"Good in Bed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weiner Jennifer)

ELEVEN

Thanksgiving Day dawned crisp and cold and brilliantly sunny. I dragged m yself out of bed, still yawning at ten in the morning, and spent a few hours outside raking leaves with Josh and Lucy while Nifkin kept watch on us, and on the stalking cats, from the porch.

At three that afternoon, I took a shower, blew my hair into some semblance of style, and put on lipstick and mascara, plus the wide-legged black velvet pants and black cashmere sweater I’d packed, hoping that the cumulative effect would be both stylish and slimming. Lucy and I set the table, Josh boiled and peeled shrimp, and Tanya bustled around the kitchen, making more noise than food, and breaking frequently for cigarettes.

At 4:30 the guests started to arrive. My mother’s friend Beth came with her husband and three tall, blond sons, the youngest of whom was sporting a nose ring right through his septum, giving him the look of a baffled Jewish bull. Beth hugged me and started sliding trays of appetizers into the oven while Ben, the pierced one, started discreetly chucking salted nuts at Tanya’s cats. “You look great!” Beth said, like she always says. It wasn’t even close to being true, but I appreciated the sentiment. “I loved your story about Donny and Marie’s new show. When you said how they were singing with LeAnn Rimes and it looked like they wanted to suck the lifeblood out of her… that was so funny!”

“Thanks,” I said. I love Beth. Trust her to remember the “Mormon vampires” line, the one that I’d loved, too, even if it had occasioned half a dozen angry phone calls to my editor, a fistful of furious letters (“Dear Too-Bit reporter” my favorite one began), plus an earnest visit from two nineteen-year-old Brigham Young University students who were visiting Philadelphia and promised to pray for me.

Tanya contributed green beans with the crunchy canned onions on top and a can of undiluted Campbell ’s Cream of Mushroom soup mixed in, then galumphed into the family room and built a blazing fire. The house filled with the sweet smell of wood smoke and roasting turkey. Nifkin and Gertrude and Alice arranged a cease-fire and curled blissfully in front of the flames, all in a row. Josh passed around the shrimp he’d prepared. Lucy mixed Manhattans – she’d perfected them during a stint as a bartender that followed the topless dancing escapade but preceded her six weeks doing phone sex.

“You look lousy,” she observed, handing me a drink. Lucy herself looked great, as always. My sister is just fifteen months younger than I am. People tell us we looked like twins when we were little. Nobody says that anymore. Lucy’s thin – she always has been – and she wears her wavy hair short, so that the slightly pointed tips of her ears show when she shakes her head. She’s got full, lush lips and big, brown Betty Boop eyes and she presents herself to the world like the star she thinks she ought to be. It’s been years since I’ve seen her without a full face of makeup, her lips expertly outlined and colored, her eyebrows dramatically plucked, a tiny silver stud flashing and winking from the center of her tongue. She was dressed for the Thanksgiving feast in skintight black leather pants, high-heeled black boots, and a sequined pink sweater set. She looked like she’d just stepped out of a photo shoot, or stopped in for a quick drink before heading off to someone else’s much more stylish holiday festivities.

“I’m a little stressed out,” I said, yawning, handing the drink back, and wishing there was time for another nap.

My mother bustled around the table with the same placecards she’d used at Passover the year before. I knew there was one that said “Bruce” somewhere in the pile, and I hoped, for my sake, that she’d discarded it rather than crossing his name off and writing in someone else’s as a way to economize.

The last time he’d been here it had been winter. Josh and Lucy and Bruce and I had stood on the porch, sipping the beers that Tanya refused to let us keep in the refrigerator. (“I’m in recovery!” she’d bleat, holding the offending bottles as if they were grenades.) Then we’d gone for a walk around the block. Halfway back, it had started to snow, unexpectedly. And Bruce and I stood, holding hands with our eyes shut and our mouths wide open, feeling the flakes like tiny wet kisses on our cheeks, long after everyone else went inside.

