A New Lu

by Laura Castoro

  “Yeah, like a rat in a wig.” Davin lounges against the doorjamb to the entry hall.

  “Stinker!” Dallas cries in delight at the sight of her brother.

  They hug but pretty soon it’s clear they are really trying to outmaneuver each other in some sort of karate match-up. I don’t care what they say about the leveling effect of martial arts. At five four, Dallas is about two-thirds her brother’s six-foot size. When all else fails, Davin simply grabs her about the waist and lifts her a foot off the floor, upside down.

  “The male again dominates the female in the age-old struggle!” he pronounces from deep in his chest.

  “Put me down!” Dallas says this with as much dignity as a person can manage while being suspended headfirst.

  I help Dallas right herself. “And to think I thought I’d be glad when you were grown.”

  “Yeah, Dallas. Act your age.” Davin is grinning, looking so much like his father did in his twenties that I do a double take.

  “You started it,” Dallas says, swiping hair from her eyes.

  “You started it!” Davin mimics.

  I’m not usually emotional, but this sniping and one-up-smanship nearly brings me to tears. I start blinking so fast I can feel the breeze of my lashes on my eyeballs. As the big empty house echoes with familiar voices, I feel deep-down warm in a way that I thought I might never feel again.

  We’re having this sleepover so that I can pretend for one night that they still belong only to me. The truth is, Dallas is about to pledge unending love to a man I like but can’t say I really know. Davin is in full blown “I’m an independent being who sprung full-grown from a stone” mode. He loves us, but right now he doesn’t want his parents to cast even so much as a shadow in his direction. I thought this was preteen stuff until I had an eighteen-year-old college freshman who lived on his own—on our money. He threatened to leave campus if we showed up for parents weekend. To have him voluntarily come home for a week? Priceless.

  I turn away quickly so neither glimpses the tears that come into my eyes. I guess I’m feeling extra maternal these days. “How about a glass of wine, for the grown-ups?”

  “Now we’re talking.” Davin rubs his hands together.

  “You wouldn’t know a pinot grigio from a watermelon spritzer.” Dallas is busy adjusting her capris and crop top.

  “Wrong! I know all about the grape, and its varietals. I took a course.”

  “In wine drinking?” Dallas and I ask in unison as we all head for the kitchen.

  “It was a nonacademic elective. A mini course in wine appreciation.”

  “How could you take it?” Dallas is clearly onto something. “You’re not of legal drinking age yet.”

  Davin ducks my oho expression. “They never checked.”

  Dallas rolls her eyes in my direction. “You see, that’s what’s wrong with the law. It’s enforced unequally. I have to pull my driver’s license out every time I order, even when I’m entertaining business clients. Waiters do it just to embarrass me. While wild man here doesn’t even have to prove he’s eligible for a class!”

  “If you’d get a grown-up haircut and stop looking like a Rugrat maybe they wouldn’t do it.” Davin offers this sage advice while I busy myself reaching for the cheese board I readied to go with the wine.

  “Dallas, chardonnay or pinot grigio?”

  Dallas frowns. “The pinot should breathe after opening.”

  “That’s only true of pinot noirs. The grigio is fine served immediately.” Davin gives her a superior look, then sets about making a racket while looking for the corkscrew.

  We talk right through wine and cheese. I have a club soda, saying that I’m trying to lose a few pounds. It doesn’t seem right to bring up booze and baby in the preamble of the evening. Okay, I’m stalling. But timing is everything, as they say. First we reminisce and then we’ll talk of our respective futures.

  Dinner is moussaka, Davin’s favorite, Greek salad and bread. Dallas is partial to my homemade fudge brownies. I bought ice cream to go with them. I notice that while Dallas said she can’t eat much, with her wedding dress about to be fitted, she consumes nearly as much as Davin.

  “This is wonderful. I had forgotten what real home cooking is like,” she says more than once.

  I’m reassured. Tonight, she’s happy. I watch her face, animated by her brother’s dorm stories, and remember when she was happy all the time. Well, she was a teenage girl. Happy most of the time.

