Heads or Tails (7 page)

“She’s in the car seat,” I said.

“The base! Where’s the car seat base?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. Just like I had no idea how to properly dispose of a dirty diaper. The one I’d changed on the plane was still tucked away in my purse. I hoped the cab driver wouldn’t smell it — if he even deigned to give us a ride.

Suddenly, I remembered a blue plastic square thing that Jean had stuffed into one of the duffle bags. I crouched down to fish for it. I don’t know what Sarah had been thinking when she insisted that I only needed some formula, diapers and onesies. Jean had sent me and the baby off with two enormous bags filled with clothes, toys and other unidentifiable baby gear. I hoped Sarah would help me sort it all out.

“Do you mean this?” I asked, waving the plastic thing above my head.

“Yes! What else could I mean? Go ahead — put it in already!” For a guy who easily disparaged New Yorkers, he certainly seemed to behave in a manner far more stereotypical of New York than San Francisco.

“Um, I —. Would you mind doing it for me?”

Before I even finished asking, he shook his head vigorously, as if he’d been just waiting for that very offensive question. “Nope. Can’t do it. Liability.”

I willed myself not to cry and debated whether to just lug all my bags and the baby down to the next, hopefully more sympathetic, taxi driver in line. I was grimy, tired and just wanted to get home. Even though I was finally back in San Francisco, somehow it seemed like I’d actually arrived in a foreign land. I felt upside down, inside out.

“I don’t —. My husband normally does it,” I lied.

He shook his head. A jetliner took off overhead and my curls once again blew everywhere. From the car seat on the curb, the baby began to whimper.

I’m smarter than this car seat
, I told myself.
I can figure it out
.

“Okay,” I said. “The baby is fussing. Could you maybe hold her while I do this?”

The driver took a quick step backward, then glanced at the next group in line for a taxi, a family of five with two school-aged kids who were swatting each other. The third child, a toddler, hacked with a phlegmy cough.

The driver exhaled audibly. “Christ. Gimme that.”

As he installed the base, which required several minutes of probing between the back seats for a long abandoned middle seat belt, I held the baby and with my other arm lugged her two large duffle bags as well as my own small carry-on into the trunk. My whole body ached.

Once on the Bayshore freeway, I tried to relax. For the last several hours, I’d been on anxious guard, expecting to be halted by someone shouting “That’s not your baby!” But no one even blinked at the two of us. In line to board, a woman behind me kept squeezing the baby’s toes and saying, “I gotcha!” As I handed over my boarding pass, the ticketing agent glanced at me furtively and whispered, “You shouldn’t let strangers touch your baby. Germs are everywhere!”

Moments later, my seat mate, the one who wouldn’t know that she was on back-up for diaper duty, smiled at us when I sat down. “Awww, how old?”

“Um, about six months? I think.”

She shot me a troubled look and didn’t speak to me again for the rest of the flight.

The cab driver continued north, directly towards the San Francisco sky, which was draped in a rich red swath of foggy haze, like a signal of my own state of high alert. The baby, who’d been remarkably mellow on the flight, scrunched her face, whimpered and smacked her thighs with her hands. I patted her black hair gingerly. She quieted for a moment but then began to howl.

“That kid’s hungry!” the cab driver barked. His confident proclamation startled me and I jumped up in my seat.

“Right!” I said.

I dug into my purse for a bottle of water and the travel package of formula, spilling specks of the beige powder as I tried to read the directions on the pouch after I’d already ripped it open. The cabbie rolled his eyes at me in the rear-view mirror.

A pissed off taxi driver is the least of my worries
, I thought, trying to ignore his judgments. I was moments away from arriving home to my husband with an infant, a baby that we were in no way related to, a baby that neither one of us knew how to care for. I had no clue how I was going to make the next few days work. Jesse had always said that my loyalty, my devotion to my friends, was something that he loved about me. But I suppose neither of us ever imagined the lengths I’d go to. Sometimes it’s best not to consider whether helping someone you love will end up hurting you.

Finally, I got the bottle ready. I’d seen on TV that you’re supposed to test the formula on the inside of your wrist, though I had no idea why. I did it anyway. Large drops of the creamy white substance slithered off my arm and onto the faux leather seat.

“Stop messing up my cab!”

