Every Little Thing in the World

by Nina de Gramont

  I stepped back, defeated. “Forget it,” I said to Natalia, handing her my half-drunk beer. “Let’s just forget the whole thing.”

  I turned around and ran back over the railroad tracks, over the sprigs of poison ivy and jagged stones, back to the party. I could hear Tommy’s friends behind me, laughing and helping him up. I could hear Natalia’s light voice calling me, and I pictured Steve holding her arm, escorting her and her stupid shoes around every hole and bump. It wasn’t fair. If Natalia were pregnant, Steve would take care of everything. They might even run away and get married, catapulting themselves out of the hell of high school limbo, these stupid parties, and the stupid rules that made them exciting in the first place.

  As I ran up the hill, my blood began pumping in a pure and liberating way. Even though it was impossible to the point of ridiculous to think that I might actually be pregnant, this image appeared in my mind for one split second, of a little baby floating around on an umbilical cord, getting bounced and jostled because I was fleeing from half its DNA.

  “Sydney,” Natalia yelled, and I stopped, not so much because of her order but because I’d reached the threshold of the party, and bodies stood too thick to run through. I waited for her and Steve, my chest rising and falling with labored breaths.

  Natalia’s face when she reached me looked pink and exhilarated. I couldn’t blame her. It was thrilling, all this drama. She still had a beer in one hand, but she placed her other hand on my shoulder and looked directly into my face, searching. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “But I think I need a plan B.”

  She nodded and said, “It’s not like we really had a plan A,” which was true. We hadn’t worked out anything besides telling Tommy, as if he would take over the problem and make it right, like some kind of wonder parent. We both laughed now at our lack of logic and foresight.

  “We should get back to your house anyway,” I said. Natalia’s parents were due home from their dinner no later than ten.

  While Natalia and Steve began their lengthy and tongue-thrusting farewell, I sidled my way through the party. As I stepped out of the trees and onto the playground, I could see the silent, whooshing lights of a parked police cruiser. I stood there for a minute, watching the red and yellow shadows pulse across the dented metal slides, the merry-go-round’s sad and chipping horses.

  “Shit,” Natalia said, coming up beside me. “Do you think they’re here for us?”

  “That would be my first guess,” I said, “given my recent luck.”

  There was no point ducking back into the woods. We joined hands and walked toward our decidedly less luxurious—but much safer—ride home.

  Natalia’s parents were a strange combination of strict and good-natured. They laid down firm laws and drastic repercussions but always did it with sweet, giggly smiles on their faces. Whereas my mother would get angry—screaming and yelling and listing hurt feelings—they would just issue their edicts as if Natalia’s adventures were as understandable and expected as they were punishable.

  When they’d come home early from dinner, they found our cell phones on Natalia’s bed and the new Cadillac missing from the garage. They called the Overpeck police, who discovered the car almost immediately in the playground parking lot. I rode back to Natalia’s house in the back of the police car, while Natalia drove the Cadillac sitting next to the younger of our blue-capped escorts. I imagined him flirting and giving her driving tips, while my officer lectured me all the way home.

  “You smell like a brewery,” he told me. He had a thick New Jersey accent. He sounded a whole lot like Steve and Tommy.

  “Someone spilled whiskey on my shoes,” I said. I held up my brown-stained sneaker so he could see it in the rearview mirror.

  “You’ve got no business hanging around kids like that,” he said. “A nice girl like you.”

  I put my foot back on the floor of the car. Where my sneaker had been reflected, I could now see my face, which certainly looked like it belonged to a nice girl. I had big brown Bambi eyes. I had round apple cheeks. I had lips that would not hold any color of lipstick, because my too-big front teeth rested naturally on my bottom lip and couldn’t resist scraping it off. I had curly, shoulder-length brown hair. Everyone thought I looked sweet. Innocent. I had “girl next door” written all over me.

  “I’m sorry, officer,” I said. “I won’t do it again. It wasn’t much fun anyway.”

