by Mira Ptacin
As if having no control over these sudden shifts and new roles weren’t baffling enough, I have no control over my body, which is now a real adult body. Goodbye, Forever 21 clothing. I won’t be able to get away with your cheap, cute, disposable tops anymore. My body is a primal, mature one. It is an animal’s body, shifting and growing and doing things I never knew it could do. I’m swelling, and my body isn’t under my control, and it’s leaving me more isolated and unfamiliar with this new self and it’s terrifying. And this fear produces, on top of everything else, an overwhelming guilt.
Andrew, on the other hand, is optimistic. He embraces the first weeks of the pregnancy with his own brand of humor. For instance, during our transvaginal ultrasound, the one where the delivery date is predicted, he asks my doctor if he himself could perform the ultrasound on me. Patiently, our doctor tells him no. Then Andrew requests that the ultrasound be performed on him. Again, Danya denies him, but Andrew keeps on pushing. Finally, he asks if the machine is advanced enough to predict if the baby is gay, and if not gay, will it be able to tell us if the baby is going to be a Republican. The room falls silent. I am sprawled on my back in a paper gown, legs locked in stirrups as Andrew wheels his stool close and whisper-yells into my ear, “Don’t worry, darling. I’ll love our child just as much if it is gay. But not if it’s Republican.”
Weeks pass, and I go mean on Andrew like a snapping turtle. I continue to remind him that I didn’t want any of this, that none of it was a part of my plan, that this will destroy my parents, that my life is over. I’m not sure if I mean it or not, but it doesn’t really matter. The only thing that matters is that we both just shut up and start taking good care of this new part of us.
“Calm down, just calm down. Everything is going to be fine,” Andrew tells me, lovingly, again and again, but I can’t just calm down. I am overcome. I don’t want to be the one who ruins things, ruins lives, the fuckup. I just want some control over something.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, over and over again for weeks, but I keep fighting him on it because he doesn’t understand. No matter what happens, whether he stays or goes, whether we get married or not, whatever happens from here on out, we’ll be living in separate worlds with separate feelings and understandings and interpretations and memories of this pregnancy. It’s as if being pregnant is a reminder that we are all born alone and die alone.
I am about two months along in my pregnancy when we break the news to the first set of parents: Andrew’s. Andrew is confident that his mom and dad will be happy about it. They are old enough to be grandparents and Andrew is thirty-one. I interpret this as a hint that they are much less emotional than my parents. It is Memorial Day weekend. We are sitting around the breakfast table at a family restaurant in southern Illinois. It’s the day after his sister Kerri’s wedding reception and it’s only the second time I have ever met Andrew’s kin. We drink our orange juices, our tomato juices, and coffees and read the menus. Everyone is happy. We make a nice bunch. The waitress takes our orders, then Andrew taps a silver spoon on a small water glass and says cheerily, “I have an announcement to make!”
Now? I didn’t know he was going to do it right now. I don’t even know what he’s going to say, or how he’s going to say it, and I regret trusting him to be sensitive about this. I’m worried about what this will ignite. Andrew said not to worry—“They’ll be excited. They love you.”—but I am worrying.
“I have an announcement, everyone,” he repeats, and my stomach twists. Goddamnit, Andrew. Why are you so fucking confident? And before I can tell him to stop with the grand announcement, Andrew halfway stands up and says, “I have asked Mira to marry me.”
“Already?” someone says. I cower.
“And,” he continues quickly, like it’s a punch line, “she’s pregnant.”
And-she’s-pregnant. Just like that. Her. Right there. That girl, right over there. Every speechless face at the table turns to me, including Andrew’s, in pewter silence. Then my face starts to burn. Andrew’s mother gasps and his father begins to cry.
“How—?” someone starts to ask, then stops.
More silence.
“Congratulations,” Kerri tells us, nobly, and I thank her with my eyes. Jesus Christ.
“Thanks,” I say. Thank you, Kerri, for your understanding on how I might feel at this very moment. Thank you for breathing some air into my lungs as I drown in this torrential awkwardness.