“Sorry.”

I put the bottle to the baby’s lips and she suckled gratefully. I turned my head to look out at the now eggplant-colored night sky. Moments later, I felt a tiny tug on my sleeve. The baby had grabbed it, as if to capture my attention. I looked down and her coal-black eyes locked onto mine with a strangely knowing gaze. It was only then that I truly understood — and maybe she did too — that I was her only hope. That it was me, of all people, was a measure of how desperate her situation was. Something deep inside me fractured then and I readied myself for the potential fallout.

Jean’s Staten Island roots both grounded and propelled her. She was quintessentially working class, handling payroll at a paper manufacturing company for years. It was probably one of the least stimulating jobs ever for a woman as dynamic as Jean, but it was stable. And after her husband, an insurance claims adjuster, died of a sudden heart attack when Margot was in elementary school, Jean had made smart choices. She’d inherited a tiny pension and somehow made it bloom. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to send Margot to an excellent boarding school and to college. They’d had virtually no other family so it must have been particularly hard for Jean to send Margot away to school. But like many women of her generation, she was determined to smooth a path for her daughter despite personal sacrifices. For her part, Margot had maximized those opportunities, maybe because of her own inherent ambition, maybe out of obligation to her mom’s sacrifices. Either way, at Egan, Margot was a straight-A student, earning her admission to an Ivy League education. After graduation, she applied her solid training and quick smarts to a series of hedge fund jobs, working her way up the power chain each time. Ten years out of college, she was a regular on the
Wall Street Business Times
’s Top Forty Under Forty list, twice as the only woman. Five years ago, Jean was able to retire and Margot bought her a small Upper West Side condo a few blocks from her own.

Jean was no-nonsense but kind, exceedingly practical but in no way at the expense of empathy. Which was why I instinctively clung to her at the most vulnerable time in my life.

I’d met Arlen at the start of senior year. He was the hockey star at our brother school. He was handsome in a way I knew I should like — tall, broad-shouldered, with sandy blond hair and a masculine Roman nose. Looking back, he wasn’t my type. At all. But all the girls were nuts for him. (The pack of freshman and sophomores who followed him to all his games were nicknamed the Arlen Globetrotters.) And for some reason, it was me he liked. So I went with it.

We dated for a couple of months that fall. I realize now I that definitely didn’t love him. How could I? Though we were boyfriend-girlfriend, I hardly knew him. We were together usually in groups, infrequently alone. He never told me what drove him, what scared him or even why he liked me. Yet we slept together.

Losing my virginity to Arlen was not at all an act of love. Rather, it was a hormone-driven impulse and, if I was honest, a check-mark on the pre-collegiate to-do list. I imagined the same was true for Arlen, though we never discussed it because we didn’t discuss anything of substance. Our relationship changed little after we started having sex. Everything about us was mechanical, devoid of true connection.

Right after Halloween, I realized that my period was nine days late. I took a pregnancy test in the Walgreens bathroom moments after purchasing it, my knees bobbing up and down as I sat on the toilet, shaking. I wasn’t even sure how it could have happened. A tiny tear in a condom? That one night when he promised he’d pull out in time?

I called Arlen from the pay phone outside Walgreens. First, he cursed and then declared that we’d have to decide whether to get married or give the baby up for adoption. One of the few things I knew about Arlen was that his family was Catholic.
Exceedingly
Catholic. I hurriedly hung up the phone, terrified.

I stood outside the store for twenty minutes, trembling from nerves and the New England autumn wind. At once terrified and dumbfounded about what to do next, I picked up the phone and dialed Jean.

The ironies of my having an abortion were not lost on me, given my mother’s own history with me. But there was no way I was having that baby. Looking back, I terminated not just that singular pregnancy, but also any reasonable notion that I could ever become a mother.

Two days later, Jean took a day off of work to meet me at a Planned Parenthood two towns over from Egan Academy. Neither one of us told Margot about what was going on. I’d just turned eighteen so I wasn’t required to consult my own parents. At the registration desk, when I started to unroll my wad of emergency twenties that I’d saved from my summer job hostessing at Denny’s, the woman behind the desk waved at me dismissively.

“Don’t worry about it, hon,” she said, glancing knowingly at Jean. “It’s been taken care of.”

