The Birthdays (4 page)

Ellen left the trunk open for Joe and went back inside. She hadn’t returned to Maine in years, since that visit with the boys. She thought a moment—was that in fact the last time? No, they went again with the boys a couple of years later. And she went to an art show on Great Salt, a benefit three years ago for her friend Emma’s cousin’s organization that raised money for Alzheimer’s. She’d stayed at an inn, one she could barely afford. Jake kept saying he’d have them up once they’d redone the house, but they’d only just finished. Ellen still
remembered the two-lane road from the ferry landing that wound through the small town and out to a steep rise where the ocean ahead looked like what she pictured it to look like in Ireland—tossing, endless and alive like a storm. The road then traced the circle of the island, leading through the hippie commune on the north end where a few run-down houses huddled close to each other, on past the clusters of artists’ bungalows to the east, the tall, grassy dunes and narrow beaches to the south and finally back to the ferry slip and the few stores, the health clinic, the post office. Just after the ferry slip stood an inconspicuous little diner where the fishermen went. Here, Ellen, Emma and Vera had eaten fried cod sandwiches and whispered giddily like teenagers about all the handsome men around them. These fishermen were throwbacks from history, Ellen thought now, these men who worked out at sea. They exuded physicality and bravery and masculinity. And their wives beside them were weathered and pretty, deeply tanned and ragged, and seemed to her to possess some sort of ancient wisdom. The weekend was like a happy dream in hindsight.

She’d have liked to bring MacNeil there, as she imagined the brisk sea air and slow pace would do a mourning man good. And was he still mourning? It had been seven months: of course he was. One never stopped. This thought weighed on her. She had an urge to call him and make sure he was feeling all right, but she saw Joe heading toward her, struggling to carry their suitcases. She would call later, once she had a moment to herself, if she could get one.

“Be careful there,” she said.

“I’m trying to impress you.” He dumped the bags at her feet. He smiled up at her and turned to go inside again. When
he came back, he held the large cage in his hands and a plastic bag of carrots in his mouth for Babe.

“Tell me you’re not bringing him,” she said.

“It’s my birthday.”

“Is your family not enough for you? You absolutely need that thing too?”

“You’ve got Jake’s phone number?” Joe set the cage in the back seat of the car and stood, his legs apart.

“Jake will faint when he sees this.”

“Here are the keys, right in my pocket. I’ve been looking all over the place for them.”

Too often they talked at each other. Each heard at most fragments of what the other said, and she wondered if it had always been this way, this selective hearing.

He took his seat at the wheel and she went back inside to make sure they hadn’t forgotten anything. Standing alone in their living room, even Babe out of the house now, she felt a swell of nostalgia for something she couldn’t quite pinpoint. She made her way through the rooms, checking under the beds—so many things like wallets and socks and shoes were forgotten under beds—and turning off the lights, then headed to the front hallway and pulled the door shut. From behind the steering wheel, Joe gazed at her. She started, for it had been some time since they’d looked each other directly in the eyes.

Jake Miller followed his wife into their kitchen, where she’d arranged the food for the weekend by meals. Next to a carton of eggs on the counter sat a brick of cheddar, a red onion, a bag of mushrooms, a package of sausages. The canister of coffee sat beside the bag of sugar; the baguette beside the
raspberry jam; the cantaloupe beside the blueberries. He loved when she arranged items this way, by theme or function—he supposed it gave him a sense of peace and of being tended to. Other men might not have appreciated this, he often thought. She even took the time to arrange their shampoo and conditioner alternately on the shelf in the shower: his, hers, his, hers. She kept the whole house orderly and clean (and he helped, but he didn’t need to do that much when it came down to it). They certainly could have afforded a maid or a housekeeper, but Liz wouldn’t have been comfortable with that. When Jake was promoted to CFO, vice president and partner of his investment firm and paid a much larger salary, Liz had made him promise that their lifestyle wouldn’t change all that much. She continued to teach art at a public high school in the city. She continued to volunteer at a nursing home once a month, and hadn’t bought any new clothing or art supplies or anything, really, since the promotion. She even still drove her beat-up Volkswagen. Jake didn’t know anyone quite as virtuous, deeply virtuous, as his wife, and when he told her so once, she blanched. “I’m not doing this stuff to be honorable. It’s just that I like my job and my car. I like my clothes.” “That’s one of the great things about you. It comes so naturally, virtue,” and she’d said, “Sometimes you give me too much credit.” She was a difficult person to compliment—she was uncomfortable with overt praise. And the more she squirmed about it, the more she insisted that he was putting her on a pedestal she didn’t deserve, the harder Jake tried to convince her that she was wrong. She deserved every syllable of what he said, he insisted, and the only thing wrong with the pedestal was that it wasn’t high enough. “You can’t love your wife too
much,” he told her, and she responded, “I’m not a hundred percent sure about that.” His face sank, and she added, “Oh, sweetie. Maybe ninety-nine percent,” and reached over to touch his cheek.

