... and Baby Makes Two (23 page)

Jane didn't know how they made their way into the bedroom. She thought she heard fabric tear as they uncovered each other. This was all too fast. At the same moment, they both slowed down to savor all the new skin. Peter finally spoke.

“This changes everything.”

Jane knew he was right. She had been biding her time, wondering

when they would ever turn this corner. Now that they were turning, she wanted to wait.

“What's going to happen to us?” She took a gamble that her words wouldn't ruin this, wouldn't stop the momentum, wouldn't take him away from her.

“I care about you, Janie. I really kind of love you.”

Her muscles twitched. She sat up. Was she supposed to like that kind of declaration? She didn't. And she was ready to turn hostile at a moment's notice.

“Peter, make a choice. Either be married to your wife or be with me. I can't do this for you. I can't help you here. What do you want?” She didn't wait for an answer, and maybe she should have, but she kept talking. “I know what I want. I want a family of my own. I want to be a mother. I want to raise my daughter and be good to her and be happy and grow old and get into that really good nursing home. Tell me you don't want to be part of that.”

“I do. But I can't just leave Bianca.”
Eek!
He said her name! “We've been together for twelve years, off and on. We have a life and a history—”

“And three thousand miles between you. Teenagers who are going steady see more of each other than you do.” Jane opted for hostility.

She found her shirt and tried to make noise as she pulled it on. She locked her teeth. Peter looked a wretched mess, his head in his hands. Jane had never noticed the little scar on his earlobe. Did Peter once have an earring disaster? How long ago? Half-dressed, half-empty she was free enough to touch the small shadow near the tip of his ear.

“Peter. Should I just walk away? If you were my friend, what would you tell me to do?”

“I want you.”

“How much? Look, I can't play junior high anymore. Staying or going. Make a choice.” Jane was still looking at his ear.

Peter stood up, forcing her to let go of his dimpled ear.

“Staying. I told you: I want you. I want this. I want to be there in China when that baby is put in your arms, and I want to be there when she learns to read and learns to drive. I want this whole life right here.”

She saw the word
“finally”
in her head once again. He was choosing her. Finally.

“But look at where I am. I need to work this out with Bianca before I say anything more. And before I do anything more. I have to be fair to her, you know.”

She hated that he was right.

“I'll talk to her soon,” he continued. “She doesn't know anything. This is going to blindside her. And my parents. They can't know about this yet. Oh, God. Look. We can't be
us
until I take care of that. I need to go to L.A. and talk to her. Can you wait? Because this is big. This is huge.”

He was so right.

…

Ray's parents. Jerry and Rita. Try to remember that they meant well and had never been in a situation like this before, and that they really really meant well.

Ray set them up with a full agenda. Tickets to big splashy musicals, to serious, edgy dramas, and a handful of cabarets. He insisted that they ride a double-decker tour bus and spend the day hopping on and hopping off. Ray kept them busy while Burton doubled his usual quota of meditation.

Ray, their only child, beloved son, would be accompanying Jane to China to adopt a baby. That little girl was the closest they would come to grandchildren. They wanted to meet Jane, and they really did mean well, as you know.

Jane invited them over for brunch, and included Karen and Teresa, to keep things lively and to give her a good context. If other women, perfectly respectable single women, were adopting, it added to Jane's sense of legitimacy.

Mr. and Mrs. Whittier took so long coming up the stairs that Jane began to worry.

“You okay down there?”

“Whoo! Yeah! Give us a few minutes, here! Whoo!”

Teresa sympathized. “Those stairs are just awful. Maybe you should go help them.”

“How? I can't carry them up.”

“How are you going to have a baby in this apartment?” Wow, Teresa was becoming so blurty too. Jane couldn't answer because she had no answer and because Ray's parents made their entrance.

“How are you going to have a baby in this apartment?” Rita asked, following a few Whoos and Oh, Mys.

“You must be Jane! Hi!”

