“When you call me sister girl, I always know you’re making fun of me.”
“Damn straight.” Tequila was the only person on earth with whom I’d ever had an honest conversation about race. Actually, we may be the two people in New York City to have had an honest conversation about race.
I remembered Tequila’s insistence on race-based intuition the next time I went to teach parenting classes. Charisse looked at me and rolled her eyes around like she was going to have a fit. “So?” she said.
“Twins,” I replied.
Pandemonium broke loose in the community room. The old woman across the hall was in the middle of making sweet potato pie, she told us, but she came across anyhow. “I thought somebody won the lottery,” she said in her soft voice. You had to hand it to the women in my parenting class; their kids might wind up leaving school, going to jail, or if they prospered, leaving the neighborhood behind. But they still thought having two babies at once was almost as good as making a big win on the Lotto.
That’s when I’d finally told Meghan, when I left the doctor’s office after seeing those grainy moonscape images: a heart, a hand, an eye, a foot, a heart, a hand, an eye, a foot. The room filled with the thumping percussion of two heartbeats not quite in sync, so that they sounded like bad audio, stereo reverb, a three-second delay. My aunt Maureen took the train down to sit with me. We must have looked like inept mimes. An enormous grin followed by a quivering upper lip and then the tears. Unlike the heartbeats, we were almost exactly in sync.
“Yep, there are two,” said the technician.
“Let’s have an ice cream sundae,” Maureen said. Hot fudge, too.
That afternoon I sat down and wrote, “Dear Meghan, I just found out that I am expecting twins. It was a shock for me and it will certainly be a shock for you. Please come home. Leo is fine and sends his love. XOXO Bridget.”
Twenty minutes later I heard the laborious mechanical breathing of the old fax machine. Tequila came in with five sheets of paper. They were covered with lists: the names of neonatologists, of pediatricians, of prenatal yoga and exercise classes, of places to buy strollers, of the best strollers to buy.
“Score one for Leo Grater,” I said aloud.
“Now you talking to yourself,” Tequila called from her desk. The last page said: “I am wild with joy. XOXO M.”
I faxed back the Polaroid from the sonogram, although by the time the fuzz of the image had become the fuzz of the Polaroid and then the fuzz of the fax it must have looked like a sleet storm at midnight. I sent a list of names, and she sent it back with big black lines through half of them; Fitzmaurice Lefkowitz, for one, did not make the cut. One day I sent along a couple of paragraphs about the yoga class, which was absurd on its face, a brace of women trying to find their centers when they were not only off center but off center in a slightly different fashion with each passing week. Another morning I sat down first thing and typed out a description of how Ricky at Cubana Sandwich Shop gave me two each time I ordered one and put hot sauce on everything for some complicated reason that apparently had to do with hair growth, although it was unclear whether the hair involved was mine or the babies’.
One afternoon as I was preparing to go home, Edward Prevaricator called. “Your sister wanted me to pass along this phone number,” he said.
“She has a phone?”
“No, but Derek does. You remember Derek from your visit. He and his wife have a telephone, and if there is an emergency he can drive down to the house immediately.”
I looked at the number on the paper. Leo’s letters, my dispatches, a phone number: my sister was edging back into the world.
“I think your mother will come home soon,” I said to Leo that afternoon as we sat on the front steps licking lemon ices.
“I don’t think so. I told her to stay awhile longer.”
“What? You did? Why?”
“I don’t know. It seems like she’s spending a lot of time thinking about stuff, and I just figure you guys don’t get enough time thinking about stuff. When you’re a kid, you spend all your time in your room listening to music, playing video games, but mainly thinking about stupid stuff. I mean, not all stupid—like when Jack Wallace’s little brother had some weird cancer, he was thinking about important stuff. And when Nate’s parents split. But like, the point is that we just have a lot of time to think. But you guys—there’s just no time. Work, dinner, trips, whatever. It sounds like my mom has all this time to just think. And I figure she hasn’t done that in a long time and maybe we should just leave her alone to do it.”
