by Sally Koslow
I hear Nat, and stash my macabre mail in one the catalogs.
“Georgia,” he says, with a coaxing and ripeness almost like foreplay. He kisses me lightly on the lips and then the top of my head.
“Hey, you.” I like his white T-shirt hanging over his jeans, his bare feet, his compact paunch, his rumpled hair. I like everything about Nat and about today.
“Are we cooking?”
“That’s the plan.”
“No Luey?”
“Only me.” We cook and eat and shower and watch half a movie before we’re back in bed, the best day and night of my life for almost six months.
48.
Nat leaves earlier than I expect, shortly after ten. “You need time with your daughter,” he says.
There’s sense and sensitivity in that, which I appreciate, but what’s the point of living near the Atlantic and paying fat taxes if you and a lover can’t have a briny hike on the shore, fulfilling the requirement of two out of three personal ads? I’d pictured us at the beach. As we stand by his car, I could take him upstairs all over again.
“I’ll be at the London book fair next week, but back here the weekend after—if you’ll have me,” he says.
“Of course I’ll have you.” Don’t be such a girl, I tell myself. This is how things work. Stop imagining the swash is gone from his buckle. Nat’s as airborne as you are, but he has two stores to run, a trip to take, and, for all you know—and hope against—other women to see. “I’m going to stand here until I can’t see you anymore.”
“I’m going to replay our adult movies, and hope I don’t crash.”
I wave as he drives off, and when his car turns the corner, I remind myself that this, too, is how it feels to be with a man, to miss the sound of his voice and laugh the minute he is gone. Hello, 1983.
I change into ancient jeans, a tattered sweatshirt, and one of Ben’s rattier baseball caps. Now that I’ve turned into both Adam and Eve, I need to attack the spring cleanup and plantings. Chip has lectured me on the necessity of curb appeal. His California customers liked the house enough to agree to a two-month postponement, which means that in four weeks I either accept their terms and set a closing date or pass up this chance and pray for another buyer.
Every day this week I raked and collected winter debris, and don’t my bones and muscles know it, especially after my workout in bed. Cutting grass will be tomorrow’s task—the lawn is greening up, and Luey scored a mower at a garage sale. I’d like a day off, but there’s a job to be done before a storm hits. I slip on my garden gloves and begin to turn over the earth in preparation for flats of pansies and petunias. The dirt is yielding, like stiff dough. I dig a hole, wiggle a plant from its casing, and pat it in place. I repeat the process again and again, finding peace in the repetition of homey horticulture. Soon two lines of plum pansies curtsy like kindergarteners. I can see why my brother draws the line at these flowers, but I have loved them forever, as I do the complete retinue of old-fashioned blossoms—asters and peonies, hollyhocks and cosmos, wisteria and lilies of the valley.
I am ready to start on the petunias when from across the yard Luey shouts, “Need a hand?” The dogs are off their leashes. They stampede in my direction, tails and limbs aloft, happiness distilled to a blur of reckless energy.
When she saw Nat and me together, Luey strained for blasé, as if every morning a man who wasn’t her father sat at her mother’s side with his thinning hair dripping from the shower. I imagined her trying to think about anything but what had recently transpired in my bed.
“You’re just in time!” I shout, eager for her company. “Why don’t you start on the vinca—if you’re not too uncomfortable?” Seemingly overnight, like a flower herself, Luey has blossomed. She is carrying her child exactly how she positioned herself in my womb—high, narrow, and vertical, as if she wanted to be introduced to whoever was out there.
Luey kneels on the ground with surprising grace. “It’s good to see Nat here,” she says, as she grabs the trowel and begins to dig.
“I feel the same way,” I say, though I hear my own reluctance. Can I be open to anyone again? Where is my money-back guarantee?
“He’s a great guy, Ma. I hope he’s more than a practice run.”
“My whole life feels ad-lib right now.” It’s surprisingly fine, I realize, to take each day as it comes. “I’m glad you like him.” I plant another pansy. “Does it seem strange to see us together in . . . that way?”
