“Lize,” Marilyn said, “when a—when a mother and a father love each other…”
“Men and women have sexual intercourse, sometimes, honey, and when they do that, sperm come out of the man’s—”
“David.” Marilyn beckoned Liza into her lap. “Pumpkin, this is a really great thing, okay? Mama and Daddy are so happy about it. The baby grows in here for a little while—” His wife deigned to rest a hand in the general vicinity of her uterus. “And then he’s going to come out and we’re going to set up the bedroom next to yours with a crib. And you can take him on walks, and hold him, and read to him. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
“I’m not sure,” Liza said, frowning. “How do the—tadpoles, how do they…”
“You’re almost forty,” Violet said, studious now in her appraisal.
Marilyn squeezed his hand in desperation. He looked at her helplessly, surveyed his triangle of daughters with their varying amounts of angst. After Liza was born, they’d marveled at the odds—another girl.
“We’re thinking a boy this time,” he said now, squeezing Marilyn’s hand, in return, three times. He nudged Liza with a playful elbow. “Huh, Lize? What do you say?” He could feel the weight of Wendy’s and Violet’s judgment. He cleared his throat. “Tip the scales in my favor.”
* * *
—
Gillian, through Marilyn’s entire pregnancy, seemed to get livelier and prettier as Marilyn grew older and larger. She was on the young side given all that she’d accomplished, energetic and successful in the same way David had been early in their marriage. And Marilyn noticed moments of youthfulness in the woman that reminded her of her daughters—how when she came into the room for the prenatal appointments, Marilyn sometimes felt like her mother or her teacher, firing off a bunch of nervous questions: How was the new apartment? What had she been up to lately? And Gillian, only four years her junior, divulged her dating mishaps and her reluctance to acclimate to the suburbs, lengthy reviews of restaurants in Wicker Park and Roscoe Village that Marilyn and David would never be cool enough to visit.
Odd, perhaps, to seek medical care from a woman who’d attended Christmas parties at your house. But David had been singing her praises since she’d joined the practice and Marilyn felt bad objecting, because to do so seemed like an affront to her husband’s medical expertise. So she signed on as a new patient with Gillian, enduring marginal prickles of impropriety each time the woman queried her about hemorrhoids or discharge. Gillian was professional and hyperintelligent and Marilyn tried to be grateful for this, but she wasn’t entirely comfortable with the fact that her onetime dinner guest had given her multiple pelvic exams.
The one appointment David had to miss, Gillian swept into the room saying, “Heard our favorite superhero doctor got called to the ER.” He had: one of his patients had had a stroke. Marilyn knew this because David had called her. It irked her that Gillian knew as well.
And, oh, what happened next. Because, alone, without her husband, in the company of another woman, she’d gotten weepy; as Gillian prodded at her, looked off into the distance, frowning, listening to overlapping heartbeats, Marilyn started to cry. She surprised herself: she hadn’t, previously, been aware of feeling unhappy.
Gillian was unfazed. She got a few tissues from a box by the door, pulled the gown back down over Marilyn’s belly, and dragged a chair next to the exam table to sit with her. “You want to talk about it?” she asked. “It’s okay if you don’t. Take a few deep breaths.”
She supposed it was because David wasn’t there that she did it—she felt a simultaneous license to disclose and a profound loneliness, exposed like this, solo, in a doctor’s office, though she knew her husband was just a mile away, knew he’d be there if he could be.
“I’m sorry,” she said, but her efforts to speak just made things worse.
“In through your nose. Out through your mouth. It’s okay. Go ahead and cry.”
She mimicked the doctor’s breathing a few times, feeling herself settle. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
Motherhood was the loneliest thing in the world sometimes. And pregnancy was isolating, exhausting; her fatigue distanced her from her daughters and their lives; it made her forgetful and distracted. What made this time so different hadn’t been clear to her until that moment in Gillian’s office, with her husband missing in action. David had always been the one she could go to when she felt alone. It never mattered how disconnected she felt from the world around her, because David was always there. When she was tired or sore or hyperemotional, he’d show up, rub her back, give her a hug, make her laugh. But it didn’t feel that way this time; he was working late hours; the girls were all at varying stages of intolerability; she was thirty-eight years old and had started going to bed before nine some nights.
“I’ve just been feeling very—old, lately, I guess. And David isn’t— Oh, this feels like a betrayal to say when he’s not here.”
“You’re my patient, Marilyn. It won’t leave this room.”
“He’s not attracted to me anymore, it seems. This was never a problem before. He’s just so— We haven’t made love in—since February. We’ve never gone that long.”
“Well,” Gillian said. “It’s a transitional time, you know. Physically, obviously. Emotionally, very much so. It’s not uncommon in the least.”
“We’ve done this three times.” She smiled ruefully. “It’s never been a problem.”
“You’re a little busier this time, though, are you not? A little older.”
She started crying again. “I don’t— I mean, I am. I’m a lot older. And I just wonder if I—if maybe I’m not making myself available enough to him? I feel like I’m in this other world and I’m not even sure how I got there but I’m not doing anything well right now and I…I just wonder if we’ve made the right decision.”
“About what?”
