Toby looked at me. “Oh, yes,” I assured him, “you are.”
He turned to Teo, who had finally unraveled the mechanics of placing his bagel on his plate and rising to his feet.
“Ass,” Teo confirmed.
“Oh, come on,” averred Toby, jovially. “I was planning on telling you guys. I even thought about doing it at Christmas, doing that knife-tapping-my-glass, ‘I have an announcement to make’ routine. I just didn’t want to, like, steal your thunder.”
“For starters,” I said in a big-sister tone that would have annoyed even me if it hadn’t been so abundantly necessary, “Christmas was three months ago. Surely, there have been a few moments in the past three months when you could have shared the news without stealing anyone’s thunder. Furthermore…” I had been about to say something like “Furthermore, you cowardly juvenile, you know very well that your announcement would have incited a completely different variety of thunder than your married sister’s. Along with lightning, earthquakes, hail, and, possibly, a plague of frogs,” but it occurred to me that Miranda might be better off without this bit of information, so I finished with “Furthermore, you’re an ass.”
“Okay, okay,” said Toby, still twinkling, but throwing up his hands in surrender. “My bad. Now that you know, though, is it awesome or what?”
Not a muscle in Miranda’s face twitched, but something in her eyes suggested that “awesome” was not the word she would choose, and not merely because it made her pregnancy sound like a new skateboard. I softened. “Of course,” I told her, walking over and giving her a hug, “of course it is. The news just caught us off guard.” She raised her eyebrows with a tired irony that said “Tell me about it.”
Then Teo was next to her with his top-drawer, kindest smile. “Sorry, Miranda. We’re a little dumb on Sunday mornings. Why don’t you let me take your coat?”
Miranda pushed Toby firmly away when he tried to help her off with her coat and removed it herself. As she unwound her long gray scarf, her gaze dropped to the cluttered top of our dining room table and one corner of her mouth lifted in fond recognition.
“You figure out the trick to the crossword puzzle yet?” she asked.
“It’s a killer,” said Teo. “Something to do with First Ladies’ maiden names and the periodic table of the elements. We think.”
“You sit down,” I said to Miranda, pulling out the chair next to mine. “Give us a hand with it.”
“Can I get you some coffee?” asked Teo, starting for the kitchen.
Miranda hesitated, then sat down in a grudging manner meant to suggest that, while she did not generally like being taken care of, in the interest of making things go smoothly for all of us, she’d make an exception this morning. But I watched her shoulders relax and saw her look up at Teo with a smile of honest gratitude. Face it, friend, I thought to myself, a little taking care of is just what you need.
“Sure. Thank you,” Miranda said, then added, automatically, “Decaf.”
Our eyes met, and, for a split second, instead of being two people caught in a desperately and possibly eternally uncomfortable situation, we were simply two pregnant women, smiling the same wry smile.
Miranda was due at the end of May, although, unlike most women, myself included, for whom, despite their doctor’s warnings that it’s only an approximation (Ollie gave me the unsolicited assurance that the chances of accuracy were roughly 5 percent), the due date is a sacred promise, the holy grail of dates, Miranda was counting on being late.
“May twenty-eighth doesn’t really work for me. I need a week or so to regroup after finals. Pack my bag, shift my mind-set, get my brain and body into baby-delivery mode.” She didn’t just sound hopeful; she gave the impression that the postponement of her child’s birth was all arranged. Miranda sat in the passenger seat of my car. She was turned partially away from me, but her profile, with its Isabella Rossellini nose and milky skin, bespoke a cool, almost queenly decisiveness. Even in the oblique, she looked like a girl who was used to getting her way.
Because I’d invited Miranda to stay for an early dinner before remembering that we had next to nothing to eat in the house, she and I were on our way to the small, conveniently located, horrendously expensive gourmet grocery store that Teo had christened Sucker Mart after the day he’d gone there with a list from me and purchased, in a moment of inattention, a $22 bottle of vanilla extract. (For months afterward, every time he bit into a homemade cookie he’d say, “These are the best cookies in the history of the world. Repeat after me: these are the best cookies in the history of the world.”)
