Loose Screws

by Karen Templeton

  “Ginger, stop. I’m perfectly healthy. In fact, a helluva lot healthier than I thought I was.”

  What is with that weird expression on her face?

  “Okay. I’m lost.”

  My mother hands me something. A photo…of…

  Of…?

  My eyes shoot to hers. She gives me a wobbly smile.

  “Congratulations, bubelah. You’re going to be a big sister.”

  Fifteen

  What the hell is this, an epidemic?

  “You’re pregnant?” This last word is screeched.

  “Seems so.”

  My knees give way. I sink into a molded plastic chair nearby. “But…but…you said you hadn’t had a period in more than six months.”

  Nedra shrugs.

  God, I so don’t want to hear this. Be living through this.

  “How…how far along?”

  “Six weeks, maybe? Eight at the most.” She goes over to a mirror in the exam room, pulls a comb from her purse, runs it through her hair. Her hand is shaking, as is her voice. “For thirteen years, Leo and I tried to have another kid, and nothing. And now…” She sighs. “God, life is weird, isn’t it?”

  To say the least. “Is it…this whoever it is you’ve been seeing, is he the father?”

  Her eyes meet mine in the mirror, a wry smile twisting her mouth. “You think I’m sleeping with more than one man?”

  I cross my arms. “Think maybe it’s time to tell me who he is? Maybe even introduce him to Nonna and me?”

  She turns, twin wrinkles marring the space between her heavy brows. Then, shaking her head, she lets out a short laugh.

  “What?”

  “To say my getting pregnant wasn’t part of the plan is a gross understatement. To be honest, I haven’t gotten that far in my thinking. So all I can say is…I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Are you going to tell…the father?”

  “Eventually. Not yet. Not until…”

  But she doesn’t get to finish whatever it was she was going to say because a short, chocolate-skinned doctor with a white turban comes into the room, just as cheery as he can be.

  “Ah,” he says, extending a delicate-looking hand. “You must be Mrs. Petrocelli’s daughter.” At my expression, the smile vanishes. “Oh, dear.” He looks from me to my mother and back again. “She has told you her news?”

  I nod.

  “Ah.” He links his hands together over his crotch. “I suppose finding out one’s fifty-year-old mother is pregnant would come as a bit of a surprise.”

  You could say that. Which is more than I can, because, right now, I can’t say anything. So I slip into a nice catatonic trance while the doctor chats with my mother for a few more minutes.

  “Ginger?” I look up at my mother, realize we’re alone again. “I can go now.”

  I try to get to my feet, but my legs aren’t sure they want to support me.

  “Hey,” Nedra says. “I’m the one who just found out she’s pregnant. Not you.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Would you rather it had been a heart attack?”

  “No, of course not. It’s just…God. What are you going to do?”

  “Start shopping for baby clothes?”

  “That’s not funny. Jesus, Nedra—how can you even think of having a baby at your age?”

  Her expression turns to stone. “How can I think of embarrassing you, you mean.”

  “This isn’t about me—”

  “You’re right. It’s not.” She grabs her purse, slings it over her shoulder. “I’m sure they need the room. We’ll talk about this later.”

  My head spinning, I follow her out of the exam room. When she spots my grandmother and Nick in the waiting room, she says, “Not a word to anyone. Not until I’ve decided how to handle this. Understood?”

  I nod, even though, right at the moment, I don’t understand anything.

  Nick insists on driving us back the few blocks to the apartment, my mother in front, Nonna and me in the back seat. Once Nedra assures my grandmother that she’s fine, she’s sorry she called us away from the party, a silence thick as smoke settles inside the car. I can practically hear the gears grinding inside Nick’s head.

  Nick pulls up in front of the building; my mother and grandmother get out first, head inside. But I stay behind for a moment, leaning on the open window to say thanks. Nick startles me by reaching for my hand.

  “Look, I just want you to know…you need someone to talk to, about anything, whatever, I’m here.”

  I smirk. “Believe me, you don’t want to get mixed up with this crazy family.”

  He shrugs, does that crooked grinning thing again that makes me nuts. “What family isn’t?”

