Kate Jacobs (15 page)

* * *

Georgia folded up her laundry while Dakota
practiced baton twirling in the living/dining/everything room. It was just the
way she liked to spend her Saturday nights, hanging with Dakota. Though more
and more often, her daughter was being invited to sleepovers and movie outings
and Georgia was home alone. Tonight, thankfully, it was just the two of them
and a million loads of laundry to lug up and down the stairs.
"I wish we lived in a big house with its own washer and dryer," said
Georgia, starting the "I wish" game that she and Dakota loved to
play. There were also the "Someday" and "When I'm Grown-up"
variations, depending on her mood.
"I wish we had our own gymnasium," countered Dakota.
"I wish we were spending Easter with Gran in Scotland," said Georgia.
She had looked at the savings account and decided that this was going to be the
summer she finally took Dakota to the U.K. She needed her baby to see the
country that she loved, and the grandmother who, while not exactly effusive
with the hugs, held her tightly when she did hug her. She wanted to show her
gran
just how well she was doing with her little girl and
what an accomplished knitter Dakota was becoming. And hey, let's be honest,
thought Georgia. She wanted to get one of those tight hugs for herself.
"I wish we were spending Easter with Dad," said Dakota, interrupting
her reverie.
Georgia stopped folding
midsheet
and tossed the sheet
back into the basket; it was a fitted one and she could never do those right
anyway.
"What do you mean? Do you really want to have your father over for Easter?
We typically just have us and Anita, baby," reminded Georgia. Thank
goodness for Anita, who always included Dakota in her Passover Seder and then
didn't hesitate to come over a few days later to eat lamb and chocolate
bunnies, always bringing some leftover
matzoh
-ball
soup.
"It's not like I have to believe in Jesus to eat the celebration
dinner," Anita had pointed out with a wink over Dakota's head at their
first Easter. So far, for a little girl whose mother was Presbyterian and whose
up-until-now-absentee father was nominally Baptist, Dakota had been receiving
quite an interfaith training.
"I'm sure Daddy has plans for Easter, sweetheart," said Georgia
gently, wondering if her daughter could pick up on her reluctance. If so,
Dakota didn't let on.
"Oh, no, I asked him when we went to the pottery studio this afternoon.
He's cool with coming by. Said he likes lamb."
"We'll see, honey, we'll see," said Georgia. The last thing she
wanted to do was to let down her guard with James. She still suspected he was
up to something.
And Georgia was done with making stupid mistakes.

* * *

Darwin rolled over in bed and looked at the
clock. One P.M. Could that be? She never slept past noon, even on a Sunday. It
was leftover training from when she was a kid—she still woke up at nine and
felt guilty about not going to church.
Damn, the blood in her brain was aching, and her mouth felt fuzzy and dry at
the same time. And did she ever have to pee! She swung her legs over the side
of the bed and went to stand, discovered the floor was rolling—were they having
an earthquake?—and so she fell, awkwardly, back onto the covers. She looked at
the ceiling, which was spinning in circles. She closed her eyes. The spinning
got faster. She opened them and groaned.
"I think I have a hangover," she whispered, then paused a moment to
consider what she was saying. A hangover! She squinted her eyes as if trying to
see a long distance but really just tried to think back to the night before.
She remembered waiting to hear from Dan, and when he missed their call time for
the third day in a row, she decided to go to the West Side and see if
Peri
wanted to move up their interview. They were scheduled
to talk today for the thesis research, but
Peri
seemed comfortable with switching it up, even if it had been a Saturday night.
"Come on down," she had said. "It'll be fun."
Darwin was simply exhausted with being home and waiting by the phone, hoping it
would ring and that Dan would have more than three minutes to talk; their
conversations were becoming ever briefer and more strained. So she pulled on a
pair of mules and her spring coat and headed for the train station to travel in
from Jersey.
What she'd hoped to be a diversion turned into an awesome evening. Even Georgia
had been pretty friendly, heading upstairs early to do laundry with Dakota,
leaving
Peri
to lock up, Darwin following behind with
her notebook.
Peri
had shown Darwin the handbags she
sold in the store and then even revealed a few designs still in the works,
telling Darwin all about her ambitions. It had been fascinating. And then
Peri
showed her the most expensive yarns in the shop.
Eighty-nine dollars for that little ball!
It was like being let into some strange inner world of knitting.
Kinda
, she'd had to admit, cool. She'd gone to the shop to
interview
Peri
, yes, for the thesis, but Darwin gave
in easily to
Peri's
insistence that she join her at a
Greek restaurant and meet her friends from FIT. They were all friendly—Henry,
Elon
, Bridget, and
Anjali
—even if
they did talk nonstop about all these people Darwin had never heard of. Who
cared whether or not Anna
Wintour
wore fur? But the
evening was truly fun, especially because
Elon
really
wanted to hear Darwin's thoughts about midcentury styles as a form of
repression. She may not care that much about design, but Darwin loved to talk
corsets and all the ties that bind.
Last night was the first time she had tried hummus, startled by the texture of
the chickpea mixture and yet savoring it as well.
Souvlaki
she could gladly skip forever; baklava left her salivating for more. Oh, and
then there was the ouzo. Yes, they had had a few glasses of the liquor. Darwin
had loved licorice candy since she was little—who knew they made it into a
drink? Delicious. She made a smacking sound with her mouth, then felt slightly
sick at the remembrance of the alcohol. She gently rubbed at her lips.
Lips.
A memory flashed, so briefly that Darwin shook her head as if to make it fall
out.
Lips.
Warm, soft, nibbling at her mouth.
Lips.
She put her hand to her face and then looked down, realized she was still in
her blouse from the night before, although it was adjusted awkwardly, the first
button through the third loop and so on. Her legs were bare: jeans lay crumpled
on the floor, along with her shoes and one of her socks and a pair of pink
striped panties. Darwin reached out to take her underpants and put them on for
the trip to the bathroom when she heard a low moan from the bed.
"Dan?" she said softly, afraid to turn around. "Did you fly in
last night? Dan?"
"Hey," came the croaked reply. "Darlene, baby, come back
here."
Darwin felt a shiver of revulsion run down her back. She turned around, one
hand clutching the headboard to steady herself.
There, his head on her husband's pillow, his arm lazily reaching out to her,
lay
Peri's
friend from the restaurant.
It was
Elon
.

