Friendship (22 page)

Elise furrowed her brow cutely. “You claimed you’d stay in touch! But not a peep. What gives? What have you been up to? I hope you’re getting lots of writing done.”

“No, I totally haven’t. I’ve been more, like, accumulating material,” Bev said with a slight eye roll to show that she was kidding.

“Don’t roll your eyes! That’s a legitimate thing for you to be doing. Listen, I’m going to sit here and eat fifteen dollars’ worth of kale and hazelnuts, and you’re going to tell me absolutely everything that’s been going on with you.”

Ordinarily Bev would have told what was appropriate to tell and left it at that. But she was in a strange, expansive mood, and Elise was just far enough outside of Bev’s life that she
could
tell her everything. Elise’s eyes got gratifyingly wider and wider, and when Bev finished, Elise seemed genuinely awestruck. “Oh, wow. That’s a weird one, huh? I don’t know whether to congratulate you or console you.”

“I don’t know either. Um, I know it’s a bizarre thing to ask, and obviously you shouldn’t feel pressure, like my whole decision is going to hinge just on what you say, but … what do you think I should do?”

“Well, primarily I think you should get a job.”

“Ha! That’s definitely true.”

“No, like, a good job. No more temping. And nothing to do with books, or publishing, or teaching or tutoring, or anything like that. You just won’t make enough money doing any of those things to be able to have a baby on your own, even with some help from this wannabe godmother.”

“I’m with you so far,” Bev said. “Except that I’ve never done anything besides those things, unless working in a wine bar counts.”

“It does,” Elise said. “In fact I think it’s the most important thing on your résumé. Okay. Here’s my idea: my friend Anna owns this high-end maternity boutique in Carroll Gardens, and she’s trying to hire a manager right now so that she can spend more time with her own kids.”

“Which one? Where is it?”

“It’s on Smith Street.”

“Oh my god, your friend owns Push It?”

“I know it’s a punch line, but here’s the thing. They do like half a million dollars in sales every month. It’s insane. She gives her employees health insurance, paid vacation … and maternity leave, needless to say! It’s hard work, of course, and you have to be nice to a lot of … people. But I think she’d hire you.”

“Why? I have no retail experience…”

“You have customer-service experience out the wazoo. And you have the right look. Especially pregnant. I know that’s weird to say, but I just imagine you in that store, maybe with your hair in two braids, wearing J Brand maternity overalls and maybe a sleeveless button-down—you have just the right mix of edgy and wholesome. You’ll inspire those mommies to spend.”

“Um, thank you?”

“I know it’s a bizarre thing to say. But I’m right, though.”

“Okay, well … I’m in, I guess. Are there any conditions?”

“Yes.” Elise pulled down the corners of her shapely mouth and became serious. “You have to promise me you won’t give up. If you have the baby. You won’t let that be your excuse. It’s a great excuse, and you already have so many. But you have to make it something else instead.”

“The opposite of an excuse, maybe?”

Elise smiled, and Bev tried to remember whether she had kids. “Okay, call your friend. I might as well at least interview.”

After they’d finished their salads and Elise had given Bev a big, sincere goodbye hug, promising she’d be in touch about the job by the next day at the very latest, Bev immediately pulled out her phone and called Amy. On the third try she finally picked up.

“Now you call me! Well, it’s done now, so don’t bother coming over here.” Amy sounded bad, peeved but trying to hide it under a veneer of manic cheer.

“What’s done? Did I miss something? I’m sorry, I was at the doctor.”

“The doctor! Are you okay?”

Good, she’s not a complete monster,
Bev thought. “Totally fine. Just, you know…”

“Oh, did you finally go through with the abortion? Jesus, Bev, you should have told me. I could have put Mr. Horton off a couple more days if I’d known it was today.”

“No, I … it wasn’t today. Mr. Horton?”

“He evicted me, remember? I had to move out today. I hired movers. I didn’t want to be pathetic and ask people for help, but anyway I’m putting all my stuff into storage. I’m cat-sitting for a friend of a friend from Yidster while I look for a room in Bushwick or whatever. I’m at the storage place now. Actually, can you hang on one sec?”

