by Lori Carson
Gabriel is waiting for me in the doorway. “Hi, baby.” He embraces me.
I’m wearing a dress he thinks looks good on me. It’s tight across the belly, but I’ve managed to close the zipper. My legs are bare and tan. I’ve got a little makeup on, but not too much. It takes a lot of thought to be the girl he wants me to be.
He leads me directly to the bedroom, although I attempt to resist. I’m hoping to speak to him while I’ve still got his attention, while he’s full of desire and in a good mood. The changes to my body excite him. My normally small breasts are spilling out of my bra. I probably seem like a completely different woman to him.
“Wait, wait,” I say as he unzips my dress. “Can we talk first?”
“Let’s talk second,” he says.
So we begin our talk after making love, sheets tangled around us.
“Baby, don’t you want to see your daughter grow up?” I ask him. My heart is fluttering in my throat.
“I want to see you grow up,” he says, and I hear the beginning of anger in his voice. “You can stay here whenever you want. Why would you want to live here? You love having your own place.”
“But I want us to live together as a family,” I say.
“¡Puta su madre! I’m sick of this shit!” He pulls the sheet back and gets out of bed.
“We’re not a family,” he says. “You’re my girlfriend and you’re doing this thing I don’t want you to do. You’re forcing this thing that I don’t want. Do you hear me? It’s not going to be good. I’m telling you right now.” His voice escalates as he says this. By the last of it, he’s shouting and I’m cowering under the covers. I don’t know what to do when he gets mad. I go numb. I can’t think at all.
Minutes later, I find him on the couch watching videos on MTV. He takes my hand and kisses it. “I’m sorry I lost my temper, baby. Do you want to order some Chinese food? Go grab a menu from the kitchen.”
I get the menu from a kitchen drawer and come back, sit beside him on the couch. We decide what we want and I call in the order.
We watch a video by an Australian band called Men at Work. The song has a reggae feel. It’s called “Down Under.” I can see Gabriel’s wheels turning. He’s moving to the music, thinking about how he can do something like that. He’s watching the lead singer and seeing himself there instead.
Eleven
Before I knew your father, I didn’t know who or what I wanted to be. I’d dropped out of school and was estranged from my family. I drank too much, stayed out all night, smoked a joint if I had one with my morning coffee. I had a number of boyfriends, but nothing ever lasted very long. I’d leave them at the bar, or in their beds, and make my way home alone. I can’t tell you how many times I lost my keys and had to climb through that front window on East Seventy-eighth Street, which wasn’t easy. You had to balance on a wrought-iron banister and reach across to the window. Drunk as I was, it’s a miracle I never fell and cracked my skull.
Once a burglar climbed in that window when I wasn’t home. He didn’t steal a thing from me, because there was nothing to steal. I had a TV with a wire hanger for an antenna. The thief made his way from my building into the house next door and robbed a rich guy who was very unhappy about it. I had to have a gate put on the window. After that, when I lost my keys, I was out of luck.
When I met Gabriel, he was like a father to me in some ways. I needed to be loved by a strong man. I needed guidance and care, someone to tell me what was what.
Every day that first year, I took the crosstown bus at Seventy-ninth Street and met him on the West Side. Total strangers couldn’t help but smile when they saw how much in love we were. Walking around the neighborhood, arms wrapped around each other, the world went slightly out of focus around us.
Being in love with him gave me confidence. He thought I was smart and I felt smart. He thought I was talented and I knew it was true. We played each other songs on the guitar, read to one another from the books we loved, talked about everything and anything. Sometimes, when it rained, we went to the movies all day, from one theater to the next.
We traveled to faraway places, for his concerts, or for fun. I’d never been anywhere before. We played dominoes and rode bicycles in a Greek seaport town; had breakfast in Paris in a room with a view of the Seine; raced at dawn to a plane waiting on a Bogotá runway; listened to the waves crash, late at night, on a beach in St. Barts.
I learned how to be a lover, how to please and be pleased. He told me stories and asked me to make them up for him, too. We spun each other’s fantasies out of thin air.