“I see what you mean,” I told her, which wasn’t exactly true. I did see what she meant, but I thought she was kidding herself. From where I stood, the movement from exam mode to baby-delivery mode seemed pretty negligible when viewed against the larger backdrop of moving from decades of childless living to a lifetime of motherhood. Regroup? Pack my bag? But then I caught a glimpse of Miranda’s hands, startlingly young hands, the nails bitten to the quick, a silver ring on one thumb, and felt a rush of compassion. She’d be the mother of a newborn in a matter of weeks, but she was still twenty-three, barely out of college, still at the age when finals are a combination of Mount Everest and the bogeyman, the biggest challenge you can imagine.
We rode along in a moderately awkward silence, but I resisted all my impulses to fill it. I’d done enough yammering for one day. Besides, earlier, something had flashed in her eyes when I’d announced I was off to the store and she’d volunteered to come along, something that told me she wanted to talk. I kept quiet and drove.
Finally, she said, “I guess Toby told you that we’re not together anymore.” There was a note of what might have been, in someone else’s voice, defensiveness, but the uptilt of her chin and her remote eyes turned it into a challenge.
“He said something like that. Not that exactly.” I didn’t mention her alleged case of “I love you buts” or Toby’s confidence that he’d win her back, no sweat, although the next thing she said told me that she knew about the “no sweat” part.
“Of course not,” she said, an edge of bitterness in her voice. “He thinks he’ll wear me down. Charm me into being in love with him. I’m sorry, but his faith in his own charm can be so galling.”
Certainly I could sympathize with this. I’d thought the same thing about Toby myself, too many times to count. I was even willing to acknowledge that Toby’s galling faith in his own charm was not even a matter of opinion at this point, but a simple fact. Toby: curly brown hair, blue eyes, size-10 shoe, galling faith in his own charm. I knew that. Still, I felt a flare of sisterly indignation when Miranda said it. Because I was not an experienced enough driver to reconcile these opposing sentiments while operating an automobile, I didn’t speak until I’d pulled into the Sucker Mart parking lot and turned off the engine. Then I looked Miranda in the eye and said, “So you’re not in love with him?”
I saw it then: a tiny hesitation, a wobble in Miranda’s self-assurance. Maybe, I thought. Maybe Toby has a chance. Looking at Miranda off balance, the small, momentary furrow across her brow, I remembered something else about Toby’s faith in his own charm, the most galling thing about it: it was usually justified.
“Not”—she paused—“not the way I’d need to be.” Then she clenched her small hands into two frustrated fists. “He’s so literal. And limited. This idea of his that the world is one big playground. The total refusal to see complications or dark sides. It’s so adolescent. Don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I answered. I couldn’t deny it. Now that she’d dropped her steely implacability, I found the truth elbowing out sisterly loyalty.
“And you know what else?”
“What?”
“He doesn’t know me. I mean, he knows the parts he wants to know. The sunny parts. But he doesn’t want to know the rest. And trust me, it’s not all sunny. My life…,” she said, rapping on her sternum with one hand, “is not a beach.”
“Can
I ask you something?”
She nodded. When viewed head-on, her face was vulnerable, pale violet hollows under each Pre-Raphaelite eye.
“How did the two of you end up together?”
“You mean why would Toby fall for such a sourpuss?” She sounded glum and arch at the same time.
I didn’t reassure her that she wasn’t a sourpuss. I said, “No, I don’t mean that.” It wasn’t actually at all obvious to me why Toby would be attracted to Miranda. Not that she wasn’t attractive in a dour, whip-smart, imperious way. I could visualize plenty of men being attracted to her, just not my bright-eyed, bushy-tailed brother. But I also understood that what I’d seen of her was far from a complete package, and we hadn’t met under the most comfortable of circumstances. The morning hadn’t actually been a showcase of my charms either. “What I mean is, why would you fall for him?”
She shrugged, then stared down at her ragged fingernails.
“Come on,” I said, opening my car door, “let’s go shop.”
