Heads or Tails (10 page)

It was Thursday, a week since I’d received Jean’s call. Because Mercedes couldn’t start until that day, I’d been home alone with Gretchen again all day on Wednesday. Though Sarah had given me a stroller, I was too insecure to take the baby outside myself. We needed several things at the store — diapers, formula, not to mention food for me and Jesse. But I kept picturing the baby requiring a diaper change or wailing from hunger in the middle of Walgreens and not knowing how to handle it with just my two hands. I’d noticed the day before that Gretchen could actually sort of hold the bottle herself. Still, the thought of managing her and errands in the outside world alone was too overwhelming. Fortunately, when Jesse got home from work, he offered to go to the store and in fact even suggested that the three of us walk together to Walgreens and Cole Valley Foods, a favorite neighborhood market. We changed into sweats, dressed the baby in a fleece onesie and a knit San Francisco Forty-Niners hat that Sarah had loaned me and headed out towards Stanyan Street. Having been cooped up all day, the evening breeze electrified me, sending energy to my pores, my capillaries. Gretchen seemed to relish it too. She didn’t, in fact, end up having any blowout poops or meltdowns. Instead, she emitted pleased “whoo” and “eeee” sounds along the way, triggering bashful smiles from yuppie twenty-somethings walking through the neighborhood after getting off the N Judah streetcar.

That morning, after I’d shown Mercedes the location of the diapers, formula, baby clothes and the “Gavin Newsom” plastic Lego toy (which Gretchen continued to gnaw at like it was a lollipop), it was time for me to say goodbye.

“Bye, baby girl,” I said awkwardly. I wasn’t Gretchen’s mother. In fact, she hardly knew me and I doubted that she’d care or even notice if I left the house. “Hilly will be back this afternoon.” I decided to refer to myself by my old nickname in case sometime, in those rare postpartum moments when Margot had been herself, that’s how she’d referred to me in front of the baby.

Outside the front door, I took a breath and then finally embarked down the front steps. I decided to walk to work. Even though it would take longer — and I had tons to catch up on — I needed the late autumn breeze and the extended time to myself, something that had been in short supply in the last week. The last two nights, Gretchen had slept all the way until five so I felt energetic enough for the mile-and-a-half trip.

I headed up Frederick towards Buena Vista Park. After being cooped up for several days, I savored the palpable energy of a weekday morning and appreciated the full spectrum of San Francisco’s population on the streets. High school students with backpacks, twenty-somethings with unusual piercings, techies and manual laborers and middle-aged nannies pushing strollers. At Masonic, I walked north for a few blocks before taking Fulton to the Postcard Row project. As I traveled, I ticked off agenda items in my brain. Analyzing whether vertigrain doug fir treads could be used on a porch, discussing with Frank whether we should purchase our own excavator, inspecting the new material we’d used to bond granite to concrete, watching a YouTube video about how to restore antique hardware using fabric softener and a crock pot. Although Jesse had not changed a diaper, fed or in any way cared for Gretchen yet, he’d graciously agreed to meet Mercedes back at our flat when she needed to leave at four-thirty so that I could work an hour or two later. He wanted this Curtis Construction project to succeed as much as Frank and I did. Fortunately, there were no group training sessions scheduled for the evening so Jesse planned to do some stretches at home while watching the baby. I hadn’t had the heart to tell him that he’d likely barely be able to get to the toilet, let alone work out the kinks in his hip flexors.

I arrived at Alamo Square refreshed, with a sheen of perspiration covering my upper lip and hugging my bra line. I didn’t care. Entering the familiar Curtis Construction trailer felt like awakening from a strange dream. Everything was the same as it had been a week before — the pile of orange worker vests in the corner, Frank’s stash of granola bars on the shelf. On the house project itself, I was pleased to see that the custom front door with leaded glass had been completed and installed and the tile leveling had begun in an upstairs bathroom. So much had happened since last Thursday.

I sat in my chair and regarded the stacks of paperwork, but they didn’t intimidate me. The fast-paced management required of a general contractor was precisely what I loved about the job. Construction and restoration had never been a field I’d planned on. But after graduating from college, I’d taken a receptionist job at Curtis to pay the bills while I looked for something more suitable, though I wasn’t exactly sure what that would be. What I did know was that after waitressing for so many years, I wanted off my feet.

