Still, I wasn’t such an idiot that I didn’t use condoms. The top drawer of my nightstand was reserved for only an eye pillow and a box of Trojans. But Philippe couldn’t seem to manage with one on. We spent a while trying. Finally, I threw it aside.
“Is it okay?” he asked. For three years, whenever someone asked if I was okay, I thought of my mother. Her taxi had crashed into a guardrail, and she died on the shoulder of the Cross Bronx Expressway at forty-five years old. How could things be okay?
I kissed Philippe’s tender neck. “Yes,” I whispered. I trusted his polite and eager foreignness, and sex was always a diversionary gamble anyway. I just didn’t really care.
* * *
—
At the pub, we had consumed seven alcoholic drinks, two root beers, and an assortment of things sauce-smothered and fried.
“Okay, last one,” Anne said, plucking an onion ring from Lara’s plate. “We have to go to dinner with Robert’s parents tonight.”
“Can’t you get out of it? Tell them you need to see a sick friend. After a few more beers, I’ll throw up for you,” Elaine said.
“You know what my mother-in-law would say? ‘She wants to see you, this sick friend? You’re a doctor now? What happened to the social work?’ The way she says social work, it’s like I’m planning parties. Her faith in doctors is insane. According to her I just haven’t gone to the doctor enough—that’s why I can’t have kids. You find a good doctor, and you go to him, and you keep on going to him until he fixes you. Unless you have cancer, and then there’s no hope.”
Anne ate another onion ring. “But I’ve been saving my good news. We put an application in with an adoption agency in China. They approved it last week.”
We all agreed this was great and clinked our glasses with Anne’s.
“Do you know how long it might take?” Lara asked.
“It could be a month. It could be six months. We have to be ready to buy a ticket to China. They tell you when to come, and then they send you on a tour with these other prospective parents. It’s this weird vacation where you get a baby prize at the end.”
I let Lara and Elaine continue to ask the questions. Last Mother’s Day Anne and I had clashed over adoption. She was struggling through her second round of IVF, and I wanted to know whether she was considering adopting. “Yes, of course,” she said coldly. But they really wanted their own baby. I pressed her on it. Why such attachment to your own genetic lineage? I didn’t mean to be self-righteous or accusatory. My interest in this topic was philosophical. Wasn’t motherhood essentially a matter of care? Was origin so important? True, I had fantasized all my life about finding my father. But wasn’t that because I didn’t have any father at all?
“Okay, Karyn,” Anne had said. “You make a good case. But do me a favor? Let me have my fantasy. Let me have it until I’m out of patience and stamina and spirit, which will happen soon, and then maybe I’ll come around to your point of view.”
I felt like I’d been put in my place by a teacher or a mother, though not by my mother, who wouldn’t be so direct. But then, I hadn’t pushed her the way I pushed Anne. I had never asked her what she thought motherhood was. I had never asked her for my father’s name. In the following year, Anne and I saw each other at a few different social occasions. We weren’t friends exactly. There was formality and tension, a kind of tightly controlled uncertainty between us, the kind that makes you think either you’ll never connect with this person, or you will eventually, in a deep and inextricable way.
“They’re all girls, of course,” Anne said about the Chinese babies. “I’ve always wanted a girl. I remember thinking at nine or so, in an extreme boy-hating stage, maybe I’ll adopt a baby when I’m older so I won’t get stuck with a stupid boy. I was always planning ahead.”
“Girls are the best,” Elaine said.
“Girls are the smartest,” Lara said.
It was hard to tell how happy Anne was about the prospect of adoption. But then, we weren’t a happy bunch. We descended into this below-street-level pub on Mother’s Day, holding our losses close, though how much did they really have to do with the way we met the world? Whatever influences our mothers had on us, that work had been done long ago. And though we had our moments of tunneling into the past with hard hat and headlamp, for the most part, out of loyalty and love, fear and denial, we didn’t want to think about how our mothers had raised us.
What I had thought about a lot since my mother’s death was the story of how she came to be my mother. That is, from a child’s perspective, how she came to be herself. I knew the story from bits she had told me over the years and from the narrative license of my own imagination.
Elizabeth Rylant grew up on a farm in Idaho. She was the only child of older parents who were surprised when she finally came along. They’d resigned themselves to calves and chicks and kittens for babies. But Elizabeth was born, and she was a restless child, racing through her chores and startling the animals. She watched the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration on TV every year. “The Big Apple,” she wrote for a fourth grade social studies report. “It doesn’t have apple trees and it’s actually not that big. But seven million people live inside it. When I grow up, I will be one of them.” Her parents smiled at her dream. What she didn’t know, apart from how impossibly expensive everything was in New York, was that big cities were horrible. The buildings closed you in, the crowds pushed you down. The day was choked with smog and the night was shut off from the stars. Her great-grandparents had climbed aboard trains heading west the first chance they could. Elizabeth would be lucky to go to the University of Idaho.
