Good in Bed

by Jennifer Weiner

  “I was, but I stopped myself,” he said. “Well, almost.”

  “Okay. So no kids. How would you feel, if you’d been with someone, and then you weren’t with her, and she came to you and said, ‘Guess what? I’m having your baby!’ Would you even want to know?”

  “If it were me,” he said, thoughtfully. “Well, yes. If it were me I’d want to know. I would want to be a part of the child’s life.”

  “Even if you weren’t with the mother anymore?”

  “I think children deserve to have two parents involved with them, and who they become, even if the parents live apart. It’s hard enough to grow up in this world. I think kids need all the help they can get.”

  That, of course, was not what I’d wanted to hear. What I’d wanted to hear was, You can do this, Cannie! You can go it alone! If I was going to be apart from Bruce – and there was ample evidence that I would – I wanted every assurance that a single parent was a fine and proper thing to be. “So you think I should tell him.”

  “If it were me,” he said thoughtfully, “I would want to be told. And no matter what you do, or what he wants, you’re still the one who ultimately gets to decide. What’s the worst thing that can happen?”

  “He and his mother sue me for custody and try to get the baby for themselves?”

  “Wasn’t that on Oprah?” he asked.

  “Sally Jessy,” I said. It was getting colder. I pulled the lab coat tight around me.

  “Do you know who you remind me of?” he asked.

  “If you say Janeane Garofalo, I’ll jump,” I warned him. I was forever getting Janeane Garofalo.

  “No,” he said.

  “Your mother?” I asked.

  “Not my mother.”

  “That guy on Jerry Springer who was so fat that the paramedics had to cut a hole in his house to get him out of it?”

  He was smiling and trying not to. “Be serious!” he scolded me.

  “Okay. Who?”

  “My sister.”

  “Oh.” I thought about it for a minute. “Is she…” And then I didn’t know what to say. Is she fat? Is she funny? Did she get knocked up by her ex-boyfriend?

  “She looked a little bit like you,” he said. He reached out, his fingertip almost brushing my face. “She had cheeks like yours, and a smile like yours.”

  I asked the first thing I could think of. “Was she older or younger?”

  “She was older,” he said, keeping his eyes straight ahead. “She died when I was nine.”

  “Oh.”

  “A lot of my patients when they meet me want to know why I got into this line of medicine. I mean, there’s no obvious connection. I’m not a woman, I’ve never had a weight problem…”

  “Oh, sure. Rub it in,” I said. “So your sister was… heavy?”

  “No, not really. But it made her crazy.” I could only see the side of his face as he smiled. “She was always on these diets… hard-boiled eggs one week, watermelon the next.”

  “Did she, um, have an eating disorder?”

  “No. Just neuroses about food. She was in a car accident… that’s how she died. I remember my parents were at the hospital, and nobody would tell me for the longest time what was going on. Finally my aunt, my mother’s sister, came to my room and said that Katie was in Heaven, and that I shouldn’t be sad, because Heaven was a wonderful place where you got to do all your favorite things. I used to think that heaven was a place full of Devil Dogs and ice cream and bacon and waffles… all the things that Katie wanted to eat, and would never let herself have.” He turned to face me. “Sounds silly, doesn’t it?”

  “No. No, actually, that’s kind of how I imagine Heaven myself.” I felt terrible as soon as I’d said it. What if he thought that I was making fun of his poor dead sister?

  “You’re Jewish, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I am, too. I mean, I’m half. My father was. But we weren’t raised as anything.” He looked at me curiously. “Do Jews believe in heaven?”

  “No… not technically.” I groped for my Hebrew school lessons. “The deal is, you die, and then it’s just… like sleep, I think. There’s no real idea of an afterlife. Just sleep. And then the Messiah comes, and everyone gets to live again.”

  “Live in the bodies they had when they were alive?”

  “I don’t know. I personally intend to lobby for Heidi Klum’s.”

  He laughed a little bit. “Would you…” He turned to face me. “You’re cold.”

  I had been shivering a little bit. “No, I’m okay.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “No, it’s fine! I actually like hearing about other people’s, um, lives.” I had almost said “problems,” but I’d caught myself just in time. “This was good.”

