Good in Bed

TEN

The summer between my junior and senior years at Princeton, I had an interns hip at the Village Vanguard, the oldest and most attitudinous of the alternative newsweeklies in the country.

It was a wretched three months. For one thing, it was the hottest summer in years. Manhattan was boiling. Every morning I’d start sweating the instant I exited the shower, keep sweating through the subway ride downtown, and basically continue sweating the whole day.

I worked for a horrible woman named Kiki. Six feet tall and skeletally skinny, with henna’d hair, cat-eye thrift shop eyeglasses, and a permanent scowl, Kiki’s summer uniform was a miniskirt paired with thigh-high suede boots, or, alternately, the noisiest clogs in the world, topped with a tight T-shirt advertising Sammy’s Rumanian Restaurant, or the Boy Scouts Gymboree, or something else so square that it was hip.

Initially, Kiki confounded me. The hipster garb made sense, and the bad attitude was par for the Vanguard course, but I couldn’t figure out when she was getting any work done. She showed up late, left early, and took two-hour lunches in between, and seemed to spend most of her time in the office on the phone with a cadre of interchangeable-sounding friends. The mosaic nameplate on the white picket fence she’d ironically erected around her cubicle read “associate editor.” And while she associated plenty, I’d never seen her edit.

She was, however, the master of delegating unpleasant chores. “I’m thinking about women and murder,” she’d announce on a Tuesday afternoon, idly sipping her iced coffee while I stood before her, sweating. “Why don’t you see what we’ve done?”

This was 1991. The back issues of the Vanguard weren’t stored online, or even on microfilm, but in huge, dusty, falling-apart, oversized binders that each weighed at least twenty pounds. These binders were housed along the hallway that linked the offices of columnists to the feeding pen of metal chairs and cigarette-scarred desks that served as workspace for the Vanguard’s lesser luminaries. I spent my days hauling the binders off the shelves, lugging them over first to my desk, then to the copying machine, all the while trying to avoid the gin breath and wandering hands of the nation’s preeminent gun rights activist, whose office was right next to the shelves, and whose favorite summer hobby seemed to be accidentally on purpose brushing against the sides of my breasts when my arms were loaded down with binders.

It was miserable. After two weeks I gave up on the subway and started taking the bus. Even though it made the ride twice as long and just as hot, it kept me out of the sweltering, fetid pit that the 116th Street subway stop had become. One afternoon in early August, I was sitting on the M140, minding my own business and sweating as usual, when, just as the bus lurched past Billy’s Topless, I heard a very small, perfectly calm voice that sounded as if it was coming from the precise base of my skull.

“I know where you’re going,” said the voice. The hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood straight up. I got goosebumps, and was suddenly freezing cold, and I was completely convinced that what I was hearing was… not human. A voice from the spirit world, I might have said that summer, laughing it off with my friends. But really, I thought it was the voice of God.

Of course it wasn’t God, just Ellyn Weiss, the small, strange, androgynous-looking Village Vanguard contributing writer who’d sat down behind me and decided to say, “I know where you’re going” instead of “hello.” But in my mind, I thought that if I ever got to hear the voice of God, it would sound exactly like that: small and still and sure.

Once you’ve heard the voice of God, it changes things. That day, when the preeminent gun rights activist waggled his fingertips against the side of my right breast as he made his lurching way back to his office, I accidentally on purpose dropped 1987 on his foot. “So sorry,” I said, sweet as pie, when he turned the color of a dirty sheet and stumbled away, never to lay a finger on me again. And when Kiki told me, “I’ve been thinking about women and men, and how they’re different,” and asked whether I could start pulling pages, I told her a bald-faced lie. “My advisor says I won’t get credit for this if all you’ve got me doing is photocopying,” I told her. “If you can’t use me, I’m sure the copy editors can.” That very afternoon I slipped Kiki’s skinny, angered clutches and spent the rest of the summer writing headlines, and going out for cheap drinks with my new copy-editing colleagues.

Now, seven years later, I sat cross-legged on a picnic table, my face turned up to the pale November sunshine and my bike parked beside me, waiting to hear that voice again. Waiting for God to take notice as I sat in the center of Pennwood State Park in suburban Pennsylvania five miles from the house I grew up in, for God to look down upon me and intone either, Keep the baby, or Call Planned Parenthood.

I stretched out my legs, lifted my arms over my head, breathing in through my nose, out through my mouth, the way Samantha’s yoga instructor boyfriend said would rid my bloodstream of impurities and increase clear thoughts. If it had happened the way I figured – if I’d gotten pregnant the last time Bruce and I were together – then I was eight weeks along. How big was it, I wondered? The size of a finger-tip, a pencil eraser, a tadpole?

I’d decided that I’d give God another ten minutes, when I heard something.

“Cannie?”

Ugh. That most definitely was not the voice of the divine. I felt the table tilt as Tanya hoisted herself on top of it, but I kept my eyes closed, hoping that maybe, for once, if I ignored her she’d go away.

“Is something wrong?”

Silly me. I was forever forgetting that Tanya was a participant in a clutch of self-help groups: one for families of alcoholics, another for sexual-abuse survivors, a third called Codependent No More!, with an exclamation point as part of its name. Leaving well enough alone wasn’t even a possibility. Tanya was all about intervention.

“It might help if you talk about it,” she rumbled, lighting a cigarette.

“Mm,” I said. Even with my eyes shut I could feel her watching me.

“You got fired,” she suddenly announced.

My eyes flew open in spite of myself. “What?”

Tanya looked inordinately pleased with herself. “I figured it out, didn’t I? Hah! Your mother owes me ten bucks.”

I lay on my back, waving her smoke away from me, feeling a growing annoyance. “No, I did not get fired.”

“Was it Bruce? Did something else happen?”

“Tanya, I really don’t feel like discussing it right now.”

“Bruce, huh?” Tanya said mournfully. “Shit.”

I sat up again. “Why does that bother you?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, your mother figured it was something with Bruce, so if she’s right, I’ve got to pay her.”

Great, I thought. My poor life reduced to a series of ten-dollar bets. Easy tears sprang to my eyes. It seemed these days I was crying about everything, starting with my situation and continuing relentlessly to human-interest stories that ran in the Examiner’s Lifestyle section and Campbell ’s soup commercials.

“I guess you saw that last article he wrote, huh?” said Tanya.

I’d seen it. “Love, Again,” it was called, in the December issue, which had hit stands just in time to ruin my Thanksgiving. “I know I should be focusing on E. by herself,” he’d written.

I know that it’s wrong to compare. But there’s no way to avoid it. After The First, it seems that the next woman is, necessarily, The Second. At least in the beginning, at least for a little while. And E. is in every way different from my first love: short where she was tall, fine and delicate where she was broad and solid, sweet where she was bitterly, mordantly funny.

“Rebound,” my friends tell me, nodding their heads like ancient rabbis instead of twenty-nine-year-old full-time temps and graduate students. “She’s your rebound girl.” But what’s wrong with rebound, I wonder? If there was a first and it didn’t work out, then there has to be a second, a next. Eventually, you have to move on.

If first love was like exploring a new continent, I think that second love is like moving to a new neighborhood. You already know there will be streets and houses. Now you have the pleasure of learning what the houses look like inside, how the streets feel beneath your feet. You know the rules, the basic vocabulary: phone calls, Valentine’s Day chocolates, how to comfort a woman when she tells you what’s gone wrong in her day, in her life. Now you can fine-tune. You find her nickname, how she likes her hand held, the sweet spot just beneath the curve of her jaw…

And that was as far as I’d made it before running to the toilet for my second hurl of the day. Just the idea of Bruce kissing someone else on the sweet spot just beneath the curve of her jaw – even the thought of him noticing such a thing – was enough to send my already queasy stomach into revolt. He doesn’t love me anymore. I had to keep reminding myself of that, and every time I thought those words, it was like hearing them for the first time, in all-capital italic letters, being boomed out by the guy who did voice-overs for movie previews: HE DOESN’T LOVE ME ANYMORE.

“It must be tough,” mused Tanya.

“It’s ridiculous,” I snapped. And really, the whole situation was pretty ridiculous. After three years of resisting his pleas, his offers, his desperate importunings, and biweekly proclamations that I was the only woman he’d ever want, we were apart, I was pregnant, and he’d found somebody else, and I would, most likely, never see him again. (Never was another word I’d hear in my head a lot, as in: You’ll never wake up next to him again, or, You’ll never talk to him on the telephone.)

“So what are you going to do?” she asked.

“That’s the big question,” I said, and hopped off the table and onto my bike, heading back home. Except it didn’t feel like home any-more and, thanks to Tanya’s invasion, I wasn’t sure it ever would again.

The less you know about your parents’ sex lives, the better. Sure, you figure, they had to have done it at least once, to get you, and then maybe a few more times, if you had brothers and sisters, but that was procreation; that was duty, and the thought of them using their various openings and attachments for fun, for pleasure – in short, in the manner you, their child, would like to be using yours – was nothing short of sick-making. Particularly if they were having the kind of trendy, cutting-edge love life that was all the rage in the late 1990s. You don’t need to know about your parents having sex, and you especially don’t need to know about them having hipper sex than you are.

Unfortunately, thanks to Tanya’s self-help training, and my mother’s being rendered senseless by love, I got the whole story.

It started when my brother, Josh, came home from college and was rummaging in my mother’s bathroom for the toenail clippers, when he came across a small stack of Hallmark greeting cards – the kind with abstract watercolors of birds and trees on the front, and florid calligraphy’d sentiments inside. “Thinking of you,” read the front of one, and inside, beneath the rhymed Hallmark couplet, someone had written, “Annie, after three months, the fire still burns strong.” No signature.

“I think they’re from this woman,” said Josh.

“What woman?” I asked.

“The one who’s living here,” said Josh. “Mom says she’s her swim coach.”

A live-in swim coach? This was the first I’d heard of it.

“It’s probably nothing,” I told Josh.

“It’s probably nothing,” Bruce told me, when I’d talked to him that night.

And that was how I started my conversation with my mother when she called at work two days later: “This is probably nothing, but…”

“Yes?” asked my mother.

“Is there, um, someone else… living there?”

“My swim coach,” she said.

“You know, the Olympics were last year,” I said, playing along.

“Tanya’s a friend of mine from the Jewish Community Center. She’s between apartments, and she’s staying in Josh’s room for a few days.”

This sounded slightly suspect. My mother didn’t have friends who lived in apartments, let alone who slept over because they were between them. Her friends all lived in the houses their ex-husbands had left, just like she did. But I let it go until the next time I called home and an unfamiliar voice answered the telephone.

“H’lo?” the strange voice growled. It was, at first, impossible to tell whether I was talking to a woman or a man. But whoever it was sounded as if they’d just gotten out of bed, even though it was almost eight o’clock on a Friday night.

“I’m sorry,” I said politely, “I think I have the wrong number.” “Is this Cannie?” demanded the voice.

“Yes. Who’s this, please?”

“Tanya,” she said proudly. “I’m a friend of your mother’s.” “Oh,” I said. “Oh. Hi.” “Your mother’s told me a lot about you.” “Well, that’s… that’s good,” I said. My mind was churning. Who was this person, and what was she doing answering our telephone?

“But she’s not here right now,” Tanya continued. “She’s playing bridge. With her bridge group.” “Right.” “Do you want me to have her call you?” “No,” I said, “no, that’s okay.” That was Friday. I didn’t speak to my mother again until she called on Monday afternoon at work.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” I asked her, expecting her to say some variation of “No.” Instead, she took a deep breath.

“Well, you know, Tanya… my friend? She’s… well. We’re in love and we’re living together.”

What can I say? Subtlety and discretion run in the family.

“I’ve got to go,” I said, and hung up the phone.

I spent the whole rest of the afternoon staring blankly into space, which, believe me, did nothing to add to the quality of my article about the MTV Video Music Awards. At home, there were three messages on my machine: one from my mother (“Cannie, call me, we need to discuss this”); one from Lucy (“Mom said I have to call you and she didn’t say why”); and one from Josh (“I TOLD you so!”).

I ignored all of them, instead rounding up Samantha for an emergency dessert and strategy session. We went to the bar around the corner, where I ordered a shot of tequila and a slab of chocolate cake with raspberry sauce. Thus fortified, I told her what my mother had told me.

“Wow,” murmured Samantha.

“Good God!” said Bruce, when I told him later that night. But it wasn’t long before his initial shock turned into… well, call it shocked amusement. With a heavy helping of condescension. By the time he arrived at my door he was in full-blown good liberal mode. “You should be glad she’s found someone to love,” he lectured.

“I am,” I said slowly. “I mean, I guess I am. It’s just that…”

“Glad,” Bruce repeated. He could get a little insufferable when it came to toeing the P.C. party line, and to mouthing the beliefs that were practically mandatory among graduate students in the northeast in the nineties. Most of the time I let him get away with it. But this time I wasn’t going to let him make me feel like a bigot, or like I was less open-minded and accepting than he was. This time it was personal.

“How many gay friends do you have?” I asked, knowing what the answer was.

“None, but…”

“None that you know of,” I said, and paused while he let that sink in.

“What does that mean?” he demanded.

“It means what I said. None that you know of.”

“You think one of my friends is gay?”

