The Awkward Age

by Francesca Segal

  “Let’s not go there, it’s entirely insane. You would have a grandchild related to me and Daniel. And you and I would have a shared grandchild. It’s pretty fucked up. It might end up looking like both of us.” He raised her palm gently to his lips. “But you’re my family now. And that means any baby Gwen has, any time, with any man, is going to be our grandchild. It doesn’t have to— This isn’t . . . isn’t anything but an accident. Whoever our kids end up marrying and having children with, you and I are going to be a team and we’ll share all those grandbabies between us, and when it happens it will be awesome. We’ll look after them together and enjoy them and then give them back when they cry and go back to our gardening and our vacationing and—and shuffleboard. As long as Nathan doesn’t marry The Demon Barber of Seville we’ll be in clover. Give it a decade, decade and a half, and we’ll see what’s cooking.”

  “I know. Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me.” And then, to share her pain, to halve her responsibility, he offered a sacrificial lamb, an echo of the unreasonable resentment he knew she must harbor, “It’s my dumb son who knocked her up.”

  “When can she not be pregnant again?”

  “Pretty fast.”

  “How fast? This weekend?”

  “Not that fast. A week. Ten days, maybe.”

  “I could literally strangle them both.”

  “It’s a legitimate solution.”

  She was silent for a moment. “Can we grow tomatoes, too, and basil? And olives, for olive oil.”

  “Then I think we need a donkey to turn the press. Or a mule, whatever that may be; I don’t know, we didn’t have mules in Dorchester when I was growing up; they might be a form of female footwear. You’ll wear nothing but mules when you ride the donkey to press the olives. With our buffalo we’ll have an entire farm devoted to the Caprese salad.” He looked at his watch. “It’s two a.m., baby, let’s go to bed. This will still be godawful in the morning, I guarantee.”

  She laughed, and his heart lifted at the sound, the promise of future recovery, the first new buds after a hard winter.

  “Okay. Do you swear?”

  “I swear. You’ll have hours and hours of misery and stress tomorrow. Days until it’s resolved. Let’s go to sleep now so we can really appreciate it in daylight in all its sordid glory.” He took her face between his hands and kissed her, deeply. “I love you more than anything, and I promise you we will put this right together.”

  25.

  It was impossible that her mother had gone to sleep angry when Gwen so longed for her; never before had Gwen, in need, been left alone to cry. Her first thought on waking was that, despite evidence to the contrary, there must have been some mistake, half expecting to find Julia sitting quietly beside her bed, as she had so many nights in childhood. Her second realization was that it was still only four a.m., and many hours lay ahead before she could make right what yesterday had gone so very wrong. She felt feverish and queasy. She needed her mother to understand—she could not be pregnant, she was only a child, she needed to be swept up, herself a babe in arms. Her unhappiness was abject, and complete.

  She lay in a mounting agony of indecision. Not once since James invaded had Gwen been up to the top floor. To enter their room was impossible. To wait, untenable. She found herself in a state of ferocious concentration, hoping her mother would sense her need and float downstairs, gather her into safety and rescue her. As a little girl she would remain in bed and shout, louder and louder, till the thud of approaching footsteps heralded relief; in later years she had realized that deliverance came faster if she flew to her parents’ bedroom, though the midnight flight itself held unknown terrors. She would gather her strength and run up the stairs and throw open the door into the moon-softened darkness. On the left would be her father; on the right, her mother. Always a space between them, Gwen-sized. Julia fast asleep was all wrong, for how could she guard Gwen in her own unconsciousness? Off-duty, vulnerable, her mind who knew where? Gwen would whisper for her over and over until Julia opened her eyes, and then her arms, and made right whatever was wrong.

