discussed it with her.”

  “Well, I think we should. We’re not even going to be here on the twenty-fifth. Remember? We’ve got tickets to go see my mom.”

  “So I’ll tell her,” Andrew said. “It’s not a big deal. Really, it’s not. I’ll call her tomorrow night.”

  But first thing the next morning, there was a knock on the door and seven feet of fir tree on the front steps.

  “Thanks, but we don’t need a tree,” said Becky to the short man in jeans and an Eagles jacket all but obscured by the branches.

  “Delivery,” he grunted, shaking the tree at her. Pine needles drifted down around her feet. “Paid for already. Sign here, please.”

  “Just leave it on the curb,” Becky said after she’d signed.

  “You serious?” the man asked.

  “You can have it, if you want.”

  The man looked at Becky, looked at the tree, shook his head, spat on the sidewalk, and left the tree leaning against her stairs. “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  “Happy Chanukah,” Becky called and shut the door, vowing that she and Andrew were going to have a meaningful discussion about the true meaning of Christmas as it pertained to the Rothstein-Rabinowitz family as soon as he got back from work.

  Twenty minutes later, the telephone rang. “Oh, you’re home!” Mimi trilled. “Did the tree arrive?”

  Becky drew herself up straight, tensing her muscles, readying herself for the inevitable fight. “Yes, Mimi, about that tree.”

  “Isn’t it just heavenly?” her mother-in-law asked. “I do love the smell of a fresh fir tree!”

  “Listen, Mimi, about the tree . . . we’re not Christian.”

  “Well, I know that, silly!” Mimi giggled.

  “So . . .” Becky was starting to feel as though she’d slipped into Wonderland, where up was down and down was up and even the simplest, most obvious facts in the world required elaborate explanation. “We aren’t going to celebrate Christmas. We aren’t even going to be here for Christmas. We’re going to be in Florida. So we really don’t want the tree.”

  When she spoke again, Mimi’s voice was as cold as the December air. “You’re not having Christmas?” she demanded.

  Becky’s hand tightened on the telephone. “Andrew and I have talked about it, and this is how we both feel. Of course, you’re welcome to do whatever you like with Ava in your house. But no Christmas here. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re canceling my granddaughter’s first Christmas?” Mimi screeched.

  God help me, Becky thought. “No. Of course not. And like I said, whatever you want to do in your house is fine, but . . .”

  “But what about Christmas dinner? Who’s going to make the HAM?”

  Ham. Ham. Had Andrew mentioned a ham?

  “I made plans,” Mimi bleated. “I already invited my relatives. How will I ever hold up my head if you cancel? It’s already bad enough that you couldn’t even name your daughter Anna—a beautiful name, a classic name, my mother’s name, in case you’ve forgotten . . .”

  Becky bit her lip. Back to this again.

  “But then you cancel my granddaughter’s first CHRISTMAS! I’ve got the recipes all picked out, and I’ve got presents for my granddaughter to put under the tree, and you . . . you . . . GRINCH!”

  Becky felt a fit of giggles coming on. “Okay, Mimi, let’s not lose our tempers here.”

  “You have to have Christmas!” Mimi said.

  “I don’t have to do anything except be black and die!” Becky replied.

  This shut Mimi up. For all of ten seconds. “WHAT DID YOU SAY TO ME?” she screamed.

  “Who gave you the right to tell us what to do?” Becky asked. “Do I call you up and tell you who I’m bringing to your house and what holidays to celebrate and what to cook?”

  “Don’t you talk to me like that! You’re out of line! Way out of line!”

  “How am I out of line?” Becky asked. Her giggles were gone. Her last shred of patience had also vanished. “This is our house, and Andrew and I have every right to decide what to do here. We can name our baby what we want, we can celebrate what we want, we can invite who we want.”

  “I bet this was all your mother’s idea,” Mimi ranted. “I bet your MOTHER wanted you to cancel Ava’s CHRISTMAS. She gets everything she wants, and I get left out in the cold! I get nothing! It’s not fair!”

  Becky took a deep breath, determined not to be baited or to quote any more movie dialogue at her mother-in-law. “If you want to celebrate Christmas, that’s up to you. What Andrew and I do in our house, with our daughter, is up to us.”

  Mimi’s voice was deadly cold. “If you insist on going to visit your mother, I will never set foot in your house again.”

  Hallelujah, Becky thought. “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said calmly. “But Andrew and I have discussed this. And our decision is final.”

  “You . . . you . . .” There was an outraged, wordless shriek. Then a dial tone. Mimi had hung up on her.

  Becky stared at the phone. She didn’t think anyone had hung up on her since sixth grade, when she and Lisa Yoseloff had gotten into a fight about whose turn it was to sit behind Robbie Marx on the bus. She clenched her shaking hands into fists and looked at Ava, who was sitting on the kitchen floor, happily clapping her plastic measuring cups together. “I hate to have to say this, but your grandmother is insane.”

