The Birthdays

by Heidi Pitlor

  The Birthdays

  a novel

  Heidi Pitlor

  In loving memory of my mother,

  Joan Ruth Pitlor (1941–1984)

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1 Genetics

  2 Dichotomies

  3 Land to Land

  4 Phantom People

  5 Pronouncements on Motherhood

  6 Good, Happy Lives

  7 Everywhere Bits of Italy

  8 The Sound of Forgiveness

  9 Gregory Peacock in Flight

  10 The Presence of the Past

  11 A Completely New Experience

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The Birthdays

  1

  Genetics

  Daniel no longer liked the color he and his wife had painted their dining room walls. Faded, marbled ochre, it was an almost physiological shade. More the color of indigestion than peaceful meals and a happy home—what had they been thinking? He didn’t like the walls and he didn’t like the pea green place mats Brenda had just bought, or the matching cloth napkins with pea green flecks. She’d found them at a British housewares shop in Boston, a store she visited when she felt homesick for London.

  “More pancakes?” she asked, already on her third serving. Her stomach rested on her legs like a small pumpkin beneath her T-shirt.

  “No more for me, thanks.”

  She helped herself to the last two pancakes and drizzled threads of maple syrup in large circles over her plate. It was the first morning of her twenty-fourth week of pregnancy, and she’d been up since before sunrise. Through his dreams, Daniel had heard her in the kitchen moving pots and pans, dropping them on the floor. Most likely trying to wake him. Granted, her new body—and their new house just outside Boston with its narrow hallways and doors—made her clumsy. Small yellow bruises lined her hips and thighs, for she still hadn’t gotten used to cutting corners so tightly. He’d lain in bed “like a dead person,” as she sometimes proclaimed from her very high horse, and he’d listened to her clang about. Daniel had wondered if she’d want a second child, and then they’d need to move yet again to a bigger house with more rooms. She seemed to truly enjoy being pregnant. She forgave herself her new clumsiness and mood swings, her lapses of memory and constant trips to the bathroom.

  “Oops,” she said now, dropping a square of pancake on her lap. Just six months ago, she was reed thin with narrow, almost boyish hips, and her size made her look even younger than she was. Thirty-one years old, and fourteen years younger than Daniel, Brenda was short, a mere five-three, and had tiny bones, impossibly small wrists and ankles. Even now, six months in.

  “You never used to like pancakes,” he said.

  “I know. Isn’t it weird? I could eat ten more.”

  “Who are you? Where is my wife?”

  She grinned through her stuffed mouth. Daniel noticed a spot of syrup gleaming on her chin, and he reached over to wipe it off. Food used to be an inconvenience for her, something that only disrupted the flow of her days and evenings, and though at times her small appetite grated on him, he secretly loved being so much bigger than her. He’d loved wrapping his arms around her waist in bed and being able to touch his own elbows. He’d loved the faint trail of her vertebrae down her back, the shadow of her breasts on her flat stomach in the mornings—but these things had disappeared over the past months. He felt his whole body frown.

  Daniel and Brenda had recently moved from a loft in a mostly empty building in Brooklyn. He didn’t miss the musty smell of vacancy, or the cracked windows and occasional rat he saw sniffing around the dumpster out back. But he often missed the galleries and plays they used to go to, the weekly dinners they had with their neighbors, Evan and John. He missed the buzz of life in New York. Most of their new neighbors were older and bore an air of sadness, a sense that they’d sacrificed great things in their lives and had made a fragile peace with this fact.

  After she’d finished washing the breakfast dishes, Brenda stood in the shower, her mouth open to the water raining down her face. Daniel could see her—she’d left the door ajar and the shower curtain halfway open. She clearly hadn’t heard him come in. She rubbed her hands over the arc of her belly and breathed a contented sigh.

  “You look happy,” Daniel said. More and more he found himself examining her and reporting what he saw.

  “God, Dan, you scared me.” She covered her nipples.