“Bruce, I didn’t even know my own mother was gay. How do you expect me to have any kind of insight about your friends’ sexuality?”

“Oh,” he said, mollified.

“But my point is that you don’t really know any gay people. So how can you assume it’s such a terrific thing for my mom? That I should be happy about it?”

“She’s in love. How can that be a bad thing?”

“What about this other person? What if she’s awful? What if…” I was starting to cry as the horrible images piled up in my head. “What if, I don’t know, they’re walking somewhere and someone sees them and, and, throws a beer bottle at their heads or something…”

“Oh, Cannie…”

“People are mean! That’s my point! It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, but people are mean… and judgmental… and rotten… and, and you know what my neighborhood’s like! People won’t let their kids trick or treat at our house” Of course, the truth was that nobody’d let their kids trick or treat at our house since 1985 when my father began his downhill slide by neglecting the yardwork and getting in touch with his inner artiste. He’d brought a scalpel home from the hospital and turned half a dozen pumpkins into unflatteringly accurate renditions of members of my mother’s immediate family, including a truly hideous pumpkin Aunt Linda that he’d perched on our porch, topped with a platinum blond wig that he’d swiped from the hospital’s lost and found. But the truth was also that Avondale wasn’t an especially integrated community. No blacks, few Jews, and no openly gay people that I could recall.

“So who cares what people think?”

“I do,” I sobbed. “I mean, it’s nice to have ideals and hope that things will change, but we have to live in the world the way it is, and the world is… is…”

“Why are you crying?” Bruce asked. “Are you worried about your mother, or yourself?” Of course, by that time, I was crying too hard to answer, and there was also a mucus situation that needed immediate attention. I swiped my sleeve across my face and blew my nose noisily. When I looked up, Bruce was still talking. “Your mother’s made her choice, Cannie, and if you’re a good daughter, what you’ll do is support it.”

Well. Easy for him to say. It wasn’t as if the Ever Tasteful Audrey had announced over one of her four-course kosher dinners that she’d decided to park on the other side of the street, as it were. I would bet a week’s pay that the Ever Tasteful Audrey had never even seen another woman’s vagina. She’d probably never even seen her own.

The thought of Bruce’s mother in her whirlpool bathtub for two, discreetly dabbing at her own privates from beneath an Egyptian cotton washcloth with a high thread count, made me laugh a little.

“See?” said Bruce. “You just have to roll with it, Cannie.”

I laughed even harder. Having discharged his boyfriendly duty, Bruce switched gears. His voice dropped from his concerned-guidance-counselor tenor to a more intimate tone. “Come here, girl,” he murmured, sounding for all the world like Lionel Richie as he beckoned me beside him, tenderly kissing my forehead and not so tenderly tossing Nifkin off the bed. “I want you,” he said, and placed my hand on his crotch to remove any doubt.

And so it went.

Bruce left at midnight. I fell into an uneasy sleep and woke up the morning after with the telephone shrilling on my pillow. I unglued one eyelid. 5:15. I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Cannie? It’s Tanya.”

Tanya?

“Your mother’s friend.”

Oh, God. Tanya.

“Hi,” I said weakly. Nifkin stared at me as if to say, what is this about? Then he gave a dismissive sniff and resettled himself on the pillow. Meanwhile, Tanya was talking a blue streak.

“… knew the first time I saw her that she could have feelings for me…”

I struggled to sit up, and groped for a reporter’s notebook. This was too bizarre not to be recording for posterity. By the time our conversation ended, I’d filled nine pages, made myself late for work, and learned every detail about Tanya’s life. I heard how she was molested by her piano teacher, how her mother died of breast cancer when she was young (“I coped with my pain with alcohol”), and how her father had remarried a not-nice book editor who refused to pay Tanya’s tuition to Green Mountain Valley Community College (“they’ve got the third-best program in New England for art therapy”). I learned the name of Tanya’s first love (Marjorie), how she wound up in Pennsylvania (job), and how she’d been in the process of ending a seven-year relationship with a woman named Janet. “She’s very co-dependent,” Tanya confided. “Maybe obsessive-compulsive, too.” At this point I had retreated into full reporter mode and wasn’t saying anything but “Uh-huh,” or, “I see.”

“So I moved out,” she told me.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“And I devoted myself to weaving.”

“I see.”

Then it was on to how she’d met my mother (passionate glances in the ladies’ locker room sauna – I’d almost been forced to put the phone down), where they’d gone on their first date (Thai food), and how Tanya had convinced my mother that her lesbian tendencies were more than a passing fancy.

“I kissed her,” Tanya announced proudly. “And she tried to walk away, and I held her by the shoulders and I looked her in the eyes and I said, ‘Ann, this is not going away.’ ”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “I see.”

Tanya then proceeded to the analysis and reflection portion of the speech.

“The way I see it,” she began, “your mother’s devoted her whole life to you kids.” She said “you kids” in precisely the same tone I would have used for “you infestation of cockroaches.”

“And she put up with that bastard…”

“Which bastard are we talking about here?” I inquired mildly.

“Your father,” said Tanya, who was obviously not going to tone things down for the benefit of the bastard’s offspring. “Like I was saying, she’s devoted her life to you guys… and not that it’s a bad thing. I know how much she wanted to be a mother, and have a family, and, of course, there weren’t other options for dykes back then…”

Dykes? I could barely handle “lesbian.” At what point did my mother get promoted to “dyke”?

“… but what I think,” Tanya continued, “is that now it’s time for your mother to do more of what she wants. To have a life of her own.”

“I see,” I said. “Uh-huh.”

“I’m really looking forward to meeting you,” she said.

“I have to go now,” I said, and hung up the phone. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I wound up doing both at the same time.

“Beyond awful,” I said to Samantha on the car phone.

“A freak like you wouldn’t believe,” I told Andy over lunch.

“Don’t judge,” Bruce warned me, before I’d even said a word.

“She’s… um. She’s into sharing. Lots of sharing.”

“That’s good,” he said, doing his squinchy-blinky thing. “You should do more sharing, Cannie.”

“Huh? Me?”

“You’re very closed with your emotions. You keep everything so tight inside you.”

“You know, you’re right,” I said. “Let’s find a total stranger so I can tell how my piano teacher groped me.”

“Huh?”

“She was molested,” I said. “And she told me all the gory details.”

Even Mr. Love Everyone seemed taken aback by this information. “Oh my.”

“Yeah. And her mother had breast cancer, and her stepmother convinced her father not to pay her community college loans.”

Bruce looked at me skeptically. “She told you all this?”

“What do you think, I drove home and read her diary? Of course she told me!” I paused to poach a few french fries off his plate. We were at the Tick Tock Diner, home of the enormous portion and the surliest waitresses south of New York. I never ordered fries there, but I used all my powers of persuasion to get Bruce to order them, so I could share. “She sounds seriously cracked.”

“You probably made her uncomfortable.”

“But I didn’t say anything! She’s never even met me! And she was the one who called me, so how could I make her uncomfortable?”

Bruce shrugged. “It’s just the way you are, I guess.”

I scowled at him. He reached for my hand. “Don’t get mad. It’s just that… you have this kind of judgmental thing going on.”

“Says who?”

“Well, my friends, I guess.”

“What, just because I think they should get jobs?”

“See, there you go. That’s judgmental.”

“Honey, they’re slackers. Accept it. It’s the truth.”

“They’re not slackers, Cannie. They do have jobs, you know.”

“Oh, come on. What does Eric Silverberg do for a living?”

Eric, as we both knew, had a full-time temporary job at an Internet startup, where, as best we could both figure, he spent his days trading Springsteen bootleg tapes, meeting girls on one of the three online dating services he subscribed to, and arranging drug buys.

“George has a real job.”

“George spends every weekend in a Civil War reenactment brigade. George owns his own musket.”

“You’re changing the subject,” Bruce said. I could tell he was trying to stay angry, but he was starting to smile.

“I know,” I said. “It’s just that a guy who has his own musket is such an easy punchline.”

I stood up, crossed the table, and sat down next to him on his side of the booth, squeezing his thigh and resting my head against his shoulder. “You know the only reason I’m judgmental is because I’m jealous,” I said. “I wish I could have that kind of life. No college loans to pay, rent taken care of, nice, stable, married heterosexual parents who’d set me up with their slightly used furniture every time they redecorate and buy me a car for Chanukah…” My voice trailed off. Bruce was staring at me hard. I realized that, in addition to describing most of his friends, I’d just described him, too.

“I’m sorry,” I said gently. “It’s just that sometimes it feels like everybody’s got things easier than I do, and that every time I get close to having things be kind of okay… something like this happens.”

“Did you ever think that maybe these things happen to you because you’re strong enough to take them?” Bruce asked. He reached down, grabbed my hand, and moved it up on his thigh. Way up. “You’re so strong, Cannie,” he whispered.

“I just,” I said, “I wish…” And then he was kissing me. I could taste ketchup and salt on his lips. Then his tongue was in my mouth. I shut my eyes and let myself forget.

I spent the weekend at Bruce’s apartment. It was one of those times where we got it just right: good sex, a nice meal out, lazy afternoons trading sections of the Sunday Times, and then I was on my way home before we started grating on each other. We talked about my mother a little bit, but mostly I got to just lose myself with him. And he gave me his favorite flannel shirt to wear home. It smelled like him, like us: like dope and sex, his skin and my shampoo. It was too tight across my chest – all of his things were – but the sleeves fell to my finger-tips, and I felt enclosed, comforted, as if he was there hugging me tight, holding my hands.

Be brave, I thought back home in my bed. I pulled Bruce’s shirt tight around me, tilted my cheek toward Nifkin so he could give me an encouraging lick, and phoned home.

Thankfully, my mother answered. “Cannie!” she said, sounding relieved. “Where have you been? I’ve been calling and calling…”

“I went to Bruce’s,” I told her. “We had theater tickets,” I lied. Bruce didn’t do well in theaters. Short attention span.

“Well,” she said. “Well. Um, I want to tell you that I’m sorry for springing things on you like that. I guess I should have… well, I know I should have waited and maybe told you in person…”

“Or at least not at the office,” I said.

She laughed. “Right. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“So…” I could almost hear her testing half a dozen opening remarks in her head. “Do you have any questions?” she finally asked.

I took a deep breath. “Are you happy?”

“I feel like I’m in high school!” my mother said jubilantly. “I feel… oh, I can’t even describe it.”

Please, don’t try, I thought.

“Tanya’s really terrific. You’ll see.”

“How old is she?” I asked.

“Thirty-six,” said my fifty-six-year-old mother.

“A younger woman,” I observed. My mother giggled. You have no idea how disturbing that was. My mother has never been the giggling type.

“She does seem to have a little problem with… boundaries,” I ventured.

My mother’s voice got very serious. “What do you mean?”

“Well, she called me Friday morning… I guess you weren’t there”

A quick intake of breath. “What did she say?”

“It might take me less time to cover what she didn’t say.”

“Oh, God. Oh, Cannie.”

“I mean, I’m sorry she was, you know, molested…”

“Oh, Cannie, she didn’t!” But underneath the shocked, horrified tone, my mother sounded… almost proud. As if underneath the anger, she was indulging a favored child in the child’s favorite prank.

“Yup,” I said grimly. “I got the whole saga, from the piano teacher who tickled her ivories…”

“… Cannie!”

“… and the wicked stepmother, to the obsessive-compulsive co-dependent ex-girlfriend.”

“Ack,” said my mother. “Jeez.”

“She might want to consider some therapy,” I said.

“She goes. Believe me, she goes. She’s been going for years.”

“And she still hasn’t figured out that you don’t go blurting your whole life story to a complete stranger the first time you speak to them?”

My mother sighed. “I guess not,” she said.

I waited. I waited for an apology, an explanation, something that could make sense of this. Nothing came. After a moment of awkward silence, my mother changed the subject, and I went along, hoping this was a phase, a fling, a bad dream, even. No such luck. Tanya had arrived for good.

What does a lesbian bring on a second date? goes the joke. A U-Haul. What does a gay guy bring on a second date? What second date?

An old joke, true, but there’s a certain amount of truth to it. After they started dating, Tanya did in fact move out of the basement of her codependent obsessive-compulsive ex-girlfriend’s condominium and into an apartment of her own.

But for all intents and purposes, she’d moved in on the second date. I realized this when I came home six weeks after what my siblings and I were referring to as Mom’s Outage, and saw the writing on the wall.

Well, the poster on the wall. “Inspiration,” it read, above a picture of a cresting wave, “is believing we can all pull together.”

“Mom?” I called, dropping my bags on the floor. Nifkin, meanwhile, was whining and cringing by my legs in a most un-Nifkin-like manner.

“In here, honey,” yelled my mother.

Honey? I wondered, and walked into the family room with Nifkin cowering behind me. This time, the new poster was of frolicking dolphins. “Teamwork,” it said. And beneath the dolphin poster were my mother and a woman who could only be Tanya, in matching purple sweatsuits.

“Hey!” said Tanya.

“Hey,” my mother repeated.

A large tangerine-colored cat leapt off of the windowsill, stalked insolently up to Nifkin, and stretched out a paw, claws extended. Nifkin gave a shrill yip and fled.

“Gertrude! Bad cat!” called Tanya. The cat ignored her and curled up in a patch of sunlight in the center of the room.