Ray made introductions all around, while his mother gulped water and his father mopped his forehead with a tissue. Jane apologized for the stairs and began to feel that she was living in a tree house. Once the Whittiers recovered from their mighty climb, they settled in and stared at everyone in the room.

“How was the drive?” It seemed like the obvious ice breaker, but the pained looks among the Whittier family revealed an incomplete conspiracy. They had never settled on a party line to describe the torturous drive.

“That car gets wonderful m-m-m-m-mileage. I think we made it through the C-c-c-c-carolinas on one tank of g-g-gas.” Ray never told Jane that his father stuttered.

“That's important,” Karen chimed in. “For the environment.”

Jane had assembled her favorite brunch of bagels, smoked salmon, and all the fixings. She set it up as a buffet. As part of a cleansing preparation for motherhood, Karen was abstaining from meat. She was a little vague about her new diet restrictions, but she was absolutely going to have this salmon. It may have been alive once, but now it was smoked.

“Is this sushi?” Rita asked Teresa, who always seemed to be the one in the know.

“Well, technically, it's sashimi, but we call it lox.”

“I've had sushi. Made me sick. Don't care to try that again, thank you very much.”

But they made it through the meal. Back in Texas, Jerry and Rita had access to television and the Internet, so there was nothing about New York that was so surprising that they would have to sit down. It might not look, sound, or feel like Texas, but they coped with it just fine. And the bagels in New York were really much nicer than they were in Texas. So big. So fresh. They had a lovely brunch.

“When Ray was a baby he didn't sleep through the night until he was five years old. I always said that was why he was an only child. We never had a chance to make another one.”

Ray braced himself for the same stories of his potty training, odd eating habits, and stuffed animal friends that Burton had endured. Jerry and Rita obliged.

“He wore diapers at night until, oh, gosh, I think he was in kindergarten, was it?”

“Remember the way he hated ch-ch-ch-ch-cheese?”

“I think we still have Mr. Jumbles, the bear. You know, I found that thing under his pillow the morning he left for college? Isn't that sweet?”

Ray endured. He looked at the clock. They had a three o'clock matinee to attend. He could endure anything if he knew when it would end.

The mimosas went to Rita's head and made her all too comfortable with her almost-daughter-in-law. She settled in to have a real talk with this lovely girl.

“Jane. You're a lovely girl. I wonder if we could have a real talk”

“Mom.”

But Jane let the real talk happen. She knew about the matinee
and had the same sense of endurance that Ray had. The finite was infinitely manageable. And she anticipated Rita's idea of a real talk: a series of personal questions. If she thought of this as a list, it felt cozier.

“When will you go to China?”

Jane hated this question more than you might think. She didn't know if she would hear from China in a month or three months, or how long it would take to get travel permission. No one liked the haziness of the answer, including Jane. So she said, “In the spring.”

“Will you take some time off from work?”

Rita had stopped watching the news in
1989
. Jane got to fill her in on Family Leave. Some firms offered paid leave, some offered unpaid leave. Argenti, a big player on Wall Street, offered full pay for three months.

“How does your employer feel about all this adoption business?”

Jane hadn't come out at work yet. She was waiting for a sign. So she said, “They're fine.” And began to feel guilty about lying to these nice people, here and at work. She would tell the truth on the next question.

“How much money do you make?”

Ray groaned loudly. “Mother! You may not ask that! Try again. Sorry, Jane.”

Jane wondered if she could postpone the truth to another question.

“Are you going to stay home with the baby?”

Jane was planning to hire a nanny, and to be the nicest employer any nanny ever worked for.

“Can you afford that? And who's going to climb all those stairs for you every day with a baby and a stroller and God knows what else?”

Ray shot her a look.

“I'm just asking.”

Jane didn't have an answer. She hoped she'd find some very fit
person who really wanted to stay that way and saw in Jane's building the perfect workout.

“You know what, Mom? Jane doesn't know where her daughter is going to go to high school, or college, or what she'll wear on May thirtieth seven years from now. No one knows all the answers. We let you ask a bunch of questions that were none of your business, but now you're going to be late for your show. And look outside. It looks like it's going to rain soon, so let's go.”