“No tips,” Sarah had warned about the receptionist job. She’d hoped that I’d re-join her as a waitress at Garibaldi’s, which is where she worked while she figured out what she wanted to do. But I didn’t care about tips. In fact, I soon discovered that I liked the construction industry. I relished the change of scenery every few months as one project finished and another one, usually in a whole new neighborhood, began. The company owners liked me too and the job evolved as I was handed more and more responsibility. When it came time to sell the business, they approached me. I said I’d do it if Frank joined me as the business guy. Becoming a general contractor and choosing not to have children were the only non-mainstream things I’ve ever done.

“Howdy, partner,” Frank said in a cowboy accent when he entered the trailer a few minutes after I arrived.

I waved.

“Or should I say, ‘Mama’?”

“Not funny.”

“Seriously, how the hell’s it going?” He rolled his chair around his desk and across from mine so that we could sit knee to knee.

With an exhale, I shrugged. “The baby’s still alive.”

“No doubt. What’s it been like?”

I recounted the first few nights of middle-of-the-night feedings, the fear of taking the baby outside on my own, her obsession with the Gavin Newsom toy, the hilarious sideways glance she sometimes gave while getting her diaper changed, the surprising unease I felt at leaving her that morning with a complete stranger.

Frank nodded. “Good practice?”

I shot him a stern look. Though Jesse and I were still young enough to have our own baby, Frank knew about our no-kids policy. “No way. I’m
not
cut out for this.”

“Sounds to me, sista’, like you are.”

“Just because I haven’t lost her yet? Hardly. Anyway, this is just a temporary thing,” I said, wheeling myself back to my desk where I paged through paperwork.

“How’s Margot?” he asked, flipping up a page on the Lake Tahoe calendar push-pinned to the trailer’s faux wood paneling to glance at next month — November.

“Good question.”

He cocked his head curiously.

“I’m still waiting to hear from Jean,” I explained. “I haven’t bugged her because I want every ounce, every iota of her focus to be on getting Margot better and back home. And then we can get the baby back where she belongs.”

“Why isn’t Jean taking care of the baby herself?”

“Parkinson’s.”

He stretched his lower lip down, exposing his bottom teeth in a “yikes” expression. “No one else in New York can help?”

“Nope. This was a sperm-donor production. And like me, Margot’s an only child; Jean’s a widow. And, at least according to Jean, Margot wanted me to take her.”

“I can understand that.”

I drew my eyebrows together dramatically. “I can’t! Why me? I’m like the least maternal person on the planet. But Margot specifically said that, apparently. ‘Take my baby,’ she even said. Right to me. I swear, Frank, she was really out of it. Zombie-like. She practically dropped the baby. So it was me or freakin’ foster care.”

He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Did you hear about Brooke Shields?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Sarah told me all about it. I swear, how do you guys have time to keep up with pop culture?”

“How do you and Jesse have time for hockey games, aquarium conferences, let alone time to train for crazy races?”

“Touché.”

He pulled my chair away from my desk, put his hands on my knees, leaned forward and looked me square in the eye. “You’re a good friend, Hillary.”

“Yeah, well. Margot would do the same for me. Not that I’d go to such great lengths to have a baby, of all things. Anyway, stay close to the phone. I’m eagerly awaiting Jean’s call to get that baby home — any day now.”

I spent the morning sifting through the paperwork on my desk. Frank had done a fantastic job culling it down to only the most necessary action items that needed my attention. I returned several calls from potential clients who’d read about Curtis in the
7x7
Magazine
article. I was excited that the company was finally reaching the potential Frank and I always knew it had. But I was also fearful that by participating in the piece we’d inadvertently bit off more than we could chew, not unlike otherwise eager expectant parents who panicked when they learned that they were not having one baby but two.

Mid-morning, I took a break to walk the site. Frank and Jorge pointed out the lovely wood trim in the dining room, which had been cleaned and stained, and the new display shelves built around the original fireplace. With a pang of guilt over having missed my first Spanish class, I asked Jorge about his daughter in a mixture of my pathetic Spanish and ridiculous hand motions. He smiled at me, as if to say, “Don’t worry about it” and held up his hands to show me that he was going to go wash the paint off.

