Commencement (36 page)

“Sorry, I just saw myself naked again,” she yelled.

“Okey-dokey,” he said. She could hear him walking back to the TV room.

She was seven months pregnant. At five months, every part of her had suddenly exploded. She hadn’t known many pregnant women up close and personal, and she had assumed that the only part of a woman that changed was her stomach. But now Sally’s body—which she had always worked so hard to keep under control—had expanded in every direction. Her breasts grew heavy. Her face got full and fat, like those Smith College sophomores who gorged themselves on pudding and pot roast in the dining hall. Her thighs were covered in red stretch marks that wove this way and that like routes on a road map. Her fingers and feet had swollen up so that her wedding ring no longer fit, and she could only wear flip-flops, even to work (she had no earthly idea what she would do when the weather turned bitter cold in another month).

Her doctor said he’d never seen someone experience such an intensely physical pregnancy. When she got the slightest chill, her
legs and feet turned blue and splotchy. (“It’s normal!” Jake said sunnily. “It’s from all the extra estrogen you’re producing!”) Her back hurt, she felt constipated all the time, she had insane mood swings that came over her with no warning, and she sometimes wanted to murder Jake in his sleep for getting her into this position in the first place.

Sally had never cared all that much about food, but throughout her pregnancy she felt ravenous. She craved blood oranges and rare steaks and cheeseburgers and Devil Dogs (had she ever even had a Devil Dog before?) and milk shakes and cinnamon buns, the kind they only sold at the mall. Jake kept feeding her, and telling her she looked beautiful, but she had gained forty-eight pounds since she got the news that she was having a baby, which she knew was insane.

As Rosemary had so gently put it, “Slow down! You may be eating for two, honey, but neither one is a sumo wrestler.”

“Babies whose mothers gain under twenty pounds are more likely to be premature and suffer retardation in the uterus,” Jake replied. “The sensible and safe pregnancy weight gain is between twenty-five and thirty-five pounds, but Sally’s fine. Our doctor said so. She was so in shape to begin with. Although with a major weight gain like hers, a vaginal birth might become difficult or impossible, and—”

Sally interrupted him. “Honey, shut up please.”

Rosemary looked shocked by this, but Sally would not have her vagina talked about in mixed company, just because she was pregnant.

“He keeps quoting from
What to Expect When You’re Expecting,”
she said. “And it’s driving me nuts.”

Rosemary furrowed her brow. “Oh, that is annoying. Jake, keep that stuff to yourself.”

Jake looked sad. Sally didn’t care. He was so pumped about being a dad that sometimes he made her feel like she didn’t even exist.

He didn’t want to have sex anymore, because he was afraid they’d hurt the baby, even though all the books said they wouldn’t.

A week earlier, she had awakened to find him rolling up the rug in the upstairs hall.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I’m putting skidproof mats down under all the carpets today,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Well,
What to Expect
says it’s a good idea, you know, because the bigger you get, the more your center of gravity will shift, and the more likely you are to suffer a fall.”

Sally inhaled deeply. Was this supposed to thrill her? she wondered. Were there women out there who longed for husbands to care this much?

Later that day, she opened a jar of olives over the kitchen sink, and was about to eat one, when Jake said, “Did that pop?”

“What?” she said irritably.

“The jar, I didn’t hear it pop. Those olives might be spoiled, Sal. I think you need to throw them out. The smallest amount of bacteria could be lethal to the baby.”

Sally lifted the jar to her mouth and shook it hard, until her cheeks were full of olives and the salty juice leaked onto her chin and down the front of her neck. She chewed and chewed, and when she finally swallowed, she screamed, “I’m not your motherfucking baby vessel! I’m your wife!” and stormed out of the room.

She had read somewhere that women became mothers the moment they found out they were pregnant, while men didn’t become fathers until they saw their babies for the first time. In her marriage, the reverse seemed to be true. Personally, she worried about this. But intellectually, she found it fascinating and wished she had April there to talk to about it—nature versus nurture and gender roles and all of that. When she tried to engage Jake in this conversation, he just said, “Oh, honey, you’re going to be an amazing mom,” which she knew wasn’t true, and anyway, it was beside the point.

