by Lori Carson
Backstage Eddie nods hello. He’s the bandleader, a trumpet player and well-respected patrón in Latin music circles. Carole-Ann, his beautiful blond wife, leans up against the wall beside him. She’s all right, but because she’s a wife and I’m a girlfriend, she’s never as friendly to me as she is to the wives of the other musicians. Or maybe it’s because things are tense between Eddie and Gabriel lately. Eddie thinks Gabriel should be satisfied with things as they are instead of always trying to overshadow him. He wants Gabriel to keep singing in his band, keep making hit records. He doesn’t understand why Gabriel wants to woo a white audience who will never truly appreciate lyrics written in Spanish and rhythms they can’t feel in their bones.
But Gabriel is a star. Anyone can see he’s going places and won’t be taking any of us with him. Not even me.
Carole-Ann waves me over. She’s wearing a sparkly dress, snug against her curves. She offers me a cigarette from her silver case, but I turn it down. Sometimes I smoke with her even though I don’t smoke. “You sure?” she asks, and I come close to telling her that I’m pregnant. But who knows what she’d do with the information? She lights one for herself and blows the smoke to the side, away from me. “You coming to Europe?” she asks. I’ve heard that there are some dates coming up—Brussels and Amsterdam and Paris, but I haven’t been invited.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I probably have to work.”
“Gabriel has your plane tickets,” she says.
But Gabriel hasn’t said anything to me about that.
I watch him from across the room. He’s talking, moving his hands, his fans listening in rapt attention. Always there are women, beautiful and young, or older and accomplished. I’m on the lookout for the ones who are his type. Gabriel says I always pick the wrong ones, that he’s not even attracted to the women I fear. But of course it’s the cheating itself that makes me afraid. When I see a pretty girl approach him, my heart sinks. Maybe she’ll be the one he takes to Europe.
Seven
At the women’s clinic in the Flatiron District, I wait with a half dozen other girls in the reception area. We read magazines or watch the small TV monitor. We look up whenever the receptionist opens her window to call out a name. “The doctor will see you now,” she says.
Dr. Nancy isn’t really a doctor. She’s a nurse practitioner. A lot of girls I know go to see her for exams and birth control. She’s very tall and confident, a little intimidating. Holistic before holistic becomes fashionable.
When it’s my turn, I go through the door and down the hallway, into the examining room.
“Hello there,” Dr. Nancy says breezily as she comes in a few minutes later with my folder in her hands. “What can I do for you today?” She doesn’t seem shocked when I tell her my news. “Congratulations,” she says, not unkindly.
Dr. Nancy examines me and takes some blood. She says everything looks good. She tells me what vitamins I should be taking and how important it is to eat the right foods. She says she won’t actually be delivering my baby. Her partner at the clinic, Dr. Diamond, has an affiliation with a hospital, and he’ll be the one.
“I assume you have health insurance?” Dr. Nancy asks. I tell her that I don’t and show her the pocketful of cash I’ve brought, tips from weeks of waitressing. “Come with me,” she says, and walks me across the hall to sit down with her office manager for guidance.
Turns out I need health insurance, of course, but there’s no way I can afford it. I figure I have two options. I can go to Gabriel and ask him to pay for it or I can ask my parents. I’m not confident either will help me. I’m estranged from my mother and father and haven’t spoken to them in months. If they do help, I know it will come with all kinds of strings attached.
Yet I can’t bring myself to ask Gabriel. I can already see the furious look in his eye, the stern set of his jaw.
So I take the train out to Long Island to the house where I grew up. My parents live in a modest house in a middle-class neighborhood on the south shore of Long Island. It’s a split-level surrounded by neighbors and big trees. I’ve turned down my mother’s offer for a ride from the station, told her I wanted to walk instead. I’m putting off the moment when I’ll have to see them. I haven’t been back in more than a year.
As I approach the house, I’m nervous. I can see my mother waiting to greet me at the front door. She’s shorter than I am and a little more sturdy. She teaches reading to grammar school kids. Blond and blue-eyed, girl-next-door pretty, she has deep dimples when she smiles, which she’s doing now.
