The women find themselves part of the continental shift; clumps of parents have clustered around the bar, and Gabrielle and Laura are now corner-bound, sitting on a love seat with a silver tray of miniature nut-free labeled brownies in front of them. Gabrielle eats the one from the center of the plate, hollowing the daisy flower shape of its middle.
“How many kids?” Laura pauses as if she has to check, picks up a square cocktail napkin, and drapes it over her leg. “Three—Grace is the middle.” She points to the darkness of the study off the dining room, where her third child, the three-month-old, is sleeping. “You can go look at him,” Laura offers, and Gabrielle peeks at the baby and comes back. This is a change since she has become Danny’s mother. Before all this, Gabrielle would have looked at the sleeping baby to be polite, to reinforce that she is a good obstetrician—she brings babies into the world, for Christ’s sake, shouldn’t she want to gawk at them any chance she gets? As she settles back onto the love seat, Gabrielle realizes she wanted to see that baby, see if she noticed anything that made it specifically belong to Laura. Then, either way, she finds a fragment of peace there; amid the hustle and collective parental voices, the sleeping baby is still tethered somehow to his mother.
“Do you want more children?” Laura asks.
Gabrielle thinks of her patients, the ones who try for more and fail or come back every couple of years, spacing their children out evenly, appearing before her front-weighted, hands on their bellies. “I’m not sure,” she says. She almost offers the fact of how she never thought she’d have one child of her own, and then winces, knowing Danny really didn’t start out as hers.
Laura studies Gabrielle’s face and smiles as if she’s found out an answer. “Oh…was Danny a surprise, then?”
“You could say that, yes.” Gabrielle rises from the love seat for a second to check on her father’s whereabouts. Just before panic sets in because she’s unable to locate him, Natasha Meade-Martin, head of the parent volunteers and the hostess, comes over to lay a reassuring hand on Gabrielle’s shoulder, pressing her back onto the love seat.
“Hi!” Natasha’s teeth are aligned and white as new bathroom tiles. “Randall wanted me to tell you he’s gone to check on Danny in the playroom.” The parent association has hired a team of sitters for the evening to watch the children upstairs so the parents can relate unrestrained below.
“Oh, well, thanks so much for letting me know,” Gabrielle says.
To Laura, Natasha asks, “Are you getting advice from our resident ob-gyn?” Gabrielle knows that this is not out of true curiosity, rather it is to prove how much information Natasha has about each parent, profession, nanny name, geographical status. “Anyway, I’m just the messenger—back to the masses!”
Natasha leaves, her plum-scented perfume remains, and Gabrielle wonders if she will ever know the code of mothers, the unspoken way of categorizing: chic mothers on one side, natural fibers on the other. She does not know where she fits in, if she is considered a real mother yet, if her finger-painting techniques or snacks or clothing are done the right way. Gabrielle feels at turns full of herself, that her parenting skills come easily, and then suddenly, for no reason—a whiff of Natasha’s perfume—that she will never get it right.
“We want another,” Laura says, meeting Gabrielle’s gaze. “Another baby.”
“Four kids…” Gabrielle starts. “That would be…” She prepares for her next stock phrase, the one about how all her patients tell her transitioning from two to three children or even three to four is not nearly as dramatic as from one to two. But Laura doesn’t let Gabrielle go there.
Instead Laura offers, “We—or I—really want another one. But—you know—my brother died when we were kids, so…” Then she waits for Gabrielle to complete the thought.
Gabrielle feels too awkward to say anything, so she waits for Laura to go on. Both women are out of Lilliputian vegetables, and Gabrielle feels she’s eaten enough brownies and can’t defer any longer. “So obviously his death makes it much harder?” She tries to play verbal detective—was it leukemia? Car wreck? Drowning?
“It’s just—when you look at the possibilities.” Laura wipes her mouth on her napkin square and sets the paper down on the glass coffee table. “It seems like the more kids you have, the more things that can happen, right?”
Randall is back. Gabrielle can spot his maroon sweater far off in the jumble of parents. He gives her a wave from across the room. He has said something to some people, made his audience laugh, probably with a joke she has heard before—an anecdote from a patient. Gabrielle waves back and instantly misses the future that he will not be in; then, before she gets sucked into those thoughts, she thinks about the math of what Laura has said.
