Heads or Tails (13 page)

She’d been babbling in the seat, blowing raspberries, testing out her vocal cords, shrieking indiscriminately. Sarah had informed me that this was entirely age-appropriate. The problem was that Jesse was working. He’d been hired to name a new Asian-Latin fusion restaurant but had been struggling for weeks. Nacho-San. Squid. Chop-Palos. He hated them all. And while naming normally came easy to him, whenever he struggled, he needed complete quiet. The baby, of course, didn’t understand that.

Jesse must have noticed the baby’s pitiful expression because he slinked out of the dining room, papers tucked under his armpit and muttered, “Sorry. I know it’s not your fault,” he said to the two of us. A few minutes later, I heard the shower running.

Being at odds with Jesse was foreign. And at the same time, it was exactly what I feared would happen were we to bring a baby into our relationship. Needing to work, everything disrupted, each of us grasping desperately for our previous life. Having kids, I knew, was life’s one truly irreversible decision. You can always move, switch jobs, get divorced. But once you’re a parent, it’s a forever thing. And in my parents case, it’s forever even if the baby doesn’t survive. Parenthood was a no-turning-back proposition. I feared the resentment, the blame. (Just the other day, I heard Jesse mutter under his breath, “Margot is
your
friend” when I’d asked him to dash out to the store for diapers.)

Not only was caring for Margot’s baby not at all something we wanted, but we were wholly unprepared. We had no baby shower to gather infant necessities let alone nine months to prepare emotionally. But I’m not sure that would have even mattered. Life with children seemed to necessarily include profound disarray no matter how prepared you were.

Over the years, Jesse and I had developed and nurtured so much love for each other. But somehow I had this inherent sense, this hard-earned certainty, that love was a zero-sum game. Perhaps my parents had unwittingly taught me that. I didn’t want to use up my love on a baby, taking it away from Jesse. And I didn’t want to be loved any less by him either.

Would Marigold have done this?
It was the enduring question that plagued me whenever Jesse and I had conflict. Maybe Jesse would have wanted kids with her. Even after all these years, even after all the careful piecing together I’d done of his off-hand comments about her, their relationship remained mysterious to me.

Either way, if I was honest with myself, it’d be clear that the arrival of Margot’s baby didn’t create a conflict out of thin air. We’d turned to tri training precisely because we needed something new — a jolt, a shift, a charge. Hockey, travel, they were no longer enough. We needed a structure, a newfound mutual love to share. Tri training wasn’t perfect, but it was a start. No, the arrival of Margot’s baby simply served to highlight a distance that had already begun emerging.

I grimaced when I pulled my car into the garage after work. The entire drive home, I’d hoped — prayed, even — that I’d return to a quiet house, the baby content and no longer crying. Once again, she’d slept fitfully and, as a result, so had we. I’d resorted to rubbing large drops of brandy on her swollen gums, advice from Sarah that I’d sworn to her I couldn’t follow without checking with Jean first. But at three in the morning, I’d been desperate. At that hour, our downstairs neighbor, with whom we’d always had a cordial relationship, banged on his ceiling with what sounded like a broom stick. That pounding upset both Jesse and the baby even more.

Throughout the day at work, I tried to keep my head above water amidst the city’s upcoming review of our foundation work and a new woodworker flaking out on us. And in the back of my mind, I told myself that we had to be through the worst of it. We just had to. That when I got home that afternoon, leaving Frank high and dry yet again, Gretchen would be calm and untroubled and I’d be able to resume working after her five o’clock rice cereal meal. I’d even had an Elmo DVD one-day shipped from Amazon to distract her so I could work.

But even the loud clang of the garage door rolling open couldn’t mask her wails. It was a tired, hopeless, pathetic cry that made me both cringe and at the same time grab my briefcase and purse and dash upstairs with unusual speed.

Mercedes, her hair askew and circular stains on the armpits of her shirt, was waiting at the top of the stairs for me, eager and primed to quickly hand her off as if in a relay. Gretchen’s face was pink, hot and moist.

“One sec,” I said, dumping my things in the living room and grabbing a hair tie from my purse to contain my curls. “Bad day?”

She nodded, placing her in my arms. “Very fussy.”

