In the end, it didn’t matter. One event changed everything. If it hadn’t happened, everything would have been different. I think Jill and Daniel would have sat on her sofa and talked for nine months, would have run their mouths until her water suddenly broke mid-sentence and there were no longer any options. And truly, I think Daniel would have fared just fine with fatherhood thrust upon him. But there was a catalyst, an event, a moment which changed everything and not just for us. This is good for storytelling but bad for decision making, and it is frightening to look back and realize, were it not for that moment, all of our lives would have been so different. Maybe that’s revisionist history. Maybe it’s me making origin myths. But I can’t shake the conviction that Jason’s boyfriend’s friend’s ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend changed the world.
We were sitting around the post-dinner table at my house, all four of us, Katie, Jill, Daniel, and I, about three weeks after graduation, not quite two months into Jill’s pregnancy. We were sated, had eaten and chatted our fill. We had talked very little about babies and more about nothing at all. We had found someplace comfortable in all this where things didn’t seem so urgent anymore. They had to decide, but they didn’t have to decide this minute. We had reached a place where we could talk and think about other things, where we could joke with each other, where it was almost old times (she wasn’t showing; she wasn’t even throwing up). We could almost forget for whole hours at a time. Things felt okay. Then Jason and Lucas knocked on the door and came in bearing news and change and, thankfully, cake.
The weird thing is it didn’t seem that shattering to them, and later, when they tried to reconstruct the events they had set in motion, they couldn’t, and couldn’t believe that their little bit of gossip had changed everything. They didn’t even lead off with it.
“We have cake,” announced Jason, striding directly to the kitchen, taking out plates and forks, putting on water for tea.
“Left over from the restaurant last night. A whole untouched cake. Never happens,” Lucas added. “I should make pasta more often. Everyone’s too full for dessert.”
“Not very good for sales,” said Daniel.
“No,” Lucas reflected. “But good for you guys. You get free dessert.”
“I can’t believe we’re going to eat more,” said Katie. I had made pizzas. I had also made salad, grilled vegetables, and garlic bread. We had started with hummus and crackers. But Lucas-cake was too good to refuse.
“Busy tonight?” I asked.
“So-so. That new place Grill Art opened last week, so some folks are going there.” Lucas shrugged.
“We ate there for lunch yesterday,” Jason said conspiratorially. “Terrible.”
“It wasn’t terrible,” said Lucas generously. “The place just opened. Maybe it’s better for dinner.”
“Over-sauced. Nothing was hot enough. Too salty. Too bland. The man wishes he could cook like you.”
“Oh sweetie,” said Lucas, leaning over and kissing Jason on the mouth, “everyone wishes they could cook like me.”
“What are you guys doing all weekend?” asked Jill.
“Not much,” said Jason. “We have tickets to the ballgame tomorrow afternoon.”
“We must do something with the lawn.”
“I need to do some work for my summer course.”
“And we really should go visit Elise,” said Lucas.
“We don’t even know Elise,” Jason protested.
“Who’s Elise?” I asked.
“I told you about her,” said Jason. “She’s Ed’s ex-boyfriend’s pregnant fiancée.”
“Was,” said Lucas.
“She died?” I gasped.
“No,” said Jason. “Was pregnant.”
“And was a fiancée,” Lucas added dryly. Across the table from me, Jill and Daniel both hushed though neither had been saying anything.
“What happened?”
“She was in an accident on I-5. Someone two cars up blew a tire. She tried to swerve. Everyone tried to swerve. She got hit from the side and from behind,” said Lucas.
“She’s okay,” Jason reassured us. “She broke an arm and banged her head badly enough that they’d like to keep her for a couple nights. And she lost the baby.”
“And then Martin broke off the engagement. No reason to do it at that point. Said he did love her but not in that way, he’d been confused, he was really sorry, et cetera, et cetera. I feel bad for her,” Lucas added, “but the guy is so obviously gay. You don’t ungay.”
“Plus, it’s so much better to find this out now than later. Before marriage, before kids. This is a blessing really,” mused Jason.