Jean held my hand during the procedure, squeezing it in small I’m-with-you pulses. Afterwards, she rubbed my lower back as we ambled out of the clinic, me doubled over with cramps. She drove me back to campus and once we arrived, pulled from the glove compartment a white, oil-soaked bag containing three crumb donuts from Hunter’s, my favorite. She phoned me multiple times over the next few days, always timing the calls when she knew Margot would be in class so that I could speak freely with her. I didn’t say much, though. I mostly just cried quietly — for my poor choices, for my confusion, for my loneliness. She never judged or pitied me.

I never spoke to Arlen again.

Moments after the baby had drained the last drops out of the bottle, right about the time the taxi exited the freeway, she fell asleep. The cab driver seemed to calm down too. When we reached my flat in Cole Valley, he not only carried all the baby’s luggage to the top of our front stairs, but he also unclipped the car seat without being asked and accepted my payment in silence so as not to wake her.

When he drove away, I hesitated outside the front door for several moments, taking in my home and the foreign object I was about to introduce into it. I usually saw Sarah’s kids at her house but the few times she’d brought Henry and Lily over to mine, I felt on edge. They weren’t rough or misbehaved kids. (Sarah was too mindful a parent for that.) But they still had that bull-in-a-China-shop quality inherent to young children that made me nervous. Once, when she was about three, Lily yanked on the cord to my iPhone charger, sending my phone to the tile kitchen floor, shattering the screen. At her age, Gretchen wouldn’t — couldn’t — be destructive, I told myself.

At the front door, I hunched down to pick up
The Examiner
bagged in light blue plastic, resting on our Welcome mat. We’d purchased our mid-century flat six years before. It was a top-floor one-bedroom that hadn’t needed much work. Still, little by little, we’d upgraded certain elements — replacing the kitchen cabinets, refinishing the floors, adding a nicer vanity to the bathroom. The year before, we’d splurged for an uber comfortable L-shaped couch and high-definition TV, perfect for viewing our beloved Sharks games. The first night with the TV, we drank beers and marveled that we could even see Evgeni Nabokov’s chin stubble. We enjoyed the convenient Cole Valley location and the flat’s cozy feel — the one bedroom, just for us.

It was nearly nine-thirty when I finally inserted the key into the door and crossed the threshold into our home. Jesse, whose body clock was totally opposite of mine (me, being the night owl), was asleep, probably worn out from the day’s training swim. After washing up, I delicately placed the car seat at the foot of the bed and crawled under the covers myself. I couldn’t believe my luck that the baby stayed asleep through all of the transitions and I began to think that perhaps babysitting an infant for a few days wouldn’t be so hard after all. Lying there, I thought of Margot and Jean, shuddering silently at how sick they’d both seemed. Finally growing sleepy, I turned onto my side and hoped that without the burden or distraction of the baby, the two of them would be able to get themselves healthy soon.

Then, at two-thirty on the nose, Gretchen shrieked awake, sounding as if she were being stabbed. Jesse shot up in alarm, the way he always did during even the mildest middle-of-the-night earthquake.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” It spewed from him like a reflex.

My own heart rammed against my ribcage. It took a moment to catch my breath, to determine where the howl originated. Then I remembered.

“I’ll get her!” I said and stumbled out of bed, clumsily making my way to the car seat, jamming my knee on the open door on the way.

“Is she hungry?” Jesse asked. “At this hour?”

“I don’t know.”

I fumbled with the car seat buckle and lifted the baby up. Somehow, she seemed heavier than she had a few hours before. When I wrapped my forearm underneath her, I realized why — she was soaking.

“She’s wet.”

Jesse flopped back onto the pillow with a thud. I whisked the baby, still crying, out of the bedroom and crisscrossed my way around our flat trying in my mid-sleep haze to remember where all of her provisions were. I located the duffle bags near the entry way and tried to remember which one contained the diapers. I looked around for a place to put the baby but there were no extra hands and the little bouncy seat I saw Jean using at Margot’s hadn’t fit in the overstuffed bags. I tried leaning the baby up against one duffle bag while I searched the other but she instantly slid down and sobbed harder. I picked her up again and pawed through the bag with one hand. Her shrieks turned into pathetic, resigned whimpers punctuated by gasps.