Then it was “Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?”
And finally, “That son of a bitch won’t live a peaceful moment while I’m alive!”
She meant it too. Which was why I’d booked myself on the first flight to New York City that wouldn’t cost me a thousand bucks, tomorrow night’s red-eye. My mother was somewhere on the loose in Manhattan.
“Zoe, honey, it’s Mommy,” she’d said in her usual voice on my answering machine an hour ago, which I checked before every date to make sure the date was still on. “Don’t worry about me, dear, but I’m on my way to New York to shove your father’s engagement announcement up his ass. Do you believe he had the goddamn nerve to send me one? ‘See, Judith, it was the real thing,’ he wrote on the inner envelope. Well, he and his child bride aren’t going to have a wedding, because I’m going to ruin their goddamned lives!”
And then she’d slammed the phone down and called me back a moment later. “Zoe, sweetie, my anger wasn’t directed at you, you know that, right, doll? Bye now!”
My mother was crazy. My father was crazy. Giselle hadto be crazy to want to be with my father, so good riddance.
Deep sigh.
My father and Giselle had been together for a year now. They’d gotten engaged on their anniversary, which was two months ago, bought a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue and insta-decorated it, and then, two weeks ago, they’d begun sending out the engagement announcements.
If my father had planned to tell me about his engagement himself, the announcement had beat him to it.
“Zoe, it’s time to forgive and forget,” my father said over the two lunches we’d had in L.A. since my parents’ breakup, his ubiquitous sunglasses shielding his sincerity or lack thereof. “Giselle is just beside herself that you won’t speak to her. Not only did she lose her friend, but she feels like she destroyed your relationship with me, as well.”
No, you both take that honor, Dad.
“Zoe, I tell her nothing could destroy our relationship, but she thinks that you keep your distance because you’re upset with us.”
Ding! And he’s won one million dollars!
When you were in a good mood, without a care in the world, there was no one better to be around than Bartholomew Solomon. The man was always up, always ready to take on the world. If you were down, he’d tell you to snap out of it, that the world was too full of novelty and surprises to waste one second being depressed.
A divorce? A broken family? No big whoop!
“You could use some therapy, young lady!” my mother had once snapped at Ally on the telephone. I was ten or eleven, so Ally must have been eighteen or nineteen. Silence, and then; “Well, I’m not surprised to hear that you are seeing a college psychologist, because you really need to deal with your issues, Allison. You’re an adult now. And it’s time to grow up and stop expecting your father to be your daddy.”
It was a pivotal moment when you realized that you didn’t agree with your mother about fundamental things, when you realized that your values were completely different. It was no surprise to me that my parents’ marriage worked and for so long. They were peas in a pod. They both swept everything under the rug. My father wore sunglasses indoors. And my mother got a lot of plastic surgery.
What the hell did Giselle see in my father? That was the one thing I couldn’t figure out. She wasn’t an airhead or an under-the-rug-sweeper or a wanna-be film star (my father was a movie producer).
And besides her looks and her brains and the fact that she was once a very nice person, what did my father see in a woman half his age?
“She’s the love of my life,” my father said for the hundredth time.
“She’s younger than I am,” I countered.
“Age is just a number, Zoe.”
He said that a lot.
Age is just a number, Zoe, had also become my mother’s line when I asked her why she was having so much plastic surgery. She’d seen a television show about a woman who’d had over twenty-five surgeries to look like a human Barbie doll. “Why shouldn’t I turn back the clock, be the beauty I used to be?” my mother said. “To look at me, who would think I was ever a contender for Miss Orange County?”
One year. My father and Giselle had been together for one year, and now they were getting married. I’d been with Charlie for a few months longer, and I was no closer to getting married than I was when I met him.
Now, as I watched Amber scooch closer to her date, I wondered if it was really worth all she was putting into it. Paying me two hundred and twenty-five bucks to tell her what? That she shouldn’t be herself? That she was doing something wrong? My mother had spent twenty-five years doing everything she possibly could to keep my father interested, and he’d dumped her for a woman half her age. I had a boyfriend I couldn’t commit to. What the hell did I know?