Sometimes, in a perfect moment, I’d hold my breath to make time stop. I’d make a deal with God or whoever it is that listens to prayers in the dark. I’d say, “If I can hold my breath for forty-five seconds, you’ll let it stay just like this.”
Gabriel didn’t drink at first. He’d gone to AA. He said I should watch my drinking, too, so I stopped. I still smoked pot, though. I left a baggie of it under his mattress to smoke when I couldn’t sleep, which happened a lot when I waited for him to come home after a gig and he was late. Gabriel found the pot and freaked out. He said drugs were for lowlifes. So I quit that, too. For the first time since I was fifteen, I had no substances or alcohol in my body. My love for him was all the drug I needed.
But after a while, for some reason, we started drinking again and right away things took a turn for the worse, and our magical connection began to erode. I think it was the threesomes that did the most damage. Fantasies were one thing; it didn’t mean I could bear to see him do the things he did to me to someone else.
Sometimes I found girls of my own in the bars on Columbus Avenue. I kissed them in bathroom stalls. It was easy to become him when I was drunk enough. Once I even brought one back to his bed when he was out of town.
“You seem like the kind of girl who knows what to do,” that girl said to me, though it wasn’t true. I was accumulating secrets to beat him at his own game.
Things change. No matter how long you can hold your breath.
Twelve
One day I get a call from my landlord. I’ve heard rumors from my neighbors that he wants to sell our building, a charming brownstone on Seventy-eighth Street between Fifth and Madison. The gossip is he wants to make it into a single-family home, but he can’t do it unless we agree to leave. The building is rent-controlled, which means we can live in it forever with only small increases in rent, an amount determined by the city and not the landlord.
Some people have lived in my building for more than thirty years, mostly single, older women. They worry about where they’ll go. I pay only three hundred a month for my place, a tiny first-floor studio, and the ladies who have lived here for decades probably pay half that. I feel sorry for them. They seem fragile, brittle, with their home-dyed hair and pale skinny legs, coming down the stairs in worn bathrobes. I can’t imagine a worse fate than to grow old, alone in one room, and then be asked to leave it. At twenty-four, it’s impossible to imagine becoming like them. Being an old woman is something I think I’ll escape somehow.
My landlord’s office is in a run-down building in the West Thirties near Penn Station. I take the number 6 train down to Thirty-third Street and walk west. It’s a beautiful summer day. I love looking into all the shop windows, love the way the city makes me feel private in public, part of a big world full of people walking with purpose.
My landlord is a middle-aged man with thinning dark hair and wire-frame glasses. He sits behind a large metal desk. Without a greeting, he motions for me to take a seat, and I do. I’m wearing a man’s white shirt and black pants, top button undone. I’ve tried to look presentable for our meeting. It’s not so obvious that I’m pregnant.
“So, Miss Nelson, you may have heard we have an interest in your apartment.” He has an accent. I’m not sure from where. Israel, maybe.
“The thing is I don’t have any money to move,” I tell him. “And the rent is so low. I can’t see how I could afford to live somewher
e else.”
He’s ready for my response. Seems to already have an amount in mind, as do I.
“Miss Nelson, we’re prepared to offer you five thousand dollars to vacate the apartment. This will greatly help with your moving costs and other expenses.”
Five thousand dollars is a lot of money in 1982. I can rent a very decent place on the West Side for under a thousand.
“Well, I appreciate the offer,” I say. “But I’m thinking about what it’s going to cost to pay the higher rent for a year. I don’t think I can do it for less than fifteen thousand.”
My landlord sits quietly, plays with his ink blotter. I have no idea what he’s thinking. He sighs and rises from his chair. Behind him is a big window looking out onto the buildings across the alley. He turns to face it, and we both watch the people in their offices, lit by fluorescent lights. Finally, he turns back to me.
“I can tell you, Miss Nelson, it’s probably not going to happen, but I’ll talk it over with my partners. Hopefully, we can come to a compromise.”
I thank him and make my way back to the elevator, down to the street, and outside to the beautiful day.