“Sure, I just wanted to…”

But Amy had turned away from the phone and was talking to someone else. “What do you mean, it didn’t go through? Here, try this one,” Bev could hear her saying. “Sorry,” Amy said to Bev. “Jesus, it’s taking forever to get out of here. Thank you for calling me, anyway.”

“Oh, I was actually calling because I wanted to tell you … Okay. Well, so I just ran into my old teacher Elise, and she’s going to help me get what sounds like this great job, and I think if it works out, which she seems sure it will, I’m going to have the baby.”

“Have the baby—like, give the baby up for adoption or to Sally or whatever?”

“No. I was more thinking I would, like, have the baby.”

“
Keep
the baby.”

“Yup.” Bev had been so happy a moment ago. Something about the compliments and the reassuring, stable presence of Elise had made it seem that anything was possible. The silence on the line, the face she imagined Amy making—she didn’t have to imagine, she knew exactly what face Amy was making—were undoing her good mood. But not, weirdly, her certainty.

“Look, can we talk about this later?” Amy said. “I’m in the middle of all this shit. I’m really sorry. I just can’t even handle talking to you about this right now. I’ll call you tonight, okay?”

“You will? Okay, talk to you then.”

Bev bussed her salad tray slowly, meditatively, and walked out the door of the restaurant into the sunlight. Some words were forming in her mind, but she didn’t quite trust herself to think them, not yet. They had to do with Amy, with the baby, and with all the variables sliding into place at the moment. She felt a sense of nervous, slightly far-fetched anticipation, as if she’d entered a sweepstakes or made a bet. And she felt coldness around her heart, numbness, a feeling of loss that was more anticipation of loss, really, but it amounted to the same thing.

34

Eleven o’clock found Bev on the subway, on her way—like the three other people in the subway car carrying rolled-up PVC mats—to yoga. Her stomach was noticeably rounded now. Although she could still pass for simply chubby, lately some perceptive strangers had begun to discern her pregnancy, and she had started to gratefully accept seats when they were offered and mildly resent it when they weren’t.

This time, she got a seat, and the intra-Brooklyn commute passed in a flash; fifteen minutes after leaving her apartment, Bev was situating her mat near the back of the classroom. She’d chosen the studio primarily for its interior design and its proximity to Push It; the teachers, she figured, would be fine, good enough, and she would get to spend time in this big sandalwood-scented room in a DUMBO loft building, looking out across the water at Manhattan as she stood in mountain pose. Today would be her first class, though, and she wasn’t sure what to expect. She hoped there would not be sharing or deep eye contact or anything else that might rattle her; lately the dumbest things could move her either to white-hot rage or tears. She had been trying not to think at all of Amy, for instance, because Amy seemed not to be thinking at all of her, and as sad as this made her, she also felt almost as if she understood. She was traveling into a different world now: a Lycra-clad, jargon-filled, slightly ridiculous but decidedly adult world, and it was not a world where Amy belonged.

Bev hoped to spend lots of time sitting in meditative silence, feeling obscurely virtuous and soothed but not really having to
do
anything, as the rest of the class chanted in Sanskrit. She didn’t believe in any of the stuff yoga teachers talked about, all their various babblings about reframing negative thoughts and sending good vibrations out into the universe and returning always to the breath. But whenever she’d dabbled in yoga in the past, during phases when she had the necessary spare cash or spare time, she always left the classes feeling better, both in her hip, which still creaked sometimes from whatever she’d done to it with all that poor-form jogging in Madison, and, though she hated to admit it, in her mind.

The teacher introduced herself as Sky and started class with everyone sitting upright, cross-legged, and om-ing “like you’re having a conversation with that little one inside you, sending him or her that vibratory energy.” Bev dutifully om’d, but in her mind she refused to participate in the creepy ritual of pretending that what was inside her somehow had thoughts and feelings and whatever kind of sensory abilities might be able to perceive “vibrations.” It seemed as dumb and wishful as imagining your cat or dog talking to you in a funny little voice, asking you to buy its favorite brand of treats. Opening her eyes, Bev stole a glance around the room and inspected her knocked-up, tight-lidded fellow students, resting their palms on their Crenshaw melon or watermelon or barely rounded bellies and softly smiling as they om’d, as though they all shared a delicious secret.