Amber and her date left the bar together, hand in hand.
4
Sarah
As Griffen and I collected our doggie bags (containing one chocolate cupcake each), put on our jackets in what felt like slow motion, and made our way to the door of Julien’s restaurant, Griffen was hit in the ankle by the smallest baby stroller I’d ever seen. I watched him peer inside at the sleeping infant, and I was quite sure he was about to throw up on the baby.
He managed a “sorry” to the mother, eyed the two wild-eyed children who refused to put on their coats and shot a glance at the father, who was struggling to get the little girl’s arm through her denim jacket when she was busy trying to stuff a bread stick down her brother’s pants. The father grabbed the bread stick, startling the girl, and she started bawling. The couple sitting to the left of them apparently had had enough, took final sips of their wine, threw a pile of bills on the table and left, dirty looks all around.
In the five minutes it took to get out of the restaurant, Griffen didn’t say a word. Not a sarcastic “And you want to have one of those?” Not an offensive “Are you one hundred percent sure it’s mine?” He just clutched his doggie bag in his white-knuckled fist, held open the door for me and out we went into the oddly warm October air.
As we passed the entrance to the Seventy-seventh Street 6 train, he didn’t run down the steps. He didn’t hail the taxi that was stopped at a red light. He didn’t flee west around the corner to make his escape home through Central Park.
He didn’t do or say anything. He just walked, staring down at the sidewalk.
A few blocks later, at Eighty-fourth Street, he stopped. “Are you absolutely sure?” he asked me, glancing at the traffic for a moment, then at me, then at the sidewalk, then back at me. “I mean, did you see your doctor?”
I nodded.
“We can wait a few hours for the blood test results to be one hundred percent conclusive,” Dr. Scharf had said four days ago, “but you’re definitely pregnant. Your uterus is enlarged. Congratulations!”
It was interesting that the only two people who’d offered me congratulations were the doctor I saw every two years for birth control (lawsuit!), and a stranger in a restaurant.
When I’d walked out of Dr. Scharf’s office, Lisa at my side, the words Your uterus is enlarged had echoed over and over in my mind. Lisa had taken my arm and led my dazed and confused self to Barnes & Noble, sat me down in a big green leather club chair near the magazines, disappeared for two minutes and returned with three books: What To Expect When You’re Expecting, The Girlfriends’ Guide To Pregnancy and But I Don’t Know How To Be Pregnant!
And then we went to my favorite coffee bar, the very one where I’d met Griffen in the first place. She bought me a large decaf cappuccino and a Linzer torte (“Gotta watch the caffeine—in chocolate too,” she said), pointed at an overstuffed sofa and handed me But I Don’t Know How To Be Pregnant! while she started reading What To Expect. And so I drank and ate and read. We sat there for two hours, reading, flipping pages. Staring at truly frightening pictures of fetal development. I learned about the placenta. Sonograms. Arm buds. That I wouldn’t have to drink milk, after all, but
that I would have to avoid aspirin and cough medicine and soft cheeses and any fish containing too much mercury. Caffeine, to be safe. Alcoholic beverages. Hot dogs, bacon, and anything with nitrites.
Oh, and I could expect my brain to go on hiatus.
“Ready?” Griffen asked, startling me out of my thoughts.
“As I’ll—”
Ever be, I’d been about to say. But I realized Griffen wasn’t talking about the pregnancy. He was talking about resuming walking.
We turned the corner of Eighty-fourth Street and walked down to First Avenue, something of a hike from Lexington Avenue when you weren’t saying a word.
Again Griffen was almost hit by a baby stroller.
There were a lot of baby strollers in my neighborhood. I’d never really noticed them before, except to want them out of my way. Now I wanted to peer in every single carriage and ask the mother questions.
Griffen stopped in front of my apartment building. The last time he stopped in front of my building was our first date.
“Do you know what you want to do?” he asked.
I wondered what he was thinking. Get rid of it. Say you want to get rid of it! I imagined him silently chanting.
