Heads or Tails (5 page)

I looked around. It was bad now. How much worse had it been before Jean stepped in? In that moment, I understood that this was no ordinary case of the baby blues, that my job there was far beyond just cleaning up. I put my hands on the edge of the sink, my shoulders rising up like volcano lava to meet my ears. I inhaled. Cramps clutched my insides. I needed ibuprofen.

“Why me, of all people?” My stomach roiled and squeaked audibly, which would have embarrassed me if I was with anyone other than Jean.

“Why you?” Jean repeated in a shocked tone. “Because you’re family to Margot — to us.”

My eyes dampened and I squeezed them shut.

“Why not Rebecca?” I offered, hoping that in this one isolated case she’d win Margot’s favor over me. “She’s just up in Boston. She’s closer. She has her own kids.”

Jean shook her head vigorously, frustrated that I wasn’t understanding. “While there haven’t been many, in Margot’s lucid moments, she wanted you. Not me, not Rebecca.
You
.”

I turned away from Jean’s finger pointing at me and we were silent for a moment. That Margot had asked for me fed my latent competition with Rebecca, but it was also surprising. Rebecca could undoubtedly bring far more expertise to a situation like this. Not only was she a mother herself, but she was actually a trained therapist. As I wondered what to say and do next, I heard scraping along the hardwood floor in the hallway. I glanced to my left to find Margot hunched in the doorway.

It was hard to know whose deterioration surprised me more — Jean’s or Margot’s. My best friend had aged about fifteen years since I’d last seen her at her baby shower in late February. She was now an odd combination of heavy and frail. She wore men’s boxers and a tank top and I could see the skin from her belly hanging loosely over her waistband. Both deflated and plump, her arms jiggled as she moved. Her blond hair was greasy, as was her skin. Her gaze was empty and pointed towards the floor.

“Margot!” I said and threw my arms around her.

She stood motionless and I almost knocked her over. Normally, she’d have jumped into my arms, hugging her legs around me. Margot had always been tiny — taut and energetic, like a gymnast. But right then she was squishy and slumped. I grew drowsy just looking at her.

“Sit down, hon,” Jean said, pulling a kitchen chair out for her daughter.

Margot shuffled across the kitchen and collapsed into the chair. It was unclear if the stale odor that accompanied her was from her clothes or her body or both. Then, as if to prove a point to me, Jean handed her the baby.

Margot barely took hold of her and I gasped as Gretchen nearly slid off her lap and onto the linoleum. Expecting this, Jean stood next to her to spot the baby. Margot looked at me vacantly, as if she didn’t recognize me, as if we hadn’t lived together for four of our most formative years, as if we weren’t the closest thing to a sister either of us had.

My trip to New York was no longer about tidying up, about doing laundry, about giving a new mom time to nap or take a shower. In that moment, I finally accepted that something truly sinister was happening.

This was why I didn’t want my own baby. I’d seen it happen before, though certainly not to this sharp degree. This is what it did to you. Sarah would argue that motherhood enhanced all of your qualities, the good and the bad. That being forced to fight the darker parts of yourself was where the grit and passion of parenthood emerged, separating the good mothers from the bad.

But in my mind, having a baby could instantly transform you into someone you weren’t — and in many cases, not for the better. I saw that in Margot’s case, having a baby transformed my dearest friend from a highly functional, self-aware woman into what appeared to be a mentally ill zombie, someone I’d expect to see not on Wall Street but in a homeless shelter.

“Margot,” I said, kneeling down in front of her chair. I nodded up to Jean, who took the baby. “Margot, I’m here to help you.”

She stared into her lap.

“Margot, you have a beautiful baby,” I said with false enthusiasm. “Just beautiful. That black hair! Those dark eyes. So cute!”

She remained motionless.

“Mar,” I continued, putting my hand on her knee. “Margot.” I shook her a little and her chin lifted about two centimeters to indicate she was listening. I sensed I didn’t have a moment to waste. I changed my tone to the take-charge manner I used with brand new workers on a job site, those who might doubt that a woman could properly lead them as a general contractor.

“We’re going to get you some help,” I said, my voice rising in pitch and volume with each solemn word. “You need help and we’re going to get it for you. That’s why I’m here.”