“Nifkin!” I called. From upstairs I heard a faint whine of protest – Nifkin-speak for no way, no day.

“Do we have employees that we’re trying to motivate?” I asked, pointing at the teamwork dolphins.

“Huh?” said Tanya.

“What?” said my mother.

“The posters,” I said. “We’ve got the exact same ones in the printing plant at work. Right next to the “27 Days Injury Free” sign. They’re, like, motivational artwork.”

Tanya shrugged. I’d been expecting a standard-issue gym teacher, with sinewy calves and ropy biceps and a no-nonsense haircut. Evidently I’d been expecting wrong. Tanya was a tiny boiled pea of a woman, barely five feet tall, with an aureole of frizzy reddish hair and skin tanned the color and consistency of old leather. No chest or hips to speak of. She looked like a little kid, right down to the scabby knees and the Band-Aid wrapped around one finger. “I just like dolphins,” she said shyly.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “I see.”

And those were just the most obvious of the changes. There was a collection of dolphin figurines above the fireplace where the family pictures had been. Plastic magazine racks were bolted to the walls, giving our family room the look of a doctor’s office – the better to display Tanya’s copies of Rehabilitation magazine. And when I went to drop my bags in my room, the door wouldn’t open.

“Mom!” I called, “there’s something wrong up here!”

I heard a whispered consultation going on in the kitchen: my mother’s voice calm and soothing, Tanya’s bass grumble rising toward hysteria. Every once in a while I could make out words. “Therapist” and “privacy” seemed to comprise a dominant theme. Finally my mother walked up the stairs, looking troubled.

“Um, actually, I was going to talk to you about this.”

“About what? The door being stuck?”

“Well, the door’s locked, actually.”

I just stared.

“Tanya’s kind of been… keeping some of her things in there.”

“Tanya,” I pointed out, “has an apartment. Can’t she keep her things there?”

My mother shrugged. “Well, it’s a very small apartment. An effi-ciency, really. And it just kind of made sense… maybe you can sleep in Josh’s room tonight.”

At this point I was getting impatient. “Ma, it’s my room. I’d like to sleep in my room. What’s the big deal?”

“Well, Cannie, you don’t… you don’t live here anymore.”

“Of course I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to sleep there when I come home.”

My mother sighed. “We made some changes,” she murmured.

“Yeah, I noticed. So what’s the big deal?”

“We, um… well. We kind of got rid of your bed.”

I was speechless. “You got rid of…”

“Tanya needed the space for her loom.”

“There’s a loom in there?”

Indeed there was. Tanya stomped up the stairs, unbolted the door, and stomped back downstairs, looking sullen. I entered my room and saw the loom, a computer, a battered futon, a few ugly pressboard bookshelves covered with plastic walnut veneer, containing volumes with titles like Smart Women, Foolish Choices, and Courage to Heal, and It’s Not What You’re Eating, It’s What’s Eating You. There was a rainbow-triangle suncatcher hanging in the window and, worst of all, an ashtray on the desk.

“She smokes?”

My mother bit her lip. “She’s trying to quit.”

I inhaled. Sure enough, Marlboro Lights and incense. Yuck. Why did she have to plant her self-help guides and her cigarette smells in my room? And where was my stuff?

I turned toward my mother. “You know, you really could have told me about this. I could have come down and taken my things with me.”

“Oh, we didn’t get rid of anything, Cannie. It’s all in boxes in the basement.”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, that makes me feel a lot better.”

“Look,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to balance things here”

“No, no,” I said. “ ‘Balance’ involves taking different things into account. This,” I said, sweeping my hand to indicate the loom, the ashtray, the stuffed dolphin perched upon the futon, “is taking what one person wants into account, and completely screwing the other person. This is completely selfish. This is absolutely ridiculous. This is…”

“Cannie,” said Tanya. She’d somehow come up the stairs without my hearing.

“Excuse us, please,” I said, and slammed the door in her face. I took a perverse pleasure in listening to her work at the door handle after I’d locked it with her lock.

My mother started to sit down where my bed used to be, caught herself mid-sit and settled for Tanya’s desk chair. “Cannie, look. I know this is a shock”

“Have you gone completely crazy? This is ridiculous! All it would have taken was one lousy phone call. I could have come, gotten my stuff…”

My mother looked miserable. “I’m sorry,” she said again.

I wound up not staying the night. That visit occasioned my first – and, so far, my last – stint at therapy. The Examiner’s health plan paid for ten visits with Dr. Blum, the smallish, Little Orphan Annie -looking woman who scribbled frantically, while I told her the whole crazy-father-bad-divorce-‌lesbian-mother tale. I worried about Dr. Blum. For one thing, she always looked a little scared of me. And she always seemed a few twists behind the current plot.

“Now, back up,” she’d say, when I’d segue abruptly from Tanya’s latest atrocity to my sister, Lucy’s, inability to keep a job. “Your sister was, um, dancing topless for a living, and your parents didn’t notice?’

“This was ’86,” I’d say. “My father was gone. And my mother somehow managed to miss the fact that I was sleeping with my substitute history teacher and I’d gained fifty pounds during my freshman year of college, so yeah, she pretty much believed that Lucy was babysitting until four every morning.”

Dr. Blum would squint down at her notes. “Okay, and the history teacher was… James?”

“No, no. James was the guy on the crew team. Jason was the E-Z-Lube poet. And Bill was the guy in college, and Bruce is the guy right now.”

“Bruce!” she’d say triumphantly, having located his name in her notes.

“But I’m really worried that I’m, you know, leading him on or something.” I sighed. “I’m not sure I really love him.”

“Let’s go back to your sister for a minute,” she’d say, flipping faster and faster through her legal pad, while I sat there and tried not to yawn.

In addition to her inability to keep up, Dr. Blum was rendered less than trustworthy by her clothes. She dressed as if she didn’t know there was such a thing as the petite section. Her sleeves routinely brushed her fingertips; her skirts sagged around her ankles. I opened up as best I could, answered her questions when she asked them, but I never really trusted her. How could I trust a woman who had even less fashion sense than I did?

At the end of our ten sessions, she didn’t quite pronounce me cured, but she did leave me with two pieces of advice.

“First,” she said, “you can’t change anything anybody else in this world does. Not your father, not your mother, not Tanya, not Lisa…”

“… Lucy,” I corrected.

“Right. Well, you can’t control what they do, but you can control how you respond to it… whether you allow it to drive you crazy, or occupy all of your thoughts, or whether you note what they’re doing, consider it, and make a conscious decision as to how much you’ll let it affect you.”

“Okay. And what’s thing two?”

“Hang on to Bruce,” she said seriously. “Even if you don’t think he’s Mr. Right. He’s there for you, and he sounds like a good support, and I think you’re going to need that in the coming months.”

We shook hands. She wished me good luck. I thanked her for her help and told her that Ma Jolie in Manayunk was having a big sale, and that they made things in her size. And that was the end of my big therapy experience.

I wish that I could say that, in the years since Tanya and her loom and her pain and her posters moved in, that things have gotten easier. The fact is, they haven’t. Tanya has the people skills of plant life. It’s like a special kind of tone-deafness, only instead of not hearing the music, she’s deaf to nuances, to subtleties, to euphemisms, small talk, and white lies. Ask her how she’s doing, and you’ll get a full and lengthy explication of her latest work/health crisis, complete with an invitation to look at her latest surgical scar. Tell her that you liked whatever she cooked (and Lord knows you’ll be lying), and she’ll regale you with endless recipes, each with a story behind it (“My mother cooked this for me, I remember, the night after she came home from the hospital”).

At the same time, she’s also incredibly thin-skinned, prone to public crying fits, and temper tantrums that conclude with her either locking herself in my ex-bedroom, if we’re home, or stomping away from wherever we are, if we’re out. And she dotes on my mother in the most annoying way you could imagine, following her around like a lovestruck puppy, always reaching to hold her hand, touch her hair, rub her feet, tuck a blanket around her.

“Sick,” pronounced Josh.

“Immature,” said Lucy.

“I don’t get it,” is what I said. “Having somebody treat you that way for, like, a week would be nice… but where’s the challenge? Where’s the excitement? And what do they talk about?”

“Nothing,” said Lucy. The three of us had come home for Chanukah, and we were sitting around the family room after the guests had gone home and my mother and Tanya had gone to bed, all of us holding the gifts Tanya had woven for us. I had a rainbow-colored scarf (“You can wear it to the Pride Parade,” Tanya offered). Josh had mittens, also in the gay-pride rainbow, and Lucy had an odd-looking bundle of yarn that Tanya had explained was a muff. “It’s to keep your hands warm,” she’d rumbled, but Lucy and I had already dissolved into gales of laughter, and Josh was wondering in a whisper whether such a thing could be dropped to the bottom of the pool for a little summertime muff diving.

Nifkin, who’d been given a little rainbow sweater, was in my lap, sleeping with one eye open, ready to bolt for higher ground should the evil cats Gertrude and Alice appear. Josh was on the couch, picking out what sounded like the theme song from Beverly Hills, 90210 on his guitar.

“In fact,” said Lucy, “they don’t talk at all.”

“Well, what would they talk about?” I asked. “I mean, Mom’s educated… she’s traveled…”

“Tanya puts her hand over Mom’s mouth when Jeopardy comes on,” said Josh morosely, and switched to “Sex and Candy” on the guitar.

“Ew,” I said.

“Yup,” confirmed Lucy. “She says it’s obnoxious how Mom shouts out the answers.”

“It’s probably just that she doesn’t know any of them herself,” said Josh.

“You know,” said Lucy, “the lesbian thing is okay. It would’ve been all right…”

“… if it had been a different kind of woman,” I finished, and sat there, picturing a more appropriate same-sex love: say, a chic film professor from UPenn, with tenure and a pixie haircut and interesting amber jewelry, who’d introduce us to independent film directors and take my mother to Cannes. Instead, my mother had fallen for Tanya, who was neither well-read nor chic, whose cinematic tastes ran toward the later works of Jerry Bruckheimer, and who didn’t own a single piece of amber.

“So what is it?” I asked. “What’s the attraction? She isn’t pretty…”

“That’s for sure,” said Lucy, shuddering dramatically.

“Or smart… or funny… or interesting…”

We all sat, silent, as it dawned on us what the attraction might be.

“I’ll bet she’s got a tongue like a whale,” said Lucy. Josh made retching noises. I rolled my eyes, feeling queasy.

“Like an anteater!” cried Lucy.

“Lucy, cut it out!” I said. Nifkin woke up and started growling. “Besides, even if it is just sex, that’ll only get you so far.”

“How would you know?” said Lucy.

“Trust me,” I said. “Mom’ll get bored.”

We all sat for a minute, thinking that over.

“It’s like she doesn’t care about us anymore,” Josh blurted.

“She cares,” I said. But I wasn’t sure. Before Tanya, my mother had liked to do things with us… when we were all together. She’d visit me in Philadelphia, and Josh in New York. She’d cook when we came home, call us a few times a week, keep busy with her book clubs and lecture groups, her wide circle of friends.

“All she cares about is Tanya,” said Lucy bitterly.

And I didn’t have an argument for that. Sure, she’d still call us… but not as often. She hadn’t visited me in months. Her days (not to mention her nights) seemed full of Tanya – the bike trips they went on, the tea dances they attended, the weekend long Ritual of Healing that Tanya had taken my mother to as a special three-month-anniversary surprise, where they’d burned sage and prayed to the Moon Goddess.

“It won’t last,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. “It’s just an infatuation.”

“What if it isn’t?” Lucy demanded. “What if it’s true love?”

“It’s not,” I said again. But inside, I thought that maybe it was. That this was it, and we’d all be stuck, saddled with this horrible, graceless emotional wreck of a creature for the rest of our lives. Or at least the rest of our mother’s life. And after…

“Think of the funeral,” I mused. “God. I can just hear her…” And I dropped my voice to a Tanya rasp. “Your mother would want me to have that,” I growled. “But Tanya,” I said in my own voice, “… that’s my car!”

Josh’s lips twitched upward. Lucy laughed. I did the Tanya-growl again.

“She knew how much it meant to me!”

Now Josh was out-and-out smiling. “Do the poem,” he said.

I shook my head.

“C’mon, Cannie!” begged my sister.

I cleared my throat, and began to recite Philip Larkin. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”

“They fill you with the faults they had…” continued Lucy.

“And add some extra, just for you,” said Josh.

“But they were fucked up in their turn, by fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern, and half at one another’s throats.”

And we joined in together, the three of us, for the last stanza – the one I couldn’t even bring myself to think of in my present predicament. “Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like the coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself.”

Then, at Lucy’s suggestion, we all got to our feet – Nifkin included – and dropped our knitted items into the fireplace.

“Begone, Tanya!” Lucy intoned.

“Return, heterosexuality!” Josh implored.

“What they said,” I echoed, and watched the pride muffler burn.

Back at home, I parked my bike in the garage, next to Tanya’s little green car with its “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” bumper sticker, hauled the gigantic frozen turkey out of the garage freezer, and set it in the sink to defrost. I took a quick shower and went into the Room Formerly Known as Mine, where I’d been camped out since my arrival. In between short bike rides and long baths and showers, I’d dragged enough blankets out of the linen closet to turn Tanya’s futon into a triple-lined oasis. I had also dug a crate of books out of the basement and was working my way through all the hits of my childhood: Little House on the Prairie, The Phantom Tollbooth, the Narnia chronicles, and The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. I was regressing, I thought bleakly. A few more days and I’d be practically embryonic myself.

