Mom fussed over the flowers—sweetheart roses and baby’s breath, not my favorite, but I suppose she was going for a theme—while I put the food she brought on a plate and added it to the buffet. I swiped a brownie and absentmindedly nibbled on it while I worked.
“Since when did you start eating desserts?” Mickey asked, watching me critically.
“I don’t know, I’m not really,” I hedged, and then turned my back on both of them and started pulling glasses out of the cupboards. I could feel them exchange a look behind my back, and felt a surge of irritation. The truth was, I’d been eating nonstop since my night with Zack. The memory of his morning beard scratching against my face, or the way his fingers had strummed over my skin, had a way of propelling me right to the refrigerator.
There was another knock at the door, and my mom went to let Sophie in. She toddled in, out of breath and her face red.
“Hey, you! What’s wrong? Did you take the stairs?” Mickey asked her, hugging her in greeting.
“Have you talked to the doctor about your blood pressure?” Mom fretted. She took Sophie’s arm and guided her to the sofa, where she plopped down with a sigh of relief.
“No . . . the elevator . . . I get so winded lately. Thanks,” Sophie wheezed as she accepted the glass of water I handed her. She smiled at me and almost looked like her old, affable self. “Thanks for the shower.”
“No problem,” I said, and tugged the end of her hair.
We hadn’t seen each other since the day of my date with Zack, and had only talked briefly on the phone about shower-related things. But I could tell that the whole thing had blown over. Such was the way with sisters. Or at least the way it was with my sisters.
“So what have you been up to, Paige?” Sophie asked casually.
“Yeah, how’s your love life?” Mickey asked, flopping down on my pristine white love seat, tucking one foot underneath her.
“Mick, get your feet off my couch. Nothing’s up,” I said, and swiftly followed Mom back to the kitchen to escape the interrogation. Unfortunately, the condo had an open floor plan, so I couldn’t completely get away from my inquisitors.
“How’s it going with Zack?” Sophie called out.
“It’s not. We went out a few times, and that was it. No big deal,” I replied. I dug out an ice bucket—one of the few wedding presents I’d forgotten to purge—and handed it to my mother.
“Oh yeah? That’s not what he said,” Sophie teased me.
“What did he say?” Mickey asked.
“Who’s Zack?” Mom asked. She pulled the ice tray out of the freezer and dumped it into the bucket.
“Zack’s my carpenter, the gorgeous one who redid my kitchen,” Sophie said.
“How’s the redecorating coming along anyway? What did Aidan say about it?” I asked, walking back into the living room with a tray of glasses. I set them out around the punch bowl.
“Don’t change the subject. What did the carpenter hottie say about Paige?” Mickey insisted. She leaned forward, her brown eyes shining brightly, her long dark hair falling down over her shoulders. Mickey looks so much like me, although her face is softer, like Sophie’s. She doesn’t have any of the sharp angles that make me look like Snow White’s evil stepmother when I’m angry.
I was saved by a knock at the door that signaled the arrival of our guests. A flood of blonde, perky, giggling women—it seemed all of Sophie’s friends were blonde, perky, and giggling—began to pour into the apartment, each carrying a gift wrapped in pastel paper. Sophie’s mother-in-law—a short, thin, manic woman with hair that had been frosted platinum blonde—and her two anorexic sisters-in-law also arrived, and my mom rallied to entertain them among the sea of strangers.
Thankfully, Sophie insisted on skipping the typical dumb shower games, and so after everyone had arrived and caught up on gossip, we filled our plates with food and settled in to watch Soph unwrap her presents. She sat on the sofa, her legs propped up on an ottoman and a few pillows (my mother, still worrying about Sophie’s blood pressure, insisted that Soph keep her feet elevated), and Mickey sat cross-legged on the floor next to her, taking notes on who gave what to make the task of thank-you notes easier.