  How soon could this be made right so that her mother might forgive her, and how would it be? She did not know what abortions entailed but found herself picturing a high-necked white cotton nightgown, strawberry jelly and melting vanilla ice cream, the mint-green paper curtains of the hospital ward on which she had eaten these after the removal of her tonsils. Julia on a camp bed, by her side. Loving, ministering, proud of her brave girl. The thing now inside her was only the size of a poppy seed, far smaller than a tonsil, and could surely be shaken loose. A speck. She felt twitchy and restless, and to think of cells colonizing and proliferating made her skin crawl. There was not a moment to lose; she must have freedom from it. She could not quite imagine Nathan’s reaction but surely he would not be angry? He would support her, and they would come through it bound tightly together with the dark velvet bonds of a secret, but while her mother felt such paralyzing disappointment, Nathan remained out of focus. She couldn’t breathe; she longed for absolution. One could not stay angry about a mistake the size of a poppy seed.

  Upstairs she listened and, hearing only silence, knocked softly. Nothing. After a moment she pushed the door open and took a single step into what once had been her parents’ bedroom. As she adjusted to the gloom she could see Julia, sound asleep, not on the expected right but in the unimagined center. Entwined with James, face-to-face, breathing one another’s slow breath. A beefy bare arm slung over her delicate mother.

  Gwen stared, arrested by curiosity, and revulsion. What betrayal had filled the last waking moments before this easy, slumbering union? I’m sorry about my daughter, or perhaps, Never mind, nothing matters as long as we have each other. Sleep had softened her mother’s face to girlish smoothness as she lay in her lover’s arms; her brow was open, her hand resting upon James’s bare chest. She did not look like a woman worried for her only child. She looked contented. She looked as Gwen had never known her.

  Gwen backed away and closed the door, softly. On the landing she stood very still for a long time. She feared she might be sick. What truths had lain hidden in plain sight: she was alone. Fuck you, she thought, and then whispered it louder, to steady herself. She was drowning; she must evaporate her terror with burning rage.

  Fuck you.

  You didn’t choose me.

  You don’t get to decide.

  • • •

  A SERIES OF THUDS and scrapings brought Julia downstairs early the next morning. The night before, James had steadied and calmed her, and they had already taken decisive action. Falling asleep she’d remembered Claire, James’s former registrar, young and approachable and direct, with an easy manner that Gwen would appreciate. She had asked James to e-mail her and they’d received an instant reply, though it was almost three a.m.—Claire was on nights. She would go home to sleep and would then make herself available for a checkup, a scan, a chat, a cup of tea. Julia descended the stairs aching to put her arms around her daughter who must—now that anger no longer occluded her vision she understood—feel so lost and frightened. Julia longed to tell her she’d taken steps to help. But overnight, Gwen had made radical alterations of her own.

  Apparently unaided, Gwen had wrestled the mattress off Nathan’s single bed, deconstructed the slatted base, and reassembled it in her own room. What had once been Nathan’s room now resembled a university study, their pair of pine desks back to back on opposite walls. Gwen’s room, the larger of the two, now contained nothing but an improvised double bed. Julia entered to find Gwen in a burst of furious energy, pulling taut a fitted sheet to unite the two single mattresses. She was red-faced and slightly damp with sweat, and did not look up as Julia came in.

  “What are you doing?”

  Gwen did not answer. She was on all fours, straining to tuck the sheet beneath the corner. Then she succeeded and sat back on her heels, satis
fied.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Moving a mattress.”

  “You moved the mattress. And a divan.”

  “Yup.”

  Julia sat on the edge of the newly enlarged bed. “Can you stop, please? I need to talk to you. I’ve made an appointment with James’s friend—”

  “—Nearly done, one sec.”

  “Gwen, stop right now.”

  “What?”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m nesting,” spat Gwen, with heavy irony. “Can you stand up, please, I want to put the duvet down.”

  Julia stood up, casting around for something on which to fix, and feeling faintly hysterical. “You’ve lost your mind. This is not your house, Gwendolen. Darling, I know you’re upset but you can’t just— Help me, please, you will not believe this,” she told James, who had just appeared in the doorway with a tray, and three cups of tea. He peered in, looking bewildered. “What’s going on in here?”

  “Gwen moved the beds. Herself. She’s apparently taken up weightlifting.”

  “Did you have permission to do that?” James asked, and was ignored. He went to set his tray down on Gwen’s desk, but Gwen’s desk was no longer there. He cast around for another surface and then finally set the tray on the floor.