I closed my eyes against the memory.

Lucy stared at me. “Jeez, Cannie. Are you okay?”

I blinked back the tears. “Just tired.”

“Hmmph,” said Lucy. “Well, I’ll just mash a little something special into your potatoes.”

I shrugged, and made sure to avoid the potatoes at dinner. We followed my mother’s Thanksgiving tradition, going around the table and talking about what we were thankful for that year. “I’m thankful for having found so much love,” rasped Tanya, as Lucy and Josh and I winced and my mother took Tanya’s hand.

“I’m thankful for having my wonderful family together,” said my mother. Her eyes were glistening. Tanya kissed her cheek. Josh groaned. Tanya shot him a dirty look.

“I’m thankful…” I had to think for a while. “I’m thankful that Nifkin survived his bout with hemorrhagic gastroenteritis last summer,” I finally said. At the sound of his name, Nifkin put his paw on my lap and whined beseechingly. I slipped him a piece of turkey skin.

“Cannie!” yelled my mother, “stop feeding that dog!”

“I’m thankful I still have an appetite after hearing about Nifkin’s trouble,” said Ben, who, in addition to the nose ring, was irritating his parents by sporting a “What Would Jesus Do?” T-shirt.

“I’m thankful that Cannie didn’t dump Bruce until after my birthday, so that I got those Phish tickets,” said Josh in his deep, deadpan baritone, which went nicely with his six-foot-tall, skin-and-bones frame, and the little goatee he’d grown since I’d seen him last. “Thanks,” he stage-whispered.

“Think nothing of it,” I whispered back.

“And I’m thankful,” concluded Lucy, “that everyone’s here to hear my big news!”

My mother and I exchanged anxious glances. Lucy’s last big exciting news had been a plan – thankfully aborted – to move to Uzbekistan with a guy she’d met at a bar. “He’s a lawyer over there,” she’d said con-fidently, gliding smoothly over the fact that he was a Pizza Hut delivery guy over here. Before that, there’d been the plan for the bagel bakery in Montserrat, where she’d gone to visit a friend in medical school. “Not a bagel to be had down there!” she’d said triumphantly, and got as far as filling out the papers for a small business loan before Montserrat’s long-dormant volcano erupted, the island was evacuated, and Lucy’s bagel dreams died a hot molten death.

“What’s the news?” asked my mother, looking into Lucy’s shining eyes.

“I got an agent!” she trilled. “And he got me a photo shoot!”

“Topless?” asked Josh dryly. Lucy shook her head. “No, no, I’m done with all that. This is legitimate. I’m modeling rubber gloves.”

“Fetish magazine?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself.

Lucy’s face fell. “Why doesn’t anyone believe in me?” she demanded. Knowing my family, it was just a matter of time before somebody launched into Lucy’s Catalogue of Failures – from school to relationships to the jobs she’d never kept.

I leaned across the table and took my sister’s hand. She jerked her hand back. “No unnecessary touch!” she said. “What’s with you, anyhow?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We weren’t giving you a chance.” And that’s when I heard the voice. Not God’s voice, unfortunately, but Bruce’s. “Good,” he said. “That was nice.”

I looked around, startled.

“Cannie?” said my mother.

“Thought I heard something,” I said. “Never mind.”

And while Lucy prattled on about her agent, her photo shoot, and what she’d wear, all the while evading my mother’s increasingly pointed questions about whether she was getting paid for this or what, I ate turkey and stuffing and glutinous green bean casserole, and thought about what I’d heard. I thought about how maybe even though I’d never see Bruce again, it might be possible to keep part of him, or of what we were together, if I could be more openhearted, and kind. For all of his lecturing, for every time he was didactic and condescending, I knew that he was basically a kind person, and I… well, I was too, in my private life, but it could be argued that I was making my living by being unkind. But maybe I could change. And maybe he’d like that, and someday like me better… and love me again. Assuming, of course, we ever even saw each other again.

