Within Arm's Reach (28 page)

I spend a few hours at the site. I eat a sandwich with my men and use my cell phone to work on a pending real-estate deal. I walk through the site with the foreman. This is a pro bono one-week job to fix up the recreation center at Finch Park. It is not a big job and there is no structural damage to the building, which limits the danger to my men. When the girls were young they played soccer and softball on the town teams in this park. Kelly and I used to cheer them on from the sidelines. I was happy to do the favor for the town, and besides, it falls under the heading of what goes around comes around. I will get this favor back many times over from the local planning and zoning commissions. The next time I want to bend one of the absurdly outdated zoning laws or build an addition that is over scale, my renovation of the rec center will be remembered.

When I’m ready to leave it’s late afternoon. I walk across the field to my truck, skirting the edge of the town’s summer day camp. It is arts-and-crafts time. Little boys and girls are seated at picnic tables, heads bent over sheets of brightly colored construction paper. Fat crayons and what look like the cardboard centers of toilet paper rolls are piled in the middle of the tables. None of the children’s legs are long enough for their feet to touch the ground.

I sit in my truck and watch the children before I turn on the engine. It has been a long, odd day, and I am tired. I watch the children’s legs—some chubby, some rail-thin—swing above the grass. I think of Eddie’s children, and the replication of his smile and his eyes. I replay my meeting with them, and imagine that this time I know that the movement in the book bag is nothing more than the little boy’s favorite pet. I bend down and loop the lizard gently over my finger, which makes the girl smile and the little boy send out his infectious laugh. The three of us stand in a circle and the lizard seems happy to sit on my hand. The girl and boy talk to me about their day and about all of their worries and concerns. They don’t stop talking until the woman next door calls for them. Then we wave good-bye to one another, with the boy and girl continuing to wave as I walk toward my truck.

I watch the campers’ legs swing at the picnic tables as they draw shapes on the construction paper and then color them in. Children’s art turns reality upside down and sideways. It’s filled with purple grass and orange clouds and green people. I want to reimagine my daughters’ childhoods like I did the scene on Noreen Ballen’s front lawn. This time I won’t let Lila and Gracie grow up alone in their rooms and I won’t walk away when I see disturbing things through half-opened doors. This time I will go in and grab the punk boy by the arm and throw him out of my house. I will let Gracie know that she is worth more than what he saw in her.

But this rewrite is not as easy to believe in as my encounter with Noreen’s little boy and girl. I have failed in too many moments with Gracie and Lila over too many years. I gave them too much room, too much freedom. I think that probably we all had too much freedom, the two girls and Kelly and me. Maybe Catharine was right, and we should have gone to church every Sunday and eaten together as a family every night and listened for clues to the kind of women the girls were growing into while they said prayers before bed. But we didn’t do any of that and now there is no firm ground beneath our feet and it is too late to take stock in any new rules. You cannot discipline grown children. You cannot change the tone of a marriage after thirty years.

I TAKE my boots off and leave them by the back door so I don’t track in any dirt. I find Kelly in the living room, curled up on the couch with a tall stack of magazines on her lap. The central air is going full blast; the hairs on my arms stand up at the sudden change of temperature.

She looks up at me and says, “I made our reservation for Saturday night.”

“Our reservation?”

“At La Manga’s.”

Of course. I had forgotten. Well, not exactly forgotten—more like pushed out of my mind. Our thirty-first anniversary is this weekend. We used to celebrate that night by having dinner at the location of our first date, a tiny Italian restaurant in the West Village. But we let that tradition lapse quite some time ago. We used the same set of excuses the first year or two: We were too busy, it was such a hassle to get into the city, etc. But I don’t think we even mentioned our anniversary to each other last year. I look at my wife, hoping for a clue to what is happening here. She’s been behaving differently in the last few weeks. She is more emotional, and more often home.

I say, “I thought you might want to skip this year.”

Kelly hesitates, then rushes forward. “We have to go on Saturday night, because I’m throwing Gracie’s baby shower on Sunday. I’ve been going through these baby magazines all afternoon. I really want it to be something. Martha Stewart’s ideas are the only ones with any class, but the execution is almost impossible. I’ve never done this before—I’m too young to have a daughter who’s having a child.”

I shake my head. I was thinking a few hours earlier that the only choice was to end our marriage. I’m not sure now whether I’m agreeing to a last dinner, or a celebratory date. “Saturday night is fine.”

