Until the Real Thing Comes Along

by Elizabeth Berg

  A man dancing with a woman close to our table dips her dramatically; then they laugh. So many people are laughing—I hear a veritable symphony of staccato bursts of hilarity, pretty feminine trills, hearty belly laughs.

  “I find this so depressing,” Ethan says.

  “Exactly.”

  “It makes me feel so … unskilled.”

  “Yes.”

  Elaine’s mother stops by our table. “Having a good time?” she asks us.

  “Oh yes!” I say, and Ethan nods so enthusiastically I’m afraid she’s going to think he has a bit of a disability.

  After she leaves, he says, “I’m going home.”

  “Oh, Ethan, it’s not that bad!”

  “It’s wonderful for people who have someone. For those of us who are still looking—unsuccessfully—and are so tired of it … You know, I’ve been to three weddings in the last month.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, remember I told you about Ed and Paul? And then there was another one the week after. Michael and Alex, you never met them. I dated Alex for a while.”

  I watched Elaine and Mark step toward each other for a slow dance. They are smiling, each filling up the other. “You were crazy about Alex,” I tell Ethan. “I remember you talking about him. He had gray eyes that were so beautiful.”

  Ethan sighs. “Yeah.”

  “And an amazing body. And that voice.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Sorry.”

  He stands up. “You want to leave with me?”

  “No, I’ll stay for a while.”

  He looks at his watch. “It’s late. Eleven-forty.”

  “Just for a little more. I’m not quite ready to leave.”

  “I don’t know why.”

  “Don’t be so nasty. Go get some sleep or something.”

  After he leaves, I take a glass of champagne from a roving waiter. One sip won’t hurt anybody. Of course, it won’t help anybody either.

  After I am in bed, the phone rings. I look at the clocks. Two-fifty. When I answer, I hear Ethan say, “Well, weren’t we out late?”

  “Yeah.” I smile, yawn. I’m so relieved no one’s dead.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Where have you been?”

  “First of all, I don’t like your tone of voice. Secondly, I don’t think it’s any of your business.”

  “Oh, I would say it is my business. Yes, I would say it definitely is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are carrying my baby.”

  I feel a confusing mix of anger and joy.

  “And?” I manage to say.

  “And I want you to be … safe. So that the baby’s safe. Were you drinking?”

  “Yes. I had a sip of champagne.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “Ethan, I’m being literal. I had one sip.”

  “That’s exactly how it starts.”

  “How what starts?”

  “Not taking care of yourself. You know? Not being careful. First it’s a sip, then it’s a glass, then the baby comes out with wings.”

  “Ethan.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you think you’re getting a little carried away?”

  “Well, what were you doing so late? I’ve been trying to call you for hours. It’s not good for you to run yourself down.”

  “I can sleep all day if I want to, Ethan! I was having a conversation with some guy I met, okay? He was just a really nice guy, fun to be with, and the time got away from us. Everybody stayed at the reception until one-thirty, and then Jeff and I went to get something to eat.”

  “Jeff, is it?”

  “Yes, Jeff it is.”

  “Does he know you’re pregnant?”

  “No.”

  Jeff was definitely not my type—about fifty pounds overweight and a good six inches shorter than I and wildly in love with his fiancée, who was out of town, but this is something I see now I might do well to keep to myself.

  “Don’t you think you should tell him you’re pregnant?”

  “I will … eventually.”

  “You can’t sleep with him, you know, it’s too dangerous.”

  “You can have sex all the way through pregnancy!”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Ethan, what is your problem! You date!”

  “Hardly ever.”

  “But you do.”

  He is quiet for a long moment, and then he says, “I think we should move to Minneapolis.”

  “What?”

  “I think we should move there.”

  “Why?”

  “I think we should try to live together. And I can’t do it here. I think we should do it there.”

  “But—”

  “I got offered a transfer there. And a raise. You can take some time off from working, don’t you want to do that? It’s pretty there. It’s safe. And I want to be somewhere where we can try … where I’m not …”

  “Ethan, what are you saying?”

  “I don’t know. I’m happier when I’m with you. I care about the baby, I think about it all the time.”

  “I know you care about the baby.”

  “I want to … I want it to think I’m its father.”

  “You are its father!”

  “I know. But I want it to feel me. I need to be around it more.”

  “So move in here.”

  “No, it has to be … Patty, will you just try this? You can keep your apartment, let’s just go there and try it, at least for a few months, will you? I told them I’d be willing to transfer as long as I could come back if I wanted to. There’s no risk. You can take time off. No offense, but I hardly think they’d know the difference.”

  “I sell things!” I say. I hope he doesn’t ask me when the last one was.

  “Yes, but I think you could take some time off, don’t you?”

  I look out the window. Ethan is asking me to live with him somewhere where nobody knows us. He is asking me to live with him. Suppose I were lying around some idle afternoon reviewing my Wish List. Would this not be on it? Is there any real reason to refuse? “Okay,” I say.

