Our Short History

by Lauren Grodstein

  Before I could talk myself out of it, I clicked on Facebook messages and wrote, “Dear Dave, I know it’s been a long time, but I would very much like to get in touch. I have an urgent matter to discuss with you. You can call me if you’d like, or send me your number. This is a bit personal, so I’d rather not discuss it on email. Thank you for your attention. Yours, Karen Neulander.”

  I attached my phone number to the message and then I pressed Send and then I went to the bathroom and sat on the floor and waited for the sun to rise, or for you to, or for my jetpack, whichever came first.

  3

  That Thursday, your cousin Ross returned from Guatemala. This was very exciting because Ross was the Brad Pitt of my sister’s household: gorgeous, interested in many things, not enormously articulate. Do you remember how he arrived at Sea-Tac at 9 a.m., all floppy-haired and sweaty, with a robust growth of beard and something that looked very much like a tattoo peeking out from his shirtsleeve? He passed out on the couch as soon as he got home, and for the better part of the morning we tiptoed around him, marveling at the celebrity unconscious in our midst. Dustin, who idolized his brother, cooked him a large and nasty-looking pot of scrambled eggs, which lay congealing, hours later, under plastic wrap. You yourself were less impressed by Ross, and annoyed he was sleeping in the den because the den was where you liked to play with Dustin’s Wii, and there wasn’t much else to do in the day’s gusty rain.

  My stomach had taken a turn for the better, so I’d decided not to call the doctors for the moment. Your aunt Allison was still after me; she said I hadn’t been eating much, and she was worried about my strength. I could have told her the truth, that the thought of Dave Kersey made me lose my appetite, but then I’d have to talk about him and I just didn’t want to talk about him. Anyway, you seemed to have dropped the topic, which reminded me how fickle you could be about your interests, how fickle all kids could be.

  On the other hand, the day before you had again practiced tennis.

  “He’s awake!” Dustin shrieked at one in the afternoon, taking his cold pan of eggs into the den. And sure enough, Ross had risen from his slumber, showered, and resumed his place on the couch, wearing nothing but jeans, his polka-dot boxers showing decoratively above his waistband, something grotesque and tribal decorating his arm.

  “Holy shit, is that a tattoo?” Camilla asked before Allie could speak.

  “It’s henna,” Ross said. “Impermanent.”

  “It’s very nice, Ross,” Allie said, and Camilla rolled her eyes.

  We’d assembled on the thick carpet of my sister’s enormous den to hear Ross tell of his journeys abroad. He had set up various small objects on the coffee table, stones and scraps of metal and burlap, like the contents of a hobo’s pouch.

  “What have you got there?” Allie asked idly, fingering a little wooden statue but looking admiringly at her son, who was so strong and so interested in engaging the third world. I knew that gleeful look on my sister’s face because I’d caught it on myself in photographs—it was the look on my face when I looked at you.

  “That’s for you, Mom,” he said. “I got it in Petén, when we were meeting with the local indigenous woodworkers. It’s a model of Ixchel, the Mayan fertility goddess.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Asha,” he said, “she’s the one who painted my tattoo—she said that it’s good for sleeplessness and stress if you meditate on it.”

  “Who’s Asha?” Cammy asked.

  “She’s from India,” Ross said. “She works at the NGO that organized our trip. An NGO,” he added, in case we didn’t know, “is a nongovernmental organization.”

  “There aren’t enough poor people to help in India?” my sister mused. “She has to go to Guatemala?”

  “She has special skills, Mom,” Ross said. “She’s like a social worker.”

  “What’s for me?” Dustin asked, and received, with delight, a tooled leather ball. For Camilla and me, there were copper bracelets, and for Bruce, to be held by Allie until his return, a bag of fresh Guatemalan coffee beans, so he could taste real coffee—which I assumed tasted just like the hand that feeds you.

  “And this,” he said, picking up a totem and handing it, with great flourish, to you, “is a ceremonial power gourd.”

