Knit Two

by Kate Jacobs

  ten

  Saying yes was the easy part.

  Now her to-do list was out of control—and it had only been a week since the proposal. Anita had saved up the news for a little bit, just to savor it, then shared the details with Catherine and Dakota and James, before sitting down at Walker and Daughter with the members of the club and chirping out her announcement. It was a good night, and she was glad to hear that Darwin was out of the woods and had given birth to her two healthy six-pounders, Cady and Stanton.

  Things were coming along nicely for everyone.

  “If we’re going to get married, we’re going to do it right,” she told Peri during one of her mornings at the shop. “No small affair for us. We are going to have a shindig of epic proportion.”

  “Have you set a date, then?”

  “No,” said Anita, sighing. “I’m afraid we haven’t made too many strides in any direction.”

  Marty agreed to every suggestion she made, even when they contradicted each other. Get married in Central Park? Fabulous. Get married at the synagogue? Fine by him. A reception at the St. Regis? The Plaza? Essex House? Good good good.

  “At the rate we’re going we’ll be ninety before we get anything done,” said Anita. “We wondered if we should have an engagement party, for one thing, to fly the kids in and have a gathering of family and friends.”

  “When’s that going to be?”

  “We don’t have a timetable on that one, either,” she said. “It’s just that there seems to be so much to do: food, location, flowers, dress.”

  “Don’t do the sensible thing and get a good cream suit,” insisted Peri. “Wear something smashing. You are the bride, after all.”

  “Even if I’m a bit wrinkly,” said Anita. “Yes, I am a bride. A bride!”

  One thing she’d found herself doing every morning after Marty left the apartment was pulling out her old photo albums and studying her old wedding pictures, marveling at everything. Her skin, for one thing; it had been so smooth. Or her hair, all 1950s pin curls and so tight to her head. The red, red lips. The serious way she looked at the photographer, a bravado she’d put on when inside she’d been nervous. The candid shot of her wagging a finger at a person out of range of the camera. She’d forgotten about that until she started flipping through the album again. Remembering again the little flower girl, in her minty-green dress, sneaking chocolates, ruining her white gloves. Anita had been livid, afraid those little dirty fingers would get onto everything. “Do something,” she’d told her mother. “Get things under control.”

  Marty wouldn’t have minded that she wanted to look at the old snaps; he’d have been happy enough to sit there with her at the granite breakfast bar and listen to her talk about her first wedding, her first marriage. She’d never had to pretend that she didn’t have a life before him. But somehow it felt better to look at the pictures in private. She didn’t have to modulate her tone. She didn’t feel as though she had to wipe away her tears, or have to deal with the awkwardness of letting him comfort her under the assumption she was crying for Stan.

  If only Catherine hadn’t decided to purge the mail!

  Anita had looked carefully through every pamphlet and flyer, but there’d been only junk in that darn wicker basket. She’d called Catherine up, quite casually, and said she wanted to come over again. Look around the kitchen; see if anything had fallen behind the fridge.

  “The fridge?” said Catherine. “I’ve barely opened the fridge in five years, let alone put anything behind it.”

  Where was it? Why hadn’t it come?

  Her sons made clear they thought it odd that she’d left so much behind when she left the San Remo apartment and moved in with Marty, but Anita had taken what she really cared about: the photos, the jewelry from Stan, and the postcards. The pile of blank postcards, mailed from all around the globe, which she’d stored up in a junk drawer in the kitchen. Where no one ever cared to look. She’d actually tried leaving them behind initially, had waited weeks and then returned to collect the postcards surreptitiously, when Catherine hadn’t been at the apartment. She felt like a burglar, in a way, stealing her own stuff. And there they were: Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, and the Colosseum. Bundled together with a worn rubber band and crammed into that drawer. She’d dropped the entire pile in her purse and returned to her new life, the only hint of her attachment to the postcards being her seemingly intense fascination with junk mail. Marty never seemed to notice she didn’t look through the random junk that came to their house. She only cared about what came to the San Remo.