I sat at Tanya’s desk and checked my e-mail. Work, work. Old Person, Angry (“Your comments about CBS being the network for viewers who like their food prechewed were disgraceful!”). And a note from Maxi. “It’s 98 degrees here every day,” she wrote. “I’m hot. I’m bored. Tell me about Thanksgiving. What’s the cast?”

I sat down to reply. “Thanksgiving is always a production in our house,” I wrote. “Start off with me, and my mother, and Tanya, and Josh and Lucy. Then there’s my mother’s friends, and their husbands and kids, and whichever lost souls Tanya recruits. My mother makes dried turkey. Not intentionally dried, but because she insists on cooking it on the gas grill, and she hasn’t quite figured out how to cook it long enough so that it’s done, but not so long that it’s not leathery. Mashed sweet potatoes. Mashed potato potatoes. Some kind of green thing. Stuffing. Gravy. Cranberry sauce from a can.” My stomach turned over even as I typed. I had pretty much stopped being nauseous during the last week, but just the thought of turkey jerky, Tanya’s lumpy gravy, and canned cranberry cocktail was enough to make me grab for the saltines I’d packed.

“The food’s not really the point,” I continued. “It’s nice to see people. I’ve known some of them since I was a little girl. And my mom builds a fire, and the house smells like wood smoke, and we all go around the table and name one thing we’re thankful for.”

“What will you say?” Maxi shot back.

I sighed, wriggling my feet in the thick wool socks I’d swiped from Tanya’s L.L. Bean stash, and tugged the afghan I’d lifted from the family room tighter around me. “I’m not feeling especially thankful right now,” I typed back, “but I’ll think of something.”

ELEVEN

Thanksgiving Day dawned crisp and cold and brilliantly sunny. I dragged m yself out of bed, still yawning at ten in the morning, and spent a few hours outside raking leaves with Josh and Lucy while Nifkin kept watch on us, and on the stalking cats, from the porch.

At three that afternoon, I took a shower, blew my hair into some semblance of style, and put on lipstick and mascara, plus the wide-legged black velvet pants and black cashmere sweater I’d packed, hoping that the cumulative effect would be both stylish and slimming. Lucy and I set the table, Josh boiled and peeled shrimp, and Tanya bustled around the kitchen, making more noise than food, and breaking frequently for cigarettes.

At 4:30 the guests started to arrive. My mother’s friend Beth came with her husband and three tall, blond sons, the youngest of whom was sporting a nose ring right through his septum, giving him the look of a baffled Jewish bull. Beth hugged me and started sliding trays of appetizers into the oven while Ben, the pierced one, started discreetly chucking salted nuts at Tanya’s cats. “You look great!” Beth said, like she always says. It wasn’t even close to being true, but I appreciated the sentiment. “I loved your story about Donny and Marie’s new show. When you said how they were singing with LeAnn Rimes and it looked like they wanted to suck the lifeblood out of her… that was so funny!”

“Thanks,” I said. I love Beth. Trust her to remember the “Mormon vampires” line, the one that I’d loved, too, even if it had occasioned half a dozen angry phone calls to my editor, a fistful of furious letters (“Dear Too-Bit reporter” my favorite one began), plus an earnest visit from two nineteen-year-old Brigham Young University students who were visiting Philadelphia and promised to pray for me.

Tanya contributed green beans with the crunchy canned onions on top and a can of undiluted Campbell ’s Cream of Mushroom soup mixed in, then galumphed into the family room and built a blazing fire. The house filled with the sweet smell of wood smoke and roasting turkey. Nifkin and Gertrude and Alice arranged a cease-fire and curled blissfully in front of the flames, all in a row. Josh passed around the shrimp he’d prepared. Lucy mixed Manhattans – she’d perfected them during a stint as a bartender that followed the topless dancing escapade but preceded her six weeks doing phone sex.

“You look lousy,” she observed, handing me a drink. Lucy herself looked great, as always. My sister is just fifteen months younger than I am. People tell us we looked like twins when we were little. Nobody says that anymore. Lucy’s thin – she always has been – and she wears her wavy hair short, so that the slightly pointed tips of her ears show when she shakes her head. She’s got full, lush lips and big, brown Betty Boop eyes and she presents herself to the world like the star she thinks she ought to be. It’s been years since I’ve seen her without a full face of makeup, her lips expertly outlined and colored, her eyebrows dramatically plucked, a tiny silver stud flashing and winking from the center of her tongue. She was dressed for the Thanksgiving feast in skintight black leather pants, high-heeled black boots, and a sequined pink sweater set. She looked like she’d just stepped out of a photo shoot, or stopped in for a quick drink before heading off to someone else’s much more stylish holiday festivities.

“I’m a little stressed out,” I said, yawning, handing the drink back, and wishing there was time for another nap.

My mother bustled around the table with the same placecards she’d used at Passover the year before. I knew there was one that said “Bruce” somewhere in the pile, and I hoped, for my sake, that she’d discarded it rather than crossing his name off and writing in someone else’s as a way to economize.

The last time he’d been here it had been winter. Josh and Lucy and Bruce and I had stood on the porch, sipping the beers that Tanya refused to let us keep in the refrigerator. (“I’m in recovery!” she’d bleat, holding the offending bottles as if they were grenades.) Then we’d gone for a walk around the block. Halfway back, it had started to snow, unexpectedly. And Bruce and I stood, holding hands with our eyes shut and our mouths wide open, feeling the flakes like tiny wet kisses on our cheeks, long after everyone else went inside.

I closed my eyes against the memory.

Lucy stared at me. “Jeez, Cannie. Are you okay?”

I blinked back the tears. “Just tired.”

“Hmmph,” said Lucy. “Well, I’ll just mash a little something special into your potatoes.”

I shrugged, and made sure to avoid the potatoes at dinner. We followed my mother’s Thanksgiving tradition, going around the table and talking about what we were thankful for that year. “I’m thankful for having found so much love,” rasped Tanya, as Lucy and Josh and I winced and my mother took Tanya’s hand.

“I’m thankful for having my wonderful family together,” said my mother. Her eyes were glistening. Tanya kissed her cheek. Josh groaned. Tanya shot him a dirty look.

“I’m thankful…” I had to think for a while. “I’m thankful that Nifkin survived his bout with hemorrhagic gastroenteritis last summer,” I finally said. At the sound of his name, Nifkin put his paw on my lap and whined beseechingly. I slipped him a piece of turkey skin.

“Cannie!” yelled my mother, “stop feeding that dog!”

“I’m thankful I still have an appetite after hearing about Nifkin’s trouble,” said Ben, who, in addition to the nose ring, was irritating his parents by sporting a “What Would Jesus Do?” T-shirt.

“I’m thankful that Cannie didn’t dump Bruce until after my birthday, so that I got those Phish tickets,” said Josh in his deep, deadpan baritone, which went nicely with his six-foot-tall, skin-and-bones frame, and the little goatee he’d grown since I’d seen him last. “Thanks,” he stage-whispered.

“Think nothing of it,” I whispered back.

“And I’m thankful,” concluded Lucy, “that everyone’s here to hear my big news!”

My mother and I exchanged anxious glances. Lucy’s last big exciting news had been a plan – thankfully aborted – to move to Uzbekistan with a guy she’d met at a bar. “He’s a lawyer over there,” she’d said con-fidently, gliding smoothly over the fact that he was a Pizza Hut delivery guy over here. Before that, there’d been the plan for the bagel bakery in Montserrat, where she’d gone to visit a friend in medical school. “Not a bagel to be had down there!” she’d said triumphantly, and got as far as filling out the papers for a small business loan before Montserrat’s long-dormant volcano erupted, the island was evacuated, and Lucy’s bagel dreams died a hot molten death.

“What’s the news?” asked my mother, looking into Lucy’s shining eyes.

“I got an agent!” she trilled. “And he got me a photo shoot!”

“Topless?” asked Josh dryly. Lucy shook her head. “No, no, I’m done with all that. This is legitimate. I’m modeling rubber gloves.”

“Fetish magazine?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself.

Lucy’s face fell. “Why doesn’t anyone believe in me?” she demanded. Knowing my family, it was just a matter of time before somebody launched into Lucy’s Catalogue of Failures – from school to relationships to the jobs she’d never kept.

I leaned across the table and took my sister’s hand. She jerked her hand back. “No unnecessary touch!” she said. “What’s with you, anyhow?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We weren’t giving you a chance.” And that’s when I heard the voice. Not God’s voice, unfortunately, but Bruce’s. “Good,” he said. “That was nice.”

I looked around, startled.

“Cannie?” said my mother.

“Thought I heard something,” I said. “Never mind.”

And while Lucy prattled on about her agent, her photo shoot, and what she’d wear, all the while evading my mother’s increasingly pointed questions about whether she was getting paid for this or what, I ate turkey and stuffing and glutinous green bean casserole, and thought about what I’d heard. I thought about how maybe even though I’d never see Bruce again, it might be possible to keep part of him, or of what we were together, if I could be more openhearted, and kind. For all of his lecturing, for every time he was didactic and condescending, I knew that he was basically a kind person, and I… well, I was too, in my private life, but it could be argued that I was making my living by being unkind. But maybe I could change. And maybe he’d like that, and someday like me better… and love me again. Assuming, of course, we ever even saw each other again.

Underneath the table, Nifkin twitched and growled at something chasing through his dream. My eyes were clear, and my head felt cool and ordered. It wasn’t as if all of my problems were gone – as if any of them were gone, really – but for the first time since I’d seen the little plus sign on the EPT stick, it felt like I might be able to see myself safely through them. I had something to hold on to, now, no matter what choice I made – I can be a better person, I thought. A better sister, a better daughter, a better friend.

“Cannie?” said my mother. “Did you say something?”

I didn’t. But at that moment I thought that I felt the faintest flutter in my belly. It might have been all the food, or all of my anxiety, and I knew it was much too early to really feel anything. But it felt like something. Like something waving at me. A tiny little hand, five fingers spread like a starfish, waving through the water. Hello and good-bye.

The last day of my Thanksgiving break, before I was going to make the trek back into town and pick up the pieces of my life where I’d left them, my mother and I went swimming. It was the first time I’d been back to the Jewish Community Center since I’d learned that it was the scene of my mother’s seduction. After that, the steam room had never felt quite the same.

But I’d missed swimming, I realized, as I stood in the locker room and pulled on my suit. I had missed the tang of chlorine in my nose and the old Jewish ladies who’d parade through the locker room completely naked, completely unashamed, and swap recipes and beauty tips while they got dressed. The feel of the water, holding me up, and the way I could forget almost anything but the rhythm of my breath as I swam.

My mother swam a mile every morning, moving slowly through the water with a massive kind of grace. I kept up with her for maybe half of it, then slipped into one of the empty lap lanes and did a languid sidestroke for a while, thinking of nothing. Which I knew was a luxury I couldn’t afford much longer. If I wanted to get things taken care of (and that was the phrase I was using in my mind), it would have to be soon.

I flipped on my back and thought about what I’d felt at Thanksgiving dinner. That tiny hand, waving. Ridiculous, really. The thing probably didn’t have hands, and if it did, it certainly couldn’t wave them.

I’d always been pro-choice. I had never romanticized pregnancies, intended or otherwise. I wasn’t one of those women who sees her thirtieth birthday coming and starts cooing at anything in a stroller with drool on its chin. I had a few friends who’d gotten married and started their families, but I had many more friends in their late twenties and early thirties who hadn’t. I didn’t hear my clock ticking. I didn’t have baby fever.

I rolled back over and commenced a lazy breaststroke. The thing was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had been somehow decided for me. As if it was out of my control now, and all I was supposed to do was sit back and let it happen.

I blew a frustrated breath into the water, watching bubbles roil around me. I’d still feel better about all of this if I could have heard God’s voice again, if I knew for sure that I was doing the right thing.

“Cannie?”

My mother swam into the lane beside me. “Two more laps,” she said. We finished them together, matching each other breath for breath, stroke for stroke. Then I followed her into the locker room.

“Now,” my mother began, “what is going on with you?”

I looked at her, surprised. “With me?”

“Oh, Cannie. I’m your mother. I’ve known you for twenty-seven years.”

“Twenty-eight,” I corrected.

She squinted at me. “Did I forget your birthday?”

I shrugged. “I think you sent a card.”

“Is that what it is?” asked my mother. “Are you worried about getting older? Are you depressed?”

I shrugged again. My mother was sounding more worried.

“Are you getting any help? Are you talking to anyone?”

I snorted, imagining how useless the little doctor, drowning in her clothes, would be in a situation like this. “Now, Bruce is your boyfriend,” she’d begin, flipping through her ever-present legal pad.

“Was,” I’d correct.

“And you’re thinking about… adoption?”

“Abortion,” I’d say.

“You’re pregnant,” said my mother.

I sat up straight, my mouth falling open. “What?”

“Cannie. I’m your mother. A mother knows these things.”

I drew my towel tight around me and wondered whether it would be too much to hope that this was one of the few things my mother and Tanya hadn’t made a bet about.

