Dr. Ignazio was a pleasant, mild, soft-spoken man who filled out his white coat nicely, like a sausage. He seemed well suited to coaxing babies into the world with his patient manner and his clean, pink, plump hands. He always tried to take Isabel’s mind off the brief exam by asking her questions that would take no effort to answer. He inquired about the health of her relatives, one by one.
“How’s Theo?” he asked, probing her abdomen carefully.
“He’s fine. Busy at work.”
“Ah-hah. And your father?”
“All right. Just fine.”
“Ah-hah. And your mother seems well”—inserting the speculum.
“Yes. Same as always.”
It used to be that, because of the association between Dr. Ignazio and having babies, coming to the office filled Isabel with anticipation. As time passed, however, she approached the examining table with increasing anxiety. She hoped and feared Dr. Ignazio would find something Dr. Abramowitz had missed—a cyst, a blockage—which would explain why she hadn’t conceived. Something treatable, of course. Though as the years went by and she began to believe it must be something more serious—something he had overlooked before but that would reveal itself in time in all its venomous glory—a part of her felt she would be grateful even for that. A bad diagnosis would be at least an answer. She felt like a person who begged God to strike her down just to prove that He existed.
“Ah-hah,” Dr. Ignazio said. “And your sister Alice?”
“Alice is fine. She’s getting married, you’ve probably heard, to the new cardiologist.” She could feel the jaws of the speculum opening. What could he see? She felt afraid, as though her failures must be graffitied there on the walls of her vagina.
When he was done, he helped her up so that she was sitting again at the end of the table with the paper gown hanging around her.
“So,” he said. He smiled at her, a smile that seemed full of regret or nostalgia. “You’re still trying to get pregnant?”
She nodded.
He checked her chart. “It’s been how long now? A year or two?”
“Three years.”
“You’ve been seeing Dr. Abramowitz?”
“Yes.”
“And you worked out a program with him?”
“We tried a couple of regimens,” Isabel said.
“Good, good. You know what you’re doing, then. And you’re still taking the folic acid?”
It was time to take the diaphragm from her purse, but Isabel felt she couldn’t do it. She saw now that she should have given a different answer when he asked if she was still trying to get pregnant, but it seemed too late to go back.
“The important thing,” Dr. Ignazio said, “is to keep on living your life. People can get so worked up over not conceiving as quickly as they’d like that they stop doing the things they used to. Enjoying what they used to enjoy. You just need to relax. Trust to time.” He gave a version of this speech every time he saw her. At first she had ignored it, knowing it was meant for other women but not for her. Now its syllables rang in her ears like a great bell. How could she talk to him about the diaphragm? How could she tell him that Theo refused to make love? How could she reveal to his clean pink ears, plainly visible beneath the strip of hair that circled his head like a silver crown, the brokenness of her life?
He left her to put her clothes on in privacy, as though dressing were a more intimate activity than probing a rectum. Life seemed to have shrunk to the size of this room. How could she have thought a birth-control device could be the first step toward a baby? The idea was ludicrous. She opened her purse, took out the smooth, beige, clam-shaped case, and threw it in the waste-basket. It clanked against the bottom.
But as she pulled on her clothes, an idea struck her. She didn’t have to use the diaphragm the way she had intended. There was another way. The thought made the blood rush to her face, but it seemed to her—kneeling on the scrubbed floor to retrieve the clam shell—that the field of play had shifted and that actions that wouldn’t have been acceptable a month before were no longer out of bounds.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was after eleven by the time Isabel was leaving the medical group, and she thought she would swing by Alice’s office and see if her sister had time for lunch. She was retracing her steps through the waiting room when she saw a familiar figure standing in front of the directory, rocking back and forth on the balls of his scuffed sneakers. It was Simon Goldenstern, frowning up at the list of doctors and offices with his hands in his pockets. He was just looking around for somebody to accost when Isabel passed by.