That fifteen thousand will rent a place big enough for the two of us and the cats. That’s what I’m thinking. I’m not going to take a penny less.
My landlord calls a week later and agrees to the fifteen thousand. I start looking for a bigger apartment, one with a garden.
Thirteen
For the ultrasound test, the technician covers my belly with a cool gel. I stare at the empty screen, watching anxiously, until magically you appear in the shape of a lima bean, or a seashell. I’m twenty weeks pregnant. The technician, a middle-aged Indian woman, is gentle and kind. She points to your head, to your foot, to your heart. She helps me to make sense of what I see. Then she freezes your fuzzy silhouette on the screen, takes a Polaroid of it, peels off the back, and hands me a picture of you to keep.
“Looks like you’ve got yourself a little girl,” Dr. Nancy says. Although, of course, I’ve known that from the start. She lets me hear your heartbeat, for the first time, using a special kind of stethoscope. She listens first and counts, watching the clock. Then she places the earpiece in my ear.
“It’s beating so fast!” I say, truly shocked.
“That’s right,” she says. “That’s how we’re sure it’s your baby we’re listening to and not you.”
I catch the tears that fall with my tongue. I can’t stop laughing. I think of that Joni Mitchell song about laughing and crying being the same release.
Dr. Nancy smiles. “Now you can start thinking about baby names.”
“I have a name already,” I say quietly. It’s silvery, quick and shining, delicate and perfect, a name to conjure wading pools, rivers, and smooth stones. But I don’t say all that. “I’m going to call her Minnow.”
“Minnow?” Dr. Nancy repeats. Her expression says she thinks she’s heard me wrong.
“Yes.” I look down at my sneakers, feeling like your name is a secret I’ve told and want to take back.
After I leave Dr. Nancy’s office, I look for some place cool to grab a bite, but there aren’t any restaurants or cafés in the neighborhood. Years later, the Flatiron District becomes super commercial, full of restaurants, a farmers’ market, and every retail store you can think of, but at the time it’s industrial, desolate, and kind of dirty. A lot of photographers have their studios here in the soot-covered loft buildings. Garbage blows through the streets as it does in much of New York City in the eighties. I look down Sixth Avenue to the bottom of Manhattan and see the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
By the time I reach Ray’s Original Pizza, on the corner of Eleventh Street, I’m dripping in sweat. I order a Coke and a slice and snag one of the few tables. The air conditioner is blasting, but every time someone comes through the door, they bring a gust of hot air in with them.
I take your Polaroid from my bag and place it beside me on the table. I want to show it to someone, even to the strangers at Ray’s. I wish Gabriel were with me. I think of the friends I’ve lost touch with since I’ve been with him, and identify the ache I feel as loneliness. When an incoming gust sends your picture flying, I make a grab for it, and put you away safely in my pocket.
Outside, the sky grows dark through the plate glass. A skinny weed-tree blows back and forth. By the time I’ve finished my pizza, it’s pouring out, the kind of teeming rain that only happens in the extreme heat of summer. I pull up my collar and make a run for the subway.
Once, when I was about fourteen, after a fight with my mother, I ran out of the house into a summer storm like this one. It was just getting dark outside. I don’t recall the argument itself, or my mother’s shrieking voice, which surely would have demanded I return at once. What I remember is running barefoot, as fast as I could, rain pouring down, the sound of my rapid breath, the slap of my feet on the black tar street. At the end of a dead-end road, there was a high Cyclone fence that overlooked the expressway, and I started to climb it. Cars were rushing by. I was crying so hard, I couldn’t tell the rain from my tears.
All of a sudden it occurred to me that the hurtful things my parents said didn’t matter. I hung there listening to the sound of the rain in the trees, watching the red taillights speed away, and thought about how it was powerful, natural forces that ruled the world, not my parents, and that one day I was going to be free of them and everything would be different.
Now I bound down the subway stairs dripping wet. On the train, I find your picture in my pocket and dry it off with my inside sleeve.
There you are, Minnow. Proof.
