One Small Thing (2 page)

But when she realized the baby thing wasn’t going to happen if she missed sex nights because she was at the Hilton in Newark or the Ritz Carlton in Manhattan, she quit. The moment of her realization, she called her boss Brody and said, “I want to give you two weeks notice, but I really want to quit now. Tomorrow. I’m going to have this baby or else.” She didn’t go further, didn’t tell him she wanted to stay at home to focus on ovulation and mucous, taking her temperature and checking her discharge for egg-white consistency. Whatever it was, Avery did what she needed to do get things to happen, to be right. To be perfect. And this wasn’t perfect. Not in the least.

“I know,” she said, wanting Mary to like her, too. “I do have a lot of time.”

“I’ll let you know when it’s time to start worrying. I promise.” Mary nodded. “I never lie.”

Avery smiled and nodded. “Thanks.”

“So here’s your next appointment. You know the drill. Remind your husband of the rules. No hanky panky for at least a couple of days before. The more the merrier!”

Taking the sheet and thanking Mary, she left the office, trying not to notice the women in the waiting room, ripe and round and ready to pop. First it was her sister Loren, who’d had a difficult time getting pregnant, but then three? So close together? So adorable? But then, it was babies everywhere she looked. At the Oakmont café. At Safeway and Andronico’s in the produce aisles. In her neighborhood in strollers. And three months ago, Valerie had had Tomás. One month of trying, and boom, Valerie was pregnant. Just like that. Nine months to the date, Tomás was born at home with a midwife, Avery holding Valerie’s hand. Tomás was her godchild—both she and Dan had held him as the priest dotted his head with water—and she knew she should be happier, but sometimes, all the time really, she swallowed down her jealousy, a lumpy, green lozenge.

In the parking lot, Avery put on her sunglasses and kept her eyes on her black Land Rover, wanting nothing but the blast of cold air, the radio, the ride home to help her forget she wasn’t pregnant.

The Monte Veda sewer system never seemed to be in the right state of repair, ever, and each summer, the drives on city streets became a series of stops and starts, orange cones, and hot, bored flag people. Irritated, Avery idled behind a cement truck. Tiny pellets of cement hit her windshield, and every so often she turned on the windshield wipers and flicked them off, a fan of white dust floating heavily past the driver’s side window.

An
au pair
—Swedish probably, tall, blonde, blue eyes, a tattoo around her ankle and one on her shoulder—pushed a stroller down an intersecting street, and Avery sighed. She knew what it would be like to have a baby, maybe two. She could almost feel herself rounder and softer, her breasts heavy with milk, her thighs and stomach fleshy from pregnancy. The babies would curl in her arms as they all lay on the bed, Dan in the kitchen cleaning up or making something for dinner. The bedroom would be awash with light, and so would Avery’s heart.

The nursery would be filled with plush toys and blankets and presents from all the grandparents, everyone finally brought together because of the children. Avery wouldn’t care if the house was dirty or if she might never lose the twenty pounds around her middle. She wouldn’t care that she’d drifted away from technology and business and her now too- small St. Johns suits. And in the days and months that would follow, her hours would be filled with walks with Valerie and Tomás, play-dates at Monte Veda Park, Mommy-and-Me classes at the community center. She would call her sister Loren and commiserate about childhood illness and diapers and fatigue. Each night, she would sit around a table with her husband and children, everything conspiring to keep them together and happy, exactly as she had planned on a piece of binder paper when she was thirteen, positive she could make her child’s life happier than her own.

This was the family she was meant to have, the real family she would remember. Not her own. Everything had been fine before her father died, but those early years seemed underwater, murky, like a dream she’d almost forgotten. What came next was what stayed, and she wanted things different for her children. Not the way it had been after her father had died, and Isabel sank into depression, reading all day, stumbling out in the afternoon to defrost a frozen Stouffer’s meat lasagna and to toss an iceberg lettuce salad. Avery’s babies would never have to worry that the bills weren’t paid; they would never have to wonder if someone had called about the broken furnace. They would never have to empty buckets collected from the living room during a winter storm because someone forgot to call the roofer. Her babies, her children, would never sit around a dining room table as she, Loren, and Mara had, wondering if their mother had bought any Christmas presents. Grief had sunk the house, dragging them through dark waters.

