Dating Big Bird (28 page)

“Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?”

“I’m just surprised, that’s all. I can’t remember the last time you asked for it.”

I thought a minute. I couldn’t either.

She wiped her eyes again, then put the towel down, and then she hugged me. And in that one moment, in that one familiar instant of standing in the kitchen by the sink with my mother, each of us trying to understand the other and once, in a blue moon, succeeding, I knew the flood of doubt had been pushed back. Maybe she had never been able to say the right thing at the right time, but I had always believed
that in the end, my mother would stand by me. And knowing that she’d be there to teach me how to feed and bathe and diaper a baby, that she’d be there to teach me everything she knew about being a mother—however imperfect I may have thought her mothering skills were (was there a daughter on earth who
didn’t
think her mother’s mothering skills were imperfect?)—I felt less alone than I had in a very long time.

August 30 was my due date, at least by Dr. Vishnu’s calculations.

I’d told Lynn, of course, the week before, when I’d gotten there ahead of everyone else. She and I had just exchanged presents—I gave her a
mammo
necklace of course (in white gold), and she gave me a silver locket, inside of which was a teeny-tiny photograph of the Pickle and the Monkey, who looked very distinguished for all of his four months. When I broke the news, she started tiptoeing excitedly around the house, giving me her favorite early-stage sweatpants and pulling whatever pregnancy books I didn’t already have off the shelves. Which I brought home and added to my already-extensive collection.

I’ve gone back to those books, and except for the husband stuff, they make sense. Every night I get into bed and read one, and then I even fill out a diary page in the
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
“Daily Pregnancy Journal” that Amy gave me a few days after I told her. She’s given me a whole bunch of other things too since, I suspect, she still feels a little guilty for not getting pregnant, too—like a black Lycra four-piece essential leggings-skirt-tunic-dress Pregnancy Survival Kit and two stuffed dolls: one Barney and one Big Bird, for old times’ sake.

A month ago, right after New Year’s, she and Barry got
engaged, and while I wasn’t beside myself with joy, I tried to be, and I think I was almost convincing. At least, I hope I was. He really was nice, and he was clearly head over heels in love with her. I even offered to help her go looking for a wedding dress once my all-day morning sickness subsides, but she reminded me that she still has her old one. Good thing she held on to it.

A few weeks ago I started looking at larger apartments and cribs and strollers and changing tables and nursery wallpaper and color schemes, but I became completely overwhelmed. I asked Renee if she would make all these decisions for me so I could just go about the business of being pregnant without any additional stress, but she said since I’m going to
have
a baby I better stop
being
a baby and do it myself, and that she has enough to do preparing to be my birth coach.

I guess she’s just saving all her nurturing skills and moral support for the delivery room.

Karen is back at work now. I called her recently to tell her my good news, though I assumed she’d already heard it from Simon. While she wasn’t about to start trading pregnancy war-stories with me or offering to share baby clothes, she did say that if I ever needed anything—
any
thing—she would always be there to help me, and I believed her. Simon calls once in a while with gossip and news from the office, and last week I recognized his handiwork when I saw an item in the
New York Observer
with the boldfaced subhead “Karen Skipps a Meal at the Grill Room.”

Arlene Schiffler, of course, has a new column, “The First Year of Motherhood”—and when I need a good laugh or after I’ve had a good cry because I’m afraid of doing everything I have to do alone, I’ll buy the latest issue of
Glamour
or reread a grotesque diary entry from an earlier month to Amy over the phone until the panic and terror and fear of
the unknown subsides. Comfort seems to come from the oddest places these days, but when it does, I’m usually far too grateful to question it.

Or already asleep.

Malcolm called one night, out of the blue, during the second week of February. I’d been standing in the middle of the living room wondering if there was some other configuration of furniture that would miraculously provide enough extra space for a nursery so I wouldn’t have to move, when the phone rang. Ten months had passed since we’d spoken, and while I used to occasionally rehearse a script should he ever call again, when I finally did hear him asking me how I was, I had no idea what to say.

We made small talk for a few minutes—I told him I was on leave, and he told me he was teaching at Columbia now instead of the New School. Then he told me that he’d thought a lot about me and our relationship over the months we’d been apart, and asked if we could get together and talk. And because by this point I thought seeing him and talking to him couldn’t do me any harm and could only do me some good—closure and setting things right between us and all that other therapy-speak stuff—I agreed to meet him for a drink at the Cedar Tavern in an hour.

It took me almost that long to figure out what to wear, since everything I owned was already a little tight and would only make me look fat, though not necessarily fat and pregnant. But I quickly realized that it didn’t matter what I wore, so I ripped into the Pregnancy Survival Kit and put on the leggings and tunic. Then I grabbed my keys and my coat and quickly walked the few blocks to meet him.

He was already there when I came in from the cold—sitting in a booth, for once—and when he saw me come in, he
waved, then stood up as I approached the table. We looked at each other awkwardly before he reached behind me to help me off with my coat. He put his arms around me and hugged me quickly but tightly.

He went to order me a drink from the bartender and a minute or two later returned with my cranberry juice.

“It’s good to see you,” he said.

“It’s good to see you, too.” Sitting with him again was as easy as it had always been, and for a moment it felt as if those ten long months hadn’t passed at all. But I was afraid of enjoying it too much. He might not call again for another ten months.

“You look good. You look—”

I smiled. “Fat?”

“No. You just look good.”

“I do?”

He nodded.