“And you look just like I did,” she continued. “Tired all the time. When I was pregnant with you I slept fourteen hours a day.” I didn’t say anything.

I didn’t know what to say. I knew I would have to start talking about it to someone, at some point, but I didn’t have words ready.

“Have you thought about names?” my mother asked me.

I gave a short, barking laugh. “I haven’t thought about anything,” I said. “I haven’t thought about where I’ll live, or what I’ll do…”

“But you’re going to…” Her voice trailed off delicately.

“Seems that way,” I said. There. Out loud. It was real.

“Oh, Cannie!” She sounded – if it’s possible – at once thrilled and brokenhearted. Thrilled, I guess, that she’d get to be a grandmother (unlike me, my mother was prone to cooing over anything in a stroller). And brokenhearted because this wasn’t a situation you’d wish for your daughter.

But it was my situation. I saw it then, that moment, in the locker room. This was what was going to happen – I was going to have this baby, Bruce or no Bruce, broken heart or no broken heart. It felt like the right choice. More than that, it felt almost like my destiny – the way my life was supposed to unfold. I just wished that whoever had planned it would drop me a clue or two about how I was going to provide for myself and a child. But if God wasn’t going to speak up, I’d figure it out myself.

My mother stood up and hugged me, which was gross, considering that we were both wet from the pool, and her towel didn’t quite make it around her front. But whatever. It felt good to have someone’s arms around me.

“You’re not mad?” I asked.

“No, no! How could I ever be mad?”

“Because… well. This isn’t the way I wanted it…” I said, briefly letting my cheek rest against her shoulder.

“It never is,” she told me. “It’s never just the way you think that it’ll be. Do you think I wanted to have you and Lucy down in Louisiana, a million miles away from my family, with those horrible army doctors and cockroaches big as my thumb”

“At least you had a husband,” I said. “And a house… and a plan…”

My mother patted my shoulder briskly. “Husbands and houses are negotiable,” she said. “And as for a plan… we’ll figure it out.”

She didn’t ask the $64,000 question until we were dried off and dressed and in the car on our way home.

“I’m assuming that Bruce is the father,” she said.

I leaned my cheek against the cool glass. “Correct.”

“And you’re not back together?”

“No. It was…” How could I possibly explain to my mother what had happened?

“Not to worry,” she said, effectively ending my attempts to think of an appropriate euphemism for sympathy fuck. We drove past the industrial park and the fruit and vegetable stand, over the mountain, on our way home. Everything looked familiar, because I’d driven past it a million times, growing up. I would swim with my mother early Saturday mornings, and we’d drive home together, watching the sleeping towns wake up, on our way to get warm bagels and fresh-squeezed orange juice and have breakfast together, the five of us.

Now, everything looked different. The trees had gotten taller, the houses looked somehow shabbier. There were new traffic lights at a few of the more dangerous intersections, new houses with raw-looking wooden walls and torn-up lawns on streets that hadn’t existed when I was in high school. Still, it felt good, and comfortable, to be riding beside my mother again. I could almost pretend that Tanya had stayed in her obsessive-compulsive codependent ex-girlfriend’s apartment and out of my mother’s life… and that my father hadn’t abandoned us so completely… and that I wasn’t in my current condition.

“Are you going to tell Bruce?” she finally asked.

“I don’t know. We aren’t exactly talking right now. And I think… well, I’m sure that if I told him, he’d try to talk me out of it, and I don’t want to be talked out of it.” I paused, thinking it over. “And it just seems… I mean, if I were him, if I were in his position… it’s a lot to burden somebody with. That they’ve got a child out in the world”

“Do you want him in your life?” my mother asked me.

“That’s not really the issue. He’s made it pretty clear that he doesn’t want to be in my life. Now, whether he wants to be in…” I stumbled, trying to say it for the first time, “in our child’s life…”

“Well, it’s not completely up to him. He’ll have to pay child support.”

“Ugh,” I said, imagining having to take Bruce to court and justify my behavior in front of a judge and jury.

She kept talking: about mutual funds and compound interest and some television show she’d seen where working mothers set up hidden videocameras and found their nannies neglecting their babies while they (the nannies, not the babies, I presumed) watched soap operas and made long-distance phone calls to Honduras. It reminded me of Maxi, prattling on about my financial future.

“Okay,” I told my mother. My muscles felt pleasantly heavy from the swimming, and my eyelids were starting to droop. “No Honduran nannies. I promise.”

“Maybe Lucy could help out some,” she said, and glanced at me when we were stopped at a red light. “You’ve been to your ob/gyn, right?”

“Not yet,” I said, and yawned again.

“Cannie!” She proceeded to lecture me on nutrition, exercise during pregnancy, and how she’d heard that vitamin E in capsule form could prevent stretch marks. I let my eyes close, lulled by the sound of her voice and the turning wheels, and I was almost asleep when we pulled into the driveway. She had to shake me awake, saying my name gently, telling me that we were home.

It was a wonder she let me go back to Philadelphia that night. And as it was, I drove home with my trunk stuffed with about ten pounds of Tupperware’d turkey and stuffing and pie, and only after giving her my solemn promise that I’d make an appointment with a doctor first thing in the morning, and that she could come visit soon.

“Wear your seat belt,” she said, as I loaded a protesting Nifkin into his carrier.

“I always wear my seat belt,” I said.

“Call me as soon as you know the due date.”

“I’ll call! I promise!”

“Okay,” she said. She reached over and brushed her fingertips against my cheek. “I’m proud of you,” she said. I wanted to ask her why. What had I done that anyone could be proud of? Getting knocked up by a guy who wanted nothing else to do with you wasn’t exactly the stuff she could brag to her book-club friends about, or that I could send in to the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Single motherhood might be getting more acceptable among the movie-star set, but from what I’d seen from my divorced colleagues, it was nothing but a hardship for real-life women, and it certainly wasn’t a cause for celebration, or pride.

But I didn’t ask. I just started the car and drove down the driveway, waving back at her until she disappeared.

Back in Philadelphia, everything looked different. Or maybe it was just that I was seeing it differently. I noticed the overflow of Budweiser cans in the recycling bin in front of the second-floor apartment as I made my way upstairs, and heard the shrill laugh track of a sitcom seeping beneath the door. Out on the street, somebody’s car alarm went off, and I could hear glass breaking somewhere nearby. Just background noise, stuff I’d barely notice most of the time, but I’d have to start noticing now… now that I was responsible for somebody else.

Up on the third floor, my apartment had grown a thin layer of dust in the five days I’d been away, and it smelled stale. No place to raise a child, I thought, opening windows, lighting a vanilla-scented candle, and finding the broom.

I gave Nifkin fresh food and water. I swept the floors. I sorted my laundry to wash the next day, emptied the dishwasher, put the leftovers in the freezer, then rinsed and hung my bathing suit to dry. I was halfway through making a grocery list, full of skim milk and fresh apples and good things to eat, before I realized I hadn’t even checked my voice mail to see if anyone… well, to see if Bruce… had called me. A long shot, I knew, but I figured I’d at least give him the benefit of the doubt.

And when I found that he hadn’t called, I felt sad, but nothing like the sharp, jittery, anxious-sick sadness I’d had before, nothing like the overwhelming certainty that I would die if he didn’t love me that I’d felt that night in New York with Maxi.

“He loved me,” I whispered to the neatly swept room. “He loved me, but he doesn’t love me anymore, and it’s not the end of the world.”

Nifkin raised his head from the couch, looked at me curiously, then fell back asleep. I picked up my list. “Eggs,” I wrote. “Spinach. Plums.”

TWELVE

“You’re what?!?”

I bowed my head over my decaffeinated skim-milk latte an d toasted bagel. “Pregnant. With child. Expecting. In a delicate condition. Bun in the oven. PG.”

“Okay, okay, I’ve got it.” Samantha stared at me, full lips parted, brown eyes shocked and wide-awake, even though it was only 7:30 in the morning. How?

“The usual way,” I said lightly. We were in Xando, the neighborhood coffee shop that turned into a bar after six at night. Businessmen perused their Examiners, harried moms with strollers gulped coffee. A good place, clean and bright. Not a place for making scenes.

“With Bruce?”

“Okay, maybe it wasn’t the usual way. It was right after his father died”

Samantha gave a great exasperated sigh. “Oh, God, Cannie… what did I tell you about sex with the bereaved?”

“I know,” I said. “It just happened.”

She allowed herself another sigh, then reached for her DayTimer, all brisk efficiency, even though she was still wearing black leggings and a T-shirt from Wally’s Wings advising “We Choke Our Own Chickens.” “Okay,” she said. “Did you call the clinic?”

“No, actually,” I said. “I’m going to keep it.”

Her eyes got very wide. “What? How? Why?”

“Why not? I’m twenty-eight years old, I’ve got enough money…”

Samantha was shaking her head. “You’re going to ruin your life.”

“I know my life’s going to change”

“No. You didn’t hear me. You’re going to ruin your life.”

I set down my coffee cup. “What do you mean?”

“Cannie…” She looked at me, her eyes beseeching. “A single mother… I mean, it’s hard enough to meet decent men as it is… do you know what this is going to do to your social life?”

Truthfully, I hadn’t given it much thought. Now that I’d gotten my mind around losing Bruce irrevocably, I hadn’t even started thinking about who I might wind up with, or whether there’d ever be anybody else.

“Not just your social life,” Samantha continued, “your whole life. Have you thought about how this is going to change everything?”

“Of course I have,” I said.

“No more vacations,” said Samantha.

“Oh, come on… people take babies on vacations!”

“Are you going to have money for that? I mean, I’m assuming you’ll work…”

“Yeah. Part-time. That’s what I’d figured. At least at first.”

So your income will go down, and you’ll still be spending money on child care for when you are at work. That’s going to have a major impact on your standard of living, Cannie. Major impact.”

Well, it was true. No more three-day weekends in Miami just because USAir had a cheap flight and I felt like I needed some sun. No more weeks in Killington in a rented condo, where I’d ski all day and Bruce, a nonskiier, would smoke dope in the Jacuzzi and wait for my return. No more $200 pairs of leather boots that I absolutely had to have, no more $100 dinners, no more $80 afternoons at the spa where I’d pay some nineteen-year-old to scrub my feet and tweeze my eyebrows.

“Well, people’s lives change,” I said. “Things happen that you don’t plan for. People get sick… or lose their jobs…”

“But those are things they don’t have any control over,” Samantha pointed out. “Whereas this is a situation you can control.”

“I’ve made up my mind,” I said quietly. Samantha was undeterred.

“Think about bringing a child into the world with no father,” she said.

“I know,” I told her, holding up my hand before she could say anything else. “I’ve thought about this. I know it’s not ideal. It’s not what I’d want, if I could choose”

“But you can choose,” said Samantha. “Think about everything you’re going to have to manage by yourself. How every single responsibility is going to be on your shoulders. Are you really ready for that? And is it fair to have a baby if you’re not?”

“But think of all the other women who do it!”

“What, like welfare mothers? Teenage girls?”

“Sure! Them! There’s lots of women who have babies, and the babies’ fathers aren’t around, and they’re managing.”

“Cannie,” said Samantha, “that’s no kind of life. Living hand-to-mouth…”

“I’ve got some money,” I said, sounding sullen even to my own ears.

Samantha took a sip of coffee. “Is this about Bruce? About holding on to Bruce?”

I looked down at my clasped hands, at the wadded-up napkin between them. “No,” I said. “I mean, I guess it involves that… somewhat by default… but it’s not like I set out to get pregnant so I could get my hooks back in him.”

Samantha raised her eyebrows. “Not even subconsciously?”

I shuddered. “God, I hope my subconscious isn’t as unenlightened as that!”

“Enlightenment has nothing to do with it. Maybe, deep down, some part of you was hoping… or is hoping… that once Bruce finds out, he’ll come back to you.”

“I’m not going to tell him,” I said.

“How can you not tell him?” she demanded.

“Why should I?” I shot back. “He’s moved on, he’s found somebody else, he doesn’t want to be involved with me, or my life, so why should I tell him? I don’t need his money, and I don’t want whatever scraps of attention he’d feel obligated to throw me”

“But what about the baby? Doesn’t the baby deserve to have a father in its life?”

“Come on, Samantha. This is Bruce we’re talking about. Big, dopey Bruce? Bruce with the ponytail and the ‘Legalize It’ bumper sticker…”

“He’s a good guy, Cannie. He’d probably be a really good father.”

I bit my lip. This part hurt to admit or even to think about, but it was probably the truth. Bruce had been a camp counselor for years. Kids loved him, ponytail or not, dopiness or not, dope or not. Every time I’d seen him with his cousins or his former campers they were always vying with each other to sit next to him at dinner, or play basketball with him, or have him help them with their homework. Even when our relationship was at its worst, I never doubted that he’d be a wonderful father.

Samantha was shaking her head. “I don’t know, Cannie. I just don’t know.” She gave me a long, sober look. “He’s going to find out, you know.”

“How? We don’t know any of the same people anymore… he lives so far away…”

“Oh, he’ll find out. I’ve seen enough soap operas to guarantee you that. You’ll run into him somewhere… he’ll hear something about you… he’ll find out. He will.”

