The Color of Family

by Patricia Jones

  “Oh, you got that one, huh?”

  “I sure did.”

  “I got it myself,” said the woman with the flaming hair, who was now smiling less fervently. “Basically, you think you said nothing, but actually you said no, you’re not headed toward marriage, and that makes me sad because I like Maggie. The two of you seem perfect together.”

  Aaron looked off past the woman for a moment, thinking he’d heard women talk like this before, only it was generally about soap-opera characters, or Ross and Rachel on Friends. So how did it come to pass, he wondered, that his life was so invaded by the concerns of people he didn’t know, would never know, and most likely would never see again? And why did they care? All he had the presence of mind to say this time was, “She’s terrific.”

  Just then, Ellen showed up to save him from giving away secrets he’d not planned to tell. “Ellen,” he said, standing to kiss her, never before so glad to see her as he was at that very moment.

  “Hey there,” she said, returning his kiss.

  “Dr. Barrett, you never told me that Aaron Jackson was your brother.”

  “Oh, I suppose it simply never came up in conversation,” Ellen said. Then she turned to him. “I’ll be ready to leave in about forty-five minutes, if that’s not too long for you to wait. I got a little backed up even in spite of the fact that I had three patients cancel this morning. Anyway, I’ve got these three ladies, and then that’s it.”

  “That’s fine,” Aaron said as he sat back in his seat. Then he leaned over and picked up a magazine from the coffee table without noticing that it was a magazine for expectant mothers. But he flipped it open and said, “I’ll just wait here and read.”

  “Okay,” Ellen said as she turned to leave. Then she looked over her shoulder and said, “You ladies can come with me. Nancy will get you set up in exam rooms. I’ll be right with each of you.”

  Aaron continued turning the pages of the magazine until it occurred to him that he should look at the title of the magazine. Mommy To Be it said. “What the heck is this?” he mumbled beneath his breath as he tossed it back onto the coffee table. It just wouldn’t leave him. That question—“Are you headed toward marriage?” Why he answered so evasively was now pressing down hard on him. He could have said yes, since that was what they were certainly expecting him to say. But he couldn’t say yes, because that wouldn’t have been altogether true. And if he’d said no, well it would have seemed to those women, and even to himself, that he was merely trifling with Maggie, which he wasn’t; at least he didn’t think that’s what he was doing.

  What troubled him most was he seemed to recall that just a month ago, he’d given a similar answer to that very same question at a dinner he’d had with two friends and their lovely female guest who’d just moved to town. Tawna was her name. He’d never forget her or her name because he recalled how he’d come to think of her right after the introduction—the tantalizing tawny Tawna. And when she asked him if he had future marriage plans, he remembered now, with a certain humiliation that served him well as he raked himself over his own freshly laid hot coals, he’d said, “Don’t we all have future marriage plans in one way or another?” The difference between then and now, he realized, was that then, he had a reason for being so evasive—and it lay in the power of an exquisite-looking woman who seduced every one of his senses. But here, in his sister’s office, chatting with three married women, two of them very obviously pregnant, why couldn’t he have just said yes, I am headed toward marriage with Maggie? It troubled him in a way he couldn’t have imagined it ever would, mostly because until now—with that question put to him twice within one month by perfect strangers—the thought of marrying Maggie had never entered his mind. Maybe it was that she was nine years his senior. Maybe it was her college-bound daughter that made him more aware, each and every time he saw her, that Maggie was older. It didn’t much matter, though, because he could never say it out loud. Merely thinking it made him a pig, he knew. So why was he with her?

  There was something about Maggie that had always made him feel as if he’d known her forever. It was a familiarity that he took with its thorns and its blooms. One that made him as comfortable as it at times made him equally uncomfortable. And the only word that came to his mind when trying to define her was tenacious—a quality that, in his opinion, few can carry off with any modicum of grace. Yet Maggie was one who purposely straddled the line between tenacious and insufferable but did not cross it. And that, he supposed, was what kept him with her.