My mother holds the screen door open, hugs and kisses me until I pull away. It’s been a long time. Our last argument is nearly forgotten.
The house is frozen in the early 1970s: dark paneling, orange-gold carpet. There’s a wallpaper mural in the dining room of a street scene in Paris. It’s looked like this for as long as I can remember. My father is nowhere to be seen.
My mother asks me if I’m hungry, and we settle in the kitchen. Me at the Formica table in the chair that was mine, she at the stove. She makes cheese and eggs for me, the way she always has. I’m not sure if my stomach will stand for it today, but it’s comforting anyway. Through the window screen behind her, I see the familiar treetops and telephone lines.
“Where’s Dad?” I ask.
“Oh, he’s around here somewhere,” she says distractedly.
My father is a tall, handsome man with olive skin and hazel eyes. He’s one of the smartest people I know, an engineer and inventor. He’s got a strong moral code, too; never has more than a single cocktail, wouldn’t in a million years cheat on my mother.
Still, he’s a hard man to have as a father. He seems to think my artistic inclinations are a rebellion that can be cured with silence and a hard line. He looks at me as if I’m pretending not to be smart just to spite him.
I hear his footsteps overhead. He’s probably in his room, or in the attic working on some gadget.
“Mom, I need to tell you something, and I don’t want you to tell Daddy.” She looks alarmed even before I say it. “I’m pregnant.”
Her blue eyes are unblinking; still my excitement makes me hopeful.
“Are you sure?” she asks. “You’ve been to the doctor? What does Gabriel say?”
I shrug my shoulders. The gesture tells her that Gabriel is not on board, that I’m alone in this.
“What are you going to do?” she asks, and I feel a familiar disappointment.
“I’m going to have it,” I say, excitement dashed. Her reaction is not what I want. I want her to reassure me, help me to feel everything will be okay. I want her to say that no matter what happens she and my father will be there for me. But she doesn’t say any of that. We’re quiet as she serves me breakfast.
“The thing is I need a little help,” I say finally.
“What kind of help?” she asks, and I feel angry. What difference does it make what kind? What kind of question is that? But I swallow my anger because I need her to pay for the insurance. When I explain, she looks relieved.
“I’ll call Blue Cross today and see if we can put you on our policy,” she says. “If not, we’ll figure something else out.”
“Thank you,” I say, thanks a lot.
We hear my father coming down the stairs and stop talking.
“Hi, Dad,” I say. My father is forty-six years old, a little more gray than he was last year. He takes his place at the head of the table. I think his charisma comes from his confidence and the way he keeps himself aloof.
“Do you want coffee?” my mother asks him.
He ignores her. “Everything okay?” he asks me instead.
“Yes,” I say. “Everything’s fine.” I know he’ll find out about the pregnancy eventually, but it won’t be from me.
“What’s the latest?” he asks.
My mother pours his coffee and I tell him about the celebrities I’ve met at the restaurant. Dustin Hoffman. Bob Fosse. “Do you know who that is, Dad?” He does. They’v
e been to see A Chorus Line. When I run out of things to say, I ask him about the Yankees, his favorite team. I can hear the clock ticking and the hum of the refrigerator in his silences. After a while he says it’s good to see me and heads back up to his room.
My mother and I take our coffee outside to the deck overlooking the backyard with its tall trees, sloping green-brown lawn, and rusted swing set. I think about how I used to race my sister to be first down the slide after it snowed. The whole neighborhood was new then. There was a drive-in movie theater right over the fence. It got torn down when they built the expressway.
My mother asks me how I’m feeling and I tell her the morning sickness is pretty bad.
“I was sick my whole pregnancy with you,” she says.
“I think it’s supposed to pass in the second trimester,” I tell her hopefully.
“It didn’t with you,” she says.
It figures, I think. Even in utero, we couldn’t get along. But I don’t say that.