She spent a year there, taking geography and history classes, memorizing the details of places that were too far away in miles or too far back in time to travel to. She met a saxophonist named Hollis who wanted to play in clubs. He had a little money and thought they could go to Chicago, but Elizabeth convinced him it had to be New York. After her last final exam, she packed up her suitcases and sold her beat-up Ford. On the bus heading east she wrote a letter to her parents, breaking the news as gently as she could. She told them she and Hollis were planning to get married. But they didn’t marry. They lived far out in Brooklyn, and Elizabeth rode the subway over an hour each way to attend City College. She got a job as a waitress, while Hollis smoked and drank and played music in the street. A year before I was born, when my mother was twenty-one, she was finishing her degree in accounting with a minor in history and working five nights a week, hoping that Hollis would start getting gigs that were paid in more than beer. She worked late at the diner, but he was out later than she was. They didn’t explore New York together the way they used to, trying out whatever food was foreign and cheap and could be eaten while walking, making fun of stores and hairdos, stopping in parks to kiss on benches.
And then one day a musician friend told her that Hollis had been seen dancing with a slutty jazz singer, dancing too late at night and too often and too close. Elizabeth was furious, but before she confronted Hollis for this and other sins, she went out and had her own affair. A man several years older than she was came into the diner to drink coffee and flirt. Now she flirted back in earnest. By the time she found out she was pregnant, she and Hollis had split up, and she was back in Idaho, visiting her parents, who’d never liked him anyway. They missed their daughter who had, after all, not done so badly. She’d graduated from college with honors and a B.A. in accounting, and she hadn’t been mugged or raped or murdered or had the country glow knocked out of her. She was flushed and docile. She walked in the fields in the early morning, nauseated, amid the moaning of the cows. If she stayed with her parents, they would take care of her in their quietly efficient, only slightly disapproving way. She decided to return to New York to struggle on her own. Had she, too, found herself in an abortion clinic, only to walk away still pregnant? In the end, it seemed, she was determined to follow th
rough with me, as she had been determined to make it in New York, to support herself, to make practical plans for the future, and to leave a cheating man—though not as the innocent wounded party, but guilty herself.
She got a job at an accounting firm and worked until they let her go on maternity leave. As for the diner customer, she never saw him again. But she was sure that he, and not Hollis, was my father, and she was glad of it. If I had been Hollis’s child, she would probably have broken down and told him, which would have meant that her life would be forever entwined with his. One of the many beauties of New York City, a beauty shaded with disappointment and resentment, was that you could stay in it for the rest of your life, avoiding your past, living another life than the one you thought you were going to live.
What had never occurred to me until I was pregnant with a potential child I hadn’t planned to have, and by a man I didn’t expect to see ever again, was that my mother might have kept me for the company. Though of course she didn’t know this at the time, she would never have another serious relationship. There were men who drifted in and out, whom she tried to manage along with the daughter she was raising herself, and her demanding job, and going back to Idaho when she could to care for her ailing and then dying parents. If she hadn’t had me, who knows what other company might have come along? And what if I hadn’t demanded ballet lessons from the age of six on up; and if she had been able to pursue her love of geography and history instead of plugging away at people’s taxes for reliable pay; and if her boss hadn’t insisted she attend a training in Atlanta that she never got to, because a taxi driver made the worst possible mistake? I was always aware of the sacrifices my mother made for me, and in a number of little ways she didn’t fail to remind me of those sacrifices. But to dwell on that was to tumble toward one of those tunnels into which I’d barred the entrance.
* * *
—
It was getting late, and Anne was expected at her in-laws’. Elaine was heading home to Nancy; they were in the middle of watching a TV series I’d never heard of on Netflix. Lara could look forward to a chat with any number of online guys. We settled the bill and went out into lovely May. It was hard to be in the light. Down the street a middle-aged woman pushed an older woman in a wheelchair. The older woman wore a corsage and her head was cocked to one side as if someone was speaking very strongly to her in that ear. The four of us hugged or kissed each other goodbye.
“We should see each other more often.”
“Yes, let’s do that.”
“You’re going this way, right?” Lara gestured toward our subway line.
“Actually, Karyn, could you walk with me a minute?” Anne’s hand was firm on my shoulder.
“Sure,” I said, surprised.
Lara looked surprised too, but she said, “Well, take care, dears,” and crossed the street.
“I should pick up some flowers. I think there’s a place down here,” Anne said. We turned away from the pub. A sign in the drugstore on the corner read “Remember Your Mother. Chocolate Hearts!”
“I remember her. I remember that she didn’t like chocolate,” Anne said.
“Really?”
“If someone gave her a box of chocolates, she’d break off the shell and just eat the cream inside.”
“My mom hated olives, so when I was little I thought I didn’t like them either. In third grade a kid at school offered me one, and I told him my mom didn’t eat them. ‘So?’ he said. ‘So?’ I realized the flaw in my logic, and I ate an olive. I couldn’t believe how good it was.”
We walked past a gaggle of parents and young children. Everyone, even the dads, was dressed in pastel.
“If this adoption thing works out, I guess my daughter will realize early on how different she is from me,” Anne said. “I guess that’s a good thing.”
“It’s really exciting,” I said. I waited nervously for her to offer more, to explain why she’d wanted me to walk with her.