  “So there’re no wedding bells ringing for you and Maggie, huh?” a voice asked him.

  With a sudden turn of his head, he found Sharon smiling at him, expectation and a particular eagerness on her face. He could never be certain, but Aaron thought he knew women and their ways well enough to know when one had plans for him, and this woman, he thought, had rather high hopes for him. So he smiled and replied, “You never know what the future holds.”

  “That’s true enough, but you can certainly have a general idea based on what you want. It sounds to me like you don’t want marriage. At least not with her.”

  Aaron didn’t know whether to be angered or offended by the assumption, or dismayed by the accuracy of what she presumed. With this question, that wasn’t necessarily a question, he knew he had to respond in such a way that would tell the truth, yet would keep the hopes Sharon apparently had for him lying dormant. “Well, Sharon, the move toward marriage is an organic process, and it takes as long as it’s going to take.”

  “I guess,” she noted distractedly. Then she said, “It’s just that you’re a nice guy, Aaron, and I would hate to see you marry hastily out of some sort of loyalty to the history and comfort you may have with her. Trust me when I tell you, that would be a disaster.”

  “I believe you,” he said plainly, as his attention was pulled, but mostly forced by his own will, back to the magazines on the coffee table. What was it about babies that made them unable to inspire men in the same way they inspired women? But as he gave the question a second pass, he thought it might be best to wonder what it was about men that couldn’t be inspired by babies. So he turned back to Sharon, and pointing to the coffee table said, “How does it work for you women when it comes to these babies?”

  Sharon giggled and said, “I’m not so sure I understand what you mean.”

  “Well, what I mean is how is it that a man and a woman can look at a baby, the same baby, or even a picture of a baby and feel entirely different about it?”

  “It’s in our blood to be maternal, Aaron. That’s all.”

  “So what, men don’t have anything in their blood that makes them paternal?”

  Sharon looked up into the fluorescent light, as if hoping to find the answer written in the glow, then said as she looked slowly back at Aaron, “I think it’s different. I think, for men, the baby has to be born and tangible, and it has to be theirs for them to feel what women feel. And even then, I think it’s still different.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right, because I’m sitting here right now and looking at all these little babies on the covers of these magazines and they’re not doing anything for me at all in the way of making me want to have my own kid. I mean, they’re cute and all, but I guess men are just able to get over it.”

  “Yeah, women never get over it.” Then she let out a comforted laugh and continued. “You know, my mother had eight of us, and she still says that she has never gotten over the birth of any of her children. She remembers everything, right down to the smallest detail that, she says, most men would forget.”

  “She’s probably right,” Aaron said with an ironic chuckle. Then he looked off at nothing in particular and continued rather wistfully, “There are some men who have this whole thing about carrying on the bloodline and the family name and so they get all maudlin and melancholy, or at least as maudlin and melancholy as men can get, about wanting to have a baby. That’s never been a thing for me. I figure, if I go the rest of my life without
having a child to carry on my bloodline and family name, I think I’ll still die without regrets.” Then, suddenly self-conscious of the fact that he’d actually said what he’d said aloud, he looked embarrassedly at Sharon and said, “I guess that sounds pretty bad, huh?”

  As if she were somehow disappointed but trying to hide it, Sharon answered, “Well, if that’s how you feel. I don’t know. I just think there’s no point to living if it’s not for the purpose of carrying on the human race.”

  A laugh sneaked up on him with a startling intensity and he had no choice but to let it burst forth. “And you see,” he said, once he caught his breath, “the way I look at it is that there’s always a couple billion people willing to do that, so the human race is going to be just fine without my contribution. I mean, just look at Ellen. If she only has this one kid, our family bloodline will be just fine and she will have given one more contribution to the human race. It all works out in the end.”

  “And what about Maggie?”

  What about Maggie? “Maggie’s got a child,” he pointed out. “Colette.”

