"And?"
"It intrigued him. He's never been married or had kids, so it's all kind of foreign and fun to him. He's one of my husband's oldest friends. Cute, bearded, balding but sexy. Frank's very sexy. A real-estate developer. Likes to scuba dive, surf—"
"Jerra, you're starting to sound like the rundown sheet from the sperm bank," Judith said, and both women laughed, a kind of hopeful this-might-be-a-good-one laugh.
Jerralyn was right about the sexy part and Frank was very flirtatious. He held her hand across the dinner table and looked into her eyes with a knowing amusement that was very appealing. Judith felt herself drinking a little too much wine. Her policy about going on these dates was to meet the men at the restaurant because she didn't want to expose her children to them and vice versa. But tonight, halfway through dinner, she was feeling heady from the alcohol and wishing that she'd let this one pick her up at home. She knew she shouldn't be driving in this condition. How was she going to get home? She ordered coffee with dessert and drank several cups of it black, and was relieved when she started feeling closer to earth.
He never mentioned her children and neither did she. He talked about the real-estate market, and about a boat he had in the Caribbean and about various trips he'd taken on it. She talked about her job at the advertising agency and the clients she worked for. After they'd run out of food and superficial things to talk about, he paid the check and they walked outside.
"Thanks for dinner," she said, extending her hand. "It was nice to meet you." He held her hand lightly.
"Where did you park?" he asked.
"Around the back."
"Come on, I'll walk you."
"It's the station wagon with the two car seats in it," she said, wondering if that was a good opening to talk about her kids. Jerra told her he knew about them.
"Ahh, yes," he said, "the donor babies." She had parked in the back because when she'd arrived, the parking lot in front had been full. There was so much crime in these neighborhoods at night, she'd rushed from her car to the restaurant, afraid as she often was these days that someone was just waiting to grab her. And when someone did she gasped.
It was Frank. At her car, in the now empty parking lot, he turned her to face him, pressed her against the side of her car, then forced his mouth on hers. She could smell the garlic from the pasta on his beard and she didn't like his mushy wet kiss. She tried turning her face away, but he took her chin in his hand and moved her face back to his.
"Don't turn away," he said. His body was pinning hers hard now, and she was uncomfortable and a little afraid.
"I've got to get home," she said.
"To your kids?" he asked, smiling, but it wasn't a friendly smile.
"Yes," she said and tried to slide away from him, but now she realized that what she'd thought was a little heat from this guy was overpowering force. She felt a panicky quickening in her chest. Now he moved his hands to her buttocks and pulled her pelvis against his very excited one.
"No," she said, moving to get away.
"What's the matter?" he asked. "I've got sperm. Don't you want some of my sperm?"
She felt sick to her stomach, and when he placed his fuzzy garlicky face against her again, she stuck the high heel of her shoe into the arch of his loafer. He let out a grunt of pain, but wouldn't let go. Now he was talking in a weird little soft voice he must have thought was seductive. "I want to please you, baby. Won't you let me?"
"I will let you, and here's how," she said, trying to contain her rage. "It would please me inordinately if you would just fuck off."
"Cunt," he said, pushed her against the car hard, and walked away.
"You want to know why women use anonymous donors? Look in the mirror, you pig!" she shouted after him. In the car, she screamed out loud for a few minutes and cursed the fact that she'd been stupid enough to let herself be fixed up. When she flipped on the radio dial, the audiocassette she'd been playing for the children earlier that day came on, and Snow White in her trilling little voice was singing, "Someday my prince will come."
When she talked about it in the group she was surprised at how comforted she felt. There was something about blurting out the horror of it all that was therapeutic and healing. Ruthie and Shelly cracked jokes, but they lovingly offered suggestions, even tried to think of some good single men for her. And Rick Reisman turned to her and said, "Even I, with my long record of insensitivity, have to say those guys you went out with were monsters."
"I think we should go around the room and talk about dumb things people say to us and all the times we've wanted to tell them to shove it up their nose."