  “A who?”

  “Is that really a thing?” Camilla asked, but you picked up your shriveled gourd and assessed it calmly.

  “What does it do?” you asked.

  “It protects you from any evildoers or those who seek to do you harm. It makes you very strong. If you sleep with it under your pillow it will keep spirits from haunting your dreams.” And I was thinking, Really, Ross? This was the best you could do? But you gazed at the gourd with a steady, practical eye.

  “Thank you,” you said. “I think this will come in useful.”

  “You know spirits aren’t real, right?” I said, because, Jesus Christ, the last thing I needed was for you to start having nightmares again. “You know that’s all pretend.”

  “I know,” you said scornfully. “But just in case,” you added, and held the gourd in both hands while Ross divvied up the rest of his plunder, then retreated to call Asha during daylight hours in Mumbai.

  “I can’t believe he went all the way to Guatemala and came home with a squash.”

  “Mom, it’s not a squash, it’s a gourd.” The distinction had been an important one to you ever since we went to the Hudson Valley to go apple picking last year and came home with more apples, pumpkins, and gourds than we could fit in our tiny kitchen, and ended giving some of them to the homeless guy who lives on our corner to sell to tourists.

  “Asha, huh,” Allie said. “What do you think we should think about Asha?”

  “It’s a pretty name,” I said.

  “It’s about time he found himself a girlfriend,” Camilla said, rolling over onto her stomach. “I was starting to think he might be gay.”

  “Cammy, stop.”

  “What’s gay?” you asked, which was funny because usually you let what you didn’t understand fly right by, which was how I’d managed to schedule so much medical treatment right in front of you.

  “It’s when boys date boys or girls date girls,” Dustin said. “It’s weird.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Camilla said. “I mean, it’s different, but it’s not weird. I know like seven gay people.”

  “You do?” you asked, eyes wide.

  “Totally. At least seven. And then some of the girls in my grade are bi.”

  “Whoo now, I think that’s enough,” I said. “Is it time for lunch yet?”

  “What does that mean, bi?”

  “Cammy, honestly,” Allie said. “I’ll go make a salad.”

  “It means when you like to date both boys and girls,” Cammy said. “Because human sexuality is on a spectrum.”

  “Oh,” you said. I decided not to chime in. After all, this was what it would be like when you lived here with them, when Dustin and Cammy became your de facto big siblings. I guess it seemed okay. I never had big siblings, and my parents were not really the type to talk to me about homosexuality, or heterosexuality, or even sex.

  (I was the last kid in elementary school to find out how babies were made, and when I did, I was so repelled I raced home to ask my mother if it were really true.

  “Yes,” she sighed.

  “You and dad—did that?” I asked, agog. “Twice?”

  I remember her back was to me, she was doing something at the stove. Her shoulders were jiggling a little bit and I remember thinking she must have been crying, she was so embarrassed to have been caught.

  “Yes,” she said, jiggling away. “Twice.”

  “Hmmph,” I said, still disgusted but also delighted, a little, at their forbearance in the name of making a family.)

  I had actually thought more than once about sitting you down and explaining it all, where babies came from, what sex was—you were only six, but some of the books had advised explaining
this sooner than later so that kids could grow up with a healthy understanding of human sexuality. I was of a mind that a healthy understanding of human sexuality for a six-year-old was no understanding, that a kid who still believed in the tooth fairy shouldn’t have to know about erections and fallopian tubes. On the other hand, if I didn’t tell you that meant you’d get your information from your blunt and mischievous cousins and maybe that wasn’t the best idea either.

  And if I told you about sex and where babies come from, we could end up having one of two—or even two of two—difficult conversations. The first would be about your father, and about the truth that your father and I did these very particular and slightly uncomfortable things we’re talking about, and that I wanted to do them with him, and so on and so forth, and God, how awful to have to think of your mother that way.

