Bundle of Joy?

by Ariella Papa

  Since the fire, he had been shyer around me, and I still wasn’t sure I trusted him with a flame, but it seemed like a perfect thing to do on such a hot day. My stroll around the city had worked up quite an appetite.

  The fire lit the area around us as the sky became hazy. Armando had taken a plethora of meat from the freezer at the restaurant and he fed what seemed like the whole block T-bone steaks, free-range chicken and tender pieces of veal. I helped myself to some of everything and there was a steady supply of good wine.

  “I understand the miracle of the loaves and the fishes,” I said when Armando pulled another bottle of Pinot Grigio from his duffel bag. “I think Armando might be Jesus.”

  “I think Voula might be drunk.” Kelly laughed, and she was drunk too. “Hey, didn’t you have a date tonight?”

  “It got postponed, but I got this,” I said, pulling out my flashlight.

  “A vibrator.” Kelly giggled.

  I flashed her the finger and shone the light in her eye.

  “You should save that,” our neighbor from across the hall said. He handed me a candle.

  I hesitated for a second before taking it. We were safe out here, it seemed. Nothing was going to catch fire.

  We all had candles as it got darker, and all the tenants from our building and the one next door were bonding. The guy upstairs who sounded like he had brick sneakers was actually a softspoken industrial artist. The couple across the hall were getting married in the fall, and the woman on the second floor had an adorable contraband beagle puppy.

  It was just chill. Other people walked by with candles and stopped and talked to us. A woman in the building next door ran into someone she went to high school with. Kelly chatted with a passing businessman. It was unbelievably hot, but it didn’t seem to matter. I was happy to be hanging out. The past two days had been full of surprises, and even though I was living a strange part of the surprise I felt at peace. For once, there wasn’t some Italian groupie hanging all over Armando and we could talk about all kinds of things. He told us about the blackouts that had happened in his village when he was young. At midnight, Kelly read my palm by the light of her candle, putting on an accent that was a cross between British and Transylvanian.

  “I see a man with dark hair coming to take you away,” she said.

  “You are so full of shit,” I said.

  “He is going to take you away in a big truck.”

  “I think you know a little too much about me to be objective, if you are in fact really psychic.”

  “He is so close to you,” she said, and I could see in the dark that she was looking past me.

  “Oh, is he going to put out my fire with his big hard hose?” I was getting into her silly jokes.

  “Your future is certain,” she said quietly, and pointed behind me.

  I thought she was kidding. It was too much of a sitcom to think that Paul was behind me and that he had heard me. I turned quickly, almost colliding with him and dropping my candle.

  “Whoa,” he said, taking a step back. He had changed out of his uniform into a T-shirt and jeans. “I thought you were going to be more careful with fire. That was the point of the flashlight.”

  “I was saving it for later,” I said. Realizing that sounded strange, I added, “You know, in case the lights don’t come back on.”

  “They should be back sometime in the middle of the night. A lot of places have gotten the power back already.”

  “Oh, good.” I was relieved that he hadn’t heard what I’d said to Kelly.

  “But you should still be careful with that.”

  I nodded.

  “I would hate to have to get out my big hard hose.”

  I closed my eyes and took a breath. I could feel Kelly moving away from my back. When I opened my eyes, Paul was still there, smiling.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Anyway, I am heading over to a buddy’s apartment. I don’t feel like walking home over the Brooklyn Bridge just now.”

  “They won’t give you a ride? I mean, you couldn’t just commandeer a fire truck or something?”

  “I guess if I really needed a ride I could get it, but it’s fine this way. Anyway, I wanted to check and make sure you were okay, and reschedule our date.”

  Had I gotten the thumbs-up from the rest of the truck?

  “You could hang out for a while if you want,” I said. Never in my life have I been that forward with a guy; it must have been the moderate to super-expensive wine I had been downing.

  “I would really like to, but I’m so tired I can barely see straight. I need to have my A game when we hang out. I need to match you wit for wit.”

  He had this funny New York (Brooklyn?) accent, but I really liked listening to him talk.

  “How about next Thursday?” I asked.

  “How about sooner?” he asked quickly. “Like Tuesday.”

  I felt my eyes close again and this time I smiled and nodded.

  “Okay, cool, I’ll call you and we’ll work it out. Have a good night. And be careful around the hibachi. Don’t give me another reason to come back.”

  “I will—be careful, that is,” I said. “Take care.”

  He seemed about to walk away and then turned back and looked at me. “Oh, I wanted to tell you, you look really pretty in that light.”

  I started to thank him, but he bent down and kissed my cheek. It was a quick, soft kiss, but he kept his cheek against mine for a minute.

  “See you next week,” he said against my ear.

  “Yep, until then,” I said, and then, even though we hadn’t really shared a meal (though I think I decided to count the rice-cream bars), I turned my head and kissed him on the mouth. New York City was dark. I kissed a guy. I guess anything could happen.

  This time he walked away from me, all the way down the block past Armando and Kelly who were at that point just a couple of open mouths illuminated by their candles.