"Well put, Ruthless," Shelly said. "I think what she means is, let's figure out how we're going to respond to stupid questions with a little bit of grace."
"Yeah. Grace," Ruthie said. "How do you respond gracefully to this one, which I am so sick of I could kill, 'You mean Shelly's Sid's real father? How did that happen?' I always want to say, 'Come over for Thanksgiving dinner and taste my moist turkey, sweetheart!' " Everyone howled at that one.
"I've got one that people say to me all the time that all of you will love," Rick said. " 'Well, won't it be nice that by the time the baby's in his twenties, he'll be able to wheel you around the old folks' home just like you do your uncle.' " That got a hoot from Ruthie and a big laugh from all the others.
Now Shelly piped up with one he'd kept even from Ruthie. "How about this one? I've now had two different people on two different occasions ask me, 'Aren't you worried that when Sid grows up he'll be gay?' "
"No!" Ruthie said, then thought, and added, "I don't know why I'm surprised, I've actually had someone ask me, 'Did you and Shelly ever do it just to see if it would work?' " An outraged moan rose from the group.
"How about, 'Didn't it feel bad to know you couldn't have Mitch's baby and another woman could?' " Lainie offered, and the laughter stopped abruptly as everyone looked at her serious face. Barbara was surprised to hear Lainie volunteer that, since, though she and Mitch had attended all of the meetings so far, she'd been very quiet at every one of them.
Mitch looked at his wife with surprise. "You're joking!" he said. "What insensitive clod came out with that?"
"Your sister Betsy," Lainie said, and it must have been her own delivery that tickled her because she laughed along with the others, though Mitch was embarrassed and serious.
"Well, it sounds as if the biggest thing that separates your children from others is the way they happened to join their families. Because developmentally they all appear to be right on track," Barbara said.
"It's true," Rick said. "I was thinking today as I was driving here about what each of us has gone through to have these babies, to seduce the stork to visit our lives. And it cracked me up because I decided that we ought to call ourselves the Stork Club."
Everyone loved that, and Ruthie promised to have sweatshirts made for all of them, and the babies too, with that name printed on them.
"It sounds to me as if today's discussion should be about the language of unusual birth situations. So let's see if by discussing it we can find a way to handle them."
"People seem to be titillated by my story, Rick said. "I've had men leer when they hear it, as if I'd been sexually involved with David's mother."
"Seem to be titillated?" Judith said. "You just heard about the guy who tried to nail me in the parking lot."
"It sounds as if it brings up people's own fears about the two things in the nineties that are the most frightening. High technology and sex," Barbara said.
"Not necessarily in that order," Shelly added.
"And when people are afraid, they're frequently hostile. The important thing to remember is that the quality of your relationships with your children has nothing to do with the way they came into the world. And if others have problems with it, those are just their problems.
"Many of the issues can be taken care of by semantics. When people say 'real mother' or 'real father,' you can correct them
with 'birth mother' or 'birth father,' or 'biological parent,' which I've heard you use, Ruth," Barbara said. "But I think the first thing to do is expect people to ask dumb questions, anticipate them, and get comfortable with your answers so when they ask them in front of the children, which they undoubtedly will, you'll be loose and confident about it all."
"Well, what are the answers?" Judith asked, and Barbara thought about it for a while.
"Probably the best answers that will work well when the children overhear them, and even when they don't, will be the ones that have to do with how happy you are to have these children in your lives, and that really is the bottom line. So in answer to the question about the surrogate, Lainie might say something like, 'Mitch and I are so happy to have our wonderful daughter, Rose, in the family, and that's what really matters to us.' "
"I guess it would be pretty hard to argue with that," Judith said.
"Not for Betsy," Lainie said. "And the irony is she was the one who suggested we try the surrogate in the first place."
"So the rules are," Judith said, "expect people to be dumb."