  But worse, if we really got into it, the uterus and the vesicles and the vas deferens, then you’d know that this part of me that brought you into the world—the best, most magical part of me—was that which was killing me now. It all seemed like too much.

  Regardless, I thought this little project was as good a place as any to give the sex advice that I might have had the courage to give you when you were a teenager, although you should feel free to skip ahead if you find this mortifying. But if not—well, as far as sex goes, assuming you end up hetero (and believe it or not, I have no investment in your sexuality—do what you will, just please be safe about it), remember that for women, sex is relatively complicated. Young women often don’t even enjoy sex their first several go-rounds; frequently, it’s uncomfortable or even hurts. They might fake having fun, they might grin and bear it, they might go through with it just because they like you. But it’s quite possible it’s a performance—for me, at least, the first several times I had sex (college, frat brother, don’t remember his last name), it was entirely a performance. Sex is not like it is in the movies, at least for women. So my advice here is to be patient with her, be as nice as possible, and for God’s sake, call the next day. That might be why she’s doing it in the first place—for the call the next day. Don’t be a jerk.

  And as for the physical stuff, the birth control stuff—if it’s okay, I’m just going to assume you learned all about that in health class.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I reflexively checked Facebook before I checked my email. The little mailbox image was lit up, and I knew what it was, and because I was doing this for you I took a deep breath and clicked on it. The computer froze for a second like it sometimes did when I was on Facebook and I could have used that second to shut it down, close the whole thing down—I imagined lying to you, saying, “I’m so sorry, honey, he never wrote back,” but I’d already typed the truth (there it was, the mailbox, the computer screen, you playing Uno with Dustin and Ross in the big house across the lawn), so I couldn’t take it back. I took my breath, clicked my click.

  “Dear Karen, Great to hear from you. I hope all’s well and am happy to discuss whatever it is. Mornings in the office before 8 are best, or you can try me during lunch, but I’m sometimes out with clients.”

  He included his office number, and that was all.

  It seemed to me preposterous that he didn’t know why I was writing—what else would I have to write to him about? Why couldn’t he acknowledge even at this late date that there might have been a child? He knew I was pregnant. Shouldn’t he have therefore at least wondered if a child had been born?

  Well, Allie said, he assumed I didn’t have you—that I had an abortion. (I’m sorry, Jacob, to even suggest such a thing to you now, but at the time, remember—at the time you were as unimaginable as the moon. And I told your father that I would never have an abortion. I told him this as part of the planned speech I had for the last time I ever saw him. It was a speech I never managed to finish.)

  When I got pregnant, your father and I had been dating for five months, and though the fact that he never wanted to have children had always been part of his shtick, I assumed that once he found the woman he loved, he’d change his mind. Actually, what I thought was that I’d say “I’m pregnant” and that his face would go soft with tenderness and he’d take me in his arms and say something along the lines of “Marry me,” and that by the time you were born we’d have nested in a center hall colonial in North Jersey.

  Instead, he looked at me sort of funny and asked me to repeat myself. I was half-naked in his bed, expecting tenderness.

  “That can’t be right,” he said, once I’d said it two more times, first coyly, then loudly. “I had a vasectomy three years ago.”

  “You what?” I asked. “You did? You never told me?”

  “I told you I never wanted kids,” he said. “I told you that between global warming and nuclear proliferation, I don’t believe it’s fair to bring more people onto the earth. Anyway, I have never for one second in my life wanted to have a child. I just don’t.”

  “You don’t want to have kids because of global warming?”

  “I don’t want to have kids because I don’t want to have kids,” he said. I’m sorry, Jacob—I know you might not be pleased to hear this, but it’s the truth. “I never have.”

  “But why?”

  “Why? I just told you why—”

  “It’s just hard to believe—I mean, you’d be such a great dad.”

  “I can’t be a great dad if I don’t want kids, Karen.”

  “It just doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Everyone wants kids. I mean, deep down. Everyone does.” Didn’t they? Deep down where it counted?

  “Not me,” Dave said.