I hovered near the kitchen, filling the sandwich trays as they emptied, putting out more punch, and generally doing anything I could to avoid the tedium of watching Sophie unwrap yet another cute, unisex outfit from Baby Gap. I reached out and grabbed a mini–roast beef sandwich with cheddar cheese and horseradish mayonnaise off the tray and popped it in my mouth.
“How long do showers normally last?” I asked my mother when she breezed by me with a tray of empty punch glasses and discarded paper plates.
Mom shrugged. “A few hours. I think it’s going well, though, don’t you? Everyone seems to be having a good time.”
I nodded, my eyes on Sophie. She was laughing, her head thrown back and her blonde curls bouncing around her face. She looked so happy, so complete. I’d thought she’d made a huge mistake getting married right out of college and an even bigger mistake when she gave up her dream of being an art photographer. I’d done everything right—I went to law school, waited until my career was established before I married. But there she was, full of light and life and surrounded by friends, her hand affectionately grazing over her enormous bump.
And here I was. Divorced, alone, and secretly stuffing finger sandwiches into my mouth.
After the horde of chattering women left, I assessed the damage done to my apartment. Mom was washing out the punch bowl, and Mickey was carefully covering the picked-over sandwich platters with plastic wrap. Sophie was still parked on the sofa, looking like she was about to fall asleep, surrounded by a sea of crumpled light pink and baby blue wrapping paper, enormous bows, and boxes upon boxes of adorably impractical baby clothes, such as a faux fur pink baby coat spilling out of a gift bag. I plucked the coat up and held it up for Sophie to see.
“What are you supposed to do with this if you have a boy?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. The same thing I’ll do with this necklace, I guess,” Sophie said, showing me a tiny gold chain with a locket on it.
“Necklace? Do babies wear necklaces?” Mickey asked. She looked at my mom, who shrugged.
“You girls didn’t. I would have worried about it getting tangled up and choking you,” Mom said as she waded through the wrappings and sat down on the love seat. Mickey and I followed her, me collapsing on the other end of the sofa that Sophie was occupying, and Mickey returned to her spot on the floor. Sophie stuck her feet on my lap.
“Will you rub my feet?” she asked.
“Ugh, gross, get them off of me,” I said, pushing her away.
Sophie pouted. “But they’re sore. I’ve been wearing heels all afternoon, and my ankles are so swollen, they look like an elephant’s.”
“And they smell about as bad. Stop waving them at me,” Mickey said, inching away from Sophie.
“Paige. Do you think that maybe you should see a counselor?” Mom said abruptly.
“What? Why would you ask me that?” I asked, prickling.
I was tired of family members suggesting I seek out therapy. It was starting to get a little insulting.
“Well, don’t get upset. But I think it would help if you talked to someone about Scott. Ever since he, um, told you about, well . . .”
“The word you’re looking for is ‘gay,’ Mother,” Sophie said without opening her eyes.
“You haven’t been the same,” Mom continued as if Sophie hadn’t spoken. “And you’ve gotten so rigid about exercising, and for a while you weren’t eating anything, and now you’re at the other extreme, eating constantly. Do you think maybe you have an eating disorder?”
“No!” I said, dropping the cheese and cracker I’d just been about to scarf down. “Trust me, I don’t have an eating disorder.”
“There’s a girl who lived in my dorm freshman year who was bulimic. She threw up so much they had to ask her to leave, because she was u
psetting all of the other chicks with eating disorders,” Mickey said, reaching for yet another brownie. She looked at me. “Do you have any peanut butter?”
“Yes, in the cupboard. Why?”
“I want to spread some on this brownie. ‘Two great tastes that taste great together,’ ” she said, springing to her feet and heading into the kitchen.
“That’s disgusting. I don’t know how you can eat like that and stay so thin,” Sophie said, wrinkling her nose. She looked over at me. “What’s wrong with you?”
The sandwiches and cookies and brownies and chips and dip I’d been downing all day were starting to catch up with me. My stomach had started to heave, and I sat still, breathing deeply, hoping it would pass.
“Look how pale she is. Paige, I think you must be coming down with something,” Mom said.