“Yes, congratulations,” the chorus repeats. And then, like turning the channel on the television set, the flow of the conversation is switched to sports. And that is that.
Occasionally, during the next several weeks, we communicate with Andrew’s parents over the phone. Andrew and I have a strategy, and we have a request for his folks to please, please remain tight-lipped about the news of our pregnancy until we tell mine. Our plan: In a couple of weeks, Andrew and I will deliver the first news flash (we are engaged!) to them. We’ll give them time to celebrate and let it settle. Let them rejoice and be glad. I don’t want them to think we’re getting married only because I’m pregnant. I want them to be happy. To see that we really do love one another, and that our love is solid. I want them to feel proud. I’ve heard enough stories about young patients of my dad’s that were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, single, and pregnant. I don’t want my parents to think about my pregnancy in the same way. But the concealment makes it worse. I dwell on how they will respond, what they’ll think, what everyone will think. For weeks I lie about who I am, what is happening in New York. I talk to my mother every day, and every day I paint a picture that things are good and ordinary.
We decide to call them on Father’s Day. It is my sister’s idea. I am already living with Andrew. They don’t know that. Or that I have already heard the baby’s heartbeat. We are sitting on the stoop outside his apartment on 32nd Street when we make the call. My parents are at home in the kitchen. It is Father’s Day, a humid Sunday evening.
It is Andrew’s idea to have them put us on speakerphone, but the speakerphone makes things worse. There are taxis honking and sirens wailing in the background. Strangers are walking by on the sidewalk.
“I have some good news for you,” is what I first say, but it doesn’t feel like good news. And it doesn’t feel good to say it.
“What? Say it again, we can’t hear you.”
“You’re going to be grandparents,” I declare, but my parents can’t understand anything I am saying, so I have to repeat it again and again. “I said, YOU’RE GOING TO BE GRANDPARENTS.” I have to shout.
“You’re kidding,” is what my dad says when he finally hears it, but I’m not. We’re not kidding. We’re not terminating; we’re not putting it up for adoption. You are going to be grandparents.
After a long pause, my mom finally speaks. “Okay! Here we go!” she sings. “Let’s get to work! How can I help?”
But I have no response. I am crouched on the stairs of our apartment, barefoot and pregnant in New York City, trying to play it cool with everyone, but at the moment, everyone feels like an opponent.
five
A memory: I am nine years old. My sister, Sabina, my brother, Julian, and I are chickens with our heads cut off, running around our backyard in retaliation against the assigned chore of cleaning soggy dog crap out of the spring grass.
“I spend two years wiping esses,” Mom shouts from the front porch, “just so I could afford to eat!” She continues. “Before I meet you Daddy, I supported myself and lived off one chicken for ze whole week. Chicken soup, chicken salad, chicken pot pie . . . ” I’ve heard this one before. Mom saved every penny, shopped at Goodwill stores in the rich neighborhoods, ironed all her clothes and always looked good. “. . . and I saved up twelve thousand dollars cleaning poop, so I don’t want to hear you complain,” she says in a frustrated huff, and, as usual, Mom’s frightening testimonial wears me down. Next thing I know, I’m
reaching out to accept the blue broomstick-handled pooper scooper, the one with the aluminum claws. She steps off the porch and back into the kitchen when all of a sudden a wad of dog feces shoots toward me. It’s lavender colored.
“Look out,” Sabina warns in a desultory kind of way, a bit belatedly, after the shit has already dropped to the base of my feet and covered the toes of my brand-new, white LA Gear high-tops.
“Frig!” I yell and catch a fleeting glimpse of my little brother’s backside: a stonewashed, multi-pocketed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles jean jacket as he gallops down the hill, snickering.
“Poop cemetery,” he hollers. “Poop cemetery!”
Five years later, Jules and our cousin Marek are crouching among the bushes behind Mom’s restaurant, picking at dry soil and olive-colored vegetation. Their chore: pull out all of the weeds, don’t touch Mom’s tiger lilies, leave the corn flowers and the feathered reed grass. The sun-drunk cousins are hunched over like two old men, but instead of sipping warm beer and gnawing on tobacco, they’ve got Big League Chew cherry-flavored bubblegum and cans of Mountain Dew strewn about their island of shrubs and Midwestern flora.
