Goodbye Without Leaving

by Laurie Colwin

  Mary Abbott put her finger right on it. “It’s so well organized,” she said as we wandered around the streets looking at the brownstones and peering into people’s windows. “It’s like a nice little village in which everyone is represented. Young couples with children, older couples with older children, grown-up couples with grown-up children, and then the grandchildren with their children.”

  “Do I fit in?” I said.

  “Oh, give it a year or so,” Mary said. “There’s no reason in the world not to have a baby. You ought to. It would be good for you.”

  “And why would it be good for me?”

  “Curative,” Mary said. “Get some of those mother demons out of your hair.”

  We walked in silence. It was a magnificent day. Low, silver-colored clouds floated across the sky, and when they parted, golden light poured down. The maples had turned red, the ginkgoes brilliant yellow. Little children triked up and down the street and the leaves drifted slowly down like big flakes. In the air was a smell of wood smoke. In front of the third house a woman was sweeping leaves off the pavement and scooping them into plastic trash bags. A handsome black woman took a wooden basket of apples out of the back of her station wagon. My heart contracted and expanded. I longed to slip into a proper place alongside these normal-looking people—or at least I longed to long to. And on the other hand, I feared it. A pleated plaid skirt. A cashmere sweater. A baby in a pram. A broom to sweep the leaves off the sidewalk and a basket of apples. A station wagon! What, I wondered, would be left of me? I said as much to Mary.

  “Your essential self,” she said.

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” I said. “I haven’t had an ‘essential self since I quit Ruby.”

  “Nonsense,” Mary said. “I would know you anywhere. Even a nice plaid skirt and a string of pearls won’t hide you. Not even being married to Johnny.”

  Ah, Johnny! The golden mean. He managed to do good and make money at the same time. Doing good, he often said, was good for one’s career, a beautiful dovetailing of civic-mindedness and self-interest. His secretary said of him, “Unlike some lawyers who would run over their dying grandmothers to get what they wanted, Johnny would move his dying grandmother to some nice, safe place and then go get what he wanted.” That, in a nutshell, I felt, was the man I loved.

  I was constantly amazed at his ability to get things done, to get people to do what he wanted, to make sure the people he needed to like and the people he liked were one and the same. And they were the same! He did not even have to manufacture his feelings. In some ways, he was the best-adapted person in the world. Being married to someone like me gave his life an edge—I was his safe road to rock and roll, to the rebellious boy he had been in high school.

  And so I settled into life on our street, and greeted my neighbors and swept the leaves in front of the house, but it was at the Race Music Foundation that I felt most like myself.

  Once in a while I caught Ruby on television. She was now a solo act, in an elaborate wig and a dress entirely made of bugle beads. When she did some of her old songs I said to myself, “My God, I used to do that!” It seemed to me an eon ago, in some vanished era, in a time warp, in Never-Never Land, in some place that I had invented.

  “All right,” I said to Johnny. “Let’s have a baby.”

  25

  It seemed to me that about three or four minutes later I was in the office of my gynecologist, who, I learned, I was now to refer to as “my obstetrician.”

  I told Johnny that Little LaVonda, or her brother, Little Milton, was definitely on the way. He was, needless to say, jubilant.

  “Oh, how wonderful!” cried Johnny. “I’m so happy!” He grabbed me around the waist and hoisted me up in the air.

  “Put me down,” I said. “I feel sick.”

  “Lie down,” he said. “I’ll get you a pillow for your feet. Aren’t you supposed to put your feet up?”

  “I think that’s supposed to help conception, or something,” I said. “It’s too late for that now.”

  “Well, I’ll get you some tea. Or are you not supposed to have caffeine?”

  I said I had no idea.

  “No idea!” squealed my husband. “No idea! The harbinger of new life, and you have no idea!”

  “Somehow I don’t think harbinger is the right word,” I said. “But look. I got this big bottle of pregnancy vitamins.” I shook it at him. “They have lots of things I’ve never heard of before, like folic acid.”

  “Girl,” said my husband. “Get your thing together. We have to get educated. Let’s go buy some books.”

  “You go buy some books,” I yawned. “I’m sleepy. The fetus is a parasite and this one is making me very tired. Wake me when you come back.”

  My sweetie came back with a shopping bag full of tomes. Advice for pregnant fathers. Nutrition and pregnancy. How the fetus develops. What you should and should not do while pregnant.

  “Gee,” I said. “It makes me tired just looking at them.”

  “And this one,” Johnny was saying—he had not even bothered to take his coat off—“this one is in living color. Jesus, I wonder how they did this. You can see the fetus develop week by week. Yours—I mean ours—is this tiny little speck. Imagine that”

  “Imagine that,” I said, sinking into my pillow.

  “Our parents will be thrilled,” he said.

  “How about not telling them for a while?” I said. “Let’s get the first three months over with, okay?”

  “Why?” demanded my spouse. There was a truculent note in his voice.

  “High rate of miscarriage for first pregnancies in the first trimester,”

  “Oh, no, not my baby,” said Johnny.

  “Aren’t you arrogant,” I said.

