He got to his feet and ran his hands through his hair, pacing the length of the living room. “You’re right. She’s awful. She’s awful to me, she’s awful to you, and she’s probably awful to Ava when we’re not around.” He took the letter out of her hand and shoved it back into the envelope so hard the paper ripped. “She wants to disown us? Fine. Good riddance. We’ll be better off without her.”
Becky closed her eyes. This was what she’d wished for, dreamed of, prayed about, and now here it was, handed to her on a silver platter. So why did it feel like such a hollow victory?
“Andrew,” she said.
“What,” he asked, folding up the envelope and shoving it into his pocket.
“Maybe we should think about this.”
“What’s to think about?” he asked. “She’s manipulative, she’s demanding, she’s needy . . .”
“But she is Ava’s grandmother,” Becky said, hardly believing that those words were issuing from her mouth. “And the player-to-be-named later.” She patted her belly. “She’s this baby’s grandmother, too.”
Her husband stared at her as if she’d grown another head. “Are you sticking up for Mimi?”
“No, of course not. You’re right. She’s done terrible things, and as far as saying that you’re a disappointment as a son, well, that’s just beyond belief. But . . .” Good God, she thought, what am I doing? “I feel sorry for her,” she said. “Imagine how lonely she’d be without us to harass.”
Andrew narrowed his eyes. “Have you been taken over by the pod people?”
She handed him the phone. “Call her,” she said. “We need to work this out.”
∗ ∗ ∗
Mimi had deigned to meet with them on a Sunday afternoon. Three days after her letter had arrived, Becky and Andrew left Ava with Lia and made the trip out to Merion, up the long, curving driveway that led to a teeny-tiny Tara. Mimi didn’t answer the doorbell, and, after Andrew had opened the door with his key and led them inside, they found her sitting on a spindly gilt chair wearing a cashmere halter top with her head held high.
“I am not,” she began, pointing at Becky and lifting her nose into the air as if she’d smelled something foul, “talking to her.”
“My wife has a name,” Andrew said.
Mimi glared at him as if she were observing him through a microscope. “I don’t have anything to say to either one of you.” Eye-ther one of you. Becky bit back a giggle. Queen Mimi, grande dame of a kingdom that existed only in her own imagination. “The only reason I agreed to this meeting is because I would like to see my granddaughter.”
“Your granddaughter Ava,” Andrew said. Becky squeezed his knee.
“I have been insulted,” Mimi said, stabbing upward with one fingertip. “I have been threatened. I have been ridiculed. I have been more than generous to the two of you—more than generous,” she repeated, in case they’d missed it the first time. “And my generosity has been repaid with nothing. You’re a disappointment as a son,” she concluded. “And you,” she said, raking Becky with her gaze, apparently forgetting that she had nothing to say to her. “The way you’ve spoken to me is unforgivable. You are beneath my contempt.” With that, she got to her feet.
“I should have just cooked the freakin’ ham,” Becky murmured. Then she raised her voice. “Mimi, come back. Sit down,” she said. Mimi’s pace didn’t slow. “If you don’t want to do it for me or for Andrew, do it for Ava.” Becky swallowed hard and forced herself to say the words. “Your granddaughter.”
The pause seemed to stretch out forever. It ended with Mimi turning on her heel. “What,” she said coldly.
Becky hadn’t prepared a speech. She hadn’t prepared to do anything except sit quietly by Andrew’s side. “Let me do the talking,” her husband had said, and she’d agreed because if one thing had become clear in the course of her marriage, it was that she had absolutely no idea what was going on in Mimi’s head or how to make any sense of it, and Andrew, at least, could handle her, even if his bag of tricks amounted to a single shopworn strategy—Give her what she wants. But Andrew either wouldn’t talk or couldn’t. Which left Becky with the floor.