They are cousins but not by blood. The younger one is adopted, which means that if I or my sister, Sabina, or cousin Maya want to, we could end up marrying Julian and it wouldn’t be gross, but we don’t. We’d rather battle. Uncle Matteo’s two children, Marek and Maya, are visiting us for the summer from Chicago. We’ve formed our alliances and must try to keep our lines of separation clear; strictly girls versus boys even though us girls secretly enjoy getting chased by Jules and Marek. We secretly enjoy fleeing from their spit wads and their wedgie threats. Why? Because it’s funny. And we really are laughing with them when Jules makes that juicy noise as he hand-pumps the air under his armpit, but we will never tell them that. And even more than we enjoy the armpit farts that we pretend to believe are disgusting and soooo immature, we enjoy sniping insults at the boys about their hair (greasy and nappy), their lack of social life (losers, numb nuts, monkey fuckers), and all the other things Sabina, Maya, and I have a penchant for comparing them to. We are adolescent girls with blooming insecurities about our own blossoming bodies, which we are projecting onto the boys. Regardless, there is a distinctive air of Polish in all of us that can’t be denied: our far-set, almond eyes, our chipmunk cheeks, our workers’ hands, and our heavenly foreheads. None of us are very tall, except for Julian.
“Boooooooyyyyys!” Mom shouts from the top steps of the back terrace of her restaurant. Her outdoor voice is shrill, high-pitched. “If those weeds are not cleaned up in two minutes, then poor your soul. Poor your soul!” What she means by this is, “If those weeds are not cleaned up in two minutes, then I feel sorry for your poor soul because it is going straight to hell.” My mother’s warning glides through the balmy summer air and, although she is shouting just three short, low words, you can still detect her sharp, high accent. Slavic.
It’s a muggy one out here today in Battle Creek—sultry, overcast, and as pallid as a bowl of leftover milk. The year is 1994. And even though it’s mostly cloudy, the boys’ shoulders and round faces have gotten tanned, freckled, and burnt. Julian looks just like Leonardo diCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. He’s skinny and lanky in jeans and sneakers and his cheeks are as bright as a hot-pink Easter egg, and it’s not even three o’clock yet.
“We go. Now.” Mom calls again, this time reminding them from behind the screened-in porch door, then strides back into the industrial-sized kitchen without waiting for their response. She’s looking for her keys. Her keys are in the car.
I am standing behind a sink at my mother’s restaurant. My fingers are soggy and my forearms are covered in greasy suds. I’m looking down, scrubbing dried sauces off the rims of last night’s china. It is my summer vacation. I have small boobs and I really would like a padded bra before August ends and school starts up. A little while ago, I stole a bikini top from Sabina’s dresser drawer. It is red with white polka dots and a foamy push-up insert, though I don’t have much for it to boost. The makeshift bra adds two petite mounds to the center of my level chest, about two inches higher than where real breasts should be. I am a dishwasher.
Some of my friends from W. K. Kellogg Junior High work at Cereal City USA for their summer jobs. They snap photos of out-of-towners, then print their pictures on Corn Flakes boxes. Some of my friends are employed at Marywood Golf Club. They drive golf carts around the greens, selling the beer in their coolers to men in khakis and pine-green polo shirts. They steal Pabst Blue Ribbons and make good tips. Some of my friends work as lifeguards at Full Blast Water Park. They get to scold little kids for running by the pool, stuff them in plastic tubes, and then shoot them down curlicue water slides. This summer, I’m stuck at Mom’s restaurant washing dishes, which I do pretty much year-round anyway, remaining pasty with soggy fingers. I wash plates, dry plates, put them away. I sweep floors, take out the garbage, scrub the sinks and the toilets, and it is impossible to call in sick unless I really am. I have no choice. I can’t argue with the woman who drives me to the mall, buys my clothing, feeds me, birthed me, shelters me. You work hard, you play hard.