In the fish department, as we admired the tuna, Arctic char, wild salmon fillets, and red snapper, displayed like sculpture, a glistening study of pinks, Miranda said, wistfully, “He thinks I’m funny. Hardly anyone thinks I’m funny.”
In the bakery section, amid the boules, ficelles, batons, baguettes, bloomers, miches, and twists, all not so much baked, apparently, as lovingly coaxed into being by artisans, she said, “He wakes up happy. Happy is his fallback mode. Who wakes up happy every single morning?”
In the poultry department, right after I told her about the time Teo came home with a chicken and said, “This chicken roamed freely, ate organic whole grains, was given zero antibiotics, and was taught to read before they slaughtered it,” she said, “Have you ever seen Toby in the ocean?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Surfing, bodysurfing, whatever. The way he just gives his body over to it, free, and so at home in his own skin. That physical joy. You know?”
I knew. “It’s the way he does everything. He’s always been that way, ever since he was a little boy. You should have seen him sled.”
“I just wanted to be close to that.”
She was near tears. Her face and her voice were so profoundly woebegone, so flat-out sad, and that’s when I knew that Miranda would never love Toby enough. She wouldn’t live with him. She wouldn’t marry him. If she’d been simply angry with him, or disappointed or frustrated or impatient, he would have had a chance, but what I understood at that moment was that she had tried, that she wanted him and ached for him and would never think of him without longing and regret. But she had tried and couldn’t love him enough.
Oh, Toby, I thought, it’s over.
Out loud, I said, “But it’s not really over. There’s the baby.”
Miranda pressed her palms against her eyes hard, as though she were stanching a wound. When she took her hands away, she frowned and gave her head a short, impatient shake. Then she looked at me and said, coldly, “I don’t know what your politics are, but until I give birth, I am carrying a fetus, not a baby.”
It may have been a low blow, but it hit its mark, and, instantly, helplessly, I fluffed up into full-blown, pupils-dilated defensive mode, like a threatened cat. It was all I could do not to hiss and bat Miranda with one clawed foot, and I wanted to whip out my pro-choice résumé, to explain that those were my politics, too, from way back, that I’d been active in my college’s branch of NOW, that while she was sitting in algebra (or pre-algebra) class, I’d been doing clinic defense, walking frightened women into Planned Parenthood through hordes of yelling antichoice protestors. Yes, Teo and I allowed ourselves to call Penny “our baby,” but that was purely personal, a way to negotiate the unknown, a way to bond, a show of faith. In my defensive state, it even flashed into my head to tell her about the miscarriage, an impulse so appallingly wrong that it brought me back to myself in a flash. I gave Miranda a neutral “Of course.”
Then she said, “Anyway. I think I’m going to give the baby up.” She stopped. Her mouth tightened. “Not up. That’s a stupid phrase. Over. To people who are ready to be parents.”
For a few seconds, I could not comprehend what she meant. I stood staring at her, struggling to understand, gripping the handle of the grocery cart so hard that pain shot up the backs of my hands. I let go.
“Adoption.” Miranda threw the word like a stone. “It’s a good thing.”
She picked up a spelt loaf, examined it, then tossed it into the cart.
“Oh, don’t look like that,” she told me, angrily, but her eyes were pleading. “I am twenty-three years old. I’m not ready to be a mother. I want a life.” She pointed a finger at me. “And you know Toby has absolutely no business being someone’s father.”
She turned on her heel and started walking. Less than two hours ago, I’d been eating bagels and reading the newspaper. Now I was watching my brother’s life fall to pieces in the middle of Sucker Mart. I placed a hand on my belly. “Breathe,” I told myself, “handle this.” I left the cart where it was and followed her.
“Miranda.” I kept my voice low, even though I wanted to bellow until jars fell off shelves. “Does Toby know about this?”
She didn’t answer. I didn’t exactly grab her, but I slid my hand around her upper arm so that she would stop walking.
“What?” She swung around to face me and hissed, “Toby is the manager of a ski shop, and it’s the best job he’s ever had. He doesn’t take anything seriously. Nothing. He talks about marriage like it’s this totally great luau we should go to. You think he’d make a good father? Honestly?”