“May I say something?”
“Oh, jeez, Bridey, whenever you say that it means you’re going to say something really nice to me that’s so over the top that I feel like a jerk.”
“All I want to say is that if my kids grow up to be as great as you, I’ll be the happiest woman on earth.”
“I’ll whip them into shape,” Leo said, hiding his face in the paper cup of lemon ice.
If, as the old proverb goes, victory has a hundred fathers, these kids were going to have thousands of parents. In the muggy July evenings as I shuffled, splay-footed in flat sandals, from the subway station to my building, I was accosted by anonymous well-wishers, the familiar strangers I had known by sight but not by name. “You…are…glowing,” gasped a woman who lived at the end of the block as she ran toward the park in shorts and a marathon T-shirt. “I’m so jealous,” said a woman I’d seen with a toddler and a baby at the bodega on the corner, her hair always slightly untidy, spots on her clothes. Leo’s friends Doug and Doug, who incredibly enough both dated girls named Caitlin, just bobbed their heads and said, “Cool. So, like, cool.”
Sometimes at night Leo sprawled on the couch and sang softly to my stomach while we shared ice cream straight from the container. Mostly he sang a rock song he loved that began, “Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known.”
Suddenly I understood what it feels like to be public property, to have people feel entitled to approach, to comment, to have an opinion. But because it was new to me, and because it would pass in the finite endless span of the pregnancy, I did not mind. I felt prosperous, as though I had so much, so much, as though I had been flat water and now I was carbonated. My apartment was too small and my body was so big and the future seemed so strange and yet so clear, too. At five I would walk them to the public school, the one with the gifted and talented program. At eight they would play soccer in the park, in one of the leagues; they would have brightly colored shirts and small muddy cleats. At sixteen they would stop speaking to me but never to each other, even if it was only to bicker and whine.
“Isn’t it great that there’s two, Bridey?” Leo said one night, and I looked at him in surprise, wondering why I had never really registered the faint nimbus of loneliness that had always encircled his sweet face.
There were two of us preparing, although it was in a most peculiar way. When I left the office now, there was almost always a squad car at the corner. Alison was delighted; the boyfriends, the common-law husbands, the exes were particularly bothersome in summer, and occasionally one would reel around the corner, determined to get his own back, and come face-to-face with two young officers in mirror shades. When I would come out at the end of the day, the patrol car would start up unabashedly and then follow me to the subway station. On the train a transit cop would sometimes saunter through the car where I sat, sweating in the summer heat, and I would wonder if he, too, had been sent.
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen the fine hand of Irving Lefkowitz in my daily life. Several years back I’d stumbled down the corridor to the community room at Tubman, a corridor in which half the lights had burned out, and come upon a narrow young man in a do-rag who had a larger guy pressed back against the wall, a box cutter up and ready. “You don’t want to be back here at this particular moment,” he said. It was such an elegant locution that it stayed with me as I began to shake slightly and approached the security guard at the desk.
“Uh-huh,” he said and scribbled something on his log, which was a spiral notebook of the kind kids use. But he never moved from behind the faux wood desk he had shoved in one corner.
“Did anything bad happen at the Tubman projects yesterday?” I had asked Irving at dinner the next night.
“That is one of the more ridiculous questions you’ve ever asked me,” he replied, putting down his fork and jamming a corner of a roll in his mouth, which he often does before he begins a long disquisition on the nature of crime in the city. “At one point they thought of setting up a satellite station house in the bottom floor of building A. The only reason they didn’t is because they knew any officer assigned would apply for a transfer.”
The next time I went to Tubman a patrol car trailed me there and back. “I can’t have a black-and-white following me around the neighborhood,” I told Irving. “It makes me stand out.”
“See, I never thought of that. A tall woman with reddish hair, blue eyes, and skin so white you can practically see through it walking through an entirely black and Latino neighborhood wouldn’t want anything that would interfere with her ability to melt right into her surroundings.”