“This directory is useless,” he said, turning toward her with an irritable slouch. “Tony has been here for six months, and his name isn’t even up there.”
Isabel looked up at the black notice board with its white letters dusty even behind the glass. “You’re not supposed to just go up and see your doctor anyway,” she said. “You’re supposed to check in at the front desk.”
“Why have a directory, if you don’t want people to use it?” As before, Isabel found his manner so oddly exaggerated that it was hard to tell whether he was truly angry or just playing at anger for his own amusement. She was also struck, as she had been previously, by his inability to keep his body still. His foot tapped, his brow furrowed and smoothed, and he jingled his keys in his pocket as though the conversation could not be expected to be enough to hold his attention.
“Are you having trouble with your heart?” she asked him.
“Me? No!” He laughed. “I’m as healthy as a peasant. That’s a nice expression, don’t you think? My great-grandparents wouldn’t have survived those winters in Poland or Belarus or wherever if they hadn’t been robust. All the sickly ones died in the fields.” He looked at her. “Where are your ancestors from?”
“Some from Odessa, and some from Heidelberg.”
“Oh, German Jews. They had it easy, at least until 1933. Parlor maids, ice-skating parties on the Rhine. Tutors and Wiener schnitzel! You’re not in on the secret of where Tony’s office is, are you? I just stopped by to drop something off.”
“Just because you tell secrets doesn’t mean other people do,” Isabel couldn’t resist saying, thinking of his Little League revelation.
It took him a moment to figure out what she was talking about, but when he did his fish-white cheeks flushed. “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “They weren’t engaged then.”
“Well, things have happened quickly,” Isabel said.
“Tony is always lurching into things.”
“Alice is very happy.” It occurred to Isabel to wish that Anthony’s oldest friend had something good to say about him once in a while.
“Oh, Tony is, too. But I would have thought your sister was the type to look before she threw herself over a cliff.”
“I hardly think getting married is like throwing yourself off a cliff,” Isabel said.
“Don’t you?”
Isabel pointed down the hall. “Anthony’s office is down there on the right, near the back door.”
“Near the back door,” Simon repeated. “Very convenient.”
To get to the parking lot, Isabel had to go the same way she had sent Simon. She lingered a few moments to avoid walking with him, then hoped they wouldn’t run into each other when he came out again. As she approached Anthony’s door, she heard voices.
“But I already got the tickets.” Simon’s voice was clearly audible out in the hall. The door stood slightly ajar.
“I’m sorry,” Anthony said. “I’ve changed my mind. I can’t go now.”
There was no one else in the hall. Isabel stopped outside the office and listened.
“Tony,” Simon said, “this ticket cost me three hundred bucks.”
“Isn’t it refundable?”
“No! That’s why I got a decent price.”
“Well, I can give you a hundred now.”
“You can’t reset the odometer to zero, you know, just because you pick up
a new passenger,” Simon said.
Before Anthony could answer, Isabel heard footsteps behind her. One of the nurses was escorting a patient down the hall. “Hello!” she called cheerily as she approached. “Great news about your sister, isn’t it?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Arriving at Alice’s office, Isabel was surprised to find Tina there, sitting in a chair by the desk while Alice talked on the phone. Alice smiled and waved. Tina said, “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see if Alice wanted to have lunch,” Isabel said. “I didn’t know you had plans.”
Tina shrugged. “You can tag along if you want to.” The two sisters eyed each other. They hadn’t been particularly close as children, but as adults they had grown even further apart. They almost never spent any time together alone, although occasionally Isabel accepted an invitation to have coffee or dinner, if Tina called. She knew she should call Tina sometimes, but she never wanted to. Tina irritated her and, worse, bored her. Theo had said, “It’s not that your sister is stupid. It’s just that she doesn’t have an interesting thought in her head.”
“I guess it’s lucky she has a nice body, then,” Isabel had replied, and Theo had laughed.