  “Yeah, but she’s almost grown, isn’t she? Maggie’s still a young enough woman to have another child.”

  “Quite honestly, Sharon, Maggie and I have never discussed children, so if you want a definite answer on that, I would suggest you go to the source, because I have no idea.” And he was so curt and exact in his tone that the room fell awkwardly silent. And as he watched her get back to whatever it was she was doing, her tightened face telling of her uneasiness, he figured it was best to say nothing else since he had peeled back his own scab on his own raw spot. He thought of apologizing for his sharpness, but then he’d have to explain with more words than he knew or, for that matter, cared to speak. Otherwise, he thought, he could simply let it lie, and then when they spoke again the air would be just as undemanding, as if there had never been a breeze of tension between them. That just might work. So he sat and waited for time to do the only thing it knows to do—pass.

  As he sat with nothing but his thoughts, the woman with the red hair reappeared. Standing before Sharon to make her next appointment, she turned and offered Aaron a fawning smile, to which he responded, “That was quick.”

  “All I had to do was have my blood drawn. This wasn’t a regular office visit. The doctor needs to keep watch on my hormone levels.”

  And as Aaron’s eyes glazed over with the fear that she’d end up telling him even more of what he didn’t need to know, he said, “Oh, I see.”

  Then the other woman appeared, the one who’d been sitting next to him with or without a baby in her womb, and said to the woman already standing there, “I had to have the same thing. My hormone levels were all over the place with my last two, and you know I lost a baby between those two, so Dr. Barrett is watching me like a hawk.”

  “She’s good that way, isn’t she?” the red-haired woman said.

  “Oh, the best,” the other woman said dramatically.

  The red-haired woman turned to Aaron. “You must be so proud.”

  “Yes, proud. I am proud,” Aaron answered instinctively. And even if there had been time to ponder such an inquiry, he thought, pride would be as good a word as any to describe a feeling to which he’d never truly given much thought.

  “Well, I know what I’ll be talking about at dinner tonight,” the not-so-pregnant looking woman said. “I’m going to tell everybody how I was sitting in my doctor’s office and Aaron Jackson from Channel Eleven walks in and sits down, and he’s my doctor’s brother.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” said the other woman. “Of all the places to see him.”

  Aaron smiled thinly and glanced over at Sharon, who regarded him with a certain empathetic smirk. And he thought that it must be more uncomfortable for those like Sharon, observing the fawning, than it was for him at this point in his life as a newsman because, to him, Sharon looked as if she wanted to crawl beneath her desk in shame on behalf of her entire gender. It was an embarrassment with which he could certainly find common ground, as it was no different than his reaction to the men he might see on any given summertime newscast in Orioles caps, or Orioles shirts, or simply dressed from head to toe in orange and black with an Orioles tattoo on their bicep babbling on like star-drunk fools about their devotion to Cal Ripken. But women like these, who will go home and turn a sighting of him into a large chunk of their dinner-hour talk, are a part of his life, and it didn’t much matter that, to him, there was very little about their fascination that made sense. All he could do was accept it graciously and be everything they expected him to be—and that, he knew, was something that varied from person to person, perception to perception, fantasy to fantasy.

  “Aaron, Ellen said you can meet her in her office.” Nancy appeared, snapping him out of his revery.

  As he got up and went past Sharon’s desk, where Nancy stood with the remaining patient, he smiled and said, “Good luck with your baby.”

  “Oh, thank you,” she gushed. “And it was certainly nice meeting you.”

  “Likewise,” was all Aaron said. And as he turned the corner to go into Ellen’s office, he heard the woman whisper to Nancy or Sharon, or both—he couldn’t tell—that he was much more handsome in person than he was on the television. He couldn’t help but feel the relief of having already passed by before she said this, otherwise he’d have to acknowledge the roundabout compliment.