Later, she gives me a ride back to the train. We embrace awkwardly across the front seat of the car.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” she says, worry in her eyes. I get out quickly and run up the stairs to the platform. Waiting for the train, I see her Toyota make a slow crawl around the corner, as if she’s too shaken to even step on the gas.
Eight
At the Café Miriam, I’m working double shifts. I go until I can’t anymore, then fall into bed and pass out. Waiting tables with morning sickness is not so different from the days when I used to drag myself into work after a night out drinking. Just like then, I head straight to Will, Café Miriam’s bartender, for his special hangover remedy and it helps to settle my stomach.
It’s the double shifts that wear me out. My clothing takes on the odor of cooking grease. My hair always stinks of it. I start to resent the customers for every annoying thing they do. I stand at the coffee station and stare out the windows at the free people walking by.
One day Janelle comes in and says she’s got some dirt. She says Lois, a dancer who worked at the restaurant for a short time, is giving sensual massages out of her apartment. “That means at the end of the massage? She gives the guy a hand job.”
“I bet that’s not all she’s doing,” Nina says. “Why stop there?”
We talk about what we’d do and what we’d never do. We’ve all thought about prostitution. Not about doing it, exactly, but about the fact that we could. It’s an option for attractive young women and we know it. We also know the money is supposed to be really good.
“It’s not that different from having sex with a guy after he takes you out to dinner,” Nina says. “If the guys were decent, it wouldn’t be so bad.”
“But they wouldn’t be decent. They’d be fat and old,” Janelle says.
“Ewww,” says Sofia. “They’d have hairy backs and bad breath.”
“Well, if you could pick the ones you wanted, it wouldn’t be so bad,” Nina says.
A few days later, I’m coming out of a deli on Broadway and practically bump into Lois. She looks great, as always. She’s a beautiful girl with a dancer’s body. Her hair is pulled back. She’s all cheekbones and long green eyes. Her gaze falls to my belly. You jut from my thin frame like a little melon.
“Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”
“Hey, Lois.” All I can think about is professional hand jobs.
“Is the father the Mexican guy?”
“He’s not Mexican, but yeah,” I say. “Gabriel.”
“He’s a musician, right?”
“Uh-huh, a singer.”
“You going to get married?”
“I don’t think so.” I’m dying to ask her about the sensual massage, but can’t think of a way to do it.
“Well, he has to support you even if you don’t get married,” Lois says. “You know that, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.” She doesn’t know Gabriel. “I’ll figure something out,” I say.
“Don’t be stupid.” She digs into her bag and hands me a card. It has her picture on one side and her phone number on the other. “Here. It sounds like you need some practical advice. I know about this. My sister went through it. Call me.”
She’s a very practical girl, I’m thinking. She’s probably never loved someone so much she couldn’t eat or sleep. I can’t imagine proposing such a thing to Gabriel. It would only make him angry. My plan is to wait him out. I think if I tread lightly enough, if I never ask him for anything, maybe he’ll give me what I want.
“Call me,” Lois says again.
She’s a girl who knows how to take care of herself, whatever it takes. I put her card in my pocket.
Nine
By summer, the morning sickness is gone and I’m only ravenous. I’m hungry for everything, all the time. Potatoes, cake, bread, pizza, enchiladas with sour cream, spinach pie from the Greek diner on Madison. I can eat all day and wake up in the middle of the night starving. I’ve always been skinny without trying, one of those enviable girls who can eat anything and never gain a pound, but I’ve never eaten like this before. My belly gets rounder and bigger. I don’t know how much of it is you and how much the midnight pizza, the morning coffee cake. I could win a pie-eating contest. I could beat the hot-dog-eating champ at Coney Island.
I look at my body in the mirror and am amazed to see I actually look pregnant. Your Baby has color illustrations that show sort of what you look like. If the pictures are accurate, you resemble a little alien. I study the diagrams. They label your shoulder, your eye, the chambers of your heart. You’re developing ears and your eyes are starting to open. The book says you’re the size of an orange.