Her body shook in my hands and I realized that she’d begun to cry.

Arm in arm, I guided Margot into the living room and sat her on the couch. She leaned over as if she was going to lie down but I wouldn’t let her.

“Ah ah,” I said in a strict motherly tone that surprised me. “Sit up. I’m going to make you some tea and we’re going to talk.”

I grabbed a chenille blanket from a nearby armchair and covered her, tucking the corners around her shoulders and over her thighs. She hung her head.

In the kitchen, I brewed a pot of toasted rice green tea, her favorite. Jean remained at the kitchen table giving the baby a bottle. Her posture exuded a relief I hadn’t seen since I arrived. I hoped I could live up to it.

I brought the tea to Margot, who wouldn’t reach out to hold it. I lifted the mug under her nose so she could smell the toasty warmth, but she didn’t move. I placed it on the coffee table and once again kneeled in front of her.

“Mar, you’ve got to get some help.”

She nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Did your mom tell you about the, uh, place? Up in Harlem?”

In the kitchen, the baby coughed and gagged and then began to wail. Margot remained statue still. Part of me wanted to scream at her or literally slap some sense into her. Part of me, I was ashamed to admit, wanted to bolt out the door, away from this mess, which wasn’t even my own. But I was pulled toward Margot magnetically even as I broke apart inside. Margot had become so dear to me in no small part because she’d helped me so many times, most notably when I first entered Egan Academy. I was lonely — not from missing my parents, because getting away from them was what I needed — but just lonely from life.

My mother was a much beloved principal at our local high school, which was ironic because the one and only teenager she wasn’t able to connect with was her own daughter. Not that I blamed her, after everything she’d been through before I’d been born. I was a loved, but at arms length, and it hurt. When I was thirteen, the last thing I wanted was to be a freshman at her school, watching all the kids form a line outside her office, eager for her thoughtful input on whatever was troubling them — the annoying chemistry teacher, an eating disorder, girlfriend problems. When I approached my parents with the Egan brochure, they actually seemed relieved. But once I arrived on Egan’s campus that next fall, I felt more lost than ever. I didn’t know a soul and I was unprepared for how rigorous my classes were right from the first day. Even after the first week, I kept getting turned around on campus and was embarrassed that I had to keep asking other students the way to Lopely Hall or Fox Aud.

With the perceptiveness of a wise aunt, Margot immediately sensed my mounting feelings of isolation. Before moving into the dorms freshman year, she’d been a day student at Egan since kindergarten so she knew practically everyone. Right away, she invited me to everything — whether it was a Humanities study session, a late-night game of five-card stud or a right-before-curfew donut run. When I think of that time, the most vivid and recurrent image I have is of Margot in plaid pajamas sitting across from me on my bed, where we roared with laughter over everything and nothing, Margot covering her mouth with her palm in her distinctive gesture.

Throughout my four years at Egan, and for decades after, including when I had the uncomfortable task of nursing my mom back to health after a lumpectomy, Margot was there for me. Listening to me vent, inspiring me, encouraging me. Like any friendship, it wasn’t all perfect. Her fussiness could be tiresome. She sometimes made decisions — like returning again and again in her twenties to the boyfriend who’d cheated on her — that I simply couldn’t understand. She thought I judged my parents too harshly for their failings. She didn’t understand why I was so devoted to
her
mother. But how could she? There were things she didn’t know.

In her Manhattan living room that day, I swept a piece of her pale blond, overgrown bangs behind her ear, a lump gathering in my throat. Then she surprised me by lifting her gaze to mine and coughing a little to clear her throat.

“The only way I’ll go to treatment,” she said hoarsely, as if these were the first words she’d spoken in weeks, “is if you take her. Please, Hilly, take my baby.”

For the first time since I arrived, Margot looked directly at me. Though her blue eyes were puffy, her gaze was crisp, revealing the tiniest hint of the friend I loved. My Margot. Her expression was a plea, a question, a prayer. Seconds later, she dropped her chin and it vanished.

I cupped her hands around the mug of tea and steadied it in her lap.

“Be right back,” I said.