There was silence as Barbara nodded, but Ruthie Zimmerman, never one to leave well enough alone, had to have the last word. "And then," she said, "tell them to shove it up their nose," and everyone fell apart laughing.
30
GRACIE HAD THE FLU, and she told Barbara she could manage to get from her bedroom to the bathroom, but she insisted that the kitchen, though it was approximately the same distance, was too far. She categorically refused the idea of "some stranger nosing around my house," which was her description of any help Barbara might hire for her. So every morning on her way to work, Barbara stopped and picked up a bran muffin, then used her key to get into the old apartment just off Fairfax, made a pot of herb tea, and brought her mother breakfast in bed.
Gracie joked when she bought the duplex in a neighborhood populated mostly by old people that she was moving in as an anthropologist, to study the life-styles of senior citizens. Now she had a multitude of friends, and the women in her circle took turns bringing her lunch every day, and tending to her. She seemed to be relishing the attention, but the flu bug had taken its toll and she was weak and uncomfortable.
Her choice for dinner was soup from Canter's Deli, where Barbara stopped every evening. Then in Gracie's tiny kitchen she would pour the steaming chicken noodle or matzoh ball or kasha soup from its cardboard carton into a bowl, put some bread on the side, and serve it to Gracie along with tales of her day at work. Sometimes Jeff would meet her at Gracie's, and Barbara could tell by the way he tried too hard to be okay about it that it was devastating to him to see his mighty and forceful grandmother in this diminished state. The once booming voice that was usually so big it could shake the house was now little more than a whisper.
One night when they got home he asked, "Is Grammy going to die, Mom?"
"Yes, honey. One of these days. I mean, she'll probably recover from this flu any minute and soon she'll be racing me down San Vicente Boulevard again, but eventually we'll lose Grammy. And you know what? We'll miss her terribly and be grateful for all the years we've had her, and all the funny, crazy things we learned by having her in our lives."
He had nodded at her words, but a few minutes later when she was on the phone talking to Stan she saw Jeff slip away into the powder room, and then from where she sat at her kitchen desk she could hear his sobs from behind the closed door. Both of her children were attached in some powerful, heartful way to their grandmother, who was better by far at grandmothering than she'd ever been at mothering. When she got word that her grandmother was down with the flu, Heidi called all the time to see how she was feeling, and Barbara had to admit to a wave of jealousy for the amount of attention her daughter gave her mother.
After the anniversary party Heidi had gone back to San Francisco, and in a few weeks she informed Barbara that she had quit her job in the offices of the American Conservatory Theater, a move necessitated by the fact that the no-good mother-loving boyfriend worked there too, and they were through forever. She was very serious about moving back to Los Angeles. It was an idea Barbara loved, until Heidi added that she was hoping to move back into her old bedroom, "just for maybe like six months or a year or so, until I'm squared away and have some money saved up."
Barbara's reply was a startled "Really?"
"Don't sound so thrilled, Mother," Heidi said, and Barbara heard that same bitchy edge in her daughter's voice that she sometimes regrettably used with her own mother. After they hung up the phone, she wondered if it had escaped Heidi's memory that her former bedroom was now more of an office than it was a bedroom. Barbara had filled the room with books and files.
If she had to change it back to a bedroom it would mean renting storage space for the contents. But turning the office back into a bedroom would be the least of it. Heidi hadn't lived at home for anything but school vacations in six years. Even a few of the summers during her four college years were spent away from home. One year she waitressed in Santa Barbara where she took a summer course, and another year she attended a work-study program at UC Davis. It had been a long time since she and Barbara had had extended day-to-day contact, and Barbara was worried about how that would work out.
I'll make it good, she thought. It won't be the way it was when she was a teenager, because she'll have a job to go to every morning so I won't see her until the end of the day. Most of the time not even then, because she'll be dating. Dating. What would it be like for Heidi to be living at home and going out with some man and not coming home for a day or two? Now she was dating thirty-five-year-old men. One of the group leaders at the hospital was Barbara's age and she was married to a thirty-five-year-old man. Not a good idea, Heidi's living at home. Though she had to admit it had cozy overtones. If she did decide to move to Los Angeles, Barbara and Stan would have to encourage her to find her own place without making her feel as if they didn't want her in the house.