  “I’ll come over tomorrow,” he says. “We’ll figure everything out.”

  “You could come now. Tonight.”

  “Tomorrow, okay? For breakfast.”

  I hang up the phone, start to call Elaine, and remember she’s on her honeymoon. For a moment, I consider calling her anyway. But I don’t. I lie awake, seeing if the ceiling has any idea how all this has come about.

  18

  After my mother and I finish the dinner dishes, I head for the living room to tell my father and Ethan that dessert is ready. I stop just before going into the room; my father is speaking in a low and confidential tone that means I should leave and come back later. But I edge in closer, then lean back against the wall so that I can see without being seen. My chest is full of the excitement I used to feel playing hide-and-seek when I saw the seeker’s shoes right beside me and pushed my face into my hands, squeezed my eyes shut, and held my breath. I hope my mother doesn’t catch me. She’ll ask me if this is the way she raised me and I’ll have to say no, it is not.

  “I’m going to tell you something, young man,” my father says, settling back in his chair. “There comes a time in your life when you just don’t give a shit anymore. You know what I mean?”

  Ethan sits leaning forward, his fingers linked loosely between his knees. The light from the lamp picks up highlights in his hair, outlines his profile. If I know him for eighty more years, if I see him every day for the rest of my life, he will still take my breath away at random moments. I put my hand to my belly, think, have his hair, okay?

  “You know what I mean?” my father repeats.

  “I think so.”

  “Huh?” my father asks loudly.

  “Yes,” Ethan says. “I know what you mean.”

  “All right. There comes a time when you’re no
t trying to prove anjthing. You read me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I smile at this, Ethan calling my father “sir” just because he knows how much Dad likes it.

  “Now, I don’t believe that’s happened to you yet,” my father says—kindly, really.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Right, because you know when it will happen? When it will really happen?”

  “When?”

  “When you become a father.”

  Silence.

  “When you hear your baby cry for the first time, you’re going to understand something like you never understood it before. I guarantee you.”

  “Yes, sir, maybe so.”

  “I’m telling you, I know so. Because when you hear that baby cry, your heart will practically break wide open with your all of a sudden just … knowing. All right? You’re going to understand that something is here now that you can never again be without. Something that matters more than anything. And I’m telling you … When Patty was born, I cried more than she did. And I’m not ashamed to admit it, either. That’s what will happen to you, too. You know what I mean?”

  My eyes tear; I put a finger to each corner. Lately, if I’m not laughing uproariously at things that are only slightly funny, I’m weeping.

  “Yes, sir, I think I know what you mean.”

  “Everybody will be bawling, huh?!”

  “Right.”

  “And that,” my father says, speaking quietly again, “is when you grow up, son. I’m telling you. Right then. The reason for everything is all of a sudden right in front of you. You’re holding it.”

  I can’t stand it any longer. I come into the room. “Dad? You want dessert?”

  Dad? Do you know how much I love you?

  He turns to me and I see him looking at me on the day I was presented to him. I know how his arms held me. I can feel it again. I swear I can feel it exactly, the straight line of his arm beneath my new back, the cupping of his hand under my head. I can see him, too—his rolled-up sleeves, his messy hair, his eyes directed at something he will never stop seeing.

  “Sure, honey,”he tells me now. “We’ll have some dessert.” And then, to Ethan, “You ready?”

  Ethan smiles, nods. I believe he is incapable of speaking. And that is yet another reason I love Ethan Allen Gaines. Have his heart, I think.

  My mother is sitting at the kitchen table, chin in her hands, when we come into the room. She starts, then stands, ready to serve.

  “Sit down,” I say. “I’ll do it.”

  “That was a very good dinner,” Ethan says, sitting opposite my parents.

  “Thank you.” My mother smiles at him, nods.

  “Really delicious,” he says. And then, “Patty and I are going to move to Minneapolis.”

  My parents turn to look at me. I can feel their eyes on me, but I can’t quite look up from serving the angel food cake.

  “You can’t be serious,” my father says.

  “Well,” I say. And then, into the heavy silence, “We were thinking we’d like to try living somewhere different.” I sit down.

  “ ‘We,’ ” my mother says. “We?”

  “Well, yes, we’d be living together,” I say. “There. You know, in Minneapolis.”

  “You can die in those winters!” my father yells.

  “Well, of course, it is spring,” I say and wish Ethan would help me out here now that he has created a disaster. Talk, I think.

  And he does. “I thought I might try to act a little … straight.”

  Now my parents turn to look at him, again in unison, as though they are being choreographed by a highly unimaginative director. He smiles at them, shrugs. I can’t say anything. I am very busy remembering a game I used to play when I was around four. I would climb up on a chair with a beach ball and drop it on my family of stand-up paper dolls. Who knows what motivated me to do it? I loved those paper dolls. But I chose the beach ball because I knew that with it, I couldn’t miss.