“Either that or she’s pregnant. That’s how I spent the first fourteen weeks of my pregnancy,” Sophie said, resting her hands contentedly on her massive abdomen.
Mickey, who had returned from the kitchen with a jar of peanut butter and a knife, giggled. “Well, we know she’s not pregnant. Right, Paige?”
My mom laughed, too. “That’s just what I need right now.”
I frowned. “So, Sophie gets pregnant, and we all have to suffer through yet another party thrown in her honor, but if I do, I’m just a burden to the family?” I asked.
“That’s not what I meant. And you’re not pregnant . . . are you?” my mother asked.
“Don’t you have to have sex in order to get pregnant?” Mickey asked.
“Why do you find it so unbelievable that I’d have sex?” I asked, rolling my eyes.
“I don’t know, I just can’t picture it,” Mickey said.
“God, Mick, I don’t think you’re supposed to picture your sisters having sex,” Sophie said.
“Well, I can totally imagine you and Aidan doing it,” Mickey said.
“Really?” Sophie asked, looking so pleased by this that I just rolled my eyes again.
“Will all of you please shut up!” my mother yelled.
We all turned to stare at her. My mother is not prone to screaming “Shut up.” This was the woman who advised me when I was a child that it was much more polite to say “I don’t appreciate the exuberance of your verbosity” than the easier “Shut up” or more satisfying “Shut your face.” I had to look up “exuberance” and “verbosity” in my children’s dictionary to understand what the hell she’d been talking about.
“Thank you. Now, Paige. Let me get this straight. Are you pregnant?”
“No,” I admitted. “At least, I don’t think so.”
“Good,” my mother said, looking relieved. In fact, insultingly so.
“Why would it be such a bad thing if I were pregnant?” I asked her.
“I just don’t think that would be the best thing for you right now. Do you?” she asked. “You’re not married or even in a relationship, you work long hours, you’ve gone through a difficult last couple of years.”
“Yes, but . . . ,” I started, and then I frowned, biting my lip. “Maybe that’s what I need. Marriage didn’t work out for me, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I can’t have a baby. I could always go to a sperm bank.”
“Good Lord,” my mother said weakly. She picked up her glass of wine and downed it in one long gulp.
“But you don’t like babies,” Sophie said, eyeing me critically.
“Of course I do! Why would you think that?” I asked.
“You just never seemed to have any interest in kids. Even when you were married, I just assumed that you’d be too caught up in your career to have a family,” Sophie said.
“Plenty of women balance a career and kids,” I said.
Sophie shrugged. “I know, it’s just a big sacrifice.” She looked around my apartment at the white sofas, and the glass coffee table with the hard sharp corners, and the bar against the wall that had wineglasses hanging from the underside of the cabinet, and I knew what she was thinking: this wasn’t a kid-friendly place.
“It’s not like I’m going to have a baby right this second,” I said irritably.
“Thank God for small favors,” my mother said. “Mickey, would you pour me another glass of wine?”
“Even if I did get pregnant right away, there would be nine months to get ready. I could sell this place and buy a house. And maybe I could cut my hours back at work, or work out of the house part of the time,” I mused.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sophie said, rolling her eyes. She struggled to get up off the couch. “Just a few weeks ago you were saying that you were never going to date again. And now you’re all of a sudden going to have a baby? On a whim? Having a baby isn’t something that you just casually decide to do, and it isn’t something that’s going to be a Band-Aid for everything else that’s going wrong in your life.”
“It’s not just a whim,” I said, choking on my anger. How dare Sophie, she who had everything—the doting husband, the baby on the way, the knack of being the center of attention at every single social gathering she’d ever been to—tell me that I can’t have a child? “As a matter of fact, I was pregnant once already. And then I miscarried, and then my marriage turned to shit, but before that, before I knew about Scott, all I wanted was to get pregnant. In fact, sometimes I wonder if I had . . .”
