“Well,” he says in an annoyed voice, and folds up the L.A. Times, which they did not even attempt to share. “You think about it. Because I’d kind of like to make things official, before the baby comes. Call me old-fashioned, but I think it looks so nice on the birth certificate if the parents are married to each other.”
“That does look nice,” she says, “but on the other hand, I think it’s sad to go get married in a courthouse with strangers. I want our friends there. Somebody, at least, who can say congratulations and mean it.” She sees his face. “And preferably that person wouldn’t be Andres Schultz, if you don’t mind.”
“Fine. Okay.” He looks around the diner, mouth down-turned, but then fortunately for him his phone buzzes and he leaps up and heads out to take the call. He is actually happy and adjusted when he’s not around her, she sees. Who knew he could turn into a Californian so easily? Or maybe it doesn’t matter to him where he is, as long as he’s got the teacups and a ringing cell phone.
She’s just grieving, that’s what this heaviness is. That’s why she can’t adjust as easily. Greta had said as much on the phone: “Look, you’re nine months pregnant, you just lost your grandmother, and you’ve left the state you lived in your whole life, and you’re away from all your friends, like moi. It’s going to take some time.”
And I found out my mother killed herself, and I’ve been sleeping with someone else who’s not here with me. And … despite how it looks, it turns out I’m a terrible person.
She gives herself a stern talking-to and tries to rally by getting the apartment ready for the baby. They need things, after all. The crib is really the only piece of decent furniture, and she’d had to remind Jonathan that they’ll need a changing table, too, and a dresser for the baby’s clothes.
“Really?” he said, and he started getting that vague look he used to get, but then he remembered and covered it up. “Are you sure? Can’t the baby get changed on our bed?”
She’d made a face at him. “Our bed? You do know what comes out of babies, don’t you?”
“All right, all right. Well, then, we’ll just have to go do more shopping. That’s fine, it’s fine.” He smiles.
Two days later, they buy a little gliding rocking chair she found on Craigslist, and when they go pick the thing up, she gets to talking with the woman who’s selling it. Tayari is her name, and she has a child who is a year old, a kid who apparently took so long to be born that industrial equipment almost needed to be called in, Tayari says. They were sending out for tanks and cranes and the kind of forceps that are used in factories, she tells them with a loud laugh.
She has bright red, curly hair and when she talks she moves her mouth to one side of her face, like everything she’s going to say is ironic. Rosie and Tayari say they’ll keep in touch. For good measure, Tayari throws in a folding changing table, which she said she used to use at her mother’s house when they visited there.
Jonathan beams at her as they leave.
“See? This is going to be great for you,” he says on the way out. “You’ve made a friend already.”
She stops walking. “Look, I’m not a kindergartener on the first day of school,” she says to him. “I’ll find friends, don’t you worry about it.”
Then she has to apologize again. All he wants is for her to be happy. And she has no idea how to do that. Time, time, and more time. Isn’t that what’s supposed to heal you?
“I want to name the baby Serena Sophia,” she tells him one morning. “I hope you won’t mind, but I want to honor my mother and my grandmother.”
“Seriously?” he says. “Isn’t that kind of bad luck?”
“Why is it bad luck?”
“Well, if you ask me, it’s two dead people’s names. How good can that be?”
She points out that he really wasn’t involved throughout much of the pregnancy; that, in fact, she’d made the decision of what to name this child at a time when he wasn’t even sure he was going to want anything to do with the whole business.
“Could she have a nickname?” he says finally.
“She was Serena the Bean in her ultrasound days,” she says. “So … Beanie.”
“Beanie it is,” he says. “When she gets bigger and hates that name, though, we could switch to something of a real name. Something that isn’t doomed. Like, I don’t know, Patricia.”
“No.”
“Rosie, I was kidding.”
Dear Milo, I am so sorry I didn’t get to see you in person to tell you good-bye before I left for California.
I hope that sometime you can come and visit me here. Maybe I will come back when my grandmother’s house sells and you and I can see each other then. If it sells. I hope you are having a good time at school. I love miss you. You are about the cutest kid I’ve ever had sleep in my yard. Tell your mom and Dena hi for me. Love, Rosie.
P.S. Tell your dad hi, too.
“So let me get this straight,” says Tayari. “You’re forty-four, and this is your first baby?”
“Yes,” says Rosie. “I’m a late bloomer.”
They’re at the playground, and Tayari is pushing her little one, Lulu, on the baby swing. She’s invited Rosie there just so she can see where she’ll probably spend many of her waking hours, in a month or two.
“Wow, that is seriously so brave of you! Forty-four! I just hope I’m still having sex when I’m that age!”
Rosie starts to say something and then can’t continue. She wishes she could call Greta right this instant to report this conversation. Instead, she looks at Lulu, who is adorable and wearing a pink polka-dotted T-shirt and pants with purple lacy socks, and who has red ponytails springing from each side of her head and enormous blue eyes that look glazed over from the swinging motion. She’s also sporting a gigantic yellow pacifier with a picture of a goldfish on it. She’d like to take a photo of this getup and send that along to Greta, too.