“Except she’s so in love with him, poor thing. Gets in a huge accident, wrecks her car, wakes up in the hospital with a broken arm, a concussion, and no baby, and then Martin breaks up with her. Which is why we should try to visit her at some point this weekend. We cheer people up.” The discussion had stopped being among all of us and was happening just between Jason and Lucas, who had slipped into private conversation, so comfortable that they didn’t notice Daniel had turned greenish-white, and Jill’s face was covered suddenly with a silver sheen of wet. She was shaking her head over and over, mouth open, nothing coming out.
“Uh-oh,” said Lucas, looking up.
“She lost the baby?” Jill managed, barely a whisper, barely words.
“Oh honey.” Jason was back with us now. “I’m so sorry. She did. She lost the baby. But it was okay. She was just barely pregnant. The doctor says she’s fine in there. Told Martin they could start trying again right away,” he added with a half smile because obviously Martin wasn’t trying in the first place.
Small silence.
“You’re fine.” Katie cut to the chase. “It’s not you. You’re fine.”
Jill was clutching her flat stomach, looking around a little wildly.
“She’s fine too,” I added. “She’ll be fine in a couple days.”
Jill wasn’t responding, and we weren’t, any of us, sure exactly what was upsetting her—the accident, the miscarriage, the broken engagement, the fact that it could all be lost so completely and so suddenly.
Daniel, his color starting to return, licked his lips and took his turn at trying to be comforting. “It’s so much better for everyone this way,” he said slowly into what felt like thirsty, gasping silence. “She’ll find someone else, someone who really wants her and really wants to have a baby instead of trapping this poor guy into marriage and fatherhood with her.”
I’m sure he didn’t think about what he was going to say before he said it. And what he said was true. But also tragically misguided coming, as it did, out of his mouth.
Jill got up from the table, walked directly to the purple bathroom, and loudly threw up. It was six weeks of repressed morning sickness, six weeks of denial and rejection, of fear and panic and isolation, of endless deliberation despite the lack of any real options. It was realization, finally, of what this all meant, how it was going to change her life in ways which could not even be construed as good or promising. It was realization, finally, that she was probably going to have a baby, and she was probably going to have it alone.
We sat in silence. You can’t eat cake when someone is throwing up in a one-bedroom apartment. You can’t eat cake when your friends are collapsing. The vomiting and all it meant had been six long, unnecessary weeks in coming. I exchanged guilty glances with Katie. We had spent these first weeks evading decisions, responsibility, and reality, the truth, and we’d helped Jill and Daniel do the same when it was the last thing they should have done. We were complicit in this, and I felt just as (well, maybe almost as) nauseated.
Daniel pushed back from the table, took an almost comically deep breath that went on and on—like the whole inside of him was empty and he was trying to inflate—and walked to the bathroom. He closed the door, probably in a vain attempt at privacy, but really it was a very small apartment and cheap besides and poorly built. You try like hell not
to hear when someone’s puking in the bathroom, but of course this is disgustingly impossible, and we tried not to hear Daniel and Jill’s conversation, but of course that wasn’t possible either. We should have gotten up and left the house right away, but paralyzing gas seemed to be spewing invisibly from the cake.
“Sweetie, I’m sorry,” said Daniel. “I didn’t mean us. I meant them. I wasn’t thinking.”
Pause.
“Are you okay?”
“I have to have the baby,” she said, shaky.
“Okay,” he said.
“Daniel, what if I lost it?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I have to protect it,” she said. “All my life.”
“Okay,” said Daniel.
I willed us to get up, to walk outside, but we couldn’t move. We couldn’t even look up from our plates. We were trapped in the unfolding drama and folded right in.
“I can’t believe I almost lost this baby,” Jill muttered. Daniel, quiet and resigned, taking it all in, seemed to be trying to decide how much of this was reactionary and irrational and how much was certain, and was coming just as surely to conclusions of his own.
“Jill, I can’t.” He was crying then. “I can’t. I would be like Martin. I would resent it. I would want out.”
“I don’t want you that way. We don’t.” She was crying too.
