“It was my history teacher’s girlfriend,” Portia said, smiling. “Of course I remember.”
“I never really thought she’d be happy here,” Frieda said, studying her hands. “But here we are, all these years later, and I have to be honest, it does surprise me. Not that I don’t love her, of course, but for her, I’m surprised. She’s a warrior, okay? I always saw her on the ramparts. And here… no ramparts. Peace has been declared. Forever.” She laughed shortly. “Even a couple of years ago, with the gay marriage stuff—‘Take Vermont Back’ and ‘Move Vermont Forward’—all it amounted to was a war of lawn signs. It’s done.”
“Nirvana of the Green Mountains.”
“Well, we like it,” Frieda sniffed. “It suits us. It suits me. But I’ll leave if she goes ahead.” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to. I love my life here. I’ve built my life here,” she said with a new infusion of umbrage. “I’d like you to talk to her while you’re visiting. I think she might actually listen to you. I think there’s a lot going on here. Mortality. Regrets about you. All the big stuff, you know?”
“Regrets about me?” Portia said, instantly on guard.
“Oh, nothing terrible. I’m sorry, Portia, you have to forgive me. I’m very upset. I think I must be coming at this with a sledgehammer, and I don’t want to. Not, you know, about you. I mean, you’re great. You’ve become a very strong woman. You’ve got a great career and a solid relationship with Mark, obviously. You’re a force for good in the world. She knows that. But, you know, I think she wishes you were closer.”
“Physically closer?” Portia said hopefully, but she knew the answer.
“No. I mean, it was the same when you were just up the road in Hanover. She expressed the same… sadness, really. Look, it’s not uncommon for mothers to feel this way. I miss the relationship I had with my boys when they were small. Of course, they call me, and we visit, but you do lose something. Well, you lose your kids, really. You get them in another form, as adult children, but you lose what you had. It’s part of life, so you have to accept it, and I mean, what’s the alternative? That your children never grow up? That’s unacceptable. But you know, you find other things. Your grandchildren. Or other interests unrelated to children, whatever. And I’ve been really lucky because I have my grandkids, and my music.”
Portia nodded dumbly.
“I remember, when she moved up from Northampton, you were still an undergraduate and it seemed sort of obvious that she wanted to be nearer to you. She used to talk about what it was like when you were little, how close the two of you were, but then whenever you came to visit, it was obvious to me that you needed more distance. And she just couldn’t make that adjustment. I kept telling her, ‘Portia can’t come back until she leaves. You have to let her leave.’ But she felt that something had actually happened between the two of you. There was a thing, like a rift. It was too hard for her, do you know what I’m saying?”
Portia did but couldn’t respond. This was not precisely news, but it was a topic of molten heat. She looked away. They sat in silence. It was nearly six-thirty, and outside, a light snow had begun.
“Will you talk to her?” Frieda asked. “While you’re here? I’ve never been able to change her mind about a single thing, but you might have a chance. Besides, it’s your business, Portia. This concerns you, you know.”
“I don’t see that,” Portia said, surprised. “She’s of age, obviously. And generally sound mind.”
“Yes, and good health. But what if that changes? What if she dies? Who gets to raise this child if she dies?”
Portia felt as if the breath were being extracted from her, slowly and carefully, almost clinically. It was suddenly plain to her that she had failed—utterly failed—to really engage with this notion of her mother’s. Of course she would be responsible for the child if Caitlin did not fall in love with her baby and take it away with her, and if Susannah did indeed end up fostering or, God, even adopting this child, and then if something happened to Susannah. Of course she would have to… what? Inherit? School conferences. Roald Dahl. Legos. Swimming lessons. Driving lessons. College applications. The commandments to love and nurture and discipline and safeguard. Who else could there be? How long would she have before the torch passed? How much more of her life could she expect to live, on her own terms, before it happened? And did Susannah truly understand what she was asking of her? Or… and the new idea came to her in a powerful wave. Was this what it was ultimately about, actually for? Some disjointed, backhanded, unacknowledged effort to ensure that Portia have a child, some child, any child?