  He stood in the aperture of Ellen’s office, waiting for her to look up from what she was writing. There was no doubt whatsoever that she knew he was standing there, but she would simply not respond in any way to his presence. It was as old as his memory of her as his sister, except that when she did it when they were kids, she’d do it with the sole purpose and hope that he would eventually go away, shoo, like the bothersome gnat he was to her. Why she did it now, though, he could only assign to her absolute obstinacy.

  But then, without looking up from what she wrote, Ellen finally griped, “Are you going to come in and sit down, or are you going to stand there watching me?”

  Aaron walked slowly into her office and over to the chair, and as he sat, said, “Why do you do that—just act as if you don’t know I’m there?”

  “Why do you just stand there if you know I know you’re there?”

  Aaron laughed, then replied, “All right, just forget it.”

  “You brought it up,” she said nearly beneath her breath. Then she looked up at last and went on, “So where do you want to eat? I would suggest the cafeteria, but while Johns Hopkins is known for its many areas of medical brilliance, I must say that their culinary talent is no less their Achilles’ heel than it is for any other hospital, or airline, for that matter.”

  “I thought you might want to go downtown, or something. Or Fells Point. That might be nice, huh? Go to Fells Point and eat some seafood. Some catfish, maybe. Or even crab cakes.”

  “I’m pregnant, remember. I shouldn’t eat shellfish because they’re scavengers. And the catfish can only be farm-raised.”

  “Fine,” Aaron said, his tone suggesting a mild annoyance with the rules. “I’ll ask for the pedigree of the catfish. Now, let’s go.”

  “Okay, but you’ll have to bring me back here to get my car this afternoon,” Ellen said as she gathered papers and stacked them neatly on the side of her desk. When she was done tidying up her desk, she sat back in her chair and asked, “Aaron, do you know if Ma nursed us?”

  Aaron considered the question for a few seconds, shifted with a particular itchiness at the idea, then replied, “No, I don’t know, Ellen, and I’ve really never given it a lot of thought, or any, for that matter.”

  “You’ve never been curious about it, you know, about the bonding?”

  “Ellen, I said I don’t think about it. It’s just not important.”

  Ellen looked at him with incredulity beaming from her eyes. “You could not be more wrong. Bonding through breast-feeding is the most powerful bond in the whole world.”

&n
bsp; He inhaled a deep breath then sighed it out with a low moan. Aaron wished, more than anything, that he understood all these womanly, motherly changes his sister was going through, and he could only hope that the understanding of it all would give him more patience with her, because he had none now. “Ellie, why are we talking about this?”

  “Because I had this patient in here this morning who’s pregnant, and she’s got a six-year-old son she’s nursing. When we talked about weaning him, she said she still nursed him because her mother didn’t nurse her, and she felt the void in their relationship for her entire life.”

  “So, I’m confused,” Aaron said with narrowing eyes. “How does this have anything to do with whether or not Ma nursed us?”

  “Because, Aaron, don’t you see? There was kind of a void of closeness between us and Ma, and if she didn’t nurse us maybe that’s why we don’t have as close a bond as we could have with her.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ellie. I think we’re pretty close with Ma.”

  “Close, yes, but bonded, connected. I don’t think so.” She scooted her chair closer to her desk and leaned forward, toward Aaron. She said quietly, “Aaron, don’t you remember when Clayton Cannon won that piano competition? You were ten, I was fourteen, and he was seventeen or maybe eighteen and Ma kept going on and on about him winning that piano competition.”

  “Tchaikovsky Piano Competition,” Aaron said quietly.

  “What?”

  Then he spoke up. “It was called the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition and he was eighteen.”

  “So you do remember. Well, I know I’ll never forget it because that day when Ma found out that he had won it, she went out and got that record…what was it?”

  “Something by Beethoven,” Aaron said as he listened to the notes that had been bored into his head years ago tinkle through his memory.

  “That’s right!” Ellen said excitedly. “She played it over, and over, and over again. It nearly drove me insane. It was something by Beethoven. ‘Pathétique.’ Isn’t that what it was called?”