  I look at our layered hands, slip mine out from underneath his to fold my arms across my stomach. “Why are you being so nice to me?”

  On a half chuckle, he straightens up behind the wheel, gazing out the windshield. “Damned if I know,” he says, then pulls away from the curb.

  I go straight to the freezer when I get inside, chomping down into the Häagen-Dazs bar before the paper’s even all the way off. Since I’ve sworn off booze and it doesn’t look good for sex within the next twenty minutes, fat-laden empty calories will have to suffice.

  Except they don’t. Because—I finally realize as I stamp back to my room, Geoff trotting at my heels—this frustration isn’t going to be eased by putting something in my body, but by letting something out.

  But what? How?

  And what is it I’m so frustrated about, anyway?

  Nonna and my mother are in her room, arguing. I only catch snatches, like wisps of smoke coming down the hall. Then, silence, followed seconds later by a low, shocked, “Per Dio!”

  Then it hits me: my mother is pregnant, and probably needs me.

  My eighty-year-old grandmother has just found out my mother is pregnant. She probably needs me, too.

  And maybe they could both use a Häagen-Dazs bar.

  I go back to the freezer, pull out two bars, then continue on to my mother’s room. Geoff opts to stay outside the door, since the rooster, though securely caged, is giving him the evil eye.

  “Here,” I say, handing each of them an ice cream. “Won’t solve anything, but it beats the alternatives.”

  My mother is sitting on the edge of her unmade bed, Nonna on a stool at its foot. There being no other uncluttered surface on which to plant my tush, I sink cross-legged onto the floor, glowering at the rooster. We sit in silence for some moments, licking our ice cream bars and thinking our thoughts, until Nedra says, “I’ve never been more scared in my entire life.”

  We both look at her. And my mother, who’s yelled at politicians and policemen, who’s spent more than one night in jail, who’s never been afraid to confront anybody about anything, is crying.

  Holy shit.

  I’m instantly beside her on the bed, hugging her to me. My grandmother sits on the other side, stroking her hand.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” I say, but she shakes her head.

  “I’m fifty freaking years old. I know how high the odds are that something could be wrong, could go wrong.”

  Wow. “You really want this baby, don’t you?”

  She nods, wipes at a tear. “It’s crazy, I know, but I really do.”

  I reach up, sweep her hair out of her face. “Well, then. Odds are higher that everything will be fine, you know.”

  “I know, but…” She stares at the licked clean Häagen-Dazs wooden paddle in her hand, then lets out a long sigh. “But what if they aren’t? What if…?”

  I exchange glances with my grandmother, who looks as though she’s ready to cry, too, and I think, no, Nick. Women don’t make things complicated. Life just is.

  The next day, I popped—okay, dragged—myself out of bed with Big Plans, the most immediate of which was to take my grandmother to mass, something I hadn’t done in, gee, years.

  When I was around six or so, long before Nonna came t
o live with us, she apparently decided she could no longer tolerate what she labeled my parents’ spiritual neglect of their only child, so she hauled her then-bony little butt all the way up from Brooklyn to in turn haul my bony little butt to my first mass. Not to be outdone, the instant my maternal grandmother got wind of this, she decided it was high time I began to appreciate my Jewish roots, as well, never mind that up until then my heathen upbringing hadn’t seemed to bother her one way or the other. Hence, the following Saturday I set foot in a synagogue for the first time.

  My parents, devout agnostics both, didn’t seem to care one way or the other as long as it was understood that this was simply for exposure purposes and not a sign-on-the-dotted line kind of thing. Since I got to spend precious alone time with each of my adored grandmothers, I shrugged and went with the flow for several years. Then adolescence reared its doubting, secular head, and I discovered I’d rather spend my weekend mornings with my friends than God, it never occurring to me at the time that the two weren’t mutually exclusive.

