Parachutes and Kisses (22 page)

She took off to spend the day shopping and walking. At Bergdorf‘s, she bought a beautiful brown silk smock dress (with a ruffled neck) that could well be used as a maternity dress. Isadora already knew the answer the blood told. And yet, when she called the lab from Grand Central later in the day (the doctor had authorized them to give her the answer directly), she was appalled and shocked and not a little panic-stricken when the answer was “positive.”

“Are you sure?” Isadora said.

“It says here ‘positive,' ” said the bored lab receptionist, whose belly was not going to swell, whose feet were not going to ache, whose clothes were not going to grow tight.

“It says here ‘positive.' ”

Isadora next called Josh in Connecticut. She was standing in one of those carousellike phone pods in Grand Central, watching the gray-faced commuters come and go, the men she thought of as Cheever people, all the Lowell Strathmores of the world, with their Ben Franklin glasses, their passionless mouths, and their dormant cocks that longed to dance in the night but knew not for whom.

She called collect. And just as Josh said: “Yes, I'll pay,” Isadora said, “You certainly will—I'm pregnant!”

A pause.

“Cookie—that's wonderful. How do you feel?”

“Utterly terrified,” Isadora said.

Her honesty at that moment (she later learned) Josh never ceased to hold against her. He took wholly personally the fact that she might have some ambivalence about this momentous change in state.

“Don't worry, cookie,” he said, “we'll do it together. I'll help you with
everything,
I swear it. I'll never let you down. There's no reason to be nervous.”

Having stated her fear, she was now free to experience elation. On the train home, she looked at all the gray-faced commuters and exulted. She was the only one carrying life within; they carried death. She was the one bearing the race onward as it hurtled through the cosmos. She was the cupbearer, the good-news bearer, the genetic messenger. She found, to her astonishment, that she liked that role very much. Having always borne life forward through sheer acts of thinking and willing, she now found that her cells themselves were propelling life, that the mystery printed in the DNA was doing all the work. For an intellectual woman who feels that nothing is but thinking makes it so, the very will-lessness of pregnancy is immensely appealing. The cosmos comes through you without your conscious thought. You give up control and thereby gain the greatest control. You open your palm to the skies and the stars kiss it. You open your belly to a shower of golden rain and your wealth multiplies.

On that dour, urine- and disinfectant-scented commuter train, Isadora felt smug in her secret knowledge that she was pushing life forward into the future. She remembered that as a prepubes cent girl, she used to sit on buses in New York and think (with utter amazement) that every man, in his gray gabardine suit, had one of those tubular things called a “penis” dangling between his grayish legs. She was both fascinated and repelled. What an awful thing to have to dangle there! If repressed envy was concealed in her fantasy, she could not find it. All she knew was that
she
would have felt horribly embarrassed if she always had to shift her thighs from side to side to accommodate that dingling dangling thing-ling.

When Isadora got back to Westport station, she discovered that a light dusting of snow had covered the region, making even the grim bars opposite the train station look cheery.

Josh was not waiting in the Mercedes. She called home.

“The driveway isn't plowed yet, cookie,” he said. “I can't get up it.” (Their driveway was impassable even in the lightest of snows.) “Why don't you take a cab home, and I'll walk up to the top of the driveway and escort you down.”

“Okay,” she said, not really registering the disappointment and anger she must have felt. What an ungallant way to greet a newly pregnant bride!

She looked everywhere for a taxi, and not finding a free one, was almost about to call Josh back, when a woman who had been staring at her on the train recognized her and called to her by name.

“Ms. Wing,” she said. “I just
had
to tell you how I love your books.”

Now this took Isadora aback; it always took her aback when people recognized her (since she always forgot she was famous). She thanked the woman heartily. (She was secretly pleased—if overtly somewhat abashed by such praise—who among us can accept compliments graciously?) But on this occasion, she took her heart in her hand and asked the woman if she would do her the special favor of driving her home.