“I can’t make you. I wouldn’t want to. But I can’t do it.” He was muffled. She was holding him against her. Or he had his face buried in her hair or stomach. Finally, they were both so hysterical and emotional and something else—intimate—that we were embarrassed enough to move.
“Perhaps a beer,” suggested Lucas.
“Brilliant,” said Katie, out of character, and as we left the apartment, it was like turning our backs on a fire, slowly catching, ready to rage.
By then it was late. We were all exhausted. We didn’t want a beer or anything else. Jason and Lucas, heads hung and sorry, got in their car and went home. Katie and I went to her apartment, turned on the TV, and promptly fell asleep. Overload of everything. We woke up at six o’clock in the morning, went back to my place, and found Jill sound asleep in my bed. Alone. We crawled in with her.
“Hi,” she said sleepily.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” said Katie.
“He left,” said Jill.
“Where?” I said.
“I’m not sure,” said Jill, slightly puzzled, like it was a logic problem. “Before he said he wanted to spend the summer in California. Maybe he’s headed there?”
“How did you leave things?” asked Katie.
“He did not want to parent. I did not want to abort. It wasn’t what either of us wanted, his leaving, but, comparatively speaking, of the given options, it was what we both didn’t want the least I guess, so at least we could agree on that.”
“Are you okay?” asked Katie gently.
“No.”
“Is there anything we can do?” I asked.
“Help me raise a baby?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Sure,” said Katie.
“Thanks,” said Jill, and we all went back to sleep.
Ten
The first problem was that, left to her own devices, Jill still ate mostly saltines. She wasn’t an overly picky eater. She ate well when we could afford to go out. She ate whatever I cooked for her. Occasionally, she supplemented the crackers with M&Ms and very occasionally the M&Ms with an apple or some orange juice. But mostly she just ate crackers and water. Great were she ever to be imprisoned in a nineteenth-century novel. Lousy for having a baby. The first problem we had to solve then, before the broken heart even, was getting Jill to eat.
The second, of course, was the broken heart. But as you know, mending those is tricky.
The third problem was financial. To the uninitiated, graduate fellowships seem like a great deal. They pay your tuition. They pay you a stipend to cover living expenses. In return, you teach first-year composition thereby earning your keep while also gaining valuable career experience and building your résumé. Unfortunately, the stipend is not really enough to live on. We were all getting by one way or another. Katie ran up crazy credit card debt (not, unlike school loans, with a low, fixed interest rate that would wait for payment until after she got a job). My parents gave me their old furniture. And paid my car insurance. My grandmother took me shopping when I needed new clothes. Jason had the good sense to fall in love with a man with a real job. And Jill ate saltines. Saltines worked for one maybe but wouldn’t for two, especially when one of them also needed diapers, bottles, clothes, toys, car seats, blankets, a highchair, and regular medical attention.
The fourth problem was childcare. Graduate school is a full-time job. It is only about twelve to fifteen hours a week in the classroom, learning or teaching or both. But it’s about a gazillion hours of grading. And about two gazillion hours of reading. So that’s three gazillion hours plus twelve plus you still have to eat, sleep briefly, and do a little bit of something social to keep from going mad. You can try to grade faster. You can try to read faster, skim more, skip a few books altogether. But there’s not a lot of time there for taking care of an infant.
We floated solutions sensible and ridiculous. We thought she could drop out of school and get a real job (solving problem 3 only). We thought she could become a professional food taster (solving problems 1 and 3). We proposed a reality TV show where teams of pregnant women go on scavenger hunts to restaurants across the country on a quest for meals which do not make them throw up (the footage of this would be dynamite, the feuds inevitable and profound, the public service rendered invaluable). But I kept coming back to the same thing. I tried but could find no way around it. When I was sure, I called her right away. Never mind it was three o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it. Why should she?
“We’ll move in together,” I said simply when she picked up the phone and grunted something close enough to hello.
Silence. Then, “Who is this?”