  “Ehgah?” Ava said.

  “If ‘ehgah’ is baby for insane, then yes. But not to worry.” She picked up the phone. “We’re going to call Daddy and get this whole thing straightened out.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “Can we change the tickets?” Andrew asked.

  Becky pressed the phone against her ear. She must have heard him wrong. She’d told him the whole story, from the tree delivery right down to Mimi’s threats, and this was his response?

  “Andrew. Your mother called me a Grinch, hung up the phone on me, and she seems to be having
some kind of psychotic fantasy in which I’ll be preparing her holiday ham. She’s out of control. I think skipping town is the smartest thing we could do.”

  She heard him sigh. “Mimi just called me. She’s pretty upset.” Another sigh.

  “Yeah, I figured that out when she hung up on me. Look, Andrew, she’s having a tantrum.”

  “You could call it that,” Andrew allowed.

  “And you know what you do when a little kid has a tantrum? You don’t give him what he wants. You just walk away. You tell him he needs to calm down and that you won’t talk to him until he does.”

  “I just think it would be easier if . . .”

  “ . . . we gave her what she wanted. I know. But look at the history! We always give her what she wants, and it never makes her happy. Not in the long term. Not even in the short term, really. We can’t keep doing the same thing over and over and over, giving her what she wants and giving her what she wants and having her blow up at us anyhow. It’s not working. Don’t you see that?”

  There was a pause. “Becky . . .” Andrew began.

  . . . she is my mother, Becky concluded in her head. She felt her heart sinking. How could she not have seen this coming? Her husband, wonderful, handsome, sexy Andrew was a mama’s boy of the first order. He wasn’t even really married to her. He was married to Mimi. Mimi was the one whose wishes came first, whose screaming fits got her exactly what she wanted. Becky was just along for the ride.

  “Why don’t we just call and see if we can leave the day after Christmas instead of the day before,” Andrew said. “It’s not that big a deal. We’ll still get to spend a whole week with your Mom. We’ll give Mimi her day; we’ll let her have her Christmas.”

  Becky shook her head. “No,” she said. Her voice was quiet but firm. She wasn’t going to pull a Mimi. She wasn’t going to scream or threaten or slam down the phone. But she wasn’t going to change her mind. “No.”

  “You’re not even willing to do that?” Andrew asked. “To just give her one day?”

  “It’s not the day; it’s the principle of the thing. We’ve got to take a stand somewhere, or else we’re going to live the rest of our lives with Mimi running the show.”

  His voice was getting more indignant. “It’s not like that.”

  Becky thought of all the examples she could give him; the dozens of tiny ways that Mimi manipulated and undermined them. The blueberry muffin she’d shoved down Ava’s throat; the bow she’d cornstarched to her head; the parking tickets she shoved through their mail slot. The way there wasn’t a single picture of Becky and Ava in her house; just pictures of Mimi and Ava, and Andrew and Ava, as if the two of them had grown the baby in a lab or picked her off a tree. The wedding dress that Mimi had worn to their wedding. “The Greatest Love of All.” “Think about Ava,” she said instead. “What do you think this is teaching her? She who screams loudest, who calls names and hangs up the phone on people, gets what she wants? That it’s okay to tell your children how to live their lives? To never let them decide anything for themselves? To never let them grow up?”

  “Mimi’s not young anymore,” he said. “She’s not young, and she’s all alone. I’m all she has.”

  “And you can be there for her,” Becky said. “She’s your mother. You’re her son. I get all of that. But I’m your wife. Ava’s your daughter. We should come first, don’t you think? At least some of the time?”

  There was a pause. “Did you really tell her that you didn’t have to do anything except be black and die?” Andrew asked.

  Becky twisted a curl around her finger. “It just popped out. I’m sorry.”

  She heard his sigh as if he was standing right there in the room with her. “I’ll talk to her,” he said quietly, as if he was talking to himself. “It’ll be okay.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Andrew didn’t come home until ten o’clock that night, and when he walked through the door his face was ashen and his eyes were red. Becky looked up from the floor, where she’d been playing with Ava, keeping her up way past her bedtime so that her father could see her before she went to sleep. “I take it things with Mimi didn’t go well?”

  Andrew shook his head. “She said we never told her we were going to Florida.”

  Becky felt her temper rising. “Do we have to clear it with her before we go anywhere? I’ll double-check the ketubah, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t say anything about needing my mother-in-law’s permission to go on vacation.”

  “And she’s disappointed that she won’t be having Christmas with her granddaughter.”

  “Well, you’re the doctor, but I don’t think anyone ever died of disappointment,” Becky said, pulling a wooden block out of Ava’s mouth, where she’d been working it over with the single tooth that had popped out the week before. “Easy there, Fang.”

  “Khhee!” said Ava and wriggled sideways in search of other prey.

  “So you stuck to your guns?” Becky asked.