Jake talked to the baby, he sang to the baby, he read to the baby
—Family Circus
and
Peanuts, The Boston Globe
music reviews, and
Sports Illustrated
, cover to cover.

Sally didn’t talk to the baby at all. She couldn’t quite imagine this blob in her stomach as an actual person. Of course, as Jake pointed out, she had learned about April just two months after she found
out she was pregnant. It was impossible to know how each of these things affected the other, or how she would feel about the baby if April were there. This had always been true for Sally—with happy change came surprising despair. What would it have felt like to graduate from high school or start college without having just lost her mother? What would her wedding have been like if she hadn’t gotten into that stupid drunken fight with the girls the night before? Sally would never know.

She went into the bedroom and lay down naked, pulling a sheet up over herself so she didn’t have to look at her revolting body. They were due at Jake’s parents’ house for dinner in an hour, and Sally wondered if she might be able to get out of it, just this once. It would be fabulous to have the house all to herself for the evening. She could watch a bad Lifetime movie and have a little bit of red wine. (Jake would flip, but she knew for a fact that pregnant women in Paris drank two glasses of Cabernet a day, and their babies turned out fine.) She could call Bree and Celia and talk for as long as she wanted, without Jake giving her that puppy-dog stare he always developed when she ignored him for too long.

Bree’s and Celia’s lives had changed more in these past two months than in all the years since they left Smith. She believed that April’s disappearance had had a strange effect on them both, different than she would have imagined. Of course they were all sad and on edge, dreading the inevitable news each time the phone rang. But it was more than just that. It was as if Celia and Bree now saw the entire world through the prism of this single event—April had disappeared and everything else followed from that.

Bree had gone back to New York, a city she didn’t even like, to live with Celia. She had told Sally in an e-mail about her horrible breakfast with April’s mother. “I understand the importance of family now more than ever,” she wrote. “And so for that reason, I actually feel blessed by things that have happened in my life that might otherwise make me upset.” Did she mean her mother’s heart attack? Or April? Or Lara? Sally suspected it was some combination of the three.

She was shocked that Bree had quit her job. As much as Bree seemed perfectly content to flush all her hard work down the toilet,
Sally thought it was criminal and wondered if perhaps Bree was having a nervous breakdown. The Bree she had known back at school once wept when she got an A minus on a final exam, claiming that it would derail her entire career.

Celia had changed, too, and Sally couldn’t tell whether the change was for the better. Her reaction to April’s disappearance was understandable. Realizing the randomness and brevity of life, Celia had decided to do away with everything that didn’t make her happy and satisfied in the here and now. She said she was working harder on her novel than she ever had before. She had stopped dieting and gained ten pounds. She cooked roasted chicken stuffed with lemon and garlic, or beef stew, or spaghetti and meatballs. She bought a Maltese, an adorable little ball of white fluff that had already eaten four pairs of heels, a Marc Jacobs purse, and a fifty-dollar bill, as well as pissing all over her couch. She was taking a man hiatus for at least six months, and she refused to clean her bathroom, the chore she dreaded above all others (though Sally suspected Bree was probably doing it for her).

Some nights Sally got into bed beside Jake and wanted to be with her friends instead. All of their lives had changed so quickly in so many ways, and she couldn’t help but feel a bit jealous that Bree and Celia had been able to form a little shell around themselves to brace them against whatever might come.

The only person who seemed not to have changed in the weeks since April’s disappearance was Ronnie. She was still the same self-promoting conniver she always had been. She had taken her sex-trafficking show on the road—appearing on
Charlie Rose
and
Larry King
and
Fresh Air
with Terry Gross. She had a book coming out on the topic, too. And then there was the movie they had planned from the start.