  “I’ve seen those before. You don’t need to hide them.”

  She reached for the shampoo and squeezed the bottle directly over her head, allowing the liquid to stream down the sides of her cheeks.

  “You look free. Liberated.”

  She glanced out at him. “I do?” She leaned her face toward the water again. “From what?” Her accent seemed to be returning lately, and she pronounced this last word through tight lips.

  “I can’t tell.” He lifted his glasses from his face and wiped the fog from the lenses with the bottom of his T-shirt. “Liz is already saying that she wants her old body back.” Daniel’s sister-in-law was just over seven weeks pregnant. And his sister Hilary was pregnant too—maybe that would be enough for Brenda, their child not having any siblings but at least a couple of cousins. He made a mental note to broach the topic later that morning, maybe on the drive north to Maine. His family would gather at his brother Jake’s summer house for the weekend to celebrate their father’s seventy-fifth birthday.

  The last time all of the Millers had been in one place was four years ago, for his grandmother’s funeral. Afterward, they drove to a steakhouse near the cemetery and squeezed into a plush burgundy booth. In the artificial darkness, amid the smell of charred onions, his family discussed the funeral service, which his mother thought had been a little cursory, the eulogy a little rushed. They discussed Hilary’s travel plans the next day, and soon enough those who usually drifted to the forefront of the family conversations did so, and those who did not—Daniel’s father, Daniel himself more and more—focused on their plates. He remembered he’d grown a little sleepy, as he often did in their presence. A comforting sort of sleepiness. No matter how infrequently the seven gathered, they talked about the same topics—their jobs, politics, their travel plans—in the same lulling rhythm as if they had never parted. Once the babies came, there would be ten Millers and conversations would inevitably change. They would certainly no longer fit in the booth of a steakhouse. They would turn into a completely different family. Most likely, this weekend would be the last time they would be just seven. Daniel often grew apprehensive about it all. But then again, he thought too fondly of the past—he knew he did.

  “Liz says she’s already outgrown some of her clothes,” he said to Brenda.

  “She’s probably just being vain,” she said. “Anyway, it can’t be all that bad. She’s only seven weeks. Maybe she’s just eating too much.”

  “I don’t think it was vanity.” Daniel slid his glasses back on. “And she wasn’t really complaining, more just filling me in. I can understand her being a little anxious.” He turned himself around, and his left wheel caught on Brenda’s old pink towel that lay across the floor. He reached down and walked his hands forward.

  “I suppose.”

  The towel stretched and tore beneath the wheel, and he began to lose his balance.

  “We’ve got to leave in ten minutes,” she said behind him. “Will you be ready?”

  “Goddammit,” he muttered, and jerked his chair backward.

  *

  The sperm donor was from Milwaukee—twenty-nine years old, five-eleven, 175 pounds, brown, blue. A self-described “freelance landscaper,” he had strong visual and verbal skills, weaker
math. Their counselor had described him as gentle but confident. She wouldn’t tell them why he’d sold his sperm, as he’d opted not to disclose this, and Daniel couldn’t help thinking that the man probably was desperate for money, that he was unemployable in some fundamental way that might get passed along genetically. Still, the counselor said he came closest to what Brenda had said she wanted: someone healthy, intelligent, creative and happy. This thing, this sperm donation, had been her idea.

