by Heidi Pitlor
A door slammed somewhere and Cass grabbed my leg.
“Come on,” I said. I took his hand and we ran behind a big oak, a grand, old sprawling thing that poured above us like a cloud. “We’re safe now.”
“I’m really scared.” His voice wavered.
“Cass, listen, there aren’t really any bears in Western Mass,” I lied. I set my hands on his shoulders and started to sing “Rock Around the Clock,” a song he liked.
Maggie, who had a terrific voice, joined in. She taught music at the middle school where I sometimes subbed, and the students adored her. Then we all danced around the bush, picking dead dandelions and blowing their fluff into the air. I did savor the moments when another adult helped me parent.
Cass gazed kindly over at me. I made an air kiss.
“Who’s my dad?” he asked.
It was as if a record had scratched and stopped.
“Oh.” A parent could never, not for one moment, rest. I reached for a plate-sized leaf on the ground and crinkled it in my hand.
“I should head home and help Brian with dinner,” Maggie said, taking Cass’s cue. “Let me know if you guys are coming?”
“Will do,” I watched her head back to her car, and led Cass over to our front yard. “Remember I told you about that man who came to see us once when you were a baby?” My spiel thus far had been: Your mom and dad met nine months before you were born. We loved each other for a moment and then decided that we would always love you, but that we could not live together if we wanted to be happy. The end.
Cass jammed the toe of one of his faded Keds into a tree root.
“Your father lives in Chicago now. He’s a very nice man. We met nine months before you were—”
“Why can’t boys have babies? What if a boy wants to have a baby?”
“If they really want to, I mean, there might be ways now.”
“What’s my father’s name?”
“Daniel,” I said, the name bulky in my mouth. I had googled him several times over the years, but could only find a few brief mentions of his small advertising agency. “Daniel Sikdar. I’ll tell you anything else you want to know.”
“Is he ever going to come back?”
“That, I don’t know,” I said. And then I lost my nerve. “But maybe we can go meet him one day.”
“When?”
“Hey, how about we go to McDonald’s for dinner tonight instead of Liam’s house?”
He nodded enthusiastically.
I rarely if ever spoke of Daniel to anyone.
He had been spending a summer in the Berkshires when we met. Initially, I thought he was years older than he was. I myself was thirty-seven and had been hired to landscape his grandparents’ rental house, a Queen Anne–style with a jaw-dropping view of the Berkshires.
I first noticed him lying in the sun on the back grass, reading A Death in the Family. He had a shaved head and wore wire-rim glasses, running shorts, and no shirt. We peered over at each other, me high up on my ladder by the top of the pergola trying to brush Japanese wisteria vines out of my face, him supine on a canvas beach lounger, and I thought that he was handsome, objectively handsome. He had a nice chest, smooth and fit. Embarrassingly, his smile made me blush. When I stepped down off the ladder and went for my lunch, I nodded over at him.
He said, “Hey.”
The thought of sex presented itself. I had never before and have not since had this particular experience.
I went to sit on a hammock nearby. I peeled back the Saran Wrap on my cheese sandwich and saw that he was watching me. How to proceed? It was a cloudless day in July and I had not had sex in over a year. He set down his book and removed his glasses. There was a tingling in my stomach, and I could not manage to eat my sandwich, although I did try. He finally stood and approached, and then we were on each other right there beside the hammock between the elms. “Your parents aren’t here?” I pulled away to ask, and he shook his head and I looked up at this face, his kind eyes, his deep dimples. We kissed and kissed with real force, and I let my hand explore his naked chest, and he lifted off my grubby tank top and jean shorts and his own running shorts.
“Do you have a rubber?” I whispered into his ear. A grackle above us made a chipping sound.
“No, sorry. Should we stop?”
“No,” I said because, frankly, I was about to come. It made all the sense in the world in that moment and in the moment afterward.
We held each other and caught our breath, and I had the thought that the best sex I’d ever had was free from the bounds of long-term relationships. A woolly bear caterpillar crawled across my abdomen and he picked it off and set it with great care on the grass. I ran my fingers over the rise of his bicep.
I told him that I had promised to finish this job by the end of the week and should probably get back to work, and once I did, we kept looking over at each other, grinning and shaking our heads. Just how old was he? What was his name? What if I got pregnant? I was lucky that I had never gotten pregnant before, despite stupidly neglecting birth control a few times. I thought of friends my age currently struggling with infertility—and what about disease? Anyway, it was too late to undo what was already done.
He was there the next morning, this time with a picnic blanket to lay beneath us and protection, which broke at one point, bringing an end to things that day.
When I finished the landscaping, we said goodbye, awkwardly wishing each other good Augusts. A number of months later, I learned that I was pregnant. There came dumb shock and momentary excitement and confusion. I tracked him down, this person—this college senior, Lord help me. I had guessed him to be in his later twenties; he would soon admit that he had guessed the same of me. I wrote him a letter—I suppose I felt that an email was too casual for the occasion—informing him what had happened, and I told him that I expected nothing from him. I had decided to keep the baby. There was no need to explain my reasons, although I did; I was not so young anymore—who knew if I would get another chance at this? I gravitated to children—I confessed that I understood them, sometimes more than adults. And I wanted the experience of being a mother; I had in fact begun looking into the grueling and exorbitant processes of freezing my eggs and adoption. So this was serendipity. I said that I felt up to the challenge of raising a child on my own. I felt more than up to it; I was elated.