Was he foaming at the mouth to tell me he’d pay all expenses?
“My doctor said I’m due on May fifteenth.”
He looked positively ill. Really. Like he was about to throw up on the street.
“That’ll make the baby a Taurus,” I rambled on. “My mom was a Taurus, and it’s definitely not true that Taureans—or is Tauri?—are stubborn, so…”
I trailed off as he stared down at the street. Now he looked as if he wanted to cry. “Are you really going to do this?” he asked, desperation in his voice. “I can’t believe you’re going to do this.” He covered his face with his hands, then shoved them in his pockets, then dropped down rather dramatically on the bottom step of the brownstone next door to my building. “Are you really going to do this?” he asked again.
I nodded.
He sucked in a breath. A deep, ragged breath. “So you’re going to do this. You’re really going to do this.”
Just remember the daze you were in when you found out you were pregnant, I reminded myself. That’s how he feels now. Be very kind.
“I am going to have this baby, Griffen,” I said. I laid a hand on his shoulder. He flinched, and I pulled it away. “I know it’s an incredible shock. I don’t know what else to say myself, other than that I’m pregnant and I’m having the baby.”
He let out a whoosh of breath and dropped his head between his knees. “I need some time to digest this. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’ll call you,” he added, and then he shot up and walked away. Fast.
I imagined him stopping just around the corner on Second Avenue, hyperventilating into his doggie bag.
I’ll call you. I’ll call you. I’ll call you.
A month ago, I’d gotten Astrid’s gold star raised eyebrow and a “Write it up” when I suggested “What He Really Means When He Says He’ll Call” as an article. I’d boldly stopped twenty-five guys on the street, from hot to very not, from early twenties to early forties, stuck a microphone in front of their mouths and asked the age-old question.
According to my own survey, the odds that a guy would call when he said he would were slightly less than fifty percent.
I considered those odds promising for my current situation.
Then again, I hadn’t exactly given the men hypothetical situations to mull over, such as: “Uh, a chick you’ve been seeing for a couple months tells you she’s pregnant, and you say you need some time to digest it and that you’ll call. Will you?”
Tape recorder in hand, I’d asked: “At the end of the evening, you tell your date you’ll call. Will you?”
Mark, 30: “If I like her, yeah. If not, no.”
Me: “Then why say you’ll call?”
Mark: “Sometimes I say it just to get away from the girl, you know?”
Me: “From the woman, you mean.”
Mark (rolls eyes ): “I wouldn’t call you if you said something like that on a date.”
Me: “Good.”
Jim, 34: “You just say it. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s like when someone says, ‘How are you?’ It’s like a rhetorical question. They don’t really expect an answer.”
Me: “But isn’t the woman expecting a call?”
Jim: Blank stare.
John, 29: “If I say I’ll call, then I’ll call. Guys who don’t give nice guys like me a bad rap.”
George, 21: “I’d definitely call you. I like older women. Seeing anyone?”
Me: Big smile and a proud “Yes, I am.”
Paul, 37: “I call exactly three days later. You don’t want her to think you’re too into her. Women like a man with an edge.”
Robert, 28: “I don’t even realize I’m saying it.” (In other words, what Jim said.)
Griffen (yes, that Griffen), 32: “I mean I’ll call.”
Me (smiling ): “But when will you call? Tomorrow? In three days? Two weeks? When you’re bored? If you want sex?”
Griffen (smiles back and taps my nose with his finger ): “When did I call you after our first date?”
Me: “The next day at work. You said you had a great time and asked me out again for the weekend.”
Him: “I’m a stand-up guy, huh? You’re pretty lucky.”
Me (kissing his neck ): “Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes.”
And then we had sex. Great sex.
That flirtatious little conversation over chocolate fondue and strawberries, a few glasses of white wine and a lot of sexual innuendos was one month ago. I was pregnant then.
I’d been pregnant for just about our entire relationship.
But it wasn’t the fondue or the wine or the sexual innuendos.
I was pregnant because of a large iced mocha.
