The Most Fun We Ever Had (28 page)

“Really?” she said, and he shrugged.

“Yeah. Let’s give it a go.”

In bed, now, beside his wife, their twelve-week-old new baby in her belly beneath his palm: the result of their
giving it a go.
And he felt unprecedentedly unburdened, blessedly solvent. Unworried, not like he had been any of the previous times. They had a big house. He’d settled into a spot in a private family practice in the neighborhood, regular hours and appropriate compensation. The lines in his wife’s face had receded—were beginning to be filled in by her pregnancy, though she, for the first time, had been sick in the mornings—and they were old enough, finally, at a comfortable enough station in life that they could reasonably make decisions like this one. A tiny baby, one who would keep her parents young and unite her older sisters. Grace. He imagined his mother proud of him, father of daughters, stable provider. His most tangible memory of her was the smell of the hospital: lemon cleanser, human secretions, and rot. His kids would have more than that, and he knew she would be glad for it.

“Oh, lord,” Marilyn said, tensing suddenly next to him as though privy to his olfactory memories. She rose from the bed, hand over her mouth, and made her way to their bathroom. He followed, squatted beside her and held back her hair.

Their joy over the news was tarnished somewhat the following week, when they sat down to tell the children.

“A baby?” Liza asked. “I don’t—get it.”

Beside him on the couch, Marilyn gripped his hand. There was a ludicrous book in the waiting room of his office called
How You Were Made,
which contained startlingly graphic depictions of female anatomy—blood-red uteri and a cervix like a gash—alongside utterly cartoonish renderings of the male counterparts. Could they show that to Liza, those bow-tied sperm with optimistic smiley faces journeying valiantly into the depths?

“Some gross tadpoles came out of Dad’s penis and swam in between Mom’s legs,” Wendy said casually, “and that’s what makes a baby and then it grows really big like a watermelon and Mom has to push it out of her butt and there’s all this blood and stuff.”

“Wendy,” he said, just as Marilyn was saying, “Oh, gosh, honey, no.”

“Aren’t you kind of
old
?” Violet asked, her gaze on them narrow and sharp.

“Lize,” Marilyn said, “when a—when a mother and a father love each other…”

“Men and women have sexual intercourse, sometimes, honey, and when they do that, sperm come out of the man’s—”

“David.”
Marilyn beckoned Liza into her lap. “Pumpkin, this is a really great thing, okay? Mama and Daddy are so happy about it. The baby grows in here for a little while—” His wife deigned to rest a hand in the general vicinity of her uterus. “And then he’s going to come out and we’re going to set up the bedroom next to yours with a crib. And you can take him on walks, and hold him, and read to him. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

“I’m not sure,” Liza said, frowning. “How do the—tadpoles, how do they…”

“You’re almost
forty,
” Violet said, studious now in her appraisal.

Marilyn squeezed his hand in desperation. He looked at her helplessly, surveyed his triangle of daughters with their varying amounts of angst. After Liza was born, they’d marveled at the odds—
another girl
.

“We’re thinking a boy this time,” he said now, squeezing Marilyn’s hand, in return, three times. He nudged Liza with a playful elbow. “Huh, Lize? What do you say?” He could feel the weight of Wendy’s and Violet’s judgment. He cleared his throat. “Tip the scales in my favor.”

—

G
illian, through Marilyn’s entire pregnancy, seemed to get livelier and prettier as Marilyn grew older and larger. She was on the young side given all that she’d accomplished, energetic and successful in the same way David had been early in their marriage. And Marilyn noticed moments of youthfulness in the woman that reminded her of her daughters—how when she came into the room for the prenatal appointments, Marilyn sometimes felt like her mother or her teacher, firing off a bunch of nervous questions: How was the new apartment? What had she been up to lately? And Gillian, only four years her junior, divulged her dating mishaps and her reluctance to acclimate to the suburbs, lengthy reviews of restaurants in Wicker Park and Roscoe Village that Marilyn and David would never be cool enough to visit.

