The Road Taken (38 page)

Chapter Forty-Eight

Joan’s relationship to the adult Markie was as an older and wiser friend, nonjudgmental confidante, accidental aunt, and secret mother; and Markie to her was the person through whom she relived her youth in a better way. She had to admit Markie had healthier taste in men than she had at her age. While in the conservative fifties Joan had liked men she couldn’t possibly bring home, and had probably liked them because of that, Markie’s boyfriends were of the sort,
if
she had brought them home, that her parents would have welcomed. Markie had met them in college and law school, and later as a lawyer in a firm full of bright young men, and because besides being smart she was pretty and charming and had a dazzling and open smile, she was never alone for long. A few of those men had wanted to marry her, but she said she was too young. She was not too young; she was twenty-eight already, going on twenty-nine, but so were many of her single friends.

Peggy had never given up her resentment of the closeness between Markie and Joan, so they continued to underplay it. Now that Markie wasn’t under Peggy’s roof it was easy to keep her life private. Markie never thought it was odd that her mother was so jealous. Annoying, yes, but not strange. Possessiveness had always been part of her mother’s nature. Poor Peggy, Markie told Joan, had lived only to have children; they were her raison d’être, her identity, her claim to fame. Nothing wrong with that, Joan said, it’s perfectly normal; but she was still secretly gratified every time Markie put Peggy down.

It was old news, but everyone in the family knew that Peggy had been pregnant with Peter before she was legally married—she couldn’t lie and say he had been premature because he had been such a bruiser—and they all knew his birthday and Peggy and Ed’s anniversary. But it was clear that Peggy and Ed had wanted and eagerly welcomed their firstborn and had actually been engaged before he was conceived. One time Peggy had confided to Markie about the Rh babies who had died between Peter’s birth and the birth of the now long-dead Marianne, and Markie told Joan it must have been very difficult for her mother to have had so many losses.

“Yes,” Joan said. She didn’t want to think about losses. She had put the memories away into a strongbox in her mind, and it was only occasionally that they came shrieking out like mad bats.

“All the same,” Markie said, “I couldn’t live only for my kids—I’m different.”

“You don’t know that,” Joan said enigmatically. “You don’t know anything until it happens.”
You won’t know until you have had a child.

“Sometimes I still wonder who my real parents were,” Markie said.

We’re too close, Joan thought in alarm. You can read the inside of my head. But that wasn’t true, it couldn’t be.

She hated it when Markie started the business of speculating about her real parents. It would take one little sentence to reveal the truth and end her search forever. Look how happy we are, Joan could remind her after she told her. What difference does it make who your birth mother is? But of course there was an entire story to be told, not just a declaration of maternity. It was too convoluted and too crazy, and it was in the past.

Joan’s relationship with Peggy was still so tenuous. She was wearily aware that they both tried to be civil, to pretend, but of course they did not fool each other. It had always been understood that if anyone were to tell Markie it would be Peggy, and Peggy did not want to. Once, when Markie had graduated from college, when she was twenty-one, when it seemed time, Joan had tried to broach the subject, and Peggy had flashed her a look of such hatred and fear that Joan had recoiled. “Don’t ruin my life,” Peggy had said.

“Would it be that easy?” Joan had responded. They didn’t discuss it again.

Markie had a new boyfriend now, in this autumn of 1987. His name was David Laurent, and he had been her lover for three months, or, as they called it these days, they had been “dating” for three months. They hardly knew one another yet, they were in lust, not in love, they were learning, it was fresh.

David Laurent worked at Markie’s firm, and he was four years younger than she was, which at their age was a big difference. She made more money than he did, and she said in many ways he was still a boy. But he was beautiful, with big, dark, yearning eyes and shiny dark curls, with lean, well-formed muscles and tendons moving seductively under his silky skin, and the sexual attraction between them was tremendous. “He’s too pretty to be smart,” Markie said, “but he’s that, too.”

Joan had met David Laurent twice. He didn’t seem older with Markie; she seemed younger. She was flushed, vulnerable, laughing at nothing. They were always touching.