  “Not my baby,” Johnny said. “This baby’s here to stay.”

  “Because of your fine, fine, extra-fine sperm, doubtless.”

  “Doubtless. Hey, let’s tell ’em, for God’s sake.”

  I turned over on my side.

  “Boy,” Johnny said, “you hate a public demonstration, don’t you.”

  I was mute. All I really wanted to do was go to sleep, preferably for nine months, and wake up when it was all over.

  “Okay,” Johnny said. “It’s a deal. After all, you’re the mother.”

  These words chilled me to the bone. You’re the mother. Mother of what? Something that looked like a speck or blob, and yet this little speck would soon develop fingers and toes, vital organs, a personality. And to think that I was the harbinger of all this! I found these thoughts quite daunting. They made me hungry. I demanded that my husband take me to an expensive delicatessen for an enormous pastrami sandwich.

  He actually brought along the book about nutrition in pregnancy and read to me, out loud, about nitrates and nitrites while I wolfed down my sandwich, demolished the pickles and drank a large glass of celery tonic.

  “‘… the effects of which are unknown,’” Johnny read.

  I looked down at my empty plate. I felt I easily could have polished off another entire sandwich but I contented myself by filching what was left of Johnny’s.

  26

  It took about a month before anyone at the Race Music Foundation noticed any change in me. I did not look pregnant, but I began to look slightly less defined.

  “Hey, you look terrible,” said the Bopper. “What’re you, off your feed?”

  I did feel rather off my feed. I felt I had shed whatever luster I had once possessed. Since the episode of the pastrami sandwich, I had lost my appetite, and although I was not sick, I could not have said that I felt precisely well. I found myself yawning a good deal. And curiously, I had a fierce desire to announce my condition to everyone, with the exception of my parents and in-laws.

  Naturally I told Mary Abbott.

  “It’s all over,” I said

  “Pregnant, huh?” said Mary, slumping onto her bed.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “July, right in the middle.”

  “B
ut you haven’t told Gertrude, right?”

  “Right.”

  “How thrilled she’ll be,” Mary said.

  “Just for about five minutes, and then she’ll discover that I’m not being pregnant the right way or not gaining enough weight or gaining too much weight or not wearing the right clothes. She always advised against summer babies. She thinks people should deliver before the middle of June to avoid the heat.”

  “Poor old Gertrude,” Mary said. “She’s always so anxious for everything to be right.”

  “Poor old me,” I said. “I’m the thing that’s never right.”

  “Oh, you’ll do,” Mary said. “William says the first three months are usually lousy.”

  “Oh, how interesting,” I said. “And how does William know this?”

  “He has three. He and Madeline live in adjoining houses since they have joint custody.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why don’t they just live together?”

  “They don’t live together well and they can’t divorce,” Mary said. “It’s a moral issue—they’re Catholic.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said.

  Actually, I never did quite see. I never really understood the way in which Mary was Catholic. At college she had gone off to Mass and once in a while she had dragged me along with her. Although I never told her, I stopped going because I could not bear it when she got in line to take communion. At that moment it was glaringly clear to me how different we were. Not only was this experience closed to me, but I could not believe that Mary believed in it. If she did believe in it, a huge and important part of her was totally mysterious to me. I felt I bore this stoically: I could not bring myself to discuss it with her, but it pained me.

  If I said to her, “Do you really believe all that stuff?” she would peer at me over her glasses and say with a quizzical voice, “Just because it’s difficult to believe it is no reason not to.”

  On the subject of my impending baby, Mary said, “It will give your life some structure.”

  “Structure? I get up every morning. I go to the foundation. I do my work, do my shopping, come home, make dinner, visit Johnny’s parents, go to his friends’ dinner parties, see my parents. How much more structure do I need, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Internal structure,” Mary said. “It’s different.”

  I looked around her stark apartment, once partially mine. Evidence of internal structure was everywhere, from the neat little bed she slept in, to the desk she worked at, to her books about the civil rights movement piled neatly on the floor. Chapters of her dissertation were stacked on various tables and shelves.

  Part of William Hammerklever’s role in her life was to help her with her statistical research. Many an afternoon I had appeared to find them bent over the calculator.

  As I was lying on the couch, figuring out how to break the news of my pregnancy to my mother, I heard a key in the lock and William Hammerklever walked in. He was one of those small men with a handsome, leonine head, a head that seemed meant for a larger man. He had a full mouth, green eyes and curly hair. His hands were strong, large-veined.

  “Oh, hello, you two,” he said, as if we were little girls. He put his coat in his room and came back and stood behind Mary at her desk.

  Mary was illuminated by her gooseneck desk lamp. From where I lay, she and William looked like figures in a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby. When she looked up at him I saw an expression on her face I had never seen before. Oh, the things I would never know about her!

  She was in thrall to him. He looked down at her and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “I think you’ve finally got that data right,” he said to her. It was clear that I was totally superfluous and it was time to go home.

  27

  The thing that is never emphasized enough in books on pregnancy is that it takes forty weeks, not nine months. On the other hand, it takes three trimesters of three months each, which equals nine months but does not equal forty weeks. The whole thing was explained to me by my husband, who shoved a hefty book at me and told me to read about the lunar calendar. I was emerging from my first trimester into my second, the harbinger of the miracle of life, as I liked to refer to myself.

