by Lily King
The second pitcher of sangria arrived. “For the Americans,” a woman with an aquiline nose and darkly outlined lips said as she passed it to them.
“I’m not American,” Mariska said quickly. The woman didn’t inquire further, though the man beside her in a yellow vest pestered her to do so.
Leslie watched a couple kissing on a bench in the opposite corner. Beth eavesdropped on a conversation beside her between a large German woman and a small Italian man whose shoulder and upper arm were pressed against Beth’s. Mariska lit a cigarette. She was one of the few people in the room who had both a pack and a lighter. A few feet away a man hovered over a table of women while one slipped a cigarette from a leather case and another held up a slender onyx lighter. As he took the light, he looked not into the eyes of the woman who held the lighter but of the woman who had given him the cigarette. I supposed he thought this gaze appealing, but in fact his brow was furrowed like the skin of a shar-pei. Women held their long hair in a fist at their necks as they leaned down to accept the flame, or let their short hair spill over their eyes as their lips kissed the filter and the tip flared red.
Just as Mariska was putting out her cigarette, the yellow vest made his predictable move. She slipped a cigarette from her pack, then laughed at something he said. He called to his friends for his chair, which was then lifted over several heads. He nestled it beside her to take the light, his face less vulnerable now, smoothed over by the anticipation of conquest.
The third pitcher of sangria arrived. I sipped steadily in silence, Beth sucked on the purple wedges of lemon and orange, and Leslie talked. She spoke of Bertrand and how the cat woman stole him away, and of the father in her family, who rubbed his sweaty sock against her shin beneath the dinner table. While Beth nodded and sighed, Leslie told me about the impending visit of Beth’s boyfriend and his sudden decision to bring along his best friend, with whom Beth was secretly in love. Occasionally some guy that Leslie knew would stop by the table, and her head would tip and her shoulders curl. Her face would lose its defiance and she would become nearly pretty, though it was such a tremendous effort that after they were gone her face would be shiny with sweat.
Beth ignored these approaches and departures and, while Leslie craned her neck up to the man looming over the table, told me about Mont-Saint-Michel, where they had just been last weekend. They had planned the trip in accordance with the full moon and an afternoon high tide, and had watched the sea rush in from a turret of the abbey. In the evening they had run out several miles on the wet sand but never caught the swiftly retreating sea. The week before that they had been wine-tasting in the Loire. For Toussaint, All Saints’ Day, they had spent three days in Alsace, and at Christmas they were off to Dublin. They got student rates, stayed in hostels, and taught English on the side at a hundred francs an hour to pay for it.
“What about you, Rosie?” Beth asked.
Me. Swaddled in heat and alcohol, lulled by their talk, I’d nearly forgotten me. I thought of what I’d wanted to tell them, things about Nicole and her petty ways, Lola who made up for them, Marc and his sad sweetness, the street with the oisellerie, and the bathtub at the window that gave you the sensation of bathing in the Seine.
“What about me?” I felt drunk and miserable. Remembering the bathtub made me remember the hollowness of washing my belly and the yellow crust, despite the pills, that I had to scrub from my nipples. “I got pregnant in twelfth grade, and since I lived with my sister and she really wanted a kid, I gave it to her. I was supposed to go to college, but I came here instead.” I regretted it immediately. Leslie would tell Francine, who would tell Lola, who would tell Marc, who would have to tell Nicole. Who would fire me. But I was angry. I wanted to punish them, make them feel guilty for their perfectly planned lives. And it felt good to tell the truth instead of the phony excuses about my passion for the French language and culture that I had been giving everyone since I arrived. I felt the laughter I’d been craving rise inside me.
“Oh, God, Rosie,” Leslie said, seeing the change in my expression. “I almost believed you.”
“Me too,” Beth said, letting go a pent-up gasp.
“But Lola said you had a very weird sense of humor.”
Beth stripped the last of the fruit with her teeth and dropped the rind in her glass. “Well, I’ve got that examen tomorrow.”