With my palm, I smoothed Gretchen’s dark hair out of her eyes. She heaved big breaths but actually stopped crying once I held her.
Please
, I thought.
Please calm down
. “It’s okay,” I said out loud. She tucked her head into the space between my chin and my shoulder.

“She missed you,” Mercedes said, nodding towards me and the suddenly quiet baby. “First time she stopped since lunch.” Darting towards the entryway, clearly eager to escape, Mercedes slammed into Jesse, who’d apparently observed the whole handoff without being noticed by any of us. His head was tilted to the right and he regarded me in a manner that resembled how one would look at a remodeled kitchen, taking in what, exactly, had changed. I inhaled, delving deep into reserves of strength and cheerfulness.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.” He nodded at Mercedes as she walked to the front door.

“Oh,” she said, retreating two steps. “I forgot. Can you pay me?”

I flinched. We’d agreed to pay Mercedes daily, in cash, an administrative and financial burden. I kept the running tally of what we paid her in a prominent place in the kitchen so Jesse would know that I fully intended to get reimbursed by Margot (who, I knew, would insist on nothing less once she regained her equilibrium).

“Right. Um, Jess, could you?” I lifted my chin towards my purse on the floor of the living room. “I went to the ATM at lunch.”

Jesse handed over several twenties. My stomach twisted and I looked away. I wondered then whether I could just run away, take the baby and hide out somewhere, away from my work, away, even, from Jesse. Just hole up in a remote hotel waiting for Jean’s call to bring the baby back home to New York. Then perhaps I could simply reinsert myself into my old life, the life I’d had just days ago. Intact and unchanged. As if nothing had happened. As if this baby hadn’t brought out things in me and in Jesse that I simply did not want to see.

Once Mercedes left, Jesse asked, “Savings or checking?”

“Checking.”

Bubbles of discomfort rose in my chest. I knew we didn’t have the disposable income to keep paying Mercedes in cash indefinitely. Money was another reason that we didn’t want to raise children. Throughout his childhood, Jesse’s parents had lived paycheck to paycheck. And it seemed to him that their joint mood was intricately tied to the status of their bank account. Although we’d both arrived at places in our careers where we lived comfortably, raising a child in San Francisco would undoubtedly change that.

“No training for you tonight, right?” he asked.

I shook my head. Tuesdays were optional trainings and I secretly hoped that he’d choose to stay home to be with me, to help with the baby. But he was already pulling out his workout gear, eager, like Mercedes, to escape the inevitable oncoming teeth-cutting screams. I stood in the doorway as he changed, noticing the sinewy curves of his hamstrings. His run-swim shorts smelled of chlorine, bringing a whiff of the pool, which I hadn’t visited in more than ten days and, strangely, didn’t miss. Was I losing interest in our shared passion? But even if I’d had the urge to train that night, someone had to stay home with Gretchen and I certainly wasn’t going to ask him to do it.

“Don’t eat out, okay? I’ll make something,” I offered, acutely aware of the fog of neglect that had blanketed our home. “And don’t forget, the Ottawa Senators game is on tonight.”

Since Gretchen’s arrival, we’d already missed two home Sharks games, and I hadn’t even gotten my act together enough to sell our tickets beforehand. They just went to waste. And we hadn’t even caught the games on TV or internet radio.

I hoped I could stay awake long enough after the baby went to sleep to watch the game. We hadn’t trained together, watched TV together or slept together — shit, we’d hardly slept period — in far too long. I hoped the Elmo video would give me enough time not only to make dinner but also to catch up on work enough so that Frank — or worse, our clients — wouldn’t also feel neglected. Helping a dear friend suddenly felt like that dreaded zero-sum game when it came to the other important people in my life. I questioned whether I’d made some kind of poor choice, even though taking Gretchen hadn’t been a choice at all.

We had no food in the house so I had to pile Gretchen and all of her gear into the car and drive to the market. In a peace offering of sorts, I planned to make, or at least assemble, Jesse’s favorite meal: turkey tacos. I bypassed the neighborhood Safeway and headed instead to Laurel Village because we’d long ago agreed that Cal-Mart had the city’s best avocados.