“How far have you gotten with this?”
“Let’s just say I’ve looked into it.”
“And Toby doesn’t know.”
“Not yet.”
I didn’t know if Toby would be a good father or not. Frankly, it was a hard thing to imagine. But I was pretty sure of one thing. “He won’t let you. You can’t do it without him, and he won’t say yes.”
The sadness was back. “I know he’ll hate it. I hate it. It’s agony. But it makes sense. My brother and his wife adopted a baby from China two years ago. You should see them with her.”
“But, Miranda—”
That’s as far as I got. I didn’t even know what I’d been about to say to her, but before I could go on, she was shouting, “I am not you, Cornelia! Not every pregnant woman in the world is you!”
The store got so quiet that its discreet and upscale version of Muzak—what sounded like Glenn Gould playing Bach—seemed to get deafeningly loud, and I’m sure that people were staring. But I didn’t notice them. My eyes filled with tears.
“You’re right.” Even though Miranda was practically vibrating with rage, I took her hand and squeezed it, and she didn’t pull away. “I’m sorry.”
Later, in the car, I said, gently, “You do need to talk to Toby.”
“I know,” she said. Then she grinned forlornly. “I had this crazy idea that you might do it for me.”
“He’ll try to talk you out of it.”
“I know that, too,” Miranda said, miserably, and then she turned her troubled face away and said, more to the car window than to me, something else. Her voice was so small that I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. I think she said, “Maybe I’m hoping he will.”
That night in bed, after I’d told Teo about what had happened at Sucker Mart, I said, shakily, “Miranda says Toby wakes up happy every morning. She says happiness is his fallback mode.”
“That sounds about right.” I heard the smile in his voice. “He’s got other modes, though, probably a few he doesn’t even know about yet. He’ll get through this.”
“Hold on. You’re saying there’s more to Toby than meets the eye? Still waters run deep?”
Teo chuckled. “I wouldn’t call his waters still. But yeah, I’m saying something like that. There’s more to almost everyone than meets the eye.”
I thought about this, about Toby having hidde
n reserves of fortitude, humility, reason, seriousness, strength, something other than careless joy. I’d always been the first person to say that Toby needed to grow up. Now that he was about to have to, all I felt was a chilly, spreading sadness that seemed to seep into everything.
“Sometimes, happiness feels so fragile,” I said.
“Even ours?”
Teo expected me to say no. I sat up so I could look at him.
“Everybody’s,” I said, gently.
I thought he would touch my belly, but instead he touched my face. He slid his thumb carefully along my jaw.
“So what do we do about it?” Teo asked.
“You tell me.” I had my own ideas, but I needed to hear his. I held my breath.
“Live. Forget that it’s fragile. Live like it isn’t.”
I exhaled, kissed my husband, and found myself remembering Toby cliff diving on a family vacation to California, running full tilt, straight for the edge and over, flinging his body into nothingness with a whoop of exaltation. At the time I’d thought it was pure, arrogant recklessness, the dumbest kind of dumb fun. But what if it was something more? What if cliff diving wasn’t as much about recklessness as trust, trust in the air to hold you and the water to cushion your fall? Belief in a benevolent universe. Kierkegaardian theology in action. Maybe, just maybe, it was Toby’s version of a leap of faith.
The more you think about the physical world, the more impossible it seems. And I’m not just talking about Dev’s brand of physics—string theory, quantum mechanics, all the mind-blowing rest of it. Take something as old hat as sonar. Bodiless, invisible sound traveling, bouncing, entering liquid and coming out with an image you can watch on a screen. A tiny hand splaying against a cheek. A head turning toward you in the dark. A moving picture made of echoes.
The day after Miranda’s visit, I had an ultrasound. I’d had them twice before, but this one wasn’t planned.
I’d gone in for a regular visit. Blood pressure, weight gain, sugar levels, all fine. No swelling in my ankles. No varicose veins. The tape measure pulled across the arc of my belly gave the right answer: the centimeters matching up with the weeks in the usual, magical way.