  “She could have hurt herself, couldn’t she? They’re heavy. Please tell her. Gwen, sit down, you’re upsetting me.”

  “Moving heavy furniture alone is not smart,” James agreed. “But also, and more to the point, there’s no damn way in hell that you are sharing a room with my son. Are you out of your damn mind with this? And now? Today? Seriously?”

  Gwen was shaking a pillow into a pillowcase and began to snap it violently, like a terrier breaking the neck of a small animal. Her teeth were gritted.

  “Gwen,” Julia pleaded, “please stop. Just sit down, darling. We need to talk. It’s going to be okay.”

  Gwen set down the pillow and began punching it violently into shape. “I am not an idiot and I actually don’t need to ask permission to share a room with the father of my baby. I’m fine, there’s nothing wrong with me, I’m perfectly capable of moving a bed, I’m not a fucking child, and obviously we’ll have to share a room when the baby comes so we can do nights together and you are not the only adults in this fucking house, you’re not the only relationship that counts around here, and I don’t have to ask permission to move things around in my own room. Why are you even in here?” She wiped away angry tears with the back of her hand.

  “What are you talking about? Father of what baby?”

  “You don’t control me! You don’t get to decide every single thing that happens!”

  “Come on.” James rested a hand on Julia’s shoulder. “I don’t know what the hell’s happening but this is not productive right now. We’ll be downstairs when you’re ready to explain yourself like a civilized adult,” he went on, and Gwen wondered how he could still be standing there stolidly in her doorway, how his heart could continue to beat under the annihilating pressure of her hate for him. He had taken everything from her that counted, but what little remained to her, she would keep.

  • • •

  LATE ON SATURDAY MORNING Nathan came back from Charlie’s house to find his family waiting for him in the kitchen. His father and Julia were pale-faced and grave, and before he’d had a chance to make a much-needed cup of sweet, strong coffee and address his ravenous hunger they imparted unimaginable news about his girlfriend—at that moment flushed and weeping noisily in the corner. Nathan made an odd, involuntary noise in response. A hoarse bark of a laugh; a single, mirthless staccato of irritated disbelief. He felt nothing except a surge of impatience that with their histrionics they were disturbing the warm afterglow of a perfect evening. The last big night out, they’d all decided, till summer. He was looking forward to fried eggs on toast, and then a long, hot shower to wash away the grime of the bar, and the two cigarettes he had accidentally smoked on the walk home. But everybody was now looking at him, expecting a reaction. In the corner Gwen’s sobs grew louder and she surged forward and fell upon his neck, her face blotched and swollen, snorting raggedly, as if she had been crying for hours and was only now clearing and loosening rolls of mucus from the back of her throat. He was alarmed and briefly repulsed by this transformation but he folded his arms around her narrow back to reassure her. It was only when over her shoulder he noticed his father’s expression that his stomach twisted, and tightened. This was not Gwen’s solitary tragedy. Hot tears of panic began to rise and he held her tighter, for his own comfort.

  He did not have time to speak to her. Almost immediately she was whisked away by her mother to see a woman who would talk to her about “options” and the noise and drama departed, together with his unrecognizable beloved. The kitchen was silent and sun filled. His father spoke softly. This must be a godawful shock. But Claire was calm and a pragmatist, James explained, and would inject a little reality into the situation. It would soon be resolved. Nathan felt his panic recede and a numbing wash of disbelief rise in its place. A drowsy numbness, he thought, where do I know that phrase, or perhaps I’ve coined it myself? Worth remembering—though “numbness” is a bit clunking. His head throbbed. Gwen herself had only suspected since yesterday, James went on, and it was not enough time for anything but stubborn, reflexive posturing. She could not mean what she said, and in fact last night she had clearly wanted the opposite. Nathan must have so many questions—(Nathan did not)—but he was not to listen to or be terrified by any of the girl’s wild assertions. A nightmare episode, uncomfortable, frightening, perhaps a wakeup call that one was not as mature as one believed. Nathan should know that James loved him and wasn’t mad, even though it was a goddamn stupid needless screwup. Things would change around here. Time to knuckle down, refocus, reestablish priorities. Nathan must be so angry.