Along the way, I decided to call Rebecca. Tapping her name from the contact list in my cell before pulling out of the cave of our garage, I once again felt how some women’s lives shrank once they had kids. Initially, I thought that Sarah and other moms had this big, expansive life — no job to get to, the whole day to get things done. But as I twisted my head to double-double-check that I had the stroller, the diaper bag
and
the baby in the back seat, while simultaneously realizing that there was no way I could listen to the latest episode of the Spanish instruction podcast I’d been in the habit of driving with before Gretchen arrived, I realized I’d been wrong. My world, too, was shrinking.

“Oh my
God
, I’ve been meaning to
call you
,” Rebecca answered. The drama with which she spoke was one of the things I loved about her even though it also sometimes grated on me.

“So you heard?” I said, turning on to Stanyan Street.

“
Yes
, I
heard
. Jean told me a few days ago. My calls to Margot had been unreturned for weeks and I got nervous. So I called Jean.”

“Yeah. It’s been a nutty week.” The baby blew raspberries and gazed out the window. Her cheeks were as puffy and round as foam baseballs.

“Hilly, you need to get that baby back with Jean.”

Driving across the Panhandle, I couldn’t tell if Rebecca was just annoyed because Jean hadn’t called her or if she really felt that way. Sometimes with Rebecca, it was hard to know what was behind what she said.

“But Jean called me in the first place because she couldn’t handle it anymore.” I flashed back to my sophomore year in college, when my mom and dad stretched a work conference in London into a two-week vacation smack in the middle of Thanksgiving break. When Jean learned that I had nowhere to go for the holiday, she FedEx’d me a plane ticket so I could spend the long weekend with her and Margot. “I can’t put this back on her.”

“You’re setting yourself up for liability. What if something happens to the baby?”

It was an angle I hadn’t considered. My heart pumped blood into my cheeks double time. I quickly wiped my cranium clean of the heavy sleep that Gretchen had fallen into fifteen minutes after I’d swiped her sore gums with brandy the night before. I reduced my speed as I turned onto California Street and then onto Spruce, hoping to find a parking space as close to Cal-Mart as possible. Planning my first-ever grocery run with the baby, I wondered how I was supposed to return the grocery cart to its proper hub (one of my pet peeves) once I loaded the baby and the groceries into the car. Was it okay to leave the baby alone in the car while I did this?

As if hearing my frenetic thoughts, Rebecca continued. “To lawfully place a minor with a non-family member requires legal docs. Documents, I’m afraid, that Margot isn’t competent to sign right now.”

“Would you be able to call Margot’s doctor for me? Get some information? I know it’s confidential, but, I don’t know, get it through some kind of professional privilege or courtesy?”

Rebecca was a therapist who specialized in treating people who had a family member struggling with addiction. I often teased her that the choice was ironic because Rebecca was addicted herself: to rules and order and programs. She always loved being the authority on any subject, whether it was the films of Julia Roberts, two-letter Scrabble words or, in her professional world, twelve-step programs for enablers like Al-Anon. Secretly, I was convinced that Rebecca became a therapist so she could legitimately tell people what to do. She had a personal tendency to implore people to do things, primarily, I always thought, to confirm her own choices. I could imagine her in therapy sessions: “You should send your kids to
this
school, see
this
doctor, listen to
this
audiobook, go to
this
trainer.” Ever since Egan Academy, she validated her own choices by foisting them on others, not unlike when my mother would hold up two purses, ask which one I liked better, and then go with the opposite one anyway. Despite these personal foibles, Rebecca had become a rock star in her field. Just last year she landed a primo job on the faculty at UMass.

“Uh uh,” Rebecca objected. I could hear her sip a drink and then swallow. “Not only is that outside the bounds of professional ethics, but if the wrong person finds out about this arrangement… Just be careful, is all I’m saying. You don’t want anyone to take the baby away from you — or Margot.”

The turkey tacos were delicious and Jesse and I were even able to chat awhile because the baby dozed in the infant seat during our dinner. Our earlier conflict smoothed by time, quiet and food, he reported amiably about the evening’s tri training, including telling me about two of our friends who had to drop out, one because of a torn hamstring and the other from a case of shingles. We didn’t address my own status. I was falling more and more behind each day. For the first time since we’d started our race training journey, I wondered how I was going to work off the avocado fat calories.