Beach Trip (42 page)

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Despite the change in locale, their lives followed the same routine they had established for themselves during the years in Charlotte. Sara rose early to head for the offices of Manning & Phillips with the often-vain hope that traffic along 400 would be light, and Tom rose and sat at his desk in his pajamas working on his dissertation or on what he called his “vain scribbling,” which Sara was pretty sure was a novel. He had been offered a part-time teaching assistantship at Emory and was continuing to work on his dissertation, which he hoped to have completed the following spring.

Coming home in the evenings, she would look up and see the tree-lined rise that signaled the ascent to Roswell, and she would feel a little flutter of excitement in her stomach knowing that Tom was waiting for her, knowing that she was coming home to him. It was a feeling she never got over.

He was a good cook, and after dinner she would sit on his lap and muss his hair and when he tired of her teasing, he would tickle her or carry her up to bed.

Sometimes they might walk to the square, if the weather was fine, or even if it wasn’t. They still enjoyed their walks in the rain. The storefronts and warehouses would be brightly lit, and they would sit in the middle of the square, beside the gazebo and the memorial plaque to Roswell King, and try to imagine what the place must have looked like when King first crossed the shallow ford at Vickery and gazed upon the thickly tangled wilderness. Often they would stop for a drink at the Public House, a restaurant and tavern on the square housed in one of the old cotton warehouses.

Gradually, their lives settled into a routine and they were happy, or at least Sara told herself they were. She worked too many long hours and Tom was worried, she knew, about defending his dissertation, but other than that, things were good. Sara spoke to Annie and Lola occasionally. She didn’t speak to Mel at all for a while, and later only on the odd occasion when either one of them, feeling nostalgic, might pick up the phone and call. She followed Mel’s burgeoning literary career with interest, and also with a secret, ironic feeling of pride. It was funny that of all the people she’d known, it was Mel who actually became a writer, the one she would have least expected to pen a novel, let alone four. She’d been in a bookstore recently and had picked up one of Mel’s novels and she’d been surprised to find that it was good. Really good. She hadn’t expected it. She was lying in bed late one night, reading
Big Sleazy
and laughing, and Tom
said in a cool, indifferent voice, “Good book?” He was grading papers and had them strewn across the bed.

“Yes. Very.”

“What’s good about it?” He harbored, she knew, a secret desire to write novels that would be taught in future American lit classrooms and talked about in hushed voices by literary critics and writers’ conference panelists.

“I don’t know. It’s—”

“Trite? Sentimental?”

“No. Fast and funny. It’s not great literature but she tells a good story. Once I started it, I couldn’t put it down.”

He said nothing, but went back to grading papers. A few days later she couldn’t find the book and she wondered if he’d taken it and was secretly reading it, although she could never quite bring herself to ask him.

One warm June evening, their neighbors, the Hatchers, invited Tom and Sara to join them for dinner. The four of them had cocktails, then walked the two blocks to the square for dinner. They were already a little tipsy. Mason liked his martinis dry with plenty of gin, and Tom held tightly to Sara’s arm as they walked. It was a perfect summer evening. The moon was full, filling the street with a silvery light. Great banks of low-lying clouds blanketed the sky, and the air was heavy with the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle.

Sara walked beside her husband, glad for the steadying weight of his hand on her elbow, and feeling as if the ground was rolling beneath her feet like the deck of a ship. She usually didn’t drink Mason’s martinis, but tonight she’d had three, and she was paying the price. She stumbled once and fell against Tom, and he said, “Do I need to carry you?”

She giggled. “Would you?”

Behind them Mason said, “Newlyweds!” and Elizabeth said, “When was the last time you offered to carry me anywhere?”

“When was the last time you weighed one-twenty?”

“Bastard,” Elizabeth said.

After that, Sara decided it might be a good idea if they didn’t see too much of the Hatchers. Unhappiness was contagious, and she didn’t want anyone or anything encroaching upon their carefully constructed little world. She and Tom had their careers, their colleagues, and their moonlit strolls through the square, and they didn’t need anything else. They were young, they were happy, and they were in love, but there were times when
Sara, sitting on a bench watching the moon rise over the square like a phoenix, knew it couldn’t last.