She startled, realizing what she’d said. “I don’t even know why I’m saying any of this. It’s not— I haven’t even really been thinking about it.”
But of course she had. Because Wendy seemed to be on a downward spiral, worlds more vitriolic and afflicted at fifteen than she’d been at four; and Liza was regressing, tiptoeing around with her little hands linked through Marilyn’s belt loops, asking about babies, asking about Santa, asking whether or not she could sleep in their bedroom because she was having nightmares about the characters from Zoobilee Zoo; and she was shocked by her own exhaustion, so much more crushing than it had been with any of the girls. Because she had, on more than one occasion, wondered if things might be easier if they’d decided to keep their roster at its barely manageable three.
“I feel like I don’t have enough of myself to go around,” she said.
“If I may?” Gillian touched her shoulder with a cold hand. David always had cold hands too; they turned up the heat only in the exam rooms to cut costs. “It’s become sort of a running joke around the office. He’s so— I mean, you know. David’s the most professional guy in the room, always. But he starts talking about you and it’s like he’s fifteen years old. His voice changes. I heard him on the phone with you once—I was eavesdropping, shamelessly—and I didn’t know it was him at first. God, the amount of love he has for you.”
“Oh,” she said, embarrassed in a different way now, having moved beyond caring about her coital drought. “You don’t have to say that.”
They were interrupted by a knock on the door. She blotted at her face with the tissue.
Gillian frowned, rose. “Just a minute. One of the nurses, probably.”
But when she opened the door—first a crack, for privacy, and then all the way—it was not one of the nurses but David himself.
“Well, look who’s here,” Gillian said, smiling at them.
David noticed her tears, came to her, squatted
before her with a hand on either of her knees. “What is it, sweetie?” He turned to Gillian. “Is something the matter?”
“I’m fine,” she said, putting her hands over his. “Everything’s fine. Hormones.” She laughed, ashamed, and she felt the fluttering in her belly, their innocent afterthought responding already to the sound of his father’s voice. David rubbed at her thigh over the gown.
“The baby’s okay?” he asked.
“The baby’s wonderful,” Gillian said, betraying nothing. “Everything looks great.”
* * *
—
Wendy had signed up for the spring production of 1776 not because of any particular interest in musical theater but because a boy she liked was on the stage crew. She earned an ensemble role in the front row of the Continental Congress and on opening night she “forgot” her breeches and so was bare-legged beneath her waistcoat, and so finally attracted the amorous attention of swarthy stagehand Aidan O’Brien, and it would’ve been a perfect night were it not for her family, who had insisted on attending the production. She was so mortified by it all, by her motley family: clingy Liza, Violet in her dumb Frank Lloyd Wright vest from her new volunteer job as a Home and Studio tour guide, and her mom, the most embarrassing of all, enormously pregnant, wearing one of her dad’s button-down shirts through which patches of her belly were visible when she moved in certain ways. Wendy had avoided looking at them for the entire production: the obscene swell of her mother and the awkwardness of Liza, who insisted on sitting in their father’s lap even though she was almost ten. Afterward, when everyone was supposed to be paying attention to Wendy, other parents were instead asking her mom about the baby. Her mother, at some point, produced an inexplicable bouquet of lilies from behind her back and presented them to Wendy, stooping with difficulty to kiss her hair.
“We’re so proud of you, Wednesday,” she said, but the niceness of the gesture was overshadowed both by those awful patches between the buttons of the shirt and by the fact that Aidan O’Brien had overheard the dumb nickname her parents called her sometimes.
At dinner, Wendy noticed her mother wincing, squirming, clutching her belly like a kickball.
“You okay?” David asked her. They’d been talking about Wendy, finally, about how pretty she looked in jewel tones, what a coordinated dancer she was, how exciting it had been to see her onstage. She’d been waiting for the inevitable interruption.
“Mm, fine,” her mom said. She made some secret face at their father, half eye-roll, half smile. “Tell me again, Wendy; who was that young woman who played Thomas Jefferson?”
“Summer Frank,” Wendy said. “She’s a ho.” She started talking about her classmate, making scandalizing use of the words skank and grody to her father’s gentle tsking, but then her mother made a quiet groaning noise. She nodded, trying to seem like she was still listening. “Mom, God, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing, honey, sorry,” she said. Now everyone was watching Marilyn with concern, especially Liza, who looked like she might cry. Her mother noticed this and—she was sitting next to Liza; Liza always insisted on sitting next to one of their parents—put her arm around her. “Practice contractions,” she explained apologetically. She kissed Liza’s head.
“You sure?” her father asked.
“Positive.”
“What does that mean?” Liza asked tearfully.
And then she’d launched into an explanation—one that was watered down for Liza’s benefit but still gross—about her cervix and her uterine muscles, about all of the strange private things her body was doing while they were out to dinner, allegedly celebrating Wendy’s stage debut. She smiled at Wendy, finally. “I had these for almost two months before Wendy came along. I’m fine. I’m perfectly fine; keep telling me about this wretched Summer Frank.”