  “Hey, what about your wedding dress?” Davin points out when he and Dallas reach for the final helping at the same time. “Sure you can handle thirds, orca?”

  “Thirds?” Dallas pulls back, flushing a deep rose. “With all the talking, I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “So, how’s the boyfriend?” Trust Davin to broach the subject in a way most likely to change his sister’s mood with one sideswipe remark.

  Why she feels the need to defend Stephen each and every time his name is brought up is beyond me. But she does. She looks like someone stuck a coat hanger up her back. “My fiancé is fine. Great. Wonderful.”

  “You guys still living apart?” Davin forks moussaka into his mouth as if it’s his first serving.

  “Of course. We have found celibacy to be quite instructive.” Dallas turns to me. “My productivity has actually increased. Stephen says he’s able to concentrate better, too.”

  Davin snorts like a racehorse. I try to signal him not to, but he pounces. “Oh, so Stephen thinks a sexless relationship with you is a good idea?”

  “What a stupid question!” Dallas glares at him.

  “So it’s you.” Davin crosses his arms on the table and leans in with a cheesy grin. “Is your hero a big zero in bed?”

  I thump Davin on the elbow. “Leave Dallas alone.”

  “What did I do?” He manages to lounge in a straight-backed chair. “She’s the one going all sour. I think it’s unnatural to be happy about not having sex.”

  “Is that so?” Dallas says in an oily voice. “Then why don’t you tell us about your newest girlfriend? Or haven’t you known her long enough to get her name?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. I don’t know her name.”

  “What happened to Angie?” I have wanted to ask, but couldn’t until now.

  “Angie.” Davin looks like he’s trying to remember losing his first tooth. “Oh, she was into, like, marathon relationships. I had to tell her I’m more of a sprinter.”

  “Maybe if you slowed down long enough to take notes, you’d know your girlfriend’s name and get decent grades.”

  Davin sits up. “What do you mean?”

  “Dad says you’re letting your grades slide. Again. And what’s with taking just twelve hours a semester? Don’t you plan to graduate before you’re thirty? Or do you expect to live off our parents until social security kicks in for you?”

  “Stop.” I put up a hand. “No character assassinations in my house. I just had the rugs cleaned.” I turn to Dallas. “Will you clear the table?”

  “Yeah, woman’s work!” Davin jeers.

  “Davin, you can dish up the leftovers.” I’m so sure Dallas sticks out her tongue at her brother that I don’t bother to look.

  For no particular reason I can think of, Davin adds, “And just for the record, I can’t collect social security unless I’ve had a job!”

  A child growing up as a singleton will be spared these heart-warming moments, I remind myself as I’m forced to recall the main reason for this family gathering. Maybe after dessert.

  It’s impossible not to notice that Dallas’s carefree mood has deserted her. The clang of flatware and bang of pots is alarming as she sets about clearing the table. The one time I dare sidle up to her at the sink and ask what’s wrong, she reacts with predictable defense.

  “Nothing’s wrong.” I see hurt and something else in her quick glance. “What could be wrong?”

  Good question. “Just so you know, if you want to talk…” I let it trail, for she do
esn’t even nod.

  I try to think how to segue into the subject of the evening. “Did I tell you your mother’s about to become a crusader? Breaking new ground, in a way.”

  “In what way?” Dallas asks.

  “For one, I’m about to put my job on the line as being against any radical measures to regain a youthful appearance. All this preoccupation with lines and wrinkles seems another way of making women feel they need to deny the lives we have lived. My job dilemma might serve as an instructive lesson for women of your generation, Dallas.”

  “You’re not serious, Mom?” I wish Dallas sounded more amused than annoyed.

  “I guess that did sound a bit pompous. My thoughts were more along the lines of adding to the general body of passed-on experience.”

  “I took a history course about your generation last fall. It was called ‘The Sixties,’” Davin offers helpfully. “I didn’t learn much except I can ‘really groove—’” he does finger quotation marks “—on your motto, Make Love, Not War. Right on.”

