The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

  “I’ll figure it out. You go get in your bed,” I say, and I take her by the shoulders and steer her back to her room, where her bed is all rumpled and the television set is on. I fluff her pillows and tuck her in, pulling the lavender sheets and comforter up. She looks up and smiles at me, and—I don’t know—her eyes are so sad behind her smile that I have to fight the impulse to crawl right in next to her and just hold her for the rest of her pregnancy. Instead I say, “Oh, my! Just look at that nice mound of baby you have there. Wow! You’ve gotten so much bigger since Christmas. You look like a real pregnant person now.”

  “Yeah, try telling my body that.”

  “What are you talking about? Your body knows that. Your body is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.”

  “Mom, I know you’re trying to make me feel better, and that’s very nice of you. It’s in your job description as mom. But it’s very obvious that my body has no freaking idea what it’s supposed to be doing, or otherwise it wouldn’t be trying to kick this baby out of me.”

  “Kick the baby out of you? That is not what is going on. The placenta, which does not have a brain after all, just lost its sense of direction and got started in the wrong place. You’re going to be fine.”

  “Only with medical miracles.”

  “Well …,” I say, and falter. She’s looking at me with her chin tilted up just so, and I know she can read the worry on my face. “You have all the help you need. We’re going to make sure that if it takes medical miracles, then you shall have them.”

  I tell her that I’ll make us some tea. I’d actually stopped at a health food store in New Hampshire and bought some pregnancy tea, filled with herbs that will help any baby get a good start, I say brightly.

  “Even a baby that’s getting evicted,” she says. “Good luck to it.”

  I smile and pat her belly and then escape to what passes for a kitchen in this tiny apartment. The kitchen is really just one wall of the living room, which is two steps past the postage stamp-size bathroom and approximately ten steps of hallway from Sophie and Whit’s room. It’s an ingenious use of space, actually; everything necessary to life is arranged on various shelves that line the exposed brick wall. The bowls are stacked on top of the dinner plates; the flatware drawer is designed to be a cutting board, too; the twenty-four-inch kitchen table is also Sophie’s desk, and holds her laptop and a couple of file folders. Cookbooks, photo albums, towels, bed linens, unopened bars of soap—all these are luxury items that have had to be stored in decorative crates around and under the shelves and tables. It’s like a Chinese puzzle, Grant said: each thing has to nest into something else, or serve at least two purposes. Even the couch can become a double bed, which Grant and I slept in the last time we were here—when we brought Sophie back after Christmas—and as I recall, one has to be careful to keep one’s toes out of the fireplace. I sigh, looking around the living room, marveling. How is it possible to downsize a life to the point where bringing home an additional box of tea bags can tip the kitchen into chaos? And yet I had lived this way myself for years in New York. So what was I thinking, bringing two suitcases? Where can I possibly put my things? And where in the world do they intend to put the baby’s stuff, the diapers and paraphernalia—in the fireplace? We’ll have to get to that.

  While I’m waiting for the water to boil, I go into the bathroom, pee and splash water on my face. I can hear Sophie’s cell phone ringing, and I stop and listen to her talking. It’s obviously Grant. She’s telling him I just got in, I’m in the bathroom, would he like to speak to me? No? Okay. Yeah, everything seems fine. Yeah, she’s going to take it easy. Yes, she talked to Whit. He’s upset. No, he probably can’t come home just yet. Waiting and seeing. Okay, love you lots. Good-bye.

  After I’m sure she’s done with him, I open the door, and she calls to me. “That was Daddy on the phone. He said to tell you that you can call him back if you have anything you want to say. Otherwise, he’s going to bed soon.”

  “No, I don’t have anything in particular,” I call back to her, in as even a tone as I can manage. This, of course, is an act of war from Grant, calling her cell phone instead of mine. Well, fine. If he wants to play the silent game, I’m all for it. It’s much easier to deal with a marital standoff from five hours away. Bring it on, baby.

  I make us tea and toast, and when I come back to the bedroom, chattering about how raspberry-leaf tea is supposed to be just the thing for pregnant women, Sophie is sitting on the bed looking big-eyed and frightened. She looks exactly like she did on her first day of kindergarten when she got mixed up and missed the school bus home, and she was sure they were going to kick her out of school for being too much of a baby to follow directions. By the time I had gotten to the school to pick her up, she’d been holding herself rigidly together for so long that at the sight of me, she burst into loud sobs, much to the mystification of the kindly principal, who had been standing there telling me how brave Sophie was.

  “What? What is it?” I say. I put down the cookie sheet that’s doubling as a tray for the tea.

  For a moment she can’t even speak. I sit down and rock her against me and make soothing noises, just the way I did back then, and finally she says, “Ohhh, Mo-ommm, I-I’m so scared.”

  “It’s okay, it’s going to be okay.”

  She can barely get words out she’s crying so hard. I hold her and pat her back like I did when she was a little girl. “I didn’t feel this scared until, until you came—bu-but now that you’re really here, I know a really, really bad thing must be happening for you to come all this way.”

  “No, no. It’s not so bad. You’re going to be fine. I’m here just to keep you company while you stay in bed.”