“I don’t want to intrude,” Isabel said now.
“It’s just lunch,” Tina said. “If you don’t mind vegetarian. We’re going to the Purple Turnip.”
Alice hung up the phone and held up a letter. “Look what came in the mail. It’s from that nursery owner, Rudner, about your friend Marco.”
Isabel took the letter Alice handed her. “It’s addressed to Mr. Rubin,” she said. “Did you pretend to be a man?”
“I guess he just assumed it.”
“People are so stupid,” Tina said.
Isabel read out loud, “‘Dear Mr. Rubin, I am writing in response to your letter of June twenty-fifth. You say my former employee Marcos Pena says he didn’t take the four hundred dollars that was missing from my cash register.’”
“See how the amount gets bigger?” Alice said.
“‘It saddens me that Marcos still refuses to take responsibility for what he did. He had the freest access to the cash register of anyone on my staff, being as he had been so trustworthy in the past, so there’s no question in my mind that it was him.’”
“That’s my favorite part,” Alice said. “He admits that other people had access and vouches for Marco’s character, all at the same time.”
“‘Also, he needed money. It saddens me, as I have tried to help the young man as much as I could. I employ many workers of his kind and always pay them minimum wage, not like some people in the landscape business who try to take advantage of people. I am keeping the motorcycle as collateral until the four hundred dollars is repaid, with interest. I am confident this can be worked out at a minimum of everyone’s convenience. ’ I suppose he means inconvenience!” Isabel finished, laughing.
“Alice,” Tina said, “I’ve been thinking that scarf I gave you would look really nice with that suit.”
“Do you think you can get the motorcycle back?” Isabel asked.
Alice looked down thoughtfully at her jacket. “I don’t see why not,” she said.
“Soren Zank would like this restaurant,” Isabel said as she read the menu. “It says the cheese is made without rennet.”
“He’s the one who told me about it,” Tina said. She sipped her iced green tea. “Everything here is certified organic, and pretty much all of it comes from California. They fly it in fresh.”
“I wonder how much jet fuel it takes to get it here,” Isabel said.
“Oh, Isabel,” Tina said. “They’re flying the planes anyhow, you know.”
Isabel changed the subject. “Are you still dating that guy?” she asked Tina.
“Which guy?”
“The one with the car. Mick? Sean?”
“Patrick. I was never really dating him. He’s barely twenty-eight. And he expected me to buy my own ticket when we went to see a movie or something. No, actually, there have been some new developments. In that part of my life.” But before she could tell them what the new developments were, the food arrived. Alice and Tina had Asian salads with rice noodles and marinated tofu. Isabel had the roasted eggplant sandwich on flaxseed bread, which sounded safe but turned out to be a mistake.
“Remember when we were kids?” Tina said. “Alice and I always had cheeseburgers when we went to Chelsea’s, and Isabel had spaghetti.”
Alice laughed. “Or when we went to Armando’s, Isabel had pepperoni pizza and you and I had plain.”
“You could have had anchovy and Tina would have asked for the same thing,” Isabel said to Alice.
“It always seemed to me,” Tina said to Isabel, “that you didn’t care what you had, as long as it was different.”
“Anthony likes anchovies on his pizza,” Alice said.
“You know what they say about men who like anchovies,” Tina said.
“I don’t talk about such things,” Alice said, laughing.
“Why not?” Tina said. “The sex must be good or you wouldn’t be marrying him, right? After all, you have lots of guys to compare him to. It’s not like Mom, marrying at nineteen or whatever.” (Tina was the only one of them who sometimes called their mother “Mom.”) “You know what I think is weird,” Tina went on, “is how she’s always talking about how little they knew when they got married—meaning how little they knew about sex. Not that I want to think about it too much, but it makes you wonder. Is she telling us they made a mistake?”
“There’s more to marriage than sex,” Isabel said.
“Oh?” Tina said. “Really?”
