Julie and Romeo Get Lucky

by Jeanne Ray

  “He was in bed for two months. He nearly went out of his mind. My mother, God rest her soul, she nearly went out of her mind.”

  I pulled the belt of my bathrobe tighter, a clear sign that I was ready to face whatever lay ahead. “We’ll get through this,” I said.

  “Sure we will. I’ll call the flower shops and let them know you won’t be coming back in to close,” Tony said wistfully, and gave Sandy a little sideways hug. Then he looked up at me. “By the way, Nora’s downstairs. She wanted me to tell you. She was on her way up but she got stuck watching that wretched movie with Sarah.”

  Chapter Four

  A FEW WORDS ABOUT NORA, MY OLDEST DAUGHTER: She has a way of looking at me that makes me feel like I’ve just picked up a sterling silver picture frame off an end table of a fancy hotel and stuck it in my pocket; her expression toward me is one of perpetual incredulity, shame, and weary disappointment. I was well acquainted with this look, having worn it for the first nineteen years of Nora’s life. The difference was she usually had palmed a frame, and I was timid about removing a single peppermint from the large bowl of free candy at our local Italian restaurant. Nora, so reckless in her youth, so careless, so mean, rounded a huge hairpin curve in her early twenties and became the doyenne of overachievement. I would not be incorrect in saying she swipes an iron over her gym socks. She made a blistering load of money selling real estate, and her husband, Alex, brought in an equal haul doing tax law. They were bright and disciplined and highly scheduled. There was an agenda for everything they did, and children were never on the agenda.

  But then they were. In the last year Nora started showing up at my house more and more, bringing over presents for Little Tony and Sarah, being the fun aunt who took them for pizza on a school night. One day last spring out of the blue, she said that she wanted to come with me to take Tony to one of his first baseball games of the season, then she sat in the bleachers under a big hat and cried.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  Nora slipped her fingers beneath her Jackie-O sunglasses and wiped carefully under her eyes. “I want to have a baby.”

  I looked around us. There were no babies in the stands; where had this come from? “Since when?” I whispered. I was afraid someone would overhear us and laugh us out of the park. Anyone who had ever spent five minutes around Nora knew she most certainly did not want a baby. I had asked her about it once, not long after she and Alex were married. I remember her answer quite specifically. “Babies are for losers,” she’d said.

  “I’ve always wanted a baby,” she said.

  Nora was not a crier. Sandy would sob at the mere mention of a Kodak commercial, but Nora did not cry. Therefore, seeing her cry made me extremely nervous.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  She just kept looking at the tough green grass, the field of little boys in dirty uniforms who dreamed of being Red Sox. “Of course I did, but Alex was in law school, then I was buying out the real-estate firm, and we were both so busy. There was never time.”

  “You never wanted a baby. Nora, you’ve always hated babies. You hate children. You wouldn’t even speak to Sandy when she got pregnant.”

  “I was jealous. No one ever thought about how hard that was for me.”

  “Does this have to do with your father?” I had to ask. Mort now had three children: Nora, age forty; Sandy, age thirty-six; and Nicolette, age not quite two. My sixty-five-year-old ex-husband was out in Seattle toting around a toddler with his fortysomething-year-old wife. There he was, finally picking up his Social Security check, and he was back to diapers and spit-up and booster shots. A child at his age seemed less like procreation and more like straight-out punishment. I saw it as God’s retribution on Mort for running off with Lila in the first place.

  “What do you think—Dad and Lila have a baby, and so now I want one, too?”

  “I guess not. If anything, your father makes a convincing case for birth control.”

  Tony got his turn up at bat, and after two mad swings into the air he managed to pop off a small bunt and we stood up and cheered.

  Nora had to raise her voice to be heard over the roar of the crowd. “Alex and I have started in vitro fertilization.”

  The pitcher grabbed the ball that had rolled toward him and threw it to the first baseman, where it arrived long before Tony. There was a brief collective moan, and we all sat down again.

