“I suppose,” said Rachel. “But it doesn’t feel that way, just at the moment.”
“I know, darling. It never does,” Robin said seriously. “But there are ways of making it all work out for yourself. I truly believe that.”
“Thanks,” said Rachel, and after Robin had gone she found that she felt better—infinitesimally maybe, barely a speck, but still better.
Rachel remained in her seat. She drained the last of her coffee and looked for some moments out the window, watching a gaggle of Catholic school girls in plaid skirts and blue kneesocks pass by. They were how old? Fourteen? Fifteen? Newly aware of their effect on men and boys, she could see that by the way they flipped their hair back and forth, and the way one of the girls had rolled her kneesocks all the way down to display her muscular and suntanned calves. You had to live a life of some privilege to have calves so suntanned in the very early stages of the summer.
She was due at work in ten minutes. Pushing open the heavy glass door, she emerged into the evolving Manhattan morning and reached into her bag for her cell phone. Her father would be up for certain, out working in the garden or in his office, at the computer. But the phone rang and rang with no answer and then the answering machine interceded.
“Daddy?” Rachel said, hoping her voice didn’t break, hoping her sorrow didn’t show through in her voice, hoping Ginny didn’t get the message first because it was William she wanted this time, William who would not judge or, if he did, would do so quietly, only in his head, and who would ultimately—of this she was certain—see his way clear to helping her. “Daddy, if you have a second, could you just call me back?”
Lillian took the call from Tom on the back deck. It was Monday morning. Stephen and Jane had gone downtown; Ginny was fiddling in the kitchen; Philip, having been awake much of the night, was napping in the Pack ’n Play. William and Olivia were off to the lake for a swim.
She answered because for the past three days she had allowed herself to entertain the possibility that Tom would be able to offer some sort of apology or explanation that would somehow make it all right again, that would allow her and the children to return home with a modicum of dignity and self-respect. Telling her, somehow, that it had all been a mistake, that she had misunderstood.
“Hey!” said Tom jovially. “How’s the trip?” He had called from his work number; she could picture him sitting at his desk, full of Monday morning good intentions. It seemed lifetimes ago that she had had a desk, a job, an office phone, a lunch packed in a Tupperware container and placed alongside other lunches in a communal refrigerator.
Before what she was now (Domestic Lillian, Betrayed Lillian), there had been another Lillian: Professional Lillian. When she met Tom she was working for a high-tech public relations firm in Boston, putting her English major to semi-legitimate use by writing press releases and arranging press interviews for a variety of products whose purpose, truth be told, she never fully understood.
“I told you not to call.” She leaned her elbows on the rail of the deck. Through the kitchen window she could see that her mother had ceased her movements to listen. She moved farther from the window.
She had enjoyed her job, had enjoyed, too, the camaraderie among her coworkers, many of whom, like herself, were new to the workforce, were new to living on their own, were sharing apartments with friends, were negotiating life in the city beyond the safety and security of the dorm rooms or parent-subsidized student apartments from which they had come. She had to take on a waitressing job at a restaurant in the South End, that’s how little her job paid.
“Lillian! It’s been three days.”
“But I told you not to call. At all.” She looked at her father’s garden. She knew that William would have calibrated it carefully so that something in the garden would be blooming all summer. Already the phlox had given way to the bachelor’s button—she remembered how funny she thought that name was when she was a child. This talent she had not inherited. Perhaps it came with age, the patience necessary to tend a garden. Or perhaps it would never come to her at all.
“Three days,” she said, “is not that long. Considering.” It had been at that restaurant where she met Tom, who was out for a business dinner on a damp April Wednesday. He was in sales then. He was transitioning from grunge to grown-up: flat-front khakis replacing torn jeans, Nirvana and Pearl Jam giving way to Elliott Smith.
She looked toward the kitchen window. She couldn’t see her mother. She felt Tom switch gears; she could nearly feel his exhalation of breath. “How are the kids?”