  I pulled out my FDNY flashlight, turned it on and illuminated myself so they could see the giant grin that spread across my face.

  The power came on the next morning at six a.m. I woke up with a hangover as the light in my room flashed on. I must have forgotten to turn it off when I left to meet Maureen the day before. I called my mother to make sure she was okay. She curtly told me that she was fine and managed to make me feel guilty about not being there.

  If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.

  I went back to bed for a few hours and when I woke up I listened to the radio and discovered that parts of the city still didn’t have power and certain subways were still stuck. There was no service and no one was expected to go to work.

  I walked into the kitchen, where I found Kelly drinking a Gatorade and eating a PowerBar. I could tell by her face that she was hungover too.

  “Thank God it’s a snow day,” she said.

  I plopped onto the couch and dialed Jamie’s number.

  “Hey,” she said when she answered. “You made it.”

  “Yeah, how about you and the bambino?”

  “We’re fine. We spent a few hours at the emergency room, but we’re fine.”

  “Emergency room?” I exclaimed. “What happened?”

  She told me the whole saga. She had gone over to a colleague’s apartment and had hung out there, thinking the power would come back any minute. When she finally realized that it wasn’t going to, she started walking home. It was too hot for her and she puked in the middle of the street. Some guy asked her if she was all right and she told him that she was pregnant. The good Samaritan started to panic, as his wife had had a miscarriage years ago, and the next thing Jamie knew she was in the back of an ambulance, light flashing, the whole shebang. Somewhere along the ride, Jamie started fearing the worst, too. She found herself crying as she lay on the gurney, feeling like she had seen this on an episode of ER.

  “They took me to the emergency room. Luckily it was just St. Vincent’s, right acr
oss the street from home, pretty much. I couldn’t get in touch with Raj, so I had to stay there. They checked me, told me I was okay, and then wouldn’t release me until someone came to get me.”

  “Wow!”

  “The only place where the air-conditioning was on was the chapel. So I was in there, with all the crazies. One of them found out I was pregnant—I guess she overheard one of the nurses—and started screaming, ‘Giant flabby pussy! Giant flabby pussy!’”

  “What the hell does that mean? What was wrong with her?”

  “Well, I don’t know what the problem was, but the nurse came over and tried to reason with the woman. She said that the—” Jamie switched her tone to one of a scientist proving a theory “—vagina does, indeed, lose elasticity in pregnancy.”

  “Really?” I was genuinely intrigued. I would have to look that up in my book, even if it meant skipping ahead.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then what?”

  “Raj finally came to get me and we went home and we ate bags of pretzels and chips.”

  I wanted to tell Jamie some of the stuff that had been going on with me over the past few days and ask her why she had never called me back. I wasn’t really sure where to begin, but before I could, Jamie started crying.

  “It’s okay, Jamie,” I said, thinking the whole emergency room experience had frayed her nerves and that I should be grateful that she and the baby were okay. “You just needed to find out if you were okay. Everything’s fine now. The lights are on.”

  “But, Voula,” she cried. “What if I really do have a giant flabby vagina?”

  13

  I decided to meet Helen at a Thai restaurant on Smith Street. It was close to her apartment, but not her apartment. I wanted to be on quasi-neutral turf.

  The night before we met, I had talked to Paul on the phone to plan our date and had told him I was going to be in Brooklyn. It had been three weeks since the blackout and we still hadn’t been able to keep our date: he was working so much. But we talked almost every day. Every time we spoke we made plans to get together, but were always thwarted by his responsibilities. Luckily my piece about the restaurant had been postponed, so I could keep dangling that out as a potential date. I wondered if I was going to cross the line between being a potential girlfriend and being a girl he wanted to be friends with.

  The thing was that we talked all the time. He called me at random when nothing was going on at the station. I liked talking to him. He had a unique perspective on things. He just sort of seemed to know things, about the city, about people— about everything. It was easy to talk to him. We talked for hours at a time.

  Even though I was worried that we might be crossing a line into friendship, I felt that the telephone was probably an ideal way for me to get to know someone. Over the phone, I could be myself and see if our senses of humor gelled without having to worry that my eyebrows were growing out or I had spinach in my teeth. I felt like we were really getting to know each other. It was like an old-fashioned courtship or something. The only way I think I could have communicated with someone better was via e-mail. After all, I’m a writer. Unfortunately, Paul didn’t have a computer. He said he had an e-mail account, but rarely got to use it, because some of the other firemen hogged the computer at the firehouse.

  I had thought he was so blue collar, but he had this amazing vocabulary. I knew that he hadn’t gone to college and so I figured he read a lot. Every now and then he would mispronounce a word in a way that charmed me. He had obviously taught himself things. It was hard to reconcile this witty voice on the phone with the image of the buff fireman massaging his massive thigh.

  When I told him the subway stop for my sibling rendezvous, he said that it was one stop away from his and that the restaurant I was going to was one of his favorites.

  “I should scope it out tomorrow and catch you with the other guy.”