“Of course, I'd be honored,” the woman said. She was a fortyish, brown-eyed, bleached blonde, who wore a dress-for-success suit and “sensible” midheel pumps.

“I'm Louise Mooring,” the woman said. “By coincidence, I live right near you in Rocky Ridge.”

As they drove home from Westport into higher and higher, snowier and snowier terrain, Louise poured out the sad story of her divorce, the grimness of raising children alone in Rocky Ridge (and commuting to New York to work in an ad agency), and the grimness of divorced dating in Connecticut. “That could be me,” Isadora thought, Isadora always thought, though the warmth in her belly obliterated all present doubts and dire premonitions.

When they reached Serpentine Hill Road, they found that, as always, the snow was deeper than anywhere else. On the most treacherous curve (where four years later Isadora was to skid and climb a stone wall) the car would go no more. It slid sideways and spun its wheels uselessly in the snow.

After numerous attempts to negotiate the curve, Louise turned to Isadora and said:

“Would you horribly mind walking the rest of the way? I have no snow tires and my two kids are waiting for a hot dinner. I live right here.”

She pointed to a white colonial house with a plaque on it—the eighteenth-century Ethan Wheatworth House, Isadora noted. How could she know that just a few years later that house would have again changed hands and would again figure in her life?

“Not at all,” said Isadora, feeling glad to have been driven even this far by a total stranger.

“Thanks for all your kind words about my work,” she said, stepping out of the car into the slippery snow and starting up the hill on foot.

It was ungodly quiet here in the snow, and the trees, weighted as they were by wet snow and icy droplets, seemed to droop their branches. Her thin suede boots gave her a poor foothold and became soaked almost immediately. It was too dark to see icy patches in the road and every little step slid her somewhat backward even as it propelled her forward.

Although her house was perhaps only half a mile up the hill, the hill was steep and the road was dark. No moon shone to guide her, and she knew that if she fell and sprained an ankle, no one might find her for quite a while. She cursed herself for not having called Josh again before leaving the station—but in some way, she must have wished that she
would
fall and flounder in the snow so that his lack of gallantry would be underlined. What pointless masochism! Better to choose a man who was loving and protective than to choose a child-lover and then try to punish him for being what he always was, perhaps always would be—a child.

Ten minutes or so further in her climb, Isadora heard a crackle of branches behind her and her heart raced. She turned around to see a doe walk delicately out of the underbrush, cross the road on dark, sure-footed hooves, stop for a millisecond to fix her in her wide-eyed brown gaze, and disappear into the underbrush on the other side with another crackle of dead wood and leaf mulch. This was one of the joys of living in Connecticut, and also one of the sadnesses—for often the animals one saw in the road were dead animals, oozing blood, or already furiously moving with maggots. “God bless the souls of the animals,” Isadora would say whenever she saw the road-kill. But now, peered at by another female, albeit a female of another species, she felt a surge of identification. Two females trudging through snow with no males to protect them. Who would weather the winter better—she or the doe?

On up the road she went, her stockings soaked, her boots making squishing noises as they slid backward with every step. Isadora was tired from a day in the city, drained from that grim hour or so on the commuter train. She wanted to be home in bed; she wanted to absorb the news of her pregnancy and try to make sense of it all. Never had the half-mile to her house seemed so long. She had walked it many times in the summer, jogged it even in good weather, but in the dark and snow, it seemed forbidding.

Christmas lights were still up in some of the houses and they winked and twinkled through the branches. The Bradleys had electric candles, one in each window, and the Grimshaws still had their hemlock trees draped with ugly neon-green lights. Who had the key to whose bomb-shelter? Isadora wondered—for she could never walk this terrain without thinking of Cheever, who had chronicled it all so well long before she had moved to this bleak New England landscape. True, he had written about Ossi ning, or his fictional Shady Hill—but it was all the same desiccated WASP terrain, the same forbidding antisemitic woods. She hardly belonged here, but then, had she ever lived
anywhere
she felt she belonged? Never. She hadn't belonged in Heidelberg or in Malibu, or even in New York City, where she was born, bred, and educated. Perhaps
other
people felt they belonged. Isadora always felt like an alien. Or maybe everyone else felt like an alien, too. Maybe that was why poets and artists were needed by the human race: because
everyone
felt like an alien, but poets were the ones who knew how to express it in words.

