The Awkward Age

by Francesca Segal

  “I know I sound insane. And even a few days ago I would have said it’s the worst luck in the world but yes, really really really I think this is my good luck. I have never felt more certain of anything in my life, I was meant to have this little grape, I’m its mother already. I feel it. It wasn’t what I planned but now it’s happened.” She beat a small fist above her heart, tightly clenched. “I feel it, this is who I’m meant to live for. I’m not against it or anything; if you’d asked me before, I would have said I’d totally have an abortion and feel relieved and we’d plan our lives all neatly and go to university first, blah, blah, blah, but I don’t think things happen like you plan, do they? And this way I’ll take, like, six months or a year out now, and then go back to everything and go to uni a year late and just start my job one year later. It will be like, my gap year.”

  “I don’t think having a kid is much like a gap year. It’s not like, I don’t know, counting starfish on some eco mission in the Philippines. It’s not hiking the Inca trail.”

  “But I would never want to hike the Inca trail. Don’t look at me like that, you’re making me laugh and I’m being totally serious. I’m not that type, I’m a homebody. Compared to most of the country we’re rich, really, and obviously I’ll get a job part time or whatever, but I know my mum will help look after it once it’s here, because she’ll want me to go back to school. They were probably going to have a baby themselves.” She lifted her chin, defiant, and an indecipherable expression crossed her face. Her eyes flashed. “Now they won’t have to.”

  Nathan glanced at her oddly. “Isn’t your mother, like, fifty?”

  “No!” Gwen looked wary. “She’s forty-seven.”

  “I mean, it now seems fairly obvious the men of the Fuller family have supersperm”—here Nathan paused, dusting lint or perhaps falling confetti from his imaginary epaulettes—“but I don’t think even supersperm can do much with forty-seven. Why do you think they’d even want another kid anyway? In five years my dad will be sixty. There’s no way. They’re just getting rid of us and starting their new phase or whatever, it would be craziness. My dad goes on about whisking your mom off into the sunset to hear Scriabin or Messiaen or whatever. He can’t wait to be done with school fees.” Nathan reverted to their own case. “And what if taking the Pill has like, fried it in there?”

  “They might have done. They might.” Tears threatened.

  “Okay, okay, if you say so, they might.”

  “They won’t anymore!” She stroked his arm and her voice softened. “We make such a good team. We’ve grown up more than our friends already; think about Katy or Charlie or anyone. We’ve had to.”

  Nathan had no other way to get through to her, and could not raise his voice. She shifted slightly, and her shadow fell across his face so that after the dazzling glare of the sunshine he could see again, and with this fleeting clarity of vision he spoke, as frankly as he dared. “I’m not ready for a baby. I’m not ready to be a father. I, I just don’t want to. Please don’t—I can’t.”

  “I think you’re ready. I think you’ll be amazing.” She lay down beside him again and inched closer, curled on her side, one leg slung over his, her hand resting lightly on his chest. After a moment he heard her breath change and realized, startled, that she had fallen heavily asleep.

  When on the warpath both his parents were formidable in their own way, but his father’s love for him was vast, he knew, and could conquer cities. James would always protect him. He had not felt able to present Gwen with some home truths, as his father had instructed, nor to threaten, as his mother had commanded, but at least all the adults were in agreement and he had only to survive down this topsy-turvy rabbit hole a little longer; parents were parents and ultimately she would not be allowed to go through with it. Surely there was no need for his throat to tighten like this; no need for the tears that threatened, again, again.

  The sun had moved and bright stripes now fell across Gwen’s face. As carefully as he could, he maneuvered himself from beneath her hand and sat up, leaning forward so that the shadow of his back would protect her pale, unaccustomed skin. For the sake of the imaginary film crew he dropped his head into his hands, an exquisite picture of broken, masculine despair.

  28.

  “Please don’t even joke about deliveries. This obviously cannot happen.”

  “Well, obviously not,” Pamela snapped, her voice made tinny by the speakerphone. “Someone has to knock some sense into her. I can’t believe Nathan was such a bloody wet blanket about it, I told him what to say.”

