Surprise Me (16 page)

“More than most,” she says with a sage nod of her head. She bumps the cart into her open doorway, then turns to give Isabelle the rest of her wisdom. “The Safeway—may they rot in hell for the produce they put out.” And with that, Mrs. Hershfeld maneuvers herself and her groceries through the front door and closes it with a slam of her foot.

—

CASEY CALLS ISABELLE THE FRIDAY BEFORE
Christmas from Subic Bay International Airport in the Philippines. She’s had well over a week to make some kind of sense of her new state. The first thing she did was call Deepti and make a doctor’s appointment and take Deepti with her to ask the questions she wouldn’t think to ask. And the doctor confirmed the pregnancy, even though Isabelle didn’t need any medical test to verify what she knew, absolutely, in her bones.

What she wasn’t sure of was how Casey would take the news. She realized that no matter how many hours they had spent together, no matter the whispered conversations that often took place as they lay naked in each other’s arms, no matter the complete and easy intimacy she felt between them, she had no idea what he was going to say. How could that be? She felt she knew with more certainty what Daniel would say if she told him than what Casey’s reaction would be.

When she thinks of Daniel now, she always pictures him in the messy kitchen of his rented house in Los Angeles, sitting at the large wooden table pushed against a wall, the way he was the day she took him the Philip Levine poems. Something changed that day for both of them, she believes, and it is that morning that she goes back to in her mind.

If she went to him there and told him she was pregnant, he would lean back in his chair, cross his arms against his broad chest, narrow his light-blue eyes, and appraise her, trying to discern how she felt about it. Then he would ask her, and she would tell him that she was terrified and excited and committed in a way she had never been before in her life to anything, except maybe her writing.

“What about your writing?” he would say. And she would reassure him that she wouldn’t give it up. That she would manage to do both—raise this child and continue to write. Lots of women did it. She could, as well.

“Hmmm,” he would say, coming forward and leaning his forearms on the table in front of him. “Hard to do.”

“Yes,” she would admit, “but I think I can.”

And then Daniel would smile and say, “Keep me posted,” and she would know that he was on her side, as she had felt from that day in the kitchen with the book of poems and his explanation that “what’s inside you is worthy enough to write about.” Such a powerful statement. Contained within it was the assurance that he had seen her essence and judged it worthy. What greater gift is there, except maybe his declaration that he would help her find a way to get the words on paper?

Why was she able to imagine Daniel’s reaction to the news so clearly, but not Casey’s? Was Casey the sort of person whose presence made all the difference and Daniel was not? How did that work? Why was her connection to Daniel still strong despite the months and months of absence and her connection to Casey, gone simply a matter of weeks, already feeling threadbare and thin?

Despite the questions Isabelle spends most of her days mulling over, when she hears Casey’s voice on the phone, her legs give out and she has to sit down. Simply the sound of his voice overwhelms her.

“Casey, oh, Casey, where are you?”

“In the airport, near Mindoro.”

“You’re coming home! Oh my God!”

“Well…not quite yet.”

And Isabelle is silent, flooded with disappointment. She has no idea what to say next.

“Isabelle, there’s a famine in South Sudan. Eight hundred thousand people are in danger of starvation. Can you imagine? In Bor, where I’m headed, a hundred people a day are dying—children first, of course, always, but the whole population, they’re walking skeletons.”

“That’s awful,” Isabelle manages to say, just barely.

“So you can understand why I’m not coming home just yet.” His voice is strong, urgent. She thinks she might detect some glee in it.

“Yes, but…Casey, there’s something else.”

“The World Food Program, that’s part of the United Nations, said that nowhere else in the world are people in such dire straits. The situation’s beyond a crisis. Global Hope’s got two planes loaded with food, basic stuff like powdered milk for the kids, beans and rice, essentials, and they’re on their way even as we speak, and I’m going to meet them on this dirt landing strip outside of—”

“Casey!” And Isabelle feels like a horrible person. Selfish. Superficial. Why is she making such a personal fuss when scores of people are dying? But she has to tell him. “Listen, there’s something we have to talk about.”

“Okay, shoot.”

And then Isabelle finds she can’t get the words out. She’s practiced this moment many times in her head over the past ten days, but now that she has to speak the words, she finds she can’t.