  How had we gotten to in vitro already? Nora had always liked high tech. She was the first person I knew to get a plasma screen TV. She was all about doing things in whatever way was considered state of the art. It seemed possible that she had skipped the natural middle part of this process and shot straight to the end.

  “Did you try…” I was unable to finish the sentence.

  Nora pulled her sunglasses down on her nose and peered at me over the top. “Of course we tried. We’ve been trying for a long time.”

  “Well, you never said anything.”

  “I never said that Alex and I had sex? Forgive me for not mentioning that. Yes, Mother, Alex and I have sex.” She pushed her sunglasses back. “We just can’t get pregnant.”

  “I’m sorry.” I was trying quickly to shift everything I knew about my daughter. This was Nora, who referred to baby showers as ritualized extortion. Nora, who asked to be moved in restaurants and on airplanes if a sleeping baby was located within five tables or ten rows. Nora of the personal trainer and the immaculate Lexus. Nora wanted to have a baby.

  “I’m only forty,” she said. “Everybody waits until forty now. Forty is the new thirty.”

  I wondered if anyone had let her ovaries in on this piece of news.

  “When I was forty you were a junior in high school,” I said without a trace of malice. “I sat up nights with the phone in my lap waiting for the police to call while you rode around town on the back of some boy’s motorcycle. Do you really want to be waiting for that call when you’re fifty-seven?”

  “My children won’t ever do that to me. They’ll be very responsible. They’ll be like Alex.”

  And then, thank heavens, she laughed.

  Nora bought Little Tony baseball cards and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young CDs, which seemed to speak to him deeply. For Sarah she bought lottery tickets. Often she went to the trouble of unwrapping a Hershey bar and putting the tickets next to the chocolate, then rewrapping the whole thing.

  Sarah and Nora sat together in front of the television set on Wednesday nights and waited for the lottery drawing. Sarah explained to Nora the principles of luck and how it would be better if she could come early so that they could watch Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory before the Mega Million picks. Sarah also sent Nora into the kitchen to intercede on her behalf with Sandy so that they could watch the whole thing through in one sitting (much luckier.)

  One day, Sandy told Nora, “I have a rule about television.”

  Nora gave a quick roll of her eyes. “You have a rule about everything.”

  “That’s right,” Sandy said. “I do. I have a rule about lottery tickets, too. You have to stop buying her so many.”

  “You buy them for her.”

  “I buy her one a week, and I shouldn’t even do that. You come in here with ten at a time.”

  I was sitting at the kitchen table, pretending to read the paper. I did not admit at this moment that I bought Sarah a ticket and usually two most weeks, and I had certainly seen her tap Romeo to pick one up for her when she was at one of the flower shops. Was she getting other tickets from other adults? Was she standing in the parking lot of the Stop & Shop after school, asking strangers to take her allowance to buy her a lottery ticket?

  From the living room I could hear the opening theme music, that syrupy confection that portended all the candy that was to come. “Aunt Nooorraaaa!” Sarah sang. “It’s on!”

  “I’ll be right there,” Nora called. “Look,” she said to Sandy. “I’m going to watch that movie. If Sarah is in there, that’s up to her.”

 
Sandy was an adult, a wife and a mother of two, but she was still afraid of her older sister. “It’s a good thing you never had children,” she said in defeat. She hadn’t meant it as a blow; she had no idea that Nora wanted one.

  All summer long and through the fall, I would find Nora in the living room with Sarah sprawled across her lap. Often they silently mouthed the words to the songs. Nora had completely destroyed any rules Sandy had about watching the movie too often. If Sandy complained, Nora would simply pop the tape out of the VCR and take both it and Sarah back to her house.

  Often Nora’s presence in the living room would take me by surprise. I would simply be walking through my house, and there she would be. I was starting to wonder if she was having problems with Alex, if soon both of my daughters would be living at home again.

  “When did you get here?” I asked, one day.

  “Half an hour ago.” She didn’t take her eyes off the screen.

  “Can you stay for dinner?”