Having decided that partnership was more important than motherhood, at least for the foreseeable future, it was with a sense of disorientation and concern that Sara found herself, twenty months later, throwing away her birth control pills. She opened a bathroom drawer one morning and saw them there in their brightly colored case, and without a moment’s deliberation, she picked them up and threw them in the trash. Later, she decided that it probably had something to do with the fact that she’d been on the pill for most of her twenties. She needed to give her body a break. She got a calendar and decided to use the rhythm method for a while.

Not that she told Tom any of this. They had never really talked seriously about having children. They had agreed to the idea, but they had never agreed on the specifics: how many? when? But now that the time had come when the subject should at least be broached, she found herself oddly hesitant.

Tom had successfully defended his dissertation in November and been awarded his Ph.D. Now he was planning a trip to England. He’d accepted a full-time teaching position at Emory but that wouldn’t begin until the following fall, so he had plenty of time to plan their vacation. He went around the house whistling cheerfully and spent his time poring over glossy brochures and maps of England. Sara wasn’t sure how she’d be able to pull herself away from the office for three weeks but she hadn’t been able to tell him that either.

It was the first thing she had ever kept from him, at least since their marriage, and she wondered, in moments of quiet clarity, why she didn’t tell him she had stopped taking the pill. He probably wouldn’t have minded, or at least she didn’t think he would, but she didn’t want him questioning her decision. It was just easier this way. It was her body. And she didn’t really want a child, she told herself, not when she was so close to making partner. Manning had hinted at it just last week over lunch, and Phillips had told her point-blank in December that if her billable hours stayed high, he saw no reason the offer wouldn’t be forthcoming in the new year.

So why was she secretly jeopardizing it all now by risking a pregnancy?

She wondered if it was some kind of weird competition with Elizabeth
Hatcher. She saw her occasionally for coffee, although Tom had steadfastly refused to have any more contact with Mason. And Elizabeth was still desperately trying to get pregnant; she had been trying for years.
Don’t wait too long
, she’d told Sara mournfully,
or your eggs will dry up.

Sara had read somewhere that dogs kenneled together will go into heat at the same time. It was Mother Nature’s way, she supposed, of ensuring the continuation of the species, this fierce competition over fecundity. And really, was that so surprising when competition was at the heart of everything? Competition for schools, for jobs, for partnerships. Competition for mates.

Sara faithfully marked her calendar and tried not to think about her eggs shriveling to leathery little bags.

In April, Sara and Tom attended the Atlanta Steeplechase. It was an annual tradition, advertised as
the Best Lawn Party in Georgia
, and people took it seriously. It was similar to tailgating at a prep school football game only with white tablecloths and sterling silver and people dressed up like those who attended the Kentucky Derby. Manning and Phillips always had a catered corporate tent on the backstretch, where they could easily watch infield festivities like the Ladies Hat Parade and the Jack Russell Terrier Races, as well as the thundering rush to the finish line of the five steeplechase races.

They had been to the steeplechase once before so they knew what to expect. It was a beautiful day, sunny and breezy with a clear blue sky stretching above the rolling hills. The landscape was dotted with colorful tents and long lines of automobiles glistening in the sun. There was an open bar at the Manning and Phillips tent. By midafternoon Sara had fallen asleep in her lawn chair, and Tom was standing at the finish line with a group of rowdy stalwarts, roaring at the contestants as they cleared the last hurdle and thundered past.

The firm had chartered a bus to take them home, and by the time they arrived back at their townhome that evening, Sara was beginning to sober up but Tom was more inebriated than she’d seen him in years. She put it down to his relief and celebration over the completion of his dissertation.

As she closed the door, he pulled her roughly against him and kissed her. His face was warm and smelled of cut grass and whiskey. He pulled her T-shirt over her head. “What are you doing?” she asked him drowsily.
She hadn’t checked her calendar this morning but she was pretty sure she was still at the tail end of her fertile period. Give or take a few days.