Her ultrasound had shown two embryos the other day. They’d gone to her doctor before their first scheduled exam because she’d bled on her way home from work—quite a bit at first, which was beyond alarming to both her and Jake. When they reached the doctor’s office early that evening, both shaky, as she was still bleeding, he led them into a small examining room and turned down the lights. A man—the ultrasound technician—stood by a desk typing on a laptop. Liz unbuttoned her skirt and lay on the table as instructed while the ultrasound technician closed his laptop, turned and slipped something that looked like a condom over a plastic vaginal probe. Jake stood close beside Liz and watched the man, tall and stooped with curly red hair, squirt lubricant over the probe. The doctor briefly introduced him as Claude, and Claude murmured, “Careful, cold,” and inserted the probe. “You’re going to be fine,” said the doctor. “No cramping, and you’re not passing any tissue. These are good signs.” This immediatly made Jake breathe easier. The screen next to Liz’s head lit up and swam with blurry gray images. Claude turned his wrist, shifted the probe and pushed it farther inside. Jake looked at him and was sure he saw the man glance down at her breasts. Did he find her sexy? Liz squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. But Claude couldn’t have been thinking about sex—it was all business to him. Vaginas were his clients. Ovaries his spreadsheets. Claude moved the probe left and right and finally stopped, and an image of what had to be Liz’s uterus appeared on the screen
beside her. Jake noted a couple of tiny black swirls inside a patchy gray cloud. Maybe Claude had incredible sex with women since he knew where and what every little thing was. Jake looked down to see whether he wore a wedding ring on the hand that was not between Liz’s legs. He did not. The man wasn’t exactly attractive. His eyes bulged beneath heavy lids, his red hair was frizzy and thinning on top. Still, he touched women like this every day. Slid his hand right inside.

“Hold on, we’re getting there,” Claude said.

Jake hadn’t gotten his wife pregnant. Well, technically his sperm had. Locked in a closet-sized room with only a TV, an old VCR and two videotapes hand-labeled “The Firm” and “Mean Girls” (whether these were the actual movies or porn knockoffs he didn’t know, since he couldn’t get the damned VCR to work), Jake had encouraged his sperm out of his body and into a blue plastic cup, which he handed to an obese young male nurse standing behind a desk. The next stop for the tiny fish was a petri dish, where Liz’s drug-stimulated eggs were waiting. Once the sperm swam into the eggs, the mixture sat inside an incubator while it fertilized, and two days later got injected into Liz’s womb. Jake’s body hadn’t gotten her pregnant, or more specifically, more accurately he supposed, sex hadn’t. Love hadn’t. He hadn’t even been present for the embryo transfer—he’d been at a meeting in Minneapolis. He and Liz had unsuccessfully tried IVF several times before, so Liz had told him just to go to his meeting and not to worry about it. He hadn’t wanted to leave her—he’d told her he could skip the meeting, or at least try to postpone it, but she insisted that they’d given up enough of their lives to infertility. This IVF might be no different from their earlier ones, and she would be fine, absolutely,
positively fine doing it on her own. “You don’t want me there?” he asked.

“Jake.”

“It wouldn’t be such a big deal for me not to go to the meeting.”

“Jake. End of discussion. Go to Minneapolis.”

It seemed to him as if she didn’t, for whatever reason, really want him there, but he wouldn’t press the point. He was aware of his tendency to misread her signals, and he often had to keep himself in check.

Now, in the exam room, he refocused on the task at hand and searched for something that might be a heartbeat. Suddenly Dr. Mancowicz said, “I think we’ve got ourselves twins!” Claude shifted the probe again and Dr. M. pressed his thick finger to the screen. “There’s one heartbeat. And,” he said as he moved his finger to the second black blob and the tiny flickering mass inside it, “there’s the second.”