  “Oh, Sarah,” sighed Anita, looking at the photos of the young flower girl as if they could tell her why she hadn’t heard from her baby sister this year. “What has happened to you?”

  Leaving Ginger with Rosie was turning out to be more of a problem than a help. Lucie had arrived at her apartment, expecting to find her mother and daughter making dinner as usual. Instead, her mother was snoring slightly on the sofa and her kindergartner was pulling food out of the fridge. The floor dripped in spilled orange juice and cracked eggs congealing on the tile.

  “I’m helping,” said Ginger, before putting her finger to her mouth. “Shhh . . . Nana’s tired.”

  Lucie sucked in a deep breath. Just what she needed, and only two weeks until she was supposed to leave for Italy. The plan had been to bundle up Ginger with the stuffed bunny she called “Sweetness,” an Elmo suitcase filled with a week’s supply of leggings, cotton dresses, and a healthy complement of Barbie and friends, and pack her off to Rosie’s for a few weeks while Lucie took care of business. But if just one day of full-on Ginger stamina resulted in an exhausted mother and an unsupervised daughter . . . who knew what a couple of weeks could bring? Ginger would wind up swinging from the light fixtures at her mother’s New Jersey split-level, while Rosie sat in her powder-blue La-Z-Boy with an icepack on her head. It was a recipe for an intervention from Social Services.

  She bribed a hungry Ginger with a peanut butter sandwich and an episode of Sesame Street, and then covered her sleeping mother with one of the Georgia afghans she’d knitted for charity.

  “I just closed my eyes for a second,” sputtered Rosie, drifting off again as Lucie patted her shoulder.

  It wasn’t fair of her, she realized, to expect her mother to watch after Ginger.

  “My mommy’s old,” she whispered to herself, feeling the kind of surprise at both the realization and the awareness that it had taken her so long to actually absorb that fact. Obviously, watching Ginger was too great a burden: she exhausted Lucie, and she was years younger. So what was she going to do about the gig in Italy? Her older brothers and their families didn’t have much space for a precocious little girl, even for a few weeks. They’d done their time stuffing chubby legs into leotards and sitting through swim lessons watching little heads proudly blow endless streams of bubbles.

  A year ago, she’d have asked Darwin and Dan, of course, who’d have been delighted to take on Ginger and would have treated her like a little princess. But now they were busy with two of their own.

  “Busy busy busy,” Lucie muttered in a funny tone of voice, pushing her newly colored russet hair with the back of her hand as she picked up shatterings of eggshell and dumped them into a paper towel. “Busy with babies.”

  She heard her words almost as if someone else was saying them. Busy with babies. Was it possible, she thought with a feeling of horror, that she was resentful of Darwin finally becoming a mother? Had she been so used to relying on her support that there was a certain bitterness, a concern that Ginger would no longer be the apple of her honorary auntie’s eye?

  “Oh my God,” said Lucie, up to her eyeballs in juice and egg and a stomach rolling in guilt, “I am a rotten person.”

  Ginger looked up from the TV screen. “Oh, Mommy, that’s okay,” she said. “You make very good dinners.”

  Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. That’s what someone should have said in the deli
very room. And then again, later, when they brought the babies in to nurse. Maybe the hospital should put up a sign somewhere. She had looked at Dan, her stalwart, the doctor, but the anxiety in his eyes mirrored her own.

  So I have boobs, thought Darwin as her babies began mewling. What now? It’s not like anyone ever really needed them before. And that’s what the babies were: constant neediness, day and night. Even when they slept they demanded her vigilance, to make sure they were breathing, were warm, were cool, were happy.

  There were joyous moments, lots of them. Such as when Cady cried for the first time, followed a few minutes later by her brother. Or when she held them and they just sighed as if to say, “Finally. Being here with you, Mommy, is the best place in the world.”

  She did that a lot, making up little dialogue for the babies, either when she was alone or sometimes when Dan was around. “I love my little snuggles,” she baby-talked, wanting to hate herself for being ridiculous and not-so-secretly loving it. She found herself spewing an endless stream of nicknames—Bunnykins, Lollipop, Tummyboy, Silly-baby, Dumpling—and pretending to eat their fingers and toes with alarming regularity.