  He laughed, not sure whether I was conning him but charmed anyway. The kids he was used to dealing with were like Tommy and Steve, usually drunk, not politic enough to mind their manners.

  When we got back to Natalia’s house, her parents stood together between the elaborate columns of their front porch. They waited for us with their arms crossed but big smiles on their faces, as if our disobedience was the funniest thing in the world. Mr. Miksa was somewhere in his sixties, Mrs. Miksa not far behind. Natalia had an older sister, Margit, who was thirty-three and married to a bonds trader named Victor. They had a fancy apartment on West 59th, a block from Sutton Place. Margit had sleek blond hair, a floor-length mink coat, and an incredible collection of shoes—many of which she wore once before handing them down to Natalia.

  The year before, we’d watched a show on the Biography channel about an old movie star who found out that his sister was actually his mother and his parents were actually his grandparents. Ever since then, we had decided this must be the case with Natalia and her family. Last summer she had planned to confront them, but her romance with Steve had caused so much trouble, she’d put the revelation on hold.

  “Seed-ney, dahling,” Mrs. Miksa said. “Your mother will be here in one minute.”

  Natalia shot me a look of deep, devastated apology. Until that moment, the chance had existed that only she was busted. Mr. Miksa spoke to her in Hungarian. The tone was full of fond hilarity, but the words must have been severe. Her shoulders sagged as she followed him inside.

  I stood in the quiet dusk with Mrs. Miksa. Her plump, aged face was pleasantly made-up, her bleached hair swept into an elaborate bun. Even when she came to the pool with Natalia, she always wore heavy, swirling gold earrings. She would do a breaststroke in her thick, bosomy bathing suit, her head carefully perched just above the water.

  Now she pinched my cheek and pressed my cell phone into my hand. “I don’t tink you’ll have this long,” she said cheerily. I nodded and stared into the forsythia bushes. After the police car left, the motion-sensor lights had turned off. Only the faint porch light shone above us. I could hear the whistling chirp of cicadas. A stand of honeysuckle braced the west wall of the house, and in the blossoms I saw the summer’s first firefly light up, dim, and light again.

  “Don’t look so stricken, dahling,” Mrs. Miksa said. “It won’t be a life sentence.”

  I raised my chin and smiled at her bravely, as if the worst of my problems lay outside and in the present moment—instead of far off in the future, and very deep inside.

  chapter two

  parents

  My mother wasn’t the worst in the world. I knew all about those, thanks to broadcast news. Every couple of years there would be a big story about a mother who’d snapped and done away with her kids. One time a mother pushed her car into a lake with two little toddlers locked inside. Another one shot three of her kids in the head, then claimed she’d been mugged by a black man wearing a ski mask. There was one mother who drowned six little kids in a bathtub, and all these women staged protests at her trial—as if being a mother was such a horrible and hair-raising job, who could blame someone for drowning her kids. Every so often this woman would get a new trial, and when she appeared on the TV screen—all beleaguered and bedraggled—my mother always said, “The poor thing,” in this tone that made me surprised she ever paid for my swimming lessons.

  That night in the car on the way home from Natalia’s, and back in our living room, I listened to my mother lecture. I watched her fume and pace—the same old acc
usations about how I was spoiled, and selfish, and immature. She talked about the weekend Natalia and I went to the shore, and how scared she’d felt when she didn’t know where I was. She talked about underage drinking, and she talked about lying as if truth was her religion. All I could think about was what she would say if she knew I was pregnant. Of course I knew what she would do: She would schedule me for an abortion as fast as humanly possible. The thought flooded me with relief, all this worry ended, the procedure paid for and taken care of.

  But the hurdle I’d have to jump to get to that point might as well have been Everest. I sat on the comfortable lilac sofa that she longed to have reupholstered (just one in an endless list of sacrifices she made in order to send me to private school), and listened to her rail against me. She kept karate chopping one hand with the other, making her case for my general rottenness. I’d noticed in the last year that the line that appeared between her brows when she was angry had etched itself there permanently. If Mom was this mad over a party—a stupid party that I’d attended for exactly twenty minutes—what would she say if she found out I was pregnant? I thought about that movie star on the Biography channel, how his grandparents raised their daughter’s illegitimate child as their own.

