The Solomon Sisters Wise Up

by Melissa Senate

She beamed. “I could interview everyone in my Lamaze class!”

  “Let’s do it!” I said. “We’ll shove it in Astrid’s face!”

  “So when are you going to tell Acid that you’re pregnant?” she asked.

  “A few minutes before I go on maternity leave.”

  She laughed. “By the way, Sarah, congratulations,” Danielle said. “Um, if you have any questions about anything, you know who to come to.”

  I nodded and headed back to my desk, aware that if she were really the asshole I always thought she was, she would have asked me a few questions, namely, Who’s the father? That guy you’ve been dating for the past couple of months? How are you going to manage?

  How I was going to manage was still beyond me. But the seven new e-mails I received in the past twenty minutes from Ally—links to pregnancy Web sites—would at least take care of the info factor. Amazing. The woman was clearly having serious marital troubles, yet she still found time to send me links about the importance of taking prenatal vitamins and how prenatal yoga classes would make delivery all the easier.

  I picked up the phone and called Ally’s cell. She answered on the first half ring as though she were waiting for an important call. “Ally,” I whispered, “I have an ultrasound appointment at twelve-thirty, and I thought if you were free for lunch or could get away from the office, maybe you could go with me.”

  “Of course I’ll go!” she said, and I could tell I made her happy.

  I whispered the address and we hung up.

  I wasn’t used to calling Ally when I needed the support of a friend, but Lisa had a nasty cold and Sabrina was away on a buying trip and Griffen was going on with his life as though the woman he’d been dating weren’t pregnant.

  Had been dating. Weird. I was so focused on the subject of the baby that I hadn’t even realized I’d been dumped.

  Ally was in the waiting room of the Lenox Hill Fetal Maternal Clinic when I arrived. She was flipping through Time magazine. No, she was pretending to flip. She was actually staring at the pregnant woman next to her. Ally was looking at the woman’s belly with the kind of longing I reserved for Häagen-Dazs chocolate chocolate chip ice cream and caffeinated coffee.

  Last I heard, she and Smarmdrew were trying to have a baby. I thought Ally would make a great mother. A little overbearing, yes, but a devoted mother.

  “You show up late to your own ultrasound?” she said when she saw me. “Sarah, when are you going to grow up?”

  “Ally, when are you going to lay off?” I said in the same inflection.

  I was five minutes late. But only because Danielle began telling the copy editor in the cubicle on her left about her own ultrasound appointment, which I assumed was for my benefit, and I’d sat in my cubicle, eavesdropping. She’d found out she was having a girl, and her husband wanted to name the baby Rosalind after his mother, but Danielle hated both the name and her mother-in-law.

  Danielle had made me laugh for the first time in my history of knowing her.

  “Five minutes, Ally,” I said. “Doctors keep you waiting for a half hour, minimum, so I’m technically twenty-five minutes early.”

  “Are you going to show up five minutes late to pick up your child from day care? Are you going to show up five minutes late for his basketball games? Her ballet recitals? How about your own delivery? Are you going to show up late for that?”

  “Being late is how I got into this condition,” I joked.

  She shook her head. “Go let the nurse know you’re here. Bring your insurance card.”

  What was I, five? “Ally, I’ve been to a doctor before.”

  Signed in, insurance card handed over, I took a seat next to Ally. There were five other women sitting in the upholstered chairs. Each one was with a man.

  My eyes went straight to every woman’s ring finger. Every woman had a wedding ring.

  I put my ringless hands to my sides and fidgeted. Why did I suddenly feel embarrassed that I didn’t have a ring? Women chose to be single mothers all the time.

  But you didn’t choose to be a single mother. Your ringless finger announces to the world that the father of your baby doesn’t love you.

  That was stupid. Remove that thought pattern from your brain this second, Sarah!

  But it was there.

  The women around the room were in various states of pregnancy. The blonde across from me—she looked to be around five or six months along—was talking about how nervous she was about having amnioscentesis. I didn’t even know what that was. The blonde to my left had her head on her husband’s shoulder. He was staring straight ahead, like a zombie.