Underneath the table, Nifkin twitched and growled at something chasing through his dream. My eyes were clear, and my head felt cool and ordered. It wasn’t as if all of my problems were gone – as if any of them were gone, really – but for the first time since I’d seen the little plus sign on the EPT stick, it felt like I might be able to see myself safely through them. I had something to hold on to, now, no matter what choice I made – I can be a better person, I thought. A better sister, a better daughter, a better friend.

“Cannie?” said my mother. “Did you say something?”

I didn’t. But at that moment I thought that I felt the faintest flutter in my belly. It might have been all the food, or all of my anxiety, and I knew it was much too early to really feel anything. But it felt like something. Like something waving at me. A tiny little hand, five fingers spread like a starfish, waving through the water. Hello and good-bye.

The last day of my Thanksgiving break, before I was going to make the trek back into town and pick up the pieces of my life where I’d left them, my mother and I went swimming. It was the first time I’d been back to the Jewish Community Center since I’d learned that it was the scene of my mother’s seduction. After that, the steam room had never felt quite the same.

But I’d missed swimming, I realized, as I stood in the locker room and pulled on my suit. I had missed the tang of chlorine in my nose and the old Jewish ladies who’d parade through the locker room completely naked, completely unashamed, and swap recipes and beauty tips while they got dressed. The feel of the water, holding me up, and the way I could forget almost anything but the rhythm of my breath as I swam.

My mother swam a mile every morning, moving slowly through the water with a massive kind of grace. I kept up with her for maybe half of it, then slipped into one of the empty lap lanes and did a languid sidestroke for a while, thinking of nothing. Which I knew was a luxury I couldn’t afford much longer. If I wanted to get things taken care of (and that was the phrase I was using in my mind), it would have to be soon.

I flipped on my back and thought about what I’d felt at Thanksgiving dinner. That tiny hand, waving. Ridiculous, really. The thing probably didn’t have hands, and if it did, it certainly couldn’t wave them.

I’d always been pro-choice. I had never romanticized pregnancies, intended or otherwise. I wasn’t one of those women who sees her thirtieth birthday coming and starts cooing at anything in a stroller with drool on its chin. I had a few friends who’d gotten married and started their families, but I had many more friends in their late twenties and early thirties who hadn’t. I didn’t hear my clock ticking. I didn’t have baby fever.

I rolled back over and commenced a lazy breaststroke. The thing was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had been somehow decided for me. As if it was out of my control now, and all I was supposed to do was sit back and let it happen.

I blew a frustrated breath into the water, watching bubbles roil around me. I’d still feel better about all of this if I could have heard God’s voice again, if I knew for sure that I was doing the right thing.

“Cannie?”

My mother swam into the lane beside me. “Two more laps,” she said. We finished them together, matching each other breath for breath, stroke for stroke. Then I followed her into the locker room.

“Now,” my mother began, “what is going on with you?”

I looked at her, surprised. “With me?”

“Oh, Cannie. I’m your mother. I’ve known you for twenty-seven years.”

“Twenty-eight,” I corrected.

She squinted at me. “Did I forget your birthday?”

I shrugged. “I think you sent a card.”

“Is that what it is?” asked my mother. “Are you worried about getting older? Are you depressed?”

I shrugged again. My mother was sounding more worried.

“Are you getting any help? Are you talking to anyone?”

I snorted, imagining how useless the little doctor, drowning in her clothes, would be in a situation like this. “Now, Bruce is your boyfriend,” she’d begin, flipping through her ever-present legal pad.

“Was,” I’d correct.

“And you’re thinking about… adoption?”

“Abortion,” I’d say.

“You’re pregnant,” said my mother.

I sat up straight, my mouth falling open. “What?”

“Cannie. I’m your mother. A mother knows these things.”