Odd, perhaps, to seek medical care from a woman who’d attended Christmas parties at your house. But David had been singing her praises since she’d joined the practice and Marilyn felt bad objecting, because to do so seemed like an affront to her husband’s medical expertise. So she signed on as a new patient with Gillian, enduring marginal prickles of impropriety each time the woman queried her about hemorrhoids or discharge. Gillian was professional and hyperintelligent and Marilyn tried to be grateful for this, but she wasn’t entirely comfortable with the fact that her onetime dinner guest had given her multiple pelvic exams.

The one appointment David had to miss, Gillian swept into the room saying, “Heard our favorite superhero doctor got called to the ER.” He had: one of his patients had had a stroke. Marilyn knew this because David had called her. It irked her that Gillian knew as well.

And, oh, what happened next. Because, alone, without her husband, in the company of another woman, she’d gotten weepy; as Gillian prodded at her, looked off into the distance, frowning, listening to overlapping heartbeats, Marilyn started to cry. She surprised herself: she hadn’t, previously, been aware of feeling unhappy.

Gillian was unfazed. She got a few tissues from a box by the door, pulled the gown back down over Marilyn’s belly, and dragged a chair next to the exam table to sit with her. “You want to talk about it?” she asked. “It’s okay if you don’t. Take a few deep breaths.”

She supposed it was because David wasn’t there that she did it—she felt a simultaneous license to disclose and a profound loneliness, exposed like this, solo, in a doctor’s office, though she knew her husband was just a mile away, knew he’d be there if he could be.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but her efforts to speak just made things worse.

“In through your nose. Out through your mouth. It’s okay. Go ahead and cry.”

She mimicked the doctor’s breathing a few times, feeling herself settle. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”

Motherhood was the loneliest thing in the world sometimes. And pregnancy was isolating, exhausting; her fatigue distanced her from her daughters and their lives; it made her forgetful and distracted. What made this time so different hadn’t been clear to her until that moment in Gillian’s office, with her husband missing in action. David had always been the one she could go to when she felt alone. It never mattered how disconnected she felt from the world around her, because David was always there. When she was tired or sore or hyperemotional, he’d show up, rub her back, give her a hug, make her laugh. But it didn’t feel that way this time; he was working late hours; the girls were all at varying stages of intolerability; she was thirty-eight years old and had started going to bed before nine some nights.

“I’ve just been feeling very—old, lately, I guess. And David isn’t— Oh, this feels like a betrayal to say when he’s not here.”

“You’re my patient, Marilyn. It won’t leave this room.”

“He’s not
attracted
to me anymore, it seems. This was never a problem before. He’s just so— We haven’t made love in—since February. We’ve never gone that long.”

“Well,” Gillian said. “It’s a transitional time, you know. Physically, obviously. Emotionally, very much so. It’s not uncommon in the least.”

“We’ve done this three times.” She smiled ruefully. “It’s never been a problem.”

“You’re a little busier this time, though, are you not? A little older.”

She started crying again. “I don’t— I mean, I
am.
I’m a lot older. And I just wonder if I—if maybe I’m not making myself available enough to him? I feel like I’m in this other world and I’m not even sure how I got there but I’m not doing anything
well
right now and I…I just wonder if we’ve made the right decision.”

“About what?”

She startled, realizing what she’d said. “I don’t even know why I’m saying any of this. It’s not— I haven’t even really been thinking about it.”

But of course she had. Because Wendy seemed to be on a downward spiral, worlds more vitriolic and afflicted at fifteen than she’d been at four; and Liza was regressing, tiptoeing around with her little hands linked through Marilyn’s belt loops, asking about babies, asking about Santa, asking whether or not she could sleep in their bedroom because she was having nightmares about the characters from
Zoobilee Zoo;
and she was shocked by her own exhaustion, so much more crushing than it had been with any of the girls. Because she had, on more than one occasion, wondered if things might be easier if they’d decided to keep their roster at its barely manageable three.

“I feel like I don’t have enough of myself to go around,” she said.