She looked at Mimi, who’d resumed her seat and was glaring at the both of them. The woman who’d ruined her wedding, insulted her and her family, snubbed her mother, guilt-tripped her husband, and dressed her daughter as the world’s littlest streetwalker. She breathed in deeply through her nose. Feel your connection to every living, growing thing, she remembered Theresa telling them in yoga class, back when she and her friends were mothers-to-be. She forced herself to breathe slowly and not see the woman in front of her, with her bird bones and brittle black hair, her threats and demands and pretension. She forced herself instead to imagine Mimi as a baby, an Ava-sized Mimi, standing in her crib, crying, with her little hands wrapped around the bars. Crying and crying with nobody coming to lift her up, nobody coming to help her.
The vision grew so clear that Becky could almost reach out and touch it—the soaked diaper and wet pajamas, the tears on the baby’s face. And she could hear the baby’s cries, the same indignant, self-righteous tone she’d gotten used to from Mimi . . . only imagining those cries from a baby made her hear them differently. She imagined baby Mimi’s wet face, the trembling bow of her lips, the way her breath would catch in a hiccup in her throat before she’d start crying again. Crying and crying and nobody coming to help.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. And she was sorry for the baby in the picture. Where were her parents? Andrew hadn’t told her much about Mimi’s mother and father. They’d died before he was born, when Mimi was a teenager, a year before she’d embarked on her series of marriages. Mimi’s father had been briefly, tremendously successful and then lost everything—bad investments, a partner who cheated him, something about embezzlement. And jail time. For the grandfather or the partner? Andrew wasn’t sure. Mimi’s mother had been strange. “Strange how?” Becky had asked, and Andrew had shaken his head, shrugging, telling her that Mimi wasn’t what you’d call a reliable narrator, and he’d probably never know what the story there really was. All they had to go on was the evidence in front of them, and that evidence suggested damage. What had Lia told her, all those months ago? She’s the way she is because she got hurt.
Becky raised her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
Mimi glared at her, looking ready to spit. “What did you say?” she asked shrilly.
Becky looked at her without seeing her. She was still seeing that baby girl, abandoned in her crib. Come here, baby, she would say and scoop her into her arms, the way she’d done with Ava a thousand times. She would change her diaper, put her in clean clothes, feed her, soothe her, and sing her to sleep. Bye and bye, bye and bye, the moon is half a lemon pie.
Andrew’s fingers were gripping her knee so hard she was sure they’d leave bruises. Becky tried to imagine birds with broken wings, dogs with crushed paws, and the baby in the crib, wailing away, crying for parents who wouldn’t come. She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deserved—when I’m hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me—and how that absence could warp you so that you’d lash out at the people you loved, driving them away when all you wanted to do was pull them closer. And, at that moment, she meant every word of her apology.
“I’m sorry if I overreacted about Christmas,” she said. “I can see now how much it meant to you.”
Mimi’s lips were opening and closing like a fish’s.
“I don’t think I’d ever be comfortable with having a tree in my house, but next year, I’d be happy to help you have a holiday dinner here,” Becky said. “You’ve got more room, anyhow. And two ovens.”
“I . . . you . . . we’ve already missed my granddaughter’s first Christmas,” Mimi said. Her manicured hands were clutching the arms of her chair convulsively. She looked confused, small and old and desperately unhappy. “You were visiting your mother!”
> “Yes,” Becky said calmly. “But just because we visit my mother doesn’t mean we don’t care for you. Ava can have her first Christmas next year,” she said. She curled her toes in her shoes and tried desperately to keep the image of baby Mimi in mind, trying to remember how badly Mimi must have been hurt, instead of remembering the ways that Mimi had hurt them. “Andrew and I know how much you love Ava,” she said. “She’s lucky to have a grandmother like you.”
Mimi bowed her head. Becky watched the other woman grip the arms of her chair. And then she got to see a sight she could never even have imagined. Mimi’s eyelashes were fluttering rapidly. She raised one thin hand to her face and pulled it back, staring at the moisture on her fingertips as if she’d started leaking. Becky wondered how long it had been since Mimi had cried anything that weren’t crocodile tears.
“I’ve got to fix my face,” she said and bolted.
“Okay,” Becky called to her back. “Happy New Year!” And then, not wanting to push her luck, she tugged Andrew to his feet and hurried him out the door.
It was cold but sunny, and the wind blew hard against Becky’s cheeks as they walked along the icy veranda to their car. “What was that about?” Andrew asked, looking as bewildered as a man who’s been bound and gagged to await the executioner’s machine gun, only to find out it fired bubble-gum bullets.