doing the gauge

Just as you have to take baby steps before you
walk, you can't get going with your garment until you make a practice piece. So
try out a few stitches and measure your handiwork against the pattern. Take the
measure of yourself against the expectation. (Otherwise what you make just
won't fit!) And then you make adjustments. Too tight? Try bigger needles. You
might have to adjust again or make another gauge before you're done—your
stitching may change as you become more experienced. The mystery is that two
people using needles of the same size and type can make stitches of varying
size and tension. The magic is that, even though they have differences, they
can both create something equally wondrous.

eight

Pacing up and down Mott Street, Darwin could
barely
keep
herself from crying. Or vomiting. Or hyperventilating.
"Oh my God, oh my God," she repeated under her breath, startled every
so often by the bleating horns just blocks away, on Lafayette and Houston
streets. It was Monday and the cars and cabs were ferrying the expense-account
bohemians from their
SoHo
lofts up to their midtown
advertising offices, and the young Masters of the Universe from the Upper East
Side south to their finance jobs on Wall Street. It was the way of the city
that no one lived near where they worked. And it was a typical bustling,
energy-filled day—except for Darwin. She'd left her house early to get to
Planned Parenthood before it opened, then realized she hadn't e-mailed her
advisor that she wouldn't be making her teaching-assistant gig for the
undergrad class on women in Victorian times. Fishing in her backpack for her
cell phone, she realized she'd left it at home as well. Which meant that at
least she wouldn't have to lie about not answering when Dan called. "Sorry
I couldn't pick up, honey," she imagined herself saying. "I left the
cell at home and had to go into the city."
"Didn't you have class?"
"Oh, I had to go…into the knitting shop. Do some interviews." Darwin
was deep in her fantasy.
"That's so great," he would say. "You're going to get this
dissertation completed and everything is going to fall into place. We'll get
settled together again and then we can get back to making that baby."
Darwin's lips began to tremble. She didn't deserve to have a baby with Dan
anymore. God, she missed him so much. It was funny: the last person she wanted
to know about what had happened last night was Dan. For obvious reasons. But he
was her best friend! She told him everything. He always had the smartest
advice. And even though the past several months had been excruciatingly
lonely—for both of them, right?—Dan still took the time to scribble little
notes and mail them from the hospital. Darwin had a hefty stack of Hollywood
postcards, all with a similar theme: Miss You! Love You! The occasional smiley
face on his prescription pad, too, ordering up long-distance hugs from the
office of Dr. Dan Leung. She tried to reciprocate with e-mails and phone calls.
Long e-mails. Pages and pages. Pouring out her heart to him. The breezy little
messages she got in return irked her. They did. She could admit it. Initially
she was thrilled to hear from him, then she was mad that he was fitting their
relationship in between morning rounds, cups of coffee, and catnaps.
Why did he have to go so far away? They had excellent hospitals a hell of a lot
closer. Lots of cranky, sick people in New York. Who needed good doctors.
Was she going to be one of them?
Elon
had tried to reassure her that they'd used a
condom—"You seemed totally into hooking up, Darlene," he told her as
she sobbed hysterically, demanding he leave the apartment. "You made the
first move, not me."
"I was drunk! Drunk!" she screamed.
"Not that drunk," he answered. "I asked you if you were sure and
you said yes, come home with me."
Elon
stood there, his shirt on and his leg in one
side of his pants, his wire-rimmed glasses on the top of his ruffled hair. A
little too scrawny, this sort-of stranger looked just this side of nerdy. Not
threatening. Not particularly suave. Not concerned enough to actually get her
name right, but not a complete jerk, either. He'd just, as they say, gotten
lucky.
Darwin remembered enough from the night before to know there was truth in what
he was saying. Shit.
"Get out, get out, get out." She flew at him, hands flying, pushing,
throwing him out the door. Then she crumpled onto the floor and sat there, too
long, too shell-shocked to cry or even move.
There had been short-lived relief at learning they'd used protection. A blip. A
second of thinking, "Thank God I won't have to get an HIV test." Now
she just felt dirty. Darwin had never wanted to be just a good girl, but she
didn't really want to be bad, either. Breaking her vows and for what? If only
Dan really knew her. He'd leave her.
And then she'd be alone.
The "why?" in her head became a constant echo through Sunday
afternoon as she eventually heaved herself up off the floor, took a long, hot
shower, and then fell into bed at seven P.M. She lay there, awake, for hours,
plugging her ears when the phone rang and Dan's voice boomed out over the
answering machine. Sure, she knew how to turn down the ringer, turn off the
volume. But she wanted to hear his voice, wanted to think about what she'd
done. She wanted to suffer.
Darwin knew, finally, in that moment, just how much she loved Dan. Because the
thought of losing him made it impossible to think of going on.
What was she going to do now?
Even though she'd been tracking her cycle for ages and had a pretty good idea
that she couldn't have gotten pregnant the night before, somehow, some way, she
needed to remove all traces of
Elon
. She needed to
get the morning-after pill.