  Nathan, who wasn’t, pressed his temples. James fried him eggs and buttered him toast. Nathan said, “Okay,” meekly, and began his breakfast.

  “It’s just about attention, it’s nothing to do with you,” James continued, battering the heel of the loaf into the narrow slot of the toaster with unnecessary force, “and we’ll figure it out.” Nathan took this statement at face value, and as all the explanation required. He had no wish to think deeper, or further. He had taken up the reassuring, containing phrase “nightmare episode” as an accurate description of the terrible five minutes during which his girlfriend had been wailing beside the refrigerator. That had been intense, but now he wished to burrow into his hood and sleep. It was a further unpleasant jolt to learn that before he slept he would have to help his father carry a divan and a mattress back to his own bedroom—the temporary theft of his single bed had been if anything a greater shock, and with it an attempt upon his autonomy and very manhood, he’d felt—but Gwen was obviously in distress, and would need careful handling until the nightmare episode was over. After the sheets had been restored he muttered, “Keats!” rather sorrowfully to his father, and then fell into a dreamless slumber, without pausing to remove jeans, or sweatshirt. James kissed his brow, reiterated softly that he loved him, and departed.

  Nathan had surprised himself with his devotion to Gwen, for he had believed himself sincerely in love with Valentina and had since learned something deeper. With Gwen he was able to be himself, or at least, whichever version of himself felt truest at the time. She loved him without limits or conditions, and without apparent judgment. As he was, so she took him. Schooled by his friends to be quick and judgmental and to seize gleefully upon the slips of others, he was humbled by Gwen’s simple, earnest loyalty. In their private spaces, she had made it safe for him to be sometimes wrong, or undecided. With Gwen it became less frightening to be fallible, because she resolutely refused to believe him so. If he were in trouble, he would not doubt her steadfastness. This weekend she was not rational, but his father assured h
im it was an episode, so he would stick by her until she had recovered. It was about attention, James had said, and once she’s well and had truly traumatized Julia, there was no damn way she’d go through with any baby. Well, Nathan remembered what it felt like to be sidelined in a parental drama and was anxious to believe this explanation. No one his age could be pregnant. He was not such a statistic—he went to private school, for God’s sake.

  • • •

  NATHAN AWOKE IN THE AFTERNOON to the return of the women, and of fear. By dinnertime Gwen was vomiting copiously and pitiably, as if the revelation of her condition had unleashed her symptoms like hounds uncaged. She did not have anything resembling a glow about her but instead after only a few hours had begun to look haggard and almost feral, like something, he thought, swept in off the moors. Claire’s celebrated pragmatism had had no discernible effect. During the brief moments she was not on her knees in the bathroom Gwen lurched from a soft-voiced, reasonable calm, stating her position with the deliberate, even tones of a well-trained customer service agent, and a moment later would be unhinged by an imperceptible provocation, wild-eyed and snarling at James and her mother like Bertha Rochester. For Nathan she had only words of love, and of contrition, but through all of Saturday evening and most of Sunday they were alone for only fleeting snatches.

  In the end it was decided that when term began the next morning he would go to back to boarding, as planned. Regret could be stoked and fostered into a full-time activity but it was not a very constructive one and, as the stalemate continued, it became clear that there wasn’t much Nathan could actually do. The baby about whom they all raved and ranted would be—an unimaginable hypothetical—his baby. And yet when mother and daughter clashed, eyes flashing, hands on hips, or more bewilderingly, crying softly in one another’s arms, no oxygen remained. The tears and slammed doors, the ragged apologies and immediate retractions: Nathan had no place in these scenes. Neither Gwen nor Julia thought to ask him what he wanted. Instead he retreated behind his father. It became harder and harder to believe that it would all, as James continued to promise with grim determination, be okay. Gwen had lost her mind and so far showed no signs of recovering it. He missed his mother, and longed to be at home.