Dating Big Bird (12 page)

“Oh,
right
,” I said, and laughed. “One of the many benefits of being involved with someone whose family has been decimated.”

Amy seemed far more frustrated about her relationship with Will than she had been when we first met—or rather, frustrated with his neurotic commitmentphobia that kept stopping her at checkpoints all along the way. And to make matters worse, the December issue of
Glamour
was out and apparently burning a hole in her bag. She reached for the magazine and dumped it on the table, and it fell open where
a giant paper clip had marked Arlene Schiffler’s latest diary entry.

“Month two,” she said.

I glanced down at the page and scanned a half column of text. This month’s focus? Morning sickness. How original.

She had already finished the flask of sake and had come back from the kitchen with a refill. She fidgeted on the floor across from me, and I wondered, for the second time that night, what was really bothering her.

So I asked.

She sipped her drink and smiled the way she usually smiled when she was happy. Only she wasn’t, I realized suddenly, when I saw her eyes well up with tears.

“What,” I said softly. “What’s the matter?”

She covered her eyes with her hands tightly, then took them away, wiping her lids as she did.

“I can’t stand it anymore.”

“Stand what?” I looked down at the magazine and wondered if that was what she was talking about. “This?” I regarded it disdainfully and pushed it away across the table.

She nodded yes, then no. “Arlene’s column. The two women in my office. Karen. Everyone’s pregnant all over the place all of a sudden, and I want to be, too. God, I hate this time of year. November. My mother died in November.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. No wonder she hated the holidays. As she wiped her eyes again and played absently with one of her chopsticks, I couldn’t help feeling incredible guilt over my contentious conversation with my mother the night before. At least I still had a mother to disapprove of me.

“I want to be married. I want a family,” she said finally. “My own family. I’m sick of always being a guest at my father’s house or my brother’s house. I’m sick of always being the one unmarried person at the end of the table—the
loser—who everyone assumes can’t cook a turkey because she doesn’t have anyone to cook one for.”

I made a face, and she laughed a little.

“Okay, so they’re right about the turkey. But you know what I mean.”

Of course I knew what she meant.

While I was salivating at the thought of my impending Pickle-time in two days, I was dreading the reminder that when it came to holidays and other family get-togethers, I was, as Amy had just described, the odd person out; the perpetual adolescent; the one who always came alone and was sent home with enough toaster-oven-reheatable leftovers to feed a dormitory full of women like me. Reentry into my adult life always took time, not to mention the emotional setback that lingered, it seemed, for weeks after.

But I wasn’t an adolescent. And I didn’t feel like one.

“Look, I want a family, too,” I said.

She shook her head. “Sometimes I think it’s never going to happen.”

“Of course it’s going to happen,” though I wasn’t sure it was going to happen with Will.

“I keep going over the future trajectory of our relationship, and the math doesn’t add up. Look,” she said. “He’s thirty-eight, and I’m almost thirty-six. It’s taken a year and a half for him to introduce me to his family. He’s no closer to wanting to get married than he was when I met him. He’s looking for a new apartment—a cheaper apartment, if you can believe it—cheaper than the one he’s in, which is already incredibly cheap since he can’t afford anything else—and there’s been no mention about us moving in together. Not that I’d even want to, since I think living together is a huge fucking myth and since it would definitely waste another three years, after which he’d probably dump me anyway.” She shrugged her shoulders, and the big
smile came back, only this time without the tears. “He’s broke. He doesn’t have a job-job because he’s supposed to be working on his dissertation. But he’s not working on his dissertation because he’s so depressed about how shitty his life is. And any day now he’s going to really start resenting me because I make more money than he does.”

Malcolm was suddenly starting to look pretty good by comparison.

“So what should I do?” she asked. “Should I dump him?”

While I silently searched for a noncommittal answer, she continued.

“But I don’t want to dump him. I’m in love with him. And I don’t know if I can go back to being alone again. I just don’t think I can do it again.”