  In any case, neither grandmother—or dogma—“won.” Oh, I believe in God, even if I do think He has a perverse sense of humor at times. I’ve just never declared any party loyalty. I have no qualms about putting up a Christmas tree and attending Shelby’s elaborate Seders every year. Some years I go to Easter mass, then the following fall observe the High Holidays. I’m cool with all of it…from a careful distance. I haven’t yet decided what to do if I have kids, but I suppose I’ll figure it out. After all, I turned out okay, didn’t I?

  Don’t answer that.

  Anyway, it occurred to me that Nonna probably hadn’t been to church in a while, a suspicion proved true by the way her eyes lit up when I asked her if she’d like to go. My chest ached at that—attending daily mass had been part of this woman’s life for so many years; not going at all must’ve been killing her. Yet I knew my mother would have taken her, at least occasionally, if she’d asked. Except that would be putting someone out, a far worse sin in Nonna’s book than missing mass. Which got me to thinking again about how much my grandmother gave up, coming to live with us. And wondering why she stayed on after my father died.

  So I ask her, sitting across from her after church at the Hungarian Pastry Shop at Amsterdam and 111th Street, one of our favorite haunts when I was little. She looks at me, clearly startled at my question, then sets down her teacup, folds her hands in her lap. She’s wearing her new dress; I’ve taken the curling iron to her silver hair to make it wave softly around her face. I see the cute, headstrong young woman she must have been.

  “Your mother, she needed me,” she says with a shrug. “That is why I stay.”

  Now it’s my turn to be startled. “Nedra doesn’t need anybody.”

  “She isa good actress, yes?”

  “But you yourself said how strong she is—”

  “Ah…” One bent, knobby finger comes up in a point. “But that strength, it would crumble without other people around her.”

  I sit back in my chair, my arms folded over my floral sundress. Well, duh, Ginger. I’d said it myself, that Nedra derives her energy from the people around her, just as I need my solitude.

  “But that still doesn’t explain why you thought you had to stay. After all, she was almost never alone in those days. I was still there, for one thing.”

  “But I was the one who was always there. Inna spirit as well as body. Like your father. You were there, yes, but you don’ wanna be, and your mama knows that.” She carefully cuts a corner off her Napoleon; the whipped cream squishes out from between layers of flaky phyllo pastry. “When you go, she miss you more than she can say.” Her eyes float to mine. “But she won’ say anything, because is what children are supposed to do, leave the nest, go out onna their own. So I stay, be her strength.” Her mouth pulls up into a wide grin. “She cannot suck Renata Petrocelli dry, eh?”

  I laugh, poke at my own pastry with the tip of my fork, then ask, “But did you stay because you felt you had to, or because you wanted to?”

  She looks at me. “I don’ understand.”

  I look back. “I saw your face at that party yesterday, Nonna. How happy you were. Like…like you were home.”

  She quickly lowers her gaze back to her half-eaten pastry. “It wasa nice, seeing everybody again. Thatsa all.”

  I reach over, take her soft hand in mine. “If you could do whatever you wanted, would you move back there?”

  She snatches her hand from mine. “Why you ask me these questions?” she says, her words trembling around the edges. “Did you hear Sonya ask me to move in with her? Is that what this is all about?”

  Sonya, my grandfather’s younger sister. Now widowed herself, she and my grandmother had been very close before Nonna moved from Brooklyn, more like sisters than sisters-in-law.

  Behind Nonna’s glasses, tears shimmer in her eyes. “How can I do that, with your mother having a baby?”

  “Nonna, for God’s sake—you’re eighty years old! Nobody, least of all Nedra, would expect you to help raise another baby at this point in your life! Hey, you want to go live with Sonya, you go live with Sonya, okay?”

  “And who will be there for your mother?”

  I cross my arms, my mouth thinning. “The one who should have been there all along. Me.”

  “But you will get married someday, move out again—”

  “Hey, not your problem, okay? My mother, my responsibility.”

  Nonna lifts a napkin to her nose, honks into it, then nods. “Your mama, she isa very lucky.”

  “Damn straight. Now let’s go pick out a few of these to take home, okay?”