Daniel corresponded tentatively. “If my parents or grandparents knew about this, they would disown me four times over. This is your decision and I respect it, but if you change your mind, I will support you. Either way, please let me know how you would like me to continue.” Occasionally I thought back to this note, wistfully wondering if by “support” he meant something more than emotional reinforcement.
I reassured him that I had made up my mind. He wrote back that he felt reassured. He asked me if I wanted or needed anything at all, and I answered that I only wished to learn more about him so that I would know what to expect from this baby as it grew. We continued to trade letters; he told me that he did not believe in email, that handwriting was a “dying art” and that he enjoyed receiving something other than bills in his mailbox, and I was charmed. We told one another all about our lives and families. His grandparents were from Guwahati, a city in Assam, and came to visit his family about every five years. Daniel’s father had come from India to attend Yale, where he had met Daniel’s mother, whose own parents had immigrated to Toronto from West Bengal before she was born. Both of Daniel’s parents were lawyers, and they had raised Daniel in a strict but loving home. They had taught him the basic facts about the Vedas, the Upanishads, the sacraments called the Samskaras, although they never joined a Hindu temple or burned incense. (“Mom thinks sandalwood smells like rot.”) Daniel had grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was allergic to tree nuts and was not a fan of spicy food, although he did like his grandfather’s catfish curry. He had a brother named Michael, and Daniel himself was a business major at Ithaca College. He had at one point considered changing
majors to political science in case he ever wanted to apply to law school, but the course load had been too much. He had never had a girlfriend. He had recently discovered Ayn Rand. He rode a moped. He had recently bought a new dresser. After a while, I had no idea how to respond to his revelations.
I came to think of him as a sperm donor, a lovely, gentle, curious, free sperm donor.
The pregnancy was mostly and blessedly uneventful, and I grew so used to people like my ob-gyn nosing around for information about the father of my baby that their questions no longer bothered me. Each time, I obfuscated and quickly changed the subject.
As Cass’s birth approached, Daniel admitted he was overwhelmed by the thought that he was to become a father, and I told him that I did not expect him to come to the birth—I could not imagine him at something so personal and raw, and I did not expect him to visit us afterward if he did not want to. I felt increasingly guilty. Had I used him? Was I discarding him? And what about the baby, who deserved a father?
Around the time that Cass had begun to sit up unassisted, Daniel did come to see us once. He appeared so young in his pale yellow button-down and khakis, his black hair, now grown out, combed in a razor-straight part. I watched him take in my small living room that looked as if a large gang of babies, not just one, had set up camp. I had meant to clean up before he came, but between tending to Cass, writing Jenna Rose’s book and subbing, I had been flat out. Daniel held a small gift wrapped in paper that I recognized as being from the Gifted Child in Lenox. He stared over at Cass, who was seated on a towel, busily sucking a spoon. Cass looked far more like Daniel than me, and I could see him taking in this fact. “That’s him?” he asked.
I overcompensated for his obvious unease by blathering on about what Cass ate and how he slept and cooing in Cass’s ear in an attempt to make him respond to this man, to at the very least acknowledge him. “You want to come say hello?” I asked Daniel.
“Sure,” he said. He stepped toward the center of the room and knelt down. “Hi there.” For all I knew, he had never met a baby before.
Cass turned his head the other way to face the wall.
“Let’s open the gift you brought,” I suggested to Daniel.
We helped Cass tear off the shiny wrapping paper to reveal a blue rattle shaped like a dog. We watched as he brought it to his mouth and, as if reacting to a horrible taste, tossed it aside.
“Cass, no! That’s not food,” I said.
“It’s okay,” Daniel said.
“But it was such a nice gift.”
Daniel rose and his arms hung limp from his body.
After he left, we wrote less and less frequently. I kept him apprised of milestones in Cass’s life. Daniel kept me apprised of his new job in advertising and, eventually, his engagement to a nice girl who worked in human resources at Fidelity. Her parents were Hindu; her grandparents had lived in West Bengal.
The last time I’d seen Daniel was about a year ago, when he was traveling from Cambridge to Los Angeles for work and I happened to be in New York for the day. We met up at a sports bar near LaGuardia and ordered nachos and glasses of Sam Adams. I told him that Cass was turning into a good artist, that he had separation anxiety and loved music, and Daniel listened and nodded blandly.
“I have some news, too,” he said finally.
“Oh?”
“Aadya’s pregnant.”
“That’s great!” His reason for meeting me that day came into focus. “She doesn’t know about Cass.”
“No.”
“Or me?”
He gently shook his head.
“All right.” I took a long sip of my beer.
Later I regretted that a Knicks game was blasting from the TV mounted on the wall just behind his head and that he might not have heard me say, “I won’t get in your way. Please know that I only want the best things for both of you and for your baby.” I leaned closer to him. “You’ve been so sweet.”
