trying. Trying to get pregnant, trying to stay pregnant. Trying shots, gels, pills, hope, elation, bed rest, more bed rest. In the end, despair.
Again. And again and again and again. Five in all.
And then one Easter morning – while the neighbourhood kids ran up and down the dwarfed aprons of lawns, their voices pealing with sugared-up joy, wearing new pastel clothes and chocolate smears on their faces, filling their baskets with a plethora of eggs – Henry and I sat at our long, empty dining room table and decided to quit. We quit trying to have a baby and we quit trying to have a marriage. Henry was the one who was courageous enough to put it into words: There was no us left apart from our obsession, and perhaps that’s why we’d kept at it with such tenacity.
At that time, it seemed I would always be sad. Little did I know that the universe was about to shift just six months later, when I drove through Sonoma County and took the winding road someone had aptly named the Bohemian Highway. ‘Good-bye, Bio-Tech Boulevard!’ I shouted to the redwoods, which crowded up to the road like well-wishers greeting my arrival. At the bridge, I waited as a couple of young guys with dreadlocks, wearing guitars on their backs, crossed over to head down to the river’s beach, and they waved like they’d been expecting me. I turned into Elbow and stopped at Capozzi’s Market. Good-bye, Sadness in San Diego.
Joe and I were the same height; we saw things eye to eye. We slipped into each other’s lives as easily as Annie’s hand slipped into mine that evening in front of the store. We didn’t sleep together on our first date. We didn’t wait that long. I followed him home from the parking lot, helped him change diapers and feed baby Zach and tell Annie a story and kiss them good night, as if we’d been doing the same thing every night for years. Though neither of us was pitiful enough to whisper the cliché that we usually didn’t do that sort of thing, we both admitted later that we usually didn’t. But the deepest wounds have a tendency to seep recklessness. He helped me carry in my suit-case, found a vase for a bucket of cornflowers – my Centaurea cyanus that I’d set on the passenger-side floor, brought along for good luck. We talked until midnight, and I learned that the wife whose paisley robe still hung from the hook on the bathroom door had left him for good four months before, that her name was Paige, that she had called only once to check on Annie and Zach. She never called in the three years that followed. Not once. We made love in Paige and Joe’s bed. Yes, it was needy sex. Amazing needy sex.
But now I lay in bed thinking, All I want to do is go back. ‘We want you back,’ I whispered. I slipped my arms out from under Annie’s and Zach’s heavy heads and tiptoed into the bathroom. There was Joe’s aftershave, Cedarwood Sage. I opened it and inhaled it, dabbed it on my wrists, behind my ears, along the lump in my throat. His toothbrush. His razor. I ran my finger along the blade and watched the fine line of blood appear, mixing with tiny remnants of his whiskers.
I turned on the basin taps so the kids wouldn’t hear me. ‘Joe? You gotta come back. Listen to me. I can’t fucking do this.’ The sleeper wave had come out of nowhere, and now I felt that wave in the bathroom, the inability to breathe, fighting the thunderous slam that ripped away Joe . . . Annie and Zach’s daddy. They’d already been abandoned by their birth mother. How much could they take? I had to pull it together for them. But at the same time I knew that their very existence would help hem me in, keep all my parts together.
I dried my face and took a few deep breaths and opened the door. Callie pressed her cold black nose into my hand, turned and thumped me with her tail, licked my face when I bent to pet her back. I wanted to be there for the kids when they woke, so I climbed back into bed and waited for the sun to rise, for their eyes to open.
Annie stood on a stool, cracking eggs. Joe’s mom was going at my fridge with a spray bottle, the garbage can full of old food. I went over and hugged Annie from the back. The yolks floated in the bowl, four bright, perfect suns. She broke them with a stab of the whisk and stirred them with concentrated vigour.
She turned to me and said, ‘Mommy? You’re not going to die, are you?’
There it was. I touched my forehead to hers. ‘Honey, someday I will. Everyone does. But first, I’m planning on being around for a long, long time.’
She nodded, kept nodding while our foreheads bobbed up and down. Then she turned back to her eggs and said, ‘Are you, you know, planning on leaving anytime soon?’
I knew exactly what she was thinking. Whom she was thinking about. I turned her back around. ‘Oh, Banannie. No. I will never leave you. I promise. Okay?’
‘You promise? You pinkie promise?’ She held out her pinkie and I looped mine in hers.
‘I more than pinkie promise. I promise you with my pinkie and my whole big entire self.’
She wiped her eyes and nodded again. She went back to whisking.
People kept arriving and fixing things: the unhinged door on the chicken coop, the fence post that went down in a storm months before; someone was changing the oil in the truck. Who had driven it home from Bodega Bay? Who had put Joe’s jacket back on the hook, and the blanket back on our bed, and when? The drill started going again. The house smelled like an Italian restaurant. How could anyone eat? David, the writer in the family, who was also one helluva cook, was working on the eulogy out on the garden bench he’d given us for our wedding, while some of his culinary masterpieces graced the table. Everyone seemed to be doing something constructive except me. I kept telling myself that I had to be strong for the kids, but I didn’t feel strong.
My mom, who’d arrived from Seattle, hadn’t let Zach out of her sight and was digging in the dirt with him and his convoy of Tonka trucks and action figures. Joe’s mom and Annie kept busy cleaning, stopping to wipe each other’s tears, then going back to wiping any surface they could find. I found myself wandering back and forth between Annie and Zach, drawing them in for a hug, a sigh, until they would slip down off my lap and back into their activities.
While she cleaned, Marcella sang. She always sang; she was proud of her voice, and rightly so. But she never sang Sinatra or songs from her generation; she sang songs from her kids’ generation. She loved Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper – you name a song from the eighties and she could sing it. Joe and David had told me that when they were teenagers, blaring stereos from their bedrooms, Marcella would shout up from the kitchen, ‘Kids! Turn that crap up!’
While she scoured the grimy tile grout in my kitchen with a toothbrush, she started singing in an aching soprano: ‘Like a virgin . . . for the very first time.’ I let out a strange, sharp laugh and she looked at me, shocked. ‘What, sweetie? You okay?’ She hadn’t intended to make a crack at my housekeeping, was so preoccupied with sadness that she didn’t even realize what she was singing. But I knew Joe would have got a kick out of it, that on another day, in another layer of time, we both would have pointed out the lyrics, laughed, and teased her. She would have responded by swaying her big bottom back and forth, adding, ‘Oh yeah? Take this: The kid is not my son . . .’ But instead she searched me for further signs of grief-stricken insanity to accompany my shriek of laughter. I shook my head and waved to say, Never mind. She took my face in her thick hands. ‘Thank God my grandchildren have you for their mother. I thank God every day for you, Ella Beene.’ I reached my arms around the massive trunk of her.
‘Why don’t you sit down?’ I said, then started to take the spray bottle from her hand. ‘Rest. Let me pour you a cup of coffee.’
She pulled it back. ‘No. This is what I do. This is all I can do. Resting, it makes it worse for me.’
I nodded, hugged her again. ‘Of course.’ Marcella always believed in the clarity of Windex.
The