  “I can’t believe you had a vasectomy and didn’t tell me.” I pulled up the sheets around my torso, wishing I had something to put on besides the night before’s black dress.

  “Karen, I told you everything you needed to know,” he said, as close to angry as I’d ever heard him. “I told you I don’t want children. I know I told you that. I always tell women that when we’re dating. And then they don’t believe me. They think they can change me. My first marriage fell apart because she didn’t believe me when I told her no children.”

  That was why? I hadn’t known. I looked around the room, at his collection of Star Wars paraphernalia. “But Dave,” I said quietly. “You have so many toys.”

  He put his face in his hands for just a second. He didn’t touch me. And then he put on a T-shirt and stood there, looking ridiculous, half-dressed and half-bald. “You sure it’s mine?” he asked. “Because vasectomies are ninety-nine percent effective. The doctor said.”

  That’s when I started to cry.

  Now I looked at the clock, and even though it was about 1 p.m. in New York, fuck it, I’d been raising his child alone for the past six years, so sorry if I was calling at a less-than-convenient time.

  “David Kersey,” he said before the phone had finished ringing twice. I’d been expecting a secretary. I reflexively hung up and panted a little, put my hand on my chest to calm my heart. I stared at the phone for a few minutes, expecting it to ring. It didn’t. I took a deep breath, thought about taking a Xanax, half a Xanax, told myself not to be a dummy, besides I had a no-Xanax-before-lunch rule. Then I picked up the phone again. I dialed slowly, tried to breathe.

  “David Kersey.”

  Right, I knew this would happen. His voice sounded the same, exactly the same. The same voice he used to say “I love you” with, the same voice with which he said he’d wanted to “avoid situations like this.”

  “Dave, this is Karen Neulander.”

  “Karen,” he said. “Hey, nice to hear from you.”

  What were we, lacrosse buddies? Nice to hear from me? Hey? “Yes, well,” I said. I should have written something down. “Hello.”

  There was a longer than normal pause.

  “Everything okay with you?”

  I breathed deep, closed my eyes. One hand was on the phone; the other was gripping the ragged edge of my T-shirt, wringing it fiercely.

  “Dave, I have a son,” I s
aid. “I mean, we have a son. I don’t know if you remember—I mean—” Jesus Christ. I wrung a rip in my shirt. “Almost seven years ago, I told you I was pregnant. We have a six-year-old son. His name is Jake.”

  Now the radio silence was on your father’s end, although I thought I detected an intake of breath.

  “And he would like to meet you,” I said after another silent minute. “And I told him I would ask you if you wanted to meet him too, but it’s perfectly fine if you’d rather not. I know how you feel about children.”

  More silence. I didn’t know what to add.

  Finally: “We have a son?” he said, sort of half-choked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “A son?” he repeated.

  “I told you I was pregnant,” I said. “You know that pregnancy often leads to children, right?”

  “But I didn’t—I never in a million years thought you’d keep the baby. You said—”

  “I said what?”

  “You said you were going to—”

  “He was born almost at Columbia-Presbyterian,” I said, eyes still squeezed shut. “January 20, 2007.”

  “Karen . . . I . . .”

  “You what?” I opened my eyes; I was suddenly itching for a fight. C’mon, Dave Kersey, say anything to me. Say anything, I dare you.

  “His name is Jake?” your father said.

  “Yes,” I said. Your father didn’t know your name till you were six, Jakey. Your father was asking me to repeat your name. “Jake,” I said. “Jacob.”

  “He wants to meet me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Jake?”

  “Yes, that’s his name.”

  “Jake?”

  And this is when I thought that maybe Dave Kersey had actually turned into a moron because wasn’t that what I’d just said? Okay, you find out you have a son and you might have some original questions, like what does he look like or where does he live, but this guy, your father, just kept repeating what I’d already told him with this tone in his voice like he’d never answered a question before in his life.

  “Jacob,” he said, trying it out again.