She was so full of rage that she could barely form thoughts, let alone words, but speech also required breath, and breath was still impossible to come by. She felt heat pound in her cheeks. She simply stared at Frieda, openmouthed and gasping.
“Talk to her,” said Frieda. “I’m not very hopeful, but I haven’t given up. You’re the only person she might listen to.”
Long after I have forgotten what’s in the Magna Carta or the Krebs’s Cycle, I will remember the lesson learned from my former best friend, Lisa, who betrayed my trust and unilaterally ended our friendship one day when we were in tenth grade.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE DREADED THING, THE AVERAGE MAN
Susannah, however, was not interested in listening. She lasted barely five minutes the first time Portia tried to raise the matter, late that very night as Caitlin slept upstairs and Frieda, whose dinner out did not end until nearly ten, lurked in her room, undoubtedly straining herself to listen. Then she bolted from the living room, with Portia gaping after her in serious annoyance and disbelief. There was, she would later think, a definite smack of adolescence to the scene, albeit with this comical reversal of roles, though she could not remember ever participating in such a classically juvenile exit. Susannah would not be coaxed back, neither that night nor in the days that followed. She did not care to hear the myriad reasons why she should, at the very least, think again, think carefully about what she was doing. She did not want to hear Portia’s areas of concern. She did not wish to consider whether the interests of a newborn baby might not, in fact, be best served by a single mother in her (almost) seventies or whether caring for an infant might not, indeed, be the best focus for her own life. Portia approached these conversations with great care, but care did not save her. Although she managed several times to lure her mother with innocuous queries and tender concerns (about Frieda’s health, the state of fund-raising for the battered women’s shelter in Rutland, the always damp corner of the basement), the drift of her true interests would be altogether too clear, altogether too quickly, and Susannah, aggrieved, would rise and depart. So the first days passed in anger and shared but silent meals.
Portia, who now had two very distressing things to avoid thinking about, was grateful she had brought so much work with her. She spent her days on the living room couch (her mother having laid claim to the kitchen as her own territory, and the dusty office upstairs too uncomfortable to spend any more time in than necessary), making her way through folders as Susannah prepared food for their holiday meal and Caitlin lurked in her room and Frieda made herself absent whenever she could. The atmosphere, Portia couldn’t help thinking, was like that of a commune in its final days, the sum of its parts deconstructing, inexorably, into shards of individual lives, individual agendas. She had heard enough of these stories, or read them in memoirs, to imagine that this was what it must have felt like: not the impacted bitterness of an angry family, but a simple heading for the exits. Except for herself, of course, because she was more afraid to be home than she was to be here, as dispiriting as here was.
On Wednesday night, when her mother reminded her of Caitlin’s appointment in Hanover the following day, she tried once again to turn the conversation—which was not, actually, a proper conversation at all—to the girl, her pregnancy, and the baby.
“Look,” Susannah snapped, “can you take her? Because if you c
an’t, I need to make arrangements.”
“I can take her, of course,” Portia said, straining for a conciliatory tone. “But Mom, at some point we’re going to have to talk about this.”
“Sure,” Susannah said unkindly. “Right after we get to all the things you’re never willing to talk about.”
And thus ended this particular round.
The following morning, Susannah left with Frieda for Burlington, the two of them stiff and cold in each other’s company. Portia waited in the kitchen for Caitlin to come downstairs. She had read the paper and did not want to start a folder, since there might not be enough time to complete it. There were no other obvious distractions. So when her eye settled on the kitchen telephone, she decided to dial her own number in Princeton, to see if she had messages. Their outgoing greeting had not been changed in years, not since the previous phone had packed it in. She had recorded it then without much care, reciting her office number and Mark’s, her cell phone number and Mark’s, and inviting the caller to leave a message in a tone that, she sometimes thought, sounded a bit offhand, as if she didn’t much care whether they did or not. Once or twice, listening to herself as she waited on the other end of the line, impatient to retrieve the recordings, it occurred to her that she ought to do it again, to record it again, to change it in substance or at least make it a bit peppier in tone; but she had never quite gotten to it. And now, as with so many other aspects of her old life, it was too late.