  You never know what’s going on in people’s homes or marriages, Sarah, Ally had said more than once when I’d complained last year that everyone had a boyfriend or a date to the company Christmas party or a perfect life but me. A couple walking down the street holding hands and looking for all the world like the happiest people on earth could be mourning the loss of their baby, Ally had said. Or maybe the man beat her up the night before. Or maybe they are happy. But don’t think that couples are happy just because they’re a couple.

  Sometimes I thought Ally was the most cynical person I’d ever known, and then sometimes I thought she was the wisest. It usually depended on my mood. Right now, when I assumed that everyone thought the worst about me, her Ally-isms were comforting.

  She and Smarmdrew always looked happy enough. He was a touchy-feely type and always had his arm around her shoulder or he’d sneak up on her in the kitchen and pinch her butt. But I always applied Ally’s own pronouncement to her own marriage. Yeah, they always seemed happy at the rare times I saw them together, but that didn’t mean they were.

  “Do you know what to expect when we go in?” Ally asked.

  I nodded. “I read one of the articles you e-mailed me.”

  She glanced at me. “Good. It should be very exciting. You get to see the baby, even if it’s just a tiny little speck at this point.”

  I smiled. “I know. I’m so nervous!”

  “I’m glad you invited me, Sarah,” she said. “It means a lot to me. I know we don’t always get along or see eye to eye, but you do know that I’m one hundred percent here for you, right?”

  “I do know that,” I said. “And thanks, Ally.”

  It was true. She was overbearing, domineering, bossy, impossible, annoying and incredibly judgmental. But she was there. And she always would be. She was there the way my mother would have been there. And, sometimes, knowing that made my mother’s loss a little easier to bear. I supposed that Andrew fulfilled that need for Ally. Maybe that was why she got married so young. I had Ally, and Ally needed an older sister too, so she got married.

  Finally, my name was called. Ally and I shot up and followed the nurse.

  “Sarah—”

  I whirled around and there was Griffen, his hands stuffed in his pockets.

  I was surprised. Very surprised.

  “Uh, Ally, this is Griffen. Griffen, my sister Ally.”

  They said awkward hellos and we all trailed after the nurse. I noticed Ally give Griffen the once-over, as though checking to see what the baby might end up looking like.

  The baby looked a little bit like a mouse.

  On the monitor, the technician pointed out the baby’s head and stomach, which both looked the same. Everything was fine and good and where it should be, the woman informed us. And then we listened to the heartbeat.

  I glanced at Griffen. He was staring at the monitor, at the zzzz’s of the heartbeat, which sounded very loud and fast.

  “Wow,” he said, looking quite awestruck.

  “Yeah, wow,” I breathed.

  “Wow,” Ally added.

  A doctor came in and gave us the stamp of health. I was ten weeks pregnant and due in May.

  “A Taurus,” Ally said with a smile. “Like Mom.”

  I smiled back.

  “Like me,” Griffen said, biting his lip.

  That’s right. His birthday was
May 12.

  “Here,” the technician said, printing out still images of the ultrasound. “Keepsakes.” She handed one to me, one to Ally and one to Griffen.

  Griffen glanced at the little black-and-white photo, then folded it and tucked it into his jacket pocket. “I’d better get back to work,” he said. “Um, bye, Sarah. Nice meeting you, Ally.”

  Ally nodded and Griffen practically ran down the hall.

  “Did you know he was coming?” Ally asked as the technician wiped the jelly off my slightly rounded tummy.

  I shook my head. “I was shocked to see him here. From the way our conversation went last week, I never expected to hear from him again. He doesn’t want anything to do with me or the baby.” Tears stung the backs of my eyes.

  Ally slung her arm around me. “It’s still very early, Sarah. He came today, and that’s a very good sign.”

  “A good sign of what? That he wanted to make sure I was really pregnant at all?”

  She handed me my pants and socks. “Hey, I’m the cynical one in this family, Sarah. I have a feeling he needed to really see the baby, hear it, in a hospital setting, to believe in it. Once it really sinks in, he may change his tune.”