  Every day my mother made it clear: She’d had it with sacrifices. In a thousand years, in a million years, she would never for a second consider doing something like that for me. Not that I’d want her to. But still. Wouldn’t there be something, some deep and important meaning, in the willingness itself ? Instead of these daily meltdowns, letting me know how my existence made her life a misery. Sometimes I wondered why she even cared if I snuck away for a weekend or went to a keg party. If I was so much trouble, why not just leave me alone?

  I remembered another news story we’d watched together, a long time ago, about a teenage girl who’d hidden a pregnancy. The girl ended up giving birth at her prom. She went into the bathroom and had the baby, then shoved it into a trash can and went back to dancing.

  I tried to remember what Mom had said at the time, if she’d been sorry for that girl the way she was for the mother who’d drowned her kids. But I couldn’t recall her saying anything, just a sad and curt shake of her head. I guess I could have told her I was pregnant. But I couldn’t help feeling that would be handing over the cherry to top off the ice cream sundae of my rottenness.

  “Mom,” I finally said. “You know I could sit here all night listening to what a terrible person I am. But it’s getting late. Do you think we could cut to the chase? Is there going to be some sort of punishment?”

  Mom lowered herself into the armchair and stared into my face. It was funny, sometimes, how I could see my own self in her—my own exact eyes looking back at me. My mother and I had been living alone together in this house, since I was eight. I could remember the first couple of years after my dad was gone, how she would let me sleep in her bed, and how at times it seemed like this fantastic boon that I got to keep her all to myself. I couldn’t say when exactly she had gone from that familiar comfort to this raging witch. But right now I didn’t have the energy to figure it out.

  “Sydney,” she said, in this pained little voice, “could you please just once cut me the slightest little break?” As if I had just been lecturing her for the past half hour.

  “Me cut you a break?” I said. “That’s funny, Mom. That is just completely hilarious.”

  For a second she almost looked like she might cry. “Do you think this is fun for me?” she said. “Do you think I’m enjoying this?”

  “No.” I slumped on the sofa and tried to look remorseful. It would serve me better, I always realized too late, to act more like I had with the Overpeck police, instead of fighting her every step of the way.

  “I don’t know why such a smart girl does such stupid things,” Mom said. “Sometimes, Syd, I think that’s your problem. Everything comes too easily. You don’t have to try. You don’t have to do anything.”

  “Just because I don’t do exactly what you want,” I said, immediately forgetting politeness, “doesn’t mean I don’t do anything. I do plenty.”

  Mom dropped her head onto her hand. In the broad wing-backed chair, she looked small and tired. I felt sad that I’d spoken, and sad that she didn’t have nicer furniture. I felt sad that she worked so hard at her stupid and thankless corporate job, and that she hadn’t found someone to remarry. Last fall one of the vocabulary words on my PSAT study cards had been “uxorious,” which means “overly fond of one’s wife.” Reading that definition, I’d felt a drop in my stomach, like this word had nothing to do with me or my mom, like it was from somebody else’s life and we weren’t good enough for it. Mom had been single forever, and frankly I had a hard time imagining my father ever even liking her. And the whole time I’d considered myself the perfect girlfriend—had worked so hard to be everything Greg wanted—I hadn’t been able to hold on to him, either.

  Mr. Miksa was probably uxorious. Steve would be, if he married Natalia. But at this point, there probably wasn’t anybody who would ever be uxorious to my mom. Or to me. I felt sad for both of us that on top of this I had somehow turned into such a burden for her.

  “Look,” said Mom, not knowing anything that was going on in my head. “We’ll talk about punishment later. Tomorrow morning you’re going to Mr. Biggs.”