I drew my towel tight around me and wondered whether it would be too much to hope that this was one of the few things my mother and Tanya hadn’t made a bet about.

“And you look just like I did,” she continued. “Tired all the time. When I was pregnant with you I slept fourteen hours a day.” I didn’t say anything.

I didn’t know what to say. I knew I would have to start talking about it to someone, at some point, but I didn’t have words ready.

“Have you thought about names?” my mother asked me.

I gave a short, barking laugh. “I haven’t thought about anything,” I said. “I haven’t thought about where I’ll live, or what I’ll do…”

“But you’re going to…” Her voice trailed off delicately.

“Seems that way,” I said. There. Out loud. It was real.

“Oh, Cannie!” She sounded – if it’s possible – at once thrilled and brokenhearted. Thrilled, I guess, that she’d get to be a grandmother (unlike me, my mother was prone to cooing over anything in a stroller). And brokenhearted because this wasn’t a situation you’d wish for your daughter.

But it was my situation. I saw it then, that moment, in the locker room. This was what was going to happen – I was going to have this baby, Bruce or no Bruce, broken heart or no broken heart. It felt like the right choice. More than that, it felt almost like my destiny – the way my life was supposed to unfold. I just wished that whoever had planned it would drop me a clue or two about how I was going to provide for myself and a child. But if God wasn’t going to speak up, I’d figure it out myself.

My mother stood up and hugged me, which was gross, considering that we were both wet from the pool, and her towel didn’t quite make it around her front. But whatever. It felt good to have someone’s arms around me.

“You’re not mad?” I asked.

“No, no! How could I ever be mad?”

“Because… well. This isn’t the way I wanted it…” I said, briefly letting my cheek rest against her shoulder.

“It never is,” she told me. “It’s never just the way you think that it’ll be. Do you think I wanted to have you and Lucy down in Louisiana, a million miles away from my family, with those horrible army doctors and cockroaches big as my thumb”

“At least you had a husband,” I said. “And a house… and a plan…”

My mother patted my shoulder briskly. “Husbands and houses are negotiable,” she said. “And as for a plan… we’ll figure it out.”

She didn’t ask the $64,000 question until we were dried off and dressed and in the car on our way home.

“I’m assuming that Bruce is the father,” she said.

I leaned my cheek against the cool glass. “Correct.”

“And you’re not back together?”

“No. It was…” How could I possibly explain to my mother what had happened?

“Not to worry,” she said, effectively ending my attempts to think of an appropriate euphemism for sympathy fuck. We drove past the industrial park and the fruit and vegetable stand, over the mountain, on our way home. Everything looked familiar, because I’d driven past it a million times, growing up. I would swim with my mother early Saturday mornings, and we’d drive home together, watching the sleeping towns wake up, on our way to get warm bagels and fresh-squeezed orange juice and have breakfast together, the five of us.

Now, everything looked different. The trees had gotten taller, the houses looked somehow shabbier. There were new traffic lights at a few of the more dangerous intersections, new houses with raw-looking wooden walls and torn-up lawns on streets that hadn’t existed when I was in high school. Still, it felt good, and comfortable, to be riding beside my mother again. I could almost pretend that Tanya had stayed in her obsessive-compulsive codependent ex-girlfriend’s apartment and out of my mother’s life… and that my father hadn’t abandoned us so completely… and that I wasn’t in my current condition.

“Are you going to tell Bruce?” she finally asked.

“I don’t know. We aren’t exactly talking right now. And I think… well, I’m sure that if I told him, he’d try to talk me out of it, and I don’t want to be talked out of it.” I paused, thinking it over. “And it just seems… I mean, if I were him, if I were in his position… it’s a lot to burden somebody with. That they’ve got a child out in the world”

“Do you want him in your life?” my mother asked me.

“That’s not really the issue. He’s made it pretty clear that he doesn’t want to be in my life. Now, whether he wants to be in…” I stumbled, trying to say it for the first time, “in our child’s life…”

“Well, it’s not completely up to him. He’ll have to pay child support.”