“Just can the shadow, Irving. I can’t do my work with a police escort. Those people live there every day without a police escort. I can certainly manage.” But that was then. This was now. This was us, not me. I didn’t complain. I didn’t demur. I ran my hand over the deepening shelf of my belly and let the police trail behind me.
Irving and I had enough to fight about anyway. Each time he saw me it was like he discovered my treachery anew, and his brow would tighten, his mouth thin. Sometimes we went to dinner together and didn’t talk of it. Sometimes we talked of nothing else. The one thing we never did was to sleep together. Irving said he was inhibited by Leo sleeping on the sofa, and we couldn’t go to his place. Irving kept a shabby apartment in Brooklyn with views from all rooms of a narrow air shaft. It looked like a safe house for material witnesses, which is what it was before Irving’s second divorce, when he needed a temporary place to stay. He’d been there temporarily for twelve years.
In late July, during a week of heat and humidity so thick that the air felt like suede, he took me to a small and very elegant restaurant on West Fiftieth Street where we’d celebrated my birthday. I had a new dress, white with a tight bodice. My cleavage was a national monument. “Bridey!” crowed Leo, who was on his way out with the Caitlins to a club in Chelsea famous for its chocolate pudding shots. The headwaiter at Française did a faint minuet around me, as though he was afraid he might need to catch me and there was no telling in which direction I might fall. He brought a pillow for the small of my back. “She’s fine, she’s fine,” said Irving.
The last time I had been there we had seen Fallujah Levine, who was rumored to have a lock on Meghan’s job. “Give her all my love,” she’d said earnestly, an actress playing the part of a newscaster playing the part of a sympathetic friend. But the restaurant was half empty on a summer evening. Everyone who mattered was eating in the Hamptons.
Without consulting the menu, Irving said he would have oysters and steak au poivre, medium rare. He was squirming like a man with a tack in his shoe.
“All right, so we’ll get married,” he said when the waiter left, looking at me sideways, holding a glass of red wine.
“I don’t want to get married.”
His glass hit the table with a sound like ice cracking. “What? What? You want to be a whatchamacallit?”
“A whatchamacallit?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t. I’m not a mind reader.”
“A whatchamacallit. A single mother.”
“No, I don’t want to be a single mother. A single mother is someone who has to parent her children alone. I want to share parenting responsibilities with you.”
He shook his head slowly. “Already we’re getting into trouble here. You’re using the word parent as a verb. Parent is a noun. You know better than that.” He took a gulp of his wine and threw an oyster after it. I would have felt sorry for him if I’d been able to drink champagne or stomach oysters.
“I’m having a very difficult time with this and you don’t seem to have a whole lot of sympathy for the position,” he said. “I had a lousy father. My father had a lousy father. I’m not complaining, but there it is.”
“So what? I had a lousy mother. Well, I think I did. But I did have Maureen, who was a great surrogate mother.”
“Which is probably why your sister turned out to be a good mother.”
“I’m surprised you’d say that.”
“No, come on, you know I always give the devil his due. You can’t spend time around that kid and not know that she did a good job.” One of his cell phones started to hum in his pocket. He looked at the screen, pressed a button, and put it back.
“So you don’t want to get married?”
“I don’t think so. Look at what happened to Meghan. And you don’t seem to do so well with it, either. I would like to live with you on a regular basis.” I was not sure that that was true, but it seemed like the right thing to say. “If you want to buy me an expensive ring in honor of that, that would be fine. Although we might have to wait until the swelling goes down in my fingers.”
“And you want me to do this whole thing where I go in with you, rub your feet, help you breathe?”
“Yeah. I would really like that. I think you’d really like it. I remember seeing Leo born. It was the most amazing moment of my life. There were two of us, and then there were three. Four, if you count Evan, who was sitting in the corner with his head between his knees. I don’t see you as a fainter. And I think if you didn’t see it you’d be sorry after.”