“Wow,” says Tayari, and she shakes her red curls. “My mom is only forty-five,” she says, and stops pushing Lulu’s swing so she can check her phone, which has apparently just buzzed in her jeans pocket. She looks down at it for a moment and then says, “That is so weird.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s weird,” says Rosie. “Two generations—”
“No, no, not you. My friend Lani just posted this thing on Facebook about what she ate for lunch,” says Tayari.
“She posted a picture of her lunch?”
“Yeah. I mean, lots of people do that. But the thing is—whoa! Look at that wrap thingie she ate! I thought she was going on the paleo diet, but this wrap is so not on the diet.” She starts tapping away at the keys on her phone with her thumbs. From the slowed-down swing, Lulu lets out a wail. “Give her a push, will you?” says Tayari, and so Rosie does. But then after a moment she says she has to get going, and thanks Tayari for showing her the playground. It looks like a fabulous place. She knows this will be her main hangout soon.
“Oh, sure. Yeah, I’m sure I’ll see you around. This is like the place where everybody comes between naps. Sometimes the grandmothers come, too, ha ha! You’ll like them.”
“I’m old,” she says to Jonathan that night. “I have it on good authority that no one this old has ever attempted to be a mother.”
“What about Sarah from the Bible? Wasn’t she ninety?”
“Forty-four is the new ninety,” she says.
He doesn’t answer. She knows why: there are no words. Also, he’s staring at his phone. He is always staring at his phone.
“You know that we need to practice Lamaze,” she tells him.
He looks up from whatever he’d been studying and frowns at her. “Does that stuff really work? I have to say, when I was there, I thought it sounded like wishful thinking to me.”
“Jonathan, don’t say that! We have to believe in it. It’s all we have.” She bursts into crazy tears. “If we don’t believe in Lamaze, then we might as well just declare we’re unfit parents right now!”
He looks at her
steadily. “Okay, okay! I’m so sorry. I didn’t know, honest.”
After that, he gets down on the floor with her every night before bed and helps her practice the breathing, except he has to read from the faded mimeographed sheets that Starla Jones had handed out, and often he doesn’t have his glasses because he left them at the museum, and, all in all, she’ll be lucky to get through labor without being put in a strait-jacket, or whatever they do to women who can’t do it.
One night he comes over to her side of the bed and wraps his arms around her and they just lie there together, feeling the baby doing her evening calisthenics.
“I’m sorry you’ve having such a hard time,” he says in her ear. “But I just know you’re going to end up loving it here. We’re going to be okay. It’s all going to work out.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“We just have to stick together,” he says. “We’re like two gears trying to meet and work together, to blend. And the trick is not to break off any of the teeth.”
She laughs.
“Ohhh, Rosie,” he says. “Oh, honey, it’s so good to hear you laugh again. I can’t believe it! You haven’t laughed in weeks.”
One day after she finishes painting the baby’s room a light mossy green, which she did without even asking permission from the doctor—what the hell does he know about whether she can paint a room?—she goes into the kitchen to get a drink of water. Her cell phone is on the counter, and, after thinking about it for two-tenths of a nanosecond, she picks it up and punches in Tony’s number. She’ll just talk to him for a minute. It’s her reward for all that painting. She should think of a question she needs to ask him. He’s a painter, so is moss green a good color for a baby girl’s room if you’re not intending to go the bubble-gum pink route? That’s what she’ll say.
And then he answers. “Oh my God,” he says in her ear. “How are you? Let me guess. You’re in labor, and you want to remember how to do the cleansing breaths.”
She laughs.
“No, no,” he says. “Really. How are you?”
“I’m … good,” she says. And then she tells him that since she left Connecticut, she’s found out that she’s the oldest person ever contemplating giving birth and that another mom at the park thinks she’ll get along better with the grandmothers than with the other new moms.
“Well … hell, yeah!” he says.
“Get this. Their idea of interesting is to photograph their lunch and put it on Facebook.”
“Oh wow, do you think the world can handle a photo of my grilled cheese and arugula sandwich?”
Oh, she loves this. The sound of his voice, even the way he eats those stupid sandwiches. She’d forgotten about his unlikely sandwiches. Let’s see, she says, there was the peanut butter and olive sandwich, and wasn’t there something with tomato sauce and something else?
“Raw onion,” he says. “As you well remember. And sometimes I added Spam.”
“Please,” she says. “I’m pregnant. I have a delicate constitution.”
“How’s Beanie the prizefighter fetus?”
“Still working out. Yesterday I’m positive she was doing lunges and squats. Today she’s taking a break. She must know I’m painting her room.”
She walks around the apartment while she talks to him, holding the phone close to her ear, laughing and talking. A half hour goes by. Forty-five minutes. She starts dinner, still on the phone. She tells him she’s bigger than a house now, that her new doctor thinks she should be induced if she goes more than ten minutes beyond her due date, and also she can barely fit behind the wheel of the car anymore, and he insists she send him a photo of herself with her phone, and so she makes a face in the picture and pokes her belly out, and then he sends one of himself making the same face and with his flat belly thrust toward her.
Before they hang up, he says, “It’s just good to talk to you. I’m glad you’re fine. J-man okay?”