  I stared at her. “Mr. Biggs” was what she had called my dad since their divorce, a sarcastic kind of snarling, like no one in the world could be smaller or less significant. She had changed her name back to Sincero and had tried to have mine changed legally too. Since she failed, it always struck me as weird that she used my own last name as a method of distancing herself, and me, from the man she’d once loved enough to marry.

  “You called Dad?” I said. Usually it was a point of pride with her to leave him out of my situations.

  “I did,” Mom said. “Because honestly, Sydney, I am at my wits’ end. I don’t know how to reach you. If I punish you for lying, you just lie to avoid the punishment. There’s no apology, no remorse. Just that blank, angry stare, like I’m some kind of jailer. I don’t have any interest in being a jailer, so I’m going to let your father have a try. He thinks he knows how to save the world? Let him start with his own daughter.”

  For the past few years, all visitation with my father had been entirely up to Mom, and she usually only doled it out when I asked her. The thought of her relinquishing me to him wasn’t terrible in practice, even though it would mean sleeping in a full-size bed sandwiched between his three-year-old twins. The chaos of Dad’s household seemed like exactly the distraction I needed. But there was something unsettling about her willingness to hand me over, after all those years of fighting against exactly that. It felt like a kind of disownment. If I’d considered for the barest second telling her about being pregnant, I knew now that it was out of the question.

  “How long will I stay there?” I asked. My dad didn’t even own a computer. Without my cell phone, I’d be cut off from the entire world.

  She raised her hands in an open question, looking pleased that I seemed worried.

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  “But I have to be back by the end of next week,” I said. “To start at the pool.”

  “The pool,” she echoed. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  “But Mom …”

  “Good night, Sydney,” she said, her voice flat and emotionless. I stood up, recognizing this as my dismissal, and went to my room, strangely sad that the lecture was over and nothing had changed.

  My mother took my cell phone, but she forgot about my laptop. I waited until I heard her go to bed, then IM’d Natalia.

  They’re going to do it, she wrote me right away. They’re sending me to Switzerland.

  All year, with Natalia sneaking around with Steve, this had been the threat: that they would ship her off to boarding school in Switzerland. “It vill be fun!” Mrs. Miksa would say. “It vill be glamorous! You can ski every day!”

&nbs
p; To us it didn’t sound fun or glamorous. It sounded like a strange, wintry exile. How could I ever be expected to live without Natalia? How could she be expected to exist an entire continent away from Steve? Away from our friends, our whole world? Switzerland might as well be the moon, without gravity or oxygen.

  They’re just pissed, I wrote back. You can talk them out of it.

  No, she wrote. It’s for real this time. I know it is. But what are we going to do about you??????

  I can’t talk about it here.

  Time is of the essence, she wrote. We have to get you to PP.

  I shuddered at how decodable this message was and gave a little prayer of thanks for my Mom’s IM cluelessness.

  Can’t tomorrow, I wrote. Going to Dad’s.

  What??!!! That’s so wrong.

  I know. I’ll call you from there.

  I signed off before she could write anything further. Then I stashed the computer back under my bed. My heart did a funny, runaway kind of pounding. I rested my head on my pillows and did my yoga deep breathing to calm myself down. Soul-cleansing breaths, my teacher called them.

  Abortion was all about the first trimester. That had to be at least twelve weeks. The night in the park with Tommy had been just over three weeks ago. I had the entire summer, which meant I had all the time in the world.

  Two days later I sat in my father’s kitchen with Rebecca, my eight-month-old half sister, in my lap. My stepmother, Kerry, worked on dinner.

  “So what’s so bad about this guy Steve?” Kerry said. She stood over the long kitchen table, rolling out dough for an apple pie. Strands of blond hair fell into her face. Her arms were almost as white as the flour that covered them, and they jiggled as she pounded out the crust. At twenty-nine, Kerry still had a pretty, unlined face, and she loved listening to my high school gossip. But in the past four years, since the twins and then Rebecca, she had gained over a hundred pounds. Her flesh moved in a strangely graceful rhythm, and she made little puffing noises while she worked.