Dating Big Bird (25 page)

“Have a baby?”

It was practically July already, and the Labor Day decision deadline was rapidly approaching.

“Let’s put it this way,” Amy said, a smile slowly spreading across her face. “If this deal goes through—
when
this deal goes through—you’ll probably be able to quit your job for good. Your friend Renee, as designer, should be happy with her cut of the royalties. She could probably quit her job, too.”

“She’d never quit her job,” I said. “No matter how much money she had, she’d always work. It’s what she loves to do most in the world.”

We beamed at each other, then clinked our glasses together to toast my good fortune.

“So you’ve been awfully quiet lately,” I said.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean about everything. About dating. About the baby decision now. The last two months have been so crazy because of Karen’s shower and the gift and the deal, that I feel like I have no idea where you are with things.”

She sipped her wine and shifted in the big leather chair. The air conditioning made the room feel almost cold, but compared with the heat and humidity outside, it was actually a relief. She pulled a little black cardigan sweater out of her bag and threw it around her shoulders.

“Where I am with things,” she said. “That’s a good question. Since I think I’m in a different place now than I was before.”

I waited for her to continue.

“I’ve met someone.”

I raised an eyebrow.
“Really.”

“Someone who’s good to me. Who’s good for me.”

“Good to you and for you? Well, this is a new concept for us.”

“I know. Positivity. In its purest form.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“A couple of weeks at least. Maybe a month, I guess.”

Again I raised an eyebrow.

“I’ve been wanting to tell you, but I didn’t want to do it on the phone.”

“So tell me already,” I said eagerly, pretending not to care that she’d kept me in the dark this long. “Who is he?”

“His name is Barry. Barry Weller.”

“What does he do?”

“Real estate lawyer. Like me.”

“And how’d you meet?”

“On a blind date.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. After three hundred total losers, I finally got lucky.”

“So is he—”

“Cute? No. Not particularly.”

“Smart?”

“Very smart.”

“And you get along?”

She nodded. Then she paused, as if she’d had this conversation with herself many times before and was getting pretty good at answering her own most difficult questions.

“He’s not the most exciting person in the world. But he’s nice. And he adores me. And he wants to get married and have children. And that’s, well, as you know, that’s what I want, too.”

“You mean you might actually
marry
him?” I could hardly believe that Amy had met someone so potentially significant and I was only finding out about it now.

She shrugged.

“Are you in love with him?”

“I don’t know yet. He’s in love with me, though. And I suppose six months from now, if I seem in the least bit interested, which I probably will be, he’ll probably start talking seriously about the future.”

I wanted to say something then about settling—about why she was settling for someone she clearly felt no passion for when she was still, relatively, so young. But she knew what she was doing, it seemed; she’d clearly thought about her life long and hard these months after Will. Who was I to presume to tell her what was settling and what wasn’t?

“You’re disappointed in me,” she said.

“I’m not. I’m really not.”

“You think I’m settling.”

She was putting me on the spot, and we both knew it.

“I probably am,” she said, letting me off the hook without
offering any further explanation or excuse, and I was relieved.

In the eight months since we’d met again, we’d covered an awful lot of ground, she and I. We were coming through our emotional tunnels now—she first, and me soon to follow—and in the near future there would be enough harsh light to judge our decisions. The last thing either of us needed was to be judged harshly by each other.

“I want you to be happy,” I said finally. “And if Barry can offer you the kind of life that will make you happy, then I’m all for it.”

She looked at me skeptically.

“I
am
.”

And I would be, in a week, or two, or three, once I’d had time to get used to it all. In minutes, though, I realized the practical ramifications of her news.

“So does this mean what I think it means?” I said.

She looked at me sheepishly and nodded.

“No two-for-one sperm-bank pregnancies, I guess, huh?”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Me, too.” And I was. “So I guess I’m on my own—
really
on my own in this. No boyfriend. No best friend. Just me and my pregnancy books and my sample donor profile and one month left to decide. That’s a sad sorry state of affairs, isn’t it?”

“What if you can’t decide by then?”

“I’m not expecting any trouble in that regard, but if I run into any, I’ll give myself an extension. A few weeks. A few months. Another year if I have to. However long it takes before I’m sure—completely sure—about my decision.”

She finished her drink, too. “Any word from—?”

“Malcolm? No. Nothing.”

Not for almost three months.

“What’s the point, I guess, right?” she said. “I mean, at
least he’s had the grace to leave you alone and let you get on with your life.”

“I suppose.”

“Of course, it would have been nice if he’d come crawling back,” she added. “Just like Will didn’t. But getting back to the pregnancy question,” she said, glancing back over at her pad of paper. “I mean, now that money’s not going to be a problem, it’s easier to decide. Isn’t it?”

No.

It wasn’t easier.

In fact, it was even harder.

Now that the last major obstacle had been removed, I had no more excuses left.

By August 1 the contract for the deal with Tiffany had been finalized and signed by all concerned parties, and a large initial on-signing payment—more than an equivalent year’s salary—was due to me by early October. Amy and Ward had gone over the contract carefully, changing things that Amy would then try to explain to me—the most important one being that my future contractual payout amounts were not contingent upon sales of the necklace. This meant that if the line sold badly, I would still receive the monies they had promised me, and if the line sold well, I would receive additional monies, once Tiffany had earned back the initial outlay that they had paid me.

“If I’d known this was going to be such a success,” Renee said when I went over her part of the contract, “I wouldn’t have been so hard on you when you first tried to explain
mammo
to me. Even though you deserved it, since nothing you said that day made any sense.”