“If I may?” Gillian touched her shoulder with a cold hand. David always had cold hands too; they turned up the heat only in the exam rooms to cut costs. “It’s become sort of a running joke around the office. He’s so— I mean, you know. David’s the most professional guy in the room, always. But he starts talking about you and it’s like he’s fifteen years old. His
voice
changes. I heard him on the phone with you once—I was eavesdropping, shamelessly—and I didn’t know it was him at first. God, the amount of
love
he has for you.”

“Oh,” she said, embarrassed in a different way now, having moved beyond caring about her coital drought. “You don’t have to say that.”

They were interrupted by a knock on the door. She blotted at her face with the tissue.

Gillian frowned, rose. “Just a minute. One of the nurses, probably.”

But when she opened the door—first a crack, for privacy, and then all the way—it was not one of the nurses but David himself.

“Well, look who’s here,” Gillian said, smiling at them.

David noticed her tears, came to her, squatted before her with a hand on either of her knees. “What is it, sweetie?” He turned to Gillian. “Is something the matter?”

“I’m fine,” she said, putting her hands over his. “Everything’s fine. Hormones.” She laughed, ashamed, and she felt the fluttering in her belly, their innocent afterthought responding already to the sound of his father’s voice. David rubbed at her thigh over the gown.

“The baby’s okay?” he asked.

“The baby’s wonderful,” Gillian said, betraying nothing. “Everything looks great.”

—

W
endy had signed up for the spring production of
1776
not because of any particular interest in musical theater but because a boy she liked was on the stage crew. She earned an ensemble role in the front row of the Continental Congress and on opening night she “forgot” her breeches and so was bare-legged beneath her waistcoat, and so finally attracted the amorous attention of swarthy stagehand Aidan O’Brien, and it would’ve been a perfect night were it not for her family, who had insisted on attending the production. She was so mortified by it all, by her motley family: clingy Liza, Violet in her dumb Frank Lloyd Wright vest from her new volunteer job as a Home and Studio tour guide, and her mom, the most embarrassing of all, enormously pregnant, wearing one of her dad’s button-down shirts through which patches of her belly were visible when she moved in certain ways. Wendy had avoided looking at them for the entire production: the obscene swell of her mother and the awkwardness of Liza, who insisted on sitting in their father’s lap even though she was almost
ten
. Afterward, when everyone was supposed to be paying attention to Wendy, other parents were instead asking her mom about the baby. Her mother, at some point, produced an inexplicable bouquet of lilies from behind her back and presented them to Wendy, stooping with difficulty to kiss her hair.

“We’re so proud of you, Wednesday,” she said, but the niceness of the gesture was overshadowed both by those awful patches between the buttons of the shirt and by the fact that Aidan O’Brien had overheard the dumb nickname her parents called her sometimes.

At dinner, Wendy noticed her mother wincing, squirming, clutching her belly like a kickball.

“You okay?” David asked her. They’d been talking about Wendy, finally, about how pretty she looked in jewel tones, what a coordinated dancer she was, how exciting it had been to see her onstage. She’d been waiting for the inevitable interruption.

“Mm, fine,” her mom said. She made some secret face at their father, half eye-roll, half smile. “Tell me again, Wendy; who was that young woman who played Thomas Jefferson?”

“Summer Frank,” Wendy said. “She’s a ho.” She started talking about her classmate, making scandalizing use of the words
skank
and
grody
to her father’s gentle tsking, but then her mother made a quiet groaning noise. She nodded, trying to seem like she was still listening. “
Mom,
God, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing, honey, sorry,” she said. Now everyone was watching Marilyn with concern, especially Liza, who looked like she might cry. Her mother noticed this and—she was sitting next to Liza; Liza always insisted on sitting next to one of their parents—put her arm around her. “Practice contractions,” she explained apologetically. She kissed Liza’s head.

“You sure?” her father asked.

“Positive.”

“What does that
mean
?” Liza asked tearfully.

And then she’d launched into an explanation—one that was watered down for Liza’s benefit but still gross—about her cervix and her uterine muscles, about all of the strange private things her body was doing while they were out to dinner, allegedly celebrating Wendy’s stage debut. She smiled at Wendy, finally. “I had these for almost two months before Wendy came along. I’m fine. I’m perfectly fine; keep telling me about this wretched Summer Frank.”