“Come on, Jilly. It’s me. Wake up. We’ll move in together. All three of us. We’ll arrange our schedules so someone’s always home with the baby.” (Problem 4.) “We’ll share expenses.” (Problem 3.) “I’ll cook.” (Force-feeding Jill and Fetus. Problem 1 and maybe even 2 depending on how good the food is.) “I’ve thought about it. It’s the best solution.”
Silence. “Who is this?”
“JILL. Seriously. How is this not a good plan?”
“How does cooking help?”
“You have to feed this baby something besides crackers.”
“I eat more than crackers.”
“No you don’t.”
“Yes I do.”
“No you don’t.”
“Any chance we could have this conversation tomorrow?” asked Jill, but I could tell she’d sat up, cleared her eyes and head a little. Finally she said, “Do you think you’d be a good father?”
I smiled. “I’d be a great father.”
Eleven
We were glib in the middle of that night, but we didn’t stay that way. We debated. A lot. Jill didn’t feel entirely comfortable asking what was really a rather large favor of us. Katie wasn’t sure living with a ruined woman and helping her raise her illegitimate child was in line with church doctrine. We were all worried about our work. It was hard to imagine having even less time to get everything done and harder still to imagine reading and writing with a baby crying all the time. We also suffered, honestly, from some hesitation to live together—me especially. I thought we were too old to have roommates, that living together might well make us all hate each other. I couldn’t believe that all the wait and headache of making my bathroom finally purple was for nothing.
But in theory, at least, it seemed very doable. We would schedule our classes at different times. We would try to overlap only on nights when Jason was sleeping over and could stay a few hours on either end. I would cook. It was ju
st as easy, I told myself, to cook for three as for one even if it did yield fewer leftovers, and that way someone else could shop before and clean up after. We would split living expenses. It was going to be easy. There was no way it would go wrong.
Of course if that were true, there’d be no story. As everyone knows, saying there’s no way things can go wrong precedes only by moments their actually doing so.
We got a dog from the pound, Uncle Claude, for practice parenting and extra love and silver lining—if I couldn’t have my own small cute apartment all for me, if I had to have a great big house and share it with lots of people, at least that meant I could also have a dog. Uncle Claude was an angel dog, a Border collie mix, a genius (smarter than many of my students), a relentless, even compulsive, chaser of balls, a tremendous shedder (which we didn’t realize until it was too late), and needer of a large backyard. So we found a house with a yard that was large indeed and huge inside as well. Four bedrooms so everyone—even the baby—got her own. Three baths so no sharing on that front either. A large kitchen, a nice porch, and lots of light. Even though I would have enjoyed another few months of freedom, we thought it best to do as much of the moving in and getting our lives settled as possible before Jill became too pregnant. Even in a city as liberal as Seattle, some people might be reluctant to rent to a family like ours. Three female roommates is nothing, but draw one a taut, rounded body over skinny legs, and suddenly we’d be a cult, a cause—at the very least, a lot of trouble.
Plus it was summer, so we had the time to do it. And it was fun. We culled our furniture, throwing out the worst pieces, each feeling like we’d gained a whole two-thirds of a house of new things. We shopped for bath mats and throw pillows. We bought candles and lamps and an afghan. It’s amazing that even on so little money you can buy belonging, stability, commitment. Living alone, I realized after I wasn’t doing it anymore, had felt like waiting, and so having a plastic grocery bag looped over a drawer handle felt reasonable. Now we were nesting. Together, we felt worth a real trash can. Together, we were making a home—for the baby but also for us. It wasn’t that I felt undeserving when I lived alone. I had painted my bathroom after all. It’s just that most things didn’t seem worth it. What need had I for a real trash can? It had always annoyed me that people live in relative squalor for years, but the moment they become engaged, they need matching towels and sheets and expensive cookware (even when they do not cook). But moving in with Jill and Katie, I decided it isn’t that newlyweds feel deserving because they are suddenly married; it is just the first time it seems worth the effort. I learned many things over the subsequent months, but the first and most lasting was the weight—of family, of being part of a unit—that one simply doesn’t have on one’s own. It was friendship too of course. And though I didn’t recognize it at the time, it was motherhood.
The Atlas of Love Page 5