The original plan was to sightsee on Cape Cod, to hit vacation spots, cranberry bogs, and whatnot. But we ended up leaving the next morning. Juniper claimed to have the flu. She said she’d just feel terrible if we caught it. My mother offered to help out until she was back on her feet, but Dinah had already showed up to take care of her and take over the house. We’d never really unpacked, so my mother and I zipped our suitcases and walked back down the servants’ stairs into the kitchen.
Dinah was a tall, slender black woman with a thin gap between her front teeth, so unlike Mrs. Shepherd that I was shocked. She was my mother’s age and wore a blue shirt with puffed sleeves and a tan skirt. She stood at the sink cleaning dishes from dinner the night before. It was a Monday, and when my mother and I came down for breakfast, the two kids were hunched over cereal bowls, dressed in tennis whites for a morning lesson. They looked completely different. Their clothes fit, sneakers were laced. Their tattered braided anklets were hidden in their short socks. Church’s hair was slick from a shower and Piper’s was back in a tight ponytail. The remains of Juniper’s breakfast sat on a small silver tray on the counter.
“This is Dinah,” Piper said, introducing us. “And this is my mom’s friend from college, Dotty, and her daughter Lissy.”
“Hi,” Dinah said, nodding from the sink. “Breakfast isn’t anything fancy today. Help yourselves to cereal.”
And so we did. Piper and Church were finishing up breakfast, and Dinah grabbed the keys off a silver hook on the wall.
“I’ve got to run the kids to tennis,” she said.
“Don’t worry. We’re leaving. We’ll show ourselves out,” my mother said.
Church jerked around and then slouched, his hand in the pocket of his tight white tennis shorts. He smiled sheepishly, and I wondered what lies he was concocting. We ate whole-grain cereal with Juniper’s low-fat milk. My mother didn’t weigh her portions. She was groggy and hungover, and I was imagining Church sitting next to Piper in the backseat of the Saab, whispering, “We did it. Me and that girl Lissy. She was good, like a pro.” I didn’t care. If Piper believed Church at all, she might think I was wild, and that was okay by me. I was tired of my dull, predictable life. I even thought maybe we would have done it if one thing had led to another. I wanted drama, my own drama. I was beginning to think that anything was possible.
6
My gynecologist is a woman, Dr. Jennifer, a young, sure-handed petite blonde with bobbed hair and straight teeth. I chose her because she’s nothing like my father and should not in any way remind me of him. Still, her office brings him back to mind. The instruments have changed—the wide bulb lamp is a sleek-lined Welch Allyn; now there’s Aquasonic gel for sonograms, the German-made colopyscope, an evacuation air filtration system, and an unlimited supply of ambidextrous Sterigard gloves. But essentially things haven’t changed: the whiteness, the clean, empty counters, the little shiny tools hidden in drawers, the strange and sterile intimacy. I can’t help but think of my father, how it must have been to have him as a gynecologist, this shy, awkward man, flustered and astonished each time he surfaced from the white tent covering his patients’ legs. It’s the way I have always imagined myself giving birth—the icky image, not at all sexual, of my father’s pink-flushed face rising up from between my stirruped legs as if I’d given birth to this full-grown man. It’s a boy, the nurse squeals. And he shyly nods, straightening the eyeglasses that have slipped down his tilted nose.
Of course, it makes no sense that Dr. Bob Jablonski should be the one I’m giving birth to. For genetic reasons, I should be giving birth to a little Anthony Pantuliano, my real father. It’s Pantuliano’s recessives and dominants that my eggs haul around. But I’ve never really been able to see myself as his daughter. He is a part of my personal mythology, as if my mother were a Bayonne maiden who had caught the eye of a strange big-headed, big-cocked god, a Cyclops, no less—like the seduction of Europa, riding the bull, or Leda being struck by a giant swan’s beak—and I was the product of their union.