Alice remarked casually, “Some people still decide not to sleep together until after they get married. Even if they’ve slept with other people before.”
Silence fell. A new understanding of why the wedding was happening in such a rush broke over Isabel and Tina at the same time, and they stared at their sister, united, for once, in their disbelief. “Is that a good idea?” Isabel asked, while Tina exclaimed, “You’ve got to be out of your mind!”
Alice hardly seemed to hear them. A dreamy look had come over her face, and Isabel recognized the expression she used to have as a child when she talked about world peace. She said, “It’s just remarkable! It adds a whole new dimension to things. It marks this relationship out as different from anything that came before. A lot of people are doing it. It’s like stepping back to a more romantic era. I wasn’t sure Anthony would agree, but he really seemed to like the idea.”
“Alice,” Tina said, “that’s like marrying someone without ever having talked to them.”
Isabel said cautiously, “Now that you’re engaged, couldn’t you just—go ahead with things?”
“It will all happen soon enough,” Alice said. “We’ve settled on August twentieth for the wedding. If you have any other plans, change them now.” She smiled radiantly, waiting for the exclamations of delight. If her sisters’ responses were more muted than they would have been a few minutes before, Alice generously did not notice.
“Listen!” Tina said. “I have some news, too!” And to Isabel’s amazement, Tina’s face turned as crimson as her nail polish. “I’m pregnant.”
Isabel felt as though a small explosion had taken place in her chest. “How do you know?” she said.
“Would you like to guess who the father is?” Tina beamed, basking in her sisters’ astonishment. “You won’t be able to, so I’ll tell you. Soren! We’re going to get married! I told him about the baby, and he got right down on his knees and proposed. It was like a movie. Oh, when I think about the wedding dress I’m going to have!”
“Oh, my God!” Alice said. “It’s so sudden.”
“You’re one to talk,” Tina said. “Anyway, doesn’t love at first sight have to be sudden? By definition?”
Love at first sight, Isabel thought. The idea had never seemed more appalling. How could people rush into marriage as though it were a weekend at
the shore? Why did everyone assume being married would make their lives better? How could they possibly know?
“So you knew?” Alice asked, leaning across the table toward Tina. “You knew that day when he came to brunch in Devon?”
“Maybe not that day.”
“But you suspected? You felt something, but you didn’t know if it was what you thought it might be?”
“I always planned to get married by the time I was thirty,” Tina said.
How could Tina be pregnant? Isabel’s ears buzzed and she couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. She looked at her sister’s face, then around the restaurant at the faces of the other diners, laughing and chattering soundlessly like faces in a dream. How long had Tina known Soren—a month? And Isabel had been trying to get pregnant for years. The buzzing in her ears crescendoed and then began to subside, leaving her feeling drained, dry as dust.
“Are you absolutely sure it’s Soren’s?” she asked, thinking of the profusion of men Tina dated. She wondered whether she should tell Tina what had happened at the Xando. Would it be in her sister’s best interest or merely gratuitously cruel?
Tina looked at her blandly. “I believe I’m in possession of all the facts,” she said.
“I’m so pleased for you, Tina!” Alice said. “I really am.”
Isabel said, “I hope you’ll be very happy.”
Tina said, “I’m sure we’ll be at least as happy as most married people. And happier than some.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Alice and Tina had to go back to work. Isabel envied them. She wished she had something she had to do that would distract her while she tried to digest what she had heard—as though her mind were a snake and the news a rat it had caught that was almost too big to go down.
She walked north along the river for a long time, and then she sat in the scrubby grass in Fairmount Park and watched the runners and the dogs. College students walked by hunched under backpacks or rowed by in sculls. How differently she had expected her life to turn out when she was a student—she who at twenty was always busy, taking extra classes, volunteering at the animal shelter, going out with friends, going to lectures, talking, never finding enough time to sleep. Now she had plenty of time. Time lay around her like dust.
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