“For God’s sake,” Lillian’s friend Amy had said after Lillian and Tom started dating. “Don’t get out of control.”
“Lillian? I said, ‘How are the kids?’ ”
But she had, after all, gone out of control: she’d gone completely, utterly out of control.
“Don’t become one of those girls,” Amy had said one day, in the overly fluorescent ladies’ room at work.
“I won’t.”
But she did! She became one of those girls. And she didn’t care. She was consumed with Tom, ravenous for him, dizzy with it all. Then one day, in the middle of the Common, just to the left of where a bunch of college students were playing a game of Ultimate Frisbee, down on one knee, a black velvet box appearing from his bag, where, to her knowledge, there had been only a bottle of water and a baseball hat, he had proposed to her.
Now, not trying to shroud the sarcasm, she said, “Wonderful. Philip woke up every two hours last night.” She was so tired that she found it difficult to focus on anything. The flowers in front of her seemed to have blurred their edges, and the sunlight reflecting off the deck chairs felt like a physical pain.
“Oh, Lilly. That’s terrible. I’m sorry.”
Her friends were doing it too. There was the summer they went to eight weddings in a row, their bank accounts depleted from buying gifts, their heads aching from too much drinking. Then the baby showers started, one after another, white cake with pink or blue frosting in someone’s mother’s living room, a stockpile of loot from Babies “R” Us in the corner, all the talk about strollers and diaper brands and day care versus nannies and was formula going to ruin your baby forever or not.
That’s what she wanted, she wanted all of that! She wanted to write thank-you notes on little gender-neutral cards featuring a yellow baby buggy or a set of tiny clothes swaying on a clothesline. She wanted to eat saltines in the morning to chase away nausea. She wanted to know what it felt like to have a tiny person growing inside you, multiplying cell by cell.
“Yes, well. You have other things to be sorry about, before that.”
Then suddenly the baby shower was hers. She was the one sitting in the frilly white chair, pulling pastel wrapping paper from packages of tiny washcloths; she was the one cruising the aisles of Magic Beans, looking at strollers that cost more than her first car had cost; she was the one watching her husband, newly earnest and responsible, putting together a crib in a pale green bedroom.
“Olivia must be asking about me.”
“She’s not.” That was a lie; Olivia had asked about Tom every day. Lillian told her he was tied up with a major work project and wouldn’t be in touch for a while.
“Can I talk to her?”
“She’s not here.”
“Really?”
“Really. She went swimming. With my dad.”
“Oh. Well, when she comes back you can call—”
“Maybe,” said Lillian. “But maybe not.”
“Come home. I miss you. I miss the kids. It’s so quiet—”
“Don’t you know,” she said, “that I would give anything to be surrounded by quiet. Anything.”
“Then come home!”
“It’s not quiet for me at home. I have an infant and a three-year-old. It’s not quiet for me anywhere!”
“That’s all temporary. Come home, and you can rest. I’ll take a day off work. You can have a whole day to yourself.”
“And I suppose you’re g
oing to nurse Philip all day too?”
“You can pump. Pass bottles out to me.” She heard the beep of another phone line ringing in his office. She supposed his little slut secretary would answer that one.
“Tom? I have to go. I’m too angry to talk to you. I can’t even stand to think about you. I really can’t. Maybe in a couple of days, or a week. Yes, a week. You need to give me a week. But not now. I can’t talk to you now.” She closed the phone and placed it on the table.
She sat in one of the deck chairs and considered the garden: how orderly it looked, all those plants waiting their turn to bloom. How predictable and dependable they were.
Looking back, she wasn’t quite sure how it had happened. All of it! Marriage, motherhood, the whole thing. She had always been decisive and methodical; as a child, just ask her mother, she had organized her dolls’ clothes by color, and had kept a sharpener in the colored pencil box in case any of the pencils got dull, and had completed her homework and packed it back in her schoolbag nearly as soon as she had finished her afternoon snack.