  But he was already on his feet and three long-legged strides ahead of me, almost to the door. “We should get you inside,” he was muttering. He held the door open. I stepped into the stairwell, but didn’t move, so that when he shut the door he was standing very close to me.

  “You were going to ask me something,” I said. “Tell me what it was.”

  Now it was his turn to look flustered. “I… um… the, uh, pregnancy nutrition classes, I think. I was going to ask you if you’d consider signing up for one of those.”

  I knew that wasn’t it. And I even had a faint inkling that it might have been something completely different. But I didn’t say anything. Maybe he’d just had a brief, fleeting thought of asking me… something… because he’d been talking about his sister and he felt vulnerable. Or maybe he felt sorry for me. Or maybe I was completely wrong. After the whole Steve debacle, and now with Bruce, I wasn’t feeling very trusting of my instincts.

  “What time do they meet?” I asked.

  “I’ll check,” he said, and I followed him down the stairs.

  THIRTEEN

  After much deliberation and about ten rough drafts, I composed, and mai led, Bruce a letter.

  Bruce,

  There is no way to sugar-coat this, so I’ll just tell you straight out that I am pregnant. It happened the last time we were together, and I’ve decided to keep the baby. I am due on June 15.

  This is my decision, and I made it carefully. I wanted to let you know because I want it to be your choice to what extent you are involved in this child’s life.

  I am not telling you what to do, or asking for anything. I have made my choices, and you will have to make yours. If you want to spend time with the baby, I will try my best to make that work out. If you don’t, I understand.

  I’m sorry that this happened. I know it isn’t what you need in your life right now. But I decided that this was something you deserved to know about, so you can make the choices you think are right. The only thing I ask is that you please not write about this. I don’t care if you talk about me, but there’s someone else at stake now.

  Take care,

  Cannie

  I wrote my telephone number, in case he’d forgotten, and mailed it off.

  There was so much more that I wanted to write, like that I still pined for him. That I still had daydreams of him coming back to me, of us living together: me and Bruce, and the baby. That I was scared a lot of the time, and furious at him some of the time I wasn’t scared, or so racked with love and longing and yearning that I was afraid to let myself even think his name, for fear of what I’d do, and that as much as I filled my days with things to do, with plans and lists, with painting the second bedroom a shade of yellow called Lemonade Stand and assembling the dresser I bought from Ikea, too often, I’d still find myself thinking about how much I wanted him back.

  But I wrote none of those things.

  I remembered when I was a senior in high school and how hard it was to wait for colleges to send out their letters and say whether they were taking you or leaving you. Trust me, waiting for the father of your unborn child to get back to you as to whether or not he’s willing to be involved with you, or the baby, is a lot worse. For
three days I checked my phone at home obsessively. For a week I drove home at lunchtime to check my mailbox, cursing myself for not having sent the letter via registered mail, so I’d at least know that he’d received it.

  There was nothing. Day after day of nothing. I couldn’t believe that he would be this cold. That he would turn his back on me – on us – so completely. But it was, it seemed, the truth of the matter. And so I gave up… or tried to make myself give up.

  “It’s like this,” I addressed my belly. It was Sunday morning, two days before Christmas. I’d gone on a bike ride (I was cleared to ride until my sixth month, barring complications), put together a mobile made of brightly painted dog bones that I’d made, myself, from a book called Simple Crafts for Kids, and was rewarding myself with a long hot soak.

  “I think that babies should have two parents. I believe that. Ideally, I’d have a father for you. But I don’t. See, your, um, biological father is a really good guy, but he wasn’t the right guy for me, and he’s kind of having a rough time right now, and also he’s seeing somebody else” This was probably more than my unborn child needed to know, but whatever. “So I’m sorry. But this is the way it is. And I’m going to try to raise you as best I can, and we’ll make the best of it, and hopefully you won’t wind up resenting me horribly and getting tattoos and piercings and stuff to externalize your pain, or whatever kids will be doing in about fifteen years, because I’m sorry, and I’m going to make this work.”