“I don’t know. Milk of human kindness?” She smiled. That was Sarah’s joke about the tres leches cake they served at Mas. When customers asked what the three milks were, she’d say, “Evaporated, condensed, and the milk of human kindness.”
“Milk of human kindness,” Andrew repeated.
“You don’t have to look so shocked. I do feel sorry for her, you know.” She clutched Andrew’s arm as she edged her way around a patch of ice. “She must be so lonely. And she probably doesn’t have any idea of what little girls are like, or what they want, so maybe that’s why she keeps buying Ava all that slut-wear . . .”
“All that what?”
Oh, dear. “Well, you know, all those things that say SEXY or HOTTIE or whatever.”
“She probably just thinks it’s fashionable.”
“I feel sorry for her. I do,” Becky said. Andrew held the door for her and helped her into the passenger’s seat. “And I guess I was thinking about my friends. If Ayinde can forgive Richard and talk with that girl from Phoenix. And if Lia . . .” She sighed and bent her head. “We’ve got it pretty good, you know?” She yawned and stretched in the seat. “Of course, you should feel free to remind me of this the next time she does something outrageous.” But even as she said it, she wasn’t sure there’d be a next time. She suspected—or maybe just hoped—that all of the fight had been knocked out of her mother-in-law.
Or maybe that was too much to hope for. Maybe she would have to take it one day, one week, one holiday at a time, lurching from one crisis and blowup to the next in an endless loop of recrimination and rage. Maybe Mimi would be a misery to them until the day she died. But with so much joy in her life, perhaps, Becky decided, a little misery was in order. It was like the horseradish on the Passover plate—the bitterness that reminded you of how sweet life was.
Andrew pulled onto the highway. “So you’re going to cook Christmas dinner next year?”
“Why not?” Becky said. “It won’t kill me to cook a ham, if it matters so much to her. And as for the things that matter to us—like where we go on vacations or where we live or what we spend our money on or what we name our children . . .”
“We’ll what?” he asked. “Lie to her?”
“We’ll tell her what she needs to know,” she said. “And then we’ll do what we want. What’s best for us and for Ava.” She patted her belly with his hand. “And for the niblet.”
“Ah. The niblet.” He beamed at Becky. “When are we going to tell Mimi about the impending arrival?”
“Let’s wait awhile, okay?” No matter how warm and fuzzy she was feeling toward Mimi, she knew that five and a half months of being quizzed about diet and weight gain and why she was still breast-feeding because surely that couldn’t be healthy would be more than she could take.
“I think you’re incredible,” Andrew said. He cleared his throat. “The day Ava was born, I thought I could never love you more than that, but I do.” He leaned close, touching her face, and kissed her softly. “You amaze me.”
“I love you, too,” she whispered. She tilted her seat back, adjusting the vent so that warm air blew over her knees. “I’m so tired,” she said, yawning.
“Take a nap,” he said and cleared his throat. “And thank you. If I forget to tell you later. Thank you so much.”
“Ain’t no thing,” said Becky. She laced her hands over her belly and closed her eyes. At some point, she dozed, and when she woke up Andrew was backing into a parking spot.
“Andrew?”
“Hmm?” he asked, looking over his shoulder as he steered.
“Do you think we’ll be good parents?”
He put the car in park and turned toward his wife. “I think we already are.”
KELLY
On the twenty-third day of her separation, Kelly opened the mailbox to find two bills, an overdue notice from the library, and a large manila envelope containing a copy of Power magazine.
Kelly went upstairs and sat with the envelope in her lap for a while as Oliver crawled around the floor with his squeaky monkey toy caught in his undercarriage. “Bah!” he yelled. “Bah!” Then he turned around to look at her, and she gave him an encouraging wave and tried to smile. He yelled “Bah!” again and kept crawling forward. Finally, she pulled the flaps of the envelope open. The magazine slid into her lap. And there she was, on the cover, in her horrible lavender sweater with a burp cloth slung over her shoulder, standing in front of the closet, knee-deep in the ruins of her life. The look on her face, underneath the blow-dried hair and careful makeup, could only be described as bewildered. Bewildered and beaten down. Having It All? asked the cover. Why a Working Girl Can’t Win.