We stood up into the layer of smoke that had been accumulating over our heads all night and said good-bye to Mariska and her man, who seemed pained by the interruption. There was no path in any direction to the stairs. I pressed hard through the piles of knees and ankles, the tangle of arms and chair backs. I gave people little warning. I heard Beth and Leslie behind me, apologizing, letting themselves get waylaid by the attention. I would reach the metro before they reached the stairs. I wanted to get far, far away from them. I wanted to be stepping on deck, lifting the black key from its nail, creeping quietly down the narrow stairs, pouring a tall glass of water, and watching the dark glinting river out the kitchen window, silent and alone.
Sweet Sister
IN THOSE FIRST FEW HOURS WE TOOK TURNS WITH HIM, EACH CAREFUL NOT TO HOLD him too long. A nurse set up a cot for her, but she crawled in beside me and we lay there together, passing him back and forth. “Your turn now, Rosie,” she whispered, laying him heavy-headed on my chest, his purple lids sealed tight. After a while I lifted him back into her arms. It was that moment—when his skin was pulled from mine, when the weight of him was gone, when the inordinate amount of love no longer had a place to rest—that was the most painful. I watched him settle easily against my sister, and I lied. “This isn’t as hard as I thought,” I said.
Sarah had always wanted a big family. When we were little, she made me pretend we were two of seven children, or twelve, or fifteen. Sometimes she gave birth to all these other siblings. She’d walk around with a pillow strapped beneath her nightgown, then lie down without warning and holler like a lunatic until I pulled out the teddy bear or sneaker she’d lodged between her legs. The game petrified me, and I always begged to have fewer brothers and sisters. I hated the white creases in her red face as she screamed, and how quick and desperate her breathing became. Her death was something I’d been terrified of all my life.
My father never settled down with one woman again. He said he was picky, but my sister said he was scared. Sometimes it seemed he was too frightened to love either of us very much. He moved us from city to city without warning or explanation and, within a month or so, had found someone new to share his bed. He was erratic in his care for me—it depended on the girlfriend and her interest in children—but Sarah was constant. She got me up for school, packed me off with a sandwich, quizzed me before tests. I cried the day I found the short lifeline on her palm; I worried when she was in high school and drove around at night in unfamiliar cars; and I prayed shamelessly when, after nearly a week of listening to her complain of abdominal pain and fever, my father finally took her to the hospital. She came home five days later like a ghost: translucent, hollow-eyed—and infertile.
At twenty, she married Hank Mulvaney, who owned the restaurant in Cleveland where she worked. He’d waited a year to ask her out, then proposed after a month. He was thirty-three and said he was tired of restaurants. He wanted a farmhouse and a vegetable garden. She wanted to move somewhere and never leave. When they went to Lyme, New Hampshire, they offered to take me with them. I was fourteen and glad to go.
Before they were married, Hank had claimed he wanted to adopt kids—lots of them. But when, after two years in Lyme, my sister began to talk of it, he balked. He told her they couldn’t afford it yet. He cut out articles about troubled adoptees. He suggested she go to the infertility clinic in Hanover. “I had a hysterectomy at sixteen, Hank,” I heard her tell him. “There’s nothing in there to work with.”
Sarah worked in a coffee shop and studied at night for her teaching certificate, but I often found her folded in a tight ball in her desk chair, books pushed aside, her f
ace drained of hope. I’d never once seen her cry, but she could disappear deep within herself in sadness. And if I tried to comfort her, she was the one who ended up doing the reassuring, insisting that Hank would come around, that he was processing, that infertility was much harder on men.
I asked him once, “What if you knew someone who was pregnant and she didn’t want the baby?”
“What about it?” Hank said uncomfortably, wishing my sister wouldn’t share her problems with me.
“Well, what if that person asked you to raise it? Would you do it?”
He looked at me closely. “I really don’t want to hear that you’ve gotten yourself in some sort of trouble, Rosie.”