  Andrew nodded. “She was crying.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “But she’ll get over it, won’t she?”

  Andrew slumped into an armchair. He picked up one of Ava’s blocks and started twirling it. “I’m not sure.”

  “Oh, come on. This isn’t going to kill her. She’s just got to learn to compromise a little. You’re married now. She can’t have you at her beck and call, doing everything she wants. And like I told her, she can do whatever she wants in terms of holidays, religion, whatever, in her house. She just can’t tell us what to do here.”

  Andrew buried his face in his hands. Becky got to her feet and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “We’re going to get through this. And then we’re going to be in Florida. Fun and sun! Sand and surf! We’ll put Ava in that little lobster bathing suit and let her float around the shallow end. Right, Ava?”

  “Ish!” said Ava and popped another block into her mouth.

  “Girlfriend, what have I told you about eating wood?” asked Becky. She replaced the block with a teething ring and kissed Andrew’s ear. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “She’ll find someone else to cook her ham, and someday she’ll get married again, and by the time we come back from Florida, she’ll have forgotten all about it.”

  Andrew stared at her bleakly. “I hope you’re right.”

  AYINDE

  “Sorry I’m late,” said Dr. Melendez, hurrying into the exam room. She stopped at the edge of the table and beamed at Julian, who gave her a gummy smile in return. “Oh, my,” she said. “What an angel.”

  Ayinde felt her body relaxing, and she beamed down at her son. Her marriage might have been a mess, but at least she was succeeding as a mother. Well, more or less.

  “Missed your six-month, huh?” the doctor chided. Ayinde looked down at her fur-lined boots.

  “We were busy,” she said. Dr. Melendez merely nodded. Was it possible she didn’t know what was going on in Ayinde and Julian’s life, or was she just being polite? “I’m very sorry. We’re probably behind schedule on our shots.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” the doctor said, peering into Julian’s ears. “I just don’t want to make a habit of it. Tell me how things have been,” she said, running her hands deftly over Julian’s body as the two medical students behind her watched. She wiggled his feet, squeezed his knees in until they touched, then let them slip apart. “Is he on the move yet?”

  “He’s not crawling, but he’s sitting up well and reaching for things. And babbling a lot, and trying to pull himself up on the edge of the couch.” Ayinde paused for breath.

  “Sounds just fine,” said the doctor, slipping the stethoscope into her ears. She listened, glanced at Julian’s chart, then slid the stethoscope’s bell to another spot on his chest and frowned. “Hmm.”

  Ayinde’s breath caught in her throat. “Is everything all right?”

  Dr. Melendez held up a finger for silence. Ayinde watched the second hand sweep around the clock. Ten seconds, fifteen, twenty. She closed h
er eyes. “Is everything all right?” she asked again.

  Dr. Melendez unhooked the stethoscope and looked at Julian’s chart again. “Has Julian ever had any trouble breathing? Have you ever noticed him breathing rapidly?”

  “No,” Ayinde said, shaking her head. “No, never.”

  “Has anyone ever mentioned to you that Julian has a heart murmur?”

  Ayinde sank onto the wheeled stool next to the examination table. “No,” she said. “No. He was perfect. He was born a few weeks early, but other than that, he was perfect.”

  “Well, he’s got a little murmur, and I’d like a cardiologist to take a listen. And probably a look.”

  Ayinde leaned over and lifted Julian, still clad only in a diaper, into her arms. “What’s wrong?” she asked. Her voice was rising, and her own heart was banging against her ribs. “How bad is a heart murmur?”

  “Lots of times, they’re no big deal,” Dr. Melendez said, squatting so she was at eye level with Ayinde. “The murmur by itself doesn’t tell us much. Heart murmurs are very common, and frequently they’re indicative of a problem that will correct itself over time. Julian’s been healthy and thriving, as you’ve said, and his growth, well, as you can see, no problems there.”

  Ayinde found herself nodding rapidly. Julian had been in the ninety-fifth percentile for height and the eightieth for weight since he’d been born. My big man, Richard used to call him, when they’d still been speaking.

  “There’s a good chance that he might just have a condition that we’d watch as he grew or something that we can handle with medication.”

  “And if not?”

  “Well, there are surgical options,” Dr. Melendez said. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The first thing we need to do is find out what we’re dealing with.” She reached for her prescription pad and started writing. “I want you to see my colleague Dr. Myerson.”

  Ayinde felt dizzy. She tightened her grip on Julian. “So we should make an appointment?”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Melendez, handing over a prescription slip with a name, a telephone number, and an address. “He’ll probably see you next week. And I want you to keep an eye on Julian. If you notice he’s having trouble breathing—if he’s gasping, if his lips turn blue—I want you to call us immediately and take him to the nearest emergency room. I don’t think there’s much chance of that happening,” she continued, putting her hand on top of Ayinde’s forearm. “If something was going to go wrong, it would have happened by now. The chances are good that he’s fine. I just want us to be sure.”