  “This is an absolutely ridiculous idea,” my father says, standing. “You don’t need to go running off to some godforsaken place. Why don’t you try to change right here? Be a man about it!” He hikes his pants up emphatically.

  “Well, there’s a certain … history here,” Ethan says. “It would be hard to live a different kind of life.”

  “A certain history, huh?” My father sits back down, leans in toward Ethan. “Now, you listen to me, son. I don’t hold it against you, your … I say a man is entitled to live his life as he sees fit when he’s living for himself. But now you’re talking about dragging my pregnant daughter into all this with you.”

  “Dad,” I say.

  “Never mind! There’s no reason for you to move! It’s not a good idea to move now!”

  “Robert!” my mother says quickly.

  A moment, and then, “… What?” I say. “Why isn’t it a good idea?”

  “Oh, he just doesn’t want you to go. You’re the last child left here. He’s just being selfish. You’re being selfish, Robert.”

  “Marilyn—”

  “No,” she says. And then, to me, “Do you want to go, honey?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Do you think it might be … better?” she asks quietly. And with that it is the two of us alone and she is sitting at the side of my bed in her skirt and ironed blouse and cardigan sweater, her legs crossed, her hands folded in her lap. I am lying down in my realest nightgown and wildest hairdo, my arm across my eyes, shredded Kleenex in a wet pile beside me. We have finished a long and extremely difficult conversation during which I have revealed everything—everything—as though I were removing detritus from my soul, then dusting it off and lining it up on the windowsill for her inspection, just as I used to do with wildflowers, with seashells and valentines, with glass jewelry from the gum-ball machines outside Woolworth’s. And, as always, she has seen it. And she has tenderly handled each thing to show me that she sees it, and that she knows.

  I do what people almost always do in situations where gratefulness is more than we can bear: almost nothing. I nod. Sniff.

  “Well, then,” she says. She stands up, goes to put her cup in the sink. “Minnesota is not so far away.” She looks at my father, smiles. It’s not.

  My father sighs, looks at me. “Are you really going to do this, honey? You don’t even know how to fish. All they’ve got there is lakes.”

  “I thought we’d try it,” I say. “I can always come back.”

  “You know, I think maybe I said this all wrong,” Ethan says, as though he can start over.

  I am lying in bed, just ready to slip over the blurry line into sleep. Ethan drifted off over an hour ago; I listened jealously to his even breathing, hoping that he would start snoring so I could poke him and wake him up.

  We looked at places for rent in Minneapolis before we went to bed tonight, sat at the kitchen table squinting at the poor-quality faxes I’d brought home from the office of high-rises, duplexes, and tiny single-family houses. We talked about that so we wouldn’t have to talk about anything else, namely what he means by “acting straight.”

  “Look!” I said, about one place. “I think this is where Mary Tyler Moore lived, after she moved!”

  “No big apartment buildings; I don’t want so many neighbors,” Ethan said.

  “But Mary Tyler Moore lived there! She and Mister Grant tried kissing there!”

  “She didn’t really live there, Patty.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Don’t you like this place on Lake Minnetonka?”

  I looked at it. “I don’t think I can live in a place near a lake with a name like that.”

  “Well, I’m afraid the lakes all have names like that.”

  “No. There’s a Lake Harriet.”

  “Too old-maid-auntish.”

  “And a Lake Calhoun.”

  “ ‘Calhoun’ doesn’t even go with a lake!”

  “Well, you’re the one who wants to live there!
”

  “Yes, but for the Democrats!”

  “I think you nearly killed my parents tonight, Ethan.”

  “Speaking of Democrats?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “I know. I was wondering when we’d get to that. I’m sorry.”

  “Well.”

  “I’ll fly them out to visit us as soon as we’re moved in. And when the baby’s born, of course.”

  “I’m going to bed,” I said. “Are you coming?” The words had a richness in my mouth like chocolate. He looked up, and I saw the answer there. Yes, he was coming to bed. No, not for that. Not yet, I thought, that’s all he means. One thing at a time, that’s all.

  Now I feel something like a flash of nausea zip through my stomach. Morning sickness, I think? Now?

  Again. A sensation of … no, not nausea. Of … a goldfish swimming. Of something wrong? Of something wrong?

  “Ethan?” I say.

  “Hmmm?”

  “Wake up!”

  He turns over. “What is it? What happened?”

  I sit up, turn on the light, remember. “Oh,” I say.

  “What?”

  “It’s … I’m feeling the baby move. It moved in me, and I felt it. Quickening, that’s what it is.”

  He sits up, his face pale.

  “No, it’s good. It’s good.”

  “I know. Do you think I can I feel it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Can I try?”

  “Of course.”

  He puts his hand gently to my belly, then stills as though feeling by listening. After a while, he shrugs, lies back down.

  “You’ll feel it pretty soon,” I say. “It will start kicking.” It will start kicking!

  “Does it hear yet?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  He presses his face to my stomach, speaks quietly. “Hey, it’s me. Your father, Ethan.” He looks up at me. “I hope he speaks English.