My voice trailed off, and I clapped my hand over my mouth. Salty tears stung at my eyes and spilled over onto my cheeks. Sophie, Mickey, and Mom were all staring at me.
“Oh, Paige,” Mom said, and she leaned over and put her hand on my leg. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you tell us before?”
“If you had, maybe Scott wouldn’t have left you?” Sophie asked, finishing the thought that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to complete.
“No. I mean, yes, I wonder what would have happened. I’m not saying I think a baby would have saved our marriage. There was that one rather large problem that he wasn’t attracted to me, or anyone of my gender,” I said. “But I wish I’d been able to have that baby or that I’d gotten pregnant again. I want a family.”
“But you’ve said you don’t want to get married, or even date again,” Sophie said carefully. We’d suddenly swapped roles: I was emoting, she was analyzing.
“I don’t know what I want,” I said miserably.
Chapter Twelve
“What do you think you should do?” Elise asked.
“Don’t do that. Don’t get all shrinky on me,” I groaned.
God, I hated therapy. It always seemed so self-indulgent to me, wasted money and wasted time. I’d first seen Elise several years ago, when Scott and I had been married for about six months and I’d been struggling with a low-grade depression that I couldn’t seem to shake. One year and a grossly large amount of money later, we’d discussed everything from the competitive nature of my relationship with Sophie to the many issues stemming from my parents’ acrimonious divorce to the distance I sometimes felt from my new husband, and I was no closer to uncovering what had been bothering me. So I stopped going.
But now that I was wading through this postdivorce swamp, I for once decided to take my mother’s advice and called Elise for an appointment. I figured that now more than ever I probably needed a neutral opinion on how to proceed. Should I call Zack? I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him, but the idea of getting further involved with him terrified me. What if he, too, was gay, and I was somehow doomed to a life of dating and marrying closeted men? And was it really so crazy to consider having a baby on my own? Or were my baby pangs the result of loneliness and grief?
“Okay, here’s my non-shrinky answer for you: you’re really screwed up,” Elise said, peering at me through her thick, tortoiseshell-framed glasses.
“What? You’re not supposed to say that,” I protested. “You’re supposed to be supportive and kind.”
“Whenever I try to be supportive and kind, you accuse me of being shrinky,” Elise pointed out. Accura
tely.
“True, but I don’t think you should go around telling your clients that they’re screwed up. At least give me some hope.”
Elise looked at me thoughtfully. But then, Elise did everything thoughtfully. She probably peed thoughtfully and went through thoughtful labor with her children. She even looked like a therapist, with her tasteful brown pageboy haircut and her gently rounded face.
“I didn’t say you’re irredeemably screwed up. If you wanted to, you could overcome it,” she offered.
“With another year of therapy spent discussing why my mother always felt she had to befriend my friends?” I asked, and crossed my arms.
“No, that’s not what I was going to say. But I’m not going to tell you if you’re just going to sit there and be sarcastic,” she said.
“You can’t do that! I’m paying you for this!”
“Paige, you are not the craziest client I’ve ever had, but I think you might be the most stubborn. Which is not necessarily better,” Elise sighed.
I bit my lip. I was a little intrigued. “Okay, I won’t be sarcastic. Tell me how I can unscrew myself, ha-ha.”
Elise shook her head, obviously not appreciating my shrink humor. “Okay, here it is: stop being so fucking closed off.”
Fucking? I’d never heard Elise swear before. It was like hearing your parents curse for the first time—it was both titillating and disillusioning, and not at all what you expect to come out of the mouth of someone wearing a long flowered skirt and matching pink sweater set.
“Fucking?” I repeated.
“Yes. Fucking. I’m not denying that you’ve had a tough time, and I can understand how having to cope with the loss of your pregnancy, the loss of your marriage, and finding out that your partner was not the man you thought he was would be overwhelming. And it does take time to get over those kinds of traumatic events, absolutely. But you’re not trying to heal. You’re just closing yourself off and making stupid declarations about how you’re never going to risk getting involved in another relationship again,” she said.
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