When she came to her driveway, she saw Josh waiting with a large flashlight in his hand; he was wearing snow boots and a ski cap. He had a long scarf draped around his neck and icicles trembled from his red beard. Seeing him, she felt warmed and happy, suddenly ready to forgive everything. She ran to him and threw her arms around him.

“Cookie,” he said, “that's
wonderful,
about your being pregnant!” They walked down the driveway arm in arm, Isadora's boots slipping in the wet snow, Josh's flashlight beaming on the large wet flakes whose myriad crystals, no two alike, reminded her of the blastula—or was it already a fetus?—in her belly.

They walked into their house, and Chekarf, his coat all matted and wet from earlier romps in the snow, jumped on her. Their big red mutt, Virginia Woof, sulked in a corner, as if she already knew she was about to be replaced in their affections by a baby. These two animals had
been
their babies ever since they came to Connecticut. The animals bonded them; Josh and Isadora spoke a whole secret language about the dogs—each of whom, like an Eliotesque cat, had several names. Virginia Woof was also “Ginny” and “Woofly,”and “Dame Dog.” Chekarf was also “Arf,” and “The Teller of Tales,” and “Russki.” Many things are lost in the process of divorce, but the loss of the secret marital language (which comes with the division of the animals) is perhaps the most crushing.

“What happened with the test?” Josh asked.

And Isadora related, as best she could, the whole story of slogging up Madison Avenue with the phial of blood in her pocket. She tried to communicate what she had felt at the moment of being told she was pregnant, but there seemed to be no way to say it right.

“I was suddenly terrified,” she said. “I feel like too much of a baby myself to
have
a baby. But I also feel terrific somehow—as if for the first time in my life I am doing something without my bloody
mind
controlling it. I seem to swing back and forth between these two feelings—terror and elation.”

Josh didn't want to hear this; he had his own ambivalence to deal with and he didn't want to hear about Isadora's. He went into the kitchen and began making cocoa. It was carob cocoa from the health-food store. Josh had, not so long ago, given up meat, fish, caffeine, and all alcoholic beverages. He had been a serious doper in college, and virtually, as he once said, “majored in LSD,” but now, like a number of members of his generation—refugees of the sixties—he was into pure foods, Zen meditation, and yoga. He had replaced one obsession with another, like so many of us do.

Isadora and Josh sat down at their dining-room table to drink the cocoa. A fire roared in the large fieldstone fireplace; outside the snow kept falling.

“What do you feel about having a baby?” Isadora asked Josh.

“Great—I've wanted it for years,” he said, staring impassively. He didn't
look
happy.
Stunned
was more the word.

“Don't you have any mixed feelings about it?” Isadora asked. “Most people do.”

At the utterance of that phrase, Josh stood up suddenly and pounded the table with his fist so hard that the carob drinks splashed all over the wormy-chestnut veneer.

“God damn it, Isadora! I'm
not
like you!” he shrieked. “I
know
what I feel! I
don't
feel ambivalent about everything the way you do and I hate your goddamned Freudian, psychological way of looking at everything!” He stamped out of the dining room and into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

Isadora sat there in stunned silence. Whenever anyone screamed at her, she crumbled, felt utterly wrong, utterly wronged. She joined in the accusing, attacking voices and began to destroy herself. He was right; she was nothing but a psycholo gizing Freudian fink, a character out of a Jules Feiffer cartoon, a silly goose, a vacillator, unable to feel totally glad about anything. The voices in her head joined his attack on her until she began to tremble, as she had in childhood when her mother screamed at her. Finally, she broke down in tears and buried her head in her hands.