  Optimism from Ally was worth quite a lot. If she believed, I could too.

  “Which is the head and which is the body?” Zoe asked, turning the grainy photograph of my ultrasound upside down and sideways.

  The three sisters Solomon were in a Mexican restaurant near the bridal salon Giselle and her mother had dragged us to in order to photograph potential gowns. Ally and Zoe and I had all made excuses to leave at exactly the same time, found ourselves breathing sighs of relief outside the salon on Madison Avenue and having exactly nowhere to go. Zoe had suggested getting a bite to eat, and Ally, with a “My appetite is miraculously restored now that I’m out of wedding gown hell,” agreed.

  “Any way you hold the photograph,” Zoe added, “you can’t tell which is which.”

  Ally laughed and pointed out which end was up. “These pictures were taken only seven hours ago, so they’re already very outdated. The changes to the fetus in just one day are incredible.”

  “Wow,” Zoe said. “It’s just amazing. Giselle once showed me Madeline’s first ultrasound picture, and I couldn’t believe that big, bouncy baby girl was once a teeny tiny little thing like this. Isn’t it amazing that this little creature is going to be a walking talking little person very soon?”

  “You’re scaring me,” I said with a smile. “I’ve only read up through twelve weeks of fetal development. Baby Solomon doesn’t even have knees yet.”

  “Baby Solomon?” Zoe repeated. “So you’re going to give the baby your name?”

  “Looks that way,” I said. “Unless Griffen magically wants to be ‘and daddy makes three.’”

  Zoe turned to me. “But he did show up at the ultrasound appointment. That has to be a sign of things to come.”

  “That’s what Ally said, but I don’t know. ‘Wow’ was about the only thing Griffen said during the entire hour. That and ‘Nice to meet you, Ally.’”

  “Well, at least our nephew’s father has manners,” Ally commented.

  Except for his habit of walking away. “I can’t even speculate anymore about what Griffen’s going to do or say. It’s enough of a brain-drain to think that this—” I gestured at the photograph with a tortilla chip “—will be a Madeline or a Matthew one day.”

  “Speaking of Madeline,” Ally said, “I think she should stay at home when we go on wedding hell outings. Maddy-Waddy vomited on my shoes twice in one hour.”

  As our entrées arrived, I wondered why Ally was suddenly anti-Madeline. Ally had zero interest in Giselle, and Giselle had long ago given up on trying to engage her in conversation, but Ally could never get enough of Madeline. She always wanted to hold her and sing to her. But tonight’s after-work wedding gown hunt seemed hard on everyone, not just the baby. We didn’t even have to watch Giselle try on dresses; she wanted only to select a bunch she liked and photograph them so that she could figure out what style wedding she wanted. The dress was the showpiece for everything else. If she liked a modern dress, she’d have a modern wedding. If she liked an antiquey dress, she’d have an old-fashioned wedding. Maybe if she chose a transparent dress, she could have an invisible wedding!

  There was something about watching an excited bride-to-be pick out wedding gowns that made you even more aware of how far from the altar you were. I’d sat on a stool and wondered if people used the word illegitimate anymore. Ally had practically ripped apart the headpiece she was “looking at.” And Zoe had stared out the window onto Madison Avenue, every now and then adding a “very nice” when Giselle asked for her opinion.

  It was interesting that the three of us felt compelled to go on these little trips; it was as if each of us felt we had to go in lieu of rent or something. Or perhaps we simply thought our crankiness about choosing china patterns and wedding gowns and rubber chicken would make our own love-life issues a bit too apparent. Ally still hadn’t mentioned her husband’s name once. Zoe stared at a wallet-sized photograph of a good-looking guy every now and then, but without expression. And I spent my nights thinking up baby names for boys and girls, rejecting anything that didn’t sound musical with both Solomon and Maxwell.

  The waiter arrived with refills of our drinks, three more Sprites in honor of my inability to consume margaritas.

  “How about a toast—to the new addition-to-be to our family,” Zoe said, and we raised our glasses and clinked.