  James and Pamela had been speaking every day for the last terrible fortnight, so she was well aware that there had been no change. Gwen had moved beyond the reach of all reason, as if beneath a dome of thick glass through which nothing, no sound, no sense, could penetrate. She had the blank-eyed conviction of the religious zealot, and the zealot’s placid, maddening pity for those who didn’t see the light. She was having the baby, she could do it, she’d been reading about it on the Internet, she had an instinct, a second sense; they just needed to have faith. James found it hard to look at her. How was it possible that one spoiled, angry teenager had wrested control of all their lives?

  “Anyway,” Pamela went on, “speaking of deliveries, you delivered our boy back to school. He sounds like a different child; you’d think he was at Disneyland. It’s heartbreaking. My beloved little boy. I’m driving on the freeway in the sunshine and I was feeling such lightness thinking, yes, he’s going to be okay, my baby’s going to be himself again, but now I’m questioning the wisdom of his absence. He should be processing, he’s deeply in denial. It’s dangerous. He should be fighting to prevent it before it’s too late, that’s the key here, isn’t it? You can’t do anything from a place of denial. For God’s sake, he can be home a few weeks and then go back to boarding once it’s dealt with; he’s the only one with any influence; he’s got to tell her as many times as it takes that she’s being a bloody moron. I don’t know what went wrong when they spoke on the Heath, I couldn’t have prepped him any better but when I spoke to him just now he sounded manic and was wittering on about spending his gap year volunteering in a South African clinic. It’s out of sight and utterly totally bizarrely out of mind.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “That’s what Gwen said. Ha, ha. Anyway, so you see. I did mention that by the time this supposed gap year rolls around he’ll have a six-month-old and won’t be gapping anywhere, but it didn’t seem to register. Total denial.” In the background James could hear the voice of the satellite navigation commanding Pamela to keep left ahead. “But between us, I will say I hated making every word of that speech to him. I don’t want to be Mean Mummy, the voice of doom and responsibility, but I was trying to scare him. Surely she’ll listen to him if he’s insistent enough, if he collapses when they talk face-to-face, then he must e-mail her from school like I’ve instructed. That is, assuming she can read. I’ve written him a draft. I want my baby traveling the world, carefree, with girlfriends in Argentina and Italy and Australia and Japan, learning his heart, expanding his horizons. I always tell him, if you call all your girlfriends ‘Darling’ it will save you the trouble of keeping their names straight. You know something, he’s having that bloody gap year if it kills me, whatever I said to him. If she wants it so much, she can look after it. What was the point of— Wait, what? One second, the road’s— I need to read the signs. The satnav’s saying North-South and the road’s saying East-West. Okay, right. What was I saying? Oh, yes. I wanted him to fly. I did not envisage him trapped in the suburbs with a sulky little teen bride and a bawling bundle. It’s not what I wanted for his soul.”

  “I hope you didn’t make teen bride jokes with Nathan. We’ve had enough dumb moves.”

  “Are you kidding? I told him I’d disown him for his stupidity. Luckily it hadn’t crossed his mind, he sounded suitably horrified. Why the bloody bollocks is there an exit here? One sec
ond. I’m going to call you back, I’ve gone wrong.”

  • • •

  SOMETHING HAD GONE WRONG for Pamela lately, and not simply with her navigation. Her very identity was in conflict.

  Her office at the clinic was a parlor. No hierarchical furniture arrangements, no barriers of desks or intimidating swivel chairs that spoke of diplomas and educational advantages and a disconnection from the common lives of those she sought to help. Instead, soft, womanish furniture—soft sofas, pairs of matching, soft egalitarian armchairs. And in this safe, cushioned space women cried and cried about men. About what had been done to them. About what had been sown in them by men. Biology itself dictated who was taking possession of whom; that was the oldest metaphor, the oldest reality. It was there in the syntax—women were never the subject, only the object, subject to a man. And yet two brains make a sequence of decisions; two bodies unite and two people should face the consequences. With the women in her office Pamela sympathized, and raged, and helped. The men must be made to take equal responsibility. They must.