He unzipped her skirt and pulled it down over her hips. “What do you think I’m doing?” he asked, kissing her and backing her across the room. He had taken off his shirt, and his shoulders were sunburned and covered by a light sprinkling of freckles. She loved his arms, the sturdy thickness of them, with their faint covering of auburn hair.

“Wait,” she said. The dying sun pushed its way through the closed blinds, falling in narrow bands across the hardwood floor.

He picked her up and set her on the desk.

She couldn’t let this go on. It wasn’t fair to him with his dreams of En gland. It wasn’t fair to her with her dreams of partnership. With a sudden fluid motion, he swept the top of the desk behind her. Paper clips and storage trays clattered to the floor.

She giggled suddenly. Apparently she wasn’t as sober as she’d thought.

He grinned and slipped her bra off.

“Wait,” she said. “I need to tell you something.”

He touched her hair. He licked the little hollow at the base of her throat. Distantly, she could hear the sound of the river. She thought,
Maybe I read the calendar wrong.
She thought,
My eggs are probably too shriveled anyway.

Five weeks later, when she told him, he took the news with characteristic calm. They were sitting in front of the opened French doors, watching the river run. Late-afternoon sun slanted across the surface of the water, turning the river a glinting sheet of blue. “When were you going to tell me you went off the pill?” he asked quietly.

“Don’t be angry.”

“I’m not angry, I’m just—confused.”

Evening fell. Bats darted in the sky. Beyond the distant ridge a pale moon rose.

“I didn’t really decide, I didn’t think about it clearly, I just stopped taking it.” She put her hand on her stomach. It felt tender. Her skin smelled different. Everything about her was different. “I kept a calendar. I thought we’d use the rhythm method, but it didn’t work.”

“Clearly.”

“It worked up until the steeplechase,” she said shortly.

He stood up and went to the opened doors, standing with his shoulder
against the jamb and looking out. The night sounds were as rhythmic as a heartbeat. “Well, I guess I’m to blame for that,” he said.

“No one’s to blame,” she said, rising swiftly and going to him. She laid a timid hand upon his shoulder, feeling the muscles tense and ripple beneath her fingers. “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you I had gone off the pill. Maybe I was afraid you’d say no. Maybe I was afraid that if we waited too long, I wouldn’t be able to have a baby. I don’t know. I guess I wasn’t really thinking it through.” She turned to go but he grabbed her hand and pulled her against him, folding his arms around her and resting his chin on her head.

“I’m getting used to it is all,” he said. “It’s a shock.”

She pushed her face against his chest. “I want this baby.”

His arms tightened around her. “I want it, too,” he said.

Pregnancy was easier than she had expected. There was no morning sickness, no nausea. Except for the fact that she grew huge and her skin smelled strange, she might not have known she was pregnant. She was careful, at first, about her weight, but after the sixth month, she just didn’t care anymore. Food tasted so great and she had so few pleasures now, besides eating and the occasional massage Tom gave her. He waited on her hand and foot. He brought her any food she craved, no matter what it was or when she wanted it. She was like a big swollen queen bee and he was her drone, busy and attentive to her every need.

The baby was due in January, and in October they signed up for a Lamaze class. All the other moms wore leotards and talked a lot about natural analgesics and amniotic sacs, and Sara felt like a fraud rolling around among them in her tent smock and stretch pants. Everyone was kind and cheerful, especially the moms who’d already gone through labor before, who were more than willing to share their graphic birth experiences with novices like Sara. She smiled politely and tried to steer the conversation around to something other than delivery. She didn’t want to know the painful details. She figured the less she knew about the whole process, the better. She’d stopped reading her
Ready, Set, Deliver!
book after Chapter Seven (“Pelvic Pressure & Mucus Plugs!”) because she didn’t want to know what came next. It was this same logic that drove her to close her eyes and stick her fingers in her ears during the Lamaze birthing tape.

Tom was fascinated by the whole process. He treated her like an entomologist might treat some kind of rare molting caterpillar. “Wow,” he
would say, running his hand over her swollen belly, “how does it get so big? How do your hips know to stretch like that? Have your feet always had those little pads of fat?”