“Well, I don’t know,” Gabrielle says. “All the bad things that are out there could still happen to just one kid, though.”
“And then you wouldn’t have any,” Laura says.
In the bathroom, a powder room really, Gabrielle’s knees nearly touch the sink, and she allows her posture to flag as she pees. Outside, the Purple Room parents and teachers are talking scheduling and boundaries, year goals. After washing her hands, Gabrielle retreats to the quiet of the study and looks at Laura’s baby.
Laura appears next to her, unbuckles him from the portable car seat, and brings the baby to an oversized chair to nurse. “Want to keep me company?”
Gabrielle nods and then wonders if, in the half-light, Laura can see her gesture, so she adds, “Sure.”
Laura says, “With the first one, I nursed alone. I just loved that time with her, you know? And now…by the third one it’s like, hello? This is sweet and all—but it’s boring.” She laughs slightly, then adjusts her breast, propping the baby up on a cushion. “But then—I feel like it’s all going so quickly that I should appreciate every second of it, since it might be the last time I do this.”
Gabrielle sighs and tries to verbalize something she’s thought of a lot recently. “I never know whether I celebrate the first time of things enough—like when Danny walked or said ‘quack’ when we fed those Canada geese in back of the library.” She waves her arm as if the fowl are actually clustered around her. “Or if I’m too busy mourning each passage, the end of the bottle, or…Danny can’t say ‘Connecticut,’ and we went for my college reunion and he said ‘Connekatit’ the whole time.” She pauses and listens to the quiet gulping from the baby. “And I just know he’ll grow out of that and that I’ll miss it.”
“Yeah.” Laura nods. “You always do miss it, and then they’re suddenly into the next thing, like they can hit a ball with a bat or use a fork or go to the bathroom without your help and you forget what you just lost.”
The word lost stays in the air between them, and together Laura and Gabrielle go back to their earlier conversation. They make a list of all the bad things they can think of. Gabrielle has written in her all-caps doctor font on Natasha Meade-Martin’s personalized stationery. Now it looks like this:
A Special note from Natasha Meade-Martin!
BIRTH DEFECT
BIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS
THAT PRESENT LATER IN LIFE
MECONIUM BIRTH
CAR ACCIDENT
ILLNESS
Then they get more specific, Gabrielle’s writing degenerating into scrawl as they talk.
“We have a trampoline,” Laura admits. “It’s already a danger…and this one—we got it used, and the mesh siding is torn. Even worse.”
They list genes from one side of the family with the brain tumor of unknown origin, inheritable depression from the other.
“Plus,” Gabrielle adds, shaking her head, “there was that article in the Times about drugs to treat depression in kids and how those might cause more suicides.” She chews on her upper lip and adds, “But I’m not sure how skewed those statistics were.”
As Laura’s baby suckles, both women imagine a parade of less specific, general yet horrible things: kids getting snatched from yards, malls, tee
nagers chatting online and winding up assaulted, bikes skidding off the sidewalk and winding up under SUV tires. Then, further, what kinds of accidents: if the trampoline causes the high bounce into a fall, that could lead to the broken arm, leg—a sprain and scare, concussion or fatality, the broken neck. Gabrielle does not press Laura for information about her brother’s death but silently thinks the genetics from the brother could already be there in Laura’s children. But then maybe multiplying more could just create further opportunities for terror, death? Never mind the good life, the siblings, the laughs, learning—
“So, you see why we have the struggle,” Laura says. She has finished nursing, and Gabrielle can sense the party reaching its apex. She checks her watch—it is two and a half hours past Danny’s bedtime. She is of the camp that kids need schedules and lots of rest, and her prior announcement that Danny goes to bed at seven every night was met by envy and disbelief, a few mothers clucking about kids having freedom to choose their own schedules.
“I guess if you want more kids, you have to figure out the math of the fourth child and go from there,” Gabrielle suggests and wishes it had come out funny. Instead, it sounds like doctorly advice.