* * *

The security guard was bored.
"Bag to me here and then walk through," he said, giving her a quick
glance up and down.
Lucie walked swiftly through the metal detector, grabbed her purse on the other
side, and waited to be buzzed in. She'd given up on her pricey uptown
gyno
when she went freelance (good-bye, affordable
health-care!); it would be three more months before the health plan from the
public-station job kicked in. And even then, her pregnancy might be considered
one of the "preexisting" conditions that they wouldn't cover her for.
So Planned Parenthood it was—and thank God for them. Of course, her original
motivation for showing up at the door of PP was something else altogether.
She'd been surprised by her late period, assumed it was—what do all the
magazines call it?—
perimenopause
. Even though she
wanted a baby. She'd been afraid to hope. And then the stick turned blue.
"Let's talk," the counselor had said after her physical exam. It had
been a long morning, that initial visit. First the wait in one room, then
finally being buzzed in, again, to a smaller waiting area. God, the security in
this place! It was a far cry from her sedate doctor's office. Yet she felt
protected, safe. And certain she wasn't going to run into anyone she knew.
"You're among friends here," the counselor prodded upon meeting
Lucie. "I want to help you do what's right for you. Is this pregnancy a
positive experience for you?"
That's all it took—a few kind words—for Lucie to crack. Well, in truth she'd
had no one to talk with about her situation. It had seemed easy when it was
theoretical. Now she was freaked out by the prospect of having a baby and, to
all intents and purposes, raising it alone. On very little money.
She wasn't sure she could do it. That's why she hadn't told anyone. Not a
friend, no one at work.
"Do you want to have this baby, Lucie?" The counselor waited for her
answer.
"More than anything."
"Then we're here to help you. We typically encourage women to see their
regular doctor, but because you're in limbo in terms of insurance, we can deal
with your prenatal care here for the time being."
The counselor looked at her until Lucie met her eye. "Eventually everyone
will
know, Lucie. There's almost no way to hide your stomach in the later months. So
you may want to consider talking with your family, especially if you want them
involved in the baby's life. But, until then, let's get you on some vitamins
and get you some literature."
Lucie had been so relieved that February morning, just to have someone treat
her so…matter-of-factly. To not react when she told her story.
Now it was April and she sat, thirteen weeks pregnant, waiting for her name to
be called. Easter was coming up and she was going to be spending the holiday
all alone; she hadn't told Rosie and she wasn't about to show up at home in the
family way. It hurt, her self-imposed exile, to know the entire family was
together and she was alone in her apartment. Coming up with plans to make extra
money, like with those knitting videos.
She squeezed her eyelids shut as she fought back a stress headache. She'd had a
lot of those lately.
"Lucie?"
Her eyes opened rapidly, blinking. There, standing just in front of her, was
that annoying woman from the knitting club. The
blahblah
,
I'm-too-good-to-knit-and-I-can't-believe-you're-all-here-butlet-me-eat-a-muffin-anyway
academic. Darwin Chiu.
"Hey, Lucie, I had no idea. You always wear such big sweaters at the
store. I just thought you were, you know…" Darwin made a vague motion with
her hands. "Fat."
Fat! I barely look pregnant, thought Lucie with indignation. And then she was
called to the back for her weigh-in, leaving Darwin standing there, clutching
an old copy of
Reader's Digest
.
So much for not meeting anyone here.