“Thanks.” Malcolm didn’t often hand out compliments, so when he did, they meant a lot—especially given our last conversation and my current vulnerable state of mind. “You look very—”

“Fat?” he said, imitating me.

I laughed. “No.
Fit
.”

“I started running again.”

“I didn’t know you used to run.”

“I did. A lot. Marathons, even.”

“Really.”

“It’s one of the few small but significant changes I’ve made in my life recently. I sold my apartment. And I’m buying a place downtown. On Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street. Right near you, actually,” he added.

“Right near me.”

“I’m still going to have the long commute that I had
before, only now it’ll be in reverse. But I thought it was time for a change.”

“Well, that’s quite a change—uptown to downtown.” I knew that wasn’t the kind of change he’d meant, but I was stalling for time. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to open that particular can of worms before he did.

“I also started writing—a little.”

“That’s great,” I said. “I’m happy for you.” I had never heard him say anything about his writing, and knowing how much it had meant to him once, I was moved now to hear he was inching back toward it.

He shrugged. “It’s not great yet. But at least I’m doing it.”

“That’s a pretty big ‘at least.’ ”

He nodded. “What about you?” he said.

Me?

“I read about your success with the necklace. That’s terrific.”

“Thanks.”

“So now that you’re on leave—now that you don’t have to do a job you hate for a while—have you decided what to do next?”

“Kind of. I’m still in the planning stages, though.”

“Listen,” he said, “I asked you to meet me here because I wanted you to know that I thought about what you said that night, the last time we were here. I thought about it a lot. And you were right.”

“Right about what?”

“About everything.” He shifted in his seat. “I was frozen. Completely frozen. I wasn’t ready to”—he looked up at the ceiling as if he might find a way to say what he wanted to say—“I wasn’t ready for you. But now I am.”

I was completely shocked to hear him say that. Dumbstruck, in fact. “Oh,” I said flatly.

He took a sip from his drink, then rubbed his hand dry. “I have no idea where you are with things. If you’re happier without me. If you’ve met someone else. For all I know, you could be engaged by now.”

“I’m not engaged.”

I was
pregnant
, but I was not engaged.

He ran his hands along the edge of the table. “I want to try again. I want—I want to be with you.”

I sat back against the hard wood of the booth and put my hands in my lap. I’d imagined this scenario a thousand times—him saying these exact words, wanting me back—but now that it was actually happening, I felt numb.

“I know that a lot didn’t work between us, but I’m getting better, I think. I’m seeing someone now, a therapist, and he’s good. I’ve got a long way to go, but I feel—I feel more like myself than I have in a long time.”

“I can tell,” I said. “You seem—well, you seem more at peace with yourself.”

He looked at me. “But?”

I smiled and shrugged. “But—a lot of things.”

“Like what?”

“Like—things are different now. I’m different now.”

“Are you involved with someone?”

“No.”

“Then how are things different?”

I knew I had to tell him the truth. And I wanted to tell him. He had, after all, had a great deal to do with my decision.

“I’m pregnant.”

His mouth dropped open. “How far along are you?”

“Eleven weeks.”

“Eleven weeks,” he repeated. “Was it—was it an accident?”

“No. It wasn’t. It was planned.”

He swallowed hard. “With someone you knew?”

“No. I can’t say I’ve ever met anyone at the Cryogenesis International Sperm Bank.”

He sat back against the hard wood of the booth now, too, and after what seemed like forever, he smiled. “Jesus, that’s brave.”

“Brave? I didn’t do it because I was brave. I did it because I was terrified. Terrified of what I’d miss if I didn’t do it.”

“Are you still terrified?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when I think about the enormity of what I’ve done and whether things will turn out okay, yes, I feel terrified.”

“Don’t be.”

I laughed. “Easy for you to say.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Of course it wasn’t. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be glib.” Somehow there seemed to be an opening, so I decided to take it. “When your wife was pregnant,” I started slowly, “with Benjamin, were you scared?”

He thought a minute. “No. I wasn’t scared. I was excited. I was happy. I felt like my life was finally starting.” He disappeared from behind his eyes for a few seconds, and in that brief time it seemed he went somewhere very far away. When he came back and looked at me, I saw a film of tears. He had indeed come far since we’d been apart. “The fear will pass,” he said softly. “It will pass.”

“It will?” I covered my eyes with my palms and felt my own tears suddenly. Until that moment I hadn’t told anyone I was scared, and now that I had, I was overwhelmed with relief.

He waited for me to collect myself, then he took my hands. Our fingers locked, and I took in a long deep breath.

“I want us to be together,” he said finally.

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You haven’t given this any thought—the fact that it’s not your child—the fact that there
is
a child.” I took a deep breath. “And even if you did think about it and you did actually want to do it, there are other things we’d have to work out.”

“I know.”

I wondered if we were talking about the same thing.

“We’re talking about the same thing,” he said, as if he were reading my mind. “My shrink gave me a prescription for that.”

“You switched off Prozac?”

“No.” He looked at me. “He gave me a prescription for something else.”

“Oh,” I said.
“Oh.”

He ran his thumbs along my wrists, and then he tightened his grip on my hands.

“Does it work?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t tried it. Yet.”

I smiled. “This is ridiculous.”

“What’s ridiculous?”

“Just when you can finally, you know—”

“Have sex?”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“Because I’m—”

“You can have sex while you’re pregnant,” he said.

“I know, but isn’t it kind of dangerous?”

“Not if you do it right.”

I looked at him. “How do you do it right?”

He touched the side of my face with his hand. “I’ll show you,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

And later that night, he did.