  Dallas shakes her head. “The point is, your generation tried to have it all. Now that it’s fallen apart, you’re whining. Don’t worry, Mom. We don’t want to be like you. Five-O is practically a manual of how-not-to become like you.”

  Davin, who’s started dishing out ice cream to go with the brownies, whistles softly and shoots his sister a “boy, you stepped in it” glance.

  “I didn’t mean you, personally, Mom.” Dallas looks apologetic as she rinses the wineglasses. “I mean, for instance, those women profiled in last month’s issue. They were so busy being professionally fulfilled that they waited until forty to try to have children. Now they expect the rest of the world to mourn their lack of reproductive opportunities.”

  “Yeah,” Davin chimes in. “What if you’d waited until now to have a child? It just wouldn’t happen.”

  My moment. “Funny you should bring that up. What if I were pregnant now? What would be your reaction?”

  “Pregnant? At your age?” Davin snickers. “Sorry, Mom.”

  “No, seriously. What do you two think about me having another child?”

  Dallas shakes her head. “You can’t expect me to react to an impossibility.”

  “It’s not impossible. It is a fact.”

  I wait for them to both turn startled glances my way and then nod. “I’m going to have a baby. In November.”

  17

  “Maybe it’s a hysterical thing.”

  Dallas swings around on Davin. “What are you talking about?”

  “You never heard of hysterical pregnancy?” He’s looking smug to be the bearer of knowledge his sister does not have. “It happens to stressed-out women. Happened to a friend last week.”

  “What friend?” Dallas and I chorus in identical suspicion.

  Davin’s expression slips into vague mode, the kind he adopts when his father asks what he’s been doing with his time, or his money. “A friend of a friend, okay? This guy’s girl thought she was pregnant, having all these symptoms, you know? Only it turned out she was major stressed over finals. The infirmary said that kind of thing happens every semester. Women get emotional, right? It affects things. Female things. I’m just saying with Mom going through the divorce and all…” He shrugs. “Hysterical stuff happens.”

  Dallas looks back at me in disgust. “Do you hear the kind of chauvinist you’ve reared?”

  “I’m not responsible for your brother’s warped understanding of female biology.”

  I reach for one of the bowls of ice cream Davin has filled and plop a still-warm brownie on top. “This is not stress. I have four pregnancy tests and a doctor’s examination to back me up.”

  Two exclamation points appear between Dallas’s brows to punctuate her surprise. “You’ve seen a doctor about this?”

  “Two physicians, actually.” I drop a thin curl of vanilla ice cream onto my brownie. The truth has given me a powerful new appetite.

  “Jeez, Mom!” The same look of utter bewilderment is on Davin’s face as when he was four years old and his ice cream fell off his cone onto the grass.

  Dallas, as always, takes command. “Is there something we don’t know, Mom?”

  About half of my life. A mental image flares through my mind of me flat on my back at a beach house, draped with nothing but the doctor-on-call. But this is not the time to inform my children about how much I can deviate from the person they think I am. “Your father and I made an error in judgment a few months back—”

  “The Caribbean trip!” Davin chimes in at last, grinning. “I hear the tropical beach scene is a real turn-on.”

  “The point is, we didn’t mean for this to happen.”

  “Didn’t mean…?” Dallas looks stunned. “After all those books you made me read in junior high about safe sex and birth control, and then write reports about…”

  “Yeah, and those dumb lectures at the YMCA,” Davin chimes in.

  “Mom, what were you thinking?”

  “Obviously she wasn’t thinking ‘no glove, no love.’” Davin snickers. “So Dad’s still got it in him. Awesome!”

  I hereby promise myself to never ever have another discussion about my sex life with my children.

  “Does Dad know?” The tone of Dallas’s question could be termed insulting. I remind myself that she’s trying to absorb a shock, and choose to accept it at face value.

  “Certainly. He wanted me to wait—”

  Dallas launches herself across the room to embrace me, cutting off my prepared speech. “But this is great! So great! Isn’t it, Davin? Dad and Mom are getting back together!” She’s hugging me so tight I can’t get in a word. “Oh, but, Mom, at your age, you’ll need to look after yourself.” She releases me and turns to her brother. “Davin, get Mom a stool for her feet.”