  Nora gave one slight turn of her head to indicate no, she would be dining at home this evening. She looked glazed over, exhausted, while the fat orange Oompah-Loompahs danced in front of her and the real Oompah-Loompah lay across her loafers like a tiny beached whale. Her pants were not exactly wrinkled, but they did not have a sharp crease, and she was wearing one of Alex’s dress shirts with the sleeves rolled up. It was a very un-Nora look. Sarah was wearing Nora’s favorite Hermès scarf tied around her head and neck like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief.

  “Nora, get up and come into the kitchen. I have to talk to you,” I said.

  “In a minute,” she said.

  In A Minute. That was the only thing she ever said to me when she was a teenager. Where was Alex? Why wasn’t she working? Nora never had any time for anyone or anything, yet now she seemed to be taking up permanent residence in my living room.

  I picked up the clicker and shut the television off. Sarah immediately snapped up and started howling like I had stepped on her head. “Nora. In the kitchen. Right now.”

  Nora looked up at me and blinked. She didn’t seem to notice the fact that Sarah was screaming. She dislodged the cat and pushed herself off the couch to follow me sullenly into the kitchen. As I left the room I turned the television back on and Sarah breathed a deep sigh of relief. The Oompah-Loompahs took up exactly where they had left off, and the cat collapsed back on the floor.

  “What?” she said to me. She had that same hollowed-out expression she used to wear as a teenager, and for a minute I thought of asking her if she was smoking pot again.

  “What? Nora, you’re lying on the couch watching Willie Wonka for the fiftieth time. Your best friend is your eight-year-old niece. You don’t seem to be spending much time at home anymore. Don’t you think something’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” she said heavily, and turned back to follow the music into the living room.

  “This conversation isn’t over.”

  Nora looked at me with a squint. “Why, because you need more information about my personal life? I’m tired, okay? Is that what you want to hear? I’m tired of Alex giving me shots every night and tired of hoping I won’t get my period, and I’m tired of feeling like a failure. I’m used to being very good at whatever I put my mind to, and I have to tell you, my mind is on having a baby and I’m getting nowhere. As for spending time with Sarah, I like it. She believes that good things are going to happen, and that’s good for me. There was a woman in my doctor’s office today who was forty-nine years old and she got pregnant, bang! And I just sat there, and said, ‘Oh, that’s so nice for you.’”

  “Who would want to have a baby at forty-nine?” I genuinely could not imagine it. I remembered a woman who had a daughter in Girl Scouts with Sandy and two more daughters at home. She turned up pregnant at forty-five, and she cried about it for three weeks.

  “Lots of people!” Nora said. “You just don’t understand. You wanted a baby, and so you had a baby. It wasn’t any problem for you at all.”

  “I was twenty-three when I had you. I would have gotten pregnant if I’d bumped against the washing machine.”

  “So you think it’s my own fault for waiting?” Nora did not say this in an angry way. She was asking me. She had clearly given the subject of fault and blame a great deal of consideration.

  “Of course I don’t think it’s your fault. But Nora, you have a very happy life. You love your work, you love Alex. You have a million things going for you, and all of those things are going to be there if you don’t have a baby.”

  “Hurry up!” Sarah yelled. “It’s almost time.”

  It was time for the lovely Dawn Hayes to call the lottery numbers as they popped out of the machine. Nora turned away and walked into the living room, and I followed her. Sandy wandered in with Little Tony and even Big Tony, who usually made a real point of staying away from the television set, came to watch.

  Sarah had a piece of paper and a pencil ready, and she wrote the numbers down when each white Ping-Pong ball shot up through the tube and Dawn read them out. Everything about her face was focused. She was channeling the spirit of Charlie Bucket, the poor but hopeful hero of Mr. Wonka’s chocolate factory. She had every intention of winning.

  “Thirty-seven, nineteen, seven…” Sarah repeated each number out loud.

  It wasn’t a match. She knew her tickets by heart, and even though she would go upstairs and pull out the envelope where she kept them—in her left bedroom slipper in the far right-hand corner of her closet—to double-check just in case, she wasn’t a winner. No golden ticket.