I thought about what she’d said tonight and what I’d said tonight and about what we’d talked about every single time we’d gotten together: my Pickle and her Pumpkin, and our desire for commitment—Amy wanting one from Will and me wanting one from Malcolm. And yet maybe we were the ones who had to commit to what we wanted: children. I looked over at the magazine, squished at the end of the table like a big dead bug, then took a deep breath.

“Maybe we should give ourselves a deadline.”

“What kind of deadline?”

“A deciding deadline. A set amount of time that we’ll use to come to a decision, one way or another, about what we’re going to do.”

“Do about what?”

“About having kids.”

“You mean, by ourselves.”

“Maybe. Presumably—in my case anyway, given what I’m working with. At least you and Will have sex. You’re
way
ahead of me in the anything-is-possible department.”

“By ourselves how, though?”

“I don’t know. The way other women who are in the same position as we are do it.”

“With turkey basters? Like lesbians?”

“No. Not with turkey basters. You know, like sperm banks. Or by accident. Or the direct approach, by asking someone to—”

“To donate?”

“I guess.”

“Who would you ask?”

“I have no idea. I haven’t even thought about it.” Which wasn’t a complete lie. The idea of asking Malcolm had crossed my mind once or twice, but in the past I’d always dismissed it out of hand. Until recently it had seemed too far-fetched, too disconnected from reality—the reality of our relationship and of Malcolm’s state of mind. But now that we’d had some kind of emotional breakthrough, I wondered if I myself shouldn’t exercise some positivity.

She sat back in her chair and considered my proposal.

“I could just stop using my diaphragm,” she said, “only I’m not sure I want to do it alone. I’m not sure I even could do it alone—emotionally or financially.”

“I’m not saying we’ll have to. We’re still only thirty-five. And I’m not sure I want to do it alone or could do it alone, either. I’m just saying we should start investigating it. So when the time comes—when our gum-ball machines are on their last eggs—we’ll have a backup plan.”

She looked at me and said nothing, but I could tell she wanted me to go on, since having a plan—any plan about anything at all—made us feel like we had control of our futures instead of waiting for them to pass us by.

“Let’s say we give it nine months,” I said matter-of-factly, as if I were talking about a diet, or a fitness plan, and not genetic reproduction. “Just like Arlene Schiffler’s column. Nine months from now”—I counted on my fingers and
mouthed the names of the months from November on—“by August—by
Labor
Day, let’s say”—and I paused to smile goofily at my stupid but remarkably apt target-month pun—“we’ll each come to a decision. Either to do it and how to do it. Or to not do it.”

“Or,” Amy said, “to keep waiting.”

After Amy left, I packed my black nylon overnight bag and took a taxi up to Malcolm’s apartment so we could leave early the next morning for Sag Harbor. We went out to his house most weekends, and while we tried to leave Friday night, we’d leave early on Saturday morning if either of us had something to do the night before, or if we didn’t feel like rushing. Like this time.

I liked Malcolm’s house, a yellow clapboard built in the late 1800s. It stood on Bridge Lane in Sag Harbor, and despite how close it was to the center of town, the street was remarkably quiet.

The house was small—four rooms downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs—with a screened-in porch in the back and a small open porch in front, but it was the kind of house that somehow seemed bigger from the inside than it looked from the outside. Not that he would have needed more space. It was just him alone there after Benjamin died and Jean left. For years, he told me, before he cleared out Benjamin’s old things and turned the second bedroom into a study, he used to sit in that little room in the dark, all night sometimes. That was when he still drank. A few years ago he bought an old refectory table to use as a desk and had bookshelves built on every wall, and now and then on the weekend, in between cooking or reading or talking, I’d see him go in there, bend over the desk to put a newspaper clipping into a file folder or scour the shelves for a book he was looking
for. But as far as I knew, he hadn’t been able to write anything for five years. Not since Benjamin’s death.