Jake swallowed a pocket of air.

Liz laughed nervously. “Can we see them again?” she asked.

Claude pointed more slowly to each pulsing dot. He then removed the probe and its condom, casually tossed it in the trash and dropped the probe on a side table with a small thud.

“Congratulations, you two! Let’s go to my office and talk about this good news,” Dr. M. said. “Meet me there when you’re ready.”

Claude pulled the door shut behind him and Jake worried for a second that he’d said all his thoughts about him aloud.

“Hurray!” Liz sang. “We’ll have our two children all at once! No more treatments! Hurray!”

Jake took her hand and pulled her off the table, only then fully realizing the enormity of what they’d just seen. Two babies. At once.

“Come on,” she said. “It’s so great. It’s good, at least, isn’t it?”

He nodded, reached for her purse on the chair and watched her turn and rush out of the room.
Two babies at once.
He clutched her purse to his side.

In his narrow, bright office that smelled of rubber, Dr. M. explained the risks they faced: early birth, infection, birth defects, death in utero. He spoke plainly, as if he were selling them windows. And for Liz, he continued, there were more risks. High blood pressure, gestational diabetes, hemorrhage, infection. She would need six more weeks of shots and would probably spend at least some of her third trimester on bed rest. After a brief silence and a long sigh, Liz asked him about traveling to Great Salt (“Fine, just don’t push yourself”) and vitamins, caffeine and exercise. “What about sex?” Jake blurted. They hadn’t had any since before she’d gotten pregnant. She’d been too tired, too nauseous, too preoccupied, too something virtually every night. “Is it okay?”

“By all means, just not for three days.”

Jake glanced at Liz, but her eyes were on her lap.

He had told his family that she was pregnant, but he hadn’t told any of them about the twins yet—they would all be together soon enough, and he wanted to tell them in person. Jake and Liz had hoped for children since before he could remember, and he thought having them should feel more singular, more monumental than it did in the context of Brenda’s pregnancy. But now there was the matter of two, he thought as they drove home from the doctor’s office that day.
Not that he was competitive, not that he wanted to outdo Daniel in any way, but as the middle child, he was aware that he was always—consciously or subconsciously—vying for the spotlight in his family. He’d read several books about birth order, and middle children finding themselves less special, less visible to their parents than the eldest and youngest.
Middle children grow up feeling squeezed, without the rights of the eldest or the privileges of the youngest children, and often seek to establish an identity separate from the family. While doing so helps them assert their individuality, it can also lead to feelings of exclusion and loneliness within the family.
He’d read a few passages aloud to Liz, perhaps to explain a few things about himself. She’d seemed interested at first but after a while had begun to fidget, perhaps because she was an only child and couldn’t relate to any of this. Or perhaps because she’d grown tired of listening to Jake constantly try to understand himself, something he couldn’t seem to stop doing despite his best efforts. At any rate, he had read somewhere that psychologists were giving birth order more credence in personality studies and that it could be used in certain cases as a predictor. He wondered now what it would mean to have two children born at the same time. Would there even be a real birth order? Who knew what would happen to such children, and how would this determine their identities? Would they be more competitive with each other?

Jake and Liz had started trying in earnest to have children five years ago. The first night they’d tried was on the island. Liz had lined the windowsills of the bedroom with candles, and the smell of them—lavender, vanilla, lilac—made his nose itch and run. He must have told her thirty times before that he couldn’t stand scented candles. The waves crashed predictably
outside the walls. As she brushed her teeth, he lay in bed and, smoothing the sheets around him, was struck by the force of expectation. The moon was full, crickets chirped outside the windows, a warm breeze blew across his face. The world seemed to be aligning itself in expectation, and he told himself to relax, it was just another night. He’d made love to his wife before—he certainly knew what he was doing. The curtains billowed with the breeze and sank. Liz stepped out of the bathroom wearing her green flannel pajamas. She looked like a big child, a wing of hair poking out from the left side of her head. When they did make love it was no different than it ever was, though perhaps quicker, and afterward, they lay side by side on their backs and stared up at the shadows of moonlight in stripes across the waves, reflecting off the beams of their ceiling. Light twice removed from its source.