And because my air conditioner had conked out yet again.
And, indirectly, because of my Don’t-You-Dare-Do-It sister, Ally.
Two months ago, on a hot, humid late August morning, the kind that wakes you up with its stickiness, I’d decided to spend the sunlight hours at the very air-conditioned DT*UT, a coffee lounge around the corner from my apartment. I took a cold shower, threw on a tank top, jeans and my flip-flops that annoyed even me with their clickety-clackety on the sidewalk, twirled my hair up into a messy bun, grabbed a bunch of competitive women’s magazines and a pad of paper and headed out. I planned to write a “What the Competition Is Doing and What Wow Woman Should Be Doing” memo to Astrid, since it was my month to report on the competition. After the stifling heat of my apartment and the sauna outside, the cool air in the coffee lounge was almost too cold, and I ran back home for a meshy cardigan.
I was standing at the condiments counter with a large iced mocha into which I was stirring an extra packet of Sweet’N Low, when someone backed into me.
The cutest guy I’d seen in a long, long time.
“I am so sorry,” he said, grabbing a wad of tissues and handing them to me, his expression full of apology. He grabbed another wad of tissues. “I hope your sweater isn’t ruined. It’s nice.”
I beamed. Was there a stain on my sweater? Was I standing in a coffee bar? I had no clue. I felt as though I’d been transported to dreamland. That was how instant the chemistry felt. To me, anyway.
I looked down at myself. My new pale pink Banana Republic cardigan, the one Ally had bought me because she’d been offended by the ratty black one I’d shown up in for lunch a couple of weeks ago, was soaked with a combination of espresso, milk, chocolate syrup and whipped cream.
From the breasts down.
He was looking at the stain. At my chest?
“Here,” he said, reaching into his back pocket. He pulled out his wallet and handed me a card. “Call me when you get the bill for the dry cleaning. I’ll pay for it. That sweater looks expensive.”
“It’s really no problem,” I said.
“Easily could have been the other way around.”
He smiled. And a tingle shot up both my legs.
Thick, silky blond hair. Real blond. Baby blond. But brown eyes. Pale brown. And long, boy eyelashes. One dimple, in his left cheek. He was tall and lanky, with delicious shoulders, and dressed guy Gap-y in army green cargo pants and a white T-shirt and sneakers.
I realized I was staring and hoped I wasn’t salivating. “You could—”
“I’m really sorry again,” he interrupted, “but I’m so late. I have to go.” He pointed to the card he’d given me. “Call me when you get the bill and I’ll send you the money. I’m good for it.”
And before I could say another word, he was out the door with his take-out cup of iced coffee.
I looked at his card. Griffen Maxwell. Producer at Fox News.
I whipped out my cell phone and woke up Lisa.
“Don’t wait for the dry cleaning!” she shouted. “Call him tonight! He sounds gorgeous!”
“But—”
“No buts,” Sabrina insisted when I called for her opinion. “You like the guy, call him. Why do you think he gave you his card in the first place? He was in a rush, didn’t have time to get your number, so he whipped out his card.”
For once, Lisa and Sabrina were in agreement.
“Talk about cute meet,” Lisa said. “You can write it up for a Wow How-We-Met sidebar!”
“Don’t you dare call him!” Ally advised later that day when she called to ask if I’d gotten our father’s engagement announcement with the Wedding Fest event time card. (Yes, I had. I’d shaken my head and flung it across my room with a Yeah, right.)
“Sar, if he was interested, he wouldn’t have run out of the coffee shop like that,” Ally said. “He would have asked you your name and gotten your number. When a man is sexually attracted to a woman, nothing keeps him from sniffing out a date. Men are always throwing around their cards, especially if they’re proud of their jobs. Don’t call a guy who isn’t interested.”
Can you spell KILLJOY?
“Do what you want,” Ally said when I complained that she was always raining on my parade. “But trust me—he’ll say okay to getting together because he figures it’s easy sex, and suddenly you’re nuts about a guy who never liked you to begin with.”
The Solomon Sisters Wise Up Page 5