“It does,” Luey says. “Good strange. You’re special, Ma. You deserve the best.”
Like your father? Not like your father? “I appreciate that.” I pat a plant in place, divot after divot. “What was that couple like yesterday?” I anchor my eyes to a petunia to tamp down my curiosity, which is acute.
“Pretty much ideal.” She praises the food, the house, and the books, details I would care about if she’d gone to a party, not to meet the potential mother and father of her child.
“You can tell this how?”
“They’re mature—they must be close to forty—and smart.”
If only people got wise simply by having birthdays. “You’re smart.”
“But they’re secure, reliable, prosperous, polished. Want me to go on?” Her usually well-modulated voice goes high. “I felt like a sham next to the wife, like I was wearing a pillow under my shirt for a school play and she was the one with a funky stripe down her belly and a belly button like a third nipple.”
Luey is trying—and failing—to laugh. I gather her in my arms, her pregnancy between us like a warm knot tying three generations. She smells both sweet and salty, like she did as a girl after coming in from roller skating in the park.
“It must have been hell,” I say, patting her back.
“They want this baby so badly.” A tear drops on my neck. “My baby.”
When Ben and I adopted Cola, we became a triptych greater than the sum of its parts. “Who can blame them? You could make their world.”
Luey doesn’t let go. “The whole ride home I started to think, what if the baby I gave away is the next Steve Jobs and when I’m fifty and go looking for him he spits on me? Or she’s a girl who publishes a memoir about how her mama abandoned her at birth? I don’t want to be the witch who does that to her child.”
I have no answers. All I can do is crush my daughter against me.
“I want to be more than an egg donor. Louisa Silver-Waltz, cautionary tale—that story’s getting old.”
“Listen.” I push her away to see her face. “Be whoever you want.”
“I want to be a mother, but I’m scared shitless.”
“If a pregnant woman says she isn’t scared, she’s lying.”
“The couple from yesterday aren’t going to be the parents for my baby,” she adds, answering the question no one has asked. “I can’t do it. I called them this morning.”
“My God, Luey.” She has buried the lede. Now I am crying, too. “Honey, what did they say?”
“The wife wouldn’t come to the phone. Her husband said I’m the third birth mother—God, I loathe that term, birth mother, like you can buy me at The Container Store—who changed her mind, and that he wasn’t surprised. When I was quiet during the visit, he thought he could see my gears shifting. He asked if I had a problem with them, begging for advice. I told him they’re perfect, that it was all because of me. Ma, it was awful, like I’m a conniving bitch.”
I ache for these strangers, but my allegiance is to Luey and her baby, to my family. “I think you owe them a letter. Put your feelings down on paper for them—get it out and send the letter—and then think of your baby, only of the baby.”
She wipes her tears on a sleeve and leans back, her legs stretched out on the grass.
“I’m proud of you for making this decision,” I say, my mind already on knitting a bunting.
�
�Maybe I’m an idiot.”
“Did you discuss all this with Peter?”
“Some.” She threw her hands up, as if caught red-handed. “None.”
I dare to ask, “Will you tell me now how things stand between you?”
Luey waits a moment before answering, pulling out a blade of grass and examining it. “He knew I was looking into adoption, that it had to be my choice.”
“Lu, do you think he’d want to be . . . involved?”
“He’s skittish—about me and especially about being with me and a baby—but he might come around, and if he doesn’t, so be it,” she says defiantly. “I’m making this decision without him. Obviously”—she pats her belly. “I don’t have time to wait for him to figure things out. I should call him, though.” She takes the trowel and starts to dig. “I thought telling the people from yesterday was going to be hard . . . .”
“It’s all going to be hard.”
“I have to get this right.”