I shrugged, trying to look brave. “So he finds out I’m pregnant. It doesn’t mean I have to tell him that it’s his. Let him think I was sleeping around on him.” Even though I felt struck through with grief at the thought that Bruce would ever have cause to think that. “Let him think I went to a sperm bank. The point is, he doesn’t have to know.” I looked at Samantha. “And you don’t have to tell him.”

“Cannie, don’t you think he’s got a right to know? He’s going to be a father”

“No, he’s not”

“Well, there’s going to be a child born that’s his. What if he wants to be a father? What if he sues you for custody?”

“Okay, I saw that Sally Jessy, too”

“I’m serious,” said Samantha. “He could do that, you know.”

“Oh, please.” I shrugged, trying to look less worried than I was. “Bruce can barely keep track of his rolling papers. What would he want with a baby?”

Samantha shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Or maybe he’d think that a child needs… you know… a male role model.”

“So I’ll let it hang around Tanya,” I joked. Samantha wasn’t laughing. She looked so upset I felt like offering her a hug, until I realized I’d sound just like Tanya at her most Anonymous. “It’s going to be okay,” I said, keeping my voice light, and convincing.

Samantha looked at me. “I hope so,” she said quietly. “I really do.”

“You’re what?” asked Betsy, my editor. To her credit, she recovered a lot faster than Samantha did.

“Pregnant,” I repeated. I was getting a little tired of playing this particular cut on the soundtrack of my life. “With child. Knocked up. Bun in the oven…”

“Oh. Okay. Oh, my. Um” Betsy peered at me from behind her thick glasses. “Congratulations?” she offered tentatively.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Is there, um, going to be a wedding?” she asked.

“Not in the forseeable future, no,” I said briskly. “Will that be a problem?”

“Oh, no, no! Of course not! I mean, of course, the paper would never discriminate, or anything”

I was suddenly very, very tired. “I know,” I said. “And I know it’s going to be weird for people…” “The less explaining you do, the better,” said Betsy. We were in the conference room with the door closed and the shades pulled, which meant I could only see my colleagues from the knees down. I recognized Frank the copy-editor’s beat-up loafers slowing as they made their way to the mailroom, followed closely by Tanisha the photo clerk’s stack-heeled Mary Janes, moving at a ridiculously snail-like pace. I was sure, if I had the full-body view, their heads would all be swiveling toward me, trying to figure out why Betsy and I were in here, whether I was in some kind of trouble, and what the trouble was. I was sure that once they’d made the obligatory stop at their mailboxes, they’d make a sharp right to the desk of Alice, longtime departmental secretary and depository of all things juicy and scandalous. Heck, if someone else were in here with Betsy right now, I’d be doing the exact same thing. It’s the downside of working with people who poke and pry and investigate for a living. You don’t wind up with much of a private life.

“If I were you I wouldn’t say a word,” Betsy said. She was in her forties, a short, quick-witted woman with a shock of white-blond hair who’d lived through sexism, corporate takeovers, budget cutbacks, and half a dozen different editors in chief, all men, and all with their own unique visions of what the Examiner should do. She was a survivor, and my mentor at the paper, and I trusted her to give me good advice.

“Well, eventually I’m going to have to say something”

“Eventually,” she said. “But for now I would say nothing.” She looked at me, not unkindly. “It’s hard, you know,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“Will you have any… help?”

“If you mean, is Bruce going to ride in on a white horse and marry me, probably not. But my mother and Tanya will help out… and maybe my sister, too.”

Betsy had come prepared. She pulled a copy of the union contract out of her briefcase, then a notebook and a calculator. “Let’s see what we can do for you.”

What she came up with sounded more than fair – six weeks of paid leave after the birth, and if I wanted, six more weeks of unpaid leave after that. Then I’d have to work three days a week to keep my health benefits, but Betsy said she’d be amenable to having me work one of the days from home, as long as I was reachable. She tapped out my new salary-to-be on a calculator. Oof. Worse than I thought it would be… but still livable. At least, that’s what I hoped. How much would day care cost? And baby clothes… and furniture… and food. I saw my carefully maintained nest egg – the one I’d built up, figuring I’d need it someday to pay for a wedding, or maybe a house – dwindling down to nothing before my eyes.

“We’ll work it out,” Betsy told me. “Don’t worry.” She gathered up her papers and sighed. “At least, try not to worry more than you absolutely have to. And let me know if I can help.”

“Eight weeks,” said my gynecologist, in her melodious clipped British voice. “Or perhaps nine.”

“Eight,” I said faintly. It’s hard to be emphatic when you’re flat on your back, with your feet up in stirrups and your legs spread.

Gita Patel – at least, that was the name on the tag clipped on to her lab coat – set her instruments down and slid around on her wheeled stool to face me, as I struggled into a sitting position. She was about my age, I guessed, with shiny black hair pulled into a low bun at the nape of her neck. She wasn’t the one I usually saw in this HMO-run hidey-hole of a doctors’ office, located one level below the street on Delancey, but she had the first available appointment, and, thanks to my mother’s ceaseless chorus of “Have you seen a doctor yet,” I decided not to wait. So far, I thought, it was working out. Dr. Patel had gentle hands, and a pleasant way about her.

“You are feeling well?” she asked.

“Fine. Just a little tired. Well, very tired, actually.”

“No nausea?” Wow. I even loved the way she said “nausea.”

“Not for the last few days.”

“Very well, then. Let us discuss your plans.” She tilted her head ever so slightly toward the waiting room. I admired the discretion of the gesture even as I shook my head.

“No. It’s just me.”

“Very well,” she said again, and handed me some glossy brochures. My HMO’s name was emblazoned at the top. “Little Sprouts” read the title. Ugh. “Helping our members as they begin one of life’s most exciting journeys!” Double ugh.

“Now then. I will see you monthly for the next five months, then every two weeks for your eighth month, and then weekly until it is time to deliver.” She flipped some pages on the calendar. “I am giving you a due date of June 15… understanding, of course, that babies come when they please.”

I left with my purse rattling with bottles of vitamins and folic acid, my head spinning with lists of things I couldn’t eat and things I’d have to buy and calls I’d have to make. Forms to fill out, birthing classes to register for, a fact sheet on episiotomies that I didn’t even want to look at in my current state of mind. It was December, and the weather had finally gotten cold. A brisk wind kicked dried-up leaves into the corners as I walked, my thin jacket wrapped tight around me. I could smell snow in the air. I was tired down to my bones, and my head was spinning, but I had one more stop left.

Fat Class was just getting out when I arrived. I found my classmates, and Dr. K., exiting the Weight and Eating Disorders offices, chatting happily, bundled up in sweaters and winter coats that looked as if they were being worn for the first time that year.

“Cannie!” Dr. K. waved and walked over. He was wearing khakis, a denim shirt, and a tie. No white lab coat, for once. “How have you been?”

“Oh, okay,” I told him. “I’m sorry I missed class. I meant to stop by earlier”

“Why don’t we step into my office,” said Dr. K.

We did. He sat behind his desk, I took the chair opposite, not realizing until I’d sat down that I wasn’t just tired, I was completely exhausted.

“It’s good to see you,” he said again, looking at me expectantly.

I took a deep breath. Get through this, I told myself. Get through this, and you’ll be able to go home and go to sleep.

“I’m going to, um… stay pregnant. So I have to drop out of the program,” I told him. He nodded, as if this was what he’d been waiting to hear.

“I’ll make arrangements for the department to send you a check,” he said. “And we’ll be starting new studies next fall, if you’re still interested.”

“I don’t think I’m going to have a lot of free time,” I said.

He nodded. “Well, we’ll miss you in class. You really bring a certain something.”

“Oh, you’re just saying that”

“No, I’m not. That imitation of the female fat cell you did two weeks ago… you really should think about stand-up.”

I sighed. “Stand-up’s hard. And I’ve got… a lot of things to think about right now.”

Dr. K. reached for a notebook and a pen. “You know, I actually think we might have some kind of nutrition workshop for expectant mothers,” he said, clearing books and papers away, locating his telephone directory. “I mean, since you’ve paid already, you might as well get something… Or, of course, if you just want a refund, we can definitely do that”

He was being so nice. Why was he being so nice to me? “No, that’s okay. I just wanted to say that I had to drop out, and that I’m sorry”

I took a deep breath, looking at him looking at me from across the desk, his eyes so kind. And then I was crying again. What was it about this room, and this poor man, that every time I sat across from him I wound up in tears?

He handed me the Kleenex. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I’m fine. I’ll be okay I’m sorry”

And then I was crying so hard that I couldn’t speak. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I think this is one of the first-trimester things, where everything makes you cry.” I patted my purse. “I’ve got a list in here somewhere… things you’re supposed to take, things you’re supposed to feel…”

He was reaching over me, pulling a white lab coat off the coat rack.

“Stand up,” he said. I stood up, and he draped the coat over my shoulders. “I want to show you something,” he said. “Come with me.”

He led me into an elevator, then down a hall, through a door marked “Staff Only” and “Keep Out,” through another door marked “Emergency Only! Alarm Will Sound!” But the alarm didn’t sound as he pushed open the door. And suddenly we were outside, on the roof, with the city spilled out beneath our feet.

I could see City Hall. I was practically at eye level with the statue of Billy Penn on top. There was the PECO building, studded with glistening lights… the twin towers of Liberty Place, shining silver… tiny cars, inching down infinitesimal streets. The rows of Christmas lights and neon wreaths marching down Market Street to the waterfront. The Blue Cross RiverRink, with tiny skaters moving in slow circles. And then the Delaware River, and Camden. New Jersey. Bruce. It all looked very far away.

“What do you think?” Dr. K. asked. I think I must have jumped when he finally started talking. For a moment, I’d forgotten him… forgotten everything. I was so wrapped up in the view.

“I’ve never seen the city like this,” I told him. “It’s amazing.”

He leaned against the door and smiled. “I think you’d have to pay a pretty hefty rent in one of the Rittenhouse Square high-rises to get a view like this,” he said.

I turned toward the river again, feeling the wind blow cool on my face. The air tasted delicious. All day long – or at least since Dr. Patel had given me the pamphlet listing Common Complaints of the First Trimester – I’d noticed that I could smell everything, and that most of what I could smell made me feel sick. Car exhaust… a whiff of dog crap from a trash can… gasoline… even things I normally enjoyed, like the scent of coffee wafting out of the Starbucks on South Street came to me at ten times their normal intensity. But up here the air smelled like nothing, as if it had been specially filtered for me. Well, me and whatever rich balcony-lined-penthouse-‌dwellers were lucky enough to have regular access.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

Dr. K. sat down, cross-legged, and motioned for me to join him. Being careful not to sit on his lab coat, I did.

“Do you feel like talking about it?”

I shot him a quick sideways glance. “Do you want to listen?”

He looked embarrassed. “I don’t mean to pry I know it’s not any of my business”

“Oh, no, no, it’s not that. I just don’t want to bore you.” I sighed. “It’s the oldest story in the world, I guess. Girl meets boy, girl loves boy, girl dumps boy for reasons she still doesn’t really understand, boy’s father dies, girl goes to try to comfort him, girl winds up pregnant and alone.”

“Ah,” he said carefully.

I rolled my eyes at him. “What, you thought it was someone else?”

He didn’t say anything, but in reflected light from the streets below, I thought he looked abashed. I hunkered around until I was sitting facing him.

“No, c’mon, really. You thought I found another guy that fast? Please,” I snorted. “Give me a little less credit.”

“I guess I thought… well, I guess I really hadn’t thought about it.”

“Well, believe me, it takes a lot longer than a few months before I meet someone who likes me, and who wants to see me naked, and before I get comfortable enough to actually let them.” I looked at him sideways again. What if he thought I was flirting? “Just FYI,” I added lamely.

“I’ll file that away,” he said somberly. He seemed so serious, I had to laugh.

“Tell me something… how do people know when you’re kidding? Because you always sort of sound the same way.”

“Which is what? Nerdy?” He spent a long time saying the word nerdy, which, of course, made him sound… a little nerdy.

“Not exactly. Just serious all the time.”

“Well, I’m not.” He actually appeared to be offended. “I actually have a very fine sense of humor.”

“Which I’m just somehow managing to completely miss,” I teased.

“Well, considering that the handful of times we’ve spoken, you’ve been having some extravagant life crisis, I haven’t been at my funniest.”

Now he was definitely sounding offended.

“Point taken,” I said. “I’m sure you’re very funny.”

He looked at me suspiciously, thick brows furrowed. “How do you know?”

“Because you said you were. People who are funny know that they’re funny. People who aren’t funny will say, ‘My friends say I’ve got a great sense of humor.’ Or ‘My mother says I’ve got a great sense of humor.’ That’s when you know you’re in trouble.”

“Oh,” he said. “So if you were to describe yourself, you’d say you were funny?” “No,” I sighed, looking out at the night sky. “At this point, I’d say that I was fucked.”

We sat in silence for a minute. I watched the skaters turn.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to do?” he finally asked. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to”

“No, no. I don’t mind. I’ve only figured a few things out, really. I know that I’m going to keep it, even though it’s probably not the most practical thing, and I know I’m going to cut back my schedule when the baby comes. Oh, and I know I’m going to maybe start looking for a new place to live, and see if my sister will be my birth coach.”

Laid out like that, like a losing hand of cards fanned out on a table, it didn’t seem like much.

“What about Bruce?” he asked.