I laughed. “The last time I kissed a boy was in seventh grade. But say I was. Just say.”
“If that’s how it was. If that’s what you really wanted, then things might be different.”
* * *
My sister was made to be a mother. You take one look at her and you see it. In her presence, you feel safe. Her hands seem larger and warmer than other women’s, her laugh more sincere. You want to show her things; you want her to be proud of you; you want to never let her down. She gave to me all her life, and I wanted to give something back.
I chose Cal Cleary because he was tall like Hank and kind like my sister, and because he confessed to a friend that he had a crush on me. I chose him at the beginning of September, but it took nearly a month to get him to go out with me. I lingered near his locker between classes; I positioned myself in his line of vision during lunch; I began hanging out with the girls at the side of the playground after school, watching the guys play pickup basketball. “Silent Cal” our history teacher called him, after Calvin Coolidge. He always blushed when he saw me, but he never spoke.
I finally had to do it myself. “So, are you ever going to take me out on a date, Cal?”
He’d been reaching for something deep in his locker, and when he straightened up I saw small beads of sweat on his forehead. “A date? Is that some sort of midwestern ritual?” he said.
I’d been in New Hampshire almost four years now, the longest I’d ever lived anywhere, and still people thought of me as an outsider. Still, I had the upper hand here. He was the one who was nervous. When I turned to walk away, he said, “Friday night?” like the idea had been his all along.
Sarah nearly exploded when I told her. “You have a date? I thought they didn’t do that here.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“Not a big deal! It’s your first one!”
“I want to wear something really sexy.”
“Not too sexy, though. You don’t want to scare him off.”
He came by at seven on Friday. I wore jeans and one of my sister’s clingy striped tops. She’d bought me an underwire bra that kind of pushed things out a bit. I didn’t want Sarah and Hank to meet him so I went out to the car the minute I saw him pull up.
Nothing happened in the movie theater. He kept his hands to himself and never reached for the popcorn at the same time I did. We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant around the corner. Silent Cal was no misnomer. The only time he said something that wasn’t prompted by a question was when he stopped the car outside my house and said he’d had a good time. I leaned over and shut off the ignition, then the headlights. Our street was dark and still. I wasn’t going to get out of that car until something was established between us. When I kissed him, he didn’t separate his lips. I’d chosen badly. Instead of tall and kind, I should have looked for short and fast. I fell back to my side of the car, sighed, then opened the door.
“Wanna do something tomorrow night?” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “Call me.”
On our third date, I told Cal I was on the pill. We’d only kissed twice but I thought it might speed things up. It didn’t. But he was definitely kind. He sent me roses once for no reason. He saved a seat for me at assemblies. He called me every night. He’d begun to talk a bit more, and I called him Chatty Cathy when he did, which he said was another of my midwestern expressions.
In November, Hank and Sarah went away for a weekend. I checked the chart I kept hidden in a shoe box with the thermometer. It was perfect timing. That Friday night, I gave Cal a few of Hank’s beers and his hands became a little more exploratory, slipping beneath the underwire and tentatively touching my nipples. I reached down to the first button of his pants.
“Let’s,” I said, feigning breathlessness.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s.” Then he shuddered hard against my hand on his still-fastened fly.
He started laughing. “I’m sorry. Just the thought put me over the edge.” He reached down and started rubbing between my legs. “Your turn to go over,” he said.
I rolled away from his hand. I didn’t think it would be this complicated. I just wanted to do it and get it over with.
“I love you, Rosie.”
It was the worst thing to do but I began to cry. I’d just wanted a one-night stand, the way it was on TV—a tumble in the hay, then a baby on the way. He kissed my neck, my ear, my temple, my mouth. He tasted my tears and told me he loved me again. He lay on top of me and I felt him grow hard. This is it, I thought, pulling down my pants, then his.
He came within seconds, before I could feel what sex was. When he called the next day, I told him I was coming down with the flu.