“Will you?” Laura puts the baby back in his seat and waits in front of Gabrielle, who still has pen and paper. Gabrielle thinks Laura is serious and starts to write. Laura says, “I’m just kidding. Kind of. I mean, if you happen to stumble on the answer, let me know. We could meet for coffee sometime—after drop-off?” This is the first time Gabrielle has been invited to do anything one-on-one with another preschool parent, and she blushes like it’s a prom date.
“That’d be great.”
“Dad,” Gabrielle says. She finds him leaning on the kitchen counter, slumping slightly. “You okay?”
“Fine,” he says to her over his shoulder. “But I need to go to sleep. I’m tired.”
Gabrielle puts her arm around her father’s shoulder, then reconsiders and touches his hand. “I’ll go get Danny and meet you in the car?” She wants to guide her father outside, make sure he navigates the steps without falling, but knows this will frustrate him, so she leaves him to thank the hosts and finds Danny snail-coiled and asleep at the top of the stairs.
“We tried to move him,” one of the sitters says, “but he just wouldn’t let us.”
Gabrielle knows it’s not worth a speech about how she thinks adults are losing control of their kids, how a three-year-old shouldn’t decide where he sleeps, particularly if that place is at the top of a precariously high staircase, but instead she folds Danny into her arms and hefts all thirty-two pounds of him downstairs. She looks to say good-bye to Natasha, to the teachers, or to Laura, but they are otherwise engaged and she has a heavy toddler on her shoulder.
“Come sit,” Randall says to her outside, where he’s taken a seat on a small stone bench in the landscaped yard. There is room for both of them, and they lay Danny out so he’s spread evenly on their laps, his head on Randall’s thigh. “Nice night.”
Gabrielle fills her father in on what she and Laura spoke about.
“She’s basing her decision about having another baby on the chance of bad things happening,” Gabrielle says and then suddenly is aware of how her vocal tone reverts to sounding thirteen, or younger—nine—around her father. This feels comforting to her now, probably to him, too. Gabrielle will be a child until Randall is gone.
“Let’s work it out,” Randall says. He launches into his breakdown of the situation. And Gabrielle records it on the back of a long gas receipt, knowing she will keep the thing forever. She writes:
IF YOU BELIEVE THAT THE CHANCE OF SOMETHING BAD HAPPENING TO A PERSON IN HIS OR HER LIFETIME IS X (WHERE X IS A NUMBER BETWEEN 0, MEANING NOTHING BAD EVER HAPPENS, AND 1, MEANING SOMETHING BAD IS GUARANTEED TO HAPPEN, THEN THE CHANCE OF SOMETHING BAD NOT HAPPENING IS 1–X. IF YOU HAVE Y CHILDREN, THE CHANCE OF HAVING NOTHING BAD HAPPEN TO ANY OF THEM IS (1–X)Y, WHICH MEANS TAKE 1 MINUS X AND RAISE IT TO THE POWER OF Y. WHAT YOU WILL FIND IS THAT NO MATTER WHAT YOU THINK X IS, THE CHANCE OF ALL OF YOUR KIDS NOT HAVING SOMETHING BAD HAPPEN TO THEM GETS SMALLER AS YOU HAVE MORE KIDS.
“So Laura’s correct,” Randall says.
Gabrielle nods but then goes on, “There’s an important caveat to this, though.”
Randall touches his daughter’s face with his cold hand. He can imagine her in any of the settings in which he’s seen her: Iceland, Texas, her childhood bedroom, its walls covered with miniature bouquets of blue flowers. “What’s that?”
“The argument assumes that the occurrences of bad things in different people’s lives are uncorrelated. It’s an assumption that makes the statistics easier, but it’s not necessarily true. It would be true if your kids all grew up in different states and never had any contact with one another. But if they live together—which is pretty likely, right?—there may be a greater chance of something bad happening to all of them…”
“Like a plane crash with all of them onboard?” Randall suggests.
“Exactly. But, on the other hand, there might also be positive effects, like they protect each other and keep each other out of trouble.”
“Okay,” Randall says. “Summary time.”