The food arrived, interrupting them again, but by then her stomach had turned, thinking of contractions and kickballs and her own irrelevance, how easily her mother had forgotten her. She wasn’t large, but she was the proportionately biggest person in her family, bested by her mother now only because of her pregnancy. There was the most damning story about how Wendy weighed nearly 10 pounds when she was born, that her birth had nearly done her mother in, her mother who weighed, on a bad day, maybe 115. Wendy’s origin story: the tale of a giant mutant baby hell-bent on wrecking her tiny elfin mother from the inside out. She watched Liza, stick-thin and birdlike, surreptitiously smash three pats of butter onto a piece of bread before shoving it into her mouth. She watched Violet, prissy like Summer Frank, eating the salad she’d ordered in imitation of their mother, undoubtedly in an attempt to seem reasonable and adult. Wendy had ordered penne alla vodka in an effort to appear mature, and she pushed the creamy orange mess around her plate again and again. She thought of her parents naked, her father pumping over her mother; she thought of her mother straining to give birth; she thought of the salad her mother was eating traveling through secret, bloodied channels to feed the new baby. She felt sick. Her father, so tall and thin, had finished his cavatelli quickly and she moved to push some of her food on his plate.
“Eyes bigger than your stomach, Wend?” he asked, joking, accepting the ration.
She forced herself to laugh, felt her mother’s eyes on her, ignored them. It was the first meal she successfully avoided eating.
* * *
—
The Mother’s Day that fell just a week before Grace was born: she awakened to the feel of David’s mouth on her shoulder, kissing a line from the nape of her neck, and she was so disoriented by the notion of being roused by anything romantic that it took her a minute to register him. She shifted and he moved his kisses down into her clavicles and she moaned a little before remembering the unforgettable fact of her girth, remembering that the last time she and David had had sex there had been snow on the ground outside.
“Honey, what are you doing?” She couldn’t roll over without considerable assistance so she flopped artlessly on her back. He was propped up on his elbow, his hair in one of its more comical states of disarray, and she couldn’t help but smile at him.
“What do you think I’m doing?” he asked, laughing, and it occurred to her that she’d forgotten what it felt like to have her husband desire her, and she felt her eyes filling hotly, felt the jab of the baby against her ribs, felt the sheets beneath her, damp with a mammalian but decidedly unconnubial sweat.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said, pressing her face into her pillow.
He moved closer to her, a tentative hand on her side. “What is it?”
“Look at me,” she said into the pillow, her words coming out like marshmallows.
“I am,” David said, running his hand up and down. “I am looking at you.”
“Well, stop.” She looked up and they both laughed. “What’s with us? When did this become so foreign to me? Am I— Something’s off, David, don’t you feel like something’s—” Beneath his hand on her side, the baby kicked hard, and he met her eyes, smiling.
“Things are a little different these days,” he said. “I know we can’t—” He paused, blushing. The idea that they couldn’t was new, specific to this pregnancy; she was convinced that late-term carnal indulgence was what had put her into labor with all three of the girls. “I was reading about— I thought that maybe I could—service you.”
“Service me?” She was horrified. The wave of emotion had passed, its only evidence a salty wetness on her cheeks, cooling in the breeze from their window. “Like a car?”
“No, not like a car,” David said. “Open your legs.” This, whatever it was, sounded suspiciously like a pelvic exam, and she watched him, thighs clamped together. He leaned in and kissed her and then scooted his way down the mattress by her feet and put a hand on her knee, pulling gently. “Come on. Let me do something for you.”
“David, what are you—”
“Shh.”
She shifted somewhat doubtfully and he reached to slide off her underpants. She considered their beige unsexiness, the urine that had probably leaked into their crotch every time she’d sneezed or moved too suddenly since putting them on.
“Do you want an extra pillow?” he asked, and she shook her head, too curious to interrupt him. “Okay,” he said. “Just try to relax.” He reached for her knees again, parting them tenderly. He kissed the inside of each of her thighs and her breath caught in her throat.
“I know you love me,” she said. “I know we’ll have sex again—maybe when the baby’s in college. You don’t need to do this to prove something. You don’t want to put your face—”
She stopped speaking because apparently he did; she suddenly felt his tongue, its rough, catlike warmth between her legs, exploring, venturing shallowly inside her.
“Oh,” she said, more of a gasp than a word. She thought, shamefully, of Dean McGillis, in the sand on Oak Street Beach, their bodies shielded by the boulders. Her life before David. She felt the blood rush to her cheeks. She sank back onto her elbows. “Honey.”
The sensation abated and his face appeared, rising like a moon over her belly. “Everything okay?”
She felt herself flush and she nodded. “Yes.” Resting weakly against her pillow, she added, “Thank you.”
He grinned. “You don’t have to thank me, kid.”
“I might,” she said dizzily. How was it possible they’d never done this before? She did the equivalent for him on occasion—much less frequently since they’d had the children—but she always felt a low-level gag reflex as she did, persevered only because she could see how much he enjoyed it. But this: what was this? She pushed the thought from her head with surprising ease as she felt a quickening low inside of her, David’s tongue—that chaste, gentle tongue—working its way around the sacred space that she hadn’t shared with him in months. Or that he hadn’t wanted her to share. She stroked his neck.
The Most Fun We Ever Had Page 22