“I’ve seen it. I delivered two babies when I was a patrolman. It happens all the time, you get to a car parked along the side of the Belt, there she is with her feet on the dash, screaming.”
“Oh, great. That makes me feel a lot better.”
Irving shook his head. “Sweetheart, you’re going to be fine. I know you. A trouper. You given any thoughts to what you’re going to call these kids?”
“I’ve eliminated some names already. Did you know Leo has three friends named Kate and two each named Sarah and Emily? I think the only thing they all have in common is that they’re blond.”
“Ask Tequila. She’ll give you some doozies.”
“Yeah, she explained hers to me once. Baruch after the college. Armand after some TV actor, Princess Margaret after Princess Margaret. And George.”
“Washington? Foreman? Hamilton?”
“I think she just got tired. She’s getting a second wind with me. The other day she suggested Meghan Jr.”
“Over my dead body. Which is another thing. I’m too goddamn old. I’m going to look ridiculous. Not to mention the dying thing.” That’s what Irving always called it. The dying thing.
“Too late,” I said, looking down at my evaporating lap. I looked up and saw the headwaiter leading Evan across the room. A woman was with him, and he had his hand at the small of her back, steering her to a table in a corner. It was a gesture as familiar to me as the up-and-over sweep of my sister’s arm as she stroked her way across the sea. I covered my mouth with my hand.
“I have to go to the ladies’ room,” I said.
Anyone who has ever been single in New York knows how to use the restroom to take the measure of an old lover’s new love. There are the mirrors over the bar, the big plate-glass window facing the street that reflects nearly as well as the mirrors do, the arbitrary room dividers with flower arrangements atop that make it possible to stand behind the delphiniums and hide in plain sight. One of these last served. Evan’s companion was small, wiry, with enormous blue eyes and a funny fish mouth. He talked, she laughed. In only a few months he apparently had become hilarious. In the ladies’ room, I watched the door as I washed my hands. I could hear Tequila’s voice in my head, telling me to say “Rise and shine, bitc
h!” if she walked in. But I would have slunk out, although my ability to slink was severely compromised by my size. Brave in my imagination, not in fact.
Back at the table there was a chocolate mousse at my place. It was the first time I can ever remember that I was not joyful at the sight. From across the room, I imagined I could hear the faint sound of feminine laughter.
“So no deal on the marriage proposal?” Irving said casually.
“That wasn’t a proposal,” I muttered. “That was a capitulation.”
“I can’t figure out how to get this right.”
“Whatever. Let’s get a check.” We rode home in a taxi in silence. I looked out the window, which reflected Irving looking at me. A metaphor for all relationships. If I had turned to him, chances were better than even that he would have turned away. And so on, and so forth, the emotional concomitant of the White Rock girl.
“I’m not going to come up,” he said when we got to my door.
So the next afternoon when he appeared suddenly in the doorway of my office, I thought for a moment he had come to make peace, to abne-gate himself through Lamaze classes, to vow to give up cigars and so live long enough to watch his children grow. He looked like a door himself, so big and boxy, almost Frankensteinian, his shoulders raised, his head bowed. He looked down at me, and I saw that for the first time in all the years I had known him he looked as though he’d been crying. Unthinkingly I put my hand down to my belly.
“Meghan,” I whispered.
“Leo,” he said.
I HAVE BEEN at this hospital so many times before, but this was the first time the staff thought I was the patient. Usually I am with a woman who is bleeding, a child who is gasping for breath, a teenager who is screaming as her baby threatens to be born. Now the staff, taken in by the size of my belly, assumed it was my turn. A woman with a clipboard approached. “My nephew has been shot,” I groaned loudly, and she lost interest. A pregnant woman about to give birth is a person of interest; a relative awaiting news of a gunshot victim is a bystander. “Take a seat,” she said. Outside Irving yelled into one of his phones.