“Isabelle, what is it? They’re calling my flight.”

“When will you be back?” is what she is able to manage.

“Jeez, I don’t know. It depends on what we find when we get to the Sudan. And how much relief work they’ll let us do there. There’s a civil war going on, that’s a huge part of the trouble, and the government—”

“Casey, I’m pregnant.”

There’s an immediate black hole of silence, sucking out all of Isabelle’s hope, and then a very soft “Wow” from Casey.

“Is that a good wow or a bad one?”

“I’m just sort of shocked.”

“Me, too.”

“What do you want to do about it?”

“I’m having this baby.” Isabelle says this quietly, resolutely.

Casey says nothing. Isabelle can hear in the background, behind his silence, a muffled voice calling for passengers to board a plane, probably Casey’s.

“Shit, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you again. As soon as I can. All right?”

“Yes, but—”

“I love you.” And then there’s a dial tone.

CHAPTER TEN

B
y the time Isabelle gives birth to her son in late July 1995, just days after her twenty-third birthday, Daniel is in Iowa. He doesn’t tell Isabelle about this move, and she doesn’t tell him about the baby. Since the summer of her graduation and his exile from Los Angeles, they have e-mailed each other only sporadically—their exchange of Christmas messages, an e-mail from Isabelle when she found Daniel’s third novel, long out of print, in a used-book store and he made her promise not to read it. But primarily Isabelle has been consumed with the life taking shape within her and Daniel has become more and more disgusted with himself and his vagabond existence, this begging for academic scraps and babysitting a son who refuses to grow up.

Isabelle names her son Avi, which means “my father” in Hebrew, a name carefully chosen. It is a talisman, one more way of tying Casey to a child he professes to love.

After their initial stunted conversation from Subic Bay Airport, Casey called a second time, when his plane landed in Khartoum. He had minutes before he had to board a much smaller plane, which would land on the dirt airstrip outside the town of Bor.

In this phone call, Casey sounds excited about the baby—that’s Isabelle’s sense of it, and her heart soars. He’s had time to think about her news on the plane ride, she decides, and he’s gotten over his shock and has come down on the side of excitement. She tells him her due date, July 21, and he promises to be home for the birth.

“But Casey, that’s seven months away. You’ll be back before that, right?”

There is a microsecond of hesitation and then Casey answers, “Sure. Probably. I should be. Once we finish giving out the foodstuffs here and see what else we can do, then I should be coming home.”

And Isabelle’s whole body relaxes into relief. She hears what she wants to hear: Casey is coming home. She can hold it together until that day.

“I wish it were tomorrow,” she tells him.

“Me, too,” he says before he gets off. And she believes him—he wants to come home.

But in January there is a 6.9-magnitude earthquake in Kobe, Japan, that kills 6,425 people, injures 25,000, and renders 300,000 people homeless. It is the worst Japanese disaster since World War II, and Global Hope sends Casey immediately.

“I don’t have control over all this,” Casey informs Isabelle in an early-morning phone call that wakes her up. “They need every able body they can get to Japan, fast. It’s better that I go there than come home. You can see the sense of it.”

Isabelle is silent. She doesn’t see the sense of it, not at all, but she also doesn’t feel awake enough to present a cogent argument. It’s dark outside her uncurtained window, just a few minutes past four o’clock, and her mind won’t work. Only her emotions are awake, and they are screaming,
No! No! I want you with me!
But she knows she can’t say that. Even to her ears it sounds too selfish to voice.

“I’ll be home as soon as I can.” His tone isn’t placating or the least bit guilty. It’s matter-of-fact and firm.

But what Isabelle hears is
home
. He considers her home.

Five months later, it’s spring when Casey returns to Oakland and moves into Isabelle’s half of the Craftsman duplex. With Casey’s unerring instincts, he arrives in time for her birthing classes, to pick out a crib, and to marvel at the physical changes in her body. How beautiful she is. How beautiful their baby will be. He can’t get enough of placing his large, warm hand on the tight basketball she carries proudly in front of her. He wants to feel the baby stretch and kick. “I
need
to,” he tells Isabelle, as if his desire to connect with their child were a physical ache. All of it delights him, and his happiness lulls Isabelle into thinking that somehow everything will be all right. Casey loves her. He’s excited about the baby. He’s here now. The possibility of his going away again she banishes from her mind. No, the three of them will be fine, she tells herself every day.