  Daniel was forty-five, five-eleven when standing, 170 pounds, brown, brown, with a square jaw and the close-set eyes characteristic of the Millers. He was a commercial illustrator, but he wasn’t afraid of numbers like the other illustrators and artists he knew. He took care of his and Brenda’s budget and bills, their taxes. He would have described himself as detail-oriented, but maybe this was just a function of the wheelchair, since before the accident he’d been markedly less organized. Though the accident was only a year and a half ago, he remembered life as absolutely different before it. More driven by amorphous ideas and concerns: When would he be able to do his real drawing and painting full-time? Where should they travel to next? Where would they ideally like to settle down, in what sort of place? His old life often came back to him in what seemed like passing memories of a dream: the sensation of running toward a soccer ball, of sprinting to catch a bus into the city, wet grass beneath his toes in the summer, a heavy cloth napkin blanketing his lap in a restaurant. Now his legs hung from him like a doll’s, useless. And his days were composed of floods of details: how much time to leave for getting to the physical therapist, where to meet Brenda for her ultrasound. The goal now was to prevent flukes and mistakes, to control the surface layer of life. Even his conversations with Brenda had seemed different and easier, at least more playful before the accident. Sometimes when they’d lie in bed on Sunday mornings, she’d ask him to imagine that he was painting a part of her body, and to talk her through each stroke. She’d never picked the obvious parts—never her breasts or legs, never her face. She’d say that she wanted to keep him guessing, so she’d ask him to draw her thumb, or her left knee, her chin. As he spoke in as much detail as he could, she’d sometimes interject with random thoughts about fantasies she had—living near the Mediterranean, starting an artists’ cooperative. Their words took on a lazy air of reverie, and they’d stay in bed through the afternoon and into the early evening, dozing on and off, making love, rising only to get something to eat or to change the music on the stereo. Lounging in bed, describing Brenda’s perfect body parts and dreaming about living in France seemed almost silly now, indulgent and irrelevant. And sex was no longer the spontaneous, transporting experience it used to be. On a good day, Daniel could manage to get it up for five seconds or so—actually, on a good day, he could manage anything at all. It was obvious that Brenda missed their old talks, as well as their former sex life. Sometimes she still asked him lofty questions about art and travel and love (always, it seemed, as they were falling asleep, when he had little energy for abstract thoughts), but overall, she seemed more and more preoccupied with her pregnancy and getting ready for the baby. Daniel supposed this satisfied her need for something hopeful and positive, given his moods lately. He often felt he’d aged threefold in the past year and a half.

  After their first appointment at the sperm bank, Daniel said, “Isn’t it strange, thinking about the donor, this very significant person that we’ll never know?” Andrea, their genetic counselor, had explained the many varieties of sperm that were available, the endless varieties of men that had offered up their genetics (straight, gay, black, white, Hispanic, tall, short, broad, lanky—the list was truly infinite). She began to seem like a god, so many possible lives at her fingertips. Daniel noticed that she spoke primarily to Brenda, and that she included him in the conversation once or twice merely as an afterthought. Daniel and Brenda sat in the car, stopped at a traffic light.

  “Maybe a little,” she said. “Just try not to think about him as a person. That’s what I’m doing. It’s just sperm. It’s just science, really, and in the end it’ll be our baby. You’ll be its father.”

  “Sort of,” Daniel said, though he was relieved to hear that Brenda had in her mind reduced this man to a faceless shot of liquid. Unbelievably, they hadn’t more fully discussed this before now, but then the whole process had moved so quickly. Initially he’d looked into various new types of surgery and processes with sinister names like “electrical ejaculation” and “testicular sperm extraction” and immediately rejected them—he’d had enough of surgeons and hospitals and machines and drugs in the past year and a half. He and Brenda had briefly considered adoption, but she’d been opposed to it. She’d heard horror stories about adopted children growing up to be schizophrenic, psychotic, and when Daniel argued that even their own child could turn out this way, she put her foot down and said no. No adoption. Period. And then she came up with the idea of using a donor. Half of their genetics was better than none, she said. The logic made sense at the time, and seeking a donor the best option. They barreled ahead with her plan, and he didn’t stop to think twice about it.

  “This guy will have nothing to do with our lives in the end,” she said.

  “Except for providing the genetics.”

  “Half of the genetics.”

  “True, but still. I’m starting to hate how tangential I am in this whole process. Andrea talked to you like you were the only one in the room.”

  “Come on. You’ll be right there when I’m inseminated. You’ll come with me to all these appointments. You’ll take Lamaze with me. Pretty soon you’ll forget about the donor.” She sounded tired.