I have been a regular at Dr. Jennifer’s for years. I go to the gynecologist more often than most women do. In addition to the fact that I’m prone to urinary tract infections, irregular periods, and murky Pap smears, I’ve gone most often for a heaviness in my pelvis, an expanded uterus, and nausea. I have convinced myself again and again in the weakest of moments that I was pregnant. I’ve bought pregnancy tests in bulk. I’ve peed on hundreds of test strips. After the tests came back negative, I became convinced that I was dying, rotting, that my tumorous uterus was going to fall out of me, that I would be stripped of what was essentially mine. It was an issue of control, dating back to my earliest notions of pregnancy, my mother’s stories of Anthony Pantuliano, the idea that pregnancy is something that can happen to you without your stamped approval.
I went to Dr. Jennifer for reassurance. She would take a look and smile and say, “Once again, I pronounce you unpregnant and healthy.” And I would walk out of the office thankful, relieved, renewed. I could believe for a short time that I was not dying from the vagina out, that I was fine, the way I imagine someone truly Catholic must feel after confession, knowing that if a bus hit her right at that minute she’d be going to heaven.
Shortly after my breakup with Peter Kinney, shortly after Church fell in love with Kitty Hawk, I wrangled an appointment from Dr. Jennifer’s receptionist, a stingy woman who always implies, with her typed-up set of questions and little annoyed sighs at my responses, that mine is not an authentic emergency. I had convinced her this time that I’d taken tests that actually proved positive. I walked into the back wood-paneled office defiantly and pulled a bouquet of pregnancy tests, all positive, out of my pocket-book. I was proud almost, finally demonstrating that I am not absolutely insane after all. But I was like a crazy person in a storm that she had predicted, not really aware of the storm itself, the high winds and gusty rain, but finally ecstatic to be proved right, the way Noah must have felt after having been called an old, addlepated drunk, except of course I had no ark. I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
She was startled. “Oh my!” she said, like a little old lady at a church bazaar who’s just won a raffle.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“I think it means you’re pregnant,” she said.
I thought of the names Megan and Todd, although I’d never name a child Megan or Todd, names that brought to mind a sunshiny kid raising a hand in math class. I realized that I could become a mother, that I could swell up and give birth and go to PTA meetings. I was shocked. The diaphragm had failed. It suddenly seemed a ridiculous thing to have put faith in, jelly coated and slippery. I felt betrayed and overwhelmed, stupid, realizing that thinking you’re pregnant and knowing you’re pregnant are two completely different things.
I felt for the first time in my life really and truly alone. I had the keenest sense of panic. I wasn’t thinking consciously of my mother, her instinct to find someone, to find a husband for herself, a father for me. But it was there, the lurking fear. My mother was raised in the artificial neon glow of the ’50s, and I was raised in its psychedelically altered afterglow. It is one of the most obvious reasons that I cannot live my mother’s life. The ’50s, my mother’s youth, marked the golden age, the coming of age of the golden age of the golden life. The American dream became a machine that everyone drove together, willingness to believe at an all-time record high, hope for the masses. In the ’60s, the disparity between hope and reality started to become more obvious, a string in the seam that some people tugged at and others ignored. It tore straight up the middle of the country, and by ’69, my mother was only twenty. She didn’t have a chance. But I couldn’t believe in the golden life—it no longer existed as a concept. I was twenty-nine, a single working woman of the nineties. I couldn’t believe that I needed a man to complete my life, and yet I did; it seemed a cruel paradox, that I was raised to believe something that I would find appalling. And so, when my mind flipped to C
hurch, the idea wasn’t blatant. It couldn’t be. I wouldn’t have allowed it. I was telling myself that I was not envisioning Church heroically swooping in to save the day. I was thinking only that maybe I could confide in him. I decided that I would tell Church that I was pregnant. I wasn’t allowed to think of it outright, to admit it even to myself, but my hope was that Church, despite being temporarily sidetracked by Kitty Hawk, had come to rescue me.
I lay there on my back, looking at the white sheet, my red knees. Nothing was real to me, not the pregnancy, not the child taking root. I felt as if I were lying not within myself but next to myself. I was detached, separate. I imagined my father, Dr. Jablonski, emerging in his white coat, his thick glasses sitting crooked on his bent nose, saying, in a reverent, perplexed voice, “It’s happened again. A miracle.”
