Breakable You (29 page)

"Show me a Jewish father who
wouldn't
be bothered to see his daughter marry an Arab," he said, "and I'll show you Noam Chomsky."

He finished his drink and called for another, looking pleased with himself.

"I just hope she gets the abortion over with as soon as she can," he said.

"What do you mean? Have you talked with her about it?"

"No. I figured that was your job."

"Then how do you know she's planning to have one?"

"What's the alternative?" he said.

"The alternative is this little thing called 'having a baby.'"

"You don't think she'd be foolish enough to do that now?"

Eleanor didn't say anything. She was reproaching herself for being here with him at all, for having dreamed that he could change.

"Ye gods," Adam said. "That would be a pretty picture."

When Eleanor spoke to Maud that night, Maud said that she was going away for the weekend.

"Where?"

"I don't know. I just want to rent a car and drive for a while."

This sounded ominous.

Don't panic
. Or at least don't let her see that you're panicking.

"Will you call me when you get wherever you're going?"

"I'll call you or send you an e-mail."

"Are you taking your computer?"

"I don't think so."

"So how will you be able to send me an e-mail?"

Even as she asked this, Eleanor knew it was a stupid question, but she was brain-locked.

"Just trust me, Mom. It can be done."

When they got off the phone Eleanor had to exert all her self-control to prevent herself from crying. It was hard to be sure what was affecting her more: her worry about Maud or her frustration that Maud wasn't letting her in. She remembered the days when her daughter used to say, "I want to marry with you, Mom," and she'd had to explain to Maud that girls don't marry their mothers.

Maud rented a car, drove north, and spent three days visiting the towns in Massachusetts and Maine that she had visited with Samir in January. On her second night, when she reached Cape Elizabeth, Maine, she checked into a motel and just before midnight she walked down to the beach.

She stood under a clear black sky, under thousands of tightly packed stars, thinking the same thoughts that everyone thinks when looking up at the vast nightlit sky. She tried to comprehend the idea that the universe might go on forever in space and time, and she tried to comprehend the idea that it might not. Both were incomprehensible. How can the universe go on forever? How can it stop?

She remembered lying on a hill in Vermont with her brothers—she must have been eight or nine—and learning that some of the stars she was looking at may have died millions of years ago. This was as hard to grasp now as it had been then.

She wasn't troubled to be thinking the thoughts that everyone thinks. She had no desire to be original. At a moment like this all you can do is wonder, and the fact that all of us wonder about the same things struck her as comforting.

When she thought about the vastness of the universe in time and space, the question of whether she carried the child to term did not seem very significant. The universe would roll on, unaffected by her choice.

And yet she had to choose.

Under a sky like this, humility was an appropriate response; but it would be wrong, she thought, to undervalue ourselves
too
much. She was in awe under the blazing battering time-traveling light of the stars. But the light that we send out from ourselves, the light of consciousness, is even more mysterious, even more miraculous, than the lights we behold when we look up at the night sky.

Maud, a light of consciousness, held another light within herself, a light in waiting, and, standing on the beach where she had stood with her lover, she knew, for the first time, what she wanted
to
do. She wanted
to
let the new light come.

And yet everything got harder.

It was spring, but her body had decided it was winter. Her lips were cracked and her palms were cracked and the soles of her feet were cracked, and the heaviness of her body as it grew did not feel in any way miraculous. The heaviness of her body was accompanied by a heaviness of mind. No one had told her that when you are pregnant you feel, more than anything else,
stupid
. The quickening made her slow.

She kept trying to rediscover the sense of the miraculous that had come over her during that walk on the beach, but she couldn't do it.

A sense of the miraculous, she finally decided, was too much to ask for. All she could ask of herself these days was that she find a way to keep it together.

She received permission to put off her dissertation for a full year, but this didn't give her the relief she'd hoped for. All it meant was that she now spent as much time worrying about her dissertation as she used to spend working on it.

She was still teaching her classes, though it was growing harder. She was just so
tired
all the time. She felt like herself for only about three hours a day, but she needed to keep teaching as long as she could. She needed the money. The chair of her department was being nice to her, and he told her she could take a leave whenever she wanted, but she wanted to put it off until the baby was born.

She knew she had a safety net—her parents would never let her go under—but she didn't want to rely on them any more than she needed to.

She kept telling herself that she needed to stop worrying. She needed to stop worrying about how she was going to afford this child; she needed to stop worrying about becoming dependent on her parents again; she needed to stop dwelling on lurid visions of herself a year in the future, pop-eyed with fatigue and dragging along a baby whose howls were unlike the howls of other babies, because they were the howls of a baby who had been disenfranchised before he was born, a woeful slice of doomed fatherless meat.

Sometimes she felt as if she hadn't absorbed the fact that he was gone. She kept thinking of things she wanted to
tell
him.

Each step she took brought fresh news of his death. When she passed the park, she remembered their first day together there—the sunlight, the families, the Ramble. If she had to consult a subway map, she tried
to
avoid looking at Brooklyn, because she didn't want to be forced to remember their nights in his apartment.

Celia and George kept inviting her to dinner at their apartment. Most of the time she begged off with vague excuses, but when she did see them, she arranged to meet them in restaurants. She couldn't bear to return to the place where she'd first met him.

They hadn't had time to marry, but she felt wedded to him nevertheless. Before she'd met him, she was sure the idea that each
of
us has a soulmate was sentimental nonsense; after she met him, she was sure he was hers. Even during their first few weeks together, when the only thing that kept them coming back to each other was sexual attraction, she'd been sure of it; she'd been sure that what seemed like sexual attraction was in fact something deeper: it was their souls conspiring to bind them until both of them realized that they were each other's fate.