  I limped through the holidays. I made fudge and cookies for my friends instead of buying them stuff, and I tucked cash (less than I’d meted out the year before) into cards for my siblings. I drove home for my mother’s annual holiday open house, where dozens of her friends, plus all of the members of the Switch Hitters and much of the roster of A League of Their Own fussed over me, offering good wishes, advice, the names of doctors and day-care centers, and a slightly used copy of Heather Has Two Mommies (the latter from a misguided shortstop named Dot, whom Tanya immediately took aside to inform that I wasn’t a lesbian, just a dumped breeder). I stayed in the kitchen as much as I could, grating potatoes, frying latkes, listening to Lucy regale me with the story of how she and one of her girlfriends had convinced a guy they’d met at a bar to take them back to his place, then opened all the Christmas presents under his tree after he’d passed out.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” I scolded.

  “He wasn’t very nice,” said Lucy. “What was he doing, taking the two of us home while his wife was out of town?”

  I agreed that she had a point.

  “They’re all dogs,” Lucy continued loftily. “Of course, I don’t have to tell you that.” She gulped the clear liquid from her glass. Her eyes were sparkling. “I’ve got to get my holiday swerve on,” she announced.

  “Take your swerve outside,” I urged her, and added another dollop of raw potato goo to the frying pan. I thought that Lucy was probably secretly delighted that it was me, not her, who’d wound up in this predicament. From Lucy, an unplanned pregnancy would have been almost expected. From me, it was shocking.

  My mother poked her head into the kitchen. “Cannie? You’re staying over, right?”

  I nodded. Ever since Thanksgiving, I’d fallen into the pattern of spending at least one night every weekend at my mother’s house. She cooked dinner, I ignored Tanya, and the next morning my mother and I would swim, slowly, side by side, before I’d stock up on groceries and whatever new-baby necessities her friends had donated, and head back to town.

  My mother came to the stove and poked my latkes with a spatula. “I think the oil’s too hot,” she offered. I shooed her away, but she only retreated as far as the sink.

  “Still nothing from Bruce?” she asked. I nodded once. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “It’s not like him”

  “Whatever,” I said shortly. In truth, I thought my mother was right. This wasn’t like the Bruce that I had known, and I was just as hurt and bewildered as anyone. “Evidently I’ve managed to bring out the worst in him.”

  My mother gave me a kind smile. Then she reached past me and turned the heat down. “Don’t burn them,” she said, and returned to the party, leaving me with a pan of half-cooked potato pancakes and all of my questions. Doesn’t he care? I wondered. Doesn’t he care at all?

  All through the winter, I tried to keep busy. I made the rounds of my friends’ parties, sipping spiced cider instead of eggnog or champagne. I went out to dinner with Andy, and went for walks with Samantha, and to birthing classes with Lucy, who’d agreed to be my birth coach “as long as I don’t have to look at your coochie!” As it was, we’d almost got thrown out the first day. Lucy started hollering “Push! Push!” when all the teacher wanted to do was talk about how to pick a hospital. Ever since then, the mommy-and-daddy couples had given us a wide berth.

  Dr. K. had become my new e-mail buddy. He’d write to me at the office once or twice a week, asking how I was doing, giving me updates on my friends from Fat Class. I learned that Esther had purchased a treadmill and lost forty pounds, and that Bonnie had found a boyfriend. “Let me know how you’re doing,” he would always write, but I never felt like telling him much, mostly because I couldn’t figure out what box to put him in. Was he a doctor? A friend? I wasn’t sure, so I kept things topical, telling him the latest pieces of newsroom gossip, and what I was working on, and how I was feeling.

  Slowly, I started telling the people close to me what was going on, starting small, then moving in ever-widening circles – good friends, then not-so-good friends, a handful of coworkers, a half-dozen relatives. I did it in person, wherever possible, by e-mail, in Maxi’s case.

  “As it turns out,” I began, “I am pregnant.” I gave her the condensed, PG-13 version of the events. “Remember when I told you about the last time I saw Bruce, at the shiva call?” I wrote. “We had an encounter while I was at his house. That’s how this happened.”

  Maxi’s reply was instantaneous, two sentences long, and all in capital letters. “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?” she wrote. “DO YOU NEED HELP?”

  I told her my plans, such as they were: have the baby, work part-time. “This isn’t what I would have planned,” I wrote, “but I’m trying to make the best of the situation.”