  Still. Darwin hadn’t washed her hair in days; it was challenging to keep track of the time. She was fascinated and disgusted by her body at the same time. At what it could do, at how much it seeped after all the action. And everything—her body, the twins, the house—was so freaking messy. Gross, even.

  Being with the babies was a constant roller coaster—the highs of clean, sweet-smelling, sleeping infants, and the lows of stinky, ill-tempered, wailing balls of rage, growing more red-faced with each passing second she misinterpreted their cues. Trying to change their diapers when they wanted a burp, or swaddle them in an extra blanket when they were already too hot, their tiny little fingers balling into fists and flailing about as if to say, “Mommy, why are you so stupid?”

  “I can’t do this alone,” she shouted at Dan one night, her breasts leaking, the newborns crying. It was four a.m., and they’d had about a half-hour of sleep between the two of them.

  “Let’s call your mother,” he suggested. “Or my mother.”

  “No,” said Darwin, starting to cry herself. “They’ll just tell me how to do everything.”

  “But we don’t know actually what we’re doing,” he’d replied, exasperation creeping into his voice. “Shouldn’t we ask for help?”

  “I’m smart,” cried Darwin, feeling desperate and overwhelmed. “I have a Ph.D. Why can’t I look after my own babies?”

  The books hadn’t been clear enough, really. Oh, they alluded to the misery, to the baby blues, to the sense of inadequacy when the babies couldn’t latch on and the pain when her nipples cracked. But those were just theoretical problems. Issues that Darwin had been confident she wouldn’t have to face.

  She really wanted her children. Had dreamed about them for years. So, surely, every moment was going to be a joy, no?

  No. Turns out becoming a mother was more than she’d bargained for.

  “I’m not ready,” she confessed to Dan as the sun began to come up. “I’m not able to do this!”

  “Well, we’re kinda stuck with them now, hon,” he’d pointed out. “I think it gets better when they’re twenty-one.”

  But not every feeling was about Cady and Stanton. Becoming a mother was forcing Darwin to think more about herself as a daughter. Imagine, she thought, if Cady didn’t call her for a month. A week. A day. How could she stand being apart from her baby so long? And yet she was a haphazard communicator with her own mother in Seattle. Rarely called just to say hello.

  After three days at home with the twins, meeting yet another sleepless sunrise, Darwin was ready. Having two babies might have seemed movie-star-esque, but it wasn’t so glamorous when you didn’t have a staff.

  She had her doubts that she’d ever sleep again.

  “Call the moms,” she sighed wearily to Dan. “We need reinforcements.”

  Catherine was not afraid of change. She welcomed it. If, that is, she was the person leading the charge. It did not sit well with her at all that Anita had decided to sell the apartment. Not that there was much Catherine had to do. Pack up a few clothes, a toothbrush, a few bottles of wine she’d yet to drink. The little cottage was where she’d unloaded all the items she’d stored for years, the armoire she once had to keep hidden in her large walk-in closet because Adam couldn’t stand anything that wasn’t sleek and, preferably, made of metal. Like his heart had been.

  But it was something altogether different, having to keep step with someone else’s timetable, and though she felt babyish about it, Catherine was a little miffed with Anita.

  “Is this because I threw out the coupons?” She phoned Anita’s cell one afternoon as she sat at The Phoenix, biding time until the wine tasting she was hosting that evening.

  “Absolutely not,” said Anita. “It’s just time. And you have your house now.”

  “Every girl needs a pad in the city,” insisted Catherine.

  “You could well afford to buy one, my dear,” Anita pointed out.

  “Well, I like living in yours,” said Catherine, wheedling just a little bit. This never had any effect on Anita, unfortunately.

  “We’ll talk about it at the next club meeting, dear,” said Anita. “Right now I’m making a list.”

  “Another one?”

  “Yes,” said Anita, growing irritated. “I had three sons, you know. I’ve never done weddings before. My mother planned mine.”