“The shower has to be this weekend, you see. After all, time is running out. Gracie’s due in three weeks. She could give birth any time now.”

I sit down in the armchair by the door, a big leather chair that used to belong to Kelly’s father. No one ever sits in this chair. It is on the fringes of the room, outside of any direct line of conversation. I always feel my lack as a man when I sit in this chair. It seems to demand a pipe and a glass of scotch from its visitor. Kelly’s dad was not a happy person, but he was indisputably a man in a hard-living way I’ve never tried to achieve.

“Your hair looks better,” Kelly says. “You look human again. You went to Vince?”

I hope that my wife knows what she’s doing. I have seen this determined look on her face before. She has the ability to make a decision and then inflate her emotions like a bicycle tire until they back up the decision with no wiggle room. The problem is that if her emotions are false, there is still a hole in the tire and the air will eventually seep out.

All I can do is show up on Saturday night and pull out her chair. I will chink glasses and hold her hand. I’ll hope that she has found an answer, a solution that I haven’t yet been able to see. I will speak loudly that night, and try not to listen for the hiss of escaping air.

Kelly seems to read something in my expression. “Are you going to keep sleeping in the den, Louis?” She sounds curious. “I know you,” she says. “You’re sleeping there to protect me, or to help me somehow. I want you to know that you’re not helping me by doing that.”

Her words, though quiet, boom between the four walls of the room. I find myself thinking that where we are headed in this moment is going to be messy, more complicated, unpredictable. I put my hands on my knees. I grip the joints through the denim of my jeans, through the pounds of muscle, tendons, ligaments, and fat. “I’m not sleeping well,” I say. “I’ve been having nightmares. I might kick you.”

“I’ll kick you back,” Kelly says.

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay, then,” she says, and turns back to the baby magazines.

GRACIE

I wake up at five-thirty in the morning. I haven’t slept past dawn since the seventh month. I am so uncomfortable at night tossing and turning and getting up to pee every hour that when the first light slides under my window shade I crawl out of bed. While I make my way downstairs I remember how difficult it was for my father to wake me up in the morning when I was a teenager. I used to be a gifted sleeper. I could sleep anytime, anywhere, but as a teen I was at the height of my powers. I could go to bed at ten at night and sleep until one o’clock the next day. It drove my parents, overachievers that they are, absolutely crazy. I don’t think my father has ever slept past eight in the morning in his life. Lila was always halfway to the nearest library by breakfast time, which was something my parents could get behind, but I was another story.

On the weekends my father would stomp up and down the hall outside my door and call out loudly to my mother, who had long ago delegated the task of worrying over my degenerate sleep habits to him. For some reason my father wasn’t comfortable leaving the house until he had me in an upright position, so inevitably somewhere between ten and eleven o’clock in a fit of frustration he would burst into my room and yell something like, “What do you think you’re doing, young lady?” My father is a big man, and he rarely yells. When he does the noise is not only surprising but capable of making a bed shake. I know, because between the ages of fourteen and eighteen I often went from dead sleep to a near heart attack in the course of a few seconds when my father woke me up.

In the kitchen I take flour out of the cupboard, and then cane sugar, confectioners’ sugar, vanilla extract, vegetable oil, and baking powder. I find eggs, milk, and butter in the refrigerator. I work slowly, first with the ceiling light on, and then, as the sun rises further, with the light off. I stop in the middle of mixing to make myself a piece of toast with butter and strawberry jam. I need to eat every couple hours now or I get dizzy. After I’ve eaten I pull out the blender and mix the ingredients I’ve measured. I have to stand a good distance from the counter because of my belly.

I’ve realized from trial and error how important it is for me to do some kind of activity during these early-morning hours before anyone else is up. This is dangerous thinking time, because if I let myself go in bad directions, then by seven o’clock I will be so upset and depressed that I end up back in bed for the rest of the day. In order to make sure I do eventually take a shower and change out of my bathrobe or Papa’s sweater, I have to tread carefully from five-thirty to seven in the morning. I can’t let my thoughts fly all over the place—there is plenty of time for that later when I am in the car or visiting Gram, when I am well embedded in the flow of the day.

I am sitting at the kitchen table icing the three individual layers of the cake when Lila finally comes downstairs. She is wearing the plain shorts and T-shirt she calls pajamas. I started a pot of coffee for her a half hour ago; she pours a cup and sits across from me.

“Smells like childhood in here,” she says.