“Basically, if you thought that either of these effects—the mass catastrophe or the cooperative security—was important, then it could outweigh the purely statistical effect, the (1–x) y rule.”
Danny shifts, turning so his face is skyward, his lips wet. Gabrielle has her arms on his shins. Randall touches Danny’s nose the way he used to touch Gabrielle’s, running his finger down the nose like it’s a ski jump. “Obviously,” he says, “how much weight you give these eventualities depends a lot on your outlook. It’s an illustration of the main difficulty in making accurate statistical predictions.”
This is what Gabrielle—and Laura, though she doesn’t know it—is left with: it is true (or at least plausible) that the number of bad things doesn’t change with the increase in births; the chance of a bad thing happening to any given person is roughly the same regardless of how many people are born. This leads to the conclusion she had before, that the chance of nothing bad happening to any member of a group is smaller than the chance of nothing bad happening to a single person (except in the rather unrealistic situation in which both the number of bad things and the number of people in the world are not much bigger than 1).
“Gab,” Randall says, pulling her back from her brain.
“Yeah?” She feels as though she has levitated, seen the earth as this incredibly wide thing on which she is anchored only by this bench, these two people. They have become her personal longitudinal and latitudinal markers, and for that she feels love and enormous relief.
Randall takes Gabrielle’s hand and looks at her. “You’re a really good mother to him,” he says. Gabrielle is swept up in the praise, shrugs off the bizarre circularity that her father is praising her for mothering his child. Then she thinks that probably Danny will not remember Randall, and will know her as his only parent.
“So are you,” she says.
Randall sits in the passenger side of the car and starts to nod off before Gabrielle has finished buckling Danny into the backseat. Now that he is strapped into his car seat—the one Consumer Reports revealed to be the safest—Danny’s head lolls to one side. Gabrielle allows herself another look at him and a kiss on his pouchy cheek before she has to strap herself in a full seat away. It seems impossible that once, not long ago at all, she had never met this boy. Outside, fall is settling, the leaves wind-chucked, the air cooler now. Gabrielle catches herself taking Danny’s pulse, feeling his wrist. She can hear her father breathing in the front seat. She uncurls Danny’s small fist and clasps his hand to hers and notices the way even in sleep his fingers seem to know their way around hers; their hands together form their own organ, or an x, like on a map that insists you are here.
Everybody Has a Boy in Brooklyn
Order the Viennese Frosted Mocha Shake,” Kyla says when th
ey’re almost to the registers.
“Are they good?” Lucy asks.
“They’re supposed to be amazing,” Kyla says and gives her a jab in the side so Lucy’ll order first.
“What’s Viennese about the drink, exactly?” Lucy says to the apron-clad coffee boy behind the counter.
“It’s like, frothy, and kind of creamy, like a pastry or something,” he answers and shouts Lucy’s order to the guy who makes the drinks.
Kyla gets a soy macchiato, then she and Lucy wait by the side of the copper-domed espresso maker, looking up at its gleam and whir as if it’s a European monument they’ve been sent to photograph as the summary of a five-city tour. The coffeemaking guy hands Lucy the blended drink and smiles.
At the table Kyla looks pointedly in the direction of the counter and says, “So, you had a caffeine connection?” She goes on to tell Lucy that she’s sure the coffee guy likes her, that at the very least he approves of her drink choice, which she reminds Lucy is actually Kyla’s drink choice, not that it matters, since Kyla doesn’t think the coffee guy is that cute. At least not for her—but for Lucy, he’s very attractive.
“You should write your number on a napkin and slip it to him,” Kyla says, blowing through the sip hole on her cup.
“Maybe on one of those stirrers,” Lucy says. She holds her fingers to her ear like a phone, saying, “Why, of course I’ll go out with you.” Lucy’s been single on and off, mostly on, for the better part of her postcollege life. Kyla is contemplating a move to L.A., mainly, Lucy thinks, because Kyla’s swatted through the dating scene in New York, Boston, and New Hampshire, and come out empty.
“Then you’d have to commute to kiss him,” Kyla says and takes another glance at the coffee boy. Lucy and Kyla have come to Williamsburg just for the afternoon before the film festival starts.
The Girls' Almanac Page 20