Church and Kitty were inseparable. I couldn’t find a moment alone with him. They slept together in my guest room, Kitty’s old room, where Church had taken up residence. They showered together, brushed their teeth together, fed each other. Church tagged along after her when she worked, hanging out in the dressing room while she strapped on her Velcro-fastened gear—lily bras and panties, leather G-strings—and then while she danced, he was belly-up at the bar.
The relationship was typical Kitty. She loved intense romances, to be the star of her own feature film, a passionate love story, strutting and glaring, the queen of the Bette Davis moment. And when she looked up at Church, even when they were just hanging out on the sofa watching TV, their fingers stained orange from cheese curls, there was a From Here to Eternity intensity in her gaze. She was beautiful, too, and fairly young, midtwenties, smooth skin, upturned eyes, white-white teeth, and that shiny hair halfway down her back.
Kitty liked to focus in and wring someone out. I’d seen her do it to boyfriends, to a few of her coworkers at the Fruit, Cock, Tail Strip Club. She’d done it to me, too, in a way, although not with as much ferocity. I wasn’t worth as much to her as Church, a rich American man. She’d primarily asked me questions about my childhood. She wanted nothing to do with the summer in Bayonne—didn’t know that Church and I had lost our virginity together. She stuck to life in Keene, New Hampshire—sprinklers, ice cream trucks, streamers on the handlebars of my bike. She wanted to know if I gave apples to my teachers. I thought she was sweet and in a strange way naïve, even her ability to dance naked in front of men a kind of innocence. I taught her the doo-wop hand gestures to “Stop in the Name of Love.” We sang into hairbrushes.
But when I asked her questions about growing up in Korea, she’d say, “Oh, Korea is a dirty, ugly place. No one want to live there. I always want to live in America with superstars!”
In the end, I didn’t like Kitty Hawk because she was the worst kind of liar, no sport to it, no art. She lied to get what she wanted. She was a slut, too, not because she loved men—it’s perfectly acceptable to be a slut if you truly love men, even in a whimsical way, as I once did—but because she despised them. She wanted power, which is what she got onstage, an audience. She hid behind the broken English, the girlish giggle, the mincing steps. And she was a thief, too, which is why I’d finally kicked her out. When I realized she’d stolen my mint sweater, she broke down and cried, “My parents never love me.” When she’d taken my alarm clock—as if I wouldn’t notice or call her on it—she said, “Mine not working.” She started to sob. “And everything work for you, you so perfect.” She stole money and jewelry, not to mention bits and pieces of my childhood, a glued-together assortment of details that I’ve decided she’ll try to pass off one day as her own.
Kitty was all façade. Once, when we were still roommates, I saw her out with a group of other Koreans at Beauty Bar. It’s an old salon-gone-bar, complete with sixties-style dome hair-drying chairs. It has a velvet-curtained glass-enclosed counter case with vintage knickknacks, Kewpie dolls, and soap bars. The whole place has a carnival/funeral parlor feel. Kitty sat at the head of one of the lounge-style tables with their mismatched, circa 1969 chairs. She was loud and tough. I said hi to her, and she stopped and just gave me a look, her nostrils flared, a look that implied that I had no right to talk to her in public, that we were not friends. She was wearing her mirrored sunglasses, and all I could see in them were two warped reflected versions of myself, confused and uncomfortable in front of her group’s table. She said nothing, turned away, and whistled through her teeth to get the bartender’s attention. Kitty was untrustworthy and sad. I had the feeling, although she never talked about her childhood, really, that she’d been through awful things, that she’d learned at a very young age to take care of herself first, to survive.
When I told Church all of this a couple days after they’d met, catching him alone for a minute in the kitchen, where he was scraping black off his toast, he said, “She’s complex. You don’t get her. She’s really honest. She has nothing to hide. You should see her strip. It’s nothing to her. She is who she is. I love that.”