“Not ours. I don’t remember ever coming home to the smell of a cake baking. I made this from a cookbook I bought at a yard sale last month. Do you think the baby can smell this?”

“I doubt it.” Lila rubs at her eyes. “Today’s the big day,” she says. “You must be excited.”

I smile. “It’s hard to contain myself.”

“I should hope so. Mom had me folding napkins in the shape of diapers yesterday afternoon. You now owe me so much that even if you focus your energy only on that for the rest of your life, you will never be able to repay me.”

“I know this is Mom we’re talking about,” I say, pushing the knife, fat with white icing, across the top of the top layer of the cake. “But still I don’t understand why, if this shower isn’t supposed to be a surprise and she’s throwing it, she hasn’t mentioned it to me. She could have left a message on the machine if she didn’t want to talk to me. I feel like she’s actually throwing the shower for someone else, and I’m going to be embarrassed when I waddle in and see another pregnant girl there holding the presents.”

“Pregnant woman, you mean.”

I fight the urge to plunge the knife into the cake, cut out a massive piece, and cram it into my mouth. “Whatever.”

“Well, I can assure you that I wouldn’t have folded napkins into the shape of diapers for anyone else.”

“Mmm. Are you going to tell Mom and Dad you dropped out of school? Because I’d appreciate it if you made the announcement during the shower, to take the attention off of me.”

“Not going to happen,” Lila says calmly. “Speaking of occupations, you haven’t been going into work much lately.”

I concentrate on spreading the icing evenly. “Grayson’s been away at a conference, so I’m working from home. He’s back now, though. I invited him to the shower. Hey”—I point the knife at her—“why don’t you invite Weber?”

“I did.”

“Really?”

Lila gives a strange smile. “Actually, I sent the invitation with the return address as the Christian Home for the Elderly so he would think Gram was inviting him. He loves Gram.”

I nod in approval. The stakes are being raised all around me. My malaise has been slowly lifting over the past few days. I climb out of bed every morning with a little more energy and a little less fear. Even though I don’t know what exactly to do, I am now ready to take action. This change is due at least partly to the fact that my body is humming with greater motion beneath me. The baby kicks and squirms and tumbles through the days and nights. I have sudden cramps and backaches and hot flashes. I can feel this baby warming up to take the final leap and join the world. The least I can do is try to keep up.

AS USUAL, I arrive early at the hospital. Lila and I planned to meet by the vending machine outside the emergency area. From there it is only a quick elevator ride and a short walk to the room where the birthing classes are held. This is our third class. During the first class we watched an utterly horrific movie showing a birth in far too much detail. The second class was a lecture on the importance of nutrition and vitamins while pregnant. The third class is supposed to concern breathing.

Of course, it was the first class, and more specifically the film, that has stayed with me. I remember the pregnant woman writhing on the bed, huge and swollen and screaming for help from the seemingly anesthetized doctors and nurses around her. Then the camera moves in for a close-up on the woman’s vagina, which also looks angry, red and gaping, stretched well beyond reasonable limits by this baby whose head is clearly far too big to make its way out of the available exit. It looks, frankly, like a tragedy waiting to happen, death to both mother and child. But then, miraculously, the baby’s head pushes through the hole, and his body wriggles free after him. The doctor holds the limp red thing and suctions out its mouth and nose, at which time the baby starts screaming for help from the numb doctors and nurses and the exhausted, deflated woman collapsed on the bed with her legs spread-eagle.

I lean against the vending machine, look down at my swollen stomach, and shudder. I cannot believe how soon this baby is coming. I don’t even own a crib yet. I don’t have any of the necessary items. This is due partly to the fact that I have only gotten one check from Gram over the last three months and I can’t afford to buy furniture. Grayson has offered money, but somehow in my gut it doesn’t seem right to take it from him. I’m sure I will change my mind and get off that high horse soon. But money is only part of it. I haven’t gone into the baby stores because I didn’t really believe until recently that this choice to stay pregnant and not have another abortion was anything other than that. It was a moral choice, a character-building choice. Wasn’t that enough? Do I actually have to deal with
having
a baby as well?

I step back and look at what the vending machine has to offer. It is filled with foods that are terrible for both mother and child: Doritos, Lay’s potato chips, Snickers, Oreos, Skittles, Whoppers, Milk Duds. It seems peculiar that they plant candy and soda machines all over a hospital, a place that is supposed to promote and fight for good health. I fish coins out of my purse and select the Oreos. I press the buttons and watch the package fall off its shelf to the basin at the bottom. It takes me a while to bend down and then come back up again with the cookies in hand, and it is only then that I notice someone watching me in the reflection of the shiny vending machine. The outline doesn’t look like Lila, so I turn quickly around.