  “Just think of it as a party,” suggested Catherine.

  “I am,” said Anita. “A party for which I need to repaint the apartment, reupholster the sofa, hire a caterer, find the perfect dress, lose thirteen and a half pounds, and get a face-lift.”

  “Let me tell you from face-lifts, Anita,” said Catherine, who’d dabbled in a fair amount of enhancement surgery. “You look gorgeous, as always. It’s not worth the recovery time. I mean, when are you planning to have this thing anyway?”

  “For the hundredth time, I don’t know! If one more person asks me when it is, I’m going to clock them in the head with this ring.”

  Catherine held the telephone out from her ear.

  “Are you really comfortable getting married?” she ventured.

  “Yes, it’s not the marriage part that is causing the problem!” said Anita. She took a deep breath, spoke more quietly. “There’s too much choice.”

  “I’d have thought someone of your . . . ” Catherine paused, struggling for a word, “wisdom would be immune from all that bridezilla business.”

  “Age has nothing to do with being sensible, dear,” said Anita. “I thought you’d have figured that out by now.”

  “Ouch,” said Catherine. Anita was getting crankier. “Look, the other phone is ringing. Can I call you back later? I’ve some good ideas and I’d like to help with the planning, if I can. Gotta go, though.”

  She sat back on the stool she kept near the register, her eyes surveying all the shiny objects at The Phoenix. Some days Catherine felt powerful and ambitious and she loved the name of her store; other days, she wished she hadn’t opened at all. She barely noticed when the grandfather clock chimed, alerting her that it was three p.m. and she might want to actually do a little something before calling it a day. She’d found the clock in France on one of her trips to scour for inventory. Catherine even had a few trinkets—a silver Covenanters cup, and a cherry side table—that she’d brought back from Scotland two years ago, when she had met up with Dakota and James and taken a gargantuan box of Belgian chocolates to Gran. It had been very well received, especially the dark ganache truffles, and yet Catherine had felt uneasy drinking tea in the kitchen with Gran. You feel so a part of things, she thought now, and then you discover it was never really yours. It was always someone else’s and you were just a part of the crowd.

  “I miss having a person who will pretend to be interested in my laundry list of complaints.” That’s what someone had said at the gro
up session, when she and James had sat in a circle with all the other sad sacks. They’d all needed porters for all the emotional baggage they were carrying, the moms and dads and siblings and friends mired in frustrations and confusions. She and James were not quite above their nature, of course, and contented themselves by spending a good part of the time feeling superior, reassuring each other with discreet head nods and raised eyebrows. So it was a bit of a shock to be sniveling with all the rest by the evening’s end.

  “I miss being significant to somebody,” Catherine had said. She thought of her late parents as much as Georgia in this regard. “It made me feel important.”

  So did attention from a man.

  She wasn’t so different that way from many women, she realized. Even if they didn’t want to admit it. If they spoke about looking for love, or finding a soul mate. It all came down to the same thing: mattering to someone else. Even her ex-husband, Adam, had relied on her, found her useful to trot out in public. She’d had a role, knew what was expected.

  She picked up the handset again. The phone hadn’t actually been ringing when she was talking to Anita; she’d just felt a moment of envy and frustration.

  “There’s not a lot of talking going on here,” said Catherine to the shop filled with furniture but devoid of human beings. “You never ask me how I am,” she told the register. She walked over to a cherry break-front. “I’m fine,” cooed Catherine into the glass. “How are you?”

  Catherine strode back to her desk and pulled out a business card, dialing a seemingly endless stream of numbers.

  “Buongiorno, Marco,” she said. “I loved the wine—I drank as much as I sold! What a wonderful recommendation. You’re going to have to sell me more, no questions about it. So tell me, what’s the weather forecast in Rome this summer?”

  eleven

  Sooner or later, she’d have to tell the boys, Anita realized as she glared at the glowing letters on the clock radio. Let Nathan rant, David pretend to be interested, and Benjamin sit on the fence. “On the one hand it’s a good idea, Mother, but on the other . . .”