Sally knew it was a good thing that child prostitution and sex trafficking were finally getting covered in the news—April would have been proud of that. But the way Ronnie used April’s disappearance as her vehicle for getting the word out sickened Sally. Every story started in the same way: “April Adams wasn’t your typical sex-trafficking victim. She was white, well educated, and yadda yadda yadda.” It made Sally cringe, because in truth there was no
proof that April had been kidnapped by a pimp, other than the testimony of some old woman. She could be anywhere, with anyone.

Thinking it over as she pulled the sheets up to her chin, Sally felt overcome with anger—at that fucking Ronnie for taking advantage of April’s idealism and making April yet another casualty of her mission. At April herself for being so naïve (wasn’t she lucky enough to have made it through all of Ronnie’s other stupid projects?). Sally was irrationally enraged at her mother, too, for leaving her alone before she had time to ask any of the important questions. For the first few years after her death, Sally could always predict exactly what she might have said in response to any given problem. Now she really had no clue. Would she have been delighted to become a grandmother so soon, or disappointed in Sally for not following through on her dreams of med school? Would she know what to do about April? Would she understand how guilty Sally felt for letting a year pass between them without so much as a word?

Jake pouted a little, but ultimately he agreed to tell his mother that Sally felt too sick to go out. Ten minutes after she heard his car pull out of the driveway, she went down to the kitchen in her bathrobe to forage for food. She felt giddy, like the first time her parents left her home alone when she was eleven. She could do whatever she wanted! Which for the moment only entailed putting on a Faith Hill CD, making two peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, pouring a huge glass of chocolate milk, and eating standing up at the counter. But even so.

Faith’s voice echoed through the wide rooms of the first floor.
I believe in Peter Pan and miracles, anything I can to get by
.

The house was too big for just the two of them. It was too big even for the two of them plus a baby, really. Neither of them had ever owned an apartment let alone an entire house before, and the constant upkeep amazed them. While a leaky faucet or a broken pipe had previously meant a call to the landlord, now it was a whole new level of work. They went to Home Depot at least once every weekend.

“How do you stand it?” Celia had asked her once on the phone, and Sally said, “I honestly don’t know. Believe me, I never thought I’d be pregnant and shopping at Home Depot at the age of twenty-six.” As soon as the words came out of her mouth, she felt like she had betrayed Jake—she actually enjoyed their Sunday drives to the garden department and the paint center. Afterward they always stopped at Brigham’s for a hot-fudge sundae, and Jake got unduly excited about blasting an old Bruce Springsteen album and singing along.

Sally’s father loved their house. She saw more of him these days, which wasn’t particularly enjoyable. He never asked about the baby or April, just about their property tax or how much Jake had paid for his golf clubs. He had taken up with a new woman, Barbara, and Sally assumed she was the instigating force behind trying to make them closer. She could not bring herself to refer to Barbara as her father’s girlfriend. She was fat—there was no nice word for it. She had gray stringy hair, and even on her best day she could not hold a candle to Sally’s mother on her worst. She was forty-seven and worked in the accounting office of a suburban nursing home and seemed to have absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Sally had no idea what her father saw in Barbara. Maybe, like her mother had said once, men just could not be alone.

“Women leave their marriages when they can’t take any more,” she had told Sally. “Men leave when they find someone new.”

Sally took a bite of her sandwich and washed it down with a big gulp of milk. As she swallowed, she felt it—the very first kick from inside. She let out a little squeal. Then, another kick.

“Oh my God,” she said with a laugh.

It was the weirdest and greatest thing she had ever felt. Her child, alive inside her.

For two months, the doctor and nurses had been asking her if she had felt anything. She hated that she grew guilty each time she told them no, as if she was an inadequate mother even when it came to being kicked in the stomach. And now, this. She could not wait to tell them.

“Do you like bananas?” she asked, and she felt a surge of love and panic and safety all at once.

The phone rang, and Sally reached for the cordless, hoping it was Jake. Maybe she ought to drag her butt over to his mother’s house after all, though she was glad to have had this moment just for herself.

“Hello?” she said.

At first, Sally could only make out a crackling sound at the other end of the line. Then she thought she could hear a whisper.