  Often when I could not get to sleep I made myself even more anxious by reflecting on the awesome notion that I would soon be responsible for forming another person’s character. What if my darling child grew up and ran off to tour with some rock and roll act? A baby is one thing. A teenager is quite another. The whole prospect seemed too daunting for an exhausted person.

  What was I going to do with a child?

  I would teach it how to dance, and all the words to “Tutti Frutti.” We would take it to concerts and oldies shows. We would take it to see The Nutcracker at Christmas and to the circus in the spring. And in between times, we would worry about enormous issues such as how to find an appropriate school for a young child, how to manage a temper tantrum, how to deal with colic, how to get a child to sleep through the night. The road you walked with a baby was a long, hard one, it seemed, what with teething pain, controversy about whooping cough inoculations and the prospect of chicken pox. You had to teach a child to be fair and considerate to its peers, to have nice manners, not to draw on the walls or furniture. All this, and breast-feeding too! To say nothing of labor and delivery, which, no matter how you sliced it, sounded like being drawn and quartered. I took a deep breath and realized that some of my anxiety came from the fact that I had not yet told my mother or father, or my in-laws, this thrilling news.

  We decided to do it by telephone.

  “Preferably from a crouched position,” I said.

  “Hello, Gertrude,” Johnny said. “We have wonderful news. You are about to be a grandmother. I mean, in the summer. Here’s your daughter.”

  “When did you find this out?” said my mother.

  “Oh, just a little while ago,” I said.

  “It must have been a good bit of a little while, since it’s almost the new year. You were pregnant at Christmas and didn’t tell us?”

  “Well, you know,” I said.

  “No, I don’t,” said my mother. “Perhaps you’d like to explain it to me.”

  “Well, there’s a chance of miscarriage in the first trimester with a first pregnancy and I just wanted to get through it before I told anyone.”

  “Anyone,” said my mother. “Your parents are anyone?”

  “Well, I just wanted to make sure all was well.”

  “And you thought that your parents shouldn’t go through this with you if all was not well?”

  The answer to this was a resounding yes. My mother would have driven me insane on various points such as my choice of doctor, hospital and method of delivery. But after she finished venting, she and my father were genuinely delighted, and Johnny’s parents were thrilled. They looked forward to a future lawyer or doctor.

  As I grew larger I saw them giving my belly musing looks, as if to say “I wonder who she’s got in there.” At night I felt there was a lump under my heart—this was not the baby, I was assured by my doctor. It was some other heart in the shape of a valentine full of anxiety and uncertainty.

  “They should make you take a test before you get pregnant,” I said to Johnny. “To see if you’re mentally and emotionally equipped.”

  “There’d be about four people on the planet who’d pass, Sweetheart,” said Johnny. “Get real. Even morons have perfectly nice children.”

  “Really?” I said. “How do you know that? Do we know any morons?”

  “You know what I mean,” said Johnny.

  “Well, what about Steve and Ginger’s children,” I said. Steve was a colleague of Johnny’s, and Ginger, his repellent wife, was a city planner. Their two children, Jason and Samantha, were horribly ill behaved. They threw food, whined and had the posture of two almost empty sacks. They were the sort of children I liked least: scrawny and undercooked-looking, with what seemed to be some chronic nasal blockage that c
aused their mouths to hang open, giving them the aura of those very morons Johnny claimed to know something about. These gruesome children, who their parents claimed had the IQ’s of geniuses, gave me new cause for insomnia. Supposing I produced a child like one of Steve and Ginger’s?

  “It isn’t genetically possible,” said Johnny, when I shared this new fear with him. “We’re very good-looking and, frankly, Steve and Ginger are not.”

  “That doesn’t guarantee anything. What about all the dope we smoked in our youth?”

  “It’s been metabolized out. Go to sleep.”

  “If I had a child that looked like Steve and Ginger’s, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “Look, we’d give it to Steve and Ginger and start all over again. Now go to sleep.”

  28

  One cold night Johnny and I went to hear the blues singer Bunny Estavez at a club called Smokey Minnie’s.

  “I wonder about the lung function of the developing fetus,” said Johnny, surveying what looked like a roomful of smog.

  “Maybe we can rent an oxygen tank for the evening,” I said.

  We sat at a tiny table—I was aware of how small it was in relation to how large I was. I now had the belly of a pregnant woman. I found myself patting it, and I noticed other pregnant women patting their stomachs, too.

  Bunny Estavez was very old. His wife and son-in-law had to help him onto the stage. He looked like melted candle wax. He could barely sing and the sounds he emitted were more like croaking hums, vaguely on key. His guitar style had once been florid, but he was so old now, he had stripped it down to something that sounded sort of Japanese. When the set was over we stomped and clapped, and then it was time to go home. As I leaned over to get my coat, I felt a strange sensation, as if something were darting across my stomach inside. It was not precisely in my stomach but only in the vicinity, and it was not any flutter I recognized.