  “Are you happy?” Maxi e-mailed back. “Are you scared? What can I can do?”

  “I’m sort of happy. I’m excited,” I wrote. “I know my life will change, and I’m trying not to be too scared about how.” I thought about her last question and told her that what I needed was for her to keep being my friend, to keep in touch. “Think good thoughts for me,” I told her. “And hope that this all works out, somehow.”

  Some days, though, that didn’t seem likely. Like the day I went to the drugstore to stock up on appealing pregnancy necessities including Metamucil and Preparation H and came across Bruce’s latest “Good in Bed” column, a treatise on public displays of affection entitled “Oh, Oh, the Mistletoe.”

  “If it were up to me,” he’d written, “I would hold E’s hand forever. She has the most wonderful hands, tiny and slender and soft, so different from my own.”

  Or from mine, I’d thought sadly, staring at my own thick-fingered hands with their ragged nails and picked-over cuticles.

  If it were up to me I’d kiss her on every street corner and hug her in front of live studio audiences. I don’t need seasonal excuses, or random bits of greenery dangling from the ceiling as incentive. She’s completely adorable, and I’m not shy about showing it.

  It makes me unusual, I know. Lots of men would rather hold your shopping bags, your backpack, possibly even your purse, than hold your hand in public. They’re okay kissing their mothers and sisters – years of conditioning have worn down their resistance – but they’re not so great about kissing you when their friends can see. How to get your man over his hump? Don’t stop trying. Brush his fingertips with yours while sharing popcorn at a movie, and hold his hand as you walk out the door. Kiss him playfully at first, a
nd hope he’ll reciprocate with more passion, eventually. Try tucking that mistletoe in your brassiere, or, better yet, that lacy garter belt you’ve never worn

  Lacy garter belts. Oh, that hurt. I remembered how, for my birthday and for Valentine’s Day, Bruce would show up with boxes full of plus-size lingerie. I refused to wear it. I told him I was shy. In truth, the stuff made me feel stupid. Regular-sized women are ashamed of their butts and bellies. How could I feel good about pouring myself into the teddies and thongs he’d somehow procured? It felt like a bad joke, like a mean trick, like a Candid Camera stunt, where as soon as I showed that I was dumb or gullible enough to think I’d look good in this stuff, Allen Funt and his crew would pop out of the closet, bright lights flashing and wide-angle lenses at the ready. No matter how Bruce tried to reassure me (“I wouldn’t have bought it for you if I didn’t want to see you wear it!”) I just couldn’t bring myself to even try.

  I shut the magazine. I paid for my things, shoved them in my pocket, and trudged home. Even though I knew he’d written his December article months before he’d gotten my letter – if he’d gotten it at all – it still felt like a slap in my face.

  Because I had no party plans (not to mention no one to kiss), I volunteered to work on New Year’s Eve. I got out at 11:30, came home, bundled Nifkin in the little fleece sweatshirt he despised (in my heart, I was sure he thought it made him look silly… and in my heart, I had to admit he was right), and packed myself into my winter coat. I stuck a bottle of nonalcoholic grape juice into my pocket, and we walked down to Penns Landing and sat on the pier, watching the fireworks go off, as drunken teenagers and South Philly denizens screamed and groped and kissed each other all around us. It was 1999.

  Then I went home and did something I probably should have done much earlier. I got a big cardboard box and started packing away all the things I had around that Bruce had given me, or the things that reminded me of him.

  In went the half-melted globe candle that we’d lit together in Vermont, and in whose flickering sweetly scented light we’d made love. In went all of the letters he’d sent me, each folded neatly into its envelope. In went all the lingerie he’d bought me that I’d never worn, and the vibrator and the edible body oils and the pink fur-lined handcuffs, which were probably things I shouldn’t have lying around anyhow, what with a baby on the way. In went a hand-painted glass bead necklace his mother had given me for my last birthday, and the leather bag from the birthday before that. After some deliberation I decided to hang on to the portable phone, which had managed to lose its association with Bruce… after all, he wasn’t calling. And I kept the CDs from Ani DiFranco and Mary Chapin Carpenter, Liz Phair and Susan Werner. That was my music, not his.