“Ugh,” I said, imagining having to take Bruce to court and justify my behavior in front of a judge and jury.

She kept talking: about mutual funds and compound interest and some television show she’d seen where working mothers set up hidden videocameras and found their nannies neglecting their babies while they (the nannies, not the babies, I presumed) watched soap operas and made long-distance phone calls to Honduras. It reminded me of Maxi, prattling on about my financial future.

“Okay,” I told my mother. My muscles felt pleasantly heavy from the swimming, and my eyelids were starting to droop. “No Honduran nannies. I promise.”

“Maybe Lucy could help out some,” she said, and glanced at me when we were stopped at a red light. “You’ve been to your ob/gyn, right?”

“Not yet,” I said, and yawned again.

“Cannie!” She proceeded to lecture me on nutrition, exercise during pregnancy, and how she’d heard that vitamin E in capsule form could prevent stretch marks. I let my eyes close, lulled by the sound of her voice and the turning wheels, and I was almost asleep when we pulled into the driveway. She had to shake me awake, saying my name gently, telling me that we were home.

It was a wonder she let me go back to Philadelphia that night. And as it was, I drove home with my trunk stuffed with about ten pounds of Tupperware’d turkey and stuffing and pie, and only after giving her my solemn promise that I’d make an appointment with a doctor first thing in the morning, and that she could come visit soon.

“Wear your seat belt,” she said, as I loaded a protesting Nifkin into his carrier.

“I always wear my seat belt,” I said.

“Call me as soon as you know the due date.”

“I’ll call! I promise!”

“Okay,” she said. She reached over and brushed her fingertips against my cheek. “I’m proud of you,” she said. I wanted to ask her why. What had I done that anyone could be proud of? Getting knocked up by a guy who wanted nothing else to do with you wasn’t exactly the stuff she could brag to her book-club friends about, or that I could send in to the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Single motherhood might be getting more acceptable among the movie-star set, but from what I’d seen from my divorced colleagues, it was nothing but a hardship for real-life women, and it certainly wasn’t a cause for celebration, or pride.

But I didn’t ask. I just started the car and drove down the driveway, waving back at her until she disappeared.

Back in Philadelphia, everything looked different. Or maybe it was just that I was seeing it differently. I noticed the overflow of Budweiser cans in the recycling bin in front of the second-floor apartment as I made my way upstairs, and heard the shrill laugh track of a sitcom seeping beneath the door. Out on the street, somebody’s car alarm went off, and I could hear glass breaking somewhere nearby. Just background noise, stuff I’d barely notice most of the time, but I’d have to start noticing now… now that I was responsible for somebody else.

Up on the third floor, my apartment had grown a thin layer of dust in the five days I’d been away, and it smelled stale. No place to raise a child, I thought, opening windows, lighting a vanilla-scented candle, and finding the broom.

I gave Nifkin fresh food and water. I swept the floors. I sorted my laundry to wash the next day, emptied the dishwasher, put the leftovers in the freezer, then rinsed and hung my bathing suit to dry. I was halfway through making a grocery list, full of skim milk and fresh apples and good things to eat, before I realized I hadn’t even checked my voice mail to see if anyone… well, to see if Bruce… had called me. A long shot, I knew, but I figured I’d at least give him the benefit of the doubt.

And when I found that he hadn’t called, I felt sad, but nothing like the sharp, jittery, anxious-sick sadness I’d had before, nothing like the overwhelming certainty that I would die if he didn’t love me that I’d felt that night in New York with Maxi.

“He loved me,” I whispered to the neatly swept room. “He loved me, but he doesn’t love me anymore, and it’s not the end of the world.”

Nifkin raised his head from the couch, looked at me curiously, then fell back asleep. I picked up my list. “Eggs,” I wrote. “Spinach. Plums.”