Yes, her mother had snapped out of it, slowly but completely, humming back into life four years later as if their father hadn’t died from stomach cancer. For all of Avery’s high school years, especially the three when both Mara and Loren were out of the house, she learned to watch for clues, to check the air every day when she woke up, sniffing in the signs of her mother’s depression. Would today be a good day, her mother sitting at the kitchen counter in her robe, a cup of tea in her hands, asking Avery about English and math? Or would it be one of those days or weeks where she didn’t emerge from her room until evening? Or worse? A day Avery would have to gently pull her mother out of bed for a shower? Each morning when the alarm went off, Avery wondered who she’d have to talk to—the Visa representative, the P. G. and E repairman, her mother’s old bridge friends. “she’s good,” Avery learned to say, her voice crisp. “Just tired.”

One morning in the middle of Avery’s senior year, Isabel was making eggs at the range when Avery walked into the kitchen. “Scrambled’s okay, right?” Isabel said, pushing down the toast.

Avery nodded, sat down at the counter, saw her other mother, the one from the time before, the one who’d loved her children and husband. What a change from the bedraggled woman who crawled out of her room at dusk, only to discover that she was left with only one daughter at home. In an effort to keep her mother from hearing the silence of their house, Avery learned to talk about everything but her father, feeling that one wrong word would capsize them both. She knew neither she nor her mother could live through years like the ones they’d just survived.

As the truck lurched, backed up a bit, and then pulled forward, Avery started the car and followed the cement truck slowly down the street, passing the sweating flag woman, who stared at her watch, a staticky walkie-talkie blaring from her work belt. From habit, Avery began to think,
That’s what happens when you don’t go to college,
but she cut herself off. She’d read the books on mindfulness and forgiveness and karma. Even if she didn’t really believe any of the theories, she needed to practice being a person who could actually become pregnant. A person who deserved it.



“Mom. Mom! I told you I’d call you.”

Avery took off her sunglasses and put her Prada purse on the granite kitchen counter. She’d barely stepped into the house when she heard the phone ringing.

“But you’re so late. I thought maybe something had happened at the doctor’s.”

“There’s construction going on everywhere. I was stuck in traffic.”

“So? What’s the news? Is it good? I had to know. I figured that your appointment was over at 2.30, so even with the traffic, I timed it just right, didn’t I?”

“Yes, Mom.” Avery opened the fridge and took out Calistoga water, cradling the phone between her cheek and shoulder as she opened it. It was so hot. She wanted nothing more than to hang up the phone and go outside to the pool, sitting in the shallow end until she needed to get dinner ready. Had she even been in the pool at all this summer? She couldn’t remember. At one time in her life, water had been as known to her as air. She’d loved all the laps, the mileage, the way the world was shimmery through her goggles, the strength in her body as she pulled across the pool. But she’d stopped feeling that way after her father died, the tightness of water around her head clastropbhopbic, keeping her stuck in thought, all of them about those last minutes in the hospital. She’d quit the team and nvever compeated again, jumping in pools only to cool off, as she wanted to today.

“So?”

“I told you it wouldn’t be good news. I already knew.”

“But I thought maybe . . .” Even though Avery herself had hoped for the same thing, she was irritated, grinding her teeth as she listened to her mother go on. “You’ve just been through so much, sweetie. All those shots and blood tests and ultrasounds. I just want you to get the news you need.”

“Listen, I would have called you from the Dr. Browne’s if I had something worth telling. You know that. I’m sorry.”

Isabel gasped. “Don’t be sorry. I’m not sorry. I know you’ll get pregnant. Look how long it took your sister to get pregnant!”