“He’s good,” she says. “Yeah, everything is great.”
“That’s wonderful.”
They don’t say they’ll keep in touch. They just click off, and that’s that.
“Okay, let me explain the importance to you of the cleansing breaths,” he says the next day. He has called her. “Because I think you’ve taken this part of labor and delivery way too cavalantly.”
“Too what?” She falls over, she is laughing so hard.
“I’ll just wait until you’re finished laughing at me.”
“I’ll never be finished laughing at you.”
“Maybe a cleansing breath would be helpful to you right now.”
Two days later:
“Milo told Annie he wants to live with me. I guess things aren’t so great over there. He feels shut out.”
“Jesus. What did Annie do?”
“Let’s just say I’m looking for a bigger place.”
“For you and him or for all of you together once again?”
Long silence. “Is it possible for you to go and wash out your mouth with dish deterrent? I am not living with those women ever again.”
“Did you say dish deterrent?”
“See how nice I am to you? I give you these things just so you can use them to make fun of me.”
“Yeah, you’re a prince. Listen, I know this phone call is all about you and your problems and not about mine, but can you tell me one more time how to do the cleansing breaths?”
“What is up with you with this breathing? Am I going to have to fly out there and birth this baby with you?”
“Would you please?”
A week later:
“Tomorrow is the due date. So if I don’t go into labor … yikes. I go to labor prison.”
“You will.”
“Can you promise?”
“Send me another picture of you, and I’ll do a magic spell on it.”
“Okay.”
“Also, that woman at Edge of the Woods. The one you tried to fix me up with. She had her baby two days ago.”
“Ah. Leila. How nice. So are you two dating, or what?”
“Yeah, that’s right. We’re getting married next week. Her goon of a boyfriend said if I can get the two mommies to join us, we can all make a nice happy family.”
“Nice one.”
“Oh. And I saw George. He’s aged about a hundred years, but he says he’s fine.”
“Oh, Jonathan’s coming in. Gotta go. I’ll call you on the other side of the delivery.”
“Yeah. And listen, good luck. Okay? Cleansing breaths … one, two, three … that’s all there is to it. It centers you. That’s why! Okay, I’ll hang up. Bye. I … I love you!”
She says, “Yes. Good-bye.”
[thirty-one]
She wakes up in a puddle, having dreamed that she was jumping in a lake. It’s 4:33 in the morning, and she’s not in a lake after all; her water has broken. She lies there, soggy, smiling in the darkness, feeling a thrill that she decides is 70 percent excited/happy and 28 percent terrified, and probably 2 percent undecided. It’s her due date, and this is one prompt little baby.
She reaches over and nudges Jonathan. It’s time, she tells him, and he instantly springs awake. He’s done his reading, has crammed for the final exam, he told her last night. He’s ready.
“Okayyyy,” he says. “So she’s decided to be a nocturnal sort. And a wet one! It’s going to be this way, is it?” He leans over and turns on the lamp and gets his glasses and looks at her through his sleep-encrusted eyes. “So. You’re really going to do this thing, huh?”
“I think at this point I don’t have much choice.” Then a contraction hits her, and she says, “Aaughhh.”
“That’s a funny look you just got on your face,” he says.
“I think I have to breathe.”
“Wait. I should get up and run around the room and pack a bag and stub my toe on the bed, shouldn’t I? Isn’t it my right as an almost-father?”
“Please,” she says. “Don’t make jokes, and don’t do Dick Va
n Dyke. Can’t we be calm? Where are the lollipops and tennis balls?”
Another contraction hits. Now she sees what she’s up against, and this is just the early stage. She pulls herself up and remembers that there’s a remedy for this pain. She takes a long, slow, deep breath—and after the contraction is over, she takes off her wet nightgown, and Jonathan pulls the mattress off the bed and removes the sheets. She breathes through the next contractions in the bathtub. He puts on the CD of Paul Cardall they’d chosen for its piano music, soothing and calm.
“Can you light some candles so we can—oh my God!”
“Breathe,” he says. He’s getting it. “So much better to breathe than to say oh my God.”
“You have to help! You’re supposed to be guiding me! Do you even know about the cleansing breaths?” she says, her eyes closed. The light is too bright, bright like the pain. “I have to do … cleansing breaths.”
“Sure. Those are breaths you’re doing in the bathtub,” he says.
“Go stub your toe on the bed, why don’t you?”
“That’s not very nice.”
When they get to the hospital, the nurse checks her and says she’s four centimeters dilated—four out of ten. Best not to get in the bed at this stage, the nurse says. Why don’t they walk? So she and Jonathan walk through the corridor on the labor and delivery floor, going back and forth again and again. The nurses seem to find them amusing, and Rosie can only imagine how they must seem—like the oldest couple giving birth ever to be seen in San Diego. She’s bent over and moaning, and Jonathan, the befuddled labor coach, looks like an absentminded professor with his glasses on the end of his nose, and his graying buzz cut and polo shirt. He has to keep flipping through the cheat sheets, and she has to keep pointing things out to him between the contractions. He forgot, he says mournfully, to brush up on the stages of labor. “What’s transition again?” he whispers to her.
The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel Page 32