  Unable to decide what Nedra might like, we get a half dozen different goodies so she can choose. I suggest a taxi—it’s only five short blocks north, but the two long crosstown blocks are killers—but Nonna insists she’d rather walk. So we do, Nonna completely hidden from me by the beige umbrella she’s carrying to shield her from the sun. Which suddenly shifts to one side so she can squint up at me through her glasses.

  “In church, I light a candle for your mama, pray to the Virgin Mother. I hear the Holy Mother whisper your mama will be fine. Baby will be fine. You will see.” She squints at me. “Is a gift, this child. Like Sarah’s Isaac, in the Bible.”

  I shift the Times I bought earlier to my other hip, realizing I’m doomed to get newsprint ink all over my dress. “Except wasn’t Sarah like ninety-something when she had Isaac?” I squint in the harsh sunlight at my grandmother. “How would you like to have a baby in ten years, Nonna?”

  A horrified look crosses her face. “How you say, inna you dreams?”

  I laugh, feeling a little better. Because, see, the reason I was taking my mother’s bombshell so personally is because, quite simply, I’m jealous as hell.

  I’m the one who’s supposed to be pregnant. Not my mother. And now I’ve just assured my grandmother that I’ll be the one who’ll stick around and see my mother through this pregnancy. An offer I didn’t make just to hear myself talk, or give Nonna an out. Seriously. This new twist on things might have thrown me for a loop, but I really do want to help…even though that just effectively screws up any chance I thought I had of reclaiming my own life. How am I going to have my own babies if I’m busy helping my mother raise my thirty-plus-years-younger-than-me sibling?

  Not that babies of my own seem to be in the offing.

  Okay, I’m just making myself depressed, here, so I’m going to stop.

  Geoff greets us at the apartment door, looking…well, relieved is the only word I can come up with. I frown at the dog for a moment, puzzled. Nonna goes to her room to change, I slog down the hall with the goodies to find my mother sitting at her computer in her office, glasses perched on handsome nose, trolling the Net. I come up behind her, place the fragrant white box beside her, squinting at the screen.

  Your Baby and You, it says.

  And so it starts.

  Nedra’s opened the box, given a gasp of delight. “All morning I
’ve been having these weird cravings—quick, hand me a napkin or something!—but I couldn’t figure out for what. Now I know!”

  The nearest thing is a tissue, which I hand her, but the first pastry is already half devoured. Nedra has whipped cream on her chin, which I reach over and wipe off with another tissue.

  “I better get as much of this stuff now as I can, because you know what my doctor’s going to say as soon as I go in for my first appointment.” She puts down her fork, horror streaking across her features.

  “What is it?” I say.

  “I have to buy maternity clothes!”

  She sounds both horrified and delighted. I smile, then take a deep breath and tell her about Nonna. And Sonya’s offer.

  Nedra wipes her mouth, looks at me. “Are you sure?”

  “I had to drag it out of her, but yeah. She just told me.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud…” Nedra shakes her head, her mouth twisted in annoyance. “Why the hell didn’t she just come out and tell me?”

  “Sonya just asked her yesterday, at the party. She didn’t have a chance.”

  “No, I mean before this. That she was unhappy here.”

  “Because she wasn’t unhappy. In fact, I don’t think she fully realized how much she wanted to go back to the old neighborhood until she got out there yesterday, saw all those people.”

  “Still, I wonder why she stayed with me all these years?”

  “Because…I think she convinced herself you needed her.”

  My mother blinks at me. “I needed her? Are you serious?”

  I nod. Nedra laughs a little, stares into the box as if contemplating a second pastry. I push the box toward her.

  “Live. The baby will thank you for it.”

  She takes a second pastry, this one with almond paste and chocolate icing, and I hear myself say, “I think I’ve just about got her convinced that she doesn’t have to worry about you if she goes, because I said I’ll be here for you.”

  Nedra chokes. I jump up, run into the bathroom for some water. When I get back, she’s staring at me, her hand on her chest, her eyes watery from the choking. She grabs the cup of water from me, chugs down several swallows, then says, “Now you listen to me, and you can relay this to your grandmother, too. I don’t expect anyone to mold their life around me, or to give up anything for me—”