She folded her arms and used them as a pillow for her head. Wasn’t this how they were instructed to rest during the school day in elementary school? She remembered that! How peaceful that was.
“Lilly?” Ginny was standing in the doorway. “Lilly? Is everything okay?”
Lillian didn’t look up. She spoke from the depths of her arms. “Yes. Just tired.”
“I heard Philip stirring. Do you want me to get him?”
“No.” Lillian sighed heavily and stood. “No, I’ll get him.”
As she passed her mother, Ginny made an uncertain gesture toward her, perhaps wanting to embrace her, but Lillian knew getting through the day—the week, the month!—would require a steely resolve, a careful boxing up and compartmentalizing of emotions, and so she walked on, all the way up the stairs, slowly, purposefully, to the room where her baby waited.
The baby was somersaulting, or at least that’s how it felt to Jane. The sensation was strange and pleasant to her in the way that riding in a car moving very fast over hilly terrain is strange and pleasant. And it was comforting, too, to know that the baby was all right, was receiving adequate food and liquid and oxygen or whatever it was that it received through the umbilical cord. She made a small gesture toward her abdomen.
“Is it moving?” said Stephen eagerly. They were walking down Church Street on Monday morning—Stephen had persuaded her to take one of her precious vacation days from work so that they could extend their visit to Vermont by a day—and Jane halted, taking one of Stephen’s hands and putting it on her stomach. “I can’t feel anything!” he said.
“Be patient. You will. I feel something moving—right here. Could be his hand or his foot.”
They didn’t know for sure that the baby was a he, because Stephen had adamantly not wanted to find out during the ultrasound and Jane, fighting hard against all her urges to prepare and anticipate, all her unwillingness to brook unnecessary surprises, had acquiesced. But she was nearly certain the baby was a boy. Already she had experienced a few of those pregnancy dreams she had long heard about. In one she was chasing a two-year-old boy around a playground; in another, she held a newborn wrapped in a blue blanket, who looked up at her and with a perfect French accent said, Bonjour, maman.
How strange it was to have this other being tethered to her, partaking in each meal and each drink and each taxi or subway ride along with her. On balance, Jane had decided, she liked being pregnant more than she expected to. Once the morning sickness had departed, once her energy had returned, and once her belly had grown enough to accommodate the maternity business suits she had purchased at no small expense, she discovered she possessed feelings she would not have expected herself to possess—feelings of wonder and joy, feelings of protectiveness and responsibility that went far beyond those she felt for her career, for the apartment in which she and Stephen lived, for the furnishings her job had allowed them to put there, for marriage, for her relationship with her mother.
When she took the time to examine these feelings, she knew that part of what was allowing them to exist was the fact that once the baby was born, and once her three scheduled weeks of maternity leave had ended, she would be going back to work, back to sit at her tidy, polished desk, with her telephone and her computer and her cup of coffee and her assistant, Rebecca, at her disposal, while the baby remained safely at home with Stephen, fed and burped and shielded from harm. She did not, truth be told, anticipate that her day-to-day life would change dramatically once the baby came. Stephen’s, yes. But not hers.
Then, when Stephen was ready to get back to work, maybe in a year or so, maybe longer, they would employ some sort of a nanny, perhaps a sturdy, grandmotherly type, with a seen-it-all demeanor, and life would go on rather smoothly. Blissfully.
Recently she had visited her closest friend from business school, who had three children and lived in a four-bedroom colonial in Nyack. “I’ll get back to it—working—someday,” the friend—her name was Lisa—had said, while she was peeling Play-Doh off the kitchen counter and searching through a cluttered kitchen drawer for a Band-Aid to cover somebody’s skinned knee. “When I’m ready.” She had worked for some time in marketing at P&G; she had climbed high up the ladder and had been in line for another promotion when she became pregnant with the second child.
Jane had looked with some surprise at Lisa’s tousled ponytail, at the sleeve of her white T-shirt, crusted with some sort of indiscernible squash, and had known that this wasn’t the truth.