Yes, she has to get this right. Luey plants a vinca behind some pansies. I plant a petunia, then another. “I’m willing to be reprogrammed, inside and out, if that’s what it takes. Cola promises she’s on board, that she won’t go back to Europe, but I’m going to need you, too, Ma. Will you help me?”
I know I will try, day by day, in any wingman role she wants. “Of course. Darling, of course.”
I hear her sobs, as she can hear mine, but I can’t see her face. We plant flowers, side by side for ten or fifteen minutes. Then she reaches for my hand and puts it on her stomach. “Feel that?” she says. “Buffalo Baby’s kicking.”
49.
I stand to admire my work. Chip is right. The color scheme is straight from the tween department, but my home now looks as if I give a damn.
Inside, under the letter from Westchester Hills, I find the gardening catalogs that arrived in yesterday’s mail. I open one. Plant names call out to me. Eight Mile High Daylily, Red Creeping Thyme, Cranberry Crush Hardy Perennial Hibiscus, and Raspberry Mousse Toad Lily. I want them all, and how can I get a job naming flowers?
I reach for the second catalog. As I open it to consider the 41 percent discount on the Passion Flower collection, the pieces of mail I moved aside yesterday fall loose—bill, bill, bill, letter. I rip open the last and least threatening envelope, handwritten with penmanship of which nuns would approve. No return address.
A check falls out. It is drawn on the account of Naomi DeAngelo McCann for the sum of forty-thousand dollars.
I grab the edge of the kitchen chair to sit as the numbers swim. I feel stunned and light-headed. Have I been Tasered? I look again but there is no mistake. The check is made out to Georgia Waltz.
The memo line is blank. Interest due on the loan of a husband?
I’d been able to convince myself that the six-figure check came from one of Ben’s delinquent clients. Anonymity was clean, unencumbered, and required no acknowledgment. I am stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel, afraid to look down.
Shaking, I carry the check upstairs, where I hide it under a book on my nightstand. It sits like a car bomb, waiting to explode the peace of my Jerusalem.
Over the next three days, I accompany Luey to a birthing class, mow the lawn, polish an essay about the tribulations of being a 384-pound high school senior—I thought my life had challenges—and plant a bed of lavender. Each night, Nat calls. Our pillow talk reminds me that I am a warm-blooded female who enjoys the attention of a male she wants to know better, yet as I come and go the check is a cryptogram reminding me that Naomi McCann and I have unfinished business.
After tonight’s dinner with Luey, I work up the nerve to at least find out what Naomi is thinking. As I dial her number, I feel the cognitive dissonance that a lung cancer victim might feel who knows that a cigarette could kill her but smokes nonetheless. “She ain’t here now,” says the hag of the Hamptons when I ask for her daughter.
“It’s Mrs. Silver,” I say, as I never do. “Ben Silver’s wife.” I recite the number and ask Naomi to please get in touch.
She doesn’t call that night, nor the following day, nor the next. I phone again. This time she answers. Even the words, “It’s Georgia Waltz,” are hard to spit out. Except when I had to let Opal and Fred go, can I remember another time when I have felt this awkward?
“Hello,” Naomi says, conveying no surprise.
“The check you sent,” I sputter, regretting that I haven’t worked up a script, “would you explain it, please?”
“What do you want to know?” I read menace in her answer, but I would even if she were singing “Polly Wolly Doodle.”
“Do you feel sorry for me?” I’ve worked hard not to throw a pity party.
“No sorrier than I feel for myself.” It sounds as if she is choking out her words. “I want to do the right thing.” The pause is as long as a semester. “Try to understand. I loved Ben, too.”
He was mine to love, mine alone. I don’t want to understand. I refuse to try. “If I’d known the first check was from you, I wouldn’t have deposited it.” Menace is most definitely in my tone.
“Yet you did. You need the money, correct?”
“You can have it back. I haven’t spent a cent.”
“It’s yours.” Naomi’s voice is controlled, though not cruel. “I’m sure you think I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a thief.”
Except when it comes to my husband.