Mothers and daughters. Why was it so complicated? Tonight while she was helping Gracie, practically lifting her from the chair to the bed so she could change the bedclothes on which her mother had spilled some of her dinner, she wondered if Heidi would someday have to do this for her. And suddenly the idea of being the aging mother seemed appealing and she had an urge to crawl into the newly made bed and ask Gracie to please feed her some soup.
"My new group is really working out well," she said. "They've really connected with one another. They have a great sense of humor about themselves. And probably because they went through so much to get these babies, they don't let anything get in the way of their happiness. It's a real lesson, watching them."
"Well I'm delighted to hear it's going well, I knew it would, but I don't know how the hell you're going to do all that you do and ever have time to make a wedding too."
"Make a what?"
"I talked to my granddaughter today," Gracie said, smiling, then pushing her spoon hard into a matzoh ball and breaking it into bite-size pieces. "And she told me we're going to have a wedding."
"What?" Barbara asked, stunned.
"Ooops, did I spill the proverbial beans?" Gracie asked with a guilty look. "Didn't she tell you yet that the errant boyfriend showed up and said he's decided he can't live without her?"
"Mother, you're not serious."
"I'm sure she'll call you tonight and tell you herself," Gracie said and tucked her napkin into the high collar of her flannel nightgown. "For whatever it's worth, she sounded deliriously happy."
Bad news, Barbara thought. Probably a ploy from the guy to get Heidi back into bed, but it would never last until a wedding. "I won't chop the liver or devil any eggs yet, Mother," she said.
"You had two kids when you were her age."
"I also had Stan. This guy Ryan is a flake. She told me so herself. Not exactly a gentleman of strong character, shall we say?"
"Well, Mother dear," Gracie said to her with irony, "as you always used to say to me . . . you don't
get to pick." Then she laughed a big hearty laugh, which should have cheered Barbara since it was an indication that Gracie was on the mend, but Barbara didn't notice.
Ronald Levine was waiting outside the door of her Wilshire Boulevard office when she arrived in the morning. His face was ashen and his eyes were filled with rage. He didn't have an appointment but he'd come to tell her that his estranged wife had left a message on his answering machine saying she and their son, Scottie, were off to Hawaii. She didn't tell him where in Hawaii or for how long. He was seething, and when Barbara opened the back door to her office he strode in behind her.
She was early because she'd planned to make some phone calls before her first appointment, but Ronald Levine's pain filled the room. His broken posture looked wrong for the smart Armani suit he wore as he paced in front of her desk, cursing Joan and blaming Barbara. Barbara listened without saying a word, letting him get it all out. Finally he collapsed in the chair across from her desk and wept, his face on his arm on her desk, his body heaving with agonized sobs.
"Look what we do to one another in the name of love," he choked out between his sobs, and after a while he raised his face to her and asked, "Have you ever been divorced?"
"No," Barbara said.
"Can you imagine what it feels like to have to share your child with someone you hate? Who's acting despicable, trying to turn the child, the only creature on this earth you can love and relate to unconditionally, against you? No, you can't." He spoke in a small voice.
"It must feel awful."
His eyes were angry as he stood. "Don't give me the sympathetic-psychiatrist talk, you supercilious bitch," he screamed. "It feels worse than awful. I want a life with my son, and I don't even know where he is. Why did I come here in the first place? To pay you to say inane shit to me like 'It must feel awful.' " For an instant Barbara thought he was going to leap across the desk and grab her. "You have to help me get full custody. You have to tell the court, the judge, the powers that be that I'm the sane one. That his crazy mother spends every waking minute trying to drive him crazy. Will you say that?"
The Stork Club Page 27