There was no real option but to join them. For the duration of the class Bev would have to drink their brand of organic agave-sweetened Kool-Aid. She would dedicate her practice to world happiness and send healing love out into the expanding universe and down into her own expanding uterus. She came to the front of her mat, bent her knees, and bowed forward as Sky led them through a sun salutation. “Draw energy up through the soles of your feet!” she intoned. “In-heeel. Ex-heeeeel.”

Bev focused and went inside herself, emerging only at the end of class as everyone lay in corpse pose. She was among the minority of students who were still early enough in their pregnancies to lie on their backs; her vena cava was still unencumbered by her unborn baby’s weight. Everyone else lay on their sides, with bolsters between their knees. Bev looked up at the ceiling, unable to relax enough to allow her eyes to close. The ceiling was nice: white-painted pressed tin. Then it was obscured by Sky, who loomed over Bev and straddled her as she adjusted her shoulder blades. Bev tried to keep her gaze on the ceiling, but Sky insistently caught her eye. The whites of Sky’s eyes were very white compared with her turquoise pupils. Was she wearing
colored contacts
? “Allow your eyes to gently close if you wish!” Sky whispered. Bev blinked and realized that her eyes were full of unshed tears. Rather than shed them, she closed her lids and tried to go limp as Sky adjusted her occiput with patchouli-scented fingers. A few minutes later they were allowed to sit up, om one last om, bow forward, thank themselves for coming to class, and then get up and start making their way back to their jackets and shoes.

When Bev looked up from lacing her sneakers, a watermelon-bellied woman who’d come in late and positioned her mat toward the front of the classroom locked eyes with her as she pulled her blond curls into a tighter ponytail. “Oh my god. Bev Tunney! What are you doing here? Oh my
god
! Congratulations! I didn’t even know you were married!”

“I’m, um. Hi! From Oberlin, right?”

“Allie Heffernan! Formerly Allie Singer? We had that Dante seminar together junior year. The one where that kid had a seizure?”

“Ah! Right.” Bev had been jealous of the kid who’d had a seizure; he’d gotten an automatic A.

“I didn’t even know you lived in the city! What are you up to, besides…” And here Allie Heffernan gestured to her own gigantic Lycra-covered stomach.

“I, you know, this and that. Grad school?”

“Amazing! Wow! Well, listen, I have to pick this one’s older sister up from preschool, but do you want to come get a smoothie with me, or something, on the way? I mean, we don’t have to get a smoothie.” Allie put her hand over her mouth and whispered dramatically, “I could go for a burger, to be honest.”

They’d probably exchanged ten sentences in college. “I have to go to work, actually,” said Bev, grateful for the easy out.

“But you have to eat! What time do you have to be there? Come on, walk with me. We need to catch up!”

“One thirty. I guess I could get lunch on the way.”

Against her will and her better judgment, Bev found herself following Allie, who walked more quickly than her bulbous middle seemed likely to permit. As they sprinted down the stairs to the F-train platform, Allie caught her up on their classmates’ doings; they’d known such completely different types of people that the news wasn’t already familiar to Bev from Facebook. Allie had been friends with private school and boarding school kids who’d gravitated back to the New York area, where they’d originated, the type of people who’d gotten all the performance art and lesbianism out of their systems before graduation and had gone on to law school or management consulting and in due time had, like Allie, forged unions with men as practical and well-heeled and boring as they were. Bev’s friends from college had mostly been midwestern, like her, and most of them were in the middle of the country getting doctorates in some useless branch of the humanities, or in someplace like Laos, studying hard drugs, or in San Francisco, living in shared houses and still drinking as much as they had at twenty-two.

And where did Bev fit into this continuum of outcomes? Talking to Allie made her feel uncomfortably aware of the possible Bev futures she’d scrapped or that had been pulled out from under her feet: the Bev who lived happily in Madison, married to a lawyer, was someone Allie would have an easier time wrapping her mind around than the Bev who, four months pregnant by a random stranger, lived with roommates and worked in a maternity boutique called Push It. Or, for that matter, the Bev who had an M.F.A. and published short stories in obscure but impressive-sounding periodicals. But boutique Bev was the real Bev, and her life was the life she was going to have to describe to an increasingly uncomprehending Allie.