I see only the back of the person, who is now near the other end of the long hall. His head is down and he is moving fast, but there is no mistaking who it is. I recognize Joel’s tight kicklike walk, and his shaggy brown hair. He is wearing a blue blazer and khakis instead of his usual uniform of jeans and a T-shirt. I wonder if I should call after him and tell him that he can look at my stomach openly if he wants to. He doesn’t have to sneak up on me from behind and then run away. But I realize that it’s Margaret he’s scared of, not me. Joel wouldn’t want Margaret to find out from one of her many gossip connections that he was seen talking to his ex-girlfriend, who is pregnant with his child. That wouldn’t bode well for me, either. God only knows the kind of Dear Abby letter I would get from Margaret after that. The letter would probably arrive, à la
The Godfather,
with the bleeding head of a horse.

Joel disappears through a set of swinging doors. Stranded in the center of the hallway looking at a place where the father of my child used to be, holding a pack of Oreos, feeling the weight of every one of the thirty-eight pounds I have gained, I suddenly feel very alone.

Lila is late, sneaking into the hospital in a baggy sweatshirt and baseball hat. We grab the first elevator and then run down the hallway, me holding my stomach, but we’re still late for class. We take seats on the floor because that’s where everyone else is. The teacher comes over and fusses with us until we are in the correct position. I sit between Lila’s legs. The teacher tips me backward until I am lying against Lila, my head beneath her chin. My legs are bent at the knees. The teacher’s adjustments are so quick that when she walks away it is a shock to find ourselves in this state. I can feel my sister’s breasts push into my back. Her thighs wrap around me. Her breath is hot against my ear. It occurs to me that this is physically the closest I have been to another human being since the last time I had sex.

“I can’t believe I am fucking doing this,” Lila says.

Lila’s warm breath on my ear and her saying “fucking” and the fact that my legs are spread and that I haven’t had sex or even touched anyone in six months makes me start to giggle. The noise is a bit hysterical and high-pitched and sounds like my mother’s laugh when she is with her brothers and sisters. The giggling tickles me from the inside out, and the tickling keeps me going.

“Gracie,” Lila says.

I look up and see the teacher, a plump woman well past childbearing years, glaring at me, and all of the couples in the class, collapsed on the floor in similar positions to Lila and me, watching. There are seven other couples, and each one is made up of a pregnant woman and a male coach. They are looking at me, wedged between my sister’s thighs, as if they are considering calling a family services agency and having my baby removed from my immoral, negligent care before he or she is even born.

“Sorry,” I mutter to the room at large.

“Now, class,” the teacher says. “Let’s get to work on that breathing. The breath is the key to a beautiful childbirth experience. I want both mommies and coaches to follow along. This is the breath that I want you to practice at home, and whenever you feel stressed and achy. This will be the foundation of your labor; this is what will save you from the pain. Come on now, here we go, it’s two short breaths in and one long release breath out. Hee-hee-hoo. Hee-hee-hoo.”

“Hee-hee-hoo,” the class says.

“Hee-hee-hoo,” Lila says into my ear.

The baby gives me a mighty kick in the stomach then, which seems like a clear message that I am in trouble. This strikes me as rather obnoxious, because I didn’t need the air knocked out of me to learn that. I have no time to recover because the teacher is still looking doubtfully in my direction as if she has the number for the Department of Youth and Family Services on speed dial. I struggle through the pain for a breath. My first effort is more of a wheeze than anything else. I am trying to follow along and not stand out from the group, who are deep-breathing as though their lives depend on it. But as hard as I try and as deep down in my lungs as I reach, there is no force to my breath. There is no conviction, no strength, no faith that this is going to save me from anything. “Hee-hee-hoo.”

AFTER CLASS I am tempted to go home, change back into my pajamas, and climb into bed. But there is a party later, and I have vowed to take action and not spend all my time in the house, so instead I stop home just long enough to pick up the white iced cake and then continue on to my parents’. I drive slowly these days because I don’t feel entirely confident sitting as far away from the steering wheel as my belly demands. I can’t reach well enough to wrap my hands around the wheel, only the tops of my fingers.