“See, that’s the part I haven’t figured out yet,” I said. “We haven’t talked in weeks, and he’s seeing someone else.”

“Seriously?” “Seriously enough for him to tell me about it. And to write about it.”

The doctor considered this. “Well, that might not mean anything. He might just be trying to get back at you… or make you jealous.”

“Yeah, well, it’s working.”

“But a baby… well, that changes everything.”

“Oh, you read that pamphlet, too?” I hugged my knees into my chest. “After we broke up… after his father died, when I felt so miserable, and I wanted him back, and all, my friends kept telling me, ‘You broke up with him, and you must have done it for a reason.’ And I know that it’s true. I think I did know, deep down, that we probably weren’t supposed to be, you know, together for the rest of our lives. And it was probably my fault I mean, I’ve got this whole theory about my father, and my parents, and why I don’t trust love. So I think that maybe even if he was perfect… or, you know, not perfect, but a good fit for me… that maybe I wouldn’t have been able to see it, or I’d have tried to talk myself out of it. Or whatever.”

“Or maybe he wasn’t the right guy for you. They always taught us in medical school, when you hear hoofbeats…”

“… don’t look for zebras.”

He grinned at me. “They said that in your medical school, too?”

I shook my head. “No. My father was a doctor. He used to say that all the time. But I don’t know. I think this might actually be a zebra. I mean, I know how much I miss him, and how awful I felt when I found out he had somebody else, and I think that I blew it… that he was actually supposed to have been the love of my life, my husband.” I swallowed hard, my throat closing around that word. “But now…”

“Now what?”

“I miss him all the time.” I shook my head, disgusted at my own mopiness. “It’s like being haunted or something. And I don’t have the luxury of being haunted right now. I need to think about myself, and the baby, and how I’m going to plan and get ready.”

I looked at him. He’d taken off his glasses and was watching me intently.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

He nodded.

“I need a male perspective. Do you have any children?”

“None that I… I mean, no.”

“See, you were going to say, ‘None that I know of,’ right?”

“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, and 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.

I bundled it all up, taped the box, and walked it down to my storage area in the basement, thinking I could maybe sell some of the nicer stuff if it came to that, but for now, it would be out of sight, and maybe that would be enough. Or at least, a start. Then I came back upstairs and cracked open my new journal, a beautiful book with a marbled paper cover and thick lined pages. “ 1999,” I wrote, as Nifkin hopped up and sat on the arm of the couch beside me, looking over my words with what I hoped was approval. “For my baby, whom I already love very much.”

It rained through most of January and snowed almost constantly through February, turning everything white for about ten minutes, until the belching city busses and the guys hawking snot on the streets turned it gray again. I tried not to look at the red foil hearts in drugstore windows. I tried to avoid Moxie’s red-on-pink Valentine’s Day issue to which Bruce, the cover informed me, had contributed a piece entitled “Make Him Wanna Holler: 10 Sizzling New Sex Tricks for the Erotic Adventuress.” One ill-fated day I’d flipped to his column while waiting in line at the convenience store, and had been assaulted with a full-page picture of Bruce wearing lipstick-red silk boxer shorts and an expression of abject bliss as he lolled on bed with a woman I sincerely hoped was a Moxie model as opposed to the mysterious E. I’d thrust the magazine back into the rack as if I’d been burned, and decided, after in-person consultations with Samantha (“Just let it go, Cannie,”) and e-mailed debate with Maxi (“I could have him killed, if you like,”) that the best thing to do would be to just ignore it, and be grateful that February was a short month.

Time passed. I developed a new and interesting set of stretch marks, and started craving the imported Stilton cheese that they sold at Chef’s Market on South Street for $16 a pound. A few times, I came close to slipping a wedge in my coat pocket and slinking out of the store, but I never did. Too embarrassing, I reasoned, having to explain my cheese habit to whoever would have to come and bail me out after my inevitable arrest.

I actually felt pretty good, which was how most of the relentlessly upbeat pregnancy books I’d read described the second trimester. “You’ll feel radiant and alive, full of energy!” read one, beneath a picture of a radiant and alive-looking pregnant woman walking through a field of wildflowers, hand in hand with her devoted-looking spouse. It wasn’t that great, what with the occasional overwhelming sleepiness, and my breasts aching so badly some days that I had fantasies of their falling off and rolling away, and the night I ate an entire jar of mango chutney while watching a rerun of Total Request Live on MTV. Occasionally – well, maybe more than occasionally – I’d feel so sorry for myself that I’d cry. All of my books had pictures of pregnant ladies with their husbands (or, in the more progressive ones, partners) – someone to rub cocoa butter on your belly and fetch you ice cream and pickles, to cheer you up and urge you on and help you pick out a name. I had nobody, I would mope, conveniently ignoring Samantha and Lucy and my mother’s twice-a-night phone calls and weekly sleepovers. Nobody to dispatch to the convenience store in the middle of the night, nobody who’d stay up late debating the relative merits of Alice and Abigail, nobody to tell me not to be scared of the pain and not to be scared of the future and tell me that everything would be fine.

And it felt like things were getting more complicated instead of less. For one thing, people at work were starting to notice. Nobody’d come right out and asked me yet, but I was getting the occasional stare, or hearing the occasional hushed silence when I came into the ladies’ room or the cafeteria.

One afternoon Gabby cornered me by my desk. She’d been gunning for me since the fall, when my forty-inch Sunday feature on Maxi ran on the front of the Entertainment section, much to the delight of my editors. They were thrilled that we were the only East Coast paper to have secured an interview with Maxi, and even more thrilled that we had the only story in which she spoke so candidly about her life, her goals, and her failed romances. I got a nice little bonus, plus a glowing note from the editor in chief, which I kept prominently posted on my cubicle wall.

All of this was good for me, but it meant that Gabby was in an increasingly foul mood – especially since I’d gotten the nod to write about the Grammys, while she’d been consigned to prewriting Andy Rooney’s obituary, lest his health take a turn for the worse.

“Are you gaining weight?” she demanded.

I tried to turn the question around, the way Redbook’s latest “10 Tips for Handling Difficult People” advised, aware that people’s ears had pricked up. “What an unusual question,” I said through numb lips. “Why are you interested?”

Gabby just stared at me, refusing to bite. “You look different,” she said.

“So what I’m hearing you say,” I began, per Redbook’s instructions, “is that it’s important to you that I always look the same?”

She gave me a long, angry stare, then huffed off. That suited me fine. I hadn’t decided what to tell people, or when to tell them, and for the time being I was wearing oversized shirts and leggings and hoping they’d chalk my weight gain (six pounds in the first trimester, another four since Thanksgiving) up to holiday overindulgence.

And it was true that I was eating well. I had brunch every weekend with my mother, and dinner once or twice a week with my friends, who seemed to be operating on some kind of top-secret schedule. Every night, somebody would call, and offer to come over for coffee or meet for a bagel in the morning. Every day at work, Andy would ask if I wanted to share leftovers from whichever fabulous place he’d dined at the night before, or Betsy would take me to the tiny, excellent Vietnamese luncheonette two blocks over. It was as if they were afraid to leave me alone. And I didn’t even care that I was their sympathy case or their project. I sucked it all up, trying to distract myself from missing Bruce and obsessing over the things I didn’t have (security, stability, a father for my unborn child, maternity clothes that didn’t make me look like a small ski slope). I went to work and to see Dr. Patel, and made arrangements for all of the classes and courses a new mother-to-be could want: Breast Feeding Basics, Infant CPR, Parenting 101.

My mother put the word out, and her friends all emptied their attics and their daughters’ attics. By February, I had a changing table and a Diaper Genie, a crib and a car seat and a stroller that looked more luxurious (and more complicated) than my little car. I had boxes full of footie pajamas and little knitted caps, drooled-upon copies of Pat the Bunny and Goodnight Moon, and silver rattles with teeth marks. I had bottles and nipples and a nipple sterilizer. Josh gave me a $50 gift certificate to EBaby. Lucy gave me a packet of hand-drawn coupons agreeing to baby-sit once a week when the baby came (“as long as I don’t have to change number two diapers!”).

I gradually turned my second bedroom from a study into a nursery. I took the time I used to devote to the composition of screenplays and short stories and query letters to GQ and the New Yorker – to bettering myself, basically – and started a series of do-it-yourself home improvement projects. And, regretfully, I started spending money. I bought a sea-green rug that went nicely with the Lemonade Stand walls, and a Beatrix Potter calendar. I trash-picked a scarred rocking chair, had the seat recaned, and spray-painted it white. I started fill-ing the bookshelf with every children’s book I could scrounge from the book editor, plus books from home, and books I bought secondhand. Every night, I read to my belly… just to get into the habit, plus, because I’d read somewhere that babies are sensitive to the sound of their mother’s voices.

And every night, I’d dance. I’d pull the forever-dusty metal blinds down, light a few candles, kick off my shoes, crank up the music, and move. It wasn’t always a happy dance. Sometimes I’d blast early Ani DiFranco and think about Bruce in spite of myself as Ani roared out “You were never very kind, and you let me way down every time…” But I’d try to dance happily, for the baby’s sake, if not my own.

Was I lonely? Like crazy. Living without Bruce, and without the possibility of his eventual return, of even ever seeing him again, and knowing that he’d totally rejected me and our baby, felt like trying to live without oxygen. Some days I’d get angry and be furious at him for letting me stay with him so long… or for not coming back when I wanted him to. But I’d try to put the anger in a box, the way I’d put away his gifts, and keep moving forward.

Sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder whether it was only pride that was keeping us apart, and whether it wouldn’t be smarter for me to call him, or better yet, go see him, and just beg until he took me back. I wondered if maybe, despite everything he’d said, he did still love me. I’d wonder if he ever had. I’d try to make myself stop thinking these things, but my mind would churn and churn, until I’d have to get up and do something. I polished my silverware, child-proofed the cabinets, cleaned my closets. My apartment, for the first time ever, was neat, even beautiful. Too bad my head was such a mess.

FOURTEEN

“The thing that every single woman has to remember,” said Samantha, as we walked along Kelly Drive on a brisk, breezy early morning in April, “is that if he wants to talk to you, he’ll call. You just have to keep repeating that. ‘If he wants to talk to me, he’ll call.’ ”

“I know,” I said mournfully, resting my hands on the ledge of my belly, which I could do since I had officially started showing the week before. Being pregnant was strange, but it did have a few benefits. Instead of having people – okay, men – look at me with disinterest and/or scorn because I was a Larger Woman, people looked at me with kindness, now that I was visibly pregnant. It was a nice change. It even made me feel a little bit better about my own appearance – at least for a few minutes every now and then.

“I’m actually doing better,” I said. “I’m trying to be proactive. Whenever I think of him, I force myself to think of something about the baby. Something that I have to do, or buy, or sign up for.”

“Sounds good. How’s work going?”

“Not bad,” I said. Truthfully, work was a little weird. It was strange to be doing things that would have had me so excited… or nervous… or upset… or happy, just a year ago, and have them feel like they barely mattered. A personal audience with Craig Kilborn over lunch in New York, to discuss his show’s new direction? Eh. A nasty spat with Gabby over which one of us was going to get to write the postmortem on The Nanny? Whatever. Even my coworkers’ increasing and not-so-surreptitious glances, from my belly (burgeoning) to my third left finger (bare) didn’t seem to matter. Nobody’d worked up the nerve to actually ask me anything yet, but I was ready for the questions when they came. Yes, I’d say, I’m pregnant. No, I’d tell them, not with the father any more. That, I thought, would maybe hold them… provided I could change the subject to their own pregnancy/birth/child-‌rearing stories.

“So what’s on the agenda for today?” Samantha asked. “More shopping.”

Samantha groaned.

“I’m sorry, but I really just need a few more things from the maternity place”

I knew that Samantha was trying to be a good sport about shopping with me. But I could tell it wasn’t easy. For one thing, unlike any other woman I’d ever known, she loathed shopping. For another, I was pretty sure she was getting sick of everybody assuming we were lesbian lovers.

While Samantha was extolling the virtues of mail-order catalogues and Internet shopping, a guy jogged by us. Tall, lean, shorts and a ratty-looking sweatshirt advertising some college or another. Typical jogger on Kelly Drive on a Saturday. Except that this one stopped.

“Hi, Cannie!”

I stopped and squinted, my hands resting protectively on my belly. Samantha stopped, too, gaping. The Mystery Jogger pulled off his baseball cap. It was Dr. K…

“Hey!” I said, smiling. Wow. Outside of that horrible fluorescent-lit building, outside of his white lab coat and glasses, he was kind of cute… for an older guy.

“Introduce me to your friend,” Samantha practically purred.

“This is Dr. Krushelevansky.” I pronounced it slowly and correctly, I think, because he smiled at me. “From the University of Philadelphia program I was doing.”

“Peter. Please,” he said.

Handshakes all around, as two rollerbladers almost crashed into us.

“We’d better get moving,” I said.

“I’ll walk with you,” he said, “if that’s okay. I need to cool down”

“Oh, sure! Absolutely!” said Samantha. She gave me a short but significant look, which I took to mean, “Is he single, and is he Jewish, and if he is, what possible excuse could you have for not mentioning him to me?”