  But—when she thought of Nathan, when she considered her sweet son, his puff-chested naïveté, his ebullience, his grin, she felt that something essential had been stolen from him that he had simply been too innocent to guard. Gwen, predatory and conniving beyond her years, had entrapped him. Some women did, we were not all passive, not all united in benign and supportive sisterhood, after all. Seeking revenge upon her mother, or a means to get her claws irretractably into Nathan (for he was manifestly out of her league, only available because of this accident of circumstance; of this Pamela felt quite certain), or perhaps just wanting a warm, responsive living dolly to cuddle, she had attacked—mugged was the best word—had mugged Pamela’s little boy. It was almost as if— She toyed with the word that had risen spontaneously to the surface. No, all right, she conceded, defensive against herself, it wasn’t quite like that. But something like it. Certainly a violation.

  She had not gone wrong. She found her exit and after leaving the slip road redialed James, who answered immediately and said, “Look, maybe he should be around but you can’t imagine how godawful it’s been in the house with Julia and that girl at each other’s throats; I just wanted him out of it. The boy deserves some peace and quiet to study now.”

  Pamela whistled through her teeth. Ahead she saw a drive-thru Dunkin’ Donuts and realized with a flash of grateful recognition that a large iced coffee would elevate this journey from tedious to transcendent. She slowed and turned, her mood already transformed. “What a trip. Do you remember when he begged for that Japanese fighting fish? And then he forgot to clean it out and it suffocated. I retract what I said, I actually think it’s a gift that he’s away during the week and he can breathe. Charlie came into his room while we were on the phone and he sounded so happy to be with his friends again. They’re good boys, with all their high fives and weird Masonic handshakes.”

  “I asked the other day if he’d told Charlie about the baby and he looked at me like I’d lost my mind and I thought, you know what? Let him have his denial. If we can’t change her mind in the next few weeks, he won’t have much longer to be a kid.”

  “Oh, Jamesy,” Pamela breathed, back in the seductive tone she assumed when she felt he was no longer opposing her. He could picture her quite clearly leaning forward, steepling her fingers and offering beyond them the musky darkness of a substantial cleavage, and an outrageous pout of her lips. In fact, she was idling at the mouth of the Dunkin’ Donuts takeout lane, reading the menu with greedy pleasure. “He’d still be a baby. He’d just be a baby with a baby. Which is precisely why you cannot let it happen. We’re depending on you now; all these random people are your bloody responsibility. Please give your son a kick up the arse and get him to fucking deal with it.”

  29.

  Philip had been disappointed in Julia before, saddened that in her guilty indulgence she succumbed to Gwendolen’s rages. Gwen had been sent to a progressive school at which the delayed gratifications of discipline and academic success were sacrificed in favor of immediate comfort and coziness, and which placed primary emphasis on the value of imaginative self-expression, time that elsewhere might have been devoted to the studying of parts of speech or long division. Even so, Gwen had never been made to go to lessons, nor to do what little homework she had, nor to help her mother around the house. She had not been taught, or helped, to see her mother as a differentiated individual, for both Julia and Gwen found pleasure in the obsessive and intricate fulfilling of Gwen’s needs, and this shared interest bound them. She had never been told, “no.” Ever since Daniel’s final diagnosis, Julia had devoted her life to smoothing away tiny quotidian discomforts like the ultimate, inexhaustible celebrity fixer, toiling to compensate for that one, huge, unrelenting sorrow. But giving Gwen what she wanted did not mean it was what she needed. “Babies protest if one confiscates the steak knife they’ve grabbed,” Iris had observed, during one of their lengthy analyses, “it doesn’t mean one lets them play with weapons.” Philip agreed and had always agreed—Julia ought to have confiscated the knife long ago, and had the foresight and strength and conviction to withstand the howls. To parent well, sometimes one makes one’s children unhappy, yet Julia had never had any ambition for her daughter’s future besides a nonspecific “happiness.” She doesn’t have to be an astrophysicist; all I want is for her to be happy. She spoke of it as though such a state somehow precluded hard work, or discipline, or focus. He and Iris discussed it interminably. Weren’t there happy astrophysicists? But Philip had always dissuaded Iris when she announced her intentions of wading in, and for that he, too, now felt complicit. They should have spoken. He should have braved Julia’s unhappiness by speaking out—he himself was guilty of the same indulgence.