I remember that, Joan thought. She was nostalgic for the excitement and sad for the pain. After the first time she saw Markie and David together Joan surprised Trevor with her demanding passion, and even more with her tears, and she couldn’t explain why. Those two are
breeding,
Joan thought. Markie would have been shocked at the very idea. Nature knows, Joan thought, even when they don’t. They might as well be trying to make a child. They’re programmed for it. The musk, the heat . . . For the first time, Joan felt fifty-six.

It was not enough, Joan thought, that sex and love could break your heart, but even the physical part was dangerous. Contraception was sometimes dangerous, as the Dalkon Shield had turned out to be. This IUD, which resembled a spiky piece of Native American jewelry, with a cord hanging down for testing, looked so frightening that Joan didn’t know why any woman would have let a doctor insert it into her body. And childbirth was still occasionally dangerous too. And the woman had the responsibility. At least a woman didn’t have to ask her husband for permission to have an abortion anymore.

Joan had greeted her own menopause a few years ago with a combination of relief and nostalgia. She had read in one of her feminist books that menstrual blood was power and that men were jealous of it and the fact that it represented women’s magical ability to create life. Joan thought it was merely an unpleasant nuisance, and she was glad to have her body back for nothing but her own pleasure, and Trevor’s. He had always thought of them as a childless couple, and he had never minded. She and Trevor hadn’t been able to have another child after Markie, and now they never would.

But I have her, Joan thought. She is my direct bloodline. Fond as Joan was of Peter and Angel, she knew Markie would always be her favorite. She had stopped trying to mislead the family into believing that this was not so, because no one really cared. Some day, when the time is right, I’ll have a grandchild through her, Joan thought, and I’ll be able to see the future. Somehow it made her feel serene to imagine this: her child’s child, Rose and Ben’s great-grandchild, the lineage continuing into another century, into the Millennium.

“Could we have lunch together on Saturday?” Markie asked. “Just you and me?”

“Of course.”

Markie chose a tea room type of place on the upper East Side that didn’t suit her at all, but she said she didn’t want to run into anyone else she knew. She ordered chocolate cake and milk instead of her usual salad, and when it came she pushed it aside and her eyes filled with tears. “Life is just too difficult,” she said.

“What particular part of it?”

“Everything. Sometimes I’m so tired.”

“Maybe you’re working too hard,” Joan suggested.

“No . . .” She pulled the cake back and poked at it with her fork and then pushed it away again. Joan had noticed, when Markie walked in, that she looked a little bloated, as if it had happened suddenly. She wondered what had made her let herself go. “I need you,” Markie said.

“I’m here.”

“I’m pregnant,” Markie said.

So that was why she looked different. Joan didn’t know whether to be excited or upset; mainly she was numb. Suddenly there was a woman with a baby sitting here—her child carrying her grandchild, her fantasies come too soon—and she could almost see the mysterious floating creature, even though she knew it was too small to be seen. She put her arm around her daughter’s slim shoulders and didn’t know what to say.

“It’s David’s,” Markie said. “I think it happened the first night we were together. I’ve only known him for three months! And I can’t have it, of course. David isn’t ready to help bring up a child. He isn’t even ready for
me.
He’s a kid. I can’t do it alone. I’m having an abortion on Wednesday and I need you to come with me because someone has to bring me home.”

“But so soon?” Joan cried. “Don’t you want to think about it?”

“What would I think?”

“At least you should tell him.”

“Of course I told him. He said he’d go to the clinic with me, but I want you. I’m angry with him, even though it’s as much my fault as his.”

“It’s normal to be angry,” Joan said. “Please don’t have an abortion. If you want to keep it I’ll help you bring it up.” She had blurted out the offer without thinking, but as soon as she said it, it sounded practical—warm and cozy, exciting. In one instant she was already wondering about the best preschool.

Markie just smiled, as if the idea were beyond ridiculous.

“I have time,” Joan said. “Trevor and I will help. Everyone will. And your parents . . .”

“Not my parents,” Markie said. “They don’t know and they’re not to know.”