  “Mom. You know it’s not fine. The baby might not be fine.”

  “The baby is going to be perfect. You’ll see. Now, come on, why don’t you take a sip of this pregnancy tea I brought you? Raspberry leaves are—”

  “How can you say that? What if everything goes wrong? What if my body doesn’t know how to do this?” She blows her nose and throws a Kleenex on a huge pile of used ones.

  “Listen,” I say. “Your body knows how to do this. It’s nature. And this happens sometimes, with the placenta. But the baby is fine. The doctors wouldn’t have let you come home if they thought that baby was in any danger at all.” I stroke her hair.

  She sniffles and looks at me with her big eyes. Go on.

  So I think of more stuff to say. “I think that this time, now, is the very worst of it, because of the uncertainty. But you know what? Here’s something my mother used to tell me when I would worry, and it really helped me. She’d say that no matter what happened—no matter how scared I got—we’d always be okay because we’d face it together. You won’t have to be by yourself. Ever.”

  She buries her head. “This has been the most terrible time!”

  “I know it has.”

  “No, not just this. Everything. The whole pregnancy. Ever since Christmas … when I came back … all I do is just cry and cry. And—and sometimes when I’m going to work or when I’m coming home, I think I can’t breathe. The other day on the subway I had to sit down and put my head between my knees because I thought my heart was beating so hard that I was going to pass out.”

  “Oh, baby. That’s an anxiety attack. You should have let me know.”

  “And at work, all the women in the office go out for drinks at night and have di-dinner together, but I never go. I can’t. And I just don’t know people who are like me. I’ve always had, like, a million friends, and now nobody even talks to me! Nobody my age is having a kid, just really older people are pregnant, even at the OB appointments, they’re all in their thirties, and they all have husbands and nannies and … all I do is just come home every day all by myself. And Whit is so far away, and he doesn’t get it.” She throws herself down on the pillows, really wailing now. “I have nobody, and he doesn’t even care!”

  “He just doesn’t understand,” I sa
y. “He cares, I’m sure, but he doesn’t know what it’s like. Even I didn’t know you were having such a hard time. You hide it so well, darling. You seem so competent all the time.”

  “But I’m not competent! Maybe I used to be competent, but now I’m a stupid crybaby—and I’m all alone and my husband doesn’t even love me enough to know he’s supposed to be here with me!”

  “He does love you—you told him that it was fine with you for him to stay away,” I say, and she practically screams, “I’m supposed to have to tell him I need him? He doesn’t just know that? I’m carrying his child!”

  I can’t think of anything to say, anything that would help. I love her, I adore her, but she’s so different from the way I was at her age. What do you say to someone who’s never really been disappointed by life before, who has always gotten all she wanted so easily?

  She was at the center of everything back in high school: captain and top scorer of the field hockey team, the lead in the school plays; she ran the student government and made the honor roll every single semester. Even more important, she was always surrounded by people who wanted to be around her. She was almost never alone. It strikes me now that she didn’t know how to be.

  After high school, she didn’t want to stay local and go to college near home, which surprised me a little. I suppose I shouldn’t have been shocked. She was a college professor’s daughter, after all, and Grant had been talking to her about the need to get as far as she could in her career. She picked Brown University, majored in communications, and despite my misgivings, did perfectly well away from home. I remember Grant shaking his head and chuckling as he said to me, “Of course she had to leave—to spread that Sophie magic around the region. New Hampshire had its turn with her for eighteen years, so it was only fair to give Rhode Island its chance.”

  We were the helplessly proud but humble parents, beaming when, alone in our bedroom at night, the pillow talk turned to our children’s accomplishments. Sure, there were Sophie’s successes, but also Nicky was showing himself to be quite a sportsman, if not the scholar she was—and I remember how it would sometimes feel like we were so lucky that our DNA, mingled together, had done more than either of us could have done separately.

  And then, during her senior year, Sophie met Whit. He was from a wealthy family in New York, a film student and photojournalist, the kind of fast-talking, all-balls-in-the-air kind of guy who had so many plans and dreams and ideas it was as though he couldn’t hold them all in his head. Grant, with his more plodding, deliberate way of going about life, disliked him almost immediately, but I knew my daughter, and I could tell that Sophie was determined to get this guy, that there was something about his wild-eyed fascination with everything that called to something deep inside her. And almost immediately she did get him. By Christmas of her senior year, they had fallen in love, and he came to stay with us through part of the break, and then she went to New York to meet his family—and then suddenly, by summer they both had managed to get jobs at a magazine in the city.

  “Next target: the Big Apple,” I said. “Move over, Rhode Island. She’s working her way west.”

  Grant pronounced it a disaster.

  “God damn it. She can’t go to New York with him. She barely knows him,” he said, and he didn’t even laugh at the irony of the thing when I reminded him that had been exactly our situation. Hadn’t we—I—come from even farther away, from across an even greater cultural divide, to show up in New York back in the seventies?

  He just pursed his thin lips and made a weird noise in the back of his throat.