The taxi let me out at the corner of Ninety-sixth and Broadway, and I walked into the lobby of Malcolm’s building and waved past the doorman. Malcolm was expecting me and had left his door unlocked and open a crack in anticipation of my arrival. He was just coming out of the kitchen when I stepped into the foyer and shut the door behind me.

“How was dinner?” he said, reaching for my coat and hanging it in the hall closet.

“It was okay.”

“Where’d you go?”

“We didn’t. She came over, and we ordered in.”

He started for the living room, expecting me to follow.

“So what’s new with Amy?”

Malcolm had never met her—he was uncomfortable meeting new people, as he dreaded answering their questions—but he liked the sound of her from everything I’d told him. He thought she sounded unpretentious and sincere, and after I told him that her mother had died a year ago, he seemed to soften toward her even more.

I positioned myself on the couch, and he sat on the armchair across from me.

“She’s frustrated,” I said.

“Frustrated about what?”

“She wants to get married and have kids already, and it’s just not happening yet.”

Well, he
asked
.

“What’s the deal with Smarty Pants?”

Malcolm almost never called anyone by their real name, especially someone who sounded as immature as Will, from what I’d told him—and especially someone with too much formal education, which he found highly suspect.

“Nothing. I mean, nothing new. She’s going to Chicago for the holiday to meet his family, finally.”

He shook his head. “Tell her she should get another boyfriend,” he said. “Because it doesn’t sound like it’s going to happen with this one.”

He was right, I knew, but I regretted bringing the subject up anyway. My wanting children and him not had never been a positive conversation point for us, given how fraught the subject was to begin with.

We had talked about it several times, oddly enough, given the fact that we didn’t have sex—talked about it the way we talked about most things: intellectually, hypothetically, in the abstract. One unusually chilly night in late August, he asked me for the first time if I wanted children, and I hadn’t thought to tell him anything but the truth.

“That’s good,” he’d said, as if I’d just told him I wanted to spend a year in Italy studying art. “You should have them. It’s the most important experience you can have in life, and you shouldn’t miss out on it.”

I was hurt that he’d said
I
should have them—it’s an experience
I
shouldn’t miss out on—making it clear that our lives were destined to divide and separate and that he’d already accepted it as fact—and maybe even with relief. His words and his tone were dispassionate and objective, and because it had stung me to hear him sound so distant, I decided to turn the question back on him.

“Would you ever want to have another child?”

He’d thought a minute before answering.

“I did, when Benjamin was still alive. I’d always wanted a daughter. But after he—” He paused, and I saw the muscles in his jaw tighten. “No. To give you the short answer to your question, I don’t want to have another child.”

The longer answer wasn’t that hard to figure out—how he couldn’t replace Benjamin and didn’t want to; how he
couldn’t bear the thought of something bad happening again. It was easy to connect those dots.

“It’s too much baggage to bring to the table,” he’d said. “It would be unfair to impose that burden on a child—to make them afraid of life because I’m afraid of death.” He had looked at me then, to see my reaction, and because I wanted him to leave the subject open, even just a little so it wouldn’t be sealed shut forever, and because I was still feeling stung from his earlier remark, I decided to challenge him on it.

“It’s less about how it would affect a child and more about you. About your fear. About what it would mean for you to risk something as big as that again.” He said nothing, so I pressed on. “But maybe in time the fear would go away. Maybe if you felt joy again—if you felt life again—it would recede. Recede enough to become manageable. Enough so you could learn to live with it.”

“I don’t know if that kind of fear is manageable. If it’s something I could learn to live with. I mean, what’s more frightening than losing a child?”

“Never having one.”

We’d left it there that night, and I hadn’t thought about the discussion again until now—until he’d said that Amy should find someone else because she wasn’t going to get what she wanted from Will—and I couldn’t help but feel his words were some kind of veiled message for me, too.

“Are you trying to tell me something?” I asked, my throat constricting as I tried to get the question out.

He looked confused. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, is the advice you’re giving Amy the advice you’re trying to give me? Are you trying to tell me I should find someone else, too?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“But is it what you think?”