Fourteen
The new apartment is in the back of a town house on West Seventy-first Street, between Broadway and West End Avenue. It has a nice kitchen, with a small butcher-block island, that takes up a whole wall of the main room. Through a Dutch door in back there’s a garden that’s not a garden, exactly, but a yard full of broken concrete and rocks. The narrow bedroom has a window with a view of a scraggly sapling, the only tree in the yard. The whole apartment is probably no more than five hundred square feet in all. Still, it’s twice the size of the Seventy-eighth Street studio. It feels like a real home to me.
I move in August, with no furniture except for the crib, changing table, and other baby things. I set up the bedroom for you as a nursery, make curtains for the window, paint a mural of the solar system on one wall and a girl flying a kite on another. Maybe you’ll dream of flying, as I did when I was a girl. It’s been a long time since I could fly in my dreams, but I can clearly recall the way it felt to lift off, and up, to glide over the rooftops of my neighborhood. Imagine what it would be like to fly over New York City? What views! The Metropolitan Museum of Art glowing next to the dark trees of Central Park, sailboats on the East River, the bright lights and billboards of Times Square. I’d like to fly over it with you.
Here on earth, I paint and clean and fix things—doing it now because soon I’ll be too pregnant, and it will be impossible. I’m right on schedule. Your Baby says now is the time for making the nest.
I pick up the rest of the furnishings at the flea market on Twenty-sixth Street and Sixth Avenue. I find an old wicker daybed, a walnut dresser, a long table with three pine boards, and a red rocking chair. I face the rocker toward the window and place a soft blanket on its back, imagining it wrapped around us in the middle of the night.
I buy plants for the garden, too, but the job of cleaning it out is too much for me. I don’t even consider asking Gabriel for help. Even before he began to avoid me, he would have found a way to avoid yard work. I call my friends Jules and Alan, and they agree to come over and give me a hand.
Jules and Alan have been my closest friends for almost as long as I’ve been in New York City. They are the family I made when I left home, the ones who will sing to you and bring you presents, make you laugh and watch you grow up. The two share the same birthday, a year apart, and although they only know one another through
me, the coincidence makes them feel related. I haven’t seen much of either one since I’ve been with Gabriel, but they understand that, or say they do.
Alan is a guitar player. I met him in school. We used to cut class together and walk around the city talking about music. He’s very opinionated and cool, but if he’s your friend, it’s for life. He’s funny, too. Once, I was drinking milk and he made me laugh so hard it came out of my nose.
Jules also has a good sense of humor, although there’s something almost regal about her. Maybe it’s the high forehead or her clear gray eyes. She’s even smarter than she is beautiful, always hungry to learn more about philosophy, mythology, or art history. She’s a little full of herself, but so would you be, if you were a brilliant actress on the cusp of becoming a movie star. One time, before we really knew one another, we discovered we were dating the same man. We compared notes, ditched him, and became best friends.
The three of us begin cleaning out the garden around noon, and hardly take a break all day. It’s grueling work to rake out all those rocks. We fill garbage bags to bursting with debris and drag them out to the curb. The cats follow us out back. They stretch their long bodies in the sun and scratch on the old fencing. It’s a hot summer day and the sweat pours off us, but we have fun, too. We catch up, talk about our latest adventures and mishaps.
By five o’clock, we’re so giddy with fatigue and hunger that everything strikes us funny. We laugh so hard, we have to stop to hold our stomachs and wipe our eyes.
“I’m starving,” says Jules.
“Me, too,” I say.
Alan takes a look at the contents of my fridge and decides he can make spaghetti Bolognese. He loves to cook. We think if he wanted to, he could be a chef. Jules and I watch him chop the pathetic onion and lone garlic clove he finds in the crisper. He combines a couple of hamburger patties and simmers it all together. The smell makes our mouths water.
We put whatever money we’ve got together, a few crumpled dollar bills and some change, and I make a run to get wine. Alan and Jules drag the table outside to the newly cleared yard, and we set it with candles and my mother’s cloth napkins. It’s a warm August evening. I tell myself it’s a night I will never forget, and maybe that’s what makes it so.