“Don’t look at me like that, Janey,” said Lisa. “You! So smug and employed.” She was smiling, but it was clear to Jane that she didn’t think any of this was funny. “Your time will come soon enough,” she added. “You’ll see. You think it’s easy, making these decisions—”
“I don’t,” said Jane defensively. “I don’t think it’s easy at all.” She just didn’t think these decisions pertained to her, particularly, even now, in her pregnant state. But she understood that this was what Stephen’s parents expected from her: the house, the children and pets, the clatter and disorder of domestic life.
“They just worry, that’s all it is,” Stephen told her. “That you’ll regret your choices, later on, when it’s too late.”
“But I haven’t got a choice!” Jane’s voice rose stridently. “I worked so hard, to get where I am.”
“I know you did.” They had been married for seven years; he had seen her through the end of business school, and her first job, and then this one, which taxed her and exhilarated her all at once.
“I haven’t got a choice. There’s nothing to choose between. There just is.”
“I know,” he said soothingly. But she wasn’t sure, always, that he did know.
Once, when she was in first grade, Jane had been sitting in her bedroom reading when she overheard her mother and a man she was dating talking in the kitchen. The man was tall and broad, with a rumble in his throat when he talked, like a car starting up. Roger, his name was.
“Not a beauty queen, is she,” said Roger. “Good thing she’s smart.”
Jane looked down at her book; she was reading James and the Giant Peach. She was the best reader in her first-grade class; her classmates were still making their way haltingly through picture books. James had just spilled the magic beans. She imagined the desperation he felt, scrabbling at the ground.
“Jesus Christ,” said her mother. “Roger. What a thing to say.” She could tell by her mother’s tone, and by the way her voice and the man’s voice lowered immediately: they were talking about her.
The words blurred in front of her, but she blinked and wiped her face on her sleeve and read on. The peach started to grow; Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker built a fence around it; James, hungry and alone, watched the crowds gather from inside the house.
Some time later her mother came in. “Jane? Jane. What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said. She held the book steady in her lap.
Her mother crouched down beside her and met her eyes. “Janey? Tell me.”
Roger had laughed after he said it, and that’s what bothered her the most.
“Nothing,” she said more sharply. And then, because she wanted to hurt her mother, she said savagely, “Just leave me alone.” Her mother left, closing the door softly behind her, and although they never spoke of it they both knew Jane had heard.
The next day, Roger was gone. When Jane asked where he’d gone, Robin said, “I don’t know. But I didn’t think he was that nice. Did you, Janey?”
“No,” said Jane softly. “I didn’t either.” She was sad because until she overheard the conversation she had liked Roger; he had taken her and her mother to an Italian restaurant near their building, where she was served a Shirley Temple and was allowed to order off the adult menu and to tuck a big red napkin into the collar of her white shirt to keep the sauce off of it. He had called her “kiddo.”
She had never told anyone about it, not even Stephen, but sometimes she thought about it at odd moments, and she remembered the feeling of having something bloom inside her, some sort of perception of how the world worked, of its little cruelties.
Earlier that day, at breakfast, Ginny had watched her checking her BlackBerry and had said, with manufactured bemusement, “Heavens. Something going on already? So early in the morning?”
Stephen had answered for her, exasperatedly, “Mom. There’s always something going on. And it’s not that early.” William, who was painting a birdhouse with Olivia on the porch, had looked up sharply and said nothing.
Well, if they were going to fault her for being successful, then so be it. She had not studied so hard at college, had not been at the top of her class at business school, had not worked like a maniac all these years, to be made to feel guilty about all that she had achieved. To be made to feel like an outcast if she answered e-mail each night before bed.
“It’s not guilt exactly,” said Stephen when they were in the car, driving down Pine Street toward the downtown, in search of the cranberry scone that Jane had decided that she wanted. “It’s not that they actually want you to feel bad about it. It’s just that they’re not accustomed to your—”
The Arrivals: A Novel Page 7