“Oh, Jesus, Mom! Do you have to bring up Loren every time?” Even as she said it, Avery knew that Loren and she would always be placed side-by-side. Loren lived close by, in Walnut Creek, coming over often to Avery’s with first one, then two, and now three children. Isabel babysat frequently, calling Avery with updates: “Sammy’s learned to read!,” and “Jaden’s walking!” and “Dakota rolled over!”

Her mother was silent, and Avery could almost hear Isabel biting on her lower lip to keep more words from spilling out. “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean that. It’s just that Loren is so lucky to have her children. I don’t really want to hear about her all the time You’re always comparing us.”

Isabel sighed. “Sweetie, I’m sorry. But we’re women in the same family. You have to remember how hard it was for her.”

Avery nodded. Loren had tried for almost three years before conceiving Sammy. And then in three years she’d had Jaden and Dakota. But now Avery was as old as Loren had been with Jaden. It was time. It was her time.

“I don’t think Mara will ever have children, so you’re next.” Mara lived in Philadelphia in a nine thousand square foot house with her architect husband, both of them so busy they rarely come to California on visits. She was a pathologist, cutting up who-knew-what for a living. Once when Mara was in medical school, she brought home a book about sliced up body parts, even a brain and a penis. Avery couldn’t sleep the night after she’d flipped through the entire book, unable to tear her eyes away from the glossy, cross-sectioned flesh. For days, the pictures popped up in her mind, the red and tan pieces of a human body. Mara had just laughed, saying, “God. Just don’t think about it. Let it go.” Even now, Avery shivered, thankful that Mara’s visits were few. Each time she did show up at a holiday dinner, she brought work stories, hearts in pans, cancer on skin, lungs with loops of disease. After what Avery had been through the past months, she didn’t need any more woeful tales about the body.

“I know, Mom. But you’re not . . . it doesn’t help when you call me all the time. I’m worried enough. This whole thing is driving me crazy. It’s like—it’s like this is all I am. All I’ve become. An egg. A broken egg.”

“You’re not broken. You’re the most put-together girl I’ve ever known. Look how well you did in school! How quickly you proved yourself at PeaopleWorks! This is just a minor setback for you, sweetie. I know about those.”

For a moment, the quiet dark years pressed against Avery’s throat, and she wanted to ask, “Do you miss him?” She wanted to know what it was that flicked Isabel into action again, brought her out of her room and back to her life of bridge games and gardening and Russian and history and art classes at the community center. But Avery didn’t ask, couldn’t, the rules still in place.

“Listen, Mom, Valerie, Luis, and Tomás are coming over for dinner, so I’ve got to get things ready. I’ll see you on the Fourth.”

“Should I bring anything?”

Every Fourth of July, the entire neighborhood closed off the cul-de-sac, hauled out their gas grills, and then lit illegal fireworks in the center of the court, while they waited for the sanctioned Monte Veda Fire Department’s yearly fireworks display. The women made pesto and grilled eggplant and lentil and walnut salads. The men stood over the BBQs and grilled salmon and chicken breasts and sometimes abalone or oysters. One grill continuously spun out hot dogs and hamburgers for the kids, who in the gathering of adults, felt safe to eat everything and run over everyone’s perennials and feed the pets Fritos and watermelon. Each year they’d lived there, Avery always warded off her mother’s gross green Jell-O salad with cottage cheese, saying, as she did now, “Oh, Mom. We’ve got so much. Just come and we’ll have a good time.”

“That’s what you say every year. One year, I’m just going to bring my salad. You know, the one your father loved so much?”

Avery smiled, knowing that her father had hated the salad, but he’d loved Isabel, so with each bite, he’d said, “Delicious. This is my favorite.”

“You are our guest, Mom. Just come.”

Isabel sighed. Avery imagined her curling the cord of her old rotary dial phone around her finger. “All right. But you call me before if anything happens. You know.”

“Yes, Mom. I’ll call. Got to go.” Avery hung up, knowing that nothing was going to happen. Not this month. Not for awhile.