  “Hey, don’t you think she can hold things together better than we did?” I said. “And look at us today—still here!” The only way I knew for sure that Grant had heard me was that he so studiously pretended that he had not. The little vein pulsing madly right at his temple was the only outward sign. I recognized that vein from previous encounters with unpleasant truths.

  But then New York wasn’t even the worst of what he was asked to accept. Whit wanted to do documentaries, and by the following fall, Sophie told me he had lined up a film crew and equipment and financing and was planning to do a film about an orphanage in Brazil. This was a place his roommate had told him about, a one-of-a-kind institute where volunteers could come and help the third world street children who find their way there, throwaway kids who otherwise would have died on the streets. Whit wanted to do a film about the way this orphanage had changed lives—both those of the kids and of the volunteers from high-income families in the United States who had had their eyes opened to poverty.

  And Sophie was going with him. She told us she would write stories about the place and the people, and he would film the journeys of the volunteers and how the experience had changed them. They’d live on the property, writing and filming for at least six months; the directors were psyched about the publicity, and Whit had gotten backing from some real heavy hitters his father knew. Everything was happening fast, things were just falling into place, she said, and from the tone of her voice, I could tell that she was overexcited and scared out of her mind and also that nothing was going to stop this.

  “There are way too many exclamation points in all our conversations about this,” I told her calmly. “Can’t we take it down a couple of notches and just talk about it realistically, problems and all?”

  “The only problem, if you must know, is that Dad doesn’t want me to do it. He’s e-mailing me every day telling me that I shouldn’t just go along on Whit’s trip, that it’s not really my project because I didn’t think it up, and that I’m getting in way over my head, and I need to think smarter.”

  I sighed. That was always his mantra for the kids: Think smarter. I’d hear him shouting it at them out in the driveway the year he was coaching the basketball team, and then again when he’d review their history assignments with them, or test them on physics questions or algebra equations, or when they were ice-skating on the pond or downhill skiing. Think smarter. What the hell does that really mean, anyway? Why is that the thing to send children out into the world with? If I were summing up my worldly philosophy in a two-word command, it would most likely be, Be real.

  Naturally Sophie wanted me to run interference for her and Whit with Grant. As if I could convince him of anything. He and I were already arguing about the trip and what it meant. I accused him of wanting everybody he ever loved to stay in New Hampshire, close by where he could keep an eye on them; he said I saw romance in even the most wrongheaded and dangerous schemes, and that I would think it was equally perfect if Sophie had insisted on signing up for the space program or joining the circus or—or taking a time machine back to the Stone Age. He said she’d never shown the slightest inclination to go make documentary films in Brazil until this guy came along, that it wasn’t her project, and that she was just an appendage. Is that what I wished for our daughter’s life, that she would become an afterthought or an appendage to some man? And how were we supposed to believe that Whit even knew what he was doing? He was a spoiled rich guy who’d never been told no, and this wasn’t even his money he was using—and on and on and on.

  And then suddenly one day, in the middle of the fight, he cleared his throat and announced he’d feel better if they at least got married first. It would prove Whit’s commitment or something like that. I knew what he was doing: throwing down the gauntlet, putting everything he had on the roulette wheel, sure that Whit and Sophie weren’t that serious. I did not approve.

  But they said yes. I’ve often wondered why they listened to him; after all, they were already living together in New York, and they were both old enough to do as they pleased. Sophie told me on the phone one day that her father had been right to insist on this, and that they were going to do it.

  “If this is just to get your father’s blessing for the trip, you do not have to get married,” I whispered into the phone, which was subversive of me, but I thought it needed to be said. “I hate to think of you tying yourself to this guy just be
cause your father says you have to. That is not a good enough reason to start your life together.”

  I couldn’t believe how much I sounded like my mother. Or how much Sophie sounded like me.

  “No, no, of course that’s not the only reason,” she said. “God, Mom. It’s the reason we’re doing it now, but I know we would have eventually gotten married anyway. Besides, I want to get married! I think it’s a great idea. I want to have a wedding in the backyard under the rose arbor and I want to invite everybody from high school and make it a big party, and I want to wear a dress that has lace and pearls on it and a big veil. Okay? I want a really, really big veil.”

  And so that’s how it happened that we had a big wedding last June—backyard reception, everybody from high school, everybody from elementary school even, and a huge white dress with pearls and lace and a big, big veil, father giving her away, flower girls, ring bearer, the whole bit. And if Whit seemed a little less than excited over all the wedding details, if instead he concentrated exclusively on the details of their Brazilian venture and had to be reminded to go out and buy rings and rent a tuxedo and line up a best man—well, I figured it was just the way his personality worked. He was a documentary man and had a lot on his mind, was the way I saw it.

  But then—in September, just when we were all used to the idea of the marriage and the trip and the prospect of doing without Sophie for months on end—there was another surprise.

  “I don’t want you to tell anybody, but I started a baby,” she said to me on the phone one day.

  “You what? Wait. You started it? Did you have Whit’s help at least?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t think so, the way he’s acting about it.”

  Then it hit me. I sometimes have a nine-second delay, like all your better talk shows. “Oh my God. Sophie! You’re pregnant?”