But before he comes home, Isabelle has to fend for herself. She’s proud of how she manages to find a job, which pays the rent and the necessities, just barely, but that’s all right. Lots of people in Oakland and its neighboring city, Berkeley, live the sort of frugal life she is crafting. People make do. They tend home gardens, shop at thrift shops and co-ops, buy secondhand books, and barter services for goods. They help each other out.

Isabelle never once considers asking her parents for money. She understands without needing to have the conversation that the support would come with demands—
Come back, leave Casey, play by our rules.
So she waits until she knows Casey is coming home to her, until she has found a job and can pay her rent, until she can speak calmly and firmly, until her pregnancy is well advanced and she’s sure she won’t buckle, to call her father at work. He tells her mother, of course, and her mother calls and says all the things Isabelle knew she would:
How could you be so stupid, Come home immediately, There’s no way you can manage by yourself, Whatever were you thinking, getting pregnant?

To the last question, Isabelle answers simply, “I wasn’t,” and hangs up.

Mrs. Hershfeld turns out to be her inadvertent guardian angel, inadvertent because her neighbor is not in the habit of being especially benevolent. Fanny Hershfeld’s preferred stance toward the world has always been a slow, simmering indignation, but as she tells Isabelle the long-running story of her estrangement from her brother, Meir, Isabelle sees a possibility.

They are in the backyard, their common space, their only meeting place, since Isabelle hasn’t accumulated enough furniture yet to invite Mrs. Hershfeld over for coffee, and Mrs. Hershfeld never invites anyone into her half of the house. It is her domain and she doesn’t want it invaded. But the backyard, that’s where she allows herself a few minutes to stop and talk.

Years ago, a long-forgotten tenant left behind a tiny, circular wrought-iron table and two lacy chairs. The white paint has chipped and blistered, but the wrought iron underneath is sturdy, and Isabelle often finds herself walking out and sitting there at the table, under the one tree in the yard, a persimmon tree, which hangs its globular orange fruit on leafless limbs from October through January. Organic holiday ornaments.

It is the week between Christmas, which Isabelle spent with Deepti and Sadhil in San Francisco, and New Year’s, and Mrs. Hershfeld is shuffling out with a wad of dripping-wet cotton support hose to hang on the clothesline. Isabelle is bundled in a heavy sweater—the sun is out but gives little warmth this far into the winter—reading
The Simple Truth
by Philip Levine, which had been published earlier that year. She has set herself the task of trying again to understand the poetic form, to discover what speaks so strongly to Daniel.

“You like to read. Every time I see you—here, the front porch—you’re reading.”

“It’s poetry,” Isabelle tells her, holding up the book so Mrs. Hershfeld can see the front cover.

“Ah, Levine,” the older woman says as she lowers her aging body into the other chair and gingerly straightens out her aching knees. Fanny Hershfeld reminds Isabelle of a pouter pigeon, all billowy chest and skinny, birdlike legs. Rarely has she seen her out of a housecoat—this current one is printed with a green-and-yellow pineapple pattern—and Isabelle watches as Fanny smoothes the cotton down over her naked legs.

“Do you know him?” Isabelle asks.

“I know he’s Jewish and writes about the working man. What else is there to know? He’s on our side.”

Isabelle is struck again by the dichotomy Mrs. Hershfeld insists upon. The Jews over here, everyone else over there. Gingerly she says, “I guess I never thought about the world as our side or their side.”

“That’s because you’re too young,” Fanny Hershfeld shoots back. “What year were you born?”

“Nineteen seventy-two.”

Fanny utters something that sounds like “Pssshaw,” and Isabelle is chastised, dismissed by her youth and inexperience.

“Try the thirties and the forties, when anti-Semitism grew like baker’s yeast. And the fifties, when that megalomaniac Joe McCarthy saw a Communist under every bed. People were
blacklisted
.” Fanny turns and stares into Isabelle’s eyes as if to burn in her message. “Jewish people. Their lives were ruined. Permanently.” And now the older woman turns away from Isabelle and stares out over the overgrown backyard. “Sometimes they even became other people.”