  “I’m fine, Dallas, really. Look.” I plop down on a kitchen chair. “I’m sitting.”

  “Are you sure? Because if you need anything, anything—” She pauses to inhale an incredible breath. “This is just soooo great!”

  My daughter is too happy. It’s the kind of instant euphoria that’s so over the top you just know the person is going to crash and burn. I should have waited. Should have had her father here to catch her as she falls.

  But for the moment her hyperactivity has kicked even her brother out of energy-conservation mode. Davin snatches up the footstool I use to reach the high shelf in the pantry, and puts it before me. Then he lifts each of my feet with the care I wish he’d use when he handles my Waterford crystal, and places them on it.

  Dallas actually puts another curl of ice cream on my brownie before she hands me my bowl. All the while she’s babbling about new starts, the joys of life with renewed purpose, and how glad she is that her parents have come to their senses.

  Finally she pauses and stares at me with such concern that I suspect she’s about to drape a tea towel around my shoulders to ward off the possibility of an ice-cream chill. I decide a bracing dose of the creamy cold stuff is just what I need. As I bring a mouthful of brownie and ice cream to my mouth, she reaches out with a napkin to catch a drip.

  It’s too much.

  “Stop! Sit!” The tone of voice, accompanied by the hand command I learned at obedience school when we had a cocker spaniel, works perfectly with children—certainly better than it did with that dog. They resume their chairs at once.

  I put my bowl aside and stand up. The general always stands to charge her troops. “First, I’m touched by your enthusiastic response to my news. However, the situation is not that simple. To begin with, your father isn’t at all happy about it. In fact, he’s very clear that he doesn’t think I should have this child.”

  “Dad’s just in shock. Who wouldn’t be? At your time of life?” Dallas is nothing if not tenacious. “But he will come around, won’t he, Davin?”

  Davin shrugs, still clearly out of his depth. At a later time I must ponder his ease with the notion of hysterically pregnant women but not truly pregnant ones
.

  “Listen to me. This is very important. When your dad returns from his business trip, I don’t want either of you to pressure him. He is a free man, after all. All decisions and responsibilities concerning this child are mine.”

  Exclamation marks reappear between Dallas’s brows. “You mean to have it even if Dad disapproves?”

  The word “it” is beginning to bug me. “My child, Dallas. And yes, I have every intention of seeing this pregnancy through. Alone.”

  “Oh, my God!” The hysterical edge is back in Dallas’s voice, minus this time the euphoria. “What do I tell Stephen? What will he say to his parents?”

  At last, Davin finds his footing in the conversation. “Tell them the truth. Dad knocked up Mom after their divorce.” Dallas turns on her brother. “That’s—disgusting!”

  Davin cackles with laughter. “Better get used to it. Remember the belly on Stephen’s sister Lucy last Christmas?”

  Dallas’s gaze lowers to what is still my fairly flat middle section and her eyes buck wide. “Oh, Mom! He’s right. You’ll be a blimp by my wedding!”

  And the blessings just keep coming. I never liked the mother-of-the-bride ensemble she chose for me. She calls it goldenrod. Looks Teletubby yellow to me. “You can tether me to the church’s front pew like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloon.”

  Dallas backs away from me as if I’ve grown Buffy-the-Vampire-style fangs. “I know you don’t take my wedding plans seriously, Mom. But I don’t understand how you can laugh at me when it’s you who seems to have lost all sense of decency.” She pronounces these words as if they were a judicial pronouncement. “My family has turned into one big joke and embarrassment!”

  “I’m not embarrassed,” Davin volunteers.

  “That’s because you don’t have a grasp of the situation,” Dallas shoots back. “I do.”

  “It’s not about you,” I interject before she can begin the barrage sure to follow this martyrdom preamble. “This conversation is about me. Okay? I shared my condition with you out of love and respect. You do not get a vote on how I handle the matter.”