In the kitchen, Jean patted the baby, who not only belched but farted too. I’d never have suspected that babies farted. Jean looked at me expectantly while trying to loosen a clump of her brittle hair from the baby’s grasp.

“She said, ‘Take my baby.’ What does that mean?” I realized I was trembling and I steadied myself by leaning against the counter. Behind me, a cup shifted in the dish drainer with a clang.

“I think she means take Gretchen back to San Francisco with you.” Her voice caught and her head fell.

“Take the — to
San Francisco
? What? Jean…” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. If I was relaying the exchange to Margot herself, I’d tell her, “It was
bananas
.” One of our favorite expressions.

Abruptly, Jean turned the baby around to face me. Gretchen flapped her arms up and down excitedly like she was ready for take-off. Her cheeks were like tiny matching ivory pillows.

“
This
,” she said with surprising force, “is a
person
. She needs help. I can’t raise her.” Tears punctuated her words. “Margot must get better. She has to go to that program.”

I ripped a scrap of paper towel from the roll on the counter and walked it over. She blotted her eyes and cheeks.

“I’m sorry, Hilly. I know this is a lot — too much — to ask of anyone. But Gretchen needs a connection. You’re the closest thing we have to family. Let’s do what it takes to get Margot better and then the baby can come back home.”

When I was a teenager, I’d insisted to Margot that while losing her father certainly had been a tragedy, Jean alone was a better parent than my own two put together. And no matter how many years had passed, I couldn’t escape the memory of what Jean had privately done for me when I’d been in trouble. This, I was beginning to sense, was how I could finally repay her.

“But what about —”

Her palm and her words stopped me. “No nannies. No nurses. No shift changes between paid caregivers. This baby needs consistency. She needs love. You, of all people, should know that.”

While true, her statement burned. Decades before, I’d confided in Jean and Margot about what my parents had been through and why they just couldn’t love me the way I needed, the way any daughter would have needed. I’d been lucky enough to find a kind of family substitute at Egan. Yet I exited adolescence with a profound certainty, a determination that I would not carry on my family’s weakness. I vowed that the cycle of parental disinterest would end with me. I would not have children of my own. Truthfully, it was a somewhat hollow proclamation, one that contained little sacrifice since, unlike Margot, I had no desire to become a parent anyway. I was without a biological clock. I felt no mothering urges. Watching Gretchen on Jean’s lap pulling on each of her toes and glancing around as if she was eager for something — anything — to do, I seized up inside.

“I can’t!” My objection came louder than I intended and I lowered my voice. I rubbed my eyelids, then crossed my arms and leaned my upper body toward her. “I have no experience with babies. I never even babysat.”

“All children need is love.”

“I have a job.”

“Jesse can help.”

It took extreme effort not to bust out a whoop of laughter. Jesse was many things — kind, creative, determined, devoted — but fatherly wasn’t one of them. We’d felt like true kindred spirits when we first confessed to each other that we weren’t really sure that we wanted children. In fact, that was actually the precise moment that our relationship transformed from casual to serious.

If it was possible, Jesse knew even less about kids than I did. A few years ago, he even bowed out of the annual Labor Day camping trip with his closest college buddies, previously something he’d look forward to the whole year. The other guys, all dads by then, could talk about nothing besides their kids and it drove Jesse nuts. Gone were the days of chatting amiably about sports, life plans, the novels of Jack Kerouac, and whatever else men discussed on camping trips before fatherhood. One guy had taken a picture of every single finger painting and wobbly drawing his three-year-old had ever made and spent a half hour on the trip showing everyone the photos on his phone. What was worse, Jesse reported, was that the other guys eagerly viewed the pictures. Once Jesse stopped going on that camping trip, we made a point to spend the next long Labor Day weekend in Monterey, just the two of us. Smugly, we referred to it as our “Never-Going-Into-Labor” Day weekend. As a couple, we cherished our freedom, a freedom so precious to us that we wouldn’t even get a dog for fear of it tying us down. We bragged to each other that we could dart out of town without making advance plans, that we could go out to dinner on a random Tuesday without having to first reserve a babysitter. Not that we did those things that much, but the option was always there. We were together, yet free.