  “The odds are millions and millions to one,” Sandy said, and reached down to pet Sarah’s hair.

  “It just means there’ll be more money next week,” Sarah said bravely. “It’ll be even better to win then.”

  “That’s assuming that nobody won this week,” Little Tony said. “In which case the whole thing goes back to zero.”

  Sarah looked truly shocked that even an older brother could say such a cruel thing. “I’m going to win.”

  Nora picked up the child’s hand and kissed it. “Of course you are.”

  But that was all several weeks and many drawings ago. By the time Romeo had crunched down the tiny vertebrae in his back, it was almost Halloween and neither Sarah nor Nora had won their separate lotteries, though they went to the television as religiously as Father Al went to church, to try and bend God’s favor in their direction.

  I finally, gratefully, managed to jump into a pair of sweatpants and a big flannel shirt and came down the stairs in my sneakers. I made a vow to stay in my clothes forever, just to be on the safe side. Nora was back on the couch with one arm tossed around Sarah’s shoulder, and they were watching the movie—or Sarah was watching the movie and Nora was gazing fondly at the top of Sarah’s head.

  “How’s Romeo?” Nora whispered when I came into the room.

  “Not so good. He’ll be fine eventually, but right now, not great.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nora said, but frankly, she didn’t look so sorry. She looked like she was about to start laughing hysterically.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  “She’s pregnant,” Sarah said, never once taking her eyes off the television where Veruca Salt, the rich little girl who was the worst one of them all, demanded that the workers in her father’s factory unwrap the candy bars faster. “And I’m going to win the lottery.” Sarah held up a dozen shiny new lottery tickets.

  Nora rapped Sarah lightly on the top of the head. “It’s my news. I should have been the one to tell.”

  “You weren’t fast enough,” Sarah said. “Anyway, you just said you were going to tell her. I never told her before today.”

  “Sarah knew?” Was it possible that I felt jealous of my eight-year-old granddaughter?

  “I guessed,” Sarah said.

  “Oh, Nora,” I leaned down to wrap this woman in my arms who was my first baby, my own pink-cheeked girl. I’ll admit it, I didn’t think it was suc
h a great idea for Nora and Alex to pursue a pregnancy at this point, but the second it was a reality, every lingering doubt I had flew out of my head, and I was only completely happy. “When are you due?”

  “Early April. I just came from the doctors’, and he said things looked very strong. That was how he put it, ‘strong.’”

  I ran the numbers quickly in my head. “You’re four months pregnant?”

  “Three and a half.”

  I looked at her. It was true. I hadn’t noticed it before, but there was something going on underneath her loose-fitting shirt. Still, I couldn’t believe that she’d been sitting on my couch all this time wearing a long face when she already knew the truth. Nora was never a big one for sharing, but this seemed impossible. “You’ve been pregnant all this time, and you never told me?”

  “I didn’t want to get anybody’s hopes up until things looked good. Even now.” She shrugged in a peculiar attempt to seem casual about things. “You never know.”

  “But everything’s going to be fine.” Technically speaking I didn’t know this, but as her mother I felt certain.

  “It didn’t work the last time,” Nora said.

  “Last time?”

  “She had two miscarriages before,” Sarah said.

  This broke my heart a thousand times over.

  “Miscarriage might be too strong a word. It was only after a few weeks.” Nora stretched out her hands and inspected her cuticles, which was what she did when she was determined not to let herself cry.

  “It just didn’t work, was all,” Sarah said, like she was trying to make me feel better about it. And Nora had told Sarah?

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish you had told me.”

  “I didn’t want you to be sad for me,” Nora said. “And anyway, it doesn’t matter now. This last batch stuck.”

  “Batch?”

  “You know the way it works. They put in half a dozen or so eggs, then you wait and see how many of them attach.”

  I guess I didn’t know how it worked; I just had some vague ideas from scanning Newsweek articles in doctors’ offices. Besides, my head was now too full of information: Nora had had two miscarriages; Nora was pregnant; Nora was pregnant with a batch. “What do you mean, ‘How many of them’?”