My mother named her restaurant RSVP. When she opened the place a few years ago, she explained that RSVP is a French phrase that translates into “Respond if you please.” That to RSVP is to employ the polite and customary etiquette when confirming or declining an invitation. I told my mother she should’ve named her restaurant Momma Maria’s, but Mom said what our town didn’t need was another burger joint.
It hadn’t been her plan to be a professional chef. Before having us kids, my mom had been a physicist. She said she didn’t immigrate to the US to cook for people, that she is a scientist, not a server, and that the reason she left Poland in the first place was to stop pumpering people. She meant pampering. But after Jules started the first grade, Mom was suddenly alone in an empty house and didn’t know what to do with herself.
She was a good cook. In Poland, my grandmother taught her the art of concocting delectable meals for any occasion out of whatever food was around, even when all they had to choose from were a few potatoes, bread, and an onion. When she brings a dish to a funeral, the mourners momentarily shake their postures of bereavement and ask her to please give them the recipe. At his wake, Vernon Butler’s wife Dody told Mom that, sure as shit, if Vernon’d had the privilege of sampling Mom’s butternut squash and creamed-spinach gratin, he’d return from his grave for a second helping. What Mom didn’t tell Dody was that she just grabbed the leftovers from our fridge and the vegetables on their way to our compost, added lots of cream and butter, then baked it. Anyone who tasted her food insisted that Mom should cook for a living.
Often, Mom would warn me that life could bring all sorts of surprises when I least expected them, and that it’s best to be prepared for the worst. In a raw voice, she’d remind me to always cover my ass and always have something to fall back on. “Just in case. I work for myself. Just in case. What if you Daddy die? What if we divorce?” Mom said she always wanted to be in charge of something, and since she was from a Communist country, the possibility of being her own boss seemed like a dream come true. So after we kids were old enough to hold our own, Mom shifted gears. She rented out the commercial kitchen at St. Philip Elementary School, and once the lunch ladies had left for the day, she started cooking. But this time, it was strictly business. Spinach squares, raspberry tortes, stuffed mushroom caps. Baby showers, funerals, anniversary dinners. Soon enough, Mom’s rinky-dink catering company was the best food in the city, and when Mom’s business took off, so did the competition for storage space in the shared refrigerator. Following a confrontation about the cafeteria lunch ladies’ meatloaves and her truffle pâtés, Mom told Dad they were interfering with her work, and that she needed her own space to create. That’s around the time our family purchased and renovated an elaborate Queen Anne-style building on Capitol Avenue Northeast.
It’s where my family spent an entire summer painting, weeding, moving, and paving, until it looked like it did in the nineteenth century—presentable—and then my mother erected a big wooden sign that read RSVP Fine Dining: European Elegance with American Flair in fetching teal- and rose-colored letters. This is where I’d been working ever since.
The building that housed RSVP Fine Dining is a nationally registered historical home with a flat, jade-colored face and huge, forward-facing windows. To me, the house looks like a fabulous owl. The bright purple door has a beak-like appearance and perched above it are conspicuous ornamentations—tremendous turrets, metallic wreaths, a pink-sash upper trim, and a chimney shaft. And on the very, very top of the bird is a widow’s walk, and circling the perimeter below, like a sautoir necklace, is a baby-blue wooden veranda.
The house was built in the 1850s, right around the time a Michigan Quaker by the name of Erastus Hussey became a conductor on the Underground Railroad and began leading slaves through Battle Creek to Marshall, Albion, Grass Lake, Ann Arbor, Plymouth, then on to Detroit and freedom. This was right around the time Sojourner Truth made her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech in Ohio, then moved to Battle Creek to lead the abolitionist movement until she died in her home on College Street, just down the road from Mom’s restaurant. “Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?” Mom told me that once, during one of her speeches in Silver Lake, Indiana, someone accused Sojourner of being a man in disguise, so Ms. Truth ripped open her blouse and bared her breasts to the audience to refute the preposterous claim. I’ve given this story a lot of thought because I doubt I’ll ever be brave enough to do something even a third as courageous. I don’t even have the guts to ask my mother for a padded bra.