I gave her a brief shrug and raised eyebrows, which I was certain she would understand as, “I have no idea if he’s single, and aren’t you supposed to be taken?” Samantha seemed to have broken her bad-luck streak of third-date lunacy and was still with her yoga instructor. Many of our non-Bruce discussions revolved around whether he was too Zen to consider marrying.

Meanwhile, completely oblivious to our eyebrow-encrypted messages, Dr. K. was introducing himself to Nifkin, who’d been the object of several discussions during Fat Class.

“So you’re the famous little guy,” he said, as Nifkin demonstrated his vertical leap, bouncing higher and higher each time. “He should be in the circus,” Dr. K. told me, rubbing Nifkin vigorously behind his ears as Nifkin preened.

“Yeah, well, a few more pounds and I’ll go, too. They still hire fat ladies, right?”

Samantha glared at me.

“You look very healthy,” Dr. K. pronounced. “How’s work?”

“Good, actually.”

“I read your piece on The View,” he said. “I thought you were absolutely right… it does remind me of Thunderdome.”

“Five girls enter, one girl leaves,” I intoned. He laughed. Samantha looked at him, looked at me, did a few quick equations in her head, and grabbed Nifkin’s leash.

“Well!” she said cheerfully. “Thanks for walking with me, Cannie, but I really need to get going.” Nifkin whined as she started dragging him toward where she’d parked her car. “I’ll see you later,” she said. “Have fun shopping!”

“You’re going shopping?” asked Dr. K.

“Yeah, I need some…” What I actually needed was new underwear, as my Jockey For Her briefs were no longer covering the waterfront, but I was damned if I was going to tell him that. “Groceries,” I said weakly. “I was heading over to Fresh Fields”

“Would you mind if I came?” he asked. “I actually need to pick up a few things. I could drive you,” he offered.

I squinted up at him in the sunshine. “Tell you what. If you can meet me in an hour, we can get breakfast, then shop,” I said.

He told me that he’d lived in Philadelphia for seven years but had never been to the Morning Glory Diner, my absolute favorite breakfast spot. If there’s one thing I love, it’s introducing people to my food finds. I walked home, took a quick shower, pulled on a variation on my standard outfit (black velvet leggings, giant tunic top, lace-up Chuck Taylor low-tops in a subtle shade of periwinkle that I’d bought for $10), then met him at the diner, where, blessedly, there wasn’t even a line – a total fluke on a weekend. I was feeling pretty good about things as we slid into a booth. He looked nice, too – he’d showered, I thought, and changed into khakis and a button-down plaid shirt.

“I’ll bet it’s weird for you, going out to eat with people,” I said. “They probably feel very self-conscious about ordering what they really want.”

“Yes,” he said, “I have noticed some of that.”

“Well, you’re in for a treat,” I told him, and flagged down a dread-locked waitress in a halter top with a tattoo that snaked across her exposed belly. “I’ll have the neighborhood fritatta with provolone cheese and roasted peppers, a side of turkey bacon, a biscuit, and would it be possible to get potatoes and grits instead of just one or the other?”

“Sure thing,” she said, and wiggled her pen toward the doctor.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” he said

“Good boy,” she said, and twitched off toward the kitchen.

“It’s brunch,” I said, by way of explanation. He shrugged a little bit.

“You’re eating for two,” he said. “How have… things… been?”

“If by ‘things’ you mean my situation, it’s going fine. I’m actually feeling a lot better now. Still kind of tired, but that’s about it. No more dizzy, no more barfing, no being so exhausted that I fall asleep on the toilet at work”

He was laughing. “Did that happen?”

“Just once,” I said. “But it’s better now. Even though I realize that my life has turned into one of the lesser songs in the Madonna catalogue, I limp along.” I passed a hand dramatically across my brow. “Eh-lone.”

He squinted at me. “Was that supposed to be Garbo?”

“Hey, don’t hassle the pregnant lady.”

“That was the worst Garbo imitation I have ever heard.”

“Yeah, well, I do it better if I’ve been drinking.” I sighed. “God, do I miss tequila.”

“Tell me about it,” said our waitress, as she deposited our heaping plates on the table. We tucked in.

“This is really good,” he said between mouthfuls.

“Isn’t it?” I said. “They make the best biscuits. The secret is lard.”

He looked at me. “Homer Simpson.”

“Very good.”

“You do Homer much better than you do Garbo.”

“Yeah. Wonder what that says about me?” I changed the topic before he could answer. “Do you ever think about cheese?”

“Constantly,” he said. “I’m tormented, really. I lie awake at night, just thinking… about cheese.”

“No, seriously,” I said, and poked at my fritatta. “Like, who invented cheese? Who said, ‘Hmm, I’ll bet this milk would taste really delicious if I let it sit until a rind of mold grew around it?’ Cheese had to be a mistake.”

“I never thought about that,” he said. “But I have wondered about Cheez Whiz.”

“Philadelphia’s official food!”

“Have you ever looked at the list of ingredients for Cheez Whiz?” he asked. “It’s frightening.”

“You want to talk about frightening, I’ll show you the fact sheet on episiotomies my doctor gave me,” I said. He swallowed hard. “Okay, not while you’re eating,” I amended. “But seriously, what is it with the medical profession? Are you guys trying to scare the human race into celibacy?”

“Are you nervous about labor?” he asked.

“Hell, yes. I’m trying to find a hospital that’ll give me that Twilight Sleep thing.” I looked at him hopefully “You can prescribe stuff, right? Maybe you could slip me a little something before the fun starts.”

He was laughing at me. He really did have a very nice smile. His full lips were bracketed by deep laugh lines. I wondered idly how old he really was. Younger than I’d thought at first, but still probably fif-teen years older than me. No wedding ring, but that didn’t mean anything. Plenty of guys didn’t wear them. “You’ll do fine,” he said.

He gave me the rest of his biscuit and didn’t even flinch when I ordered hot chocolate, and insisted that brunch was his treat, and that, in fact, he really owed me for introducing him to the diner.

“Where to next?” he said.

“Oh, you can just drop me off at Fresh Fields”

“No, no. I’m at your disposal.”

I looked at him sideways. “Cherry Hill Mall?” I proposed, barely hoping. The Cherry Hill Mall was over the river in New Jersey. It had a Macy’s, two maternity shops, and a M.A.C. counter. And my own car was on a weekend loan to Lucy, who’d gotten a job as a singing flower delivery girl on her heartfelt assurances that yes, she could provide her own transportation, while waiting for her spokesmodel career to take off.

“Let’s go.”

His car was a sleek silver, some kind of heavy sedan-type thing. The doors closed with an authoritative chunk, and the motor sounded much more ostentatious than my modest little Honda ever had. The inside was immaculate, and the passenger seat looked… under-utilized. Like the upholstery was still untouched by human buttocks.

We got on 676 and drove over the Ben Franklin Bridge, over the Delaware River, which sparkled in the sun. The trees were covered with the faintest green fuzz, and the sun was shining off the water. My legs were pleasantly tired from the walk, and I was pleasantly full from the food, and, as I rested my hands on my belly, I felt something that it took me a minute to identify. Happy, I finally figured out. I felt happy.

I warned him in the parking lot. “When we go into the stores, they might think that you’re the, uh…”

“Father?”

“Um, yeah.”

He smiled at me. “How do you want me to handle it?”

“Hmm.” I actually hadn’t thought that part through, so enraptured was I with being in this big, steady, powerful-sounding car, looking at springtime through the window and feeling happy. “Let’s just play it by ear.”

And it wasn’t bad, really. At the department store, where I purchased a Pregnancy Packables kit (long dress, short dress, skirt, pants, tunic top, all in some engineered, indestructable, stretchy and guaranteed stainproof black fabric), the aisles were crowded and we were pretty much ignored. Same deal at Toys “R” Us, where I bought blocks, and at Target, where I had coupons for buy-one-get-one baby wipes and Pampers. I could feel the girl at Baby Gap looking from him to me and back again as she rang up my stuff, but she didn’t say anything. Not like the woman at Pea in the Pod, who’d told me and Samantha last week that she thought we were both very brave, or the woman the week before at Ma Jolie who’d assured me that “Daddy will just love!” the leggings I was trying on.

Dr. K. was very nice to shop with. Quiet, but willing to offer an opinion when asked, and to carry all my packages and even hold my backpack. He bought me lunch at the food court (sounds tacky, but the Cherry Hill food court is actually quite nice), and didn’t seem perturbed at my four bathroom stops. During the last one he even ducked into a pet store and bought a rawhide bone at least as long as Nifkin was. “So he won’t feel neglected,” he explained.

“He’s going to love you,” I said. “That’s going to be a first. Nifkin usually works as my first line of elimination with…” Dates, I was thinking. But this wasn’t a date. “New friends,” I finally said.

“Did he like Bruce?”

I smiled, remembering how the two of them had existed in a fragile détente that felt like it would rupture into full-scale war if I’d only turn my back long enough. Bruce had grudgingly agreed to let Nifkin sleep in my bed, like he was used to, and Nifkin had reluctantly conceded that Bruce had a right to exist at all, but there’d been any number of raised voices, insults, and chewed shoes, belts, and wallets in between. “I think Bruce was always about two minutes from drop-kicking Nifkin somewhere far away. He wasn’t exactly a dog person. And Nifkin isn’t easy.” I leaned back in the new-smelling car seat, feeling the late-afternoon sunshine streaming through the sunroof, warming my head.

He smiled at me. “Tired?”

“A little bit,” I said, and yawned. “I’ll take a nap when I’m home.”

I gave him directions to my street, and he nodded approvingly as he turned onto it. “Pretty,” he said. I looked at it, trying to see what he saw: the just-budding trees arcing over the sidewalks, the pots full of flowers in front of the brick townhouses.

“Yeah,” I said. “I was lucky to find it.”

When he offered to help me carry things upstairs, I wasn’t about to turn him down, even though I was thinking, as I toted diapers up to the third floor, what my place would look like to him. He probably lived in the suburbs, in one of those grand old houses on the Main Line with, like, sixteen bedrooms and a stream running through the front yard, not to mention kitchens that did not boast Harvest Gold appliances, circa 1978. At least my place was relatively neat, I told myself. I opened the door, and Nifkin catapulted himself into the hall, hurtling into the air. Dr. K. laughed.

“Hey, Nif,” he said, as Nifkin sniffed the rawhide bone through three plastic bags and went into a seizure of joy. I dumped my bags on the couch and hurried to the bathroom as Nifkin tried to burrow into the bag. “Make yourself comfortable!” I yelled.

When I emerged he was standing in the second bedroom where I’d been trying to piece together a crib from one of my mother’s friends. The crib had come to me unassembled, without directions, and possibly missing important pieces.

“This doesn’t look right,” he murmured. “Mind if I give it a go?”

“Sure,” I said, startled and pleased. “If you actually get it together I’ll owe you big-time.”

He smiled at me. “You don’t owe me anything,” he said. “I had fun today.”

Before I could think of what to make of that, the telephone rang. I excused myself, grabbed the portable, and flopped gracelessly onto the bed.

“Cannie!” bellowed a familiar British accent. “Where’ve you been?”

“Shopping,” I said. Well, this was a surprise, too. Maxi and I had been corresponding through e-mail and the occasional telephone call at work. She talked about her travails on the set of PlugIn, the futuristic sci-fi thriller in which she was costarring with a hot young actor who required not one, not two, but three full-time “sobriety managers” to keep him in line, and e-mailed me investment tips and articles about how I should set up a fund for the baby. I’d write her back, talking about work, mostly, and my friends… and my plans, such as they were. She didn’t ask many questions about the impending arrival – good manners, maybe, I thought.

“I have news,” she said. “Big. Huge. The hugest. Your screenplay,” she began breathlessly. I swallowed hard. Of all the things we’d talked about in the months since our meeting in New York, my screenplay hadn’t come up once. I’d assumed that Maxi had forgotten about it, hadn’t read it, or had read it and decided that it was so terrible it would be better for our friendship if she never spoke of it again.

“I loved it,” she said. “The character of Josie is such a perfect heroine. She’s smart, and stubborn, and funny, and sad and I would be honored to play her.”

“Sure,” I said, still not understanding what was happening. “Start eating.”

“I fell in love with the part,” Maxi continued, ignoring me, her words tumbling over each other, faster and faster. “And you know I’ve got this deal with this studio, Intermission… I showed the script to my agent. She showed it to them. They loved it, too… especially the idea of me as Josie. And so, with your permission… Intermission would like to buy your screenplay, for me to star in. Of course, you’d be involved the whole way through… I think that both of us should be able to sign off on any changes to the script, and, of course, on major casting decisions, not to mention who’s going to be the director…”

But I wasn’t listening. I lay back on the bed, my heart suddenly feeling fierce and strange and enormously excited. Making my movie, I thought to myself, a huge smile spreading over my face. Oh, my God, it’s finally happening, somebody’s going to make my movie! I’m a writer now, I’ve really made it, maybe I’ll be rich!

And that’s when I felt it. Like a wave cresting inside of me. Like I myself was in the ocean, being gently tumbled, over and over, by a wave. I dropped the phone and put both hands on my belly, and then came a gentle, almost inquisitive series of tap, tap, taps. Moving. My baby was moving.

“You’re here,” I whispered. “You’re really here?”

“Cannie?” said Maxi. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine!” I said, and started laughing. “I’m perfect.”