She waited through the rings, three, four, five, craving, oddly, the sound of this blasé former self who had a partner and a job and a cell phone, a partner with a job and a cell phone, a life somewhere else, and a house in which a phone might ring long and loud through untenanted rooms, and when the phone gave its distinctive click—Enough already! No one is here!—she tensed, eager for her own voice. But it didn’t come. Instead, a breathless Mark recited their number and thanked her for calling. “You may leave a message for Portia after the tone,” Mark said. “If you are trying to reach me, please try my office or my new number.” And this he gave. Local area code. Princeton prefix. The beep came, loud and sharp. Portia stared straight ahead at the kitchen phone, mounted to the wall with a long coiled cord swinging below like a lazy jump rope. It was dingy with handling, unfashionable avocado in color, and altogether unaltered since the year 1978, when it had been installed, because it would not have occurred to Susannah to fix what was not broken. Obviously, such a thought had not occurred to her, either.
Caitlin materialized, wearing layers of sweatshirts. Portia drove them both down the icy drive and onto the road, which was better, gritty with sand. The road twisted down the hill and out of the woods, into fields of snow, the highway, and the ice-packed river. Caitlin rode in silence, arms folded across her belly.
“You warm enough?” asked Portia.
“Too warm,” she said. “Hot.”
Portia nodded. This was the entirety of their conversation.
The midwife her mother had chosen was part of a hybrid OB-GYN practice at the south end of town: MDs and midwives, childbirth educators, even a prenatal yoga teacher. In the homey waiting room, there were framed prints of massive Native American women with their arms full of corn (they looked ready to squat and produce their offspring on the spot), fat kilim-covered pillows on the floor, and long, deep sofas. In the corner, a little fountain gurgled, the water running over polished black stones. Portia took a seat as Caitlin checked in with the receptionist, noting the range of reading material on the low table (the full ideological spectrum from Parents to Mothering, Prevention to Holistic Parenting) and the women doing the reading: an appallingly young girl in black, clutching the bony hand of her black-clad boyfriend, a woman in denim overalls and a buzz cut, a woman her own age, heavily pregnant, unwrapping a roll of Tums as she turned the pages of the Valley Advocate. Faculty? Faculty spouse? She wore a man’s roll-necked sweater and sweatpants in the ubiquitous Dartmouth green. Caitlin sat on the opposite couch with a clipboard.
“My midwife’s at the hospital,” she told Portia. “I have to wait for the other midwife.”
“Did they say how long?” said Portia, paying attention to a small pulse of nausea just beginning to announce itself.
“No. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Portia told her. “I don’t have any plans.”
But she also had no work with her, which meant that she had no focus, no distraction from her now evident and growing discomfort. Those files that might have consumed her—and she had many, many still to read—were back at her mother’s house, back in the dusty office room she’d slept in now for three fitful nights. It wasn’t good practice to take files out in public. Especially in a college town. Even in an obstetrician’s office. Who knew? Maybe these moms-to-be were already obsessing about college admissions.
She picked up the nearest magazine and started to read an article about a woman in Connecticut arrested for breast-feeding at a Denny’s restaurant. But she didn’t like the woman, who was a La Leche instructor and, Portia quickly suspected, had planned her arrest, and the civil suit that followed, well in advance. Lactation Nazis, Rachel had once called them (this after a woman in her mothers group had condemned her decision to stop nursing after six months). Portia flipped past articles on aromatherapy as a means of avoiding gestational diabetes, water birth, the dreaded cesarean, and how to outmaneuver a scalpel-happy (and, it was implicit, male) doctor. She realized that she was becoming more and more irritated with every page.