She shut her eyes, and the magazine slid onto the floor. Oliver scooched himself over and reached for it with one chubby fist. She captured it in her own hands, guided it away, pulled the subscription card out of Oliver’s mouth, and flipped to the page that Amy Mayhew had paper-clipped open. There was a note attached. Dear Kelly. Thank you so much for your help with the story. As you can imagine, it didn’t turn into quite the celebration my editors had imagined, but I think that what I wound up writing is much more honest—and may be more helpful to the generation of women who come next.
“Helpful,” she said and gave a rusty laugh. She set the baby in his high chair and opened a jar of oatmeal with peaches for his dinner and one for her own. Then she dropped her eyes to the magazine and read the opening sentences, beneath boldfaced words in quotation marks. It took her a minute to recognize the words as her own: “THIS IS SO MUCH HARDER THAN I EVER THOUGHT IT WOULD BE.”
Kelly felt her eyes move almost inadvertently to the third cabinet in the kitchen, the one where they kept the Scotch and the vodka. A nice juice glass full of either one—topped off, perhaps, with one of the leftover Percocets from her C-section—and none of this would hurt so much. She’d done that the first night Steve was gone, when she couldn’t reach Becky or Ayinde or Lia and she couldn’t stop crying. But it was only one step from vodka and prescription painkillers to bourbon and Tab. She was determined not to go down that road, but she was beginning to understand how her mother could have. When your life turned into one big disappointment, a frantic hamster-wheel blur of work and baby with no one to love you or tell you that you were doing it well, bourbon and Tab did start to take on a certain allure.
She sighed and started to read.
By all rights, Kelly O’Hara Day should have the world at her feet.
“Yes, she should,” Kelly murmured, spooning a bite of sweet goop into her mouth.
“Ghee!” cried Oliver. She fed him a bite of his own and kept reading.
&
nbsp; Magna cum laude in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. A promising career in venture capital, followed by success in high-end event planning. Marriage to a Wharton whiz kid. But Baby made trouble.
“Oh, you did not,” Kelly said, slipping another spoonful of oatmeal and peaches into Oliver’s mouth. “It wasn’t your fault. Don’t even read this, sweetie. The media lies.”
O’Hara Day went back to work after a scant twelve weeks of maternity leave. Initially, everyone was excited—the boss, the clients, Day herself, who’d get to keep a foot in the working world while she raised her son, Oliver.
But in the three months since O’Hara Day has been back on the job, nothing’s gone according to plan. Colleagues and clients complain that O’Hara Day, twenty-seven, is distracted and ditzy, absentminded and hard to reach.
Ouch. Kelly squeezed her eyes shut. She knew her work hadn’t been perfect and that there’d been one too many conference calls she’d missed or conducted from home with Oliver in his Ultrasaucer (which frequently turned into Oliver on her lap or Oliver screaming in her ear or Oliver trying to chew the telephone or pull her hair or do both at the same time). There had also, of course, been the ill-fated Dolores Wartz party, and Oliver’s not-so-festive dirty diaper. But still, there was nothing quite like the pain of seeing what your coworkers really thought of you, spelled out in black and white.
In person, O’Hara Day, a tiny, peppy blonde, is friendly and outgoing, and in ten minutes’ time, we’re chatting away like girlfriends. But up close she looks like a woman on the verge of the proverbial nervous breakdown—overextended and frazzled, dependent on a fragile webwork of a babysitter and a husband who works from home to make her working days possible. “This is so much harder than I thought it would be,” she says, sitting in a living room that’s picture perfect only because a few months’ worth of clutter has been shoved behind closet doors. And if O’Hara Day, with her smarts and her savvy and her Ivy League degree, can’t successfully integrate a career and a family, it doesn’t suggest that things for other working mothers are much different—or that thirty-some years after the feminists waged a so-called revolution, the workplace is likely to become a kinder, gentler place for the women who will follow in her footsteps.
Little Earthquakes Page 38