Which was, I figured, her way of saying thank you.

Shortly after the paperwork was finalized, I started to give
serious thought to taking time off from work. I needed some time and space to think—to think as clearly and as deeply as I could in order to make my final decision. I had never
not
had a job, and I wondered if not having a place to go to every day or people to talk to would depress me. But I was too superstitious to quit outright before I’d received any money, so I decided I’d first ask Karen for a six-month leave of absence and go from there.

She was still on maternity leave, surprisingly enough, since we all thought she’d have come back a week after her episiotomy stitches came out, but it seemed that carrying around such a massive fetus for all that time while working seven days a week had taken its toll even on her. For the first time since I’d known Karen—and probably since anyone had known her—she was exhausted, and doctor’s orders had precluded her from returning to work for another month at least.

“Since the mountain can’t come to the office, the office is going to have to come to the mountain,” Gail said, answering Karen’s home phone during that first week. As Simon, who would be working from Karen’s for the rest of the month, explained it to those of us in the office, all of the KLNY department heads would make a pilgrimage to Karen’s apartment on Monday mornings for a weekly meeting. An additional assistant would be hired for Karen, who would messenger a pouch to her at the beginning and end of every day so that business could proceed apace. It was via this pouch that I sent my written request for a leave of absence to Karen, and it was from this pouch that her approval came back to me—with something very unexpected. “O.K.” was written and circled with her trademark red grease pencil, but instead of her usual initials, she had signed her memo this way: “Mammo Karen.”

In the middle of September, I heard from Simon that Arlene Schiffler had given birth to a seven-pound eight-ounce
baby girl—via cesarean—and had, in the time since I’d seen her at Karen’s shower in May, gained sixty pounds.

Sixty pounds.

Somehow, though, she did manage to have a piece about her delivery come out almost immediately in
Glamour
—the ninth and final month’s entry of her “Nine Months” series. And it seemed to Amy and me, when we read it aloud to each other one night over the phone, screaming and howling at how disgustingly self-involved she was, that she must have written two versions—
vaginal delivery
and
cesarean delivery
—well before the actual event and phoned in the correct version from the hospital.

Had I not been so tired of her columns and so tired of baby-gift buying—the Karen extravaganza having been only the most prominent baby gift in a year of constant baby-gift giving—I might have sent her something. But I was preparing to take a much-needed break from the business of professional falseness, and I was longing to stop doing things I didn’t want to do.

And besides, I was getting ready to go up to Maine to be with my sister before her due date, and I had a lot on my mind.

I had to think of a nickname for the baby.

Something a little more original than Co-Pickle, or Vice-Pickle.

Lynn gave birth to an eight-pound three-ounce baby boy, David Samuel—via cesarean, again—at nine o’clock on the morning of July 10th. When her contractions started in the middle of the night, she and Paul went to the hospital at four-thirty, and my parents, who had come to Maine early in anticipation of the birth, met them there shortly afterward, leaving me alone with Nicole.

She and I were up having our waffles by the time they called to tell us the news. And when I hung up, I told Nicole to finish eating because we had a special day ahead of us.

“Remember Mum-Mum and Daddy told you that Mum-Mum’s in the hospital even though she’s not sick?” It was bright and chilly that early Tuesday morning, and the breeze rattled the window jambs in the breakfast nook as we ate.

Nicole seemed unusually quiet as she dipped a bite-size waffle cube into the little puddle of syrup on the side of her plate. “Uh-huh.”

“Well, when we go to visit her in a little while, she’s going to have a surprise for you.”

Lynn and Paul had been preparing her for a new baby brother for months now. “I know what it is.” She stuck her fingers in her mouth and whispered as if she were suddenly shy.

I knelt down in front of her to button up her little green sweater. “And what is it?”

“It’s Baby Boy.”

“And do you know what Baby Boy’s name is?”

“It’s David Samuel.”

I gave her a hug and held her close to me.

“Auntie LaLa?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“How long is Baby Boy going to stay here for?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. My mother had always told us how Lynn had asked the same question about me when I was born.

“He’s going to stay forever.”

“What’s forever?”

“Forever’s a long, long time.”

“Are you staying forever?”

I took her little hand and brought it up to my mouth and
kissed it. I could feel the back of my throat tighten, and I knew I’d have trouble getting the words out. “No. I’m not staying forever.”

“How long are you staying for, then?”

“For a week. So I can help Mum-Mum with the new baby.”

“I wish you could stay longer.”

“I know. Me, too.”

“Then you could play with me. And sleep in my bed with me.”

“I know. I love playing with you and sleeping in your bed with you.”

“Because you know what?” She put her hands on my face lightly, as if she wanted to know what the skin felt like, and when she looked me in the eyes, I felt my throat seize up again. This was my Pickle, the little girl I loved more than life itself, and we would always be friends. No matter how old she got.

“What?”

“When you go away, I miss you a lot and a lot, and really bad.”

“And when I go away, I miss you a lot and a lot, and really bad, too.” I gave her another hug and then patted on her Pull-Up. “Come,” I said on the way to the car, “Mammo’s waiting.”

The minute I laid eyes on David that day, I knew that I was going to be as crazy about him as I’d been about Nicole. Holding him, draping him over my shoulder as I’d done with my niece four years ago, made my heart hurt, and I relished the infant smell of his little head and the feel of his tiny new cotton one-piece pajamas under my palm. Dark haired with big black eyes, he looked to me exactly like Lynn.