“To be honest, I haven’t known how or, like, what to be during any of this.”
“Who would have?” I said. “I’m glad for you.”
“Are you?”
“Yes,” I said, and I was. I think I was.
Still, as we said goodbye, I knew that Cass would in time grow to crave this man and suffer his absence. I nursed my Sam Adams as I watched Daniel hurry off toward his gate, his leather briefcase swinging in one hand.
Awake in bed hours after our dinner at McDonald’s, I ruminated over the fact that Cass had no Indian men in his life. Kurt had fallen asleep about an hour earlier, after we had watched two episodes of our favorite British spy series. He turned over now and grunted quietly.
I went to find the Woolf book. “ ‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added.”
I put the book down and picked up my laptop. My mother had been urging me to join Facebook like she recently had, so I decided to create an account, but to only “friend” her, and to use a fake name, Amy Cassidy, in case any nervous clients came across me there. I explored other people’s pages, and quickly located my ex in San Francisco, now married with three kids. It was a shock to see him this way and to see him so much older and thinner now, although why should it be? On Lana’s public page was an article from The Washington Post about a demonstration that morning. A group called Women Vs. Feminism had protested a global economic conference about women and children taking place in Washington, D.C. Several delegates from other nations had pressed for the United States government to overhaul a welfare reform law that had proven harmful, primarily to poor black mothers. An Austrian delegate told a reporter, “Your racist policies are weapons that kill.” In a photograph, a group of women, some younger with children, some older, brandished signs that read Real Mothers Stay Home With Their Children and CAN’T FEED ’EM? Don’t have ’em! A few held homemade signs that read Lock Her Up! When asked by the reporter about these protestors, Lana said, “These women who are not feminists might not understand what the word ‘feminism’ means.”
I scrolled down to the comments from her followers and took in one lewd GIF involving a photograph of Lana and a crossed-out hammer and sickle, as well as two entries—“Go back to your country, Lana. Don’t talk down to American women!” and “Fe-men like Lana oppressing real men and real womenz who want real men cuz fe-men can’t get laid bitch”—before closing my computer in disgust. I crawled back beneath the sheets and tried to gently rouse Kurt. He stirred, but did not wake. I turned to face the ceiling and a water stain that had, I could tell in the dim light, spread into the shape of a clover. I recalled a poll I had seen earlier that day; the numbers were close, but Hillary Clinton held the lead. The election could not come soon enough.
Chapter Six
Chapter One looks good! Once I get my thoughts together I’ll send you something for Chapter Two.
Lana had not written, “Thank you for providing me the material for my op-ed.” Nothing like, “Maybe we can cut some of the business of infertility section since I already used it in The New York Times.” I wondered if her not thanking me, her never apologizing for using my words or for taking so long to respond, were actually functions of feminism. What did we really owe anyone, after all that we had endured? Didn’t we all have more important things to do than worry about niceties and timeliness? Especially now that we had our new president.
My mother had been calling several times a day since the election, and together we thrashed around in the news, alternately reacting to and venting about the promise of mass deportations, the announcement that more Facebook users had engaged with fake articles before the election than real news, the swastikas found in schools, the racist slurs on park benches. Something toxic had been released and was continuing to mobilize in the country. I began to wonder about Cass’s safety amid the eruptions of racism nationwide, and found myself watching vigilantly anyone who looked at him in the grocery store or on the street.
As a pro
minent feminist immigrant, Lana was in higher demand than ever before. Google Alert flooded my inbox with links to TV, radio, and podcast interviews, more op-eds, videos of what had to be three or more speeches each day. She spoke with a kind of weariness, as if she had seen our current situation coming years earlier, but she also tried to impart hope. “We will come together at last. Poor women and rich, black women and white, even women and men if we have to,” she said to a crowd in Burlington, Vermont. “You just watch us!” I was pleased to see the return of her chunky eyeglasses, at least for the day. She tweeted more regularly. She was everywhere, in multiple time zones each day. She even made a cameo appearance on Saturday Night Live.
I told Colin that I worried she might not want or have the time to publish a book anymore. “Oh, I’m sure nothing’s changed. But if you want me to, I’ll call her manager just to ask.” Shortly after, he called back to tell me that we were a go. “Shirley was even ready to talk about Lana’s book tour.”
“Great!” I said. I wondered how long it would be before I got my orders for Chapter Two.
We were deep in November now. The air bit at any skin left exposed, and the ground was slick and craggy with ice. On a blustery Wednesday, after I got home from subbing at the middle school, I walked Cass home from Bertie’s; rather, I ran, with him riding piggyback through the slicing wind.
At the kitchen counter, I poured a glass of milk for Cass and asked about his day.
“Bertie slept all morning,” he said. “I watched TV.”
Apparently he had gotten to watch two episodes of Dora and two Caillous, which I estimated as one hundred and fifteen minutes, nearly two hours of being unattended. Afterward, he said, he had crawled inside her washing machine, although he could not figure out how to turn it on, so he got out and built a pyramid of “these little orange bottles that she had on her counter” and then gave himself a snack of chocolates. He was clearly proud that he had found ways to entertain himself for so long.