I prayed for it to work. Sarah and Hank had come back from their trip more morose than ever. They’d gone to stay at a lake house with two other couples, both of whom had children. According to Hank, Sarah did not say one word to an adult the entire time. According to Sarah, Hank became a nasty old man, swatting the children away like horseflies. By Thanksgiving I’d taken three different home pregnancy tests, each one with the same result.
I sat them down at the kitchen table. We’d had a big turkey dinner, but all the guests, single solitary people, had gone home. I knew Sarah was in a maudlin mood; she always was at holidays.
“I’ve got some news,” I said. “I’m pregnant.”
“Jesus H. Christ!” Hank said.
“Oh, God,” Sarah said. “Are you sure?”
I nodded.
“It’s all my fault,” she said. “We had that talk, but I should have made you an appointment with Dr. Knott. I should have—”
I was impatient for them to understand. “I want you to keep it.”
She looked at me as if she’d never seen me before.
“I want you to raise this child.”
“What?”
“I do.”
“Rosie, that’s crazy. You’re going to college. You’re—”
“That’s why I want you to keep it.”
She looked at me, realizing for the first time what I was saying. A tremor passed through her. “Oh, God.” She covered her mouth as her eyes began to fill. She turned to Hank when the tears spilled over her hands. He pulled her close and she began to sob, a sob that must have been inside for many years. Hank pressed his cheek to her hair and shut his eyes. Just when I thought he’d forgotten I was still there, he said, “Are you sure this is what you want, Rosie?”
“This is what I want.”
Sarah came around to my side of the table and hugged me hard. “My sweet sister,” she said. “My sweet sweet sweet sister.”
* * *
I liked being pregnant. I liked the attention, the concern, the gratitude. Breaking up with Cal was the only unpleasant thing. I told him I’d met someone else and he walked away from me without a word. When I saw him after that, his face would flame up before he turned in another direction. I suppose I drifted away from my friends, too, but my sister and I needed the time together. Once I began to feel the baby move, she’d sit on the couch with her eyes closed and wait for it to tap against her palm.
I graduated pregnant and no one ever knew. At the reception afterward, I overheard someone joke about me gaining my freshman fifteen ahead of time. To me, the joke was on them. I was excited about the child. My sister
and I were back in our world, only now I was the one who was going to lie down and holler. It was better this way; it was her death, not my own, that I was scared of.
The first week of July, I came into the house and found Cal sitting at the kitchen table. No one else was home. He’d grown some sort of patchy beard which only covered half his blush when he saw me. It was a hot afternoon and I was wearing an old workshirt of Hank’s that barely stretched over my belly. I knew I didn’t look just fat anymore; I looked unmistakably seven and a half months pregnant.
Cal was the oldest of five boys. His parents showed up together to all of his basketball games. Every other Saturday, all seven of them helped serve lunch at a homeless shelter. In August they rented a cottage on Lake Winnepesaukee. I hadn’t wanted him to find out and for that reason stayed close to the house. But someone must have seen me out in the garden; someone must have told him.
“It’s my sister’s.”
“What?”
“I’m giving the baby to my sister.”
He pushed the salt shaker back and forth with the tips of his fingers to conceal how much they were shaking. He once told me how his littlest brother almost died, choking on a deflated balloon, and his hands had shaken then, too.
I knew what I needed to say to still them. “It’s not yours, Cal.”
He looked up at me, wanting to believe. “But in the fall. That’s when we—”
I looked shamefully at my enormous belly. “I was sleeping with someone else.” I created a guilty, reassuring face. He accepted it eagerly.
Through the front window, I watched him leave. His whole body swung into fluid motion. Out on the street, three kids whizzed by on bikes, one calling back, “Hey, Cal!” in a voice quickly thinned by the wind. He raised an arm, though all the riders had disappeared around the bend. Very soon he disappeared, too.
A friend of Sarah’s recommended we see someone she knew, a social worker who counseled people on adoption. I told Sarah it was a waste of money. She reminded me that it wasn’t my money, and we went.