  • • •

  IT WAS PASSOVER and Passover was somehow unavoidable, even for so lax and assimilated a family. James’s suggestion that they “pass on Passover” this year was tempting but was as unrealistic as canceling Christmas. And so they were assembling at Iris’s house for the first time, aping normality, just a fortnight after the bombshell. Iris would almost be choked by the commands she wished to issue, by the speeches she longed to give, and Philip alone would hear them all, over and over on a loop inside his head. Julia had already warned them both—it’s not the place to attack her, if we want her to see sense, then ganging up will backfire; if this really has to happen, then let’s just have a nice family evening—but restraint was not Iris’s forte. She would need an outlet, and there was no such edict in place against attacking Philip.

  “You can spare me the sanctimony,” Iris told him sharply when he arrived, though he hadn’t spoken. She signaled toward the kitchen with the paper-wrapped bunch of crimson tulips he’d presented. “Go through. If you hush me again, I shall go wild. I’ll be shtum; as instructed, just don’t repeat it. Don’t even think it.”

  It would not help for him to say, “I didn’t say anything.” She had heard his thoughts. Together, they had exhausted every iteration of every argument. So much of their map was covered in this old terrain—familiar pitfalls and ravines into which they fell and then revolved together, uselessly. They were trapped in their old roles and their own selves.

  Gwen appeared behind her grandmother holding a bowl of cashews, which she was posting into her mouth with the regular swipe of a metronome. Her lovely hazel eyes were blackened with too much makeup, her freckles partially erased with something powdery and pale. “Grandpa,” she said, smiling uncertainly from beneath her lashes, and wiped a salty hand on her jeans before coming forward to embrace him with her free arm. “Cashew?”

  “Not just yet, thank you. How are you, maidele?”

  “Fine. A bit . . . have to keep eating or I feel sick.” She colored.

  Philip watched Iris drift upstairs without obvious purpose, repelled away from their granddaughter like a slow, elegant magnet. Keeping Iris silent would be impossible if Gwe
n kept referring to her pregnancy, even obliquely. Gwen barely seemed abashed. She seemed almost jaunty. He felt an urgent longing to go home.

  In the kitchen he found James laying the table. As they exchanged greetings Philip held out his hand for a bunch of cutlery, to help.

  “No, it’s almost done, thanks. How are you?”

  Philip lowered himself into the chair he hoped Iris would permit him to occupy for the evening. She had strong ideas about seating plans and might well, though it was only family, have a configuration for this dinner scrawled on the back of a notecard. She was not above asking people to move, if they’d installed themselves somewhere that displeased her. “Fine, thank you. How have you all been?”

  James gave Philip a long look. “Put it this way. Blood. Frogs. Pestilence. Cattle disease. Whatever. It all sounds better than twenty-four hours in our house. I must tell you, I’m ashamed. I feel I must apologize to you for my son’s part in all this. You and Iris must have been very shocked.”

  “Yes,” said Philip, simply. “But you have no need to apologize.”

  “Well, I’m deeply sorry nonetheless. And now we must set it all aside this evening to contemplate the Exodus, so I’m told. I’ve been deputized as bartender; can I get you something? I intend to drink heavily; I advise you to join me.”

  “Nathan’s not here this evening?”

  “No, we decided . . . He’s studying at his friend’s house for the night. I felt . . . Do you know where the corkscrew is? I just felt he needed . . .” James seemed unable to complete any of these sentences. It seemed likely that Nathan was avoiding Gwen, or all of them, and Philip found it hard to blame him. He, too, had dreaded this evening. He began the arduous process of standing from his seat and abandoned it with relief when James said, “Here it is. There’s only red, for the seder.”