“Oh, there’s the store,” Anne said. The bodega sold flowers under an awning outside. A few bouquets of roses remained, on sale, along with bouquets of their poorer cousin, the carnation.
“I just don’t think they’re a beautiful flower,” I said, pointing to the carnations.
“Yeah, they look raggedy. The roses are so tightly wound, and the carnations are just kind of splayed out there, trying but not making it.” We laughed, and I realized that any disapproval I’d felt toward Anne had been replaced by admiration. She put her hand on my shoulder again.
“How are you doing?”
“I’m, well, I’m okay.”
“You seemed to be mulling something over this afternoon.”
I hesitated, leaning into the lilacs. What did she know, or think that she knew? Sometimes my mother had seemed fully absorbed in her own concerns, and then she’d come out with an observation about me that I couldn’t deny, though I tried to, with the vehemence of a young person convinced that to be known by a parent, even in one’s graces and triumphs, was fundamentally an embarrassment. If my mother were here today would I persist in that evasion, or would I lay my sorrows and my tiny burst of joy at her feet?
“I feel weird telling you this.”
“I’m a social worker, remember? Weird is what I know.”
“Okay. I’m pregnant. Thirteen weeks. The guy is gone, but I’m going to have the baby.” The colors of the flowers were kaleidoscoping in my eyes. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. A noise escaped my throat, like the squeak of a hinge. I couldn’t look at Anne.
“What do you think of the irises?” she asked. “They don’t last very long, but you can’t beat that blue.”
“Pretty,” I managed.
“There’s a bench down the street,” Anne said. “Why don’t I finish up here and I’ll see you there in a minute.”
I stumbled over to the bench. It was next to the kind of tree that is carefully doled out on well-tended New York City blocks, a tree with its own tiny plot of dirt, fenced off protectively and given its best chance to grow. Anne was coming toward me with two bouquets of flowers, irises and lilacs, wrapped up in paper cones. She smiled with the pride of a woman bearing something beautiful. She set her canvas bag down on the bench and gently angled the irises inside it.
“These are for me, though when my mother-in-law sees them, she’ll think they’re for her.” The dizzying scent of the lilacs enveloped me. Anne placed them in my hands.
“And these are for you.”
Tanglewood
Until her sophomore year in college, Elise had thought the term was unrequieted love. Love that would not be quiet, would not shut up, though it should, because what was the use of shouting at a deaf person? Then an English professor circled the offending word in her paper on Proust. Mortified by the error—someone who wanted to be a writer shouldn’t make such a mistake—Elise looked up the etymology of the word. Un—not; requite—to pay up. Yes, that was right. Unrequited love did not pay up. You spent everything you had, and what did you get in return? Once, she’d plucked a quarter from the dirty-clothes-strewn carpet of Sam’s dorm room, and with a heartbreaking grin he’d said, “Keep it.” And yet, Elise had to agree with Nietzsche, whom she’d read in the existentialism class where she and Sam had met, first semester of their sophomore year. “Indispensable…to the lover is his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference.” Kierkegaard was also profound on the subject, with his depiction of two knights in love with an unattainable princess. The Knight of Infinite Resignation is forever resigned to his inability to realize his one great love. The Knight of Faith believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he will win her in the end.
Elise spent the rest of college in kinship with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and then, the summer after graduation, she wrote Sam a letter, filled with extravagant metaphors and wild hope. A mon
th later, he sent a two-sentence reply on a torn-out sheet from a yellow legal pad. I value your friendship, but I cannot return your feelings. I respect and admire you, but I’m not in love with you. The coldness of the thing was a kind of cure. Elise clipped it to the last page of a diary filled with swoons and laments, as punishment for all the mawkish writing she’d allowed herself to do. Every time she started to long for Sam, she pictured the words in that letter, black on yellow.
Thirteen summers later, Elise had a husband; a sizeable bump due to be born in three months; and a newly published book of poetry, containing no poems about her unrequited first love, Sam. She’d met Derek four years earlier in San Francisco, when she was getting her MFA and Derek was doing a postdoc in chemistry. It was the first time a relationship felt equal to her, not one person wishing or angling for more than the other, not the pining nor the pulling back, but the strangely kinetic feeling of moving forward together, like two people rowing a two-person boat. They got married, moved to the D.C. area for Derek’s job, discussed how many children to have.
After a few months of sex off the pill, Elise felt a tingling in her breasts, a queasiness down her throat. Derek took a picture of the plus sign on the test stick. They started mentally rearranging the furniture, debating names, looking at baby gear online. Four weeks later, Elise began to bleed. She’d been observing herself in the mirror with interest, as if she were a woman containing a feminine secret rather than a woman who didn’t quite look young anymore—and then she was herself again.
Miscarriage had always struck her as an ugly, unapproachable word, but now Elise appreciated its odd formality. She consulted the Webster’s she kept on her desk. The first definition was “failure to carry out what was intended [a miscarriage of justice]”; the second, “failure of mail, freight, etc. to reach its destination”; the third, “the natural expulsion of an embryo or fetus from the womb before it is sufficiently developed to survive.” The order of this list was somehow comforting: the primacy of thwarted justice, of wayward mail, over the loss of a pregnancy.
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