“As soon as they look at that child they’ll be thrilled,” Joan said. “And then when you’re ready you’ll take over. It will be the family baby. You won’t be alone. This is the eighties. People aren’t embarrassed to have a baby without being married.”

Markie shook her head. “It has nothing to do with what people think. This is what I have to do.”

Of course Markie was right. A baby was not a toy. Joan began to wonder if everything she had believed all her life had been unrealistic, sentimental and mad. Mother’s instincts? Familial adjustment? People who thought they
wanted
children often did not know how to bring them up, so what of people who knew they didn’t? She had only to read the newspapers or watch television to see how people who should not have had children behaved toward their young; she had only to look at the difference between Peggy’s full-time efforts and her own ignorance to see how difficult it was to bring up a child, and she thought about it frequently, no matter how ironically the results of Markie’s upbringing had turned out for both her and Peggy.

Just don’t think of it as a person, Joan told herself. If you don’t think of it as someone you would have met, you’ll get through this. “Are you upset?” she asked.

“Of course I am,” Markie said. “I’ll be twenty-nine soon, that’s almost thirty, and I think about my biological clock. I should be looking for the right man. I want kids some day. But this is the wrong time and the wrong man. Not that I don’t love him. I think I love him. But how would I know? This is something that should never have happened, but it did. After next Wednesday I can start pretending it didn’t happen.”

And I will never be able to pretend that, Joan thought.

On Wednesday, after it was over, Joan brought Markie back to her own apartment, where she slept for hours; and David, when he came by after work, with a dozen roses, bustled around trying to make tea and soup and being generally apologetic that he was well and Markie was not. Neither he nor Joan ever mentioned the reason for Markie’s recent operation. But it was clear that he was concerned about her, and Joan couldn’t help liking him for worrying and apparently sharing responsibility.

He and Markie weren’t living together; he didn’t even have a key, and there were only a few of his things in Markie’s closet. He mentioned that he had a horrible apartment with two roommates, that he needed to move, that meeting Markie, who had become very special to him, had made him think they might find a new apartment together, or perhaps he would live here with her; how practical it would be if they shared the rent, then they would have money to go skiing. Perhaps it was too soon to make such a decision, he wondered, but then, perhaps not. A shared apartment wasn’t a lifetime commitment, he murmured, but it was a step, wasn’t it, toward getting to know someone, and he didn’t want to end up like his parents, who had married each other as virtual strangers even though they didn’t think so, and now were, of course, divorced, leaving two children to make the best of it.

As the trusted friend of this afternoon Aunt Joan was suddenly the recipient of his free-floating anxiety and his confidences. While he continued his stream of consciousness he showed her where he wanted to build bookshelves, and a partition for a small home office.

That would have been the baby’s room, Joan thought. She wondered if David would have stayed all the same and made plans if Markie had had the baby, but now they would never know. Joan wondered if, despite his out-loud musing and planning, he would stay now. He was like a large child—enthusiastic, shy, mercurial—but of course this was a difficult moment for him, and Markie’s drugged sleep made it worse. At least he was here today.

Markie turned twenty-nine before Thanksgiving, and had a small dinner party with some of her friends. “One more year before the dreaded three-oh,” Markie said. “A significant year to cherish.” How nice, Joan thought, to be so young that thirty seems old. But it was, in fact, the end of the confused twenties, the end of youth. You thought about mature good resolutions, even when you didn’t keep them.

When the family gathered for Thanksgiving at Rose’s house, Markie did not bring David with her. “He’s with his family,” she explained. Joan wondered if everything was all right. They were all in the living room having champagne, with spaces between their fragile bodies it seemed, in a room that had once accommodated many more. By now everyone had reluctantly grown used to the relatively meager number of their holiday group: it was Rose, Hugh and Teddy, Aunt Harriette alone for the first time in years, Ginger, Joan and Trevor, Peggy and Ed, Markie and Angel, Peter and Jamie: the family survivors. No one said they hoped that thirteen at table wasn’t bad luck, but Joan thought it, and she knew her mother did too.