“May I see that one?” said the woman in the green sweatpants when Portia tossed the magazine back on the table.
“Oh, sure.” She picked it up again and passed it down the couch. “I should warn you, it’s pretty hard-core. If you’re planning on taking an aspirin during labor, I wouldn’t read that.”
“Really?” The woman frowned. “You’d have thought the pregnancy wars would be over by now.”
Caitlin, who had finished filling in her forms, was listening.
“You’d have thought.” Portia halfheartedly rummaged through the other magazines. There wasn’t anything she wanted to read. After a steady diet of Princeton applications for weeks, nothing felt as urgent, as vital. Nothing, she reflected, equaled the adrenaline jolt of opening the folder and meeting the person inside.
“I haven’t read anything, really,” the woman said. Then she sighed. “You know, I’ve sort of been ignoring this whole thing.”
Portia heard herself laugh. But that was terrible, she thought suddenly. So she apologized. “I suppose you’ve had an easy pregnancy,” she added. “I mean, if you’ve been able to ignore it.”
“No, no. I mean, yes, I suppose it’s been easy. I just… well, I’ve had a lot of miscarriages. A lot.” The woman shrugged. She seemed embarrassed, a little out of it. “It got to the point that whenever I got pregnant I’d just start waiting for the miscarriage, because my doctor told me not to get my hopes up. So when I got pregnant, I more or less tried not to think about it. And then, last month, my husband and I kind of looked at each other one day and went, you know, ‘Oh, my God, I think we’re really having a baby.’”
Caitlin, beside her, said, “Oh, wow.”
“I know. I mean, it’s not that we’re not happy, we’re just in shock. And of course they’re mad at me that I haven’t been coming in all summer and fall, but I just couldn’t put myself through all that again. So now I have to come every week, to get scans and everything. I haven’t had time to think about the pregnancy wars, or the birth wars, or anything.”
Portia looked at her. The woman was her own age, certainly no younger. The skin around her eyes was loose and dark. Her hair, halfhearted blond, was dark at the roots. How many miscarriages did “a lot” mean? How many years had her body been conjuring and expelling unrealized children? She felt, as she thought about this, a wave of powerful aversion—to the woman, so heavily pregnant, and then to the girl, who would soon be just as heavily pregnant.
“You okay?”
said Caitlin.
“Me?” Portia asked stupidly.
“Should I go get someone?”
This was the woman, the older woman. Portia wondered what they were talking about. Then, quite suddenly, she understood that she was looking at the floor, at her two feet in the warm boots she always wore when she was in Vermont: Abominable Snowman boots, Mark called them, since they looked like the feet of the mythical Sasquatch. They had bought them one summer in the sale at the Princeton Ski Haus, though she couldn’t now remember why they had gone in there, since they didn’t ski. The white furry feet were planted squarely on the carpeted floor of the waiting room, and Portia, who had an excellent vantage point from between her knees, could see the tufts of synthetic hair curling around the rubber soles.
“Are you going to be sick?” she heard the woman say, but from very far away, like across the room, except that she also felt the woman’s hand on her forehead, holding her forehead, just as Susannah had done years before, when she was a child and needed to throw up. It was something a mother did: holding a forehead like that. This woman, Portia thought, already knew how to do it. She was already a mother.
“You’re going to be fine,” the woman said in her soothing, mother voice. “They say nausea means it’s a healthy pregnancy.”
“Oh no,” Caitlin said loudly. “She’s not pregnant. I’m pregnant.”
Portia shot to her feet, bashing her shins against the low table. This hurt terribly, but the pain also cleared her head. She climbed past Caitlin’s knees and away from the woman, the mother. “I’m sorry,” she said, not looking at either of them. “I think I need to go outside. I need some fresh air.”
“Okay,” Caitlin said amiably. “You don’t need to wait with me.”
“Can I meet you?” she asked. Her voice sounded absurdly cheery. “Do you know that café up at the top of Main Street? It’s called the Dirt Cowboy?”
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