“We traded in those t-t-t-tickets. We wanted more time with y-y-y-you and Jane.”

The unmanageable infinite. Oh, no.

Teresa and Karen were watching the launch of some horrible new reality show: Watch Your Friends Squirm. They spent a lot of time wrestling with the moral dilemma of staying vs. leaving. The longer they wrestled, the more they got to see. But there would be a price to pay.

“Do I understand this right? You're all adopting? And you're all single?”

And it began to rain. Karen and Teresa should have left while the sun shined.

“Why? I mean, why are you adopting a yellow baby? Can't you get a white one?”

Ray was imploding. Jane wanted to take care of him. So she did her best. She answered the question.

“I don't really care if my daughter resembles me or not. That isn't important. And I guess I chose China because I knew China wouldn't reject me. They would let me adopt a baby, even though I'm not married. And it's all so regulated and proper. No black market, nothing devious going on. That's Communism, for you, right?”

“So, China just lets single ladies adopt their b-b-b-babies? Just like that? Don't they care about fathers? And w-w-what's the deal, do they just hate girls or what?”

Jane decided everyone needed more coffee/tea/juice/water/
anything in the kitchen. She let Karen and Teresa testify for a while. Ray followed Jane into the kitchen and stayed in there, washing dishes as loudly as he could. When Jane returned to the living room, Teresa seemed to have things under control.

“So you see, if Dan Quayle was right, then one parent is better than zero parents.” She smiled obligingly at Jane as her footnote. Jane nodded back. Rita and Jerry seemed satisfied with the answer. Rita leaned in and spoke quietly.

“Tell me, what would you do if your little girl came home from college and told you that she was becoming a gay? That's what happened to us, and I think we handled it as well as anyone. Have you met Burton? Nice man, but he's so hairy! We all went to the pool and—”

Ray had finished washing the dishes, so Rita leaned back, using her full voice once again.

“I know we've been intruding, and I'm sure Ray already told you that I'm a busybody and a snoop and he wants nothing to do with his mom and her nosy old questions—”

“You're close!” Ray shouted from the kitchen, where he was still hiding.

“But I thank you for talking to me like this. You don't know me from Adam, and all I really wanted out of this trip—aside from seeing Katie Couric—was the chance to get to know you and find out about this whole China baby thing. Yes, I'm a nosy old lady but you're all such sweethearts. Thank you.”

This made it sound like it was over. And it almost was.

“Can I ask one more q-q-q-question?”

Why not?

“Why aren't any of you ladies m-m-married? I'll tell you, if you moved out of this big city you'd catch a husband as fast as you please. The fellows here all have the eye for each other, and I say that with all d-d-due respect.” He nodded gravely to his son.

“Jerry's right. You're all pretty enough—you shouldn't have to die old maids.”

It was Karen's turn.

“We all follow our own path, Mrs. Whittier. I think that, perhaps, in another life, I had a difficult marriage, and that's why I avoided it this time around. I needed to work on myself.”

Jerry and Rita didn't understand Karen's answer, and didn't want to lose this last opportunity to find out.

“But why don't you at least have a b-b-boyfriend?”

Karen described her last seven boyfriends, of the last three years. Jerry thought she was a bit of a wildcat, with an eye for the wrong man, every time. Teresa described the painful breakup with Victor, her business partner. Rita thought she should snip off his thing. “If he's not going to have babies, he won't need it, right?”

And then Rita asked, “What about you, Jane?”

Everyone turned to look at Jane, who had no answer. She wasn't about to say anything about Peter until he was ready to be an
us.
Maybe she was supposed to tell them about Sam and how he died. But she didn't want to talk about him, either. She didn't want to blame Sam for anything. For years, she saw herself as his widow. But today, trying so hard to tell the truth to her pseudo-mother-in-law, she knew that Sam had nothing to do with this. He had been dead such a long time.

“I'm single, Mrs. Whittier. I just am.”