  A couple passing by smiled at us in midclink, and I realized we probably looked like three friends or possibly sisters (not that we looked that much alike, except for the eyes; we all had the Solomon almond-shaped dark blues), out for a fun night together. This was the first time the three of us had gone anywhere alone together. And it was nice. If I didn’t have to write a two-thousand-word article on sex and relationships by the crack of dawn, I’d even suggest a movie after dinner. It wasn’t every day (or any day) that Ally and Zoe could be in the same room, let alone sitting right next to each other, without one of them (usually Zoe) stomping away hurt.

  Brainstorm. “Are you guys in the mood to help me plan out an article I have to write by tomorrow morning?” I asked my sisters. “If I don’t get started now, I’m screwed. I can’t keep my eyes open past ten o’clock anymore and I can’t have caffeine to help me.”

  “What’s the topic?” Zoe asked.

  “How you know it’s too soon to have sex in a new relationship,” I said. “And let’s not use me as an example, Ally,” I added fast. I knew my older sister too well.

  “Okay,” Ally said, forkful of refried beans in her hand. “It’s too soon to have sex if you don’t know where you stand.”

  “Only if you care where you stand,” Zoe said.

  “Yeah, but you can’t care where you stand on the third date,” Ally countered.

  “Who has sex on the third date?” Zoe said. “That’s way soon.”

  Ally and I stared at her.

  “In fact, my boy—my ex-boyfriend made me wait,” Zoe said. “His last girlfriend was two-timing him, and he got so burned that he wanted to take things slowly in the intimacy department. It took him three dates to French-kiss me, a month before he went near my bra, and it was two months before we slept together.”

  “How long were you together?” I asked.

  “A year,” Zoe said. “So maybe he had something there.”

  A year. I slept with Griffen on our second date. I even initiated it. Well, not sex itself so much as sexuality. He’d walked me home after the movie, I invited him up for a nightcap, and a glass of wine later, we were liplocked on the couch. Of course, Jennifer walked out in her bra and teeny-tiny underwear (“Oh my God, Sarah, I am so sorry. I totally didn’t know you were even here. Oh my God, if I’d known you had a guy here, I would never have walked out like this. Giggle. Giggle. Oh hi, there. You must be Griffen. Really, I never would have walked in half-naked
if I’d known Sar had a guy here. She never does. Oops, I mean, well she’s no slut, huh! You two have fun, see you in the morning, singsong, singsong.”)

  I was not exaggerating.

  Something about Jennifer’s little cutesy routine worked, though, because Griffen and I both rolled our eyes in unison and shared a laugh, a real laugh, and I’d felt better than I had in forever.

  And then he leaned closer to me and kissed me. A sweet kiss, with tenderness, that he turned hot real fast. And then I took his hand and led him into my bedroom and closed the door.

  And unbeknown to either of us, sperm met egg.

  I dipped a tortilla chip in salsa. “How about, it’s too soon for sex if you don’t know how he’d react if you got pregnant?”

  “I don’t know, Sarah,” Zoe said. “No one really knows how they’re going to react. You couldn’t have said for sure how you’d react. Even married couples don’t necessarily react well to a pregnancy. What if it’s unplanned?”

  That was true. “I think I should skip the pregnancy angle anyway.”

  “Consequences of sleeping with a guy too soon are important to mention,” Ally said. “Let’s say you don’t know someone’s sexual history and end up with chlamydia?”

  “Good one,” Zoe said, pointing a chip at her.

  During dinner on that second date, I’d asked Griffen about his previous relationships, not so much for sexual history but because I was curious and wanted to know what his track record was.

  “What would the Dating Diva say about that question?” he’d asked. On our first date, I’d told him about Zoe and what she did for a living. He was impressed that someone could make such good money telling people to stop talking about sex and politics on a first date, essentially what they already knew if they’d been socialized in this country.

  “The Dating Diva would say there’s nothing wrong with a provocative conversation about experiences,” I told him.

  He tapped me on the nose. “Unless one party of the conversation would rather not discuss his experiences.”

  I’d turned red. “Oh. Okay. I didn’t mean to pry.”