Back in the trailer, I wondered whether I’d get to Spanish before the other students long surpassed me. Meanwhile, my in-box pinged with an e-mail chain about post-run snacks, the Wednesday night tradition of our training group. Jesse and I had been slotted into next week and I wondered when, exactly, I’d have time to pick up cheese sticks and chocolate milks for twenty aspiring triathletes. “Maybe it’ll rain that night,” I thought hopefully, wondering how in the world real parents got any work done or pursued any outside interests.

Frank kindly offered to pick up a sandwich and drink for me so I didn’t have to stop work to get lunch. Later, while eating that week’s designer sandwich special — quinoa and curried vegetables wrapped in garlic naan — my cell phone rang.

“Hi Jess,” I answered.

“How’s your day?”

I eyeballed the stack of documents, which had decreased considerably in just a couple of hours. “Not bad, actually. Pretty productive. And the house looks great. Frank did awesome in my absence. You?”

Jesse’s job was to name things. He started out in advertising, where his bosses quickly discovered that he had a Rowling-esque way with words (though
Harry Potter
hadn’t debuted yet). He became the agency’s go-to guy for start-up clients and kept so busy with cleverly naming businesses and products that he soon realized he could go freelance, be his own boss and earn more money. Since then he’d named everything from paint colors to independent schools and even provided titles for blockbuster films. My personal favorite was a flooring store that wanted to market itself as a local discount shop when, in reality, its prices were just as high, if not higher, as big-box store competitors. The founder explained, “See, what I want is the place to
look
like a grocery co-op — markdowns indicated with hand-lettered signs on cardboard, that kind of thing. But in the office, it’s corporate, right? So the place is like co-op in the front, Wal-Mart in the back. Got it?” It took Jesse a few days, but he came up with “Linoleum Larry’s.” Every time I drove by it in the Mission neighborhood, I marveled at his genius.

“My day’s pretty good too,” he said, crunching on what I suspected were carrot sticks. “I just got hired to name someone’s
kid
.”

“Get out!” Sarah, I knew, would be so jealous.

“Yup, I’d better get back to it. Gotta scope out the couple’s family tree — they want to try to use one of their ancestor’s last names as a first name. Right now, it’s not looking so hot considering they’ve got ‘Gross,’ ‘Weiner’ and ‘Schlomo’ in their history.”

Soda shot out my nose as I tried to laugh with my mouth closed full of food. “Oy,” I choked out.

“I know. I’ll get home at four-thirty. What’s the lady’s name again?”

“Mercedes.”

“Now
that’s
a good name. See you tonight.”

After lunch, I called back the prospective clients, scheduling appointments that I hoped I’d be able to keep considering that I still didn’t know what day Gretchen would be returning to New York. Part of me hoped that Margot would make such a drastic and complete recovery that she’d hop on a plane to come retrieve her. I wondered whether we could even spend a night up in Napa together, just like we used to do whenever she had a business meeting in the Bay Area. Once, we drove up to Page Hot Springs, which I’d heard was one of the most relaxing, rejuvenating spots in Northern California. But we drove away ten minutes after we arrived, howling with laughter when we discovered that every guest was entirely nude, not just in the hot springs, but in the dining hall and other communal areas. I realized that in so many of my memories with Margot, we were laughing.

Working on the Curtis projects, it felt good to be competent at something again, compared to how I felt with the baby. I still hadn’t even given her a proper bath. I didn’t know how to do it without drowning or burning her. I jotted a reminder note to scan YouTube for videos on bathing infants. But as happy as I was to be back in my element at work, by two-thirty, I grew strangely antsy. I had so much work still to do but I also had a nagging feeling that I should be elsewhere. As much as I enjoyed my work, I’d spent so much time at home the last few days that I’d begun to miss it. And though I couldn’t really believe it, I sort of missed the baby too. The weight of her in my lap, the feel of her little star-like hands grasping at my curls as she sucked on a bottle. It reminded me of the time my college roommate brought home a kitten to our apartment without asking me. I didn’t want anything to do with it, but the cat had other ideas. He seemed to like me better than my roommate, meowing outside my bedroom door at night until I let him in. When I moved out that summer, it took me weeks to get used to sleeping without a twelve-pound cat purring on top of the covers at my feet.