“Cookie?” peeps a small voice at the other end. “I want a cookie.”
“What’s the magic word?” Naomi asks.
“Please,” the child squeaks.
Please let me figure out what’s going on. What’s the magic word for that?
“You have to wait a minute, Theo,” she says. “Be patient, sweetie.”
“It sounds like this isn’t a good time.” Though I’m the one who made the call, I have exhausted my courage and would gratefully postpone our conversation.
“You’re right. I’m putting Theo to bed, and then I’m going out. Can you speak tomorrow?” she asks.
“Sure.” I tell myself I want this resolved.
“How’s nine?”
“Okay, I’ll call you.”
“Georgia, it would be better if we’d talk face-to-face.”
“Why?” Better for whom? Will it be a duel? Do I get to bring a second?
She says only, “Let’s meet at Main Beach. I’ll wait near the entrance.”
I agree.
The dire occasion for which I’ve hoarded my last Ambien has arrived. I tell Luey I have a headache and not to wake me, even if Nat calls. Blessing pharmaceutical voodoo, I set the alarm and swallow.
50.
Seven hours later I wake to fog. At this time of year it doesn’t roll in on little cat feet. It arrives like a shroud catapulted from the heavens. By noon the sun may burn through, but now the sky is a dirty windshield. I dress in clothing that is equally drab, with the exception of my wedding ring, which I remove from its hiding place in a wooly sock and put on my finger for the first time since the day I left Wally’s office. Ben, what kind of fool’s errand is this? I think as I drink strong black coffee and mindlessly putter while I wait to leave.
Out of season, even on a Sunday morning, Main Beach is coldly empty, home to a scattering of walkers, often robotically tossing their retrievers a stick. It’s devoid of sunbathers who have never heard of melanoma, sandcastle-building children whose parents are convinced they are the next I. M. Pei, and tourists searching for beach glass—beer bottles shrapnel they value like pirate doubloons. I park my car close to the entrance, tighten Ben’s worn trench coat against the damp, and pull down my hat as if I am trying to disappear.
“Good morning,” Naomi says, waiting at the edge of the parking lot. Her hair is too strawberry blond for her ruddy skin, but she’s gone to the trouble of blowing it dry and waves fram
e her face. In a police lineup, you wouldn’t pick her as a perp, though she might look familiar from church or the day care center. She’s dressed in a barn jacket exactly like one of Ben’s. I wonder if she bought his jacket as a gift, or vice versa. I am glad Ben’s jacket now belongs to Fred, along with most of his wardrobe.
“Theo, not so far, honey!” she shouts into the mist.
A child in red trots toward me, a comet with rosy cheeks, and offers me a handful of shells.
“Why, thank you,” I say, accepting the gift.
Theo giggles and turns to Naomi, grabbing her hand. “Do you mind this weather?” she says, touching my arm.
I pull away, but answer, “Not at all.” Bracing air is what I need. My boots sink into the sand.
“There’s so much I want to tell you,” she says.
I’m not sure I want to hear it, but I surprise myself by saying, “Start at the beginning.”
She takes a deep breath, as if she is going to blow out fifty birthday candles, and says, “Ben and I met in Hawaii.” At Theo’s pace, the three of us begin to walk down the beach. “It was a flirtation. Period. We didn’t ask each other many questions.” I look ahead into the nothingness. “I didn’t know he was married, only that he was a runner from New York City. After the marathon, I never expected to see Ben Silver again. We didn’t exchange numbers or emails and I didn’t try to track him down.”
Does Naomi McCann want a salute? Moisture is beading on my coat. I feel colder than I did all winter and am glad for Ben’s leather gloves that I find in my pockets, though when I slip into them, I imagine Ben wearing them and holding her hand.
“Then we saw one another the following summer on this very beach, when I was out jogging.”
I turn to look hard at Naomi’s face. I see no softness in this woman. “Had I realized this was holy ground,” I say, “I wouldn’t have agreed to meet here.”