And I looked at him and it struck me that Kitty fit into his definition of “real people,” was essential to the “authentic experience” he’d come to the city looking for. She was another shot at lowering his class. He was burdened by the notion that he’d missed something, something real, possibly dirty, that the rich had rinsed from their bleached lives—something like Kitty. It was an outdated notion, something political advertisers played up in times of depression and war, all of those poor-little-rich-girl movies of the Roman Holiday variety, the idea that the rich were unhappy and unloved, that the poor were dirt poor but singing-and-dancing happy. They were coming at it from different ends, but both Church and Kitty were desperate for different lives, for American middle-class existences—no different from my mother. They were in many ways a pathetic couple, but not one you could really feel too sorry for, because they were so sexually charged. It’s hard to feel sorry for sexy, in-love people, especially when you’re dejected.
I said, “You know the American middle class isn’t a religion. You can’t convert.”
Church stopped. “I disagree. I wholeheartedly object. I could be pope, actually, of the Church of the American Middle Class. We’ll worship power lawnmowers and try to conceive children to get optimal tax advantage.” Then he quickly changed the subject. “I think I’d like to be a columnist. Not that I’d enjoy actually writing, but I’d be great at riding the camels and eating soup with the homeless, test-flying jets, or just, you know, making fun of potatoes. You know that kind of stupid banter. Or I could be a poet. Nowadays, I hear, even these cat hair-covered professors at Ivy League schools are writing shoot-up-heroin and tough-times-in-prison stuff. The critics love it. It’s a rip-off—don’t get me wrong. Like M.C. Hammer’s attempt at gangsta rap. But it’s a bandwagon that anyone can get on.” And then he strode off into the other room, shouting out his new ideas to Kitty.
Yes, Church was crazy, but I wasn’t really in any position to point this out. I was pretty crazy myself, having sunk a small fortune into pregnancy tests.
In any case, I felt immensely more stable than Kitty Hawk and decided that maybe I should target her. I caught her one morning, shuffling out of the bathroom in Church’s boxers, her little tan boobs jiggling. I said, “Look, don’t fuck with him.”
“I’m going be his wife. I fuck with him all time.” And she smiled sweetly.
It was quintessential Kitty. She wanted to leave me wondering if she knew the difference between fuck with and fuck. But I knew she did know the difference. She contorted the language, was a master of the nuances of mangled English and how to use miscommunication to her advantage.
The next Saturday afternoon I was sitting at the kitchen table eating buttered toast and drinking orange juice, something I’d begun to crave, and thinking vaguely about issues of maternity leave, clothing, child care, but still these weren’t real issues. I realized that many people in my situation would have considered abortion. I’d had a number of friends who’d had them. But I couldn’t think of it as a real option,
not because I’m kind of still Catholic—I’m also pro-choice—but because I was an accident myself; an abortion would have been a suicidal thought.
I had been given a Peter Rabbit diaper bag at Dr. Jennifer’s office. It was filled with pamphlets and formula, a book of children’s names and a week-by-week breakdown of the events of pregnancy with pencil drawings of the eventually enormous uterus, but I didn’t dwell on these pictures. I preferred the notion of a Megan or Todd, someone else’s eight-year-old. But that, too, was uncomfortable, as if I were being forced to fall in love with a stranger. Really, your child is a complete stranger; everyone seems to overlook that—a stranger who will never go away, unlike my favorite kinds of relationships, which end before really beginning. Having a child is a giant act of hope. I’ve come to deeply mistrust hope.
I was flashing to my parents. This was before my father had had his first heart attack, and both seemed very healthy, like they would live forever. I was wondering how I would tell them, wondering what they would say, especially my mother. They’d recently gotten to that age when their friends were bragging about grandkids, and I was, after all, nearly thirty, with no prospects. I thought they’d probably be a little relieved. But there would be no way around the obvious question, the father. Perhaps my father could overlook it—he had experience in that area—but my mother would want to know. She had, after all, told me her secrets, in great detail. I thought how much easier it would be to arrive with Church, already three or four months’ pregnant, and have him announce the news, how I’d never have to mention Peter Kinney, his wife and kids. Still it wasn’t real to me, the pregnancy, even the nausea that took hold every once in a while and sent me reeling, the fatigue settling in.