Eleanor was visiting all the time. Eleanor was always underfoot. Maud was glad to have her mother around, but then again, she wasn't. There was something infantilizing about it, about having your mother drop in carrying hot meals from Zabar's because she's afraid that you haven't eaten that day—and having her be right.

Her mother had hinted, several times, that it would be a good idea for Maud to see a shrink. Maud had seen someone for five years, whom she'd liked a lot. But she didn't want to go back to him now.

Maud wasn't reading any books on motherhood. Instead, she read her old mainstays—some of them, at least: Kant and Buber and Levinas—as she continued to work doggedly on her dissertation. Sometimes she felt as if her dissertation was the only thing that was keeping her in one piece. The importance of it became more and more obvious to her: of the simple idea that we must treat other people as ends in themselves, that we must remember that everyone is the center of his or her own universe. Keeping this idea in her mind, going more and more deeply into its implications, seemed like the best way to prepare for being a mother.

She didn't have a social life. She taught her classes, had conferences with her students, went home.

More and more, she was pretending that Samir was still with her. She didn't talk to him; she didn't come close to deluding herself that he was actually with her. But she liked to sit in her easy chair and close her eyes and imagine that he was in the room with her. She felt warmer when she imagined him in the room.

Her body seemed to be changing every day. She was not enjoying it. She was sick all the time, and she felt misshapen. It was astonishing to remember that this body so recently had given and received pleasure.

Sometimes she lay in her bed and put her hands on her belly and tried to imagine how she would feel about her body if Samir were alive. She
felt
sure that if he were still here he would find her beautiful. She felt sure that he would still be attracted to her. She lay in her bed with her hands on her belly and thought, If he were still alive I would find my own body beautiful. If he were still alive he would be touching me right now. He would be touching me with desire.

The only person whose company she enjoyed was Ralph. They got together every Friday. They always met at his apartment and had their dinner delivered from a Japanese restaurant down the street. It was convenient for him, because getting in and out of restaurants was such a chore. He probably thought Maud was being considerate when she told him that staying in the apartment suited her fine. But that had nothing to do with it. For Maud, Ralph's apartment was a refuge, a place of quiet and calm.

One soggy Friday night in late April, a month after Samir died, it was cold enough for Ralph to make a fire. He put three logs in the fireplace. It didn't look easy, doing it all from his wheelchair, but he had practice.

"How are you?" he said.

She sipped her drink—a ginger ale—and said, "I've been having a hard time."

Ralph lit a long wooden match and applied the name to the crumpled newspaper he'd stuffed under the logs.

"It's a relief to be able to say that," she said.

"Why is that?"

"You're the only person I don't need to pretend with. Everyone is so invested in making sure I'm all right that it's like I can't let them down."

He maneuvered his wheelchair so that he was facing her. Experience had taught her not to try to help.

"I'm invested in making sure you're all right too," he said.

"I know. But it's different. I know you care about me. But if I say I don't feel like I'm doing that well, you're not afraid to hear it. It might make you concerned, but it doesn't seem to make you nervous."

"I'm glad you feel that way."

"But?"

"But I do want to ask you—very un-nervously—if there's anything I can do to help."

"You're doing it," she said. "You do it."

He called the restaurant and ordered their meal. They had the same thing every week. Visiting him here had the aspect of ritual, and he seemed to understand, without her having told him, how comforting their rituals were to her.

"I wish I could believe in God," she said.

"Why is that?"

"I could believe things happen for a reason. Samir once told me that when his daughter was getting her bone-marrow transplant, he met a lot of parents whose children were going through the same thing, and almost all of them were religious. The parents. Not the kids. He said God had it easy. When the children were admitted for their transplants, the parents would be saying that God was going to heal them, and when the kids died, they'd say that God had taken them to a better place. If you were cured, it was because God loves you, and if you died, that was because God loves you too."

"Can't quite imagine you going for that," Ralph said.

When their food arrived, Ralph gave her his credit card. Long ago he had made it clear that he would never allow her to pay for their dinners or even chip in. Maud met the deliveryman at the door.

Ralph wheeled his way over to the dining room table and allowed her to set it and lay out the food.

"So has the experience affected your philosophy of life?" he said. "That's not the right way to put it. What I mean is, has it changed what you believe in?"

He didn't say any of this in an ironic tone. He wanted to know.

"I think I just believe more intensely in the things I believed in the first place."

"For example?"

"That there is no God, and that the universe doesn't give a flying fuck about us. That's probably it."

"And does that imply a code of behavior? The universe doesn't give a flying fuck about us, and therefore… ?"

Ralph was a friend who asked the second question. She thought that this might be one of the definitions of true friendship. If you have a friend who pays enough attention to you to ask the right question, you're lucky; if you have a friend who listens to the answer, thinks some more, and asks the second question, then you're blessed.

"There is no therefore that I can find. No universal therefore. I still believe the same things I always believed, but it's a choice. Life doesn't care about us, everyone gets pulverized sooner or later, and therefore we should take care of each other. But I believe that because I choose to believe that. If it's a therefore, it's just a personal therefore."

She looked into the fire for a while.

"As long as I'm telling you things I can't tell anybody else, can I tell you one more thing?"

He didn't bother to say anything. He didn't need to.

"Sometimes I feel certain that I'm harming this child even before it becomes a child. I'm so sad so much of time that I'm afraid I'm poisoning it. This thing is supposed to be getting a warm, nurturing nine-month bath, but instead it's getting… misery."