  “It’s not another guy, it’s—” the word felt foreign in my mouth “—my sister.”

  “Aha!” he exclaimed. “I’ve caught you. You said you only knew Park Slope in Brooklyn. I’m totally setting up a sting.”

  “Listen, Columbo, it’s really my sister. I do only know Park Slope. I’ve never visited Smith Street before.”

  “You would have been here if your sister lived here,” he said. “I’m no fool.”

  “You certainly aren’t,” I agreed. “But I have only been to Park Slope.”

  “She just moved?”

  “No,” I said. I wanted to leave it at that. This conversation was only confirming my belief that letting other people into your life made things complicated.

  “One of those funny family things,” he said, like he knew all too well.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, listen, if it goes sour, you have my number. I’ll be home tomorrow night. I can meet you wherever.”

  I wondered if he could hear me smiling. It was true that I barely knew him, but something about him seemed protective and safe. In spite of myself, I liked it.

  “Thanks” was all I could think to say.

  The woman at the table by the window looked like my aunt Effie looked when I was a kid. It took me a moment to get my bearings and realize that it was my sister. She got up and hugged me. I returned the embrace stiffly. I had wondered if I was going to feel the love all the talk show reunions seemed to celebrate. Instead, I felt like I was meeting a new editor to go over a story. The editor was going to be interviewing me in a sense and just happened to look like a member of my family. I sat down and we stared at each other for a few seconds before either of us said anything.

  “Did you find it okay?”

  “Yep.”

  She looked past my shoulder, as if trying to find the next question written on the wall. “How is your job going?”

  “Okay,” I said. I probably should have elaborated, but it seemed like it should be my turn to ask a question. Then I realized I couldn’t really remember what she did. I guessed. “So you teach, right?”

  “Yes.”

  She asked where I had been for the blackout, and I told her.

  She told me a long rambling story of how she had to find her son during the blackout, and I had a feeling that she was trying desperately to dispel the weirdness and realizing as she went on that she was only making it worse.

  When the waitress took our drink orders, we consulted our menus in great depth. I was certain I wanted the massaman curry with chicken as spicy as I could get it, with a side of jasmine rice instead of regular, and I was definitely going to try the curry puffs. I stared at the menu for a while, though, pretending I wasn’t sure.

  The waitress came back and Helen ordered first. She chose the exact same thing I did, right down to the really spicy curry.

  “And for you?” the waitress said.

  I hesitated, but then asked for the same thing. Helen smiled, looking pleased, as if she had to prove we were really related. I don’t know why I was so determined to put some distance between us.

  “Look, this is really strange.”

  “I know,” she said, sounding almost desperate.

  “I know we have a lot in common, but I just don’t really know how to be. I’ve gotten used to not having a sister.”

  “You had two.”

  “I haven’t forgotten that, believe me. I just don’t like to think about it. I mean, you made a choice to leave.”

  “What else could I have done?”

  “I don’t know, listened to them, served out your time.”

  “For how long?” Her voice rose.

  I looked over at the people at the next table. They were close enough to hear us.

  She lowered her voice. “I was dying there. It’s no way to live. They never would have let me go away to college. I mean, did they let you go away to college?”

  “Well, I went to Columbia. That’s not too shabby. I lived at home to save money.”

  She raised an eyebrow. She knew it was bullshit. “With your grades, you mean to tell me
that you couldn’t have gotten a scholarship to a school that was just as good, but not in New York. Georgia told me you only moved out a few years ago. It’s time to cut the cord.”

  “It’s easy for you to say.”

  “It’s not easy, I just did it.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing—”

  Our food came and we pulled back from the table as the exact same plates were set before us. When the waitress told us to enjoy our meals, Helen picked up her napkin and folded it into a perfect square on her lap.

  “I just wanted us to be in contact again. You’re my sister. I love you. You saved my life,” she said.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I took a few bites of my curry puff. It was piping hot and I felt my mouth burning. I swallowed quickly and it burned all the way down. I knew what she was talking about—one of the many nights I had woken up in a cold sweat.

  “I don’t know if I did. I don’t remember.”

  “Papa would have killed me.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “No.”

  Helen reached across the table and took my hand. I glanced down at our identical skin tone, the exact same jagged fingernails. I let her hold my hand without squeezing back.

  “We share so much,” she said. “We share Cristina.”

  “Please don’t talk about Cristina,” I said in a voice I didn’t recognize. I imagined what Georgia must have told her about my methods of denial. Georgia was always encouraging me to talk about Cristina, but I still couldn’t. “It wasn’t all bad, you know, living there.”

  “No, I know,” she said. “My husband always tells me that his family is mine now. He says he and the kids are my family, that we are different than they were with us and Cristina.”

  I felt my nose fill and numb. I wanted to defend our family.

  “He’s right in a way,” Helen continued. “Having kids changes things, but I wouldn’t change all of it. It wasn’t the normal happy American family, but it was mine. You know, it made me me. It wasn’t all bad. I remember watching the soccer games, late into the night. You remember that?”