  “I guess,” he said, but as the insemination drew nearer, he found he couldn’t forget at all. And afterward, as the weeks and months passed after that day, he thought about the donor more and more. Daniel tried to imagine what the man looked like, his face, his clothes, what his house looked like, his car. Daniel wanted him to be perfect and imperfect at once, flawless and profoundly flawed. When he mentioned his thoughts to Brenda, she humored him at first—“I’m seeing a tan guy who wears flannel shirts and jeans. He drives a non-dad car, something sporty, something red”—but soon chafed at this game and grew more and more exasperated with Daniel wanting to talk so frequently about the donor. One day she finally grumbled, “To be honest, I think it’s getting unhealthy, this obsession of yours,” to which Daniel responded, “I guess I just need to make myself think about other things.”

  *

  Daniel sat beside the living room window now, waiting for Brenda to finish packing. He saw their neighbor, Morris Arnold, step out his back door. A paunchy, elderly hermit, the man regularly hung his stained underwear on a line that faced their back yard. His terrier, Rex, peed on their rosebushes and ravaged their trash, leaving chunks of cardboard and coffee grounds and plastic and pens strewn across their lawn. For some reason, Brenda had taken a liking to Morris. Right in the middle of dinner, just as Daniel began telling her about his day, she would jump up, fill a plate with food and head for the back door. Daniel would hear her next door talking to Morris, cooing at his new rhododendrons, making sure he remembered to reheat the dinner if he wasn’t going eat it right away. People she hardly knew were endlessly interesting to her.

  He heard her in the bathroom, doing whatever she did in there and singing loudly. She had a mediocre voice, and she chose to sing octaves higher than her natural range. It was unlike her, at least unlike her old self, to so openly revel in her bad voice.

  He looked out at five pairs of Morris’s underwear flapping in the breeze. A glass of something in one hand, Morris raised his other hand to Daniel. He wheeled behind a curtain and peered out at the old man cushioned in so much flesh, sitting on his rocker, gazing at his underwear and the clouds that gathered like a family of whales above. A woman Daniel didn’t recognize stepped out from behind Morris. Brenda had told Daniel that he was widowed and had been for years. This woman was short and scrawny with a high, beaklike
nose and a pile of pinkish hair stacked on her head—the sort of woman who could be drawn easily in caricature. She placed her hands on his shoulders and rested her chin on the top of his head. Rex pushed the door open and ran onto the back lawn, jumping and picking a fight with a light blue pair of underwear. Morris just sat there and watched.

  “Who’s she?”

  Daniel hadn’t heard Brenda come up behind him. “I don’t know. His sister?”

  “No, he doesn’t have any living siblings. And his kids live in Oregon.”

  “You think she’s his girlfriend?”

  “I doubt it. He just doesn’t seem the type.”

  “The type of what?”

  Brenda moved beside him. “I guess the type who dates. Maybe she’s an old flame or something, a widow whose husband just died and she’s been in love with Morris her whole life.”

  “And now here they sit, so romantic, watching his underwear billow with the breeze.”

  “I don’t know why that bugs you so much, love. It’s just clothing.”

  “It’s an old man’s underpants. It’s clothing that’s been somewhere I don’t want to think about.” He leaned back and made a pinched expression.

  “Oh, lighten up. It’s too early for the gloom show.”

  —

  Brenda helped him into the car—she’d gotten good at this. Her arms had grown tight and muscular, and despite her size, she was able to use enough force to prop him up and over so he could grab the handle above the window. Even at six months, she still had the strength to help him into his seat. He’d become a little lazy; initially he’d trained himself to do such things entirely on his own. He’d lifted weights daily, and worked his arms into good shape at the gym. But lately he liked Brenda’s help. He could build himself back up another time, another year. And anyway, doctors were taking big steps toward understanding and even reversing some spinal cord injuries. Every once in a while Daniel allowed himself to hope.