My mother puts the word out to her friends, the ones who have daughters with daughters, now three and four, and as the weeks go by, I’m given a secondhand crib, a changing table, and a stroller. The world loves a baby on the way. Maybe she’s told them that I’m doing it alone; the cardboard boxes of donations accumulate. They pile up in front of the marble fireplace mantel in my small studio apartment. The cats use them for scratching posts.
My mother calls nearly every day. She proposes schemes to get Gabriel to marry me, but none of them make sense. She doesn’t know Gabriel and mistakes him for a normal man, one who can be tricked or talked into doing something he doesn’t want to do. I know he’s proud of the fact that he doesn’t care what anybody thinks, and only does exactly what he wants. To me, he seems a different species from my family, and I like that about him, because I’ve always felt like I’m a different species, too.
Still, it’s nice to have my mother with me. She likes to come into the city to see musicals on Broadway. I don’t like them much but go with her anyway. The air-conditioning feels good and it’s comforting to have her company. We go to museums on the Upper East Side. The Whitney is right by my apartment and is small enough to see in its entirety. We stand in front of a black painting by Mark Rothko and laugh.
“Even I could do that,” my mother says.
My youthful rebellion has been cut short by your lovely form pushing against me, the way I once pushed against everything. I listen to my mother tell me I could run a day-care center, or get a degree in education and teach as she does. I try not to let it get to me, although often it does.
Every day I play my guitar. I always have a new song I’m working on. Every one is better than the one before. I try to write melodies that go to unexpected places. Gabriel loves that about my songs. When he shows me a new chord, I surprise him with a whole new batch. “Pajarito, you are the best female songwriter I know,” he says. The songs make him fall in love with me again. That’s what it feels like.
But not even my songs can make up for this thing that I am doing to him. He kisses me good-bye and disappears for a week. I take the phone to bed with me so I won’t miss his call. When he resurfaces, he says, “Baby, where are you?” As if I’ve been the one avoiding him. “Come over,” he says, and I do, but he doesn’t want to talk about you.
&n
bsp; By Christmastime you’ll be here. It’s hard to imagine Christmas in the heat of July. People will be walking quickly on the street, holding their coats closed against the wind. The air will have a crisp bite to it. Christmas tree vendors will travel from Maine and Vermont to set up on Broadway and fill the street with the scent of pine needles. I’ll wrap you in a soft blanket and take you to see the shop windows at Macy’s and Bergdorf Goodman, buy you woolen mittens and hats. Fat snowflakes will fall. We’ll get a tree and decorate it with white lights.
I’ll be a mother. And Gabriel will be a father, whether he likes it or not. I can’t help but picture our tree set up in a corner of his living room, a fire burning in the fireplace, all together, a family.
Ten
I tell Gabriel I need to talk to him and we make a date to meet at his place at the Sheridan. The apartment is technically a two-bedroom, but Gabriel has knocked down a couple of walls, put in French doors, and turned the second bedroom into an office. Except for the fireplace, there’s nothing cozy or charming about it. The walls are covered with framed photographs of him at different stages of his career and posters of his concerts from all over the world. The furniture is cheap and kind of tacky. Next to the king-size bed, a fancy lamp sits conspicuously on an end table, an obvious gift from another woman. There’s absolutely no reason why any woman in her right mind would want to live there. Except I do. I want to move in and make the office into a baby’s room. I want the three of us to live together as a family.
I take the bus across town in the early evening. The light casts a beautiful glow on the buildings of the Upper West Side. They look especially three-dimensional, like an Edward Hopper painting. The sky is a deep blue, strewn with a few cumulous clouds dipped in purple. It makes me glad to be alive just to witness it. The world is so beautiful, Little Fish.
I get off the bus at Columbus Avenue and it’s just a few steps to the entrance of the Sheridan. I take a deep breath and enter the building, heart already pounding.
The doorman gives me a wave and I make my way to the elevator around the corner. My mouth is dry. I’m nervous I’ll be shot down before I’ve even been invited inside.
